“How do we know for sure?” Jim said.
“Let’s split up,” Dade said. “Me and Griffith will follow out the ciboleros; won’t take us long to catch them up now. You and Spybuck keep on the tracks of this lame horse. We’ll find out from the ciboleros just where he’s at, and maybe what he’s up to. Could be the bastard’s heading back to Santa Fe to blow up the rest of the Hidalgito.”
CHAPTER V
IT WAS NEARLY sundown by the time Dade and I caught up with the ciboleros. They had come upon a small herd of buffalo, perhaps 100 animals, and were in the process of running them. While the hunt went on, the wagons drew up in a rough circle, covering altogether about ten acres, and prepared to make camp for the night.
The spearsmen had ridden out to the herd and driven them into a circulating “surround/’ the buffalos loping counterclockwise in a thick black mass. Dust towered into the darkling sky. From time to time a rider would dash into the herd, his ten-foot-long lance braced against a leather strap secured to the high-cantled saddle, and drive its two-foot-long blade into a cow buffalo’s shoulder just behind the crease. They avoided the bigger bulls: too hard to kill, and the meat was too tough. Sometimes, if the lancer hit bone, his spear broke off short, but most often they struck true. The blades, forged as we later learned of strong Toledo steel, were unbarbed, and as soon as a rider had stabbed one buffalo to the heart, he was out and dashing at the next. We saw one cibolero kill six in a run that could not have lasted more than two minutes. These men were skillful. One would not have wished to meet them on the field of battle.
We watched from a rise above the killing ground. When the lancers had made enough meat for the day, they allowed the remaining two dozen buffalo to escape and rode back to the encampment. The lancer who had killed the six buffalo, and whom I had been watching, spotted us on the hilltop. He must have descried us as whites, for he called over two compadres and rode up to meet us without hesitation. He was an older man, tall and gray-haired yet lean as a hungry wolf. Like the others, he was dressed in leather and wore atop his head a low-crowned, flat-brimmed sombrero of finely plaited straw. His lance was bloody halfway down to the tassels that danced gaily near the grip of the shaft.
“Hola, gringos!” he said as he rode up to us. “Como ’sta ustedes? Dónde va?”
This man proved to be Don Tómas Griégo, alcalde of the small pioneer village of El Rosario, a fledgling settlement located in the Blue Mountain country north of San Fernández de Taos. After we had introduced ourselves, he escorted us down to the camp. Already the wagons had been wheeled into a defensive circle; guards armed with bows and arrows and a few ancient flintlock escopetas were posted against the Indios, and while some of the women built cookfires and prepared the evening meal, others were out ripping hides from the dead buffalo and slicing off thin sheets of buffalo meat. Rawhide lines had been stretched between the wagons, and over these the meat was draped. Don Tómas told us they would camp here tomorrow, which promised to be a typically hot sunny day, during which time the meat would dry, whereupon it would be packed down tight in layers into the meat carts for transport onward. In this fashion the village would replenish its commununal cocina. The Mexicans pulverized this dried buffalo meat into a fine powder, which was then liberally mixed with tallow and a sizable dose of chilis calientes to form a spicy meat paste, which was stored in glazed ollas of great capacity. Tonight, though, we dined on biscoche, frijoles, and fresh buffalo hump.
After we’d eaten, a few of the villagers produced their guitars and began singing canciónes de amor. The women rolled plump cigarillos of com husks and the sweet, pungent tobacco of the country and offered them around. We lit them from an ingenious form of lighter made of cotton cord, bound in calico, and run through a slender tin tube no thicker than a goose quill, the women igniting the cotton with deft blows from their firesteels, puffing them to life, then extinguishing the flame by drawing the cord back down into the tube and snuffing it with their thumbs. When one of the women noticed me admiring the device she offered it to me. I refused it as politely as possible, but she insisted. I took it. Who knows? It might come in handy someday.
“Have you seen another gringo traveling in this vicinity recently?” Dade asked the alcalde.
“Sí, only yesterday morning,” Don Tómas replied. “At first I took him for a Mexican, his Spanish was so good. Just a slight accent. Perhaps an alemán—you know, a germánico—for there are many of that persuasion in this country since the revolution began in Europe. They come for the mining. But I think now he was a countryman of yours, a norteamericano ”
“Which way was he traveling?”
“Porqúe?”
“He’s a friend of ours. We were supposed to meet him in the mountains but were delayed, and when we reached the rendezvous, alas, he had already gone on. But whether he continued north, as was our plan, or returned to Santa Fe we know not, having lost his track among your many.”
The alcalde looked at us skeptically. “Your amigo rode with us today, senor, then departed.”
“Judging by his track when last we saw it,” I said, “his horse was going lame.”
“Sí.” He was wary now, reluctant to say more.
“Did the hoof improve enough while he traveled with you for him to continue his journey?”
“It was not all that lame to begin with.”
“Perhaps he purchased another horse from your caballada?”
A long pause.
“Quizás.”
“Did he?” Dade asked.
“Excuse me, senores,” Don Tomas said, rising from the blanket on which he’d been seated. “I must consult with my ayudantes.”
“Your brother must have paid them plenty,” Dade said when he was gone.
“Offer him more.”
Dade put ten pesos on the blanket. When the alcalde returned, he looked at the silver with ill-concealed distate. He picked the coins up and handed them to Dade. “I believe these must have fallen from your purse, senor. They are not mine.”
“Where did our friend go?”
“It is true your friend purchased a horse from us. He then proceeded northward, toward the Río Huerfano. Now if you will forgive me, there are matters of importance I must attend to. I assume you will be on your way … north ... in the morning. I will say my farewells now. Buen viaje, senores.”
He was a proud and honorable man: having taken money from my brother, he would not sell him out. I was sorry to leam, some weeks later, that the entire party from El Rosario had been wiped out by Gomanches on the Llano Estacado. No survivors.
AS WE PREPARED to leave camp the following morning, Jim and Spy came riding in from the north, escorting a shamefaced young Mexican on a lame bay stallion.
“Caught up with him last night,” Jim said. “Nice enough fellow. Owen paid him twenty pesos to divert us. That’s more money than this kid has seen in his whole life.”
“Which way did Owen go?” I asked.
“Southwest, the lad said. Probably to Santa Fe.”
“God damn it, I was right. He’s heading back to the Hidalgito,” Dade said. “He led us on a wild goose chase. Let’s make tracks!”
We rode hard all that day and half the night on Owen’s trail, but he had too great a jump on us. From time to time along the way, checking our backtrail, Spy caught sight of a lone rider: Pine Leaf, the Quick Killer. She was trailing us at a distance just out of rifle shot. I saw her, too. When she noticed me watching, she reined in her mount. We sat our horses, near half a mile apart. But I felt her eyes boring into my brain. I pulled a spyglass from my saddlebags and twisted her into focus. Her face was hard as obsidian, longer, it seemed, and thinner. There was something wrong with her nose. It looked too wide, shiny down the middle. Her black eyes, staring down the tunnel of the glass, had the same mad intensity as those of a buffalo wolf preparing for the kill.
“I think she’s lost her mind.” Spy sat his horse beside me. “Wilderness will do that. We can’t live alon
e too long. Maybe some small wrinkle in her soul is telling her to rejoin the human race. She could have killed at least one of us anywhere along the trail, or anyway taken our horses. We must give her more time. The decision must be hers.” When we arrived at Santa Fe in the early-morning hours, Dade proceeded straight through to the mine, with Jim and Spy accompanying him. I rode up to the casa.
Lamps burned in the kitchen, and when I went to the back door I found it locked and barred. I knocked. The muzzle of my old fuke poked out through a slot in the adobe wall beside the door. “Vamos,” came Plover’s voice. “Or I shoot.”
“Hey, it’s me!”
“Válgame Dios! Dillon! Thank God you’re here. He has kidnapped Jaime!”
PLOVER AND THE two girls were in the kitchen. Gwen was now seven, a tough little tomboy who loved to ride the pinto pony I’d given her last Christmas after “retrieving” it from horse thieves up on the Picketwire. She named it Jocko. The baby was another girl, just over a year old, named Esmeralda for the green of her eyes. We called her Esme for short. She’d recovered from the croup.
“He followed me home from the office yesterday,” Plover said. “I didn’t recognize him at first—he has a white beard now and white hair down to his shoulders. He was dressed all in leather like a cibolero, his coat was a wolfskin, and he wore a big dark sombrero of felt. He had a little brown-and-white dog trotting at his heels. I figured him for some bummer from Missouri, looking for a handout. He rode behind me, about a hundred yards back, all the way home. I wasn’t worried, for I always carry my scalp knife. But when I dismounted at the stable, he was standing beside me. All of a sudden. Poof! As if he’d appeared from thin air. ‘Plover,’ he said in Grow. ‘Why is my brother working for that devil Dade? Why is he pursuing me?’ Then I knew him.”
She brought him into the casa, prepared food for him, and coffee; she introduced him to the older children as their long-lost uncle. They were fascinated. The girls loved the little dog and played with it all the while, Esme all coos and smiles.
James was more taken with the man himself Jaime, we call him now. He is fourteen years of age and among the Grows would already be a fledgling warrior, going off on raids with one soldier band or the other. He’d be stealing horses and lifting Blackfoot hair. Instead he had to attend the new English-language school in Santa Fe, founded only last year. He could only read about war and, what was worse, in Latin. Owen captivated him with the tale of our fight with the Gros Ventres, his capture and imprisonment at the copper mines, the Mimbres massacre of the Apaches and their later slaughter of the Santa Ritans, his escape from Mangas, and his subsequent adventures in the mountains of Mexico; of treasures waiting to be discovered in the wild, dangerous malpais of the Great West. What boy wouldn’t be captivated?
Plover told my brother again and again that I was only with Dade and the Delaware to protect Owen from harm, when and if they caught up with him. Finally he rose from the table and laid a hand on Jaime’s shoulder.
“That may well be,” he said. “But best intentions are sometimes frustrated by subsequent events. Con permiso, I will take young James with me now, to ensure my brother’s good will in the future. I hope to see him soon, unarmed and unaccompanied by my sworn enemies.” “You do not have my permission to take our son,” Plover told him. “It’s all right with me!” Jaime piped up. Plover said she wanted to swat him, pull her knife on Owen, and have at him right then and there. But motherly caution prevailed. Owen was heavily armed—two revolvers in his belt, a bowie knife in the top of his knee-height moccasin—and the girls were in the room. While Jaime gathered his bed roll, foul weather gear, spare clothing, and the double gun I’d given him (an Allen & Wheelock over-and-under in .38 caliber for the rifle barrel, twelve-bore for the shotgun), Owen handed Plover a letter.
“This is for Dillon, but you can read it, too, after we’re gone,” he said. Then he whistled up his dog and they went out to saddle Jaime’s horse, a sturdy little gray Morgan gelding with a pacing gait and a deeply arched neck. As they rode off, Plover said, Owen was asking Jaime how comfortable he was working with large quantities of gunpowder.
THEY BLEW UP the remaining two shafts of the Hidalgito mine that very night, a few hours before I got home. Fortunately, the foreman, Ings, had dismissed the night crew before the bombs went off. No one was killed this time, but the shafts were totally collapsed. I could not help but think that Jaime must have gotten a big bang out of it, though I said nothing like that to my wife. In her current humor she would not have appreciated it.
But of course I was outraged as well once I read Owen’s note.
CHAPTER VI
MY DEAR BUT traitorous brother,” it read. “I pen this in haste, having just returned to Santa Fe from a pleasant northward excursion to the vicinity of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. I recommend them to you for their salubrious waters. I must admit to considerable dismay, however, on seeing you following me north in company with Don Lafcadio Dade and his Delaware butcher boy. Are you working on the side of the Devil these days? I understand from local gossip that you are Dade’s man these days, along with your partners Captain Beckwourth and the Shawnee Spybuck. So angered was I at finding you hot on my trail that I decided to return to Santa Fe before continuing my journey. My intention is to impress your wife with the gravity of your transgression. Blood is thicker than dinero, Hermano mio, and I am willing to shed some of hers to prove my point, along with that of your children, should you have proved so blessed as to have any. Make no mistake: I will have total satisfaction from Senor Dade and his ilk. If you are part of that ilk, you, too, shall feel the heat of my anger, even unto death. If, however, you choose to join me in my battle for justice, you will—if you can see the inevitability of my choice for a final stand—know where to find me. Sincerely, Owen Glendower.”
He was mad—loco as a loon. A surge of rage flooded through me as I read that awful letter. He’d kill Plover? He would harm my lovely daughters? He would go against even the most sacred ties of blood to ensure my cooperation in his vengeful scheme against Dade. And now he had my unwitting son as his hostage, forcing me to go along with his will. Since early childhood Owen had always demanded compliance with his wishes. If I wanted to hunt rats, he made us fish trout. If I wanted to climb a mountain, he insisted we explore a cave. When I wanted to continue trapping beaver with the Crows, he had had his way, and we ended up digging for gold in White Hart Hollow. And that’s what got us into this whole infernal mess to begin with.
“What does he mean by this ‘choice for a final stand’?” Plover asked. She stared at me over her glasses, his letter in her hand. “Where is it?”
That stare brought me back to reality. “I guess he means White Hart Hollow,” I said at last. “He was always reading romantic novels when we were growing up—Scott, Fielding, Captain Maryatt—and prating on about the beauty of structure. If a story began with some particular event, in some particular place, it must follow an almost circular course back to that place, and the denouement echo in some respect that event which set the whole sequence of events in motion.”
“Whatever that means,” she said. “But I take it you think he’s heading back to where it all began. Well, we’d better pack up our stuff and get going.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m going back north with you, to find your brother and bring back our son.”
“What about the girls?”
“We can’t leave them here, even if we hired a responsible woman to care for them,” she said. “I couldn’t stand it. They’ll come with us.”
“But the baby? She’s only just learning to walk.”
“My mother packed me on her back for hundreds of miles when I was an infant,” Plover said. “Or else I rode in a bundle on a travois, behind the dogs or horses. By the time I was five years old, I had my own pony. Gwen can ride, and I will pack Esme along, on my back if necessary.” She rose from her chair and came over to me, took off her
glasses
, leaned down, and kissed me atop the head. “I will not remain here worrying about you and tending to my knitting like these gringo cows. I’m a Sparrowhawk, by God. I fly. And if necessary, I kill.”
I SLEPT UNTIL nearly noon the following day. When I woke at last, it was to find that Plover had made all the arrangements for our departure. She’d ridden down into town and asked our wrangler, a reliable New Mexican named Pánfilo Ramirez, to occupy the casa with his entire family during our absence. His wife and children would love it. They would tend to the animals—there were chickens to be fed, half a dozen porkers to be swilled, a cow to be milked twice daily, and about two dozen long-homed beef cattle, wild as deer, to keep an eye on out in the pasture. Pánfilo’s eldest daughter, Rosalinda, could read and write, so she would tend to the office affairs of the B, S&G stock detective agency during our absence. Plover had packed a kit with Esme’s necessaries, while Gwen had stuffed her own bedroll with plenty of extra clothing and her favorite kachina doll. Plover was traveling light, Indian fashion, and had added only a few items to my always-ready traveling pack.
As I came into the cocina, I found Spy and Jim seated at the kitchen table drinking coffee. I showed them Owen’s letter.
“He’ll head for White Hart Hollow now; I’m sure of it,” Jim said. “But Dade doesn’t know that. He’s organizing what he calls a posse comitatus— a lynch mob made up of his local caballero pals and whatever Missouri toughs he can find.”
“He’ll find plenty, the money he pays,” Spy said.
“Dade says they’ll ride Owen down now, once and for all. He’s even sent a man up into the mountains near Taos to find that Delaware, the Big Nigger. I know the fellow. He’s a damn good tracker, a far tougher case than the late Mister LeNapier. Dade’s arranging a pardon for him from the governor.”
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