Bride of the Baja (30 page)

She knew she couldn't have stayed with him much longer. How free she was now! Yet she still missed Esteban terribly, and for some strange reason she felt guilty, as though to be free was wrong. Why is it wrong? she asked herself. I am free. From this time forward I mean to be beholden to no one but myself.

They stopped in a grove of pines off the trail and ate dried beef and drank wine. When Jordan spoke to her, Alitha turned her head, and he soon fell silent. As she remounted, she saw him watching her with frank admiration, and her hand briefly caressed the leather flap on her saddle where she'd hidden Esteban's pistol. She couldn't harm Jordan without provocation, but she knew that if he touched her, she meant to kill him. Shortly after they left the grove of trees, the pack horse that had been favoring his foreleg began limping noticeably.

"Damn," Jordan said, slowing their pace.

He has no choice, Alitha thought, but to go on, hoping for the best while trying to replace the injured animal in one of the Indian villages along the way. She also knew that horses were scarce because of the banditry and the fighting.

They were riding along a dusty trail with a sloping field rising to their left when a horseman rode from the trees at the field's upper boundary some two hundred feet above them. The man, lean and dark and wearing a black sombrero, rode parallel to their trail while glancing down at them from time to time. She saw Jordan's hand slide along the stock of his rifle as he urged his horse on.

Another rider came from the trees into the field. As soon as he had galloped past the first man, he slowed his pace to match theirs. Alitha felt her heart begin to pound as she spurred her horse to a trail lope.

"Bandits," Jordan said.

A third rider left the woods on the hill above them and followed the first two. Alitha's gaze searched the trees but she saw no more men. All at once the lead rider spurred his horse to a gallop until he was well past Jordan, then raised a musket over his head and, at the signal, all three men wheeled down the hill and galloped toward them.

"Cut the pack horses loose," Alitha shouted to Jordan. "Let them have the gold."

Jordan shook his head. "This way," he called to her and wheeled his horse to the right down a steep slope. They rode in and out of a gully and over a rise into a waterless arroyo, a dry creek bed, the pack horses scrambling after them. Behind them she heard horses' hooves thudding on the hard-packed earth and the shouts of the bandits.

The lame pack horse stumbled and fell. With a curse Jordan reined in, waving her past him as he cut the rope leading to the fallen animal. He sprang to the ground and opened a pack on the horse's back, and Alitha saw the glint of gold in the sunlight.

She spurred her horse up the side of the arroyo to the crest of a small hill, stopping and waiting a short distance farther on until Jordan, leading the other pack horse, joined her.

"This way," she said, pointing to a defile between the high rocks ahead of them.

"No." Jordan clambered to the ground and looped the reins of his horse around a dead branch. "Get down," he ordered her.

She hesitated, but when she saw him start toward her, she swung from her horse. Jordan, using his rifle to motion her to follow him, climbed back to the top of the rise, where he threw himself to the ground. Alitha dropped to her knees and crawled up to lie beside him.

Below them the injured pack horse lay on his side on the rocky bottom of the dry creek bed. As they watched, the horse tried to struggle to his feet but with a whinny of pain he fell back, his legs kicking futilely in the air. Gold coins and jewelry lay scattered on the ground near the open pack.

"They'll find the gold," she whispered.

"I intend them to," Jordan said.

The first of the three black-garbed riders crested the hill at the top of the arroyo. The rider, seeing the fallen horse, rode cautiously down the gully with his eyes scanning rocks on both sides of him. "Do you know how to use this?" Jordan handed her a pistol.

Alitha nodded, grasping the gun in both hands.

"It's loaded," Jordan told her. "Here's the fixings to reload. Can you do that, too?"

"Yes."

The second rider came into view farther up the arroyo, and they heard the hoofbeats of the third horseman off to their right.

"
Oro
! Gold!" The first rider rode into the creek bed, leaped from his horse and reached into the pack, his hands coming out clutching gold ornaments and coins.

"
Oro
!" he shouted again to his two companions. They spurred their horses toward him.

"When I tell you," Jordan said, "shoot the man kneeling next to our horse. Shoot to kill."

"I can't ..." she began.

"Do as I tell you," he insisted, "or they'll kill us both. Or worse."

The other two men dismounted and ran to where the first rider was scooping gold from the injured horse's pack. They knelt on either side of him and plunged their hands into the pack, laughing and talking loudly.

"Now," Jordan said.

He fired as he spoke and the bandit on the left spun around and fell to the ground. Holding her pistol in both hands, Alitha pulled the trigger and the gun bucked back. She saw the center man jerk upright, a black hole in the upper shoulder of his jacket. The man on the right whirled about, his musket in hand. A bullet zinged past Alitha's head, and she smelled the acrid odor of gunpowder. The man she had wounded was firing now, and a bullet struck a rock a few feet from her and ricocheted away.

Jordan fired again. The man on the right dropped his rifle, grasped his stomach with both hands and plunged face first to the ground. The bandit with the shoulder wound fired again, wildly this time, then turned and ran to his horse and leaped into the saddle.

Jordan came quickly to his feet and stood taking careful aim as the bandit, riding low in the saddle, urged his horse up the arroyo. Jordan fired, and as the man spun from the horse to the ground, his foot caught in the stirrup and he was dragged until his body struck a boulder and he tumbled free to lie motionless in the dust. His riderless horse galloped on out of sight.

Grunting with satisfaction, Jordan scrambled down into the gully with his rifle reloaded and ready. He used the toe of his boot to turn the three men over. As she watched, Alitha felt bile rise in her throat and she stumbled a few steps away, where she leaned against a boulder and was sick.

When she returned to the gully, Jordan had pulled the three bodies into a ditch, where they lay piled on top of one another in a grotesque tangle of arms and legs. He began covering the bodies with rocks as she stared first at him and then at the three dead men. She had shot one of these men, she reminded herself. Perhaps she hadn't killed him, but she knew she had meant to. She shook her head.

"That last man," she said to Jordan, "the one who rode off. Did you have to kill him, too?"

Jordan finished piling rocks on the bodies before he answered. "If I hadn't killed him," he said, "he'd have spread the news of the gold from here to Mexico City. Every bandit, revolutionary and government soldier in the country would have been on our trail. Besides, don't you think they would have done the same if they had managed to ambush us?" When she didn't answer, he asked again, "Don't you?"

"I suppose they would have," she said. She slumped down to sit on a boulder facing away from the grave.

Jordan came up behind her, his hand gripping her shoulder so tightly she winced. "Listen to me," he said angrily. "We're in a foreign country in the middle of a revolution, carrying a fortune in gold in our packs. Do you think bandits are going to stop and ask for our calling cards or that we should do the same?"

When she didn't answer, he swung her around and tilted her face up so that she was forced to look at him. "This is American gold now, and you and I are going to see that it gets to Acapulco and aboard a ship bound for the States. If you're not going to help, I'll go on atone I don't have the time to wait while you sit around feeling sorry for yourself."

As she stared up at him, a seething rage coursed through her. I shot one of those bandits, she told herself, what does he mean about not helping? He's being unfair. She took a deep breath. That's what he wants, to make me angry, she thought. I won't give him the satisfaction.

Brushing his hand aside, she stood up, hiding her clenched fists in the folds of her gown. Her eyes stung with tears she refused to shed. She longed to strike out at him, to hurt him, while at the same time she longed to have someone comfort her. She turned away and stared up at the barren rock hill and the pine-covered mountain beyond.

"Do you understand what I'm telling you?" Jordan demanded.

"I quite understand." She faced him and spoke as calmly as she could. "I'm ready to ride when you are."

Jordan looked at her for a long moment, then he drew in his breath and let it out slowly. "At least we've gained a new pack horse," he said finally, "and an extra mount besides." He nodded at the bandits' two horses farther down the arroyo. "Come along," he told her, "and help me reload the gold."

By three that afternoon they were descending into the tropical lowlands, the
tierra caliente
. The country grew more arid and the heat became so intense that they were forced to stop near the trickle of a stream and rest until the sun dropped behind the mountains. They went on in the half-light of early evening along a road winding through a succession of boulder-strewn badlands and woods. After they passed an Indian village of cane cottages in an oasis of flowering shrubs, the country became even drier, with the only trees an infrequent palm or two.

As the sky darkened overhead and the first stars appeared, Jordan called a halt. They made camp off the trail on flat ground sheltered by huge boulders. Afraid to attract attention by building a fire, they ate bread, cheese and dried beef.

"Listen," Alitha said.

They heard a muted rumbling from a great distance. Thunder? Alitha wondered. Or gunfire? She glanced at Jordan's dark form seated a few feet from her.

"A storm in the mountains," he said, and in a few minutes she saw lightning, not jagged streaks but a dim, pulsing glow above the horizon.

"Good night, Alitha," Jordan said. When she looked, she could no longer see him in the darkness and knew he must be lying on his pallet.

"Good night," she said tonelessly.

She lay on her back, pulling a blanket to her chin as she felt a chill breeze sweep between the boulders. She stared overhead at the stars, reliving in her mind the long journey from California to Mexico with Esteban. She remembered making love beside a stream after Esteban had soaped her body, remembered watching the sailors throwing the hides from the cliff at San Juan Capistrano, remembered reaching out for Esteban in the night and feeling him enfold and comfort her as his hands moved along her body, teasing and caressing her at the same time.

She closed her eyes, imagining she was with him again, not the Esteban of these last weeks in Mexico but Esteban as he had been at first, loving and attentive. And passionate. She sighed as she drifted toward sleep.

She heard a slithering sound somewhere in the darkness to her left. Opening her eyes, she drew in and held her breath. As they had entered the tierra caliente earlier in the day, she had seen lizards scurrying away from the hooves of their horses to seek shelter in crevices in the rocks. Now she remembered Esteban telling her of the many and varied venomous creatures that thrived in the hot country.

"There are the scorpions," he had said, "whose tails carry poison deadly to a young child or to an old person, so you must always examine your bed and the walls of your room before you extinguish your candle. Then there is the vinagrillo, an insect like a large cricket, orange in color and always smelling of vinegar. And spiders without number, one in particular whose body is red and black and whose bite sends pain into all your bones. And, of course, there is the tarantula." Alitha had shivered when he said the word. "The tarantula is soft and fat and covered with dark hairs like a great ugly beast. And the coral snakes and the rattlers."

Again she heard the slithering and imagined snakes and scorpions crawling toward her in the dark night.

Jordan," she whispered urgently.

"Jordan," she said again. When he didn't answer, she repeated his name a third time, more loudly than before. She heard him stir, then sit up abruptly.

"What is it?"

"Listen," she told him. A moment later the sound came again, nearer than before.

Jordan stood and lit a lantern, and she heard him tramping about in the scrub brush near their sleeping place. She heard the sound of rocks scattering, and then it was quiet. When Jordan returned, he stood over her with the light from the lantern mottling his unshaven face.

"Just a lizard," he said. "I used a stick to toss him away from the camp."

"Oh," she said. She lay back on her pallet in some embarrassment. Jordan continued looking down at her. "Thank you," she said. "I'm not usually so—so nervous."

He extinguished the lantern, and she heard him return to his pallet. Why did she always encounter Jordan Quinn at the wrong time and in the wrong place, she wondered. In other circumstances she might have liked him. She shook her head. It was their fate, she thought, to meet and then go their separate ways, following their separate destinies.