Read Online House of the Rising Sun: A Novel by James Lee Burke - Free Book Online

corked bottle of greenish liquid propped between his thigh and scrotum. The line of six horses disappeared from view, in the shadows of a hill. Hackberry closed the spyglass and followed.
    He watched them cross a dry lake bed that cracked under the horses’ feet and left a long line of serpentine tracks entwined like a braided scar across the landscape. They camped at the foot of a hill, among brush and cottonwoods, and built a fire around which they squatted as their simian ancestors might have. One man left the firelight and went into the bushes to defecate. His friends acknowledged the event by arching dirt clods down on his head.
    Hackberry tied his horse to a bush and pulled the .44 double-action revolver and the hatchet and the bowie knife from the saddlebags, and worked his way uphill in the dark, until he was above the campsite and could look down on it without silhouetting against the stars. Six to one, he thought. Well, it could be worse. Then he added, as he was wont with his thoughts, Not really.
    Two of the soldiers had gone to sleep on bedrolls. Three others were listening to a joke Miguel the executioner was telling while he sat on a log, taking small sips from his bottle, the bottle lighting against the fire each time he raised it. The joke was not actually a joke but a story involving a prostitute and a donkey performing on a stage. The soldiers’ horses were tied in a remuda between two trees; the soldiers’ rifles were stacked.
    Hackberry’s sheathed bowie was stuck in his back pocket; he held the .44 in his left hand, the hatchet in his right.
    He stepped into the firelight, his coat open, his straw sombrero pushed up on his forehead. “Top of the evening to you, boys,” he said. “This is from my friend Mr. Glick.”
    The first two who died never knew what hit them, one of them falling into the fire. The men in the bedrolls ran for their rifles. Hackberry kept shooting, not counting rounds, hardly able to make out a target in the smoke and waving shadows, the .44 bucking in his palm. Then it snapped dryly on a fired shell. He let the revolver fall to the ground and pulled the bowie from his back pocket with his left hand and slung the scabbard from the blade and plunged his own body into the midst of those still standing. He felt the bowie embed to the hilt in a soldier’s side, felt him slide off the blade as another man shot at him with a Mauser, the bullet whining into the darkness like a whipsaw. He swung the hatchet blindly behind him and struck nothing, then caught a fleeing soldier between the shoulder blades.
    Just as quickly as his vendetta had begun, it ended, and he was standing in front of the executioner, who stared at him openmouthed, the bottle of mescal still in his hand, as though his possession of it could return him to that envelope of time and security just before his camp was attacked. Hackberry’s sleeves were red with splatter, his ears filled with a sound like wind echoing inside a cave.
    “I am only a soldier carrying out orders,” Miguel said.
    “Take my knife.”
    “No.”
    “I’ll give you the hatchet and keep the knife.”
    “No.”
    “Pick up one of the rifles.”
    “I’m only a functionary, little more than a clerk. I am not one who makes decisions.”
    “Then drink from your bottle. All of it.”
    “No. Not unless you will join me. We are both soldiers.”
    “Look at the evening star. Right above the hills. It always winks, like a faithful girlfriend. In the summertime, on the Guadalupe, it rises into a lavender sky about nine o’clock. You can pert’ near set your watch by it.”
    “See, you are like me, a man of intelligence. There should not be these difficulties between us. Down there in the village, the people live as ants, as Indios . They appreciate nothing.” He pointed. “The women are good for chingada , but what good are the others? I am glad that—”
    After it was over, Hackberry threw the hatchet in the fire and peeled off his bloody