LOOK AT THEM arrogant characters,” Hugh said. He and Son and White-Man’s-Woman were outside the tepee, cleaning two raccoons that Hugh had knocked out of a tree with a club. “If that ain’t a bunch of peacocks for you. They got enough braid and whistles on them to sink a horse through the ground.”
They watched the formation of horses and uniformed Mexicans approach Iron Jacket’s tepee, their silver scabbards and white bandoleers flashing in the sunlight. Iron Jacket stepped outside in his coat of mail with one coup feather in his hair. He looked absurd in front of the Mexican lieutenant.
“I think he’s about to make a yellow puddle around his moccasins,” Hugh said.
“They come for the horses at the last of the moon,” the woman said.
“You mean they make that old horse thief steal for them?” Hugh said.
“He only steals from the Americans, and they take away half.”
“That lieutenant must have his own business going then, because the Mexicans usually don’t bother the Indians,” Hugh said.
“You ever have trouble with them?” Son said.
“I had a bunch of them chase me across the Guadalupe once. But they ain’t too bright in dealing with a white man. They tried to swim their horses after me, and they almost drowned with all that junk they wear on themselves.”
“There go his horses. And I reckon ours, too,” Son said.
They watched five enlisted men walk back into the pines and drop the shaved poles that formed one side of the horse pen. In fifteen minutes they had formed all the horses into two long strings, and they cantered them in a broken line back to the center of the clearing. Iron Jacket was talking rapidly to the lieutenant, his coup feather glued flat to the side of his face.
“I thought they only took half,” Son said.
“At the last moon Iron Jacket had only nine horses,” the woman said. “The Mexicans were mad, and they took away Buffalo Hump and his sons.”
“I think that lieutenant just seen our brands,” Hugh said.
The lieutenant walked to the two army horses and ran his hand over the thick, hairless scar in the flank of Son’s roan.
“Why’s he so interested in where they come from?” Son said.
“He don’t want no trouble with any of Andy Jackson’s soldier boys. He knows there’s a whole army of them on the other side of the Sabine just waiting to come in and eat Texas up.”
“I got another feeling, Hugh. He’s heered something about us.”
“Them Mexicans don’t know nothing except what time to squat over the honey hole.”
The lieutenant walked back to Iron Jacket and spoke briefly, then the Indian pointed in the direction of their tepee.
“He ain’t exactly loyal about the people that live in his village, is he?” Son said.
“His balls are hanging over a fire right now, boy.”
The Mexican officer motioned them toward him with a casual gesture of his fingers, as though he were dealing with a situation that was momentarily irritating and would soon be corrected. When they didn’t move, his eyes became more concentrated, and fixed on them under the black bill of his cap.
“Aqui,” he said.
“How do you like a fellow like that telling you to fetch for him?” Son said.
“What language do you speak?” the Mexican said. “English? French? Come here.”
Hugh wiped the raccoon blood off his knife blade and stuck it down in his trousers with the edge turned upward.
“Let him walk over here,” Son said.
“He’s got the guns and the men. We ain’t got nothing but this pig sticker between us. Try to use your head awhile.”
They walked across the clearing, and Son looked with more curiosity than heat into the officer’s face. It didn’t have the toughness of a soldier’s, not the ones whom he had occasionally seen back in Tennessee or the mountain men who had fought with Andrew Jackson at Chalmette outside of New Orleans. Instead, the lines and the skin were soft, without windburn or scars or even a faint discoloration from the flint exploding into the flashpan of a rifle. The eyes went back to Europe, to an autocratic view of the world that he resented without even being able to understand it completely.
“Where did you get them?” the officer said.
“We got out of the army a couple of months ago and decided to try our luck over in Texas,” Hugh said.
“How did you get the horses?”
“When him and me got discharged in Opelousas, we seen our mounts getting auctioned off to some Frenchies, and we bought them for five dollars apiece. Then we swapped them to Iron Jacket for a stay here and that squaw over by the tepee.”
“The Americans don’t sell their horses unless they burn the brand first.”
“Yes, sir, that’s true. But the first sergeant that was doing this sale is drunk most of the time, and he don’t go about particulars when you show him a gold piece. Also, I was hurrying a little bit to get across the Sabine. I used to visit this lady that lives in St. Martinville—”
“What did you do with the saddles? Did you bury them along the road with the men you killed?”
“I don’t think you’re listening, Lieutenant. We didn’t steal no horses, and we sure didn’t kill nobody,” Hugh said.
“How did you get those scars on your ankles?”
“I done some time when I was a kid.”
“What do you care where them horses come from?” Son said. “You’re taking them from the Indians, ain’t you?”
“Son,” Hugh said.
“Them horses is ours. We rode them over from Louisiana, and what we done over there ain’t any business of yours.”
“I think both of you are escaped convicts,” the officer said.
The wind blew out of the pines and scattered ashes from the fire burning under the racks of venison in the center of the village. Son felt the wound in his side begin to quiver again.
“I done told you, Lieutenant,” Hugh said. “I got these manacle scars when I was a boy over in Mississippi. All we want is to get up to the plains and make some money knocking down buffalo.”
The lieutenant looked Son hard in the eyes.
“Do you know a Frenchman, a prison warden, named Landry?” he said.
Son stared back at him and forced his eyes not to blink.
“There’s a lot of Frenchies by that name. I don’t know no prison guard.”
“I didn’t say ‘guard.’ ”
“I ain’t ever seen you before, and you’re telling me I been in prison.”
“This man’s brother was murdered by these two convicts. He believes one of them may have been shot. You limp when you walk, don’t you?”
“I been limping since my horse hit a whistle-pig hole and throwed me over his head. Look at his hoof. It’s splayed. He ain’t going to be worth nothing to you.”
“What?”
“Take them off.”
“You must be drinking the same stuff that drives these Indians crazy.”
The lieutenant motioned to his sergeant major, who rode his horse forward out of the formation and kicked Son squarely in the middle of the face with his boot heel. He felt the Spanish roweled spur bite into his forehead, and he fell sprawling in the red dust, his nose ringing with pain. Two other enlisted men dismounted, pulled his boots from his feet, then began jerking his trousers off his legs. He kicked at them while they dragged him on his back, but he kept one arm pinned across the shirt that covered the wound in his side.
“Get up,” the lieutenant said.
He rose to his feet and felt the wind blowing across his buttocks and genitals. The fat women by the venison racks were laughing in their hands, and he saw the eyes of the soldiers looking at his sex. The backs of his legs were shaking, and his hands were like wood by his sides.
“Turn around,” the lieutenant said.
“You greaser sonofabitch. Them Texians are going to cut your liver out one day, and I hope I’m there for it.”
He saw the insult, the word, tick in the officer’s eyes.
“You ought not to done that, Lieutenant,” Hugh said. “You can see he ain’t never been shot.”
“Yes, but he’s been whipped.”
“Upbringing in the Cumberland Mountains ain’t easy sometimes,” Hugh said.
“I want both of you to leave this village. Don’t ever come again,” the lieutenant said. Then he turned toward Son and looked at him with a face as cool and smooth as marble. “Don’t ever use words like that to a Mexican officer again. Today you are a fortunate young man.”
The sergeant major brought up his horse, a Morgan with wideset eyes, and the lieutenant swung up into the split-wood saddle as though his body had no weight. Son watched him post ahead of the formation and the two long strings of Indian horses that followed him toward the pine trees.
He picked up his pants and put them on awkwardly. He felt as though he were moving inside a dream. For the first time, he looked back at the tepee and saw that White-Man’s-Woman had gone inside and tied the flap to the lodge pole.
“I seen actors on stage in a public house that never done that good,” Hugh said.
“I wasn’t doing no acting.”
“Hell, you wasn’t. I thought any minute your side was going to pop loose and spill jelly all over that lieutenant’s boot.”
“I’m going to get a dirk in that fellow, Hugh.”
“No, you ain’t.”
“He earned a new asshole today.”
“The only thing you and me are going to do is get our butts out of here. I wish that Mexican had said how long ago he seen Emile Landry. Maybe he figured we headed toward Bexar or the coast, but the chances are he knows we didn’t get too far with you carrying a ball. I’d feel a lot better if we got a big piece of Texas between us and him.”
“He probably went on through. There must be money on us now, and that Mexican would have taken us with him if he thought he could turn a dollar on our hides.”
“Emile Landry is just smart enough to let us think like that, too. He might be a cruel sonofabitch, but he can sniff a blood spore in the ground like a dog. Before they sent you up to the camp, a crazy fellow got loose from the chain once and ran back through the marsh. All the other guards figured he’d just die in there because he was so crazy he couldn’t poke a hand in his mouth to feed himself sometimes. But Landry went after him and brought him back on a rope behind his horse.”
“That don’t change nothing. I still want a piece of that Mexican.”
“I don’t like to tell you things all the time, but what you let get done to yourself out here saved us from going back to the pen. If it had been me when I was your age, I would have cut that fellow from his belly button right up to his throat. And that’s how I spent all the years I did in Frenchy jails. It ain’t good to look back sometimes and figure how many years you lost because you didn’t know how to stick a hot iron in water.”
“Hugh, if you ain’t slick as wheel grease.”
“I think you’re starting to learn something. In fact, that’s about the smartest thing you ever said. I’m right proud of you.”
It began to rain softly that night, and inside the tepee they cooked a stew of the raccoons Hugh had killed and ate it from the clay bowls with their fingers. A few raindrops fell through the chimney and hissed on the hote stones around the fire, and Son could hear the wind beginning to blow more strongly in the pines. He lay under a buffalo robe with his head on a blanket and listened to Hugh’s outrageous stories while the woman slept on the opposite side of the fire.
“I don’t give a damn if you believe me or not,” Hugh said. “I knowed Dan’l Boone. Me and my daddy met him at a place called Bean’s Station in Tennessee when he was an old man.”
“What kind of work did your daddy do?”
“He was good at doing things wrong. It was a talent with him. He was so good at it that people would find out how he done something and then turn it around when they done it themselves. He dug water wells on high ground, planted his seed just before a storm, built the smokehouse next to the bedroom, hired a drunkard to run his still, penned his hogs in a hollow that flooded each year, put lye-water on infected warts, and set fire to his own beard every time he lit his pipe.”
Son felt his face begin to glow with sleep and the warmth of the fire, then he heard Hugh’s voice faintly above the rain and the wind in the trees. In a bright corner of his mind he saw the pine logs flare briefly and crumble into ash.
He didn’t know how long he had been asleep when he heard the tepee flap open and felt a spray of rain across his face. Iron Jacket stooped his head as he came inside, and behind him a streak of lightning jumped across the black sky. His wet hair was unbraided, and he wore a Mexican enlisted man’s coat with the sleeves cut off at the shoulders.
“Close the flap, Iron Jacket,” Hugh said. “I ain’t fond of sleeping in the mud.”
“The old man comes,” the Indian said.
“What is it?” Hugh said.
“Come to tepee.”
“Are them Mexicans back?”
“You talk with me.”
“Just say what it is. I ain’t going out in that rain.”
The Indian looked at him with his flat hazel eyes.
“No more talk here,” he said.
“You’re right, Son,” Hugh said, as he put on his boots. “There’s crazy people everywhere these days.”
Son tied the flap to the lodge pole again after Hugh and Iron Jacket stepped out into the rain. The shallow red ditch around the edge of the tepee was almost filled with water. He looked across the dead fire and saw the woman’s outline move under the blankets.
“What’s that about?” he said.
She didn’t answer, and he picked up a small pine cone and threw it in her direction.
“Don’t let on like you’re asleep,” he said. “You people can hear a frog hop while you’re sleeping.”
“The Mexicans shamed Iron Jacket in front of the village.”
“I don’t know how you can shame an old thief like that. It sure didn’t bother him none when he pointed us out to that lieutenant.”
“He’s leader of the Choctaws because he always has food and clothes for the people. With no horses to sell back to the Americans, we will have no food when the brown moon is finished.”
“What do you mean you won’t have no food? These woods is full of deer and everything else.”
“The Choctaws are not real hunters. They fish—back across the river where the Americans come from. The Mexicans make Iron Jacket a warrior in front of the village because he steals for them. They give him the buffalo robes they trade from the white hunters. Now the Choctaws will have nothing.”
“You still ain’t answered my question. What’s that old sonofabitch got in mind for Hugh and me?”
“Bad.”
“You’re a regular blabbermouth, ain’t you? What’s he going to do? Tell the Mexicans I caught a ball in my side?”
“He wears the iron shirt to make the people believe he’s a warrior. But he sends others to fight and steal for him.”
Hugh unfastened the thong on the tepee flap and stooped inside with a muddy blanket over his head. Water dripped out of the tangle of hair over his eyes.
“Get that fire started again. You won’t believe what that dumb bastard wants to do,” he said.
“He wants to get even with a bunch of Mexicans tonight.” Son picked up a handful of dry pine needles and rotted twigs and placed them on top of the flat cook-stone in the center of the fire pit. He began striking two pieces of flint into the edge of the needles.
“How did you know that?”
“I just guessed. In fact, let me guess a little more. He wants to burn their stockade down, but he’d like us to do it.”
“He ain’t that dumb, and I ain’t, either. I didn’t know it, but that lieutenant really stuck a bayonet up his ass out there today. The only reason these Choctaws follow Iron Jacket around is because nobody ever goes hungry or gets cold while he’s taking care of them with the Mexicans. But right now he ain’t worth a wad of spit with his people.”
Son watched the pine needles catch slowly, and he fanned the sparks into the kindling.
“So what are we going to do?” he said.
“He wants to steal all them horses back tonight, and any others they got, besides.”
“And you said we’d go.”
“Damn right, I did. He’s going to raid their herd, anyway, and when he gets done we better not be around here.”
“I don’t want to offer no problem, but what are we going to ride?”
“You can’t wait to start asking questions, can you? Like I’m some old fool that don’t know how to take a squat by himself. He’s got six horses hid out in the trees that he was going to sell to the Texians on his own. The Mexicans keep all their herd in a meadow about two miles south of their stockade, and they don’t leave more than three or four pickets on guard at night. When we hit the herd, his people are going to fold up everything and head for the Brazos. They figure they can’t do no worse there than what that lieutenant’s been doing to them around here.”
The fire flared and lighted the inside of the tepee. Son could see the dark spots of rain on the stitched deer skins.
“What do we get out of it besides a couple of mounts?” he said.
“I told him I wanted at least eight head. We can run them between us without no trouble, and we’ll sell them off to a trader I know the other side of the Trinity. What do you think?”
“It’s not as good as raising that lieutenant’s belly button a few inches, but it’ll have to do.”
“All right, that’s it, then. We’re going to see Jim Bowie, and we’ll have some hard dollars in our pocket when we do.”
The woman hit Hugh on his sleeve with her fingertips. The firelight wavered on her face.
“I go with you,” she said.
“Wait a minute,” Son said.
“I don’t belong to Iron Jacket’s women again.”
The pine cones snapped in the fire pit, and Hugh looked steadily at Son.
“It’s going to be tough for her if she has to go back with them fat squaws again,” Hugh said.
“Emile Landry is out there somewhere. You said it yourself. We got to move our ass across a big piece of country.”
“I ain’t arguing one way or the other. It don’t make no difference to me. I just said them squaws are going to treat her like sheep flop when she starts toting and fetching for them again.”
“Damn you, Hugh.”
“Make up your own mind about it. Don’t put them things on me.”
“I give you something,” she said. “Buffalo Hump’s rifle and the metal balls and the horn with the fire dust.”
“Now, you see, there wasn’t no decision at all,” Hugh said. “Where’s it at?”
“His woman put it in the ground by the spring in the trees after they killed him. Then she went back toward where the Americans come from.”
Outside, they heard horses’ hooves splashing in the mud.
“Let’s get it,” Hugh said. “Does she go with us or not?”
“I didn’t say she couldn’t, did I? Why don’t you stop all them tricks of yours?”
They stepped out into the rain and saw the women of the village taking down the tepees and rolling the deer skins and buffalo robes into tight bundles that they tied onto the tops of travoises with strips of hide. The rain drove through the skeletal frames of lodge poles and hissed in the fire pits. Iron Jacket and three other Indians sat bareback on their horses with bows and quivers of arrows over their arms. Iron Jacket wore his mail vest under his Mexican enlisted man’s coat, and he and the other Indians had streaked their faces with a mixture of blackberry juice and animal fat. They all wore buckskin breeches, and their legs clung to the sides of their horses as though they had been welded there.
The woman stepped out last from the tepee.
“White-Man’s-Woman no go,” Iron Jacket said.
“We took a vote on that,” Hugh said. “We decided we need somebody to keep on cooking for us and dressing out our game and such as that.”
“Woman no go on raid against Mexicans.”
“Now, you give us her as part of the deal for our horses,” Hugh said. “You sharped us a little bit on that trade, and I don’t want to lose what we got.”
“Only six horses. She stay with women.”
“We ain’t going to argue about it,” Son said. “She comes along, or you can go up against them Mexicans on your own.”
“Tonto boy,” Iron Jacket said. He motioned to one of the Indians behind him, who brought up two unshod, unsaddled horses by their bridles.
Hugh and Son pulled the reins back over the horses’ ears and slid up on their backs. The rainwater was cutting deep rivulets through the red clay earth in the center of the village. A white spiderweb of lightning broke across the sky, and the horses spooked sideways in the mud.
Son sawed back the bit and put his hand down toward the woman.
“Get on up here. Let’s find that rifle,” he said.
They rode at a walk across the clearing into the trees, while the Indian women finished loading everything that was of any worth to them on the travoises—jerked venison, scalded and salted piglets and dogs, clay bowls filled with flint arrow points, turkey feathers stiff with animal grease for arrow shafts. Only once before had Son seen an Indian village move so quickly, and that was in Tennessee when they heard that the white man’s fever, smallpox, had been found west of Cumberland Gap.
The rain dripped out of the pine trees in large flat drops that made the horses blink their eyes and toss their heads against the reins. The woman held Son around the waist, and he could smell smoke in her hair and that odor of fleshed-out raccoon hide in her clothes.
“You ain’t got to hold on like that,” he said. “These Indian horses can go through a woods at night like an owl.”
They were following the stream that led up through the piney woods to the Mexican fort, and just before the stream made a bend back through an outcropping of rock dripping with moss and fern, the woman pointed at a streak of water leaking through the roots of the pine trees high up on the embankment.
“There,” she said. “Under the rocks by the spring.”
Son reined the horse, and he and the woman walked up the rise to where the spring water glistened along the ground. Ahead, Iron Jacket and the other three Indians stopped their horses and turned them around in the stream.
“You come,” Iron Jacket said.
“Tell them to go on. We’ll catch up,” Son said.
“You tell him. I got a notion he might want that rifle,” Hugh said.
“He ain’t getting it.”
“Come now. Moon no pass when we take horses,” Iron Jacket said.
Son ignored him and began lifting a pile of flat stones that covered an eroded rock opening in the embankment.
“That rifle better be there, or them Indians are going to think you’re really crazy,” Hugh said.
The woman reached inside the opening and pulled out a long object wrapped in deer skin and tied with thongs. The thongs had dried and drawn tight as wire, and even with his teeth Son couldn’t loosen the knots.
“You’re going to be eating with your gums, boy,” Hugh said, and flipped his knife underhanded up the embankment.
Son unrolled the deer skin from the rifle, and then he saw the long barrel and the tapered stock and the flintlock action.
“A Kentucky,” he said.
Even though in the dark he couldn’t see every detail of the rifle, he already knew each piece of it from memory as well as an ancestral mountain veneration for the weapon that Daniel Boone and his men had carried. He knew the wood was maple or apple and had been wrapped with tarred twine which the gunsmith burned away to give the stock grain. The bore was rifled so that the ball would drop only three inches in one hundred yards, and the balance was so perfect under the trigger guard that just the removal of the split-hickory ramrod under the barrel would upset it. He cocked back the hammer and opened the flashpan and ran his thumb along the smoothness of the steel. No water or rust had gotten to it, and the sides of the octagon barrel were as slick as when they had been honed in the smithy’s vise.
“Look at it, Hugh. My uncle owned one, and he could knock a turkey’s eye out at fifty yards with it.”
“It ain’t worth a shit to you tonight unless you got the rest of it,” Hugh said.
Son propped the half-moon brass butt piece of the stock on his thigh and flipped open the rest of the deer skin. Inside the folds was a powder horn with a beveled wood plug at the bottom and a smaller one in the loading end. He hung the horn across his chest by its thong and unsnapped the cover on the elongated brass box set in the rifle’s stock. He touched his fingers along the .45 caliber balls and the greased cloth patches that were used to slide them down the barrel and seal them tightly over the powder.
“It’s like White-Man’s-Woman said. It’s all here,” Son said.
“That not my name,” she said.
He looked at her strangely in the flicker of lightning through the treetops. Her eye with the small white scar in the corner, like a piece of string, was pinched at him in the drip of rain from the low pine limbs over their heads.
“You never told us your name,” he said.
“Get it down here, Son,” Hugh said. “Iron Jacket is fixing to blow a brown hole in his britches.”
IT HAD STOPPED raining when they rode out of the creek bed into the perimeter of woods that bordered the meadow where the Mexicans kept their horses. The night was still dark, with a crack of moonlight between the clouds, and a thick low fog floated in pools over the knee-high grass. The horses were penned in a one-rail corral, and two soldiers sat by a fire under a sheet of canvas stretched on poles. Son’s horse began to nicker, and he leaned forward with the rifle balanced on his thigh and cupped his hand over its nose.
“There must be a hundred head in there,” Hugh whispered.
Son strained his eyes into the darkness and traced a line from one end of the corral to the other, in the same careful way that he used to move his vision across a stretch of woods when he was hunting deer back in the Cumberlands. Then he saw the soft outline of both mounted pickets by the far end of the fence.
“How do you want to take them?” he said.
“We get them all at one time,” Hugh said. “Ain’t that right, Iron Jacket? You let your bucks circle wide and bring down them two on horses, and we go right through the middle and stick the Kentucky up the noses of them other two. White-Man’s-Woman keeps the horses and rides in when we whistle. How’s that?”
“You use knife on Mexicans,” Iron Jacket said.
“We’re going to pig-string them two so they don’t get loose till their own people finds them,” Hugh said. “It’s the same thing.”
“We take coup this day,” Iron Jacket said.
“You take care of your side of it,” Hugh said. “Don’t truck with what’s ours.”
“Take coup.”
“I done told you, Iron Jacket. There ain’t a sound coming out of them Mexicans. Now, don’t be pestering folks about it.”
“Old man with bad eye just like tonto boy. Fool.”
Iron Jacket and his three braves dismounted and tethered their horses to pine saplings. They slipped their bows and quivers of arrows off their backs, inserted one arrow loosely in their bow strings, and put another in their teeth. The tallest of the three braves took a tomahawk out of his legging and stuck it down the back of his buckskin breeches. They moved out of the trees in a crouch and disappeared into the grass. Son looked hard at the pools of fog on the meadow and the wet tips of grass bending in the wind, but he could see nothing of the Indians’ movement.
“Stop studying on them Indians,” Hugh said. “What they do ain’t no business of ours. Get your rifle loaded. I don’t want to grow no older here.”
Son pulled the wood plug from the powder horn with his teeth and poured into the barrel, then took a lead ball and a greased patch from the brass box set in the stock and ran them down to the charge with the ramrod. He poured the flashpan and closed its cover.
“How’s your flint?” Hugh said.
“It ain’t hardly worn.”
“Let’s get our peckers down in the dirt, then. Don’t stand up out of the grass till you hear the Indians first.”
“You said we all hit the Mexicans at the same time.”
“Shit on that. If them Indians mess it up, they’re on their own. You and me is going to be long gone.”
They crawled on their stomachs and elbows through the wet grass with Son in front. He balanced the rifle in the crook of his arms and let the powder horn drag at his side. A gust of wind blew across the meadow and flattened the grass around them, and they froze with their faces in the damp earth. The barrel and the flash pan of his rifle glistened with water, and he wondered if his primer would still fire when the flint touched the steel. He could hear the Mexicans by the fire talking now, and he put his thumb over the heavy hammer and pulled it back to half-cock. The sound was like a thick dry twig snapped across someone’s knee. He felt Hugh’s fist hit him in the sole of the boot. He didn’t have to look back to feel Hugh’s livid anger at his stupidity.
They moved forward until they could see the wavering shadows of the fire through the grass. Hugh was next to him now with his knife in his hand. Their dry controlled breathing and the sweat rolling off their faces was an agony in the stillness.
Why don’t them savages do their bloody work, he thought, and then he felt shame and guilt at what he knew he wanted in his fear.
You ain’t no different than them red niggers, are you, he thought. You want their pickets cut open so you don’t catch a ball when you jump them Mexicans by the fire.
He squinted through the grass and saw one soldier stand up in silhouette against the fire and begin to urinate in the darkness. Then he heard a loud voice in Spanish back by the horse pen and a murderous blow like stone crunching through an earth-filled clay pot.
“Get it!” Hugh shouted, and hit him violently in the shoulder with his elbow.
Son went to his feet and ran forward with his rifle pointed at the soldier who was still urinating into the wind and staring into the darkness over his shoulder at the same time.
“Both you fellows get on your face,” he said. “You hear me? Lie down on the ground like you was a pair of lizards.”
The soldier who was standing looked at him in disbelief, and the man seated by the fire started to raise his hands, then lowered them and finally began to shake all over.
“Get on your damn face,” Son said. “I got a .45 ball in here that’ll bust you all over the bushes.”
The two soldiers’ faces were terrified in the firelight, and the soldier who was still seated kicked his rifle and his leather powder flask away from himself.
“They don’t talk English,” Son said. “How do you tell them to lie down in Spanish?”
“You ain’t got to. They’re scared so bad now they couldn’t button their britches.”
Hugh walked to the fire and kicked at it until it flared into a large flame again. The sparks showered up into the canvas stretched on the poles overhead. Out in the darkness, they heard a man scream.
“What are they doing?” Son said.
“It ain’t our business. We done our end of it, and we take the horses we got coming.”
Son’s hands were damp on the stock of the rifle, and he thought something was beginning to tremble inside him.
“Tell them to stop,” he said, and the words seemed to click in his throat with a guilt that he knew he would not resolve easily.
“It stopped with that poor fellow’s scream,” Hugh said.
Iron Jacket and his three braves walked into the firelight leading the saddled horses of the Mexican pickets behind them. The tallest of the braves was spotted with blood, and the stone tomahawk pushed down in the front of his buckskin breeches had patches of human hair stuck to it.
“Two coup,” Iron Jacket said, and held up the scalps in the yellow light of the fire. On one, there was still a piece of skull plate attached. “Now other two before men from soldiers’ town come.”
“We already been through that before, Iron Jacket,” Hugh said. “This pair is ours.”
“No leave Mexicans to tell.”
“We ain’t going to do it that way,” Hugh said. “What we’re going to do is divide up these horses, get across the Trinity, and drink a lot of whiskey.”
“First, Mexicans,” Iron Jacket said.
“Are you hard of hearing or something?” Son said. “We got eight head coming, or maybe more since there must be a hundred head out there, and the Mexicans get trussed up and that’s it.”
“No talk with young boy. Old man talk.”
“You don’t listen too good, do you?” Son said. “You done taken all the coup you’re going to tonight.”
The two soldiers, who now sat flat-legged in the dirt, began to realize that the continuation or the end of their lives was being decided in the wavering yellow light. The skin on their faces grew tight, and their eyes had the plaintive look of hurt animals.
“A deal’s a deal, Iron Jacket,” Hugh said. “Besides, he’s the one holding the rifle.”
“No use. Sweat on face with fear.”
“You asshole,” Son said. “You didn’t take them scalps. You got Slim here to do it for you. You open your mouth again to me like that and I’ll give you a belly button you can put a pie plate through.”
“He’s a crazy enough sonofabitch to do it, too,” Hugh said. “I don’t have no truck with him when he’s like this.”
“Don’t talk with him no more. Whistle up the woman,” Son said.
“She’s right behind you.”
Son turned and saw White-Man’s-Woman sitting on his horse with the reins of the other five in her hands. Her knees were drawn almost up to the horse’s withers to hold him in.
“All right, let’s get what’s ours and pig-string the Mexicans and find that horse trader friend of yours,” Son said.
“How about that, Iron Jacket?” Hugh said. “We’re too damn rich to set here and piss on each other till the damn Mexicans come to relieve their pickets.”
“You hang too when soldiers tell,” Iron Jacket said.
“There isn’t nobody hanging us. Especially not no Mexicans,” Son said.
“Tell your braves to drop down the rick and cut out our horses,” Hugh said. “The deal was eight and I hold by that, but we don’t want none with a brand and no quarters or pintos.”
The first gray edge of dawn broke along the bottom of the eastern sky, and the wind picked up out of the trees across the meadow. Son heard the Indians drop the rail off the fence into the grass and begin turning the herd into a circle. Hugh pulled down the canvas stretched on the poles over the fire and cut six long narrow strips out of it with his knife. The Mexicans still sat in the dirt with eyes like wounded deer.
“There isn’t nothing going to happen to you,” Hugh said. “We’re going to tie you up so tight your eyeballs come out, but them Indians ain’t going to bother you.”
But they didn’t understand, and they saw only the wide-blade knife in Hugh’s hand.
“These are sure hopeless sonsofbitches, ain’t they?” Hugh said. “I don’t know why Sam Houston ain’t run the bunch of them in the Gulf yet. Turn the short one over and knot his hands to his feet.”
Son took two strips of wet canvas from Hugh’s hand and touched the Mexican on the shoulder. The man’s body shivered with fright under his fingertips.
“When you get done, take their guns and their ammunition boxes,” Hugh said. He was seated atop the prone body of the other soldier, tying knots in the canvas strips that would turn to rock in the sunlight. “I want to make sure Iron Jacket don’t try to slip in a couple of lame ones on us.”
“You done good about the Mexicans, Hugh.”
“When are you going to learn? I don’t care about these bastards. When their relief gets here, they’ll tell them we saved their lives and we ain’t got but eight of their horses. They’ll go after Iron Jacket and the rest of the herd.”
“You always play every card in your hand, don’t you?”
“You damn right. That’s why me and you are going to be splashing across the Trinity while them Indians are shooting over their shoulders. And I sure wouldn’t want to be them and get caught after bashing open them two pickets.”
Hugh rose up from the soldier and walked to the collapsed pen, where the Indians were cutting out the stallions and haltering them in strings with the Mexicans’ lariats. When they drove the whole herd westward, the mares would follow the stallions without a rope and could be controlled with only a few outriders. The sky was beginning to soften more rapidly now, and Son kept looking at the distant line of trees where he expected the pickets’ relief to emerge at any moment.
He unfastened the belts on both soldiers and slid off the ammunition boxes and picked up their leather powder flasks. He put the boxes and flasks inside his shirt, and cocked back the hammers of their rifles in the firelight. The action was filled with dirt and grease, and the cap holes were corroded with burned powder. He slipped off the long tapered bayonets with the blood groove and threw them into the grass.
“I told you we didn’t want none of them inbred pintos,” he heard Hugh say.
“Hugh, it’s getting awful light.”
“Shit on that. We ain’t driving no pintos twenty-five and thirty miles at a lick. They’ll be walking on their knees before we get to the river. You understand that, Iron Jacket? That’s clear enough, ain’t it? You cut that dog food out of our string or me and you is going to get mad at each other.”
The tall Indian with the bloody tomahawk stuck in his breeches pointed at the distant woods.
“Where?” Hugh said, as they all stared, momentarily frozen, in the same direction.
The tall Indian pulled a flint knife with a deer-antler handle from his legging and stuck it in the soft ground, then bent over it on all fours and clenched the handle in his teeth. The scalp lock braided on the back of his head glistened from the dew. He rose up quickly and spoke to Iron Jacket while moving his hands rapidly at the same time.
“Tell somebody else,” Son said.
“He ain’t got to. We’re in the shit house,” Hugh said. “Throw them Mexican rifles away and let’s get the hell down the pike. This part of the country is wearing out for us in a hurry.”
Hugh pulled their string of eight horses toward the fire while Son mounted one of the Indians’ horses and galloped between the two terrified soldiers. He balanced the Kentucky rifle on his horse’s withers and grasped the lariat from Hugh’s hand.
Hugh was trying to mount his horse, which was swinging in a circle each time he tried to throw his weight over its back.
“Hold, you shit hog, or I’ll fillet your nuts and feed them to you,” he said. The horse’s hooves kicked into the fire and covered the two soldiers with sparks and ash.
“Pull back the bit,” Son said.
“What’s it look like I’m doing? His mouth must have been trained on rusted wire.”
The woman brought her horse next to Hugh’s so it couldn’t swing away from him again. He grabbed the mane in his fingers and swung up over the horse’s rump, his walleye shining with effort.
“You got it?” Son said.
“Hell, I always got it. Did you get the money off the Mexicans?”
“What money?”
“That Mexican scrip. Do I have to tell you everything each time? Their enlisted men got wads of it stuffed down in their crotch. You stick one of them in the butt and they explode like turkey feathers.”
“Look back of you,” Son said. “There’s about a dozen of them sonsofbitches coming out of the pines now.”
“Oh shit, let’s run for it, boy. We’re too young to bounce off a tree.”
The three of them raced their horses, with the roped string of eight between them, toward an arroyo that led up through the western side of the timber. The horses’ hooves showered divots of grass and dirt over Son’s body; and when he looked behind him he saw Iron Jacket and his braves trying to stampede the herd toward the far woods, but the stallions were still roped together and spooking back toward the pen, and the mares were turning in a circle and raking down the other fence rails. Then Son heard the popping of musket fire, and he was glad the Indians were between them and the Mexicans.
They hit the arroyo in a full gallop and whipped their horses up the incline. The pines were thickly spaced on each side of the ravine, and in moments the meadow was out of sight behind them. Rolling fields covered with mist in the soft morning light opened up before them, and as Son laid into his horse and felt the steady rhythm between his legs he thought he heard a man’s scream in the distant spatter of musket fire.