Crack in the Sky tb-3

by Terry C. Johnston

  “My, my,” Hatcher exclaimed, then whistled low and long. “To think of another American getting hisself baptized just so he can get hitched up to a Mex gal.”

  “I don’t figger you can ever understand that, Jack … because none of you are the kind ever to settle down in one spot long enough to have a wife, raise some kids, maybeso even have a job that means you don’t have to look back over your shoulder for Injuns.”

  “I like my life just the way it is, Willy,” Hatcher said, then corrected himself. “I mean, Julian.”

  “Man oughtta be happy with the way he’s living his life,” Workman declared as he scooted back from the fry skillet and got to his feet. “If he ain’t happy, then he ought’n change something so’s he can be happy. Like this new fella here—’pears he left ever’thing behind and come west to the mountains to find what wasn’t back there.”

  “Happy? I’ll tell ye what makes that nigger happy!” Jack snorted, pointing his knife at Scratch. “Bass is the sort what ain’t happy less’n he’s making life hard on me!”

  Titus chuckled, saying, “It’s for sartin no woman ever want you around long enough to get yourself baptized so you could marry up to her, Hatcher.”

  “See what I mean, Willy? This nigger’s nothing more’n a pain in the ass to me.”

  Rufus Graham dragged the back of his hand across his lips, belched, then stood to stretch. “When you gonna bring us some lightning?”

  “Thirsty?”

  “Save for ronnyvoo last two year,” Graham explained, “I been thirsty near all the time, Willy.”

  “I’ll fetch us up some,” their host stated, dusting his hands together eagerly.

  By the time Workman was back with a clay jug in each hand, the rest had finished the last of their supper and had sopped up all the corn juice and bear grease. Some of the men even tipped up their tinware and licked their plates clean, eyes half-closed, savoring the last of the corn.

  “Ain’t gonna be the last meal you have, fellers,” Workman said as he came back into the fire’s light.

  “Never know when you’re riding with Jack Hatcher,” Caleb grumbled. “Every meal might be a man’s last—’cause you sure as hell don’t always know when you’re gonna get the next one.”

  They laughed together as the jugs clunked to the surface of a thick plank table before their host pulled small, crudely formed clay cups from the two big patch pockets on his short blanket coat.

  Bass watched as the man began to pour a clear liquid into each cup, filling them about halfway to the top. When they all had a cup in hand, Workman passed the last to Titus and raised his own.

  “A toast—to the new mountaineer,” Workman said. “And his first trip to Taos.”

  “Hurraw for Scratch!” Hatcher bawled, slapping Bass on the back of his shoulders.

  For a moment he watched the others stuff their clay cups to their hairy mouths, tossing back the cups and their heads at the same time. Then he brought his cup to his lips and tasted. Damn, if it didn’t have the sting of distilled corn itself!

  “What you think?” Workman asked.

  “G’won, drink up and tell the man what ye think of his lightning,” Hatcher demanded.

  Scratch brought the cup from his lips, licking them a moment. “Tastes like John Barleycorn to me.”

  “Drink it down and tell me if’n you like it,” Workman suggested, crossing his arms.

  He had to admit that he did. Having found that first sip quite to his liking, Bass threw back the cup, letting the rest of the clear, potent liquid tumble back over his tongue, right on down his gullet, where it scorched a wide, fiery path all the way to his belly.

  Impatient, Hatcher brought his face close, asking, “Well?”

  “M-more,” Bass stuttered, his voice as raspy as a coarse file dragged over crude cast iron. A bare whispery ghost of its former strength.

  “I think he likes it!” Caleb declared.

  “Lookit his eyes!” Isaac said as he leaned in an inch from Bass’s nose. “This man’s gonna be drunk on his ass afore he knows it—ain’t he, Jack?”

  “If that hoss don’t take the circle, Willy!” Hatcher bellowed. “Looks like ye found ’Nother nigger what took to yer likker right off!”

  “M-more, I said,” Scratch repeated, his voice a little less raspy this time. Already he was sensing the heat rise in his throat, his face and forehead feeling flushed and feverish.

  Workman complied, pouring a full cup this time. Then the others held out their cups as their host made the rounds of that tight circle, dispensing more of the heady grain spirits he had distilled from wheat and corn grown nearby in the Taos valley.

  “Now, s’pose you boys tell me all ’bout them scalps I see you have hanging from your belts and pouches,” Workman declared. “And don’t forget to tell me how you come to ride back into Taos with this here whiskey-lovin’ Titus Bass!”

  He didn’t remember much about that night, just crumbs of recollection scattered across the empty plate of his consciousness, no more than scraps slowly tumbling round in his aching head as he forced himself out of the blankets before he peed all over himself right then and there.

  Someone had put him to bed and covered him up. As he stood unsteadily, Scratch watched the slow spinning of a half-dozen points of light: the flames of low candles reflected against the walls, their pale light fluttering against the dark void surrounding the cave entrance, where an ashy grayness told him dawn was coming soon.

  How his head swam as he struggled to stay upright, wobbled, then almost went down, catching himself with a hand against the cold cavern wall. The others lay here and there, all six of them dead for all he could tell. But they weren’t—because somehow they had gotten him back to the cavern from the mill house and stretched him out beneath his blankets.

  This lathering his tonsils with whiskey wasn’t as much fun as it used to be.

  For an anxious moment he worried that he might have puked on himself while he’d lain there passed out. Sickened with the throbbing of a dull drum in his head, he stopped, braced himself against the wall just beneath one of the low, sputtering candles, and inspected the front of his shirt. Wiping a dirty hand down his chest, across his belly, and then lifting his breechclout to give it a quick inspection, Bass was satisfied he hadn’t made a mess of himself.

  The air grew chillier the closer he inched to the mouth of the cavern. A stiff breeze drifted down the riverbed the moment he stepped out into the morning air, nudging his wild, tangled hair. As he stood watering the ground, Bass realized the hangovers were beginning to hurt more than they ever had before. Maybeso the older he got, the more his body rebelled at the way he abused it.

  Tucking the breechclout back over himself, Scratch fought the dizzying headache doing its best to blind him, then swallowed down a little of the bile revolting from his stomach. How his head pounded, reverberating with the dull echo of distant gunshots.

  Then his stomach had finally had enough of his standing upright. What he had left from last night’s bear and corn mush flung itself against the back of his tongue violently. Folding at the waist, Titus spilled it onto the ground until he gagged nothing but a burning bile. Slowly he straightened, distressed that his head still echoed with the hammering of those distant gunshots—

  “Get them others rousted, goddammit!”

  Turning, Bass strained valiantly to focus his bloodshot eyes on where the voice had come from—finding Workman coming out of the gloom of that cold, gray dawn. The man took shape out of the dizzying rocks, that rifle across his arm.

  “Get Hatcher!” the whiskey maker shouted, his voice shrill, ringing off the narrow canyon walls. “Roll ’em out!”

  Behind him Scratch could hear others stirring, muttering inside the cave. Groggy, he grumbled, “What?”

  Workman came to a stop before him there at the entrance to the cavern. “There’s trouble in the village an’ we gotta go.”

  “Trouble?” Elbridge Gray asked as he emerged from the d
ark, swiping a big hand over his face several times.

  “Gunfire,” Workman said, starting to push past Gray. “Where’s Jack?”

  “I’m coming,” Hatcher’s voice was heard. Then he stood in the cold with the rest of them shoving up behind him.

  “Hush! Listen,” Rufus demanded.

  They did, for the space of a few heartbeats until Workman spoke.

  “Grab your guns, boys—and foller me.”

  “We gonna saddle up, Willy?” Caleb Wood asked.

  “Ain’t got the time!” he ordered. “We gotta go now!”

  They had led their horses out of the pole corral and were on the cold, bare backs, crossing that dark bottom ground between the cavern entrance and the stone mill house, urging their mounts up the trail cut along the gentle side of the canyon onto the high ground, where Workman led them out at a stiff lope. The wind at their back, the eight rode toward the graying horizon, toward the gunshots, toward the rising screams of the women.

  This was something totally new to Bass, this mix of rifle fire and those cries—the shrieks, the fear and horror of women. Never before had there been any womenfolk mixed in with the times he had been forced to spill blood.

  But of a sudden he remembered Annie Christmas’s gunboat on the Mississippi River. Moored up to the pier both bow and stern, what was once a Kentucky flatboat had been converted by its madame into a floating saloon and brothel. Just the sort of place where a man who drank too much might well never wake up. He recalled how Hames Kingsbury ended up having to gut the whore who came for him with blood in her eye. On Annie’s boat the whores were every bit as treacherous as were the river pirates themselves. Leaving dead men and women behind, they had fled Natchez by the skin of their teeth, praising the fates for sparing their lives.

  One of those big iron bells began to ring in the chill gray air—not two, as there had been at dusk last night. Just one bell, its tolling both a shrill warning, and a plaintive call for aid and succor. When the hair prickled on the back of his neck, Scratch tugged the coyote-fur cap down a little farther on his wild, unruly hair, hoping to make it more secure over the blue bandanna as they raced toward the outer buildings that gradually took form out of the gloom.

  Someone was blowing a horn now—its clear, brassy notes shrill on the air between each resounding peal from the cathedral bell. But by now the gunfire was fading quickly, falling off to a few scattered shots, then a final volley by the time the horsemen tore into the western outskirts of the village. Down a narrow street they clattered across the icy, rutted ground pressed between two rows of low-roofed dirt buildings, the dawn-gray walls like skulls pocked with black-doored nose rectangles and empty eye sockets of lightless windows. Dodging a dog here and there, reining aside for a crude, wood-wheeled carreta shoved up against its owner’s house, the eight kept on, stringing themselves out into a long file as Workman led them toward the center of town—

  Where the screaming grew louder, wails and shrieks of horror and distress swelling like a massive wave rumbling toward them, about to engulf the horsemen, when Bass saw the crowd take shape out of the dark.

  “Pray it ain’t one of our boys,” Isaac Simms growled beside him.

  “One of our—”

  Simms interrupted, “Gone under, Scratch. Gone under.”

  As the crowd congealed, become an organic, growing wild thing filling the street’s entrance to the town square, that cathedral bell continued clanging its call of danger, the brass horn kept raising its stuttering, clarion call from somewhere else in the village. Perhaps a rooftop, its braying alarm coming from on high, Scratch figured.

  They brought their guns up about the time Workman and Hatcher each threw up an arm to signal a halt. For another breathless heartbeat it appeared the crowd was turning to rush them, whirling away from the village square with murderous intent.

  “It’s the wimmens!” Jack bellowed as he yanked back on the reins, sawing them savagely to the left to spin his horse aside as the women surged toward the horsemen, screaming in utter chaos.

  In a swirl of shawl and dress, they poured around the riders, every arm held up to the horsemen, every hand imploring the Americans, eyes wide and fear filled, tears streaming down their faces, mouths chattering a wild, confusing, ear-taunting cacophony of a foreign tongue.

  “What’re they saying?” Jack shouted at Workman as their horses wheeled about, jostling, bumping into one another as the rest of the riders came to an abrupt halt, trapped in the narrow confines of the icy, rutted street. “Ye make it out?”

  “Comanche!” Workman barked the single word the rest of the horsemen could understand.

  “Hatcher!”

  Out of the milling mass of frightened women emerged the huge figure holding a rifle overhead at the end of his arm.

  “Kinkead!” Jack bellowed.

  It took several moments for the big man to force his way through the stream of women who flooded round him, and that tiny woman who dared not leave the safety of that shelter right beneath his left arm. They pulled at Matthew’s clothing, touched his face with their fingers, stumbled backward in front of him as they screamed and cried out their warnings, their pleas, their prayers.

  “Yer Rosa all right?” Hatcher asked as Kinkead and the woman reached the side of his horse.

  He pulled her closer beneath his bulk. “Rosa ain’t hurt. She came along—helped reload my guns.”

  Hatcher managed to get his horse close. “Willy says it was Comanche!”

  With a nod Kinkead replied, “They hit us in the dark, Jack. Come in on the south side of the village.”

  Rufus asked, “Where’s Rowland?”

  “I ain’t see’d him,” Matthew declared. “But I heard him hollering for me during the fight.”

  “Heard him?” Jack inquired.

  “His gun, heard it,” Kinkead explained. “And I thought I heard him yelling for me too.”

  “Maybeso the Comanch’ got him?”

  With a shrug Kinkead said, “Could have, Jack. I know he was staying the night on the far side of the village, near where the Comanch’ rode out when they was finished with us.”

  “What’d they get?” Workman demanded, trying to settle his nervous horse as the women shoved against the riders, filling every space between the Americans like water seeping between the boulders on a summer-dry creekbed.

  Looking down at Rosa, Kinkead had to shout to be heard. She appeared to listen a minute, then asked first one of the shrieking women, then another, before she stood on her toes and spoke into his ear.

  Matthew gazed up at Workman and Hatcher as they jostled before him in the frightened crowd, his face gray with concern. “They got some women, Jack. And a few of the niños … chirrun too.”

  “Women? Some growed women?”

  Kinkead nodded, swallowing. “Sounds like they got Rowland’s woman … his wife.”

  Hatcher’s eyes narrowed. “It don’t look good for Johnny, does it?”

  Staring at the ground a moment, Kinkead said, “Rowland ain’t the sort to let the Comanch’ take his wife if he were still alive.”

  “Let’s go find Johnny afore we go after the red-bellies!” Workman hollered.

  Hatcher whirled on him. “Ye fixing to go running after them Comanch’?”

  “Damn right! We can’t let ’em get too far ahead!”

  Jack turned to the others in a blur, asking his men above the dying tumult of screams that had become more a sobbing, wailing, whimpering mob of mourners, “We going after them Injuns?”

  “If Rowland’s wife is took by ’em,” Elbridge answered for the rest, “we’re going after every last one of the bastards!”

  Jack’s eyes bounced off the hairy faces, each pair of bloodshot eyes like sunset-streaked portals into their tortured, hungover souls. He asked, “Elbridge speak for the rest of ye?”

  Feeling the fear of it rise in a knot from the gut of him, Bass watched them all nod, some of the men growling their agreement like the distant coming
of black-bellied thunder.

  Hatcher turned toward him. “How ’bout you, Scratch?”

  He felt the eyes on him, not just of the men who had saved his hash after he’d been left for dead, but of these half a hundred or more women who looked up at him with their pooling eyes. His belly was empty of everything but the fear, now that he had puked back at the cave. A cold, gut-wrenching fear … and the hot, rising flush of adrenaline giving fire to his veins.

  “Ain’t nothing could keep me from going.”

  8

  “Ain’t a man worth his salt gonna stand for Injuns stealing women and young’uns,” Bass told them as they nudged their horses into motion, slowly parting the crowd of wailing women. “I ’member my grandpap telling me about the Shawnee and others what come down on the canebrake settlers way back, not just to kill and burn them folks out, but to steal the womenfolk and the young’uns too.”

  “This is different,” Hatcher groaned as he studied the scene, side to side. “There’d be too damned many of them Comanch’ for us to take on from the looks of things here.”

  Solomon hollered, “But them red-bellies gotta pay!”

  “Too damned many of ’em!” Jack repeated, working to convince them. “There’s just a handful of us.”

  “We ain’t gonna give it a try?” Bass shouted.

  “And get ourselves kill’t in the bargain?” Caleb protested.

  Titus sighed, his eyes imploring Hatcher. “Awright, Jack. We find John Rowland first—then go out there on their trail and see if we figger out how many we’re up against by the looks of the tracks.”

  For a long moment their leader considered that. “So be it. I don’t cotton to no Injun carrying off no woman or child neither, boys. We’ll go find Johnny … then we’ll see what the trail’s got to tell us about what we’d be up against.”

  There erupted a spontaneous, raw cheer among these men yanked from their blankets, heads throbbing with a long-overdue hangover, men grouchy, out of sorts, and damned well ready to do battle.

  “Get you yer horse, Matthew!” Hatcher shouted, turning to fling his words behind him as the Americans moved their animals slowly into the noisy crowd filling the village square. “We gotta find Johnny!”