Death Rattle

by Terry C. Johnston

  Night came down quickly, tucked here as they were on the east slope while the sun slid on past that narrow strip of Mexican California. The Americans quickly sorted out a rotation of nighthawks as the able-bodied would all take their turn at riding the fringes of the herd until enough light oozed out of the eastern sky for them to move on. Scratch’s watch would be the last before dawn.

  As weary as he was, sleep was still slow in coming. The ground was either too rocky, or his thick blanket wasn’t warm enough, or the throb of too many hooves on the ground where he rested his ear too loud … it all made sleep hard to come by for him, his blankets close to where they had settled Purcell and Adair for the night.

  Titus Bass lay staring at the stars here on the high ground between California and the desert where they would once again be tested. This time across, however, they could push as hard as they wanted. With all these horses, the raiders would have no worry for fresh mounts, no reason to concern themselves over a steady food supply, even a source of moisture between springs and water holes as they navigated the wastes for that land of the Ammuchabas. Enough stringy horsemeat to fill their bellies until they reached buffalo country; and enough of the thick, hot horse blood to see them all the way back to the cold, clear streams of the Rocky Mountains.

  Just as he felt himself drifting off on that hard ground, Titus heard the soft, stifled sobs of the two Indians weeping for their dead sister. He listened for some time, wondering what Frederico and Celita would do with the body. What was the custom of their people? Did they scoop holes out of the ground as the white man did, or did they leave the departed in the limbs of tall trees for the winds to reclaim them? Or as some claimed the Cheyenne did, would they wedge the body back into the rocks, seated upright and facing the rising sun?

  What would the two do now with Mayanez? They were leaving behind their home, those hills and valleys of California where their people had been enslaved by the indolent Franciscan friars and forced to labor in the mission vineyards and fields or be brutalized by the Mexican soldiers. Where would the two of them go now? Did it make sense for Frederico to return to his new life in the Ammuchaba villages?

  Where did one go when there was nowhere else to turn?

  It was a question Titus Bass prayed he would never have to face.

  Lying there in the dark, Bass pulled the thick blanket over the side of his head, pressing it against his ear, doing his best to blot out that quiet sobbing. It served only to make him sense a gnawing emptiness of his own. Titus realized he knew something of how the two Indians felt, had some experience with mourning. As the beaver trade died, as the annual summer rendezvous slipped farther and farther into the past, as more and more of his fellow white men fled the Shining Mountains—Titus Bass had pondered just where he was to go. Where was he to point his nose when there no longer was any direction for him to take?

  Wallowing in that confusion, her face swam before the dark of his eyes—her cheeks smooth as the day she had first spoken to him beside the icy river. Cheeks yet untouched by the smallpox scourge that had ravenously devoured the northern plains, sated its appetite on the Blackfeet and others, in the process nearly robbing him of his wife. The swimming vision smiled and held out her arms to him, pulling him down upon her, welcoming him into her wet, waiting warmth. He sensed how she reached out to seize his hardened manhood insistently, to guide it inside her, her own breathing coming quick and shallow as she thrust her hips upward, seating him hungrily to his full length—

  Suddenly he was aware of the Indians crying—no longer sobbing softly. Their wails immediately dispelled the heat of that too-real vision he was desperately reaching for here on the low divide between Mexican California and that no-man’s-land of desert wilderness. Now they were wailing, supplicating their own god.

  Would his own god answer his private prayer, Titus wondered? Would he make it back to Absaroka alive and whole to caress her soft flesh, to have Magpie press her head into the crook of his neck and to bounce Flea upon his knee?

  He rolled onto his other hip and did his best to conjure her up again, thinking how good it felt to sleep curled against her bare back, one of his hands nestled between her soft breasts … how she often reached back and took hold of him in his sleep, arousing him with her fingers, awakening him—knowing he could never refuse her.

  “Bass!”

  Yanking the edge of the blanket from his face, Titus blinked into the black of night—realizing he had finally fallen asleep. After rubbing the heels of his hands into both eyes, Bass recognized Pete Harris kneeling above him.

  “Get up, goddammit,” insisted this friend of Philip Thompson’s. “You’re taking over my watch.”

  “Where?” he asked as he kicked his blanket off.

  Harris pointed east before he trudged off without a word.

  Scratch pulled on his capote, belted it, then stuffed two pistols into the belt. Finally he grabbed his rifle and pouch and started for the edge of the herd. Carefully feeling his way along in his moccasins, Titus toed atop some of the tall boulders scattered around the watering hole, settled onto his haunches, and stared out over the extent of the herd. The sheer size of the remuda dwarfed their little camp—the horses filling the narrow, grassy meadow that stretched farther than he could see here in the cold, dry air of these last hours before dawn. They’d be pushing the animals on when it grew light enough. On down to the sands where they would begin their crossing.

  This high desert darkness had a dreamlike quality all its own: cold enough to keep him wide awake although he was never really sure what was real and what was not in this world of darkness that had closed in around him. Over time the sky lightened below them, along the horizon at first, slowly grinding his way, yard by yard. Shapes took form in the coming of day. He began to recognize brush from horse, boulder from man. Animals snorted. Someone threw some kindling on a dying fire.

  He could see it was Peg-Leg, kneeling there on his good leg, that wooden pin shoved out from him at an angle, shoving the old coffeepot closer to the flames with a grating scrape across the rocks—

  Erupting in a hundred directions at once, the big, black pot exploded. Smith tumbled backward as embers from the fire shot upward in spirals like a thousand fireflies suddenly hurled up, freed from a clay jar. Many of the raiders were yelling, one of them crouching over Smith, helping Peg-Leg up when a second gunshot echoed in this rocky hollow where they found water for their stolen horses.

  A third, then fourth, gunshot reverberated off the rocky walls now. One of the trappers went down in the half-light, noisily screaming. Bass was already off the rock and on his belly, staying low, watching the wounded trapper slide backward as Adair rolled sideways off his improvised travois, painfully pulling himself out of the firelight the moment the rocky defile came alive with the roar of confident voices. Mexicans.

  “They ambushed us, goddammit!” Williams was growling.

  Smith peered from behind a low boulder, his eyes sweeping the rocky ledges above him. “Came up on us while we was camped.”

  “How’d they follow our trail in the dark?” a voice called out.

  “It wasn’t no big secret where we was headed,” Williams grumbled as he shoved his rifle against his shoulder.

  “Silas!” Scratch hissed as he slid in beside Adair. He started to rock the wounded man off his bad leg.

  “Can’t get up!”

  Titus shoved his rifle into Adair’s hands, then hoisted the man back onto the crude travois. Stepping into the vee, Titus grabbed the cradle’s support and heaved forward as the air around them was rent with bullets. A damn good thing those soldiers never weren’t any good with their poor smoothbores, or they’d likely have more of us already cut down.

  Above the Americans reverberated the commands of the Mexican officers, echoes ordering the soldiers down from the timber and rocky cliffs, goading them to close quickly on the outnumbered and surprised Americans. Those horses grazing nearest the camp grew restless, stirring this way, the
n that, like a flock of wild wrens as stray balls landed among them, gunfire drawing closer and closer, voices growing strident and desperate. Shots ricocheted off the rocks with shrill cries of warning.

  The wild horses were the very first to break, lunging past Titus, sweeping some of the California horses with them as the nervous animals blocked him from reaching the boulders where the rest of the Americans were retreating one by one by one.

  “They got knives on their guns!” Adair screeched.

  Huffing wearily, Scratch whirled, glancing over his shoulder—finding that the Mexicans did have long knives pinned beneath the muzzles of their rifles. Four of those bayonets glittered in the remnants of the fire’s light that gray morning as the soldados slowly advanced over the rocky ground toward Bass and his travois. “Titus Bass!”

  He whipped back around to find two of the trappers standing atop the rocks, making conspicuous targets of themselves as they leveled their weapons on those four soldiers closing in on Scratch. He and Adair were trapped—frightened horses milling between him and the boulders where the others had taken cover.

  One of the Americans fired. Scratch watched the bullet graze the forestock of a soldier’s musket before it slammed into the man’s chest, shoving him backward off his feet as his own weapon discharged into the air.

  Dropping Adair’s travois, Titus reached down and yanked his rifle out of the wounded man’s hands. He dragged the hammer back as the weapon reached his hipbone. Set the back trigger and leveled the muzzle at the closest Mexican.

  He felt a ball rake his upper arm with fire as brilliant flame jetted from his own barrel. Not far past the shreds of burning patch that had exploded from the flintlock’s muzzle, he watched the soldier spin around on his boot heel, screwing himself into the grass with a grunt of surprise and pain.

  Another gun roared on those rocks behind him. A third soldier pitched backward off his feet, landing flat on his back in the grass. Only one more of them to keep off Adair, one more Mexican who instantly stopped, eyes wide with terror as he gazed around him at his three dead companions.

  “Get over here, Titus Bass!” another voice boomed from the rocks.

  Turning on his heel he found only a few horses blocking his retreat now. Laying the rifle alongside Adair’s hip, he yanked one of the pistols from his belt, then slapped it into Silas’s waiting hand.

  “Use it when they get close,” he huffed. “Only when they’re close enough you’re sure to kill one of the bastards!”

  His lungs were screaming with hot tongues of breathless fire by the time he lunged to the bottom of the boulders and dropped the travois. Quickly kneeling beside Adair, Scratch raised one of the trapper’s arms. He ducked under that thick blacksmith’s arm and rolled Silas across the back of his shoulders. Dragging his own legs beneath him, Titus rose slowly, unsteadily, with the heavy man’s bulk centered atop his spine.

  “Merciful a’mighty!” Adair gasped in pain as his wounded leg dragged off the ground and slammed into the back of Scratch’s hip. Silas clutched desperately at the front of Titus’s shirt with one of those broad-beamed blacksmith’s hands.

  “Help him!” Williams was roaring as Bass stumbled uncertainly around the base of the rocks.

  Coltrane was at Titus’s side in the next heartbeat. Short and stocky, but built like a whiskey barrel—Roscoe slipped under Adair’s other arm and dragged Silas crosswise onto his own shoulders. With his two thick arms looped under Adair’s armpit and one of his legs, Coltrane sidestepped into a narrow crevice between the jumble of boulders as lead smacked the rocks around them.

  One of the Mexican’s bullets grazed the boulder just above the spot where Scratch knelt to retrieve his rifle. With a shrill scream of its own, a tiny fragment of granite was shaved off near his ear. The long cut it opened along his left cheek burned with a tongue of icy fire.

  Looking up, he found Tom Smith holding his hand down for him. Grasping Peg-Leg’s wrist, Scratch dragged himself through the crevice behind Coltrane and Adair.

  “You’re the last,” Smith growled.

  “The bastards’re chivvying the herd!” someone roared above them.

  “Kill as many of ’em as you can!” Bill Williams ordered. “We’ll drive ’em back, then go round up them horses again!”

  But there were too many Mexicans.

  That was plain enough for Titus to see. They were all over the rocks, bristling at the edge of the cliff to their left, more shoving their way through the frightened horses. Vaqueros and soldiers both. Yelling at one another now that they knew they had the horse thieves surrounded and whipped. Yelling at the Americans to surrender or be killed.

  “S-surrender?” Williams screeched as Smith translated.

  Two more balls of lead smacked the rocks behind them.

  “Don’t fret none, Bill,” Peg-Leg said. “Ain’t none of us goin’ to no California hoosegow for a hanging now.”

  “They’d sooner kill us all as put us behind their bars,” Scratch explained. “If we surrender, we’ll be helpless. That’s when them bean-bellies gonna cut us down.”

  “That’s right,” Kersey snorted. “They won’t waste no trouble hog-tying us back to California.”

  “Maybeso we’re gonna go down here and now,” Scratch told them all as he rammed a ball home against the breech of his rifle. “But leastways, fellas … we can show these pelados how to die like men.”

  * The Mexican term for the “wild” or “gentile” Indians who had been acquired by the Franciscans or the ranchos through capture or purchase.

  14

  He wondered if the Mexicans hung horse thieves. Maybe they wouldn’t waste time with a rope—just stand them up in front of a firing squad, their backs against the fort wall, blindfolded or not, and let these bad-shooters bang away at them.

  Right then Bass didn’t know which way he preferred to die. Hanging seemed like such a terrifying, prolonged way to go, especially if his neck did not break at the bottom of the drop: suspended, swinging there until he choked to death, legs kicking while he soiled himself.

  Any time these greasers hit something with their muskets, it was more idiot’s luck than it was skill. Chances were a firing squad would botch the job but good, wounding him badly rather than killing him outright with a clean bullet through the heart. Then he’d be no better off than swinging from a noose, forced to endure the agony of his wounds until he bled enough to pass out, no longer in misery.

  “How many goddamned greasers they bring after us?” Thomas Smith shrieked as he whirled with those two big horse pistols in hand: .62-caliber smoothbores they were.

  Their attackers weren’t all soldiers. Not all wore those short blue jackets draped with braid and the flat-brimmed hats. The rest must damn well be vaqueros come after the thieves—maybe to even a personal score for all the killing done yesterday morning in the valley.

  “We need powder!” one of the trappers yelled.

  “What’s in my horn s’all I got,” another explained.

  Kersey’s voice bellowed, “How you fixed for balls? Anything less’n fifty-four’ll work. Who can spare me some balls?”

  “Here, Elias,” Scratch called out, digging into his pouch as he crabbed over. “I got a handful for you.”

  Appreciation lay deep in Kersey’s eyes as he scooped out more than a dozen from Titus’s palm. “Ain’t this a yank on the devil’s short-hairs, Scratch?”

  “Never thort I’d die in California,” Jake Corn grumbled. “Allays thort it’d be Blackfoot.”

  “Maybeso a griz,” Titus said as he wheeled back around at the growing noise from their attackers. “I figgered to go out wrasslin’ with a griz … but not till I’d bounced me some grandpups on my knee.”

  Reuben Purcell groaned, “We cain’t shoot ’em all! Too dang many!”

  “Don’t none of you give up!” Bass snapped at Purcell the moment after he fired and was throwing his rifle butt to the ground to begin reloading.

  “Just shoot ever’ liv
ing one you can,” Corn declared.

  “Jake’s right,” Bass said, glancing a moment at the fear tightening Purcell’s face. He felt bad for Rube, sorry that he’d snapped at the man, maybe even made Purcell feel cowardly—when he was for sure Reuben wasn’t a coward. He’d held his own without complaint back when Ol’ Frapp went under. “Knock ’em down one at a time. They ain’t gonna rush us ’cause they know that’s certain death, boys. We can hold ’em off—”

  “Robiseau’s down!” came the cry.

  Williams growled, “Blazes! That makes four more out of the fight!”

  Titus spit one of the round lead balls into the palm of his hand, rolled it between his thumb and forefinger, then pressed it into the muzzle. Dragging the wiping stick from its thimbles at the bottom of the forestock, he rammed the ball down against the powder charge without a patch. No time to mess with such things. He’d use a greased patch on that gummy, unburnt powder fouling the barrel after another shot or two. But for now—they had to hold the Mexicans back, keep them at bay … maybe they’d even give up and pull off their attack.

  The sun was coming. It had grown light enough that Titus had no trouble making out the dip and sway of the mountainside as it fell away to the desert far below. Why’d he ever crossed that godforsaken piece of sandy ground? He had no business in such inhospitable country. Not that he hadn’t crossed some water scrapes in his time, like that trail running from Santa Fe and Taos clear back to the settlements of Missouri. But, this was something different. They’d come here to ride off with every last Mexican horse they could lay their hands on.

  The sun was coming. Might well be his last.

  Just that Titus could smell death hovering nearby. Hell knew he had experienced enough of it: killed plenty men himself, or been there as men died … so he could for certain smell death’s fetid stench strong in his nostrils right now.

  Bass made the next shot, dropped one of the vaqueros, all of whom were more daring than most of the overcautious soldiers.