by Dale Cramer
“Anyway,” Caleb said, tossing an ear of corn into the wagon, “the bandit problem doesn’t seem so bad. I have only seen two groups of them since our trip to Saltillo last month.”
Domingo laughed out loud. “Then you need to train your eyes, señor. In the last week I have seen four different bands passing by or watching us from the ridgetops, and two others late at night in San Rafael.”
Caleb stopped to roll up his sleeves, as the afternoon had grown warm. “You talk as if the whole country is full of bandits. How many are there?”
“How many men are in an army?”
“So you’re telling me, now that the war is over, everyone who fought in the revolution has become a bandit?”
“Not all of them, but many. You have not seen the last of the bandidos, Señor Bender.”
Domingo’s prophecy proved true. As the days cooled and the hardwood trees on the ridges began to turn, more bandits drifted down out of the hills, though they were not always seen. Chickens went missing, the kitchen garden was regularly plundered, and sometimes the coop yielded no eggs when there should have been a dozen.
About once a week some ragtag clutch of armed men would wander up the driveway in the evening to water their horses. Almost always they came from the hills, out of rough, mountainous terrain, and the Bender place was the first farm they saw when they came down into Paradise Valley. From the ridgetops it must have looked very inviting with its neat quilt of irrigated fields. The Benders were quickly turning a barren prairie into an oasis that nomads could not resist.
The bandits always wanted food, and before they left they would usually ask for a sack of oats for the horses. It was an unexpected strain on the meager stores put by in one short growing season. Already Caleb feared there would not be enough to last the winter, but if his family tightened their belts a bit they could get by somehow, and next year would be better. Next year the others would be here to share the burden.
Up to now the bandits had never openly threatened anyone at the Bender farm, and so long as they harmed no one Caleb saw no reason to take action against them. He said the Bible was clear on this – when someone asks you for something, give it to him.
But then, in October, something happened on the road from the hacienda that changed his mind.
Rachel and her sisters milked four cows twice a day, which supplied the families with more than enough milk. Every day one of the women would run the fresh milk through a hand-cranked cream separator and then store the cream in the well house to let it cool. After a couple of days they would take the cream out and churn it into butter. Once a week one of the women – usually Emma or Mary – would take the surrey into the village at the foot of the hacienda and trade butter for a bag of salt or sugar or whatever they needed from the mercado. While there, they would run errands and stop by the hacienda post office to drop off the week’s letters and pick up mail. It was a pleasant little half-day excursion, and sometimes Rachel or Miriam got to go along as a treat. Dat was reluctant to let his daughters go to town unescorted at first, but the hacienda village was within sight of home, only a few miles away, and he needed his boys on the farm.
On a glorious fall day in October Rachel took an afternoon off to go to town with Emma. A little wind rustled the dry brown prairie grass and the air felt cool. Swallows dipped and dove after bugs, and a pair of large gray hawks hung almost motionless against a crystalline sky, hunting. Emma carried Mose in a cloth sling, but Rachel got to hold the baby while Emma was driving the buggy.
Everyone in the village was in a festive mood that day. Señor Hidalgo had returned to the hacienda less than a week ago to oversee the harvest and immediately declared the first three days a fiesta, during which he visited among his peons and gave them gifts. Rachel spent a wonderful day with her sister, and to cap it off there were two letters from Jake waiting for her at the post office. Rachel read them in the buggy while Emma drove out of the village, but the first letter made Rachel smile and blush so much that Emma teased her to read it aloud.
“Nooo, I couldn’t do that, even for you,” Rachel said, folding the letter back into its envelope.
The second letter brought a frown to her face.
“What is it?” Emma asked. “Come on, I can see it in your eyes. What’s wrong?”
Rachel lowered the letter to her lap and stared off into space.
“It’s his dat,” she said. “Jake says there are rumors of bandit trouble down here and his dat is wavering. They are afraid.”
“So write him back and tell him yourself, there is nothing to fear. Jah, there are a few bandits roaming around, but mostly they are just hungry. They have done us no real harm, and they have never taken anything of great value. Tell him.”
Rachel read both Jake’s letters over again as Emma drove back toward Paradise Valley, the surrey rattling and rocking gently over the rutted dirt road. As they topped a shallow swell near the fork where Saltillo Road veered off to the north, Emma tapped Rachel’s knee with a fist.
“Look,” she whispered.
Up ahead at the fork, four men stood huddled next to their horses. One of them held a left front hoof between his knees, the horse standing patiently on three legs. The other three men leaned in, examining the hoof with him. Even from a distance there was no mistaking the pinto ponies, the layered clothes plastered with road dust, the bandoliers and pistols.
Bandits. Rachel and Emma couldn’t have run into them in a worse place. There wasn’t even so much as a thatched hut within a mile of the Saltillo fork. A cry for help out here in the open would not be heard by anyone.
Emma slowed the buggy to a walk, but it was too late to turn around. They had come too far even to dash back to the hacienda village. The four men looked up at the same time, sombreros turning toward the surrey like sunflowers to the sun.
She tried to hold the buggy to the left side of the road and keep moving, but one of the bandits stepped out and raised a hand. When the horse came close he reached up and deftly caught hold of the bridle, halting the nervous horse in its tracks. The bandit who’d been looking at his horse’s hoof stayed where he was and held the reins of all four horses while the other three men surrounded Emma’s buggy.
The one on Emma’s side lifted his sombrero and slid it off the back of his head, letting it hang from its neck cord behind him while he smiled up at her. He was a wiry little man with a face like a weasel, badly in need of a shave and a bath.
“Buenos días, señorita – ” Then he noticed the tiny baby Rachel cradled in her arms, and the empty sling around Emma’s neck. “Pardon me. Señora,” he said. “Please, I do not wish to trouble you, but my amigo’s horse is injured – not badly, mind you, only a little.” He held his thumb and forefinger an inch apart, smiling apologetically. As he was saying this, one of his friends kept a tight grip on the buggy horse’s bridle while the other ran a hand down its slick flank.
“Porfirio’s horse has only a little stone bruise in the soft part of his hoof,” the weasel said. “But this is a big problem for us, beautiful señora. It would not matter so much, but we must get to Arteaga before morning. We have work to do there.”
The other man, the one who had been appraising their horse, now slipped back to the buggy and fixed Rachel with an openly lascivious gap-toothed grin. She tried very hard to keep her eyes straight ahead and not look at him at all.
The weasel-faced leader spoke with the exaggerated sincerity of a huckster. “Now, Porfirio’s horse is a fine specimen. He was once a rodeo champion, no?” He held out a hand to the other three men for affirmation of this outrageous lie.
They all nodded vigorously and said, “Sí, señora, a champion!”
“So I wondered, if it would not trouble you greatly, if perhaps Porfirio might trade horses with you – only for a few days,” he said, holding up both hands and rushing his words when he saw the rebellion in Emma’s eyes. “Only for a few days, señora, or perhaps a week, until we can come back to retrieve Porfirio’s champ
ion stallion. Then we will return your old mare as good as new, I give you my word.”
Appraising him coldly, Emma opened her mouth to say something to him, but Rachel squealed.
The bandit standing next to Rachel had reached into the buggy and laid a hand on Rachel’s knee. Her face flushed crimson. She shrank away from his touch, clutching Mose close to her chest, but there was nowhere to go.
“Como una fresa!” the man said, grinning, pointing at her face. Like a strawberry! “I would like to take this ripe strawberry home with me. I would make the lovely señorita the queen of my hacienda!”
Emma tried to stare him down, but he had eyes only for Rachel. She appealed to the weasel.
“Señor,” she said sharply, “surely your companion knows he should treat the friends of the haciendado with respect here in the shadow of the hacienda, especially when Señor Hidalgo is on his estate.” It was a calculated bluff. Señor Hidalgo kept a small army of bodyguards with him on the estate, and the bandits knew this.
The weasel, glaring at his man through the open front of the surrey, said to him in a dangerously quiet tone, “Go and help Porfirio with the horses.”
The gap-toothed bandit tensed. His grin vaporized, and his eyes narrowed in unmistakable challenge. But when he saw the weasel’s hand slip down to the butt of his pistol he broke the stare and stalked away.
“You must forgive my friend, señora – he has no manners,” the weasel said, but his hand remained where it was, a forefinger tapping ominously against the side of his leather holster.
“Take the horse,” Emma said slowly through gritted teeth. Rachel muttered something, but Emma shushed her and continued. “Put Porfirio’s horse in the traces for us. Then we will go, no?”
The bandit smiled broadly, pointing a bony finger at Emma. “I knew you would understand! You are very kind, señora. And do not worry. You will have your horse back in a week, wait and see!”
The buggy horse was as smooth a trotter as Rachel had ever seen, a prize standard-bred mare, well-trained and in her prime. The broken-down pinto that replaced her stood a good two hands shorter and his head drooped. Thin and lethargic from hard use, his ribs poked through a dull, patchy coat. Emma let him limp along at his own pace the last two miles to the house.
“Dat will be furious,” Rachel said as the lame nag grudgingly negotiated the turn into the driveway.
“Not with us, he won’t. We did the only thing we could.”
“Do you think they will bring our horse back?” Rachel asked.
Emma sighed, shook her head. “No. We have seen the last of her. I hope they treat her well.”
Dat, as Rachel predicted, was furious. He met his daughters in the driveway a hundred yards shy of the house, demanding to know exactly what his buggy was doing strapped to a half-starved painted pony and precisely what had become of his best buggy horse. When they told him, he snatched his hat off and paced back and forth a few times, then stalked away and waded far out into the thigh-deep oats, where he stood with his hands on his hips staring off in the direction of the hacienda, talking vigorously to himself.
Emma snapped the reins and marched the half-dead plug on up to the house, leaving her father to his rantings. It was his way. He would get out all of his reckless words in the open field where no human would hear, then apologize to Gott for his anger and return to civilization with his usual placid demeanor.
Chapter 30
The next morning before daylight Caleb dressed himself in his Sunday clothes, saddled his one remaining buggy horse and rode off to the east. It was high time he introduced himself to Señor Hidalgo.
He was met at the gates of the hacienda by two armed guards who asked him his business. When he told them he wished an audience with the haciendado, they made him get down from his horse. While one of the guards poked around his saddle, the other actually frisked Caleb’s person, looking for concealed weapons. Once they decided he was not a threat they directed him through the gates and up around the curving drive to the stables, where his horse was taken from him and a stable hand led him to the back entrance of the hacienda. There he was met by another armed guard who turned him over to a butler, who took him down a maze of polished hallways to a small room with a large window and eight wooden chairs, six of which contained Mexicans who sat quietly with ragged hats on their laps, obviously waiting for an audience.
Caleb sat down and waited his turn.
After a few minutes a door opened at the far end of the room and a barefoot Mexican worker emerged, followed by Diego Fuentes, Señor Hidalgo’s administrative chief. When Fuentes saw Caleb his face lit up and he came straight over to shake hands.
“Señor Bender! Buenos días! It is good to see you again. I have heard very good things about your farm. Everyone says you are doing very well indeed!”
“Muchas gracias,” Caleb said. “We do what we can as hard as we can and trust Gott to do what we cannot.”
Fuentes waved an arm toward the door. “Please, Señor Bender, we must not keep you waiting. Come into the library and let me introduce you to the haciendado.”
The half-dozen Mexicans who had been there before him said nothing as Caleb walked between them into the library and Fuentes closed the door behind him.
Caleb had never seen anything remotely like the grand library at Hacienda El Prado. Three walls of the cavernous room were lined with ornately trimmed mahogany bookshelves twenty feet high with a narrow balcony halfway up, its delicate handrail supported by hundreds of curved spindles of exquisite design. The outer wall held a solid bank of windows facing east over a splendid garden that must have covered five acres, with lawns and shrubs and ponds and shade trees and vine-laced trellises over neatly paved walkways. The frescoed ceiling of the library looked like something out of a museum, each of its gilded sections framing a different painting, indecipherable scenes that Caleb figured must have been drawn from Mexican folklore. Persian carpets covered almost the entire polished stone floor.
A man who looked to be in his forties stepped out from behind a massive cherry desk at the far end of the room as Fuentes bowed slightly, made a sweeping gesture in Caleb’s direction and said grandly, “Señor Hidalgo, may I present to you Señor Caleb Bender. Señor Bender, Don Louis Alejandro Hidalgo.”
The haciendado greeted him warmly with a firm handshake. Hidalgo was ten years younger than Caleb, and slightly smaller. Señor Hidalgo’s clothes were nothing like those of a farmer; he wore a perfectly fitted three-piece wool suit, tailor-made white shirt, and an ascot in place of a tie. Clean-shaven, with dark hair slicked down and neatly parted on one side, he looked like the pictures of movie stars that Caleb had seen on the covers of glossy magazines in the store racks.
And he was well-spoken. He offered to speak English or German if Señor Bender preferred, but Caleb politely declined, explaining that he lived in Mexico now, and though his Spanish was very coarse, it would only improve through use.
Señor Hidalgo offered him a cigar. When Caleb declined, Hidalgo lit one for himself and puffed away as he made small talk. Hidalgo wanted to know all about the farm and how the irrigation system worked, and then he asked after the others – when they would come and how many. When he finally asked if there had been any problems with the local people, Caleb took a deep breath and drew himself up.
“Well, sir, that’s what I came here to talk to you about.” He informed Hidalgo of the increase in visits his family had been getting from small groups of outlaws of late, the pilfering of eggs and chickens and vegetables. Then he said, “But that’s not the worst of it. Yesterday, they took one of my horses and threatened my daughter.”
Hidalgo pondered this with a frown, a fist containing a huge cigar pressed against his cheek in thought. “What kind of horse?” he asked.
“Standard-bred,” Caleb said. “Best buggy horse I had, a mighty good trotter.”
Hidalgo’s eyes lit up. “I have heard of those! There is no talk of them here, but in New York everyone knows
about the fine, fine, standard-bred trotters of the Amish in Ohio and western Pennsylvania. I would love to have seen this horse.”
“I have another almost as good,” Caleb said. “It is in your stable as we speak.”
“Well then, let’s go! I must look at it. Come, Diego!”
Diego Fuentes and Caleb Bender followed, hat in hand, behind the haciendado as he hurried down the labyrinthine hallways of his palace and out the back door to the stables. They found Caleb’s horse housed in a paddock right next to the splendid Friesian he’d seen Fuentes riding that first day. Hidalgo opened the barred door and went right up to the horse, patting and rubbing it, talking to it in soothing tones.
“You can ride him if you want,” Caleb said. “He’s kid broke.”
Within minutes the impeccably attired master of the estate was gliding around the show ring beside the stables, putting Caleb’s horse through his paces and grinning from ear to ear with that cigar clenched in his pearly white teeth. When he was satisfied he dismounted and turned the horse over to a stableboy, saying, “Give this excellent animal the royal treatment.”
He found the ride invigorating, and rather than going back into the library Hidalgo decided to show Caleb around his gardens. He was profoundly impressed with the horse, and in fact tried to buy it, but Caleb refused to sell.
“It’s the only buggy horse I have left. I don’t see how we could get by without it,” he explained. But the horse had left a deep impression, and Hidalgo treated Caleb as an honored guest.
“So, what can we do about these bandits?” Caleb finally asked as they strolled past a pond full of some kind of bright orange fish.
Hidalgo’s face fell. “Alas, my friend, there is little I can do anymore. There was a time . . .” Then he shook his head as if to clear it and said, “Ah, but those days are gone, my friend. Mexico is in a time of change, a time of chaos. Old things are passed away, but new things have not yet come. I’m afraid the day of the hacienda, as glorious as it once was, is past. For centuries the haciendas ruled the land, and the pure-blooded Spaniards who owned them brought peace and morality and culture to this impoverished country.”
