Brian Garfield (11 page)

“He loves you.”

“He has never said that,” she said, and it made Boag remember the same conversation with Don Pablo.

“This gold,” she said. “Do you really expect to take any of it away from that man?”

“Well I expect to try.”

“Is it enough to die for?”

“He owes me something else besides gold. There was a friend of mine.…” But he didn't go on about Wilstach; it would probably make no sense to her. “He needs killing.”

“But how will you fight him if you find him?”

“Dirty.”

Her head stirred. Boag said, “There's no difference between one way of fighting and another. The winner is the man still alive afterward.”

“If we could help, Don Pablo and I .…”

“Yes?”

“… Do you think you could try to recover Pablo's money as well?”

Well there had to be a reason, he supposed bleakly.

She read his mind; she sat up. “That is not the reason I came to you tonight. Did you think it was?”

He made no answer of any kind; his silence argued with her, however, and in the end she got off the cot and reached for her clothes. “I suppose it is what you must believe. I was foolish, I should have said nothing.”

“All right. Forget it.”

“I shall try to. I hope you will also.”

He reached for her. “Come on then, let's do this again.” In relief he laughed till his stomach hurt. And when they had made love he kissed her thoroughly on the mouth. “That's to be sure you won't forget me right away.”

She teased him. “I have a very poor memory.”

He kissed her again.

He had been a soldier all the years; in the Army you learned not to think about women except when there were women within reach. Either you had women or you did not, and if you did not have them there was nothing but pain in thinking about them. But he knew he was going to think about Dorotea. They had not had much time together but it was enough to make him wish there was more.

7

There was nothing dog-in-the-manger about Don Pablo Ortiz. He summoned Boag to his chambers in the early morning and when Miguel had left the room the young Don said, “Are you a man of means,
Señor
Boag?”

“Do I look it?”

“You look like a penniless black gringo to me. But I have learned something about appearances.”

“I am what I look like.”

“And you seek to do battle single-handed against a cut-throat army. It would not be putting it too strongly to state that you have the life expectancy of a lit sulphur match.”

“I'd rather not put it just like that.”

“Do you know what I think,
Señor?
I think you are hoping you never find Jed Pickett. You are hoping you will continue to arrive at places to find that Jed Pickett is no longer there, he is still a week ahead of you. He will always be a week ahead of you, Boag; I think he was born a week ahead of you.”

“If I don't really want to catch him why should I keep chasing him?”

“I think it gives you something to do, something to justify your existence. And I think you hate being afraid. You hate it that much.”

Boag thought, it was true. Not once in his life had he been so afraid as that night in the river in the swirling afterwash of the
Uncle Sam's
paddlewheels, the water tumbling him over and over until he was sure he would drown, and knowing that if he surfaced the guns on deck would finish him. Mr. Jed Pickett had no right doing that to a man.

“So you have to prove something now,” Don Pablo said in his voice that was half a wheeze. “You will of course get killed and that will be the proof that you were not afraid. The only one who will know it is a lie is yourself, and of course when you are dead no one can force you to confess it.”

“You're a little deep for me now.”

“
Señor
Boag, I have seen the eyes you exchange with Dorotea.”

Boag stiffened.

Don Pablo waggled his frail hand. “Did she visit you in the night? I suppose it does not matter. I will be truthful. If you were a man who could afford to buy a villa like this one then I should not object to anything you did; I would be pleased to see Dorotea go with a man who can make her happy. I suspect if you asked her to ride away with you this morning she would do it without a backward look.”

“You're wrong.”

“No.”

“Shall we ask her?” Boag said in the most formal Spanish he knew. He got up to move toward the door.

“Wait. Hear me out.”

“Get it said, then.”

“I have accustomed her to a certain kind of life. I can no longer provide it myself. But when I look into your future I must ask you to get on your horse and go. For Dorotea's sake,
no es verdad?
”

Boag studied the ravaged face. “That was what I aimed to do anyway. But after I go you ask her. The trouble with both of you, you don't trust each other enough.”

“You are very kind,” Don Pablo wheezed. “I hope we meet again.”

When Boag rode away she was standing just outside the gate and she was still watching him, one arm raised to shade her eyes. When he had his last look at her from a low hill four miles out, she was only a speck.

chapter five

1

After that it was days and days on horseback, going from town to town trying to ask questions without being shot for it.

It took a week to get a line on Mr. Pickett. Along the Rio Bavispe in a town called Huásabas there was a fat man in a
cantina
who knew Mr. Pickett by sight from the old scalp-bounty days and said he had seen Mr. Pickett ride through the town two weeks ago with six hardcase riders and several pack animals. So they had split the bunch up again. Heading for where?

The fat man said Mr. Pickett had headed out up the mountain toward Granados, but in that town Boag found no trace of the rawhiders. He cast around for spoor in the memories of goatherds and
vaqueros
and mountain people of indeterminate occupation; it took another four days before he turned up a trace of Mr. Pickett's passage at Mazatán, west of the Yaqui River. Again Mr. Pickett had been seen riding away to the south; this time it was said he had nine tough men with him and at least half a dozen pack mules. For rawhiders with a lot of spending money they had been curiously well behaved, they hadn't treed the town the way gringo gangs liked to do. Possibly Mr. Pickett had given orders to be on good behavior because that way nobody would notice them, but it was having the opposite effect because the town had noticed how well behaved these toughs were.

The trail was not getting any warmer but Boag was patient. He had nothing else to do.

It was getting on for the middle of May; along the Yaqui River the heat was intense. Boag's sorrel wore out and he had to give ten Yankee dollars along with it in trade for a sturdy blue roan mare. He was nearly down to the twenty dollars he had started with before he'd rolled the poker player in Yuma.

Here and there he passed the signs of combat and the tracks of wheeled cannon carts. Rebels and troops were having it out but the warfare in the countryside didn't seem to have much effect on the villagers Boag talked to; perhaps they had lived with revolutions so long they had got bored with them.

In Nuri there was a mescal-swilling
alcalde
who was glad to have a stranger to drink with; the
alcalde
was a gossip and a philosopher. From three hours of his talk Boag gleaned a few shavings. Fourteen horsemen, leading nine pack mules, had passed through the area more than two weeks earlier; no one had recognized any of them but it was thought probable that they had to do with the revolution, so no one approached them.

“Which side?”

“Who knows,” said the
alcalde
in his cups. “Does it matter?”

The riders and pack animals had moved on to the west, back toward the Yaqui River.

Boag went that way. But it was not until four days later in Cocorit that he found traces of them again. A talkative bartender in the
cantina
on the central square. “Yes there were fourteen men, I counted them because I was concerned about how many bullet holes there might be after they left. But they behaved themselves with distinction. They were here the one night, very courteous to everyone but they kept mainly to themselves. In the morning they traded a few horses with the stable man, Cruz, and they left.”

“Their leader,” Boag said. “A man with a yellow mustache and pits in the skin of his face? Not a very big man?”

“No, I do not recall him that way at all,
Señor.
The leader was a very large man in fact.”

Boag thought about that. “A lot of brown hair on the backs of his hands?”

“Exactly,
Señor,
that is the man.”

Ben Stryker, the
segundo.

But where did that put Mr. Pickett? If he wasn't traveling with his men, where was he?

Anyhow there were at least six or seven men missing. There had been twenty or more of them at first; now the reports were fairly consistent, thirteen or fourteen men at most.

So Mr. Pickett was off somewhere else with half a dozen men. Doing what?

It looked as if Boag was following the wrong bunch. But it was the only trail he had to follow.

Cruz at the livery barn was a nervous little chatterbox who chewed on coco leaf while he talked. Yes he still had three of the horses the gringos had traded; they were in the corral, would the
señor
like him to point them out?

Boag didn't know why he bothered to look. He'd never seen their horses before anyway. They'd had a remuda of fresh mounts ready for them on the Gila River where they'd beached the Uncle Sam under the trees. He hadn't ever set eyes on those horses so it wasn't surprising that none of the mounts in Cruz's corral looked familiar.

It was just that it helped give him the feeling he still had some kind of contact with them. The thread was frayed but it was still a thread.

“Was there among them a man with a yellow mustache and a pitted face?”

Cruz did not recall such a man although of course there were a dozen men or more and it was many weeks ago and he could not remember faces all that clearly. “But the leader was a striking man, striking, a very tall man, he spoke Spanish very well but with a Yankee drawl, his accent was not so good as yours,
Señor.
”

“How many horses did you sell them?”

“Five, it was all I had to spare.”

“Any of them have distinctive markings?”

Cruz had to think about it, visibly. Boag found a silver peso in his Levi's and placed it on the flat-sawed top of a corral post. Cruz covered it with his hand. “There was one sorrel with a very pale mane and tail, I recall. Almost like a palomino's mane and tail, yet the horse itself was very dark red or brown.”

“Any of them have a split shoe, anything like that?”

“You mean something that would leave a hoofprint you could recognize. No,
Señor,
I recall nothing like that.”

“The brand on this horse with the palomino's mane?”

“That was a horse from Chihuahua,
Señor,
it had several brands and I believe the most recent was the big circle of the Ochoa
rancho.
”

When Boag rode out of the place Cruz's voice followed him: “I hope you find your friends.”

2

Then he lost the spoor for more than a week. No one to the south or west had seen the gang. It was farm country getting down toward the Gulf; there were plenty of people, too many for the rawhiders to have passed unseen. So they must have doubled back. Boag rode back to Nuri and singled out the
alcalde
who liked to drink.

“It is good to see you again,
Señor
Boag.”

“Let me buy you a mescal,
alcalde.
”

“
Simpático.
Like your friend the tall gringo.”

“He bought you a drink too, did he?”

“Only four days ago it was.”

Boag grinned to hide his excitement. “So they did come back this way.”

“Nine of them did. With their pack mules.” The
alcalde
lifted his mescal in toast. “
Salud y amor, Señor
Boag. I think your friend was very glad to hear you were looking for him.”

“You told him about me.”

“Yes of course. He said it had been a long time since he had seen you and he looked forward with keen pleasure to seeing you again.”

“I don't suppose he told you where that might be.”

“Well he did say if you should return I could tell you he was going to spend a few days in San Ignacio. He hopes you will find him there before he has to leave.”

“I'll just bet he does,” Boag said.

3

So Ben Stryker's bunch knew Boag was behind them. Knew his name, from the
alcalde.
He wondered what they thought about that. It had to worry them a little. But he wished he hadn't told the
alcalde
his name because if Stryker had known only that a black man was looking for him it would have been more mysterious.

San Ignacio was a foothill village well to the east of the Yaqui River. It was a hot place built on the south slope of a barren hill; a stupid place to build a town. There were 'dobe huts with thatched roofs scattered around the hillside with dirt paths worn from one 'dobe to the next but there was nothing regular enough to be called a street. Even the church looked poor.

Boag reconnoitered from a distance. He rode all the way around the village and then approached it from the upper end. He supposed he was looking for a dark horse with palomino mane and tail; he didn't see one. He only saw two horses at all. One was tethered to a picket rope behind somebody's hut. The other had a saddle on it and was tied to the hitching rail in front of a building that probably served as
cantina
and general store and post office and whatever else the town had need of.