CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Papa Mace Rathmore was worried, and he voiced his concern to his eldest surviving son. “Damn your eyes, Elijah, the outsider we killed was a prospector. If he knew that there’s gold in the Cornudas, others might. They could descend on us like a plague of locusts, and we can’t kill them all.”
Tall, pale, and emaciated like all his kin, Elijah said, “Papa, the gold is almost gone. We can move away from this place where the Kanes prey on us and shoot us for sport. We could live in the forest.”
“Forest? What forest?” Papa Mace said.
“We’ll find one,” Elijah said. “Head north to where the bears live.”
“Are you afraid of the Kanes?”
“Yes.”
Papa Mace sighed. “The quartz vein continues into the rock. We must dig deeper.”
“But how long will that take?” Elijah wore an old army greatcoat that made him look skinnier. His thin-stranded black beard was matted from that morning’s burro meat soup, and his eyebrows met above his eagle beak of a nose.
“Not long. Just until we uncover more of the quartz seam. Put your brothers to work, and their lazy wives if need be.”
“And the slaves?”
“Not the slaves. The gold must be found by our blood. The slaves can continue to crush the ore. Use the whip on them if they don’t work hard enough.”
“We have a new repeating rifle, a Henry,” Elijah said.
“From the prospector. Yes, I know,” Papa Mace said.
“It will help protect us from Ben Kane and his cowboys,” Elijah said.
“We must catch another cowboy and send Kane his skin like we did before,” Papa Mace said. “They didn’t hunt us for a long time after that.”
“Ben Kane is an evil man,” Elijah said.
“We steal his cattle to feed ourselves.” Papa Mace shrugged. “He hates us for that.”
* * *
Thirty-seven people crowded into a narrow arroyo that morning—Papa Mace and his brood, his seven sons and their wives and twelve children, and ten captive Mexican males held as slaves. The Mace clan was an unwashed, underfed bunch and none of the sons had inherited their sire’s smarts. They dressed in whatever rags they could steal, adding animal skins in cold weather. Papa Mace, a conman, robber, dark-alley killer, and sometimes fire-and-brimstone preacher, had been thrown out of a dozen towns, twice on a rail wearing a coat of tar and feathers. He was hardly an imposing figure. He stood only five feet, four inches tall but weighed close to four hundred pounds, and his great belly hung between his knees like a sack of grain. Run out of the New Mexico Territory, he’d assured his tribe that Texas was the promised land . . . but he’d led them into an annex of hell.
Deprivation coupled with their low intelligence had made the thieving Mace clan brutish, violent, and deadly. Only the meager amounts of gold from the abandoned mine they’d found kept them alive. Grim old rancher Ben Kane and his Rafter-K riders hated them with a passion.
The news that the mine’s gold-bearing quartz vein had lost itself in solid rock was a blow to Papa Mace. For the past three years his sons had sold enough gold in Forlorn Hope, a struggling settlement at the northern edge of the Chihuahuan Desert, to buy meager supplies, though Papa Mace made sure his whiskey and cigars were always a priority.
His brood would have to dig out the quartz vein, hard work that his sons shunned, but there was no other way. The gold must be mined by those of his own blood. God had told Papa Mace that . . . or had it been the devil? Either way he didn’t much care, so long as the precious metal was found, and his family continued to prosper.
* * *
“I don’t like this, Jake,” Rafter-K cowboy Milton Barnett said. “We don’t know these mountains.”
“No, but we know the folks who live in them,” Jake Wise said.
“The boss won’t like it.” Barnett swallowed hard, his nervous gaze fixed on the Cornudas. “I mean, Mr. Kane ain’t one fer harming woman and children.”
“Even if they are a bunch of animals?” Wise said.
“Even so,” Barnett said. He tipped his hat back on his head, letting the breeze cool his sweating forehead. “I mean, killing young ’uns . . .”
Wise said, “We ain’t gonna kill no young ’uns, just their daddies. And old Ben ain’t gonna find out, because we ain’t gonna tell him. You seen what that Rathmore trash done to Jesse Holt.”
“I know,” Barnett said. “I seen it, all right.”
“Then let me hear you tell it,” Wise said. “Say it, Milt. Let me hear you say what they done to Jesse.”
“They skun him.”
Wise nodded. “That’s right. They skun him alive. Real white folks don’t do that. See, the Rathmores ain’t real white folks. Like I said, they ain’t human. They’re animals.”
Jake Wise was big and blond and pale-eyed. Big defined him. Big shoulders, big chest, big hands, a big yellow mustache under a big beak of a nose, big in the confidence that many eighteen-year-olds possess, especially those who walked tall around men and slept with grown women.
By contrast, Milton Barnett was small and dark and slim and quick and nervous. But he was good with a gun and had killed a man in El Paso.
Wise said, “Anyways, we ain’t gonna kill anybody. Just shake up them Rathmores a tad, booger them real good. See the smoke rising from the arroyo over yonder? That means there’s a nest of them in there. We gallop past and shoot into the arroyo, make them remember the Rafter-K. That’s all we’re gonna do today, Milt. Just shake ’em up.”
The morning sun was well risen in a turquoise sky and the shadows on the mountain slopes had lowered. The day promised to be a hot one. The frail breeze had dropped and the smoke from the arroyo rose straight as a string.
Wise gathered his pony’s reins and said to Barnett, “You ready to give her a whirl?”
“One pass and then we’re outta here,” Barnett said. “Enough to let them know that the Rafter-K is thinking about them. That’s all, Jake. You hear me?”
“I hear you,” Wise said. “Now let’s grab us some fun.”
The two young cowboys rode down a sandy slope cluttered with cactus, mostly claret cup and cholla. A lot of fat, black flies were buzzing in the air.
Wise waved a hand in front of his face. “What the hell?”
“Something dead,” Barnett said. “Smell it?”
“Coyote, maybe,” Wise said.
“Or a jackrabbit,” Barnett said.
“It stinks, whatever it is,” Wise said. “I’m taking a look.” He kneed his horse into a canter.
A few moments later he and Barnett rode up on a patch of grass growing between some sizable rocks where a moving mass of flies covered a stinking gut pile and a few feet away sprawled the naked, mangled body of a . . . man or woman. At first glance it was hard to tell.
“It’s a man,” Wise said, leaning from the saddle for a closer look. “It’s got a beard under all that blood.”
“Hell,” Barnett said. “He was took by wild animals. Wolves maybe. I think it was wolves.”
“No, looks more like knife wounds,” Wise said. “A whole heap of knife wounds.”
“The Rathmores?”
“Who else? Damned white trash. They murdered him . . .”
“And his animal. Burro’s head lying over there by the rock,” Barnett said.
Jake Wise straightened in the saddle and stared at the smoke rising from the arroyo. He shook his head and then slid his Winchester from the boot under his knee. He racked a round into the chamber and said, “Well, let’s go bag us a few Rathmores.”
“No, Jake. I got a bad feeling,” Barnett said. “I don’t like this.”
Wise scowled. “What kind of bad feeling?”
“Real bad. Like they know we’re coming and they’re laying for us. It’s so bad, I feel like puking.”
“Then you stay here and puke out your yellow,” Wise said. “I’ll do the shooting for both of us.”
Whooping, the young man set spurs to his horse and galloped in the direction of the arroyo.
With bleak eyes, Barnett watched him go, the smell of death everywhere around him. “You big, dumb ape,” he yelled after Wise. “What do I tell Ben Kane if you get killed? What do I tell him?”
Wise didn’t hear. He made a galloping pass across the mouth of the arroyo, his Winchester hammering. The hooves of his horse drummed and kicked up small explosions of dust, and then he was beyond the arroyo. He turned, battled his rearing mount for a few moments, and charged again. He grinned, having himself a time.
Milton Barnett shook his head and watched Jake Wise die.
Later, he couldn’t rightly recollect how many rifle bullets hit Wise that day. A lot. They kind of pinned him in the saddle for a spell, jerked him around like a ragdoll, and then slowly . . . ever so slowly . . . the big man bent over and slid to the ground. His horse trotted away a few yards and stopped, its head hanging.
A bullet whispered past Barnett’s ear as several men ran toward him, stopping every now and then to shoulder their rifles and fire. He’d been right. The Rathmores had seen him and Wise coming and had lain in ambush around the arroyo. Jake had ignored his friend’s premonition and had paid for it with his life.
Barnett fired once, a miss, swung his horse around, and lit a shuck at the gallop. He glimpsed behind him and saw men, woman, and children swarm over Wise, their knives rising and falling, and he hoped to God that the big man was already dead when the blades went in.
Barnett’s mind reeled as he put a heap of git between him and the Rathmore savages. Would he be blamed for the death of Jake Wise? The big man was an arrogant piece of dirt and he’d thrown his life away, figuring he was bulletproof. He’d been a fool, riding straight into an ambush like that. But Jake was a top hand and Ben Kane set store by him. He could hear the old man now . . . “You damned yellow-bellied coward. You should’ve gone to Jake’s aid when you saw him fall from his horse.”
Damn, it was so unfair.
Barnett’s anger at Wise soured inside him like acid and turned into a burning hatred. He knew what he’d tell Kane. He’d tell him that it was high time the Rathmores were wiped out—seed, breed, and generation, man, woman and child—so their shadows, wherever they fell, no longer defiled the earth.
Jake hadn’t died in vain. Yeah, that’s what he’d tell him.