Scratch didn’t see when his friends got into the melee—he was already swinging the thick chair leg he clutched in his sweaty hands at the first of two soldiers rushing him. That burly Mexican reached up, seizing the chair leg in midarc as he leaped up toe to toe. Bass brought up his knee in that instant the soldier was setting himself to strike, savagely driving it into the Mexican’s groin. But he had little time to enjoy watching the man crumple before him, clutching his genitals, his dark face gone pasty in pain.
For the second soldier had grabbed the end of the chair leg and rocked back with a jerk, then made a second attempt to loosen it from Bass’s grip. Instead, Scratch drove his heel down onto the Mexican’s shin, stabbing the man’s instep with all his weight. As the soldier lunged back, releasing the chair leg, Bass was already swinging it behind his shoulder—
—just when he felt a huge fist slam into his lower back.
The pain was so immediate, so severe, that he sensed the breath rush out of his lungs, sensed his knees turning to water.
Then came a second blow to his back, harder than the first. His legs went out right under him as if they weren’t there.
As Scratch went down, he heard the women’s screams for the first time. They almost drowned out the grunts of men colliding, bone and muscle and sinew crashing together, might against might. So loud was the screaming and that thunder of bone striking bone that he almost didn’t hear the sharp gust of wind rush from his lips as he struck the hard clay of the earthen floor.
Gasping for breath, he twisted about to look up—finding that shadow looming over him become the first soldier he had kneed as the Mexicans rushed them. While Scratch drew himself into a ball, the soldier drove his cowhide boot into Bass’s ribs again and again. With each blow great bubbles of air exploded from Titus’s lungs, replaced by searing pain. Moccasins and boots scuffed around his head as he fought to curl himself tighter … struggling not only against the Mexican’s boot, but fighting down the frightening remembrance of that brutal beating at the hands of Silas Cooper.
Suddenly the Mexican’s foul breath was in his face as the soldier grabbed a handful of Bass’s shirt, raising the American slightly, then driving his fist into Titus’s face. A second time the man pulled Bass halfway up off the floor, only to slam his jaw back down with another blow.
He was going to kill him, just as Cooper tried!
But this time Scratch vowed he would not lie there and take a beating like a whipped dog.
From somewhere at the marrow of him Titus found the strength to seize the Mexican’s left wrist in both of his hands. He jerked it up at the same moment he opened his mouth, instantly clamping down with his teeth on that soft web of skin between the thumb and forefinger. Grinding, sawing, chewing on the hard thumb bone and musky tissue that tasted of days’-old dirt and spilled aguardiente.
The Mexican smashed his other fist into the side of his head again as the man cried out in pain.
Bass bit down harder.
Again the soldier hammered a fist into Scratch’s cheek. But not near as hard as before.
Through every blow Titus locked down harder on the skin, feeling that single bone grind beneath his teeth, feeling the flesh tearing away and the gushes of warm blood oozing over his tongue—thick and salty.
Of a sudden the fist opened and clawed at Scratch’s neck, a thumb pressed against his larynx so hard, Bass wasn’t sure he would breathe again. Freeing his right hand from the Mexican’s wrist, Bass lashed out clumsily, finding his enemy’s face. Seizing the fleshy jowl, his fingers crawled up the whiskered cheek until he found the eye socket. Remembering his struggle with the Comanche, Titus plunged his thumb past the edge of bone, stabbing into the soft, pliant tissue.
Above him the man flinched, yanking his head to the side—unable to free himself of Bass’s terrible thumb. Instead, all the Mexican could do was tighten on the gringo’s neck.
As Scratch watched the first sharp pricks of light shoot from the center of his head with that convulsive pain crushing his throat, he flexed his thumb spastically, digging deeper and deeper into the eye socket. Each time he did, he sensed the Mexican relax that iron vise on his throat just a little, before the man clamped down once more.
His decision was made—knowing he would either die without drawing another breath … or he would have to disable the Mexican and possibly kill the soldier outright.
With another sharp jab of his thumb, Scratch felt the bony rim of the socket, realizing he had reached the corner of the man’s eye. As he struggled to draw a breath into his tortured, quaking lungs, Bass scooped his thumb to the side with what little resolve he had left.
Beneath his thumb soft membranes tore away from the socket. A sudden gush of warmth spilled over his thumb and hand. The Mexican’s unearthly cry stung his ears as the soldier jerked backward, releasing that mortal grip on the American’s throat.
Scratch was unable to focus at first; all the movement around him was a watery blur, like that deafening cacophony of noise—unable to pick out any one sound, any single voice. He struggled to breathe: for him every gasp was filled with such exquisite pain. Air! How it hurt to suck it in … but it was air!
Then his vision cleared enough that he saw the Mexican stumbling backward against other soldiers, both hands held at his face, his mouth open, screaming in agony. That black hole within a black mustache and beard—with a sound so shrill, it reminded Bass of a wild animal.
Blood slicked down the Mexican’s cheek as two soldiers rushed to him—
Then someone grabbed Scratch, snatching hold of the back of his collar, dragging him backward.
On instinct Scratch whirled clumsily, still fighting for breath, locking his hands around the arm that yanked him across the trampled floor.
“Easy, goddammit!” Elbridge bellowed.
It was Gray’s face. And his arm pulling Titus back toward the others, who were again drawing into a tight circle. Their faces and heads and knuckles bloodied. Two of them still holding their heavy chair legs.
“Bass put his goddamned eye out!” Kinkead yelled with glee.
Jerking back around the moment Elbridge got him to the others, Titus looked for the soldier—found him. Someone had a white handkerchief out and was pressing it against the man’s cheek, where a wide ribbon of crimson shimmered in the candlelight. Above that bloody handkerchief the eyelid fluttered loosely over the socket. Empty was it, like a grave yet unfilled, black as night.
Several women burst out of the crowd to join the two soldiers helping their own stumble away toward the door. The sound the blinded man made was one of excruciating agony, a shrieking warble slowly dying in that suddenly hushed room. Mingled with the muted murmurs of the crowd were the gasps for air and grunts of newfound pain from nearly all the fighters taking stock of their own injuries.
Suddenly the ring of Mexicans around the gringos appeared to shrink.
“Ye done good, Scratch!” Hatcher cheered, slapping him on the shoulders.
“I—I really put his eye out?”
“Ain’t nothin’ but a hole there now,” Caleb answered. “I see’d that a few times afore. Leastways, he’s lucky you didn’t kill—”
Kinkead shushed them as the governor began speaking again. “He’s asking them soldiers if they had ’em enough.”
Their only answer was a sudden shriek from the lieutenant and those left standing with him as they rushed the Americans again. Both forces met with a mighty noise, the wooden sound of hard bone meeting hard bone. Men grunting and cursing in both languages. Bodies slammed to the floor.
Scratch saw the lights again, felt himself sinking to his knees, watched figures swimming before him in an inky pool. Like the summer night he first laid between Amy’s soft thighs beside that old swimming hole. This was just as black, just as liquid as that.
He caught himself with one arm, starting to blink as he looked up, turning to gaze back over his shoulder—finding the Mexican lunging over him with most of what had been a h
uge chair still in both his hands.
Bass tasted blood, wondering if it was the eyeless soldier’s blood … or if it was his own. It was dripping down his neck, along his jaw and cheek, through his beard and onto his lips. Must have opened up the back of my head, he thought in a blur as he blinked again, trying to focus on the Mexican bringing down the chair against his head and shoulders a second time.
That blow sounded exactly like one of his mother’s heavy churns dropped onto their puncheon floor, back in Kentucky. Hollow, ringing, and with the same dull echo as he felt the cool, earthen floor smack against his cheek.
He shivered so hard, he thought his teeth were going to rattle out of his mouth. Clacking so loud, they sounded almost like those bone dice in that ivory cup of Ebenezer Zane’s—the way the old riverboatman shook them whenever he gambled with his flatboat crew on its float down to New Orleans that autumn of 1810.
Bass was certain his cheek still lay against the clay floor in Mirabal’s sala, so cold it felt. And he wondered how long he had been out as he attempted to open his puffy eyes.
“Lookee there!” Jack’s voice sang beyond the foggy, black curtain. “The nigger’s coming to, boys!”
Then he felt a cool, damp rag brush his forehead, down his cheeks, as he struggled to pry open his eyes again. They remained so heavy.
“Maybe not, Jack. His eyes jumpin’—that’s all.”
That sounded like Elbridge.
“Likely had all the mortal sense knocked out of him clear back to the Wind River, I’d wager.”
Caleb.
“What with that wallop he took, I don’t reckon the child’s gonna wake up for a week.”
Bass tried to say the name, “R-rufus?”
“Eegod—ye hear that, fellers?” Hatcher said. “He called for Rufus.”
The damp cloth brushed his face again as he forced his eyes open into slits. There were people before him—at least he took the milky forms to be people. It hurt to move his eyes. Not that there was any real pain right in his eyes—just the dull throb everywhere in his head. Moving his eyes hurt about as bad as anything.
Then he suddenly smelled something strange. Different. Sweet and alluring. It damn sure wasn’t the odors of those men he had ridden miles and months with.
This was the smell of a woman!
Slowly prying open an eye a bit farther, Bass rolled it so he could peer first in one direction, then in the other. His eyes fluttered open as soon as he saw her.
Recognizing that small, smooth face with its high cheekbones. The large, dark eyes. The lips she had rouged with crimson alegría juice. The lips moved—she was talking to him, speaking with that gentle voice of hers so like a soft breeze.
Trying to speak himself, all Bass could do was get his dry lips open and a few strange sounds past them. Nothing that made any sense.
“Matthew, tell the man what she’s saying to him.”
“Scratch—the governor’s daughter here come to see how you was after the fight last night.”
Sure felt like he’d been down in the black a lot longer than that.
“M-morn … ing?” he croaked.
“It’s near evening now,” Hatcher replied, coming up beside Kinkead to peer directly down into Bass’s face.
“The girl come out here special with her servant and her driver too,” Kinkead explained. “She was afraid you was dead, what with the way we dragged you out of there last night.”
Elbridge Gray was chuckling, then said, “The way we tied you over the backbone of your horse like you was gone under for sure.”
“Wa … ter?”
Someone gave the young woman a half gourd of water, into which she dipped her fingers, then laid them against Bass’s parched lips. Time and again his tongue licked the droplets off as she continued to brush water there until his throat no longer felt so dry. Filled with a sickening pain, Scratch knew his throat was bruised severely. Yet he was relieved to find he nonetheless could speak with a raspy harshness.
“My h-head …”
“Likely gonna hurt for some time to come too,” Hatcher warned. “Solomon here sewed ye up.”
“My head—sewed?”
Fish answered, “Yep. Ain’t never sewed so many stitches afore neither, Scratch. You was a awful mess.”
Then Hatcher and the rest began to laugh.
Jack declared, “Nigger, was ye ever a tolerable mess! Just laying there on that floor—out colder’n a preacher’s wife on her wedding night. But soon as I had Solomon here get down to take a look at ye, he pulled that blue bandanny off’n yer noodle, and that’s when the hull room got scared!”
“S-scared?”
“Hell, yes!” Kinkead replied as he came up to stand beside Jacova. “All them soldiers and guests thought somehow you’d had your hair knocked right off with that chair the nigger hit you with.”
“My hair?” he asked, none of it making sense right then.
“Ye stupid idjit!” Hatcher roared. “Solomon scalped ye again—right where you was scalped by them Arapaho!”
Unable to contain his amusement, Caleb gushed, “Them Mexicans was all worried you’d been hit hard ’nough to knock off a big knot of your hair!”
“So we brung you on out here,” Kinkead continued. “You been sleep till now.”
Scratch inquired, “What come of the greaser’s eye?”
“I s’pose one of their own got the feller fixed up best they could,” Kinkead answered. “But he was bound to lose the eye for good—no two ways of it.”
Rufus clucked, “Made all of ’em mad as a spit-on hen.”
“I s’pose that’s why that soldier hit you so damned hard with the chair,” Elbridge explained.
He swallowed a gob of saliva, finding it hurt terribly. When he opened his eyes again after that wave of pain had passed, Titus found Jacova hovering over his face.
“How long she been here?”
Matthew said, “Soon as she could get dressed at sunup, she come on out to see ’bout you.”
“Told ye,” Hatcher said, “this’un’s sweet on ye.”
“Too damn sweet on you for my notion,” Kinkead replied sternly in that solemn way of his.
With a squeak Scratch protested, “I ain’t done nothing to make her sweet on me, Matthew.”
“Hell, I know that, Titus,” he responded. “S’pose she just don’t know no better’n to fall for a wuthless gringo.”
“Rosa got herself a good gringo,” Bass replied.
Kinkead was visibly touched, his lower lip quivering slightly. “And you been a good friend to Rosa’s gringo.”
“Maybeso tell the girl go on back home now,” Scratch said, his eyelids falling. “Tell her I’m gonna be fine now but I wanna get me some more sleep.”
Eyes closed, he listened as Kinkead spoke low to the young woman. Then, without a single word from her, Bass felt soft fingers lightly touch his swollen cheek before they briefly squeezed his hand. And she was gone. It grew quiet as he heard the voices of the others move off. Bass shivered once in the growing cold, then quickly slipped off to sleep.
When next he awoke, Scratch found himself ravenous. Opening his eyes, he found the cavern still lit with a number of thick candles, the gray of dawn at the entrance to the cave no more than a thin sliver from where he lay. But he also discovered that the back of his head still throbbed mercilessly—worse even than when he had been scalped. Just beyond the room where they had placed him, he heard low voices.
It hurt too much to try raising his head, what with the way his neck and shoulder muscles protested, that wide band of painful stricture wrapping itself around his head like the jaws of a huge iron trap. Bass closed his eyes and welcomed the sleep that allowed him to leave the pain behind.
Sometime later the voices grew louder.
He awoke with a start, irritated at first that they weren’t letting him sleep any longer. Then he concentrated: slowly discerning the different voices, able to tell that they were angry.
“Hat
cher!”
Oh, how it hurt to call out!
Those angry voices fell quiet as he shut his eyes, trying to squeeze off the throb in his head. Feet shuffled into the cavern.
“Scratch? Ye call me, Scratch?”
Looking up, Bass saw most of the faces around his bed. “Why you so all fired mad?”
At first no one answered.
Then Hatcher glanced at the others and eventually looked at Bass. “Goddamn Mexicans wanna come throw us out of the country.”
“But they ain’t,” Workman asserted.
“Willy here just come from town with Matthew,” Hatcher continued. “He heard from Padre Martinez that the soldiers and most of the folks in town was talking about coming out here to try flushing us out.”
“Flush us out?” Bass echoed. “They figger to kill us?”
“Sounds like it,” Matthew said. “But Mirabal and the padre wasn’t about to let ’em. Fire’s out for now.”
“Then … everything’s fine.”
“No,” Workman answered sadly. “None of you fellers can trade off your plews in town. Fact be, the governor wanted the padre to tell us that he could do all in his power to make sure no mob come out to kill us … but he couldn’t have us coming in to Taos no more this winter.”
“Means we gotta stay out here,” Caleb grumbled.
“That ain’t so bad, I s’pose,” Bass figured, relieved.
Solomon snorted, “What the hell use of a man coming to Taos if’n he can’t drink till he’s shit-faced drunk!”
“Or dance with the gals!” Graham shouted.
Elbridge roared, “And get his pecker soaked with poontang!”
Slamming a fist into an open palm, Hatcher growled, “Maybeso we just should’a kill’t our share of them greasers when we had us a chance and been done with it!”
Workman wagged his head. “From the sounds of things—you’d never got out of Mirabal’s house, you gone and done that.”
“What’s so bad ’bout them not letting us go into Taos no more this winter?” Scratch asked.
Caleb said, “We don’t go in—we can’t get all our plew traded off for supplies.”
It was quiet a moment before Workman replied, “Maybe you don’t need to trade all them plews.”
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