The Trailsman #281

After a simple breakfast of cornmeal mush, the old woman, Maria, presented Rosalinda with a breechloader and a doeskin ammo pouch.

“My husband,” Maria said, making the sign of the cross, “was the ferry operator at Rio Mora for many years. Despite the law forbidding us to own weapons, he kept this with him. Take it, Rosalinda, and always keep it by your bed.”

Fargo glanced at the weapon. It was a cap-and-ball single-shot rifle made by William W. Marston of New York City. A Marston rifle always had an excellent ramp sight on it, making it an accurate piece.

“Easier than rolling off a log,” Fargo assured her. “Just always be careful handling it, and if trouble comes, don’t even pick it up if you aren’t dead set on using it. Never bluff with a firearm.”

“Just chew open the cardboard cartridge,” he said, spitting out a wad of brown paper, “and thumb the ball through the loading gate, right there. Then you just poke the rest of the cartridge in, like so, close the breech, and your primer’s built into that leather base on the cartridge.”

He thumbed the hammer to full cock. “That’s all you do to get it ready to fire.”

He thumbed it back off cock. “I’ll lash it to my horse until we get to your sister’s place in Chimayo. That way you’ll be legal.”

When Fargo and Rosalinda went outside, a slat-ribbed gelding waited in front of the hut, already saddled. A group of well-wishers stood waiting to say good-bye to Rosalinda.

“This was once a plow horse, for its sins,” apologized an old peon wearing a straw hat and rope sandals. “But it is broken to the saddle. Rosalinda can leave the old nag with my brother Pablo in Chimayo.”

Fargo glanced at the cinch and grinned. Whoever had tightened the girth had been duped by the old nag’s cunning. He undid the cinch and tugged it tight and quick. Otherwise, the crafty animal would sneak a big breath and toss the rider later from a loose saddle.

“That man from last night,” Rosalinda said with a shudder as they rode out. “I know you went out later to find his trail. Did you?”

Chimayo lay only about three hours’ ride to the east, an ancient village almost forty miles north of Santa Fe. It was an important site to many Christianized locals, because it was home to El Santuario—one more of many unpretentious little chapels throughout New Mexico.

But the trail was a dangerous stretch that had Fargo worried. At times it was high elevation, with rock parapets, which meant possible trouble. There were also plenty of thickets, cutbanks, and other good ambush points.

“She will sell high to some rich man with a hacienda in the south country,” Jemez Gray Eyes said. “I know that one. Comanches sent her man under. She will sell high.”

The night before, Jemez and his hard-bitten band of Mescaleros and Jicarillas had made camp in the lee of a long spine of rimrock. The crosswinds were fierce here, and colder than in the lower elevations. They buffeted the men from every direction. But they always felt safer in the high places.

The Fighting-Men, as was their ancient custom, had slept behind low windbreaks made of stones.

“And this beauty,” chimed in Hoyero, “will not be traded for guns or horses. We will take only the glittering metal disks.”

Although not as rapidly as the Navajos had, Apaches, too, were starting to realize that gold and silver coins had great value to all the invaders of their historic homeland.

“All this land, as far as you can see,” Jemez said, making a sweeping gesture with one arm, “was once called Apacheria by our enemies, who stayed out. Then Coronado came and called it New Spain. Next it was called Mejico, and the brown ones placed a bounty on our scalps.”

“Now these white-skins like him call our land America. It is still Apacheria to we who are the Fighting-Men. But that one?”

“This Son of Light . . . he is widely respected for his fighting skills. Let us put him to the test. Mahko!”

“You are a good shot,” Jemez told him. “Get below and send them a greeting from the Fighting-Men.”

The Apaches had begun one of their favorite harassing tactics: “showing” themselves, a little game they played to unnerve a man and test his mettle.

It began with brief glimpses. Fargo would glance up and sight one standing openly on a ledge. As they advanced along the winding trail, the braves began to appear lower and lower down.

“Madre de Dios!” Rosalinda gasped behind him, and Fargo realized she’d finally spotted one of them. “Dave! I saw—”

“Just stay calm,” he cut in without turning around to look at her. “Don’t let them see you’re scared.”

You just can’t tell, Fargo thought, with a bunch like that—probably an outlaw band cast from their clans. Theirs was the primitive, nomadic lot of a people who had been driven to the harshest, hottest, driest, most dangerous places in the Southwest—some places so remote they were not yet on maps.

As the twig is bent, Fargo mused, his eyes going distant for a moment. Right now, he knew exactly how they felt. Hounded, unsafe day or night, always waiting for the next hidden rifle to speak its piece.

“Ojo!” Rosalinda cried. “Look out! That one is pointing a rifle at us!”

Because they want you, sweet and juicy little beauty, Fargo thought. And that bunch won’t have any trouble of the kind Blaze Weston had last night, when his manhood failed to perform. After they’ve had their use of you, they’ll sell you into slavery.

“They do it because we’re here,” Fargo replied. “Some shots are coming, but don’t panic.”

Despite the warning, Rosalinda cried out when a bullet kicked up a geyser of dirt in front of the Ovaro.

“Steady, querida,” Fargo called to Rosalinda. “We’re just riding off to a Sunday picnic, that’s all.”

Another plume of dust spat up when a bullet splatted into the trail, this one closer.

Fargo used his knees and a familiar, soothing tone to calm the Ovaro. It was more of a job, however, to get Rosalinda’s stove-in nag under control.

“They’d’ve done it by now,” he assured her. “Right now it’s a game.”

“Ain’t had this much fun since the hogs ate Maw-Maw!” Fargo called out cheerfully to the scowling Apache, who now stood only thirty yards away on a basalt ledge.

Now the “game” had to end, Fargo told himself, and he had to end it. Of all the tribes he’d had set-tos with, none surpassed the Apaches in ferocity, courage, and cunning. The key, when confronting them, was to mingle respect with strength.

And since they could be unbelievably cruel to an enemy, it was best not to become one.

With a blur of speed, Fargo’s Colt cleared leather, then leaped into his fist.

The Apache loosed a bray of pain, his dropped carbine clattering among the rocks. He held up his left hand, the one he’d used to steady the barrel, and stared at it in astonishment.

The tip of his left index finger had been precisely blown off at the first joint.

Evidently Fargo must have passed his test with the Apaches. He and Rosalinda made the rest of the ride unmolested.

“There’s Chimayo,” Fargo said as they rounded the shoulder of a mountain.

The village was a tight cluster of adobe buildings down below in a fertile valley. Wild columbine colored the surrounding pastures and meadows with splashes of sky blue. Workers filled the milpas, or communal fields.

“You still see his tracks, don’t you?” Rosalinda asked, watching Fargo study the trail as they descended the final slope into Chimayo.

He nodded, saying nothing. But Fargo feared there was going to be a hot time in the old town tonight, unless he could flush Blaze Weston out first.

They reached the outskirts of the village. In these remote mountain settlements, Christian and Indian religions often mixed. White crosses alternated with prayer plumes planted to curry favor with the gods.

“May we stop here a moment?” Rosalinda asked. “I wish to give thanks for our safe journey.”

“Here” was El Santuario de Chimayo, a small chapel nestled among cottonwoods.

“Well . . . no offense, pretty lady, but me and churches aren’t exactly too well acquainted. I’m not precisely what you’d call a ‘believer.’ ”

Fargo was about to beg off. Just then, however, he realized something: the tracks of Blaze Weston’s horse—turned in at the lane leading to the chapel.

True, another set proved Blaze had already left again. But suddenly Fargo wanted to see what might have interested him so much.

She smiled. “So you do know about it? Well, the miracle dirt is there. Ven conmigo. Come with me, I’ll show you.”

Fargo threw off, helped Rosalinda down, then walked her under the rustling cottonwoods toward the open front door.

Fargo glanced down at the sand path, his stomach going queasy with loathing when he recognized Weston’s boot prints.

“Don’t be afraid,” Rosalinda teased him, misunderstanding his sudden apprehension. She tugged him through the doors. “If sinners are struck by lightning, we’ll both be hit—after last night,” she added, flushing.

“These doors left unlocked all the time?” Fargo asked, glancing around at the cool, dim interior.

Maybe so, thought Fargo, and it looks like the devil’s been poking around lately, too.

The interior was sparse and simple, with a puncheon floor and raw-lumber pews. Niches in the thick old walls held plaster statues of the saints. Despite the overall simplicity of El Santuario, however, the elaborate altar featured intricate bas-relief designs in hammered gold and silver.

“Look,” Rosalinda said, pointing to one wall of the anteroom where she and Fargo stood. It was covered with rows of crutches. “Those belonged to people who came here lame and left healed.”

“With all those crutches,” Fargo remarked mildly, “wouldn’t you expect to see at least one wooden leg?”

“Exactly in the center of that room,” she said, “is the hole with the sacred soil. The holy dirt from that ground has been taken out by believers for many, many years. Yet, miraculously, it is always replaced.”

“Uh-huh,” Fargo said politely, more interested right now in those hobnailed boot prints than in lore.

Rosalinda prayed at the altar while Fargo tracked the sandy prints. Blaze seemed to have made one quick pass around the chapel—and Fargo doubted it was for religious inspiration. This place would not ignite easily from outside—this was not grass-impregnated adobe, but solid baked mud.

But the inside . . . that was all wood. Old, weather-sapped wood that made for perfect tinder.

“C’mon,” he said, the moment Rosalinda finished praying. “Let’s get you to your sister’s, then I got a telegram to send.”

Rosalinda’s sister, Serafina, lived just past the southern edge of the village. A handsome woman perhaps five years older than Rosalinda, she was weeding a strip of side garden as the two rode up.

The sisters greeted each other effusively in rapid Spanish mixed with an indio dialect Fargo didn’t recognize.

Fargo had noticed how Indians in New Mexico considered it bad manners to ask a person his name directly, such was the important power of a name. It was the custom to ask a friend instead.

“Will you have comida with us?” Serafina asked. “There is plenty.”

“Con gusto,” Fargo replied. “But first I need to send a telegram.”

Major Jeff Carlson, commanding officer of the garrison at Fort Union, had just been handed an odd message from the post telegrapher:

SEND TROOPS TO SPRINGER IMMEDIATELY
STOP CITIZENS COMMITTEE ABOUT TO
EXECUTE INNOCENT PRISONER IN ABSENCE
OF SHERIFF STOP WILL EXPLAIN ALL LATER
MISTER BRASS BUTTONS

“Skye Fargo,” he said aloud. “So you’re still among the living, old friend?”

Not for one second had Carlson ever believed the wild tales about Skye Fargo, arsonist and woman-killer. The major had known and worked with Fargo—as friend, scout, hunter—since the days when Carlson was a shave-tail fresh out of West Point. And he’d never met a better man, in or out of uniform.

“Tell Sergeant Avery to pick ten men immediately. They’re to be issued short rations and forty rounds of ammunition apiece. I want them dispatched immediately to Springer, where they will seize the town jail under martial law and take custody of any prisoners until Sheriff Rafferty returns. Any ‘vigilantes’ who attempt to interfere will be arrested—or shot, if need be.”

When Wexley had left, Carlson gazed at the telegram again, more thoughtfully this time. He knew damn well why Skye had not shown up to begin his new duty as a scout for a road-building crew. He had his name to clear and one hell of a monster to stop.