Jack Iron (29 page)

They were camped in a grove of scrub oak a couple of miles from the arroyo. Josefina, too shaken to continue on throughout the afternoon, had insisted that Zion find a place to make camp. She was hoping to rest the remainder of the afternoon and evening and calm her nerves. Zion hadn’t objected all that much. One of the axles could use some repair. The former slave had grudgingly hitched his gray to the singletree after cutting the dead mare loose. It was a shameful waste of a damn good cutting horse, but necessity demanded the sacrifice.

At least the timber and overgrowth of brush offered plenty of cover, and a spring, bubbling up in the center of the grove, provided plenty of sweet water. It was as good a place as any for the women to recover from their harrowing ordeal.

“
Alacron …
the scorpion,” he continued. “I think it suits you, Señor Alacron.”

“Alacron,” Ben wearily repeated. The name spilled from his lips as Isabella stepped around the campfire and handed him a tin cup of steaming coffee. Well, he had to be called something, and the name would do until he made his way across the border and rejoined the United States Army, where he hoped to discover his true identity. Ben glanced down at the ragged remains of his uniform. Either he had been or still was a soldier. Perhaps he was a deserter. In that case, returning might place him in front of a firing squad. Now there was an unsettling notion.

“Bet I can count on my fingers higher than you,” Isabella said, interrupting his thoughts. “Want to see?”

“Leave the poor man be, Isabella,” the girl’s stepmother called out. “The very least we can do to show our gratitude to Señor Alacron is to give him a moment’s peace.” Josefina Quintero spoke while peeling a jicama root and placing chunks of the root’s white meat into a cook pot, along with strips of dried beef and peppers. She brushed a blond strand of hair back from her features and smiled wanly. Behind the mask of grief was a very pretty face. The late Señor Quintero had shown good taste in his choice of a bride.

“It’s all right,” Ben said. He set his coffee aside, reached out and examined the girl’s hands.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Just checking to see if you had twelve fingers or something,” Ben said with mock seriousness.

Isabella shook her head. “You count first.”

“One, two, three, four …” He continued onto ten.

When it was her turn, Isabella raised her hands high above her head and counted on her fingers. With Ben seated on the ground, she was indeed counting “higher” than her ragged benefactor. With a squeal of triumph she scampered off to help her mother.

“That’s Isabella.” Zion chuckled. “I’ve seen twisters get into less mischief.” He sighed and ran a hand across his weathered features. “But there’s nothing I wouldn’t do to see that little spitfire safe and happy. I owe her daddy a powerful lot.” Zion’s gaze seemed to watch events from his past unfold in the tangled shadows of the grove. “I ran off from a plantation in East Texas, over by Washington on the Brazos. I reckon it’s been ten years now since I seen the place, and I don’t miss it. No sir. I outran dogs and the overseer and crossed the border with nothing but the shirt on my back and a gnawing in my belly. Don Sebastien found me half starved and near dead and brought me back to Ventana. I learned to ride and rope cattle. Don Sebastien gave me a home.” His head turned slightly as he shifted his attention to the coffin in the wagon bed.

“What happened to him?” Ben asked. “Comanches?”

Zion shook his head. “His sister passed away. He hadn’t seen her in a long time. She lived in Linares. Don Sebastien hoped to straighten out her affairs and locate some papers he was missing that he thought she had. One night he didn’t return to the hotel and I went looking for him. I found him lying facedown in the middle of the plaza, with his back broke and skull caved in. A freight wagon ran him down. Witnesses said the driver had lost control of his horses. I don’t imagine Señor Quintero knew what hit him.” Zion stretched out a leg and rubbed a sore calf muscle, but it was his heart that was really aching. The memory was still vivid in his mind and caused him pain. As the segundo, it had been his responsibility to watch out for Don Sebastien.

Ben could sense Zion’s turmoil, but in a way, he envied the former slave. At least Zion had a memory, no matter how painful. But to have nothing but a blank … Well, not nothing. Ben knew the United States and Mexico were at war; but what part, if any, he was playing in the conflict, lay beyond his grasp.

His thoughts drifted back to the aftermath of the fight in the arroyo. They had left the two Comanche braves where they had fallen. The carrion birds had already begun to circle, and neither Zion nor Ben saw any reason to deny the buzzards their feast. The Comanches were a part of the wild and untamed country, so now the land was reclaiming its own.

However, Zion seemed especially upset that the third man had escaped. Ben suggested that perhaps the three were not part of some larger raiding party, otherwise the main force of warriors would have arrived at the arroyo at the first exchange of gunshots. Zion had agreed.

“Tell me, Alacron, did you get a close look at the one in the serape?” he asked.

Ben stared at the former slave, wondering if the man had somehow read his thoughts. “No,” he sighed. “I was pretty dizzy, and the gun smoke stung my eyes.” He could picture a flash of color from the gunman’s serape, a band of black and scarlet. As for the man’s features, everything had happened so fast. All Ben could discern was a patch of shadow beneath the man’s sombrero. Judging by his garb, he was no full-blood. Perhaps he had been a breed, hoping to turn a profit on the deaths of three innocent people with the help of a pair of renegade Comanches.

Half an hour later, Josefina stepped around the campfire and brought a plate of food over to Ben, who managed to stand as the lady approached.

“I can get that, ma’am,” he said.

“Nonsense. I was the governess and teacher in the Quintero household for many years following the death of the first Señora Quintero. Just because Don Sebastien took me to wife doesn’t mean I have forgotten simple courtesies. It is always an honor to serve a friend.”

“You hardly know me, ma’am,” Ben said. Their eyes met, held, then she looked away.

“You risked your life to help us. My husband says that makes you a friend.” The woman did not notice how Ben’s expression changed, and the furtive glance he snuck toward the coffin. She handed Ben his plate of food. “And I still throw together a stew when our cook allows me in the kitchen.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, inhaling the mouthwatering aroma that wafted from his plate. Hunger was all the seasoning he needed. And if the events of the past week had left her a little crazy, what the hell. He met Josefina’s eyes with a look of heartfelt gratitude. She was an attractive woman whose physical attributes—her laughing brown eyes, a well-rounded figure, and flaxen hair—were enough to set a man’s blood racing and put fire in his veins. She handed a second plate to Zion and then returned to the campfire, where Isabella had already helped herself.

“Sit here with me, Josefina,” Isabella said, making room on a log for her stepmother.

“No. Thank you, dear. I’m not hungry just yet,” the widow replied in a voice tinged with a sense of loss. Lifting the hem of her embroidered riding skirt, she climbed up in the wagon bed and sat alongside the coffin, her hand resting upon the lid. She remained there throughout the afternoon, although gradually her head lowered and came to rest upon her arm. She closed her eyes and fell asleep. Ben, however weary, could not bring himself to rest unless he had pulled his share of the night watch. Zion was impressed when the young man put his empty plate aside and announced he would keep an eye on their back trail and the mesquite-dotted hills they had left behind.

“Maybe you better take care of a more pressing matter, amigo,” Zion suggested. He stood and walked over to the wagon, retrieved a pair of saddlebags and brought them back to Ben. “You can’t walk around with your back end hanging out. Hell, there’s not enough of that uniform left to make a proper set of clothes.” Zion dropped the saddlebags into Ben’s outstretched arms.

The man called Alacron untied the rawhide strings and opened the saddlebags, to find a pair of coarse denim pants and a faded gray shirt, both of which had belonged to Don Sebastien Quintero. The haciendado’s work clothes looked a close fit and certainly preferable to running around Mexico with the seat of his britches torn away. And the sooner Ben was rid of the remnants of his uniform, the better. At least until he crossed the Río Grande into Texas, several days to the north.

“What about …” Ben looked toward Josefina.

“It was her idea,” Zion replied.

Ben walked out of camp and ventured into the thicket until he was hidden from the widow and her daughter, then he quickly changed clothes. As he had no hat, he hid his red hair beneath a bandanna. Fortunately, the shirt fit with only a modest effort to tug it into place. Lastly, he buckled the gun belt around his waist. The Patterson Colt rode at his side. A leather pouch of shot and a brass powder flask also dangled from the belt. He had handed the Allan .32 caliber over to Zion. And he could keep it as far as Ben was concerned. The weapon had proved too untrustworthy in the arroyo and nearly blown off his hand. The man they knew as Alacron wasn’t taking any chances; his fingers were still numb. Ben wearily returned to camp carrying the remains of his uniform rolled up underneath his arm.

“Think you can stay awake, mi amigo?” Zion asked. Sweat beaded like pearls on the segundo’s ebony features. His own eyes were pouchy from lack of sleep.

“Watch me,” Ben stated flatly.

“Not hardly. Reckon I’ll hunker down and take a siesta.” Zion passed a rifled musket to the Anglo, who cradled the long gun in the crook of his arm and took up his position alongside the wagon, where he could keep a watchful eye on the narrow winding trail they had followed into the grove. Ben decided that waiting here at the campsite wasn’t the best of ideas. If Comanches pursued them into the thicket, it would be better if Zion and the women had some warning. They might be able to make good their escape. Ben sauntered off toward a natural barricade of fallen timber he had spied about twenty yards from camp.

“Can I come with you?” Isabella asked, anxious to escape another boring late afternoon with nothing to do but sit around and watch the dragonflies and mud dawbers.

“You stay here with me, little one,” Zion said.

The girl glared at him. “I won’t get in his way.”

“You already have,” Zion told her.

“You need to be with your mother in case the Comanches show up again,” Ben said, pausing among the scrub oak.

“But I want to know all about you. We don’t get many visitors at Ventana.” Isabella sighed. “It’s lonely talking to the wind.”

“I know nothing about myself,” Ben tried to explain. What was there to say? That he had been wandering around the Sierra Orientals for God only knew how long?

“Oh, that’s quite all right,” Isabella enthusiastically replied. “I can make things up.”

And despite his sense of loss and terrible confusion, Ben almost smiled. Almost.

At the ripe old age of seventeen, Raúl Salcedo had already killed five men, “not counting Indians,” as the gunman liked to say. His first kill had been the result of an argument over a chicken. Raúl had roasted the scrawny hen and enjoyed his dinner over the body of the bird’s former owner, a bellicose farmer who had the misfortune of fathering Raúl and raising him for the first twelve years of his life.

Raúl was slender, with hard brown eyes and narrow, pinched features that women often laughingly described as weasely behind his back. No one derided him to his face, for Raúl’s quick temper made him as dangerous as lightning.

He lifted a smooth, tapered hand to his face to examine the pockmarks made by the scattershot from Zion’s shotgun. His fingertips came away tipped with dots of crimson. The bullet crease striping his thigh had ceased to bleed. He had stanched the wound with a paste of spiderwebs and mud, and tied a bandanna around his leg to hold the makeshift poultice in place. A quarter of a mile from the grove and on high ground, Raúl had easily located Zion’s campsite. But that knowledge was of little value. Alone and across open ground, he would not last a minute against the guns of Zion and the stranger who had come out of nowhere to ruin his best-laid plans. The loss of the Comanche renegades was hardly a tragedy. As far as Salcedo was concerned, the two had not even been worth the whiskey he had plied them with. Still, the gunman was unaccustomed to failure; and even less so was General Najera, the man who kept the seventeen-year-old killer employed.

The palms of Raúl’s hands were as smooth as a courtesan’s. The hard gritty toils of ranch life were none of Raúl’s concerns. His duties were more suited to his considerable talents. His skills were with pistol, rifled musket, or throwing knife, like the thin, finely balanced blade he kept in his boot sheath. Raúl shook his head and cursed. He didn’t look forward to admitting failure to Valentin Najera,
El Jefe,
who commanded the troops garrisoned around Saltillo. Najera was not a forgiving man. But Raúl had served the general well in the past, and this whole mission had not been a total failure.

Raúl opened his saddlebag and rummaged through the contents until he found a twist of beef jerky. His yellow teeth clamped down on the dried meat and gnawed a morsel free. He chewed the dried, peppery beef and studied the tendril of white smoke that drifted above the post oaks and mesquite trees. Well, there’s still time, he thought to himself. Señor Quintero’s gringo whore hadn’t reached Ventana yet. At the rate they were traveling, Raúl calculated he still had four or five days to redeem himself. The gunman pictured other places along the way where he might pick off Zion and the stranger if the man were foolish enough to tag along.

Raúl smiled and ran a finger along the pencil-thin moustache he wore as an affectation, hoping it made him appear older. His brown eyes took on a dreamy look as he played out his course of action. He intended to ride past the thicket under cover of darkness, and range a couple of miles ahead of Zion’s wagon. The next time they met, Raúl vowed the blood spilled would not be his own.