by Tripwire
The trail was not getting any warmer but Boag was patient. He had nothing else to do.
It was getting on for the middle of May; along the Yaqui River the heat was intense. Boag’s sorrel wore out and he had to give ten Yankee dollars along with it in trade for a sturdy blue roan mare. He was nearly down to the twenty dollars he had started with before he’d rolled the poker player in Yuma.
Here and there he passed the signs of combat and the tracks of wheeled cannon carts. Rebels and troops were having it out but the warfare in the countryside didn’t seem to have much effect on the villagers Boag talked to; perhaps they had lived with revolutions so long they had got bored with them.
In Nuri there was a mescal-swilling alcalde who was glad to have a stranger to drink with; the alcalde was a gossip and a philosopher. From three hours of his talk Boag gleaned a few shavings. Fourteen horsemen, leading nine pack mules, had passed through the area more than two weeks earlier; no one had recognized any of them but it was thought probable that they had to do with the revolution, so no one approached them.
“Which side?”
“Who knows,” said the alcalde in his cups. “Does it matter?”
The riders and pack animals had moved on to the west, back toward the Yaqui River.
Boag went that way. But it was not until four days later in Cocorit that he found traces of them again. A talkative bartender in the cantina on the central square. “Yes there were fourteen men, I counted them because I was concerned about how many bullet holes there might be after they left. But they behaved themselves with distinction. They were here the one night, very courteous to everyone but they kept mainly to themselves. In the morning they traded a few horses with the stable man, Cruz, and they left.”
“Their leader,” Boag said. “A man with a yellow mustache and pits in the skin of his face? Not a very big man?”
“No, I do not recall him that way at all, Señor. The leader was a very large man in fact.”
Boag thought about that. “A lot of brown hair on the backs of his hands?”
“Exactly, Señor, that is the man.”
Ben Stryker, the segundo.
But where did that put Mr. Pickett? If he wasn’t traveling with his men, where was he?
Anyhow there were at least six or seven men missing. There had been twenty or more of them at first; now the reports were fairly consistent, thirteen or fourteen men at most.
So Mr. Pickett was off somewhere else with half a dozen men. Doing what?
It looked as if Boag was following the wrong bunch. But it was the only trail he had to follow.
Cruz at the livery barn was a nervous little chatterbox who chewed on coco leaf while he talked. Yes he still had three of the horses the gringos had traded; they were in the corral, would the señor like him to point them out?
Boag didn’t know why he bothered to look. He’d never seen their horses before anyway. They’d had a remuda of fresh mounts ready for them on the Gila River where they’d beached the Uncle Sam under the trees. He hadn’t ever set eyes on those horses so it wasn’t surprising that none of the mounts in Cruz’s corral looked familiar.
It was just that it helped give him the feeling he still had some kind of contact with them. The thread was frayed but it was still a thread.
“Was there among them a man with a yellow mustache and a pitted face?”
Cruz did not recall such a man although of course there were a dozen men or more and it was many weeks ago and he could not remember faces all that clearly. “But the leader was a striking man, striking, a very tall man, he spoke Spanish very well but with a Yankee drawl, his accent was not so good as yours, Señor.”
“How many horses did you sell them?”
“Five, it was all I had to spare.”
“Any of them have distinctive markings?”
Cruz had to think about it, visibly. Boag found a silver peso in his Levi’s and placed it on the flat-sawed top of a corral post. Cruz covered it with his hand. “There was one sorrel with a very pale mane and tail, I recall. Almost like a palomino’s mane and tail, yet the horse itself was very dark red or brown.”
“Any of them have a split shoe, anything like that?”
“You mean something that would leave a hoofprint you could recognize. No, Señor, I recall nothing like that.”
“The brand on this horse with the palomino’s mane?”
“That was a horse from Chihuahua, Señor, it had several brands and I believe the most recent was the big circle of the Ochoa rancho.”
When Boag rode out of the place Cruz’s voice followed him: “I hope you find your friends.”
2
Then he lost the spoor for more than a week. No one to the south or west had seen the gang. It was farm country getting down toward the Gulf; there were plenty of people, too many for the rawhiders to have passed unseen. So they must have doubled back. Boag rode back to Nuri and singled out the alcalde who liked to drink.
“It is good to see you again, Señor Boag.”
“Let me buy you a mescal, alcalde.”
“Simpático. Like your friend the tall gringo.”
“He bought you a drink too, did he?”
“Only four days ago it was.”
Boag grinned to hide his excitement. “So they did come back this way.”
“Nine of them did. With their pack mules.” The alcalde lifted his mescal in toast. “Salud y amor, Señor Boag. I think your friend was very glad to hear you were looking for him.”
“You told him about me.”
“Yes of course. He said it had been a long time since he had seen you and he looked forward with keen pleasure to seeing you again.”
“I don’t suppose he told you where that might be.”
“Well he did say if you should return I could tell you he was going to spend a few days in San Ignacio. He hopes you will find him there before he has to leave.”
“I’ll just bet he does,” Boag said.
3
So Ben Stryker’s bunch knew Boag was behind them. Knew his name, from the alcalde. He wondered what they thought about that. It had to worry them a little. But he wished he hadn’t told the alcalde his name because if Stryker had known only that a black man was looking for him it would have been more mysterious.
San Ignacio was a foothill village well to the east of the Yaqui River. It was a hot place built on the south slope of a barren hill; a stupid place to build a town. There were ’dobe huts with thatched roofs scattered around the hillside with dirt paths worn from one ’dobe to the next but there was nothing regular enough to be called a street. Even the church looked poor.
Boag reconnoitered from a distance. He rode all the way around the village and then approached it from the upper end. He supposed he was looking for a dark horse with palomino mane and tail; he didn’t see one. He only saw two horses at all. One was tethered to a picket rope behind somebody’s hut. The other had a saddle on it and was tied to the hitching rail in front of a building that probably served as cantina and general store and post office and whatever else the town had need of.
His anticipation had cooled by now. He didn’t see any place in this village where you could hide fifteen horses and mules. Of course it was possible they had put a couple of animals in each hut and paid the villagers to keep silent. But that seemed an awful lot of preparation to go through if they knew there was only one man looking for them and they couldn’t even be sure he would ever come this way.
More likely they’d leave one man here to see about Boag. That would be the horse hitched in front of the cantina. It had a Mexican saddle but that didn’t mean anything, Mr. Pickett’s men had been in Mexico off and on for years and of course some of them like Gutierrez were Mexicans themselves.
He kind of hoped it would be Gutierrez. He wanted to meet up with Gutierrez again.
He had no patience to wait for nightfall, which perhaps would have been the wiser thing to do because in daylight there was no way at all to approac
h the cantina without being seen from inside it.
He sized up the cantina’s openings. There were windows on all four sides, but not many of them and not large ones; in these hot places you didn’t build in a whole lot of windows for the sun to beat on. The front of the place actually offered the best approach; there was only one window, set high in the wall to the right of the door. The door was shut against the heat and it didn’t seem to have any openings in it big enough to sight a gun through.
Boag dismounted fifty yards from the cantina and approached from an angle that kept the saddled horse at the hitch rail between him and that window. They could see him coming but they couldn’t get a clear shot.
With his shoulders braced stiff against a half-expected bullet he entered what might have been the town square if it had been more regular and had more buildings. His eyes flicked all the corners in sight, the huts and the church and the cantina.
A woman in a loose frayed dress walked slowly across toward one hut, supporting her pregnant abdomen in both hands. A dog lay asprawl and panted in the strip of shade beside the church.
The feel of the place was wrong; demons were on the prowl. Boag stopped sixty feet from the saddled horse and turned a slow circle on his heels.
The church door opened and a soldier came out onto the top step. A Mexican infantryman with a .45-90 rolling-block rifle. It was held across his chest at the port-arms position. The soldier just stood there, he didn’t make a move.
The pregnant woman stepped aside to let another soldier walk out of the hut she was bound for. She curled past the soldier and went inside. The soldier also held his rifle at port-arms and watched Boag with weary indifference.
Soldiers stepped out of all the huts around the ragged square.
In the end a Lieutenant of Infantry emerged from the cantina with a corporal behind his left shoulder. The Lieutenant’s holster flap was unbuttoned, but he didn’t bother reaching for the revolver. “You will abandon your gunbelt please, Señor Boag.”
“What the hell for?”
“You are under arrest by authority of Governor Ignacio Pesquiera.”
“For what?”
“I was not told the charges,” the Lieutenant said. He gestured wide to encompass the eight soldiers and their rifles. “Do you care to fight the drop, Señor?”
Boag looked around at them all. He’d been so long in the Cavalry he hadn’t even thought about Infantry. Not everybody had a horse.
It was pretty elaborate just to put the grab on one man. A Lieutenant and a detail of soldiers—rurales, they were; militia of Sonora.
Well if they had wanted to kill him they’d have done it. They wanted to talk to him. He would find out what it was all about.
Boag dropped the gunbelt in the dirt.
4
Laced with hurts he lay in the jail at Ures and in spite of the crowded stench of it the warmth and the pain enveloped him and sleep rolled his head against the wall.
It had been two days’ march down from San Ignacio and in Ures they had thrown him into jail without explanation. He kept waiting for someone to come and question him or accuse him of something but for four days they had done nothing except feed him slop twice a day. From that or from the water he had got dysentery, for which one of the guards had prepared a concoction which he dished out to everyone on alternate mornings; it was the old remedy of bones burnt to ashes and it worked well enough to keep you from losing your mind. But that left Boag more free to hate.
It was a helpless anger. No one told him why he was here. On the fourth day he began to rage around the jail because at least it would make them pay attention to him and perhaps that would cause them to tell him something useful. But they only worked him over with pistol-butts and riding quirts.
Like most Mexican jails it was not divided into cells. It was a big cavernous room which no one had cleaned in years. The filth was overpowering. There were chamberpots but not enough of them. Men with dysentery occupied them, squatting, for half-hour stretches in twisted agony while other men could no longer wait their turns and defecated on the floor.
Boag spent hours considering how he might tear something apart that he could use to pry the bars open. There was nothing. The place was not all that well built and if he had had a friend on the outside it would have been easy in the night to goad a mule into kicking a hole through the dry adobe wall. The floor was rammed earth and it might be possible to dig out but that would take forever and there were no tools.
On the fourth morning a guard with his back to the barred door had lighted a cigar and accidentally dropped a handful of sulphur matches. He had picked most of them up but two had rolled under the bars and Boag managed to hide them in his socks.
It was the sixth day when two guards took him out and walked him up a corridor into a small dusty room occupied by a middle-aged warrant officer with a drooping black mustache. The two guards stayed with Boag, sat him down in a chair and stood behind his shoulders.
The warrant officer was drinking wine out of a leather sack with a spout on it. “Who are you scouting for, Boag? Who sent you?”
“Nobody sent me. You got any charges against me?”
“Sedition, will that do?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Giving aid and comfort to the rebels.”
“What rebels?”
“You were seen talking at considerable length with a gringo mercenary who is known to be in the employ of the rebel bandits.”
Captain Shelby McQuade. Boag said, “We used to soldier together. We were talking about old times.”
“Of course you were,” the warrant officer said, not so much in disbelief as in indifference.
“Do I get a trial?”
“Political trials have been postponed until the revolt is put down.”
“That could be years.”
“I suppose it could,” the warrant officer said and yawned.
“You went to a lot of trouble to arrest me. How come I’m all that important?”
“Any enemy of the government is important to us.”
“Come on,” Boag said. “I don’t give a damn about your politics down here and I think you know that.”
“Then tell us who you were scouting for.”
“If I do can I go?”
“Perhaps.”
“You’ll have to do a little better than that.”
“Perhaps we’ll break one of your fingers and then ask you again.”
“You won’t find out much. I was scouting for myself. I’m not working for any rebels.”
“Would you like some wine, Boag?”
“I wouldn’t mind.”
“Thirst can be overpoweringly persuasive, we find. I believe we shall lock you up in a private room for a few days without water and see what you have to say after that. You see we are in no hurry.” The warrant officer yawned again and waved at the two guards and they took Boag down the corridor and threw him into a cubicle. He heard the key rattle in the lock.
It didn’t make a whole lot of sense unless you made an assumption. Assume that Mr. Pickett had the Governor’s ear and then it all made sense. Mr. Pickett was having his fun. That was the only way to explain it. Mr. Pickett told his friend the Governor there was a black man annoying him. Because the Governor owed Mr. Pickett a favor he had Boag picked up and they were going to sweat him for a while just for the hell of it. Boag had heard about Governor Ignacio Pesquiera for years: a man who enjoyed inflicting pain.
It had to be something like that because nobody other than Mr. Pickett had any real reason for it. They couldn’t possibly believe Boag had any connection with the rebels. Otherwise they would have done what the warrant officer had threatened to do: smash a few of his fingers and indulge in some other tortures until they got the information out of him they thought he carried. And they would have done that right at the outset, they wouldn’t have waited a week. So they weren’t interested in information, and that meant they knew Boag didn’t
have any information. It came back to Mr. Pickett.
Mr. Pickett just wanted him out of the way.
When they got tired of playing games they would turn him loose and let him get fifty feet or five miles away and then they’d shoot him down in the back and write it up as another prisoner shot trying to escape.
That friendly alcalde back in Nuri was a public official and no doubt owed his job to the Governor.
There was only one satisfaction in it. They’d gone to a lot of trouble to bring him in and that meant he had worried Mr. Pickett, if only a little.
It would be very nice now to get out of this place and disappear for a while and let Mr. Pickett worry some more, knowing Boag was loose somewhere and knowing it could come any time from any direction: a gunshot in the night, a knife through the back ribs, a pair of strong black arms waiting just inside a dark doorway.
It would be very nice but it didn’t look likely. It didn’t even look possible. This cell had been designed to keep men in. It was getting a little old and dried-out but there was no evident way out of it except through the door and that was made of heavy thick wood with hinges on the far side. There was a tiny window but even if you broke the bars you couldn’t squeeze through it. There was no bed, only a raised platform of adobe along one wall with a blanket on it. The chamberpot was made of clay and would break if you sat too hard on it.
He thought about waiting them out but he had seen what thirst did to men in the desert and he knew if he had to suffer that for more than a few days he would go out of his head and would be in no condition to plan escapes after that. There had to be some alternative.
There had to be but probably there wasn’t; Mexican prisons were well known for being impossible to get out of.
So this is how it ends, he thought. Dead in a foul Ures jail with nobody to mourn him.
He studied his world with great care for a day and a half but there was nothing to use for a lever.
At noon on the second day his tongue was beginning to swell. He had chipped a pea-sized pebble of adobe off a corner of the sill and that helped a little, keeping it rolling on his tongue, but soon there wouldn’t be enough saliva to work any more.
