The Romantics

by Peter Brandvold

  Montana was incredulous. He sucked the cheroot, puffing fragrant smoke, and blinked his mud-brown eyes. His face had been sunburned nearly black; he never wore a hat. He feared a hat would make him go bald, and he was vainly attached to his impeccable thatch of tight, curly black hair; the touch of gray in his sideburns lent what he considered an air of distinguished maturity.

  “There might have been more when he started,” Bachelard said, raising his eyes and bobbing his shoulders. “I only saw three separate shooters myself, but even if there are four, or even five, they are badly outnumbered.”

  “Si. And in a very dangerous spot.”

  Bachelard smiled. “There’s no way up, and there’s no way down but through us.”

  “So what do we do—wait?”

  “‘Fortune favors the brave,’ says Virgil.”

  “Who?”

  “Never mind.”

  “You will lead the charge?” Montana’s face broke into a grin.

  Bachelard looked at him coolly. “Yes … I will lead the charge, my friend. And so will you. We’re sharing the spoils, are we not?”

  The grin faded from the little Mexican’s face. He turned back to the cave and swallowed. “Sí.”

  Bachelard turned back to one of the men hunched behind the nearby boulder, awaiting orders. “Jumbo, go back and make sure Juanita is secure. Keep her out of the line of fire.”

  Crouching, the man ran back to where Bachelard had cached the girl in a protected hollow across the canyon.

  “And keep your hands off of her!” Bachelard called to his back. Jumbo scowled. Imagine bringing a girl along on such a journey and then not even taking your pleasure!

  Bachelard turned back to the cave. He cupped his hands around his mouth.

  “Hello!” he shouted. “Clark … in the cave!” He listened to the echo.

  Silence followed. Then: “What?”

  “Do you want to live or die?” Bachelard shouted, drawing out the words to distinguish them among the echoes.

  “What about yourself?”

  Bachelard chuffed. “A real funny man up there,” he said to Montana. “That can’t be Clark.” Turning back to the cave he cupped his hands around his mouth. “Who are you?”

  “Jack Cameron.” The sepulchral voice echoed off the rocks.

  The man beside Bachelard turned to him expectantly. Montana looked at him as well, seeing the peculiar expression on the ex-Confederate soldier’s skeletal features. “Who?” Montana said.

  Bachelard waved him off. “Ah … we meet again, Mr. Cameron! The lure of gold too much for you, eh?”

  “The lure of killing the dirty rebel dog who killed my friend was too much for me … you fuckin’ shit-for-brains asshole!”

  Bachelard’s face colored. He fought to regain his composure. “Listen, Cameron,” he said congenially, “I am going to make you an offer. You and your friends can leave the cave, and the gold, now, and we won’t kill you. How does that sound to you?”

  “There isn’t any gold.”

  “Oh?” Bachelard said. “Why don’t you let us look for ourselves?”

  “’Cause you’ll shoot us in the back.”

  “I give you my word as an officer and a gentleman. We will give you unimpeded passage if you leave the cave now—empty-handed.”

  On the heels of the last echo Cameron returned, dry with irreverence: “Kiss my ass.”

  Bachelard bit his lip. One of his men stifled a laugh. Bachelard turned around sharply to see who it was. He saw four or five faces regarding him cautiously. He turned back to Cameron, said icily, “Don’t be so hasty, my friend. I have twenty men. What do you have—three, four, five at the most?”

  “I’ve got a whole fuckin’ army up here.”

  Bachelard chuckled loudly enough for Cameron to hear. “No … I don’t think so.” He paused. “I tell you what: We will give you until dawn to reconsider your answer to my offer.”

  There was no reply.

  Bachelard turned to his men, in various positions around the base of the canyon.

  “Hark, you soldiers of a free and independent Texas and Sonora! Do you want more gold than you have ever seen in your life and ever will again—even in heaven?” His voice echoed loudly, resounding around the canyon like a bullet in a lead-lined room.

  A murmur arose.

  “Well, do you?” Bachelard shouted at the top of his lungs.

  Responses of “Si,” and “Sure,” and “Hell yes,” rose a little louder.

  “Then, at dawn we will charge the cave,” Bachelard intoned. “Any man who cowers from his duty will be drawn, quartered, and gutted like a pig.”

  Bachelard licked his lips and smiled at Miguel Montana, who had turned to him with an unguarded look of misgiving.

  Bachelard cleared his throat and cupped his hands around his mouth, raising his voice for Cameron’s benefit: “And the first one to kill Cameron gets to fuck the lovely Marina de la Guerra!”

  A soft din rose from the rocks around the base of the cliff. Someone said incredulously, “De la Guerra?”

  As Bachelard had suspected, the name was well known to these Mexican honyonkers. Some may have even worked for the de la Guerra family. More than a couple obviously knew of the lovely Marina, whose beauty was no doubt legendary.

  Bachelard let the din settle. Then he added, with a smile, “At the crack of dawn, then: Let fly the gods of war!”

  CHAPTER 36

  BACHELARD’S PATHOLOGICAL LAUGHTER sailed skyward on the cooling evening air, dying out gradually, finally replaced by the breeze shunting down the canyon and by the chirps of the small birds that had found homes in the walls of the empty ruins.

  Cameron’s face was purposefully expressionless. He did not want Jimmy or She-Bear to know what kind of an effect Bachelard’s last statement had had on him. The thought of that devilish horde storming up here in the morning, guns blazing, and …

  Marina.

  The light was nearly gone from the canyon, though the sky remained bright. Cameron holstered his pistol and stared off across the chasm to the sheer wall of fluted, crenelated rock turning gradually from pink to purple to black, and strained to come up with a means of escape.

  Cameron turned to Jimmy and She-Bear, who had drifted to separate places against the cave walls. She-Bear was eating from a small pouch of jerky, her rifle lying across her large thighs, that same emotionless, self-contained look on her round face with its hideously scarred nose.

  Cameron knew she must have loved Tokente very much to have tracked him this far—or to have tracked the man tracking him, anyway. She’d displayed no emotion over his death, but Cameron wasn’t fooled. There was plenty of pain behind those mud-black eyes and her phlegmatic demeanor, probably all the more intense for being so squelched.

  “You two stay here and keep a sharp eye peeled, will you?” he said. “I’m going to go back and check on Clark.”

  Back in the pit room, several of the candles had gone out, but Marina had lit more and set them on the rock ledge around her and Adrian. Clark was sitting against the rock wall, his shirt off and his arm in a makeshift sling. Marina had padded the wound with strips of Clark’s shirt, and secured the pad with a band tied around his chest.

  “How you doing?” Cameron asked him.

  “Not so good,” the Missourian said wistfully. “I could sure use a drink.”

  “You’re out?”

  Clark nodded.

  “Well, I’d offer you a snort of mine, but it’s in my saddlebags, which are now the property of Gaston Bachelard.”

  Clark cursed as a frightened light entered his eyes. “So it’s him … Damn.” He pondered this for several seconds. “What are we going to do?”

  Cameron had squatted on his haunches beside Clark. Marina sat on the ledge on the other side of her husband, regarding Cameron fearfully, expectantly.

  “Well … I’m not sure,” Cameron said with a sigh. “He’s giving us till dawn to think it over … Wants us to give ourselves up�
�says he’ll let us go.”

  “That’s a crock!” Clark laughed ruefully.

  Cameron nodded. “We can’t go up or down. There are no trails across the cliff, so I guess the only thing to do is to leave this cave when it gets dark, and hide in another one. They maybe wouldn’t find us. Hell, maybe once they’ve gotten the treasure, they won’t bother lookin’.”

  He hated the idea of running and hiding from Bachelard. If it were only himself in this dilemma, he probably would have stayed and fought. But he had others to think about—namely, Jimmy and Marina. He didn’t want to see them hurt.

  “They can’t have that treasure, Jack! It’s mine!” Clark’s eyes turned fierce and his back stiffened against the wall.

  “Easy, easy. I think we’ve already lost it. We may be able to get out of this alive—and that’s a big maybe—but there’s no way we’d get out with the treasure. I’m sorry, but there just isn’t any way. There are at least twenty men down there.”

  Clark pondered this, the fervor in his eyes becoming tempered with frustration and disappointment. “Goddamn him … Why the hell did he have to come along? We were so close …”

  Cameron nodded. He felt the same way. When he’d held that statuette in his hand, he’d felt the gold fever leak into him like a fast-working drug, making his heart beat fast and his knees quake. How gold could change one’s life!

  Maybe he could go back down and get just a little. Hell, Bachelard didn’t know how much was there. If Cameron took a few of those statuettes, the Cajun would be none the wiser. One of those statuettes would probably go for at least four thousand dollars …

  Cameron said to Clark, “I’ll see what I can do.”

  He glanced at Marina and their eyes locked. He couldn’t help feeling jealous of Clark, being under her ministrations. She must have sensed it, for she smiled curiously and turned away.

  Cameron stood and walked back down the corridor to Jimmy and She-Bear, who sat with their backs to opposite walls. Jimmy was holding his Remington in his lap and chewing jerky that She-Bear must have given him. She-Bear sat stonily with her rifle across her thighs, head tilted back against the wall as though asleep, but her eyes were open. Cameron knew she was listening as only an Indian could listen.

  Outside, the canyon was nearly dark. The sky had paled. No sounds lifted from below. Bachelard’s crew must be settling in for the night.

  “Here … eat,” She-Bear said, offering Cameron some jerky.

  He shook his head. “No, thanks.”

  He remembered Adrian saying that this cave was the only one with a back door. Maybe …

  He turned, ducked through the opening in the back wall, and walked to the room with the pit. Clark was asleep and Marina was leaning against the wall with her arms around her legs, resting her head on her knees.

  “I’m going to check something out,” Cameron said to her, picking up one of the candles planted in a puddle of dry wax.

  He ducked through the door and stepped into another corridor similar to the first, the guttering candle shunting shadows of protruding rocks around the walls, his own shadow crawling down the ceiling.

  Ducking uncomfortably, he walked for several minutes. The walls and ceiling remained the same height and width. The only thing that changed even slightly was the rumbling. It seemed to grow louder the farther he moved down the corridor.

  Suddenly the floor began to drop at a slight angle. The ceiling rose a little, for which he was grateful; his neck was getting sore. Fifty yards farther on, the candle went out. Blackness like he’d never known before engulfed him. He reached into his tunic pocket for matches, relit the candle, and continued walking. He’d moved only about six more feet when the candle went out again.

  “What the hell?” he said, his voice sounding eerie in the tight confines of the stone corridor.

  He lit the candle one more time, and again it went out. Giving up, he continued without it, feeling his way along the wall. The candle had to have been blown out by air funneling down the corridor. He thought he could smell it, however faintly. If there indeed was air, it had to come from somewhere outside.

  Maybe the corridor traversed the mountain, opening on the other side! If that was true, Adrian had been speaking more literally than he’d realized when he’d described this as a back door.

  Suddenly Cameron stumbled on a shin-high rock. There had been no other such rocks in the corridor.

  Curious, he bent down and touched the stone, feeling it on all sides. On the other side of the rock was nothing but air—even below the level of the floor. A chill ran down his spine.

  He struck a match and cupped it in his palm, bending low to reveal a pit, much like the one in the room where he’d left Adrian and Marina. His heart thumped. If he’d simply stepped around the rock, he would have now been lying at the bottom of the pit!

  Who knew how many more pits lay in the corridor? He didn’t have enough matches to keep lighting one after another, either, and since the candle wouldn’t stay lit, he’d have to go back. If there was air coming from outside—he could feel it now, a slight freshening against his sweat-soaked tunic—then there would have to be light coming from outside, as well.

  The sky was probably nearly completely dark now, however. He’d wait until dawn, then he and the others would return this way, hopefully literally see the light at the end of the tunnel, and get the hell out of here.

  It was a better chance than merely hiding in another cave. Chances were Bachelard would detail at least a few men to find them. Back where he’d started, he told Clark and Marina his plan. Clark was awake and blinking with interest.

  “What about the treasure?” he said fervently, then turned as a coughing fit gripped him. Marina handed him an already bloody handkerchief.

  “I’ve got an idea about that, too,” Cameron said.

  Getting up from where he’d been sitting on the ledge beside Marina, he slipped into the passageway leading to the cave entrance. Finding that all was quiet—relieved that Bachelard at least appeared to be keeping his word to wait for dawn—he told Jimmy and She-Bear his plan. She-Bear listened stonily. Jimmy’s eyes were bright with hope.

  Cameron turned to She-Bear, vaguely wondering what her real name was. Going had told them only “She-Bear,” but Cameron knew she had a Pima name. If she’d been a little more talkative he would have asked her.

  “Can you handle it alone out here for a few minutes? I have a job for Jimmy.”

  The woman only nodded.

  Back in the pit room, Cameron looped the rope around Jimmy’s waist. “I’d go back down myself, kid, but you’re younger than I am. Besides, I can hold your weight; you can’t hold mine.”

  “I don’t mind, Jack,” the kid said eagerly. “So the treasure’s down there, huh? It really is?”

  “That’s right.”

  Clark and Marina were watching from the gargantuan shadows the candles cast on the wall.

  “We’re gonna be rich, ain’t we!” Jimmy exclaimed.

  Cameron pulled the rope taught and turned the boy around by the shoulders. “What have I told you about sayin’ ‘ain’t’? These people are gonna think I haven’t taught you anything at all.” He grinned. “Be careful now. Go slow. I’ll have the rope in case you fall.”

  Gently he lowered the boy into the pit, kneeling on one knee beside the hole and running the rope through the second ring and over his shoulders. When Jimmy had made the bottom, Cameron brought the rope back up, and used it to lower a long candle into Jimmy’s waiting hands.

  “Jeepers creepers, it’s dark down here—even with the candle.” Jimmy’s voice rose hollowly from the pit.

  “Wait now,” Cameron said. “I’m lowering the saddlebags.”

  When Jimmy had the bags, Cameron said, “Right through the side hole there, about twenty yards. You’ll find another room, like a root cellar. There are some burlap bags and a crate. Take five of the small gold statues from the crate. Put them in the saddlebags and hightail it out of there.�
��

  “Gotcha,” the kid said, bending to peer into the hole.

  “Why only five?” Clark asked Cameron.

  “They’re heavy; it’s all we’ll want to carry without horses.”

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah … well, it’s better than nothing at all. Each of those statues is worth all the money I’ll ever need.”

  “Yeah, but what about me?” Clark growled. “My tastes are a little more refined and cultivated than yours, I would suspect.”

  “I’d suspect that, too,” Cameron said, trying not to let the Missourian rile him.

  It wasn’t long before Jimmy reappeared at the bottom of the hole, toting the saddlebags, which had grown considerably bulkier and heavier, his face lit specterlike by his candle. He tied the rope around the bags, and Cameron raised them. Jimmy himself crawled out three minutes later.

  “Jiminy! A real treasure cave! I can’t believe it!” he exclaimed, dusting himself off.

  Marina smiled at him, thoroughly affected by the boy’s enthusiasm.

  “There was really a lot, huh?” she said, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees, hair falling from a shoulder.

  While Jimmy described the treasure to Marina, Clark inspected the statuettes in the saddlebags, candlelight gleaming off the smooth-polished gold. Cameron disappeared down the corridor, to the cave opening where She-Bear sat alone, rifle held across her knees.

  He sat down across from her, stretched out his legs and crossed them at the ankles, took a long pull from his canteen lying there, and dug in his tunic pocket for his makings.

  “Smoke?” he asked She-Bear.

  She said nothing, only held out a hand. Cameron tossed her the pouch. When she had what she needed, she tossed it back to him. Slowly, ponderously, he rolled a smoke, stuffed the makings back in his pocket, and lit the quirley on his boot sole.

  She-Bear had already lit hers. She sat across from Cameron, hiding the glowing coal in her palm—no use giving Bachelard’s men a tempting target—and smoked silently.

  Cameron drew deeply on the quirley, enjoying the taste of the tobacco, the slightly heady feeling the smoke gave him. It was all he enjoyed, however. His thoughts were not pleasant.