Sometimes, when he had the strength, he paced. Sometimes he merely sat on his tattered, louse-ridden blanket, head tipped back against the wall, eyes closed.
When he heard the tramp of boots in the hall outside he thought it was merely the turnkey with his dinner and did not move or open his eyes. But when the barred door was unlocked, and he finally looked up, he saw a pair of Mexican dragoons. Crossed belts gleamed whitely against bright blue tunics and beneath tall shakos their faces were set in a dark, professional indifference.
“I am Sergeant Antonio Barrios, señor,” one of them told Kelly. His voice sounded strangely tense. “We have come to conduct you to Mexico City.”
Kelly got to his feet slowly, with great effort. He was too feeble for much reaction. He had been through so many of these trials before. They were interminable affairs, accomplishing little. He would almost rather stay in the cell.
Between the dragoons he shambled into the corridor. The turnkey let them through the barred door at the end of the hall and they started up the curving stone stairs. Somewhere water dripped endlessly and the torches socketed against the walls cast a weird, wavering light across the dragoons’ tense faces. Halfway to the next level another pair of troopers met them.
“You’re to see the governor again before you leave,” one of them told Barrios.
The dark-faced sergeant seemed angry. “What is it? I got my pass signed before we came down.”
“Something about your papers,” the soldier said.
He lowered his musket from his shoulder. It was pointing at Barrios. The sergeant frowned at his companion. Then, shrugging, he aided Kelly on up the steps. At last they reached the office of the governor of the prison. The sentry outside the door passed them in. By one of the windows was a lieutenant. Behind an ornate desk sat the governor of Perote, Colonel Rivera. He was a man in his early fifties with a sallow bald pate and shrewd, squinted eyes.
“Your papers are hardly in order,” he told Barrios.
“What more do you want?” the sergeant asked. “They’re signed by General Leon himself.”
Rivera looked toward the officer by the window. “Lieutenant Salazar has just arrived from Mexico City. His requisition is also signed by General Leon and contains a court decree that Señor Morgan is to be executed by a firing squad tomorrow.”
Barrios glanced sharply at Salazar, face pale and taut. “There must be some mistake—”
The governor stood, hands flat on his desk. “Indeed.” He spoke crisply to the troopers who had brought them up. “Take the prisoner back to his cell. I’m holding Barrios in custody till this is settled.”
The two soldiers guarding Kelly and Barrios had grounded their muskets. They had not disarmed Barrios. All he had to do was raise his musket. It took them all by surprise. His gun was covering the colonel’s chest before the others could even get their musket butts off the floor.
“If you want your colonel alive,” Barrios told them, “you will drop your guns and line up against the wall.”
The sentry outside heard it and wheeled into the doorway, only to look down the muzzle of the musket held by the dragoon with Barrios. A pale fury replaced the stunned expression on Colonel Rivera’s jaundiced face.
“Sergeant—are you insane?”
Barrios did not answer him. He spoke in a taut, jerky voice to his companion. “Pio, bind them with their belts, then find something for gags.”
Kelly still couldn’t quite comprehend what was happening. So weak he had to lean against the desk for support, he gaped at the sergeant.
“What the hell?” he said.
“The details later, my friend,” Barrios told him. “Hide a gun under your shirt. You may need it.”
Pio was working swiftly and efficiently, using the belts that crossed their tunics to bind the sentry and the other soldiers. He pulled Lieutenant Salazar’s pistol from its holster and tossed it to Kelly. Realizing this was some sort of a break, Kelly stuffed the gun into his waistband and dropped his rag of a shirt over it.
Salazar and the other soldiers were tense with frustrated anger, bent forward like dogs on a leash, eyes darting from Barrios to Pio in an avid search for the slightest chance to take them off-guard. But the threat of the gun on their governor held them in check. With Colonel Rivera still cursing them, Pio bound and gagged him and put him on the floor with the others. Barrios scooped his pass off the desk and took Kelly’s elbow, hurrying him to the door.
“Someone’s bound to go to that office soon,” Barrios said. “We can only hope we get to the sallyport first.”
Stumbling, tripping, growing dizzy from the effort, Kelly hurried between them down the hall. They had to slow up every time they reached a sentry post, but finally they reached the main door. They got across the courtyard and presented their pass to the corporal at the sallyport. The bored non-com had already passed Barrios in and he only glanced at the pass, not bothering to check for a counter signature. He nodded to the pair of sentries and they began to open the heavy, iron-studded doors. The gates were almost open when Colonel Rivera ran from the door of the main building, still struggling to tear a knotted belt off one wrist. He was followed by half a dozen troops.
“Corporal—stop those men—they’re impostors!”
The corporal tried to pull his pistol. Barrios lifted his musket and shot him through the chest. The sentries had put aside their muskets to open the gate. As they scrambled for the guns Pio lunged against one, clubbing him across the back of the neck. Kelly was too feeble to go after the other one. Robbed of support, it was all he could do to remain erect and pull the pistol from his belt. As the second sentry scooped up his musket and wheeled, Kelly fired. It struck the man in the leg and he went down hard.
Barrios grabbed Kelly’s arm and shoved him toward the gate. The guards with Colonel Rivera were firing now, as they crossed the compound, and others were appearing from sentry boxes around the courtyard. Kelly had only gone three paces, with the bullets kicking up dirt all about them, when he stumbled and fell to a knee. But Pio was there to grab his other arm. The two men half dragged him through the gate. Just outside another pair of mounted dragoons waited with four spare horses by a black coach.
“We can’t use the coach now,” Barrios shouted. “Get him on a horse.”
They lifted Kelly bodily into the saddle and swung aboard other mounts themselves. The coachman dropped off his seat onto the saddle of the remaining horse. Kelly got a glimpse of his face and saw that it was Felipe Vargas.
They raced away from the abandoned coach at a dead run. They had just gotten under way when the first pair of guards ran out the door, discharging their muskets. One of the dragoons ahead of Kelly clapped hands to his face and pitched off his horse. The coachman started to pull up and veer back.
“Don’t stop, Vargas,” Barrios yelled. “He was dead before he hit.”
With Barrios and Pio supporting Kelly between them, the riders galloped madly down the winding mountain road. Far below, the jungle spread its misty green carpet over the land, and in the distance the tile roofs of Vera Cruz shimmered in the hot sun. The effort of running and of battle had drained Kelly; waves of nausea swept through him and he would have pitched off the horse but for the support of the men on either side.
As they neared the bottom of the precarious, shelving road, Vargas plunged off onto the slope, leading them in a scrambling, sliding descent down the steep pitch. At the bottom the dense mass of the jungle swallowed them. They had to slow down, picking their way carefully through the thick undergrowth. Kelly tried to straighten up. His face was sallow and drawn with nausea. Vargas dropped back, grinning at him.
“I’m sorry we had to do it this way, amigo. We wanted to do it legally. But only a few days ago we got word that Lieutenant Salazar had left Mexico City with orders for your execution.”
“We h
oped to make it ahead of him,” Barrios said. “The passes were forged for us in Vera Cruz yesterday, the uniforms stolen only last night.”
“We have about twenty miles to ride,” Vargas said. “Can you make it?”
The sheer daring of the exploit touched something wild in Kelly. He wanted to throw his head back and howl like a curly wolf at being free. But he only had the strength to grin feebly.
“I’ll make it, Vargas, if I have to wiggle on the ground like a snake all the way to Santa Fe.”
The man shook his narrow head. “It would be suicide to go back there. An Indiaman left Vera Cruz this morning. They agreed to stand off Los Palos till dusk. They’ll take you to Corpus Christi. You’ll have friends waiting there. It’s all been arranged.”
The world began to spin and Kelly sagged forward on his horse. He had only a dim, agonized consciousness of the rest of that ride. He knew that it got dark and that sometime later they reached a tropical beach. The yellow moon gleamed against the reefed sails of an Indiaman out in the bay. Vargas built a signal fire and soon a whaleboat was pulling in toward the foaming breakers. As they beached the boat Kelly started trying to thank Vargas. But somehow the words were all jumbled up. He felt them lifting him onto the thwarts and he was still talking when he lost consciousness completely….
It was a long trip. The sun and the sea filled Kelly with renewed vigor and he soon began to gain in weight and strength. He was not fully recovered, however, when he was put ashore at Corpus Christi Bay in early March. The only settlement on the bay was a huddle of adobe buildings, fortified by a wall of shell-cement, called Kinney’s Trading Post. They rowed Kelly ashore in a gig and held him on the beach while the bo’sun went to the post with a note Vargas had given him. Within fifteen minutes the sailor came back in a wagon driven by Bob Whitworth, a man who had fought beside Kelly at San Jacinto. Whitworth chuckled at Kelly’s amazement.
“I been waiting for you almost a year,” he said. “That Teresa Cavan got in touch with me through Sam Houston. She’s been payin’ me a reg’lar salary just to wait around this bay in case they had to get you out by sea.”
Kelly shook his head helplessly. Through the years, Vargas had told Kelly of Teresa’s efforts to free him. Yet the scope of her operations never failed to amaze him.
“I never knew a woman like her, Bob. In the whole damn world I never knew one.” Kelly looked up as a file of blue-coated troopers passed them at a canter. “What the hell are U.S. dragoons doin’ in Texas?” he asked.
“Texas ain’t a Republic any more, Kelly. The U.S.A. annexed us in December, while you was on that ship.”
Kelly’s face darkened. He knew what annexation could mean. Despite their defeat at the hands of Sam Houston in 1836, the Mexican government had never recognized Texas independence. They had insisted that the boundary between the United States and Mexico was still the Sabine River. The Texans and the United States claimed that the line was the Rio Grande. And in between these two rivers lay the bulk of Texas. Whitworth told Kelly that President Polk, to back up American claims, had moved General Zachary Taylor and an American army into the disputed territory.
“Might as well declare war,” Kelly said. “Santa Anna swore he’d fight if the U.S. took Texas.”
Whitworth nodded darkly. “Now we hear General Ampudia’s moving to Matamoras with a big Mexican army.”
Kelly looked westward, his face bleak, driven. “You figure there’ll be fightin’ in Santa Fe?”
“That’s part of Mexico, ain’t it?”
Kelly’s great trap-scarred hands knotted together in his lap. “I got to get to her, Bob. I got to get to her right now.”
Whitworth stared at him blankly. “Don’t be crazy. They’d shoot you dead the first foot you put on Mexican soil.”
Kelly clenched his teeth. “There must be a way.”
Whitworth clucked at his horses. “You’d be a little safer if you went in with the army. The officers here think that if war comes Fort Leavenworth’s the most logical jumpin’ off place for Santa Fe.”
“Where’s that?”
“On the Missouri. Up in Kansas.”
“How long would it take?”
“Kelly, don’t be a fool. You got to rest. You got to get well.”
“Bob, damn you, how long does it take to reach Kansas?”
25
In the early evening of May 17, 1846, a rider came at a dead run into the plaza at Santa Fe. Teresa was in her sala, checking cash at the faro layout. The front door was open to admit early patrons and Teresa could hear the sound of the running horse beat hollowly against the blank walls along San Francisco Street.
There was a frantic portent to the sound and she could not help turning sharply toward the door. She had been on edge for weeks, waiting for some word from Mexico City. The last letter she’d received from Vargas had been dated March 9. He’d told her that the court had decreed execution for Kelly and that as a last resort he was going to try to effect Kelly’s escape. Since that time she had heard nothing.
As the sound of the galloping horse died abruptly she felt her shoulders sag. None of her couriers would make such a display of their arrival anyway. And even if the escape had been successful, it was quite natural that she shouldn’t hear yet. News always took weeks to arrive from Mexico City.
“You’ve counted that same stack six times,” Antonio said.
She glanced at her faro dealer, then smiled ruefully. At the same moment there was a hubbub at the front door and Teresa turned to see a Palace maid hurrying through the crowd. Teresa had long been garnering most of the Palace secrets via this grapevine and had a standing cash offer for any information the servants could bring her. The woman grasped her arm and in a low, tense voice blurted out the news.
“The courier just came from Chihuahua, señorita. General Taylor clashed with Ampudia’s army near Matamoras. Mexico has declared war with the United States.”
It was no surprise. The threat of this war had been hanging over them for years. Yet for a moment she could not think of what it would mean to Santa Fe—only of what it would mean to Kelly. If he hadn’t escaped yet—
She shook her head savagely. It had been over a month since Vargas’s letter. Kelly was out of Mexico. He had to be. In the meantime, there was so much else to do.
The following weeks in Santa Fe were hectic. None in the town had a clear picture of what the war would mean to them. Amado was in his glory, playing the part of the harried general to the hilt, storming around the Palace and making impressive clattering rides out of town to the outposts at Taos and Las Vegas, enlisting militia and drilling them in the square. Most of their troubles had been with Texas in this last decade and everyone looked for the attack to come from that quarter. Amado wanted to garrison all the towns along the Lower River. But there were rumors of a United States force gathering at the eastern end of the Santa Fe Trail. Amado finally came to Teresa for help.
“We haven’t got enough men to protect the whole border. If I concentrate my troops on the Lower River, the United States might bring a force through Taos. But if I go north the Texans might strike down here. A Mexican can’t get beyond Bent’s Fort without being discovered. None of my agents have been able to find out what’s going on at the other end of the Trail. I’ve got to find out where the attack will come from, Teresa.”
“I’ll do what I can, Nicolas,” she said.
She sent for Gene Cummings, Vargas’s Yankee partner who had been on her payroll ever since the Archuleta conspiracy. After the declaration of war he had fled to the mountains south of Taos to escape being jailed or confined to quarters as an enemy alien. He came to her sala, buckskinned, heavily bearded, jumpy as a wild animal from his primitive life of the last months. She told him what she wanted.
“If they’re fixin’ to come in from Missouri,” he said, “I reckon I cou
ld find out. If they’re buildin’ any kind of army at Leavenworth, they’ll be askin’ for volunteers. A week on the muster rolls and I’d know everything you want.”
He asked an exorbitant price for the job. But she knew the risk it involved and agreed to pay it. Through the rest of May and most of July she waited for word from him. Early in July he returned with word that Stephen Watts Kearny had been organizing the Army of the West at Fort Leavenworth. They needed men too badly to question the background of their recruits closely and Cummings had enlisted without trouble. He had stayed with the force until it began its march along the Santa Fe Trail, then had deserted and ridden ahead. The details he gave Teresa caused Amado to take the bulk of his troops away from the Lower River, strengthening the garrison at Taos and frantically preparing defenses in the narrow defile at Apache Pass, a few leagues outside Santa Fe. It was still July when Kearny reached Bent’s Fort, and the people began to flee Santa Fe.
On August 12th two emissaries of Kearny arrived in Santa Fe under a flag of truce, escorted by a dozen United States dragoons. They were closeted with Amado in the Palace. But Teresa soon got the news that one of the emissaries was Danny O’Brien, the trader who had been with Ryker and Gomez and Teresa when Villapando was killed in the Palace. Teresa knew that he had long ago disavowed Ryker and that he represented the bulk of legitimate American merchants in town. His integrity was unquestioned and he was trusted by both Yankees and New Mexicans alike.
In the evening O’Brien and his companion, Captain Harry Coombs of the 1st United States Dragoons, visited the house on Burro Alley. Teresa met them in the tile-floored room off the patio.
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