In the Rogue Blood

by Blake, J

  It happened that a party of officials of the Chihuahua government was at that time in Saltillo attending a federation council and these men were deeply impressed by the sight of the miscreant heads lined along the top of the front wall of the municipal building and being fed upon by crows. They invited Hobbes for an audience and informed him that if he could hunt Indians as well as he could catch bandits he should be interested in the state of Chihuahua’s willingness to pay one hundred pesos for every Indian warrior scalp and fifty for the scalps of women and children. Hobbes claimed to have fought the heathen in the years he’d trapped in the Sangre de Cristo range and while with the Henry expedition on the upper Missouri and with the likes of Tom Fitzpatrick and Jedediah Smith along the lower Colorado River. He said that if the governor could see fit to pay the bounties strictly in gold—any mix of Mexican doubloons and American eagles being just fine—they had a deal. The governor’s men were agreed, and Hobbes set about readying his company.

  While he took on supplies in Saltillo he sent a few men upcountry to Sabinas to buy and break fresh horses from the mustangers who regularly brought their wild herds there to market. Geech and another man he sent to Laredo for a supply of dependable blackpowder and new gangmolds for the company’s Texas revolvers. When those two rejoined the company just south of Sabinas they brought with them as well the news that Jaggers was in the West Laredo jail.

  “The captain don’t like killing lawmen if he don’t have to, not even Mexican ones,” Huddlestone told Edward, then turned and grinned at Finn. “Which is more than I can say for some in this outfit.” Huddlestone was burly and one-eyed and a pink cicatrix wormed from above his brow down under his eyepatch to midway down his cheek.

  Finn spat into the fire and ignored him. He was a small but compact man lacking a left ear and the little finger of each hand. His hair flared from under his hat and his beard was a greasy thicket thriving with parasitic life. Edward would come to hear that Finn was a fugitive from the Kentucky hills who’d burned his wife to death for an act of infidelity. The man who put the horns on him he was said to have beheaded.

  “They aint no money in killing a lawman,” Huddlestone said, “and it can bring on trouble a businessman don’t need. And that’s what he is, the captain, a businessman, you see.”

  Finn snorted. “So’s a undertaker a damn businessman. But I don’t know no undertaker with five hundred dollars on his head.”

  Now Huddlestone ignored Finn in his turn. “But he warnt about to leave old Bill in that cárcel, the captain. A man rides with James Kirkson Hobbes is a man don’t get left behind. But like I say, he’ll try to keep from killing a lawman if he can. When we got to the outskirt of the west Laredo an hour or so before dawn, the captain went on in by hisself to talk to the alcalde and try to buy Bill out of the hoosegow. He come back before long and said the alcalde hadn’t been too pleased about getting woke so early and wouldn’t even come downstairs to talk to him. Had his manservant to tell the captain maybe he would have time to see him later that afternoon. Well hell, the captain didn’t have time to waste waiting on some Mexican muckamuck who might see him. So we all rode into town and up to the alcalde’s house and the captain halloed the place again and the alcalde come out looking all Señor Mucho Mighty. The captain said he had to have Bill Jaggers out of the juzgado right now so we could get on about our business. But it’s no reasoning with some people. The alcalde starts blabbering real loud at the captain in Mexican and the captain stood for it for about a half-a-minute and then shot him in the mouth and blowed his teeth out the back of his head. Not ten minutes later you was heading for the outcountry with us. Could say it was a lucky thing for you the alcalde didn’t let the captain buy Bill out of jail or you’d likely still be back there.”

  Edward looked over at the captain sitting apart from the company, removed from the raillery and the fires, with a Mexican sarape over his shoulders against the gusty chill, smoking his pipe and staring out at the vast blackness to the west.

  They were a band even more primitive of aspect than the horses they rode and all had eyes that never did look on a living thing with a moment’s mercy. They wore coarse cloth and animal skin, some of it not fully cured, and their hats were of every description and appointed with raptor feathers or snakeskin bands. They wore belts fashioned of human skin and necklaces of gold teeth and of trigger fingers and ears withered and black and looking like strung dried fruit. The one called Finn carried on his belt a tobacco pouch tanned from a squaw teat, the hide the same brown hue as its contents and black-nippled at its base. Some had themselves been docked of one or both ears and some lacked fingers or owned but one eye. Among such mutilations Edward’s severed ear was of little note. In that company were tattoos of every sort and scars of every description, primitive sutures fashioned in dire circumstance. Some in the company bore branded letters or numbers on faces and hands and inner forearms. They were armed each man with bowies the size of machetes and skinning knives and Colt five-shooters, and in that company were longarms of every sort from Hawken guns to Kentucky and Jaeger rifles to doublebarrels to hugebore muskets charged with shot or pieces of brass or handfuls of silver dimes. And among them too were five Shawnee trackers and scouts, their chief called Sly Buck, the large one who’d pitchforked the stableman.

  This Indian conferred now with Hobbes and his lieutenants, a lean and thinly blondbearded man named John Allen and a whitewhiskered and rotund man of indeterminate age named Foreman who dressed in black and was supposed to have once belonged to the Jesuit order and was addressed by all as padre. When the confab broke up the Shawnees mounted and departed to westward.

  By himself any man of the company would attract wary attention on the streets of any town. He would be regarded as a vagabond pariah, as a moral affront and a physical danger to ordered society, as the sort to be dealt with swift and sure by well-armed and strong-numbered legal authority. Many of them had been thus regarded and dealt with. Most every man among them had a price on his head. But conjoined in company they were more than an engine of outlawry. They were a violent agency as old as human blood. They were a force as fundamental and terrible and beyond rational ken as death itself, as elemental as fire or temblor or howling wind.

  2

  Some in the company were curious about this new and youngest of their comrades who called himself Edward Boggs. At a night’s encampment Huddlestone spat into the fire and leaned back against his saddle and his solitary eye gleamed in the firelight. He grinned at Edward and said, “Old Bill here says you’ve hunt the savages afore.”

  Edward shrugged and spat.

  Geech laughed. He was skeletal and his face was redly raw with open sores. “That’s right, lad. Don’t say yay or nay and ye won’t be lyin now, will ye? You’re a right bright pup, ye are.”

  “Apache,” Jaggers said, and winked at Edward across the fire. “That’s the lad’s specialty. Los tigres del desierto as the Mexes call them. Best hunting they is.”

  “If they be tigers, what do ye call the Comandh?” Geech said. “I reckon they be lions.”

  “No matter,” Huddlestone said, lighting his pipe and billowing smoke. “We aint like to see comanch down here this time a year. Not till the harvest moon when the waterholes are full up.”

  “Ye best hope we don’t see no damn Comanch,” Tom Finn said. “It’s some of us seen the sort a harvestin them mean bastards do.” He’d been drinking from a bottle of mescal since before they put down for the night and the faint creosote smell of the spirit was detectable amid his other effluvia Edward had come to know from others of the company that Finn and Huddlestone had once been friends but in recent weeks an animus had grown between them and none knew what their quarrel was.

  “One heathen’s hair’ll bring the bounty quick as another’s,” Huddlestone said. “Makes no never mind to me. I hunt em all kinds.”

  “Price might be the same but you play rougher hell taking Comanche hair than Apache,” Finn insisted. “It’s some of
us know what we’re talkin about.”

  Huddlestone’s eye narrowed. He leaned forward off his saddle and said, “I don’t know what I’m talking about?”

  Finn stared at him.

  “The difference between them heathen sonsabitches aint worth arguing,” Jaggers interjected quickly. “The one’s as bad as the other. They got a saying down here: ‘He’ll make a good man if the Apaches don’t stick him on a cactus.’”

  “That aint hardly the worst them red niggers’ll do,” Geech said.

  “Them of us who know what we’re talkin about’ll chase Apache all day long,” Finn said, still looking at Huddlestone. “Just don’t bring us no damn comanch.”

  Huddlestone laughed without humor. “How in hell you ever fool the captain into thinking you’re a scalphunter?”

  “I’m ever bit the scalphunter as any man here, especially you for damn sure.”

  They locked stares, their unblinking eyes glinting in the wavering light of the fire as they set their legs under them, the air charged with their ready violence.

  But now Captain James Kirkson Hobbes stepped into the cast of firelight and every man held fast. He looked at each of them in turn, his face expressionless but his eyes as hotly bright as embers. He spat into the fire and took slow care in lighting a cigar and puffing it and checking its burn. Then he looked at them all again and turned and faded into the darkness. And Huddlestone and Finn sat back again, their stare now uncoupled, the moment expired.

  3

  They rode out of the brush country of northern Nuevo León and into the dustlands of eastern Coahuila under a sun as pale as a Spanish priest. They camped that evening beside a small rill running through a thin stand of willows under an amber cat’s-eye moon. At the fire Padre Foreman asked Jaggers if he’d taken care of that matter in Arkansas.

  “I did,” Jaggers said. His sister had written to him in care of a hotel in Bexar some months before and told him her unarmed husband had been killed by a neighbor named Raitt in a dispute over the boundary between their properties. Her oldest son was but eight years old, not yet of an age to take his daddy’s part, and so she was calling on her only brother to set the matter right. The company was then ready to leave for Coahuila to hunt bandits for the state, and as much as Jaggers hated to miss out on that enterprise, she was his only sister and he felt he could not refuse her. So he had gone to Arkansas and settled the matter by shooting Raitt dead.

  Tom Finn asked if the man had sons.

  “Aye,” Jaggers said. “Two of em. One looked about eight, the elder near on to eleven. I come up on him in his field and was near as me to you when I shot him in the brainpan. His boys seen the whole thing and come running over and the way they looked at me I figure them to come hunting me soon as they get their growth. I guess I ort to killed them too.”

  “Ye damn well should of,” Tom Finn said. “I known boys grown to old men hunting some fella who owed them blood. It’s some like that who don’t never quit lookin. But ye say these was so young, by the time they of age they maybe won’t know where to start lookin for ye. It’s a big world.”

  “Tis that,” Jaggers said, “but it do have corners. And a man never knows when he’s like to find hisself in one a them and no telling who else might show up there too.”

  “That’s true enough,” Finn conceded. “Never no tellin about them corners.”

  A man called Himmler walked by with an incurious glance their way. He was large and easy of movement and not much of a talker. He habitually wore his hat pulled low over his eyes. He settled himself alongside the rill and began to play softly on a harmonica. Sweet Betsy from Pike.

  “Your mistake was in reading her letter in the first place,” Huddlestone now opined. “Ye ought thow away any damn letter just as quick as ye get it. I never did know good news to come in any damn letter noways.”

  “How in the purple hell would you know?” Finn said. “You can’t even read you own damn name.”

  Huddlestone’s eyes cut to him but he held mute. He knew Tom Finn could at least recognize his own name in writing. He had lost a twenty-dollars wager to him when Finn proved it in a Saltillo cantina. He turned back to Jaggers and said, “Thow the goddamn things away soon as you get em. Don’t even open em.”

  Jaggers gave him a narrow look. “Shit Lon.”

  Huddlestone spat and shook his head. “Oh I know, I know—she be blood. I don’t understand why that counts so much with such as you. Bloodkin aint but a goddamn accident.”

  “Wait now,” Padre Foreman quickly interjected, leaning forward with roused interest, eyes bright and quick. “Accident is no argument against obligation to kin. One can argue that beyond the creation of the world by the Lord Himself everything in life is an accident and man therefore has no obligations whatever except those he believes he owes directly to God. But is not the concept of accident itself a tenuous one? Much that seems mere accident in the world is later seen to be part of a larger design, and even if it is not seen so, the lack of witness is no disproof of the design’s existence.”

  Huddlestone laughed. “Ye got some peculiar blather for a man of the cloth, padre, and that’s no lie.”

  “I am not a man of the cloth,” the padre said. “And the notion is not as peculiar as you think. Consider: What does obligation to God entail if not obligation to kin? Did not the Son sacrifice himself with the Father’s blessing to make blood atonement for the sins of all His mortal kin? Did the Father demand more of Abraham than He Himself willingly surrendered?” The padre’s eyes blazed. “But mark me now. The son was not literally of the Lord’s flesh, was he? He was not conceived of blood passed by the brute coupling of the flesh, was he now? No. And yet who would deny that the Christus is kin to God the Father? The divine notion of kinship is far more encompassing than mere ties of the flesh, and the sheer scope of the Lord’s sacrifice of his son—His spiritual kin—makes that clear.”

  “Aint a damn thing out you mouth ever clear,” Geech said.

  The padre smiled upon him, upon them all. “I am at this moment among closer kin than any I am connected to by line of birth. I am among men whose cast of spirit is most like my own, whose particular damnations, if you will, most closely resemble mine. No birth brother nor sister nor even my father himself, rest his soul, was as similar in spirit to me as are you all. Not one of ye has a soul darker nor fairer than mine. Not a one has more likely chance of heaven nor greater certainty of hell. Our very choice of trade, the common path we’ve elected to follow through this vale of tears, a path elected through the exercise of our independent will, has made us of blood more closely joined than that of any family comprised of mere lineage.” He paused and grinned in return at the circle of grins and shaking heads about him.

  “You saying I’m closer kin with this bunch a no-counts than with my sweet momma up in Michigan?” Runyon the deadeye said. “I’ll be damned if that’s so!”

  The former Jesuit smiled more widely yet. “Aye, me good Teddy! Well and exactly said.”

  “Exactly said, shit,” said Huddlestone. “A man’d have to be crazy as hell to listen to your bullshit, padre.”

  Others around the fire nodded at this, grinning.

  The padre fairly beamed and spread his arms as if he would induce benediction and then sweep them all to his breast. “Indeed,” he said. “Indeed. Quod erat demonstrandum.”

  4

  Some days later they came upon the Shawnees waiting for them on a rise where a spring flowed down below. The company watered and made camp and the scouts conferred with Hobbes. “Aint likely we’ll find sign of the heathen till we get the other side of them mountains,” Jaggers told Edward. The range he spoke of stood darkly on the west horizon. These were the first true mountains Edward had seen since his early boyhood in upland Georgia and were different in every way: bare and sharp-edged and rawly purple against the red sky of late afternoon. As the company advanced on this rangeline they came to a low woodland about the Rio Sabinas and rode through the cool
shade of ancient ahuehuete trees and willows. The water here ran clear and sweet and in another two days they arrived at the pueblo of Sabinas where another six of the company were waiting with a caballada of mustangs freshly but barely broken to the saddle and with packmule supplies taken on in Saltillo and Monclova.

  The new mounts were urgent with meanness, all snapping teeth and white rolling eyes. “These little sonsabitches as soon bite and kick you as not,” Jaggers told Edward, “but they’ll ride all day and night with but a sip of water and will eat any damn thing—rocks, dirt, you hat, anything. You won’t see a meaner or tougher horse except under a Comanche.”

  A dozen of the company went into a restaurant where the local patrons gaped at this wild bunch of white men and Indians that seemed emanated from a realm of bad dreams. The company ate their fill and then repaired to a cantina that emptied of nearly all other customers within half-a-minute of their entry. Only a few machos stood their place at the bar and there were but two fights that night. A young but whitehaired Australian named Holcomb badly cut up a Mexican drover whom he took to have sneered at him, and a Mex-Indian halfbreed called Chato broke a bottle over a wrangler’s head and gouged out his eye with the jagged end of it when the wrangler muttered something about “indio mugrioso.” But no one was killed and no enforcers of law presented themselves and before sunrise the company rode out, trailing the caballada and packmules, every man sliteyed and testy with the dolor of hangover.

  The country rose before them. They came to the southern reaches of the Sierra del Carmen and beyond them the Encantadas and over the next weeks crossed them on rising switchbacks and through narrow passes whose sides loomed dark and ever higher and to which clung drooping juniper and red-fruited prickly pear and stilted century plants with center stems long as Spanish lances. The clatter of their horses’ hooves echoed off the stone walls. They shot and roasted wild pig for their suppers and filled canteens from icy creeks and in the moonlit evenings their breath issued like plumes of blue smoke. Their fires flattened and leapt and spun in erratic canyon winds. They heard cougars shriek in the barrancas. In this high country they had expected no sign of the savages and found none. In time the trail leveled and wound around the rocksides and cut through juniper and piñon growth and began its slow descent. They at last debouched onto the lesser bajada and spied a swirl of buzzards to the west and near noon the next day came upon a village in ruins still smoking.