Crack in the Sky (24 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Ain’t a man worth his salt gonna stand for Injuns stealing women and young’uns,” Bass told them as they nudged their horses into motion, slowly parting the crowd of wailing women. “I ’member my grandpap telling me about the Shawnee and others what come down on the canebrake settlers way back, not just to kill and burn them folks out, but to steal the womenfolk and the young’uns too.”

“This is different,” Hatcher groaned as he studied the scene, side to side. “There’d be too damned many of them Comanch’ for us to take on from the looks of things here.”

Solomon hollered, “But them red-bellies gotta pay!”

“Too damned many of ’em!” Jack repeated, working to convince them. “There’s just a handful of us.”

“We ain’t gonna give it a try?” Bass shouted.

“And get ourselves kill’t in the bargain?” Caleb protested.

Titus sighed, his eyes imploring Hatcher. “Awright, Jack. We find John Rowland first—then go out there on their trail and see if we figger out how many we’re up against by the looks of the tracks.”

For a long moment their leader considered that. “So be it. I don’t cotton to no Injun carrying off no woman or child neither, boys. We’ll go find Johnny … then we’ll
see what the trail’s got to tell us about what we’d be up against.”

There erupted a spontaneous, raw cheer among these men yanked from their blankets, heads throbbing with a long-overdue hangover, men grouchy, out of sorts, and damned well ready to do battle.

“Get you yer horse, Matthew!” Hatcher shouted, turning to fling his words behind him as the Americans moved their animals slowly into the noisy crowd filling the village square. “We gotta find Johnny!”

“I’ll catch up to you!” Kinkead said, clutching his Rosa tight. “G’won past Rowland’s hut, off yonder—I figger we’ll cut the trail out by his place.”

On all sides of them the devastation increased as they pushed for a narrow street on the far side of the village square. There at the corner squatted an old woman, a filthy shawl hanging half on her head, each of her hands resting on the body of a dead man crumpled at her knees. Beneath her fingers lay a bloodied face dotted with a gray stubble, the old man’s skull cracked open. At her feet sprawled the body of a younger man, perhaps a son. At least four arrows were stuck deep in his bare brown back. A dog slinked close, cautiously, its feral nose twitching at the smell of blood and gore seeping from the bodies.

Bass gave heels to his horse, reining straight for the cur. The dog’s neck ruff bristled as Scratch leaned over, swinging his rifle butt for the canine, smacking it in the ribs. Rolling over and over with a pitiful yelp, the dog picked itself up from the icy ruts and scurried away down the street, tail tucked between its legs.

Here and there in the village around them some of the squat adobe houses smoldered, wisps of ghostly smoke seeping from the rawhide-covered windows, curling up in twisted columns from the portals where the doors hung akimbo on broken hinges. Overturned
carretas
. A dead goat or dog, a pig or some chickens—the refuse of animal carcasses strewn about to mark the Comanches’ path through town.

Villagers suddenly converged on the path the Americans were taking, appearing from behind them in the narrow
street, flowing in from both left and right to form a noisy mob. Weepy-eyed women and angry men shuffled into that open ground where a handful of squat sapling-and-mud wattle huts stood leaning against the cold dawn sky. There on the snowy, trampled ground three women were hunched over their prey, pummeling the enemy again and again with short pieces of firewood, one wailing hag swinging a long wrought-iron fireplace poker. More of the mob surged forward, eager to join in—shrieking, swinging, and kicking.

“Get back!” Hatcher bellowed above them as he steered his horse into their midst. “Goddamn ye—get back!”

The crowd may not have understood his words, but there was no mistaking the gringo’s meaning. Slowly the villagers stepped back, and back some more, until the trappers recognized the bloodied, battered body of an Indian.

He didn’t look to be too tall a man, dressed only in a shirt and breechclout above his moccasins. A blanket had been torn from his waist. Bare-legged, his hair disheveled, the Indian had a face almost unrecognizable as such.

Someone had even begun to decapitate the body. A woman nearby shook with rage, a huge knife trembling in her bloody hand.

“He dead?” Solomon asked as he halted his horse with the others.

“Damn well better be,” Caleb growled. “Let ’em work the son of a bitch over, Jack. That dead Comanch’ is the only thing they can take it out on now.”

“First whack, it’s my turn,” Hatcher said as he kicked his right leg up and to the left, sliding off the bare back of his horse.

The crowd inched back even farther, muttering in unrequited fury as he strode up without hesitation, yanking his skinning knife from the sheath hung at his hip. Without a word he knelt, whizzed the sharp blade around the head, then wiped the knife off on the Indian’s shirt before he stuffed it away. Placing a foot on the warrior’s face, Hatcher leaned back against the Comanche’s thick hair
until the scalp peeled away, complete with the tops of the ears.

This moist, limp trophy he held up for all to see at the end of his outstretched arm. Slowly he turned, the blood dripping in the dirty snow. Suddenly Hatcher opened his mouth and let out a long primal scream. Nothing close to being a word, only a frightening sound—some guttural, wild, and feral noise the people in that crowd understood.

“Wagh!”

With that ear-shattering cry of the grizzly boar preparing for battle against one of its own, Jack pushed on through the crowd, walking up to a wooden door, where he looped the long black hair over the top hinge, took a quick step back, then spit on the scalp.

As others, mostly old men and young boys at first, shoved out of the throng to imitate the trapper by spitting on the scalp themselves, Hatcher turned and pushed his way back through the crowd. At that moment some of the infuriated Mexican women threw themselves back onto the body, resuming their brutal, passionate dismembering of the dead enemy.

Jack grabbed a handful of his horse’s mane and flung himself onto its back. Taking up the reins, he brought the animal around and began to part the growing crowd that clamored for vengeance upon the raiders. One by one the Americans slipped their horses through that narrow gap in the mob. Alarmed by sudden and wild shrieks from the Taosenos, Bass turned to look over his shoulder—seeing the Indian’s head appear above the throng. In the next moment it was hoisted far above the Mexicans at the end of a long, sturdy pike, the people swirling about on their heels like a throbbing mass below this gory, eyeless trophy they began to carry back toward the square.

As the mob washed away, a group of young boys led by a pair of old women stayed behind to tie lariats to the wrists and ankles of the headless body. As the last rope was knotted, the youngsters took off on foot, wildly screaming together as the beaten, bloodied, pummeled body bounced, tumbled, and flopped crazily behind the racing boys. Hobbling along behind the torso came the
teetering old women, both of them striking what was left of the enemy again and again with firewood switches.

While the clamor of the mob faded toward the square, from a side street came the sudden clatter of boot heels echoing off the cold whitewashed walls of the village. Suddenly more than fifty Mexican soldiers burst around a corner. The trappers brought up their long weapons. For a terrifying instant, both groups stared at one another provocatively—ready for the other side to open fire. Every bit as disheveled as the Americans, the soldiers looked as if they too had just been pulled from their beds. Very few of them wore a complete uniform—and those who had managed to pull on their coats hadn’t taken the time to button them in the morning’s cold. Red-eyed, pasty-faced: these were men rousted from their barracks with the toe of a boot or the point of a bayonet.

“Señores!”
the thin-faced officer at the head of the formation finally yelled as he took two steps toward the trappers, slapping a sword against his tall boot.
“Americanos!”

With his eyes locked on the officer, Hatcher quietly spoke from the side of his mouth, “Willy—ye know their talk better’n I do. Tell ’em to get out of our way so we can find our friend.”

After a quick dialogue, Workman said, “This one—he’s the ensign.”

“What’s that?” Hatcher demanded.

“The big soldier chief here ’bouts,” the whiskey maker replied. “Name’s Don Francisco Guerrero. These here are his soldiers ’cause he’s Senior Justice and War Captain of San Geronimo de los Taos.”

A smirk crossed Jack’s bony face. “This bastard’s got too damned many names for me, boys! Willy, tell him to get his ass out of our way.”

Wagging his head emphatically, Workman protested, “But they ain’t fixing to stop us—”

“Damn right these greasers won’t stop us!” Isaac bellowed as he came up to stand shoulder to shoulder with Hatcher.

Workman continued, “But this here Guerrero says they found the Injuns’ trail.”

“Where?”

“Heading north out of town,” Workman said to Hatcher, pointing.

“With them red niggers gone, we go find Johnny—”

“They want us to help ’em go after the Comanche.”

Hatcher turned to look at Workman now. “Why they want our help trailing after a bunch of Injuns?”

“Guerrero here, he says the Comanche took some women and children with ’em.”

“We know that!” Jack snapped.

“One of them women is the wife of the gov’nor,” Workman explained quietly. “And … they run off with his li’l girl too.”

“Why us?” Hatcher demanded, eyeing the soldiers suspiciously.

Licking his lips, Workman sighed, “They figure the only chance they got of trailing the Comanche is using us gringos as trackers.”

“Why use us gringos?”

Workman grinned. “These Mex think we’re damned close to being ’bout as bad as Injuns anyway, Jack.”

“So we work for the Mexican army as trackers?” Jack squeaked in protest. “’Cause we’re the only ones can foller Injuns?”

“To hell with ’em!” Caleb snarled. “They can track the Comanche on their own!”

“There’s J-johnny!”

At Isaac’s wild cry, Scratch jerked around.

His forehead smeared with blood, Rowland suddenly emerged from a thick veil of smoke that clung close to the snowy ground like the bushy tail of a black cat switching back and forth as it waited patiently for a mouse to come within pouncing distance. Soot smeared his face in broad, grotesque patches.

“T-they got m-my … Maria,” John sobbed, his eyes pooling, tears spilling down his cheeks, tracking the black soot as he stood before the smoking ruin of the hovel that was his Taos home.

Hatcher held down his hand, grasping Rowland’s in sympathy. “We been told they got away with some women, and young’uns too.”

John nodded, choking on his sobs. “When I come out of the house, I see’d they had the gov’nor’s wife and his little g-girl with ’em,” Rowland explained. He turned away suddenly, looking to the north, swiping a hand first beneath his nose, then dragging it beneath both eyes, smearing soot. “The red-bellies knocked me in the head and left me for dead, I s’pose. Afore they took ’em all that means—”

“We’re going after your Maria now, Johnny,” Rufus said as Rowland looked away, a man clearly uncomfortable with his grief.

“We’ll bring her back to ye.”

Rowland whirled back around on them, his wild eyes darting between his friends and the soldiers, his lips moving wordlessly for a moment before his voice crackled in its growing rage the moment he lunged forward and seized hold of Hatcher’s reins. “I’m going after her with you!”

“Ye’re … hurt right now,” Jack explained, rubbing his fingers across his own forehead there below the front of his badger-fur cap. “Better ye stay behind.”