Crack in the Sky

“I—I really put his eye out?”

“Ain’t nothin’ but a hole there now,” Caleb answered. “I see’d that a few times afore. Leastways, he’s lucky you didn’t kill—”

Kinkead shushed them as the governor began speaking again. “He’s asking them soldiers if they had ’em enough.”

Their only answer was a sudden shriek from the lieutenant and those left standing with him as they rushed the Americans again. Both forces met with a mighty noise, the wooden sound of hard bone meeting hard bone. Men grunting and cursing in both languages. Bodies slammed to the floor.

Scratch saw the lights again, felt himself sinking to his knees, watched figures swimming before him in an inky pool. Like the summer night he first laid between Amy’s soft thighs beside that old swimming hole. This was just as black, just as liquid as that.

He caught himself with one arm, starting to blink as he looked up, turning to gaze back over his shoulder— finding the Mexican lunging over him with most of what had been a huge chair still in both his hands.

Bass tasted blood, wondering if it was the eyeless soldier’s blood … or if it was his own. It was dripping down his neck, along his jaw and cheek, through his beard and onto his lips. Must have opened up the back of my head, he thought in a blur as he blinked again, trying to focus on the Mexican bringing down the chair against his head and shoulders a second time.

That blow sounded exactly like one of his mother’s heavy churns dropped onto their puncheon floor, back in Kentucky. Hollow, ringing, and with the same dull echo as he felt the cool, earthen floor smack against his cheek.

He shivered so hard, he thought his teeth were going to rattle out of his mouth. Clacking so loud, they sounded almost like those bone dice in that ivory cup of Ebenezer Zane’s—the way the old riverboatman shook them whenever he gambled with his flatboat crew on its float down to New Orleans that autumn of 1810.

Bass was certain his cheek still lay against the clay floor in Mirabal’s sala, so cold it felt. And he wondered how long he had been out as he attempted to open his puffy eyes.

“Lookee there!” Jack’s voice sang beyond the foggy, black curtain. “The nigger’s coming to, boys!”

Then he felt a cool, damp rag brush his forehead, down his cheeks, as he struggled to pry open his eyes again. They remained so heavy.

“Maybe not, Jack. His eyes jumpin’—that’s all.”

That sounded like Elbridge.

“Likely had all the mortal sense knocked out of him clear back to the Wind River, I’d wager.”

Caleb.

“What with that wallop he took, I don’t reckon the child’s gonna wake up for a week.”

Bass tried to say the name, “R-rufus?”

“Eegod—ye hear that, fellers?” Hatcher said. “He called for Rufus.”

The damp cloth brushed his face again as he forced his eyes open into slits. There were people before him— at least he took the milky forms to be people. It hurt to move his eyes. Not that there was any real pain right in his eyes—just the dull throb everywhere in his head. Moving his eyes hurt about as bad as anything.

Then he suddenly smelled something strange. Different. Sweet and alluring. It damn sure wasn’t the odors of those men he had ridden miles and months with.

This was the smell of a woman!

Slowly prying open an eye a bit farther, Bass rolled it so he could peer first in one direction, then in the other. His eyes fluttered open as soon as he saw her.

Recognizing that small, smooth face with its high cheekbones. The large, dark eyes. The lips she had rouged with crimson alegria juice. The lips moved—she was talking to him, speaking with that gentle voice of hers so like a soft breeze.

Trying to speak himself, all Bass could do was get his dry lips open and a few strange sounds past them. Nothing that made any sense.

“Matthew, tell the man what she’s saying to him.”

“Scratch—the governor’s daughter here come to see how you was after the fight last night.”

Sure felt like he’d been down in the black a lot longer than that.

“M-morn … ing?” he croaked.

“It’s near evening now,” Hatcher replied, coming up beside Kinkead to peer directly down into Bass’s face.

“The girl come out here special with her servant and her driver too,” Kinkead explained. “She was afraid you was dead, what with the way we dragged you out of there last night.”

Elbridge Gray was chuckling, then said, “The way we tied you over the backbone of your horse like you was gone under for sure.”

“Wa … ter?”

Someone gave the young woman a half gourd of water, into which she dipped her fingers, then laid them against Bass’s parched lips. Time and again his tongue licked the droplets off as she continued to brush water there until his throat no longer felt so dry. Filled with a sickening pain, Scratch knew his throat was bruised severely. Yet he was relieved to find he nonetheless could speak with a raspy harshness.

“My h-head …”

“Likely gonna hurt for some time to come too,” Hatcher warned. “Solomon here sewed ye up.”

“My head—sewed?”

Fish answered, “Yep. Ain’t never sewed so many stitches afore neither, Scratch. You was a awful mess.”

Then Hatcher and the rest began to laugh.

Jack declared, “Nigger, was ye ever a tolerable mess! Just laying there on that floor—out colder’n a preacher’s wife on her wedding night. But soon as I had Solomon here get down to take a look at ye, he pulled that blue bandanny off’n yer noodle, and that’s when the hull room got scared!”

“S-scared?”

“Hell, yes!” Kinkead replied as he came up to stand beside Jacova. “All them soldiers and guests thought somehow you’d had your hair knocked right off with that chair the nigger hit you with.”

“My hair?” he asked, none of it making sense right then.

“Ye stupid idjit!” Hatcher roared. “Solomon scalped ye again—right where you was scalped by them Arapaho!”

Unable to contain his amusement, Caleb gushed, “Them Mexicans was all worried you’d been hit hard ’nough to knock off a big knot of your hair!”

“So we brung you on out here,” Kinkead continued. “You been sleep till now.”

Scratch inquired, “What come of the greaser’s eye?”

“I s’pose one of their own got the feller fixed up best they could,” Kinkead answered. “But he was bound to lose the eye for good—no two ways of it.”

Rufus clucked, “Made all of ’em mad as a spit-on hen.”

“I s’pose that’s why that soldier hit you so damned hard with the chair,” Elbridge explained.

He swallowed a gob of saliva, finding it hurt terribly. When he opened his eyes again after that wave of pain had passed, Titus found Jacova hovering over his face.

“How long she been here?”

Matthew said, “Soon as she could get dressed at sunup, she come on out to see ’bout you.”

“Told ye,” Hatcher said, “this’un’s sweet on ye.”

“Too damn sweet on you for my notion,” Kinkead replied sternly in that solemn way of his.

With a squeak Scratch protested, “I ain’t done nothing to make her sweet on me, Matthew.”

“Hell, I know that, Titus,” he responded. “S’pose she just don’t know no better’n to fall for a wuthless gringo.”

“Rosa got herself a good gringo,” Bass replied.

Kinkead was visibly touched, his lower lip quivering slightly. “And you been a good friend to Rosa’s gringo.”

“Maybeso tell the girl go on back home now,” Scratch said, his eyelids falling. “Tell her I’m gonna be fine now