THE CAGE, by Talmage Powell

Copyright 1969 © by Talmage Powell.

CHAPTER 1

The frontier wilderness of the Tacton Flats country was no place for timid men or fainthearted women. North of the badlands that stretched into Mexico it had grass and water but it didn’t yield easily to the needs of people. Life wan a relentless grind from sunup to sundown. There were few fat people in the Flats.

The pole-and-sod cabin on Wucumma Creek, which meandered through the Flats, had little in common with a balconied house and courtyard in New Orleans. But even in her altered circumstances, Temple Cameron enjoyed just about every hour of every day. The tendency to be happy was a part of her nature.

Her habits of thinking were simple, straightforward, and positive. Why waste a brand-new day miserably, dwelling on the darker side of life? If reality offered nothing to bring a smile, she made up something in her mind. She didn’t have to do this often. She looked in the right places to find things of interest in her surroundings.

She enjoyed color for its own sake; the different blue shadings of the sky, the flash of a redbird in drab brown foliage.

She liked bright-eyed living creatures. Some of the things they did were downright humorous. For example, the old speckled hen didn’t scratch the way a chicken should. She was a fastidious scratcher, and the tips of her claws performed with a certain rhythm. She was surely the prima ballerina of all barnyards.

Even Webb had never caught the look of disgust in the eyes of Duchess, the mare, when he came to the corral with a saddle slung across his shoulder. While Webb was saddling her, Duchess would turn her head and study Webb’s backside. One of these days the mare was going to yield to the impulse, and Webb would jump right out of his boots.

Washdays were the ones that really put a woman’s good spirits to the test. The grubby routine was always the same. Fill the big black iron pot that perched on its three stumpy legs beside the creek, scrounge the sticks, and build a fire under the pot. Tote the dirty clothes from the house, boil in lye soap, rinse in the creek, hang, dry. Then a woman was ready to heat her flatirons on the hearth and start coaxing out the wrinkles.

This washday was uncommon in that it started off with an undue trial of Temple’s good humor. She woke before daybreak with a headache. She said nothing to Webb about it. He had a hard day ahead fetching off a bog in the south quarter where fool cows were always getting stuck.

Temple lay quietly to soothe the headache until the first gray smudge of dawn dirtied the sky in the east. Then Webb stirred in the bed beside her, stretching, yawning and mumbling a “good morning” as she got up.

Her headache eased as she busied herself. Webb’s large dark eyes constantly strayed to her as she dressed in cotton dirndl, blouse, and rope-soled huaraches. She was a beautifully made young woman, with long tapering legs, a nipped-in waist that accented the flare of hips, warm firm breasts that were fully developed but not bovine. She gathered her long yellow hair and tied it with a bit of ribbon at the nape of her slender neck to keep it out of her way while she worked.

The early morning passed quickly. With the embers that had cooked breakfast dying in the fireplace, and Webb gone to his fencing chore, she straightened the single large room of her house and gathered her laundry in the large wicker basket.

She was strangely short of breath when she reached the gurgling creek. She set down the basket of clothing and linens, rested her palms on its rough rim, and wished there was a breeze. The laurel and bramble thickets seemed dead in the rising heat of the morning. She put the back of her hand against her forehead and looked at the sky; it had a metallic glint, as if a norther were forming somewhere far away.

The headache had faded, but left a residue of edginess that plagued her as she gathered sticks and stacked them under the monstrous wash kettle. On one knee, she crumpled tinder of dry moss and leaves, pushed it into the nest of sticks, and reached into the large pocket of her skirt for a precious sulphur match. She drew the match out but didn’t strike it. Instead the very stillness of the day, a hush so complete that all the birds and insects might have been dead, seemed to freeze her hands. She had the crazy certainty that she was being watched.

She didn’t breathe for a moment, and slipped a glance about her.

The thickets were the same as always; a mottle of brown and green with splashes of red and yellow wildflower color here and there. Nothing moved or made a sound in the masses of underbrush or the waist-high areas of sage and grass between. Only the creek whispered.

Resolutely, Temple struck the match and fed the flame to the tinder and sticks. She watched the tongues of orange and yellow lick upward, adding bits of tinder.

Then leaves rustled and a dry branch broke in the thicket behind her. The sound seemed as sharp and loud as a pistol shot. She felt as if the flames curling around the bottom of the washpot had suddenly drenched her with heat.

For a moment she couldn’t force herself to move from her knee, then took hold of the edge of the washpot and pulled herself up. She turned her head slowly, fighting the stiffness in her neck and body.

Half-obscured, so that he was like a partially seen mirage, a man was standing in the thicket not a dozen yards from her. A stranger.

Her heart stopped beating, but icy clear thoughts crashed through her mind. Webb was miles away by now, and the nearest neighbors were nearly twenty miles to the west.

She knew the man was a drifter and perhaps not alone. Rootless men who filtered through the country these days with increasing frequency often they traveled in pairs or small groups. There were all kinds of them, good, bad, black, white; men from disbanded Northern armies who’d tasted blood and sneered at the thought of returning to a New England sweatshop, or gaunt ex-Confederates half mad with the thoughts of scorched earth and families that had vanished.

The rough lip of the wash kettle was cutting her palms. She pulled her hands away. It was possible the man in the thicket didn’t mean to harm her. It was possible that he’d left a companion or two at the empty house, scouted the place, spotted her, and simply had to look, before he spoke, with eyes that had grown hungry for the sight of a woman.

Somehow, she had the strength to turn as if she hadn’t seen him. She started walking away, toward the house. Her knees were trembling and weak, but her footsteps were unhurried and steady.

She had covered about a dozen yards before the man realized that she was leaving the creekbank. She heard the brittle snapping and thrashing as he hurled himself out of the thicket.

She faltered as a feeling of faintness swept over her. Without wasting time to look back she willed herself to run. She’d taken half a dozen quick steps when a heavy weight slammed against her back. She was thrown forward, the scream forming in her throat was cut short as her face was smashed into damp earth, leaves and twigs.

The man’s bulk knocked the breath from her. She writhed and struggled, pinned beneath him on her stomach. The man was gibbering wildly, making sounds like those of a crazed rutting animal. His hands were tearing at her clothing. His nails branded her shoulders and back with hot furrows as he ripped her blouse away.

She screamed Webb’s name more times than she would ever remember as she tried to wriggle free.

The man grabbed her by the hair and flipped her over. Everything blurred in her vision. She kicked at him, and pummeled his face, shoulders, and chest with her fists.

“Please…” she prayed to him. “Oh, no… Don’t do this… Take anything…but not this…”

Her supplications and writhing struggles excited him all the more. He had her flat on her back, one hand locked on her throat. He was filled with a frenzy, wallowing all over her.

Vaguely, she saw the man’s head dip. She felt his hot spittle on the curve of her naked breast. Then his snapping teeth gouged the tender flesh and ground together. Her body seemed to burst with pain. Her scream keened into the vacancy of earth and sky. And then she didn’t scream again.

CHAPTER 2

Webb Cameron spotted the dustball several miles to the west and south of him in mid-afternoon. The haze was stirred up by human movement, and Cameron immediately thought of drifters. Nobody else dared the badlands route toward Mexico. Men with honest business below the border chose the longer and safer trails.

Webb’s flat-bed wagon had reached a low rise when he noticed the dust. He stopped and stood up in the wagon, watching the distant puff for several minutes. It inched along like a crawling caterpillar across rocky, forbidding, sun-blistered land where even cactus struggled to grow. The rider, or riders, were much too far away for him to make them out. Just the dust, as fine as dry talc, hung in the shimmering heat long after it had been whipped up.

Cameron dropped to the hard wagon seat, reassuring himself with the westerly direction of the dust. The drifters had probably passed closer to Clyde Tomberlin’s place than to his. Even if they’d homed-in on his chimney smoke they’d probably wanted water and any food that could be spared.

He kicked the brakepole and shook the reins. The wagon trundled down the slope, fencing tools and leftover wire rattling in the bed. The bog, now a couple of miles behind him, was secured. He was moderately tired from the day of pole-setting and wire-stringing. A hot tub and fresh clothing was a gratifying prospect.

The day was the twenty-third of June, and he wondered if Temple remembered. Two years ago today, June 23, 1867, they’d spent the first night on their homestead site on Wucumma Creek. They’d lain under the covered wagon that carried everything they owned. They’d watched the flickering campfire for a while, not at all certain of the future, thinking of the hard miles that now stretched between them and the postwar ruin of Louisiana. The moment had been poignant with memories of events and of places and people they would never see again.

Webb knew that he and Temple had been talked about in the scattered cabins from the day they’d got out here. A woman such as Temple Cameron was bound to be particularly discussed. Her loveliness, charm and breeding risked the envy and sudden dislike of the work-gnarled women. And the men who spent hard, lonely days behind a plow or on a cow pony had to feel the sting of half-forgotten hungers when they looked at her.

Flats people had little time for socializing. Neighbors presented themselves only on important occurrences—births, deaths, dire sickness, weddings—and the rare arrival of homesteading strangers.

They trekked over to examine the newcomers in those first days, breaking the ice with a few ounces of precious white sugar, a wild berry pie, a crock of sorghum, or a jug of homemade whiskey. They asked few direct questions; but their curiosity was whetted by isolation, sharp eyes, and an uncanny ability to pick out details and read sign.

They’d noticed the pearl pendant—handed down from her maternal grandmother—that Temple wore always, even when working, as if the fine gold chain bridged a gap in her life. Men had remarked on the silver-chased pistol with the trademark of the old firm of fine English gunsmiths. They hadn’t missed the daguerreotype of General Jackson, inscribed by the old rock himself “to my fearless brother in arms, Captain Webb Cordwainer Cameron.”

Women had mulled over Cameron habits: Temple’s needlework and embroidery, the aroma of fine Creole cooking emanating from her hearth, the lace cloth on the plank table, the Irish linen napkins with the frayed edges carefully re-hemmed, or the fact that Webb always came to his dinner table in a fresh shirt, string tie, and black broadcloth coat.

Webb suspected that to these Texans the swapping and expansion of clues and observations had been as effective as written volumes. The weighing, balancing, and assessing hadn’t bothered or influenced him. He was himself, in any circumstance, and he hadn’t much use for the man who was otherwise.

Still, it was good to know that the judgments had been favorable. The storekeeper in the town of Tacton Flats had been a “weathervane” a few weeks ago.

Webb had changed one of the gold pieces from his small horde to buy supplies. The grizzled merchant had flipped the coin, caught it, looked at it, and laughed under his breath. “This is good, Cameron! I’m glad to know you outfoxed them carpetbagging bastards and got out with a little something.”

Webb’s even, heavy, black brows had questioned.

The storekeeper had shrugged. “Hell, man, folks in these parts have put the pieces together. Damn few secrets around here. You and the missus ain’t been ones to blow your own bugles, and that’s fine. We like that. It fits you—both of you.” The storekeeper had scratched his stubbled jaw. “What I’m trying to say… Well, we’re all a little proud to have some real quality folks take up homestead. Makes us feel like Tacton Flats can’t be pure mule’s ass country after all.”

Webb hadn’t suppressed his smile. “Sometimes I feel it’s about as tough.”

The storekeeper studied the man who stood beyond the scarred counter. Quiet cut of a man. Tall, good shoulders. Moved easy. Didn’t smile much, but meant it when he did. Same way with his talk.

Fine-boned face. Chiseled features not quite sharp enough to ruin their good looks. Thick hair that curled a little at the ends, and so black it had purple shadows. Expressive black eyes, that looked at a man direct, tempered but unquenched by all they’d seen.

“We figure you a little tougher,” the storekeeper had spat, and sleeved his lips. “Yes, sir. We’ve drawed us a picture. You was a Confederate officer ruined by the war and the Gawd-Almighty reconstruction bills them sons-a-bitching radicals in Washington keep jamming through Congress. They done their best to strip you right down to your naked balls, and you packed up in a covered wagon and brought your wife out here for a fresh start.”

The summation had been jolting in its accuracy.

“And your missus, Cameron…like a breath of fresh air in this country. She’d sure be the belle of any governor’s ball. But main thing is, she strikes us as being as good as she’s beautiful.”

There’d been a time when Webb had thought he would never feel emotion again, other than for Temple, the focus of all the emotion that war hadn’t distilled out of him. But that day in the dusty, fly-specked Tacton Flats store something had stirred to resurrect life inside of him. He’d looked at the storekeeper a moment longer, and he’d said, “Temple will be busy at the dressmaker’s another half an hour. We’ve time for a drink. Would you join me?”

“My pleasure, Mr. Cameron.” The merchant came around the counter smiling. “Hell’s afire, man, I thought you’d never get around to asking.”

Reflections on the past faded from Webb’s mind as the wagon jolted across the creek where it made the wide bend below the house. He drew up near the pole corral and dropped to the ground.

He started unharnessing the horse, his glance straying toward the house. He expected Temple to come to the front door and give him a yell, but she didn’t.

He began to notice the unbroken quiet. The stillness took on a quality that wasn’t normal. He didn’t take time to unload the wagon. Instead he pitched the loose harness across the dashboard and hurried through the shade of the willows toward the house.

He saw that the front was standing open. This wasn’t unusual, but he caught no sight or sound of Temple’s presence. His stride quickened. He closed the gap between himself and the house almost at a run.

He reached the open doorway and stopped dead in his tracks. A breath ripped out of him. He might have made the same sound if he’d been kicked in the guts. He was staggered by the impression of wreckage, and then details sprang at him—smashed crockery and furniture, slashed bed-ticking, contents of bureau drawers and clothespress a scattered shambles on the floor. It looked as if a cyclone had roared through miraculously, leaving walls and roof intact.

He didn’t stop to wonder what or how much had been taken. Not yet. His first thought was of Temple. Had the ransackers taken her with them? No…they’d had to kill her to do all this.

White and trembling, he stumbled backward into the yard. He was too tough to panic, but he came close to it. The setting sun threw an unreal bloody light that blurred his eyes. The emptiness all about him sucked at his senses. He shouted her name, his voice hoarse with fear. Trees, barn, corral, cooperage shed swirled past him as his muscles drove him in a wild search.

On the sandy bank of the creek he stumbled to a halt, looking at the wash kettle with its dead fire and the hamper of laundry. He snatched up a shirt, crumpling it in his hands. She’d started her day normally, but it hadn’t lasted long.

As his eyes raked the creek banks he glimpsed a smudge of white that didn’t belong in the greenery of a laurel thicket. He ripped into the underbrush, slashing a pathway with his hands.

As he struggled through the tangle, his first glimpse of white resolved into a human form. Naked, she was hunkered in a small, muddy clearing beside the creek. She didn’t turn her head, or give any sign that she had heard him threshing toward her, but sat like a battered rag doll propped into position.

He plunged the final few yards and fell on his knees beside her.

“Temple…” he choked on the effort to speak. His eyes stared in disbelief. He wished he were dead rather than see her like this. Her golden hair was a filthy tangle. Her face was misshapen with purple and mottled-yellow bruises. Her stomach and tender young breasts were swollen from a brutal mauling. A crescent of black, dried blood was caked about the teeth marks high on her left breast. All this frightful physical havoc was climaxed by the total, unseeing vacancy of her eyes.

Cameron grabbed her hand. It was cold and limp. He seized her shoulder with his other hand.

“Temple, speak to me! It’s Webb. Please look at me—say something. Temple!”

He was shaking her, but she was no more responsive than a sack of cold wet meal. He folded his arms about her, pressed her against him and rocked slightly on his knees there in the mud. “My God, my God,” he moaned in a breaking voice.

His eyes squeezed shut, and his body shook. Then, when the moment passed, he gathered her up, slipping his arms behind her back and knees. He stood with her cradled against him, then began moving slowly, skirting the thicket by wading the creek to a point below where she had set up her washpot. He slogged out and carried her to the house. She didn’t seem to know she was being moved.

He eased her into a chair, where she sat lifeless, while he moved about gathering up straw and stuffing it back into the slashed ticking. He smoothed the mattress on the bed, picked her up, placed her on it.

She let him bathe her and put ointment on the bruises and lacerations. She was docile as he moved her limbs and torso, dressing her in a flannel gown. She didn’t know where she was, or that he was there.

CHAPTER 3

It was very late, and the lanterns had used up most of their coal oil when Cameron lashed the final rawhide thong around a joint in the willow withes. He stepped back in the lantern glow and looked at this ugly thing he’d erected on the bed of the covered wagon. A cage…it could only properly be called a cage. It had walls and top of the willow withes and rawhide he had latticed together. Already he hated the cage. But it was the only solution. Caged, she wouldn’t hurt herself or wander into danger. He could keep her near and attend to her needs—wash her, feed her, dispose of her excrement, take her out for exercise…

He turned with dull movements, shut off the pair of lanterns, and trudged toward the house. He looked at the shadowy moon-bathed landscape, and wondered if this was the last night they would ever spend here. Tomorrow morning he would stock the wagon and put her in the cage.

His mind didn’t want to think about the future. Instead he thought of the past few hours. Before dark, he’d cut the sign that had been all around the house, different sets of bootprints, the hoof marks of two horses and a mule. He’d quickly reasoned it out. Two mounted men and a pack mule had come down from the north. The men had seen his chimney smoke, found Temple alone, and after they got through with her they pillaged the place. They’d carried off the mantel clock, the silver-chased pistol, and Temple’s pearl pendant. They’d searched for money, but missed the small cache in the oilskin pouch at the bottom of the flour bin.

From here they’d angled south by west, headed for Mexico. Two men who’d taken turns to rape her… Cameron shivered.

He went into the darkness of the house and crossed to the bed. She was still sleeping, a filter of moonlight softening her battered face. He eased down beside her and sat there looking at her, now and then murmuring a soothing word when she whimpered in her sleep.

The memory of the bright heat of the badlands and a stirred-up rope of dust kept stinging across his mind. He was tormented by the certainty that only a few miles had separated him and the southward-fleeing intruders of that afternoon. If only he’d known! He could have turned, shortcut them, met them face to face. He could have shot them, chased them off their horses, picked up their canteens and ridden away.

But he hadn’t known.

And now the job didn’t look the least bit easy or at all simple.

CHAPTER 4

Clyde and Ethel Tomberlin were the Camerons’ closest neighbors. They also were about the most well-to-do couple in the Flats. They had a Negro house servant and two vaqueros and their families in tenant houses to work the cattle.

The Tomberlins lived in a whitewashed adobe brick hacienda that enclosed a courtyard glowing with the colors of sunflowers, tiger lilies, and night blooming jasmine.

Clyde was put together like a nail keg and could carry three hundred pounds on his shoulders. He had a square face, capped with a mass of wiry red hair. Strangers remembered the face—and Clyde’s eyes. They were large, green, restless, and a man never could be sure what was going on behind them.

Clyde had been among the first settlers in the Flats. He’d cut no conniptions of joy when Webb and Temple had taken up homestead, but he respected Webb’s rights to the well-watered piece of land. He was glad he’d gotten out here well ahead of Cameron, who, Clyde suspected, would be a hard man to rival if given an even start; and Clyde rather liked being looked on as a king bee when his sleek bay pranced his buggy into town.

Ethel Tomberlin was more outgoing than her husband. She was a big sturdy woman, with large white teeth and apple-red cheeks. She had few female vanities and was more at home in levis than in bustles. She cut her iron-gray hair short and wore it in a straight back pompadour.

The saloon hounds in Tacton Flats said it was really Ethel who’d built up the Tomberlin place. They’d snigger and say she just kept Clyde around because she was a robust she-male who had to have a bull in her bed.

Clyde wanted to go into town that Wednesday morning. He was grouching in the courtyard because Ethel had decided at the last minute to go with him. She had some hell-raising to do in the kitchen before she took a bath and got in her linsey-woolsey dress, and Clyde didn’t like the waiting.

Then, just as he decided to leave the courtyard and get himself a tall cool drink, Clyde heard the creaking of a wagon.

He turned and saw the covered rig coming toward the house. He strolled out to meet it, and presently made out Webb Cameron on the seat. A pair of workhorses drew the wagon, and that black mare, the one Cameron called Duchess, was halter-reined to the tailgate.

“Howdy, there, Cameron,” Clyde made himself omit the “mister” just because it seemed natural to use the word when addressing this tall man with the lean, angular face and widow’s-peaked shock of midnight-black hair. Clyde didn’t like to mister any man.

“How are you, Mr. Tomberlin?”

“Tolerable.” Clyde’s eyes swept the rig. “You taking a trip?”

“Yes, and I wanted to talk to you about it, Mr. Tomberlin.”

“Well, now, my vaqueros are pretty busy, but I reckon I could have them look in on your place and stock.”

“My place will keep, and stock feeds itself.”

“Then you won’t be gone long?” Clyde asked. That figured. He didn’t see Cameron’s wife. Maybe Cameron wanted a place for her to stay for a few days.

“I can’t say,” Webb answered. “I don’t know how long it will take. I’m provisioned—and I can do a lot of living off the land.”

Clyde began to sense something very wrong. He moved closer, rested his hand on the iron-tire of the front wheel. He squinted at Cameron, and the man’s face was a shock. Cameron’s eyes were as bloodshot and mean as a man’s coming off a two-week red-eye whiskey drunk.

“You look like you got some bad news,” Clyde observed.

“A pair of strangers came to my place, Mr. Tomberlin.” Cameron had to stop for a moment. “My wife was alone. It wasn’t very pretty.”

Clyde fell back. “They…they killed her?”

“No,” Webb shook his head. Again he was unable to speak right away. Clyde found himself staring at the bleak face over the wagon seat and holding his breath.

“They didn’t kill her, Mr. Tomberlin. But the way they left her—she doesn’t know she’s alive.”

Clyde swabbed under his chin with a bandanna. “My God,” he muttered in disbelief. Then he looked up at Webb again. “What have you done with her?”

“She’s here. Back here in the wagon.”

Clyde made a movement as if he would step up. The quick thrust of a dusty boot barred the way.

“I’d rather you didn’t see her right now, Mr. Tomberlin.”

“Well, I…sure…” Clyde stepped back. He glanced toward his house. “We was getting ready to go to town. You want us to bring the doctor out?”

“We don’t have doctors for this. Maybe a hundred years from now. But not in this day and time.”

“I see.” Clyde went even paler. His eyes were hard on Webb’s face. “They hurt more than her body, is that what you’re saying? It affected her mind?”

Clyde read the answer in Webb’s face. He looked at the canvas wagon shelter and then away, as if he really didn’t want to see through it. “Folks with a problem like that…not much you can do. Fix a room with a lock on the door and tend the problem as best you can. ’Course there’s asylums.”

“Do you know where the nearest is, Mr. Tomberlin?”

“Come to think of it, I don’t.”

“Neither do I. And if I did, I wouldn’t put her in such a place—to be chained and fed like a dog.”

Clyde’s mind tallied the shocking facts and leaped to the wrong conclusion. “I’d like to help out, but I’d feel mighty bad if anything happened to her over here, Cameron. Maybe somebody in town would know more about taking care of her.”

Webb’s lips whitened. “I intend to take care of my own, Mr. Tomberlin. That isn’t why I came here.”

“Well, I…I mean…I didn’t think nothing else. But I don’t see how…” Clyde stopped, got his words under control. “Man, you can’t watch her night and day. She’s liable to jump out of the wagon and get in all kinds of sorrow.”

“She’s quite comfortable in a little room of willow withes, Mr. Tomberlin.”

“You mean—a cage?”

“I suppose it could be called that,” Webb conceded. “I could think of no other way. Can you?”

“In your shoes, just the two of you, I reckon not.”

“But that isn’t the reason I came here, Mr. Tomberlin.” The wagon seat creaked as Webb’s weight shifted. “You understand, I’m after two men—and I’m alone. I’ve thought of every man I know in the Flats, and they are all like myself, one-man outfits, or tied to a business in town, or saloon rummies I could better do without. You’re the single exception. You have the vaqueros. You’re free to leave your place for a few days, if you so choose.”

Clyde put his hands in his pockets and thought about it for a full minute. He watched his boot toe destroy an anthill. “You ought to go into Tacton Flats and tell the sheriff what’s happened, Cameron.”

“And have that lard-butt ride five miles south and back again? Have him tell about the hardships of trying to pick up a trail while somebody buys him a drink?”

“I reckon he’s not much of a sheriff,” Clyde admitted. “But you ain’t got a chance of catching two mounted men, Cameron.”

“Why not? I’m certain their destination is Mexico. They don’t know I’m behind them. They’ll come to rest sooner or later. I think I have an excellent chance.” He stopped speaking. Waited.

Clyde Tomberlin didn’t break the silence.

Under different circumstances Webb would have driven off then and there. But he had more than himself to consider. He spoke with a low note of humility in his voice. “We’re the only near neighbors to each other, Mr. Tomberlin. Even if I wanted to go to somebody else I haven’t the time. I can’t waste another day or two. I wouldn’t have used the time to come over here except…surely you understand…if anything happens to me, she could starve to death in the cage.”

“Then maybe you ought to try some other way, Cameron, pick up the pieces and let it go at that. Be better for both of you. Catching them men ain’t going to undo what is already done.”

Cameron’s lips thinned. He looked at the southerly distances far beyond Tomberlin’s head. “It might be the only way of undoing. I saw a few cases of shock during the war. Men in a cataleptic state where they saw nothing, heard nothing. It’s beyond the knowledge of doctors we have today, but I saw one such victim cured, by a shock—a second shock that shattered the first.”

“I don’t know about such things, Cameron, but it sounds wild-goose to me.”

Webb dropped his eyes back to Tomberlin’s blocky face. “And to me. But it’s all I have.” He leaned forward slightly. “And if you came by my place, Mr. Tomberlin, I’d let the questions wait.”

Clyde turned red, and then pointedly stepped out of the way of the team. Webb gave him a final glance, more in pity than scorn, then his rat-tailed whip sizzled over the horses’ backs. They lunged against the harness and the wagon began to move away.

Clyde didn’t go into the house rightaway. He stood there, watching the wagon get smaller with distance, his eyes darkening as if a part of him was stepping away and having a look at himself. Once he raised his hand as if he would yell and start after the wagon, but let his hand fall back to his side after a moment Then he felt Ethel’s presence beside him.

“Whose wagon was that, Clyde?”

“Webb Cameron’s,” he muttered.

“Why didn’t you ask him in for a visit?”

“Because, by God, he didn’t come for a visit!” he snarled.

“Well, you don’t have to be so nasty. What’s come over you?” She tilted her big horseface as she studied him. “What was Webb Cameron doing over here, Clyde?”

“Trying to get up a two-man lynching party, that’s what!”

“A… Do you know what you’re saying? You’re surely not talking about Webb Cameron.”

“Like hell I ain’t.”

“I can’t imagine Webb Cameron, of all people, cooking up a lynching. What’s his reason?”

Clyde jerked away from her touch on his arm. “We going to town or not?”

“Didn’t you hear me, Clyde?”

“’Course I did, woman! You think I’m deef?”

“Then you tell me why you’re so upset, and how come Webb Cameron’s trying to stir up a lynching.”

“Because two men raped his wife, and she lost her mind.” Clyde didn’t shout, but a vein stood out on his neck as if his voice had been strained to the utmost. “Cameron’s got her with him—in a willow cage so’s he can take care of her.”

Ethel’s large eyes stared at him, going out of focus for a second. “Dear Jesus!” she whispered.

He jabbed a forefinger at her, and his voice took on a low savage ring. “Two men, Ethel. Two. Get that? Cameron says so. Not one man, the way it happened so long ago in Kansas.”

Ethel’s eyes were glued to the now-distant wagon. “Nobody said anything about Kansas, Clyde.”

“You don’t have to. You’ve never forgotten it for a minute.”

She brought her attention to him slowly. “I took your word, didn’t I? When you swore you hadn’t raped the girl in Kansas, I helped you. I’ve helped you make more of this place than gullywashes running a few head of mavericks.”

A sudden tired sag came to Clyde’s shoulder. “Damn it all to hell!” he said to no one in particular, and about nothing in particular.

“Talking about ourselves never helps, Clyde.”

“No, it sure as hell don’t.”

“Then let’s talk about Webb Cameron,” Ethel said. “He came over to ask your help, didn’t he? He wanted you to ride with him.”

“You listen to me!” Clyde’s voice was a tormented crackle. “That man’s out to kill. It’s wrote all over him. If he can, he’s going to kill two men—guilty or innocent. And, by God, I won’t be a party to it. I know what it feels like to have people chasing and trying to kill you when you’re innocent.”

“No, Clyde. Webb Cameron is intelligent. He knows what he’s about. He’ll make sure he has the right men.”

“Maybe be can’t,” Clyde said. “You ever think of that? Maybe he won’t have the chance to make sure.”

“Then all the more reason that Webb should have someone with him,” Ethel said. She turned and started toward the house.

Clyde took a step and grabbed her arm. “Where the hell you think you’re going?”

“To change my clothes, first thing, Clyde. Then I’ll grub up and saddle the toughest horse on the place. I can catch up to that wagon by nightfall.”

“Woman, you’ve plumb lost your mind!”

“But not my guts, Clyde.”

He stepped back as if she’d slapped him. His eyes filmed. “All right,” he said. “I’ll borrow me some apron strings and use them for guts.”

“Clyde, I didn’t mean—”

He drew away from her touch. “You spoke your mind whether you meant to or not. I reckon I’ve let the apron-string habit slip up on me over the years. Now it wouldn’t surprise you if I stayed on my behind while you rode off to do something you figure is a man’s job. But it won’t be that way, Ethel. We’ll both go. I wouldn’t want either of us to miss out on the butchery.”

CHAPTER 5

Webb Cameron drove steadily until failing light stopped him. He camped beside an arroyo that offered forage for hobbled horses. He built a small fire, opened the cage, and lifted Temple from the wagon. She meekly obeyed his guiding hand, walking blindly, and let him seat her near the fire.

He heated a small crock of soup and fed her spoonful by spoonful. When she no longer opened her lips to receive the spoon, he ate a few bites.

For the next fifteen minutes, he exercised her, walking her back and forth on an aimless path that never got more than a hundred yards away from the wagon. When her steps began to lag, he knew she’d had enough. He didn’t want to tire her.

At the tailgate of the wagon he took her shoulders and turned her to face him. Her empty eyes looked right through him. With a sound of pain, he held her close.

“Temple… Temple…” he whispered against the softness of her hair. His voice stuck in his throat. He stood there, just holding her for a long moment. “Will you ever know you’re in the world? Will you ever understand why I’ve brought you out here like this?”

He forced his arms to loose her, and when he touched her elbow she climbed up and lay down on the soft pallet in the cage.

He closed the small gate and knotted the rawhide lashings. With a last look at her silent form, he made his way to the fire. His movements were weary, he was suddenly steeped in fatigue.

He was on one knee feeding broken pieces of mesquite to the dying camp fire when he heard a moan. He jolted to instant alertness, throwing a glance at the wagon.

He heard the sound again, but it didn’t come from the wagon. The source was several yards to the left, and as Cameron stood, eyes peering, he made out the shadow of a lurching human form.

Cameron reached the stranger just as the man crumpled and fell forward on his face.

Webb bent, pulled the man’s floundering arm across his shoulder, and braced against the weight as the stranger tried to get up.

“Easy now,” he said. “I’ll help you.” His knees bent under the bulk as he half-carried the stranger and eased him down beside the fire.

“Obliged,” the stranger gasped. “Much obliged…thought I was a goner for sure.”

He was a sloppily huge man, pig-gutted and flaccid, clothed in a filthy muslin shirt and homespun britches. He’d taken one hell of a beating. Blood and dust and sweat were caked on his huge, lacerated face. His left eye was almost closed and the color of a rotten egg. Blood had seeped over his temple and ear from a scalp gash in his bald, bullet-shaped head. A lump on his jaw gave his face a lopsided twist, and his lips were like ruptured grapes.

And he stank, of soured sweat and another odor that Webb didn’t immediately define. Then Webb knew. Sometime during the beating the man’s bowels had literally opened and he had messed himself.

Webb poured a tin cup of water from a canteen. The stranger grabbed the cup with shaking hands and threw the drink down his gullet, then dropped it and seized the tin plate of soup that Webb offered. It was steaming hot, but that didn’t deter the stranger’s greedy hunger. He lifted the plate to his lips and sucked the soup with the noises of a feeding hog, the tasty broth dribbling from his chin. When the soup had vanished, the stranger licked the plate before handing it back to Webb.

“I’m going to make it now,” he muttered, as he fell back. “By God, I’m going to live!”

“We’re not long on water,” Webb said, “but you can clean yourself up.”

“I’m beholden.” The man was breathing heavily from the exertion of eating. “Give me a minute. Right now I just want to lay here and think about seeing the sun rise tomorrow morning. I feel like a new man already, Mr…?”

“Webb Cameron.”

“I’m Loudermilk, Mr. Cameron. Tobe Loudermilk. Met a pair of scorpions out there in the badlands and they done this to me. Sonsabitches! It wasn’t babies their mamas had, but turds.”

Webb eased to a cross-legged seat on the ground beside the reclining man. “Two men headed southwest?”

“Two devils. A big nigger and a scrawny white man. They cut my trail, and I offered them all I had. I begged them to let me go, but they had to have some fun.” Loudermilk’s voice grated. He reared to one elbow. “Tormented me with jokes about what they was going to do to me. Kicked and mauled me around. When I tried to run, the big black devil caught me. He held me so’s I couldn’t fight back and begged the white scum to kill me slow. The white one whipped me with a fancy silver-chased pistol until I blacked out. Next thing I knowed, the sun was cooking my brains and I was falling around out there with nothing but the shit in my pants. I never would of made Tacton Flats. I reckon I would of died out there in spitting distance, if you hadn’t built a fire. I seen the fire one of the times I come out of the fog for a few minutes.”

Cameron’s chiseled features had taken on an almost inhuman cast in the fireglow. “Are you certain about the pistol?”

“Hell, yes! All I could see was the sun flashing on it every time the one called Sykes hit me.”

“Did these men say where they were going?”

“They didn’t say. But Mexico. Where else?” Tobe Loudermilk turned his head to spit. “Damn crazy renegades! Filthy scum!”

“They were mounted on horses and leading a pack mule?”

Loudermilk lay back, half closing his eyes and looking at Webb. “You after that pair?”

Cameron didn’t answer. After a moment, Loudermilk closed his eyes all the way. A shiver touched him. “I wouldn’t fool with that pair if I was you. Country’s full of hard cases, but them two would make the rest seem lily-pure.”

“What else can you tell me about them?”

“Not much.”

“You said they were talkative.”

“But they didn’t give me their life histories, Mr. Cameron.”

“I didn’t expect them to, but nobody talks without spilling details.” Webb’s hand snaked to the heavy sloping shoulder, and the firmness of his grip snapped Loudermilk’s eyes open. “I want to know everything that passed between them, Loudermilk.”

“Why, sure Mr. Cameron. But it wasn’t much.” Loudermilk cringed slightly as he looked at Webb’s face. “I gathered their names. The white weasel was called Sickly Sykes. He wore what was left of Confederate gray britches and a blue-belly coat, likely stripped from men he’d murdered. Sykes addressed the big black one as Columbus George. That nigger could bend a crowbar with his bare hands. He had a scar on the side of his neck that a blacksnake whip must have made. I figured he had scars like that all over his back, too. Whoever tied that big brute up and flogged him should of finished the job and killed him.”

“Did they mention where they were from, or perhaps brag about any recent escapades?”

Loudermilk shook his head. The motion brought a small grimace of pain. “No, Mr. Cameron. But it was certain they’d come a long ways, robbing and killing for a hard-money dollar or a bowl of beans. Sykes talked with a twang to his voice. Maybe he’d come clear from the mountains of Carolina or Kaintuck and sided up with Columbus George somewhere along his crooked trail.”

Webb studied the man. “What is your business, Loudermilk?”

“Prospecting. Scratched around in the badlands some. No luck. Then them devils took all I owned—even to my pickaxe. Left me out there for buzzard bait.” The food, water, and sudden certainty of staying alive had strengthened him. He grunted to his feet. “How come you got business with that pair, Mr. Cameron?”

“They took a silver-chased pistol from my home on Wucumma Creek.”

‘Take my advice. Forget the pistol and anything else they stole. Forget it even they burned your house down. Let Mexico have them, and just hope they never come back.”

Webb got to his feet in silence. “I’ll spare you half a bucket of water to wash up.”

Tobe Loudermilk wiped away film from his damaged eye. “You been good to me, Mr. Cameron, and I wish you’d changed your mind about that pair.”

“My wife was alone on Wucumma Creek when Sykes and George rode through,” Webb said.

The big man fell back a step. “They…killed her?”

Webb couldn’t keep from looking at the white shadow the wagon canopy made in the darkness. “Killed her? Yes, they killed a part of her.”

Good eye popping, Loudermilk eased his head around and stared at the wagon. “You got her out here with you? In the wagon?”

“Wagon or palace, she wouldn’t know the difference right now,” Webb said heavily.

“You mean her mind…”

“I mean,” Webb’s voice was suddenly chisel-hard, “you’re not to go near the wagon.”

“No, sir, Mr. Cameron. I wouldn’t want nobody gawping at her either.”

Webb spun on his heel. “Come on. I’ll get your water.”

With many gasps and groans, Loudermilk stripped beside the fire. He tore off a piece of his shirttail for a disposable rag. Webb didn’t surrender the water bucket. He didn’t want it in direct contact with Loudermilk’s present filth. He poured water in careful measures as Loudermilk required. With stiff joints, and sore muscles Loudermilk washed himself and scrubbed the soiled spot on his pants between his hands. Webb splashed rinse water on the britches, and the ritual was complete. Loudermilk wouldn’t have cut a figure at an opera house, but at least he smelled of lye soap strong enough to blister his skin.

He had no choice but to put his wet pants back on. When he had knotted the rawhide strap that served him for a belt, he sank by the fire.

“Plumb tuckered,” he said with a heavy breath. “Plumb wore out, but feel like a new man.”

“I’ll get you a blanket from the wagon.”

“That’ll be fine, Mr. Cameron. This is one night I’ll sleep like a newborn baby right here at the fire.”

Empty bucket dangling from his hand, Webb had taken but a few steps when the creak of a saddle and jangle of a bit filtered out of the night.

He dropped the bucket and put his hand on the Remington holstered at his right side.

Loudermilk seemed to forget all his aches and pains. He floundered to his feet. He was shaking all over. “It’s them! Sykes and Columbus George. They seen the campfire. They’ve come to kill us and take ail we got!” He made a movement with his tattered boots to stamp out the fire. Webb shoved him aside.

“Shut up, Loudermilk! If you’re afraid, hide there in the mesquite.”

Loudermilk sucked air through the massive purple swellings of his lips. He stumbled as he turned. On all fours, he crabbed his way out of the circle of firelight. Dry mesquite rattled as he took cover.

Webb slipped behind a boulder, the .44-caliber pistol a comforting weight in his hand. The sounds of approaching horseflesh were becoming more distinct. A walking horse was picking its way, its hoofs clicking on stone now and then. No, by all that was holy, it wasn’t a single horse. Two of them!

Cameron searched the darkness beyond the boulder with burning eyes. He eased the Remington to full cock. Was it possible that Sykes and George had decided to wander back north and had seen the campfire like a beacon?

The shadows began to separate and define two human forms on horseback. Come on, Webb thought, I won’t kill you. Not right away. I want you alive for a while…

The two riders had stopped, noting the emptiness about the campfire and the silence.

Then like the taste of tepid water when a man has expected good whisky, the sound of Clyde Tomberlin’s voice drifted to Webb.

“Cameron? You over there, Webb Cameron?”

Webb stood, holstering his gun. “Here, Clyde,” his voice sagged as tension snapped inside of him. “Ride on in.”

CHAPTER 6

Webb hadn’t realized how bushed the last two days had left him until he’d rolled in a blanket. The minute his head pillowed on his saddle he’d sunk into a black sleep that resembled a mild coma. It didn’t release him easily. He awoke by degrees, senses sluggish, feeling the stiffness of muscles that hadn’t turned all night.

But as he felt the touch of cool dawn on his face his head cleared, and strength began to fill his rangy body. His mind stirred with a cold clarity it had lacked from the moment he’d found Temple on the creekbank.

He didn’t rise at once, but lay there putting himself in the boots of Sickly Sykes and Columbus George, picking a route across the forbidding country and choosing a point at which to cross into Mexico.

Thank God for Tobe Loudermilk, he thought. For all his size and muscle, the middle-aged prospector wasn’t much of a man. He was of the breed that didn’t want to have to measure up to other men. He found a certain kind of security in a wilderness where he could talk to himself. But if Tobe hadn’t been scratching in the barrens for grubstake dirt the silver-chased pistol might have disappeared forever, safely tucked in Sykes’s waistband until it was sold to some don in Chihuahua or traded for tequila in a Monterrey cantina.

Webb opened his eyes to the gray first light. The camp site was quiet. Tobe, Clyde, and Ethel were sleeping mounds under blankets beyond the dead camp fire.

Webb had been surprised to see Ethel instead of one of the vaqueros riding in with Clyde. He’d sensed the strain between the Tomberlins, in Clyde’s moodiness and the way they avoided looking at each other. Webb guessed that the decision to help had been Ethel’s. Clyde hadn’t changed his mind, but he’d been ashamed to let his woman ride off alone.

In any event, Webb felt reinforced by their presence. He wasn’t in a situation to question or refuse help from any quarter. Still, Clyde was a puzzle. He was stand-offish and felt the importance of owning the biggest ranch around; but he knew the rules of the country, and he wasn’t a coward. His flat refusal yesterday had been a shock to Webb. It had raised questions that didn’t have answers.

But Clyde’s business was his own, and time was ticking away. Webb threw off his blanket sat up, and pulled on his boots.

The wagon stood a few yards away, too crowded with the cage and provisions to accommodate Webb at night. He walked to it quietly and parted the back flaps of the canvas canopy.

Details were vague in the murky light, but he didn’t need a noonday sun to see that her sleeping shadow wasn’t in the cage. The door of willow rods was ajar on its rawhide hinges.

His hands crushed the edges of the canvas flaps and he seemed to hang there, staring with eyes that didn’t want to believe. Then he jerked away, his gaze stabbing the dead landscape.

“Ethel! Clyde!” His voice broke the silence like the crack of a pistol “Get up! Temple’s gone!”

Ethel woke instantly, floundering out of her blanket. Clyde reared up, mumbling and groggy, trying to get his bearings. “Wh-what is it?”

“Temple wandered off,” Webb said, “sometime during the night. I’m going to look for her,” and rushed from the wagon in a circling search, cupping his hands and yelling Temple’s name every few steps.

Ethel yanked on her left boot, picked up the other and slapped at Clyde with it. “Off your behind, man! You, too, Loudermilk!”

Tobe’s voice was muffled by his blanket. “I swear I’m sore as a boil this morning. Anyhow, the woman couldn’t of got far.”

Ethel looked at the blanketed bulk with distaste. She’d met the man last night, after Webb’s announcement that the newcomers were friends had brought Tobe Loudermilk crawling from cover.

Fully alert at last, Clyde was on his feet. Big and capable in the levis and brush jacket in which she’d slept, Ethel had already moved off. Clyde picked a direction that put him a hundred yards to Webb’s right, further widening the hunt.

The searchers were bug-like in the hugeness of the land. In minutes they had lost sight of each other.

A glaring half-sun, sliced by the eastern horizon, caused Webb to squint as he worked his way out of a patch of chaparral. He paused, breathing hard from exertion, sweat coursing down the angles of his face, eyes moving in their continual probe. The endless land was a broken jumble of arroyos and jagged stone outcroppings in which a small army might have hidden. Where the wind hadn’t stripped off the topsoil tangles of dwarf oak, mesquite, and prickly pear struggled for life. Temple could be holed in the chaparral a dozen yards away without him knowing it.

He gave the rising sun a second look, and made a decision. In the face of gila monsters, sidewinders, scorpions, and gulches where a fall would break a human neck he needed more than luck. He needed time, and he would save time by returning to camp and outfitting a search by horseback.

Then, from a long distance to his left, came the thin echo of a pistol shot. He snapped around. If Clyde or Ethel hadn’t stepped on a diamondback, the shot was a signal that one of them had found her.

His ground-eating trot broke a stride when he spotted two walking figures a few minutes later. A thankful murmur filled his throat. As if on a quiet Sunday stroll, Ethel was walking along and leading Temple by the hand.

Ethel heard his shout and stopped, smiling a little as he rushed up. She noted the way his gaze leaped all over Temple.

“She’s none the worse for wear, Webb.”

He put his arms about Temple. A pent-up breath burst out of him. “God bless you, Ethel! Where did you find her?”

“Curled asleep under a little old juniper tree that somehow growed all by itself on the lip of a ravine back yonder.”

Webb looked at the strong, full-cheeked face under the hacked-off iron hair. “Ethel, I just don’t have the words. Nobody’s invented them yet.”

Her smile deepened. “The things that count between neighbors don’t always fit words.”

Clyde hailed them from a stony break in the mesquite, and joined them with the grace of a tumbleweed.

“Heard the shot.” He swabbed his thick neck with a bandanna, looking at Webb. “Is she hurt?”

“Not from the night in the open,” Webb said.

As they walked back, Webb noticed an odd thing. Most people would have been impelled to look at Temple’s bruised face, but not Clyde. Not once had he looked at her. He did, in fact, stay a little ahead and to one side to avoid anything more than the merest peripheral glimpse of her. It wasn’t because he was known to be a squeamish man. If a couple of saloon toughs got in a fight, Clyde bought drinks for the man whose fists broke a nose and showed him some blood.

Then Webb forgot about Clyde for the moment as they neared the camp site. The black mare, Duchess, was nuzzling about the wagon, smelling grain and water.

“Thought you had that mare hobbled,” Clyde said.

“I did.” Webb eased Temple’s hand into Ethel’s keeping. “I don’t understand how she got loose.”

Clyde started forward, but Webb checked him with a gesture. “Easy, Clyde. She’s a high-strung filly.”

Clyde and Ethel waited, Ethel hovering beside Temple, as Webb moved smoothly toward the wagon. Duchess heard him. She arched her neck, swished her tail, and seemed to toy with a capricious impulse. She pawed the ground with her forefoot and tossed her mane.

“Easy, girl,” Webb pleaded, “no games. Not right now.”

She watched Webb with mischievous eyes, backing away from him with flanks quivering. With quiet motion, he lifted a bridle from the wagon and walked with casual steps to her.

He thought this was going to be one of those times when he had the devil’s own job of catching her, but he was wrong. She submitted to the bridle and he retied her to the wagon brake pole.

Webb motioned to Ethel and Clyde. They came over, and Ethel helped Temple into the wagon. “Well,” she said, “it’s started out to be one busy day even before breakfast.”

“Yes, it has,” Webb nodded. “Do you mind eating it cold this morning? We’ve already used up a lot of time.”

“Not a bit. You hitch the team. I’ll take care of Temple.”

Clyde called Webb’s name sharply from the other side of the wagon. With a quick frown, Webb moved away from Ethel’s side and stepped out where he could see Clyde. Clyde said, “Here’s how your horse got loose.”

Tobe Loudermilk, barely conscious, was lying almost against Clyde’s boot toes. A dozen feet from Tobe a gunny sack had spilled beans, meal and a slab of smoked meat in the dust.

“The sonofabitch was too played out to help hunt a lost woman,” Clyde said. “But the minute we were out of sight he was up to trying to steal a horse and provisions.”

Webb stopped, standing with Tobe between himself and Clyde, Tobe must have been knocked out for quite a while but was regaining consciousness now. He groaned as if he were dying.

“Get off your belly, you crawling bastard,” Clyde said, nudging Tobe with his boot.

Tobe covered his face with his hands and made a noise like an animal that should be pitied.

“I guess he figured the mare was the fastest,” Webb said, “but he picked the wrong horse. She’s always been saddle-shy, and she hates strangers. I wonder if she threw him or just kicked the hell out of him when he reached for the saddle.”

“Does it matter?” Clyde asked. “He wanted to spook, so I say we should let him.”

Flat on his back, Tobe cracked his fingers and peered through them at the two faces hovering above him. He bawled like a yearling stuck with a branding iron. “I’m a sick man. I’m all busted up. You can’t leave me out here.”

“You want to bet?” Clyde said. “Cameron saved your life and took you in. I guess he’d still spare you a canteen of water and handful of jerky before he kicks your ass toward Tacton Flats.”

“I’d never make it,” Tobe sobbed. His tears were now genuine. “Not on foot. I’d die before nightfall.”

“You should have thought about that.”

Tobe’s grasping hand clutched the leg of Webb’s britches.

“Mr. Cameron, I wasn’t spooking. I swear it. I was going for help—account of your woman was lost.”

“Aw, hell,” Clyde turned away in disgust.

“Please, Mr. Cameron,” Tobe pleaded, “don’t listen to him…don’t throw me out to die.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Webb said.

Clyde gave him a stare. “Horse thieving calls for hanging, Cameron, not nursemaiding a worthless snake with everything else we’re facing.”

“He goes, Clyde.”

“Not eating my rations, he don’t.”

“That’s up to you. Whether you travel with him or not is also up to you. But he goes,” Webb repeated.

“For God’s sake…” Clyde put his knuckles on his hips and stood as solid as a barn door. “Are you plain loco or do you have a reason?”

“I’ve a reason,” Webb said.

Very carefully, Tobe raised himself up between them.

“All right,” Clyde said. “I got a ring in my nose, and I’m tied into this thing whether I like it or not. I don’t mind telling you that you could have ridden to hell and back for all I care and I’d never put a question to you. But once I’m sucked in, I don’t untie easy. The last thing in the world I’d do is let the presence of this iguana turn me back, run me off. And I figure that gives me some rights.”

“I agree,” Webb said.

“The right of hearing your reasoning concerning this sonofabitch,” Clyde added.

“It’s simple,” Webb replied. “If you weren’t so blind-galled at him, you’d have thought of it yourself. Tobe was beaten by two men who had a silver-chased pistol. Two men stopped at my house. They rode off in a southwesterly direction. They turned up to beat Tobe in a time and place as precise as the coordinates on a surveyor’s map. If there’s another silver-chased pistol in all of the Flats, I’ve never seen it or heard any talk about it. So unless you can swallow the biggest pig in the dirtiest poke, you’ll admit that the pistol had to come from my place and Tobe was whipped with it by the same men who’d taken it.”

Clyde brooded for a moment. “You’ve got a witness. You do want proof.”

Faint color came to Webb’s lean cheeks. “Of course I want proof! What do you think I am?”

“And when you get it?”

“I’ll carry out the law.”

“And if the proof leaves a shadow of a doubt?”

“It won’t, Webb said firmly, “not when I’m through.”

The answer didn’t seem to wholly satisfy Clyde. It was even more than unsettling to Tobe. Sitting with splayed legs, he hugged his own gut and shivered. “I ain’t facing them two again, Cameron.”

“You’ll have to.”

“But I told you all I know,” Tobe begged. “I told you the names they used talking to each other. I told you how they was dressed.”

“They might change clothes,” Webb said.

“But I told you what they looked like—scrawny white man stringy as rawhide, and a grizzly-sized nigger.”

“Thousands of men like that, Tobe.”

“I’ll chance the beef jerky and canteen of water,” Tobe pleaded, “only let me go. Normal humans ain’t a match for them devils. And the minute they kill you, I’m a dead man.” He staggered to his feet as a thought came to him. “You don’t need me, Mr. Cameron. It’s simple. Just find a black giant and a white man made out of hickory sticks and barbed wire traveling together. Couldn’t be but one pair like that trailing south.”

Webb nodded. Except for his eyes, his face was almost placid. “Sounds pretty good.”

“Then you’ll let me…”

“Except for one thing,” Webb added. “If they change clothes and split up, they’ve lost their identity as a pair. You’ve seen them. You’re the witness who can identify them singly.”

Tobe looked from one to the other of the two men who hemmed him. His eyes glazed slightly. Then he stumbled toward the wagon, mumbling to himself.

CHAPTER 7

Sickly Sykes lay with propped elbows on the low escarpment. The shale was hot against his belly. He liked heat. Once, as a young’un freezing in Virginia winters, he’d wondered why his mama, a scarecrow always spitting blood into the rags she carried in her faded apron pocket, was so scared of hell. It was nice and hot in hell—all the time. Folks in hell couldn’t wake up shivering their tails off because an icy wind was knifing snow through the cracks in a dirt-floored shanty.

When he grew older and more cunning, Sykes figured hell was a booger made up for their own protection by the elegant gents who always ended up with all the shares when a crop was in. They never included themselves when they talked about hell. It was a place for somebody else, especially mean white trash.

Slaves didn’t have to worry about hell in the first place. They were property, like mules. Sykes would have died before admitting it, but now and again, lurking about a slave cabin in hopes of an invitation to eat, Sykes had the secret wish he’d been born black.

The day he destroyed hell, along about his thirteenth birthday, Sykes felt as if he saw the world for the first time. Dark fears he’d known throughout his life seemed to drain out of him all at once. Hate was a good, hot feeling like hell. He looked at the landlord prancing down the road on a curried gelding and imagined the man bloodied and dead. He cussed his daddy for a sniveling sonofabitch. He’d chewed the questions over in his mind for a long time, but when the answer came it was a bursting light. There was just one rule. It was simple. It said: Don’t get caught.

The warm shale ground his elbows as Sykes lifted his field glasses to his eyes. He’d ached for those glasses, and the night he deserted he’d aimed to have them. The Confederate lieutenant had caught him in the act; and even while the dumb bastard was lecturing on the crime of stealing, Sykes had let the homemade stiletto slide down his sleeve into his hand. He’d saved the blue-bellies the trouble of killing that reb shavetail. He’d had the glasses a long time now, and he’d never considered selling them even when he was hungry.

The road below was little more than a pair of ruts wandering east-west It declined from the escarpment in a long gradual slope to arid land dotted with clumps of brown sage. Sykes focused the glasses and studied the movement far out there. “It’s a stagecoach, right enough. I told you this was the stage road that finally winds up in El Paso.”

A giant black form that oozed grease, Columbus George rested in the shade of a boulder a dozen yards behind Sykes. “So’s you did.”

George didn’t share Sykes’s fondness for heat. There was no misery like an Alabama cotton field when the sky was a solid blaze and the heat wavered all around like a lake. The whites believed that Africans should be happiest when the sun was hottest. Hadn’t they come from a hot place? But George knew better. Africans in Africa didn’t chop cotton for days on end, with the sun pouring melted metal over everything. Black skin soaked up the sun quicker than white. The white man might cook his brains and keel over; but it was the black who shivered to death in the night with the poison of the sun in him.

George opened his large, almond-shaped, yellowish eyes as Sykes slid across the shale toward him. Moving like that, Sykes made George think of a leather-skinned lizard. With the puny face, snag teeth, and sunk-in chest Sickly looked like he needed to crawl into bed and die. But George knew the truth of that matter also. Nothing in nature could kill Sykes. If you chopped him up the pieces would just keep on wiggling, like the stringy meat of a turtle when it lands in a hot skillet.

Looking at Sykes, George knew that one day he would test the idea. When the time came for their trails to part he would take the pearl on the gold chain, and the silver-chased pistol, and he would see if Sykes could be killed. Sykes didn’t mind killing whites, and George credited him for that. But if Sykes seemed to forget that he also was white, George hadn’t.

“George, you laying on your big butt all day?”

George got up, dusting off his seat. “Don’t go lipping me now, Sickly!”

Sykes laughed. He knew George was crazy. George was one of them that had to go crazy or die. Before the blue-bellies had freed them, some niggers had been that way. The old-time overseers would sell them off when the whip didn’t knock some sense in them. Some of them ran away, holed up in the swamps, and had to be hunted and shot. Sykes believed that he had a mysterious power over the big, crazy brute. It made a man feel pretty good.

George had lips like huge wads of black satin. They worked silently when he was thinking. “I ain’t sure about this, Sickly.”

“How come you ain’t sure?”

“Why don’t we just keep on making tracks?” George asked.

Sykes took a piece of dirty twist from his pocket and bit off a chew. He rolled the tobacco cud into his jaw before he even bothered to look at George. “You’re the dumbest critter on two legs, you know that?”

“Don’t you go messing with me, Sickly!”

“Ah, the hell with you! I don’t know why I put up with you. Here we’ve laid around all morning, hoping a coach would use the stage road, and now there’s one coming. How many chances you think we’re going to have like this? You wouldn’t know good luck if it jumped up and spit in your face.” Sykes’s heels grated as he turned. “You’re full of manure if you think I’m passing up a chance like this.”

George’s dim brain filed away the insults with a care equal to a banker’s when he counts his money.

“Wait a minute, Sickly.”

Sykes stopped and looked over his shoulder. George shuffled forward, and they picked their way down the escarpment.

“I reckoned you’d see the light,” Sykes said. “Stagecoaches haul passengers, and can’t nobody be a passenger without money. We got money coming at us on the road, George.”

“Yeah,” George said, “money.” He hunkered, braced with his hand, and vaulted down a six-foot break in the stone. “Money’s all right for you, Sickly. But I can’t drink in a saloon or buy me a ticket to a whorehouse.”

“It’s different across the border.”

“Maybe. I ain’t so sure.”

Sykes dropped down beside George. “Then how come you following me?”

“Man, I got to look after you. I don’t want nobody else killing you. That’s my joy, Sickly, when me and you has hit the end together—when we ain’t got no more use for each other.”

Sykes began laughing. Tears rolled down his gaunt, gray cheeks. He punched Columbus George in the gut. “That’s good, that is! You big bastard, I could take you before breakfast.”

Another insult to be remembered. George stood stiffly. “And I could break you in two, Sickly. I could do it right now.”

“You’re a powerful damned black panther, George. I’ll give you that. But it ain’t what counts. I got a brain. You got none. That’s what counts.”

“You’re pushing hard, Sickly.”

Sykes wiped his eyes and his thin-lipped mouth. “Aw, dry up,” he said. “You don’t scare me. You wouldn’t last a week without me. You got to have a white skin to go in for you and buy a bottle, or ask the way without arousing suspicion, or ride up to a house and ask for water. Now go get the horses. Leave the mule.”

George turned and trudged through the shadows below the escarpment. It was too bad, he thought. His mind went back to the night he and Sykes had joined up. Sickly had seemed different then. Starving, he’d sneaked toward Sickly’s camp fire, the smell of roasting groundhog making a sharp sweet pain in his belly. He’d been very quiet, but Sickly had known he was out there.

“Come on in,” Sickly had said, “whoever you are, and quit that pussyfooting around!”

George had eased into the firelight glow. The sight of so much desperate black muscle and bone didn’t bother Sickly at all. Chomping on a half-done groundhog leg, he motioned to a spot beside the fire. “Sit down. Help yourself. You look done in. Come far?”

“Alabam.”

Sickly had stopped chewing for a second. “That’s three states away.”

“I reckon it is,” George had said. He let it lay right there. He hadn’t come from Alabama with any banjos on his knees. He’d wandered off rootless and unpossessed. By the time he reached Louisiana there’d been twenty-eight in his bunch. They’d worked when they could find work, lived off the swamps, stolen when they were hungry, and killed when cornered. A federal patrol, sent out by the military ruler of the district, had hit their camp late one night, scattering them and taking a few captive to stand trial for their crimes. George had seen none of the other twenty-seven since.

Sickly had been all right at first. He’d treated George like a man. Then he’d gradually changed. No real reason for it except that Sykes just happened to be Sykes. He would have been the same trailing with a white man. He had to be the boss. He seemed to have the feeling that anybody who would trail with him must be trash.

Sykes was at the edge of the road when George led the horses down. Both men mounted. Sykes checked the load in the army issue Colt he carried.

“We’ll make it simple so’s there’s less room for mistakes,” Sykes said. He tightened the rein on the deep-chested, spirited sorrel to which he’d helped himself one night in Goliad. “We’ll stop the stage and take what they got.”

“If we ain’t killed first,” George answered. “We’re in the open. Men in the stage have got cover.”

“Won’t do them any good—when we get the drop.”

“How we do that, Sickly?”

“You’ll find out Just make sure you do what I tell you, and leave the rest to me.”

Sykes took the lead down the long slope. The horses picked their way until the road flattened. Sykes halted, lifted his glasses. At the point of the dust-tail inching toward them, the stagecoach leaped into clarity. It was drawn by a team of four, the box-like body swaying on the massive leather straps that acted as suspension springs. The driver sat alone on the high seat Nobody was riding shotgun. So the coach wasn’t carrying mail, gold, or money.

Sykes cursed under his breath. He’d hoped for something better. Then, again, a little luck was better than none. A man had to grab whatever turned up.

He took the strap from his neck, wound it about the glasses and put them carefully in his saddlebag.

“Now get this straight big man. I won’t have time to tell it but once. Already that driver can see there’s something out here on the road.”

“I’m listening,” George said.

“Get off your horse and lay down in the road, doubled up, like you was dying. Have your gun drawed and ready, but hide it against your belly. When I throw down on the passengers, you roll over and shoot the driver. And don’t fool around about it I’ll have to cover the passengers. Don’t you give the driver a chance to plug me.”

George looked up and down the road, making no move to get off his horse.

“Get the hell moving!” Sykes exclaimed. “The driver’ll see what we’re up to when them wheels turn a few more times.”

“Why don’t you lay down in the road, Sickly?”

“Because I got a better chance to palaver with the driver than a big black man out here in the middle of nowhere, where he’s got no business. Anyhow, I’m taking all the risk when I poke my snoot in the coach and depend on you to cover the driver. You’ll be safe as a baby in its crib. You ever hear of a stagecoach running over a dying man on purpose?”

CHAPTER 8

George lay between the gritty ruts, measuring the thunder of hoofbeats transmitted to him through the ground. His muscles were tight, prepared for the explosive action that would throw him aside if Sickly failed to stop the coach before those hoofbeats reached a certain intensity.

Sykes nodded at the massive, huddled figure and spurred the sorrel to meet the coach. He heard the jangling and creaking of the coach as the distance between them narrowed. Pulling the sorrel to its haunches just off the road, he took off his hat and waved it in a frantic signal.

“Help!” he yelled. “Sick man…help…man dying!”

The stage driver hauled back on the reins and slammed his foot against the brake pole. The coach rocked to a standstill in a billow of dust.

The driver was a lean, grizzled man who might have been thirty or fifty. He slid the carbine from the boot beside him. “What’s the trouble?”

Sykes drop-reined his horse, slid from the saddle, and ran the few steps to the right front wheel. A quick cut of his eyes caught the startled faces of two men peering from inside the coach.

Sunlight danced bluely on the driver’s carbine. Sykes’s tongue flicked across his lips. “Man sick all night,” he said, breathless. “Trying to get him to a settlement…fell off his horse…how much room in here?”

Before the driver could raise a question, Sykes had stepped to the side of the coach and opened the door. The Colt materialized in his hand, freezing the two passengers.

In front of the coach, George sat up and fanned his gun. He wasn’t an expert marksman, but the driver was a sharp target against the sky. George played the odds. One or more of his slugs was bound to strike home.

The horses whinnied and shied from the continuous crashing of George’s gun. The driver strained to full height, then toppled from the high seat. The dull, meaty impact of his body seemed to stifle other sounds.

“Gents,” Sykes leered at the passengers, “you just lost your driver. We got plenty more of the same medicine, so step out like you was crossing a canyon on a piece of string.”

George ran up besides Sykes as the two men eased from the coach with their hands up. “What we got here, Sickly?”

One of the captives was a thin sandy man with a wooden stump making do for a left leg. He looked about the right age to have had the leg shot off by the Yankees. He wore faded denim and a dirty hat with a limp brim and a hole where the crown was creased. He couldn’t hold much of a job, and Sykes guessed he was on his way to work a chuck wagon somewhere or shovel manure from an El Paso livery stable.

The other passenger was far more interesting. He was short, plump from the long habit of good eating, sported a thin black mustache, and his round face was slightly pale; but his eyes were cool and calculating. He was dressed in doeskin britches, alpaca coat, white shirt, polished calfskin boots, and a beaver hat that had cost fifty dollars if it cost a penny. Held at shoulder height, the palms of his hands looked as soft as a woman’s.

“What’s your handle?” Sykes asked.

“Truelove.”

“From where?”

“New Orleans.”

“To where?”

“California.” Truelove took a breath. “I happen to be a gambler. I know a winning hand when I see it. How about I throw in all my chips. You take the pot, and ride off.”

“George,” Sykes said, “it wouldn’t do to get in a game with this gambler. He reads minds.”

“He do.”

“You sure the driver won’t make any more trouble?”

“Not unless he can see with three eye sockets in his head.”

“That’s good, George. Now relieve these gents of their guns.”

“I ain’t got a gun, mister,” the one-legged man said.

The gambler eased his hands to the lapels of his frock-cut coat, opened the coat, and stood stock still as George reached and lifted the pistol from the exposed shoulder holster.

As George stepped back, Sykes pulled off his ragged hat and flipped it away. He lifted the fine beaver from Truelove’s head and put it on his own.

“This one is my half, George. You can have the other one.” He cut a glance at the sallow, one-legged man. “Bud, how much money you got?”

“Two dollars.”

“Give it to the nigger.” Sykes jabbed Truelove in the paunch with the gun barrel. “How about you, dude?”

“A little more than fifty dollars,” Truelove said. “You’re welcome to it.”

“I know I am,” Sykes said. “Turn around.”

Truelove presented his back. Sykes searched the britches pockets, then reached around the pudgy chest to explore the inner pockets of the alpaca. He fished out a thin black leather wallet and tossed it to George.

George opened the wallet. His lips moved as he counted. “He told the truth, Sickly. Less’n fifty.”

“To set up shop in California?” Sickly said. “Just don’t seem right to me…” His words trickled off as his searching hand touched the suspicious thickness of a money belt. “You cheating, lying sonofabitch!”

He grabbed Truelove’s meaty shoulder. As he spun the man, the sleeve gun seemed to appear as if by magic in Truelove’s hand. He squeezed the trigger without hesitation, shooting at a range so close that grains of black powder were driving in Sickly’s clothing.

Sykes felt as if a hot metal spike had been driven through his heart. He was knocked backward. Everything around him was instantly covered by a hazy veil. Truelove was a blurred distortion wheeling toward George. Sykes didn’t know he was shooting back even when the Colt kicked in his hand.

The gun was jarred loose as the hard earth flew up to strike Sykes’s skinny rump. He dropped his hands to brace himself over a pit of nothingness.

George was struck dumb by the burst of action and two quick blasts of gunfire. He saw the gambler pinned against the side of the coach, arms outflung. Truelove hung there, then went sliding down as his body doubled. He did a crazy kind of half-somersault, his head hit the ground, then rolled onto his back, eyes staring at the sun. His breathing was like a wind in a long, dark tunnel as bright-red froth rose from the hole in his lungs.

George saw Sykes sitting no more than a dozen feet away from the gambler. A crimson stain was spreading on the left side of Sickly’s shirt, but he didn’t keel over. He sat there, a little doubled, propped up by his arms.

Then George realized that the one-legged man was no longer beside him. He twisted his head and saw the man running away from the road like an insect without all his legs.

George wiped the back of his hand across his mouth as he let the running man make thirty, thirty-five, forty yards, then padded after him as he closed the distance with deliberate slowness, his eyes glowed yellow with pleasure. His sinews felt as if they were oiled.

The one-legged man heard the sounds of George’s nearness. He stumbled as he tried to veer away. When George’s leaping weight came down on him, he was knocked flat. He spent his strength in a brief thrashing struggle with George’s knees pinning him. He made sounds akin to speech as he tried to beg for his life.

George put an end to it by taking the man’s neck in his hands and twisting until he felt the bones snap. Then George arose from the prone form, touched it with his toe as if asking a question, turned and trotted back to the stagecoach.

Sykes was still sitting upright, spread-legged. George dropped to one knee and ripped Sickly’s shirt away. “You got a gouge along the rib, Sickly.”

“I know.” Sykes’s voice had a fuzzy edge, but his eyes were coming into focus. “He made a mistake, George. He used a small bore gun on a man-sized job.”

“You’d have that small bore ca’tridge in your heart if it hadn’t hit a rib.”

“But I ain’t, and it did. That’s what counts. Bullet glanced off like it hit a piece of flint. Sonofabitch should of knowed better than to try and kill Sickly Sykes with a bullet.”

“That’s right, Sickly,” George agreed.

Sykes felt steady enough to loosen his left palm from the ground. “Strip off that money belt, George. I got know what kind of cotton we’re in.”

Sykes watched with avid eyes as George went to the gambler, ripped open his clothing, and dragged the money belt from his middle. George came back grinning, slapping the money belt against his leg.

Sykes reached up, snatched the belt, tore open the flap, and caught his breath.

“Glory be!” George muttered and sank cross-legged beside Sickly. “I didn’t know there was that much money in the world.”

“It’s Christmas, George!” Sykes looked at George, and for a second he was the Sickly Sykes who’d shared groundhog over a camp fire with a starving stranger. “By hell, George, it’s all the Christmases we never had rolled into one!”

George strained forward. Sykes counted the money with hands that shook so hard that the federal paper rattled. “More than five thousand dollars, George.”

“Man!” George exclaimed. “Oh, man!”

Sykes used George’s shoulder for a handhold and struggled to his feet. The movement iced his face with fine sweat. “Them horses must have rested and pissed by now. George, you mix up a horse-piss poultice to stop the bleeding and keep this bullet crease from festering up. Then run the stage horses off.”

George waggled a thumb toward Truelove. “What about him?”

“Ain’t he dead?”

“Not yet,” George said, “but he can’t last long. He’s laying there sucking the blood in and out of the hole you shot in his chest.”

Sykes touched his bleeding ribs. “That’s good. Let him pay! Let the sun, the flies, and the buzzards have him, while me and you tear us up a Mexican town with his five thousand dollars!”

CHAPTER 9

The black mare Duchess didn’t like standing still with a weight on her back. She sidestepped nervously, annoyed by the bit. Cameron sat easy in the saddle, check-reining her with automatic responses as he counted the horses wandering the dry wastes before him. Two were browsing in clumps of brown grass a few hundred yards away. A third and fourth were diminishing figures trotting eastward between the ruts that marked the stagecoach trail.

Cameron eased the pressure, and Duchess cavorted forward. The nearest horse lifted its muzzle, and, instead of showing alarm, trotted to meet the familiar sight of a horse and rider.

Webb drew the mare up. The time wasn’t right for her to welcome a male and she quivered with distaste while Webb looked the strange horse over.

With compact body and deep chestnut coloring, the horse had been bred out of Morgan stock. Plainly a stagecoach was missing its team of four somewhere west of here.

Webb stood in the stirrups, shading his eyes against the sinking sun. In the heat-shimmering distance, just before the stage trail snaked up into the sweeps of broken rock, he saw an object that from here looked a little like a child’s wooden block.

He eased down on the saddle and turned his head. A smudge of dust marked his covered wagon, which had not as yet reached the stagecoach trail. Ethel and Clyde were with the wagon, giving Webb a broader latitude of personal movement. He’d been ranging well forward, when his first sight of the draft horses had veered him westerly.

Alert to every signal of Webb’s hands and knees Duchess broke into a gallop, giving the male horse a disdainful flick of her tail.

As the distance narrowed, the stranded stagecoach took on definite shape. It appeared to be deserted.

Webb slowed the mare, his eyes searching the terrain.

It was then that he saw the feeding vulture. “Gahhh!” he shouted, as he slapped his hat against his thigh and drove Duchess ahead. The huge bird lifted a dripping beak, backed away from its feast, and lifted toward the brassy sky on creaking wings.

Webb dismounted and walked over to the dead man. The vulture had started on the eyeballs of the weirdly-twisted head. The man was clad in denim. The left pants leg had been folded back and forth to cushion the man’s stump against the wooden peg.

Webb slid the Remington from its holster. He grasped the reins with his left hand, and led Duchess toward the stage.

A second man lay near the front wheels. He’d been shot almost precisely between the eyes. Webb’s eyes measured from the body to the high seat. The driver, he decided. A perfect target up there. Shot before he knew what hit him.

Cameron continued moving, letting his eyes and the Remington look inside the coach at the same time. The passenger compartment was empty, but through the open doorway on the other side Webb saw a third body.

“My God!” Cameron muttered. He was a little pale.

As he rounded the coach he saw that the third victim had been a city man, well fed, expensively dressed. He had been shot in the chest, the wound erupting a bright red tide that had turned into a black sticky stain on his shirt and alpaca coat.

Webb thought the man was dead; but his shadow caused the eyelids in the round, black-mustached face to flicker.

Webb dropped to one knee beside the man, loosened the shirt collar, and started to peel away clothing and examine the wound. Instead his hands froze with caution. Clotted, sun-broiled blood had made a thin seal over the bullet hole. Only by this near-miracle had the man survived this long. At a touch, the last ounce of life would pour out of the man. At best he had only minutes more to live.

The most Cameron could do was cool the man’s face and lips. He started to rise, to fetch the canteen from his saddle, but the man’s burning eyes held him. He was trying desperately to speak, to say something before he closed his eyes for the last time.

Webb bent down and placed his ear almost against the puffy, sun-blistered lips.

As the man made his effort, a thin whistle of air from his chest joined the faint sound in his throat.

“Truelove…name is Truelove…two men…took five thousand…rode off for Mexico…shot small man…but didn’t…kill him.” The air seepage stopped. The man was dying.

Webb palmed the cold sweat from Truelove’s forehead. “Can you still hear me?”

Truelove wanted to speak, but couldn’t.

“If you can hear me, Mr. Truelove, blink your eyes.”

Truelove blinked.

“One blink for yes,” Webb said, “two for no. Do you understand?”

Truelove’s lids dropped and opened with an effort.

“Were the two a white man and a Negro?” Webb asked.

Yes.

“Did they call each other by name? Did the Negro call the white man Sickly or Sykes?”

Yes.

“It was the scrawny white man you shot? Did the Negro have to carry him off?”

No.

Sykes, then, was still mobile under his own power. “Do you have people, Mr. Truelove? Is there someone you want notified?”

Truelove was sinking fast. His lids moved once, then again. No. No one. A man who had lived alone, dying alone.

“Truelove, if it will make it any easier for you…I’ve got business with those two men, killing business. What you’ve told me will help me find them.”

Truelove understood. A spark of gratification flickered in his eyes. He made an effort to move his hand and touch Webb’s, but went limp. He was dead.

Webb closed the lids over the staring eyes with his thumb and arose slowly. With a tightness in his guts, he dragged the bodies of the driver and one-legged man to the side of the coach where Truelove lay. He entered the coach and secured the leather window flaps. Dropping to the ground, he wrestled the bodies of the driver and one-legged man inside. Before he loaded Truelove he opened the alpaca coat and tore a large piece from the side and back of Truelove’s shirt, then pitched the cloth aside for the moment.

Truelove was the hardest to handle. His body was heaviest and most flaccid. Webb lifted and pushed the body into an awkward sprawl on the coach seat, facing the other two, then slammed and latched the coach door to seal out scavengers.

He paused to let out a long breath and swab his sweaty face with the bandanna from his hip pocket. He didn’t envy whoever came out to investigate when the stage horses, true to domesticated instincts, finally showed up at the way station.

He moved away from the coach, gathered a handful of dry twigs from a bramble beside the road, and built a small fire. In three or four minutes he had several charcoal sticks which would do for writing. He spread the piece he’d torn from Truelove’s white shirt on hard ground, bent over it, and printed a message:

“I discovered this coach with two men dead and a third dying who managed with his last breath to tell me that: This deed was done by two renegades, a scrawny white man named Sickly Sykes and a giant ex-slave called Columbus George. Sykes suffered a noncritical wound. Sykes and George are journeying to Mexico with five thousand dollars stolen from the stagecoach passenger, Truelove.

“I am trailing these men for prior crimes. Webb Cameron, Wucumma Creek.”

Webb climbed to the driver’s seat and tied the message to the brake pole where it could not be overlooked.

Duchess was eager to put distance between herself and the smell of death, and Webb let her stretch her legs. The stagecoach dropped far behind. When he was about half a mile from his wagon Webb saw a rider, Clyde Tomberlin, detach and angle out to meet him.

Webb slowed as Clyde galloped up. Clyde wheeled and let his horse jog beside Duchess.

“You were gone a time, Cameron. I was beginning to wonder if the mare had stepped in a gopher hole.”

Webb detailed his grisly discovery. Clyde listened in silence, his face sober and whitening a little as Webb’s unadorned words evoked mental images.

“The filthy sonsabitches!” His words had genuine heat. Webb gave him a sharp glance. There were things about this man, this neighbor, that he just didn’t understand. Clyde had shied from news of the rape of a woman as if something in his mind turned and hid from the thought; but in the murder of men, Clyde seemed almost glad to have something on which he could pin a personal hatred.

From the seat of the trundling wagon, Ethel yelled, “Yahoo!”

Webb lifted in the stirrups and waved to let Ethel know he was all right. Tobe Loudermilk was a morose figure riding the gee-horse hitched to the wagon. He barely looked in Webb’s direction.

“I figure Sykes and George didn’t meet the stage by accident,” Webb told Clyde. “They laid up in the rocks and waited for a coach to come along. They don’t know yet they’re being trailed or they wouldn’t have wasted the time. They’ll cross the border looking for the nearest dives to throw Truelove’s money around. They’ve grabbed themselves a five-thousand-dollar trap.”

CHAPTER 10

High in the rocks, a ten-minute crow flight from the stage road, Micco the Indian hunkered beside a small bed of glowing embers. He shared the fire with three followers, each as bedraggled as Micco himself, Alligator, Spotted Deer, and Sopchoppy the Red Oak. The three watched avidly as Micco divided the scorched rattlesnake meat in five pieces with the tip of his dagger.

This land, to which he was a stranger, had treated Micco harshly. His ancestors had never hunted or claimed the limitless world of plains, mesas, desert, canyon. Micco was, in point of fact, a Seminole, although he’d never been closer to Florida than the Oklahoma reservation.

He lifted the snake meat on the dagger’s tip. Each brave in turn snatched his ration and ripped into it with his teeth.

Micco had not kept both the remaining portions for himself. He chose the tail. It was stringiest, and a leader must set an example for his followers.

He chewed methodically. The nourishing juices flowing in his shriveled stomach lifted his spirits only a little. When the spirit is a cold knife in the heart, Micco thought, something more than a bite of food is needed.

The snake meat vanished amid chomps and gulps, and the other three weary braves sat looking at the final piece.

“It is for Yeehaw,” Micco said, although it was difficult for him to keep from grabbing the meat and stuffing it in his own mouth. “It is Yeehaw’s share, and no one else will eat it.”

A sullen murmur passed among the squatting figures. Gaunt, scabby, hair matted with filth, dressed in the tatters of stolen clothing, they were a dangerously sorry-looking lot. The worst change was in the hollow, burning eyes. They were no longer the eyes of young and confident braves who, under cover of night, had marched off the Oklahoma reservation those long weeks ago.

Micco sneered at them. “Are you slaves to your bellies? Would you fight over a crumb of snake meat?”

“If Yeehaw fails to come back,” Alligator said, “the ants will eat it.”

“The Wolf won’t return,” Spotted Deer said. “He is dead—or he has eaten the horse. We are all dead.”

“You are squaws,” Micco said. He looked across the embers and stared down his followers one by one. And then he couldn’t bear to look at their misery and shame, to which he had brought them. He got to his feet “No, I am wrong. You haven’t the backbone of squaws!”

He turned and prowled among the rocks, which were purpling with night. He was afraid that if he said another word his voice would break.

His companions out of sight Micco dropped to a bed of dust and dry grasses the winds had trapped in a stony pocket. As he lay staring up at the darkening sky he chewed his lip, but the pain wouldn’t replace the sharper inner anguish.

He watched for the haze of light to form against the black heavens. The peculiar people with white skins claimed the glow was made up of stars. They called it the Milky Way. The name was pleasant to the ear, but Micco had never let the white devils beguile him. The band of heavenly light was the bridge to the City in the Sky, and Micco wondered if tonight it would again shine brighter to guide a warrior’s spirit—Yeehaw’s soul.

Yeehaw would glow like the path itself and with a shout would go like the rushing wind to meet Smith Billie Possum, Iron Tree, Jones Istachatta, and all the others whose earthly bones were strewn over a thousand wandering miles between here and Oklahoma.

Oklahoma…the reservation… Crushed with fatigue and hunger, Micco’s eyes were heavy. He didn’t think of the reservation as one thinks of home. He’d never had a home. The white men had taken Florida, his home, before Micco was born.

As a child he had learned how it had happened. He’d listened to the tales told by the old ones who hunkered about reservation camp fires with no future but only memories. Black Bear had told the best stories of all. He was a black-skinned Seminole, a Negro who had run away from a Georgia master and, like many others of his kind, had joined The People.

It was Black Bear who had given Micco his name, which meant, simply, “chief” in the Mikasuki dialect.

The creatures with pale, repulsive skins, the fiery-eyed lad was assured, had conquered only through guile and treachery. Was not one Seminole warrior equal to any ten whites in battle?

Osceola, Negro Abraham, Coachoochee the Wildcat, the leaders, The People, all had been tricked. In the final breaking of promises the whites had effected the last great removal, shipping boatloads of The People from Tampa Bay, leaving less than ten score of The People in all the land of Florida.

Micco the boy thrived on tales of Seminole valor. The stories—not the starving hell of reservation life—were his day-by-day realities. In his games he cut down cowardly whites, who screamed for mercy at Kissimee; he led raids on the outposts of General Jesup, that old fool who with eight thousand troops couldn’t track down and defeat a few hundred warriors.

Sitting cross-legged beside Black Bear, the boy would conjure up visions in the flickering camp fire. “Tell me about Wildcat and Negro Cuvallo, Black Bear.”

“Boy, I done told you that story about ten hundred times.”

“I don’t care! I want to hear it again. Tell me—before I think of you as a white man and put out your eyes with a stick from the fire.”

Black Bear would rumble a laugh. “Boy, I do believe you been eating some of that fire. Maybe you better stop running off in the woods so much and go to the new schoolhouse with the white teacher.”

The boy knew when Black Bear was joking. He would try to make his own laugh rumble. “I wouldn’t piss in the white man’s school.”

“You a good boy.”

“Now tell me about Wildcat and Negro Cuvallo.”

“Well, boy, it happen just a few hot and sorry old summers ago, about the time your mama had a new baby to take your place at her tits. Negro Cuvallo and Wildcat get one hundred men together and break out. They fight their way across the whole state of Texas and go into Mexico at a place called Eagle Pass. I ’spects they all got children scattered both sides of the Rio Grande by this time,” Black Bear would add a chuckle.

A rapturous shiver would touch the boy’s shoulders. “Through a whole nation infested with whites…nothing could stop them.”

“Nothing, boy.”

“Black Bear…”

“Yes, boy?”

“Some day I’ll lead my own men over the path of Wildcat and Negro Cuvallo.”

“I don’t know, boy. I just don’t know.”

“You doubt me, Black Bear?”

“Boy, looking into your face and eyes I see a lot of things. I see that you will try. But the times…things have changed.”

“I’ll never change, Black Bear! I’m a Seminole! You and I, we are The People!”

Black Bear would then often gaze into the fire, and for the time being the tale-telling would be over.

Micco grew into his youth witnessing the changes referred to by Black Bear. He saw the whites deceive and degrade his people with their medicines, seed grains, and books from which a man long dead could speak. He saw the Seminole forsake the freedom of the open tchiki for the cell-like cabins similar to those of the cursed whites. He seethed when he saw warriors bereft of weapons and threshing grain like squaws. But he walked with pride because he was a Seminole, and because the whites had tacked the “mean injun” label on him.

Micco’s maturing presence was a discomfort to many of The People, the foolish ones who’d been softened by white man’s ways. Also he was a magnet for several young men who shared his hatreds. Gradually a band of a dozen formed, with Micco as the natural leader. They roamed, hunted, fished, and talked long over their camp fires. When supplies ran short, they stole with increasing boldness from the Strangers, as they called the Indians who had adapted to life on the reservation.

Accumulating complaints of Micco’s small raids at last prodded the white authorities to action. Black Bear, crippled now with the disease that hunched his back and inflamed the joints of his limbs, came to Micco’s camp one night with word that a company of soldiers was being sent in from Fort Staley.

Camp fire flickering on their impassive faces, Micco’s band listened to Black Bear in silence and then looked at their leader.

Micco strode back and forth, the fire burnishing his lean bronze face. Black Bear watched him with narrowed eyes. He knew Micco better than the young brave’s own father had known him. Micco’s mind was an open book to him, and he gave blunt advice without being asked. “Boy,” he said, “you better lay low for a while.”

Micco wheeled on him. “Is this Black Bear talking? We are few in number, but strong in spirit. We are not squaws!”

“Nobody said you was,” Black Bear answered. “But use your head. Let things cool down. They maybe will, so far. But they never will after the first white soldier you kill.” Micco was stunned by the gravity and nature of Black Bear’s advice. “My ears are playing tricks on me!”

“No, boy, you heard me right.”

Micco studied the pain-twisted form of the old Negro. Then he understood, and pitied Black Bear. Physical suffering had dimmed the old man’s spirit.

“We can fight these soldiers, our way,” Micco said. “Hit them, and vanish like the mist. Strike at times and places where they least expect.”

Black Bear struggled to his feet. “You can do a lot of damage, boy, but they’ll send more men.”

“Let them,” Micco said. “Their searches will harry The People. Our own numbers will grow, because The People will join us.”

Both Micco and Black Bear felt the rustle of excitement about the fire. One by one, Black Bear looked at the young faces.

“I wouldn’t count on The People. Even if you got help, the soldiers would keep on coming. You’d still end up with your dead bodies stacked like cordwood.”

Yeehaw leaped to his feet. “I follow Micco!”

“And I,” the words raced around the camp fire.

Black Bear nodded slowly. His yellowish old eyes met Micco’s. “Then it’s up to you, boy, whether they live or die.”

“I will think about it,” Micco said.

“If I don’t see you again…good luck, boy.”

“You are our friend and our father, Black Bear.”

The old man turned quickly and hobbled out of the firelight.

That night Micco didn’t close his eyes in sleep. He ached to do battle, but Black Bear’s unexpected sentiments aroused misgivings. Then, in the heaviest hour before dawn when sick men die, Micco saw the momentary brilliance of a meteor cleaving the southern sky.

He leaped to his feet. “Wake up,” he shouted. “Open your eyes, you sleeping panthers!”

Micco’s warriors jarred to consciousness, some floundering for weapons, groggily wondering if the soldiers had already attacked.

“Gather around and hear me!” Micco cried. Limned in the faintest glow of the almost dead camp fire Micco’s appearance threw a hush over his warriors. He seemed to tower over them. His eyes flashed. His hawkish face was charged with an energy that set him apart from mere men.

“I have seen a sign in the heavens,” he said. The sudden thought came to him that men stripped of all self-doubt fight better, go farther, even live longer. So he instantly decided to stretch the truth a little. “It came from the spirit of Osceola himself!”

Awed murmurings arose from the group. Micco gave the idea a moment to sink in. During that moment, he came to believe that he hadn’t strained the truth at all. If the sign had not come from Osceola, how was it that the words had fallen unbidden from his lips?

He raised a hand for silence. “It is true. I lay troubled with no sleep to ease me. Then I saw Osceola’s spirit flash out of the City in the Sky and point the way for us.” He extended his arm toward the south. “There,” he said. “The spirit had told us to follow the trail of Negro Cuvallo and the one hundred. We are going to invade Texas, and fight our way to Mexico!”

The news was too big, too stunning to be grasped in an instant. Then Possum, who usually had laughter all over his round face, ventured to question the decision.

“We’re a dozen, Micco,” Possum said, “not one hundred.”

“Good! We can move that much faster.”

“We have but four horses and meat for only one day.”

“We’ll have plenty of everything,” Micco told them. “We will kill white people, and take what we need and want. It is no crime. Anything a white man makes, he owes to me.”

Micco’s warriors muttered a growl of assent. He nodded his approval.

His experience in leadership had taught him that voluntary followers are the most dedicated and loyal. “Let the squaws, if any be among us, separate themselves. The rest of us will move out before the sun rises.”

Not a man moved.

“You have chosen. The action is yours,” Micco said cunningly, “if any should bleed in the days to come.”

Eventually Micco came to be haunted by his words. When at last he lay among the rocks, a fragment of snake meat in his belly tantalizing his hunger, watching the path to the City in the Sky for a clue to Yeehaw’s fate, he knew in his heart that he was wholly to blame. His followers had trusted him with their lives. They had been faithful.

Micco’s sense of failure was the sharpest of his pains. He couldn’t understand how it had happened.

They’d slipped off the reservation without mishap, lived on game meat until they were well into Texas. They’d wiped out a family on a small ranch before the whites knew what was afoot. Glutted on unaccustomed delicacies—honey, preserves, rock-hard smoked ham—those without horses had taken their pick from the ranch stock. Jubilant, they’d pushed on south, laughing, boasting, playfully insulting each other.

The next raid had been costlier. Jones Istachatta and Possum had died in the relentless gunfire before Micco had decided to burn the house with the whites inside, although it meant the destruction of needed supplies. Four charred bodies had been left hanging by the heels in a cottonwood tree as a warning to those who would kill The People.

Micco had guessed that word of his coming was flying before him. Cannily, he’d veered west, moved fast and stayed out of sight until the supply situation became acute. Again surprised whites had died easily in their isolation, and Micco’s victorious warriors had loaded two pack horses. Micco had been exultant. Careful rationing should see them almost to Mexico. But he hadn’t known that the town of Muldoon was close by, or that a midwife, on her way to the ranch, had heard the shooting and raced back to Muldoon screaming, “Masacreeee!”

Fleeing south, Micco had fought a three-day running battle with the townsmen, losing his supplies and two more warriors. The skirmish had been the first of a series. From one settlement after another white men had put aside their tools, picked up their guns, and come out in relays to secure their neck of the woods from redskins.

Lying among the rocks, Micco groaned in anguish as the memories of their bloody flight burned in him. Days of hiding, nights of running; leaving the dead unburied, and letting the wounded die; cowering with hunger like a mole burrowing in the belly, while a well-fed, searching white beat the brush within a hundred yards. Then at last coming to this place of sun-baked rocks to await the return of Yeehaw, who two sunrises ago had gone out to scout on the lone remaining horse. Or awaiting the news of his death to be revealed in the sky.

Micco watched the first stars appear, cold, distant, ominous. The chill of the desert night nipped him. Beyond exhaustion, his mind could no longer hold his thoughts. He sank into sleep.

A hand on his shoulder and the voice of Sopchoppy speaking his name awakened Micco. His eyes flashed open. He sat up. It was still night, with moonlight painting the harsh landscape with silver.

“Hurry, Micco!” Red Oak said. “Yeehaw has returned, but he won’t speak until you are present.”

Micco jumped to his feet, stumbling among the rocks to get down to where the camp fire had been built up.

Squatting at the fire, Yeehaw was eating the snake meat that neither Alligator nor Spotted Deer had touched despite their complaints.

Micco fell to a hunker beside Yeehaw, who grinned with lips that were slick with snake fat.

“Well, speak!” Micco said. “Do I have to gouge your eyes to make you speak?”

Yeehaw sucked the snake oil from his fingers as the others pressed close.

“We don’t have to walk and starve any more,” he said. “I have found a wagon drawn by two fine horses and loaded with supplies.”

His companions gasped their astonishment.

“To ride dozing on a wagon with a full belly!” Alligator said.

“The spirits have sent it!” Red Oak announced, making a sign toward the sky.

“A wagon,” Spotted Deer breathed in simple wonder.

Micco extended his hand to hush them, his eyes hard on Yeehaw’s gaunt, heavy-boned face. “There are soldiers with the wagon?”

“No,” Yeehaw said, “it’s not a soldiering wagon.”

“Then how can it be—a wagon, out in this place?”

“I don’t know,” Yeehaw said. “But it is there.”

“Or the sun has cooked your head,” Micco said, “and you are seeing dreams.”

“No,” Yeehaw shook his head. “I’ve dreamed no dreams with my eyes open. Let me show you…”

He scooted back, smoothed a place in the dust, and began tracing markings with his fingertip.

“We are here.” He drew a line. “Up here and to the east is a place called Tacton Flats. We have outrun the news of us by swinging so far west. They don’t know about us in Tacton Flats.”

“How did you find this out?” Micco said.

“From a Mexicano working in a hayfield owned by a white man. I was prepared to kill him, but he thought I had come up from the border and was looking for work. He shared his food with me. So he lived, without knowing he had purchased his life.”

“You did well,” Micco said. “If he was young, perhaps he is a child of Negro Cuvallo’s one hundred.”

“I didn’t ask,” Yeehaw laughed. “I said as little as possible. When I learned that a white man’s town was in my path, I turned. The land became no longer fertile. I saw cabins, but always there were males armed with guns at their sides. It wouldn’t be wise to bring the men of Tacton Flats out and have them pin us in this place.”

“Were you seen?”

“Not once—except by the Mexicano who spit on the ground every time he used the word gringo. I worked south and toward the place where the sun rises. Today I came upon a stagecoach filled with dead men. The horses had been run off, and I could find none. But as the sun was walking down the sky, I first saw the wagon.”

“How far away?”

“Half a day on horseback. It has four people, two men who ride on horses, a man who walks or rides one of the wagon horses, and a woman who guided the wagon.” Yeehaw’s finger stabbed a spot in the dust “They are there, moving south, all alone. Perhaps they murdered the men in the stagecoach. Perhaps not. I do not know.”

Micco felt disappointment sink into his companions. He knew what they were thinking. Half a day on horseback, the wagon was out of reach. But we must have it, he thought. This is the last hope. We must capture the wagon—or die.

He raised his head. His warriors grew still, watchful of him.

“The wagon wheels will leave a track easy to follow,” he said. “We will take the wagon while it is alone, before it reaches a settled place where it will have help.”

“Are we to fly like spirits?” asked Alligator.

“We will trot, like Seminoles.” Micco slowly rose to his feet. “Each of us has, one time or another, caught a wild horse by trotting him to exhaustion. A walking wagon, stopping by night, is much slower.”

“Our bellies are empty,” Alligator said. “Our strength has been used all the way from the camp fire where Black Bear spoke words which were perhaps wise.”

Micco’s hand jabbed out as if to grab Alligator by the scruff, then stopped himself. “Will you crawl among the rocks and wait for death, Alligator?” Micco’s eyes drifted to the other three. “Will any of you join him?”

“The land is hard desert,” Sopchoppy the Red Oak pointed out, “and Alligator has raised a true question, which is his right.”

“We will have strength,” Micco said. “We will catch the wagon and take it We will reach Mexico.”

He drew the dagger from the belt of the homespun britches he’d taken from a settler north of Bigfoot Trace.

“Bring the horse, Yeehaw. We will drink deeply of the hot blood for strength, and strip the flesh so that each man can carry a ration. We’ll run every night, and rest when the day grows hot.”

The dagger glinted in the firelight as he raised it. “I, Micco, am stronger than the spirits of demons that would defeat you!”

CHAPTER 11

Cameron bathed his wife each nightfall before the first chill seeped into the thin desert air. He guided her out so that the wagon stood between them and the others, a shield for privacy.

Keeping a piece of soft muslin damp with precious drops from his canteen, he first wiped the dust and dried perspiration from her face, his hands as sensitive as a surgeon’s. After he sponged her hands and arms, he loosened her blouse and skirt and gently rubbed down the parts of her body without removing the garments.

He could salve her bruises and lacerations now; not with detachment, by any means, but without the feeling that his head was going to burst. The young, healthy vigor of her was healing her physical injuries quickly. He did not believe that her breast and lips would be scarred.

While he washed her, he talked to her. His voice was soothing, murmuring. He talked about pleasantries she’d known as a girl in Louisiana, but she didn’t respond. Her vacant smile, like that of an idiot child’s, merely expressed a dim, disassociated comfort in the cool refreshment of her bath.

His talks to her sharpened his own memories. His mind went back to that night in New Orleans when a benefit ball had been given to raise money for the expansion of Millard University. Webb had attended more from a sense of civic duty than anything else. He knew the man-talk would be of the unreasonable Yankees who were trying to force the South into secession. He could predict the predictions: “We’ll drive their armies from the field inside of three months!” He dreaded the stuffy, big-girthed matrons with the jeweled fans and marriageable daughters.

William McLaughlin—wee Willie was slated to die at Antietam—had spotted Webb and wormed his way through the glittering ballroom.

“Let’s do our social duty and disappear,” Willie had suggested. “We’ll play chemin de fer at Buckeye’s, and I’ll treat you to supper on my winnings at the Absinthe House. If I lose, you’re my assurance of a late night repast!”

Webb had spoken greetings to people as Willie towed him toward a tall man who was the focus of a group.

Willie had shouldered through them with the agility of a smiling, merry leprechaun.

“Webb, I want you to meet Doctor Simmons, who has just arrived from Baton Rouge to take over the chancellorship of Millard.” Willie had punched Webb on the shoulder, “Webb Cameron, Doctor, the hardest-working sugar broker in the city. Hardest-driving at anything he does, come to think of it,” Willie had laughed. “Rope him into a trustee post, and Millard will just have to flourish.”

“An excellent suggestion, Mr. McGlaughlin,” Doctor Simmons had smiled. “And how about you? I understand you’re a most canny and enterprising young man.”

“And I thought I’d been keeping it well hidden,” Willie had laughed.

Webb had shaken hands, liking Doctor Simmons instantly. They’d chatted about the problems of a struggling young college, and Webb had been impressed. There’d been little of the ivory-towered, absentminded professor in Simmons’s speech and bearing.

Then Simmons had glanced over Webb’s shoulder. “Well, there you are, my dear. Please say hello to Mr. Webb Cameron. Mr. Cameron, my daughter Temple.”

Webb had turned, expecting to see a bony figure or a round face with myopic eyes looking at him through spectacles.

Instead…

My God, he’d thought, she can’t be real!

The orchestra was playing a new Strauss waltz, and he’d taken her out on the floor seeing nothing except her face. Willie had seemed to dissolve, and Webb didn’t remember later if he’d even asked her father’s leave.

Halfway through the graceful, swirling dance, she’d leaned her head back and smiled at him. “Are you always so quiet, Mr. Cameron?”

Without thought, a strange phrase had come to his lips. “Only in church,” he’d said.

During the following weeks he’d been her constant escort at dinners, parties, concerts. Doctor Simmons had invited him to luncheon one day, and when Webb arrived at the small villa the Simmonses had taken, a table had been set for two on the terrace. Webb had smiled to himself. Doctor Simmons had decided it was time to dissect the intentions of a persistent suitor.

As they’d finished off a delicious crayfish bisque, Doctor Simmons had eased into the subject paramount on his mind. “Temple is delighted with New Orleans, Mr. Cameron.”

“I’m delighted with Temple.”

Simmons had laughed. “You’re direct and frank. It makes it easier. We both know why I wanted to see you privately. You’ve shouldered aside the competition, and monopolized my daughter.”

“I intended to, Doctor.”

“And your future intentions?”

“Avid, greedy,” Webb had smiled, “but honorable.”

“Well, at least you’re honest.”

“It’s the best relationship between in-laws.”

“Have you talked with her about marriage, Mr. Cameron?”

“Not yet.” Webb’s gaze had drifted about the peace and serenity of the sunny courtyard, with its blaze of color in oleander, hibiscus, magnolia. “But I’m going to, very quickly. We’re going to war, Doctor, and I want her while there is still time—even if the time is short.”

Simmons had studied him a moment. “The election of Mr. Lincoln makes war seem a certainty, and many young men would put off marriage until times are more settled.”

“Times have never been settled, Doctor, from the day Cain killed Abel.”

Simmons had thoughtfully chewed a sliver of veal basted with a Creole sauce. “Most of the young blades are itching for war. But you don’t seem so eager.”

“I hate the idea. But the issues are going to be taken to the battlefield.”

“Issues, Mr. Cameron? Neither you nor I own slaves.”

“How many of us do, actually? One man owns a thousand slaves, a thousand dirt farmers, artisans, merchants, and professional men own none. In my own case, I don’t care to feel that I have to own and depend on any other man to make my way.”

“Yet you would fight.”

“I’ll go with Louisiana. It’s my home. It’s given me all I have,” Webb had said. “I believe in the same principles of government by consent that led the thirteen original states to secede from Britain. Whether the idea applies to our case, remains to be seen.”

“What would you do about slavery?”

Webb had known that everything Simmons said was for the purpose of drawing him out and evaluating him. But a consciousness of this was not to be considered in an honest answer. “The same thing a growing number of thinking men would do,” Webb had answered. “The invention of machines will change our lives. Even men to whom the idea of slavery isn’t repugnant are recognizing that machines, if nothing else, will soon make slavery a bankrupt economic system. Most enlightened owners are already providing rudimentary education for their slaves. There’ll be opposition, of course. But the signs point to an orderly transition without, I hope, lasting bitterness between the races—if we’re not destroyed.”

“Talk of being destroyed wouldn’t endear listeners in the downtown coffee houses, Mr. Cameron.”

“I’d be sorry for that, but not swayed. Most people know how I feel. I’ve never tried to hide it. And it’s never made any difference to my friends. I’m lucky. I’ve many of them.”

“I’m sure of that,” Doctor Simmons had said, “just as I’m sure that your enemies would have to respect you. But do you honestly feel that we might lose?”

“War’s a game of chance. Southern men are trained to horses and guns from the time they can walk. Militia training is a year-round sport. We’re far better prepared—at the start. We’ll win all the early battles. If we have the foresight to mass supplies and follow up the victories we will win. But in a long war they’ll bleed us to death.”

The meal had reached the stage of cigars and thick black coffee and chickory in demitasse cups. When Simmons had an even coal on his cigar, he’d propped his elbows on the wrought iron table. “She’s all I have, Cameron. She may have told you that her mother died five years ago. So I want you to do me a favor.”

“What is that, Doctor?” Webb’s voice had been touched with caution.

But Simmons had not been leading up to a fatherly plea for Webb to wait. Instead Simmons had smiled like a conspirator and said, “Ask her today. And get me some grandchildren started.”

Webb and Temple had married even as his regiment was being called up. He’d got home twice on leave during the first two years of war. Then the inexorable drainage of everything—transport, food, manpower—had ruled out vacations from the battlefields of Virginia to the places that lived in men’s memories.

He’d had her letters to read and reread. Written to cheer him, they hadn’t always been able to gloss over the harsh realities at home. Her father, serving under Forrest, had died of dysentery in Tennessee. She’d worked as a volunteer nurse when the typhus epidemic blazed through New Orleans. Always she’d finished on a note of optimism and faith, adding a funny little story or a bit of harmless gossip. In the final days she’d steamed paper off the wall for writing material. Some of these letters had never reached him.

As for the children they both wanted, she’d hidden her disappointment with a humorous reference to herself as a barren filly “who yearns for the time when our intimacies will not suffer long interruptions, and the raptures I share with you, my husband, will result in a flesh-and-blood image of our love.”

Twice, after his return, she’d thought she was going to have a baby. The pregnancies had proven false, but right up to the day when her mind stopped functioning she’d been certain they would have children in due time.

* * * *

Nature’s delay had turned out to be the only decency in that hour when Sykes and George had crossed Wucumma Creek. God alone knew how much more might have happened if a child had been playing near its mother…

Having bathed Temple and clumsily combed her hair, Webb led her around the wagon. Ethel Tomberlin was a sturdy silhouette, bending to feed mesquite sticks to the fire on which she had the bean pot heating.

Tobe Loudermilk was muttering in his usual surly tones from the shadows beyond the fire. “I’m thirsty, woman. My gullet’s as dry as the drop-off to hell.”

“That’s where you’ll go pronto if you don’t shut up,” Ethel said. “You’ve had your ration.”

“I reckon it’s all right with you for one man to waste water on baths while ’tother man dies of thirst.”

Ethel straightened up, shaking a gnarled thorny stick at him as if nothing would please her more than to use it. “We been out nigh a week now, Mr. Loudermilk, and if I had my druthers we’d be spending it without your stinking company! Just too bad for us, I say, that your actually seeing them white and black devils has made you so important to Cameron.”

Tobe hawked a wad of phlegm from his throat and spat. “Ain’t so sure I’d haul off and leave now, if I had the chance. They’s five thousand dollars in stolen money out yonder ahead of us somewhere now, you know.”

Ethel snorted her disgust with the man, turning as she heard Webb and Temple approach.

“Supper in about five minutes, Webb.” Ethel squatted at the fire. “Beans again. We’ll finish off the pot tonight before they turn sour.”

Webb nodded. With a gentle pressure of his hands, he eased Temple to a sitting position near the fire. Then he walked over to Tobe Loudermilk. The big, bullet-headed man had already scooted back. He seemed always to seek shadows when more than one person was near him.

“I’m sorry you heard Clyde and me talking about the money Sykes and George stole from the stagecoach passenger, Tobe.”

“Got ears. Can’t blame a man for having ears.”

“I suppose not. But he can be blamed for the ideas he lets grow in his head.”

Tobe sat with burly arms wrapped around his knees. He muttered several words under his breath, then whined, “We’re all in this together. Wouldn’t be fair, you keeping all the money. You owe me a cut.”

“We’re still a long way from the men who have the money, Tobe.”

“But you’ve thought about the money.”

“I’m human, and I don’t deny that I have. Five thousand federal currency is real wealth these days. But if we get our hands on it, Tobe, it’ll go to the authorities. Maybe they’ll wind up deciding we’re all due a cut. But the money means less than nothing to me, compared with my other reasons. Right now I advise you to think as I think. Don’t let thoughts of the money get you into worse hot water, Tobe.”

“You think you a king or something? You threatening me?”

“You’re damned right I am,” Webb told him, “and you’d better remember it.”

The clop-clop of a horse’s hoofs came to them, which would be Clyde Tomberlin returning from the evening tour around the camp site.

Webb turned on his heel from the prospector. He met Clyde over beyond the wagon. As Clyde dismounted he shook his head. “Never been this far south before. Knew the country was rugged, but had to see all this sand and cactus and busted up mounts of rock to believe it. Still, there’s a peon scratching a living out of a little valley up ahead.”

“Did you see him—talk to him? Any sign of Sykes and George?”

Clyde hitched up his pants and dusted the saddle creases out of his behind. “Too near full dark,” he said. “I saw smoke, sidled up a promontory, and saw his place from a distance. No activity. But Sykes and George might have found the place the same way I did. Only sign of human habitation we’ve come on in the last two days. Maybe the scalawag and nigger have already killed themselves a greaser family for the price of a tortilla.”

A restless stirring went through Webb’s body. “With Sykes shot up, they may stay put for a while.”

“If that’s the case, they’ll be there tomorrow morning. I suggest you scout the place then.” Clyde scratched his reddish stubbled jaw. “’Course they may have passed without knowing a peon lived anywhere near. I didn’t go in to see, not by myself.”

CHAPTER 12

As Clyde had said, the peon’s anemic oasis was hemmed in by bluffs whipped bald by the winds, and buckled masses of stone that stood like jagged teeth against the early dawn.

Webb had kept the place under surveillance while the final stars were still glimmering, and as he watched from a windswept ledge the lightening sky brought out details of the pathetic homestead. Smoke began to rise from the windowless adobe squatting beyond the patch of scraggly corn. The nanny goats and clanking of their bells drifted up to Webb. A rooster added his raucous crowing, and a burro brayed for breakfast.

Webb’s eyes searched for a pair of horses and a pack mule. The peon’s outbuildings consisted of a rickety shed, and a rough cover supported by two unhewn posts over the well. The burro and goats were in a long, narrow pole corral a hundred yards from the house. No other animals were down there, and Webb didn’t see any other nearby choice for Sykes and George to have tethered their animals.

A man came out of the house. He was stocky, sturdy, with slightly bowed legs. He wore tattered white pantaloons and a sombrero with the brim broken and flopping down in back.

Webb continued to wait, not ruling out the bare possibility that George might have taken the animals and gone on, leaving Sykes behind. It depended on several factors, including the nature and condition of Sykes’s wound.

The mestizo seemed to have enjoyed his breakfast. He stretched comfortably, scratched under his arms, and plodded through the corn to the legume patch beyond. He examined his chickpeas, gourds, garlic, and cultivated rows of cactus. The cactus yielded pulque, Webb surmised, the simplest alcoholic drink on earth to make. A man had but to tap the heart of the plant, collect the juice, and forget it until it had naturally fermented to the desired potency.

The peon returned to the house and picked up a wooden hoe that had been propped against the mud brick wall. A woman came out, about the same stature as the man. Her long black hair caught the first glint of the sun. She and the man talked for a moment. He pinched her cheek. They scuffled playfully. Her squeal of pleasure drifted up to Webb. As she turned to go inside, the man slapped her across the rump.

Two barefoot little girls, one lugging a clay pot with both hands, appeared from the shadow of the house and set off for the goat pen to do the milking.

Webb’s mouth tightened with disappointment. Everything was entirely too normal. The presence of intruders was ruled out. If Sykes and George had been here at all, they’d pushed on.

Webb scrambled off the rock. Duchess was nuzzling the scanty tufts beneath a stunted, twisted aspen. Webb mounted and let the mare pick her way along a shallow break in the rocks that formed a natural trail.

When the mestizo heard the sounds of a walking horse he stopped hoeing and raised to full height. He backed out of the cornfield and said something over his shoulder—warning his wife that a stranger was coming, Webb knew, and to make sure the gun was loaded.

The silent peon leaned on his hoe until Webb halted Duchess at the edge of the hard-packed house yard.

“Que tal, amigo?” Webb said pleasantly.

The mestizo studied him a moment and seemed to relax a little. “Buenos dias.”

Webb made no move to dismount. He hadn’t yet been invited.

“Hablo Ingles, señor?” Webb asked.

“Si. Yes. At least a little.”

“You have a well-worked place here.”

“Yes, I work hard.”

Webb sensed a movement behind the dark square of a house window. The woman was waiting and watching, a gun in her hands, alert to the slightest of signals from her husband.

The two little girls had forgotten about milking. Webb caught them sticking their heads around the corner of the house to stare. He couldn’t help smiling. “You have two beautiful children, señor, and I guess I’m a strange sight to them.”

“It isn’t every day a tall Americano rides into our yard,” the peon said. He raked Webb over once more with his eyes. “Will you not get down, señor?”

“Thank you.” Webb peeled his right leg across the saddle horn and dropped to the ground. “My name is Webb Cameron. I come from far up north, from Wucumma Creek.”

Webb offered his hand, and after the barest hesitation the peon shook it. “I am called Manuel Lopez, Mr. Cameron. It is a common enough name, and this place has little. But you are welcome. If you wish water for yourself and the beautiful black mare, it is yours.”

“Nothing could pay me greater honor than your sincere welcome,” Webb said. “I thank you doubly.”

Lopez leaned his hoe against his shoulder and popped his hands together. “Chola! Pelita! Fetch Mr. Cameron a cool gourd of water. Draw it fresh from the well.” The two little girls dashed out of sight, and Lopez said to Webb, “I have good water, señor. A fine well. It is how I make things grow here.”

Lopez was young, on the shy side of thirty, Webb guessed, except for his eyes. The old, patient eyes had deep crow’s feet wrinkling the brown skin at their corners. Webb wondered fleetingly about this man, how he’d come to be here. Lopez and his woman had probably been willing to gamble their lives for freedom from serfdom, and had sought security in a place so poor that no one else would bother with it.

“I have a covered wagon coming behind me,” Webb said. “I’ll pay well for water for our barrels.”

“It will be so,” Lopez nodded.

The little girls rushed up, stringy black hair tumbling about their round faces. The one carrying the splashing gourd held it up to Webb with both hands. “I’m Pelita,” she giggled.

“Thank you, Pelita.”

They and their father watched as Webb drank the water to the last drop. “You are right, Lopez. Not a taint of alkali in that water.”

Lopez gave a pleased smile. “I dig deep. Many days. Just when I’m about to call the…how you say…the diving rod a liar, I strike the water.”

“How about grain? Have you any com to spare? We’re not on short rations yet, but we picked up an extra mouth on the trail. I’ll pay in gold.”

Lopez groaned, a sigh. “The touch of gold would warm my flesh, but the other two bought the little com we don’t need for ourselves.”

Webb caught a breath. “A white man and a big black one?”

“Si. Yes. A dried-up peanut and a potato. Do you know them?”

Webb seemed not to hear the question. “How far ahead of me are they?”

“Half a day, or less. They came yesterday when the sun was about halfway down.”

Holding the mare’s reins, Webb began slapping the loose ends across his other palm. “That’s good. That’s very good. They cause you any trouble?”

Lopez shook his head. “They looked like trouble, but what is here to interest them? The white one had a bad place in his side. He had dried blood and pus on his shirt, and every time he stopped moving the flies gathered on it. They stopped and bought water and a little food, and then they went.”

Webb heard his wagon coming down the draw. He and Lopez watched as Clyde Tomberlin guided the rig alongside the corn patch and brought it to a stop. Tobe Loudermilk was walking; Ethel had ridden beside her husband.

The sight of a woman on the wagon seat reassured Lopez. He walked to the doorway of his adobe. “I think it is all right, Rosa.”

From inside came the faint click of a rifle being taken off full cock. The woman took time to put the gun away, then materialized in the doorway.

Barefoot, her sturdy young body clad in a shapeless dress of coarse cotton, Señora Lopez was not beautiful. But she wasn’t unattractive. She was clean. Her movements had a natural grace and femininity. The sensitivity of her full mouth, and her large dark eyes lent charm to the broad mestizo face that would otherwise have been homely.

Ethel and Clyde were clambering from the wagon, Tobe Loudermilk shuffling behind them. Introductions were made all around as the travelers and the mestizos clustered in the yard.

Ethel’s hearty voice and smile soon gave the gathering the air of a neighborly visit instead of a meeting of strangers. She was right at home with these people, and instantly taken with the two little girls. She tousled their heads and goosed them in the ribs with a forefinger, to their giggling delight.

Lopez suggested they unlash the water kegs from the sides of the wagon and empty them in his garden prior to filling with fresh water from the well. The men tackled the job, Tobe complaining until Clyde told him to shut up or face a long walk with a dry gullet.

The two women drifted inside the adobe, Rosa Lopez eager with questions about places beyond her own.

Chola and Pelita waited with childish cunning until no adult eyes were trained on them, then they slipped across the yard and tumbled beneath the wagon. They lay on their stomachs, giggling breathlessly for a moment. By looking past the horses’ legs they would watch the house.

Pelita rolled over and stared up at the bottom of the wagon. “It is so big, Chola. A big house on wheels.”

“Made of cloth,” Chola said. “The gringos live in it.”

“They are funny people.”

“Si!”

They put their hands over their mouths and giggled at the strange ways of the gringos. Pelita squirmed around and crawled to the wagontail. She thrust her head into the sunlight to look up. She wriggled back to Chola, who’d sat up, and said, “I can get in from the back without anybody seeing me.”

Chola was seven, a year older than her sister. But it was always Pelita who planned the games. This one, like so many others that Pelita could think up to get them into trouble, caused Chola’s brown face to lighten a shade.

“No, no, Pelita! You mustn’t…”

Pelita put her hand across her sister’s mouth. “Shhhh! They’ll hear you. We’ll get in trouble, and it will all be your fault.” Pelita drew her hand away. “You don’t want to get us a whipping, do you?”

Pelita could be so confusing. Chola turned her head and looked at the house, wishing mama would call them.

Pelita was again scrambling to the rear of the wagon. Chola breathed a sigh, and could think of no choice but to follow. Anyway, if Pelita explored this gringo mystery, what harm?

Chola hung back and watched Pelita stand up at the rear of the wagon. Pelita’s head and shoulders disappeared. The wagon creaked faintly as Pelita took hold to pull herself up. Chola watched Pelita’s feet lift from the ground.

“Chola!” Pelita’s quick gasp came down through the floorboards. “Quick! Come and see!”

Chola banged her head as she floundered out. She clambered to her feet, holding her crown. Then her mouth fell open and a sudden cold wind seemed to strike her. Pelita had pushed back the canvas flaps and wedged herself into a precarious perch on the tailgate. Pelita had her face against the huge cage the gringos had built in there. She was staring at the golden woman who sat inside in a strange silence.

“Is—she dead?” Chola said through chattering teeth.

“Maybe she is an angel they have caught,” Pelita said.

“Madre mia!” Chola crossed herself. Her knees buckled. She grabbed the tailgate for support, almost dislodging Pelita. “Come away, Pelita! Please come away—”

Pelita giggled, having frightened Chola beyond expectation.

“You are silly, Chola.”

“No, no! We’ve seen enough!”

“Don’t you know people can’t catch angels? You’re just a rabbit, Chola. Here…watch this!”

Chola moaned and half closed her eyes as Pelita wedged her hand and forearm between two of the willow withes.

“Come on up, Chola,” Pelita teased. “Try it yourself.”

“Not I,” Chola gasped, even though she knew her sister would taunt her for a week about her cowardice. “And if you don’t get down, I’ll call mama!”

“Nyah, nyah, nyah,” Pelita said. “All you think about is calling mama. Come on. Just your fingers. You can pull them out if the pretty woman moves. She can’t get out of the cage. She can’t hurt…”

So quickly that neither child had actually seen the movement, the woman had grabbed Pelita’s wrist with both her hands.

Chola was totally paralyzed for a moment. She saw Pelita’s sudden struggles to pull her arm out of the cage, but the woman inside wouldn’t let go. Her lips moved like pieces of wood breaking. Strange sounds came from her mouth. She tugged at Pelita’s arm as if she wanted Pelita in there with her. Thrashing, held fast against the cage, Pelita screamed. One long, piercing scream that would never stop.

Chola clapped her hands over her ears and turned and ran. She thought she was running for the safety of her house. Instead she felt long thin leaves slashing her face. She stumbled, fell, and lay sobbing in the middle of her father’s com patch.

CHAPTER 13

Webb’s response to Pelita’s desperate outcry was automatic and instant. He whirled about at the well, where Clyde was drawing a bucket on the creaky wooden winch. The house stood between him and the wagon, but he was already running even as the terror-stricken scream froze Clyde, Tobe, and Lopez.

Crossing the side yard, he glimpsed Ethel and Rosa Lopez bursting from the house. The child’s screams, which seemed to come from inside the wagon, were affecting the team. The horses were champing their bits and beginning to struggle in the harness.

“Don’t let the team bolt, Ethel!”

He was aware of her hurrying to the head of the wagon. “Whoa, boys! Easy there, now—”

He reached the tailend of the wagon and a wordless exclamation was jarred out of him. He sprang and grabbed Pelita. She was dangling over the tailgate, her struggles having knocked her off her perch. Her full weight bore down on her arm, which was stretched across the tailgate with Temple clutching the tiny wrist inside the cage.

Pelita clawed at Webb with her free hand as he lifted her and relieved the pressure on her arm. She was out of her head with panic, and he didn’t waste useless words. With one arm firm about her writhing body, he stabbed his free hand into the cage.

Temple’s fingers were stronger than the willow withes that made her cell. Webb gritted his teeth as he pried them loose. “Temple, please… No Temple… Let the child go!”

He fell back half a step as Pelita’s wrist slipped free. She kicked and beat at him with her small fists. Webb eased her to the ground, and she ran with outstretched arms to her mother who scooped her with invective Spanish streaming from her lips.

With the knowledge that the child wasn’t seriously hurt, Webb thought only of Temple. His knuckles were white as he leaned over the tailgate and took hold of a couple of willow rods like a man might clutch the bars in a jail.

“Temple, you knew…you were aware! This is Webb, your husband. You know me too! Say it, Temple!”

Words stuck in his throat. Hope was like a burning prayer in his mind. He watched lines of pain twist her face. Her mouth gawped like that of a dying fish. For the briefest tick of time her eyes were raw with agony. Then she retreated, her mind recoiling and plummeting into the dark nothingness where there was no torment.

“Temple, no!… By God, I won’t let you…”

He was ripping the door of the cage open. Clyde was beside him, grabbing his arm. “It’s no use, Cameron. She can’t see or hear you. She doesn’t know you’re here.”

He looked at Clyde with something in his eyes close to blind hatred for everything outside his own area of suffering, slid his hands from the cage, and drew in a long steadying breath.

“Anyhow,” Clyde said tonelessly, “we got a fresh problem. Mrs. Lopez has grabbed her young’uns and hightailed it to the house. I think, Cameron…in fact I’m damned sure we’ve wore out our welcome.”

Webb followed the motion of Clyde’s eyes. Lopez was standing at the edge of his corn patch with an old buffalo gun in his hands.

“You didn’t tell me what was hidden in the wagon, señor.”

“She’s my wife. She’s sick and…”

“She is dangerous.” Lopez made a studied motion with the gun. “Take your water, be thankful I let you do that, and go, Señor Cameron.”

“Lopez…”

“Now, señor! Or I change my mind.”

“He ain’t in a reasoning mood right now,” Clyde murmured at Webb’s shoulder. “Better do as he says.”

Webb didn’t relent. He seemed to be wrestling with something inside of himself.

“For Temple’s sake, if not our own,” Clyde added.

Without speaking, Webb turned. Tobe Loudermilk was slinking at the rear wheel of the wagon. “You too, Loudermilk! Get to the well and grab hold of a cask.”

For once Loudermilk seemed anxious to do his share. In a few minutes they had the casks loaded, Lopez keeping them under constant threat with his gun.

Webb hesitated before climbing on Duchess, as if, inwardly, he hadn’t settled the issue. On the wagon seat, Clyde cracked the whip. “H’ah!” The wagon moved in a bend around the garden space, and Webb followed slowly on the mare.

The trail climbed gradually around a rocky dune. When they were out of sight of the house, Webb kneed Duchess up beside the wagon seat “Hold up, Clyde.”

Clyde rocked back on the reins and halted the team. “Something still spooking you, Cameron?”

“The child…” Webb tightened the bit on Duchess and looked in the direction of the peon’s place, “the child almost worked a miracle, Clyde. I can’t leave it like this. Temple didn’t hurt the child. She wouldn’t hurt her. But the child might do a lot for Temple. I’m going back.”

“You’re crazy,” Tomberlin said flatly.

Ethel stirred on the seat beside her husband. “I don’t reckon he is. The young’un’s the first thing Temple’s reacted to. I got a hunch what you’re thinking, Cameron. I say you ought to give it a try.”

“You’re both plain loco,” Clyde told them. “Lopez will go trigger-happy—with one more nudge.”

“I don’t think so,” Webb said. “He’s had time to cool down a little. I think he may talk before he shoots.”

“And he may not.”

“I’ll have to chance it,” Webb replied. He met Clyde’s sullen stare. “Alone, if that relieves you any, Clyde. If more than one of us went back Lopez might get the wrong idea.”

“He’s razor-sharp with just one idea right now,” Clyde said, and spat across the wagon wheel. “How long are we supposed to wait here?”

“Until I come back with the child.”

“And if you get shot instead?”

“If you hear shooting, don’t stick your own necks out for nothing. Just pick a way back north.” He looked at the canvas canopy for a moment. It rippled faintly as a dry, searing breeze stirred. “Do the best you can for her. You can have my place and all that I have, with Tobe for my witness. Use what you can realize on it to find someone who’ll feed and wash her.”

Webb wheeled Duchess quickly and turned her up and across the dune. At the crest she was blowing just a little. Webb looked over the Lopez place, lying slightly below him. It seemed unnaturally quiet. The family were all gathered in the house.

Dutchess picked her way down the dune. Webb stopped her about a hundred yards from the house and rose in the stirrups. “Lopez!”

Lopez stepped out of the house, his gun half raised to his shoulder. “I have nothing more to say to you, señor!”

With exaggerated gestures, which Lopez could not fail to see in detail, Webb unbuckled his gunbelt and lifted it and the holstered Remington up high. He stretched his arm out, opened his fingers, and heard the gun thud on the ground.

“I’m your friend, Lopez.”

“Then go away!”

“In the excitement we forgot the money for the water.” While he was speaking, Webb slid from the saddle. He drop-reined Duchess and moved toward the peon with long, quiet strides.

As the distance narrowed, Webb watched the buffalo gun creep up to firing position. His stomach began to knot. Dry-mouthed, he watch for the flash from the buffalo gun’s muzzle. But none of his uncertainty showed. His bold steps carried him into the yard. “Far enough, Señor Cameron!” The peon’s voice was tight to the point of breaking. “Drop the money. I don’t mind picking it up off the ground.”

Webb reached into his pocket and pulled out a silver dollar. It glinted as he tossed it. Lopez freed his right hand and caught it.

Beyond the peon, Rosa Lopez had come to the doorway. Both girls squeezed around her and pressed back against her thighs to stare at Cameron.

“I see the little girl got over her scare quickly,” Webb said.

“Pelita is too fearless for her own good.” Lopez punctuated the words by crossing himself.

Webb tilted his head. “What’s this, muy bueno amigo? You make a familiar sign. You’re a Christian.”

“I also believe in protecting what is mine.”

Webb nodded. “The woman in the cage is mine, Lopez. I believe you’re a man who’ll understand that. I’d give my life to bring her back. The two men who passed here also came to my house. They found her alone. They violated her body, and her mind couldn’t stand it. That is how she came to be in the cage.”

Webb believed he saw a small change come to the peon’s eyes. Lopez was wordless for a moment. Webb’s words became a torrent. He told Lopez how he had returned home, found Temple, made the cage, tracked Sykes and George.

“While I was in the war,” Webb continued, “I saw a few cases of men blacked out because their minds wouldn’t hold all they’d seen and endured in battle. I saw one or two recover when a second shock jarred them loose from the first. So you see, amigo, from the moment I found her I haven’t given up the hope of saving her. She was a tender and kind woman. If she’d been less tender, she might not have suffered in the way she did.” Webb’s right hand lifted, the fingers pressed his temple. “I’ve hoped that when I caught the two men I could build a shock that would start her on the way back to reason. It didn’t happen often in war, but it was the only chance I could see. Now I see another…” his eyes strayed to Pelita.

“You ask too much, señor!”

“She did react to the little girl, Lopez. I ask only that you take the child to my wagon. Bring your gun. Protect your baby. I swear that a hand won’t be raised against you. But let the brave little girl try to get the sick woman to talk back to her.”

The peon’s earthy brow furrowed with indecision. His head made a slow negative movement “Señor, I’m sorry for your woman, but I won’t…”

“Manuel!” Rosa Lopez’s voice was quiet but cutting. Both men looked at her. She took Pelita’s hand and marched forward. “We will go to Señor Cameron’s wagon.”

Pelita enjoyed her status as a key figure in this mysterious problem that so concerned adults. Being a natural show-off and daredevil, reassured by the presence of her parents, she stood against the tailgate and lifted up her small face fearlessly. Her mother’s hand touched her shoulder. “Speak to the pretty lady, Pelita.”

“Hello, pretty lady.”

“Is that all you can think to say?”

“I have a doll, pretty lady. Mama made it with husks from the corn.”

Webb stood close beside Lopez, his hands curling into hard knots at his sides. Ethel and Clyde were ranged behind the peon and wife, holding their breath. Tobe Loudermilk sulked out of sight in the shadow of the wagon, as if seeking a poor substitute for the satisfying isolation he’d known in his years of desert wandering.

For Webb, everyone seemed to dissolve except the woman in the cage. His eyes burned as he looked at her. His brain throbbed with the intensity of his silent urging, his willing her to open her mouth and speak.

He heard the child’s chatter rise on a humorous note as she told of the time papa had milked the nanny and a horsefly had stung nanny and nanny had kicked up her heels at papa.

The words might have been addressed to a stone. Pelita fell silent, lower lip pouting. “She don’t like me.”

Ethel went to one knee and put her arm about Pelita’s shoulder. “Yes, she does, child.”

“She didn’t even smile.”

“But you can make her smile. I know you can.”

Ethel scooped up the little girl and held her above the level of the tailgate, close to the cage. “Now you can see her much better, and she can see you.”

“I don’t like the way she looks, not any more,” Pelita said. “I want to go home.”

“Hush that,” Rosa Lopez admonished. “Have we come this far for nothing? Show her the church and steeple and all the people, little one.”

With a sigh, Pelita put her hands together. She recited as she folded and arranged her fingers in a church-and-steeple, then opened the doors to see all the people.

Temple’s unawareness rebuffed Pelita. The girl stretched in Ethel’s arms, took hold of the door of the cage, and rattled it. “Don’t you know anything?”

“No, child.” Ethel lowered Pelita with a weariness in her movements. “I don’t reckon she does.”

Lopez stirred. He’d stood with the stock of his gun on the ground, crossed hands resting on the muzzle. He lifted the weapon to the crook of his arm. “I’m sorry, Señor Cameron. It’s no use. We’ve done what we can. Now it is time that we go.”

Webb slowly pulled his eyes from Temple’s frozen countenance. He looked at Lopez as if he’d only half heard what the peon said.

“You can at least know that we tried, señor…we all tried.”

Webb didn’t speak for another moment, gathering himself inside. “Yes…we tried. I’ll never forget that I met a gentleman and his lady here, Lopez.”

“Vaya con Dios, señor.” His voice was low with sadness. He picked up Pelita and handed the gun to Rosa so that he could put an arm about her. He seemed to want them in physical contact with him for the walk home, as if they were gifts that made him the luckiest man alive.

CHAPTER 14

Yeehaw melted out of the night, suddenly present at the fireless Seminole resting place in a shallow arroyo. Yeehaw’s arrival brought Micco and the others leaping to their feet.

“The wagon is not far ahead,” Yeehaw reported. “They have camped for the night.”

Micco laughed a note of joy and rubbed his palms together. Sopchoppy, Alligator, and Spotted Deer were imitative shadows in the chill moonlight.

“We are done with running!” Alligator shuffled his feet in a caricature of the untiring Seminole trot.

“I’ll drive the wagon and let the horses do the running—to Mexico!” Sopchoppy exulted.

“Shut up,” Micco said. “We don’t have the wagon yet.” His manner had grown serious. He hunkered, and with that motion as a signal the others did likewise. They sat in a small circle facing each other. His warriors controlled their itchy impatience, waiting for Micco to speak.

Micco turned the problem over in his mind. They had at last spotted the wagon just before sundown. The trail had led past a peon’s house, which had been the subject of a war council in the rocks half a mile from the place. Micco had vetoed Yeehaw’s proposal to attack. The peon and his woman were doubtless well armed, and that adobe was a brick fortress. In the face of this was the fact that only two rifles and four cartridges remained in the possession of the Seminoles.

“We could burn his corn,” Yeehaw had suggested.

“Would that give us food or get us to Mexico?” Micco had countered. “No. We waste no time or leave Seminole blood here. If the wagon stopped at the stranger’s farm, it has gone on now. And it is the whites who have wasted time. We’ll stick to the plan. We are gaining. We’ll catch the wagon soon!”

Now they had caught up with it. And Micco was trying hard to think what to do. Whites had a habit of trekking with guns hanging onto them, scabbarded in their saddles, veritable arsenals.

We need more cunning, Micco thought, than the foolish serpent we ate in the rocks two…or was it three?…nights ago. Silently he cursed his mind for being so fogged with hunger and exhaustion. He must think…think… Their lives depended on it.

His bones ached even when he turned his head to look at Yeehaw. Dried sweat and dust made burning hairline threads across the skin of his neck.

“Do they sleep, Yeehaw?”

“All but one.”

Micco felt an inward groan. He wasn’t surprised, but he’d had the vague hope that the very emptiness of the country would lull the whites into not setting a watch.

“Which one has the first watch, Yeehaw?”

“The tall one,” Yeehaw said.

Micco grunted. In his mind he saw the tall, erect man astride the fiery black mare in the waning daylight hour when the Seminoles had dogged the wagon from a distance.

Micco couldn’t say why, but a squirming discomfort had plagued him from the moment he’d seen the man. He’d singled out the man for study, the way he moved and handled the horse, constantly probing the terrain with his eyes and assessing it.

“Be silent and unseen shadows,” Micco had cautioned his men, “or that tall one will discover us.”

Micco scratched his crotch, where sweat, dust and body oil had left an itchy film. His eyes glinted in the moonlight. He didn’t like to have any man affect his instincts as the tall man had.

His warriors were waiting, but Micco’s mind couldn’t cut through to an answer worthy of a leader. Four cartridges… He was assailed with the memory of the bullets that had been shot off in the air to celebrate those first victorious raids. His gaunt young face, dirty lank black hair falling about it, was an impassive mask for his uncertainties.

“Is there cover, Yeehaw?”

“They’re camped in a flat, open place,” Yeehaw replied. “Some rocks are above them, to the west. We could pick them off, if we had bullets. But we can’t get in close without great risk.”

Micco’s eyes hooded. “Then we move in, and wait. If you can’t go into the fox’s den, you bait the fox out.”

A grumbling passed among his followers. Micco didn’t need the surly reminder. They couldn’t wait long. Without water, and with the last of the horsemeat rotten in their bellies they had one more day at best.

“Save your breath,” he growled, “and get on your feet, squaws. Haven’t I promised you the white man’s wagon and all the water and food it carries?”

He clambered out of the arroyo. He knew they would fall in behind him. They had no other choice.

* * * *

In the early morning hour when the watch changed, Ethel Tomberlin stirred in her sleep and her senses slowly roused. She heard the tapering-off of Clyde’s brief spasm of coughing. The sound had awakened her. She guessed that Clyde had started coughing when Webb rousted him to stand watch.

From under the wagon where she’d bedded down, Ethel looked at the night sky. The desert stars glittered like chips of ice. She was grateful for the warmth of the blanket.

Ethel’s ears caught a little of the low mumbling between Clyde and Webb Cameron. Clyde was talking about Tobe Loudermilk. He was saying that Tobe had developed a real scheming look from the time he’d heard about the five thousand dollars Sykes and George were carrying from the stagecoach robbery.

She looked across twenty yards of moonlit sand to the mound that was Tobe’s sleeping figure, and wondered if the overgrown desert rat was also awake and listening to Clyde’s comments.

She didn’t understand Clyde’s greater than normal distaste for the prospector. Was it because Clyde didn’t want to admit something that was deep down inside of him? Did Clyde sometimes wish he could turn his back on it all, the way Tobe Loudermilk had?

The low talk faded. Cameron was turning in, but the watch would continue as it had every night after that very first night when Temple had wandered away from the cage.

Ethel heard the long sigh from Cameron that welcomed sleep. He could get by on less sleep than anyone she knew. He never showed how tired he was. He had control over himself that was almost frightening. She remembered a saying that hot fire makes strong steel.

It had in Cameron’s case.

But hot fire can take out the temper, too, Ethel thought. And Clyde had never gotten over the fact that he’d discovered fear within himself on that long-ago night in Kansas. That was the difference in the two men, her Clyde and Webb Cameron. Cameron had never disdained himself because he was subject to the fears of all mortal men. He accepted fear, faced it, controlled it.

Ethel heard Clyde cough again, off there in the darkness. Not as young as he used to be, and acclimated to four walls and a roof, Clyde had caught a little cold sleeping on the ground these last several nights.

I’m wide awake now, Ethel thought, I could stand watch as well as a man.

She half raised, then she fell back. At home it was natural for her to take hold when Clyde was slow or reluctant. But out here, home was something that seemed to belong to another person’s lifetime. The mind acted up out here, dredging up unsettling questions and thoughts.

Ethel stirred restlessly in her blanket. She was nagged by the feeling that she hadn’t used the past years well, that she’d used them to control a man because she was afraid she couldn’t hold him in any other way. Did the fact of owning the best ranch in the Flats really mean so much to Clyde? Or did he strut a little and put on an air of importance to cover an emptiness in him?

He was an ordinary man, really. He would never have risen above the ordinary without her; but he might have been more comfortable inside himself. Who could say, when you got right down to it, what it was that made a man ordinary? Clyde might have bulled himself to the top if he’d had a fragile porcelain doll depending on him. Instead in his house and out in his fields he had always been a big efficient horse, with a shoulder stuck in his way for him to lean on.

“Why are you rushing in and grabbing the rifle, Clyde?” Ethel seemed to hear the words as if they’d actually been spoken this instant instead of a night in Kansas years ago. Her eyes snapped open. Her lips silently repeated the two-way conversation that had taken place that night in the first cabin they’d ever owned.

“How come any man grabs his rifle, woman?” he’d snarled. “I’m going to shoot with it.”

“Clyde…”

“You better get out, Ethel. Go to your uncle’s place. Them sonsabitches might burn the house. The Timmerman boy says they saddled up and got them some torches.”

“What is this, Clyde, what’s happened?”

“I’m going to shoot me a couple of bastards before they string me up.”

“String you…Clyde! Dear God, am I going crazy?”

“Please, Ethel. There’s no time. Just get moving while you’ve still got the chance.”

“But I’ve got to know… Why are they after you, Clyde?”

“All right. I’d rather you heard it from me anyhow. They’re figuring to hang me for raping the Wakebury girl.”

“Lissa?”

“There ain’t but one. Her daddy may be the biggest man in this town. He may think his daughter is an angel, but he just don’t know. That little bitch is hot for anything in pants. Early tonight her daddy found her naked in their carriage house. Whoever had been with her had skedaddled in time. She bawled and screamed and said a man had dragged her in there and raped her, and her daddy said who was it, and she had to tell him a name. She was in a real bad mess, so she told him the first name that came to her. It happened to be mine.”

“Did you do it, Clyde?”

“I ought to bust you one for even asking!” He’d looked her up and down. “You may not believe this, but Lissa Wakebury’s hated my guts because I wouldn’t bed her. She wanted it. She practically came out and asked me. I told her I was a married man, with plenty waiting for me at home.”

Ethel had struggled to keep her faith in him intact, but he’d looked and acted guilty. His flimsy story had sounded to her like a hurried explanation offered by a frightened, cornered man. She’d known the lusty wildness of his passion, and it hadn’t seemed possible that he could scorn the beautiful Lissa Wakebury for no other reason than to remain true to the likes of his wife.

If he hadn’t been in the carriage house…then who? But that hadn’t meant he’d raped Lissa in the strictest sense of the word. Maybe Lissa had met him and teased him a little too far.

Having excused him she’d said, “I’m still your wife, Clyde. You can always depend on me.” (And it wouldn’t matter that she was robust and awkward, with a big peasant’s face which she hated every time she looked into a mirror. She’d have her man for keeps.)

“Ethel, I’m telling you for the last time—they’re coming. Liquored up. A mob. Hungry for a hanging.”

“They won’t hang you, Clyde, because they won’t find you.”

“The hell they won’t! They’ll spread out and scour the country. I wouldn’t make two miles. No. I thought about it. I won’t be dragged out of a ditch where I’ve taken cover like a rabbit. And I won’t be hung. I’ll make my stand right here, in my own house. They’ll have to cut me down with bullets, and the sonsabitches will leave some widows before it’s done!”

She’d pleaded with everything that was in her for him to think again, to do it her way. In the end she’d prevailed.

He’d refused her request to hit her hard on the cheek, and she’d gritted her teeth and smashed her face against the edge of a door jamb. She’d hidden him among her dresses in a clothespress, and left the wardrobe standing innocently open.

When the night riders came she’d met them with the side of her face so swollen that the left eye was completely shut. She’d told convincing lies about Clyde going out of his mind, grabbing a gun, slugging her out of the way, and heading for his brother’s place. So the night riders had charged off in a body, and Clyde and Ethel had slipped away.

But now, years later, Ethel wasn’t sure they’d truly escaped. Clyde had yielded the leadership, and this was something a man might recover from another man but never from a woman.

She closed her eyes on the desert stars. What if she’d stood beside Clyde that night in Kansas instead of grabbing the chance to tower over him? Yes, he might have died, and she with him. But looking back she wasn’t so sure. Less than a dozen town hotheads had formed the mob. She and Clyde might have held them off until cooler citizens and the law arrived. The truth, whatever it was, might have come out.

In any event she wouldn’t be out here tonight, wishing to God she could turn the clock back.

Her tossing and turning told Tobe Loudermilk that the big woman with the hacked-off iron hair was awake. He guessed that she, too, had been roused by her husband’s coughing when Cameron changed the guard, and he wished she’d settle down and go back to sleep. He didn’t like to have people around him, especially at night when they couldn’t be seen.

Tobe was relaxed only when he was alone. Even with a poke scratched together he would hang back until the supply situation was desperate, forcing him into a town or an inhabited place. Walled-in rooms and streets writhing with a clutter of horses and men filled him with panic.

He never dreamed of striking a rich lode, as other prospectors did. In fact if he found a vein of pure gold or a creek with nuggets for pebbles he’d take out just the little he needed and never tell anyone. Gold was a means to an end; not to be valued for its own sake. As a consequence he didn’t like prospecting. He hated the necessity that drove him to it. If he had a goal or any ambition at all it was to live in a cave or shelter of piled-up rocks on some distant crag where no other human being would ever set foot. He was cut from the pattern of the true hermit.

Stuck in his present situation, his mental suffering had been intense. At first all he’d wanted was out. But Cameron hadn’t let him out. And now, for the first time in his life, Tobe was trying to lay plans of his own in that world where all other men were crazy.

More than anything, he wanted Cameron dead. He didn’t care how or by what means. The quicker, the better. Cameron was a relentless barricade against the future. Cameron had to die, and that’s all there was to it.

But the more he brooded, the more convinced Tobe became that he was also due everything he could get. He hated them all: Sykes, George, and Cameron. But they owed him a debt for all this suffering. And there was the five thousand dollars Sykes and George had stolen from the stagecoach passenger. Tobe’s head ached every time he tried to imagine such a staggering sum.

The time was nearing, he sensed, when things were going to get mighty unsettled. There’d be killing and confusion among his enemies. A man ought to have the chance to latch onto a fortune of a few hundred from the mass of wealth. It would set him up for a long time; it was a treasure to be buried near the cave he would pick.

But how?

The question spun through his brain until bursts of pain stabbed behind his eyeballs. If only he knew in advance where, when, and how the final set-to would shape up…

The best thing would be if they all killed themselves; then he could pick the money like a dog stripping a bone. It wouldn’t do for Sykes and George, carrying the money, to get away. But it would be just as bad or worse if Cameron killed them and got his hands on the money.

But figure this: Say that Sykes and George were tipped off that Cameron was closing in on them. They might even pay for that kind of information, and Tobe’s worries would be over before the shooting started.

But figure they didn’t; figure they might turn and fight. Two against two. The odds favored all of them getting hurt bad or killed, and a man might have the chance to slip in and get his hands on what he wanted.

But I got to take care, Tobe told himself. Already Cameron and that reddish big-chested bastard who was right now standing guard were giving him some narrow looks. He mustn’t let them guess what was on his mind. Just sit tight and wait. When they’ve located Sykes and George, then’s the time to make a break and dicker with the men Cameron was after.

Clyde Tomberlin thought he heard Loudermilk whispering. The man was either mumbling in his sleep or talking to himself without knowing he was doing so. Clyde squinted across the moon-spangled clearing. Tobe was motionless in his blanket. Clyde guessed the prospector had been dreaming.

Clyde could have done with a little more dreamtime himself, even though Cameron was taking most of the punishment. Got to hand him one thing, Clyde admitted to himself, he’s a man…a man like I used to think I was myself…

Clyde ambled across the clearing, flapping his arms across his chest to stir up his circulation against the desert chill. As he moved about and got his blood going, he felt less draggy from the cold that stuffed his head and made his throat raw.

Be daylight soon, he thought. This may be the day we catch up to Sykes and George.

A hollow formed in his stomach. A sick, dizzy feeling flashed over him as if he were teetering over a black bottomless hole. It left in its wake a mist of hot sweat all over him. His breath suddenly came short.

Jesus God, he thought, what’s the matter with me? Was I born yellow?

He’d drifted from the immediate vicinity of the camp site. Ahead, rising above him, a jumble of rocks were a mottled pattern of reflected moonlight and black shadow. He walked to the nearest low boulder, sat down, and looked at the sleeping camp. His hands rested on his knees. His fingers began to tighten. His teeth clamped slowly.

Now, by God, he cursed himself, just why do I feel the way I do? Am I gun shy? Afraid of dying? If he was, it was of no account. Any sane man feared those things.

This thing that he felt stemmed from a cause he couldn’t isolate. It was something on the dark edges of his mind…something that was a part of him, like his shadow. It despised him and wanted to torture him. It damn well succeeded, and he was sick with the thought that it might at some crucial time overpower him and turn him into a mewling infant for all men to see.

But his heartbeat gradually subsided. The wave of panic had left a pressure in his kidneys. He stood up and started to unbutton his fly to answer the call of nature.

He didn’t hear a sound, but he sensed a presence rising from the rocks directly behind him. He spun about, and glimpsed the impossible—a lean, nearly naked Indian leaping onto the boulder where he’d sat.

Before Clyde could take another breath, the Indian dove into him. The weight smashed Clyde back. His head struck a stone. A single explosion seemed to rip through his skull, then he felt nothing.

CHAPTER 15

The freedom from pain seemed to last only a moment. Little darts of agony started up behind Clyde’s eyes, then it seemed as if his head was going to fly into a million pieces. He set his teeth against the nausea that rolled up in his stomach. He cracked his lids, and light from the half-sun on the eastern horizon scalded his eyes. He clamped his forearms about his head, groaning as he rolled onto his side.

“Wake up, white man!” A bare foot kicked him in the ribs.

Clyde dragged himself half upright and fell back against a boulder. His surroundings steadied. As if wondering if they were real, he looked at the Indians standing before him in a tight semicircle and watching him in silence.

Five of them. Young bucks, but gaunt and with ribs showing like those of hungry old men. Their filth gave out a stink like that of an animal’s lair. Their lank hair hung in strands about sunken faces and eyes that weren’t altogether sane.

Clyde said the first thing that came to his mind. “How the hell’d you ever get here?”

They looked at each other, then at him. Maybe they didn’t understand English. He dragged himself up, and stood with his hands on the boulder supporting him. “You savvy the lingo?”

“Oh, yes,” the tallest buck answered. “We speak the language forced on us and taught in our schools.”

Clyde looked beyond the Indians. They’d dragged him much higher among the rocks. In the clearing below Cameron and Ethel were standing beside the wagon, talking earnestly and looking up in this direction.

“They know we have you,” the Indian said. “Now we’re letting them boil in their own thoughts for a little while.”

“What do you want?”

“I’m Micco,” the Indian informed him. “I lead these brave men. We have come from Oklahoma and been hunted halfway across Texas. Now we would ride a while. We shall take the wagon.”

Clyde squinted at Micco. Clyde’s head hurt so bad right now that he didn’t much care if he lived or died. “You can go to hell, far as I’m concerned.”

“We shall see. Now move. We go down.”

Cameron watched the cortege file down the rocky hillside. Clyde was in the lead, picking his way, holding onto boulders as his boots slipped now and then.

Standing beside Webb, Ethel made a sound that wasn’t quite a sob. “They’ve got him all right. Just like they hollered down and said.” She made a motion to go forward. Cameron grabbed her wrist.

“Easy, Ethel. We don’t want him to get killed.”

“From the looks of that pack, they’ve come to kill us all.”

Cameron swallowed slowly. He was inclined to agree. He counted two old rifles among the Indians, and guessed that lack of ammunition had kept the guns from going into action before this.

The procession paused at the edge of the small sandy mesa, two Indians each grabbing an arm and jerking Clyde back when he tried to break forward.

“They’re a bunch of renegades who want the wagon…” Clyde’s shout was broken off as the tallest Indian sprang and slapped him hard across the face.

“…and all that we got…”

A second hard blow snapped Clyde’s head around. He was silent long enough to spit some blood.

“…and if you give it up…”

This time the Indian hit Clyde in the mouth with his fist. Clyde sagged, supported by the Indians on either side of him holding his arms.

“…they’ll leave us dead.”

Micco’s hand flashed back. Clyde flinched. “Save your strength, you sonofabitch, I’ve said what I meant to say.”

Micco glowered at him, then turned to face Cameron across the hundred yards of clearing.

“I’m Micco, bravest of The People!”

“The People?” Cameron said. “What are Seminoles doing here?”

“We go to Mexico, and we ride. We walk no longer.” Webb kept his right palm dangling close to the Remington but didn’t touch the gun. “We also go to Mexico.”

“I care nothing for that,” Micco yelled. “We need the wagon more than you. It is right that we have it.”

Ethel’s hand on Cameron’s arm was an entreaty. “For God’s sake, Webb, be careful! Holding Clyde, they’ve got the upper hand. Maybe we can buy our way out with some grub and water.”

Cameron didn’t take his eyes off Micco. “I’d like to think you’re right, Ethel. But I think Clyde has faced up to the facts. If we start surrendering, we’ll end up dead.”

“What’s the parley?” Micco shouted. “Don’t try any tricks! And who is that hiding behind the wagon?”

“A prospector we picked up. He won’t hurt you.”

“None of you has the power to hurt us,” Micco said. “Drop your weapons and come forward with your hands raised.”

“Don’t do it, Cameron!” Clyde shouted. He thrashed, struggling to break free. The braves on either side of him slammed back and forth, staying on their feet with difficulty. A third Indian leaped on Clyde’s back and locked a forearm around Clyde’s throat Clyde bent backward and fell in a flurry of flying arms and legs.

Cameron ran forward, Ethel close beside him.

“Not another step, white man!” Micco crouched over Clyde who was now stretched on his back, Seminole hands and knees pinning his arms and legs. The tip of Micco’s dagger flashed close to Clyde’s throat.

Cameron stopped, thrust out an arm to keep Ethel from going farther. “All right, you’ve made your point. Ease off with the knife.”

The warriors hauled Clyde to his feet. He was dusty and rumpled, hardly able to stand on his feet. “Cameron…I’m a goner anyhow. So give it to the filthy dogs!”

“Enough!” Micco shook with rage. He stood with his bony chest heaving, wiping spittle from his mouth with his forearm. He succeeded in calming himself. “Now, you, tall one…we make no parley. I give you one chance only. Call the one from behind the wagon. Drop your gunbelt. Then I let all of you walk away.”

“First let the redhair go.”

Micco’s lips curled. “You think I’m so foolish? Without one of yours for a shield, you would shoot us down like the white devils you are.”

Webb stiffened. He searched their young, savage faces.

“Devils?” he asked. “If you believe in devils, do you dare attack us?”

“You are flesh and blood,” Micco said.

“But I…” for a moment Webb wasn’t able to force the words. He thought, God forgive me, Temple! “I have a demon,” he said. “I have a demon woman protecting me through all the miles of wilderness.”

Micco lifted his head and shouted laughter. He pointed at Ethel. “This is a demon woman?”

“No, I keep the demon caged inside the wagon. It wouldn’t do for her to roam loose. The breath of her eyes might start fires in the rocks or kill those I don’t wish to be killed.”

Micco’s warriors stirred behind him and looked at one another. Micco himself was wordless for a few seconds at this unforeseen development. He gently scratched his jaw with the dagger. “You’re a liar, white man!”

Webb made an openhanded gesture toward the wagon. “Then see for yourself. For your own sake, find out what you’re doing. A wise leader sees and knows, else his own men pay the price for his ignorance with their blood.”

Micco felt the sudden silence of his men. He waved Cameron’s words aside. “It’s but a wagon. In it we’ll ride to Mexico.”

“Have it your own way,” Webb said. “You’ll kill us, and then it will be too late. You’ll go to your own deaths.” Webb’s eyes raked the warriors and returned to Micco. “From the looks of your men, I’d say you haven’t been a wise leader. They bear the brand of many of your mistakes. You have them here in this desert dying of hunger. So make your last and biggest mistake, you ignorant fool who would lead warriors!”

A Seminole eased forward to stand at Micco’s right hand. “Where do you get this demon woman?”

“I don’t care to talk to you,” Webb said. “Micco, who is this jackass?”

“I’m Yeehaw. It means…”

“Wolf,” Webb said, “I’m not as stupid as this fool, who takes you to your death. And a fine wolf you are! Look at you. You couldn’t fight a chicken.”

Yeehaw smacked his chest with his fist. “I have killed men who insulted me less.”

“The hell with you,” Cameron said. “You’re a pack of yellow curs, and I’ll talk to you any way I like. It is I, not you, who has the demon woman for an ally.”

Yeehaw studied Webb’s mien of cool certainty, then sneaked a glance at Micco. “I would see this demon woman before we put our feet in a trap.”

Micco’s eyes seemed to penetrate Webb’s bearing more deeply than Yeehaw had. A thin smile touched Micco’s raw, thirst-blistered lips. “He sweats, Yeehaw, even though the morning hasn’t yet grown hot. He tries to turn us aside with a tale.”

Cameron’s head made a slow movement, as if expressing sympathy for ignorant children. “Very well, my savage young friend, you asked for it.”

With cool contempt he turned his back on Micco and called, “Loudermilk! Quit trying to hide behind a wagon wheel and do as I say.”

The bearish prospector crept into the open. The early sun gave his bald head the look of a smooth rock.

“Undo the ties and throw back the flaps,” Cameron directed, “so these stupid dogs can see for themselves.”

Loudermilk stood motionless, back hunched, arms dangling.

Cameron gritted his teeth. Couldn’t the fool understand a simple cue?

“Move, damn you!”

The lash of Webb’s voice broke Tobe’s stance. He backed to the wagon, at last summoning strength to tear his gaze from the Indians. He fumbled the straps loose and threw the flaps back out over the sides of the canopy, then ducked behind the wagon wheel with the movements of a burrowing animal.

An awed murmuring came from the Seminoles as the morning sun burst full across the cage. Temple couldn’t be seen in detail, but for Webb’s purpose the shadowed impression of an ivory-like woman with a glint of fire in her yellow hair was even better.

Cameron stood with hands on hips, his eyes cold, his laughter cruel. “She speaks to me with her thoughts. She’s drawn you here like rats to a trap. She wants to exercise her power.”

Micco swiveled his head to look at his fearful, uncertain warriors. His gaze rested longest on Yeehaw, who’d eased back a step. Lines of suffering deepened in Micco’s thin face.

He knows, Webb thought, and can feel their spiritual mutiny. He felt a distant pity for the Indian, but it didn’t cloud his thinking. He lifted his arm. “You, the two holding the white man, let him go!”

“No!” Micco commanded, and his voice retained enough authority to keep the pair who held Clyde from turning him loose. “She is a flesh and blood woman!”

“Then why do we keep her in a cage?”

“Because the ways of whites are strange. But I prove what I say!” Micco whirled. The tip of his knife opened a red crease on the side of Clyde’s neck. Clyde screamed softly and sagged to his knees. Ethel cried, “Oh, God!” and rushed past Cameron. Before she could reach her husband, one of the rifle-carrying warriors struck her on the forehead with the gun stock. She pitched forward and lay moaning, barely clinging to her senses.

Micco spun out of his crouch over Clyde and sprang once more to the forefront of his men.

Cameron felt sweat crawling all over him. The end was just seconds away. Micco’s next command would be to destroy the helpless whites.

With eyes that burned into those of the white man, Micco stretched up his arm. His mouth opened to shout the final order.

Cameron spat at Micco’s feet. “You haven’t proved a damn thing.”

Micco stood with his arm rigid. “I cut the white man, and the demon woman does not destroy me!”

“You haven’t cut me,” Cameron said.

“There is no difference!”

Cameron’s lips curled in contempt. “There is—and you know it. I’m the leader.”

“But I’ve showed which leader is the greater!”

“You’ve proved nothing except that you’re a pile of dung,” Cameron told him. His eyes swept the Seminole faces. “Why did he pick which man to cut? Why will he order one of you to finish me off with a gun instead of doing the job himself?”

The knife was a glinting arc aimed at Webb’s face. Cameron felt it tug his sleeve as he broke his body aside.

Micco’s rush carried him past. When he whipped about, Webb was facing him, knees bent, arms hooked outward, fingers splayed.

Webb circled and backed as Micco stalked him. Micco gave the wagon only a swift look, a smile touching his lips when no fire forked from the cage to cut him down.

He feinted, shifted, and flashed in suddenly with the knife ripping at Webb’s guts. Webb sucked his belly button against his backbone. His left palm was laid open as he knocked the knife downward. Their bodies slammed together. Webb pawed a fist at Micco’s cheek. Micco writhed away.

Again they circled. Webb’s left hand burned. He felt blood dripping from his fingers. Micco danced in and out, the knife making quick flashes of light.

“You’re cut, white man! But your demon sits and dreams.”

“A scratch on the hand,” Cameron said. He saw Micco through a fog of sweat and the pall of dust their feet had raised. “Only a chicken would call it a cut.”

Micco darted in, and Cameron leaned to the left. The knife lashed for its mark, but Cameron had moved to the right. Then, as Micco stopped his rush and started to turn, Cameron’s shadow swept over him. With a startled grunt Micco backhanded the knife, his wrist slapped into Cameron’s palm.

Micco twisted and tried to free his arm. His tugging smashed Cameron against him. Their feet tangled and they fell.

Micco battered at the white face with his left fist, but he had little room to punch. His knife hand was pressed between him and Cameron. He felt the clamping down of a tremendous pressure on his throat. His breathing was cut off. His struggles to break free became wild writhings of desperation. Dust rose in a gray cloud, blotting out the sun.

Micco went limp. Then renewed violence exploded through him. He kneed Cameron in the groin. He shot his left hand to Cameron’s face, fingers searching and gouging for eyeballs.

The sweaty neck slipped from Webb’s grip. Their bodies broke a little apart. Agile as a panther, Micco flipped from under Webb’s weight. The knife hand was twisting and jerking in Webb’s grip. The knife hovered between them, each man using both hands to try to turn it and send it plunging.

Then Webb saw the blade disappear just below Micco’s breastbone. The Indian’s back arched, his mouth opened. He stared at Webb in absolute disbelief. Then, in the same instant, Micco’s eyes were no longer living.

Webb stood up, getting his limbs under him a joint at a time. He looked at the twisted young body and the dead boyish face, and his pity was not at all distant. He closed his eyes, dragged in a breath. Then he bent, picked up Micco’s right ankle, and dragged the body behind him, objects swimming at him as he moved out of the dust cloud.

The Seminoles watched silently. Cameron stopped before Yeehaw.

“The demon woman guided his knife,” Cameron said. “Here is your leader.” With a final tug, he turned loose of Micco’s ankle. The body lay in a grotesque heap at Yeehaw’s feet.

While the warriors stared at the corpse, Cameron shoved them aside with rough hands. He reached out and steadied Clyde. Ethel had crawled to her feet and was leaning against her husband. Cameron whispered, “Move!”

While Clyde and Ethel stumbled toward the wagon, Cameron paced back and forth glaring at the Seminoles like a drillmaster.

“The demon woman speaks to my thoughts. There is still a foolish dog among you who would risk his life for the wagon.”

He watched them sneak glances at each other.

“You’ve worn out the patience of the demon,” Cameron said. “If one of you makes a move, you will all die.”

“We are tired,” Yeehaw said at last. He turned his eyes and looked toward the north, his eyes deep with longing. “We try to go back. We no longer have Micco to lift our hearts when we’re hungry and filled with pain. But we have fathers, mothers, brothers. And we are tired…”

Compassion brought a small change to Webb’s dark eyes. “Then go in peace.”

“It is so.”

“Then I wish you well. With peace in your hearts, I will leave you a gift of peace.”

Webb returned to the wagon and gave quick orders. “Loudermilk, unlash one of the full water casks. Clyde, measure what we can spare from the bean sack and brine barrel. We’re leaving that.”

Webb harnessed the team, saddled Duchess, and they moved out, the Indians waiting and watching from the rocky perimeter of the clearing.

On Duchess, Webb led the way around the foot of the rise. The Seminoles were soon out of sight. The terrain ahead offered a natural trail that wound through craggy hills.

Webb dropped back to ride beside the wagon. He made a quick study of the wear and tear visible on Ethel and Clyde. A yellowish bruise on her forehead matched the imprint of a rifle butt. Clyde’s lips were puffy, a pumpknot had seeped a crust of blood on the back of his head, and his eyes were red and rheumy.

“We’ll break and do some patching up,” Webb suggested, “the first shady spot we reach.”

“I’d as soon keep going,” Ethel said, “just in case the redskins change their mind.” She glanced at Clyde who sat in a half slump beside her, handling the team. “Unless Clyde feels like he needs to…”

“I can make it all right,” Clyde said.

Cameron reined Duchess in close. “You were pretty good back there.”

Clyde gave the reins a little slack and watched the horses’ humping backs. “I figured I was dead anyhow. Made no difference to a dead man if I tried to warn you.”

“That’s one way of looking at it.”

Clyde pulled out his bandanna and blew his runny nose. “You mean the yellow didn’t show?”

“No more than mine did,” Cameron said.

Clyde glanced up. Cameron’s mildly joshing smile was the kind a man reserves for his friends, the people he understands and respects. No one had looked at Clyde like that for a long time. He watched Duchess high-step her way up front of the wagon. The sense of well-being that stirred inside him didn’t seem logical. His head and face were battered and throbbing with pain; his cold was a physical misery; he was a long way from home; and the worst part still lay ahead.

But he was strangely glad to be out here, eating Webb Cameron’s dust.

CHAPTER 16

Two hours before nightfall Webb sensed alluvial land ahead. He felt the first subtle change in the dry desert air, the faintest hint of humus and moisture. It made him think of the loamy delta country that a man’s senses could reach out and feel while he was still far upriver.

He rode Duchess up a long slope, and suddenly it was down there before him—a muddy river snaking through the resaca silt it had deposited in its ever-shifting course for endless ages. Greasy green palmetto and saw grass glinted along the banks. Here and there a water oak threw shadows. The Rio Grande. But it was not at all an impressive river at this point; it looked dirty, contaminated, and lazy.

Cameron strained in the saddle as his gaze swept the endless miles beyond the river. The land was but little more inviting than that which he’d crossed, barren hills broken by pockets of tenacious green, stretches of chaparral, twisted and stunted blackjack oaks throwing absurd shadows here and there.

Far to the south a white hillside ebbed and flowed, grazing sheep gnawing grass to its very roots. South by west, beyond the dunes, wisps of smoke straggled toward the sky. Cameron watched the smoke for several minutes. He ruled out a single peon’s hut Some sort of settlement was over there.

He wheeled Duchess and rode to meet his wagon. Feeling better as the day had worn on, Clyde had saddled up at noon and was riding drag. Ethel shared the wagon seat with Loudermilk, who sat steeped in his usual dim and distant thoughts.

Clyde rode out and met Cameron.

“We’ll reach the river by dusk,” Webb said. “Fording will be no problem. We’ll cross the first thing tomorrow morning.”

“Well, by God, Mexico at last!”

The next morning while Ethel cared for Temple, and Clyde and Tobe broke camp, Webb tested the bottom in several places. Duchess had a penchant for water not shared by all horses. She wanted to play and cavort in it.

Drenched to his waist, Webb returned to the wagon. The team was hitched and ready to go. Clyde handled the rig, following Webb upstream to the chosen fording place. The wagon worked its way into the water, inched across, and was dragged onto Mexican soil by the struggling team.

They halted to give the draft horses a chance to blow. Webb swung out of his saddle at the river’s edge and studied the paler ribbon of water which gradually melted into the mainstream.

Clyde walked up to him. Webb pointed at the water. “The river’s got a little tributary feeding in not far west of us. We’ll find the stream and follow it.”

They saw no one during the morning. At noon Cameron called a halt at a cottonwood-shaded clearing beside the tributary stream. He took off his hat and wiped the sweatband. His sweat-plastered jet-black hair was far shaggier than when he’d left home.

“The stream’s routing us toward the smoke I saw yesterday,” he said. “I’m sure we’re near a village—probably the only one for miles. If that’s the case, we may be right on the heels of Sykes and George.”

Clyde and Ethel looked at him from the wagon seat, saying nothing. Peering around the rear wheel, Loudermilk was just as intent.

“In any event,” Cameron said, “a look at the land is in order. This looks good for a camp site. I won’t be long.”

He was absent for about an hour. During that time Clyde built a cook fire and unhitched the team while Ethel prepared mush and side meat.

Webb ladled food onto a tin plate and ate as he talked. “I was right about the village. It’s called Fatigoso.”

Clyde had already eaten. He sat on his hunkers beside Webb, flipping bits of twig at the camp-fire embers. “Guess you could translate that as meaning a place of weariness. They got a way of tacking on names down here. Any sign of Sykes and George?’

“I didn’t go in—not yet. I talked with a peon sheepherder a couples miles from here. He told me he wouldn’t go near the village.”

Clyde glanced up. “They got an epidemic or something?”

“Or something,” Cameron said. He got up, walked to the creek, and rinsed his plate. “They’ve got a two-legged disease named Ojaro de Luz. Federales drove him out of Sonora, where he taxed the peons to suit himself. He holed up in the hills, licked his wounds for a spell, and hit Fatigoso a week ago with half a dozen cutthroats. They shot the priest, and hung the mayor. The village constable and his deputy vamoosed. Since then de Luz has had himself a town. He’ll play dictator until the federales get around to chasing him back into the hills.”

Clyde stood up. He didn’t cut the imposing figure he had back home. He was rumpled and stained. His eyes were bloodshot, as red as the tangle of hair about his ears. He didn’t have that self-protective, prideful look. Instead he looked plain-out durable.

As he mulled over the situation his face tinged with gray, but his voice was steady. “I’m saddled and ready, Cameron.”

Cameron dropped his hand on Clyde’s shoulder. “I need you here. We’ve two women to think about. And I want Loudermilk watched. He doesn’t think like the rest of us. We don’t know what goes on in that mind of his. He’s done a lot of woolgathering, and I’m not sure I like it.”

“Whatever you say, Cameron.”

Webb walked to Duchess and ted the mare from her browsing along the creek bank. He mounted, and from the height of the horse’s back looked at the wagon canopy for a long moment.

“I’ll be back by noon tomorrow,” he promised.

Ethel and Clyde stood beside each other and watched him move out beyond the shadows of the cottonwoods. Slouched on the creekbank, Tobe showed no interest. He seemed intent on the slithering water, but his ears were tuned to the sounds of Webb’s departure.

He got up, shuffled to the fire, and sat down. The routine of camp life resumed about him. Ethel carried the empty mushpot to the creek to scrub it out with sand. Clyde started rubbing down the team, looking at Tobe every minute or so.

Between his spread legs, Tobe was building a pile of crumbled bark and dry grass the size of his fist. Idly, he seemed to be doing nothing more than watching the dying fire. He leaned and fished out a short twig with an inch-long glowing ember on its tip. He wadded the tinder in his left hand, and picked up the twig between the first and second fingers of his right. The glowing end was almost against his palm.

He walked to the wagon, and with a water cask shielding his hands from Clyde’s view Tobe wedged the tinder between the cask and the canvas wagon cover.

“What’re you doing there?” Clyde said from across the clearing.

Tobe jabbed the glowing twig into the heart of the tinder wad. “Just fixing to get a drink.”

“There’s a creekful of it.”

“Well, all right,” Tobe said. “I ain’t deef.” He walked to the creek a few yards above Ethel. He lay stretched, supporting himself with his arms, and studied the thickets and the trees at a bend before he lowered his face to lap a mouthful.

He straightened, unable to keep his eyes from the wagon. His face began to sag with disappointment. It wasn’t going to work. The tiny coal had gone out, smothered by the very tinder it was supposed to ignite.

Then he saw the wisp of smoke curl from behind the water cask. A tongue of flame shot out of the smoldering tinder as if a small explosion had occurred. The sun-baked canvas was itself volatile tinder. It seemed to suck at the flame. Before Tobe could draw a breath, a sheet of fire shot up the side of the wagon.

Tobe heard Clyde yell, “For God’s sake, Ethel, get Temple Cameron out of there!”

Tobe ducked past a thicket and raced through a spangle of sun and shadow, his movements no longer those of a sullen bear under restraint.

CHAPTER 17

Cameron held Duchess to a walk as the narrow stony road widened to become the village plaza. Squalor and poverty were etched in the sagging, uneven lines of the buildings clustered about the broad square. Here and there outer walls showed ragged scabs where mud stucco had yielded and fallen away.

In the center of the square a round, knee-high stone wall protected the mouth of the well that gave Fatigoso life. The mare’s hoofs stirred a powdery dust that would turn to slimy mire when the rains came.

Physically, the sight of the village held no surprise for Cameron. Its drab grayness was the color he’d expected. But even forewarned of Ojaro de Luz the absolute lethargy, deeper than a siesta quiet, was unsettling. No women were resting their clay jugs to gossip a moment at the well. No ragged urchins at play chased through the alleys or narrow slots between the buildings. Not a doorway held men bartering in a trade or telling fanciful stories.

Fatigoso might have been dead. But Webb knew it was simply in a stupor. Its citizens were staying behind closed doors, and de Luz’s men were sleeping off a carousal that had lasted until dawn. Yet neither ruled out the certainty that Webb’s arrival had been noted and was being watched.

He spotted a squat mud brick building that had cantina barely discernible across its front in faded letters. He angled across the plaza, dismounted, and dropped the reins across the rotting hitching rail. He gave Duchess a brief pat on the neck, and the act of turning away offered him the opportunity for a final examination of the silent square.

He stepped down into the dimness. The cantina had a raftered roof and a moldy sawdust floor. A few plank tables and cane chairs took up most of the space. To Webb’s right, a fat greasy man in filthy cottons lay on the bar snoring.

Webb moved around the end of the bar, picked up a bottle of mescal and a fly-specked glass. He dropped a half-dollar beside the sleeping man’s dirt-crusted bare feet.

His passage to a table and the creak of the chair as he sat down didn’t disturb the barman, but the clink of the bottle neck against the glass did. A snore snapped off in mid-pitch. The man coughed, made sounds as if he were trying to spit out his tongue, and sat up.

Webb raised the glass. “Your health.”

“Señor?”

“Didn’t mean to wake you. Just killing time. Your money’s there on the bar. I take it you are the proprietor.”

“Proprietor?”

“You run the place.”

“But si!” The man dropped his feet to the floor and stood yawning, scratching his ribs, then his bush of black hair. His eyes were brown glints in a mass of fat. “Americano.”

“That’s right,” Webb said. “I’m meeting two others here, a little dried up white man and a big black one. Where are they staying?”

“I have no knowledge, señor.”

“Come on,” Webb laughed, “I’m not asking…”

“No, señor! You wish knowledge, you ask Ojaro de Luz!” The man went behind his bar and poured himself two fingers of tequila.

“That sounds reasonable,” Webb said. “Where do I see de Luz?”

“He stays in the Hotel Centro across the plaza.” The proprietor swished the liquor in his glass and added grimly, “The best room…naturalmente. But I wouldn’t go over there.”

“Why not?”

“He is with his woman. But he will learn that a strange Americano has appeared. He will see you, señor, when he is ready…”

In the hotel room overlooking the street, Madellina Aspana shook her skirt over her full hips and knotted the tie that drew it snug about her small waist. She smoothed the loose drawstring blouse over large jutting breasts, tilted her face back, and ran her fingers through the bed-play tangles of her long gleaming black hair. Her large slanting eyes still smoldered with passion. Her body felt as if it were oiled. Exhaling a long breath, she lifted her hair in a loose mass on top of her head. She stretched, a sinuous writhing.

“Yi,” she murmured. “I wish we could go on like this forever.”

“We will,” de Luz said, “until the federales come again with banging guns.”

Naked to the waist, he stood at the washstand dipping his head between sentences to splash and snort in the washbasin. He wasn’t a handsome man. He was short and stocky, muscled in huge lumps that curved one into another. As he raised, water sheeted over a broad, heavy-boned, swarthy face with a flat, broken nose and wads of bone about the eyes, his wet hair plastered on a forehead that fell back in a steep slope from heavy jutting brows.

Yet each time Madellina looked at him her eyes reflected a sensual hunger. What he said to her so often was true. She was a hot-blooded bitch, and she would have despised a lesser man.

She was enduringly grateful that he’d bought her five years ago, when she was fifteen. He’d paid her peon father thirty-five pesos and ripped the virginity from her almost before they were out of sight of the hut she would never see again.

The purchase price—a veritable fortune—had flattered her, and she had responded to his violent lovemaking from the beginning. She enjoyed the careless life of make love, sleep, eat, ride, steal, make love. She didn’t like being constantly hunted. But who had everything?

She seldom displeased de Luz, and the few times he’d really beaten her the fault had been her own. She experienced moods. Without reason, they gathered in her now and then and came rising and ripping. Ojaro said she was a hellcat at those times. She would scream and curse and snatch up a deadly weapon at the slightest provocation. Being of short patience himself Ojaro would first warn her, then knock her down and kick her in the belly. As often as not, he would then drag her to bed. So far, his cure for female tantrums had been an unqualified success.

Ojaro was watching her in the stained brown mirror as he dried his ears with a rough towel. She smiled, drifting across the bedroom to him.

She pressed against his damp back, draped her arms across his shoulders, and tiptoed to nibble the ear he’d just dried.

“Tell me I’m still beautiful, Ojaro.”

“I think my actions have spoken.”

She laid her cheek against his shoulder. “But I like to hear you say it.”

“Women!” he exclaimed.

She felt a sudden vague fear. She knew that Ojaro had singled her out five years ago because she was unlike other mestizo girls. Her body was long and sleek, not a dumpy collection of lumps. Her neck was slender. The features of her face were bold, but put together to form an image of startling sensual beauty. Her skin was a pale olive and as smooth to the touch as down. Her hair was silken, compared with other Indian women’s.

Now she was a ripe and aging twenty, and she knew how cruel time could be to a woman. A little sag here, a little wrinkle there, and how would Ojaro react? Would he look and remember, thinking only of what had faded and been lost to him?

But, no! She would never stop pleasing him. Even if the rose wilts a little, is it not preferable to the freshest ragweed?

She trailed her nails softly down his back. “Why don’t you say I’m beautiful with the pearl, Ojaro? You promised it to me.”

She felt the ripple of power latent in his shoulders as he shrugged. “Why not?” He gave a laugh. His teeth glinted. They were strong and white with very sharp canines. “Any time I need the pearl I can wring the pendant off your neck. Hand me my shirt.”

She sprang to obey, snatching his shirt from the clothes-press and handing it to him. He wriggled the sack-like garment of white cotton over his head and shoulders. Then he drew the pearl pendant from the shirt pocket and tossed it as if it were but a centavo. Her delighted squeal brought a tolerant smile from him.

She untangled the thin gold chain with eager fingers and pirouetted to the dingy mirror. He slapped her across the hips. “First my boots.”

“Si, jefe!”

He stretched across the bed, bare feet extended. The feather ticking was still warm from the heat of their clashing bodies.

Madellina dropped to her knees. She giggled and tickled the sole of each bare foot before she pushed and tugged a boot on. The new footgear was a bit of tribute de Luz had collected the day after his arrival.

He sat up, watching Madellina. She fastened the pendant about her neck and struck a high-breasted pose to admire her reflection in the washstand mirror. “Ah, jefe, it was made for a woman as beautiful as I!”

De Luz grunted. He was sometimes annoyed by her self-adulation. Interest in her faded out of him for the moment. Her body had satiated him, and the quiet and inactivity of the village was beginning to bore him.

He ambled to the window and looked out at the quiet plaza. Then he propped his hands on the thick mud brick sill and leaned out.

“Paloma, tear your eyes from your image and come here.”

Madellina stood beside him. “What is it?”

He lifted a hand and pointed. “What do you see?”

“A beautiful black horse hitched at the cantina—with an American saddle.”

“Why would a gringo ride such a horse to this place?”

“I can’t think of a reason, jefe”

“Neither can I.” De Luz drew back from the window. “Go over and find out, muchacha.”

“But Ojaro…”

“You’re not pretty when you question me, muchacha.”

She winced as his grip fell on her shoulder. He turned and gave her a light kick to get her started. She slammed the door on her way out, and he laughed. A few moments later, from the window, he watched her cross the square.

CHAPTER 18

The Fatigoso livery stable was a slab building just off the western limits of the plaza. Tobe Loudermilk crept into the shadow of the rough side wall and peered across the empty square. Shimmering heat waves blurred distant objects, but the black mare hitched in front of a gray building wasn’t that far away.

Tobe sleeved sweat from his bald pate and rested against the wall. He’d figured Cameron would beat him here. But he worried about Clyde Tomberlin. The lone horse was a satisfying sight. If Clyde had turned up he couldn’t have missed Cameron’s mare and right now there’d be two horses hitched at the rail.

Tobe shuffled toward the front corner of the livery. He was barely winded from his jog into Fatigoso. In his time, he’d traveled many desert miles that were a lot rougher. He’d recovered his full strength on the trail a lot sooner than he’d let on to Cameron.

Tobe craned his neck and looked inside the livery through a large entry that had been made merely by omitting part of a wall.

It sure looked like business was good. The stalls were all full. Tobe eased inside, looking into each stall. Midway in the barn he stopped. His hands clenched. He watched the sorrel toss its mane and stamp restlessly. “If you ain’t the one Sykes was riding,” Tobe muttered, “I’m a horned-toad’s daddy.” He prowled further, and if he needed more evidence he found it in the rearmost stall where the mule was quartered.

Tobe stood sweating in the manure-rancid shadows. Now that he was close, indecision clouded his mind. His forehead knotted with the effort to think. Should he really face Sykes and George again? Or just hightail it into the hills, where a man could always find something to eat if he knew how to go about looking and a quiet place he could talk to himself?

“Señor?”

Tobe jumped. An old man had come into the livery carrying a hayfork.

“I-I-I’m looking for somebody,” Tobe said. A breath rushed from him. “I swear, you scared the hell out of me. I wasn’t bothering anything…just looking.”

The old man tossed the hayfork into the loft. “Americano. You look for the other Americanos?”

“Yeah. That’s right Little white fellow and a big black one.” Tobe’s voice was eager. “Where they at?”

The livery keeper brushed past to take a pair of wooden-staved buckets from their pegs. “I should know? I should care? Maybe they sleep at the whorehouse.”

“Where is that?”

“The pink house. Over there. Not far.”

Tobe burst out of the livery, blinking in the sunlight. A faded pink two-story house stood across the way at an angle from the livery. The house was edged into the western limits of the plaza just enough to claim kinship to the town instead of the stable. Tobe surveyed the plaza. It remained as before. He worried his lower lip between a thumb and forefinger, giving the silent house a second look. Then he ducked across to the doorway that stood open almost against the edge of the street.

He pushed his head past the doorjamb. Red-eyed draperies shut off most of the light and gave the inside of the place a cast of twilight orange. Tobe found himself looking into a parlor that appeared to him rather splendid. A clavichord stood against the staircase that led to an upstairs gallery. A nearby table, dripping a tasseled scarf, held a disarray of liquor and wine bottles. Tobe glanced at a pair of overstuffed couches, turning his head to the left.

His fingers clenched on the doorjamb. Several small tables and straight chairs occupied the farther end of the room. Sitting all by himself, playing solitaire, was Sickly Sykes.

Tobe hadn’t made a sound, but Sykes seemed to sense a presence. He looked up. All he could see was Tobe’s head and shoulders thrust into the oblong of bright light. Sykes stared without recognition, putting the cards down as if they might break. Then his chair went over with a crash as he jumped to his feet. He snapped his fingers.

“By hell, the big bastard we met on the trail!” The bolstered pistol seemed to jump into Sykes’s hand. “Come in, big bastard!”

Tobe edged forward, gulping. He heard a bluebottle fly buzzing in the heat and sudden silence. The sour smell of old whisky that permeated the place made him slightly ill.

“Now, wait a minute! I didn’t come here looking for no more trouble.”

Sykes stood without speaking, the pistol looking far too big for him. Tobe cringed forward. “I come to do a little business,” he said.

“Business? After the way we whomped you?” Sykes was spruced up in new black britches and a candy-striped shirt. His shriveled face had the same gray cast, but his bullet wound was on the mend. He moved without favoring his side.

“I’m willing to forget all that,” Tobe said. “Sometimes men has to use their heads and drink out of the same dipper.”

Sykes was studying him hard. “You must have a damn good reason.”

“I got two.”

“Yeah?”

“I want some money.”

“For what?” Sykes asked.

“Information. I can warn you about something that might save your life. Ought to be worth a few dollars.”

“Some folks would argue that.” Sykes spread his lips in a snag-toothed grin. “But go on. What’s your second?”

“I want to see a sonofabitch get killed. You’re the man can do it.”

“Why should I?”

“Because it’ll save your life,” Tobe said.

Sykes dropped his pistol into its holster. “Sit down,” he said. He flicked a finger at the uncorked bottle of tequila on the table. “Pour yourself a drink.”

As Tobe seated himself, a girl came from one of the cribs that opened off the gallery and started down the stairway. Her thin body was exposed by the greasy wrapper draped across her shoulders and open down the front. Her hair was a mass of black ringlets.

Sykes glanced at her. “Go pee,” he yelled. “We’re talking business.”

Loudermilk twisted his head and half rose as the girl scurried up the stairs and out of sight. Sykes reached across the table and thumped Tobe on the shoulder. “Take it easy, big bastard. Ain’t you never seen a bitch before? Plenty of time for that later.”

Tobe reddened, realizing that Sykes was laughing at him.

Sykes sat down facing Tobe. The glint of coarse humor passed from Sykes’s eyes as quickly as it had come. “Now, who am I supposed to kill so’s he won’t kill me?”

“You show me some money first.”

Sykes shook his head. “Never buy blind pigs in dirty pokes. You got to first let me hear the squeal. I can’t figure how the hell you even turned up here.”

“I was brought—by the man that aims to kill you.”

“Who is he?”

“You heard the squeal,” Tobe said, “and I’m ready to open the poke.”

Sykes rocked back and picked his nose for a moment. “How much?”

Tobe swallowed slowly. “Five hundred dollars.”

The forelegs of Sykes’s chair hit the floor with a thump. “I ain’t got that kind of money.”

“You got five thousand dollars. You took it off a stagecoach passenger.”

Sykes pursed his lips. “Sounds like this fellow ain’t missed a turn of my trail.”

“For nearly two weeks now.”

Sykes pulled a roll of money from his pocket. He counted out a hundred dollars. Tobe’s eyes bulged. As his hand moved toward the money, Sykes slammed a palm on it.

“You tell me one wrong word, big bastard, you won’t live to spend it.”

“Would I be here on my own hook to tell a lie?” Tobe whined.

“You may be trying to set me up, but I’m listening. Who is the man?”

“His name is Webb Cameron.”

“Where does he come from?”

“Wucumma Creek,” Tobe said.

“Where the hell’s that? Why is he after me?”

“That’s the name of the creek where you ripped the house apart.”

Sykes didn’t speak for a moment. His mouth became a thin line. “Where is Cameron now?”

“In the cantina,” Tobe said. “Right here in Fatigoso.”

Sykes lifted his hand from the money, but Tobe grabbed it, and started stuffing it in his pocket in a wad. Sykes stood up almost lazily, picked up the tequila bottle and smashed Tobe across the face.

Tobe’s bulk hurled backward. As he floundered on the floor in a half-conscious state, Sykes walked around the table. He pulled his gun and hit Tobe above the temple. An inch-long flap of skin burst loose and blood spread across the bald pate.

Sykes bent over the limp man and retrieved his hundred dollars. He looked about the room, then took Tobe by the collar and dragged him to the space between the clavichord and the wall. Bottles crashed and hit the floor rolling as Sykes jerked the tasseled scarf from the nearby table.

He threw the scarf across Tobe as a cover, re-crossed the room. Studying the angle from the corner to the open doorway, he placed a chair with its back to the wall. He sat down, and pulled the card table toward him.

Under the cover of the tabletop he laid his gun in his lap, picked up the cards, and started a spread of solitaire.

“George,” he yelled. “George, you big black devil… Roust out up there! We got to kill us a smart-alec homesteader.”

CHAPTER 19

The girl had accepted Cameron’s invitation to join him without coquettish byplay. She’d been pleased and flattered when he’d held the chair while she sat down. Now she looked across the rough table at him with considerable interest.

She was a very beautiful woman, dark, sleek; her quick movements, flashing smile and glinting eyes suggested a temperament ruled by fiery emotion. Webb wondered fleetingly where Ojaro de Luz had found such a woman.

The girl lifted her glass. “Salud, señor. I’m called Madellina Aspana.” Noting the direction of Webb’s gaze, her smile became amused. She lifted her breasts a little higher. Let the tall handsome Americano enjoy imagining what was under her blouse, if he would.

Webb lifted his eyes from the pearl pendant resting on the cloth stretched between her breasts, a faint white line about his lips.

“Webb Cameron,” he said.

“A very nice name.” She flirted with her lashes. “Not many like you come into Fatigoso.”

Webb searched her face, put his glass down and folded his hands on the table.

“I think you are probably most intelligent.”

She laughed. “A woman doesn’t necessarily care to have…”

“As well as being exceptionally beautiful,” Webb continued.

“Ah!” Her lips parted a little. “That is much, much better!”

“So there’s no need of bush-beating between us.”

Her left brow arched. “Señor?”

“As you were coming across the plaza the barman said you are de Luz’s woman, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s him watching the square from the hotel window.”

A laugh burst from her. She was thoroughly enjoying herself. “I hope you haven’t come as an enemy, Webb Cameron. One such as you might give my Ojaro a bad time.”

“I don’t intend to meddle in affairs between Ojaro de Luz and the Mexican government.”

“Then what brings you? Why are…”

“Why not signal de Luz?” Cameron suggested. “I’ll be glad to tell you anything you want to know.”

Her eyes sparkled. “You are indeed a strange one! Well, then…if I cannot amuse myself for a little, then I suppose it must be so.”

Cameron stood up as she pushed back her chair. He watched her walk to the doorway. She looked at the hotel window and gave a nod.

De Luz appeared in the cantina doorway almost before the girl was reseated. Cameron stood behind the table watching the guerrilla chieftain cross the room. Stocky, slightly muscle-bound, possessing a flat coarsely cut swarthy face, Ojaro de Luz nevertheless didn’t fit the image of an oily repulsive bandido leader. He had a hearty and earthy simplicity about him. He looked like a man who liked to laugh, tell tall tales, and eat and drink well. As he glanced at Madellina his eyes twinkled. She’d not had time to play her little game on the Americano, and Ojaro seemed to find her failure cause for drollery.

Feigning boredom with the prospect of nothing but man-talk Madellina murmured the introductions. The two men sat down. De Luz waved the barman away, his keen eyes examining Cameron. “Are you an Americano gun looking for a place?”

“No.”

“I see. We have them turn up once in a great while, you know. You don’t look like one. You are, perhaps, a patron—a great landowner, with a fine house and many blooded horses such as the mare outside?”

“No, I’m just a small rancher.”

“Then, madre mia! What brings you to the ends of the earth?”

“Two men,” Cameron answered. “Americans. A white one, and a black one.”

De Luz leaned back. “What makes you think they are here?”

“I don’t think it,” Webb said. “I know it. They came in yesterday, or late the day before if they wound up riding that hard. They paid you for sanctuary—with this.” He reached across the table and jerked the pearl pendant from Madellina’s neck.

“Señor!” de Luz said in an absolutely calm voice. He caught Madellina’s arm as she gave a squeal and lunged at Webb. She writhed, fighting his strength until she saw the way he was looking at Webb. She shrank in silence and de Luz turned her arm loose.

“Señor,” de Luz said, “you are far more foolish than you look.”

Webb let the broken gold chain drop across his fingers, the pearl dangling against his open palm. “This was handed down to my wife from her grandmother,” he said. “It was made many years ago by the finest jeweler in New Orleans, and my wife clung to it through many hardships. In the end it was ripped from her throat when she was raped. I’ve followed this pendant all the way from a place far to the north called Tacton Flats. Now I would deal with you honestly.”

“Is there honesty in this world, señor? I watched the hanging of my father for daring to steal a bag of beans. I ran away to the hills. This was a long time ago. I haven’t found honesty since.”

“And you needn’t look for it in Sykes and George,” Webb said.

“How so, señor? I’m curious to know before I decide whether you are to live or die.”

“They made a deal with you and gave you a bauble. I’m sure they didn’t tell you what else they were carrying.”

“Which is, señor?”

“Five thousand dollars, cold American cash. They took it from a stagecoach passenger.”

De Luz’s face added another degree of chill. “I wonder if you are lying to me, señor?”

“You’ll have to make up your own mind about that. All I can give you is my word.”

“You are offering me this five thousand dollars for the pearl?”

Webb’s fingers closed about the pendant. “No. The pearl belongs to my wife. Nobody else has the right to bargain for it. I’m offering you five thousand dollars for the two men—and I want them alive.”

De Luz cupped his chin in his fingers and massaged it gently. He slipped a glance at Madellina as if, from habit, he could read advice in her face about a touchy matter.

“Señor,” he said, “if these men are not carrying five thousand dollars, you know you won’t leave Fatigoso alive.”

“I’m not spooked. I know they have it They haven’t had time yet to spend much of it.”

“In American dollars…” de Luz said. “A great deal of money. A fortune.” He looked directly at Madellina. “For once, you and I, we don’t share it with the others. You understand? This is more than money. We may go far from the hills, the way we have sometimes talked. It may not be so impossible as it has always seemed, eh, muchacha? Therefore say nothing to the others.”

“Ojaro…”

“I speak, you obey! This man is also after much more than money. It is good. We have the surprise, and we don’t need the others. Cameron will leave Fatigoso with the two men tied to their saddles, and that is all the others need to know.” He stood up. “We go.”

“Where are they?” Cameron asked.

“The pink house at the end of the plaza. They drink all night. They won’t expect us.”

Madellina watched them leave. She slowly picked up her glass of tequila and sipped. She was unusually quiet. She sat staring at the patch of sky beyond the small high window. Her mood deepened.

She heard a man come in but didn’t bother to look until the man spoke to the bartender in a tight, rasping voice. “Where’s the tall man who left the black mare hitched outside? I got to find him!”

“I know nothing,” the proprietor said from behind the bar.

“Now you listen to me! I said I…”

“Why do you have to find him, señor?” asked Madellina.

The newcomer was a stocky man of ruddy complexion with reddish hair like a fringe below the sides of his hat. Madellina’s question stopped him in the act of reaching across the bar.

“Who are you?”

“Ojaro de Luz’s woman. What business have you with Señor Cameron?”

The man strode toward her. “Have you seen him? Where is he?”

“Not so fast, señor. You haven’t yet given me the courtesy of your name.”

He stopped, his thighs pressed against the edge of the table. His breathing was rapid. Sweat sluiced down his cheeks. An urgency burned in his eyes.

“My name is Clyde Tomberlin. I’ve ridden with Cameron all the way from the north country. Now I’m afraid I’ve made a mess.”

The contemplative moodiness vanished from her face. “How is this so?”

“It’s a long story, and I don’t know if I can make you understand without a lot of time-wasting talk. Believe me, I need to reach to Cameron. If you know where he is, just tell me.”

She was rising, her eyes piercing him. His anxiety for Cameron’s safety appeared genuine, but the world was full of tricksters. “Señor, you are a stranger to me.”

A breath exploded from him. “All right! We picked up a half-crazy prospector, Tobe Loudermilk. Cameron’s held onto this bird because Loudermilk has seen a pair called Sykes and George and could identify them if they split up. I was supposed to hold Loudermilk in camp, only he outfoxed me and got away. If he got it in his head to sell us out and warn the men who Cameron’s after it won’t be pleasant.”

His words had an undeniable ring of sincerity. They drained the color from her face.

“Quickly! We go! The pink house… Ojaro and Cameron…already they have more than time to get there—”

CHAPTER 20

Cameron’s old battlefield instincts instantly absorbed details of the setup. The reddish twilight of the brothel’s silent parlor that threw him and de Luz in sharp relief against the doorway brightness; the stairway; the gloomy upper gallery; boots sticking out from behind the ancient clavichord where a man had apparently passed out. And the keynote of everything was the small figure that lurked behind a table in the farther corner.

Somehow he knew, even before de Luz spoke, that this was Sykes. For too many nights, while the rest of the camp slept, his mind had burned with images of Sykes drawn from every described detail he’d learned. His agonized mental artistry had been accurate. Sickly Sykes was exactly what he’d expected.

He’d prepared himself for the moment when he would face the flesh and blood men, the reachable realities that would replace the images. He’d known it would be hard to keep from going kill-crazy and to let Sykes and the Negro live longer than the time it took to draw a gun. A hundred times he’d disciplined his mind in advance. Sykes and George must die. This was simply justice. But justice meant nothing if Temple were lost forever; if in the final moment his self-control shattered and he destroyed the slim hope of shocking through to her.

His and de Luz’s shadows melted from the white oblong cast across the floor by the open doorway. He watched the table and the shriveled, repulsive creature sitting behind it swim at him through the orange gloom.

Sykes’s ferret gaze raced up and down Cameron, but he spoke to de Luz. “I didn’t expect you, General.”

“You didn’t play straight with me,” de Luz said.

Sykes turned a card from the top of the deck with his left hand. He didn’t look at it. “What gave you that idea?”

“You told me you had only the pearl and a few dollars. Instead you have much money.”

“Who says?”

“This man,” de Luz said.

“His name must be Cameron,” Sykes said.

Webb didn’t know how Sykes had learned his name; but somehow Sykes had been warned. It was a trap. Sykes was waiting for him, with his left hand a busy decoy with the cards, and his right holding a gun under the table. The Negro had to be concealed upstairs to complete the ambush. Sykes had anticipated everything except the appearance of de Luz. He’d hesitated just long enough to learn whether he and de Luz were still on the same side of the fence.

Webb saw the spark in Sykes’s eyes as Sykes squeezed the trigger. Webb was already falling away. The blast of the gun filled the house. A splinter jumped from the table’s thin top. The bullet whined off the front wall.

Webb threw himself toward the cover provided by a nearby couch, the Remington in his hand. He glimpsed Sykes and de Luz shooting at each other. He heard Sykes scream. Then a shot from the gallery knocked de Luz down. The bandit leader sat splay-legged, dead before he rolled onto his side.

George was little more than a shadow in the gallery. His gun winked twice, punching holes in the couch as Webb broke for the stairs.

Flashing in and out of the doorway glare, Webb glimpsed Clyde Tomberlin rushing up. He couldn’t imagine the how or why of Clyde being there. He yelled, “Cover the back!” as he slammed onto the lower stair landing.

He saw the Negro rear up behind the gallery banister. George’s gun was clicking on empty shells, and he turned and ran as Webb hurled up the stairway.

A girl was screaming endlessly behind the closed doors of the cribs that lined the gallery.

George threw a leg through an open window at the end of the gallery as Webb reached the top.

“Hold it, you filthy bastard!”

George answered by hurling the empty gun at Webb. Webb half tripped ducking the missile. George had both legs out the window and was bracing himself to jump.

Webb steadied his feet, lifted the Remington, and fired. The bullet hit George in the left shoulder and the big Negro rolled forward and dropped out of sight.

Webb reached the window and thrust out his head and shoulders. George lay in a massive heap directly below.

Clyde Tomberlin was closing in on the Negro. Clyde dropped to one knee, turned George over with the tip of his pistol barrel, and looked up. “He lit on his head, Cameron. His neck’s busted.”

Webb’s shoulders sagged. “Is he dead?”

“Not yet, but he’s going. We can’t move him.”

“We’ll have to,” Webb said. He twisted his body through the window, hung by his hands for a second, and let go. His knees jarred with shock. He let himself jackknife beside George, using his hands to help break the short fall.

As Webb straightened, George looked at him with eyes yellow with hate.

“You white devil…devil…” George’s head lay with the ear against the top of his shoulder.

Cameron bent beside him. He saw the lump made by the stump of broken bone. It pushed against the side of George’s neck where a pulse was pumping wildly.

Cameron’s face grayed. Clyde was right. George was dying. They couldn’t move him five feet, much less get him back to camp and have him live long enough for it to do any good.

“You and Sykes…cheating me even at the end,” Webb said.

“Wish I could kill you white man. Massa…massa…” George mouthed the hated term with a lifetime of slavery poison behind it. “Sykes say you come…say we kill…sounds good…feels good to think about blood all over your white face.”

“Like the blood on my wife’s body?” Cameron said.

“Wife? No wife…”

“The woman at the homestead on Wucumma Creek,” Webb said. “You remember.”

“Remember house…no woman…just house. It empty. Sickly say we help ourselfs…take silver pistol and clock. But no money…”

Cameron raised a hand as if he would hit George. “And the woman! Damn you, the woman!”

“No woman.” George could see the upraised fist. His eyes had no room for fear, only hatred and contempt. “Wish there had been woman…throw it in your teeth while I die…but no woman. Just empty house…nobody to home…just…”

He died with his mouth open to form his next words.

Webb crouched in an absolute paralysis. Gradually he felt Clyde shaking his shoulder and speaking his name. He got up, staring at Clyde as if still half blind from a sudden knowledge.

As they moved around the house, he listened to Clyde’s account of what had happened at the camp. Temple hadn’t been hurt. Clyde had beat out the fire with a blanket before the wagon suffered serious damage.

On the plaza men were beginning to appear, shouting questions to each other about the shooting they’d heard.

“De Luz’s men,” Cameron said. “Right now they’re leaderless. And if we pass up the money Sykes and George stole from Truelove, they’ll be occupied for awhile. But we’d better make dust fast.”

“How about Tobe Loudermilk?”

“Now that I know he got away and warned Sykes,” Cameron said, “I’ve got a hunch about Tobe’s whereabouts.”

He stepped inside the orange-hued parlor. Sykes lay near the table, with the side of his face blown away. Madellina Aspana sat on the floor not far away, cradling de Luz’s lifeless face against her breast. She didn’t seem to hear Webb or see him there.

Webb crossed to the clavichord and grabbed hold of the ragged boots that stuck out. As Webb pulled the bulk, the table scarf that covered the man’s head and torso came with him. Webb reached down and yanked off the scarf.

Tobe groaned. He began mumbling and tried to sit up. Webb put a rough grip on his shoulders and assisted him.

Tobe sat blinking at Webb.

“Sykes gave you a slugging instead of a reward, didn’t he?” Cameron asked. “Now get on your feet!”

“I’m sick,” Tobe said. “I hurt.” He lifted a hand to the lump on his scalp.

Webb looked over his shoulder at Clyde. “Bring the horses. Better take the back way and avoid the plaza. You’ll have to ride double if we get this carrion out of here.”

CHAPTER 21

Ethel met them at the edge of the clearing when they rode in. She looked questioningly at Clyde, and he answered from the height of the saddle. “Sykes and George are both dead.”

The three men dismounted. Cameron looked at the burned forequarter of the wagon canopy, then at Temple. Statue-like, she was standing beside the wagon.

Ethel fell in step with Cameron as he crossed to his wife.

“I walked her some and calmed her down,” Ethel told him. “She reacted to the fire—just a little—seemed to know something was happening.”

“At least that came of it,” Cameron said. “Did she say anything?”

“No, just showed a mild upset.”

Cameron took Temple’s hands and lifted them. They were lifeless weights. Looking at her blank face he said, “Clyde, you and Tobe come over here.”

“Now, listen,” Tobe whined, “there ain’t no more Sykes and George. Nobody for me to point out to you. I don’t want no more truck with this shebang!”

“Walk him over here, Clyde,” Cameron said, “or I’ll shoot him.”

He let Temple’s hands fall, turned and watched Clyde and Tobe come toward him. Tobe was in the lead, his shuffling gait prodded now and then by Clyde’s hand shoving him in the back.

“You know,” Webb said, in a tone that was almost conversational, “the Negro’s dying statement throws a brand-new light on things. He told the truth. If he and Sykes had found a woman on Wucumma Creek, he would have wanted the satisfaction of hurting me all he could.”

Ethel hovered on Cameron’s left. “What are you saying?”

“That Sykes and George found exactly what the Negro said they found—an empty house. No woman in sight, because the woman was cowering mindless in a thicket beside Wucumma Creek when Sykes and George arrived at the house.”

Clyde’s brow creased. “You’re saying another man had already been there?”

“That’s the only possibility, Clyde. I read signs and jumped to the natural conclusion that two mounted men leading a pack mule had been there. Natural, but wrong. The mule wasn’t a pack animal when it left hoofprints in my yard. It was a riding animal, and the man on it homed in on my chimney smoke before George and Sykes did.”

“By damn!” Clyde said. “A mule…a prospector riding on his mule!”

“Nothing else is reasonable,” Cameron said.

Tobe’s breath made a gagging sound. “I don’t have to stand here and listen to…”

“I’m afraid you do.”

“No! I didn’t do it! I swear…” Tobe fell back a step from Cameron’s eyes. Clyde drew his pistol and stuck it in Tobe’s back.

Tobe’s eyes began to move wildly.

Cameron slowly eased closer to Tobe, hands opening and closing at his sides. “From the time it happened I thought it strange that Temple, unable to do anything for herself, got out of the cage that very first night we were out. Now we know. We understand, don’t we? You sneaked her out, Tobe, while the rest of us slept. You hoped—and tried—to get away while we hunted for her. You were afraid the woman you’d desecrated would regain her senses and recognize you. Finally you warned Sykes that I was coming after him and George. In your half-mad dreams, I’m sure you convinced yourself that you could bargain with him and get paid for the information. Your second reason for going to him was even stronger. If he killed me, it would all be over. You’d be forever safe. Otherwise the woman might one day recover from her madness, describe you, and I would take up the trail again and hunt you down wherever you went.”

Tobe looked at Ethel with despairing eyes. “M’am, you got to help me…talk to Cameron…give me a chance. I never done nothing to you.”

“You won’t ever do anything to another woman,” Cameron said. “You’ve done it all already. You saw Temple alone when you drifted to my place. She was helpless against you. When you were all finished with her you snatched the pearl pendant from her neck, mounted your mule, and decided you’d better head for Mexico.”

Tobe moaned and covered his face with his hands. Webb took the heavy wrists and forced them down.

“Look at me, you filth!” Cameron said. He wrestled Tobe forward, Tobe squirming and digging his heels in the dirt. “Look at her! After you left her the way you did, Sykes and George cut your trail. They took your mule, and used it for a pack animal from then on. They took everything you had—including the pearl pendant. Later, they used the pearl to bribe a bandito leader to let them have the run of the town he was temporarily bossing. And the leader gave the pendant to his woman. Pretty damned strong for a little gold chain, wasn’t it? Linked everything from Temple to you to Sykes and George to de Luz to Madellina Aspana—to me!”

Within a few feet of Temple, Tobe was writhing and lunging. Webb held him with increasing difficulty.

“Temple…” Cameron said, “see him, Temple! He’s no supernatural monster rising from the ground at your feet. Flesh and blood. A poor excuse for a man.”

Tobe broke loose and bolted for the creek. Webb’s weight slammed onto his back and pinned him to the ground. Tobe knew he was fighting for his life. He heaved his huge body and threw Webb off balance. Both men leaped to their feet. Tobe swung heavy blows at Cameron’s face. Webb slipped most of them, stepped in close, hit Tobe in the nose and broke it.

Tobe stumbled back, screaming and grabbing at his face. Webb grabbed his shoulder and swung him so that he was in plain view of Temple.

“See him, Temple! See him for just what he is!”

Cameron hit Tobe in the mouth and saw the lips disappear in a pulp of blood and tissue as Tobe fell backward. Tobe twisted on the ground. Webb kicked him in the guts. Tobe yelled out hoarsely, his body doubling in a convulsion.

Cameron’s face looked as if hot oil had been poured over it. “She was alone…and she fought…and now it’s your turn to fight, big man!” He lifted his foot and brought his boot smashing against Tobe’s cheek. Tobe began trying to flounder away, blindly. Ethel made a sound as if she were turning sick. She stumbled a step toward Cameron. Clyde caught her wrist. “No, Ethel He’s trying to do a job.” He took a breath. “Too bad we didn’t have a Cameron around to turn up the man who was really guilty in Kansas years ago.”

She stared at her husband, and something that had been held tight in her for the years Clyde had mentioned suddenly wasn’t there any longer. A sob burst through her lips, a woman-sound that hadn’t come from her since she was young.

Clyde felt her need, as she, until now, had never been able to discern his real needs. He put his arm about her, and she pressed her face against his shoulder while he forced himself to watch what was going on in the clearing.

Tobe’s face now was hardly recognizable. He crawled to Temple, clawing at her feet. He looked up, his mouth a bloody maw of burst lips and ragged gums from which the teeth had been smashed.

His words were a dying rattle. “Please, m’am…have mercy…help me…have mercy…I’m sorry I done it to you…”

Webb grabbed the remnants of Tobe’s shirt, dragged him back, half lifted him, and hit him in the face. Tobe toppled back. His spread-eagled body slapped dust from the ground.

And Temple screamed. She raised her hands, grabbed at her hair, and continued the long scream that had begun in a rattling thicket on the banks of Wucumma Creek.

Cameron staggered to his feet and stumbled toward her. His groping hands found her. His arms went about her. She lay against him sobbing. “Webb, no… I saw you…but so cruel… I couldn’t stand seeing you…”

She went limp. She had fainted. Cameron caught her as she fell. With his arms behind her shoulders and knees he lifted her, gathered her close.

Gradually he became aware that he and Temple weren’t alone in the clearing. He looked at Ethel, who was coming toward him.

“She won’t get entirely well overnight,” Cameron said, “but the medicine took. She’ll make it.”

He heard Clyde say from beside Tobe’s prone form, “He’s dead, Cameron. Maybe you busted a blood vessel in his brain or one going to his heart. Or maybe it was that licking Sykes gave him on the head. He might have taken down and died tonight or tomorrow with delayed reaction to a skull fracture even if you’d never touched him.”

Cameron stood silent, with Temple’s hair like the brush of fresh light across his shoulder. Then at last he said, “I’m sorry, very sorry, for only one thing. I’m sorry for the necessity of it all.”

* * * *

The next day a peon on his way to Fatigoso turned off the road to give his burro a drink at the creek. He thought that the clearing seemed unusually quiet. Not a bird chattering. Not an insect humming.

He saw the cold embers of a camp fire someone had built here perhaps yesterday. And beyond… The peon crossed himself. The oblong of fresh earth reminded him of a grave, an unmarked grave.

But the strangest thing of all was the contraption the peon found a little nearer to the creek. It was a large empty cage, made of willow withes and strands of rawhide lashings.

All the while his burro drank, the peon stood and studied the thing and scratched his head. For the life of him he couldn’t understand what it had been used for, or how it had ever come to be in this lonely silent clearing beside a little creek that didn’t even have a name.