Crack in the Sky

by Terry C. Johnston

  “Tell me, Matthew—she a gal gonna get Jack in trouble?”

  “Nawww, she’s the sort gonna get us all in trouble,” Kinkead replied. “That’s Consuela Guerrero.”

  Bass licked his lips, thinking how lucky Hatcher was to be getting all that attention from such an alluring woman arrayed in black lace stretched tight against her dark-brown skin. “She’s a purty one.”

  Matthew clucked, “Her husband was the officer what got hisself killed by the Comanche when we brung back the women.”

  “That’s her?”

  Kinkead nodded. “The widow Guerrero her own self.”

  “What’s she doing here after her husband got hisself kill’t?” Caleb asked.

  “Why, lookit there—the widder is wearin’ black!” Elbridge said, patting the beginnings of a potbelly slipping over his belt.

  “Wonder if she’s gonna be wearing black all night?” Bass snorted with a grin. “Or if she’s gonna shuck herself outta them widder’s weeds for Mad Jack Hatcher!”

  In a flurry the following moment, Kinkead pushed away from the rest of them, leaving his Rosa behind as he warned, “Jack ain’t never gonna know now!”

  Their eyes followed Matthew into the crowd, finding the dancers at the center of the floor suddenly shoving backward, getting themselves as far as possible from the spot where Hatcher stood imprisoned by two large Mexican soldiers as Lieutenant Jorge Ramirez yanked the widow away from the American, whirling her back by her arm. She screamed, swinging out with her flat hand. But the lieutenant caught it, held it prisoner while he shouted at her and the room grew hushed, the music ending in discordant notes.

  “What’s he saying to her, Kinkead!” Hatcher bellowed, twisting this way and that, trying to free himself from the two men who had him stymied.

  “Telling her she ain’t got no business dancing with you—not when her husband is in his grave because of us gringos.”

  Every set of American eyes snapped to Ramirez as the trappers came to a stop arrayed on either side of Matthew Kinkead.

  His eyes narrowing into a feral wildness, Jack echoed, “He said her husband’s dead ’cause … ’cause of us?”

  “Shit!” Caleb growled. “The rest of them li’l wooden soldiers be nothing more’n buzzard bait right now if’n it weren’t for the likes of us!”

  Jack tried again to twist away from his handlers. “Tell these sumbitches let me go!”

  Matthew spat some of the foreign tongue at the soldiers being joined by young men in civilian clothing. In their sashes were jammed pistols, and from their wide belts hung stiletto knives and short swords.

  The lieutenant howled with a derisive laugh, then snarled something in reply.

  “Caleb—get these greasers off’n me!”

  Speaking low, Caleb said, “Elbridge, you and Scratch come with me to get Hatcher free.”

  “That’ll start the dance!” Gray said.

  “Fight now, or fight later,” Caleb snapped. “We damn well ain’t gonna show the white feather to these here greasers tonight!”

  With those words still in the air, the trio descended upon the two soldiers so suddenly, the Mexicans let go of their prisoner on reflex to reach for their weapons. Hatcher whirled on one of them like a wild blur, his bony fist cracking into the soldier’s jaw like a twenty-pound sledge colliding with solid hickory. Bass was right behind Hatcher as Elbridge and Caleb leaped into the second soldier.

  In the next heartbeat Matthew and the others surged past Titus in a blur, lunging toward bystanders on all sides the moment the Mexican males jumped out of the crowd to resist the gringo attack. Women screeched. Furniture was overturned and crumbled. Clay and glass shattered against walls and the hard earth floor. Men grunted as bodies slammed together.

  Isaac was suddenly there beside Bass, grabbing Scratch’s hand—shoving into it a thick piece of a broken chair that felt as big as a horse’s leg. An instant later the stocky Simms turned aside, slapping another chair leg into Rufus’s hand. That done, Isaac began swinging two chair legs over his own head as he hurtled toward the worst of the fighting.

  First one, and a second, then more heads cracked loudly in that noisy room as the three of them cleared a swath right into the soldiers and their civilian friends. Joining Hatcher and the rest, they kept swinging their crude weapons as they retreated to the center of the room, eyes quickly darting this way and that. The trappers crowded back together, each of them facing out like herd bulls protectively surrounding the cows and calves against a pack of wolves snarling, yapping, dodging in to slash at a hamstring.

  “No guns!” the governor bellowed in English from the platform.

  His futile warning was hardly heard above the frightening clamor as the soldiers warily inched toward the ring of eight Americans, their pistols and knives, swords and shards of broken glass, held before them as they closed the noose.

  “No guns, señores!” Mirabal warned again, louder still, as the Mexicans came within striking distance.

  “Get ready for the nut-cutting, boys!” Hatcher bawled, his arm slowly waving his own knife back and forth as he went into a crouch, preparing for the coming clash. He took a quick feint toward the closest adversary—getting the soldier to leap back—then Jack rocked onto the balls of his feet, body swaying side to side as he laughed.

  Bass knew Hatcher was laughing at death.

  Hell, he could smell that stinking odor of death all around them in this room.

  Suddenly certain he was about to die.

  Instead of making a life for himself within the bosom of the high and lonely places, he was going to shed his life’s blood here on this clay floor in a foreign land, cut to ribbons by greasers, perhaps with a Mexican bullet in his heart.

  Where was his mother’s god now?

  Why would any god leave him to die after he’d somehow survived those long years rotting in St. Louis, lasted long enough to make it to the Rocky Mountains on his own hook? Why would a god that ruled from the heavens above abandon him now after the Arapaho had tried twice to kill him? Blackfeet done their best too….

  So he was to die among these Christian people whose eyes were filled with such hate.

  11

  As Mirabal’s daughter rushed onto the platform, lunging across the last two steps to clutch her father’s arm, screaming at him, the governor shoved Jacova behind him and continued yelling into the pandemonium.

  Suddenly Mirabal drew his own pistol from the wide red sash there beneath the short-waisted chaqueta.

  At that instant the screaming women were falling back toward the walls, leaving the two rings of antagonists alone in the middle of the long sala: that small knot of outnumbered Americans at the center, a thick ring of Mexican rivals surrounding them.

  Firing his weapon into one of the thick wooden beams above their heads, Mirabal instantly silenced the entire room. The soldiers spun with a jerk. And the trappers looked up in alarm.

  Bass wondered, Was this the signal for the killing to begin?

  When he had their attention, the governor began to speak again in his loud, certain voice.

  “He just ordered them soldados to put their pistols away,” Kinkead translated breathlessly.

  For a moment no one moved; then the first of the soldiers began to comply … as if they had weighed the odds of disobeying not only their governor but their gracious host. The haughty Mexicans stuffed their pistols back into the colorful sashes tied around their waists, still brandishing their knives and short swords with unmasked glee.

  “If one of us falls,” Hatcher growled, “the rest get round him—don’t let them greasers drag him off.”

  “How many you figger we can take on?” Caleb asked.

  Elbridge was the first to answer. “Many as they wanna throw agin’ us!”

  Just as the soldiers took another cautious step toward their rivals, Mirabal hollered again.

  Jack demanded, “What’s he saying?”

  “Something about the knives,” Kinkead decla
red. “He don’t want no killing here.”

  The governor hollered to some older men at the foot of the platform. Reluctantly two of them handed up their pistols to Mirabal. He immediately held them right over the heads of those standing below him on the clay floor, pointing the weapons directly at Ramirez.

  Matthew swallowed hard, saying, “Mirabal just told ’im he’d be the first to die. If there’s gonna be blood, then Ramirez’s blood’s gonna be the first on this floor.”

  “He—he’s really pulling them soldiers back?” Fish asked in that hushed room.

  Kinkead nodded. “Says he won’t let the lieutenant and his men dishonor him twice.”

  It was plain as sun how the governor’s words slapped the officer and his men every bit as hard as if he would strike them across the cheek.

  “Says them soldiers dishonored him when they didn’t fight hard enough to save all the prisoners,” Matthew explained to his stunned companions.

  “Weren’t their fault the bastards was yeller polecats,” Isaac grumbled.

  Continuing, Kinkead declared, “He won’t stand for the soldiers dishonoring him again by killing in his … in his house …”

  Bass listened to the way Kinkead’s voice dropped off. “What … what is it, Matthew?”

  “He said there won’t be no killing in his house, ’specially no killing the men what brung his wife and daughter back to him safe.”

  The lieutenant whirled on the governor, red-faced as he spat out his words, gripping the huge butt of that pistol stuffed into his sash. The officer’s whole body trembled with rage.

  “He says that’s twice Mirabal’s shamed him and his men,” Matthew warned gravely. “Says they’re due the right to wipe off that shame, or there is no honor in this house.”

  Slowly the governor lowered one of the pistols, pointing the other directly at the lieutenant’s head.

  “If there’s gonna be killing, that Ramirez gonna be the first to die here. Mirabal ain’t gonna let them soldiers disobey him.”

  Even though the room was as quiet as a convent at dusk, the governor bellowed like a bull, flushed with anger from the neck up.

  “Told ’em to put away ever’thing,” Kinkead translated. “Knives too.”

  “Why?” Hatcher asked.

  Pausing before he answered, Matthew eventually explained, “Told Ramirez if they wanted to show they was honorable men, then they could fight like real men—’thout no guns or no knives.”

  “No knives?” Simms repeated.

  For a long time no one moved.

  Then suddenly the lieutenant turned away from his men and stepped right to the foot of the platform, where he passed both his pistol and his long stiletto to Jacova. The governor’s daughter took the weapons as the rest of the Mexican males reluctantly handed over their weapons to women lining the adobe walls where candles flickered in the still air.

  Mirabal hurled his voice over the heads of the others, speaking to the trappers.

  Matthew translated, “Says it’s our turn to put our guns away—”

  “Cache our guns?” Hatcher replied in disbelief. “Ain’t no way in hell I’m letting go of this pistol of mine—not when these sumbitches got us outnumbered the way they do.”

  Silence fell heavy about them once more. And finally Mirabal spoke, filled with apparent regret.

  “Governor says we ain’t the honorable men he thought we was when we brung his family back … not if we don’t put our guns and knives away like his soldiers done.”

  “If we do,” Wood demanded, “then what?”

  Matthew drew himself up hugely, “Then we’ll have us our fight.”

  “Us agin’ alla them?” Isaac inquired.

  “Just our fists, boys!” Kinkead cheered as he turned and passed his weapons to Rosa.

  “Who’s gonna hold the rest what we got?” Hatcher demanded.

  Graham said, “Yeah—I ain’t trusting no one with my gun and my knife!”

  “Lay ’em on that table by you,” a voice cried out in plain English from somewhere beyond the thick ring of Mexicans. “They be safe right there.”

  “Damn,” Bass muttered as the slight figure poked his way through the last layer of soldiers and stepped into the open between the two groups of rivals.

  “Johnny!” Hatcher bellowed with glee. “Come to fandango with yer friends?”

  Rowland’s eyes bounced over the crowd a moment before he answered. “I s’pose you might say I come to fandango, Jack.”

  “We was ’bout to have us a do-si-do with these here greasers,” Caleb explained.

  “That’s what I was tol’t,” John replied. “My Maria’s mama—she come to get me over to Matthew’s place.”

  “She come for ye?”

  With a nod Rowland answered bravely, “Tol’t me there was trouble aplenty ’tween the soldiers and my companyeros. Said I should come help my friends—since they was such good boys to go help me get my Maria back from the Comanch’. M-my Maria.”

  At Rowland’s pained words a flame burned gently in Scratch’s chest, a sharp warmth lodged just behind his breastbone. He felt the salty sting at his eyes.

  “You gonna fight with us?” Elbridge asked, tugging manfully at his leather britches.

  “I didn’t come to dance with the likes of you, you ugly nigger!”

  Then Rowland moved past the trappers, laying his two pistols on the long table. He didn’t turn until he had taken his knife from its scabbard and propped it between the two pistols shoved in among the clay jugs of lightning and crystal bowls of sweet brandy.

  Johnny turned back to the Americans, his eyes damp. “Yeah, boys—I come to fight ’longside my friends.”

  Hatcher suddenly raised his chin and let loose a shrill wolf howl. The rest instantly followed suit, clearly unnerving the soldiers as John Rowland stepped up and squeezed in between Hatcher and Kinkead, both men making room for him in their tight circle.

  Matthew ordered, “Rest of you—put your guns and knives away, fellers … just like Johnny done. Because—by God—we’re gonna give these here greasers the thrubbin’ they been needing ever since’t we come back from fighting the Comanche for ’em!”

  One by one, wary and watchful, the trappers stepped over to the table, laid their weapons down, then quickly resumed their place in the tiny ring. Now there were nine of them. Nine against many times their number. But as the last of the Americans, Jack Hatcher himself, stepped back to that circle of defenders, the lieutenant growled a command of his own and the soldiers started forward.

  But this time there were only the seven in uniform, and no more than nine in civilian clothing. Realizing he no longer had the great numbers behind him, the lieutenant halted right in his tracks, whirling around on his heel to glare back at those who no longer joined him.

  Hatcher turned to Kinkead as Ramirez began shouting.

  Matthew said, “The rest of ’em he’s calling cowards.”

  “I figger ’em for smart fellers,” Bass declared.

  “How you figger on that?” Solomon asked beneath that sharp hatchet of a nose dotted with huge pores forever darkened with fire soot and ground-in dirt.

  Titus explained, “They’re smart enough to know that they ain’t got near as good a chance taking us on when they don’t have all them guns and knives.”

  “Give ’em the thrubbing they deserve!” Caleb bellowed as the lieutenant turned around to face Hatcher.

  With a sudden screech of rage Ramirez lunged forward, his arms raised, both hands stiffened like claws over his head. Jack was the first to swing his chair leg as the others rushed in behind the lieutenant.

  Scratch didn’t see when his friends got into the melee—he was already swinging the thick chair leg he clutched in his sweaty hands at the first of two soldiers rushing him. That burly Mexican reached up, seizing the chair leg in midarc as he leaped up toe to toe. Bass brought up his knee in that instant the soldier was setting himself to strike, savagely driving it into the Mexican’s gr
oin. But he had little time to enjoy watching the man crumple before him, clutching his genitals, his dark face gone pasty in pain.

  For the second soldier had grabbed the end of the chair leg and rocked back with a jerk, then made a second attempt to loosen it from Bass’s grip. Instead, Scratch drove his heel down onto the Mexican’s shin, stabbing the man’s instep with all his weight. As the soldier lunged back, releasing the chair leg, Bass was already swinging it behind his shoulder—

  —just when he felt a huge fist slam into his lower back.

  The pain was so immediate, so severe, that he sensed the breath rush out of his lungs, sensed his knees turning to water.

  Then came a second blow to his back, harder than the first. His legs went out right under him as if they weren’t there.

  As Scratch went down, he heard the women’s screams for the first time. They almost drowned out the grunts of men colliding, bone and muscle and sinew crashing together, might against might. So loud was the screaming and that thunder of bone striking bone that he almost didn’t hear the sharp gust of wind rush from his lips as he struck the hard clay of the earthen floor.

  Gasping for breath, he twisted about to look up—finding that shadow looming over him become the first soldier he had kneed as the Mexicans rushed them. While Scratch drew himself into a ball, the soldier drove his cowhide boot into Bass’s ribs again and again. With each blow great bubbles of air exploded from Titus’s lungs, replaced by searing pain. Moccasins and boots scuffed around his head as he fought to curl himself tighter … struggling not only against the Mexican’s boot, but fighting down the frightening remembrance of that brutal beating at the hands of Silas Cooper.

  Suddenly the Mexican’s foul breath was in his face as the soldier grabbed a handful of Bass’s shirt, raising the American slightly, then driving his fist into Titus’s face. A second time the man pulled Bass halfway up off the floor, only to slam his jaw back down with another blow.

  He was going to kill him, just as Cooper tried!

  But this time Scratch vowed he would not lie there and take a beating like a whipped dog.