Crack in the Sky

by Terry C. Johnston

  For those innocent folks settling at the ragged edge of a dangerous frontier, whether in the valley of the Ohio River or in that Taos valley he and the others had left down below, a person simply came to accept the raw odds of life versus death. Some men just naturally figured they would be brave enough to stare their enemy in the eye if that time ever arose … while others prayed they would never have to find out.

  He couldn’t blame these soldiers for doubting what they had gotten themselves into; the more ground they put between them and their homes, the farther they climbed into the mountains, the colder and darker became the smother of night. Just as he couldn’t really blame folks back in America for figuring they could push against the frontier without having to pay the price in blood and lives. It had always been that way, Bass figured. Back to the time of his grandpap. Down through the days of his own father.

  Here in his thirty-fifth winter, Titus realized he could no longer blame his father for trying to give his son what he figured his son would want from life. Even though it turned out that Thaddeus’s life of peace and quiet and security was about as far away as anything could be from what Titus wanted for himself.

  If that man hadn’t been the sort to go forth, to push against the starry veil of the frontier, to dare dance on the winds of fate … then at least Thaddeus must be the sort of man who could summon up the courage to defend his family, those dear to him. To defend his own kind against those who came to steal from him. Like these Comanche.

  He hoped these soldiers would be brave enough for what stared them in the eye this cold morning.

  With that first distant shot echoing through the timber ahead, down in his marrow Bass wondered if any of them—American or Mexican—had any idea what they had bitten off.

  9

  “Andele! Andele!”

  Workman was shouting, waving for all he was worth, already a horse length behind Bass, doing his best to goad the Mexicans into hurrying their stubborn horses into motion.

  It was like dragging a reluctant, harness-sore mule out of its stall to plow a field.

  In a matter of moments the air on the other side of a low rise dotted with pine and spruce was cluttered with more gunshots, the yelps of warriors, and shrieks of women and children.

  One of the women kept screaming so long and so loud Bass wondered if she would ever take another breath. But as long as she was hollering, he figured she was still alive.

  At the top of the knoll he burst out of the timber, the clatter of the Mexican brigade coming up behind him, the noise of the fight rising from below him.

  But for their straight black hair and the feathers tied in it, the warriors didn’t look any different from the trappers—except that the white men stood back at the edge of the trees and rocks, jamming more powder and ball down the long barrels of their rifles—the Comanche threw tomahawks and knives, fighting to control their frightened ponies so they could rush their enemy as they wildly swung long-handled clubs or dashed toward a target with one of their buffalo lances. Others fought dismounted in the swirl of horses and bodies, seeking a target for their small, strong bows of Osage orangewood, firing their rosewood arrows.

  “Save the women! Watch for you don’t shoot the women!”

  On that far side of the meadow he heard his friends yelling to one another, each of the eight fighting his own battle against more than four or five bandy-legged raiders against every white man. Already the ground was littered with more than a dozen Comanche bodies.

  With a mournful anguish Rowland darted from the trees, shouting, “Maria? Maria?”

  Where were the women and children?

  Then Scratch saw them as the horses jostled and sidestepped. There … in the middle of some ten or so Indians the women struggled against the enemy, who clamped on to wrists, yanking them off their horses, dragging them brutally away from the fight. Children clawed and kicked at the warriors, crying out for their mothers.

  He shot one last glance over his shoulder as he jabbed heels into the horse’s ribs, seeing the whiskey maker working everything he could out of his animal, the Mexican officer and about ten of them right behind him.

  Down the gentle slope Bass raced, beginning to yell. All the fear, all the goddamned, paralyzing fear … just yelling always got rid of most of it as he reined right for those horsemen in the middle of the pack who had charge of the prisoners.

  Somewhere among them would be Rowland’s Maria.

  The hillside behind him suddenly filled with the garbled commands in a foreign tongue, the depression in front of him a torrent of war cries, gunshots, and the screams of utter terror.

  “Bass!”

  He was too late in turning: finding the Comanche already driving the sharp blade of a short cutlass down into the top of a woman’s skull, part of her head peeling away from the blow like a thick layer of onion. Too late to save her, he brought the rifle up anyway as the warrior whirled about in sheer ecstasy, bellowing full-mouthed, shaking that bloody blade at the end of his arm.

  The ball caught him high in the chest, knocking him back the distance of two full steps, his legs churning, before his feet touched the ground again and he collapsed beneath one of the milling, stamping ponies.

  Rowland was struggling to fight his way into the open, grassy depression, screaming her name as if it were a battle cry.

  “Maria!”

  There were at least four rushing John in that next moment, closing in on him as he fired his pistol, then jammed it into his belt to begin reloading the rifle.

  Scratch knew the man wouldn’t have a chance.

  Looking up the slope to where the Mexicans had fanned out behind their leader to charge into the fray, Bass sawed the reins to the right before he stuffed them into his mouth so he could pull the big pistol from the wide belt around his blanket coat. Dragging the hammer back, Scratch chose the one who would reach Rowland first.

  The warrior heard him coming at the last moment, whirling suddenly, his face pinched with surprise as Scratch brought the pistol across his body, held it steady on his target that lone moment as he raced past—pulling the trigger to watch the oak-brown face explode into a bright crimson crescent in that cold mountain sunrise.

  As his horse carried him on by, Titus watched Rowland turn in his direction, the trapper now seeing the twisted body of the Comanche only steps from his back. For a heartbeat John gazed up at the horseman, attempting to mouth something, only his eyes able to convey the gratitude.

  With shouts and screams of their own, the Mexicans flooded into the clearing with a noisy crash of arms. Their crude smoothbores barked, great mushrooms of gray smoke coughing from the muzzles as their horses balked, many spinning to attempt fleeing the melee. For a narrow sliver of time the Indians burst in all directions at once, like a covey of quail exploding from their hiding place among the tall grass. But in the next heartbeat the Comanche must have realized they still had the advantage of numbers and whipped back to hurl themselves onto the soldiers.

  Those tortured moments allowed the trappers to emerge from the trees and rocks where they had awaited the Comanche, where the Americans had slapped shut their trap, where they had fired the first shots of this battle—likely spilling as many riders as there were American guns trained on the raiders.

  As he clumsily poured a palmful of powder down the muzzle of his rifle, Bass turned to watch the warriors who mingled with the women and children. The Comanche were forcing their captives slowly back toward the center of the clearing, the first of the children being wrenched from the arms of their mothers and thrown onto the back of a pony. Another warrior savagely kicked a woman, at the same time pulling from her arms a small child he handed up to another warrior already on the back of a horse.

  “Maria!” Rowland screeched.

  There came no answer that Bass could hear above the roar of guns, the slap of lead among the trees and rocks, the neighing of the horses and the shrieking of the prisoners.

  Another woman went down, her sk
ull crushed with a stone club as a Comanche stood over her, swinging the club’s handle back in a graceful, deadly arc, preparing to make another blow. Her brown, naked body twitched in the grass convulsively from that first wound.

  “Maria!”

  Out of the corner of his eye Bass saw Rowland inching toward the captives, swinging his rifle this way, then that—his eyes just as wide with fear as were every woman’s.

  Spilling a few grains of priming powder into the pan, Bass dragged the frizzen down and brought the rifle up to his hip, yanking back on the trigger without consciously aiming just as the warrior began the deadly downward arc of that club.

  The ball caught the Comanche in the lower belly, doubling him over in half as he was knocked off his feet, spinning to the side, tumbling over the naked captive. Rowland collapsed at the woman’s side, turned her crushed, bloody skull so he could stare into her face, then stood suddenly, his face one of horror as he peered into the blurry torrent of bodies.

  “Maria!”

  Bass knew the body wasn’t hers. But where was she?

  His eyes raced over the naked prisoners herded within a shrinking compound of horses and warriors. Very few left: women struggling to pull their children out of the arms of a few horsemen attempting to escape, women seeking to shelter their little ones with nothing more than their bare brown bodies.

  “Juan!”

  As Scratch held the muzzle to his lips and blew down the barrel to clear it of embers, he heard the woman’s shrill voice above the rest of the screeching and war cries and rifle fire.

  She was so close. Closer to Bass than she was to Rowland as she fell to her hands and knees, then rolled under the dancing legs of a pony to scramble back to her feet. Scratch could see she was already bloodied, could see her wrists still bound by loops of crude hemp, two sections of rope still wrapped around her ankles to show how her legs had been tied beneath the belly of a pony that carried her out of the Taos valley, her mouth and chin smeared with blood where they had struck her in anger—perhaps to silence her screams, to quiet her sobbing.

  Jamming the plug between his teeth, Bass pulled it from the end of the powder horn, spilling the coarse black grains straight down the muzzle. Racing to reload.

  She was struggling back into motion, stumbling toward Rowland, raising in the air those hands still tied together. Begging …

  “Maria!” John bellowed, focusing his overwhelming relief on the woman.

  Titus dropped the powder horn so that it hung suspended there above his shooting pouch as he tongued another ball from the inside of his cheek, pushing it forward with the tip of his tongue.

  From his left Bass saw the movement of one of the horsemen as the warrior whipped his pony around, the fourteen-foot-long buffalo lance coming up halfway between earth and sky like a crude splinter against the winter blue. His black hate-filled eyes followed the escape of the woman, spotting the white man rushing toward her.

  Spitting the wet lead ball from his lips with a noisy puert, Scratch yanked the ramrod free of its thimbles under the big octagonal barrel, ramming the ball home against the powder and the breech.

  How Bass wished he would have enough time to finish reloading …

  Then knew he wouldn’t—

  Just as Rowland was reaching out for her, the warrior cocked the huge lance beneath his arm, his horse leaping into motion as the arm snapped back, then slingshotted forward.

  Both Bass and Rowland watched it hit the naked woman stumbling toward her husband. Piercing her body more than six feet of its length, suddenly erupting from her chest, red and glistening as she stumbled two more steps, staring down at the lance that impaled her, imprisoned her there, on the point of death.

  She seized hold of the lance with her two grimy hands becoming slicked with her own blood. Fluid gushed from her mouth, spilling off her chin and onto her small brown breasts as she collapsed forward.

  “Juan!”

  It was more of a gurgle than a scream of pain or anguish.

  With a terrifying scream the Comanche flung the long lance forward, releasing it.

  Rowland was a few feet shy of catching Maria as she collapsed onto the long point of the lance, teetering there a moment as if in the hovering flight of a nectar-robbing hummingbird, then keeled off the six feet of lance to fall to the side with more than eight feet of the shaft slapping the icy snow behind her as she thrashed on the ground, gurgling.

  Lustily screaming in victory, the horseman was pulling an ax from the back of his belt as Rowland spun to his knees over his wife, shrieking in horror.

  Kicking his pony and yanking savagely on the horsehair rein—struggling to get his animal slowed and turned around—the Comanche came about and started to dash toward the grieving white man at the instant Scratch jammed the rifle into his shoulder. At the very moment he realized he’d forgotten to remove the ramrod from the barrel, Bass raked back on the trigger.

  Both ball and hickory wiping stick exploded from the rifle as the muzzle spat a bright torch of yellow flame. While the lead sphere smashed through the warrior’s breastbone, the long ramrod embedded itself deeply at the base of his throat. There it quivered for a moment before the warrior released his big-headed ax, seizing the wiping stick with both hands as his legs lost their grip on the pony. He slid over onto the snow.

  Rowland hunched over the naked, bloody body—sobbing—as Scratch skidded to a stop beside him.

  “Gimme your pistol!”

  Rowland looked up dumbly, his eyes at once filled with rage, wild and feral, at the very moment they pooled with tears of unfathomable grief.

  “M-maria—”

  “Gimme your pistol!” Bass shouted again, then crouched and grabbed for the weapon stuffed in Rowland’s belt like a goat’s hoof.

  Dropping his rifle at his feet as he started to rise, Scratch dragged back the huge hammer on the pistol and whirled at the shrill war cry ringing in his ears. Nearly upon them was a warrior whose skin was more mahogany than oak brown, racing toward the trappers on foot.

  His finger twitched on the trigger … but he held—spotting a second warrior sprinting right on the heels of the first headed their way.

  Scratch waited, waited—his whole body tensing as he struggled against the instinct to shoot … then fired the big horse pistol—its huge ball cutting a swath through the first Indian and smacking into the second, dropping them both within spitting distance of Rowland.

  As the two Comanche tumbled out of the way onto the icy snow, behind them a mounted warrior charged up to skewer a Mexican horseman with his buffalo lance. With so much power behind the impact, the warrior was able to pick the Mexican out of his saddle, dangling the helpless soldier aloft momentarily on the end of that terrible spear, then fling the dead man off into an icy patch of pine needles before the trembling carcass could break the lance.

  Realizing that now he was without a loaded firearm, Scratch dropped the pistol beside Rowland at the same time he snagged hold of John’s collar and pulled his head back so he could stare into the trapper’s eyes.

  “Get your goddamned pistol loaded—or you’re gonna end up like her!”

  Wagging his head slightly, Rowland let the tears pour out.

  It was plain to see the man didn’t care if he ended up like his Maria then and there. Bass let go of John’s shirt, leaving the man to collapse over the bare, bloody body, his own chest racked with silent sobs.

  From the back of Rowland’s belt he pulled free the throwing tomahawk and leaped to his feet, exploding into a sprint. The Comanche lancer who had speared the soldier was turning his horse, bringing that huge blood-slickened weapon around to find another target. The closest was another of the naked women stumbling away, tripping and pitching into the snow to crawl on her knees and hands across the frozen ground. Her feet must be as leaden as adobe bricks, Bass thought as he lowered his head, his eyes locked on the horseman, flying across the crusty snow.

  At the instant the Comanche loped past, Scratch flu
ng himself onto the pony’s rear flanks, his left arm locking around the warrior’s chest as he swung out sideways with the tomahawk—hurling it back in savagely as the warrior twisted and jerked, trying to free himself from the white man he suddenly found clinging to him like a buffalo tick.

  The tomahawk sank into soft tissue.

  Only his gut!

  Bass swung out again, this time bringing it against some bone.

  Ribs!

  Again, and again—hacking the blade higher and higher as the man coughed and gurgled and thrashed … until the Comanche went completely limp. Scratch yanked the warrior and his lance off the horse. He hopped forward just as the pony leaped aside, snatching hold of the reins in his left hand, spinning the animal around in a tight circle.

  Some of the Comanche were already spurring their horses into the trees out of the depression where Hatcher’s men had sprung their attack. Nearly half of the horsemen bolted right past the trappers. Those warriors who were left to fight were either the very brave, or the very dead.

  In his own most private duel Ensign Guerrero slashed and jabbed and parried with his sword against two Comanche who swung at him with their clubs and tomahawks, all three of them still on horseback, spinning about and bumping, throwing the weight of their animal against the others, kicking out with their legs at the enemy.

  Suddenly the officer froze, his face gone pasty as day-old bread dough the instant a third Indian behind the Mexican pierced him with a long lance. The Mexican gazed down at the bloody lance protruding from his chest, vainly pulling at the slick wood with his empty left hand as he began to slip to the side from the saddle, spilling to the ground. Sprawling there, kicking his legs futilely, Don Francisco Guerrero finally dropped his engraved sword so he could clutch the thick, bloody wood with both hands as his eyes glazed over, staring sightless at the lowering sky.

  Bass drew back the tomahawk and hurled it at the closest of the three horsemen, watching it crack into the warrior’s back. The other two wheeled around immediately as Bass pulled his own tomahawk from his belt, ready for the charge they were sure to make.