JAIME SANCHEZ HAD worked for Señor Padillo for a little more than one year, mostly as counterhand in the store, from time to time as a messenger between his boss and the snake-eyed gringo, Nolan. He knew about Padillo’s trade in human hair, but preferred to ignore it. If el jefe wanted to make some money on the side, what did a few dead indios matter to Jaime? Anyway, Señora Padillo – Maria, when they writhed together on that great big bed – more than made up for her husband’s shortcomings.
It was Jaime’s job to open the store each morning. Maria would provide coffee when he arrived soon after dawn, and he would sweep the place out and set things in order while his boss slept off the night’s excesses. And sometimes Maria would lace the coffee with good American whisky, arousing him with a kiss full of promise if she felt the need for a real man.
So Jaime was curious that neither one was around when he arrived late. He had sat up discussing the strange affair of Nolan’s ranch over a bottle of mescal; and slept late in consequence. Now, when he had expected a reprimand, there was not even the smell of cooking or coffee to greet him.
He let himself in the rear entrance and stared idly at the big coffee pot lying on its side atop the stove. The grounds had spilled out over the griddle and the kitchen was rank with the odor of burned coffee. A chair lay on the floor as though someone had kicked it over, and two empty glasses stood on the table. Jaime lifted one, sniffing the sticky dregs. Tequila: maybe Señor Padillo had done some more drinking after he got home. But that would not explain why Maria was still in bed.
Jaime shrugged and set fresh coffee to brew. Then he began to sweep the store.
An hour later, he was ready to open up for the day and there was still no sign of his employer or his wife. Curiosity got the better of Jaime’s discretion and he began to climb the stairs.
The door to the familiar bedroom was closed, so Jaime knocked gently. There was no answer. This was definitely odd, for Maria, at least, would have said something if they had decided to go away.
Jaime decided to investigate and pushed on the door. Something blocked its opening and Jaime shoved harder, grinning as he heard a bottle roll across the boards. So that was it. Old Ramon had taken a bottle to bed with him, no doubt hoping that the tequila would put some fire where it counted. He coughed, the quintessence of tactfulness, and called through the half-open door.
‘Señor? Señora Padillo? It’s Jaime. Shall I bring you some coffee?’
There was no answer, so he pushed the door a little farther open. The bottle clattered noisily across the floor and Jaime smelt the reek of spilled liquor. There was something else, too. The sour smell of stale urine. Jesus, had old Padillo pissed the bed?
He listened for a moment, aware of flies buzzing and a very low, monotonous sound like someone trying to weep with a blocked throat.
‘Señor? Señora?’
There was still no answer, so Jaime pushed the door fully open. And stood there with Ids eyes jumping out of his head.
Maria was tied to the bed, her legs spread wide and her eyes wild, stark naked and moaning rhythmically. Jaime ran to her side, pulling his clasp knife from his pocket. He cut her free and pulled the gag from her mouth, nervous of the madness shining in her black eyes.
‘Sweet Jesus, Maria.’ Instinctively, he cradled her in his arms, as he might hold a frightened child. ‘What’s happened? Are you all right?’
Maria Padillo went on moaning, rocking to and fro as he held her. Then, very slowly, as though terrified of what she would see, she turned her head towards the farther corner of the room.
Jaime followed her blank gaze, frowning at the flies circling around his head. Then he saw Ramon Padillo. And threw up all over the floor.
The first trooper to enter the room vomited as copiously as Jaime, so that Capitan Rafael Vega – who was holding his own stomach in check only with considerable difficulty – had to send him back downstairs.
He had been irritated when Sanchez burst into the Federale barracks screaming about murder and Apache raids. The attack yesterday was annoying enough, the babbling, vomit-streaked figure of the clerk had spoiled his breakfast completely. But a capitan of the Federales had his duty, so Vega had called up a squad and gone to see what the half-crazed peasant was raving about.
He found Maria Padillo – hombre! What a fine looking woman – wrapped in a stained blanket and rocking slowly backwards and forwards in the kitchen. Her eyes were glazed, unseeing, and when he spoke to her, she screamed. She went on screaming until he slapped her, but she still wouldn’t speak, just rocked, moaning deep in her throat, in the chair.
Capitan Vega drew his gun and started up the stairway.
When he entered the bedroom he halted involuntarily, as though confronted by an invisible wall. Without a word, he walked – a trifle unsteadily – to the window and threw it open, sucking in great deep lungfuls of air. Then he turned back to the thing on the far side of the room.
Vega had seen dead men before, twice he had led patrols after Mimbreño raiders who had left mutilated corpses behind to mark their passing, but he had never seen anything like this. Reluctantly, his eyes moved down the wall, over the spreading, fly-infested stain, to the body of Ramon Padillo.
The man had never had much hair, and now the wispy strands hung from his mouth, straggling down from the scalp stuffed between his lips. Someone had incised a neat circle around Padillo’s skull and tom his entire scalp away, so that the blood-encrusted bone of his cranium stood bared to the feasting of the winged and crawling insects gorging themselves on his juices.
His arms were broken at the elbows, dragged back in contorted angles to either side of the body, a gouged eyeball resting like sacrificial offerings on either palm. Knife wounds gaped redly over torso and limbs, and the groin was black with flies drinking the congealing blood from Padillo’s brutal castration.
Vega forced down the bile filling his throat and marched resolutely back to the kitchen. He helped himself to the dead man’s liquor and swallowed two brimful glasses of neat tequila before he could bring himself to speak coherently.
‘Mount a patrol.’ He saw his sergeant’s face and hurriedly poured a third glass, holding it out in a trembling hand. ‘We’ll need a scout and food for three days.’
The sergeant forgot protocol as he tossed down the alcohol, then nodded, gesturing a salute, and hurried out of the stinking, death-ridden house.
Azul squatted in a pinon thicket several miles out of Galenas, humming a hymn his father had taught him as a child while he waited for the bacon he had taken from Padillo’s kitchen to cook.
The fire was small and made of very dry wood, so that no smoke showed above the spiny branches, the green tangle of twisted boughs dissipating what little rose from the spitting strips of pork. He had taken a slab of the dried meat along with salt, flour and coffee, four boxes of cartridges, three canteens filled at Padillo’s well, and the two hundred and fifty dollars the Mexican had promised on confirmation of Nolan’s death.
Azul felt happy. Maria Padillo had sated his fleshly appetites for a time, and her husband’s death had served to quiet the bristling worm of vengeance coiled in his soul. For a time.
The over-fed scalp trader had become voluble as the knife blade darted over his body. A prick here, an answer there. A question, a cut, an explanation: Padillo had told him a great deal.
So now he waited for the scalp hunters to come by. Padillo had told him of their plan, and if they intended to retrace their steps to the Mogollons, or even the White Mountain territory, they must take the trail north to Cristobal. It was simply a matter of waiting for them; patience had long been an Apache virtue.
Cursing his slovenly men, Capitan Vega took them out of town at a crisp gallop. Two killings in as many days were more than his career would stand, and if he didn’t at least make a show of pursuing the crazy indio, not even his father’s money could save his commission. Still, old Rodrigo was with them, and the Yaqui, for all his years, was a fine tracker. If anyone could trail the killer, it was him; and if a whole troop of Federales couldn’t finish him off, Vega might as well quit now and go home. He cheered up as he thought about it: if he, Rafael Vega, could bring in the murderer, it would be a fine feather in his cap, fresh braid on his uniform. He sat straighter in his saddle, adopting a look of firm resolve as he rode on to personal glory.
‘Sheeeit!’ Jude Christie’s comment whistled between pursed lips. ‘I seen Kansas Jayhawkers looked better’n them.’ Nolan spat the nub end of a cheroot into the dust and watched the Federales disappear out of town.
‘They ain’t about to find him, Jude. Unless that Injun tracker does the work for them.’ He paused to accept the match Manolo offered. ‘But at least they’ll cover us.’
‘I thought you was wantin’ him to foller us.’ Christie glanced at the tall man.
‘Hell,’ grunted Nolan, drawing on the pungent black tobacco, ‘way I see it is that with Padillo dead we may have to find another buyer anyway, so losin’ the spread ain’t that bad.’ He broke off, staring moodily across the street. ‘Losin’ Ginny is something else. I ain’t about to forgive him fer that. Still, a man needs to keep a perspective. Ginny’s dead an’ nuthin’s gonna bring her back, no use spillin’ tears over a lost woman. Let’s just say we’ll look fer him on our own with the Federales to beat the brush for us.’
‘You’re the boss,’ said Christie, wondering if anyone ever knew what went on in the cold, dark recesses of Nolan’s mind.
Hell, he thought, I don’t even know his first name. We’ve been riding together three, maybe even four years, but I still call him Nolan. I never heard anyone, not even poor old Ginny, call him anything else.
‘Let’s go.’ Nolan stood up, brushing ash from his black pants. ‘Get the horses Manolo.’
He didn’t bother to look round to see if his order was obeyed, just stood, dark and alone, looking out towards the prairie.
Azul watched the riders coming from the vantage point of a low bluff. He waited until they were close enough for him to be sure that they were Federales, then wriggled down the slope to the two waiting horses.
The promptness of the pursuit was something of a surprise, though not the accuracy of it. He had recognized the trappings of the old man way out in front of the Mexicans as those of the Yaqui, a people the Apache almost respected. They lacked the stiff-bone hardness of his mother’s people, but they could track near as well. Which meant that he must be that much more careful; maybe even kill the old man.
He mounted his pony and rode away at a ninety-degree angle to the Yaqui’s path.
He rode for the better part of an hour across the shale bed of the bluff, then turned due south at a break in the rock face, heading back towards Galenas. The trail, what little there was of it, was solid rock that would show no tracks. He waited behind a sheltering cliff to give the Federale patrol time to cross over the bluff, out of sight, then struck back across the scrubland in the direction of the Cristobal trail.
He hugged the foot of the cliffs as he rode, pushing the horses hard over the sandy ground. Several times he raced them in wide circles to confuse his followers, even driving them up on to the lower slopes of the bluff.
Then, when he came back on to the main trail, he turned north again, galloping for Cristobal.
He held the horses to a fast pace, alternating between them, until both were winded, then climbed down from the pad saddle of the mustang and walked off into the badlands. Meandering back and forth across the trail, retracing his steps and then cantering through the scrub to come back to the trail ahead of his departure point, he sought to throw off the pursuing Yaqui. He kept going as the moon climbed high into the velvet sky, a pale disc that looked as though it wept at what it saw below. Azul grinned, in sympathy with the moon’s grief even though he preferred the bland, burning face of the sun, the face that lit and scorched a man’s deeds with no distinction between race or color or creed. The sun was like that speech his father had told him about, regarding all men as equal, with equal right to the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness.
Excepting Indians.
But the sun was the Apache’s friend and Azul knew that he could lose his pursuers when the great gold globe rose the next day.
He kept moving until the moon was directly overhead, then made camp, dry and cold in the desert night, wrapped his blanket around him and slept like a contented baby.
A prairie chicken woke him, cackling a strident greeting to the new day, and he rose to his feet, stretching the stiffness from his limbs. The land was flat around him, studded with tall cacti and occasional pinons: an easy terrain to watch, just as easy to be seen in. But there was no sign of pursuit, so he drank deeply from a looted canteen, watered the horses and rode off at a leisurely pace, chewing on a hunk of raw bacon.
Cristobal, he estimated, was about a day and a half away - two to three if he had to backtrack again - and there he could find shelter with Father Duran and the grateful villagers. If necessary, he could pick up Nolan’s trail from there, once he had lost the Federales.
Around noon he saw them again. Someone had either taken a long chance, or – more likely – the Yaqui had guessed his direction and talked the Mexicans into a headlong pursuit. Either way, they were riding hard, straight up the Cristobal trail.
Azul consigned the tracker to a sightless hell and rode off the path. He pushed through the mesquite at a wild gallop, until he reached a hidden ravine. Plunging down, he thundered along the dried-out streambed for a quarter-mile, then forced the two horses up the far slope. Zig-zagging across the gulley, he left a trail that dipped and turned around enough boulders and cut-offs to make anyone worry about ambush before turning north again.
He found another dip and tethered one horse in the center, riding the other off into the scrub. He walked back, treading on his toes in the hoof-prints, mounted the second animal and rode it in the opposite direction. Then he walked back to the first pony, wiping out his tracks with a blanket and led the animal, still using the blanket, back to the other.
He mounted and rode north again, hoping the Yaqui would be fooled into following the south-bound tracks.
Gradually, he swung east, away from Cristobal, then swung around in a wide crescent, moving back towards the village.
He had time, and time was all he needed to lose them. Time would bring him Nolan and the others, and revenge was all the better for the savoring.
He pushed on through the night, steering by the stars that prickled like tiny wounds in the dark flesh of the sky. The moon was cold and lonely as a rejected woman, a pale lantern guiding lost souls to whatever destination awaited them, but she served his purpose, gave him sufficient light by which to see, and that was as much help as he could ask from anyone.
Midnight’s cold frosted the badlands with glittering, ghostly light and the breathing of the winded horses gusted unnaturally loud in the stillness. Azul wrapped his blanket around his shoulders and rode on in the direction of Cristobal.
Dawn came and went, and the new day’s sun began to bake the scrub. Azul drove the horses on, letting the warmth of morning heat the chill from his bones. He stopped at noon to eat and walk the stiffness from his limbs. It was a white man’s misconception that an Indian could ride for days on end without suffering: he could stay in the saddle longer than a white, but he still got saddle-sore. So, figuring that he had some time, Azul walked, leading the two horses, for a couple of hours. Then, looser of limb, he mounted again and lifted the paint pony to an easy, mile-eating canter.
Man and animals were rested and they reached Cristobal a little after dusk. Azul reined in some way out of the village, scanning the single street for signs of ambush.
Nothing showed except the lights of the solitary cantina and a small dog, trotting towards him with something held in its jaws. He watched it go by, then guided his pony down the street, heading for Father Duran’s house.
A light showed at the kitchen window and Azul could see the woman, Linda, preparing food. He hitched the horses to the porch rail and knocked on the door.
‘Matthew!’ The priest appeared both pleased and surprised to see him. ‘Come in, my son. Sit down, dinner’s nearly ready.’
Across the room, Linda dropped the spoon she was using and ran to him.
‘Azul! You are all right?’
He nodded, smiling at the concern in her voice. ‘Yes, I’m well.’
‘And the others? The men you went to find?’ Father Duran spoke slowly, as though afraid of hearing the answer. ‘What happened to them?’
Azul looked at the young priest, wondering what kind of battle he fought with his conscience. Did he want to hear that the scalp hunters he loathed were dead? Or would he prefer that Azul’s hands remained free of their blood? He grinned, accepting the coffee Linda offered before replying.
‘They are alive,’ he said evenly, ‘but they don’t have a buyer in Galenas anymore.’
‘What happened to him?’ Father Duran sounded nervous, tom between his priestly morality and his desire to see justice done.
‘Padillo is dead.’ Azul remembered the man’s face as the knife hacked away his scalp, the blood that gouted over his tears. ‘That kind of business goes to a man’s head.’