Angry shouts and bloody cries echoed from the snowy streets below him as the mob flowed around the line of shops on both ends of the square. Those poor, downtrodden bastards had no idea they were merely pawns in Martinez’s plot to put him back on the confessional throne.
Huffing to the edge of the adobe roof, the sheriff stared down at the one-story building below him. Before he could think of why he shouldn’t jump, Lee flung himself off the edge and went sprawling on the crusty snow, sliding uncontrollably for the edge of the flat-topped building. Twisting, he flopped himself onto his belly the instant his legs went out from under him and he went down: grabbing, clawing for anything that would hold him … but he kept right on oozing for the edge.
The fury in their voices grew in volume, echoing, reverberating, slamming off every
Shakily pushing himself onto his hands he looked left, then right, unable to spot an animal. But he did see the flickering lights of their torches illuminating the walls at both ends of the alley. If he could crawl behind those crates, they might not find him and rush on by.
Their shrill cries, and how they all took up his name like a curse, grew louder and louder still—the sound of their shrieking bouncing off the adobe walls, thundering upon him like the reverberations from a canon.
Suddenly one of them seized his ankle, pulling him from the crates.
Lee twisted, lunging in an attempt to hold on to the side of a huge box, hoping his fingers would find something to break with his bare hands so he had anything for a weapon. He was screaming at them in Mexican now as they dragged him out into the fluttering light of their hissing torches. Smoke steamed up from every one. Angry vapor whispered up like gauze from the face of every last one of the Indians and Mexicans as they closed around him.
“Lee!”
He felt the first knife go in slow. Lee winced, immediately angry at himself for showing them any pain. He would not show his murderers any of that.
“Lee!” they cursed again.
Suddenly his shoulder burned where before it had been nothing but bone-numbing cold. Twisting to look at the wound … he saw that his arm was gone—cleaved off clean, right at the shoulder.
“Lee!” the shrieks came louder, right at his ear.
His eyes climbed up to the man who had taken off the arm as the bastard held it aloft and shook it over the crowd, splattering many with warm blood, each spurt of crimson steamy on this subfreezing night.
A leg burned.
Gazing down he could see them hacking crudely at his left thigh—cutting him into pieces while he still lived. These goddamned Mexicans and their Pueblo henchmen—Martinez’s Catholic goons … heathens who didn’t even have the Christian decency to kill a man before they chopped him to pieces.
Lee was gurgling, trying to catch his breath—then realized they had slashed his windpipe. It wouldn’t be long now. The burning. The cold. The pain. None of it any stronger than the anger he felt for every last one of them. But even his hate for these butchers would soon be over.
Blood gushed from the side of his mouth as he tried to hoist his head up and look down at what was left of his body. Both arms gone and one of the legs ripped off already. And while two of them sawed away at his last leg, another had his manhood gathered in his dirty brown hand, preparing to hack off his penis and scrotum with that butcher knife. The bastard looked up and found Lee staring at him in half-lidded pain.
Then the brown-skinned son of a bitch started drawing the knife back and forth, slowly—to make long work of it.
“Lee!”
Something about that voice he recognized. Despite the fog of his pain and the blindness of his hatred, the sheriff looked up, and blinked, locating the face of Tomas—the Indian who was leader of this gang of cowardly cutthroat scum.
Then Stephen Louis Lee could not hold his head up any longer. He knew that last sudden breath he had taken was already done and no more would he ever suck another ounce of air. His head spilled back, praying his family was safe out there in the darkness with that old trapper now.
Lee couldn’t remember his name. Funny. But it really didn’t matter because something told him that old friend of Paddock’s would get them all through on the other side of this.
Oh, how he wanted to laugh right in the mob’s faces … as he thought on how his old friends, trappers all, would avenge his death. On how Price’s dragoons would gallop up from Santa Fe and execute the ringleaders by firing squad—Padre Martinez and all the rest. No … all the rest like this Tomas, they would hang at the end of an oiled rope.
To see these butchers dangling there for long minutes while they slowly strangled, kicking, kicking and shit in their pants.
I’ll see you in hell, Tomas—Lee thought, his eyes glazing in death. One day soon, you an’ me gonna settle this in hell.
They called him Big Nigger.
That wasn’t the name given him by the men of his Delaware tribe far away to the east. But it was what he was called by those hardened white frontiersmen whose trapping expeditions he had joined after he came here to the Southwest. They used to joke that he really wasn’t a redskinned Delaware Indian. Truth was, his flesh did have the look of glossy char, the appearance of a burnished ebony. And he was big. The Delaware trapper stood nearly a foot taller than most men of the day, his long bones riveted with bulky straps of muscle that made his stygian skin shimmer when he walked.
Big and black, and imposingly scary too—they called him Big Nigger.
Years ago, more than a handful now, Jim Swanock had brought Big Nigger and some other members of the Delaware tribe west, more than a handful now. Some reports stated Big Nigger had reached the mountains not long before the beaver trade died. Others claimed that no trace of him existed in the West before 1842. No matter what any of them believed—Big Nigger was one of those faceless, nameless breed who walked out of the eastern woodlands and slipped unseen into a shadowy life among the recesses of the Rocky Mountains.
That is until old chief Jim Swanock engaged his band of twelve hunters to accompany John C. Fremont on his infamous third expedition to California in 1845. Big Nigger went along, just for the diversion of it. Then he was back in the southern Rockies by the following June of ’46, for the traders’ records show he bartered away a few furs at Hardscrabble and the Pueblo. But he didn’t follow the Arkansas on out to Bents Fort. Around the time of the expedition with Fremont, Big Nigger had come to hate the Bents and everything they stood for: money and power, white dominance over the region, and more money and power.
Only a few of the traders up at Greenhorn or Hardscrabble, sometimes at the Pueblo, ever saw Big Nigger after Fremont’s expedition to California. Likely they were the only ones who knew that he had a woman tucked away down in the Pueblo outside Taos—a half-wild, purebred she-cat of an Indian who had just borne him a son early in the fall of ’46. Though Big Nigger came and went, disappearing for weeks at a time among the mountains, he nonetheless always returned to his wife and her people at the Pueblo—spending ever more time in those six- and seven-story mud fortresses after Kearny’s army marched through northern New Mexico, bringing American rule and driving out the former Mexican and Catholic despots.
His wife’s people had been here so long, far longer than the Mexicans, here even before the coming of the Spanish. Their adobe pueblo had been their sanctuary in this valley far back into the time the Apache conducted their annual raids from the west, when the Comanche raided twice a year from the east.
Now the American dogs believed they could just dance right on through and upset centuries of tradition and custom, overnight. Especially when they didn’t leave but a token number of their dragoons—and those were all more than seventy miles away in Santa Fe!
Back in the Taos Pueblo late last autumn for the birth of his son, Big Nigger listened to lots of angry talk bubbling to the surface. In and out of the old mud fortress slipped disgruntled Mexicans keen on casting out their new overseers. If there was any time to do it, a moment to wrest control back from the Americans while Kearny’s
