In the Rogue Blood

by Blake, J

  The dead lay strewn and naked, caked in their own blackdried blood and swarming with ants and flies and partly consumed by canines and scavenger birds still picking clumsily over the corpses like drunken morticians. The remains of men and women lay eviscerated and throatcut and mutilated in the private parts. Not a corpse remained unscalped except for some of the infants who’d yet had no hair and who lay scattered and askew among the rocks on which their skulls had been crushed. The malodor was not yet at full ripeness but would achieve it by next day. Only the blacksooted adobe walls still stood. Everything of wood was charred and smoking, everything of straw reduced to ash. The Shawnees quickly found out the survivors and rousted them from their hiding places in nearby arroyos. Fewer than a dozen and all appeared demented. A woman with eyes fixed on something far beyond the world around her held a dead babe to her teat.

  The raiders had ridden off to the northwest with the stock and several young female captives. Hobbes looked about at the meager scattering of dead pigs and dogs and leaned out from his horse and spat and advised the elder in his fluent Spanish to strip and jerk all the unrotted meat they might find. The old man raised a hand as if he would point something out to Hobbes and then seemed not to know what he wanted to say and so dropped his hand and kept mute.

  Hobbes spoke with Sly Buck and then the Shawnees galloped off on the trail of the raiders. The company mounted up and followed at a canter. They rode the rest of the afternoon and kept the mountains to their right. The sparse grass soon played out. They rode single file into the wider arroyos to avoid skylighting themselves to any watchers ahead. In this country of cactus spines and bloodstained rock and remnant bones the air was the driest Edward had ever breathed and it smelled of dusty death. Hobbes occasionally reconnoitered from the crest of a rockrise and studied the line of dark mesas standing squat on the far horizon under low reefs of clouds looking smeared with blood. They camped that night without fire. The moon came up from behind the Carmens and the wind blew cold and the sky was massive and congested with stars. Bright yellow comets flared across the sky and into oblivion. Edward rolled himself in his blanket and lay awake for a time, staring into the vastness of this desert nightsky and listening to the high yip of coyotes in the darkness and feeling in this alien wasteland a sense of rightful belonging he could not have put into words.

  They rode another day and again made a fireless camp and in the forenoon of the following day they found a recently dead mule hardly more than hide and bones and with its flanks well butchered. Some hours later they spied the speck of a figure on the flatland ahead and after a time came upon one of the Shawnee outriders. Beside him a naked Mexican girl barely of age lay murdered on the hardpan. She bore no cut nor bullet wound but her inner thighs were coated with dried blood and her pudendum was crusted black and her eyesockets had been hollowed by the ants. Her arms were crossed over her breasts as though she would assert modesty even in death.

  The Shawnee spoke in his tongue with Hobbes and pointed to the dark form of a mesa some fifteen miles distant where the sky was staining crimson about the lowering sun. Hobbes relayed the information to the company: the raiders were encamped at a place the Mexicans called Fuente de Dios, a waterhole set in the mesa ahead, and were apparently unaware of their trackers. He ordered the company to put down in a near gully and there rest up till nightfall lest their quarry descry their advancing dust. As he reined the Janey horse about, Edward saw the Shawnee bend to the dead girl with a knife in his hand. A moment later the Indian was remounted and catching up to Hobbes and her longhaired scalp dangled from his belt.

  They moved out at dark with a pale half moon hung low in the sky behind them, proceeding at a trot, single file and well apart, their gear lashed tight against clatter. Still, had the savages had an ear to the ground they might have heard them coming. The moon gained its meridian and began its slow fall to the west. As they neared the mesa they slowed their pace to a walk. Their only sounds were of the horses’ shoeless hooves whispering through the sand and the low creak of saddles and light chink of bitrings. Sly Buck and John Allen turned off with half the company in a wide arc to the left while Hobbes took the others around to the right. Both groups clung close to the shadows of the outcrops.

  As they reached the yet larger outcrops near the base of the mesa the zodiacal light of false dawn was showing over the distant line of mountains in the east. Hobbes halted the party. They dismounted and the captain swiftly unfurled his blanket from behind the saddle and hooded the head of his horse with it and the rest of the band followed suit. Edward felt the Janey mare tremble and patted her neck and whispered in her ear and she settled. They walked the horses and mules further up into the rocks and into a ravine and now Hobbes scanned the men and Edward knew that as the youngest and least experienced among them he would be chosen to stay with the animals. But Hobbes instead pointed to a man called Patterson who had recently complained aloud about having to stand watch two nights in a row. Patterson scowled and gnashed his teeth but Hobbes simply stared at him and Patterson turned away and took each man’s reins.

  Hobbes led them swiftly and surefootedly through the rock shadows and cactus growths and up the stone slopes and they at last crested on a tablerock. They followed Hobbes at a crouch through the sand and scrub brush and a figure suddenly stepped out of the shadows before them and Edward’s skin jumped in the instant before he recognized Sly Buck. Hobbes and the chief parlayed in whispers and then moved up to the rockrim on their bellies and took a long look and then Hobbes motioned the others to come up. As they crawled toward the edge of the rock they passed within a foot of a dead Apache sprawled on his back in the scrub and Edward caught a scent like smoke and raw leather. His heart pounded against the earth.

  In the first gray light of dawn they saw the raiders in a wide sandy clearing some fifty feet below. Edward’s quick count numbered nearly two dozen. They were just roused and feeding off the low fires set hard against the rockwall so that the thin smoke carried through natural flues to disperse unseen from some other part of the mesa. Their horses and the stolen stock were bunched in a makeshift corral flanking a narrow pass. A pair of women huddled at the wall fire nearest the waterhole and a tall Apache kicked one of them in passing. Her yelp carried up to the men on the rock and the Apaches laughed.

  Hobbes looked to the deeply shadowed rockwall across the way and then at Sly Buck who nodded and pointed to a brushy portion of the opposite rockrim. Edward figured that was where John Allen and the others were positioned. Now Sly Buck whispered to Hobbes and pointed to the tall Apache moving about the camp and talking to various of the braves. Hobbes nodded. He unholstered his two Colts and lay them close to hand and then brought the Hawken up to shooting position. Every man readied himself as well. The captain drew bead on the tall Indian as he moved across the clearing and then the Hawken’s muzzle blasted orange flame and the report echoed deafeningly off the rock walls as the back of the Indian’s head came apart and he spun as if drunk and even as he fell every gun along both rockrims opened fire.

  Edward fixed on an Apache racing for the corral and led him perfectly with the smoothbore and the .525 ball knocked the man off his feet as if he’d been swatted with a mace. The mulekick recoil against his shoulder was more satisfying than Edward could have said. He recocked with the ring lever and aimed and hit his next target in the hip and as the wounded savage crawled on he aimed more carefully and shot away the forepart of his skull. He hurried the next two shots and missed both times and put aside the longarm and switched to his revolver and kept adding to the hellish crossfire raging into the hapless indigenes. On either side of him lay an angelfaced blond Jessup twin, three years older than he was and each at work first with a doublebarrel rifle and then going to their pistols too. A woman’s lingering scream cut through the thunder of gunfire and then abruptly ceased. Apaches ran and spasmed and fell. A handful reached the corral and kicked down the rail and leapt to horse. They headed for the narrow pass but a fusillade fro
m the rocks above where Sly Buck had posted his other Shawnees sent the Indian mounts down shrieking. Some of the riders rolled clear and jumped up and began running and then were shot down too.

  And then it was done and not a single savage had made away. The company descended through the lingering blackpowder haze to the floor of the clearing and began taking hair. Edward watched Jaggers roll an Apache onto his stomach and squat beside him and run his knife edge hard all the way around the top of the skull and then put a foot firmly behind the dead man’s neck to serve as a fulcrum as he wrapped a hank of hair round his hand and with a sharp hard tug ripped the scalp from the skull with a sound like a booted foot being pulled from deep mud. He held it up lank and dripping for Edward to see. The same sound was all about them. Indians lay with the tops of their heads raw and bloody to the red light of the morning sun risen to the rimrock.

  “Here’s one needs trimming, boy.” It was John Allen, standing beside him and pointing at an Apache lying hard by. Edward bent to the task and executed it with the ease of someone long practiced. The feel of the scalp tearing free of the bone sent a quiver through him unlike any sensation he’d ever known. He held the prize up high and felt the blood rivuleting down his arm and under his shirtsleeve and saw Padre Foreman smiling broadly at him and there rose now an exultant howling of the hellbound and his war cry carried with it.

  5

  They found the animals unattended in the ravine, Patterson gone. His trail led off toward a line of blue mountains to the north and he had taken two horses from the caballada. Hobbes dispatched Chato the Breed and one of the Shawnees after him and sent Sly Buck and the rest of the scouts as outriders to cut for sign in the west. Then the company got moving again, bringing the stolen Apache stock behind with their own horses. None of the captive Mexican women had survived the fight and so were scalped also and left to the scavengers with the other dead at Fuente de Dios. The only one in the company to suffer injury was Castro the Spaniard who hated mestizos as ardently as he hated Indians. Many of the indios at least owned courage, he often expounded, but the mestizos were craven mongrel dogs, shaped from the worst traits of both races and possessing nothing of the admirable from either. He’d slipped coming down off the tablerock and fractured his left arm. Doc Devlin had set it and bound it in a splint and the Spaniard had made a big show of how well he could yet handle and even spin his pistol with his good right hand lest Hobbes think him unable to carry his share of the load.

  A Shawnee outrider returned at midday to report sign of the savages ten miles ahead. Hobbes appointed the Spaniard and the Shawnee to bring along the stock and the company set out riding hard and that evening caught up to Sly Buck and the other scouts. The Encantadas were a hard red rockline to their right. On the far horizon, visible between a pair of short low ranges, could be seen the ghostly forms of the Chisos standing on the other side of the Rio Bravo del Norte where it formed a deep southern bend. The Apaches had made a jerkycamp at the foot of the nearest mountains. The Shawnees guessed them to be the rest of the raiders’ clan. They told Hobbes it was composed mostly of women and children with but a few braves to watch over them.

  “Easy pickins,” said John Allen.

  They attacked from the east at daybreak like demons unloosed from the hell-red sun itself, galloping through the heart of the camp and shooting down every man in sight and then reining about and riding through again and this time shooting anything still on its feet and setting afire the scattered hogans shaped of saplings and hides. And then they were off their mounts and shooting whatever still drew breath and one dying warrior rose to his knees and loosed an arrow into Runyon’s lower belly that sat him down cursing and Himmler ran forward and with a twohanded swipe of his bowie lifted the archer’s head from its mooring in a great spout of blood and sent it arcing to hit the ground and roll within reach of a stake-tied dog that fastened onto it and shook the thing viciously in its crazed excitement.

  And then there was only the moaning and keening of the dying women and children and the company walked through the carnage and shot them dead every one. And when they had done with their business they had increased their harvest by thirty-eight scalps. Hobbes put the expert Shawnees to trimming the hair on the women’s scalps the better to pass them off as belonging to warriors and reaping the higher bounty.

  They supped on the meat the Indians had hung to dry on scrub brush and mesquite limbs, all but Runyon who had been helped into the shade of a rockface and now sat with his back to the rockwall and his hands holding tight on his belly around the protruding arrow shaft. Hobbes had come to have a look and then moved aside for Doc Devlin who made an examination and said he could do nothing.

  “Soon’s I yank her out you’ll die.”

  “Well hell,” Runyon grunted through his teeth, “I can’t go around with no arrow sticking out my gut.”

  “No you can’t,” said Doc Devlin. And because there was nothing more to be said he and Hobbes repaired to the fire to join the others at supper and left Runyon to mull his circumstance.

  At the fire Lionel and Linus Jessup were smiling and showing off their newly begun necklaces of Indian ears. They hailed from the northernmost reaches of Minnesota and had come to Mexico to see the elephant and had stayed to flay its hide.

  Later that night Chato and the Shawnee arrived with Patterson in tow on his horse and with his hands bound behind him. They brought in the other two horses as well. But for a bloody arm wound received from Chato’s longrifle Patterson was unhurt. He grinned down at the gathered men and called salutations to some but none hailed him in return nor even smiled at him.

  Hobbes said for someone to yank the sorry son of a bitch off the horse for he would not look up to the likes of him now or ever. John Allen grabbed one of Patterson’s feet from the stirrup and shoved his leg outward and up and thus unsaddled the traitor. Himmler pulled him to his feet by his shirt collar and stood him before the captain and Hobbes asked what he had to say for himself.

  “If I aint to be but a horseholder I want nary more to do with this compny,” Patterson said.

  “I say what every manjack in this compny do and don’t do,” Hobbes said.

  “I say I aint no damn horseholder.”

  Hobbes punched him in the mouth and Patterson went down and Himmler stood him up again. Patterson worked his tongue in his bloody mouth and spat a tooth at Hobbe’s feet and said, “Put that on yer necklace, ye damn twistbrain.” Hobbes hit him and blood flew from his mouth as he went down once more and this time no man made to pull him up.

  “I won’t abide a quitter,” Hobbes said. He kicked Patterson in the short ribs and Patterson rolled against his horse’s legs and the horse shied and nearly stomped him as though even it found him contemptible. One of the Jessups grabbed the reins and pulled the animal away.

  “Man who quits on his compny’s the lowest thing there is,” Hobbes said, kicking at Patterson as the man tried to scrabble away from him, following after him, kicking at him again, trying for his balls. “Man quits his company is spittin on every man rode with him, but he’s the one aint worth spit. He aint worth half that dog yonder.” He gestured at the rope-staked dog glowering and snarling at every man to pass by. He kicked Patterson again and said, “Get him out my sight till I decide what to do with the sorry whoreson.”

  By sunup he’d decided. He had Patterson hoisted onto his horse and tied to the saddle with his hands bound behind him still. He told him if he tried turning the horse to north or south or back to eastward the first outrider to spot him would shoot the horse from under him and leave him to die of thirst alongside his dead animal.

  “Only way you can go is west,” Hobbes told him. “Now go!” He lashed the horse’s hindquarters and it bolted so fast Patterson nearly tumbled from the saddle. They watched him diminish into the vast flat desertland on the cantering horse until he was but a dark speck wavering in the rising heat and then he was visible no more.

  “Why’s he let him go, he hates qui
tters so much?” Edward asked Jaggers.

  Jaggers looked at him. “He aint let him go but into the Apacheria. That’s how much he hates a quitter.”

  Hobbes cut the rope holding the Indian dog to its stake and for a moment the animal stood crouched with its nape roached and teeth bared. It slowly circled away from Hobbes and the other men looking on and then sprinted over a low rise and was gone.

  Now the company prepared to ride out and Runyon’s eyes followed first one man and then another as they caught up their horses and made ready. The Spaniard had arrived with the caballada and the herd of captured stock and to it were added the newly taken Indian ponies. No man met Runyon’s gaze. Then Hobbes went to him and asked if he had a charged pistol. Runy on removed one bloody hand from alongside the arrow in his belly and withdrew a loaded Colt from under his jacket and laid it beside him.

  “It’s naught I can offer ye, Teddy,” Hobbes said, “except if you want it done I’ll oblige ye.” He already held a cocked pistol in his hand and he glanced now to the far horizons. “Others of em might be by before you’re done.”

  Runyon stared up at him for a moment and then dropped his eyes to his wound and shook his head.

  “You know how they’ll do ye. Better a bullet than that.”

  “No,” Runyon said. “Aint fittin.”