Episode 10

A Losing Fight

The Comanchero camp lay ghostly quiet but for the wind hissing in the pine tops.

Young Joe Wiley crouched by a pool dug before the spring opening. He filled two buckets with cold, fresh water and carried them, muscles aching, back toward the cabins. The horses and mules, set free to graze, parted before his approach.

Every man was down with one ailment or another. In the first days back to the camp, some of the men came down with stomach pains. Agonies that doubled them over and left them curled up and kicking on the ground with a terrible flux that loosened their bowels in stinking streams. These men died first. Ben Temple fell to this illness but was still among the living, thrashing like a wild thing in a bed fouled with his own wastes.

Others were afflicted with the pox, flesh hot to the touch and covered in running boils. Some were weak as kittens and lay struggling for each breath. Others were raving out of their minds and those were hardest to deal with. Joe had to bind them down to their bunks or bundle them in blankets to stop them wandering away.

Then there were the dead. Within two weeks half the camp was down with one complaint or another. There were hummocks of dirt in the pines where each lay in a shallow grave scraped from the sandy ground. Men died and finally Joe was the only one remaining on his feet and with all his wits. Joe was too occupied with saving men to bury any more of them. All he could do was haul them by the heels to a stack as far away from the cabins and the stream bed as his strength allowed. The pile was growing and beginning to stink even over the shit stench from the cabins. Flies covered the corpses in a boiling black cloud.

All the men who fell to the flux were dead now. All but Ben who lay in his cabin writhing like a soul in Hell until the pain made him faint dead away. There were eighteen left, white men and a few of the Mexicans. The Indians had been the first to slip away.

It was all Joe could do to keep the men from going dry. He’d give them drops of water squeezed from a cloth. He’d bathe them as best he could. He cut their filthy clothes away and burned them. They all lay naked now, shivering with eyes wide and frightened, seeing something beyond the confines of the log and mud walls around them. Joe would splash a bucket of water over them in hopes of quelling the fire that was consuming them from within.

He knew it was a losing fight. Every day he’d find one or more of the men lying still and cold, skin gone ashen, eyes like sun-parched pebbles in a dry wash. On the worst day he woke in the morning to find five men gone all at once.

The work was wearying and unforgiving. He’d taken to sleeping out of doors on a pine needle bed, grateful for the stiff wind coming down from the crest of rocks each evening. He might even take a few moments to sound out words from the bible: squinting in the firelight, running a dirty finger under each word.

“And Moses told these sayings unto all the children of Israel. And the people mourned greatly. And they rose up early in the morning and gat them up to the top of the mountain, saying, Lo, we will go up unto the place which the Lord hath promised for we have sinned.”

Whether the Lord answered their prayers or not, Joe could not say as the next passages were lost in the ragged bullet hole burned through the page.

It seemed each time he lay down or closed his eyes he’d hear a call from one of the cabins and would rise to follow the voice to its source. Sometimes the man wanted water and sometimes he only wanted someone near, to not be alone.

These men who were murderers, thieves, and worse than those, turned to children under the cruel trials of the pox. They called for their mamas and, sometimes, believed that Joe was their mother. He would sit by them, even taking their burning hand in his, and listen to their pleas.