by Dale Cramer
“Is your sister all right?” Caleb asked.
“Jah. There’s more strength in her than we know, Dat. Mamm worries me more than Ada. She’s gone to pieces.”
He nodded. “High-strung, your mamm is. I will speak to her and try to ease her mind. Could Ada tell you anything about what happened to Aaron and Rachel?” He braced himself for the worst.
Miriam’s shoulders slumped, and she couldn’t look at her father as she spoke. “We couldn’t get much out of her. She kept saying bad over and over, and sometimes she would drag a finger down across one eye, like this.”
Like the scar on El Pantera’s face. Caleb swallowed hard. “What else? Did she say anything else at all?”
A small nod. There were tears in Miriam’s eyes. “She said Aaron and she said blood. Then she got so upset it was no use talking to her.”
Jake had crept close, listening. “What about Rachel?” he asked, his eyes focused and intense.
Miriam sighed deeply and shook her head. “I tried, but she either didn’t know or couldn’t remember. I think she told me all she knows.”
Chapter 23
Caleb’s heart was in his throat as he and Harvey set out in the wagon while Jake and Domingo scouted ahead on horseback. Dr. Gant offered to go with them, but Caleb declined. There were sick children who needed him more.
Three hours later, high up on the barren ridge halfway to Agua Nueva, Caleb spotted Domingo and Jake up ahead, kneeling on the ground. Rushing to the site, Caleb set the brake and climbed down from the wagon.
Domingo rose to meet him. “Something happened here. There is blood.”
Unprepared for the sight of so much blood, dried brown on the barren rock—the blood of one of his children—Caleb’s knees almost buckled and his voice quavered.
“Tell me what happened. Where are Rachel and Aaron?”
“Find the buggy and it will tell us something,” Domingo said, his eyes roaming the crest of the ridge. “Bandits will steal a horse, but they would have no use for the surrey. It has to be here somewhere.”
Harvey spotted the wrecked surrey right away, down the hill at the edge of the trees. He ran down to it and shouted back up to the others, “Aaron is here!”
Aaron lay trapped between the seats in the crumpled surrey. Together they righted the buggy and pried him out of it. His normally ruddy skin was pale yellow and cold to the touch. When they stretched him out he uttered a muffled groan. His chest rose and fell slowly under a shirt soaked with blood.
Caleb leaned over him, pressing a finger under his jaw, feeling for a pulse. Fast and shallow. “Aaron,” he whispered.
No answer.
“I don’t know how he’s still alive,” Caleb said, pulling aside the soaked shirt. “He’s lost so much blood. He’s been stabbed—it’s a knife wound, not a gunshot.” Caleb almost choked on the words, imagining the horrifying scene.
Harvey gave up his own shirt to make a bandage, then they struggled up the hill with Aaron as gently as they could and laid him in the back of the wagon. Harvey brought a buggy robe from the wagon box, and he and Jake tucked it around Aaron while Domingo left them to their work and went to scout around on horseback.
“What do we do now?” Harvey asked.
Caleb took off his hat, wiped his brow on his coat sleeve. “We got to get him home as quick as we can. I can’t do nothing for him here.”
“Agua Nueva is about as close as home, and there’s a good doctor there,” Jake said.
“There’s a better one at home,” Caleb said, rising, standing in the back of the wagon. “Harvey, you keep him still and I’ll try to drive smooth.”
Hoofbeats announced Domingo’s return. He trotted up to the wagon and stayed in his saddle.
“Did you see any sign of Rachel?” Jake asked, his voice quavering with fear.
Domingo held out a prayer kapp. “I found this down the hill a little ways.”
“Ada’s kapp was missing,” Caleb said. “It could be hers.”
Jake held the kapp up to his face, pinched a long hair from inside it and held it up to catch the sunlight.
“Red,” he said. “Rachel. So what happened to her?”
“I’m not sure,” Domingo answered. “I circled this whole place twice and didn’t see any other traces. There’s an old trail about a quarter mile back where I found the tracks of ten or twelve horses in a soft place, going north. Bandits.”
But as Domingo talked he kept glancing at Caleb. He was holding back. There was something else he wasn’t saying.
Caleb spoke up. “Tell us what you think, Domingo. All of it. We are all men here.”
With a reluctant glance at Jake, Domingo said, “Rachel would never have left her brother’s side or let Ada go wandering off by herself unless she was dead or captured.”
Caleb nodded.
“If she was dead, I would have found her.”
“So they have taken her.”
“There is no other explanation.”
Jake was incredulous. “Why would they take her captive?”
Domingo shrugged. “To sell.”
“To sell? What does that mean?”
“As a slave,” Domingo said. “There are rich men who will pay a lot of money for a young girl. Surely I don’t have to explain—”
“No,” Jake said, breathing deeply, his eyes wide and his fists clenching and unclenching. “You’ve told us enough.” He untied his horse from the wagon, hooked a foot in a stirrup, and swung up into the saddle.
“I’m going after her.”
The look in the boy’s eye told Caleb there was no point in arguing with him. But now he faced an impossible choice. Should he try to save his son or pursue his daughter?
Domingo, waiting patiently in his saddle, stared at Jake and held out a hand, palm down. Both of them remained where they were and waited for Caleb to speak.
“I don’t know what to do,” Caleb finally said, his eyes pleading. “I want to go after Rachel. But the bandits already have a head start, and Aaron is barely alive. He will surely die if we don’t get him to a doctor quickly.”
“Señor Bender,” Domingo said softly, “we have only two saddle horses.” He waved casually toward Jake. “You will not stop this lovesick fool from going after Rachel, and it would be suicide for him to follow bandits into those mountains without me. There is no choice for you to make. You and Harvey must take Aaron home. Jake and I will go and find your daughter.”
The young man’s judgment was sound, his words wise. Caleb nodded slowly. “Be careful,” he said. “And bring my Rachel home.”
It was chilly in the heights, even in summer. Jake buttoned his denim work coat and turned up his collar, but the thought of his Rachel in the hands of those bandits left him shivering anyway. A whirlwind of horrors haunted his imagination as he followed Domingo up and down narrow mountain trails. If they couldn’t find Rachel and bring her back, he was pretty sure he’d never be warm again.
Domingo trotted along at an even pace through forest and creek, up and down and around steep mountainsides on the meandering trail, moving ever northward.
“Can’t we go any faster?” Jake asked for the tenth time. Alone with Domingo he spoke German, because Domingo’s German was much better than his own Spanish.
Domingo shrugged, his shoulders hidden under a striped poncho. “Jah, we can go faster, but then the horses will have to stop and rest. We must pace ourselves.”
His flat-brimmed hat snugged tight on his head, Domingo’s eyes constantly scanned the ridges and trees up ahead and on both sides. Most of the time he refused to talk, and it took a while for Jake to realize that he wasn’t being unfriendly, he was just listening.
“Are you sure we can find them?”
Domingo gave him a sideways glance, almost a smirk. “I am not the tracker my father was, but I think I can follow the tracks of a dozen horses through the soft dirt of the woods. Anyway, I think I know where they are going, or at least I know the area.”
&nb
sp; “Really?” This was a surprise to Jake. “You know these men?”
Domingo nodded. “In this part of Mexico there is only one man who kidnaps girls to sell. El Pantera.”
“The one who came to the logging camp last summer? Who robbed Herr Bender in the fall?”
“The same.”
Domingo followed the bandit trail down to where the tracks disappeared into a creek. He didn’t hesitate but pushed Star right into the middle of the shallow creek. They began sloshing upstream.
Jake drew alongside. “How do you know El Pantera?”
“My father knew him. They fought together in the Revolution.” Domingo answered without looking up, his eyes scanning the banks for the spot where the bandits left the creek.
“And you know where he lives?”
“I know of it. They say he has a little ranch in a remote place called Diablo Canyon, far to the north in the mountains west of Arteaga. My father said it was well hidden, and well guarded. El Pantera keeps a small army there—twenty or thirty men.”
This was grim news to Jake. “Twenty or thirty,” he muttered. “How can you fight so many?”
Domingo chuckled. “I can’t. I have only a rifle, and you will not fight at all. Our only hope is to get in and out without them knowing we are there, and to do this we must be quiet.”
Jake saw the sideways glance full of doubts about his ability to be quiet, but he still had a lot of questions. From now on he would talk more softly.
“How far is this place?” he whispered.
Domingo shrugged. “A long day’s ride, probably.”
Jake slumped in his saddle, his heart sinking. “Then they are already there.”
“Maybe not. They might have stopped someplace for the night. El Pantera is in no hurry.”
“How do you know this?”
“The tracks are close together. Their horses are walking, not even trotting. Anyway, El Pantera knows no one would be foolish enough to come after him in these mountains without an army. Even an army failed, once.”
Suddenly he pointed to a bare spot on the bank. “There it is.”
Domingo spurred his horse and trotted up the bank onto dry ground, picking up the trail of the bandits where they left the creek, moving steadily northward.
Rachel was numb, all emotion wrung out of her during the night. She clung to the saddle listlessly, her face expressionless. At least she was alone. No one’s hands groped her today, for as soon as the weasel cinched the girth on his saddle that morning El Pantera put Rachel on his horse alone and made the weasel ride bareback on the stolen standard bred. The weasel sulked, humiliated while the others harassed him mercilessly with their callous jokes. He didn’t answer them, but the hounded look in his eye let them know that sooner or later someone would pay.
The bandits moved through the woods and creeks at an unconcerned pace, their horses ambling along. El Pantera was supremely confident, fearing no one in his corner of the mountains.
Before noon Rachel could make out a rocky bluff through the trees up ahead, rising high above the trail on the left. A quarter mile from the bluff they reached a clearing, where El Pantera stopped the column and waved his hat over his head.
A lone rifleman stepped out from behind the rocks on top of the bluff, returning the signal with his sombrero. El Pantera spurred the Appaloosa and they pressed on.
A few minutes later the column of horses rounded a sloping field of sandstone boulders at the base of the bluff, heading downhill and to the left into a steep-sided canyon. Sheer walls of rock towered a hundred feet high on three sides. On the floor of the canyon Rachel could make out a little clutch of adobe buildings—a house off to one side, and beyond it a long structure that looked like a bunkhouse. Behind the bunkhouse lay a two-acre garden patch, looking wilted and unkempt, the cornstalks yellowing. A rail fence stretched all the way across the back end of the little box canyon, making use of the walls to form a natural corral. A large all-wood barn stood in the center of the fence, and next to it a wire pigpen where two sizable hogs lay in the strip of shade cast by the barn. The house was partly shaded from the midday sun by a huge old oak tree, but apart from that only a few spindly pines and cottonwoods stood isolated on an otherwise rocky landscape. To Rachel’s eyes it was a red and desolate place. What was left of her heart sank, and she wondered how much worse things could possibly get.
The horses picked up the pace a little as they neared home, cantering toward the barn.
Caleb worked his team of Belgians with a delicate finesse, steering them over the gentlest ground he could find on the long rocky ridge. Harvey lay beside his wounded older brother in the back, holding him as steady as possible. Caleb glanced back often, each time praying he wouldn’t see the hope gone out of Harvey’s bright face. At nineteen, Harvey was his youngest son. They’d lost Aaron’s twin brother, Amos, in the flu epidemic of 1918, and if Aaron didn’t make it Harvey would be the only living son. The thought was almost more than Caleb could bear. He prayed for mercy and strength and drove his horses on, his shoulders tight, his forearms tense.
Three hours later, as the wagon crept down the last of the narrow switchbacks at the base of the ridge and crawled out into the flatland of Paradise Valley, with home in sight, Harvey called to him.
When Caleb looked back and saw urgency in Harvey’s young face, he hauled back on the reins and stopped.
“I think he wakes,” Harvey said. “He tried to talk.”
Caleb scrambled into the back of the wagon and lay propped on his elbows at Aaron’s side, their faces inches apart.
“Aaron.”
The eyes didn’t open, but his head turned toward Caleb’s voice and his lips parted. He made no sound and yet there was no mistaking what his tongue said.
Dat.
Caleb gripped his shoulders and squeezed. “Son, you hang on. We’re almost home. There’s a doctor in the valley and he can fix you. You’re gonna be all right.”
Aaron winced weakly and his face moved from side to side slowly, feebly. Caleb wanted to believe the wince was only pain, but deep down he knew his son too well. It was surrender. He couldn’t fight anymore. Aaron had the heart of a plow horse, but the slack skin and ashen complexion did not lie. Aaron had fought his way to the surface, using his last ounce of strength to communicate one last time.
It was enough to break a father’s heart.
Aaron’s mouth moved, but his breath was so faint that no sound came out. Caleb laid his wide hat aside and leaned close, placing his ear against his son’s lips.
“What is it, son? Are you trying to say something?”
The lips moved again, and this time a single word brushed against Caleb’s ear so lightly that at first he wasn’t sure he’d heard it right.
“Amos.”
He pulled back and stared. Amos. Had death drawn so near that he was seeing his twin brother on the other side? But then Aaron’s eyes opened for a moment. When Caleb looked into them he saw tears, and behind the tears a desperate need, a burning question. Wounded as deeply as Aaron was, with such great loss of blood, Caleb knew an ordinary human should never have survived the night. More than once on the long drive home he had wondered what was keeping his son alive—what lay beneath this inner pool of strength, this mountain of resolve?
Now he knew.
Caleb nodded, tried to smile. “He’s fine, son.” His voice broke, but he got the words out. “Little Amos is at home with his mother. Ada brought him back to us safe and sound. He’s fine.”
Aaron closed his eyes, and an unmistakable satisfaction crinkled the corners. He drew a deep breath, let it out like a sigh, and never drew another.
Chapter 24
The afternoon sun slanted sharply through the trees as Jake and Domingo came across the place where the bandits had camped the night before. Domingo knelt down by the cold campfire between the two logs and pressed his hand into the ashes. Rising, he wiped his hand on his pants.
“The coals underneath are still w
arm. They camped here last night and headed north again this morning. They would not have stopped if they were close to home. I’m thinking Diablo Canyon is another three hours’ walk.”
Jake was leaning forward in his saddle, watching. His head tilted. “So what do we do now? Do we keep going?”
Domingo looked up at the sky. “Only as long as the light holds. I can’t track them in the dark, and this close to Diablo Canyon we don’t dare light a torch. From here on we must move slowly and be very careful.”
Jake shifted uneasily in his saddle. “I don’t mean to complain, Domingo, but I would feel mighty bad if something happened to Rachel because we took too long being cautious.”
Domingo gave him a look. “And what good will it do Rachel if we get ourselves caught? I have said from the start that our only hope lies in El Pantera not knowing we are here. Now that we’re getting closer it’s more important than ever to be invisible.”
“I’m not afraid of him.”
Domingo chuckled, swinging back up onto his horse. “Only because you do not know him. I am not afraid to die, but I do not love the idea of dying for nothing. There will be lookouts posted on the heights, watching.”
Miriam was worried about her mother. A son and daughter missing, possibly hurt or killed, and diphtheria terrorizing the valley, leaving one of the newcomers’ little ones dead already and several more in danger—with Caleb gone, it was just too much for Mamm. Her hands shook constantly, and she sat at the kitchen table dabbing at her eyes with a crumpled handkerchief all day, ignoring her work, weeping quietly.
Late in the afternoon, when she finally got a break, Miriam wandered out to the buggy shed to check on her school supplies and to have a moment to herself. She kept paper, chalk, pencils and erasers in a cedar box on a high shelf, but the school had been empty for a week and there were rats about.
Everything was fine, though she noticed as she trailed her fingertips over a tabletop in the half-light that the place needed a good dusting. The deafening silence made her miss the kids even more.
