She had betrayed me, no doubt for a reward and her freedom. Fool that I was, I anticipated she would and still walked into the trap.
The “countess” was truly a demon in a dress.
Only one thing, other than that I prayed she rotted in hell, came out of the trap set for me: it confirmed she didn’t have the gold. The governor must have seized it because if she still had it, she would have let me help her escape.
I didn’t have the gold, either.
PART 5
SIR KNIGHT TO THE RESCUE
FORTY
HEADING UP THE coast out of Vera Cruz, I was sure I left pursuit far behind as Rojo opened up his stride after I walked and then rested him.
A posse would not keep up the chase long once night had fallen and I was out of sight. Traveling at night was dangerous with a horse because the road was sandy and paved with ruts and potholes. Besides hoping your horse didn’t break a leg, it was the time deadly snakes slithered around looking for something warm-blooded to bite.
I traveled through the entire night, dozing in the saddle, walking in front of Rojo when I couldn’t see enough of the road in the moonlight to know if there were holes he had to avoid. The region was almost entirely unsettled except for a few indios who sold tortillas and brackish water from huts at several places along the twenty-mile stretch of sands and stinking swamps before the route to the Valley of Mexico started up the mountains.
One bit of luck in my favor was that the pursuit was on the hot, swampy, coastal plains where sunstroke would get you if the terrible contagion called black vomito didn’t strike you down first.
The people of Vera Cruz, from the governor down to léperos on the streets, lacked the energy and determination in everyday life that was evident in Oaxaca and other places I’d been, and most say it’s because the heat and foul conditions made working hard impossible.
During a short period of winter when snow fell on distant mountains, Vera Cruz cooled down to the point of being livable. But during most of the year the region was insufferably hot, and Vera Cruz became almost a ghost town because everyone who could left their homes on the coast when ships were not due in and stayed in their homes on the other side of the mountains where it was cooler.
I couldn’t have slept on the ground even if I had taken the time to lay out my bedroll and share the ground with snakes, scorpions, and poisonous spiders—I was too angry at my own stupidity to rest.
Three years of work had been lost in an hour of being played a fool by a woman. She tickled my ego and took everything from me—my gold and my dream, leaving me just with my damaged pride.
I grit my teeth thinking about her. If I ever met up with that woman again … Ayyo! I crossed myself. Even I knew that burning her feet over a fire, a favorite torture of the Inquisition, was too harsh. Maybe just a little toasting would do. Or better yet, tying a rope to her neck and dragging her behind Rojo over a bed of cactus.
I amused myself for about two minutes with all the ways I would take revenge on the woman before I gave up the ghost on the subject because I knew in my heart I wasn’t capable of any of them.
More important than revenge that I would never have the opportunity to take or the dark heart to administer, I had to make a decision now about what I was going to do. To start all over and go back into horse stealing, I needed money for food for myself and the horses and a new territory to work because word would be out about me.
The choice as to how I would make the needed money seemed obvious: the route from Vera Cruz over the mountains to the capital was the most traveled road in the colony and the most robber-infested.
I would go back to being a bandido.
There was good reason that the road was beloved by bandidos—not only did more people and merchandise flow on it than any other road in the colony, but the route itself was difficult for the army and constables to patrol because of its narrow paths and length, its numerous small bridges that could be burned to cut off pursuit, and its rocky terrain in which rockslides could be triggered to cut off a small group of travelers from caravans of heavily armed mule trains of merchandise and pursuits by law enforcers.
A sole traveler was the most vulnerable. As I started into the mountains, I hoped that bandidos would come after me. Two pistolas and a machete from my saddlebags were now ready to be used.
It was one of those days when killing someone would have been a pleasure.
I would not be in a position to rob until I got beyond the narrower parts of the mountain pass that led to Xalapa, the main stopping area before travelers proceeded onto the capital.
It was a four- to five-day trek from Vera Cruz to Xalapa during good weather and could take several times longer during the rainy season. At the speed I was going, I would make it in half the time.
Being a lone highwayman was fraught with much more danger than leading a band of dumb léperos. Seeing one masked man charging at a carriage most likely would get the guard riding next to the coach driver to fire his harquebus rather than throw his hands up in surrender.
As I did with Cerdo and the gang of worms, once I reached the area on the mountain where the road widened and carriages were once again in use, I would stay away from the heavily guarded mule trains and passengers that tended to travel together as a caravan. I would wait and find a straggler or a carriage with problems, a not infrequent occurrence since the “road” at best was full of rocks and ruts.
* * *
Once I had passed beyond the mountain path suited for mules and goats and was well along the road to Xalapa on which carriages were in use, I left the road and moved slowly along a ridge just above it. The low ridge gave me a good view of movement on the road.
I saw a carriage in the distance and heard gunshots. Squinting to get a better look, I realized that a carriage was being attacked.
Two men on horses charged a carriage whose driver and guard were sitting in the shade of a tree eating their midday meal. One of the mules pulling the carriage went down as it was hit by the gunfire. The horsemen had deliberately shot the mule to keep the carriage from being driven away.
As the horsemen came up to them, the coachmen stood and raised their hands in surrender. The front rider stopped his horse next to a coachman and, without saying a word, swung down with a machete and split open the man’s head as if cutting a melon.
The second coachman started to run, and the other bandido rode up behind him and hit the man behind the back of the neck with a machete, nearly severing the head.
Ayyo! It was unnecessary violence—the two coachmen had already surrendered.
I spotted a third man. He slipped out of the side of the carriage opposite to the highwaymen and ran.
A bandido spotted him and yelled, both kicking their horses to cut him off as he ran. From my vantage point, I could see that the man was running toward a deep river crevice without realizing it was not an escape route.
The man running appeared young, slender, and well dressed.
I slipped my bandana up over my nose, grabbed a pistola, and gave Rojo a kick.
To distract them from the running man, as I came off the ridge I shouted so the murderers would know I was coming.
That halted them fast, and they both turned toward me. I could see the confusion on their faces.
One of the men charged me while the other wheeled and went for the running young man.
The man came at me at a full gallop, a pistola in hand. He had already used his pistola to frighten the guards into surrender and had not had time to load, so he must have carried two pistols as I did.
I pulled Rojo to a stop and the other man took the movement to be one of fading courage on my part, but he was wrong. The way his horse was running, with him bouncing in the saddle, he would have to be nearly on top of me before he got close enough to get off an accurate shot.
Sitting calmly on Rojo, I waited until I had a good shot and raised my pistola. The man realized his mistake and got off a hurried shot that went wild
. As he wheeled his horse to make a run for it, I went after him, giving Rojo his head, knowing the bandido would not get far on his much smaller mount.
I put the pistola back in its holster attached to the saddle and took out my machete.
As I came up behind the man, he turned and gave me a look of fright—the same look that had been on the face of the coachman he murdered in cold blood.
I made him a headless horseman and kept going, heading for the man who was running for the cliff with the other bandido behind him.
The man from the coach had reached the edge of the crevice and saw that he could go no farther. The rider bearing down on him fired, and the man stumbled backward and disappeared over the edge.
The highwayman had used both his pistolas. Unlike his companion who tried to outrun me, he took one look at my big stallion and stopped and held up his hands.
He was surrendering.
It caught me completely by surprise, but I realized what he had in mind. My mask said I was another bandido. He was right that I would permit some courtesy among thieves. But he was a murderer.
As I rode up to him I pulled out my pistola and shot him between the eyes.
“No quarter for murderers,” I told his body as I galloped by.
A horse whinnied, and I looked farther along the ridge from the spot where I had come off. A man on a horse was there, watching—and wearing a mask even though the two bandidos who did the attack had not bothered to hide their faces. He wheeled his horse and was quickly out of sight.
Strange. It made no sense to me. For sure, he wasn’t like me, a thief who just happened along. Eh—there weren’t that many lone bandidos on the road. He had to be with the other two, but had stood back, watching what was taking place. Waiting to pop out of hiding if his compadres needed the help? He would have seen that the coachmen had surrendered. Why didn’t he come down then?
Whatever his motives for not taking part of the action, even with the quick glance I got, I learned something about him: he was riding a good horse, not the skinny nags the two other men were on, and his clothes were better than his two amigos wore. The dead men were dressed in well-worn work clothes, what a vaquero working with cattle and horses would wear. Pretty much what I was wearing.
The clothes of the man who fled were also the kind worn on haciendas, but his were of a better quality, what a majordomo or foreman who never got his hands dirty would wear.
Because of the mask he wore, I wouldn’t recognize him if I passed him on the street … but I had more of an eye for horseflesh than most people and would know his mount if I saw it again.
I galloped over the edge of the crevice—a hundred-foot cliff down to river rapids. If the carriage passenger who went over was not already dead from being shot, he would not have survived the fall and rocky rapids below.
“Vaya con dios, amigo,” I said, crossing myself.
Two coachmen, one gachupin, all dead. Even one of the carriage mules was dead.
I got into the carriage to see what valuables I could find. The two horses of the bandidos had not gone far, and I would round them up later. I’d take them and the remaining mule with me.
The interior of the coach was not as grand as some, and that told me it was not the personal coach of the passenger but had been hired to transport him to the point where coaches could run again.
I ignored the trunks strapped to the back and top of the coach and went inside to go through what he would have carried close to him—other than what went over the cliff with him.
Raffling through the young Spaniard’s bags in the coach, I discovered that he was a personage of wealth because his clothes and jewelry were expensive.
I slipped on a well-cut, soft leather doublet and put on his hat, laughing as I played the gachupin. Eh, I could get used to the soft life of a Spanish caballero with nothing to do but parade in the paseo all day and play with cards and women at night.
I took off the vestlike doublet and put on breeches and a waistcoat, then put the doublet back on and admired myself in a small mirror I found in the bag. I leaned out the open door.
“Eh, Rojo, meet Don Juan Lépero de Oaxaca.”
He ignored me and I went back to rummaging.
“Antonio de los Rios” had a royal letter permitting his passage to the colony and a letter of introduction to the viceroy from an official in the colonial office. While I had not learned to read well enough to understand all the words in the documents, I had seen travel documents among the effects of people I robbed and recognized the names and seals of the officials.
“Antonio, you have friends in high places. Which means you are a personage of importance despite your young age.”
I heard horses coming and stuck my head out the window of the coach. An army patrol was coming at a gallop from the direction of Xalapa.
Behind me coming up the road was a mule train.
A ridge was to my right and a sheer drop where I could join the young gachupin in a watery grave to my left.
Ayyo! I was boxed in and caught with dead men and not just loot in my hands—I was wearing stolen clothes.
While the rest of the army patrol came to a halt before the coach, an officer dismounted and approached on foot.
I stepped out of the carriage and removed the gachupin’s hat, using it to make a sweeping bow.
“Antonio de los Rios, at your service, señor.”
FORTY-ONE
“I’VE SEEN THE two bandidos before,” the officer, a capitán in charge of the patrol, told me after he had looked around at the carnage. “Trash that hangs around pulquerias. They would slice their own mothers’ throats for a real.”
Since it took eight reales to equal a single piece of eight, about an ounce of silver, the capitán didn’t think the dead men had valued their mothers much.
I merely nodded at his sage observation, too worried I would say something that revealed that I wasn’t a Spanish gentleman. He was in awe of me for having dispatched two bandidos after my guards were killed without firing a shot, and I wanted to keep it that way. I would have given my valiant guards the credit for the kill, but it was obvious that their muskets had not been fired.
“It was pure luck and the hand of God,” I said with great modesty. “I surprised them by fighting back.”
“You say a stranger came to your aid?”
“Sí, as I said, sadly the man went over the cliff and was lost in the terrible rapids below.”
The officer made the sign of the cross. “May God accept him for the hero he was. Is that his fine horse?” he asked of Rojo.
“No, his horse went over with him.” I gave a quick answer to that one so the officer would not grab Rojo for himself. It was common on long trips to have a personal horse hitched to the rear of a coach.
“I brought the stallion over from Spain. I was about to ride it to the nearest settlement to get help and have my possessions transported. I have urgent business in the capital.”
I made sure my chest swelled a bit when I added the last bit.
“Of course, from your travel documents, it is obvious that your business in the capital is most important.”
The moment the capitán saw my papers, he began to fawn over me. Eh, I was a peninsulare from Madrid and he was a low-ranking officer in the colonial militia, which did little except patrol the Vera Cruz–Xalapa trade route.
He shouted orders for my trunks to be loaded on mules.
“I will leave men here to clean up this mess and bury the dead while I escort you to Xalapa.”
Ayyo! The last thing I needed was to be taken to a city where I would have endless chances of being exposed as a highwayman and imposter.
“That won’t be necessary. I would be remiss if I took you away from your urgent duties of protecting the many travelers along this treacherous route. I will just ride my horse to Xalapa—”
“Oh no, Señor Rios, that would not be possible. I would be broken down in rank and sent to the northern desert to fight the s
avage Chichimeca if I did not personally deliver you to Don Riego.”
I cleared my throat and pretended I was trying to remember. “Ah, Don Riego…”
“Sí, Don Domingo del Riego, the viceroy’s aide. He is waiting for you at Xalapa.”
“Waiting for me,” I repeated.
“Of course, señor. The mail packet from Madrid brought word of your coming a week ago. We were told to be on the lookout for you and take you to Señor Riego when we found you.”
My brain was freezing up as I tried to keep up the pretense, but what he said got through loud and clear: he was taking me to the viceroy’s aide—who was expecting me.
Oh shit. I smelled doom.
So far I had avoided exposure as a fraud because I had Antonio’s possessions. Nor was my olive complexion a problem—Spaniards come in many shades, and mine was similar to the southern Mediterranean skin color of many of them. But sooner or later I would say something that would reveal my complete ignorance at being a Spaniard fresh off the boat from … from … from where?
I had seen the word “Madrid” on the travel documents, and that was where the court and other high officials were located, but I didn’t know if Antonio was also from there.
There were many cities in Spain and many ports, and, while I had heard of many of them, I didn’t know which port I was supposed to have departed from. Madrid, perhaps?
Sí, that was it. If I was asked which port I had boarded ship at, I would say Madrid. It had to be the biggest and most important port in Spain since the king was there.
The officer paused for a moment to inspect the way “my” carriage trunks were being loaded on mules and then returned to escort me to my horse.
“This is not a privilege, of course, that we extend to all bearing letters of introduction from Madrid. But your situation being unique, it is one the viceroy considers to be of utmost importance.”
I didn’t dare ask what was unique about my situation.