ALL NIGHT JACK Cameron and Jimmy Bronco moved steadily and deliberately through the mountains. Even with the moon it was often a treacherous ride.
At one point, when the moon was blocked by a peak and Cameron couldn’t see the terrain, Cameron’s horse nearly slipped down a ridge into a gorge. If he hadn’t felt the cool breeze blowing up, sensed the drop, and reined in the buckskin, he and the horse would have been goners.
Riding through a meadow encircled with pines, they stopped when they heard a hunting mountain lion scream, and Cameron felt a chill in his loins, knowing what such a creature could do to a man and a horse. Other sounds filled the night as well—wolves, night birds, the wind sawing the stony peaks around them, the tinny chatter of water bubbling in a creek or spring, javelinas scuttling in the brush—and Jimmy and Cameron traveled nearly as much by these noises as by sight.
Cameron halted several times to rest the horses as well as Jimmy, who would not complain or ask for a break, but Cameron knew the boy was spent. In the morning they stopped on a grassy ledge overlooking a valley of undulating hummocks of low, juniper-tufted hills. Tying his horse to a picket pin, Cameron produced his field glasses from his saddlebags, climbed a low, rocky mound, and scanned the terrain behind them.
“Shit,” he said after a minute, not quite able to believe what he was seeing.
“What is it?” Jimmy asked him.
“If I’m not loco … No, it’s them, all right … the rurales. Somehow they’ve managed to follow us.”
“With the cart?” Jimmy exclaimed.
Cameron adjusted the focus and surveyed the group, but saw no sign of the cart. What he did see was a bulky object strapped to one of the pack mules. From the size and shape, he figured it was the Gatling gun.
Apparently, after Cameron and Jimmy had slipped away from him, Gomez had gotten serious and decided to get rid of the bulky cart. Cameron had made a fool of him by getting away so easily, and now Gomez was tracking him and Jimmy with fervor.
It looked like he was even using an experienced tracker: A skinny young man in an oversized rurale uniform was leading the way, pointing out sign as he rode. As far as Cameron could tell, they were covering the very same ground he and Jimmy had traversed about two hours ago. The kid must have been raised in this country, and knew its every crease and fold.
“Well, I’ll be goddamned,” Cameron said wonderingly, as he stared at the ragged column moving deliberately through the broken, ridge-relieved, canyon-creased country behind him. “I think we put a burr under ol’ Gomez’s blanket, kid. We’d better mosey.”
An hour later he stopped again.
Scanning the country behind them, he saw that Gomez was staying hot on their trail. He didn’t appear to be gaining ground, but Cameron had a newfound respect for the man. He and Jimmy couldn’t dally.
Cameron trained the field glasses eastward and spied a flicker of movement in a narrow defile between two mountain crags. Probably just a cloud shadow, but he stayed with the spot, tightening the focus.
Nothing. Then something moved. It was no shadow.
A horseback rider.
Damn. Apaches.
No … wait.
Cameron held the glasses on the split between the promontories. Something passed the opening, and from this distance it was hard to tell even with the glasses, but it looked very much like another rider.
There was another movement, then another and another, and Cameron realized there was a whole column of riders passing behind that rocky upthrust. They didn’t ride like Apaches. The only non-Indians out here would have to be Gaston Bachelard and Miguel Montana.
Cameron suddenly felt apprehensive about pursuing the man, yet that’s what he’d come here for—to make Bachelard pay for the death of Pas Varas.
Bachelard was a nut, but he was a dangerous nut, and he had a lot of dangerous men behind him. And tracking him down with the intent of killing him, Cameron saw now, wasn’t exactly sane.
But whether he liked it or not, he’d gotten what he’d come for. Bachelard was indeed after the gold, and it did look as though their paths were going to cross. Whether he liked it or not, it looked like Cameron was going to get his shot at the man.
Cameron swung the glasses in the direction Bachelard was heading and stopped when a particular formation caught his eye. His heart grew heavy in his chest and he felt a drop of sweat sluice down his spine as he realized he was looking at the tall stone spire, capped with an arrow-shaped boulder, that resided very near the X on Clark’s plat.
“Holy Jesus,” he muttered.
“What is it?” Jimmy asked. He was taking a breather in the shade of a boulder, holding his horse’s reins in his hands.
“I think I just found the X on the map … and Gaston Bachelard.”
Remounting, they continued on, reckoning now on the arrow-shaped boulder capping the spire, just as Bachelard was doing. Cameron rode with a renewed sense of urgency, his thoughts turning to Marina.
She, Clark, and Tokente had no doubt discovered the spire by now. It wasn’t that far from where Cameron had left them. They’d probably found the cache, or at least the place where the cache was supposed to be.
He hoped he could reach them before Bachelard did, and warn them, lead them to safety, if there was such a thing out here. If Bachelard came upon them anywhere near the supposed gold, he’d kill the men with as little concern as he’d have for squashing a bug. There was no telling what he’d do to Marina, but Cameron knew it wouldn’t be anything as merciful as killing her.
Mile after twisting, turning mile he and Jimmy rode through one canyon after another, keeping the arrow-shaped spire ahead of them. Several times Cameron stopped to climb a butte and look around. Sometimes he saw the two groups of men following him and sometimes he did not, but he always knew they were there—the rurales slowing in the canyons, Bachelard keeping pace.
In the early afternoon, Cameron was scouting from a low mesa and saw that an ancient, deep river gorge lay in Bachelard’s path. Cameron felt a surge of optimism. Bachelard and Montana would lose some time finding a way around the chasm, time Cameron hoped he and Jimmy would be able to use to their best advantage, locating the Clarks and Tokente and getting them the hell out of here.
Cameron would backtrack later and, crazy as it was, find a way to isolate Bachelard from his group and kill him. He owed it to Pasqual Varas and his family.
He knew the reluctance he felt now was due to Marina. Because of her, he wasn’t as indifferent as before about putting his life in harm’s way. But he told himself that whatever he felt for her was for naught; she was another man’s wife. Cameron’s sense of honor and decency would not allow him to take the wife of another—no matter how beautiful she was or how much he loved her … or how much sense she made of his existence.
It might be better, he mused, if he did not come out of this alive.
Cameron thought it must have been about three in the afternoon when he and Jimmy at last came to the spot where Jimmy and Bud Hotchkiss had been attacked by Apaches.
Cameron recognized the place and saw what looked like half a dozen carrion birds working on an elongated lump on the ground. He’d seen similar things before, but it was still a startling and disturbing sight.
Cameron told Jimmy to wait, and rode on ahead. One of the birds broke away with a raucous cry, beating its wings violently in the unmoving air, then jumped back into the fray. Cameron picked up a stone and threw it, sending up dust near the mass. The birds awkwardly took flight, squawking and flapping their heavy black wings.
Cameron had not had time to bury Hotchkiss before, so now, while the horses and Jimmy rested, he dragged the bloating, stinking, ravaged corpse into an arroyo. With the rurales and Bachelard so close, there was no chance to dig a grave, but Cameron doubted Hotchkiss would know the difference between scavenger birds above ground and worms below.
“You were a good friend,” were all the words he could come up with, but somehow they seemed enough. He donned his hat again and walked over to where Jimmy was resting with the horses.
“Forget it, Jim,” he said, seeing that the boy was staring with haunted eyes at the boulder-strewn slope down which the Apaches had come. The kid blinked and slowly stood. He wrapped his reins around the saddle horn and poked a ropesoled sandal through a stirrup.
“I can’t,” he mumbled.
Less than twenty minutes later they came to the point where Cameron had separated from the others, and soon after, they found the campsite on the hillside. Then it was easy, just a matter of basic tracking, then finding the turtles the padres had etched in the rocks and the spire, its arrow-shaped cap looming darkly against the afternoon sky. It was so close that Cameron could make out the sun-shadowed gouges and splinters in the andesite, the fluted reliefs aimed skyward.
At this altitude the air was thin, the sun intense, and the horses were winded, but Cameron did not want to stop again until he’d found the others. He figured they were two or three hours ahead of Bachelard but he didn’t know the country well enough to be sure, and there was no point in taking chances.
Just ahead, in the direct path of the arrow pointing behind them, stood two towering escarpments forming a gateway into a canyon. It was like something out of a kid’s storybook, and Cameron’s heart tattooed an insistent rhythm as he realized this was the place—this was the X marked on the old Mexican’s plat.
Before the entrance to the canyon was a jumble of boulders, strewn and cracked as though fallen from high above. Looking again, Cameron saw what remained of an adobe church, its walls nearly crushed by the boulders so that they were nearly unrecognizable at certain angles.
A woman appeared around one of the boulders—a tall, slender woman with long, black hair. She wore a white blouse and butternut slacks, with a gun and holster on her slender waist. She was holding a hat.
Marina …
So great was his relief to have found her still alive and apparently well, that he couldn’t help grinning as he rode up to her. Her eyes followed him, looking up beseechingly into his face. There was something wrong.
“What is it?” he said, dismounting.
She turned and he followed her around the boulder to where the fire ring lay surrounded by blankets, canteens, an empty brandy bottle, and cooking utensils. A man lay in the shade of one of the half-pulverized church walls, a blanket over his chest and face. Cameron could tell by the soiled, sweat-stained sombrero lying nearby, and by the boots and buckskin pants, that it was Tokente.
The relief Cameron had felt at seeing Marina again suddenly vanished. His heart sank and a high-pitched hum filled his ears. No, he thought, pulling up his dusty jeans at the thighs and squatting down on his haunches. He wiped his hands on his jeans, then removed the blanket from the man’s face, drawn yet blissful in death, eyes closed, slightly parted lips revealing a single tooth.
“He died only about ten minutes ago,” Marina said quietly.
“What happened?” Cameron asked her.
“Jake Hawkins,” Marina said in a voice taut with anger.
Cameron looked at her sharply. “Where is he?”
“Dead. Señor Going killed him with his rifle. He’s back there.” She jerked her head to indicate the rocky hills behind her.
“Are you sure he’s dead?”
“I walked back and saw.”
Cameron turned his eyes back to his dead friend and nodded, scowling.
Marina turned to Jimmy. “I’m glad you are well,” she said. She frowned, looking around. “Where is…”
“He’s dead,” Jimmy said, turning to her with tears in his eyes, knowing she meant Hotchkiss. He sobbed, and Cameron knew he’d been holding it back.
Marina took the boy into her arms, holding him tightly. He buried his face in her shoulder and cried with abandon.
Cameron disposed of Alfred Going’s body the way he’d disposed of Hotchkiss. He felt tired and weak, and he didn’t think he had it in him anymore to kill Bachelard. Too much had happened, too many friends had died, and his anger over Pas Varas’s death had transformed into a generalized sadness that could not be relieved by vengeance. Killing Bachelard would not bring back Varas. Tracking him, in fact, had only brought more death to Cameron’s friends.
He wished now that he’d stayed in Arizona. But how could he have explained to Leonora Varas, with her Hispanic’s belief in vengeance, that he had not gone after her husband’s killer?
Grimly he walked back to the camp, feeling as hollow as an old cave. Marina had built a fire and made coffee. She’d also heated some javelina meat, and Jimmy Bronco sat on a rock, eating voraciously.
She held out a plate and a cup of coffee as Cameron walked up. “I’m very sorry about your friends,” she said, looking boldly into his eyes. “All this”—she held out her arms as though death were some palpable thing around them—“is my fault … mine and Adrian’s.”
“No,” Cameron said, shaking his head. “I didn’t come down here for you. I came for Bachelard. And I think I found him.”
“What?” Marina was clearly startled and a little afraid.
“Him and his army, or whatever you call it … they’re only about an hour away. I saw them coming from the east. We have to get moving.”
Cameron glanced around, remembering Adrian. He’d been taken so unawares by Going’s death that he hadn’t asked where the Missourian was.
Reading his mind, she said, nodding toward the black canyon corridor yawning behind them, “Adrian went in there early this morning, looking for the gold. I waited here with Señor Going.”
“He find anything?”
Marina shook her head. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen him since he left.”
“Well, we’d better find him and get the hell out of here—with or without the gold, if there is any. Bachelard will be here, and so will about fifteen rurales we picked up along the trail.”
“I thought you wanted to kill Bachelard.”
“I do. But first I want to get you three out of here.”
On a bald knob a mile away Perro Loco stood, hunched and watching. The figures in the distance appeared no larger than ants, but the Indian knew that one of them was Jack Cameron. He could tell by the way the man moved and carried himself and by the color of the horse he’d been riding.
A rare wintery smile formed on the Indian’s lips as he squatted on his haunches and wrapped both hands around the barrel of the shotgun standing between his knees.
It wouldn’t be long now …