City of Widows

by Loren D. Estleman

  I said, “That’s close work. Are you any good at it?”

  “Ask Francisco and Carlos.”

  “How are you with that rifle?” Whiteside asked Ortiz.

  The marshal had picked up his stick and resumed making marks in the earth. “A Henry is not a Creedmoor. Within its range I am adequate.”

  “Just so you’re good enough to shoot this Indian son of a bitch if he cannot do all he claims.”

  Axtaca returned the knife to its sheath without another word. The animosity between the Aztec and the old campaigner was as thick as the woodsmoke in the air.

  “Baronet took over the old Sherman spread,” said the rancher. “The headquarters was just a dugout shack last time I was there.”

  “He has built a fine house with many rooms with good lumber from the Oscuros,” Ortiz said.

  “How do you know this?”

  “I built it.”

  “Well, now, that’s right handy.” Whiteside was disgusted.

  “I am a carpenter, señor. I am the son of a carpenter and if just one of my sons proves to be less worthless than I fear, he, too will be a carpenter. You are a cattleman. Señor Murdock is a saloonkeeper. Miguel is a ranch foreman. We are none of us warriors, yet we have all made war and we are all still living. In the light of this I do not see cause to defend what each of us does when he is not fighting.”

  “Save it for Sunday. What’s the layout?”

  While we had been talking the marshal had drawn a floor plan in the dirt. Now he used the stick as a pointer. “It is a house a man might conceive whose conscience is troubled. This is a tower room of three stories, open on all sides, from which a man with good eyes may observe a rider approaching from a great distance. The windows on the ground floor have oak shutters two inches thick, with gun ports. All of the roofs are pitched steep, that none who is not part fly can hope to scale them. Of course there is no ground cover within rifle range of the house.”

  I said, “Is that all?”

  “Lo siento, no. The basement is eight feet deep, lined with stones and mortar, and has many shelves and cabinets for the storage of provisions. The well is there. With only a small trapdoor to defend, a man in that dark hole might withstand a siege of many months.”

  Whiteside stared at him. “Didn’t any of this make you curious?”

  “The sheriff said he wished to secure the house against an Indian attack. I thought it was excessive.”

  “It shouldn’t, but it always surprises me,” I said. “The lengths some men will go to in order to stay out of jail.”

  “Even build one of his own.” Axtaca eyed the plan gravely.

  “It is a jail,” Whiteside said. “Ain’t it?”

  We looked at him. His eyes were as bright as pennies.

  * * *

  Axtaca left camp twenty minutes later. Francisco and Carlos, unchanged from when I had last seen them at the Diamond Horn, wanted to go with him, but he rebuffed them in harsh Spanish, bundled his sorrel’s hoofs in rags torn from his only other shirt, and rode off at a walk armed with only his knife and medicine bag. Whiteside had turned in by then, having dispatched a rider to the Slash W on an errand, and the entire encampment was settling in for the night. Men snored, spoke in low rumbling voices of past battles won and lost in and out of town, cleaned and loaded weapons, and scraped mud off their boots in the glow of dying fires. I poured myself a second cup of coffee and drained the pot’s remaining contents into Ortiz’s.

  “Any trouble getting Whiteside to throw in with Guerrero’s men?” I sat down beside him.

  “Very little. When two men have been fighting as long as they, the thing they share is not so different from love. It was this way with my wife and me.” He crossed himself and drank.

  “You said you killed her.”

  “I took no pleasure in it. She pleaded with me to do it. I swore the day we married that I would deny her nothing.”

  “She asked you to kill her?”

  “She said if I did not agree to do this thing she would find a way to do it herself. I could not let her soul go to hell and so I agreed.”

  “Was she ill?”

  “Her body was healthy. In here…” He touched his head and shook it.

  I said nothing. The wood in the fire separated slowly into coals, and I thought the conversation was ended.

  “It was in the church,” he said then. “She knelt before the Virgin, and as she was praying I shot her once in the back of the head. She died in a state of grace.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He moved one of his heavy shoulders. “I lost her long before that day. My sorrow is that we cannot be together in the next life. The bullet that spared her from hell has damned me.”

  “Did you confess to the padre?”

  “No. If one is to be forgiven, he must first be repentant. I would do this thing again.”

  “The rumor around town is you found her with another man.”

  “That is the story I told at my trial. A jury of twelve men, husbands all, found me innocent of murder. And Serafina’s torment is not spoken of in the saloons of San Sábado.”

  I drank the rest of my coffee in silence. I had ridden through thickets and mountain passes crammed with ice that were easier to penetrate than his tragedy.

  At length I threw the wet grounds into the fire. “Earlier tonight you called Miguel Axtaca by his Christian name. Even Francisco and Carlos don’t do that. How far do you go back with him? Spare me the peon humility,” I said when he started to reply.

  “Sí.” He raised and lowered his chin. His jowly profile was a blank cutout against the slightly lighter sky. “In truth we did not meet before Las Cruces, five days ago. However, I read his name many times in dispatches in the old days when we were on opposite sides, and I came to feel that I knew him then.”

  “Opposite sides of what?”

  “The revolution against President Juárez. I was a colonel in his army.”

  “Ortiz, you’re a damn liar.”

  “I do not lie about these things, señor.”

  “Not about that. I mean before, when you said you weren’t a warrior. I’m wondering when you found time to practice carpentry.”

  “It is not what we do that makes us what we are, but what we feel. I have not known a day since I learned to think for myself when I did not run my palm along the grain of a piece of wood and feel the life that resides there. Death is nothing. What have you done when you have brought nothing to your fellow man?”

  “With some men,” I said, “there was nothing there to begin with.”

  “You are wrong, Señor Murdock. There is always something. When you destroy a man you take upon yourself the burden of never knowing what it might have been. When you have spent much of your life destroying men, the burden is sufficient to cause your own destruction.”

  “If you feel that way, why are you here instead of back in town finishing the harness shop?”

  He breathed deeply and drank the rest of his coffee, which must have been ice-cold. “You ask that question of the wrong carpenter, señor.”

  Soon after that we rolled ourselves up in our blankets, and within minutes Ortiz was snoring. What dreams he dreamt I could not fathom.

  21

  THERE IS AN old Zuni legend, nearly as ancient as Creation itself, that maintains that when Father Sun made the world he dumped all the parts he had left over in New Mexico. The story makes sense when you see Chupader Mesa for the first time pouncing straight up out of the planed country east of Socorro City, fluted at its base and blunted at the top like a spent bullet, with the sun, no longer young and red-faced from the effort, hauling itself over the edge. Faced with such momentous physical evidence in support of a pagan belief, it was no wonder the early Spanish missionaries had made so little headway bringing the natives around to a faith in a tale of floods, apples, and shrubbery ablaze.

  Rich as it was, I doubt the local Indian canon encompassed anything as strange as the party now approaching tha
t geological non sequitur: one hundred men and change riding together but separated by their dress, loyalty, and philosophy into two distinct bands with a destination in common. Behind them trailed a pack train and, lurching along a good quarter-mile behind that, a small supply wagon new to the expedition since early that morning, its driver a man whose lost face said he had long ago abandoned his ties to life. His name, if it mattered, was Wendigo, and behind his seat rode death in a box measuring three feet by two.

  “The sticks are old,” Whiteside had explained when the wagon arrived. “They sweat in this heat and nobody but Wendigo will come near them. He lost his wife and two sons to the cholera last year. He don’t care if he blows to pieces.”

  “Don’t you have anything more stable?” I’d asked.

  “Governor Wallace has placed an embargo on explosives and ammunition in quantity until the dust settles in Lincoln County. I tried old Mexico, but the lid is even tighter there on account of the revolution, I forget just which one. I have had to give up my mining aspirations for a spell. Not that them two holes in my southwest sixty ever coughed up anything shinier than a salamander.”

  The vaqueros from Don Segundo’s Diamond Horn were a disciplined-looking lot, riding mustangs by and large with both hands on the reins, elbows out, backs as straight as the Springfield carbines and El Tigre Winchesters slung behind their shoulders. Their flat-brimmed hats were secured with strings ending in tassels and worn at an identical angle. It was clear that the White Lion of Chihuahua had not laid aside his military sensibilities when he had turned from fighting men to raising cattle. John Whiteside’s cowhands looked almost slovenly by comparison, but they were armed as heavily and rode like men who did everything but defecate in the saddle. The one-armed rancher who led them wrapped the reins of his big black around his wrist and manipulated the horse with his knees.

  There had been incidents. Breaking camp, a vaquero and a cowboy had disagreed over the ownership of a canteen, a knife had been produced, and a Mexican arm splintered when two other cowboys intervened; and in an epilogue, Francisco, who had apparently been placed in charge of Guerrero discipline in Miguel Axtaca’s absence, slashed his quirt across the face of a Whiteside man on his way to reopen the argument with pistol drawn, laying the flesh open to the bone. The marshal of San Sábado, mounted also, broke up both fights by inserting his gray between the combatants, one hand resting on the butt of his Schofield. I remembered the stern father frightening a roomful of unruly children into paralysis by his presence alone on the day we met. It seemed that with each mile he progressed from his sleepy life in town, he lost another layer of Rosario Ortiz the fat part-time peace officer, paring down closer to the young Mexican Army lieutenant who had impressed Harlan Blackthorne so many years before.

  Abbott fell first.

  The callow cowhand who had challenged me at the edge of camp the night before was riding a few yards to my left and a little in front when he grunted and slid sideways out of his saddle. He grasped at the horn, but his fingers refused to close. For a second his left boot snagged in its stirrup. Then his momentum tugged it free and he fell hard on his shoulder and rolled over half onto his back, broken in the middle. All this took place before the report reached us, drawn so thin by distance it bent double. Near the north end of the mesa a scrap of tissuey smoke scudded across the crags.

  “Down!” Whiteside’s roar bounded off that rock wall. Most of us were off our mounts before the echo made it back, our long guns rattling out of their scabbards. I hauled the claybank over onto its side and was pleased to see it stayed put. For all his grousing about how much time he spent stringing fence, the old rancher still took pains to train his horses for combat.

  The same wasn’t true of the pack animals, whose death wails drifted our way as the wranglers cut their throats to make breastworks of their carcasses.

  “It is Palo Duro all over again.” Ortiz was down on one knee behind his supine gray with the barrel of his Henry resting across its ribs. “All day and all night we slaughter the horses. When Quanah returns and sees what we have done, it is his sickness at the sight that makes him surrender.”

  Patting the claybank’s flank for courage—the animal’s or mine, it didn’t matter which—I crawled on my belly over to where Abbott had fallen. After a minute I crawled back. Ortiz read the news on my face.

  “His spine, sí?” He shrugged at my reaction. “From the way he fell.”

  “I said Jubilo slept with that Creedmoor.”

  A spout of dust erupted in front of my horse. It snorted and stirred, but I reached across to grasp its bit and it subsided. The sound of the shot followed. Somewhere among us a Winchester spoke back.

  “Hold your fire, you damn idjit!” Whiteside. “You’re just throwing away cartridges.”

  “I hope that sorrel of Axtaca’s didn’t put its foot wrong last night,” I said.

  “I think it did not, señor. Even if it did he would continue. He was the only soldier not of rank whose name appeared in the dispatches.”

  “Oh, Mama, I’m hit!” This from a point somewhere ahead. We heard the shot.

  I said, “Right about now I’d settle for something a lot less showy, like a buffalo gun.”

  Something moved at the top of the mesa then. A human silhouette separated itself from the rock, craning high. More smoke blossomed, a series of ovals pushed in instantly by the wind and torn away. Then: crack-crack-crack-crack-crack-crack.

  “That was no single-shot Remington,” Ortiz said.

  “That was a pistol,” I said.

  “Miguel did not have a pistol.”

  “Jubilo did.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “One way to find out.” I pointed the Deane-Adams at the sky and emptied the cylinder. The shots flopped around in the distance and expired.

  In the silence that followed, the man atop the mesa stood up the rest of the way, waving a rifle high over his head. Then he bent. Something fell from the rock. Fell and fell, turning in the air. A man. It struck the ground, bounced, and lay still. Again the man on top stood and waved the rifle.

  A hundred feet in front of me, Francisco rose to his feet, tore off his sombrero, and slapped it at the sky. A shrill cry came from his throat, making all the hairs stand out from my body. In another moment the entire party of Mexican vaqueros and American cowboys was cheering.

  “I liked Jubilo,” I said.

  Ortiz said, “If it was not he who killed your friend Señor Harper, he had a hand in it.”

  “He confessed to it. I can’t help who I like.”

  “Frank Baronet has much to answer for.”

  We buried young Abbott where he fell, scratching a trench in the hard earth with what tools we had and covering him with rocks. Standing over the unmarked mound, John Whiteside removed his sombrero.

  “Lord, we give you Jim Abbott, aged about twenty-two years. He pulled his own truck and sent home half his wages first of every month. Dick Lung-hammer here says Jim told him his people made him study the piano, but none of us ever heard him play. I guess that’s all about Jim.”

  Wedging the hat under the stump of his left arm, he extracted a small cylinder of oilcloth from inside the sweatband, jerked loose the tie with his teeth, and thumbed through a number of closely printed leaves folded inside. When he found the one he wanted he snapped it open and dropped the rest inside the crown. His harsh ramrod’s voice rose as he read.

  “‘If he smite him with an instrument of iron, so that he die, he is a murderer. The murderer shall surely be put to death.

  “‘And if he smite him with throwing a stone, wherewith he may die, and he die, he is a murderer. The murderer shall surely be put to death.

  “‘Or if he smite him with a hand weapon of wood, wherewith he may die, and he die, he is a murderer. The murderer shall surely be put to death.

  “‘The revenger of blood himself shall slay the murderer. When he meeteth him, he shall slay him.’ Amen.” He retrieved the oilcloth, returne
d it and the pages to the sweatband, and walked away, putting on the sombrero.

  I watched Ortiz crossing himself. “I don’t think that was your Testament.”

  “I am a good Christian, señor, or I was.” He tugged on his slouch hat. “This does not mean I am blinded by my faith. The Holy Book is a gun with two calibers. One will suffice where the other falls short.”

  We mounted and rode. There were no further squabbles among our party.

  The house stood nearly in the shadow of Chupader Mesa, a complicated arrangement of turrets, gables, and railed balconies, whitewashed blindingly in the relentless sun, a sharp contrast to the gray barn standing two hundred yards away with its slanted roof reaching almost to the ground. The sentry post Ortiz had described stretched a full story above the rest of the house and resembled nothing so much as a church tower minus its bell. There would be a rifleman crouching there to avoid silhouetting himself in the opening. There would be others as well, in the windows on the lower floors and in the loft of the barn. The grounds looked far too deserted for a working ranch in broad daylight. The shots from the mesa would have alerted the Baronets and their men long before the lookout had spotted us.

  The loft opened up first, jets of flame spurting from the opening over the doors.

  “Back!” Again Whiteside’s bellow rang. The riders up front wheeled their mounts and galloped. A ragged volley answered from among our ranks, a delaying action while we regrouped. Whiteside passed me aboard his black, drew in, and stood up with the reins in his teeth, beckoning with his arm. The wagon jolted forward from away back.

  “He does go forward until he has to back up, doesn’t he?” I said to Ortiz.

  “It is said that during your War Between the States he reported more casualties for every mile of ground gained than any other commander.” The Mexican changed hands on his reins to adjust the bandolier over his left shoulder. “It is also said that he never lost a fight, though he was the only man left on his feet.”

  “I’m sure he put it just that way in his letters to the widows.”