Ahead of her, she heard noise. A voice! Gordon’s. “Gordon!” she cried.
“Stay where you are!” he shouted back.
ARE. Are. are.
Her torch’s light chose to die at that moment. It flickered once more, then was gone. Dank, cold darkness closed in on them. “Albert! Another cactus!”
The stalk prodded her shoulder. She could hear her son’s breathing. It was rapid and shallow. He was as frightened as she. Where was Bingham? “Bingham?”
“I’m here,” he said, coming up from behind. “You got a match, Mattie?”
She fumbled for her pouch, found its drawstring, and sank her hand inside. By touch, she felt amid the various articles for the phosphorous matches and found one. “Hold the stalk close, Albert.”
Soon, a light spread among their three terrified faces. They looked at one another in open acknowledgment of their fear. Bingham voiced it. “The ceiling’s too high for us to follow the smoke.”
She didn’t want to acknowledge the hopelessness of their situation. “Let’s find Gordon and Diana.” Ahead, she glimpsed formations. Stalagmites? No. What she had seen was a sad, subterranean chapel, where miners had prayed for their lives to be spared. Its gilded Virgin was encased for all time in calcium-carbonate deposits.
She scurried past. Hurried along a vaulted catacomb. It emptied into a cavern where her torch light was all but lost. On the cavern’s far side, beyond a field of inverted icicles, was another pool of light. Gordon’s.
She, Albert, and Bingham negotiated the obstacle course of stalagmites. The three drew ever closer to what appeared to be two figures. Gradually, she could hear Gordon.
He was talking in a low, coaxing voice that shook slightly. “Diana, no one need ever know what happened.”
“No. I am damaged goods. Do you think I would return to a society that would scorn a Diana Ashley?”
“You can start over somewhere else.”
Mattie and the others were close enough now to see the drama being played out. Gordon was at one end of a rope bridge. It swayed with every cautious step he took.
On the other side of the chasm spanned by the bridge, Diana was pressed flat against a moisture-sheened rock wall. She seemed to be unwilling to move any farther along a ledge that sloped upward into the darkness. “There is no place left for me!” she cried out. “Can’t you see, Gordon? I have been defiled!”
“Listen to me, Diana! What Nantez did to you only changed you if you let it be so.”
He took another step along the suspension bridge. It wobbled wildly. His free hand gripped the rope support. He never looked down but kept his gaze fixed on Diana. “Nantez can’t defile your spirit! Do you understand what I am trying to tell you?”
“I can’t endure myself!” Her beautiful face was a study of tortured agony. Tears spilled over her cheeks. “I can’t endure this world! I can’t endure the people in it!”
“Time will change your—”
The rest of his words never got past his lips, for suddenly, without further warning, she jumped.
“Diana!” Gordon screamed. He dropped his torch. It fell so far down that not even a hiss rose from the water.
Mattie ran to the chasm’s edge. Far below, the river had swallowed up the human offering as the green brew disappeared into the darkness.
Gordon had reached the bridge’s far side. He knelt there, his hands over his face, his shoulders heaving. Mattie started across the bridge. Holding the torch, she had only her left hand to steady her as she picked her way across the rotting planks.
Behind her, Albert and Bingham followed. The bridge swayed precariously, and she gasped. She couldn’t get to the other side quickly enough. When she did, she collapsed to her knees beside Gordon and wrapped a free arm around him.
He dropped his hands. His face was wet.
“There was nothing ye could do. Diana made her choice.”
“I know.” His voice was like the rustle of autumn leaves. “But why couldn’t she have chosen otherwise?” Behind her, she heard a sizzling. She looked around and saw that Bingham was using his torch to set fire to the rope bridge. “The heathens won’t be following us now.”
They had literally burned their bridges. She could only hope that the chamber on this side of the subterranean river had an outlet to the top. “Let’s get moving before we run out of torches.”
Gordon nodded, rose, and took the torch from her. “I am in what Diana’s mother would call ‘my milieu.’ I spent more of my time in the dark than I did sunlight. Now I’m ready to leave the dark. Forever.”
The ledge widened into a path, and the ceiling lowered, so that it was easier to follow the smoke, most of which was coming off the remaining torch that Gordon held. At some points, the chiseled trail was steep and slippery. Mattie, third in line, could barely keep her footing.
The light of their last torch burned low. She glanced up at it, then out into the gaping darkness beyond its perimeter. At least, the torch’s thin wisp of smoke still curled along, as if pulled by a draft. Surely, there was an exit ahead.
Her skin felt damp and moldy, and goose bumps prickled her flesh. Diana’s death leap would be a horrible image in her mind forever.
Then her sight went as black as her thoughts. The torch. It had gone out!
“Damn!” Gordon said. “Now what?”
Closer to her, Bingham said, “We pray.”
Her eyes played tricks on her. At first she thought that the pinprick of light was the after-image of the torch glow. However, as she moved slowly forward, the circle widened. The light came from a hole in the cavern’s ceiling.
Ahead of her, Bingham intoned, “‘Behold, bless the Lord, all servants of the Lord, who serve by night in the house of the Lord!’ God is merciful!”
“Daylight!” Gordon said.
Drawing near that warm circle of light, Mattie felt as a soul must when it leaves the corpse and enters God’s endless presence. The sight spurred her footsteps. A rickety rope ladder seemed to climb up, up, far upward into a small crack in the cosmos.
Albert reached the ladder first. He put his foot on the bottom rung. It splintered like a toothpick.
“Rotten,” Bingham said. In the mass of his beard, his mouth curled downward. “I bet it’s as old as Jacob’s Ladder. The ropes will probably crumble to dust.”
“The bridge’s rope held,” she said.
“You go first, kid,” Gordon said. “It may hold your weight. Then you, Mattie.”
She knew the two men could only hope that the ladder would sustain their heavier weights when their turns came.
She watched Gordon give her son a boost up to the second rung. Her eyes followed the boy as he ascended the rungs easily. The ladder swayed, but the wooden slats held. Within minutes, Albert blended with the blue of sky, then was gone from view.
“You next, Mattie.” Gordon put his hands around her waist and lifted her until she could get footing in the first solid rung.
She tucked her revolver into her waistband and climbed rapidly. Out of fear. If she let herself think, if she paused and looked down, she was lost.
The higher she climbed, the more the rope swayed. Even looking up was dizzying. Suddenly, a rung cracked beneath her left foot. She slipped and clutched the rope sides. Her revolver fell from her waistband and a moment later thudded on the ground not a yard from Bingham’s boots.
Her grip was sweaty. She slid only a few inches, but the ropes burned her palms. Still, she held fast.
When her heart quit pounding, she blindly felt around with her foot for a stable rung. She found one, then started climbing again.
When she could feel the warmth of daylight on her face, she began smiling. The hole turned out to be as large as a room.
At last, she emerged into the upper world. Calling Albert’s name, she started hauling herself up over the rock ledge to which the ladder was anchored.
That was when she saw Nantez’s vermilion-and- black war-painted face and torso.
<
br /> § CHAPTER EIGHTEEN §
Mattie started to scream, and Nantez’s hand clamped down over her mouth. Over his smothering, stinking hand, her gaze darted around, glimpsed only three other Apaches. All were wearing war paint. He must have posted the others at the mine’s main entrance.
She kicked and pummeled, aiming behind her for his shins and crotch, but, held before him as she was, she was virtually helpless.
He hauled her down a pebbly slope toward a clump of cottonwoods, where Indian ponies foraged among the meager plants fighting for subsistence. He thrust her amid the horses, which danced out of the way.
Only then did she see Albert. He was struggling with a warrior, who had gagged his mouth with a red flannel rag and was trying to restrain his thrashing hands.
Nantez leaned toward her. His eyes were bright with malice beneath the Neanderthal ridge that hooded them.
She knew he wasn’t going to kill her. Not yet, anyway. He would want to savor her death. So when he cuffed her on the jaw, she crumpled to the ground, as if unconscious. It was a trick she had learned early on in her captivity.
The blow hurt like hell. She wondered if she had lost any teeth.
He was already loping back to the cavern hole to intercept the next climber. She wiped away the blood that trickled from her nose and scrambled to her feet. Albert’s captor was busy, binding Albert with a rope.
Nantez and two more warriors squatted on their haunches around the hole. Grinning in anticipation, Nantez waited for his next victim.
“Gordon!” she screamed out in warning. With her knife drawn from the sheath at her thigh, she charged toward Nantez.
He must have heard her coming, or maybe the warrior across from him had seen her and given a signal. Whatever, Nantez sprang upward and easily dodged her lunging knife. At the same time, he backhanded her with a fist that brought blood streaming from her nose.
He laughed.
She despised him at that moment so much that a fiery pit of volcanic anger erupted inside her. It was as if Mount Etna rumbled.
Before she could make another move, Albert darted between them. His face was red with fury, and the bandanna that had gagged him hung around his neck like a noose. “No!” he shouted at his father and rained punches at his stomach.
For an instant, there was surprise in Nantez’s expression. Then ruthless purpose set his malevolent features in stone. He grabbed Albert’s little fist and jerked the boy to one side.
That one side-step took Albert to the rim of the hole. There was no where he could move now. He did a circus rope-walker’s dance of balancing, arms flung wide, hands clutching at the air.
All this happened in less than a second. In that same second, Mattie lunged past Nantez, reached for Albert, caught her son’s fringed shirt.
Then the fringe tore away!
She screamed and latched onto his hand as it was slipping through her sweaty fingers. She felt the weight of his body tugging her with him.
With a strength that could come only from desperation, she threw her weight to one side, yanked hard, and collapsed half atop him at the rim’s edge.
Beneath her, below Albert’s head, she glimpsed Bingham rapidly climbing the ladder toward them and farther down, Gordon waited at the bottom. The juxtaposition of the three was enough to make her dizzy.
Next, she heard her son’s grunt of pain from a kick delivered by Nantez. She felt Albert slipping on the loose gravel around the rim’s edge. Her hands scrambled for anchorage to support both her and her son.
She heard Nantez laugh again. That maniacal laugh combined with his attack on Albert . . . she was renewed with a frenzied energy she didn’t know she was capable of possessing.
She rolled to one side and sprang upright, knife in hand. Again he laughed. He was so certain of himself, so cocky.
“The field mouse would nip the heel of the jaguar?”
She didn’t bother to reply to his taunt. She thrust out her knife and charged forward in a drive that took him by surprise.
Unhindered by shame, she felt something light burble inside her. She recognized it as satisfaction. No amount of self-lecturing about the baseness of her nature could dissuade her from making that final thrust that would disembowel him.
He stepped aside . . . tottered on the rim.
She had staggered with the force of her drive. From where she had fallen on all fours, panting, she looked up at him through her mess of hair. He was doing a balancing act. His short, powerful arms flailed. She saw in his eyes that same wild, disbelieving, desperate glaze that could be found in the black eye of a landed trout.
Quicker than thought could flash, her free hand clamped onto his thick wrist. Tugged terribly. In that one moment, she might have saved him . . . but for his greasy war paint. With what seemed to her glacial slowness, his wrist . . . his palm . . . his fingers slipped through hers. Like an autumn leaf, he fell away. His bellow echoed so loudly surely her ears would shatter. Then . . . silence.
Across the hole, knife still in hand, she stared with eyes as hot and harmful as a branding iron at the two remaining Apaches. Cautiously, they rose. Gazes still locked on her, they backed away toward the grazing horses. Then they turned, ran, leaped on two, and rode off as if a witch-woman was after them.
She laughed so she would not cry. And laughed. And laughed.
* * *
The adobe buildings of Fort Bowie could be seen from a southeastern bluff of the Chiricahua Mountains. The Stars and Stripes drooping from the post staff represented the completion of an arduous ten-day descent into Mexico.
And descent into our own private hells, Mattie thought. For hours after she had killed Nantez, she had been filled with a remorse that had isolated her from Albert, Gordon, and Bingham.
“Stop ruminating, gal,” Bingham said, riding up beside her. “What you did back there was the Hand of God.”
Her smile was wan. “So, ’tis gone from Whore to Hand of God, has it, Bingham? No, me killing Nantez was not the Hand of God. Sometimes, we do things without thinking. And then we live with them. That’s all.”
Gordon detoured to the post sutler’s store only long enough to cash a voucher drawn on Wells Fargo in Tucson for her and Bingham.
Could you come to love someone in a mere ten days? Mattie wondered. After all that had happened, the ten days seemed like ten years.
The Fourth Cavalry band practiced “Auld Lang Syne,” and Company A drilled on the post parade ground as Bingham, Mattie and her son trotted their spent mounts past. Fourteen miles ahead was Bowie Station, where Mattie spent the first of her fifteen hundred dollars.
Bowie Station was a railroad town, so new that the lumber had that fresh pine scent. Even the boardwalks were still yellow and resinous. The four weary travelers tied their horses to the one hotel’s hitching post and sought rooms to clean up.
Her nine-year-old had little desire for a bath and immediately afterward was off to explore the scattering of buildings around the depot.
She, on the other hand, spent an inordinate amount of time at her bath. Settling back into the steaming water with a sigh that was close to a statement of bliss, she lit up a cigarette. Her last one. Forever. This time she meant it. FOREVER!
Too soon, she had to desert the bath. The east-bound train was due in less than an hour. Not that she would be on it. She had paid for a room for the night since she didn’t want to start the trip west back to Tucson by horseback this late in the day.
When she was at last dressed, in clothes that were less than clean, she sought out a bench in the shade of the station’s eaves. Only Albert was there, walking the rails, his arms stretched out to balance him. She didn’t doubt that his father’s death affected him more than he showed. She could only hope that it was true that children were resilient. With his hair slicked back, she almost didn’t recognize him.
In turn, he stared at her with rounded eyes.
She felt nervous. “Get off the track afore the train flattens ye like a johnnyca
ke.”
Eyes still clamped on her, he did as she bade him and joined her on the bench.
With its back to the town and the mountains, the depot looked out over wooden ties and an empty treeless valley. In the distance, a dust devil whirled.
The afternoon was so quiet that if she listened intently, she thought she could actually hear the cholla and ocotillo withering in the boiling sunlight.
She glanced up to see Bingham coming down the platform. Sweat glistened above his beard, which was freshly trimmed. She forestalled whatever he might say by asking, “Well? Now that you’ve claimed your reward, is it off to that gold mine of yours?”
He eyeballed her as if she were The Annunciation and shook his head. As if making up his mind to make no comment on her appearance, he instead spit on the plank platform and said only, “I’ve seen enough mines to last a lifetime.”
“Mother?”
She looked down at Albert, sitting beside her on the bench. “I don’t want to go back to school.”
“Ye have to.”
“The Netdahe children don’t.”
She sighed. “The Anglo children do.”
“I can’t be in both the Netdahe camp and the Anglo town,” he said in a very mature tone.
She was too tired to explain that he would have to see value in both Anglo and Indian ways before fusing them into something unique for himself. He had already come so far.
With the reward money put toward a good education for both Albert and her, who knew? Mayhap, as old Sam Kee had often suggested, she could get her medical degree at the college that was being opened in Tucson.
“I’ll head on out, now,” Bingham said. “I want to get a good start before sundown.”
“A good start for where?” she asked.
He smiled at her. The smile was like a benediction. “There’s a church that needs restoring back in Cusarare. And a flock that needs a shepherd.”
And an Indian woman waiting. Mattie chuckled aloud. “Good-bye, William.”
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