The Scalp Hunters

Chapter Three

His last name was Venom. Those who knew him said the name fit his nature like a tight sock, but they never said it to his face.

Venom had a first name, which he never used. It was Nadine. If anyone else used it he kicked their teeth in. He hated it. He hated a lot of things. He hated preachers because they had their heads in the clouds. He hated kids because they were sniveling brats. He hated women because they put on airs. He hated dogs because they were always sniffing the hind ends of others dogs, and he hated cats because they were always rubbing against him and he couldn’t abide being touched by anything or anyone unless it was a woman he paid for.

Venom hated Mexicans. He hated blacks except when it suited his purpose. He hated Indians, all Indians, with a fierce hate born of the loss of his father to a barbed shaft when he was seven. He hated Indians so much that when he drifted down to Santa Fe after the beaver trade petered out and met a man by the name of Kirker who offered him a job scalping redskins for money, he eagerly accepted.

The Mexican government was paying bounty for Apache scalps. Good money. A hundred dollars for a warrior’s hair, fifty dollars for the hair of a female, twenty-five for the hair of what Venom liked to call “Apache gnats.”

Kirker had formed a company of scalpers made up of men who could hold their own against the most formidable warriors on the continent. Men without scruples. Men who regarded killing Indians as exterminating vermin. Men who could take a squalling Apache infant and bash its brains out on the rocks.

Venom fit right in. He took to his new profession with a zeal that at first amused and then troubled the hard men he worked with. One day he went out and slaughtered a harmless Pima family—father, mother and three small children—and turned their scalps in for the bounty, claiming their hair belonged to Chiricahua Apaches.

That angered Kirker. Not because Venom had done it; Kirker did it, too. Kirker was angry because Venom bragged about it. The Mexican government turned a blind eye to the slaughter of innocent Indians so long as it was done quietly. Kirker didn’t want Venom spoiling a good thing. He told Venom to scalp-hunt by the rules.

Venom said the rules be damned, he would kill any redskin he pleased. When Kirker told him that if he couldn’t follow orders he couldn’t be in Kirker’s company, Venom formed his own company. Within a year his company was earning more bounty than Kirker’s, but the more scalps they took, the harder it became. The merest whisper that Venom and his men were coming, and every Indian for a hundred miles, hostile and peaceful, melted away until it was safe to come out again.

It got so that killing Indians didn’t bring in enough money. Venom started killing long-haired Mexicans and claiming their scalps belonged to Indians.

Then Venom heard that the government of Texas was offering bounty money for Comanche scalps. He figured that Comanches would be easier to catch and kill than Apaches, so off to Texas he and his company went. He figured wrong. Soon they were back to their old tricks of killing friendly Indians and Mexicans and even a few whites with long black hair.

One evening Venom and his company came on a lone Mexican rider, a youth in a fine sombrero and expensive clothes, riding a grand bay. An entire silver mine went to decorate the youth’s saddle. The youth’s dark hair, unfortunately for the youth, fell well past his shoulders.

Venom pretended to be friendly. The boy claimed to be related to the alcade of San Antonio, but Venom didn’t believe him. In his eyes all Mexicans were born liars.

So Venom pointed into the distance and asked if that was a buffalo he saw, and when the youth turned to see for himself, Venom buried his knife between the boy’s shoulder blades. He helped himself to the scalp—and the grand bay and the fancy silver saddle, besides.

All went well for a couple of weeks. Then Venom heard that the law was after him. The boy had been telling the truth about the alcade, and someone got word to the authorities.

Texas was suddenly too hot for Venom. He decided to hell with Texans and took his company east to St. Louis for a much-deserved debauch. Whiskey, women and cards soon ate up the last peso in their pokes.

Venom’s company headed west again after more scalps. Since Venom couldn’t return to Texas, he headed for the province of New Mexico. He had barely started out when inspiration struck.

Friendly Pawnees rode up to Venom’s camp and asked if he had any liquor they could buy or trade for. Venom smiled and invited them to sit by his fire. He passed around a flask and while the Pawnees were sipping and smiling, his men pounced.

Just like that Venom had seven new scalps. It occurred to him that if he sought Indians out on the way to Santa Fe, preferably the peaceful ones who rarely fought back, he’d have a lot of scalps to turn in. In fact, if he did it right, his packs would practically bulge with bounty.

So far he had twenty-three scalps.

Venom wasn’t happy. He paced back and forth, his jaw muscles twitching, and glowered at his company. “You call yourselves scalp hunters? What gall. We had four bucks in our sights and you let two of them get away.”

A heavyset man named Potter nervously shifted his weight from one pudgy leg to the other. “They were too quick for us, boss.”

“Speak for yourself, you tub of lard,” Venom snapped. “And since when is a man on a horse faster than a bullet?”

“We hit one,” declared a tall bundle of whipcord and bone. “That should count for something.”

“Not when they don’t go down, Tibbet.” Venom gestured in contempt. “Here I thought I’d hired the cream of the Injun killers, and all of you are plumb worthless.”

Of the eight men, five withered under his glare. Three didn’t.

One was called Logan, and he had been hinting of late that he would make a better leader than Venom.

The other two were as alike as peas in a pod, with good reason; they were twins. Both had strawcolored hair and blue eyes and freckled complexions. The Kyler brothers hailed from Kentucky. That was all anyone knew about them. That, and they would kill anyone or anything, anytime, anywhere. Now one of the twins said in his slow Southern drawl, “My brother and me don’t much like bein’ insulted, Mr. Venom.”

His sibling bobbed his chin. “That’s right. We did our part, and there ain’t a coon here who can claim different.”

“Did I blame you? Either of you?” Venom retorted. “You’re the best shots in the outfit. If you had shot at the two who got away, they wouldn’t have got away. You never miss.”

“Oh, now and then we do,” said one of the twins.

“Remember that Comanch that time?” said the other.

Venom snorted. “He was five hundred yards away. You’d need a damn cannon to hit something that far off.”

“We’ve done it before,” said the first twin.

“These rifles of ours ain’t for show nor ballast,” said the other. “But the sun was in our eyes that day.”

“You don’t need to convince me.” Venom never antagonized the pair if he could help it. Secretly he thought they were as dumb as tree stumps, but they were also quite deadly.

“Do we go after those two?” asked Rubicon. He was black. Venom tolerated him because Rubicon was the best tracker Venom ever came across.

“Do buffalo roll in their own piss? Of course we go after them. But there’s no hurry.” Venom stepped to where the two dead ones had been laid out. Drawing his skinning knife, he tested the edge on his thumb and smiled when a thin red line appeared.

No one objected. They knew he liked to do the cutting. Even those he didn’t kill he often scalped himself. Not that he kept the scalps if he didn’t make the kill. He just liked to lift hair. That, and one other thing he liked.

Squatting next to the Arapaho who had done most of the talking, Venom inserted the tip a quarter inch from the hairline and carefully cut a straight line from brow to brow. “Smell that? This buck used bear fat to slick his hair.”

“A lot of Injuns do,” Tibbet said.

“Smelliest critters on God’s green earth,” declared Logan. He spat a wad of tobacco and picked at his armpit. “If it ain’t buffalo fat, it’s horse piss. How their women can stand to be near them is a wonder.”

“I had me a squaw once,” Potter said. “An Otoe, she was. Scrawny little thing, but she kept herself clean. Well, except for the lice. But I don’t mind lice much. I’ve got some myself.”

Venom wasn’t paying much attention to their prattle. He was engrossed in the scalping. He always did it a certain way. He started at the front and worked clear around, prying and peeling until he could lift the entire scalp just as easy as could be. Some scalp hunters did it in a rush and didn’t bother to take all the hair. Not him. He always took all of it.

There was something else that Venom did. Something none of the others would do, ever. They were used to him doing it, but it still gave some of them queasy stomachs to watch, and they were men who did not get queasy easy.

Venom cut around an ear and felt the edge of the knife scrape on the skull bone. That only happened when he pressed too hard. He eased up slightly, enough that the blade seemed to glide from the ear to the base of the neck and then around to the other side. As he cut, he licked his lips in anticipation.

Potter did more fidgeting. “Can I ask you something, boss?”

“So long as it won’t make me mad.” Venom didn’t like being distracted while he cut.

“Why do you do it?”

“What? Lift scalps? I told you about my pa, didn’t I? How those damn Creeks did him in? Ever since, I’ve made it my life’s work to kill as many redskins as I can before I get planted.”

“No, not that.” Potter shifted again. “The other thing. Why do you do the other thing?”

Venom cut around the other ear. He didn’t pull on the hair, as some did, not yet, anyway. Experience had taught him that he wasted a lot of blood that way.

“I mean, it’s none of my business, I know,” Potter babbled on. “But me and some of the others have wanted to ask for a long time. You’ve never said, exactly.”

“You should try it,” Venom said. “Then you’d understand.”

Potter put a hand to his ample middle. “No sir. Not me. I don’t draw the line at much, but that there is one line I refuse to cross.”

“You drink water, don’t you?”

“Only when there’s nothing stronger.”

“Milk, then? You drink milk?”

Potter shrugged. “Now and then. I liked it more when I was a boy. My ma put it on my oatmeal and she’d slice up peaches and—”

“Do I care what your damn mother did?” Venom interrupted. “We were talking about drinking. You’re partial to rye, as I recollect.”

“What’s your point?”

Glancing up, Venom wagged his knife, causing scarlet drops to spatter his boot. “My point, jackass, is that you drink what you like and I drink what I like. There’s your answer.”

“But it’s not drinking you do. It’s more like—” Potter scrunched up his face. “It’s more like sucking.”

“Drink or suck, it’s all the same.”

“Begging your pardon, boss, but a drink is when it’s in a bottle or a glass. Not when it’s skin.”

Logan said, “I’d as soon suck swamp water as what you do. How’d you ever get started, anyhow?”

“It was back when I was hunting Apaches, before I formed my own company,” Venom explained. “Kirker and me and some others were in the desert, tracking Chiricahuas. Little did we guess at the time but the red bastards led us out there on purpose, thinking we’d die of thirst. And we damn near did. We ran out of water and separated to hunt for a tank or a spring, anything.” He chuckled at the memory. “Do you know what saved me?”

No one hazarded a guess.

“I’ll tell you. It was a Chiricahua buck. He’d hid behind a cactus and didn’t think I’d spotted him, but he made the mistake of blinking. I scalped him and it started to bleed, and the blood set me to thinking how thirsty I was, and the next thing I knew, I stuck a finger in my mouth and sucked the blood off.”

“Injun blood,” said Calvert. He was typically the quietest of the bunch.

“Wet is wet,” Venom retorted. “Just the little I sucked made me feel better so I smeared more on my finger and sucked that off.” He bent over the Arapaho and peeled off the scalp as he might peel an orange. Then, holding it up for them to see, he smacked his lips. “I reckon you know what I did next.”

Potter turned away. “I can’t watch. It makes me sick to my stomach every single time.”

“You damned weak sister.” Venom held the scalp in both hands so the blood-soaked skin side faced him. Then, slowly, methodically, he commenced to suck on the skin and to swallow with relish.

“You couldn’t pay me to do that,” Tibbet remarked.

“I’d die of thirst first,” the man they called Ryson said.

Venom stopped sucking and grinned, his mouth and chin smeared bright scarlet. “Potter’s not the only weak sister. But that’s all right. It leaves more of the sauce for me.”

“The sauce?” Tibbet repeated.

“The blood, stupid.” Venom sucked, and beamed, his teeth gleaming bright red. “It’s too bad they don’t sell blood in bottles. I’d drink that before I’d drink whiskey.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, boss,” Potter said, “but you’re loco.”

Nadine Venom laughed.