He touched his sash, turned to face the opposite direction, and then raised his other hand. The sun flashed off the signal mirror in his hand.
Fire Eyes heeled the barb on up the meandering canyon, keeping the horse to a trot. Cuno and Spurr flanked her, looking around warily. Cuno felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up. He sensed a primal menace. The fear was like hot lead seeping into his bones. He resisted the urge to reach forward and slide his Winchester from his saddle boot, instinctively feeling eyes on him and knowing that the move could get him killed.
He looked at Spurr. The old lawman was riding stiff-backed, grinning as though he were watching dancing girls undress on the stage of some frontier opera house.
“What the hell are you smiling about?” Cuno asked, unable to mask his annoyance.
“I always grin like that when I’m about to load my drawers.”
As they wended their way through the canyon, Cuno saw several more armed pickets standing amongst the rocks. They watched expressionlessly as the Yaqui queen and her gringo partners trotted past them.
Finally, they rounded a curve and the canyon opened into a large, pie-shaped bowl with a creek running through it diagonally. Brush huts were scattered along both sides of the creek, and smoke from several outdoor cook fires rose. There were several large rope corrals containing a colorful selection of mustangs amongst the groves lining the creek.
Here and there, animal hides were stretched between standing poles. Bulky, raisin-faced old women ambled amongst the huts and the fires and the stretched hides that several were in the midst of curing. Small children ran amongst them.
As Fire Eyes reined the cream to a stop beside a large jacale partly dug into the side of a low, sandy hill, an old man stepped out of the hut. He wore a breechclout, fur moccasins, and a wolf fur cape, with a soiled blue bandanna wrapped around his forehead. He was gray and withered, his face long and angular, the sun-dried flesh hanging from his bulging cheekbones. One of his eyes was the color of an eggshell, and a jagged scar ran over the socket.
Fire Eyes sat her cream before him, and the old man scrutinized the girl’s partners incredulously, lips parted to reveal only one yellow front tooth. At the same time, a younger man walked out of a jacale opposite the old man’s. A small brush arbor fronted the young man’s lodge. A colorfully dressed old woman sat cross-legged on a blanket on the earthen floor, sort of rocking back and forth, a striped blanket draped across her shoulders. As the young man muttered something to the old woman, he turned to dip water from an olla hanging from an arbor beam, then followed the old woman’s gaze to the newcomers.
The young man, who wore a calico blouse and deerskin leggings, had Fire Eyes’s fine features. He was almost as pretty, and he was long-limbed and muscular without being bulky. If he wasn’t the girl’s brother, Cuno thought, he was at least a cousin.
Now he dropped the dipper back into the clay water vessel and strode out from the jacale. He had a Navy revolver wedged inside the waistband of his deerskin breeches, and an antler-handled knife was sheathed low on his thigh, just above his knee.
As he approached the newcomers, he shifted his gaze from Fire Eyes to her two unlikely companions and back again, and then he said something in Yaqui—sort of spitting the words out and curling his upper lip and flaring his nostrils. His eyes shone hotly with the same passionate amber as did Fire Eyes’s, and Cuno forcefully resisted the urge to reach for his Winchester.
Fire Eyes rejoined the man’s exclamation in the same tone, and the argument continued for nearly five minutes, both Cuno and Spurr sitting their saddles tensely, hands glued to their thighs near their holsters but both knowing that if hell started popping, there would be no shooting their way out of this heavily guarded canyon. The young man was speaking Yaqui to Fire Eyes, but his fierce gaze was shifting rapidly between Cuno and Spurr.
Fire Eyes had the last guttural word, leaning out over the cream’s left wither. The young man then turned to the old man and shouted something, waving one arm, but the old man did not respond. He turned and shuffled back into his jacale. Meanwhile, a crowd of old and young women and small children and several braves the young man’s age had gathered in a semicircle around the strangers.
They regarded the white men with bald disdain.
Finally, the young man whom Cuno took to be Fire Eyes’s brother wheeled and stomped back into his own jacale.
Fire Eyes turned to her guests and said with the anger of her recent exchange still burning in her eyes. “You will be welcome here.” She jerked her gaze toward the creek. “Make your camp by the stream. There is grass for your horses. Food will be brought to you.” Then she added, even more crisply than before, as though convincing herself, “You will be welcome here.”
“Well, it’s good to know we’re welcome here,” Cuno said as he and Spurr rode past several jacales and staring children toward the creek. “Especially since I don’t reckon I’ve ever felt less welcome anywhere. And I’ve been unwelcome a lot of places.”
Spurr chuckled. “Sometimes, kid, you just gotta let go and be a tumbleweed in a cyclone.” He glanced over his shoulder as Cochise picked his way through the rocks, sage, green grass clumps, and willows that widely sheathed the stream flashing in the trees just beyond. “Just the same, I know I’ll be sleeping with one eye open tonight.”
They dismounted near the water but let their horses cool, unsaddling them and rubbing them down, before allowing them to drink. They arranged their gear around a stone fire ring, gathered wood though most of the deadfall around them had been gleaned, and built a small fire. They were lounging around, sipping coffee and smoking quirleys as the sun sank and the canyon filled with cool shadows, when a boy of about twelve years old came through the brush with an armload of split pine and cedar.
He said nothing as he dropped the wood near the stone ring, turned, and scampered away. Later, a round-faced girl about the same age, in a doeskin dress and wearing a blue bandanna, came from the same direction with a basket covered with burlap. She shyly set the basket down near where Spurr lay against his saddle and ran back toward the heart of the Yaqui village.
Spurr lifted the basket to see two wooden bowls steaming up at him—a thin, dark stew with some kind of shredded meat in it, and white flecks of something that looked like wild onions. He handed one bowl to Cuno, then took one for himself. No spoons had been provided, so they sipped from the bowls, sitting back against their saddles and staring suspiciously down at the steaming grub.
Cuno glanced at Spurr. “Reckon they might try to poison us?”
Spurr shrugged. “What’s better—dyin’ by poison or starvation?” He sucked some meat and broth into his mouth, and Cuno followed suit. The broth had little flavor aside from the onion, and the meat, which must have been some kind of bird—possibly sage hen or quail—was tough and stringy, but it went down well and fast. Cuno felt rejuvenated. Spurr set his own bowl down and belched.
“Well, we ain’t dead yet—so that’s a good sign.” He grabbed his whiskey bottle and popped the cork. “Libation?”
Cuno had just poured himself a fresh cup of coffee. “Don’t mind if I do.”
Spurr was splashing whiskey into Cuno’s cup when Cuno spied someone moving toward them through the brush, angling away from the jacales and a remuda of mustangs frolicking in the misty, blue twilight. Fire Eyes held a clay jug to her breast. She wore a short deerskin jacket trimmed with coyote fur and deerskin leggings. Her long, straight black hair appeared freshly brushed, so that violet streaks glinted in the blue light. The cuts and bruises on her face were healing and nearly unseen in the dim light.
She moved toward the gringos’ camp with her slow, rolling-hipped, insouciant stride. Her feet were as light as stardust. The beating the Rurales had given her had taken nothing out of her, Cuno was happy to see.
Both he and Spurr stood as she approached—a white man’s tradition that was likely not recognized here, as she gave them both a faintly puzzled look before glan
cing at the whiskey bottle in Spurr’s hand, and saying, “That is not a real drink.” She extended the clay pot in her hands. “This is a real drink. Pulque. My father makes it.”
Spurr set the bottle down, looked into the pot at the milky brew, and sniffed. The vapors made his eyes water and his throat constrict.
“Yeah,” he said. “That does indeed look like a real drink.” He glanced at Cuno. “A drink to make you feel like someone drove a railroad spike through both ears…”
Politely, though he was not aware of the Yaqui custom concerning drink, he extended the pot to Fire Eyes. She accepted the pot, tipped it to her lips, and took a good pull before handing it back to Spurr and running the back of her hand across her mouth. Spurr drank, then, too, and his eyes bulged and watered a little, and his throat worked extra hard, but he otherwise did not make a spectacle of himself. Cuno took a sip of the brew, then, too, and after the initial punch and firey burn from lips to toes, the liquor cast a soft haze over his eyes, easing the tension in his bones and muscles.
Fire Eyes sat down on a rock on the other side of the fire. Spurr sank back against his saddle with the clay pot, and Cuno sat on a log.
“What’s the plan, Fire Eyes?” he asked the girl. “We appreciate the hospitality an’ all, but what’re we doing here? It’s obvious we ain’t exactly welcome.”
“That was my brother you saw earlier. Tushikinhi. It means Red Water in your language. The old man is my father, the chief of the Agave clan. I have not seen them for a time. A wedge came between us when I decided to form my own clan and to make war myself, in my own way. My father and brother were insulted… especially when I gained the respect of other clan chiefs.”
She lifted her eyes from the fire. “But we have discussed the stolen guns and the dynamite and General Cuesta’s plan for Montana del Loco Oso, and we have agreed to work together.” She shifted her gaze from Cuno to Spurr. “To work together with you in defeating the gunrunners and Cuesta. We will ride from here at dawn tomorrow. I have learned from my brother that Cuesta is awaiting the guns at the foot of our sacred mountain.”
“How many warriors you have?”
“Fifteen have agreed to join me, including my brother.”
“That gonna be enough?”
“It should be enough if I can get into Cuesta’s camp first and kill him. The others should be much easier to kill after the general is dead.”
Cuno and Spurr shared a dubious glance.
Cuno laughed at the matter-of-factness with which she espoused such a grand intention. “What makes you think you can get into Cuesta’s camp and kill him before he kills you?”
“For the oldest reason in the world, mi amigo.” Fire Eyes stared into the thickening darkness beyond Spurr. “General Cuesta is in love with me.”
Cuno and Spurr just stared at the mysterious woman sitting on the other side of the fire. They were both so amazed by the information she’d just shared that they didn’t hear the tread of light feet until the newcomer was only twenty yards away. Cuno turned to see a short, rounded figure in a long bear robe step into the firelight—a young woman with a heart-shaped face and freshly brushed black hair spilling over her shoulders.
“Who’s this?” Spurr said, climbing to his feet a little clumsily.
“This, in your language, is Chokecherry,” Fire Eyes said. “She will keep your bones warm tonight, old man.”
A faint smile touched the Yaqui queen’s eyes.
“Oh—no kiddin’?” Spurr said, glancing over his shoulder at Fire Eyes, tugging speculatively at his chin whiskers. “This purty little gal is gonna… make me happy tonight?”
“Si,” said Fire Eyes, jerking her head. “Go.”
Spurr accepted Chokecherry’s extended hand, and then the girl, quirking a bemused smile on her down-curved, thin lipped mouth, turned and began leading Spurr away from the camp.
Cuno watched them go, then turned to Fire Eyes. He was feeling a little left out, and the liquor had loosened his tongue. “If ole Spurr gets Chokecherry,” he said, glancing around, “who do I get?”
Fire Eyes rose and walked lightly around the fire on her long, supple legs. The firelight danced in her eyes and glistened off the wedge of bare skin at her midriff. She knelt down before Cuno and shook her hair back from her shoulders. Her eyes were like warm coals caressing him.
“You get me.”
A hard wooden knot grew in Cuno’s throat.
She started to lean toward him, and he felt himself pull back slightly, instinctively. But then she wrapped her arms around his neck and, no fire suddenly blazing in her eyes and not reaching for a sharp knife with which to gut him, touched her lips very gently to his.
“I’ll be damned,” he said. “You mean it.”
“I do not give myself freely to any man. Only those who earn me. This morning, you earned me.”
She slid the deerskin jacket off her shoulders, then opened her vest, peeled it off her shoulders, and tossed it aside. The knot in Cuno’s throat grew. His pulse throbbed in his temples. He extended his hands very slowly and slid his fingers along the sides of her fine, proud breasts. She closed her hands over his, pressed them more firmly to her bosom, and tossed her head back with a heavy sigh.
Finally, she rose, spread out his blanket roll, and lay her deerskin jacket down on top of it. Cuno kicked out of his boots and shirt and jeans and longhandles, all the while watching her shed her deerskin breeches in the firelight, her skin shining like a million copper pennies.
She lay down on the jacket and blankets, and now her eyes and hair shone as she faced the fire. Cuno stood naked before her. Her eyes drifted across him, the lids lowering a notch, her mouth corners rising in an alluring half smile.
“You are fine,” she whispered.
Cuno dropped to his knees, and she spread her legs for him and reached for him, gently stroking, her eyes acquiring an almost startling dreamy cast. As he lowered his head to hers, pressing the length of his hard body against hers, the kiss with which she returned his was surprisingly gentle and warm and silky. There was none of the expected savagery in it.
Just as there was none of the wild zeal in what came later—only slow, gentle, eminently erotic and boundlessly satisfying lovemaking with a tender, uninhibited woman.
They punctuated their coupling by taking a swim, then drying each other off slowly, kissing and nuzzling, and making love by the built-up fire once more. Cuno’s anxieties over being trapped in the canyon with a whole herd of savage Yaqui burned off like Arizona ground fog.
He thought he’d died and gone to heaven, or as close to it as he was ever going to get.
24
GENERAL ARTURO CUESTA woke with a start. He jerked his head up as the echoes of the rifle shot, sounding like the detonation of a near cannon, echoed off the ridges around him.
“Mama mia,” the general said, making the sign of the cross on his chest over his long silk underwear shirt revealed by his unbuttoned blue uniform tunic. “Those men are going to be the death of me yet. Mierda!”
Of course, it was better that the occasional shots echoing around the near ridges were made by his own men hunting the area around the train than by another batch of rampaging Yaqui. Still, Cuesta’s nerves were shot, and with a groan he sleeved sweat from his brow.
The general was sprawled atop a red velvet settee that he’d ordered his men to set on the roof of his own private railcar. His car and the rest of his twelve-car military train sat at the end of the new railroad line, nearly at the foot of formidable Montana del Loco Oso. The general and his small army—around fifty federal soldiers—were stalled there until they could get more rails hauled up from Mexico City, and until they received the dynamite and badly needed, newer-model Gatling guns and ammunition that the general was having shipped down from Arizona. Mexico, it seemed, was low on both iron and black powder.
The general had ordered the expensive, ornately carved settee hauled up to the roof and a cream burlap canopy erected over it, beca
use, after two months of being stalled here in this godforsaken sierra in north-cenral Sonora, four hundred miles from his home, the car’s close confines were beginning to drive him as loco as the mountain he was assaulting, causing him to wake at night, heart fluttering, gasping for air, believing he was being buried alive.
And the intermittent rifle shots of the crew either hunting or target shooting wasn’t doing his nerves any good, either. At least the lack of dynamite had halted the blasting of the tunnel through the mountain, though that would resume as soon as the dynamite arrived with Cuesta’s business associate from Arizona, or with—Cuesta gave an evil, cunning grin—the notorious bandito, Carlos Riata, he’d sent to intercept the caravan and who would spare Cuesta about half the gold bullion the general had agreed to pay the Americanos. Of course, Cuesta wasn’t certain Riata was up to the task, as the bandito’s own ranks had been cut down in his own war with the Yaqui. But Cuesta had thought it worth the risk, as there wasn’t much the Americanos could do about the double cross except to get angry about it.
In the end, they’d hand over the guns and ammunition, and be paid…
Cuesta looked around and yawned, his boredom a palpable thing, a weighing depression. Once the rail line, which his superiors including the president had ordered Cuesta to oversee personally, had made it this far from Mexico City, his crew had encountered one delay after another. And there was also the problem of the Yaqui who had, until recently, been making night raids on the work camps that had been set up on the far side of the creek from where Cuesta’s private car now sat, waiting for supplies.
The pesky little Indians, viscious as wolverines, seemed to think the mountain was sacred, harboring the heart of their warrior god, the loco grizzly, and were intent on keeping Cuesta’s crew from blasting a hole through it. So far, Cuesta’s men had been able to hold off the swarthy hordes on their wild mustangs because most of the Yaqui were armed with only bows and arrows. But Cuesta’s men were running dangerously low on ammunition, which was also hard to come by in Mexico City. Fortunately, since the blasting had ceased and the work crews released, the night raids had tapered off, but the general remained uneasy.
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