Death Rattle

by Terry C. Johnston

  “Keep your heads down!” he ordered, tucking himself as much as he could over the round Santa Fe pommel.

  Instead of pursuing the thieves into the herd, the Mexicans warily hung back at the rear of the stolen horses. Not daring to enter the surging mass of animals on the run.

  “C’mon, boys!” Bass rallied. “We best put some more room atween them and us!”

  He kicked his horse in the ribs again and sprinted away, faster still. Running much slower, the stolen horses gradually streamed to the rear as the Americans put a hundred yards, then a hundred fifty, between them and the vaqueros.

  “They stealing anything back?” Scratch asked the moment he turned to look over his shoulder.

  “A few,” Kersey answered as they watched the Mexicans wave rope coils overhead and snap long, silken whips in the air, wrangling about three dozen of the horses away from the rest of the herd.

  “No matter,” Titus grumped. “Them at the back wasn’t good runners no how.”

  “You still figger to go after them two Injun gals?” Corn shouted as he edged up on Bass’s right heel.

  “You gettin’ cold feet, Jake?”

  “Just a bad feeling’s all,” Corn confessed.

  “Why?” Titus asked. “We ain’t seen a soldier. Only a few vaqueros what tried to get their horses back.”

  “What happens when they don’t send all them soldiers out to stop the others boys the way you said they would for Bill’s plan?” Corn asked.

  Scratch brooded on that a moment, squinting into the sunlit distance as the horses at the front of the herd swept up more and more loose animals the farther north they raced down the valley for the San Gabriel Mission.

  “Way I see it—every one of us gonna ride outta that soldier fort with Frederico’s sisters,” Scratch vowed. “Or, ain’t none of us coming back out at all.”

  12

  It was down to the nut-cuttin’ now.

  Bill Williams and Thomas Smith signaled Philip Thompson on by with the stolen horses, wave after wave of the animals streaming north into the valley where stood the San Gabriel Mission. The two booshways reined over to the side of the hill and halted, waiting for Bass and his bunch to cut their way out of the side of the herd. The seven of them came to a halt near Bill and Peg-Leg.

  “Sure you don’t want me to come ’long with you?” Williams asked, his eyes focused on the bloody tear in Titus’s shirt.

  “Don’t worry—just a scratch, s’all.” Bass looked over his men, then shook his head. “The Injun got hit, but it ain’t bad. ‘Sides, you’re gonna need ever’ man you got, Solitaire. The seven of us can see to what we gotta do for Frederico’s sisters and catch on up to you.”

  “How long you figger that’ll take?” Smith inquired.

  “If’n we can steal a couple soldier horses for them women afore we ride outta there, we’ll cover some ground,” he suggested. “But, if them soldados take all their horses when they ride out to follow you boys … then a couple of us gonna be riding double. An’ that’ll slow us down some.”

  Williams’s eyes narrowed once more on Scratch’s bloodied shirt. “You need anything more?”

  “Can’t think of what it’d be,” Titus replied with a sigh, turning away to watch the last of the horses lope past. He whistled low and said, “Them Bent brothers gonna shit in their britches to see so many horses.”

  Smith grinned hugely. “What them two don’t take, I’ll drive right on back to Missouri to sell my own self!”

  Bass held out his hand to him. “See you soon, Peg-Leg.”

  “Don’t go make a bull’s-eye out of yourself, Titus Bass.”

  Williams held out his hand now and they shook.

  Scratch reminded, “We ain’t caught up with you in three days—”

  “ ’Bout the time we should reach the desert on the other side,” Bill interrupted.

  “Then you oughtta just reckon on us not catching up to you boys at all,” Scratch admitted, then suddenly cracked a lopsided grin.

  “You’ll come out fine on the other side,” Williams offered, wearing his own hopeful smile.

  “If’n I don’t, Bill,” Titus sighed as the grin disappeared, “do for me like you promised you would. Trade off my share of the horses and buy a passel of plunder with ’em. Take all that foofaraw on up there to Absaroka an’ find my woman. Give ’er what I got comin’ from my share of them horses.”

  “Least I can do for you, friend,” Bill admitted. “You’re the man seeing we keep our promise to the Injun got us ’cross the desert.”

  Titus reared back, stretching the muscles in his old back already tired from the morning’s ride. “Take good care of our packhorses, won’cha fellas?” He tugged down the front of his brim there in the hot afternoon sun and reined hard to the left. “Let’s ride, fellas!”

  With Frederico wearing a bandanna around the wounded arm at his side, Titus led the other five directly across the valley stripped bare of all horseflesh. The sprawling mission itself was less than a mile away, and the soldier fortress not all that far beyond it. They planned to slip up behind a knoll that lay to the east of the post and tie off their horses. Bellying up to the top, they’d lie patiently in the brush and watch the small fort below, hoping that the Mexicans would do what the trappers expected.

  Together with Williams and Smith, Scratch had cobbled out this plan that sent most of the raiders with the two booshways, driving the stolen horses right on past the mission walls, near enough to the soldier post that the gringo thieves would make themselves a taunting challenge. And when the soldados rose to the bait—every last one of them saddling up and riding out to sweep down on the Americans and make a sure, quick fight of it—then Bass’s small outfit could slip right into the soldier post and hurry the two women right back out again.

  Not that the fortress would be totally abandoned. They figured they could expect to encounter a modest resistance from no more than a handful of soldiers left to watch over the place—maybe a blacksmith, some stable hands, and a cook or two as well, perhaps even a guard at the gate—but not enough of a force that would prevent the Norteamericanos from riding away with Frederico’s sisters.

  “This here brush is good,” Scratch told them as they came to a halt at the bottom of the low knoll. “Leave the horses here. You follow me and the Injun to the top. Get on your bellies afore you break the skyline.”

  He gestured Frederico to join him on the climb, but just shy of the crest he reached out and tapped on the Indian’s bare arm. Pointing at the ground, Bass went to his belly. When their guide dropped to his stomach too, the seven crawled in and out of the brush to the grassy top. As they came up on both sides behind him, Bass could hear the others scritching over the gravel and dirt, rustling the stunted cedar and brush.

  Titus rolled onto his left hip, pulled up the flap to his shooting pouch, and dug at the bottom for the spyglass. Flat on his belly again, Bass extended the three sections, then swiveled the tiny brass protective plate back from the glass in the eyepiece.

  Training the spyglass on the post below them, Bass slowly retracted one of the leather-covered sections to bring the scene into focus. And felt the hair prickle on the back of his neck. The post was a beehive of activity. Cavalry horses were everywhere. A few of them were already saddled and stood outside the stockade wall with their riders. Other soldiers were engaged inside the compound, throwing saddles onto their mounts. And still more Mexicans were leading their horses out of the narrow barns and into the central square. Titus could almost imagine the racket made as horses snorted, stomped, and whinnied. As the men shouted orders, hammered across the hard ground in their boots, their stubby muskets and short sabers clinking … this half-baked army could never creep up on an enemy by surprise.

  But, the Mexican Army never would have to do that out here in California, he decided. Or in northern Mexico either. They were merely an army of occupation, able to subjugate a weak and peaceable Indian population. Nothing like the warrior bands of
the mountains and plains: intractable, bellicose, and intensely jealous of their territory. No, Titus figured, these Mexican soldiers had all grown soft and lazy because they had never been summoned into battle with a real enemy. Not the way soldiers near Taos and Santa Fe constantly had to deal with both Apache and Comanche.

  This bunch charged with guarding the San Gabriel Mission and the nearby valleys were such predictable fools. They formed up outside their adobe walls and rode off as the gates were dragged shut. More than fifty soldiers loped past the base of the knoll where the seven lay in hiding, headed right to left as they pushed on down the road that would carry them east for the foothills and up toward the pass in pursuit of the chaguanosos. Titus realized some of those soldiers knew the route well enough—from time to time they had pursued fleeing slaves, tracked runaway Indians into the low mountains—attempting to capture their prey before they reached the desert moat on the far side of California.

  As he lay there watching them go, Titus was struck with the remembrance of slaves running off from their masters in the southern region of the States. For the first time in many, many years recalling Hezekiah: the bareheaded former field hand who had worked for a Mississippi gunboat brothel madam named Annie Christmas, the slave owner he had wronged in a brawl against Ebenezer Zane’s riverboatmen. Annie Christmas, an angry, spiteful shrew of a woman who promptly sold Hezekiah to the highest bidder, shipping him off north to the Muscle Shoals.

  With that small band of Kentucky flatboatmen looking on outside of Kings Tavern, a Natchez tippling house, sixteen-year-old Titus Bass had freed Hezekiah from his cage, releasing the slave from what cruel fate might await him at the hand of his new taskmaster. At Owensboro on the Ohio River, the Negro prepared to push on west—giving Titus his farewell and announcing that he was taking his former boss-lady’s surname as he embarked on his new life as a freedman.

  Hezekiah Christmas.

  Scratch pulled the spyglass from his eye and turned slightly to peer at the guide. He’d never thought to ask what the youngster’s Indian name was. Frederico was merely the name the Catholic fathers had branded on the Indian—just as the friars gave all their slaves Spanish names, since they were baptizing these former heathens into the holy Spanish church, thereby saving their immortal souls from a life everlasting in the lake of endless fire—

  “How many you make out?” Kersey interrupted his reverie.

  Again he squinted through the eyepiece and attempted to count what men he could see. “I figger there’s at least one on the gate I can’t see a’t’all, maybe two what closed it.”

  “What of the others?” Purcell demanded.

  Bass counted a moment. “I see three others. That could mean there’s at least three I don’t see.”

  Corn was visibly tallying his fingers, staring at both hands. “All right. We can take care of them.”

  Adair asked, “You see them women? Any sign of his sisters?”

  For some time he studied every visible corner of the compound, gazing into every narrow window or doorway for some hint of movement that might betray a woman. But, he didn’t sight a hint of Frederico’s sisters.

  “You are certain your sisters are at the soldier post?” Titus asked in his faltering Spanish.

  “Si,” the guide responded. “They were taken from the mission—”

  “But,” Scratch interrupted, “how long ago?” He knew Frederico had been gone from California for some time, escaped to the Mojave villages.

  “Not for long—”

  “This past winter?” he inquired. “Tell me how long it has been since you saw your sisters carried off to the soldier post?”

  The youth’s face sagged along with his shoulders. “Almost all the seasons. Come autumn, I ran away to the desert.”

  Bass sighed. “Just shy of a year,” he said in English.

  Corn was the first to capture the meaning of that. “Been a whole year since he knowed his sisters was down there?”

  “Almost.” Titus reluctantly nodded. “Maybeso this ain’t but a fool’s errand we’re on, fellas.”

  “Por favor” Frederico pleaded with his dark eyes as well as his tongue. “Help me save my sisters.”

  For himself, Bass nodded, but turned to the others to declare, “I can’t make you others ride down there with the Injun to find two women who likely ain’t still alive no more.”

  Adair’s eyes squinted as he turned his head to stare down into the valley at the post. “I figger them soldiers used up both of them squaws pretty hard, then killed ’em when they wasn’t no use no more.”

  “What’re you asking, Scratch?” Kersey prodded.

  “Me and the Injun, we’ll slip down there—”

  “Just the two of you?” Purcell inquired.

  “I figger to show him his sisters ain’t … around no more,” Titus explained. “Then we can come on your back trail and catch up to the herd together.”

  “There’s too many of them lop-eared greasers for one man to handle down there,” Corn declared, tugging down on a low-crowned hat that had been at one time of a cream color. “I’m going with you.”

  Kersey nodded, rubbing a hand across his dusty leggings cut from a red wool blanket. “Count me in too, Scratch. You’ll need some men at your back, even with them fat Mex soldiers.”

  “Awright,” Adair relented. “Me and Roscoe gonna throw in too.”

  “We all go down there an’ kill ourselves,” Purcell groaned, wagging his head.

  “Maybe not,” Kersey suggested in a whisper, rubbing the end of his sharp, aquiline nose, a most prominent feature on his face: tracked with tiny blood vessels as if someone had crisscrossed it with an inked nib filled with indigo. “Scratch, I got a notion for you an’ the Injun here.”

  “Dust it off and spill your idee.”

  “We have the Injun go round to that post—on foot it’s gotta be. Act like he’s just a dumb, lost Injun, needing to find his way back to his mission.”

  Bass smiled, a light coming across his whole brown face. “I’ll wager them soldiers gonna let the Injun in—”

  “And he can have a look at things on the inside,” Corn interrupted to finish the plan.

  “So he’s got inside to see if his sisters are still around,” Titus said, nodding with approval.

  He rolled onto his hip and quickly stammered through his skimpy Spanish vocabulary, wishing the California Indians understood sign language as well as those tribes of the high plains savvied it.

  Sliding backward on their bellies until they were no longer in danger of breaking the skyline, Scratch and Frederico started down to the animals. There he stopped, grabbed the youth by the shoulders, and studied the youth up and down.

  He retightened the black bandanna around the bloody arm, then—without a word of warning—Titus bent to scoop up a handful of dirt. Spitting into his palm, Scratch mixed the mud with a couple of fingers. When he went to smear the mud on Frederico’s face, the Indian flinched, pulling aside.

  “No,” Bass said in a soothing manner. “We make you look dirty. You have been lost. You were hungry for days. You must fool the soldiers to free your sisters.”

  A light went on behind Frederico’s eyes, and he nodded his permission. Titus smeared a little of the mud on his face, some across his chest, and the rest on his knees. Then he took another handful of dust and powdered it on the mud before stepping back to look at his handiwork.

  Suddenly he pulled his knife and snatched up the long flap of the Indian’s breechclout, nearly ripping off a long corner of the cloth, leaving the fragment hanging.

  “See? You do not wear the Mexican pantaloons the other Indian slaves wear at the mission,” Titus explained as he stepped back and gave Frederico another appraisal. “You are a wild Indian. The soldiers must believe you are a wild Indian to let you inside that fort.”

  “Si, this will work,” Frederico said quietly as he held out his right arm to Bass. They clasped wrists.

  “We’ll be watching from up t
here,” Titus declared. “Get away as quick as you can.”

  The Indian nodded and turned away, trotting around the bottom of the wide knoll.

  “Frederico!” Bass called. “Don’t cause any trouble by yourself. And don’t let your sisters know you have come to rescue them.”

  With a fading grin, the youth took off on foot.

  Titus and the others scrambled back up to the top of the rise and bellied down among the brush. He took out his spyglass and waited for Frederico to appear on the plain below them, zigzagging through the undergrowth, making for the stockade at a lope.

  After long minutes of peering through the lens, watching almost breathless until the gates finally opened, Scratch announced in a whisper, “He’s in.”

  Frederico disappeared, and the gate was closed once more.

  “We wait?” Purcell asked impatiently.

  “We wait,” Elias Kersey told him.

  But even Titus itched to know what was going on by the time Jake Corn revealed in a rasp, “Gate’s opening!”

  “Is he coming?” Purcell inquired, squinting in the harsh sunlight. “The Injun coming?”

  The gate swung clear, and two horsemen left the compound.

  “Nawww,” Adair responded, disappointment heavy in his voice. “It’s just a couple of soldiers—”

  “Be-gawd!” Corn said little too loudly. “Them soldiers’re draggin’ the Injun off somewhere!”

  Behind those two Mexicans a third horse emerged from the gate. Frederico sat astride its bare back, his arms held out straight, lashed to a narrow tent pole laid across the top of his shoulders, wrists tied to either end. His brown ankles were lashed to another tent pole that hung underneath the belly of the horse. Trussed up like a hog for the slaughter.

  “T-they gonna kill the Injun?” Kersey asked.