He propped one knee between Canton’s shoulders and forced his face down into the fire. He cut the man’s throat with his knife. Blood hissed and smoked on the embers. Marwood took his time to work the slender blade between Canton’s neck bones and, with a murderous cry of rage, flung his head into the desert.
He wiped his knife on Canton’s clothes and folded it with care as the thing inside him coiled again in an uneasy sleep. Then Marwood stripped the corpse of its stinking rags and threw them on the fire. They blazed and billowed greasy smoke.
Canton had little in his pockets other than a handwritten letter from a wife in Kentucky. There was a second letter from an uncle in Lexington, demanding a receipt for buffalo bones sold to a fertilizer concern in Dodge City.
Marwood looked at the remains of the man at his feet. “You aren’t from up Arkansas way,” he said. He tossed the correspondence into the fire.
Under the Indian blanket covering the saddle were three scalps. Marwood examined the scalphunter’s gun. It was in fair condition with three rounds left in the wheel. Low on ammunition, Marwood thought. Which was why Canton risked using a knife instead of an expedient bullet through his head. Well, a man too cheap to kill right deserves to die.
Marwood put the gun down and dragged Canton’s body into the desert. He returned to camp and searched the saddlebags and panniers. He found a pound of salt pork wrapped in stiff calico. Another leather bag of possibles contained seventeen dollars in Mexican silver. Marwood roasted the meat over the fire and ate.
Canton had also hidden a wolf’s hide waterskin under his saddle. Marwood shook it and drank, listening as the snarling coyotes tore Canton apart, wrestling with his head between their popping jaws.
CHAPTER 14
Marwood woke once again with the sun full in his eyes. He hiked into the desert and found no trace of Canton, just the circling tracks of the coyotes, who’d crept out of the low, bare hills, took the offering, cracked bone and meat, and left. There was nothing else but sand and wind-scoured rock for miles.
Marwood watered Canton’s horse from his hat. What little remained he kept for his own use. But if he didn’t find more water in the next forty-eight hours he would have to shoot the horse, and probably himself.
Marwood saddled up. Canton’s horse wasn’t much of an animal to stake his life on. The wretched, swaybacked creature had no spirit: the homemade hackamore rubbed raw, bleeding spots on the muzzle; the left foreleg had high ringbone. Marwood worked the pastern joint back and forth. The horse took the pain, but it would not be long before he walked himself lame.
Marwood mounted the horse and rode north. He travelled slow, pacing the horse and himself. As he rode he checked his backbearing. No sign of Rangers or the Buffalo Soldiers. They had departed for bigger game. No sign of any Pinkertons, either. Maybe they, too, had taken off after new game. He could live with that.
The following day Marwood shot a javelina nosing through a sunbaked streambed with Canton’s gun. He made a dry and fireless camp. What he didn’t eat raw he staked in thin sheets under the sun to dry. The trapezoidal head of the beast stared at him from a mesquite stob, black with crawling insects.
Late that night he reached a shambled collection of adobe structures and ugly mud hovels. He bedded down for the night under a thatched portico. The next morning he sold the horse, saddle, and Canton’s gun in Gallina for three hundred pesos. In a cantina off the square, an elderly vaquero expressed an interest in, and subsequently examined, the scalps.
“Are they Apache scalps, señor?” he asked.
The vaquero’s name was Matias Antonio Sosa-Ruiz. He smoked black Maduro cigars. He wore brown on black and a silver concho belt. They talked business over bowls of black piñon coffee. The air swarmed with clouds of snarling flies and the tang of chili peppers assaulted Marwood’s nostrils. Skinned goats hung in an open window, their blue bald eyes staring at the ceiling.
“I don’t know,” Marwood admitted. “Hair’s greased. They’re Indian, anyway.”
He had the notion Canton cut the scalps off anyone he came across and greased them with tallow to pass for Indian. He might have done as much with Marwood’s hair.
Sosa-Ruiz held one of the scalps toward the light. “The State of Chihuahua will buy Apache scalps,” he said.
Male Apache scalps went for a hundred American in Chihuahua, fifty for women and children.
“I’m staying in Texas,” Marwood said.
Sosa-Ruiz put the hair back on the table. He smoked for a minute and let his mind work. “I will pay one hundred Yankee dollars.”
“That’s not much.”
“The peligro is mine, señor. If I am caught I will be hanged. Or worse. You are going to Texas, but this is Mexico. There is always worse for a man who remains in Mexico.”
“All right, but make it gold.” He could use gold on both sides of the border.
“Your terms are more than fair,” Sosa-Ruiz agreed. “I will have your money tonight.”
“I’ll meet you at sundown,” Marwood said.
They shook hands and parted. Marwood ate scrambled eggs and chorizo in a taqueria. He bought coffee, pinto beans, and salt. He also bought lead balls and powder for his gun.
He hung around the plaza until early evening. There was another man standing between two adobe buildings halfway down the street. He wore a black hat with a feather in it. When Marwood looked at him, the man backed off into shadow.
Sosa-Ruiz stood under an oil lamp hanging from a stone crosstree. Guitar music came from the cantina. Malagueña. Sosa-Ruiz took possession of the scalps, and Marwood pocketed five gold double eagles.
“I will ride to Chihuahua in the morning,” the vaquero said. He folded the scalps in a white calfskin mochila and put them away. “There I will light a novena for my hijo muerto. Veinte años he is gone. How do you say it, señor?”
“Twenty years.”
“Sí. Twenty years, my son, he is dead.”
White moths dropped from the wooden rafters overhead and circled the lamplight. Their shadows flitted across the windows.
The vaquero smoked a cigar. “My son was the only person I lived for. Now I sell scalps. What can I say to God about that? If he would even listen to my petition, which he will not. Los años no pasan en balde y cada gallo canta en su muladar.” He looked at Marwood. “I also light the candle for you, señor. Perdóname, but you look like a man who travels a dark path.”
Marwood didn’t know what to say to that. They shook hands a final time.
“Vaya con Dios, señor.”
“Goodbye.”
Marwood hefted his war bag and walked to the edge of town. Spaw was waiting for him with two fresh horses.
“They’re all back at camp,” he said when Marwood drew close. “We had a caution finding you. Those Rangers came out of nowhere and chased us over creation.”
Marwood picked up the trailing reins of a chestnut gelding. It looked a decent enough horse. “Everyone make it out of that scrape alive?” he asked.
“Amos went under,” Spaw said. “Caught a ball in his liver and died the following night. Wasn’t nothing Doc could do. Goddamn Texans sold us out, Mar. Hope you’re ready for a bloody, hard ride. We’re headed for deep country. The pincers are closing in, and our necks are gettin’ squeezed.”
“I’m ready,” Marwood said.
He chucked the horse and they rode off.
He found the men concealed in a hackberry grove at the base of a 175-foot waterfall in the Rio Grande Rift. Their bestial faces were quiet and withdrawn as they sat around the sparkling water pool.
Jubal Stone had deep pain lines carved on his face. The wound in his shoulder kept festering and had to be drained daily. They looked whipped and chewed up to a man, and their countenances startled Marwood.
Botis brought Acheron around and roused them to their feet. They rode throu
gh the night into the Cuesta del Burro hills. The range was covered with rhyolite and igneous shards of volcanic rock that split the horse’s hooves, making them stumble and groan.
They rode out the next day over the Chihuahua Trail, through scrubby desert cactus. Flocks of startled doves flew up before them, their wings whistling with alarm. Toward evening Lovich shot a pronghorn antelope and they cooked meat over a fire on bayonets. The night after they gained the eastern reaches of the Glass Mountain Range.
While they rode Marwood noticed the men stared at Botis in spells and turns. Their own faces were unreadable and enigmatic. It was as if they were trying to fuddle something out, and either could not comprehend what they knew to be true, or trust their own sanity.
They had to shoot two lame horses in the course of the week, and were down to their last one in the remuda when they happened upon a cluster of wooden buildings that shared a communal water well.
Seventeen men and five women, all Mennonites, emerged from their respective abodes and stared in astonishment at the feral men dressed in cannibalistic vesture: animal skins, furs, and disparate parts of human beings worn as ornamentation. Teeth, blackened ears, a necklace of fingers and shells, tooled belts and bridles cut from human skin, clattering scalps hanging from the horses like black moss. They were blood stained and reeking—men who rode the brim of Hell’s expanse, and supped on the devil’s scat.
“Do you have any horses?” Botis asked.
“Not for sale, mister,” replied an aged foreman dressed in black with a fringe of whiskers under his chin.
Botis dropped all pretence. “I wasn’t asking to buy.”
They had to shoot one recalcitrant Mennonite to make their position clear. Dan Lovich flipped a rope around the wounded man’s neck and dragged him back and forth over the ground. When he finished he threw the rope down in disgust. The torn and bloody body lay where he left it. No one moved to touch it.
They ransacked the shacks, turned over beds, and emptied cabinetry. There was little to eat other than collared peccary, feed corn, and a wheel of goat cheese.
The settlers did have guns and powder at their disposal. The Hydra took it, along with all the lead shot and percussion caps they could find.
Botis was prying open a small button chest with an iron pritchel, looking for hidden valuables, when a settler filled the doorway of the single-room structure.
“Get out of my fucking light,” Botis growled.
“We are peaceful men of God,” the man told him. “I will pray for your soul.”
“That’s the least you can do before I whip your goddamn ass for standing in my light,” Botis replied without turning around. He returned to work once the man’s shadow departed.
They gathered the stock and were about to depart when a dark-haired woman ran past Marwood toward Botis, who was already sitting in his saddle. She carried a loose bundle of clothes pressed against her breast, possibly everything she owned in the world. She took hold of Acheron’s bridle.
“Take me with you,” she begged. “There is nothing left to build on. I will be your woman.”
Botis kicked her in the stomach. “Let go the goddamn horse.”
Her knees buckled. She dropped her bundle of linen but stubbornly held onto the bridle, jerking the horse’s head down.
“No,” she said. “You have taken everything. These men are too weak and cannot protect us.”
“Acheron.”
The blue roan snapped his teeth onto the woman’s face and hair. He shook the upper half of her body like a dog with a rag, tearing skin and ripping hair from her scalp.
She screamed wildly, her arms flailing. She fell back on a pile of gravel, wheezed with pain and stunned surprise. Blood dripped in her eyes and soaked the front of her cotton dress.
Acheron shook his head, bridle rattling. Gore and foam flecked off his muzzle. He wickered. Maimed and bereft, the woman covered her head with folded arms. She shrieked and rocked back and forth.
Botis and party left the settlement in their backwash; only slowing later in the day so the horses could blow and regain their strength. Otherwise, they would have ridden the animals into the ground. They were but that desperate to put long safe miles under them.
They rode on. Men slept and ate and lived in their saddles. They relieved themselves without stopping. The Tonkawas would leap from their horses, put their ears to the ground to listen, then vault back onto their animals without breaking stride. They kept going all through the night and the next day, and the night that followed. The horses were played out. Marwood’s body ached from the never-ending ride; his eyes burned with sand, sun, and overwhelming exhaustion. Water scarce, food little. Hope none. This was the mixture they rode on.
By mid-afternoon of the following day, when they believed they had placed enough distance between them and the Texas Rangers, Botis called a halt.
They had crossed canyons, doubled back, and laid many false trails. Marwood more fell from his horse than dismounted. If anything, he left the saddle with less grace than when he lost his mare in the flash flood. So too did the others, dismounting in similar fashion. They staggered into a small clearing and dropped and sprawled.
Spaw and Marwood joined the beaten company. The Tonkawas also drew near. This was to be a major council of war. Every man had a living stake in the decisions that would be made over the next hour.
No one said anything for a space. Botis used the time to quietly load his gun. His clothes were smeared with blood and streaks of caked mud, but otherwise he looked no worse for wear. The same could not be said for the remainder of his crew. Every man had a wound of some kind, and was damaged near the point of inaction. Gratton had a deep gash on his face sutured with cactus thorns. He had shaved part of his beard to repair the wound. Lovich had one knee wrapped with rawhide and used a broken rifle as a crutch. Blood and foul yellow pus seeped through his crude bandages. Quillen drained the pus and cupped him for good measure, but his fever wasn’t breaking.
Rota whet stoned his harpoon. The harsh rasp of stone on steel caused the men to look up.
“Goddamn, old man,” Charley Broadwell growled, “can’t you be quiet?”
Bill Rota lifted his eyes toward Charley then bent back to his task.
The other men were too tired, or too hurt, to do anything but sit in a mute circle. Much like a ring of Paleolithic savages off the short end of a bad mammoth hunt.
Botis took a powder flask and charged an empty chamber of his gun. He patched a ball and levered it into place. He did the same for the other chambers and centred percussion caps over each. He spun the cylinder, checked the gate and hammer action. Satisfied, he thrust the gun through his belt and glanced at Lovich.
The Dutchman took this as his signal to open the floor for discussion.
“The Captain wants to ride into Comancheria,” Lovich said, tapping a hobble rope against his leg. He waited for a reaction.
There was none. The men were looking down at the ground. Even Rota had stopped sharpening the point of his harpoon. If Lovich was disappointed by their response he did not show it. Men studied their boots, their dirty nails, or contemplated a horned toad sunning itself on a rock. No one looked up, and no one dared look at Botis.
“That’s a mistake,” Marwood said.
Botis swung his head and eyed him hard. Marwood was not put off. He returned the man’s stare.
“They won’t follow us into Comancheria,” Botis explained.
“You’re goddamn right they won’t,” answered Marwood. “They won’t have to.”
“Cibola is there, Mar. I saw it, again. So did these men.”
Marwood remembered the unknown star-filled sky. He looked at the men, who were reluctant to add their voices to the discussion. Perhaps they had differing opinions on Botis, even as to his sanity, but they trusted him. That went a long way between men desperately
fighting for their lives in the desert bush.
“I want to find Cibola,” Marwood said. “Or whatever this place is that haunts me and has stolen my memory. I want to know who, and what, I am. I think you know the answers to these things, Captain. I think you’re keeping them to yourself because it gives you power. It gives you power over the world, over yourself, and over me.”
“We can’t head back west,” Botis said, not gainsaying Marwood’s words. “Not on this same track. That’s certain death.”
“No, I agree.” Marwood frowned. He kicked at the dirt. He was not a man who often gave vent to frustration. “Going west would be like running us through a slaughter chute. Texas border narrows down at El Paso. All they have to do is put the stopper in to bottle us up. No way we will ever get through El Paso into New Mexico Territory. North of that lies Comancheria. South of El Paso is all of Mexico. It’s a huge death trap for every one of us here.”
“We might have an easier time in Mexico,” Jubal Stone said. “If we keep jumping the border we could get both sides chasing their tails.”
“I am not so sure about that,” Marwood cautioned. “The Federales have warrants out on us by now. We can hold up somewhere down there until the heat comes off. But I wouldn’t want to bet my life on the good graces of Mexican hospitality.”
“I agree with Mar on that point,” Botis interjected. “So what do you suggest?” The last question had been put back to Marwood.
Marwood looked at the big man whose secrets he wished to know. “You know my answer. We need to run hard back up through Texas. We will have a much easier time in Hill Country than the flat waste of the Sonoran Desert or that Chihuahuan hellhole. Or anywhere in West Texas for that matter. There are more settlements and towns up central way, which is to our benefit. It will allow us the opportunity to stay ball and powdered, and find fresh horses.”
“I suppose if I got to be shot I’d rather it be by a Texas lawman than a Mexican one,” Spaw said hopefully.
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