across the mouth, which spurred a loud chorus from the crowd pressing in around them, eager to watch how Tomas would open the cell doors. Tomas glanced at Big Nigger for approval. The Delaware nodded slightly.
“Open the cages, gringo!” Tomas growled before he slammed a bony fist into the middle of Lee’s face.
Blood spurted from the sheriff’s nose, oozing freely over his mouth and bare chin. It took a moment for Lee’s eyes to focus again.
The American licked the warm blood from his lower lip, then centered his gaze on Tomas. “No.”
Tomas slammed his’fist into the sheriff’s face again, then again, and another time too. With each blow he watched how Lee’s head snapped back, then lolled forward until he could open his eyes—likely fighting unconsciousness every time.
“Stop! Stop this, I say!”
Tomas wheeled at the sound of the voice crying out in Spanish—wondering why one of the Mexican conspirators was demanding a halt to this torture. The crowd surrounding Tomas was grumbling with ugly intent as they rolled this way and that.
“You lawless scum!” the voice ridiculed the mob.
More shrieks from Tomas’s rebels as the thin Mexican shoved his way toward the steps of the jail where Tomas gripped the front of Lee’s bloody longhandles in his fists.
“By all that’s holy!” Cornelio Vigil growled as he came to a halt four feet away. “Not one of you are worthy to stand before a man of God!”
“So, it is you, Vigil! Friend to the American tormentors!” Tomas shrieked when he recognized the Mexican official.
Suddenly two of the Indians leaped forward, seizing Vigil’s arms.
“Let me go, you snakes! Let me go!” the prefect ordered his manhandlers. “You should tremble to even lay a hand on me!”
With a strident laugh, Tomas screamed, “We aren’t your inferiors now, Prefect!”
Two more large Indians squatted at the Mexican’s knees and hoisted the struggling Vigil completely into the air. The prefect scuffled, flailing his arms and bellowing what he planned to do about this unthinkable act of rebellion by his inferiors. He reminded them he was their better, from a noble class—a group of people who sought to help the Americans because it was good for business.
But this was the moment it fell to both the poor of the Pueblo and Taos itself to reclaim New Mexico for its native peoples.
“Scoundrels and scum!” Vigil screamed at them as four of the mob dragged him off the steps at the front of the jail and into the center of the street. “Disperse now or your lives will be forfeit!”
Tomas released the groggy sheriff for the moment. He could come back for Lee in a few minutes. For now he followed the four through the surging crowd. “What do you think of your poor peons now, Vigil?”
“No—you’ll hang!”
“If you’d fight me fairly like a man,” Vigil was shrieking, spittle crusted at the corners of his mouth, “I’d show your kind for the cowards you are—rebel scum!”
“Kill him!” Tomas suddenly yelled.
In less than a heartbeat the four keepers dropped the prefect onto the icy street before the throng collapsed over Vigil. Tomas heard the Mexican screaming in agony, watched the dozen or more arms rise and fall, the machetes and scythes, hoes and butcher knives rising after each descent, more and more blood glistening on and dripping from their blades.
Suddenly a disembodied arm was brandished overhead. Then a lower leg, with pieces of Vigil’s boot still dangling from a nearly severed foot. Tomas was just about to shove his way into the mob when a dark, round object was hurtled into the sky by one of the murderers. It sailed down into the crowd, but was caught and immediately tossed into the air again. Up and down the spinning object ascended into the flickering torchlight as Tomas slowly recognized it for what it was.
Vigil’s patrician head—a look of horror frozen forever on his features.
After more than a dozen short flights into the air, Tomas retrieved the head from the trampled, snowy, bloody ground and ordered the others back. From the hands of one of those nearby he wrenched a long, iron- headed pike he now shoved into the base of the severed neck. Tomas hoisted his grotesque battle trophy aloft.
Those wide, anguish-filled eyes, and that gaping mouth twisted in anger … Vigil would trouble them no longer. Never again would the Mexican look down his long, patrician nose at them. At long last the prefect had gotten what he deserved for bedding down so comfortably with the conquerors. Now his mob would do to the other foreigners what they had done to Cornelio Vigil.
Next to die—would be Sheriff Lee.
But as Tomas wheeled about, brandishing his first victim’s head above the mob on that long pike, the rebel leader realized the porch was bare. All of Lee’s guards had poured into the street as soon as the fun began with Vigil.
“Lee!” Tomas roared the American’s name in English.
All around him the crowd fell to a murmur.
“Lee!” he shrieked again, fury growing.
Those in the mob were turning this way, then that—frantically searching for the sheriff, who should have been their next victim.
“Find the American!” Tomas bellowed with the screech of a wounded animal. “Lee—we are coming for you!”
31
“There he goes!”
When that shrill warning caught him from behind, Stephen Louis Lee quickly glanced over his shoulder, finding the dark clot of the bloodthirsty mob gazing up at him as he scrambled onto the flat roof of the shop next door to his jailhouse. The muddy, trampled, snowy ground beneath the angry Indians and Mexicans vibrated and pulsated with the flickering light of their crude torches.
They had spotted him.
Thank God his family was already on its way to safety with Paddock and Bass.
But where he could go from here, Lee did not know. By now his stockings were soaked, his feet half frozen, colder than they’d ever been since that first winter he endured trapping in the mountains. Like two cakes of ice they were now as he had heaved himself onto a window ledge, teetered there to reach up and grab the hollo wed-out top of a high wall where the shop owner would plant geraniums come spring—and once he stood upon that wall, Lee hoisted himself onto the second-story roof.
Perhaps he could dash across the crusted, icy snow to the back of the roof in time to jump off the edge, down onto a neighboring one-story building, and from there he could leap into the alleyway—find himself a horse or a mule and race out of town. Once in the desert it would be dark and he might stand a chance of them not finding him.
The bastards! The bloody, ungrateful bastards. Red niggers, brown niggers—they were no different. Crying to get things back to the way they were when they thought their peoples were on top of the heap! Stupid
Only Governor Armijo and Padre Martinez were at the top echelon of the social pecking order … not these poor sonsabitches. They were a simple, simple lot. Easily stirred up by the likes of Martinez. Damn his Catholic balls anyway! This bloody coup had Martinez’s prints all over it!
Lee knew nothing would ever convince him that the venal, corrupt padre hadn’t cooked up this little plot to kill all the Americans who had removed that godless Christian friar from his cozy seat of power.
