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missed. But after that he turned away.
    So three rode on, following a plume of dust already distant upon the prairie. “We’ll have the answer soon,” Amos promised. “Soon. We don’t dast let ’em lose us now.”
    Mart Pauley was silent. He didn’t want to ask him what three riders could do when they caught up with the Comanches. He was afraid Amos didn’t know.

Chapter Nine

    They kept the feather of dust in sight all day, but in the morning, after a night camp without water, they failed to pick it up. The trail of the Comanche war party still led westward, broad and plain, marked at intervals with the carcasses of buffalo ponies wounded at the Cat-tails. They pushed on, getting all they could out of their horses.
    This day, the second after the Fight at the Cat-tails, became the strangest day of the pursuit before it was done, because of something unexplained that happened during a period while they were separated.
    A line of low hills, many hours away beyond the plain, began to shove up from the horizon as they rode. After a while they knew the Comanches they followed were already into that broken country where pursuit would be slower and more treacherous than before.
    “Sometimes it seems to me,” Amos said, “them Comanches fly with their elbows, carrying the pony along between their knees. You can nurse a horse along till he falls and dies, and you walk on carrying your saddle. Then a Comanche comes along, and gets that horse up, and rides it twenty miles more. Then eats it.”
    “Don’t we have any chance at all?”
    “Yes.... We got a chance.” Amos went through the motions of spitting, with no moisture in his mouth to spit. “And I’ll tell you what it be. An Indian will chase a thing until he thinks he’s chased it enough. Then he quits. So the same when he runs. After while he figures we must have quit, and he starts to loaf. Seemingly he never learns there’s such a thing as a critter that might just keep coming on.”
    As he looked at Amos, sitting his saddle like a great lump of rock—yet a lump that was somehow of one piece with the horse—Mart Pauley was willing to believe that to have Amos following you could be a deadly thing with no end to it, ever, until he was dead.
    “If only they stay bunched,” Amos finished, and it was a prayer; “if only they don’t split and scatter... we’ll come up to ’em. We’re bound to come up.
    Late in the morning they came to a shallow sink, where a number of posthole wells had been freshly dug among the dry reeds. Here the trail of the main horse herd freshened, and they found the bones of an eaten horse, polished shiny in a night by the wolves. And there was the Indian smell, giving Mart a senseless dread to fight off during their first minutes in this place.
    “Here’s where the rest of ’em was all day yesterday,” Amos said when he had wet his mouth; “the horse guards, and the stole horses, and maybe some crips Henry shot up. And our people—if they’re still alive.”
    Brad Mathison was prone at a pothole, dipping water into himself with his tin cup, but he dropped the cup to come up with a snap. As he spoke, Mart Pauley heard the same soft tones Brad’s father used when he neared an end of words. “I’ve heard thee say that times enough,” Brad said.
    “What?” Amos asked, astonished.
    “Maybe she’s dead,” Brad said, his bloodshot blue eyes burning steadily into Amos’ face. “Maybe they’re both dead. But if I hear it from thee again, thee has chosen me—so help me God!”
    Amos stared at Brad mildly, and when he spoke again it was to Mart Pauley. “They’ve took an awful big lead. Them we fought at the Cat-tails must have got here early last night.”
    “And the whole bunch pulled out the same hour,” Mart finished it.
    It meant they were nine or ten hours back—and every one of the Comanches was now riding a rested animal. Only one answer to that—such as it was: They had to rest their own horses, whether