Shadow Riders, The Southern Plains Uprising, 1873 (29 page)

“Appears to you?” Donegan squeaked.

“She's aiming to make you hers, Seamus. Plain and simple,” Grover declared.

“Samantha tell you this?”

“She didn't have to. Rebecca told me.”

Donegan felt his face go flush, becoming hot and prickly, wondering if Grover knew … or Rebecca knew … maybe Samantha actually had told her sister of the night that began on Sharp Grover's porch and ended up on a few blankets tossed carelessly atop some freshly mown grass stacked in the corner of Grover's lopsided barn.

For the longest moment Seamus studied the older man, peering at him for any clue that might betray Grover's knowledge of that night.

“Reb … Rebecca told you about Samantha wanting to get her hooks in me?”

Grover nodded, grinning as he threw a punch at the Irishman. “Stupid mick. Where the hell you think I come up with an idea like that—all on my own? Samantha told my wife!”

Donegan shrugged. “I suppose I'm just a bit put-off at the woman talk behind my back, is all.”

Then Seamus studied the country ahead as it opened up to them, helplessly thinking on Samantha Pike. Remembering with such vividness the full, vital fleshiness of her body and how she had given herself to him so willingly, with such a fury that it had startled him.

With a hunger that had matched his own. A ravenous, insatiable hunger.

*   *   *

Simon Pierce had gladly escaped a muggy summer in Washington City.

And now that the promise of success loomed that much closer on the horizon, Pierce believed the excruciating discomfort he had suffered traveling through this savage frontier might not all be for naught.

The ancient map might not be a hoax.

At first he and other scholars had truly believed it was some very sophisticated and well-executed ruse. Nothing more than a well-contrived hoax on the world's scientific community, but albeit an elaborate hoax dating back centuries … a historical practical joke nonetheless.

Now, it appeared of late that the brittle parchment map and its cryptic promise were not some ancient jokester's plan to laugh at them from beyond the grave.

Simon Pierce had been brought onto the small team at the Smithsonian when the map first made its appearance, and only then because he was the country's foremost scholar on the most ancient of Castilian dialects.

But by the time Pierce had been brought down to Washington City from his native New England, the others had covered a lot of ground. Enough of it by then that Pierce and fellow researcher William Graves could plan a trip to the Great Plains, far from the security and creature comforts of the East Coast that was all the two men had ever known.

From his study of the ancient dialect used on the map, Pierce grew certain of its richness, either as a joke or as a true linchpin in locating what would prove to be an unbelievable treasure. A mother lode, only hinted at and whispered about in every schoolboy's history of the exploration of the New World. Until now, Simon knew the map could only have been compiled by one who had a command of the old tongue—the language of the most royal of Spanish conquistadors.

But in the last two days conclusions the two had come to here in this hovel called Fort Richardson and highly secret discoveries made back east in the lamp-lit cellars and dusty archives of the institute itself told Pierce and Graves that the map had to be genuine. The ancients were pointing their fingers to Indian country where untold wealth beckoned from beyond the grave.

The pair would soon be walking on ground where the great explorers once stood … looking at the landforms as the conquistadors had. Not for the purposes of discovery in this new and foreign land had the Spaniards come but to look instead for a place to hide their most valuable treasure.

It was enough to raise the hairs on the back of his neck—to one day soon be close enough to feel the presence of those ghosts, countless soldiers left behind on the long marches, their bones left to bleach in the eternal sun.

Pierce pitied those expendable men, the mighty right arm of the ancient Spanish Empire. But now that military might had eroded and Spain was nothing more than a mere shadow of what greatness it had once experienced. Simon understood the need for expendable men—the soldiers and civilians who guided early explorers across the trackless wastes of this godforsaken land. Those guides too were most expendable when the time came.

Yes, with Spain's economy a thin shell of what it once was, it had not been hard to convince the poor and venal Spanish scholars to free the map once enough American money had been coughed up and put on the table.

That's where Graves had come in, and proved his worth.

A member of a wealthy family from which he inherited a sincere interest in ancient Spain and exploration of the New World three centuries before, William Graves had both redeeming and despicable qualities, if Simon Pierce was to admit it. While Graves was indeed born to countless riches accumulated through generations of savvy entrepreneurs who bankrolled America's early decades, Graves had known enough of the ancient archaeology to actually make himself invaluable to the entire research project as well. And, when a great amount of money was needed by the institute to purchase the map—more so to bribe the Spaniard in Barcelona who said he would let it slip through his hands if the price were right—William Graves assured the institute he could put his hands on the required amount.

In a week Graves was back with every last American dollar required by the institute to secretly acquire the ancient map from its Spanish caretaker. The money, and a contract that required signatures of the institute's directors, demanding a four percent per annum charge for the luxury of borrowing against the possibility that the map might actually be the genuine article.

Graves had known all along, Simon Pierce thought now as his fingers once more brushed lightly over its parchment surface. He looked at the bowed head of the other man as Graves studied more of the northwest corner of the map, comparing and recomparing the lines and landforms and watercourses between it and the most recent of surveys performed by government crews sent out to prepare the way for the coming of the railroad to Santa Fe.

The railroad had been laid—from Kansas down to the territory of New Mexico … across the corner of a stretch of unforgiving wilderness some called the Staked Plain, what others called the Llano Estacado. And little had those filthy-rich railroad barons known that they had passed through a country rich with possibilities.

Pierce did not like Graves that much, but he would never tell the man. For all his upbringing, all his wealth and position, Graves was a renegade historian—not content to believe and study and reinforce what his betters had proven to be scientific fact. History was, after all, just that—scientific fact. But then, Simon thought, only the wealthy had enough aplomb, or downright nastiness to go against the established grain. And only then if they had the venal side William Graves did.

But that was exactly why Simon Pierce liked Graves at times. Because they had that trait of venality in common. Both had begun this quest fully realizing it as the search of the centuries: a chance to turn the scholars of the civilized world on their ears. And by now, what with the correlations of the Barcelona map to the most recent topographical surveys, along with the continuing efforts to decode the inscriptions at the border of the map by scholars back at the institute in Washington City—it appeared both Pierce and Graves stood not only to make themselves a reputation that would shine resplendent in the scientific and historical texts for all time, but stood to make themselves some of the richest men in the history of the world.

“Excuse me, Mr. Pierce?”

Graves and Pierce quickly drew the sheet of crimson velvet over the old map as soon as the first syllable had come from the soldier's mouth when he presented himself at their tent flaps. Simon turned, disturbed.

“Yes? What is it?”

“Colonel Mackenzie asked me to come over to see if you'd care to dine with him again this evening.”

Pierce looked down at Graves, who was gazing up at him, smiling.

“Yes. I believe we will,” William Graves answered. “Don't you think it would be a good idea, Simon? Tonight is, after all, our last night here at dear old Fort Richardson.”

“There, you have your answer … Lieutenant, isn't it?”

“Yessir. Colonel Mackenzie's adjutant.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Pierce said. “I never served myself, so I never got the meaning of the different ranks. You were in the war, Lieutenant?”

“No, sir,” the young officer answered with resignation. “Wasn't old enough before Appomattox. But I satisfy myself by listening to the colonel's stories. The others regale me with their experiences whipping the Johnnies in fine fashion, from Manassas to the Georgia campaign.”

“I bought my way out,” Graves said, quite matter-of-factly. “Money can do that, you know. As far as I understand, the taker of my bounty was killed at Gettysburg. A nasty affair I've heard.”

The young officer blanched, his mouth moving wordlessly until he said, “I'll see you both for dinner at the colonel's quarters.”

“Will Mackenzie have that soldier who plays the mouth harp there, as well as the one who sings so beautifully?” Pierce asked, remembering past dinners at the colonel's.

“Yes,” the lieutenant answered. Clearly distressed at Graves's disclosure, the young man fled and the flaps fell behind him in his leave-taking.

“Why did you do that, Graves?”

He looked up at Pierce, his face as innocent as the day he had been born. “Do what, my dear Simon?”

“That young man idolizes those other, proven soldiers. He probably dreams of campaigns filled with gleaming sabers and daring men and mighty, painted red savages screeching past on horseback.”

“And what, Simon? Did I puncture his martial fantasies—let the air out of his schoolboy's dream by giving him a dose of cold reality? Yes, and I damned well enjoyed it too. These military types bore me. Were it not for the fact that we need them, and those unseemly civilian guides—”

“What, William? What would you do? Go off on your own into that savage country…” and Pierce jabbed a finger down on the map usually protected from view, wrapped in the blood-colored velvet he began to stuff inside the long leather map tube, “go off by yourself into that land teeming with evil, grinning Comanches?”

Graves grinned that charming, handsome smile of his, pushing one of the black curls back out of his eyes. Pierce hated Graves for his good looks. It seemed the wealthy did have it all.

“Simon … dear Simon. One of these days, we won't have to worry about needing anyone else to help us. One of these days—and very soon—you and I will be rich enough … we'll own our own goddamned army—because you and I will own and run our own goddamned country!”

Chapter 22

Late October 1873

“You … you want me to guide you two where?”

Jack Stillwell had trouble with few of his faculties, and hearing simply wasn't one he had ever experienced problems with in his life. In fact, his acute sense of hearing had protected both him and old Pierre Trudeau back to '68 when they walked more than a hundred miles on foot through Cheyenne-infested high plains wilderness to deliver word that the survivors of Major Sandy Forsyth's fifty white scouts were pinned down on a nameless island in the middle of a nameless river.
*

So Jack had heard Simon Pierce plain enough the first time.

“I said we have changed our plans, Mr. Stillwell,” said the older man. “Or, more to the point—our plans have been changed for us. We need you to take us north by west from here. At each night's camp we'll review with you the march for the following day.”

“You'll review for me the march for the following day?” Jack asked, disbelieving his ears, as good as they were.

“Every stream and creek and river we cross,” Pierce went on. “We'll tell you where to go from here.”

“I'd like to tell you where you can go, Pierce,” Stillwell snapped as Seamus Donegan came up, having finished saddling his horse for departure. “Both of you with your starched collars and nasty tones.”

“To Hell, I imagine,” William Graves said in that engagingly civil tone of his.

“As a matter of fact—”

“You aren't planning on going down toward the Rio Grande and Mexico now?” Donegan asked the two easterners.

Pierce glanced at him as if the Irishman was an unwanted intruder. “No. We no longer need to explore territory south toward Mexico.” He turned on Stillwell. “Are you going to lead us, Mr. Stillwell? Or am I going to have to acquire the services of another guide here at Fort Richardson or in nearby Jacksboro?”

“There's a lot of 'em might think about taking your money and guiding you from here south to the Rio Grande,” Jack told them. “But if you're hoping to find a guide to lead you northwest of here—I doubt you'll find any takers.”

“The money's very good,” Graves added, regarding an old scab on the back of his hand.

Stillwell gazed a long time at the strikingly handsome, black-headed William Graves. “I don't doubt that the money is very good. And I planned on having me some of it. But I plan on living long enough to enjoy that money you two say the government's going to pay me for guiding you. So, thanks … but no thanks. You'll have to find yourself another fool.”

Stillwell had turned, shoving past a bewildered Donegan, the Irishman's face showing only confusion, when Simon Pierce's voice stopped him in his tracks among the pack animals Jack was breaking out.

“The money aside, Mr. Stillwell … you still understand this is government business.”

“It might be, Pierce,” Jack replied, flinging his voice over his shoulder as he worked to free the knots binding his belongings to the cross-buck pack saddle. “But it's none of my business any longer.”