Chapter 41
Lou turned to see Baja Jack riding toward him atop his brown Arab with tricolor shading.
“Got the trail covered,” Jack said, grinning, his wild eye rolling toward his nose. “We’re safe now, amigos. Yeats will drive himself madder’n he already is scouring these rocks but he’ll never find us. We’ll wait in my canyon until tomorrow night and then flee under cover of darkness.”
“He’ll hunt you down, Jack,” Colter said. “He’ll follow you back to the farm where you grow your locoweed. I don’t know what the ‘purty ones’ are carryin’, but you piss-burned him positive with that Gatling gun.” They were riding along single file now, Jack riding drag behind Prophet and Alejandra. Pepe and the burros led the way into the deep, forbidding gorge carved by an ancient river. The rocks on each side of the knifelike slash of the canyon were limned brightly with ancient paintings—haunting, harrowing scenes of savage pageantry from long ago.
“Sí, sí,” Jack said. “You got that right, Red. He would follow me, all right. But I’m not goin’ back there.”
They all looked over their shoulders at him, including Alejandra.
“Where the hell you goin’ if you’re not goin’ back to your farm?” Prophet asked.
Jack rode along leisurely, casually rolling a quirley, one thick leg bent around his silver-capped saddle horn. “Me? I’m gonna head east to New York, Philadelphia, Washington City, which I hear they call Washington, D.C., now. Look around a bit. My dear old pa told me about some things I should see before I snuggle with the diamondbacks and angleworms. I’m gonna go to the museums, the Smithsonian an’ such. Hell, I’m gonna see the elephant!” He laughed. “And then I’m gonna hop a steamer and head on over to Pa’s home—Rynn-Douglas Manor in Newcastle. I’m gonna meet my long-lost relatives, don’t ya know. Hell, won’t they break the teapot when they get a load of me?”
He slapped his thigh and threw his head back in silent laughter. He snapped a lucifer to life on his thumbnail and lit the quirley, inhaling deeply, his wild eye rolling queerly back in its socket.
Prophet narrowed an eye at the odd little man, curiously. “What’s in the panniers, Jack?”
Smiling merrily, Jack blew smoke out his mouth and nose and said, “Soon, Proph. Very soon now, indeed.”
“Whatever it is, it must be worth a sizable fortune.”
“Soon, Proph,” Jack repeated. “Very soon indeed.”
Lou gave a caustic snort. Jack was enjoying tormenting him and Colter with his secret. Lou couldn’t help chuckling. Baja Jack had a special way about him, Jack did. Lou had met some characters in his life, but none more colorful than Baja Jack.
Lou drew back on Mean’s reins. “Let’s stop here.”
“Why?” Jack said, checking the trigueño down behind Prophet.
“I wanna check our back trail.” Lou shoved his left boot into his stirrup then swung his right leg over Mean’s rump before dropping to the ground.
“What for?”
“I wanna make sure Yeats ain’t behind us. If we get trapped in your canyon, Jack, our goose is done scalded, plucked, and greased for the pan. The only English family you’re gonna meet are them that’s done been planted six feet down.”
Jack rolled his head and grimaced. “What a negative nancy you are, Lou!”
Lou gazed up at Alejandra. “Do I need to tie you to the saddle?”
She turned to him, blinking once, slowly. “In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m not exactly dressed for a run across the desert.”
Prophet looked at her sheer dress, her bare feet, and smiled. “I noticed.”
Lou tied Mean’s reins to a twisted bush growing from a crack in the stony embankment. He grabbed his field glasses out of his saddlebags and glanced at Colter. “Come on, Red. Four eyes are better than two.”
Colter swung his right foot over his saddle horn and dropped smoothly to the ground.
“That old borrachón ain’t behind us, I tell ya,” said Baja Jack, his voice indignant as well as adamant. “I covered the trail, what little sign we left in the rocks, an’ I know for a fact I’m the only one who knows about that canyon.”
“Keep movin’, Jack,” Lou said as he started climbing the steep escarpment rising on the barranca’s right side. “We’re gonna take a gander and then we’ll be along.”
Jack pulled his horse around Mean and Ugly and Northwest, and gestured for Pepe to continue on down the barranca. “Wastin’ your time, boys!” he called smugly over his shoulder, his quirley dangling from one corner of his mouth. “Just ’cause I’m short an’ ugly don’t mean I’m stupid!”
Lou traced a winding course up the incline, so steep that he occasionally dropped to his hands and knees. When he gained the crest of the one-hundred-foot-high formation, he lay at the base of a fingerlike protrusion jutting straight up toward the sky, rising still another hundred feet.
He was sweating and breathing hard.
“What’s the matter, Lou?” Colter said, crawling up behind him. “Don’t tell me you’re gettin’ too old for a leisurely climb.”
Lou spat to one side and raised the field glasses. “It ain’t the years, Red, it’s the trail of sins I’ve left behind me.”
Prophet aimed the binoculars back along the path they’d taken down from a ridge two ridges to the west. There was no path, exactly, so he was mainly looking for movement behind him.
All he could see were rock and cirios, the occasional candelabra cactus, and thin clumps of saltbush. A lone hawk hunted high above the ridge down which they’d ridden into the barranca. For a time, the raptor appeared to be holding absolutely still but then a sudden dip of either wing told of its riding a thermal, looking for an early supper along the shoulder of the ridge below it.
“Anything back there?” Colter asked.
“I don’t see nothin’.” Prophet handed the glasses over to the redhead. “You give it a try. Your eyes are probably better than these sinful old peepers of mine.”
Colter poked up his hat brim, held the glasses to his face, and adjusted the focus. He slid the binoculars left, back to the right, then slowly left again.
“Nothin’ but that hawk up yonder. Oh, wait!”
Prophet’s heart quickened. “What?”
Colter lowered the glasses, grinning. “Coyote.”
Prophet released a held breath, scowling at the younker. “You ought not torment your elders so.”
“Sorry, Lou. I think Jack has it right. If Yeats knew about the canyon, we’d see him by now. He wasn’t that far behind us, and he’s gotta be madder’n an old wet hen.”
Prophet looked off, pensive.
“What is it?” Colter asked him.
“What was that coyote doin’?”
“Huh?”
“Was it just moseyin’ along or was it runnin’?”
Colter hiked a shoulder. “It was sort of joggin’.”
“Joggin’ an’ lookin’ behind it, or was it chasin’ a rabbit or a mouse or some such, looking forward?”
“It was lookin’ behind,” Colter answered, studying Prophet curiously though apprehension was building slowly in his eyes.
“Give me them glasses.”
Prophet rose to his knees, held the binoculars to his face, and scanned the rocky terrain flanking them once again. The coyote must have drifted off through the rocks, for there was no sign of it. No sign of trouble, either. There was nothing along their back trail but more rocks and cactus climbing one ridge after another until all the ridges merged into one big blue blur beyond which lay the Pacific Ocean.
“Hmmm,” Lou said. “That brush wolf must’ve been watchin’ his shadow. Or maybe we spooked him.”
Colter smiled at him. “Satisfied?”
“No, I ain’t satisfied. I’m gonna keep an eyeball skinned and so should you, but I reckon I’m ready to head to Jack’s canyon. I could use a good, quiet night’s sleep for a change, though that ain’t the ideal place for it.”
He and Colter made their careful way back to their horses. Alejandra was where Lou had left her, sitting atop Mean. She sat slumped forward, head hanging, her thick red hair obscuring her face. Prophet pulled his reins free of the shrub and frowned at her.
“You all right, señorita?”
She turned to him and brushed her hair out of her eyes, throwing it straight back over her head. She looked weary and drawn, probably foggy from all the weed she’d smoked for the past several weeks she’d been housed in Yeats’s lair. Maybe now that reality was settling over her, she was realizing the mistake she’d made, forsaking her family for Ciaran Yeats and his locoweed.
She said nothing but merely returned her gaze to the pommel of Lou’s saddle.
Prophet mounted up and, Colter following close behind him, continued along the barranca’s twisting course between high red ridge walls painted by the ancients and flecked with the bones of dinosaurs and likely with a few of the ancient folks’ bones, as well. Prophet didn’t relish the prospect of spending another night in the canyon amidst all the ghosts that lingered in the ancient village. Despite the strange haunts of the place, though, it was likely the best sanctuary around.
If Baja Jack was right, that was, and Yeats didn’t know about the canyon—didn’t know that the mysterious cliff dwellings were where Jack would be heading with whatever he was carrying on his burros.
Prophet’s uneasiness ratcheted up when a croaking cry rose from ahead along the barranca. A strangled wail followed, echoing. A mule brayed.
Lou glanced back at Colter, whose eyes popped wide as the strange sounds that could only be from a man in distress continued to vault off the canyon’s close walls. Prophet whipped his head back forward and ground his spurs into Mean’s flanks, the dun giving an indignant whinny and lunging off its rear hooves.
Prophet galloped around a bend in the barranca and then, spying movement ahead of him, shucked his Peacemaker from its holster, holding the gun barrel-up in his right hand. When Mean had taken three more long, galloping strides, Lou jerked back on the horse’s reins and stared ahead in shock toward where the canyon’s back door was a black hole before him.
Pepe and the burros were clumped near Jack’s trigueño in front of the portal. The trigueño’s saddle was empty, its reins hanging. The Arabian’s neck and tail were arched and it was looking up and dancing around nervously. Pepe, mounted on his mule, was also looking up and shaking his head and yelling in shrill Spanish, gesturing with one gloved hand.
What the old man and the trigueño were gaping at was none other than Baja Jack himself, who dangled six feet off the ground before the canyon’s narrow entrance. He was suspended in the air, sort of dancing and twisting and snarling like a leg-trapped bobcat. A rope encircled his chest, drawn up taut beneath his arms. He clawed at the hemp with his fat little hands.
Lower jaw hanging in befuddlement, wondering if the cavern’s strange magic wasn’t already in play, Lou followed the rope straight up from Baja Jack’s sombrero-clad head. Lou’s jaw hung even lower and his eyes grew even wider when he saw . . . or thought he saw . . . Louisa Bonaventure kneeling on a ledge over the cavern’s portal. Her pinto horse flanked her.
The rope suspending Baja Jack over the portal angled over Louisa’s right shoulder and curved up and over her saddle horn. She held the end of the taut rope in both her gloved hands down close to the ground, keeping a firm grip on the hemp.
The Vengeance Queen’s jaws were taut. Her face was red from strain. She glared down at the thick little man dancing the midair two-step beneath her. She appeared to be saying something to Jack, but Prophet couldn’t hear her above Jack’s crowlike rasps and wails and his shrill curses as well as the hoarse protests of old Pepe and the braying of the old man’s mule.
Prophet blinked and shook his head as though to clear his vision.
Surely he was seeing an image spawned by his weed-fogged brain or the canyon’s dark magic. But when he opened his eyes again, Louisa was still there on the ledge above the canyon’s mouth, dangling Baja Jack over the portal like a worm on a fishing hook hanging into a lake.
When Lou finally found his voice, he bellowed, “Louisa, for the love o’ Uncle Mike, stop playin’ cat’s cradle with Baja Jack, you crazy catamount!”