Nabours held his silence as long as he could, but at length spurred up to the morose and solitary man who rode without a word regarding the herd, himself or his own plans.
“Mr. McMasters,” said he, “I don’t know where we are right now. I don’t know where we’re going. We haven’t got no map. I don’t know when Rudabaugh may jump us. It’s time you and me got plumb serious.”
“Yes, I think so.”
“For instance, we ain’t on no Chisholm Trail?”
“No, that’s over in east, if it can be called a trail. Fort Sill—that’s what they call the camp where the soldiers stop, in west toward the Wichita Mountains—is the nearest white settlement. It’s only a camp; there is no actual Army post there yet.”
“My notion, soldiers mostly ride around and don’t do nothing much.”
“They’d do more if they were let alone by the Indian Department. Those men are doing what Captain Marcy advised fifteen years ago—figuring on an Army post north of the Red, to watch the Comanches.
“The worst Comanches, as you know, are the Quahrada bands—that’s old Yellow Hand. Their right range is north of the Buffalo Gap and west into the Staked Plains; that’s their big buffalo country. But I think word has gone out for some kind of a council between them and the Kiowas, and that’s what has brought Yellow Hand in here.
“The policy of the Indian Department now, as you may know,” he went on explaining, “is to round up all these Indian tribes and get them on reservations. That’s going to mean war, next year probably. This whole country in here is just as like as not to be on foot right now. The best hope we’ve got is that none of them get together with Rudabaugh.”
“That’s fine, ain’t it? And you done told me that Rudabaugh was heading in ahead to meet us.”