In the Rogue Blood (29 page)

They found the animals unattended in the ravine, Patterson gone. His trail led off toward a line of blue mountains to the north and he had taken two horses from the caballada. Hobbes dispatched Chato the Breed and one of the Shawnees after him and sent Sly Buck and the rest of the scouts as outriders to cut for sign in the west. Then the company got moving again, bringing the stolen Apache stock behind with their own horses. None of the captive Mexican women had survived the fight and
so were scalped also and left to the scavengers with the other dead at Fuente de Dios. The only one in the company to suffer injury was Castro the Spaniard who hated mestizos as ardently as he hated Indians. Many of the indios at least owned courage, he often expounded, but the mestizos were craven mongrel dogs, shaped from the worst traits of both races and possessing nothing of the admirable from either. He’d slipped coming down off the tablerock and fractured his left arm. Doc Devlin had set it and bound it in a splint and the Spaniard had made a big show of how well he could yet handle and even spin his pistol with his good right hand lest Hobbes think him unable to carry his share of the load.

A Shawnee outrider returned at midday to report sign of the savages ten miles ahead. Hobbes appointed the Spaniard and the Shawnee to bring along the stock and the company set out riding hard and that evening caught up to Sly Buck and the other scouts. The Encantadas were a hard red rockline to their right. On the far horizon, visible between a pair of short low ranges, could be seen the ghostly forms of the Chisos standing on the other side of the Rio Bravo del Norte where it formed a deep southern bend. The Apaches had made a jerkycamp at the foot of the nearest mountains. The Shawnees guessed them to be the rest of the raiders’ clan. They told Hobbes it was composed mostly of women and children with but a few braves to watch over them.

“Easy pickins,” said John Allen.

They attacked from the east at daybreak like demons unloosed from the hell-red sun itself, galloping through the heart of the camp and shooting down every man in sight and then reining about and riding through again and this time shooting anything still on its feet and setting afire the scattered hogans shaped of saplings and hides. And then they were off their mounts and shooting whatever still drew breath and one dying warrior rose to his knees and loosed an arrow into Runyon’s lower belly that sat him down cursing and Himmler ran forward and with a twohanded swipe of his bowie lifted the archer’s head from its mooring in a great spout of blood and sent it arcing to hit the ground and roll within reach of a stake-tied dog that fastened onto it and shook the thing viciously in its crazed excitement.

And then there was only the moaning and keening of the dying women and children and the company walked through the carnage and shot them dead every one. And when they had done with their business they had increased their harvest by thirty-eight scalps. Hobbes put the expert Shawnees to trimming the hair on the women’s scalps the better to pass
them off as belonging to warriors and reaping the higher bounty.

They supped on the meat the Indians had hung to dry on scrub brush and mesquite limbs, all but Runyon who had been helped into the shade of a rockface and now sat with his back to the rockwall and his hands holding tight on his belly around the protruding arrow shaft. Hobbes had come to have a look and then moved aside for Doc Devlin who made an examination and said he could do nothing.

“Soon’s I yank her out you’ll die.”

“Well hell,” Runyon grunted through his teeth, “I can’t go around with no arrow sticking out my gut.”

“No you can’t,” said Doc Devlin. And because there was nothing more to be said he and Hobbes repaired to the fire to join the others at supper and left Runyon to mull his circumstance.

At the fire Lionel and Linus Jessup were smiling and showing off their newly begun necklaces of Indian ears. They hailed from the northernmost reaches of Minnesota and had come to Mexico to see the elephant and had stayed to flay its hide.

Later that night Chato and the Shawnee arrived with Patterson in tow on his horse and with his hands bound behind him. They brought in the other two horses as well. But for a bloody arm wound received from Chato’s longrifle Patterson was unhurt. He grinned down at the gathered men and called salutations to some but none hailed him in return nor even smiled at him.

Hobbes said for someone to yank the sorry son of a bitch off the horse for he would not look up to the likes of him now or ever. John Allen grabbed one of Patterson’s feet from the stirrup and shoved his leg outward and up and thus unsaddled the traitor. Himmler pulled him to his feet by his shirt collar and stood him before the captain and Hobbes asked what he had to say for himself.

“If I aint to be but a horseholder I want nary more to do with this compny,” Patterson said.

“I say what every manjack in this compny do and don’t do,” Hobbes said.

“I say I aint no damn horseholder.”

Hobbes punched him in the mouth and Patterson went down and Himmler stood him up again. Patterson worked his tongue in his bloody mouth and spat a tooth at Hobbe’s feet and said, “Put that on yer necklace, ye damn twistbrain.” Hobbes hit him and blood flew from his mouth as he went down once more and this time no man made to pull him up.

“I won’t abide a quitter,” Hobbes said. He kicked Patterson in the short ribs and Patterson rolled against his horse’s legs and the horse shied and nearly stomped him as though even it found him contemptible. One of the Jessups grabbed the reins and pulled the animal away.

“Man who quits on his compny’s the lowest thing there is,” Hobbes said, kicking at Patterson as the man tried to scrabble away from him, following after him, kicking at him again, trying for his balls. “Man quits his company is spittin on every man rode with him, but
he’s
the one aint worth spit. He aint worth half that dog yonder.” He gestured at the rope-staked dog glowering and snarling at every man to pass by. He kicked Patterson again and said, “Get him out my sight till I decide what to do with the sorry whoreson.”

By sunup he’d decided. He had Patterson hoisted onto his horse and tied to the saddle with his hands bound behind him still. He told him if he tried turning the horse to north or south or back to eastward the first outrider to spot him would shoot the horse from under him and leave him to die of thirst alongside his dead animal.

“Only way you can go is west,” Hobbes told him. “Now go!” He lashed the horse’s hindquarters and it bolted so fast Patterson nearly tumbled from the saddle. They watched him diminish into the vast flat desertland on the cantering horse until he was but a dark speck wavering in the rising heat and then he was visible no more.

“Why’s he let him go, he hates quitters so much?” Edward asked Jaggers.

Jaggers looked at him. “He aint let him go but into the Apacheria. That’s how much he hates a quitter.”

Hobbes cut the rope holding the Indian dog to its stake and for a moment the animal stood crouched with its nape roached and teeth bared. It slowly circled away from Hobbes and the other men looking on and then sprinted over a low rise and was gone.

Now the company prepared to ride out and Runyon’s eyes followed first one man and then another as they caught up their horses and made ready. The Spaniard had arrived with the caballada and the herd of captured stock and to it were added the newly taken Indian ponies. No man met Runyon’s gaze. Then Hobbes went to him and asked if he had a charged pistol. Runy on removed one bloody hand from alongside the arrow in his belly and withdrew a loaded Colt from under his jacket and laid it beside him.

“It’s naught I can offer ye, Teddy,” Hobbes said, “except if you want
it done I’ll oblige ye.” He already held a cocked pistol in his hand and he glanced now to the far horizons. “Others of em might be by before you’re done.”

Runyon stared up at him for a moment and then dropped his eyes to his wound and shook his head.

“You know how they’ll do ye. Better a bullet than that.”

“No,” Runyon said. “Aint fittin.”

“It’s no shame in it, man,” Hobbes said in barely above a whisper.

Runyon shook his head without looking up. He said no more.

Hobbes waited a moment longer and then uncocked and holstered his pistol. He went to his horse and mounted up and led the company out to westward. Edward looked back and saw Runyon sitting as before and looking after them, and then he turned forward and did not look back again.

They were now deep into the bloodlands, into regions labeled “unknown” on maps and marked by sharply rugged ranges interspersed with immense bolsóns and dry cracked playas that lay hazed and shimmering in the rising heat of the emptiness under the white sun. The fiercest of these wastes was the Bolsón de Mapimí whose northern reach they now traversed and whose gray wavering flatness lay unbroken to the horizon in every direction but for scattered low buttes and a jagged blue line of mountains showing far to the north.

The nights quivered with the crying of coyotes. He dreamt one night he saw Daddyjack sitting on a rock in an immense desert, watching the company go by and grinning as if he knew them all. And indeed Hobbes raised a hand in greeting of him, and Padre Foreman called out, “How do, Haywood!” and John Allen touched his hat brim and said, “Good to see you, Jack.” Edward nodded as he passed and Daddyjack grinned and said, “Make youself to home, boy.”

Three days out they spied a high noon dust cloud rising quickly from west by north and Hobbes ordered the company into a shallow gully and there every man unsheathed his rifle and set himself to stand against a heathen attack. After a time the source of the dust came thundering into view and went galloping past and was but a breathtaking herd of hundreds of mustangs wilder even than the company mounts had been at
breaking. The scalpers had a devilish time holding their animals down against their trumpeting lunges to break free and join with their wild passing blood. They anyway lost four of the caballada to the mesteños.

Two days later they spied a small dark form in the vastness ahead and by and by drew near enough to make out it was a solitary and skeletal mesquite whose bare thorny branches were hung with something that on drawing nearer they saw was what had once been a man. It was Patterson hung upside down on the tree. His eyelids had been excised and his genitals cut away and put into his mouth and he had been scalped and completely flayed. Through the raw striations of his sunroasted flesh were visible his pale ribs and hipbones. His eyes looked to be cooked solid as boiled eggs. The ground beneath him was stained black with his fallen blood.

Edward had heard a hundred tales of things men did to one another in times of war. How the Creeks had done to the whites at Mims and how Jackson had done to the Creeks at Horseshoe Bend, how the Mexicans had done to the Texians at the Alamo, how Houston’s army had done to Santa Ana’s fallen soldiers at San Jacinto. He believed he himself had already seen all possible example of human cruelty and well knew its vast inventiveness. But he’d no acquaintance with such as he now beheld. He was at once informed with dread at the thing in the tree and with an admiration for the purity of its horror. And he felt now the certain realization that here in this maledict portion of the world was truly where such as he and his fellows in this company of the damned properly belonged—here where blood was both common instrument of commerce and venerated tool of art.

Finn dismounted and stepped up for closer examination and then took a quick step back and said, “God
damn
, it’s alive!”

As if to prove him right the thing on the tree did emit a weak fluttering groan through the bulge of genitalia in its mouth. The horses sidled and tossed their heads and rolled their eyes white, sensing perhaps some tremor in the riders they carried. Hobbes pulled his pistol and drew bead and fired into the head of the wretched thing and only then did the muscles unflex and the body sag fully dead.

The company settled their mounts as Hobbes holstered his Colt and his horse whirled in a quick tight circle before he reined it steady. He pointed at the thing on the tree and shouted, “See him! See him who quit this company!” He looked and sounded like a crazed Old Testament
prophet who’d known exactly what fate awaited this wretched apostate in the wilderness.

“See this one who broke faith with his fellows!
See
him!”

And he heeled his horse forward and the company hastened after him into the deeper wilds.

So much had Patterson’s perfidy enraged James Kirkson Hobbes that he set the company upon the very next consort of Indians they encountered and said devil take it when Doc Devlin remarked that they were no relation to the Apache but a people who meant harm to no man. “Hair, boys!” he called as he pulled his Colt and raised his arm in signal for them to charge the luckless Indians. “Take it all!” And in less than ten minutes they did.

They rode on with nineteen more scalps freshly salted and hung on their mules and the smell of hard death holding close about them. Wolves trailed them in the open light of day and sometimes loped out on their flanks and some in the company shot at them but never hit even one. The nights were rent with their howling.

Now the company turned north and in time came to a range of nameless mountains and ascended the switchback trails through the scrubbrush and from the rimrock scouted the boisóns below wavering in the rising heat. They saw but two nightfires over the next weeks and one proved to be that of a large bandit gang that gave them wide berth on the playa the next day. The Shawnees reported the other campfire as belonging to a unit of Mexican cavalry that rarely ventured into this portion of wildland and the company swung wide and rode through the night to put distance between them and the army by daybreak.

In Barrenitos they took an evening’s respite and left behind them in the red dawn two maimed locals and one dead who’d confronted Himmler and Huddlestone in a matter of honor involving some women of the village. In San Pedro where they were greeted as venerable protectors from the demon aborigines Castro was obliged to kill a citizen who raised armed objection to the Spaniard’s flirtations with his daughter. They crossed the Río Conchos in a brief hard rain that roused the smells of hot sand and creosote in its steamy aftermath. Then reached the Sierras de la Tasajera and ascended into forests of dwarf oaks and pine and
manzanita. They scouted the ridges and scanned the flats below and then descended on the switchbacks and defiled onto the flatland and rode on. They saw no living thing for days on end save a few hardy lizards and some high-sailing zopilotes.

West of Gallego they could see four separate rainstorms raging blackly in the distances before and behind them but there was hint of neither shade nor moisture for miles around the ground they crossed. They blacked their eyes and the eyes of their horses yet the underside of the men’s faces got burned from the sun’s fierce reflection off the hardpan. In time they came to scrubland once again and to a minuscule muddy creek where they watered. Next day they arrived at a village whose name none in the company knew nor asked after. In the solitary cantina on the sole street of that forsaken place of a dozen adobe buildings they were informed of the rumor that the Apaches had only a few days before slaughtered a small train of pilgrims on the trail not fifteen miles westward at the foot of the Tunas range whose low blue peaks were visible from the doorway of the cantina where they drank.

Well before dawn they were headed for the Tunas. In time they came upon the remains of the train—charred wood and blackened axles and the scattered savaged corpses humming with flies and some few dead and bloated animals. Their spirits rose at this proof of Apache proximity and they set upon the raiders’ trail and followed it to the mountains. But here the ground was all loose stone and the possible trails were various and even the Shawnees argued among themselves about which to follow and Hobbes in his urgency finally pointed up the mountainside and said, “That way.” And that way they went.

But this trail did not cut through a pass as Hobbes had thought but rather climbed and narrowed and became yet more unsure as it steepened. A rock wall rose on their right and the earth fell away on their left as the night descended like a black shroud. Every man now knew the Indians had not driven their stock by this high trail and yet Hobbes pressed them onwards in the darkness thinking to get sufficient elevation to sight them come the dawn. They could see the pinpoint lanternlights that marked the village they had departed nearly a day earlier. Then Chato the Breed’s horse lost its footing and Chato just did sprawl to safety before the pony toppled over the ledge and went twirling and screaming into the void and then vanished into silence. Sometime thereafter they arrived at a tablerock and there Hobbes put down their camp. They scanned the vast blackness
but spied nothing but lightning jagging brightwhite and silent at the far end of the earth.

The following morning broke blood red over the eastern ranges and saw a sudden rising of thunderheads. The sky darkened in its entirety and then the rain came down in gusting torrents. They feared the narrow trail might wash out from under them but it held and that afternoon the sun reemerged and steam rose off their horses. They achieved a rimrock peak and scouted the horizon in every direction but saw no sign of the Apache. They were two days coming off the Tunas and it rained on them most of the way.

For weeks to follow they found no sign of quarry. They thought that word of their coming must have spread and the Indio was on keener watch and in better hiding. They rode deep into the night and set fires in one place and camped without fire a few miles removed to try to lure the heathen but no Indians did appear. They ranged in wide searching loops and the Shawnees cut for sign in vain. They traversed vast and shifting gypsum dunes as fine as lady’s facepowder through which the ponies and mules labored for breath like bellows. The wind blew the sand like seaspray but only the whited bones of men and animals did they find there. They crossed shimmering flats empty of vegetation but for occasional saltbrush and stunted cactus. They rode up narrow arroyos to mesa tops and searched the terrain to every point of the compass and then descended again and rode out into the broiling cracked flats of the playas. They lay on their bellies to skylight the horizon for sign of men to kill. They dismounted and sat out a sandstorm for all of a night and most of the next day behind the shelter of their horses and were sitting in sand to their waists when it was past and their horses looked formed of silicate crystals. Some of the animals had gone blind and so were shot and butchered and their meat jerked.

They searched the night for flicker of campfire but saw none, saw only the distant flash of silent lightning casting its blue shimmer over the empty land. And then came a night they descried the bare glintings of fires to the north. They rode hard in that direction three nights running and on the third night they had closed to within two miles of their quarry. Hobbes put down a fireless camp and sent the Shawnees ahead. Just before first light they returned with the news that it was a party of forty Apaches returning home from a raid with many fresh scalps and driving a herd of some three dozen stolen horses and mules.

They struck at dawn in their usual strategy, one arm of the company
led by John Allen closing from one flank and another led by Hobbes closing from the other side. They killed half the party in the first charge and pursued the others the day long before at last overhauling them at dusk at a low outcrop and there fighting them through the night and finally overcoming them at the first light of the following day. The company’s only loss was one of the Shawnees and the keening of his four tribesmen was great as they sang the death song at his burial in the rocks. In addition to the forty-two scalps they took themselves they gained twenty-two more their prey had carried, and their horses and mules as well.

On their way back south they met with a band of thirty Indians of a tribe not recognized by any in the company. When the jefe of this band raised his bare hand in greeting of them John Allen said, “Looks a hostile move to me.”

Hobbes drew his pistol and shot the jefe through the throat and the company fell on them and slaughtered them one and all.