In the Rogue Blood (30 page)

On a hot bright August morning they trooped bloodcrusted and reeking through the gates of Chihuahua City, in that day the most prosperous trading metropolis of the Southwest. They’d hung some of the scalps on poles and bore these before them like regimental banners as they rode in to the city’s clamorous reception, to cheers and flung flowers and the kisses of women and girls, to the blaring of brass bands and the shouted adoration of boys who ran alongside in the dust raised by their horses and the stock they now turned over to government wranglers for official accounting in the governor’s corrals. They were guided to the governor’s palace and led into the courtyard and followed by the cheering throng and there greeted with a speech most cordial and laudatory by the governor himself. They laid out their trophies on the courtyard stones and the governor’s man made loud public count and when the last of the scalps was tallied the number totaled one hundred seventy-two and the acclamations of the crowd rose shudderingly to the sky. Hobbes asserted that all but thirty-one of the scalps were taken from warriors. If any thought this imbalance suspicious or wondered if every hair had in fact come strictly from Apache head none said so. Within the hour some of the scalps were dangling from the front wall of the palace and the other
half from the portals of the main plaza and in both places coteries of young boys stood below and gaped in awe the whole of the afternoon.

The scalphunters repaired then to the city baths and there spent the greater part of the day scrubbing away the filth and blood and gore encrusted in the crevices of their flesh, in their ears and hair and fingernails. Spectators lined along and atop the walls nudged each other and whispered at the sight of these hairy northern barbarians in all their scarred and branded and tattooed nakedness. They pointed at Huddlestone’s un-patched eyesocket and the earless side of Finn’s head and the ropeburn scar around Chato’s neck, at the branded number 12 over Himmler’s eye and the assorted numbers on the inside of Geech’s forearm and the patches of mange afflicting Castro’s chest and back. So utterly ragged and befouled were these killers’ clothes that only the fire would do for them. They purchased new raiment from the army of vendors arrived to besiege them. They submitted themselves to barbers of priestly demeanor and had their beards trimmed or shaved away and their wild locks shorn and even the hairs of their nose and ears were dealt with.

That evening they presented themselves each man including the Shawnees in a newly tailored suit and silk cravat in the main dining room of the palace, there to be honored and regaled by the governor who began the festivities by praising their fearlessness and martial skills yet once again. They learned now that their host country had been at war with the United States since early May, that even as they sat and drank in the palace of the governor of Chihuahua the U.S. Army was on the march to Monterrey which stood nearly four hundred miles to the southeast as the crow flies but was in fact much farther removed for being on the other side of the eastern Sierra Madre range.

“But the war is another business,” the governor said in English, which was but one of the various languages he spoke admirably well, “and has nothing to do with our own.” Neither he nor any man in that lavish room could know that in little more than six months Big Bill Doniphan’s army of one thousand barbaric and ragged Missourians would blast into the city like the assembled wrath of God and kill and maim and wound more than one thousand Mexicans while suffering the loss of but one of their own.

The governor raised his glass high in salute to the company and they all saluted him in return. Padre Foreman was heard to whisper, “God
keep
those dear Yankee troopers … keep them far from our portion of this lucrative land!”

The governor now presented to Hobbes a handsome leather-and-canvas satchel bearing their recompense for the scalps and stock. Their captain’s dignified aspect and the eloquent sound of his Spanish speech of acceptance impressed every man in the company even though few of them understood any part of what he said. At its conclusion even the Shawnees, who knew no Spanish at all and but few words of English, joined in the vehement applause that shivered the board’s glassware.

There followed a sumptuous feast complemented by much proffering of toasts. So unrestrained was the company’s subsequent libation that soon enough most of them were well drunk and calling loudly for women of ready affection. Hobbes suggested that the governor’s attending officer show his men the way to the nearest well-stocked whorehouse before they surged into the streets and helped themselves to whichever women they found at hand. The governor laughed at what he was certain was the sort of rough joking one could expect from such men but then noted the absence of mirth in Hobbes’s face and whispered in the ear of his adjutant. The officer clicked his heels and turned to the scalpers now pounding the table with tankards and knife heels and chanting, “
Gash!…. Gash!…. Gash!
” and raised his arms wide and proclaimed, “Atención, caballeros! Siganme a la tierra prometida! Vamonos a ver las mujeres mas bonitas and mas cariñosas de la cuidad. Del mundo!” He gestured for them to follow him. “Síganme por acá.”

“What’s that soljerboy sayin?” Geech asked Padre Foreman, who was already rising from his chair and mopping the grease from his lips with a napkin.

“Our brute but sincere prayers of supplication have been answered, me lads. It’s this way to the ladies. Let’s don’t dally. Vita breve.”

As Hobbes and John Allen rose to follow after the company the governor asked if the captain might spare a moment to speak with one Señor Aristotle Parras, who was not only the richest merchant in Chihuahua but a dear personal friend as well. He indicated an immaculately groomed little man sitting at his right hand who had spoken not a word thus far in the evening.

“Well, sir,” Hobbes said, “I’m kinda itchy to attend the ladies myself at the moment, so maybe we can—”

“Please forgive my miserable manners, Captain,” Señor Parras said in almost accentless English, “but I have a proposition for you that I believe you will find greatly worth your while. I am most eager to discuss it with you.”

John Allen grinned at Hobbes and said, “I believe the gentleman’s asking do we want to make some money, J.K.”

“Please, sir, but a moment of your time,” Parras said.

Hobbes shrugged and sat back down and said, “All right, mister, what’s on your mind?”

He dreamt that night that he was drinking in a saloon hard by a transport wagon trace nearby the Del Norte River. The night was cold and windblown and the talk around him was of a whorehouse fire that just two weeks before killed ten of the twelve girls who worked there and burned to death as well five of their patrons. The place was called The Pink Passion and the locals were reminiscing about their favorites among the perished. He heard them tell of Jeanette with the talented cooter that could smoke a cigar. About Charlene who would give it free to any man who could last five minutes with her without coming and had not had to give a freebie but twice in three years. About Candy and Randy the redhead twins who liked to work together, whether with one man or two or three. About Eve, the moodiest and meanest of them, who some of them said was plain and simple crazy and could get a man killed quick. She liked to incite fights among the men and watch them go for each other’s blood. But she was the best in the house and could damn near pull a man inside out if she was of a mood to. “Scared me, she did,” one man said, “and I aint shamed to admit it. But ever time I was drunk enough, she’s the one I wanted.” Nods and knowing smiles all around. “She had the most scars of any gash I ever knew,” said another, “but it was something about her. Ever time I had her it felt like I’d shagged the devil’s wife and got away with it.” They all agreed you didn’t forget that one, that crazy Eve. “That nipple,” someone added, “all twisted up thataway, like somebody sometime tried to bite it off. About the worst sew-up work I ever did see.” He listened to them with his drink halfway to his lips and his heart thumping in his throat, his eyes cutting from one to another of them, thinking sure it was a devil’s joke they had somehow figured to play on him. But they were all of them laughing and nodding at each other and paying him no mind at all. He knew then it was no joke, knew it had been her. Knew that here in this dusty patch of borderland she had burned to hell and gone. And then it was bright morning and he was striding
along the trace and past the charred remains of the house and a little farther along there hove into view a cemetery. Then he was standing before the marker over the common grave where they’d laid the bones they’d found in the ashes.

And in the mind of his dream he said
:
I guess you suited well enough. Ye never cared much for talk noways
.

He came awake to a hand insistently shaking his shoulder. His head felt full of broken glass and his tongue savored of something dead a week. John Allen was grinning down at him through his sparse blond beard. “Let’s go, lad. Captain’s called a company meet in the yard below. Let’s up and about.”

He saw the faint light of early morning in the window, then the naked brownskinned girl beside him. The girl was very pretty and she was smiling at John Allen’s fondling hand at her breast.

“Hey, goddamnit!” He pushed John Allen’s hand away and sat up and winced at the pain now augering his skull. John Allen kept his grin and winked at the girl, then said to Edward, “Come on, boy, let’s go!” Then he was out the door and down the hall and rousting someone in a room adjacent.

They stumbled downstairs red-eyed and disheveled and exuding the rank effluvia of tequila and sexual fluids and whorehouse perfume. A half-dozen stableboys had saddled the company horses and behind each cantle tied wallets freshly packed with foodstuffs and new clean bedrolls and these boys now held the readied mounts in the brothel courtyard where Hobbes and John Allen were waiting for the men to assemble. Neither had slept at all but both looked eager for the day. Some of the men glared at them and muttered testily about spoiling a man’s fun so damn early in the morning and before he could begin to enjoy his second wind.

“Say now, boys,” Geech said, “lookit there them pistolas.”

They saw that each pony now carried a pair of holsters set before
the pommel and each holster held a new model Colt. Hobbes had awakened the city’s premier gun dealer in the middle of the night and presented him with the governor’s immediate order for the guns. He now pulled a similar pistol from his own holster and held it up for all to see. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I dislike to interrupt you at your fun, I do. But I want you all to look here at this new Colt.”

It was a five-shooter like the Texas Colts on their hips but differed in that it had a ramming lever attached underneath the barrel. The company watched the captain closely as he put the pistol at half-cock to permit the cylinder to rotate freely and charged a chamber with powder from a flask and pushed in a ball and turned the cylinder to align the chamber under the lever and rammed the ball home. When he had thus charged all five chambers he capped them each in turn and the pistol was ready for use.

“See?” Hobbes said. “No call to take the thing apart to load the cylinder like with them Texas models. But a man wise enough to carry him a spare cylinder or two already loaded and he shoots up all five loads, then all he does is this.” He pushed on a wedge key set alongside the barrel and slid the barrel and cylinder off their holding pin and swiftly exchanged cylinders and snapped the pistol together again and spun the piece on his finger as adroitly as any trick shooter. He reholstered it and spat to the side.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “these pistols are the governor’s present to us for the good job we done. A bonus, ye might say. Now a friend of his wants to make our hire. It’s a sweet job and if we pull her off we’ll be able to buy all the fun we want till we too damn old to remember how to have it. The thing is, we got to move on this right now.”

He explained Parras’s proposition in less than a minute and two minutes later they were all nineteen of them mounted and chucking their horses down the streets toward the gates of the city and outbound to the bloodcountry.

Three days before, a train of eighty mules bearing an immense store of merchandise from St. Louis had been attacked by a party of several dozen Apaches some thirty to forty miles northeast of the city and every member of the train killed but two. The survivors had walked the rest of the way to Chihuahua. One of them died within sight of the city and the other collapsed at the very gates. He lived only long enough to tell of the raid before dying with his head in his mother’s lap. The entire train had belonged to Alexander Parras and his proposition to Hobbes was this: he could have half the mules and half the merchandise that he recovered
from the Indians. Further, Parras offered to match the governor’s bounty on every scalp Hobbes brought back. All Parras wanted was half of the recovery and to see those Indians’ scalps on poles all around the walls of his hacienda as notice to every heathen redskin in northern Mexico of what would happen to those who robbed from him.

“We catch them red niggers we’ll all be richern Midas,” John Allen had told the company, and not a man among them begged to differ.

Hobbes sent the Shawnees ahead and they’d ridden swiftly out of sight. The company rode hard all that day and night and all the next day. In the late afternoon they arrived at the site of the attack and found one of the Shawnee outriders awaiting them. The shadows of nopal and yucca stretched long on the hardpan and the sky to the west looked awash in blood. The few mules killed in the attack still bore their goods but lay ravaged by vultures and writhing with maggots. The company collected the abandoned sacks of grain and crates of dried fruit and bore them on their pack animals to the next outcrop and there cached the goods among the rocks for retrieval on their return. Then set out on the raiders’ trail leading eastward to the wasteland.

They pressed on through the night and rode through the next two days and nights and continued to come upon dead mules and disposed goods every ten miles or so and they every time cached the goods and cursed the savages for not taking better care of the animals. “Ever mule they run a lance through just cause it stumbles is one less mule we gone get to sell,” grumbled Geech. “Fucken heathen sons a bitches.”

They pressed on, feeding on jerky as they went and taking turns sleeping in the saddle. Late that night the land lit palely blue with lightning and then thunder blasted like cannonfire and the ensuing storm blew the rain sideways. The rain broke before morning and their horses splashed through the playa but before the sun was halfway to its meridian the land was again dry and becoming dust. They rode deeper yet into the great bolsón. On their eighth day out of Chihuahua City, as the eastern sky reddened like a fresh slow wound, a Shawnee outrider brought news that the raiders were but another day ahead at a mesa containing a spring and apparently thought themselves beyond all pursuit.

They caught sight of the mesa at sunset and hove up and waited for
nightfall and then moved out quickly under a silver crescent moon with cusps upraised like horntips. They closed to within a mile of the nearest rocks and there dismounted. A pale cast of firelight was barely visible against the mesa walls. The company hooded the horses’ heads with blankets and walked them to within a hundred yards of a connecting outcrop. Even at this distance they could now hear faintly the caterwaul and whoop coming from the other side of a high rockwall just ahead. Hobbes and Sly Buck went forward at a crouch and kept alert for sentries and saw none and reached the sloping rockwall and scaled it to the top as noiselessly as cats. They found themselves on a flat narrow rim with an excellent view to the Indian camp set fifty feet below in a wide mesa pocket. They were atop the pocket’s eastern arm which curved around for perhaps three hundred feet and fell sheer on the side toward the camp. The opposite wall was part of the mesa’s eastern face, a higher and even sheerer rockwall that extended straight and unbroken to the north for more than a mile.

Not a sentinel to be seen. A half-dozen fires blazed on the camp’s sand floor. The deepest part of the pocket clearing had been roped off as a corral for the ponies and mules. Most of the mules still bore their cargo packs, though a number of packs had been broken open and lay scattered about the camp.

The savages were chanting and dancing and dressed in a carnival medley of fashions, wearing every combination of wedding dresses and top hats and overalls and hip boots and sunbonnets and vests and oil slickers and still more. Nearly every man of them had a bottle or flask in his grip and some were carrying small casks in both hands and drinking directly from the unbunged hole. Hobbes counted thirty-four of them and whispered so to Sly Buck who whispered back that there were thirty-eight. A mule lay dead with its haunches and flanks cut away and the packs it had carried lay burst apart in a wide litter of clothing. The mule meat was roasting on sticks over campfires that popped and lunged in a wayward wind and sent sparks rising up the rockface and vanishing into dark nothingness.

Now an Apache in top hat and stiff-looking overalls let a great shout and raced toward the largest of the fires and leapt over it laughing and staggered on landing and fell forward on his face and lay unmoving. The others around him laughed uproariously and grabbed up handfuls of sand and flung them at his sprawled form.

Hobbes grinned in the dark and nudged Sly Buck and they descended
the slope and went back to the waiting company and told them the Apaches were drunk as coots and the time to strike was right-goddamn-now. He sent Sly Buck and his Shawnees and the Jessup brothers back to the top of the rockwall they had been on. John Allen, Huddlestone, Geech, Chato, Himmler and Holcomb he ordered to positions thirty yards east of the mouth of the mesa pocket. Then Hobbes and the rest of the company mounted up and rode north until they were out of range of the Apaches’ firelight and then made a wide half-circle and angled back southward toward the Indian camp. When they closed to within a furlong of the mouth of the mesa pocket they hove up.

They were still under cover of darkness but could see clearly into the camp’s firelit heart. Even at this distance the sight of the Apache celebration—their clownish dress and wild shrieking, their long shadows lurching and reeling along the rockface wall—struck Edward as a scene from hell’s own madhouse. Hobbes dismounted and steadied his horse and braced the Hawken on the saddle and took careful aim. The rifle blasted with an orange tongue and at almost two hundred yards’ distance an Apache in a planter’s hat and with a woman’s skirt belted around his neck like a cape left his feet in a backward arc as if performing a gymnastic feat. Even before he lit fully on the ground the rest of the Indians were racing in every direction and snatching up weapons and the Shawnees and the Jessups were shooting down on them from the rockwall above.

Every shot put down an Indian. Some of them ran for the horses and some came scampering out of the pocket with the intention of going up the slope to kill the snipers but as they came round the wall they presented themselves as stark silhouettes against the firelight behind them and John Allen’s boys hardly had to aim to put down the first bunch of them with a rifle volley and then shoot the others with their pistols.

Now a dozen or so mounted Apaches came galloping out of the mouth of the pocket bearing north and away from the murderous gunfire coming from atop the rockwall and from their right flank. Hobbes and his team sat their horses in the darkness and watched the approach of the Indian riders’ silhouettes and took aim on them with their rifles. When the savages closed to within thirty yards they fired a yellowstreaking fusillade that dropped the front seven horses and their riders with them and some of the ponies behind them tripped on these and went down screaming too. Now the scalphunters had pistols in hand and were urging their mounts forward and shooting every Indian to raise any part of himself
from the ground. And then all of them—Sly Buck’s shooters on the rockwall and John Allen’s party on the flank and Hobbes’ mounted team—recharged their pieces and again shot every Apache who did not appear sufficiently dead. It was an attack of altogether perfect execution and they made short work of it.

As Edward chucked the Janey horse forward into the Indian camp the Shawnees skimmed down the rockwall as lightly as lizards and began scalping the dead. Their own technique for taking hair was to make a cut all the way around the top of the head and then sit with their feet braced on the man’s shoulders and a tight two-hand hold on his hair and jerk the scalp off the skull with a wet sucking pop.

John Allen’s shooters came jogging into the clearing, every man jaunty and loud with an ebullience peculiar to men of shared expertise in the blood arts. Some of the company set to taking scalps and some went to the mules in the corral and began rummaging through the packs to see just what it was they had come to own half of and would be selling at profit to the Chihuahua merchants. There was yet more clothing of every sort, men’s suits and roughwear and suspenders and boots, dresses and parasols and women’s shoes and ladies’ undergarments of sundry sorts which roused cheers from this company of killers and many boastful proclamations of dire sexual intent on their return to Chihuahua. There were bolts of cloth in various colors and men’s beaver hats and ladies’ hats appointed with egret plumes as pale as cream. And yet more grain and dried fruit and sugar and angora wool and cotton, jars of preserves and candies, tins of meats and fish and sweets.

Now Geech gave a shout and from a mulepack pulled a bottle of French brandy and raised it high and the company fell to the cargo of spirits like wolves on a wounded beef. Edward joined the rush to the store of liquor and the melee thereat and fetched out a bottle of rye for himself. Had Hobbes been present at this discovery he likely would have stayed the company from the spirits until they first repacked the mules and made ready to start back to Chihuahua City at first light. Even then he likely would have held them to the sharing of a few bottles and nothing more until they were back in town where every man could addle his mind as he wished and exercise the license he desired and fend for himself with the consequence. But at the time the jubilant scalpers began unstoppering and turning up bottles of whiskey and jugs of wine their captain was with Doc Devlin on the other side of the rockwall seeing by torchlight to those in the company who had been wounded.

They were two. Himmler had taken an arrow through his calf and now lay on his belly with his teeth locked on a leather ball pouch as Doc Devlin first cut away the pointed end and then placed one foot behind Himmler’s knee and the other on his ankle and carefully gripped the shaft with two hands just under the fletching of the remaining portion, setting himself to extract it with one hard pull. Himmler’s face poured sweat and his jaw muscles looked like small fists and the veins bulged in his neck and across the number 12 on his forehead. As the arrow came free he let a strangled cry and arched backwards so far it seemed his spine might break and the pouch fell from his mouth on strings of saliva. His breath rushed from him and he fell forward with his face in the dirt and groaned like a man spent on a woman. Doc Devlin tossed aside the arrow portion in his hand and left Himmler to bind the wound himself.

The other casualty was a Shawnee who sat at the base of the rock slope gasping wetly with nearly a foot of the feathered end of an arrow angling down from just below his breastbone and two feet of the pointed end projecting upward from between his shoulder blades. Sly Buck stood close by without looking at him. Blood streamed from the Indian’s mouth and nose and his eyes were set on some distant shore where his spirit would shortly alight. Doc Devlin stood over the man and studied his circumstance and then spoke to Hobbes who spoke in turn to Sly Buck in the Shawnee tongue. The chief made no response and the captain nodded and he and Doc Devlin walked away.

They found the company given over to riot. Castro and Geech and the Jessups were each armed with a bottle of whiskey and a knife and making bets on throws at a scalped Apache they’d sat up against the rockface some twenty feet away. One of the Jessups set himself and threw his knife in an end-over-end blur and sank it almost to the hilt in the corpse’s stomach. This Jessup whooped in triumph and raised his bottle to his fellows and they all bubbled their bourbon. Padre Foreman sat pale and round beside a crackling fire, naked but for a woman’s bonnet and a pair of great red drawers, smiling into the flames and imbibing from a decanter of Spanish wine. Jaggers and Huddlestone and Holcomb hefted magnums of champagne and were watching an Indian burn in the fire where they had pitched him and the smoke of this fire was greasily bittersweet.

Edward sat on a flat rock near the corral and sipped at his rye and beheld this carnival of the bloodcrazed.

John Allen appeared at Hobbes’s side and made a dismissive gesture in response to the captain’s glare. “I couldn’t of stopped them if I tried,
J. K. You neither. I anyway figured they would of got into that liquor store somewhere between here and Chihuahua someways or other and no telling but it would come at a worst time. We best off letting them get it over and done tonight.”

Hobbes stared hard at him a moment longer and then again looked about at his carousing company. “They at least take the hair already?”

“They did.” John Allen pointed to the corral rope where the scalps hung dripping.

Hobbes let a long slow breath. “Well, hell. They done a smart of killing and the badger’s done loose. Fuck it, John. We might’s well have a drink ourself.”

“Glad you feel that way, J.K.,” John Allen said, and brought a full bottle of bourbon from behind his back and pressed it to Hobbes’s hand.