by Lyle Brandt
Nantan turned to the other Mescaleros, village elders by the look of them, and whispered conversation passed between them. Clint could not keep up with it, simply observing as the chief and his advisers spoke among themselves. Aguirre seemed to catch the gist of what they said but kept his face composed, expressionless, until Nantan nodded and turned to face his guests once more.
“We can spare five men,” he said, “but they must be volunteers. I cannot order them to risk their lives for you.”
Aguirre nodded. Said, “My riders volunteered as well.”
“Their pay depends on how long they are gone. One dollar each, per day, or the equivalent in food.”
Clint did the math, came up with the equivalent of what Aguirre paid his hired hands on the hacienda. Figured it was not a bad deal, and significantly more than any peon earned across the border.
“And for a warrior who does not return?” Nantan inquired.
“Whatever you consider fair, nitis,” Aguirre said.
“Five dollars.”
Call it a month’s wages, give or take a couple of days.
“Agreed,” said Alejandro.
Nantan nodded. Said, “Then let us smoke on it before I call for volunteers.”
* * *
* * *
When they had finished with the smoking ritual, passing around a feathered pipe loaded with kinnikinnick—a mixture of regular tobacco with assorted herbs and barks from desert shrubbery—Nantan led his three elders from the tipi with his guests in tow. Outside, the Mescalero villagers stood waiting to discover what would happen next.
Clint and Alejandro watched and listened while Nantan explained the situation to his people in their native language. Parnell followed little of it, speaking next to no Ch’laandé, but he reckoned that the chief was spelling out Aguirre’s offer, putting out a call for volunteers. It was instructive in a way, watching the older Mescalero braves whisper among themselves, most looking dubious, while womenfolk and minors huddled closer to their parents.
When the chief had finished, five young men stepped up, forming a line of volunteers. From the varied expressions on their faces, some of them were eager for the hunt, while others kept their feelings hidden behind bland postures, revealing little or nothing.
Nantan seemed satisfied with the selection ranged before him and he introduced them to Aguirre, starting on the left end of the lineup. Kuruk was the first, with hair of medium length, broad shoulders, and a half smile brightening his face. Clint pegged his age as somewhere in the early twenties, though he held himself with confidence that spoke of greater age. His name, according to the chief, meant “bear.”
Next up, to Kuruk’s right, was Goyathlay, translated to “yawner” from Ch’laandé. Clint supposed that might explain his vaguely sleepy look, but there was something in his eyes that let an adversary see he was alert, in spite of any seeming outward lassitude. He wore his hair in braids and had large hands that seemed a tad ungainly at the termination of his slender arms.
The third in line was Nantan Lupan—“gray wolf”—and he proved to be the chief’s son. Parnell wondered that Nantan did not prefer to keep him safe at home, then thought the young man might have seen that as an insult to his manhood and rebelled against a well-intentioned bid to make him stay home.
The next to last in line was called Itza-chu, meaning “great hawk,” although Clint saw nothing birdlike in his face or build. Of all five volunteers, he was the stockiest and seemed most eager to embark upon their quest. Whether that attitude derived from yearning for adventure or just waiting to get paid, Parnell could not have said with any certainty.
And finally, the chief identified Bimisi, translated as “slippery” in English or resbaladizo in Spanish. Nothing about him seemed to justify the name per se, and Parnell hoped it would not indicate a tendency to slip away and hide when things got tough out on the trail.
When Nantan finished with the introductions, Alejandro moved along the line of volunteers from right to left and shook each of their hands in turn, spoke briefly to them, verifying his intent to compensate the volunteers or reimburse the tribe if they should not return. It was agreed for the five warriors to arrive with ponies, guns, and ammunition at the hacienda by first light the next day, ready to depart.
Clint and Alejandro mounted their buckboard after a final round of thanks and shaking hands, starting for home, while Nantan huddled with the volunteers who would be joining them. This time tomorrow, they should be across the Rio Grande into Mexico, and no one could predict what happened next—or who would live to see the journey through.
CHAPTER SIX
The Aguirre Hacienda
The kitchen staff served breakfast well before daybreak, at trestle tables set up in the yard. A few older vaqueros looked askance at the young Mescaleros, ancient enmities remembered from a time when things were bloody on the borderlands and racial warfare was the order of the day, but no one stared too long or risked their jefe’s wrath by upsetting the plan he had in mind.
If it came off, there would be blood aplenty, but no more spattered across the doorsteps of their homes.
The Mescaleros had arrived on unshod ponies, using blankets in place of saddles, set for double duty as their bedrolls when they camped at night. None came with saddlebags, knowing a packhorse had been set aside for hauling food and other necessaries on the trail, but all were armed for manhunting. All five carried long guns, mostly Sharps carbines, while Goyathlay and Itza-chu had six-guns tucked under their beaded belts. All carried knives of varied lengths, fine honed. Kuruk and Nantan Lupan also carried tomahawks with brightly painted handles, heads of polished steel.
Clint Parnell watched the Mescaleros on arrival, taking note of their selected mounts. Kuruk’s horse was a blood bay, Goyathlay’s a smoky cream. Nantan Lupan straddled a cremello. Itza-chu managed a skewbald, while Bimisi sat astride a rabicano. Spirited but well behaved, the animals reminded Parnell of their riders, stuck somewhere between the wild times of their ancestors and what passed now for civilized society.
The morning meal was fried eggs, ham, and biscuits under sausage gravy. Strong black coffee washed it down, and every member of the hunting party went for seconds, knowing that the best part of the day might pass before they ate again. Across the river to their south, even for those who had completed journeys into Mexico or hailed from there, lay terra incognita now. The world had changed for all of them over the past two days and nights. Once they had crossed that borderline, they would be cast in deadly dual roles, as both hunters and prey.
Of those assembled at the outdoor tables, Alejandro spoke the least. His Mescalero reinforcements talked among themselves, their language barely understood beyond their small circle of five. Aguirre’s riders told old jokes and stories many had heard before, most talking with their mouths full. Seated to their father’s right and left, sisters Dolores and Sonya restricted conversation to their absent brother, letting Papa Alejandro understand their need to make things right.
As if they ever could.
Clint listened, taking in what he could overhear and translate, wondering if he had bitten off more than he might be capable of swallowing. Not breakfast, but its aftermath in Mexico, where every face they saw would be an enemy’s or a suspicious stranger’s, wondering if it was best to just ignore the interlopers or betray them for the prospect of a small reward.
Clint did not relish this new undertaking, would have gladly palmed it off on someone else if that were possible, but he was cornered now, with no choice but to forge ahead. He still was not at ease with the Aguirre sisters joining in the hunt, and more particularly not Sonya. Although the sisters were supposedly identical, he felt more warmth for Sonya than Dolores, even knowing that he should not have a favorite between his jefe’s daughters or aspire to any more between them than a friendship spanning years.
Despite his elevated rank as foreman of the h
acienda, he would never be a member of the family, could not replace Eduardo in his role as Alejandro’s son. But if he could retrieve the stolen herd, or most of it at least, while meting out a taste of vengeance to the bandidos responsible . . .
What then?
Was there a chance he could find greater favor in his jefe’s eyes, perhaps enough to compensate for having been born Anglo on the north side of the Rio Grande?
Don’t jump the gun, he thought. The first thing that you have to do is get your job done and come back alive.
* * *
* * *
Pearl-gray dawn was breaking in the east as the assembled diners finished mopping up their plates and started making ready for the trail. Clint and the twins were mounted on their normal horses. Joaquín Cantú rode a brindle gelding. Paco Yáñez settled comfortably on a liver chestnut stallion, while Ignacio Fuentes was mounted on a buckskin mare, and a piebald gelding served Arturo Lagüera.
Each vaquero packed a rifle or a shotgun, all wearing at least one pistol. The Aguirre sisters, in addition to their gun belts, each had extra holsters stitched onto their saddles, Sonya sporting one on each side of the saddle horn for three in all. The riders had canteens, lariats, and spare ammunition in their saddlebags. The pinto packhorse showed no strain under their food, cooking utensils, and spare water bags.
The last nightjars were winging home from insect hunting, bound for gullies where they nested on the ground, as Alejandro moved among the dozen riders, making his farewells. He lingered longest with the twins but made no last attempt to talk them out of joining in the hunt. There would have been no point beyond delaying their departure, and he felt it had already been stalled long enough.
The little caravan of thirteen horses headed southward, with the rising sun off to their left. Watching them go, Aguirre wondered whether they could manage to perform the task he’d set for them or if it was already doomed to failure from the start.
But most of all, he wondered whether he would ever see his girls again.
* * *
* * *
The Rio Grande
At first glance, the river separating Mexico from the United States is not the most impressive waterway. Granted, it winds for nearly nineteen hundred miles between New Mexico and Texas, frequently disputed on the grounds of natural course changes, but the Missouri and the Mississippi both are longer, wider, deeper. The Rio Grande’s greatest measured depth is sixty feet, but other places find it only inches deep, while droughts may dry it to a creeping trickle.
The Aguirre posse chose a point where they could wade their animals from one bank to the other without having to dismount. The danger there was not in being swept away and drowned.
Instead, the peril came from being seen.
It was full daylight, with the desert heating up around them, as they scanned the river’s length as far as human eyes could see, alert to any sign of a patrol on either side.
The risk, as Clint Parnell knew, was threefold.
Six years earlier, mounted watchmen from the U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor had begun erratic patrols of the river from their base of operations at El Paso, Texas. Fortunately, they never numbered more than seventy-five men in total, spread out across 724 miles between their headquarters and San Diego, California, assigned primarily to head off Asian laborers trying to circumvent the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. They rarely bothered Mexicans unless an untaxed pack train crossed their path, and the patrols had zero interest in whatever Americans might haul across the border, headed southward.
On the other side, Díaz’s federales stood watch, and while there were more of them—some thirty thousand on official rolls—they were dispersed throughout Old Mexico’s 762,000 square miles, pursuing bandits, smugglers, and determined rebels against el porfiriato. Clint knew that his party’s federale problem would depend not only on random encounters with the troops, but on which troops they met.
Díaz’s army was a patchwork quilt including old men in the ranks, incompetent commanders, and some units that were little more than bandits in their own right. Those extorted tribute from wayfarers headed north or south, had nasty reputations for assaulting women, and sometimes looted whole villages, stealing whatever came to hand, from food to meager hoarded cash.
And then, there was the other threat, from roving parties of bandidos, who might loot and kill for profit or pretend they served some higher cause, whether political or religious, as “liberators” of the peasant class they generally preyed upon. When bandits struck a group of travelers, survivors were a rarity. Those who survived the first encounter generally wound up without horses, weapons, even clothes in many cases, left to roam the desert waste until its lack of water, heat by day, or cold by night eventually finished them.
Apaches, in particular, were often slain on sight by either federales or bandidos, from race hatred or in hopes of claiming a reward for scalps.
All that passed through Clint Parnell’s mind as he approached the river, but he wasted no time moping over it before he led the team and their packhorse across, the Rio Grande’s murky water barely rising to their horses’ knees at midstream. No one barred their way, but every member of the posse kept a firearm cocked and ready, just in case.
Once on the other side, their search began in earnest, and Chihuahua threatened to obstruct them every mile along the way—assuming they could even find their way at all.
They had no trail to follow through the state named for the much larger Chihuahuan Desert, which sprawled over 194,000 square miles from Albuquerque and El Paso southward to Durango and the northern part of Zacatecas. And if broiling desert were not adequate impediment, Chihuahua also featured mountains—the Sierra Madre Occidental—and the Copper Canyon system, larger and deeper than Arizona’s Grand Canyon. To that, add more forestland than any other Mexican state, plus vast prairies of short yellow grass, much of it under year-round cultivation. Politically, Chihuahua had been a major battleground for the Mexican-American War of 1846–48, the Reform War of 1854–67, and the Second French Intervention in Mexico, lasting from 1861 to 1867. Its ground had swallowed endless seas of blood and waited placidly for more.
And if all that were not enough, Clint’s party had no pointers toward their human quarry or the stolen horses they were hoping to retrieve.
* * *
* * *
Ascensión, Chihuahua, Mexico
Zapata’s messenger arrived as Pancho Villa and his aides were sitting down to lunch in a cantina, ringed by bodyguards. Arriving out of breath, his stallion lathered, he risked life and limb through his insistence that he must see Villa instantly and pass along his master’s words.
Villa called for cerveza for his unexpected guest and watched the rider guzzle it before he asked, “What is so importante that you manage to forget the common courtesies?”
“Señor Zapata wishes you to know that he will be delayed,” the young man answered, remembering to add jefe at the last instant.
“Delayed longer than he has been up to now?” Villa inquired, pretending that he did not hear his chief lieutenants sniggering.
“An unexpected clash with federales, jefe.”
“As opposed to an expected skirmish, then?”
More laughter from his men, half of them with their mouths full of tortillas and frijoles.
“There was an informer,” said the messenger, “but he has been identified.”
“Belatedly,” Villa surmised.
“It was his last betrayal.”
“So, a little present for the federales, then.”
“Sí, jefe.”
“And the horses that we have procured for him? When does he plan to take delivery?” Villa inquired.
“As soon as possible. Señor Zapata is redoubling efforts to accommodate you.”
“Better late than never, I suppose.”
“He asks for your i
ndulgence, jefe.”
“Does he? And for how long might that be, pray tell?”
“A few more days, at most.”
“He realizes that we may be forced to relocate at any moment or risk losing everything?”
“Sí, jefe. That is understood.”
“I hope so,” Villa answered. “Or I may be forced to find another buyer for the animals I cannot use myself.”
“Señor Zapata means to keep his bargain with you. He is counting on it, jefe.”
“As am I,” Villa replied. “But if he cannot reach us soon . . .”
The messenger shifted upon his bench seat. Said, “Perhaps if I might be permitted to observe the animals and count them . . .”
Villa’s full-throated laugh cut short the young man’s words. When the hilarity had passed, Pancho replied, “¿Por qué no? Why not? I can show you where we keep them safe and then dismiss my guards while you ride back and tell Emiliano where to find them, ripe for taking. Would you find that satisfactory?”
The young man’s eyes flared, and he might have paled if he had not been so dark skinned. “No, jefe,” he replied, half stammering. “I had no such idea, I promise you!”
“In that case, do you carry gold? Have you authority to finish our negotiations?”
“No, jefe,” the rider almost whispered in reply.
“Then ask me no more foolish questions, niño. This is man’s work, not a game for children.”
The answer came back sounding almost strangled. “Sí, señor. Por favor discúlpame.”
“You are forgiven, naturally,” Villa answered, smiling. “This time only, mind you.”
“And what should I tell Señor Zapata, jefe?”
“That our deal is still in place, provided he arrives in timely fashion. As a knowledgeable man, he must know that I cannot wait indefinitely for him to appear.”