“Just to get it straight,” the movie man said, “your name is Reed, Jack Reed—is that a nickname for John?”
“It is,” Reed replied.
“And you are a reporter for the New York Telegram?”
“No, the New York World—and I’m also covering this for the Metropolitan.”
The man squinted for a moment. “Ain’t that one of those socialist magazines?”
“Well, progressive,” Reed equivocated, “if that’s what you mean.”
“All right,” said the man, eyeing Reed suspiciously. “S’pose we get a shot of you talking to the general here. You be writing in a notepad or somethin’, like you’re getting an interview.”
Reed pulled out a pad and began to act. Next the man turned to Bierce.
“And your name’s Jack Robinson—that stand for John, too?”
“No, just Jack,” Bierce said. The cameras continued to roll.
“You a reporter, too?”
“No,” Bierce answered. He shied away from the camera.
“Look over that way,” the man said. “You don’t want your back to be in the movies, do you?”
“I’d prefer it,” Bierce told him. “I don’t want my family to know where I am.”
“You look old enough to me to make your own decisions,” the man said testily.
“I am, and I don’t want to be in the movies.”
Before letting them film, Villa had instructed the movie people not to take pictures of the children or Donita Ollas because, he said, it might upset their relatives. He had declared he was going to turn them all over to the proper authorities, when he found some. But for now, he, Villa, was the proper authority. However, while Reed “interviewed” Pancho Villa, one of the cameramen accidentally swung his lens onto Timmy, Katherine, and Donita, who were standing at the edge of the campfire. He didn’t shoot them long, but it was enough.
When the movie people had finished and were packing up their cameras and equipment, Mix asked the man where and when the films could be seen. He especially wanted to know if they would be shown in Hollywood.
“Hell, feller, we’re with Black’s Movie News of the World. These pictures’ll be shown in movie houses all over the planet—probably in a couple of weeks, providing we can get our asses to where we can catch us a train out of this hellhole.”
Mix’s heart jumped. He didn’t know what Villa had in mind for them next, but he hoped to high heaven it included someplace with a movie theater.
“And you,” the man asked, poised with a pencil and pad, “does Tom stand for Thomas?”
“No,” Mix said, “it stands for Tom.”
FORTY-THREE
The days seemed to spin endlessly by as Villa’s troop ascended higher into the mountains, where the air was fragrant and sweet. They rode slowly through giant pine forests and down steep trails into valleys where often there was a rushing river, then up again to the canyon rims, where they could see for miles across the reddish brown ceilings and monstrous escarpments. Days earlier they’d turned northward, and kept in that direction until Reed figured they must be as close to the United States border as they were to Chihuahua City. Late one afternoon, as they reached the rim of one canyon, they saw what they took for an Indian seated on a large rock, a black silhouette against the setting sun. He sat scratching himself and looking around the valley like a thoroughly satisfied owner.
Bierce and Reed had been riding with Villa and Fierro, and Fierro saw the man first.
“That’s strange,” Fierro remarked. “These people usually don’t go around up here alone.”
“He ain’t alone anymore,” Bierce remarked. “Now he’s got us to contend with.”
Fierro cut Bierce a slit-eyed glance. This meddlesome old goat was beginning to get on Fierro’s nerves, too.
“An outcast, maybe,” Reed offered. “I read up on these people a little before I left New York. Sometimes they’ll kick one of their own out of the tribe if he doesn’t do right.”
Just then the man rose and climbed off the rock, and to their surprise they saw two other men emerge from behind the rock, leading pack animals. They headed along a thin rocky trail at the rim of the canyon, a trail that would take them straight to Villa’s party if they kept on it. Fierro pulled out a pair of field glasses and studied the men as they plodded along.
“They’re not Indians—not by a stretch,” he announced, his eyes still glued to the binoculars.
“Maybe they’re tourists,” Bierce offered. “Hell of a view from up here. It’s better than the Grand Canyon.”
Fierro put the glasses down and looked at Bierce sourly.
“Señor,” he said, “we have to be suspicious. Whoever they are, if they see us here, they might report it.”
“So what?” Villa interjected. “Report to who? What’s anybody gonna do about it, anyway?”
By this time the man who had been out on the rock had climbed aboard his animal and taken a good lead on the others. Villa might have moved his party along, but he didn’t. He waited patiently until the man was within speaking distance. The man was dressed in soiled white cotton peon’s clothes and arrived on a filthy mule.
“Afternoon,” the man said politely.
“Buenas tardes,” Villa replied, noting that he was a gringo. “Are you lost or something?”
“Hardly,” said the man. “My friends and I are making our way back to civilization.”
“And from where did you come?” Villa asked.
“From over there.” He swept his arm to indicate the endless maze of canyons to the west.
“Sounds like you came from over in Sonora,” Villa said. “Those barrancas are a pretty good place to get lost in.”
“Tell me about it,” the man said. By now he had dismounted and was standing in front of Villa’s party. “We got lost several times, but, well, now you have found us.”
“And what am I to do with you?” Villa asked.
“We been eating nothing but beans for three weeks. Maybe you got a change of diet,” he said hopefully.
“You see many Federales over in Sonora?” Villa asked.
“Well, Hermosillo’s the only big town we went through, and we ain’t been there for six months. But there was Federales there then.”
“How many?”
“Thousands, I guess. We didn’t count ’em all.”
“Guns?”
“Yeah, they had a lot parked around town.”
Villa grunted. The other two in the man’s party had arrived by now. One was a grime-faced American and the other was an old white-haired mestizo. They halted some steps away from the man and stood holding their burros and shuffling their feet.
“Well, I guess you need some dinner and we need to make a camp. This looks like as good a place as any,” Villa said finally.
“Gracias,” said the man.
“De nada,” Villa replied.
They sat around Villa’s campfire as the sun beamed its last pink rays over the measureless expanse of canyons and mountains. The three newcomers greedily devoured freshly cut steaks and, in the firelight, their chins dripping grease, explained why they were there.
“El Dorado,” the man said. He was small in stature, yellowed by what appeared to be jaundice, and had a head bald as a split pea.
“The lost gold mine?” Fierro asked.
“No less,” said the man. He told them how he and his friend had worked their way down to Tampico on a steamer laden with oil-drilling gear, then got a job in the oil fields, and when that played out they bummed around for a while and he’d even wound up writing for an English-language newspaper in Mexico City. There they had met the old mestizo who talked all the time about this lost gold mine of El Dorado in the mountains, and the mestizo claimed to know an Indian whose tribe had worked it way back in the old days a hundred or more years before.
Priests found the Indians mining the gold, the man said, and, after converting them, made them slave in the mine for half a century to bring out
gold for the Church. Then one day a party of soldiers were headed up the trail toward the mine and the priests were afraid they would report it and the government would confiscate the gold, and so they made the Indians fill in the mine and smooth out all traces of it, including planting cacti and other things around it, until nobody could ever find it again except them. Then they murdered all the Indians who had worked on it so they couldn’t tell anybody. Before they died, the Indians put a curse on the mine.
The mestizo in Mexico City said he could produce the Indian who was the son of the lone survivor of the killings and knew where the mine was. And since the revolution was starting to heat up again in Mexico City, the four of them, the man, his friend, the mestizo, and the Indian, figured there was nothing to lose and set out from Hermosillo to find the lost gold of El Dorado.
“And did you find it?” Reed asked enthusiastically.
“Hell, no,” the man replied. “We wandered all over those mountains and canyons nearly half a year, and all we found was rocks and bandits and snakes. It was probably all a bunch of horseshit.”
“Might have been the curse,” Bierce remarked. He believed in curses—sometimes.
“And what about the Indian?” Villa asked.
“Dead,” said the man. “He was about to go crazy up there anyway, but one time he got in one of our packs and found a quart of whiskey. Got drunk on it and fell off a cliff.”
“Too bad,” Bierce remarked.
“Yes,” said the man.
“I mean about the whiskey. I imagine you could have put it to better use.”
“And so where are you headed now?” Villa inquired.
“Back to Tampico or Veracruz, I reckon. Maybe the oil fields have opened up again. Otherwise I guess I’ll go to El Paso and then get on home.”
“That’s a hell of a good tale,” Reed interjected. “You said you had been a reporter; maybe you could write a book about it.”
“The hell with it,” said the man, wiping steak grease from his chin with his sleeve. “We didn’t find anything, did we?”
EVER SINCE THEY HAD LEFT THE RARÁMURI INDIAN VILLAGE, a plan had begun to take shape in Johnny Ollas’s mind. One thing he knew for sure was that with every passing day the time for action was getting short. So tonight, while Villa and the others were dining with the treasure hunters, Johnny laid out his scheme for the rescue of his wife. It’s said the best-laid plans always have the beauty of simplicity, but Johnny’s plan was about as complicated as the inner workings of a pocket watch.
“There is something he is afraid of,” Johnny reminded them again. “That day Rigaz was killed he said something very strange about an old man on a gray horse, with a white beard and a rifle. He said this man was trying to kill him.”
“To kill the general?” Julio asked.
“Yes, it was very strange, like he’d had a vision, maybe.”
“Visions often come true,” Gourd Woman offered.
Luis and Rafael sat on a log eating beans and beef spiced with peppers and onions. The campfire flickered in their faces.
“Well, I can’t wait around for that,” Johnny said. “I’ve been working on something and maybe pretty soon we can pull it off. Now, one of these riders who came back today for some beefs told me we are gonna start down into the canyons tomorrow. That might be our chance, because what I have in mind wouldn’t work up here on the canyon rims—its too close for visibility, and you can’t jump over canyons. But down there, just maybe . . . and this thing he has about the old man with a rifle, that, too . . .” Johnny understood as a matador the advantage in knowing your opponent. Before a bullfight he often spent hours on the rails of the bullpens, watching and studying the animal he was to fight.
“What you have in mind?” Luis asked.
“Like I said before,” Johnny continued, “I’ve got to make his ear twitch, make him nervous, see which way he hooks, then we know what he’s gonna do. And when we get him jumpy, he’ll go into his querencia, scared, confused, and only looking for one thing, and he will not be expecting us. But we can only stick him a couple of times, you know, ’cause anything more, he’ll catch on.”
Julio, Luis, and Rafael nodded obediently, just as they did before the bullfights, absorbing each detail Johnny gave them, since they knew all their lives depended on it, then as now.
“First we need two things we don’t have,” Johnny said. “And we are going to steal them.” The eyes of the cuadrilla widened.
Johnny said, “I noticed there are two small wagons at the very end of the ammunition train. I just got a glimpse, but in one of them are some rifle cases made out of leather that hold rifles with telescope sights. They are marked. We need to steal one of these. And in the other wagon there are electric torches. We need to steal two of those—maybe three, if it’s possible.”
“Stealing is immoral,” Gourd Woman declared. The others looked at her like she was crazy.
“What, are you a priest now, too?” asked Julio.
“No, but I think it will be a bad omen to begin by stealing.” Her hands were in the pocket of her dress, fooling with the bones.
“We are dealing with murderers and kidnappers,” Johnny said. “Stealing is hardly a mortal sin in the face of that.”
“The bones tell me it’s the wrong way to go about it.”
“Same bones that told you Villa was in Creel?” said Luis. “Don’t make me laugh.”
“Same ones,” she said. “Laugh if you want.”
AFTER DARK, LUIS AND RAFAEL MADE THEIR WAY through the long encampment up to the ammunition train and, just as Johnny had described, the two smaller wagons were there. Luis stepped into the firelight and asked if anyone had a cigarillo, while Rafael sneaked around between the wagons and managed to locate the flashlights in one of them. He put two into his jacket and stepped into the dark of the tall trees. Next evening they reversed the scam, Rafael stepping into the camp of the teamsters to ask for a tin of salt, while Luis slipped one of the cases with a telescoped rifle out of the wagon. The ploy almost blew up in their faces when Luis disturbed the fighting cocks and hens and they set up a squawk in their cages, but nobody paid much attention and he vanished into the woods with the gun.
Next morning, Villa’s detachment began the long and perilous descent into the canyons. The descent came not a moment too soon, Johnny thought, because as dawn broke it began to snow, and this time it was heavy: big wet flakes at first, then smaller ones that swirled in the air and sometimes reduced vision down to a few yards. Within half an hour everything at the top of the mountain was covered in powder. The wagons creaked and groaned and sometimes skidded on the mushy gravel and dirt down the prolonged trail that wound to the floor of the canyon.
By midmorning, Katherine’s party was below the snow and the leaden sky was now filled with rain. Winds whipped through the canyon, sometimes with such ferocity that it threatened to knock the wagons off the cliffside. It was a slow struggle and those riding on animals, Katherine included, often closed their eyes and trusted the horses or mules or donkeys to pick their way down the steep rocky trail. To look down into a canyon bottom more than a mile below would fill all but the boldest, or craziest, with sheer, icy terror.
It didn’t help that they saw a team of mules slip off the edge. Something had made one of the animals balk or shy and the others pulled the wagon around so it slid partially over the precipice. The teamster was walking in front of the mules, leading them, and he jerked at their harness and tried to get the wagon pulled back on the trail, but the wheels stuck and the mules panicked. They backed up to get better purchase, but the whole wagon slipped off, pulling the mules right along with them, into the rocky gorge without a sound, at least not one that could be heard in the back of the caravan. The mules went down as they had pulled, in the harness traces, but on their backs and with their legs straight up in the air and not kicking at all, as though they were lifeless already before they hit bottom.
FORTY-FOUR
Arthur Sha
ughnessy was riding at the front of his party with Cowboy Bob, Crosswinds Charlie, the Colonel, and Strucker when Death Valley Slim came cantering back toward them over a rise in the high mountain plain.
“There’s Indians just over that hill there!” said Slim, pulling up on a lathered horse.
“Wild Indians!” the Colonel exclaimed.
“Well, I wouldn’t exactly say that. It’s Tarahumaras—or Rarámuris, is what they call themselves—them’s ridge-running Indians. And they said Villa and his bunch passed through there not two days ago.”
“Were the children with them?” Arthur asked anxiously.
“Villa camped his people a ways from the village. But they did see a little boy about nine or ten that came to their camp about dark. Way they described him, it sure must be your boy.”
“Thank God,” Arthur said. The rush of relief and elation brought chills to his body. They weren’t going on a wild goose chase after all, and Timmy—and in Arthur’s mind it stood to reason Katherine, too—was unharmed for the moment.
“There!” cried the Colonel. “That’s fine news!” He slapped his saddle with his hand.
Arthur suddenly had a renewed respect for the Old Man; somehow, of course with Bob and Slim’s help, he had put them hot on the trail. Just being closer, and knowing it, was enough, for the moment.
“What’s more,” Slim said, “I think I know where they went. Before they left, they hired on a couple of Indians as guides to lead them down into the canyons—which figures, ’cause it’s gonna start to get pretty cold up here.”
“So you think we can find them?” Arthur asked tentatively.
“Yeah, I think so. I expect we ought to hire a couple of Indians ourselves. They know these canyons pretty good.”
“And what, when we do find them?” asked Cowboy Bob, as if he’d been reading Arthur’s mind. Bob had been silent and even distant most of the last couple of days. He had no illusions about their chances against a reinforced military detachment led by Pancho Villa.
“We’ll cross that river when we come to it,” said the Colonel. “The main thing is we’re close.”