Valley of Fire

by Johnny D. Boggs

  “And if I blow off your head?”

  “Then you’d be breaking the seventh commandment,” I told her.

  “Sixth.”

  I turned around.

  “It’s the sixth,” the Sister said. “That’s ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ The seventh I have no intention of committing. Not with you, sir.”

  A grin stretched across my beard stubble. “Oh, yeah. The seventh’s that one. Not that it matters. I ain’t married, and unless the Catholic church gotten mighty free-spirited since last I heard, you ain’t, neither.”

  It was dark, but I could tell she was pointing that pepperbox in my general direction. As I rose to tighten the cinch, I told her, “But if you fire that gun, you’ll have more problems than I’ll never know.” I threaded the latigo through the loop, pulled, did it again. “Your roan and the mule ain’t tethered no more. They hear a shot, they won’t stop till they’re drinking water in Demyan Blanco’s trough.”

  The hammer eased down. I moved around the horse.

  “So you plan to leave me here. In the wilderness.” She wasn’t asking, she was telling. I didn’t say nothing, but that was exactly my intention.

  “Sticking around here ain’t my idea of a good plan, Sister.” I tugged on the horn, and the saddle felt good, though I’d tighten the cinch again before I mounted. “I got Felipe Hernandez to worry about, and I figure I can make it to Texas or Colorado if I get lucky. Now, thanks to you and that nugget, I’ll have to dodge Blanco and de la Cruz, too. There ain’t nothing here for me.”

  “There’s that ingot,” she said.

  “Which you ain’t got no more.” I looked into the shadow I assumed was her. “Or you was lying?”

  “No.” Her voice seemed resigned. “No, that was the only ingot Sister Rocío gave me.”

  I had the reins in my hand, and was ready to lead the paint horse a few rods before I swung into the saddle. My brain told me to start walking, but my legs didn’t obey.

  “Rocío?” I blinked.

  “She gave me the ingot.”

  I thought about this for a spell, then laughed. My legs obeyed, and I was walking away. “Sister, I always knew that blind, one-armed crone was older than dirt, but she wasn’t around two hundred years ago.”

  “She wasn’t. But she knows where the rest are.” I stopped, turned, ran my hand over my beard stubble. “The Valley of Fire.” I wasn’t asking, either. It made sense.

  “Yes.”

  “She told you that.”

  “She did.”

  “She said I knowed how to find it?”

  “She said you were the one who could find it.”

  This I considered, then shook my head. “She’s lost her reason.” I was walking again. “Crazy as a loon. I don’t know what she’s talking about.”

  “She can tell you herself.”

  “No, thank you, ma’am.” I eased into the saddle. Have to admit, I kept expecting her to fire that pepperbox, to see that I’d lied, as was my habit, and hadn’t bothered with the tethers to the mule and her roan. “I’m not going back to that orphanage in Santa Fe.”

  “That’s too bad. Then we must go to Gran Quivira.”

  My hand held the horn and reins. All I had to do was tug on the reins, kick the piebald’s side, and light a shuck for parts unknown. But I stared into the darkness at Sister Geneviève’s voice.

  “Gran Quivira?” Maybe she nodded, though I couldn’t tell. I just assumed the nun wasn’t lying to me. “There ain’t been nobody at them ruins in ages.”

  “If we hurry,” she said, “we should find help there.”

  “Help? Your help or mine?”

  “Ours.”

  “I don’t—” I caught myself, figuring out that she was correcting my grammar, which made me angrier. If a body kept correcting my speaking, I’d never get nothing said. “Who’s there? Rocío?”

  “Rocío? I certainly hope not.”

  “Your friends? Or Sean Fenn’s?”

  “Friends of the faith.”

  I done some more studying. Finally, I shook my head. “It’s a long ride to Gran Quivira, but you might make it. Then it’s another ungodly ride to the Valley of Fire. You might find some water north of Rattlesnake Hill, but don’t drink it. Salt water. It’ll kill you.”

  The piebald was tired, didn’t want to leave his companions in the middle of the night, but he moved deliberately, like me. I had gone ten yards, when Sister Geneviève called my name. She added a few words, too, words that caused me to rein up.

  “How you gonna make this worth my while?”

  “There were twenty mules carrying ingots like that one I used at Anton Chico,” she said. “Do you know how many six-ounce ingots twenty mules can carry?”

  Ten minutes later, the piebald was unsaddled, tethered, and happy, and I was wolfing down more cabrito wrapped in a tortilla, massaging my own smelly feet. Sister Geneviève was sitting across from me. “Sister Rocío told me that it happened something like this....

  CHAPTER TEN

  “In the Year of Our Lord 1598, Juan de Oñate led the Spanish colonists to the place that would be called San Gabriel northwest of Santa Fe—four hundred men, including roughly one hundred thirty soldiers, another one hundred thirty wives and children, seven thousand head of horses, cattle, goats, and burros, eighty-three carts, and ten Franciscan friars.

  “The friars came to convert the savage Indians to Christianity. Soldiers came to kill and conquer. The colonists came to establish a new land. They all, even the friars, came for silver and gold. In fact, Governor Oñate himself came from a wealthy mining family in Zacatecas and brought mining equipment with him. The settlers spent more time looking for gold than farming along the Río Grande.

  “Pueblo Indians gave their allegiance to the Spanish Crown, and to God, or rather, the friars. At the confluence of the Río Grande and the Río Chama, the first capital was established in New Mexico, San Juan de los Caballeros, then moved to higher ground and rechristened San Gabriel. A church was built. And soldiers, colonists, and friars went off looking for gold.

  “One family, one friar, wanted more than San Gabriel had to offer. So they moved east into the mountains, finding a fertile valley. They called the place Mora, after the mulberry trees.

  “They found more than mulberry trees. In the rugged mountains somewhere between Mora and Santa Fe, they found gold. Tons of it. They found Indians, too. The priest became more interested in the gold mines than in the salvation of pagan Indian souls.

  “The colonist went back to San Gabriel, and returned to Mora with a dozen soldiers. They enslaved the Indians to work the gold mine. They grew wealthy. The mine seemed as if it would never play out. It was like they had found the Seven Cities of Cibola—all in one place.

  “The mine’s location, they kept secret, known only by the colonist, the friar, the soldiers, and their families.

  “Eighty years passed. The descendants of the colonists inherited the mine. The children, then grandchildren of the slaves, worked the mine. A new friar took over, bringing with him a mold to make ingots, stolen from Mexico City. Two other friars joined him. Life was good, for the colonists, the Spaniards, the friars.

  “But in the early summer of 1680, the gold became scarce. Finally, the mine was playing out.

  “When dawn broke on August tenth, some fifty to sixty Pueblos revolted, killing every Spaniard they could find. Word reached the mine. The friars and the families forced the Indians there to pack sacks and sacks of gold ingots onto burros and fled. They hurried south, past Santa Fe, joining hundreds of fleeing Spaniards. The miners made it to Gran Quivira. And that’s the last anyone ever heard from them. Other colonists, soldiers, friars, fled back to Mexico. Spanish rule would not return to New Mexico until 1692, when Diego de Vargas reestablished Spanish settlements.

  “By then, the priests, the soldiers, and the colonists who had fled the mine near Mora were all dead, or had no interest in returning to the mountains of New Mexico, even for a fortune. The t
reasure was lost.”

  While Sister Geneviève had been talking, she had started shivering. Like I said, even in summertime, the nights can turn chilly in this country so I decided to chance a fire, gathering dry wood, keeping it small. She kept talking, inching closer to the fire.

  Her face glowed, and even though she still wore that hood, I could see the flames in her dark eyes. Such a pretty face. Damn, it sure was wasted on a nun.

  When she got to the part about the treasure being lost and all, I tossed some more wood onto the fire. No smoke, and what with us tucked down in the arroyo, I didn’t think the fire could be seen by anything other than owls and nighthawks.

  She fell quiet, extending her hands, warming them over the fire.

  “Sister,” I told Geneviève as gently as I knew how, “that is an interesting tale. But your nun friends raised me to know better than waste my time gallivanting across the New Mexico desert chasing lost mines.”

  “Not a lost mine,” the nun said. “Especially one that was played out two hundred years ago. You saw that ingot. That’s what we’re after.”

  “It’s still lost. Same thing. Gold that ain’t been seen for two centuries.”

  “You saw it.”

  “I saw one ingot.”

  “Sister Rocío saw twenty mule-loads of ingots.”

  I laughed. “She’s blind.”

  “She wasn’t in 1848.”

  I let her keep talking.

  “After the Mexican War, Sister Rocío, then a nun in her mid-thirties, arrived at Gran Quivira at the Salinas Mission ruins with two priests, an historian from the newly-founded Smithsonian Institution, and two Mexican guides. They weren’t looking for gold, just wanted to see the old mission.

  “What they found behind one of the walls startled them—bones of Indians, skulls crushed, bodies hacked to pieces, and one of those ingots clutched in a skeletal hand. That got them looking, exploring, digging.

  “Scientist James Smithson had founded his institution to help increase and diffuse knowledge among men. Well, the scientific-minded historian with the party studied the scene and then guessed what had happened—the friars and colonists had made it to Gran Quivira—especially after one of the old Mexican guides told them of the legend of the lost Mora treasure.

  “The historian wasn’t sure if the Pueblo was part of the 1680 revolt, but those Indians had been murdered, and the ingot in one hand seemed to say that they had been killed in or around 1680.”

  “The priests,” I said, and shuddered, which I hardly ever do, especially in summer. “They . . . murdered those slaves.”

  The nun’s head bobbed. She no longer looked me in the eye. “Most likely. Sealed them in a tomb for almost one hundred seventy years.”

  “And that old nun, that scientist, those priests . . . they found the gold.”

  She looked up at me again, her head still bobbing slightly. “All of it. Well, most likely, all of it. It took them months. It was January before they had it all.

  “They loaded the treasure on twenty mules, and moved quickly south, staying away from the trails to the east, staying well from the Jornado del Muerto to the west.”

  I kept trying to do some ciphering in my head. Twenty mules. All of them couldn’t carry gold, not if those fools knowed anything. They’d need to pack food and water. So let’s make it fifteen mules carrying gold. A good mule can carry maybe twenty percent of its body weight. Say the mule weighs eight hundred pounds. That would mean . . .

  I gave up. “Sister, what’s twenty percent of eight hundred?”

  She looked at me as if I was an idiot.

  “One hundred and sixty.”

  “So . . . times that by fifteen . . . and . . .and . . .?” I asked her again.

  “Two thousand four hundred.”

  I nodded. Then it struck me that that was pounds. There are sixteen ounces in a pound, so that made it . . . ?

  Another question.

  She give me another answer. “Thirty-eight thousand, four hundred.”

  I give her a stare, then grinned. “You don’t have to do no scratching, no carrying, none of them kinds of things.”

  “It isn’t that difficult.” She was smiling, not looking at me like I was a fool and criminal, which I was. She smiled like she liked me.

  Sort of.

  “Let’s say gold’s twenty dollars an ounce,” I suggested.

  “It’s more than three-quarters of a million dollars,” she said.

  “You don’t know the exact figure?”

  “That might take me a while to do in my head.”

  But I knowed. Not the exact figure or nothing like that. But she was lying. She knowed exactly how much money it was. She could probably tell me at $19.84 an ounce. Troy ounce. But $750,000 was a nice round number. That’s all I needed to know.

  “So they took off south, probably bound for Mexico to one of the port cities. And had to go through the Valley of Fire.”

  Sister Geneviève said that’s what happened and resumed her story.

  “It’s hard to keep seven hundred fifty thousand dollars a secret. They had to go for supplies, for burros and mules to carry the gold. Someone, probably one of the guides, told a friend, who told a friend. Finally, Sister Rocío’s party left, moving south. By the time that pack train had reached the Valley of Fire, they knew they were being followed. They pretended to bed down for the night, making a big show of fires, then sneaked out, moving south. Quickly. Desperate.

  “Two days later, the bandits caught up and attacked. But the party managed to hold out, at least until nightfall. That night turned cold, bitterly cold. One priest was dead, but Sister Rocío was determined not to let these killers get the gold. To her way of thinking, the gold belonged not to Mexicans or Spaniards or scientists with the Smithsonian Institution, but to those murdered Pueblo Indians. Definitely, bandits did not deserve the fortune.

  “The priest, the scientist, the guides agreed.

  “That night, the young nun and a guide named Cortez led most of the mules away from camp, turning toward the mountains to the east.”

  Just like that, the story ended.

  Oh, I was certain-sure there was more to it. But the nun wasn’t talking no more. She was staring. Staring right behind me. Slowly, she raised her hands over her head. Even slower than that, I turned to stare down the barrel of that big-ass .45-70.

  They stood at the edge of the arroyo, up on the slope. I couldn’t see past them where it was pitch black, but the light from the fire reached them two sorry cusses.

  “Buenos noches,” Demyan Blanco said. Beside him, holding two damned quiet horses, stood the farmer, Jorge de la Cruz. I looked around for others, but, like most folks, Blanco and the farmer was greedy sorts. They hadn’t told nobody about the ingot. They’d just come chasing after us.

  Blanco knelt, to give me a better look at that Winchester Centennial.

  Me? Without looking back at the nun, I told her, feeling right proud of myself, “Sister, I told you we should have bought that damned rifle back in Anton Chico.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Sister,” Blanco said, “you and your compadre are far from the road. Far from civilization.”

  “One gets closer to God while alone in the wilderness.”

  The horse trader laughed. “I would not know. Since I do not believe.”

  “I will pray for you.”

  “You should pray for yourselves!” This, surprisingly, came from the massive farmer, who led the two horses down the slope and into the arroyo, while his cousin, the horse trader, stayed up top, covering us with his Winchester. “You should pray for yourselves!” Jorge de la Cruz repeated.

  It’s hard to figure a fellow sometimes. I mean, twenty-four hours earlier, this farmer had shown his gentle nature, had helped fix up Sister Geneviève’s leg, practically acting like his was smitten with a woman of God. Just this evening, he had lashed out against his cousin’s haggling, or refusal to haggle, and had come close to getting into a row w
ith Demyan Blanco. Now, he ground-reined their two horses, and pulled a pistol from his waistband. One of them Dean and Adams five-shot affairs, English made, old-fashioned. Not a small gun, but it looked like a toy in that big oaf’s hand.

  “We do not believe that that piece of gold is all you possess,” he said. Unlike that outburst a moment earlier, his tone sounded almost apologetic.

  That big pistol sure didn’t look it.

  Sister Geneviève struck a Christlike pose, holding her arms out, her voice soft. “You may search us if you desire.”

  De la Cruz went about gathering some more firewood with his free hand, while his right hand kept that Dean and Adams on me. He built up the fire real good and stepped back.

  Finally, the horse trader came down the slope carefully, keeping that cannon of a rifle aimed at my chest. With the rifle’s barrel, he motioned me to stand closer to the nun, and I obeyed. Criminy, I had half a mind to stand behind the Sister and use her for a shield, as menacing as that Winchester was, but I knowed something about guns. A .45-70 slug would tear right through Sister Geneviève and then blow me apart as well. So I done the manly thing. I stood in front of the Sister.

  Blanco spoke in rapid, angry Spanish. Jorge de la Cruz slid his pistol back inside his pants, and pulled a coal-oil-soaked torch from the back of his horse. They had come prepared. He stuck the end of the torch in the fire, then carried his light toward our horses, jamming the bottom in the soft sand, and went to work. He sure made a mess of that fine packing job the clerk at Abercrombie’s had done, throwing sacks and cans every which way, startling the mule, then ransacking my saddlebags that had come with the saddle. That didn’t take long. Didn’t have a damned thing in them. Blanco just stood there, cradling that Winchester, staring at us.

  Wasn’t too long, since we hadn’t packed too much stuff, before an angry “¡Maldita sea!” exploded from that burly farmer’s mouth. He rose, drew his revolver, and stepped around the torch. “There is nothing of value!”