With a snort Bass shook his head. “Of all the softheaded, schoolchild—”
McAfferty jerked down on Scratch’s shirt, shutting him up. “You listen,” he rasped, his dark eyes filled with terror. “Only one scalp I never took, Mr. Bass. Only one. The hair of a Ree medicine man.”
“Hatcher told me …” and then his voice trailed off as he watched how pale his partner’s face became.
Asa’s blue eyes had gone to slate as they flicked left and right, as if he were expecting to catch something more hurtling at them out of the gray of dawn’s light. “Should’a took the hair of that’un … but I didn’t. And now the old bastard’s ghost is gonna come for me.”
Scratch swallowed hard. “You don’t believe—”
“One day he’ll come for me.”
19
They had waited out that short autumn day there beside the river, watching for more Apache.
Better to fight them here, Bass thought, than have them catch you out there on the desert. Here—where a man at least had water, and a few rocks around him, along with a little shade slanting down off the rocky bluff once the sun began its dip into the last quarter of the sky.
By the time Bass turned to move back toward the animals so he could retrieve some bear grease to smear on his tender belly wound, he sidestepped through the rocks to watch one of McAfferty’s packhorses go down. Its knees buckled as the animal snorted, kneeling into the sand clumsily. Arrows bristled from its neck and front flanks. More shafts quivered from the other animals, their packs, and saddles.
He quickly counted—finding one of them missing.
Dropping to one knee, Scratch peered under Hannah’s legs, finding his saddle mount already down, on its side and unmoving—more than a dozen arrows sticking from its bloody ribs and belly, all of them fired from above where the three warriors had crawled along that narrow shelf.
With a groan he let his head sag between his shoulders.
Right then the two of them had tougher problems than Asa’s goddamned ghost.
For a while Titus brooded on just what they could do with all the plunder and supplies without adding to the burden the animals were already carrying. To put any more weight on Hannah and the last of McAfferty’s horses was unthinkable—not with the heat and the desert and all that distance still to go before they would reach Taos.
Another option would be for him to walk those hundreds of miles, wearing out one pair after another of his moccasins. But even in the cool of that desert morning, Titus doubted he could ever accomplish that journey on foot.
Their only choice lay in separating wheat from chaff: packing only what was absolutely necessary on Hannah’s back, caching the rest here beside this river—as if they would one day return to reclaim what they would abandon.
Bass knew he never would.
“I ain’t digging no hole for it,” he growled at McAfferty. “Let the Apache have it all.”
Once the sun rose high enough to warm the air, Scratch settled back against the side of the bluff to wait out the rest of the morning. He simply didn’t have enough strength left to work any longer in the immobilizing heat. By midafternoon, when the sun’s direct rays slid behind the sandstone butte—bestowing a little shade upon their side of the hill—the dead horses had already begun to bloat. Now and then expanding gases whimpered and hissed from the arrow wounds and anuses.
In the cool of twilight, after an entire day with no further sign of more Apache, Bass felt confident enough to stand and move around in the dimming light. Managing to free his saddle from the carcass of the dead mount, he propped it atop the boulders while he went to work pulling the supply packs from the dead packhorse. After removing the last of the packs from Hannah and McAfferty’s second horse, Titus began to tediously go through all that they possessed—setting aside what was essential. That done, he put everything else in two stacks: what they would readily put to use, and what was more luxury than necessity. This last pile they would leave here in the shadows of the bluff, beside the Gila, come nightfall.
Titus stood and looked down at the rest when he was done, wagging his head at how pitifully small was what they could carry away from this place. Without those two extra animals and their four packs—why, what they were taking along now might just outfit a small band of Digger Injuns. No more than that.
But he and Asa had their lives back in their own hands, and that was a damned good feeling for a man who had no hankering to turn over his fate ever again to another, nor to the desert. His life was back in his hands, and his hands alone.
As soon as it was nearing full dark, Bass was already strapping the rebuilt packs back on Hannah and on Asa’s packhorse. Kneeling, he nudged McAfferty awake, and together they hauled themselves into the saddle and reined away from the boulders, following the river toward those mountains looming in the distance. Swinging loosely from the ropes lashing both bundles carried by Asa’s packhorse were the nine Apache scalps. Every bit of the long black hair, and the tops of the ears too. Titus wasn’t about to let any hoo-doo haunt him from here on out.
With the arrival of dawn Bass was half dozing in the saddle. McAfferty lay asleep, slumped forward against the withers of his horse. It wasn’t until some time after the sun came up that Scratch found them a place out of the light among some small but shady paloverde trees.
Another day out of the sun, followed by another long autumn night of relentless riding—pointing their noses northeast, keeping the North Star at the corner of his left eye. Pick out some feature of the land in the dark and ride right for it until they got there. Then select another landform in the distance and make for it. Again and again while the stars continued to wheel overhead and the night turned cold enough to turn their lips blue and cause their teeth to chatter.
Night after night of riding. Waiting out each day, keeping a rotation of watch between them, their eyes constantly searching the horizon for pursuit until sundown again marked the hour for them to pack up and remount.
How much longer? he had often wondered. How much farther did they have to go? … Until he scolded himself and forced his mind to think on something else. Day and night Bass tried hard to remember the look of Taos from afar, remember the smell of the rutted streets littered with refuse and offal. Were the women really as pretty as he remembered them? Was the village as gay as his memories painted it? Or had he only grown so sick and lonely for the sight of another human face, desperately yearning for some sign of those whitewashed walls, that the Taos he conjured up was far more than it really was?
“How ol’t a man you be, Mr. Bass?” Asa asked early of a morning after they had snuffed out the moon and rolled into their robes to sleep out the frosty day.
He thought a moment, tugging at the figures the way a man might tug at the strings on his moccasins to knot them securely. “I’ll turn thirty-six this coming birthday.”
“When will that be?”
“First day of the year.”
“A noble day, that,” McAfferty replied. “Meself, I’ll be turning thirty-six next year too. Late of the year, howsoever.”
Bass turned in the growing light and pulled the edge of his robe from his face to peer over at his partner. “You’re younger’n me?”
“’Pears to be.”
“S’pose it’s that white hair of your’n,” he said finally. “Makes you … seems you’re older’n me.”
“My years out here make me a old man to some,” Asa confessed. “But I’m a young’un to others.”
“Never asked where you come from.”
McAfferty hacked at some phlegm, then answered, “I was bred and borned in North Carolina.”