Valley of Fire (9 page)

“In the Year of Our Lord 1598, Juan de Oñate led the Spanish colonists to the place that would be called San Gabriel northwest of Santa Fe—four hundred men, including roughly one hundred thirty soldiers, another one hundred thirty wives and children, seven thousand head of horses, cattle, goats, and burros, eighty-three carts, and ten Franciscan friars.

“The friars came to convert the savage Indians to Christianity. Soldiers came to kill and conquer. The colonists came to establish a new land. They all, even the friars, came for silver and gold. In fact, Governor Oñate himself came from a wealthy mining family in Zacatecas and brought mining equipment with him. The settlers spent more time looking for gold than farming along the Río Grande.

“Pueblo Indians gave their allegiance to the Spanish Crown, and to God, or rather, the friars. At the confluence of the Río Grande and the Río Chama, the first capital was established in New Mexico, San Juan de los Caballeros, then moved to higher ground and rechristened San Gabriel. A church was built. And soldiers, colonists, and friars went off looking for gold.

“One family, one friar, wanted more than San Gabriel had to offer. So they moved east into the mountains, finding a fertile valley. They called the place Mora, after the mulberry trees.

“They found more than mulberry trees. In the rugged mountains somewhere between Mora and Santa Fe, they found gold. Tons of it. They found Indians, too. The priest became more interested in the gold mines than in the salvation of pagan Indian souls.

“The colonist went back to San Gabriel, and returned to Mora with a dozen soldiers. They enslaved the Indians to work the gold mine. They grew wealthy. The mine seemed as if it would never play out. It was like they had found the Seven Cities of Cibola—all in one place.

“The mine's location, they kept secret, known only by the colonist, the friar, the soldiers, and their families.

“Eighty years passed. The descendants of the colonists inherited the mine. The children, then grandchildren of the slaves, worked the mine. A new friar took over, bringing with him a mold to make ingots, stolen from Mexico City. Two other friars joined him. Life was good, for the colonists, the Spaniards, the friars.

“But in the early summer of 1680, the gold became scarce. Finally, the mine was playing out.

“When dawn broke on August tenth, some fifty to sixty Pueblos revolted, killing every Spaniard they could find. Word reached the mine. The friars and the families forced the Indians there to pack sacks and sacks of gold ingots onto burros and fled. They hurried south, past Santa Fe, joining hundreds of fleeing Spaniards. The miners made it to Gran Quivira. And that's the last anyone ever heard from them. Other colonists, soldiers, friars, fled back to Mexico. Spanish rule would not return to New Mexico until 1692, when Diego de Vargas reestablished Spanish settlements.

“By then, the priests, the soldiers, and the colonists who had fled the mine near Mora were all dead, or had no interest in returning to the mountains of New Mexico, even for a fortune. The treasure was lost.”

 

 

While Sister Geneviève had been talking, she had started shivering. Like I said, even in summertime, the nights can turn chilly in this country so I decided to chance a fire, gathering dry wood, keeping it small. She kept talking, inching closer to the fire.

Her face glowed, and even though she still wore that hood, I could see the flames in her dark eyes. Such a pretty face. Damn, it sure was wasted on a nun.

When she got to the part about the treasure being lost and all, I tossed some more wood onto the fire. No smoke, and what with us tucked down in the arroyo, I didn't think the fire could be seen by anything other than owls and nighthawks.

She fell quiet, extending her hands, warming them over the fire.

“Sister,” I told Geneviève as gently as I knew how, “that is an interesting tale. But your nun friends raised me to know better than waste my time gallivanting across the New Mexico desert chasing lost mines.”

“Not a lost mine,” the nun said. “Especially one that was played out two hundred years ago. You saw that ingot. That's what we're after.”

“It's still lost. Same thing. Gold that ain't been seen for two centuries.”

“You saw it.”

“I saw one ingot.”

“Sister Rocío saw twenty mule-loads of ingots.”

I laughed. “She's blind.”

“She wasn't in 1848.”

I let her keep talking.

“After the Mexican War, Sister Rocío, then a nun in her mid-thirties, arrived at Gran Quivira at the Salinas Mission ruins with two priests, an historian from the newly-founded Smithsonian Institution, and two Mexican guides. They weren't looking for gold, just wanted to see the old mission.

“What they found behind one of the walls startled them—bones of Indians, skulls crushed, bodies hacked to pieces, and one of those ingots clutched in a skeletal hand. That got them looking, exploring, digging.

“Scientist James Smithson had founded his institution to help increase and diffuse knowledge among men. Well, the scientific-minded historian with the party studied the scene and then guessed what had happened—the friars and colonists had made it to Gran Quivira—especially after one of the old Mexican guides told them of the legend of the lost Mora treasure.

“The historian wasn't sure if the Pueblo was part of the 1680 revolt, but those Indians had been murdered, and the ingot in one hand seemed to say that they had been killed in or around 1680.”

“The priests,” I said, and shuddered, which I hardly ever do, especially in summer. “They . . . murdered those slaves.”

The nun's head bobbed. She no longer looked me in the eye. “Most likely. Sealed them in a tomb for almost one hundred seventy years.”

“And that old nun, that scientist, those priests . . . they found the gold.”

She looked up at me again, her head still bobbing slightly. “All of it. Well, most likely, all of it. It took them months. It was January before they had it all.

“They loaded the treasure on twenty mules, and moved quickly south, staying away from the trails to the east, staying well from the Jornado del Muerto to the west.”

I kept trying to do some ciphering in my head. Twenty mules. All of them couldn't carry gold, not if those fools knowed anything. They'd need to pack food and water. So let's make it fifteen mules carrying gold. A good mule can carry maybe twenty percent of its body weight. Say the mule weighs eight hundred pounds. That would mean . . .

I gave up. “Sister, what's twenty percent of eight hundred?”

She looked at me as if I was an idiot.

“One hundred and sixty.”

“So . . . times that by fifteen . . . and . . .and . . .?” I asked her again.

“Two thousand four hundred.”

I nodded. Then it struck me that that was pounds. There are sixteen ounces in a pound, so that made it . . . ?

Another question.

She give me another answer. “Thirty-eight thousand, four hundred.”

I give her a stare, then grinned. “You don't have to do no scratching, no carrying, none of them kinds of things.”

“It isn't that difficult.” She was smiling, not looking at me like I was a fool and criminal, which I was. She smiled like she liked me.

Sort of.

“Let's say gold's twenty dollars an ounce,” I suggested.

“It's more than three-quarters of a million dollars,” she said.

“You don't know the exact figure?”

“That might take me a while to do in my head.”

But I knowed. Not the exact figure or nothing like that. But she was lying. She knowed exactly how much money it was. She could probably tell me at $19.84 an ounce. Troy ounce. But $750,000 was a nice round number. That's all I needed to know.

“So they took off south, probably bound for Mexico to one of the port cities. And had to go through the Valley of Fire.”

Sister Geneviève said that's what happened and resumed her story.

“It's hard to keep seven hundred fifty thousand dollars a secret. They had to go for supplies, for burros and mules to carry the gold. Someone, probably one of the guides, told a friend, who told a friend. Finally, Sister Rocío's party left, moving south. By the time that pack train had reached the Valley of Fire, they knew they were being followed. They pretended to bed down for the night, making a big show of fires, then sneaked out, moving south. Quickly. Desperate.

“Two days later, the bandits caught up and attacked. But the party managed to hold out, at least until nightfall. That night turned cold, bitterly cold. One priest was dead, but Sister Rocío was determined not to let these killers get the gold. To her way of thinking, the gold belonged not to Mexicans or Spaniards or scientists with the Smithsonian Institution, but to those murdered Pueblo Indians. Definitely, bandits did not deserve the fortune.

“The priest, the scientist, the guides agreed.

“That night, the young nun and a guide named Cortez led most of the mules away from camp, turning toward the mountains to the east.”

Just like that, the story ended.

Oh, I was certain-sure there was more to it. But the nun wasn't talking no more. She was staring. Staring right behind me. Slowly, she raised her hands over her head. Even slower than that, I turned to stare down the barrel of that big-ass .45-70.

They stood at the edge of the arroyo, up on the slope. I couldn't see past them where it was pitch black, but the light from the fire reached them two sorry cusses.

“Buenos noches,”
Demyan Blanco said. Beside him, holding two damned quiet horses, stood the farmer, Jorge de la Cruz. I looked around for others, but, like most folks, Blanco and the farmer was greedy sorts. They hadn't told nobody about the ingot. They'd just come chasing after us.

Blanco knelt, to give me a better look at that Winchester Centennial.

Me? Without looking back at the nun, I told her, feeling right proud of myself, “Sister, I told you we should have bought that damned rifle back in Anton Chico.”

“Sister,” Blanco said, “you and your compadre are far from the road. Far from civilization.”

“One gets closer to God while alone in the wilderness.”

The horse trader laughed. “I would not know. Since I do not believe.”

“I will pray for you.”

“You should pray for yourselves!” This, surprisingly, came from the massive farmer, who led the two horses down the slope and into the arroyo, while his cousin, the horse trader, stayed up top, covering us with his Winchester. “You should pray for yourselves!” Jorge de la Cruz repeated.

It's hard to figure a fellow sometimes. I mean, twenty-four hours earlier, this farmer had shown his gentle nature, had helped fix up Sister Geneviève's leg, practically acting like his was smitten with a woman of God. Just this evening, he had lashed out against his cousin's haggling, or refusal to haggle, and had come close to getting into a row with Demyan Blanco. Now, he ground-reined their two horses, and pulled a pistol from his waistband. One of them Dean and Adams five-shot affairs, English made, old-fashioned. Not a small gun, but it looked like a toy in that big oaf's hand.

“We do not believe that that piece of gold is all you possess,” he said. Unlike that outburst a moment earlier, his tone sounded almost apologetic.

That big pistol sure didn't look it.

Sister Geneviève struck a Christlike pose, holding her arms out, her voice soft. “You may search us if you desire.”

De la Cruz went about gathering some more firewood with his free hand, while his right hand kept that Dean and Adams on me. He built up the fire real good and stepped back.

Finally, the horse trader came down the slope carefully, keeping that cannon of a rifle aimed at my chest. With the rifle's barrel, he motioned me to stand closer to the nun, and I obeyed. Criminy, I had half a mind to stand behind the Sister and use her for a shield, as menacing as that Winchester was, but I knowed something about guns. A .45-70 slug would tear right through Sister Geneviève and then blow me apart as well. So I done the manly thing. I stood in front of the Sister.

Blanco spoke in rapid, angry Spanish. Jorge de la Cruz slid his pistol back inside his pants, and pulled a coal-oil-soaked torch from the back of his horse. They had come prepared. He stuck the end of the torch in the fire, then carried his light toward our horses, jamming the bottom in the soft sand, and went to work. He sure made a mess of that fine packing job the clerk at Abercrombie's had done, throwing sacks and cans every which way, startling the mule, then ransacking my saddlebags that had come with the saddle. That didn't take long. Didn't have a damned thing in them. Blanco just stood there, cradling that Winchester, staring at us.

Wasn't too long, since we hadn't packed too much stuff, before an angry
“¡Maldita sea!”
exploded from that burly farmer's mouth. He rose, drew his revolver, and stepped around the torch. “There is nothing of value!”

“I told you as much,” Sister Geneviève said demurely, “when I bought those horses and mule.”

“Bastardo,”
Jorge de la Cruz whispered, then spoke again in Mexican at his cousin, who shook his head.

Blanco took over the interview. “You said the ingot was given to you by another nun.”

Sister Geneviève nodded. “That is so.”

“And you do not know where she found it.”

“As I told you back in Anton Chico—”

The Centennial rifle came up to Blanco's shoulder. “Then why do you travel with this rapscallion, Sister? Why do you leave the road and hide in this arroyo? Why is it that Felipe Hernandez rode into our quiet village shortly after you left?”

That got my attention. I stared into the night, wondering if Hernandez was out there waiting.

“He says that you helped this miserable gringo escape from jail. He was sentenced to hang.” Blanco was grinning when I turned back, figuring if Hernandez was out there, I'd already be dead. “There is a nice reward for your return to Las Vegas, señor.”

“Where's Hernandez?” I asked.

The rifle lowered, but just slightly. I stuck my hands behind my back, palm out, hoping Sister Geneviève would get my intention and place that little Ladies Companion in it.

“I sent him to Puerto de Luna,” Blanco said.

“Señor.” Jorge de la Cruz said. “Step away from the Sister of Charity. Do so now, amigo, or I will kill you both.”

“Do as he says, Mister Bishop.”

The way she said it, I knew it wasn't a suggestion, and all them years in that orphanage run by nuns must have made me obey her. I moved closer to the fire, and turned around, half-expecting to see that nun gun down them two boys with that pocket .22, but she just stood there.

“Where is the gold?” Blanco asked.

“If it is not with those horses,” the farmer said, “it must be on their bodies.”

“You dumb son of a bitch,” I told the fool. “You think we'd carry gold on us? Heavy as gold is?”

“Those are small ingots, señor.” Blanco nodded at his massive cousin.

The cousin stepped in between Sister Geneviève and me. “Take off your clothes.”

Blanco grinned.

Now, being truthful and all, this being likely the last testament of Micah Bishop, I admit that I had wondered just what that nun looked like under all that black wool and white trim, had done some picturing in my mind my ownself, but there is a limit to what even a rapscallion and horse thief and card sharp will tolerate. Nuns had practically raised me and all. I might be what you call lapsed or a backslider, but there was some things you just did not do.

“What kind of men are you?” I snapped, and took several steps until that Winchester barrel was right at my sternum.

Blanco's eyes didn't blink. I could hear Jorge de la Cruz turning around, figured he had that pistol aimed at my skull.

“She's a nun!” I yelled.

“Felipe Hernandez has put a price on her head, too,” Blanco said. “Nuns do not help outlaws.”

“There was Sister Blandina!” I said. “She helped Billy the Kid up in Trinidad.”

“She was not my nun. Nor is this wench.”

Now, here I was, an inch from a .45-70 slug ripping through my chest, had gotten the attention of them two ruffians, and all Sister Geneviève had to do was pull that pistol, put a slug in the big man's back. That would distract Blanco, and I'd knock the rifle aside, jerk it from his hands, beat his brains in with the Winchester's stock.

That's what I was hoping would happen. I mean, that nun had shown no qualms about shooting me after she'd busted me out of jail. I'd even suspected her, since she had partnered with Sean Fenn, of not even being a nun, but now she acted so sweet and innocent.

“You must not harm him.” She didn't shout that. Just said it like she was telling a toddler, pretty please, that he needs to hush.

Blanco shot her one mean glance. I contemplated knocking the rifle aside, but then decided I was in no hurry to get to Hell.

“You will do as my cousin says. Take off your clothes.” That mean horse trader must have been picturing her as I'd been doing.

“No, señor, I will not do that. You may kill me. Do as you wish. You may even kill Mister Bishop.”

That wasn't what I wanted to hear.

“But then you will never find more than three-quarters of a million dollars in ancient Spanish ingots.”

Both of them thieves whispered a stunned,
“¡Joder!”
Then they got quiet, staring, dreaming of all that beautiful gold.

Things stayed that way for the longest while, them cutthroats practically salivating over their newfound riches that they hadn't found yet, the nun just standing there, hands nowhere near that pepperbox pistol in her habit, me realizing that I really needed to empty my bladder, and the horses swishing their tails.

“Where is it?” Demyan Blanco had finally found his voice.

“It is buried,” she said, pausing, “at the mission ruins at Gran Quivira.”

I bit my bottom lip. She, a nun, had just cut loose with a shameless falsehood. Or had she? Maybe she had lied to me. I mean, she told me the gold had been buried at Gran Quivira, but now was buried somewhere in the Valley of Fire.

“Gran Quivira?” Blanco pursed his lips. “There has never been gold there,” he said after a moment. “There is nothing near those old ruins but salt . . . and . . .”

“Fantasma.”
Jorge de la Cruz spoke in a whisper so soft, I could just manage to hear.

Well, them cousins went at each other again, barking in Mex, gesturing at each other. A good time for Sister Geneviève to pull that .22 and start the ball, but she remained an unmoving angel.

“There are no ghosts!” Blanco finished his argument with a flurry.

For a moment, I thought he might turn that Centennial rifle on the big farmer, but, alas, that wasn't in the cards. His giant cousin kicked some sands, hunched his shoulders, and glared.

“I would not discount the stories of their presence,” the nun said.

Blanco spit and snorted. “I thought you would only believe in one ghost, Sister, the Holy One.”

“I believe in angels,” she said calmly, “and what is an angel but a ghost, a specter, an apparition.” She give him one of her charming smiles. “It is said that before the Revolt of 1860, four hundred and fifty poor souls starved to death and were buried in a mass grave. That is why there was nothing there but ruins when the gold arrived during the revolt.”

I could see Blanco's eyes doing some mental figuring. He knowed that piece of gold had been made during the reign of King Philip Something or other, and I doubt if he was that caught up on his studies of ancient New Mexico, but it must have struck him as being reasonable.”

“The gold arrived in 1680?” Blanco asked.

“Yes. When the Pueblo Indians revolted.”

Blanco shook his head. “Sister, the Pueblo Indians were revolting. So why would those dirt-diggers at Gran Quivira not kill the priests and soldiers there?”

“The
Northern
Pueblo Indians revolted,” she corrected him like a child.

Reminded me of my schooling back at the orphanage, only she said it right pleasantly, and didn't crack no knuckles with her ruler.

“Not the Pueblos in the Salinas region. Besides, by that time, there were few of
Las Humanas
, as the Indians there called themselves, left at the pueblo and mission. As I said, most had died during the terrible drought in the years before. The sur vivors—the Spanish survivors, I mean—in Mora where the gold was mined fled for Mexico, or at least to what is today known as El Paso.”

“And, naturally,” Blanco said, his voice accented with sarcasm, “they took all that gold with them. They loaded down their burros with a fortune in gold.
As they fled for their very lives?
”

“Wouldn't you? Three-quarters of a million dollars worth of gold?”

That shut the bastard up.

“Why did they not come back?” Blanco asked. “When de Vargas returned years later?”

The farmer just blinked with stupidity. I reckon he hadn't studied much history.

“¿ Quién sabe?”
She shrugged.

Blanco chewed on this for a spell, carried on a quick conversation in their native tongue with his cousin, gesturing at each other, voices rising every so often, one pointing at me, the other at the Sister, then to the south a long way toward those ruins, then north back to Anton Chico.

They got quiet again, but only because the Sister had started talking.

“That much gold is too much for the Sisters of Charity. As I said, another Sister in our order revealed the story to me. We are humble people. All we desire is to help those in need, especially the children. If you can take me to the ruins at Gran Quivira, and we find the gold, you may have most of it. All we ask, as the Sisters of Charity, is enough to improve our school for girls, our orphanage, and our hospital. Is that too much to ask?”

More of that harsh Mexican lingo, more pointing, then both men nodded.

“Jorge is a faithful Catholic. He agrees with your terms, Sister. We shall take you to Gran Quivira. But we do not need this
norteamericano.
” Blanco rammed the barrel into my stomach, knocking the breath out of me, and when I doubled over, the sneaky fiend tried his best to hammer out my brains with that barrel.

I hit the ground hard, rolled over, wheezing, just managing to see through tears of pain that Centennial's barrel which Blanco had planted on the bridge of my nose.