Crack in the Sky

20

Conchita was everything Bill Williams said she would be.

Of course, it wouldn’t have taken much to satisfy a man with as wild a woman-hunger as he was nursing about the time he and McAfferty banged the huge iron knocker against the cottonwood plank door that very next evening.

Stripping his wide-brimmed hat from his hair he had tied in braids for this special occasion, bowing low in his freshly brushed and dusted buckskins, Bass used a few of the sparse words Williams had taught him to greet the fat, moon-faced woman who answered the door—light and warmth, music and laughter, pouring out around her ample form.

“Buenas tardes, Senora!”

“Sí?”

“Senoritas?” he asked, working hard to get the right roll to it.

Her red, liquor-puffy eyes shifted to McAfferty and took their measure of them both. “Gringos, eh?”

“Sí,” Scratch answered, thinking he might get this Mexican talk licked yet. “Senoritas for us. Two. Dos senoritas.”

She poked a grimy finger at the corner of her bloodshot eye and rubbed as she stepped back out of the way, then motioned for them to enter. The sudden warmth of the place surprised him as they stepped into the entry. On two sides of a large parlor flames danced in tall fireplaces. Rugs and blankets lined the walls where a half-dozen men sat, each of them accompanied by a woman. As the Americans followed the large one toward a small bar in the corner, the room fell hushed of a sudden, merry laughter and happy voices disappearing as if swallowed in one great gulp of silence. Only the two guitar players in another corner played on a few more measures before they too looked up in wonder and fell quiet.

The fat woman stopped and snarled something at the musicians, and they began to play again as she pointed the way for the Americans to accompany her to the bar.

Behind the broad cottonwood plank a woman set down two clay cups and poured the gringos a drink from a wicker-wrapped gallon jug. McAfferty pulled a single coin from his belt pouch and slapped it down on the plank. The fat woman held up four fingers to the woman behind the bar, then turned away.

Dragging his cup from his lips, Titus reached out to grab the fleshy arm of the large one who had answered the door that evening as twilight gave its way to night.

She looked at him with disdain and sighed as she pulled her arm free of his hand.

“Barcelos?” he asked.

“Sí.”

“I want Conchita.”

Her brow furrowed. “Conchita?”

“Sí,” he replied, nodding. “Conchita.”

For a moment she looked him down and up. “Bueno” and then she turned to the woman at the bar, to speak rapidly in Mexican before turning away once more.

Bass watched as she left, about to speak when the woman at the bar spoke.

“I am Conchita.”

Bass whirled, his throat suddenly constricting. “Conchita?’

“Sí.”

“Bill Williams … he said I should ask for you.”

“Conchita … me,” and she tapped a finger into that cleavage between the full breasts that strained against the low-slung camisole she wore with nothing more beneath it to conceal her fleshy charms.

“He said … Bill said I should ask for you.”

“Conchita, me,” she repeated, a little confusion crossing her face.

“You don’t know much American, do you?”

“Gringo … Conchita,” she explained slowly, as if to make the trapper understand, while pouring McAfferty some more of the pale aguardiente from the wicker jug. “Gringo … pesos, Conchita go gringo.” And she pointed toward a darkened hallway leading from the parlor.

“Mayhaps she don’t know much American, Asa,” Bass said, “but this is a gal what means business.”

“Lo, but a woman’s heart is wormwood, Mr. Bass,” McAfferty warned as his eyes flicked around the room. “Best you watch your backtrail with this’un.”

As the barmaid came around the end of the short plank resting atop four large oak barrels, Bass looked over the room with a growing worry. Wasn’t natural the way everything had come to a stop and everyone was studying the two Americans.

“Ain’t this Mex gal I’m worried ’bout, Asa. Looks to be these soldiers don’t want us here.”

“Aye, Mr. Bass,” McAfferty replied, and threw back the rest of his liquor. “‘To keep thee from the evil woman, from the flattery of the tongue of a strange woman.’ These here whores don’t mind taking American money, but their men don’t cotton to having gringo dogs dipping their stingers in Mexican honey pots.”

The barmaid slipped her arm in his and Scratch beamed with anticipation. “I s’pose it’s time to dip my stinger.”

“‘And upon her forehead was a name written,’” McAfferty called to Scratch’s back as Titus left with the woman. “’MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH!’”

Conchita led him back to the portal of that darkened hallway, stopping for a moment to pull a candle from an iron holder hammered into the whitewashed adobe wall. On down the hallway she stopped and pulled open a sagging door, then held back a thin blanket to let Bass into the tiny crib where she plied her ancient trade.

Setting the candle in another wall-side holder, Conchita turned to the bed, where she flung back the layers of thick Indian blankets, then stepped right up to the American and proceeded to help him off with his pouch, then his coat. Next she yanked up the long tail of his buckskin shirt, tugging it over his head.

Hurling his garments aside piece by piece, without any preliminaries the shorter woman surprised Scratch when she stood on her toes and ran her lips across his chest, the hot tip of her tongue circling his nipples before she dragged it up the side of his neck.

While Titus threw back another long swallow of his fiery Taos lightning, her fingers yanked at his belt buckle, then dragged aside his breechclout as the belt dropped. Suddenly she pushed him toward the thick pad of mattress and blankets tucked in the corner of her tiny cell, so abruptly that he spilled some of the liquor from his clay cup, drops spilling onto the back of her head as she went to her knees in front of him as Bass eased back onto the bed.

As her sure hands flew over the knots lashing his moccasins around his ankles, then tugged at the top of his leggings to pull them off his feet, Scratch found his flesh hardening, stretching, growing just with the sight of her breasts all but spilling out of that loose-topped camisole, growing warm with the sweet anticipation of having himself buried deep within a female once more.

He wasn’t sure if it was the heat from the pale, amber liquor, or the closeness of the small room where the single candle flutted against the mud wall. Maybe even the strong odor of lard coming from that poor lamp made of nothing more than a burning wick set within a small cup of pig fat. Perhaps it was the cinnamon oil he could tell she had rubbed in her hair.

But he knew he was ready to explode when she rocked up on her knees above him and thumbed down the top of her camisole, slipping it off her bare shoulders one side at a time, tugging it over each of those breasts the color of smooth milk chocolate stirred into steaming coffee. But when he reached up to grab them, Conchita pushed his hands away and instead rocked forward so that her shoulders were right over his hips. Smiling broadly enough to show her two missing teeth, she gently spread her fleshy breasts apart enough to swallow his hardened penis between them.

Then, with her hands clamping the soft, chocolate flesh around him, the woman began to rock herself up and back, up and back as she rested her chin on his upper belly and gazed up at him devilishly.

Savoring the delicious wickedness of having her watch him as she brought him to climax, Scratch was certain she knew exactly what she was doing. Sure she had done this a hundred times before—even a thousand … with a thousand other men. But as he felt the boiling eruption begin all too quickly, those others didn’t matter. All that was important right then was the woman-hunger that overwhelmed him every few months … thinking back to how it was when he had been a young man and this unimaginable hunger had run hot in his veins more frequently than it did nowadays.

With the sudden explosive release as his hot eruption washed over her breasts, he once again realized that of all the different women in all the Indian camps, and of all the whores in every one of the Taos knocking shops—none of them could come anywhere close to satisfying what he figured he truly wanted. With each passing season, each new moon, with every day’s sunrise, he wondered why he was no longer satisfied to have each new woman spread her legs for him and be done with her. In years gone he would have been more than content to take his pleasure and quickly move on.

But of late here he was beginning to get the nagging sense that something was missing from these infrequent grapples with a woman’s flesh. Not that this bucking and thrashing of that ol’ monster with two backs didn’t bring him a moment’s peace and contentment … but rarely anything lasting. And even as deliciously wicked as the way Conchita had used her soft breasts on him, the satisfaction of this long-pent release she had just given him began to fade quickly like a cooling breeze come to erase the fever from his skin.

Then, again, perhaps that was the way it was meant to be between men and women—that they somehow coexisted despite never truly giving one another what each really wanted. In the end they were at best able to give one another only what they themselves needed.

With that moist, mindless, momentary compulsion to couple brought to a boiling eruption—men and women retreated from each other, back to truly needing little else the other could give. Although married—as his parents were, as Able Guthrie and his wife were, as were all those who clung to one another in the sight of their God—a husband and wife struggled through their days together as no more than polite strangers come from different sides of the river.

He was certain no woman would ever understand what lay inside him, waiting to be spoken. He was sure no woman ever could. And for him to attempt to fathom the depths of a woman’s soul … why, he might as well climb to the highest peak in the mountains and with his rawhide lariat try to rope the moon.

Men and women were never meant to live together—that much was plain to him from the painful thrashing life had given him. Hell, there were few men he could live with day after day himself. But he was certain that unanswered, aching loneliness each man and woman must feel a’times compelled them on rare occasions to reach out and somehow touch a private place within one another, no matter how brief and short-lived that intimacy. Still, what troubled him was that as soon as each brief fever had passed, both man and woman went back to walking on alone. Went back to feeling little more than emptiness until they struggled to reach out for one another again.

As he felt his flesh hardening, Bass realized he had been asleep. Conchita was awakening him with her hands. He opened his eyes into slits and watched her in the slowly dancing candlelight as she held him between her two palms, rolling his responsive penis between them like tortilla dough a woman kneaded. Here she massaged his stiffening flesh into readiness.

As Conchita rolled onto one hip and kicked a leg over him, he savored the fleshy sway of those healthy, pendulous breasts as she straddled him, took his manhood in one hand, then settled down upon him with an earthy groan from them both. It fired him anew to find just how moist she was for him, so wet there was hardly any friction as she immediately set about her throbbing dance upon him. With every thrust she took upon him, Conchita became more furied, driving herself more wild, causing her breasts to dance and volve above him until he found himself so maddened, he seized them both—pulling her down savagely so he could suck on one as her hips continued to drive up and back, up and back.

A wild, feral sound was born low in her throat as she pounded herself so fast and hard above him that he knew she was going to flatten out the straw mattress stretched out beneath him on the earthen floor. So savagely did she hurl herself down upon Titus again and again that he knew Conchita was going to hammer him right into the ground itself before she was done with him.

Yet of a sudden he didn’t care again. His own rising fever boiled over in those last few moments before the mindless explosion overwhelmed him, causing Bass to lose himself in the soft coffee-brown flesh of her, tugging for all he was worth at her colorful striped skirt she had hiked up over her hips.

Conchita immediately stopped bobbing atop him for those few seconds it took her to reach down, untie the knot in the upper hem, and pull the long skirt away from her hips, flinging it over her head, where it landed against the nearby wall. Now she was completely naked but for her crude moccasins and that silver crucifix around her neck that rhythmically tapped against his cheek as he pulled the other breast to his mouth and began to suck.

“Mr. Bass!”

She tasted so good—piñon woodsmoke and aguardiente and cinnamon. Oh, the way she gripped his manhood within that moist, heated crevice of hers—

“Mr. Bass!”

Reluctantly he opened his eyes and gazed into her face, expecting that she would call out his name again in that muffled way he heard her call out before.

But Conchita’s head was thrown back and to the side, lost in the delicious passion … and she was biting her own lower lip as she continued to hammer herself down upon him so she couldn’t have spoken—

“Mr. Bass! Your union with that whore is over!”

Almost there. He felt himself like an overripe fruit about to burst, when more voices suddenly grew loud right at the edge of his consciousness. Exactly the way he might see something flit at the corner of his eye but—when he looked—it would be gone.

Just when he was certain Conchita was moistening even more around him and Bass sensed that first wave of release himself—

—a sudden rush of cold air flooded into the tiny room as the blanket was flung back.

She froze above him as he jerked up on an elbow.

In the darkened open doorway stood a figure wide of shoulder. A man.

“Conchita!”

Although she did not dare dismount from Bass, the woman nonetheless reached over and swept up her skirt, pulling it up to cover her breasts as the man in the doorway lumbered into the room, into the gently flutting candlelight, stirring shadows and hues of saffron as he came in two long steps and stopped, his arms hung at his side, his chest heaving, fists clenched as he snarled low foreign words at the woman.

Bass did not understand anything of what the man barked at her, but his meaning was never more clear. The import of the intruder’s words was as shockingly plain as the ominous bark of a strange dog encountered on the backtrails of Boone County, the warning growl of a cornered badger, the hostile grunt of a grizzly boar closing in on him.

The stranger took another step into the room as Titus searched frantically for his coat, his belt that had been wrapped around the coat, the scabbard that had been hanging from that belt—

Then looked up at the intruder.

The lieutenant!

“You son of a bitch!” Bass spat at the soldier who stood above him, bare-chested, wearing only his black pantaloons, held up by wide leather braces.

Conchita suddenly dragged herself off him, both of them still wet from their mutual release. He began to rise to meet the soldier who Scratch knew felt nothing but hatred and rancor for the Americans who had trailed the Comanche into the mountains to save what women and children they could.

In the hallway behind the sergeant shadows darted, voices called out, someone grunted and others screamed as a heavy object struck the wall outside. A man cried out in pain. Then a second, and a third body smacked against the side of the hall. And in those fleeting seconds as he rolled onto his hip, scrambled to his feet, and hurled himself at the soldier, Bass thought he heard the white-head barking in that dark, narrow tunnel of a hallway—grousing with fire and brimstone and a most certain eternity spent in hell’s own fire for those he found arrayed against him.

A solid thunk burst through the doorway from that hall, echoing with the sound of a heavy maul striking tight-grained hickory.

The sergeant met him in the middle of the room. Conchita screeched in horror as they grappled, arms and legs a blur. For a fleeting moment Bass was gratified that his opponent had burst into the room without a weapon … gratified, that is, until the Mexican cocked back a huge, hard-boned fist and drove it against the American’s temple.

With the light of a thousand shooting stars the darkened crib lit up as Scratch rocked back on his bare feet, then shifted his weight back farther still to keep from pitching over, when the sole of one bare foot landed on the wide band of thick leather. He stood there, blinking his eyes to clear them of stars as Conchita burst up from the floor, shrieking, her arms outstretched before her as she lunged for the sergeant’s arm curling in the wavering candlelight, in that hand a long double-edged dagger appearing right out of the air.

Ramirez swore at her while she struggled to pull the arm down far enough to seize the knife. Sobbing, she implored him as Bass blinked again, trying vainly to clear the rain-soaked cobwebs from his mind: hearing men banging the wall outside, the grunts and curses in a foreign tongue, McAfferty’s cries almost as foreign to his ears.

“‘… will I lay apart the Philistines like sheaves of wheat!’”

Then, as Scratch sank to his knees, his temple throbbing still but the shooting lights grown dim, he felt the belt beneath one hand. And beneath the other, the rock-hard rawhide sheath.

At the moment Titus seized the scabbard in one hand, gripped the knife’s handle in the other—he watched the sergeant clench his beefy left hand into a fist, drag it back as a man would cock the huge goosenecked hammer on a smoothbore, then fling it at the woman’s face.

The wide row of hard knuckles struck Conchita squarely across one eye and the bridge of her big nose. Titus watched her head snap back from her shoulders like a withered shaft of the corn he sheared with a huge scythe back on that Kentucky farm so many years ago. As the woman collapsed against the wall, smacking her head into the crude mud bricks, Ramirez slowly quartered around on Bass, grunting from somewhere within his barrel of a chest.

The soldier’s long blade shimmered in the candlelight as he held the weapon out in front of him and began to snarl in Mexican.

Just behind the lieutenant’s shoulder a knot of shadows congealed against the crude plank door; then a body collided with the door itself, smacking the planks against the mud wall as the man melted to the floor and in stepped a white-headed warrior. His long hair flowing about his shoulders like corn silk in that muted candlelight, McAfferty immediately whirled about, putting his back on the room as he inched inward—a tomahawk in one hand, his long skinning knife clutched in the other. Foot by foot he retreated, holding more Mexicans at bay there in the darkened doorway.

Both Bass and the lieutenant realized McAfferty had his back to them at the same moment.

Like a strip of night torn from a midnight sky itself, Ramirez whirled and brought up his dagger, yanking it into the air as he started to lunge for McAfferty.

And like sunlight glancing off the rushing surface of mountain creek water, Scratch exploded from the floor. Slinging his left arm around the soldier’s bull-thick neck, he plunged his skinning knife into the side of the barrel of a chest there below the arm raised to strike McAfferty.

With a piglike whimper of surprise, Ramirez jerked, muscles tensing as Bass felt his thin blade slide along a rib for an instant, then suddenly plunge in clear to the hilt.

He had it buried until it would sink no farther.

The soldier tried jerking away, tried flinging Bass to the side, but the American clung there like a bloated tick to the hump of the herd bull.

Stumbling to the side a step, the Mexican nonetheless swung his knife downward at McAfferty. Missed. Then yanked his huge knife back into the air to try it again.

Bass’s arm pistoned only enough to free his knife from the enemy’s chest before he jabbed its razor point between another pair of ribs, feeling the warmth ooze over the back of his hand as he twisted the skinning blade this time, working it side to side through the muscle, slashing it on into the man’s bellows.

Again from the corner of his eye Scratch watched that huge right arm swing up and down toward McAfferty—realizing too late that the lieutenant’s target was not the white-head. The Mexican was arching his knife back at the naked tormentor plastered on his back. Too late—

“Arrrghghgh!”

The pain grew hot as the huge flat blade plunged into the meat of his right thigh, close to the hip.

So much pain that Bass almost went faint, sensing his damp, sweaty grip loosening around the Mexican’s neck. Feeling his hand releasing the warm, slick handle of his skinning knife.

“Asa!” Titus cried out desperately as he watched the muscular Mexican yank the knife out of his leg and cock it into the air for a second plunge.

At his call McAfferty whirled in a crouch no more than three feet from the sergeant and immediately raked his left arm to the side before him. The dull oil-blued metal of the tomahawk blade slashed through the Mexican’s flesh, which gaped like a bloody mouth opening with bright-red berry juice the way Mexican women stain their own lips with the seductive red of the alegría, that honed blade cleaving the entire width of the man’s belly in that one smooth motion as the Mexican’s arm drove downward, completing his reflex.

Ramirez’s knife planted itself into Bass’s leg a second time before the big, hard-knuckled right hand tensed into a bird’s claw, releasing the weapon’s handle. He left it quivering in the meat of the American’s thigh.

“‘The bows of the mighty men are broken, and they that stumbled are girded with strength!’”

Feeling his supper smack itself against his tonsils with the icy pain, Bass slid backward, no longer able to hang on to the lieutenant’s neck. Scratch’s moist, sticky right hand opened and closed, empty now as he struck the cold earthen floor. His knife still hung in the Mexican’s chest as McAfferty whirled away, growling, cursing, spewing biblical invocations at his enemies who crowded against the doorway, working against themselves to get at the white-headed American.

“‘Whoso sheddeth a man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God made He man!’”

Asa lunged toward the shadows in the door as Bass sensed Ramirez begin to totter to the side, both his arms clutching his belly, where blood splattered his forearms, the first squirt of purplish-white gut puerting from the wound that had nearly cleaved the huge man in half.

Mumbling moistly around the blood that burbled from his lips, the Mexican lurched to the side, suddenly stiffening as he collapsed to his knees, his eyes opening wide, his chin sagging. Ramirez pitched forward onto his face across Conchita’s legs.

She began moaning in that slow, dull-witted, dazed, and wounded way of an animal … realizing a dead man pinned her legs to the floor, his warm blood gushing over her bare flesh, pooling on the ground around them, soaking into the pounded clay. But her guttural moans became unearthly shrieks of horror the moment she attempted to free her legs from their prison beneath Ramirez’s bloody, eviscerated body.

“Mr. Bass!” McAfferty cried as he backed another step into the room, one moccasin landing in the black puddle as the sergeant’s blood pooled near the center of the tiny crib. “’Lust not after her beauty in thine heart; neither let her take thee with her eyelids!’ Cover your nakedness before the eyes of this whore and come help me!”

How it hurt with a cold fire now to slowly drag that hot metal from his flesh, the whole of his leg from toe to hip throbbing with pain … just as two Mexicans leaped through the narrow doorway and McAfferty stepped back, a foot slipping in the dark puddle of the dead lieutenant’s blood.

In a smooth sweep Bass brought Ramirez’s knife up as he rocked onto his one good leg, jabbing forward the moment one of the soldiers cocked his arm over his head, knife in hand. Scratch caught the Mexican squarely in the left side of his chest, low. Dragging the big double-edged stiletto to the side, he felt the blade separate the muscle between two ribs, slash on through the tough muscle of the lung as the soldier recoiled in a jerk, attempting to pull away so violently, he struck the mud wall behind him. Dead, as he struck the floor already littered with another man’s blood.

Hearing the crack of metal against bone, Scratch whirled—finding McAfferty yanking the tomahawk out of the side of another soldier’s skull, letting the gurgling Mexican sink slowly to his knees before Asa flung the dead man back against the crude table where the pig-lard lamp spilled to the floor, snuffing itself out with a stifling stench of rancid bacon.

In the light of that one small candle, McAfferty spun for the last of the shadows in the door, flinging the knife an instant before pulling his pistol. He fired at the shadows, the sudden light blinding them all in the closeness of that tiny room.

“It’s time to find your pistol, Mr. Bass!”

His hands gumming with drying blood, his knees cold on the earthen floor, then suddenly warm as he crabbed through the Mexicans’ blood, Scratch searched the darkness for where his pistol had fallen in those frantic, fevered moments as the whore grappled with his belt, coat, and clothing. Beneath the flap to his capote he felt the short, hard barrel. Flinging back the thick blanket wool, Bass seized it with his left hand, dropping the knife from his right to fill it with the pistol butt as he palmed back the hammer with his left hand.

Brought it up just as another shadow burst from the darkness of the hallway. Firing at the black hole the figure made in the dim, flutting candlelight. How his eyes stung with that bright-yellow jet of flame spewing from the muzzle as the shadow hurtled back against the door, its wooden planks slamming against the mud wall with a hollow sound.

“Gather your damned clothes!”

Scratch couldn’t agree more. He scooped up his leggings and moccasins, stuffing everything inside his war shirt before he jabbed his arms inside his coat sleeves as McAfferty swept out of the darkness and whacked his pistol against the side of a soldier’s head the instant the Mexican leaped into the room.

Scratch clambered to his bare feet, trying to balance on that one good leg, flinging the wide black belt around his waist and buckling it as he stabbed the knife into its scabbard, shouting, “Let’s get!”

At the doorway a step ahead of Bass, Asa stopped, peered quickly at the three bodies of unconscious men who lay sprawled across the hall, then looked toward the dull, dancing light of the parlor, where women still shrieked and more than four vaqueros stood shoulder to shoulder, squinting into the darkness of the hallway. Their own knives at ready, each one waited half-dressed, their bare-breasted whores clinging frightened to their backs, peering between the shoulders of the men as they clamored and swore and screamed. Behind them flitted a huge, blurry form half-illuminated and backlit with more than two dozen candles.

As he followed McAfferty from the doorway, Scratch stopped a moment and gazed down that narrow hallway so low a man almost had to duck, peering at those vaqueros, at that gaggle of prostitutes, at that fat and frantic madam who had looked upon them both with such disdain—eager to take their American beaver money, eager perhaps to help the lieutenant and his soldiers take their American lives once she had her fat fingers secured around their beaver pesos.

How he wished he could plunge his knife into her heart.

But Asa grabbed a fistful of Bass’s capote and yanked him farther into the darkness, on down the narrow hallway and out a door so low, they both had to duck as they plunged into the shocking cold of that moonless night. Dogs barked nearby on the far side of this mud-walled den of whores. Voices streaked out of the starshine beyond in the streets with a growing echo. Coming closer. Angry voices accompanied by the clatter of hard-leather boot heels and the jangle of arms.

“Forget the horses!” he snarled at McAfferty.

“On foot?” Asa demanded in a harsh whisper. “All the way to Workman’s?”

“You figger us to make it out of town in our own saddles? When those horses are out in front on that street?”

For a moment in the dim, silvery light, McAfferty stared this way and that—his mind working feverishly. Then shook his head. “We’ll have to steal a couple of horses on our way out.”

“We better,” Bass swore as they started away, pressing themselves into the shadows along the adobe wall. “We gotta make it to Workman’s place afore the soldiers do … or our hash is fried.”

The bear of a shadow loomed out of the night as if it were a tattered shred of the black sky itself.

Bringing up his knife, Bass braced himself on his good leg, prepared to cut his way through more enemies—

“Bass!”

Confused, Scratch turned to glance at McAfferty a flicker of a moment, whispering, “Who is it knows my name?”

“Kinkead!”

“Damn,” he sighed in relief as the shadow inched closer, taking shape as the big American stepped into the starshine. “Matthew.”

“It really is you, Asa McAfferty,” the shadowy shape said as it came to a halt right before them.

“Pray—what finds you here, Mr. Kinkead?”

“You don’t have the time to listen to my story,” Kinkead explained, seizing them both by the shoulder and shoving them back toward the shadows at the side of that narrow street, the very same shadows where he had just emerged.

Scratch looked in one direction, then another. “Where?”

“Out of town, now!” Matthew ordered. “On four legs!”

“I’ll kill for that horse of yours!” Bass husked. “I won’t make it on my two—”

“He’s game,” McAfferty explained. “Took it in the leg.”

Kinkead turned on Bass. “You walk on your own?”

“How far?” Titus asked, his face pinched in pain.

“The corner,” Matthew said, pointing. “Here,” and he swung an arm around Scratch’s shoulder, nearly hoisting him off the ground as he set off in a trot, Bass’s feet all but dangling on the crusty snow.

Leading them around a corner at the end of the long row of low-roofed adobe houses, Kinkead lunged for the reins of one of the three horses he had tied to a tall wooden post buried in the ground. “Take your pick of them two—but leg up quick, fellas.”

Bass watched Matthew swing up into the saddle and settle before he lumbered against the post and untied the first animal. Quickly lashing his clothing behind the Spanish saddle, he stuffed his left foot into the stirrup and dragged the wounded leg over the cantle before adjusting the tails of his capote.

Wagging his big head, Kinkead chuckled. “You’re bare-assed naked under that capote, ain’cha?”

Scratch came alongside as they wheeled about and put heels to their horses. “Never rode with a naked man afore?”

Down the street, voices grew louder.

“Don’t make no never-mind to me.” And Kinkead grinned. “Long as you got your business done afore them soldados showed up. Vamoose!”

All three put their animals into a rolling gallop, threading themselves through the dark tapestry of that sleepy village. Behind them the shouts of soldiers quickly faded as they raced on, submerged in a maze of shadows where disembodied dogs barked and every few houses a candle fluttered into life behind a frost-coated, rawhide-covered window where frightened faces briefly appeared.

On the far side of Bass, McAfferty asked, “We going to your place?”

“Hell, no!” Matthew grumbled. “Gonna keep you two troublemakers far away as I can from Rosa and me!”

“Maybeso you ought’n turn back now,” Scratch said as they shot past the last houses and reined toward the low ridge where the night lay its deepest.

“Hep!” was Matthew’s reply as he kicked his horse into a harder gallop. “Me leave you niggers on your own now? Just when you’ve gone and stirred up more fun than this sleepy village seen in years?”

Kinkead ended up leading them along the patchy shadows of the broken butte until the village disappeared from sight behind them. Only then did he rein his horse up a narrow switchback trail the Mexican shepherds used to guide their flocks of sheep to the top of the mesa. On that flat above the distant village, Matthew headed cross-country, making a beeline for Workman’s canyon beneath the cold, starry sky. Already the North Star was slipping into the west.

“Who’s there?” the sleepy voice called from the stone house when Kinkead sang out their arrival.

“It’s Kinkead, Willy! Got a couple troublemakers with me.”

Workman noisily dragged back the door on its earthen perch and stood there before them of a sudden like a thin strip of coal cotton in the night, his rifle laid across his elbow. “What’d they do?”

“Said they killed a couple of soldiers.”

Bass looked up from his right leg. “More’n two—”

“Shit!” the whiskey maker grumbled.

“We only come to get our plunder,” McAfferty explained as he leaped down, handing Kinkead his reins, and started to turn away. “We’ll be gone afore any more of them greasers catch up to us.”

Workman stepped into the starshine, stopping Asa in his tracks. “Where you gonna go that the soldados won’t chase you?”

“The mountains,” Bass declared, dragging his bad leg off the saddle and landing with a grunt.

“It’s the middle of winter!” Workman snorted.

“Maybeso we’ll ride to Santy Fee,” Asa said, starting to push past the whiskey maker.

Kinkead himself reached out and grabbed McAfferty’s arm, stopping him. “And wait for the soldiers to figger out you gone south?”

“There’s a place where they can lay in,” Workman declared quietly. “Fella by the name of Vaca.”

“Ol’ Vaca?” Kinkead repeated. Then he turned on Bass. “Has him a rancho at the mouth of the Peñablanca. South of Santy Fee, not far down the Rio Grande, fellas.”

Workman nodded. “Heard from the tongue of Ewing Young hisself that Vaca been hiding furs for gringos at his place last few winters.”

Scratch stepped up close to the whiskey maker. “The name’s Vaca?”

With a nod Workman said, “Luis Maria Cabeza de Vaca. But among us Americans he’s knowed as Ol’ Vaca.”

“Head for his place,” Kinkead demanded firmly. “And stay there till you figger out how to keep your necks outta the hangman’s noose.”

“Them soldiers had it coming!” Bass snarled, the cold sinking to the bone in that wounded leg. “Ramirez busted in on me, looking for trouble—”

“Likely so,” Matthew interrupted. “Ever since we stole their thunder with the governor’s wife—but Mex is Mex and gringo is gringo down here, Scratch … and now them soldados got ’em a license not just to arrest you for your beaver—but they got a reason to kill you where you stand.”

Bass looked over at McAfferty. Asa nodded.

So Scratch said, “Let’s get what little the two of us own packed up and on the animals.”

“What all plews you wanna leave with me,” Workman offered, “I’ll keep ’em till I can sell ’em off and hold the money for you.”

“You get the money to us at Vaca’s?” McAfferty inquired.

“Just tell me so, and I’ll bring it to you there.”

“Maybeso to keep the soldiers off your trail, Willy,” Bass said, “send Johnny Rowland down with the money what we get for our plews.”

Wagging his head, Kinkead replied, “Johnny’s gone, Scratch. How long for, I ain’t got no idea.”

Scratch asked, “Rowland—gone? Where?”

“Threw in with Antoine Robidoux’s bunch, last fall. Not long after he talked a squaw from out to the pueblo into riding with him.”

“So Johnny’s got him ’Nother woman now?”

Matthew nodded. “Seems a likely enough gal. Someone help ease him over his Maria.”

“Good for him,” Workman agreed.

“Where they going?” McAfferty inquired.

“Winty country,” Matthew explained as the four of them started for the cavern. “Fixing to get some trapping in afore winter comes.”

“That country gets its share of snow early enough,” Asa declared. “Maybeso it ain’t so smart of Robidoux to winter ’em up there.”

“A might safer’n greaser country is for the two of you,” Workman scoffed.

“All right—we’ll send you word how to get the money to us, Willy,” Bass said as he limped behind them, all four men hurrying down the narrow path that led to the cavern where they had stowed their goods.

By the time Titus had dressed, and he and McAfferty had their packs separated and had hauled what they could take out of the torch-lit cavern, Workman and Kinkead had the horses and Hannah ready to go. Between the four of them it took but a matter of minutes to get what few possibles and supplies they were taking with them lashed onto the pack frames. Then Bass turned to the whiskey maker.

“Willy—you do what you can with them plews of ours, but don’t sell ’em cheap.”

“I’ll get best dollar I can.”

They shook, and Titus gripped both of his hands around Workman’s, saying, “I know you will.”

As McAfferty stepped up and took the trader’s hand, Scratch turned to Kinkead. “Don’t know the next time I’ll see you, Matthew.”

He smiled broadly, those big teeth of his glittering in the night like a string of mother-of-pearl buttons. “Just you count on seeing me again, Scratch. Don’t worry about the when. Could be next month. Could be next year. Hell, I might not lay eyes on you for winters yet to come.”

Damn! But this tug at his heart always caused his eyes to smart. “Take care of Rosa for me,” he asked. “She’s a fine woman, Matthew. And she’s got her a good man too.”

Kinkead threw his arms around Bass, nearly squeezing the juices out of the smaller man before he stepped back and said, “You two watch over each other, won’t you?”

“We will,” McAfferty vowed as he held out his hand. “Way I figger it—we both saved each other’s hash now.”

Titus painfully pulled himself into the saddle. “Seems the score’s even atween us, Asa.”

“That don’t matter a tinker’s damn if you niggers don’t live to get out of Mexico,” Workman growled. “Best get!”

“Time to get high behind,” Bass agreed, shifting some weight off the wounded leg.

McAfferty whirled about and swung into the saddle, adjusting his moccasins in the stirrups, tucking the tail of his capote around his leggings.

“I swear I’ll see you boys again,” Bass promised as he nudged his horse into motion, yanking on Hannah’s lead rope.

“Just make sure you don’t show your faces around Taos till folks down here forget just how ugly you two niggers really are,” Kinkead chided them. “Give it least a winter or two.”

“Tell Rosa to keep you fed and happy in the sack, Matthew!” Bass said, turning in the saddle to hurl his voice back at Kinkead as they loped away. His words echoed off the canyon walls, “And keep your eye on the skyline. One day soon you’ll see this child back on your doorstep!”

It was Christmas the day they reached Santa Fe. The plaza and surrounding streets were jammed with worshipers headed for Mass: horses and donkeys, carts and wagons and carriages, all squeezing past one another as the two Americans slipped off the hills and onto the muddy, rutted, snow-covered road, disappearing among the throngs merging to celebrate the Savior’s birth long, long ago.

Swept along with the pious and the noisy, Bass and McAfferty stayed among the crowds as those masses pushed for the town square. Once there, they could thread their way back out on the far side of the village with little chance of standing out in the throng. Safer that, what with all the soldiers coming and going.

Maybe the soldados posted here hadn’t been alerted to the killings in Taos. But maybe they had.

As the streaming masses began to converge on the outskirts of town, Bass and McAfferty were swept on through the clutter of hovels where Santa Fe’s poorest inhabitants lived. Tiny pole-and-wattle huts, these were really shelters no more than a single room where a large family eked out their daily existence. While the walls of some were constructed with crude mud bricks, so too were the low roofs. Because they were nothing more than dirt and straw spread across a network of branches and limbs, when the rains came, or the soaking of wet winter snows, those roofs invariably leaked, often collapsing on the sleeping inhabitants below.

If there happened to be any windows in the walls of those adobe huts the two Americans passed by this morning, they weren’t covered with glass. That extravagance was found only on the richest of homes standing closer to the town plaza. Here where the poorest lived, the tiny windows, most no larger than portholes, were covered instead with rawhide scraped to a translucent thinness, or even sheets of transparent mica quarried from the nearby hills.

In the shadow of every house stood the squat outdoor ovens fashioned from adobe as well, each one shaped very much like bone-china coffee cups turned upside down on the icy ground. During the day these beehive-shaped ovens contained the fires tended by a woman for her baking; at night they and their warm coals provided shelter for each family’s dogs.

Among the songs and joyous shouts, the two trappers were swept along beneath bright strips of cloth fluttering from banners held high, the Mexicans joining the brays and bleats of nervous animals, curses from the poor owners of the crude carretas, and cries from Indian servants guiding the carriages of their wealthy owners through the crowds along the hard-packed streets—faceless Americans lost in the cacophony of this sacred day, pushed ever onward toward the central square and the huge, towering cathedral. Along each side of the narrow avenues stood those carts and stalls of vendors crying out to the passing crowds, their loud and shrill voices hawking trinkets or cloth, coffee or sweets, perhaps some shiny bauble to offer a loved one, or a candle to light for the Virgin Madonna on this special day.

In the air drifted the close smell of animal and man, fresh dung and old sweat, in addition to a mingling of savory spices simmering in a hundred different kettles hung over fires burning along each avenue. Cedar and piñon added their thready smoke to the cold, frosty air as the huge bells began to peal and the crowd shouted anew, surging forward in a hurry through the rutted streets of icy corduroy. All were eager to reach the cathedral and find themselves a place to sit, if only a place to stand, before the priests began their sacred high Mass on this most holy day.

Here the wealthy rancho owners and their families rubbed shoulders with the hacienda peons and the slaves who worked their fields. Many of the tribes in the region raided neighboring bands, stealing children from one another, then selling these prizes to slave traders, who would bring them to the Mexican villages where the captives would be sold at auction. Young boys grew up working in the fields or tending the owner’s animals. There was an even higher demand for young girls to work the many household chores it took to keep their master’s rancho operating. The Navajo were the most numerous and, therefore, made the most wealth at this trade in human misery, while the destitute Paiute were driven to venture to the Mexican towns, where, having no captives of their own and possessing nothing else to trade, they reluctantly sold their children into slavery.

Suddenly the Nativity procession came to an abrupt halt as a parade of small children streamed in from a side street, raising their beautiful voices in a song of the blessed birth, some of them bearing streamers over their heads, the rest carrying tall tallow candles, flames fluttering on the morning air as they marched in formation past the braying burros and whinnying mules, the crowd clapping and joining in that joyous, youthful song. At the end of their line came groups of the oldest youngsters, who carried on their shoulders long platforms bearing crude papier-mâché effigies of the magi, lowly shepherds, the sacred Madonna and Joseph, and of course the infant Christ swaddled and lying in his simple corncrib.

Immediately behind these children appeared the holy fathers: a half-dozen black-robed priests, swinging the smudge of their sacred incense and surrounded by their young acolytes. As the holy men passed by, some of those in the crowd fell to their knees and cried out for heavenly mercy and temporal blessings; others turned their faces and palms heavenward, making sacred vows, while most merely bowed their heads in silence while the padres moved on past, the oldest of the altar boys struggling beneath the huge wooden cross he dragged along.

As soon as that replica of the dying Christ nailed to the crossed timbers went by, the somber devout rose from their knees, joyous smiles returning to their faces, and songs began to spill from their tongues, many clapping in ecstasy as they resumed their celebration of this holiest of Christian holidays.

Here in this last push toward the plaza many of the revelers who were wrapped in thick multicolored Navajo blankets or kept themselves warm beneath striped serapes were huffing mightily on their last corn-shuck cigarillo rolled from a mild native tobacco wrapped in a small sliver of husk, this vice enjoyed by man and woman alike: a few last puffs taken before they would join the hundreds in climbing the steps to enter the cathedral’s huge double doors.

Past the bustle of carriages and carts rumbling noisily to a halt in the midst of that teeming throng of those on foot who streamed toward the morning Mass, the two lone Americans eventually reached the far side of the plaza. Here they were forced to squeeze their horses against one side of the narrow street as they swam against the surging tide of bodies and carts, horses and burros, all those pilgrims intent upon reaching the town square. Then of a sudden the crowds thinned and trickled off, just about the moment the cathedral bells pealed one last time.

Joyous voices, the clamor of celebration, the bleats and whinnies and brays, all faded quickly behind them as the two trappers hurried down the trampled street toward the southern side of the sprawling village. Here and there they encountered a rumbling cart or a carriage chock-full of a family of anxious churchgoers realizing they were already late, racing past the Americans without so much as a greeting or a second look. Back in the shadows of the side streets mangy hounds and ribby, mixed-breed dogs roamed in pairs and packs, sniffing among piles of refuse. Some of the braver animals ventured out to bark or yip among their horses’ legs, yelping in surprise and pain when Hannah tumbled an unwary cur with her hoof.

Beneath the low-tracking sunlight of this midwinter day the whitewashed walls of the wealthy residents soon gave way to the earth-toned sepia of the poorer adobe homes, the appearance of it all quite striking against the expanse of those hills rising beyond the outskirts of town. There at the far reaches of Santa Fe among the growing stench of the open-air sewers, Bass and McAfferty hurried on by the well-marked bordellos and watering holes where a few bleary-eyed inhabitants stumbled from the doorways to stand in the morning sun, staring up at the two Americans. Half-dressed soldiers and still-drunk vaqueros emerged to shade their eyes as they gazed at the pair. Some of the dusky-skinned, buxom women pulled cigarillos from their lips and pushed unruly sprigs of black hair back from their faces to call out invitations to the trappers as the pair plodded on by. It struck Bass how a whole section of this capital city was devoted to whiskey and women, revelry and sin.

Just the sort of deadly mix that had put the two of them on the run.

With all the celebration of this holy day they had slipped on through the inhabitants of Santa Fe to reach the southern road that would take them to the hacienda of wealthy rancho owner Luis Maria Cabeza de Vaca.

“If we don’t find no one around out to his place down on the Peña blanca,” McAfferty said at last as they nudged the horses into a lope, putting the mud-walled village behind them, “I figger they’ve all come here for church.”

“We’ll just lay low out to Vaca’s place,” Scratch agreed, “till the old man can come back to hide us.”