CAMERON WAS RIDING beside the rurale lieutenant, whose name he had learned was Premierio Gomez. “Maybe we should have left the cannon,” he suggested, glancing over his shoulder at the column of gray-clad rurales trailed by a Gatling gun that was mounted on a two-wheeled cart normally used by peasants for hauling hay.
The mule hauling the cart kept wanting to stop to graze along the road, and whenever the cart foundered in sand or alkali dust, the mule wanted to stop rather than push on through. The young soldier who was driving whipped the animal and screamed.
“It’s not the gun, it’s the mule,” Gomez said.
“I think you should have left them both,” Cameron said. “And the kid driving the cart.”
“If we run into Apaches, we’re going to want the Gatling gun. The same is true if we find Montana and Bachelard. If we encounter them, my friend, you are going to thank me for bringing the ‘cannon’ as you call it.”
Cameron peered ahead at the floury white trail twisting over hogbacks as it climbed ever higher into the mountains hovering darkly in the east. “How’re you going to get it through the mountains, for chrissakes?”
“You gringos are all alike,” Gomez said acidly. “You think you know it all. If you know so damn much, Mr. Cameron, why are you here in this godforsaken place hunting Apache scalps for seven pesos a head?”
Cameron sighed. “You got me there, Lieutenant.”
“Unless you were not hunting scalps,” Gomez suggested, giving Cameron a sidelong look.
“What else would I be doing?”
“You tell me, amigo.”
“Okay, I’m looking for the Lost Treasure of San Bernardo.”
Gomez looked at Cameron again and smiled. The smile widened until the lieutenant threw his head back and laughed. “That … That’s a good one, señor,” he said as his laughter settled to a head-shaking chuckle.
“You’ve heard of it?” Cameron asked.
“Yes, I have heard of it,” Gomez said, mopping his forehead with a handkerchief. “Who in northern Mejico has not heard of it? Who in northern Mejico has not tried to find it, and died trying? Fools, all.”
“I take it you haven’t.”
“I am not a fool, gringo, and don’t you forget it.”
That ended the conversation. After about fifteen minutes, Cameron slowed his mount, and Jimmy Bronco, who’d been several places back in the column, caught up to him.
“How ya feelin’, kid?”
“Tired, Jack,” Jimmy said.
His face was drawn and swollen from the beating he’d taken from the Apaches. The prefect’s wife had bandaged most of the cuts, but the bruise over his right eye was a garish purple that covered a good quarter of his face. He was wearing clothes the prefect’s wife had rounded up for him—an ill-fitting pair of old denim jeans with holes in the knees, a rope belt, and a cotton poncho with rawhide ties at the neck. Cameron had also bought him a felt poncho and a hat from an old peasant drinking beer in one of the village cantinas. With Jimmy’s face badly burned and bruised, he needed as much protection as possible.
“Well, it doesn’t look like we’re going to be riding very hard,” he groused. “Hell, at this pace you can nap in your saddle.”
Jimmy turned to Cameron with his jaw set. “They come up on us mighty fast, Jack.”
“The Apaches? I bet they did.”
“I—I…”
Cameron frowned. “What is it, Jim?”
The kid licked his cracked lips and turned his gaze to the rolling, sunbaked hills. “Ol’ Hotch, he had his six-shooter out and shot back. But me … well, I…”
“Froze?”
The kid nodded slightly. His eyes filmed over with tears.
Cameron shrugged. “Same thing happened to me when I was your age.”
The kid looked at him, wide-eyed with surprise.
“I was cowpokin’ in Nebraska one summer, just after I left home,” Cameron continued. “Me and another guy were ridin’ drag on a herd when all of a sudden about twelve Arapahos come stormin’ down a hogback, a-whoopin’ and a-hollerin’.
“Well, me and Joe Luther—that was the older guy I was with—we hightailed it to a buffalo wallow and took cover. Joe Luther, he got his rifle out of his saddle boot and started sendin’ some lead after those braves, but me … Well, Joe Luther glanced over at me when he was reloadin’ and gave me the queerest look. Just then I realized my six-shooter was still in my holster. I hadn’t pulled it. I was froze up like a dead cow in a January blizzard.”
“You, Jack?”
“Yeah, me. What do you think—I’m not human? I froze up and pret’ near got Joe Luther and myself killed. Fortunately, Joe was able to squeeze off enough rounds to hold those braves off until some other drovers arrived to help out.”
“Yeah, but ol’ Hotch is dead on account of me,” Jimmy said.
“Oh, he’s not dead on account of you!” Cameron scolded. “He’s dead because it was his time to go. Nothin’ you or me or anyone else on God’s green earth could’ve changed that. When it’s a man’s time to go—or a woman’s,” he added, thinking of Ivy Kitchen, “then they go, in spite of how the rest of us feel about it or what plans we made or how much we want them to stay. That’s just the way it is. Even if you’d fired off a few rounds, the Apaches still would have killed Bud, and they probably would have killed you to boot.”
“You think so?”
“I know so. Now quit sulkin’. Keep your mind on the moment.”
Cameron was about to spur his horse back toward Gomez, when Jimmy said, “Jack, you think I can get another brace of pistols somewhere? Those ’Paches took mine.”
Cameron suppressed a smile. “First chance we get, Jim,” he said, then heeled his horse up alongside the lieutenant’s.
“How is your young partner in crime, amigo?” Gomez asked him with a self-satisfied smirk.
“Better,” Cameron said.
An hour later they were off the wagon road and angling into the mountains. It was a rolling, rocky, water-cut country unfavorable for speedy travel, especially when you were pulling a rickety haycart equipped with a Gatling gun.
The main group went ahead of the wagon and two other soldiers, but halted periodically to wait, as the wagon bounced toward them over the eroded, cactus-studded country. The thing looked as though it would lose a wheel or break its axle at any moment. Cameron wished it would; then they would have no choice but to abandon it and really make some time.
Cameron was eager to find his group. The cries he had heard last night still haunted him, and he wanted to confirm that Going, Clark, and Marina were safe.
He still wondered … If it had not been one of the men of his party he had heard last night, then who?
The answer came when one of the rurales who had been scouting ahead returned to the column and reported seeing what looked like a human tied to a piñon tree under a distant cliff. Cameron, Gomez, and two other men rode out to take a look.
Fifteen minutes later they ascended a gravelly finger splitting two dry washes, to the base of the granite escarpment. They found the man staked to the tree, facing out from the cliff, head down, long, sandy-blond hair hiding his face.
The man was naked and covered with dried blood, crawling with ants and abuzz with flies. He’d been castrated, partially skinned, and several of his fingers were missing. There were hardly three square inches on him that had not been violated with a sharp knife.
The stench was almost palpable. Even Cameron, who had seen the grisliest of Indian outrages, had to work to keep from gagging.
Lieutenant Gomez said, “Ai-yee,” and crossed himself.
One of the men next to him vomited.
Cameron dismounted, walked over to the body and lifted the chin. The man’s eyeballs had been burned out with pokers; his nose was smashed and his jaw broken, but Cameron still recognized him.
It was Ed Hawkins—Jake’s brother. What the hell was he doing here?
Ed and Jake must have followed him and the others from Contention City. The Apaches must have found him on Cameron’s trail last night. Serves you right, Cameron thought, staring into the empty eye-sockets. But where was Jake?
The answer came to him like a sudden onset of the flu. No doubt Jake was still trailing Adrian Clark, Marina, and Tokente. Maybe he’d shown himself by now and the others were in trouble. Cameron’s urgent need to find the others renewed itself with vigor.
“You know this man?” Gomez asked him.
Before Cameron could answer, the head moved slightly and the lips parted. Cameron’s heart thumped.
Ed was alive.
“Jesus God,” Cameron breathed.
The man’s lips formed the words long before he could give them voice. “Help … Help me … please…” The voice was little more than a labored rasp.
Feeling sick, Cameron pulled his bowie—he did not want to signal his presence with the Colt—and plunged it into Ed’s chest just beneath the breastbone. Ed shuddered as if chilled.
When the body was finally still Cameron removed the bowie and cleaned it in the sand. Standing, he turned to Gomez, who was watching him, white-faced, with newfound respect.
“No, I don’t know him,” Cameron said. He grabbed the saddle horn and climbed back into the leather, then spurred his horse back toward the column.
As they made their way farther into the mountains, Cameron considered ways he could get rid of the rurales and back to Tokente, Marina, and Clark. For the moment, he and Jimmy were safest in the soldiers’ company, but tonight he wanted to keep traveling—only him and Jimmy.
There would be a moon by which to navigate, and the Apaches would have a hard time cutting their trail without the sun, so he and Jimmy could travel relatively safely. They’d no doubt catch up to the others sometime tomorrow morning.
It would take these distinguished upholders of Mexican law another week to cover that much ground, especially if they kept packing the cannon.
An hour later Gomez halted the column for the day, in a spot protected by a steep, sandstone ridge on one side, and brushy arroyos on two more. A spring bubbled out of several places in the rocks. The sun turned the sandstone ridge the color of copper; above, a hawk hunted, turning lazy circles in the cerulean sky, where a crystalline moon shone.
There was still at least another hour of good light left, but Cameron was glad the lieutenant had decided to call it a day. Traveling with these men was an exercise in frustration. Nearly all but Gomez looked greener than spring saplings, and had probably spent most of their lives hoeing beans and peppers. Cameron wondered if any of them even knew how to shoot the outdated Springfield rifles poking out of their saddleboots. In addition, could Gomez keep them from bolting or freezing when and if things got sticky?
Something about the man’s countenance, no less dubious and defensive for being so overbearing, told him not to count on it.
Cameron slipped the saddles and bridles from his and Jimmy’s mounts, then tethered them in a patch of grass near the water. He built a small fire. Gomez left his mount to be tended by one of his men, spread his bedroll in the shade of a boulder and collapsed on it, producing a bottle from his saddlebags, a dreamy cast entering his eyes as he uncorked it.
Cameron and Jimmy shared the dried goat-meat and cheese the prefect’s wife had sent with them, Cameron giving Jimmy the brunt of the portion. When Jimmy had finished eating and had a cup of coffee, he went out like a light.
When the sun set, Cameron rolled up in his own blanket and tipped his hat over his face. He wanted to catch a few hours of shut-eye before he and Jimmy tried lighting out on their own.
Sometime later he opened his eyes to a sky full of stars, the crescent moon shimmering and bathing the foothills in ghostly light.
He squeezed Jimmy’s shoulder, and touched his index finger to his lips. The boy came awake and instantly began rolling his blanket. When Cameron had done the same, he looked around.
The rurales were dark heaps around the three guttering fires. Their snores rose on the vagrant breeze.
Gomez had posted guards on the perimeter. Cameron knew that he and Jimmy would have to make as little noise as possible so as not to alert them. Cameron figured they’d be seen eventually, but he hoped it wouldn’t be until after their horses were saddled.
He and Jimmy saddled the horses in anxious silence, glancing around, then led the animals down one of the arroyos, where the sandy bottom muffled the sounds of their hooves. They’d gone about seventy-five yards down the twisting, turning course when Jimmy’s horse started at some night creature scuttling in the shrubs. The animal jerked to a stop and whinnied.
Cameron and Jimmy stopped, listening. Cameron was about to sigh with relief when he heard questioning voices in the distance.
“Let’s go!” he said, and he and Jimmy quickly mounted and spurred their horses down the arroyo.
A rifle popped behind them, then another.
With Jimmy following closely behind him, Cameron traced the arroyo for half a mile, then followed a game trail up the bank through a narrow cut in a ridge, then higher into the mountains. Post oaks and piñon pines rose around them, silhouetted by the moon. Last night Cameron had oriented himself using the distant ridges as a guide, and now he rode in what he hoped was the general direction of the rest of his party.
When they were a good three miles away from the rurale bivouac, Cameron halted his horse on a ridge, turned back and cocked his head to listen. He thought he could hear a thin, distant voice or two, but nothing else aside from the labored breathing of his own horse and the mournful howl of a wolf higher up in the mountains.
“I think we’re rid of ’em,” Cameron said, smiling at Jimmy. “How ya doin’, kid?”
“Just fine, Jack,” Jimmy said, in a voice that sounded very much like his old self.
“Let’s ride, then,” Cameron said, giving his horse the spurs.