Sister started shouting when she passed the hide-covered tipis and the brush-covered lodges and arbors of She Moves Like Water.
“Shiwoyé. Grandmother.”
Her grandmother put aside the cradleboard she was making. She stood and held out her arms. Sister ran into them. “You have come.” Grandmother's voice broke with joy and grief.
The boys standing watch had seen the procession approaching. They had told the old ones that the number of people returning was much smaller than those who had left. Grandmother had waited all day while anxiety pecked at her like magpies at a horse's sore back.
Others put their arms around the old ones who had stayed behind to look after the lodges. They held them close in a silent greeting. Smoke hung over the village for days as people set fire to the belongings of those who had died. They had to burn so many lodges that they moved the village. But even there, the women's wails of grief sounded from the forest each evening at sunset.
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MORNING STAR AND COUSIN RAN BAREFOOT IN A ROCKING lope behind the two horses they had stolen from the pickets of some Pale Eyes wagon drivers. Morning Star looked back over his shoulder at the cloud billowing up and outward from the desert floor. It disgorged a pair of men on horseback, their forms blurred by the dust. The fine powder had coated the horses. It had permeated the riders' canvas trousers and cotton shirts, heavy boots and wide-brimmed felt hats. As they drew closer, they seemed to materialize from the cloud itself. Finally they solidified into flesh and bone, canvas, leather, felt, and a goatee.
Morning Star and Cousin reached the thicket bordering the rock-strewn creek. They flapped their arms to send the ponies veering down a narrow track through the bushes to join those few that they had been able to steal on this raid. The herd
boys, Talks A Lot, Ears So Big, He Steals Love, and Flies In His Stew, guarded them.
A mother bear with a cub had made this raid harder for Cousin. He had been lying on his stomach drinking at a spring when the bear snagged his moccasin and tried to drag him away as though he were a fat trout. Cousin objected. In the tussle the bear tore the left side of his face before he drove the knife through her eye and into the brain. He made a necklace of the claws and teeth that had disfigured him.
Blood still stained the teeth and claws. Cousin's face was still swollen and raked with raw, red slashes. In the fight he had gained something more valuable than a necklace. Killing her had given him Bear Power. Bear Power was unpredictable, though, and those who had it were unpredictable, too. Bear power could make a person act insanely. Already people had begun to treat Cousin with a wary respect, and when he wasn't around, they called him Loco, Crazy.
The two men stood at ease in front of the snarl of stunted willows, cactus, and interlacing vines. Loco lifted his torn eyelid so he could see out of it.
“Two white men are chasing us,” Morning Star told the thicket. “One of them is black.”
“Black?” the thicket asked.
“Maybe that one was left too long in the sun when he was a baby,” Loco added for the thicket's edification. “He's as black as that mule steak your wife let fall into the flames.”
“If you don't like my wife's cooking, why do you show up whenever the meal's ready?” the thicket retorted. “How far away are they?”
“They're coming into range now,” Morning Star said.
The thicket quivered and rustled, and Broken Foot, Skinny, and the fifteen other men in the party stepped out of it. They brandished their lances and bows and commenced whooping.
The pursuers reined to a stiff-legged halt that sent up a shower of dirt. The horses reared and plunged as the two men scrambled off. The black man's foot caught in the stirrup, and he hopped around, trying to free it, while the horse
circled and kicked. Both men tangled themselves and their weapons in the reins when they put their arms through them to keep their mounts from running away.
“I think they mean to shoot each other,” Loco observed.
“The white white man needs an extra mule to carry that big gun,” said Broken Foot.
Morning Star chuckled. “They're either brave or stupid.”
“I would say stupid,” said Loco. “All Pale Eyes are stupid.”
“I think their guns misfired.”
Loco began to leap up and down and shout. “You Pale Eyes are such bunglers you can't find your arse holes with your nose-picking fingers.”
“I'll bet you've shit into those trousers of yours,” shouted Skinny. He turned and lifted the tail of his breechclout, to give them a clear view of his bony rump.
Loco, Broken Foot, Morning Star, and everyone else turned around too, presenting their attackers with a long row of bare, brown backsides. They beat a tattoo on them, and hooted and shouted insults.
When the two men realized that their guns weren't going to fire, they chased their horses in circles at the ends of the reins. The black man clambered aboard first and held the other's big shotgun so he could vault into his, bypassing the stirrups. As the two rode off, clinging to their horses' necks and with their own rear ends bouncing, Morning Star and the others let fly a shower of arrows gauged to fall just short.
When the dust cloud had swallowed the two men again and whirled them off to a safer place, the Red Paint men trotted out to collect the arrows. Then they sauntered to the small horse herd that Morning Star and Loco had increased by two. Morning Star gestured to He Steals Love to bring his new pony.
The horse was a compact little stallion, the yellow dun color of a smoked hide. He had big restless ears, sly eyes, long legs, and a short body. Morning Star decided to call him Coyote.
Morning Star mounted and rode laughing after his friends. He Steals Love and the other herd boys trotted behind him.
PANDORA IN A BOX
R
afe hooked a leg over the pommel of the Mexican saddle on his big roan gelding, cocked his old Hall rifle, laid it across his thigh, and watched the pack of men approach. They were heading south, toward the border most likely. God help any poor Mexicans they found. Any Indians they found would have to help themselves.
Rafe glanced to heaven, where a raiding band of Comanches in west Texas had sent his own mother and father when he was fifteen. He thanked God for constructing him with yellow hair. Comanches preferred scalps with yellow hair attached, but not these men. He curled his finger around the trigger, reassured by the hard, smooth curve of it.
The bounty hunters carried enough weapons to outfit a group containing twice their numbers. Bundles of scalps, salted and stretched on hoops, dangled from the lead rider's saddle. The horse's bridle looked as though it were made of braided black horsehair, but Rafe had seen it up close before. The human teeth dangling from it as decoration reinforced his belief that the hair hadn't come from horses.
Rafe was acquainted with the tightly strung, greasy-haired, undersize individual who occupied the saddle on the lead horse. He had crossed paths with John Joel Glanton and his rabble of bounty killers before. He knew, for instance, that Glanton had once been a preacher, and that he referred to the scalps as “golden fleeces.”
Attrition ran high in Glanton's crowd. They'd been known to scalp injured members of their own company on the principle of “Waste not, want not,” but today the gang consisted of a familiar bunch of cutthroats. Rafe recognized two former
Texas Rangers, a runaway Negro slave, an Irishman, a French Canadian, a Comanche, two Mexicans, and a Delaware Indian. A few of the men were strangers to Rafe, and they didn't look completely at ease in the company they were keeping. They were probably gold rushers who thought to earn some quick cash in the scalp trade.
Instead of their usual leather britches and hunting shirts lacquered black with grease and blood and dirt, they wore breechclouts and moccasins. A few of them carried bows and quivers slung across their backs, which meant the rumors were true. Glanton had killed so many Indians that his quarry had become wary and difficult to find. Dressed as Apaches, he and his men were now attacking Mexican villages.
The rumor was that after they murdered the inhabitantsâmen, women, and childrenâthey filled the cattle with arrows to make it look like an Indian raid. Rafe knew that Apaches didn't scalp their enemies, but most MexicansâAmericans, tooâbelieved they did. Glanton's crowd collected on the Mexican scalps in the governors' offices of Chihuahua and Sonora. Glanton was a pragmatic man, and black hair was black hair. The authorities wouldn't know the difference.
When they got close enough for Rafe to smell them, which was well beyond rifle range, Rafe raised a hand that was more a warning that they advance no farther than a greeting.
“Good day to you, John,” he said.
“Rafe.” Glanton reached two fingers up to the place where a brim would be if he were wearing a hat. “Seen any 'Patch around here?” He spoke with a cultured North Carolina accent.
“Can't say as I have.”
“Well, keep your hair under your hat.”
“I will endeavor to do that.” Rafe watched until they had ridden out of sight around a bend in the river before he kicked his mule into motion.
When he reached his camp, he wanted to strip naked, wade into the muddy water of the river, and wash the stench of Glanton's rabble off his skin. Instead, he stood with arms folded across his chest and listened to the report of his three
Mexican drovers. Apaches had stolen two of the horses from the picket line, and Señor Absalom and his big Negro had gone after them. Rafe was about to set out to find Absalom and Caesar when they saved him the trouble. Their horses were lathered and blowing.
When the two men dismounted, they walked with a distinct wobble. Caesar led the horses off to rub them down and feed them.
“I see you didn't recover the ponies or take the scalps you bought that blunderbuss to hunt.” Rafe nodded at Absalom's big shotgun. Absalom had had one barrel rifled in order to bring down much bigger game than quail.
“We were fortunate to escape with our lives.”
“I don't doubt it.”
Absalom started to give details, but the arrival of a few wagons interrupted him. All of them were loaded, but the lead one rode lower on its front springs than the others.
“Damnation,” Rafe muttered.
“Someone you know?”
“General Armijo.”
John Glanton, Apache horse thieves, and Manuel Armijo all on the same day, Rafe thought. The devil must be in a particularly meddlesome mood.
Armijo pulled up, axles shrieking. The color was flaking off the Virgin Mary and her mob of cherubim painted on the wagon's side. They looked as though leprosy had been added to their afflictions of jaundice and constipation. Three Apache women and a teenaged boy, their wrists tied behind their backs, walked behind. The ropes around their necks tethered them to the wagon's tailgate. They glared from behind the dark bangs that fell in front of their eyes.
Some carpenter had strengthened the wagon seat with extra boards, but still it sagged under Armijo's weight.
“Señor Collins, what a pleasure to encounter you here. We will camp with you tonight.” Armijo spread his arms to include his little caravan, though the arms' bulk prevented them from ever lying flat against his body, anyway. “As you can see, we reached Chihuahua in safety, thanks be to God,
and have returned. On the way back I bought some servants for my wife.” He gestured to the ragged and filthy women and the boy behind the wagon. “General Carasco captured them at their camp outside Janos.”
Three of Armijo's men helped him climb down from the seat, giving Rafe an unwelcome view of the man's backside.
It was an arse, Rafe thought, that was big enough to be declared a Mexican state.
Armijo was wheezing like a leather bellows when he finally made landfall. He jerked a chain, and the same young Apache woman Rafe had seen with him three months earlier in Mesilla climbed out of the wagon. She was still beautiful. She still looked lethal.
When she jumped down, she landed on one foot. The other foot and ankle were swollen and bruised a dark purple, and she could put no weight on it. The ankle was obviously broken and must have hurt like the very dickens, but Rafe could see no indication of pain in her eyes. Only hatred smoldered there, a hot and well-tended fire.
The chain was fastened to a shackle around her undamaged ankle. Armijo looped the other end to a spoke of the wagon wheel and fastened it in place with a large iron lock. He put the key into the pouch hanging from his belt.
Armijo nodded to the swollen ankle. “She tried to escape again, so I have ensured that she will not make another attempt.”
“For the love of God.” Rafe turned on his heel and walked away.
“Will we be moving to another campsite?” Absalom asked.
“It's too late for that, but we'll hitch the wagons and drive upriver a bit. I don't like the smell of this place.”
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RAFE AND ABSALOM SAT BY THE FIRE. CAESAR MENDED A bridle at a discreet distance. Since Rafe found them sharing a bottle in the wagon yard in Mesilla, he had never seen them give any indication that they were other than a Southern
planter and his loyal slave. At five feet eleven inches, Rafe had always thought of himself as a tall man, and strong enough to make a six-mule team sit up and take notice. Caesar dwarfed him in every physical dimension. He worked hard, said little, and never complained.
Absalom held up two pairs of moccasins. The soles and the leather patches used to mend them had worn through. The knee-high tops were scarred. Four parallel gashes ran diagonally on one of the left moccasins, about midway between the ankle and knee. From the size of them Rafe would have bet that a bear had left them there.
“We found these hanging over a low branch where our horses were tethered before the Apaches stole them.”
Rafe took the one with the claw marks. He ran his fingers over the deep grooves and imagined the encounter that had put them there. He noted the neat stitching, the way the strip of leather from the sole had been brought up and sewn in place to reinforce the toe. The style was Apache, and peculiar to the bands around here, the ones who called themselves Red Paints. He wondered, briefly, what the moccasin's previous owner was like.
“Why were they left there?” Absalom asked.
“They're a message,” Rafe said. “The Apaches are saying, âWe walked until our moccasins wore out. Now we have your horses, and you can walk.'”
“You know,” Absalom said. “I had every intention of shooting those two thieves today and taking their scalps as souvenirs. When that horde of fifty or sixty Apaches stepped out of the bushes, I'll tell you. Rafe, I pissed myself. They could have skinned and salted us both, yet there they all were, jumping around like cockroaches in a hot skillet. They preferred to have their joke and spare our lives.”
“There's no telling what an Apache will do. They'll steal stock from everybody, and they'll kill anybody tries to stop 'em, but their blood feud is with the Mexicans.”
Absalom took a drink of whiskey from his tin mug and stared into the fire. The two men sat in a lengthening silence that Rafe found far more comfortable than talk.
“I suppose you're wondering about Caesar,” Absalom said finally.
“No, I'm not.”
“His mother was in charge of the nursery at the big house on my family's plantation. We grew up together, Caesar and I. When we were young, we fished and picked berries together. We raided the watermelon field in the summertime. I taught him to read.”
Rafe made no comment, in hopes that Absalom would not turn loose any more information. He had found that personal histories almost always contained troubles. People didn't confess good news or virtues. Rafe had troubles enough of his own. He didn't need to weigh down his heart's springs with anyone else's. Besides, the histories of most men out here included crimes and derelictions that could prove dangerous to know.
“My ma died when I was a sprat, and Caesar's mammy raised me. When she was dying of a fever, a year or so back, I promised her that I would set Caesar free. My father passed on not long after, and as the inheritor of his estate I found myself in a position to make good on my promise.” He glanced at the spot where Caesar had been sitting.
“I thought about taking him north, but slave-catchers are on the lookout for runaways. The laws are designed to prevent a colored person from leaving the South for any reason. We thought perhaps they would accuse me of slave theft as a ruse to throw me in jail and sell Caesar down the river to the rice plantations.” Absalom threw a few more limbs onto the fire. “We decided to slide sideways, joining the Argonauts in search of gold. We wouldn't be suspected, heading west instead of north. We reckoned to ride clear to California. Since slavery is not allowed there, Caesar can be a free man whether he finds gold or not. When I see him safely set up, I shall return home and marry the beauty who waits for me.”
Absalom reached into the inner pocket of his vest and pulled out a miniature portrait in a double frame clasped shut
to form a box. He opened it and held it up. Rafe studied it in the fire's light.
He felt uneasy, staring at another man's betrothed, but he couldn't help himself. The sight of her, blond hair falling in ringlets around the narrow oval of her face, set up a longing in him. It reminded him that there were riches in the world that had nothing to do with gold or silver; but obtaining them was next to impossible and fraught with its own peril.
“That's an admirable undertaking.” Rafe kept his voice noncommittal, although when Absalom put the portrait away he wanted to ask if he could look at it a while longer.
“When we finish this delivery to the Santa Rita mines with you, we'll have enough money to continue our trip.” Absalom took another sip of whiskey. Whiskey might set free the demons in some men, but for Absalom it was apparently the key to opening his heart and letting out angels of good deeds. “I have some money hidden away, but that's to stake Caesar when he gets to California.”
Rafe raised his tin mug of whiskey. “To the success of your enterprise.” But he had his doubts.
With few exceptions, this territory was populated by men like John Glanton, scoundrels of every race and nationality who had only one thing in common. They had committed murder, rape, theft, arson, blasphemy, loitering, and every other conceivable misdemeanor. Some of them came to New Mexico Territory to enjoy a system of justice even more lackadaisical than the one in Texas. For others, San Francisco's Committee of Vigilance had made life too precarious and liberty too uncertain, so they had drifted east and washed up here. Rafe would not have wagered a centavo that a pampered Southern fop and an inexperienced slave could avoid the snares laid by man and nature between here and California.