They left behind them in Laredo eleven dead and more than a dozen maimed or wounded on that cool March dawn when they broke the blackbeard Jaggers out of jail and accepted Edward into the company as well. Only one of the dead was their own. They were fifteen that departed at a gallop and in a great raise of dust bore due west, Edward on the Janey horse he’d recovered along with his guns and outfit from the livery where he saw a large painted Indian impale the stablebuck to the wall with a pitchfork through the neck. As he put heels to his mount he caught glimpses of men sprawled in the street in the awkward attitudes of death and splotched dark with blood. He saw a woman kneeling at a water trough with her back bloody and her face submerged in the gray-pink water. Saw a dog crawling on forelegs and dragging its bullet-smashed nether half. Saw a small boy staggering in the street with blood in his eyes and then abruptly trampled under the hooves of the horse express rumbling out of town and out to open country. In that galloping band the Janey mare looked like a blooded darling in contrast to the motley bunch of yet half-savage horses that only weeks earlier had been running wild on the desertland and now wore bridles of plaited human hair adorned with clicking bones and teeth.
The company went unpursued.
They made camp that evening in the hills. The Janey horse was white-eyed fearful at being tethered amid the mustangs. They jostled her and snapped at her with their teeth. One lunged and bit her flank and she spun and kicked the pinto so hard it trumpeted and shied away and thereafter the mustangs mostly let her be.
The company’s fires tossed and swirled in the sandy nightwind and the men supped on the haunches of an antelope brought down with a Hawken gun at well nigh six hundred yards by a deadeye named Runyon who had been showing off. Jaggers introduced Edward to Geech and Finn and Huddlestone, who sat about the same fire.
They were going to Chihuahua under contract to the governor to hunt Apache. The deal had been closed in the neighboring state of Coahuila where the company had been recruiting itself and squandering its pay in Saltillo cantinas and cathouses after weeks of chasing down a fearsome bandit gang in the Sierras de San Marcos for the Coahuila government. They’d returned to the capital from the expedition with fifteen heads dangling on either side of a blood-stained pack mule including that of the infamous Pablo Contreras which of its own brought them one thousand pesos in silver. The alcalde himself identified the head as Contreras’s and the governor ordered it displayed on a lance head over the main portal of the municipal building.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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 from 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.
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 quitters 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.”
“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.
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.
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 black 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.
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 sumptuous 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.”
John Allen grinned at Hobbes and said, “I believe the gentleman’s asking do we want to make some money, J.K.”
“Please, sir, but a moment of your time,” Parras said.
Hobbes shrugged and sat back down and said, “All right, mister, what’s on your mind?”
He dreamt that night that he was drinking in a saloon hard by a transport wagon trace nearby the Del Norte River. The night was cold and windblown and the talk around him was of a whorehouse fire that just two weeks before killed ten of the twelve girls who worked there and burned to death as well five of their patrons. The place was called The Pink Passion and the locals were reminiscing about their favorites among the perished. He heard them tell of Jeanette with the talented cooter that could smoke a cigar. About Charlene who would give it free to any man who could last five minutes with her without coming and had not had to give a freebie but twice in three years. About Candy and Randy the redhead twins who liked to work together, whether with one man or two or three. About Eve, the moodiest and meanest of them, who some of them said was plain and simple crazy and could get a man killed quick. She liked to incite fights among the men and watch them go for each other’s blood. But she was the best in the house and could damn near pull a man inside out if she was of a mood to. “Scared me, she did,” one man said, “and I aint shamed to admit it. But ever time I was drunk enough, she’s the one I wanted.” Nods and knowing smiles all around. “She had the most scars of any gash I ever knew,” said another, “but it was something about her. Ever time I had her it felt like I’d shagged the devil’s wife and got away with it.” They all agreed you didn’t forget that one, that crazy Eve. “That nipple,” someone added, “all twisted up thataway, like somebody sometime tried to bite it off. About the worst sew-up work I ever did see.” He listened to them with his drink halfway to his lips and his heart thumping in his throat, his eyes cutting from one to another of them, thinking sure it was a devil’s joke they had somehow figured to play on him. But they were all of them laughing and nodding at each other and paying him no mind at all. He knew then it was no joke, knew it had been her. Knew that here in this dusty patch of borderland she had burned to hell and gone. And then it was bright morning and he was striding along the trace and past the charred remains of the house and a little farther along there hove into view a cemetery. Then he was standing before the marker over the common grave where they’d laid the bones they’d found in the ashes.
THE GIRLS OF THE PINK PASSION
AND THEIR LAST RIDES
And in the mind of his dream he said: I guess you suited well enough. Ye never cared much for talk noways.
He came awake to a hand insistently shaking his shoulder. His head felt full of broken glass and his tongue savored of something dead a week. John Allen was grinning down at him through his sparse blond beard. “Let’s go, lad. Captain’s called a company meet in the yard below. Let’s up and about.”
He saw the faint light of early morning in the window, then the naked brownskinned girl beside him. The girl was very pretty and she was smiling at John Allen’s fondling hand at her breast.
“Hey, goddamnit!” He pushed John Allen’s hand away and sat up and winced at the pain now augering his skull. John Allen kept his grin and winked at the girl, then said to Edward, “Come on, boy, let’s go!” Then he was out the door and down the hall and rousting someone in a room adjacent.
They stumbled downstairs red-eyed and disheveled and exuding the rank effluvia of tequila and sexual fluids and whorehouse perfume. A half-dozen stableboys had saddled the company horses and behind each cantle tied wallets freshly packed with foodstuffs and new clean bedrolls and these boys now held the readied mounts in the brothel courtyard where Hobbes and John Allen were waiting for the men to assemble. Neither had slept at all but both looked eager for the day. Some of the men glared at them and muttered testily about spoiling a man’s fun so damn early in the morning and before he could begin to enjoy his second wind.
“Say now, boys,” Geech said, “lookit there them pistolas.”
They saw that each pony now carried a pair of holsters set before the pommel and each holster held a new model Colt. Hobbes had awakened the city’s premier gun dealer in the middle of the night and presented him with the governor’s immediate order for the guns. He now pulled a similar pistol from his own holster and held it up for all to see. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I dislike to interrupt you at your fun, I do. But I want you all to look here at this new Colt.”
It was a five-shooter like the Texas Colts on their hips but differed in that it had a ramming lever attached underneath the barrel. The company watched the captain closely as he put the pistol at half-cock to permit the cylinder to rotate freely and charged a chamber with powder from a flask and pushed in a ball and turned the cylinder to align the chamber under the lever and rammed the ball home. When he had thus charged all five chambers he capped them each in turn and the pistol was ready for use.
“See?” Hobbes said. “No call to take the thing apart to load the cylinder like with them Texas models. But a man wise enough to carry him a spare cylinder or two already loaded and he shoots up all five loads, then all he does is this.” He pushed on a wedge key set alongside the barrel and slid the barrel and cylinder off their holding pin and swiftly exchanged cylinders and snapped the pistol together again and spun the piece on his finger as adroitly as any trick shooter. He reholstered it and spat to the side.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “these pistols are the governor’s present to us for the good job we done. A bonus, ye might say. Now a friend of his wants to make our hire. It’s a sweet job and if we pull her off we’ll be able to buy all the fun we want till we too damn old to remember how to have it. The thing is, we got to move on this right now.”
He explained Parras’s proposition in less than a minute and two minutes later they were all nineteen of them mounted and chucking their horses down the streets toward the gates of the city and outbound to the bloodcountry.
Three days before, a train of eighty mules bearing an immense store of merchandise from St. Louis had been attacked by a party of several dozen Apaches some thirty to forty miles northeast of the city and every member of the train killed but two. The survivors had walked the rest of the way to Chihuahua. One of them died within sight of the city and the other collapsed at the very gates. He lived only long enough to tell of the raid before dying with his head in his mother’s lap. The entire train had belonged to Alexander Parras and his proposition to Hobbes was this: he could have half the mules and half the merchandise that he recovered from the Indians. Further, Parras offered to match the governor’s bounty on every scalp Hobbes brought back. All Parras wanted was half of the recovery and to see those Indians’ scalps on poles all around the walls of his hacienda as notice to every heathen redskin in northern Mexico of what would happen to those who robbed from him.
“We catch them red niggers we’ll all be richern Midas,” John Allen had told the company, and not a man among them begged to differ.
Hobbes sent the Shawnees ahead and they’d ridden swiftly out of sight. The company rode hard all that day and night and all the next day. In the late afternoon they arrived at the site of the attack and found one of the Shawnee outriders awaiting them. The shadows of nopal and yucca stretched long on the hardpan and the sky to the west looked awash in blood. The few mules killed in the attack still bore their goods but lay ravaged by vultures and writhing with maggots. The company collected the abandoned sacks of grain and crates of dried fruit and bore them on their pack animals to the next outcrop and there cached the goods among the rocks for retrieval on their return. Then set out on the raiders’ trail leading eastward to the wasteland.
They pressed on through the night and rode through the next two days and nights and continued to come upon dead mules and disposed goods every ten miles or so and they every time cached the goods and cursed the savages for not taking better care of the animals. “Ever mule they run a lance through just cause it stumbles is one less mule we gone get to sell,” grumbled Geech. “Fucken heathen sons a bitches.”
They pressed on, feeding on jerky as they went and taking turns sleeping in the saddle. Late that night the land lit palely blue with lightning and then thunder blasted like cannonfire and the ensuing storm blew the rain sideways. The rain broke before morning and their horses splashed through the playa but before the sun was halfway to its meridian the land was again dry and becoming dust. They rode deeper yet into the great bolsón. On their eighth day out of Chihuahua City, as the eastern sky reddened like a fresh slow wound, a Shawnee outrider brought news that the raiders were but another day ahead at a mesa containing a spring and apparently thought themselves beyond all pursuit.
They caught sight of the mesa at sunset and hove up and waited for nightfall and then moved out quickly under a silver crescent moon with cusps upraised like horntips. They closed to within a mile of the nearest rocks and there dismounted. A pale cast of firelight was barely visible against the mesa walls. The company hooded the horses’ heads with blankets and walked them to within a hundred yards of a connecting outcrop. Even at this distance they could now hear faintly the caterwaul and whoop coming from the other side of a high rockwall just ahead. Hobbes and Sly Buck went forward at a crouch and kept alert for sentries and saw none and reached the sloping rockwall and scaled it to the top as noiselessly as cats. They found themselves on a flat narrow rim with an excellent view to the Indian camp set fifty feet below in a wide mesa pocket. They were atop the pocket’s eastern arm which curved around for perhaps three hundred feet and fell sheer on the side toward the camp. The opposite wall was part of the mesa’s eastern face, a higher and even sheerer rockwall that extended straight and unbroken to the north for more than a mile.
Not a sentinel to be seen. A half-dozen fires blazed on the camp’s sand floor. The deepest part of the pocket clearing had been roped off as a corral for the ponies and mules. Most of the mules still bore their cargo packs, though a number of packs had been broken open and lay scattered about the camp.
The savages were chanting and dancing and dressed in a carnival medley of fashions, wearing every combination of wedding dresses and top hats and overalls and hip boots and sunbonnets and vests and oil slickers and still more. Nearly every man of them had a bottle or flask in his grip and some were carrying small casks in both hands and drinking directly from the unbunged hole. Hobbes counted thirty-four of them and whispered so to Sly Buck who whispered back that there were thirty-eight. A mule lay dead with its haunches and flanks cut away and the packs it had carried lay burst apart in a wide litter of clothing. The mule meat was roasting on sticks over campfires that popped and lunged in a wayward wind and sent sparks rising up the rockface and vanishing into dark nothingness.
Now an Apache in top hat and stiff-looking overalls let a great shout and raced toward the largest of the fires and leapt over it laughing and staggered on landing and fell forward on his face and lay unmoving. The others around him laughed uproariously and grabbed up handfuls of sand and flung them at his sprawled form.
Hobbes grinned in the dark and nudged Sly Buck and they descended the slope and went back to the waiting company and told them the Apaches were drunk as coots and the time to strike was right-goddamn-now. He sent Sly Buck and his Shawnees and the Jessup brothers back to the top of the rockwall they had been on. John Allen, Huddlestone, Geech, Chato, Himmler and Holcomb he ordered to positions thirty yards east of the mouth of the mesa pocket. Then Hobbes and the rest of the company mounted up and rode north until they were out of range of the Apaches’ firelight and then made a wide half-circle and angled back southward toward the Indian camp. When they closed to within a furlong of the mouth of the mesa pocket they hove up.
They were still under cover of darkness but could see clearly into the camp’s firelit heart. Even at this distance the sight of the Apache celebration—their clownish dress and wild shrieking, their long shadows lurching and reeling along the rockface wall—struck Edward as a scene from hell’s own madhouse. Hobbes dismounted and steadied his horse and braced the Hawken on the saddle and took careful aim. The rifle blasted with an orange tongue and at almost two hundred yards’ distance an Apache in a planter’s hat and with a woman’s skirt belted around his neck like a cape left his feet in a backward arc as if performing a gymnastic feat. Even before he lit fully on the ground the rest of the Indians were racing in every direction and snatching up weapons and the Shawnees and the Jessups were shooting down on them from the rockwall above.
Every shot put down an Indian. Some of them ran for the horses and some came scampering out of the pocket with the intention of going up the slope to kill the snipers but as they came round the wall they presented themselves as stark silhouettes against the firelight behind them and John Allen’s boys hardly had to aim to put down the first bunch of them with a rifle volley and then shoot the others with their pistols.
Now a dozen or so mounted Apaches came galloping out of the mouth of the pocket bearing north and away from the murderous gunfire coming from atop the rockwall and from their right flank. Hobbes and his team sat their horses in the darkness and watched the approach of the Indian riders’ silhouettes and took aim on them with their rifles. When the savages closed to within thirty yards they fired a yellowstreaking fusillade that dropped the front seven horses and their riders with them and some of the ponies behind them tripped on these and went down screaming too. Now the scalphunters had pistols in hand and were urging their mounts forward and shooting every Indian to raise any part of himself from the ground. And then all of them—Sly Buck’s shooters on the rockwall and John Allen’s party on the flank and Hobbes’ mounted team—recharged their pieces and again shot every Apache who did not appear sufficiently dead. It was an attack of altogether perfect execution and they made short work of it.
As Edward chucked the Janey horse forward into the Indian camp the Shawnees skimmed down the rockwall as lightly as lizards and began scalping the dead. Their own technique for taking hair was to make a cut all the way around the top of the head and then sit with their feet braced on the man’s shoulders and a tight two-hand hold on his hair and jerk the scalp off the skull with a wet sucking pop.
John Allen’s shooters came jogging into the clearing, every man jaunty and loud with an ebullience peculiar to men of shared expertise in the blood arts. Some of the company set to taking scalps and some went to the mules in the corral and began rummaging through the packs to see just what it was they had come to own half of and would be selling at profit to the Chihuahua merchants. There was yet more clothing of every sort, men’s suits and roughwear and suspenders and boots, dresses and parasols and women’s shoes and ladies’ undergarments of sundry sorts which roused cheers from this company of killers and many boastful proclamations of dire sexual intent on their return to Chihuahua. There were bolts of cloth in various colors and men’s beaver hats and ladies’ hats appointed with egret plumes as pale as cream. And yet more grain and dried fruit and sugar and angora wool and cotton, jars of preserves and candies, tins of meats and fish and sweets.
Now Geech gave a shout and from a mulepack pulled a bottle of French brandy and raised it high and the company fell to the cargo of spirits like wolves on a wounded beef. Edward joined the rush to the store of liquor and the melee thereat and fetched out a bottle of rye for himself. Had Hobbes been present at this discovery he likely would have stayed the company from the spirits until they first repacked the mules and made ready to start back to Chihuahua City at first light. Even then he likely would have held them to the sharing of a few bottles and nothing more until they were back in town where every man could addle his mind as he wished and exercise the license he desired and fend for himself with the consequence. But at the time the jubilant scalpers began unstoppering and turning up bottles of whiskey and jugs of wine their captain was with Doc Devlin on the other side of the rockwall seeing by torchlight to those in the company who had been wounded.
They were two. Himmler had taken an arrow through his calf and now lay on his belly with his teeth locked on a leather ball pouch as Doc Devlin first cut away the pointed end and then placed one foot behind Himmler’s knee and the other on his ankle and carefully gripped the shaft with two hands just under the fletching of the remaining portion, setting himself to extract it with one hard pull. Himmler’s face poured sweat and his jaw muscles looked like small fists and the veins bulged in his neck and across the number 12 on his forehead. As the arrow came free he let a strangled cry and arched backwards so far it seemed his spine might break and the pouch fell from his mouth on strings of saliva. His breath rushed from him and he fell forward with his face in the dirt and groaned like a man spent on a woman. Doc Devlin tossed aside the arrow portion in his hand and left Himmler to bind the wound himself.
The other casualty was a Shawnee who sat at the base of the rock slope gasping wetly with nearly a foot of the feathered end of an arrow angling down from just below his breastbone and two feet of the pointed end projecting upward from between his shoulder blades. Sly Buck stood close by without looking at him. Blood streamed from the Indian’s mouth and nose and his eyes were set on some distant shore where his spirit would shortly alight. Doc Devlin stood over the man and studied his circumstance and then spoke to Hobbes who spoke in turn to Sly Buck in the Shawnee tongue. The chief made no response and the captain nodded and he and Doc Devlin walked away.
They found the company given over to riot. Castro and Geech and the Jessups were each armed with a bottle of whiskey and a knife and making bets on throws at a scalped Apache they’d sat up against the rockface some twenty feet away. One of the Jessups set himself and threw his knife in an end-over-end blur and sank it almost to the hilt in the corpse’s stomach. This Jessup whooped in triumph and raised his bottle to his fellows and they all bubbled their bourbon. Padre Foreman sat pale and round beside a crackling fire, naked but for a woman’s bonnet and a pair of great red drawers, smiling into the flames and imbibing from a decanter of Spanish wine. Jaggers and Huddlestone and Holcomb hefted magnums of champagne and were watching an Indian burn in the fire where they had pitched him and the smoke of this fire was greasily bittersweet.
Edward sat on a flat rock near the corral and sipped at his rye and beheld this carnival of the bloodcrazed.
John Allen appeared at Hobbes’s side and made a dismissive gesture in response to the captain’s glare. “I couldn’t of stopped them if I tried, J. K. You neither. I anyway figured they would of got into that liquor store somewhere between here and Chihuahua someways or other and no telling but it would come at a worst time. We best off letting them get it over and done tonight.”
Hobbes stared hard at him a moment longer and then again looked about at his carousing company. “They at least take the hair already?”
“They did.” John Allen pointed to the corral rope where the scalps hung dripping.
Hobbes let a long slow breath. “Well, hell. They done a smart of killing and the badger’s done loose. Fuck it, John. We might’s well have a drink ourself.”
“Glad you feel that way, J.K.,” John Allen said, and brought a full bottle of bourbon from behind his back and pressed it to Hobbes’s hand.
They were most of them hungover and some still drunk when the captain roused the company at first light. Men had slept where they’d fallen and now raised themselves with the slow unsure action of rusted machinery, their heartbeats jabbing in their heads like cactus spines. Hobbes himself was redeyed and ensconced at the single campfire that still burned and which he’d mended to the right flame for making coffee. John Allen sat close to the fire too and nursed his own headpains with a cup of coffee laced with cornmash. The top of the mesa highwall was the color of raw beef in the first rays of the sun. The Shawnees were burying their kinsman under a shelf jutting from the lower rockwall and for the second time in his life Edward heard their quivering death song.
A few yards away sat Tom Finn, slackfaced and barechested and wild of hair, digging intently and deep down the front of his trousers. He withdrew his hand with the thumbnail and forefinger pinched together and studied his catch closely and then leant forward and pressed it into the sand and covered it over.
And now this way came Huddlestone and Holcomb and Castro, all three wretchedly besotted and trudging laboriously. As they passed by Finn, Huddlestone sneered down at him and then said something to his companions and all three men laughed lowly. Finn looked after them for a moment and then rose to his feet as smoothly as a snake uncoiling. He brandished an enormous bowie in both hands like a broadsword. Castro glanced back and saw him coming and fell aside and Holcomb too saw him and stopped walking as Finn stepped past them with the bowie over his head in the manner of one about to axe firewood. Perhaps Huddlestone heard the whisper of the blade as it descended. It clove his head with a wet shunk! to a point between his eye and his patched socket and for an instant they were joined, these comrades in arms, by the blade halfway through the center of Huddlestone’s head and the haft tight in Finn’s grip. Finn gave the bowie a grunting twist and the blade torqued apart the skulltop with a sound like sundering wood. He withdrew the blade as Huddlestone fell forward with all thoughts and plans and memories vanished from the spilling stew of his brains and blood. He lit on his face and gore jumped from his gaping head to shape a broad stain over the forward ground he never achieved.
Tom Finn turned and walked back to where his gear lay and his face read of no inward disturbance. He wiped the blade clean on his shirt and sheathed it and then put the shirt on and all the men looked to Hobbes to see what he might do. For a long moment the captain stared at Finn going about his business and then looked to Huddlestone on the ground and then he looked away from both and said: “Let’s move.”
Every man turned to the loading of the mules and assembly of his own outfit and within the hour the seventeen men remaining in the company set out to westward with their train of fifty-eight mules of recovered goods. Among the fallen and scalped aboriginal dead left to the gathering flock of buzzards were the cloven-skulled remains of Huddlestone whose bones the birds and coyotes would soon denude of all flesh and anyone to come upon them later would not know whose bones they had been. The bones would dry and crack and break apart in the sun and be blown over by the sand so that in time there would be no sign at all of what had once been Lonwell Pike Huddlestone of High River, Kentucky. And those few who had known him in manhood would be dead too and so not even memory of him would exist and it would be as though he had never set foot in the world.
None in the company knew the reason Finn had killed him. If Finn himself knew he did not say, not that day, which was the last left to them all but one.
Late that afternoon they were in the deep reach of a shimmering bolsón and sixty miles distant from the nearest ranges showing on the horizon as thin wavering lines of red stone when they spied a dust cloud swelling off the open horizon to southwestward. John Allen said that likely as not it was another wild bunch of mustangs headed for the grasslands. “Maybe so,” Hobbes said. He glanced about uneasily at the utter lack of bulwark on the vast surround of hardbaked playa. He ordered a circle of packmules and every man drew his longarm and sat his horse inside the ring of mules and watched the dust draw nearer and billow higher and wider. It had to be a thousand head or more to raise such dust at that distance and none of them had seen a wild herd as large as that. They sat their horses and spat and watched as the first of the robust little mustangs took shape at the fore of the advancing dust and the faint thrumming of their hooves carried on the waveringly hot and dusty air.
“It’s more horses than the boils on Job’s ass,” said John Allen. “Aint nobody can drive that many of them crazy jugheads. It’s a wild bunch.”
Now the alkaline dust rolled thickly over them and in the light of the low red sun the world assumed a crimson haze as if submerged in a bloodstained tide. The ground trembled beneath them as the pounding hooves came closer and now a mustang came racing past with tangled mane streaming and neck outstretched and eyes huge and white and froth flying from its flanks and behind it came the rest of the herd. The company’s mules shied and lunged and Hobbes shouted for his men to hold the animals fast. Galloping mustangs swept past either side of the encircled company like a crashing river of horseflesh breaking round an island.
The men eased down the hammers of their guns and some resheathed their rifles and all of them grinned like lunatics in the red haze and every man among them felt kinship with this brute roving herd of the bloodland.
Then in that swirling dust they saw horses with trimmed manes and tails and with brands on their haunches and the men of the company exchanged fast looks and Edward heard John Allen yell out. He turned and saw him standing in the stirrups and staring hard into the dense red dust and there suddenly appeared a brightly fletched arrow through his neck. Allen’s hand rose toward it and stopped midway and he fell forward onto his horse’s neck and the animal shied and John Allen toppled dead from the saddle.
A great fluttering rain of arrows swooped upon them and mules and horses cried out and reared and broke from the train. An arrow sucked into Doc Devlin’s chest. Another transfixed Castro’s leg to his mount and horse and rider together went down screaming.
There came now a howling to seize the Christian heart. Out of the red dust and not eighty yards distant there appeared a horde of shrieking savages sounding like legions of Pandemonium, all in black faces and body paint of madhouse designs and brandishing bows and lances and clubs and clenching ready arrows in their teeth and even their horses were painted and seemed to be howling too with mouths open wide and huge teeth bared. A second flurry of arrows shuddered into the company before it had yet got off its first shot and another dozen mules and a scattering of horses and some of the animals in the passing herd too went down. One of the Jessups tumbled from his saddle and the Australian Holcomb grunted alongside Edward and clutched at the arrow in his arm. Hobbes was dismounted and shooting with a pistol in each hand and yelling orders never heard in that hellish din of war cries and curses and the screams of rent men and animals. The company sought cover behind fallen packmules and Edward slid off the Janey mare and ran past Padre Foreman lying prone and shooting even as a pair of feathered arrows angled from his back like fates come to roost. He threw himself behind a downed mule and fired all five rounds of his carbine so quickly he thought he had fired but once and was enraged at the weapon and flung it aside and drew his revolver and shot a savage off his horse at twenty yards and fired again and an Indian pony went down at full gallop and flung its rider and the animal came tumbling head over heels at Edward who ducked behind the cargo pack as the paint pony went over him in a wild screaming flail of legs. He raised his head and an arrow flensed his cheekbone. And now the horde was fully on them and their demonically howling black faces everywhere and he shot one through the eye not five feet from him and then felt his chin strike the ground. His face was pressed to the sand and he wanted to rise but could not move and could not draw breath and then felt his hair clutched and his head was jerked up and directly before him was the wide-rent belly of a fallen mule and its huge welter of bloody viscera and he felt a sharp line of pain across the top of his forehead an instant before the very roof of the world ripped away and a great heaviness fell over him and then all was mute darkness.
And in darkness he awoke. He heard a heavy droning of flies. The crown of his head felt afire. His limbs would not obey his commands to move and he thought he was paralyzed, perhaps his spine severed, his neck broken. He knew his eyes were open but he could see nothing and so thought he was blind as well. Then his right arm flexed and he realized he was but pinioned under a heavy weight and he strained and struggled until at last he was able to wriggle out from between the dead horse and mule where he’d been snugged. He raised a raging swarm of greenflies as he came free. He felt something brush his back and he flinched and turned and saw an enormous black vulture tottering away, nodding its ugly redly naked head and holding its wings out in a perverse gesture of priestly blessing. He sat up and saw vultures everywhere in dusty twilight but could not tell if it was end of day or its beginning, could not for the moment determine east from west. He at last made out the brighter sky in the east and gained his directional bearings.
Wherever he looked was carnage. The carrion birds probed and tore and fed upon it with sounds like sloppy chuckling. He stood and swayed but held his balance. To the north he saw a long low cloud of dust that marked the savages’ progress on the trail home to the high plains.
He wandered about like a drunk on ground sogged with blood and the void of animals and the rising stench might have originated in the bowels of hell. Mules and horses and men lay in grotesquely twisted attitudes. No man remained clothed or intact or unscalped. He recognized Padre Foreman’s pale large-girthed corpus despite its missing face. The padre’s private parts had been cut away and all other men the same. Here lay Tom Finn, yesterday’s killer of Huddlestone, now tonsured to the bloody bone and with an arrow jutting from his eye and one arm hacked away. And here a Jessup sprawled and there another and vultures squabbled over the entrails of both. Yonder lay the unmistakable blackbearded remains of eviscerated Bill Jaggers who had reprieved him from prison and introduced him to the lucrative trade of Indiankilling. He found too what remained of John Allen and the Spaniard Castro. Holcomb the Australian. Doc Devlin. All of them with their forearms flayed and the bones of them removed to be fashioned into flutes for the warriors’ favored children.
Himmler was gutted to the backbone and Geech so savagely mutilated Edward would not have known him but for the tattooed “Tess” over his heart. The only Shawnee he recognized as such was Sly Buck, who lay bellydown over a cargopack of rice with his hands cut away and his severed genitals stuffed in his mouth and a feathered lance in his rectum. Hobbes he found headless.
He searched for the Janey mare but saw none among the dead animals that looked like her and he reckoned the savages had her. His head was searing still and the sight of so many heads bared raw and bloody to the morning sun prompted him to put a hand to his own head and he howled at the white pain and his fingers came away sticky with coagulating blood and he knew then that among the scalps being carried in triumph back to the Comancheria was his own.
He scavenged intently through the slaughter and found three canteens that yet held water, one nearly half full. He found too a hat and was able to set it on his head so that no part of it pressed on his wound. He had the bowie he’d been wearing and the Colt he’d been clutching when he fell and he still had his charge pouch and he now loaded the pistol. The only packs the savages left behind contained commodities as useless to him as to them. He sliced out a portion of the flank of a horse and skinned it and cut it in strips and attached the strips to arrows to jerk in the sun.
The nearest range stood in thin red silhouette to the north-by-east and he made it for the Sierra Ponce mountains and knew that springs ran through the foothills there. He set out toward them, the meat-hung arrows stuck into his belt and positioned to catch the brunt of the sun. He walked the day long and his head flared with every heartbeat. He several times cried out against the pain and twice almost swooned and had to stop to rest. When the setting sun again bathed the bolsón in a blood-red haze the narrow line of mountains on the horizon appeared but barely larger than when he had started for it. He had no idea how much distance he had covered. He’d gathered sticks he came upon as he walked and now had a small bundle of firewood under his arm when he put down for the night in that vast waste. He’d drunk up the two lesser canteens during the day and now vowed to take but five swallows of water from the remaining almost-half-full canteen but he took ten before he could stop. The wind blew cold and his little fire lunged and flattened and swirled and jumped like a thing desperate to escape its own essence. He roasted a few strips of horsemeat and ate them before they were fully cooked. Then he lay down and curled tight into himself and nearly howled with the pain of his scalp wound. He awoke with a start in the middle of the night and was not sure if the beast he saw in the dim cast of the moon was coyote or wolf or yet something else but in an instant it was vanished in the darkness with his horsemeat.
The next day he saw a storm raging blackly over the mountains ahead and the jagged blanched lightning and believed he could hear the faint rumble of its thunder but the rain did not come his way and he walked the day long under a relentless sun. He dreamt that night of firestorms rent with screams, of stone streets running with blood, and he wanted to wake but could not, not until the first gray line of light was showing along the east rim of the earth. He groaned to his feet and pushed on. By midday his water ran out. At sundown the mountains looked close enough to touch but he knew they were yet at least a dozen miles distant and if he did not gain them before the sun rose again he would never reach them. As he trudged on in the dark he thought he saw firelight flickering at the foot of the rockface but was not sure it was real. After a time he collapsed and got up and staggered on and then fell again and lost consciousness and did not come to until after first light. He pushed up to his hands and knees and made it to his feet and set out again toward the looming mountains. As the sun rose his tongue thickened and gagged him and he knew the next time he fell would be the last.
And now riders came toward him from the mountains. Three of them. Advancing slowly as if on the surface of a vast shimmering lake. He was afraid to stop walking for fear he would fall but when they drew within fifty yards he stopped and swayed and was surprised to feel the weight of the Colt in his hand and the hammer cocked under his thumb. When they closed to ten yards they reined up and studied him for a long moment. Then one of them, a Mexican with a flat-crowned black sombrero and a long droopy mustache put his horse forth another few yards and grinned at him with white perfect teeth. His eyes made inventory of him, pausing on the pistol in his hand.
“Hello, my friend,” he said. His accent was pronounced but not as heavy as most Edward had heard from Mexican mouths. “You must are very tired, no?”
Edward shrugged. His lips were swollen and cracked and he did not want to speak if he didn’t have to.
The Mexican unslung a canteen from his huge saddlehorn and heeled his horse forward and handed it down to him. It was full and heavy and Edward unstoppered it and raised the neck to his mouth and hesitated and then gently put it to his lips. The pain jumped into his eyes and he shut them hard and drank and gagged and nearly vomited the water. He fought down the gagging and then took smaller, more careful sips. He paused for breath and then sipped again.
“Basta,” the Mexican said, and reached down for the canteen but Edward clutched it to his chest and stepped back quickly and nearly fell. The Mexican quit his grin and his eyes thinned. He gestured impatiently with his outstretched hand. “Dámelo, muchacho.” Edward took one more drink and handed up the canteen and the Mexican stoppered it and hung it on his saddlehorn.
“We see you desde ayer,” the Mexican said. “Desde—how you say?—yesserday. My friends, they say you don’t reach la montaña, but me, I say you do. We say, ah, una apuesta.” He paused and turned to the other two and said, “Una apuesta?”
Edward saw that one of the other two was a white man in a gray duster with a pair of pistols at his belt. This one said, “A bet.”
The Mexican turned back to Edward and said, “We say a bet. And you have make me win.” He showed the great white grin.
“I aint—” Edward began, his voice a croak, his cracked lips beading with blood. He swayed and caught himself. “I aint there yet.”
The Mexican laughed. “Pues, I think you are sufficiente close. I think so, yes.”
Edward thought this was funny and wanted to laugh but his legs gave out and he fell forward and his hat came off and he heard a sharply uttered “Jesus goddamn Christ!”
And a softly spoken “Ay Chihuahua!”
They laid him in the shade of a rock overhang and gave him more water and a portion of food and treated his wounds except for his savaged scalp for which nothing could be done.
“Your head’s festering and you got a mean fever. I guess you’ll either die of it or you won’t. But hell, I knew a fella was scalped to the bone by Kiowas and lived to tell the tale for years till he choked to death on one a his wife’s biscuits.”
Speaking was Jack Spooner, the sole white man in that gang of eighteen until now. “Even if you don’t die you won’t have need of any more barbers or be turning the ladies’ heads, that’s sure.” He studied Edward’s mutilated cheek for a moment, then his remaining portion of ear. “I gotta say, boy, you missin more pieces off your head than just about any living man I ever seen.” He turned and spat and looked off to the open country and then looked at Edward again. “We’re ridin out tomorrow so we aint gonna know if you live or die unless you ride with us. Manuel says you can if you want.”
“Who’s Manuel?” Edward asked.
“The chief,” Spooner said. He gestured toward the Mexican who had given Edward water out on the playa. He was sitting in the shade of another rock with several others, gesticulating, laughing with them at the tale he told.
“I got no outfit,” Edward said. His crown felt as if live coals were pressing upon it.
“We’ll outfit you. You can pay the chief for it later. If you die I don’t guess he’ll hold you to accounts.”
They rested that day and through the night there in the foothills of the Sierra Ponce just south of the del Norte. The downcountry flatland was bone-white under a pale half-moon and the Carmen range stood starkly purple in the east. Comets described bright amber streaks across the black void and vanished from existence in the same instant they appeared.
The gang was up before dawn and made ready to move out. Edward was redeyed and dizzy with fever. The chieftain walked up to him trailing his horse and grinned and asked if he was sure he wanted to go with them. “Maybe you want be here hasta los Comanches come otra vez. Maybe you want for to kill all them for because they kill you friends.”
That got a laugh from the two or three other Mexicans who understood English and they told the rest what the chief had said. All of them laughed and slapped one another on the shoulder and pointed at Edward and rubbed the crowns of their heads and laughed harder still. Spooner smiled. Edward felt as if the world were slightly atilt under his feet and he could not quite get his proper balance. All things looked to him sharp-edged and hot to the touch in the red light of the rising sun. Every man appeared swathed in a haze of a different hue. He felt becrazed.
He grinned through his pain to go along with the joke. He said he took revenge only against insults and although the savages had killed his companions and taken his scalp they had at least known better than to risk insulting him. He grinned like a lunatic as Spooner translated for the compañeros who howled with glee and pointed at him and tottered like drunks in their laughter and some made “fuck you” gestures toward the Comancheria to the north. They nodded at each other and agreed that Eduardo was muy chistoso y muy simpático, these dark-skinned hot-eyed men shaped of the violent mix of pagan Indian blood with that of the carriers of the Spanish Cross. Their teeth flashed white under thick black mustaches and every man of them was scarred of face and hands. They were loud in talk and laughter, in curses and melancholy song. They bore weaponry of every sort—firearms and knives and machetes, and some carried lances and some wore cavalry sabers and all of them expert with lassos to take a man off his horse and drag him to raw meat behind their galloping mounts. Some carried scalps strung on their saddlehorns but even in his fever Edward noted that much of the hair was shot with gray and had been taken by unpracticed hands.
Dominguez the chieftain was a Poblano, a man of the city of Puebla, which lay far to the south some sixty-five miles beyond the capital and whose beauty he said could not adequately be described in the words of any language but that of the heart. At the age of fifteen he had concluded that it was unjust for someone so handsome and strong and smart as himself to be so poor while so many fat, weak, stupid men were so rich. So he set about righting the scales of justice and quickly progressed from preying on drunks in the late-night streets to robbing isolate travelers on the mountain roads to holding up stagecoaches along the main highways. He’d been at the robber’s trade six months when he got a price on his head for killing a diligence guard who refused to throw down the strongbox and grabbed instead for a shotgun. Other killings followed. When he was twenty-two he killed a famous bandit chief named Manolo Gomez in a knifefight in a cantina fronting Orizaba’s main plaza and then dragged the body outside and dismembered it with a machete and scattered the bloody pieces to the plaza dogs. By the time the sun went down the town balladeers had composed a song about the fight and would sing of it for generations to come. Dominguez’s reputation as a fearsome killer of men had thereafter grown swiftly.
He formed his own gang and over time it became the most notorious of the dozens of robber gangs ranging the high country between Mexico City and the Gulf, a region long infamous for banditry. The gangs became so rampant that no traveler or train of packmules or cargo wagons was safe from robbery along either of the two major highways between the capital and Veracruz. The government assigned more and still more lancers to escort the wealthy merchants’ trains and to patrol the main roads. Soon the richest trains were routinely protected by entire regiments and were virtually unassailable. Judicial formalities had furthermore been much relaxed and men only suspected of banditry as well as known bandidos were often executed on the spot of arrest. Highway robbery became such perilous enterprise that Dominguez and his band departed to the northern badlands where there was easy money to be made killing Indians—or so they had heard.
That had been a year ago. And the money did not prove so easy. Dominguez’s trackers were unequal to the Apache and the gang never collected more than a dozen scalps at a time and most of the hair was of women and children and frail old men. Come autumn they were attacked by a huge war party in the Sierra del Hueso and of the gang’s fifty-two men only eighteen escaped with their lives. The survivors repaired to El Paso to tell of their harrowing adventure and drink and whore away the last of their money. There they heard that the American army had defeated the Mexican forces at Monterrey the month before and the gringos now occupied the city. The Yankee supply trains from the Rio Bravo into Nuevo León were said to be rich pickings for those with the balls to rob them.
Nuevo León was where the compañeros were headed when they spied the dust of the gringo mule train and then the greater dust of the savages closing upon it. The outriders came back at a gallop, wide-eyed and yelling of Comanches, and the gang sped to the refuge of the mountains and from there watched the dust of the Comanche attack on the gringo train. By evening the dust began to settle, and early the following morning the Indians resumed their northward trek for home. The compañeros held to their hiding place in the rocks and the next morning watched the Comanches pass by within a half-mile of their position, driving the stock before them, laughing and yipping, every brute of them coated with blackened blood and gore and their stink carrying into the mountain, many with scalps dangling from lances and some with blood-crusted heads strung from their ponies. Dominguez said they looked like devils heading home to hell. The compañeros waited the rest of that day and through the night to be sure they were well gone and at daybreak made ready to ride. But in the red light of sunrise they descried Edward’s distant figure slouching toward them like the incarnation of their own folly in having come to this wasteland to chase their fortune.
“You are very much lucky,” Dominguez said to Edward as they rode side by side. On Edward’s other side rode Pedro Arria, a hawkfaced man who had been with Dominguez since his earliest bandit days and was the company’s second in command. “All you friends they are died, but no you. Only you no die. Que buena suerte, hijito. Very much lucky, you.”
“Yeah,” Edward said. “I feel just awful damn lucky.”
Dominguez laughed.
His next days were hazed with fevered pain, his sleep haunted by visions from hell which he then would recognize as out of his own recent past. At the village of Boquillas they took a night’s respite. Pulque eased his suffering until morning and then heightened it with hangover, but his fever broke at last and some of the compañeros reluctantly paid off bets, arguing hopefully but without much conviction that the gringo might yet take a turn for the worse and die. The villagers thought him the most fearsome in the bunch because of his butchered head, the wound to his face where the cheekbone showed pale under the tight new growth of skin. Only the devil’s spawn, they whispered to one another, could survive such savage wounds. There was little tribute the gang could exact from the frighted inhabitants save dried meats and clean clothes. And then they rode on. That evening two of them fell into dispute over ownership of a shirt and knives came into play. The fight fell off when one staggered away into the dark with his hands holding in place his exposed intestines. The other sat down by a campfire, grinning in victory and clutching at his slashed neck as the blood ran blackly down his arm and fell in gleaming bulbous drops and hissed on the firestones and its vapor smelled sickly sweet. A few minutes later he let a gurgling sigh and slumped over and was dead. One of the compañeros removed this man’s boots and left his own worn ones there beside him and another took his pistol and knife but none made a move to bury him. A short while later they heard coyotes calling and drawing close in the night and then came the high howl of a wolf and the coyotes fell silent. In the morning they mounted up and hupped their horses to southeastward. A quarter-mile out on the hardpan they passed by the other one lying dead also, his abdomen hollowed of viscera. On a flanking ridge above them they spied a lone pale lobo looking down on their passing with its ears erect and its muzzle stained darkly red, but no man among them even thought to shoot at this wolf or any other ever.
They rode up into the blood-colored Carmens and wound through juniper forests and past century plants with stalks double the height of their horses. His scalp was scabbing now and the pain of it lessened every day. Fredo Ruiz, a rarity of a hulking mestizo and the largest of the compañeros, presented him with a wide black bandanna and showed him how to tie it over his head like a pirate headpiece to protect his crown from curious eyes whenever he removed his hat.
Over the next weeks they rode through the high country and its steep passes and deep gorges, rode along narrow mountainside trails that looked out to the ends of the earth. They could see below them the outspread wings of hawks circling slowly on the hunt. They camped on tablerocks and the flames of their fires played drunkenly in the wind. Now and then in the depths of the desert night they could see the tiny winking lights of other fires, though whether of pilgrims or savages or denizens of another world none would hazard to guess.
They came down in single file through a sequence of deep barrancas and rocky switchbacks overhung with piñon and catclaw and mountain cypress. The air was wet and blued with mist. Occasionally there came from the shadowed high rock the screech of a cougar that raised the hair on their napes and frighted the horses. Riding through this mean country of stone and sand and thorn, Edward felt himself drawing toward a reckoning he could not bypass whatever road he took.
They debouched at last onto the bajada. The horizons shimmered at midday and icy winds gusted through their night camps and their fires swirled and lunged and trailed furious lines of sparks into the darkling void. They rode long days through spiny growths of sotol and ocotillo and lechugilla and in a dusky twilight blinking with fireflies came to the village of Nacimiento on Christmas Eve of 1846. Here they learned that in the past months more than two thousand Yankee soldiers under command of a general named Wool had marched down from the presidio at the Rio Bravo and crossed the river just forty miles ahead near the village of Sabinas. Their dust had been visible to the east for weeks. These gringo troops were now at Monclova seventy-five miles south and awaiting orders from Taylor in Monterrey. The compañeros listened to the news and feasted on cabrito and got drunk on mescal and several of them fought among themselves but none killed another and the combatants seemed the more refreshed afterwards despite their battered aspects. But tempers stayed short through the evening and the air remained charged with ready violence. Dominguez sat with Pedro, Spooner and Edward at a table against the back wall of the little cantina and his own face sagged with drink. He watched his men and sighed and said they had to find somebody to rob soon or most of them would start killing each other out of boredom.
Just south of Sabinas they waylaid a passenger coach in a chilly drizzling rain. At the sight of them the two mounted guards threw down their weapons and raised their hands as did the guard beside the driver. The box contained two hundred pesos in silver, all else was contracts and deeds and various other papers of no use at all to the bandits. Dominguez ordered the passengers out of the coach and had a compañero named Chucho search them for weapons and valuables. One of the five passengers was a woman of passing attraction enfolded in a hooded cloak, the wife of a prosperously dressed man at her side. After Chucho searched the man and extracted a small purse bearing eighty pesos in gold coin, he turned to search the woman. But the husband stepped between them and told Chucho he most certainly could not put his hands on her. Chucho pulled his pistol and looked up at Dominguez sitting his horse. Dominguez told the man it would be best for him if he permitted his wife to be searched, but the man said absolutely not. Dominguez shrugged and turned to Edward and said, “Mátalo,” and made a shooting gesture with his thumb and index finger
He knew he should have expected it. Of course they would test him. Of course he would have to show he was of them. For a moment he thought of himself as one who had never killed in cold blood and then remembered some of the harmless Indians in whose slaughter he had joined. Still, those were Indians. This was an unarmed white man standing there and wanting only to protect his wife. He drew the Colt and pointed it at the man.
“Mira esa bonita pistola!” Dominguez said to Pedro Arria, admiring the five-shooter.
The man gently pushed his wife out of the line of fire, then glared up at Edward and said, “Crees que te tengo miedo, gringo? Nunca! Nunca, maldito!”
Edward cocked the weapon and sighted between the man’s eyes and wondered how he might explain if he chose not to shoot. It occurred to him all in an instant that it made no real difference whether he shot this man or not, just as it made no difference why he did so if he did. In time both he and this man would be dead and all trace of their existence long vanished. It would be as if neither had ever existed at all. And yet they did exist, both of them, now, and although a man might do what he did in his time of existence simply because it was in his blood to do it, he might sometimes have the choice of rejecting his blood’s urging. And so, at this moment, he could choose not to shoot.
What his choice of the moment would have been he would never know because just then the woman brought a small two-shot pistol from under her cloak and fired at him. Edward’s hat brim twitched and his horse shied and he shot her through the top teeth. In the same instant Fredo shot the husband. And then all of them were shooting and wrestling with their spooked mounts and every passenger fell down bloodied and some screamed in the gunfire and the thickening mist of powdersmoke. The two mounted guards reined their horses around to escape and Edward shot one down and Dominguez dropped the other. The guard on the coach fired with a pistol and one of the compañeros toppled from his horse and Edward shot the guard and blood jumped from his neck and he fell from the coach as the driver stood up with his hands held high but Fredo shot him too.
Now some of the bandidos dismounted and used knives to finish those of the coach party who still drew breath. The fallen compañero had been shot in the stomach and his shirt was brightly thick with blood. Pedro Arria was bent over him, examining the wound, and now he looked up at Dominguez and shook his head.
“No! No, jefe!” the wounded man cried up to Dominguez. “Estoy bien! Ya lo verás, jefe!” He grunted painfully with the effort of trying to rise and then fell back with a grimacing moan.
Dominguez motioned Pedro Arria out of the way and raised the spare caplock already cocked in his hand. He leaned forward from the saddle and aimed carefully and shot the wounded man through the eye.
They rifled the pockets and purses of the dead and some could not resist fondling the woman as they pretended to search her yet again lest the previous searchers missed something. A few among them would not have been above ravishing her before she cooled had not so many of their fellows been present. A young compañero named Gustavo who had once studied in a seminary stood over the bodies and remarked aloud that it was interesting to see how the termination of these human lives now provided such abundant aliment for the ants and flies and the buzzards soon to appear. “De verdad nada se desperdicia en este mundo,” he said. “Todo lo que occure tiene algún resultado bueno.” His fellows smiled at his banalities with avuncular indulgence though some were ever wary of him as one who had been maddened by the conflict between his abiding reverence for God’s mysterious workings and his readiness to kill any of His creatures.
They took the guards’ weapons and freed the coach team from its traces and strung the horses on a pair of lead ropes. As they recharged their arms Dominguez offered Edward fifty silver dollars for the Colt. Edward said he would not sell it—and then presented it to the jefe as a gift. Dominguez was effusive with gratitude and in turn gave Edward three fine caplock pistols and a .50 caliber Hawken with a sawed-off barrel charged with two dollars in silver dimes.
They followed the Río Sabinas to its junction with the Salado and held to the Salado’s southeast course and arrived at the village of Anahuac on an afternoon bright with sun and piled high with deep white clouds. Flocks of grackles squawked in the trees and mangy dogs slank along the building walls and squealing children trotted beside the company’s horses. The Laredo Road was another twenty-five miles downriver but the villagers informed them that the main American supply line to Monterrey was the Camargo Road, another fifty miles beyond the Laredo route. A large American army camp sited at Camargo, on the southern bank of the Rio Bravo, was the major transfer point for Yankee supplies to General Taylor. The villagers had heard that the gringos were getting ready to move from Monterrey to Saltillo for a battle with Santa Ana and the road from Camargo was said to be heavy with wagon traffic bearing Yankee supplies.
Dominguez thanked them for the information and then told the compañeros to take from the village whatever they needed by way of commissary. Some of the compañeros forced the villagers to trade fresh sarapes or shirts or sombreros for their tattered own, and some went from hut to hut and stripped each one of its meager store of food. They took all the jugs of mescal from the village’s single cantina. Some paid a few centavos for what they took and one or two who could write laughingly scribbled notes of hand, but the more brutish among them spat into the palms held out to them for payment. The village elders protested and Dominguez politely apologized but told them his first duty as a chieftain was to the welfare of his men. The few citizens so rash as to resist the thievery were beaten to the ground. A dog composed of little more than hide and bones barked and barked at them from the corner of a house until Pedro Arria shot it dead and the quiet that ensued was greater than that of the silenced dog and hung behind them as they rode away.
They found the Laredo Road but sparsely traveled. Only woodcutters and parties of Mexican army scouts occasionally passed by. The gang moved away from the river and rode south for the Camargo route. Two days later at the Rio Alamo they came upon a trio of Mexican cavalry scouts replenishing their canteens at the bank. Two of the scouts stood and turned just as the compañeros drew out their pistols on Dominguez’s signal and opened fire. The two were knocked back into the water and the third received his bullets while still kneeling and he too fell in the shallow river. The hair of the dead soldiers wavered in the current and blood rose off their wounds in red swirls and carried downstream. They pulled the bodies from the water and went through their pockets and Spooner claimed a pair of cavalry boots for himself and announced them to be a perfect fit. They chased down the soldiers’ horses and some of the compañeros laid claim to the saddles and quickly strapped them onto their mounts in place of their old broken ones. They added the army animals to the company caballada.
Dominguez stood at the riverside and sang softly as he flicked powder residue from the Colt and recharged the chambers. He saw Edward looking at him and smiled. Edward gestured at the dead Mexican soldiers and said, “I figured you and them was on the same side.”
The chieftain smiled uncertainly, his brow furrowed in confusion. “Same side?” he said. He looked at the fallen soldiers and appeared to consider Edward’s question and then spat toward them and looked back at him and said, “Me and they? Noooo. Not same side. Somos enemigos!” He laughed and turned toward the compañeros and swept his arm to include them all. “My side, Eduardito. I my side, they my side. You, tambien! You my side.”
He grinned at Edward like a brother wolf.
They came the following afternoon to the Camargo Road and spent a few days reconnoitering. Some days later they attacked a poorly guarded American pack train and killed a half-dozen soldiers before the rest fled in the wake of the muleteers. The compañeros made away with a wagonload of Hall percussion rifles and two cases of Colt five-shooters and mules loaded with powder and ammunition. They armed themselves anew and sold the rest of the weaponry and the mules to a ranchero band operating out of the Magdalena Hills.
They remained in the region for the next three months. When U.S. trains were too well-guarded the company would set upon Mexican army or civilian transports, though these were never so lucrative in their yield as the Yankee trains. They recruited new members and at one point their band numbered nearly fifty but their ranks were always thinned in fights with the Americans. Then their number would again grow slowly.
During this time Edward learned to speak a passable Spanish although his natural reticence kept him from practicing the language sufficiently to allay his wretched accent. He habitually kept his own company. During respites between the company’s forays he took to riding up into the higher country, to rimrocks facing west for miles to the wilder reaches of the sierras. He’d sit his horse and stare out to the horizon as the sky turned red as a jagged gash in the dying light of the sun. Had he been asked what thoughts he had while gazing on this ancient bloodland his only true answer would have been a howl.
On a chilly afternoon in January they went to Saltillo to attend the hanging of a compañero named Carlito Espinosa. He’d been shot off his horse and taken prisoner during their raid on a Mexican army pack train traversing the sierras between Victoria and Saltillo. The regional commander wanted him made an example to all other bandidos in the region and so announced his execution date and invited the populace at large to attend. The gang entered the town in scattered groups of three and four in order not to attract attention. They entertained no notion of rescuing Carlito, so grossly outnumbered were they by the garrison troops. The streets were chockablock with soldiers ahorse and on foot and all of them grim of aspect. The gang sought only to bear witness to their compañero’s execution. They joined the swelling crowd in the central plaza. A large alamo tree stood in the center of the square, the bark of its main branch scarred by the hanging ropes of generations. The air was festive. Music and song mingled with shouted talk and children’s laughter and the hawking cries of street vendors. The redolence of roasting chiles and charcoaled meats carried through the plaza.
When Carlito was brought out in a flatbed wagon some of the spectators hissed and flung mudballs at him and some laughed and made loud jokes about his hanging. The compañeros made no show of knowing the condemned. Carlito stood in the wagon and a priest gave him final absolution and the hangman put the noose around his neck. The officer in charge asked if he had any last words. Carlito said, “Chinga tu madre!” The officer went redfaced and the compañeros had to stifle their laughter. The officer loudly proclaimed to the spectators that sooner or later all bandidos were killed or captured and this was what became of the captured. The children, especially, he said, should let it be a lesson to them.
His remarks drew applause and whistles of approval. The officer signaled to the teamster on the wagon seat. The teamster cracked his whip and the wagon rolled out from under Carlito and the crowd cheered lustily as he kicked the air. A second later he abruptly went slack in the way only the dead can do and he oscillated slowly under the tree limb, his pants freshly stained, his eyes upturned and solid white, his tongue bulging from his enpurpled face.
Watching Carlito suspended from the alamo branch Edward remembered a distant time when he had seen a Negro lynched in Mississippi, he and his brother John, and the thought of John reminded him of a recent dream in which he’d seen his brother wandering in a deep wood, the top of his skull flensed to the bone and his head cauled in blood. And in this dream he had again heard Daddyjack’s voice crying, “Blood always finds blood. Ye best know it for the truth.”
In February Taylor took his army to engage Santa Ana at Buena Vista. The skeleton force he left in Monterrey was hardly adequate to police the region and over the next few weeks the compañeros had their most lucrative raids yet along the Camargo Road north of Monterrey. They stole payrolls and clothes and food and new tack, stole horses and guns and ammunition which as always they sold to other bandits and to bands of Comancheros. Sometimes Edward and Spooner were recognized as Americans by surrendered Yankee guards who cursed them for traitors to the Stars and Stripes. Spooner was oblivious to their insults but Edward was incensed at being condemned by men who accepted army punishment as a natural condition of life. On one occasion he threatened to shoot a sergeant who would not leave off his slurs. The sergeant spat at him and said, “I bet you a goddamn dollar you won’t shoot no real soldier when he’s lookin ye square in the eye!” Edward lashed him across the mouth with the barrel of his pistol and the sergeant fell to all fours and spat bloody teeth. Edward asked if he had anything more to say and the man shook his head. He dug a silver dollar from his pocket and dropped it at the sergeant’s knees.
Spooner laughed and said, “Damn, bubba, if you aint the sportsman.”
They sometimes sneaked into Monterrey in groups of a half-dozen or so to sport in the city’s finest whorehouses. For most of the compañeros it was a time of spree and prosperity never to be equaled in their lives.
Taylor returned to Monterrey in March, there to stay until the end of the war, and the gringo army patrols on the Camargo Road became more numerous than ever. On three consecutive raids the gang was driven off from a cargo train by the sudden arrival of Yankee dragoons and in every instance a dozen or more compañeros were killed or captured.
The compañeros had been reduced to eighteen when word came of General Winfield Scott’s landing at Veracruz and his bombardment of the city into submission. When he heard the news Dominguez felt greatly cheered. Now the Yankee advance on Mexico City would be through his patria chica, the region of his birth and boyhood, through the lower eastern ranges of the Sierra Madres that he knew as well as he knew his own hands. The American supply trains would have to follow Scott up into the rugged high country where passage was difficult. It would be much easier to ambush them in the mountains and then elude pursuers than it had been in Nuevo León.
“In the mountains there,” he told Edward, “they will never to catch us. I know many good hide places en esas montañas.” The Mexican merchant trains would also be easier to rob now because every Mexican soldier would be needed to defend against Scott and far fewer of them would be assigned to guard the transports.
The whole gang was happy to be going south. That night they sat around the main fire in high spirits and drank mescal and each put five pesos in a hat and were agreed that he who told the best story would win the pool of money. Edward pitched into the hat but passed on a turn at a story. Most of the stories were morally didactic and the compañeros received them with nodding accord. The winning tale was told by the oldest member of the bunch, a graybeard named Lorenzo who was an uncle of Manuel Dominguez. He said the tale was told to him many years ago by his grandfather in Puebla who had heard it from his Spanish grandfather in Guanajuato who had heard it from an English mineowner. His tale was of three bandits who came upon an old man sitting by the side of the road one evening and decided to kill him for sport. The old man was but skin and bone and looked ready for the grave but he pleaded for his life. He said that if they would spare him he would reveal where he had hidden a strongbox full of gold. The bandits grinned and winked at each other and said all right, and the old man gave them directions to a hill a few miles away and told them the gold was buried under the highest tree atop the hill. The bandits thanked him and then killed him anyway. And then for lack of anything better to do they sought out the hill he had told of and dug under the highest tree and were astonished to discover a large strongbox full of gold, just as the old man had said. They laughed and hugged each other and danced all about, singing that they were rich. But the gold was too heavy to carry away all at once and so they decided to sleep there that night and in the morning figure out how to move the treasure to a safer place. The two older bandits then sent the youngest back into town for a bottle of tequila with which to celebrate their good fortune and defend against the night chill. While the youngster was away these two talked things over and agreed that it made much greater sense to split the gold two ways rather than three, and so when the boy got back from town with the tequila they killed him. They then uncorked the bottle and toasted their rich futures and each took a deep drink and both suddenly felt a great pain in their bellies and fell down and died from the poison the boy had added to the tequila after deciding in town that he wanted all the gold for himself.
The compañeros laughed knowingly at this tale’s ironic truth and applauded vigorously. Some pointed at others and said, “Esos tontos eran exatamente como tú!” And those pointed at affected astonishment and said, “Como yo? Carajo! Como tú!”
In the morning they were ahorse before sunrise and riding downcountry on an old burro trail well removed from the main road and the gringo army patrols roaming over it.
Southeast of Linares they came over a low sandrise and spied a pair of large covered wagons halted a half-mile ahead. A stiff wind tugged at their clothes and they wore their hats pulled low against the stinging sand. The overhead sun was huge and orange in the dusty haze. The two wagons were each pulled by a pair of mules but one of the animals of the lead wagon was holding up a foreleg and a party of six women and two men were gathered about the injured beast. One of the women caught sight of the riders and pointed at them and all the party turned to look their way and most then glanced around as if seeking somewhere to hide. But the land about was flat sandy scrub to the distant mountains and so they could but stand beside the wagon and watch the eighteen riders coming on.
One of the men was a muscular Negro in a sleeveless shirt, the other a tall clean-shaved white man in a yellow duster, and as the gang drew closer they saw that although the women were dressed in the Mexican style of loose colorful cotton skirts and bare-shouldered white tops they were all of them American and young and most of them pretty. The horsemen broke into grins and some whistled and raised a fist to each other and one said, “Ay, que bonita compañía de putas! Y puras gringas!”
“Esas gringas son tan puras como una pocilga,” Pedro Arria said and they all laughed.
They reined up before the party and sat their horses and the white man shielded his eyes with his hand against the blowing sand and said in English, “Amigos! Hello, amigos, hello!” His face was tight with apprehension until he saw that two among this band of dusky mustached men appeared to be of his own race and he bellowed at them, “Howdy, boys! Damn good to see some fella Americans hereabouts!” He carried a pistol on his belt but the black man was unarmed. Some of the girls looked frightened but others boldly returned the grinning Compañeros’ carnivorous leers. The injured mule had a broken leg, a compound fracture of a fore cannon, and the jagged ends of the break showed through the bloody hide. The animal stood in its traces with the bad leg held off the ground and seemed to be staring into its own unconveyable experience of the world.
“I was warned I ought not take this damn sandland route,” the man said, addressing himself to Spooner and Edward in a strained voice striving for familiarity, “specially not with mules instead of oxen. But I just figgered they was exaggerating, the way folk tend to do. Now looka here this mule. Stepped in a hole yonder you got to practically step into youownself before you can see it. Bone just went pop! like busting a scantling under a boot heel.” He looked at the mule with disgust, as if the animal had deliberately maimed itself simply to irritate him.
He introduced himself as Alan Segal of Tennessee by way of Mississippi and freely volunteered that he was in the whore business. The previous summer he’d recruited a dozen American girls in Louisiana and Texas to come with him and make their fortune servicing Old Rough and Ready’s troops down on the Rio Grande. But by the time they got there Taylor had moved the bulk of his force some eighty miles upstream from Fort Brown to Camargo on the tributary San Juan about three miles below its Rio Grande junction. Segal and his whores made their slow way over a rough wagon trace and came at last to the American camp which proved a pesthole even in comparison to Fort Brown. The soldiers were elated to have these American cyprians come to ply their trade but life in Camargo had made their tempers raw as open sores and on the very night of the whores’ arrival a pair of soldiers got in a fight over one of them and the bloodied loser limped away into the night only to reappear a few minutes later with pistol in hand and fire on his assailant but he was too drunk to shoot straight and instead hit the girl in the neck and killed her. The next day Segal solicited General Taylor for reimbursement for his loss of property and was laughed out of Old Zack’s tent. A week later one of the other girls got her face and breasts razored badly by a drunken corporal who cursed her and repeatedly called her by the name of his faithless sweetheart back in Arkansas. This girl didn’t die but the episode left her so badly disfigured and so unenthusiastic toward the trade that Segal was obliged to put her on a steamer back to Galveston.
Before they’d been at Camargo a month he lost two other girls to sickness. “You never did see such a place for sickness,” Segal said, looking up at the half-circle of riders sitting their horses and staring down on him and the Negro without a trace of fellowship on their faces and all of them casting looks at the girls like dogs eyeing freshly butchered meats. The whoreman had been talking fast in his obvious belief that a steady flow of words might hold these men at bay. The Negro at his side didn’t know where to look.
Segal said so many of Old Zack’s troops had made use of the muddy and sluggish river for everything from a horsewash to a laundry to a latrine that the San Juan had quickly become a cesspool, and yet it served for the camp’s drinking and cooking water. Hardly a man in camp was unafflicted by diarrheal distress the soldiers called the “blues.” There was no escaping the stink of shit within five miles of the camp. The most common complaint from Segal’s whores was of men fouling the bed as they humped. Dozens of soldiers were stricken daily by dysentery, yellow fever, measles, typhus, God knew what. The hospital tents were always full and the groaning carried through camp day and night. At every dawn and sundown the dead were taken from the tents and heaped on carts and trundled to the burying ground. Anybody with eyes, Segal said, could see that more troops would die of disease in this forsaken country than would ever be killed at Mexican swordpoint. Except for the two girls who took sick and died, however, the rest of his whores seemed immune to everything save the common venereal afflictions.
“When General Zack left for Monterrey, we followed along,” Segal said, “and I tell you, once our boys took that town we did a better business than ever.”
Dominguez watched the whoreman as if he were an enthralling freak of nature on par with a talking dog, but most of the compañeros now paid the gringo little mind, being far more interested in the smiling girls and stepping their horses nearer to them.
Segal and his party had then tailed Taylor’s army to Saltillo and provided respite to the boys at Buena Vista, then returned to Monterrey in Taylor’s wake. But by now other American whoremen had showed up with their stables and the Mexican clergy were complaining loudly that the Yankee cyprians were a disgrace to their noble city. Because he was trying to maintain cordial relations with the local population Old Zack ordered all the American whores and their mongers out of town. Some of the operations set up in tents just outside the city but Segal had heard that Taylor’s next move would be to Victoria and he wanted his troupe to be among the first to get there. Rather than take the well-traveled Monterrey-San Luis Road down to Salado and then cutting through the pass to Victoria, Segal thought to take a shortcut via Linares and the open country to the south of it. They’d been trudging over that flatland for more than a week when the mule broke its leg not an hour ago. Segal scowled at the crippled animal whose breath was coming hard and whose eyes were white and rolling.
“Porqué no han matado esa mula?” Dominguez said.
“Why aint you shot that mule?” Spooner asked the whoreman.
“We was just talking about doing it, me and the Ethiopian here, when you fellas come along. We was thinking maybe—”
“Chingados!” Dominguez snarled. He pulled his Colt and shot the mule twice through the head and the whoreman flinched and the horses shied as the dead mule crashed to the ground in its traces and the girls squealed and huddled closer together.
Dominguez spat and reholstered the pistol. “Dijo que eran ocho,” he said. “Donde están las otras?”
“You said it was eight of em,” Spooner said to Segal, “but we don’t count but six of the little darlins here.”
“Two of em took sick just before we left Monterrey this last time,” Segal said, speaking even faster than before. “Worked in that pesthouse of a Camargo camp for weeks and didn’t neither of em even say a-choo and then they both of a sudden turn sick as dogs and been steady puking and shitting and just generally making a smelly awful mess so I put em in the other wagon by theirselfs and let the nigger drive it and hope none the other girls catch it from em. But I swear I’m bout ready to leave them two by the side of the road someplace cause it aint no damn hospital train nor deadcart I’m—”
“Is any a these sweeties sick?” Spooner asked. He smiled at the girls. They were grinning at the compañeros and letting the wind swirl their skirts up high on their thighs and folding their arms under their breasts to swell them in the low-necked Mexican blouses.
“These here girls? No sir, nary one,” Segal said. He looked at his girls and then back at Spooner and abruptly smiled as if suddenly suspecting that not only might this proceeding yet be survived, it might even prove profitable. Edward looked on him in wonder. The man’s turn of optimism struck him as lunatic.
“They’re hardy stock as well as finelookin, these gals,” Segal said, “not a tainted one in the bunch and each of them more fun than—”
Dominguez put his horse forward and the pony snapped at the whoreman’s face like a mean-tempered dog and Segal’s smile vanished as he fell back. The chief beckoned a tall redhead whom he’d been giving the eye and who had been smiling at him in return. The girl came forward and took his proffered hand and her thighs flashed whitely under her blown skirt as he swung her up behind him on the horse. A look passed between him and Pedro Arria and then Dominguez reined the animal about and hupped it into a canter toward a clump of mesquite some fifty yards away and there he halted and dismounted with the girl and drew her into the sparse chaparral.
“Yo no soy tan modesto como el jefe,” a compañero named Julio said as he slid out of the saddle, his eyes fixed on a darkhaired vixen who smiled at him and stood her ground as he approached. “Aquí mismo me sirve bien.” He grabbed the girl’s arm and pulled her to him and her smile vanished as he ripped open her blouse to expose her breasts.
“Hey now, amigo!” the whoreman said. His protest was lost in the compañeros’ cheers. The girl tried to pull away but the bandit twisted her arm and forced her to her knees and held to her with one hand as he unbuttoned his pants with the other. The compañeros laughed and dismounted and started for the other girls who were now all of them big-eyed with fear, their backs against the wagon.
The whoreman made no move for his pistol but only raised his hands and patted the air and shouted like a carnival barker: “Hold on now, boys, hold on! Let’s do her in a orderly fashion! Just form up a line at the wagon here and all of ye have ye money ready and—”
Pedro Arria stepped up to him with a wide smile and put a hand on his shoulder in the manner of an old friend. A Green River knife appeared in his other hand and without losing his smile he thrust the blade to the hilt into Segal’s heart and the man was dead even as he fell. The Negro turned and ran and two of the compañeros shot him in the back and the man collapsed with his feet still striving for purchase in the sand for a few seconds more before they stilled.
The compañeros fell to the girls and there followed carnal riot on that sandblown flatland. They took turns at holding some of the girls down for their fellows who went at them with their pants bunched at their boottops and their buttocks bared to the wind. Dominguez returned with the redhead whose hair was now wild and her mouth bruised and a pair of compañeros quickly set upon her. Most of the whores were acquainted with mean turns of the trade and bore their violation with little outcry. They would all of them survive the brutal visitations of that afternoon although two of the them would take ill and die before summer and one would perish a year later in a San Antonio hotel fire and one would be disfigured by smallpox and spend her remaining days attending in an East Texas pesthouse. The redhead would make her way to Saint Louis and within months enrapture a wealthy silverhaired shoe manufacturer who would die of heart failure while they made love on their wedding night and she would thereafter become a woman of fashion and a patroness of the arts and live a life of sophisticated ease into the next century.
The wind slowed and then ceased altogether as the compañeros continued to sport with the girls into the late afternoon. But now Edward’s interest waned and he belted up his pants and went to rummage through the lead wagon. He there found a sealed jar of peaches in syrup and just as he opened the jar Spooner came over to join him. They shared the peaches and then went to see what might be found in the other wagon.
Spooner pushed aside the cover flap and the stench that befell them from the darkness within was a fierce and sickly composite of body wastes and mortifying flesh and it loosened their sinuses and watered their vision. They fell back from the wagon and hawked and spat and wiped their eyes and nose. “Sweet Mother Mary,” Spooner said. They tied bandannas across their lower faces and again pulled back the flaps and peered over the wagon gate and saw the two girls the whoreman had spoken of.
They were lying naked on blankets befouled with their wastes. All Edward and Spooner could see of them in the dim light was that one was darkhaired and the other fair. They let down the wagon gate and pulled out the brunette by her heels and Edward felt the stiffness in her heelstrings and knew she was dead even before they saw her distended belly and that her eyes and mouth were full of ants. They gently lowered her to the ground so as not to jar the pent gases from her. Then they brought out the other and saw that she was yet alive.
She was wasted to skin and bone and crusted with filth. Her eyes were red slits against the light of the late afternoon. Her pale yellow hair was a rank tangle. Edward knelt beside her and saw her eyes move from him to Spooner and then cut back to him. She was breathing through her partly open mouth and showed a chipped front tooth. A white razor scar followed the line of her jaw from ear to chin. Her eyes showed a rim of blue and roamed over his face and her little breasts rose with a deep breath. A small choked sound issued from deep in her throat.
“I be damn,” Spooner said, looking on her closely. “I believe I know this little thing. Sported with her in a Galveston house about a year ago or I’m a striped-ass ape. I gotta say she looked a sight bettern now. Drank like a fish but a load of fun. Hell, I went to that same house three nights in a row for the pleasure of her. I tell you I knew this gal real good but bedamn if I recall her name.”
“Margaret,” Edward murmured. And thought: She lied, she lied!
“No,” Spooner said, staring hard at the wasted girl, “that aint it. Jeannie … Janey … Julie, more like, somethin like that.”
Goddamn crazy bitch. I knew she lied and she did and oh sweet Jesus look what’s come of it, just look. Because she lied, she lied, she lied….
Her gaze held on Edward at her side and her eyes glimmered wetly. She made as if she would raise her hand to him but the pain of the effort was evident on her face and she groaned and let a long breath and closed her eyes. Edward clutched her hand and raised it to his lips and held it there.
“Hey pardner,” Spooner said, puzzled and unsure if he should be amused. “What the hell’s this?”
Edward did not say anything nor look at him.
Spooner watched him for a long moment, then said, “Hey, Eddie,” in a different voice. Edward kept his gaze on the girl, kept her hand to his lips. A while later Spooner went away.
After a time the girl opened her eyes again and looked at him and her hand pressed against his mouth with no more strength than that of a baby bird. She tried to speak but could form only a small rasp. Her breath labored. She worked her blackened tongue over her lips and tried again. “What they … done … to you.” Her eyes brimmed and tears cut thin pale tracks down the sides of her face.
His throat felt as though hands were seized hard on it. Her face wavered and he brushed at his eyes to clear them. His hand tighted on hers but he immediately eased his hold for fear he’d break the bones of it.
“Ward,” she rasped. “Ward.” Her fingers applied the barest pressure to his lips and then her eyes again closed.
He watched the rise and fall of her breasts and would never in the rest of his life remember what he was thinking then or if he was thinking anything at all. The western sky was afire with the remains of the day. Two compañeros came and carried off the other girl. Dominguez appeared in the twilight and sat beside him without speaking. After a time he got up and left.
Darkness rose over the country. He became vaguely aware of a campfire flaming near the lead wagon and of the movements of shadows and silhouettes. He smelled food and heard low voices and the soft singing of a compañero. Then again came shrieks of women, most now sounding more of pleasure than of pain.
He wondered if she would open her eyes again. He would not know it in the dark. He thought of fetching a torch to stick in the sand beside her so he could see her face but decided against it because he did not want to be away from her for even a second while she yet lived, nor did he want anyone else to look on her. Because he now could not see if she was breathing he placed his fingers to her parted lips and felt there her vague warm exhalations. He felt her breath become fainter until he felt it barely at all and then he did not feel it but kept his fingers on her lips for a time longer until he felt them cooling and knew she was dead.
At first light he took off his shirt and covered her nakedness and went to the lead wagon and there found a spade and used it to dig her grave at the foot of a sand rise some fifty yards away. Fredo and Spooner came to ask if they might help but he did not speak nor look at them and they withdrew. When the hole was deep enough to defy the scavengers the sky was burning red over the distant eastern range. He went to the wagon and picked her up and cradled her spare flesh against his chest and breathed deeply the entire mortal truth of her. Then he carried her to the grave and placed her in it and buried her. Then he went about gathering large rocks and when he had covered the grave with them he was done.
He had thought to ask among the whores what they knew of her, where she’d been and what she’d been doing and what she’d talked of, but then decided it was folly. He had seen what there was to know, seen it in the dying light of the day before, seen it and smelled it and felt it under his fingers and buried it this sunrise. What else was there to know that mattered?
The whores were standing around the smoky remains of the campfire, dressed now and hugging themselves against the morning chill and all of them watching the compañeros add the wagon mules to their string. Some of the girls asked how they were supposed to get out of there without mules to ride but no man paid them heed.
None of his fellows questioned him then or later about the girl. Dominguez gave him a shirt to wear and Chucho brought him his saddled horse. He mounted up and looked back once at the cairn he’d erected in that lonely waste and then hupped his mount forward and rode away with his compañeros.
That night and on many to follow he dreamt of her. Saw her laughing on the porch back home and putting her legs up on the railing and letting him and his brother see up her dress all the way to her cotton under-drawers. She was smiling wickedly and then reaching down and ruffling his brother’s hair with her hand and his brother flushed and quickly ran the back of his hand along the underside of her leg and then snatched his hand away and blushed even more furiously.
And he dreamt too of Daddyjack, of course. Who pointed at Maggie and grinned at him and cackled, “I tole ye blood always finds blood! I tole ye!”
They rode the passes up into the Sierras de Tamaulipas and descended the eastern slope on the pine forest switchbacks and debouched onto the tierra caliente of the gulf coast plain. The air turned moistly heavy and smelled of salt and swampland. In the port city of Tampico they saw American soldiers and sailors everywhere who looked with suspicion on them and their half-wild ponies and rank aspects and clattering array of arms but none did confront them. Marimba music plunked and tinkled in every plaza. They entered a restaurant from which their mien and reek drove away a good portion of the patrons. A quartet of nervous policemen came in and sat at a doorside table and watched them noisily gorge on crab legs and shellfish and turtle steaks. When the gang had done with its supper it trooped out with its armament aclatter and hardly a glance at the police who kept their seats. They went to a bagnio overlooking the harbor and they bathed in large tin tubs and every tub was left with a thick and sudsy pink-gray surface of bloody filth. And then they each of them repaired to a room in the company of a girl.
Edward was attended by a young mestiza who did not seem bothered by his scarred face but she went pale when he exposed his mutilated crown so he put the bandanna back on. Her skin was smooth and honey-colored, her eyes black as a night of rain. She smelled of damp grass and earth.
She was astraddle him and working her hips smoothly when a man in the white cotton clothes of a peón crashed through the door and screeched “Puta!” and slashed at her with a machete. He hacked at her upraised arms and at her shoulders and blood flew to the walls and even through the girl’s screams Edward heard the machete striking bone as he struggled to get out from under her and clear of the bed. The blade clove her neck and blood fountained to the ceiling and then Edward was on him and twisting his arm and the machete clattered to the floor. He beat the man to his knees and snatched up the machete and stanced himself to swat off his head but was set upon from behind by several men who wrested the weapon from his grasp and pinioned his arms behind him. A jabbering crowd was now at the door of the tiny room and Dominguez appeared and barked an order and Edward was instantly released.
Blood dripped from the ceiling and streaked the walls and slicked the floor and soaked the bed where the girl lay nearly decapitated with her dead eyes open wide. The killer was sobbing as he was taken away by policemen. And now Edward learned that the girl was a newcomer to the trade who had been working in the house but a few weeks and the man who killed her was her brother. He had shown up three days ago to take her back to their family’s village in the hills but she’d refused to go. When he tried to drag her out, the house guardian had evicted him bodily. He’d since been drinking in the neighborhood cantinas and holding muttered conversations with himself and seemed at a loss about what to do. Today he’d made up his mind.
They ascended the Sierra Madre and entered cold blue clouds that made ghost figures of the trees. The trail narrowed as it rose. The steep rock facings were dark and slick. They rode single file with their rifles across their pommels and spoke hardly at all for days, their mounts’ hooves clacking on stone, bits chinking, saddles creaking. Birds whistled and flew from the trees and deer bounded across the trail and small creatures rustled in the brush. The sundown sky looked like marbled, freshly butchered meat. Timber wolves howled like woeful souls.
They met one forenoon with a pack train bound from Pachuca for the coast. The lead rider reined up and grinned at them and took off his sombrero and shielded his belt pistol with it. Dominguez did not wait to see if he was going for his gun but simply pulled his Colt and shot him in the face. The man tumbled from the saddle and rolled off the trail and plunged into misty space and the other guards were still unslinging their rifles as the gang gunned them down in a thunderous enfilade that echoed down the canyon walls. They killed too all the muleteers but for three who escaped into the forest. The compañeros made away with satchels of freshly-minted silver specie and fifty mules loaded with coffee. The animals and the cargo they sold to a broker in Tulancingo who asked no questions.
They resumed the sierra trail and rode downcountry without haste. A week later a Mexican army patrol came wending up the mountainside behind them. They set up an ambush on either side of a narrow pass and caught the patrol in a crossfire and put down more than half the cavalrymen before the rest were able to retreat. They gathered up the fallen soldiers’ mounts and weapons and then rode on toward Jalapa. A few miles north of that town they met with a guerrilla chieftain, a ranchero named Lucero Carbajal whom Dominguez had known since boyhood, and they sold the mules and all their extra horses and guns to him and then took supper in his camp.
Dominguez wanted to visit Jalapa, a lovely place of gardens and orange trees and weather unsurpassably fine. But Carbajal warned him away from there. A month earlier General Scott’s army had crushed Santa Ana’s troops in a ferocious battle at Cerro Gordo, some fifteen miles southwest of Jalapa, and sent the broken Mexican ranks running for their lives. The Napoleon of the West himself had fled the field on his pegleg and was said to have finally arrived at Orizaba and begun to reorganize his army for the defense of Mexico City. Scott’s army was now ensconced in both Jalapa and Puebla and all the talk in the cantinas was of the gringos’ preparation to begin their move on the capital. The only real resistance the gringos faced between Puebla and Mexico City, Carbajal said, was that of the ranchero bands led by such as himself, Padre Colombo Bermejillo, Anastasio Torrejón and José Miñon. They had each been harassing the Yankees with hit-and-run raids on their supply trains and with sniper attacks on their columns. They regularly trailed the gringo patrols and killed the stragglers and mutilated their remains in order to frighten their comrades who found them. But despite the rancheros’ continuing guerrilla raids, the American victory at Cerro Gordo had cleared their route to Mexico City and the war was sure to reach the capital soon.
The Yankees weren’t the only problem, Carbajal said. The alcaldes of Jalapa and Pueblo had told the gringo commanders that most of the local ranchero gangs were nothing but bandidos looking to enrich themselves under the banner of patriotism. The bastards had given the gringos a list of names. They were all on that list, Carbajal said angrily—himself, Dominguez, Bermejillo, Torrejón, everybody. He knew the local people hated them for bandits and wanted to see them all dead or at least behind bars but he’d never thought they hated bandits so much they’d turn to the goddamned Yankees for help. Dominguez smiled over the rim of his tequila cup and said it surely was amazing that some people could hate a bandit just because he robbed and killed a few of their friends and neighbors every now and then. Carbajal grinned back at him and shrugged. He said the locals knew Dominguez and his gang were back in the region because two surviving muleteers of the Pachuca pack train had brought back the tale of the robbery and of the killings of the guards and the other drovers. It was widely supposed that Dominguez was headed back to his native city and both the local police and the Yankee army were on the lookout for him. It would be unwise to show his face in Jalapa, Carbajal told him, and even riskier to appear in Puebla.
Dominguez shrugged and thanked him for the information and advice and then they passed out bottles to their compañeros and there ensued an evening of drinking and singing and the two chieftains told stories of the old days when they were boys just starting out as bandits. And before daybreak Dominguez and his gang were mounted and on their way.
They came through a high pass and into view of Puebla on a bright late afternoon and sat their horses on a high ridge overlooking the city and listened to the tolling of church bells. Dominguez sighed and said, “Ay, que linda ciudad!” Beyond the city’s perimeter rose the presidio of Loreto with the American flag fluttering over its gates and some few of the compañeros cursed through their teeth but most were as indifferent to one flag as another and shrugged at their fellows’ ire. Dominguez put his mount forward onto the downward trail and the company followed after.
It was Mexico’s second largest city and the tidiest Edward would see in his life. The streets were perfectly-paved with cobblestone and shaded by trees. In every plaza there stood churches and convents ornately trimmed with colorful glazed tiles. In the central plaza loomed the imposing Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception built by the Spaniards two hundred years before. It was Sunday midday and the last masses of the morning had just finished. The streets and squares were thronged with people in their finery and priests and nuns in flowing black robes and habits. Fredo Ruiz, who detested the Catholic Church as a personal enemy, looked about at the multitude of clerics and spat. “La Roma de Mexico,” he growled.
The plazas sparkled with fountains and were lively with musical bands and fireaters and jugglers and clowns from the local circus. There were street vendors of fresh fruit and tamales and charcoaled meats and gimcrackery. Patrons crowded the arcade shops and cafes. And everywhere they saw Yankee soldiers, most of them strolling wide-eyed with wonder at the city’s ancient beauty and agape at the lovely girls who smiled at them over their lace fans as they were hurried along by scowling dueñas. The Yankees paid the gang no mind, but in the shadows of the arcades were some who watched intently as the compañeros passed by and they recognized the bandit Dominguez and some of the other riders as well and made visual inventory of their weapons. And then they followed at a distance.
They boarded their mounts in a livery off the main plaza and there washed themselves thoroughly and then bought new clothes at a haberdasher’s and had themselves barbered and pomaded and shaved and powdered. Their longarms they stored with their horses but those who were following and watching took notice that every man of them wore a pair of Colts under his coat. They sat for dinner at a banquet table in a fine restaurant where Dominguez several times had to hiss at some of the less urbane of his fellows about their faulty manners. They attracted much sidelong and murmuring attention from the surrounding tables and many of the compañeros were pleased by it, but not Edward, who felt most of the attention was of the sort one saw at a zoo and most of it was directed at him for the bandanna on his head. He was tempted to remove it and really give the gawkers something to whisper about but he checked the impulse.
They next repaired to the corrida and bought seats in the shade and drank beer and cheered those matadors who braved the bulls’ horns most daringly and artfully and cheered too the bulls who fought and died well. They ridiculed and cursed those few matadors whose ineptness or fear made for an awkward show and was taken as insulting to a noble bull. Several among the compañeros joined other disgusted aficionados in tossing cupfuls of piss down upon these disgraces to the matador’s art. It was Edward’s first witness of the corrida’s pageantry and blood rituals, and the good fights stirred him in a way he had not felt since his young boyhood in Georgia when he saw Daddyjack stab Tom Rainey dead. Each time he shouted “Ole!” in unison with the crowd as the bull lunged at the matador’s swirling cape and its horns brushed the front of his spangled jacket he felt a tight excitement all the way down to his balls.
Exiting the plaza de toros into the encroaching twilight of early evening the compañeros were all mildly drunk and eager for women. Dominguez said La Mariposa was the best house in the city, but Pedro Arria, who was also a Poblano, believed Las Flores Picantes was a better place. Half the boys wanted to go to the one and half to the other. Dominguez said he would meet them all the following afternoon in the main plaza and then headed off by himself.
“Where’s he off to?” Edward asked Spooner.
“See his wife, most likely,” Spooner said. He laughed at the look on Edward’s face. “Hell, boy, ole Manuel’s been married since before I met him. Bout four years, I believe. Name’s Laura. I aint seen her myself, but some of the boys have, and they say she’s a right beauty. Know what his great sorrow is? Him and his wife? They aint got no kids. Tells me they try like hell ever time he comes home but they just aint had no luck that way.”
Spooner went off with Pedro and his group to do their sporting in Las Flores and Edward and Chucho and the rest made their way toward La Mariposa. As they passed the lamplit main plaza they paused to admire the pretty girls promenading in the company of their dueñas at the evening paseo. A brass band played merrily as the women strolled about the perimeter of the plaza in one direction while the men circled in the other, smiling and giving each other appraising looks as they passed. The moon showed bright white through the trees. “Andale,” Chucho said after a minute. “Estas hermosas me tienen de rabia por una mujer. Vamonos!” They left the plaza and went another two blocks and turned down a long and darkened alleyway and arrived at La Mariposa.
Edward’s girl was a sexy but sullen wench who coupled like the act was an imposition. When he had done with her he did not want to linger and got dressed while she lay naked on her side, smoking a thin cigar and watching him with hooded eyes. But neither did he want the compañeros to make fun of him for having been so quick about it and so he rolled a cigarette and sat on the bed and smoked it. The room was small and lighted by a single candle and their smoke swirled blue and clung to the ceiling in webs. Neither of them spoke. When the cigarette was down to a nub he crushed it under his boot and went out and shut the door behind him. Chucho just then came out of another room down the hall and they grinned at one another and headed down the stairs and at the middle landing found themselves staring down at more than a dozen cocked rifles pointed at them from the brightly lighted parlor floor. Some of the riflemen wore police uniforms, some did not.
“No se muevan, carajos,” said a man with a raised pistol in his hand. He was the chief of police and his authority was proclaimed by his uniform, the most elaborate in the room, topped by a stiff-crowned cap with a silver badge pinned to its front. Two of his minions came warily up the stairway and relieved Edward and Chucho of their Colts and prodded them the rest of the way downstairs. They were made to sit on the floor with their hands under them and their backs against the wall. The chief told them that if they so much as shifted their weight they would be shot for attempting to escape. He examined their Colts and smiled and handed his flintlock to an aide and cocked a revolver in each hand and turned his attention back to the stairway landing.
A few minutes later Cisco appeared on the landing and his face fell at the sight of the ready rifles. He put up his hands and was disarmed and ordered onto his hands beside Edward and Chucho. In this way were all the compañeros in La Mariposa put under arrest. All but Gustavo the seminarian who as always was the last to finish his business with the girls because after sating himself on them he always spent a while trying to persuade them to give up the whore’s life. When he finally came down to the landing and saw the riflemen and the chief said, “No te mueves, cara—” he went for his Colts and the rifles all fired at once and knocked him back against the wall amid splatters of blood and he pitched headlong down the stairs and rolled to a crumpled heap and the chief stood over him in a gunpowder haze and emptied both Colts into him as Gustavo’s blood soaked the carpet in a widening red stain. Not until both pistols were done blasting did Edward hear the high steady screaming of the women of the house.
They were eight of them manacled and taken out to the street and led off toward the jail. People had come hurrying from the plazas to see what was happening and the chief told them to keep their distance. The gawkers followed along on either side of the line of chained men in the wavering light of the street lamps, talking excitedly about these captured bandidos and heaping imprecations on them. One of the plaza brass bands joined the procession and added to the festive air with a lively tune. Now some of the boys snatched up stones and pelted the prisoners who cursed and tried to shield themselves with their arms and the police laughed at them along with everyone else.
The jail was a communal cell, a long stone room set in the rear of the main municipal building of the central plaza. It had a wide door of steel bars and the floor was covered with straw the color of mud. A single heavily barred window was set a dozen feet above the floor and rose almost to the ceiling. The compañeros were unmanacled one by one in the anteroom and shoved inside. The cell was dimly lighted by small candles set on the floor and by lamplight falling through the door from the anteroom. It stank powerfully of sweat and human waste. Slop buckets stood in the corners. Most of the two dozen inmates already there had been comrades of some the compañeros in earlier bandit gangs and there were greetings and nods of recognition and bittersweet abrazos.
Barely an hour later the eight compañeros who’d gone to Las Flores Picantes were brought in. Julio had a broken wrist and Fredo’s cheek had been fractured by a rifle butt and the half of his face was swollen grossly and purple as a plum. Spooner had lost his hat. He sat down beside Edward and sighed. “Aint we the dumb sonsabitches, lettin em slick up on us easy as that?”
“They aint got Manuel,” Edward said. “Could be he’ll get us out of here some kind a way.” He surprised himself by saying it and more so by believing it. He was recalling how Captain James Kirkson Hobbes had dealt with the arrest of one of his company.
“Don’t believe he will,” Spooner said, and spat into the straw.
“And why not?” Edward said, irritated by Spooner’s air of defeat.
“Because right there he is.”
A knot of policemen led by the chief had brought Dominguez into the anteroom. He was held by a policeman on either side of him and his hands were cuffed behind him and his mouth was bloated and bloody. His shirt was torn and he was hatless. The hair about his right ear was matted with blood. A knot of compañeros converged on the cell door and were warned back by the jailers. The police chief grabbed a fistful of Dominguez’s hair and directed the bandit chiefs attention to the men in the cell. “Ya lo vez, cabrón? Hay están tus chingados compañeros, lo mismo como te dije! En dos días los colgaremos a todos. Todos! Te lo prometo!” He rammed his knee up between Dominguez’s legs and the bandit groaned and sagged in the grip of the men who held him. Now Ortiz stepped back and said, “Tíralo adentro!” and the men holding Dominguez dragged him to the cell door and flung him inside and a jailer clanged the door shut and turned the lock.
Later that night they sat around a guttering little chunk of candle and Dominguez told Spooner and Edward how he’d been mounted on his wife and was right on the brink of coming when his head suddenly burst with stars and the next thing he knew he was on his face on the floor with his hands manacled behind him and a boot sole pressing hard on his neck. He’d always been careful in going to his house, always taken roundabout routes through side streets and back alleys and crowded marketplaces, always taken precautions against being followed. But this time he obviously hadn’t been careful enough. The police had with them a pair of Tarascan Indians who sneaked into his house and up the stairs and into the bedroom and went right up to him as he was fucking his wife and he’d never heard a thing until his head exploded.
When he regained consciousness a pair of policeman were holding him fast, one on either arm. He was surprised they hadn’t simply shot him in the back and been done with it. Then he saw that the police chief was Huberto Ortiz and he understood why they had not. Ortriz greeted him with a wide smile and a punch to the mouth that smashed his lips and loosened his front teeth.
“Ortiz, he hate me since we are little boys,” Dominguez said. “We fight and I win him. We race and I win him. We dance and make love with the señoritas and I win him. All the times I get the more pretty ones. He hate me because he never can win me. When we are hombres I make together my gente, my compañeros, but he don’t want to call me el jefe and so he make together his own gente, but they never can steal so much like my gente can steal. He never so good like me at nothing, Ortiz, from the time we are muchachos. So he hate me, you see. Is simple. Is why he want for all the peoples to see me hang. Is more shameful for me than he shoot me, and is more better for him if the peoples see me to hang. He can say to everbody, ‘You see all this bad mens? You see this bad hombre Manuel Dominguez? I am going to hang him for you and you can see him to die with your eyes.’ He will be more famous, you see.”
“And now the bastard’s the chief of police?” Spooner said. He chuckled. “Aint that always the way?”
Dominguez’s smile was twisted on his bloated lips. “The peoples, they want a policemens who can make them to feel safe, you know? Somebody strong for to protect them to the bad mens like Manuel Dominguez.” He laughed without humor. “They want for to see me be hang, this damn peoples.” He looked up at the high dark window as if he might scale the wall to it and look out on all his fellow citizens who wanted him dead. He spat.
He made no account of his wife and neither Edward nor Spooner was so impolite as to ask after her. It was sufficient to know she had been naked in the bed when the police came in. It required little imagination to know what happened thereafter, and they knew that had it been otherwise Dominguez would have said so. But he had not.
The morning brought verdicts rendered by a judge they had none of them ever seen or ever would. All of them had been found guilty of “undeniable” acts of murder and robbery and rape and all of them had been sentenced to death. They were to be hanged in the municipal square at four o’clock that very afternoon. Hanged four at a time from branches of the Hanging Tree, one bunch after the other until only Dominguez was left and then he would be hanged by himself.
Ortiz delivered the news. He grinned through the bars at Dominguez and said he was now going to pay Dominguez’s wife a visit but would return in time to watch his execution. Dominguez stared at him without expression and Ortiz laughed. “Quieres que la daré un besito por ti?” he said, puckering his lips. He was laughing as he left.
The condemned spoke little as their final hours passed. Each man of them sat with his back to the wall and kept to his private thoughts. Edward leaned back with his eyes closed and was surprised by the rush of memories of the days in Florida. He recalled the ripe swampland smells and the feel of the long summer’s wet heat. He saw vividly the creek where he’d witnessed one of his dogs killed by an alligator, where he and his brother caught catfish and turtles and where farther upstream he’d once spotted his brother hidden in the reeds and spying on their sister as she bathed. He had himself remained hidden and watched her too. He felt himself hardening as he recalled his naked sister—and now remembered the softbrain girl who had been his first—and the girl’s momma who only minutes later had been his second. And recalled too the countless sunsets when he sat on the stump next to the stable and looked to westward and envisioned some vast territory burning red under a noonday sun fierce and pitiless as the Devil himself.
And remembered feeling absolutely certain, in a way he would never understand, that only out there did he truly belong. Only out there.
Two hours before they were to be hanged they could hear through the high window the sounds of the gathering crowd in the municipal plaza. A band was playing merrily. Laughter and shouts of children. Cries of vendors hawking snacks. The head jailer appeared at the barred door and called for Dominguez to come forward. Dominguez stared at him from where he sat against the wall and said if the jailer wanted to see him up close he was welcome to come in and sit beside him. The compañeros laughed maliciously.
“Ven aquí, cabrón!” the jailer commanded. “Ya te lo digo.”
“No,” Dominguez said. “Tú ven aquí, hermanito.”
Now a pair of American army officers stepped into view and peered into the cell’s noisome gloom. The compañeros turned to each other with puzzled glances and their murmur snaked through the room. The jailer motioned the Yankees back and said he would take care of this but the officers ignored him. The jailer put his hand on an officer’s arm as if he would guide him away from the door and the Yankee turned and shoved him hard against the wall and the bonk of the jailer’s head resounded loudly. Several of the inmates laughed and the jailer slank from sight.
“Captain Dominguez,” the other officer said into the dimness. “General Winfield Scott wishes to speak with you in his headquarters, sir. Right away.”
Dominguez turned to Spooner. “El General Escott quiere hablar conmigo?” Spooner arched his brows and nodded.
Dominguez looked back at the Yankees. “For why he want to talk with me?”
“I’m not at liberty to say, Captain,” the officer said. “If you’ll just come with us, sir.”
“Pues,” Dominguez said, getting to his feet. “A ver que pasa. Si me van a colgar, que me cuelgan de una vez.”
The other officer went out of view momentarily and then reappeared with the jailer’s keys. He worked the lock and swung the door open. Some of the other inmates made for the opening but the officer drew his pistol and said, “Get back, damn you,” and they did.
Dominguez stepped out and the officer relocked the door and then the three of them walked off with their bootheels clacking on the stones. The prisoners heard an outer door creak open and then slam shut and then nothing.
The compañeros exchanged looks and shrugs. “What you reckon it’s about?” Edward asked Spooner.
“Could be they aim to hang him for all them U. S. of A. trains we robbed. Only I never heard of no general wanting to talk to somebody he was about to hang, and specially not no Mexican. And specially not asking so nice as all that.” He scratched his chin thoughtfully. “General Scott, by Jesus! Old Fuss and Feathers hisself. No sir, I don’t believe they’ll hang him. I’d say the general wants somethin. And if that’s the case, then maybe, just goddamn maybe …” He left the thought unspoken.
But now Edward too was thinking, “Maybe, maybe …” as the high window above them admitted the rising clamor of the crowd so eager to see them die.
At ten minutes to four the gloomy cell was resounding with the carnivorous rumblings of the crowd outside when Dominguez reappeared at the jail door. Edward’s heart jumped at the sight of the chiefs wide grin. The jailer eased up next to Dominguez and turned his key in the lock and then quickly stepped back. Dominguez looked at him and laughed. He entered the cell and the compañeros gathered around him with a clamor of questions and the other inmates closed in behind them. The jailer did not reshut the door. There were fresh dark bloodstains on Dominguez’s shirtsleeves and Chucho asked him if he’d been wounded. The jefe laughed and shook his head and said for them to shut up and listen, he had some things to tell them. His high spirit was infectious. Edward felt his own blood racing.
Dominguez described Winfield Scott as having the face of a Roman emperor whose picture he had once seen in a book. His uniform was the most splendid he had ever seen on a Yankee. In addition to Scott, there had been several others at the meeting. General William Jenkins Worth was there, silverhaired and mutton-chopped and nearly as dazzingly outfitted as Scott. He had commanded the U.S. forces in Puebla for the two weeks preceding Scott’s arrival and had an air of vanity about him. Also present was Scott’s adjutant, a trim and quick-talking colonel named Ethan Allen Hitchcock. And a rugged-looking colonel named Thomas Childs, Scott’s appointee to serve as Military and Civil Governor of Puebla. And a strange man named Alphonse Wengierski, tall, lean and goateed, who served as translator in the proceedings. Wengierski said he was from Poland, and though his Spanish was excellent it was the most strangely accented Dominguez had ever heard.
Hitchcock did most of the talking, occasionally glancing at Scott to assure himself of the general’s concurrence with a point. Worth sat with his arms folded over his chest and showed little expression through most of the meeting. Childs watched everyone closely, especially Scott, who kept his eyes on Dominguez.
They gave no time to amenities. Through Wengierski’s interpretation Hitchcock told Dominguez that General Scott was in need of someone who had been raised in this part of Mexico and knew the region very well. Someone who could serve as a scout during the coming advance on Mexico City. Someone who could gather accurate intelligence information for him. Someone who knew every foot of the main highways and where guerrilla gangs might position themselves to attack military supply trains, who knew the high country and where the guerrilla camps might be. Above all, General Scott needed someone who could be depended upon to organize—and quickly—a counterguerrilla force to seek out and destroy these gangs and thereby spare the general the necessity of appointing any of his regular troops to that special duty. The general’s forces had been greatly reduced of late with the expiration of many of the volunteer units’ terms of enlistment and every soldier of the regular ranks was needed for the push toward the capital.
Hitchcock paused to give Dominguez a moment to absorb this information. Dominguez looked to Scott and the general smiled slightly. In that moment, Dominguez told his compañeros, he knew they might yet escape the noose.
Then Hitchcock said: “The question, of course, is whether such a man as we are discussing might have reservations about fighting against his fellow countrymen.”
Dominguez affected to mull Hitchcock’s point for a moment, then said that he knew of such a man as they were discussing, a man with no reservations whatsoever about fighting against his fellow countrymen. This man had in fact been fighting his countrymen for most of his life and even now could name several fellow countrymen whose hearts he would dearly love to cut out. The real question, Dominguez said, was whether such a man as they were discussing would be relieved of any legal difficulties he might now be facing from his fellow countrymen.
Hitchcock smiled and said, “Such legal difficulties as being scheduled to meet with the hangman within the next two hours, for instance?”
Dominguez said yes, that was a perfect example of the sort of legal difficulty he had in mind.
Hitchcock assured him that all legal problems such a man might be facing from his own government would be resolved immediately. Furthermore, he said, such a man would likely be interested to know that the American army would not now or ever charge him with any U.S. military train robberies he might have committed, or with any other crimes alleged to have transpired during those robberies—notwithstanding any official reports of his own government that might name him as the culprit in any of those crimes.
Dominguez said that such a promise by the American government would certainly give comfort to such a man as they were talking about. Would such assurances, he asked, apply as well to all members of the man’s company?
Hitchcock looked to Scott and Scott nodded at Dominguez.
This man, Hitchcock told Dominguez, would be granted the rank of colonel and be paid fifty dollars a month. He would be authorized to raise a special cavalry unit to be called the Spy Company. It would consist of thirty men, including two captains and two sergeants of his own appointment. The captains would be paid forty dollars per month, the sergeants thirty. The other members of the company would each receive twenty dollars a month—more than a U.S. sergeant was paid. The entire company would be enlisted in the Army of the United States for the duration of the war and would be provided with the best of arms and horses and its own distinctive uniform bearing U.S. Army insignia. Colonel Childs and he himself, Hitchcock said, would be the intermediaries between the company and General Scott, under whose direct orders they would operate.
Dominguez said that such a man as they were discussing might find it perilous to remain among his fellow countrymen at the end of the war. Could provision be made to remove him to some safer location when the war was over—to the United States, for example?
Hitchcock looked to Scott. The general nodded. Dominguez smiled.
“Now tell us, Captain,” Hitchcock said, “who is this man you have in mind who might meet General Scott’s requirements?”
Dominguez faced General Scott, stood at attention, saluted smartly, and said, “Coronel Manuel Dominguez de la compañía de espías—a sus órdenes, mi general!”
Even General Scott had joined in the laughter.
And now, facing his grinning compañeros in the dim jail cell, Dominguez said that whosoever among his compañeros would ride with him as members of General Scott’s Spy Company should come with him now to the U.S. garrison where they would sign enlistment papers and be given temporary lodging and fitted for uniforms. Tomorrow they would draw weapons and horses and begin planning their campaign against the region’s ranchero gangs.
Every compañero rose to his feet to go with him. And from the clamoring throng of other inmates who also wanted to join, Dominguez swiftly selected the thirteen most capable to fill out his authorized roster of thirty. They filed out of the cell and into the anteroom and out the door into the municipal building courtyard where a dozen U.S. soldiers were waiting to escort them to the garrison. Fredo kept calling for the jailers but none would show himself.
They swaggered through the plaza, laughing and making obscene hand signs to the gaping and frightened crowd that had collected there to be entertained by the spectacle of their hanging. The policemen kept their distance but many of the compañeros pointed at them in passing and said they would come back to see them again. Dominguez spoke to the sergeant in charge of the escort detail and the sergeant shrugged and said, “Hell, Colonel, you’re giving the orders. We’ll go any way you say.”
Dominguez turned them off the main avenida that led directly to the garrison and took them instead down a series of back streets where people saw them coming and ran out of sight. At the corner of a narrow residential street shaded by oaks and brilliant with flowers he halted the procession. No one was on the street but for a handful of small children who stood gaping up at the huge front door of a house midway down the short block. Dominguez pointed at the house and told the compañeros it was his and that after leaving the meeting with Scott he had come directly home to get his wife and move her to another residence where she would be safe from the police and from anyone else who would do him harm by harming her. Edward now recalled Ortiz’s parting words to Dominguez in the jail and he saw that others of the company remembered as well, and they all shifted about uncomfortably and none would meet their jefe’s eyes for the shame his wife must have been made to suffer at the hands of that son of a whore.
But Dominguez was grinning wide and telling them that he had been lucky because he found Ortiz at his house and lingering over his wife when he arrived.
The compañeros exchanged looks of confusion. Dominguez laughed. “Miren!” he said, striding quickly toward the house where the children were gathered. The compañeros followed after and he pointed to the large crosstimber above the imposing front door that opened into a courtyard. “Miren!”
And there in the center of the crosstimber was the badged cap of the chief of police held fast to the wood by their jefe’s Green River knife that pinioned as well a shriveled cock and dangling bloody balls.
A week later they rode out of Puebla on their first mission, every man of them mounted on a fine American stallion larger than most Mexican horses and seated on a well-tooled saddle and armed with a pair of new Colt five-shooters and a Hall percussion rifle and some with a shotgun besides. A half-dozen of them carried a lance they had learned to use when they served in the Mexican army and some were armed with sabers and some with bowies as big as machetes. They wore high black boots and gray trousers and short-tailed gray coatees with red collars and cuffs and flat-crowned black felt hats banded with a blood-red scarf. The effect of the uniforms was heady. Edward felt cloaked in power.
With Hitchcock’s approval Dominguez had organized the company into two units which he named the Eagles and the Serpents, a patriotic allusion he found amusing in its irony but which outraged the local populace. Mexican newspaper editorials condemned the company as a reprehensible collection of society’s dregs, as a crew of despicable and utterly damned murderers and convicts who lacked even the single saving grace of allegiance to their native land. The more the good citizens ranted the more pleased did Dominguez seem. “This people are want to hang me,” he said to Spooner and Edward, “and now they are want me to fight the gringos for them. This people are very stupid, no?”
Edward was assigned to the Eagle squad, which was captained by Spooner and had Fredo as its sergeant. The Serpents’ captain was Pedro Arria and their sergeant a new man named Rogelio Gomez whom Dominguez had known in the old days and who had served as a sergeant in the Mexican army before deserting. As they rode out of town on their fine prancing stallions they were looked upon by the citizens on the streets as a damnable spectacle but a fearsome one even more and thus no one cursed them audibly as their horses clopped past on the cobblestones.
Two weeks later they found Padre Colombo Bermejillo’s ranchero band encamped in the hills a few miles east of the junction of the National Highway and the Orizaba Road. So confident of never being discovered by Yankee scouts had the guerrillas become that they did not even post night guards. Dominguez positioned Spooner’s men on one flank of the camp and himself with Pedro Arria’s men on the other and they waited for first light. When it came they opened fire and killed a dozen as they slept on the ground and shot the other fifteen when they jumped to their feet and ran about in confusion. They then descended into the slaughter and killed off the wounded. Padre Bermejillo was easily identified by the priestly robes he had persisted in wearing despite his excommunication from the Church. Dominguez sent the padre’s tonsured head and the twenty-six noses of the other rancheros back to Hitchcock in a bloody sack.
The trophies appalled many of the Yankee officers in attendance in Hitchcock’s headquarters when they were delivered to him, and the next time Hitchcock and Wengierski met with Dominguez the colonel told him not to send any more such evidence of his successes. Dominguez said he simply wanted him and General Scott to know the Spy Company was doing its duty. Hitchcock said he understood, but there were some officers in their ranks who were set on making trouble for General Scott with the politicians back home and these men would not hesitate to provide American newspapers with a lot of muck about Scott’s sanctioning of “barbarities” in Mexico. General Scott believed that Dominguez and his boys should do whatever they had to do in order to achieve their missions, but Dominguez must henceforth be very careful in his reports to exclude all the unpalatable particulars. And now it was Dominguez’s turn to assure Hitchcock that he understood perfectly.
Dominguez thereafter omitted from his reports even the details of the interrogation techniques they were sometimes obliged to apply as they sought information from villagers in guerrilla territory. When a response seemed to him evasive or untruthful Dominguez would permit the Yaqui half-breed Bernado—whom they called El Verdadero because of his talent for eliciting truth—to exercise his own persuasive methods of questioning, methods he’d learned as a scout for the Mexican army in its endless war with the Apaches. No man could hold to a lie once Bernardo began to burn his feet or cut out his teeth or slap at his bare testicles with a little rawhide quirt or press the burning end of a stick to his asshole or to the head of his dick.
In early July they caught up to Anastasio Torrejón’s gang in the highlands near Las Vigas where they were lying in ambush for a U.S. pack train coming from Veracruz. The company had been informed of the rancheros’ plan and came around from the west and behind them and caught them by surprise in a drizzling rain. The ensuing fight lasted an hour and four of the company were wounded although only two seriously enough to be of no further service. They killed all twenty-two of the Torrejón bunch. Dominguez sent to Hitchcock a courier report of their success and a string of the guerrillas’ horses.
Ten days later they tracked down the Miñon gang to its hideout in a canyon just north of Orizaba. The rancheros made a run for it and the fight carried for three days and covered nearly fifty miles before the last of the Miñonistas went down. As a warning to other bandits and rancheros in the vicinity the company hung naked Miñonista corpses by their heels from a tree every few miles along the road between Orizaba and Córdoba. Mexican officials of both church and state complained in outrage to the American authorities and Hitchcock sent a detail to cut down the bodies and bury them. But there was no reprimand of the Spy Company.
The company next rode into the sierras north of Jalapa and searched out the ranchero band of Lucero Carbajal. The fight was fierce but quick and when it was done Dominguez found his old friend still alive among the fallen though he’d been mortally wounded in the belly. Dominguez sat and cradled Lucero’s head in his lap and mopped his brow and rolled cigarettes for him. Edward and Spooner sat close by and waved away any others who approached. Dominguez and Carbajal spoke of the old days and sang songs they had learned together as children and every time Lucero screamed with a new rush of pain Dominguez gripped his hands tightly and whispered to him to be strong, be strong. They watched the western sky turn bloody red behind the mountains and Carbajal said the sight was the most beautiful in all God’s world and Dominguez agreed. A moment later Carbajal was dead and Dominguez and Rogelio Gomez who had also known Lucero since boyhood dug his grave in the dark and buried him. The rest of the rancheros they left to the scavengers.
They arrived back in Puebla in the first week of August to find Scott ready to begin his move on Mexico City at last. He decided that one squad of the Spy Company would go with him, one would stay behind in Puebla under the authority of Colonel Childs. Dominguez selected Spooner’s band to go with Scott and he put himself in command of it. They set out on a red-streaked daybreak—foot soldiers, cavalry, artillery limbers, caissons, supply wagons, a military train that stretched for rumbling miles and wound about the mountain trails like an enormous martial snake.
The Spy Company rode well ahead of the main force and through the day Dominguez alternated between Spooner and Edward as his report riders to Scott, thinking the general would be grateful not to need an interpreter. And grateful Scott was, but he and his fellow officers had as well been surprised to learn of a pair of Americans riding with the Spy Company. Spooner had carried the first report and on his return he warned Edward of what to expect, but still, the first time he rode to the main body, Edward had suddenly felt every eye in the column fixed sharply on him as he rode past on his way to Scott’s wagon. And then in the general’s quarters he’d been subjected to the severe scrutiny of the half-dozen other officers in attendance. He’d removed his hat and reported that the road ahead looked to be all clear for at least the next ten miles and Scott thanked him and was about to dismiss him when General Worth asked his name and where he hailed from.
“Edward Boggs, sir, from Tennessee. Nashville.”
A bullnecked, whitebearded general named Twiggs asked if he’d ever worn the uniform of his true country. Edward said he’d never been in service before signing on with the Spy Company. Twiggs looked around at his fellows with a narrow smile and said it might be interesting to check the deserter rolls for the name of Edward Boggs. He started to say something else but Scott broke in and asked Edward why he wore the bandanna over his head.
“An accident, sir,” he said. “It’s to cover it over.”
“Let’s have a look,” said a general with muttonchops joining his thick mustache though his chin was shaved close. Edward looked at Scott and the general returned his stare blankly. So he took off the bandanna.
“Damn, son,” the muttonchops said.
“I fell down drunk one night, sir, I’m ashamed to say, and my hair caught aflame from the cookfire. My own fool fault.” He quickly retied the bandanna over his crown.
Several officers exchanged smiling glances and one said, “I once saw such a—” but Scott silenced him with a raised finger.
“I too have seen similar scars on some few other heads,” Scott said. “Curiously, all the heads belonged to men who had been fallen upon by savages yet were lucky enough to escape with their lives, if not the entirety of their hair.” The officers laughed and Edward felt his face flush hotly.
“No, Davy,” Scott said confidently to the general named Twiggs, “I do not believe this young man is likely to prove a deserter. No one with such, ah, campfire scars on his head could be so cowardly as to desert his ranks.” He smiled at Edward and made a gesture of dismissal and Edward hastily saluted and exited the wagon.
A group of enlisted men stood nearby and watched him closely as he went to his horse and mounted up. He heard one say something about “a damn deserter in that Mex scout outfit.”
But another quickly said, “How’s he be a deserter if he’s reporting to General Scott and got the U.S. insignia on his coat?”
“He’s riding with Mexicans, aint he?”
“Those Mexes are on our side, you damn fool!”
“Shitfire, you’re the damn fool if ye believe any Mex be on our side!”
Three days west of Puebla they came up through a wide pass flanking the great volcano called Popocatepetl and crested a ridge and of a sudden found themselves looking out upon the entire Valley of Mexico three thousand feet below and spread out before them like a vast map of bright green felt. It lay engirt by a sharp and darkly rugged range, a mountainous circle 120 miles in circumference. And there, directly ahead and blazing like some vision conjured of medieval magic was the fabled city of the Aztecs. The towers of Mexico City stood so vivid in the sharp cool air they seemed to Edward close enough to hit with a rifleshot but were in fact some twenty-five miles distant. The three great lakes about the city blazed like silver mirrors. It was a vista to awe even Dominguez and the few others who had seen it before, and those who looked upon it for the first time could not put into words what they beheld, this portion of earth fashioned by ancient gods unknown.
When Scott arrived and gazed at the panorama he too was bedazzled. Dominguez beamed as if the vista were his personal gift to him. “Look!” Scott said, spreading his arms toward the valley in the manner of a munificent war lord bestowing wondrous spoils upon his minions. “Look there, my brothers! The very seat of the Montezumas! And soon, soon, by all that’s right and holy, that splendid city shall be ours!”