by Alex Frew
She had kept her distance from him even though they were conversing with each other now. As he moved off she still kept from coming too close to him. No wonder the men who had brought her here had left her untied, he thought, it was obvious that she would never have tried to escape on her own. Yet for all he knew her behaviour was some kind of act and she had a gun beneath that somewhat plain dress she was wearing.
It was obvious, even after a short search, that there was nothing on the island that resembled a boat, except for the rotting frame of an old canoe. In the same area he found a rusty old knife, however, and an axe. What they also found, though, was a totem pole of the kind venerated by the Indians. It had some wonderful carvings on it of faces with native characteristics, bears and even a bald eagle atop. This was probably the reason why this area was called Shrine Island, and was a cause for concern. Not all of the tribes in this area had been placed in reservations and Ryan had the sudden thought that if they were around they might take a dim view of intruders in their holy space. It was a thought that sent a shiver running through him because he was well aware of what the Indians were capable of in defending what they saw as theirs. The girl looked at the religious artefact without much concern, not knowing what it signified.
‘There’s no way of getting off, is there?’ she asked, still keeping her distance from him.
‘Well, at least there’s plenty of water,’ he said. ‘We won’t die of thirst. I detected rabbits and ducks and turkeys, there’s fish in the river, and I noticed there was some basic hunting gear in the lean-to. I can make fire by getting dry grass and striking flint against a bit of old iron or steel, getting a flame and building a fire down at the shoreline. We won’t starve either.’
‘You can get fire and feed us?’ she asked looking at him as if he had two heads.
‘Sure,’ said Ryan with a confidence he did not feel. ‘It was the way I was brought up. There’s always a way of fighting back.’ He looked at the waters rushing past the island and fell silent. The wooded shoreline was temptingly close and he was a powerful swimmer. His biggest worry was that the waters would carry him down to the very falls that gave the village its name. However, on this side of the island, they were not only closer to the shore: there was a bend in the river that the waters swept around, with the far shore jutting out like an isthmus from the mainland. If he had some sort of craft and they could steer in the right direction there was a possibility they could catch the shore. He stood there so long with the wheels of his mind turning that the girl gave an impatient shout and his head cleared.
‘Can we get out of here?’ she asked. ‘You said yourself there might be Indians. Can you light that fire you were talking about and get us some food?’ He looked at her, deciding that perhaps this was not the time to let her know what was on his mind.
‘We’ll try,’ he said.
Chapter Seven
The villagers found themselves being led towards a place that looked as if it should not have been there. It was a long grey wall built from a mixture of adobe and brick, a wall that was obviously part of a bigger structure, but which they were approaching from a low level so that they could see little more than that side. It was situated close to the mighty Brazos so that the waters could still be heard rushing past, but was a few hundred feet from the river itself, tucked amongst the Pinto hills. A place this vast could only have been built by the government, and the age of the place told its own story. They were toiling upwards to the structure from the lowlands at the river’s edge. One of the villagers, a man in his fifties looked at the building and gave a faint groan. The people walking with him looked at him covertly to avoid the attentions of the men with whips.
‘What is it, Bert?’ asked a stick-thin woman called Aimee who had run the village inn, a place where weary travellers could buy a bite to eat and grab a place to sleep. Her business had been quiet to begin with, but thrived during the cattle drives and it was rumoured that as a widow she hadn’t been too fussy about shaking off the attentions of the cowboys.
‘Camp Brazos,’ said Bert, a stocky man who looked as if he would have keeled over in the first ten miles but who had somehow survived well. ‘Used as a prisoner of war camp during the Civil War.’
‘Shut it up, gringo,’ said their overseer, who was riding beside them, a swarthy Mexican with a fierce moustache, who waved his quirt at them and caught Bert on the shoulder with a lash of the leather. The villager winced in pain and went quiet, the expression on his broad features showing that he was storing up a degree of resentment for later.
The walls of the camp were closer now and it was obvious that the place had seen much better times. The gates of the former internment camp were opened and the villagers were prodded and pushed into line by their guards and made to go inside. None of the captured villagers were sure of what they were going to see, even the man who had known that they were entering a type of prison did not know what was inside, merely that the camp existed. From the start the impression was that of a big parade area of the kind beloved by all military institutions. In the centre of this square was a flagpole, which was a sorry looking sight given that it was totally bereft of a single banner.
At the head of the rectangular military parade ground was a fort that was raised several storeys high. It was a plain building that had once had whitewashed walls but was now an uneven grey with peeling paint evidence of past glories. To one side of this was a barracks that would have housed the soldiers who had guarded both the installation and their prisoners. To the other was the stabling for the horses, and those guards who had entered first dismounted and stood beside their horses, their guns at the ready as the prisoners were driven forward.
As for the prisoners themselves, their accommodation was to be a great deal more basic. To either side of the parade ground was what could only be described as a holding area. During the Civil War, commanders had been under pressure to make a place where their prisoners could be kept and Camp Brazos, although large, was constructed in an extremely basic manner. There had been no time to construct cells and make a prison near the river. These camps were supposed to be places where people would be held for short periods of time while they were awaiting trial, and reassigned to a proper prison away from the scene of military conflict. They were also places from which people could be plucked and shot if that was considered necessary.
The compounds were simply areas that had been fenced off from the rest of the camp. They were mostly open and had little in the way of seating except for stone blocks set at regular intervals. At the back of the compound, which was at least fifty feet wide and a couple of hundred feet long, was what passed for accommodation, areas where walls had been built much lower than the height of the prison camp and roofed over with wooden boards. There were only six of these to each compound and they were open to the front so that every movement of the prisoners could be seen.
There was no sign of traditional bedding, although some loose bales of straw had been thrown inside to be divided by the prisoners, to give them something to lie on. Near the front were water troughs like those used by horses, but it was plain that these could be filled from outside the fence, although they were already full. One of the compounds was sealed from the rest of the camp by a long metal fence with the newly invented barbed wire at the top.
The other compound was bare and some of the rusty fencing had been used to restore parts of the other side, where the prisoners were to be kept. The walls at the back of the damaged area were crumbling.
The fenced-in area had a metal gate that was the only new-looking part of the construction besides the barbed wire. This was opened and the prisoners were herded inside, with one or two making a feeble effort to resist. One man was clubbed to the ground and booted in the ribs by a large Mexican who looked as if he might have continued to kick until the man was dead, but was restrained by a stern look and a cry of ‘detener,’ from Rivero, who despite his position was supervising the whole process closely. The injured
man was flung inside with the rest.
When his prisoners were sealed in, they were ignored for the moment while many of the other horses and men entered and the animals were stabled. Not all of the men and horses had been brought inside, and it was obvious that men would be needed to patrol the area and to create hunting parties that would go out and forage for food. Only when he had seen that the fort was set up to his satisfaction did Rivero reappear with Ramirez, flanked by guards with guns who dwarfed them. The prisoners, most of them, were lying down. Some of the more enterprising had created makeshift beds in the bedding areas from the straw that had been left.
‘Come forward, you filthy American dogs,’ said Rivero, who was not a man to mince his words or conceal his attitudes. When the prisoners did not come forward fast enough he nodded to one of the men beside him and that individual fired a few bullets that kicked up dust near the recumbent figures that had not yet risen and made them come forward hastily.
‘You American dogs wonder why we have done this,’ said their captor. He gave a grin that was totally devoid of humour. ‘You have taken large areas of my homeland and that of my people, you settle here on land that was ours for generations. These hills belonged to my ancestors. They are rich in gold, copper, zinc and other metals, yet all this is no longer considered mine, but belongs to your filthy government.’
‘He tells the truth,’ said Ramirez, with a serious nod. ‘You are invaders, not us.’
‘That is why you are here. I have used money from my family to come here, with the men who believe in my cause,’ said Rivero, ‘and together we will take back what is mine.’
‘But why us?’ asked Bert, shaking the bars. ‘We can’t do anything for you.’
‘You can’t, señor?’ asked Rivero. He looked around at the crumbling walls. ‘You can build, can’t you? All of you can.’
Hawk was not one to unburden his feelings. His face was expressionless as he rode around the area of the ranch looking for clues as to what had happened. He examined the soil with some thought and then came to some conclusions that he shared with his men.
‘There’s three of them, and I know for a fact that one of them was Yancey.’ He looked out towards the huge sloping fields that led down from his ranch. These were busy with cattle, big black and white longhorns that were feeding well on the crisp spring grass. These were not the focus of his attention; instead he was looking at the woodlands beyond the fields, knowing that beyond this was the river that dominated the area. He was using line of sight and that seemed good enough to him.
‘I reckon they didn’t mess around,’ he said. ‘Yancey and one of them came up here in the early hours. Yancey knew that I liked to sit on the porch, so they would have been in place before I arrived. Any movements would have been concealed by the soft, new grass and the sound of them restless cattle.’
‘Why didn’t they just rob you?’ asked Holt.
‘Because they wouldn’t have known where the money was,’ said Hawk, thinking of the spot in his home, under the floor in the front room in the left corner beneath a cabinet. Almost certainly it would have been a hard place for them to find his money, especially at that time of the morning. Besides, there was something else going on here. ‘I feel as if they were homing in on me like some kind of target, as if I had a big blue circle on me,’ he added. ‘I can’t explain why, but that’s what it’s like.’
‘But what reason would they have?’ asked Clay.
‘Regardless, I’m on their track, and with your help I’m going to get them,’ said Hawk.
‘Surely the best way to deal with this would be to take the ransom to Three Forks and wait,’ said Clay. ‘Then you could attack them then and force them to tell you where your boy is.’
‘Not the best way,’ Hawk shook his head and gazed upon his three men. They were all standing beside their mounts at the headland of the ranch, gazing down at the thick woodlands across the green expanse before them. ‘The reason is that they’ll use Yancey, and if he doesn’t come back they’ll get off with their freedom and we’ll never find him.’
‘This way seems kind of filled with chance,’ said Holt.
‘Have you ever been in the same room as a wasp?’ asked Hawk. ‘We all have. Well, see that critter? He’s mighty mad at being trapped in there, and he gets madder and madder all the time and his brain ain’t that mighty. You might open a door or window and try to get him out, but he’s so mad at you that, despite trying to help him, he’s going to sting you just to get rid of his madness. Well, what you’ve got to do is roll up a newspaper and whack him on the head before he gets to that stage. That’s what we’re doing. We strike now and we do it well.’
On his instructions the four of them fanned out but still followed a direct line of sight from the ranch. The cows looked at them with some kind of respect and curiosity because they were used to being herded, with one or two even coming towards the riders, but a quick ‘holah’ from the riders and a wave of the quirt was enough to disperse them. Hawk feared that this might alert the kidnappers but it was something that had to be done.
Finally, when they arrived at the tree line, they dismounted from their steeds, took out their guns and walked amidst the foliage.
With his acute senses, Hawk was able to detect the smell of recently burned charcoal long before his companions. Dressed in his long greenish-grey coat with a grey felt hat on his head with a jay’s feather stuck in the band, his slow movements and ability to slide through the undergrowth, barely cracking a twig in the process, meant that he was able to find the camp belonging to the intruders before the rest of his men.
They had set up quite a little home from home in a clearing in the forest, but still sheltered by the oaks, pines and beech trees that so happily intermingled in the rich soil close to the river. They had two canvas tents, both of which looked as if they had been bought cheaply from previous owners, probably prospectors, and both of which had been patched several times. In addition, they had wisely built a fire in the middle of the clearing by surrounding it with large stones so that the flames would not escape and set their surroundings on fire. He could even smell the coffee brewing in a tin can sat amid the glowing coals. They were not too bothered about telltale smoke giving away their position, given that it was trapped by the thick green canopy above them.
Hawk had been hoping that this situation would be resolved right then and there, and as Clay arrived, Hawk signalled to him to come to a halt. Clay was a big man and would seriously alarm the three individuals who were currently seated around the fire. There was no sign of his son. Ryan might have been a prisoner tied up inside one of the tents, except the way these were situated they were face-on to him, with their fronts tied back to keep them aired in the hot day, and he could see they only contained bedrolls and some weapons. If they attacked and killed the three men right now they might never know where his son was, and that would defeat the exercise.
Hawk gave a nod of his head to Clay and the big man understood exactly what to do. The other riders were on the far side of the camp. They too would follow his lead.
Hawk stepped forward, gun in either hand. ‘I guess you boys have got a bit of explaining to do.’ He hefted one of his guns as Jardine scrambled for his weapons. ‘I wouldn’t do that, else you want your head to part from your shoulders.’ Jardine halted where he was, all the fight out of him, but the other two men turned and faced Hawk. One was the huge figure of Yancey Barnes, but it was the other man who drew his immediate attention.
‘Scott? What the hell are you up to?’
‘Never mind,’ snarled McArthur. ‘Yancey, rip his head off.’ With a snarl the big man threw his body forward, doing as he was told.
Chapter Eight
‘You’re going to do what?’ asked the girl again. They were back at the lean-to and had finished a meal of cooked duck, of which there were plenty on the island. The girl had turned pale when Ryan trapped the animal before it could get into the water, but he had broken its neck w
ith a degree of efficiency that showed he had done the same kind of thing before, not just once but many times.
‘Paw always says there’s no reason why a man should starve when he’s surrounded by plenty,’ said Ryan at the time. He had used the knife he had found to prepare his catch and she had robbed him of her presence while he was doing so, unable to bear the reality of what he was doing. But the smell of cooking had brought her back to his fire in front of the makeshift building and she had eaten ravenously as if she had not been fed for a while. He had found some edible plant leaves – a form of wild lettuce – and they had eaten the meat wrapped in this like a makeshift taco. It was then that he had made the proposal that had made her stare at him. Not just stare either, but rising and backing away from him as if he was some kind of madman.
‘We don’t have a boat,’ he said reasonably enough, ‘but we have plenty of wind-blown and chopped down wood. Some of the trunks are old enough to have dried out without rotting through. They’ll float well enough. We can launch ourselves into the river on one and use it as a way of getting to the bank.’
‘That’s mad,’ she said, ‘mad; you’ll get us both killed.’ She was trembling now. She had managed to tidy herself up somehow; she had tied her hair back using some cotton and had cleaned her face in the river. Scrubbed up like that, and sitting across from him, he had thought she was quite pretty. Her features were delicate and refined and she had large, doe-like eyes. He could imagine that her smile would be quite bright, but she had not smiled once since their unfortunate meeting. She was already on her feet, and now she backed away from him even more in the clearing and away from the fire. Her face crumpled and she began to sob, not loud, but quietly, her hand coming to her face as she tried to hide her distress.