Authors: Terry C. Johnston
Bass watched Matthew swing up into the saddle and settle before he lumbered against the post and untied the first animal. Quickly lashing his clothing behind the Spanish saddle, he stuffed his left foot into the stirrup and dragged the wounded leg over the cantle before adjusting the tails of his capote.
Wagging his big head, Kinkead chuckled. “You’re bare-assed naked under that capote, ain’cha?”
Scratch came alongside as they wheeled about and put heels to their horses. “Never rode with a naked man afore?”
Down the street, voices grew louder.
“Don’t make no never-mind to me.” And Kinkead grinned. “Long as you got your business done afore them
soldados
showed up. Vamoose!”
All three put their animals into a rolling gallop, threading themselves through the dark tapestry of that sleepy village. Behind them the shouts of soldiers quickly faded as they raced on, submerged in a maze of shadows where disembodied dogs barked and every few houses a candle fluttered into life behind a frost-coated, rawhide-covered window where frightened faces briefly appeared.
On the far side of Bass, McAfferty asked, “We going to your place?”
“Hell, no!” Matthew grumbled. “Gonna keep you two troublemakers far away as I can from Rosa and me!”
“Maybeso you ought’n turn back now,” Scratch said as they shot past the last houses and reined toward the low ridge where the night lay its deepest.
“Hep!” was Matthew’s reply as he kicked his horse into a harder gallop. “Me leave you niggers on your own
now? Just when you’ve gone and stirred up more fun than this sleepy village seen in years?”
Kinkead ended up leading them along the patchy shadows of the broken butte until the village disappeared from sight behind them. Only then did he rein his horse up a narrow switchback trail the Mexican shepherds used to guide their flocks of sheep to the top of the mesa. On that flat above the distant village, Matthew headed cross-country, making a beeline for Workman’s canyon beneath the cold, starry sky. Already the North Star was slipping into the west.
“Who’s there?” the sleepy voice called from the stone house when Kinkead sang out their arrival.
“It’s Kinkead, Willy! Got a couple troublemakers with me.”
Workman noisily dragged back the door on its earthen perch and stood there before them of a sudden like a thin strip of coal cotton in the night, his rifle laid across his elbow. “What’d they do?”
“Said they killed a couple of soldiers.”
Bass looked up from his right leg. “More’n two—”
“Shit!” the whiskey maker grumbled.
“We only come to get our plunder,” McAfferty explained as he leaped down, handing Kinkead his reins, and started to turn away. “We’ll be gone afore any more of them greasers catch up to us.”
Workman stepped into the starshine, stopping Asa in his tracks. “Where you gonna go that the
soldados
won’t chase you?”
“The mountains,” Bass declared, dragging his bad leg off the saddle and landing with a grunt.
“It’s the middle of winter!” Workman snorted.
“Maybeso we’ll ride to Santy Fee,” Asa said, starting to push past the whiskey maker.
Kinkead himself reached out and grabbed McAfferty’s arm, stopping him. “And wait for the soldiers to figger out you gone south?”
“There’s a place where they can lay in,” Workman declared quietly. “Fella by the name of Vaca.”
“Ol’ Vaca?” Kinkead repeated. Then he turned on
Bass. “Has him a rancho at the mouth of the Peñablanca. South of Santy Fee, not far down the Rio Grande, fellas.”
Workman nodded. “Heard from the tongue of Ewing Young hisself that Vaca been hiding furs for gringos at his place last few winters.”
Scratch stepped up close to the whiskey maker. “The name’s Vaca?”
With a nod Workman said, “Luis Maria Cabeza de Vaca. But among us Americans he’s knowed as Ol’ Vaca.”
“Head for his place,” Kinkead demanded firmly. “And stay there till you figger out how to keep your necks outta the hangman’s noose.”
“Them soldiers had it coming!” Bass snarled, the cold sinking to the bone in that wounded leg. “Ramirez busted in on me, looking for trouble—”
“Likely so,” Matthew interrupted. “Ever since we stole their thunder with the governor’s wife—but Mex is Mex and gringo is gringo down here, Scratch … and now them
soldados
got ’em a license not just to arrest you for your beaver—but they got a reason to kill you where you stand.”
Bass looked over at McAfferty. Asa nodded.
So Scratch said, “Let’s get what little the two of us own packed up and on the animals.”
“What all plews you wanna leave with me,” Workman offered, “I’ll keep ’em till I can sell ’em off and hold the money for you.”
“You get the money to us at Vaca’s?” McAfferty inquired.
“Just tell me so, and I’ll bring it to you there.”
“Maybeso to keep the soldiers off your trail, Willy,” Bass said, “send Johnny Rowland down with the money what we get for our plews.”
Wagging his head, Kinkead replied, “Johnny’s gone, Scratch. How long for, I ain’t got no idea.”
Scratch asked, “Rowland—gone? Where?”
“Threw in with Antoine Robidoux’s bunch, last fall. Not long after he talked a squaw from out to the pueblo into riding with him.”
“So Johnny’s got him ’Nother woman now?”
Matthew nodded. “Seems a likely enough gal. Someone help ease him over his Maria.”
“Good for him,” Workman agreed.
“Where they going?” McAfferty inquired.
“Winty country,” Matthew explained as the four of them started for the cavern. “Fixing to get some trapping in afore winter comes.”
“That country gets its share of snow early enough,” Asa declared. “Maybeso it ain’t so smart of Robidoux to winter ’em up there.”
“A might safer’n greaser country is for the two of you,” Workman scoffed.
“All right—we’ll send you word how to get the money to us, Willy,” Bass said as he limped behind them, all four men hurrying down the narrow path that led to the cavern where they had stowed their goods.
By the time Titus had dressed, and he and McAfferty had their packs separated and had hauled what they could take out of the torch-lit cavern, Workman and Kinkead had the horses and Hannah ready to go. Between the four of them it took but a matter of minutes to get what few possibles and supplies they were taking with them lashed onto the pack frames. Then Bass turned to the whiskey maker.
“Willy—you do what you can with them plews of ours, but don’t sell ’em cheap.”
“I’ll get best dollar I can.”
They shook, and Titus gripped both of his hands around Workman’s, saying, “I know you will.”
As McAfferty stepped up and took the trader’s hand, Scratch turned to Kinkead. “Don’t know the next time I’ll see you, Matthew.”
He smiled broadly, those big teeth of his glittering in the night like a string of mother-of-pearl buttons. “Just you count on seeing me again, Scratch. Don’t worry about the when. Could be next month. Could be next year. Hell, I might not lay eyes on you for winters yet to come.”
Damn! But this tug at his heart always caused his eyes to smart. “Take care of Rosa for me,” he asked. “She’s a
fine woman, Matthew. And she’s got her a good man too.”
Kinkead threw his arms around Bass, nearly squeezing the juices out of the smaller man before he stepped back and said, “You two watch over each other, won’t you?”
“We will,” McAfferty vowed as he held out his hand. “Way I figger it—we both saved each other’s hash now.”
Titus painfully pulled himself into the saddle. “Seems the score’s even atween us, Asa.”
“That don’t matter a tinker’s damn if you niggers don’t live to get out of Mexico,” Workman growled. “Best get!”
“Time to get high behind,” Bass agreed, shifting some weight off the wounded leg.
McAfferty whirled about and swung into the saddle, adjusting his moccasins in the stirrups, tucking the tail of his capote around his leggings.
“I swear I’ll see you boys again,” Bass promised as he nudged his horse into motion, yanking on Hannah’s lead rope.
“Just make sure you don’t show your faces around Taos till folks down here forget just how ugly you two niggers really are,” Kinkead chided them. “Give it least a winter or two.”
“Tell Rosa to keep you fed and happy in the sack, Matthew!” Bass said, turning in the saddle to hurl his voice back at Kinkead as they loped away. His words echoed off the canyon walls, “And keep your eye on the skyline. One day soon you’ll see this child back on your doorstep!”
It was Christmas the day they reached Santa Fe. The plaza and surrounding streets were jammed with worshipers headed for Mass: horses and donkeys, carts and wagons and carriages, all squeezing past one another as the two Americans slipped off the hills and onto the muddy, rutted, snow-covered road, disappearing among the throngs merging to celebrate the Savior’s birth long, long ago.
Swept along with the pious and the noisy, Bass and
McAfferty stayed among the crowds as those masses pushed for the town square. Once there, they could thread their way back out on the far side of the village with little chance of standing out in the throng. Safer that, what with all the soldiers coming and going.
Maybe the
soldados
posted here hadn’t been alerted to the killings in Taos. But maybe they had.
As the streaming masses began to converge on the outskirts of town, Bass and McAfferty were swept on through the clutter of hovels where Santa Fe’s poorest inhabitants lived. Tiny pole-and-wattle huts, these were really shelters no more than a single room where a large family eked out their daily existence. While the walls of some were constructed with crude mud bricks, so too were the low roofs. Because they were nothing more than dirt and straw spread across a network of branches and limbs, when the rains came, or the soaking of wet winter snows, those roofs invariably leaked, often collapsing on the sleeping inhabitants below.
If there happened to be any windows in the walls of those adobe huts the two Americans passed by this morning, they weren’t covered with glass. That extravagance was found only on the richest of homes standing closer to the town plaza. Here where the poorest lived, the tiny windows, most no larger than portholes, were covered instead with rawhide scraped to a translucent thinness, or even sheets of transparent mica quarried from the nearby hills.
In the shadow of every house stood the squat outdoor ovens fashioned from adobe as well, each one shaped very much like bone-china coffee cups turned upside down on the icy ground. During the day these beehive-shaped ovens contained the fires tended by a woman for her baking; at night they and their warm coals provided shelter for each family’s dogs.
Among the songs and joyous shouts, the two trappers were swept along beneath bright strips of cloth fluttering from banners held high, the Mexicans joining the brays and bleats of nervous animals, curses from the poor owners of the crude
carretas
, and cries from Indian servants guiding the carriages of their wealthy owners through the
crowds along the hard-packed streets—faceless Americans lost in the cacophony of this sacred day, pushed ever onward toward the central square and the huge, towering cathedral. Along each side of the narrow avenues stood those carts and stalls of vendors crying out to the passing crowds, their loud and shrill voices hawking trinkets or cloth, coffee or sweets, perhaps some shiny bauble to offer a loved one, or a candle to light for the Virgin Madonna on this special day.
In the air drifted the close smell of animal and man, fresh dung and old sweat, in addition to a mingling of savory spices simmering in a hundred different kettles hung over fires burning along each avenue. Cedar and piñon added their thready smoke to the cold, frosty air as the huge bells began to peal and the crowd shouted anew, surging forward in a hurry through the rutted streets of icy corduroy. All were eager to reach the cathedral and find themselves a place to sit, if only a place to stand, before the priests began their sacred high Mass on this most holy day.
Here the wealthy rancho owners and their families rubbed shoulders with the hacienda peons and the slaves who worked their fields. Many of the tribes in the region raided neighboring bands, stealing children from one another, then selling these prizes to slave traders, who would bring them to the Mexican villages where the captives would be sold at auction. Young boys grew up working in the fields or tending the owner’s animals. There was an even higher demand for young girls to work the many household chores it took to keep their master’s rancho operating. The Navajo were the most numerous and, therefore, made the most wealth at this trade in human misery, while the destitute Paiute were driven to venture to the Mexican towns, where, having no captives of their own and possessing nothing else to trade, they reluctantly sold their children into slavery.
Suddenly the Nativity procession came to an abrupt halt as a parade of small children streamed in from a side street, raising their beautiful voices in a song of the blessed birth, some of them bearing streamers over their heads, the
rest carrying tall tallow candles, flames fluttering on the morning air as they marched in formation past the braying burros and whinnying mules, the crowd clapping and joining in that joyous, youthful song. At the end of their line came groups of the oldest youngsters, who carried on their shoulders long platforms bearing crude papier-mâché effigies of the magi, lowly shepherds, the sacred Madonna and Joseph, and of course the infant Christ swaddled and lying in his simple corncrib.
Immediately behind these children appeared the holy fathers: a half-dozen black-robed priests, swinging the smudge of their sacred incense and surrounded by their young acolytes. As the holy men passed by, some of those in the crowd fell to their knees and cried out for heavenly mercy and temporal blessings; others turned their faces and palms heavenward, making sacred vows, while most merely bowed their heads in silence while the padres moved on past, the oldest of the altar boys struggling beneath the huge wooden cross he dragged along.
As soon as that replica of the dying Christ nailed to the crossed timbers went by, the somber devout rose from their knees, joyous smiles returning to their faces, and songs began to spill from their tongues, many clapping in ecstasy as they resumed their celebration of this holiest of Christian holidays.