The American consul Alvarez lit the way down the long stairs with a candle lantern, and bid Skye good night.
“Señor, you have no place to go,” he said, questioning.
“I have never had a place to go since I was a boy,” Skye replied.
Skye stepped into the dark plaza, smelled the freshets eddying down from the Sangre de Cristos, noted the deep starlit heavens, the black rooflines of buildings around the square, and waited. The little monkey had summoned him; the monkey would find him. Victoria hated that monkey, and Skye could never understand it. The monkey had constantly aided them all.
Now he heard a soft chittering. He walked blindly into the plaza, following the sound, and suddenly found the others looming out of the depths of darkness.
“Skye, dammit,” Victoria cried, and she wrapped her arms about him, hugging him fiercely, and he felt her thin, bony body pressed tight against him, and her hands possessing him. He hugged her joyously, this woman who had been his friend, lover, mate all these years.
“Victoria!” he whispered.
“I think maybe I never see you again.”
“I’m here.”
Victoria’s hands found his face, the stubble of his beard, his neck. He scraped a rough hand down her back, the embracing filling and blessing him.
“Ah, Skye,” said Childress. “Come.”
Skye paused, his anger welling up in him, but he contained it. The man had gotten him into mortal trouble—and then had gotten him out of it.
They led him out of the plaza. He trusted Victoria’s eyes because he could see so little at night and the sliver of moon didn’t help any. Santa Fe this night was as dark as anyplace he had ever been.
He felt Childress’s heavy footsteps beside him.
“I will explain it all,” Childress whispered. “Rejoice! We have good news.”
Skye thought the man would have a lot of explaining to do to make it right.
He was being led gently downslope and south and west; that was as much as he could fathom. But eventually they struck the Rio Santa Fe, and he was oriented.
“We have recovered Standing Alone’s daughter,” Childress said, after they had reached the river.
Skye stopped dead. “You what?”
“Little Moon had been employed in the very Governor’s Palace where you spent a fateful hour, working for Governor Armijo. We ran into her utterly by accident. Standing Alone started to swoon; the girl fled. But we succeeded. We have her!”
“You have her now?” It was all too much for Skye.
“We do; we executed a little maneuver this evening.”
“Is she well?”
“Ah, Skye, Sah, what is slavery but the destruction of dreams and hope, eh? She was a prisoner, what they call criados sin sueldo, servants without hire. A convenient set of muscles to be used at labor, a mortal without the hope of a life.”
Skye marveled that this self-proclaimed privateer and pirate
could speak so eloquently of slavery in its various forms and subtleties. But Childress was an enigma, and there was no point in wondering about him. Nothing on earth could explain the man.
They proceeded downriver to a place where livestock were penned, and numerous wagons lurked in the slight light of a sliver of moon.
“Here, Sah, is where we are domiciled,” Childress said, steering toward one big Conestoga that he somehow singled out of the gloom.
He stood outside the mammoth conveyance. “Standing Alone, we are here,” he said.
The monkey bounded inside and Skye heard a rustling and voices. Victoria clambered in, and soon stepped through the puckered canvas, followed by two women.
“Hey, this here is Little Moon,” Victoria said, her voice crackling.
Skye found a gaunt Cheyenne girl, fear visible in her face even in that sparse light. But her mother was talking swiftly, and soon the girl’s fears subsided, and she even smiled at Skye.
He held out his hands and the girl took both of them shyly. Standing Alone clasped her hands over the girl’s, capturing Skye’s hands in their embrace. They were thanking him with tears and clasps and sighs.
This was a strange, sweet moment. For just this had Skye thrown aside everything else and come here. Before him was one of the missing children, a young woman now, safe and free—at least if they could smuggle her out of Mexico.
He knew that Armijo would probably put things together: Childress, pretending to be a British diplomat; a girl vanishing from his staff; and Skye, released from death by Childress’s monkey. Give those odd facts to a man as alert and suspicious as Armijo, and there would soon be a platoon of soldiers tracking them all.
He held these hands a long moment, for he shared their joy, and wanted them to know it.
They repaired to the dark confines of the wagon where they would be safe from wandering gazes, and there Skye learned their story: Childress’s amazing acquisition of the carriage in Taos, obtaining the dresses for the women, a suit of clothes for himself, spare goods, a little food, a few knives, even a rifle, all by mortgaging his stock of goods up on the Arkansas River. All of it the work of a self-proclaimed pirate.
Skye sighed, unbelieving. What was Childress? Trader? Texas Colonel? Filibuster? Pirate? Rescuer of Indian children, a man absorbed with slavery and justice? What sort of alchemist was he, transmuting the base metals of his character into gold?
“I accused you, Mister Skye, Sah, because one of us had to escape and deploy. It worked, eh?”
Skye felt his rage boil up, but there was little to say. The man who had put him in such jeopardy got him out, somehow. Or the damned monkey did.
“Shine palmed a white bean?” Skye asked.
“Ah, Skye, I trained him to leave the black beans alone.”
“It’s Mister Skye,” he snarled. “Mister Skye and don’t call me anything else.”
That ended it. Skye felt his rage and terror leak away, like blood from a cut wrist.
There was too much to absorb. Skye sat quietly, leaving his fate to the rest. His weariness was telling on him again. Victoria’s hands found him in the dark, each caress loving him, each touch of a finger reaching beyond his flesh and into his soul.
Finally Childress broke the quiet. “We have a good idea where the boy, Grasshopper, is, if he’s alive,” he said. “The last thing he said to Little Moon was that he would be taken to where gold is scratched out of the earth.”
Skye sighed. Chances were, the boy would be dead, then.
But at least they had fulfilled half of their goal; they had rescued a sweet Cheyenne woman.
“I made inquiry, Skye. As a Briton looking for a good investment, I had a perfect cover. I’m now a baronet, Sir Arthur Childress. Where would a man invest in gold mining? I asked. They said no foreigner could work the gold deposits. But that didn’t deter me. I said I might make a considerable payment to the governor for some land in the goldfields. Well, Mister Skye, Sah, I got the whole history.”
Skye nodded. Now Childress was calling himself a baronet.
“Back twelve or fifteen years ago, Sah, a herder stumbled on some placer gold, loose gold flakes trapped in gravel, you know, not far south of here on the east slope of the Ortiz Mountains. There’s plenty of it there, and it’s very pure, assays at .918 pure, almost as good as it gets in nature. But there’s not much water there for washing it, so mining has been slow and most of the washing’s done in winter, when snow can be melted. They have chopped deep into the gravel there, and employ slaves to do it, all Indians. Much of the ore is trapped in a conglomerate that needs to be broken up.
“There were some later discoveries of vein gold farther south, but most of the work is taking place scarcely thirty miles from here. They use the most primitive methods, Sah. Wooden vessels called bateas to wash the gold. Arrastras, rude stone grinding devices powered by bullock. Slave labor hauling the sands upward in baskets, climbing ladders fifteen or eighteen feet high, nothing but notches in a log. There’s a bit of a town there called Dolores, and that’s where we will go.”
“All right.”
“But there is risk, Sah. A few years ago an American named Daley headed that way, wanting to buy in, and he was murdered. The murderers never were brought to justice and Armijo did nothing, even under the most intense pressure
from the Americans in the area, including the Bents. But what was a mere murder of a heretic Yank? So nothing happened. So the lesson was learned at the mines: outsiders are fair game. We’ll need a plan, Sah. Arms, defenses, everything.”
“You know how to get there?”
“Certainly. A British diplomat can find out anything.”
“We go in that rig? Your black carriage?”
“It will convey us all. You shall drive; I and the three women will occupy the facing seats, and oh, what a fine sight we’ll be, eh?”
“That’s what worries me.”
“Never fear, Skye. This little simian accomplishes wonders.”
“It’s Mister … .”
“Touchy, aren’t you. Well, first we have a little problem to work out. I’m in hock. Have to pay the hostler here for graining and haying the nags. Haven’t a cent of cash, you know. Pirates make a poor living, Skye, I assure you. It’s feast or famine, but mostly famine. We’re going to have to pay, or the hombre will set off alarms and we’ll have a squad of dragoons riding us down.”
“Daylight is our enemy, Childress.”
“Can’t be helped. But never underestimate my monkey.”