CHAPTER THREE
1
THEY DIDN’T MAKE THE CROSSING BEFORE DARK. THE delay caused by the trading parley stretched out as problems began concerning exactly what the Indians would receive in at least a temporary exchange for the settlers’ lives.
Jack Sterling caused trouble when he fell into an argument with one of the braves over the single bull in his herd. For some reason—probably just to devil the white man, Moses thought when he intervened—the Indian insisted that one of the three cattle to be cut out would be the yearling, which would not have made very good eating, as both the red and the white men knew. A tugging and shouting match developed over the animal, and it threatened to turn violent before Moses managed to pacify the Indians by adding a barrel of salted meat in addition to the heifers Sterling was more or less resigned to parting with.
Then there had been a problem with Runnels. Revived from his wound sufficiently to watch the Indians collect the scattered bolts of cloth, he again took to cursing them in both German and English. While the braves couldn’t understand what he was calling them, his tone was clear enough, and they did not like it and began answering him in their own tongue. Moses had barely settled the matter of the bull when the shouting rose once more around the Runnels wagon, and he galloped up to the German, who sat in the back of his Conestoga with his bandaged foot propped up on the rim while he swore at the two braves who were inspecting the cloth.
“You’d best shut the hell up!” Moses yelled. “You been lucky so far, but they ain’t goin’ to take much more.”
“You call dis lok? Gottdamn your black zoul!” Runnels steamed. “I vill not be robbed by zese heazens. You are in cahoots mitt dem! Dis I know! Ach!” The strain of his yelling caused him to lift his bandaged foot, and it came down and reopened the wound, forcing him to cry out. But his face showed the utter contempt he had for the two races which, somehow, had conspired to rob him of the materials of his trade.
The most serious incident took place unexpectedly. While waiting for Herbert to cut loose a keg of whiskey from Sterling’s wagon, a brave boldly lifted the canvas on the next vehicle in line and, to his delight, discovered a small boy peeking out from under a quilt. Although frightened, the boy was almost as fascinated by the brightly painted Comanche, and he didn’t resist at all when the buck lifted him out of the wagon and held him up high.
The boy belonged to the Simmons clan, an older couple with six children. Bob Simmons, a gunsmith by trade, was quick to react when he saw his youngest son in the muscular hands of an Indian.
He came hauling around the back of his wagon and bellowed at the bewildered brave, doubled up his fists, and delivered a smashing blow to the confused young Indian’s painted face. The brave collapsed, dropping the boy and spouting blood from a cut lip. Simmons swooped up his son and placed him back into the wagon, only then turning to finish what, to his mind, was a fairly started fistfight.
To a Comanche, however, a blow struck with a bare hand was the worst insult one man could pay to another. The outraged warrior removed a club from a thong around his waist and smashed Bob Simmons’s skull as soon as the upstart white man turned to face him.
The blow was not meant to be lethal. It wasn’t intended to do much more than stun the white man, but the Indian was angry and insulted, and blood rushed from Simmons’s ears and nose. He collapsed at the brave’s feet.
His honor satisfied, the Comanche returned to watch Frank Herbert’s efforts to unload the barrel, and Hilda Simmons had to do what she could to drag her unconscious husband back inside their wagon.
The Indians drove the cattle out and ran them into the grass, firing their flint-tipped dogwood shafts into them and chasing them as if they were buffalo. They killed the frightened and confused animals quickly and, to Sterling’s loud expressions of dismay and disgust, began butchering them before the train was moving again. Moses did what he could to urge the drivers to hurry their animals as much as possible. They had lost over an hour of daylight dickering with the Indians, and his landmark was already fading into a mass of distant, dark clouds when the Indians disappeared in the buffalo grass behind them.
The scout still held forth hopes of reaching the crossing and camping there rather than in the open, but more bad luck awaited the party. The Ambrose wagon lost a wheel two hours after they pulled away from the Indians.
“We can’t jus’ leave it!” Kyle Ambrose said when Moses rode up to see why everyone had stopped. “I mean, it’s ever’thin’ we got left.” Ambrose was a hard-looking man with tired yellow hair that had already started to show gray, although he wasn’t yet forty. His two sons stood next to him.
Graham walked down the train from the other direction and stood beside Moses’s horse. “Load what you can on other wagons,” he said. “You know we can’t stop out here. You’re riskin’ the whole train.”
“I ain’t leavin’!” Ambrose declared. “I’ll stay right here an’ fix’er, goddamnit! I ain’t leavin’.”
Graham shrugged. “That’s your lookout, Ambrose. But I think the kids ought to go along.”
“It ain’t fair!” Ambrose swore and kicked the disabled wagon with a broken boot. “Goddamnit, it ain’t fair at all!”
“Nobody said it was goin’ to be,” Graham said. He looked up at Moses and gestured. “Go see if Sterlin’ll take some of this stuff, especially the whiskey. He’s a shade lighter since this afternoon.”
To Moses’s relief Sterling only grunted an agreement when he heard that the keg of whiskey he had lost was to be replaced by two of Ambrose’s load. In a while they had most of the family’s things distributed among three or four other wagons. Kyle Ambrose stood in the middle of his wagon’s bed when the train began moving again.
“I’m goin’ to fix’er an’ catch up,” he announced to each driver who passed.
“C’mon, Mr. Ambrose,” Moses called. “We got to move fast.”
“I ain’t goin’,” Ambrose replied. “I’m goin’ to stay right here an’ try an’ fix’er. My boy Tom’s stayin’ with me.”
Moses looked around and saw the teenaged Ambrose boy coming through the tall grass toward the broken wagon. The other son, Jed, was walking beside Jason Sterling, who continued to herd the cattle.
“Them Indians’ll be along here in a bit,” Moses argued, glancing at the darkening horizon behind them. The western sky was now revealing enormous thunderheads that climbed rapidly skyward from behind the all-too-distant mesa.
“It don’t matter,” Ambrose insisted. “Goddamnit! This here’s all we got in the world. An’ no goddamn Indian’s goin’ to scare me into leavin’ it here to rot.”
Moses looked over the dross of Kyle Ambrose’s life. The chest of drawers and bedstead that leaned uncertainly against the wagon’s denuded frame, now stripped of canvas protection, the carpetbags and other junk. He understood that no amount of talk would move the man, so he wheeled his horse around and caught up to the moving train. He looked back and saw that two of the Ambrose oxen, left unhobbled while their master absentmindedly began working on his wagon, were following along behind the train.
Two more wagons, the Newsomes’ and the Haws-haws’ antique Studebakers, collapsed within a mile of where they left Ambrose. This time, however, the families were more practical. Taking only those belongings they felt they couldn’t live without, they tied their draft animals up and piled onto others’ loads and were on their way again in half an hour.
Moses’s hopes for reaching the crossing before dark faded completely when the sunlight disappeared behind the growing thunderheads in the southwest. Lightning snaked out of the enormous black clouds and seemed to make them grow larger with each flashing explosion as they advanced on the small train. He kept an eye out for cyclones and for more Indians, but neither appeared as the train pushed its way through the trackless grass directly into the huge black maw of the storm.
The wind shifted and now hit them in the face. The air seemed alive with electricity that caused the animals to shy and balk as they drew closer to a tiny grove of scrub cedar at the bottom of a small depression between two outcroppings of red sandstone. Moses spotted a circle of buzzards floating on the updrafts above the small group of trees. They were high overhead, and in spite of the wind’s growing fierceness, the birds continued to circle the depression, riding the heated air currents high and then sweeping down from time to time toward their carrion meal. Moses wondered if a buffalo had gone there to die, or maybe some mustang had broken a leg in a prairie dog hole and limped in before being torn apart by wolves or wildcats.
He spurred his bay and forced her down into the trees as soon as he reached them, thinking that they made a poor substitute for the shelter and natural defenses of the crossing. But as he entered the small grove he groaned out loud. There was almost no protection from either the Indians or the weather. The depression opened on the southern end to an expansive prairie, and the trees were too green and scrawny for firewood.
He pushed the mare down into the tiny grove and set a covey of quail scurrying away from the horse’s hooves. A dozen chicks followed their fat mother out of the trees and into the covering grass. All at once the bay reared back as the wind gusted and brought the overripe stink of rotting flesh. Her reluctance to go down into the hollow had nothing to do with the storm, he realized, and he complimented the beast for having the sense to want to avoid this place. But now that he had seen what was there, he acknowledged that there was no turning away.
He reined the bay around and galloped back toward the train. Graham saw him coming and pulled up. He grabbed his rifle and took up a defensive posture on the seat.
“What now?” he called. “Indians?”
“Worse,” the scout said breathlessly. He drew his horse around and let her stand. “Massacre.”
“What? That’s impossible.”
Moses shot a hard look at Graham’s scowl and fought back anger. He was sick of having to argue every point with this white man. “Well, you jus’ come an’ have a look-see. You tell ‘em it didn’t happen.” He wheeled the horse and rode back down toward the grove.
Graham set his brake and climbed down. He waded through the chest-high grass toward the small grove. Behind him, a number of others followed. All carried weapons high and ready.
Moses waited until Graham reached him, then pointed down into the grove.
There were three wagons, buckboards like Graham’s, several mules and two burros, and a large number of people. The carnage told the scout that much. After Graham and the others came up, they all stood and stared at the remains of a Comanche raid and tried to put together what had happened.
“They was Mescans,” Moses deduced aloud. “You can tell from their clothes.” Coarsely woven strips of serapes and ponchos were scattered around the area.
He couldn’t guess what they had been doing alone out on the plains, this far from the Indian Line and even farther from the well-worn trail that led from Chihuahua and the Paseo del Norte up to Santa Fe. People didn’t travel out here except in large numbers, and not even in large numbers in Comanche Spring, at least not normally, not without a heavily armed escort, and they were too far from any settlement to have been merely lost. But whatever their intention had been would always be a mystery, for none of them survived.
Twelve scalpless corpses were strewn about the small camp like broken dolls. Scavengers had done severe damage to the remains, and it was hard to determine from a distance which of the dead were male and which, if any, were female.
Two had been tied to wagons, and their bodies were festooned with sharp sticks and broken arrows, indicating the manner of their deaths. Another pair had been hanged upside down from the wagons’ uplifted singletrees; the charred remains of their corpses and blackened circles beneath their burned skulls testified to the horror of their ends.
The settlers began to move about, and some soon discovered several female corpses in the grass nearby. The unmutilated but severely decomposed body of one woman was discovered in the brush off to one side. A single bullet hole gaped between her breasts, and her hands clutched an ancient horse pistol. She had apparently killed herself.
All of the wagons had been burned, but they had not caught properly and were mostly intact. The men poked around the charred beds and found two dead children, infants, which apparently had been the victims of the besieged Mexicans before they were overrun by the Indians.
“I can’t believe they shot their own young’uns,” Frank Herbert offered as they looked down on the grisly remains of a family’s life.
“They reckoned the Indians’d jus’ do it for ‘em, an’ slower,” Moses said. He gagged back his stomach’s revolt. The Mexican men had been methodically tortured. It was as if the Indians had cooked their victims one limb at a time.
“I thought they always took kids an’ women with ‘em,” Frank said. His wide blue eyes were heavy with sadness as he looked at the rotting body of a young woman whose breasts were cut away and stomach slashed wide open.
“Sometimes they do,” Moses said. “But war parties need to move quick an’ quiet. Women an’ kids’re noisy.” He cut the bonds on a body and stepped away when it fell from the burned wheel. The odor was overwhelming, and he found himself talking aloud to keep from heaving.
“Once, I hear, down near San Antonio, they got ‘em a whole bunch of kids from some schoolhouse. Hauled ‘em all away, damn near as far as Kansas. Kids kept cryin’, though. Nothin’ would shut ‘em up. So the Comanche got to a bunch of trees, like these here, an’ they jus’ busted all their heads in, one at a time. Just like they was puppies or somethin’.” It was a long speech for the scout, and the white men gaped at him. He turned back to his grisly chore slightly embarrassed.
Graham and Jack Sterling joined Moses in cutting the men’s bodies from the wagon wheels, and Graham picked up remnants of the strewn clothing and covered the ravaged bodies on the ground. He draped the ragged cloth over the corpses with what could only be described as tenderness. Moses watched him for a moment, wondering at the peculiar activity. All of the men on the train had seen corpses before. Many of them were veterans of horrible battles where bodies were strewn about as mere parts, bloody and torn from their owners by the violence of grapeshot and Minié balls. Graham himself was a veteran. But the way in which he covered the bodies, particularly those of the slaughtered women, stirred something in Moses. There was clearly more to the wagon master than the scout had at first perceived.
“Why’d they cut off their tits?” he heard Harvey Pierce, a short, wiry carpenter, ask of no one in particular.
“I hear they make tobacco pouches out of ‘em,” Jack Sterling offered and then laughed. “Mescans got big tits, you know.”
Moses saw Graham flinch, but none of the men said anything more. They were dumbfounded with the horror of the scene. The thoughts of each ranged back to the party that was going on around the whiskey and slaughtered cattle only a few miles behind them. They each figured that the Comanche were probably plotting an even bigger and bloodier raid as soon as they finished off their refreshments and took up the trail again.
“Ain’t we goin’ to bury ‘em?” The voice came from the edge of the clearing, and Moses looked up, finding himself not at all surprised to see Aggie Sterling standing there. She had a handkerchief jammed against her nose, and he could see her eyes were wet.
“Course we’re not!” her father answered her sharply. “They’re just a bunch of stinkin’ Mescans, an’ we’re not wastin’ our time. We can’t camp here, now, if that’s what this nigger had in mind.” He turned to Moses. “We got to get movin’. Right, boy?”
Moses stood and stared back at this scowling white man. Sterling wore a thin mustache and a scraggly, dark goatee. His cheeks sprouted a three-day growth of whiskers. Long, dirty black hair escaped from beneath a once expensive but now trail-battered hat, and his open mouth revealed bright yellow teeth that formed themselves into a sarcastic grin.
The scout wondered how anyone so ugly could have sired such a beautiful daughter as Aggie. At the same time, he remembered how Sterling no longer swaggered with pride in his walk and stance. He was feeling the strain of all the bad luck, Moses realized, and he was looking for someone to blame.
No one liked Sterling. Graham and he didn’t get along, and even Frank gave him plenty of room. He slapped his boy every time the youngster came in arm’s reach, and usually when the train bedded down, Moses saw Sterling sitting off by himself, smoking or maybe pulling off a bottle.
Moses was surprised that Jack Sterling hadn’t already lit out on his own. He showed all the symptoms of a man who would run at the first sign of trouble. Sterling rode the best horse in the train’s remuda, a big black stallion, and he could make good time on his own. But he stayed, and he gave no indication that he was about to do anything else. There was something more than the meager pile of junk in his wagon keeping Jack Sterling along for this trip, more than the dowdy woman Moses figured was his wife, Aggie’s mother, more than a handful of rapidly thinning beeves. He was a slicker, Moses told himself, and a dangerous one.
Moses had been pressing for rapid movement all day. He knew how important it was to find a reasonably safe camp before dark, and clearly, as Sterling had said and as much as he hated to agree with him, they couldn’t camp here. The place reeked of death. No one in the train could stand it. But Sterling’s impudent, ugly grin made the scout stiffen and shake his head. He felt defiant, and something in him made him want to please this strong, pretty girl by antagonizing her father.
“I reckon we ought to plant ‘em,” he heard himself say, and he stood silently while Graham gaped incredulously at him.
He saw Aggie move quickly toward a wagon. She had two long-handled shovels in her hands. Sterling exploded.
“Niggers, Mescans, an’ redskins!” He threw his hat down. “I swear to God almighty in heaven, I’ve never seen such! First you’re all for buyin’ time with my cattle, an’ then the first bunch of dead greasers we come across, you want to throw the whole thing up an’ bury ‘em. God almighty damn! I’m tellin’ you, Graham, I ain’t goin’ to take this. Nossir, I’m not!”
Graham moved his gray eyes between them as if trying to decide if either was worth arguing with. There was no anger in his face, only disgust, a kind of weariness. For the second time that day, he looked to Moses like a man trapped between two untenable alternatives and hating himself because he was being forced to make a choice. He lowered his head and said nothing, but Moses felt his own anger rising all at once. The scout had had enough of Sterling. He was now determined to bury these people, not out of any sense of decency—that was a commodity on the plains that was often too expensive—but simply because he knew that Jack Sterling, an ugly, mean man, a white man, didn’t want him to.
“Look, Mr. Sterling,” Moses said, noting that the wind was beginning to blow harder now. “You get your cattle movin’. I’ll stay here an’ bury these folks. You’d want somebody to bury you, an’—”
Before he could finish, Pierce, the short, wiry man, burst forth from the grass brandishing an empty bottle. “Looky here,” he shouted. “Looky here what them redskins got from them Mescans!”
Sterling snatched the bottle away from the short man, who announced to everyone around, “It’s mescal. Or tequila. Or somethin’. It’s liquor surer’n God. If they done this after a bottle of cheap Mescan liquor, what’re they goin’ to do when they finish off a whole keg of Tennessee sour mash?”
Sterling handed the bottle to Graham and walked off a step, shaking his head. “Niggers an’ Mescans,” he said. “I’ll be damned.”
“There’s some more bottles out there, too,” Pierce continued. “They’re all busted up. We better get goin’.” He raced back toward the train.
“It looks like he’s right,” Graham said, sniffing the bottle’s neck. “We can’t stay here, an’ it’s about to come up another frog choaker.” He glanced appreciatively up to a sky that was now almost completely covered with black. “Maybe it’ll wash some of this away.”
“It’s already rained on ‘em at least twice,” Moses said. “I think we’re okay for a while, anyhow. If they drink that whole keg, they ain’t goin’ to be able to ride, much less track us. Not ‘fore mornin’.”
The men already had started moving back toward the wagons. Harvey Pierce was informing everyone from the top of his lungs that a massacre by drunken Indians was in the making if they didn’t move pronto.
“I’m goin’ to stay an’ dig some graves,” he said.
“The hell you say!” Graham burst out. He turned suddenly and dropped his hand to his Colt’s. He didn’t draw it, but he held its butt in a ready manner. “I’ve about had enough of your goddamn sass for one day. You’re bein’ paid to do a job, an’ so far about all you’ve done is give away our stuff an’ lead us to nowhere. For about six bits I’d just blow your head off an’ leave you right here to rot.”
“I got six bits,” Sterling said, and Moses noted that he had moved slightly beside Graham and also rested his hand on the butt of his pistols, which were arranged in front of him in a cross-draw pattern. Behind them, also, two men who had never spoken to Moses at all stood at the ready as well. They were the men who owned the hogs, and Moses knew them to be from a deeper South than anyone else on the train. One of them wore a stained gray forage cap; the other usually covered himself against the rain with a tattered greatcoat that still bore the stripes of a Confederate sergeant. Moses had instinctively ridden around them since the journey began. Now they looked at him with slightly amused expressions.
A big chunk of silence suddenly grew up in the small grove and stood like a wall against the increasing wind. Moses figured he could take on Graham easily enough. The big man was off balance where he stood, and with one arm crippled, the chances were good that he couldn’t pull a gun out that fast. The two Southerners had rifles, but they weren’t cocked or aimed, and that took time. Sterling’s cross-draw rig was fancy, but Moses doubted that the ugly man was any sort of gunfighter; then, neither was Moses. He wore his guns high on the back of his waist with the butts pointed out for easy reach, and knew he could hit what he shot at from this range, yet he was no quick-draw artist. For Moses, guns were tools, nothing more. The tension mounted as the storm approached, and the electricity that infected the air supercharged the conflict. Moses realized that he had to fight or back down, and neither option was inviting.
“I guess the next move’s yours, nigger,” Sterling hissed. “Pull out them six-shooters, an’ let’s just end it right here. We’ll leave you to rot with your bean-eatin’ friends.”
Graham glanced at Sterling, and Moses saw a glint of something in his gray eyes that told him he hated being backed up by someone of Sterling’s ilk. But the wagon master didn’t back away.
“I reckon it’s your bet, Moses,” he said. “Call or fold. I say we move on. Get to this goddamn crossin’ soon as we can. The livin’ are what’s important now.”
“You won’t think so if you’re the one that’s dead.” Aggie Sterling’s voice cut across the clearing like a scythe. The tension that had built up was mown away like tall grass. They all turned toward her.
She stood off to the group’s left, near one of the Mexicans’ wagons. She spoke to all of them, but her eyes particularly focused on Graham. In her hand was Moses’s knife, the one he had used to cut down the burned corpses and left sticking in the wagon’s side.
For another moment, no one said anything. Then she moved quickly over between Moses and his white adversaries. “We’re goin’ to bury these folks,” she said. “It’s the decent thing to do. I just hope that somebody has the grit to bury me when they find me.”
“Get back on the wagon, girl.” Jack spat out the order in a vicious tone.
“Go to hell,” she said quietly.
“What did you say?” Anger swept over his face in a red blush. His hand fell and withdrew his starboard Colt’s. Moses was right. He fumbled with the pistol’s grip and almost dropped it before he managed to get it out of the holster. “I’ll shoot you like the bitch-bastard you are! Talk back to me! I ought to lick you good. You get on that wagon!” He advanced on her. Moses’s hand went to the butt of his own revolver. Graham could shoot him, but the scout couldn’t—wouldn’t, he determined—just stand there and let this ugly man kill his own daughter. He looked quickly at Graham and saw that the wagon master had drawn his own pistol and was turned now toward Jack.
“Put it up, Daddy,” another voice called from across the clearing. Aggie’s brother, Jason, stood with his feet apart, a shotgun in his hand. The hammers were drawn back, and the twin barrels were directed toward his father’s middle.
“Jason, get the hell back up there with your mother!” Sterling screamed. “What the hell’s goin’ on here? What’s got into you kids?” He turned and scanned the astounded faces of the men in the clearing. Then he wheeled on his children again. “Are you crazy? I’m your daddy. This is your goddamn father you’re talkin’ to.”
“Put the gun up,” Jason repeated. “You ain’t goin’ to shoot her, so put it up.” Moses gaped at the boy. During the whole trip he had never seen the child talk to anyone, had never heard him utter a sound. He went about the chores of tending to Sterling’s herd silently, with his head bowed down. Moses watched the boy stand there with the huge weapon pointed at his father and felt a mixture of relief and guilt at the witness he bore of a family falling apart.
Sterling stood still for a long moment. This was intolerable, Moses knew. Every man on the train was watching Sterling being backed down by his children. But what could he do? There was no mistaking the deadly seriousness in his son’s black eyes. There was more than some principle of decency involved here, Moses realized. There was hatred, deep and of long standing. No one doubted that Jason would as soon kill his father as he would shoot down a coyote or wolf.
The two Southerners slowly moved away from Jason’s line of fire, turning their backs on the scene and making their way through the tall waving grass toward the train. Whatever their intentions had been, they apparently now recognized this as a family matter and none of their business. One by one the rest of the men in the clearing exercised their deference to Sterling’s shame by shifting their positions and looking away. Only Graham remained standing where he was, and even he reholstered his pistol.
Sterling’s face was bright red under his beard’s stubble. His shoulders shook with rage, and he slowly put his Colt’s away. He glared at Aggie and Moses. Raw hate seethed from his eyes.
“C’mon.” Aggie’s voice broke the silence. “Let’s get to it.” She handed the knife to Moses and walked right between Graham and her father and went over by some trees where she had dropped the shovels. She tossed one of the implements onto the ground near one of the abused bodies. Her eyes were blue and sharp over the red pattern of the bandanna around her face. There was something deeper there than Moses had noticed earlier, something more determined. She’s got something in her that’s harder than most men have, he thought.
“We ain’t buryin’ em, Aggie,” Sterling said, but his voice sounded false, strained. “Get on back to the wagon.”
“I’m buryin’ em,” she said. “Me an’ Mr. Franklin here, an’ anybody else who’s decent. The rest of you can go to hell.”
The men who remained in the clearing shuffled and said nothing. They had been prepared to see Moses and Graham shoot it out with each other, and suddenly a simple girl and her younger brother had shamed all of them. Sterling finally broke the tableau and stormed off swearing toward the train. Along the way, he snatched the shotgun from his son’s hands and cuffed him hard on the head. “Son of a bitch,” he shouted.
Moses watched Aggie’s father’s back and realized that the man had lost more than his ability to control his daughter. The scout didn’t understand it fully, but he felt as if something solid had broken in the confrontation. He found that however much he thought of her earlier that day and again during the incident with the Runnels, he now appreciated her even more. There never was any danger of her being shot by her father, he knew. No one in the clearing, not even the aloof Southerners, would have stood for that. She likely knew she was in no real danger, but she had played it as if Sterling were nothing more than a barking dog who challenged her. She was stronger than most of the men he’d known, white or otherwise.
“You ain’t stayin’ here,” Graham said in a firm voice. Aside from the removal and return of his gun, he had not budged through the whole ordeal. He remained with his feet unevenly planted like a statue, his eyes cold and gray as they looked at the white girl and black man who stood uneasily before him. “Not with him.”
“Then you stay with us,” Aggie invited in a serious voice.
“I can’t do that,” he said, and he brought his hand up and wiped his eyes as if he were weeping. When he took it away, however, Moses could tell that tears had not caused the reaction. He was tired, scared, and worried. When the wagon master looked at Aggie, however, Moses saw something else, something he couldn’t quite define. Whatever it was, it made the scout feel suddenly very sorry for Graham.
“I’ll stay with ‘em,” Jason offered. He had dusted himself off and was walking over. A bright red welt had formed on his cheek.
“No,” Aggie said. “Mama needs you. There’s no tellin’ what might happen, now. You stay with her. Promise?” The boy nodded and returned to the wagons.
“We’ll be here awhile,” George Newsome announced. He and Benjamin Hawshaw came into the clearing with an armload of tools. “I ain’t wastin’ time buryin’ nobody, but we need a wagon. The animals’ll play out ‘fore long with all our stuff burdenin’ other folks. We can put it all—most of it anyhow—on that buckboard. It ain’t much, but it’ll do.” The men went directly to the one wagon that had not been badly charred and began crawling under it to inspect for damage.
“Don’t transfer your kegs. Leave the whiskey with the train,” Graham said, and he finally moved over to Moses and Aggie. A sadness flitted across his face, Moses saw, but he couldn’t tell if it was born of memory or regret.
“This is all your fault,” he said, but even though Graham’s gray eyes were directed toward him, Moses wasn’t sure whether he was speaking to him or to the girl. He decided to answer anyway.
“Can’t be helped,” he said. “Got to do’er.” He wondered why. The whole thing contradicted every lesson he had learned on the Southern Plains. He had left other men, red and white and brown, to rot and be eaten by scavengers. Why did he feel so compelled to stay here and risk his life and the lives of everyone on the train for this bunch of unfortunate fools who had come out beyond the safety of the forts? There was no answer other than the corn-haired girl who stood beside him. She had somehow made him do it. She had forced him to go against his judgment. He didn’t know if he blamed her for it or owed her for it. Right now it didn’t matter.
“You keep headin’ north by nor’west,” he said to Graham. “I’ll catch you in a hour. Cut me a horse loose.” He saw Graham start to stiffen. “For her.” He gestured toward Aggie, who had already started turning earth in the midst of the grove. “‘Less you want her ridin’ double with me. Them folks ain’t goin’ to have room on that buckboard for theirselves as it is.”
Graham glanced over to where the Newsome and Hawshaw families were trundling crates and bags down into the area to load onto the wagon as soon as it was ready to go. He nodded and moved away toward his wagon.
In a few minutes he was back leading a small white mare, which he wordlessly tied to one of the cedars near Moses’s bay. He looked for a long moment at the black man and white woman who were preparing to dig graves for the ravaged Mexican party, but he continued in silence and turned away and left them alone. Soon the creaking of the wagons and teams sounded through the wind that continued to sweep the small grove with sudden, violent gusts, and Moses and Aggie were left alone to dig the graves. The Newsomes and Hawshaws loaded their gear onto the wagon and rigged canvas over it to protect it from the rain that would be coming soon. Moses stood watching the wagons pulling out of sight, the drivers and beasts alike bent into the southwestern wind.
“Let’s get to it,” Aggie said, and he turned to see her dragging one of the corpses toward the bare space she had made in the center of the clearing. None of the other people paid them any mind at all. With a shrug of his shoulders that failed to dislodge the guilt he felt, he turned and joined her.
2
THEY STARTED DIGGING A LONG TRENCH, HER SCOOPING out the soil he loosened with his shovel, and in an hour they were done. The storm was almost on top of them and great drops were falling when they lowered the remains of the Mexican party into the shallow hole and covered them. They had worked the entire time in silence except for their occasional gagging. The Newsomes and Haws-haws were having trouble arranging their things under the loose canvas, which flapped uncontrollably as the wind whipsawed this way and that in advance of the storm.
“Should of hitched them other wagons up, too,” Moses shouted over the wind and rain. The two burned-out hulks would still roll, he believed, and even if they were used for nothing but wheels and axles, they might be valuable. Neither the Newsomes nor the Hawshaws paid any attention to him. It was as if he weren’t there.
He saw that the settlers had finally stowed all their gear as well and were trying to settle down a mule team to get them into the traces. The long-eared beasts were frightened both by the smell of death that still permeated the hollow and by the brilliant flashes of lightning that stunned the darkening sky with explosions of heavy thunder.
Aggie asked, “Oughtn’t we to say somethin’?” She prodded the fresh mound a bit with her toe. “Seems like we ought to say somethin’.” Her calico skirt whipped up in the wind and showed her battered high-buttoned shoes, which were now covered with red mud. She had tied a bonnet over her head, but the wind had torn it off, and it now hung around her throat by the strings and sailed out beneath her flowing golden hair.
“I don’t know what,” Moses said. “I never was much good at that sort of thing.”
“I’d like to put up a marker, but I guess buryin’ em was what mattered.”
The storm suddenly broke with a rush, and he braced himself against the gusts of wind and grit that swept across the hollow. He grabbed the horses from where they were milling about in the trees. She had already crawled underneath the nearest burned-out wagon, following the settlers’ example. Moses started to go over to where the two families crouched under their appropriated vehicle, but he realized that they would never let him share their small dry space. He securely tied the reins of the horses to the wagon’s charred wheel and tried to calm them down at the same time while he bent his hat against the pelting raindrops.
“You goin’ to just stand out there an’ drown?” he heard her yelling at him.
He glanced once more over toward the white settlers’ wagon, but he could see only a sheet of rain. Water ran down his back and blew up under his hat. He grabbed his bedroll, crouched down, and scrambled underneath the wagon beside her.
He handed Aggie an oilskin, and she wrapped herself in it against the wind, which now contained hailstones that clattered down onto the wagon’s bed. Moses moved as far away from her as he could and still stay relatively dry. He didn’t want the others to see him sitting close to her. They could hear squeals of mixed terror and glee from the Hawshaw children, but the storm was so furious, he realized any fear he had of being observed near the white woman was groundless. He could barely see the outline of the trees across the small grove.
“I hope the train found some kind of shelter,” Moses yelled.
“Serve ‘em right if they don’t!” she yelled back, and she said something else that was lost in the storm’s violent noise.
Unable to hear their own voices, they fell silent. Only the muddy mound of the covered trench remained to tell of the death that had lain around the grove an hour before.
After what seemed an uncommonly short period, the front of the storm passed and left a gentle spring rain in its wake, and the light in the grove rose from blackness to a dull gray. The rain diminished to a spotty drizzle, and Moses and Aggie sloshed out from under the wagon and looked around. A field of marble-sized ice crunched under their feet as they moved, but the sight that stunned them into silence was across the grove. The wagon with the Hawshaws and Newsomes was gone. Sometime during the height of the storm, or shortly before it ended, they had moved out. Muddy tracks bore testimony to their flight. Neither Aggie nor Moses had heard them leaving.
There was nothing to say, but the scout appreciated the awkwardness of their position. No matter what happened, Moses had not been prepared to remain in the tiny grove of trees alone with Aggie. He was, he supposed, willing to remain behind and bury the dead Mexicans by himself rather than allow her to do the same, but he knew that if she and he stayed behind together, there would be more trouble than the argument over the incident had already caused. He knew that aside from the hatred it would inspire against him, the danger it would put him in as a black man who was, on the surface of things at least, compromising a white woman would make her the target of the settlers’ outrage.
For her part, she seemed not to consider the situation. “I’m soaked to the skin” was her only comment.
He looked with futile hope after the wagon tracks that led out of the tiny clearing back up onto the plains. The storm had lasted only a short time, but God only knew how long Newsome and Hawshaw had been gone, or why they had left. They hadn’t been in the grove when the argument heated up between Moses and Graham. They likely hadn’t heard anything about the fracas, so busy had they been removing their belongings from the others’ wagons and preparing to take over the abandoned Mexican rig. Chances were that they had paid small attention to any part of it. They knew why Aggie and Moses were staying behind, but they had offered no help with the funeral tasks. A hot feeling of being in trouble rashed up on the back of his neck, and his hand automatically went there to massage it away.
After only a few minutes to collect the shovels and make sure they had left nothing behind, he and Aggie mounted their horses and began to follow the wagon trails in the tall grass as they wound their way north by northwest. The Newsome-Hawshaw rig intersected with the other irregular and almost parallel lines of the wagon train about a hundred yards from the grove and then fell into their deep cuts in the grass. But they were not going to be just up ahead as Moses had hoped. Instead, their buckboard’s wheels cut back to the east, back to where they had abandoned the bulk of their belongings earlier in the day. The fools had gone to collect what they could of their things before rejoining the train. The western horizon was still dark with clouds, but behind them flashes of lightning continued to lighten the sky. It was as if they had gone to chase the storm and its fury, but what they were more likely to find was Comanche.
Moses debated about going after them, trying to catch them and persuade them to turn around and chase the train’s tracks through the grass. But light was fading rapidly. He and Aggie sat wordlessly on their mounts at the point where the buckboard had moved off to the east, then without anything more than a nod from the black scout, the girl reined her horse in next to his, and they made their way toward the northwest, following the train.
3
THEY HAD RIDDEN LESS THAN A MILE WHEN SUDDENLY the horizon changed, and out of the darkness of the storm clouds, a brilliant line of yellowish pink exploded across the mesa and outlined the copse of trees. The storm was passing, and the clear sky brought forth a spectacular sunset that promised a dry night if not a safe one. Once again, Moses was struck by the beauty of this frontier. He had never seen a sunset anywhere else to match the majestic array of colors that streaked across the western sky.
As the rain stopped completely, they rode along in silence and enjoyed the cool of the evening. They peered into the dusk for the lights of the train’s camp. Moses was certain that Graham would not have the presence of mind to forbid fires and lanterns, not that it would make any real difference. Comanche could smell white men, he had heard.
Moses had put everyone in danger, since none of the settlers had any experience with Indians whatsoever. Now he would likely be blamed for the Hawshaws’ and Newsomes’ disappearance as well. He was in deep trouble, he told himself, and he tried to understand why he had done it. He glanced over at the girl who rode easily beside him, and the understanding came to him in a flash of realization that almost shamed him in its honesty.
As dusk settled more heavily around them, ground fog rose from the sodden grass, almost as if the water caught in the blades was trying to moisten the dry atmosphere that had oppressed the plains all day. The sky was fading from brilliant pink to a deep purple, and the mesa’s outline was now sharp against the dying light.
There was another foolish thing involved, he admitted to himself, more dangerous than any trouble that he himself faced. Her reputation was more than harmed; it was destroyed. She was out in the dark with a Negro man, alone, and that would be enough to start rumors circulating back at the train. It could be enough to start guns cocking and hanging ropes coiling as well. She had to be aware of it, he knew, but she didn’t seem to mind.
Aggie, he observed, seemed unworried about the prospect of any sort of retribution, either at the hands of her volatile father or from the actions of her fellow whites on the train. He had trouble envisioning her submitting to any sort of punishment, especially anything involving a beating. She was different from any girl—white or black—he had ever met. He wondered how much impulsiveness had to do with her behavior, or if it were not something more, something he was used to seeing in brave men, who tended to do what their hearts told them was right even when common sense contradicted them, men whose experience had hardened them more than second-growth hickory, whose actions were dictated by a higher moral principle than others could fathom. He couldn’t divine her motives, though, and her face, lit as it was by the fading sunlight, told him nothing.
Suddenly Aggie broke their silent ride. “You was born a slave, wasn’t you?”
Moses was startled by the question. “Yeah . . . uh, yes, Ma’am, I was.” His voice was unsteady. Surely that was obvious, he thought.
“What was that like?” she asked with a bright voice. “To be a slave?”
She might as well be asking what it was like to fly, Moses thought. Even so, he contemplated the question. What was it like? How could he even begin to describe it for this girl whose life had, perhaps, been hard, but who had no inkling of what it was like to be owned by someone else?
“It’s bad, Missy,” he said after a moment. “It’s worse’n anythin’ you can imagine.”
“I s’pect so,” she said slowly.
Moses thought carefully. It wasn’t a question anyone had ever asked him before. People—white and black, even freeborn Negroes—never asked what it was like to be a slave. They had just assumed they knew, or, in the case of most whites, they didn’t care.
“I can’t imagine it,” Aggie said. “I mean, we never had nothin’, nothin’ at all, an’ we were always beholden to somebody, it seems. But we were our own folks, owned ourselves anyway. I can’t imagine ownin’ somebody. Not even a nigger slave. I mean, buyin’ and sellin’ folks. Did that happen to you?”
“Yessum,” he muttered. “It happened.”
“What was your, uh . . . master like?” Aggie asked. “Was he mean? Did he, uh . . . beat you?”
“No, Ma’am, not much. My actu’l master never beat me hisself. He liked me, I think. He learned me to ride an’ shoot.” He also let the women alone, Moses thought with an antique anger flushing through him. Joseph Grierson—and his first overseer, Evan Carpenter—had never, so far as Moses knew, messed with any of the black girls they owned and worked.
“I didn’t think slaves was s’posed to know that,” she said simply.
“They ain’t,” Moses replied. “Not many does. But I learned. He learned me good. He was a, uh . . . he was a good man.” Then he added, “For a master.”
“What ‘bout your mama an’ daddy? Did he beat them?”
“I was sold away from my mama when I was young. Never had no daddy,” he said, then he silently concluded, no daddy whom he could call such.
“Did he, your master, beat others?” Aggie persisted in her questioning. “Your friends?”
A slave has no friends, Moses wanted to tell her. “No, not much,” he said. “He didn’t never beat me or anybody personal. But there was other men, overseers.” His jaw set. “They did.”
“I hate that,” Aggie said. “People who beat people who are weaker than them are lowlifes. They deserve to be shot.”
Moses did not respond but only listened to the night sounds. For a moment, he thought he could smell the gunsmoke and black powder of the battle where Henry Thomas had died. With Aggie’s words other odors seemed to float around him and mix with his memories. The fragrance of the dung the Comanche used on their hair made Moses’s skin tingle. In a while, he thought, coyote calls would howl over the prairie, and it would seem that the whole plain was alive with voices of ghostlike creatures that could chill the blood of even the bravest men.
He glanced over his shoulder, and what he saw made his own blood freeze. The dark horizon to the east was already alight with an orange glow that indicated that the moon—the Comanche moon—was soon to rise. It was a harbinger of death all across the Southern Plains. It meant that Comanche were riding that night.
“I hate slavery,” Aggie went on, not noticing that he had spotted the pending moonrise behind them. “I’m glad it’s done with.”
“Yessum,” Moses muttered. But he thought, It ain’t done with, Missy, not by a long shot.