Some of the papers inside were in Latin. These I set aside. At the bottom was a long parchment envelope sealed with the K.G.C. crest impressed in red wax. I broke it open and unfolded the parchment sheets from inside. It was lettered in copperplate and signed by Childress.
I skimmed through the bequests; for it bore all the highblown obsolete language of a will. There was no mention of his fiancée’s name, and I recognized none of the others. Upon the signer’s passing, command of the army was to pass to Eustace McCready, Captain (to be promoted to the brevet rank of major upon acceptance). On the fourth page was the passage I’d been looking for:
Under no circumstances is my death or incapacity to interfere with the purpose of this militia, which is to march upon Mexico City and by military engagement induce the government of Mexico to surrender the command of its forces to Captain McCready, who will annex them to the militia and invade the United States of America.
A sound outside brought me to my feet; it was the clank of a dangling saber in its metal scabbard banging against a boot-top. Either Captain McCready or one of his subordinates was coming to gather the personal effects of their deceased leader or was looking for me.
I refolded the sheets and put them in the inside pocket of my coat.
My way was clear. If my suspicions were right and I had been allowed to live only because Childress wanted fresh conversation, my usefulness was at an end. Unless McCready disobeyed the posthumous command—and if anything the man would be even more fanatically devoted to the major now than when he breathed, he’d be more interested in taking possession of the Ghost, in which case Joseph the engineer’s existence was more secure than my own. The Indian had saved my life, but he was in no condition to escape that place, and from what I’d seen of the infirmary his chances were better there than anywhere within a hundred miles.
But a hundred miles from where? I had no idea how far I’d been brought from the train, or in which direction other than up. To miss it by fifty yards in either direction would be the same as missing it entirely. I could wander along the rails for days, then blunder into an ambush; or break my neck riding down a grade as steep as a grain elevator in search of a fly-speck on the map called Cabo Falso.
Map.
The saber was jangling down the hallway. I spotted the ancient Spanish wall decoration in its frame. I took along the paper knife and slashed the map all around the inside edge. The doorknob rattled, someone pushed at the door, encountered the resistance of the chair. Whoever it was put his shoulder into it. The chair’s wheels skidded out from under it and it fell on its back. It bought me a second.
I bought another. A slug from the Deane-Adams split a heavy panel. I hadn’t hoped to hit anything, just play for time. I loped to the connecting door to the bedroom.
The key was in the lock. I turned it and swung open the door just in time to stop a slug from the man who’d pushed in from the hall. Just as I jerked the door shut, I caught a glimpse of a gaping eye socket in a face black with fury.
TWENTY-NINE
The room where I’d recovered was a bedroom once again, with no sign of the bathtub or shaving materials; the late Major Childress had run a tight ship in a country not notorious for its discipline. I’d brought the key inside with me and turned it in the lock just as a hand grasped the knob on the other side, and got away from the door an instant ahead of the next bullet. This one penetrated the thick pine and punched a hole in the tall window across from it.
I didn’t waste time returning fire. In another moment the lock would be shot off or the door forced. I snatched up the heavy washstand and flung it that direction, but I didn’t look to see if it fell to the floor in a position to slow down pursuit. That kind of time goes for gold double-eagles, and I hadn’t a penny to spare. I crumpled up the ancient map and stuffed it into a pocket on the run.
The window was the only other way out. I used the barrel of my revolver to clear away the rest of the glass and got a leg over the sill just as the crash came, accompanied by splintering wood. For good measure I slung another piece of lead that direction and dropped four feet to the ground.
Or to be more exact, onto a pile of skeletons. At that corner of the house they reached to the sill.
There was no getting through that grotesque stack except the long way. The closest end, at the rear of the house, led to a cliff that fell hundreds of feet almost straight down the mountain. I’d climbed and descended as bad in like situations, but not when I was still recovering from serious illness, with the possibility of a fresh attack coming on while I was hanging by my fingers from a slippery shelf of rock. Even if I made it to level ground, I’d be on foot in country I didn’t know and easily recaptured. I’d left my bay tethered to the rail of the front porch.
So on I went, stumbling over rib cages, flinging aside skulls and pelvises and arms angled like cranes. Stiff jagged fingers snagged my coat and snatched at my hat as if they were the last to give up. Razor-sharp sternums slashed at my shins. I tripped and fell, shouting, into grisly spirals of bone, struggled in a panic to untangle myself from limbs I swore still had life in them. There was more than dried stalks in that heap; it had been added to as recently as that morning, and I breathed through my mouth to avoid the stench when I wasn’t gritting my teeth against the likelihood of sinking my fingers into rotting remains. Flies the size of hummingbirds floated on the foul air, buzzing drunkenly, their abdomens glistening emerald-green. They landed on my face, favoring the moist corners of my mouth and eyes, and quitted with sullen reluctance when I swiped at them. They flew so slowly, fattened on their feast, I caught three of them in mid-air, only half-trying, and batted them to the ground. All around me sections of human jetsam plinked and plunked and clattered like someone striking together hollow sticks for the pure perverse pleasure of making a racket.
The same thing was happening behind me, as McCready came hard on my heels.
A bullet screamed a foot past my ear and crackled to a stop in a nest of bones. I didn’t stop, and when he heard the noise he returned to the chase. I’d gained ground while he stopped to level his pistol.
My luck held. I made my way through that charnel yard without encountering putrefying flesh, and stumbled into the open.
My luck didn’t hold. My bay wasn’t where I’d left it.
No, it still held. When I raced around the end of the porch, it was standing nearer the front door; I’d been careless with the tether, leaving enough slack for the animal to drag it down toward an inviting clump of grass.
That was where my luck gave out. A group of men dressed in rags with pinched-in heads stood at the far end of the house facing me, their eyes dull between sunken temples, but their unsheathed machetes burning bright in the sun.
* * *
I didn’t want to do it. The wretches were little more than the brutes Childress had called them, but human, and hardly in command of their lives. They existed because of Childress and for Childress; they knew no other god. When the first one lumbered toward me, raising his short-bladed weapon, I shot a fresh hole in the crown of his hat high up, snatching it off his low cranium. I might have been shooting at the house for all the effect it had. He took another stumbling step, swinging the machete back as far as his arm would reach. Cracked lips skinned back from black gums, spittle bubbling in the corners.
I aimed lower and fired. He was still coming when the scarlet stain spread all the way across his belly; then he tripped over his own feet and fell headlong, landing stiff as a plank with his weapon still at arm’s length, and lay without jerking so much as a nerve.
By then the others were on the move. If, as the major had said, they understood only fear and hatred, the second was stronger than the first. I didn’t think they mourned their comrade so much as saw me for a member of an alien tribe, where wrath and fear intermingled, like grease and fire, leading to white flame. It hardly seemed possible the news of Childress’ death had reached them, but if their instincts were as bestial as he’d made t
hem out to be, they might have smelled it, the way they said some breeds of dog can detect disease before a trained physician can suspect it. In any case his order to spare me from harm was no longer regarded.
I could have shot them all. It was a small group, and their reflexes were so primitive it would have been like picking bottles off a fence rail, but maybe because of that I saw no honor in it, even in defense of my own life. When the first of the rest came within blade’s reach I swept the barrel of the revolver against his wrist, where the bone was as obvious as those in the pile I’d struggled my way through, and striking it with a noise that was half-thump, half-crack. He yelped and stumbled, losing his grip on his weapon, and I followed through, shoving him off his feet with my forearm.
By then I had my hand on the bay’s reins, but as I jerked them loose of the rail a vise closed on my gun arm just above the elbow. It went dead to the shoulder and I felt the butt slipping through my fingers. The creature could have cracked a cue ball in that fist. Something flashed in the sun; I threw up my other arm, expecting the blade to slash through muscle and tendon as easily as it sliced cane; but something struck with a thud and a third eye opened at the bridge of his nose. The machete spun out of his hand, hitting my shoulder with the flat of the blade and bouncing off. He fell even faster than his partner; those weak minds had only a tenuous connection to their bodies, and switched off like a telegraph key snatched loose of its wires.
I heard the echo of the shot then, but I didn’t sacrifice a second looking over my shoulder to confirm it was McCready who’d fired. I swung the bay between me and his weapon, hooked one foot over the edge of the saddle, and loosed a round close enough to its ear to put it to gallop. We took off toward the mountain trail I’d come up by wagon, I riding Apache fashion, hanging on by a handful of mane with one foot lifted just short of the ground and the horse serving as a moving breastwork shielding me from lead.
Not that it stopped the captain, who seemed to have no more sentiment for the beast than I; a bullet struck the saddlehorn square, gouging the leather and ricocheting off the hickory core, and when I had the opportunity later to examine the bay’s hindquarters I saw where another had plowed a furrow a half-inch deep through the flesh behind the cantle.
Which would have been the moment when the animal screamed and took off like Pegasus.
* * *
I wouldn’t repeat that ride. The way down from the house to where we’d left the train was as steep as the way up from it to the plantation, but I’d made both trips aboard the relative safety of a wheeled vehicle under someone’s control. Just galloping on flat ground plugged my throat with my heart, and I don’t trust the animal at even a slow walk.
More shots came, rattling and growing fainter. When they stopped—to reload, I thought—I swung my leg across the saddle and pulled myself upright, and almost as an afterthought holstered the Deane-Adams. I’d shifted it to my left hand in order to grasp the bay’s mane with the other; the bandage on the bullet-crease in the left had come loose in the meanwhile. I unwound it and threw it away. The wound was still angry red, but it had closed. Taking care to keep it from bleeding again was less of a distraction than the bandage itself.
Distractions I had in plenty. Behind me I heard the pounding of more than one set of hooves. McCready had rallied all the troops handy. Childress had been over-conscientious in writing down his wishes for his campaign against Mexico and the United States to continue after his death. If his captain was this determined to prevent me from reporting back to Washington, he had no intention of abandoning his predecessor’s mad dream.
The road narrowed. I slowed my pace, ducking overhanging tree limbs, and took a nearly vertical grade with the reins taut and leaning back parallel with the side of the mountain. The bay picked its way daintily, whistling through its nostrils, eyes rolling over white. That was the test of a good mount; but you never knew how it would measure up until you put your hide on the line. I cursed Judge Blackthorne more often than I praised him, but when it came to outfitting the men he sent into hazard he spent every nickel he kicked and bit the Congress to get, and when it pulled tight its purse strings he chipped in from his own household accounts. This was a good horse.
I found respect then for the creatures who had carried me up that same route by wagon. And I was grateful I’d spent so much of the trip senseless. At times the way was so narrow they had to have rigged ropes to steady the wagons when the outside wheels had no purchase, and just how they’d managed a ton of Gatling has vexed me in all the years since.
The sun was making its rapid descent behind the mountains before I felt secure enough to dismount and lead the bay down the more precarious stretches. After pounding along in the first heat of pursuit, McCready’s cavalry had had to slow down, and with darkness piling up the echo of hoofbeats had receded. I didn’t dare hope they’d given up, but Childress’ insanity hadn’t spread so far they’d risk riding that terrain at night. I made a cold camp in the shelter of a shale shelf, sitting up with my back against the Sierras and my revolver in my lap, listening to a healthy set of three-year-old teeth chomping grass and wondering if I’d ever set foot on level ground again.
I dreamed I had, my boots clomping a civilized boardwalk on a street as flat as a lily pond, touching my hat to men and women who’d never heard of Ralph Waldo Emerson and when they spooned sugar into their coffee didn’t pause to consider where it had come from and whose bones it had sifted through; and woke in gray light, still a thousand feet above the ocean and Cape Hell.
The birds were awake, singing their sweet melodies of murder. A twig snapped. It was as loud as a pistol report at that empty hour. The birds heard it, too, and went silent. I looked at the bay, standing with its forefeet crossed, eyes shut and breathing evenly; it hadn’t stirred in its sleep. I stood and swung the Deane-Adams up the trail, where the danger was greatest. An iron shoe scraped rock. I rolled back the hammer. The crackle echoed among the surrounding peaks, followed by thick silence.
“Do not shoot.”
I recognized the voice, the accent. It had been so long since I’d heard it, I couldn’t place it at first.
“Come out in the open.”
The shoe clanged again, then another and another. I steadied the revolver against my hip, concentrating on the curve of the mountain. Most of a minute passed; I could have measured the time with a calendar. Then a man appeared, leading a gray mule with a rope bridle and only a worn and faded blanket for a saddle.
“It is I, Senor Deputy.”
I seated the hammer and leathered the pistol. It was the first time Joseph had addressed me as anything more than an equal since he’d promoted himself to engineer.
THIRTY
He wore the white cotton shirt and trousers of Childress’ creatures, and sandals in place of his boots. He was pale and gaunt, and when he spoke he broke often to take in air. I took the mule’s reins from him, tethered it to a stunted pinon, and helped him into a sitting position under the rock shelf, lowering myself beside him; two pilgrims resting from their travels.
“I didn’t think you could make it out of that bed,” I said.
“I was awakened by shouting, and guessed the rest. Major Childress—”
“I was there when he died.”
“One of those—things was in the room next to mine, with its legs in splints. I took its clothes from a cupboard, and unhitched this animal from a wagon outside.”
“How did you get past McCready and the others?”
“I grew up in these mountains. I know a hundred trails to their one.”
“You should have stayed where you were. They’d have taken care of you. Without you they can’t run the Ghost.”
“And when they have learned to run it themselves, what? What they did to that man this morning would have been a mercy compared to what would happen if they turned me over to those creatures, as surely they would have done, to keep them docil. You saw how I was treated on the way to that devil’s place.” He
flexed his shoulders, still raw from the cross.
“Are you up to this trip?”
“More so than you. You will never find your way to where we were taken following this road. In two miles it winds back into the mountain.”
I unfolded the map from my pocket and showed it to him. He shook his head. “This will not get you to Cabo Falso, unless your bones are discovered and brought down the mountain. The Spaniards did not bother to explore this high, with gold so plentiful down below. A man could follow these trails for weeks and finish where he started. Did you forget the man DeBeauclair?”
“He was killed by Childress’ men.”
“Perhaps. There are creatures as dangerous, men and pumas, and then there are the mountains themselves. Do you think he cared whether he was slain by a bullet or slipped and fell a thousand feet onto his head? Do the men whose bones are piled at Childress’ house care? No, senor; I did not drag you back from death to see you throw away your life because of a worthless piece of paper.”
I put it away and rose. “There’s no time to argue.”
He ignored the hand I held out and pulled himself to his feet. “I think the captain must give up. Someone must look after the plantation.”
“He’s got twice as much reason now to keep going.”
He did allow me to help him onto the mule’s back. He took the lead then. After about a mile we heard hooves ringing on stone. I’d as soon have been proven wrong.
Just about then the grade to our left eased up and we left the road, dismounting to walk our animals through scrub and zigzag washes where the runoff from the rainy season carved treacherous ditches through earth and rock. He kept going as steadily as if he were following a flagstone path, detouring occasionally to go around a dense copse of pine or an enormous boulder, and always returning to his original course—I supposed. For all I made sense of our way we might have been traveling in circles; there were times even when I was sure we were going up instead of down, and I told him so.
Cape Hell Page 17