by Geff Moyer
“Least a dozen riders,” answered Sparky as gazed to the southwest. “They skirted southwest, probably headin’ fer ‘em cliffs.”
“How long ago?” inquired J.J.
“Ground’s still warm.”
“What color were the horses?” Billy asked with a grin.
Sparky chuckled and spat back, “Kiss yer grandma’s butt!”
That was about the foulest thing Sparky would ever say. He never cursed. He never visited the whore houses. Besides an occasional shot of red eye, his only true vice was he could chew and spit as much tobacco as any two men combined. Head scratching the clouds at six-foot-ten-inches tall and crushing the scales at two-hundred-seventy pounds, some folks thought he was two men. He lifted one long leg over his horse, settled into the saddle, and stared southwest.
“Only five a us,” he stated. “Ain’t good odds.”
“Guess we’ll have to surround them then,” answered Jeff Kidder as he spurred his horse.
“Appears that new Ranger don’t believe in the dem’cratic process of votin’,” stated J.J. Brookings as he watched Kidder trot off to the southwest.
Alex MacDougal turned his mount to the southwest, dug in his heels, and said, “Cap’n did say perf’rate as many as we can.” He wasn’t about to let the new fellow have all the fun.
Billy, Sparky, and J.J. looked at each other and sighed, then reluctantly followed the two rambunctious Rangers.
The trail was hot. The banditos couldn’t be more than an hour ahead. With hearts’ pumping and eyes wide, the Rangers picked up their pace. Forty-five minutes later that pace came to an abrupt halt.
“I don’t like this,” Sparky muttered.
The hot trail suddenly led straight into a narrow, winding gorge. All five animals nervously twitched, twisted, and turned in circles as their riders studied the tight entrance.
“Yeah, well, if ya liked ev’erthin’ ‘bout yer job ya wouldn’t have nuthun to bitcha ‘bout,” replied Alex as he boldly entered the skinny cranny with Kidder tight on his tail.
Nodding towards the gorge Sparky said, “Could be hot grease in thar!”
“Been in it afore,” stated Billy as he allowed his horse to slowly follow Alex and Jeff into the split in the rock.
“Keep yer eyes skinned!” warned Sparky.
“And yer asshole tight!” added J.J.
The jagged cranny was barely wide enough for two horses abreast, but quickly gave way to more open area, enough for three or four mounts side-by-side. Billy lightly spurred Swiss, his chocolate gelding, to get up alongside the new Ranger.
“Slow down, Kidder,” he stated. “We all wanna git there t’gether.” He scanned the sheer rock walls and said, “Feel like we’re ridin’ into a tomb.”
“Might be,” Jeff replied with a half grin.
Billy watched the new Ranger slip a cartridge into the empty chamber that rested under the firing pin of his Colt, then spin the fancy pearl handled revolver back into its holster. He’d seen calves like Kidder before—bucking for a fight. Most times they wound up feeding worms.
The gorge had opened up even wider, but they rode slow, keeping their eyes glued to the rocks above. At twenty yards in it twisted to the right then made a wide, lengthy turn back to the left. The walls on each side were a good fifty feet high and lined with perfect pockets for hiding a man with a rifle. After a straight stretch of about thirty yards, one more tight turn took them back to the right. There they came face-to-face with a large, bowl-shaped box canyon surrounded by solid rock walls.
“Where the hell’d they go?” shouted Alex, turning his horse in circles
With his gut instincts boiling over Sparky turned his horse and shouted, “GIT!!” His voice echoed through the rock walls as he spurred the animal like a man dancing over a rattlesnake. With his warning still bouncing off the enclosure, bullets roared down, kicking up dust and ricocheting off rocks. As he waved his hand and yelled “GIT!” once again, a bullet took off the top half of his thumb.
In seconds the Rangers were riding like hell to escape the deathtrap. At every twist and turn lead rained down. Billy felt a hot, stinging sensation cross his calf. Three rounds struck J.J. almost all at the same moment. One removed part of his ear as two others smashed into his right forearm, shattering bone and defiling his tattoo of Ol’ Glory.
When they turned the final corner of their narrow grave they found the entrance blocked by burning debris. Horses whinnied and panicked and turned in circles. Another bullet creased Billy’s forehead, almost knocking him from his saddle. Sparky took a second round in the soft spot of his shoulder. The men fired blindly into the rocks above. Alex MacDougal’s collarbone exploded, twisting his body and throwing him from the saddle, but with his foot hung up in the stirrup. His terrified horse bolted straight for the fire and tried to leap the rising flames, dragging Alex along with it. Neither made it. The horse’s mane and tail instantly ignited. Alex’s dry, dusty clothes went up like a piece of paper in a campfire. He was screaming, his horse was screaming. The blazing animal bolted back into the gorge, dragging a burning Alex along with him. Kidder looped his lasso around a half-burning stretch of timber and pulled it aside. That was all they needed. Billy saw a round blow a hole in the new Ranger’s side. It didn’t even slow him down. They rode out of the cranny fast and hard with Kidder being the last to leave.
Twenty minutes later Billy cried out, “The horses are baked!”
They slowed to a trot.
“I’m bleedin’ like a stuck pig,” J.J stated with a painful groan.
Darkness was coming. Their clothes and saddles were caked with blood, but Sparky wanted them to push on just a little bit farther.
“Feather Yank done tol’ me ‘bout some moss ‘at grows in marshes,” explained Sparky through gritted teeth as he fought the pain from his wounds. “Says it’s good fer healin’.”
“You believe an Injun?” Jeff asked, gritting his teeth and holding his side. “What if we bleed out before we find this magic moss?”
“Ain’t gonna happen,” replied Sparky. He pointed to their left. “Thar be the marsh!” Although the stagnant water was unfit to drink—and no Ranger was yet willing to light a fire—it did help in cleaning their wounds. “Not the dark stuff,” instructed Sparky. “Feather Yank says the light stuff be best.”
The moss is sphagnum—though Sparky didn’t know that—a healing agent Mother Nature kindly provided for as long as man had been collecting wounds. He didn’t know that either, but he did know Feather Yank.
Cringing in pain as he scooped up a handful of the moss Jeff said, “I hope your damn Injun’s right. Lucky none of our horses were hit. Raised Vermillion from a colt”
“Tweren’t luck,” declared Sparky. “Em Yaquis wanted our mounts. What they couldn’t ride, they’d et!”
“You mean those were Injuns up there,” asked Jeff, “not Arango’s men?”
“Arango must’ve given ‘em some of ‘em Winchesters he stole to hold us off,” explained Sparky. “Make a friend with a Yaqui and he’s a friend fer life. We was lucky they weren’t good with ‘em rifles yet or alla us mighta still be layin’ back in that canyon with po’ Alex.
J.J. Brookings was first to try the sphagnum. He spread some on his ear then gingerly applied more to his damaged forearm. “I’ll be damned!” he grunted. “It do cut down the burnin,’ but look how ‘em fuckers ruined my tattoo.”
Billy helped J.J. prepare a sling.
“Have to dig this one out when we get back to the barracks,” said Sparky as he pushed a wad of moss into the hole in his shoulder. Then he covered his half-of-a thumb with the healing substance and wrapped a cloth around his shaking right hand. “Good thing I’m left-handed.”
“Now ya can only count to nineteen-and-a-half,” teased Billy.
“How the hell’d they git outta that canyon?” asked J.J.
“Must be a slit or somethun’ in ‘em rocks,” answered Sparky. “Yaquis prob’bly showed it to ‘em!”
<
br /> “Go back and find out, Sparky,” Billy teased again.
“Kiss yer grandma’s butt!”
Jeff was studying a handful of the moss as he voiced his concern to Sparky. “You sure this shit isn’t gonna make the wound fester all up and just get worst?” he asked. “I don’t trust no Injun’s remedies.”
“Don’t use it then,” Sparky flatly replied.
“It works, Kidder,” insisted J.J. “Don’t be a pucker-ass!”
They all laughed then grimaced at the pain it caused. Jeff finally began to doctor the wound in his side. He was stunned by how quickly the moss stopped the burning.
“Thought I was gonna go the way of my uncle that time,” Jeff said to Billy, who was next to the new Ranger tending to his own wounds.
“How’s that?” asked Billy, as he gingerly plunked pieces of boot leather from a flesh wound in his right calve. The graze on his forehead was minor, but the blood kept seeping into his left eye.
“My Uncle Lyman was a Calvary lieutenant,” Jeff explained, grunting as he shoved some of the sphagnum into the hole in his side, just inches below his rib cage. “Lucky! Damn thing went clean through.” He covered the moss with a folded piece of cloth, also pushing it slightly into the wound and continued his story. “My Uncle Lyman, along with ten soldiers and an Injun guide, was hauling dispatches to Fort Wallace when they were ambushed by a band of Cheyenne and Sioux, July first, eighteen sixty-seven. Killed every man! Chopped them up so bad Custer couldn’t even recogni...”
“Custer?” interrupted Billy. He finally got his forehead dressed enough to stop the dripping irritation into his eye. “The Custer?” Seeing Jeff was struggling to get a long swath of cloth wrapped around his waist he said, “Lemme do that!”
“Appreciate that!” he said to Billy and cringed as he raised his arm to allow the cloth its access.
Billy pushed some moss into the round’s exit hole that Jeff couldn’t reach, then wrapped and tied the temporary bandage.
“Ya stretchin’ my blanket,” asked Billy, “bout Custer?”
“No. It was George Armstrong himself! He and his men found the bodies. They were so chopped up they just buried all the pieces in a big hole right there on that Kansas prairie. Well, ‘cept for my Uncle Lyman. They were able to spot his remains by the calico shirt he was wearing. My grandma had made it for him. His pieces were sent home to his pa, my grandpa. Can ya imagine that? Gettin’ a box with pieces of yer son in it? History books call it ‘The Kidder Massacre.’”
“So yer famous?” asked Billy.
“Me?” replied Jeff. “Naw!” With a grin he added, “Not yet!”
Even though his uncle had died eight years before Jeff was born, at every family gathering the brutal incident would experience a rebirth. An uncle, a cousin, any relative with too much hooch in them would regurgitate it.
“Them savages couldn’t just kill a man,” declared a cousin while gnawing on a turkey leg and using it to point and put emphasis on his ramblings. “Them poor soldiers were sliced and hacked up into a hundred pieces, and each piece was punctured with dozens of arrows and all of them left to rot on that prairie.”
Every time Jeff heard the tale it was more brutal than the last. He saw pieces of men scattered about a red-soaked Kansas prairie. Each piece riddled with arrows, making them look more like dead porcupines than anything akin to humans. He saw drunken Indians in his hometown. He saw the jails constantly filled with them. He saw their filthy reservations and how they lived. They disgusted him.
Touching the firmly wrapped dressing, Jeff said, “Thanks! I’ve never been shot before.”
“Hurts, don’t it?” Billy said with a forced smile.
“More than I thought. How ‘bout you?”
“Second time—first time ri’chere.” Billy tapped his chest. “Bullet went straight ‘tween my heart and lung, missin’ both of them by a horse hair.”
“Lucky! Did you get the shooter?”
“Nope,” answered Billy. “She got away.”
“Oh,” Jeff said with a little smile.
“Ya know, just ridin’ hell bent straight into a gorge like that...well, we were lucky this time...might be wise to talk things out first. Don’t wanna get famous fer bein’ dead, do ya?”
Jeff smiled and said, “Good thinkin’.”
It was a response that surprised Billy. No one had ever accused him of being a good thinker.
Two days later the bloodied and exhausted Rangers limped back in to Nogales, but the moss had lived up to its reputation. Rangers Langston Penny and Freddie Rankin were in the open training area to greet them.
“Ya fellas git on over to the infirm’ry,” ordered Freddie. “Langston and me will take care a yer mounts.”
J.J. Brookings was half conscious and began to slip from the saddle.
“I got ‘im,” cried Langston as he caught his fellow Ranger. Looping J.J.’s undamaged arm around his shoulder, he helped him to the small hospital.
Jeff stretched and twisted as he carefully removed the dressing from his waist. The air felt good. “Guess even a dumb Injun can be right once.”
“Feather Yank ain’t dumb,” said Billy. “And I wouldn’t ne’er call ‘im that.”
“You telling me you know a smart Indian?”
“Smarter ‘en me.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“Quit my schoolin’ in the fifth grade,” Billy admitted with a hint of embarrassment.
“That’s still five more grades than any Injun,” replied Jeff as the two walked to the infirmary. “Try livin’ near one of their reservations for twenty years; enough to make you sick.”
Born and raised in south Texas, Billy knew the loathing folks had for the Comanche. Working in New Mexico he witnessed that same hatred for the Utes, Pueblo, Zuni, and others. Now, in Arizona, it was the Apache, Hopi, Papago, Pima, Yaqui, Navajo, and many, many other tribes that held the wrath of the white man. But he had heard this new Ranger was supposed to be an educated man. He had gone to college. It made Billy wonder how someone with so many smarts could be so bent on putting a whole type of people into one big pile of hate.
“You can read and write, can’t you?” asked Jeff.
“Smidgen,” Billy said as the two slowly limped towards the infirmary.
“Smidgen is still more than none,” replied Jeff, releasing a stream of tobacco juice into the dirt. “Injuns don’t even have a written language.”
“They got pitchers on rocks and an’mal skins.”
“Pictures leave too much up to a man’s eye. The written word says it, right there, in black and white.”
“Written words ain’t always true. Look at them broken treaties.”
Jeff stopped and looked straight at Billy. “You a bleedin’ heart Injun lover, Billy Old?”
Having to stop and think for a moment before he answered, Billy finally said, “No, but I respect them. Ifin ya don’t, they can kill ya sure as snot from a bull.”
April, 1908
It was a stormy Monday night when Sparky entered the barracks to find Billy sitting on his bunk, a half empty bottle of whiskey in his hand. The two friends had hardly spoken since Jeff’s death. Sparky slipped out of his wet duster and shook it. He slowly undressed, stealing an occasional worried glance at his compadre. He stretched out on his bed of two mattresses placed end-to-end on the floor to handle his six-foot-ten-inch frame. For a long moment he just watched Billy sway back and forth on his bunk, his eyes half-closed, drool dripping down his chin.
“Ya thunk ‘bout goin’ to church, Billy?”
“Why?”
“Sometimes it helps.”
“Won’t help me none,” Billy slurred.
“Ya ne’er know ‘til ya try.”
Standing quickly he hissed at his friend, “Well, I ain’t gonna try, goddamn it.” He rose and headed for the door.
“It’s rainin’ frogs and fish out thar, Billy!”
Stomping towards the door Billy threw his word
s back at Sparky. “All the hate I got in me right now, Sparky, that rain’ll just sizzle offa me.”
He walked out into the wet night and headed for the whorehouse. It was the one place where he could shake his head loose of “Amador, Alvarez, Quías, Pasco, Victoriano..Amador...” He even had a favorite whore, which wasn’t unusual. Many fellows did. Some even ended up getting hitched to them. Jeff’s was a short, thick nineteen-year-old woman from Colorado named Abbie Crutchfield.
Although she preferred Abbie, her papa had named her Abigail after the wife of John Adams, his favorite president. Widower Leo Crutchfield had a small wheat farm in the eastern Colorado flatlands, spitting distance from the Kansas border. At sixteen Leo’s only daughter ran off with a roving gambler. It was no surprise to him. Knowing Abbie had a wild hair he didn’t even consider going after her. Besides, he’d had his turns with her and his wheat needed tending.
The gambler took the young girl to Dallas. One week later he had his neck stretched by some angry cowboys when they discovered an extra ace up his sleeve. Another gambler took pity on the well endowed teen and whisked her off to Corpus Christi. While the two were skinny dipping in the Gulf a jellyfish stung him in the ball sack. Three agonizing days later he threw in his cards. Sure enough, along came another big-hearted gambler with eyes on those bosoms. He made the mistake of taking her to Nogales where history repeated itself. For reasons never determined, which was common in the notorious border town, the fellow was gutted in an alley less than a week after they had arrived. Alone, a thousand miles from Leo Crutchfield’s wheat farm, Abbie turned to the only thing her papa ever taught her. Aware of the hazards her chosen occupation could bring, the first thing she did was purchase a boot gun.
Billy’s favorite was a saucy Mexican bobcat named Retta. Since business was always slow on Mondays, especially rainy Mondays, it ended up being a very drunk night.
“Yo’no lea’me, too, Billy, sí?” Retta slurred as the two entered her tiny depressing room.