Written in Blood Read Free Page B

hanging from the saddle horn.
    In the early afternoon we stop to rest the horses in a small stand of mesquite trees. A heavy thundershower passed over here in the night, and there are pools of water standing in hollows in the red rock. The horses drink and we fill our water bottles. I eat the last of some tortillas and beans I bought two days back, and Ed chews on a long strip of tough-looking jerked meat. I notice that he has the black object from his saddle beside him. He sees me looking at it.
    â€œThis is my good luck charm,” he says, tossing the thing over to me. “What d’you reckon it is?”
    It’s an old, irregular piece of dark brown leather from some animal, and there is long black hair hanging from it.
    â€œPiece of bearskin?” I guess.
    Ed laughs loudly.
    â€œReckon you led a sheltered life up yonder in British Columbia. What you’re holding there is a genuine human scalp.”
    I almost drop the grisly relic and hurriedly toss it back up to my companion.
    Ed catches it deftly and strokes the hair.
    â€œThis here scalp was fresh in 1850, the year I turned sixteen. Scalps were worth good money in them days, a hundred silver dollars for an Apache warrior, fifty for a woman and twenty-five for a child. In some places rate went as high as two hundred and fifty dollars for a warrior scalp.”
    â€œThat’s horrible. Who would offer money for a scalp?”
    â€œMexican state governments. They put a bounty on Apache scalps, Ley Quinto it were called. Still a law down there in many places but not the trade there used to be. Not enough Apaches left and those that are left are hard to catch. Course, it’s difficult to tell from a piece of skin and hair if it come from an Apache or a Mexican, so I do hear tell that there’s some money to be made still, especially when an Apache band breaks out of the reservation, like Victorio did this past summer up at San Carlos. That scares a lot of good folks, and everyone gets kind of skittish then and is prepared to believe that every old piece of hair is the scalp of one more vicious Apache brave they don’t have to worry about.”
    I sit in shocked silence, listening to Ed’s brutal tale. I wonder vaguely why, if scalps were worth so much money, he hadn’t sold this one, but I’m not about to ask. Ed goes on talking. He seems to take pleasure in the grim details of the business.
    â€œAround 1850 it were so profitable they had to tighten up the laws. You see, when a scalp’s still fresh, it’s possible to stretch it. Then you can cut it up into seven or eight pieces, dry them and collect the bounty on each piece. Law said a scalp had to include at least one ear and the crown of the hair.
    â€œGangs of men made a good living harvesting scalps and didn’t pay too much attention to where they came from. One of the best was led by a fella called Roberto Ramirez.”
    I started at the name from my father’s letter, but it was probably a common Mexican surname.
    â€œHe weren’t no more’n a kid back then, not much older than you are now, I would guess, but he was brutal.” Ed looks down at me with an odd, almost conspiratorial smile. “It’s said that in one raid in the spring of 1851 Ramirez and his boys took two hundred and fifty scalps in a single day.
    â€œThe Ramirez gang had their own way of doing things. Once the shooting was over, each man would take out his scalping knife. He’d sit by the head, run the knife around the scalp, put his feet on the shoulders and pull. Scalp came off as clean as anything—made kind of a popping sound I hear tell. Then all you had to do was sprinkle some salt on it and hang it to dry.”
    â€œHow do you know all of this?” I ask.
    â€œI been around,” Ed says noncommittally, “and those days ain’t completely over. I heard it said that Victorio and his band is raiding around the Black Mountain in New