Death Rattle tb-8

by Terry C. Johnston

  They camped that night in the foothills and moved on at first light, following their Indian guide as he swept them around to the west once they left the rolling hills and emerged into an endless, grassy valley broken only by the myriad of narrow streams tumbling off the slopes, each one lined with an emerald border as it hurried to the seacoast. This valley was nowhere near as lush and green as his home in the wilds of the Rocky Mountains—its rounded, carpeted hills covered with little more than grass. Only the deep clefts between the knolls where the waters gurgled possessed any brush and trees. Mostly … grass.

  But—he realized—that was exactly what nourished the horses of these Californios. The grass made this a horseman’s paradise.

  Even though it was no later than midafternoon, Smith and Williams pulled them up behind a pair of low hills and gave orders to make camp for the night.

  “The Injun—he say we’re close to his mission?” Philip Thompson asked Smith eagerly, rubbing his hands together.

  “Not far,” Peg-Leg responded. “We don’t want none of them soldiers spotting our smoke so keep the fires small, back under the trees.”

  Williams walked over, dragging a bundle he had just taken from the back of his pack animal. As the others leaned in to watch, the old trapper tore at the knots in the rope, then flung back the oiled canvas to expose some well-weathered Navajo blankets, their colors faded from seasons of use. He stood with two of them hung over his arms.

  “Here,” Williams said, tossing the first to Frank Curnutt, one of Thompson’s allies. “You look dark enough to be a Mex, Frank.” Then he pitched the second to Bass. “An’ I damn well know you ’member some of the Mex tongue, Scratch. Want you come along with me and the Injun.”

  “How come he’s going and I ain’t?” Thompson bawled. “I been here before!”

  “But you damn well don’t speak no Mex,” Smith challenged. “If’n any of ’em get spotted, they’re gonna have to talk Mex.”

  “Bass don’t need to go,” Thompson argued with a sly grin. “You talk better’n most Mexicans I know, Peg-Leg.”

  “I ain’t going,” Smith admitted. “I’m staying here with you, if’n any bunch of soldados wander by and find us camped here.”

  By this time Williams had knelt and picked up his last two heavy Navajo blankets. “Felix—how ’bout you coming too?”

  Warren caught the blanket and smiled at his friend Thompson. “Me and Frank keep a eye on Bass for you, Phil.”

  Unfurling the last blanket for himself, Williams removed his hat with one hand and located the slit at the center of its fold with the other. After pulling the blanket over his head he replaced his floppy hat and held out his arms expressively. “What you think, boys?”

  “Look the Mex to me,” Silas Adair said with approval.

  “C’mon, Frederico,” Williams commanded as he turned back to his saddle horse. “Let’s go have us a look at where them padres sent off your sisters to live with them soldados”

  Hanging in the lee of the hills, the five horsemen picked their way northwest along the rim of the valley. Every now and then Bill would signal for them to dismount and leave their horses behind. Then the quartet would follow the Indian up the back slope of a knoll where they dropped to their bellies to break the skyline. From each prominence the trappers gazed across a new stretch of the valley, wary of any vaqueros tending their great herds of horses, mentally plotting the location of the few ranch buildings they came across.

  On the last of those stops, the sun was about to drop below the brims of their hats as they peered down upon a cluster of adobe structures behind a mud wall. Frederico tapped Williams on the arm.

  “Can’t make out all he’s saying,” Bill grumbled disgustedly. “Goddamn red nigger with his Mex talk—”

  “Something about the soldiers,” Bass broke in.

  “I damn well know that,” Williams snapped. “Soldados this and that. What he sayin’ about the godblame-ed soldados?”

  “His sisters,” Titus explained. “He says that’s where they are.”

  That bit of news quieted Ol’ Bill’s muttering like a slap of thunder. “Si, si, Frederico,” he whispered.

  Clearly the Indian had become excited, pointing out the adobe buildings ringed by a high wall of mud and wattle. “Soldados … y mis hermanas—” “Your sisters, yeah,” Scratch repeated.

  In the late-afternoon light he studied the big compound, those backlit buildings erected inside the low wall. Although there were no tall parapets, there was no mistaking this for a fortress of sorts. Nothing remained outside. Even the stables ran along the full length of one wall. Some of the Mexicans had their horses out in a corner of the compound, soaping the animals down. At another corner a blacksmith worked to reshoe a glossy, majestic black. Across the yard stood what appeared to be a low, one-story barracks. The roofs of a pair of buildings rested at either side of the double-wide gates, which stood open. Titus had no clue what those rooms were.

  All the way at the rear of the huge compound stood a two-story building, a wide porch running across the full width of the structure, with a balcony across the width of the second floor. Several windows and two doors broke up the expanse of adobe on both floors.

  Felix Warren let go a low whistle. “That’s a heap of Mexicans down there.”

  Bass quickly turned to Frederico, “Cuánto es?”

  At first the Indian shrugged, then his face went serious and he began flipping his fingers into his palms.

  “What’s he doin’?” Frank Curnutt demanded.

  “I think he’s ciphering how many’s the lodge,” Titus replied.

  “It don’t really matter, does it, Scratch?” Williams asked.

  Bass said, “Sorry, Bill—I don’t catch the drift.”

  “If’n there’s twenty of ’em, or if there’s eighty of ’em down there … we still know what we gotta do.”

  “Y-you can’t be serious ’bout our outfit fighting all them Mex soldiers!” Frank Curnutt scoffed. “Why don’t we just ride right on around ’em and they won’t be none the wiser.”

  Williams argued, “But Smith give his word to the Injun here.”

  “Shit!” Warren snorted. “What’s your damn word to a Injun? That’s like shoveling fleas in a barnyard!”

  “The Injun brung us here just like he said he would,” Williams said heatedly, his eyes narrowing on the trapper.

  “Let the Injun go raise hell with the soldiers if he wants,” Curnutt argued. “It ain’t gonna chap my hide to leave this red nigger to go his own way.”

  “You ain’t listening to Bill,” Titus growled. “He told you the way it’s gonna be.”

  Curnutt’s eyes closed into dangerous slits as he squinted over Williams’s shoulder at Bass. “A white man’s word to a Injun ain’t but a piss in the wind.”

  “Bill and Peg-Leg both told the Injun what we’d do if he got us through that desert—”

  Interrupting, Curnutt snarled, “Don’t mean we gotta fight them soldiers. Hell, them two sisters of his nothin’ better’n Mex whores now anyway—”

  Springing onto his knees, Bass vaulted past Williams and snagged hold of the front of Curnutt’s colorful serape before the other two could react. Jerking his leg up, Titus pressed a knee down on the right hand that Curnutt was attempting to wrap around his knife. “You heard Bill. We give our word to the—”

  “I didn’t give my word!” Curnutt spat, arching his back as Scratch pinned his left arm with one of his hands. “Sure as hell Thompson didn’t give his word to no red nigger either!”

  “Get off him,” a voice warned at his back.

  Williams tensed, rolling onto his hip to peer behind Titus and said, “Put the knife down, Warren.”

  Bass immediately twisted to look over his shoulder, finding Felix Warren rocking onto his knees, his big skinning knife out before him. Slowly and out of sight beneath his serape, Titus inched his fingers toward one of the two knives at the back of his belt.

  “You figger o
n doing something stupid with your sticker,” Scratch warned, “Curnutt here gonna be a dead man for it.”

  “Tol’cha: Get off ’im, Bass.”

  Williams tucked his legs under him into a crouch now, slowly pulling his belt pistol into view. Although he did not raise it enough to point its muzzle directly at Warren, it would have been apparent to a blind man that this was no veiled threat. “You’re goin’ again’ my word, Warren.”

  “Just tell ’im get off Frank.”

  “Maybe I will,” Williams said. “But not till you put that skinner away.”

  Bass shook his head emphatically. “I ain’t gonna get off this son of a bitch till he shuts his meat hole ’bout helping the Injun.”

  Felix Warren just started to inch forward, saying, “Then you’re a dead man—”

  Then Williams brought the pistol up, raked his arm forward, and jammed the muzzle against Warren’s ribs. “This here’s gonna make a damn big hole in you by the time the ball comes out your back.”

  Warren’s eyes widened, nearly crossing when he peered down at the pistol and the brown hand holding it.

  “It’s your play, Felix,” Bill explained.

  Bringing his eyes up to glare into Williams’s, Warren started pulling the knife back toward his belt, saying, “I’ll put it away … then you get that bastard off Frank.”

  “Get off him, Scratch,” Bill ordered as Warren’s knife slid into the scabbard.

  “Not till the bastard tells you he won’t go running against your grain, Bill.”

  Williams dragged the pistol away from Warren’s rib cage and said, “I think Curnutt understands who’s booshway of this here horse raid—don’t you, Frank?”

  “You are, Bill.”

  “I s’pose you can crawl off him now, Scratch.”

  The instant Bass took his weight off the man’s arms, Curnutt spun out from under him, rubbing the wrist where Titus’s bony knee had pinned it against the ground. He shrugged his shoulders to settle the serape back into place, glowering at Bass.

  “I want you boys stay away from each other,” Williams ordered. “We got horses to steal. You understand, Scratch?”

  “Soon as the horses is stole,” Bass said low, the words rattling at the back of his throat, “I got some business to see to, soon as the horses is stole.”

  “Your time’s coming,” Curnutt warned with a sneer.

  Titus wagged his head as he slid backward off the skyline and got to his feet. “Won’t be by the likes of you two.”

  “That’s right, Frank,” Warren snorted with a wide grin. “We wouldn’t wanna go an’ spoil Thompson’s li’l fandango with this son of a bitch.”

  * Mojave River

  * San Bernardino Mountains

  * Cajon Pass, aptly given the Spanish word for “box.”

  10

  When did the mountains roll over on themselves? Who was the first to pit white man against white man?

  Oh, sure—there’d always been John Bull’s boys working for Hudson’s Bay Company, poking around over in Snake River country where they didn’t belong. And there’d been those years while Rocky Mountain Fur Company did everything it could to hold the high country against Astor’s mighty American Fur Company brigades probing the mountains from forts along the Missouri River. But … how did it ever come to pass that when the beaver business went to hell it became every man for himself?

  Or, had things always been that way and Titus Bass was just one stupid nigger who failed to read the sign?

  Maybe while he hadn’t been looking, that unspoken code between men had broken down. Time was, a man came into the mountain West, he accepted the certainty of a few immutable laws. You took care of those who stood at your back. You didn’t steal what furs another man busted his hump to earn. And you stood by those Indians who had taken you in … God knows there were already enough red niggers out here willing to part a child from his hair at the blink of an eye.

  It all had to do with knowing who your friends were, and who weren’t. So, when did Scratch’s whole world heave over on itself? When did these mountains start filling up with men who couldn’t give a good goddamn for the way things used to be?

  That next morning after the ruckus with Curnutt and Warren, Smith took Thompson with him and rode south through the hills to have a good look at what herds might await them on the ranchos in that direction. And Williams took Bass to scout the look of things on west of the Mission San Gabriel along the foot of those loftier mountains timbered with yellow pine and fragrant cedar.

  Not very far beyond the soldiers’ post, Titus had his first gander at the strangest cattle he had ever laid eyes on.

  “Longhorns,” Bill explained. “Leastways, that’s what such critters ought’n be called.”

  Like nothing else, these Mexican cattle were. Unlike the full-bodied, short-horned breeds raised by those farmers back in the States, these were rangy and far leaner animals, head-heavy with a pair of saberlike horns that curved and swirled gracefully out from their bony skulls.

  “You s’pose these here longhorns are a Mex breed?”

  Williams shrugged. “Maybeso the Spanyards brung ’em over to Mexico like they is.”

  “Longhorns,” Bass repeated, almost under his breath, trying hard to imagine more than a handful of the creatures crowded together, stuffed down in the belly of those huge, tall-masted oceangoing ships he had seen so long, long ago in New Orleans. “I’ll be go to hell.”

  Could be they were the perfect breed for such arid country as this, a land where it didn’t rain all that much, despite the proximity of damp ocean winds. Farmers back east in the States did well with cattle that required a lot of the lush grasses that grew in a country where a lot of rain fell. But out west … well, now—maybe those Spanish did have something right when they brought those longhorns to Mexico a few centuries ago.

  Near midafternoon Williams and Bass spotted a confused cluster of buildings in the distance and pulled up on the side of a hill that overlooked the extensive settlement.

  “You make that for a rancho?” Bill asked.

  “Naw, I don’t,” he squinted in the light. “Too many folks.”

  There were. Many of them coming or going, some moving in or out of the settlement on horseback, in wagons or carriages. Besides, there simply wasn’t any sign of those sorts of structures a man assumed he’d find on a Mexican ranch. No corrals or barns or outlying huts where the servants lived, no rows of those low-roofed barracks where the vaqueros slept when not in the saddle.

  “Lookee there, Scratch,” Williams said. “See them sails in the harbor there? By blazes, that’s a town!”

  When Bass turned his head he found Bill grinning at him. “What you up to, Solitaire?”

  “I figger the boys are due a grand spree afore we go round up the biggest cavvyard ever took from California and get high behind for the mountains again,” Williams declared with a matter-of-factness. “A li’l likker, and some wimmens too.”

  Titus sighed, recalling the heady numbness of Workman’s corn whiskey down Taos way. “Maybe some pop-skull and a spree could take the edge off things for all of us afore we gotta leave Californy in a hurry.”

  “Let’s circle to the south for to get back to camp,” Williams advised, eager to be on the way again. “See what horses there are for the taking.”

  It was well past dark and the moon had risen when they found their way back to the others. Already Smith and Thompson had come in to report there had to be more than two thousand head of Mexican horses. The Americans and Frenchmen were growing anxious to get on with their raids.

  From their springtime camps in the central Rockies, these men had ridden something on the order of a thousand miles or more to reach Mexican California, the land of the horse. They had suffered hardship the likes of which few men would ever choose to endure. Besides being forced to drink their own urine and blood to cross the southern desert that early summer, these twenty-four had subsisted on skinny, played-out horseflesh and
bitter-tasting cactus pulp. Not hard to understand that these trappers had grown restless, anxious to be gathering up horses and turning them east for the Bent brothers’ post on the Arkansas … eager to be doing just about anything instead of cooling their heels in these California hills.

  “Peg-Leg, I figger it’s ’bout time for me to dust off the bad news and tell the boys what I got in mind,” Williams announced around a chunk of Mexican beef Silas Adair had managed to cut out of a nearby herd early that afternoon.

  Smith nearly choked on his coffee as he sputtered at Bill’s surprise. “I found a lot of horses for the takin’, Solitaire. There ain’t no bad news in that!”

  “Couple thousand ain’t near enough,” Williams grumbled dramatically, then quickly winked at Bass as the other men around them began to groan and grumble in disappointment. “I figger it still ain’t the right time to steal horses.”

  Smith bolted to his feet, some coffee sloshing out of his tin. “Your brains run out your ears back there in all that desert, Bill? I tol’t you: We found us plenty horses south of here.”

  “Ain’t yet the time, boys,” Williams repeated. “Not yet, sorry.”

  “Dammit to hell!” Philip Thompson flung his whetstone down at his feet. “So when does the high-an’-mighty Bill Williams figger on it bein’ time to gather up the horses we come across the desert to steal?”

  Williams slowly dragged the back of his hand across his mouth and chin, then licked the shiny grease from his hand and fingers. “We’ll go steal horses soon enough, boys. But not till me and Scratch lead you all down to a li’l California town to have ourselves a spree.”

  “A sp-spree?” Peg-Leg sputtered.

  “You mean likker?” Reuben Purcell asked.

  “Mexican likker,” Titus confirmed with a smack of his lips.

  With a bob of his head, Williams said, “Likely that means some lightnin’ for those of you wanna smash your faces on the floor just once afore we head back home. And for the rest, some sweet California wine or pass brandy—”