At first I thought the dugout had fallen in, or been carried away by rocks; the Sierras were continually shifting shape, like the beasts in Indian lore. The spot Joseph had pointed out, cleared from forest that had grown right up to the tracks, looked swept clean in the shaft of light from the champing locomotive: A crumb-scraper couldn’t have been more thorough. Then the fog and drifting steam parted to expose something black and gaping, as if the mountain had opened its mouth to expel sulphurous smoke from its lungs. It was the entrance to a structure erected in partnership between nature and man.
Joseph busied himself with the engine while I retrieved the Whitney rifle and scouted out the location, gripping the weapon in one hand and a bull’s-eye lantern in the other. I tipped open the louvers, directing the beam inside the arrangement of mossy logs with a roof made of rocky outcrop and an extension of poles shingled with bark. Apart from the usual rubbish of temporary habitation and the palpable odor of earth, mildew, and sodden wood-ash, it was unoccupied, at least by humans. I’d half expected to disturb a sow bear sleeping with her cubs or at the very least a nest of rats. A beetle nearly the size of my hand stirred and scaled the Pike’s Peak of my toe, that was all. I shook free of it and hung the lantern from the end of a pole by its bail to investigate the rest.
A pile of moldy rags got the attention first of my nose, then my eyes as a likely resting place for rattlers. It lay heaped in the corner where a windscreen of logs chinked with clay and dead leaves met the side of the hill, where a previous tenant would have flung it to lighten his load before venturing back out. I picked up a stick, poked at the heap, and when nothing issued forth twisted the stick, winding a bit of rotting cloth around the end, and tugged it free. Something tumbled out, rattling like hollow wooden flutes; something rolled across the packed clay floor and came to rest against my foot, leering up at me with the porcelain grin of death.
I started; but I’d seen human skulls before. Stripped of flesh and gutted of brains, they offered no harm. It wore a patch of black hair like peat on a rock and two inches above the right eye-socket a hexagonal hole as big as my fist. It might have been made by a stone falling, but I doubted it.
“Que pasa?” Joseph’s call, bent out of shape by damp and distance. I ignored it, stirring the stick among the bones. Something crackled; I speared it and brought it up into the light. It was a scrap of foolscap, as yellow as any of the dead leaves stuck among the chinking between the logs, but marked with script written in faded ink:
gone up the tracks for help, but
That was it: a journal entry of some kind. Who’d gone up the tracks for help I might never know, but if he’d returned with it he’d been too late.
I brought the scrap close to my eyes. It seemed to be deteriorating as I looked at it, from sudden exposure to the open air, like the mummified remains of an ancient Incan king disinterred after centuries; but it was more recent than that. Like Judge Blackthorne, I had little faith in a man’s personality revealing itself in his hand, but I knew a closed loop from an uncrossed t; and I knew as sure as I was a hundred miles from the civilized world that I was reading the last words of Agent DeBeauclair, the Pinkerton operative who’d disappeared after filing his last report on Oscar Childress.
“A friend?”
I jumped again. Joseph stood in the entrance, the light from the lantern lying on his square cheeks and the edge of the axe in his hand.
* * *
“DeBeauclair is a French name, sí?” The Indian crunched cracked corn. “I would think he would look more foreign.”
I sat across the fire from him in the entrance of the dugout, the Whitney across my lap. The fire was of my own making, chunks from the tender chopped into kindling with the axe Joseph had brought. The light of the flames crawled and twitched over the bone face where it had come to rest, changing its expression from amused idiocy to deep contemplation. Outside, tree frogs, night birds, crickets, and cicadas made a racket, as deafening as in any city. The bay, hobbled just outside the halo of heat, grazed and switched its tail at mosquitoes the size of chimney swifts. I ate beef from the tin with a spoon, washed it down with water, and passed him the canteen. “We’re all the same under the skin. What do you think made that hole?”
“A rock from a sling or a stone axe.” He drank, his jaws grinding without cease. His molars must have been worn down to stumps.
“Not a ball from a percussion weapon.”
“I know of none that would make a wound that size.”
“I do. I saw my share of them in the war.”
“I cannot think why white people should make war on each other except over horses.”
“We can’t all be as civilized as Indians. Who do you think he sent for help?”
“Someone unreliable, I should think.”
Something cried, sounding close. In town, I would have put it down to a colicky baby. In that country it made the hairs bristle at the top of my spine. “There’s your puma. You must have a cousin or two left.”
“I think I am that cousin. Perhaps my great-great-grandfather destroyed all the litter-mates of a cat that has sworn not to die until it has done for his family as well.”
“It didn’t kill the detective, that’s plain. There’d be no bones left to tell the tale.”
“Bandits. Yellow fever, and the hole came later. The great bird of death swooped down and snatched his soul. Where is the good in guessing? He is beyond caring.”
“He cared enough to write something, but that scrap is all that’s left.” I’d found a ball of shredded paper left by a brood of mice. They’d built the nest inside the dead man’s rib cage, from the record of his last days. “What was he doing here? It’s a long way into the wilderness, even if he rode a horse or took along a pack animal.”
He helped himself to another handful of corn. “What are you doing here?”
“They say, even his enemies, that Childress is a brilliant man. I came to see what makes him shine.”
“You wish to learn from him about horses and making money?”
“If he brings them up; not that I care a shuck about horses, and money runs out between my fingers like water. I expect to hear about poetry, philosophy, history, governing, science, and religion.”
“What will you do with what you learn?”
“Something, possibly. Nothing, maybe. Sometimes knowledge alone is enough.”
He shook his head, rooting in his sack for corn. Those loose kernels had reality for him, purpose and meaning.
“And after you have learned these things, you will kill him.”
“Those are the orders. The killing, that is. I added the other.”
“It is like squeezing all the good out of an orange and throwing away the skin.”
“Very like.” I scraped up the last of the beef, ate it, and set the tin on the ground.
He turned his face into the wind. It carried the smell of brimstone. “The dry season is early. We must take on water tomorrow. There is a tower twenty miles ahead. Nearer twenty-five. After that we must draw it from the earth.”
“A village?”
He shook his head. “Only the tower, and such as gathers there. Good local beer and a woman.”
“Just one?”
“I would not say ‘just’ of this woman.”
His face showed no amusement. A man of his kind, in a place like that, didn’t leer about such things. They were like water and meat. “What about you?” I asked. “What made you come all this way?”
He spoke without raising his eyes, poking a stick at the fire. They reflected the light like pieces of polished coal.
“I wish to be the first of my people to pilot a train from the top of Mexico to the bottom. Then perhaps I will be made an engineer in truth as well as in name.”
“That’s important?”
“My father and all my brothers died, either in the mines or from the dirt that filled their lungs. It is not my wish to die as they did.”
“They should be grateful.”
He looked up at me sharply, his hand still gripping the stick. “Why?”
“The mines got to them before the puma.”
He looked down again and resumed stirring the ashes. “I did not think of that.”
The noises from outside increased, as if whoever directed them had raised his baton. Further conversation seemed not worth the effort to compete. I mixed water from the canteen with a handful of Arbuckle’s and set the pot on a flat rock by the fire, turning it from time to time as the Indian munched.
“Do you think the men who run the railroads will not want to make me an engineer because I killed the one I worked for?”
“Not the railroad men I’ve met.”
He smiled, pieces of corn shell stuck between his teeth. When the coffee was ready I filled two cups and handed him one. He wrapped his hands around the tin as if they needed the heat, but he didn’t drink from it at first. “I think they would choose the puma,” he said.
“Who?”
“My father and my brothers. It is better to be eaten by an animal than by the dust from a shaft.”
“Quicker, anyway.”
Outside the dugout the big cat cried.