“All right.”
“But there is risk, Sah. A few years ago an American named Daley headed that way, wanting to buy in, and he was murdered. The murderers never were brought to justice and Armijo did nothing, even under the most intense pressure from the Americans in the area, including the Bents. But what was a mere murder of a heretic Yank? So nothing happened. So the lesson was learned at the mines: outsiders are fair game. We’ll need a plan, Sah. Arms, defenses, everything.”
“You know how to get there?”
“Certainly. A British diplomat can find out anything.”
“We go in that rig? Your black carriage?”
“It will convey us all. You shall drive; I and the three women will occupy the facing seats, and oh, what a fine sight we’ll be, eh?”
“That’s what worries me.”
“Never fear, Skye. This little simian accomplishes wonders.”
“It’s Mister … .”
“Touchy, aren’t you. Well, first we have a little problem to work out. I’m in hock. Have to pay the hostler here for graining and haying the nags. Haven’t a cent of cash, you know. Pirates make a poor living, Skye, I assure you. It’s feast or famine, but mostly famine. We’re going to have to pay, or the hombre will set off alarms and we’ll have a squad of dragoons riding us down.”
“Daylight is our enemy, Childress.”
“Can’t be helped. But never underestimate my monkey.”
forty-four
Childress padded through the murk of predawn amid a hush that was not even broken by the morning song of a bird. He had Shine bounding along beside him in great frolics, plotting perfidy, and he had Skye with him as well.
“All right,” Childress said. “You get out on the plaza, stay in shadow if there is any. Watch the barracks door. If any trouble starts, just drift back here and let me know, and I’ll whistle Shine away from his nefarious duties.”
“I don’t like this,” Skye said.
“Mister Skye, old friend, it’s justice. We’ll simply extract from the governor a small repayment for the four years of free labor he got out of that poor girl.”
Skye stared. Childress knew what he was thinking.
“Sah, I know you don’t approve. But we are engaged in an act of liberation, not theft. Call it restitution. He paid her nothing; now we shall extract a small price, and without his consent. Nowhere near the value of her labor, Sah, but a small recompense even so. By my reckoning we ought to extract a hundred pounds from the devil to balance things up.”
Skye nodded, and reluctantly headed for the silent plaza, while Childress and his cheerful primate, who was growing agitated, circled around to the rear of the palace where there were barred windows, their shutters opened to the night breeze. The bars might foil a human but not the skinny monkey.
No one stood about. The predawn murk remained so thick on this southwest side of the mountains that Childress was all but invisible.
“Go,” he said, and the monkey bounded up to the window in tumultuous leaps, peered about, and vanished within.
Childress waited nervously. Nothing stirred in the alley, but he heard the distant groan of a carreta. Some peasant on some early mission was passing by somewhere near.
Nothing changed. Childress paced. Then the monkey appeared on the sill, clutching something shiny. It leaped downward and handed Childress a silver candlestick holder.
“No, no, this will never do, you idiot. The hostler won’t accept it and he’d report us. Take it back, you little bugger.”
The monkey chittered and clacked his teeth. He could bite hard, and those clacking teeth were a warning that he was not to be trifled with.
“Shine, my apologies. Just try again. Something less, ah, incriminating.”
The monkey bounded gracefully upward to the sill, bearing his candlestick holder, and vanished into the silent interior.
Childress thought he heard voices within, but strain as he might to hear, he couldn’t be sure. He wondered how Skye was faring out on the plaza.
Then Shine materialized on the sill, clutching something dark, and jumped down to the clay. This object was mysterious, and Childress couldn’t fathom what it was until the monkey handed it over. It proved to be a handsome humidor of enameled sheet metal with an elaborate design on it. Childress pulled the tight-fitting top, and discovered twenty or thirty fine cigars within, their pungence nectar to his nostrils.
“Ah! You little beggar, you’ve done it! Bravo, you little pirate.”
The monkey bared its teeth and then sucked its thumb. Childress hastened down the alley, rounded the corner, waved at Skye, and then proceeded away from the plaza. Skye caught up with him.
“A humidor full of fine cigars,” Childress said. “Now, weigh this in your scales: any Mexican male, upon given a fat black cigar, will stuff his mouth with it, light up, strut and swagger, and make a great noise so that all the world can witness his machismo. I imagine it’ll pay our feed bill, and the hostler won’t suppose anything’s amiss, either.”
“You know Mexicans better than I do,” Skye said, doubt in his voice.
They were soon out of Santa Fe and back in the livestock yards, still before sunrise. They returned to the big wagon and settled in without waking anyone except Victoria, though the Conestoga creaked.
Not until the wagon yard was stirring did Childress judge the time to be ripe for the exit. He lumbered over to the ancient hostler, who was shoveling hay with a big wood-pronged fork.
“Ah, señor, I have yet to manage a financial transaction so far from England. I have pounds but I am temporarily without pesos. However, I do have means,” he said in Spanish to the wary and wizened man. “Look, señor, at these fine Havanas, eh?”
Childress stuffed one into the man’s rough hands. “It’s yours, all yours, un cigarro. Sniff it, taste it, roll it under your nostrils, covet it, you lucky hombre.”
“Ah! Bueno!”
“I’ll give you four, cuatro, more of these fat wonders for haying and graining my trotters, eh?”
The hostler was not about to surrender. He held up ten fingers.
“Diez! But these are worth two pesos each!”
The man wagged ten fingers.
“Ah, very well, ten it is,” Childress said.
Ten fat cigars, payment in full, and now they could leave. He doled out his pungent payment, the hostler nodded, and pointed at the harness. Childress set to work.
A while later they were all seated in the ebony calash, and Skye was driving down an obscure dirt road that would take them to the Ortiz Mountains, which formed a purple sunlit mass on the horizon. The trotters were making music with their hooves.
Childress sat facing the women, enjoying the sweet chill air of early morning and the tawny and purple vistas of this arid land. They were off on the last lap, the final mission, and with luck, they would succeed. He opened the humidor and pulled out a cigar, debated whether to offer one to Skye, decided not to, and chewed on it unlit. When they came to a place where he could employ flint and steel, he would try to fire it up. Meanwhile he waggled it with baronial vigor.
Childress was in a very fine mood.
“Give me one of those,” Victoria said.
“You? But madam …”
She glared. He surrendered a cigar and she stuffed it into her small mouth. The sight was disconcerting, but he began to enjoy it. What better than a fat cigar for the queen of Zanzibar?
The day passed gently; the carriage making good time over a bare excuse for a road. Perhaps by mid- or late afternoon they would raise Dolores, the hamlet where they intended to sojourn. They pierced deep into arid blue mountains, passing arroyos that carried no water.
“We should make plans, I suppose,” Childress said, turning to Skye.
“It’s your show,” Skye said.
Childress watched him, concerned. Ever since Skye’s narrow escape from the firing squad, he had not seemed to be himself.
“Well, we have to find out about t
he mining. How the Indians are kept in line; how they’re punished or enslaved. Their quarters, if they have any. Clothing. Have we spare duds? The boy will be naked or nearly so. We can’t hustle him out of there naked.”
“Will he know his mother?” Skye asked.
Victoria, who was listening, translated for Standing Alone.
“She says he probably would, but not in this stuff she’s wearing.”
“I don’t want her to change, not just yet. I don’t want anyone who might seem Indian looking around at Indian slaves,” Childress said.
“I think we’d better wait and see,” Skye said. “This is a gold mine. There probably will be guards. We don’t even know whether we can buy the boy; simply pay for him and walk away without trouble. What’s the price, and how do we pay?”
Skye’s caution annoyed Childress. “Pah! We’ll find him, just as we found Little Moon, and slide him out.”
Skye said nothing and Childress took it for disapproval. Well, what did it matter?
They encountered more and more traffic, mostly people afoot, walking who knows where? But they also met with carretas, some carrying hay, others squash or produce, heading toward the mines. It would take a deal of food to keep hundreds of miners alive. Childress noted the garden patches, the adobe jacals, the herds of sheep, ribby cattle, and goats, often attended by a herding boy. But mostly this was a harsh land of barren rock, scanty grass, cactus, juniper thickets, and forbidding blue canyons that seemed to keep secrets.
The herders and peons gawked at them as they trotted by; no doubt they had never seen a rig so handsome, or men and women so fashionably dressed. The ladies looked elegant; Childress was the soul of gentility. A few of the Mexicans spotted Shine, perched beside Childress. They obviously had never seen a monkey. Shine licked his hairy lips and picked his nose, and sometimes bounced up and down on the quilted seat. That was good. Childress intended to make an impression, especially of wealth. Little could they guess, these humble, weathered, sun-stained people, that they had more wealth than everyone in that calash put together.
“Skye, we need a plan,” he reiterated, annoyed at Skye’s passivity.
“All I need to know is who you are and what we’re doing here.”
“I’m the viceroy of Borneo and Tahiti, that’s who I am,” Childress snapped. “And I’m here to look at obscene investments, and these are royal ladies of Timbuktu and you’re my hired man.” He laughed.
Skye stared at him.
They rolled into an adobe hamlet called Dolores, a scrabble of little square earthen buildings and a cantina in a gulch hugging a yellow slope. As humble as it was, it served the mines. They were in the Ortiz Mountains, and the last chapter would soon begin.
forty-five
Skye was discovering a new way to be a prisoner. He was helpless to resist Childress’s follies simply because Childress could speak fluent Spanish while Skye could barely speak a dozen words. Wherever they went Skye was utterly dependent on Childress to deal with the Mexicans. He didn’t even know what Childress was saying to them.
So Skye sat in the front seat of the calash, minding the horses, wondering what Childress would say to the people there in Dolores or to the mine owners, and it was not hard to imagine a dozen ways of getting into trouble.
One American had already been murdered here for poking around too much. Gold did that. Gold aroused passions and turned men into animals. And here was Childress, fluent in their tongue, floating one preposterous story after another, poking around wealth that Mexico guarded zealously. And there was Skye and the women, inevitable victims of any blunders Childress might make.
Skye halted the coach at the mercado, which seemed to be the only store in this rude settlement.
“I’ll inquire,” Childress said, lowering his bulky body to earth.
“I’ll go with you,” Skye said sourly. Maybe someone spoke English, and if so, he wanted to know it.
“Yes, see what’s in the place whilst I jabber with these people,” Childress said, flapping toward the store like a penguin.
Shine landed beside his master and swiftly aroused the interest of half a dozen barefoot men, who eyed the monkey with amazement.
“Don’t let that monkey steal one damned thing,” Skye snapped.
“Tut, tut, Skye. You owe him your life and your liberty.”
Childress plunged through a doorless doorway along with the little primate, and Skye followed. The dark interior revealed the simplest sort of store, with rough burlap sacks of beans and rice and sugar on the earthen floor, some crockery and tinware, sewing items, and little else. All lit by a late-afternoon sun.
Childress scarcely looked at the foodstuffs. He pulled one of his fat black Havanas from his breast pocket, lit it with a brand plucked from the beehive fireplace within, sucked and exhaled until the tip of the cigar glowed bright orange, and then approached a stocky woman with vast bosoms who seemed to be overseeing this rural emporium. Childress was soon talking and gesticulating and patting the stolid woman on the shoulder, while Shine cased the joint, looking for plunder.
Skye couldn’t grasp a word of it. For all he knew, the Texas pirate was describing them all as buccaneers, bandits, crooks, abusers of women, escaped prisoners, heretics, murderers, and desperados. From time to time the woman glanced at Skye and at the monkey, and sometimes out the door toward the fancy carriage where the women sat expectantly.
But the Mexican woman didn’t seem to grow excited. Plainly, she was giving Childress directions, pointing southward, lifting her thick arms up and down as she talked.
Childress nodded, patted her, and at the last, gave her a fat cigar. She sniffed it, smiled, bit off the end, and stuffed it between her stained teeth.
Skye studied her and the other Mexicans lounging about. Plainly they were rural laborers, mestizos mostly. Nothing about them suggesting mining, and he doubted that any were miners. These were the weathered ones who hoed and scraped those fields they had passed, the ones who fed the miners if the rains came.
Childress bowed, lifted his silk top hat to the woman, settled it again on his sweaty brow, and retreated into slanting sunlight, beckoning Skye. The monkey followed, barehanded.
“There now, I’ve got what we need. There were seven holdings originally; now it’s two after some consolidating. They employ Indian labor exclusively. She says the Indians make good workers and don’t need the whip. All we have to do is keep on going. The first, the Blessed Saint Ignatius of Loyola Mine, is up ahead, and employs maybe a hundred, she thought, but counting that high taxes her mind. The other is smaller, Santa Rosita, and she couldn’t say for sure what it employs. Ah, we’ll find the bugger yet, eh?”
“Maybe. What did you tell her about us?”
“Is something wrong with you?”
“What did you tell her?”
“What does it matter? We’re Finland royalty. I eat caviar. We have the queens of Van Dieman’s Land and Iceland to amuse us, and are looking for gaudy investments.”
“That’s trouble.”
“Ah, pah! Mister Skye, you’re a worrywart. Leave it to Childress. Leave it to Shine, the phenomenal burglar.”
Childress clambered into the calash, rocking it under his vast bulk. Skye settled himself wearily in the van, and urged the trotters forward. A thick coating of dust covered their sleek black hair.
The canyon widened abruptly ahead, forming a plain compassed by slopes. A dry riverbed ran beside the rutted road, and even though the summer had not progressed far, a great aridity marked the land.
A gash disturbed the rolling land just ahead, and as Skye drew close he beheld a giant pit swarming with human bodies. A single adobe shack stood on the brow of a hill. Off to one side stood some rude rectangular adobe buildings, probably quarters for the miners. A gulch had been dammed to provide some water.
But it was the pit that riveted Skye as he drove the trotters alongside the gaping hole in the earth. The solidified gravel rose in benches, which supported rude
ladders of sorts, each hacked out of a single log. These were notched for the feet of those using them, but they lacked a handrail or any other means by which a person could steady himself. Yet the workers were climbing and descending these rickety devices while carrying huge baskets of ore.
“Look at those poor devils, Mister Skye,” Childress said. “Swarms of them, like ants.”
Skye slowed the horses. The sight horrified him. Those thin workers were bent double, no matter whether their baskets were loaded or empty. Years of brute labor and the weight of tons of ore had bowed their legs and twisted their spines, until not a one of them could stand upright.
Most were naked. A few wore loincloths of some sort. None had shoes or sandals. Nothing protected them from the harsh summer sun. They toiled ceaselessly, some at the bottom level hacking open the gravel, others loading baskets with crude wooden shovels, others parading up one ladder and another, delicately balancing the burdens while inching upward, one notch at a time until they reached the next narrow bench, and the foot of the next rickety log ladder. One misstep meant death. And there would be no pensioning of cripples. Above, somewhere out of sight, the ore was being heaped into a pile that jutted into the brassy blue sky. Skye wondered what sort of labor proceeded up there, and how the gold was extracted from this crumbling gravelly matrix.
He reined the horses to a halt, transfixed at the human anthill before him, where men threw long shadows in the low sun. These workers were small, wiry, bent, and bore terrible wounds across backs and calves and thighs. One labored with a stump of one arm. A few had tied a rag around their forehead to hold their jet hair back from their faces, but that was all the cloth Skye saw on most. He saw very little gray hair; these bent-over mortal males were young. Or were they all male? He studied them closely, his eyes uncertain. Maybe some were girls, but they all were so thin that none had breasts.
They did not notice the black carriage above, or at least pretended not to. Skye wondered where the overseers were, the ones who forced labor from this pitiful gaggle of captive mortals. He had been right; none of these had been at the mercado, and not one ever would enter those cool confines.
The Deliverance Page 24
