Ben held the rifle aimed at Carlos, but halted the squeeze of his finger on the trigger. He considered the Valdes wealth to have been gotten largely by illegal means. Further, a great uncle of Ben's had been killed at the Alamo, and another at the battle of Goliad, so stealing from the Valdes did not trouble his conscience or cause any regrets. Still, Ben understood why Carlos and his pistoleros were trying so hard to take back the horses; they considered them to rightly be Valdes property. Also, they wanted to catch and punish him to set an example for other thieves. The fact the men were trying hard to kill Ben was bothersome; however, he would make that feat a very difficult task to accomplish.
He shifted the aim of the weapon from Carlos to the black horse he rode. A cold chill went through Ben at the thought of killing the splendid animal. He moved the point of aim back to Carlos. Shoot the man or the horse, hurry and decide, for the band of pistoleros was spurring their mounts up the north bank and directly at him.
Ben couldn't bring himself to shoot the man without warning. He settled the sights of the rifle on the black horse and fired. The animal staggered back at the punch of the big bullet and sank to its knees. Carlos sprang clear as the horse toppled to its side on the ground.
Ben levered another bullet into the firing chamber of his fine killing weapon. He pressed the trigger and sent the bullet into the horse of the rider to the left of Carlos. Immediately he shot a third horse.
He lowered the rifle. He felt revolted at what he had been forced to do. Carlos, you son of a bitch, go back to Mexico now.
The three remaining riders spun their mounts, and lashed them back down the bank and into hiding among the cottonwoods by the river.
Carlos rose to his feet and faced toward Ben, lying unseen in the grass. He raised his fist and shouted out in English, "You ugly bastard, I'll kill you for this."
"Not right now." Ben lifted his rifle again and fired. The bullet struck the ground between Carlos's legs and clods of dirt and fragments of lead stung him. The man jumped, and in his hurried action, stumbled and fell to his knees. He straightened, and stood aiming his eyes in Ben's direction.
After several seconds, Carlos slowly and deliberately turned his back to Ben. He spoke to the other two men who had lost their mounts, and all three removed their canteens and rifles from their dead horses. Carlos bent down and started to loosen the cinch of his saddle to remove it. Ben fired a warning shot close above Carlos's head. He had once seen the saddle and knew its high value.
Carlos jerked back from the saddle. Ben could see the man shaking with anger. Without looking again in Ben's direction, Carlos stood erect and went down the bank toward the river. The other two men went with him, throwing nervous looks behind as they moved.
Carlos shouted out angrily ahead. His three mounted riders came out of the woods to meet him.
Ben rose up from the grass and stood watching the Mexicans, riding two to a horse, cross the river and go south. He chuckled to himself. By trying to catch him they had lost three additional horses and a very valuable saddle, and had a long distance to travel riding double back to the Valdes rancho. When the riders had become lost to sight and none of them had dropped off a horse to stay behind to trail Ben, he snapped his spyglass closed and turned away.
Carlos would know that Ben could have killed him; still, that would do nothing to lessen the Valdes family's desire for revenge. Ben took the saddles and bridles from the dead horses and fastened them upon the backs of three of his. Carlos's riding gear was heavy, with beautifully sculptured silver ornaments, and the most valuable Ben had ever seen. Hardly a section of the equipment was free of decoration by the precious metal. The saddle and bridle were worth as much as all the horses.
Ben mounted Brutus, and the fall of hooves carried him and his prizes north into the awesome emptiness of the Staked Plains.
* * *
The sun had rolled down its high-sky trajectory and lay flaming on the far, flat horizon when Ben drew close to the spring he had guided his course toward. While still out of sight of the spring, he left his horses behind and stole forward. He wanted to be certain no enemy had laid claim to the water ahead of him.
He reached the lip of the valley and peered over. The valley, shallow and narrow with a dry watercourse in the center, lay deserted. The spring, its location marked by three trees clumped together, was on the far side of the valley directly opposite Ben. He felt an increase of his thirst for he knew the water, coming from some deep subterranean reservoir, was sweet and cold.
Ben gathered his animals and went down into the valley. After hobbling the front legs of the stolen horses with short lengths of rope, he turned them loose to graze the wild grass. Brutus was left free for he would always hang close to Ben.
Ben spread his bedroll on the thick mat of leaves beneath the trees. Taking his canteen, he went to the spring. The water came to the surface on top of a layer of sandstone, poured down into a pool some five feet across, and then flowed away for a few yards before disappearing into the ground. He knelt and leaned over the pool of water.
A devil's face rose up out of the depths of the water to look at Ben. The reflection was of Ben's face, a face mutilated and scarred and, God, so horribly ugly. A Union cannonball had struck him a hard, glancing blow on the face and ripped the flesh from the skull. A Confederate surgeon had attempted to restore Ben's face to a human appearance, but so torn and mangled was the flesh that the surgeon had failed, failed horribly.
When Ben returned from the war to El Paso, he had asked for his old job back as deputy sheriff. The sheriff had been his friend, and reluctantly returned the badge to him. He'd quickly learned that he could not take up where his prior life had ended. The world had changed most drastically for him. Men he met on the street would take one look at him and then turn hastily away, for they were unable to endure the sight of his grotesque features. Women and children ran from him in horror. Within hours of receiving his badge, he had returned it to the sheriff. He bought a broad-brimmed hat and kept it pulled low, and also held his head slanted down so that his face was mostly hidden from the people he encountered.
Once he had gone to a brothel to satisfy his twenty-three-year-old body's needs for a woman. No amount of money could persuade one to lie with him. When a woman finally offered herself if he would put a pillow-case over his head, he ran from the whorehouse in heartrending humiliation.
He had often reflected during this past year on how it would be to have a loving wife and several children, and how at his death they would be gathered around him. That was not to be, for his ugly wounds had changed the rules of the world. He was an outcast and would be alone forever, and would die, and his body would rot and waste away, in some wild and lonely place.
He leaned closer to the gargoyle face in the spring. He shivered in revulsion at his own image. He was overwhelmed at the unjustness of such a wound. He should have been killed outright; that would have been so very much better than this. Now all he had was a bleak, empty life stretching out ahead of him. A burning anger seized him. He closed his right hand into a fist and smashed the face in the water.
The reflection shattered, vanishing in a turbulence of waves. But the water quickly quieted and his image reassembled itself, thrusting itself before him with its twisted features screwed into even greater ugliness by his raw anger.
In a paroxysm of violent blows, he began to beat at the repugnant face. The water jumped and splashed under his driving fists. Beat the damn thing. Destroy it. He hammered and hammered at it.
Finally Ben controlled his crazed outburst of swinging fists. His arms lowered to hang by his sides. He hunkered there by the spring, breathing through his ragged slash of a mouth.
The reflection of his mutilated face came together again as the water stilled. He cried out, the anguish-filled voice rushing out across the plain. A sob escaped him before he could trap it in his throat.
He pulled his pistol and placed the end of the barrel against his head at the temple. There was a way to end all his suffering.
On the plain not far from Ben, a young female wolf halted her smooth, fluid lope and froze into a gray statue when the cry of suffering reached her. She cocked her ears in the direction from where the sound had come, and heard the human sob of anguish that followed after the cry. In her wolf's way, she sensed the other creature's deep pain. Earlier this day, the male wolf she had journeyed with since being a pup had been killed by a bull buffalo, and her feelings of loss and aloneness were still tormentingly fresh.
She raised her head and howled a long and lingering cry full of her own sorrow. She breathed and again howled, a mournful sound flowing out through the dusk of the evening.
Ben lowered the pistol from his head and listened to the plaintive wolf call. He tried to pinpoint its source, but it had no origin, seemingly coming from nowhere and everywhere. He was struck by the similarity of the sound to his own voice raised in lament. Why had it responded to his cry, and at the exact moment when he was prepared to send a bullet crashing into his head? A wolf had saved his life. For what purpose?
Ignoring the face in the spring, he lowered his canteen into the water and filled it. The canteen was laid aside and he lowered himself to drink straight from the pool. He blew against the water to break up his image, and drank, the water sliding down his throat cold and delicious. There was always tomorrow to use the pistol.
* * *
The black wave of the night came stalking, and Ben went to his bedroll and lay down. He couldn't sleep, and lay watching the full moon come up, a huge yellow sphere that faded to a silver dime as it rode higher in the sky. Later he was still awake when the star-filled sky, whirling about its axis, swept the Seven Sisters of the Pleiades right up overhead. Brutus finished feeding and came to stand close to Ben. The horse lowered his head to be petted, and Ben stroked the long, bony jaw.
"Brutus, old horse, it's just you and me. I'm damn glad that you don't care how ugly I am."