by Tripwire
There hadn’t been any sign of pursuit along the riverbanks but it would be stupid to build a fire and invite investigation; he wasn’t more than ten or twelve miles south of Hardyville. He ate the meat raw.
4
The current carried him along at a good clip and only occasionally he used the oar he’d built like a broom by lashing a bunch of stiff rushes to the end of a broken willow limb. When the sun started to get hot he soaked Wilstach’s bandanna in the river and tied it down over his head. Every little while he took it off and wetted it down again. No point getting sunstroke. He remembered the white officers of the Tenth and their tired jokes about the Buffalo soldiers’ suntans.
He had worked it out in his head. It was about 375 river miles to Yuma and the current held a steady twelve or fifteen-knot speed down the Colorado. Taking an average that meant he would be about thirty hours on the river. He’d lost some blood and there was still the vestige of shock; he couldn’t expect to spend fifteen hours a day steering the raft so he gave himself three days.
He was already thirty-six hours behind them when he started, and the steamboat would pick up another day on him—maybe two days—but still they’d only be three or four days ahead of him out of Yuma and they had the weight of that ton-and-a-half of gold to slow them down. They’d have to use pack mules or wagons.
He didn’t have a plan worked out. That would come.
In the middle of the day he let the raft drift onto the sandbank in a bend by the western shore and he rested a while and ate the last of the porcupine meat that he was going to eat; there was some left but it would go rancid by nightfall and he kept it with him only to use as bait for fishing. He made hooks out of the metal eyelets of the buttons from Wilstach’s shirt-tunic and he said, “John B., you’re helping me catch up to that son of a bitch all the time.” Slender strips of Wilstach’s clothes made his fishing line and he tied Wilstach’s brass buttons just above the hooks to attract the eyes of the fish. He imbedded the hooks in porcupine meat and let the lines trail the raft and by sundown he had six little fish aboard.
He had come far enough to risk a fire; he built one Indian-style and rubbed willow sticks over arrowweed tinder to start it going. He disliked fish anyway but raw fish was too much to contemplate; he cooked them in their skins and cut them open afterward and ate them from the inside out, spitting out the bones, hungry enough not to mind the taste.
The leg was mending all right. He still hadn’t put his weight on it and he didn’t intend to until he had to. Things were coming along, he thought. He’d need a gun and a horse but he still had the two gold eagles in his boots and that was enough to buy a gun and some cartridges, and with that he could commandeer the rest.
“I know it, John B., it’s a damn fool thing to be doing. But I got nothing else to do right now and I never expected to make old bones anyway.”
The next morning the current took him into an eddy of rapids that smashed up his raft and almost drowned him and busted his leg wounds open all over again.
5
The sun had both feet on his shoulders. Above the rock banks the desert winked and glittered with pyrites; heat haze wavered above the ground. When his head cleared he looked ahead across the long curve of rocks and pebbles. No reed bottoms here, it was all rock and then withered sand country above that. Nothing to build another raft with. The muddy flow of the river rushed through the sands.
A single wagon stood sagging on the near bank just below the bend.
Boag tied up his leg and started forward on one knee and both blistered hands, moving with the careless deliberation of half-drowned exhaustion.
The effort sapped him less than halfway along and he had to lie down in the sun for a time; and that was when he heard something stir.
He rolled over on his side and dug for the sharpened belt buckle in his pocket. His eyes swept the rocks in a steady arc.
A flutter of brown movement drew his attention to the left. A ragged small figure emerged from the boulder and stared at him with large grave eyes: a scrawny little girl in a filthy sack of clothes.
She spoke to Boag in Spanish, in a piping high voice: “Quién es usted?”
The little girl came toward him without fear. Boag said in Spanish, “How many of you over there?”
“There is just me. And then there are the Mexicans.”
“How many?”
“Who are you?” she said again.
“Corazon,” he said, “I do not have time to fool with you. How many are the Mexicans?”
“The old man and the woman, that is all.” Her eyes were bottomless and held distrust but not fear. Her skin was the color of old copper; she had a narrow triangle of a face and black hair tangled with burrs. Anywhere from nine to thirteen years, she had. Boag said, “You’re Indian.”
“I am Yaqui.”
“All right.”
“You are a ladrón” she told him.
He started to drag himself toward the wagon. The little girl buzzed around him like a horsefly. Finally Boag got to his feet slowly. It was the first time he’d stood up in several days and the blood fell from his head; he tightened his belly muscles and waited for the dizziness to pass. Finally he hobbled toward the wagon, putting very little weight on the bad leg. “You look like a stinking Gypsy to me.”
“I am Yaqui,” she said angrily.
She kept worrying close to his heels while he stumbled along the rock bank toward the wagon. “Don’t dog me,” he said.
“Why should I obey a ladrón negro? Have you killed many men?”
Boag hobbled to the wagon. The old man and the fat woman sat in its narrow band of shade and the old man had a Spanish percussion rifle aimed at Boag.
Boag stopped two paces from the rifle. “Put your rifle down, old man.”
The old man looked sick; he was sitting still but his chest heaved with his breathing. His face was lined as though he had slept all his life with his face pressed against a screen of rabbit wire.
Boag bent down, gripped the rifle and pulled it out of the old man’s limp grasp. It had not been cocked and it did not go off. Boag slung it across the bend of his elbow. “If you point a gun at a man it only makes good sense to cock it.”
“We have very little ammunition left,” said the old man. He sat against the wagon wheel and soon the sun would reach its midpoint and either the old man would have to suffer its rays or he would have to move underneath the wagon. He seemed to drift; his eyes kept closing slowly and popping open again. He wore dust-coated remnants of good Spanish clothing, old now, worn thin and patched.
The fat woman said, “He has the fever,” as if in apology.
“He has chills?”
“Frequently.”
“When the chills start you should cover him up. Keep him covered and get all the water down him he can swallow.”
Her eyes beseeched. “Is that all one can do?”
“What do you want me to do? Hold his hand?”
“Will he be better?”
“He’ll be better or he’ll be dead.” He turned. “You ought to tell that little girl to wear a hat in this sun.”
Boag sank down in the patch of shade beside the old man. “What happened to your mules?” The iron rim of the wheel was hot against his back.
“Two Mojaves came here the night before last night,” the woman said. “They ate our meal with us and then stole our mules and our cow.”
“No mules,” Boag said weakly. He roused himself: “How do you expect to get anywhere without mules, you damn fools?” But it was in English, this last, and they only gave him puzzled looks, the woman and the girl; the old man’s eyelids had sagged and he wasn’t listening. Boag wiped a forearm across his face and looked at the river and saw that this had been a ferry landing at one time. The wreckage of a ferry-raft was tied up on the far side of the river.
The wind came damp and sultry off the river. He was thinking that old wreck of a ferry would make a good enough raft if he could find some kind o
f pole to steer it with. Maybe that wagon tongue of theirs.
The old woman had got started and seemed unable to stop talking now. “We have seen much misfortune. The revolution has destroyed my husband’s properties. We must go to my uncle in California, in the county of Tuolumne.”
“What revolution?”
“In Sonora the revolution.”
They were always having revolutions in the northern provinces but he hadn’t heard about a current one. “Tell me about that.”
“How can I tell you anything while my husband is so ill? We must get him across the river. This desert is a poor place for a proud man to die. He must be brought to our family in Tuolumne.”
The wagon’s stripe of shade was very thin. Boag said, “You’d better get him under the wagon.”
He sat frowning at the river while the old woman struggled with the old man’s weight. “Nina, come and help me.”
The little girl moved reluctantly; they struggled and the old man tried to assist them but he seemed weak to the point of helplessness. It was curious he had been able to hold the rifle.
The old woman sat down by Boag. “There is no one to rob here except ourselves, and we are poor, it would not be worth your trouble. You must either go back in the desert or swim across the river. But you cannot go back, for you have no horse. What happened to your horse?”
“You will hurt yourself talking so much.”
“I have nothing to do but talk, and you have little to do but listen. You cannot return into the desert with that injured leg. You must swim across. I only ask that you carry the end of the rope and tie it to the ferryboat. When you have done that, we can pull the ferry across to us.”
“You have a long enough rope?”
“We have three riatas and if they are tied together they are very long.”
“You are mistaken. Three riatas would be two hundred feet, perhaps three hundred feet of rope. From here to the other shore is four times that distance. Perhaps more.”
“There must be a method,” she said with stubborn helplessness.
“What if I say you can die without my help?”
“Then that is what we shall do, is it not?”
“What if you do get to the far side? You still have no mules.”
“But we shall be in California then.”
“What difference does that make? It is still the same desert.”
The old woman seemed puzzled and confused. He saw that she had been doing the same thing Boag had been doing for several days: thinking ahead just one step at a time because if you thought it all the way through you had to give it up. The old woman had thought no farther than the other side of the river.
He could get across the river by himself all right. The old ferry would be an adequate raft.
Boag crawled down to the ferry landing. The flies were numerous but he paid them no mind.
When the little girl came down to the dock Boag laid his hand on the rifle. “You’re a witch. Get away.”
The little girl said, “They keep me because I can work but they hate me because I am Yaqui and they know the Yaqui is better than they are. You are a ladrón, you can understand. My father was a warrior and he killed many of them.”
“And they killed him, didn’t they?”
The little girl ran away. Boag picked up the rifle and hobbled back to the wagon. The wound wasn’t as bad as he’d feared this morning; he felt better about the idea of a swim across.
The old man was breathing heavily beneath the wagon, a flush on his cheeks. The little girl wandered away into the rocks.
The woman said, “The truth is that her mother was not a Yaqui. Her father may have been. A mountain thief, I am sure.”
“Your mouth flaps,” Boag told her.
“Would you shoot me for that, tough one?” A plump finger waggled at him. “You will not shoot, but you will leave us to die.”
“Old woman, I have trouble enough of my own.” He made his way down to the river. The flow was fast and steady, and frightening. He bounced the rifle in the circle of his fist.
Finally he went back to the wagon. “Listen to me. I will take you to Yuma—I go that way anyway.”
If the woman had feelings she gave no indication. “How will you do this?”
“Swim across, pole the ferry over to this side. The current will drive me far downstream before I reach this bank so you must get him on his feet and come down along the bank to meet me.”
He went back down to the crumbled landing and scowled at the river. This morning it had almost killed him.
The little girl trailed him there. Boag had the rifle in his fist and the little girl said, “You cannot take that with you.”
“You are right.”
“I will keep it for you.”
He didn’t trust her, but he trusted her not to be able to use the rifle. He handed it to her and stepped into the water. His toes felt the suck of the mud bottom. He stepped out again and stripped off his pants and shirt and placed them in a neat bundle on the landing. “Bring these to me also.”
“All right, ladrón.”
The sun was very hot on his bare flesh. He moved out into the current, feeling the force of the river against him. It rushed warm toward the south. He struck out into it.
6
In Boag’s judgment they made seventy miles before nightfall. Delay annoyed him but the old man was too weak to make a night trip of it. They camped in reed bottoms.
Boag lay on his back with one knee bent and the Spanish rifle across his stomach. After the fire was laid the little girl came and sat beside Boag and talked softly. “If we go to California the old man will die, and she will have her people. They will have no use for me.”
“Then you will have to learn to look out for yourself.”
The woman propped the old man up against the raft and they ate. The food was meager. Afterward Boag picked a spot to sleep, and did not awaken until sunrise. In the morning he had a look at the leg. Swollen but not much pus; the scabs were tight, the leg itched. Good signs.
The old man lay on his back, his mouth open and slack. Boag looked away with his eyebrows drawn together. He pitied them all and he was angry because he had to be pitying them; they were getting in the way.
The sun blasted his face. Heat glistened on the muddy surface of the Colorado and the water rushed past the banks, tearing bits of it away.
The woman crouched by the old man. “He is dead.”
They buried him in the riverbank. The old woman mumbled words and Boag filled in the grave and tamped it with a stone.
“That was kind,” the woman said.
Boag grunted.
“But there are still the three of us,” she said.
“No, there are the two of you and there is the one of me.”
“And we are not three? You have no sums?”
“I have no ties,” Boag said. “I’m a fool. I ought to let you get across the river by yourselves, the old man did.”
“And now you are a philosopher? Besides, we no longer go across, we go down the river, yes?”
“Yuma is as far as I go with you.”
“That is understood.”
The little girl waited until the woman went away to kill the fire; the little girl said, “She will sit in the sun in Yuma and die.”
“She doesn’t care about you, niña. Why think about her?”
“She does. She is only gruff.”
“I thought you hated her.”
“I do.”
“Make up your mind.”
“What are you going to do after we come to Yuma?” “Leave me alone,” he growled, and set his good leg in the mud to shoulder the ferry-raft into the river.
7
By the next night he was tired of them both, tired of the little girl’s chatter and the woman’s sour body smell.
In the dusk he poled the ferry-raft through the crosscurrents of the Gila fork. The Gila rose somewhere in the mountains over in New Mexico or far-eastern
Arizona and came down the White Mountains, fed by the Salt River and some others, and went past Phoenix and a few no-account towns and finally flowed into the Colorado here a few miles north of Yuma. Buffalo-soldiering, Boag had followed the pilgrim highway along the south bank of the Gila a good many times across the desert. It was nobody’s favorite river.
He got the raft through the turmoil and they floated on down. Boag said, “You said you would tell me about the revolution in Sonora.”
The little girl watched them both with her big angry eyes. The woman sighed. “They are a people who must be slaves or tyrants. Revolution only means exchanging one group of tyrants for another.”
“Who are they this time?”
“Pesquiera is the governor. There are bandits and rebels trying to overthrow him.”
“Who leads these bandits and rebels?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Just tell me, vieja.”
“I think it is a man called Ruiz from Caborca. I am not sure. There are many bandit chieftains who pretend they are revolutionary leaders.”
“What does Mexico City do about all this?”
“No one in Mexico City cares what happens in the provinces. We beseeched the government to help but they ignored us, which is why we are without our properties. The peones burned us out and ran to the hills to join the bandits who promised them freedom.”
It sounded familiar enough to Boag. The woman said, “But there is no freedom for them except for the few who become tyrants.”
“Who’s going to win?”
“Who can say? The Governor Pesquiera has many troops, he will probably win.”
It was dangerous making too many guesses. But a man like Mr. Pickett would find some way to make profit out of rebellions. Yet right now that didn’t necessarily follow: Mr. Pickett had three hundred thousand dollars’ worth of gold bullion and he didn’t need to mix in anybody’s trouble for money right now.
A ton and a half of gold. It had to leave deep tracks. Boag kept dwelling on that.
