The Blaze of Noon

by Tim Champlin

  “Dead?”

  “No.”

  Coopersmith dismounted and ground-reined the Arabian and began what, for him, was a laborious ascent of the slightly inclined wall, slipping and sliding, skinning his shins. He finally pulled himself up onto the ledge, breathing heavily in the heat. He crouched by Mora and felt his pulse. He was breathing, but unconscious. Apparently he’d lost a lot of blood. Dirt and sand were caked on the half-dried blood on his clothing.

  “Let’s get him out of the sun, and see where he’s wounded.” He looked about quickly. Getting him off this ledge would be a problem without rope or something to anchor it to.

  “Coop!” Quanto motioned for him to put his hand by an opening in the rock five feet away that was emitting cool air. The Indian got down and crawled on hands and knees into the mouth of the cave.

  Coopersmith followed and stood up inside the ventilated room where a shaft of sunlight slanted down from an overhead crack some twenty feet above. He motioned for Quanto to drag Mora inside. The wounded man opened his eyes as he was being moved.

  “Ah, two old friends,” he muttered weakly.

  At least he’s in his right senses, Coopersmith thought. He cradled the injured man’s head and held a canteen to his lips. “Rest easy. Where are you hurt?”

  “Top of left arm, cut on the rib, bullet in the side of my buttock. Arm’s the worst.”

  “We got here too late to warn you,” the Englishman said. “Saw Rivera’s body down below. Must have been one helluva fight.”

  Mora nodded. “Don’t know where the other man is.”

  “Your camp nearby?”

  “About a mile to the north,” he whispered huskily, accepting another drink of water.

  “We’ll clean you up as best we can here, then use your coil of rope to let you down the bluff,” the Englishman said, planning as he spoke. “Think you can stand it?”

  “Yeh.”

  “I want to get some hot coffee into you . . . and a little food when you can tolerate it. We’ll take you to camp and bandage those wounds.”

  “I’m mostly just sore.”

  Coopersmith glanced around and saw the mummified Franciscans for the first time. “My God, what’s that?”

  “Tell you about it later.” He gestured weakly with his head. “Vein of gold back there in the wall. Got a couple bags full of ore.”

  Quanto came over and hunkered by him, taking out his knife to begin cutting off the bloody shirt.

  Mora struggled to sit up and assist him. “Quanto, this is the third time you’ve come to my rescue. Now I finally have the means to thank you.”

  If the Tarahumara understood, his stony expression never changed. “No talk. Rest.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  November 3, 1878

  Sand Tank Station

  “That’s the last of it,” Jason Watley said. “We’re packed and ready.”

  “Thanks, Jason. Better have a last look around to make sure we didn’t forget anything,” Lila Strunk said.

  The hostler disappeared inside the log building where Quanto and Coopersmith were tying up their bedrolls from having slept on the plank floor overnight. Sand Tank station was now officially closed. Hired wranglers had retrieved the stagecoach company’s livestock three days before.

  Lila’s few belongings were packed on the wagon.

  “I hate to leave this place,” she said. “It’s been home for some years now, and Frank is buried here.” She wore a wistful look as her gaze rested on the buildings and the cottonwoods.

  Daniel Mora nodded. “I thought you might be here at least until the railroad reached Tucson . . . maybe another sixteen months.”

  “Yes.” She nodded. “But business was off, and the stage company decided to go ahead and shut down.”

  “I’m surprised at that, since the Southern Pacific only resumed construction this week. Quanto left them just before they halted building for three months because of the heat and lack of wooden ties.”

  Lila shrugged. “They won’t even reach Casa Grande until next spring.”

  “I reckon the S.P. saved a few dollars by routing the line several miles south,” Mora said. “They apparently don’t need this spring for the steam engines.”

  “The spring is what I’m going to miss most about this place,” Lila said. “I’m afraid the station’ll be abandoned and the Indians will reclaim it.”

  “Nobody will own the water, though. Sand Tank Spring will be like all the other springs in the desert . . . it’ll belong to the animals and any traveler who wants to use it.” He looked at Lila who was dressed in a long, blue traveling dress, her graying hair swept up and pinned under a wide-brimmed matching hat. He’d urged her to take his Smith & Wesson for protection, and she’d tucked it into her handbag, which she’d placed on the bench while they talked. Dressed up like this, she appeared ten years younger than when he’d last seen her. “I probably won’t come back this way,” he said after a short silence. “It’ll seem too desolate without you.”

  “Where do you go from here?”

  It was the question Daniel Mora had been dreading, and he was glad Lila wasn’t looking directly at him when she asked it.

  “Not real sure,” he answered truthfully.

  “No thought of returning to San Francisco?”

  He shook his head. “No. But who can say what’s down the road? Times change . . . people change.”

  “If you go back to that woman, you’re a fool.”

  He laughed. “Lila, I can always count on you for an unbiased opinion.”

  “Living out here has ground all the subtlety out of me. It’s reduced my life to the essentials.”

  For the last time they stood near the gurgling spring outside the station. The morning sun was an hour above the horizon, dispelling the overnight autumn chill.

  Her distressed expression melted into a smile. “Now that you’ve endowed all your friends with a passel of gold, you’d best decide what you’re going to do with what’s left.” While he was fashioning some appropriate reply, she went on: “You can’t escape responsibility by hiding in the desert, you know.”

  “I took your advice and registered the claim,” he said.

  “A good first step.”

  “And I sent enough to my wife to keep her for the rest of her years.”

  “Not that she deserves it.” Lila sniffed.

  “Most of us don’t get what we deserve, for better or worse. And I, for one, am glad of it.”

  “You’re probably right,” she acknowledged. “The sun and rain fall equally on the good and the bad. I’d rather have the Almighty’s mercy than His justice.” She glanced toward the span of mules harnessed to the spring wagon that would haul her and the hostler to Tucson. From there she planned to travel on to live with her widowed sister in Cincinnati.

  “You know, you and I would have made a wonderful couple,” she said quietly. “We’ve both traveled some hard roads and don’t have any unrealistic expectations.”

  “Lila, I love you,” he said simply, touching the barely visible scars on her neck. “If my wife should die. . . .”

  She shook her head. “You’re entirely too straight-laced, Dan. Even if that lady you’re parted from should pass away, you and I’ll never get together. Once we leave here, we’ll go our own ways and never see each other again. That’s just the way of things, and we both know it.”

  Making no reply, Mora turned aside and took a long, slow breath, savoring the musical trill of an unseen warbler cheering the desert morning. The warmth of the sun through the branches of the cottonwood felt good on his back; only a few months before he would have dreaded the coming of the day’s blistering heat.

  “Do your wounds still bother you?” she finally asked.

  “No. They’re completely healed. I may not be good as new”—he grinned—“but I’m as good as slightly used.”

  “What’s next?” she asked again.

  “I’ve taken Quanto and Coopersmith as partners in
the mine,” Mora said, “so now there are four of us. You get half, per our agreement, and the other half will be divided three ways.”

  “Dan, I don’t want all that,” she insisted again. “I’ll settle for what’s in that strongbox you brought me.”

  “Nevertheless, I’ve got your sister’s address in Ohio. You’ll be hearing from me as the mine develops. Quanto, Coopersmith, and I will dig out what we can during the mild winter months, and then decide if the Saint Francis is worth keeping. Should the vein start to pinch out, or go too deep, we might sell to some big mining company that has the equipment and expertise to do hard-rock tunneling. The three of us get along well and can work together. Coopersmith will have time to finish his book, and we can teach Quanto more English.”

  “If that Indian shares his gold with his people, he’ll have the richest village in the Sierra Madre,” Lila said, and laughed.

  “Come next summer, if we’ve sold the mine, I’ll probably donate a good chunk of my money to charity, then go live in a cooler climate for a few months. But I’ll come back to the desert. It’s part of me . . . like the salt in my blood. Can’t really explain it. Eternal . . . peaceful.”

  “I know. I won’t stay away long, either. Maybe I can convince my sister the dry, warm climate would help her rheumatism.”

  “In a couple more generations,” he said, “this whole country will likely be civilized and settled.”

  She was silent for a few moments. “What did you do with those two mummies you found?” she asked.

  “Brought them in caskets to Yuma for a belated funeral Mass. They’re buried in the churchyard. It was time they got a little rest after guarding that mine for a hundred years. The parish priest there is doing some research in the Spanish records to find out who they were.”

  “And the law hasn’t caught up with Hugh Deraux yet?” she inquired.

  “Not yet. Frankly I don’t care if they ever do. He’s gone out of our lives.”

  Coopersmith and Quanto emerged, and the Englishman tied his bedroll behind the California saddle. Lila had made him a present of the Arabian, Pistol. Since Quanto still wasn’t used to riding a horse, Mora had stabled his mule and burro, and they’d traveled here from Yuma in a light, rented buggy. They all gathered to give Lila her share of gold, and to help her pack to leave.

  Jason came outside to join them. “The place is cleaned out,” the hostler announced.

  The men shook hands with Jason and hugged Lila. Mora was last and kissed her. He held her close for several seconds and could feel her heart beating. It was a sensation he would remember for a long time. When they pulled apart, her eyes were moist. She brushed away a tear that escaped onto her cheek. “Daniel Mora, look what you’ve done to me,” she said.

  The hostler climbed to the driver’s seat of the wagon and Mora helped Lila up on the other side. A metal strongbox packed with a generous amount of rich sponge gold rested in the bed of the wagon along with her luggage. Mora had no worries about her being alone with this hostler. He was an honorable man if Mora’d ever seen one. And Lila had the loaded pistol in her bag, just in case.

  Coopersmith mounted his horse. Mora and Quanto climbed into the buggy. With a last wave Mora pulled the horse around and snapped the reins over its back. He didn’t see Lila looking over her shoulder as Jason drove their team out onto the Gila Road and headed toward the rising sun.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Tim Champlin, born John Michael Champlin in Fargo, North Dakota, was graduated from Middle Tennessee State University and earned a Master’s degree from Peabody College in Nashville, Tennessee. Beginning his career as an author of the Western story with Summer of the Sioux in 1982, the American West represents for him “a huge, ever-changing block of space and time in which an individual had more freedom than the average person has today. For those brave, and sometimes desperate souls who ventured West looking for a better life, it must have been an exciting time to be alive.” Champlin has achieved a notable stature in being able to capture that time in complex, often exciting, and historically accurate fictional narratives. He is the author of two series of Westerns novels, one concerned with Matt Tierney who comes of age in Summer of the Sioux and who begins his professional career as a reporter for the Chicago Times-Herald covering an expeditionary force venturing into the Big Horn country and the Yellowstone, and one with Jay McGraw, a callow youth who is plunged into outlawry at the beginning of Colt Lightning. There are six books in the Matt Tierney series and with Deadly Season a fifth featuring Jay McGraw. In The Last Campaign, Champlin provides a compelling narrative of Geronimo’s last days as a renegade leader. Swift Thunder is an exciting and compelling story of the Pony Express. Wayfaring Strangers is an extraordinary story of the California Gold Rush. In all of Champlin’s stories there are always unconventional plot ingredients, striking historical details, vivid characterizations of the multitude of ethnic and cultural diversity found on the frontier, and narratives rich and original and surprising. His exuberant tapestries include lumber schooners sailing the West Coast, early-day wet-plate photography, daredevils who thrill crowds with gas balloons and the first parachutes, tong wars in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Basque sheepherders, and the Penitentes of the Southwest, and are always highly entertaining.