Brian Garfield (7 page)

It broke up the game. New players started to move in to the table and once three of the original players had left, Elmer didn't seem to see any reason to stay around and let the others try to get even. He scooped his winnings into a canvas poke and pulled the drawstring shut and stuffed the poke down in his hip pocket, finished off his drink—it was the fifth shot of whiskey Boag had seen him down—and meandered out of the saloon, pausing twice to talk to acquaintances. While Elmer was talking to the second one, at the bar, Boag moved slowly to the door and went outside.

It was about midnight and the traffic had thinned out on the street. Boag put his boots down into the loose dust of the thoroughfare and walked across the way to the dark passage between two red-light houses opposite the saloon. He posted himself in the shadows until Elmer emerged from the saloon and when Elmer turned up-street Boag let him get a block away before eeling out onto the boardwalk and following him.

2

At the mouth of an alley Boag caught Elmer from behind, clamped his palm over Elmer's mouth and lifted the revolver from Elmer's holster. Boag jammed it in Elmer's back and hissed in Elmer's ear:

“Eef you don' keep es-shut op, I goeen to keel you. Onnerstan'?”

Elmer nodded and Boag removed his hand from the man's mouth. “Now don' turn aroun'.” He lifted the fat poke from Elmer's hip pocket and stuffed it into his own.

“Now you es-start walkeen. Es-straight ahead an' you don' look back, onnerstan'? You look back an' I goeen to hahv to es-shoot you.
Ahora ve.
” He prodded Elmer in the back with the gun muzzle and Elmer walked away unhurriedly, an easygoing fellow who took such things with equanimity. Boag waited until Elmer had traversed most of the length of the alley before Boag wheeled back around the corner and broke into a sprint across somebody's dark lawn.

He slipped through back alleys for ten minutes before he stopped in a passage behind a thriving saloon. Lamplight spilled out of a high back window, enough for him to see. He emptied Elmer's poke and separated the coins from the greenjackets; he distributed the coins in his pockets so that they wouldn't make telltale bulges. The greenjacket bills he stuffed back into Elmer's poke because paper money was printed up by various local banks and Elmer might be able to identify his own greenbacks, although it was doubtful since he'd just won most of them in the poker game. Still there was no point taking the chance. Boag left the poke, the green-jackets, and Elmer's revolver in the pile of trash behind the saloon; guns had serial numbers and Elmer might be able to identify that too.

With one hundred and forty-six dollars in coin on his person, Boag climbed into the loft of a horse-boarding stable near the waterfront and fell asleep almost instantly, his leg throbbing only a little.

3

He had himself clothed and outfitted and ready to go by nine in the morning; by nine-thirty he had ridden beyond sight of the Yuma bluff and was trotting north on the hard-mouthed horse toward the confluence of the Colorado and the Gila.

It was a used McClellan army saddle for which most civilians wouldn't give ten dollars, which Boag had paid for this one; he was used to the split-tree saddle, he'd ridden them nearly twenty years. The rifle was a .38-56 Winchester with calibrated hunting sights and the revolver was a .45 Colt Theuer-conversion model, ten or twelve years old but the rifling grooves and lands were in good shape and there wasn't any rust on it and the gunsmith had let him have it for four dollars. He'd bought ammunition moulds and primers and crimpers as well as several boxes of cartridges so he was ready to reload his own if circumstances took him where you couldn't buy cartridges, especially for the .38-56 which wasn't all that common a caliber. He'd picked it for its high velocity and long-range accuracy; a steady enough rifleman could keep all his shots within a hat-size circle at four hundred yards with this rifle, and that was a lot better than the Army .45-70 he'd been used to, where you were out of luck beyond two hundred yards.

He had a few luxuries like a flint-and-steel fire-starting mechanism, a rain poncho, a good flat-crown border hat, and somebody's old heavy plaid flannel riding coat which might keep him warm if he had to ride up into the Sierra. He had spare underclothes and socks and he'd bought a pair of moccasins which were now in the saddlebags along with several days' worth of food. The canteen was a two-gallon container: heavy, but if you ran out of water in the desert you were dead.

And he still had sixty-four dollars in his new jeans. He'd bought well—all except the horse, about which he was beginning to have his doubts. Thirty-five dollars for a seven-year-old sorrel gelding with the gait of a razorback sow and the mean eye of a wolverine.

But the horse moved along at a good clip and he guessed that would do.

He found the Uncle Sam where he had thought she would be. You couldn't really hide anything that big. They'd put her where nobody would look for her for a while. It was where she had to be and Boag had no trouble.

They had steamed her up the Gila a few miles to a point where the highway veered away from the riverbank and went around behind the far side of a big hill. They'd anchored her up under the overhang of some big cottonwoods. Nobody would come across her by chance; you had to be looking for her to find her. So far, nobody had any reason to be out looking for her.

Except Boag.

Obviously Mr. Pickett had planned it all pretty well in advance. The buckboard was still on deck, they hadn't bothered to use it. Boag examined the tracks leading away from the boat. The horse and mule tracks (he assumed they were some of each although from the remaining indentations it was impossible to tell which was which) were too numerous to count but there had to have been thirty or more. They'd probably loaded about two-hundred-and-fifty pounds of gold onto each pack animal. It made for quite a mule train. But that was a lot more maneuverable than wagons would have been.

He followed the trampled mess up around the hill and across the highway, tracking southeast. It had been some years since he'd been down here on Cavalry patrols but he had no trouble remembering how it lay. A hundred miles of dry soda lakes and baked soil that was scorched and cracked and shriveled by a perpetual drought and a perpetual sun. Tumbleweed and cactus and the occasional mesquite and patches of greasewood and organ pipe. Give this country an inch and it would take your life. You had to shake out your boots in the morning before you put them on because if you didn't you might be putting your toes in with a scorpion or tarantula or centipede or black widow.

He had a look at the horse-droppings. None of them was still moist or green. Hard to say how much wind there had been in the past few days; the extent to which sand had drifted into the tracks was no real indication of how long they'd been gone, but working out the probabilities in his head he judged they had to have three days' jump on him, possibly closer to four.

He tested the weight of the canteen—a nervous gesture; he'd just filled it in the Gila and watered the horse and drunk his fill—and then he gigged the horse out into the Sonora Desert.

4

When the cruel sun climbed high he knew he was going to have to surrender to it and take shelter. His cracked lips stung with sweat. If you kept moving in this blast of heat you'd use up too much water on the horse and yourself. There were waterholes down along the Border but they were two days along from here; you had to ration things. Better to travel the cool hours of evening and night and early morning. There would be a moon again tonight, getting on toward last-quarter; enough to track by.

Somewhere deep underground a rock cistern gathered enough moisture to feed the long roots of a clump of mesquite. He hobbled the sorrel and bedded down under the meager shade. Dust motes hung in the sunbeams that lanced down between the branches. He slept; he had the ability to relax completely when there was nothing to do.

The clock inside him brought him awake when it was cool enough to eat. Somewhere around half past four by the sun. He gave the horse a ration of water and scrubbed out the old Army mess kit with sand, put everything away where it belonged, saddled the horse and untied the hobbles and went on his way into the evening.

In the night three times he came across the bleached bones of travelers who had tried to make the crossing without sufficient experience.

In places the wind had blown the tracks over completely but it was impossible for a thirty- or forty-horse trail to disappear that quickly; a few minutes' scouting around and he always picked them up again. The trail led him steadily southeastward on the high flats. Mr. Pickett knew exactly where he was headed.

There were a few towns down that way—Sonoyta and some others, scattered around the oases of the plain. Beyond the Border there were mountains and then more desert, although that desert was not as dry or treeless as this one. Mr. Pickett was heading into Mexico as he had said he would. The question was, once in Mexico—where then?

He found shade at nine-thirty in the morning and although it wasn't fully hotted up yet he decided not to risk another few miles; he ate and bedded down and waited out the heat. He was up before four, eating dried beef and pinto beans and the last of the cornbread, and feeding the horse a nosebag ration of grain and a hatful of water. The canteen was less than half full now. He put a pebble in his mouth and rolled it around with his tongue to keep the saliva going.

At sundown he came upon what he had feared he might find. The tracks began to split up.

By twos and threes and fours, groups of horses peeled away from the main gang and went their own way. All of them headed generally southward but the little bunches were diverging by miles. The main track got smaller and smaller and finally there was no way to know which was the main track any more, and at ten or eleven o'clock that night Boag had to toss a coin. He picked a set of four-horse prints and settled down to follow them south.

5

He was guessing but his opinion of Mr. Pickett was that in each group of four-horse prints you would probably find two trustworthy old-time Pickett rawhiders, one pack animal loaded with gold, and one relative newcomer to the Pickett-Stryker organization whose potential greed would be tempered by the constant presence of the two old rawhiders who probably slept in shifts and kept both eyes on him. In that manner Mr. Pickett would guarantee, as much as it could be guaranteed, the safe delivery of that portion of the gold to wherever it was destined.

Splitting up this way would be a risk—three men and a packhorse being far more tempting to bandits than an army of twenty-odd men armed to the teeth—but then it did make the track harder to follow and it also provided good odds that most of the four-horse groups would get through.

It was odd the way he kept thinking of Mr. Pickett's men as old rawhiders. It was the same way he thought of himself as an old soldier. They were mostly in their forties, not old men at all. It was just that they'd been riding with Mr. Pickett for more than twenty years, most of them. They probably averaged six or seven years older than Boag, that was all; by his best reckoning Boag was thirty-seven. In Mississippi they didn't keep close birth records on field niggers. Boag didn't know but that he might be a field nigger right now if the war hadn't emancipated him when he was about fourteen or fifteen by his own reckoning; he had lied about it—he was big, he had always been big—and the Army had thrown him right into its new black horse-regiment, the Tenth Cavalry, because Boag had a natural eye with a rifle and the seat of Boag's pants fit very well on the back of a standard-size Cavalry horse.

They had fought the Sioux on the northern plains and the Comanche on the southern plains and there had been several years' garrison duty and then the Army had sent them out under Crook to find Geronimo.

Then when the Indian wars were over the Army decided to cut back about two hundred personnel. They found in the service records of Boag and Wilstach that they'd both been busted back to private several times for various infractions, so the Army discharged them in the middle of Arizona and they found themselves in the desert with no trade but soldiering, no job but drifting, and the road leading finally to the Ehrenburg jail.

Now on Mr. Pickett's backtrack Boag was thinking about Wilstach and thinking about all that gold. Of course he was just one man and he was a little crippled up by the bullets he'd taken on the river, but he had nothing better to do with his time and you needed some reason to get up in the morning.

There was the revolution going on in Sonora; there always was. Boag expected to have to dodge some combat. In times of rebellion in Mexico anybody suspicious was in danger of getting killed merely as a precautionary measure.

In a midmorning blaze of heat he reached Tanques Verdes where the four horses ahead of him had watered. Under the shade of the towering
algodones
Boag went from the trading post to the blacksmith's stable to the saloon asking questions about the three men with the packhorse. An hour's questioning convinced him that the three men had not been Mr. Pickett or Stryker. As he had guessed there was one relatively young man, a Mexican, and two middle-aged gringos. One of the two gringos had stayed with the packhorse at all times during the six or seven hours the men had spent in Tanques Verdes four days ago. None of them had said anything that anybody remembered about where they were headed. They had eaten supper and ridden into Mexico at sundown.

Boag filled his canteen and replenished his food and rode out after them.

A gauze of dust hung low over the desert. He rode past the heap of stones that marked the international boundary and climbed toward the foothills in Mexico.

The track was vague and intermittent. Winds had blown the prints over, sometimes for hundreds of yards at a stretch. Boag scowled irritably at the earth and often had to guide on flimsy probabilities: an iron-scratched stone, a carelessly broken greasewood branch where a horse had brushed too close. Every fifteen or twenty minutes he would come across a patch on the lee side of some boulders or brush where the prints of the four horses were still identifiable. He hadn't lost them but he was losing time with all the circling and back-tracking it took to stay with them.