Wood waited a moment, then leaned toward Bass. “Five days,” he whispered, and held up all the fingers on one bare hand. “Five.”
It didn’t matter to Titus. This close, those two days they argued over truly didn’t matter. They were drawing nigh, near enough that Scratch could sense the keen edge to the anticipation building in the others, an anticipation that ignited an excitement of his own.
As long as he had been out here already, in the last few days Bass was coming to realize that everything would be brand-new in this country south of the Arkansas. Not just the peoples—both Mexican and Indian—but their food and drink as well, along with another new and foreign language bound to fall about his ears. As much as he had been swallowed up in the varied cultures and races at the international port of New Orleans back in his youth, or lived at the St. Louis crossroads of a nation busy with its westward expansion, Bass was surprised to find himself growing as anxious to reach this Mexican village as he had been to enter his first Indian village back in twenty- five.
But more than anything else, he was finding the country itself different from what lay to the north.
This mountain southwest was truly a land of extreme contrasts. While spring would give birth to richly flowered valleys, so too did high, snowcapped peaks rise well above the desert floor. Green, rolling meadows carpeted the slopes of hills all the way down to sun-hardened desert wastes speckled with ocatillo and barrel cactus, mesquite trees and frequent reminders of an even more ancient time in the sharp-edged, black lava fields that occasionally cluttered the landscape.
Always the land of the lizard, horned toad, prairie dog, and rattlesnake, this was also a country where he found cottonwood and willow bordering the infrequent gypsum-tainted streams where that “gyp” water might well cause most unaccustomed travelers to grow sick, stricken with a paralyzing bowel distress.
These vast, yawning valley plains stretched upward toward the purple bulk of hills, from there up to brick-red mountainsides timbered with the ever-emerald-green of pinion pine and second-growth cedar. At sunrise a man would find the treeless ridges staring back at him like some swollen, puffy, fight-ravaged eye. But by the time the sun rose high, that same vista would be painted a hazy blue, eventually turning to a deep purple as the sun finally sank to its rest. In such a land there was sure to come the summer heat of hell, the bitter cold of an unexpected and uncompromising blizzard in winter.
For much of the last few weeks, the nine and their animals had threaded their way through this high land of brilliant color and startling contrast by following the Rio Grande itself as it flowed due south. Eventually, of an early afternoon, they stopped to water the animals for midday at the mouth of a narrow river that flowed out of the hills to the east to mingle its snow-melt with the Rio Grande.
“That there be the Little Fernandez,” Caleb Wood instructed as he pointed toward the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.
Come evening, with the sun setting across the valley, those hills themselves would take on a crimson hue so realistic that it had reminded the early Spanish explorers of the blood Christ Himself had shed on the cross.
Isaac stepped up as their horses drank at the icy stream. “There be a pass up there a feller comes over. Just follow the crik down into this here valley, turn south yonder there … and you’ll run onto the village called Taos.”
Overhead the last of a winter storm was spending itself among the high places, while on the valley floor where they put their animals back on the trail, the snow fell gently. Here a man might find refuge from winter’s harsh fury that battered the northern plains and Rockies. From spring until well into the fall here, green pastures welcomed the heat-jaded prairie traveler who stumbled in from the dry and dusty Santa Fe Trail. Here the shadows of the Sangre de Cristos offered a man respite from the harshest weather meted out by both summer and winter.
The valley had long been a refuge to weary sojourners.
As early as the 1300s the Indians had begun building the massive multistoried Pueblo de Taos, raising the thick mud walls near Taos Mountain at the northernmost end of the valley. Successive pueblos had been added over the centuries. Finally, after the threat of frequent and deadly attacks by roving bands of Comanche raiders had diminished, a new Spanish settlement was given birth. Named after a seventeenth-century Spanish pioneer who settled in the valley and made it his home, the tiny village came to be known as Don Fernando de Taos.
Up ahead in the lengthening shadows of late afternoon raced Kinkead and Rowland, kicking their horses into a gallop to shoot past Rufus and Isaac. At the top of the bluish, twilit rise covered with snow, the two yanked back on their reins, settled their horses, and pounded one another on the back. As Hatcher led the others up this last gentle slope, Bass heard the excitement in how Johnny and Matthew yelled back and forth with childlike eagerness, pointing this way and that, pulling their caps from their heads to signal the others to hurry, their long hair tormented with each gust of wind.
Bass stopped at last, gazing south, staring down into the valley for the first time. What with all the snow and those whitewashed adobe walls, it was hard for him at first to make out the village. Soon enough his eyes spotted the faint glow of candles and lamps brightening more and more windows as afternoon light oozed from the early winter sky.
“That there’s Taos, Scratch,” Hatcher said quietly.
“Welcome,” Kinkead added, his eyes beaming. “My Rosa’s yonder!”
Jack turned and asked, “Ye’ll keep your head down tonight, Matthew? You too, Johnny?”
They glanced quickly at one another and nodded.
Kinkead declared, “We’re going our own ways, Jack. This first night I’m laying low with Rosa’s folks.”
“How ’bout you, Rowland?”
“Me too, Jack,” he answered, his happy face gone serious. “Don’t wanna dance with no trouble—not after two years.”
Hatcher nodded. “That’s the chalk of it, boys. Slip into town quietlike, and don’t let many folks see ye. We’ll catch up to ye down to the square in a day or two.”
“You’ll see to our animals and plunder, won’t you, boys?” Matthew asked the group.
“G’won now,” Jack coaxed the two. “Ye got wives waiting for ye down the hill in Taos. Get yer gullet shined with lightning and yer stinger dipped in sweet, warm honey tonight!”
Rowland turned to gaze at Kinkead. “Jack don’t have to ask me twice!”
They started to whoop like wild men as they kicked their horses into motion, but Hatcher hollered at them to be quiet. Instead, the two men raced down the snowy slope toward the distant village without another sound out of them but the hammer of the hooves, and the pounding of their excited hearts.
“Look at them two, won’t you?” Caleb asked as the others sat in silence. “Like a pair o’ bulls in the spring —”
“You’d be bellering like a scalded alley cat if’n you had you a woman tucked away down there!” Rufus scolded Wood.
Caleb wheeled on him. “Who says I don’t have me a woman tucked away down there?”
“They really got wives down in that town?” Titus asked. “Mexican wives?”
“Yup,” Jack replied, then winked wickedly.
“So what we gonna do when we get down there tonight? Find us some women and whiskey?” Bass inquired, the tip of his tongue licking his cracked lower lip.
“We ain’t going to Taos tonight,” Jack explained as he raised his face to the sky, peering this way and that at the onrushing darkness.
Down in the valley the distant peal of a solitary bell drifted up the slope. After two rings a second bell took up the faint chorus. Back and forth the two rang for the space of a half-dozen heartbeats, then faded off into the cold as silence replaced their joyous song.
“What was that?” Scratch asked.
“Church down there,” Isaac said. “Got two towers. A bell in each tower. They ring ’em at break o’ day, then at noon. And again at eventide.”
“Bells,” Bass repeated. “I’ll be go to—”
Caleb said, “Looks like we got here about the right time of the day.”
“Right time of the day for what?” Scratch proclaimed.
“To get ourselves round to the far side of town ’thout the Mexicans seeing us come in,” Hatcher declared, raising his right arm and pointing with his rifle to the hills west of the village.
