Quotation

(snipe hunts in college beer keg parties ...) “What’s a snipe hunt?” “It means you convince a fellow he can catch all the snipe he wants if he holds a flashlight in front of an open gunnysack by a barbed-wire fence between the hours of eleven and midnight.” “Who would be so stupid?” “It’s a metaphor. It means you confuse and mislead and mystify your enemy. Stonewall Jackson said that.” Beckman is one cut above a man with a bone in his nose and a spear in his hand. The rationalization was always the same: The Indians, particularly the Comanche, had committed atrocities against innocent farm families and missionaries or sometimes a lone trader whose wagon was loaded with pots and pans and machine-made-clothes and whiskey. But Hackberry always had the sense that the thundering charges upon the wickiups and the storm of bullets and the burning of the Indians’ food and blankets and buffalo robes were intended to be repeated until there was not one Indian left alive south of the Red River.