Crack in the Sky (33 page)

Was he crazy? Or had she really sought to hang on to Bass until the very last moment they might have to share, the last moment they would have to touch, to gaze into one another’s eyes?

As he watched Jacova float back across the front of
the room to rejoin her parents, Titus suddenly became aware of the hateful glare in the eyes of all those young soldiers arrayed just behind the governor, his wife, and daughter as the Mirabais stopped before Matthew. Mirabal motioned for Rosa to join her husband. While she shyly stepped to Kinkead’s side at the center of the
sala
, Bass noticed the governor’s daughter looking at him from beneath her long eyelashes.

“Maybeso that young’un’s got the idee to make herself your wife,” Rufus whispered, leaning into Bass’s shoulder.

With a reflex jerk Titus jabbed back with his elbow, planting it deep into Graham’s belly. Giving a noisy
ooomph
, Rufus stumbled back a step, snorting with laughter.

“What’s he saying now, Matthew?” Gray asked.

Kinkead translated in a whisper, “Says they’re gonna bring in the lamb and the calf now. I don’t figger there’s gonna be a empty belly in the whole house!”

At the far end of the room the crowd parted as four men stepped through the cordon, on their shoulders a large pewter platter atop which lay the roasted carcass of an entire lamb. Right behind them came four others, these carrying a roasted calf. Whistles of approval and cheers arose as the fragrance of the steaming meats washed over the room.

With his mouth already watering, Scratch had his knife halfway out of its scabbard before Kinkead locked his hand around Bass’s wrist.

“You’ll get your turn, pilgrim,” Matthew warned. “Let the women get their meat first.”

Suddenly shamed and remembering the long-ago social manners his mother had worked so hard to teach him, Bass dropped the knife back into its sheath. “I’m sorry, Matthew.”

With a wink the big man replied, “Don’t you need feel sorry, Titus. Folks like us, we ain’t got much call to show our proper manners what with the life we have in the mountains.”

When, if ever, had he gone and bowed to a gal …
much less kissed a woman’s hand? But in the last few minutes, here in a foreign land, he had just done both! Right in front of a whole room filled with gawking folks watching him as his face grew hot and his eyes smarted with embarrassment.

This was all something so different, so completely new to him. Oh, to be sure, many of the women he’d known could be brazen in their own way, usually when he found himself alone with them. Amy Whistler, even Abigail, the Ohio River whore. And Marissa wasn’t shy at all about letting him know exactly what she had on her mind when she came sneaking out to where he had his blankets laid in her father’s barn.

Now, those Injun gals, Fawn and Pretty Water, they had never appeared to worry about the niceties of preliminaries nor concerned themselves with social appearances. Behind the dropped door of their lodges, neither had a problem showing Titus just what they wanted from him of a sexual nature. There was no clutter of polite manners to get in the way of man and woman taking what they needed most from one another.

So it struck him as all the more flattering that this young woman had made her thoughts abundantly clear through nothing more than that steamy look in her eyes and the way she gripped his hand until her mother demanded she move on down the line.

Through the early part of the evening Bass had danced one lively
jota
after another with a succession of young women brought up and introduced to him by Matthew and Rosa. There had been a Carmelita, a Maria, and a Linda, those three somehow rememberable among all the faceless others who came to sway at the end of his arms in that Mexican dance so reminding him of a country reel, each of those perfumed females smiling politely through their song, then turning away before he could escort them back to their side of the room.

“Don’t you know Jacova’s mama is gonna keep a close eye on that girl now, Scratch,” Kinkead warned hours later after the lamb and calf were no more than greasy platters heaped with bones, long after the musicians
were beginning to tire and the room had grown unbearably warm from all the heated bodies pulsing to those most ancient rhythms of the courtship ritual.

Bass turned to Matthew. “Whose mama?”

“Jacova’s mama,” Kinkead chided. “The governor’s wife. It’s his daughter you gone and got all moon-eyed over.”

“I ain’t moon-eyed,” he snapped.

“Well, she sure as hell is,” Matthew snorted with a wink. “Best you just forget that girl afore she spells trouble for you.”

“I ain’t about to do a thing to make for trouble—”

“G’won and set your eye on one of them others,” Kinkead suggested. “Like Hatcher there.”

“Jack ain’t about to sit out a dance!” Caleb gushed as he came up, a clay cup in one hand, a rib he was tearing meat from in the other.

“See how I got him a good woman to take a whirl with and he’s a happy man, Titus,” Matthew boasted. “Now, whyn’t you do the same and forget that Jacova Mirabal.”

“I ain’t thinking ’bout Jacova!”

Kinkead jabbed an elbow in Caleb’s side. “Looks to me you gone all soft-brained over her.”

“Then bring me ’Nother girl to dance with or leave me be!” Bass grumbled, his forehead hot as all-night coals—already sensing the long evening’s potent liquor. “To hell with what’s right and what’s wrong with these here Mex folks. Can’t think of nothing better to do than drink till my own feet don’t hold me up no more.”

“You’re damned near that now!” Rufus said as he came back to the group at the end of a song.

“That Hatcher,” Bass said, watching Jack standing near the center of the floor, holding both hands with a comely maid until the next song started. Just beyond them stood at least a dozen young Mexican men glaring at the lone American.

“Tell me, Matthew—she a gal gonna get Jack in trouble?”

“Nawww, she’s the sort gonna get us
all
in trouble,” Kinkead replied. “That’s Consuela Guerrero.”

Bass licked his lips, thinking how lucky Hatcher was to be getting all that attention from such an alluring woman arrayed in black lace stretched tight against her dark-brown skin. “She’s a purty one.”

Matthew clucked, “Her husband was the officer what got hisself killed by the Comanche when we brung back the women.”

“That’s her?”

Kinkead nodded. “The widow Guerrero her own self.”

“What’s she doing here after her husband got hisself kill’t?” Caleb asked.

“Why, lookit there—the widder is wearin’ black!” Elbridge said, patting the beginnings of a potbelly slipping over his belt.

“Wonder if she’s gonna be wearing black all night?” Bass snorted with a grin. “Or if she’s gonna shuck herself outta them widder’s weeds for Mad Jack Hatcher!”

In a flurry the following moment, Kinkead pushed away from the rest of them, leaving his Rosa behind as he warned, “Jack ain’t never gonna know now!”

Their eyes followed Matthew into the crowd, finding the dancers at the center of the floor suddenly shoving backward, getting themselves as far as possible from the spot where Hatcher stood imprisoned by two large Mexican soldiers as Lieutenant Jorge Ramirez yanked the widow away from the American, whirling her back by her arm. She screamed, swinging out with her flat hand. But the lieutenant caught it, held it prisoner while he shouted at her and the room grew hushed, the music ending in discordant notes.

“What’s he saying to her, Kinkead!” Hatcher bellowed, twisting this way and that, trying to free himself from the two men who had him stymied.

“Telling her she ain’t got no business dancing with you—not when her husband is in his grave because of us gringos.”

Every set of American eyes snapped to Ramirez as the
trappers came to a stop arrayed on either side of Matthew Kinkead.

His eyes narrowing into a feral wildness, Jack echoed, “He said her husband’s dead ’cause … ’cause of us?”

“Shit!” Caleb growled. “The rest of them li’l wooden soldiers be nothing more’n buzzard bait right now if’n it weren’t for the likes of us!”

Jack tried again to twist away from his handlers. “Tell these sumbitches let me go!”

Matthew spat some of the foreign tongue at the soldiers being joined by young men in civilian clothing. In their sashes were jammed pistols, and from their wide belts hung stiletto knives and short swords.

The lieutenant howled with a derisive laugh, then snarled something in reply.

“Caleb—get these greasers off’n me!”

Speaking low, Caleb said, “Elbridge, you and Scratch come with me to get Hatcher free.”

“That’ll start the dance!” Gray said.

“Fight now, or fight later,” Caleb snapped. “We damn well ain’t gonna show the white feather to these here greasers tonight!”

With those words still in the air, the trio descended upon the two soldiers so suddenly, the Mexicans let go of their prisoner on reflex to reach for their weapons. Hatcher whirled on one of them like a wild blur, his bony fist cracking into the soldier’s jaw like a twenty-pound sledge colliding with solid hickory. Bass was right behind Hatcher as Elbridge and Caleb leaped into the second soldier.

In the next heartbeat Matthew and the others surged past Titus in a blur, lunging toward bystanders on all sides the moment the Mexican males jumped out of the crowd to resist the gringo attack. Women screeched. Furniture was overturned and crumbled. Clay and glass shattered against walls and the hard earth floor. Men grunted as bodies slammed together.

Isaac was suddenly there beside Bass, grabbing Scratch’s hand—shoving into it a thick piece of a broken chair that felt as big as a horse’s leg. An instant later the
stocky Simms turned aside, slapping another chair leg into Rufus’s hand. That done, Isaac began swinging two chair legs over his own head as he hurtled toward the worst of the fighting.

First one, and a second, then more heads cracked loudly in that noisy room as the three of them cleared a swath right into the soldiers and their civilian friends. Joining Hatcher and the rest, they kept swinging their crude weapons as they retreated to the center of the room, eyes quickly darting this way and that. The trappers crowded back together, each of them facing out like herd bulls protectively surrounding the cows and calves against a pack of wolves snarling, yapping, dodging in to slash at a hamstring.

“No guns!” the governor bellowed in English from the platform.

His futile warning was hardly heard above the frightening clamor as the soldiers warily inched toward the ring of eight Americans, their pistols and knives, swords and shards of broken glass, held before them as they closed the noose.

“No guns, señores!” Mirabal warned again, louder still, as the Mexicans came within striking distance.

“Get ready for the nut-cutting, boys!” Hatcher bawled, his arm slowly waving his own knife back and forth as he went into a crouch, preparing for the coming clash. He took a quick feint toward the closest adversary—getting the soldier to leap back—then Jack rocked onto the balls of his feet, body swaying side to side as he laughed.

Bass knew Hatcher was laughing at death.

Hell, he could smell that stinking odor of death all around them in this room.

Suddenly certain he was about to die.

Instead of making a life for himself within the bosom of the high and lonely places, he was going to shed his life’s blood here on this clay floor in a foreign land, cut to ribbons by greasers, perhaps with a Mexican bullet in his heart.

Where was his mother’s god now?

Why would any god leave him to die after he’d somehow
survived those long years rotting in St. Louis, lasted long enough to make it to the Rocky Mountains on his own hook? Why would a god that ruled from the heavens above abandon him now after the Arapaho had tried twice to kill him? Blackfeet done their best too….

So he was to die among these Christian people whose eyes were filled with such hate.

As Mirabal’s daughter rushed onto the platform, lunging across the last two steps to clutch her father’s arm, screaming at him, the governor shoved Jacova behind him and continued yelling into the pandemonium.

Suddenly Mirabal drew his own pistol from the wide red sash there beneath the short-waisted
chaqueta
.

At that instant the screaming women were falling back toward the walls, leaving the two rings of antagonists alone in the middle of the long
sala:
that small knot of outnumbered Americans at the center, a thick ring of Mexican rivals surrounding them.

Firing his weapon into one of the thick wooden beams above their heads, Mirabal instantly silenced the entire room. The soldiers spun with a jerk. And the trappers looked up in alarm.

Bass wondered, Was this the signal for the killing to begin?

When he had their attention, the governor began to speak again in his loud, certain voice.

“He just ordered them
soldados
to put their pistols away,” Kinkead translated breathlessly.

For a moment no one moved; then the first of the soldiers began to comply … as if they had weighed the
odds of disobeying not only their governor but their gracious host. The haughty Mexicans stuffed their pistols back into the colorful sashes tied around their waists, still brandishing their knives and short swords with unmasked glee.