Jim and I dismounted and walked over to the adit with Spybuck.
A stench of rot wafted up from the shaft, along with the putrescent odor of tainted water. Nothing had been done to retrieve the bodies of the dead. Spy pointed to the sign in question. “They aren’t Apache or Navajo moccasins,” he said in a low voice, “nor Pueblo either. I’ve seen this style only once before, during a hunt I made with Ewing Young’s brigade down in the Sierra San Pedro Martír.”
“Where’s that?” I asked.
“Below La Puebla de San Diego, down in Baja California.”
“Owen for sure. That’s where his letter came from.”
“They don’t have to know that,” Spy said. “Let’s let on that they’re Coyotero Apache or some such tribe, one they know little about.” “These tracks look older than the boot tracks,” I said. “Look how they’re crumbled at the edges.”
“They were made just when it started to rain that night,” Spy said. “Probably during the changing of the guard, just before the night shift came on. But I don’t think Owen went into the mine entrance. He was probably just scouting. Notice that the man and the dog went over toward the corral. I followed them out, and they disappear. He had a horse tied over there, in the dark, a good one to judge by how little it shifted while he left it there. He picked up his dog, and they rode on out. The hoofprints are indistinct, so he probably had wrapped them in hide or burlap to mufHe the sound. But no, he didn’t go into the mine from here. He must have found another entry to the mine to plant his bomb.”
He’d been casually scuffing out the moccasin tracks as we spoke, very cool and indifferent. This was in case Lenny LeNapier decided to check the tracks for himself. But that blockhead had not yet bothered to stand down from his horse.
“Let’s find it,” I said.
“Not now,” Spy advised. “For the moment let’s lay it on heavy about the Coyoteros.”
Which we did. But Dade was not taken in.
“Do you think I was born yesterday? Lenny can read sign as well as Spybuck. He told me, in sign language, that these tracks were made by a gringo. It’s your brother all right. And if you want to stay in business in this territory, you won’t try to dupe me again. We’ll find him, rest assured.”
THAT NIGHT DADE chose to sleep in the quarters provided for the mine supervisors, a spacious adobe structure near the Estancia de Be- neficios. We pitched our tent near the corral, and while Jim went over to the adobe with Dade for a drink before dinner Spy and I headed up into the hills, ostensibly to hunt up a herd of carneros cimarrones, mountain sheep, which we’d seen on the ride back to the estancia. Once out of sight of the others, we circled back to Shaft Number Three and began casting for Owney’s horsetracks. Spy found them on a reverse slope, perhaps a hundred yards from the adit but invisible from the watchtower.
Behind a little tuft of palmillo we found what we were looking for: the low, narrow mouth of a cave in the side of the hill. Dried scat indicated that black bears had used it for their winter quarters in years past, probably up to the time the digging and blasting at the mine had made them search out a quieter residence. Both man sign and dog tracks disappeared into the cave, the man crawling on his belly and dragging a heavy sack behind him. I dropped to my hands and knees and slithered in. Ten feet inside the hole it was utterly dark. I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck; my breath came short, gasping. I felt I would suffocate in there. Yet Owen had always felt at home beneath the earth, exploring deep into the caves we found in the Taconic Mountains or the Alleghenies. He didn’t need his eyes underground, he once told me: the earth and the rocks themselves told him which way to go.
A faint current of air moved along the tunnel, colder and wetter than the air outside, and bearing with it the smell of moldering meat. So the cave must in some way be connected to the mine shaft, probably through a natural crevice in the rock. Once Owen had discovered this cave, and with his instinctive feel for subterranean formations, the hidden geography of the Uffern, that would not have been difficult; he could have crawled in here with his bundle of gunpowder, lit a long fuse, and dropped it down into the mine shaft from its ceiling. Even if the bomb lodged partway down the chute, fire from the subsequent explosion would have reached the mine shaft; the shock of the blast would loosen the rock enough to make the whole tunnel collapse. Even the mountain would settle, rearranging itself. But by that time he’d be well clear of the cave and on his way.
With that thought, I decided to get out of there. The cave itself might collapse at any moment.
“This is the place all right,” I told Spy when I’d regained the open air. “He dropped his bomb right down into the mine. You can smell the dead in there. Let’s forget about that sheep for supper. Tortillas and chilis will suit me fine.”
Spy said, “The sheep are gone anyway, spooked off. Someone is down there in that woodline, watching us.”
“Owen?”
He shook his head. “It’s not your brother. While you were in the cave I faired out his track from here.” He pointed to the northwest, where an entire horizon of long, square-topped, snow-clad pyramids of rock flared red in the sunset. “He headed up there, toward the Sangre de Cristos. No, it’s someone else down there in the woods.”
“Who?”
“The Quick Killer, I’d say. She must have seen me down at Sandía, maybe recognized me, and followed me up here. I’ve had a feeling for some days now that someone was watching us.” He shook his head again. “She’s good, damned good. Best not to go after her. She’ll approach us when she’s ready.”
CHAPTER IV
THE FOLLOWING MORNING we began running Owen to ground. Dade and LeNapier came with us. “Jim likes to track fast,” I said. “Sure hope you fellows will be able to keep up.”
Dade snorted. “Don’t you worry about me, sonny boy. I was crisscrossing the mountains of the West while you was still in swaddling clothes.”
Oh, yes, I thought, but you're a lot older now, Don Lafcadio. You’ve gotten fat and soft from too much lying around your estancias counting your money. All that aguardiente has robbed you of your wind. Let’s face it: you’re an old fart.
Frankly, I hoped he would have a syncope right then and there, and from his color it looked like he might. But he sputtered on for a while about the old days, so I picked up the pace. Soon he was too busy keeping his seat on the hard-trotting blood stallion he rode to say any more. But he knew I was right. Yet even though it might kill him, he tried to keep up.
We rode north and west through increasingly rugged hills, alternating a trot or a canter with a few minutes of walking. On the steeper slopes we dismounted and led the horses, to allow them to recoup. Jim was older than Dade but still fit, both from our horse-stealing expeditions to California and from the many trips he’d made up and down the Santa Fe Trail in recent years, escorting trains of trading goods from Independence. There was talk in town of establishing a stage line between Santa Fe and Independence or Kansas City sometime next year. It would carry light freight and mail by contract and make the round-trip twice a month. But there were still plenty of wild Indians along that route, Cheyennes, Arapahoes, Kiowas, Comanches, and Lipans, and I wondered how long such a civilized innovation would last if it ever indeed got rolling. No, the best way between the two points was still a strong, slow, well-armed wagon train, led by a knowledgeable scout like James Pierson Beckwourth.
Spy had ridden off to the west a ways, hunting some meat for our dinner, but also for sign of Quick Killer, of whom we had as yet said nothing to Dade. Jim and Lenny rode ahead, following the trail left by Owen and his horses, for he had two of them, a tall stallion (Jim said) and a shorter, heavier pack mare. “I can see how you arrive at the tall- short distinction,” I said, riding up to join them, “from the differing lengths of stride. And the weight difference is clear from the depths of the hoofprints. But how in the hell do you know one’s a stallion?”
“Look there,” he said, pointing to a damp spot in the
sandy trail. We reined in our mounts. “The horse stops to stale. The piss splashes down between or slightly ahead of the rear hooves. That’s a stallion or gelding. A mare stales backwards a bit, and the wet is behind the hooves. I say it’s a stallion because he got restless, see?”—pointing to a tattoo of hoofprints in the sand—“when the mare started making water. They’ll do that, you know.”
“Mountain man lore,” I said.
“No, just common sense. Watch them sometime when you’ve got a minute.”
Every now and then we saw the dog’s tracks running alongside those of the horses. Then they’d disappear again for a while, just plain vanish. Finally I figured it out: Owen was carrying the dog with him on the saddle but allowing it to run a ways whenever it got too squirmy. The paw prints, I saw, were similar in size and shape to those of our old terrier, Thump. Owen always loved that dog more than I did. He must have gotten himself another terrier somewhere along the way, out of sheer sentimentality. Only a terrier, after all, would follow him so eagerly into that bear cave. It was strange, I thought: Here’s a man so vengeful that he’d blow up a mine full of innocent souls, prisoners at that, without a second thought. Yet still so soft-hearted as to carry a small dog with him, a-horseback, to spare it from running itself to death keeping up. A man of mixed priorities, this brother of mine.
Spy rejoined us during the afternoon. He had a spikehorn mule deer buck draped over the back of his packhorse. “Found him munching piñon nuts up in the hills,” he said. “Should taste sweet.”
“Any sign of our watcher in the shadows?”
“Didn’t see her, but she has three horses. Traveling light. She can move if she wants too, a lot faster than we can.”
I looked back at Dade. He was riding better now, his muscles firming up after two days on horseback. He looked better, too, a lot of the pallor giving way to a brassy gleam of fresh sunburn. Only trouble he had was in mounting and dismounting: his thigh tendons must be aching something fierce by now, but that, too, would pass. He rode up to join us.
“Where do you think he’s headed?” he asked.
“He’s tending toward the east now, probably going to leave the Sangre de Gristos on his left hand, I reckon,” Jim said. “Looks like he’s aiming for Colorado.”
“Damn. I have two new mines up there, up near Pike’s mountain. Both of ’em damn promising. Silver. The Spanish used to pack lead out of there, and usually where there’s lead there’s silver as well.”
“If it’s any comfort,” Jim said, “I think we may be gaining on him a bit. That stallion of his has been limping some, and he’s switched over to riding the pack mare. Doesn’t have too much in the way of gear with him, and it’s easier on the stallion that way.”
“Does he know we’re following him?”
“He’s been riding up to a height of land every now and then, I imagine to spy us out, or at least our dust cloud. If he has a glass with him, he’ll know how many we are.”
“So he’s not all that far ahead,” Dade said.
“Ten or twelve miles. We can close with him tomorrow if we put on a turn of speed.”
“Why not today? Our horses are healthy, fresher than his.”
“Be dusk by the time we caught him up. Night’s not a good time to fight a desperate man. All this is good ambush country. I’ve seen him shoot. He’d knock your eye out at 300 paces.”
Dade scanned the sky, judging the height of the sun above the western horizon. Three hours to sunset, another hour of twilight after that.
“I want to get this over with,” he said. “I’m going to send Lenny ahead on our fastest horse, that tall bay he’s been holding in reserve. If my Delaware can’t kill a damned white man, no Injun can.”
“He’s your boy,” Jim said. “Throw him away if you must.”
A few minutes later Lenny LeNapier galloped ahead, warbling his Death Song with that truncated tongue. He had stripped down to a breechclout and carried with him a Hawken rifle, a sinew-backed bow of Osage orangewood, a quiver of arrows, a two-foot-long bowie knife, and a wicked-looking Delaware war club with a six-inch spike mounted in its face.
“Loaded for bear,” Jim said, watching him go. He spit in the dust. “Well, as they used to say in Virginia, some days you eat the bear; some days the bear eats you.”
He didn’t get far. An hour later, as we skirted a dense stand of scrub oak, Jim spotted the bay horse grazing absently on acorns in the shade of the thicket. Riding up, we found Lenny dead, naked and nailed to one of the low, thick-trunked, knotty-limbed trees by three of his arrows, one each through his hands, the third through his lower abdomen. His scalp had been ripped off, and big, slow blue flies fed in snarling clusters atop his raw skull. His chest cavity had been slashed open with his own bowie knife, and when I peered inside I saw that his heart and liver were gone, too. The bear fed well that night, I reckon.
We scraped a shallow grave for him there in the rocky soil of the oak thicket, covered it with slabs of sandstone against the wolves, and camped well out into the prairie that night. Dade was unusually silent as we supped on biscoche, the hard, sweet bread of the country, and venado con chilis color ados. “He’d been with me a long time,” he said at last. “Since ’25, that’s what, twenty-three years? Game out here from Missouri with about two dozen other Delawares, best damn trappers I ever worked with. But too much in love with war. Slow but sure they went under, six kilt by the Blackfoot, another three by the Snakes. Apaches took off yet half a dozen more. One of them, a fellow named Darby Earnshaw, got et by a griz’ up to South Park. Only one of ’em went bad—the one they called ‘Big Nigger,’ who stood with the insurgents in the Taos iglesia. His real name was Edward Chambers. He’d married a woman of the Taos pueblo, but still he had no call to side with the rebels in the rising. Oh, he made a lot of Missouri boys come that day. Some say his rifle, with his squaw reloading for him, accounted for most of the American dead. Was he kilt there or what? I hear it both ways.”
“His woman was killed, but he got away,” I said. “He’s up in the mountains right now, I heard, hiding out till the fuss blows over. Up in the Bayou Salade.” I’d met Ed Chambers in ’43 or ’44, at Pueblo. He was a tough cuss.
“Well, good for him, though he oughtn’t to have raised his rifle towards his own countrymen.”
Jim laughed at this last statement. “Don’t expect patriotism from any Indian,” he said. “After what’s been done to them, why should they feel brotherly toward the white man? Lands taken by force, whole woodland tribes cast out of their ancestral homes and sent across the Mississippi to a prairie country they’ve never hunted before, set down cheek by jowl amongst the wild tribes who deem them subhuman, worthy prey for their arrows and lances. Some of them have even been enslaved by unscrupulous whites.”
Dade thought about this for a moment. His color heightened. I readied my revolver, for I thought he might explode after the reference to slavery. After all, his mines were worked in large part by New Mexican Indians who might as well be slaves, since their trumped-up prison sentences were interminable. But he must have counted the odds: three of us with ready Colts against only one of him. “Then there was Thomas Gray,” he said at last. “Your friend the warrior-woman did for him up on Garnet Greek. But she paid for that murder when I gave her to Mangas Goloradas. I hope her bones are bleaching even as we speak, somewhere up in the MogollÓns.”
I wanted to tell him right then and there that she was still alive, and especially when, later that evening, Jim told me that it hadn’t been my brother who killed Lenny LeNapier. All the sign indicated Pine Leaf’s hand.
IN THE MORNING we came acropper. Descending into the flats east of the Sangre de Gristo Mountains, we followed Owen's track to a point where it intersected with the fresh trail: apparently a mass exodus of vehicles, horses, mules, oxen, burros, men, women, and children. To complicate matters, dogs of all sizes were traveling with this band, making it more difficult to isolate the tracks of Owen’s companion from th
e others. The entire party must have numbered two to three hundred people, on horseback, driving, or walking. They had at least one hundred carts and wagons with them.
“What is this,” I asked Jim, “the flight of the Israelites from Egypt?”
“Ciboleros,” he said. “Mexican meat hunters. It’s a bit early in the season for them, but every year the villages around here sent out bands of buffalo hunters to the Llano Estacado, in groups large enough to defend themselves against the Indians. Women and kids come along to help with the skinning and butchering. They ride down the cibolas— buffalo—and lance them to death, Indian fashion. Then they dry the meat, pack it in their carts, and head back across the Pecos, their commissary supplied for the year. It’s quite a sight to behold. Usually they hunt in the fall, when the buff are their fattest, but last winter was a hard one, and I suspect they were having to tighten their belts a bit earlier than usual.”
All four of us combed the morass of tracks for the distinctive hoof-prints of Owen’s horses, but the ground was so crosshatched with wheel marks and hoofprints that it took near an hour to find even a doubtful sign that he’d traveled with them. The ciboleros were headed east and a bit south, toward the Pecos River.
“The bastard is traveling with these people to throw us off,” Dade said. “Well, they can’t be moving too fast, not with wagons. Well ride them down and have our man.”
Spy and I rode at a quick trot along the northernmost edge of the cibolero trail, looking for a place where Owen might have broken away from the train. We did not find it until midafternoon.
“Here he goes,” Spy said, indicating the prints. “His horse for sure. Still favoring that off hind leg, though not quite so much. He’s headed back north again.”
“Wait up a minute,” Dade said. “His horse is lame. Why would he stick with it? Maybe he swapped it to the Meskins for another, sounder mount, then paid a man to ride the lame one north so’s to fool us. Where’s his packhorse? Where’s his dog? No, I’ll bet he’s still ridin’ with the ciboleros.”
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