Power in the Blood

by Greg Matthews

  When Leo came through the door for his dinner, it was served to him by his wife-to-be.

  It was March before the deer lick thawed sufficiently for Zoe to think of resuming work there. Leo had found a new partner to help him with his claim, but the partnership dissolved when nothing of worth came from the shaft. Now Zoe and Leo had each other and Omie and little else besides. They owed a substantial sum of money to several merchants, and had to live with the galling knowledge that Chadbourne and Yost and their partner had made a modest strike, sold out to a large commercial mining enterprise and left for lower elevations with a handsome profit. Representatives of the Rocky Mountain Mining Corporation had arrived in Glory Hole with the thaw, and begun buying up all claims that had revealed the presence of color without actually disgorging riches. Leo wished openly that his claim could be among the chosen ones; he would willingly have sold out for a song. His mood of late had become disagreeably morose, and Zoe did not ask for his help in reopening her own distant workings.

  When several days of fine weather robbed Leo of any excuse for not working his claim, he enlisted the aid of Zoe, who had proved herself a steady worker after Leo’s latest partner quit (Zoe provided the cash that enabled Leo to buy back his share), and they labored together for more than an hour, Leo down in the shaft, Zoe unloading the buckets the mule drew to the surface. Omie assisted her in wheeling each load to the cradle for sluicing, and lent her eyes to the task while Zoe rocked the contraption back and forth as water played over the riffle slats. It was Omie, therefore, who first saw the gold.

  “Mama! Stop! There’s some in there! It shines, Mama!”

  Zoe sent her to fetch Leo while she plucked three nuggets the size of walnuts from the cradle. By the time Leo and Omie returned, she had washed out four more, including one as large as a peach. Leo stared, his jaw slack, then he scooped up his wife by the waist and waltzed her around the cradle while Omie clapped her hands and laughed.

  The Rocky Mountain Mining Corporation paid Leo ninety thousand dollars for his claim, and when the deal had been made, and the ink allowed to dry on the bill of sale, Zoe took her husband aside and suggested a stroll up the side of the valley so they might overlook Glory Hole in its entirety before leaving for the warmer world of California, this being Leo’s stated intention. She led him up to the deer lick, and bade him jump down into the hole she had made there. Leo did so, laughing at her unusual request.

  “Dig,” Zoe told him.

  “I’m done with digging,” he told her.

  “No you’re not. Dig with the toe of your boot.”

  He did, and soon thereafter was on hands and knees, unable to accept the riches crammed into so confined a space. The nuggets went down and down, a tightly packed funnel of yellow that actually began to widen, the deeper he dug.

  “Your claim was empty. Its gold came from this place,” said Zoe, “and I make no apology for having done what I did. Any man who has worked as hard as you for so long deserves to reap a reward of some kind, even from the great and greedy Rocky Mountain Mining Corporation. Now then, husband, are you truly done with digging?”

  Literally up to his ankles in gold, co-owner by marriage of a claim that clearly would yield millions, Leo could only shake his head and admit his wife was his superior in every way.

  23

  Newspapers reaching Fort Mobley were distributed among those troopers who could read, before being cut into squares for use in the latrine. The news would be old by then, since the papers had to come by supply wagon from Albuquerque, a journey of ten days or more, and then the officers monopolized them for at least another week before releasing them to the lower ranks.

  Drew found early on that he was the company’s most capable reader, and his services were in demand when newspapers were distributed among the barracks. He would read them from the first page to the last, before an audience starved of information concerning the outside world. He found his listeners curiously uninterested in such items as the assassination of James Garfield, twentieth president of the United States; they preferred more entertaining fare, the report from Socorro, for example, that a woman had killed her husband with an ax one night, then run through the town howling like a wolf. Her explanation for the murder rested on the premise that she was not herself on account of the full moon, and so was not responsible for what she did to her spouse, whom she had loved dearly. The sheriff was informed by neighbors, however, that the couple often quarreled over the husband’s excessive drinking and infidelities, and no one had ever heard the accused baying or otherwise acting peculiar at the time of the full moon, so it was generally held that the murderess was simply trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the law. The correspondent opined that the blatant lying and poor acting ability of the woman would prove prejudicial to her case when it came to court.

  “She done it deliberate,” said Osgood, who was considered by some to be the wisest man in the barracks. “She said it just to get put in the monkey house instead of getting stretched like she deserves.” There were murmurings of agreement from several of the bunks, but it was difficult to tell from which, the only lighted lamp being above the newspaper reader, John Bones. Osgood continued: “A smarter woman now, she would’ve never said that about the moon. She would’ve said something about how she seen him come in through the window real late, and figured he was an Injun, so she took the ax to him. Maybe no one would’ve believed her, but they sure would’ve respected her brains a lot more, and maybe let her off on account of it. She never thunk it through like she should’ve, so now she’ll get stretched for sure, even if she’s a woman.”

  “That’s right,” said Fannin, Osgood’s best friend and second shadow. It was said of Fannin that if Osgood ever stopped walking too suddenly, Fannin’s nose would be jammed permanently up Osgood’s ass, not that either party would have found this position unnatural or inconvenient. “That’s what she should’ve done, told about the Injun, not the moon.”

  Drew found it sad that the level of learning at Fort Mobley was so low he had been elevated to a position of considerable status solely because he could read without a pause and explain the many complex terms that baffled his listeners. He quickly became aware that he had unwittingly supplanted Osgood as the company’s most learned and erudite individual, and regretted that this should have happened, since Osgood’s expression made it clear he considered Drew his enemy. It had only come about because Osgood, during one of his readings, had stumbled over the pronunciation of the word “intimidate,” and Drew, without even looking over his shoulder, had deduced from the article’s context what the awkward word was, and his speaking of it aloud had stunned everyone. Soon after, his star had risen higher when he assisted one of the men in the writing of a letter to his sweetheart. The writer knew his girl would never believe the flowery sentences had sprung from himself, but he sent it anyway, because it was a damn fine poetical piece of art.

  “Too late now,” continued Fannin. “She should’ve had Ossie for her lawyer to tell her what to do, but that won’t happen, so she’ll drop for sure.”

  Osgood nodded in acknowledgment of the truth in Fannin’s words, but he was aware that there was less than the usual level of enthusiasm in the room for his pronouncements, despite Fannin’s efforts on his behalf. More and more, lately, the men wanted to hear what Bones thought of the items he read to them, and Osgood was experiencing the pangs of rejection. Until the arrival of Bones, his had been the voice that relayed and interpreted the news, often with a fair amount of improvisation, since Osgood’s grasp of spelling and vocabulary was limited.

  “Think she’ll get away with it, Bones?” asked Taynton, a lanky New Englander.

  “She’d have a chance if they let women on juries; then it wouldn’t matter if they believed her or not. If she killed her husband for running around with other women and drinking too much, they’d find her not guilty, because some time or other most women want to do exactly the same to their own man. Someday they’ll put women
on juries, and that’s what’ll happen to husband-killers.”

  “That’s stupid,” Osgood said, cramming as much scorn as he could muster into his words. “Think a judge’d let some bunch of women let a murderer go free? It won’t happen, not in this life.”

  “It could,” Drew countered. “I once heard of a case where the accused was a spittoon emptier, just the lowest dog in town, and he killed a man worth plenty of money, because that man spat on him intentionally when he was trying to take the spittoon away for emptying at the same moment the rich man felt the need to expectorate. The low dog came up with the spittoon in his hands and whanged the rich man so hard on the head he died on the spot. Outright murder, committed in front of dozens of witnesses, but they couldn’t find a jury that would convict him, because every poor man wants to kill a rich man sometime, to balance the universal order of things, what you might call natural redress of fiscal imbalance, or just the plain old poor man’s revenge.”

  “Sounds about right,” agreed Taynton, who despised Osgood and Fannin for their weaselly ways and high opinion of themselves. He didn’t believe a word of Bones’s story, but that wasn’t the point. The tale of the spittoon emptier and the rich man had set everyone in the room thinking, whereas Osgood’s words generally fell like blankets over his audience, unconsciously freeing them from any obligation to ponder the news, since Osgood had already instructed them on what it all meant. Bones was a queer duck, as out of place in the army as a teacher in a stokehole. Taynton decided he would be Bones’s friend from then on, just to poke a stick in Osgood’s eye.

  Drew applied himself to the newspaper again. “Here’s something that concerns us,” he said. “Listen: ‘On Wednesday last, while being transferred from the jail at Magdalena to the jurisdiction of federal marshals, the notorious Apache fiends Panther Stalking and Kills With a Smile managed to slip free of their bonds and make good an escape which Marshals Willis Beecher and Lee Hoyt had called “impossible.” While placed under guard in the center of town and surrounded by several score of citizens eager for a glimpse of the murderous duo, both Indians suddenly threw down their handcuffs, which apparently had been opened on the sly, and sprang onto horses nearby. Several shots were fired, the marshals’ aim being hampered by the presence of so many innocents, and in a trice the two Apache desperadoes were gone without blood being spilt. The stolen horses were located within the hour by a heavily armed posse, but no trace at all was found to indicate in which direction the wily murderers chose to vanish.’”

  “Shoot,” said someone. “They oughtn’t to have gotten away that easy.”

  Drew continued: “‘These slayers in the night have proved once again they are too slippery for such forces as the federal law authorities are capable of mustering against them, and it is to be hoped that the oft-heard rumors concerning an all-out hunt by the army will at last be made real. Nothing less than a fully equipped company must be despatched to track down these red hellions and rid the southwest territories of their presence once and for all. It is reliably calculated they have tortured and killed fifty-one persons, including seventeen women and nine children, since their bloody reign of terror began last year. It is beyond understanding why they have been able to evade capture—and wriggle free again when finally caught—for this length of time. Outraged white folk and even Mexicans are demanding action that will bring surcease to this shocking episode which, if not stopped, may well inspire Apaches of lesser nerve to rise up in numbers to do even more harm than their kind already has. This editor calls upon the government to do what it must, or be answerable for the bloodbath that will surely follow.’”

  “Won’t happen,” Osgood assured the barracks. “We’re so undermanned we can’t even do drill every day like we’re supposed to. This outfit couldn’t find them two redskins if we looked for a year.”

  For once, Drew was inclined to agree with Osgood. His arrival at Fort Mobley nine days before had been a shock. The “fort” was without fortifications of any kind, lacking even a row of stones to mark the perimeter. There were a dozen adobe buildings scattered about a dusty parade ground, a flag-less flagpole and a view in all directions that could be described as either magnificent or hell on earth, depending upon the inclination of the viewer. On his arrival, Drew had tended to the former description, but now he understood the average trooper’s firm declaration of the latter. The mountains surrounding Fort Mobley held heat like a crucible, making life in the bottom of the desert bowl around the fort the equivalent, Drew thought, of one of Dante’s hellish circles.

  A roster of living things at the fort included two officers, one officer’s wife, one noncommissioned officer, one cook, thirty-eight troopers, forty-one mules, two dogs, one cat, a rooster and seven chickens. The scorpions and flies were beyond counting. Drew regretted having held true to his promise to Judge Craven; the judge could have had no idea army life could be as pointless and soul-destroying as duty at Fort Mobley clearly was. There hung in the tortured air of the place a kind of silent shrieking, a cry from the collective heart of every human posted there. Its name in the barracks, Drew learned, was Fort Hellhole. The temperature often climbed to one hundred eighteen degrees Fahrenheit in the afternoon, and the adobe dwellings retained much of this heat through the night, making each building an oven of baked clay, slowly roasting the unfortunates within. The night air was considerably cooler, but it was forbidden to sleep outside the barracks, in case of Indian attack. Men risked death by marauder and punishment by officers anyway, simply to find relief from the heat in a few hours of oblivion. Fort Stanton, where Drew had enlisted and received his training over the winter months, was a paradise, a whitewashed monument to the saving graces of civilization; by comparison, Fort Mobley sat like the ruins from a forgotten age.

  Taynton formed the habit of cultivating Drew’s company over the breakfast table. The same miserable fare was made available in variations on a culinary theme, and served up for all three meals. Salted beef was the staple, bread dried to a bricklike consistency the dessert, and coarse coffee rendered the communal throat moist enough to pass it down for queasy digestion. Sharing his opinion of the food was an easy way to approach the newcomer. Others had made a casual effort to pry into Bones’s life before he’d come to Hellhole, but had been rebuffed with just enough friendliness to prevent bad feeling. Taynton wanted to find out what others could not. He had an innate curiosity concerning mankind, and saw in Bones a suitable target for investigation. Slowly at first, then with more determination, he began to assemble a notion of who John Bones might be.

  “There’s men here,” he said, “that murdered and ran, and changed their names when they signed up. Me, I think it makes sense. Anyone does wrong, they should be put in the army and punished for it.”

  Drew accepted the overture without responding. Taynton took his silence for encouragement, and continued. “See Corwin over there? Did his own sister back in Chicago.”

  “Killed her?”

  “No, did her. Put it to her, you know.”

  “Why would he tell you a thing like that?”

  “Most of these fellers, they’re ashamed of what they did, but not Corwin, he brags on it, says she was the best piece of tail he ever had. A man that talks about his own sister like that, he’s the lowest kind of scum, in my opinion.”

  “Have you shared your opinion with Corwin?”

  “No, that’d just get my head stove in, and Corwin, he’d still be the same kind of scum, so why bother.”

  “That’s practical. Who are the murderers?”

  “Well, there’s Benton, the one with the walleye. He’s known to have killed a man in New York City, someone he owed money to, they say.”

  Drew was aware of Taynton’s probing, but had little fear that he might be found out. He had grown a short beard before enlisting, and had seen a poster with his former unshaven self on it directly outside the recruiting office. The beard was ample disguise, and he appreciated the fact that it made his boyish features a
t least five years older.

  “Did you kill anyone, Taynton?”

  “Me, no, I’d like to sometime, though. There’s some men need killing, I reckon. Captain Mayles, for one, and maybe old Shrike for two.”

  Mayles had been in command of the fort since his superior officer died suddenly of a burst appendix. Word of the incident had been dispatched to the outside world, but had not brought any response. Dispatches from Mobley often tended to vanish into the shimmering desert air. The arrival of Drew was in response, it was assumed, to a request for several dozen men, made five months earlier. Mayles himself seemed to relish the power that was thrust upon him, and had begun to swagger when he walked, a pose that did not suit his girth. No one understood how it was that Mayles and his wife were able to maintain their corpulence when everyone else grew thin on their poor rations. Mayles seldom spoke with anyone but Lieutenant Dobson, and Dobson was not about to ask. It was rumored that Dobson was waiting for Mayles to contract some fatal affliction, whereupon he could assume control of the fort, and of Mayles’s wife, who was often seen tipping Dobson the glad eye from deep within the folds of her sunbonnet. Despite her unattractive physical appearance, it was clear why Dora Mayles had won Dobson’s heart: she was the only female in a hundred miles.

  Conveying an occasional order from the officers to the men was the task of Sergeant Shrike, a dour individual unfit for the work, since his presence aroused in the ranks not a jot of fear or respect. Shrike was known to have given orders that were coolly ignored, and during one momentous confrontation he had screeched an order over and over again at the top of his voice, earning for himself the sobriquet Shriek. The men obeyed him if an officer was nearby, but at no other time. Shrike had a small room to himself, and spent a great deal of time inside it. Some said he prayed alone, others swore he was hatching plots against the troop for their humiliating indifference to his rank, and others said he was either playing with himself to pass the time behind his closed door, or else sleeping.