The Californios

by Louis L'Amour

  At the same time Sean had bought his rifle, an eight-shot Colt revolving rifle, and a good one. He had himself tinkered with it a little, setting the sights a bit finer and improving the mechanism.

  It was good to be back in the saddle again, and the mustang he rode was a sure-footed mountain horse brought up from Mexico. Several times he glanced back, and once, far away on the sandstone ridge, he thought he caught a flash of sunlight on something metallic. It could have been his imagination.

  The sun was sliding rapidly downhill when the old man finally drew up at a spring in the Potrero. “Water your horses and fill your canteens. We’ll make a dry camp.”

  “We’re going further?” Sean was worried about his mother and Mariana.

  “Only a mile or two. Tomas might know of this spring, although I doubt it.”

  They let the horses drink deep, then rode away in the gathering darkness. Their camp was a hidden place in a niche of the hills.

  There was soft sand there; Sean kicked away a couple of stones and spread blankets for his mother and Mariana. “Better get some sleep. We’ll be moving on at daylight.”

  He watched as Montero led the horses to a patch of grass and picketed them there, then sat down on a rock and looked at the stars. Tonight the old man was not talkative, and after a few minutes Sean saw Montero returning.

  “I will watch,” Montero said. “Sleep while you can.”

  “Call me at midnight,” he told Montero, and going to a point near the women, who were already asleep, he rolled in his blanket with his weapons beside him and stretched out.

  He tried to sleep, but for awhile sleep would not come. The stars seemed very near, very bright. The night was soft as a maiden’s touch, and there was only a suggestion of a breeze.

  He heard a pebble fall among stones, the brief stirring of some small animal and when next he awakened, Montero was beside him.

  He sat up quickly. “What is it?”

  “I am sleepy, amigo. It is time for you to watch.”

  Sean shook out his boots carefully. He had no desire to put a foot into a boot with a tarantula or scorpion in it. Then he stood up, shook out his blankets, rolled them behind his saddle, and taking up his rifle, listened to Montero.

  “It is quiet. I do not believe they are close, but be careful.”

  “What about Indians?”

  Jesus shrugged. “No California Indian would come near us when the Old One is along…and they know he is here. I can’t answer for raiders from across the Colorado, the Mohaves or Paiutes from the north.”

  An hour passed, and then another. Sean circled the camp several times, checked the horses, and then returned to the campsite. He had seated himself on a rock when his mother joined him.

  “I am awake, Sean, if you wish to sleep.”

  “It is all right. I slept well.”

  “We must save the ranch, Sean. Somehow it must be saved.”

  “We will.”

  “I know.” She sat down near him. “Mariana is a lovely girl.”

  “Yes.”

  “You are in love with her?”

  He chuckled. “There’s been no time for romance. Too much to worry about. She is lovely, though, and if the ranch were free and clear—”

  “There is time. I think she will be with us for a long while, Sean.”

  He said nothing, listening into the night. There seemed a sudden, heavier stillness. He waited, expecting he knew not what.

  He glanced at his mother. She was sitting a little straighter, looking down the valley toward the spring.

  “Somebody is coming,” she said.

  Chapter 7

  * * *

  SUDDENLY JUAN WAS near them. “Come, we will go now.”

  Montero had brought their horses, and once mounted Juan turned sharply away from the way they had come and led them into what appeared to be a solid wall of chaparral, higher than their heads.

  There was, in fact, a trail. The brush closed in on either side, the leaves brushing their knees and stirrups, sometimes their shoulders. Juan wasted no time. The old man led the way into the tangle like a young vaquero after an old mossyhorn steer.

  In single file, they followed. Weaving and winding through the dark passage, able to see no further than their mounts’ ears, maintaining absolute silence aside from the small sounds of their passing.

  At a small clearing in the brush the Old One pulled up long enough for Montero to drop back to the rear, then they moved on. Suddenly, Sean realized the air was growing lighter…the moon was rising.

  Emerging from the brush they dipped into a deeply shadowed canyon. Juan held his pace. Above them the mountains loomed, dark and mysterious, and before them the canyon was black, showing nothing.

  After an hour of riding they emerged into a wide, moonlit valley, but the old man wasted no time, riding out into the valley and pointing the way diagonally across it.

  Here the grass was brown and parched. There was dust, and silence.

  For two miles or more they stayed with the valley, then pointing at a rocky tower before them they skirted it and entered a narrow draw.

  Steadily they rode and suddenly emerged from the draw into a wide place where there were cottonwoods, an old adobe house, now fallen to ruin, and a pole corral.

  “We will stop here,” Juan said “for one hour of rest.”

  “I will ride back and watch the valley,” Montero said, and was gone.

  Sean helped his mother from the saddle, although she needed none of it. “Help yourself,” she said, “I have ridden further than this.”

  “We have further to go,” he said quietly.

  “What do you know? Juan will tell us.”

  “It is further?” Mariana asked.

  The old man smiled. “Three days, if all goes well. Possibly four. You will come?”

  “Of course,” Eileen Mulkerin said. “Did you think we would stop?”

  “Can we have coffee, Old One? Or is a fire dangerous?”

  “It would be good.” He squatted on his heels near a rock. “They will not find where we have come until daybreak, I think. The path through the brush is not much.”

  “Old One,” Sean said carefully, “one of those who rides with Tomas once rode with Vasquez, the outlaw. He knows the trails.”

  The old man looked up. “There are some trails a man can ride that can be ridden by no other. Let them follow if they dare.”

  Sean made a small fire and got a coffeepot from a packhorse. In a few minutes he had water boiling. Eileen took over then and made the coffee, and he walked out away from their group to listen.

  It was very quiet.

  The Old One knew what he was doing, but Sean liked none of it. Tomas Alexander’s cantina was a stopping place for all who rode through, and many were outlaws from the gangs of Vasquez or one of the several Joaquins. Tomas knew the back trails himself and had men with him who knew them, too.

  If caught out in these lonely hills where Californios rarely came, they would hesitate at nothing. Juan was unarmed, Montero had an old Hawken rifle, while his mother had a Colt revolving rifle like his own. Mariana was not armed.

  In a fight it would be Montero, his mother, and himself.

  Machado would have Russell, Tomas, and others.

  To avoid a fight was the logical conclusion, and that was what Juan seemed inclined to do.

  Eileen Mulkerin stood by the campfire and studied her son. Somehow it seemed odd to think of him in that light, for in many ways this broad-shouldered young man was a stranger to her.

  Michael, for all his youthful wildness, had always been closer to home. It was Sean, the steady one, who had gone out upon the deep water with Jaime and with others, and who had come back to her from time to time, stronger, more assured, and with a ringing voice of command that startled her at times.

  Yet he had a vein of something else, too. Some might have said it was the sea except for the fact that it was the same quality, a strain of mysticism, that had turned Michael
toward the Church.

  Jaime had had it too, and she did herself. It was Celtic, deep within them all, yet deeper and stronger in Sean perhaps than in any of them. Montero had mentioned it once when he was speaking of Sean as a boy. Old Juan had seen it, too.

  What were the things that made up a man? Was it only hard fists and a salty way? Was it a strain of gentleness, a love of the land? Or was it so much else?

  In these last hours of the night she looked again at the sky, growing faintly pale now along the eastern rim of the mountains. A few stars still hung in the sky like distant harbor lights, and the blackness in the deepest canyon remained.

  She crossed to where the old man sat, and he looked up as she approached. He started to rise, but she gestured for him to stay. “I will sit,” she said.

  Juan looked older, even quieter if that was possible. Yet something was different about him. “What is it, Juan?”

  “There will be blood,” he said quietly, “blood and death. You should not have come.”

  “Since when was a woman afraid of blood?” she asked. “The problem is not only Sean’s. It is mine also. If there is to be blood, I will share in the letting or the losing of it.”

  He shook his head. “There is no end. Man was born in travail, and in travail he lives.”

  “This place to which we go? Will there be safety there? Shelter?”

  “There is no safety upon this earth, and no shelter but for a time. There was once a time when my people had shelter, and in a night, it was gone, and in the days and weeks that followed there was not even a stone laying upon a stone that was not shaken down.

  “We lived in a world of our making. We had learned things beyond the ways of men, and we believed ourselves secure. We were not secure.

  “We had wisdom of a sort. We knew not the things you and your people know, but we knew much else that you do not know, perhaps cannot know, yet it was of no use. The earth trembled and cracked and dust arose, and there was fire, and my people fled, fled they knew not where. Some went to the sea and died there in great waves that followed the fifth week of trembling, and some went to the desert and died of thirst, and many lay dead in the ruins of all we had built.

  “A few of us went to the mountains. Some of us lived. Many died because they knew not how to live without all they had had about them. I was young. I was a priest among them, but I was also one who loved the wild lands and often went out to search for herbs for medicines, so I lived.”

  “I have never heard of this.” She looked at him, wondering. “Did you ever tell Jaime of this?”

  “A little. He found a wall once, in the desert, and beside the wall some broken bits of a pot. It was thin, fragile, beautiful. He wondered how a Chinese pot could come here and was surprised when I told him the piece was not of China, but a fragment of our own. We talked a little then.”

  “And Sean? Does he know of this?”

  The old man was silent for several minutes, and then he said, “He knows much by himself. He perceives. He feels. He knows where something has taken place, where things have been. It is something deep within him.”

  “You taught him something when he was much younger?”

  “Taught? Perhaps. All teaching is not instruction, sometimes it is only opening a door or lifting a veil. Lift the veil and one does not need to teach for the mind sees, realizes, understands.”

  “You spoke of blood? Will my son survive the bloodletting?”

  “I do not know, Señora. Once I was young, and I knew many things, but now the light burns low and what I perceive is but dimly as through a curtain.”

  “And your city? The place from which you came? Your people? Who were they?”

  “Another people…it does not matter now. I am the last of us, I believe, and I am old, so very old.”

  “But where did you come from?”

  “Elsewhere, but long, long ago. It does not matter, Señora, and I speak of this to no one.”

  “Not even to Sean?”

  “Not yet…soon, perhaps. But only a little. The past is gone. My people who were proud and strong and fierce went down as does the grass before the fire.

  We were once here, and there was dust and smoke, and there was no more of us.”

  “You should tell someone what you know. There should be a history, so that men can learn from it.”

  He smiled. “Men do not learn from history. Each generation believes itself brighter than the last, each believes it can survive the mistakes of the older ones. Each discovers each old thing and they throw up their hands and say ‘See! Look what I have found! Look upon what I know!’ And each believes it is something new.

  “We had them in plenty, the new discoverers, exclaiming with excitement over what we had long ago tested and found false. We had the greedy ones, too, and those who wished for power or to show power. They are gone now, with all the rest.

  “Once a priest talked to me. He spoke long of the sins of this world and wished me to declare for his god that all my sins be remitted. I listened to him patiently and smiled inside for I had no sins to be forgotten and none to be forgiven. He told me of Sodom and Gomorrah, and I listened and felt a sadness upon me, for what had happened to us had happened there also.”

  The last of the stars had disappeared. The old man got to his feet. “We must go now. I do not know how, but they have found a way and they are close…much too close.”

  She went to Sean. “Juan says they are coming, and he says there will be blood.”

  “I have been expecting it.”

  Once more they merged with the beginning day, lending their movements to the vanishing shadows and the growing light, riding along the faces of slopes like cloud shadows under the sun, and leaving no mark upon the land they left behind.

  Sean dried his hands on his shirt again and turned his head to look at the hills behind them. Nothing…yet.

  He knew it was coming and rode warily, sitting light in the saddle, ready to kick free of the stirrups and drop to the ground if need be. He wanted no wasted shots, no galloping horse beneath him. He could shoot from the saddle, and had done it many times, but this time he must be sure, and with each shot a man must fall. His mother was here, and Mariana.

  The old man set a killing pace. On through the sun-blasted hills he rode, winding up on the long slopes, along the ridges and into strange canyons. He waded their horses through streams, pushed through thickets, turned and doubled and changed his direction again and again.

  Once, far back, Sean thought he saw dust, but Juan shook his head. “I do not know what dust that is, but it is not theirs. They are closer. They simply do not see us.”

  Sean saw, once in awhile, a deer track. He saw no others. Yet within the last mile or so the terrain had suddenly changed, for he was weaving a way through canyons of up-tilted strata, great layers of rock broken and thrust sharply upward, the edges only beginning to be worn by wind and blown sand. It was a nightmare of broken ledges, twisted rocks, deep gorges, and desolation.

  He spoke of it to Montero.

  “It is a great crack,” the Mexican said, “a crack in the earth that cuts through the mountains for many miles, from Mexico to the sea far north of Monterey. At places the trail follows the bottom, and I have ridden it.”

  “An earthquake fault,” Sean commented. “I’ve heard of such places.”

  It was dark when again they stopped, and Juan drew up and got stiffly down. “Do not unsaddle. We will make coffee, eat, and ride on.”

  “Tonight?” Mariana was incredulous.

  “We must.”

  When they had eaten and had drunk their coffee, Juan got more slowly to his feet. Sean looked at him, suddenly worried. “Perhaps we should rest, Old One. You are tired.”

  Juan shrugged. “These days I am often tired. It is no matter.”

  “But a little rest—?”

  “There is no time. They come quickly.”

  As Sean moved to put out the fire, the old man stopped him. “No, add wood
, and leave it burning. They will believe that we are here. They will get down, creep up, and find nothing. Nothing at all.”

  “And so?”

  “We shall have gained a few miles, perhaps a whole night. It is a difference, amigo.”