Clark lifted the deerhide shade from his window and peered into the dust lifting behind them. Several horseback riders were closing at a hell-for-leather gallop, firing pistols in the air. The hard cases from the cantina. Their hats, secured to their necks by leather thongs, whipped behind them in the wind.
Clark stared disbelievingly for several seconds.
“Shit,” he said, squelching a cough. He craned his neck to yell up at the driver, “We’ve got company!”
The driver had heard the racket; his response was quick, and keen with anger. “You two are gonna get me killed yet!” Then he cracked the whip against the horses’ backs and yelled shrilly, his voice breaking on the high notes.
Clark yelled, “Doesn’t someone usually ride shotgun on these things?”
“Someone usually does!” the driver replied. “But someone bought an Apache war lance two days back, and we ain’t exactly been flooded with applicants for his job!”
The yells, the pounding of the horses, and the crack of the pistols were growing louder and louder.
“Don’t worry,” Clark said, glancing at Marina. He drew his Bisley, spun the cylinder, and smiled. “I am rather handy with a forty-five.”
She did not respond. She was staring straight ahead, back stiff, hands clutching the leather straps hanging from the ceiling. Her lips were moving, praying.
“Come on, amigo!” someone yelled. “¡Dios mío!”
Clark looked out the south-facing window. The man who had tossed the pouch on Clark’s table back in the cantina had ridden up so close to the window that Clark could see the lather on his horse, the stitching in his bullhide chaps. He yelled again. “We offer you gold!”
“Never!” Clark shouted at the man.
“Amigo,” the man said in a tone of mock lament, “my loins are heavy for her!” He spread a snaggle-toothed grin.
Clark poked the Bisley out the window and fired.
The vaquero flinched as the bullet brushed his hat. He cursed in Spanish, and grabbed the gun off his hip and snapped off two quick shots at Clark, who flung himself sideways to avoid the lead.
Pushing Marina to the floor, Clark yelled, “Stay down!”
Guns were barking and lead was flying all over the place. Wood shards were ripped from the carriage as bullets tore in one wall and out the other. The driver cursed and yelled at the horses, the long blacksnake punctuating his epithets with sharp cracks.
Clark was preparing to take another shot at the vaquero when the carriage suddenly sank to the left. Clark turned to see a man clinging to the outside of the stage, trying to crawl through the window.
Clark shot the man through the right eye. The attacker screamed, clung for a moment to the window frame, then fell. The carriage bounced as the left rear wheel plowed over his body, sending Clark against the door.
A gun exploded from just behind the stage, and the driver cried out in anguish. “Oh … oh, ya lousy goddamn—”
A shadow passed over the window beside Clark. He risked a glance out and saw the driver tumbling in the trail behind the stage, a rag doll consumed by dust and distance. Adding insult to injury, the wind caught the driver’s hat and flung it across the desert.
The stage was now a driverless runaway. Clark’s stomach filled with hot bile. The stage suddenly lurched. A horse screamed. The carriage rose on the right as though from an explosion, and all four wheels left the ground.
Just as Clark realized that one of the horses had been shot and had fallen under the stage, he found himself on his back, with the right side of the carriage beneath him, Marina on top of him, and dust and stones pouring over his face. He gagged and choked, fighting for air. Abruptly the stage crashed to a violent stop, throwing Clark forward and on top of Marina.
In the sudden silence, he asked his wife, “Are you okay?”
Before she could answer, the door above them opened, filling the stage’s dusty interior with harsh yellow light. Then a face blocked the sun. It was the vaquero from the cantina grinning down at them.
Marina screamed.
“Ah, señor!” the vaquero cried. “It would have been easier my way, no?”
Clark searched frantically for his gun, but it must have gone out one of the windows. The vaquero leaned down into the stage, and with one swoop of his giant arm, grabbed Marina around the waist and lifted her out the door, screaming and clawing at his face.
“That … That’s my wife!” Clark yelled, fumbling for her legs.
Still disoriented from the crash, he fell back, then gathered his wits and heaved himself through the opening. He tripped over the step and went headfirst over the side, hitting the ground hard and getting another taste of Sonoran gravel.
When he’d finally gained his feet, someone jabbed a rifle butt against his head, and he went down again, blood flowing freely from the side of his head. The pain skewered hotly, watering his eyes, and for a second he thought he would pass out. A rough hand grabbed him by the collar and dragged him to his knees.
Shaking, Clark got to his feet. Marina was about twelve yards away, trying to work free of the big Mexican’s grip. Clark started toward her, but the man with the rifle grabbed him. Seven grinning men stood around him. An eighth stood to one side—a tall, skinny man in a dusty gray coat and gray campaign hat. The man had the ashen, hollowed-out face of a long-dead cadaver, and the long hair curling onto his shoulders was nearly white and of the texture of straw.
The man’s eyes were a washed-out blue. They owned a devilish slant and were as flat as a reptile’s. He smiled with cruel, cunning humor, showing long teeth like miniature, coffee-colored stilettos, and Clark knew this had been the man half-hidden in the cantina’s dusky shadows.
To the man holding Marina, Clark yelled, “Take your hands off my wife!”
The man with the long gray hair unfolded his arms and planted a hand on the shoulder of the vaquero nuzzling Marina’s neck. “That’s enough now, Mocho,” he said casually, in a Cajun-accented Southern drawl. “We’ve other business for the moment.” Despite his nightmarish looks, there was a gentlemanly air about the man, an air of formality that did not come naturally to him. He was not a man of breeding, Clark could tell, but that’s how he saw himself.
“She’s mine,” Mocho grunted.
“I said that’s enough!” the gray-haired man yelled, cuffing Mocho’s head with his open hand and knocking off the man’s hat.
Mocho turned an idiot’s angry glare at him. While Mocho was distracted, Marina broke free of his grip and raced to Clark’s side, where she stood trembling and watching the renegades with haunted eyes.
The leader turned to Clark, regaining his frigid smile, and strutted over casually. He planted his feet about a yard from Clark’s and folded his arms across his skinny chest.
“You’re a dead man, Mr. Clark,” he said matter-of-factly.
“Who are you?”
“Gaston Bachelard.”
Clark stared into the man’s face, puzzled. Gaston Bachelard had ridden with Bloody Bill Anderson in Missouri, during the war. Like Jesse James and Cole Younger, Bachelard had been a savage Confederate freedom-fighter, called to action by the barn burnings and execution-style murders committed by the Kansas Red-Legs. He’d hailed originally from the Louisiana bayous, and was part French, part Indian, and a cold-blooded killer. After the war he’d retreated to Texas and started terrorizing and slaughtering Texans he believed had sympathized with the Union.
“Bachelard,” Clark mumbled, squinting his unbelieving eyes at the Cajun.
Bachelard shuttled his predatory gaze to Marina. He tipped his hat, flashing his long, thin teeth in a wide grin. It was a chilling expression on his humorless face.
“Why don’t you introduce me to your lovely señorita, Mr. Clark?” He spoke with a Cajun accent.
“You know my name?”
“Of course I know your name—your family was one of the wealthiest in Missouri … before the war. You were adjutant to Brennan. Your father bought you the
position to keep you out of harm’s way”—the man snarled with disdain—“while others, like me, fought the war for you.”
He paused thoughtfully, and slowly the grimace relaxed, the deep-etched lines in his face shallowing. He held up a finger. “And that is not all I know, mon ami.” The smile broadened mischievously. “I know why you are here.”
Clark’s heart skipped a beat. The hair on the back of his neck tingled.
Bachelard moved to the girl and yanked the silver chain from her neck.
“No!” she yelled.
Ignoring her, Bachelard held the cross up to Clark’s face. It turned on its chain, showing the inscription etched on its back—San Bernardo, 1733.
Bachelard thrust his face so close to Clark’s, that he could smell the beer and hog tripe on the Cajun’s breath. “The gold would go very far in buying you a fresh start, wouldn’t it, Captain?”
His eyes were cold and cunning. “I am sorry,” he said, “but I am afraid you are going to know poverty for once in your life … like the rest of the South. Hand over the plat and live,” he hissed maniacally. “Keep it and die!”
Clark’s knees felt like putty. He did not know what to do. He’d lost his pluck and felt as weak as a child, but he would not give up the plat. It was all he had.
“H-how did you know?” he managed.
“You can’t be in Sonora long without hearing about the Lost Church of San Bernardo,” Bachelard said. “Of course, like most, I thought it was just a legend. Then one of my men showed up with a silver cross like this one, with a similar inscription. Said he’d won it in a poker game off an old mestizo named Julio Mendez. I had my man fetch him.
“Mendez was in a very bad way—very sick, very drunk—and it didn’t take much prodding to get him to tell me where the cross had come from. Eventually we learned he’d drawn a map, but his brain was too dead to reproduce it. Then he told me he had given it to the lovely daughter of Don Sebastian de la Guerra.”
Bachelard smiled at Marina. “By the time I tracked you down, you’d married a mining speculator in Prescott, Arizona, and set out to meet a guide in Tucson. That was Reese McCormick, I take it?”
“Did you kill him?” Clark asked coolly.
Bachelard frowned, as though hurt by the accusation. “No, no, no, Mr. Clark. The poor man died in a rockslide three weeks ago when he was out working his mine near Bisbee. I’m saddened by the accusation.”
“You’ll get over it,” Clark said tightly.
Bachelard looked thoughtful. “Too bad, though, about Reese.” He shook his head with mild consternation.
“Julio—?” Marina asked.
“He’s dead too,” Bachelard said brusquely. “I cut his throat when I’d gotten as much as I was going to get.”
“You bastard,” Marina breathed, eyes filled with anguish. “He was a defenseless old man.”
“He was nearly dead anyway, señora. I did him a favor. Besides, I couldn’t risk him spilling the beans about the treasure to anyone else, now, could I?”
Bachelard held out his hand to Clark. “Kindly hand over the plat, Captain Clark, or I will shoot you where you stand and take your lovely wife into the brush with me.” He cut his eyes at the other men standing around grinning at the woman. “Then I will give her to them to do with as they please.”
Clark’s thoughts scurried. “I don’t have it,” he said finally. “I left it in a bank in Prescott.”
Bachelard frowned. “I don’t believe you, m’sieur.” Turning sharply to his men, he barked, “Tear open all the luggage. Throw everything on the ground where I can see every—” He slid a lascivious gaze to Marina. “—every lady’s lacy undergarment, eh?”
Three of Bachelard’s men went to work scrounging through the luggage boot. Two ran back along the trail to retrieve the trunks that had fallen out when the stage overturned.
Mocho came to stand before the girl, a goatish hunger imprinted on his sweating face.
Bachelard turned to the big hombre and clapped him on the back. To Clark and Marina he said, “I think my friend Mocho thinks your lovely wife is carrying the plat on her person. Is that right, Mocho?”
The Mexican just stood there, staring at Marina. Clark could hear him breathing and grunting. Clark’s stomach filled with fresh bile.
“Get him out of here,” he said.
“The plat did belong to her, did it not?” Bachelard asked.
Clark said nothing.
Bachelard furrowed his brow in thought. “I tell you what I’ll do. If she shows Mocho that she is not carrying the plat in her blouse, I’ll keep Mocho from taking her off in the brush. Eh? What do you think? Does that sound fair, m’sieur Clark?”
Clark set his jaw and snarled, “You’re a lunatic, Bachelard.”
“No?” Bachelard said with surprise. Turning to the big Mexican he said, “Well, okay then, Mocho.”
“No!” Marina cried. She jumped back several steps, eyes wide and bright with fear. “Please … no.” Her voice was small, and she looked at Clark imploringly.
There was nothing he could do beyond giving up the plat, and he couldn’t bring himself to do it. It was all he had left. His mother was dead, his father driven insane by the war, his sisters scattered and living like paupers. His family’s plantation was now in the hands of Yankee squatters. Without the plat, without the gold, he’d have nothing.
“It is just a small thing that we ask, señora,” Bachelard said reasonably, holding out his hands. He moved toward her. “Here … let me help you.”
“Leave her alone!” Clark yelled, moving to intervene.
Suddenly, Bachelard’s sidearm was in his hand, aimed at Clark’s head. Clark stopped and stared down the barrel.
“No … wait … please,” Marina pleaded. “I’ll do it.”
“You will not!” Clark retorted, horrified at the thought of her baring herself to these savages. “You’re my wife!”
Bachelard moved the gun only two inches from Clark’s face. “Neither of you really has a choice,” he said matter-of-factly, arching a brow.
Clark’s knees went numb. He hated the fear he heard in his voice. “Please …”
“Yes,” Bachelard said. “Please have your wife remove her blouse, m’sieur.” He smiled with only his eyes. “It is mere precaution, you understand, ma cherie.”
“You son of a bitch,” Clark said.
Bachelard grinned. Still holding the gun on Clark, he cut his eyes at Marina and thumbed back the hammer on the .45. “Now then, Mrs. Clark.”
Marina looked at him, her cool eyes filling with contempt. Then she looked toward the horizon and lifted her slender hands to the first button of her blouse.
When she’d finished with the last, she peeled the blouse from her shoulders and dropped it at her feet. Clark could hear Mocho’s raspy breath and the horses obliviously cropping sage. Bachelard regarded Marina with dark, grinning eyes.
She wore the thin, silk chemise with lace edging that Clark had bought for her, along with the rest of her traveling attire, in Prescott. Gaze locked on the horizon, she inhaled deeply and pulled the chemise out of her skirt and slowly lifted it above her head, her thick hair lifting with it. As she dropped the garment on top of the blouse, her hair floated back to her slender, naked shoulders and breasts, which looked terribly exposed and vulnerable under the harsh Sonoran sun.
Clark jerked an exasperated look at Bachelard. “You son of a bitch!”
Bachelard tore his stare from Marina, showing his teeth and backhanding Clark solidly across the face. Clark fell to his knees.
“Stop!” Marina yelled.
Bachelard stepped toward Clark as his men returned, one of them now wearing a woman’s stole over his cartridge belts and grubby deerhide vest. Seeing Marina, the vaqueros hesitated, eyes brightening.
“Good Lord,” said the man with a flattened nose. “Look at them chichonas!”
Bachelard turned to them sharply. “Did you find it? Did you find the plat?” he barked.
<
br /> The men stared at Marina without speaking. Her hair fell around her well-formed breasts. Though it had to be close to a hundred degrees, goose bumps rose on her olive skin. Head lowered, she sobbed, her hair hiding her face.
Bachelard fired his revolver in the air. The men gave a start and turned to him. “For the last time, did you find it?”
“No, jefe,” said the man wearing Marina’s stole. “We went through it all and found nothing of any value.” He lifted an end of the stole and added girlishly, “Except this, of course! Do I look nice, jefe?”
The others laughed.
Bachelard swung around to Clark. “Do I have to let Mocho do what he will to your lovely wife before you’ll tell me where the plat is?”
“I don’t have it,” Clark said. He was now seated one leg curled beneath him. Bachelard’s backhand had packed a wallop.
“You don’t, eh?” Bachelard said, eyes wide and crossed, hawk-nose red with anger. “Mocho!”
“No!” Clark wailed.
Something struck him hard on the side of the head and he went semiconscious for several seconds. By the time he coaxed his eyes into focus, Mocho had pushed Marina to her knees and dropped his pants. He yelled at her in Spanish to perform well for him or he would cut her tongue out.
Then the back of his head burst open like a ripe melon, spitting blood, bone, and brains. A rifle shot echoed.
Mocho swung around, teetering, his eyes lifting skyward. There was a nickel-size hole between them. He stumbled over his trousers and fell in a lifeless heap, his feet jerking.
A second bullet spanged off a rock, splattering shards around the stage. One of the other men yelled out and clutched his neck as another rifle cracked.
The rest were still looking around, dumbfounded. Finally, one man cried, “Apaches!” and lunged for his horse, which was tied to a mesquite bush.
“Apaches!” echoed another. He pulled his revolver and fired blindly as he struggled with his own horse’s tether. Rifles cracked and bullets kicked dust at his feet, and littered the ground with mesquite branches.
Bachelard ran to retrieve his own horse. When he’d mounted, he brought the screaming gray next to Clark.
The Romantics Page 2