“Others? Muties?”
“Worse than that.” Her eyes had narrowed, and her voice dropped. Her companion looked nervously out the door, as if she feared their being overheard. “Sickly, ailing creatures. Devil’s spawn. Head and legs. Body like a girt spider. Another with claws, like a crab, but with a cluster of eyes across its little forehead.”
Her friend crossed herself. “Poor wee mites. That one with a tangle of arms from its tiny chest. And the one with kind of feathers all over its misshapen skull.”
“The goat child.”
“Aye, Jesus save it.”
“And the one that bit a finger clean off Goodwife Biddy at its birthing.”
“By the saints! That was one of the worst of them all. Took three bullets to dispatch its hideous scaly body all the way to Paradise.”
“Hopeville to Paradise.”
She addressed Krysty again. “Rightly said, outlander. This is a poor, blighted place for raising children.”
“Why not move from the hot spot?” Mildred asked. “You’d have been spared much of this.”
“No,” they said in chorus. The older one wrung out her mop to indicate that the conversation was almost over. “Brother Wolfe says that it’s all a part of our suffering. Suffering like He suffered. Our own cross to bear.”
Doc had jerked awake from sleep, lying still, listening to the women talking. “Golgotha!” he said, very loudly. “Not Hopeville. Golgotha, the place of the skull.”
“Stay loose, Doc.” Ryan had come back from the sunshine to stand next to Krysty. “How many of the Mescalero children have been taken?”
“Can’t rightly say, Brother Cawdor.” The older woman shook her head. “Not our place to say. But I’d figure the answer is close on twenty.”
“They still living?” Ryan asked.
“Some. Most of them don’t take to our ways and food and all. Some get sick. Sores around the eyes and mouth. Shittin’ disease. Piss blood. Only about four or five actually what you might call left living. The Apaches take it hard.”
The other woman nodded eagerly. “That’s true, Sister Helen. Like bein’ at war, it is.”
Jak reappeared. “Food near ready,” he said.
IT WAS A CASUAL MEAL, no tables, with the food served on an assortment of home-fired dishes and wooden platters. Big bowls of food sat on one trestle, to be taken away and eaten while sitting on the cropped grass around the huts.
Wolfe was in a jovial mood, ladling out venison stew, reassuring them this was better-quality meat than what they’d eaten back at Mom’s Place. He told them that sec scouts had gone back along the trail and found the smoldering ruins of the eatery and a charred skeleton in the glowing ashes.
“And a stench of kerosene,” he said, grinning broadly, the smile puckering his scars. “Looks like she disagreed with someone who ate there.”
Ryan figured that the leader of the Children of the Rock strongly suspected their involvement in the slaying and arson, but didn’t seem to be particularly worried by that, letting it pass, unchallenged.
Which was fine with him.
But it was another good reason to keep checking over his shoulder.
The rich stew came with an assortment of fresh vegetables, well cooked and flavored with a mix of local herbs and spices. Josiah Steele had brought them straight to the head of the self-service line, where Wolfe was already waiting for them, holding a rough-cut goblet of reconstituted glass filled to the brim with spring water.
He had greeted them cheerily and joined them when they had all loaded their plates and sat down to eat.
Doc was the only one whose platter didn’t groan under the weight of food. He had selected a few tender pieces of venison for himself and a small spoonful of the buttered, whipped potatoes, picking at his food between noisy snuffles and outbreaks of phlegmy coughing.
Ryan noticed that the old man looked pallid and was sweating profusely, though the temperature under the shadowing mammoth trees couldn’t have been much above seventy.
“Tell us about this testing,” J.B. said to Brother Joshua.
“Nothing for anyone to be concerned about,” the leader of the ville replied.
“Who gets tested and how?”
“All of you, Brother Cawdor,” he replied. “All of you, by all of us.”