It was Woodrow Call who liked to hear the Captain discourse on the wars of history, or weaponry, or fighting tactics of any kind.

The Captain had even given Call a ragged old book about Napoleon; though the book had one cover off, Call carried it in his saddlebags and read in it a page or two at a time, at night by the campfire.

"What is horse heat, Captain?" Augustus asked--he did not want to seem indifferent to Inish Scull's instruction.

Indifference might result in Woodrow getting promoted over him, a thing he would find intolerable.

"Horse heat?" Inish said. "Why, your Mongol would slice off his steak in the morning and stick it under his saddle blanket. Then he'd gallop along all day, with the steak between him and the horse. Your Mongol might ride for fourteen hours at a stretch. By the time he made camp the steak would be cooked enough to suit him--a little horse heat and a lot of friction would do the job." "Fourteen hours under a saddle blanket?" Augustus said. "Why, it would just be horsehairs mostly, by then. I doubt I could stomach horsemeat if it had been under a saddle blanket all day." The Captain raised his binoculars--he had been looking down the canyon, where the sizable Comanche horse herd grazed.

"Buffalo Hump and his boys are hardly shy of horseflesh, at the moment," he said. "There must be nearly a thousand horses in that herd. I wonder what would happen if we tried to spook his ponies." "We'd need to find a good trail down off this rim," Call said, but Captain Scull seemed hardly to hear him. He was imagining a grand charge.

"These red men are in their winter camp," he said. "I expect they're lazy and well fed.

There's buffalo meat drying everywhere. We could come down like the wolf on the fold. It would be a chase you'd never forget." Augustus was annoyed. Just when he wanted to stretch out and enjoy the sunlight, the Captain wanted to run off the Comanche horse herd, a mission that was sure to be perilous.

"I expect they'd stop feeling lazy pretty quick, if we was to run off their horses," he said.

Inish Scull, binoculars to his eyes, suddenly stiffened. He had his glasses fixed on a certain lodge in the Comanche camp.

"That's him, gentlemen--I told you. That's Buffalo Hump. Bible and sword," the Captain said in an excited tone.

Call strained his eyes, but could barely see the lodges, across the canyon. Augustus, whose vision was the talk of the rangers, saw people, but they were the size of ants. He had once owned a good brass spyglass, but had lost it in a card game several months before. He had meant to get another, but so far had been prevented by poverty from acquiring that useful tool.

Inish Scull had not moved--his binoculars were still trained on the same spot.

"That young brave you chased is talking to Buffalo Hump--I expect it's his son.

The young wolf's bold, like the old wolf. We put some bullets in him, though. He's leaking considerable blood." "Not enough bullets, I guess," Call said.

"He made it back to camp." "Yes, and the rascal had a good look at the troop," Scull said. "He knows our numbers --in fact, he reduced our numbers, the damned scamp. He has a Mexican look-- the son of a captive, I expect. Here, gentlemen, I'll share my glass. It's not every day you get to watch Buffalo Hump at breakfast." It's not every day I'd want to, Call thought, but he eagerly took the binoculars. It took him a moment to focus them, but when he did he saw the great hump man, Buffalo Hump, a figure of nightmare across the southern plains for longer than he and Augustus had been rangers.

Call's last good look at the man had come twelve years earlier, during an encounter in the trans-Pecos. Now, there he stood. A young wife had spread a buffalo robe for him, but Buffalo Hump declined to sit. He was looking around, scanning the rims of the canyon. As Call watched, Buffalo Hump looked right at him-- or at least at the large rock where they all sat.

"He's looking for us, Captain," Call said. "He just looked right at me." "Let me look," Augustus said. "He almost got me once, the devil. Let me look." Call handed Gus the binoculars--when Augustus trained them on Buffalo Hump, the man was still standing, his head raised, looking in their direction.

"He's older, but he ain't dead, Woodrow," Gus said.

When he handed the binoculars back to Captain Scull he felt his stomach quivering--an old fear unsteadied his mind, and even his hand. His first glimpse of Buffalo Hump, which had occurred in a lightning flash many years before, was the most frightening moment in all his time as a fighting man on the Texas frontier. He had only escaped the hump man that night because of darkness, and because he had run as he had never run, before or since, in his life. Even so, he bore a long scar on one hip, from where Buffalo Hump's lance had struck him.

"Did you see, Woodrow?" he said. "He still carries a big lance, like the one he stuck in me." "Why, you're right, sir," Inish Scull said, studying Buffalo Hump through his binoculars again.

"He does have a lance in his hand. He's devoted to the old weapons, I suppose." "Why not?" Call said. "He come near to wiping out our whole troop the first time we fought him, and he didn't have nothing but a bow and a knife and that lance." "It's practice, you see," Scull said.

"The man's probably practiced with those weapons every day of his life since the age of four." Call had fought the Comanches as hard as any ranger, and yet, when he had looked down at them through Captain Scull's glass, saw the women scraping hides and the young men racing their ponies, he felt the same contradictory itch of admiration he had felt the first time he fought against Buffalo Hump. They were deadly, merciless killers, but they were also the last free Indians on the southern plains. When the last of them had been killed, or their freedom taken from them, their power broken, the plains around him would be a different place. It would be a safer place, of course, but a flavor would have been taken out of it--the flavor of wildness. Of course, it would be a blessing for the settlers, but the settlers weren't the whole story--not quite.

Inish Scull had lowered his binoculars--he had stopped watching the Indians and was staring into space.

"It's the quality of the opponent that makes soldiering a thing worth doing," he said. "It ain't the cause you fight for--the cause is only a cause. Those torturing fiends down there are the best opponents I've ever faced. I mean to kill them to the last man, if I can--but once it's done I'll miss 'em." He sighed, and stood up.

"When we finish this fight I expect it will be time to go whip the damn Southern renegades-- there'll be some mettle tested in that conflict, let me assure you." "Renegades, sir," Call said, a good deal puzzled by the remark. "I thought the Comanches were about the last renegades." Inish Scull smiled and waved a hand.