by Tripwire
In the night three times he came across the bleached bones of travelers who had tried to make the crossing without sufficient experience.
In places the wind had blown the tracks over completely but it was impossible for a thirty- or forty-horse trail to disappear that quickly; a few minutes’ scouting around and he always picked them up again. The trail led him steadily southeastward on the high flats. Mr. Pickett knew exactly where he was headed.
There were a few towns down that way—Sonoyta and some others, scattered around the oases of the plain. Beyond the Border there were mountains and then more desert, although that desert was not as dry or treeless as this one. Mr. Pickett was heading into Mexico as he had said he would. The question was, once in Mexico—where then?
He found shade at nine-thirty in the morning and although it wasn’t fully hotted up yet he decided not to risk another few miles; he ate and bedded down and waited out the heat. He was up before four, eating dried beef and pinto beans and the last of the cornbread, and feeding the horse a nosebag ration of grain and a hatful of water. The canteen was less than half full now. He put a pebble in his mouth and rolled it around with his tongue to keep the saliva going.
At sundown he came upon what he had feared he might find. The tracks began to split up.
By twos and threes and fours, groups of horses peeled away from the main gang and went their own way. All of them headed generally southward but the little bunches were diverging by miles. The main track got smaller and smaller and finally there was no way to know which was the main track any more, and at ten or eleven o’clock that night Boag had to toss a coin. He picked a set of four-horse prints and settled down to follow them south.
5
He was guessing but his opinion of Mr. Pickett was that in each group of four-horse prints you would probably find two trustworthy old-time Pickett rawhiders, one pack animal loaded with gold, and one relative newcomer to the Pickett-Stryker organization whose potential greed would be tempered by the constant presence of the two old rawhiders who probably slept in shifts and kept both eyes on him. In that manner Mr. Pickett would guarantee, as much as it could be guaranteed, the safe delivery of that portion of the gold to wherever it was destined.
Splitting up this way would be a risk—three men and a packhorse being far more tempting to bandits than an army of twenty-odd men armed to the teeth—but then it did make the track harder to follow and it also provided good odds that most of the four-horse groups would get through.
It was odd the way he kept thinking of Mr. Pickett’s men as old rawhiders. It was the same way he thought of himself as an old soldier. They were mostly in their forties, not old men at all. It was just that they’d been riding with Mr. Pickett for more than twenty years, most of them. They probably averaged six or seven years older than Boag, that was all; by his best reckoning Boag was thirty-seven. In Mississippi they didn’t keep close birth records on field niggers. Boag didn’t know but that he might be a field nigger right now if the war hadn’t emancipated him when he was about fourteen or fifteen by his own reckoning; he had lied about it—he was big, he had always been big—and the Army had thrown him right into its new black horse-regiment, the Tenth Cavalry, because Boag had a natural eye with a rifle and the seat of Boag’s pants fit very well on the back of a standard-size Cavalry horse.
They had fought the Sioux on the northern plains and the Comanche on the southern plains and there had been several years’ garrison duty and then the Army had sent them out under Crook to find Geronimo.
Then when the Indian wars were over the Army decided to cut back about two hundred personnel. They found in the service records of Boag and Wilstach that they’d both been busted back to private several times for various infractions, so the Army discharged them in the middle of Arizona and they found themselves in the desert with no trade but soldiering, no job but drifting, and the road leading finally to the Ehrenburg jail.
Now on Mr. Pickett’s backtrack Boag was thinking about Wilstach and thinking about all that gold. Of course he was just one man and he was a little crippled up by the bullets he’d taken on the river, but he had nothing better to do with his time and you needed some reason to get up in the morning.
There was the revolution going on in Sonora; there always was. Boag expected to have to dodge some combat. In times of rebellion in Mexico anybody suspicious was in danger of getting killed merely as a precautionary measure.
In a midmorning blaze of heat he reached Tanques Verdes where the four horses ahead of him had watered. Under the shade of the towering algodones Boag went from the trading post to the blacksmith’s stable to the saloon asking questions about the three men with the packhorse. An hour’s questioning convinced him that the three men had not been Mr. Pickett or Stryker. As he had guessed there was one relatively young man, a Mexican, and two middle-aged gringos. One of the two gringos had stayed with the packhorse at all times during the six or seven hours the men had spent in Tanques Verdes four days ago. None of them had said anything that anybody remembered about where they were headed. They had eaten supper and ridden into Mexico at sundown.
Boag filled his canteen and replenished his food and rode out after them.
A gauze of dust hung low over the desert. He rode past the heap of stones that marked the international boundary and climbed toward the foothills in Mexico.
The track was vague and intermittent. Winds had blown the prints over, sometimes for hundreds of yards at a stretch. Boag scowled irritably at the earth and often had to guide on flimsy probabilities: an iron-scratched stone, a carelessly broken greasewood branch where a horse had brushed too close. Every fifteen or twenty minutes he would come across a patch on the lee side of some boulders or brush where the prints of the four horses were still identifiable. He hadn’t lost them but he was losing time with all the circling and back-tracking it took to stay with them.
In the past twelve hours he had climbed a steady and barely perceptible incline and was probably two thousand feet higher in elevation than he’d been last night; the difference in sun-temperature was apparent and it was no longer impossible to travel by day. He pushed on through the sun hours and only stopped for half an hour to noon on the north side of a hill.
By now of course somebody back in Yuma would have gone looking for the Uncle Sam and probably they’d found her on the Gila but the tracks had had several more days to blow over and it was not likely any posse would take up the hunt. Johnson-Yaeger would complain to the Territorial Governor at Prescott and in due course an official inquiry would be lodged in Mexico City, probably identifying Mr. Jed Pickett, and as usual it would be put into some dusty drawer and ignored. Mexico City was still busy getting out from under all the problems that had been created by the reign of Maximilian and Carlotta and they didn’t have time down there to poke around looking for gringo fugitives.
He was relieved not to be burdened any longer by the weighty presence of the old woman and the persnickety little Pilar who wanted to be called Carmen.
Angling more directly south than before, the tracks led him up across foothills into a minor range of mountains with which he was not familiar; the Geronimo chase had not taken the Buffalo soldiers this far west in Mexico. There was timber up here, the ground was covered with a silent lawn of pine needles and the late afternoon sun flickered through the pines like a moving signal lamp as Boag climbed toward the high passes, keening the ground.
It was a hard country for tracking; the pine needles did not take impressions and hold them. But the ground was soft underneath and in bare spots they had left hoofprints in the rotted half-mud. It was one of those open mountain forests with no underbrush; the high corridors ran unobstructed between rows of lanced pines and the air was very cool with a sharp coniferous pungency. Boag’s horse moved along with very little sound and for a moment he was reminded of a church he had once rested in, an empty church in some mountain village south of Fort Defiance.
He was hurrying the horse because h
e knew there would be no tracking after dark in these woods. At sunset he was ready to give it up for the night when he picked up the lights of some establishment winking through the forest and he homed in on them, riding into a little village of log buildings that was decidedly un-Mexican in flavor; you thought of all Mexico as being nothing but mud huts and dusty plazas and narrow streets in squalid colors. This was more like something in the Wyoming mountains. But wherever men went they built with the materials at hand and up here the most plentiful things were pine trees.
Probably a community of trappers and prospectors and those who traded with the mountain Yaquis. There were half a dozen log cabins, cook-smoke rising from the chimneys of three of them, and there was one large building with a galleried porch across the front and a pair of long hitch rails at which Boag counted seven tied horses. All but one had Mexican rigs and there was no packhorse but he hadn’t expected to come upon any of Mr. Pickett’s people this quickly anyway. The one horse that stood out from the rest had a blanketed McClellan rig and when Boag looked closer he saw the U.S. brand on the horse’s flank. An American Cavalry horse, but not a regulation Cavalry saddle. Something to look out for, he judged; he dismounted and loosened the cinches and gave the hard-mouth sorrel a nosebag of grain and climbed the four wooden steps to the porch and walked along the porch to a window to look inside.
It was a trading post with a saloon bar along one of the walls. He counted six Mexicans standing at the bar eating pinto beans and pork cubes off wooden plates. They were hardcases, their chests crossed with bandoleros of cartridges. The seventh man was a gringo in a fringed buckskin outfit that looked as if it had been made up for a performer in a wild-west show. Boag recognized him mostly by the clothes and by the dirty white Cavalry hat with its crossed brass sabers; it touched Boag with surprise and then made him grin and he walked along the porch to the log door and went in, and the gringo in buckskin looked around with his dour long face—the lugubrious doleful face of a professional mourner— and broke into a painful creasing of wrinkles which passed for a smile. “Well zippity-doo-day if it isn’t the good Sergeant Boag!”
“Your humble servant, Captain,” Boag said.
6
“You’re a long way from home, Sergeant.”
Boag said, “I have to be.”
“Tequila or mescal or beer?”
“Tequila, beer chaser,” Boag said, and Captain Shelby McQuade relayed the order to the man behind the bar.
“You hungry, Boag? I don’t much recommend the food here, it’s enough to give a buzzard the trots but there’s not a whole lot of competition.”
“I could eat, Captain, my belly feels like my throat’s been cut. What you doing in this town?”
“I thought,” Captain McQuade said, “that question was one that nobody in a town like this ever asked.”
“No offense.”
“I’m just ribbing you. You’re welcome to ask.”
“Those boys with you, Captain?”
Captain McQuade looked upon the six armed Mexicans with distaste. Evidently none of them spoke English; they watched Boag with curiosity, reserving hostility. “They’re with me,” the Captain said without pleasure.
Boag sampled the tequila. “They seem to be putting bigger snakes in these here bottles this season.”
Captain McQuade’s mouth smiled again while his eyes sized Boag up. “Looks like you’ve got some kind of burden, Sergeant.”
“Well I’m looking to find some people. How long you been in this town, Captain?”
“About two hours. I gather that won’t help you.”
“Looking to find three men rode in here maybe four days ago, probably rode right out again.”
“Well you can ask the storekeeper here. These three men some kind of special friends of yours?”
“I guess not,” Boag said.
Captain McQuade took a snap-lid timepiece out of his pocket and opened it and raised one eyebrow, and put the watch away. Boag said, “You got to be someplace?”
“There’s time. Got a bit of a ride ahead of us.” Captain McQuade glanced at the row of fierce Mexicans and shook his head and said under his breath, “Been a long time since I closed both eyes, Boag. You wouldn’t be looking for a job, would you?”
“Doin’ what?”
“Same kind of thing you used to do before the both of us got cans tied to our tails. Only this time you’d be my topkick instead of Captain Gatewood’s.”
Boag said, very dry, “Which side, Captain?”
“Rebels.”
“Ruiz?”
“That’s right.”
“You hiring out mercenary, Captain?”
“What else is a soldier to do?”
“I don’t know, Captain. I ain’t sure I understand why you ain’t still in the Army. I mean I always thought they couldn’t fire officers.”
“They can put them on shelves someplace where they can’t do a damn thing for amusement. They wanted to post me to some Godforsaken Indian agency in Texas with a detail of four enlisted men. I don’t know a worse way to rot, Boag. I resigned and came here seeking adventure and usefulness and I imagine I’ve found them. But I can’t say I’m happy with the tools I have to work with. I’d be a much happier man if I had a man at my back I knew I could trust. These gentlemen you see here would slit your throat for a peso.”
Boag kept his hat on while he ate, standing up at the bar. “So now you’re a captain in Ruiz’s rebel army.”
“Actually I’m a coronel.” The doleful eyes beamed.
“Well congratulations, Captain.”
“How about it—Sergeant-Major?”
“I guess not, Captain, I got a few fish to fry. But thank you.”
“Pays a good wage, Boag. You draw down a hundred pesos every month and that’s in gold coin, and on top of that you can keep anything you loot.”
“Well I’m obliged but no.”
“What are you so bent out of shape about? Somebody step on your sore corn?”
“I guess you could say that. You know anything about Mr. Jed Pickett, Captain?”
“I’ve heard he used to scalp-hunt around here. Haven’t heard anything about him recently. What would you be having to do with the likes of him?”
“Just looking to find the man, that’s all. He owes me something.”
“I’d forget it, Boag, Jed Pickett’s as crooked as a dog’s hind leg. You go looking to get him to settle a debt and you’re just likely to spend the rest of your life all shot to pieces.”
“Well chicken today, feathers tomorrow. I’d dearly like to catch up with Mr. Pickett.”
“They’ll take you apart and throw the pieces in the Gulf of California. Jed Pickett travels with a retinue, Boag. Fifteen or twenty men and the one that wouldn’t shoot you for the fun of it’s as rare as a pair of clean socks around an enlisted men’s barracks. Why don’t you just forget this debt of Pickett’s?”
“I guess I just ain’t gaited that way.”
“Boag, I must admit there have been times I suspected you had nothing but pork fat between your ears. This is one of those times. I recall you always did think with your fists, it got you busted three or four times and this time it’s likely to get you killed. Why the hell don’t you give it up and join up with me? We can have a hell of a fine time trying to kick over the pail.”
Boag mopped up the last of the bean gravy with a crust of heavy bread. “Coffee, Captain?”
“Uh-huh.”
Boag said to the barkeep, “Draw two,” and turned his back to the bar to hook his elbows over it. “Captain, Mr. Jed Pickett must have somebody around Sonora he deals with when he’s got something to sell. You wouldn’t have no notions about that, would you?”
“I don’t follow you.”
“Well Mr. Pickett’s got something that belongs to me and I expect he aims to sell it somewhere. Now how would you tote that?”
“Well I think you’re a damned fool to pursue this, Boag, that’s the way I tote it.
But there’s a man named Almada down the Rio Conceptión a few miles the other side of Caborca, owns a big ranch and a hacienda, and a good many of our rebel bandits go there to trade loot. You might try Almada.”
“Much oblige.”
“I’ve got to be moving,” Captain McQuade said after he looked at his pocket watch. “We’ve got a train to meet. If you finish what you’re doing alive, come over to Caborca and ask for Hector Veragua. He can always tell you how to get in touch with me. Any time you want that job.”
“Thank you Captain.”
“Well I’ve got to gather my children and be on my way. Why don’t you buy yourself another drink? You may as well, while your money’s still some good to you.” Captain McQuade shook his head and strode to the door. “Vamanos, muchachos,” he said in a ringing cavalryman’s voice, and banged out followed by his hulking warriors.
Boag heard the horses mill around while their riders got mounted, and then there was the call of Captain McQuade’s command-voice and the hoofs drummed away until distance absorbed the sound.
The bartender said, “You wish something more, Señor?”
“Nada, grácias.” Boag finished his coffee and settled the tab and went outside. The night was sharp with chill. He thought about bedding down for the night but the juices were running in him. He went back inside; the bartender was going around the room blowing out the lamps. Boag said, “Hey amigo, how do I get to Caborca?”
“Through the pass to the south and down the mountain until you find the river. That is the Rio de la Conceptión. You go downstream and you will come to a town with many tall palm trees.”
He heard the barkeep latch the door behind him. He was tired and his bad leg was bothering him a little. Ought to sleep it out, but the juices were still pumping and he cinched up the sorrel and rode out toward the pass.