Teresa knew she was the only one who had seen him fire. To the rest of the mob it must have appeared that he emerged from the alley with a loaded gun. He struck with his gun again as the first Indian reached him. Perea wheeled and ducked under a portal. This arcade running down the front of the building had been deserted by the surge of the mob into the plaza. Others in the mob tried to dart between the posts and stop him but he struck their arms down with the gun, eluding them.
Teresa saw that he was heading for the jail and began to run after him, under the portal. She saw Amado in the crowd and called to him. The mob, struggling with the remaining dragoons, had left a portion on one side of the square open. Perea appeared from beneath the portal, ran headlong across the mouth of a street, and reached the front of the jail. He put his back against the door, chest heaving, face covered with dirt and blood.
Villapando was already fighting his way to the edge nearest the jail, turning the mob’s attention that way with his shouting. But the sight of Perea, standing against the door with his pistol, stopped their first surge toward the mud building.
“The first man within ten feet of this door will get a ball through his head.”
No single man wanted to be a martyr; they had been responding to the authority of a uniform all their lives. The vaqueros on the rooftops had discharged their guns and would have to reload. And there was something so frighteningly indomitable about that single man facing them alone that it gave pause to the most avid rebel among them.
Villapando thrust himself to the forefront. In his fierce eyes shone admiration for such foolhardy courage. “Declare for us, Lieutenant,” he shouted, “and we will spare you.”
“I declare for God, for Santa Anna, and for the Republic. Now clear the plaza or suffer the consequences.”
The pure audacity of it held them a moment longer. Teresa reached Amado, pressed him through the crowd toward the front ranks. She hissed in his ear, “There is no ball in his gun. We are the only ones who know it.”
He turned to stare blankly at her. “How can you be sure?”
She kept prodding him through the pack of men. “I saw him shoot a man in the alley.”
Amado’s face shone with sweat. “Pues—he may have re-loaded.”
“He didn’t have time. I saw. This is your chance. Think what a hero it would make you.”
His eyes began to glow. “Are—are you sure?”
“Have I ever lied to you before?” she said. For a moment he hesitated. She saw fear on his face, doubt, hesitation. She leaned closer. “It takes greatness to snatch such opportunities as this, Nicolas.”
She saw the vivid eyes begin to shine. With a deep breath he shoved aside the few men in front of him and stepped into the open. Villapando, thirty feet away, looked at him in surprise. The whole crowd seemed to grow quiet, awaiting this new development. She saw Amado stop, his face growing pale. But the focus of their whole attention was upon him now. If he quailed he would be branded forevermore.
The lieutenant aimed the brass-bound pistol at his chest. “You have two paces more, Amado.”
Teresa saw Amado’s lip twitch. His voice sounded strained. “This is a thing of the people, Lieutenant. You might as well try to stop the sun from rising. If my death will prove that, it is in a good cause.”
In the hot yellow sun of late afternoon, a hush had settled over the crowd. Amado held out his hand for the gun.
Perea jerked the weapon back, meaning to strike with it. Amado let one of his arms fly into the air, as if he had knocked the gun up. The lieutenant tried to club him with the gun but Amado blocked the blow and hit him in the stomach. Perea gasped and doubled over. Amado wrenched the gun from his nerveless fingers and struck him across the head with it.
An instant later a shout rose from a hundred throats. The crowd surged forward, trampling the lieutenant, battering at the door with their own bodies. Then they were pulled away by those behind, leaving an open space for the dozen men who came in with a log. Three times they had to strike before the iron hinges tore from their sockets. Then the mob poured in and pulled Mayor Melgares from the depths of the dark cell.
A small, frightened, blinking man in a dusty alpaca suit, he was lifted onto their shoulders. And another man was lifted up, to sit beside him, Nicolas Amado, while Villapando and Gomez stood on the ground below, looking up.
Teresa looked up too, standing with her back pressed against a building, while Amado and Melgares were carried around the square, the heroes of the hour, and the wild shouts rang triumphantly down the crooked streets of the ancient town.
“Viva Melgares. Viva la revolución. Viva Amado!”
6
Kelly Morgan was born in Nashville, sometime in 1813, one of a family of twelve spawned in a two-room dogtrot cabin by a drunken keeler who died in the Red Stick war fighting with Jackson. Kelly grew up to believe that the only god was Andy Jackson, the only salvation was a Jake Hawkins rifle, and the only hell was a place where they didn’t serve enough Kentucky red-top to get drunk on.
When Kelly was sixteen a Nashville rake seduced his sister and got her big with child and Kelly hunted the man and cut off his ears and put the HT brand on his cheek. The jury held that the rake was not technically a horse thief, and therefore Kelly had no right to usurp the authority of the law by marking a man’s face in such an outrageous fashion. The sentence was a year and a day, despite his youth. Kelly had served the day when four of his brothers bolted a log chain to the bars of the jail window, hooked it to a team of mules, and pulled the wall out of the building, thus rendering Kelly automatically GTT.
In those days, Gone To Texas was a common appellation attached to the men who fled west to escape the law, a hanging, or a nagging wife. In most cases it could be taken literally. Texas, still under Mexican rule, was becoming a haven for more and more of the growing tide of emigration—both of the lawful and unlawful—that was moving west.
In Austin young Kelly Morgan met Jim Bowie and learned how to use his knife, perhaps too well. A frontier restlessness would have pushed Morgan on if the revolution hadn’t started. He was with Sam Houston when things were finally settled at San Jacinto.
Six months after the battle Morgan killed a man with his Bowie in an Austin brawl. He might have gotten off on self-defense, but a man with an unfinished jail sentence in Nashville couldn’t afford to take a chance. So it was west once more, with a party of trappers bound for the great shining mountains.
This was the man who stood with the party of trappers in front of Barton’s Trading Post, watching the triumphant Indians carry Amado and the mayor around the square. During the battle, the mob choking the square had prevented the trappers from escaping. Barton had advised them to load their guns and pull their horses in under the portal, prepared to make a stand should the Indians turn on them.
“They’ll begin to break up in a minute,” he said. “Soon’s you see it clear, take that street north toward the gate. Any of ‘em make a pass at you, jist keep ridin’ like hell.”
Cimarron Saunders and Turkey Thompson began to load the buckskin sacks of LeCroix traps they’d gotten from Barton onto the pack horses. Ryker stood by one of the posts supporting the overhang, his immense Ketland-McCormicks in his hands.
“I wonder where she got to,” Kelly said.
“Forget her,” Ryker growled.
Kelly only half heard him. The marching, chanting, shouting mob had shifted away from the front of the jail. Through a scattering of Pueblos that remained he saw the blue-uniformed man sprawled on the ground in front of the jail door. And crouching beside him was Teresa Cavan.
Ryker led his skittish saddle horse out from beneath the portal. He stuffed one of his Ketland-McCormicks into his belt, grabbed the saddle horn with his free hand, and stepped aboard.
“I’ll lead out,” he said.
Kelly dra
gged his quivering, excited roan into the open. “You go ahead. I’ll meet you outside the wall.”
Ryker saw where he was looking. “Damn you, Kelly, we can’t stop for that girl—”
Without answering, Kelly led his roan across the plaza. The few Pueblos around the jail spread away from his towering figure, watching him suspiciously. They stirred and muttered among themselves, and Kelly caught the gleam of a knife blade. The girl looked up, saw him coming, saw the gathering tension among the Indians.
“Leave him alone,” she called in Spanish. “He is not your enemy.”
A Mexican woman came fearfully from one of the houses next to the jail, carrying a clay bowl filled with water and some rags. Kelly put his rifle against the wall, hitched his roan to a post, and helped Teresa drag the half-conscious lieutenant to a sitting position against the wall. Then Teresa washed the blood and dirt from his face with the wet rag. Her lips were soft and slack and her eyes were dark with compassion. The lieutenant moaned and opened his eyes.
“Pobrecito,” she said. “You’ll be all right now. I don’t think there is anything serious.”
A half-dozen buckskinned vaqueros crossed the square, herding seven dragoons before them. One of the soldiers held a wounded arm and two others showed blood on the front of their coats, but the rest were just badly battered. They were driven into the gaping door of the jail and one of the vaqueros stopped above the lieutenant, waving a pistol at him.
“He is to be imprisoned also, señorita, by the order of Don Gomez.”
Shakily, Perea got to his feet. He bowed stiffly to Teresa. “My thanks, señorita.”
He marched into the jail like a drill sergeant on the parade ground. Kelly grinned down at Teresa.
“You’ll be all right here, with your cousin?”
“Of course. I told you.”
“What if Don Biscara comes?”
Her eyes grew tempestuous. “He’ll never find me.”
“Maybe you better tag along with us.”
The storm had gone from her green eyes. She smiled up at him. It was a dazzling sight, with the vivid red lips curving off the perfect small white teeth.
“This is quite a change from Santa Fe. As I remember, you were rather sorry you’d rescued me.”
He grinned, abashedly. “It wasn’t that. I jist didn’t know what to do with you.”
“And now you do?”
All the humor left his face. His eyes grew dark and heavy-lidded. “Yes ma’am,” he breathed. “I sure do.”
She was a sight to see. The way her body dipped and curved and flared fair took a man’s breath. Her flesh was like gold, with a glowing, satiny life all its own. Her breasts bulging so impudently against the camisa made a man think of ripe apples, they were that round. Like a flood of heat the intense desire for her swept through him. It was the plain carnal desire of an elemental man, but it seemed to cut through him more cruelly than ever before. She saw the flush seep into his gaunt cheeks and she moved back, with the smile gone.
“You’d better go now.”
“Yeah.” He moistened his lips. “I’d better go.”
He picked up his rifle, unhitched his roan. Up on the horse, he looked ten feet tall.
“You’ll be here come winter?”
Her lips grew petulant. “I don’t know. I suppose.”
He stared at her a moment longer. Then he reined the skittish roan around and pricked it with his cartwheels and the horse went at a dead gallop across the square and down the crooked street. He didn’t slow it down till he was outside the walls because the want of her still burned him like fire and if he’d stayed a moment longer he would have made a damn fool of himself over a woman and ended up with a clout on the head or a knife in the ribs for his trouble.
Riding north along the Taos Trail, he met a party of Indians coming from San Geronimo, the Pueblo village three miles from Taos. All of them carried buffalo lances or war clubs and had naked knives stuck in their waistbands. There was something sinister about the way they went by, hardly looking up at him, their bare feet slapping against the earth in a muffled, unremitting drumbeat.
A half mile from Taos he found the trappers. They had pulled the horses into a field beside the trail and were all dismounted except the squaw, sitting like a chubby brown doll on her split-eared buffalo pony. Kelly checked his roan and it fiddlefooted like a dancer beneath him.
“Let’s light a shuck.”
“Ryker says we go back to Santa Fe,” Turkey Thompson said.
Ryker scowled up at Kelly. He pointed at another party of Pueblos in war paint approaching them on the trail. “This has the makings of a full-scale revolution. I’ve got to protect my interests in Santa Fe.”
“What about our interests?” Kelly said.
“They’re involved. There’s no telling what attitude a new government would take against trapping.”
Kelly swung off his horse. There were gaunt hollows under his bleak cheekbones and his mouth was tight as a jumptrap. “And while we’re down there protectin’ our interests, we’ll get paid?”
Ryker scowled. “With what?”
“That’s what I mean,” Kelly said. “Go back now and we lose a whole season. I didn’t come a thousand miles to sit around Santa Fe all winter and starve to death.”
“We’ve got to go back. You know the feeling against foreign trappers in this country. If I don’t keep my contacts in Santa Fe we wouldn’t be able to sell the furs we got.”
“We’ll take ‘em to St. Looey, then.”
“We couldn’t even get them out of the country. You’d have a squadron of dragoons down your neck.”
Ryker was thinking like a trader now, a business man, with no sympathy for the trapper’s position. And in protecting himself he was violating the contract he had signed with Kelly. He had agreed to finance the expedition and supply all the equipment for seventy per cent of the profits, while the trappers divided the thirty per cent remaining. Kelly hadn’t come all the way from Texas on the strength of that contract, traveling for months through an Indian-infested wilderness without a cent of pay, to be left holding the sack because Ryker got cold feet.
“All right,” he said thinly. “You go back to Santa Fe. We’ll go on and we’ll take the traps.”
“What guarantee have I got that I’d ever see you again?”
“My word.”
Ryker snorted disgustedly. “Would you take mine?”
Kelly was silent a moment, digesting that. Then he grinned, slowly and balefully. “I guess that leaves just one thing.”
“What?”
“Come or not, like it or not, take my word or not, I’m heading north—and I’m takin’ the outfit.”
Ryker took a step backward and in the same swift motion elbowed aside his bearskin coat to draw one of the Ketland-McCormicks. Kelly followed him in a single long lunge, swinging his five-foot rifle up in a vicious arc. It whipped against Ryker’s neck as he pulled the pistol. Ryker’s eyes rolled up and his face went slack and pale with the shock. He fell heavily to one side, dropping the gun, and struck the ground as limp as a drunk.
Kelly kicked the pistol away from the man and whirled on the others. Neither Saunders nor Turkey Thompson had made a move. The squaw dropped off her buffalo pony with a broken sound and went to her knees beside Ryker. Kelly stooped to yank the second pistol from Ryker’s belt; he dropped it beside the other Ketland-McCormick and with the butt of his rifle deliberately smashed the flints in both pistols. Ryker groaned and rolled over, face squinted up in pain. Kelly proceeded to load his rifle.
“Who’s goin’ with me?” he asked.
Turkey’s Adam’s apple bobbed like a cork in his neck. He looked at Ryker, at Cimarron. Then he gulped. “You’re right, Kelly. He ain’t got no right to back out on his contract.”
> Saunders scratched his jaw absently through the mat of his fiery beard. “You’re a couple of damn fools. These Pueblos take it in their heads to include the Yankees, you’ll be a target for every Indian from here to Picketwire.”
“We’ll take that chance.”
With the help of the squaw, Ryker sat up. His broad, brutal face had a putty color and he breathed in stertorous gusts. “It’s highway robbery, Kelly. I’ll have you posted in Santa Fe. Set foot inside any town in a thousand miles and they’ll clap you in jail.”
Without answering, Kelly swung onto his horse. Turkey hesitated, then got on his spotted mare. Ryker made a grating sound, saying to Saunders, “Stop them, damn you—”
Before Saunders could react, Kelly swung his loaded rifle to cover the man. “Git ‘em on the road,” he told Turkey.
As the groaning, snorting line of pack animals walked out into the trail, Kelly said, “I’ll be back come winter. You’ll git your split.”
He followed the pack train northward on the trail, keeping his horse turned and his rifle covering them. When they were out of range, Kelly joined Turkey Thompson. The skinny trapper looked at the curing grass, gold as wheat on the slopes.
“Early winter,” he said.
“Beaver’ll be prime,” Kelly said.
In a while they came in sight of San Geronimo, the Indian pueblo. Like terraced citadels the two communal buildings faced each other across the placid mirror of Taos Creek. Before they reached it, Kelly heard a horse behind and saw Cimarron Saunders riding to catch up. He pulled his broad-chested pinto down to a walk beside them.
“Ryker started jumpin’ down my craw after you left. I guess you was right about him.”
“Maybe Ryker sent you to keep an eye on us,” Kelly said.
Saunders leaned toward Kelly, eyes like gimlets. “This is your first season in the mountains, son. You got a few things to learn. To a free trapper, there’s one thing lower’n a varmint.”
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