Better than just about anyone living, Glorious Johnson understood what the look meant. As clear as staring into a traveling gypsy’s crystal ball, he could see the blood-soaked future of the killers in my flint-eyed gaze.
Men who had never heard of Rangers Lucius Dodge, Randall Bozworth Tatum, or Glorious Johnson would pay dearly for the death and destruction they had wrought on the banks of Three Mile Creek. They were dead men on horses and didn’t have the slightest clue that their departure from the ranks of the living had already been written into the golden pages of the Angel of Death’s eternal book.
Those men’s damnable names, and ten times damnable deeds, were already inscribed in flowing script by the blood-dipped finger tip of a dangerous man most people didn’t even know. I could tell what my friend was thinking. For the slaughter of this unknown family, Lucius Dodge’s ruthless, relentless, unstoppable judgment was now focused on them like a narrow pointed shaft of August sunlight falling through the cottonwoods beside Three Mile Creek. Mounted on a blue-gray horse, bony-fingered death was headed their direction—and his judgment was coming damned quick.
Solemn with respect for what he detected on my stony countenance, Johnson grimly nodded. “Yes, suh, Mistuh Dodge, Mistuh Boz. Don’t you be worrin’ none. Me’n ole Bear, we be findin’ ’em fellas as done this horrible thang. Fast as a vengeful God’ll let us,” he said.
Johnson made a clucking sound, snapped his fingers at the dog, then turned and vanished into the thick patch of weeds with the snuffling animal hot on his heels. As he strode away, I barely heard it when he muttered, to no one in particular, “Thankee Lord God for not makin’ me help burry them poor childern. Not sure I coulda took part in such a gruesome task.”
I watched Glo disappear into the curtain of tall grass between the blood-soaked green spot and where we’d left our animals. Then I propped my rifle against the wagon’s back wheel, unbuckled my pistol belt, and draped it over the sideboards.
Set to rolling up my sleeves. “Best see if we can locate a shovel, Boz. Two would be even better. Need to get ourselves busy digging graves. Might as well go on ahead and get these poor folks underground ’fore they get too ripe on us. Time’s a-wastin’.”
Boz stared into the heavens, as though silently hoping for some sort of divine intervention. Perhaps a miracle the likes of which he’d never witnessed in his long life. When none came, he turned to me and said, “Where you suppose God was when this happened, Lucius.” A single tear streamed down his leathery, stubble-covered cheek. He wiped the droplet away on the sleeve of his shirt. I’d never witnessed such an open display of emotion from my best friend before. Never. His momentary loss of control had a profound and powerful effect on me.
Couldn’t do much of anything but say, “Don’t have a single idea, Boz. Just don’t know.” I hemmed and hawed around some, then clumsily added, “Appears pretty certain he wasn’t anywheres around these parts. Must’ve had more pressing business elsewhere.”
Boz toed at the dirt again and shook his head in sad resignation.
I tried to smooth the situation over a bit in the only way I knew how. “Figure the best thing we can do for these poor folks is get them in the ground quick as possible. See to it they’re covered up where nothing can get at ’em. Don’t you think?”
Boz rubbed a reddened eye with a scruffy knuckle and tried not to look at me when he croaked, “Yeah, I know, Lucius. You’re right as rain. Hot as it is, and as hot as it’s gonna get ’fore dark finally comes, these poor people gonna be getting mighty rank,” Almost as an afterthought, he coughed, stared at Heaven again, then added, “Gonna be all swole up ’fore a body can spit. Putrefied quicker than double-geared lightning.”
Squint-eyed, I nodded. No point debating the brutal truth of the situation. I turned my back to the wagon and its contents and stared at the river.
Remember thinking, sweet Jesus give me strength in this time of unparalleled horror and uncommon butchery.
9
“SNAPPING AND BITING LIKE A RABID DOG.”
BOZ AND ME stood barefoot in the lazy, fetid trickle of Devils River. Pants legs rolled up to bone-white knees, both of us sloshed water over forearms soaked all the way to the elbows with dried gore. Burial of the five bullet-shattered bodies had proven more difficult and taken longer than either of us had anticipated.
Rather than attempting to dig individual holes in the sunbaked, near impenetrable earth, we’d been forced to scratch out a single, shallow grave barely large enough to accommodate the entire massacred clan. The excavation took two hours of backbreaking, debilitating labor. We spelled each other in that grueling effort, using the only shovel to be found amidst the blood-soaked wreckage left behind by merciless killers.
Worst part of the nightmarish enterprise was carrying, or dragging, the still-seeping corpses of the children and their parents for placement inside the crude riverbank tomb. During the grisly interment, it took the total of our concentrated, gulping effort to keep Paco Matehuala’s early morning coffee and breakfast tacos from coming back up in a rush of bitter, pukey, stomach-churning bile.
The gruesome task proved especially problematic during that period when we worked to cover the pathetic bodies of the dead kids with several blood-encrusted, rigid, scab-like blankets retrieved from the wagon. When finally satisfied with our best possible efforts, we threw dirt over the sad corpses like reluctant family members forced into a surprising and deplorable undertaking. Finished off the soul-wrenching job with a layer of all the rocks we could retrieve within fifty feet of the rude burying. Then we decorated the grave with as many blooming cactus plants as I could wrench from the clutches of a reluctant, covetous earth.
Sweat drenched and soaked in gore, Boz had squatted at the foot of the completed tomb. Crestfallen, my friend scratched in the loose dirt with a cottonwood twig and wiped leaky eyes on a filthy shirt-sleeve. He shook his shaggy head and muttered, “They murdered the children. And just a bit earlier this mornin’ we ’uz rememberin’ ole Jasper Pike and how he’d done as much for his own pitiful family.”
“I know, Boz.” What else could I say?
“Musta been some kinda omen, Lucius. Swear it’s enough to make a body wanna puke up his socks. My, oh, my. What’s this ole world a-comin’ to?”
He repeated himself over and over, as though his brain had locked on this single notion. His thoughts appeared focused like a fifty-ton Baldwin locomotive headed in a preordained direction that had no way of diverting itself from the narrow track.
Once finished with our fractional Devils River wash, I pulled dust-covered boots onto still-wet feet. Stamped into them, then set to toweling off with my shirt. Slid the damp garment over a sopping, drippy head and turned to find Boz staring at me with all the baggy-eyed gravity and tremulous intensity of an abandoned, starving bloodhound.
“You are gonna read over these folks, ain’t you, Lucius? Maybe say some good words for ’em?”
I tucked a sodden shirttail inside the waist of my pants, then pulled up my blue-and-yellow-striped suspenders. Slipped into my vest before I said, “Didn’t think to bring a Bible along, Boz. Must admit, had not the slightest inkling we’d find one dead body when we set out this morning, much less five of them. And the kids, sweet merciful Jesus, the kids. Just wrings a body’s heart so hard makes you want to commence blubbering and never stop. Can’t imagine the kind of men as could commit such an act. Just can’t imagine.”