Comanche Moon Read Online Free PDF Page B

in snow. What was he to do?" Captain Scull was drinking brandy, his morning drink and his evening drink, too, when he could have it.
    One well-padded brace of saddlebags contained nothing but brandy. A tipple or swallow or two in the morning cleared his head wonderfully, when he was campaigning, and also rarely failed to put him in a pedagogical mood. History, military history in particular, was his passion.
    Harvard wanted him to teach it, but he saw no reason to be teaching military history when he could go out in the field and make it, so he packed up the ardent Dolly Johnson, his Birmingham bride, and went to Texas to fight in the Mexican War, where he promptly captured three substantial towns and a number of sad villages. The air of the raw frontier so invigorated him that he gave little thought to going back to Boston, to the library and the ivied hall. Because of his long string of victories in Mexico he was soon offered the command of the disheveled but staunch band of irregulars known as the Texas Rangers.
    Inish Scull was convinced, from what he knew of politics, that a great civil conflict was looming in America, but that conflict was yet some years away. When it came, Inish Scull meant to have a generalship--and what better way to capture the attention of the War Department than to whip the Comanche, the Kiowa, the Apache, the Pawnee, or any other tribe that attempted to resist the advance of Anglo-Saxon settlement?
    Scull might not have broken the wild tribes yet, but he had harried them vigorously for almost ten years, while, little by little, settlement crept up the rivers and into the fertile valleys. Farms and ranches were established, burned out by the red men, and built again. Small poor townships were formed; wagon roads rutted the prairie; and the government slowly placed its line of forts along the northern and western line of settlement. All the while, Scull and his rangers ranged and ranged, hanging cattle thieves in the south and challenging the fighting Indians to the north.
    Still, now and then, with a prickle of brandy in his nostrils, and a cold wind worthy of New England cooling his neck, Scull found that the professor was likely to revive in him, a little.
    At moments he missed the learned talk of Cambridge; at times he grew depressed when he considered the gap in knowledge between himself and the poor dull fellows he commanded--they were brave beyond reason, but, alas, untutored. Young Call, it was true, was eager to learn, and Augustus McCrae sometimes mimicked a few lines of Latin picked up in some Tennessee school. But, the truth was, the men were ignorant, which is why, from time to time, with no immediate enemy to confront, he had started giving little impromptu lectures on the great battles of history. It was true that the little butte to the west did not look much like an Alp, but it was the only hill in sight, and would have to serve.
    "No, you see, Hannibal and his elephants were on the wrong side of the hills--or at least he wanted his enemies to think so," Scull said, pacing back and forth, his brandy glass in his hand. He hated to drink brandy out of anything but glass. On every patrol he carefully wrapped and packed six brandy glasses, but, despite his caution, he would usually be reduced to taking his brandy out of a tin cup before the scout was finished.
    "What was he doing with elephants if he was out there in the snows?" Augustus asked. He hated it when the Captain got in one of his lecturing moods--though, since as far as he could tell they were just wandering aimlessly now, it probably didn't much matter whether they were riding or getting a history lesson. Now there the Captain was, drunk on brandy, pointing at some dull little hill and prattling on about Hannibal and elephants and snow and Alps and Romans.
    Gus could not remember ever having heard of Hannibal, and he did not expect to enjoy any lecture he might receive, mainly because one of his socks had wrinkled up inside