moment he slid on top of her naked, trembling body. Hard and insistent and every bit as hungry as she had prayed he would be.
She awoke slowly, groggily, sometime long after they had both fallen asleep; he tucked against her back like a nesting of spoons. The noises outside the house were liquid—thick like syrup—not quite distinct: loud voices, shrill and angry, unearthly screams and bloody oaths, along with the clatter of wood and the jangle of iron hardware—
That first thunderous slap of something solid against the bolted front door brought her fully awake. Charles was already rolling away from her, leaping off the bed, lunging around in the dim candlelight flutting against the wall from that single wick now awash in its own small puddle of opaque liquid.
“Get your gown, Ignacia!” he ordered, his tone so harsh it frightened her.
“G-gown?”
“Go to the children,” he demanded as he found his britches on the floor near her side of the bed. “Gather them and take them to the pantry door.”
She hated to leave the bed now that it was warmed to their bodies—
“Ignacia! Move, now!”
Swinging her legs off the bed, she bent forward and scooped up her dressing gown, dragging it off the cold, clay floor that was covered here and there by small rugs of Navajo or Pueblo wool.
“W-where are you going?” she asked as he pulled his shirt over his head and dragged the braces over his shoulders.
That terrifying clamor grew more insistent at the front door: eerie, screeching voices and that thumping that seemed to fill the whole house.
He grabbed her by the shoulders and yanked her upright beside the bed. “I fear something evil is afoot, Ignacia.”
Then he embraced her roughly, passionately crushing her mouth with his, and finally stared into her eyes to say, “Now do as I told you—get the children and the others to the back door, and when I have gone to the front of the house—flee out to the alley as fast as you can get everyone to safety.”
“S-safety?”
His jaw went rigid, muscles flexing. “Get our family to the church,” he said with a flat and hollow voice. “Take sanctuary there.”
“No! No!” she screamed, throwing her head from side to side. “I’m not leaving here without you!”
He shook her, then promptly seized the two loose ends of the cloth belt that hung from the waist of her dressing gown. He tied it in a knot, then gave it an extra jerk to hold it securely over her naked flesh.
“If you have ever wanted to show me how much you love me,” Charles began, “if you have ever wanted to show how much you love our children … do this for me now, Ignacia. Do this without question.”
“Father, what is going on?”
It was Alfred’s voice on the other side of their bedchamber door.
“Get your sisters and meet your mother in the pantry, Alfred!”
“Father?” the boy pleaded. “What do they want?”
Charles was at the door, yanking it open to suddenly stare down at his ten-year-old son. “They want me, Alfred. Now help your mother get your sisters to the pantry as I’ve ordered!”
“Charles!”
It was Rumalda, still an adolescent. At her shoulder stood Josefa. Ignacia prayed that moment Carson and Boggs could be there to protect them at this moment of danger.
“Ladies, please,” Charles begged, “help me with Ignacia and the children. Get yourselves to the church, to safety—”
“No, no, no,” Ignacia mumbled when Charles pulled her against him, pressed her cheek against his neck, her nose buried in that filthy shirt that smelled of horses and sweat, of trail grime, fire and tobacco smoke. Most of all, it smelled of him, just the way he had smelled last night when he had smothered her with his body—seizing her with all of his being.
“I love you, Ignacia.” Charles choked out the words. “I always will.”
Then he was cruelly turning her around, shoving her into Alfred’s arms. Josefa and Rumalda came forward in their bare feet to each take one of Ignacia’s arms. Beyond them, she saw Estefina and Teresina standing with the two female servants, one old and one almost as young as her children. They all had their sleeping caps on and dressing gowns hastily pulled over their shoulders.
“Go together—now, hurry!” Charles ordered in a loud voice as a splintering racket suddenly reverberated from the front parlor.
They had broken through the door! Voices shrieked just down the hallway.
“Do not make a sound!” he screamed above the tumult as the crowd surged into the parlor. “In God’s name,
That last glance she took over her husband’s shoulder was to see the shadows bobbing on the parlor wall just a matter of yards down the narrow hallway. So many shadows that she could not begin to count the intruders who had violated their home.
Then she gazed at her Carlos’s face even while Alfred dragged her into the darkness, toward the rear of the house, all of them scurrying like frightened animals for that door that held the only chance of escape.
Upon reaching the far end of the hall, she struggled to have a last look upon her Carlos, ducking her head this way and that over young Alfred’s head. She watched her husband step into the firelit shadows of the parlor, shouting boldly at the intruders—throwing up his hands and screaming back at those who had invaded the sanctity of their home, those who had sullied this beautiful sanctuary she shared with her husband and their children.
At the very same moment Alfred pulled her around the darkened corner toward the rear pantry, Ignacia watched more than a dozen pairs of hands and arms and a multitude of angry faces take form out of the dim, flickering firelight, all those fingers like buzzard claws as they seized her Carlos and dragged him into the shadows with them.
She started to scream—
But her sister’s hand immediately clamped over Ignacia’s mouth.
“Mother!” Alfred whispered harshly to her. “Hush! Not a word! Remember what father told us!”
Yes—she thought—I will remember what your father told me.
If any of the Pueblo Indians hated their American conquerors, it was Tomas.
This violent, foul-humored miscreant had eagerly joined the plot when the three Mexican ringleaders— Archuleta, Duran, and Ortiz—had vowed they would throw off the American yoke, or die trying. But when that trio’s plans were discovered and the Mexicans fled for Chihuahua, Tomas alone did all he could to keep alive the embers of revolt.
Then Big Nigger showed up at the Pueblo, come home to see his wife. The huge, brooding Indian immediately stepped forward to join Tomas’s call for death to all foreigners. Tomas thought that was ironic, seeing how Big Nigger was a foreigner himself. Yes, an Indian—but not born of this land. Many years ago he had come to northern New Mexico with an American trapping party.
But none of that mattered now that he and Big Nigger, along with at least two dozen more Pueblos, had confronted their most despised enemy that afternoon on the outskirts of town. After the American governor had slipped through their mob, Tomas and Big Nigger rallied hundreds to follow them into Taos, intending to free their compatriots who were rotting in the Americans’ jail.
The
Well after dark when the mob noisily burst into the jail brandishing guns, butcher knives, and torches, they caught the surprised sheriff scrambling off his cot in his longhandles. Several of the Indians grabbed the sheriff and dragged him to Tomas’s feet.
“Set our friends free!” Tomas demanded.
“No,” Lee said in English.
Even Tomas could understand that, what little of the enemy’s language he understood. He slapped Lee
