William W. Johnstone (12 page)
Read William W. Johnstone Online
Authors: Savage Texas
“What a bunch of damned fools we was,” Johnny said to himself, smiling at the memory. He peeked over the edge into the depths of the sinkhole. Way down at the bottom lay a broken human skeleton clad in strips and shreds of rags. A nameless victim given up to the pit. A lonesome death. Had he been alive when he went in, or already dead?
He wouldn’t lack for company now. Lots of it.
Johnny gave a kick-push with his booted foot and sent the outlaw’s dead body tumbling into the pit. It hit outcroppings from the shaft walls several times on the way down before touching bottom.
The meaty thud was followed by a discordant hissing like steam escaping a boiler.
The floor of the pit swarmed with snakes blanketing the body, many sinking fangs into it. The pit housed a rattlesnake den. The reptiles must have some hidden tunnels and byways connecting the sinkhole to the surface.
Johnny went to fetch another body. Several times Luke had to use the carbine, drilling overly bold aboveground rattlers who were in too much of a hurry to reclaim their turf. Johnny labored at his chore, not lingering. The rattlesnakes were eager to reestablish their dominion.
Johnny toted one corpse after another to the pit and threw them in. Presently only Monty remained. Johnny took hold of him by the legs. “Sure you don’t want to kiss him good-bye?” he asked, sarcastic.
“I’ll wave as he goes over the edge,” said Luke.
Johnny dragged the body to the sinkhole and dumped it in.
“Adios, Monty,” Luke murmured, “you sombitch.”
Johnny wasted no time putting some distance between himself and the pit. Those rattlers were crowding back onto the scene. He rejoined Luke. “Reckon we ought to say a few words over them hombres, hoss?”
“How about, ‘Good riddance,’” said Luke.
“That’ll do,” Johnny said. They packed up. The travois was rigged to be collapsible, like an umbrella or folding tent. It might come in handy again, especially since they lacked a wagon. It was closed up, poles and blanket tied into a roll with ropes and secured to the back of the big draft horse.
Johnny and Luke mounted up and rode out, trailing a string of three horses behind them. They threaded the narrow gorge to Wild Horse Gulch. Johnny dismounted, breaking some leafy branches off a bush and using them to sweep away their tracks leading to and going away from the valley of the Snake Pit.
They returned to the ranch without incident.
E
LEVEN
LEVEN
On Tuesday night, Sam Heller awoke in the steaming cauldron of a bed of pain. Not that he knew it was Tuesday night. He didn’t know when it was. He was in a small room on the second, top floor of the storehouse. It was dimly lit by a flickering oil lamp placed on top of a packing box.
He lay on a narrow, wooden-framed bed that was too short for him; his bare feet hung off the end of the bed. The bed stood lengthwise along the wall in a corner opposite the door to the room. A dark wooden crucifix was nailed to the wall above the bed’s head.
Sam was entangled in sweat-soaked sheets. He was feverish, light-headed. He felt like he was burning up. Sweat poured from him, soaking into a thin, palletlike mattress. His thoughts were confused. He had trouble thinking straight. It took too much effort to concentrate, to follow a single line of thought.
He wanted to go back to sleep but sleep wouldn’t come, only a kind of half-waking delirium. Movement nearby caught his attention. By willpower he forced his eyes to focus.
He was not alone. Two women stood at his bedside, the raven-haired beauty and the crone. Lorena and Alma.
Lorena wore a long-sleeved brown dress that was tight at the waist and reached down to her ankles. A crocheted black shawl was wrapped around her shoulders.
Alma held a brown ceramic pot with a lid on it, gripping it in both hands by twin handles that protruded from the top. She set it down on a squaretopped table that stood beside the bed’s head.
Lorena held something at her side, a wooden bowl which she set down on the table next to the pot. She leaned over Sam. “Gringo,” she said.
“. . . The lady with the knife,” Sam murmured.
“You remember that? I took a bullet out of you.”
“I remember.”
“Good. Listen to me. You have a fever, a high fever. I have some medicine that will break it. You must drink it, all of it. Otherwise, you will die. Do you understand what I am saying?”
“Yes.”
Lorena turned to the crone. “Alma.” Alma took the lid off the pot. A wooden ladle with a curved handle was hung over the pot’s lip. Steamy wisps of vapor rose from the potion within.
Alma had brewed the stuff earlier. It contained distilled extracts from certain medicinal plants and vegetables from her homemade pharmacopia. Powdered roots and weeds, a variety of tree fungus, exotic mushrooms and strips of cactus. The mixture was slow-cooked for hours over a charcoal fire. When it was ready, she notified Lorena and the two of them went to the upper room in the storehouse. The brew had be taken quickly to avoid losing its potency.
Alma ladled the potion into the shallow wooden bowl, filling it.
“Sit up, gringo,” Lorena said. Sam tried but couldn’t do it. He lacked the strength. Lorena held the wooden bowl in one hand. She reached the other behind the back of his head, lifting it upright. “It will taste vile but drink it all,” she said.
Sam made a noise signaling assent. He had no fear of being poisoned. The woman could have killed him earlier if she’d been of a mind to. She wanted him alive—why, he didn’t know.
Lorena held the bowl close to his mouth. The potion was a watery, gray-green color. Swirls of rainbow-colored grease floated on the surface. It smelled musty, like a damp root cellar.
She put the edge of the wooden bowl to his lips. “Drink, hombre. Drink deep,” she said.
Sam swallowed, his throat working. The stuff was warm. It tasted awful, like soup made from clay.
“Don’t stop, drink it to the last,” Lorena said.
Sam gulped it down. The dregs of it spilled down the corner of his mouth. It left a bitter aftertaste on his tongue. He gagged, choking.
“Keep it down. If you throw it up, you will die,” Lorena warned.
Sam clamped his jaws shut. His stomach churned, knotting. It rebelled at the contents but Sam held it down. After a moment, the spasm passed. His head sank back down on the pillow. Lorena straightened up, looking down at him, studying his reactions.
The warm liquid sank into Sam’s belly like a paving stone. His tongue and the inside of his mouth tingled. The tingling spread down his throat, worming through his innards. Hair rose on the back of his neck.
Sam shuddered. He felt alternately hot and cold. He breathed shallowly, panting.
He’d drunk worse stuff, but he really couldn’t remember when. Numbness came to his hands and feet. The skin of his face felt taut, stiff. A strange sensation came over him, a sense of forward momentum, as if he were sitting still on a moving train.
The oil lamp on the packing box swam in and out of focus. The room wavered.
An effect of the lamp’s flickering glow, or of the potion?
Sam took a deep breath, hoping to steady his reeling senses. Several times during the war when he’d been treated for wounds, the doctors had dosed him with laudanum or morphine. This was like that and yet not like it.
His vision swam as he eyed Lorena. She was a sinister madonna, beautiful and dangerous. Alma was impossibly old, a living mummy.
Sam’s eyes closed. Fireworks erupted on the insides of his lids, unrolling in slow motion. He felt like he was sinking deeper and deeper into the bed. It had no bottom; it was bottomless.
The fireworks behind closed eyes became the sun, moon and stars. Sam was off on a comet—
Fever dreams!
Heat? The agony of a living, sensate being suffering the merciless torments of an inferno? Sam Heller had known his share and more. Now, in his mind, he relived some of those incidents:
There was the time a few years before the war, when a war party of Apaches had been rampaging throughout south Arizona. Sam was one of a party of gold-seekers prospecting a likely claim in the high desert mountains when the Apaches struck. He’d been one of the few to survive the initial onslaught on the miners’ camp and flee on horseback.
The fleeing miners took shelter in a Butterfield stage station on the overland route. The station house was made of thick stone walls. Some travelers and local ranchers and their families were forted up there.
Apaches generally liked to hit and run, but this raid had been coordinated among several tribes, laying waste to the whole southern tier of the territory. The red raiders besieged the station house. They stole all the horses first thing and settled in to wait out the defenders.
They avoided a head-on charge. No sense in that. They were there not to be killed, but to kill. Lurking in the surroundings just out of sight, they were elusive, phantomlike, rarely showing more of themselves than the shadow of an overflying bird.
For one of the defenders in the station house to show himself for even an instant in one of the windows was to risk death. The station had solid walls; the besieged had plenty of guns and ammo. But the water supply was outside: a well in the dirt front yard. The only water inside was a single, small cask that was half-full when the attack struck.
Eighteen souls, men, women and children, were penned in the stone house under the blazing Arizona sun. The water went fast, rationed or not. The well was less than ten yards from the front door, its tantalizing nearness even more maddening once the water ran out. And run out it did, early.
Water is like breathing: one of those those things you never think about until it’s suddenly cut off. Funny how thirsty a man becomes the instant he realizes he can’t have a drink of water when he wants one . . .
Stalemate. The Apaches couldn’t storm the place without suffering too-costly casualties, but the besieged were pinned down with no escape.
Apaches prefer not to fight at night—but they will, if necessary. On the second night, several volunteers tried to make a rush to the well to get some water. The lucky ones died in a salvo of bullets. One poor devil was taken alive. He lived for a day and a night and a day, fiendishly tortured out of range of any merciful death-dealing bullets.
Thirst. Sam’s throat closed up; he couldn’t swallow. His tongue swelled up in his mouth. Unquenchable thirst lit a fire in the brain.
A mother was found dead in the morning, throat cut by her own hand, but not before she first had quietly smothered to death the infant at her breast when she could stand its piteous cries no longer.
A tough desert rat, a prospector who was all rawhide and sinew and bone, threw open the door in the heat of the day and strode boldly to the cistern. It took all his strength to keep from staggering. Hauling a full bucket out of the well, he raised it in both hands to his lips before Apache bullets drilled it, knocking it out of his hands.
He dropped to the ground, scrambling for what water was left in the bucket. Unseen Apaches shot him to pieces.
Days dragged on with no help in sight. A scant few of the toughest remained alive in the stone house. A single, concerted rush by the Apaches would have overwhelmed them.
Sam felt that the end was near. There was a roaring in his ears, fading vision; his heartbeat fluttered in his breast like a little bird trapped in a closed fist. When suddenly sounded the sweetest sound he’d ever heard: The ringing brass of a cavalry trumpet sounding the charge.
An army detachment came thundering toward the stone house. The Apaches melted away long before relief arrived.
Sam’s first sip of life-giving water was so sweet it hurt . . .
Heat that made the fever now wracking Sam’s body seem like a spring breeze by comparison?
Fort Fillmore, New Mexico, July 1861. Sam Heller joined the Union Army early in the war. He’d been assigned to the command of Major Lynde’s 550 troops stationed at Fort Fillmore on the Rio Grande. The area swarmed with Southern sympathizers. An invasion by a column of Lieutenant Colonel John R. Baylor’s 2nd Texas Mounted Rifles threw Lynde into a blind panic.
Beaten in a few tentative engagements with the Rebels, Lynde convinced himself that Fort Fillmore was indefensible and decided to abandon it, retreating to Fort Stanton far in the north of the territory. Lynde overrode the wishes of his subordinate officers and the vast majority of the troops, who wanted to stay and fight. Fearing that Confederate sympathizers in towns along the Rio Grande would make that route untenable, Lynde “led” his men on an alternate route through the desert—a 140-mile trek.
The retreat—rout is more accurate—quickly turned into a torturous death march through a raging inferno hell. No springs along the way, no fresh water. Some of the troops had been foolhardy enough to fill their canteens with whiskey instead of water. They were the first to go mad and die. Soldiers fell out at the side of the road and in the road, some being trampled by other poor devils too sunstruck to stagger around them.
The final death knell was struck when the Federals made the climb to the San Augustan pass in the foothills of the Organ Mountains. Covered with dust, the stumbling, shambling troopers looked like crumbling statues from antiquity given some scant semblance of animation. They’d been beaten down by a hammer sun on a desert anvil.
Baylor’s troops started to close in. By this time they were looked upon as saviors by the Unionist stragglers and dropouts who’d fallen by the wayside for miles along the trail. The Confederates took them prisoner and gave them water.
As Baylor’s Texans surrounded the remnants of the Yankees’ main body, Major Lynde decided to surrender. Officers protested, outraged. “Stand and fight, you yellow cur—” they demanded. Some would have wept tears of rage if they’d had even that much moisture left in them.
Sam Heller and a handful of like-minded stalwarts had had enough. They were not of a mind to become prisoners of war to the Confederacy. Mostly desert-wise Westerners, they’d rationed their thin supplies of water long enough to keep going. A dozen or so, they now rode off, deeper into the desert.
Desertion? They thought not. Not when their commanding officer surrendered what was left of 500 men to Baylor’s 300 without firing a shot.
The fugitives took cover in arroyos and canyons with their welcoming shadows. They traveled by night in the relative cool of same, making their way through a dusty desert hell. Even more than Rebel patrols, they were wary of marauding Apaches out hunting for stragglers.
For much of the grueling trek, they went on foot to spare the horses, holding on to the saddles to keep from falling. When they were lucky enough to find them, they carved up barrel cactuses for a few precious drops of moisture. Parched, sun-cracked tongues strained to lick up morning dew drops.
In the end, only a handful survived to meet a friendly patrol from Fort Stanton. One of the few was Sam Heller . . .
A steaming cauldron of hell?
During the siege of Vicksburg in summer of 1862, Sam had been one of a scout squad on a recon mission behind enemy lines. Vicksburg was a roadblock in the middle of the vital artery of the Mississippi River. The watercourse was open and under Union control both above Vicksburg and below it. But the Confederate stronghold resisted Northern attempts to take it.
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