She was in her sala again on Burro Alley, spinning her webs, weaving her plots. Perea was released and brought to Teresa before he saw Amado. At first the captain was reluctant to support the governor further. But Teresa convinced him it was better than the chaos that would result if Amado was deposed. That same night she sent a rider south to catch up with Uvalde and the Texans and to see what could be done for Kelly.
With the army behind him, Amado again threatened to invoke the Expulsion Law. It was stalemate and Biscara knew it. Once more he retired sullenly to his hacienda south of Santa Fe. The Archuleta letters were presented at the Palace, proving without a doubt that Archuleta had been ready to betray New Mexico. The Assembly itself voted to send him to the capital for trial. It started the stampede. Seeing how thoroughly Teresa had regained her power, the rest of the Biscara faction capitulated. Gomez resigned as Secretary and left for Taos.
Within the week the rider returned from the column of prisoners. Kelly was still alive but so feeble and sick they had to carry him in a carreta. To arrange his escape would be dangerous, next to impossible. He was unable to sit a horse, and couldn’t walk six paces. Uvalde knew what a touchy subject Kelly was to Amado and would take no bribe, fearing reprisal from the governor. He had ordered his troops to shoot any prisoner attempting to escape.
Teresa’s first impulse was to go to Kelly. Yet she knew how foolish that would be. Things were at the crucial stage. Her very survival here depended upon a constant manipulation of a million interlocking details. A week away and the whole precarious network would crumble. And Kelly’s survival depended upon her survival.
She knew the next man she sent south would have to be more than a courier. It was going to be a long process and would take someone with daring and resourcefulness. Felipe Vargas had worked for her ever since he’d gotten the Archuleta letter. The excitement and danger appealed to the rogue in him, she paid him handsomely, and he had become as devoted as Perea. She gave him a petition to General Santa Anna for Kelly’s pardon, a message to the United States Minister in Mexico City, and money to bribe Kelly’s way out if all else failed.
It was not until March of 1842 that he returned. She was having her morning chocolate and buñuelos when Pepita ushered Vargas into her chamber, sun-blackened, caked with the dust of the long journey, hollow-cheeked with exhaustion. He knew how eager she was for news and spoke without preamble.
“I did all that was humanly possible, señorita. Mexico is still bitter over the war with Texas. Santa Anna refused a pardon. Morgan had been out of the United States so long his citizenship was cloudy. The American minister’s hands are tied. I used up all the money, trying to bribe Morgan’s way out. It wasn’t any good.”
Her face grew pale; she locked her hands together and paced agitatedly across the room. “Is there nothing we can do?”
“We need more time,” Vargas said. “Morgan’s been transferred to Perote, at Vera Cruz. Uvalde damned Morgan at the trials with a pack of lies and half-truths. We’re lucky he wasn’t executed.”
Uvalde! She almost cursed. She knew he had done it under orders from Amado. This was Amado’s jealousy of Kelly, his revenge on her.
“Can’t we plan an escape?”
“It would be too risky. If he was caught he’d surely be executed. I wouldn’t try it till everything else fails.”
She shook her head helplessly, still pacing. “I’ve got to go to him now, I’ve got to—”
“It would do no good,” Vargas said. “Mexico City isn’t Santa Fe. You can serve him better by staying here where you have power and influence.”
She knew he was right. It was the same barricade she had met before. Her whole position here, financially and politically, depended on her constant presence in Santa Fe. A few weeks away and she’d be ruined. How could she help Kelly then?
The months that followed were an anguished, unreal time. General Sam Houston, now president of the Republic of Texas, was working unceasingly for the release of the Texas-Santa Fe Expedition. Through Texas traders on the Santa Fe Trail, Teresa got into correspondence with Houston. He promised to do all he could, but since Kelly was not a citizen of the Republic, Houston had no official claim on him. In June of 1842 Santa Anna released most of the Expedition. The only exceptions were those classed as spies. And when the list of freed prisoners reached Santa Fe, late in the year, Kelly’s name was not on it.
Grimly, Teresa took up the fight again. But the troubles between Texas and Mexico were growing. There was a strong movement in the United States to annex Texas. To Mexico, who had never recognized the independence of Texas, this would be tantamount to annexing a slice of Mexican territory. In 1843 the Mexican president, Santa Anna, warned that “the Mexican government will consider equivalent to a declaration of war…the passage of an act for the incorporation of Texas into the Territory of the United States.”
A thousand times, during those years, Teresa must have stood in the little room where Kelly had finally possessed her remembering his hands on her body, remembering her hopeless sobbing, trying to resurrect the picture of his face. And a thousand times she wondered how that face looked now, in the castle at Perote….
* * * *
The Viceroys of old Spain had built the prison fortress a century before. Its gray rock walls stood on a shelf in the mountains behind Vera Cruz, seven thousand feet above the sea, and the peak of Cofre de Perote towered a mile higher above it. Within its twenty-six acres was a honeycomb of cells and dungeons where countless political prisoners had languished and died. In one of these cells, deep in the earth, they had put Kelly Morgan.
He was not the same man who had left Santa Fe so long ago. An eternity spent in this dank gloom, near death from dysentery and malaria, had left marks he would never lose. The meat and muscle had been bled from his great frame till he was barely more than a skeleton. His face was a ravaged, hollow-cheeked skull from which burning eyes stared, close to insanity. Behind him was an endless time of which he had only foggy memory—a time of delirium and semi-consciousness and utterly blank spaces when he must have been hovering near death.
But these last months he seemed more lucid; the malaria was gone and the dysentery had lessened and he had enough strength to move about. Felipe Vargas had been to see him several times, bringing him gifts of food, telling him of Teresa’s efforts to free him, trying to encourage him. On his last visit a month ago Kelly had asked the date, and had begun marking off the days with scratches on the wall. As near as he could tell, today was February 10, 1846.
Sometimes, when he had the strength, he paced. Sometimes he merely sat on his tattered, louse-ridden blanket, head tipped back against the wall, eyes closed.
When he heard the tramp of boots in the hall outside he thought it was merely the turnkey with his dinner and did not move or open his eyes. But when the barred door was unlocked, and he finally looked up, he saw a pair of Mexican dragoons. Crossed belts gleamed whitely against bright blue tunics and beneath tall shakos their faces were set in a dark, professional indifference.
“I am Sergeant Antonio Barrios, señor,” one of them told Kelly. His voice sounded strangely tense. “We have come to conduct you to Mexico City.”
Kelly got to his feet slowly, with great effort. He was too feeble for much reaction. He had been through so many of these trials before. They were interminable affairs, accomplishing little. He would almost rather stay in the cell.
Between the dragoons he shambled into the corridor. The turnkey let them through the barred door at the end of the hall and they started up the curving stone stairs. Somewhere water dripped endlessly and the torches socketed against the walls cast a weird, wavering light across the dragoons’ tense faces. Halfway to the next level another pair of troopers met them.
“You’re to see the governor again before you leave,” one of them told Barrios.
The dark-faced sergeant seemed angry. “What is it? I got my pass signed before we came down.”
“Something about your papers,” the soldier said.
He lowered his musket from his shoulder. It was pointing at Barrios. The sergeant frowned at his companion. Then, shrugging, he aided Kelly on up the steps. At last they reached the office of the governor of the prison. The sentry outside the door passed them in. By one of the windows was a lieutenant. Behind an ornate desk sat the governor of Perote, Colonel Rivera. He was a man in his early fifties with a sallow bald pate and shrewd, squinted eyes.
“Your papers are hardly in order,” he told Barrios.
“What more do you want?” the sergeant asked. “They’re signed by General Leon himself.”
Rivera looked toward the officer by the window. “Lieutenant Salazar has just arrived from Mexico City. His requisition is also signed by General Leon and contains a court decree that Señor Morgan is to be executed by a firing squad tomorrow.”
Barrios glanced sharply at Salazar, face pale and taut. “There must be some mistake—”
The governor stood, hands flat on his desk. “Indeed.” He spoke crisply to the troopers who had brought them up. “Take the prisoner back to his cell. I’m holding Barrios in custody till this is settled.”
The two soldiers guarding Kelly and Barrios had grounded their muskets. They had not disarmed Barrios. All he had to do was raise his musket. It took them all by surprise. His gun was covering the colonel’s chest before the others could even get their musket butts off the floor.
“If you want your colonel alive,” Barrios told them, “you will drop your guns and line up against the wall.”
The sentry outside heard it and wheeled into the doorway, only to look down the muzzle of the musket held by the dragoon with Barrios. A pale fury replaced the stunned expression on Colonel Rivera’s jaundiced face.
“Sergeant—are you insane?”
Barrios did not answer him. He spoke in a taut, jerky voice to his companion. “Pio, bind them with their belts, then find something for gags.”
Kelly still couldn’t quite comprehend what was happening. So weak he had to lean against the desk for support, he gaped at the sergeant.
“What the hell?” he said.
“The details later, my friend,” Barrios told him. “Hide a gun under your shirt. You may need it.”
Pio was working swiftly and efficiently, using the belts that crossed their tunics to bind the sentry and the other soldiers. He pulled Lieutenant Salazar’s pistol from its holster and tossed it to Kelly. Realizing this was some sort of a break, Kelly stuffed the gun into his waistband and dropped his rag of a shirt over it.
Salazar and the other soldiers were tense with frustrated anger, bent forward like dogs on a leash, eyes darting from Barrios to Pio in an avid search for the slightest chance to take them off-guard. But the threat of the gun on their governor held them in check. With Colonel Rivera still cursing them, Pio bound and gagged him and put him on the floor with the others. Barrios scooped his pass off the desk and took Kelly’s elbow, hurrying him to the door.
“Someone’s bound to go to that office soon,” Barrios said. “We can only hope we get to the sallyport first.”
Stumbling, tripping, growing dizzy from the effort, Kelly hurried between them down the hall. They had to slow up every time they reached a sentry post, but finally they reached the main door. They got across the courtyard and presented their pass to the corporal at the sallyport. The bored non-com had already passed Barrios in and he only glanced at the pass, not bothering to check for a counter signature. He nodded to the pair of sentries and they began to open the heavy, iron-studded doors. The gates were almost open when Colonel Rivera ran from the door of the main building, still struggling to tear a knotted belt off one wrist. He was followed by half a dozen troops.
“Corporal—stop those men—they’re impostors!”
The corporal tried to pull his pistol. Barrios lifted his musket and shot him through the chest. The sentries had put aside their muskets to open the gate. As they scrambled for the guns Pio lunged against one, clubbing him across the back of the neck. Kelly was too feeble to go after the other one. Robbed of support, it was all he could do to remain erect and pull the pistol from his belt. As the second sentry scooped up his musket and wheeled, Kelly fired. It struck the man in the leg and he went down hard.
Barrios grabbed Kelly’s arm and shoved him toward the gate. The guards with Colonel Rivera were firing now, as they crossed the compound, and others were appearing from sentry boxes around the courtyard. Kelly had only gone three paces, with the bullets kicking up dirt all about them, when he stumbled and fell to a knee. But Pio was there to grab his other arm. The two men half dragged him through the gate. Just outside another pair of mounted dragoons waited with four spare horses by a black coach.
“We can’t use the coach now,” Barrios shouted. “Get him on a horse.”
They lifted Kelly bodily into the saddle and swung aboard other mounts themselves. The coachman dropped off his seat onto the saddle of the remaining horse. Kelly got a glimpse of his face and saw that it was Felipe Vargas.
They raced away from the abandoned coach at a dead run. They had just gotten under way when the first pair of guards ran out the door, discharging their muskets. One of the dragoons ahead of Kelly clapped hands to his face and pitched off his horse. The coachman started to pull up and veer back.
“Don’t stop, Vargas,” Barrios yelled. “He was dead before he hit.”
With Barrios and Pio supporting Kelly between them, the riders galloped madly down the winding mountain road. Far below, the jungle spread its misty green carpet over the land, and in the distance the tile roofs of Vera Cruz shimmered in the hot sun. The effort of running and of battle had drained Kelly; waves of nausea swept through him and he would have pitched off the horse but for the support of the men on either side.
As they neared the bottom of the precarious, shelving road, Vargas plunged off onto the slope, leading them in a scrambling, sliding descent down the steep pitch. At the bottom the dense mass of the jungle swallowed them. They had to slow down, picking their way carefully through the thick undergrowth. Kelly tried to straighten up. His face was sallow and drawn with nausea. Vargas dropped back, grinning at him.
“I’m sorry we had to do it this way, amigo. We wanted to do it legally. But only a few days ago we got word that Lieutenant Salazar had left Mexico City with orders for your execution.”
“We hoped to make it ahead of him,” Barrios said. “The passes were forged for us in Vera Cruz yesterday, the uniforms stolen only last night.”
“We have about twenty miles to ride,” Vargas said. “Can you make it?”
The sheer daring of the exploit touched something wild in Kelly. He wanted to throw his head back and howl like a curly wolf at being free. But he only had the strength to grin feebly.
“I’ll make it, Vargas, if I have to wiggle on the ground like a snake all the way to Santa Fe.”
The man shook his narrow head. “It would be suicide to go back there. An Indiaman left Vera Cruz this morning. They agreed to stand off Los Palos till dusk. They’ll take you to Corpus Christi. You’ll have friends waiting there. It’s all been arranged.”
The world began to spin and Kelly sagged forward on his horse. He had only a dim, agonized consciousness of the rest of that ride. He knew that it got dark and that sometime later they reached a tropical beach. The yellow moon gleamed against the reefed sails of an Indiaman out in the bay. Vargas built a signal fire and soon a whaleboat was pulling in toward the foaming breakers. As they beached the boat Kelly started trying to thank Vargas. But somehow the words were all jumbled up. He felt them lifting him onto the thwarts and he was still talking when he lost consciousness completely….
It was a long trip. The sun and the sea filled Kelly with renewed vigor and he soon began to gain in weight and strength. He was not fully recovered, however, when he was put ashore at Corpus Christi Bay in early March. The only settlement on the bay was a huddle of adobe buildings, fortified by a wall of shell-cement, called Kinney’s Trading Post. They rowed Kelly ashore in a gig and held him on the beach while the bo’sun went to the post with a note Vargas had given him. Within fifteen minutes the sailor came back in a wagon driven by Bob Whitworth, a man who had fought beside Kelly at San Jacinto. Whitworth chuckled at Kelly’s amazement.
“I been waiting for you almost a year,” he said. “That Teresa Cavan got in touch with me through Sam Houston. She’s been payin’ me a reg’lar salary just to wait around this bay in case they had to get you out by sea.”
Kelly shook his head helplessly. Through the years, Vargas had told Kelly of Teresa’s efforts to free him. Yet the scope of her operations never failed to amaze him.
“I never knew a woman like her, Bob. In the whole damn world I never knew one.” Kelly looked up as a file of blue-coated troopers passed them at a canter. “What the hell are U.S. dragoons doin’ in Texas?” he asked.
“Texas ain’t a Republic any more, Kelly. The U.S.A. annexed us in December, while you was on that ship.”
Kelly’s face darkened. He knew what annexation could mean. Despite their defeat at the hands of Sam Houston in 1836, the Mexican government had never recognized Texas independence. They had insisted that the boundary between the United States and Mexico was still the Sabine River. The Texans and the United States claimed that the line was the Rio Grande. And in between these two rivers lay the bulk of Texas. Whitworth told Kelly that President Polk, to back up American claims, had moved General Zachary Taylor and an American army into the disputed territory.
“Might as well declare war,” Kelly said. “Santa Anna swore he’d fight if the U.S. took Texas.”
Whitworth nodded darkly. “Now we hear General Ampudia’s moving to Matamoras with a big Mexican army.”
Kelly looked westward, his face bleak, driven. “You figure there’ll be fightin’ in Santa Fe?”
“That’s part of Mexico, ain’t it?”
Kelly’s great trap-scarred hands knotted together in his lap. “I got to get to her, Bob. I got to get to her right now.”
Whitworth stared at him blankly. “Don’t be crazy. They’d shoot you dead the first foot you put on Mexican soil.”
Kelly clenched his teeth. “There must be a way.”
Whitworth clucked at his horses. “You’d be a little safer if you went in with the army. The officers here think that if war comes Fort Leavenworth’s the most logical jumpin’ off place for Santa Fe.”
“Where’s that?”
“On the Missouri. Up in Kansas.”
“How long would it take?”
“Kelly, don’t be a fool. You got to rest. You got to get well.”
“Bob, damn you, how long does it take to reach Kansas?”