maker.
Cobb watched the fire, fed on it, felt it burning inside him, too. His blood was acid that bubbled and seethed. His heart a red-hot piston hammering and hammering, throwing sparks and oily steam. The birthmark at his back was like an iron brand scorched into his flesh.
The volunteers ringed the schoolhouse, muskets at the ready.
“ Any of them chilis get out,” Cobb told them. “Drop them bastards.”
The volunteers had tracked the Mexican guerrillas here to a little town called Del Barra. This is where they lived, operated out of. Just a shabby collection of shacks and adobes leeched by the sun and blasted by desert wind, all lorded over by an old Spanish church and schoolhouse. In the basement of the church, the volunteers found rifles and ammunition, uniforms and weapons stripped from American dead. Many of these still had bloodstains on them.
The priest had refused to let them see the cellar.
Cobb slit his throat.
So the schoolhouse blazed in that hot, arid country and the wind was that of pyres and crematories, the sun melting like a coin of yellow wax in the cloudless sky above.
Sweat ran down Cobb’s face like tears, cutting clean trails through the ground-in dirt. His eyes were wide and unblinking, red-rimmed like the boundaries of hell. A pink worm of a tongue licked salt from his lips. He could hear the sounds of the shouting and shrieking within. Flames had engulfed one side of the schoolhouse now and were greedily licking up another. Inside…old men, women, children. Pounding and screeching to be let out.
There was a sudden wild, roaring sound and the entire schoolhouse was engulfed. It didn’t take much. The wood was dry as tinder, caught flame like matchsticks. Smoke twisted in the air, black belching funnels of it. It stank of charred wood, cremated flesh and singed hair.
The screaming and pounding was dying out now.
“ Just about all fried up, I reckon,” Jones said, scratching at his crotch.
A few flaming forms burst from the inferno now, stick figures swallowed in yellow and orange flame. They stumbled about, arms waving about crazily. If it hadn’t been so profane, it might have been comical. Volunteers opened up on them dropping them as danced through the doorway. More followed. Anything, anything to escape the flames. The volunteers fired, primed and loaded, fired again.
A final form came running with a weird, jerking gait, flames licking from it in flickering plumes. It carried something. Cobb figured it was a mother carrying her child.
He held his hand up.
The volunteers did not fire.
She made it maybe ten, fifteen feet, collapsed in a smoldering heap. Cobb watched her until the fire died out and she was just a folded-up, blackened window dummy, her flesh falling away in cinders. She and the child had been melted together in a roasted mass. Their faces were incinerated skulls. The smoke that came from them was hot and stinking.
Within an hour, as the volunteers sat around drinking mescal and chewing on tortillas looted from the adobes, the schoolhouse had fallen into itself in a jackstraw tumble of soot and blackened beams.
There was nothing left.
After a time, the volunteers burned the church and dynamited the adobes until there was nothing left to mark the village of Del Barra but embers and smoke and the stink of death.
And that’s how they left it.
But, of course, the war had to come to an end.
After Monterrey and Camargo, Buena Vista and Vera Cruz, Cerro Gordo and Palo Alto, the Mexicans, beaten and weary and just simply tired of the carnage, signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the war ended.
The Americans filtered back into Texas and New Mexico.
Some were grateful that it had come to an end.
Others just went looking for another fight.
James Lee Cobb went looking for something, too…he just wasn’t sure what.
5
Long before the Mexican-American War, the Mexican authorities paid private armies to hunt down and kill marauding tribes of Indians-particularly Apaches and Comanche’s-that were harassing Mexican towns and villages. The Indians would swarm down from the U. S side of the border, killing men, kidnapping women, stealing livestock and horses…in fact, anything they could lay their hands on.
The Mexican army simply couldn’t contend with these raiders, so scalp bounty laws were enacted. The scalps acted as “receipts”: each worth roughly a hundred pesos. And for industrious, prolific bounty hunters the rewards could be quite lucrative indeed. One might think the repellent nature of the business would limit the amount of hunters, but this wasn’t so. After the Panic of 1837, there were plenty looking for quick cash. And they weren’t real particular as to what they had to do to get it.
During the Mexican-American War, Indian depredations diminished somewhat. Mainly because U.S. soldiers spent their free time hunting down renegade bands. When the war ended…the Indian raids picked-up considerably. Comanche’s and Apaches killed hundreds of Mexicans, stole thousands of heads of livestock, and kidnapped an untold number of women and children.
The scalp bounties were revived in most Mexican states, but particularly in Chihuahua and Sonora…and with a vengeance.
The price was now $200 American for a single “receipt”.
James Lee Cobb, like many other soldiers, found himself suddenly working for the very government he’d done his damnedest to sack during the war. The whole thing became something of a cottage industry complete with regulatory committees and inspectors. Standards were set by the Mexican authorities to prevent fraud-a scalp had to include either the crown or both ears and preferably both. This prevented fresh scalps from being stretched and sliced-up, sold off as a dozen or more.
Cobb worked with a team consisting of himself, two ex-Texas Rangers, and three Shawnee Indians who were expert at removing scalps. They hunted down Apaches, Comanche’s, even Seri Indians. They scalped men, women, children…sparing no one.
Since it was easier to work on a freshly-killed body-the living ones protested the practice vehemently-Cobb and his boys usually put their rounds into the chests of their victims. A clear heart-shot simplified the hell out of things. Their prey went down dead and you could get to work on them right away, instead of waiting for them to expire from their wounds. Because scalp-hunting was a business like any other and time was money. Of course, to save time you could slit their throats or stab them in the heart to speed things along. Women and children you could lay in wait for, lasso ‘em like stock and gun them down.
Drop ‘em and peel ‘em, as Cobb liked to put it.
The braves took a little more stealth. Sometimes Cobb and his boys sprang carefully-arranged ambushes to bring down hunting parties and sniping from a distance had its merits. The Shawnees were real good with the wet work. They’d slit around the crown of the head and then, sitting with their feet on the victim’s shoulders, yank the scalp free. They could go through a dozen Indians in record time.
Of course, Cobb and the Texans were no slouches either.
After the scalps were yanked, they were salted and tied to poles to preserve them until they could be cashed-in.
One time, in Durango, Cobb’s hunters killed a party of thirty braves by sniping them in a dry wash with long rifles. After they’d dropped and peeled ‘em, they backtracked to the Indian’s camp and slaughtered no less than sixty women and children. Though, truth be told, they spent most of the day beating the brush for those that had run off.
