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insupportable fear. Martin Pauleywould not have recognized her, even if he had been in a mood to notice anything at all.
    He looked startled as Laurie kissed him, but only for a second. He seemed already to have forgotten her, for the time being,
     as he turned his horse.

Chapter Seven
    Out in the middle of a vast, flat plain, a day’s ride from anything, lay a little bad-smelling marsh without a name. It covered
     about ten acres and had cattails growing in it. Tules, the Mexicans called the cat-tails; but at that time certain Texans
     were still fighting shy of Mexican ways. Nowhere around was there a river, or a butte, or any landmark at all, except that
     nameless marsh. So that was how the “Fight at the Cat-tails” got its foolish-sounding name.
    Seven men were still with the pursuit as they approached the Cat-tail fight at sundown of their fifth day. Lije Powers had
     dropped out on the occasion of his thirty-ninth or fortieth argument over interpretation of sign. He had found a headdress,
     a rather beautiful thing of polished heifer horns on a brow-band of black and white beads. They were happy to see it, for
     it told them that some Indian who still rode was wounded and in bad shape, or he would never have left it behind. But Lije
     chose to make an issue of his opinion that the headdress was Kiowa, and not Comanche—which made no difference at all, for
     the two tribes were allied. When they got tired of hearing Lije talk about it, they told him so, and Lije branched off in
     a huff to visit some Mexican hacienda he knew about somewhere to the south.
    They had found many other signs of the punishment the Comanches had taken before the destruction of the Edwards family
     was complete. More important than other dropped belongings—a beadedpouch, a polished ironwood lance with withered scalps on it—were the shallow stone-piled Indian graves. On each
     lay the carcass of a horse of the Edwards’ brand, killed in the belief that its spirit would carry the Comanche ghost. They
     had found seven of these burials. Four in one place, hidden behind a hill, were probably the graves of Indians killed outright
     at the ranch; three more, strung out at intervals of half a day, told of wounded who had died in the retreat. In war, no Indian
     band slacked its pace for the dying. Squaws were known to have given birth on the backs of traveling ponies, with no one
     to wait for them or give help. The cowmen could not hope that the wounded warriors would slow the flight of the murderers
     in the slightest.
    Amos kept the beaded pouch and the heifer-born headdress in his saddlebags; they might help identify the Comanche killers
     someday. And for several days he carried the ironwood lance stripped of its trophies. He was using it to probe the depth of
     the Indian graves, to see if any were shallow enough so that he could open them without falling too far back. Probably he
     hoped to find something that would give some dead warrior a name, so that someday they might be led to the living by the unwilling
     dead. Or so Martin supposed at first.
    But he could not help seeing that Amos was changing. Or perhaps he was seeing revealed, a little at a time, a change
     that had come over Amos suddenly upon the night of the disaster. At the start Amos had led them at a horse-killing pace,
     a full twenty hours of their first twenty-four. That was because of Lucy, of course. Often Comanches cared for and raised
     captive white children, marrying the girls when they were grown, and taking the boysinto their families as brothers. But grown white women were raped unceasingly by every captor in turn until either
     they died or were “thrown away” to die by the satiated. So the pursuers spent themselves and their horse flesh unsparingly
     in that first run; yet found no sign, as their ponies failed, that they had gained ground upon the fast-traveling Comanches.
     After that Amos set the pace cagily at a walk until the horses recovered from