SLINKING LOW and slow against the ground, the animal moved in the night beneath the trees on the slope of the hill. It stopped and, lying prone, was very still. After a time the dark form rose, seeming to tremble as it did so, and again advanced at a sluggish, halting pace.
Cavillin sat waiting on Chilton’s doorstep. He watched the creeping figure in the woods. One of the dogs of the town stalking something in the weeds, he thought.
A shuddering human moan escaped from the crawling thing. Tom leaped to his feet at the sound. He sprang across the space separating them and knelt beside the man.
“Easy, fellow, let me help you.” The man’s shirt was wet and sticky under Tom’s hands. He smelled the cloying odor of blood.
Tom scooped the figure up in his arms. He was surprised at the slight weight.
Thinking there was something familiar about the man, Cavillin stepped hurriedly out into the full fall of the moon rays. He looked down into the gaunt, bony face of Chilton.
“Matt? What has happened to you?”
“Tom, is that you?” Chilton asked, bubbles of blood bursting on his lips. “I can’t see too good. Is it dark?”
“Yes, Tom, it’s dark, but the moon is bright. I’ll get you to Dr. Campbell. He’ll fix you up.”
Matt quivered with a terrible spasm of pain. He was weakening swiftly from his dreadful wounds. “It’s too late for the surgeon this time, Tom. Ussing has killed me.”
“Ussing did this to you? That damn whoremaster!” Cavillin was angry beyond imagination, his breath scalding in his lungs. His throat tightened so that he could not speak.
As Matt fought to hold off death he saw the ghosts of his men. They were lying on the ground of the many battlefields where they had fought and fell. Some had their legs shot off by cannonballs; arms were missing and some bodies were mere masses of crumpled human. Matt saw their eyes dimming to cold, blank stares. His laboring heart felt lonesome and squeezed, and his mind drew back from the awful remembrance.
Tom leaned very close to Matt. “Let me take you to Campbell.”
“No. Just set me up a little so I can breathe and talk with me for a moment.”
“Sure, Matt.” Tom gently propped Chilton against his leg.
“I want you to know why I’ve done all this robbing.” Matt’s voice was barely a whisper. “Please understand and do not judge me too badly. I have no family, only my troop of dragoons. They were everything to me. And I helped kill many of them by the orders I gave. I wanted only to try in some way to partially make up for what I did.” Matt was quiet. Oh, what he would give for a family and longtime friends.
“Yes, Matt, go on,” Tom said, hoping that in keeping him talking, that would somehow prolong his life.
“Tom, are we still friends?”
“Always.”
“Good. It is not a good thing to die in the dark without a friend.”
“You can live. You have been hurt bad before.”
“Not like this. I am dying. Man was never meant to last forever, or even for very long.”
Matt coughed blood. He sucked in a shallow breath of air. “Ussing took the gold and Mexican paper money we had. It was a fortune. He must have been hiding and saw where I hid it. Will you get it back from him and give it to my men?”
“I’ll surely do that.” Tom could promise nothing less to his dying friend, even knowing all the money was stolen and men had died protecting it.
“Will you kill Ussing for me?”
“I’ll find him and do that.”
“I’ll be waiting in hell for him. Send him to me soon.”
“Right. Very soon.”
Matt pulled a trembling draft of the black night air. “In my things is a list of my men that are to receive part of the money. If they are dead, the names of their families are written down. See that it is divided that way.”
“How about you? Is there anyone in the States you want me to go and see or give part of the money to?”
“No, there is nobody in the States. Perhaps you would tell Sophia and Stoffer what has happened. ...” Time flew around Matt like a hurricane. He heard Tom calling to him from a great distance. He felt the Ranger’s hands gripping him. It was not so bad dying in the dark when a friend held you.
* * *
“The bastard has left us stranded in this damn country.” Emily was screaming and crying at the same time. She moved across the room nearer Cavillin. “He took every dollar he was holding for us.”
Cavillin swung his view over Ussing’s three harlots with their rouged faces and silk dresses. The whoremaster and the guards and all the customers were gone now. Beneath the rouge, the women’s faces were strained and no longer pretty in their fear at being abandoned. Cavillin was sorry for them.
“How long has he been gone?” Cavillin asked.
“About an hour,” answered Helen.
“He took Jungling and Gonzalez with him,” Emily added. “They loaded their belongings on a wagon and had extra riding horses. Wade seemed in damn high spirits.”
“Where did Ussing go?”
“He said something about picking up something valuable at a church, then straight away to Vera Cruz,” Emily replied.
Cavillin believed the women told the truth. “Then I must leave immediately,” he said.
“You’re going to try to catch Ussing and kill him,” Helen said.
Tom did not reply. The answer was in his face, tight and masklike in his anger.
“Would you wait until we pack our belongings and then help us to travel to the coast?” asked Emily.
“No, I can’t do that. Ussing would reach the coast before us and leave aboard a ship. Then I could never overtake him. However, several companies of volunteer soldiers are being released. They will be going home. Ask them, and they will be glad to see you safely to Vera Cruz. Go see Sophia. Help her get back to New Orleans.” He turned quickly to the door.
Emily cried out behind him. “Don’t give the son of a bitch a chance. Shoot him in the back. Watch the Spaniard more than Jungling.”
Cavillin ran his horse on the blackness of the Mexican night, lying densely on the ancient El Camino Real. The stalwart beast carried him past a string of six large cinder cone hills, then through the sleeping village of San Marcos Huixtaco, and began the long climb to the high pass between Ixtacihuatl and Cerro Telapon.
After leaving Ussing’s brothel, Tom had gone to General Scott’s headquarters in the Governor’s Palace. He left a message with the lieutenant on duty, telling the general that Ussing had killed Chilton and Cavillin was going in pursuit.
Tom stopped at Sophia’s quarters in Tacubaya. She had cried when told of Matt’s death. In her grief, her frail body seemed to collapse in upon itself. Tom could not convince her that she was not at fault for what Ussing had done. He left after a time and found Sergeant Stoffer.
“He was not just my lieutenant but also my friend,” Stoffer said. His eyes were filled with his misery. “Do you want me to ride with you after Ussing?”
“No. Take your wounded men and go home. I’ll do what I can to complete Matt’s plan.”
Tom departed Tacubaya with his few belongings and a small supply of food rolled in his sleeping blankets and tied behind his saddle. At the border of the town he lit a lucifer, and in the light of its flame examined the many tracks in the deep dust on the road. The recent passage of Ussing’s wagon of gold drawn by trotting horses with two flanking riders was easy to detect among the other sign.
Tom touched his horse with spurs and held the brute to a grueling pace, mile after mile. A man on horseback could run down a loaded wagon if he pressed hard. Soon he would have the whoremaster in the sight of his pistol.
In the small hours of the night, the sky became very black and half obscured by the mountains that crowded in to tower over Cavillin. A cold wind came tumbling and moaning down from the huge ice fields on the crown of Ixtacihuatl. Tom hunched his shoulders against the stiff, chilling breeze and hurried onward.
The walls of the mountains started to retreat. The moon became visible, pallid and hazy behind high thin clouds. The stars were nothing but weakly shimmering halos faraway.
The El Camino Real angled down. Soon it entered a zone of large trees interspersed with small open parks.
The icy wind from the peaks of Ixtacihuatl was left to the rear, giving way to a warmer breeze blowing in from the direction of the sea, which lay more than two hundred miles to the east.
Tom let the tired horse slow and finally stop on its own volition. He felt his own weariness, his head light and woozy from the long ride after Chilton, and now the race across the night in pursuit of Ussing. Before the day arrived, he would rest a couple of hours.
He guided his mount from the road and into deep woods. In a small hidden meadow, the horse was staked out on the end of a long Mexican lariat. Tom spread his blankets beneath a giant tree.
For several minutes he lay recalling, distinct and sharp, the pleasant comrade Chilton had been. “God damn you, Ussing,” Tom cursed. “You killed a man a hundred times better than you.” He reached out and rubbed the butt of one of his Colt revolvers in its holster.
Cavillin went to sleep with his hand on his weapon.
* * *
Tom awoke to the first weakening of the night. In the east, a drop of dawn had made a hole in the darkness. He saddled his horse and left the meadow. He struck the El Camino Real and kicked his horse to a fast gallop.
The road soon came out of the woods and ran straight across a land of knee-high grass. The night dew lay thick on everything, bending the reeds down in a million fragile arches. In the day’s first sunlight, the chill was lifting off the earth in little gray lines of vapor.
In mid-morning, thick clouds, heralding a storm, appeared on the eastern horizon. The long gray line grew rapidly as Tom and the storm raced at each other.
For an hour the storm and the sun battled for possession of the sky. The clouds won and hung threateningly over the darkened land. Rain began to leak from their swollen bellies. Stiff, blustery winds thrust out ahead of the storm.
Cavillin pulled on his slicker and jammed his hat down hard. He turtled his head down between his shoulders and ran his steed into the maw of the storm.
A gale force wind tore at him and knocked him around. He turned his head to the side to breathe, and he gasped to ease the aching emptiness in his lungs.
The rain increased to a deluge. The dust changed to deep, sloppy mud, and the horse began to slip and slide. It fought vainly to keep on its feet.
The horse tried to slow and turn away from the fierce lash of the storm, but Tom drove it onward with sharp spurs.
The rain become frigid. An instant later, hail as large as the rocks that boys throw was pummeling Cavillin. The ice balls beat the crown of his hat down tight against his skull with hammer blows.
The horse whinnied in pain. Tom halted the suffering beast, and it whirled to put its rump to the driving hail.
Cavillin jumped to the ground and crouched beneath the horse’s drooping head. He pushed backward between the animal’s front legs for as much shelter as he could find and shouted to the stalwart beast to stand against the hail and wind.
Man and horse humped their backs as the slashing hail fell cold upon their aching bodies.
* * *
Cavillin sat his horse at the crossroads in the center of the town Texmelucan. He cautiously swept a look over the few townsfolk watching him from doorways and windows. One gringo would be a tempting target to an angry Mexican with a gun.
He removed his slicker as he impatiently scanned the rain-washed road. Not one track of man or horse marred the mud.
Due east, the three-mile-high round dome of Sierra La Malinche loomed over the town. A road ran off to the south, skirting the base of the mountain. That way led through Perote and onward to Vera Cruz. A short, but rougher route to the sea by way of Huamantla curled north around the giant volcanic mountain.
Cavillin stared searchingly along first one road and then the other. The storm had cleaned and cooled the air and sharpened his eyesight to a greater distance; still, he saw no men or horses moving on either road.
Tom pointed his finger at the nearest man and called out in Spanish, “Two Americans and a Spaniard and a wagon passed here in the last few hours. Which way did they go?”
“El Camino Real a Huamantla,” replied the man.
“Gracias,” Tom said. He reined his horse to the northern route. Throwing mud, the mount sped along the street. On the border of Texmelucan, the road dipped down to the Rio Atoyac. The horse took the shallow ford of the river in long, wet splashes.
In the afternoon, Cavillin found fresh tracks imbedded in the muddy surface of the road. He could tell by the sign that Ussing was running his horses. That explained why Tom was gaining but slowly. He spurred his mount to a faster pace.
* * *
Cavillin stopped to change horses at the army outpost in Huamantla. As he shifted his gear to the new mount, he spoke to the corporal in charge of the remuda. “Have you seen three men with a wagon? Two were riding horseback.”
“Yes, sir,” answered the corporal. He had fought with Cavillin in the battle for Huamantla and remembered the Ranger lieutenant. “They tried to talk me into giving them fresh horses. But, hell, they were civilians, so I told them nothing doing. I thought the tall, dark fellow was going to shoot me. Damnation, but he was mad. Are you after them, Lieutenant?”
“They killed a cavalry officer in Mexico City.”
“Then that explains why their horses were sweating and blowing hard, for they had been pushing them plenty fast.”
“How long ago did they pass by?”
“Two hours, maybe a little longer. You’ve picked a good mount. You can catch them, Lieutenant. Do you want to see the captain? He’d most likely send a patrol to help you.”
“I can take care of this by myself,” replied Cavillin. “My food has run out. Where can I get something to eat?”
“There’s a cantina two blocks up the street that way.” He pointed. “I’ve eaten there. They dish out only Mexican food, but it’s good.”
* * *
Two miles east of Huamantla, Cavillin found two Mexican men and a boy dead on the El Camino Real. Close by, three exhausted horses stood with drooping heads. Ussing had killed to obtain a rested team for the wagon and a replacement for one of the riding mounts.
Tom hurried faster, passing over land populated with herds of sheep and cattle. On the level creek bottoms, there were small farms protected with stone fences. In the afternoon, Tom traveled in the bottom of an intermontane basin, a sunken area into which streams flowed but could not escape. He passed Laguna Totolcingo on his left. Six miles later he reached Laguna Salado.
When night swarmed across the sky, the tracks of Ussing and the others still lay on the El Camino Real. Cavillin continued on into the dark for an hour. On a rise of land he made a damp bed among the rustling blades of grass and fretfully waited the gloomy hours away.
* * *
Dawn light crept in slowly as Tom pounded through Perote. In the morning’s drowsy first hours, only the wood peddlers were stirring. With long, limber switches, they whipped the donkeys out of Cavillin’s path as he charged past.
The King’s Highway began to climb, twisting and curving as it crawled up the flank of the coastal mountains. Cavillin crossed over the summit at the cluster of eight wooden houses that marked the villages of Acajete. Two hours later he arrived at the city of Jalapa.
Certain that Ussing would acquire fresh mounts in the city, Tom turned aside to the army garrison and traded horses. He stopped briefly at a mercado, a marketplace, and purchased cheese, hard bread, and apples. His canteen was filled at a public well. He ate as the rested horse settled into a ground-devouring gallop, running directly upon the new sign of a wagon and two riders.
* * *
Tom sped down the slanting stretch of The King’s Highway leading to Vera Cruz and the sea. He looked out over the wooded sweep of the mountain, straining to pierce the great distance to the coastal city. All he could see were the hills stepping down and away and gradually fading to a blue gray haze.
The vegetation became more dense as the route descended. On this wetter side of the mountain, the road was badly eroded and cut with gullies, and all the depressions stood full of water. The hot breath of the tropical lowlands near the coast thrust sweaty fingers up the mountainside.
When the night flung a thick, dark curtain over the land, the horse slowed to a walk. Tom rode on as the moon rose and lit the road. Lulled by the soft, quiet step of the horse on the moist ground and feeling safe in the blackness, Cavillin half slept.
He stopped at Cerro Gordo, where the arching stone bridge crossed the Rio del Plan. The horse was unsaddled and staked out to graze.
Sensing the presence of the warm-blooded animals, mosquitoes flushed up off the river and out of the groves of trees in a dense, seething swarm. They swooped upon Tom with a hungry, hostile buzzing. He batted once at them and took a tin of grease from his pack and smeared a thin coating on his face and hands. It was poor protection from the pests, but the best the Americans had devised during their months in this alien land.
Cavillin crossed the bridge on foot and halted. Beneath the moon, the terrain lay gently rolling with meadows and pockets of trees. The big hill, El Telegrafo, lying a mile northeast, was a dark mound blanking out the lower stars of the sky. An innocent land. However, one of the toughest battles of the American march inland had been fought over El Telegrafo and the bridge that spanned the fast flowing Rio del Plan. The innocence of the place had been destroyed by the deaths of hundreds of men.
Tom peered into the gloom of the night. On the killing ground one cannon blasted tree looked like a skinny, stump armed man. Craters made by exploding bombs were everywhere. The stone sides of the bridge were pockmarked with bullet strikes too numerous to count.
On a rise of land above the river, Tom had shot seven Mexicans making a stand against the invading Americans. In his mind, as if it were happening all over again, he heard the moans and screams of the dying men and horses, and smelled the stench of burned gunpowder.
He moved a short distance up from the river and onto a meadow. The Americans killed in the fighting had been gathered and buried near where they fell. Scores and scores of those graves were spread in front of Tom. The graves gaped empty and partially full of foul, dank water.
The graveyard patrols had been here, and now mounds of excavated dirt were ridged beside each hole. The corpses had been removed, crated in wooden boxes, and hauled to the coast and homeward bound ships.
Tom turned away, greatly saddened by the cost of the war in dead and crippled men. By the time he had passed back over the bridge, he fully understood Chilton, and the final dredges of his anger at his friend for his deeds had been washed away.
* * *
The voice floated across the empty graves, ghostly and complaining. Cavillin yanked his horse to a fast halt with a tight rein. A prickle ran along his back.
The night was at its blackest, that time of morning when the moon is lost behind the horizon and the sun has not yet risen above the curve of the earth. Tom had awakened early, determined to overtake Ussing before he could reach the coast and escape on a swift ship.
Tom waited for the voice to come again. However, nothing broke the eerie silence lying on the deserted cemetery.
He guided his mount down from the road and tied it at the abutment of the bridge. He climbed back up the bank and carefully started to feel his way among the water-filled holes of the temporary graveyard. He had heard a man’s voice—of that he was certain. He did not think the defeated Mexicans would spend the night there until the graves were closed. The victorious Americans would.
He shadowed his way to the opposite side of the meadow and to a patch of trees. He hunkered down, listening.
An owl glided past, close overhead, to check him out. A few moments later a red glow came to life on the far side of the woods. Men’s voices began to grumble. A camp was stirring.
Cavillin stole through the woods. The fire grew larger, casting a red bubble in the darkness. A group of men sat within the flickering zone of light.
To Cavillin’s surprise, five American soldiers sat eating breakfast with Ussing and his men. The whoremaster had joined with an army patrol. Tom made out the outlines of a wagon and stagecoach in the murk beyond the reach of the fire. The soldiers were escorting one of General Scott’s dispatch coaches.
Tom wormed backward. He veered around the camp and came to the wagon. Shoving his hand under the tarp covering the bed, he felt the small, heavy sacks underneath. Here was the fortune Chilton had stolen. If the women had told him the truth, here also was Ussing’s own accumulation of wealth.
Cavillin’s vengeful eyes glittered as hotly as the coals of the fire. He could not shoot Ussing and his cohorts from ambush. Neither could he walk out into the firelight and ask the patrol officer to help him arrest the murderer. Either way, Chilton’s money would be found by the army and surely kept.
Ussing, you are safe for tonight, Tom thought. But still I will kill you. If not now, then tomorrow or the next day.