Sundance 20

by Peter McCurtin

  ‘You know they are, Sundance.’

  ‘Then how are we going to get out?’ Jorge looked puzzled. So was Silvestra.

  The question was one that Sundance had been turning over in his head all day. If they just rode out, even armed to the teeth, they wouldn’t get far into the desert before Bannerman’s riders caught up with them. No matter what kind of fight they put up they would still die.

  ‘How?’ Jorge repeated.

  Sundance spoke to the Indian. ‘You want to take a chance? They know you’re working with Jorge, so it won’t be safe if you go out in the streets of the town by yourself. In here we’re safe enough for the time being. I’m safer than either of you because of General Crook. That’s also for the time being, but that will change.’

  The Indian’s face showed nothing. ‘What do you want me to do, Sundance? I have come this far with Jorge.’

  It might work, it might not. Sundance said, ‘In a few hours the town will be awake and the cantinas opening up. Just about then I want you to go out of here staggering and yelling with a bottle in your hand. Then stand in the street and look up at the window and call Jorge every dirty name you can think of—coward, pig, child raper, drunkard, traitor. Yell coward and traitor many times, but use the other names too.’

  ‘I know many dirty names,’ the Indian said.

  The lawyer’s mouth hung open in astonishment and he looked from Sundance to Silvestra. ‘In the name of the Savior what is going on here? Dog! Pig! Coward! Traitor! Drunkard!’

  Silvestra’s brown face was solemn. ‘The last name will not be a lie.’ Turning back to Sundance, Jorge said, ‘Would you please tell me—’

  ‘You have finally turned yellow and are leaving Las Piedras. Mescal has rotted your courage away and you no longer have the stomach for the fight against the slavers. You’ve become a drunken coward. You’re running like the mongrel you really are. You’re packing up and pulling out for good. Silvestra will say all this. When he finishes shouting that in this street, he will go into the cantinas and say it. He has risked his life for you and you have betrayed him, betrayed all Indians. He will curse me too because I encouraged you in your betrayal.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Then you will leave Las Piedras, but not before Bannerman hears everything we want him to hear. A few hours should do. I’ll leave after Silvestra starts acting like a drunken Indian. You’ll have to stay here by yourself for a few hours. That’s another chance, but I don’t see any other plan that will work. Later I’ll buy a horse and wagon and come back here to get you loaded up.’

  Sundance went on. ‘We’ll load the law books and your legal papers in the wagon. Along with the guns. We have enough guns. They’ll be wrapped in sacking so Bannerman’s spies won’t know what they are. We’ll shake hands when it’s finished and then you’ll head back to Morelos a drunken, defeated man. Keep going on the south road until you’re sure you’re not being followed. They may not follow you at all. If they do, keep going. Don’t stop till you’re clear. Then take the wagon off the road and wait. Stay there for as long as it takes but stay out of sight. We’ll find you and that’s where it begins.’

  ‘How long do you think I’ll have to wait?’

  ‘Maybe as long as a day. They may watch me, watch Silvestra for a while. I don’t think so. Silvestra is just a dumb Indian and I no longer have any interest in your cause. But we must have time to get everything set.’

  It was less than an hour to first fight.

  Sundance told Silvestra he’d better drink some beer to get a smell on his breath. The big Indian nodded. He must have known what Sundance was thinking because he said, ‘I will not get drunk in the cantinas. All my life I have seen what tequila and other liquor has done to my people, and to other men.’

  Jorge scowled. ‘This is worse than being at a temperance lecture.’

  Sundance asked Silvestra if he was sure he had enough dynamite hidden away. ‘It isn’t sweated? You know what sweated means?’

  ‘I do,’ Silvestra answered. ‘Sweated is when the nitroglycerin begins to ooze and bead on the outside of the sticks, a thing that happens when the dynamite is old and dangerous to handle. No sweating. Yes, I have stolen enough dynamite in the past year. Stick by stick I stole it from Bannerman’s mine. It was my hope that it could be used to destroy his fine hacienda, to close his mine for good. It will be good to use it against his slavers.’ At last, after all the hours of talk, sunlight was slanting through the windows.

  ‘It’s time,’ Sundance said.

  Not much more than twenty-four hours later they were heading into the Sonora desert, traveling west on a downslope. At first there were foothills falling down and away from the first slope of the Sierra Madre. Here the bare, brown hills were covered with thickets of cacti, many kinds of acacias, mesquites, paloverdes and brittle bush. In the distance was a thorn forest and beyond that black lava beds. Here and there an organ pipe cactus stood up taller than anything else. It was an hour past noon, but the fierce Mexican sun seemed to be suspended directly overhead, as if daring them to ride out into country that had claimed so many lives. Beyond the foothills the desert stretched out in front of them, bleak and hostile, shimmering in the sun. Each man carried four canteens slung on both sides of his saddle.

  ‘Looks like we got out without being spotted,’ Jorge said, sweating badly though the long trip had just begun. ‘You made a good plan, Sundance.’

  Jorge had a brave heart, but he was not a professional. ‘Don’t be too sure about anything,’ Sundance said. ‘Bannerman didn’t get to be where he is by chance. All we can do is keep going and see what happens. Either way we have our work cut out for us. The best we can hope for is a head start.’

  They skirted the thorn forest when they came to it, and that took up some valuable time. On the other side of the lava beds the country began to level off. After that there was nothing but yucca, creosote bush and cactus short grass.

  An hour later they stopped to water the horses and let them rest. The sun beat down with savage force. Even in the shade of a big yucca anything metal was blistering hot to the touch. They started off again and now the desert was different, even more forbidding than it had been. The sand was softer and whiter than it had been. Now and then there were dunes that rolled away for miles. The sun’s glare on the white sand was hard on their eyes.

  ‘¡Dios!’ What country!’ Jorge said, tying a bandanna around his forehead to keep the sweat from running into his eyes. ‘What pigs these slavers must be! To ride across such country just for money!’

  Sundance turned to scan the country behind them. There was nothing but a zapolote, a turkey buzzard, wheeling lazily in the sky. ‘For them money is the best reason,’ he said. ‘They will fight and suffer and die for money.’

  ‘But surely they are cowards as well as greedy men?’

  ‘No,’ Sundance said, ‘men can be brave as well as bad. There may be more brave bad men than brave good men. That is a fact you must face, Jorge. You would like to deny it, but it is true.’

  Jorge said irritably, ‘I do not like your truth, Sundance, but it is too hot to argue. ¡Dios! It is so hot!’

  ‘It will be worse tomorrow,’ Silvestra said quietly. ‘In the dead heart of the desert will be the worst part of all. Out there even the Gila monsters lie still in their burrows under rocks when the sun is overhead.’

  ‘I knew I could count on you to say something cheerful,’ Jorge said. ‘Have you any other good news?’

  ‘It’ll be cool in an hour,’ Sundance said. ‘Everybody’s going to feel better then.’

  Now it was close to six o’clock and the sun was beginning to weaken. They rested and watered the horses again. They kept going until the light was gone and it was time to bed down for the night. After they hobbled the horses they chewed on dried meat and took careful sips of water. Too tired to talk, Jorge rolled himself in his blankets and was instantly asleep.

  Sundance said he would take the first watch. ‘Tonig
ht we’ll let Jorge sleep,’ he told Silvestra. ‘In the morning he will argue that we should have waked him, but he’ll be glad we let him sleep.’

  During the night it was cold, with stars bright and frosty in the limitless sky. Sundance sat with a blanket draped over his shoulders until it was time to rouse Silvestra. There was no need; the big Indian was already awake.

  ‘Everything’s quiet,’ Sundance said quietly. ‘How is Jorge?’

  Silvestra said, ‘He sleeps badly but he sleeps. After he sweats out the mescal he will be all right. Then his dreams will no longer be filled with demons.’

  Sundance rolled out of his blankets at four the next morning. A cool wind blew across the desert; a glimmer of light showed on the eastern horizon. Within hours the wind would blow furnace hot as the sun crept up to its full blazing fury, but for the moment this terrible land was still and peaceful.

  Silvestra stood up and let the blanket fall from his shoulders. He shook his head. ‘Nothing,’ he said.

  ‘Nothing all night.’

  Sundance watered the horses and let Jorge sleep until it was time to go. By then the sky was washed in red and the wind had grown warmer. The water in the canteens was cold and Jorge’s teeth chattered as he drank from his. To head him off, Sundance said, ‘We let you sleep because you needed the sleep. That’s all we want to hear about it.’

  Jorge nodded as he stoppered his canteen. ‘All right,’ he said.

  They kept going all that day and the day after. The sun beat down with relentless force, trying to kill them every mile they traveled across the wasteland. Jorge had sweated the last of the alcohol from his system. Though he was pale, he was in better spirits. He didn’t snap back when one of the others said something.

  During the day, the three men said little. At first Jorge, a man of many ideas, was inclined to talk, but as time passed the overwhelming silence of the great desert caused him to fall into a relaxed silence of his own. Sundance began to feel better about his old friend; his quiet mood showed that he was getting a hold on his nerves.

  When men who trust each other have traveled a long way together there comes a time when a gesture or a single word will do in place of many words. For Sundance, Jorge and Silvestra, a gesture was often enough. It was when the sun went down and camp was made that they talked—and their talk was seldom of the slavers and the fight that lay ahead. They knew what lay ahead, but talking about it wouldn’t make it happen any faster, or tell them how it would end. Water was running low, but they didn’t talk about that either.

  On the third night they were camped on the edge of what had been a lake thousands of years before. It was too late to cross and so they made camp. The sun was gone, but the wind was still hot. They were chewing dried meat and taking careful sips of water, barely touching the mouths of the canteens to their lips. They hadn’t made a campfire since the long journey began.

  Jorge began to laugh and they looked at him. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going crazy. I’m going sane, I think. I was just thinking this is a hell of a way to take a cure from the mescal. Oh, I don’t say I don’t think of it—I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t—but when I know I can’t have any, I can accept that.’

  Jorge laughed again, took one last birdlike drink of water, and stoppered his canteen. ‘You wouldn’t have a bottle of mescal stowed away in your saddlebags, Sundance? You too, Silvestra?’

  Sundance smiled. ‘Not a drop, old friend. Silvestra is drier than I am.’

  ‘True,’ the big Indian said.

  ‘There you are,’ Jorge said. ‘I’ve won my case.’

  ‘Maybe he has no mescal, but he’s still crazy,’ Silvestra said. ‘Our friend, the judge, thinks he’s in court.’

  Sundance, his strong white teeth working methodically, patiently on the tasteless jerked meat, smiled again. ‘Don’t be too hard on the judge, Silvestra. He knows what he’s saying and so do I. You say you haven’t been through it, but I have. It takes a shock or something like it to shake a barrachon —a drunkard—loose from his bottle.’ Silvestra thought about that for a while. ‘What was your shock, Sundance?’

  ‘General Crook said he’d have me shot if I ever got drunk again,’ Sundance said. Sundance never laughed, but he could smile when he was with friends. He smiled now. ‘General Crook said I was no good to myself or to the world the way I was. A bullet would be a kindness to me. He was right.’

  The big Indian said gravely, ‘It is good to have such a good friend.’

  They ate in silence for a while. Then Silvestra said, ‘Is it true, Sundance, that in your country there are places where rich men go or are sent to take the cure from alcohol? A rich American I once guided into the Sierra told me that. He was drunk when he told me. He had been to such a place, he told me, but the cure had not worked. So he hired me to take him far into the mountains and to tie him up when the craving for alcohol was upon him. He paid me well and told me—dared me—to find his whiskey bottles and to break them when I found them. He had many burros loaded with much equipment and I had to work hard to find all his bottles. I had to take his guns away before I broke the bottles. He was a wild man, though kind sober. He fought like a tiger when I put the ropes on him. It was the hardest money I ever earned as a guide, but I felt proud and useful when after a week in the cold, clear air of the mountains he stopped shaking and ate heartily what I cooked for him.’

  ‘Then what happened?’ Jorge asked.

  Silvestra said, ‘At the end of ten days this rich American said he was going to be all right—and we should start back to Las Piedras. I was better than all the doctors in the United States, he swore. We were brothers for life, he declared with much sincerity, and he would name me gratefully in his will.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ Jorge said. ‘I just know this Indian is leading up to something. I just know he is.’

  Jorge sounded all right, so Sundance was able to smile. ‘It’s his story. Let him finish. What happened, Silvestra?’

  ‘This rich American raced me down the mountain like a goat. In all my life I had never seen a sickly man with such energy. He bounded ahead of me with such energy that I feared his heart would stop. Or that he would stumble and fall from a high place and injure or kill himself. This way we traveled—ran—for days until the mountain was behind us and Las Piedras was in sight. When it was he pulled much money from his pocket, thrust it upon me and said it was time to say goodbye.’

  Silvestra paused and looked at Jorge. ‘That night, very late, I found him reeling in the main street, very drunk.’

  But all Jorge said was, ‘No wonder he got drunk, you damned Indian. Two weeks in the mountains with you, I don’t blame him.’

  Sundance smiled. ‘Good for you, Jorge. And since you’re feeling so great—why don’t you take the first watch?’

  Getting across the dead lake was the hardest part of the journey. What had once been mud was now stone, cracked and jagged, baked to its present state by century after century of sun. There was no way to get around the lifeless inland sea unless they were prepared to lose many days of time. To the north and to the south it barred the path of the traveler. It took them three days to cross it. Nothing grew, nothing lived on its surface, not even the hardiest of desert growth. If it had been prairie, they could have crossed it in less than a day. Much less than a day.

  By the time they reached the other side of the lake the water was gone. They had saved the last of it for the horses. The animals were beginning to falter and wouldn’t last much longer without water, fodder and rest.

  ‘It’s not too far now,’ Silvestra said, ‘but in this country any distance is great.’

  That night they talked little; their thoughts were on water. They started again early in the morning and by mid-afternoon they were traveling on an upward slant. This went on for many miles. It was almost dusk before they came to a level place, and from there they could see a line of mesas that ran along the horizon about twenty miles in the distance. In the clear dry air, the mesas
looked close enough to touch.

  Silvestra pointed to the biggest and highest of the mesas. ‘To get to the foot of the mesa we have to go through Canon de Nutria. The canyon splits the cliff face and runs back for a distance. They will see us long before we get there.’

  There was no use going on after dark, so they camped where they were. All the way across the desert they had checked their back trail. Now they were up high enough to be able to see back for many miles. But nothing stirred out there in that great emptiness. Not even a buzzard kited in the hard blue sky. No sun glinting on metal. Nothing at all.

  In the morning they were up before the sun, silently preparing their horses for the final part of the long journey. They were well on their way by the time the sun was hot. In hours they started to come up out of the desert. Not much later the mesa was dead ahead, a great escarpment of red stone that all but blotted out the sky. Then they went up a long slope with big rocks along its spine. Silvestra pointed and they led the horses through a narrow draw that would have taken a stranger a long time to find. Out of the draw, going down the far slope, they were finally in Canon de Nutria.

  Fruit trees and other crops grew along the west slope of the canyon. The slope climbed by stages to the foot of the mesa. Com and beans, melons and peach trees flourished on the slope because there was water as well as sun.

  ‘Up there is the village,’ Silvestra said, pointing. ‘On the top, back from the rim, is the village.’

  Hours of sun remained and the Pima farmers should have still been working. But the slope was deserted. ‘They’re watching us,’ Silvestra said. ‘They have been watching us for a long time.’

  Silvestra led them to the place where the trail to the top of the mesa began. It started from behind a jumble of rocks big as houses that had torn loose from the side of the mesa. The beginning of the path was hidden and the path itself couldn’t be spotted, even by a man with binoculars. If the Pimas had been warlike people, as the Apaches were, they could have knocked the slavers or anybody else to the bottom without any trouble. But the Pimas had been farmers and hunters long before the Spanish arrived in Mexico.