Death Rattle

Behind the fallen carcasses and soldiers a few men bellowed orders … but most of the trapped soldiers were cursing, some vaulting out of their saddles with their rifles, attempting to shove through the clutter of men and wounded horses so they could get a shot off at the fleeing gringos. At the same time the rest at the extreme rear of the formation were clumsily getting their mounts wheeled around and started down a side street or alleyway.

“There’ll be some comin’!” Bass warned as he and the mutelike Roscoe Coltrane brought up the rear. “A few of ’em still on our back trail!”

At the eastern outskirts of the village the trappers began to gradually fan out as their straining horses rolled into a gallop and were given their heads. Titus wondered how long the animals could take a bruising chase, considering what the horses had been through in crossing that desert. These bigger horses still might not stand a chance against the smaller Mexican animals because the Spanish barbs weren’t handicapped, save for the weight of the soldiers.

Jehoshaphat! How his head thumped painfully, screaming with every hoofbeat as his horse licked it down the hardpan road between the coastal pueblo and Mission San Gabriel. He had come to hate hangovers, especially the sort of hangover that buried its vicious talons into his head even before he’d had the chance to enjoy his whiskey at all.

California hooch. The prickly squeezin’s were nowhere near as smooth as Willy Workman’s Taos lightning had been. No, this California popskull tasted like the greasers’d strained it through some poor field peon’s longhandles!

Riding at his left knee was Roscoe Coltrane. On Bass’s right rode Elias Kersey. Just ahead of him Rube Purcell stood partway in the stirrups, his knees flexing, so he could twist around a bit and have himself a look at the back trail.

Bass took a look too.

Purcell saw Titus turn behind him. He hollered into the wind, “How many of ’em you see coming, Scratch?”

“Fifteen, maybeso twenty,” Titus yelled when he had faced front again. “Not near enough to give us any trouble if it comes to a fight.”

“They’ll give up, don’t you think?” Kersey asked.

With a nod, Scratch said, “Ain’t a one of them soldiers wanna bite off more of us’n they can chew.”

Kersey asked, “They just gonna make a show of it?”

“Yeah,” Scratch hollered. “So them folks back in that village can see their soldados running off the Americans.”

“Then they’ll pull off,” Purcell hollered.

But only when the trappers and the soldiers both were well out of sight by anyone in the village—several miles on up the valley road to San Gabriel and well-hidden behind several intervening hills. And not before Scratch’s belly started crawling with apprehension that the pack animals were about to go bust and give in. He could see it in their wide, rheumy eyes, read it in the thickening phlegm around the nostrils of every animal straining around him. One thing especially telling was Scratch remembered they hadn’t watered the horses since early that morning. Hardly any bottom left in them by now.

This chase couldn’t have lasted much longer before the Americans had to pull back, fort up, and force a showdown of it. But from all his years of experience with them, Titus Bass hadn’t been a bit impressed with the bottom, fortitude, or fight in the Mexican soldier. Not those around San Fernando de Taos who had left it up to the trappers to track and trap a large band of Comanche raiders. Not those drunk, jealous soldiers who had busted into the tiny cribs at the back end of a Taos bordello either. And surely not this crop of Mexicans who cuffed their whores around as if that brutality would make them big, brave men in front of the foreigners.

“Tell ’em to pull up!” Bass cried at those fanned out in front of him the moment he watched one of their pursuers wave his arm and signal the others to rein back and pull around.

He watched over his shoulder as the soldiers slowed to a halt, got their horses circled up, then lined out into two short columns to start back down the road winding through the tall hills, returning for the village after making a good show of it. They’d run off the infidel extrajanos. Showing the invaders who was boss in California.

Titus thought of Captain Janus C. Smathers and his seafarers—hoping nothing the trappers had done at the cantina would make things hard on those few Americans who had come a long way under sail to do some business with the Californios. Here and there, up and down the coast, he figured there were plenty of Mexicans who didn’t mind having some foreign visitors—even if the Mexican government did not want to tolerate the strangers. And chances were good there were even more Mexican citizens who, even if they did not particularly want to rub elbows with any Americans, at least coveted those American goods brought to their coastal towns.

Odds were, nothing untoward would rub off on Smathers and his crew because they had been long gone from the watering hole before any of the trouble raised its ugly head. Fact be, only one who could make things tough for the captain would be that cantina man. But then, any Americans who entered a foreign land had to figure that the chances were good someone, somewhere, wouldn’t be real happy seeing such well-armed strangers show up uninvited. That sort of thing lay in the cards. Americans coming in ships off the ocean. Or Americans crossing that great moat of an impenetrable desert, come all the way from the Rockies.

Trouble was, these trappers were about to give the Mexicans one more reason to hate gringos.

Not since the days of that great ’33 rendezvous had he seen near so many horses as this!

None of those warrior bands of Shoshone, Crow, Assiniboine, or Ute he had ever run across could boast anywhere near this many animals in their individual herds. As he stared at the sight, Titus couldn’t reckon on how they would manage to get this many horses back across all that desert, and over the mountains too. But he was getting ahead of himself. First, they had to get the herds—and their own necks—out of California.

Not to mention that little business about busting into the soldier outpost to free Frederico’s sisters.

Scratch figured he’d just worry about one thing at a time. No sense in fretting himself over that homebound journey when they hadn’t even put California behind them.

After escaping Pueblo de los Angeles by the skin of their teeth yesterday afternoon, the raiders hurried east into the foothills, at sundown circling south a little until they ran across a canyon where Williams and Smith determined they’d spend the night. It was a cold camp. No fires. Only some dried longhorn beef to chew on as they nursed their hangovers. Twenty-four men with pounding heads that made them grumpy, even a little belligerent, especially when six of them were awakened at a time to take their rotation on night guard, ordered to watch the valley and listen for the approach of any soldier patrols.

But the self-assured Mexicans hadn’t pressed their pursuit. No one followed the infidels into the hills. So the trappers laughed at the cowardly soldiers who had given up the chase far too easily—and congratulated one another on this expedition that was turning out to be far easier than any of them had expected.

In the cold, predawn darkness, Thomas Smith and Bill Williams, along with the four others on their watch, moved through the brush and those eighteen forms wrapped in their blankets and robes on the cold, bare ground. In minutes the raiders had gathered up their animals, slipped halters over noses or slid bits into the horses’ jaws, cinched down saddles, and relashed diamond hitches over the bundles on the backs of the pack animals. The shivering Americans moved out in the starlit darkness, the breath of man and horse alike spewing with the consistency of a puffy, silver gauze in the last shimmer of a sinking half-moon.

Peg-Leg had them on a hillside overlooking a broad, oval valley before the sun tore itself off the hill at their backs. The meadows were thick with grazing horses. Williams and Smith quickly talked things over.

Then Bill reined his horse around and announced to their twenty-two. “This here’s where we get on with what we come to this here Mex country for. Drive them horses north till we strike that valley where the mission stands. Just short of there we’re gonna turn east for the pass.”

“You all drove horses afore,” Peg-Leg reminded them. “So you know what to do.”

“A horse here or there gonna get fractious and take off on you,” Williams warned. “Let ’em go. Keep the herd together and let a few rambunctious ones go.”

Titus snorted, “Didn’t think you was aimin’ to leave any horses behind in California, Bill!”

As the men chuckled nervously, Williams grinned apishly and replied, “Only ones I plan to leave these greasers is the gentled horses they got tied up to some rico’s porch rail this mornin’!”

Smith waited until the restless raiders got quiet. “Your bunch ready to leave off when the time comes, Titus