Crack in the Sky

19

They had waited out that short autumn day there beside the river, watching for more Apache.

Better to fight them here, Bass thought, than have them catch you out there on the desert. Here—where a man at least had water, and a few rocks around him, along with a little shade slanting down off the rocky bluff once the sun began its dip into the last quarter of the sky.

By the time Bass turned to move back toward the animals so he could retrieve some bear grease to smear on his tender belly wound, he sidestepped through the rocks to watch one of McAfferty’s packhorses go down. Its knees buckled as the animal snorted, kneeling into the sand clumsily. Arrows bristled from its neck and front flanks. More shafts quivered from the other animals, their packs, and saddles.

He quickly counted—finding one of them missing.

Dropping to one knee, Scratch peered under Hannah’s legs, finding his saddle mount already down, on its side and unmoving—more than a dozen arrows sticking from its bloody ribs and belly, all of them fired from above where the three warriors had crawled along that narrow shelf.

With a groan he let his head sag between his shoulders.

Right then the two of them had tougher problems than Asa’s goddamned ghost.

For a while Titus brooded on just what they could do with all the plunder and supplies without adding to the burden the animals were already carrying. To put any more weight on Hannah and the last of McAfferty’s horses was unthinkable—not with the heat and the desert and all that distance still to go before they would reach Taos.

Another option would be for him to walk those hundreds of miles, wearing out one pair after another of his moccasins. But even in the cool of that desert morning, Titus doubted he could ever accomplish that journey on foot.

Their only choice lay in separating wheat from chaff: packing only what was absolutely necessary on Hannah’s back, caching the rest here beside this river—as if they would one day return to reclaim what they would abandon.

Bass knew he never would.

“I ain’t digging no hole for it,” he growled at McAfferty. “Let the Apache have it all.”

Once the sun rose high enough to warm the air, Scratch settled back against the side of the bluff to wait out the rest of the morning. He simply didn’t have enough strength left to work any longer in the immobilizing heat. By midafternoon, when the sun’s direct rays slid behind the sandstone butte—bestowing a little shade upon their side of the hill—the dead horses had already begun to bloat. Now and then expanding gases whimpered and hissed from the arrow wounds and anuses.

In the cool of twilight, after an entire day with no further sign of more Apache, Bass felt confident enough to stand and move around in the dimming light. Managing to free his saddle from the carcass of the dead mount, he propped it atop the boulders while he went to work pulling the supply packs from the dead packhorse. After removing the last of the packs from Hannah and McAfferty’s second horse, Titus began to tediously go through all that they possessed—setting aside what was essential. That done, he put everything else in two stacks: what they would readily put to use, and what was more luxury than necessity. This last pile they would leave here in the shadows of the bluff, beside the Gila, come nightfall.

Titus stood and looked down at the rest when he was done, wagging his head at how pitifully small was what they could carry away from this place. Without those two extra animals and their four packs—why, what they were taking along now might just outfit a small band of Digger Injuns. No more than that.

But he and Asa had their lives back in their own hands, and that was a damned good feeling for a man who had no hankering to turn over his fate ever again to another, nor to the desert. His life was back in his hands, and his hands alone.

As soon as it was nearing full dark, Bass was already strapping the rebuilt packs back on Hannah and on Asa’s packhorse. Kneeling, he nudged McAfferty awake, and together they hauled themselves into the saddle and reined away from the boulders, following the river toward those mountains looming in the distance. Swinging loosely from the ropes lashing both bundles carried by Asa’s packhorse were the nine Apache scalps. Every bit of the long black hair, and the tops of the ears too. Titus wasn’t about to let any hoo-doo haunt him from here on out.

With the arrival of dawn Bass was half dozing in the saddle. McAfferty lay asleep, slumped forward against the withers of his horse. It wasn’t until some time after the sun came up that Scratch found them a place out of the light among some small but shady paloverde trees.

Another day out of the sun, followed by another long autumn night of relentless riding—pointing their noses northeast, keeping the North Star at the corner of his left eye. Pick out some feature of the land in the dark and ride right for it until they got there. Then select another landform in the distance and make for it. Again and again while the stars continued to wheel overhead and the night turned cold enough to turn their lips blue and cause their teeth to chatter.

Night after night of riding. Waiting out each day, keeping a rotation of watch between them, their eyes constantly searching the horizon for pursuit until sundown again marked the hour for them to pack up and remount.

How much longer? he had often wondered. How much farther did they have to go? … Until he scolded himself and forced his mind to think on something else. Day and night Bass tried hard to remember the look of Taos from afar, remember the smell of the rutted streets littered with refuse and offal. Were the women really as pretty as he remembered them? Was the village as gay as his memories painted it? Or had he only grown so sick and lonely for the sight of another human face, desperately yearning for some sign of those whitewashed walls, that the Taos he conjured up was far more than it really was?

“How ol’t a man you be, Mr. Bass?” Asa asked early of a morning after they had snuffed out the moon and rolled into their robes to sleep out the frosty day.

He thought a moment, tugging at the figures the way a man might tug at the strings on his moccasins to knot them securely. “I’ll turn thirty-six this coming birthday.”

“When will that be?”

“First day of the year.”

“A noble day, that,” McAfferty replied. “Meself, I’ll be turning thirty-six next year too. Late of the year, howsoever.”

Bass turned in the growing light and pulled the edge of his robe from his face to peer over at his partner. “You’re younger’n me?”

“’Pears to be.”

“S’pose it’s that white hair of your’n,” he said finally. “Makes you … seems you’re older’n me.”

“My years out here make me a old man to some,” Asa confessed. “But I’m a young’un to others.”

“Never asked where you come from.”

McAfferty hacked at some phlegm, then answered, “I was bred and borned in North Carolina.”

“I ain’t never been there. Was down along the Natchez Road, clear to the Muscle Shoals—but never got that far east.”

“A purty country, so my pappy said. He come to America back in eighty-nine. He always told folks he got here when this here country got its first president. I be full-blooded Scot, you know. A Scot I am—and most proud of that. Though I was borned this side of the east ocean, I’m a Scotsman like my pappy’s people.”

“My grandpap was a Scot his own self,” Bass announced. “You come west to the mountains from Carolina country?”

“By the heavens no,” McAfferty snorted. “I was on the Mississap when it come time to point my nose for these shining hills. Wasn’t too old when my family up and moved west from the Carolinas, clear across the Mississap to the Cape, south there from St. Louie.”

“I know of the Cape,” Scratch replied. “So you was the firstborn to your mam and pap?”

“My folks had three boys awready to bring along with ’em when they come to America. The family come in from the coastal waters, on to the deep forests where my pappy started off trading with the wild Injuns for their skins. He brung to the villages blankets and axes and mirrors and paint, goods like coffee and sugar too. It was a hard life, but a good one for my folks. After them three boys, they had ’em three girls. Then I come along there at the last.”

“If you was a young’un when you come to the Cape, it must’ve been a wild place back then.”

“Not many a white man had come across the Mississap to settle. Oh, there was folks up around St. Louie, but only a few French farmers down at the Cape. Good, rich ground that was too.”

With no school within hundreds of miles, McAfferty had come to learn his reading and writing as most did on the frontier, if they were fortunate: studying at his mother’s knee, copying words every night, following supper, from their old Scottish Bible, by the light of the limestone fireplace.

“By summer of 1810 more and more folks was coming in, so my pappy itched to move us on to a crik near the Little White River—a place more’n a week’s ride on west of St. Louie.”

“That was the fall I left home,” Bass admitted, watching his words drift away in hoarfrost. “Run off and ain’t ever been back.”

“You was sixteen then—a time when a boy figgers he’s just about done with all his growing,” Asa confided. “Likely you figgered you was man enough to set your own foot down in the world.”

Scratch turned to his partner. “You ’member the day the ground shook so terrible the rivers rolled back on themselves?”

“I do,” McAfferty said. “I was turned seventeen that fall. By the prophets, I do remember the day the earth shook under my feet. ’O Lord, be not far from me!’”

“I was working on the Ohio—a place called Owensboro. Where was you?”

“On the Little White,” Asa replied. “That first day the shaking started early off to the morning, afore the sun even thought to come up. I woke up, me pappy yelling at me, ’Asa! Asa! Get up, boy! Fetch the dogs! They under the floor after a coon, boy! Fetch them dogs out!’”

Titus inquired, “Them dogs of your’n was chasing a coon under the house that very morning the earth was shaking?”

“No—my pappy thought the rumbling and the roaring under the floor come from the dogs chasing a coon critter under our cabin. We all come right out of our beds—hearing the dogs outside the window, in the yard—all of ’em howling and yowling. Wasn’t a one of ’em under the floor!”

“You all knowed right then it weren’t the dogs?”

“Pappy hit the floor with his knees, and my mama was right beside him—and they both started praying like I ain’t ever heard ’em pray afore or since. Their eyes so big—saying they was sure the day of judgment was at hand.”

“I was up the Ohio a ways that cold day,” Titus explained. “Remember my own self how the ground rolled and shook so hard, the river come back on itself.”

“We was all on our knees—praying our hardest together,” McAfferty continued his story. “Soon as my mama went to singing ’Shall We Gather at the River,’ the might of the Holy Spirit come right over me, commanding my tongue to speak words right from the Bible: ’Thou are my hiding place; thou shalt preserve me from trouble; thou shalt compass me about with songs of deliverance.’”

“You knowed those words by heart back then?”

“I never paid me much attention to the lessons my mama gave me from the Bible,” Asa admitted. “But there I was—watching my pappy pray like he never done afore, the trees outside our window swaying this way and that, big limbs snapping off like they was fire kindling, my sisters caterwauling like painter cubs … when my mama up and tells us all she see’d it all real plain, see’d it as a sure sign that I was to preach God’s word to his wayward flocks.”

Scratch nodded, enthralled with the story. “You knowed back then you was made for speaking them Bible words.”

McAfferty snorted and rubbed the raw end of his cold nose. “No, Mr. Bass. I was a idjit nigger back in them days. This child just laughed at the notion of me taking up the Lord’s work. ’Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful.’”

“You didn’t turn to preaching then and there with that ground shaking under you?”

With a wag of his head Asa declared, “No, not till later on that year when we had us a great shooting star come burning ’cross the sky. The ground shook under my feet. But that star was something made me look right up at heaven. Something made me behold the power of the Lord. ’The God of glory thundereth.’ Maybeso the ground shook for there is the dominion of the devil hisself … but to have me a sign from above, from the realm of God!”

“That’s when you knowed you had a calling then and there?”

“That shooting star come back night after night,” he explained. “Made it plain I had the Lord’s calling.”

For the next few years Asa studied the family’s Bible, investing nearly every waking hour not spent in the McAfferty fields in reading, prayer, and long walks in the woods as he talked to his Maker.

“Wasn’t until eighteen and sixteen when I felt the burning in my heart that set me on the path to tell others of the word of our redeemer.”

It wasn’t long after that the young circuit rider took a proper wife. For more than a year his heart had been the captive of Rebekka Suell’s beauty. Finally, as the eldest in the family of nine children he visited once a month on his lonely circuit, sixteen-year-old Rebekka’s pa agreed to Asa’s marriage proposal.

McAfferty dolefully wagged his head now as darkness came down on the valley. “I can see how it weren’t no life for a woman—that riding the circuit from gathering house to gathering house. What few days a month we was home, she tried her best to keep up a li’l garden, and I done my best to bring game to our pot … but we never had much more’n my trail of the Lord’s calling and that tiny piece of ground where I scratched us a dugout from the side of a hill.”

By 1819 two interlopers came in and filed for ownership on the land where Asa had neglected to make his claim formally. Amid rumors that they accepted “donations” from rich landowners, the slick-haired government folks issued a demand that threw Asa off his place.

“‘Behold, these are the ungodly, who prosper in the world; they increase in riches.’ Losing what little we had took the circle for Rebekka,” Asa declared with bitterness. “With her gone, I put what little I had in my saddle pockets and set to drifting.”

Asa preached where he could, wheedling a meal here and there, sleeping out in the woods or slipping into some settler’s shed when the weather turned wet or cold. Those next two years were a time of sadness, loneliness, despair. Still—he had his Bible, and his faith that the Lord was testing him for something far, far bigger.

In the late spring of twenty-one he found himself among the outflung Missouri settlements, hearing news that two traders by the name of McKnight and James had cast their eye on the villages of northern Mexico.

“Asa McAfferty had no home in the white diggings,” he said. “And this was one nigger what had him nothing or no one to leave behind. Even the tiny flocks I was shepherd to didn’t heed to my warnings that the world was near its end. ’For God speaketh once, yea twice, yet man perceiveth it not!’”

“That when you come west? Twenty-one?”

“I was a man broke down, ground under the heel: ready to look west for my salvation, Mr. Bass,” and he nodded. “The west—where a man depends only upon the Lord … and mayhaps a rare friend, for his daily salvation. ’This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him, and saved him out of all his troubles.’”

On through the late autumn Bass and McAfferty continued their crossing of the craggy mountains and the desert wastes as the days continued to grow short, as the nights lengthened beneath each starlit ride, pushing hard for the Rio Grande. It was snowing the night they reached its banks—a light, airy dusting, the air around them filled with the sharp tang of a harder snow yet to come.

“Santy Fee ain’t far off now,” Asa said, nodding to the east.

“We going there?”

“Not ’less’n we want to cut out more trouble for ourselves,” McAfferty replied. “’They wandered in the wilderness in a solitary way; they found no city to dwell in.’”

Downstream at a ford they crossed that black, shimmering ribbon in the dark and rode until the sky began to lighten in the east before locating an arroyo where there were enough leafless cottonwood to provide some shelter, branches to disperse the smoke from their tiny campfire, modest protection from any distant, any curious, eyes.

So they skirted Santa Fe and its seat of Mexican territorial power, wary of the frequent army patrols the officials sent out—soldados instructed to detain any gringo careless enough to be caught on Mexican soil with beaver but with no Mexican license to trap that fur. Better was it for them to stay with the Rio Grande as they continued north each night rather than make for the well-traveled road that lay between the territorial capital and that string of villages in the Taos valley itself.

By the time they drew close to the Sangre de Cristos, Scratch imagined he could actually smell the burning piñon on the cold winter air in the gray light of a rosy dawn. At the knob of a hill they halted, their noses greeted with more of that smoke carried on a wind working its way out of the north, their eyes falling on the welcome sight of those clusters of mud-and-wattle huts, those neat rows of adobe homes arranged along a maze of narrow streets, all of them nestled across a whitewashed, snowy landscape.

McAfferty took in a deep breath, sighing. “’Hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted in them. Then they cried unto the Lord in their trouble, and He delivered them out of their distresses. And He led them forth by the right way, that they might go to a city of habitation. ’”

Watching the keen fire in the man’s icy-blue eyes, Scratch shuddered with a gust of that cold wind and followed the white-head down the snowy slope.

Los Ranchos de Taos was the first village the trappers reached at the bottom of the broadening valley. Beyond it lay the largest of the local villages—San Fernando de Taos—lightly veiled this sunup by a low cloud of firesmoke. Farther still they could make out the squat buildings of San Geronimo de los Taos.

“I’ll lay it’s San Fernando where Jack Hatcher and his boys brung you,” Asa proclaimed, pointing out the prominent church steeple.

“We didn’t come in to town all that much,” Bass admitted. “Stayed out to Workman’s place, mostly. When we first come in, he said it was a far sight better if we didn’t show our faces in town too much. After we went for them women took by the Comanche—things was better for us.”

“‘And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not vex him. But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself,’” Asa quoted.

Wagging his head, Titus declared, “Much as they appreciated what we done, them greasers wasn’t about to treat us like one of their own. ’Specially after that fight we had with them soldiers.”

“We’ll go round and lay up at Workman’s our own selves,” McAfferty instructed. “Be best we don’t make too much a show of ourselves. Not just yet. Till that whiskey maker tells us what be the temper of these here greasers.”

As they reined away from the road leading into San Fernando, Bass gazed longingly at the buildings still shuttered against the cold of the winter night, at the piñon and pine garlands draping the doorways and windows, at those ghostly wisps of smoke starting to curl from the chimneys of each low-roofed house as its inhabitants began their day.

“They prepare for our Lord’s blessed birthday,” McAfferty commented as they pitched toward the hills west of town. “Even these Mex celebrate the Lord’s sacred birth, Mr. Bass. Might’n be some hope for these people yet.”

A land of extreme contrasts this: dotted with flowering valleys in the spring, shadowed by high, snowcapped peaks year-round, with green rolling meadows butting up against the sun-baked hardpan, desert wastes speckled only with cactus, lizard, and scorpion. Along the banks of each of the infrequent streams grew borders of cottonwood sinking their roots deep to soak up the gypsum-tainted water that rumbled through the bowels of many an unaccustomed American come fresh from the States.

Here in dawn’s first light the snowy valley lay like a rumpled, cultured-folk bedsheet, rising unevenly toward the purple bulk of the surrounding foothills, farther still to that deep cadmium red of those slopes the sun’s first rising would soon ignite, mountainsides timbered with the emerald cloak of piñon, blue spruce, and fragrant cedar. How quickly the light changed as night gave way to day, as deep hues softened and the last of winter’s stars flickered out in the brightening sky right overhead.

The bruised-eye black of night faded around them, and Scratch said, “Caleb and them others, they didn’t tell me much at all ’bout the time you run with ’em.”

“Some men keep their own counsel, Mr. Bass,” McAfferty eventually replied.

“Will you tell me?”

Asa turned to look at Bass for several moments, then answered. “Been trapping for two years already by the time I hooked up with Johnny Rowland, Jack Hatcher, and the rest in Taos. That first season we worked our way north across the Arkansas.”

“That’s a good bunch,” Bass said.

“Johnny Rowland,” McAfferty said with fond remembrance. “Now, he’s a Welshman—almost like me own kin. Yes, I took to Rowland, right off.”

Two years of trapping and Indian fighting, wenching and wintering in Taos, found the free trappers up close to Arikara country.

Asa clucked. “Them critters never really took to a white man, Mr. Bass.” Then he growled bitterly, “’Let death seize upon them, and let them go down quick into hell: for wickedness is in their dwellings, and among them.’”

Jack Hatcher’s brigade made the mistake of crossing the homebound path of a Ree war party returning from raids in Sioux country to the south. When both sides drew up, keeping their wary distance, the warriors signed that they sought only to trade with the white men. In order to buy themselves some time to slip off after dark, the trappers said they would open their packs—but not till morning.

“Night come on, and us fellers all gathered up round our li’l fire we made inside our packs where we figgered to fort up there at the edge of that Ree camp, ever’one of us ready for what be coming—knowing Rees’re good ones for hair stealing.”

Hatcher and McAfferty sent Joseph Little out to determine just how well the Arikara had them surrounded. He returned well after darkness with distressing news that there lay but one path for making good their escape without alerting the enemy. In the dark that would take them along a narrow prairie goat trail that switchbacked up the side of a thousand-foot bluff.

Bass exclaimed, “Sounds to be your powder was damp!”

With his mitten Asa smoothed his long white beard. “‘Though a host shall camp against me, my heart shall not fear. And now shall my head he lifted up above my enemies round about me. Deliver me not over unto the will of my enemies.’”

But just as the trappers were gathering at their fire to lay plans for their flight, who should show up to speak to McAfferty but the war party’s medicine man himself, signing that he wanted to speak with Asa alone. The two stepped away toward the black belly of the timber, stopping just beyond the ring of faint firelight, in that darkened no-man’s-land between the two groups.

“When we got stopped in the dark, off from the other coons, that Ree nigger made it plain he wanted me Bible!” McAfferty roared in indignation. “’Regard not them that have familiar spirits, neither seek after wizards, to be defiled by them; I am the Lord your God!’”

“What happed?” Scratch asked. “Did that nigger get your Bible?”

“When I told him he wasn’t ’bout to get my Bible—the heathen tried to rip the book right outta me pouch—signing that he wanted the power of me own medicine!”

When McAfferty refused a second time, the Indian threatened that he would have the Bible before sunrise anyway … along with Asa’s scalp, which he said he would hang from his belt pouch.

“‘And they shall no more be a prey to the heathen, neither shall the beast of the land devour them; but they shall dwell safely, and none shall make them afraid,’” Asa declared. “I wasn’t ’bout to be buffaloed by no red nigger. No matter he was a medicine man or not!”

But the trapper’s strong protests caused the Arikara to explode. At that moment the Indian suddenly yanked out his tomahawk, lunging in close … but McAfferty was just a little faster with his skinning knife.

“Parted that red nigger’s ribs, I did,” Asa admitted, patting the handle to his knife. Then he shuddered slightly, although the air had begun to warm with the sun’s coming.

“Dropped him where we stood. ’And that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams, shall be put to death.’ But … I didn’t take his scalp, Mr. Bass. I left him be where he fell.”

“You raised them Apaches’ hair. Why didn’t you take his hair?” Titus inquired.

“That was afore I knowed better.” Then McAfferty turned to gaze at Bass with a mortified look. “I wasn’t ’bout to cut off the hair of no medicine man! There’s been many a thing I done in my life I’m sure the Lord don’t look kindly upon … but I wasn’t gonna raise the scalp of a medicine man, Mr. Bass.”

“Way it looks, your horn was empty.”

“By damned—I was in a proper fix then and there,” McAfferty agreed. “’Yet the Lord will command his loving-kindness in the daytime, and in the night his song shall be with me, and my prayer unto the God of my life.’”

“How’d you come to get your leg outta that trap you fixed to close around it?”

“Shaking just like the trembling earth come Judgment Day, I creeped on back to our camp and told them others real quietlike what just happened with the medicine man. Said I knowed for sure now the Rees was getting blackened up for morning. But Hatcher, Rowland, Kinkead, and the rest acted like they wasn’t listening to me—all of ’em just looked at me with the queer on their faces.”

Titus nodded. “They told me how you come back with your hair turned white.”

Slapping the top of his thigh, Asa said, “Damn if my head weren’t as white as the fur on a winter snowshoe hare! And that sure scared all them boys something fierce.”

Scratch asked, “Didn’t it scare you none?”

McAfferty quietly replied, “I was more scared than all the rest put together. I’d be damned for crucifying through all eternity if I didn’t admit it was the truth. The Almighty Hisself had turned my head to white—done it to show me the power of the Holy Ghost! ’For the Lord most high is terrible; He is a great King over all the earth.’ It was plain as paint to me, Mr. Bass: Asa McAfferty had set his foot on evil ground! I figgered I’d even had a hand in setting free them Rees, the devil’s own hellions, myself.”

“Hatcher said you all made tracks that night.”

“Somehow we got our horses up the side of that canyon in the dark and slipped off ’thout getting caught by them Rees. But it never were them warriors I was ’fraid of while we was running south.”

“What?”

“It were them evil spirits I could feel all round me—clawing at my shoulder, breathing on my neck, hanging just at the corner of me eye every time I turned to look.”

“Ghosts?”

“Maybeso,” he eventually answered as they reached the foothills. “They was the spirits from the beyond, Mr. Bass. The same spirits that ol’ Ree medicine man was carrying with him … them devil’s whelps what come after me then and wasn’t ’bout to let go their hold on me. ’Wilt thou shew wonders to the dead? Shall the dead arise and praise thee?’”

“Sounds like you was more scared of them spirits than you was scared of that Ree war party what was bound to be coming after you.”

“Abominations, Mr. Bass!” he began with a voice that shriveled to an ominous quiet. “Asa McAfferty ain’t never been ’fraid of anything he can see. What I can’t see be the only thing what scares Asa McAfferty!”

As they picked their way across the snowy landscape toward Workman’s caverns, he went on to explain to Bass how the trappers had galloped south from Arikara country. Weeks and many miles later, a restless, frightened Asa split off from the rest, and returned to Taos for the winter. The next spring he ventured north on his own.

“For the first time I liked the lonesome. And for the most part I been alone ever since I kill’t that medicine man. ’And the soul that turneth after such as have familiar spirits, and after wizards, to go a whoring after them, I will even set my face against that soul, and will cut him off from among his people.’”

McAfferty was quiet for a long time as they pushed on, expectant of the sun’s appearance on the mountain peaks above them. Finally he sighed when they came to a clattering halt on the rim of the prairie looking down at the canyon where Workman had erected his distillery. “Ever since that winter, seems most white fellers I run onto don’t take to traveling with a man what speaks the Bible, a nigger like me what begs the Lord for forgiveness ever’ day and night. I s’pose such folks just don’t care to be with a man who listens real hard to the voices of them spirits what be all round us.”

“Your Bible talking ain’t bothered me none,” Bass admitted. “And I figger a fella gets lonely enough for real company … he’s bound to start talking to any damn hoo-doo and spirit what’ll listen to him.”

“Listen to you now, Mr. Bass,” Asa snorted, then chuckled as he pressed his heels into the pony’s ribs and started down the side of the canyon toward Workman’s stone house. “’The Lord bringeth the counsel of the heathen to nought.’”

“So you figger me for a heathen, Asa McAfferty?”

“No, I don’t,” he answered after a pause. “I figger you for the sort of friend what puts up with a very, very troubled man. A tormented man like me. An inflicted man what the Lord has set adrift in a world of woe and despair.”

“But you ain’t alone, Asa.”

Ahead of Titus on the trail descending into that dark canyon where the sun’s first rays still refused to shine off the icy granite flecked with snow, a somber McAfferty replied, “That’s where you’re wrong, Mr. Bass. In the end, no matter what … every one of us is alone.”

They’d limped into Taos with little more than it would take to outfit a band of Diggers. But they had their hide and hair. And—by damned—it was Nativity time in ol’ Taos town!

A holiday when every Mexican male appeared to turn and give the long-haired gringo a second look, when every cherry-cheeked, black-eyed senorita seemed to smile and flutter those long, dark eyelashes at him and him alone.

This second winter among the Mexicans was proving all the more joyous than the first, perhaps because there weren’t all that many Americans around. From what Workman reported, most of the gringo trappers had spent only a few days here earlier in the month, then moseyed on down the road to Santa Fe. Those who remained behind were the quiet sort—not at all like Hatcher’s bunch, not the sort given to stirring up a ruckus among the Taosenos. A few here and there even remembered Scratch, remembered how he had been one of those daring Americanos who had risked his life to bring back the Comanche captives.

A few of the hard-eyed soldiers glared at him whenever he came to town. Bass figured they were just the sort to remember the faces of those gringos who’d stood their ground at last year’s grand baile. Scratch didn’t figure he could blame them—not since he had himself been the sort to nurse his thirst for revenge for some two years until he ran across the Arapaho buck what took his hair. Just the same, he never put the soldados at his back and always made sure there were folks around, along with an escape down a side street, or up a set of outside stairs, or was always near a likely runner of a horse. A man always needed him a way out of a tight spot when he found the odds stacking against him.

One thing for sure, no handful of soldiers was going to jump him anywhere near the Taos square. Not while Ol’ Bill Williams was around to help.

That morning of his third day out at Workman’s, Titus decided he would give the village a try, figuring he would stroll about the tiny plaza where he could mingle with Mexican folks, maybe buy himself a sugar-sweetened treat or two. After knotting his horse’s reins to one of the iron rings sunk deep along the walls of adobe lining the treeless square, Scratch turned at the strong fragrance greeting his nose on the cold, chilling air. There, near the center of the plaza, he spotted several of the vendors gathered around their communal fire, each of them roasting coffee beans and brewing a thick, heady concoction.

His pouch a peso emptier and his fingers wrapped around a clay mug he peered over to take in the holiday scene, Titus sipped at his coffee and began to wander. He hadn’t taken but a few steps toward the north side of the square, when he suddenly stopped and turned at the cry of a familiar voice.

Unsure at first, Bass squinted through the fingers of thick smoke curling from every one of the many fires where vendors warmed themselves or prepared kettles of frijoles, baked their crepelike tortillas, or offered customers freshly slaughtered chicken and lamb, each selection hanging from the rafters of their huge-wheeled carts. It was then he heard that voice call out again in greeting to someone across the square, and laugh.

Sure enough. The smoke danced aside, and there stood Bill Williams his own self, slapping a vaquero on the shoulder, sharing a lusty story between them.

How good to see an old face!

Immediately Scratch cried, “Ho! Bill!”

Williams turned, finding Bass headed his way. He quickly said something to the Mexican before beginning his long-legged way across that corner of the square.

“You remember me, Bill?”

“Scratch, ain’t it?” he asked as he came to a halt and held out his bony paw. “We run onto one ’Nother up to the Bayou, didn’t we?”

“Right on both counts,” he replied, shaking the offered hand vigorously.

“Down to Taos for the winter, are ye?”

Bass said, “Me and a partner come in three nights back.” Then he whispered. “Laying up out at Workman’s.”

With a nod Williams rocked back and roared, “Sometimes it’s best to stay low around these here pelados. But as for me—I damn well let ’em all know I’m in town for a spree!”

“You’re here for the winter too?”

“Been here for more’n a month now,” Williams answered.

Gesturing toward the canvas-draped stall filled with bright, gaudy, eye-catching trade goods, Scratch said, “This here fella appears to have him quite the geegaws and hangy-downs, that’s for sure, Bill!”

Williams started them toward his sales stall. “Ye see anything catch yer fancy?”

“You don’t need my help trading off your plews now,” Scratch snorted as he glanced at the way a couple of Mexican men looked him over, figuring the pair for the shop’s keepers. “How’s this here feller’s prices?”

Williams grinned as if it were going out of style and brushed some of the long fur on his wolf-hide hat back from an eye. “This here nigger’s prices is allays low as they can be and him still make a decent living. Lookee here, Scratch.” He stuffed his hand into a wooden tray and brought up strings of huge varicolored glass beads, each one bigger than his thumbnail. “Won’t those make some senorita’s eyes shine just to look at ’em?”

“You got your sights on a likely gal, have you?”

“Hell, no, Scratch! I thort ye might get yer wiping stick polished yer own self, seeing how ye’re here to winter up.” Then Williams slung an arm over Bass’s shoulder. “And we both know winterin’ is a time for a man to get hisself a hull passel of polishing!”

Scratch hooted, “Better polish it enough to last him through till next year!”

“Lookee here too. The man’s got tin cups and American blankets. Brass wire for them ear hangy-downs of yer’n, child. You could string ye a big bead or two on them wires ye got awready—it’d purty ye up real good.”

Scratch’s eyes bounced over some of the rest of the trade goods displayed against the stall’s three sides as the cold breeze tugged at the canvas walls and roof. “Almost sounds to me like you’re wanting me to buy something from this here trader, Bill.”

Williams dug at his chin whiskers with a dirty fingernail. “Sure as hell am! How ye ’spect a man to make him an honest living?”

“You know the trader?”

“Know him!” Williams snorted. “The god-blame-med trader’s me!”

“You?”

“This here’s my plunder!”

Wagging his head in disbelief, Bass sputtered, “W-why the hell you selling your own plunder?”

“Decided I’d give a offhand shot at turning trader, Scratch. Brought my plews in last month. Traded ’em to a Kentucky feller here what come in with a train from St. Lou. He give me good dollar for my beaver, so I’m pounding my bait-stick in right here in Taos.”

“Ain’t you gonna trap no more?”

“Not if I can make a living right here, sitting in the sun ’stead of wading in icy streams up to my huevos and cock-bag!”

They both chortled; then Williams retrieved his own china cup of coffee from the rocks surrounding a nearby fire where the two of them stood warming themselves as Taosenos crisscrossed the plaza in their daily shopping excursions.

“Bill Williams—trader,” Bass announced, testing the feel of it.

“Don’t sound too bad, do it?”

“You’re happy with staying put to one place, Bill?”

“Wouldn’t you be happy?” he asked. “Happy not to worry about having yer hair raised, or yer bones gnawed on by some wild critter back up in that high lonesome where no man might never again set down another mokerson?”

Scratch raised his coffee mug in salute. “Then I’m glad for you, Bill Williams. Here’s to your success this winter.”

“How’s trading sound for you?”

“For me?”

“You, become a trader like me,” he answered. “Like the rest of these here damned pelados.”

“Titus Bass—trader,” he rolled the words off his tongue. “Naw. Don’t taste right.”

“Ye don’t mind living yer life on yer fingernails, eh?”

“Don’t get me wrong, Bill,” Bass explained. “There’s been many a piece of ground where I wondered then and there if I was about to leave my bones bleaching in the sun. But I figger a man takes him a little bad with all the good of living free like I do.”

“I’m a free man! I can pack up my truck and ride off any time I want,” Williams bristled in protest. “I just don’t have to worry ’bout no red varmit putting a early end to my days, afore my time.”

“Damned Apache almost put me under this fall,” Bass admitted.

“West of here? Or was they roaming north?”

“Over on the Heely. Bastards follered me and my partner for days,” and Bass went on to relate the tale as Williams poured more coffee for them both.

When Titus finished the story with their arrival at Workman’s place a few days back, Williams said, “This McAfferty—he’s the one I heerd tell of got his hair turned white.”

“One and the same.”

“And folks call me a strange one!” Williams chortled. “From what I hear, that McAfferty takes the circle.”

“He may talk strange and have him his spells a’times—but he’s never let me down.”

“That’s all a man needs in a partner,” Williams agreed. “Find a partner what don’t ask for no more than he’s ready to give his own self. So”—and he turned, ready to change the subject as he gestured toward his stall—“ye had yer wiping stick polished yet since ye come in to Taos?”

“Naw: this here’s my first trip in from Workman’s.”

Williams draped a long, bony arm over Bass’s shoulders and urged him toward the stall as he confided, “Hmmm—let’s us see what a man like you could need, what with him figgering to get his wiping stick polished!”

Despite the coffee, Scratch’s mouth was going dry. “You hap to know where a feller might go to … to find him a likely gal—”

“A bang-tail whore?”

Embarrassed at Williams’s loud response, Bass flicked his eyes this way, then that.

“Hell!” Williams roared loudly. “These here greasers don’t know much American talk! And they sure as hell don’t know sheep shit from bang-tail whores!”

Several of the Mexicans nearby turned at Bill’s loud voice, but they as quickly returned to their own affairs.

“See, Titus Bass?” he asked. “Ain’t a one of these here pelados know any American!”

Speaking in a hush, Scratch asked, “You know where I can find me a gal might be happy to let me crawl her hump?”

“There’s two places in the village,” Williams explained. “But, for my money, the gals over to the Barcelos house are the finest American money can buy!” And he smacked his lips in delight.

“Barcelos, you say?”

“Senora Gertrudis Barcelos,” Williams repeated. “She ain’t here herself no more, but she’s got her sister running the Taos house since she went down to Santy Fee. Older gal—’bout as tough talking as a Yankee sailor, she is … but she runs the best knocking shops and saloons here ’bouts in north Mexico.”

Grabbing hold of Bass’s shoulder, Williams turned Scratch and pointed off to the east side of the square. “Off yonder, that way takes ye to a street where ye’ll come to a fork at the corner of a low building—been whitewashed just this fall. Go on down past it to the left, and ye’ll come to a place allays got horses tied up out front, morning and night. Allays busy with soldiers, them gals is.”

Bass marked it in his memory the way he would a piece of ground he figured to remember. “Barcelos.”

“Barcelos,” Williams echoed.

“And it might be worth yer while to ask for Conchita,” Williams advised. “If she ain’t busy with no soldier.”

“She a looker?”

Williams expressively held his cupped hands out in front of his chest as his eyes got big as saucers. “A likely gal with lots for a man to enjoy kissing on, if’n ye catch the way my stick floats. But this here Conchita ain’t young as most of them others at the Barcelos house. Still, she knows her business, and her business is pleasuring a man like he ain’t been pleasured in a long time.”

“Good, eh?”

“For my money Conchita is the gal to ride yer wiping stick till ye’re panting like a played-out mule and yer eyes roll back in yer head!”