The Eye of the Hunter (14 page)

Nevertheless, the girlish soldier helped him drink some water and fed him some medicine, then bathed his chest and back with alcohol, which brought his temperature down. Since there was no one to see, he submitted to these procedures, wondering at the funny chap's being in the Army. His personal opinion had always been that such men were usually not bad types at all.

The next time he opened his eyes, his head was clear and he knew he was not in Cuba after all. Wherever he was, an old Mexican lady sat near his cot, sewing. She was dressed in black. He tried to speak, and she rose quickly and hurried away.

While he waited, he looked over the enlisted men's quarters. A bone-deep fatigue kept him lying there perfectly content, grateful to be alive, understanding now that he had been very sick, had survived, and that his body was beginning to rebuild itself. He doubled the pillow under his head so that he could look around and see where he was.

His cot was in a long white-walled room in what looked like a very well-appointed bunkhouse. On wall pegs hung items that appeared to be cowboys' gear—chaps, coils of rope, leather jackets, spurs, quirts, and bright Mexican and Indian blankets. His eye was caught by what looked like an ivory-gripped single-action Army pistol. In the aisle was a little iron stove with a box of mesquite roots beside it.

The ceiling was of square-hewn cottonwood beams supporting a her ringbone pattern of willow wands. Suddenly he remembered arriving at a ranch with the woman. He must have given her quite a time! In Cuba he had helped control the antics of malaria victims, and they could be crazy as bedbugs. He peered through a window and saw brittle, small-leafed Arizona shrubbery and a reddish, layered rimrock cliff. He perceived the upper body of a black-haired youth and heard a hammer clinking on metal.

In a few minutes Frances Parrish hurried in, carrying a cup of coffee. Her dark hair was pinned atop her head, and she wore a long white cotton dress. She set the tray on the cot beside him and sighed.

“Oh, Henry!” she said. “What a scare you gave us! Are you hungry?”

“Starved!” He waved his arm. “What kind of a bunkhouse is this?”

“It's General Stockard's idea of one. My husband used to call it the enlisted men's quarters. It's what the Corps of Engineers produced when Stockard told them to build him a bunkhouse. The ranch house has rifle loops in the roof parapets and a pantry big enough to feed a whole Army during a siege.” Frances placed the coffee on his nightstand.

“Lots of cattle?” Henry said.

“Not a single cow! After he was ready to stock the ranch, his partner lost it in a gambling game. As I'm sure you know. But all he actually lost was the land—the Army built him the house and so forth. Called it a ‘camp,' and then decommissioned it as soon as it was finished. Camp Logan, as a matter of fact—I'd forgotten! After your famous father.”

Henry said, “He never told me....”

“He was a hero in this part of the country. You can be proud. He never lost a payroll until—I'm sorry, we don't need to talk about that.”

“Oh, I know about that. He died when he lost that one. But I'll tell you something, Frances...”

But then he began chuckling, and told her nothing. She studied him for a while, finally patted his cheek. “Josefina's making you some breakfast. After a while I'll bring you something to read, too.”

“I'm sorry to be on your hands. I'll be all right in a couple of hours.”

“Couple of hours? Three days at best. For a while you're going to rest and read.”

“Read what?
Frank Leslie's Magazine
?”

“Papers of Richard's. Maybe you can fathom them. I can't.”

After a Mexican breakfast of refried beans, tacos, eggs, and a tropical fruit he'd first eaten in Cuba, he dozed. When he woke, he saw a couple of articles resting on a chair pulled up where he could reach them. One was a wooden box with the stenciled words:
BALL AMMUNITION
CAL.
38-40.

So the general's hand still lay subtly upon the ranch. In the box, however, were canceled checks, papers, and a few letterpress copies of correspondence. But these were in Spanish, signed by Francisca Wingard de Parrish and addressed to the Gobernador de Sonora and the alcaldes of several towns of Sonora. But why tell him about it?

The canceled checks were also signed by Frances. For supplies according to the memo lines, things like hay and grain, tools and food. Finally he organized a small sheaf of onionskin forms with the letterhead of the United States Government Assay Office, in Oro Blanco, Arizona Territory. They were made out to Richard I. Parrish and referred to having received so many ounces of silver. The dollar value of these silver sales were always the same—one hundred twenty-five dollars—which happened to be the amount of Rip's monthly trust checks.

Richard
, Henry thought,
what were you up to, you rascal?

The enigma deepened when he examined the last item in the box: a stained rawhide sack tied with a thong. He shook it and it jingled darkly like a collection of nuts and bolts. After a frustrating battle with a hardened leather knot, he opened the sack and peered inside.

It was full of silver pesos.

As a guess, he would say about two hundred and fifty of them—or a hundred and twenty-five dollars' worth.

He lay back, chuckling. Richard liked a mystery, he suspected. He was digging silver somewhere, selling it to the U.S. Assay Office, cashing the checks at the bank for silver pesos.... And then what?

For some reason he looked at the Colt hanging on the wall. He gathered his strength and shuffled across the aisle and took it from the peg where it hung. Sitting cross-legged on the cot, he looked it over. It was a common single-action Army pistol, 1872 model, but the nickel-steel barrel and frame were engraved from front sight to butt plate, and the engraver's vinelike tracings were filled with gold and silver. Rip's motto was written in silver on the ivory grips: Let 'er RIP! As a last unique touch, a tiny square-cut ruby was set into the front sight.

Looking out the window, he saw the Mexican boy carrying a couple of water buckets down the cliffside trail, and he laid the ruby on his black head and squinted. The stone filled the rear sight with red light. He lowered it, turned it, squinted at both sides of the gun. Beautiful!—but absolutely the most tasteless thing he had ever seen. And one other curious factor made him frown, some small flaw in logic. Something wrong here, Rip!

Suddenly he sniffed the barrel. And there was the answer: The weapon had been put away dirty when it was fired last. A man who had spent a fortune on this gun had left the black-powder filth to corrode the barrel.

He flicked open the ejection gate and checked the loads of the cylinder. All six chambers were filled, and he punched the heavy cartridges out onto the blanket one by one and picked up the single spent shell.

He looked at it, wondering where its lead slug was now. Trying to understand that exhausted him, and he yawned, lay back, and fell asleep.

When he woke, he found a washroom at the end of the room, with a commode, washbasin, and mirror, and he got razor and soap, comb and clippers, from his valise and prepared for a painful shave with cold water. But the Mexican woman appeared with hot water just in time to save him.

Afterward he splashed on some of Rip's bay rum, tamed his sorrel hair with his hair tonic, and looked for clean clothes. On hooks under a wall shelf hung a white silk shirt, a work shirt, a dandy's trousers with a fine black-and-white stripe, jeans, and some Wellington boots.

He pulled them on. The dandy's outfit was almost a perfect fit. Every item was from a store in San Francisco.

As he admired himself in the mirror, Frances's voice called from the far end of the room.
“Que guapo tu eres!”
He saw her coming down the aisle with another tray. Henry hurried to take it from her, sniffing the cinnamon toast, hot chocolate, and spicy scrambled eggs.

She sniffed, too. “My, I do love the smell of bay rum! I'm glad you found it—it's really the only thing I miss about Richard.”

She smoothed her skirts and sat on a cot and watched him devour the food. He kept glancing at her, grinning, admiring. Lord, Lord, he thought, no wonder Rip had to have her! The exotic dark eyes, the rich lips and thin cheeks—she was a collector's item herself, a presentation model, a miser's pride! Signed and gold-inlaid and with a ruby in her front sight.

“Papa would have been impressed by you, Henry,” she said.

“How so?”

“He had a special interest in the sons of outstanding men. So many of them are either rascals or rattlebrains. The rascals go to jail, and the rattlebrains sink without a trace, drowned by the weight of their fathers' medals. Papa's phrase. Your father was apparently a fine officer.”

“And I'm a rascal or a rattlebrain?”

“Papa would have known at once. I'll have to wait and find out. But you're no rattlebrain.”

Henry grinned and went on eating. Frances interrupted his feasting by filling a tumbler with water and handing it to him with a pink pill. “Take this—it's best taken with food.”

Henry put it on his tongue and tossed it back with a big slug of water—and choked and spat it all on the floor! Salt water! Frances exclaimed and took the glass from him.

“I'm
so
sorry! How awful—I filled the pitcher from the sink pump instead of the water bucket. Forgive me.”

Henry rinsed his mouth with coffee. “What's the difference?”

“The pump draws from the alkali spring in the yard—we use it for laundry and cleaning, but it's not fit to drink. I'll get you a fresh pitcher.”

“Wait.... The drinking water is what Alejandro carries down the trail all the time?”

“Yes. There's a wonderful spring up there. But the cliff—”

“And you plan to blow that rocky ledge off and bring a pipe down the cliff?” When she nodded, he laughed. “Praise God, Frances! A firecracker would have brought the whole cliff down on the house. You can see the cracks in it from here.”

“For heaven's sake! Then what—”

“I picked up some good medicine for rock breaking from an Indian scout when we lived at Fort Bowie. You'll have sweetwater in the kitchen tomorrow. Bring me one of those owl feathers Rip keeps in the ribbons of his hats. And take one to Alejandro. And tell him this: Build a big fire right where he's been drilling. Line up four buckets of water and keep the fire going for two hours. Then throw the water on the fire, fast. ”

“And put it out?”

“And stand back. I'll get up there later in the day and see how he's doing.”

From experience, Henry knew that his system would require about three days to trap and skin out all the malaria alligators still cruising his veins. Then he would suddenly be as good as ever. Until next time.

Despite Frances's orders, he climbed the brushy trail to the bench. He found Alejandro piling dead mesquite branches, brittle and gray as old bones, onto a fire he had built at the spot where lately he had been drilling. When he saw Henry, he smiled and removed his straw hat and said something in Spanish. Henry gave him the Latin
abrazo
he had seen men using in Nogales, and then set to work explaining that he wanted four or five buckets brought up from the yard. Bring a rake and a pickax, too, he mimed.

Alejandro took off. He was
muy listo
, Frances had said—very willing.

Waiting, Henry inspected the stone rampart he had to breach to get water across it. Seemed a pity to shatter it, it was so pretty, salmon-pink and gray and with embedded nuggets of mica resembling dice. At its lowest point, the ledge was about four feet higher than the water source. Maybe a wall could be constructed across the narrow fissure where the spring bubbled from the upper cliff, creating a dam, but there were so many cracks in the rock that filling the dam would be impossible. The little existing rock-and-cement wall would have to suffice to collect water and channel it into a pipe.

And since water traditionally refused to run uphill, the rampart must fall.

Henry fed the fire and Alejandro worked at filling the buckets he had brought. Then Henry lay on his back and let the sun warm him, a smile of contentment on his face. Ideas about Rip and his silver obsession were shifting around in his mind like trout in a pool....

Suddenly the ringing of a triangle startled him. He had been asleep. He looked around, trying to comprehend where he was. Alejandro bent close to him and said:
“Lonche, señor!”

Henry stretched. Then he signed that he wanted all the fire and frosty-red coals raked away. After the stone was cleared, so hot it glowed pink, Henry picked up a bucket, had the boy do the same, and they doused the rock. There was a single loud crack, then an angry hiss, and dirty steam erupted from seams in the rock. Boiling water bubbled in a small basin in the stone.

Henry took the pickax and worked it into a steaming crack. He pried out a long thin splinter of rock and dragged it aside, opening a deeper vein. The next assault of fire would work into that one, again the cold water would cause an explosion, and in a day or two Frances's
agua dulce
would be at her kitchen door.

Apache dynamite.

And with luck that foul alkali water would never cross his lips again.

Now that he was back on his feet, Frances showed him through the house. The Engineers with their hairy ears had done themselves proud in creating Camp Logan. No wonder Stockard wanted it back.

The parlor was a thirty-foot expanse of red tile floor and beamed ceiling like a hunting lodge, with a pueblo-style fireplace and small windows in deep adobe walls. Indian blankets brightened the walls, pots and
ollas
rested on shelves, and corn grinders were used as doorstops. There was a small pedal organ and a huge fumed-oak sideboard. On one wall was a map of Santa Cruz County.