Now, though, they needed him. Pea Eye himself had never been in that part of Mexico before, and though Brookshire had come down the Rio Concho with Captain Call, he had no eye for landmarks and would be lost without expert help.

"All I know is that if we follow this river to the Rio Grande, we'll come to the village where Joey Garza's mother lives," Brookshire said. He had caught his breath, and his big shotgun was loaded. He had only managed to collect four shells. He had no idea what he and Pea Eye were going to do.

"I wish the Captain would show up," Pea Eye said. Often in the past, when he and some of the men found themselves in a predicament, the Captain had showed up and had taken matters in hand.

Now, though, it was just himself and Brookshire, and an Indian who might appear again or might not.

Their horses were dead and likewise their pack animals. If they survived, they would have to walk out. On foot, the Rio Grande was at least three days away, probably more. They could go back to camp when it grew too dark for the killer to shoot, and provision themselves from the packs.

They possessed adequate food and lots of ammunition. Also, they were right in the Rio Concho.

Unless the killer forced them out of the river, there was not much danger that they would get lost and starve.

Still, Pea Eye felt nervous; but more than that, he felt scared. When the shooting had started, he'd done what he always did when shooting started: he had taken cover. Being shot at was always a shock, and it was not something he had ever gotten used to. It took a while for the shock to subside sufficiently to allow him to think. Sometimes it took a week or more for the shock to subside, but in this instance he wasn't with a troop of Rangers, and he didn't have a week in which to calm his nerves and take stock of the situation.

"Why did he shoot the horses and mules?" he asked Brookshire. That was a question that had nagged him even as he was running up the riverbed.

"Why didn't he just shoot us?" he asked.

"We was standing in plain sight. Except for that big nag of yours, he killed all the animals with one bullet apiece. He could have shot us just as easy as he could shoot a mule. It don't make sense." "Nothing makes any sense," Brookshire said. "This whole trip hasn't made any sense. The Captain ought to have caught this boy by now. He's taking much too much time. If it's the Garza boy shooting at us, then the Captain ought to be here.

"Maybe it ain't the Garza boy, though," he added. "Maybe it's the vaqueros who killed Ted Plunkert. Maybe they came back to get more plunder." "No," Pea Eye said. "It was just one gun and one shooter, and I never caught a glimpse of him. If it was vaqueros, there would have been three or four of them, and they would just have rode in, blazing away. They wouldn't have shot the horses, either. They would have tried to shoot us. Then they'd have been two horses and two mules richer." "Maybe he was trying to shoot us," Brookshire suggested. "Maybe he just missed and hit the horses." "Nope, he hit what he aimed at," Pea Eye said. "He wanted to put us afoot, and he done it. What I don't know is why." Brookshire felt dull. He had felt dreadfully frightened when the bullets started hitting the horses, and while he was running he had felt scared. He had expected a bullet to strike him at every step.

But no bullet had struck him down, and now he just felt dull. Over the course of the trip, he had gradually stopped being interested in his own fate. He knew he had made a great error in coming to Texas. He understood little enough of life as it was lived in Brooklyn, but he could make nothing at all of life as it was lived in Texas; or at least as it was lived by Captain Call and those associated with him. They had gone from somewhere to nowhere, accomplishing nothing along the way except the loss of Deputy Plunkert. All he had expected of the morning was a piece of bacon and a big cup of coffee. Why some maniac would suddenly shoot the very mule that carried the coffee, and the other mule and the two horses as well, was beyond him. It made no sense at all, but it was in keeping with everything else that had happened since his arrival in Texas. Captain Call, who seemed the most rational and most methodical of men and who was the most experienced manhunter in the West, had done nothing that made clear sense from the time they had left Amarillo together. The Garza boy was still free to do whatever he chose to do, including shooting mules and horses, if indeed he was the shooter. The only exceptional thing Call had done on the whole trip was beat a sheriff nearly to death. Admittedly, catching one quick boy in a vast country was a difficult task --but then, that was the Captain's work; his life's work, really. If he couldn't accomplish it in this instance, then he should have resigned.

Brookshire no longer believed, as Pea Eye seemed to, that the Captain was still in control of events. He didn't believe that he would simply show up in the right place at the right time and end the career of Joey Garza. While the Captain had been looking for him in Mexico, Joey had robbed a train in Texas. Now that the Captain was in Texas somewhere, Joey was in Mexico, shooting the mule that carried the coffee.

It was a botch. When Colonel Terry heard about it he would be angry, and in this instance justifiably so.

Brookshire had almost stopped caring whether he lived or died. The cold had frozen the will to live right out of him. Katie, his excellent wife, was dead. In the past weeks, he'd had time to remember all the ways in which Katie had been an excellent wife. He was losing his ability to imagine Brooklyn and the office, and the good chops Katie had cooked him, and the cat, and the cozy house. What he had feared that first morning on the windy station platform in Amarillo had actually happened. He had blown away, into a dry creek in Mexico--cold every night, cold every day, wind all the time, sand in the food, sand in the coffee, no houses and no coziness of any kind. He had blown away; now he was so tired that the long struggle upwind, back to where he had once been, back to who he had once been, no longer seemed worth it. Let the young killer walk up and finish him. Maybe he would get off a shot with his eight-gauge, but he didn't expect to eliminate Joey Garza as easily as old Bolivar had eliminated their unfortunate mule.

"What do we do next?" he asked Pea Eye, though he didn't really expect Pea Eye to know. But they had to do something next. Or were they just going to stand in a drafty creek bed all day?

"We'll wait for dark and go back and get our supplies," Pea Eye said.

So they did--they stood in the dry, drafty creek bed all day. When they weren't standing, they squatted. Pea Eye wanted to wait until full dark to go back to camp and secure food and ammunition. It was the longest, dullest, coldest wait of Brookshire's entire life. It was cloudy, and he did not even have the distraction of watching the sun move across the sky. There was no distraction at all, and Famous Shoes hadn't come back from wherever he had gone.