“Okay,” said Mix. “We’ll ride over behind that little knob there. But remember, you run off now, we’re gonna catch you, and there won’t be any more bathing or anything. General Villa, he might put all of you in a cage.”
Donita and Katherine removed most of their clothes and waded into the stream. Even though there was a chill in the air and the water was icy, it felt wonderful. They passed a bar of soap between them and luxuriated in the bath. Timmy had walked away upstream so as to have his privacy, too, and he sat down in the river and washed himself, then toweled off with his shirt. He sat on the bank for a while, watching the water and wondering what would become of them. He was frightened for his mother and his grandmother; last time he had seen them, they had looked so bad, but Mix continued to reassure him. He wondered about Bomba, too—was he dead? Mix didn’t actually know anything about that. And he wondered about Grandpapa and his father and what they were doing to save them. He knew they would do something. They wouldn’t just leave them here; in fact, Timmy would not have been surprised to see his father and the Colonel riding up right now to take them home.
Enveloped in these thoughts, Timmy got up and began walking along the riverbank, when he noticed a hole about a foot wide in the dirt. For an instant, when he peered into it, he saw something glimmer in the darkness of the hole, like a jewel. He reached inside to pick it up.
Katherine and Donita finally came out of the water. They would have stayed in longer if it hadn’t been so chilly. They dried themselves off with their clothes, dressed, and walked up the bank to sit down when an unearthly shriek split the air.
Mix and his people heard it, too, and came galloping over the rise. Timmy was out of sight and around a bend, but he was screaming so loudly it echoed down the river and across the nearby meadow. Donita and Katherine scrambled up and rushed toward the commotion. Mix had arrived before them and leaped off his horse to grab Timmy, who had been seized on the wrist by a gila monster that had been looking out at him from inside its lair. The gleaming eye had, for an instant, looked like a jewel. Timmy flailed his arm wildly, but the thick coral-and-black-tinted reptile wouldn’t let go. Mix grabbed Timmy by the shoulders and dragged him into the water, pressing the arm down so the gila monster would go under. It still wouldn’t turn loose.
“Get me a stick!” Mix hollered. Other members of the party had rushed to the riverbank. Someone produced a stick. Mix jerked Timmy’s arm out of the water and began beating the creature. It still would not let go. He pried at the gila monster’s mouth. Timmy was still screaming awfully, and his eyes were wide with fright and horror. Mix continued to pry. When Donita and Katherine ran up and saw what had happened, Donita put her hands to her mouth and Katherine rushed into the water to help.
Finally Mix managed to get the stick between Timmy’s wrist and the jaws of the thing, and when it moved its mouth momentarily to improve its grip he jerked Timmy’s wrist from the creature’s grasp. The gila monster plopped into the water and drifted away downstream. Several of the men fired at it but missed. Mix carried Timmy to shore; his arm was a bloody mess from the sharp teeth and claws of the monster.
“We’ve got to get him back to the doctor, now,” Mix said. He slung Timmy on his horse and took off at a gallop. Katherine wanted to go, but others restrained her.
“What, what was that?” she cried.
“Gila monster, missy,” one of the men said, “least that’s what they call ’em over in Sonora. I seen one before.”
“He’s badly hurt?” Katherine said.
“Yes, miss. That thing’s got poison. But Doc’ll take care of it, I guess.”
“See what you’ve done?” Katherine growled, losing control. “My little brother might die!” She wasn’t just scared, she was furious. They didn’t belong here, and it was outlandish, kidnapping people and putting them in situations they didn’t know how to cope with. They should be home and going to school and dances . . .
“Doc takes care of a lot of snakebites and such, miss,” said the man, “but he’s gonna be one sick little boy.”
Tears of frustration came to her eyes. Katherine began to sob and turned away.
BOMBA HAD NOT INTENDED TO KILL THE MAN from Villa’s cattle party, but in his intensity to learn information he’d gone too far. He had shadowed the herd ever since intercepting the soldier who’d been riding Señor Gonzales’s horse. Several times he’d tried to catch one of the drovers riding drag off guard, but something always seemed to work against him. For one thing, they had entered the lomas, the plains, and he’d had to conceal himself far away behind swales in the landscape or lag far behind, catching up when night fell.
At one point near a stream he saw a canebrake and cut off a long hollow cane stem, which he whittled into a blowgun. Bomba had noticed a few poison frogs along the way, and next time he came upon one, he caught it in a big leaf and scraped off a little of the skin from its back, which was deadly toxic in anything other than tiny doses. As Bomba hung back and shadowed Villa’s band, he whittled darts from branches of a hickory tree and later made a paste of water, clay, and a little of the poison, which he put on the tip of the darts. It would be cleaner and quieter than trying to knock somebody off a horse with a knife.
One afternoon another chance presented itself. A man from the cattle party, at the back of the herd, had gotten off his horse to urinate. He seemed to be alone, and Bomba moved stealthily on foot and from about fifty feet, with the man’s back to him, put the blowgun to his lips and blew out a dart, which hit the man in the shoulder. The man swatted at the sting, probably thinking it was a bee or wasp.
When he went down face-first in the grass, Bomba dragged him back into the woods. He shook the man and pinched his cheeks to bring him to, and when the man’s eyes opened he bent close to him.
“Where the children?” Bomba demanded.
The man blinked. “Huh?”
“Where? Kids?” Bomba said.
Suddenly the man began to struggle and yell. Bomba clapped a hand over his mouth and held him down.
“Where?” he repeated. When he continued to struggle, Bomba lifted him off the ground and wedged him into the fork of a tree. He stood in front of him and demanded again, “Where children?”
When the man still fought back, Bomba grabbed him by the head and jerked it back. It was meant only to make him answer, but to his surprise Bomba heard a loud crack as a vertebra snapped and the man went limp. Bomba lifted the head and stared into his lifeless eyes. The man took a few more breaths, then stopped breathing. Bomba stepped back, angry at himself. He might have learned something from this man. The cattle herd had moved on, so just the two of them were in the quiet of the woods. No birds sang, no breeze blew. He walked around the tree where the man’s body was wedged. Then he lifted up the man’s uniform shirt. The skin was beginning to pale and turn gray.
Bomba took out his knife and made a quick incision in the side. He peeled back the skin and continued to cut until he saw the liver. It had been the custom of his people that eating the liver of your enemy made you invincible. Bomba had been living in civilization now for twenty-five years, and he knew better, but these were desperate times that called for desperate measures. He looked at the liver and was within an inch of cutting it out, but something stopped him. Here he was, a grown man, actually thinking about eating the liver of a man he’d just killed. He was suddenly horrified, and backed away from the dead body. He could never look the Colonel in the eye again, or Mrs. Shaughnessy, or Arthur or Xenia, or any of them, including the children, if he had done that. He felt ashamed. Meanwhile, the wound in his shoulder continued to fester.
FORTY
The train in which the Colonel and his party rode south was halfway to Chihuahua City when they encountered a dreadful spectacle. Rounding a curve, they could see ahead of them a black spot far down the tracks that slowly turned into the scorched hulks of a locomotive and many railcars lying in a ditch. As they got nearer, they saw objects dangling from the telegraph
poles beside the tracks.
These turned out to be the bodies of soldiers, hanged, wearing the plain white peasant uniforms of Villa’s army, three or four bodies to a pole. The train slowed while everybody looked out the windows in revulsion. The bodies were perfectly mummified in the rarefied air of the desert plateau. Vultures flapped up as the train rolled by and resettled after it passed. There were bodies as far as the eye could see.
“Good God,” croaked the Colonel; his stomach turned. Never, even in war, had the Colonel encountered such a sight. Many in the train drew away from the windows and sat in silence. Finally, Cowboy Bob said, “Well, the Federales don’t give no quarter, Colonel. I expect them people was prisoners taken at the battle, or maybe the Federales captured their train.”
“Sheer barbarism,” Shaughnessy muttered.
“They all do it,” said Death Valley Slim. “Don’t think no more about it than squashing a cockroach.”
Strucker for once seemed subdued, and chewed on the nail of his thumb. He was dressed in a riding jacket and highly polished black boots. Before he left El Paso he’d spied a blooming camellia bush outside the Toltec, and had plucked a lush red blossom for his boutonniere.
“You still want to do business with these people?” Arthur asked. They were seated next to each other on the train, an arrangement that had not made Arthur particularly happy; he’d wanted to be alone, with so many things on his mind.
“Their cruelty is studied, reminiscent of Golgotha,” Strucker declared in his guttural Prussian accent. “Staggering, isn’t it, to believe that the same civilized and cultured people I met with in Mexico City two weeks ago are capable of this? Their mannerly airs must all be a facade.”
Arthur barely paid attention to what the German was saying; he was thinking that since the trains were running again, Xenia and his mother would also pass by this grisly scene on their way up to El Paso from Valle del Sol, and he wished for God’s sake someone would come and take these bodies down.
When the sun began to sink a few hours later, Death Valley Slim told the Colonel they had reached the closest point to the mountains where he thought Villa would be hiding. When the train stopped, they stepped out onto a forlorn waste; not a house or living thing was to be seen. The unloading of the horses, wagons, and equipment took half an hour; then the train pulled away, leaving them all standing in a desert dotted with scrub. There was still a little daylight left and the Colonel, anxious to get someplace other than this, directed them to move out—thirty-four men on horseback, thirty-one pack animals, one large and three small wagons.
As Shaughnessy’s Partisan Rangers began to move westward, someone looked into the blue and cloudless sky.
“Hey, look there!”
Everyone near him looked up.
“What is that?”
“I’m a son-of-a-gun,” cried Cowboy Bob. “It’s pelicans.”
“Pelicans—impossible,” said the Colonel.
They were three hundred miles from the nearest large body of water, but a flight of a dozen or so white pelicans soared low above them.
“What could they be doing here?” the Colonel wondered.
“Maybe they got lost,” Bob offered.
The flock of pelicans swooped overhead, then turned gracefully to the north against the deep blue sky so that the sun shone golden off their white feathers and yellowish legs.
Slim figured the pelicans were an omen but didn’t know what kind. Some others of the party talked about it that night over their campfires. Strucker didn’t believe in that sort of thing, but he didn’t like what he had seen so far. The hanging bodies had unnerved him.
ARTHUR FELT THE POWERFUL RIB MUSCLES of the horse between his legs and ignored last night’s talk about the pelicans. In spite of everything, he was anxious to get going, too, closer to his children with every step of the animal. All day a fury had been building in him, against Villa, against Mick Martin, against his father, too, for getting them into this mess. His anger was not frustrating, however, but somehow made him feel stronger, and he suddenly thought of a line he’d learned long ago in school: “If the sun insults me I will strike it down.” Bold words, perhaps, here in the Mexican desert thousands of miles from anyplace, but the fury swooped down on him like an evil genie that would not let him be.
By the following evening, the desert country turned into rolling plains, which were covered with tall grasses that swayed easily in the light breeze. Then they came to an abandoned apple orchard where a dilapidated adobe house lay in ruins and the trees were overgrown and moldy. Far in the distance loomed the Sierra Madre, some peaks already snowcapped in the late autumn. Arthur made a point of sticking close to Bob and Slim, who were riding out ahead. Bob carried a large sinister-looking bullwhip on his saddle and Arthur asked him about it.
“It’s something I learned when I was a kid,” Bob said. “You know how it is, you’re young and you’re bored and so you just take something up.” He unlimbered the black leather whip and snapped it two or three times. “I learned to plait my own out of hides.”
“See that over there?” Bob said. He nodded to a tree about fifteen feet away with a dozen or so overripe apples on it. “Name one.”
“Name one what?” Arthur asked.
“Apple. Which one you got in mind?”
Arthur looked puzzled. “I don’t understand.”
“Pick a apple,” Bob told him, “on that there tree.”
“All right, the one on the top, at the left.”
Bob swung the whip in two or three long swaths to get it fully uncoiled and under control, then lashed out with a startling crack and the apple Arthur had named simply disintegrated.
“Damn!” Arthur yelped.
Cowboy Bob smiled and re-coiled his whip. “I used to snap off cigarettes from a guy’s mouth at rodeos,” he said. “Had to make a deal with him, though—he got two-thirds of the take and I got one. Seemed fair enough.”
“Think you could teach me to do that?” Arthur asked. Before they left El Paso, Cowboy Bob had already begun giving Arthur shooting lessons and teaching him the fast draw.
“I reckon so,” Bob said, “provided you apply yourself.”
Bob was still wearing his red flannel button-down cowboy shirt and Arthur asked him, “Aren’t you worried that shirt stands out too much? You might get shot.”
“I already was,” Bob told him. “Not in this shirt, but another red one. Since it didn’t kill me, I figure it brings me good luck.”
ONE AFTERNOON AS THEY PASSED ALONGSIDE A LAKE, the Colonel took his fancy Purdey shotgun and killed a number of ducks for dinner. As he was watching Ah Dong roast the ducks, the Colonel inveighed against the British notion of sportsmanship.
“The English build the world’s finest shotguns but they’re vulgar in the use of them,” Colonel Shaughnessy announced. “Not in their own country, mind you, but when they travel to somebody else’s they’ll go out with five cheap guns apiece and shoot fowl until the barrels get too hot to handle—then just leave the birds lying on the ground for crow’s bait and ants.”
“We did the same thing to the passenger pigeons in our country a while back,” Arthur reminded him.
“Yes,” said the Colonel, “but at least we learned our lesson. When we kill something now, we eat it.”
“You didn’t eat that elephant you shot, did you, Papa?” said Arthur, unable to resist.
“Somebody did,” the Colonel retorted. “I took the head back to be stuffed, and the rest fed an entire native village for a month, I expect.”
“What’s it like, Colonel, shootin’ a elephant?” Bob asked.
“About like shooting a cow, I guess, except it’s about ten times as big and can stomp you to mush.”
Colonel Shaughnessy respected this rough cowboy but also knew the man had never dealt with anything like a bull elephant in the wild. There were various forms of courage, but he, in fact, had faced down such a beast and conquered it—which was not something to be sniffed at.
Something in Bob’s tone made the Colonel wonder if Cowboy Bob was trying to make fun of him.
“Hummmm,” Bob replied, “I don’t much fancy hunting things that can hunt me back.”
The old guy was tough, Bob thought, he’d give him that, but he still couldn’t see how killing a big old elephant with a high-powered rifle made you a hero. People like the Colonel lived in a different world. But what was going to transpire over the next few days, or weeks, or months, now, that was going to be the test of the thing. That thought sobered Bob and made him wonder what he was doing here, except for the good wages, which he couldn’t spend anyway if he ended up like one of those devils swinging from the telegraph poles.
“Well, what do you think we’re doing here?” Arthur asked Bob in the awkward silence. “We’re certainly hunting something that can hunt us back.”
“It’s different,” interjected the Colonel. “This is a manhunt.”
There was a bemused aspect in Slim’s snaggletoothed grin. “Colonel, we kill ol’ Pancho Villa, you gonna eat him?” he asked tentatively.
“I might,” the Colonel grunted. “He ate my bull, didn’t he?”
FORTY-ONE
Days later the Colonel’s party was on the high plains and the cold had firmly set in. The mountains were more ominous now and loomed much higher as the travelers came near. Sometimes there were tall stands of ponderosa pine or groves of scrub oak, but mostly the plains were an endless stretch of desolation, with occasional wagon tracks leading nowhere in the dusty soil. During the day, Bob worked with Arthur on his pistol handling, and he was impressed; Arthur was becoming a highly competent fast-draw man, although in these days and times, the use, and art, of the fast-draw had almost vanished, except for Wild West shows.
Rifles were aimed using one eye, but with shotguns and pistols the weapon was simply “pointed” with both eyes open. Bob’s trick, which he taught to Arthur, was making it all-important to take your time and set your body and your mind right, before firing. No jiggling, no waving the pistol, a firm wrist and steady hand. It didn’t matter how fast you could get the pistol out of its holster if your shots went wild.