They had his weapons, they had the deer he had slain—now all that was left was to decide what to do about him.
Grinning, the leader answered the query by drawing a finger across his throat.
Chapter 18
An inner voice, manufactured out of sheer terror, shrilled in Eben's head.
I'm going to die!
He had come all this way, endured so much to get here, and now he was going to die, right here, right now, and that was as certain as the turning of the earth.
And then another voice, grim and calm. Yes, you are going to die, so you should die fighting. That way, at least, when Hugh Falconer stood on this very spot and read the sign as other men might read a book, he would know that Eben Nall had not gone quietly.
The man with the knife was still looking at the leader—all of this had passed through Eben's mind before the leader was through with his throat-cutting gesture. Eben's left hand, clenched into a fist, came surging up to plow into the man's face and his right arm swept down to strike the knife away from his throat. The blade grazed Eben's collarbone. He hardly felt the wound. Grappling with the stunned Mexican, he managed to swing the man's body between him and the leader just as the latter's rifle discharged. At such close range the impact of the bullet, squarely in the chest, hurled the knife-wielding Mexican into Eben. Eben lost his balance and fell, with the dead weight of the Mexican on top of him. The leader yanked a pistol free of his belt, screaming something at Eben, his ugly face twisted with rage.
A rifle spoke.
Eben's body jerked involuntarily, in anticipation of the bullet.
But neither Mexican had fired. Eben watched, dumbfounded, as the leader toppled sideways, an expression of disbelief frozen on his face. Sprawled in the tall grass, his body arched in one terrible spasm. A guttural sound welled up in his throat and then ceased abruptly, and his body went limp as life deserted it.
It took a few seconds for what had happened to register in Eben's numbed brain.
Rube. It had to be Rube . . .
The last Mexican turned and ran, heading for the top of the hill. Eben felt the ground tremble beneath him. He shoved the dead man aside and rolled up on one knee—then fell back down, throwing up his arms to shield his head as a horse thundered by so close he could feel the wind of its passage. Two more horses galloped by, almost on top of him. Shaken, Eben looked after them. Three horsemen, riding the last Mexican down. They closed on him just as he reached the top of the hill. There he turned at bay, realizing the riders were upon him, and determined to face death. Several pistols, one in each rider's hand, spat flame and smoke. The Mexican crumpled, riddled with bullets.
Eben did not see what the three riders did next—another horse appeared above him, and he looked up to identify the rider, but the sun seemed to be perched on the horseman's shoulder, and it momentarily blinded Eben. He glimpsed a concho-studded saddle complete with mochilla and tapaderos, a leg encased in black pants with conchos along the outer seam. Big-roweled spurs jangled their music as the man dismounted, to sit lithely on his heels in front of Eben, reins in one hand, rifle in the other. Eben thought, There's the rifle that killed the leader.
"Buenos tardes, amigo. Como esta usted?"
Eben just stared, in the grip of an uncomprehending stupor.
The man smiled. He was young, about Eben's age. The fierce sweep of a black mustache that reached from one jawbone to the other gave his demeanor a rakish cast. His brown eyes were so dark they glittered like polished obsidian. He wore a short scarlet jacket embroidered with bold black swirls on the cuffs and lapels. A sombrero hung by a rawhide cheek strap down his back.
"Yankee?" he asked.
"What?"
He pointed at Eben. "Yankee?"
"Yes. American."
The man nodded. "English, I speak a little." He seemed quite proud of the fact. "You hurt?"
"No."
"Bueno. Muerte, almost."
"What?"
The man's brows knit together, then came unraveled. "Dead," he said, and smiled—a token smile, devoid of feeling.
"Yes," said Eben. "Almost dead." He began to shake, and couldn't stop.
The man stood and glanced at the crest of the hill. Eben looked that way too, just as the three horsemen reappeared from the opposite slope. Two of them were each leading a pair of saddle horses. The third was leading a man by a rope. The rope was tight around the man's chest and shoulders, pinning his arms to his sides. As they got closer Eben realized the prisoner was not a man at all, but rather a boy, maybe fourteen or fifteen years old. Lank black hair hung down over his forehead, behind which flashed scared eyes. The three horsemen were laughing and joking. Eben didn't have to know the language to know that much. Their carefree attitude troubled him. After all, they had just finished killing two men. Regardless of whether those men deserved killing, it was nothing to take so lightly. But apparently killing was old hat to these men.
When the trio of horsemen reached the spot where Eben stood with the Mexican in the scarlet jacket, the rider who had the boy in tow gathered up the rope, reeling in his prisoner as one would a fish hooked on a line. Some words passed between the rider and the Mexican standing with Eben. Then the horseman planted a booted foot between the boy's shoulder blades and gave him a hard shove. The boy sprawled in the grass at the foot of the Mexican in the scarlet chaqueta.
"Como se llama," said the latter.
"Arturo."
"Ladron," said the man in the scarlet jacket, using the tone of one who is correcting a child.
"No!" The boy shook his head emphatically. He cast desperate eyes in Eben's direction and spoke rapid-fire, and though Eben could not decipher a word of it, he could tell the boy was making an earnest plea.
The man in the scarlet jacket smiled another one of those meaningless smiles and shook his head. "He say he no want to kill you," he told Eben.
"He didn't try. I never saw him."
The man in the scarlet jacket looked at him with such impassivity that Eben had no clue what was going through his mind.
Then the man turned abruptly, slipping his rifle into a hard leather boot tied to the side of his saddle. When he turned back around, he had a pistol drawn. He put the pistol to the boy's temple. The boy fell to his knees with an anguished cry.
"Good God," said Eben, horrified.
His words were punctuated by the crack of the pistol.
The boy's lifeless body was flung violently sideways to the ground. His assassin belted the pistol and smiled at Eben. The smile turned Eben's blood cold.
"We go," said the man.
One of the horsemen leaned in his saddle to offer Eben the reins of one of the ponies he was leading. Eben dragged his gaze away from the corpse of the boy to the proffered reins and then to the face of the horseman. Outraged, he felt his anger thaw the paralysis that had gripped him. He surmised that the boy had been holding the horses of the three men who had waylaid him. That had been Arturo's only crime. Yet he had been executed. Shot down in cold blood, without even the chance to make his peace with God. It was the most brutal act Eben Nall had ever witnessed.
"You bastards," he muttered, then turned on the man garbed in the scarlet jacket, the one who was proud that he could speak a little English, and repeated himself, louder this time and with more feeling.
The boy's executioner froze, one foot fitted into a stirrup, one hand on the horn of his high-cantle saddle. He looked at Eben without a trace of emotion. Yet Eben sensed that he understood. This one is the most dangerous man I have ever met, thought Eben, because his eyes tell you nothing. They give no warning. It is impossible to know what he is thinking, or what he will do next.
"We go," repeated the man, and mounted up.
"I don't go," said Eben hotly. "I'm staying right here. I've got—"
He caught himself on the verge of telling them he had friends nearby. Would it be wise to tell them about the brigade? Who were these men, anyway? Where did they come from? All he knew
about them was that they had saved his life, but he didn't take it personally, feeling certain somehow that they had been hunting the three men and the boy and had not slain them because they had attacked him. And the fact that they had saved his life was cold comfort to Eben; they were cut from the same cloth as the three who had ambushed him. They had gunned down two of the robbers and laughed about the deed. They had executed a defenseless boy. And now they were going to leave the bodies to the buzzards. Eben didn't feel at all like a man who had just been rescued.
The one in the scarlet jacket sat his horse, watching Eben, and Eben could tell he really had no choice in the matter. They wanted him to go with them, and that was precisely what he was going to do, willingly or otherwise.
Eben scanned the skyline, wondering what had become of Rube Holly. He had a feeling the old-timer was close by. Or maybe it was simply wishful thinking. Resigned to his fate, he retrieved his Kentucky rifle—moving slowly and with circumspection, careful not to make any sudden moves that might be construed as threatening. He didn't want to give these men another corpse to joke about. Mounting the horse that was offered him, he nodded at the man wearing the scarlet jacket, who spun his pony around and raked those bigroweled spurs to provoke the animal into a gallop. Eben and the others followed.
Chapter 19
It was called Hacienda Gavilan.
Eben Nall had never seen anything like the place in all his born days. Having ridden for hours across wild, beautiful country seemingly untouched by human hands, he reached the crest of a hill and looked down upon an amber plain stretching to a distant blue line of ridges, and there it was, hard by a sparkling river that wound its serpentine way across the plain. Speckling the plain were cattle—hundreds, maybe thousands, of head—but Eben paid them little attention compared to the time he spent gazing in rapt fascination at the hacienda itself.
The main house was a square two-story structure, built around a courtyard large enough to hold a hundred horses with room to spare. Its adobe walls, Eben would learn, were three feet thick, impervious to bullets or arrows or fire—impervious to anything, in fact, except the blast of a sizable cannon. In essence it was a fortress, the heavy shutters on its narrow windows crosshatched with gun ports, while its doors were made of solid mountain-mahogany timbers, reinforced with strap iron. The lower level's windows also sported grills of iron elaborately wrought. Four massive chimneys, one on each side of the house, pierced a roof of red clay tiles.
Around the main house were dozens of other buildings and a number of pole corrals. Encircling all of this was a mudbrick wall. In places the wall stood ten feet high, in other places half that. A great arch marked the main entrance into the compound, access that could be denied by a pair of gates fashioned from squared timbers more than a foot in thickness. Above the gate, secured to the arch, was a set of cow horns spanning nearly ten feet. Eben found it hard to envision the cow that had once worn such headgear.
As Eben and his escort approached the gate, a solitary rider exploded out of the compound on a stretched-out bay horse. He did not check his pony until almost upon them; then he pulled rein so hard the horse sat down on its haunches. The man was dressed in the same manner as Eben's four companions; he was clad in terra-cotta buckskin chaqueta, white muslin shirt, and a bright blue neckerchief, and he wore heavy cowhide leggings over his trousers. A sombrero hung down his back by its chin strap. Big spurs jingled against his boot heels. A gaily colored serape was draped over the back of his saddle. He spoke to the man in the scarlet jacket a moment, and his bright, inquisitive eyes kept flicking over to Eben. His unkempt black locks and angular brown features gave him a wild look. Then, abruptly, he spun the responsive pony around and thundered back to the hacienda, shouting to the collection of men, women, and children now gathered in the vicinity of the gate.
As they passed through the gate, Eben studied the crowd assembled there with every bit as much curiosity as they examined him. The women were clad in calico dresses and blue cotton rebozos. The children wore white muslin shirts and trousers or dresses, if they wore anything at all, and every one of them was barefoot. The men fell into two distinctly different categories. There were those clad in a style akin to that affected by Eben's companions, while the rest wore white shirts and trousers and straw hats, sometimes with a serape draped over a shoulder.
As they crossed the hardpack to the main house, Eben tried to take in everything around him. Over there was a blacksmith at his forge. Stripes of sunlight coming through the pole roof of the ramada lay across sweat-glistening shoulders rippling with muscles as the smitty wielded a heavy mallet to shape a piece of red-hot iron clasped in the jaws of a pair of tongs. Over here, an old woman sat in a ribbon of blue shade beside a doorway. Her face was creased with countless seams, as brown as old leather. She deftly rolled a cornhusk cigarette with one hand while her eyes followed Eben riding by. Next to her lay an old white bulldog, stirring itself only to nip at pestering flies. Over there, children played stickball, screaming in delight; they froze in place as Eben passed, falling silent. Then they leaped into action again. Beyond the big house stood a structure that Eben recognized as a small church when the bells in its squat tower suddenly began to chime, competing with the rhythmic ringing of the blacksmith's mallet. Up on pole parapets located at strategic points along the wall, men stood gazing watchfully out across the plain. Between the wall and the river—a stretch where the wall was low enough to see over from the vantage point of a horse's back—men in white labored in irrigated fields where corn, beans, and potatoes flourished. Over in a pole corral, young men were busting broncos in a swirl of dun-colored dust.
Eben realized this was much more than just a ranch. It was a self-sufficient community, an outpost of civilization in the wilderness. At first glance he estimated at least a hundred residents. It was all wondrous and intriguingly foreign to him, and for a moment he forgot that he was, in effect, the captive of a band of cold-blooded killers.
As they neared the big house, Eben saw a man emerge from a door on the second floor, stepping out onto a balcony of wrought iron. He was tall and square-shouldered, with black hair streaked at the temples with silver and brushed straight back, curling long at the shoulders, forming a widow's peak in front. Long side-whiskers framed a strong, chiseled face. He wore a white ruffled shirt and yellow doeskin trousers. A scarlet kerchief fluttered at his throat. There was no doubt in Eben's mind that this man was the lord and master of all he surveyed—the aura of power and majesty invested in him was apparent to anyone with eyes to see.
As Eben's four companions checked their horses below the balcony, all of them doffed their sombreros out of respect for the man above them. Eben was bareheaded, but had he owned a hat he would have followed suit—it seemed a natural thing to do in this man's presence.
"Buenos tardes, Patrón," said the man in the scarlet jacket.
"Remo, quien esta hombre?"
As he spoke, the man on the balcony pointed to Eben. It was natural to assume he was asking for the identity of the stranger, so Eben took it upon himself to speak up.
"My name is Eben Nall," he said. "I'm an American."
The man on the balcony cocked an eyebrow. "Indeed. My name is Don Carlos Chagres. An American, eh? What, may I ask, are you doing in California?"
"I was hunting. Minding my own business, when three men attacked me. They were going to cut my throat, and then these men showed up and shot them down."
"I see." Chagres glanced at the man in the scarlet jacket. "Es verdad, Remo?"
"Si, Patrón."
"Who were these men?"
"They were the thieves who have been stealing our horses and cattle. The ones you ordered us to find."
"Good." Chagres turned his attention back to Eben, switching to English, which he spoke with impressive fluency. "I am very happy that my vaqueros arrived in time to save your life, Señor Nall."
"This man," said Eben, pointing to Remo, "killed a boy in cold blood. The boy could no
t have been more than fifteen years old. He was unarmed and had done nothing wrong."
Chagres raised his brows at Remo. "Did you kill an innocent boy in cold blood, Remo?"
"He was one of them, Patrón. Those were your orders."
"He was a thief, like the others, Señor Nall."
"He had no chance. He begged for mercy."
"Obviously, then, he was not yet a man. Perhaps my vaqueros should have set him free. Then he could have stolen our livestock for several more years, until he was old enough to kill."
Eben glanced at Remo. Remo was watching him, his eyes as blank as a doll's stare, a hint of a smile on his lips, and Eben realized that while Remo was indisputably a cold-blooded killer, he was no more so that Don Carlos Chagres. Maybe, thought Eben, I should just let the matter drop and be thankful for my life.
"I'm grateful to your men for saving me," Eben told Chagres. "It is just that the boy's death . . . bothers me. In my country, every man has a right to a fair trial before he is judged."
"Ah, but this is not your country, is it? Which brings us back to you, Señor. What are you doing so far from home?"
Eben didn't know what to say. He was reluctant to tell Chagres about the brigade, not knowing how the man would respond to the news. What if he dispatched Remo and a host of vaqueros to deal with his companions in the same way they had dealt with the thieves? No doubt the brigade would give a better accounting of itself than the cutthroats had done. But Falconer had said in no uncertain terms that he did not want to start a war, and Eben wasn't about to start one.
But, with the truth unavailable to him, Eben was at a loss to explain his presence. If only I could lie like Silas, he thought. Eben was sure his brother, if placed in this situation, would have deftly fabricated some entirely plausible falsehood without missing a beat. By his silence Eben knew he appeared to be hiding something. Chagres obviously thought so.
"I am a poor host," said Don Carlos. "You must be very tired after your ordeal. Come, you are welcome in my house." Switching to Spanish, he said, "Remo, show our guest in."
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