In the Rogue Blood (31 page)

They were most of them hungover and some still drunk when the captain roused the company at first light. Men had slept where they’d fallen and now raised themselves with the slow unsure action of rusted machinery, their heartbeats jabbing in their heads like cactus spines. Hobbes himself was redeyed and ensconced at the single campfire that still burned and which he’d mended to the right flame for making coffee. John Allen sat close to the fire too and nursed his own headpains with a cup of coffee laced with cornmash. The top of the mesa highwall was the color of raw beef in the first rays of the sun. The Shawnees were burying their kinsman under a shelf jutting from the lower rockwall and for the second time in his life Edward heard their quivering death song.

A few yards away sat Tom Finn, slackfaced and barechested and wild of hair, digging intently and deep down the front of his trousers. He withdrew his hand with the thumbnail and forefinger pinched together and studied his catch closely and then leant forward and pressed it into the sand and covered it over.

And now this way came Huddlestone and Holcomb and Castro, all three wretchedly besotted and trudging laboriously. As they passed by Finn, Huddlestone sneered down at him and then said something to his companions and all three men laughed lowly. Finn looked after them for a moment and then rose to his feet as smoothly as a snake uncoiling. He brandished an enormous bowie in both hands like a broadsword. Castro
glanced back and saw him coming and fell aside and Holcomb too saw him and stopped walking as Finn stepped past them with the bowie over his head in the manner of one about to axe firewood. Perhaps Huddlestone heard the whisper of the blade as it descended. It clove his head with a wet
shunk!
to a point between his eye and his patched socket and for an instant they were joined, these comrades in arms, by the blade halfway through the center of Huddlestone’s head and the haft tight in Finn’s grip. Finn gave the bowie a grunting twist and the blade torqued apart the skulltop with a sound like sundering wood. He withdrew the blade as Huddlestone fell forward with all thoughts and plans and memories vanished from the spilling stew of his brains and blood. He lit on his face and gore jumped from his gaping head to shape a broad stain over the forward ground he never achieved.

Tom Finn turned and walked back to where his gear lay and his face read of no inward disturbance. He wiped the blade clean on his shirt and sheathed it and then put the shirt on and all the men looked to Hobbes to see what he might do. For a long moment the captain stared at Finn going about his business and then looked to Huddlestone on the ground and then he looked away from both and said: “Let’s move.”

Every man turned to the loading of the mules and assembly of his own outfit and within the hour the seventeen men remaining in the company set out to westward with their train of fifty-eight mules of recovered goods. Among the fallen and scalped aboriginal dead left to the gathering flock of buzzards were the cloven-skulled remains of Huddlestone whose bones the birds and coyotes would soon denude of all flesh and anyone to come upon them later would not know whose bones they had been. The bones would dry and crack and break apart in the sun and be blown over by the sand so that in time there would be no sign at all of what had once been Lonwell Pike Huddlestone of High River, Kentucky. And those few who had known him in manhood would be dead too and so not even memory of him would exist and it would be as though he had never set foot in the world.

None in the company knew the reason Finn had killed him. If Finn himself knew he did not say, not that day, which was the last left to them all but one.

Late that afternoon they were in the deep reach of a shimmering bolsón and sixty miles distant from the nearest ranges showing on the horizon as thin wavering lines of red stone when they spied a dust cloud swelling off the open horizon to southwestward. John Allen said that likely as not it was another wild bunch of mustangs headed for the grasslands. “Maybe so,” Hobbes said. He glanced about uneasily at the utter lack of bulwark on the vast surround of hardbaked playa. He ordered a circle of packmules and every man drew his longarm and sat his horse inside the ring of mules and watched the dust draw nearer and billow higher and wider. It had to be a thousand head or more to raise such dust at that distance and none of them had seen a wild herd as large as that. They sat their horses and spat and watched as the first of the robust little mustangs took shape at the fore of the advancing dust and the faint thrumming of their hooves carried on the waveringly hot and dusty air.

“It’s more horses than the boils on Job’s ass,” said John Allen. “Aint nobody can
drive
that many of them crazy jugheads. It’s a wild bunch.”

Now the alkaline dust rolled thickly over them and in the light of the low red sun the world assumed a crimson haze as if submerged in a bloodstained tide. The ground trembled beneath them as the pounding hooves came closer and now a mustang came racing past with tangled mane streaming and neck outstretched and eyes huge and white and froth flying from its flanks and behind it came the rest of the herd. The company’s mules shied and lunged and Hobbes shouted for his men to hold the animals fast. Galloping mustangs swept past either side of the encircled company like a crashing river of horseflesh breaking round an island.

The men eased down the hammers of their guns and some resheathed their rifles and all of them grinned like lunatics in the red haze and every man among them felt kinship with this brute roving herd of the bloodland.

Then in that swirling dust they saw horses with trimmed manes and tails and with brands on their haunches and the men of the company exchanged fast looks and Edward heard John Allen yell out. He turned and saw him standing in the stirrups and staring hard into the dense red dust and there suddenly appeared a brightly fletched arrow through his neck. Allen’s hand rose toward it and stopped midway and he fell forward onto his horse’s neck and the animal shied and John Allen toppled dead from the saddle.

A great fluttering rain of arrows swooped upon them and mules and horses cried out and reared and broke from the train. An arrow sucked into Doc Devlin’s chest. Another transfixed Castro’s leg to his mount and horse and rider together went down screaming.

There came now a howling to seize the Christian heart. Out of the red dust and not eighty yards distant there appeared a horde of shrieking savages sounding like legions of Pandemonium, all in black faces and body paint of madhouse designs and brandishing bows and lances and clubs and clenching ready arrows in their teeth and even their horses were painted and seemed to be howling too with mouths open wide and huge teeth bared. A second flurry of arrows shuddered into the company before it had yet got off its first shot and another dozen mules and a scattering of horses and some of the animals in the passing herd too went down. One of the Jessups tumbled from his saddle and the Australian Holcomb grunted alongside Edward and clutched at the arrow in his arm. Hobbes was dismounted and shooting with a pistol in each hand and yelling orders never heard in that hellish din of war cries and curses and the screams of rent men and animals. The company sought cover behind fallen packmules and Edward slid off the Janey mare and ran past Padre Foreman lying prone and shooting even as a pair of feathered arrows angled from his back like fates come to roost. He threw himself behind a downed mule and fired all five rounds of his carbine so quickly he thought he had fired but once and was enraged at the weapon and flung it aside and drew his revolver and shot a savage off his horse at twenty yards and fired again and an Indian pony went down at full gallop and flung its rider and the animal came tumbling head over heels at Edward who ducked behind the cargo pack as the paint pony went over him in a wild screaming flail of legs. He raised his head and an arrow flensed his cheekbone. And now the horde was fully on them and their demonically howling black faces everywhere and he shot one through the eye not five feet from him and then felt his chin strike the ground. His face was pressed to the sand and he wanted to rise but could not move and could not draw breath and then felt his hair clutched and his head was jerked up and directly before him was the wide-rent belly of a fallen mule and its huge welter of bloody viscera and he felt a sharp line of pain across the top of his forehead an instant before the very roof of the world ripped away and a great heaviness fell over him and then all was mute darkness.

And in darkness he awoke. He heard a heavy droning of flies. The crown of his head felt afire. His limbs would not obey his commands to move and he thought he was paralyzed, perhaps his spine severed, his neck broken. He knew his eyes were open but he could see nothing and so thought he was blind as well. Then his right arm flexed and he realized he was but pinioned under a heavy weight and he strained and struggled until at last he was able to wriggle out from between the dead horse and mule where he’d been snugged. He raised a raging swarm of greenflies as he came free. He felt something brush his back and he flinched and turned and saw an enormous black vulture tottering away, nodding its ugly redly naked head and holding its wings out in a perverse gesture of priestly blessing. He sat up and saw vultures everywhere in dusty twilight but could not tell if it was end of day or its beginning, could not for the moment determine east from west. He at last made out the brighter sky in the east and gained his directional bearings.

Wherever he looked was carnage. The carrion birds probed and tore and fed upon it with sounds like sloppy chuckling. He stood and swayed but held his balance. To the north he saw a long low cloud of dust that marked the savages’ progress on the trail home to the high plains.

He wandered about like a drunk on ground sogged with blood and the void of animals and the rising stench might have originated in the bowels of hell. Mules and horses and men lay in grotesquely twisted attitudes. No man remained clothed or intact or unscalped. He recognized Padre Foreman’s pale large-girthed corpus despite its missing face. The padre’s private parts had been cut away and all other men the same. Here lay Tom Finn, yesterday’s killer of Huddlestone, now tonsured to the bloody bone and with an arrow jutting from his eye and one arm hacked away. And here a Jessup sprawled and there another and vultures squabbled over the entrails of both. Yonder lay the unmistakable blackbearded remains of eviscerated Bill Jaggers who had reprieved him from prison and introduced him to the lucrative trade of Indiankilling. He found too what remained of John Allen and the Spaniard Castro. Holcomb the Australian. Doc Devlin. All of them with their forearms flayed and the bones of them removed to be fashioned into flutes for the warriors’ favored children.

Himmler was gutted to the backbone and Geech so savagely mutilated Edward would not have known him but for the tattooed “Tess” over his
heart. The only Shawnee he recognized as such was Sly Buck, who lay bellydown over a cargopack of rice with his hands cut away and his severed genitals stuffed in his mouth and a feathered lance in his rectum. Hobbes he found headless.

He searched for the Janey mare but saw none among the dead animals that looked like her and he reckoned the savages had her. His head was searing still and the sight of so many heads bared raw and bloody to the morning sun prompted him to put a hand to his own head and he howled at the white pain and his fingers came away sticky with coagulating blood and he knew then that among the scalps being carried in triumph back to the Comancheria was his own.

He scavenged intently through the slaughter and found three canteens that yet held water, one nearly half full. He found too a hat and was able to set it on his head so that no part of it pressed on his wound. He had the bowie he’d been wearing and the Colt he’d been clutching when he fell and he still had his charge pouch and he now loaded the pistol. The only packs the savages left behind contained commodities as useless to him as to them. He sliced out a portion of the flank of a horse and skinned it and cut it in strips and attached the strips to arrows to jerk in the sun.

The nearest range stood in thin red silhouette to the north-by-east and he made it for the Sierra Ponce mountains and knew that springs ran through the foothills there. He set out toward them, the meat-hung arrows stuck into his belt and positioned to catch the brunt of the sun. He walked the day long and his head flared with every heartbeat. He several times cried out against the pain and twice almost swooned and had to stop to rest. When the setting sun again bathed the bolsón in a blood-red haze the narrow line of mountains on the horizon appeared but barely larger than when he had started for it. He had no idea how much distance he had covered. He’d gathered sticks he came upon as he walked and now had a small bundle of firewood under his arm when he put down for the night in that vast waste. He’d drunk up the two lesser canteens during the day and now vowed to take but five swallows of water from the remaining almost-half-full canteen but he took ten before he could stop. The wind blew cold and his little fire lunged and flattened and swirled and jumped like a thing desperate to escape its own essence. He roasted
a few strips of horsemeat and ate them before they were fully cooked. Then he lay down and curled tight into himself and nearly howled with the pain of his scalp wound. He awoke with a start in the middle of the night and was not sure if the beast he saw in the dim cast of the moon was coyote or wolf or yet something else but in an instant it was vanished in the darkness with his horsemeat.

The next day he saw a storm raging blackly over the mountains ahead and the jagged blanched lightning and believed he could hear the faint rumble of its thunder but the rain did not come his way and he walked the day long under a relentless sun. He dreamt that night of firestorms rent with screams, of stone streets running with blood, and he wanted to wake but could not, not until the first gray line of light was showing along the east rim of the earth. He groaned to his feet and pushed on. By midday his water ran out. At sundown the mountains looked close enough to touch but he knew they were yet at least a dozen miles distant and if he did not gain them before the sun rose again he would never reach them. As he trudged on in the dark he thought he saw firelight flickering at the foot of the rockface but was not sure it was real. After a time he collapsed and got up and staggered on and then fell again and lost consciousness and did not come to until after first light. He pushed up to his hands and knees and made it to his feet and set out again toward the looming mountains. As the sun rose his tongue thickened and gagged him and he knew the next time he fell would be the last.

And now riders came toward him from the mountains. Three of them. Advancing slowly as if on the surface of a vast shimmering lake. He was afraid to stop walking for fear he would fall but when they drew within fifty yards he stopped and swayed and was surprised to feel the weight of the Colt in his hand and the hammer cocked under his thumb. When they closed to ten yards they reined up and studied him for a long moment. Then one of them, a Mexican with a flat-crowned black sombrero and a long droopy mustache put his horse forth another few yards and grinned at him with white perfect teeth. His eyes made inventory of him, pausing on the pistol in his hand.

“Hello, my friend,” he said. His accent was pronounced but not as heavy as most Edward had heard from Mexican mouths. “You must are very tired, no?”

Edward shrugged. His lips were swollen and cracked and he did not want to speak if he didn’t have to.

The Mexican unslung a canteen from his huge saddlehorn and heeled
his horse forward and handed it down to him. It was full and heavy and Edward unstoppered it and raised the neck to his mouth and hesitated and then gently put it to his lips. The pain jumped into his eyes and he shut them hard and drank and gagged and nearly vomited the water. He fought down the gagging and then took smaller, more careful sips. He paused for breath and then sipped again.

“Basta,” the Mexican said, and reached down for the canteen but Edward clutched it to his chest and stepped back quickly and nearly fell. The Mexican quit his grin and his eyes thinned. He gestured impatiently with his outstretched hand. “Dámelo, muchacho.” Edward took one more drink and handed up the canteen and the Mexican stoppered it and hung it on his saddlehorn.

“We see you desde ayer,” the Mexican said. “Desde—how you say?—yesserday. My friends, they say you don’t reach la montaña, but me, I say you do. We say, ah, una apuesta.” He paused and turned to the other two and said, “Una apuesta?”

Edward saw that one of the other two was a white man in a gray duster with a pair of pistols at his belt. This one said, “A bet.”

The Mexican turned back to Edward and said, “We say a bet. And you have make me win.” He showed the great white grin.

“I aint—” Edward began, his voice a croak, his cracked lips beading with blood. He swayed and caught himself. “I aint there yet.”

The Mexican laughed. “Pues, I think you are sufficiente close. I think so, yes.”

Edward thought this was funny and wanted to laugh but his legs gave out and he fell forward and his hat came off and he heard a sharply uttered “Jesus goddamn Christ!”

And a softly spoken “Ay Chihuahua!”