Río Chama, page 11
Archie looked tired and old. “‘If they live.’” He sighed heavily. “Like you say, Roman Cole isn’t paying me to fetch home Jeremiah’s corpse. Reckon I’ll follow them into the cañon. Chama Cañon’s not the Río Grande Gorge.”
“Nor is it a stroll across the Santa Fe plaza,” I warned him, and pointed at my busted leg. “I can’t go through that cañon with you, though. Wish I could.”
“I know, Colonel. I wish you could, too.”
Archie told two of his riders, Tom Oliver and Matt Denton, to get me to a doctor in Abiquiu, then see to it that we got back to Chama, to tell the senator what had happened. Tom Oliver, however, allowed that he would ride into the cañon with Archie, so another cowboy—whose name I disremember—took Oliver’s place as one of my nursemaids.
Now I must draw to quick conclusion this ignominious episode of my life. My dear reader might have heard or read other accounts, most based on the imagination (or lack thereof) belonging to some no-account writer churning out blood-and-thunders who never laid eyes on the Southern Rockies.
Yes, there is more to this story, as I have always been bound to my word, and my word had been given to Roman Cole. We retrieved my Hawken and revolver, and buried Dan Augustine, the cowboy called Buttons, and Andy O’Neill. Some men, gutless wonders that they were, quit us for the comforts of the Abiquiu saloons, and I was relieved to see them go.
Often, though, I wish I had quit, too, for the events I later witnessed haunt me still, especially when I recall the despicable act a man I had trusted and called a friend did ask, nay, ORDER, me to do.
That is all I will say on this subject.
Chapter Thirteen
It took them a day to reach the Chama.
They galloped north along the road before turning off into a narrow cañon cut by a long-dry river, following it as far as they could, then beginning the tortuous climb, forging a path through junipers and boulders, eventually camping that evening atop a mesa, Clint Paden staying near the horses, and Britton Wade heading into the rocks with his books, both men sleeping hard, heavily, exhausted from what they had done that day, and knowing what faced them over the coming week.
Rest revitalized Clint Paden, for he was chatting at first light, jovial as they continued up, down, and around the mesas, jumping narrow chasms, winding through a forest of boulders, moving through the high-walled country.
“You sure you know where you’re going?” Paden asked.
Rubbing his shoulder, Wade didn’t answer.
“I thought you said you’d never been in Chama Cañon before.”
“That’s what I said.”
“So how come you know so much about it?”
“You knew a lot about it. You knew about Dead Man’s Peak and Mesa de las Viejas.”
“Yeah, but I’d just heard about ’em places. You knew where to tell Stew and Randy to meet up with us.” He leaned to massage his right leg, wrapped tight with a bandanna just above his boot top. “I think you’re holdin’ back on me, pard.”
Wade reined in the buckskin, stood in the stirrups, staring ahead at a vast emptiness, beautiful but daunting, humbling.
“I don’t even see no river,” Paden said. “Maybe what you’re holdin’ back is the fact that you’re lost, that you don’t know nary a thing about this country. I think . . .” A gust of wind silenced him.
Wade had to hold his hat to keep it from being swept into a patch of cholla. When the breeze died down, Wade spoke. “You wish you had stayed behind with the others?” He didn’t wait for an answer. Leaning back in the saddle, Wade gave the buckskin plenty of rein, letting the horse pick its own path down the rocky ground. Loose stones tumbled, but the horse kept its footing. So did the chestnut Paden rode.
“I’ll tell you this, Brit.” Paden combed his tangled hair with his fingers. “I’d like to be in my own shirt, wearing my hat. I never should have let you talk me into that harebrained scheme.”
“It worked.”
“Yeah, it worked, but Cole’s shirt itches like it’s chockfull of graybacks.” He reached inside his shirt, scratching furiously. “And I feel naked without my hat. This sun’ll bake you blind. If the wind don’t blow your eyes out first.”
“Now you know how Jeremiah Cole feels. He hasn’t worn a hat since we left Santa Fe.”
Paden quit scratching. “And I don’t like him wearing mine, even if your idea got us out of that jam. That hat’s new. Cost me two whole dollars. The lady at the mercantile in Magdalena said it’s called The Governor, and I thought that would be just fine, maybe folks would call me governor. Governor Clint Paden. It’s got a nice sound to it, don’t you think?”
Wade found a piece of jerky, took a bite, handed the rest to Paden. The dried beef didn’t shut him up.
“A man should better himself, pard.” Paden kept talking, Wade thought, to keep his mind off that hole in his leg. “That’s why I joined up with you. Oh, not at first, I mean, ’cause when we lit out after you from Española with ’em other fellows, that was just something to do, something fun, something different. But that reward, whoo-wee, I could make my pile at last. Start fresh. I’d have more to me than a hat with a big name to it. I’d be able to put this life I been livin’ behind me.”
Wade washed down the jerky with a sip of water. “You know how many men I arrested who sang that same tune?” He put the stopper back in the canteen, and hung it from the saddle horn.
“At least one.” Paden grinned. “Me!”
“You think your share of one hundred and fifty dollars will buy you a new life?”
Paden rested his hand on his Bulldog. Wade let his right hand fall on the .44’s butt.
“Well, I been thinking,” Paden said, deliberately thickening his drawl, “there might be some other rewards.”
“I wish you wouldn’t think that, Clint. I’d hate to kill you.”
“It would be a plum shame, I admit. You’re killing me. And it would break my heart, a little bit, if I had to kill you. But it is a temptation . . . Roman Cole’s money.”
“Like I said, the senator would pay you off in lead.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“Then why didn’t you let that gunman shoot me in the back?”
Chuckling, Paden put both hands on the reins. “That bothers you, don’t it? You a gambler and all, you want to be able to read the fellow sitting across from you at the poker table. Only you just can’t peg Clint Paden, can you? I told you yesterday, it would have made me sick, letting you get done in that way.” He pushed wet bangs off his forehead. “Damn, I miss my hat.”
“We’ll get you back to your hat.”
“Well, it ain’t the hat that truly worries me.”
“Can you walk?” Wade pointed at Paden’s wounded leg.
“Bullet went clean through. Didn’t hit no bone. Think it was a confounded ricochet, curse my luck.” He rubbed the leg, before swinging from the saddle, gripping the horn, and leaning against the chestnut for support. “Yeah, I can walk. Long as it ain’t too far.”
Wade eased off his mount, and they led their horses through a slot cañon, its red and yellow walls high, barely enough room for them to move through the path of eroded Zs and Ss.
“We’ll catch up,” Wade said.
“I ain’t rightly sure I can trust Stew and Randy. Leaving our prisoner alone with ’em was risky.”
“You picked them as partners.”
“Well, it was more like they picked me. Randy ain’t too bright, but Stew, he can be devilish. Devious. And greedy.”
“They’re both killers,” Wade said, adding, before Paden could say the same thing: “I’d know.”
“Yeah.”
They made it to the other side, staring at more rocks, more cholla, snakeweed, and sagebrush, and another hill to climb.
“Randy and Stew can’t turn back.” Wade spoke with a false confidence. “Someone in Stone’s posse’s sure to follow us into the cañon. There’s nowhere to go but north.”
Paden nodded. He checked the cinch, then mounted, grimacing as pain raced up his leg. “Sure, but there’s the girl to think of. I don’t like her being left alone with Stew. Or Randy.”
Wade swallowed. He hadn’t thought of her. Swearing softly, he mounted the horse, kicked it into a trot up the hill.
“Figured I’d be in the Army by now, on my way to help the Cubans,” Paden said when they reached the top. “Whip the tar out of ’em Spaniards.”
“It’s not exactly where I thought I’d be, either.” Wade shook his head. “This might strike you as funny, but this isn’t the life I had chosen for myself when I was a kid.”
With a laugh, Paden pulled up alongside the buckskin. “No? What was you gonna be? A doctor? A schoolmarm?”
Wade didn’t answer. He looked around, trying to find an easy way down.
“It might strike you as funny,” he heard Paden saying, “but this ain’t exactly what I had planned for myself, either.”
“What did you want to be?”
Paden shrugged. “It ain’t what I wanted to be. More like it’s what I didn’t want to become. Memphis wasn’t nothing short of hell.”
“Never been there.” Wade wondered why he had become so talkative, almost as windy as Paden. “But I always figured it would be a charming city on the river and all.”
“Charming?” Paden sniggered. “You never lived through a yellow fever outbreak. Seemed like we had one every year when I was a kid. Wasn’t even a city, lost its charter when I was ten or so. I hear it’s gotten better of late, but it was rough back then.”
“Baltimore wasn’t much better,” Wade admitted.
“That where you come from?”
He nodded.
“Huh. I had you pegged as hailing from some place farther south. Anyway, like I was saying, I just wanted to get out of Memphis, so as I wouldn’t become one of ’em riverboat swine that come calling on my mama, or those sons-of-bitches she worked for.” The smile hardened into a bitter frown. “That’s why I had to shoot that fellow before he killed you. Had I let him gun you down like that, Brit, well, hell, then I would have become one of the vermin I swore I’d never turn into.”
The words sank in. The wind blew harder, and Wade stared at Clint Paden, not speaking. What could he say to that?
Paden spoke softly, pointing: “How about that way?”
“Good as any.” Wade dismounted. “But let’s walk them down, if your leg won’t vex you.” He swung his arm out. “See the light green down below?”
“Uhn-huh. Cottonwoods. They think it’s spring, even if the wind don’t.”
“Right. That’s the river.”
They led the horses down the hill, hoofs and boots kicking up dust, starting a small rock slide, then landed on a ledge. Thirty minutes later, they could see the winding river, and the vast, forested land, more valley here than actual cañon. Yellow walls rose in the distance, covered with dense vegetation, and behind those popped the curved peaks of mountain tops.
“Which one’s Dead Man’s Peak?” Wade asked as he mounted his horse.
“I think we’re standing on it,” Paden joked.
Wade had to laugh at that, before kicking the buckskin, now hesitant, down the rocky slope.
* * * * *
“Some road you chose for us,” Paden said.
Fifty feet below ran the muddy Chama, the roar of the rapids almost drowning out the cold wind. The opposite bank looked practically impenetrable with brush.
“People have been using this river as a road for ten thousand years,” Wade said.
“So you say.”
“We’re not riding in the river. We’re riding with it.”
“All the way to Chama?” Paden’s head shook doubtfully.
“No.” Wade studied the wide valley, trying to spot a landmark. Nothing he could recognize. He withdrew the telescope he had stolen from Zech Stone, looked upstream, then down, decided to take a guess, and turned the buckskin downstream, closing the telescope and returning it to the Gladstone. “We can’t follow the river to Chama.”
“I thought that was your plan.”
“It was. If no one found us. Stone found us.”
“Reckon he’ll follow us?”
“Stone can’t. Not with his leg busted. But someone will, sure as hell. And Senator Cole will be waiting for us at the far side. Or riding down to meet us.”
“So what’s your plan now, pard?”
“We follow the river upstream, then find a way out of the cañon, pick another way to the jail in T.A. or Chama. But first, we rendezvous with the rest of our partners, and our prisoner.”
They rode another mile before Wade stopped, dismounted, opened the Gladstone, and withdrew The Man in the Iron Mask.
“Let’s rest our horses. They’ve had a rough go of things lately. So have you. Want me to look at that leg?”
Paden shook his head. “You and your books.” He stared at the river below, and dropped from the saddle. “That’s a lot of river.”
“You won’t go thirsty.”
“I don’t know about that. I’ve felt mighty thirsty since we polished off your rye.” Sighing, wrapping the reins around his left hand, he sank onto the ground, letting his boots drop over the ledge, watching the Río Chama rumble around the bend.
* * * * *
The river twisted, turned, forming islands and oxbows, red cliffs jutting into the graying skies between the riders along the ledge, and the Chama.
“This river’s a lot like you, Brit,” Paden said brightly, pointing to calm brown water. “Peaceful one minute, then roaring like Beelzebub himself the next.”
Wade hadn’t been listening. He figured he had guessed wrong, that Stew, Randy, Cole, and the girl were somewhere upstream, and was about to turn around, head back up the river, deeper into the cañon, when Paden urgently reined the gelding to a stop, and leaned forward in the saddle, listening, right hand on the rifle, pulling the Marlin from the scabbard.
“You hear that?” Paden asked in a fierce whisper.
The chestnut snorted. Wind. River. Chirping birds. Then, the soft pop of a rifle.
“Damn,” Wade said, and kicked the buckskin into a lope.
Chapter Fourteen
What she wanted most was a bath.
They rode close to the Chama River, already running hard and high, but those calm pockets here and there looked so inviting, even in the cold wind, beckoning her to wash off that trail dirt, to baptize her again. Only, Fenella Magauran knew she could never be truly clean, and the Chama wasn’t exactly holy water. She knew that from washing her clothes in the town of Chama, where the clay and silt from the river left white clothes dyed a reddish brown. Nor was she about to take a bath in her present company.
She hated the men she rode with. Maybe she hated them more than she despised Jeremiah Cole. The greasy one named Stew with his leering eyes, and the other one, Randy, clutching that shotgun while hardly speaking a word. She hoped they would hook up with Paden and Wade soon, hoped they hadn’t gotten themselves killed trying to lead the posse away. Hoped she wouldn’t have to spend another freezing night alone with Randy and Stew.
Under different circumstances, she might have felt bemused by Clint Paden’s boyish good looks, his childish banter. She might have felt that motherly instinct to help nurse Britton Wade back to health. Instead, she felt herself damned to this purgatory, her insides gutted by a hatred to kill a boy not even twenty-five, her heart blackened by revenge. She didn’t even know why she felt that way. Hadn’t the law sentenced Jeremiah Cole to death? Even if his father somehow managed to free him from the hangman, the boy could never show his face in New Mexico again. Her Irish temper had gotten the best of her again, and now she rode with men with less morality than the one she had sworn to kill.
Thick brush clawed at her, ripping her sleeves, scratching her flesh until Stew, riding point, had the sense to lead the horses into the river for a few rods. They came out on the flattening bank, following a series of Ss the Río Chama cut through shale and sandstone.
Ahead of her, Jeremiah Cole sat slumped in the saddle, wearing Paden’s blue shirt and Sears, Roebuck and Co. hat—both a size or two too big for him—riding Paden’s sorrel, or, rather, the horse that Santa Cruz priest had procured for him. Behind her came Randy, his breathing heavy. She could hear it when they were near the calm sections of the river, but not along the rapids.
With a heavy sigh, Fenella cursed her stupidity. What had she been thinking? Quitting her job. Leaving her church. Taking a ten-inch Wilson’s butcher knife from Gage’s Mercantile, and riding her dun all the way to Chamita, where she planned to wait for Jeremiah Cole to step off the Chile Line train, and kill him. Instead, she had heard that the murderer of Father Vasco was holed up in the Holy Cross Church in Santa Cruz, so she had made her way through a blizzard, sneaked into the churchyard unseen, found the horses in the stable, and waited.
It had almost worked.
Maybe, deep down, she was glad it hadn’t. Only now, instead of taking her confessions to a priest, she was praying for her life, riding with ruthless men in a lonely wilderness.
It was late afternoon. The wind had turned colder, harder, and the sky looked gray farther down the valley.
As the river cut sharply, she looked to the hills to her right, a multitude of colors with little life to them except for the piñons and junipers in the distance. No sign of Wade or Paden, and now, the way her luck had been, she presumed they were dead. Presumed she’d soon join them.
Here the current flowed fast, deep, and ahead she could see the shallow rapids around the next curve. She was looking at those rapids, not paying attention, only thankful that the current drowned out Randy’s hoarse breath, when a shot sang out.
Ahead of her, Stew’s bay dropped as if it had been pole-axed, pinning the long-haired killer underneath. Horse rearing, Jeremiah Cole dived off the sorrel into the muddy bank, rolling, moving quickly into dead brush. The sorrel dashed toward the hills, and her dun, snorting furiously, wanted to follow. She pulled the reins hard as the dun fought the bit. Looking up, she heard Randy ear back the hammers of his shotgun, heard the leather creak, heard the wind, heard the river, then heard a man’s voice.
