Free Comanche Moon by Larry McMurtry Page A

horse and stopped the troop for a moment.
    "You need to think about your horses first and foremost," he said. "Be sure their feet are sound. A lame horse will get you scalped quicker than anything in this country." "And be sure to sight your rifles every morning, too," Augustus added. "Bouncing around all day in a saddle scabbard can throw a gun off sight.
    If a red warrior forty feet away is about to put an arrow in you, you don't want to have to stop and fix your sight." Teddy Beatty resented such instruction, particularly since the two captains were both younger than he was.
    "I can't think about horses and guns all the time," he said, in a tone of complaint. "There's too much time for thinking out here on the plains." "Think about whores, then," Augustus said.
    "Pretend you won enough money in a card game to buy fifty whores." "Buy fifty whores and do what with them?" Long Bill asked. "That's too many whores to worry with even if I wasn't a married man --and I am a married man." "It's just something to think about that's more cheerful than torture," Augustus explained.
    "Survival's more cheerful than torture," Call said. "Watch your weapons and your horses and stay close to the group. That way you won't suffer nothing worse than hearing Gus McCrae talk about whores seven days out of the week." Neely Dickens heard the ^ws, but the ^ws didn't change his opinion. In his view it was hot coals in the belly for sure, if a man lingered too long in the north, in which direction, led by their young captains, they were even then tending.
    Neely still thought the best plan would be to make for Galveston and hide out in a ship.
    Maudy Clark only wanted to die--die and have no more freezing, no more outrage, no more having to worry about what Tana, the cruelest of her captors, would do to her at night, when they camped. Tana led the horse she was tied to himself; sometimes, even as they rode, he would drop back to pull her hair or beat her with a mesquite switch. Those torments were minor compared to what Tana and the other three Comanches did to her in camp. She had never expected to have to bear such abuse from men, and yet she still had two living children, Bessie and Dan, and could not allow herself to think too much about the luxury of death.
    William, her husband, had been away, driving some stock to Victoria, when the four Comanches burst into her cabin and took her. The babe at her breast, little Sal, they had killed immediately by dashing her head against a log. Eddie, her oldest boy, hurt his leg in the first scuffle --the pain was such that he couldn't stop whimpering at night. Maudy would hear him crying even as she endured her torments. On the sixth day the Comanches lost patience with his crying and smashed his head in with a gun butt. Eddie was still breathing when they rode on--Maudy prayed someone would find Eddie and save him, but she knew it was an empty prayer. Eddie's head had been broken; no one could save him even if they found him, and who would find a small dying boy in such emptiness?
    But Bessie and Dan, three and five, were still alive. They were hungry and cold, but they had not been hurt, apart from scratches received as the horses crashed through the south Texas brush.
    Several times, during periods of outrage, Maudy had thought of grabbing a knife and slashing her own throat, but she could not surrender her life while her children needed her. Bessie and Dan had stopped watching what the men did to their mother. They sat with their eyes down, silent, trying to get a little warmth from the campfire. When the men let her tend them, Maudy fed them a few scraps of the deer meat she was allowed. She meant to keep them alive, if she could, until rescue came.
    "Pa will be coming--he'll take us home," she told them, over and over.
    Maudy knew that part was a lie. William wouldn't be the one to find them, if they were found and saved. William barely had the competence to raise a small crop and gather a few