by Lyle Brandt
“And we still need to see that for ourselves,” Clint said. “You’re going with us, so get used to it.”
Zarita made an anguished face as he replied, “But what if Villa has removed the herd without my knowing it, señor? What then?”
“Then you’re a dead man,” Clint assured him. “And it won’t be quick. I guarantee you won’t enjoy it.”
* * *
* * *
Dolores watched as two of their Apaches placed Jesús Zarita on his horse, one of them using rawhide strips to bind his wrists securely to the saddle horn. Before he mounted up, another frisk revealed a penknife in his trouser pocket, Nantan Lupan removing it and tucking it inside a leather belt pouch for himself.
When she was mounted on her snowflake Appaloosa, Clint Parnell upon his dapple gray gelding, she asked, “Do you believe his story?”
“I won’t know until we see that box canyon, if there is one,” Clint said. “Short of having Kuruk’s people skin the miserable wretch, I reckon that’s the best that I can tell you.”
“I think he was with the others when they hit our rancho,” she replied. “He lies as other people breathe.”
“Can’t argue with you there,” Clint said. “Still, he’s the only lead we’ve got to find the herd and try to slip past Villa’s people in the process.”
“And if he plans on trapping us somehow?”
“Then he’s the first to die. I’ll take him down myself. You have my word on that.”
Another thought occurred to her, not for the first time since they’d crossed the Rio Grande, although she had kept it to herself during their first long, bloody day crossing northern Chihuahua. Even now, voicing the notion made Dolores feel guilty, as if she were betraying Papa Alejandro, her late brother, and the very reason for their quest.
“You realize that only nine of us remain,” she said.
Clint nodded. “Sure. I learned to count that high in school before I quit.”
“And Villa had at least four times that number when he took the herd.”
Another nod. “That’s also true, and it’s been on my mind.”
“How can we drive them north across one hundred fifty miles with Villa’s riders chasing after us and maybe federales, too?”
Clint smiled at her. Replied, “I’d say we’ll likely need a miracle.”
Dolores felt her cheeks flush, whether from embarrassment or sudden anger she could not have said. “Do you believe in miracles?” she challenged him.
“I never have before,” Parnell said. “Never had a cause to, but I have seen things I can’t explain that go against the normal odds. Remember you and Sonya argued with your father that you ought to come along.”
“It is our duty.”
“And it’s my job,” Clint responded. “What I’m drawing pay for if I ever see the ranch again. Besides, from where I sit, we’re past the point of no return. Either I find the herd and try our best to get it home again, or I can slink away and crawl into a hole somewhere. As for you and your sister . . .”
“We have made a promise to our father. I will not betray him. Neither will Sonya.”
“I guess we forge ahead, then,” Clint replied. “Whatever happens next, we face it and fight through.”
Or die trying, Dolores thought, but kept that to herself, internalizing the depression it elicited. Instead, she answered Clint, saying, “I’ll do my part. Be sure of that.”
“I never doubted it,” he said, wearing a wistful smile. “Just keep your Winchester and pistols handy.”
Raising an index finger to his hat brim in parting, Clint rode off toward the column’s head, Dolores following and easing into place beside her sister’s varnish roan. Ahead of them, but trailing Clint, Jesús Zarita rode slumped over, wrists bound tightly to his saddle horn. Two Mescaleros flanked him, Kuruk on his right, Nantan Lupan off to his left, holding Zarita’s reins.
Between them, the Apaches could prevent him from escaping, but Dolores almost hoped that he would try. In that case, she had made a solemn promise to herself. Before one of his escorts could lash out with knife or tomahawk to finish him, Dolores meant to draw her Colt .38 caliber and put a bullet through his brain.
For Papa Alejandro and the brother she would never see again in life, she thought it was the very least that she could do.
And truth be told, the prospect did not bother her at all.
* * *
* * *
Jesús Zarita reckoned that he must know how a hog felt, trussed up in a killing shed and waiting for a butcher’s knife to open up its throat. He had survived so far—more than Enrique Rocha might have said, if a cadaver could express itself in words—but as for coming through the day and night ahead still living, Jesús did not like his odds.
Thinking about Rocha caused him to wonder where the brash bandido’s soul was at that moment. Visions of the afterlife, assuming such a thing existed, rarely crossed Zarita’s mind, and then only to sneer at the idea of heaven with its rumored streets of gold. After the things that he had done, the many crimes he had committed in his thirty years on earth, it never had occurred to him that he might be made welcome at the Pearly Gates, wherever legend claimed they could be found.
And as for hell, with its eternal torment of the damned . . . well, Jesús blocked that from his thoughts, preferring to indulge in alcohol when teachings from his early childhood bubbled to the surface of his dissolute subconscious mind. Thinking of tequila and cerveza now, wishing he had some, set his upset stomach grumbling again, Zarita fearing that he might disgrace himself by spewing uncontrollably.
The moment passed, and he cast sidelong glances at the Mescaleros flanking him like bookends, seeming to ignore him while their hands rested on weapons, ready to eviscerate Zarita if he made a sudden move. One of his second cousins had been murdered by Apaches in Sonora, years before, and while Jesús had never viewed the corpse, descriptions of it circulated through his family, each telling turned more gruesome than the last, and somehow always raised at mealtimes when they killed Zarita’s adolescent appetite.
In fact, he knew that if he tried to flee and the Apache watchdogs did not kill him outright, others from the party would be quick to blast him from his saddle into dark oblivion. That fear immobilized him, but his mind was racing at the same time, plotting ways in which he might escape after the gringo and his riders saw the stolen horses, leaving Jesús to his own devices while they moved in to reclaim the herd.
And things could only go downhill from there.
On one hand, his captors might execute him once they found the horses in the canyon he’d described for them—and if Villa had moved the herd sometime yesterday, while Rocha and Jesús were in Ascensión, his fate would certainly be sealed.
Unfortunately, that was not the only danger to Zarita’s life, as he well knew. Assuming that the gringo and his mismatched team of riders found the stolen horses as predicted, they would obviously leave him bound to stop him from alerting his fellow villistas to their plan. When they attempted to retrieve the herd, outnumbered four or five to one, they would be massacred, and then Villa would ultimately find Jesús wherever he’d been left, assuming rightly that Zarita had betrayed him.
That meant certain death as well, and when it came to punishing a traitor, Jesús knew that Pancho Villa could be just as brutal as a tribe of renegades. Only three months before, when Javier Jurado caught a member of the gang deserting after sundown, sneaking off to summon federales in the hope of getting a reward, Villa had ordered the construction of a pyre and supervised the turncoat being set ablaze beneath the light of a full moon.
Sometimes, when he was standing guard at night or lying in his bedroll on the verge of sleep, Jesús imagined he could still hear the defector screaming his lungs out as flames devoured him, flesh blackening and crisping off his bones.
Zarita’s stomach gave another bili
ous lurch and might have shamed him if he had consumed his meager breakfast at the Lucky Lizard. As it was, he could not bottle up a belch that made his Mescalero escorts laugh until the stale aroma of tequila reached their nostrils. Jesús could not understand the words that passed between them, but he needed no interpreter to realize that they were mocking him.
It was almost enough to set Zarita raging, make him try a break for freedom even if it cost him his life, but courage failed him at the final instant, as it had before, when Rocha tried to pull a weapon on the ambush party and was instantly cut down.
Jesús Zarita was a killer, knew that he was named on “Wanted” posters and that nooses waited for him in Chihuahua and Jalisco if Díaz’s federales ever captured him alive, but he had never been much good at fighting in a manly way. Of course, he’d had his share of drunken barroom brawls, but that was alcohol posing as courage. He had never stood before another gunman in the street to fight it out at noon, always preferring to attack from hiding when he could, back-shooting, or relying on a greater force of numbers to suppress unruly adversaries.
Faced with Pancho Villa’s righteous anger, Jesús knew that he would crumble, weeping, begging for his life, screaming until his lungs at last could draw no breath.
And that was why he must attempt to flee as soon as possible, the first time that he saw even the slightest opportunity.
* * *
* * *
Sonya Aguirre had no faith in what their captive had revealed, but she was loath to say so openly, aware that there was no alternative to following his lead and hoping for the best. As for herself, Sonya had largely given up on hoping when the raiders struck her father’s hacienda, and she’d seen her sister lose much of her normal confidence when Paco Yáñez fell in battle on their first day in Chihuahua.
As a twin, she felt the grief Dolores had endured after Paco’s death, when both of them were still grieving brother Eduardo’s loss and worrying about their wounded father, back at home. Leading the team that had been whittled down considerably, Clint Parnell felt duty bound to soldier on with his assignment, even unto death, and fear for his well-being amplified her own sense that their time was running out.
Sonya had seen the way Clint looked at her, the secret smiles he flashed at her from time to time, when no one else was watching, and while nothing more had passed between them yet, she had begun to see a future there—until Francisco Villa intervened to tear her comfortable world apart. Since then, she had sustained one loss after another, slaying strangers to the point where it began to seem routine, imagining a bloody end for all of them in Mexico that left her father childless, ultimately destitute.
With those thoughts brewing in her mind, Sonya briefly considered reaching for her Springfield rifle, executing their reluctant guide before he could betray them all, then caught herself, backed off from the insane consideration as Dolores rode back from her talk with Clint and took her normal place on Sonya’s left.
“A penny for your thoughts?” Dolores said.
“You would not get your money’s worth,” Sonya replied.
“You do not trust the swine we captured,” said Dolores. Not a question from her tone.
“Do you?” Sonya replied.
Dolores smiled at that. “Of course not. At the first sign that he’s tricking us, I’ll blow his brains out.”
“You will have to get in line, hermana,” Sonya cautioned. “But if he can lead us to the herd . . .”
“Then what?” Dolores asked her twin. “Villa is said to lead forty or fifty men.”
“Minus the ones we killed at home,” Sonya reminded her sister.
“So?” Dolores answered. “Suppose there are no more than thirty. We are still outnumbered nearly four to one.”
“If we can take them by surprise . . .”
“And there is still the herd to think about,” Dolores said. “Consider driving them across the border and back home again, with federales and villistas hunting us along the way.”
“I’ve thought of little else,” Sonya advised. “Our duty still remains.”
Dolores frowned at that. “Do you suppose Papa would rather have his horses or his daughters safely back at home?”
“I think he would prefer that none of us go hungry through the winter and next year,” Sonya replied.
“You think we have a chance then? Honestly?”
“I say we’ve come too far and sacrificed too much to simply turn around and run, hermana. Not that we could make it anyway, after the federales we have killed.”
Dolores thought about that, frowning, finally agreeing with a desultory nod. “Entonces, hasta el final,” she said at last.
Sonya echoed her twin, translating her words mentally. “On to the finish, then.”
“And may the devil take whoever stands between us and our goal,” Dolores said.
“From what I understand, the devil has already taken Pancho Villa.”
Putting on a smile she did not feel, Dolores said, “Then we shall send him down to hell where he belongs.”
And likely join him there, she thought, but kept that morbid postscript to herself.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
West of Ascensión, Chihuahua
Where are those idiotas inútiles, Javier? Are they not hours late by now?”
“At least three hours, jefe,” Javier Jurado answered with a nod of confirmation. He agreed with Villa that Enrique Rocha and Jesús Zarita were idiots, indeed, but had not found the pair of them entirely useless. They were sometimes fairly good at cleaning up around the camp, and adequate at standing guard by night, if they could stay awake and had no liquor close at hand.
“Four other men are nagging me about their turn in town,” Villa explained, as if he thought Jurado might be unaware of that. “I have a mind to send them on and find the absentistas, possibly disarm them before sending them back here.”
Jurado frowned. Said, “Jefe, that might cause an incident involving la policía. If they become involved, or summon federales . . .”
A weary sigh from Villa as he said, “You are correct, of course. That is the last thing that we need while waiting for Zapata to arrive. But I must punish them somehow if they ever return.”
“It is a matter of some delicacy, jefe,” his lieutenant ventured. “Rocha is the worse borracho of the two. He’s always sneaking drinks and slipping off from work if he can manage it. Zarita is more pliable and would not leave Enrique drunk in town or laid up in some puta’s crib to ride back here alone.”
“Perhaps a whipping,” Villa said, a smile playing across his face.
“Perhaps.”
“You disagree?” asked Villa.
“If we shame Rocha in public, he is likely to desert, jefe,” Jurado counseled. “If he runs . . . well, who knows where he might end up, revealing secrets that may harm us in the end.”
“So, you think I should kill him, then?” The prospect did not seem to bother Villa overmuch.
“Or possibly assign him to a dirty job like cleaning out the stables, eh?” Jurado said. “A month or two of that with no more trips into the city may encourage him to mend his ways.”
“You trust in his intelligence?” Villa inquired.
Jurado stalled answering that. At last he said, “Not much. He’s like a simple-minded child, but he can follow orders well enough if supervised.”
“In which case, you’ll be happy to ride with him if I ever let him go back to Ascensión.”
Jurado managed to suppress a grimace and keep any skepticism from his tone as he replied, “As you see fit, jefe.”
“Bueno. Go on and send the others who are waiting, with instructions for their tardy comrades to return immediately and report to me.
“And if they don’t come back within the next two hours, we must reconsider executing both of them. Does twenty pesos for the head of a deser
ter seem a fair price, Javier?”
“It should encourage prompt response,” Jurado said. “Once we have spread the word, they will find nowhere in Chihuahua safe to hide themselves.”
“Now, if only we could speed Emiliano on his way,” mused Villa.
“He is still beyond our reach, jefe,” Jurado said. “We should not risk a scouting expedition at the present time.”
“No,” Villa granted. “We can only wait—but not much longer, eh? If there is still no word by day after tomorrow, we should look for other buyers. I obtained this herd to sell, not start a breeding rancho of my own.”
Jurado sometimes marveled at the way Villa claimed credit for the deeds accomplished by his men acting together. Granted, he came up with most of the ideas, always consulting Javier, but nothing on the scale of their New Mexico incursion could be realized without seasoned bandidos pitching in.
That simple knowledge was not jealousy; far from it. Javier Jurado knew he lacked Villa’s charisma when it came to handling others, mollifying and cajoling them into pursuing tasks that placed their lives at risk. Granted, they were compensated handsomely, but it was still the man in charge—backed by his ever-growing legend—who commanded their respect and loyalty.
When all else failed, Jurado played the role of hatchet man.
He knew his place and had no yearning to rise above it, to command a troop of raiders on his own with all of the attendant dangers. Javier was happy in his role as Villa’s second-in-command, and if that forced him into dirty jobs from time to time, like playing nursemaid to a pair of negligent villistas, he could live with that.
It was the price of standing next to power, basking in his jefe’s aura, elevated by that close proximity. But given Villa’s volatility, standing too close meant that Jurado faced a risk of being burned—perhaps incinerated, so that there was nothing left.
As Villa’s teniente, he passed orders down to their soldados and made certain they were carried out. But there might come a time when being privileged to speak with Pancho’s voice was a handicap.