CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The same moonlight that tangled in Luna Talbot’s hair lay lightly on the steep slopes of the Cornudas Mountains sixty miles to the north as Jacob Brook led his burro into a valley between two peaks that lay just south of the New Mexico Territory border.

A talking man with no one to talk to, Brook, as was his habit, addressed the burro. “We’ll camp for the night among them rocks over there, Thomas Aquinas, and bile us up some coffee. How does that set with ye?”

The burro, an animal with a philosophical turn of mind, hence the grand name that Brook had given him, said nothing, stoically carrying his burden of hard rock mining tools and a few meager supplies without complaint.

“Glad you agree,” the old man said. “High time we rested our old bones and got some shut-eye.”

Jacob Brook was eighty years old, but he figured he might be a year or two younger, or older, he didn’t rightly know. He’d fought in the War Between the States in the 4th Mounted Volunteers, 1st Regiment, Sibley’s Brigade, was wounded in the Red River Campaign and thereafter walked with a limp. He’d been prospecting since the war ended but he’d never hit pay dirt. He hoped all that was about to change. The West was a gossip mill, and there were vague rumors that a man called Matthew or Mitchell Ford had lived like a king in Cottondale after striking it rich in the Cornudas. Well, Cottondale was a ghost town, and folks said Ford was dead and had taken the secret location of his gold mine to the grave with him. But Jacob Brook figured where there’s smoke there’s fire, and if the rumors were true, a fortune in gold was his for the taking. He’d never had much, never hoped for much, but a strike after all these years could put him in a rocking chair on the front porch of some big-city hotel with a fat cigar in one hand, a glass of champagne in the other. As he had told Thomas Aquinas so many times, their luck was about to change.

And he was right about that. His luck was about to change, but not for the better . . . for the worse . . . a lot, lot worse.

* * *

Brook staked out the burro on a patch of grass, then boiled coffee over a hatful of fire, sat back against a rock, a steaming cup in his hand and his pipe in his mouth. Beside him lay the old .44-40 Henry that he’d carried in the war and that had served him well. When he finished his coffee, he took a Jew’s harp from his coat pocket and twanged out a credible version of “Buffalo Gals,” much to the irritation of the straitlaced Thomas Aquinas, who deplored music of any kind.

Unfortunately, at that tuneful moment in time, death had begun to stalk Jacob Brook.

The chase closed in moments after the old prospector said, “What will I play next, Thomas? What’s your pleasure?”

Brook heard a rustle in the brush behind him but paid it no heed. A night creature, the restless desert breeze, that and nothing more.

Emboldened, death slunk closer.

“How about ‘Turkey in the Straw’?” Brook said. “That’s always been one of your favorites, huh?”

Small sounds slithered all around him. Breathing. Did he hear breathing?

Something was moving in the night . . . something dark. Something sinister.

There! A flicker of movement. A bent figure, tall, white, running toward him. No, not one. Two . . . three . . . four . . . five . . . more . . .

Alarmed, Brook shoved the harp back in his pocket and reached for the Henry.

He never made it.

They came at Brook from all sides, six or more, half-naked, pale-skinned, and they piled on top of him. Frenzied arms rose and fell, fisted knife blades plunged home time after time, gleaming in the moonlight. The old man screamed as his lifeblood erupted above him in a scarlet fan, staining red his ashen attackers. But a moment later Brook’s screams gurgled to a halt and the only sound was the triumphant, wild shrieks of his killers. Thomas Aquinas died a martyr’s death. Quickly, the burro was knifed to death, butchered, and his meat wrapped in his skin and carried away. Silence once again fell on the Cornudas, but for the discordant twang of the mouth harp that one of the savages had found in Brook’s pocket. That too faded into distance and the indifferent moon and the stars shone in their sky . . . as though nothing at all had happened.