Image TWENTY

OUR DEPARTURE IN the morning put us on the road to the town of Dolores, more than a day’s ride northeast of Guanajuato. Dolores lay outside the mining country, but Guanajuato’s mountains made the going slow and tedious, oftentimes little more than a narrow path fit for a donkey hugging a sheer drop of hundreds of feet.

Dolores was a slow-paced community of haciendas and rancheros. Its most attractive feature, besides the difficult path out of the Guanajuato mountains making it undesirable for a posse, was that I had no connection to the town.

We stopped at a village of Aztecs where we ate a simple breakfast of beef rolled in corn tortillas.

“This village is part of the Espinoza hacienda,” I told Lizardi. “I know Espinoza. He lives in Guanajuato. Two weeks ago, I would have stopped at his hacienda, and his servants would have prepared a feast and a fiesta.”

After we descended down the mountains to a wider road, four men came out of the tree line near a hillcrest two hundred meters from us.

“Vaqueros from a hacienda?” Lizardi asked. “Your friend Espinoza?”

“They’re not vaqueros. Look at their mounts.”

They had an odd assortment of mounts: Two were on mules, the other two rode donkeys. Vaqueros mostly rode horses, though a mule would not be unusual. The donkeys stood out—being small, donkeys were primarily used by indios to haul their crops, not by men who herded cattle—and these donkeys were even smaller than most.

The clothes of the men were also jarringly mismatched, ranging from the rags of a lépero to the clothes of a gentleman. Even at that distance, I knew the man wearing the best clothing was a lowlife, not a gentleman.

“They’re bandidos,” Lizardi said.

“True.”

“We have good horses; we can outrun them.”

“You’re not a good enough rider. A hard chase over broken ground and steep mountain trails would unhorse you. Besides, I’m not running back in the direction we came, into the arms of pursuing posses.”

The men on the hillside urged their mounts toward us. Only one appeared to have a pistol; the others wielded machetes.

“There’s four of them,” Lizardi yelled. “We can’t fight!”

“Like hell we can’t!” I drew the machete from its sheath and slapped Tempest’s rear with the flat of the blade, yelling “¡Vamos caballo! ¡Ándale! ¡Ándale!”

Tempest shot forward. The stallion was my best weapon. He was a head taller than the mules, and the small donkeys only came up to his shoulder. But what the mules lacked in height they had in girth.

I drove at a donkey rider first, spurring Tempest into the mount. The donkey went down as I slashed the bandido across his shoulder.

The mule rider before me leveled his pistol at me. I had less fear of the pistol than I did of the men with machetes. The flintlock weapons were notorious for misfiring even in the hands of an experienced shooter. When the hammer-flint struck the steel plate, its spark was supposed to ignite the powder charge and blow the lead ball out the barrel, but any one of a dozen things could happen, eleven of them bad. A well-placed machete blow, on the other hand, had catastrophic consequences.

Since the bandido had only one shot in his pistol, I was unperturbed.

“¡Andale!” I shouted, driving Tempest at the shooter’s mule. The mule stumbled and spooked getting out of the way. The pistol went off, but the shot went wild as the rider was unhorsed.

I wheeled about. The other mule rider came into machete range. Swinging the big broad blade like an axe, I caught him in the side of the neck, nearly decapitating him. As he dropped from the saddle, his head flopped and the mule bolted.

Reining Tempest in, I wheeled him around. Their love of combat rapidly fading, the shooter had gotten back on his mule and had joined the other donkey rider, who had simply ridden by me and kept going in the direction of Guanajuato without offering a fight.

As I anticipated, Lizardi’s horse had thrown him, but as he pulled himself to his feet, I saw that he had miraculously maintained a grip on the reins.

But the battle wasn’t over yet. The bandido with the shoulder wound had remounted his donkey and was urging it toward Lizardi, knowing he would not get far on that small slow-footed burro with his life’s blood pouring from his shoulder. His machete in his good hand, his last chance at a fast escape was Lizardi’s horse.

I slapped Tempest with the flat of the machete again and went for the donkey rider. Smarter than its rider, the burro heard the big horse’s hooves and veered off, heading back up the hill. I came up from the rear, laying open the bandido’s back with the machete. He screamed and dropped from his mount.

I was surveying the battlefield when Lizardi came beside me on his horse. “You’ve killed two of them.”

I saluted him with the bloody machete. “Have I thanked you for your courageous assistance, señor?”

His mount still spooked by the violence and the blood, Lizardi had to fight the reins. “Fighting is for animals.”

“True, but dying knows no bloodlines . . . as you almost found out.”

I went through the pockets of the dead bandidos. In the pocket of one, I found only a few centavos and some coca beans, which among indios were negotiable currency. But the other had a neck pouch with pesos, silver and gold crucifixes, and expensive rosaries, the ones favored by wealthy old women and venal priests.

Blood was on the two gold-chained crosses. It wasn’t blood I had spilled; the crosses had been in the pouch.

“Bandido blood?” Lizardi asked.

“No . . . and not Blood of the Lamb, either.”

We dragged the two bodies into nearby bushes and brushed away the drag marks. When we were through, I stared up at the hill where we’d first spotted the bandidos.

“Why do you keep staring up at that hill? We have to get out of here. There may be passersby, maybe even constables.”

“They might be up there.”

“Who?”

“Whomever those trash killed. They must have killed them shortly before we came along. They didn’t have a chance to divide up their booty before they spotted us and thought they could increase their wealth.”

We found them on top of the hill, tied sitting down with their backs to trees, their throats cut.

“Priests,” I said. “They killed two priests.” I crossed myself.

“They’re not priests. They’re Bethlehemite monks, a lay brotherhood known for its healing arts. But I suppose in the eyes of God they are the same as priests.”

Lizardi and I both knelt. He offered a prayer, and I mumbled along with him as best I could. I admit that I was not suited for the church, but I was raised, as all in the colony were, to consider priests to be proof against life’s sins and temptations. To kill a priest was a great offense against God.

An idea seized me as we got onto our feet.

“Are there many of these—What did you call them?”

“Bethlehemites. No, you don’t see many,” Lizardi shrugged. “Certainly not as often as you see other monks and brothers. They come over from Spain to do missionary work among the Aztecs, staying for a few years until they are replaced by others of the brotherhood. Skilled healers, they lack the evil reputation that doctors in general have, and I say that as the son of a medical man.”

I rubbed my beard. “Señor Worm, the only thing that distinguishes us from these two bearded monks—other than their severed throats—are the robes they wear.”

“What are you getting at? You think you can make yourself a monk by putting on a robe?”

“ ‘Veni, vidi, vici,’ as Caesar would say.” I wasn’t sure I had the Caesar quote accurate, but it captured my mood. “Were we not both seminary students? Besides, you say these two are not really priests, that they only look like priests. We, too, will only look like priests.”

I slapped him on the back. “Brother José, let’s get these robes off these two and wash them in the river below before the blood dries. On our way to Dolores, you can instruct me on the tricks and alchemy your father uses in his treatments. Who knows, someone may need our healing services.”