Buffalo Hump saw from the awkward way Blue Duck held the lance that he had not changed. He seemed undecided as to whether to throw the lance or jab with it. Any well-trained Comanche, who knew how to use a lance, could have killed the young fool in only a few seconds.

Buffalo Hump felt the scorn he had always felt at Blue Duck's crude disregard of the old weapons. He saw that Blue Duck rode a Mexican saddle and had a buffalo gun strapped to it. But such failings didn't matter now. His son had come to kill him and had even awakened him from his death sleep to do it. All that was left was one fight, and since his son had brought two well-armed helpers, it would not be a long fight. Buffalo Hump crouched a little and waited, hoping Blue Duck would be fool enough to grapple with him. Even though he was weak, Buffalo Hump still trusted his skill with the knife. If Blue Duck were fool enough to come near him, Buffalo Hump meant to slash at his throat. Several times he had opened an enemy's windpipe so cleanly that the enemy would not even know he had been touched until blood blew out with the bubbles of air.

For a minute, there was a circling. Blue Duck shifted the lance from hand to hand; Buffalo Hump held his knife and his shield. Buffalo Hump knew that he could not move well. One of his legs had stiffened when he slept, and it was still stiff. All he could do was wait and hope Blue Duck made some foolish mistake. Buffalo Hump began to sing his war cry as he waited. His voice cracked as he sang, but he wanted his three enemies to know that he was still a Comanche warrior, a man who sang as he went into battle.

The three men looked amused when he began to sing. They thought it was funny that an old man would sing as he was about to be killed. They were men so degraded that they didn't realize it was a warrior's special obligation to sing in battle and to raise a death song if it was clear that the battle was going against him. Other warriors who might be fighting with him would need to hear that their chief was still making war; if it had to be that he must die in the fighting, then, particularly, the spirits needed to be offered a death song, so that they could welcome the warrior into the spirit world once he had fallen.

The comancheros didn't know these things.

They merely thought he was a silly old man, singing in a weak voice to the men who were about to kill him.

Then Blue Duck disappeared. The other two men pulled knives and waved them at him, though they didn't come within the circle of rocks.

Buffalo Hump, his vision wavery, realized that his son must have slipped behind him; before he could turn to face him, Blue Duck, who was young and nimble, struck full force with the lance. Buffalo Hump had tried to turn but the stiff leg had kept him from being able to pivot as he once had. He had twisted, and then the lance struck his hump. It went in but did not go through, though the force of the blow knocked Buffalo Hump on his face; dust was in his nostrils. He didn't feel the piercing at all, only the force of the blow. Blue Duck tried to push the lance through, or else pull it out, but could do neither. The lance point was stuck more firmly in the big hump than it had been in the buffalo skull shield. Blue Duck, maddened by the failure of his blow, jumped on his father's back and put all his weight on the lance, determined to shove it through.

"Come help!" he yelled at the two renegades--soon Buffalo Hump saw several feet moving around him as the two men and Blue Duck leaned as hard as they could on the lance.

Buffalo Hump realized that once again his foolish son had erred. Once he himself had tried to put his lance through the hump of a running buffalo and had nearly lost his life as a result. Before he could push the lance through, the buffalo jerked him off his horse into the path of other buffalo. Now Blue Duck had made the same error by thrusting the lance into his hump rather than his heart. Buffalo Hump lost his war song --the men were stepping on him as they tried to push the lance through; he could not get his breath well enough to sing.

He was jerked this way and that as the men struggled with the lance. Once he tried to slash at the feet of the men moving around him, but his fingers had no strength. He lost hold of his knife just as he was losing hold of life itself, his life as a warrior. With a final desperate push Blue Duck shoved the lance through the hump and through Buffalo Hump's body too; its red point went into the earth beneath him, just as his own arrows had once gone through the bodies of his enemies, pinning them to the ground. Buffalo Hump was filled with hatred for his son, for denying him the death of prayer and song that he had hoped for, though he knew, from seeing many men die, most of them at his own hand, that few men were fortunate enough to die as they would have chosen, for death did not belong to the humans or the great creatures either--death came when it would, and now had come to him; he could do no more, and even the last look of hatred which he directed at his son went unnoticed. Blue Duck and the two other renegades were panting behind him somewhere, panting from the effort it had taken to kill him. Even then Buffalo Hump could still move his hands and legs a little, as the lance held him pinned to the earth.

"Look at him!" one of the men said. "He still ain't dead. He's moving like an old turtle." Buffalo Hump closed his eyes. He remembered that there were old stories--old, old stories, about a great turtle that had let the People ride on its back as he brought them from their home in the earth to the place of light. He remembered the turtle story, an old story he had heard from his grandmother or from somewhere even older than his grandmother, someone who knew about the beginnings of the People in the time before they knew of the light or the buffalo or the grassy plains. He felt the grass growing beneath him, growing and rising to cover him, growing to hide him from wolf and bear. Then he knew no more.

"He's gone, Duck," Monkey John said, observing that the old Comanche with the ugly hump had ceased to move his arms and legs.

Blue Duck was still breathing hard from the effort it had taken to kill his father. For a few moments, when the lance stuck in the hump, he had been desperate. His fear was that his father would cheat him again by dying in his own way. His father's last looks, when he had been just a weak old man holding a knife and pretending to be a warrior, had been the same looks of determined hatred that had caused so many men to lose their will and allow Buffalo Hump to kill them. Even when the old man was pinned to the ground by his own lance his look was one of hatred--Blue Duck had been ready to get a hatchet and cut his head off, if it took that to finally kill him; but when he looked again he saw that Monkey John was right. Buffalo Hump was dead. All the same, he started for his horse, meaning to get the hatchet, when Ermoke stopped him.

"Where are you going, Duck?" Ermoke asked him.

"I mean to take his head," Blue Duck said.

"Not today, you ain't got time," Ermoke said, pointing south toward the Lake of Horses.

Blue Duck saw what he meant. On the dry plain the dust thrown up by the four horses of their pursuers hung in the air. It annoyed Blue Duck that the rangers were so persistent, rushing him, denying him the full pleasure of his triumph over his father.