The moment Banquo Collins heard the two shots and the teamsters started hollering, he quietly but quickly looked to his own gear. One of the teamsters said, "Who fired? 'Paches?"
"I doubt it. Sometimes they carry stolen pieces, but customarily it's a club — or a wee knife to slit your throat. Also, they'll not risk a fight and possible death at night. They believe conditions existing when they die follow them to the spirit world, and they want to rest forever in pleasant sunshine. Nothing to fear, see?"
Throughout the speech, Collins had finished gathering his gear. He tugged his hat over his eyes, turned and started away from the fire at a brisk walk. The teamster was too tense and stupid to compare the guide's statements with reality: the full moon lent the landscape a clarity and whiteness almost like that of a wintry noonday.
But Collins's rapid stride woke up the teamster. "Where the hell you goin'?" he yelled.
Head down, the guide kept moving. A few more steps, and he would have cover among the big —
"Collins, you yella dog, you come back here!"
Not a dog, a glass snake, he thought, recognizing hysteria in the voice and flinging himself sideways while reaching for his revolver. The wild shot fired by the teamster missed by two yards, pinging off rock. He didn't waste a bullet of his own — he might need every one — but his leap threw him against a boulder, bruising his shoulder. Recovering, he lunged on.
After a few steps he turned again, glimpsed part of the clearing between tall stones. He saw the Jicarillas swarm out of the dark beyond the fire and surround the three hired men. Genuinely frightened, Collins fled, leaving behind the capering Apaches and the wild, sharp barks with which they imitated a coyote. The barks were not quite loud enough to drown out the screams.
Running, stumbling often, Collins drove himself until pain and shortness of breath forced him to slow down. His chest felt close to bursting. After a brief rest he pushed on until he found a place where he thought he could descend. Hand over bloodied hand, he went down the rock wall. He misjudged one hold and fell the last twenty feet, knocked nearly unconscious.
Dust-covered, his hands and face red from cuts and scrapes, he rested again, then lurched to the edge of the stream, which he crossed with a minimum of noise. Not that the Apaches would hear the splashes. They were whooping and yelling to celebrate.
Collins knew they would take the horses to ride awhile, then butcher. They would also break open the gun crates and take the Spencers. He wanted to learn the fate of the two heavy wagons, the object of the late Mr. Powell's attention. The moment Collins saw the Apaches at the fire he knew they had disposed of his half-crazy employer and that worm of a lawyer. Neither man mattered to him, nor any of the teamsters. The teamsters were the tail of the glass snake.
What mattered was his own skin and, secondarily, the wagons. When he reached the shallows on the other side, he headed upstream until he located a good observation point in some twisted junipers. He was almost directly opposite the mouth of the deep gully near the campsite. The Apaches had added fresh wood to the fire. He saw flames leap above the tall rocks occasionally.
He was wrong about the source of the fire, he quickly discovered. It came from one of the wagons, which appeared between the rocks, pushed by fifteen or twenty angry Indians. The whole forward third of the wagon was burning. The front wheels blazed brightly.
The Apaches pushed it to the gully rim and with grunts and exclamations tipped it over. The emptied wagon — if indeed it was completely empty, which Collins doubted — stood perpendicular a moment, tailgate toward the moon. Then it dropped, the front end decorated with two swiftly spinning disks of fire, like the Catherine wheels he remembered dimly from a childhood visit to his pa's home city of Glasgow.
Wood splintered. The fire separated into several gaudy sections, each of which hit a different place on the bottom. The Apaches disappeared, returning soon with the second burning wagon, which they also sent into the gully. Then they howled and shook their clubs and lances.
To Collins they sounded angry. Maybe they had expected some greater prize from the wagons than rifles and provisions. Maybe, he speculated, fingering an oozing gash in his left cheek, they didn't know where to look. The heaviness of both wagons in relation to their appearance had long ago convinced him of the existence of false floors.
He would investigate, though he certainly wouldn't remain here through the night to do so. He wanted no contact with the Jicarillas. It wasn't wise to buck the odds. A man won a pot with a pair only once in a while.
Merely by surviving the night, he would win plenty. He would win the chance to come back to the gully. He doubted these particular Apaches would ever come back to it, and they would be gone by daylight. The debris in the gully was safe for a while; this was not a heavily traveled route. He could return weeks, even months later, and be confident of finding whatever the burned wagons had concealed. Especially if it were gold.
Banquo Collins didn't know a lot about metallurgy, but he knew some. Gold could change its form. Mingle with other elements in the earth — that was gold ore. But it couldn't be destroyed. So long as no one chanced on the gully or examined the ashes, any gold that was there would remain there, his for the claiming.
Feeling good, he slipped away from the junipers by the stream. The red light down in the gully faded as he limped east beneath the huge full moon, wetting his lips occasionally as he imagined himself a wealthy tourist swallowing raw oysters and bouncing a San Francisco whore on each knee.
136
Homebound soldiers stopped occasionally at Mont Royal, bringing the Mains vivid word pictures of the ruin in the state. These they traded for water from the well. Cooper had no food to offer the travelers.
Although no partisan of the South, especially of the reasons it had waged war, Judith broke down and cried when she heard descriptions of the huge swathes of burned forest, trampled fields, looted homes that marked the passage of Sherman's juggernaut.
Columbia was scorched earth, whole blocks gone except for a fragment of wall or an isolated chimney standing amid acres of rubble. The new statehouse, roofless and unfinished, had been spared, though its west wall had been marked forever by four Union cannonballs fired during a bombardment from Lexington Hills, across the Congaree.
Bands of blacks clogged the roads, the visitors said, free but generally baffled by their new status and, for the most part, starving. There was no food available for white or black, and many village storekeepers had closed and boarded up their places. Altogether, the picture was one of desolation.
Since the danger of crop damage from the spring rice birds was past, Cooper decided to plant three squares for a June crop, something his father always did in case the earlier planting was ruined by the birds or by a storm-summoned infusion of salty water. To help him prepare the ground with a few rusty, unbroken implements remaining, he had only Andy, Cicero — too old for the work — Jane, and his daughter. Judith helped when she wasn't cooking or tending the small house built of raw pine.
Unused to physical labor, Cooper stumbled back to the house every night insect-bitten and hurting from his ankles to his neck. He would eat whatever tiny portion of food was offered, saying little, and go straight to his pallet. Often he moaned or exclaimed in his sleep.
Questions without answers tormented him during his waking hours. Could they raise enough rice to sell off a little, retaining the rest to help them survive the coming winter? Would the South be occupied by hostile troops for years now that the North was reportedly set on harsh reprisal because of Lincoln's murder? How would he ever learn what had happened to Orry's body since Richmond had been burned and, presumably, many army records destroyed? One soldier who had stopped described the mass graves around Petersburg, hundreds of corpses dumped in each with little regard for identification.