“How do you want to take them?” he said.
“We get them all at one time,” Hugh said. “Ain’t that right, Iron Jacket? You let your bucks circle wide and bring down them two on horses, and we go right through the middle and stick the Kentucky up the noses of them other two. White-Man’s-Woman keeps the horses and rides in when we whistle. How’s that?”
“You use knife on Mexicans,” Iron Jacket said.
“We’re going to pig-string them two so they don’t get loose till their own people finds them,” Hugh said. “It’s the same thing.”
“We take coup this day,” Iron Jacket said.
“You take care of your side of it,” Hugh said. “Don’t truck with what’s ours.”
“Take coup.”
“I done told you, Iron Jacket. There ain’t a sound coming out of them Mexicans. Now, don’t be pestering folks about it.”
“Old man with bad eye just like tonto boy. Fool.”
Iron Jacket and his three braves dismounted and tethered their horses to pine saplings. They slipped their bows and quivers of arrows off their backs, inserted one arrow loosely in their bow strings, and put another in their teeth. The tallest of the three braves took a tomahawk out of his legging and stuck it down the back of his buckskin breeches. They moved out of the trees in a crouch and disappeared into the grass. Son looked hard at the pools of fog on the meadow and the wet tips of grass bending in the wind, but he could see nothing of the Indians’ movement.
“Stop studying on them Indians,” Hugh said. “What they do ain’t no business of ours. Get your rifle loaded. I don’t want to grow no older here.”
Son pulled the wood plug from the powder horn with his teeth and poured into the barrel, then took a lead ball and a greased patch from the brass box set in the stock and ran them down to the charge with the ramrod. He poured the flashpan and closed its cover.
“How’s your flint?” Hugh said.
“It ain’t hardly worn.”
“Let’s get our peckers down in the dirt, then. Don’t stand up out of the grass till you hear the Indians first.”
“You said we all hit the Mexicans at the same time.”
“Shit on that. If them Indians mess it up, they’re on their own. You and me is going to be long gone.”
They crawled on their stomachs and elbows through the wet grass with Son in front. He balanced the rifle in the crook of his arms and let the powder horn drag at his side. A gust of wind blew across the meadow and flattened the grass around them, and they froze with their faces in the damp earth. The barrel and the flash pan of his rifle glistened with water, and he wondered if his primer would still fire when the flint touched the steel. He could hear the Mexicans by the fire talking now, and he put his thumb over the heavy hammer and pulled it back to half-cock. The sound was like a thick dry twig snapped across someone’s knee. He felt Hugh’s fist hit him in the sole of the boot. He didn’t have to look back to feel Hugh’s livid anger at his stupidity.
They moved forward until they could see the wavering shadows of the fire through the grass. Hugh was next to him now with his knife in his hand. Their dry controlled breathing and the sweat rolling off their faces was an agony in the stillness.
Why don’t them savages do their bloody work, he thought, and then he felt shame and guilt at what he knew he wanted in his fear.
You ain’t no different than them red niggers, are you, he thought. You want their pickets cut open so you don’t catch a ball when you jump them Mexicans by the fire.
He squinted through the grass and saw one soldier stand up in silhouette against the fire and begin to urinate in the darkness. Then he heard a loud voice in Spanish back by the horse pen and a murderous blow like stone crunching through an earth-filled clay pot.
“Get it!” Hugh shouted, and hit him violently in the shoulder with his elbow.
Son went to his feet and ran forward with his rifle pointed at the soldier who was still urinating into the wind and staring into the darkness over his shoulder at the same time.
“Both you fellows get on your face,” he said. “You hear me? Lie down on the ground like you was a pair of lizards.”
The soldier who was standing looked at him in disbelief, and the man seated by the fire started to raise his hands, then lowered them and finally began to shake all over.
“Get on your damn face,” Son said. “I got a.45 ball in here that’ll bust you all over the bushes.”
The two soldiers’ faces were terrified in the firelight, and the soldier who was still seated kicked his rifle and his leather powder flask away from himself.
“They don’t talk English,” Son said. “How do you tell them to lie down in Spanish?”
“You ain’t got to. They’re scared so bad now they couldn’t button their britches.”
Hugh walked to the fire and kicked at it until it flared into a large flame again. The sparks showered up into the canvas stretched on the poles overhead. Out in the darkness, they heard a man scream.
“What are they doing?” Son said.
“It ain’t our business. We done our end of it, and we take the horses we got coming.”
Son’s hands were damp on the stock of the rifle, and he thought something was beginning to tremble inside him.
“Tell them to stop,” he said, and the words seemed to click in his throat with a guilt that he knew he would not resolve easily.
“It stopped with that poor fellow’s scream,” Hugh said.
Iron Jacket and his three braves walked into the firelight leading the saddled horses of the Mexican pickets behind them. The tallest of the braves was spotted with blood, and the stone tomahawk pushed down in the front of his buckskin breeches had patches of human hair stuck to it.
“Two coup,” Iron Jacket said, and held up the scalps in the yellow light of the fire. On one, there was still a piece of skull plate attached. “Now other two before men from soldiers’ town come.”
“We already been through that before, Iron Jacket,” Hugh said. “This pair is ours.”
“No leave Mexicans to tell.”
“We ain’t going to do it that way,” Hugh said. “What we’re going to do is divide up these horses, get across the Trinity, and drink a lot of whiskey.”
“First, Mexicans,” Iron Jacket said.
“Are you hard of hearing or something?” Son said. “We got eight head coming, or maybe more since there must be a hundred head out there, and the Mexicans get trussed up and that’s it.”
“No talk with young boy. Old man talk.”
“You don’t listen too good, do you?” Son said. “You done taken all the coup you’re going to tonight.”
The two soldiers, who now sat flat-legged in the dirt, began to realize that the continuation or the end of their lives was being decided in the wavering yellow light. The skin on their faces grew tight, and their eyes had the plaintive look of hurt animals.
“A deal’s a deal, Iron Jacket,” Hugh said. “Besides, he’s the one holding the rifle.”
“No use. Sweat on face with fear.”
“You asshole,” Son said, “You didn’t take them scalps. You got Slim here to do it for you. You open your mouth again to me like that and I’ll give you a belly button you can put a pie plate through.”
“He’s a crazy enough sonofabitch to do it, too,” Hugh said. “I don’t have no truck with him when he’s like this.”
“Don’t talk with him no more. Whistle up the woman,” Son said.
“She’s right behind you.”
Son turned and saw White-Man’s-Woman sitting on his horse with the reins of the other five in her hands. Her knees were drawn almost up to the horse’s withers to hold him in.