his waist and buckling it as he stabbed the knife into its scabbard, shouting, “Let’s get!”
At the doorway a step ahead of Bass, Asa stopped, peered quickly at the three bodies of unconscious men who lay sprawled across the hall, then looked toward the dull, dancing light of the parlor, where women still shrieked and more than four vaqueros stood shoulder to shoulder, squinting into the darkness of the hallway. Their own knives at ready, each one waited half-dressed, their bare-breasted whores clinging frightened to their backs, peering between the shoulders of the men as they clamored and swore and screamed. Behind them flitted a huge, blurry form half-illuminated and backlit with more than two dozen candles.
As he followed McAfferty from the doorway, Scratch stopped a moment and gazed down that narrow hallway so low a man almost had to duck, peering at those vaqueros, at that gaggle of prostitutes, at that fat and frantic madam who had looked upon them both with such disdain—eager to take their American beaver money, eager perhaps to help the lieutenant and his soldiers take their American lives once she had her fat fingers secured around their beaver pesos.
How he wished he could plunge his knife into her heart.
But Asa grabbed a fistful of Bass’s capote and yanked him farther into the darkness, on down the narrow hallway and out a door so low, they both had to duck as they plunged into the shocking cold of that moonless night. Dogs barked nearby on the far side of this mud-walled den of whores. Voices streaked out of the starshine beyond in the streets with a growing echo. Coming closer. Angry voices accompanied by the clatter of hard-leather boot heels and the jangle of arms.
“Forget the horses!” he snarled at McAfferty.
“On foot?” Asa demanded in a harsh whisper. “All the way to Workman’s?”
“You figger us to make it out of town in our own saddles? When those horses are out in front on that street?”
For a moment in the dim, silvery light, McAfferty stared this way and that—his mind working feverishly. Then shook his head. “We’ll have to steal a couple of horses on our way out.”
“We better,” Bass swore as they started away, pressing themselves into the shadows along the adobe wall. “We gotta make it to Workman’s place afore the soldiers do … or our hash is fried.”
The bear of a shadow loomed out of the night as if it were a tattered shred of the black sky itself.
Bringing up his knife, Bass braced himself on his good leg, prepared to cut his way through more enemies—
“Bass!”
Confused, Scratch turned to glance at McAfferty a flicker of a moment, whispering, “Who is it knows my name?”
“Kinkead!”
“Damn,” he sighed in relief as the shadow inched closer, taking shape as the big American stepped into the starshine. “Matthew.”
“It really is you, Asa McAfferty,” the shadowy shape said as it came to a halt right before them.
“Pray—what finds you here, Mr. Kinkead?”
“You don’t have the time to listen to my story,” Kinkead explained, seizing them both by the shoulder and shoving them back toward the shadows at the side of that narrow street, the very same shadows where he had just emerged.
Scratch looked in one direction, then another. “Where?”
“Out of town, now!” Matthew ordered. “On four legs!”
“I’ll kill for that horse of yours!” Bass husked. “I won’t make it on my two—”
“He’s game,” McAfferty explained. “Took it in the leg.”
Kinkead turned on Bass. “You walk on your own?”
“How far?” Titus asked, his face pinched in pain.
“The corner,” Matthew said, pointing. “Here,” and he swung an arm around Scratch’s shoulder, nearly hoisting him off the ground as he set off in a trot, Bass’s feet all but dangling on the crusty snow.
Leading them around a corner at the end of the long row of low-roofed adobe houses, Kinkead lunged for the reins of one of the three horses he had tied to a tall wooden post buried in the ground. “Take your pick of them two—but leg up quick, fellas.”
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
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
“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 Penablanca. 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’
