Scalpers (2 page)

Sam listened as he ushered her up into the barb's saddle.

“My husband's brother, Felipe, took Ana and me in when my husband died from the fever. But Felipe could not take care of us and his wife and children as well. So he sold us to King Troxel.”

“King . . . ?” Sam asked as he settled into her saddle and he swung up atop his dun.

“I meant
Vernon
Troxel,” the woman said, correcting herself quickly. She sidled the barb over to the dun and said under her breath, “He has the two of us call him
King
when he is drinking his whiskey and we are . . . all three alone.” She lowered her dark eyes in shame. “Please do not tell him I told you this—I only say this to you because you are a man of the law.” A fearful look came over her face.

“I won't tell him,” Sam said. Letting out a breath, he looked out across the darkening desert flats. “You can talk as we ride, ma'am,” he offered, knowing there was more to come.

“Gracias,”
she whispered. “I know I must ask
God to forgive me for what I tell you now, but I wish he would die before this night is through.” She immediately crossed herself for saying such a thing. Tears glistened in her eyes.

Sam nodded and leveled the brim of his sombrero. Before he scooped Troxel up into his arms and carried him to the cart, Sam had seen the wispy figures of the two wolves circling farther out in the waning evening light. They were growing bolder, more brazen in their quest for food. He did not want to fire a gun, he told himself. Gazing off into the encroaching darkness, he saw other black forms appear as if out of nowhere and move about, falling onto the wide circling pattern as he and the woman and the mule cart moved forward at a slow pace.

“Careful what you wish for,
señora
,” he said quietly. “A night like this, you just might get it.”

In the purple starlit night the small party rode on, the Ranger taking the reins to the mule, leading the fearful animal and its cart at a slow but steady pace. Less than thirty yards out, the wolves had grown bolder. The shadowy animals howled and yipped and continued circling and threatening them. Riding alongside the cart, Sam heard the wounded man groan and mutter to himself inside the cart bed.

“They've come back for me, Pa . . . like I knowed they would,” he babbled mindlessly. “They ate Little Charlie's head . . . 'fore I could stop them! Oh my Gawd!” he screamed. “They et
his head
!”

Sam turned his eyes to the woman, who sidled close to him in fear of the looming predators and the man's hallucinations.

“Who knows what thoughts go on inside this man's mind?” she said almost in a whisper. “It is said that all evil in a man's life comes back to him when he is dying.” She crossed herself and drew her ragged blanket up around her shoulders. “His evil lies dark and heavy upon us. Can you feel it?”

“There's plenty of evil to go around,” Sam said,
not wanting to encourage further discussion on the matter. “What I
can
feel are desert wolves prowling our flanks.” He glanced around the purple night. “I hate firing a rifle, but we're going have to do something pretty soon. They're getting too bold.” Even as he spoke he saw a large wolf dive forward out of the greater darkness, lunge a few feet toward the mule, then circle back out of sight. “Testing us,” he added.

“They smell his warm blood,” the woman whispered. She looked up at the young girl and said, “Get down in the cart, Ana.”

The girl followed the woman's order quickly. The woman turned back to the Ranger.

“If I slipped a knife into his heart, his blood would stop. We could leave him here for them,
sí
?”

Sam just looked at her for a moment.

Slipped a knife . . . ?
Not
stabbed
or
stuck
, but
slipped . . . ,
he thought. She made it sound painless, almost merciful. She was right that killing him and leaving him would solve their problem. But he shook his head.

“We're not going to do that, ma'am,” he said.

“Then we must roll him out,” she urged, “and let the wolves do their own killing.”

“Stop it,” Sam said.

“No, God forgive me, of course we are not going to do that!” she said, crossing herself quickly. She paused. The two of them watched two wolves move into sight on the darkened trail ahead of them. The wolves stood with their head lowered, as if to bring the mule cart and the riders to a halt.

“Easy, Copper,” Sam said to the dun beneath him as the horse grumbled and chuffed under its breath. He drew a taut hand on the reins to the mule cart. Beside him the barb tried to balk, but the woman kept it settled. Sam gathered the dun's reins and the mule's into his leaf hand; he lifted the rifle from across his lap. The mere sight of the rifle coming up sent the wolves back into the darkness.

“All right, it's time we do something,” he said.

“I will do it,” the woman said without hesitation.

“No, that's not what I mean,” Sam said. “Here, hold these animals.” He held out both sets of reins.

The woman took the reins with an almost disappointed look in her dark eyes. She watched the Ranger slip down from the dun's back, cocked rifle in hand, and walk to the rear of the cart.

“I don't like doing this,” he murmured to himself. He untied the ropes holding Mickey Cousins' body to the board and let it fall to the ground. He took the knife from inside his boot well as he looked at melon-sized stones littering the edges of the trail on either side. “Tough break, Mickey,” he said to the blanket-wrapped corpse.

The woman watched the Ranger from her saddle. The young girl peeked over the cart's edge. From in the cart bed, Vernon Troxel awakened slightly and began anew his mindless litany to the wolves.

“I'll kill every . . . damn one of yas! Damn your eyes!” he raged in warning. But his breathing was weak and shallow, and his words fell away into the
starlit darkness. The wolves gathered just out of sight and watched the Ranger intently.

As the woman and the young girl watched the Ranger carry out his gruesome handiwork, they turned away from him from time to time and looked at each other with caged eyes. After a moment the Ranger had finished severing Cousins' head from his body and walked back toward them washing his hands in a trickle of water from a canteen. He saw the young girl staring down at him over the edge of the cart.

“Sorry you two had to see that,” he said firmly to the woman as he capped the canteen. He took the rifle from under his arm and swung up into his saddle.

“We have seen much worse things than this,” the woman replied flatly, handing him the reins to his dun. They heard the rustle of paws out of sight in the sand. “Why did you carry the rocks? Was it to cover the body in respect for the dead?”

“Maybe . . . ,” Sam replied, not wanting to talk about it. “Maybe it's to let them know they have to work for it . . . buy us some time to get out of here.” He took the reins to the mule cart, turned the dun to the trail and tapped his heels to its side.

The woman rode up close beside him as they heard the sound of wolves running alongside the trail in the opposite direction. Behind them they heard growling, arguing back and forth among the pack.

“You told Vernon Troxel you are hunting the
scalp hunters, the men who are paid by the Mexicans to kill Apache?” she asked.

“Yes, that's right,” Sam replied, putting the scene behind him out of his mind. “One of them anyway. He took part in killing a sheriff. Then he escaped jail.”

“Not because he kills the Apache and takes their scalps?” she asked.

“In this case, no,” Sam said. “It's no longer lawful to take scalps in my country. But these mercenaries stick close to the border. They get the Apache stirred up and get them on their trail. Then they kill them in self-defense, doesn't matter which side of the border they're on.” He looked at her. “Sounds rotten, I know, but that's how it's done.”

“Rotten . . . ?”
she asked curiously.

“Rotten means
bad
,
terrible
,” Sam said, clarifying the word for her.

“
Bad
I understand, and
terrible
too,” she said. She shook her head. “
Rotten
I have not heard, but I will remember. Please excuse my
rotten
inglés
?” She managed a weary smile, calmer now that wolves had been pacified, for the time being.

“Your English is not rotten,
ma'am. It's a lot better than my Spanish,” he said.
In fact. . . .
As he looked at her he wondered how her English could be so good for a peasant Guatemalan, as Troxel claimed her and her daughter to be.

“I learn
inglés
from the mission schools. After the Spanish priests whipped Spanish into our heads, they left, and in my time the mission school taught us
inglés
, only without the whip.”

“I understand,” Sam said. Although it was not really a satisfactory answer, he let it go. “You must be sleepy.” He nodded at the cart. “You and your daughter rest in the cart. I'll wake you when we stop closer to Iron Point.”

At the mention of the young girl and the cart, the woman sat upright in the saddle and adjusted herself and batted her eyes to ward off sleep.

“No, I will stay awake and keep you company,” she said. “You must excuse my daughter for falling asleep. She is so very young, and she needs a child's rest so she can someday grow to become a woman.” She looked at Sam as if to gauge his thoughts on the young girl.

“I understand,” Sam said. “Then we'll talk until you get too tired. Then you can get some sleep.” Even as he spoke, he knew the woman was up for the night, posting herself as guard between him and young Ana. . . .

Behind them in the night the wolves had scraped away the rocks and gone into a feeding frenzy. The woman looked back once nervously, then turned forward and gave Sam a tired smile. And they rode on.

*   *   *

In the silver-gray hour before dawn, the Ranger brought the mule cart and his dun to a halt alongside a stone-lined water hole that the mule's and horses' noses had brought them to, just off the sand-packed trail. As Sam and the woman stood beside the mule and the horses and let them drink, the girl looked down from the cart's edge and summoned the woman without saying a word. Sam
watched as the woman turned away and climbed up the side of the cart. While the two women whispered back and forth, he scanned the other side of the water hole and the cliffs and hill line stretching above it.

“He is dead, Ranger,” the woman said quietly over the cart's edge. “
Por favor
, come see for yourself.”

But Sam didn't respond right away. He continued scanning the hills and the cliffs that lay shrouded in a silvery looming mist.

“Open the rear gate,” he said over his shoulder barely above a whisper.

The woman and the young girl looked at each other, both sensing a wariness in the Ranger's tone.

Sam watched the hills closely as he heard the rear loading gate of the cart creak down to the dirt. When he was certain the cart was open from the rear, he stepped over and turned and looked at the pale lifeless face of the slaver. He glanced up at the bandaging on the dead man's chest, seeing it looked no different from before. He turned his gaze to the young girl, then back at the hills and rock across the water hole.

“Died in his sleep, did he?” he said quietly over his shoulder.

The girl stared to speak, but the woman cut her off.

“
Sí
, yes, he dies in his sleep, this
rotten
man,” she said. “You heard him all night, crying out to the dead, as if beckoning them to come for him.” Her tone was defensive.

“Yes, I heard him,” Sam said, knowing that it
would be pointless to try to suggest that the girl had anything to do with the slaver's death. And if he asked and she admitted it, what good would it do? What purpose would it serve?

The law . . . ? What law?
he asked himself, here in the border badlands where men, women and children were slaughtered for the color and shine of their hair.

He still stared off at the hills.

“We did not throw this
rotten
man out on the trail for the wolves to eat while he still lived,
sí
?” the woman said, unsure where the Ranger stood on the slaver's death.

“No, we didn't do that,” Sam said, understanding her meaning, giving her and the young girl the relief they appeared to need for some act they might or might not have contributed to.

“If we feed him to the wolves now that he is dead,” the woman went on to say, not realizing the Ranger had settled the matter in his mind, “would it be wrong, any more wrong than when you fed the wolves the body—”

“Get the gate up!” Sam said sharply, cutting her off. He gripped his rifle in his hands, ready to raise it to his shoulder.

The woman looked stunned. “I—I did not mean to say you did a bad thing—”

“Get the gate shut
now
, ma'am, pronto!” Sam said, again cutting her short. “We've got company.”

He heard the woman gasp; he heard the gate creak up and slam shut as he hurried forward between both horses. Grabbing the watering horses
by their bridles, he jerked them back from the water, to the side edge of the cart, making them and himself a smaller target. There was nothing he could do for the mule without turning the whole cart around—no time for that. This would have to do for now, he told himself.

As a last resort before firing the rifle, he scanned the rocky hillside one more time.

“Hello the water hole,” he called out, letting whoever was there know he'd seen them, even though what he'd seen was only a slightest movement of a ragged hat along an edge of jagged rock.

“Hello yourself,” a gruff voice called out in reply. “I hope you know if we didn't mean to be seen, you wouldn't be seeing us.”

“Sounds fair,” Sam said. “Now stand and come forward, be seen proper.”

“
Proper?
Ha!” said the voice. “If
proper
goes to heaven, I'm plumb bound for hell.”

Sam watched as shadowy figures rose among the rocks like ghosts. The man talking was tall and broad-shouldered, dressed in fringed buckskins and a battered Confederate cavalry uniform. The men on either side of him wore slouch hats and ragged coats. But they were smaller, their hair long, beneath drooping hat brims. As they stepped around from behind the rocks, Sam saw knee-high desert moccasins, loincloths. Some carried short-stock rifles; others carried bows with arrows strung and ready.