Death Rattle (69 page)

She hated to leave the bed now that it was warmed to their bodies—

“Ignacia! Move, now!”

Swinging her legs off the bed, she bent forward and scooped up her dressing gown, dragging it off the cold, clay floor that was covered here and there by small rugs of Navajo or Pueblo wool.

“W-where are you going?” she asked as he pulled his shirt over his head and dragged the braces over his shoulders.

That terrifying clamor grew more insistent at the front door: eerie, screeching voices and that thumping that seemed to fill the whole house.

He grabbed her by the shoulders and yanked her upright beside the bed. “I fear something evil is afoot, Ignacia.”

Then he embraced her roughly, passionately crushing her mouth with his, and finally stared into her eyes to say, “Now do as I told you—get the children and the
others to the back door, and when I have gone to the front of the house—flee out to the alley as fast as you can get everyone to safety.”

“S-safety?”

His jaw went rigid, muscles flexing. “Get our family to the church,” he said with a flat and hollow voice. “Take sanctuary there.”

“No! No!” she screamed, throwing her head from side to side. “I’m not leaving here without you!”

He shook her, then promptly seized the two loose ends of the cloth belt that hung from the waist of her dressing gown. He tied it in a knot, then gave it an extra jerk to hold it securely over her naked flesh.

“If you have ever wanted to show me how much you love me,” Charles began, “if you have ever wanted to show how much you love our children … do this for me now, Ignacia. Do this without question.”

“Father, what is going on?”

It was Alfred’s voice on the other side of their bedchamber door.

“Get your sisters and meet your mother in the pantry, Alfred!”

“Father?” the boy pleaded. “What do they want?”

Charles was at the door, yanking it open to suddenly stare down at his ten-year-old son. “They want me, Alfred. Now help your mother get your sisters to the pantry as I’ve ordered!”

“Charles!”

It was Rumalda, still an adolescent. At her shoulder stood Josefa. Ignacia prayed that moment Carson and Boggs could be there to protect them at this moment of danger.

“Ladies, please,” Charles begged, “help me with Ignacia and the children. Get yourselves to the church, to safety—”

“No, no, no,” Ignacia mumbled when Charles pulled her against him, pressed her cheek against his neck, her nose buried in that filthy shirt that smelled of horses and sweat, of trail grime, fire and tobacco smoke. Most of all,
it smelled of him, just the way he had smelled last night when he had smothered her with his body—seizing her with all of his being.

“I love you, Ignacia.” Charles choked out the words. “I always will.”

Then he was cruelly turning her around, shoving her into Alfred’s arms. Josefa and Rumalda came forward in their bare feet to each take one of Ignacia’s arms. Beyond them, she saw Estefina and Teresina standing with the two female servants, one old and one almost as young as her children. They all had their sleeping caps on and dressing gowns hastily pulled over their shoulders.

“Go together—now, hurry!” Charles ordered in a loud voice as a splintering racket suddenly reverberated from the front parlor.

They had broken through the door! Voices shrieked just down the hallway.

“Do not make a sound!” he screamed above the tumult as the crowd surged into the parlor. “In God’s name,
run for your lives!”

That last glance she took over her husband’s shoulder was to see the shadows bobbing on the parlor wall just a matter of yards down the narrow hallway. So many shadows that she could not begin to count the intruders who had violated their home.

Then she gazed at her Carlos’s face even while Alfred dragged her into the darkness, toward the rear of the house, all of them scurrying like frightened animals for that door that held the only chance of escape.

Upon reaching the far end of the hall, she struggled to have a last look upon her Carlos, ducking her head this way and that over young Alfred’s head. She watched her husband step into the firelit shadows of the parlor, shouting boldly at the intruders—throwing up his hands and screaming back at those who had invaded the sanctity of their home, those who had sullied this beautiful sanctuary she shared with her husband and their children.

At the very same moment Alfred pulled her around the darkened corner toward the rear pantry, Ignacia watched
more than a dozen pairs of hands and arms and a multitude of angry faces take form out of the dim, flickering firelight, all those fingers like buzzard claws as they seized her Carlos and dragged him into the shadows with them.

She started to scream—

But her sister’s hand immediately clamped over Ignacia’s mouth.

“Mother!” Alfred whispered harshly to her. “Hush! Not a word! Remember what father told us!”

Yes—she thought—I will remember what your father told me.

I love you, Ignacia. I always will.

If any of the Pueblo Indians hated their American conquerors, it was Tomas.

This violent, foul-humored miscreant had eagerly joined the plot when the three Mexican ringleaders—Archuleta, Duran, and Ortiz—had vowed they would throw off the American yoke, or die trying. But when that trio’s plans were discovered and the Mexicans fled for Chihuahua, Tomas alone did all he could to keep alive the embers of revolt.

Then Big Nigger showed up at the Pueblo, come home to see his wife. The huge, brooding Indian immediately stepped forward to join Tomas’s call for death to all foreigners. Tomas thought that was ironic, seeing how Big Nigger was a foreigner himself. Yes, an Indian—but not born of this land. Many years ago he had come to northern New Mexico with an American trapping party.

But none of that mattered now that he and Big Nigger, along with at least two dozen more Pueblos, had confronted their most despised enemy that afternoon on the outskirts of town. After the American governor had slipped through their mob, Tomas and Big Nigger rallied hundreds to follow them into Taos, intending to free their compatriots who were rotting in the Americans’ jail.

The
Americano
called Lee—he was the man who had imprisoned Tomas’s friends from the Pueblo.

Well after dark when the mob noisily burst into the jail
brandishing guns, butcher knives, and torches, they caught the surprised sheriff scrambling off his cot in his longhandles. Several of the Indians grabbed the sheriff and dragged him to Tomas’s feet.

“Set our friends free!” Tomas demanded.

“No,” Lee said in English.

Even Tomas could understand that, what little of the enemy’s language he understood. He slapped Lee across the mouth, which spurred a loud chorus from the crowd pressing in around them, eager to watch how Tomas would open the cell doors. Tomas glanced at Big Nigger for approval. The Delaware nodded slightly.

“Open the cages, gringo!” Tomas growled before he slammed a bony fist into the middle of Lee’s face.

Blood spurted from the sheriff’s nose, oozing freely over his mouth and bare chin. It took a moment for Lee’s eyes to focus again.

The American licked the warm blood from his lower lip, then centered his gaze on Tomas. “No.”

Tomas slammed his’fist into the sheriff’s face again, then again, and another time too. With each blow he watched how Lee’s head snapped back, then lolled forward until he could open his eyes—likely fighting unconsciousness every time.

“Stop! Stop this, I say!”

Tomas wheeled at the sound of the voice crying out in Spanish—wondering why one of the Mexican conspirators was demanding a halt to this torture. The crowd surrounding Tomas was grumbling with ugly intent as they rolled this way and that.

“You lawless scum!” the voice ridiculed the mob.

More shrieks from Tomas’s rebels as the thin Mexican shoved his way toward the steps of the jail where Tomas gripped the front of Lee’s bloody longhandles in his fists.

“By all that’s holy!” Cornelio Vigil growled as he came to a halt four feet away. “Not one of you are worthy to stand before a man of God!”

“So, it is you, Vigil! Friend to the American tormentors!” Tomas shrieked when he recognized the Mexican official.

“Malditos usted!
I’ll kill you with my bare hands,” the prefect vowed. “Free that man and go back to your Pueblo. Break this up now and I’ll deal with you tomorrow—”

Suddenly two of the Indians leaped forward, seizing Vigil’s arms.

“Let me go, you snakes! Let me go!” the prefect ordered his manhandlers. “You should tremble to even lay a hand on me!”

With a strident laugh, Tomas screamed, “We aren’t your inferiors now, Prefect!”

Two more large Indians squatted at the Mexican’s knees and hoisted the struggling Vigil completely into the air. The prefect scuffled, flailing his arms and bellowing what he planned to do about this unthinkable act of rebellion by his inferiors. He reminded them he was their better, from a noble class—a group of people who sought to help the Americans because it was good for business.

But this was the moment it fell to both the poor of the Pueblo and Taos itself to reclaim New Mexico for its native peoples.

“Scoundrels and scum!” Vigil screamed at them as four of the mob dragged him off the steps at the front of the jail and into the center of the street. “Disperse now or your lives will be forfeit!”

Tomas released the groggy sheriff for the moment. He could come back for Lee in a few minutes. For now he followed the four through the surging crowd. “What do you think of your poor peons now, Vigil?”

“En el nombre de Dios,
you’ll hang for this!” the prefect shouted.

“No—you’ll hang!”

“If you’d fight me fairly like a man,” Vigil was shrieking, spittle crusted at the corners of his mouth, “I’d show your kind for the cowards you are—rebel scum!”

“Kill him!” Tomas suddenly yelled.

In less than a heartbeat the four keepers dropped the prefect onto the icy street before the throng collapsed over Vigil. Tomas heard the Mexican screaming in agony,
watched the dozen or more arms rise and fall, the machetes and scythes, hoes and butcher knives rising after each descent, more and more blood glistening on and dripping from their blades.

Suddenly a disembodied arm was brandished overhead. Then a lower leg, with pieces of Vigil’s boot still dangling from a nearly severed foot. Tomas was just about to shove his way into the mob when a dark, round object was hurtled into the sky by one of the murderers. It sailed down into the crowd, but was caught and immediately tossed into the air again. Up and down the spinning object ascended into the flickering torchlight as Tomas slowly recognized it for what it was.

Vigil’s patrician head—a look of horror frozen forever on his features.

After more than a dozen short flights into the air, Tomas retrieved the head from the trampled, snowy, bloody ground and ordered the others back. From the hands of one of those nearby he wrenched a long, iron-headed pike he now shoved into the base of the severed neck. Tomas hoisted his grotesque battle trophy aloft.

Those wide, anguish-filled eyes, and that gaping mouth twisted in anger … Vigil would trouble them no longer. Never again would the Mexican look down his long, patrician nose at them. At long last the prefect had gotten what he deserved for bedding down so comfortably with the conquerors. Now his mob would do to the other foreigners what they had done to Cornelio Vigil.

Next to die—would be Sheriff Lee.

But as Tomas wheeled about, brandishing his first victim’s head above the mob on that long pike, the rebel leader realized the porch was bare. All of Lee’s guards had poured into the street as soon as the fun began with Vigil.

“Lee!” Tomas roared the American’s name in English.

All around him the crowd fell to a murmur.

“Lee!” he shrieked again, fury growing.

Those in the mob were turning this way, then that—frantically
searching for the sheriff, who should have been their next victim.

“Find the American!” Tomas bellowed with the screech of a wounded animal. “Lee—we are coming for you!”

“There he goes!”

When that shrill warning caught him from behind, Stephen Louis Lee quickly glanced over his shoulder, finding the dark clot of the bloodthirsty mob gazing up at him as he scrambled onto the flat roof of the shop next door to his jailhouse. The muddy, trampled, snowy ground beneath the angry Indians and Mexicans vibrated and pulsated with the flickering light of their crude torches.

They had spotted him.

Thank God his family was already on its way to safety with Paddock and Bass.

But where he could go from here, Lee did not know. By now his stockings were soaked, his feet half frozen, colder than they’d ever been since that first winter he endured trapping in the mountains. Like two cakes of ice they were now as he had heaved himself onto a window ledge, teetered there to reach up and grab the hollo wed-out top of a high wall where the shop owner would plant geraniums come spring—and once he stood upon that wall, Lee hoisted himself onto the second-story roof.