I shook my head. “Miguel, this is more than I can handle. There’s a slug in there. You want me to go burrowing around in your busted-up shoulder bone looking for it?”
“Yes,” he said. But it come out like a sort of gasp.
I said, “Then you got more guts than I do.”
On the first watch I laid on top of the railroad grade, staring off in the distance in all directions, looking for movement of any kind. I wasn’t particularly sleepy, but I was so weary I could have laid down and not got up for a week. Looking down on the hard clay floor, I could see the rest of them jerking and shuffling around trying to get comfortable. We had the horses all tied to one loose-ended picket rope. But even that was unnecessary. Those poor beasts were so give out they wouldn’t have walked away if you’d taken after them with a bullwhip. I had no earthly idea how much longer they could last. I’d rode horses before with little water, but that had been in country that had some moisture in the air. Where we were the air just seemed to suck the fluid right out of your body. And the bigger the body, the harder it sucked.
I tried not to think about Nora but she kept sneaking into my thoughts. For all I knew it was practically my wedding day. I hated to think what sort of thoughts she was entertaining about me at that instant. If I ever got to see her again, let alone have her marry me, I’d have to count myself lucky. Well, my duty to the family had come first, but, then, hell, she was family too. What I should have done was let Norris enjoy the comforts of Monterrey while I got myself hitched, took my honeymoon and then leisurely slipped on down and straightened out his trouble.
But I hadn’t done that. I’d been so sure I could make a quick trip down, bluff me out a few little Mexicans and then be back home without supper even having a chance to get cold.
Only it just hadn’t worked out that way. I didn’t know who I was madder at—me or Norris.
After about two hours I went down and woke Ben up. He yawned and looked at his watch. “Went a little over your time, didn’t you?”
“I’m too tired to sleep,” I said. “Call Lew next.”
We didn’t have any blankets or bedrolls. There was nothing to do but take my slicker, lay it on the hard ground and rest my head on my saddle. I didn’t figure to really get all that much sleep.
Next thing I knew Hays was shaking me awake. Anybody that could have slept under those conditions must have needed the sleep mighty bad. I sat up rubbing my eyes and tasting the cotton in my mouth. Hays said, “It’s goin’ on for four of the mornin’, boss.”
I got up swearing. “Dammit, I didn’t want to dally this long. Rouse everybody. Pass the canteen around for a short drink of water and then let’s get saddled up and start moving. Goddammit, what do you mean waking me up so late? Did you go to sleep on watch?”
He shook his head. “Not me, boss. It’s just the way it worked out.”
Well, it couldn’t be helped now and it was probably just as well. God knows, everybody, especially the poor rode-down horses, could use the rest. I said to Hays, “You got any provisions left?”
“Nary a thing,” he said. “Cupboard is bare.”
“Then strip that pack saddle off the packhorse and put him on lead. He’s got a fresh back and we might need it before the day is over.”
All around me men were getting up groaning and swearing. They eagerly took the canteen as it was passed around. Hays followed, making sure nobody got overly ambitious with the last of our water. I went over to Miguel Elizandro about half dreading what I was going to find. I don’t like to break a man out of jail and then have him die on me. But the
caballero
was sitting up and struggling to reach his feet. I took two quick steps to give him a hand. I’d just thought he’d had a fever the day before. Now there was no doubt. The heat just radiated off him. It was a sickening thought but I knew I was going to have to cut into him before the day was out or he wasn’t going to make it. I said, “Can you ride?”
He gave me a look, sick as he was. It had been a damn-fool question. He didn’t have much choice. He had to ride unless he wanted to leave his bones to bleach where we stood.
One of his men had saddled his horse and brought it over. Together we assisted the don into his saddle. He made it without a lot of cries or moans, but a blind man could have seen the pain in his face.
After that I went to see about Jack Cole. Norris was helping him to mount so I hung back until Jack was in the saddle and Norris had gone on about his own business. I tell you, I was getting madder and madder at Norris. It’s one thing to be a damn fool where you’ve only got yourself to hurt; it’s quite another to endanger a whole lot of other people by acting like one. Of course his answer would be that nobody asked me to come down and rescue him, or to even get involved for that matter. Well, me and Mr. Norris Williams was going to have an accounting and in the not-too-distant future. That is if any of us made it out of the mess alive.
Just as I was about to go to Jack I saw one of Elizandro’s men strike a match to light a cigarillo. I struck it out of his hand as quick as I could. “You damn fool!” I said lowly but with as much force as I could get in my voice. “No lights!”
Then, just in case anyone else was about to get the same harebrained idea, I said, “No lights! No matches! No smoking!” I was going among them, whispering but making it urgent. “And be as quiet as you can. Sound carries a long way on this desert at night. Now let’s move out. We got miles to make.”
I swung into my own saddle and got us started down beside the track. After a little I reined back to where Jack was riding sort of hunched over in the saddle. I asked after his condition. He gave me a kind of wan smile. “Tell you the truth,” he said, “I been better.”
“That gunshot kicking up?”
He shook his head. “Naw, since you reamed it out it’s been considerable better. It’s just sore now. Onliest thing I can figure out is wrong with me right now is I’m gettin’ too old for this foolishness. Been a long time since I was this give-out an’ thirsty and hungry.”
I said, knowing I was lying, “Well, it won’t be long now.”
He just gave me a little smile and said, “Bullshit, Justa. You better go kid somebody else. I live down in this country.”
Sometime before dawn we saw a light far off in the distance. Lew said, “Train’s coming.”
“Everybody get away from the tracks,” I said. “Hurry! That thing might be full of soldiers.” I led them in a shambling trot a hundred yards until we were far back in the darkness. The train suddenly came roaring past us, rattling and shaking the earth. A few of the horses skittered and trembled but they were too tired to do much of anything.
It was just an ordinary passenger train and we watched in envy as the lighted windows flew past. One in particular took my eye. It appeared to be the dining car and I could see people through the lighted windows eating breakfast and drinking coffee. Coffee! God, I reckoned I would have killed for a cup of coffee and a drink of brandy.
After the train was gone we stared after it in envy. Ben said, “Don’t you wish you were on that?”
I shook my head. “Going the wrong way.”
But it had put a thought in my head, one that I couldn’t do anything about right then but that I might could make use of if we got lucky and the right set of circumstances happened. We rode on.
The sun got up and began to beat down on us. But, mercifully, the broad plain remained empty of uniforms. Once I thought I saw a little file of white-clad peons but they were too far away to be sure. And even if we could have gotten to them they wouldn’t have had anything we could have used.
About nine of the morning I halted us and went to the rear where Lew was riding with his sullen
capitán.
Though by now the
capitán
didn’t look so much sullen as desperate. I think he’d already figured out that whatever happened to us was going to happen to him and he’d better hope we did good. I said to Lew, “Listen, that packhorse is about the freshest animal we got. I want you to put your saddle and bridle on him and scout on up the tracks. I’m going to stay here and rest these horses and men for about an hour and then we’ll follow along slow.”
He swung out of the saddle and started undoing the cinch. He said, “Got any idea what I’m looking for?
Rurales?
Water? Food? Shelter?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“How far you want me to go?”
I shrugged. It wasn’t a question I could answer. I said, “That will pretty well depend on your horse. Say you can get five miles in an hour and a half. With us coming your way that’ll give you an hour back to us. I don’t know what to tell you if you run into any police, but you got the uniform for it.”
He was starting to saddle the packhorse. He said, “Hell, I’m a
capitán,
ain’t I? Maybe I’ll order them to give me their horses. Who knows?”
I said, “Just don’t take any chances.”
He laughed. “Aw, no, I wouldn’t do that. It’s so damn safe and secure back here with y’all.”
As he rode away I yelled for Hays and detailed him to take over the watch of Davilla. Then I directed everyone to get out of the saddle and take a rest. “Now you can smoke,” I said. I sat down by the embankment and leaned back against it, my horse’s reins in one hand, and lit a cigarillo. It was a poor substitute for food and drink, but it was all I had.
My thinking, in sending Lew on ahead, was that there had to be some way to service the rail bed and somebody to do the servicing. At least that was the way it was around Texas railroads. Maybe he’d find a little crew bunkhouse that had stores in it. Maybe he’d find one of those little pump carts that crew people used to get by rail from job to job. Hell, I didn’t know what he was likely to find; I was just hoping he’d find something that would give us a little relief. The shape we were in we could have used week-old water and two-week-old bread. But looking at the horses, I figured we weren’t long from being afoot. But at least that way we’d have something to eat.
After an hour I mounted up and directed the rest into their saddles. It was painful watching Senor Elizandro being helped astride his horse. But I didn’t think it was yet time to take desperate measures.
We trailed north for about half an hour. I taken notice that the roadbed was starting to get lower and lower, a situation I didn’t much care for. I could see the country falling away to the north and I guessed the railroad builders had figured there was less chance of disastrous flooding with a drain plane rather than the flat way it had looked some few miles back.
But I still didn’t like it. That embankment was the only cover for twenty miles and I hated to see it dropping away to nothing.
After about a quarter of an hour I saw a dim speck coming toward us. I held up a hand and halted the party. Ben rode up beside me. “Reckon that’s Lew?”
“Should be,” I said. “But let’s wait a bit and see.”
We watched as the dot grew larger and larger until it turned into the figure of man and horse. After a few more minutes I could see it was Lew. I urged my horse forward, the rest following. It took about ten more minutes, but we finally closed on one another. The first thing I noticed was the sort of satisfied look on Lew’s face and the fact that his horse didn’t look nowhere near as drawn and worn down as he had when Lew had taken out two hours earlier. Near as I could figure, two hours riding in that heat had never done a horse no appreciable amount of good, especially without feed or water. Also, Lew was chewing something.
I said, watching him closely, “Find anything?”
For answer he reached into a cloth sack he had tied from his saddle horn. He held out a handful of flour tortillas. He said, “Care for a bite?”
“You son of a bitch,” I said. But I took me a couple and passed the stack on back to the rest. The tortillas were tough and hard to swallow but the finest light bread had never tasted so good. I said, “Where’d you get these?”
He jerked his head back in the direction he’d come. He said, “They’s a water tank, a railroad water tank, the kind with a spout that they use to fill up a railroad engine’s boiler, back up yonder about a mile.”
“My God!” I said. “We can finally water these horses. Anything else? Is it guarded?”
He said, “Well, it’s supposed to be but it didn’t work out that way. They is a little crew bunkhouse there. Whatever you call it. Was two ol’ boys that work for the railroad there. But they ain’t guarding it right now.”
“You kill them?” I was about to get sick of the depredations we’d done in a country we didn’t have no standing in.
He shook his head. “Tied ’em up. They was pretty gentle. Thought I was a
capitán
of the
federales.
They was plenty helpful. Even give my horse some water and feed and give me all sorts of useful information.”
“They got a telegraph there?”
He shook his head. “We ain’t talking about the kind of hired help that can run a wire key. They more what you might call caretakers.”
“But there’s feed and water for the horses there?”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “Not a hell of a lot, but they is that big water tank and they got a well. Also got some beans and some dried beef. But I reckon we ought to kind of get in a hurry.”
“Why? If you’ve got them tied up.”
He gave me a wink. “We’ve got a train to catch. In just a little over two hours.”
I stared at him. “A train? How we going to stop a train, much less catch one?”
He said, “I think I’ve got a way. How’d you like to be in Laredo by this evening?”
Wasn’t much I needed to say to that. The men were crowding around, demanding to know what was going on. I told them that I didn’t know but that Lew had reported some help up ahead. Just how much I couldn’t say.
We hurried that last mile, spending the last of our strength and the last of our horses. As we rode I asked Lew for more details.