In the Rogue Blood (28 page)

Some in the company were curious about this new and youngest of their comrades who called himself Edward Boggs. At a night’s encampment Huddlestone spat into the fire and leaned back against his saddle and his solitary eye gleamed in the firelight. He grinned at Edward and said, “Old Bill here says you’ve hunt the savages afore.”

Edward shrugged and spat.

Geech laughed. He was skeletal and his face was redly raw with open sores. “That’s right, lad. Don’t say yay or nay and ye won’t be lyin now, will ye? You’re a right bright pup, ye are.”

“Apache,” Jaggers said, and winked at Edward across the fire. “That’s the lad’s specialty. Los tigres del desierto as the Mexes call them. Best hunting they is.”

“If they be tigers, what do ye call the Comandh?” Geech said. “I reckon they be lions.”

“No matter,” Huddlestone said, lighting his pipe and billowing smoke. “We aint like to see comanch down here this time a year. Not till the harvest moon when the waterholes are full up.”

“Ye best hope we don’t see no damn Comanch,” Tom Finn said. “It’s some of us seen the sort a harvestin them mean bastards do.” He’d been drinking from a bottle of mescal since before they put down for the night and the faint creosote smell of the spirit was detectable amid his other effluvia Edward had come to know from others of the company that Finn and Huddlestone had once been friends but in recent weeks an
animus had grown between them and none knew what their quarrel was.

“One heathen’s hair’ll bring the bounty quick as another’s,” Huddlestone said. “Makes no never mind to me. I hunt em all kinds.”

“Price might be the same but you play rougher hell taking Comanche hair than Apache,” Finn insisted. “It’s some of us know what we’re talkin about.”

Huddlestone’s eye narrowed. He leaned forward off his saddle and said, “I don’t know what I’m talking about?”

Finn stared at him.

“The difference between them heathen sonsabitches aint worth arguing,” Jaggers interjected quickly. “The one’s as bad as the other. They got a saying down here: ‘He’ll make a good man if the Apaches don’t stick him on a cactus.’”

“That aint hardly the worst them red niggers’ll do,” Geech said.

“Them of us who know what we’re talkin about’ll chase Apache all day long,” Finn said, still looking at Huddlestone. “Just don’t bring us no damn comanch.”

Huddlestone laughed without humor. “How in hell you ever fool the captain into thinking you’re a scalphunter?”

“I’m ever bit the scalphunter as any man here, especially you for damn sure.”

They locked stares, their unblinking eyes glinting in the wavering light of the fire as they set their legs under them, the air charged with their ready violence.

But now Captain James Kirkson Hobbes stepped into the cast of firelight and every man held fast. He looked at each of them in turn, his face expressionless but his eyes as hotly bright as embers. He spat into the fire and took slow care in lighting a cigar and puffing it and checking its burn. Then he looked at them all again and turned and faded into the darkness. And Huddlestone and Finn sat back again, their stare now uncoupled, the moment expired.

They rode out of the brush country of northern Nuevo León and into the dustlands of eastern Coahuila under a sun as pale as a Spanish priest. They camped that evening beside a small rill running through a thin stand of willows under an amber cat’s-eye moon. At the fire Padre Foreman
asked Jaggers if he’d taken care of that matter in Arkansas.

“I did,” Jaggers said. His sister had written to him in care of a hotel in Bexar some months before and told him her unarmed husband had been killed by a neighbor named Raitt in a dispute over the boundary between their properties. Her oldest son was but eight years old, not yet of an age to take his daddy’s part, and so she was calling on her only brother to set the matter right. The company was then ready to leave for Coahuila to hunt bandits for the state, and as much as Jaggers hated to miss out on that enterprise, she was his only sister and he felt he could not refuse her. So he had gone to Arkansas and settled the matter by shooting Raitt dead.

Tom Finn asked if the man had sons.

“Aye,” Jaggers said. “Two of em. One looked about eight, the elder near on to eleven. I come up on him in his field and was near as me to you when I shot him in the brainpan. His boys seen the whole thing and come running over and the way they looked at me I figure them to come hunting me soon as they get their growth. I guess I ort to killed them too.”

“Ye damn well should of,” Tom Finn said. “I known boys grown to old men hunting some fella who owed them blood. It’s some like that who don’t never quit lookin. But ye say these was so young, by the time they of age they maybe won’t know where to start lookin for ye. It’s a big world.”

“Tis that,” Jaggers said, “but it do have corners. And a man never knows when he’s like to find hisself in one a them and no telling who else might show up there too.”

“That’s true enough,” Finn conceded. “Never no tellin about them corners.”

A man called Himmler walked by with an incurious glance their way. He was large and easy of movement and not much of a talker. He habitually wore his hat pulled low over his eyes. He settled himself alongside the rill and began to play softly on a harmonica. Sweet Betsy from Pike.

“Your mistake was in reading her letter in the first place,” Huddlestone now opined. “Ye ought thow away any damn letter just as quick as ye get it. I never did know good news to come in any damn letter noways.”

“How in the purple hell would you know?” Finn said. “You can’t even read you own damn name.”

Huddlestone’s eyes cut to him but he held mute. He knew Tom Finn
could at least recognize his own name in writing. He had lost a twenty-dollars wager to him when Finn proved it in a Saltillo cantina. He turned back to Jaggers and said, “Thow the goddamn things away soon as you get em. Don’t even open em.”

Jaggers gave him a narrow look. “Shit Lon.”

Huddlestone spat and shook his head. “Oh I know, I know—she be blood. I don’t understand why that counts so much with such as you. Bloodkin aint but a goddamn accident.”

“Wait now,” Padre Foreman quickly interjected, leaning forward with roused interest, eyes bright and quick. “Accident is no argument against obligation to kin. One can argue that beyond the creation of the world by the Lord Himself everything in life is an accident and man therefore has no obligations whatever except those he believes he owes directly to God. But is not the concept of accident itself a tenuous one? Much that seems mere accident in the world is later seen to be part of a larger design, and even if it is not seen so, the lack of witness is no disproof of the design’s existence.”

Huddlestone laughed. “Ye got some peculiar blather for a man of the cloth, padre, and that’s no lie.”

“I am not a man of the cloth,” the padre said. “And the notion is not as peculiar as you think. Consider: What does obligation to God entail if not obligation to kin? Did not the Son sacrifice himself with the Father’s blessing to make blood atonement for the sins of all His mortal kin? Did the Father demand more of Abraham than He Himself willingly surrendered?” The padre’s eyes blazed. “But mark me now. The son was not literally of the Lord’s flesh, was he? He was not conceived of blood passed by the brute coupling of the flesh, was he now? No. And yet who would deny that the Christus is kin to God the Father? The divine notion of kinship is far more encompassing than mere ties of the flesh, and the sheer scope of the Lord’s sacrifice of his son—His
spiritual
kin—makes that clear.”

“Aint a damn thing out you mouth
ever
clear,” Geech said.

The padre smiled upon him, upon them all. “I am at this moment among closer kin than any I am connected to by line of birth. I am among men whose cast of spirit is most like my own, whose particular damnations, if you will, most closely resemble mine. No birth brother nor sister nor even my father himself, rest his soul, was as similar in spirit to me as are you all. Not one of ye has a soul darker nor fairer than mine. Not a one has more likely chance of heaven nor greater certainty of hell. Our
very choice of trade, the common path we’ve elected to follow through this vale of tears, a path elected through the exercise of our independent will, has made us of blood more closely joined than that of any family comprised of mere lineage.” He paused and grinned in return at the circle of grins and shaking heads about him.

“You saying I’m closer kin with this bunch a no-counts than with my sweet momma up in Michigan?” Runyon the deadeye said. “I’ll be damned if that’s so!”

The former Jesuit smiled more widely yet. “Aye, me good Teddy! Well and exactly said.”

“Exactly said, shit,” said Huddlestone. “A man’d have to be crazy as hell to listen to your bullshit, padre.”

Others around the fire nodded at this, grinning.

The padre fairly beamed and spread his arms as if he would induce benediction and then sweep them all to his breast. “Indeed,” he said. “Indeed. Quod erat demonstrandum.”

Some days later they came upon the Shawnees waiting for them on a rise where a spring flowed down below. The company watered and made camp and the scouts conferred with Hobbes. “Aint likely we’ll find sign of the heathen till we get the other side of them mountains,” Jaggers told Edward. The range he spoke of stood darkly on the west horizon. These were the first true mountains Edward had seen since his early boyhood in upland Georgia and were different in every way: bare and sharp-edged and rawly purple against the red sky of late afternoon. As the company advanced on this rangeline they came to a low woodland about the Rio Sabinas and rode through the cool shade of ancient ahuehuete trees and willows. The water here ran clear and sweet and in another two days they arrived at the pueblo of Sabinas where another six of the company were waiting with a caballada of mustangs freshly but barely broken to the saddle and with packmule supplies taken on in Saltillo and Monclova.

The new mounts were urgent with meanness, all snapping teeth and white rolling eyes. “These little sonsabitches as soon bite and kick you as not,” Jaggers told Edward, “but they’ll ride all day and night with but a sip of water and will eat any damn thing—rocks, dirt, you hat, anything.
You won’t see a meaner or tougher horse except under a Comanche.”

A dozen of the company went into a restaurant where the local patrons gaped at this wild bunch of white men and Indians that seemed emanated from a realm of bad dreams. The company ate their fill and then repaired to a cantina that emptied of nearly all other customers within half-a-minute of their entry. Only a few machos stood their place at the bar and there were but two fights that night. A young but whitehaired Australian named Holcomb badly cut up a Mexican drover whom he took to have sneered at him, and a Mex-Indian halfbreed called Chato broke a bottle over a wrangler’s head and gouged out his eye with the jagged end of it when the wrangler muttered something about “indio mugrioso.” But no one was killed and no enforcers of law presented themselves and before sunrise the company rode out, trailing the caballada and packmules, every man sliteyed and testy with the dolor of hangover.

The country rose before them. They came to the southern reaches of the Sierra del Carmen and beyond them the Encantadas and over the next weeks crossed them on rising switchbacks and through narrow passes whose sides loomed dark and ever higher and to which clung drooping juniper and red-fruited prickly pear and stilted century plants with center stems long as Spanish lances. The clatter of their horses’ hooves echoed off the stone walls. They shot and roasted wild pig for their suppers and filled canteens from icy creeks and in the moonlit evenings their breath issued like plumes of blue smoke. Their fires flattened and leapt and spun in erratic canyon winds. They heard cougars shriek in the barrancas. In this high country they had expected no sign of the savages and found none. In time the trail leveled and wound around the rocksides and cut through juniper and piñon growth and began its slow descent. They at last debouched onto the lesser bajada and spied a swirl of buzzards to the west and near noon the next day came upon a village in ruins still smoking.

The dead lay strewn and naked, caked in their own blackdried blood and swarming with ants and flies and partly consumed by canines and scavenger birds still picking clumsily over the corpses like drunken morticians. The remains of men and women lay eviscerated and throatcut and mutilated in the private parts. Not a corpse remained unscalped except for some of the infants who’d yet had no hair and who lay scattered and askew among the rocks on which their skulls had been crushed. The malodor was not yet at full ripeness but would achieve it by next day.
Only the blacksooted adobe walls still stood. Everything of wood was charred and smoking, everything of straw reduced to ash. The Shawnees quickly found out the survivors and rousted them from their hiding places in nearby arroyos. Fewer than a dozen and all appeared demented. A woman with eyes fixed on something far beyond the world around her held a dead babe to her teat.

The raiders had ridden off to the northwest with the stock and several young female captives. Hobbes looked about at the meager scattering of dead pigs and dogs and leaned out from his horse and spat and advised the elder in his fluent Spanish to strip and jerk all the unrotted meat they might find. The old man raised a hand as if he would point something out to Hobbes and then seemed not to know what he wanted to say and so dropped his hand and kept mute.

Hobbes spoke with Sly Buck and then the Shawnees galloped off on the trail of the raiders. The company mounted up and followed at a canter. They rode the rest of the afternoon and kept the mountains to their right. The sparse grass soon played out. They rode single file into the wider arroyos to avoid skylighting themselves to any watchers ahead. In this country of cactus spines and bloodstained rock and remnant bones the air was the driest Edward had ever breathed and it smelled of dusty death. Hobbes occasionally reconnoitered from the crest of a rockrise and studied the line of dark mesas standing squat on the far horizon under low reefs of clouds looking smeared with blood. They camped that night without fire. The moon came up from behind the Carmens and the wind blew cold and the sky was massive and congested with stars. Bright yellow comets flared across the sky and into oblivion. Edward rolled himself in his blanket and lay awake for a time, staring into the vastness of this desert nightsky and listening to the high yip of coyotes in the darkness and feeling in this alien wasteland a sense of rightful belonging he could not have put into words.

They rode another day and again made a fireless camp and in the forenoon of the following day they found a recently dead mule hardly more than hide and bones and with its flanks well butchered. Some hours later they spied the speck of a figure on the flatland ahead and after a time came upon one of the Shawnee outriders. Beside him a naked Mexican girl barely of age lay murdered on the hardpan. She bore no cut nor bullet wound but her inner thighs were coated with dried blood and her pudendum was crusted black and her eyesockets had been hollowed by
the ants. Her arms were crossed over her breasts as though she would assert modesty even in death.

The Shawnee spoke in his tongue with Hobbes and pointed to the dark form of a mesa some fifteen miles distant where the sky was staining crimson about the lowering sun. Hobbes relayed the information to the company: the raiders were encamped at a place the Mexicans called Fuente de Dios, a waterhole set in the mesa ahead, and were apparently unaware of their trackers. He ordered the company to put down in a near gully and there rest up till nightfall lest their quarry descry their advancing dust. As he reined the Janey horse about, Edward saw the Shawnee bend to the dead girl with a knife in his hand. A moment later the Indian was remounted and catching up to Hobbes and her longhaired scalp dangled from his belt.

They moved out at dark with a pale half moon hung low in the sky behind them, proceeding at a trot, single file and well apart, their gear lashed tight against clatter. Still, had the savages had an ear to the ground they might have heard them coming. The moon gained its meridian and began its slow fall to the west. As they neared the mesa they slowed their pace to a walk. Their only sounds were of the horses’ shoeless hooves whispering through the sand and the low creak of saddles and light chink of bitrings. Sly Buck and John Allen turned off with half the company in a wide arc to the left while Hobbes took the others around to the right. Both groups clung close to the shadows of the outcrops.

As they reached the yet larger outcrops near the base of the mesa the zodiacal light of false dawn was showing over the distant line of mountains in the east. Hobbes halted the party. They dismounted and the captain swiftly unfurled his blanket from behind the saddle and hooded the head of his horse with it and the rest of the band followed suit. Edward felt the Janey mare tremble and patted her neck and whispered in her ear and she settled. They walked the horses and mules further up into the rocks and into a ravine and now Hobbes scanned the men and Edward knew that as the youngest and least experienced among them he would be chosen to stay with the animals. But Hobbes instead pointed to a man called Patterson who had recently complained aloud about having to stand watch two nights in a row. Patterson scowled and gnashed his teeth but Hobbes simply stared at him and Patterson turned away and took each man’s reins.

Hobbes led them swiftly and surefootedly through the rock shadows and cactus growths and up the stone slopes and they at last crested on a
tablerock. They followed Hobbes at a crouch through the sand and scrub brush and a figure suddenly stepped out of the shadows before them and Edward’s skin jumped in the instant before he recognized Sly Buck. Hobbes and the chief parlayed in whispers and then moved up to the rockrim on their bellies and took a long look and then Hobbes motioned the others to come up. As they crawled toward the edge of the rock they passed within a foot of a dead Apache sprawled on his back in the scrub and Edward caught a scent like smoke and raw leather. His heart pounded against the earth.

In the first gray light of dawn they saw the raiders in a wide sandy clearing some fifty feet below. Edward’s quick count numbered nearly two dozen. They were just roused and feeding off the low fires set hard against the rockwall so that the thin smoke carried through natural flues to disperse unseen from some other part of the mesa. Their horses and the stolen stock were bunched in a makeshift corral flanking a narrow pass. A pair of women huddled at the wall fire nearest the waterhole and a tall Apache kicked one of them in passing. Her yelp carried up to the men on the rock and the Apaches laughed.

Hobbes looked to the deeply shadowed rockwall across the way and then at Sly Buck who nodded and pointed to a brushy portion of the opposite rockrim. Edward figured that was where John Allen and the others were positioned. Now Sly Buck whispered to Hobbes and pointed to the tall Apache moving about the camp and talking to various of the braves. Hobbes nodded. He unholstered his two Colts and lay them close to hand and then brought the Hawken up to shooting position. Every man readied himself as well. The captain drew bead on the tall Indian as he moved across the clearing and then the Hawken’s muzzle blasted orange flame and the report echoed deafeningly off the rock walls as the back of the Indian’s head came apart and he spun as if drunk and even as he fell every gun along both rockrims opened fire.

Edward fixed on an Apache racing for the corral and led him perfectly with the smoothbore and the .525 ball knocked the man off his feet as if he’d been swatted with a mace. The mulekick recoil against his shoulder was more satisfying than Edward could have said. He recocked with the ring lever and aimed and hit his next target in the hip and as the wounded savage crawled on he aimed more carefully and shot away the forepart of his skull. He hurried the next two shots and missed both times and put aside the longarm and switched to his revolver and kept adding to the hellish crossfire raging into the hapless indigenes. On either side of
him lay an angelfaced blond Jessup twin, three years older than he was and each at work first with a doublebarrel rifle and then going to their pistols too. A woman’s lingering scream cut through the thunder of gunfire and then abruptly ceased. Apaches ran and spasmed and fell. A handful reached the corral and kicked down the rail and leapt to horse. They headed for the narrow pass but a fusillade from the rocks above where Sly Buck had posted his other Shawnees sent the Indian mounts down shrieking. Some of the riders rolled clear and jumped up and began running and then were shot down too.

And then it was done and not a single savage had made away. The company descended through the lingering blackpowder haze to the floor of the clearing and began taking hair. Edward watched Jaggers roll an Apache onto his stomach and squat beside him and run his knife edge hard all the way around the top of the skull and then put a foot firmly behind the dead man’s neck to serve as a fulcrum as he wrapped a hank of hair round his hand and with a sharp hard tug ripped the scalp from the skull with a sound like a booted foot being pulled from deep mud. He held it up lank and dripping for Edward to see. The same sound was all about them. Indians lay with the tops of their heads raw and bloody to the red light of the morning sun risen to the rimrock.

“Here’s one needs trimming, boy.” It was John Allen, standing beside him and pointing at an Apache lying hard by. Edward bent to the task and executed it with the ease of someone long practiced. The feel of the scalp tearing free of the bone sent a quiver through him unlike any sensation he’d ever known. He held the prize up high and felt the blood rivuleting down his arm and under his shirtsleeve and saw Padre Foreman smiling broadly at him and there rose now an exultant howling of the hellbound and his war cry carried with it.