Two days later Bass spotted his first herd of wild horses racing along the bench a short distance above them. None of the creatures appeared to be the least bit concerned about men capturing them—often loping along the outfit’s line of march for hours at a time. On those occasions the trappers had to be very wary that none of their pack animals broke loose to follow the wild herd. The farther south they pushed, the more of those mustangs they encountered crossing their trail day after day. This had to be a horse thief’s paradise, Scratch thought.
“Injuns in these parts?” he asked of the others one night at their fire as the men unfurled their robes and blankets, settling in for a few hours of sleep.
“Not many what a man might worry about,” Jack replied.
Then Elbridge added, “Less’n the Comanche ride down on the town.”
Hatcher nodded. “The Comanche been known to cause considerable trouble for the Mexicans.”
Throwing his arm in a wide arc, Bass inquired, “This here Comanche country?”
“Not rightly,” Jack declared. “They just come here to raid the poor pelados, to carry away everything they can. Horses, cows, mules, anything they take a shine to.”
“That means they’ll carry off Mex young’uns too,” Solomon stated.
“What the hell they want with the young’uns?” Scratch asked.
“Turn ’em into good Comanche,” Caleb said. “The boys they make into warriors, and the girls—well, down the line the girls gonna start having Comanche babies.”
Rufus wagged his head sadly. “The greasers ain’t all that good at putting up a good fight of it.”
“Ain’t they got any soldiers?”
“They got soldiers, Scratch,” Isaac said. “But they ain’t allays the sort to be any help.”
“What these soldiers good for?”
“Sometimes they dare ride out on the Santy Fee trail what takes a man back to Missouri,” Hatcher said. “But there’s Comanche out there in that water-scrape hell. So most times them yellow-backed polecats are hanging round where they can be safe when they stare real hard at traders come in from the States. Making sure they’re always somewhere they don’t have to worry ’bout no Comanche.”
“Mostly, them soldados gonna be where they find lots of women and pass brandy and some fandango to take in,” Caleb said.
“Fandango?” Scratch asked.
“Mexican for dance,” Rufus said with a generous grin. “A real hurraw an’ stomp—with plenty likker and womens!”
Turning back to Hatcher, Titus asked, “So how bad these Comanche be?”
Jack’s merry eyes darkened. “The Blackfoot be the devil’s sumbitches up north. And down here the wust a man run up against be the Comanch’. Ain’t no red nigger any finer on the back of a horse.”
That night it snowed, right on into the pale, murky dawn as the sky continued to lower off those craggy mountain slopes rising on either side of them as they flung the fat, icy flakes off their robes and blankets, quickly rolling up the bedding and lashing it atop the packs they hung across the backs of their animals. The wind stirred just before sunrise, hurling itself at their backs all that day, whining and whimpering around them on into that night when they made camp just as the sky muddied and the snow finally let up.
“How far now, Jack?”
Hatcher ruminated on that a moment, then said to Scratch, “Less’n a week, give or take.”
“Five days, I’ll wager,” Solomon declared.
“Ye’re up to making a bet?” Jack asked.
“Five days,” Fish repeated. “An’ I said I’d wager.”
“A week,” Hatcher stated. “No less.”
“Anyone else?” Solomon asked, gazing around at the others huddled shoulder to shoulder at the edge of the flames as he shook Hatcher’s lean hand.
“Can’t be soon enough for me,” Kinkead groaned. “No matter how many days.”
It began to snow again the following morning as the nine of them rolled out and stomped around to stir up some warmth in their limbs. Bass, Kinkead, and Fish went out to take the horses down to water, finding the narrow creek beginning to ice up along the banks. Using a dead limb he found beneath an old cottonwood, Scratch hammered away at a thin crust, breaking a large hole where the animals could drink before taking to the trail.
As he stood there shivering slightly, huddled within his soot-smudged, grease-stained red blanket, Bass watched the frosty halo over the herd slowly change from a misty gray to a delicate rose as the sun climbed briefly until swallowed by a thickening boil of snow clouds. As he watched, that tint of crimson gradually faded to pewter as the sun continued to rise, hidden once more behind the lowering of the heavens.
“C’mon, Scratch!” Caleb hollered as he and the others drove the horses back toward their camp. “We only got us five days till we reach Taos.”
“Seven days!” Hatcher bellowed like a calf hamstrung by a pack of prairie wolves as he struggled past, huffing as he hefted a pack onto the back of a horse.
Wood waited a moment, then leaned toward Bass. “Five days,” he whispered, and held up all the fingers on one bare hand. “Five.”
It didn’t matter to Titus. This close, those two days they argued over truly didn’t matter. They were drawing nigh, near enough that Scratch could sense the keen edge to the anticipation building in the others, an anticipation that ignited an excitement of his own.
As long as he had been out here already, in the last few days Bass was coming to realize that everything would be brand-new in this country south of the Arkansas. Not just the peoples—both Mexican and Indian—but their food and drink as well, along with another new and foreign language bound to fall about his ears. As much as he had been swallowed up in the varied cultures and races at the international port of New Orleans back in his youth, or lived at the St. Louis crossroads of a nation busy with its westward expansion, Bass was surprised to find himself growing as anxious to reach this Mexican village as he had been to enter his first Indian village back in twenty-five.
But more than anything else, he was finding the country itself different from what lay to the north.
This mountain southwest was truly a land of extreme contrasts. While spring would give birth to richly flowered valleys, so too did high, snowcapped peaks rise well above the desert floor. Green, rolling meadows carpeted the slopes of hills all the way down to sun-hardened desert wastes speckled with ocatillo and barrel cactus, mesquite trees and frequent reminders of an even more ancient time in the sharp-edged, black lava fields that occasionally cluttered the landscape.
Always the land of the lizard, horned toad, prairie dog, and rattlesnake, this was also a country where he found cottonwood and willow bordering the infrequent gypsum-tainted streams where that “gyp” water might well cause most unaccustomed travelers to grow sick, stricken with a paralyzing bowel distress.
These vast, yawning valley plains stretched upward toward the purple bulk of hills, from there up to brick-red mountainsides timbered with the ever-emerald-green of pinion pine and second-growth cedar. At sunrise a man would find the treeless ridges staring back at him like some swollen, puffy, fight-ravaged eye. But by the time the sun rose high, that same vista would be painted a hazy blue, eventually turning to a deep purple as the sun finally sank to its rest. In such a land there was sure to come the summer heat of hell, the bitter cold of an unexpected and uncompromising blizzard in winter.
For much of the last few weeks, the nine and their animals had threaded their way through this high land of brilliant color and startling contrast by following the Rio Grande itself as it flowed due south. Eventually, of an early afternoon, they stopped to water the animals for midday at the mouth of a narrow river that flowed out of the hills to the east to mingle its snow-melt with the Rio Grande.