Jubilee kept them up to their elbows in steady work. And blood. And scalps.
When he grew weary of the hunt and the carnage, Usher ordered his army back to one of the larger provincial towns to present his bags to the local officials: Cibuta, or Magdalena, Cananea, and Turicachi. There the debt was always paid promptly, and without fail, from local treasuries. Those officials knew they were sure to be reimbursed from the provincial capital of Hermosillo. It had not always been so.
One failure to pay the promised bounty, seasons ago—and the Mexican officials came to realize just how great a mistake it would be to loose Usher’s carnivorous brigands on the countryside.
Furious that he had been refused his money, Jubilee released his hounds of war. They had pillaged, raped, and killed, burning to the ground a small village of farmers and shepherds just the way Usher’s army rode through Indian camps dotting the scrub in the distant foothills and mountains. When the government sent its soldiers against the invading army of Jubilee Usher, his gunmen turned the Mexicans around, then made slow work of the hapless soldiers over three days of a running fight, chasing the Mexicans back toward the valley towns and settlements. Although they were outnumbered by the provincial soldiers, Usher’s men clearly had their enemy outgunned. These bounty hunters enjoyed prolonging the inevitable end—eventually killing all but one, a major who spoke a smattering of English.
Leaving the man barefoot and in his underwear, Usher dispatched the major back to Hermosillo with a message for the governor and all the venal officials around him who had refused to pay the offered bounty that first time.
“Your soldiers cannot prevent the Apache from banging on your doors. If you do not pay—your soldiers will not be able to keep my army from the walls of your cities and towns and villages. If you will not give me what you guaranteed me—I will take it out in blood, crossing and recrossing your land, leveling it all with a clean swath of my bloody sword!”
It had been a message not lost on the Mexican officials.
In seventy-two Usher had expanded his operations as the Apache, no respecters of any boundary, crossed over the mountains into the province of Chihuahua, making things hard on outflung villages like Nacori, Chico, and Madera, Huachinera and Huasabas, over to Sahuaripa and down to Yepachic. Back and forth across that continental divide his gunmen rode, driving the Apache before them and in the end taking all that they wanted as a virtual army of occupation. They used the sheep herded by the poor villagers for target practice. They took girls and women with them whenever they left a jacal, using their prisoners as long as the women served their purpose—then leaving them behind in the desert to find their own way back to what was left of their dusty, bloodstained villages, or die alone and forgotten.
After the first real cold rain of autumn that clearly announced the coming of winter, Jubilee had collected the Mexican bounty and turned his army north in triumph. As always, they rode wide around Fort Bowie and Fort Thomas, especially Fort Apache. To fight the puny Mexican army was one thing. But Usher would hardly be fool enough to prod the might of the U.S. Army against him.
No less than Brigham Young himself might tempt the fates, pushing and goading the federal government to find out just how far he could go before he had to back down. But Jubilee Usher was a different sort. He knew enough about fighting and killing, enough of the blood sport of war, to stay clear of the army.
After all, such just might prove to be an admirable alliance come a day when Usher needed the help of the U.S. Army to pry that heretic Brigham Young out of his throne in Deseret.
Once more winter settled down on the central basin, and those last, short days of December waned. Again Jubilee led his long column of weary, bloodied gunmen back to the security of John Doyle Lee’s settlement at Cedar City. It was here his army rested and recruited itself each winter, celebrating their victories and spending hard-earned blood money, waiting again for the advent of spring when they could ride south, to determine if the cowed officials of Mexico were once more in need of their specialized services.
“Where else is an army such as this to go, brother?” Usher had asked the double-dyed pious Lee for the first time that autumn of sixty-nine.
Among the polygamist’s faithful the Danite gunmen had wintered until that spring of seventy, when they rode out to the south and discovered the rich cornucopia to be made in Apache scalps. Usher knew Lee was relieved to see his army of gunmen depart.
But when the raiding season ended, Jubilee had needed a place to post his brigands until the following spring allowed them to take to the blood trail once more.
“John Doyle,” he had replied in that soft rumble of his cannonlike voice, “these are Saints. My Saints. Like you, like me. How well you know we are not of the mold Brigham would want of us. But instead, we are born of the mold Almighty God has Himself made—formed us of its dust and clay—then shattered that mold into an infinite number of pieces. Charging us to go forth and do His work. You,” Usher said, snatching up Lee’s black wool lapel and leaning his big face inches from the polygamist’s, “you and me are destined to control the fate of the Church, of the faithful, of this whole earthly Empire!”
Lee had removed Usher’s hand from his coat, slowly, his fiery eyes narrowing as they rose from the grisly necklace of human ears interlaced with blackened, shriveled penises once pendant between the legs of Usher’s victims, worn front and back like a medieval church scapular.
His eyes turned up in an owlish frown, Lee told the Danite leader, “Only so long as your soldiers walk the path of righteousness. Only so long as that, Jubilee—will you be allowed to commune among us. These are gentle folk and you, your men—”
“Are rough-hewn, yes,” Jubilee had interrupted. “They are fodder only, Lee. Don’t you see? Among them are the makings of our greatness. Yours and mine.”
“Count me out of your blood work, Jubilee,” Lee had protested, wagging his head meaningfully, his Adam’s apple as big as a turkey’s egg.
Usher had laughed, a caustic sound, like ice breaking apart in northern rivers. When he spoke, his words came sharp, filled with bile, cutting with a lasting sting. “Seems I recall a great deal of blood work done at the behest of John Doyle Lee back to 1857,” he said more softly then, theatrically. “That train of Gentiles, wanting nothing more than to make their way to California. You slaughtered them all—man, woman, and child at Mountain Meadows—didn’t you?”
“What of it!” he protested in a voice as tart as pickling brine, the rangy dance of his big Adam’s apple bobbing up and down his stringy neck.
He had rocked back into Lee’s face, the venom returned to his words, licking a fleck of spittle from the fleshy curve of his lower lip as he said, “Don’t seek to preach to me about blood work, John Doyle Lee! We know where we each stand, whereof the call from on high comes. And now we share the same dream of seeing that false prophet Brigham Young removed from his temporal throne.”
“The years have brought a change in … circumstances, shall we say?” Lee replied, his face as dreary as a priest’s at a sacrifice. “I want nothing more than to live out my life—”
“The old fires dying in you, my friend?” Jubilee had asked. Then sighed. “All right. I think we understand one another. For the time, I only ask you and yours to help me embrace these men within the folds of your faithful for the coming winter. Help me teach them the true faith, John Doyle—and in return you and yours will be paid handsomely for all that we are fed, for the roofs put over our heads.”
“I cannot escape the feeling that you have brought to my doorstep an army of occupation,” Lee protested softly, his arms swung out wide as if submitting to crucifixion. “These are gentle, common people—”