“Maybeso the Comanch’ got him?”
With a shrug Kinkead said, “Could have, Jack. I know he was staying the night on the far side of the village, near where the Comanch’ rode out when they was finished with us.”
“What’d they get?” Workman demanded, trying to settle his nervous horse as the women shoved against the riders, filling every space between the Americans like water seeping between the boulders on a summer-dry creekbed.
Looking down at Rosa, Kinkead had to shout to be heard. She appeared to listen a minute, then asked first one of the shrieking women, then another, before she stood on her toes and spoke into his ear.
Matthew gazed up at Workman and Hatcher as they jostled before him in the frightened crowd, his face gray with concern. “They got some women, Jack. And a few of the
“Women? Some growed women?”
Kinkead nodded, swallowing. “Sounds like they got Rowland’s woman … his wife.”
Hatcher’s eyes narrowed. “It don’t look good for Johnny, does it?”
Staring at the ground a moment, Kinkead said, “Rowland ain’t the sort to let the Comanch’ take his wife if he were still alive.”
“Let’s go find Johnny afore we go after the red-bellies!” Workman hollered.
Hatcher whirled on him. “Ye fixing to go running after them Comanch’?”
“Damn right! We can’t let ’em get too far ahead!”
Jack turned to the others in a blur, asking his men above the dying tumult of screams that had become more a sobbing, wailing, whimpering mob of mourners, “We going after them Injuns?”
“If Rowland’s wife is took by ’em,” Elbridge answered for the rest, “we’re going after every last one of the bastards!”
Jack’s eyes bounced off the hairy faces, each pair of bloodshot eyes like sunset-streaked portals into their tortured, hungover souls. He asked, “Elbridge speak for the rest of ye?”
Feeling the fear of it rise in a knot from the gut of him, Bass watched them all nod, some of the men growling their agreement like the distant coming of black-bellied thunder.
Hatcher turned toward him. “How ’bout you, Scratch?”
He felt the eyes on him, not just of the men who had saved his hash after he’d been left for dead, but of these half a hundred or more women who looked up at him with their pooling eyes. His belly was empty of everything but the fear, now that he had puked back at the cave. A cold, gut-wrenching fear … and the hot, rising flush of adrenaline giving fire to his veins.
“Ain’t nothing could keep me from going.”
8
“Ain’t a man worth his salt gonna stand for Injuns stealing women and young’uns,” Bass told them as they nudged their horses into motion, slowly parting the crowd of wailing women. “I ’member my grandpap telling me about the Shawnee and others what come down on the canebrake settlers way back, not just to kill and burn them folks out, but to steal the womenfolk and the young’uns too.”
“This is different,” Hatcher groaned as he studied the scene, side to side. “There’d be too damned many of them Comanch’ for us to take on from the looks of things here.”
Solomon hollered, “But them red-bellies gotta pay!”
“Too damned many of ’em!” Jack repeated, working to convince them. “There’s just a handful of us.”
“We ain’t gonna give it a try?” Bass shouted.
“And get ourselves kill’t in the bargain?” Caleb protested.
Titus sighed, his eyes imploring Hatcher. “Awright, Jack. We find John Rowland first—then go out there on their trail and see if we figger out how many we’re up against by the looks of the tracks.”
For a long moment their leader considered that. “So be it. I don’t cotton to no Injun carrying off no woman or child neither, boys. We’ll go find Johnny … then we’ll see what the trail’s got to tell us about what we’d be up against.”
There erupted a spontaneous, raw cheer among these men yanked from their blankets, heads throbbing with a long-overdue hangover, men grouchy, out of sorts, and damned well ready to do battle.
“Get you yer horse, Matthew!” Hatcher shouted, turning to fling his words behind him as the Americans moved their animals slowly into the noisy crowd filling the village square. “We gotta find Johnny!”
“I’ll catch up to you!” Kinkead said, clutching his Rosa tight. “G’won past Rowland’s hut, off yonder—I figger we’ll cut the trail out by his place.”
On all sides of them the devastation increased as they pushed for a narrow street on the far side of the village square. There at the corner squatted an old woman, a filthy shawl hanging half on her head, each of her hands resting on the body of a dead man crumpled at her knees. Beneath her fingers lay a bloodied face dotted with a gray stubble, the old man’s skull cracked open. At her feet sprawled the body of a younger man, perhaps a son. At least four arrows were stuck deep in his bare brown back. A dog slinked close, cautiously, its feral nose twitching at the smell of blood and gore seeping from the bodies.
Bass gave heels to his horse, reining straight for the cur. The dog’s neck ruff bristled as Scratch leaned over, swinging his rifle butt for the canine, smacking it in the ribs. Rolling over and over with a pitiful yelp, the dog picked itself up from the icy ruts and scurried away down the street, tail tucked between its legs.
Here and there in the village around them some of the squat adobe houses smoldered, wisps of ghostly smoke seeping from the rawhide-covered windows, curling up in twisted columns from the portals where the doors hung akimbo on broken hinges. Overturned
Villagers suddenly converged on the path the Americans were taking, appearing from behind them in the narrow street, flowing in from both left and right to form a noisy mob. Weepy-eyed women and angry men shuffled into that open ground where a handful of squat sapling-and-mud wattle huts stood leaning against the cold dawn sky. There on the snowy, trampled ground three women were hunched over their prey, pummeling the enemy again and again with short pieces of firewood, one wailing hag swinging a long wrought-iron fireplace poker. More of the mob surged forward, eager to join in—shrieking, swinging, and kicking.
“Get back!” Hatcher bellowed above them as he steered his horse into their midst. “Goddamn ye—get back!”
The crowd may not have understood his words, but there was no mistaking the gringo’s meaning. Slowly the villagers stepped back, and back some more, until the trappers recognized the bloodied, battered body of an Indian.
He didn’t look to be too tall a man, dressed only in a shirt and breechclout above his moccasins. A blanket had been torn from his waist. Bare-legged, his hair disheveled, the Indian had a face almost unrecognizable as such.
Someone had even begun to decapitate the body. A woman nearby shook with rage, a huge knife trembling in her bloody hand.
“He dead?” Solomon asked as he halted his horse with the others.
“Damn well better be,” Caleb growled. “Let ’em work the son of a bitch over, Jack. That dead Comanch’ is the only thing they can take it out on now.”
“First whack, it’s my turn,” Hatcher said as he kicked his right leg up and to the left, sliding off the bare back of his horse.
The crowd inched back even farther, muttering in unrequited fury as he strode up without hesitation, yanking his skinning knife from the sheath hung at his hip. Without a word he knelt, whizzed the sharp blade around the head, then wiped the knife off on the Indian’s shirt before he stuffed it away. Placing a foot on the warrior’s face, Hatcher leaned back against the Comanche’s thick hair until the scalp peeled away, complete with the tops of the ears.
This moist, limp trophy he held up for all to see at the end of his outstretched arm. Slowly he turned, the blood dripping in the dirty snow. Suddenly Hatcher opened his mouth and let out a long primal scream. Nothing