The horses could have pulled loose from where they were tethered and wandered off, although Preacher figured that was unlikely. But he didn’t see anybody moving around the site, either. He expected Esteban would have come hurrying out to meet him, to see how the parley with Juanita’s kidnappers had gone, and he should have been able to see Father Hortensio and the two Yaquis, as well.
“Esteban!” he shouted as he rode closer. “Padre!”
Where the hell had everybody gone?
That unanswered question made a bizarre thought flash through Preacher’s brain. Father Hortensio had talked about the smell of brimstone and how that shaft leading down into the earth was like a portal to Hades itself. Maybe Lucifer and his imps had crawled up out of the hole and dragged Preacher’s companions back down to Hell....
He gave a little shake of his head. That was crazy. Preacher had no doubt Hell existed, but you couldn’t get there by going down a hole in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Something had happened to the others, all right, but it wasn’t the hand of Satan that had caused the trouble.
Spotting a limp figure sprawled on the ground near the opening of the shaft, Preacher reined in and flung himself out of the saddle before Horse had completely stopped moving. Preacher ran over to Esteban Alvarez and dropped to a knee beside the young man’s motionless body. Esteban lay facedown. His sombrero had fallen off and lay next to him. Preacher saw blood welling from a swollen gash on the back of his head. Somebody had clouted the youngster a good one.
Carefully, Preacher turned Esteban over, wadding up the young man’s sombrero and placing it under his injured head to cushion it. Preacher’s fingers pressed against Esteban’s neck, searching for a pulse. He found one beating strong and fairly regularly. Esteban’s eyelids flickered and he stirred slightly as consciousness began to creep back into him.
“Esteban!” Preacher said urgently. “Wake up, hombre, and tell me what happened.”
Preacher’s gaze darted around the area, searching for any sign of Father Hortensio, Pablo, or Joaquin. The three men were gone, vanished just like the horses. Preacher’s eyes narrowed as he noticed that the pile of sacks containing the holy relics from Mission Santo Domingo wasn’t there anymore, either. Nor was the chest that had contained gold ingots. The suspicion that began to lurk in his head wasn’t a pretty one.
Esteban groaned and opened his eyes. He stared uncomprehendingly up at Preacher. The mountain man leaned over him and said sharply, “Better get your wits back about you, son. We got all kinds o’ trouble here.”
“P-Preacher?”
“That’s right. You remember me, but do you know what happened here whilst I was gone?”
Esteban lifted a hand toward his head, but stopped before he touched it. “Someone . . . hit me.”
“I figured as much. Did you see who it was?”
Esteban hesitated. “Not . . . sure. I had been arguing . . . with Father Hortensio . . . when I saw one of the Yaquis . . . step behind me . . . Then . . . I was struck down . . . and I remember nothing more until . . . just now.”
“One o’ the Yaquis hit you?” That didn’t come as a complete surprise to Preacher since he hadn’t seen any sign that anyone else had been up here. Still, it was something of a shock, considering what devoted servants the Indians had seemed to be.
But they were actually Father Hortensio’s servants, Preacher reminded himself. It was the priest they were devoted to, along with the Church itself.
“I . . . I cannot be sure,” Esteban said. “But no one else was around.” His voice strengthened a little and sounded certain as he went on. “It must have been Pablo or Joaquin. No one else was here except me and Father Hortensio, and he was in front of me. He motioned to whoever was behind me.” Esteban paused and then said grimly, “He gave the order.”
Preacher’s jaw clenched in anger. “The padre betrayed you.”
“Sí.” Esteban closed his eyes for a second, then opened them and said, “Though it pains me to admit it, Father Hortensio betrayed me. He told the Yaqui to strike me down.”
“Why would he do that? What had the two o’ you been arguin’ about?”
“The treasure.” That answer didn’t come as a surprise to Preacher, either. “He said it belonged to the Holy Mother Church, and that he could not allow it to fall into the hands of heathens.”
“What about your sister?”
“He said that he was sorry about Juanita, but that the needs of the Church came first.” Esteban struggled to a sitting position, clawing at the sleeve of Preacher’s buckskin shirt as he did so. Preacher put an arm around his shoulders to help him sit up. “He had one of the Yaquis knock me unconscious so that he could steal the treasure!”
“It sure looks that way,” Preacher agreed. His face was set in bleak lines. “The padre wouldn’t see it like that, though. To his way o’ thinkin’, he was savin’ the treasure, not stealin’ it.”
“But how . . .” Esteban looked around wildly. “How did he get away? Where did he go?”
“I ain’t sure about that,” Preacher admitted, “but he sure as blazes went somewhere. Him and those Yaquis didn’t just flap their arms and fly off like big ol’ birds.”
Esteban clutched at Preacher again. “What about Juanita? How can we trade the treasure for her if Father Hortensio has taken it?” His voice went up in a note of panic.
“Don’t start worryin’ about that yet,” Preacher told him. “Just lay back and rest for a minute whilst I take a look around.”
Esteban didn’t want to rest. He wanted to get up and rush around, looking for Father Hortensio and the Yaquis. But Preacher wouldn’t let him, and Esteban was still too weak to stand. With a worried sigh, he lay down again.
Preacher stalked over to the spot where the bags of loot and the chest of gold had been left earlier. The rope was missing, too. Preacher stared at the hole for a moment, then grimaced and lowered himself into it, bracing himself against the walls and inching down the shaft as he had climbed up it earlier.
He reached the drop-off and let himself slide, catching the edge with his hands just long enough to break his fall before he let go and dropped the rest of the way to the floor of the cave. He was in darkness; the fire had gone out. But working by feel, he was able to gather up enough unburned brush to start a small fire with his flint and steel.
Looking around by the flickering glow, he saw that the other chests had been emptied of gold ingots as well, just as he expected. They were lying around haphazardly, wherever they had landed when they had been tossed back down the hole. Preacher counted the empty chests. There were eight of them, and he was pretty sure that was how many had been down here to start with. Father Hortensio and the Yaquis had been busy while he was gone. After knocking out Esteban, they had hauled up the rest of the chests, taken out the gold, and thrown the chests back down the hole. Preacher wondered about that for a moment, but then he realized it had been a shrewd move on Father Hortensio’s part. Preacher had been forced to spend some time climbing down here, just to make sure the gold was gone. That was time he hadn’t been able to use getting on the trail of the priest and the two Indians.
Moving quickly, well aware that minutes were ticking by, Preacher stacked up the looted chests so that he could climb on them and reach up to grasp the edge of the slanting shaft. With a grunt of effort, he pulled himself into the shaft and started the laborious climb one more time. It would be the last time, because there was no longer any reason for him to come down here. The treasure chamber where Don Francisco Alvarez had cached the loot a century and a half earlier was now empty.
When Preacher reached the top and crawled out of the opening, he found Esteban sitting up again. The young man asked anxiously, “The gold?”
“All gone,” Preacher told him bluntly.
Esteban’s face fell. “But how?” he wondered. “How could they carry it all away? Where did they go?”
“They had three horses and some rope,” Preacher said. “I reckon they t
ied the bags of relics together and slung them over the backs of the horses. Somehow they rigged some other bags for the gold and tied those to the horses so that they could drag ’em.”
“But the weight would be tremendous!”
Preacher nodded. “Yeah, it would, and it would wear out the horses pretty quick, too. But I reckon Father Hortensio figured if he could get away from here, he could stop and let the horses rest as often as he needed to.”
“They did not go down the canyon. You would have seen them.”
“Yep, and they wouldn’t go that way to start with, because Chambers and the others are down at the bottom. They went somewheres else.” Preacher got hold of Horse’s reins and swung up into the saddle. “I aim to go find out where.”
Esteban started to get up. “What can I do to help?”
“Stay here,” Preacher said. “You’ve still got a pistol and a rifle, in case Chambers and his bunch show up. Take cover and try to hold ’em off, and if I hear shootin’ I’ll light a shuck back here. With any luck, though, I’ll find what I’m lookin’ for and be back here before they show up to make the trade.”
“Ah, Juanita!” Esteban said anxiously. He was muttering to himself in Spanish as Preacher rode off.
Horses didn’t leave much sign on this dry, rocky ground, but it didn’t take much for a man with eyes as keen as Preacher’s. He found tracks that indicated three men on foot and three horses had started off toward the eastern end of the shelf. As he followed the tracks, he saw some scuff marks on the ground that confirmed his earlier guess: The horses were dragging something heavy behind them. Bags full of gold bars, no doubt.
Preacher hadn’t been on this part of the shelf. His searching had been concentrated on the other end, and the actual location of the treasure cave was more toward the middle of the flat land that shouldered out from the side of the mountain. So it came as a surprise to him when he found a narrow trail leading off around the mountain. He wasn’t too surprised, though. He had known that Father Hortensio and the Yaquis were heading somewhere, so there had to be another way off this shelf.
The trail was nothing more than a ledge that was just wide enough for a horse to negotiate it. The men had led the horses along it, with a sheer rock wall to their left and a drop of several hundred feet to their right. It must have been a harrowing trip, where one misstep would mean a long plunge to a crashing death. Preacher looked down the cliff, searching for any smashed bodies of man or horse. He didn’t see any. Father Hortensio and the two servants had made it without falling at least farther than Preacher could see.
He wheeled Horse around and galloped back to where he had left Esteban. There was no sign of Chambers, Cobey, and the others. Without dismounting, Preacher held out a hand to Esteban and said, “Come on.”
“Come on?” the young man repeated as he climbed unsteadily to his feet. “Where? Did you find out what happened to Father Hortensio and the Yaquis?”
“There’s another trail over yonder.” Preacher inclined his head toward the eastern end of the shelf. “It ain’t much of one, but it was enough for them to be able to get out of here. We got to do the same thing.”
“But what about Juanita? We . . . we cannot abandon her to being a prisoner of those men.” Horror tinged his voice at the very idea.
“We ain’t abandonin’ her,” Preacher said, “but we can’t do her any good by stayin’ here. There’s only one way we can help her, and that’s by gettin’ that loot back and usin’ it to bargain with the bastards who’ve got her.”
“I . . . I suppose you are right, Preacher.” Esteban passed a trembling hand over his face. Then he reached up, grasped the mountain man’s wrist, and climbed onto Horse’s back behind him. “But when they come up here, expecting to make the trade, and find us gone . . . what will they do then?”
“I ain’t sure,” Preacher said, “but they know the only chance they’ve got of swappin’ for the treasure is to keep Juanita alive and unharmed. You hang onto that hope, Esteban, and I will, too.”
They rode away, trailed by Dog, leaving the now-empty cave behind them.
TWENTY-THREE
Juanita saw the man called Cobey stalk toward the wagons. Wick got up from the rock where he had been sitting and greeted his friend by saying, “She’s still in there, Cobey. She ain’t tried to get away. I watched her real good, just like you told me.”
Cobey brushed past the giant with a curt nod and didn’t say anything to him. Perhaps stung by being ignored, Wick went on. “I didn’t touch her bosoms or loosen them thongs around her wrists or nothin’ like that.”
Juanita closed her eyes for a second in despair. She had been working at her bonds for the past half hour, trying to loosen them even more, but so far she’d had little success. Now she wouldn’t get a chance to continue the effort, because Cobey stopped short and swung around to glare at Wick.
“Damn it, Wick, what’d I tell you—”
Wick looked like he was going to cry. Cobey shook his head and went on. “I don’t reckon it matters. We’ll be tradin’ her for that treasure in a little while, so she won’t have time to try to get away. Get her out of the wagon.”
“Sure, Cobey,” Wick said eagerly, his expression happy again after having been given a job to do by his friend. He came over to the wagon and reached in toward Juanita. Instinctively, she shrank back from his grasping, hamlike hands. “Don’t be scared,” he told her. “I ain’t a-gonna hurt you.”
He slipped his hands under her arms and lifted her out of the wagon as if she had been nothing more than a child’s doll. She couldn’t help but gasp at the enormous power in his grip. As he had promised, though, he was gentle with her and didn’t hurt her. He just set her feet on the ground and then let go of her.
Cobey stood in front of her and grinned. “Your brother must think a lot of you, Señorita. He’s willin’ to trade all that hidden loot for you.” He brought his hand up and brushed his rough knuckles against the smooth skin of her cheek. “Too bad we ain’t got time to get better acquainted before we make the swap.”
Juanita wanted to spit in his leering face, but she suppressed the impulse. She didn’t want to anger him or test the limits of his patience. She just wanted to be back with Esteban.
But could these men be trusted? The obvious answer was no. They would try some sort of trick, rather than sticking to whatever agreement they had made. Treachery would be second nature to them. But surely Esteban would realize that.
Even if he didn’t, Preacher would. The mountain man would not be fooled, Juanita told herself.
She looked past Cobey as Professor Chambers walked up. Seeing a civilized man like him gave her hope, even though she knew it shouldn’t. “Professor,” she said, “are you sure you want to do this thing? There is no honor in it.”
“No, perhaps not,” he agreed. “But only a rich man can afford honor, my dear. Unfortunately, I’ve never fallen into that category.”
Her hopes fell yet again. She couldn’t look for any help from Chambers. Indeed, the look in his eyes when he gazed at her was just as lustful as that of any of the other men. Despite his background, he was just as evil as they were.
Cobey gestured curtly toward the mouth of the canyon. “Let’s go,” he ordered. “Wick, put the girl on my horse.”
Again the giant sprang to obey. He lifted Juanita onto the back of one of their mounts, just in front of the saddle. She had to straddle the animal, which meant her dress was pulled up, revealing her boots and the stockings above them. She burned with shame at that indecent display, and her flush deepened as Cobey swung up behind her and slid an arm familiarly around her waist.
The other men mounted up as well, and the entire party started riding up the canyon toward the shelf where the cave was located. The rocking motion of the horse and the pressure of Cobey’s arm around her waist meant that Juanita spent most of the time pressed tightly against her captor. “You’re a sweet one, you are,” he hissed in her ear. “I’ll bet you’re a r
eal wildcat when it comes to lovin’, too.”
She ignored him as best she could and distracted herself from the humiliation he was putting her through by thinking about what Preacher might do to him. Preacher would find some way to prevent these men from getting away with their villainy, and then he would dispense frontier justice to them. That justice would be swift and ruthless. At least, Juanita hoped so.
It was late afternoon by the time the riders neared the top of the canyon. Despite the harrowing situation in which she found herself, Juanita was aware that she hadn’t eaten since early that morning. Her stomach growled and complained. She ignored that, too.
Cobey called a halt while there was still one more bend between them and the top. “Remember, don’t open fire until we’ve made the swap,” he told the others.
Juanita stiffened at those words and tried to turn around to stare at him. He was going to betray the agreement, just as she had feared. That meant Esteban, Preacher, and Father Hortensio would be riding into a trap. Perhaps they were close by. She opened her mouth to scream a warning.
Before any sound could come out of her throat, Cobey looped a twisted bandanna around her head from behind. He jerked it tight, so that it closed off her mouth. All she could do was make incoherent noises. He tied the bandanna in a knot at the back of her head.
“Thought you was gettin’ away from me, didn’t you, gal?” He chuckled. “Well, you ain’t. We’re gonna have you, and the loot, too. You might as well get used to the idea.”
Juanita made strangled noises.
“Don’t worry about your brother and Preacher, though,” Cobey went on. “They’ll both be dead, along with the priest and them Indians of yours.”
He was wrong about the Yaquis, of course. They were Father Hortensio’s servants, not hers and Esteban’s. Not that it mattered now. Pablo and Joaquin would be gunned down just like the others. Killed as Benedicto and Ismael had been. The slaughter would be complete....
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