The Romantics

by Peter Brandvold

  Cameron halted several times to rest the horses as well as Jimmy, who would not complain or ask for a break, but Cameron knew the boy was spent. In the morning they stopped on a grassy ledge overlooking a valley of undulating hummocks of low, juniper-tufted hills. Tying his horse to a picket pin, Cameron produced his field glasses from his saddlebags, climbed a low, rocky mound, and scanned the terrain behind them.

  “Shit,” he said after a minute, not quite able to believe what he was seeing.

  “What is it?” Jimmy asked him.

  “If I’m not loco … No, it’s them, all right … the rurales. Somehow they’ve managed to follow us.”

  “With the cart?” Jimmy exclaimed.

  Cameron adjusted the focus and surveyed the group, but saw no sign of the cart. What he did see was a bulky object strapped to one of the pack mules. From the size and shape, he figured it was the Gatling gun.

  Apparently, after Cameron and Jimmy had slipped away from him, Gomez had gotten serious and decided to get rid of the bulky cart. Cameron had made a fool of him by getting away so easily, and now Gomez was tracking him and Jimmy with fervor.

  It looked like he was even using an experienced tracker: A skinny young man in an oversized rurale uniform was leading the way, pointing out sign as he rode. As far as Cameron could tell, they were covering the very same ground he and Jimmy had traversed about two hours ago. The kid must have been raised in this country, and knew its every crease and fold.

  “Well, I’ll be goddamned,” Cameron said wonderingly, as he stared at the ragged column moving deliberately through the broken, ridge-relieved, canyon-creased country behind him. “I think we put a burr under ol’ Gomez’s blanket, kid. We’d better mosey.”

  An hour later he stopped again.

  Scanning the country behind them, he saw that Gomez was staying hot on their trail. He didn’t appear to be gaining ground, but Cameron had a newfound respect for the man. He and Jimmy couldn’t dally.

  Cameron trained the field glasses eastward and spied a flicker of movement in a narrow defile between two mountain crags. Probably just a cloud shadow, but he stayed with the spot, tightening the focus.

  Nothing. Then something moved. It was no shadow.

  A horseback rider.

  Damn. Apaches.

  No … wait.

  Cameron held the glasses on the split between the promontories. Something passed the opening, and from this distance it was hard to tell even with the glasses, but it looked very much like another rider.

  There was another movement, then another and another, and Cameron realized there was a whole column of riders passing behind that rocky upthrust. They didn’t ride like Apaches. The only non-Indians out here would have to be Gaston Bachelard and Miguel Montana.

  Cameron suddenly felt apprehensive about pursuing the man, yet that’s what he’d come here for—to make Bachelard pay for the death of Pas Varas.

  Bachelard was a nut, but he was a dangerous nut, and he had a lot of dangerous men behind him. And tracking him down with the intent of killing him, Cameron saw now, wasn’t exactly sane.

  But whether he liked it or not, he’d gotten what he’d come for. Bachelard was indeed after the gold, and it did look as though their paths were going to cross. Whether he liked it or not, it looked like Cameron was going to get his shot at the man.

  Cameron swung the glasses in the direction Bachelard was heading and stopped when a particular formation caught his eye. His heart grew heavy in his chest and he felt a drop of sweat sluice down his spine as he realized he was looking at the tall stone spire, capped with an arrow-shaped boulder, that resided very near the X on Clark’s plat.

  “Holy Jesus,” he muttered.

  “What is it?” Jimmy asked. He was taking a breather in the shade of a boulder, holding his horse’s reins in his hands.

  “I think I just found the X on the map … and Gaston Bachelard.”

  Remounting, they continued on, reckoning now on the arrow-shaped boulder capping the spire, just as Bachelard was doing. Cameron rode with a renewed sense of urgency, his thoughts turning to Marina.

  She, Clark, and Tokente had no doubt discovered the spire by now. It wasn’t that far from where Cameron had left them. They’d probably found the cache, or at least the place where the cache was supposed to be.

  He hoped he could reach them before Bachelard did, and warn them, lead them to safety, if there was such a thing out here. If Bachelard came upon them anywhere near the supposed gold, he’d kill the men with as little concern as he’d have for squashing a bug. There was no telling what he’d to do Marina, but Cameron knew it wouldn’t be anything as merciful as killing her.

  Mile after twisting, turning mile he and Jimmy rode through one canyon after another, keeping the arrow-shaped spire ahead of them. Several times Cameron stopped to climb a butte and look around. Sometimes he saw the two groups of men following him and sometimes he did not, but he always knew they were there—the rurales slowing in the canyons, Bachelard keeping pace.

  In the early afternoon, Cameron was scouting from a low mesa and saw that an ancient, deep river gorge lay in Bachelard’s path. Cameron felt a surge of optimism. Bachelard and Montana would lose some time finding a way around the chasm, time Cameron hoped he and Jimmy would be able to use to their best advantage, locating the Clarks and Tokente and getting them the hell out of here.

  Cameron would backtrack later and, crazy as it was, find a way to isolate Bachelard from his group and kill him. He owed it to Pasqual Varas and his family.

  He knew the reluctance he felt now was due to Marina. Because of her, he wasn’t as indifferent as before about putting his life in harm’s way. But he told himself that whatever he felt for her was for nought; she was another man’s wife. Cameron’s sense of honor and decency would not allow him to take the wife of another—no matter how beautiful she was or how much he loved her … or how much sense she made of his existence.

  It might be better, he mused, if he did not come out of this alive.

  CAMERON THOUGHT IT must have been about three in the afternoon when he and Jimmy at last came to the spot where Jimmy and Bud Hotchkiss had been attacked by Apaches.

  Cameron recognized the place and saw what looked like half a dozen carrion birds working on an elongated lump on the ground. He’d seen similar things before, but it was still a startling and disturbing sight.

  Cameron told Jimmy to wait, and rode on ahead. One of the birds broke away with a raucous cry, beating its wings violently in the unmoving air, then jumped back into the fray. Cameron picked up a stone and threw it, sending up dust near the mass. The birds awkwardly took flight, squawking and flapping their heavy black wings.

  Cameron had not had time to bury Hotchkiss before, so now, while the horses and Jimmy rested, he dragged the bloating, stinking, ravaged corpse into an arroyo. With the rurales and Bachelard so close, there was no chance to dig a grave, but Cameron doubted Hotchkiss would know the difference between scavenger birds above ground and worms below.

  “You were a good friend,” were all the words he could come up with, but somehow they seemed enough. He donned his hat again and walked over to where Jimmy was resting with the horses.

  “Forget it, Jim,” he said, seeing that the boy was staring with haunted eyes at the boulder-strewn slope down which the Apaches had come. The kid blinked and slowly stood. He wrapped his reins around the saddle horn and poked a ropesoled sandal through a stirrup.

  “I can’t,” he mumbled.

  Less than twenty minutes later they came to the point where Cameron had separated from the others, and soon after, they found the campsite on the hillside. Then it was easy, just a matter of basic tracking, then finding the turtles the padres had etched in the rocks and the spire, its arrow-shaped cap looming darkly against the afternoon sky. It was so close that Cameron could make out the sun-shadowed gouges and splinters in the andesite, the fluted reliefs aimed skyward.

  At this altitude the air was thin, the
sun intense, and the horses were winded, but Cameron did not want to stop again until he’d found the others. He figured they were two or three hours ahead of Bachelard but he didn’t know the country well enough to be sure, and there was no point in taking chances.

  Just ahead, in the direct path of the arrow pointing behind them, stood two towering escarpments forming a gateway into a canyon. It was like something out of a kid’s storybook, and Cameron’s heart tattooed an insistent rhythm as he realized this was the place—this was the X marked on the old Mexican’s plat.

  Before the entrance to the canyon was a jumble of boulders, strewn and cracked as though fallen from high above. Looking again, Cameron saw what remained of an adobe church, its walls nearly crushed by the boulders so that they were nearly unrecognizable at certain angles.

  A woman appeared around one of the boulders—a tall, slender woman with long, black hair. She wore a white blouse and butternut slacks, with a gun and holster on her slender waist. She was holding a hat.

  Marina …

  So great was his relief to have found her still alive and apparently well, that he couldn’t help grinning as he rode up to her. Her eyes followed him, looking up beseechingly into his face. There was something wrong.

  “What is it?” he said, dismounting.

  She turned and he followed her around the boulder to where the fire ring lay surrounded by blankets, canteens, an empty brandy bottle, and cooking utensils. A man lay in the shade of one of the half-pulverized church walls, a blanket over his chest and face. Cameron could tell by the soiled, sweat-stained sombrero lying nearby, and by the boots and buckskin pants, that it was Tokente.

  The relief Cameron had felt at seeing Marina again suddenly vanished. His heart sank and a high-pitched hum filled his ears. No, he thought, pulling up his dusty jeans at the thighs and squatting down on his haunches. He wiped his hands on his jeans, then removed the blanket from the man’s face, drawn yet blissful in death, eyes closed, slightly parted lips revealing a single tooth.

  “He died only about ten minutes ago,” Marina said quietly.

  “What happened?” Cameron asked her.

  “Jake Hawkins,” Marina said in a voice taut with anger.

  Cameron looked at her sharply. “Where is he?”

  “Dead. Señor Going killed him with his rifle. He’s back there.” She jerked her head to indicate the rocky hills behind her.

  “Are you sure he’s dead?”

  “I walked back and saw.”

  Cameron turned his eyes back to his dead friend and nodded, scowling.

  Marina turned to Jimmy. “I’m glad you are well,” she said. She frowned, looking around. “Where is …”

  “He’s dead,” Jimmy said, turning to her with tears in his eyes, knowing she meant Hotchkiss. He sobbed, and Cameron knew he’d been holding it back.

  Marina took the boy into her arms, holding him tightly. He buried his face in her shoulder and cried with abandon.

  Cameron disposed of Alfred Going’s body the way he’d disposed of Hotchkiss. He felt tired and weak, and he didn’t think he had it in him anymore to kill Bachelard. Too much had happened, too many friends had died, and his anger over Pas Varas’s death had transformed into a generalized sadness that could not be relieved by vengeance. Killing Bachelard would not bring back Varas. Tracking him, in fact, had only brought more death to Cameron’s friends.

  He wished now that he’d stayed in Arizona. But how could he have explained to Leonora Varas, with her Hispanic’s belief in vengeance, that he had not gone after her husband’s killer?

  Grimly he walked back to the camp, feeling as hollow as an old cave. Marina had built a fire and made coffee. She’d also heated some javelina meat, and Jimmy Bronco sat on a rock, eating voraciously.

  She held out a plate and a cup of coffee as Cameron walked up. “I’m very sorry about your friends,” she said, looking boldy into his eyes. “All this”—she held out her arms as though death were some palpable thing around them—“is my fault … mine and Adrian’s.”

  “No,” Cameron said, shaking his head. “I didn’t come down here for you. I came for Bachelard. And I think I found him.”

  “What?” Marina was clearly startled and a little afraid.

  “Him and his army, or whatever you call it … they’re only about an hour away. I saw them coming from the east. We have to get moving.”

  Cameron glanced around, remembering Adrian. He’d been taken so unawares by Going’s death that he hadn’t asked where the Missourian was.

  Reading his mind, she said, nodding toward the black canyon corridor yawning behind them, “Adrian went in there early this morning, looking for the gold. I waited here with Señor Going.”

  “He find anything?”

  Marina shook her head. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen him since he left.”

  “Well, we’d better find him and get the hell out of here—with or without the gold, if there is any. Bachelard will be here, and so will about fifteen rurales we picked up along the trail.”

  “I thought you wanted to kill Bachelard.”

  “I do. But first I want to get you three out of here.”

  ON A BALD knob a mile away Perro Loco stood, hunched and watching. The figures in the distance appeared no larger than ants, but the Indian knew that one of them was Jack Cameron. He could tell by the way the man moved and carried himself and by the color of the horse he’d been riding.

  A rare wintery smile formed on the Indian’s lips as he squatted on his haunches and wrapped both hands around the barrel of the shotgun standing between his knees.

  It wouldn’t be long now …

  CHAPTER 33

  WHEN CAMERON HAD shoveled down enough food to get through the rest of the day, and slugged back several cups of coffee, he, Marina, and Jimmy broke camp, packing everything onto the mules. He sent the others ahead while he hiked up a butte to check their back trail.

  He’d peered across the hazy, broken hills and towering escarpments for nearly a minute before he saw a fine dust veil lifting behind a low ridge about three or four miles away. He recognized the route as the one he and Jimmy had taken, which meant that Bachelard and Montana had made it around the gorge and were making their way in this direction.

  It could have been the rurales, but Cameron judged it impossible for them to make that kind of time in the rugged, switchbacking canyons, especially with the Gatling gun.

  At the pace the pursuers appeared to be traveling, Cameron figured they’d reach the church before nightfall. But it would be late enough in the day that he didn’t think they’d try searching the canyon for gold until tomorrow morning.

  Cameron returned to the camp and mounted his buckskin, glancing at the ruins as he made his way past them—the crumbling adobe walls, a smashed window arch, pieces of a broken belfry lying here and there among the boulders. He wondered idly about the bells—could they have been gold, and cached with the rest of the treasure?—and felt an ethereal sense of the place, as though a ghostly presence lingered here.

  Riding away, twisting around in the saddle to look behind him, he imagined the people who had designed and built this place so far from civilization, and those who’d worshiped within these long-defunct walls. He knew the descendants of the Pimas and Yaquis were still around, living in villages scattered throughout Sonora and Chihuahua. But what of the Jesuits and Franciscans who had come to convert them?

  He caught up to Marina and Jimmy five minutes later, walking their mounts and pack mules up the gradually ascending trail through the boulder-littered, steep-walled canyon, which reminded Cameron of parts of the Grand Canyon in Arizona; the walls were nearly as high in some places.

  “Is there anyone behind us?” Marina asked him as he fell in behind them.

  “Yep,” he said darkly. “But maybe they won’t enter the canyon until morning.”

  It was not easy to make good time on the treacherous trail, and they did not try to get too much speed out of their horses.
The trail would slow Bachelard and Montana and the rurales down, as well.

  They’d ridden half a mile when Clark appeared, riding around a bend of low-growing shrubs. Cameron could smell fresh manure—probably left by mountain goats that had scattered when they’d heard the horses. The Missourian halted his horse on a rise between two cracked table rocks and waited for Cameron, his wife, and Jimmy to come on.

  “Well, well, you made it back,” he said contemptuously to Cameron. “My wife was getting worried.”

  “Stow it,” Cameron said. “We have to shake a leg out of here. Bachelard’s only about an hour or two away, and a passel of rurales are en route, as well.”

  “Well, why didn’t you bring the whole Mexican army?” Clark snarled.

  “It couldn’t be helped.”

  Clark shook his head. “Well, I’m not going anywhere. I found the ruin where they stashed the gold.”

  “And …?”

  “And I’ve found a pit but I wanted to get help exploring it, in case something happened and I couldn’t get out on my own.”

  “There’s no time,” Cameron said. “There’s probably no gold there anyway.” His tone belied his own curiosity. If there really was a cave, like the vaquero friend of Marina’s had avouched, then maybe there really was some gold. But with Bachelard and the rurales on their asses, there was no time to get it out.

  “Only take a few minutes,” Clark said. “I’ve found the pit. All we have to do is drop a line down and check it out.” He reined his horse around and started back up the trail, in the direction he’d just come.

  Cameron glanced at Marina. She shrugged as if to say, “Maybe …”

  Jimmy wore much the same expression under the unraveling brim of his straw hat. If there was gold in the area, how could they leave it behind?

  Cameron cursed, clucked to his horse, and followed Clark up the trail. “I take it your friend—Señor Going—didn’t make it?” Clark asked with a superior air.

  Cameron wanted to say, You owe him your life, you little fuck—and he would have if Marina and Jimmy hadn’t been listening. Instead he said, “No, he didn’t make it,” and rode grimly on.