The Romantics

by Peter Brandvold

  “You don’t have to worry about that,” Clark said gravely.

  There was a pause filled with the sounds of cicadas and horses. Clark leaned back on his elbows and said thoughtfully, “How hard do you men think it would be to find a guide in Contention City?”

  His gazed shuttled from one man to the next. Only the boy returned it, cocking his head and squinting his eyes curiously.

  “Depends on what kind of guide you’re lookin’ for,” Cameron said after a while. His back was to Clark, and he was adjusting the leather thongs holding his bedroll behind his saddle.

  “I’m looking for a man to guide my wife and me into Mexico,” Clark said. “I’d arranged for Reese McCormick, but I understand he’s dead. He was supposed to meet us in Tucson. When he didn’t show I decided to start looking for him … or for someone else who could do the same job.”

  “I heard about Reese,” the Mexican Pas Varas said in Spanish-accented English. He stood by his horse, holding the reins in one hand, his rifle in the other. “Too bad. He would have been a good guide. It will be hard to find another to take his place in Contention City—one that will not take your money and then cut your throat, that is.” Varas shook his head. “You better go back to Tucson, maybe.”

  Clark lowered his eyes, sucking a tooth, then lifted them again. He gazed at Cameron. “How ’bout one of you?”

  As though he hadn’t heard, Cameron poured more water into his hat, and returned the hat to the ground before his horse. He took a drink from the canteen as he walked to the mesquite shrub. He sat down next to Clark and offered the canteen. Clark waved it off.

  “Where you headed in Mexico?” Cameron asked, setting the canteen aside and fishing in his shirt pocket for a small sack of tobacco and papers.

  “The Sierra Madre,” Clark said. “The northwest side.”

  Cameron nodded and offered the makings pouch. “Smoke?”

  “No thanks.”

  Cameron took out a paper and sprinkled tobacco on it. Deftly, he shaped it with his fingers, licked it and twisted it closed. “What’s in the Sierra Madre?” he asked, scratching a lucifer to life on his thumbnail and lighting the quirley.

  Clark bit his lip. He didn’t like the idea of sharing his plan with these strangers, but they looked honest enough, and they’d saved his and Marina’s lives, after all. “I have a treasure map.”

  Cameron exhaled smoke, watching his horse thoughtfully and nodding, then shared an inscrutable glance with Varas and Hotchkiss. When Cameron said nothing, Clark said, “I need someone to help us follow it.”

  Cameron pulled on the quirley. “Well, good luck,” Cameron said, exhaling smoke.

  “You won’t consider it?”

  “Sorry.”

  “We need someone who knows the country and knows Apaches.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “There’s gold at the end of the trail, Mr. Cameron. You’ll be well paid. Richer than your wildest dreams, as a matter of fact.”

  Cameron smiled and studied the coal of his cigarette. “Where have I heard that before?”

  “It’s Jesuit treasure.”

  “How do you know?”

  Clark pulled up his pants leg and produced a rolled-up sheet of heavy parchment from his boot. “I have this, a plat drawn by the man who found it, and … well, I had a silver cross forged by the Jesuits who ran the church. There was an inscription on the back.”

  “‘Had’?” Hotchkiss asked, cocking his head. The boy had gone off to relieve himself behind a rock.

  “Bachelard took it.”

  “Lousy luck,” Varas said. It was hard to tell if he meant it or if he was just being sarcastic. Mexicans were funny that way.

  Clark felt his frustration building. These men were not taking him seriously. They were patronizing him, as though he were a tinhorn.

  “He wanted the plat,” Clark said to Varas, as if Bachelard’s wanting it somehow validated it.

  Hotchkiss said, “Then he’s as crazy as you are, if you’ll pardon me for saying so, hombre.”

  “How did he know about the plat?” Cameron asked Clark.

  “He found the man who gave it to Marina,” Clark said darkly.

  “Your wife?”

  “Yes. The plat is actually hers.”

  A faint light of interest grew in Cameron’s eyes as he turned to Marina. Obviously he’d been struck by her beauty, as was nearly everyone who ever saw her. The information that the map to a lost treasure belonged to a beautiful young Spanish woman somehow made the story more credible; in the very least, it made it more compelling. Realizing this, somewhat abated the resentment Clark felt at seeing the effect his wife’s beauty had on the frontiersman.

  “Marina grew up on a big rancho by the Rio Concho,” Clark explained. “One of her father’s men, an old cowboy named Julio Mendez, stumbled upon a plat to an old Spanish church in the Sierra Madre. These churches were said to be decorated with gold the padres mined. Well, after about ten years of searching, Julio found it. It’s in a canyon, near some ancient ruins. There was no gold inside, however. It had been stripped clean.”

  “Looted,” Cameron said.

  “That’s what old Julio thought at first. Then he got to thinking. He had heard that when the Jesuits were kicked out of Mexico, they hid their treasures from the Franciscans who were sent to replace them. So he started exploring the canyons behind the mission, and guess what he found?”

  “El Dorado,” Cameron said wryly.

  “A deep pit filled with gold and silver.” Clark looked at Cameron, small fires burning brightly in his gray eyes.

  “Why didn’t he excavate it?”

  “Indians scared him off before he could return with the supplies he needed. Then he had a heart attack. He gave the plat to Marina.”

  Cameron looked at Marina again. “Why?”

  Clark shrugged and sighed.

  Marina’s gaze dropped from the distance. She cleared her throat. “He never said why he gave it to me,” she said, her voice thin with wonder. She held her blowing hair back from her face with her right hand. “He just gave it to me … with the cross. He was old. There was no family, I think. I suspect he no longer cared for such things as gold.” She shrugged and ground her heel in the sand, staring at it.

  “There you have it,” Clark said to Cameron, hiking an eyebrow.

  Cameron’s eyes stayed with Marina. “Where’s your family?”

  She was still watching her foot, absently excavating a little hole in the sand. “Dead,” she said, softly.

  Cameron nodded thoughtfully. He took a final drag off his cigarette, glanced again at his companions, mashed the quirley in the sand, stood, and walked over to his horse. Picking up his hat and pouring out what little water remained, he said, “Hell of a story.”

  “Hell of a true story, Mr. Cameron.”

  “I hate to burst your bubble, but there’s no treasure.” Cameron untethered his horse from the mesquite and turned to the Southerner and his wife with a serious look. “And I strongly advise you not to go after it. If you follow through with your plan, you and your wife are gonna end up dead. I can almost guarantee you that. I’ve been through that country. I know.”

  “What about the story?”

  “Sounds like two dozen others I’ve heard.”

  “Let me show you the plat.”

  Cameron shook his head. “We’d better get a move on.” He and Hotchkiss mounted while Varas kicked the Indian and gestured to the man’s horse, indicating it was time to ride. The Indian obeyed stiffly, with the dolor typical of captured Apaches.

  Meanwhile Clark climbed to his feet, a little unsteady, and brushed off his pants. He held out a hand to Marina. She took it, standing, gazing at Cameron wonderingly. Apparently she, too, knew that he was the right man for the job, and was frustrated he wouldn’t take it.

  “It’s all right, my dear,” Clark said with a sigh, when he’d helped his wife onto Hotchkiss’s skewbald. “There are plenty of men in the desert w
ho wouldn’t mind finding the mother lode of Jesuit bullion.”

  Cameron gave Clark a hand up on his own horse, and put the metal to the buckskin’s ribs. “Yes, there are,” he said.

  CHAPTER 5

  AN HOUR LATER, Cameron left the others along a dry creekbed, and spurred his buckskin ahead to scout the place where he wanted to camp. He rode a half-mile before halting his buckskin on a flat rock above a dry, rocky wash and reaching into his saddlebags for his field glasses. He’d fashioned a stiff leather hood over each lens, to keep the glass from reflecting sunlight, and now he brought the sand-colored spur above him into focus.

  At the base of the spur was a shallow wind cave in which he’d camped several times when traversing the country between Tucson and Tombstone. It offered perfect shelter from wind, rain, and sun. Situated as it was on a rise, with rocky ground sloping away to the dry wash, the cave also offered protection from other men.

  Interlopers could come from the west only, for in the south and north loomed steep-walled mountains, weathered smooth to preclude climbing or anything but a suicidal descent by even the surest-footed Apache. To the east the trail wound along the wash until it vanished in a cul-de-sac from which a spring issued. Twenty feet below the spring the water pooled in bowls it had carved in slabs of black basaltic rock, ideal for watering horses and filling canteens.

  The entire place was so favorable for overnighting, in fact, that it often attracted other campers. You never knew who you might run into. Cameron had once camped in the cave with a doctor traveling to deliver a baby, but he’d once spotted a party of young Apache warriors there, as well, and had lost no time in hightailing it back down the trail.

  Now the dying sun had filled the cave with stygian shadows while pinkening the sandstone wall around it. But he could see no horses, and no smoke from a cookfire. Reasonably sure the place was deserted, Cameron returned his field glasses to his saddlebags, turned the buckskin around, and headed back down the trail to retrieve the others.

  A half-hour later the ragged procession plodded up the slope, the hang-headed horses winding around boulders and the dangerous “jumping” cholla cactus. Rein chains jangled, horses blew, and shod hooves rang off rocks.

  Cameron brought up the rear, behind Marina, who rode now with young Jimmy Bronco. Her head hung wearily to the side, long black hair bouncing on her shoulders. She’d torn a slit in her skirt so she could ride astraddle, and Cameron tried to keep his eyes off the bare thigh the breeze occasionally revealed—not an easy task, given the sensuousness of the woman the thigh belonged to. She hadn’t said anything for hours, but Cameron could tell she was no ordinary woman. She’d nearly been raped by Bachelard’s men, not to mention killed, yet her eyes remained brave. Although riding the bare rump of a half-wild mustang over rough terrain, she’d never asked Cameron and the others to stop so she could rest. Her stalwart, self-contained sense of self only added to her beauty.

  What the hell was she doing here? Cameron wondered. Something told him that she wouldn’t be here if she didn’t want to be—with or without the strong-willed Adrian Clark, whom Cameron already suspected was not only talented at, but accustomed to, steering people in his direction. Which meant she had pluck but, like her husband, was sadly misguided.

  Cameron had heard enough legends of lost Spanish gold—had gone after enough of them himself—to know them for what they were.

  Legends.

  How many such tales had he heard, convoluted legends of buried treasure, like the Lost San Saba Mine, the Lost Mine of Tiopa, the Lost Adams Diggings? How many men had found Spanish bullion and been frightened off by Indians? How many stories of Aztec gold were told and retold in every dusky watering hole from Dodge City to Bisbee?

  The stories were enticing enough to drive sane men to madness. For most, once the gold lust got into the blood, it was there to stay. Cameron had followed his share of treasure trails into the earth’s loneliest places, trails that petered out at rock walls or alkali flats littered with derelict wagons and bleached bones, but he was lucky. He’d rid himself of the disease a long time ago. All he wanted now was to return to his ranch and his cattle, the house he was building from native stone, with a broad hearth and a porch where he could sit on desert evenings and watch the sun gild the flat peak of Rockinstraw Mountain.

  When it came his time to die—not an unpleasant thought for a man like Cameron, who’d been where he’d been and seen what he’d seen—he wanted to be buried behind his cabin, where the brush grew thick because of the spring, and there was an old cottonwood, a giant tree with a lightning blaze just below the fork in its trunk, that offered shade on hot afternoons, and the somnolent sound of rattling leaves.

  The only way you could convince Cameron there was a cave stashed with gold in the Sierra Madre was to lead him there and shove his face in it. But first you’d have to knock him out, hog-tie him, and throw him over his saddle.

  He wasn’t going anywhere but to Contention City, where, after delivering the Indian to the soldiers, he would see about a stiff drink, a hot bath, and a hearty meal. He’d rest for a day, then head back north to his ranch. He had work to do.

  What Clark and his wife did was entirely up to them. He’d warned Clark about the dangers of taking a beautiful woman into the wilds of Mexico. That was all he could do.

  As the group made the crest of the rise, Cameron twisted around in his saddle one last time, scouring the shadowy western plain from which they’d come. A shadowy dust devil rose, turned, caught a splash of pink light, and disappeared. The cooling breeze whispered.

  If Bachelard came, he would have to come from that direction; but given the terrain, Cameron was relatively certain they’d be safe here.

  STRIPPED OF ALL tack but bridles, the horses were led down to the spring for water. Just inside the cave, a small fire was built with the nearly smokeless wood of the curl-leaf. Bacon was fried and coffee was made. Saddles were thrown down around the fire. Blankets were rolled out.

  There wasn’t much talk. Sound carries far on a desert night. Besides, the travelers were too tired for idle banter.

  Pasqual Varas secured the Indian to a stout cottonwood and tied sleigh bells around his wrists and feet. Bud Hotchkiss washed down at the spring, then returned and scrounged in his saddlebags for sewing needle, catgut thread, and a flat blue bottle with a cork in it.

  The portly graybeard in calico shirt and buckskin pants strolled over to Clark at the back of the cave. The Missourian was cursing and complaining while Marina cleaned the contusion above his ear.

  Hotchkiss tossed the bottle to Clark. “There you go, Captain. Have you a swig or two o’ that—Hotchkiss’s Special. You’re gonna need it.” In conversation along the trail, Clark had informed Hotchkiss and the others he’d attained the rank of a Confederate captain during “the War of Northern Oppression.”

  Now he looked at the bottle. “For what?”

  “Pain reliever. I’m gonna sew up that head so’s you don’t bleed to death.”

  “That’s not necessary. I think she’s got the blood stopped.”

  Hotchkiss pulled a burning branch from the fire and swept the needle through the flames to sterilize it. “Captain, if that hole ain’t sewed up you’re gonna have half the desert in it before the night’s through.” He looked at Marina. “Ma‘am, if you’d just thread this needle for me, I’ll do the dirty work. Threadin’ needles went with my eyesight.”

  Marina glanced at Clark warily. Clark returned the look. Then he lifted his eyes to Hotchkiss. “Do you really think it’s necessary?”

  “Not unless you want infection, it ain’t.”

  “How do I know you’re qualified?”

  Hotchkiss chuckled and glanced at Cameron, who sat on his haunches away from the fire, against the cave wall, a tin cup of coffee in his hands. His face was cloaked in darkness, and his hat was pushed back on his head. He cleared his throat.

  “Bud here was something of a nursemaid to the officers’ wives at Camp Gran
t. They trusted him to deliver their babies before they let a corporal fetch the doc from the village.”

  “And the doc had ’im a Yale edeecation, he did!” Hotchkiss added with glee.

  “Sí,” Pas Varas added. He was sitting near the Indian, his Sharps buffalo rifle across his knees and smoking a cigarette rolled from a brown cornhusk. “Señor Bud delivered my Leonora’s last two niños, and he even cured Leonora of last winter’s fever.”

  “Hell, Pas,” Hotchkiss said, “I even doctored that knee of yours—”

  “All right, all right!” Clark popped the cork on the bottle and took a liberal pull. Bringing the bottle back down, he looked at Marina. “Well, you heard the man.” He coughed as the burning liquor hit his stomach.

  When Marina had threaded the catgut through the needle, she gave it to Hotchkiss.

  “Okay, here we go, Captain,” Hotchkiss said. He looked at Clark, a glitter in his eyes, the deep lines of his big, bearded face filled with shadows shunted by firelight. His buckskins smelled like rancid bear grease. “You know, when you told me back on the trail that you wore butternut-gray during the Little Misunderstandin’, I told you I wouldn’t hold it against you.” He stopped and regarded Clark severely, as though waiting for a reply.

  Clark looked at him warily. “Yes … ?”

  “Meant every word of it!” the old tracker roared.

  Clark took another long pull from the bottle. Hotchkiss grabbed it away. “Save some for later … and for me.” Then to Marina, “Okay, ma’am, if you’ll just hold the captain’s head real steady …”

  Cameron finished his coffee, chunked a few small branches of curl-leaf on the fire, then stepped out of the cave, looking around.

  Nothing. Only the black of the night and the blacker black of the mountains looming behind and before him, blocking out the stars. A faint breeze rustled the leaves of a jojoba, and a coyote called.

  Cameron turned to where Varas sat against the cave wall, smoking and resting. “You’ll watch the Injun, Pas?”

  “Like a hawk, Jack.”