“You’d like pa,” I said suddenly. “The more I think of him the more I like him, myself. I mean other than just as a father. I figure he’s the kind of man I’d like to ride the trail with, and I guess that’s about as much as a man can say.”
Ahead of us I saw a mite of grass bunched up, and I drew rein sudden and felt my breath tight in my throat. Gin started on, but when she saw my face she stopped.
“Orlando, what is it?”
It was a small tuft of grass kind of bunched up, and some other grass stems had been used to tie a knot around the top of the bunch.
There it sat, kind of out of the way and accidental-like, but it was no accident. Maybe many men used that trail marker—no doubt Indians did. But I knew one man who’d used it, and who knew I’d spot such a thing.
My pa.
“Gin”—I couldn’t speak above a whisper—
“pa’s been here.”
She looked at me, her eyebrows raised a little. “Of course, when he found the gold.”
“No … recent. Maybe the past two or three days.”
Swinging down, I slid an arm through the loop of the bridle reins and squatted down to look closer. That marker had been made within the past couple of days, for the broken grass used to tie around the bunch was still green.
Straightening up, I looked all around, taking my time. Whoever had made that marker intended for it to be seen, but not by just anybody. Nobody would see it unless he was trained to look for sign.
It stood all by itself, though. I mean, there was grass all around and some brush, but no other markers. That meant that what it was intended to mark was close by, within the range of my eyes. It was up to me to see it. Yet, looking all around, I saw nothing. The clouded sky, the gray, whitecapped water, the green grass growing just short of knee-high, the scattered brush, the reeds along the shore …
The reeds!
Reaching up, I taken my Henry from the boot.
“You stand watch, Gin. Watch everything, not just me.”
For two, three minutes I didn’t move.
I stood there beside my horse and I studied those reeds, and I studied them section by section, taking a piece maybe ten foot square and studying it careful, then moving on to another square.
Trailing the bridle reins, I stepped away from the horse and worked my way carefully through the reeds. What I had spotted was an open space among the reeds, which might mean an inlet of water, for there were several such around. However, when I got to that open place—minding myself to break no reeds and to move with care—I found a low hive, a mound-like hut of reeds made by drawing the tops together and tying them, then weaving other reeds through the rooted ones. It was maybe eight feet long by four or five wide.
Room enough for a man to sleep.
“I’m friendly,” I said, speaking low but so I could be heard. “I’m hunting no trouble.”
There was no answer.
Easing forward a bit, I spotted the opening that led inside, and kneeling, I eased forward. I spoke once more, and there was no response. Then I stuck my head inside.
The hut was empty.
The ground inside must have been damp, so close to the water, and it had been covered by several hastily woven mats of reeds, with grass thrown atop of them.
I backed out and stood up.
My father had taught me to build an emergency shelter just thataway from reeds, cane, or slim young trees. He taught me when I was six years old, and I’d not forgotten.
Pa . Was here.
I was sure of it now. That marker, just the way he used to use them, something to call attention, not necessarily to indicate a trail … and now this.
When I got back to the horse I put a foot in the stirrup and swung my leg over the saddle. Gin was waiting for me to tell her, and I did.
“Pa’s close by,” I said. “I’ve got an idea that prisoner Herrara is hunting is my father.”
“You’re sure he’s near?”
So I told her what I had seen, and explained a bit about it.
If he was close by, he would fine me— unless he was lying hurt.
Even so, he would find me or let me know some way, so I turned and we started back to the herd.
We rode more swiftly now, eager to get back.
There was so much inside me I wasn’t looking out as sharp as I should have. We came riding around the brush, and there were fifteen or twenty riders, and down in the middle of them was Miguel.
Miguel was on the ground, and his face was all blood. A thick-set Mexican was standing over him with a quirt in his hand. Herrara sat his horse nearby.
Only thing saved me was they’d been so busy they weren’t listening, and a horse on soft sod doesn’t make a whole lot of disturbance.
Lucky for me I was carrying that Henry out in the open. She swung up slick as a catfish on a mudbank and I eared back the hammer.
They all heard that.
Their heads came around like they were all on string, but the one I had covered was Herrara himself.
“Call that man off,” I said, “or I’ll kill you.”
He looked at me, those black eyes flat and steady as a rattler’s. I’ll give him this.
There was no yellow showing. He looked right into that rifle barrel and he said, “You shoot me, se@nor, and you are dead in the next instant.”
Me, I wasn’t being bluffed. Not that day. I looked right along that barrel and I said, “Then I’ll be the second man to die. When I fall, you’ll lie there to make me a cushion.”
We looked at each other, and he read me right. Whatever happened, I’d kill.
“And the lady? What happens to her if we die?”
“We’d never know about that, would we?” I said.
“I think she’d take care of herself, however, and if anything happened to her, I don’t think Cheno would like it.”
“What do you know of Cheno?”
“Me? Next to nothing, but the se@norita’s family were good friends to Cheno’s family when he lived north of the border. How else would a mere woman have the courage to ride alone into Mexico?”
He was listening, and I think he believed me.
Sure I was lying. Maybe her family had known the Cortina family, and maybe they never had. But I was talking to save the lady trouble, and maybe some talk for my own skin as well.
He did not like it, because it tied his hands, and he wasn’t letting up yet.
“Why do you stop here?”
“Hell,” I said offhand, “you’re a better cowman than I am. I ran the legs off those steers getting them up here. I got a girl north of the border, and I wanted to get back.
Those other hands never showed, so we pushed ‘em hard and nearly killed our horses. We had to rest.”
It was true, of course, and I made plenty of sense, and that was one thing I had planned just that way. I wanted that story to tell if he came up on us again.
“Has anyone come to your camp other than the se@norita?” he asked then.
“If they did, I didn’t see them.
We’ve been hoping somebody would come by who had some frijoles to sell. We’re short on grub.”
He asked a few more questions, and then they rode off, but I’d a hunch they would leave somebody to watch, or maybe none of them would go very far.
Miguel’s face was cut and swollen. He had been lashed several times across the face and struck once with the butt because he could tell them nothing.
Now he washed the blood from his face and then looked around at me. “Careful, amigo. That one will kill you now, or you shall kill him. You faced him over a gun and made him back up.”
“Twenty-five miles to the border,” I said.
“Can we make it in one run? Maybe losing a few head?”
Miguel shrugged. “With luck, se@nor, one can do anything.”
Me, I was doing some studying, and it came to me that whatever was going to happen would happen fast now.
Tomorrow night—or perhaps t
he next—we would be driving for the border. And we’d have the gold with us.
But I wasn’t thinking of that gold, I was thinking of pa. My father, whom I had not seen for eight years, was somewhere out there in the darkness.
The question was: did he know I was here?
Chapter Seven.
Miguel shook me awake an hour after midnight, and I sat up, feeling the dampness caused by the nearness of the Gulf. The fire was a glowing bed of coals and the coffee pot was steaming.
Gin was asleep, her head cushioned on her saddle.
“It’s quiet,” Miguel said, “too damn’ quiet.”
He looked very bad this morning, his face still swollen, and blood from an opened whip-cut tracing a way across his cheek.
“We’re going to make a run for the border,”
I said. “You get your sleep.”
He was dog-tired, and he hit the blankets and was asleep before I could drink my coffee.
He’d taken time to saddle my dun before waking me, which was like him. I thought of his wife back in Texas and knew that whatever else happened, he must get back to her. And he would not go unless with me. He was that loyal.
The cattle were resting and quiet. They’d had grass and water a-plenty and were fixing to get fat. Or maybe they were stoking up for what was to come.
Among any bunch of cattle, as among humans, you will find a few staid, steady characters, and there were a couple of such steers in this herd that I’d been cultivating. These had been wild cattle; but cattle, horses, or men, no two are quite alike, and these I’d chosen showed a disposition to be friendly. It was in my mind that I might need a couple of steady steers, and these two I’d fed a few choice bunches of grass or leaves.
Truth of the matter was, I was scared. Both Gin and Miguel were looking to me, and I wasn’t sure I was up to it. I had never been in a real shoot-out difficulty, and it worried me that I was trusted to handle whatever came.
Wind moaned in the brush. Finishing my coffee, I put aside my cup and, shoving the Henry into the boot, mounted up and rode out to the herd, singing low. Water rustled along the shore of the inlet, sucking and whispering among the reeds and the old drift timbers. Once it spat a few drops of cold rain.
This time of night, I was thinking, would be the time to run. Herrara would have us watched, but on a cold, unpleasant night there might be a chance.
Twice I rode wide of the herd to get a better over-all look, and I rode with care, pistol to hand. There was nothing to see, less to hear.
But bit by bit something was shaping up in my mind.
There was this long arm of the sea to the east of us, and that other wider arm to the west and south. We were on a point, with water on two sides. Dimly, I recalled some tracings pa had made in the earth at the back door of the cabin one day as he talked. It was like this point … down there on the very point he’d made a cross of some kind.
Tomorrow … I would go there tomorrow.
It was coming up to day when I turned back toward camp. The cattle were on their feet, most of them cropping grass. If what I thought proved true, we might be lighting a shuck out of this country come nighttime. And believe me, I wanted to be shut of it.
When I rode up to the fire I saw Gin was up and drinking coffee. How she’d managed to get her hair to looking like that, I don’t know. She reached across the fire’s edge to fill Miguel’s cup … but it wasn’t Miguel.
It was pa.
He was setting hunched up to the fire with a blanket over his shoulders and a cup of coffee held in both his hands. He looked thinner than I had ever seen him, his face honed down hard.
He looked up when I walked that dun into the fire’s circle of light, andfora minute or two we just stared at each other like a couple of fools.
“Pa?” I said. It was all I could get out.
He got up, the blanket falling to the ground.
He was a big man, even now with almost no flesh on him. He’d been that prisoner who escaped, and Lord knows how long he’d been mistreated in that prison.
“Son?” He had a hard time with the ^w.
“Orlando?”
“It’s been a long time, pa.”
No ^ws came to me, and it seemed he was no better off. He had left me a child, and found me a man. Swinging down, I trailed my reins and stepped out to face him.
He was taller than me, but raw-boned as he was now, he was no heavier than my one-eighty.
He thrust out his hand and I took it. “You’re strong,” he said. “You were always strong.”
“You’ve had some grub?”
“Coffee … just coffee, and some talk with Gin.”
Gin, was it? He wasted no time getting down to cases. “You’d better eat,” I said. “Come daybreak, we’re going down to the Point.”
“Ah?” he was pleased. “So you did remember?”
“Took me a while, but it was coming to me.”
“Gin said you’d recognized the shelter—andthe marker, too.”
“You’d better sit down and wrap up,” Gin advised. “You aren’t well.”
She put the blanket around him when he sat down andwitha tiny prick of jealousy I couldn’t help but think that if pa were shaved and fixed up they’d make a handsome pair.
I got out the frying pan and mixed up some sourdough, listening to them talk the while. He had the pleasant voice I’d remembered, and the easy way of moving. Glancing over at them, it came over me that pa was here … he was alive.
I’d been too stunned to take it in rightly before, and it was going to take some getting used to.
His eyes were on me as I shook up that bread, and I suppose he was wondering what sort of a man I’d become. But there was something else in his mind, too.
“You speak as if you’d had no schooling,” he said. “Not that it’s better or worse than most men speak out here.”
“We’ll have to talk to Caffrey,” I said.
“He used your money for his own self. I’ve been caring for myself at your old cabin since I was twelve.” Looking up at him, I grinned.
“With some help now and again from the Cherokees.”
“I worried about Caffrey,” pa said, “but I was in a hurry to get off. And that reminds me.
We’d best get out of here. If they find me with you, you’ll all be shot.”
“Not without that gold,” I said. “We came this far for it.”
“There’s some all ready to go,” pa said.
“I’ve taken it out myself. The rest—most of it—w take time.”
Gin looked over at me. “Orlando, I think he’s right. He’s a sick man. The way his breathing sounds, he may be getting pneumonia.”
The ^w had a dread sound, and it shook me.
Miguel was sleeping, but it came on me then that we’d best move the cattle a little way, like to new bedding grounds, but hold them ready for a fast move when darkness came.
“Is that gold where it can be laid hands on?”
I asked.
“It is.”
“We’ll move the cattle on to the end of the inlet and bed down there, like for night. Short of midnight we’ll make our run.”
My mind was thinking ahead. Gin probably was making the right guess, for pa looked bad. He had been lying out in the brush without so much as a coat, just shirt and pants. Even his boots were worn through and soaked.
Leisurely, we rounded up the cattle, with pa keeping from sight in the brush, and we walked them on not more than a mile. Then, late afternoon, we built ourselves a new fire and settled down as if for the night.
Rounding up those placid steers I’d been keeping my eyes on, we brought them up to camp.
Then, with pa resting, we waited the coming of night.
Miguel was restless. He never was far from his horse, and he worried himself until he was taut as a drumhead, watching the brush, listening, afraid something would go wrong before we could get away.
“I’m going into Guadalupe,” I said to him.
“We need a couple of horses.”
There was no way he could deny that, although he wished to. We had no mount for pa, and if we made a run for it, we’d be riding from here clean to the border.
Miguel shrugged. “I think it is safe enough,” he admitted reluctantly, “and we have reason to get horses.”
Gin had money. She had more than I did, which wasn’t much, so she turned over a hundred dollars to me and I saddled up the dun. Just before I left, I walked over to where pa was lying, with Gin setting beside him. No question but he looked bad.
“You take it easy,” I said. “I’ll get two, three horses and come back.”
“What about pack horses? For the gold?”
“Packs would make the Mexicans mighty curious, so I figured on steers. Nobody will pay any attention to the herd.”
“They’ll be seen.”
“Maybe … but with horns moving, and the dust, the shifting around of the animals … I think we’ve got a chance.”
It was a mite over four miles to Guadalupe, and not even a dozen buildings when I got there, most of them adobe. There was a cantina, a closed-up store, and the office of the alcalde, with a jail behind it. The rest were scattered houses and one warehouse.
In a corral were several rough-looking horses, but nobody was around. The air was chill, offering rain. At the hitch-rail of the cantina stood more horses, three of them led stock. I tied up the dun and went inside.
It was a low, dark room with a bar and several tables. Three men were at the bar, two of them standing together, their backs to me. A broad-shouldered Mexican with a sombrero hanging down his back by the chin-strap, and crossed cartridge belts on his chest, stood at the end of the bar, a bottle before him. He looked like a Herrara man to me. The other two were lounging with a bottle between them. The Herrara man was obviously interested in them.
Walking up to the bar, I put my elbows on it and ordered a beer.
The operator of the cantina accepted my money and flashed a brief smile at me, but in his eyes I thought there was a warning, an almost imperceptible gesture toward the Herrara man, if such he was.
“Holding cattle outside of town,” I said suddenly. “We’ve played out our horses. Know where I can buy a couple, cheap?”
For maybe a minute nobody made any sign they’d heard me, and then the man next to me said, “I have three horses, and I will sell—but not cheap.”
Lando (1962) Page 9
