Episode 4

Night Raid

The teamster camp lay under a star-filled sky spread about the nimbus glow of a quarter moon. The laden wagons were all secured. The horses and mules all seen to; gathered in a remuda of ropes strung in a square to wagons serving as posts at each corner. A guttering cook fire threw dancing shadows over the sleeping men. A half dozen guards were awake. Some smoked in the shadows near the wagons. Other stood post on the rocky ground beyond the fire.

Out in the wild dark, Ben Temple kept his wolves at bay. A slow-moving bank of clouds crossed the sliver of moon, throwing the camp into deeper gloom. Temple gave a low whistle in imitation of a woodcock. The men about him moved low toward the slumbering camp.

Young Joe Wiley was struck at how quiet it all was. No sound save the flapping of an unsecured piece of canvas in the breeze. And the crack and pop of the cook fire. The first targets were the men standing watch. They never stood a chance. Muñoz emerged from the shadows in the gorse brush to garrote one to the left of Joe. Ben dropped from a shelf of rock to cut the throat of another.

All of his life Joe had been fighting for scraps of food and for his very survival. He never took joy from hurting another man or even killing one. It wasn’t a choice one had the freedom to make in this hard land. And, like any task he put his mind to, he became expert at it. Time and nature had provided him with a lean muscular form that powered him with more speed and strength than the wolf cub Ben Temple had taken away from Bent’s Fort behind the cantle of his saddle all those years before. Joe was anxious to prove himself to the other men and to Ben Temple especially. He longed to be one of Ben’s lieutenants. Not just an eager kid tagging along Ben’s back trail. He was confident that he could better serve Ben than the two he had now, particularly Muñoz.

Unseen in the poor light, the few of the renegade Indians among them were dispatching their chosen targets.

Joe quietly and efficiently murdered the lookout he’d chosen to attack. A hand clapped over the man’s mouth. The point of a spade-shaped blade driven into the base of the man’s skull. A punch upward through bone and gristle. A twist of the point in the soft meat of the brain. He glanced down at the now dead man and then stepped over him. He looked to Ben, seeking his approval and the next silent command. Ben nodded and gave the signal for the others to close in.

Somewhere in the unfamiliar dark one of the raiders tripped over a rope line sending a water bucket and some pans crashing. Shapes about the fire moved, jerking to life. The teamsters and pistoleros emerged from their bedding, some clad in their long drawers and some riders in short britches. They came awake with blades and firearms in their fists. The sleeping camp roused to chaos. It was a close quarters gunfight, the two sides clashed in a struggle for their lives. The men of the camp couldn’t be certain from which direction the danger came and so lit the night with fire in all directions. The thunder was returned by the attackers. A drifting pall of smoke from the combined discharges fell over the circle of wagons. The raiders rushed howling from the sulfurous cloud like the host of Satan.

Diego, a short, stout, long term member of Temple’s raiders, took a bullet to his heart and fell dead at Joe’s feet. A spray of black blood from his mouth as he kicked out his last. Another of the raiders was lifted clean off the ground by a load of shot. The force was enough to send one of the man’s boots flying from his foot. Other men cursed in fury or mewled in terror. Bodies fell to the ground as hot lead filled the air while the desperate men on both sides attempted to kill the other. The smell of gun smoke and blood was pungent, as was the piss of those who lay dead. The fight seemed like an eternity in the moment but actually was a flash of motion and fury, men shooting, knifing, clawing and killing each other in the wild confusion.