“It is Saddle Rock…and as close as we come. We ride north and a little east.”
Sean dismounted and walked his horse back into the shade, seating himself on a rock near the women, who had also gotten down to rest their horses.
“Will he stop to eat?” Mariana asked.
Sean grinned at her. “Hungry? No, I don’t think he will…yet. He’s heading for a place where there’s water. Dry as these hills are, there’s water if you know where to find it. Montero has handled cattle in these hills long enough to know most of them.”
“Not all?”
“Only the old Indians know all of them.”
He gestured. “Lobo Canyon lies yonder. I killed my first lion over there. Nine feet long he was and crouched on top of a boulder trying to decide whether I was dangerous or not. I was twelve then, and I guess he decided I was pretty small stuff. His tail was lashing…getting set to jump…so I shot him.”
Once more they started on, following a dim trail westward toward the highest peak in the immediate area, a blunt sandstone shoulder that was part of a long ridge that ended in another bold peak to the west and south.
Suddenly Montero turned north and began to follow a still dimmer trail that seemed to be leading up the sandstone peak itself. Several times Sean saw the tracks of sandals here, and recognized them as those left by the Old One.
He was alive then. The old man was not dead. He felt a curious excitement as well as relief, for all the way along he had been fearing the old man had passed on. How long since he had seen him? It had not been for a long, long time!
The growth thinned out, everywhere there was sandstone. How, he wondered, did the old man live? Where did he get water? What did he eat? Why had he not come down to the ranch where he would have been welcome at any time?
Suddenly they were in a nest of smaller peaks almost atop the ridge. There were some trees here and some brush that was suddenly of a deeper green. They rounded a boulder into a small clearing and there before them, built against the wall of sandstone, was a small hut of woven branches. Part of it woven from still living, growing trees.
On a bench at the door sat Juan, the Old One.
He looked incredibly old, unbelievably frail. He wore a straw hat, a worn serape of many colors, and handwoven sandals.
“How do you do, my friends?” His voice was low but resonant. “You have been long in coming.”
“You have been waiting?” Eileen asked.
“Of course. Your husband said that if anything happened to him I was to tell only you…or the boy.” He looked at Sean. “The boy is a man. It is good.”
He waved a hand. “Will you be seated? My home offers little.”
They dismounted. Montero led the horses into the shade, then returned and squatted on his heels and began to smoke a thin cigar.
Sean put a hand on Mariana’s elbow. “Old One, this is Mariana de la Cruz. She is from Mexico.”
The dark eyes turned to her. “Ah? Of course. I was there once…as a boy. A beautiful city, but not what I had expected. We were told it was an island in a lake, but there was no island and not much left of the lake.”
They sat around on stones and benches, and the old man went within. When he returned it was with a pitcher of something cold and he filled a small clay cup for each. “It is an old drink, made of chia and honey. It is cooling…and it gives strength to the muscles.”
“We are in trouble, Juan,” the Señora said gently. “Men would take the ranch from us if we do not pay. We thought you might know where my husband found the gold.”
“Yes. I know you are in trouble, and I know you came about the gold. I will tell you, and then you must go. You are followed. Eight men follow you. They would kill you, all of you.”
“You will come with us?”
“I will come. You could not go alone.” He looked at Sean. “And once we have gone, only you may ever come back for gold. Remember…only you.”
Montero rose. “I will get your horse, Old One.”
“Gracias.” The old man turned to Eileen. “You do not change, Señora. You are as one of us.”
“Us?” she asked gently.
He smiled, amusement stirring the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. “My people are gone now, Señora, but once we were many. Never so many as you, never so many as most peoples, but enough.”
“Your people did not age?”
“All men age, as all men die. The thing is not to die too soon, Señora, and to live wisely. To live a long time is nothing, to live a long time wisely is something.”
“You speak well. You are a strange man, Old One.”
“I believe unfamiliar is the term, Señora.” He paused a moment, watching Montero come up from the rocks behind the hut leading a fine buckskin horse. “Until your husband came I was a lonely man. I needed ears to listen, a voice to reply. The Chumash were a good people, very bright and quick, but their experience was only with our land here. Your husband was a man who had traveled in ideas as well as upon trails and the sea. He listened well, he talked well. He understood much. His was a wide mind, given to acceptance where others might have denied.”
“You are an educated man, Old One.”
“What is education but a conditioning of the mind to a society and a way of life? There are many kinds of education, and often education closes as many doors as it opens, for to believe implies disbelief. One accepts one kind of belief but closes the mind to all that is, or seems to be contradictory.”
Sean was sitting forward, all his attention upon the old man, everything within him suddenly alive. What was it the old man had said to him, those times long ago? He did not remember what was said, only that it had made a difference. He knew now he had never been the same since, that he would never be the same again.
“You said something once about wisdom,” he said. “That it must be shared. I would share yours, Old One. If you will talk, I will listen.”
“Yes. I will speak. But it is important to listen with all the senses, and to feel. Awareness is a way of learning, too. In these days to come you must be alive and aware to everything. Let the days leave tracks upon your memory.”
Suddenly he turned away and walked to the buckskin horse. He gathered the reins, put a hand on the pommel and swung easily to the saddle. He motioned to the others to mount and follow him. Without another word he started along the ridge, then crossed over to the north side.
There seemed no trail beyond that point, but he led on.
He turned in his saddle and spoke to Sean, who now rode behind him while Montero had fallen back to the rear. “Do not forget the way. I am soon to die.”
“No.”
“Soon.”
Sean glanced at his mother. Her cheeks looked gaunt, a little tired. It was the same with Mariana. “Can you make it?”
“Of course,” the Señora smiled. “Can you?”
Sean laughed, and Mariana smiled back at him. “Ride on,” she said, “you will not leave us behind!”
The wind blew off the sea, and although the sun was hot, the wind kept them cool. At times they rode in the shade of sandstone cliffs, at other times under trees. Twice Sean saw the tracks of grizzlies, different from other bears by the long claws on the forepaws. Once he saw the track of a mountain lion and several times of bighorns.
The old man led them down a narrow, switchback trail. This was an old trail now, into which they had suddenly come. He led them deep into a canyon past huge boulders where water dripped. There were many birds, all chirping at once.
“Water here,” the old man said. “It is far.”
There were a few minutes of respite in the cool shade where the water fell, it was a lost place, a cool, pleasant place away from the hot sun.
Soon the old man mounted again. “How far?” Sean asked.
The old man merely said, “To the end. To where we go, and it will be like places you have seen, but unlike places you know.”
Sean dried his palms on his shirt front
and looked down into the deeper canyon. It was nondescript, offering no landmarks. This was a trail that would be easy to lose. The old man was right. One must be aware.
Mariana rode beside the Señora at a place where the trail was wide. “He does not sound like an Indian.”
“What is an Indian? There are Aztecs as well as Eskimos. There are Toltecs and Iroquois.”
“I like him.”
“Yes.” They separated as the trail narrowed, drew together again when it widened. “Did you notice that he said nothing when he found we were coming along? He did not even suggest we be left behind.”
“He knew better,” Eileen said dryly, and then added, “but it is true. Obviously the equality of women has never been an issue among his people…or so it would seem.”
Topping out on a rise, Sean looked back, mopping the sweat from his forehead. He could see nothing behind him but sandstone heights and shimmering heat waves. Were Machado and his men following?
The Old One had said they were, and in his heart he believed it himself. Perhaps one did not always have to see or hear to know. Perhaps one just knew. Was that how the old Indian did it? Even Montero, at times. Was there something on the wind? Did the motion and men and their thoughts create patterns in the air that traveled on until felt by someone attuned to them?
He shrugged. His hand went back to his belt where his pistol was. It was a new-style repeating pistol made in Paterson, New Jersey, and designed by a man named Colt. It was a good pistol, the best of them so far, and called a “long nine” by the man who sold it to him, a man who was broke in Panama.
At the same time Sean had bought his rifle, an eight-shot Colt revolving rifle, and a good one. He had himself tinkered with it a little, setting the sights a bit finer and improving the mechanism.
It was good to be back in the saddle again, and the mustang he rode was a sure-footed mountain horse brought up from Mexico. Several times he glanced back, and once, far away on the sandstone ridge, he thought he caught a flash of sunlight on something metallic. It could have been his imagination.
The sun was sliding rapidly downhill when the old man finally drew up at a spring in the Potrero. “Water your horses and fill your canteens. We’ll make a dry camp.”
“We’re going further?” Sean was worried about his mother and Mariana.
“Only a mile or two. Tomas might know of this spring, although I doubt it.”
They let the horses drink deep, then rode away in the gathering darkness. Their camp was a hidden place in a niche of the hills.
There was soft sand there; Sean kicked away a couple of stones and spread blankets for his mother and Mariana. “Better get some sleep. We’ll be moving on at daylight.”
He watched as Montero led the horses to a patch of grass and picketed them there, then sat down on a rock and looked at the stars. Tonight the old man was not talkative, and after a few minutes Sean saw Montero returning.
“I will watch,” Montero said. “Sleep while you can.”
“Call me at midnight,” he told Montero, and going to a point near the women, who were already asleep, he rolled in his blanket with his weapons beside him and stretched out.
He tried to sleep, but for awhile sleep would not come. The stars seemed very near, very bright. The night was soft as a maiden’s touch, and there was only a suggestion of a breeze.
He heard a pebble fall among stones, the brief stirring of some small animal and when next he awakened, Montero was beside him.
He sat up quickly. “What is it?”
“I am sleepy, amigo. It is time for you to watch.”
Sean shook out his boots carefully. He had no desire to put a foot into a boot with a tarantula or scorpion in it. Then he stood up, shook out his blankets, rolled them behind his saddle, and taking up his rifle, listened to Montero.
“It is quiet. I do not believe they are close, but be careful.”
“What about Indians?”
Jesus shrugged. “No California Indian would come near us when the Old One is along…and they know he is here. I can’t answer for raiders from across the Colorado, the Mohaves or Paiutes from the north.”
An hour passed, and then another. Sean circled the camp several times, checked the horses, and then returned to the campsite. He had seated himself on a rock when his mother joined him.
“I am awake, Sean, if you wish to sleep.”
“It is all right. I slept well.”
“We must save the ranch, Sean. Somehow it must be saved.”
“We will.”
“I know.” She sat down near him. “Mariana is a lovely girl.”
“Yes.”
“You are in love with her?”
He chuckled. “There’s been no time for romance. Too much to worry about. She is lovely, though, and if the ranch were free and clear—”
“There is time. I think she will be with us for a long while, Sean.”
He said nothing, listening into the night. There seemed a sudden, heavier stillness. He waited, expecting he knew not what.
He glanced at his mother. She was sitting a little straighter, looking down the valley toward the spring.
“Somebody is coming,” she said.
Chapter 7
*
SUDDENLY JUAN WAS near them. “Come, we will go now.”
Montero had brought their horses, and once mounted Juan turned sharply away from the way they had come and led them into what appeared to be a solid wall of chaparral, higher than their heads.
There was, in fact, a trail. The brush closed in on either side, the leaves brushing their knees and stirrups, sometimes their shoulders. Juan wasted no time. The old man led the way into the tangle like a young vaquero after an old mossyhorn steer.
In single file, they followed. Weaving and winding through the dark passage, able to see no further than their mounts’ ears, maintaining absolute silence aside from the small sounds of their passing.
At a small clearing in the brush the Old One pulled up long enough for Montero to drop back to the rear, then they moved on. Suddenly, Sean realized the air was growing lighter…the moon was rising.
Emerging from the brush they dipped into a deeply shadowed canyon. Juan held his pace. Above them the mountains loomed, dark and mysterious, and before them the canyon was black, showing nothing.
After an hour of riding they emerged into a wide, moonlit valley, but the old man wasted no time, riding out into the valley and pointing the way diagonally across it.
Here the grass was brown and parched. There was dust, and silence.
For two miles or more they stayed with the valley, then pointing at a rocky tower before them they skirted it and entered a narrow draw.
Steadily they rode and suddenly emerged from the draw into a wide place where there were cottonwoods, an old adobe house, now fallen to ruin, and a pole corral.
“We will stop here,” Juan said “for one hour of rest.”
“I will ride back and watch the valley,” Montero said, and was gone.
Sean helped his mother from the saddle, although she needed none of it. “Help yourself,” she said, “I have ridden further than this.”
“We have further to go,” he said quietly.
“What do you know? Juan will tell us.”
“It is further?” Mariana asked.
The old man smiled. “Three days, if all goes well. Possibly four. You will come?”
“Of course,” Eileen Mulkerin said. “Did you think we would stop?”
“Can we have coffee, Old One? Or is a fire dangerous?”
“It would be good.” He squatted on his heels near a rock. “They will not find where we have come until daybreak, I think. The path through the brush is not much.”
“Old One,” Sean said carefully, “one of those who rides with Tomas once rode with Vasquez, the outlaw. He knows the trails.”
The old man looked up. “There are some trails a man can ride that can be ridden by no other. Let them follow if they da
re.”
Sean made a small fire and got a coffeepot from a packhorse. In a few minutes he had water boiling. Eileen took over then and made the coffee, and he walked out away from their group to listen.
It was very quiet.
The Old One knew what he was doing, but Sean liked none of it. Tomas Alexander’s cantina was a stopping place for all who rode through, and many were outlaws from the gangs of Vasquez or one of the several Joaquins. Tomas knew the back trails himself and had men with him who knew them, too.
If caught out in these lonely hills where Californios rarely came, they would hesitate at nothing. Juan was unarmed, Montero had an old Hawken rifle, while his mother had a Colt revolving rifle like his own. Mariana was not armed.
In a fight it would be Montero, his mother, and himself.
Machado would have Russell, Tomas, and others.
To avoid a fight was the logical conclusion, and that was what Juan seemed inclined to do.
Eileen Mulkerin stood by the campfire and studied her son. Somehow it seemed odd to think of him in that light, for in many ways this broad-shouldered young man was a stranger to her.
Michael, for all his youthful wildness, had always been closer to home. It was Sean, the steady one, who had gone out upon the deep water with Jaime and with others, and who had come back to her from time to time, stronger, more assured, and with a ringing voice of command that startled her at times.
Yet he had a vein of something else, too. Some might have said it was the sea except for the fact that it was the same quality, a strain of mysticism, that had turned Michael toward the Church.
Jaime had had it too, and she did herself. It was Celtic, deep within them all, yet deeper and stronger in Sean perhaps than in any of them. Montero had mentioned it once when he was speaking of Sean as a boy. Old Juan had seen it, too.
What were the things that made up a man? Was it only hard fists and a salty way? Was it a strain of gentleness, a love of the land? Or was it so much else?
In these last hours of the night she looked again at the sky, growing faintly pale now along the eastern rim of the mountains. A few stars still hung in the sky like distant harbor lights, and the blackness in the deepest canyon remained.
Novel 1974 - The Californios (v5.0) Page 5