CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

To many people South Texas presents a bleak and unforgiving landscape. Most of the trees are stunted and gnarled, and in places the undergrowth forms an impenetrable barrier against all but the most determined of men and beasts. I hadn’t exaggerated when I told Madeline that anything out in the brush that didn’t bite you would sting you or stick you. Rattlesnakes and scorpions abound, and the iron-hard spikes of the blackthorn bush are everywhere. Yet it has its own rough charm. The wildflowers seem brighter there than anywhere else, perhaps because you instinctively realize that their fragile splendor is the only color that ever comes to an otherwise drab and colorless land. And in the spring of 1943 they were magnificent, though I can’t swear they were really better than in other years. I know that I took more pleasure in them than I ever had before. Coming within an inch of being murdered will do that to you.

My foot had to be rebroken in the surgery of the San Antonio hospital, and it was a long time healing. It was the middle of summer before I could walk without a limp. In the intervening months I rested and read a great many books and often took the reins of the old buggy beside Tía Carmen as we made our daily inspection tours of the ranch. The price of beef skyrocketed, just as I’d predicted. When all the bills were paid after roundup, the books showed that 1942 had been La Rosa’s best year in over half a century.

Some nights as I lay in my bed in the dark, my mind wandered back to that late afternoon when Walsh and his two goons came to La Rosa with their hard eyes and their big guns. If I had it to do all over again, I would slaughter them the minute they stepped out of their car. But until that moment I’d had some lingering uncertainty in my mind. I’d thought that Walsh might be content to take the journal and call it quits. But when I saw Stubb Martindale with them, my doubts faded away. Walsh and Nolan were already partners in crime, each with enough on the other to send him to the chair, and they had to stand or fall together. But they had no real hold on Martindale beyond his participation in my abduction, something they could have claimed was a legal arrest. This made him both dangerous and expendable.

When we searched the bodies we found the Colt .38 Super they’d taken from me down in Beaumont. It was in Nolan’s overcoat, and I knew then what they’d had in mind. They intended to murder my aunt and me, and then one of them would have shot Martindale with my gun and arranged things to look as though he and I had killed each other in a shootout that had its roots in our mutual hatred from years past. I have no idea what they’d planned to do if their gunplay brought the attention of the vaqueros. But if Milam Walsh was anything, he was a skilled improviser, and he had brass. No doubt he’d thought he could pull it off.

The bodies went into deep pools in the Rio Grande, weighted down with old chains and stripped of anything that could identify them. I knew that before a week passed the turtles and the catfish would do their work. Two of the old men took the John Deere tractor far out into brush and bored three deep holes with the auger. Into these holes went the men’s clothes and rings and watches and wallets. Then they filled the holes, and within a few days even they would have found it impossible to return to the exact spot. Shortly after midnight that same evening a heavy car with Mexican license plates rolled up to the international bridge at Laredo. At the wheel sat a well-dressed but tired-looking man of middle age who carried documents that identified him as a medical doctor from Sonora. Traffic was light and the guards were tired. After waving him across with no more than a cursory inspection of his papers, they stood watching sleepily as Milam Walsh’s fancy Packard vanished forever into the bowels of Old Mexico.