The Shadow Man (11 page)

Jacob found no sign of human life. Only the prints of deer and elk and the hungry lion and wolf marred the blanket of snow.

Glorieta Summit had been passed in the early morning, and the caravan had encountered the Rio Pecos hurrying in from the north. The wagons turned to follow the river in a long descent to the southeast. On the steep, snowy downgrade, the brakes of the wagons wouldn't hold tight enough on the icy wheels to control the speed of the vehicles. To prevent the heavy wagons from overrunning the horses or plunging into the canyon, the men had chained one of the rear wheels of each vehicle so it would not turn.

The locked and dragging wheels often cut through the snow to the ground, and Tamarron could hear the sharp, complaining screech of the iron rim grinding on the granite rock that underlay the mesa.

The sun was mellow for March, and the air, warmed by the bright rays, flowed past Jacob in a slow, invisible stream up the mesa slope. The limbs of the pines swayed with a whispering rustle. Jacpb breathed deeply of the pungent scent of the pine resins cast upon the wind. His heart beat a gentle tempo. It was a fine thing to be gone from the town.

Jacob's horse tossed its head, and its big ivory teeth rattled against the iron bit of the bridle. The animal was anxious to be traveling. Jacob reached out and playfully slapped the muscular neck of the cayuse.

It was an ugly horse with a large, bony head and legs that seemed too long for its body. Its eyes were quite big, with lots of white showing, giving the horse an appearance of always being frightened and ready to bolt away. But the cayuse was steady, quick to obey, and as agile as a mountain goat. It was the swiftest runner Jacob had ever seen.

“Old fellow, we have fallen on good times,” he told the horse as he watched Petra, Emmanuel, and the wagons melting into a dark green stretch of woods below him.

The mustang twisted its head and locked one large eye on Jacob. It snorted as if it understood what he had said.

“I'm glad you agree,” Jacob said. He touched the horse with his heels, and it moved off nimble-footed along the snow-covered slope of the mesa.

The sun floated down behind the high, rocky backbone of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and the Rio Pecos Valley filled with gray shadow. Below Jacob on the edge of the gorge, the caravan continued onward into the swiftly forming evening dusk.

The last of the lingering heat of the sun radiated away into the sky, and the wind blew cold. The snowbanks stopped melting.

On the Canyon rim above the Rio Pecos, the cavalcade of horses and wagons entered a snow-covered meadow. The wagons pulled together around a small square of space and halted.

The men and women instantly sprang to their tasks of preparing the camp before the darkness of the night overtook them. The horses were unhitched and the harnesses stripped off. One man took a rifle and climbed up on a rise of land for the first night watch. Another man with an ax over his shoulder, followed by two of the larger boys, walked to a tall dead pine and began to chop. The tree soon fell, and the man started to cut it into short lengths. The boys filled their arms with the dry wood and carried it toward the wagons.

Jacob reined his mustang in the direction of the camp. The horse, sliding on the steepest spots and trotting where it could hold its feet, carried its rider down to the cluster of wagons.

The smell of frying meat and baking bread wafted to Jacob as he unsaddled. Petra waved a welcome to him from the fire where she was helping the women cook.

Conrado passed Jacob with a sullen face and did not speak. The man resented Jacob. Conrado had even grown quarrelsome with Petra and at times deliberately refused to respond to her attempts to talk with him. The fact that Conrado would not speak to Jacob did not bother him, but he was sorry for Petra, for he knew how much she loved her younger brother.

Jacob believed Emmanuel Solis had accepted him as Petra's husband and part of the clan. Señora Solis spoke to him when they encountered each other, but always in a reserved manner that didn't lead to more than a few words of conversation.

A snowball whizzed past Jacob's head. He ducked and dropped his saddle. He grabbed a handful of snow and whirled to meet his attacker. A son of one of the vaqueros was fast disappearing behind a wagon. Jacob lobbed the snowball, coming close but missing. The boy shouted gleefully and dove out of sight.

Smiling, Jacob tied his mount to the long picket rope fastened between two pines just outside the wagon square. He gave the animal a ration of grain and approached the fire.

Emmanuel called to Jacob, and Jacob joined the group of men sitting near one of the wagons. He found a chunk of wood, like the other men used to keep their rumps out of the snow, and seated himself.

Solis had been an officer in the revolutionary army that had wrested Mexico away from the harsh control of Spain. He was a man who believed in organization. He spoke at length with the other men about the events of the day and the plans of the morrow. The periods of duty for the night guards were assigned. Jacob liked the stern, protective manner of the old man in regard to the safety of the women and children.

Señora Solis called out that the food was ready. The men separated and moved off to eat with their own wives and children. Jacob seated himself beside Petra, and she handed him a heaping plate of meat, beans, corn bread, and a large piece of dried peach cobbler. She had discovered Jacob's fondness for sweets and had baked several pastries to bring with them on the journey.

The man on guard duty was called in. Another of the vaqueros picked up a rifle and went outside the wagons to begin his night vigil.

The fires gradually burned down and the conversation ebbed. One after another, the families drifted off to their sleeping robes. Jacob looked at Petra. She nodded that she, too, was ready for bed.

In a corner of the space enclosed by the wagons, they spread a length of tarpaulin, and upon that unrolled thick buffalo robes. Petra silently entered the bedding.

Jacob placed his weapons on the fur robe near his hand. Then, for several minutes, he sat with the cover pulled up over his lap and listened to the night sounds. Once in a while he could hear the crunching footsteps of the guard beyond the ring of wagons, for the slushy snow had grown hard and brittle as the temperature had dropped.

On the canyon rim above the Rio Pecos, a March wind came in from some unknown dominion and chased itself in powerful gusts, and it moaned, cut by the high cold stars.

Jacob slid in between the buffalo robes and took Petra in his arms. They lay in a small world of their own making, two bodies wrapped in fur robes in the night. He felt the wonder of being alive and strong and having a woman all his own. All of his yesterdays faded and became lost; tomorrow was unseen ahead and just the present was real.

Jacob went to sleep warm and near his woman.

* * *

The caravan dropped below the snow line in the morning of the third day. Near noon they passed the ancient ruins of a moderately large pueblo that once perhaps had contained a hundred rooms.

Jacob was near Petra, and she called out to him. She swept her hand, pointing at the crumbling adobe wall. “Legend says that a town of industrious Indians called the Forked Lightning People once lived there. Then they vanished. The legend doesn't tell what happened to them.” Jacob saw Petra's face become sad as she contemplated what great harm might have come and destroyed the Forked Lightning People.

In the afternoon the wagons reached a split in the road at the fork on the Pecos River below Punta de la Mesa San Jose. Jacob arrived first at the water's edge, waiting as the other men came to stand along the bank.

“It is good that we are not going to Las Vegas,” said Tomas, one of the vaqueros. “The bottom of the crossing is at least eight feet under water.” He gestured along the main road that led down to the swift current of the flooding Pecos. On the opposite side of the river the road crawled out of the water and led straight east.

Jacob had ridden the Santa Fe Trail and knew that Las Vegas lay twenty-five miles northeast. Seven hundred miles farther to the northeast was Independence, Missouri, the beginning of the heavily used trade route. In another month long trains of huge, Pittsburgh-built cargo wagons carrying more than five thousand pounds of goods each would be creaking and bumping their way south to Santa Fe, and onward deep into Mexico to Matamoros, Saltillo, and Chihuahua.

The American traders would bring manufactured goods, calicos and linsey, tables and chairs, spices, medicines, tableware, oil lamps, ink and paints, and scores of other items. They would return with Mexican rugs, cloths, hides, furs, gold and silver. And, more than likely, they would come south with oxen and return home with Mexican mules.

“Let us be on our way,” said Emmanuel. “If we press on, we can be at the hacienda in three more days.”

The men hastened to their wagons and climbed up the wheels to the high seats. They picked up the reins and popped the long bullwhips over the heads of their teams of horses. Shortly the vehicles were strung out along a road that headed southeast over a land rich with grama and buffalo grass. To shorten its length the road held a straight course just west of the bends and windings of the deep yellow water of the Pecos.

On the morning of the fourth day Jacob saw a small band of sheep grazing along the Pecos. Larger bands were encountered as the wagons journeyed south. Not one herdsman guarded the sheep.

“All the land we've crossed today, and the sheep, belong to the Bautista family,” Petra told Jacob. “They were preparing to leave Santa Fe shortly after we did. The King of Spain gave Luis Bautista the Los Trigos Land Grant in 1794. That was the same year the king gave Carlos Solis, my grandfather, the El Vado Land Grant. Both men had been officers in the king's army and had fought many battles for him. He rewarded them with the land in Mexico for their valiant service. They traveled from Spain to Mexico together. Our families have been friends all these many years.”

“How many other land holdings are there on the Pecos?” asked Jacob.

“There are two other privately owned ranchos. They are south from ours along the river. Both of them are much more recent than my grandfather's, having been deeded since the revolution by the federal government that now rules Mexico.”

Night overtook Jacob and Petra and the others as they approached the junction of the Gallinas River with the Rio Pecos. Emmanuel called orders to the drivers, and they drove on into the night. Jacob rode close ahead of the lead wagon and called out warnings about the bad spots in the road. When the half-moon was the height of a tall man above the black horizon, the travelers came to the Hacienda de Luis Bautista at the merging place of the two rivers.

Roberto Bautista, son of the ranch owner, had wintered at the rancho with the peons. He made the travelers welcome. Anxious for news of the outside world, he talked late into the night with the Solis family.

* * *

On the fifth day of travel Jacob saw scattered sheep and some cattle bearing the Solis brand grazing on the new green grass of the meadows near the river. By the afternoon of the sixth day the number of animals had increased greatly and were always in view, not only by the river but also on the grass-covered hills as far to the west as he could see. As at the Bautista rancho, not one man was to be found tending the herds. Jacob thought the loss of animals from wolves, Indians, and the river's quicksand must be very large.

The road veered away from the river, and the horses quickened their pace. The drivers encouraged them with shouts and cracking whips. Now and then the metal end of a whip would drop to bite a lagging animal not pulling its full share. The caravan climbed a slight grade and came out onto a ten-acre stretch of bench land above the Pecos. The teams began to trot, the iron wheels of the wagons rattling and banging on the gravelly earth.

The flat shelf of land was an ancient terrace of the Pecos, created by the stream when it had been a youngster. Now the river flowed a hundred feet lower and in a broad valley half a mile to the east. Beyond the river the broad, flat surface of the Llano Estacado stretched away into hazy infinity. West of the bench land, the terrain rose upward in a series of tall, juniper-covered hills. Miles distant, the woods ended and the horizon was full of large, rocky mesas stepping ever higher as they approached the far-off Gallinas Mountains.

The Solis hacienda stood in the center of the flat bench land. Immediately north of the house was a quite large round stone corral. To the east at the base of the bench land near the river was a smaller corral with walls made of willow stems.

The hacienda was a sprawling, single-story structure surrounded by a protective stone wall six feet high enclosing two or more acres. The house itself was a huge rectangle made of brown adobe, like the earth it rested upon. A round tower ten feet in diameter and thirty feet tall reared above everything. Jacob saw gun ports located at equal intervals midway up the tower, and again near its top. From the most elevated position a man with a rifle could kill any enemy that tried to use the wall as a shield while assaulting the hacienda.

Three Mexican men trotted through a gate in the compound wall. A dozen or more children, both boys and girls of many ages, ran behind. They cried out a greeting in a loud chorus. All the children scurried beside the wagons that continued directly toward the gate to the hacienda without slowing.

A little girl dashed in close to the front wheel of the wagon on which Señora Solis rode. The girl turned up her happy brown face to the woman. “What did you bring me, Señora Solis? What did you bring me from Santa Fe?”

“I will show you soon,” Señora Solis called back. “Run on ahead.”

Petra veered aside and rode her horse near Jacob. “This is the home of the Solis family,” she said. “I was born here.”

“A well-designed and constructed little fort,” Jacob replied. “I see that it has its own water supply.”