Blackjack

Quinton removes his hat as he lay on the ground peering over the scene that is spread out just below the ridge. The wind up here never fully stopped; it pushed grit against his cheek and pulled at the brim of the hat he now held flat against the rock so it wouldn't catch and give him away. Below, the last of the daylight was draining out of the sky in long orange bands, and the desert floor was going the color of an old bruise. Quinton, a twenty-something bastard son of a drunk Georgia gold miner and an unlucky Cherokee squaw, mumbles under his breath but loud enough for his horse to hear. One Horse stood a few feet back down the slope, ears swiveling, patient the way only an animal that has seen a man think out loud for years can be patient. Quinton directs his remarks to One Horse, "I bet those wagons use to belong to living folks." Remaining fixated on whatever he is squinting to see, he feels the instrument he holds and without taking away his stare, he extends the optics for a closer look. Through the brass and glass the wreckage sharpened into something worse than a smear of dark shapes — canvas tops slashed and sagging, wheels canted at wrong angles, a scatter of trunks thrown open and picked clean. "It looks like there were six, maybe seven wagons and maybe fifteen or more mules. They are all gone now. Looks like some Comanche sent all the people to see Jesus!" Quinton continues to comment to the horse as he reviews the carnage below, "Damn shame, all the folks and their babies too! I'll bet they all use to be alive yesterday, probably just happened this afternoon. Better stay put 'til it gets dark. Gonna be a bright full moon tonight." He said it plain, the way a man says the weather is turning, because dwelling on it any harder out here in the open was a good way to end up part of the scenery himself.

The light kept bleeding out of the sky until the ridge went from orange to purple to the flat gray-blue of true dusk, and then, right on schedule, the moon came up fat and white over the far rimrock, throwing enough silver across the desert floor that Quinton could pick his way down without a torch. Later, Quinton quietly moves, in the almost daylight by the moon, from wagon to wagon checking the dead and making sure that nobody with any hair left wasn't as dead as they looked. The smell reached him before the details did — blood gone tacky in the heat, and under it something sweeter and worse. He stepped careful, toe first, the way a man moves through a room he doesn't trust the floor of. Quinton hears a whimper followed by a quick "Shhh!" from an overturned wagon a few feet away. Every hair on his arms stood up at once. "What the hell?" Quinton says with a whisper. He carefully crawls on his belly to a position next to the still-smoldering wagon, the canvas above him still ticking faintly as it cooled, a curl of smoke rising thin and gray against the stars. "Who's there? Are you still alive? Let me see your face." Quinton is in a position just inches from having a view under the wagon that reveals the wagon's contents. Quinton strains to view the cargo. Four little girls, probably the sex, and two boys, the oldest was about 12 he thinks and except for one baby, they were all wide-eyed and alive, packed together in that black wedge of shadow like they'd tried to become part of the wagon itself. "I'll be damned! You can put the baby down now," he instructed a little maybe eight-year-old, dead babysitter, she got an arrow through her neck! Quinton's words just inspired the little sad-eyed girl to hug her lifeless baby sister a little tighter, her knuckles white around a bundle that would never again need holding that way. Quinton wants to help the children be at ease so he introduces some sympathy, "I was a baby once!" he declared enthusiastically, his voice pitched soft and foolish on purpose, the kind of foolish that might coax a scared animal or a scared child a half-step closer to trusting him. Quinton strains to lift the wagon's corner and immediately insists that the children exit their hiding place. "Ain't got but one horse, I call him 'One Horse'... guess he'll have to do, let's go."