"So that's the long and short of it," said Falconer, in conclusion. "Except for one thing. Eben and Sombra got married a couple days ago."
Eben breathlessly watched the faces of his colleagues, having wondered what their reaction to Falconer's revelations might be.
Rube Holly was the first to step forward. "I'm tinkled pink to make yore acquaintance, Mrs. Nall," he told Sombra. "But I got to say, with all us handsome devils to choose from, how come you went and picked this hyar unpleasant-lookin' feller to get hitched to? Ask me, he's purt near ugly as a mud fence."
The others laughed. Much relieved, Eben joined them.
To spare Sombra, Falconer had omitted a few details from his narrative, telling the men only that Don Carlos Chagres had been mistreating Sombra cruelly. Now Taggart stepped forward to take Rube Holly's place.
"Don't you go worryin' your pretty head, ma'am," said the mountain man earnestly. "If your father wants to get his hands on you again it'll be over our dead bodies."
The others nodded and murmured assent. Eben smiled. He recalled expressing that very sentiment to Sombra not too long ago. Sombra tried to smile too, but her heart wasn't in it. She knew her father very well, and she was afraid of exactly that—more dead bodies.
"One thing," said Falconer grimly. "Before we move on, you boys ought to give some careful thought to this. I broke my own law by helping Eben. I did it knowing full well that I was putting everybody's neck on the chopping block. I don't think Don Carlos will give up trying to get his daughter back, no matter what."
"What are you trying to say, Hugh?" asked Gus Jenkins.
"I'm saying I killed Doc Maguire for doing pretty much the same thing I did."
For one fantastic moment Jenkins thought Falconer was going to order his own execution.
"Let me put it to you boys this way," said Eben. "If you don't want Sombra and me along, we'll understand and go our own way, with no hard feelings."
"The three of us will go," corrected Falconer.
"Wagh!" exclaimed Rube Holly. "You reckon it would make a hair's difference to that feller Don Carlos if you three was with us or not? Way I see it, he'd try to put us all under ground, anyroad."
"Yeah," growled another. "And just let him try."
"You ain't goin' nowhere without us, Eben," declared Taggart.
All the other mountain men were in complete accord. Eben was so overwhelmed he dared not speak.
"As for you," Jenkins told Falconer, "there's a big difference between what you did and what Doc did, Hugh. He took a life. You did what you had to do to save one." He glanced at Sombra.
"We got a lot better chance of gettin' out of here with you than without you," added Rube Holly.
Falconer was silent a moment, a strange expression on his face. Eben could tell he was deeply moved. I think he's found what he came all this way to find, mused Eben, with a sudden, dazzling burst of insight into the man.
Finally Falconer nodded curtly and turned to his horse.
"Then let's ride, boys," he said. "We're burning daylight."
Chapter 37
Eben Nall closed his journal, tucked it away in his possibles bag, and rubbed his aching eyes.
It had surely been a long day. After rejoining the brigade, Falconer had led them west until they came upon a sizable stream. Here he had everyone except Gus Jenkins and the three squaws dismount. While Jenkins and his men took all the horses and continued east, Falconer and the rest waded upstream. He invited Sombra to remain mounted, but she would have none of it. They stayed in the creek all day. It was slow going, and especially difficult for Sombra, who was entirely unaccustomed to this kind of exertion. But she stuck to it without a word of complaint, doing her level best not to slow the others down. As his companions cast approving looks in her direction, Eben felt a sense of pride in her.
Falconer hoped that, if they were being chased, their pursuers would follow the horses east. It would take a tracker with sharp eyes and a lot to experience to tell that most of the horses were not carrying riders. Gus and the three squaws would split up an hour before dark, each with several riderless ponies in tow, and go off in all directions, to meet up at a prearranged point about sundown, then ride north to find the rest of the brigade as far as they had managed to walk upstream. Falconer hoped by this subterfuge to confuse their pursuers and, at the very least, slow them down.
Jenkins and the squaws rejoined the brigade several hours after nightfall. Falconer had everyone mount up and, keeping their horses in the creek, ride another few miles before stopping for the night. No fires were permitted, and no shooting game. A few fish had been harvested from the creek. These, and what little remained of the company's jerked venison, were the only food available. The Nez Perce warrior, Bluefeather, was fashioning a bow and a few arrows. They would be finished, he said, tomorrow.
Eben's thought turned to his brother, Silas. Falconer had informed him that Silas had gone missing along with Doc Maguire. Apparently he had not been involved in the murder of the prostitute. But what had become of him was anybody's guess. Eben figured Silas was probably laying low in Monterey, aware that in California it had suddenly become open season on all American buckskinners.
It bothered Eben some to leave Silas behind like this. But there was nothing he could do about it. His foremost responsibility now was to Sombra. He had to take her to safety, beyond the reach of her father. Were it not for her, he would have felt obliged to return to Monterey and try to find Silas. His guilt was mitigated somewhat by the sure and certain knowledge that, were their situations reversed, Silas would have no qualms about leaving him to his own devices.
Brotherly love had nothing to do with it. During the journey to California, Eben had learned to dislike Silas with a passion. His brother was a selfish, conniving, untrustworthy person, loyal only to himself. Still, he was Eben's brother, and that fact, unfortunate though it had proved to be, was enough to nibble at the edges of his conscience.
The camp was asleep. Apart from the guards Falconer had posted, the rest of the brigade were asleep in their blankets. Everyone was plumb worn out. A dozen different snores made a rumbling chorus to compete with the crickets in the marsh grass down along the banks of the creek. Eben stretched out alongside Sombra and fell immediately to sleep.
He woke before dawn, vaguely troubled, momentarily disoriented, and realized he had been dreaming. Don Carlos had been there in his dream, standing on a windswept skyline with a bloody red sun ablaze behind him and a struggling Sombra in his grasp. The haciendero was laughing, and the laughter seemed to linger, a faint echo, in Eben's head, even though he was awake. Remo was there too, his features inscrutable as he put a pistol to the head of a man kneeling on the ground. Eben had been able to see only the back of the victim's head in his dream. But he knew the identity of the man about to die . . .
Sombra was gone.
In his panic Eben leaped to his feet. His first instinct was to rouse the sleeping camp with a shout of alarm. But perhaps she had merely gone down to the creek for a drink. He looked for her there, but found Taggart instead.
"She's upstream a ways, by those trees yonder," said Taggart, rifle cradled in his arms, answering Eben's question before Eben could even speak. "Said she wanted to freshen up, so I wandered on over here to give her a little privacy. Don't worry, hoss. She promised not to go far."
"Thanks." Eben ran to the clump of trees, where the creek bent. He found the dress she had been wearing since the mass almost a week ago. Now it was draped over a low-lying limb. It was pretty tattered, after all they had been through. When he got the chance he would kill a deer and have Luck make her a buckskin dress. He figured she would look pretty good in buckskin.
As he turned he saw her emerging from the creek. He looked quickly away, embarrassed.
"Sorry," he mumbled. "Didn't mean to intrude."
"Don't you want me?" She stood before him, her willowy body glistening in the starlight.
"Yes." He tried not to cho
ke on the lump in his throat.
"We are married."
"Yes, but, well, this doesn't strike me as the time or the place."
She curled her arms around his neck and pressed her body against his. "Make love to me, Eben. Here. Now. Please. Who knows what might happen to us tomorrow?"
Eben glanced nervously around. What if Taggart or one of the other guards, prowling the perimeter of the camp, saw them like this? He thought about Rube Holly and Luck, fooling around under their blankets, blissfully undeterred by the fact that Eben had never been more than a stone's throw away. Eben had a young man's strong desires, but of that sort of thing he was not capable.
"I-I just thought . . ." He stumbled over the words. "After what your father's done to you and all . . ."
"Help me forget," she said, and kissed him, a lingering kiss. Eben's deeply ingrained caution was swept away by a rising ride of passion. She pulled him down to the ground, on top of her. Her fingers worked feverishly at the fastenings of his buckskins. Eben forgot about everything else—the guards, Don Carlos, Remo, Silas, California, everything. A moment later they lay flesh to burning flesh, heart to racing heart, and she locked her arms and legs tightly around him, holding him a willing captive inside her, and her soft cries were sweet music to his ears.
Later, their passion spent, they lay beneath the trees, curled up together, lying on their sides, back to front. Eben's strong arms were wrapped around her, and his face nestled in her still-wet hair. He felt a contentment more complete than he had ever experienced.
"I love you more than I can say, Eben," she whispered dreamily. "We must never be parted. I think I would die."
Eben felt desire stirring in his loins again, and she laughed with gentle delight, but then they heard Rube Holly, just beyond the trees, calling Eben's name, and reality came crashing down upon them. Dawn traced the eastern horizon with pale yellow highlights. The brigade was breaking camp.
They dressed in a hurry and made their way through the trees, meeting Rube Holly on the other side. The concern on the old trapper's grizzled features drained away, replaced by relief, then by amusement, as he recognized the look on Sombra's radiant face.
"Now just what have you two younkers been up to back in them there bushes?" he asked, smiling.
Wearing a foolish grin that said it all, Eben just shook his head and walked on by, hand in hand with Sombra.
The beating Silas Nall had suffered at the hands of Don Carlos Chagres's vaqueros had been designed to mold him through physical intimidation into a more malleable traitor to his own kind. It had also done Don Carlos some good to watch an American suffer so, even if it wasn't Eben Nall. The vaqueros had enjoyed taking their frustrations out on the Yankee because their patrón had been giving them hell every day since Sombra's disappearance.
But the exercise had failed to work its painful magic on Silas—it just served to make him more determined to doublecross Don Carlos. Somehow, some way. Because Silas Nall was not without his ego, and ego's handmaiden, pride. He had been thinking along the lines of turning the tables on Chagres—until he had witnessed the murder of Padre Pico.
That had scared him. As Don Carlos methodically turned the priest's skull into a bloody pulp, the resolve drained out of Silas, leaving him an empty, trembling shell of a man. Never in his life had he seen anything so coldblooded, so brutal, so . . . so inhuman. From that moment he was terrified of Don Carlos and willing to do anything Chagres asked of him, if it meant escaping, even if only temporarily, the fate of the priest.
Silas became only gradually aware of the effect the murder of Padre Pico had on the men who rode for Chagres. The vaqueros who had, like Silas, been stunned witnesses to the deed, spread the word among their companeros. They were fiercely loyal to their patrón, but to the man they were also good Catholics, if not always devout ones. They had done bad things at the bidding of Don Carlos; they had burned, looted, brutalized, and terrorized. Some of them had even raped and killed in the name of their patrón, and with his blessing. But they agreed among themselves that they had never done anything so evil as to kill a priest. That was something Gaviota might have done, without compunction, but none of them had liked Gaviota anyway, as most men naturally hate what they most fear. Gaviota had been without a soul. The vaqueros believed that they had souls, and every one among them would have balked at killing a priest, even if the patrón had demanded it, for fear of what would happen to their everlasting souls should they commit such an unspeakable act. To their way of thinking a man could kill anyone but a priest and be absolved of the crime in God's eyes.
And so, on the following day, when six vaqueros rode out of Monterey behind Don Carlos, accompanied by Silas Nall, they found their loyalty to Chagres challenged for the first time in their lives. If Don Carlos sensed that something was wrong he did not reveal it.
In fact, Don Carlos was so consumed by his obsession for Sombra, and his rage at all Americans—Eben Nall in particular—that he failed to notice how unusually grim and subdued his men were on this day. He had no regrets for killing Padre Pico. He had long despised priests and everything they stood for. Had ever since his childhood. Priests, he was firmly convinced, were the most vile and hateful of creatures. They were rapacious, unprincipled predators who victimized the people and cowed their victims with the most powerful weapon at man's disposal—religion. They cloaked their greed and their lust behind a facade of righteousness.
Padre Pico had been a thorn in his side for many years, an outspoken opponent to his scheme to deal California's missions a death blow. Killing a priest, particularly Pico, didn't bother Don Carlos in the least. The nerve of that bastard to rebuke him for what he had done to his own daughter, which was nobody's business in the first place! No doubt, mused Don Carlos bitterly, Pico had done as much and even worse in his time. Certainly the priest Chagres had known as a child—and who had known Chagres in unnatural ways—had done much, much worse.
Just thinking about Sombra in the arms of that American, Eben Nall, made the haciendero's blood boil. If Padre Pico had thought for one minute that by marrying Sombra to that Yankee son of a bitch he had somehow thwarted me, he was sadly mistaken, Don Carlos thought. It would make no difference. Sombra would soon be a widow. She belonged to him, Don Carlos Chagres, and would never belong to anyone else. The image of Sombra's pale, willowy body haunted Don Carlos, made him ache with desire, as it had done for years, even before his wife's demise. In a world where priests raped and robbed their own followers, what could be wrong with a man's passion for his own daughter?
They rode west out of Monterey, to the site of the brigade's old camp, where Don Carlos had been once before, the day after Sombra's disappearance, in the company of Lieutenant Ramirez. The brigade's trail pointed north, but, to the surprise of Silas Nall, Don Carlos continued in an easterly direction, riding hard all day. By sundown men and horses were bottomed out. The next day was no different.
At the end of the second day they met Remo and thirty heavily armed vaqueros. Now Silas understood. He had wondered what had happened to Remo. Obviously Don Carlos had dispatched the man some days ago to Hacienda Gavilan, and now he was on his way back with every able-bodied man he had been able to get his hands on. They were a tough-looking bunch, too, thought Silas. All hell was going to break loose when they finally tangled with Falconer's brigade.
Now Don Carlos turned north. The next day they cut the trail of the brigade. Chagres and Remo parlayed for a while. Then the haciendero had Silas brought before him.
"How old is this trail?" asked Don Carlos.
"Couple days."
Chagres nodded. "That agrees with what Remo has told me. I am glad you did not lie."
Silas could not meet the man's eyes. The fear that had haunted his every waking moment since the murder of Padre Pico reached up and grabbed him by the throat. He hadn't even thought about lying. But, as he realized what Don Carlos might have done to him if he had, he almost lost control of his bladder.
"You know these men," said Don Carlos. He meant the trappers of the brigade. "You ride with them. You know their tricks. Lead me to them."
"Listen," said Silas, terrified at the prospect of failure. "Hugh Falconer is a legend among the mountain man. He's lived with the Shoshones, for God's sake. He knows more about this kind of thing than I ever will. Hell, I only spent one season in the high country before I came out. You can't expect me to . . ."
"Shut up," said Don Carlos, steely-eyed.
Silas shut up.
"No excuses. Remo will be watching you. Do not try to fool him to save your friends. And do not lose the trail."
Silas glanced at Remo. What was the haciendero's game, anyway? Remo could probably read sign as well, or better, than he. So why am I here? It had to be that Don Carlos had something else in mind for him when they caught up with the brigade. But what?
Whatever it was, Silas was sure he wasn't going to like it.
Chapter 38
The next day, about noon, Hugh Falconer called a halt in a stand of trees. The brigade had been pushing hard all morning, heading due north. So far they had seen no sign of pursuit. Not a single Californio had crossed their path. This part of the country appeared untouched by the human hand. But Eben Nall recalled having thought the same thing some weeks ago—just before being waylaid by three cutthroats, rescued by Remo and his companions, and hauled off to the hacienda of Don Carlos Chagres.
That wounded deer I chased all over God's creation sure changed my life, mused Eben, with a fond glance at Sombra.
The terrain itself was not much changed from that found in the vicinity of Don Carlos's feudal empire. Rolling hills, dotted with clumps of trees, golden valleys of wild oats and lush grass, plenty of creeks but no major rivers to cross. Game was plentiful, too, which was sheer torture for men who were short on provisions and under strict orders not to discharge their weapons. Falconer could tell his men were suffering, even though they suffered in stoic silence, as befit mountain men. He dispatched Blue Feather, the Nez Perce warrior, whose bow and arrows were finished, to bag some game. Though he had seen no evidence of it, Falconer was convinced they were being tracked. His instincts, honed by years of surviving by his wits in the mountains, told him so, and he had learned to listen to instinct.
Falconer's Law Page 24