The Romantics

by Peter Brandvold

  Perversely, Clark didn’t want anyone else loving Marina, either. He wished now they’d never met Jack Cameron. Because no matter how much the thought appalled him, Clark was going to have to kill the man.

  CHAPTER 22

  PERRO LOCO WAS alive and well and riding hell-for-leather toward Contention City.

  He knew that’s where Cameron was heading, and he *wanted—needed—to kill the frontiersman who had shamed him. Killing Cameron was the only way the Apache could get his honor back—and get it back he would, or die.

  Vengeful purpose fairly boiled in his blood. He ground his heels into the sides of one of the mules he’d stolen from two miners he’d run into two days after he’d regained consciousness in the gorge where Cameron had left him for dead. The other mule was tied to the tail of the first, following the Apache across the scorching, undulating desert.

  The fall into the gorge had fractured Perro Loco’s skull, cracked several of his ribs, and broken his front teeth. After a desperate struggle under the baking sun, the Apache had found a cave where the body of an old Indian moldered. The man had broken his leg so that the bones had split the skin and drained his blood. Fortunately for Perro Loco, the old one had died before he’d eaten all the dried mule meat in the elkskin sack around his neck.

  Loco slept in the cave for two days and a night. Then he wrapped his ribs in a strip of elkskin he’d cut from the dead one’s tunic. The hide collected his own body’s moisture and dried, tightening to hold his ribs in place. He relied on his own stubborn will and overpowering sense of purpose to kill the pain in his head and jaw.

  Three hours after he’d left the miners’ bodies for nature to dispose of, the first mule stumbled onto its knees and rolled to its side, its breath shallow, its eyes rolling up into its head. Its mouth and nose were covered with blood-flecked foam.

  The Apache removed the mule’s blanket and threw it over the second one, a hammerheaded dun with spindly legs. Then he mounted up and continued the breakneck pace until that animal, too, suddenly halted in spite of Loco’s fierce kicks to its ribs.

  Its head went up with a sigh as it teetered. Cursing, the Indian dismounted and removed the blanket from the mule’s back as the dun slowly toppled like an ancient wickiup in the wind.

  “Goddamn white-man’s mules,” Perro grumbled in Apache.

  Fortunately, he’d ridden nearly fifty miles and figured he had only twenty-five more between him and where he was bound—the rancho where the old half-breed tracker Tokente lived.

  Perro Loco knew the man had scouted with Cameron, and knew that if Cameron was heading to Sonora with a treasure map—he’d learned this from Bachelard the night the Cajun had freed him—he would no doubt look up his old scouting partner along the way. From the Mexican, Perro Loco would learn exactly where Cameron was headed. At the very least, he would have fresh tracks to follow.

  Tokente would have fresh mounts for him to filch, as well.

  Loco decided to take the death of the second mule as an opportunity to rest and to eat. Plucking the miner’s bowie knife from its scabbard, the Indian knelt at the mule’s sweatlathered rear and cut several strips of flesh from the stillspasming hip. He sat in the shade of a large, flame-shaped rock and ate the strips of mule meat raw, going back for seconds and thirds and wiping the blood from his hands when he finished.

  He drank from the waterskin and set off on foot, making the little village of Wilcox well after dark. He skirted the town’s perimeter, stepping quietly, watching the lighted windows around him, until he came to a stable behind a clapboard house with a flagstone walk leading to the outhouse. A white man who could afford such a house could afford good horses.

  There were four horses stabled in the dark building, but Perro Loco took only three, as the fourth was so spooked at the Indian’s presence that it threatened to tear apart its stall. Perro Loco had the other three bridled and tied nose-to-tail when he heard a door slap shut.

  “Harlan, what’s going on? Is that you?” a man called.

  Perro Loco wasted no time in mounting the first horse and lighting out with a yell his excitement and Apache fury could not contain. He was beyond the town and heading south across the country in seconds.

  THE FIRST TWO horses had given out and Loco was riding the third when he topped the ridge overlooking Tokente’s cabin and barn, where the pale figures of goats grazed in the misty, lightening darkness.

  Loco dismounted, slapped the horse away, and squatted on his haunches. He’d relieved the two miners he’d killed of their shotgun, and the double-bored beast now lay across his knees as he watched the cabin for movement. He could smell bacon in the smoke curling from the chimney. Tokente must be home. Had Cameron already come and gone?

  He found a trail and stole down the ridge, keeping a watchful eye on the cabin and outbuildings, and made his way to the cactus corral, where four horses munched fresh hay. Tracks in the powdered dust of the yard told Loco that several more horses and mules had ridden out four or five days ago. The size and shape of the fresh moccasin prints near the corral told him that the person who had pitched hay to the horses that morning had been a woman.

  Maybe Tokente had a woman. Maybe that woman was here, alone …

  The latch on the cabin door clicked and the door scraped open. Loco squatted down behind the feed trough. A stout Indian woman in deerskins swung the door wide and chocked it open with a rock. She stood on the gallery, facing the yard, fists on her hips, sniffing the breeze and looking around. Had she sensed his presence? Loco wondered.

  He clenched his jaws and fingered the trigger of his shotgun. Somewhere, a rooster crowed as the sun cleared the eastern ridge and gilded the brush growing from the cabin’s sod roof.

  The Apache’s tension eased when the woman turned to her right, stepped off the gallery, and headed for a chicken coop set back in the shrubs flanking the cabin. She disappeared in the brush, and Loco could hear the excited sqawks of chickens.

  Loco ran from behind the trough to the shadows of the barn, where he paused to study the cabin once more. Seeing and hearing nothing, he ran to the cabin, stepped softly onto the gallery, and peered in the open door. He turned his head to listen, holding his breath.

  Nothing.

  He stepped in, holding the shotgun before him, and checked each of the tiny rooms. Finding no one, he went to the window that looked out on the front yard, and waited, holding the shotgun low across his knees.

  Finally the woman appeared, slapping dust from her leggings. She drank at the well in the front yard, then started for the cabin. Stopping suddenly, as though realizing she’d forgotten something, she mumbled in Papago and started back to the coop.

  Perro Loco stood crouched between the window and the door, waiting … Suddenly a floorboard squeaked behind him. A high-pitched, devilish shriek rattled his eardrums. He’d only begun to turn when a rifle exploded. The bullet made a furrow above his lip as he turned.

  Behind him the woman stood, jacking another shell into the rifle’s chamber.

  Dropping his shotgun, Loco heaved the table toward the woman. As it struck her, knocking her back, her rifle went up and barked a round past Loco’s head and into the adobe wall. The woman fell, yelling like some she-devil loosed from hell.

  Loco scrambled over the table and on top of her. In seconds he had the rifle. He heaved the table away and pointed the rifle at the woman’s throat.

  The scar on the woman’s nose was unsettling. This fat Papago was a warrior squaw, probably more treacherous in a fight than most men. Damn the luck.

  Not knowing Papago he said in guttural, halting English, “Cameron—where?”

  She scrunched up her eyes and shrieked.

  Loco fired a round into the mashed earth beside her face. She blinked, but that was her only reaction. He grabbed one of her legs and dragged her out the door. She grabbed a gallery post. He had to yank several times before jerking her free. Then he dragged her squealing and cursing across the yard.

  When
he came to the barn, he turned and smashed the screaming woman in the face with the butt of the rifle. That knocked her semiconscious, silencing her.

  He went into the barn, returning moments later with a rope, then lassoed one of the four horses in the corral. He saddled the horse with tack he’d found in the barn—an old Mexican saddle worn down to nothing in places—and dallied one end of the rope around the horn. He tied the other end of the rope around the woman’s wrists.

  Climbing into the saddle while the frightened horse sidestepped and crow-hopped, he gouged his heels into the animal’s ribs. The horse bucked frantically and took off at a gallop, dragging the woman, who had regained consciousness, across the yard, then down the trail through the canyon.

  The woman bounced over rocks and through brush, moaning and throwing up dust. “Wai-eeeee!” she screamed as she plowed through yucca and prickly pear.

  Perro Loco halted the horse and turned to the woman, lying facedown in the dust. “Where go Cameron … Tokente?”

  She-Bear had decided there was no point in resisting. He was Apache. That meant that no matter how strong she was, he would be stronger, and in the the end he would either get the information he wanted, or he would kill her.

  If she did not speak, he needed only to follow the tracks. It would take him longer, and rain might obliterate the trail, but chances were that he would still be able to follow Cameron and her man, Tokente, to Mexico.

  She knew that the Apache would probably kill her no matter what she said, or did not say, but if she lived, she would have a chance of revenge. She might even be able to track him and kill him before he got to Cameron and her man.

  “They go south, to … the Sierra Madre,” she said thinly, glancing that way.

  She lowered her swollen, bruised face and prayed that the savage would spare her.

  The rope struck her head; the horse galloped back up the trail. Hope made her heart light. The Apache must have gone back to the corral for more horses. Still, he would have to pass this way on his way south, and he might kill her then.

  With all the strength she could muster, She-Bear pushed herself to her feet and stumbled into a cleft in some rocks. She was only about twenty yards off the trail, and her tracks were obvious. If the Apache wanted her dead, she would be easy prey. But maybe he was too preoccupied with Cameron to waste any more time with her.

  What was she but a fat, ugly Papago squaw?

  Not too much later, the Apache rode down the trail, She-Bear’s revolving Colt rifle slung from a rope around his neck, and trailing three of her best horses in a nose-to-tail string. He didn’t so much as glance in her direction, and She-Bear bowed her head and thanked the Creator for saving her.

  She promised the All-Knowing, All-Seeing One that she would repay him by ridding this world of the evil Apache who was obviously the son of the dark gods from below.

  To that end, she struggled to her feet and started back to the cabin. There she would doctor her wounds and prepare for the hunt.

  CHAPTER 23

  DAY AFTER DAY Cameron’s group angled southeast from the Mexican border across Sonora and into Chihuahua, where Alfred Going believed the treasure lay. The little village of San Cristóbal was not named on the map, but Going believed he knew the country the plat described.

  Cameron was happy his old friend Tokente had come along. With each mile, each mountain crossing and saddle ford, it became more and more apparent to him that, on his own, Cameron would have gotten them lost. Worse, he might have led them to an Apache hideout.

  As it was, they spotted no Apaches, besides the two Cameron had killed back in Arizona. They saw a few old moccasin prints and tracks made by unshod hooves, and, while scouting a side canyon, Hotchkiss stumbled upon human bones; arrows lay among the scattered remains. But no actual Indians were seen, and for that, the group was grateful.

  They swam in the Rio Bavispe, a cool, green ribbon of seed- and leaf-flecked water angling through chalky buttes, then led the horses across. In a little village called Dublan, Clark traded his tired mules for fresh ones and Cameron bought two extra, mountain-bred horses for the trail. All the horses were reshod by a one-eyed blacksmith named Ambrosio, who sang Spanish ballads in a pitch-perfect tenor and smoked cigarillos rolled with corn husks.

  At Ambrosio’s insistence they ate with his family and slept in his stable. Before anyone else in the village had stirred the next morning, the treasure hunters saddled up, rigged the panniers to the mules, and were on their way.

  Clark would have little to do with Cameron. Cameron assumed the Southerner suspected there were feelings between himself and Marina. There was little he could do to reassure the man—it was true, after all. Why make it worse by talking about it? When Bachelard was dead and they were all safely back in Arizona, with or without the gold, Cameron would simply take his leave of these people and try to forget that Marina had ever existed.

  Meanwhile, Cameron and Marina kept their distance from each other. On the rare occasions when their eyes met, they both flushed a little and looked away, embarrassed about what had happened between them, wanting to forget. But while Cameron lay in his blankets at night, well back from the fire and a good distance from where she lay with her husband, he couldn’t help remembering.

  If he’d been clairvoyant he would have known that Marina, lying beside Clark, was thinking of him, as well … imagining herself wrapped in his arms …

  LATE THE NEXT afternoon they swung deeper into the hills and the terrain grew more and more rough as they followed washed-out canyons and gullies between towering rock monoliths as big as houses. At noon Going led them up a dry creek that traced a zigzagging course through jagged walls of black basaltic rock blown out of the earth’s center millions of years ago. They found themselves in a deep canyon.

  Like the slash made by a giant knife, it was a forbidding place. The walls were black-speckled granite and sandstone. The caves carved from the terraced rock above were ruins left by the ancients, those the Indians called “those who came before.”

  No one knew who they were or why they had disappeared, but their stories of deer and bear hunts and battles with other tribes had been etched in the rock on both sides of the canyon. The sight gave Cameron a chill, like a bad premonition.

  Going traced a winding course through the maze of rock until the canyon widened and a spring issued from a terraced, flinty wall upon which moss grew. Water prattled onto a bed of polished rock, pooling where the bed widened, and twisted a course down the canyon. They followed the stream through a defile wide enough for only one rider at a time, to a broad, deep pool on the other side.

  The pool lay beneath the trail in a basin made from shelving black rock, and was surrounded by green grass, other springs, more ancient carvings.

  Clark halted his pack train and dismounted in a hurry, fairly running to the pool and dipping his sunburned and peeling face in the tepid water. He shook his head like a horse and whooped.

  “Take it easy,” Cameron warned him. “There’s plenty. Drink a little at a time or you’re gonna get sick.”

  The man turned to him sharply and gave him a cold-eyed look of pure hatred. “You think I’m stupid?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Cameron said, loosening his saddle cinch.

  “I’m not as stupid as you think,” Clark said, then shunted his gaze to Marina. She looked away, and so did Clark, returning his face to the pool.

  It was the first time he had openly indicated his jealousy. Cameron felt sick. He could see now that Clark was going to turn what had happened between him and Marina into a royal ugliness.

  They picketed the horses in the grass, at a point where the animals could drink from a lower pool. Going gathered wood and broiled the hindquarters of an antelope Cameron had shot the previous day. Night fell quickly, the rock walls above them changing through all the shades of purple as shadows filled the draws and gullies carved by old flash floods and dry slides.

  Coyotes yammered at the thumbnail sli
ver of new moon rising and growing brighter against the darkening sky. The smell of crushed juniper blew down from the heights.

  The group sat around the fire and smoked. Cameron, Going, Hotchkiss, and Jimmy Bronco talked quiedy. Clark sat against a rock and drank his brandy. Marina wandered off down the canyon. Cameron didn’t worry about her. She’d grown up in this kind of country and she needed her privacy. Besides, she had a gun on her hip and was no doubt a fair shot.

  When, later, he went down to check the horses, he heard a gentle splash of water and saw her sitting on a rock, thoughtfully kicking her bare feet in the pool. Starlight glinted on her bare, wet legs exposed by her parted riding skirt.

  It was too dark to see her face but Cameron knew she was looking at him. He turned away to check the picket ropes. Marina said, “It is a nice evening, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is,” he answered reluctantly.

  “Do we have far to go?”

  “Not far. Three, four more days’ travel, Tokente thinks.” He knew she was talking just to talk. They had discussed the remaining distance over supper. She was no doubt desperate for conversation—Clark rarely spoke to her, and there were no women around.

  Figuring Clark was passed out from the brandy by now, Cameron hunkered down next to her on the rocks. She stopped kicking her feet in the water.

  “Nights like these,” she said, “remind me of home. I used to ride to a canyon like this, when the Apaches and Comanches were not a threat. I would swim in a big deep pool.”

  “ou miss home?”

  “Very much.” She paused. “Where is your home?”

  “Originally? Illinois. I came West just before the war broke out. Had to run out on my family ‘cause my pa wouldn’t hear of me doin’ anything but stayin’ home and takin’ over the farm. I never saw any of them again. I heard from a cousin that my parents are both dead. I don’t know where my brothers and sisters ended up.”