“I failed,” he whispered. “That Miss Vienta was right. Things change too fast in Mexico. If what I knew had any value two days ago it’s probably worthless now. Even if I got free it wouldn’t matter. And I won’t get free. I’ll just die in here.”
“Vienta!” Chaco’s voice snarled from out on the porch. The whole house rattled as he banged on the door. John scooted under the covers. In a moment Chaco had burst in and entered the bedroom.
“Muchacho,” Ham said grandly. He had been out to look around early that morning and had gathered some flowers with Angelita, sticking them in his hair and bandage. He picked one out and held it out to Chaco. Chaco knocked his hand aside and seized Maeve by the arm.
“Shut him up and get out here to the kitchen with me,” Chaco demanded. Ham dipped his head and scooted around to the other side of the bed. He sat down in the chair beside John and began to rock and hum monotonously. Maeve left the room with Chaco, closing the door behind them. John sprang silently across the room and pressed his ear to the door. Ham, having no real knowledge of Spanish, simply crouched on the edge of the bed and watched John’s face.
“I need you to come with me,” Chaco said. ‘We have business to take care of at Chilida.”
“Chilida?” Maeve repeated. “What kind of business, Chaco?”
“I have guns and ammunition stored there,” Chaco said. “I need to move them up here. I want you to drive that new buckboard you brought back, and I’ll bring my wagon, and you and that girl are going to fix food for us so we can load up the guns and get moving by sunset.”
“But what about my father, Chaco?” Vienta asked. “I can’t leave him alone with just the girl as long as that. Get Mia to cook for you.”
“Her mother says she’s sick. Don’t give me trouble, Vienta. Bring the old man in Mia’s small cart, and that idiot, too. This can’t wait.” Chaco said, and stormed out.
“Wow, it’s a good thing I’m not really an invalid,” John said. “All this moving around might be bad for me.”
“What did he say?” Ham asked. “I only got that he mentioned Chilida.”
John explained as Maeve returned. “Whew!” Ham said. “We’ll get a look at what guns he’s moving. That might be useful.”
“Food, Vienta,” Chaco ordered as the small cart pulled up behind the buckboard. Chaco’s men unloaded a grill and put it in a stone framework near one of the more-or-less intact buildings. Maeve hopped down and Angelita joined her unloading food supplies from the buckboard. They fixed a meal and Ham produced bottles of Tequila. Chaco seemed about to protest, then shrugged. The men ate and drank, then disappeared into shaded areas to sleep.
Ham ambled around, carrying an old leather strap, which he let Hermes worry and tussle with him for. Angelita followed the dog, who eventually left Ham and began nosing around the buildings.
Zachary could look up and see many small gaps in the wood covering. The loosely-tied planks over the top seemed likely to be easy to move. It didn’t matter because he had no strength to try to escape. The shackles remained and he felt hot and sick.
Something scuffled nearby. He wondered dimly if there were rats. A snuffling sound made him look up. Rats were bad enough, but he couldn’t ignore the possibility that a coyote might want a piece of helpless bleeding Texas beef. He didn’t know how closely he might be watched, but he doubted whether his captors would hurry to his rescue if a coyote wanted to worry him a little bit. They might come to enjoy the show.
Zachary shied away as a muzzle touched his head, snuffed, and retreated. Suddenly a voice came into his head, this time not his father’s, with advice on handling torture. It was a wholly different memory.
“Un per, mon petit,” the rough, elderly voice said. “Pour du.”
“Merci, Grandpere,” Zachary said hoarsely, not realizing he spoke out loud. Suddenly something else touched his head, very softly. Zachary made the effort to open his eyes. A pretty, dark girl knelt beside him. She smiled.
“Je secour vous,” she said in a whisper. And she was gone, replaced momentarily by a man with a bandage wrapped crazily around his head, who carried a jar of salve and tried to tend some of his wounds. Zachary thought he might be delirious, but there was no mistaking that jar and its contents. Someone who carried around Mammy’s salve was no interrogator of Chaco’s. Besides, he looked familiar. Zachary couldn’t shake the thought that he knew him from somewhere.
“You know English?” Zachary whispered. The man nodded vigorously. “Can you get a message out?” The man hesitated and shrugged. “Maybe’s better than my chances. Okay, how’s your Spanish?” the man winced. “Oh, maybe about as good as mine. Well, I heard Chaco say dia de San Mateo, and Monterrey. I think that means he’s meeting Ampudio on Saint Matthew’s day in Monterrey. Try and tell somebody, will you?” The strange man nodded and vanished.
“Zach should be free soon,” John whispered to Maeve as she came by the cart to pretend to arrange his covers. She had parked the cart in the shade of some planks of wood laid over a storage pit with adobe walls. “The others are going into the fort this afternoon to get him out.”
“Trouble is,” Ham murmured, lounging by, “he’s not at the fort we saw on the map. He’s here.”
“What?” Maeve gasped. “Mia said the old fort. That’s where I thought he would be.”
“Mexico’s full of old forts,” Ham shrugged. “Angelita found him. Actually Hermes found him and led Angelita there. I got Zach’s old gun strap from Pere Duvall in case I had a chance to use Hermes to sniff him out. He had a snootful of Zachary and went pretty much straight to him. And Angelita led me there. He’s right down below us in this storage pit. Hermosa doesn’t even begin to describe it. He’s pretty as a girl, is your baby cousin, John Duvall. I’d’ve given him a kiss for you, Maeve, but there’s not an unbroken inch of skin on his face. I wondered why Chaco hadn’t posted any guards. Doesn’t look like he needs guarding. He’s in bad shape.” Maeve choked back a sob and John clenched his fists. Ham looked around.
“The rescue party’s probably fifteen or twenty miles away not rescuing him right now. I don’t like his color one bit. They’ve been banging him in the sides with a gun butt and he’s hurt. We are going to have to get him out of here before they get back to their tender caresses. He won’t last the night if they do. And he’s got the last piece of intel we need to have the whole picture, I think, and he’s desperate to accomplish his mission and get it out, even if he doesn’t get out with it. That boy’s smart, and he’s determined to get the job done. Let’s figure out how to help him.”
Soon the sun was setting and Chaco’s men were stirring from siesta as Maeve and Angelita prepared tortillas, beans, rice and chicken on the grill. John lay in Mia’s small cart. Ham kept everyone entertained with his Herve antics. He slipped past Maeve one time to report that he had found the building where the guns were stored and, mercifully, the cart would be out of sight while the men were working. Finally the men left them alone to clean up and got to work carrying boxes to the buckboard and Chaco’s big wagon.
Maeve grabbed the blanket and some ropes from the cart. John slithered out of the cart and the three of them slipped inside Zachary’s prison. Inside they found Zachary lying in a crumpled heap on sand rusty with blood. John produced a set of lockpicking tools and quickly had the shackles off. They looked up and saw Ham carefully widening a gap in the adobe wall. They made a stretcher of the blanket and poles they had secretly cut that afternoon and hidden in the wagon under John’s blanket. Zachary didn’t even grunt when they rolled him onto the blanket. Ham helped as they began to draw Zachary slowly up out of the pit.
Ham refrained from saying anything about “dead weight” to John while they strained to raise his cousin, but he anxiously checked Zachary while they rested with him before moving him to the wagon. Ham climbed the neighboring roof, hand over hand on a rope coiled around his waist and thrown over a corner of the roof, to check on the men loading the guns. He was alarmed to find them
turning the wagons back toward the area where they had eaten. He hooted and started to slide down his rope to the ground.
Suddenly a rumbling sound filled the air and Maeve, John and Angelita looked up in horror as the wall upon which Ham had stood crumbled into a pile of adobe brick and Ham disappeared. Chaco and his men came running, surveyed the destruction, and laughed heartily. John crouched out of sight around the corner, Zachary lay buried in the blanket, and Ham was still nowhere to be seen.
“Where’s your stupid brother?” Chaco demanded as the buckboard and wagon pulled up and he hopped onto the seat of the first vehicle.
“He had to relieve himself, Chaco,” Maeve said with a helpless shrug. “We’ll be right behind you.”
“Hurry up,” Chaco snarled, chucking up the horses and pulling out. The two larger wagons rumbled away.
“Stay with Zachary,” Maeve ordered Angelita. She and John dashed to the pile of bricks. “Ham! Oh, Ham! Where are you?” Maeve whispered desperately, afraid Chaco might still be within earshot. Ham sat up suddenly, looking dazed and holding his head.
“Ow,” he said. “Uh, here.”
“Merciful God!” John breathed. “Ham, can you feel your leg? Can you move it?” He strained frantically at the pillar of ruined wall Ham sat behind. Maeve clutched at Ham, trying to pull his head down into her lap.
“Lie back down, Ham,” she ordered.
“I can’t budge it,” John groaned.
“What? Oh, my leg,” Ham said. He pulled on his thigh experimentally. “Nope. It’s there to stay. I’m willing to bet it’s crushed, in fact. Ow, my head. Poor Timmy.”
“He’s in shock,” Maeve said.
“Look, Maeve, as nice as this pillow is, we’ve got to get going. Give me your knife, John. Mine’s under the rubble somewhere with poor Timmy.” Ham pulled John’s knife out of his belt and sawed away at his trapped pantleg. “Maeve, couldn’t you make yourself useful and wipe the blood out of my eyes?”
“Ham, what are you doing?” Maeve tried to do as he said, using Herve’s bandage, then gasped, horrified as Ham dug deeper into the shadows in the bricks, stabbing and hacking savagely with the knife. He tossed aside a mangled piece of thick leather strap. Suddenly he heaved himself erect.
“You’ve – you’ve got an artificial leg?” John said faintly.
“I had one,” Ham said ruefully. “It’s more like kindling now. Poor Timmy,” he said again.
Maeve staggered up, staring at Ham. “It’s my opinion, madam,” he said brightly, “That my valet and your lady’s maid know more about us than we do about each other. Give me a shoulder, John. Hop, hop, hop to the cart.”
Angelita screamed and let out a flood of mixed Spanish and French when she saw Ham’s dangling pantleg. “I thought you said she was a mute,” John breathed.
“Angelita had some kind of bad illness, the same one her parents died of in New Orleans,” Ham explained. “But her hearing and her speech have gradually returned, not what they used to be, but she has some of both. Maeve just wasn’t around enough to know it, and I’d forgotten to tell her. She speaks Spanish and French, and I’ve taught her some Indian sign language, and we spent many a cozy evening translating your diary together, ma’am.”
Maeve stared at him, speechless. “You have to disappear now, John,” Ham said. “Zachary’s going to become the sick papacito in the bed and you’re going to high-tail it to where the others are not rescuing our boy and bring them to our rescue. And John – dia de San Mateo, Monterrey. That’s Zach’s intel, in case we don’t get to join you. But I hope he’ll get a chance to tell it himself.” John grabbed a water skin out of the cart, touched Zachary on the head briefly, and disappeared into the night.
“We’re taking Zachary back to town?” Maeve asked.
“Do we have a choice?” Ham asked. “Business as usual. That’s the game we have to play now. Otherwise we try to run I know not where and Chaco hunts us down and we all die horribly, possibly after telling things we must not tell. And he’ll be on us soon if we don’t move.” He swung himself up into the cart beside Zachary. “I hope for his sake especially that the cavalry comes soon. Boy looks like a tallow candle. Drive on, Maeve.”
A little while later Angelita nodded and slept against Maeve’s shoulder. “What did happen to your leg, Ham?” she asked softly. “Your real one, I mean? You lost it at San Jacinto?”
“Actually, I lost it at Goliad,” Ham sighed. “I just didn’t know it at the time. That story I told at the ladies’ luncheon was my own. I was shot with the others, just in the leg, escaped as I said, hid as I said. Dan was in the group our Angel of Goliad managed to rescue. He found me, got me to a doctor, whom I promptly bribed to say I was fit to go to San Jacinto. It didn’t seem like that much of a wound. I was twenty-five. Infection, gangrene -- those words had no meaning for me. Dan and I scouted for Houston. You know how everyone couldn’t believe that Houston would just charge across an open field into Santa Ana’s camp at San Jacinto. Well, he did it because Dan and I told him that Santa Ana believed we were pinned down, helpless, and was giving his men a rest.
“We were also supposed to be the ones who told him about the siesta with no sentries. Unfortunately, one lone Mexican soldier happened to wake up and take a poke at me with his bayonet. Dan dealt with him before anyone else woke up. The charge began before we could make it back and I watched the battle from under Dan’s shadow. Then Dan picked me up and carried me back to camp. Heaven knows how he did it, twice, mind you, but you know he was a great slab of beef like these Duvalls, and maybe poor little Ham was just a morsel for him to haul on his back to safety. At first I thought it was odd that the leg hardly bled, didn’t hurt. The doctor was very reassuring and I passed out long before he decided it had to come off. And when I woke up, it was gone.
“I was considered a genius at school, first in class in everything, war hero, so when a grateful nation presented me with a thing that resembled a jointed fence post and weighed more than I did and called it a leg I felt compelled to spend the next eight years and nearly every cent I had trying to make a real one. I thought I finally had it but I still couldn’t manage stairs and your Palacio Del Oro had so many steps just in that grand staircase. Finally I worked up Timmy Timbertoes, who could do anything but dance. When Grover drugged you after the concert he sent me out the back door knowing I’d take a tumble. Timmy was damaged and the knee joint locked in very much the wrong position. Walker was my repairman when Arthur couldn’t handle it. That time we were lucky Walker could handle it. We took quite a tumble.”
Maeve reached back a hand and touched his bandaged head. “Ham, you’re the bravest, smartest, gentlest, most magnificent man I never knew.”
“You forgot hermosa,” Ham said wryly, looking down at Zachary. “Oh, to be nineteen again.”
Maeve smiled. “When I came out of the bushes on that road you scooped me up in your arms like the biggest, strongest, most beautiful angel carrying me off to heaven. I thought you were stumbling into this just because you wanted to help me, but you’re the real spy, aren’t you? Ham, you have got to tell me the rest of this, how you knew to come for me, how you know so much about all this.”
Ham caught hold of Maeve’s fingers and kissed them, light and quick, and then let go. “Later. We’ve got to wake up the sleeping beauty,” he said. “Our boy, I mean, not poor little Angelita. He can’t play the bit if he doesn’t know his part. Zachary. Zachary Duvall. Hey! Hey!”
Zachary shielded his head and sobbed. “Milk and honey. Milk and honey!” Ham said in his ear. “Easy, boy. We’re friends. No more whips, no more banging on the ribcage, God willing. You hearing me, laddy?”
Zachary relaxed a little and looked up in bewilderment. “Miss Vienta,” he said stupidly. “I was worried about you.”
“A true gentleman,” Ham grunted. “Zach, attend me, even though I’m not beautiful in the moonlight.” Zachary shifted his gaze to Ham.
“Yes, sir, I’m listening,” he said in
a very normal-sounding voice.
“Good boy,” Ham grinned. “Actually, you are a man. Anybody tells you different, let me know and I’ll requisition somebody to straighten ‘em out.”
Zachary grinned back. “What are your orders, Captain?” he asked.
“Your assignment is to lie down and be sick,” Ham replied. “Keep yourself covered up, and try to look about six inches shorter. You are playing the role of your cousin John playing the role of Vienta’s father: senile, bedridden, likely to die any minute. You are to be kept in a darkened room, hopefully out of sight but possibly not out of earshot, so a sickly cough now and then would not be out of place.”
Zachary experimented a little with sickly coughs and they sounded too real for Ham and for Maeve. “My head’s hot,” he said in a low voice. “And something’s not right inside.”
“I know,” Ham said. “Your cousin John’s gone to bring rescuers, but we have to go back into the lion’s mouth and hope he doesn’t notice us there or the lion will come and eat us anyway.”
“You mean back to Chaco’s town,” Zachary supplied. “I get the picture. Say, Captain, I don’t know if you noticed, but you’ve gone shy a leg since we last met.”
“Oh, well, everything can’t go just as planned,” Ham said. “And I’m still trying to come up with a way to keep Chaco from noticing that fact.”
“Oh, Ham I didn’t even think of that!” Maeve gasped. “You can’t go back to town.”
“How can I do anything else, Maeve?” Ham scoffed. “We now have one man who probably can’t get his two legs under him, two women, and one too smart for his own good one-legged real spy. We have the right number of bodies to impress Chaco that all is well, we just have to keep him from looking too closely at the particulars.”
Chasing the Texas Wind Page 13