TRABAJO DOZED A little in the sunlight which had finally penetrated the morning mist. The air was fresh and clear as Old Yakima trudged up to the cemetery. The crisp ringing of a sledgehammer on metal came from a blacksmith’s shop, mingling with the insistent braying of a mule.
The old man carried a hoe in his leathery hands. When he reached the graveyard, he went to work chipping weeds around new graves and old. There were many new graves since the great battle and in one of them lay the old man’s son.
Yakima was too old to feel bitterness. His son had lived a good life and his end had come quickly. None knew whether it was a Federale or a bandido bullet that had cut his son down in the square. It would make no difference if they did. The outlaws had been slaughtered to a man and the colonel and his accursed Federales had left for the north by train. At least Trabajo would not have Xavier to fear any longer. And with luck and the grace of God, a lightning bolt might split Diego de Varga from crown to crotch before he ever came to the Chuchillos again.
The old man paused to make the sign of the cross on his breast and ask forgiveness of the Virgin for that uncharitable thought.
It was strange, he thought, how he almost always spoke to the Virgin in his prayers. He knew the same was so with his fellow villagers. She was their special deity ... and he had always felt she heard him even after all these years ...
He worked his way up one row and down another. He worked slowly but steadily and the warmth of the sun was kind to his old back. A new weed had sprung up squarely in the middle of an unmarked grave. He bent to pull it out with his fingers. Then he spat on the rough soil. Sancho Xavier, burn in hell forever!
Another sign of the cross followed. Then a few more weeds before he moved to the shade of a tree to rest.
And he was still standing there when the bell began to toll.
Old Yakima went very still, staring down on the spires of the church. Solemnly, slowly, the bell struck five times, the sounds carrying sweetly up to the crags and drifting back down again on the echo.
Five bells!
Below him Trabajo was stirring with sudden life. Men, women and children rushed from their houses and stared towards the square. The old man heard their excited voices drifting up from the streets. And then the bell sounded again, ringing five times and drawing the people to the church in a living flood with its voice.
The old man was amongst the last to reach the church. It was crowded. Yakima removed his floppy hat and shuffled slowly down the aisle. There was a great buzzing sound in his ears and whether it was the voices of the throng or some foolish sound in his old head, he couldn’t be sure.
They made way for him, for he was the oldest of the Old Ones and the most respected man in town next to the padre.
He halted at the altar rail. Abundio stood up on the steps with his arms extended, his face shining in a way they hadn’t seen in years. He must have been waiting for Old Yakima to arrive, for now he turned to the altar, took something from it and turned.
In his hands was the Golden Virgin.
A great noise swelled through the church as they knelt, until only the old man was left standing.
“How?” he asked, reflecting the question in every heart. “How?”
The padre looked down at him. “I came to the altar to clean it, Old Yakima, and she was here.”
Tears ran down the old man’s face. “A miracle!” he whispered. And then he shouted it. “A miracle!”
“A miracle!” the crowd chanted. “A miracle!”
The padre nodded his head in total agreement. A miracle indeed. He held the Virgin higher so all could see. The little Virgin seemed to smile upon them all.
The fist exploded against Brazos’ jaw, rocking his head against the high back of the chair to which they had tied him. He shook his head, rolled his tongue around his mouth, then grinned.
“Old Granny Brazos used to give me harder licks than that.”
Crash!
It took him longer to recover from that punch, delivered with all Kell Zachary’s strength. But when his head stopped ringing, Brazos still managed another crooked smile.
“Days she felt sassy—she hit me a hell of a lot harder.”
For long minutes after that, the only sounds in the adobe-walled room, deep in the headquarters of the Rosarita 21st Federales, were the crunch of blows against flesh and occasional splashes of water needed to keep the battered prisoner conscious.
Such scenes were nothing new in this compound of buildings ringed by a tall stone wall on a treeless hill above the town, for in this corner of Sonora, the power of the Federale was absolute. To this place were brought the bandits, gunmen and rebels who set themselves against the so-called law. It was also a place where a man might find himself arraigned for no greater crime than being poor, for refusing to pay bribes, or merely for being seen with a Federale’s woman. For in Rosarita, a man was guilty until proven innocent, and those who determined innocence or guilt were the men who had been justly described as ‘the scum of Sonora’.
Old bloodstains spattered the walls of the room where Zachary, California Jim and Barrera took turns to slug Hank Brazos’ body. Instruments of torture were piled in the gloomy corners, a single high window admitted a feeble light. The very air seemed thick with the ghostly memories of men and women, innocent and guilty, who had entered this grisly chamber in good health, and been carried out dead or maimed. It was the nerve center of Colonel de Varga’s empire of terror.
The colonel sat slumped in his creased blue tunic at his desk beneath the small window. The light fell across his head of greasy black curls and put a silvery sheen on the epaulettes on his meaty shoulders. He held a glass in one hand, a half-filled bottle of tequila stood on the bench before him.
The colonel no longer smiled.
Yesterday, travelling up from the south, it had been different. His men had taken the gringos prisoner and it was certain that the colonel would retrieve either the statue itself or the map showing where it could be found. It would be simply a matter of ‘persuasion’.
Now the colonel drank bitter tequila and spoke little. He had learned from the man Moore, who talked like a frenzied woman, that the Virgin had been recovered, but hadn’t reached Rosarita with them. Only the giant gringo Brazos knew what had happened to the Virgin, the colonel knew now, and this man would not tell.
De Varga had believed it would be only a matter of time before Brazos cracked, but after many hours of torture, he found himself no closer to his goal. If anything, the more punishment they heaped on the man, the more stubborn and defiant he seemed to become.
The bucket of water was upended over the prisoner’s head yet again. The water streamed down over the swollen face and the bruise-darkened torso. Brazos’ chin rested on his chest. Slowly the blue eyes opened and lifted to the men grouped about him.
He winked.
A choked sound burst from Zachary’s throat. He threw a venomous, badly timed punch, slipped in the spilled water and fell heavily against the arm of Brazos’ chair. Brazos’ big head snapped forward before Zachary could regain his balance. There was a sharp crack of bone meeting bone and Zachary tumbled unconscious to the floor with blood streaming from a terrible gash in his forehead.
De Varga watched with a mixture of satisfaction and frustration then as Barrera and California Jim attacked the giant Texan with mindless fury. Brazos was beaten unconscious, and still they kept up the fierce tattoo of blows. Blood streamed from his mouth, nose, ears and eyes. They will kill him, de Varga mused. What a pity he could not afford to have him die ...
“Enough!” he called finally. Heavily he rose, and slapping his quirt against his boot top, walked slowly across to the chair. Barrera had dragged Zachary to a bench and stretched him out with his face to the light. He would carry that disfiguring scar to his grave, the colonel knew. California Jim stood bare-chested behind the chair with his bloodied fists still clenched, looking like a savage dog waiting to be unleashed again. De Varga’s torturer, still peeved because the colonel had allowed his gringo friends to usurp his role here tonight, stood with his hands locked behind his back, a sulking eminence by the locked door.
De Varga halted before the unconscious prisoner, boots wide-spread, arms folded. The Federale’s swarthy face was expressionless as it often was at times of greatest emotion. De Varga was a man of many hatreds, but seldom had he had as much cause to hate anybody as he did this hulking young Texan and his insolent trail partner. On each occasion they had clashed, de Varga had come off second-best. And even now, here in Rosarita where their lives were in the palm of his hand, he was being denied his full triumph.
Hours of torture and interrogation, and not one word of the Virgin.
Was this man made out of flesh and blood, or iron?
Zachary moaned and Barrera put a damp cloth to his mouth. De Varga glanced in his direction, then brought his speculative gaze back to Brazos.
Moore and his son had both admitted that the Golden Virgin had been recovered from the Lost Mission. Very likely they would have found out more from Moore had not the torturer hit the man too hard earlier and put him out for most of the day. The boy obviously had no knowledge of the Virgin’s hiding place, and whether Benedict knew it or not remained uncertain. The only one who knew for sure, in the colonel’s mind, was this Texan. And this Texan was wearing his tormentors into the ground.
What to do now?
Cut his throat and be damned to it? De Varga shook his head. No. He’d give an arm to see the Texan’s life-blood on the stone floor, but not at the cost of the Golden Virgin.
There must be a way to crack his resistance without killing. There always was.
Stepping back, de Varga suddenly barked an order and his torturer opened the chamber door and troopers hurried in. De Varga gestured at Brazos and the men unstrapped him from the chair and started toting him out, groaning under his weight.
De Varga consulted his watch. It was gone ten and the day had been long. He had been on the trail a long time—far too long to be away from his girls. Queenie’s chiquitas would know how to draw the tension and anger out of him. And who could tell? Perhaps when he was relaxed the solution to this vexing problem may just come to him as had happened before.
Informing California Jim of his plans and promising to send in the medic to check Zachary out, the colonel followed his heavily burdened men into the cell-block. It was a gloomy place of foul odors and sickly light and their boots plucked hollow echoes from the flagstones as they walked.
Duke Benedict was leaning against his cell door with his hands in his pockets when they delivered his unconscious companion to the adjacent cell. Taking one look at Brazos’ face, Benedict started cussing out the Federales with a truly impressive string of invective which aggravated the troopers but had no noticeable effect upon the colonel.
For de Varga had glanced in at the Moores’ cell, and the light of inspiration had flashed so brightly he couldn’t understand why he hadn’t thought of it before. He supposed, in retrospect, that the real reason was that he was so accustomed to dealing with his own people here, that he overlooked the very important factor that so many gringos saw themselves as heroes, regardless of how low and corrupt they might really be.
The colonel was happy with himself as he turned to go. He was going to enjoy his few hours at Queenie’s all the more keenly now he had decided on the course of action that may well bring final success.
He only delayed long enough to inform the gringo Benedict of his decision. The colonel wasn’t at all surprised that the Americano was too shocked even to curse at him now.
Hank Brazos could remember feeling better.
It was a real job of work to drag his battered body up onto the hard cell bunk where he sat, shoulders hunched and big head hanging. Now and again he would spit blood on the floor between his boots. There didn’t seem to be a square inch that wasn’t hurting and he was reminded of the time as a boy when he and his daddy had been forced to jump from a runaway wagon on Bear Claw Pass in Texas. Hitting the ground at thirty miles an hour had been rough enough, but the old man landing square on top of him to break his own fall had been the clincher.
He tried to grin. Old Joe Brazos. They sure threw the mold away when they made him. Which was likely just as well.
“Reb?”
His shaggy head lifted slowly. Benedict was peering anxiously through the bars of his cell at him. His face swam in Brazos’ vision. The whole damned cell-block looked like something viewed through clouded glass.
“Howdy, Yank,” he managed to get out. “We sure do fun it up when we hit Old Mexico, don’t we?”
“No bones broken?”
“Well, I feel kind of knock-kneed, arrow-scarred and cow-hocked just right now. But you ought to see the other feller.”
Benedict smiled admiringly. He knew Brazos was tough rawhide clear through, yet the range of his toughness could still surprise him.
“What other fellow is that, Reb?”
“Zachary. Got him one with the old headpiece, Yank.” Brazos broke off to spit again and tenderly massaged a deep cut in his eyebrow. “That’s one skunk that ain’t goin’ to be steppin’ quite so tall for a spell.”
“I’m assuming by the sound of you that you’ll live,” Benedict said.
“I’m a hard man to kill.”
“Doubtless, doubtless. Unfortunately, everybody doesn’t share your indestructibility.”
The big words always took a lot of digesting, doubly so when Brazos’ head was ringing like a dinner gong and his brain felt like something composed of soggy cotton and chicken fat. But at length the thread of Benedict’s statement got through to him and he forced himself to sit up straighter. Benedict looked serious, he realized. Mighty serious.
“What’s goin’ on I don’t know about, Yank?”
“I’ll tell you when you’re feeling better.”
“I feel as good as I’m ever likely to in this roach trap.”
“Sure?”
“Sure as sin’s for sale in St. Louis.”
Benedict shifted an unlit cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other then gave it to him straight.
“They’re going to shoot the boy.”
That brought Brazos to his feet fast. He lurched drunkenly and slammed into the wall. Leaning there for some seconds until the dizziness passed, he opened his eyes, pushed off the wall and made his way across the cell with tangle footed determination.
“They’re what?” he panted, clutching the bars between them so he wouldn’t fall down.
“It had to come,” Benedict said with icy calm. “The only surprising thing is that de Varga didn’t think of it before.” He shrugged, cold-faced. “In your rustic words, Johnny Reb ... ‘there are more ways to kill a skunk than setting it’s tail afire.’ De Varga can’t crack you one way, so he’ll do it another.”
Haggard lines etched Brazos’ battered face as he turned his head to stare across the littered corridor. He could dimly make out Dusty Moore’s sleeping figure on the bunk. The boy was curled up under a filthy blanket on the floor.
He swallowed hard. “When?”
“Dawn.”
“Did he mean it?”
“He meant it.”
Brazos slid down the bars until he was squatting on his haunches. He held onto a bar with his right hand to steady himself. Ever since their arrest, he had been swaggering about, ribbing the jailers, taunting his torturers, cracking jokes and working hard at keeping everybody’s spirits up. But all along he had known they had never been in a more desperate situation, knew Old Man Death was just waiting to claim them all. He’d gambled that de Varga wouldn’t kill him or Benedict until they told him where to find the Virgin. But now de Varga was calling his bluff with the kid.
That was using the whip, all right.
“Reb?”
“Yeah?”
“It’s in Trabajo, isn’t it?”
“The Virgin? How’d you figure that?”
“I’ve had time to think here, waiting for them to get through with you and start on me again. The night we were camped and you went off to check on the trains. That’s when you took the Virgin to Trabajo, isn’t it?”
“That’s a heap of hogwash.”
“It’s the truth and we both know it. I should have reasoned it out before, mister—based on your habit of making noble gestures.”
“Yank, I got me a real bad head and them jawbreakers of yours ain’t improvin’ it at all.”
“Admit I’m right and I’ll ease up on you.”
“So I admit it. So what?”
Benedict let a long breath go. “You really outdid yourself this time, didn’t you, Johnny Reb? All that danger and hardship ... just so you could make a big man of yourself. That’s one I’ll owe you when we get out of here, mister.”
“You mean if, don’t you?”
“I mean when,” retorted Benedict, who would never concede the possibility that he could die young. Then the chinks in his bravado showed also as he stared across at the opposite cell. The handsome face softened. Somehow young Hughie Moore had penetrated Benedict’s armor and the prospect of the little boy standing before a firing squad in the dawn light twisted something within him like a wrench forcing a rusty bolt.
“If we tell de Varga what he wants to know, Reb ...” he began.
“He’ll kill the lot of us on the spot,” Brazos finished for him.
Benedict nodded his head in mute acknowledgement of that cold fact. “So we let them take that child out in the morning and murder him?”
“It ain’t mornin’, yet.”
The irrepressible Brazos optimism, Benedict thought as he took out his box of flint and steel. Lighting his cigar, he checked his watch. Eleven o’clock. Six hours until dawn. Slowly he began pacing the confines of his cell, reflecting on the jails they had been in and the jails they had broken out of, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the Federale headquarters, considering and rejecting one impossible scheme after another.
Across the fetid corridor, young Hughie Moore slept on, serene in the belief that, some way or another, Mr. Duke would get them out of this terrible place and safely home.
And outside, beyond the compound of the barracks, the old Mexican moon shone down gently on the bloodied, bullet-pocked wall where Colonel de Varga carried out his executions.