Six feet six inches in his moccasins, he walked out of the sala and onto San Francisco Street. He was filled with his frustrated need of Teresa and with anger at himself. Why did he keep coming back when he knew how it was? Why didn’t he give up? There was always greener pasture over the hill.
He spat. Hell. He couldn’t help himself. A man wanted a woman that much he couldn’t help it. So he went on making a fool of himself.
There was a crowd in the plaza and he skirted its edge. He came in sight of La Castrenza, the military chapel on the south side of the square. Leaning against its ancient wall were Cimarron Saunders and Wingy Hollister. They stiffened, with sight of Kelly, and for a moment all three were like strange dogs with their hackles up. This was always the way of their infrequent meetings since the fight in the mountains north of Santa Fe. Finally Saunders smiled maliciously.
“Goin’ trappin’, Kelly?”
“For poachers,” Kelly said.
Wingy Hollister smiled unctuously. “A worthy search, brother. Don’t let it become an obsession.”
“Not an obsession, exactly,” Kelly said. His eyes dropped to the tomahawk swinging from Hollister’s belt. “Jist somethin’ I can’t forget.”
He let the drift of the crowd move him away from them toward Galisteo. Kelly was almost around the corner and into Galisteo when he saw Vic Jares join them. Cheek bulging with a chaw, the fox-faced man spoke quickly to the other pair. His bright eyes darted across the square and he gestured toward the Palace. Hollister and Saunders looked that way. Kelly did too.
Captain Perea was talking to a ragged peon in the deep shadow of the Palace portal. He was nodding and asking questions and glancing off toward the Sangre de Cristos. In a moment Perea left the man and went to his handsome black horse hitched by the customhouse. Hollister and Jares and Saunders began walking quickly toward La Fonda. There was a definite pattern to all of it that held Kelly’s attention.
Perea trotted his fretting cavalry horse past La Fonda and down the street that led to the Santa Fe Trail, not seeing Saunders and the other two in the crowd. As soon as Perea had disappeared, the three trappers hurried to a trio of horses racked in front of La Fonda, mounting up. They held the animals there, talking among themselves, and finally followed Perea.
Kelly remembered what he had told Teresa. But somehow this went deeper than her politics. Somehow it was part of the debt he owed Tico Velez.
He got his horse from its rack in the plaza and rode after the men. It was already dark when he reached the trail and traffic had thinned out to nothing. It was broken, rising land now, where the cedars and piñons clustered like stunted ghosts on the benches and the yucca stood like lonely candles in the light of a rising moon. By that same light he read sign on the trail.
He reached Apache Pass, with rocky walls towering monumentally on either side, rising through a defile so narrow and tortuous that a few men could hold back an army here. The moon was higher now and he knew he couldn’t be far behind them. He pulled off into timber, paralleling the trail. He came to the old Pecos Trail. Here his quarry had turned off. Caution turning his face bleak, he worked his way through scrub timber. Then he heard a horse snort softly in the night ahead. He checked his animal, listening.
After a while the horse snorted again, stamping. It was no farther ahead.
He hitched his mount. Rifle swinging at his side, he found brush choking a wash and used it for cover. It took him to within sight of the animals. Three horses, hitched to a dwarf cedar, with no sign of their riders.
Kelly circled them till he found the tracks of three men, leading northward. In a few hundred yards he heard another horse snort and came upon Perea’s handsome black mount, fretting nervously on its tie-rope. The tracks of Cimarron and Jares and Hollister clustered at the animal, as if they had stopped a moment; then each man had taken a different direction away from the horse. Kelly followed the deepest tracks.
Topping a brush-covered rise, he stopped abruptly. Before him, completely revealed under the high moon, was an eery sight. Two immense communal dwellings, ancient and deserted in the pale yellow light, the crumbling remains of a vanished race.
He realized he had been led to the ruins of Pecos, a Pueblo village whose people had been wiped out many years ago by pestilence and war. The buildings were four stories high, laid out in a quadrangle, which left a vast courtyard in the center. Typical of the pueblos, the upper stories were terraced back so that the rooftops of the lower level formed a balcony. Tico Velez had told Kelly that before the buildings had fallen into decay a man could make an entire circuit of the village on these balconies without setting foot on the ground.
Finally he worked his way around the buildings till he found an approach that would not expose him. Squirming through the cover of washes and brush and broken land he reached the adobe wall of the first great communal building. There were breaks in the age-old wall and he climbed through one into the utter blackness of a rubble-filled chamber.
He found no doors in the walls of this lower chamber, but his hands encountered a notched cedar post leading upward. He crawled up the primitive ladder, through an open trap, and found himself on the balcony formed by the rooftop of the first level. Fifteen feet back of the edge rose the wall of the second story. A door pierced this wall and he quickly stepped into it, feeling too exposed on the balcony.
He stood in the doorway, looking out onto the dead city, listening. He wanted to move around the quadrangle but he didn’t dare do it in the open. He finally turned and moved through the pitch-black room, seeking another door.
It was then that he heard the sound.
Muffled whispering, far ahead.
Sweat broke out on his palms. Pawing walls till he found another opening, he stepped into the next room. Moonlight streamed through a dozen breaks in the front wall. He crossed warily, flattened himself against crumbling adobe in the darkness beyond. At last he heard the sound again. Closer this time. More distinguishable. Feet crunching rubble on the floor.
He moved down the wall to a cedar-framed door. The chamber beyond was dark again. No moonlight to show him the way. Only the sound, still muffled, intermittent, to guide him. He put his back to a rear wall and slid down it, foot by foot, feeling each time with his moccasins so they would not betray him by crunching unseen rubble. He reached a corner, stopped. This room was silent. But somewhere there was noise again. He slid down the new wall, reached another door, stopped again.
The noise was clear now, no longer muffled. It came from the room beyond. It echoed, as if in a vast, long chamber. In complete darkness, soundless as an Indian, Kelly moved through the door and put his back to the wall. He held his breath and heard the crunching, the footsteps coming, one by one.
A faint light bloomed against a distant wall. It looked to be a hundred feet away. So distant that it only illuminated the far end of the great chamber, revealing a few huge beams that held up the roof, leaving the bulk of the room still in darkness.
The light became brighter, a flaring pin-point in the velvety blackness, a sotol-stalk torch held in the hand of Captain Perea as he moved into a door. The light fell on a pair of crates in a corner. Long crates, with printing on their sides.
Perea exclaimed softly and walked quickly to the corner, saber clattering.
From the darkness in another side of the room came a whisper of sound. Kelly stiffened. The whisper became a sharp hiss, like an arm drawn violently back.
“Perea,” bawled Kelly.
Perea wheeled. The tomahawk whipped past an inch from his chest, passing through empty air exactly where the middle of his shoulder blades would have been if he hadn’t turned. It struck the sotol stalk beyond, held in Perea’s hand, and knocked it from his grip. The torch fell to the earth and snuffed out.
Kelly’s shout had betrayed his position. Even as the torch fell a gun began to boom in the huge room. Kelly heard the first bullet whack into the wall six inches to his right, spitting adobe all over him.
He dropped his rifle and threw himself flat. As he rolled to escape the searching bullets, with the thunder of the smashing gun blotting out all other sound, Kelly felt the floor tremble beneath him with the feet of a heavy man running across the room toward Perea. He tried to stop himself but it was too late. The man ran right into him and spilled over his body.
He heard the elephantine grunt as the man struck the floor. He heard him roll over and scramble up. Kelly was already lunging to his knees, whipping his Bowie from his belt. The man ran hilt-deep onto the knife and his cry of agony joined the reverberating echoes of the gunshots.
His great weight knocked Kelly backward and then sprawled across him. The breath left Kelly in a gasp and he was helplessly pinned. The man wheezed and rolled off. Kelly still had his grip on the knife and it pulled free.
He heard the man gasp with pain, rise, and stagger into the darkness. He lay flat, moveless, soundless, till that noise died, and the shuddering echoes of the shots faded away.
The silence was eery, aching, after so much violent sound. It seemed like he lay there for an eternity. Finally there was a hiss of clothing on a moving body from Perea’s corner.
“Captain?” Kelly said.
“Who is it?”
“Kelly Morgan.”
“Are they gone?”
“I think so. If they stayed, they would’ve reloaded. If they’d reloaded, we would’ve heard ‘em.”
There was more movement, the flare of steel sparking flint, the bloom of fire from the sotol stalk again. Perea was not a fool. He stood back from the torch for a few moments, looking around the room, a pistol now in his hand. Finally he said, humbly:
“How can a man thank you?”
“Don’t bother. They pulled the same thing on me once. What’s it all about?”
“Ryker’s been smuggling guns to the Apaches,” Perea said. I’ve been trying to prove it. One of Teresa’s spies in the plaza told me he’d seen four of Ryker’s wagons turn out of the train at the cutoff to Pecos.”
Kelly looked at the crates. “They’ve been here all right.”
Perea said, “We’re too late. They’re empty.”
With the light held high they saw that there was a break in the crumbling wall, opening onto the balcony in front. They walked to the break and peered through without exposing themselves. The city lay silent and gilded with haze. And ten feet from them, sprawled near the edge of the terrace, lay the dead man, Wingy Hollister, huddled on his side, both hands still clutched over the bloody wound Kelly’s knife had ripped in his paunch.
“I guess that’s for Turkey Thompson,” Kelly said.