by Horst, John
She liked the prospector’s take on it a lot better. She felt grown up, like a grown woman thinking this way. She had free will. She could manipulate her own world as she saw fit. Not be some puppet, a marionette, like the prospector said, with the padres or God or the church holding the strings and making everyone act a certain way.
She suddenly felt energetic, excited. She got up and wiped the dust from her pants. “You are a very smart man!”
He blushed and looked at the fire. “Oh, no ma’am. If I was smart, I wouldn’t be out here, in the middle of nowhere with a mule, looking for bits of rock.”
“You are smart, Mister.” She grabbed him by the hand. “Come with me, Mister. I want to show you something very nice.”
She took him to a spring she had discovered when she was here with Juana. The water bubbled out of the ground hot and further down there were pools that mixed with cooler water. They formed a comfortable warm bath. She stripped down to her underwear; she did not want to distract the man or give him any ideas and she was not interested in anything more than a warm swim in the pool. He smiled and did the same and they were soon swimming together and soaking and Maria could tell that it was good on his old, stiff joints.
She lit a cigar for him and stuck it in his mouth then one for herself and they smoked together and soaked and tried not to fall asleep.
Maria lay back and blew smoke at the clouds and watched the smoke drift away. “Mister, someone once told me that gringos are all assholes.”
The prospector sat up to avoid choking on his smoke. He laughed out loud.
Maria continued. “But you are not an asshole at all.”
“Thank you.” He got himself under control and stopped laughing. He wiped the tears from his eyes. “Ma’am, assholes are everywhere. No one country has cornered the market on ‘em. There’s gringo assholes and Mexican assholes and even Canadian assholes. I’m sure there’s assholes all over Europe. They’re everywhere.”
She thought on that. Of course he was right. She reached over and kissed him on the forehead and then regretted it. He was falling in love with her and she felt sorry because she could not, like with the lady fence, oblige him.
He knew it too and resolved to take a deep breath and wait for the flutter to subside. He leaned back against the silt bank and soaked. “Ma’am, I will tell you, this is living.”
She sold the head to the prospector as he had a use for it and she was tired of carrying it around. He didn’t have much money, so she sold it to him cheap. It did have the gold in the tooth, and that was likely the only gold the fellow was going to get any time soon. He just could not find enough in the region to pay for the expense of extracting it.
She resolved to go and would leave him at the cave. He seemed to like it there and she welcomed him to all she’d done. She smiled at him as she rode away, “Adios, Mister.”
It felt good to tell him to be with God, it didn’t anger Maria so much anymore and she knew it was because of the man that she felt this way. She looked back and could see he was crying and she wanted to stop. She continued on and then did stop and ride back.
“What’s wrong, Mister?”
Tears ran down his face and he rubbed them away with the palms of his hands. He smiled and moved his head from side to side. “Nothing, ma’am, nothing at all. God be with you, ma’am. God be with you.”
Chapter XII: Colonel Charles Gibbs, Esq.
Maria found herself in a lively town that she’d not visited before. She found some Indian women there selling beautiful silver jewelry and decked herself out accordingly. She let them pierce her ears and she got some pretty earrings to go with the bangles on each arm. She looked stunning in her new finery and decided that she would begin collecting pretty ornaments and wear them wherever she went. This would be more confounding to men and would help her maintain the upper hand.
She looked into her mirror and was pleased and thought that she’d better not wear these around the lady fence as that might break her heart further. She felt a little wicked and proud at that thought. Not that she wanted to hurt the lady, but it was a nice feeling to know that someone loved her and desired her so much. She thought about the prospector, too. It was something Maria would have to be careful about from now on. She broke hearts everywhere and she didn’t intend to do that. She didn’t like making good people sad.
She wandered through town and nearly ran into a stately looking man, a gringo with long white moustaches and white hair. He was tanned dark by his time in the Mexican sun and he was dressed impeccably in hunting clothes. He stopped Maria and arrogantly put a hand to her face, then looked at his entourage of fellow hunters.
“My, my, and my New York friends wonder why I love Mexico so much.”
The men all laughed and Maria stood still and looked the man in the eye. She held her face still as he patted her cheek and waited for the men to walk away. She looked back and one of the men sneered and tried to impress his little party by commenting that he didn’t know that Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show was in Mexico. That elicited a great laugh and Maria thought that these men needed a lesson.
They were all in the big saloon eating steak, their horses tied outside. They hired a peon boy to guard the horses and he sat in the shade and dozed and waited for the men to return.
Maria walked up on him and handed him a cigar. “How much are they paying you, muchacho?”
“Un centavo, Miss.”
“Hah.” She looked the horses over and noticed that one had a fancy scabbard with a queer looking rifle in it. It was not like anything Maria had ever seen. She looked back at the boy and smiled and handed him a pile of coins. He looked at them, astonished. It was more money than he’d ever seen.
“Do you know magic, muchacho?”
“No, Miss.”
“Well, it is time you learned. I’ll give you all this money if you disappear. You know how to disappear, don’t you, little one?”
“My mother says I disappear all the time, lady. I know how to disappear.”
Maria smiled. “You are a smart boy. She waved her hands in the air, like a magician. “Poof, boy. Disappear.”
He stood up and held the money in his hand. He began to trot off. “Lady?”
“Yes, my little one?”
“If you ever talk to them,” he pointed at the saloon, “those gringos. Tell them that I said for them to go to hell.” He was gone.
Maria surveyed the horses. They were very fine animals. She wished she could steal them all but knew this was impossible. Instead she walked to each and cut the cinches on every saddle. She took the fancy rifle, scabbard and all, and tied it to her saddle. She mounted up and rode down the street. She turned and, tapping her mount’s sides, got him into a canter, than a full gallop. She pulled her six shooters and fired through the saloon’s windows and kept going. She was gone.
The gringos came after her. They all, every one of them, put a foot in the stirrup and ended up on their backsides in the dusty street with a saddle in their laps. The colonel was red-faced and angry. He’d not yet fired his new rifle, and now it was gone.
Maria rode and laughed and was so happy that she thought she’d burst. The men paid dearly for their little joke and now they’d be paying the harness maker to put new cinches on their saddles. She stopped and pulled out her prize. It was an odd looking contraption. She played about with it and pulled on a handle and made the action open. It had a cartridge in the chamber and she took it out and examined it. It was huge. It was more than twice the size of the bullet her Winchester fired and she wondered at the gun’s power. It had a long brass tube attached to the top of it and this, she surmised, must be some kind of sight. But she couldn’t see through it and the whole thing just made no sense to her. She put it back in the scabbard and looked through the pouch sewn onto it. It held many more bullets. At least she’d have ammunition for the rifle; she just needed someone to show her how it all worked.
She continued riding south. She knew the gringo
s well enough to know they’d not let this go. They’d use her as quarry instead of some silly deer and they’d track her and find her and there’d be no telling what their punishment would be. This pleased her no end. She was excited to be the hare for a change. She was never the hunted and she was keen to match wits with this old American colonel.
She was initially disappointed as it took them two days to get even remotely close to her. She left a trail a blind man could find and she watched with satisfaction as they never got within a mile of her. They were constantly stopping and camping and she was growing bored. She’d have to stop as well, so they could catch up.
She ran them through a great thicket of scrub and mesquite thorns and the posse got torn to pieces. She wasn’t more than thirty yards from them at the time, but they couldn’t even see her. She made certain they could hear her, though, and she taunted them as they cried out like little school girls when the sharp stickers got them.
At one point, she was afraid she’d gone too far. One of the men, the young one who commented about Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, was blubbering, crying and having a little tantrum and Maria actually felt sorry for him. She could hear the pain and frustration and panic in his cries and decided not to do that to them again.
Some of the men fired in the direction of her voice and Maria laughed at them. They couldn’t touch her and were nearly driven mad by her jeers. She was impressed when the colonel made them stop. He did not want the hare killed, only captured. She developed a little respect for him because of that.
She eventually left them to work their way through the little thorn forest and rode quickly to a high spot and watched them from a quarter mile away finally drag themselves through and regroup. They were disoriented until she called out. “Yoo hoo, boys. Over here!” She waved and gave them just enough time to pull their guns. She turned and rode over the hill and out of sight.
Finally, after five days with no progress, the loss of two horses to horrible terrain and not an insignificant amount of skin and blood from many of the gringos, they decided to send a scout out alone. They had a pretty good one. He was a former army scout, a Chiricahua, and he did a good job finding her. Maria watched him from her false camp, she’d made lots of false camps so they could track her, then she’d actually camp a distance away, in the brush where she could ambush anyone who tried to attack her.
The Chiricahua was fascinating. Maria had not seen one before. He was from up north. He was smallish but stout and wore a mix of army and white man’s clothing. He had a scarf tied neatly around his head. He wore a kind of breechclout which would have covered his private parts, yet he also wore trousers. It all looked very odd to Maria. He had soft moccasins on his feet that extended up to his knees. Maria was impressed with him until he dropped his trousers. Nature had called and he defecated near her mock fire ring. She threw a rock and clobbered him and he sprawled on his back, lying in his feces.
She walked up to him and poked him awake with her foot.
He looked around and then spotted Maria and smiled. It was the first time he’d gotten a look at her in a week. She held out a water gourd and he drank. She wet a rag and placed it to the knot she’d raised up on his forehead. She wasn’t worried about him at all, she knew he’d do her no harm or try to take her captive.
Maria smiled as she watched him recover. “And you call yourself an Indian?”
He smiled sheepishly. “You are a good rock thrower.”
She sat down beside him, lit two cigars and stuck one in his mouth. “What’s your name?”
“Joe.”
“Really? I thought you’d have some long Indian name.”
“I do.” He looked at the end of his cigar. He was enjoying it. He pointed off in the distance. “They can’t say it, so I’m Joe.”
She held out her hand. “I am Maria. Welcome to my camp.”
They smoked together a while and Maria went to her horse and dug some mescal out of her saddle bag. She offered it to him. It would make his head hurt less. He thanked her and drank.
“You know, Maria, they will stop chasing you if you give the rifle back.”
“Hah!” She spit on the ground and smiled at Joe. “Anyway, this is too much fun. I don’t want them to stop chasing me. They cried like little girls coming through the stickers. That was more fun than I’ve had in a long time, Joe.”
She regarded him. “I hope you didn’t get hurt.”
He grinned. “I know how to travel in the desert.”
“Well, what do we do now, Joe?”
He wasn’t certain. He couldn’t go back. He’d be dishonored and humiliated. He couldn’t capture her and he didn’t want to, anyway. He hated the colonel. Hated all of the arrogant bastards.
“I know.” Maria grinned. “You will be my hostage, Joe. You can always say that your horse fell and it was on top of you and I was able to capture you. Then you will not have been captured by a woman and your honor will be saved.”
He grinned at the irony of being captured by a woman. It was preposterous even if he had been. He was most certainly her captive.
He looked behind him and doubtfully sniffed the air. “First thing is to get the shit from my back.”
They rode all that day and the next and Maria let Joe keep his guns and big knife. He respected her for that. She slept soundly but every time Joe moved, Maria would raise up, head resting on an elbow. She was a pretty good Indian herself. She’d watch him and determine what had awakened him and then turn on her side and go back to sleep.
As they rode, Joe had a thought. “We could run them through the worst of the Sonoran. We might kill a few that way.”
“I don’t want to kill any of them, Joe.”
He regarded her. He didn’t expect such compassion. She read his mind and shrugged. “I only kill bad men. These men were just rude to me.”
He shrugged. “You have not heard of the Indian Wars.”
They rode on. She took a deep drink and handed her gourd to him. He had another thought. “We could run them across the Rio Grande, way up east, near Matamoros. It’s near the Gulf and I hear there are sharks in the river there.” He bared his teeth and made chomping motions with them.
“What are these sharks?”
He smiled at her and wondered at her innocence. “The great fish with the sharp teeth. The posse would hate that.”
“But they might get killed.” She drank again and then lit two cigars. “Come on, Joe. You are wanting too much blood.”
They rode on and then had to wait for the lumbering posse to catch up. Maria did like Joe’s idea though and turned north. She’d not travel so far east, but she did have some ideas about the Rio Grande.
They’d slept another night as the posse had to bed down again and they didn’t want the hapless men to lose their trail. Maria was getting tired of doubling back to leave enough clues so that they wouldn’t get lost.
She made a fire in a low arroyo and they settled in for the night. Joe had killed a chicken and they added that to their meal.
“Who are all these men so worried over this gun, Joe?”
“Oh, the colonel, you know. He’s a big ass. Was in the Great War, back east where the white men were trying to rub each other out. Then when that was done he came out here to kill Indians.” He poked at a fire and Maria gave him some mescal. “Then there’s the Russian. Kosterlitzky. He’s a rurale and he’s with the colonel. He was having a lot of fun watching the colonel get angry about you. He doesn’t really want to catch you.”
“What’s this Russian?”
“A man from way on the other side of the world. He came here and now he is turning into a Mexican. He’s very odd. Very smart, but very strange. He left his country, they say, because he loves this place so much.” He looked around and wondered how terrible the man’s homeland could possibly be.
Maria lay back on her blanket and regarded Joe. He was good company and he was not a bad looking man. He was tough enough. She noticed him looking at her
differently this past day and was waiting for him to make his move. He didn’t disappoint her and she was impressed with his boldness.
“Why don’t you bed down over here tonight, Maria?” He looked her in the eye.
“Oh, that’s a nice idea, Joe, but no.”
He shrugged. “You don’t rut with Indians?”
She laughed out loud. “Well,” she held up an arm, comparing her complexion to his. “That would be hard to avoid.” She got up and adjusted her blankets. “No, Joe. And it’s not you, I just don’t want to.”
He let it go.
They had to wait nearly until noon to get moving and Maria hated the prospect of traveling in such heat. She’d surely kill some of the gringo posse now and she felt sorry for them. She and Joe traveled north and eventually made it to the Rio Grande. It was swift and deep where they finally crossed and their horses had to work a little to get through the moving water. They made it and rested and dried off on the other side.
Joe mounted up and she knew he was going to leave. She regretted it as she enjoyed his company. “Adios, Joe.”
He was gone.
The posse finally made it to the river and began to cross. They eventually all made it. When the last man was on the bank, and they were all dripping and exhausted and taking inventory of their progress, they heard a voice, way off on the Mexican side. The pretty bandit was waving her sombrero. “Yoo hoo, boys.” She turned and began to ride away. “What are you doing all the way over there?”
Some of the men drew their guns but the colonel ordered them to stop. He raised a white flag and called back. “Please, Señorita, don’t run away. We have something for you.”
