Brian Garfield (18 page)

“A few things I could use. A coil of heavy-gauge wire. A few kegs of blasting powder. Maybe half a dozen rifles. A few hundred rounds ammunition. A couple good hundred-foot lassos. One first-rate long-range rifle. Thirty-eight fifty-six if you got one. I had one but they took it off me in Ures. A few gallons of kerosene, a couple blankets. A buckboard to carry it all. And maybe you could cut me out a horse to haul the wagon.”

“Boag you're putting me ass-deep in requisitions.” Captain McQuade looked pained. “I've got damn little to spare in this camp.”

“I'll pay you for it, Captain.”

Captain McQuade did not stir; only the eyes moved. They settled on Boag with enormous disgust. Captain McQuade picked up a twig and burrowed it into his ear and examined it and threw it away, and in the end he said, “I can let you have the kerosene. The blankets and the lassos, all right. I can probably even scare up a few beat-up carbines and a little ammunition. If I can find any construction wire I'll let you have a roll. But a good long rifle and blasting powder and a buckboard? Those I can't spare, Boag.”

It was what Boag had expected but he had tried it first; you had to.

He stood up and raised the tent flap to look outside. Then he turned back and when Captain McQuade lifted the ruby coals of his eyes, Boag flicked out a revolver and cocked it with a series of ominous clicks. “Let me see your holster gun a minute, Captain.”

“What the hell?”

Boag took the revolver from him. Emptied it and handed it back to Captain McQuade.

“Aw Boag,” Captain McQuade said in disgust.

“Well I'm sorry Captain. If I had another way I'd do it.”

“You won't get ten feet from here. Not alive.”

“Sure I will. Because nobody's going to know about it except you and me, and you ain't going to talk up.”

“Why won't I?”

“Because I just unloaded your gun, Captain, and I got mine pointed at you, and if you hear a loud noise it will be you dying.”

“They'll know, Boag. They'll shoot you full of holes.”

“Not as long as I stick close to you like a burr. Captain they need you so bad they can taste it. You're a first-class soldier and they ain't got another one like you in all of Sonora. They can't afford to open up shooting if you could get hit. So it ain't much risk for either of us so long as you play by my rules. It ain't going to hurt you, all you'll lose is a little sleep.”

“Boag if you knew how much sleep was worth to me right now.…”

“Sure enough. Well now you can pucker up your asshole and walk out of here right in front of me. I ain't gon show my gun but it'll be right handy if I need it. All you got to do is tell your boys to rustle up that order of mine. Including the Gatling gun.”

Captain McQuade tipped his head just a little bit to one side. He watched Boag and didn't say anything. It was as if he was waiting to wake up from a tedious dream. Out on the picket line Boag could hear the light thud of hoof, the swish of tail.

“Come on now Boag, you're not going to shoot me.”

“Captain I'll shoot your ears off one at a time and then I'll go for your kneecaps. You won't be able to ride, let alone walk. You try me.”

“What the hell. I thought you were a friend of mine.”

“Another time I'll apologize for this, Captain.”

Captain McQuade went toward the tent flap. Boag said, “Kindly don't tell me I won't get away with it.”

“You don't mind if I think it, do you?” Captain McQuade's face was composed into lines indicative of mild scorn but it seemed directed at himself as much as at Boag. He batted the tent flap back and Boag went outside with him.

4

The wind ruffled the blue lining of Captain McQuade's cape. Boag stood close behind him and watched the troops load the wagon, grunting under the weight of the powderkegs and the dismounted Gatling gun. Gnats and flies swarmed around a dribble of horse dung near Boag's feet.

A Mexican brought Boag's horse along and Boag told him to tie it to the tailboard of the wagon.

Boag said, “You drive, Captain.”

“That's what I thought.”

“Look, I'll turn you loose, it'll be a couple hours' walk back here. Ain't no big thing.”

“Damn it Boag, I need some sleep. If I don't get some sleep I swear I'm going to perish,”

“We get out of camp here, I'll drive the wagon. You can sleep. That sound all right?”

Captain McQuade hauled himself up onto the high seat and Boag settled beside him. “I hope they don't try to follow me,” Boag said. “They ain't good enough.”

Captain McQuade said to a lieutenant, “I'm doing a reconnoitre with the scout here. I'll be back sometime tonight. Keep this camp secure and tell them not to shoot my ass off when I get back, all right?”

Captain McQuade lifted the reins and made noises at the horse and Boag put one hand on the edge of the seat to keep from being pitched off. The wagon bucked out of camp and Boag said, “Upstream a ways and then we'll turn east up the mountains.”

When the fires of the camp fell away behind them Boag took the reins and Captain McQuade leaned forward with his elbows braced on his splayed knees. His head hung down and swayed. By God he really was asleep.

Boag did his best to avoid the big bumps. He rode the buckboard up into the mountains and somewhere around midnight he stopped the wagon and climbed down, went back to his horse behind the tailboard and got the hunk of gold out of the saddlebag. Then he shook Captain McQuade by the shoulder. “This where you get off.”

Captain McQuade gave him a drunken look. “Uh?”

“Come on, Captain.”

“Where the hell are we?”

“You just head west and keep going downhill, you'll hit the river down there. Turn left, go downstream you'll walk right into your camp. Take you two-three hours from here.”

Captain McQuade climbed down; Boag gave him a hand. “Here, stick this in your pocket.”

“What's—?”

“I said I'd pay you for the stuff.”

“Jesus.”

“I'll get the Gatling gun back to you if I can.”

“This honest-to-God gold?”

“Yes sir. You don't want to spend it all in one saloon.”

“Right now I could just about do that.”

“Captain you better wake up. You don't want some bandit taking that hunk of gold away from you. And don't forget to load up that gun I emptied.” Boag climbed onto the seat and settled the reins among his fingers. “Good luck in your war, Captain.”

Captain McQuade just glared at him and Boag drove the wagon on up the slope.

But after a little while when he looked back he saw Captain McQuade raising an arm to wave. “Good luck in yours too, Boag.”

5

Morning was a bad time. You woke innocent and then you remembered last night. That had been a bad trick to play on a friend.

And remembering last night you superimposed it on today: you remembered how you had invited getting all shot to pieces by a regiment and you knew the good fortune of the escape might not be granted you again today.

Boag checked out the load on the wagon and tied his saddle horse to the tailboard again and headed the buckboard for the Santa Cruz district.

Last night he had spent a couple of hours wiping out his sign so that if Captain McQuade took a notion to track him he wouldn't catch up too fast. Boag was hoping Captain McQuade would come to the Santa Cruz to find out how Boag's war was going. But he didn't want Captain McQuade's army showing up before the fight started. Anyhow it was a distant hope at best; he couldn't count on Captain McQuade coming and even if he did come it didn't mean he'd help out.

It was about seventy miles up the ridgebacks of the Sierra Madre to the Santa Cruz district and it took Boag all day and half the night to get there, and that was pushing hard; the wagon horse was all used up by the time he stopped in the middle of the night. He got on his saddle horse and rode around the town of Coronado, following Jackson's directions, and at about two in the morning he found the wagon road that had to head up to the old mine that Mr. Pickett had turned into his fortress.

He stopped along the creek bank and dipped a canteen of water out of the stream; he set it down on the ground long enough for the floating debris to settle to the bottom before he drank out of it. He looked at the night sky; he didn't see many clouds but he could smell a change in weather coming and he tried to work out ways to make use of it.

The ruts of the old road had once been worn right down to bedrock but years of disuse had rilled them in here and there with enough topsoil to grow weeds. In places the weeds were belly high on Boag's horse. But they were limp because they'd been crushed down lately by the passage of wagon-wheels and they hadn't sprung back fully. Heavy wagons, Boag judged. Possibly Mr. Pickett's big vault, coming up the road in sections.

It was good country up here, a lot of timber and meadows. But when Boag reached the edge of the forest and looked up the road he could see why Mr. Pickett had chosen the spot. It was a
mesa,
a tabletop mountain with a steep cut running up into it for the road—possibly it was a natural cut because it would have taken a prodigious amount of blasting to man-make it. From the parapet on top of the mountain the sentries would have a clear command of almost a mile of cliffs and open flats. You couldn't get anywhere near that mountain without being spotted; not on this front approach at least.

Boag turned the horse to the right and began to ride a full circle around Mr. Pickett's mountain.

He kept inside the fringe of the trees because he didn't want them to spot him. The route took him along a ragged line, bulging and doubling back with the trees, so that it consumed most of the remaining hours of the night. He found that the trees came up reasonably close to the bottom of the mountain on its back side, to the north, but that was no use because the cliff was too sheer to scale. The mountain was shaped like a stump, as if it had once been the base of a tree forty miles high. Ridges ran out from its base like the roots of a stump and some of them climbed pretty close to the top; but there was always at least twenty or thirty feet of sheer cliff above the ridges, and there was a man-made stone wall above that, and he was sure the rawhiders had rifles in the gunports up there. By the time he got back to his starting point at the foot of the wagon road it was nearly dawn and he hadn't seen any way in or any way out except for the road cut. Mr. Pickett had got himself a choice spot.

Boag thought of a few ways he might smuggle himself inside, aboard one of Mr. Pickett's arriving wagons for instance, but the idea didn't have any real strength to it. You didn't go into the enemy's camp when he had you that badly outnumbered.

The main purpose his tour had served just now was to confirm an expectation: Mr. Pickett had found himself a fortress that was damn well nigh impregnable.

But it was also damned hard to escape from. It could nicely be turned into a trap.

A prison for Mr. Pickett?

The idea made Boag grin for a while but in the end he gave up on it. He had no patience for a siege and it would be practically impossible for one man to keep that road bottled up for any length of time. A man had to sleep some time. All they had to do was wait him out and slip past him when he slept and stick a knife in him.

Boag had made a kind of a plan before he'd ever seen this place. Now that he'd reconnoitered and discarded a couple of alternative plans, he saw that his original plan was still the right one.

It was the only one, in fact.

You didn't go in after the enemy. You made the enemy come out to you.

6

By sunup he was riding back around the perimeter of Coronado town. He got back to the wagon where he'd left it, hitched up and drove the wagon back along the same route to the forest that aproned Mr. Pickett's mountain. Well back inside the trees where they couldn't see him, and off a hundred yards to the side of the road, he stopped the wagon and walked out to the edge of the trees to get a view of the ground and pick his spots.

There was a long ridge that came down the western side of the mountain and sloped into the trees, breaking up into a number of tributary ridges and hogbacks and canyons. It might do; but the military axiom was not to fight with the sun in your eyes and if he set things up there, he'd be at a disadvantage in a morning fight. Boag might be able to influence their actions but he couldn't force them to pick a time of day that was convenient to him. So he discarded that area and looked for another.

Trees gave a man good cover and it had occurred to him he might set up right alongside the wagon road itself. But there were too many corridors through a forest. You needed a spot where the numbers of routes and accesses was limited. Otherwise you couldn't enfilade them all.

This was Thursday, about the middle of the morning, and he didn't know for sure when the first of Mr. Pickett's gold bearers would arrive but from what Jackson said it looked as if they were all due to show up some time tomorrow. To be on the safe side he gave himself until midnight to set up.

He got the saddle horse and rode a little way around the south perimeter. It took him more than an hour even though he was covering only a few dozen acres, mostly because he had to keep out of sight wherever he went but also because he had to be patient, he had to take his time and pick the best possible spot if he was going to have any chance at all of making it work.

Once he thought
Why the hell am I doing this?
But he didn't dwell on it; he was keyed up and ready for the battle and at times like this you didn't think about why, you thought about how. Working out the methods took all a man's conception.

“Hey now.”

He said it to himself very softly and with considerable satisfaction; he backed the horse a couple of strides and mused upon the scene.