Cape Hell (22 page)

For months or years, he'd slept beside that likeness, until it occupied his thoughts no more (or not as much) as his paintings of fierce peasants torturing prisoners of war to death, until the letters came to remind him. Then he'd thrown the photograph in the fire with the lot.

I went back to the desk. The belly drawer was unlocked, but there was nothing of interest in it. The same was true of five of the six deeper drawers that flanked the kneehole. The last I tried was locked. I'd seen nothing resembling a key, but took a silver-plated paper knife from the blotter and poked it this way and that inside the keyhole, tugging on the bronze lion's-head knob, until something snapped and the drawer came open.

The first thing that greeted me was my old Deane-Adams in its gun belt. I inspected the cylinder, found all the chambers loaded, and buckled the rig around my waist. I looked for the Bulldog revolver, without success; but I hadn't had it nearly as long and was less familiar with it, so I didn't spend much time regretting the loss.

On the bottom of the drawer lay a black iron strong box edged with gilded oak leaves. It, too, was locked, but I inserted the scratched paper knife under the lid and forced it open.

Some of the papers inside were in Latin. These I set aside. At the bottom was a long parchment envelope sealed with the K.G.C. crest impressed in red wax. I broke it open and unfolded the parchment sheets from inside. It was lettered in copperplate and signed by Childress.

I skimmed through the bequests; for it bore all the highblown obsolete language of a will. There was no mention of his fiancée's name, and I recognized none of the others. Upon the signer's passing, command of the army was to pass to Eustace McCready, Captain (to be promoted to the brevet rank of major upon acceptance). On the fourth page was the passage I'd been looking for:

Under no circumstances is my death or incapacity to interfere with the purpose of this militia, which is to march upon Mexico City and by military engagement induce the government of Mexico to surrender the command of its forces to Captain McCready, who will annex them to the militia and invade the United States of America.

A sound outside brought me to my feet; it was the clank of a dangling saber in its metal scabbard banging against a boot-top. Either Captain McCready or one of his subordinates was coming to gather the personal effects of their deceased leader or was looking for me.

I refolded the sheets and put them in the inside pocket of my coat.

My way was clear. If my suspicions were right and I had been allowed to live only because Childress wanted fresh conversation, my usefulness was at an end. Unless McCready disobeyed the posthumous command—and if anything the man would be even more fanatically devoted to the major now than when he breathed, he'd be more interested in taking possession of the
Ghost,
in which case Joseph the engineer's existence was more secure than my own. The Indian had saved my life, but he was in no condition to escape that place, and from what I'd seen of the infirmary his chances were better there than anywhere within a hundred miles.

But a hundred miles from where? I had no idea how far I'd been brought from the train, or in which direction other than up. To miss it by fifty yards in either direction would be the same as missing it entirely. I could wander along the rails for days, then blunder into an ambush; or break my neck riding down a grade as steep as a grain elevator in search of a fly-speck on the map called Cabo Falso.

Map.

The saber was jangling down the hallway. I spotted the ancient Spanish wall decoration in its frame. I took along the paper knife and slashed the map all around the inside edge. The doorknob rattled, someone pushed at the door, encountered the resistance of the chair. Whoever it was put his shoulder into it. The chair's wheels skidded out from under it and it fell on its back. It bought me a second.

I bought another. A slug from the Deane-Adams split a heavy panel. I hadn't hoped to hit anything, just play for time. I loped to the connecting door to the bedroom.

The key was in the lock. I turned it and swung open the door just in time to stop a slug from the man who'd pushed in from the hall. Just as I jerked the door shut, I caught a glimpse of a gaping eye socket in a face black with fury.

 

TWENTY-NINE

The room where
I'd recovered was a bedroom once again, with no sign of the bathtub or shaving materials; the late Major Childress had run a tight ship in a country not notorious for its discipline. I'd brought the key inside with me and turned it in the lock just as a hand grasped the knob on the other side, and got away from the door an instant ahead of the next bullet. This one penetrated the thick pine and punched a hole in the tall window across from it.

I didn't waste time returning fire. In another moment the lock would be shot off or the door forced. I snatched up the heavy washstand and flung it that direction, but I didn't look to see if it fell to the floor in a position to slow down pursuit. That kind of time goes for gold double-eagles, and I hadn't a penny to spare. I crumpled up the ancient map and stuffed it into a pocket on the run.

The window was the only other way out. I used the barrel of my revolver to clear away the rest of the glass and got a leg over the sill just as the crash came, accompanied by splintering wood. For good measure I slung another piece of lead that direction and dropped four feet to the ground.

Or to be more exact, onto a pile of skeletons. At that corner of the house they reached to the sill.

There was no getting through that grotesque stack except the long way. The closest end, at the rear of the house, led to a cliff that fell hundreds of feet almost straight down the mountain. I'd climbed and descended as bad in like situations, but not when I was still recovering from serious illness, with the possibility of a fresh attack coming on while I was hanging by my fingers from a slippery shelf of rock. Even if I made it to level ground, I'd be on foot in country I didn't know and easily recaptured. I'd left my bay tethered to the rail of the front porch.

So on I went, stumbling over rib cages, flinging aside skulls and pelvises and arms angled like cranes. Stiff jagged fingers snagged my coat and snatched at my hat as if they were the last to give up. Razor-sharp sternums slashed at my shins. I tripped and fell, shouting, into grisly spirals of bone, struggled in a panic to untangle myself from limbs I swore still had life in them. There was more than dried stalks in that heap; it had been added to as recently as that morning, and I breathed through my mouth to avoid the stench when I wasn't gritting my teeth against the likelihood of sinking my fingers into rotting remains. Flies the size of hummingbirds floated on the foul air, buzzing drunkenly, their abdomens glistening emerald-green. They landed on my face, favoring the moist corners of my mouth and eyes, and quitted with sullen reluctance when I swiped at them. They flew so slowly, fattened on their feast, I caught three of them in mid-air, only half-trying, and batted them to the ground. All around me sections of human jetsam plinked and plunked and clattered like someone striking together hollow sticks for the pure perverse pleasure of making a racket.

The same thing was happening behind me, as McCready came hard on my heels.

A bullet screamed a foot past my ear and crackled to a stop in a nest of bones. I didn't stop, and when he heard the noise he returned to the chase. I'd gained ground while he stopped to level his pistol.

My luck held. I made my way through that charnel yard without encountering putrefying flesh, and stumbled into the open.

My luck didn't hold. My bay wasn't where I'd left it.

No, it still held. When I raced around the end of the porch, it was standing nearer the front door; I'd been careless with the tether, leaving enough slack for the animal to drag it down toward an inviting clump of grass.

That was where my luck gave out. A group of men dressed in rags with pinched-in heads stood at the far end of the house facing me, their eyes dull between sunken temples, but their unsheathed machetes burning bright in the sun.

*   *   *

I didn't want
to do it. The wretches were little more than the brutes Childress had called them, but human, and hardly in command of their lives. They existed because of Childress and for Childress; they knew no other god. When the first one lumbered toward me, raising his short-bladed weapon, I shot a fresh hole in the crown of his hat high up, snatching it off his low cranium. I might have been shooting at the house for all the effect it had. He took another stumbling step, swinging the machete back as far as his arm would reach. Cracked lips skinned back from black gums, spittle bubbling in the corners.

I aimed lower and fired. He was still coming when the scarlet stain spread all the way across his belly; then he tripped over his own feet and fell headlong, landing stiff as a plank with his weapon still at arm's length, and lay without jerking so much as a nerve.

By then the others were on the move. If, as the major had said, they understood only fear and hatred, the second was stronger than the first. I didn't think they mourned their comrade so much as saw me for a member of an alien tribe, where wrath and fear intermingled, like grease and fire, leading to white flame. It hardly seemed possible the news of Childress' death had reached them, but if their instincts were as bestial as he'd made them out to be, they might have smelled it, the way they said some breeds of dog can detect disease before a trained physician can suspect it. In any case his order to spare me from harm was no longer regarded.

I could have shot them all. It was a small group, and their reflexes were so primitive it would have been like picking bottles off a fence rail, but maybe because of that I saw no honor in it, even in defense of my own life. When the first of the rest came within blade's reach I swept the barrel of the revolver against his wrist, where the bone was as obvious as those in the pile I'd struggled my way through, and striking it with a noise that was half-thump, half-crack. He yelped and stumbled, losing his grip on his weapon, and I followed through, shoving him off his feet with my forearm.

By then I had my hand on the bay's reins, but as I jerked them loose of the rail a vise closed on my gun arm just above the elbow. It went dead to the shoulder and I felt the butt slipping through my fingers. The creature could have cracked a cue ball in that fist. Something flashed in the sun; I threw up my other arm, expecting the blade to slash through muscle and tendon as easily as it sliced cane; but something struck with a thud and a third eye opened at the bridge of his nose. The machete spun out of his hand, hitting my shoulder with the flat of the blade and bouncing off. He fell even faster than his partner; those weak minds had only a tenuous connection to their bodies, and switched off like a telegraph key snatched loose of its wires.

I heard the echo of the shot then, but I didn't sacrifice a second looking over my shoulder to confirm it was McCready who'd fired. I swung the bay between me and his weapon, hooked one foot over the edge of the saddle, and loosed a round close enough to its ear to put it to gallop. We took off toward the mountain trail I'd come up by wagon, I riding Apache fashion, hanging on by a handful of mane with one foot lifted just short of the ground and the horse serving as a moving breastwork shielding me from lead.

Not that it stopped the captain, who seemed to have no more sentiment for the beast than I; a bullet struck the saddlehorn square, gouging the leather and ricocheting off the hickory core, and when I had the opportunity later to examine the bay's hindquarters I saw where another had plowed a furrow a half-inch deep through the flesh behind the cantle.

Which would have been the moment when the animal screamed and took off like Pegasus.

*   *   *

I wouldn't repeat
that ride. The way down from the house to where we'd left the train was as steep as the way up from it to the plantation, but I'd made both trips aboard the relative safety of a wheeled vehicle under someone's control. Just galloping on flat ground plugged my throat with my heart, and I don't trust the animal at even a slow walk.

More shots came, rattling and growing fainter. When they stopped—to reload, I thought—I swung my leg across the saddle and pulled myself upright, and almost as an afterthought holstered the Deane-Adams. I'd shifted it to my left hand in order to grasp the bay's mane with the other; the bandage on the bullet-crease in the left had come loose in the meanwhile. I unwound it and threw it away. The wound was still angry red, but it had closed. Taking care to keep it from bleeding again was less of a distraction than the bandage itself.

Distractions I had in plenty. Behind me I heard the pounding of more than one set of hooves. McCready had rallied all the troops handy. Childress had been over-conscientious in writing down his wishes for his campaign against Mexico and the United States to continue after his death. If his captain was this determined to prevent me from reporting back to Washington, he had no intention of abandoning his predecessor's mad dream.

The road narrowed. I slowed my pace, ducking overhanging tree limbs, and took a nearly vertical grade with the reins taut and leaning back parallel with the side of the mountain. The bay picked its way daintily, whistling through its nostrils, eyes rolling over white. That was the test of a good mount; but you never knew how it would measure up until you put your hide on the line. I cursed Judge Blackthorne more often than I praised him, but when it came to outfitting the men he sent into hazard he spent every nickel he kicked and bit the Congress to get, and when it pulled tight its purse strings he chipped in from his own household accounts. This was a good horse.

I found respect then for the creatures who had carried me up that same route by wagon. And I was grateful I'd spent so much of the trip senseless. At times the way was so narrow they had to have rigged ropes to steady the wagons when the outside wheels had no purchase, and just how they'd managed a ton of Gatling has vexed me in all the years since.