Lando (1962) (11 page)

"Recognized? By whom?"

"They came looking for him, just as if they knew he would be there."

My first thought was of Franklyn Deckrow. He was the one with the most to gain if Jonas was not permitted to return. Of course, he might have been seen by someone who remembered him from prison.

It was little enough I knew of the Deckrow deal, but from all I'd gathered Deckrow had run the plantation into debt and Jonas believed it had been done deliberately so Deckrow could later buy up the mortgages and gain possession. If so, he could have sent a rider on a fast horse to Matamoras.

"You shouldn't have come," I said. "This is no place for a woman."

"The place for a woman," she said, smiling at me, "is where she is needed. I ride as well as most men, and I have a fine horse. Also, I've lived on a ranch most of my life."

"Did you see anybody as you came along the trail?"

She looked at me curiously. "Not for miles. I've never seen a more deserted road, and if I hadn't seen a reflection of your campfire I might have gone right on by."

"You didn't circle the camp?"

"No."

Miguel was looking at me now, and I noticed he had his rifle in hand.

"There was somebody around the camp. Somebody or some thing."

Miguel stared uneasily at the blackness beyond the fire. Neither of us liked to think there was somebody or something out there whom we could not see.

"Maybe we should go, [email protected]?"

"No, we'll sit right here and let the stock rest up." That was my plan, but the arrival of Gin had put a crimp in it. If outlaws were going to come hunting her, we'd be in trouble a-plenty.

"Come daybreak," I said, "we'll move the herd."

"Where, [email protected]?"

"Yonder, I think we can find a place to hold the cattle. Maybe some of the other men will get through. That Tinker--he's a sly one. If he had any warning, no law is going to latch onto him."

Gin made herself comfortable on my bed. I stirred up the fire and finished off what coffee the three of us hadn't drank, and ate a couple of cold tortillas.

At daybreak the wind was off the sea, and you could feel the freshness of it, with a taste like no other wind.

Wide awake, I thought of those initials of pa's. Pa had left that sign, and he'd left it for himself, or mayhap for me. He was a planning man, pa was, and one likely to foresee. ... I think he taken time deliberately to teach me where that gold was. The trouble was, I'd gone ahead and forgotten.

Some things I did remember. He'd taught me to mark a trail, Indian fashion. Now, suppose he had marked this one? If he had, he would have added his own particular ways to it, but meanwhile, I planned to look around. If I found no sign I was going to drive that herd where I felt it should go, with no scouting for grass, or anything. Maybe out of my hidden thoughts would come the memory of what pa had taught me, to guide our way.

I taken a circle around camp, and I found no sign--nothing left by pa that I could make out.

That isn't to say I didn't find sign of another kind, and when I seen that track I felt a chill go right up my spine that stood every hair on end.

What I found were wolf tracks, but wolf tracks bigger than any wolf that ever walked-- any normal sort of wolf, that is. These wolf tracks were big as dinner plates.

Well, I stopped right there, looking down at those tracks, and the other two came over to look.

Miguel's face turned white when he saw the tracks, and even Gin kind of caught at my arm.

We had both heard tell of werewolves, and certainly Miguel knew the stories about them.

Me, I was thinking of something else. I was thinking of where those tracks were. Soon I scouted around, and a far piece away, like whatever it was had been taking giant strides, I found another track, this one set deep in the sod.

The tracks circled about the water hole at the spring. Whatever it was, it was trying to get to water, but the water had been lighted by our fire, with one of us setting awake.

All of a sudden I saw something that made me forget all about werewolves and ha'nts and such.

Far as that goes, I'd never heard tell of a thirsty ghost.

What I saw was something back in the brush, and at first it didn't look like much of a find, except that there was no reason for it being where it was. It was a broken reed, and it lay right on the edge of a bunch of mesquite.

Taking up the reed, I drew it out, and you know, there were several pieces of reed stuck one into another until they were all of eight or nine feet long. Stretched out, they reached from the spring's pool to the brush nearby.

"What is it?" Gin asked.

"Somebody wanted a drink, and wanted it bad, so he made a tube of these reeds, breaking them off to be rid of the joints and putting them together so he could suck water through them. He must have siphoned water right out of the pool into his mouth while I was just a-setting there."

Nobody said anything, and I nosed around a mite, studying the brush, and finally finding where the man or whatever it was had knelt.

There, too, I found the wolf tracks.

"Two-legged wolf," I said, "wearing some kind of coarse-woven jeans or pants. See here?" I showed them the place in the brush. "That's where he knelt whilst siphoning the water."

Following the tracks back from the brush, I said, "He's big--look at the length of that stride. I can't match it without running."

I studied the reed tube again. "Canny," I said. "Like something the Tinker might do."

"We should go," Gin suggested.

"No," I said, "not without what we came after.

We have come too far and risked too much."

"But how can you hope to find it?" Gin said.

"You've no idea where to look."

"Maybe I have. Maybe I am just beginning to recollect some things pa told me."

The wind was blowing harder and the sky was gray and overcast. The cattle wandered to the water in small groups, then returned to the bedding ground to graze or rest. They showed no restlessness, and seemed content to hold to the low spots out of the wind.

I cut some sod with a machete, and made a wall to protect our fire from the wind, adding just enough fuel to keep some coals. Miguel was worried, which I could see plain enough, and so was Gin.

Meanwhile I was doing some figuring. Jonas was in prison, and the Tinker might well be, so that left whatever was to be done up to me. Gin was with us, which she hadn't ought to be, the country being torn up with trouble the way it was, and somewhere close by was that ship filled with gold.

Jonas needed his share to get his mortgage paid off, and the Tinker wanted his. As far as that goes, I wasn't going to buck or kick if somebody handed me some of that there gold.

Around the fire at breakfast, Miguel told me a mite about Herrara. He was a lieutenant of General Juan Nepomuceno Cortina, usually called Cheno, and part of the time he was a soldier with a legitimate rank, and part of the time an outlaw, depending on who was in power in Mexico and on his own disposition at the moment.

Of good family, Cortina had become a renegade, but one with a lot of followers. He was a shrewd fighter, risking battle only when it suited him, and running when it didn't. He was a man of uncertain temperament, but dangerous enough and strong enough to handle the pack of wolves that followed him.

Frequently, they raided across the border into Texas and had run off thousands of head of Texas cattle. Yet he had good men following him, too, and on occasion he could be both gallant and generous. But generally speaking, he was a man to fight shy of.

As for Herrara, he was one of the wolves, fierce as an Apache, and by all accounts treacherous.

Leaving Miguel by the fire, with his horse saddled, to keep an eye on the cows, Gin and I rode off through the brush, hunting the water's edge.

We hadn't far to go. A long gray finger of water came twisting through the grass, leading some distance away to a larger body of water like a bay.

There we could see the white, bare bones of an ancient boat, much too small for what we were looking for ... which, anyway, was by all accounts down under water.

My Henry was in the saddle boot, and Gin carried one also. But what I kept ready to hand was that Walch Navy. I liked the feel of that gun.

As we rode we saw nothing--only a low shore of gray-green grass, the gray water looking like a sheet of steel, the reeds bending under the wind, gulls wheeling and crying overhead.

Whitecaps were showing on the water.

It might have been a world never seen by man. No tracks, no ashes of old fires, nothing man had built but the stark white ribs of that old boat.

"It's cold," Gin said.

Her face looked pinched, and the place was depressing her, as it did me.

Yet, wild and lonely as it was, the country had an eerie sort of charm like nowhere I'd ever seen. Toward the Gulf I could see the dunes of sand heaped by wind and wave, and somewhere out there was a long bar that stretched miles away to the south.

A barren desolate land. In spite of this, the place seemed to be working a charm on me.

"Let's go back," Gin said.

We turned and made our start, riding along the shore. The wind was blowing stronger, the brush and reeds bending before it. A few cold, spitting drops of rain began to fall.

The place to which we had driven the herd was in a cul-de-sac, with the sea on three sides--long arms of the sea where the water had flowed in over low ground or the working of the waves had hollowed it out.

To the east was a long, snake-like arm of the sea that nowhere was over a quarter of a mile wide. South and southwest the coves were wider.

The grass was good, and the cattle were protected by thick brush from the worst of the wind. Most of these cattle had at one time or another grazed along the shore, and like Shanghai Pierce and his "sea lions," as he called the longhorns that swam back and forth from the coast to Padre Island, they were used to the sea and were good swimmers.

"I like it," I said suddenly, gesturing toward the country around us. "It's almighty wild and lonely, but I take to it."

We drew up and looked back. The sweep of the shore had an oddly familiar look to it that started excitement in me. I frowned and tried to remember, but nothing came.

"Pa must have told me about this place," I said. "I can feel it. This here's where the gold is, somewhere about here."

"Your father must have been an interesting man."

So, a-setting there in the chill wind, I talked about him as I recalled him, big, powerful and dark, straight and tall. An easy-moving man who never seemed in a hurry, and yet could move swift as any striking snake when need be.

"He'd never let be," I said, "not with him knowing where that gold is. He'd come back for it.

Ma never wanted him to go back.

"You see, before pa and ma met, he had trouble with her brothers, the Kurbishaws, and over this gold. There were three of them, led by Captain Elam. The other two were Gideon and Eli.

"I never got the straight of it, although from time to time I'd hear talk around the house, but they were after the gold the same time pa was, and they tried to run him off. Pa never was much on running, as I gather.

"Later on, with some of this gold in his jeans, he went to Charleston and cut quite a swath about town. And there he met ma. They taken to each other, and it wasn't until she invited him home that he met her brothers face to face and knew who they were."

"It sounds very dramatic."

"Must have been, pa being what he was and those Kurbishaws hating him like they did. I knew little about it, but I gathered more from talking with the Tinker and Jonas ... that helped me to piece together things I'd heard as a child."

We walked our horses on, the dun's mane blown by the wind. It gave me an odd feeling to know that pa had more than likely watched and walked this same shore, maybe many times, a-hunting that gold.

Odd thing, I'd never thought of my pa as a person. I expect a child rarely does think of his parents that way. They are a father and a mother, but a body rarely thinks of them as having hopes, dreams, ambitions and desires and loves. Yet day by day pa was now becoming more real to me than he had ever been, and I got to wondering if he ever doubted himself like I did, if he ever felt short of what he wished to be, if he ever longed for things beyond him that he couldn't quite put into ^ws.

"You'd like pa," I said suddenly. "The more I think of him the more I like him, myself. I mean other than just as a father. I figure he's the kind of man I'd like to ride the trail with, and I guess that's about as much as a man can say."

Ahead of us I saw a mite of grass bunched up, and I drew rein sudden and felt my breath tight in my throat. Gin started on, but when she saw my face she stopped.

"Orlando, what is it?"

It was a small tuft of grass kind of bunched up, and some other grass stems had been used to tie a knot around the top of the bunch.

There it sat, kind of out of the way and accidental-like, but it was no accident. Maybe many men used that trail marker--no doubt Indians did. But I knew one man who'd used it, and who knew I'd spot such a thing.