Teresa by Les Savage Jr

Author:Les Savage, Jr. [JR, LES SAVAGE,]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: rebel army, revolution, patron, Yankee trapper, game of politics, manipulation, peons, monte table, bribery, conspiracy, New Mexico, Upper River, exile, politics, fear, Santa Fe Trail, mountain man, love and passion, plot, Assembly, original Spanish settlers, Pueblo Indians, Expulsion Law, jealousy, diligencia, card dealer, rico, Governor’s Palace, gambling, gente fina, counterrevolution, Spanish colonial rule, murder, prison break, native-born Spaniards, fur traders, betrayal, loyalty, aristocrats, monte game, Mexican peasant, illegitimate son, peaceful occupation, Texas Republic, prisoner, invasion, spies, bravery, vanity, scalping, United States, pride, graft and corruption, Texas-Santa Fe Expedition, freedom, Lower River, Navajo Indians, pobre, taxes, Rio Grande, gun smuggling, honor, servants, passive resistance, dragoons, customs inspector, spy network, intrigue, military, political power
ISBN: 9781610130479
Publisher: Wonder eBooks
Published: 2010-07-13T16:00:00+00:00

14

The black coach went north, escorted by a dozen dragoons. As Pablo had predicted, in the badlands near Black Mesa the coach was attacked by a horde of Pueblos. The dragoons abandoned the coach: it was drowned in a sea of vengeful Indians and when they found it empty they literally tore it apart in their rage.

Kelly Morgan heard about it. He heard about it from where he lay feverish and pain-racked on his dirty straw pallet in the two-room adobe hovel somewhere east of Taos. He had been there, hovering between life and death, ever since the Mexican hunter, Tico Velez, had found him, delirious and dying in the mountains north of Raton Pass.

Kelly had no way of knowing how long he had wandered after he had escaped Vic Jares and his men. Only his towering rage and his awesome animal vitality had kept him going, had kept him alive till Velez stumbled across him. The Mexican made a litter out of willow saplings and his serape, hitched it to his horse like an Indian travois, and carried Kelly home in it. Velez got the curandera from Taos, a toothless old hag smelling of wild cherry bark and romero tea and juniper juice. She made a poultice of prickly pear that sucked the putrefaction out of his wound till he thought it would take his guts too.

When his fever finally broke and his wound began to heal, Velez’s fat wife took over, treating him with as much clucking solicitude as she did one of her dozen owl-eyed children.

From her he learned of the happenings in Santa Fe. The Esquadron de Vera Cruz had arrived early in 1838, and with the combined force Amado had marched north to do battle with the Pueblos at La Canada. Here the Pueblo Indians met their final crushing defeat, putting an end to their uprising.

With spring coming to the mountains, Kelly was up and around. Though most of his strength was back, he still had not regained all his weight. His eyes were sunk deep in their sockets and there was so little flesh on his face that his cheekbones pressed against the skin in silvery ridges. Tico offered his horse but Kelly knew it was the only one he had, and declined.

So he started to walk south. It was a spring country he walked through. White-stemmed aspen and green grama carpeting the fields and new silver tips on the spruces.

Kelly Morgan was a man of violent moods—shouted laughter and wild drunken sprees and soaring passions and anger so deep it could shake him to his toes. But the very violence of all his emotions excluded hate. For hate took a sustained meanness that was foreign to such a mercurial nature. Now, with the sweet perfume of the earth’s rebirth swimming around him and the pure simple goodness of walking across the face of a new world uplifting him, he could not even feel much anger at Ryker. He just knew his share of

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