Cape Hell (23 page)

The sun was making its rapid descent behind the mountains before I felt secure enough to dismount and lead the bay down the more precarious stretches. After pounding along in the first heat of pursuit, McCready's cavalry had had to slow down, and with darkness piling up the echo of hoofbeats had receded. I didn't dare hope they'd given up, but Childress' insanity hadn't spread so far they'd risk riding that terrain at night. I made a cold camp in the shelter of a shale shelf, sitting up with my back against the Sierras and my revolver in my lap, listening to a healthy set of three-year-old teeth chomping grass and wondering if I'd ever set foot on level ground again.

I dreamed I had, my boots clomping a civilized boardwalk on a street as flat as a lily pond, touching my hat to men and women who'd never heard of Ralph Waldo Emerson and when they spooned sugar into their coffee didn't pause to consider where it had come from and whose bones it had sifted through; and woke in gray light, still a thousand feet above the ocean and Cape Hell.

The birds were awake, singing their sweet melodies of murder. A twig snapped. It was as loud as a pistol report at that empty hour. The birds heard it, too, and went silent. I looked at the bay, standing with its forefeet crossed, eyes shut and breathing evenly; it hadn't stirred in its sleep. I stood and swung the Deane-Adams up the trail, where the danger was greatest. An iron shoe scraped rock. I rolled back the hammer. The crackle echoed among the surrounding peaks, followed by thick silence.

“Do not shoot.”

I recognized the voice, the accent. It had been so long since I'd heard it, I couldn't place it at first.

“Come out in the open.”

The shoe clanged again, then another and another. I steadied the revolver against my hip, concentrating on the curve of the mountain. Most of a minute passed; I could have measured the time with a calendar. Then a man appeared, leading a gray mule with a rope bridle and only a worn and faded blanket for a saddle.

“It is I,
Senor
Deputy.”

I seated the hammer and leathered the pistol. It was the first time Joseph had addressed me as anything more than an equal since he'd promoted himself to engineer.

 

THIRTY

He wore the
white cotton shirt and trousers of Childress' creatures, and sandals in place of his boots. He was pale and gaunt, and when he spoke he broke often to take in air. I took the mule's reins from him, tethered it to a stunted pinon, and helped him into a sitting position under the rock shelf, lowering myself beside him; two pilgrims resting from their travels.

“I didn't think you could make it out of that bed,” I said.

“I was awakened by shouting, and guessed the rest. Major Childress—”

“I was there when he died.”

“One of those—things was in the room next to mine, with its legs in splints. I took its clothes from a cupboard, and unhitched this animal from a wagon outside.”

“How did you get past McCready and the others?”

“I grew up in these mountains. I know a hundred trails to their one.”

“You should have stayed where you were. They'd have taken care of you. Without you they can't run the
Ghost
.”

“And when they have learned to run it themselves, what? What they did to that man this morning would have been a mercy compared to what would happen if they turned me over to those creatures, as surely they would have done, to keep them
docil.
You saw how I was treated on the way to that devil's place.” He flexed his shoulders, still raw from the cross.

“Are you up to this trip?”

“More so than you. You will never find your way to where we were taken following this road. In two miles it winds back into the mountain.”

I unfolded the map from my pocket and showed it to him. He shook his head. “This will not get you to Cabo Falso, unless your bones are discovered and brought down the mountain. The Spaniards did not bother to explore this high, with gold so plentiful down below. A man could follow these trails for weeks and finish where he started. Did you forget the man DeBeauclair?”

“He was killed by Childress' men.”

“Perhaps. There are creatures as dangerous, men and pumas, and then there are the mountains themselves. Do you think he cared whether he was slain by a bullet or slipped and fell a thousand feet onto his head? Do the men whose bones are piled at Childress' house care? No,
senor
; I did not drag you back from death to see you throw away your life because of a worthless piece of paper.”

I put it away and rose. “There's no time to argue.”

He ignored the hand I held out and pulled himself to his feet. “I think the captain must give up. Someone must look after the plantation.”

“He's got twice as much reason now to keep going.”

He did allow me to help him onto the mule's back. He took the lead then. After about a mile we heard hooves ringing on stone. I'd as soon have been proven wrong.

Just about then the grade to our left eased up and we left the road, dismounting to walk our animals through scrub and zigzag washes where the runoff from the rainy season carved treacherous ditches through earth and rock. He kept going as steadily as if he were following a flagstone path, detouring occasionally to go around a dense copse of pine or an enormous boulder, and always returning to his original course—I supposed. For all I made sense of our way we might have been traveling in circles; there were times even when I was sure we were going up instead of down, and I told him so.

“We are,” he said, “for the moment. The Mother Mountains are not so kind as the Blessed Virgin.”

“Will McCready be taking this route?”

“I think not. There are others easier on horses, but which take them farther out of the way.”

I remembered that around noon, when the bay started favoring its left forehoof and with no knife handy I had to use my belt buckle to pry a mesquite thorn from the fetlock. Putting the cavalry farther behind us was a fair trade for the hazards of rough country.

We rested oftener than I liked, despite the advantage. Joseph never complained, but when I saw him list in his seat I reached over to touch his elbow and we dismounted so he could stretch out in the shade and gather strength. He'd started out pale under the brown of his race, and had taken on a yellowish tinge that disturbed me, and his skin glistened with more than just the sweat of effort. But in each case he recovered, or professed to have recovered, in less time than I would have in his condition, and what he knew of the fruits of his native land more than made up for the delay. The roots we ate were edible, however a St. Louis chef might scorn them for their bitter taste and toughness, and he had a botanist's knowledge of which plants flourished in the arid season because of the water they stored in their bulbous roots.

At dark we camped in a horseshoe-shaped depression gouged in passing by the heel of a glacier a million years before Solomon. He scraped the dirt off an albino hunk of twisted vegetation, broke it in two, and handed me half. We crunched and chewed and sat admiring a view New York millionaires shipped themselves first-class to Switzerland to see: thousands of acres of two-hundred-foot pines descending in rows like seats in an opera house to flat white sand—brief as a cuticle seen from that height—and beyond it the empty sky that hung over the blue Pacific.

He tipped back his head and spread his nostrils. They were as wide as shotgun bores. “I smell rain. At the first drop, we climb out of this hole fast as we can manage. I had a cousin who lay down in a dry riverbed to sleep off a bag of wine and woke up drowned to death.”

“A puma would have got him sooner or later.”

“One did. They are not always partial to live prey.”

I laughed like an idiot. The joke wasn't that good, but it seemed I hadn't felt the urge since Helena. He stared at me for most of a minute, then dropped his jaw and let fly with the kind of hooting laughter you never saw in dime-novel Indians. I'd spent enough time with them to know they were gifted clowns, every last one, but it had been so long since I'd been in one's presence when he was in the mood I laughed harder yet, until I choked on my root and he slapped me on my back until I coughed it out.

If a man can love another man without inviting cruel whispers, I loved this one. I never knew what became of him. Three days later, spent crunching through scrub, picking our way across acres of rock, and trotting too briefly along stretches of level road, we came upon the
Ghost,
standing just as we'd left it, with the tree that had blocked it waiting to be removed, as calm as any great beast at rest, and after I traded my stolen gear for my good saddle and bridle from the stock car we parted company. Joseph assured me that my three-hundred-year-old map would get me to Cabo Falso–Cabo Infierno, Cape Hell, whatever you wanted to call it. I'd been there and back without ever seeing the place that sought the honor.

I patted the pocket containing Oscar Childress' last will and testament. It would be evidence enough for the United States to press the Mexican government to lay siege to the late major's plantation; with the usual contingent of U.S. troops serving in an “advisory capacity.” That was how we'd taken the Southwestern states from Mexico in the first place.

“In Cabo Falso, where there is law to protect law, you may wire
Los Estados Unidos
and arrange your transportation back to the Montana Territory. Even Captain McCready would not attempt an action there that would place his dead master's grand plan at risk. They haven't everything yet in place; that much I overheard in my sickbed.”

“You won't come with me?”

He shook his head. The sallowness was gone from his face, and it seemed to me it had started to take on flesh; although how those blasted roots could contribute to that I couldn't imagine. After forty years I wake from a dream of Mexico with that sharp taste on my tongue.

“I said I wish to be the first of my tribe to drive a train across the length of the Sierra Madre,” he said. “What has happened since to make you think I would change my mind?”

“You haven't anything to defend it.” I unshipped the Deane-Adams and held it out, butt-first.

One of his rare grins cracked his face, blinding white against the brown. “You will need it more than I, if you are to make your way back to your home. Have we not heard our pursuers, resolute even as of this morning? I have a weapon far more
efectivo
.” He slapped the
Ghost
's cowcatcher. It resonated like a great iron bell. At times I hear it still.

 

Books by
Loren D. Estleman

AMOS WALKER MYSTERIES

Motor City Blue

Angel Eyes

The Midnight Man

The Glass Highway

Sugartown

Every Brilliant Eye

Lady Yesterday

Downriver

Silent Thunder

Sweet Women Lie

Never Street

The Witchfinder

The Hours of the Virgin

A Smile on the Face of the Tiger

Sinister Heights

Poison Blonde
*

Retro
*

Nicotine Kiss
*

American Detective
*

The Left-Handed Dollar
*

Infernal Angels
*

Burning Midnight
*

Don't Look for Me
*

You Know Who Killed Me
*

Sundown Speech
*

VALENTINO, FILM DETECTIVE

Frames
*

Alone
*

Alive!
*

Shoot
*

DETROIT CRIME

Whiskey River

Motown

King of the Corner

Edsel

Stress

Jitterbug
*

Thunder City
*

PETER MACKLIN

Kill Zone

Roses Are Dead

Any Man's Death

Something Borrowed, Something Black
*

Little Black Dress
*

OTHER FICTION

The Oklahoma Punk

Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Holmes

Peeper

Gas City
*

Journey of the Dead
*

The Rocky Mountain Moving Picture Association
*

Roy & Lillie: A Love Story
*

The Confessions of Al Capone
*

PAGE MURDOCK SERIES

The High Rocks
*

Stamping Ground
*

Murdock's Law
*

The Stranglers

City of Widows
*

White Desert
*