Death Rattle

Titus reared back, stretching the muscles in his old back already tired from the morning’s ride. “Take good care of our packhorses, won’cha fellas?” He tugged down the front of his brim there in the hot afternoon sun and reined hard to the left. “Let’s ride, fellas!”

With Frederico wearing a bandanna around the wounded arm at his side, Titus led the other five directly across the valley stripped bare of all horseflesh. The sprawling mission itself was less than a mile away, and the soldier fortress not all that far beyond it. They planned to slip up behind a knoll that lay to the east of the post and tie off their horses. Bellying up to the top, they’d lie patiently in the brush and watch the small fort below, hoping that the Mexicans would do what the trappers expected.

Together with Williams and Smith, Scratch had cobbled out this plan that sent most of the raiders with the two booshways, driving the stolen horses right on past the mission walls, near enough to the soldier post that the gringo thieves would make themselves a taunting challenge. And when the soldados rose to the bait—every last one of them saddling up and riding out to sweep down on the Americans and make a sure, quick fight of it—then Bass’s small outfit could slip right into the soldier post and hurry the two women right back out again.

Not that the fortress would be totally abandoned. They figured they could expect to encounter a modest resistance from no more than a handful of soldiers left to watch over the place—maybe a blacksmith, some stable hands, and a cook or two as well, perhaps even a guard at the gate—but not enough of a force that would prevent the Norteamericanos from riding away with Frederico’s sisters.

“This here brush is good,” Scratch told them as they came to a halt at the bottom of the low knoll. “Leave the horses here. You follow me and the Injun to the top. Get on your bellies afore you break the skyline.”

He gestured Frederico to join him on the climb, but just shy of the crest he reached out and tapped on the Indian’s bare arm. Pointing at the ground, Bass went to his belly. When their guide dropped to his stomach too, the seven crawled in and out of the brush to the grassy top. As they came up on both sides behind him, Bass could hear the others scritching over the gravel and dirt, rustling the stunted cedar and brush.

Titus rolled onto his left hip, pulled up the flap to his shooting pouch, and dug at the bottom for the spyglass. Flat on his belly again, Bass extended the three sections, then swiveled the tiny brass protective plate back from the glass in the eyepiece.

Training the spyglass on the post below them, Bass slowly retracted one of the leather-covered sections to bring the scene into focus. And felt the hair prickle on the back of his neck. The post was a beehive of activity. Cavalry horses were everywhere. A few of them were already saddled and stood outside the stockade wall with their riders. Other soldiers were engaged inside the compound, throwing saddles onto their mounts. And still more Mexicans were leading their horses out of the narrow barns and into the central square. Titus could almost imagine the racket made as horses snorted, stomped, and whinnied. As the men shouted orders, hammered across the hard ground in their boots, their stubby muskets and short sabers clinking … this half-baked army could never creep up on an enemy by surprise.

But, the Mexican Army never would have to do that out here in California, he decided. Or in northern Mexico either. They were merely an army of occupation, able to subjugate a weak and peaceable Indian population. Nothing like the warrior bands of the mountains and plains: intractable, bellicose, and intensely jealous of their territory. No, Titus figured, these Mexican soldiers had all grown soft and lazy because they had never been summoned into battle with a real enemy. Not the way soldiers near Taos and Santa Fe constantly had to deal with both Apache and Comanche.

This bunch charged with guarding the San Gabriel Mission and the nearby valleys were such predictable fools. They formed up outside their adobe walls and rode off as the gates were dragged shut. More than fifty soldiers loped past the base of the knoll where the seven lay in hiding, headed right to left as they pushed on down the road that would carry them east for the foothills and up toward the pass in pursuit of the chaguanosos. Titus realized some of those soldiers knew the route well enough—from time to time they had pursued fleeing slaves, tracked runaway Indians into the low mountains—attempting to capture their prey before they reached the desert moat on the far side of California.

As he lay there watching them go, Titus was struck with the remembrance of slaves running off from their masters in the southern region of the States. For the first time in many, many years recalling Hezekiah: the bareheaded former field hand who had worked for a Mississippi gunboat brothel madam named Annie Christmas, the slave owner he had wronged in a brawl against Ebenezer Zane’s riverboatmen. Annie Christmas, an angry, spiteful shrew of a woman who promptly sold Hezekiah to the highest bidder, shipping him off north to the Muscle Shoals.

With that small band of Kentucky flatboatmen looking on outside of Kings Tavern, a Natchez tippling house, sixteen-year-old Titus Bass had freed Hezekiah from his cage, releasing the slave from what cruel fate might await him at the hand of his new taskmaster. At Owensboro on the Ohio River, the Negro prepared to push on west— giving Titus his farewell and announcing that he was taking his former boss-lady’s surname as he embarked on his new life as a freedman.

Hezekiah Christmas.

Scratch pulled the spyglass from his eye and turned slightly to peer at the guide. He’d never thought to ask what the youngster’s Indian name was. Frederico was merely the name the Catholic fathers had branded on the Indian—just as the friars gave all their slaves Spanish names, since they were baptizing these former heathens into the holy Spanish church, thereby saving their immortal souls from a life everlasting in the lake of endless fire—

“How many you make out?” Kersey interrupted his reverie.

Again he squinted through the eyepiece and attempted to count what men he could see. “I figger there’s at least one on the gate I can’t see a’t’all, maybe two what closed it.”

“What of the others?” Purcell demanded.

Bass counted a moment. “I see three others. That could mean there’s at least three I don’t see.”

Corn was visibly tallying his fingers, staring at both hands. “All right. We can take care of them.”

Adair asked, “You see them women? Any sign of his sisters?”

For some time he studied every visible corner of the compound, gazing into every narrow window or doorway for some hint of movement that might betray a woman. But, he didn’t sight a hint of Frederico’s sisters.

“You are certain your sisters are at the soldier post?” Titus asked in his faltering Spanish.

“Si,” the guide responded. “They were taken from the mission—”

“But,” Scratch interrupted, “how long ago?” He knew Frederico had been gone from California for some time, escaped to the Mojave villages.

“Not for long—”

“This past winter?” he inquired. “Tell me how long it has been since you saw your sisters carried off to the soldier post?”

The youth’s face sagged along with his shoulders. “Almost all the seasons. Come autumn, I ran away to the desert.”

Bass sighed. “Just shy of a year,” he said in English.

Corn was the first to capture the meaning of that. “Been a whole year since he knowed his sisters was down there?”

“Almost.” Titus reluctantly nodded. “Maybeso this ain’t but a fool’s errand we’re on, fellas.”

“Por favor” Frederico pleaded with his dark eyes as well as his tongue. “Help me save my sisters.”

For himself, Bass nodded, but turned to the others to declare, “I can’t make you others ride down there with the Injun to find two women who likely ain’t still alive no more.”

Adair’s eyes squinted as he turned his head to stare down into the valley at the post. “I figger them soldiers used up both of them squaws pretty hard, then killed ’em when they wasn’t no use no more.”

“What’re you asking, Scratch?” Kersey prodded.

“Me and the Injun, we’ll slip down there—”

“Just the two of you?” Purcell inquired.

“I figger to show him his sisters ain’t … around no more,” Titus explained. “Then we can come on your back trail and catch up to the herd together.”

“There’s too many of them lop-eared greasers for one man to handle down there,” Corn declared, tugging down on a low-crowned hat that had been at one time of a cream color. “I’m going with you.”