A day’s journey on the back of a burro brought her into Cristo Rey territory. Dressed in men's clothing, she rode clear of the basin, keeping to the lava rock trails that bedded the far eastern side of the Whetstones. Higher up, where the juniper and piñon and scrub oak fuzzed the bald caps, she set up camp in a small abandoned mine.
She had thought she would be frightened, sleeping alone, or uncomfortable, but she enjoyed the challenge. Lying in the cold darkness, she thought about the confrontation the following day would bring and smiled to herself before falling asleep.
Halfway through the next day she discovered that her raids would have to be postponed until she studied the comings and goings from the main mine shaft. She had blundered in thinking that wagons left every day. It took a full seven days, watching through the field glasses from a position on a cliff above the mine, until she was able to establish a definite pattern to the movements of the men and wagons.
Once she thought she could make out Brig below, talking to three miners who wore the candle-sconced helmets, but she could not be sure And she realized, to her surprise, that her heart no longer hurt. Only one thing mattered She might never be able to prove that Cristo Rey was hers, but she would make certain that it became a millstone around the veined neck of Elizabeth Godwin.
Tuesday mornings and Friday afternoons, two or three wagons, hitched together and pulled by ten to twenty teams of mules, left the main mine and began their snaking descent to the Tombstone-Charleston road.
Carefully she studied the way a driver would handle his teams. Usually he rode the near-wheel mule. From his seat in the saddle he managed all the animals by a single jerk line attached to the near leader. The mules understood the jerks, short or long, and were thus guided. In addition to the jerk line, the driver manipulated the brakes of the wagons by another rope. Yet at the end of that first week Jessie thought she could master the technique— enough, at least, to accomplish her purpose.
When she thought she knew as much as was important to her plan of operation, she slid her carbine into the saddle’s holster and left the brush-sheltered mine. With a bandanna covering the lower half of her face, she waited in the second of the mesquite-stubbled canyons through which the wagon had to pass. Long before the two wagons arrived at the bend, she heard the hoarse cursing of the driver mixing with the music of the chiming bells attached to the collars of the mules’ harnesses.
Her throat suddenly went dry, and the pulse began to pound at her temples. She realized she was about to embark on what could well be a disastrous undertaking. Yet she knew there was no alternative for her. It was her karma, as Taro said.
As it turned out, that first robbery was absurdly easy. When the two ore wagons rolled around the bend, she rode the burro out of the mesquite thickets onto the road. The musical “Whoop—whoop, haw!" broke off as the driver, this one an older, stoop-shouldered man, jerked back on the reins at the sight of the masked rider.
"Get down!” she ordered as gruffly as her voice would lower.
The driver’s hands shot up. He slid off the mule as if it were a greased pig. “You don’t plan to use that, do you, kid?” he squeaked.
“Nope, not as long as you keep walking back where you came from. Now get those boots a-movin’.”
The old man hastily complied without even a backward glance, and she felt shame lap at her feet for the fear she had seen in the rheumy eyes. Perhaps he was from the rancheria—one of the people she would have been feeding, ironing and washing his clothes. Her thoughts moved on to Marta. Was the dear old woman still alive? Jessie would never be able to return to the rancheria to find out.
For a moment the triumph was driven from her victory. Nevertheless, she quickly set about her course of action. The mules were unharnessed, and a smart slap on the rump sent them scattering. The brake was released. Slowly, inch by inch, the wagons began to roll forward. A full five minutes passed before they gathered sufficient speed to be termed runaways.
The two wagons, joined like mating cattle, careened their way along the rutted road, bouncing off boulders. They came to the curve bordered by the deep gulch Jessie had marked earlier and missed the turn. Seconds later the splintering crash of the wagons fifty-five feet below echoed up the canyon.
Jessie smiled to herself and returned to the mine to await her next foray. Two days later a lone ore wagon began its descent, but this time with an armed guard. She reassessed her plan and waited until the wagon passed, then fired a shot into the air.
The driver tugged desperately at the reins to keep the mules from spooking. The guard whipped around his shotgun, scanning the thickets behind him.
“Drop the firearm,” she shouted from her concealment.
The sombreroed guard complied. This time she had both men unharness the mules and scatter them before she sent the two employees walking back to the Cristo Rey mining camp. They had to dodge as the wagon began to roll rapidly backward. The bluff it sailed over was a mere twenty-five or thirty feet, but she believed the wagon’s contents, the precious ore, were lost to the swift flowing creek below.
She made two more raids over the next seven days, each time surprising the guards and drivers. But her supplies ran out in concurrence with a sudden instinct urging her to let a few weeks pass until Cristo Rey relaxed its guard once more.
And she needed the time, too. The triumph of her raids faded at night, leaving her lonely, empty; and it was with rising excitement that she rode the day’s journey back to the Mule Mountains and Taro.
He was still working at the mine when she arrived, and she took the opportunity to enjoy her first bath in over two weeks. Imagining how she must look—and smell—dressed as she was like a man, she had to laugh as she shucked the dirt-encrusted clothing and slid into the tub. The hot water steamed away her weariness with the dirt.
Later, the delicate woman wrapped in a yellow silk ceremonial robe who knelt serenely before the kotaku bore little resemblance to the wiry young bandit who plagued the Cristo Rey Consolidated Mining Company. When Taro entered, she bowed her head to the floor, touching her overlapped hands with her forehead and murmured, "O-yasumi-nasai, good evening.”
Taro removed his boots and crossed to the young woman. He took her hands and pulled her to her feet, his own hands cupping her shoulders. His dark eyes glided over her face, always returning to her eyes as if he sought to find her in their depths. “You have been ever on my mind.”
She stood on tiptoe to brush the lips that had showered passionate kisses, bringing life to her body so that it blossomed as a desert flower beneath the spring rains. “I need you," she whispered.
His fingers slipped down to part the robe, exposing her slender, supple beauty to his touch. His hand slid around her waist and crushed her to him in a savage kiss. There was no patient journey to the culmination this time but a frenzied seeking, a fiery explosive renewal of their love.
Taro’s teeth cast tiny love marks into Jessie’s smooth, sleek skin, and her nails welted his muscles in crimson half-moons. They came together again and again throughout the night, as if they would never have enough of each other—as if they feared there might never be another time.
Sometime toward dawn they withdrew from each other’s arms long enough to have tea and a cold dish of rice and vegetables. Over the meal, Jessie recounted to Taro her successes, giggling like a girl as she told of the bearlike driver who had soundly cursed her one moment, then yelped like a dog when she fired a shot into the air to send him galloping on his way back to the mines.
Taro listened, a faint smile on his lips. When she finished, he rose and crossed to the black lacquered chest. He withdrew a folded newspaper. “You went into Tombstone?” she asked, taking the newspaper he handed her.
“My concern was too great. It would seem that Elizabeth Godwin does not share your amusement at your success.”
Jessie’s eyes scanned the print. Then, “Godwin Family Offers $2,000 Reward.” The small article went on to note the bandit’s descri
ption, a young male, and listed two of the four robberies she had made.
She would have tossed the newspaper aside but for the even smaller notation in the “Condolences Column.” Her eyes burned as she read of Brig’s year-old son’s succumbing to some fatal childhood malady. She knew it could have been their child who had died.
“You will destroy Brigham Godwin along with his grandmother,” Taro said. “You realize that, don’t you?”
She shrugged, trying to hide the old hurt she suddenly felt . . . a pain for what was lost to her and Brig, a pain for what could have been. “Brig doesn’t covet Cristo Rey as his grandmother does. She will stop at nothing to keep it. And I will stop at nothing, Taro, to take it from her.”
CHAPTER 41
When Jessie returned to her role as highwayman, her first two robberies were easy enough. Apparently Taro’s strength and love had renewed her. With the two-week interval the miners—and Elizabeth Godwin—must have believed she had disappeared from the area, for the wagons which Jessie watched from her perch on the bluff no longer carried the guard.
She chose a different location each time, and her method worked so well that after three weeks of her relentless attack the ore wagons, with a double guard now, left the mines only once a week.
At night she lay alone in the darkened mine shaft, shivering from the cold, wishing she could build a fire. But that day she had sighted a band of men and knew they were scouring the countryside for her. Hands behind her head, she silently questioned why she continued, why she did not return to the man who gave her the only peace she knew in her life.
But her love for Cristo Rey and her hatred for Elizabeth were bound together as tightly as barbed wire and fence post. She knew she would never be able to claim the land as hers, but when Elizabeth’s gray head was bowed in defeat, then she would cease her attacks. When Cristo Rey went up on the auction block she could return forever to the haven of Taro’s arms.
With the guard now doubled, she knew she had to be more resourceful, more careful. She chose the next site of her attack at a most unlikely place—clear of the canyons on the open range. It would be there the driver and guards would be most lax.
She waited at the bottom of a draw that angled near the road. As she had foreseen, one of the guards had even propped his shotgun, butt down, on the wagon floorboard. The other guard had his shotgun lying carelessly across his knees.
Her plan went smoothly, the guards yielding their firearms— and boots—and, cursing her, beginning the long walk back to the Whetstones and the mines. Disposing of the wagonload presented more of a problem this time. Though not as strong as the driver, she was able to manage the mules and maneuver them off the main road. She drove for perhaps three hours across the range. She judged that initially the wagon’s trail would be easy enough to follow. But once far enough away from the road there would be other wagon tracks crisscrossing the grass—those of the Indians who did not keep to the main road of the white man’s civilization.
By late afternoon she was whipping the four-mule team wagon into the small but wild outlaw hideout of Charleston. She joined the other ore wagons that crossed the bridge to the stamp mill. Its stacks belched great plumes of gray smoke twenty-four hours a day. When it came her turn for her wagon’s ore to be dumped into the hopper, she pulled her sombrero down low and mumbled to the smelter superintendent a fictitious name.
“The Hellhole Mining Company?” the potbellied man asked, his pencil poised over the notebook. “Never heard of it.”
“We’ve just started up.”
“Well,” he grunted, “give me a box number where your payment can be mailed.”
She rattled off some box number with a Tombstone destination and hurried away. The sight draft would sit in the Tombstone post office’s dead-letter box for months, with any sort of luck.
Over the week that followed she was both triumphant and wary. Not one wagonload of ore left the mine. Once she walked close enough to view the mine through her field glasses. Work was still going on, but with fewer men. She would wait for the next wagon out, she decided. The loss of its ore should be enough to break Elizabeth Godwin.
For this last robbery she was most meticulous in her planning. She dressed in her old skirt and blouse and the sombrero. The driver and the guards would not be expecting a woman. Her face she left uncovered, judging that the floppy hat would make it difficult to later identify her accurately. It should be the easiest of all her forays.
She waited just beyond the site of her first attack, her carbine hidden in the folds of her skirt. Within minutes after stationing herself on the road, the chimes of mules’ harness bells could be heard. The wagon rumbled over the porcupine ridge into view. At once the two armed guards snapped up their shotguns into position. In spite of the fact that she was a woman, both kept the sights trained on her until they pulled alongside. The Mexican driver, a short stocky man with yellow-brown teeth, whistled, and the guards grinned when they saw the pretty face.
The guard closest to her spit a brown stream of tobacco juice into the dust and said, “You’re on the right road, miss, if you're headed for Tombstone, but you oughtta be a sight more careful. There's a bandit working this road.”
She dimpled a smile. “I’m visiting the McPherson ranch and somehow got lost. Can you tell me how to find my way back?” His wariness allayed, the nearest guard sat his shotgun down and pointed to the northeast. “Just keep to that dirt path veering off over them hills there, ma’am. You can't miss it.”
At that moment her carbine came up from the fold of her skirts. She smiled again. “Thank you, gentlemen. Now, all three of you will toss your guns over the side—and your boots, too. Please.”
The trio uttered gasps at the realization that this dainty female was the bandit. Amazingly, no words were exchanged as they grunted and groaned in removing their boots. The two guards climbed down from the wagon in obvious disgust, but the driver said, “Guess you’ve duped us, señorita. But one day—pronto— your pretty neck’s gonna swing at the end of a hangman’s noose. ”
She repressed a shiver. It was not what the Mexican said, but the way he said it, the certainty, that suddenly frightened her.
She told herself she must not let him shake her and proceeded with her usual plan, dispatching the men on the hike back up the hilly road. When they were too far away to be of danger, she boarded the wagon, only to hear the sudden drum of hooves. She whirled to see a dozen or so men descending on her in a flurry of dust. Her hand went to the shotgun on the floorboard, and a shot rang out, its whoosh sizzling past her ear.
Instantly she knew there was no hope of holding the posse off. She crouched low in the wagon seat and snapped the lines over the mules. Their ears pricked up and they broke out into a trot—a slow one. hampered by the wagon’s load.
Too soon the men drew closer. She realized it was stupid to try to outrun the horses. Her shoulders drew back in a surge of pride, and she tugged on the reins, pulling the mules to a halt. She drew a shuddering breath and turned to face her enemies. A dozen guns trained on her as the posse cantered up to the wagon.
Two men rode forward, one wearing the badge of Tombstone’s new U.S. marshal, John Slaughter—who had replaced Wyatt Earp. The other wore a brown Stetson, but she recognized him immediately. “Brig!” she breathed.
For a moment he did not say anything. His gaze moved disbelievingly over her face. He reined in next to the wagon and lifted the hat from her head. Her wild golden curls tumbled over her shoulders. “Oh, God,” he rasped. "Why, Jessie?”
She met his tortured gaze. “You need to ask?”
"String her up now!” a voice in the posse shouted.
Hands grabbed for her, yanking her down from the wagon. Her head cracked against the sideboard. Simultaneously she felt the sharp pain along with the warm blood that streamed down the side of her face.
“Wait!” Brig's command was lost among the babble of the men. A gunshot went off, and all turned toward the marshal. �
��This here is no lawless vigilante committee," the sun-leathered man said.
She shook loose the hands that held her arms and looked up into Brig's face as he came to support her.
“You’re not setting her free?" a cowboy demanded heatedly. Several men stepped forward with bellicose snarls, only to face the sight of the rifle Brig trained on them.
“No,” Slaughter said, coming to stand at the other side of her. “But she will have a fair trial.”
Her gaze swung back up to Brig’s face, and she saw there the same great sadness she felt for what might have been.
Jessie sat in the courtroom, handcuffed. She stared about her at the rabid faces who had come to see her trial, all hoping to see the first hanging in the territory of a woman.
There were so many faces, yet she felt as if she knew each of them intimately after the three days of testimony . . . damaging testimony. There was the old man on the jury who looked to be at least seventy-five and who sat whittling each day, never once looking up. Only that morning, as the testimonies reopened, she realized he was carving a hangman's gallows. There was the fat woman who brought a picnic lunch each day so that she would not miss getting a front row seat. There were the many righteous faces that became more indignant as each witness took the stand.
And there was Elizabeth Godwin, who sat in the back, dressed all in black. Her Victorian-proper face was starched with her noble long-suffering. Beside her sat the vividly beautiful Fanny and a granite-cast Brig.
Each day as the deputy led Jessie from the jailhouse into the courtroom, it was Brig's face she sought. Only his face held out hope. Her eyes would meet his, and she would see a spasm of the muscle in the jaw.
This morning would bring the last of the prosecutor's witnesses. Jessie had hoped that Brig would testify in her behalf, but the small, balding lawyer told her it would be out of the question— not just because Brig's own grandmother was bringing the charges against her but also because his testimony could be made damaging by only a few adroit questions from the brilliant prosecutor, brought all the way from New Orleans by Elizabeth Godwin.
Deep Purple Page 28
