Readers of this Substack have already been introduced to C.R. Moultrie in the story “Sheriff Moultrie and the Sulfur Springs Bandits” (published last year). That was not actually the first story I wrote with those characters, however. The story below was published in the Winter 2023 issue of Cirsova Magazine, and I’m now pleased to be able to share it with you in this space.
For more adventures with C.R. Moultrie and Deke Piebald, be sure to check out “Range of Deceit” in the Summer 2024 issue of Cirsova Magazine, which is available now!
“for no falshood can endure
Touch of Celestial temper, but returns
Of force to its own likeness”
~ John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book IV
“Hey mister, are you a marshal?” a wide-eyed, skinny, redheaded kid asked me as soon as I stepped off the train. It was more than passing pleasant for someone to be excited to see me for a change. Still, I knew from that moment that something was not quite right.
I rode up from Santa Fe on the “Chili Line,” and to this day you will not convince me it is not the hottest, dustiest train ride in all of the New Mexico Territory. In those days, Tres Piedras was pretty much the only town between there and the border that had much more than the rail depot and a post office. A telegraph office, too, but that should have been my first clue.
“Yeah, kid. Be a good deputy-in-training and point me at the telegraph office.”
“Over there,” he gestured with finger caked in dust. “But it is not working.”
“Come again?” I said.
“Operator says the lines are up and all, but it has been three days since any messages went out or came in. Some kind of buzzing sound if you put your ear right next to the receiver, but the operator does not know why.”
“Thanks, sonny. I figure I better go talk to the man anyway. Can you run along to the stable and tell the man I will be needing a horse?”
“Sure thing, Marshal!” He started off in the direction of the stable, but whipped around to ask me, “Hey, you must be here about the kid that disappeared, right?”
“What did you hear about that?” I asked him. I must have cut him a pretty mean sneer when I did, because his eyes got big as saucers.
“Oh, uh, nothing much, mister. I just heard some men talking about it when my Pa sent me to get the newspaper.” He shoved his hands into his back pockets and added a sheepish, “Honest.”
He scampered off to the stable at the double-quick after that.
“It is the dangedest thing, Deputy,” the telegraph operator said a few minutes later. “All the connections are fine. I have checked them three times. Then I checked the wires for near a mile in both directions, and I cannot see any problem.”
“Further up the line then, you think?” I asked.
“Could be. But when one of the poles blew over in that big storm this past winter and the line went down, it was just dead. No sound at all, you know?”
I shook my head.
“Well, it all operates on electricity. If you cut the circuit somewhere, then you got nothing. That is why this buzzing has me stumped. It is almost like . . . well, I suppose I do not exactly know what it is like. If I cannot figure it out soon, there will be nothing for it but to get on down to Santa Fe. I can let you know if anything changes.”
“I would be obliged,” I said. “But in the meantime I have to head up to Cielo Hondo. Can you get a message to me there if you get it working again?”
“Uh, well yeah, I reckon I can.”
I could tell he wanted to say more, but held back. It did not seem worth it to press the issue at the moment. I tipped my hat and took my leave. The ride to Cielo Hondo was not very long or very hard, as far as I knew, but I wanted to get settled in as soon as possible.
The sun was just setting when I rode into Cielo Hondo. Calling it a town was a fair piece more generous than it rightly deserved. It was more like a logging camp with some clapboard buildings thrown up in a shape that vaguely resembled a town square.
I spied the sheriff as he was coming out to meet me. I was expected, I suppose.
“I can tell you what I know about the Montgomery boy’s disappearance right now,” he began almost immediately. “Nothing. I do not know any more than you do, in any event. Until that scoundrel of a sheriff over in Rio Arriba gets his act together and admits that he is the one with jurisdiction, I do not see as how anyone will get to learn much more about it neither.”
“Now hold on, Sheriff. You seem to be telling me that you all are fighting to get rid of this case? I thought you were fighting over keeping it.”
He squinted his eyes at me then stepped closer and lowered his voice, though we were the only ones in the square.
“Here is what you can write in your report: ‘Sheriff O’Riley has concluded that all available evidence indicates the disappearance occurred in Rio Arriba County.’ Now, that is the honest truth, and I would swear to it in court. Confidentially—and if this ends up in any official report, then I will deny it and you will regret it—the available evidence of where this thing happened is nothing. The boy is gone without a trace, and that is that. You could come up with a hundred different possible explanations, but at the end of the day, none of them matters. I have neither the time nor the men to follow where there is no trail. So do me a favor, one lawman to another, and help me clean up this whole mess. What do you say?”
No words came immediately to my mind. Of course I had come across lazy, figurehead sheriffs more than a time or two during my work with the Marshals, but that O’Riley was something else.
“I will do what I came to do, Sheriff.”
The pudgy man released his grip on my upper arm that, until that moment, neither of us seemed to notice he had taken.
“I would offer you a cot over at the jail, but my deputy will be using it tonight. He is on duty every Saturday night owing to the, shall we say, ‘proclivity of the sawmill workers to indulge too heavily in the intoxicating spirits,’” O’Riley said, putting on an exaggerated Yankee accent for the last phrases.
“But the foreman’s office is over there. Just tell him I sent you.”
What the foreman had to offer was probably a rung or two down from whatever I might have found at the jail. It beat sleeping out under the stars, I reckoned. The bedding could have passed for a pile of dirty rags, and the ropes hardly looked strong enough to hold my weight, but nevertheless I said my prayers—the same way I did every night, just as my mother taught me all those years ago, still hoping that one day I could be sure that they rose beyond the ceiling—and then I very carefully crawled into bed.
Morning came, and it seemed almost as if I had not slept at all. My body still seemed as tired as the day before. On top of that, I had that sensation a body sometimes gets of closing his eyes in sleep, only to open them moments later and find it is already morning. But it also was not a dreamless sleep. I could not remember the details of any dream from that night, yet still I woke with the lingering, unpleasant effects of an intense vision. Those kinds of nightmares had been at their worst in the years just after the war, but had gradually faded. I dreaded the notion that they might return.
I slipped on my boots and found that the foreman had already left for the day. Scrounging up something for breakfast would be another self-guided adventure. Venturing out into the little town square, I was met by the unmistakable sound of a chuck wagon’s triangular dinner bell. There was my meal ticket.
Following the sound to a little copse of trees a stone’s throw behind the jail led me not to a chuck wagon—or any other source of food, for that matter—but what appeared to be a church service. A dozen or so men were seated in a scattershot formation facing another man who stood near the still-leafy boughs of a young smoketree. The dinner bell was doing double-duty as a church bell, I gathered.
The parson took notice of me, I could tell, but said nothing. That suited me fine. There were a couple empty chairs on the edges of the congregation; I took up one of them, and a minute later, a poor sinner who must have come directly from the jail took the other, the smell of some rotgut, backwoods firewater still seeping out of his pores and his eyes drooping helplessly. At least he was there, I told myself.
The Reverend gave an opening prayer and then launched straight into his sermon. The preacher took as his text “we wrestle not against flesh and blood” from the epistles. I listened only intermittently; he was no worse than many preachers I had heard in my life, but, just the same, for all his passion, I did not think that he was really any better.
When the sermon was over, we rose to sing a doxology—if the noise that rose from the copse had any right to be called singing—and I lingered near my seat. Only a couple of the men stayed to shake the Reverend’s hand, but even that looked like a formality. Finally, he made his way to me. “Amos Schafer,” he said, extending his hand and wearing one of the grins I had come to associate with preachers. In my experience, they always turned out to be forced.
Amos Schafer was, I later discovered, a Methodist circuit rider. That morning he had been due in another community almost on the border with Colorado, but had decided to remain an extra week or two after he learned of the disappearance. My nominally Baptist childhood left me with no great love for the Methodists, but of late I had no great love for supposed holy men of whatever sect.
The Reverend Schafer helped his cause in my eyes by foregoing clerical garb, instead dressing as plainly as the men he had come to preach to. Small patches of gray had just started to creep backward from his temples. His slight frame marked him as a man of the cloth rather than the axe or the plow, but his face and hands were weather-beaten and calloused. He must have spent more time in the saddle than some of the marshals I worked with. I could find at least that much reason to respect him.
“Pleased to meet you, Reverend Schafer,” I said. “I am C.R. Moultrie.”
“From the Marshal’s office, I see,” he said, nodding toward the badge pinned to the lapel of my vest.
“That is correct.”
“You will be wanting to see Mrs. Montgomery, then.”
He took a deep breath, but did not wait for my answer, which must have been obvious.
“Under the circumstances, I suppose I should not be surprised that she was not here today,” the Reverend said. “Mrs. Montgomery is my most faithful congregant at this stop on my circuit. If you care to go with me, I will go to visit her this afternoon.”
“And that will not interfere with your pastoral duties?”
“Oh, well, I suppose it could.” The momentary look of contemplation that crossed his face seemed genuine enough. “Still,” he continued, “recalling what she knows about . . . her son will probably be difficult. I am more than happy to be there for her spiritual comfort.”
After arranging to meet in the town square later that day, we departed. I would have preferred to go immediately, but the Reverend had other duties and having him there seemed certain to draw out more information. In the end, he kept me waiting for almost a quarter of an hour past the time we had agreed to meet.
“I do apologize, Marshal Moultrie,” he said as he arrived, coming from the western outskirts of town. “My other visit . . . took longer than expected today.”
His hesitation was noticeable, but I did not say anything at the time.
“Mrs. Montgomery’s cottage is just over there.”
Calling it a “cottage” was generous. I thought “shack” would have been more accurate; “shanty” would not have been altogether unfair. The door hung unevenly on rusty hinges, and the walls barely looked sturdy enough to bear up under a stiff breeze.
We found the woman behind the house, pinning up laundry on a line that sagged between the eave of her back door and a lonely, young pine tree. The delightful smell of fresh bread crept into my nostrils, drawing my attention away from the assorted clothing and toward a small adobe horno that appeared well-used.
“Mrs. Montgomery?” the preacher said as we approached. “We missed you at service this morning, but I have come with a visitor. I hope you will not mind.”
Even now, I am still not quite sure what I expected to see, but when the woman turned around, her expression struck me. Her eyes were red and puffy, but they were dry; I assumed she had no tears left to weep. There was a sadness there that I had seen on more than a few faces before, but also anger and desperation. She was younger than I had prepared myself for. A few stray locks of dark brown hair had escaped the simple bonnet that shielded her face from the sun.
“Deputy Marshal Clive Ransom Moultrie, madam,” I said, doffing my hat in the process.
“Let me get the bread and we can go in and sit down,” was all she said.
A few minutes later, we were all seated in the dim interior of the small dwelling. Mrs. Montgomery sat on the bed while we pulled the table and two chairs up to the other side. Between the three of us, every piece of furniture in her home was being used. The bread was plain, but having been forced to forego breakfast, I welcomed each warm mouthful.
“Try to tell the marshal as much as you can remember, Charlotte.”
The Reverend had come off as a little formal and stiff up to that point. The choice to use her Christian name caught my attention.
She took a deep breath before she began to speak. I had spoken with a few grieving mothers before, but nothing like this. Her eyes shifted between looking at the floor and gazing past my shoulder, as if somewhere out into the distance.
“It was the morning of that fog. I had never seen anything like it; I overheard the men at the mill said the same.”
She paused. Her eyes remained fixed on the floor, but flitted back and forth nervously.
“It was . . . well, I do not quite know how to describe it. Odd? Unnatural, in a way, but that is not quite the right word either. It was something about the light too . . . Anyway, I had been sending Jimmy to fetch the drinking water by himself for a few weeks by that time.”
Again she paused, but for much longer. Eventually, Reverend Schafer gently touched her on the hand, bringing her back from whatever place she had gone in her mind.
“I waited longer than I wanted to before I went looking; it bothered him when I treated him ‘like a little baby’ he would say. ‘I will be eight years old soon, Mama.’ But I am his mother, of course. It is only natural that a mother treats her only son with care, is it not?”
I could tell by that point that the way I usually questioned witnesses would never do. The only way forward was to let the poor woman talk.
She locked eyes with the Reverend, but only for a moment. He gave a reassuring nod and then she continued.
“The ground was just a little damp, so his footsteps were easy to follow. So I went out into the fog and walked beside the trail that he had left. It was early so there were no other tracks but his. His were so small anyway and we had just patched his shoes, that even then I could have followed him all the way to the well and back if I had had to. But I did not get that far. Not even close.”
The set of her jaw hardened noticeably. Glancing down at the bed I saw that her knuckles had turned white, her grip on the bed frame seeming to tighten with every moment.
“That is where I found it,” she said.
I waited for more, but nothing came. The Reverend looked on, his brow wrinkled in sympathy, but he remained silent. I took it upon myself to try to move things along.
“Where you found what, Mrs. Montgomery?” I asked, as gently as I could.
“The water bucket,” was all she could manage to say. Tears streamed from both eyes, but she remained motionless. Her mind was elsewhere—gone, perhaps—and I was sure that I would get no more information from her.
“Thank you, Charlotte,” the preacher said. “We will be going now.”
We rose from the table and slid it and the chairs back to their original places. We walked in silence back toward town.
“Preacher,” I asked, several minutes after we had arrived at the foreman’s house, “is she well? If that is all she remembers, I am afraid it will not be much help.”
Schafer let out a sigh. “No, Mr. Moultrie, she certainly is not well. I am sure you are doing your best, but in the end, you cannot offer her what she most desperately needs.”
If another man had said that to me, I would have thought him a little too pious for my taste. Coming from this parson with the weather-beaten hands, it set a little differently.
“What she was able to tell you today is not all that she knows. Please allow me to fill in the rest of the details from what she has said before.”
I swept my open palm in front of me in a sign that I was ready to listen.
“You might have gotten the impression today that Mrs. Montgomery is the sort of woman who is prone to fits of hysteria and flights of fancy. I can assure you that is not the case. Of all the people in and around Cielo Hondo, she is among those who can least afford to act foolishly or panic.”
That claim seemed to bear some explanation, but I let it pass, content to let the Reverend know his parishioners better than I could.
“I tell you this about her so that you can assess the rest of what she has told me that she saw that morning.”
Schafer looked mildly nervous. I could not tell whether he was afraid that someone would hear our conversation or whether it was something else.
“When Mrs. Montgomery found her water bucket, she found nothing else.”
There he stopped and seemed to be waiting for me to say something. The fact that the boy had gone missing was my whole reason for being there, so I could not think what he expected me to ask.
“Do you understand, Mr. Moultrie? She found nothing else at all: no article of clothing, no blood trail, not even another set of footprints. Only the water bucket.”
My mind shot back to the country preachers that my mother used to take me to hear: Enoch walked with God and was not. I could not have told you anything else about that story, but that line was etched in my mind.
“She had enough control of herself to run back the way she had come, avoiding her son’s tracks, and fetched Sheriff O’Riley. They searched up and down the rest of the path to the well, but found no signs of the boy. In his haste, the sheriff had made no note of the place where the bucket was found; by the time they returned, a breeze and a sprinkling of rain had muddied everything again. The Sheriff was convinced that the woman was distraught and mistaken. He tried and failed to convince her that her little Jimmy must have wandered off in some other direction and that he would turn up later that day.”
“But he did not,” I said matter-of-factly.
The Reverend merely shook his head before continuing. He gazed across the town square in the direction of the sawmill.
“The response from the town really was remarkable. They looked everywhere. It is more than I would have expected from them.”
“Why is that?” I interjected.
“To be frank, Charlotte is an outcast. Even among the low sort of men here, a washerwoman such as herself. . . Well, that is more than I should say.”
The preacher took his leave shortly after that, and I was left to my own devices.
From the foreman—Hedgepeth was his name—I learned that the Reverend went up to the nearby pueblo every time that he was in town. Hedgepeth did not know why, but expressed the opinion that there was “about as much chance of converting those savages as I have to be elected President of these United States.”
I had seen a handful of Hopi and Navajo who had, in fact, chosen the religion of the white men over that of their ancestors. It was a tiny minority, but it existed nonetheless. Still, it would not do to argue the point. Hedgepeth went on without my beckoning.
“It is that medicine man,” he said confidently. “The Indians would come down to the town fairly often to trade and such before he came. Now they keep to themselves. I do not recall seeing hide nor hair of any of them for at least a month. If Reverend Schafer has made any progress, I am sure I have seen no evidence of it.”
It made little enough sense that any clues to the boy’s disappearance would be found at the pueblo. Still, I thought, it seemed to be the only thing left to look into. I went to tell Reverend Schafer of my intention, and he offered to accompany me. Working alone had long been my preference, but under the circumstances, it seemed like it would do no harm to let him come and might even help, given that his face was familiar to the residents of the pueblo.
We followed the main path out of town to the west for about a mile. A craggy tree that looked like it could have been there since Bible times marked the spot where the Reverend guided me to turn off onto a smaller footpath that gradually wound its way up the side of a low mesa.
At the top, we found the pueblo as well as a panoramic view of the valley below. To the east, in the distance, I could just make out the bald peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. I could not help but pause to take in the view for a moment. The Territory was nothing like the green hills of my native Tennessee, but it had its own sort of harsh beauty. Even the looming line of storm clouds that threatened to sweep west down from those distant mountains across the plain to the heights on which I stood were captivating in their own way.
“The ‘blood of Christ mountains’ is a bit of an odd name,” I said. It had been meant mostly as a statement, but Schafer took it as more of a question.
That made him chuckle slightly.
“I suppose it seems a little out of the ordinary at first, but it is not really for this part of the country. Not too far from here,” he said, gesturing over his shoulder to the south, “is Nuestra Señora de Belen, ‘our lady of Bethlehem,’ and you came from Santa Fé, ‘holy faith.’”
“Those conquistadors sure were a devout bunch.”
I had my doubts about the sincerity of their devotion, in fact. Those doubts, however, may have been merely a prejudice of my own. The bishop of Rome was certainly not regarded as any great personage in the parts where I was raised. Perhaps sensing something in my tone, Schafer surprised me.
“I question their source of authority, certainly, but not their devotion. Anyone who has ridden these mesas and canyons very often can tell you . . . well, trying to ‘sanctify’ the place names like they did does not seem like much, but still . . .”
Rather than explain what he meant—as I strongly desired him to do—he said, “We should get over to the headman’s house first. He is getting a bit up in years, but the people still call him ‘Mingo.’”
The headman was there, but was still abed. “Where I come from, it is the old folks who are awake before anyone else,” I said.
Schafer looked at me, but acted as if I had said nothing. Perhaps, I thought, the custom was simply different among these people than it was among my own.
The headman of the pueblo was, as I discovered, quite an elderly fellow indeed with skin the color and texture of one of my old saddlebags. He seemed annoyed, and at first, I assumed it was because we had awoken him. As he talked with the Reverend—through a mixture of local words, hand signs, and broken English—I decided that it was not really the interruption of his sleep that was the cause of his agitation, nor was it the presence of two unexpected white visitors.
“He,” the preacher said, pointing at me, “searches for a small boy. From the village.”
Deep creases appeared in the man’s forehead where I had been sure no more wrinkling was possible. A fire flashed in his eyes that gave me a momentary glimpse of what he must have been like decades before as a much younger man.
“No!”
It seemed to be one of the few English words in his vocabulary, and he repeated it in rapid succession, waving his hands in front of him as if he had just walked into a swarm of horse flies. He spoke hurriedly to a younger woman who emerged just then from the adobe house; she must have been one of his daughters, I assumed. He glanced at me briefly before continuing to try to communicate with the Reverend.
“Hard to understand him now . . . going too quickly. He says that his people do not know about the boy, but he says that the . . . others have seen it? Something about the holy man . . . gone to the mesa . . . the other mesa. He wants us to leave now. Says we must come back tomorrow night. The medicine man is not here now, but we may see him then.”
The young woman started to repeat “please, please, please” insistently, and gesture toward the path that led down the mesa and back toward town. That was more than enough signal for us to leave, and so we did.
“Reverend,” I said, as soon as we were out of earshot, “I sincerely hope that you can explain to me what just happened, because I am sure it makes no sense to me.”
“I would like to be able to tell you that it made perfect sense to me, but it does not. Neither does it surprise me all that much. Mingo has been gradually losing control of the pueblo to the medicine man. I cannot tell whether he is giving up or does not realize it.”
“What about this medicine man? Hedgepeth mentioned him yesterday.”
The Reverend stopped, let out a deep sigh, and then hung his head for a moment before continuing down the path.
“I really think I was making progress with them,” he said. “Until he came.”
I held no firm opinions about efforts to convert the natives of that land to Christianity. Even if I had known the history of the place, I could not have said whether Schafer’s assessment was fair or misguided. He stooped to move a fist-sized rock out of the path.
Before setting the rock in the underbrush beside the path he looked up and asked me, “How much do you know about their religion?”
“Not a blamed thing.”
For the next few minutes of our walk back to town, I was schooled in the basics of Hopi mythology: things like the Fourth World, a Spider Grandmother, and gateways between worlds known as sipapu. The last point was the one the Reverend seemed to be driving at. None of it seemed to get me even a little bit closer to figuring out what had become of poor little Jimmy Montgomery. I figured that the Reverend must have started to sense my frustration because he cut himself off and started to speak more quickly.
“This new medicine man staggered into the pueblo one day. Mingo and the people nursed him to health, calling him simply ‘the grandfather.’ Then he started teaching. ‘The Fifth World is coming soon,’ he told them. The sipapu from which the new world will emerge is nearby and he will show them the way. They have been very secretive for weeks now, but I gather that the grandfather has had them preparing for his predicted coming of the new world with some kind of nighttime rituals. Always at night.”
“And have you seen one of these rituals?” I asked.
The Reverend shook his head.
“Then consider yourself deputized and meet me in the square at sundown tomorrow night. Bring a lantern.”
That night I fell into bed and slept, but did not rest. A nightmare that had not plagued me for years returned to terrorize me.
I was back in the prison camp, rooted in a nauseous stew of mud and all manner of indescribable waste almost as high as my kneecaps. Struggling to walk—though I never knew where—I passed the same contorted faces of my brothers-in-arms from Tennessee, Mississippi, and all across the South. They lay about the camp, hanging over the foul ditches we were forced to dig for latrines, gangrenous limbs protruding in all directions from underneath the pitiful shreds of canvas that Billy Yank tossed inside the wall and expected us to make believe were tents to shelter us from the harsh northern winter.
Black clouds ringed the camp; darkness filled the space around me, and I found myself standing near the wall, across from one of the guard towers. The guard was there, his pristine blue overcoat mocking me, but in this version of my nightmare, there was something different. Turning toward me, the guard’s mouth gaped open as if he were yelling, yet no sound came out. As he raised his rifle, I felt corpse-like hands trying to pull me to the ground; men with haggard faces as gray as the last shreds of their uniforms, only half-living themselves, trying to save me from summary execution. I looked back at the tower, and the guard’s face was twisted into a grotesque expression of inhuman rage.
His face, rather, had ceased to be human at all. He was no longer the guard, but something else. A light burst into the sky behind the tower, momentarily blinding me. I looked up just in time to see a blaze from the rifle’s muzzle rip through the air, stretching impossibly far from the guard’s weapon. The sound of the explosion came a moment later, yet too slow for any weapon that I knew, and it sounded like none I had ever heard. It was like thunder in a way, but closer and deeper, as if it were in my head rather than the heavens, growing rather than diminishing in volume as it reverberated across the camp and far beyond.
The light that had flashed behind the guard then grew in intensity; it seemed to be all the colors at once, and yet none of them. Brighter and brighter it grew. The light and the thunder grew unbearable. I tried to cover my ears, but found my hands pinned to my sides.
Then, above the deafening sound and stunning light, rose a sensation that filled all my senses at once. It seemed to be coming from the mouth of the thing that had once been the guard in the tower. If it had been a sound, I would have described it as something like when a conductor suddenly throws on the brakes to a train and it comes screaming to a halt. Yet it was not merely a sound; it was equally felt and seen and tasted and smelt, metallic and searing. And I endured a dread such as I had never endured before nor have since, as if my very existence depended on my escaping that dream.
The sensation rose higher and higher until, just as I was sure it could rise no more, it exploded. My hands shot to my ears, and I jolted upright in my bed, finding myself alone in the foreman’s little dwelling. The last ripples of a distant thunderclap echoed somewhere in the distance.
It was light outside, and the foreman had already left for the mill. Swinging my legs onto the floor, I took several deep breaths and tried to clear my head. When the dreams first started years ago, I would wake in such a state of distress that I could hardly move or speak for hours or, on occasion, days at a time. Gradually, however, I had learned how to calm myself. It was no easy task, but as I did so, eventually the dreams had gone away—for good, I had thought, until that morning.
Throughout the morning and early afternoon, a line of clouds that appeared over the far-flung mountains rolled steadily westward until it settled over Cielo Hondo and the surrounding countryside. At midday, it appeared more like late afternoon and was full dark by quitting time at the mill.
Three men from the mill agreed to go with me and the Reverend, growing our little posse to five. I still suspect it was their curiosity more than anything else that moved them to action. At the time, it certainly made no difference to me; I only wanted a few warm bodies.
When it was time to go, a couple of them looked as if they had lost some of their nerve. To tell the truth, I had been starting to lose some of my own. The cloud cover made the darkness heavy, somehow thicker than it should have been. Along with the storms came a blanket of mist that reminded me much more of smoke than clouds, yet without choking us. Not a drop of rain was forthcoming, and it remained strangely quiet.
In spite of all that—and after working up our courage—the five of us had surprisingly little difficulty following the path to the pueblo. The Reverend put his hand on my shoulder just as we were coming to that ancient tree that marked the last turn in the path: there were footsteps coming toward us. It was clearly a large group, though not so coordinated a troop as I had become accustomed to during the drilling days of my short-lived military career. We ducked into the underbrush to conceal ourselves.
Moments later, Mingo came around the turn with what appeared to be every last resident of the pueblo in his train. Men, women, and even some children followed him. The Reverend tugged at my sleeve and silently made a gesture toward his eyes and then back to the procession that was passing in front of us. I knew none of those people, but it was clear enough that something was not quite right. Their eyes were open but were not moving normally. It was not as though their gazes were fixed in place, but as if they were fixed on things that I could not myself perceive. Save their silence, they gave every indication of being in a state of wakefulness. Yet part of me refused to believe it was true.
After they had passed, I made motions for our posse to follow at a distance. The villagers seemed unconcerned that anyone might be following their midnight pilgrimage. Down around the mesa the procession wound, turning away from Cielo Hondo, and eventually coming to a shallow sort of canyon. We followed them across it and up the other side until the path began to climb again.
I leaned back to the Reverend and whispered, “The ‘other mesa,’ you think?”
He shrugged, but then surprised me by saying, “Let me go in front.”
As we approached the top of the mesa, we also seemed to be climbing out of the misty haze that had lain over us the whole night. We arrived at an opening in the rock where someone had carved a short staircase of some five or six steps.
The Reverend went up first, but as I set my foot on the first of the steps, the sound of a low humming began ahead. Or maybe it had been there earlier and my hearing was worse than I thought. The Reverend paused momentarily and glanced back at me with a look of deep uncertainty and concern on his face. I half-expected him to ask me to come back to the front or that he would scurry back down the path and retreat to town, but he did not. He put his foot on the next step and went forward.
Reaching the top, we instinctively fanned out into a “V” shape with two of us flanking each side of the Reverend. What I saw is burned into my memory as vividly and as permanently as my own mother’s face.
The people of the pueblo were seated in a circle around a hole in the ground. By itself, the hole would have been totally unremarkable, but proceeding from it was a column of otherworldly light. I followed the column upward into the sky where I realized that the light was not proceeding out from the hole, but down to it from the heavens. It was not the only light.
The clouds that I had expected to be black were alive with electricity, as violent and active as any storm I had seen in my life. Yet it was not quite like those storms. This was more deliberate—though even now that does not seem like the right word—than natural. Rows of bright lights hung in the air but would occasionally race soundlessly back and forth across the sky faster than any train cutting across the plain. They were as fast as lightning, I thought, but they were too perfect and seemed too artificial for that to be the explanation.
It was only with great difficulty that I tore my gaze away from the skies as the low sound of chanting grew in volume enough to impose itself on my consciousness. I looked back at the circle.
Sitting directly across from me was Mingo whose face I recognized in the light cast by the column. Yet his face was also transformed. Where before the many years of worry and stress criss-crossed themselves across his face, now a look of peacefulness seemed to smooth the wrinkles and erase the lines. It was not peacefulness, really, but vacancy; it was the look of one who was disconnected from and unconcerned with what was happening around him.
For the first time, I noticed another man, the only one seated inside the circle. This, I thought, had to be “the grandfather” who was the cause of our visit.
The grandfather wore no shirt. His long, grayish-white hair hung loose and fell all the way down his back. Some kind of markings seemed to cover his entire upper body. I had seen Indians with tattoos of various kinds before, but never anything like that, never so many. What they were, however, I could not quite make out from that distance. His eyes were half closed and his head leaned back, as if he were directing his chanting upward. His voice rose above the others in a language that was certainly not English, but neither was it Spanish nor the native tongue.
I felt paralyzed. My body still had the ability to move, I knew, yet I could not move or would not move, though part of me—the part that could still think clearly—wanted to get out of there. With great effort, I tore my eyes away from the grandfather and looked at the Reverend.
He seemed unaffected by whatever malady had struck me and the rest of our group. I tried to call out to him, but my lips would not form the words. A scream stuck in my throat as he stepped inside the circle. The chanting rose in volume and pitch as he approached the grandfather and the words of the unknown language seemed to come more rapidly. The Reverend waved his arms, trying in vain to draw the attention of the people. Then the clouds opened up, revealing uncountable lights that pulsed with extreme intensity. A tremendous rushing sound was followed closely by a frightening, sustained blast of cold air that traveled down the column of light and kicked up dust all around us.
The Reverend still waved his hands as he faced us. He was gradually backing up toward the center of the circle and the grandfather. I could not make out the expression on his face; at first I thought it was panic, but then realized that it was resolve. He had not known what to do at first, but then it came upon him suddenly and forcefully.
He held his arms aloft, the same posture he might have used to give the benediction at the end of one of his church services, and yelled above all the noise, louder than I thought he could have.
“In the name of God, stop this!”
Nothing happened, but he began to repeat himself as he continued slowly backward, arms still raised, but turned more upwards, almost as if in prayer.
“In the name of God—” he bellowed, even louder than at first, but before he could complete his exhortation, he stumbled and fell. He had backed up right toward the grandfather and had tripped over the ancient man’s legs.
The rushing downburst of cold air stopped as if someone had suddenly shut a window to keep out a draft. The lights in the sky blinked out all at once; only the column of light strung between heaven and earth remained. Were it not for that light, I would have been left with only the horrible sounds of what followed, rather than the sights.
The grandfather ceased his chanting and turned to look at the Reverend, but it was as if it were not him that was actually looking. There was an emptiness in his eyes. When what should have been his gaze came to the Reverend, he fell backward. Or rather, he was jerked like a rag doll by some unseen force. There he lay, spread-eagle, with the column of light seeming to emanate from between his ankles. His mouth gaped open to an inhuman width and a bone-chilling sound escaped his lips. It chilled me because I had already heard it, the night before, in my dream.
The grandfather’s back arched involuntarily, and his upper body began to come off the ground in a way that it should not have. The noise peaked in volume, once more assaulting all my senses beyond explanation. I turned my face away and saw my other companions drop to their knees in agony.
Then, just as quickly as it had come, the noise was gone. The column of light disappeared. The clouds rolled away, and the mesa was illuminated only by the heavenly lights.
I knew that we had arrived only moments before—or thought that I knew it—yet as I looked toward the east, the gray harbinger of dawn had already begun to appear on the horizon. Looking to my left and to my right, I saw no sign of the remainder of our posse. Near the sipapu, however, I saw the Reverend with the grandfather’s head resting peacefully in his lap.
Bending down, I could see that the old man’s chest rose only very slowly and feebly.
“What happened?” I asked. Almost before the words left my mouth, I realized what a stupid question it was.
The Reverend did not respond to me directly. His gaze was far off, and he seemed to be muttering to himself. The only words I could make out distinctly were “prince of the power of the air,” which sounded familiar although its exact origin escaped me.
A few minutes later the old man breathed his last. The Reverend laid his head gently on the ground and stood up. I rose alongside him and only then noticed my surroundings: Mingo and his people lay, motionless, in a perfect circle around the lifeless body of the old man. Trotting over to the nearest edge of the circle, I could see that they appeared to be sleeping, their breathing heavy and regular.
Turning back to the Reverend, I said, “We had best get out of here. I am sure we do not want to be here when they wake up from . . .” I did not have then, nor to this day do I have, any single word to describe the events of that night.
“No,” the Reverend said. He shook his head and repeated himself. “No. I cannot leave. I must be here when they wake up. You do not have to stay, Marshal Moultrie.”
He silently turned toward Mingo, felt the leader’s head gently with the back of his hand, put his ear close to the man’s face, and then, apparently, he was satisfied that the old man remained among the living. He continued around the circle in the same manner, as if I had never been there.
When I returned my horse in Tres Piedras and read the message, I refused to believe it could be true. Antonito was impossibly far away for a boy that age. After more than a few telegrams were exchanged, it was decided that the Colorado office would put Jimmy Montgomery on a train and accompany him to Tres Piedras. It was only much later that I reflected on how coincidental it had been that restoration of the telegraph line had come just when it did.
Reading the brief reports of other marshals, I was taken aback to learn that neither the boy nor anyone else seemed to know how he had ended up where he was. The only one that seemed to question it was me, but I questioned it only to myself. I did not want to try to explain what I had seen that night.
“I don’t know how I can possibly thank you enough,” were the first words Charlotte Montgomery said to me the evening that the train was to arrive.
I nodded and patted her hand. Her son was returning; that was all that mattered, not who could take credit for what.
The train had not even come to a complete stop when the energetic boy bounded down the steps and flew into his waiting mother’s arms.
“You must be Moultrie,” came a reedy voice from behind me. “I am Lewis from the Colorado office. If you can sign this for me, that is all I need.”
The man was old enough to have been my granddaddy. I examined the form he handed me and scrawled my signature at the bottom.
He took it from me and said, “They say there is not a mark on him, that he just showed up at our back door talking about how hungry he was. Makes no sense to me, but if you stay in this work long enough, you will know when to let the words ‘case closed’ be enough. Anyway, I had better get over to the telegraph office. Good luck to you.”
As he left, I turned my eyes back to the reunion. Heaving, silent sobs swept over the woman’s body, but her face beamed with joy and relief. The boy had his mother’s high cheekbones and thick, dark hair. To have him back was, in a way, to recover a little piece of herself, I thought.
The urge to ask the boy what had happened to him was almost more than I could take, but it would never do. The only thing that was missing that day was an explanation, but it would not have done to intrude. The old deputy from up north was right: writing “case closed” would have to be good enough.
I suppose, however, that one other thing was missing from the poignant scene. Whether it was his work at the pueblo that kept him away that day or something else, I cannot say, but I did see the Reverend Amos Schafer one last time.
It was the following spring, and I was waiting at the train station to take custody of a prisoner who was being brought back from Mexico to stand trial. I had arrived early and so took out the secondhand copy of Milton that I had been slowly working my way through. The print was very small, so I looked up after a few minutes to give my eyes a rest. To help, I focused on something in the distance, and my gaze alighted on a face I recognized immediately: that of Amos Schafer, seated not more than a few yards away.
I sat down on the bench with him. He turned to me and touched his hat, but said nothing. We both looked straight ahead, allowing the sounds of the city and the station to wash over us.
“What happened?” I asked.
Further explanation seemed unnecessary. I knew that he knew what I was asking.
The Reverend took a deep breath and let it out again.
“Mr. Moultrie, are you a religious man?”
Without meaning to, I scoffed, but hastily added, “I apologize, Reverend. I mean no disrespect.”
“People often come to me for answers,” he continued, as if nothing had happened. “I do not always have answers for their questions. I fear I have no answer for yours.”
The train started to pull into the station, and the Reverend picked up his bag and rose to board. As he did so, he turned to me and said, “We wrestle not against flesh and blood, Mr. Moultrie. I always believed that, but now I know it in a different way. So too the men and women of Mingo’s pueblo. I think you know it, too. What you and they will do with that knowledge . . . well, God is in the heavens, and He does all that He pleases.”
We shook hands and went our separate ways.
It is odd to me that all these years later, those final words of his stand out just as vividly as all the rest of it. It is, perhaps, more telling about myself than anything, that a phrase snatched from the Holy Book is lodged in my mind as firmly as unexplained lights in the sky, a convulsing savage medicine man, and an unharmed child enfolded in the arms of his weeping mother. Maybe someday I will even figure out what it tells, but like the Reverend, I suppose I must accept that God will do as He pleases.