“All right, let’s get what’s ours and pig-string the Mexicans and find that horse trader friend of yours,” Son said.
“How about that, Iron Jacket?” Hugh said. “We’re too damn rich to set here and piss on each other till the damn Mexicans come to relieve their pickets.”
“You hang too when soldiers tell,” Iron Jacket said.
“There isn’t nobody hanging us. Especially not no Mexicans,” Son said.
“Tell your braves to drop down the rick and cut out our horses,” Hugh said. “The deal was eight and I hold by that, but we don’t want none with a brand and no quarters or pintos.”
The first gray edge of dawn broke along the bottom of the eastern sky, and the wind picked up out of the trees across the meadow. Son heard the Indians drop the rail off the fence into the grass and begin turning the herd into a circle. Hugh pulled down the canvas stretched on the poles over the fire and cut six long narrow strips out of it with his knife. The Mexicans still sat in the dirt with eyes like wounded deer.
“There isn’t nothing going to happen to you,” Hugh said. “We’re going to tie you up so tight your eyeballs come out, but them Indians ain’t going to bother you.”
But they didn’t understand, and they saw only the wide-blade knife in Hugh’s hand.
“These are sure hopeless sonsofbitches, ain’t they?” Hugh said. “I don’t know why Sam Houston ain’t run the bunch of them in the Gulf yet. Turn the short one over and knot his hands to his feet.”
Son took two strips of wet canvas from Hugh’s hand and touched the Mexican on the shoulder. The man’s body shivered with fright under his fingertips.
“When you get done, take their guns and their ammunition boxes,” Hugh said. He was seated atop the prone body of the other soldier, tying knots in the canvas strips that would turn to rock in the sunlight. “I want to make sure Iron Jacket don’t try to slip in a couple of lame ones on us.”
“You done good about the Mexicans, Hugh.”
“When are you going to learn? I don’t care about these bastards. When their relief gets here, they’ll tell them we saved their lives and we ain’t got but eight of their horses. They’ll go after Iron Jacket and the rest of the herd.”
“You always play every card in your hand, don’t you?”
“You damn right. That’s why me and you are going to be splashing across the Trinity while them Indians are shooting over their shoulders. And I sure wouldn’t want to be them and get caught after bashing open them two pickets.”
Hugh rose up from the soldier and walked to the collapsed pen, where the Indians were cutting out the stallions and haltering them in strings with the Mexicans’ lariats. When they drove the whole herd westward, the mares would follow the stallions without a rope and could be controlled with only a few outriders. The sky was beginning to soften more rapidly now, and Son kept looking at the distant line of trees where he expected the pickets’ relief to emerge at any moment.
He unfastened the belts on both soldiers and slid off the ammunition boxes and picked up their leather powder flasks. He put the boxes and flasks inside his shirt, and cocked back the hammers of their rifles in the firelight. The action was filled with dirt and grease, and the cap holes were corroded with burned powder. He slipped off the long tapered bayonets with the blood groove and threw them into the grass.
“I told you we didn’t want none of them inbred pintos,” he heard Hugh say.
“Hugh, it’s getting awful light.”
“Shit on that. We ain’t driving no pintos twenty-five and thirty miles at a lick. They’ll be walking on their knees before we get to the river. You understand that, Iron Jacket? That’s clear enough, ain’t it? You cut that dog food out of our string or me and you is going to get mad at each other.”
The tall Indian with the bloody tomahawk stuck in his breeches pointed at the distant woods.
“Where?” Hugh said, as they all stared, momentarily frozen, in the same direction.
The tall Indian pulled a flint knife with a deer-antler handle from his legging and stuck it in the soft ground, then bent over it on all fours and clenched the handle in his teeth. The scalp lock braided on the back of his head glistened from the dew. He rose up quickly and spoke to Iron Jacket while moving his hands rapidly at the same time.
“Tell somebody else,” Son said.
“He ain’t got to. We’re in the shit house,” Hugh said. “Throw them Mexican rifles away and let’s get the hell down the pike. This part of the country is wearing out for us in a hurry.”
Hugh pulled their string of eight horses toward the fire while Son mounted one of the Indians’ horses and galloped between the two terrified soldiers. He balanced the Kentucky rifle on his horse’s withers and grasped the lariat from Hugh’s hand.
Hugh was trying to mount his horse, which was swinging in a circle each time he tried to throw his weight over its back.
“Hold, you shit hog, or I’ll fillet your nuts and feed them to you,” he said. The horse’s hooves kicked into the fire and covered the two soldiers with sparks and ash.
“Pull back the bit,” Son said.
“What’s it look like I’m doing? His mouth must have been trained on rusted wire.”
The woman brought her horse next to Hugh’s so it couldn’t swing away from him again. He grabbed the mane in his fingers and swung up over the horse’s rump, his walleye shining with effort.
“You got it?” Son said.
“Hell, I always got it. Did you get the money off the Mexicans?”
“What money?”
“That Mexican scrip. Do I have to tell you everything each time? Their enlisted men got wads of it stuffed down in their crotch. You stick one of them in the butt and they explode like turkey feathers.”
“Look back of you,” Son said. “There’s about a dozen of them sonsofbitches coming out of the pines now.”
“Oh shit, let’s run for it, boy. We’re too young to bounce off a tree.”
The three of them raced their horses, with the roped string of eight between them, toward an arroyo that led up through the western side of the timber. The horses’ hooves showered divots of grass and dirt over Son’s body; and when he looked behind him he saw Iron Jacket and his braves trying to stampede the herd toward the far woods, but the stallions were still roped together and spooking back toward the pen, and the mares were turning in a circle and raking down the other fence rails. Then Son heard the popping of musket fire, and he was glad the Indians were between them and the Mexicans.
They hit the arroyo in a full gallop and whipped their horses up the incline. The pines were thickly spaced on each side of the ravine, and in moments the meadow was out of sight behind them. Rolling fields covered with mist in the soft morning light opened up before them, and as Son laid into his horse and felt the steady rhythm between his legs he thought he heard a man’s scream in the distant spatter of musket fire.
Chapter four
They rode for three days before they reached the Trinity River. The roots of the oaks and willows along the banks were exposed by the receding water, and sandbars gleamed in the current, but the river was still too high and swift to ford with the string of horses.
“Let’s go north and look for a narrows,” Son said.
They rode for a half day along the river’s edge and still didn’t find a crossing that wasn’t filled with deep holes and tangles of brush and dead trees.
“Where’s that ferry you told us about?” Son said.
“It was along here somewheres, unless the Mexicans burned it up.”
“You want to turn out the string and swim it?”
“We ain’t going to do that. That’s gold dollars on the hoof. Let’s keep going upriver. We’ll find us something.”