by Blake, J
“It’s no shame in it, man,” Hobbes said in barely above a whisper.
Runyon shook his head without looking up. He said no more.
Hobbes waited a moment longer and then uncocked and holstered his pistol. He went to his horse and mounted up and led the company out to westward. Edward looked back and saw Runyon sitting as before and looking after them, and then he turned forward and did not look back again.
6
They were now deep into the bloodlands, into regions labeled “unknown” on maps and marked by sharply rugged ranges interspersed with immense bolsóns and dry cracked playas that lay hazed and shimmering in the rising heat of the emptiness under the white sun. The fiercest of these wastes was the Bolsón de Mapimí whose northern reach they now traversed and whose gray wavering flatness lay unbroken to the horizon in every direction but for scattered low buttes and a jagged blue line of mountains showing far to the north.
The nights quivered with the crying of coyotes. He dreamt one night he saw Daddyjack sitting on a rock in an immense desert, watching the company go by and grinning as if he knew them all. And indeed Hobbes raised a hand in greeting of him, and Padre Foreman called out, “How do, Haywood!” and John Allen touched his hat brim and said, “Good to see you, Jack.” Edward nodded as he passed and Daddyjack grinned and said, “Make youself to home, boy.”
Three days out they spied a high noon dust cloud rising quickly from west by north and Hobbes ordered the company into a shallow gully and there every man unsheathed his rifle and set himself to stand against a heathen attack. After a time the source of the dust came thundering into view and went galloping past and was but a breathtaking herd of hundreds of mustangs wilder even than the company mounts had been at breaking. The scalpers had a devilish time holding their animals down against their trumpeting lunges to break free and join with their wild passing blood. They anyway lost four of the caballada to the mesteños.
Two days later they spied a small dark form in the vastness ahead and by and by drew near enough to make out it was a solitary and skeletal mesquite whose bare thorny branches were hung with something that on drawing nearer they saw was what had once been a man. It was Patterson hung upside down on the tree. His eyelids had been excised and his genitals cut away and put into his mouth and he had been scalped and completely flayed. Through the raw striations of his sunroasted flesh were visible his pale ribs and hipbones. His eyes looked to be cooked solid as boiled eggs. The ground beneath him was stained black with his fallen blood.
Edward had heard a hundred tales of things men did to one another in times of war. How the Creeks had done to the whites at Mims and how Jackson had done to the Creeks at Horseshoe Bend, how the Mexicans had done to the Texians at the Alamo, how Houston’s army had done to Santa Ana’s fallen soldiers at San Jacinto. He believed he himself had already seen all possible example of human cruelty and well knew its vast inventiveness. But he’d no acquaintance with such as he now beheld. He was at once informed with dread at the thing in the tree and with an admiration for the purity of its horror. And he felt now the certain realization that here in this maledict portion of the world was truly where such as he and his fellows in this company of the damned properly belonged—here where blood was both common instrument of commerce and venerated tool of art.
Finn dismounted and stepped up for closer examination and then took a quick step back and said, “God damn, it’s alive!”
As if to prove him right the thing on the tree did emit a weak fluttering groan through the bulge of genitalia in its mouth. The horses sidled and tossed their heads and rolled their eyes white, sensing perhaps some tremor in the riders they carried. Hobbes pulled his pistol and drew bead and fired into the head of the wretched thing and only then did the muscles unflex and the body sag fully dead.
The company settled their mounts as Hobbes holstered his Colt and his horse whirled in a quick tight circle before he reined it steady. He pointed at the thing on the tree and shouted, “See him! See him who quit this company!” He looked and sounded like a crazed Old Testament prophet who’d known exactly what fate awaited this wretched apostate in the wilderness.
“See this one who broke faith with his fellows! See him!”
And he heeled his horse forward and the company hastened after him into the deeper wilds.
7
So much had Patterson’s perfidy enraged James Kirkson Hobbes that he set the company upon the very next consort of Indians they encountered and said devil take it when Doc Devlin remarked that they were no relation to the Apache but a people who meant harm to no man. “Hair, boys!” he called as he pulled his Colt and raised his arm in signal for them to charge the luckless Indians. “Take it all!” And in less than ten minutes they did.
They rode on with nineteen more scalps freshly salted and hung on their mules and the smell of hard death holding close about them. Wolves trailed them in the open light of day and sometimes loped out on their flanks and some in the company shot at them but never hit even one. The nights were rent with their howling.
Now the company turned north and in time came to a range of nameless mountains and ascended the switchback trails through the scrubbrush and from the rimrock scouted the boisóns below wavering in the rising heat. They saw but two nightfires over the next weeks and one proved to be that of a large bandit gang that gave them wide berth on the playa the next day. The Shawnees reported the other campfire as belonging to a unit of Mexican cavalry that rarely ventured into this portion of wildland and the company swung wide and rode through the night to put distance between them and the army by daybreak.
In Barrenitos they took an evening’s respite and left behind them in the red dawn two maimed locals and one dead who’d confronted Himmler and Huddlestone in a matter of honor involving some women of the village. In San Pedro where they were greeted as venerable protectors from the demon aborigines Castro was obliged to kill a citizen who raised armed objection to the Spaniard’s flirtations with his daughter. They crossed the Río Conchos in a brief hard rain that roused the smells of hot sand and creosote in its steamy aftermath. Then reached the Sierras de la Tasajera and ascended into forests of dwarf oaks and pine and manzanita. They scouted the ridges and scanned the flats below and then descended on the switchbacks and defiled onto the flatland and rode on. They saw no living thing for days on end save a few hardy lizards and some high-sailing zopilotes.
West of Gallego they could see four separate rainstorms raging blackly in the distances before and behind them but there was hint of neither shade nor moisture for miles around the ground they crossed. They blacked their eyes and the eyes of their horses yet the underside of the men’s faces got burned from the sun’s fierce reflection off the hardpan. In time they came to scrubland once again and to a minuscule muddy creek where they watered. Next day they arrived at a village whose name none in the company knew nor asked after. In the solitary cantina on the sole street of that forsaken place of a dozen adobe buildings they were informed of the rumor that the Apaches had only a few days before slaughtered a small train of pilgrims on the trail not fifteen miles westward at the foot of the Tunas range whose low blue peaks were visible from the doorway of the cantina where they drank.
Well before dawn they were headed for the Tunas. In time they came upon the remains of the train—charred wood and blackened axles and the scattered savaged corpses humming with flies and some few dead and bloated animals. Their spirits rose at this proof of Apache proximity and they set upon the raiders’ trail and followed it to the mountains. But here the ground was all loose stone and the possible trails were various and even the Shawnees argued among themselves about which to follow and Hobbes in his urgency finally pointed up the mountainside and said, “That way.” And that way they went.
But this trail did not cut through a pass as Hobbes had thought but rather climbed and narrowed and became yet more unsure as it steepened. A rock wall rose on their right and the earth fell away on their left as the night descended like a bla
ck shroud. Every man now knew the Indians had not driven their stock by this high trail and yet Hobbes pressed them onwards in the darkness thinking to get sufficient elevation to sight them come the dawn. They could see the pinpoint lanternlights that marked the village they had departed nearly a day earlier. Then Chato the Breed’s horse lost its footing and Chato just did sprawl to safety before the pony toppled over the ledge and went twirling and screaming into the void and then vanished into silence. Sometime thereafter they arrived at a tablerock and there Hobbes put down their camp. They scanned the vast blackness but spied nothing but lightning jagging brightwhite and silent at the far end of the earth.
The following morning broke blood red over the eastern ranges and saw a sudden rising of thunderheads. The sky darkened in its entirety and then the rain came down in gusting torrents. They feared the narrow trail might wash out from under them but it held and that afternoon the sun reemerged and steam rose off their horses. They achieved a rimrock peak and scouted the horizon in every direction but saw no sign of the Apache. They were two days coming off the Tunas and it rained on them most of the way.
For weeks to follow they found no sign of quarry. They thought that word of their coming must have spread and the Indio was on keener watch and in better hiding. They rode deep into the night and set fires in one place and camped without fire a few miles removed to try to lure the heathen but no Indians did appear. They ranged in wide searching loops and the Shawnees cut for sign in vain. They traversed vast and shifting gypsum dunes as fine as lady’s facepowder through which the ponies and mules labored for breath like bellows. The wind blew the sand like seaspray but only the whited bones of men and animals did they find there. They crossed shimmering flats empty of vegetation but for occasional saltbrush and stunted cactus. They rode up narrow arroyos to mesa tops and searched the terrain to every point of the compass and then descended again and rode out into the broiling cracked flats of the playas. They lay on their bellies to skylight the horizon for sign of men to kill. They dismounted and sat out a sandstorm for all of a night and most of the next day behind the shelter of their horses and were sitting in sand to their waists when it was past and their horses looked formed of silicate crystals. Some of the animals had gone blind and so were shot and butchered and their meat jerked.
They searched the night for flicker of campfire but saw none, saw only the distant flash of silent lightning casting its blue shimmer over the empty land. And then came a night they descried the bare glintings of fires to the north. They rode hard in that direction three nights running and on the third night they had closed to within two miles of their quarry. Hobbes put down a fireless camp and sent the Shawnees ahead. Just before first light they returned with the news that it was a party of forty Apaches returning home from a raid with many fresh scalps and driving a herd of some three dozen stolen horses and mules.
They struck at dawn in their usual strategy, one arm of the company led by John Allen closing from one flank and another led by Hobbes closing from the other side. They killed half the party in the first charge and pursued the others the day long before at last overhauling them at dusk at a low outcrop and there fighting them through the night and finally overcoming them at the first light of the following day. The company’s only loss was one of the Shawnees and the keening of his four tribesmen was great as they sang the death song at his burial in the rocks. In addition to the forty-two scalps they took themselves they gained twenty-two more their prey had carried, and their horses and mules as well.
On their way back south they met with a band of thirty Indians of a tribe not recognized by any in the company. When the jefe of this band raised his bare hand in greeting of them John Allen said, “Looks a hostile move to me.”
Hobbes drew his pistol and shot the jefe through the throat and the company fell on them and slaughtered them one and all.
8
On a hot bright August morning they trooped bloodcrusted and reeking through the gates of Chihuahua City, in that day the most prosperous trading metropolis of the Southwest. They’d hung some of the scalps on poles and bore these before them like regimental banners as they rode in to the city’s clamorous reception, to cheers and flung flowers and the kisses of women and girls, to the blaring of brass bands and the shouted adoration of boys who ran alongside in the dust raised by their horses and the stock they now turned over to government wranglers for official accounting in the governor’s corrals. They were guided to the governor’s palace and led into the courtyard and followed by the cheering throng and there greeted with a speech most cordial and laudatory by the governor himself. They laid out their trophies on the courtyard stones and the governor’s man made loud public count and when the last of the scalps was tallied the number totaled one hundred seventy-two and the acclamations of the crowd rose shudderingly to the sky. Hobbes asserted that all but thirty-one of the scalps were taken from warriors. If any thought this imbalance suspicious or wondered if every hair had in fact come strictly from Apache head none said so. Within the hour some of the scalps were dangling from the front wall of the palace and the other half from the portals of the main plaza and in both places coteries of young boys stood below and gaped in awe the whole of the afternoon.
The scalphunters repaired then to the city baths and there spent the greater part of the day scrubbing away the filth and blood and gore encrusted in the crevices of their flesh, in their ears and hair and fingernails. Spectators lined along and atop the walls nudged each other and whispered at the sight of these hairy northern barbarians in all their scarred and branded and tattooed nakedness. They pointed at Huddlestone’s un-patched eyesocket and the earless side of Finn’s head and the ropeburn scar around Chato’s neck, at the branded number 12 over Himmler’s eye and the assorted numbers on the inside of Geech’s forearm and the patches of mange afflicting Castro’s chest and back. So utterly ragged and befouled were these killers’ clothes that only the fire would do for them. They purchased new raiment from the army of vendors arrived to besiege them. They submitted themselves to barbers of priestly demeanor and had their beards trimmed or shaved away and their wild locks shorn and even the hairs of their nose and ears were dealt with.
That evening they presented themselves each man including the Shawnees in a newly tailored suit and silk cravat in the main dining room of the palace, there to be honored and regaled by the governor who began the festivities by praising their fearlessness and martial skills yet once again. They learned now that their host country had been at war with the United States since early May, that even as they sat and drank in the palace of the governor of Chihuahua the U.S. Army was on the march to Monterrey which stood nearly four hundred miles to the southeast as the crow flies but was in fact much farther removed for being on the other side of the eastern Sierra Madre range.
“But the war is another business,” the governor said in English, which was but one of the various languages he spoke admirably well, “and has nothing to do with our own.” Neither he nor any man in that lavish room could know that in little more than six months Big Bill Doniphan’s army of one thousand barbaric and ragged Missourians would blast into the city like the assembled wrath of God and kill and maim and wound more than one thousand Mexicans while suffering the loss of but one of their own.
The governor raised his glass high in salute to the company and they all saluted him in return. Padre Foreman was heard to whisper, “God keep those dear Yankee troopers … keep them far from our portion of this lucrative land!”
The governor now presented to Hobbes a handsome leather-and-canvas satchel bearing their recompense for the scalps and stock. Their captain’s dignified aspect and the eloquent sound of his Spanish speech of acceptance impressed every man in the company even though few of them understood any part of what he said. At its conclusion even the Shawnees, who knew no Spanish at all and but few words of English, joined in the vehement applause that shivered the board’s glassware.
There followed a sumpt
uous feast complemented by much proffering of toasts. So unrestrained was the company’s subsequent libation that soon enough most of them were well drunk and calling loudly for women of ready affection. Hobbes suggested that the governor’s attending officer show his men the way to the nearest well-stocked whorehouse before they surged into the streets and helped themselves to whichever women they found at hand. The governor laughed at what he was certain was the sort of rough joking one could expect from such men but then noted the absence of mirth in Hobbes’s face and whispered in the ear of his adjutant. The officer clicked his heels and turned to the scalpers now pounding the table with tankards and knife heels and chanting, “Gash!…. Gash!…. Gash!” and raised his arms wide and proclaimed, “Atención, caballeros! Siganme a la tierra prometida! Vamonos a ver las mujeres mas bonitas and mas cariñosas de la cuidad. Del mundo!” He gestured for them to follow him. “Síganme por acá.”
“What’s that soljerboy sayin?” Geech asked Padre Foreman, who was already rising from his chair and mopping the grease from his lips with a napkin.
“Our brute but sincere prayers of supplication have been answered, me lads. It’s this way to the ladies. Let’s don’t dally. Vita breve.”
As Hobbes and John Allen rose to follow after the company the governor asked if the captain might spare a moment to speak with one Señor Aristotle Parras, who was not only the richest merchant in Chihuahua but a dear personal friend as well. He indicated an immaculately groomed little man sitting at his right hand who had spoken not a word thus far in the evening.
“Well, sir,” Hobbes said, “I’m kinda itchy to attend the ladies myself at the moment, so maybe we can—”
“Please forgive my miserable manners, Captain,” Señor Parras said in almost accentless English, “but I have a proposition for you that I believe you will find greatly worth your while. I am most eager to discuss it with you.”