Death Rattle

31

“There he goes!”

When that shrill warning caught him from behind, Stephen Louis Lee quickly glanced over his shoulder, finding the dark clot of the bloodthirsty mob gazing up at him as he scrambled onto the flat roof of the shop next door to his jailhouse. The muddy, trampled, snowy ground beneath the angry Indians and Mexicans vibrated and pulsated with the flickering light of their crude torches.

They had spotted him.

Thank God his family was already on its way to safety with Paddock and Bass.

But where he could go from here, Lee did not know. By now his stockings were soaked, his feet half frozen, colder than they’d ever been since that first winter he endured trapping in the mountains. Like two cakes of ice they were now as he had heaved himself onto a window ledge, teetered there to reach up and grab the hollo wed-out top of a high wall where the shop owner would plant geraniums come spring—and once he stood upon that wall, Lee hoisted himself onto the second-story roof.

Perhaps he could dash across the crusted, icy snow to the back of the roof in time to jump off the edge, down onto a neighboring one-story building, and from there he could leap into the alleyway—find himself a horse or a mule and race out of town. Once in the desert it would be dark and he might stand a chance of them not finding him.

The bastards! The bloody, ungrateful bastards. Red niggers, brown niggers—they were no different. Crying to get things back to the way they were when they thought their peoples were on top of the heap! Stupid pelados! They were never on top!

Only Governor Armijo and Padre Martinez were at the top echelon of the social pecking order … not these poor sonsabitches. They were a simple, simple lot. Easily stirred up by the likes of Martinez. Damn his Catholic balls anyway! This bloody coup had Martinez’s prints all over it!

Lee knew nothing would ever convince him that the venal, corrupt padre hadn’t cooked up this little plot to kill all the Americans who had removed that godless Christian friar from his cozy seat of power.

Angry shouts and bloody cries echoed from the snowy streets below him as the mob flowed around the line of shops on both ends of the square. Those poor, downtrodden bastards had no idea they were merely pawns in Martinez’s plot to put him back on the confessional throne.

Huffing to the edge of the adobe roof, the sheriff stared down at the one-story building below him. Before he could think of why he shouldn’t jump, Lee flung himself off the edge and went sprawling on the crusty snow, sliding uncontrollably for the edge of the flat-topped building. Twisting, he flopped himself onto his belly the instant his legs went out from under him and he went down: grabbing, clawing for anything that would hold him … but he kept right on oozing for the edge.

The fury in their voices grew in volume, echoing, reverberating, slamming off every placita wall. He heard his name again, and again. And again still. With nothing to stop his slide at the end of the roof he spilled on over, landing in the snowy alley on his hip and shoulder. Both joints cried out with cold stabs of sudden, sharp agony. Lee knew he had torn himself up something bad, if not broken something outright.

Shakily pushing himself onto his hands he looked left, then right, unable to spot an animal. But he did see the flickering lights of their torches illuminating the walls at both ends of the alley. If he could crawl behind those crates, they might not find him and rush on by.

Their shrill cries, and how they all took up his name like a curse, grew louder and louder still—the sound of their shrieking bouncing off the adobe walls, thundering upon him like the reverberations from a canon.

Suddenly one of them seized his ankle, pulling him from the crates.

Lee twisted, lunging in an attempt to hold on to the side of a huge box, hoping his fingers would find something to break with his bare hands so he had anything for a weapon. He was screaming at them in Mexican now as they dragged him out into the fluttering light of their hissing torches. Smoke steamed up from every one. Angry vapor whispered up like gauze from the face of every last one of the Indians and Mexicans as they closed around him.

“Lee!”

He felt the first knife go in slow. Lee winced, immediately angry at himself for showing them any pain. He would not show his murderers any of that.

“Lee!” they cursed again.

Suddenly his shoulder burned where before it had been nothing but bone-numbing cold. Twisting to look at the wound … he saw that his arm was gone—cleaved off clean, right at the shoulder.

“Lee!” the shrieks came louder, right at his ear.

His eyes climbed up to the man who had taken off the arm as the bastard held it aloft and shook it over the crowd, splattering many with warm blood, each spurt of crimson steamy on this subfreezing night.

A leg burned.

Gazing down he could see them hacking crudely at his left thigh—cutting him into pieces while he still lived. These goddamned Mexicans and their Pueblo henchmen—Martinez’s Catholic goons … heathens who didn’t even have the Christian decency to kill a man before they chopped him to pieces.

Lee was gurgling, trying to catch his breath—then realized they had slashed his windpipe. It wouldn’t be long now. The burning. The cold. The pain. None of it any stronger than the anger he felt for every last one of them. But even his hate for these butchers would soon be over.

Blood gushed from the side of his mouth as he tried to hoist his head up and look down at what was left of his body. Both arms gone and one of the legs ripped off already. And while two of them sawed away at his last leg, another had his manhood gathered in his dirty brown hand, preparing to hack off his penis and scrotum with that butcher knife. The bastard looked up and found Lee staring at him in half-lidded pain.

Then the brown-skinned son of a bitch started drawing the knife back and forth, slowly—to make long work of it.

“Lee!”

Something about that voice he recognized. Despite the fog of his pain and the blindness of his hatred, the sheriff looked up, and blinked, locating the face of Tomas—the Indian who was leader of this gang of cowardly cutthroat scum.

Then Stephen Louis Lee could not hold his head up any longer. He knew that last sudden breath he had taken was already done and no more would he ever suck another ounce of air. His head spilled back, praying his family was safe out there in the darkness with that old trapper now.

Lee couldn’t remember his name. Funny. But it really didn’t matter because something told him that old friend of Paddock’s would get them all through on the other side of this.

Oh, how he wanted to laugh right in the mob’s faces … as he thought on how his old friends, trappers all, would avenge his death. On how Price’s dragoons would gallop up from Santa Fe and execute the ringleaders by firing squad—Padre Martinez and all the rest. No … all the rest like this Tomas, they would hang at the end of an oiled rope.

To see these butchers dangling there for long minutes while they slowly strangled, kicking, kicking and shit in their pants.

I’ll see you in hell, Tomas—Lee thought, his eyes glazing in death. One day soon, you an’ me gonna settle this in hell.

They called him Big Nigger.

That wasn’t the name given him by the men of his Delaware tribe far away to the east. But it was what he was called by those hardened white frontiersmen whose trapping expeditions he had joined after he came here to the Southwest. They used to joke that he really wasn’t a redskinned Delaware Indian. Truth was, his flesh did have the look of glossy char, the appearance of a burnished ebony. And he was big. The Delaware trapper stood nearly a foot taller than most men of the day, his long bones riveted with bulky straps of muscle that made his stygian skin shimmer when he walked.

Big and black, and imposingly scary too—they called him Big Nigger.

Years ago, more than a handful now, Jim Swanock had brought Big Nigger and some other members of the Delaware tribe west, more than a handful now. Some reports stated Big Nigger had reached the mountains not long before the beaver trade died. Others claimed that no trace of him existed in the West before 1842. No matter what any of them believed—Big Nigger was one of those faceless, nameless breed who walked out of the eastern woodlands and slipped unseen into a shadowy life among the recesses of the Rocky Mountains.

That is until old chief Jim Swanock engaged his band of twelve hunters to accompany John C. Fremont on his infamous third expedition to California in 1845. Big Nigger went along, just for the diversion of it. Then he was back in the southern Rockies by the following June of ’46, for the traders’ records show he bartered away a few furs at Hardscrabble and the Pueblo. But he didn’t follow the Arkansas on out to Bents Fort. Around the time of the expedition with Fremont, Big Nigger had come to hate the Bents and everything they stood for: money and power, white dominance over the region, and more money and power.

Only a few of the traders up at Greenhorn or Hardscrabble, sometimes at the Pueblo, ever saw Big Nigger after Fremont’s expedition to California. Likely they were the only ones who knew that he had a woman tucked away down in the Pueblo outside Taos—a half-wild, purebred she-cat of an Indian who had just borne him a son early in the fall of ’46. Though Big Nigger came and went, disappearing for weeks at a time among the mountains, he nonetheless always returned to his wife and her people at the Pueblo—spending ever more time in those six- and seven-story mud fortresses after Kearny’s army marched through northern New Mexico, bringing American rule and driving out the former Mexican and Catholic despots.

His wife’s people had been here so long, far longer than the Mexicans, here even before the coming of the Spanish. Their adobe pueblo had been their sanctuary in this valley far back into the time the Apache conducted their annual raids from the west, when the Comanche raided twice a year from the east.

Now the American dogs believed they could just dance right on through and upset centuries of tradition and custom, overnight. Especially when they didn’t leave but a token number of their dragoons—and those were all more than seventy miles away in Santa Fe!

Back in the Taos Pueblo late last autumn for the birth of his son, Big Nigger listened to lots of angry talk bubbling to the surface. In and out of the old mud fortress slipped disgruntled Mexicans keen on casting out their new overseers. If there was any time to do it, a moment to wrest control back from the Americans while Kearny’s army was consumed with conquering faraway California, this was the time to strike.

“But to assure our victory over the Americans,” Big Nigger explained to those ringleaders planning the revolt, “you must chop off the head of the beast.”

“The head?”

As he had gazed around the dimly lit adobe room, Big Nigger’s eyes narrowed into the slits of a copperhead. “We must kill Governor Bent.”

“Bent is down in Santa Fe,” protested Tomas, one of those who had taken up the rebellion’s cause once their Mexican leaders had fled south months ago. “He has some soldiers around him down there, far out of reach.”

Big Nigger had smiled cruelly, seeing this as a beautiful opportunity not only to strike a blow for his wife’s people but to rid himself of one of the great American oppressors with the same bold stroke. “He married a Mexican. A Taos family. Surely the governor comes home to visit his wife and children.”

“Yes, he does!”

“Then we lay our preparations, have everything ready for a time Bent returns to visit Taos,” Big Nigger coached them. “And when he does, we strike!”

“Kill the Americans!” the room roared.

“Kill all of them!” Big Nigger led them in the oath. “Man, woman, and child! Not one left breathing!”

Like a ram blindly leading his pack to the slaughter, Bent had returned to Taos for an unexpected visit.

The breathless runner had carried that electrifying news from town early that afternoon. The Pueblo was instantly abuzz with preparations. Men came and went. Arms were gathered—such as they were—knives and pikes, axes and a few old fusils too. They would not need many firearms, Big Nigger realized. They had the strength of hundreds … while the Americans, while the foreigners, while all their wives and children polluted with the strangers’ blood, were pitifully few in number.

The killing they had to do would not be conducted at the long-distance range of a rifle. Nor even the short distance of a belt pistol. No, this revolution Big Nigger would lead them on would be one of close-up, face-to-face killing. An occasion to see the fear in the white man’s eyes as his heart turned to water and he pissed all over himself knowing he was about to die like a cowardly pig. It was the finest sort of killing, this done face-to-face.

To be able to cut a man to pieces, bit by bit by bit, a little at a time while your enemy was still alive.

If Big Nigger had learned anything from his Delaware people back in the eastern woodlands, it was how to make exquisite torture of dispatching a captured enemy. Suspend a live victim upside down over a low fire and cook his brains until steam spurted from his ears. Or cut a small incision just below a victim’s navel, reach in with your fingers, and pull out a section of the man’s small intestine so you could nail it to a tree—then force your enemy to walk round and round that tree, slowly, agonizingly, dragging more and more gut from his belly with every tortured step until he died in his tracks.

What would he do now to his enemy, this Governor Bent?

A little while ago Big Nigger had watched how the Indians and Mexicans had hacked their first victim into pieces right in front of the American jailhouse. They let the sheriff escape—so the mob went looking for him. By the time they hunted down the American, Tomas’s mob had worked themselves into even more of a fury. But now the Indians appeared to take much enjoyment in seeing just how long they could keep the sheriff alive while they carved off a little more of the white bastard with every slice of their machetes.

By the time they were finished with him in the alley, the mob had grown too big. Some splintered here, others there, different crowds streaming off behind one leader or another in search of an American’s shop to plunder, or an American’s house to raid, seeking to murder the inhabitants—men, women, and children too.

But those who stayed behind with Big Nigger were the ones who knew the Delaware had big game in his sights. The biggest in the whole damned territory.

He led them to the walls surrounding the Bent house. And they hoisted two men over the top of the adobe barrier, dropping to the ground inside the courtyard where they hurried over to drag the huge log from its hasps inside the gate. The pair had barely dragged the hewn timber through its iron sockets when Big Nigger threw his shoulder against one side of the double gate and flung his way into the darkened courtyard.

Screaming, shrieking, crying for blood, more than thirty of the Indians clambered on top of the house with their planting tools and began to hack a hole in the roof. Big Nigger grinned wolfishly. This was just like digging into a burrow to yank a cowering prairie dog from its den.

Using the large, squared cottonwood log from the gate, a dozen of them battered at the door to their enemy’s house. Finally a single wide panel shattered and they could peer inside. He saw shadows flickering at the mouth of a hallway. Voices, both angry and afraid too, echoing down that blackened hall.

Some Mexicans stepped up beside him, elbowing close with their muskets. He inched backward, wary that they knew little of their firearms while the attackers shoved the gun barrels through the gaping splinters of the door and fired.

“I hit him!” one of them cried.

Furious, Big Nigger seized the Mexican by the neck and flung him backward like a rawhide doll. “No one kills the governor—no one but me!” He peered inside, spotted Bent leaning on the mantel, clutching a bloodied hand to his wounded face in the fire’s reflection. Suddenly at the Delaware’s shoulder stood a Pueblo warrior he knew by sight only—a skillful hunter.

“I’ll wound him bad enough he can’t run away with his family,” the bowman vowed, bringing his short weapon up and pulling the string back to his cheek.

While Big Nigger watched through the splintered door, the first arrow pierced Bent’s cheek. As the governor snapped it in two and ripped it from his face, another arrow struck him high in the chest. He staggered, his knees becoming watery.

Now Big Nigger was furious.

“Enough!” he screamed, propelling the bowman aside so roughly he took three others with him when he sailed backward against the mob. “Bring that ram up here! Knock this door down!”

Stupid fool that he was, Bent was attempting to run away—staggering from the parlor as the remaining sections of the front door shattered into splinters and the mob streamed through the portal. The American was shuffling toward the hallway, raking at the arrow in his chest like a drunkard, mumbling incoherently.

With his left hand Big Nigger snatched a torch from one of the Mexicans and stalked after the wounded man the way a hunter would follow the blood spilled by his wounded prey. Far down at the end of the hallway he heard frightened talk, muffled voices—then a shriek as Bent must have come into view of them. Sobbing women, several of them, Big Nigger thought as he penetrated the shadowy veil of that hallway.

Now that his men had the back door blocked, he turned right into the blackened hall and saw them—the women and children. Strange thing was, one of the women was already half through the wall. She was reaching back into the hall, her arms held out for a child the others were passing to her. Big Nigger stood rooted to that spot a moment more when the women spotted him and screamed in terror, shoving the children through the hole they had made in the wall. A fireplace poker and a large pewter serving spoon lay at their feet on the floor. He admired their fortitude in digging through that wall by scraping out the mud seal around the adobe bricks with their simple tools and fingers too.

“Charles!” one of them cried, the woman who was halfway through the hole.

The rest started backing away as Big Nigger slowly advanced, his torch hissing in the darkened, narrow confines of that hall. There could be no escape. His enraged mob of Pueblos and Taosenos had the entire block surrounded. No one was escaping anywhere. Especially the wounded head of the beast.

“Run, Rumalda! Oh, run!” another woman shouted to the one in the wall as she and another seized hold of the governor, dragging him toward the hole.

As the two women attempted to push the man through, the one already in the hole used what little strength she possessed to pull the stocky American into the opening of their makeshift portal. Bent was trying to speak—nothing any of them could understand, every word of it garbled and nonsensical. Even for Big Nigger, who understood enough English to know that Bent was already out of his head and dying.

But not, the Delaware vowed, before he could get his hands on the governor.

With more than two dozen of the Indians pressing up behind their tall leader, Big Nigger watched Bent do something very strange. With his sticky, bloody fingers, the American fumbled in his vest pocket and pulled out a crumpled sheet of paper. The governor held it up, his lips quivering, his hand trembling as he appeared to implore his enemy to take it.

That made the Delaware hate him all the more. With the muzzle of his pistol, Big Nigger knocked the hand and that crumpled paper aside.

It seemed that tiny act of violence on his part spurred three of the Indians to shove their way past Big Nigger and rush to the hole in the wall. They seized Bent from the arms of the woman and dragged the American back into the hallway. One of them held Bent up by his leather braces, then flung the governor against the wall, where he collapsed onto the clay floor.

As that lone woman disappeared into the darkness on the far side of the wall, one of the Pueblos unstrung his bow and hurled the bow aside as he crouched over the American. Bent was groggy, mumbling nonsense as the Indian positioned the governor’s head just so—as only a warrior could do—then deftly used his narrow, twisted rawhide bowstring to slash the scalp from the white man’s head.

Watching the horrid scene were those children hiding in the folds of the women’s dresses. One of them was shrieking, her whole body shaking as she collapsed to her knees. Arms held out, she was begging. That much was clear to Big Nigger. She was pleading for Bent’s life, for their lives.

“You fools!” he thundered at the Indians suddenly.

The three of them atop Bent immediately froze, gazing up at their leader in confusion and utter fear.

“Don’t you see, you senseless fools?” he roared as he lunged over the scalper and slapped the man hard enough that he collided with the far wall when he flew off the American’s body.

“What are you doing?” one of the trio demanded.

Big Nigger swung his torch inches from the man’s nose, making the Indian shrink in terror, the sleeve on his greasy wool coat brushed with embers he frantically patted until they were smothered.

“You’ve killed him now,” Big Nigger snarled. “We should have kept him alive.”

“Alive?” one of the Mexicans demanded.

Big Nigger recognized the man—a surly one. He was one of the head priest’s lieutenants. One of the handful of Mexican couriers who was often seen riding back and forth between the pueblo and Padre Martinez’s church in this last two weeks, carrying plans and instructions. Big Nigger shook his torch at the Mexican.

The man leaped back a step, his face registering sudden fear.

The Delaware shook the torch at the Mexican again, backing him farther still until the man was forced to stop against the crowd packed into the hallway.

“Alive is what I said,” the Delaware repeated. “We’ll ’kill him when I say we kill him. We could have kept him as a valuable hostage until it was time for him to take his last breath.”

Turning to look over his shoulder, Big Nigger saw that Bent’s chest moved only with shallow respirations. Good thing too. After all, the Delaware wanted to be the one to kill the governor himself.

So now his gaze moved to the women and children cowering at the end of the hall.

“Put them all in a room that has no wall to the outside,” he ordered.

Some of his trusted comrades crowded past him in the narrow corridor and seized their captives, dragging them into one of the small bedchambers as the women wailed and the children screeched. The door was closed on them.

“Two of you, stay right here,” Big Nigger ordered, glancing at the hole at the bottom of the wall. “See they don’t escape.”

“Why let them live?” a voice asked.

He stopped, standing right over the governor’s body, and told that mob packed in the hall, “We could have kept him from dying until I was ready to kill him. He would have been some use to us. Now we have to keep the others alive until we know if it is better for us that they live, or that they die.”

He knelt by the governor, noticed how Bent’s hand twitched. The bastard somehow clung to life. These stupid Pueblos had ruined his plans, Big Nigger thought, when he had wanted to keep the head of the family alive. But now Bent was anything but head of his family—

That was it!

“Bring him and follow me!” Big Nigger roared at the swarms of men who stood sweating in bloodlust, packed elbow to elbow in that crowded hall. He shoved back through them to reach the front parlor.

On his heels came the scalper. Once into that front room, the Indian found a small board and some brass tacks. As they waited for the governor’s body, Big Nigger watched the bowman stretch the American’s pliable, bloody scalp on that board, tacking it down in place as a battle trophy.

Though it was a struggle, a pair of the Pueblos finally dragged the heavy American out of the crowded hall and over to their leader. The others inched back to give Big Nigger room as the pair dropped the wounded white man onto his face at the Delaware’s moccasins. Someone edged out of the crowd and grabbed Bent’s ear, yanking on it to expose the fleshy neck. Such a pretty, white neck.

“We must cut the head off this American beast!” Big Nigger shouted at them in their Pueblo tongue. Some translated it into Spanish for the enraged Mexicans among them.

“With the head cut from it—a body will wither and die!” the Delaware exhorted them. “You cut the head?” someone yelled.

They had blood in their eye, and the taste of it already sweet on their tongues. Their knives were ready. He could see they would mutilate this American beyond recognition within a matter of heartbeats … just as soon as he gave them permission.

“Yes! Cut it!” the crowd bellowed. “Cut the head from this beast!”

Handing the torch to one of the Mexicans, Big Nigger took a huge knife from the man. Then knelt and seized a handful of what stark, white hair remained at the back of Bent’s neck. Pulling the head to the side, he gazed at the flabby white skin on the neck.

Bent’s eyes fluttered. The lips moved slightly in the flickering torchlight.

But not one sound of protest came from them as the Delaware began to slice, inch by inch, all the way through the neck until the body dropped away and he was left holding the head at the end of his arm.

“Go! Find the others!” he shrieked at them, shaking the American’s head at them, splattering blood and gore on those closest to the scene.

The first of the mob turned for the open doorway as he roared his commands one last time.

“No man. No woman. And no child,” he growled like a beast with the scent of a kill strong in its nostrils. “Leave not one of them alive!”