Judgment at Red Creek (2 page)

As he remounted he muttered, “ ‘Be careful about witnesses,' T.K. said.” The advice amused him. “Well, I reckon this is about as careful as a feller kin git.”

He laughed aloud at his gallows humor and began to ride south to Tres Dedos and Manuel Santos' shabby little adobe rancho.

It was well past midnight when he rousted Santos and his wife, Rosita. The short, squat mestizo appeared rubbing his eyes. Behind him in the doorway, holding a candle and clutching the corner of a blanket for cover, his wife peered out apprehensively.

The man pointed to the riderless animals. “Run them in with yours, Santos, until I come back. And hide the saddles and rifles. Them horses is Kansas branded. If anybody asks ya 'bout 'em, say two strangers come by and paid ya to hold 'em fer a few days. You never seen 'em before. Unnerstan'?
Comprende ?
”

Santos tied the rope belt around his pants and nodded.

“
Si, Señor. Comprendo
.”

Pointing to the frightened woman, the man said. “What about her? Kin she keep her yap shut?”

“
Si, Señor
. She weel no talk.
La boca estará cerrada. Por cierto
.”

The man gave them both a threatening look. “If you talk, Santos—or if she talks...” He patted the Colt on his right hip, “it'll be the last time either of you do.
Claro ?
”

“
Si, Señor. Claro está
. Nobody weel talk to nobody.”

“Good!” He reached into his pocket and removed a ten dollar gold piece.

“Put this in your mouth. It's more'n you've seen in a year. It'll help keep it closed!”

Santos took the coin and clutched it to his bare belly.

“
Muchas gracias, Señor. En el nombre del Dios, no voy a hablar. Es la verdad
,” he said as the man mounted and disappeared in the darkness.

The first of the sun's rays were slanting over the east wall of Red Creek Canyon when the last of the wounded had been cared for and the thirteen dead had been laid out and covered in the meeting house that now served as an improvised morgue as well as the place where community problems were discussed and Bible readings were conducted by Henry Deyer.

In the Adams house, Mary could not bring herself to believe the horror that confronted them. Clayt and Nelda stood beside her silently praying for the miracle that could not happen.

Henry Deyer's weather-seamed face was a mask, the sort soldiers manage when they are steeling themselves against the sight of comrades killed or maimed in battle. Better than any of them, Henry knew that Asa had been born to inspire confidence and lead. He lifted his eyes and gazed at Clayt and saw in the tall, strong, self-possessed son, the clear reflection of the father and silently thanked God for it.

It had been Asa, then a captain in Confederate Colonel John Baylor's Texas Mounted Rifles, who had urged him to join. Together, they had fought under Baylor when he had routed the Union garrison at Fort Fillmore near El Paso. They had continued then, to drive north to join General Henry Hopkins Sibley's three thousand man army. Asa's company had fought, and how well they had fought!

They had defeated the forces under Sibley's brother-in-law, General Edward R. S. Canby, five miles from Fort Craig on the Rio Grande. Henry remembered the strange unease both he and Asa had felt when the battle was joined. The opposing commanders were married to sisters. There was no more obvious example of the tragedy of Lincoln's “house divided.”

Canby had retreated to the fort. Henry recalled the tactical mistake Sibley had made when he decided not to lay siege to his brother-in-law's routed men. Instead, he decided to drive on west to take Albuquerque and Santa Fe. It turned out to be a fatal blunder, largely brought about when Canby had ordered logs, realistically painted to resemble cannons, mounted on the parapets. Having successfully outfoxed his brother-in-law, Canby reinforced Fort Union. The strong point was the key to the conquest of Colorado and the Southwest.

When Sibley heard that Canby was moving on him, he turned to confront the Union troops at Glorietta Pass. When that bloody battle ended in a Confederate rout, Henry remembered Asa's fateful decision to lead his own men eastward to the Pecos Valley. It was on that straggling retreat to Texas that they had found Red Creek. They camped a week there before Asa revealed his proposal that they return for their families and come back to establish a community where they could live out their lives in peace.

As he watched life ebbing from his old comrade in arms, Henry sensed they were witnessing the end of a long shared dream. Hope soared briefly when Asa made a super human effort to force his body half upright.

In a barely audible whisper, he said, “Remember, Henry, when we found this place we swore an end to violence. Promise me, Henry—and you too, son—not to take the law into your own hands.”

When his body sagged, both Clayt and Henry reached out to ease him down. Struggling for one more breath, he forced out the last words he would speak.

“Without the law, there will be no peace in this land ....” His head turned slightly toward Clayt. “Promise me, son, that you'll find the ones who did this to our people—find them, make certain of their guilt and bring in the Marshall from Las Vegas. If you don't, there'll be no end...no... end...”

His eyes closed slowly. Then, suddenly, his body convulsed and a moment later they watched in horror as blood welled up in his throat and spilled from his mouth. A moment more and he was gone.

Fighting back tears of rage and grief, Clayt rested a hand on his father's moist forehead, then pulled the cover over his face to conceal the hemorrhage. Mary Adams sank to her knees and buried her face in the bedclothing. Nelda knelt beside her and nestled her cheek in her mother's graying hair. Clayt's face seemed to have turned to stone. Seething with suppressed rage, he wanted to shake his fist at Heaven, scream at a God who would let this happen. He wanted to bolt for his Winchester and his Smith and Wesson handgun, saddle up, and track down the wanton murderers, blow them to bits, slash their bellies and spill their guts as their rifle fire had done to the worst-hit of his people. Instead he lowered his head as Henry, in a strictured voice, intoned a prayer for his battle-tested companion's peace in the Hereafter.

They had scarcely echoed his “Amen” when Oss burst into the room.

“Father!” he shouted, “please come quick. It's Ned!”

Clayt got to the Deyer house first, Oss on his heels. Henry and Nelda were close behind. Ned had been sleeping under a heavy dose of laudanum after a compress apparently had stopped most of the external bleeding. Drenched with perspiration, the youth was delirious now.

Nelda blotted his forehead. “He's blazing hot,” she whispered. Henry Deyer pulled down the cover and examined the clean flannel pad. Some blood had seeped through but the glancing rifle slug had not come out the other side. Henry had seen similar wounds after battles. Fever had been a dependable sign of infection, particularly if the gut had been perforated and feces had leaked into the belly cavity. Inevitably, it proved to be a death warrant. Without exception, surgeons refused to operate. The end could come in hours or, more often, after agony-filled days.

Closing his eyes to blank out visions remembered so vividly, battlefield scenes he had witnessed so often with Asa, Henry prayed silently for his younger son's recovery, knowing as his lips moved that he was asking for the impossible.

Four days later the last wagon to make the sorrowful journey moved from the Deyer house. Oss rode beside his father.

Once again, Henry read the graveside service from the worn Bible he had carried into a score of battles. He chose the twenty-eighth Psalm, David's prayer against his enemies. He read it in a voice that betrayed little of his cold desire for revenge.

When he and Oss had committed Ned's body to the rich earth in Red Creek Canyon, he repeated Asa Adams' dying injunction.

“I swear again,” he said in a voice flat with cold purpose, “that in the name of God, with no blood of vengeance on our hands, we will hunt down the murderers and, if it's the Almighty's Will, if proved guilty in His sight, we will bring them to justice.” He searched the faces before him. “I ask you to pledge again now with your ‘amens.'”

A low murmur ran through the ranks of the settlers whose bowed heads concealed eyes newly filled with tears.

That evening, Henry Deyer convened the families in the meeting house.

“There is no power,” he began, “that can bring our loved ones back. But there is power in just purpose. We shall use it in the name of justice.” He paused and his knuckles whitened as he grasped the edge of the wooden lectern. “Men who can willfully slaughter innocent people are generally hard-drinking men—and boastful. They talk where they drink, in saloons. We don't know where they came from, but chances are they passed through Vegas.”

He indicated Clayt and Oss. “The boys have asked to go looking. They leave in the morning to find the Marshall there. Send them off with your blessings. If they happen onto the killers—and from the shell casings there was more than one, most prob'ly two or three—they'll be desperate men. If they get wind of who the boys are, there'll be trouble.” He nodded, “For sure. It doesn't seem likely that such men will come back, but you can't tell about the likes of them. So I'm asking for volunteers with rifles and shotguns to stand watch on the dam, and up at the trail head. Each man will stand four hours from sundown to sunup. I'll take the first watch up top.” His gaze moved back and forth across the faces.

“I'm asking for help now.”

A dozen hands went up. Deliberately, he chose the eldest men. “You younger ones are needed for the heavy work to repair the dam,” he explained. “We've got to mend it before storms come in the mountains.”

Before him, on the front bench, Mary Adams, Nelda and Jakob Gruen sat with the others, numb and immobile with grief. Clayt and Oss sat by themselves. Both understood the cold, vengeful murder in the older man's heart. It could not be otherwise than it was in their own.

“As for you women,” Henry continued, “you can make up refreshments and carry them to the lookouts. Decide among you who will do what and do it quick and quiet.” He paused. “That's all, except to ask God's blessings on the boys.”

A clear, red dawn was breaking when Clayt and Oss, followed by Henry Deyer, reached the top of the trail. Henry had insisted on riding that far with them to have a look around.

Suddenly, for no apparent reason, Clayt's horse shied.

“That's funny,” he said, “that's never happened before.” Oss pointed to their left. “I think something ran into the brush over there.” He reined up and slipped his rifle from the buckskin boot.

“Hold up, son, Henry said as he dismounted. “Let me take a look first.” He had moved only a few steps into the thick stand of piñon when he stopped short.

“Boys! Come over here and take a look at this!” A moment later they stood beside him staring down in disbelief at two bodies. Both had been dead long enough for rigor mortis to set in.

“Whoever shot us up must have done this,” Henry said. “Maybe these boys surprised them and got killed for it. But on second thought, why would they be comin' our way in the middle of the night?”

Clayt bent down for a better look. One of the men was obviously a half-breed. His body was slim and lean. Stringy, dirt-laden black hair partially covered his pockmarked face. Clayt stepped over him to give the second man a closer look. He seemed younger, at the most in his early twenties. His hair was light red and his complexion was pale and freckle splashed. His skin bore signs of long exposure to the sun. Unlike the hawk-faced half-breed, the redhead was pudgy with a belly already running to fat.

Henry stooped beside Clayt and picked up the half-breed's stiffening hand. “He's no cowhand. Neither is this fatty,” he added, feeling the palm. “These men are saddle tramps and gunslingers. The territory's full of them.”

He straightened. “They're the sort who could do what was done to us. No question about that. But the real question is, who killed them and why?”

“More than two men did the shooting, Father,” Oss said. “I gathered up Henry casings and Winchester casings. There were a whole slew of them.”

During the speculation, Clayt was going through the men's pockets.

“They've been stripped clean,” he said, “guns, belts, money, knives. Somewhere around there'll be two branded horses on the loose. If we run across them, that may tell us something.”

Henry Deyer pushed one of the bodies with his boot.

“I think we've been told something already. My guess is they were killed by somebody they knew. The signs say they were dragged here and stripped and left for the buzzards. They're beginning to stink already.”

He wrinkled his nose. “You boys ride on now. I'll go down and bring up a couple of men to help bury them. There'll be a wheel of buzzards over them by noon. When we finish, I'll look around for tracks and see if they say anything.”

He returned their nods and watched as they rode off at an easy lope to the northeast in the direction of the old Santa Fe Trail and the growing pueblo of Las Vegas.

Three hours of riding brought Clayt and Oss to the west bank of the Gallinas River, a small stream that flowed into the Pecos a few miles south of the Gavilan spread. They followed it into town and turned left to the plaza.

It was little more than a crude rectangle of packed earth that had been roughed out in the 1830s. A half dozen buildings were scattered around it. Two of them at the south end were hotels. A saloon and dance hall adjoined the Exchange Hotel. On the west side of the plaza, a few doors north of the American Hotel, a sign read,
DICE APARTMENTS
.