“Do they sleep with you?”
He hesitated. But he was still trembling, his face hot and flushed with desire. He turned and spoke in the Pueblo tongue, quickly, gutturally. The stolid guards walked toward the door. The two caciques got up and followed the guards out, closing the door behind them.
Breathing stertorously, Villapando released her and strode to one of the colchones rolled against the wall. He jerked it open and flopped it across the floor, looking expectantly at her.
She hesitated. Where was Amado? They had promised. An angry light filled his eyes at her hesitation, and he straightened above the mattress.
“If this is another one of your conspiracies, Teresa—”
“Not hers, exactly, Governor,” Augustín Gomez said.
Both Villapando and Teresa whirled toward the voice. Gomez had opened the narrow door in the corner of the room and stood in it, swaying a little, still drunk. There was a big Spanish pistol in his hand, pointed at Villapando.
“Stand there,” Gomez said. “Make no sound. It means your life.”
He stepped into the room and Innocent followed, scurrying to bar the door that led into the council chamber. Then Amado entered, followed by the trader O’Brien, and Ryker and Vic Jares. Villapando was trembling with rage and still was unable to believe it.
“You couldn’t get in,” he said. “The guards—”
“They know when it is time to look the other way,” Amado said, with a sly smile. “For a handful of pesos the sentry outside your office contrived to be off duty when Innocent crawled through one of the windows and admitted us.”
A last man entered the office door, closing it softly behind him. Teresa stared blankly at him, as shocked as Villapando. It was Don Tomas Biscara.
The flickering candlelight drew dark shadows into his lean, goateed face. His handsome blue velvet breeches and gilt-frogged chaqueta were torn and dusty and there was a fresh scar across his high-domed brow. His first sight of Teresa brought a vindictive gleam into his satanic eyes.
“It seems we are fated, señorita,” he said sardonically.
Villapando’s voice sounded squeezed from him. “Biscara, this is treason—”
“On the contrary,” Biscara answered. “It is escape. My good friends arranged to get me out of your dungeons. They thought I could convince you it was time to abdicate.”
At Amado’s nod Innocent had begun pulling the high backed chairs around the heavy pine table at one side of the room. Gomez waved his pistol at the table, smiling tipsily.
“Come, amigo. We will have a meeting.”
Villapando’s hands were closed into fists. He stared at the pistol, little muscles bunching along the bony ridge of his jaw. He looked at the door. Then, with a frustrated curse, he walked to the table and took a seat at its head. The others moved to follow. Biscara bowed with mock gallantry as he passed Teresa. Amado stopped beside her a moment, muttering:
“Do not fear. He is one of us now. He will not harm you.”
All the men took chairs around the table, even Innocent. Ryker told Teresa to listen at the main door and warn them if she heard anything indicating trouble. She moved over to the barred oak portal. The Assembly was still arguing vociferously outside, making so much noise that she was sure the guards could not hear the conversation in the chamber.
Gomez unfolded a big sheet of greasy paper and laid it before Villapando. “This is a muster roll of Perea’s forces. You will see that he has three times the forces Governor Carbajal had. They are marching on Santa Fe right now.”
“We will defeat him,” Villapando said.
“And the Esquadron de Vera Cruz?”
“That is only rumor. I have seen no proof that they are coming.”
“Then see it,” Gomez said. He looked at Biscara and the don pulled another paper from his jacket pocket.
“Something your bribones overlooked when they trapped me in Las Vegas,” Biscara said. “As head of the remaining Centralists here, I have been in contact with Colonel Esquivel since the first signs of this uprising. This is his last communication with me—a promise that the Vera Cruz Squadron would march north at the first word of insurrection.”
Biscara shoved the order to Villapando. The governor was not literate enough to read it all, but he could make out the salient phrases, the signature of Colonel Esquivel. Teresa saw the blood slowly seep out of his face, leaving the cheeks a sallow, putty color.
Gomez shoved a third sheet of paper toward him, an imposing document covered with handwritten flourishes and bearing a handsome seal. “There is only one way to save yourself, Villapando. Sign this abdication. Choose a successor who will declare for the central government. We have gained what we wish anyway. The corruption has been swept out, a native will be governor, we will have representation in the Republic—”
“No!” Villapando struck the table so hard it jumped. “We have none of that yet. The central government has given us no recognition. An alliance with Texas is our only salvation—”
“It will mean the end of us,” Ryker said. “They’ll swallow us up.”
“And rob you of every privilege you bribed Carbajal to gain,” Villapando said. “I know the stake you American traders have in this. I know the fortune you stand to lose with a governor in the Palace you cannot bribe or control.”
Gomez said thickly, “We offer you a chance to save your life. When the Esquadron de Vera Cruz gets here you will be sent to Mexico City in chains.”
“They will not take this city!”
Ryker sat straight, shoving aside his cinnamon bear coat. “This is your final answer?”
“It is. I will not make deals with a bunch of traitors. I will not abdicate.” Villapando turned, calling for the sentries. “Guardias, guardias—”
The gunshot was like an explosion of thunder in the room. The very walls seemed to rock. Villapando remained on his feet for an instant, like a puppet hung in midair, his eyes blank with shock. Then, with the first blood pumping from the hole over his heart, he collapsed.
For a timeless second afterward, the men sat about the table, staring in surprise, in shock, in disbelief at the fallen man. All of them had at least one hand in the black shadows of their laps or underneath the table. It was impossible for Teresa to tell which one had shot.
As the first shock dissipated, she realized that the hubbub of voices had ceased from beyond the door. Then it started again. Someone banged on the door, calling:
“Gobernador, Gobernador—”
The shout galvanized the men around the table into action. Amado was the first to jump up, knocking his chair over. He looked wildly at Gomez, at Teresa. She saw that his pistol was in his belt.
“This is insanity,” he shouted. “What can we do?”
As the others jammed their chairs back, jumping to their feet, all beginning to shout at once, Teresa crossed to Amado, dragging him toward the office door. She knew she had to think quickly and clearly.
“Get to Perea,” she hissed. “He must be very near the city. Tell him to enter immediately.”
“He’ll have me shot—”
“You fool, I told him you are a Centralist.”
He gaped at her. “You what?”
“There’s no time to explain. Simply believe. You are the hero, declaring a counter revolution, returning at the head of your triumphant army to save your people. Perea will accept you with open arms. Now—if you want to save your neck—go!”
He gaped at her. But the door was groaning and giving beneath the battering of a dozen men. The council chamber beyond it was a riot of shouts and yells. And Ryker was leading the group around the table in a rush for the back way out. Teresa and Amado had reached it first, however, and he wheeled and plunged through. She slammed it shut behind him. The key was in the lock; she turned it and sn
atched it out and darted across the room just as Ryker reached the door. He wheeled toward her, mouth gaping.
She stood with her back against the wall, the key clenched in her sweating palm. In those first few moments she’d had no time for anything but dealing with Amado. Yet, from the first second after the shot, she had realized how this affected her. And it had filled her with a bitter, steadily growing rage that spilled out of her now.
There was blood on her hands. She had been their tool, luring Villapando into this. They had planned the murder from the beginning, if Villapando would not accede to their demands. And they had used her to bring it about.
But it ended there. She spat at them like a cat. “I was the last person seen with him. If you leave now I’ll be branded a murderess whether I go with you or not.”
Ryker came at her. “Don’t be a fool. We’ll get you out of the country—”
“You’ll stay!” She eluded his grasping hands, darting to the other side of the room. The others started to spread out, circling to trap her. She glanced desperately at the main door. It could not stand the battering much longer. Its planks cracked under a new surge. She had to shout to be heard above the tumult. “You’ll stay and face this with me. If you run, it will be murder to the world.”
Gomez stopped, swaying drunkenly. “Maybe she’s right. They executed Governor Carbajal. That’s all this was. We were merely instruments of the government, saving the people from the tyranny of a rebel despot.”
Biscara smiled cynically at him. “Then you admit it was your pistol.”
“I admit nothing of the sort—”
“What does it matter?” shouted Ryker. He pulled one of his Ketland-McCormicks, pointing it at Teresa. “I’ll give you three seconds to hand over that key.”
There was another smashing blow against the door. Adobe crumbled and the bottom hinge pulled free of the wall. The door gaped, dangling on its top hinge and its lock. One more blow would have it open. Teresa smiled bitterly at Ryker.
“You’d better save your gun for the Indians. If you can’t hold them off till Perea comes, they’ll kill us all.”
12
Winter was coming early the country. In the mountains a hundred and fifty miles north of Santa Fe the rabbits were already turning from brown to white so they would be invisible in the snow—the young ducks swam in squadrons on the ponds waiting for the first storm—the dawn skies echoed to the honking wedges of southward flying geese.
It was a lonesome sound. It was a lonesome country. But it was a country where a man could breathe deep and spread his elbows and own the whole sky if he wanted. Kelly Morgan wanted. In these mountains he had discovered a kind of freedom he had never found in the river towns of the Mississippi or even the frontier vastness of Texas. He’d been hunting for something all his life and now he’d found it, even though he couldn’t put a name on it.
They trapped all through October and into November, moving north all the time. It was sometime in mid-November when they pitched their sixth camp north of Taos in a nameless valley somewhere in the Sangre de Cristos. It was their custom for one to tend camp while the other two were on their traplines. That first morning in the new camp, Kelly and Saunders took their trapsacks and rode into timber, separating as soon as they found water. Kelly moved upstream a mile before he found sign. It was a newly felled cottonwood. No bark had been cleaned off so he allowed it had been cut for a dam instead of food. Beavers were mighty sensitive critters and the sound of a horse stamping or its casual snort might send them packing. So Kelly tethered his roan in timber high above the stream and hiked back down with his rifle and trapsack.
A hundred feet above the felled cottonwood he found the slide. This was the path used by the beavers to ascend the bank, a muddy trough worn slick as bear grease by the fat little rumps of kit beavers sliding back down after they made their cuttings.
From his sack he got a LeCroix trap. He cut a foot long stake from a young willow and drove it into the sandy creekbed at the foot of the slide. Then he attached the trap by its chain and sank it beneath the surface. If a caught beaver tried to swim away he could only go the length of the chain and there the weight of the trap would drown him in deep water.
A woodpecker’s staccato tattoo broke out somewhere on his flank and Kelly straightened with a jerk. He stared around him at the shadowed, gurgling creek, wondering at his jumpiness.
Slung on Kelly’s shoulder belt was an elkhorn phial of beaver medicine, a noxious mixture made from the musk of a male beaver and nutmeg and whisky. A man who used it couldn’t wash its powerful stink off from one end of the season to the other, but it had a strong attraction for the beavers. Rubbing this bait on another peg, he drove it into the sandy shore just above the trap.
Then he moved on downstream. It took him a good part of the day to locate the rest of the sign and empty his trapsacks. He planted the last one below a dam. He was just splashing on the medicine when the single echoing flap of a beaver tail upstream made him straighten again. The beavers were strange, gregarious creatures. They lived in clans and built bridges and lodges together and warned each other when danger was near by slapping their flat tails on the water.
The noise came again, not just one slap now, but a whole volley, echoing down the timber aisles like the applause of some giant audience.
Fast as he moved, Kelly made no sound. Heedless of the man-scent he left now, he lunged up the bank and ran flat-footed for the nearest screen of brush. He was loading as he ran. With a deft flip he opened his powder horn and tilted a measure of glistening black Dupont into the charge-cup hanging to the bottom. This he dumped into the muzzle of his rifle. Without lost motion he slid open the brass trap-cover on the side of the gunstock and snatched out a greased linen patch, jamming it onto the half-ounce ball he slipped from his shot pouch. He pulled his hickory rod from its fittings beneath the gun and rammed patch and ball down the full length of the Hawkins barrel.
By the time he was pulling out his ramrod he was flat on his belly in a thick screen of chokecherry, ready to fire.
He lay there in the chill shadows with the forest utterly silent about him. This was a common occurrence when trapping in Indian country. If it was Cheyenne they might be hunting, but if it was Blackfeet they might be after scalps.
Finally he put his ear to the earth and felt the faint tremor of many hoofs. It was what had startled the beavers. It seemed to come from upstream and he watched till he finally saw them, like shadows moving through the cottonwoods. There were three white men, dressed like trappers. Two of them were herding a dozen pack animals loaded with empty apishamores. The third was leading Kelly Morgan’s roan.
Kelly waited till they were twenty feet away. Then he said, “You kin stop right there. I got you dead to rights.”
They pulled up sharply, looking around in consternation. The man leading the roan put a tight rein on his fiddling horse and sang out.
“Who are you?”
“The man what owns that horse,” Kelly answered.
The leader relaxed in his saddle. He was tall by any standards, narrow enough to dive down a Jake Hawkins barrel, dressed in a rotten shirt of antelope hide and age-yellowed buckskin britches. He had a jumptrap jaw and beadlike eyes and when he smiled it made him look like a fox.
“You give us a scare,” he said. “I’m Vic Jares and we’re a party o’ free trappers. How about showing yourself?”
“How about lettin’ go o’ the roan?”
Jares glanced at the roan, grinned again, ruefully. “It’s yours. We found it hitched up high. Didn’t know if you’d lost your hair to some Injuns or what.”
It didn’t satisfy Kelly. But he was convinced this was all of the party, and stood up, rifle pointed at them across his hip. He stepped out of the thicket without crackling a twig. Jares indicated his two companions.
“Wingy Hollis
ter and George Quinn,” he said.
Hollister was a one-armed man, seven ax handles wide, with a ruddy face, unctuous as a deacon. He wore the inevitable shoulder belt laden with the endless assortment of trapper’s tools, and at the very bottom of the belt, within easy reach of his swinging hand, was a Mandan tomahawk. He bowed his head and addressed Kelly with a voice like a tolling bell.
“My blessings, brother. May the sun always shine upon your hearth.”
George Quinn was a burly Irishman, bald as an egg. He scratched habitually at the hedge of pink hair growing like a fuzz on his jowls and his eyes twinkled secretively at Kelly from pouches of sallow fat. After the introduction, all three waited. Coldly, Kelly introduced himself. Then he nodded at the empty apishamores on their pack horses.
“Ain’t you startin’ sort of late?”
“We’re all finished,” Jares said. “Ran into poachers south o’ Colter’s Hell. Cleaned us out, traplines and camp.”
“The misguided sinners even appropriated our sustenance, brother,” Hollister said. “We’ve partaken of neither flesh nor fowl for three days. We’d appreciate it if we could join you at your camp, and perhaps beg a crumb or two.”
Quinn rubbed wet lips, grinning. “And mebbe a drink.”
“Venison steak and pemmican,” Kelly said. “And nothing to drink but branch water.”
Quinn sighed and rolled his eyes sadly at Hollister. Jares tossed the reins of the roan to Kelly, eyes darting to his face.
“Be mighty welcome to us, Morgan. My belt buckle’s gnawin’ my backbone.”
Kelly swung onto the roan. He had not unloaded the Jake Hawkins and kept it tilted up so the ball wouldn’t roll out. As they headed down the canyon, Jares asked:
“Any news from Santa Fe?”
“Last we heard, they’d kicked out the old bunch and made some Taos Indian the new governor,” Kelly answered.
“We got later word, then. The Indian was killed and they set this Nicolas Amado up as governor.”
Kelly shook his head. The tortuous course of Mexican politics had always baffled him. Jares filled out the story. A girl named Teresa Cavan had figured in the assassination somehow. The Assembly had broken into the governor’s chambers to find her with Augustín Gomez and several others standing around Villapando’s dead body. Only their drawn guns had kept the Pueblo Indians in the Assembly from tearing them apart. Word had immediately been sent to the remaining insurgents camped about the city. Infuriated, they marched upon the Palace, declaring a mob vengeance upon those responsible for Villapando’s death. In the last moment, General Amado had arrived with a force of Perea’s dragoons, putting the mob to rout and saving his compatriots within the Palace.
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