Comanche Moon by Larry McMurtry

Author:Larry McMurtry
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: torrent 04/08/2014
ISBN: 9780671020644
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 1997-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

Comanche Moon

“If we bury him good and poke out his eyes he won’t last long,” Fat Knee said.

Blue Duck was contemptuous of the suggestion— he was determined to have his way about the disposal of the prisoner.

“We are going to the camp of Slow Tree,” he insisted pompously.

So Famous Shoes was put on a horse behind Fat Knee, and the braves hurried on to the camp of the old chief, a camp that lay below the caprock thirty or more miles to the south. Famous Shoes would have preferred to walk; he had never liked the pace of horses very much.

It seemed to him that a man who bounced around on the back of horses risked injury to his testicles—indeed, he had known men whose testicles were injured when their horses suddenly jumped a stream or did something else injurious to the testicles.

But he was a prisoner of several hotheaded Comanche boys. Under the circumstances it would have been foolish to complain. Such boys were apt to change their minds at the slightest provocation.

If he argued with them they might do what Fat Knee suggested, in which case he would be blind and unable to follow tracks that interested him. It was better to keep quiet and hope that Fat Knee didn’t jump his sorrel horse over too many creeks.

It was on the days when Ahumado paid him no attention, never once raising his binoculars to the Yellow Cliffso, that Scull came closest to despair. As long as Ahumado watched, Scull could feel that he was in a fair contest of wills. When Ahumado watched, Scull immediately responded. Though he had given up scratching Greek hexameters, or anything else, on the rock wall, he grabbed his file and pretended to be scratching something. If that didn’t hold the old man’s interest then Scull tried singing. He roared out the “Battle Hymn” at the top of his lungs—then, hoping to puzzle Ahumado, he warbled a few snatches of Italian opera, an aria or two that he knew imperfectly but that might fool the old dark man who sat on the blanket far below him. It was all a bluff, but it was his only chance. He had to keep Ahumado interested in order to stay interested himself; otherwise he was just a man hanging in a cage, eating raw birds and waiting to die. One book might have saved him; a tablet to write on might have saved him. He tried recalling his Shakespeare, his Pope, his Milton, his Virgil, his Burns—he even tried composing couplets in his head; he had always been partial to the well-rhymed couplet. But his memory, stretch as it might, would only get him through two or three hours of the day. His memory wasn’t weak, he could snatch back much of the poetry that he had read, and not just poetry either. Lines came to him from Clarendon’s History, from Gibbon, even from the Bible. His memory was vigorous and Scull enjoyed exercising it; but he wasn’t at war with it and war was what he needed: someone or something to fight.

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