Río Chama, page 9
“The Wall of Many Voices.”
Paden’s head bobbed in approval. “Mexicans sure have a way with words. That’s right pretty.”
“I think so, too.”
“So where is it?”
Wade’s left hand shot out quickly, pointing northeast, toward the main road. Almost as quickly the hand pulled back, fumbling inside the Mackinaw’s pocket, jerking forth a handkerchief, and then Wade bent over in the saddle, coughing savagely, although never stopping the horse, barely even slowing down. When he straightened, he shoved the handkerchief out of sight, turned sideways, and spit out phlegm.
“Glad I ain’t ridin’ downwind of you.” Paden glanced over his shoulder, and laughed. “I warrant that cough of yours scares Randy and Stew more than your gun.”
Wade rubbed his shoulder—stiff, almost as sore as his thighs and backside. He tried to fill his lungs with cool air.
Shaking his head, Paden looked back at Wade, then focused on the trail they were cutting, looking ahead, but addressing Wade as he spoke.
“You got bad lungs, pard. You lost a right smart of blood from that bullet back in Santa Cruz. You ought to go see a doctor in some big city.”
“I’ve seen a doctor. I’ve seen a big city.”
Paden’s head shook again, and he sighed. “Be a whole lot easier on you. You’re an old man, just wastin’ away.”
With a slight laugh, Wade informed him that he was only forty-one.
“Like I said . . . an old man.”
“How old are you, Paden?”
“Be twenty-nine in August. You’re game, pard. I will grant you that.”
They rode in silence for a while, frightening a few ducks off the river.
“That means you were nineteen when I arrested you,” Wade said.
“Eighteen.”
“That’s right. Eighteen. Reason the judge gave you only two years. On account of your youth.”
The sorrel stopped, and the saddle leather creaked as Clint Paden turned, his face no longer jovial, staring hard at Wade. “Age had nothin’ to do with it, pard. First off, that fellow didn’t die.”
“I wouldn’t call him living,” Wade said, equally bitter. “His brother had to spoon him his breakfast, dinner, and supper, clean up his mess. He wasn’t alive, Clint. Not hardly.”
“He called my mama a puta. You speak that language. A lot better than me. Just now we was talking about how pretty that Mex lingo is, but there ain’t nothing pretty about the way puta sounds, especially the ugly way that big miner in Winston said it, first to my back, then to my face.”
“It’s not a pretty word in English, either.”
Paden didn’t hear Wade’s comment. “Called her a puta, and then he laughed. Laughed at me in that damned bucket-of-blood, and it chockfull of folks. Called her a puta, and me a hijo de la puta. I ain’t sorry for what I done to him. Not hardly. He was fifteen years older than me, an Army veteran, twenty pounds heavier, and neither one of us was wearing a gun. It was a fair fight.”
“Judge and jury saw things different.”
“So did you. I don’t begrudge you for what you did, Brit. Tracking me down all the way to Silver City. Buffaloing me with that pistol barrel of yours. Hauling me back to the calaboose in Winston. Don’t begrudge you at all. Just like I don’t begrudge that judge or even all those former soldier boys they picked to serve on that jury. Jury of my peers. Like hell it was. They was peers of former Sergeant Norman Wilson, not me, and Winston was his town, their town. But I don’t blame ’em none for finding me guilty. Had Sergeant Norman Wilson whupped the devil out of me, left me with vacant eyes and messing in my britches every day, they would have found him not guilty. I know that. But if that had happened in Memphis, Tennessee, then I would have gotten off, or, if the sergeant had won the fight, the true and righteous citizens of Shelby County would have sent him off to prison. Maybe. Just the turning of the cards. That’s all. Sometimes you get the card you need. Oftentimes, you don’t. But you tell me this, pard. You tell me the difference between what I done ten years ago and what you done seven years later in Chloride. Tell me that.”
Wade wet his lips, and kicked the buckskin back into a walk. “No difference.”
“Not a damned bit of difference.” The sorrel followed. “And you killed your two men.” Paden chuckled. “Maybe if Sergeant Norman Wilson had died, I would have got set free. Maybe that was the difference.”
“Maybe you should have gone free, Clint,” Wade said. “What I did was worse, far worse. The only reason I didn’t get sent to prison was because I was respected.”
The mirthless laugh came again. “You wasn’t respected, Brit. You was feared.”
For another two hundred yards they rode in silence before Paden spoke again. “The damnedest thing is this, pard. My mama was a puta. I called her that to her face . . . not puta, but whore . . . when I lit shuck of her. I was fourteen at the time, tired of getting whipped every night by that rum-soaked procurer she worked for. Tired of living in that crib she had the gall to call a home. Maybe that’s why I swung that singletree so hard on Sergeant Norman Wilson. He reminded me too damned much of that plug-ugly back in Memphis. Anyhow, she didn’t say nothing when I called her that, either, because it was truer than gospel. The point is . . . I can call my mama a whore. But nobody else can.”
A stillness returned as they rode, the only noise the whistling of wind and the plodding of horses. Behind them still loomed El Pedernal, and ahead of them rose the towering cliffs of red and vermillion, but mostly that golden yellow clay. Here marked the true beginnings of the Tierra Amarilla country, the Yellow Earth that was everywhere, in the old adobe buildings, in the pottery and body paint of the Indians, the yellow dirt now caked on their clothes and horses.
They entered the Chama again and rode upstream, but the current was strong now, getting stronger, the water cold and rising, so, after three hundred yards, they forded the river, and let the horses rest while the riders drank water from canteens, and looked all around them. It had been hours since they had seen or heard anyone, which might have given them some measure of relief if not for the Chama. As they approached the rugged cañon country, the river began to look more menacing.
Wade slid from the saddle to tighten the cinch, then wearily pulled himself back up, and nudged the buckskin forward, pushing himself, pushing hard.
“I forgot what I had been wanting to bring up, pard,” Paden said cheerily, again easing the sorrel closer. “You’ve worn yourself to a frazzle, pard, you being an old man.”
“Forty-one isn’t that far around the bend for you, young man,” Wade said.
“So here’s my proposition,” Paden continued, ignoring Wade’s comment. “You ride back to Abiquiu, find a nice little señorita to take care of you, and you wait for me and the boys . . . and Miss Fenella . . . and we’ll deliver young Mister Cole to the law in T.A. And I promise, personally, to bring you your share of the reward we collect from ’em priests.”
Stew’s sniggers seemed to annoy Paden almost as much as they pricked Wade.
“I appreciate the offer,” Wade said. “But I’m feeling fine as silk.”
“And I’m feeling finer than frog’s hair cut eight ways. But this country ain’t getting no easier.” Paden pointed ahead. “I’d hate to have to bury you in that cañon.”
“I’d hate for you to try.”
“Hate to see you swept down some rapids we’re bound to come across.”
“I’m a pretty good swimmer.”
“Hate to see a rock fall on your head.”
“My head’s mighty hard.”
Paden’s head shook. “This is no foolish thing, pard,” he said, surprisingly urgent, almost as if he cared about Britton Wade. “Even money that nary a one of us makes it to the far side. Game or not, you’re one sick man. And even if we do somehow get to the Chama valley, what then?” Paden’s thumb hooked toward Jeremiah Cole riding behind them. “That boy’s daddy ain’t gonna see his only surviving son hang. On the other hand, all those Mexicans living up yonder will be bound and determined to kill the kid before his daddy kills us. And ’em odds might be better than even money.”
“Could be,” Wade said, smiling despite his nerves, despite that cough he had been trying to hold back for the past mile. “So here’s my proposition. You and the boys ride back to Abiquiu, and take Miss Fenella with you. I’ll deliver young Mister Cole to the law. And I promise, personally, to bring you your share of any reward I happen to collect.”
Clucking his tongue, shaking his head, Clint Paden let out a defeated sigh. “You’re a stubborn, stubborn man, Brit.”
“I’m holding on like grim death.”
With that, Clint Paden swung the sorrel away, and circled back quickly, pulling up alongside Fenella Magauran, and starting a conversation with her, although Paden did much of the talking as he dominated any conversation.
Wade gave up on holding back the explosion in his lungs, spit when he was finished, and heard that sinister, barely audible laugh of the man called Stew.
He felt those nerves again, pushed back the coattail, and let his hand rest on the .44.
* * * * *
An hour later, his courting done, Clint Paden rejoined Wade at the point, immediately picking up where he had left off, pointing out the ominous country that lay ahead, saying how Wade should retire from this forlorn hope.
“Forlorn hope,” Wade said thoughtfully.
“How’s that?” Paden asked.
Wade shook his head. “Nothing.”
Paden started talking again, his drawl reassuring, folksy, friendly, while Wade looked over his shoulder, beyond Randy and Cole, Stew and the redhead. He wet his chapped lips again with his tongue, looked ahead, behind, to his side. What day was it? He had lost track of time back at the Holy Cross Church. How long would it take them to claw their way through Chama Cañon? How much more would the river rise? That late snowstorm, which had saved their lives in Santa Cruz, might wind up killing them, after all. Flooding from the snow melt . . .
He tried to shake off the next thought, but it kept echoing in his tired head: how many more mistakes can you survive?
When they dropped into an arroyo, Wade reined in his horse, twisted in his saddle, gripping the saddle horn, and looked back down the trail.
The others stopped as well, Randy dismounting to adjust his saddle, and the girl kicking free of the stirrups to stretch her long legs. Stew stared hungrily at those legs, even though they were covered by her black denim skirt and black leather boots.
“Pard,” he heard Paden saying again, “I know I keep on saying the same old thing, but if you’re gonna turn back, well, you best do it now because what’s waiting for you up yonder . . .”
“Is a lot easier than what’s back there!” Wade snapped, angry now, mad at his so-called partners, mad at his own stupidity, his carelessness, mad at the consumption killing him, mad, as he had been for years, at God for saddling him with this wretched luck.
Paden and the others jerked their heads around, staring off back toward El Pedernal and the tree-covered mountains below the peak.
“If you boys had spent more time looking and less time jawing,” Wade said, “you would have known that we’re being followed, and have been followed for the last two hours or more.”
“By who?” the one named Randy blurted.
“Who do you think?” Wade barked back.
Chapter Twelve
From Sixty-Two Years in the Southwestern Territories
by Colonel Zechariah X. Stone
Thus, it was sometime in the spring of 1898 that I found myself recruited out of my self-imposed exile to Jawbone Mountain.
Having wintered in that warm log home, and, indeed, having spent the past three springs seeing hardly any human, Ol’ Griz, that hearty German shepherd of mine now entering her fourteenth year of loyal companionship, and I were not prepared for company. As I savored the taste of a bear-grease biscuit, Ol’ Griz, curled up by the fireplace, lifted her head, and commenced a low growl.
That high up in the Tusas, that far from civilization, and that early in the spring—if my memory is right, we had just received a fresh snowfall of twelve-fourteen inches two days earlier—I suspicioned the motives of any visitor, figuring whoever it was that had woke Ol’ Griz either had to be “sent for supplies”—as some sheepherder would call it—or after blood. My blood.
A passel of enemies I had made by my sixtieth year, so I swallowed a biscuit, and fetched the Tranter .38 which Major General James H. Carleton had presented me during the war to preserve our Union, and, as always, my .54-caliber Hawken that had hardly ever been out of my hands, and never my sight. Donning bearskin cap and coat, I left the cabin’s comforts for the freezing out-of-doors, followed by Ol’ Griz, and picked a path into the pines, locating a good spot behind a snowdrift. We waited to see who had come a-visiting. We waited, quiet as a mouse in a church. Waited, and watched.
Fifteen minutes later, horse and rider came plowing through the snow, reining up a few rods from the cabin. The horse was a zebra dun, carrying a rider in blue greatcoat, heavy gloves, and scarf wrapped over his gray hat and bearded chin. It was hard to tell who looked more miserable, mare or man.
“Hallo, the camp!” the man called out, which seemed a good sign that the gent meant me no harm, nor was touched in his head, but I let him wait in the cold for another five minutes, looking around to make sure he indeed had come up alone, and looking at Ol’ Griz to make sure she didn’t smell out any other varmint.
“Colonel Stone!” the voice yelled again. “It’s me, Archie Preston! Foreman of the Triangle C!”
Ol’ Griz’s tail started wagging, and I rose, startling both horse and rider I was so close to them, and said: “Archie Preston, as I live and breathe. Light down, old hand! I got biscuits, bear grease, and bitter coffee on the hearth.”
It took Archie about thirty-five minutes to thaw out from the hard ride, standing in front of the fire, sipping scalding coffee. Archie Preston was a man in his fifties, I suspect, proud of his chin whiskers—he wore no mustache—with blue eyes, and hardly any meat on his bones. I had met him about twenty years earlier, when I was helping his boss, Senator Roman Cole, and the Army round up some Jicarilla Apaches who had fled the agency at Parkview.
As I said, having lived in the mountains and shunned towns like the plague, I was unaware of any of the news Archie Preston related to me once he had thawed the marrow of his bones. He told me about the goings-on in Cuba, the gold strike in Canada’s Yukon, and the troubles involving Senator Cole’s son, who was being transported by gunman Britton Wade to Tierra Amarilla to hang by the neck till he was dead, dead, dead.
“Sheriff Luke Murphey will deputize you,” Archie told me, “just as he deputized Dan Augustine.”
I had never met the gunman Dan Augustine. Never wanted to. Cavorting with a man of such a bad reputation was not a thing I desired.
“The county will pay you twelve bits a day plus one-half cent for each five miles you travel. And, on top of that, Senator Cole will pay you.” He sipped his coffee. “Handsomely.”
“To fetch his boy home?” I said. “So he don’t catch hemp fever?”
Archie nodded.
Truth is, money had never interested me in the slightest. Certainly Dan Augustine did not interest me, and, upon hearing why Jeremiah Cole, the senator’s son, had been convicted and sentenced to die, I had practically made up my mind to thank Archie for the visit, but to decline the invite. I had a warm cabin and Ol’ Griz. What more did a man like me need? I had solitude, and, in most cases, the Tusas Mountains all to myself, with nothing to do but hunt bears and elk, and watch the eagles fly across summer’s bluest skies.
The law had convicted Jeremiah Cole, had ordered him to pay for his crime with his life, and I had never ridden against the law. Something gnawed in my craw, though, and that was the fact that I reckon I owed Roman Cole, as I have mentioned in previous chapters of this narrative. Owed him my life. He had saved my hide once from the Utes.
It was at that moment that Archie Preston told me how much money his boss was willing to pay, and, faster than greased lightning, I heard myself taking that job, saw myself shaking Archie’s hand. Saw myself for the greedy rascal that I was. Oh, I told myself, later, that I had agreed just for the adventure, for the challenge, but most importantly to repay a debt to my friend, the senator. Never had I come across Britton Wade’s trail, and I figured him for a low-down skunk. I told myself that I did it because Roman Cole had kept a Ute buck from sending me off to glory. Yet, dear reader, I will admit the truth in these pages, in black ink, of my own volition, in my own hand: I took the job for money, plain and simple.
A great deal of money it was. Out of respect, I will not share the true amount, and now, more than a decade later, I often wonder how I let money lure me to do something so dastardly. I had never needed money. Odd, I think, how we humans work.
* * * * *
Tierra Amarilla was, and so remains, a town of yellow adobe and Mexican farmers, and not much else. Back when it had been founded, in 1860 or ’61, it had been named Las Nutrias, after the beavers that had lured me up that way from Taos. When it became the seat of Río Arriba County, in the year 1880, the name had been changed to Tierra Amarilla.
We came down from the mountains, Archie Preston, Ol’ Griz, and me, and met Senator Cole in front of the county courthouse, one of those pitched-roof structures so common in this part of the country. A couple of Mexican kids were up in the attic, tossing down corn, and it struck me funny as the way things worked in northern New Mexico Territory. People were practical, I believe, using the attic of a courthouse to store food.
Briefly I talked to the senator, who looked much older than I remembered, but a few years had passed, and I supposed I had aged myself. And unfortunately Roman Cole had lost a wife and a son since our trails had previously crossed, and was on the verge of losing the only remaining blood kin he had left.
When we had first met, Roman Cole had not been a senator. It was after the late war, and he had arrived as a sergeant-major with the troops that built Fort Lowell—originally designated as Camp Plummer—along the Río Chama southwest of Tierra Amarilla, or, as I have already mentioned, Las Nutrias as it was known back then. Clinging to General Carleton’s recommendation and letter of introduction, I found myself hired at that fort as a scout, and often led soldiers on missions to stop the Utes, who were committing all sorts of depredations in those wild and woolly times. In an earlier chapter of this narrative, during which I recall my accounts in the Ute wars, I have described the campaign during which my life was spared, thanks to Roman Cole.
Paden’s head bobbed in approval. “Mexicans sure have a way with words. That’s right pretty.”
“I think so, too.”
“So where is it?”
Wade’s left hand shot out quickly, pointing northeast, toward the main road. Almost as quickly the hand pulled back, fumbling inside the Mackinaw’s pocket, jerking forth a handkerchief, and then Wade bent over in the saddle, coughing savagely, although never stopping the horse, barely even slowing down. When he straightened, he shoved the handkerchief out of sight, turned sideways, and spit out phlegm.
“Glad I ain’t ridin’ downwind of you.” Paden glanced over his shoulder, and laughed. “I warrant that cough of yours scares Randy and Stew more than your gun.”
Wade rubbed his shoulder—stiff, almost as sore as his thighs and backside. He tried to fill his lungs with cool air.
Shaking his head, Paden looked back at Wade, then focused on the trail they were cutting, looking ahead, but addressing Wade as he spoke.
“You got bad lungs, pard. You lost a right smart of blood from that bullet back in Santa Cruz. You ought to go see a doctor in some big city.”
“I’ve seen a doctor. I’ve seen a big city.”
Paden’s head shook again, and he sighed. “Be a whole lot easier on you. You’re an old man, just wastin’ away.”
With a slight laugh, Wade informed him that he was only forty-one.
“Like I said . . . an old man.”
“How old are you, Paden?”
“Be twenty-nine in August. You’re game, pard. I will grant you that.”
They rode in silence for a while, frightening a few ducks off the river.
“That means you were nineteen when I arrested you,” Wade said.
“Eighteen.”
“That’s right. Eighteen. Reason the judge gave you only two years. On account of your youth.”
The sorrel stopped, and the saddle leather creaked as Clint Paden turned, his face no longer jovial, staring hard at Wade. “Age had nothin’ to do with it, pard. First off, that fellow didn’t die.”
“I wouldn’t call him living,” Wade said, equally bitter. “His brother had to spoon him his breakfast, dinner, and supper, clean up his mess. He wasn’t alive, Clint. Not hardly.”
“He called my mama a puta. You speak that language. A lot better than me. Just now we was talking about how pretty that Mex lingo is, but there ain’t nothing pretty about the way puta sounds, especially the ugly way that big miner in Winston said it, first to my back, then to my face.”
“It’s not a pretty word in English, either.”
Paden didn’t hear Wade’s comment. “Called her a puta, and then he laughed. Laughed at me in that damned bucket-of-blood, and it chockfull of folks. Called her a puta, and me a hijo de la puta. I ain’t sorry for what I done to him. Not hardly. He was fifteen years older than me, an Army veteran, twenty pounds heavier, and neither one of us was wearing a gun. It was a fair fight.”
“Judge and jury saw things different.”
“So did you. I don’t begrudge you for what you did, Brit. Tracking me down all the way to Silver City. Buffaloing me with that pistol barrel of yours. Hauling me back to the calaboose in Winston. Don’t begrudge you at all. Just like I don’t begrudge that judge or even all those former soldier boys they picked to serve on that jury. Jury of my peers. Like hell it was. They was peers of former Sergeant Norman Wilson, not me, and Winston was his town, their town. But I don’t blame ’em none for finding me guilty. Had Sergeant Norman Wilson whupped the devil out of me, left me with vacant eyes and messing in my britches every day, they would have found him not guilty. I know that. But if that had happened in Memphis, Tennessee, then I would have gotten off, or, if the sergeant had won the fight, the true and righteous citizens of Shelby County would have sent him off to prison. Maybe. Just the turning of the cards. That’s all. Sometimes you get the card you need. Oftentimes, you don’t. But you tell me this, pard. You tell me the difference between what I done ten years ago and what you done seven years later in Chloride. Tell me that.”
Wade wet his lips, and kicked the buckskin back into a walk. “No difference.”
“Not a damned bit of difference.” The sorrel followed. “And you killed your two men.” Paden chuckled. “Maybe if Sergeant Norman Wilson had died, I would have got set free. Maybe that was the difference.”
“Maybe you should have gone free, Clint,” Wade said. “What I did was worse, far worse. The only reason I didn’t get sent to prison was because I was respected.”
The mirthless laugh came again. “You wasn’t respected, Brit. You was feared.”
For another two hundred yards they rode in silence before Paden spoke again. “The damnedest thing is this, pard. My mama was a puta. I called her that to her face . . . not puta, but whore . . . when I lit shuck of her. I was fourteen at the time, tired of getting whipped every night by that rum-soaked procurer she worked for. Tired of living in that crib she had the gall to call a home. Maybe that’s why I swung that singletree so hard on Sergeant Norman Wilson. He reminded me too damned much of that plug-ugly back in Memphis. Anyhow, she didn’t say nothing when I called her that, either, because it was truer than gospel. The point is . . . I can call my mama a whore. But nobody else can.”
A stillness returned as they rode, the only noise the whistling of wind and the plodding of horses. Behind them still loomed El Pedernal, and ahead of them rose the towering cliffs of red and vermillion, but mostly that golden yellow clay. Here marked the true beginnings of the Tierra Amarilla country, the Yellow Earth that was everywhere, in the old adobe buildings, in the pottery and body paint of the Indians, the yellow dirt now caked on their clothes and horses.
They entered the Chama again and rode upstream, but the current was strong now, getting stronger, the water cold and rising, so, after three hundred yards, they forded the river, and let the horses rest while the riders drank water from canteens, and looked all around them. It had been hours since they had seen or heard anyone, which might have given them some measure of relief if not for the Chama. As they approached the rugged cañon country, the river began to look more menacing.
Wade slid from the saddle to tighten the cinch, then wearily pulled himself back up, and nudged the buckskin forward, pushing himself, pushing hard.
“I forgot what I had been wanting to bring up, pard,” Paden said cheerily, again easing the sorrel closer. “You’ve worn yourself to a frazzle, pard, you being an old man.”
“Forty-one isn’t that far around the bend for you, young man,” Wade said.
“So here’s my proposition,” Paden continued, ignoring Wade’s comment. “You ride back to Abiquiu, find a nice little señorita to take care of you, and you wait for me and the boys . . . and Miss Fenella . . . and we’ll deliver young Mister Cole to the law in T.A. And I promise, personally, to bring you your share of the reward we collect from ’em priests.”
Stew’s sniggers seemed to annoy Paden almost as much as they pricked Wade.
“I appreciate the offer,” Wade said. “But I’m feeling fine as silk.”
“And I’m feeling finer than frog’s hair cut eight ways. But this country ain’t getting no easier.” Paden pointed ahead. “I’d hate to have to bury you in that cañon.”
“I’d hate for you to try.”
“Hate to see you swept down some rapids we’re bound to come across.”
“I’m a pretty good swimmer.”
“Hate to see a rock fall on your head.”
“My head’s mighty hard.”
Paden’s head shook. “This is no foolish thing, pard,” he said, surprisingly urgent, almost as if he cared about Britton Wade. “Even money that nary a one of us makes it to the far side. Game or not, you’re one sick man. And even if we do somehow get to the Chama valley, what then?” Paden’s thumb hooked toward Jeremiah Cole riding behind them. “That boy’s daddy ain’t gonna see his only surviving son hang. On the other hand, all those Mexicans living up yonder will be bound and determined to kill the kid before his daddy kills us. And ’em odds might be better than even money.”
“Could be,” Wade said, smiling despite his nerves, despite that cough he had been trying to hold back for the past mile. “So here’s my proposition. You and the boys ride back to Abiquiu, and take Miss Fenella with you. I’ll deliver young Mister Cole to the law. And I promise, personally, to bring you your share of any reward I happen to collect.”
Clucking his tongue, shaking his head, Clint Paden let out a defeated sigh. “You’re a stubborn, stubborn man, Brit.”
“I’m holding on like grim death.”
With that, Clint Paden swung the sorrel away, and circled back quickly, pulling up alongside Fenella Magauran, and starting a conversation with her, although Paden did much of the talking as he dominated any conversation.
Wade gave up on holding back the explosion in his lungs, spit when he was finished, and heard that sinister, barely audible laugh of the man called Stew.
He felt those nerves again, pushed back the coattail, and let his hand rest on the .44.
* * * * *
An hour later, his courting done, Clint Paden rejoined Wade at the point, immediately picking up where he had left off, pointing out the ominous country that lay ahead, saying how Wade should retire from this forlorn hope.
“Forlorn hope,” Wade said thoughtfully.
“How’s that?” Paden asked.
Wade shook his head. “Nothing.”
Paden started talking again, his drawl reassuring, folksy, friendly, while Wade looked over his shoulder, beyond Randy and Cole, Stew and the redhead. He wet his chapped lips again with his tongue, looked ahead, behind, to his side. What day was it? He had lost track of time back at the Holy Cross Church. How long would it take them to claw their way through Chama Cañon? How much more would the river rise? That late snowstorm, which had saved their lives in Santa Cruz, might wind up killing them, after all. Flooding from the snow melt . . .
He tried to shake off the next thought, but it kept echoing in his tired head: how many more mistakes can you survive?
When they dropped into an arroyo, Wade reined in his horse, twisted in his saddle, gripping the saddle horn, and looked back down the trail.
The others stopped as well, Randy dismounting to adjust his saddle, and the girl kicking free of the stirrups to stretch her long legs. Stew stared hungrily at those legs, even though they were covered by her black denim skirt and black leather boots.
“Pard,” he heard Paden saying again, “I know I keep on saying the same old thing, but if you’re gonna turn back, well, you best do it now because what’s waiting for you up yonder . . .”
“Is a lot easier than what’s back there!” Wade snapped, angry now, mad at his so-called partners, mad at his own stupidity, his carelessness, mad at the consumption killing him, mad, as he had been for years, at God for saddling him with this wretched luck.
Paden and the others jerked their heads around, staring off back toward El Pedernal and the tree-covered mountains below the peak.
“If you boys had spent more time looking and less time jawing,” Wade said, “you would have known that we’re being followed, and have been followed for the last two hours or more.”
“By who?” the one named Randy blurted.
“Who do you think?” Wade barked back.
Chapter Twelve
From Sixty-Two Years in the Southwestern Territories
by Colonel Zechariah X. Stone
Thus, it was sometime in the spring of 1898 that I found myself recruited out of my self-imposed exile to Jawbone Mountain.
Having wintered in that warm log home, and, indeed, having spent the past three springs seeing hardly any human, Ol’ Griz, that hearty German shepherd of mine now entering her fourteenth year of loyal companionship, and I were not prepared for company. As I savored the taste of a bear-grease biscuit, Ol’ Griz, curled up by the fireplace, lifted her head, and commenced a low growl.
That high up in the Tusas, that far from civilization, and that early in the spring—if my memory is right, we had just received a fresh snowfall of twelve-fourteen inches two days earlier—I suspicioned the motives of any visitor, figuring whoever it was that had woke Ol’ Griz either had to be “sent for supplies”—as some sheepherder would call it—or after blood. My blood.
A passel of enemies I had made by my sixtieth year, so I swallowed a biscuit, and fetched the Tranter .38 which Major General James H. Carleton had presented me during the war to preserve our Union, and, as always, my .54-caliber Hawken that had hardly ever been out of my hands, and never my sight. Donning bearskin cap and coat, I left the cabin’s comforts for the freezing out-of-doors, followed by Ol’ Griz, and picked a path into the pines, locating a good spot behind a snowdrift. We waited to see who had come a-visiting. We waited, quiet as a mouse in a church. Waited, and watched.
Fifteen minutes later, horse and rider came plowing through the snow, reining up a few rods from the cabin. The horse was a zebra dun, carrying a rider in blue greatcoat, heavy gloves, and scarf wrapped over his gray hat and bearded chin. It was hard to tell who looked more miserable, mare or man.
“Hallo, the camp!” the man called out, which seemed a good sign that the gent meant me no harm, nor was touched in his head, but I let him wait in the cold for another five minutes, looking around to make sure he indeed had come up alone, and looking at Ol’ Griz to make sure she didn’t smell out any other varmint.
“Colonel Stone!” the voice yelled again. “It’s me, Archie Preston! Foreman of the Triangle C!”
Ol’ Griz’s tail started wagging, and I rose, startling both horse and rider I was so close to them, and said: “Archie Preston, as I live and breathe. Light down, old hand! I got biscuits, bear grease, and bitter coffee on the hearth.”
It took Archie about thirty-five minutes to thaw out from the hard ride, standing in front of the fire, sipping scalding coffee. Archie Preston was a man in his fifties, I suspect, proud of his chin whiskers—he wore no mustache—with blue eyes, and hardly any meat on his bones. I had met him about twenty years earlier, when I was helping his boss, Senator Roman Cole, and the Army round up some Jicarilla Apaches who had fled the agency at Parkview.
As I said, having lived in the mountains and shunned towns like the plague, I was unaware of any of the news Archie Preston related to me once he had thawed the marrow of his bones. He told me about the goings-on in Cuba, the gold strike in Canada’s Yukon, and the troubles involving Senator Cole’s son, who was being transported by gunman Britton Wade to Tierra Amarilla to hang by the neck till he was dead, dead, dead.
“Sheriff Luke Murphey will deputize you,” Archie told me, “just as he deputized Dan Augustine.”
I had never met the gunman Dan Augustine. Never wanted to. Cavorting with a man of such a bad reputation was not a thing I desired.
“The county will pay you twelve bits a day plus one-half cent for each five miles you travel. And, on top of that, Senator Cole will pay you.” He sipped his coffee. “Handsomely.”
“To fetch his boy home?” I said. “So he don’t catch hemp fever?”
Archie nodded.
Truth is, money had never interested me in the slightest. Certainly Dan Augustine did not interest me, and, upon hearing why Jeremiah Cole, the senator’s son, had been convicted and sentenced to die, I had practically made up my mind to thank Archie for the visit, but to decline the invite. I had a warm cabin and Ol’ Griz. What more did a man like me need? I had solitude, and, in most cases, the Tusas Mountains all to myself, with nothing to do but hunt bears and elk, and watch the eagles fly across summer’s bluest skies.
The law had convicted Jeremiah Cole, had ordered him to pay for his crime with his life, and I had never ridden against the law. Something gnawed in my craw, though, and that was the fact that I reckon I owed Roman Cole, as I have mentioned in previous chapters of this narrative. Owed him my life. He had saved my hide once from the Utes.
It was at that moment that Archie Preston told me how much money his boss was willing to pay, and, faster than greased lightning, I heard myself taking that job, saw myself shaking Archie’s hand. Saw myself for the greedy rascal that I was. Oh, I told myself, later, that I had agreed just for the adventure, for the challenge, but most importantly to repay a debt to my friend, the senator. Never had I come across Britton Wade’s trail, and I figured him for a low-down skunk. I told myself that I did it because Roman Cole had kept a Ute buck from sending me off to glory. Yet, dear reader, I will admit the truth in these pages, in black ink, of my own volition, in my own hand: I took the job for money, plain and simple.
A great deal of money it was. Out of respect, I will not share the true amount, and now, more than a decade later, I often wonder how I let money lure me to do something so dastardly. I had never needed money. Odd, I think, how we humans work.
* * * * *
Tierra Amarilla was, and so remains, a town of yellow adobe and Mexican farmers, and not much else. Back when it had been founded, in 1860 or ’61, it had been named Las Nutrias, after the beavers that had lured me up that way from Taos. When it became the seat of Río Arriba County, in the year 1880, the name had been changed to Tierra Amarilla.
We came down from the mountains, Archie Preston, Ol’ Griz, and me, and met Senator Cole in front of the county courthouse, one of those pitched-roof structures so common in this part of the country. A couple of Mexican kids were up in the attic, tossing down corn, and it struck me funny as the way things worked in northern New Mexico Territory. People were practical, I believe, using the attic of a courthouse to store food.
Briefly I talked to the senator, who looked much older than I remembered, but a few years had passed, and I supposed I had aged myself. And unfortunately Roman Cole had lost a wife and a son since our trails had previously crossed, and was on the verge of losing the only remaining blood kin he had left.
When we had first met, Roman Cole had not been a senator. It was after the late war, and he had arrived as a sergeant-major with the troops that built Fort Lowell—originally designated as Camp Plummer—along the Río Chama southwest of Tierra Amarilla, or, as I have already mentioned, Las Nutrias as it was known back then. Clinging to General Carleton’s recommendation and letter of introduction, I found myself hired at that fort as a scout, and often led soldiers on missions to stop the Utes, who were committing all sorts of depredations in those wild and woolly times. In an earlier chapter of this narrative, during which I recall my accounts in the Ute wars, I have described the campaign during which my life was spared, thanks to Roman Cole.
