by Jory Sherman
“Just a-watchin’ us. And now they’re waiting for Juanito and the others.”
“I only saw three or four.”
“Well, you can bet there were half a dozen more for every Apache we saw,” Anson said.
“But they would have had the two of us to help fight ’em off.”
“And we might have lost our money in the fight,” Anson said.
“We could do the same out here.”
“We could, but I’m counting on the Apaches and the Mexican bandits to stay on the trail. There were a lot of big eyes back at that fort.”
“Maybe some of them saw us leave,” Roy said.
“I’ve been watching our back trail ever since we left Fort Sumner. The only thing I’ve seen is a jackrabbit.”
“Well, I don’t much like riding at night,” Roy said. “No telling what’s up ahead.”
“Like it or not, Roy, if we can’t see them, they can’t see us in the dark.”
“I wouldn’t bet on that, neither,” Roy said.
The night shapes of saguaro and chaparral spooked the mules and the two men tussled with them until moonrise, when the animals could see better.
Sometime after midnight, the two men had their hands full when a wolf howled close by. The mules bolted so quickly, they jerked the ropes out of Roy’s and Anson’s hands. Then the horses squealed in terror and started to bucking.
“I’m going down,” yelled Roy.
Anson saw him slide over the cantle and fall to the ground. He tried to catch Roy’s horse, racing after him in the darkness. His own horse stumbled and pitched him out of the saddle, and he landed in a prickly pear plant that speared him in a dozen places.
He heard the hoofbeats of the galloping horses and the squealing bray of the mules. Then there was only a deep silence as he picked himself up out of the cactus plant and began to search for Roy.
Anson called out to Roy Killian several times, but there was no answer. He stood there picking cactus spines out of his arms and chest, and the only sound he heard was of his own breathing.
“Roy, where are you?” he called.
The wolf howled again, closer than before. Anson touched a hand to his pistol, prepared to draw if he heard the wolf coming after him.
He listened for the sound of the horses coming back, but he knew they were gone and that he and Roy, if Roy was still alive, were all alone in the desert, on foot, at the mercy of whatever peril came their way.
“Royyyyyyyy!” Anson yelled, cupping his hands together on his mouth.
The silence closed around him once again and Anson felt his throat constrict. When he looked up at the sky, the stars swam in a bleak mist and the moon seemed to mock him in the cold stillness of the eternal night.
64
KEN RICHMAN SAW his horse’s ears quicken to cones and twist from side to side. He turned the horse’s head with gentle pressure on the reins and saw the fear in the animal’s eyes, the flared nostrils. He felt the bunched muscles beneath the saddle and knew something was wrong.
“Ho there,” he said, reining up, the hairs on the back of his neck prickling as if he had been stung by a swarm of insects. He stood up in the stirrups to see what was making the horse nervous, but he saw no movement. They were following the Pecos down from Fort Sumner on the east bank, staying close enough so that the stock did not want for water, and perhaps the horse had smelled water. But even as he thought it, he knew he was dead wrong. The horse was not thirsty. The gelding was scared. Scared of something it could not see. Just ahead, beyond a wide bend in the trail.
He started backing the horse slowly, pulling gently on the reins in his left hand, sliding his hand toward his rifle stock sticking out of its scabbard.
“Easy, boy,” he said to the gelding. “Just back it on down.”
The horse was still quirky and Ken kept the spurs off the gelding’s flanks, but close enough that he could ram them into the tender flesh if he had to ride away from there in a hurry.
It was then that Ken realized he hadn’t heard a sound in the past several seconds. Before, quail had been piping, a Mexican dove had been calling from a nearby perch. Again, the hackles rose on the back of his neck.
He turned the gelding and started back to where Juanito and the rest of the vaqueros were following him. What was it? he thought. A mile, two miles? He really hadn’t been paying much attention. It was a glorious day, bright and sunny, not a cloud in the sky and they’d had a hearty breakfast fixed by Lonnie and Joselito—fresh biscuits, bacon and some kind of adobo or mole gravy and quail Ken had shot the evening before. Guzman had cleaned them, packed mud around them and baked them beneath the coffee coals so that they were cooked in time for breakfast.
Ken spurred the gelding lightly and the horse broke into a loose, wandering gallop. “Too much noise,” Ken said to himself and looked over his shoulder. He saw nothing suspicious. But he had the distinct feeling that he was being followed—or watched.
Ken rounded a bend in the trail and saw Juanito and the vaqueros, followed by Lonnie and the cook wagon all riding at a leisurely pace, as if none had a care in the world.
“What passes, Ken?” Juanito asked.
“I—I don’t know. Something spooked my horse, Dom, and I got a funny feeling that somebody’s waiting for us just down the trail.”
“That is good to trust your feelings,” Juanito said. “Could have saved your life.” He spoke to the vaqueros, who pulled their rifles from their scabbards and checked them. Some took pistols from the saddlebags and stuck them in their sashes. Lonnie and Joselito brought rifles out of the wagon and checked the caps on the nipples. “Spread out and stay about ten or twelve meters apart,” Juanito ordered.
Ken jerked his rifle from his scabbard. He wore a gun belt with a new Colt Navy .44 loaded with powder and ball in five of its six cylinders. He tapped the butt of the Colt. “I’m ready,” he said.
“Let’s ride ahead and you show me the place where Dom spooked.”
“You remember that little bend in the trail? There was a draw just before it, kind of a gully?”
“I remember the place,” Juanito said. He remembered a lot more about it. At the bottom of the draw was a dry wash, a place where flash floods had run their course. Where the trail took a bend, the floodwaters had left a lot of deadfall. The cattle had spooked and refused to go past until the vaqueros whipped them, and Juanito had had to rope Jefe by the horns and practically drag him past the pile of brush and dead cactus. It was a perfect place for an ambush.
On both sides of the draw men could wait on high ground and men could hide behind the brush and catch any oncoming riders in a deadly pocket. If men closed in behind them, they would all be trapped in deadly cross fire.
When they came to the place where Dom had heard or smelled something, Juanito stopped.
“Is this the place?” he asked.
“Near ’bout,” replied Ken.
Juanito looked behind him. The vaqueros were spread out and riding cautiously. Jefe and the other steer pulling the cook wagon lumbered on, unsuspecting of any trouble. The horses, however, all had their ears perked taut.
“If we go down in there, we might not come out,” Juanito said. A cloud shadow passed through his mind and for a moment he felt as if time had stopped. He looked up at the sky and there was no cloud across the sun. He closed his eyes for a moment and went to that deep place within where all was calm and where he could listen. Whispers, only whispers, and a faint pinpoint of light in the darkness. When he opened his eyes again, he looked around him. All was serene, but again that quick cloud shadow flitted across his mind and he knew it was a premonition of some kind. But he knew that was part of the grand mystery of life. Man could not see around corners, except in rare cases, and he must trust his own spirit to give guidance.
“We could ride around it, wide as it is,” Ken said.
“Maybe. Let us think it through.” It would be easy, of course, Juanito reasoned, to do what Ken had suggested, but would
that be tampering with the steady rhythms of the universe? Who was he to change the course of journeys that had perhaps been arranged long before he was born into this world? Still, man had choices. He did not have to follow every path blindly. “Perhaps we should check it out,” he said finally.
“You don’t like it,” Ken said.
“I have a funny feeling about it. In my gut. I can almost smell an ambush. Someone is waiting for us to come through that dry wash.”
“How do you know that?” Ken asked.
“Sometimes a man can tell if he is not going to live much longer,” Juanito said cryptically. “There is an emptiness in the mind, as if a sky full of clouds had cleared suddenly. As if a shadow had fallen across his face with no shade nearby.”
“I don’t understand what you mean,” Ken said, but there was an edge to his voice that had not been there before. “Like a hunch?”
“Much stronger than a hunch. I have always known that I would die on foreign land. That I would never see Argentina again. And when we started on this drive, I thought that I would not come back.”
“You give a man the willies, Juanito. You hadn’t ought to talk like that.”
“In my saddlebags, there is a letter. I want you to give it to either Anson or Martin Baron. I wrote it the last day we were at the fort. I thought maybe that I might not …”
Before Juanito could finish the sentence, the stillness broke with the crack of a single rifle shot. The echoes seemed to reverberate for an eternity. One of the vaqueros had ventured close to the gully, probably out of curiosity.
Then out of the draw, men on foot came charging forward, their rifles blazing orange flame, yelling at the top of their voices.
Ken raised his rifle and tracked a target. He heard the vaquero’s rifles spit lead and crack like bullwhips behind him.
He heard a sound and turned to see Juanito’s face drain of color. A stain appeared in his side. He looked at Ken and smiled.
Ken found his target again and squeezed off a shot, but his mind was on Juanito Salazar, who was still sitting his horse, but twisted in the saddle as if in the grip of a terrible pain. A split second later, Juanito fired his rifle, and Ken saw a bandit go down, writhing in agony, his arm nearly torn off at the shoulder.
And then Ken was drawing his pistol and firing at close range, firing at men he knew, men he had seen before, and wondering why they were there and why they were shooting at him.
65
ANSON HEARD ROY groan in the darkness.
“Roy?”
“Here.”
Anson stumbled through the darkness, trying to find Killian. He floundered through sage and chaparral and stepped in prickly pear, trying to follow the sound he had heard. He fought against the tug of cactus spines and the brush that grabbed his boots with invisible fingers.
“That you, Roy?”
“Down here,” came the reply.
Anson saw a dark shape a few yards away, like a shadow on the ground. He stepped toward it, saw that it was Roy.
“You all right?”
“I—I don’t know. Head feels like it’s full of lead and everything’s spinning around. Jesus, what happened?”
“Your horse ran out from under you. Mine, too. Mules and horses are gone.”
“Give me a hand up, will you?”
Anson extended his arm. He felt Roy’s hands grasp his wrist. He pulled the man to his feet. Roy swayed and Anson put his arm around him to steady him.
“Dizzy,” Roy said.
“I reckon.”
“Good thing I fell on my head. Hit anywheres else and I might have gotten kilt.”
“At least you didn’t lose your sense of humor.”
“No, but I feel bad about losing my horse and all that money.”
Anson laughed harshly. Roy started to buckle and he lifted him up until he stood straight.
“Something funny?” Roy asked.
“I’ve got some of the money.”
“All that gold and silver? Where?”
“In my boots, under my shirt, stuffed in my trousers. I must weigh two hundred pounds.”
Roy laughed and then winced with the pain in his head. He put a hand gingerly to his neck and rubbed slowly upward.
“I got me a good-sized knot up on top,” he said.
“We’ve got to find those mules at least,” Anson said. “When you feel up to it.”
“In the dark?”
“First light, at least. They got all our water. Unless they dropped a water bag on their way out of the country.”
“Where do you figure they went?”
“I haven’t the least pip of an idea,” Anson replied. “I just hope they left some tracks for us to follow.”
“Listen,” Roy said.
“Damn,” said Anson.
As they stood there in the dark and the stillness, both men heard the sound of the rising wind. In moments they became engulfed in a sandstorm that stung their faces and whipped their clothes. They pulled bandannas over their mouths and struggled to suck breath through the sand. They leaned into the wind and held on to each other like men sinking through some great black sea to the bottom of the ocean.
The wind lasted for the better part of an hour, but to both young men, it seemed like an eternity as they huddled together, trying to protect their eyes from the blowing sand.
When the wind finally died with the surging of the yellow dawn, Roy and Anson stood in the center of a deserted world, a world swept clean by the sandstorm.
“Not a track,” Anson said.
“Do you know which way the mules and horses went?” Roy asked.
Anson shook his head. “No, but I know where we have to go.”
“Where?”
“Unless we find the Pecos, we’re dead men.”
“Well, we know where to find it,” Roy said.
The two men started walking toward the southwest, the blazing sun at their backs, their stomachs roiling with hunger, their thirst almost unbearable after the blowing winds had left their throats parched, their mouths desiccated as dried corn husks.
66
KEN STEADIED HIS rifle, curled his finger around the trigger. He had reloaded after the vaqueros had shot two of the bandits and the others had thrown up their hands. A man knelt before him, his hands folded over his head. The other bandits were also on their knees, surrounded by vaqueros with reloaded rifles and pistols. Juanito lay on a stack of saddle blankets, bleeding from a hole in his side.
“How do you call yourself?” he asked the Mexican.
“I call myself Julio Herrera.”
“You work for Aguilar.”
“Yes.”
“Tell me why you are here.”
“Matteo Miguelito Aguilar told us to come here. He said that you would have much gold and he told us to take it and bring it back to him.”
“Where is Matteo?”
“He is at the ranch, I think.”
“I ought to shoot you dead right now,” Ken said.
“Please. I have a family. We did not want to do this. Matteo said he would kill us if we did not rob you.”
Ken turned away from the man in disgust. He gave orders to the vaqueros to tie all of the bandits up. “They can walk behind the chuck wagon,” he said. “Rope them around their necks. We’ll see what Anson wants to do with them when we get back to the Box B.”
“Let them go,” Juanito said, his voice weak and raspy. “It is not their fault.”
“But they killed one of us and would have killed us all if they could have.”
“They will not go back to the Aguilar ranch,” Juanito said. “Let them go.”
Ken hesitated. He respected Juanito, but it was clear to him that the man was dying and did not know what he was saying.
“I will let them go if you pull through, Juanito. Otherwise, I’m takin’ ’em back.”
“I will not survive the journey back to the Box B,” Juanito said.
Ken spoke to Lonnie. “You and Jose
lito get some men to help you lay Juanito in the wagon. We are leaving this place.”
Juanito lifted a hand, beckoned to Ken. Ken walked over to the dying man, knelt down.
“There is a letter, the one I told you about, in my saddlebags. When I die, you give it to Anson.”
“You’re not going to die, Juanito. It’s not your time to die.”
“Time? What is time to God? What is time to man? To man it is both abstract and concrete. Our time is artificial, made by man to record his days, the seasons, the cycles of life. Eternal time, God’s time, is no time at all.”
“If you say so,” Ken said, beginning to feel very uneasy.
“I do not say so, Ken. The ancients say so—and they knew. They knew all the secrets of life. And of death.”
“Old men. Dead men,” Ken said.
“No. Living men. Living in words, in knowledge they passed on to us.”
“I guess maybe,” Ken said awkwardly. He knew he was listening to the mindless babble of a dying man, and it made him feel sad. “You’ve lost some blood, but we’ll make your ride easy and you’ll get it back.”
Even as he said the words, Ken knew that Juanito would not survive the ride back to Texas. They had bandaged his wound, but he was torn up inside and still bleeding. His face was very pale and his eyes were glazed with pain.
“It has been a good life,” Juanito said. “When we get back, will you ask Anson to bury me where my little house once stood?”
“I will do that,” Ken said tightly. “If it comes to that.”
“Thank you, my friend.”
Lonnie, Joselito and two of the vaqueros lifted Juanito gently and carried him to the cook wagon. Lonnie had already prepared a bed for him. They laid him inside. Joselito crawled in and stayed with him. Juanito’s eyes were closed, but he was still breathing. Joselito did not like the sound of the breathing. It was very shallow and threaded with death.
67
ANSON PLODDED few yards ahead of Roy, forcing each step with a will that overcame the lethargy of muscles starved for moisture.
The trackless desert stretched out endlessly, maddeningly, a sameness to it all, a monotony to the slow hours that passed under a cruel, heartless sun. His parched lips were cracked and sore, but no longer bled. His mind filled with mouth-watering images. Watermelon and cantaloupes, plump milky figs and juicy persimmons, overripe tomatoes that squirted when he bit into them, icy spring water bursting from cool blue clay and pears from the storm cellar full of a sweet and wet nectar that trickled down his throat smooth as golden honey.
