Swift as the Antelope kept looking back, sweat running from beneath the band of the white-man stovepipe hat he had worn since they had sacked the coastal town. Because of the heat he no longer wore red cloth wrapped around his body, but he had not abandoned it. He had it loosely rolled and tied behind his rawhide-covered saddle. It was for his wife, he claimed.

Antelope was impatient, as usual. “We should strike them like the lightning. We could kill them all before they have time to catch a breath.”

They had tried that already, though with only a small portion of their fighting force, expecting the Texans to flee in terror. Instead, the hair-faces had surprised them with a stiff resistance. Several warriors had had to be carried away after the skirmish.

“There is time enough,” Buffalo Caller said. “Let them become tired and hungry. Sooner or later they will begin to straggle. Then we can cut them to pieces.”

“But they are growing stronger. More teibos keep joining them.”

“All the more of them to die.”

He had noticed small groups joining the pursuers periodically, but the Texans remained relatively small in number. Buffalo Caller was confident that they were much too weak to make any meaningful dent in the Comanche column, strung out so far now that he could not see the head of it. If the enemy should have the poor judgment to try, their blood and bones would enrich this prairie ground, and the grass would grow stronger for years.

Antelope opened his hands, showing all his fingers. “With this many men I could run them all the way back to the water.”

He had always been prone to overstate his accomplishments and sometimes took personal credit for deeds performed by others as long as he did not expect to be challenged by someone who had been there.

“Go, then. I will marry your widow and give her many sons.”

“You have two wives already, and your seed produces only girls. You have no son except that Texan boy.”

Buffalo Caller saw danger in Antelope’s eyes. Antelope had repeatedly made veiled threats against the child since they had taken him from his dead mother’s side.

“The boy is not your concern.”

“I tell you again, that hair is an ill omen. It looks like blood. I had a dream last night. The boy will bring evil. If you do not have the stomach to do what must be done, let me.” He clasped the deer-horn handle of his knife.

Buffalo Caller stiffened. “You will not touch him!”

Antelope roughly pulled his horse away and joined other warriors, but a dark scowl said the question was not settled. Buffalo Caller knew their friendship, though of long standing, would not be enough to protect the boy. Antelope believed strongly in medicine and omens. He had a remarkable ability to sense the presence of dark spirits when no one else was aware of them.

Buffalo Caller believed in medicine as strongly as anyone, but his guardian spirits often disagreed with Antelope’s. Antelope claimed to carry the power of the badger, and certainly he possessed that animal’s belligerent temperament. Still, Buffalo Caller sometimes wondered if Antelope was not misled by Coyote, the trickster. Coyote was always up to mischief. He liked to play with men’s minds and lead them into folly.