One-Eyed Death Page 7

  “Yeah,” said Ford. “Yeah.”

  It was around noon on the following day when Crow spotted another column of dark, sinister smoke, coiling threateningly into the cloudless sky.

  And it was evening before they reached the source of the fire, where the Dutchman’s spread used to be.

  Chapter Nine

  Crow ordered the wagon to remain well back, while he went scouting alone. Ford wanted to come along with his rifle.

  “Just set me somewhere, Crow,” he’d begged. “If’n I can see it, then I can hit it.”

  “No, Ben.”

  “Maybe you could use some backup shootin’.’

  But Crow had insisted, pointing out to the ramrod that he was the only person really capable of using a gun should there be any threat to the survivors of the Spangel family. And so, reluctantly, Ford had agreed.

  The rig halted in a narrow draw, a half mile from the ridge that overlooked the spread. Crow heeled his stallion onwards, finally stopping when he was still out of sight of the farm, tethering the animal to a boulder and going ahead on foot.

  The smoke that’d first caught his eye hours earlier had more or less disappeared. But he could still make out the faint pillar of grey, swirled against the sky. And when he breathed in deeply and then licked his lips he could taste the same bitter-sweet flavor on the wind that he’d noticed days before.

  On an impulse he took the Winchester from the saddle holster, slinging it across his shoulders by its leather strap. Whatever had started the fire was probably gone by now, but there was no point in taking chances.

  The day was scorchingly hot, the sun bouncing off

  the jagged rocks, bringing beads of sweat to his face, soaking through the dark shirt. It had been some time since he’d traveled in that part of the country, but he recalled the Dutchman. Hendrik was his name. A large, straw-haired man, with what seemed like twenty children, all smaller copies. Blue-eyed like the mother. Always welcoming a stranger, with good cooking and cool water from the only well for miles around. Now, if Crow had been looking for a place to establish a religious center, he’d have picked that valley.

  But as he inched himself towards the top of the ridge, finally peering down into the green depths, Crow’s face froze. Hardening with anger.

  It was a charnel-house.

  Even from that height he could taste the killing. Catch the scent of the slaughter.

  It must have begun first thing in the morning. Possibly at dawn. Crow could almost see the scene. The Dutchman or one of his children coming out bright and early, maybe to water the stock. And whoever it had been would be there waiting. His first thought was Indians. Everything that he was able to see from his vantage point indicated the work of an Apache raiding party.

  He waited for nearly half an hour, in case someone had seen him coming and was in hiding, but there were hordes of buzzards flapping around, feeding happily from the carcasses of the slaughtered animals, tearing out great glistening slabs of entrails and squabbling noisily over them. If there’d still been living humans around the wary birds wouldn’t have been there.

  Crow walked slowly down the hill, rifle at the trail. Bitter at the senseless butchery of defenseless animals. Cows with their throats slit, still on their knees in mute protest. No horses. That figured. Nobody but a madman would wantonly kill horses in that part of the South-west.

  All of the buildings of the Dutchman’s farm were burned down. Heaps of glowing ashes, smoke still hanging in sullen wreaths above them. Two of them, the home and the bunkhouse, had chimneys standing, the bricks resisting the flames of the attackers. Crow remembered seeing sights like it all along the frontier, and across Missouri and Bloody Kansas during the War.

  What was odd was that the shootist didn’t see any human bodies. Dead dogs, chickens, hogs. Some of them with chunks of meat hacked from their flanks.

  “No people,” he said to himself.

  As he drew nearer still he disturbed the feeding buzzards, sending them flapping heavily into the stinking air on their massive, leathery wings, squawking their protests at being interrupted in such a rich feast.

  The whole area was covered with hoof-marks. Crow didn’t need to look too closely to see that it hadn’t been an Indian raid. Too many shod horses. And all around the homestead were cartridge cases. Spent shells, glinting in the sunlight. A mix of weapons. Carbines and rifles of all calibers and ages. Winchesters predominant. Sharps, Spencers, Springfields.

  Crow began to walk around, looking for any further clues to the raiders.

  Knowing what he was likely to see. Finding it near the main house, where the trampled and bloodied earth showed the fighting had been fiercest. And the dying hardest.

  There was a spur, broken off by a bullet. A silver, heavily ornamented spur, with wicked rowels. And near the gate to the corral there was the tattered remnants of a yellow sombrero.

  It was clearly Mexican bandits, hitting across the Rio Grande, raiding northwards. Some groups came over for only two or three days. Some stayed longer. For months, in the summer. Crow put this band at around fifteen to twenty. Without some careful scouting it was impossible to tell precisely. And some would have been wounded, probably killed. The Dutchman wouldn’t have given up his beloved spread without a mortal fight.

  And where were the children? There was generally only a few hands working the land, the family relying on their own labor.

  By his remembrance there should be something like fifteen men, women and children of all ages around the valley, but there wasn’t a single body to be seen.

  Because Crow couldn’t immediately see them, it didn’t mean that they weren’t there.

  For a tracker of his skill it was only a couple of minutes before he found them. Following the trails of blood across the yard that had once been immaculately clean and swept. Clear trails of bodies being dragged through the Dutchman’s wife’s vegetable garden. The furrows of bare feet, heels digging in. Some traces of small feet. Children. Fighting as they were tugged to their deaths.

  From what the shootist remembered there had been a storm cellar on the side of the house furthest away from the trail. Some of the younger members of the family must have hidden there. As they might at times of natural danger. But the threat had come from an enemy more brutal and ruthless than any hurricane or flood.

  The trails all ended at the same point, round front of the smoldering ruin.

  It was some time before Crow started back to rejoin the others with the wagon.

  He walked away from the burned buildings and the overwhelming stink of death, leaving the remains of the Dutchman’s homestead to the setting sun and the returning buzzards.

  For a half hour or so, the shootist sat himself down on a rock, looking out across the valley, resting his eyes on the spread of green, knowing that in a matter of days—weeks at the longest—the green would have gone and the desert would have reconquered the hard-won land.

  “That’s right, Ben,” he said to himself, leaning with his back against a wind-carved boulder, watching the evening’s clouds soar sunwards. “Sure used to be a good country, once.”

  They were restless when he came back, the girl and her brother waiting for him. He heard Ben Ford’s voice calling out for news of what he’d seen and found but he didn’t tell them, at first. Ignoring the demands of the Reverend Spangel.

  Finally. “Guess we’d best take care of our water. Won’t be any from the Dutchman.”

  “Where was he?” asked the ramrod, struggling to see out of the back of the wagon.

  Crow spat in the dirt. “He was in the damned well.”

  “And the wife? All them children?”

  The shootist took his time on the answer. “They were all with the Dutchman.”

  Chapter Ten

  There was a small river eight miles further into the hills, and Crow led the way there. The news of the mass killings had lowered the spirits of the party even more, following on the death of Lily Spangel. Mary retired to pra
y with her father in the rear of the wagon and Ben Ford struggled to drag himself, using only his strong arms, to a position where he could navigate the Conestoga for Daniel.

  The shootist rode alone on his black, locked into his own thoughts about the massacre. A casual glance would certainly have pointed towards an Indian raid, but the true signs were unmistakable.

  Something around fifteen Mexicans. And their trail led in the same direction as the wagon was heading. Westwards, deeper into the endless hills.

  They didn’t reach close to the small river until the following morning, over a narrow, steep trail that seemed as though it was going to scrape its way through the clouds, before it plunged lower again in a series of dizzying bends, down to the valley floor.

  After they’d eaten a meal and watered their horses, Crow went to speak to the Reverend Charles Spangel, trying to find out what his plans were.

  “Plans, Mr Crow?”

  “That’s the length of it, Reverend.”

  “Plans for what?”

  The shootist looked at the great head, the blank eyes staring out over his head, gazing into some unknowable distances.

  “Where do we go now?”

  “Onwards.”

  “That doesn’t tell me a lot.”

  “What more is there to tell, Mr Crow? There is nothing more.”

  “I’ve just seen a family butchered worse than I seen in long whiles, Mr. Spangel.”

  “The will of the Lord.”

  “Then it’s a mighty hard will that slits the throat of a good man never did harm to anyone. And rapes his wife every way you can imagine and possibly a whole lot that you can’t even set your mind to. And used little boys for … Jesus Christ, Spangel, you sure got you less sense than your wife had!”

  As he’d expected, the great staff rose above the old man’s head and he stepped silently back, not wanting to kill him. But to his surprise the rod fell, limply, clattering among the stones, and Spangel dropped beside it, hands wound together. Tears falling in gobbets of salt water from his white eyes.

  “There’s truth in that, Crow. God help me! God help us all!” His bull’s voice rose to a bellow, shaking echoes from the cliffs around them. “We shall go on. Faring forwards to the end.”

  Crow wondered where the end was. Mary Spangel came running towards them, tripping over a low rock and nearly falling, pausing with her head on one side as she tried to gather her bearings. The shootist realized again just how poor her seeing was.

  “Don’t take on so, Pa,” she said, kneeling beside her father, looking accusingly up at Crow. “He don’t mean what he says, Pa.”

  “We have taken our path, child. Through the rose garden, and on past the gate that is never opened.”

  Crow turned away from the crazed old man and his babblings. Catching the eyes of Ben Ford, who lay there, watching him.

  “It is the moment when the bird ceases to sing and the rain falls no longer. When the glass falls from the window of the empty house and a broken shutter swings and is not heard.”

  “Hush, Pa. Hush, now. Come sit down with me and we’ll talk of what we plan to build.”

  “Build, daughter?”

  “Yes.”

  “Build and there shall you be the handmaiden of the anointed one.”

  She smiled and Crow felt a touch of passing affection for her. Without her poverty of sight, Mary Spangel could have been very beautiful.

  “We shall dwell forever, Father, shall we not, in towers that soar to the skies?”

  He was smiling as he stood up, hanging over her like a crag of a toppling mountain. Leaning on her shoulder for support. “Verily we shall. The towers shall be of onyx and of chalcedony, studded with gems beyond price.”

  The way they walked away together, chattering of what they might do, convinced Crow that the whole family was sadly touched. True, there had been bizarre religious movements, starting from less promising soil. But not so far south and west in a land that grudgingly supported life.

  Ben Ford waved him over, spitting out a stream of tobacco juice in the dust. “Nothing you can do, Crow, my friend.”

  “Guess that’s right, Ben.”

  “Sure is. When he pays you, then all this’ll seem worth the journey.”

  The shootist nodded his reluctant agreement. “Guess that’s so. Sure be glad when I can free the chains and ride on.”

  Ford’s face showed a spasm of pain and he tried to move to find a more comfortable position. “Surely hurts like a bastard, Crow. Yeah, you ride on free and clear. Me, I’ll maybe stay a whiles with them.”

  The bitterness wasn’t hidden.

  To stay would have been either to feed the Texan’s self-pity, or become involved in an argument. So Crow walked on.

  There was no further obvious sign of the band of Mexicans, though Crow constantly watched the trail, seeing the trampled dirt that told of their passing. He figured that the bandits were pushing on faster on their wiry horses than he was moving with the wagon. Which meant they were falling behind. And that was a good thing.

  They traveled deeper into the mountains for three more days. Days during which Daniel seemed to retreat totally into himself, hardly saying a word to anyone else in the party. Mary and her father spent most of the days together, talking quietly in the bed of the Conestoga, only appearing in the evening and the morning. The girl still did the cooking, though for some of the time they relied on some jerky. They had been fortunate to find a small pool close to the trail as water was becoming something of a problem.

  Ben Ford mentioned it to Crow.

  “Guess them horses goin’ to need more water damned soon. •

  “I heard the sound of falls, late last night, when it was quiet,” replied the shootist. “Recall there was some rapids and a river close by. Don’t believe it had a name. Just a river, deep down at the bottom of a valley. Plenty of white water.”

  “Can we get the rig down to it?”

  “Yeah.” He thought about it again. “Yeah, I guess we can.”

  Mary came to him again that night.

  He heard her walking towards him, across the shifting, treacherous pebbles, moving as quietly as she knew how. But making more noise than a crippled steer, waking him immediately. His hand went automatically to the butt of the scattergun, then he saw her outline, pale in the darkness, and he relaxed again.

  That you, Crow?” she whispered.

  “Yeah. What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. Nothing wrong, dearest. Not that I know of.”

  “You want to come under this blanket, Mary?”

  She giggled. “Course I do, my raven. Course I do. I got nothin’ on under this shift. Just my naked body, waitin’ for you to possess me again.”

  He wished she didn’t talk that way.

  But her body was good, and she was eager to please. Doing things that he liked with her delicate fingers and her soft lips. Giving him the pleasure that he enjoyed.

  Crow’s attitude to women had always been simple. Knowing that women only wanted whatever it was that a man was clean out of at that time. So he used them. When they were there, he’d take them. If they weren’t, then it didn’t much bother him.

  Mary squirmed over him, her body becoming slick with sweat. She took his hand and pulled it lower, so that he felt the wiriness of the hairs at the junction of her thighs. Rubbing his fingers against herself and moaning so loudly that he started to worry a little about the rest of the party waking.

  “Oh, my dearest, Crow. Wait until we have our city and we have power. You shall be a prince, Crow. Oh, come and slide that into my body so that I … Oh!”

  He grabbed her discarded shift and crammed a corner of it into her mouth, hushing her cries. She bit down on it, her head thrashing from side to side like a rabid coyote, eyes wide and staring. He held her tight, using the weight of his body to keep himself firmly in the saddle with her. For a few moments he was reminded of a mulatto whore in a brothel in Scottsville, Colorado, who used to promise two u
ps to one down.

  He felt the fluttering of her stomach muscles as she tightened herself convulsively around him, her arms so strong around his neck that he turned his face to one side to help himself breathe. As she relaxed he felt his own orgasm building and pumped at the girl, grinding her into the earth, his own fingers like steel traps on her shoulders as he juddered to his climax.

  “Oh, Blessed Lord. Blessed Lord, that was the most wonderful feeling that I’ve ever known in my whole life, Crow. I feel like I’m a field, new won from the trees and rocks. And you’re the first man to the plowing. Oh, Blessed Lord.”

  To his relief she spoke quietly, though she was clearly trembling on the edge of tears. She was locked in his arms, her body trembling against him. The moon had peered out from behind the nest of clouds and the shootist could see it glinting off the glass of her spectacles, laid close by where they rested. The wagon was still and silent and he could see the motionless figure of Daniel Spangel, lying near Ben Ford underneath the rig.

  Mary fell asleep while he held her and he let her he a while, content to rest himself. Still not sure why he didn’t just up and leave the family. Their mission was too tainted with madness to have a hope of succeeding, and there was also the small matter of a murderous Mexican gang somewhere within a few miles of them.

  But Crow had given his word that he’d go along. And it had been some time since he’d been down that close to the border. Remembering how much beauty and grandeur there was to the land.

  Holding Mary as a dream shook her. Her lips opened, softly, and she whispered to herself. Something about a child’s party. A doll in a dress made of squares of black and white. Crow kept her secure until the shaking had stopped.

  Later, after she had kissed him on the cheeks and crept back to her place alone in the creaking wagon, the shootist stretched and walked around the campsite. Hearing the rumbling of water, somewhere close to them, breathing in the clean, cool air.

  “Hell of a good country,” he said, to nobody in particular.

  Chapter Eleven

  Crow swung down from the saddle of the stallion, slapping it on the neck to quieten it. It could scent the river a thousand feet below and had been skittish all the morning.