Chapter 32
“We’ll be meeting our friend today—eh, Lou?” Colter said the next morning after they and Baja Jack and his men had enjoyed an early breakfast of tortillas, frijoles, and coffee.
Now they were all saddling their horses. Old Pepe was placing the aparejos and panniers on the burros while singing a typically forlorn Mexican ballad and smoking a corn-husk cigarette that dribbled ashes as the old man worked.
Lou was reaching under Mean and Ugly’s belly to tie the latigo straps. “Sounds like we’ll get there today, yeah. According to Jack.”
Colter had finished saddling Northwest. Now he moved up close to Mean and stared over the saddle at Lou, frowning curiously. “Somethin’ botherin’ you, Lou? You ain’t said much so far this mornin’. That ain’t like you.”
Prophet cast a quick, furtive glance toward Baja Jack, who was dressing down one of his men, whom he’d apparently caught spicing his morning coffee with tequila. His rule was only a couple of sips of tarantula juice during lunch, to wash the beans down, and a few more at night, excluding those men on first guard duty, of course.
Last night no guards had been posted since Baja Jack was fully confident that no one but him and his present company knew about the ancient mud dwellings in the secondary canyon.
Baja Jack strictly forbade morning libations, wanting his men to be as clear as “Baptist preachers and Madre María on Easter Sunday her own damn self” at the start of the day. It was a somewhat comical sight—little, squat, bull-legged, hawk-nosed Baja Jack remonstrating a man who was easily twice as tall as he was and who could, if he’d wanted, have squashed Jack like a bug without trying. The bigger man just stared silently down in chagrin at Jack, however, absently rubbing his hands up and down on his serape.
Lou was glad to see Jack preoccupied at the moment. He wanted to have a quick, secret palaver with his trail partner. He hadn’t slept much after talking with Louisa last night in the main canyon, because he knew she’d been right, and he felt like a fool for not having considered the possible problem himself.
Lou gazed over his saddle at Colter. “Keep an eye on Jack, Red.”
Colter frowned. “Huh?”
“Just keep an eye on him.”
“You don’t trust him?”
“Uh . . .” Prophet cleared his throat. “Somethin’ sort of occurred to me last night, after I walked out for my stroll and had me a ponder.” He saw no reason to mention that his female partner was shadowing him. At least not yet. It was damned embarrassing, his getting shadowed by his female partner and not even suspecting she was back there. And then her informing him of what he should have recognized as an obvious threat.
No, it was just too much to admit to right off . . .
“What occurred to you last night, Lou?”
“Jack might be onto us.”
Colter frowned. “Onto us?”
“Yeah. You know . . .”
Prophet glanced over at Jack. The little man had finished dressing down the morning tequila-imbiber and had gone over to palaver with old Pepe. His mood had changed suddenly, like Mexican governments that came and went with the wind, and now he was laughing and sharing dirty stories in Spanish with the old burro wrangler while the other men finished saddling their horses.
Lou continued with: “I’m thinkin’ Jack might have figured out we’re after Yeats. To kill him. You know—since he knows I’m a bounty hunter an’ all. He might’ve figured out our plan, see, and, if so, he ain’t gonna cotton to the idea of our killin’ his main customer.”
He glanced at Jack once more then turned back to Colter. “He might be leading us into a trap, see, is what I’m sayin’.”
Colter stared across the saddle at Lou. He smiled, chuckled, and said, “Of course he does.” He chuckled again and regarded Prophet skeptically. “Yeah, he probably does, Lou! I guess I sort of figured you already figured that out, so I saw no point in bringin’ it up!”
Lou stared across the saddle at him, his ears burning.
Colter said, “I figured we both figured it was a risk worth taking, since Jack’s gonna take us right up to Yeats’s front doorstep an’ all. I mean, how else were we gonna find the Mad Major? Hell, we’re about to get a personalized introduction to the locoweed-addicted son of a buck!”
Lou’s ears burned. “So, you . . . then . . . you already figured . . .”
“Yeah, of course,” Colter said, grinning across the saddle. “I guess the trick is gonna be how do we do-si-do around Baja Jack and kill Yeats without getting ourselves killed in the process, since we’re probably gonna have to buck both Yeats’s men and Jack’s men, too. Oh, and of course there’s the little matter of rescuing the don’s daughter from Baluarte Santiago.”
Colter chuckled and wagged his head. “I don’t know about you, Lou, but this trip to Mexico is turning out to be the most fun I’ve had in a long time. It beats running from the law up north.” He winced and clutched his side. “Except for a couple of nasty bullet burns, I mean . . .”
“All right.” Lou looked away in shame, tapping his fingers on his saddle. “All right, then. Never mind me . . .”
Again, Colter chuckled, turned, and walked over to his horse.
“Yeah,” Lou said. “Never mind me . . .”
* * *
It was late in the afternoon after a long hot day of riding when Baja Jack reined his horse to a stop at the crest of a steep ridge. It was one of many ridges they’d crossed that day.
Jack leaned back in his saddle, hooked one of his short, crooked legs around his saddle horn, and thumbed his sombrero back off his forehead. He lifted his chin to indicate a large, pale bastion topping the next ridge beyond, maybe a mile away as the crow flies.
“That, gents,” said Jack, “is Baluarte Santiago.”
Prophet stretched his gaze across the next canyon, squinting against the harsh sunlight. Baluarte Santiago was an impressive piece of Spanish masonry, at least regarding the masonry of three or four hundred years ago. The mottled pale walls appeared thick and tall from this distance and punctuated by domed defensive turrets. Inside the walls rose a heavy, blocklike building of several levels and wings and which had likely housed the bastion’s garrison and commanding officers as well as stables for the garrison’s horses.
Probably even a prison, the bounty hunter assumed, given the nature of men from all ages of history . . .
Prophet’s party faced the old fort’s west side but they were far enough forward that Lou could see the long, wide, stone-paved ramp that rose at a slant from the ground level to the edge of a moat that ringed the bulwark.
Over the moat, there’d likely been a stout drawbridge that could be raised and lowered against possible attackers by a rudimentary system of winches and pulleys. The bridge would have been pulled up to fill the large, rectangular, deeply recessed front doorway abutted by two guard turrets outfitted with loopholes for cannons.
After all these years, however—centuries, rather—even the stoutest wooden door would have long since moldered to dust and splinters. What Prophet could see stretching between the moat and the bulwark’s front entrance now was likely a recently constructed wooden bridge, but he couldn’t tell for sure from this distance, squinting as he was against the sunlight reflecting off the Sea of Cortez.
Baluarte Santiago faced the deep blue, rolling waters of the Mar de Cortés, which stretched away to a far, pale horizon on Prophet’s left. At this time of the day, the sea’s deep, roiling waters were cobalt blue overlaid with the golden chain mail of reflected sunlight.
Baja Jack turned to smile at Lou and Colter sitting on their horses to his left. “Big old place, ain’t it? Ain’t nothin’ purty to look at, but I reckon it did its job back in the olden days.”
Jack pointed his stubby left arm toward the Sea of Cortez’s sun-gilded waters stitched with the cream of rolling whitecaps. “Them stout walls protected the fort from the old buccaneer raiders from the sea—pirates, don’t ya know!”
He laughed at the romance of those adventurous olden times, though Prophet would have bet that the men and maybe some women who’d resided inside the old bulwark hadn’t thought the times all that romantic and adventurous.
Harrowing and dangerous maybe. But not romantic.
Jack swung his stubby arm to indicate the stark desert mountains to the right of the old fort. “The walls on that side protected the fort from the Indios that haunted all them rocks inland, including the family of my dearly departed madre. The Indios didn’t take kindly to the Spanish invaders, especially when the Spanish forced the Indios into slave labor growing their food and building that fort and stampeding Catholicism down their throats for their trouble!”
Jack laughed again and shook his head.
He arched a brow in devilish delight at Lou and Colter, and said, “When the slaves died while building the fort, the Spanish added their bones to the mortar. You can see ’em when you get up close. In some places you can see where they added whole skulls and arm bones an’ hip bones an’ the like, not even botherin’ to grind ’em up. Oh, them was grisly times!” Jack howled.
Prophet silently wondered how less grisly the times were at Baluarte Santiago now, with Ciaran Yeats having taken up residence . . .
He kept his gaze on the massive bulwark spread across the otherwise stark crest of the next ridge and felt a chill rise from the small of his back and spread out across his shoulder blades. He and Colter were about to meet Ciaran Yeats. They had to find a way to kill the man and rescue Alejandra de la Paz.
Back at Hacienda de la Paz, when he was under the spell of both the old don and the beguilingly lovely Señorita Marisol, the job hadn’t seemed nearly as hard as it did now. Back there, it had seemed romantic and adventurous.
Now it rose before him, harrowing and dangerous.
Now he sort of wished he were lying with the dusky-skinned, chocolate-eyed señoritas of Sayulita . . .
“Come on, gents,” said Baja Jack, dropping his boot back into its stirrup custom-built for a child-sized leg, and nudging his horse on down the trail. “It ain’t gettin’ any earlier in the day, and my throat sure ain’t gettin’ any wetter just sittin’ here!”
He laughed.
Prophet looked at Colter, sitting to his right. The redhead was staring across the canyon and up the next ridge at Baluarte Santiago, the lair of Ciaran Yeats. He was surprised to see apprehension furling the young man’s brows. He hadn’t thought Colter Farrow was afraid of anything, much less his own demise. Lou had figured he was like Louisa in that way.
But, no—the kid appeared to be having second thoughts. Or if not second thoughts, at least he wasn’t as much in a hurry for romance and adventure as he’d been that morning when he’d laughed in the face of all that could go wrong at the end of the trail.
Colter must have sensed Prophet’s stare. He jerked his head toward the bounty hunter. He frowned, suddenly peevish. He brushed his rein ends against his coyote dun’s left hip. “You heard the man, Lou,” he grumbled, setting out down the ridge and into the dust kicked up by Baja Jack’s mount. “Our throats ain’t gettin’ any wetter, sittin’ here.”
Prophet hoped that it wasn’t a dark omen that a diamondback rattler, with a body nearly as thick as his wrist, seemed to take umbrage at Mean and Ugly and came slithering out from a patch of shade along the trail. Its diamond-shaped head was up and its eyes were flat and rife with unthinking, savage purpose. It shot as though fired out of a snake-firing cannon toward Mean’s right front hock.
Old Pepe, riding on his broad-barreled donkey directly behind Prophet, saw the snake at the same time Lou did, and yelled, “Hy-yiy-yiy-yiy-yiyy!”
Mean swerved away from the snake, and sunfished a good four feet in the air. Prophet’s heart leaped into his throat. Holding Mean’s reins with one hand, he swiped his .45 from its holster, cocked it, and, seeing the snake coiled up on the right side of the trail, button tail raised, ready to strike again, Lou took quick aim.
His Peacemaker bucked six times, roaring. By the time the sixth bullet had plowed through the snake, there wasn’t much meat left, the other five big rounds having hit pay dirt, as well.
What was left of the snake, which wasn’t much—it looked like a chunk of raw beef chopped up for the stewpot—lay writhing in the sand and rocks along the trail.
Prophet got Mean settled down, leaning forward and patting the horse with his left hand. Mean regarded the snake askance, withers quivering, the big heart still pumping quickly. Horses hated sidewinders as much as wildcats. Lou didn’t blame them a bit.
There was a silence for a time as Prophet’s gun smoke thinned and the echoes of his blasts rolled away to silence. Then the others, including Baja Jack and Colter, gathered in a ragged circle around Lou to stare down at the dead viper.
Jack and his men, including old Pepe, looked from Lou to the snake and then back at Lou, their lower jaws hanging. Lou’s eyes were probably still a little glassy. Baja Jack grinned. He slapped his thigh and started laughing as though at the funniest joke he’d ever heard, and not three seconds later the others were joining in.
Their hysterical guffaws vaulted toward the heavens, echoing.
Prophet looked at them and then at Colter. The redhead looked back at him, and then he started laughing, too. Prophet didn’t know what in the hell they were laughing about—hadn’t they ever seen a dead snake before?—but in no time he was laughing, too.
As though at the funniest joke he’d ever heard.