Crack in the Sky

7

With each shrinking day Hatcher’s brigade pushed man and beast alike from the first gray stain of predawn until past the coming of slap-dark, putting behind them every mile they could—every man jack anxious for Taos.

Halting at midday only to water the animals, the trappers doggedly pressed on as the winds grew stronger and the snows fell deeper, like mules with the scent of a home stall strong in their nostrils. Grown restless around their night fires, where they began to talk more and more of the Taos valley, more and more of the spicy food and heady liquor and that strong native tobacco. And as the men pulled their blankets and robes about them with the dropping temperatures, they spoke each night of the dusky women and that particular fragrance of Mexican skin.

“Not like no Injun woman I ever knowed,” Caleb Wood advised Titus Bass.

Hatcher snorted. “An’ sure as hell like no white farmer’s gal back to the settlements.”

Wasn’t Amy Whistler a white farmer’s wife by now? Likely she had her a brood of her own, tugging at her skirt, the newest tucked in her arm, suckling at its mama’s breast. He remembered those breasts at times, how they broke the surface of that swimming hole back to Boone County, Kentucky. Firm and high, slicked with summer cool water, just begging him to fondle, to excite, to kiss each one.

How about Marissa Guthrie? Had she given Able Guthrie a grandchild yet? Why, the way that girl threw herself into the coupling, Titus was dead certain she was the sort could end up with a man of her own not long after he had pulled himself free and run off for St. Louis that autumn of 1815. Slipping away by the skin of his teeth—for he had fallen in love for the first time in his life … and if he hadn’t escaped, he’d be there still. Working the land, planting seed, tilling the ground, and raising walls around them … just like Able Guthrie, like his own pap, Thaddeus.

How much better could those greaser gals be than was Fawn, the Ute widow he bedded that first winter in the Rockies? His first Indian, so warm and fragrant with the smells of grease and smoke, bear oil and old soot, had she been. Very much like Pretty Water, the Shoshone woman who had cared for his wounds and sated his hungers that third winter before it came time to leave as the high country began its spring thaw.

In their own way, each one of them hard to leave behind.

“Just be keerful you don’t end up like Rowland or Kinkead,” Elbridge Gray warned.

Scratch would grin every time one of the others chivvied him about the Mex gals. “Don’t you worry none about me, fellas. I ain’t the marrying kind.”

“I wasn’t neither,” Matthew protested.

Hatcher would always roar, “Kinkead wasn’t till he met up with Rosa!”

At which Kinkead would nod in affirmation and agree, “That’s the solemn truth.”

Moving south over the low ridge of the Bayou Salade, the outfit dropped west to strike the Arkansas once more, following it downstream for two days until they left the river behind to climb south slowly toward the lowest pass compressed among those mountains surrounding the narrow northern reaches of a valley that eventually widened its funnel into a fertile, verdant floor carpeted with autumn-crisp grass crunching beneath the icy remnants of winter’s recent snow.

“You’re in Mexico now,” Rufus Graham explained as he brought his horse alongside Bass’s saddle mount.

“Don’t look no different to me.”

Solomon Fish explained, “Been in Mexico since we come ’cross the Arkansas.”

“How far north the greasers ever come?” Scratch asked.

With a spill of raw laughter Hatcher declared, “Never would they come this far north, Titus Bass. This still be the land of the mountaineer and the Injun. Ain’t many a greaser gonna venture far outta their villages.”

Down, down through the heart of that high valley they hurried against the lowering storms that gray-shouldered the peaks on their left and right. Finally they struck the river flowing into the valley in a tangle of streams given birth in that high ground to the west.

“A blind man could foller this all the way from here clear down to Taos,” Caleb instructed Bass that afternoon as they began winding their way along a dim trail some distance back from the brushy banks.

Hatcher said, “The wust of the ride’s over now, Scratch.” Then he sniffed the cold air deep into his lungs. “Eegod, boys! Why, I swear I can smell tortillas and beans awready!”

Two days later Bass spotted his first herd of wild horses racing along the bench a short distance above them. None of the creatures appeared to be the least bit concerned about men capturing them—often loping along the outfit’s line of march for hours at a time. On those occasions the trappers had to be very wary that none of their pack animals broke loose to follow the wild herd. The farther south they pushed, the more of those mustangs they encountered crossing their trail day after day. This had to be a horse thief’s paradise, Scratch thought.

“Injuns in these parts?” he asked of the others one night at their fire as the men unfurled their robes and blankets, settling in for a few hours of sleep.

“Not many what a man might worry about,” Jack replied.

Then Elbridge added, “Less’n the Comanche ride down on the town.”

Hatcher nodded. “The Comanche been known to cause considerable trouble for the Mexicans.”

Throwing his arm in a wide arc, Bass inquired, “This here Comanche country?”

“Not rightly,” Jack declared. “They just come here to raid the poor pelados, to carry away everything they can. Horses, cows, mules, anything they take a shine to.”

“That means they’ll carry off Mex young’uns too,” Solomon stated.

“What the hell they want with the young’uns?” Scratch asked.

“Turn ’em into good Comanche,” Caleb said. “The boys they make into warriors, and the girls—well, down the line the girls gonna start having Comanche babies.”

Rufus wagged his head sadly. “The greasers ain’t all that good at putting up a good fight of it.”

“Ain’t they got any soldiers?”

“They got soldiers, Scratch,” Isaac said. “But they ain’t allays the sort to be any help.”

“What these soldiers good for?”

“Sometimes they dare ride out on the Santy Fee trail what takes a man back to Missouri,” Hatcher said. “But there’s Comanche out there in that water-scrape hell. So most times them yellow-backed polecats are hanging round where they can be safe when they stare real hard at traders come in from the States. Making sure they’re always somewhere they don’t have to worry ’bout no Comanche.”

“Mostly, them soldados gonna be where they find lots of women and pass brandy and some fandango to take in,” Caleb said.

“Fandango?” Scratch asked.

“Mexican for dance,” Rufus said with a generous grin. “A real hurraw an’ stomp—with plenty likker and womens!”

Turning back to Hatcher, Titus asked, “So how bad these Comanche be?”

Jack’s merry eyes darkened. “The Blackfoot be the devil’s sumbitches up north. And down here the wust a man run up against be the Comanch’. Ain’t no red nigger any finer on the back of a horse.”

That night it snowed, right on into the pale, murky dawn as the sky continued to lower off those craggy mountain slopes rising on either side of them as they flung the fat, icy flakes off their robes and blankets, quickly rolling up the bedding and lashing it atop the packs they hung across the backs of their animals. The wind stirred just before sunrise, hurling itself at their backs all that day, whining and whimpering around them on into that night when they made camp just as the sky muddied and the snow finally let up.

“How far now, Jack?”

Hatcher ruminated on that a moment, then said to Scratch, “Less’n a week, give or take.”

“Five days, I’ll wager,” Solomon declared.

“Ye’re up to making a bet?” Jack asked.

“Five days,” Fish repeated. “An’ I said I’d wager.”

“A week,” Hatcher stated. “No less.”

“Anyone else?” Solomon asked, gazing around at the others huddled shoulder to shoulder at the edge of the flames as he shook Hatcher’s lean hand.

“Can’t be soon enough for me,” Kinkead groaned. “No matter how many days.”

It began to snow again the following morning as the nine of them rolled out and stomped around to stir up some warmth in their limbs. Bass, Kinkead, and Fish went out to take the horses down to water, finding the narrow creek beginning to ice up along the banks. Using a dead limb he found beneath an old cottonwood, Scratch hammered away at a thin crust, breaking a large hole where the animals could drink before taking to the trail.

As he stood there shivering slightly, huddled within his soot-smudged, grease-stained red blanket, Bass watched the frosty halo over the herd slowly change from a misty gray to a delicate rose as the sun climbed briefly until swallowed by a thickening boil of snow clouds. As he watched, that tint of crimson gradually faded to pewter as the sun continued to rise, hidden once more behind the lowering of the heavens.

“C’mon, Scratch!” Caleb hollered as he and the others drove the horses back toward their camp. “We only got us five days till we reach Taos.”

“Seven days!” Hatcher bellowed like a calf hamstrung by a pack of prairie wolves as he struggled past, huffing as he hefted a pack onto the back of a horse.

Wood waited a moment, then leaned toward Bass. “Five days,” he whispered, and held up all the fingers on one bare hand. “Five.”

It didn’t matter to Titus. This close, those two days they argued over truly didn’t matter. They were drawing nigh, near enough that Scratch could sense the keen edge to the anticipation building in the others, an anticipation that ignited an excitement of his own.

As long as he had been out here already, in the last few days Bass was coming to realize that everything would be brand-new in this country south of the Arkansas. Not just the peoples—both Mexican and Indian—but their food and drink as well, along with another new and foreign language bound to fall about his ears. As much as he had been swallowed up in the varied cultures and races at the international port of New Orleans back in his youth, or lived at the St. Louis crossroads of a nation busy with its westward expansion, Bass was surprised to find himself growing as anxious to reach this Mexican village as he had been to enter his first Indian village back in twenty-five.

But more than anything else, he was finding the country itself different from what lay to the north.

This mountain southwest was truly a land of extreme contrasts. While spring would give birth to richly flowered valleys, so too did high, snowcapped peaks rise well above the desert floor. Green, rolling meadows carpeted the slopes of hills all the way down to sun-hardened desert wastes speckled with ocatillo and barrel cactus, mesquite trees and frequent reminders of an even more ancient time in the sharp-edged, black lava fields that occasionally cluttered the landscape.

Always the land of the lizard, horned toad, prairie dog, and rattlesnake, this was also a country where he found cottonwood and willow bordering the infrequent gypsum-tainted streams where that “gyp” water might well cause most unaccustomed travelers to grow sick, stricken with a paralyzing bowel distress.

These vast, yawning valley plains stretched upward toward the purple bulk of hills, from there up to brick-red mountainsides timbered with the ever-emerald-green of pinion pine and second-growth cedar. At sunrise a man would find the treeless ridges staring back at him like some swollen, puffy, fight-ravaged eye. But by the time the sun rose high, that same vista would be painted a hazy blue, eventually turning to a deep purple as the sun finally sank to its rest. In such a land there was sure to come the summer heat of hell, the bitter cold of an unexpected and uncompromising blizzard in winter.

For much of the last few weeks, the nine and their animals had threaded their way through this high land of brilliant color and startling contrast by following the Rio Grande itself as it flowed due south. Eventually, of an early afternoon, they stopped to water the animals for midday at the mouth of a narrow river that flowed out of the hills to the east to mingle its snow-melt with the Rio Grande.

“That there be the Little Fernandez,” Caleb Wood instructed as he pointed toward the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

Come evening, with the sun setting across the valley, those hills themselves would take on a crimson hue so realistic that it had reminded the early Spanish explorers of the blood Christ Himself had shed on the cross.

Isaac stepped up as their horses drank at the icy stream. “There be a pass up there a feller comes over. Just follow the crik down into this here valley, turn south yonder there … and you’ll run onto the village called Taos.”

Overhead the last of a winter storm was spending itself among the high places, while on the valley floor where they put their animals back on the trail, the snow fell gently. Here a man might find refuge from winter’s harsh fury that battered the northern plains and Rockies. From spring until well into the fall here, green pastures welcomed the heat-jaded prairie traveler who stumbled in from the dry and dusty Santa Fe Trail. Here the shadows of the Sangre de Cristos offered a man respite from the harshest weather meted out by both summer and winter.

The valley had long been a refuge to weary sojourners.

As early as the 1300s the Indians had begun building the massive multistoried Pueblo de Taos, raising the thick mud walls near Taos Mountain at the northernmost end of the valley. Successive pueblos had been added over the centuries. Finally, after the threat of frequent and deadly attacks by roving bands of Comanche raiders had diminished, a new Spanish settlement was given birth. Named after a seventeenth-century Spanish pioneer who settled in the valley and made it his home, the tiny village came to be known as Don Fernando de Taos.

Up ahead in the lengthening shadows of late afternoon raced Kinkead and Rowland, kicking their horses into a gallop to shoot past Rufus and Isaac. At the top of the bluish, twilit rise covered with snow, the two yanked back on their reins, settled their horses, and pounded one another on the back. As Hatcher led the others up this last gentle slope, Bass heard the excitement in how Johnny and Matthew yelled back and forth with childlike eagerness, pointing this way and that, pulling their caps from their heads to signal the others to hurry, their long hair tormented with each gust of wind.

Bass stopped at last, gazing south, staring down into the valley for the first time. What with all the snow and those whitewashed adobe walls, it was hard for him at first to make out the village. Soon enough his eyes spotted the faint glow of candles and lamps brightening more and more windows as afternoon light oozed from the early winter sky.

“That there’s Taos, Scratch,” Hatcher said quietly.

“Welcome,” Kinkead added, his eyes beaming. “My Rosa’s yonder!”

Jack turned and asked, “Ye’ll keep your head down tonight, Matthew? You too, Johnny?”

They glanced quickly at one another and nodded.

Kinkead declared, “We’re going our own ways, Jack. This first night I’m laying low with Rosa’s folks.”

“How ’bout you, Rowland?”

“Me too, Jack,” he answered, his happy face gone serious. “Don’t wanna dance with no trouble—not after two years.”

Hatcher nodded. “That’s the chalk of it, boys. Slip into town quietlike, and don’t let many folks see ye. We’ll catch up to ye down to the square in a day or two.”

“You’ll see to our animals and plunder, won’t you, boys?” Matthew asked the group.

“G’won now,” Jack coaxed the two. “Ye got wives waiting for ye down the hill in Taos. Get yer gullet shined with lightning and yer stinger dipped in sweet, warm honey tonight!”

Rowland turned to gaze at Kinkead. “Jack don’t have to ask me twice!”

They started to whoop like wild men as they kicked their horses into motion, but Hatcher hollered at them to be quiet. Instead, the two men raced down the snowy slope toward the distant village without another sound out of them but the hammer of the hooves, and the pounding of their excited hearts.

“Look at them two, won’t you?” Caleb asked as the others sat in silence. “Like a pair o’ bulls in the spring—”

“You’d be bellering like a scalded alley cat if’n you had you a woman tucked away down there!” Rufus scolded Wood.

Caleb wheeled on him. “Who says I don’t have me a woman tucked away down there?”

“They really got wives down in that town?” Titus asked. “Mexican wives?”

“Yup,” Jack replied, then winked wickedly.

“So what we gonna do when we get down there tonight? Find us some women and whiskey?” Bass inquired, the tip of his tongue licking his cracked lower lip.

“We ain’t going to Taos tonight,” Jack explained as he raised his face to the sky, peering this way and that at the onrushing darkness.

Down in the valley the distant peal of a solitary bell drifted up the slope. After two rings a second bell took up the faint chorus. Back and forth the two rang for the space of a half-dozen heartbeats, then faded off into the cold as silence replaced their joyous song.

“What was that?” Scratch asked.

“Church down there,” Isaac said. “Got two towers. A bell in each tower. They ring ’em at break o’ day, then at noon. And again at eventide.”

“Bells,” Bass repeated. “I’ll be go to—”

Caleb said, “Looks like we got here about the right time of the day.”

“Right time of the day for what?” Scratch proclaimed.

“To get ourselves round to the far side of town ’thout the Mexicans seeing us come in,” Hatcher declared, raising his right arm and pointing with his rifle to the hills west of the village.

“Them greasers cause us trouble?”

“Not the plain folks,” Isaac said. “Just the greasers what run everything. The soldiers and the tax fellers what don’t want Americans to trap no Mexican waters.”

“How the hell they gonna know if we pulled our beaver outta Mexican streams?”

“They don’t,” Jack said with a shrug. “So they tax all the beaver we got—no matter where it come from.”

This was startling news. Titus continued, “How’s a man s’posed to pay a tax when he ain’t got no money to begin with?”

“Them tax collectors and the soldiers what ride around with ’em take the government’s cut from yer beaver.”

“My beaver!” Bass shrieked. “They ain’t gonna take any of my beaver—not after I lost those last packs when Bud, Silas, and Billy went under!”

“That’s just what we’re trying to explain to ye, Scratch,” Hatcher said. “Them greasers working for the governor ain’t gonna have a chance to take none of our beaver.”

“Not a plew,” Caleb echoed.

“H-how we keep ’em from it?”

“By taking our asses on over yonder there to the west now that it’s dark,” Jack explained.

“What’s over there?”

“Workman’s caves,” Caleb answered. “That child makes good corn whiskey.”

“W-whiskey?” Bass stammered.

“Taos lightning,” Hatcher said. “Take the top of yer head off cleaner’n a Blackfoot tomahawk!”

“Lemme at it!” Bass croaked, his dry throat constricting in excitement.

“Ooo-hoo! Looks like Titus here got him a thirst, fellas!” Elbridge barked.

“Time we got down off this hill anyway,” Jack advised. “A cold night like this, best thing a man can do is to find him a warm place where the wind won’t blow—”

“Like Workman’s caves!” Caleb interrupted.

“Damn right,” Hatcher continued. “A warm place where he and his companyeros can pour some whiskey down their gullets!”

“Cómo la va?”

The loud voice came booming out of the night, echoing and reechoing off the narrow canyon walls. It was enough to cause Scratch’s skin to prickle with cold despite his layers of clothing.

“Workman?” Hatcher called out after he had thrown his hand up and stopped them all as they were slowly picking their way along the dry creekbed in the inky darkness. “That you, Workman?”

“Who the hell’s asking?”

“Jack Hatcher.”

They heard sounds from the night—above and to their left: stones clunking together, pebbles ground underfoot.

“Mad Jack Hatcher, is it?”

Suddenly a figure emerged out of the gloom here at the bottom of the deep, dry creekbed.

Jack sang, “So there ye are, Willy!”

“You don’t smell like no ghosts,” the stranger said as he stepped to within a rifle’s length of the muzzles of their horses. “And for sartin you don’t look to be Mexican soldiers neither.”

With a shrug Hatcher explained, “Just a bunch of fellers need a place to spread out our robes and hide away our packs for the season, Willy.”

“Done for the winter, are you, Jack?” the man asked. “If’n that be so, kick off there and give me a proper greetin’.”

Quickly dismounting, Hatcher stomped up and the two of them embraced, pounding shoulders and backs as Bass strained to get himself a better look at this William Workman. With nothing better than dim starshine it was hard to tell more than the fact that the man kept his face shaved and his hair cropped short, looking no different from a settlement storekeeper back in the States. Across his arm lay a rifle; in the wide belt that encircled his blanket coat were stuffed a pair of pistols. He wore no hat despite the cold, his pale face smiling as he turned from Hatcher to look up at the others.

“Who all’s with you, Jack?”

“Ye know ’em, Willy,” Hatcher explained. “All here with me ’cept Kinkead and Rowland.”

Workman moved up another two steps, peering over the group. “Where’s Joe?”

“Little’s gone,” Caleb replied.

“That you, Wood?” Workman asked. “You still throwin’ in with this bastard Hatcher?” He turned to Jack. “How’d Little go under? You run onto some Blackfoot way up there where you was going?”

“He went sick, Willy. Got him the ticks last spring.”

Then Isaac added, “Just afore the Blackfoot jumped us.”

With a raw snort of humorless laughter, Workman said, “I warned you sonsabitches not to go up there to Blackfoot country when you lit out of here more’n a year ago. But would Mad Jack Hatcher listen to any sane man?”

“Hell, no!” Hatcher answered, slapping Workman on the shoulders. “What good would it do me ever to listen to a sane man?”

Workman brought up the muzzle of his rifle, pointing it in Bass’s direction. “So who’s the new man?”

“C’mon down here, Scratch.”

“Scratch, is it?” Workman echoed as Bass kicked out of the saddle. “This new hand got him a real name?”

“Titus Bass,” Scratch said, pulling off a mitten to hold out his hand.

“Good to make your ’quaintance, Titus. Whoa—your grip feels cold. Mayhaps we ought’n get you boys on inside to warm up.”

“Ye got lightning? That’ll warm me quick!” Hatcher declared as he and Workman turned and started off into the dark.

“You’ll dang well play that fiddle o’ your’n for every drop, Jack,” the whiskey maker warned. “There ain’t no free drink at Workman’s still.”

“Ye gone and wounded me, Willy! No man can’t never say Jack Hatcher don’t pay his own way.”

“What’s to eat, Willy?” Elbridge asked, trotting up right behind the two.

“Got me most of a small cinnamon I shot up in the foothills two day back,” Workman answered. “That sow was young enough to still be tender.”

Isaac asked, “Bet you’ve got some corn too.”

“We can rustle you up some corn cakes to go ’long with that bear meat.” Workman stopped and turned as the others came to a halt in a broad semicircle around him. “You boys go on with Jack here and get your packs off them horses afore we draw too much attention standing round here in the dark o’ night. You know where you can corral your animals after you’ve got your beaver underground in the cave. Then you come on over to the mill house where I got the fire going, and we’ll catch up on what all you fellers see’d since last you was in Taos.”

That bear meat was superb, kept cool hanging back in the cavern across the dry creekbed from the hut and mill house William Workman had built himself out of all the loose stone found underfoot in this broken countryside west of Taos. Some two years previous he and John Rowland had discovered the narrow entrance to the cave just big enough for a dismounted rider to bring his horse through if the need arose. Once through the portal, however, the cavern opened up. Several smaller rooms jutted off that large main room.

After dropping their packs and possibles just outside the cave entrance, Scratch helped Isaac and Elbridge wrangle the horses and mules up the creekbottom another sixty yards to a bend in the canyon where Workman had constructed a post corral big enough to contain the animals a large trapping party would bring in. Against one side of the fence they found a pair of hayricks filled with cut grass, which the three trappers pitched into the corral for their trail-weary stock after removing all the bits and rope halters, draping them over the top fence rail.

By the time they stepped through the rough-hewn door into the low-roofed mill house, the fragrance of boiling corn and frying hoecakes instantly set Bass’s mouth to watering.

“I ain’t had no corn since … since I put the Missouri River at my back in twenty-five,” he stated as Caleb Wood handed him a flat tinned plate. Titus brought the johnnycakes right under his nose and drank in their heavenly fragrance, conjuring up memories of a warm hearth, memories of a long-ago home slowly bubbling to the surface within him like a hearty rabbit stew.

“You ain’t been out here long,” Workman commented.

“Wondered if I’d ever get away from there,” Titus replied as he propped his rifle against a stone wall, pulled the strap from his shoulder so his shooting pouch draped from the long weapon’s muzzle.

“Settlers moving out toward the Santy Fee Trail at Franklin,” the man said. “But I don’t think they’ll ever put down roots on the prairies. Not anywhere near that god-forsook country a man goes through ’tween here and there. Ain’t worth the trouble to plow that ground.”

“Too damn hot, that country,” Elbridge garbled around a hunk of bear, corn soppings dripping into his chin whiskers. “What fool’d dare try to grow something in that desert, I’ll never know.”

As he speared a slab of the dark, lean bear loin onto Bass’s tin, Workman continued. “I ain’t been here much longer’n you, truth be. Got here first of July that year. Me and Matthew,” he said, pointing his butcher knife off in the general direction of town, “the two of us and a third one named Chambers was gonna start us our own still.”

“Ye see just how far Matt got being a whiskey maker,” Hatcher said.

“Door’s still open for him,” Workman said. “You tell ’im I can always use a partner around here again.”

“Ye tell ’im yourself, Willy,” Jack declared. “I figger he’ll be looking for something to do now that he’s give up on the mountain trade for a while.”

“He don’t figger to trap anymore?”

Hatcher replied, “What he’s been saying since spring.”

Turning back to the fire to stab another slice of bear from the huge iron skillet suspended on a trivet over the glowing coals, Workman said, “I’ll lay that he’s off seeing his Rosa.”

“Missed her something fierce,” Solomon said.

“Don’t doubt it,” Workman agreed. “My eye’s landed on a purty Mex gal my own self.”

“Marrying kind?”

“Enough of the marrying kind that I went out and got myself baptized in the Mexican church last June,” their host explained.

“B-baptized?” Hatcher stammered, spewing a mouthful of his meat onto the pounded clay floor.

“By Padre Antonio Jose Martinez,” he said, laying a slice of bear on Caleb’s plate. “In town the folks all call me Julian.”

“Hoo—”

“Julian,” Workman repeated the name for them. “S’pose that’s William in their tongue, eh?”

“My, my,” Hatcher exclaimed, then whistled low and long. “To think of another American getting hisself baptized just so he can get hitched up to a Mex gal.”

“I don’t figger you can ever understand that, Jack … because none of you are the kind ever to settle down in one spot long enough to have a wife, raise some kids, maybeso even have a job that means you don’t have to look back over your shoulder for Injuns.”

“I like my life just the way it is, Willy,” Hatcher said, then corrected himself. “I mean, Julian.”

“Man oughtta be happy with the way he’s living his life,” Workman declared as he scooted back from the fry skillet and got to his feet. “If he ain’t happy, then he ought’n change something so’s he can be happy. Like this new fella here—’pears he left ever’thing behind and come west to the mountains to find what wasn’t back there.”

“Happy? I’ll tell ye what makes that nigger happy!” Jack snorted, pointing his knife at Scratch. “Bass is the sort what ain’t happy less’n he’s making life hard on me!”

Titus chuckled, saying, “It’s for sartin no woman ever want you around long enough to get yourself baptized so you could marry up to her, Hatcher.”

“See what I mean, Willy? This nigger’s nothing more’n a pain in the ass to me.”

Rufus Graham dragged the back of his hand across his lips, belched, then stood to stretch. “When you gonna bring us some lightning?”

“Thirsty?”

“Save for ronnyvoo last two year,” Graham explained, “I been thirsty near all the time, Willy.”

“I’ll fetch us up some,” their host stated, dusting his hands together eagerly.

By the time Workman was back with a clay jug in each hand, the rest had finished the last of their supper and had sopped up all the corn juice and bear grease. Some of the men even tipped up their tinware and licked their plates clean, eyes half-closed, savoring the last of the corn.

“Ain’t gonna be the last meal you have, fellers,” Workman said as he came back into the fire’s light.

“Never know when you’re riding with Jack Hatcher,” Caleb grumbled. “Every meal might be a man’s last—’cause you sure as hell don’t always know when you’re gonna get the next one.”

They laughed together as the jugs clunked to the surface of a thick plank table before their host pulled small, crudely formed clay cups from the two big patch pockets on his short blanket coat.

Bass watched as the man began to pour a clear liquid into each cup, filling them about halfway to the top. When they all had a cup in hand, Workman passed the last to Titus and raised his own.

“A toast—to the new mountaineer,” Workman said. “And his first trip to Taos.”

“Hurraw for Scratch!” Hatcher bawled, slapping Bass on the back of his shoulders.

For a moment he watched the others stuff their clay cups to their hairy mouths, tossing back the cups and their heads at the same time. Then he brought his cup to his lips and tasted. Damn, if it didn’t have the sting of distilled corn itself!

“What you think?” Workman asked.

“G’won, drink up and tell the man what ye think of his lightning,” Hatcher demanded.

Scratch brought the cup from his lips, licking them a moment. “Tastes like John Barleycorn to me.”

“Drink it down and tell me if’n you like it,” Workman suggested, crossing his arms.

He had to admit that he did. Having found that first sip quite to his liking, Bass threw back the cup, letting the rest of the clear, potent liquid tumble back over his tongue, right on down his gullet, where it scorched a wide, fiery path all the way to his belly.

Impatient, Hatcher brought his face close, asking, “Well?”

“M-more,” Bass stuttered, his voice as raspy as a coarse file dragged over crude cast iron. A bare whispery ghost of its former strength.

“I think he likes it!” Caleb declared.

“Lookit his eyes!” Isaac said as he leaned in an inch from Bass’s nose. “This man’s gonna be drunk on his ass afore he knows it—ain’t he, Jack?”

“If that hoss don’t take the circle, Willy!” Hatcher bellowed. “Looks like ye found ’Nother nigger what took to yer likker right off!”

“M-more, I said,” Scratch repeated, his voice a little less raspy this time. Already he was sensing the heat rise in his throat, his face and forehead feeling flushed and feverish.

Workman complied, pouring a full cup this time. Then the others held out their cups as their host made the rounds of that tight circle, dispensing more of the heady grain spirits he had distilled from wheat and corn grown nearby in the Taos valley.

“Now, s’pose you boys tell me all ’bout them scalps I see you have hanging from your belts and pouches,” Workman declared. “And don’t forget to tell me how you come to ride back into Taos with this here whiskey-lovin’ Titus Bass!”

He didn’t remember much about that night, just crumbs of recollection scattered across the empty plate of his consciousness, no more than scraps slowly tumbling round in his aching head as he forced himself out of the blankets before he peed all over himself right then and there.

Someone had put him to bed and covered him up. As he stood unsteadily, Scratch watched the slow spinning of a half-dozen points of light: the flames of low candles reflected against the walls, their pale light fluttering against the dark void surrounding the cave entrance, where an ashy grayness told him dawn was coming soon.

How his head swam as he struggled to stay upright, wobbled, then almost went down, catching himself with a hand against the cold cavern wall. The others lay here and there, all six of them dead for all he could tell. But they weren’t—because somehow they had gotten him back to the cavern from the mill house and stretched him out beneath his blankets.

This lathering his tonsils with whiskey wasn’t as much fun as it used to be.

For an anxious moment he worried that he might have puked on himself while he’d lain there passed out. Sickened with the throbbing of a dull drum in his head, he stopped, braced himself against the wall just beneath one of the low, sputtering candles, and inspected the front of his shirt. Wiping a dirty hand down his chest, across his belly, and then lifting his breechclout to give it a quick inspection, Bass was satisfied he hadn’t made a mess of himself.

The air grew chillier the closer he inched to the mouth of the cavern. A stiff breeze drifted down the riverbed the moment he stepped out into the morning air, nudging his wild, tangled hair. As he stood watering the ground, Bass realized the hangovers were beginning to hurt more than they ever had before. Maybeso the older he got, the more his body rebelled at the way he abused it.

Tucking the breechclout back over himself, Scratch fought the dizzying headache doing its best to blind him, then swallowed down a little of the bile revolting from his stomach. How his head pounded, reverberating with the dull echo of distant gunshots.

Then his stomach had finally had enough of his standing upright. What he had left from last night’s bear and corn mush flung itself against the back of his tongue violently. Folding at the waist, Titus spilled it onto the ground until he gagged nothing but a burning bile. Slowly he straightened, distressed that his head still echoed with the hammering of those distant gunshots—

“Get them others rousted, goddammit!”

Turning, Bass strained valiantly to focus his bloodshot eyes on where the voice had come from—finding Workman coming out of the gloom of that cold, gray dawn. The man took shape out of the dizzying rocks, that rifle across his arm.

“Get Hatcher!” the whiskey maker shouted, his voice shrill, ringing off the narrow canyon walls. “Roll ’em out!”

Behind him Scratch could hear others stirring, muttering inside the cave. Groggy, he grumbled, “What?”

Workman came to a stop before him there at the entrance to the cavern. “There’s trouble in the village an’ we gotta go.”

“Trouble?” Elbridge Gray asked as he emerged from the dark, swiping a big hand over his face several times.

“Gunfire,” Workman said, starting to push past Gray. “Where’s Jack?”

“I’m coming,” Hatcher’s voice was heard. Then he stood in the cold with the rest of them shoving up behind him.

“Hush! Listen,” Rufus demanded.

They did, for the space of a few heartbeats until Workman spoke.

“Grab your guns, boys—and foller me.”

“We gonna saddle up, Willy?” Caleb Wood asked.

“Ain’t got the time!” he ordered. “We gotta go now!”

They had led their horses out of the pole corral and were on the cold, bare backs, crossing that dark bottom ground between the cavern entrance and the stone mill house, urging their mounts up the trail cut along the gentle side of the canyon onto the high ground, where Workman led them out at a stiff lope. The wind at their back, the eight rode toward the graying horizon, toward the gunshots, toward the rising screams of the women.

This was something totally new to Bass, this mix of rifle fire and those cries—the shrieks, the fear and horror of women. Never before had there been any womenfolk mixed in with the times he had been forced to spill blood.

But of a sudden he remembered Annie Christmas’s gunboat on the Mississippi River. Moored up to the pier both bow and stern, what was once a Kentucky flatboat had been converted by its madame into a floating saloon and brothel. Just the sort of place where a man who drank too much might well never wake up. He recalled how Hames Kingsbury ended up having to gut the whore who came for him with blood in her eye. On Annie’s boat the whores were every bit as treacherous as were the river pirates themselves. Leaving dead men and women behind, they had fled Natchez by the skin of their teeth, praising the fates for sparing their lives.

One of those big iron bells began to ring in the chill gray air—not two, as there had been at dusk last night. Just one bell, its tolling both a shrill warning, and a plaintive call for aid and succor. When the hair prickled on the back of his neck, Scratch tugged the coyote-fur cap down a little farther on his wild, unruly hair, hoping to make it more secure over the blue bandanna as they raced toward the outer buildings that gradually took form out of the gloom.

Someone was blowing a horn now—its clear, brassy notes shrill on the air between each resounding peal from the cathedral bell. But by now the gunfire was fading quickly, falling off to a few scattered shots, then a final volley by the time the horsemen tore into the western outskirts of the village. Down a narrow street they clattered across the icy, rutted ground pressed between two rows of low-roofed dirt buildings, the dawn-gray walls like skulls pocked with black-doored nose rectangles and empty eye sockets of lightless windows. Dodging a dog here and there, reining aside for a crude, wood-wheeled carreta shoved up against its owner’s house, the eight kept on, stringing themselves out into a long file as Workman led them toward the center of town—

Where the screaming grew louder, wails and shrieks of horror and distress swelling like a massive wave rumbling toward them, about to engulf the horsemen, when Bass saw the crowd take shape out of the dark.

“Pray it ain’t one of our boys,” Isaac Simms growled beside him.

“One of our—”

Simms interrupted, “Gone under, Scratch. Gone under.”

As the crowd congealed, become an organic, growing wild thing filling the street’s entrance to the town square, that cathedral bell continued clanging its call of danger, the brass horn kept raising its stuttering, clarion call from somewhere else in the village. Perhaps a rooftop, its braying alarm coming from on high, Scratch figured.

They brought their guns up about the time Workman and Hatcher each threw up an arm to signal a halt. For another breathless heartbeat it appeared the crowd was turning to rush them, whirling away from the village square with murderous intent.

“It’s the wimmens!” Jack bellowed as he yanked back on the reins, sawing them savagely to the left to spin his horse aside as the women surged toward the horsemen, screaming in utter chaos.

In a swirl of shawl and dress, they poured around the riders, every arm held up to the horsemen, every hand imploring the Americans, eyes wide and fear filled, tears streaming down their faces, mouths chattering a wild, confusing, ear-taunting cacophony of a foreign tongue.

“What’re they saying?” Jack shouted at Workman as their horses wheeled about, jostling, bumping into one another as the rest of the riders came to an abrupt halt, trapped in the narrow confines of the icy, rutted street. “Ye make it out?”

“Comanche!” Workman barked the single word the rest of the horsemen could understand.

“Hatcher!”

Out of the milling mass of frightened women emerged the huge figure holding a rifle overhead at the end of his arm.

“Kinkead!” Jack bellowed.

It took several moments for the big man to force his way through the stream of women who flooded round him, and that tiny woman who dared not leave the safety of that shelter right beneath his left arm. They pulled at Matthew’s clothing, touched his face with their fingers, stumbled backward in front of him as they screamed and cried out their warnings, their pleas, their prayers.

“Yer Rosa all right?” Hatcher asked as Kinkead and the woman reached the side of his horse.

He pulled her closer beneath his bulk. “Rosa ain’t hurt. She came along—helped reload my guns.”

Hatcher managed to get his horse close. “Willy says it was Comanche!”

With a nod Kinkead replied, “They hit us in the dark, Jack. Come in on the south side of the village.”

Rufus asked, “Where’s Rowland?”

“I ain’t see’d him,” Matthew declared. “But I heard him hollering for me during the fight.”

“Heard him?” Jack inquired.

“His gun, heard it,” Kinkead explained. “And I thought I heard him yelling for me too.”

“Maybeso the Comanch’ got him?”

With a shrug Kinkead said, “Could have, Jack. I know he was staying the night on the far side of the village, near where the Comanch’ rode out when they was finished with us.”

“What’d they get?” Workman demanded, trying to settle his nervous horse as the women shoved against the riders, filling every space between the Americans like water seeping between the boulders on a summer-dry creekbed.

Looking down at Rosa, Kinkead had to shout to be heard. She appeared to listen a minute, then asked first one of the shrieking women, then another, before she stood on her toes and spoke into his ear.

Matthew gazed up at Workman and Hatcher as they jostled before him in the frightened crowd, his face gray with concern. “They got some women, Jack. And a few of the niños … chirrun too.”

“Women? Some growed women?”

Kinkead nodded, swallowing. “Sounds like they got Rowland’s woman … his wife.”

Hatcher’s eyes narrowed. “It don’t look good for Johnny, does it?”

Staring at the ground a moment, Kinkead said, “Rowland ain’t the sort to let the Comanch’ take his wife if he were still alive.”

“Let’s go find Johnny afore we go after the red-bellies!” Workman hollered.

Hatcher whirled on him. “Ye fixing to go running after them Comanch’?”

“Damn right! We can’t let ’em get too far ahead!”

Jack turned to the others in a blur, asking his men above the dying tumult of screams that had become more a sobbing, wailing, whimpering mob of mourners, “We going after them Injuns?”

“If Rowland’s wife is took by ’em,” Elbridge answered for the rest, “we’re going after every last one of the bastards!”

Jack’s eyes bounced off the hairy faces, each pair of bloodshot eyes like sunset-streaked portals into their tortured, hungover souls. He asked, “Elbridge speak for the rest of ye?”

Feeling the fear of it rise in a knot from the gut of him, Bass watched them all nod, some of the men growling their agreement like the distant coming of black-bellied thunder.

Hatcher turned toward him. “How ’bout you, Scratch?”

He felt the eyes on him, not just of the men who had saved his hash after he’d been left for dead, but of these half a hundred or more women who looked up at him with their pooling eyes. His belly was empty of everything but the fear, now that he had puked back at the cave. A cold, gut-wrenching fear … and the hot, rising flush of adrenaline giving fire to his veins.

“Ain’t nothing could keep me from going.”