by Tripwire
And here’s Boag without a cent in his kick. Well there was still the twenty dollars in his boots, he hadn’t lost that.
The raft swept around a wide bend and just beyond the tall bluff sprouted the lights of Yuma town. There was a big prison on the bluff, of which Boag had heard tell; he didn’t want to get anywhere near that, he’d had enough of jails in Ehrenburg. He poled the ferry-raft up onto the eastern bank of the river in the darkness a quarter mile north of the town. “I get off here,” he said. “You can get this raft to Yuma by yourselves or you can walk.”
The woman gave the raft her dubious attention. “We shall walk, I think.”
The little girl was watching them. She hadn’t said a word for quite some time and that was unusual if not unique.
Boag helped them unload the few possessions they had salvaged from their wagon. He still had the old Spanish percussion rifle which he considered a moment before he proffered it to the woman. “You can sell this for the price of a meal and a telegraph wire to your people in Tuolumne.”
“You have been kind.”
“You will find help in Yuma, it is a big town.”
The river picked the raft off the bank and moved it out. It spun slowly into the muddy flow.
“You two go on ahead,” Boag said.
“And what of you?”
“I got things to do.”
The little girl snatched at Boag’s hand. “My name is Carmen.”
The woman snorted. “She dreams. Her name is Pilar, Señor.”
“I wish to be called Carmen.”
“All right Carmen.” Boag managed a bit of a smile before he pulled loose of her grip. “Hasta luego.”
“Adiós,” the woman said, and smiled showing the gaps between her teeth. “Go with God, our good friend.”
The woman started off laden with her things, the long rifle sticking out above her shoulder. The little girl didn’t stir and finally the woman came back and rearranged her load to free a hand, took the girl by the arm and pulled her away.
Boag watched them fade into the dissolving darkness against the lights of Yuma. When they were out of sight he began to limp along toward town.
chapter three
1
He dusted himself off as well as he could and decided he probably wouldn’t draw any more attention than any other black drifter on the night streets of Yuma. He was clean enough; he’d bathed several times the past few days, in the river with fire ashes and grease for soap. It was the clothes that were bad: ripped here and there, caked with river mud at the cuffs. He’d have to get clothes. It wasn’t vanity, it was the knowledge that they arrested you on appearance more than anything else and if you looked reasonably prosperous they’d leave you be. It was the ragged army uniform that had betrayed him in Ehrenburg, there were too many mustered-out Buffalo soldiers in Arizona right now and the whole Territory knew they were broke, jobless and vagrant. Nobody trusted them.
Walking into Yuma by way of dark side streets, Boag added up his requirements. Two pounds of iron and a holster and cartridges for it. Clothes. A water canteen, maybe a rope; a hat. A clasp knife surely. A horse, blanket, bridle, saddle. Scabbard and rifle and cartridges. At a minimum that would do it; everything else could come off the land, although it would save him time later if he found a pack of jerky and tinned food to carry along.
He toted up the value in dollars and knew he was nowhere near cutting it with his two gold eagles. A handgun, a decent .44-40 or .45, was twelve dollars right there and that was more than half his stake; a repeating rifle would run twenty all by itself.
You could stop and earn the money doing day labor but it would take months.
Well you could steal a horse, maybe a horse with a traveler’s pack on it, and then you could steal guns and clothes here and there. But then you’d have half a dozen victims looking for you along with the sheriffs.
There was one other way and it looked better than the others.
Boag stopped in an alley and worked his boots off and got the two small gold coins out. Put them in his pocket and felt around to make sure there wasn’t a hole in that pocket, and squeezed his feet back into the boots and walked on down the slope between houses, his eyes and ears guiding him toward the town’s fandango district.
The lamps were bright along the strip of whorehouses and saloons. A steady traffic of pedestrians thickened the mudcaked sidewalks and every saloon had a crimson-faced barker out front hawking the pleasures of the place in a strident voice. A great deal of cheerful racket; and here and there a gambling loser prowling through the crowd with his hands rammed in his pockets and his face twisted up in angry defeat.
Boag had thought of trying his hand at a gambling table but he wasn’t all that good at it and had dismissed the idea instantly.
He picked a dive smaller and more poorly lit than most of the others. He pushed inside through the crowd on the porch. The place had no door, only a doorway. That meant it was probably open around the clock. It must have been one of the oldest buildings in Yuma: it was a narrow dark little ’dobe with a low ceiling and improbably thick walls, and the stucco had peeled off parts of it to expose the chipped adobe bricks. The bar was a simple affair of planks laid across big empty beer kegs; a pair of Mexican bartenders moved sweating up and down the backbar slot. There were no mirrors or chandeliers. A few oil lamps on the walls, flickering on insufficient oil, and two ceiling-hung lanterns above round card tables where players sat in candy-striped shirts and laborers’ coveralls. One poker, one faro. Scrape of chair leg and bootheels, chinking of coin, clink of bottles against glasses, lusty voices; the place was thick and close, redolent of spilled whiskey and stale beer and used tobacco smoke. The floor was scuffed adobe and boots had worn a trench in it along the base of the keg-line of the bar.
Boag bought a five-cent beer and saw the barkeep make a face when Boag presented a ten-dollar gold piece; Boag took his beer and his change and went over to the back end of the bar to eat the free lunch that came with the beer. The sandwich bread was stale as overcooked toast and the slices of dry beef had curled up at the edges but it was nourishment and he chewed steadily while he put his attention on the faro rig.
The rigger was sliding cards out of the faro box, intoning “Queen loses, six wins.” They were playing for two-bits a card and Boag switched his interest to the poker table, moving along the back wall to bring it in focus and then standing backed against the ’dobe, thumbs hooked in his pockets, keeping to the shadow where he wouldn’t draw attention.
The game was table-stakes pot limit with a four-bit ante. There were six players around the table, playing with varying degrees of interest and intensity. Boag singled out a middle-sized man whose face had a shape and texture that reminded Boag of heaped walnuts in a wooden bowl. The man played carelessly, without a great deal of attention; obviously he was playing to pass the time and didn’t much care about the game, but he was getting a good run of cards and in the first ten minutes Boag saw him rake in two fair kitties and one forty-dollar pot.
One of the others addressed walnut-face: “You finding enough good cards tonight, Elmer. You put the Indian sign on that deck?”
“You know I had it in mind to try cheating you boys,” Elmer said cheerfully, “but when you all sat down to play I saw I wasn’t going to have to. ’Scuse me a minute, save my chair. Deal me out one hand.” Elmer went over to the bar to buy another drink and the player beside him put his boot up on Elmer’s chair to keep anybody else from sitting there.
When Elmer returned to his chair Boag settled down to watch the game and wait it out.
Elmer said, “Lee Roy, when you aim to get delivery on that cherrywood bed I ordered?”
“Should of been here by now. I can’t say. You know the way things get, coming across. They had to ship it out of Boston and probably it got held up wagoning acrost Panama. Then they bring it up to San Pedro on an ocean steamer and they transfer it onto one of the Johnson-Yaeger steamers up there, and it got to co
me all the way back around below Baja California and up to the mouth of the Colorado and then they got to transfer it again over onto one of the riverboats. I mind that rocking horse Mrs. Watson ordered from Baltimore took eight months getting here. You just never can tell.”
Boag sipped his beer and watched with his eyes half closed. A man who could afford to order a cherrywood bed shipped from Boston wasn’t poor.
One of the other players said, “Hey talking about steamers and all, what the hell happened to the Uncle Sam?”
Lee Roy said, “What you mean?”
“She was due in yesterday. Still ain’t showed up. My cousin Brill supposed to be on board, comin’ back down from Hardyville. I hear he made two thousand on pelts this season. Man we want to rope him into this poker game, he shows up.”
“Well two days ain’t much overdue,” Elmer said comfortably. “I raise you three dollar, Sammy.”
“Fold,” Lee Roy said. “I wouldn’t worry much. She might of got hung up on a sand bar. Sometimes takes them three, four days to work loose of them sand bars in the river.”
“I call,” Sammy said, “give me two cards.”
Now that gave Boag something to think about. The Uncle Sam hadn’t showed up in Yuma yet but Boag hadn’t passed her anywhere on the river and he’d come all the way down by raft behind her. He’d expected they would probably ram right through Yuma on the river and keep going right down to the estuary of the Colorado, which was in Mexico and out of Arizona’s jurisdiction. But she hadn’t come through. Now where the hell did you hide a hundred-foot paddlewheel steamboat?
It took him fifteen minutes’ thinking but he finally worked out how they must have done it, and that made him feel better. A good deal better because it meant he wasn’t as far behind them as he had feared.
He watched Elmer’s stake grow steadily for two and a half hours until Lee Roy suddenly stood up and pressed both fists into the small of his back to lean back and stretch. “That’s it for me, Elmer, your luck’s running too good tonight. I’ll see you boys.”
It broke up the game. New players started to move in to the table and once three of the original players had left, Elmer didn’t seem to see any reason to stay around and let the others try to get even. He scooped his winnings into a canvas poke and pulled the drawstring shut and stuffed the poke down in his hip pocket, finished off his drink—it was the fifth shot of whiskey Boag had seen him down—and meandered out of the saloon, pausing twice to talk to acquaintances. While Elmer was talking to the second one, at the bar, Boag moved slowly to the door and went outside.
It was about midnight and the traffic had thinned out on the street. Boag put his boots down into the loose dust of the thoroughfare and walked across the way to the dark passage between two red-light houses opposite the saloon. He posted himself in the shadows until Elmer emerged from the saloon and when Elmer turned up-street Boag let him get a block away before eeling out onto the boardwalk and following him.
2
At the mouth of an alley Boag caught Elmer from behind, clamped his palm over Elmer’s mouth and lifted the revolver from Elmer’s holster. Boag jammed it in Elmer’s back and hissed in Elmer’s ear:
“Eef you don’ keep es-shut op, I goeen to keel you. Onnerstan’?”
Elmer nodded and Boag removed his hand from the man’s mouth. “Now don’ turn aroun’.” He lifted the fat poke from Elmer’s hip pocket and stuffed it into his own.
“Now you es-start walkeen. Es-straight ahead an’ you don’ look back, onnerstan’? You look back an’ I goeen to hahv to es-shoot you. Ahora ve.” He prodded Elmer in the back with the gun muzzle and Elmer walked away unhurriedly, an easygoing fellow who took such things with equanimity. Boag waited until Elmer had traversed most of the length of the alley before Boag wheeled back around the corner and broke into a sprint across somebody’s dark lawn.
He slipped through back alleys for ten minutes before he stopped in a passage behind a thriving saloon. Lamplight spilled out of a high back window, enough for him to see. He emptied Elmer’s poke and separated the coins from the greenjackets; he distributed the coins in his pockets so that they wouldn’t make telltale bulges. The greenjacket bills he stuffed back into Elmer’s poke because paper money was printed up by various local banks and Elmer might be able to identify his own greenbacks, although it was doubtful since he’d just won most of them in the poker game. Still there was no point taking the chance. Boag left the poke, the green-jackets, and Elmer’s revolver in the pile of trash behind the saloon; guns had serial numbers and Elmer might be able to identify that too.
With one hundred and forty-six dollars in coin on his person, Boag climbed into the loft of a horse-boarding stable near the waterfront and fell asleep almost instantly, his leg throbbing only a little.
3
He had himself clothed and outfitted and ready to go by nine in the morning; by nine-thirty he had ridden beyond sight of the Yuma bluff and was trotting north on the hard-mouthed horse toward the confluence of the Colorado and the Gila.
It was a used McClellan army saddle for which most civilians wouldn’t give ten dollars, which Boag had paid for this one; he was used to the split-tree saddle, he’d ridden them nearly twenty years. The rifle was a .38-56 Winchester with calibrated hunting sights and the revolver was a .45 Colt Theuer-conversion model, ten or twelve years old but the rifling grooves and lands were in good shape and there wasn’t any rust on it and the gunsmith had let him have it for four dollars. He’d bought ammunition moulds and primers and crimpers as well as several boxes of cartridges so he was ready to reload his own if circumstances took him where you couldn’t buy cartridges, especially for the .38-56 which wasn’t all that common a caliber. He’d picked it for its high velocity and long-range accuracy; a steady enough rifleman could keep all his shots within a hat-size circle at four hundred yards with this rifle, and that was a lot better than the Army .45-70 he’d been used to, where you were out of luck beyond two hundred yards.
He had a few luxuries like a flint-and-steel fire-starting mechanism, a rain poncho, a good flat-crown border hat, and somebody’s old heavy plaid flannel riding coat which might keep him warm if he had to ride up into the Sierra. He had spare underclothes and socks and he’d bought a pair of moccasins which were now in the saddlebags along with several days’ worth of food. The canteen was a two-gallon container: heavy, but if you ran out of water in the desert you were dead.
And he still had sixty-four dollars in his new jeans. He’d bought well—all except the horse, about which he was beginning to have his doubts. Thirty-five dollars for a seven-year-old sorrel gelding with the gait of a razorback sow and the mean eye of a wolverine.
But the horse moved along at a good clip and he guessed that would do.
He found the Uncle Sam where he had thought she would be. You couldn’t really hide anything that big. They’d put her where nobody would look for her for a while. It was where she had to be and Boag had no trouble.
They had steamed her up the Gila a few miles to a point where the highway veered away from the riverbank and went around behind the far side of a big hill. They’d anchored her up under the overhang of some big cottonwoods. Nobody would come across her by chance; you had to be looking for her to find her. So far, nobody had any reason to be out looking for her.
Except Boag.
Obviously Mr. Pickett had planned it all pretty well in advance. The buckboard was still on deck, they hadn’t bothered to use it. Boag examined the tracks leading away from the boat. The horse and mule tracks (he assumed they were some of each although from the remaining indentations it was impossible to tell which was which) were too numerous to count but there had to have been thirty or more. They’d probably loaded about two-hundred-and-fifty pounds of gold onto each pack animal. It made for quite a mule train. But that was a lot more maneuverable than wagons would have been.
He followed the trampled mess up around the hill and across the highway, tracking southeast. It had been
some years since he’d been down here on Cavalry patrols but he had no trouble remembering how it lay. A hundred miles of dry soda lakes and baked soil that was scorched and cracked and shriveled by a perpetual drought and a perpetual sun. Tumbleweed and cactus and the occasional mesquite and patches of greasewood and organ pipe. Give this country an inch and it would take your life. You had to shake out your boots in the morning before you put them on because if you didn’t you might be putting your toes in with a scorpion or tarantula or centipede or black widow.
He had a look at the horse-droppings. None of them was still moist or green. Hard to say how much wind there had been in the past few days; the extent to which sand had drifted into the tracks was no real indication of how long they’d been gone, but working out the probabilities in his head he judged they had to have three days’ jump on him, possibly closer to four.
He tested the weight of the canteen—a nervous gesture; he’d just filled it in the Gila and watered the horse and drunk his fill—and then he gigged the horse out into the Sonora Desert.
4
When the cruel sun climbed high he knew he was going to have to surrender to it and take shelter. His cracked lips stung with sweat. If you kept moving in this blast of heat you’d use up too much water on the horse and yourself. There were waterholes down along the Border but they were two days along from here; you had to ration things. Better to travel the cool hours of evening and night and early morning. There would be a moon again tonight, getting on toward last-quarter; enough to track by.
Somewhere deep underground a rock cistern gathered enough moisture to feed the long roots of a clump of mesquite. He hobbled the sorrel and bedded down under the meager shade. Dust motes hung in the sunbeams that lanced down between the branches. He slept; he had the ability to relax completely when there was nothing to do.
The clock inside him brought him awake when it was cool enough to eat. Somewhere around half past four by the sun. He gave the horse a ration of water and scrubbed out the old Army mess kit with sand, put everything away where it belonged, saddled the horse and untied the hobbles and went on his way into the evening.