DAY AFTER DAY Cameron’s group angled southeast from the Mexican border across Sonora and into Chihuahua, where Alfred Going believed the treasure lay. The little village of San Cristóbal was not named on the map, but Going believed he knew the country the plat described.
Cameron was happy his old friend Tokente had come along. With each mile, each mountain crossing and saddle ford, it became more and more apparent to him that, on his own, Cameron would have gotten them lost. Worse, he might have led them to an Apache hideout.
As it was, they spotted no Apaches, besides the two Cameron had killed back in Arizona. They saw a few old moccasin prints and tracks made by unshod hooves, and, while scouting a side canyon, Hotchkiss stumbled upon human bones; arrows lay among the scattered remains. But no actual Indians were seen, and for that, the group was grateful.
They swam in the Rio Bavispe, a cool, green ribbon of seed- and leaf-flecked water angling through chalky buttes, then led the horses across. In a little village called Dublan, Clark traded his tired mules for fresh ones and Cameron bought two extra, mountain-bred horses for the trail. All the horses were reshod by a one-eyed blacksmith named Ambrosio, who sang Spanish ballads in a pitch-perfect tenor and smoked cigarillos rolled with corn husks.
At Ambrosio’s insistence they ate with his family and slept in his stable. Before anyone else in the village had stirred the next morning, the treasure hunters saddled up, rigged the panniers to the mules, and were on their way.
Clark would have little to do with Cameron. Cameron assumed the Southerner suspected there were feelings between himself and Marina. There was little he could do to reassure the man—it was true, after all. Why make it worse by talking about it? When Bachelard was dead and they were all safely back in Arizona, with or without the gold, Cameron would simply take his leave of these people and try to forget that Marina had ever existed.
Meanwhile, Cameron and Marina kept their distance from each other. On the rare occasions when their eyes met, they both flushed a little and looked away, embarrassed about what had happened between them, wanting to forget. But while Cameron lay in his blankets at night, well back from the fire and a good distance from where she lay with her husband, he couldn’t help remembering.
If he’d been clairvoyant he would have known that Marina, lying beside Clark, was thinking of him, as well … imagining herself wrapped in his arms …
LATE THE NEXT afternoon they swung deeper into the hills and the terrain grew more and more rough as they followed washed-out canyons and gullies between towering rock monoliths as big as houses. At noon Going led them up a dry creek that traced a zigzagging course through jagged walls of black basaltic rock blown out of the earth’s center millions of years ago. They found themselves in a deep canyon.
Like the slash made by a giant knife, it was a forbidding place. The walls were black-speckled granite and sandstone. The caves carved from the terraced rock above were ruins left
by the ancients, those the Indians called “those who came before.”
No one knew who they were or why they had disappeared, but their stories of deer and bear hunts and battles with other tribes had been etched in the rock on both sides of the canyon. The sight gave Cameron a chill, like a bad premonition.
Going traced a winding course through the maze of rock until the canyon widened and a spring issued from a terraced, flinty wall upon which moss grew. Water prattled onto a bed of polished rock, pooling where the bed widened, and twisted a course down the canyon. They followed the stream through a defile wide enough for only one rider at a time, to a broad, deep pool on the other side.
The pool lay beneath the trail in a basin made from shelving black rock, and was surrounded by green grass, other springs, more ancient carvings.
Clark halted his pack train and dismounted in a hurry, fairly running to the pool and dipping his sunburned and peeling face in the tepid water. He shook his head like a horse and whooped.
“Take it easy,” Cameron warned him. “There’s plenty. Drink a little at a time or you’re gonna get sick.”
The man turned to him sharply and gave him a cold-eyed look of pure hatred. “You think I’m stupid?”
“I didn’t say that,” Cameron said, loosening his saddle cinch.
“I’m not as stupid as you think,” Clark said, then shunted his gaze to Marina. She looked away, and so did Clark, returning his face to the pool.
It was the first time he had openly indicated his jealousy. Cameron felt sick. He could see now that Clark was going to turn what had happened between him and Marina into a royal ugliness.
They picketed the horses in the grass, at a point where the
animals could drink from a lower pool. Going gathered wood and broiled the hindquarters of an antelope Cameron had shot the previous day. Night fell quickly, the rock walls above them changing through all the shades of purple as shadows filled the draws and gullies carved by old flash floods and dry slides.
Coyotes yammered at the thumbnail sliver of new moon rising and growing brighter against the darkening sky. The smell of crushed juniper blew down from the heights.
The group sat around the fire and smoked. Cameron, Going, Hotchkiss, and Jimmy Bronco talked quiedy. Clark sat against a rock and drank his brandy. Marina wandered off down the canyon. Cameron didn’t worry about her. She’d grown up in this kind of country and she needed her privacy. Besides, she had a gun on her hip and was no doubt a fair shot.
When, later, he went down to check the horses, he heard a gentle splash of water and saw her sitting on a rock, thoughtfully kicking her bare feet in the pool. Starlight glinted on her bare, wet legs exposed by her parted riding skirt.
It was too dark to see her face but Cameron knew she was looking at him. He turned away to check the picket ropes. Marina said, “It is a nice evening, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is,” he answered reluctantly.
“Do we have far to go?”
“Not far. Three, four more days’ travel, Tokente thinks.” He knew she was talking just to talk. They had discussed the remaining distance over supper. She was no doubt desperate for conversation—Clark rarely spoke to her, and there were no women around.
Figuring Clark was passed out from the brandy by now, Cameron hunkered down next to her on the rocks. She stopped kicking her feet in the water.
“Nights like these,” she said, “remind me of home. I used to ride to a canyon like this, when the Apaches and Comanches were not a threat. I would swim in a big deep pool.”
“ou miss home?”
“Very much.” She paused. “Where is your home?”
“Originally? Illinois. I came West just before the war broke out. Had to run out on my family ‘cause my pa wouldn’t hear of me doin’ anything but stayin’ home and takin’ over the farm. I never saw any of them again. I heard from a cousin that my parents are both dead. I don’t know where my brothers and sisters ended up.”
He sighed, and smiled as though the effort pained him, picking absently at a callus on his hand. “I wish now I’d gone back just to see ‘em once, before the folks passed on and the kids all left. I regret leavin’ the way I did, but I was just a kid. Freedom meant more to me than family.”
“Did you marry?”
He told her about Ivy Kitchen without any hesitation at all, which surprised him. He’d always found it difficult to even mention Ivy’s name. Something in Marina, though, made him want to talk to her about his most private thoughts.
Suddenly he felt his face heat with embarrassment. “Well, listen to me,” he said with an effacing chuckle, coming to the end of the story. “I’ve never been known to talk a blue streak, but I believe I just have.”
Marina ignored the comment. “You have lived an interesting life, Mr. Cameron. A life of adventure.”
Cameron shrugged. “Guess it sounds that way.”
“What did you hope for, when you left your home?” she said.
He smiled. “Happiness and fulfillment,” he said. “A whole houseful of kids, and a wife to talk to when they’ve all gone to bed.” He shook his head. “Not loneliness,” he said, surprised at the regret he heard in his voice.
Marina kicked the water and sighed. “I guess we have to make do with what we are given.”
“I reckon,” he said. He wanted to take her in his arms and kiss her as he’d done before. He wanted to hold her and tell her more about his hopes and dreams, and hear about hers. He forced his mind away from it.
Standing, he said, “I’m gonna turn in.” He checked the horses again, then headed back toward the fire.
“Good night … Jack,” Marina said from the darkness.
“Good night, Marina.”
THE NEXT MORNING, before the sun had penetrated the steep canyon, Cameron rolled out of his blankets and took a walk to check on the horses and gather wood for a breakfast fire. He was stooping to retrieve a branch when he saw something in the rock wall before him.
A turtle, the very same turtle etched on Clark’s plat.
Cameron dropped his armload of wood and staggered over to take a closer look. In awe he slowly reached out his hand and ran his splayed fingers across the figure that had been carved in the rock. It had weathered some, so that the figure would have been hard to see from far away, but the white lines were still distinct.
“I’ll be goddamned,” Cameron muttered.
He swung his gaze in a full circle, looking around. This couldn’t be the place, the X marked on the map. None of the landmarks matched those on the plat.
Still, he’d found the turtle. He wasted no time in telling the others.
“What do you think it means?” he asked Going when they’d all gathered around the figure etched in the rock.
Going looked around, tipping back his head to study the high canyon walls. After several minutes, Going shrugged.
“This can’t be the place. It can’t be the X. None of the landmarks are the same as on the map.”
“Maybe we’re close,” Clark suggested.
Going nodded. “Sí. Maybe that’s all it means. When we see the turtle”—he shrugged—“we’re close.”
“It may not mean a goddamn thing,” Hotchkiss groused. He hadn’t put on his shirt yet, so he stood there in long johns and suspenders with his thin gray hair mussed about the crown of his pink, bald head. “It may have been put on the map just to throw us off. I heard they do that sometimes, these old prospectors, to throw a wrench into the search if anyone they didn’t want pokin’ around for their cache went a-lookin’.”
“Could be,” Going allowed.
Marina, standing beside her husband, said, “Jack—Mr. Cameron—said before that prospectors used marks to point the way.”
“That’s right,” Cameron agreed, looking expectantly at Going. “I didn’t find any more nearby, but they’re probably spaced a good distance apart. Maybe we should just ride ahead, the way the turtle’s head’s pointing.”
“I agree, amigo,” Going said with a nod.
Too excited for breakfast, they mounted up and headed down the canyon, eating jerked beef as they rode. The trail rose through long-needled pines on a windswept ridge where the sun peered through pink-washed clouds, then descended into another gorge. At a fork in the gorge, they found another turtle, carved in the rock, its head pointing down the left fork.
Two hundred yards farther on, the came to another fork but no turtle. They all dismounted and looked carefully, coming up with nothing. The cool morning breeze murmured in the pines above them and tiny birds chattered in the rocks on the ridgetops. The air was heating up as the sun climbed.
Cameron glanced around and sighed. “Well, I guess we split up.”
Hotchkiss nodded. “Jack, why don’t me and Jimmy take the fork to the right, and you four continue that way?”
“Meet back here in an hour?” Cameron said.
“Sounds good to me.”
Cameron glanced at the kid, whose sun-bleached hair, wispy curls sweeping his peeling cheeks, had gotten shaggy enough to brush against his neck. “No shooting, Jimmy—unless you’re sure you’re in trouble.”
“I ain’t no retard,” the kid complained, spurring his mount after the graybeard, a packhorse jerking along behind him.
When the pair had disappeared, Going started down the left fork. Cameron paused to drink from his canteen. When he lowered it he saw Clark looking at him, an impudent expression on the Missourian’s face.
“Well, Mr. High-and-Mighty—do you believe us now?”
“About the gold? I still have to see it to believe it, but I have to admit, things have gotten a mite interesting.” Cameron smiled agreeably.
Clark’s eyes grew hard. “What are you gonna do when we find it?”
“What’s that?”
“Are you gonna kill me and take my share?” He looked at Marina. “—And my wife?”
“Adrian,” Marina objected, “please … I am your wife, and I will always be your wife. That was the agreement.”
Clark nodded and made a face, as though he’d bitten into something sour. “Yes, that was the agreement, wasn’t it? … As long as I’m alive.”
Cameron leaned forward, resting his forearm on his saddle horn, and pinned Clark with a direct look. He tried to sound as hard and cold as he could, trying to convince not only Clark, but also himself, of the truth in his words. “Get this
straight, Clark. I have no intention of taking your gold or your wife. You can’t blame a man for lookin’ at her. If you were so damn worried about it, you shouldn’t have brought her out here. Now just get it out of your head. I have.” Then he rode after Going.
Clark fished his brandy bottle from his saddlebags and took a liberal pull. But it only made him angrier—angry at Cameron and Marina, angry at the world, and angry at himself. Would the gold finally bring him happiness? Would it make up for everything he lacked?
Going had just discovered another turtle when the flat pops of distant gunfire rose from the south, in the direction Hotchkiss and Bronco had ridden.
Cameron reined his horse around, drawing his Colt. “Shit!” he exclaimed, wide-eyed with urgency. “Toke, you three stay here. I’ll take a look.”
“You want me to go with you, Jack?” Going called as Cameron started off.
“No. They could’ve ridden into a trap!”