Storm's Thunder by Brandon Boyce

about?” Van Zant asked.
    â€œHe’s praying. Would you like him to stop?”
    â€œFar be it for me to come between a man and his maker.”
    â€œIt’s hardly his maker,” Cross nearly spitting with contempt. “If that heathen could understand the benevolent grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ, he wouldn’t be in this predicament. Instead what you’re hearing is wasted breath to the Great Spirit. Waka Tana.” He turned and barked something to Saulito. The Apache stopped praying.
    â€œThat’s better,” Cross said.
    â€œPretty country,” Van Zant nodding toward the Sangres.
    â€œHmm.” Cross sat back and took it in for himself. “You never saw a great buffalo run, did you?”
    â€œNah. They was all gone by the time I come west.”
    â€œI saw many as a boy. A sight like nothing else. A swirling sea of darkness. Like a thunderstorm. Only louder. Shook the ground for twenty miles. Even after they’d passed through, their dust would blacken the sky for hours. The next day I’d still feel the rumble in my bones.”
    â€œThey didn’t run this far south though, did they?”
    â€œOh, yes. Long time ago. Ran clear to Arizona.”
    â€œI didn’t know that.”
    â€œOne buffalo could pound this wagon to splinters if the notion took him. Imagine what ten thousand could do. And yet, whole generations—his ancestors,” Cross jabbed a thumb toward his prisoner—“armed with nothing more than sticks and stones hunted them, and lived off them, for thousands of years. How do you think they managed that?”
    â€œWell, if you’re asking,” Van Zant doing his best to answer without driving off the cliff, “I reckon they run their horses up alongside and spear ’em.”
    â€œAh, but you’re implying they had horses. Go back farther, centuries. Even before the Spanish came with horses to trade, when the Indians roamed on foot. How then?”
    Van Zant shrugged, his mind too occupied with keeping the bay on solid ground to entertain a parlor game.
    â€œI need to piss,” Cross said. Van Zant halted the wagon. Cross climbed down and walked around the back of the buggy to the other side and undid himself while Van Zant stared straight ahead. He didn’t much care to witness another man relieve himself, but when it came to Cross, he found a strange comfort in it because—just like when Cross ate, or slept, neither of which seemed to happen very often—it made him human. And sometimes, Van Zant had his doubts. The water splashed down the sheer rock face and then trickled to a stop.
    â€œWell?” Cross said, buttoning himself up. “What is your answer?” Cross walked over along the edge of the trail and stopped next to Van Zant.
    â€œI don’t rightly know, sir.”
    â€œGravity.” Cross grinned, his lips curling back to expose the white of his teeth. “They’d herd the buffalo toward a cliff, until the animals had nowhere else to go but over.”
    â€œGolly.”
    â€œSuch is domination of man over beast.”
    Then Jacob Cross turned behind him, yanked Saulito down from the wagon, and hurled him over the cliff. The Apache screamed until he hit bottom.
    Cross climbed back into his seat. “We don’t have time for San Carlos.”

CHAPTER FIVE
    The Spanish named it The Royal Town of the Holy Faith of Saint Francis of Assisi, and even though it has grown into a straggling aggregation of low adobe huts that make it the biggest town in the territory, Storm manages to gobble through the entirety of Santa Fe in all of two minutes. “Takes longer to speak it than to cross it,” I tell him as the last of the buildings gives way and we find ourselves on a bluff, staring southward at a sweeping blanket of sagebrush that slopes down for miles before leveling off at the valley floor and then rising again at the foothills of the Sangres. Storm