Read Online Texas Rifles by Elmer Kelton - Free Book Online Page B

touched his shoulder. “Good boy.” He turned away.
    By twos and threes, the men were moving up the creek to water their horses and drink a fill for themselves. One corner of the meat rack had gone down, just as Guffey had said, but most of the meat still hung above ground. The Texans were taking it. In some of the tepees they also found Indian pemmican tied up in gut casings.
    Captain Barcroft looked over the group of women and children. There must have been fifty or sixty women, and even more children than that.

    â€œAre you sure this is all of them?” he asked Elkin.
    â€œAll that’ve been found, Captain.”
    The captain turned to Miguel Soto. “Tell them to form a line. I want to look over these children.”
    Soto barked something in Comanche. The women were slow to comply, and he said it again, rougher this time. They strung out in a long line, clutching their children to them. Some of the women wailed as they stood there. A plaintive chant began.
    â€œThey think we shoot them, Capitán ,” Soto explained.
    Barcroft nodded grimly. “They know that’s what would happen if we were Comanches and they were white women. That, or worse.” He stepped forward. “All right, Miguel, let’s see these children.”
    Cloud stared in wonder as Barcroft started at one end of the line, carefully looking over the children. Seeing Elkin nearby, Cloud edged up to him and said, “What’s he up to?”
    â€œLooking for captive children,” Elkin replied. “Any captives, but especially his own.”
    â€œHis own?” Cloud’s mouth dropped open.
    Elkin nodded. “About three years or so ago, it was. The Comanches captured the captain’s wife and his three-year-old daughter. He found his wife later, up the trail. She was dead.” Elkin dropped his chin, staring at the ground. “He never did find his daughter. But he’s still looking, Cloud, still looking.”
    Cloud turned back toward the tall, grim man who slowly moved down the line, examining the children. Cloud let his own gaze streak swiftly ahead, at the rest of the line. There wasn’t a fair-skinned child in the bunch. But the captain wasn’t letting himself do it that way. He was looking the children over, one at a time. He probably already knew; his child was not here. But he wasn’t admitting it to himself. He was slowly, painfully working
his way down this ragged line, avoiding as long as he could the admission that he was looking for something he would not find.
    Cloud felt his throat tighten, and he turned away. This, then, was the torment he had seen in Aaron Barcroft.
    â€œMiguel,” he heard the captain say, “this girl doesn’t look Comanche. I think she’s Mexican.”
    Cloud faced back to see. Stark fear lay in the black eyes of a girl seven or eight years old. A squaw had a tight grip on her arm. Miguel touched the squaw’s hand and spoke sharply. The squaw loosened her hold, and the girl suddenly ran forward, throwing her arms around the captain’s legs. She began to sob out something in Spanish.
    Barcroft leaned down and touched his hand to her hair and looked to Miguel. Miguel listened to the girl cry out her story. Finally he said, “She is captive, Capitán, many months. She begs for us to take her home.”
    â€œWhere is her home?”
    â€œMexican settlement west of San Antonio. The Comanches they take her last spring.”
    What Cloud saw then made him shake his head in.disbelief. A tear worked a thin trail down the captain’s dusty cheek. Barcroft’s voice went soft. “Tell her we’ll get her home.”
    The captain didn’t finish looking at the children. He seemed to know he wouldn’t find what he had been searching for. He stood with his eyes closed, his hands gentle on the shoulders of the little Mexican girl.
    Cloud turned and walked away, wondering how he could so misjudge a