big limbs snapping off like they was fire kindling, my sisters caterwauling like painter cubs … when my mama up and tells us all she see’d it all real plain, see’d it as a sure sign that I was to preach God’s word to his wayward flocks.”

Scratch nodded, enthralled with the story. “You knowed back then you was made for speaking them Bible words.”

McAfferty snorted and rubbed the raw end of his cold nose. “No, Mr. Bass. I was a idjit nigger back in them days. This child just laughed at the notion of me taking up the Lord’s work. ’Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful.’”

“You didn’t turn to preaching then and there with that ground shaking under you?”

With a wag of his head Asa declared, “No, not till later on that year when we had us a great shooting star come burning ’cross the sky. The ground shook under my feet. But that star was something made me look right up at heaven. Something made me behold the power of the Lord. ’The God of glory thundereth.’ Maybeso the ground shook for there is the dominion of the devil hisself … but to have me a sign from above, from the realm of God!”

“That’s when you knowed you had a calling then and there?”

“That shooting star come back night after night,” he explained. “Made it plain I had the Lord’s calling.”

For the next few years Asa studied the family’s Bible, investing nearly every waking hour not spent in the McAfferty fields in reading, prayer, and long walks in the woods as he talked to his Maker.

“Wasn’t until eighteen and sixteen when I felt the burning in my heart that set me on the path to tell others of the word of our redeemer.”

It wasn’t long after that the young circuit rider took a proper wife. For more than a year his heart had been the captive of Rebekka Suell’s beauty. Finally, as the eldest in the family of nine children he visited once a month on his lonely circuit, sixteen-year-old Rebekka’s pa agreed to Asa’s marriage proposal.

McAfferty dolefully wagged his head now as darkness came down on the valley. “I can see how it weren’t no life for a woman—that riding the circuit from gathering house to gathering house. What few days a month we was home, she tried her best to keep up a li’l garden, and I done my best to bring game to our pot … but we never had much more’n my trail of the Lord’s calling and that tiny piece of ground where I scratched us a dugout from the side of a hill.”

By 1819 two interlopers came in and filed for ownership on the land where Asa had neglected to make his claim formally. Amid rumors that they accepted “donations” from rich landowners, the slick-haired government folks issued a demand that threw Asa off his place.

“‘Behold, these are the ungodly, who prosper in the world; they increase in riches.’ Losing what little we had took the circle for Rebekka,” Asa declared with bitterness. “With her gone, I put what little I had in my saddle pockets and set to drifting.”

Asa preached where he could, wheedling a meal here and there, sleeping out in the woods or slipping into some settler’s shed when the weather turned wet or cold. Those next two years were a time of sadness, loneliness, despair. Still—he had his Bible, and his faith that the Lord was testing him for something far, far bigger.

In the late spring of twenty-one he found himself among the outflung Missouri settlements, hearing news that two traders by the name of McKnight and James had cast their eye on the villages of northern Mexico.

“Asa McAfferty had no home in the white diggings,” he said. “And this was one nigger what had him nothing or no one to leave behind. Even the tiny flocks I was shepherd to didn’t heed to my warnings that the world was near its end. ’For God speaketh once, yea twice, yet man perceiveth it not!’”

“That when you come west? Twenty-one?”

“I was a man broke down, ground under the heel: ready to look west for my salvation, Mr. Bass,” and he nodded. “The west—where a man depends only upon the Lord … and mayhaps a rare friend, for his daily salvation. ’This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him, and saved him out of all his troubles.’”

On through the late autumn Bass and McAfferty continued their crossing of the craggy mountains and the desert wastes as the days continued to grow short, as the nights lengthened beneath each starlit ride, pushing hard for the Rio Grande. It was snowing the night they reached its banks—a light, airy dusting, the air around them filled with the sharp tang of a harder snow yet to come.

“Santy Fee ain’t far off now,” Asa said, nodding to the east.

“We going there?”

“Not ’less’n we want to cut out more trouble for ourselves,” McAfferty replied. “’They wandered in the wilderness in a solitary way; they found no city to dwell in.’”

Downstream at a ford they crossed that black, shimmering ribbon in the dark and rode until the sky began to lighten in the east before locating an arroyo where there were enough leafless cottonwood to provide some shelter, branches to disperse the smoke from their tiny campfire, modest protection from any distant, any curious, eyes.

So they skirted Santa Fe and its seat of Mexican territorial power, wary of the frequent army patrols the officials sent out—soldados instructed to detain any gringo careless enough to be caught on Mexican soil with beaver but with no Mexican license to trap that fur. Better was it for them to stay with the Rio Grande as they continued north each night rather than make for the well-traveled road that lay between the territorial capital and that string of villages in the Taos valley itself.

By the time they drew close to the Sangre de Cristos, Scratch imagined he could actually smell the burning pinon on the cold winter air in the gray light of a rosy dawn. At the knob of a hill they halted, their noses greeted with more of that smoke carried on a wind working its way out of the north, their eyes falling on the welcome sight of those clusters of mud-and-wattle huts, those neat rows of adobe homes arranged along a maze of narrow streets, all of them nestled across a whitewashed, snowy landscape.

McAfferty took in a deep breath, sighing. “’Hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted in them. Then they cried unto the Lord in their trouble, and He delivered them out of their distresses. And He led them forth by the right way, that they might go to a city of habitation. ’”

Watching the keen fire in the man’s icy-blue eyes, Scratch shuddered with a gust of that cold wind and followed the white-head down the snowy slope.

Los Ranchos de Taos was the first village the trappers reached at the bottom of the broadening valley. Beyond it lay the largest of the local villages—San Fernando de Taos—lightly veiled this sunup by a low cloud of firesmoke. Farther still they could make out the squat buildings of San Geronimo de los Taos.

“I’ll lay it’s San Fernando where Jack Hatcher and his boys brung you,” Asa proclaimed, pointing out the prominent church steeple.

“We didn’t come in to town all that much,” Bass admitted. “Stayed out to Workman’s place, mostly. When we first come in, he said it was a far sight better if we didn’t show our faces in town too much. After we went for them women took by the Comanche—things was better for us.”

“‘And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not vex him. But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself,’” Asa quoted.

Wagging his head, Titus declared, “Much as they appreciated what we done, them greasers wasn’t about to treat us like one of their own. ’Specially after that fight we had with them soldiers.”

“We’ll go round and lay up at Workman’s our own selves,” McAfferty instructed. “Be best we don’t make too much a show of ourselves. Not just yet. Till that whiskey maker tells us what be the temper of these here greasers.”

As they reined away from the road leading into San Fernando, Bass gazed longingly at the buildings still shuttered against the cold of the winter night, at the pinon and pine garlands draping the doorways and windows, at those ghostly wisps of smoke starting to curl from the chimneys of each low-roofed house as its inhabitants began their day.

“They prepare for our Lord’s blessed birthday,” McAfferty commented as they pitched toward the hills west of town. “Even these Mex celebrate the Lord’s sacred birth, Mr. Bass. Might’n be some hope for these people yet.”

A land of extreme contrasts this: dotted with flowering valleys in the spring, shadowed by high, snowcapped peaks year-round, with green rolling meadows butting up against the sun-baked hardpan, desert wastes speckled

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