Death Rattle

9

The condors and vultures had landed around them as the sun sank. Something more than a hundred of the birds had gathered—first blackening the sky over this daylong bivouac, eventually landing to encircle the parched men and their near-dead animals.

A few of the other raiders were just starting to stir as the shadows lengthened. Titus felt woozy, sick to his stomach, but as soon as he sipped at some of the warm water in his gourd canteen, the feeling started to pass.

“Bill,” he said when his eyes landed on Williams, “we gotta get this bunch moving soon as the sun’s gone.”

The old trapper nodded, slowly rocking onto his knees with a sigh. “The Injun says we should reach water afore morning.”

Just over Williams’s shoulder one of the buzzards fluttered across the sand to nab a sidewinder, its sharp beak striking out to clamp down on the snake, violently tossing its head side to side, then pitching the sidewinder into the air to break the snake’s back in a second place.

“Damn, if that sight don’t give me the willies,” Bill grumbled as he struggled to stand.

“C’mon, fellas,” Titus urged as he crouched over Kersey and Purcell. “Up, boys—up.”

One by one the two dozen were slowly coming back to life as the temperature dropped degree by degree. They sipped at the last of their mineral-laced water, bathing their cracked, swollen lips and their bloated, black-tinged tongues. Most of them had long ago learned to hold a small gulp of the water in their mouths, letting the moisture fully soak into the membranes before swallowing what little was left of the warm liquid that hadn’t been absorbed.

That first sip after a daylong drought always hammered the inside of a man’s skull almost as bad as some of Willie Workman’s raw-brewed Taos lightning going down on an empty belly. It made his eyes swim and burn. It set a man’s teeth and gums to aching after all those tissues had grown severely parched. And the longer these men went without clean water, the worse this torture would become.

“Save the last you can for the critters,” Bass reminded them.

Adair grumped a bit, but once their tongues were wet and a silk handkerchief dampened to tie around their heads or knot at their throats, most of the men set about carefully pouring what little they had left into their hats and offering that final measure to their horses or mules. Titus’s saddle horse licked the inside of his old felt hat with such gusto he was afraid the animal might well gnaw right on through the damp crown.

As it turned out three of the pack animals refused to get up. With some struggle, the men were able to strip the baggage off the horses. Then the booshways set about redistributing the loads carried by the rest of the animals. Weak as they were, Bass figured, the horses and mules really couldn’t be asked to carry much more weight.

While the sun continued to sink behind the far horizon, Bill Williams ordered the men to tear through their packs, paring what was needed from what they could leave behind. Powder and lead, heavy by any reckoning, was given primary consideration. The rest of their possibles would go into smaller, lighter packs they went about lashing on the backs of those horses and mules still able to bear up under the burdens … if for only one more night, just until they reached a damp stretch of the Mojave River.

Everything else they would leave behind.

“Shouldn’t we cache it?” Reuben Purcell wondered, gazing over his shoulder at the mounds of supplies they were about to abandon in the lee of that stand of Joshua trees.

Kersey added, “Maybeso them Ammuchabas come steal all this from us—”

“Take it along if you can damn well carry it,” Titus grumbled, sunburned and short of temper.

A wounded look crossed Purcell’s face when he said, “Just figgering we should bury it.”

“If’n you got the strength to dig down into this here ground,” Scratch advised, “go right ahead and do it.”

“You don’t figger we’re coming back for it?” Kersey asked.

Bass shook his head. “I callate we oughtta find us a differ’nt road home—a ways north of here.”

No one disagreed with that.

“How far you reckon till we get to them hills?” Jake Corn asked as they started away from their stand of the spindly cactus trees.

Bass trudged beside him on foot, all two dozen men leading their weary horses now, including the eight reluctant broodmares they held on halters at the front of the ragged column. “Four days, maybeso five.”

Later that night, the trail grew a little easier on the men and animals. Until now they had been forced to fix their gaze on a distant landmark, then march directly for it, whereupon they would locate another landmark lying at the right compass heading. Over and over through the night. But now they struck the gently meandering bed of a river^* that appeared to steer them right into that distant line of hills.^* For the most part, they found the riverbed dry. Here and there a little damp sand, just enough that they stopped from time to time in the middle of the night, got down on their knees, then scooped, dug, and tore at the sand in hopes of uncovering enough of the soapy water to give their suffering animals a drink.

A man could always cut off the flat ears of the pancakelike cactus, pluck out the spines, and slice through the armorlike protective skin so he could suck at the acrid-tasting pulp. But the horses and mules needed water, real water.

Finding nothing more than damp sand in those holes they clawed in the riverbed, the men lunged back onto their feet and stumbled away again beneath a sky so black it seemed to reflect the brilliance of a million stars. All Scratch could discern of the horizon in any direction was that the dusting of those twinkling stars abruptly ended somewhere far out there at the edge of the earth. That had to be the horizon, he reminded himself as they slowly plodded along in a world of dark velvet: a blackened sky above and this desert floor below them, the ground grown just as black as the heavens.

When the moon came up, it gave an eerie, silver glow to the pale desert hardpan. And with that light the land seemed to take on a renewed life. Tiny mice appeared, only to be hunted by the saucer-eyed elf owls streaking out of the darkness. Pin-legged, long-necked roadrunners darted in and out of the cactus, chasing string-tailed rodents and lizards alike. Mile after mile the invaders were kept company by those soft sounds rising along the dry riverbed as the night took on a life of its own: the incessant rattle of ground crickets, the flurry of wings, the hiss of scurrying feet scratching claws across the millennia-baked sand.

It was still dark when those in the vanguard spotted something shining in the meandering riverbed far, far ahead.

“I figger it for water,” Smith confided.

As the word bounced back along their ragged line of march, the men spread out in a broad front, every last one of them eager to see this revelation for themselves. Titus raised his nose, concentrated, then sensed what faint breeze was coming at his back. It would have been an entirely different matter if the air had been coming into their faces—

That’s when the first of the horses snorted. Then a few others whickered. And Scratch’s saddle mount tugged on its lead rope.

“They smell it!” Williams croaked with a dry, flaky throat. “Give ’em their head!”

Of a sudden the animals at the center of the march bolted. Weak as they were, and burdened too, none of them took off like uncorked lightening. A number of the men stood in among the horses, vainly trying to control the beasts now that the odor of moisture was faint—but certain—upon the shifting desert breeze. Two men collapsed as horses lumbered past them, their ungainly packs swaying side to side, knocking the trappers down.

After not speaking for so long, the first time Scratch attempted to yell he found his swollen tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. “L-let ’em go!”

This was no wild, picturesque stampede, this clumsy, lumbering dash for the water by those weak, emaciated, overburdened animals. Then men were right behind them, loping toward the shallow black pool.

Struck with wonder, Bass shuffled to a stop, staring at the distance and realizing for the first time exactly what he was seeing. A half mile to the west he spotted another shiny, narrow pool dimly reflecting the black of the night sky just the way a freshly-oiled gun barrel shimmered in firelight. Beyond it another quarter of a mile lay a pair of pools huddling strung end to end. And so on from there as his eyes crawled away to the western horizon.

Those spotty pools were all there was of the river. Here and there it disappeared beneath the sand, slipping back beneath the dried-up riverbed sand and flat-out disappeared. But unlike pools and ponds and small lakes of water that would eventually evaporate under a relentless summer sun, this river continued to flow—sometimes above ground, more often just beneath the desert floor.

He shambled to a stop among the rest of the men who were sitting or lying right in the shallow, inky waters, splashing themselves as the horses and mules stood all about them, noisily slurping their fill.

“These critters gonna get loggy,” Scratch warned.

“W-what the hell differ’nce it to you?” Thompson snarled as he pulled his face out of the pool, water sluicing down his brown beard in rivulets.

Bass turned away from Thompson, telling Williams, “We let these critters drink too much, Bill—they’ll be loggy.”

“Will you listen to that?” Thompson roared as he slapped the surface of the water in derision. Behind his own galling laughter arose that of his friends. “Bass wants us to quit our drinking and pull the horses off!”

“I’ll bet he wants to have the water all for his own self!” John Bowers sniped at Thompson’s elbow.

“You’re hobble-headed, you stupid son of a bitch,” Bass snapped back as Bowers got to his feet.

Williams grabbed hold of Bowers’s arm. “Hol’t on, boy.”

Bowers tried to shake his arm free. “Maybeso he’d like to have me hold ’im under till he drinks his fill!”

“There’s more water ahead, Bill,” Titus explained. “The animals don’t gotta drink till their bellies swolled up right here.”

Williams and most of the others turned slowly to peer in the direction Bass pointed. Some more of them got to their feet, water streaming off them in waves as they peered west.

“T-this cain’t be the last of it,” Peg-Leg Smith agreed softly, its sound a question as he dragged the Indian guide out of the pool and onto his feet beside him. In a staccato drumbeat of harsh Spanish, Smith growled at the escapee. Then slowed down the second time he repeated his demands.

Back and forth they chattered a minute more until Smith freed his grip on the Indian’s shoulder.

Peg-Leg turned to the others and explained, “Says this here river’s gonna lead us all the way to the mountains now. On the other side lays them California ranchos.”

“Ho-o-o-o-e-e-e!” Williams cackled as he hopped a jig in the shallow water, sending up rooster combs of spray.

Bass stomped up, splashing. “Tol’t you, I did. We’ll have us water all the way to the mountains now!”

He immediately looped his right arm into Bill Williams’s right elbow, and they proceeded to slog and splash around and around in the utter joy of their deliverance.

“Better we stay here rest of the night,” Smith said as he slogged over to the pair coming to a breathless halt.

Williams peered behind them, recognizing the narrow gray band that lay at the curve of the flattened horizon. “Day’s coming soon enough, true enough, Peg-Leg.”

Bass grudgingly agreed. “These animals got too much water in their bellies awready—ain’t gonna be fit to go on now.”

Thompson roared, “There the bastard goes again—telling us the wisdom of his mind!”

“For this he’s right!” Williams snapped. “Me an’ Peg-Leg say we stay put right here. Maybeso we’ll find something for the critters to eat when it get light.”

Smith nodded. “And push on come evening.”

Later, as the gray streamers of dawn gradually crept over the horizon, it was plain enough for Scratch to recognize that the horses and mules had been too long without enough water, too long at this little pool that they weren’t gonna be worth a damn. A man or beast gone too long without sufficient water had the stomach shrink so profoundly that on their first ingestion of large amounts of water they would grow painfully sick. Within minutes of their reaching the pool, the first of the horse thieves began to crawl to the riverbank on their hands and knees, retching, puking up the salty, gritty, mineral-laced water their bellies simply refused to hold down.

Those strongest among them began to strip the animals of their packs and saddles, dropping the baggage onto the sand. Later, as the light began to balloon around them, the trappers for the first time saw the extent of the grass that surrounded the pool here in the midst of the desert’s austere severity. And as dawn approached, their eyes made sense out of the shapes in the mid-distance. Vegetation. Not just barrel and cholla and ocotilla cactus. Not just the stunted, half-dead mesquite and Joshua trees … but vegetation that might actually shade a man.

With the coming of day, they gazed into the westward, recognizing how each short pocket of the narrow river coursed through a fertile vale watered by the river in those patches where it remained above ground. Where it disappeared, the vegetation ended. On and on, above ground and under, all the way to that far string of low hills, each tiny oasis was strung together on a narrow ribbon of moisture that, come late summer, would disappear entirely. A time when every last one of these oases would wither and shrivel like a cluster of overripe fruit, dying for another year.

Instead of that monotonous gray and volcanic black of their endless days on the desert, this sunrise greeted them with a surprising palette of colors: the whites of mariposa lilies and tiny primroses, violet lupine, and the fleshy-pink verbena, not to mention the untold hues of every nearby cactus now blooming in their abbreviated cycle of life.

For the moment it reminded him how Waits-by-the-Water harvested mountain and prairie wildflowers in the spring, drying them before she crushed the petals and crowns, then dumped them into large rawhide bags. For weeks and weeks thereafter, she would rub the petals on her skin or into the thick folds of her hair, the very air around her a heady aura with their gentle scent.

How he wished she were there to see this with him, the children to frolic upon the short, matted grasses and splash at the riverbank where the water had turned a brief, rosy hue as the sun burst over the edge of the earth. Small wrens and cactus sparrows once quiet and still, hidden among the branches of the trees and brush, suddenly began to trill and call as the light came up. As the air began to warm over time, even the flies came out. Not tiny, shriveled creatures, but those huge, cruel, bloodthirsty horseflies that so troubled man and beast alike in the mountains.

There must be enough life abounding in each small oasis for these brutal, biting creatures to feed upon.

As he laid there in the shade, occasionally swatting at those huge, hot-footed tormentors, Bass saw the desert as a land where every species fed off something else. Even the simplest part of the equation—like these damnable horseflies—might appear sleepy, perhaps slothful throughout most of the day as the sun’s fiery intensity grew. Still, every creature was both predator or prey in a most inelegant food chain. Every creature bred to be swift in attack or fleet in escape. Both traits necessary for survival in this hostile land.

It had always been that way. Knowing when to attack, when to retreat.

With this desert dawn Scratch came to realize that in this knowing lay the utter heart, the very secret, to his survival.

Those in the lead had dismounted and stood, men and animals filling a small clearing at the skyline. Riderless horses came to a halt and began to crop at the grass with the broodmares, taking advantage of this midday stop.

Bass came up behind them, sliding out of the saddle before he threaded his way on foot through the grazing horses to reach the broad flank of two dozen men staring west from the saddle of the mountain pass.^* Below their feet lay the land of the Californios.

Through eyes long blasted by desert sands, baked by an incomprehensible heat, reddened with days upon days of tortured sleep—they peered down upon the land of the Mexicans. Ranchos and missions, horses and mules, señoritas and squaws, mild ocean breezes and sweet Spanish wine.

“Damn, if that don’t look good to this child, Peg-Leg!” Bill Williams squealed with delight, slapping a bony hand on his partner’s back.

Smith turned and looked over his shoulder at the twenty-two riders they had brought across the desert to reach this mountain portal to California. “How long you figger it’ll take for us to get the boys and our animals ready for some raids?”

“Better part of a week,” Williams admitted. “Maybe more.”

“Way I remember it,” Thompson boasted as he came up to stop nearby, “them Mex soldiers didn’t put up no fight a’t’all, and sure as hell didn’t follow us for far neither. I don’t figger we oughtta worry ’bout wasting our good time resting up—”

“You wanna go off on your own now,” Williams interrupted him, “you just go ahead, Thompson. Take the men what wanna ride with you and go. I don’t want no man—not even you—giving me no trouble on anything I say from here on out.”

“I wasn’t meaning no—”

“G’won and leave, Thompson,” Williams snapped.

Thompson glanced a moment at Smith, as if to implore his old friend’s support. But while Peg-Leg might have been his friend, it was immediately plain that Smith was not about to go against Williams merely to support Thompson’s foolhardy eagerness. The chagrined trapper admitted, “I don’t wanna go off on my own hook.”

“There’s only one way we’re gonna grab for the biggest herd of horses ever was stole from California,” Williams declared sternly, louder now as he began to address the whole group, “and that’s for all of us to hang together, cover each other’s backs all the way in, and all the way back out.”

“Bill’s right on that track,” Smith confirmed. “We don’t hang together when the gunsmoke starts flying—ain’t many of us gonna make it out of California alive.”

“So let me ask this here and now, one time and one time only,” Williams growled at them. “Any man here what figgers he can lead this bunch better’n Peg-Leg and me … let that man step right up.”

Most of the men twisted this way and that, glancing quickly at one another to spot any movement. But no one stepped forward.

“Looks like it’s just you an’ me gonna booshway this bunch, Bill,” Smith said.

Williams pointed down the slope. “Yonder I see a meadow where two of them li’l cricks run through. Plenty water, and there’s more’n ’nuff timber down there too. Good grass for the horses while they fatten up again.”

“Let’s go make camp, boys,” Smith suggested. “We’ll stay put till we put some meat back on our own bones, an’ it comes time for us to shine on them Mex ranchos.”

Across the next eight days the horses grazed, sticking close to those eight wet mares the trappers kept picketed close at hand. After only five days of rest, Frederico argued with Smith that he wanted to move on—if not with the white men, then by himself. Smith protested that such an unwise move would put the guide in danger, might well get him caught by the soldiers and put to death by the priests … then where would the horse raiders be?

Without their damn-fool guide, that’s where!

Ultimately, Peg-Leg convinced the Indian that he was better off not going anywhere near the mission or the soldier fort either because of the chance of getting caught. The bitter truth of it, he explained to Frederico, was that should the Indian be seized by the Mexicans, then there was nothing stopping the white men from going right on with their plans to steal horses and mules. Without Frederico, there was no reason for the Americans to go through with their plan to rescue his sisters. The two of them would remain prisoner concubines of the soldados.

The Indian’s only chance to free his sisters lay in doing exactly as the Americans told him.

Behind them stretched hundreds of miles of desert wilderness, a land with little to offer beyond waste and want. But below their mountainside camp lay rolling green plains, cold streams tumbling toward the valley, slopes dotted with more vegetation than they had seen since abandoning the Rockies: willow bordering the creekbanks, shady groves of sycamore and elder dotting the hillside.

On that eighth night of recouping their horses and their strength in the hills, Williams announced, “Be ready to ride at sunup.”

That momentous morning they kept the broodmares on short tethers as they rode into the dimly lit dawn emerging over California. The men closely ringed the rest of the horses, with riders hugging both flanks, their best horsemen riding drag to keep the stragglers caught up now that they were dropping into the unknown—a foreign country where most of these invaders had, until eight days before, never watched a single sunrise. A land where these Norteamericanos would not be welcome because they had come to steal what belonged to the ricos, those wealthy landowners.

The twenty-four were trespassers in this green, fertile land captured between that low range of mountains the Americans were putting at their backs and the coast where the great salt ocean began. Strangers. Interlopers. Trespassers. And thieves.

Down they curved through the pass that took them on a southern route, down the timbered slopes into the foothills where the native grasses grew even taller still, nourished by the moist breezes and what rain the mountains trapped. As much as he strained and squinted into the west as the sun came over the range at their backs, lighting up everything before them, Bass could still not see anything blue in the distance. When, he wondered, would they lay eyes on the ocean?

They camped that night in the foothills and moved on at first light, following their Indian guide as he swept them around to the west once they left the rolling hills and emerged into an endless, grassy valley broken only by the myriad of narrow streams tumbling off the slopes, each one lined with an emerald border as it hurried to the seacoast. This valley was nowhere near as lush and green as his home in the wilds of the Rocky Mountains—its rounded, carpeted hills covered with little more than grass. Only the deep clefts between the knolls where the waters gurgled possessed any brush and trees. Mostly … grass.

But—he realized—that was exactly what nourished the horses of these Californios. The grass made this a horseman’s paradise.

Even though it was no later than midafternoon, Smith and Williams pulled them up behind a pair of low hills and gave orders to make camp for the night.

“The Injun—he say we’re close to his mission?” Philip Thompson asked Smith eagerly, rubbing his hands together.

“Not far,” Peg-Leg responded. “We don’t want none of them soldiers spotting our smoke so keep the fires small, back under the trees.”

Williams walked over, dragging a bundle he had just taken from the back of his pack animal. As the others leaned in to watch, the old trapper tore at the knots in the rope, then flung back the oiled canvas to expose some well-weathered Navajo blankets, their colors faded from seasons of use. He stood with two of them hung over his arms.

“Here,” Williams said, tossing the first to Frank Curnutt, one of Thompson’s allies. “You look dark enough to be a Mex, Frank.” Then he pitched the second to Bass. “An’ I damn well know you ’member some of the Mex tongue, Scratch. Want you come along with me and the Injun.”

“How come he’s going and I ain’t?” Thompson bawled. “I been here before!”

“But you damn well don’t speak no Mex,” Smith challenged. “If’n any of ’em get spotted, they’re gonna have to talk Mex.”

“Bass don’t need to go,” Thompson argued with a sly grin. “You talk better’n most Mexicans I know, Peg-Leg.”

“I ain’t going,” Smith admitted. “I’m staying here with you, if’n any bunch of soldados wander by and find us camped here.”

By this time Williams had knelt and picked up his last two heavy Navajo blankets. “Felix—how ’bout you coming too?”

Warren caught the blanket and smiled at his friend Thompson. “Me and Frank keep a eye on Bass for you, Phil.”

Unfurling the last blanket for himself, Williams removed his hat with one hand and located the slit at the center of its fold with the other. After pulling the blanket over his head he replaced his floppy hat and held out his arms expressively. “What you think, boys?”

“Look the Mex to me,” Silas Adair said with approval.

“C’mon, Frederico,” Williams commanded as he turned back to his saddle horse. “Let’s go have us a look at where them padres sent off your sisters to live with them soldados”

Hanging in the lee of the hills, the five horsemen picked their way northwest along the rim of the valley. Every now and then Bill would signal for them to dismount and leave their horses behind. Then the quartet would follow the Indian up the back slope of a knoll where they dropped to their bellies to break the skyline. From each prominence the trappers gazed across a new stretch of the valley, wary of any vaqueros tending their great herds of horses, mentally plotting the location of the few ranch buildings they came across.

On the last of those stops, the sun was about to drop below the brims of their hats as they peered down upon a cluster of adobe structures behind a mud wall. Frederico tapped Williams on the arm.

“Can’t make out all he’s saying,” Bill grumbled disgustedly. “Goddamn red nigger with his Mex talk—”

“Something about the soldiers,” Bass broke in.

“I damn well know that,” Williams snapped. “Soldados this and that. What he sayin’ about the godblame-ed soldados?”

“His sisters,” Titus explained. “He says that’s where they are.”

That bit of news quieted Ol’ Bill’s muttering like a slap of thunder. “Si, si, Frederico,” he whispered.

Clearly the Indian had become excited, pointing out the adobe buildings ringed by a high wall of mud and wattle. “Soldados … y mis hermanas—” “Your sisters, yeah,” Scratch repeated.

In the late-afternoon light he studied the big compound, those backlit buildings erected inside the low wall. Although there were no tall parapets, there was no mistaking this for a fortress of sorts. Nothing remained outside. Even the stables ran along the full length of one wall. Some of the Mexicans had their horses out in a corner of the compound, soaping the animals down. At another corner a blacksmith worked to reshoe a glossy, majestic black. Across the yard stood what appeared to be a low, one-story barracks. The roofs of a pair of buildings rested at either side of the double-wide gates, which stood open. Titus had no clue what those rooms were.

All the way at the rear of the huge compound stood a two-story building, a wide porch running across the full width of the structure, with a balcony across the width of the second floor. Several windows and two doors broke up the expanse of adobe on both floors.

Felix Warren let go a low whistle. “That’s a heap of Mexicans down there.”

Bass quickly turned to Frederico, “Cuánto es?”

At first the Indian shrugged, then his face went serious and he began flipping his fingers into his palms.

“What’s he doin’?” Frank Curnutt demanded.

“I think he’s ciphering how many’s the lodge,” Titus replied.

“It don’t really matter, does it, Scratch?” Williams asked.

Bass said, “Sorry, Bill—I don’t catch the drift.”

“If’n there’s twenty of ’em, or if there’s eighty of ’em down there … we still know what we gotta do.”

“Y-you can’t be serious ’bout our outfit fighting all them Mex soldiers!” Frank Curnutt scoffed. “Why don’t we just ride right on around ’em and they won’t be none the wiser.”

Williams argued, “But Smith give his word to the Injun here.”

“Shit!” Warren snorted. “What’s your damn word to a Injun? That’s like shoveling fleas in a barnyard!”

“The Injun brung us here just like he said he would,” Williams said heatedly, his eyes narrowing on the trapper.

“Let the Injun go raise hell with the soldiers if he wants,” Curnutt argued. “It ain’t gonna chap my hide to leave this red nigger to go his own way.”

“You ain’t listening to Bill,” Titus growled. “He told you the way it’s gonna be.”

Curnutt’s eyes closed into dangerous slits as he squinted over Williams’s shoulder at Bass. “A white man’s word to a Injun ain’t but a piss in the wind.”

“Bill and Peg-Leg both told the Injun what we’d do if he got us through that desert—”

Interrupting, Curnutt snarled, “Don’t mean we gotta fight them soldiers. Hell, them two sisters of his nothin’ better’n Mex whores now anyway—”

Springing onto his knees, Bass vaulted past Williams and snagged hold of the front of Curnutt’s colorful serape before the other two could react. Jerking his leg up, Titus pressed a knee down on the right hand that Curnutt was attempting to wrap around his knife. “You heard Bill. We give our word to the—”

“I didn’t give my word!” Curnutt spat, arching his back as Scratch pinned his left arm with one of his hands. “Sure as hell Thompson didn’t give his word to no red nigger either!”

“Get off him,” a voice warned at his back.

Williams tensed, rolling onto his hip to peer behind Titus and said, “Put the knife down, Warren.”

Bass immediately twisted to look over his shoulder, finding Felix Warren rocking onto his knees, his big skinning knife out before him. Slowly and out of sight beneath his serape, Titus inched his fingers toward one of the two knives at the back of his belt.

“You figger on doing something stupid with your sticker,” Scratch warned, “Curnutt here gonna be a dead man for it.”

“Tol’cha: Get off ’im, Bass.”

Williams tucked his legs under him into a crouch now, slowly pulling his belt pistol into view. Although he did not raise it enough to point its muzzle directly at Warren, it would have been apparent to a blind man that this was no veiled threat. “You’re goin’ again’ my word, Warren.”

“Just tell ’im get off Frank.”

“Maybe I will,” Williams said. “But not till you put that skinner away.”

Bass shook his head emphatically. “I ain’t gonna get off this son of a bitch till he shuts his meat hole ’bout helping the Injun.”

Felix Warren just started to inch forward, saying, “Then you’re a dead man—”

Then Williams brought the pistol up, raked his arm forward, and jammed the muzzle against Warren’s ribs. “This here’s gonna make a damn big hole in you by the time the ball comes out your back.”

Warren’s eyes widened, nearly crossing when he peered down at the pistol and the brown hand holding it.

“It’s your play, Felix,” Bill explained.

Bringing his eyes up to glare into Williams’s, Warren started pulling the knife back toward his belt, saying, “I’ll put it away … then you get that bastard off Frank.”

“Get off him, Scratch,” Bill ordered as Warren’s knife slid into the scabbard.

“Not till the bastard tells you he won’t go running against your grain, Bill.”

Williams dragged the pistol away from Warren’s rib cage and said, “I think Curnutt understands who’s booshway of this here horse raid—don’t you, Frank?”

“You are, Bill.”

“I s’pose you can crawl off him now, Scratch.”

The instant Bass took his weight off the man’s arms, Curnutt spun out from under him, rubbing the wrist where Titus’s bony knee had pinned it against the ground. He shrugged his shoulders to settle the serape back into place, glowering at Bass.

“I want you boys stay away from each other,” Williams ordered. “We got horses to steal. You understand, Scratch?”

“Soon as the horses is stole,” Bass said low, the words rattling at the back of his throat, “I got some business to see to, soon as the horses is stole.”

“Your time’s coming,” Curnutt warned with a sneer.

Titus wagged his head as he slid backward off the skyline and got to his feet. “Won’t be by the likes of you two.”

“That’s right, Frank,” Warren snorted with a wide grin. “We wouldn’t wanna go an’ spoil Thompson’s li’l fandango with this son of a bitch.”

^* Mojave River

^* San Bernardino Mountains

^* Cajon Pass, aptly given the Spanish word for “box.”