Amado was not a tall man. It was his massive head with its mane of black hair that gave him the illusion of great size. He had the oblique, thin-lidded eyes of an Oriental tyrant. The splayed nostrils and deep bridge of his nose lent a primitive brutality to his face. No matter how often he shaved, a blue shadow would always stain his blunt jaw, like a hint of treacherous undercurrents in the man. He wore a serape, head thrust through its center hole. The flutter of his slender hands, pulling the deep folds about his body, held a sense of suave, feminine cruelty.
Amado was a man of shadow origins. Somehow the legend had arisen that he was the illegitimate son of a Spanish grandee. Yet he bore the name of one of the poorest families in Albuquerque. He had come north from that town a few years before with the avowed purpose of making his fortune in Santa Fe, the capital of this northern department. He had no contacts, no money, no sponsorship. Yet he had soon wormed his way into political circles, rising swiftly through the hierarchy of petty officialdom until he had been appointed customs inspector for the whole Upper River.
As he drifted through the mob toward the cart, his shadow followed him. This was Innocent, a wizened little ferret of a man dressed in the soiled rawhide chivarras and cotton tilma of the peasant. A horse had kicked him in the head when he was a child, leaving him hopelessly addled. He leered and giggled as he shuffled along behind Amado, winking at the Indians as though he held some sly secret.
From his vantage point on the cart, Villapando was still haranguing the crowd. With Gomez’s crafty needling, he was proving to be a spellbinder, a demagogue. Teresa knew that many of his accusations against Governor Carbajal were of dubious validity, yet there was a burning sincerity, a dedication to the man that was lifting the crowd into a frenzy. The wild excitement on their sweating, avid faces had all the makings of a riot. Such an outbreak might well mark the beginnings of the revolt which had been building for so many years in these northern towns.
Teresa knew that Gomez had a political ax to grind. The department of New Mexico was traditionally divided into two parts. Everything north of Sante Fe was the Rio Arriba—the Upper River—and everything south of the capital was Rio Abajo—the Lower River. Because of his peasant origins, Gomez had always been looked down upon by the gente fina, the aristocrats. Thus, in the politics of the capital, Gomez and his Rio Arriba had always been relegated to the humiliating position of a country cousin by the Biscaras and their gente fina of Rio Abajo. Could it be that Gomez saw in this embryo of revolution a chance to gain the recognition he had always coveted?
Teresa knew that in actuality her cousin in Taos was not capable of protecting her from Don Biscara. She had only let the trappers bring her here as a last resort, because there was no place else to flee. But if these men were plotting an uprising that would result in Biscara’s exile, and she could somehow ally herself with them….
The possibilities of it kindled an excitement in her that Villapando’s wild harangue had failed to touch. She started edging toward the fringe of the crowd. The trappers were too intent on the speaker’s wild display to notice. In a last swift lunge she ducked into the crowd. She pushed through the mass of sweating, yelling men; few of them even noticed her in their excitement. Buffeted by their shifting bodies, surrounded by their earthy stench of sweat and chile and tobacco, she finally saw the cart ahead of her. Standing by one of the head-high, solid wheels, Amado caught sight of her.
His eyes turned blank and wide with surprise. Then a broad smile came to his lips. They were thick, carnal lips, pinched down to tight corners—made for the lechery and slyness and guile she knew so well. He called her name and pushed toward her through the crowd. The folds of his serape fell away from his outstretched arms and for a moment she thought he would embrace her. A foot short he stopped, hesitating.
“I do not know if I have the courage,” he said. “The last time I saw a man take you in his arms, he died.”
Her eyes went dark with the memory. Then she forced herself to smile and held out a hand. “Then let us greet each other like compadres.”
He laughed, taking her hand. “And how do I find you here, compadre?”
She told him of Biscara. Her face grew bleak as she spoke. “I am through being used by men, Nicolas. They have done all they are going to do to me. Somehow I will change it. I don’t know how, but somehow I will.”
“You have come to the right man, mi chiquita. You and I together—”
“Not that way, either, Nicolas.”
He sighed rolling his eyes heavenward. “Why must you be so unreasonable, Teresa?”
She broke in on him. “Why are you here? If the governor found out you were involved in something like this—”
He shrugged. “My customs report did not suit Governor Carbajal. I told him I was merely making diligencia. A peso in this hand, a peso in that. How does it compare with the diligencia Carbajal makes? For every peso that seeks the proper haven of my pocket, a thousand fall into the governor’s coffers. Yet who pays, when the order comes from Mexico City to unmask the culprits? The real thieves, the real grafters? Por supuesto, no. It is the little ones like me and Mayor Melgares. Do I want to rot for years in those Mexico City dungeons? á fe mía, no. Before they come to get me, I escape.” A pawky grin pinched the tips of his lips and he made a dramatic gesture with one hand. “Vale más estar tomado por valiente que serlo.”
It was a favorite saying of his—it is better to be thought brave than really to be so—and was as typical of him, and of her past experiences with him, that she had to smile. She had sought him out with some vague idea of getting his help. Now she realized more clearly what she had to do. If she meant to ally herself with these people she must take her place in their ranks. But they would have no use for a woman. They would suspect and mistrust one who came from a family that had been in Don Biscara’s service for generations. Her only link with them—her only chance to identify herself with them—was Amado.
“Do you think this is the beginning of a revolt?” she asked.
His frown dug deep, vertical furrows between his black brows. “Gomez is up to something.”
“And you?”
He shook his head. “The difference between a political prisoner and a revolutionary is usually a noose around the neck.”
“But what if the revolt succeeds? They’ll execute Governor Carbajal and all who stand with him.”
“But I am not with him.”
“You are either with him or against him.”
She saw that it shook his confidence. He frowned again, saying, “How can it succeed? A bunch of unarmed Indians, a handful of disaffected politicians.”
“You know it’s more than that.”
His eyes narrowed and he pursed his lips. She could almost see the wheels of his complex mind at work. He knew the background of these intricate politics far better than she—knew that this explosion had been building for years. Governor Carbajal had only a couple of hundred regular troops in Santa Fe, and half of those would dessert. A hundred dragoons against thousands of aroused rebels.
“Gomez wouldn’t be in this if it was just another Indian uprising,” Teresa said. “There’ll be Mexicans involved. They’ll need a leader, Nicolas. A man like you. Governor Carbajal wouldn’t have made an example of you if you hadn’t been important. You could be more than a customs inspector, under a new government.”
She knew his vanity, his ego, and was using it. She saw the zealous gleam varnish his eyes, blotting out the doubts, the reservations. He looked around the crowd with a new expression in his face. Gomez was prompting the Pueblo orator:
“And the outsiders, Villapando, the outsiders in our government.”
The Pueblo glanced blankly at Gomez, then turned back to the crowd, taking his cue. “Governor Carbajal comes from five hundred leagues away. How can he understand our problems?”
It was a recapitulation of all the complaints and wrongs, the cruelties and misrule under which the people had suffered for decades. And as Teresa watched Don Gomez slyly prompting Villapando, the picture became clearer.
Gomez, with his peasant origins, should have been truly sympathetic to the needs of the people. Yet his large holdings and his desire to be recognized by the aristocrats blinded him to the moral issues involved. He was obviously bent on power, and would use any means to get it.
The Pueblos, on the other hand, were thinking only in terms of justice. These sedentary, village Indians had been here before the Spaniards, had never amalgamated with their conquerors, and were patently sincere in their wish to throw off the yoke of misrule.
And for once the Mexicans stood with them. In this crowd were many pobres—small, poverty-ridden Mexican farmers and ranchers who made up the peasant class of the country. They were descended from the original Spanish settlers and were as proud of their pure blood as were the aristocrats. But they, perhaps more than the Indians, had suffered under these aristocrats, and were as sincere as the Pueblos in their desire to get rid of the corruption in Santa Fe.
The orator was in a frenzy now and it was driving the mob wild. Their shouts boomed and roared deafeningly about Teresa. She knew this was the crucial moment, sensed it was the point Gomez had been whipping them up to with his insidious needling of the Pueblo orator. She clutched Amado’s elbow.
“Now is the time. Let it come from you. They’ll remember the man who started them to freedom. Tell them we must free Mayor Melgares.”
Amado was whirled up in the excitement now. There was no more room left in his own frenzy for doubt. In a wild voice he screamed to be heard above the tumult.
“It is time to strike. We must free Melgares!”
Gomez had turned his face to Villapando, mouth open to shout. The sudden anger stamped into his seamed face convinced Teresa that he had meant to yell the same thing. But now Amado had taken it from him. The faces of the crowd swung toward Amado; then the shout left him in a frightening roar.
“Amado is right. The time has come. Free Melgares, free Melgares….”
Like a bright blade of sound slashing through all the diffuse din, Teresa heard the brazen blast of a bugle. It made her wheel toward the source, and she saw a file of blue-coated soldiers galloping down the main street and into the plaza. Amado saw them and fear ran in a flutter of muscle through his face.
“The dragoons sent to get Melgares,” he said.
The mob had already begun to surge across the plaza toward the jail. The troops galloped against their front ranks, beating at heads with the flats of their sabers, knocking men off their feet with the lunging shoulders of their horses. The leader, a young lieutenant, rode his frothing horse into the middle of the cleared space, barking a command. Six of his dozen men dismounted, slipping from under the saddle leathers their escopetas—the short smoothbore muskets of the dragoon. Then the lieutenant stood in his stirrups, yelling at the top of his voice to be heard.
“One minute to scatter, or I will order you fired upon.”
It was a clever military maneuver. A man on horseback exercised a subtle domination over those on foot. The lieutenant had kept enough men in the saddle to retain that domination, yet had added to it with the threat of those loaded guns. The front ranks of the crowd began to press back; some of the men on the fringe began to drift into the streets leading away from the square. Few of the Indians had come prepared for an out-and-out battle with regulars. Most of them had no guns, were armed only with their knives or lances. The lieutenant rode back and forth behind his riflemen, a fine proud figure on his spirited black horse.
He was a vividly handsome young man, rapier-slim in his blue coat with its red cuffs and collar. His black hair was queued beneath the round-crowned Andalusian hat, and under his jacket his torso was encased in a cuirass of double-folded deerskin. Teresa had seen him in Santa Fe. He was Lieutenant Hilario Perea, recently transferred from the Esquadron de Vera Cruz in Mexico City.
Teresa saw that Gomez was moving swiftly through the crowd, saying something to a man here, a man there. Each one he spoke to began to shove his way toward the mouth of one of the streets opening into the square. And Teresa saw that each was a Mexican—not a Pueblo Indian—and was dressed in the spurred wing boots and rawhide chivarras of the cattleman. These were probably Gomez’s vaqueros, with their horses hitched somewhere off the plaza. She saw pistols thrust in the belts of some, and knew there would be carbines and escopetas on their animals.
“Gomez is up to something,” she said. “We’ve got to give him a chance.”
“How?” Amado said hotly. “Our minute is almost up.”
“Lieutenant Perea can’t make good his threat and he knows it,” Teresa said. “Once his men fire, they’ll be no better off than we.”
Amado’s eyes began to glow again as he saw her logic. He turned to Villapando again, shouting above the babble. “How can the troops fire? One volley and their guns will be empty.”
Villapando began to exhort the crowd again, echoing Amado. The drift toward the streets began to stop, the men began to pack up again. Lieutenant Perea raised his saber.
“I warn you. If you do not scatter my men will fire.”
“The minute is up,” Villapando taunted. “Why do you not shoot?”
Perea rode his prancing, shimmering horse down the line of his riflemen. His dark young cheeks looked drawn with frustration. Villapando shouted at the Indians again. The lieutenant pulled his lathered horse to a halt, stood in the stirrups, pointed his sword at Villapando.
“Corporal, shoot that man on the cart!”
A gun cracked. The ball missed Villapando and buried itself in the adobe wall at his back. He ducked and dropped off the cart. At the same time, from the mouth of other streets and from the roofs of half a dozen buildings around the plaza, other guns began to fire. Teresa knew that it was the vaqueros Gomez had drawn from the crowd. Three of the dismounted dragoons were hit, stumbling and sprawling on the ground.
“Charge them,” Villapando screamed. “Get their guns.”
The mob surged forward. The three remaining dragoons on the ground fired in panic. A pair of Pueblo Indians were hit but the rest of the mob engulfed the dragoons on foot.
Teresa dodged into the mouth of an alley to keep from being knocked down and trampled. She looked over the dark sea of heads in the plaza to see the mounted dragoons hacking about them with their sabers. Another burst of fire from the roof tops spilled a pair of them from their saddles. It panicked Lieutenant Perea’s horse and the beast plunged headlong through the mob. Scattering men right and left, it galloped directly into the alley where Teresa had taken refuge.
The horse ran past Teresa with the lieutenant sawing savagely on the reins. Ten feet beyond her he got the animal stopped. But when he tried to wheel it in the narrow alley the frenzied mount reared and spilled him from the saddle.
Shaking his head dazedly, he rolled over and gained his feet. He had lost his saber but was drawing a big Spanish pistol. As he got it out, one of Gomez’s vaqueros appeared at the far end of the alley, gun leveled.
Perea took a snap shot before the man could fire. The vaquero was hit in the belly and sprawled on his face. The sound of the shot was lost in another burst of gunfire from the rooftops.
Perea wheeled and ran toward the plaza. In the deep shadows he must have mistaken Teresa for a man; he struck savagely at her with the gun barrel as he ran by. She had to plaster herself against the wall to escape the blow. It had all happened in a few seconds and Perea gained the mouth of the alley before any of the crowd reached it.
Teresa knew she was the only one who had seen him fire. To the rest of the mob it must have appeared that he emerged from the alley with a loaded gun. He struck with his gun again as the first Indian reached him. Perea wheeled and ducked under a portal. This arcade running down the front of the building had been deserted by the surge of the mob into the plaza. Others in the mob tried to dart between the posts and stop him but he struck their arms down with the gun, eluding them.
Teresa saw that he was heading for the jail and began to run after him, under the portal. She saw Amado in the crowd and called to him. The mob, struggling with the remaining dragoons, had left a portion on one side of the square open. Perea appeared from beneath the portal, ran headlong across the mouth of a street, and reached the front of the jail. He put his back against the door, chest heaving, face covered with dirt and blood.
Villapando was already fighting his way to the edge nearest the jail, turning the mob’s attention that way with his shouting. But the sight of Perea, standing against the door with his pistol, stopped their first surge toward the mud building.
“The first man within ten feet of this door will get a ball through his head.”
No single man wanted to be a martyr; they had been responding to the authority of a uniform all their lives. The vaqueros on the rooftops had discharged their guns and would have to reload. And there was something so frighteningly indomitable about that single man facing them alone that it gave pause to the most avid rebel among them.
Villapando thrust himself to the forefront. In his fierce eyes shone admiration for such foolhardy courage. “Declare for us, Lieutenant,” he shouted, “and we will spare you.”
“I declare for God, for Santa Anna, and for the Republic. Now clear the plaza or suffer the consequences.”
The pure audacity of it held them a moment longer. Teresa reached Amado, pressed him through the crowd toward the front ranks. She hissed in his ear, “There is no ball in his gun. We are the only ones who know it.”
He turned to stare blankly at her. “How can you be sure?”
She kept prodding him through the pack of men. “I saw him shoot a man in the alley.”
Amado’s face shone with sweat. “Pues—he may have re-loaded.”
“He didn’t have time. I saw. This is your chance. Think what a hero it would make you.”
His eyes began to glow. “Are—are you sure?”
“Have I ever lied to you before?” she said. For a moment he hesitated. She saw fear on his face, doubt, hesitation. She leaned closer. “It takes greatness to snatch such opportunities as this, Nicolas.”
She saw the vivid eyes begin to shine. With a deep breath he shoved aside the few men in front of him and stepped into the open. Villapando, thirty feet away, looked at him in surprise. The whole crowd seemed to grow quiet, awaiting this new development. She saw Amado stop, his face growing pale. But the focus of their whole attention was upon him now. If he quailed he would be branded forevermore.
The lieutenant aimed the brass-bound pistol at his chest. “You have two paces more, Amado.”
Teresa saw Amado’s lip twitch. His voice sounded strained. “This is a thing of the people, Lieutenant. You might as well try to stop the sun from rising. If my death will prove that, it is in a good cause.”
In the hot yellow sun of late afternoon, a hush had settled over the crowd. Amado held out his hand for the gun.
Perea jerked the weapon back, meaning to strike with it. Amado let one of his arms fly into the air, as if he had knocked the gun up. The lieutenant tried to club him with the gun but Amado blocked the blow and hit him in the stomach. Perea gasped and doubled over. Amado wrenched the gun from his nerveless fingers and struck him across the head with it.
An instant later a shout rose from a hundred throats. The crowd surged forward, trampling the lieutenant, battering at the door with their own bodies. Then they were pulled away by those behind, leaving an open space for the dozen men who came in with a log. Three times they had to strike before the iron hinges tore from their sockets. Then the mob poured in and pulled Mayor Melgares from the depths of the dark cell.
A small, frightened, blinking man in a dusty alpaca suit, he was lifted onto their shoulders. And another man was lifted up, to sit beside him, Nicolas Amado, while Villapando and Gomez stood on the ground below, looking up.
Teresa looked up too, standing with her back pressed against a building, while Amado and Melgares were carried around the square, the heroes of the hour, and the wild shouts rang triumphantly down the crooked streets of the ancient town.
“Viva Melgares. Viva la revolución. Viva Amado!”