Mojave (3 page)

Like I said, I didn't die. Now, them first few days riding in the back of one of Whip Watson's freight wagons is about as forgotten as my Moses-like wanderings across the Mojave Desert. Had me some wild dreams, rare for me, some disturbing nightmares, but I've never been one for remembering such things. I do recollect this woman in white with black hair and a huge Mojave rattlesnake hanging around her neck feeding me soup. Least, she called it soup. It tasted like dung. And I recalled floating on a ship, sailing the high seas, and then I'd wake up, fearing that I'd been shanghaied, and finding myself lying in that freight wagon next to crates and crates of tools and kegs of gunpowder. And I'd start to sit up, but then I'd just fall back onto somebody's bedroll, and I'd close my eyes and go back to sleep.

Till one evening, I woke up.

The wagon wasn't moving. I smelled a campfire somewhere beyond the canvas tarp, heard voices speaking Mexican and what some folks might even call English.

“Evening,” a voice said.

I turned my head.

A candle had been lit, and sat flickering atop one of the crates—not the kegs of gunpowder, or course—so I seen the gent real good.

He dressed hisself in a fine Boss of the Plains, black as my soul but with a fancy horsehair-hitched headband. He wore a blue silk shirt, double-breasted black vest, black-and-white polka-dot bandanna, black-striped woolen britches with the thighs and seat reinforced with black corduroy, the legs of which was tucked inside high-topped stovepipe boots, blacker than the ace of spades except for the red crescent moons inlaid in the tops. It was a right fancy outfit. Especially when you got a gander at the two nickel-plated Colts shoved into a black sash, their ivory grips butt forward, facing me.

His eyes was black as night, too, like most of his duds, but his hair was white, like bones that've been bleaching underneath the Mojave sun for years. A real contrast, if you was to ask me, black outfit, black eyes, but white hair. Like there was good and evil in this man. I'd soon come to know better than think that. Sun and wind had bronzed his face, but there wasn't not a hint of beard on his cheeks. I knowed why. I could smell the soap on him. Here's a guy, in the middle of nowhere, who shaves before supper. Hell's fire, he probably shaved before breakfast, too. I smelled something else, too.

My eyes found the bowl he held in his left hand. Steaming hot. Smelling mighty fine.

“Where's . . . ?” My voice cracked. Had to swallow down some spit. “Where's the lady that's been feeding me?” I asked.

He laughed so hard he almost spilt the soup, which would have been a tragedy. Placing the bowl near my bedroll, he wiped his nose with the back of his left hand, and laughed some more. “I haven't seen a
lady
since Prescott,” he said.

I give him the dumb look.

“I've been feeding you, mister.”

“Oh.” Sure couldn't hide the disappointment in my voice. Because he dressed real fine, kept hisself clean and shaved, but this guy, iffen you was to ask me, was uglier than sin.

“Brain must've been playing tricks on me,” I told him. “I saw this woman feeding me soup. With the damnedest, longest black snake hanging around her neck.”

“Like this?” He pointed at the floor.

Which is when I saw the whip. Well, they do call those whips “blacksnakes.”

I laughed.

“It bites, sure enough,” my savior said. “Kills like a sidewinder. Eat your soup, if you're able.”

Well, knowing that this wasn't some goddess saving my worthless hide but an ugly man with two pistols and a whip, I managed to get myself into a seated position, back against the wagon's side, and tasted the soup. I've tasted better, but I smiled politely. And kept right on eating.

“That's good to see,” the man said. He pointed a slim finger at me and the bowl and the spoon. “Thought you was gonna die on me. That would have set me back a spell.”

“Maybe you won't have to bury me,” I told him.

“Oh, I wouldn't have buried you, mister. Takes too much time. I would have just tossed your body to the buzzards. You would have set me back ten dollars had you croaked. Juan Pedro said you'd surely die before we reached Calico. I bet against that old Mex.”

“I'm glad Juan Pedro lost his bet.” Then his words struck me. I finished the soup, lifting the bowl and draining the rest. “You're going to Calico?”

He motioned at the crates and kegs. “That's where we're selling this.” He took the spoon and bowl, tossed them through the opening in the back of the wagon. “Juan Pedro!” he shouted. “More dishes for you. And you owe me ten dollars, old man.”

His black eyes lighted back on me. “You owe me, too.”

“I'm your servant,” I told him, and give him this slight bow.

With a grin, he moved back, taking his whip with him, sitting on one of the kegs.

“That's good to hear,” he said. “Because I can use a man like you.”

Which made me a bit nervous, more wary.

“You know me?”

“I know enough.” He reached into his vest pocket, pulled out a fine cigar—not one of them two-cent jobs I was prone to smoke, but a real fat expensive cigar—and fetched the candle, lighting the smoke, and him sitting on a keg of gunpowder with six or seven more kegs well within reach of some random spark.

Didn't offer me one of them cigars, but I don't think I would've lit it up if he had. I'm a gambler, but I don't take chances that might get me blowed to perdition.

When the cigar's tip was glowing, he moved the candle back atop the crate marked “Hammers” and exhaled a long stream of smoke toward the top of our canvas roof.

“I find you half-dead, more like three-quarters dead, fried, soles of your boots worn to nothing, clothes threadbare, alone in the desert. No horse.” He stared at me, waiting for some response.

“Had a buckskin,” I told him. “Died on this side of the Colorado River.” Figured there was no point in telling him how that horse had expired.

“Most people would have returned to Arizona Territory.”

I smiled. “I've been to Arizona. Never seen California.”

Which satisfied him, I reckon, 'cause he moved on.

“No canteen, either,” he said.

I looked around, like this white-haired man dressed in black would have fetched my canteen and left it within my reach. Like I told y'all, I didn't remember shucking it, but it sure wasn't in with the hammers and pans and powder in this wagon.

Give up looking. I turned back to my savior with a sheepish look on my face. “I had one,” I told him. “Don't know what I done with it.”

“You've never been in the desert before,” he told me, and puffed on his stogie.

Oh, I had. Had almost died in what, in New Mexico Territory, they call the
Jornado del Muerto
, the “Journey of the Dead,” which is just as deadly, just as miserable, and just as barren as the Mojave. If I didn't have the canteen no more, I sure knowed why. Even empty, canteens feel heavy, and for a fellow afoot with no water, they weigh as much as a dead man's bloated body. But I didn't say none of this. Something about this guy's demeanor told me that he didn't cotton to arguments or getting hisself contradicted or corrected.

“So I ask myself, we found you lying against some rocks,” the man in black with the white hair said. “What kind of man is it, who with no water, no horse, nothing except a ratty old hat. . . .”

I reached up for my ratty old hat, which sure wasn't as fancy as my rescuer's Stetson, and give him another one of my sheepish looks.

He had stopped to draw on his cigar, pushed the blue-gray smoke up toward the canvas roof again, and he finished his question.

“I ask myself, what kind of man is it, who alone in the desert, no horse, no gun, no chance . . . what kind of man is it who still carries a revolver?”

With that, his left hand snaked behind his back, and he pulled out that old .36. With a grin, he flicked the antique toward me. I ducked, let it slam into the wooden slats. Then I reached over and picked it up.

“A cap-and-ball antiquity that, by my guess, even empty—as it was—weighs more than an empty canteen.”

“Sister Rocío,” I told him, “always told me I had more luck than sense.” Instinctively, I looked down at my knuckles, almost feeling the good nun's ruler rapping them hands of mine. She could wield a ruler like a sledgehammer.

“Your sister?” he asked.

I shrugged. Didn't see no need in giving him any information he might be able to use against me somewhere down the line. “Just a woman I knowed,” I told him, “back when I was a kid.”

Course, I was more interested in the revolver. It felt different because it had been cleaned. I could feel the oil on the cylinder, the barrel, could smell it, too. It also felt heavier.

“It's loaded,” my savior told me.

I shot him a quick look. He was holding the cigar with his left hand, dangersomely close to one of them kegs of powder, but the thumb of his right hand was hooked on that fancy sash, just a hop and a skip from the Colt near his left hip. Next, I studied that Spiller & Burr a mite closer.

Carefully, I laid the .36 between my legs.

“Yeah,” I said, “but it don't work without caps.”

He chuckled, slid the cigar into his mouth, and used his left hand to reach into another vest pocket. Something shiny come flying toward me. This one, I managed to catch.

It was a straight-lined capper, brass, fully filled with likely fifteen number-eleven percussion caps. Put them babies on the nipples on that cylinder, and I'd be ready to tackle some sore losers from Fort Mojave or set up another crooked poker game.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Reckon you owe me,” he said.

“Reckon I do,” I told him.

He pushed himself to his feet, kneeling a mite, holding out his right hand. His left, I noticed, wasn't nowhere near none of his guns. Unless he had some hideaway derringer up his sleeve.

“Come on,” he said. “Meet the boys. We've got food that's more solid than soup, and genuine Tennessee sour mash.”

My rough hand took his soft one, and he pulled me to my feet.

“Name's Bishop,” I told him—and yes, I thought of using another handle, but hell, he had saved my life, so I reckon I owed him at least that much honesty. “Micah Bishop.”

“Whip Watson,” he said, and he was heading out the back of the wagon, and I was following him.

Outside, gathered around a right cozy fire, assembled the worst-looking bunch of ruffians I'd ever laid eyes on—and I once rode with Sean Fenn. And, well, Big Tim Pruett wouldn't have never gotten mistook for some handsome thespian. I'd expected to find teamsters. You know, mule skinners and freighting types, ugly, burly men handy with whips and cusswords. Well, they was certainly ugly, and plenty of them I'd call burly, and I suspected that all of them knowed more cusswords than Webster.

Only I wasn't so certain I'd call them mule skinners. No, sir, what I'd call them boys was . . . gunmen.

Squat assassins. Shootists. Man-killers. Vermin.

A thin, leathery graybeard rose from behind the coffeepot. I thought he might be fetching me a cup of that brew, which sure smelled better than the soup I'd just et, but he come with empty hands. I figured him to be Juan Pedro, and I figured right.

The sun had just set, so it was still fairly light outside, and that fire was roaring hot, so I got a good look-see at the Mexican. He dressed like a vaquero—or maybe one of them Spanish noblemen— if you savvy what I mean. A dandified silk shirt, tight-fitting black jacket with pretty red and blue braid all up the sleeves and shoulders. Dark blue pants called
calzoneras
decorated with silver conchos from the hem to the knees. Black boots and spurs with large rowels. And a flat-brimmed, flat-crowned hat of the finest beaver, and a fancy-braided stampede string to keep his hat from flying off.

I never cottoned to stampede strings. They choked a body's neck, and too many folks already wanted to put ropes around my neck as it was. Big Tim Pruett always told me that the best way to keep a hat on your head in a windstorm was to buy one that fits snug. Mine, while not much to look at, fit me just fine.

Juan Pedro also wore a brace of Schofield revolvers in a red sash around his belly. There was a Green River knife stuck inside one of his boot tops, and I could tell by the way his left arm hung and from that bulging fancy jacket that he also kept a smaller revolver in a shoulder harness.

Juan Pedro, I decided, was a right careful man.

With a slight bow, he introduced hisself. His name was a lot longer than Juan Pedro, but Juan Pedro was part of that handle. Then his left hand reached into a pocket on his jacket, and he fished out a coin. I knowed it was gold. I could even see the word
liberty
on the gal's head, and them stars all around the coin. A gold eagle. Looked to be fresh-minted.

He spoke some smart Spanish, then started to extend the ten-dollar piece to Whip Watson, but quickly pulled it back.

“Ah,” he said, switching to English, “but I believe the bet was that this
norteamericano
would live to see Calico, Señor Watson. We are a long way from Calico, still.”

Whip Watson stood a bit behind me, and after that introduction, I wasn't about to take my eyes off of Juan Pedro, but I heard Watson say, “That was the bet.”

“So if I kill him now, you would owe me ten dollars.”

“I reckon so.”

Me? I'm thinking:
These are the guys you wanted me to meet?

Juan Pedro was staring at me then, smiling. He had right pretty teeth. Real straight. Mostly white. Excepting for top front one with a silver speck in the middle. It glittered like a rattlesnake's eye. He was slipping that gold coin back into his pocket, but that pocket was right above one of them bit Schofield revolvers, and I wasn't the fool he must have thought me to be.

What I done was cocked that .36.

Don't know why—fate maybe—but I still held that newly cleaned revolver in my left hand. Course, what Juan Pedro and Whip Watson and nobody else knowed was that I can't shoot worth a nickel with my left hand. Even with my right, it ain't a sure bet I'll hit the target, though I had gotten lucky with Sean Fenn and some of his boys, and those other rapscallions I've already mentioned who are now roasting in hell. What Whip Watson and I knowed, however, was that I hadn't put percussion caps on that old relic, and a cap-and-ball gun don't work without the cap part. What I was gambling on was that Juan Pedro couldn't see that them nipples was empty.

Must have worked, because Juan Pedro laughed and dropped the coin in his pocket real careful, then inched both of his hands away from both of his revolvers that I knowed he carried.

“This is a smart man you have here, Señor Watson.” Juan Pedro was still grinning, but I was looking past him at those other, ahem,
freighters
. “Perhaps he will live to see Calico.”

“He will.” Watson walked to the fire, and squatted by the coffeepot.

Juan Pedro gave me another one of his bows, then stepped aside, extending his left arm in a friendly gesture that wasn't sociable at all.

“After you, amigo,” I told him.

Laughing again, he turned and went back to his place. I taken myself a deep breath, let it out, and found that capper Whip Watson had give me back inside the wagon. Set that .36 on half-cock, and began putting those caps on them nipples—all six of them, deciding against safety for the moment—and stepped toward the fire to meet some of the rest of the boys, wondering if they'd be as sociable as Juan Pedro.

They wasn't the most talkative bunch. Mostly they just grunted, drank, and farted. I counted fifteen of them, besides Juan Pedro and Whip Watson, and I ain't that fast at ciphering but I do know how to count. Cards mostly. But seventeen mean-looking gents around a campfire didn't tax me none.

What struck me strange was that nobody was eating. There was food hanging from pots, and it smelled real fine, but the pots just steamed and bubbled, yet nobody taken nothing except the coffee. Didn't bother me too much, on account of all the soup I'd swallowed, and besides, I spied a jug making its way around that circle, and assumed that was the genuine Tennessee sour mash that Whip Watson had mentioned.

So there I sat, between Whip and a sour-smelling guy with a fat gut and arms that looked as solid as two-by-fours and a rough, black beard that was moving, not from the wind, on account there wasn't no wind, but on account of the bugs. I wanted to move, but didn't want to disrespect the gent none. So I just slid as far away from him, but not too close to Whip Watson, as humanly possible.

I looked at the jug. Then I looked at the fire. Then I looked at the Spiller & Burr, which I decided wasn't very sociable being in my left hand, so I slid it into my waistband. No one noticed. Also, I started to notice something. They wasn't considering me, wasn't even following that jug of liquor, and most of them wasn't watching the fire or the food. They stared out at some rocks, but it was getting darker by the minute, and I couldn't see nothing but the shadow that was some boulders.

It couldn't be Mojave or Paiute Indians. Couldn't be bandits. Because these boys I was sitting in a circle with certainly wasn't greenhorns and if there was something dangersome in them rocks, they wouldn't be sitting around a campfire waiting on a jug of Tennessee sour mash. Since I didn't find no interest in looking at boulders that was disappearing in the darkness, I stared at the wagons. It was an odd assembly. Not those big long-hitch freight wagons pulled by massive spans of mules or oxen that I'd expected to see with a freighting train. No, these was mostly farm wagons with rear wheels topping four feet high, some with canvas covers—like the one I'd rode in—and others without. There was two combination market and pleasure wagons, and four old Conestogas like they'd taken on the old Oregon Trail all them years before. I'd never even seen one in person, just woodcuts in magazines and such. But the damnedest thing of all was that I also counted four Columbus carriages. They were parked closest to the fire, so I could see them real good. And Big Tim Pruett had once stole a Columbus buggy and give this rich lady whose husband owned one of the mines in the mountains the ride of her life up and down Wyandot Street in Denver City till he got arrested, and I got conscripted by another lawdog to help carry the lady, who had fainted in pure terror, to the nearest pill-roller.

Now, you can hall freight in market and pleasure wagons, and certainly Conestogas hauled supplies from Missouri to Oregon or even California, and farm wagons would fill the bill iffen you didn't have freight wagons. But I didn't see no reason anybody would be taking four—that's right,
four
—fancy rigs that I'd seen selling for three hundred dollars and more in towns like Kansas City and Dallas.

The next day, I'd get a real close look at those buggies, and they all was top notch. Made of hickory, with full fenders, silver-plated glass lamps so they could go at night, and canopy tops of fancy body cloth with full back and side curtains. And two-seaters, all of them, with buffed leather that didn't look dusty at all. On account that Whip Watson had some of his burly men buffing that leather, getting out all the dust and grime, making those rigs look like they'd just come out of that factory in Ohio.

But that evening, before I even saw what care Whip Watson had his men giving them buggies, I was already wondering:
Why in blazes would you haul supplies to a mining town in the middle of the Mojave Desert in fancy carriages?
Then it struck me that Whip Watson planned to sell those buggies in Calico. Shrewd man, this Whip Watson. Miners get rich, and they want to show their wealth. A fancy conveyance like a Columbus carriage would probably bring six hundred dollars in a remote spot on the map like Calico, California.

I was just about to compliment Whip Watson on his capitalism when something caught my eye. Didn't come from those boulders where most everybody still was watching. It come from one of the Conestogas.

What drawed my attention was an orange dot that got brighter, then dimmer, then disappeared, then glowed all orange again. Somebody out there was smoking a cigarette. Then that somebody stepped around from behind the feed box on the back of the wagon, and I spied another orange dot that twinkled. I could make out their shapes now as they met near the water barrel on the wagon's side.

So there was nineteen men in this company.

No. More. Two other shapes of men came dimly into view beside the second wagon. I looked down the line, and, sure enough, there was a fellow sitting on the wagon tongue who must've been cleaning his fingernails with a pocketknife. I just guessed that there was another guard on the other end of that wagon, so I looked at the final wagon. It taken a spell, on account that the light was fading fast, but I saw another glow from another smoke. That led me to guess that there was twenty-five men.

Well, it's a handy thing to have guards posted at night in country such as this. The West ain't no place for careless folks, but those guards—iffen that was the case and they was truly guards and not just cigarette smokers who didn't feel like waiting their turn for a taste of sour mash—appeared interested in only those four big wagons. Which got me to suspicion that there must be something right valuable in them wagons.

Ever seen a Conestoga? Not just a woodcut in
Harper's Weekly
or some such. I mean in person.

They remind me of that big white whale that this peg-legged Captain Ahab was chasing in another one of those books that gal from that hifalutin society read to us boys in Folsom before we got real sick of all that harpooning and avast
-
ing and whale blubbering and guys named Queequeg and Quahog and Ishmael and so we asked her to read something from the
National Police Gazette
instead.

Those wagons are eighteen feet long and maybe eleven feet high, curved
fore
and
aft
(I did pick up them two words from that book nobody had heard of about that crazy captain and that whale) with the thickest white canvas covers you'll find anywhere. The wheels' rims was made of iron. They looked like whales, I mean to tell you, but they was built like forts. Once I'd heard tell from some old-timer that Conestogas could haul twelve thousand pounds. So whatever Whip Watson and his boys was hauling in those wagons, there must be a lot of it. I didn't figure it was gunpowder, hammers, pickaxes, and copper mining pans.

Twenty-five men. But by then it was too dark to count the number of wagons.

Then my brain reminded me of something else. It takes mules or horses or oxen to move wagons, especially Conestogas. Those animals would be off somewhere real close, but they would be guarded, too. I'd put at least two men to make sure no animals wandered off or got wandered off by men like me who got attracted to good horses. Maybe four.

Twenty-nine men.

Make it thirty.

Somebody said something in our campfire group, and I looked back toward those boulders, or where the boulders were because now you couldn't see that far. Another orange glow. Too big, too bright, I figured, for a cigarette, so I decided this gent smoked cigars.

Everybody seemed taken by this cigar-smoker. A side glance even showed me that Whip Watson found the man coming from the boulders interesting. I started to look back at Cigar Smoker when the man with bugs in his beard jabbed my arm with the jug.

He said something to me. Or maybe he just farted. I took the jug, and he looked at the orange dot. That was just my luck. I got to drink after a man who stank worse than the rankest of farts and had bugs in his beard and probably everywhere else on his person.

I didn't want to be disrespectful, but I didn't want to be swallowing graybacks or ticks or whatever those bugs were, so I wiped the lip of the jug with my shirtsleeve, hoping that Bug Beard wouldn't find offense to this act and stomp my head into the ground. He didn't. Didn't notice me. Like everybody else, he focused on the man coming from the boulders.

The jug came up to my mouth, and I drunk. No bugs, no forty-rod whiskey, but pure, genuine Tennessee sour mash. Went down smooth as silk. Maybe that's what Whip Watson was hauling in those big wagons.