GARZA’S WAGON SQUEAKED and clattered into the village of San Cristóbal. The moon was angling away, casting more shadows than light, but Cameron could still see it was a typical Mexican village, scraggly and dirty, with low adobe huts for houses and business establishments. Corrals were overgrown with chaparral. The smell of burning mesquite hung in the air, and dogs barked from doorways as the wagon rolled up the main street.
They passed a fountain, with its solitary stone obelisk, and turned the corner around a blocklike, sand-colored building whose belfry, too large for the structure, told Cameron it was a church. Garza pulled up at a pitted adobe house. The smell of goat dung was heavy on the night breeze.
“You wait here, señor. I will get the señora for your boy.”
It was ten minutes before the door of the shack opened and Cameron heard Garza speaking to someone in a low tone. Then Garza and another man approached the cart. The second man, bald, and as short and round as Garza, was pulling on a shirt.
“Who are you—bandits?” the man said accusingly to Cameron, obviously not happy to have been aroused from a sound sleep. But he did not wait for an answer before peering into the cart.
In Spanish he told Cameron and Garza to bring the kid inside. He held the door open as Cameron slung Jimmy over his shoulder and carried him into the simply furnished room. A mesquite fire burned on the adobe hearth and a single lamp glowed in the hands of an elderly woman who stood silently before the fire in a night wrapper.
“There,” the woman said, motioning toward a cot topped by a corn-husk mattress.
As Cameron lay Jimmy on the cot, the kid came awake. “Jack!” he yelled, fiercely clutching Cameron’s forearm.
“It’s okay, Jimmy, I’m here. Everything’s all right. This lady here is going to get you all fixed up good as new.”
The kid slowly lay back as Cameron pushed him gently down. When his head came to rest on the flat pillow, he said in an almost normal tone, “Is ol’ Hotch … Is he dead?”
“I’m afraid so.”
Jimmy sighed. “I liked ol’ Hotch, even if he teased me more than I liked.”
“I did, too,” Cameron said, as the woman pushed him aside, moving between him and the boy.
“You go now,” she said brusquely to Cameron.
“No, Jack—don’t go,” Jimmy begged.
“I won’t be far, Jimmy. You just relax now. I’ll talk to you in the morning.”
Cameron stepped aside to let the woman take care of the boy. Garza came up beside Cameron, his sombrero in his hands, and whispered, “I must go now, señor, before Ernestine wakes and finds me gone. It is our secret, no?”
“It’s our secret,” Cameron said, nodding and smiling at the man. He held out his hand and Garza shook it. “I’m much obliged for your help, Porfirio. Muchas gracias.”
Garza clamped Cameron on the shoulder. “De nada, señor. De nada! Your horse is by the barn.” Then he turned and was gone.
The second man took him by the arm and led him out a back door. “You can sleep in the barn. There is feed for your horse,” he said.
Cameron hesitated at the door, not wanting to leave Jimmy alone with these strangers. He was sure the kid was getting tended just fine, and he had no reason to worry. It was just hard to let his defenses down when they’d been up for so long.
The man disappeared inside and returned with a bottle and a small bowl of tortillas and goat meat. “Go now. Rest. Your boy will be fine.”
The man shut the thin wooden door. The clatter of a bolt told Cameron he’d locked it.
In the barn, Cameron sat down with his back to the rough lumber and rolled a cigarette. He needed to unwind. He uncorked the bottle and tipped it back. The raw, metallic taste of mescal flooded his tongue, then burned down his throat. It gave him a pleasing sensation of instant release, and he became very grateful to the man who had offered it.
He took several more drinks and smoked the quirley down to a stub, staring at the sky and the fading moon, the dark backdrop of mountains that surrounded the village, and thought again about the screams he and Garza had heard on the road. He repressed the urge to ride back out and investigate.
Whoever had screamed was long since dead, and Cameron’s horse was in no condition for anything but rest. If Jimmy was able, they’d light out of the village tomorrow and try to find the Clarks and Tokente.
Cameron mashed out his quirley on his boot and corked the mescal. He got up with some effort, feeling pangs of fatigue shoot through his body, and led his horse into the barn. He unsaddled the animal and gave it a cursory rubdown and some water and feed.
He found a rickety cot and an old wool blanket in a corner, removed his hat and boots, and sat down. Hungrily he ate the goat meat and tortillas, set the bowl under the cot, and fell nearly instantly asleep. His sleep was deep but fitful, constricted by the sensation of constant movement, of following one trail after another and scanning ridges for Apaches.
At intervals along the trail he’d see Marina, like a ghost behind a thin, dark veil.
In the midst of this he heard, strangely, a door squeaking open. He saw light through his closed eyelids, felt the warmth of sunlight on his face, sensed movement around him.
A metallic rasp and clack jerked him awake. He opened his eyes. Three men in gray uniforms stood before the cot, aiming long-barreled rifles directly at his face.
The previous night, Ed Hawkins had brought his horse to a halt at the base of a sandy knoll, dismounted, and produced a spyglass from a leather sheath tied to his saddle. He tethered his paint pony, stolen from a rancher near Bisbee, to a dwarf pine, and ran, crouching, up the knoll.
The light was fading quickly from the canyon below, but there was still enough to make out the single rider Hawkins was following. Jack Cameron.
Cameron was studying the ground.
“Give it up, fool,” Hawkins muttered as he watched Cameron through the spyglass. “Don’t you have no sense a’tall? None a’tall? Why, you’re gonna get us both skinned and hung and greased for the spit, that’s what you’re gonna do.”
Hawkins considered calling it quits. It was pretty obvious the dumb-ass was following the Apaches who had ambushed the kid and the graybeard several miles back. He was going to try to rescue the kid.
Anyone in their right mind who’d seen the number of Apache tracks would have written the kid off a long time ago and gone back to the Clarks and the Mex, and continued searching for whatever it was they were searching for. It had to be gold. That was the only thing it could be, the only thing that would lure sane people into such a dangerous area.
But now this idiot Cameron was tracking Apaches! And right behind Cameron, at the insistence of his brother Jake, was Ed Hawkins.
But by God, enough was enough, Ed told himself, and spat, lowering the spyglass. Cameron was going to get himself killed, and Ed wanted no part of that. He’d seen what Apaches could do to a healthy body, and he’d rather go back and face his brother than even a single Apache.
Hell, he’d just tell Jake that Cameron was dead. By the time he got back to where his brother was keeping an eye on the Clarks, it wouldn’t be a lie, either. If Cameron kept heading where he was heading, why, in a half-hour, maybe less, he’d be dead—or worse.
Ed nodded to himself and walked back to his mount, where he replaced the spyglass in its sheath. Then he began to think.
What if Cameron wasn’t going after the Apaches, after all? What if he’d found another way to the gold? What if Cameron was following it by himself because he knew Apaches were about and he didn’t want to endanger the others?
Jeepers creepers, Ed sighed to himself. He mounted up, and with a heavy air of dark resignation, gave a sigh and continued after Cameron.
Ed followed at a distance. Cameron was a wily guy, with one hell of a reputation. Ed knew he had to give the man a liberal margin of separation not to give himself away, even with Apaches taking up the tracker’s attention. Ed was surprised he and his brother had been able to follow Cameron’s group as far as they had without getting noticed, but he knew that was due mostly to the distance they’d allowed between themselves and the group. Jake’s above-average tracking skills had kept them from losing the trail altogether.
Cameron’s tracks suddenly disappeared in an old rockslide. Ed’s problem was that the canyon forked at the slide, and by the time he’d picked his way across the bed of talus and flinty shale, it was too dark to pick up the trail again. Ed knew Jake would have been able to do it but, for the life of him, Ed couldn’t pick up much more than the cloven print of a deer … or was it a mountain goat?
He chose one of the canyon’s forks at random and followed the trail into the high country, coming out on a ledge with pines all around him and the smell of juniper and piñon wafting on the breeze. There was still some light left in the sky, but the ground was dark.
He fumbled around in the dark, half expecting to ride right into either Cameron or an Apache encampment. A wolf’s howl pierced the gloaming when he was making his way across a meadow, under a ridge built of blocklike chunks of rock. The eerie sound curled the hair on his neck.
Deciding it was time to get the hell out of here—if his brother wanted to track Cameron after Apaches, he could track him his own damn self—Ed brought the horse around and started back in the direction he’d come from. Fuck this. He was ready to go back to the Territories and try his luck again with stagecoaches and small-town banks.
The trail Ed was following down into the semi-arid desert did not look at all like the one he’d taken up, and he was starting to get the willies. He knew how easy it was to get good and lost out here. Hell, he’d heard umpteen dozen stories of men—even good trackers—going into the Sierra Madre and never being heard from again.
Feeling frantic, Ed started riding blind, just letting the horse pick his way, searching for the canyon from which he’d ridden into the high country. If he could get there, he might be able to find his way back to his brother.
Brother. Oh, how good that word sounded all of a sudden! When he saw Jake again, he was going to kiss him right on the mouth.
Ed came to an arroyo that did not look like any of the arroyos he’d seen in the past two hours, much less that day. Heart beating wildly in his breast and legs feeling like lead in his stirrups, Ed brought the horse to a halt and gave his sweating brow a scrub with the back of his gloved hand.
A rock tumbled down from a ridge and clattered against other rocks. A horse whinnied—not his.
Looking up at the low, stony ridge that practically encircled him, Ed saw about a dozen long-haired riders silhouetted against the star-filled sky. They regarded him almost casually.
“Oh … Oh, Lord,” Ed mumbled to himself, knowing these men in deerskin leggings could be nothing else but Apaches.
Tears welled in his eyes.
“Oh … Oh my…!”