As Early and the Mexican got up a ways, they started looking up at the top of the draw and studying it. Especially the Mexican. He was closer to Mendez’s side of the draw now and about five horselengths ahead of Early. Halfway up, the Mexican drew his right-hand gun and held it ready.
You saw Mendez pressing himself tight against the rock he was behind and not looking around now. He would inch up to sneak a look at the Mexican and then duck down again. You almost knew what he was thinking. You also knew this wasn’t something he had done before.
Looking at Russell you couldn’t even tell if he was alive, laying there sighting down his carbine now and waiting as if he could wait like that all day, waiting for Early to ride right up to him.
I don’t remember what the McLaren girl and Dr. Favor were doing then. I could feel them there. The thing is, the one I really wanted to watch was Russell; then you would see how this was done. But Mendez, the way he was fidgeting, looking up at the Mexican coming and then pressing against the rock, made you nervous and you kept watching him, holding your breath for fear he was going to jump up and start running.
The Mexican was now about a hundred feet away from him, sitting round-shouldered and relaxed, the Colt gun held about chest high and pointed straight up, the sun glinting and moving a little with the motion of the horse and rider.
That was what Mendez saw coming toward him, a man holding a gun that seemed part of his hand, and another gun still holstered; a man you knew was ready, but could still be relaxed about it and not sit stiff in the saddle or with his shoulders hunched.
Maybe if I was Mendez I would have done the same as he did. Which was all of a sudden rise up and fire both barrels of that scatter gun like he couldn’t let go fast enough.
At a hundred feet or less, some of the buckshot could have found the Mexican, but Mendez hurried and didn’t aim at all. The Mexican straightened and fired three times, faster than I’ve ever seen a man thumb and fire a Colt revolver, with all three shots zinging off the rocks Mendez had flattened himself behind. Then you saw the Mexican twist in the saddle, like something had pushed him, and grab his side right above the belt.
Russell had fired.
He fired again as the Mexican rolled out of the saddle and into cover. He fired again and the Mexican’s horse threw up its head, shaking it, and sunk on its forelegs and fell over.
Early was already off and in cover. You saw him reach up to grab his horse’s reins as it reared around and started off down the draw. Early missed. Russell didn’t though. He fired twice again, quick, and I swear you heard both shots smack into that horse. The horse went down, rolled on its side and got up again and kept going, following Braden and the Favor woman—Braden holding her horse’s reins close at the bit ring and leading it as they rode back down the draw, all the way down to the bottom and around the outcrop of rocks into a little patch of scrubby woods. Even after they were out of sight you heard the horses in the thicket. Then everything was quiet.
It was quiet for the longest time. Mendez kept looking over to about where Russell was, not knowing at all what to do and maybe expecting some signal from him.
Russell didn’t move. You could see he had learned a lot from the Apaches, a kind of patience few white men could ever command. He lay there sighting, I think, on the place where Early had gone into the brush, waiting for a movement. He lay like that, I swear, for about two hours, all the while this stand-off lasted.
Not much happened during that time. The Mexican started calling out either to Russell or Mendez in Spanish. I didn’t know what he was saying, but they were questions, and there was a sound to his voice like the questions were meant to be funny. Not funny, exactly, but like insults or inviting Mendez to step out and show himself, things you wouldn’t expect to hear coming out of that draw. You had to give that Mexican something. There was no doubt he had been shot. Still he could yell at Russell and Mendez, trying to draw them out.
Once there was a quick glimpse of Early. He was there and then gone, off behind a scatter of rocks a little farther down the draw. Russell must have been waiting for the Mexican because he didn’t fire. We never did see the Mexican squirm out of there and Early only that one time.
Both of them worked their way down though. They stood out in the open for a second, way down at the bottom of the draw. The Mexican, holding his side with one hand, waved to us. Then they were gone into the thicket.
Just for a few minutes we had time to rest, not wondering where they were or worrying about them coming. They would have to think things over and maybe wait until dark to come up that draw again. Though we couldn’t count on it. We couldn’t sit here for long either. One of them could circle around, even though it would take time, and we wouldn’t ever be able to move.
So we had to get out of there. When Russell and Mendez came up, I opened the canteen. Nobody had had any water since this morning. But Russell shook his head. “Tonight,” he said. “Not while the sun is out.” Meaning, I guess, you would sweat it out right away and be thirsty again before you knew it.
That was all he said, with not one word to Mendez about shooting too soon and spoiling the ambush. That was over as far as he was concerned; he was not the kind of man who would stew over something finished and past fixing. He just picked up his blanket roll and that meant it was time to go.
Maybe we had showed them it wasn’t going to be easy, as Russell had said we might. But look at it another way. We might have finished it in the draw, but we didn’t and maybe never would. The only good to come out of the ambush was now they had one less horse—maybe two.
But now they were close. Now they knew where we were. And now there was no doubt they would come with guns out and shoot on sight.
4
We sat there only a few minutes. That’s all the longer our rest time lasted, and it was starting again. Only not the way we expected it to. We didn’t go right then. We were about to when the McLaren girl said, “Look—” pointing down the draw.
We looked, but we all crouched down at the same time. There, way down at the bottom, was the Mexican again, his straw hat bright in the sunlight so that you knew it was the Mexican and not one of the others. But we could not tell at first what he was carrying. He had to get up a ways—taking his time, his face raised, his one hand holding his side—before we saw it was a stick with something white tied to the end of it.
He seemed careful, but not scared, keeping his eyes on the ridge, not sure we would honor his white truce flag, I guess, and ready to dive for cover if we let go at him. He was armed with both his revolvers.
Nobody said anything. We just watched. He kept coming, almost reaching the place where Mendez had been during the ambush.
Russell stood up holding his carbine in one hand, pointed down, and the Mexican stopped.
Russell said, “You come to give up?”
The Mexican stood at ease, letting his truce flag dip down to the ground. I think he smiled when Russell said that, but I’m not sure.
I know he shook his head. He said, “When you learn to shoot better.” He raised his hand from his side and there was blood on it.
“You didn’t do so good.”
“I tried to do better,” Russell said. “I think you moved.”
“Moved,” the Mexican said. “How do you like them, tied to a tree?”
“On a horse,” Russell said. “Like your friend.”
The Mexican grinned. “You like to pull the trigger.”
“I can do it again for you,” Russell said.
“You could,” the Mexican agreed, staring up at Russell, studying him and judging the distance between them. “I have to talk to this other one first. This Favor.”
He pronounced it Fa-vor, like it was a Spanish word.
“He can hear you,” Russell said.
“If he can’t you tell him,” the Mexican said. “This. He gives us the money…and some of the water. We give him his wife and everyone goes home. Ask him how he likes that.”
“You’re out of water?”
“Almost.” The Mexican grinned. “That Early. He put whisky in his canteen. He thought it would be easy.”
Russell shook his head. “It will get even harder.”
“Not if this Fa vor gives us the money.”
“He doesn’t have it,” Russell said.
The Mexican grinned again. “Tell me he hid it.”
Russell shook his head. “He gave it to me.”
The Mexican nodded, looking up at Russell like he was admiring him. “So now you steal the money.” He shrugged his shoulders. “All right, we trade with you then.”
“She’s not my woman,” Russell said.
“We give her to you.”
“What else?”
“Your life. How’s that?”
“Tell Braden how things are now,” Russell said.
“What’s the difference who has the money?” the Mexican said. “You give it to us or we shoot that woman.”
“All right,” Russell said. “You shoot her.”
The Mexican kept staring at him. “What about the rest of them? What do they say?”
“They say what they want,” Russell said. “I say what I want. Do you see that now?”
He didn’t see it. He didn’t know what to think, so he just stood there, one hand on his side, the other holding that truce flag.
“Tell Braden how it is,” Russell said. “Tell him to think some more.”
“He’ll say the same thing.”
“Tell him anyway.”
The Mexican hadn’t taken his eyes off Russell for a second, sizing him up all the while they talked. “Maybe you and I finish something first,” he said. “Maybe you come down here a little.”
“I’m thinking,” Russell said, “whether to kill you right now or wait till you turn around.”
Do you know what the Mexican did? He smiled. Not that unbelieving kind of smile, but like he appreciated Russell or enjoyed him. It was about the strangest thing I ever saw. He smiled and said, “If I didn’t believe you, I think you would do it. All right, I talk to Braden.”
He turned and walked away dragging the truce flag, not with his shoulders hunched like he expected something, but as calmly as he had walked up.
Russell waited until the Mexican was almost down to the bottom. He got his blanket roll and the saddlebags, just glanced at us, and moved off. He didn’t tell us what he had planned. If we wanted to follow him that was up to us.
We didn’t expect this. We thought he would talk to them again. But who could be sure what Russell was thinking? We knew we couldn’t sit in that draw forever. Sooner or later Braden would try to get at us. But was going on right then the best way? Russell must have thought so, though he wasn’t telling us why.
We followed him. What choice had we?
That was a funny thing. I felt closer to Dr. Favor than I did to Russell. Dr. Favor might have stolen government money and left his wife to her own fate; but it was something you had to think about before you realized it. He never admitted either right out.
Russell was something else. He had said to the Mexican, not caring who heard him, “All right, shoot her.” Like she was nothing to him, so what did he care? Do you see the difference? Russell was so cold and calm about it, it scared you to death. Also, if he didn’t care about her, what did he care about us?
Now it was almost like the whole thing was between Braden and Russell and we were in it only because there wasn’t any place else to go. Like it was all Russell’s fault and he had dragged us into it.
I would say we walked three miles from the time we left that draw until we stopped again, though we did not gain more than one mile in actual distance. We kept pretty much to ridges, high up as possible in the cover of pinyon pine and scrub, and when we stopped it was because flat country opened up at the end of the canyon not far ahead of us. It was a good two or three miles across the openness before the hills took up again.
Russell didn’t say it and nobody asked, but we knew he planned to wait for dark to cross that open part. It was no place to be seen in daylight by three men riding horses. (We did not know then whether Russell had killed one or two of their horses.)
We had climbed a pretty steep grade to reach this place we camped at (high up the way Apaches always camp, whether there is water or not) with thick pinyon on three sides of us and the slope, with some cliffrose and scrub, on the open side.
Russell had made it hard for them to follow. If they came directly on our sign, they would have to come up the open slope. If they came any other way, it would take them hours to work around, and then they would be taking a chance of not finding us. So, we figured, they would come directly when they came. All right, but to come up that open slope they would have to wait until dark. Which was what we would be waiting for to slip off through the trees.
Do you see how Russell figured to stay one jump ahead of them? I estimated we would reach the old San Pete mine some time during the night; Delgado’s if we were lucky, some time during the next afternoon or evening. Then home. It didn’t seem far when you looked ahead. The trouble was you had to keep looking back.
After the little sleep we had had it was good to lie down again. Everybody picked out a spot. We couldn’t make a fire so we ate some more of the biscuits, which were pretty hard by now, and the dried strip meat which never was very good.
We did not drink any water though. John Russell had said we would have to wait until night. It was midafternoon now. Imagine not having had a drink since that morning. The salty beef didn’t help your thirst any either. But what could we do?
I kept picturing myself sitting on a shady porch with a big pitcher of ice water, sitting there in a clean shirt having just shaved and taken a bath. Boy!
Mendez looked ten years older, his eyes sunken in and his face covered with beard stubble. Dr. Favor’s big, broad face, framed by that half-moon-shaped beard, was sweaty looking. The McLaren girl and John Russell were the only ones who didn’t look so bad, I mean not as dirty or sweaty as the rest of us. With her hair too short to muss and her dark skin, she looked like she was taking it all right. John Russell was dusty, of course, but had no beard to make his face look dirty. You could tell he had pulled out the stubbles Indian-fashion when he first started to get a beard, years ago, and now he’d never have one.
Russell stayed mostly by the open side, lying down but propped on his elbows and looking down the way we had come up. I guess he was resting and doing his thinking now, taking time to see things clearly. Whatever he saw in his mind, it got him up on his feet after a while.
He brought the saddlebags over to me and dropped them. He didn’t say guard them, but that’s what his look meant. All he said was he would go have a look at things and he left, taking only the Spencer carbine; no water or anything else. He didn’t go straight down the slope but headed off through the pinyon, I guess to keep high up as he scouted the ground we had covered from the draw.
A little while after he was gone, Dr. Favor went over to where the waterskin and canteen and provisions were. He picked up the canteen and was drinking from it before anyone had time to yell stop. It was the McLaren girl who yelled it.
She jumped up, and Dr. Favor held the canteen out to her. “Your turn,” he said.
“We’re not to drink till tonight. You know that.”
“I forget,” Dr. Favor said. She could believe him or not; he didn’t care.
Mendez, still sitting down, said, “Maybe we should all take one, to keep it even.”
“To keep it even!” the McLaren girl said. “What about later when we don’t have any. What good does keeping it even do?”
“I’m thinking of now,” Mendez said, rising. “You can think of any time you want.”
“All right,” the girl said. “And what about Russell?”
“Look”—Mendez had this surprised sound to his voice—“if he wants to wait till dark, all right. That’s up to him. We drink when we want.”
&nbs
p; “He doesn’t even have to know,” Dr. Favor said. He saw Mendez liked this idea so he put it out there again. “If you’re worried about Russell, why would he even have to know?”
“And you think that would be fair,” the McLaren girl said.
“It’s his rule,” Dr. Favor said. “If it’s unfair, he brought it on himself.”
“Look,” Mendez said, making it sound simple, “if you want to wait, you wait. If you want a drink now, then you take it.”
That was when he grabbed the canteen from Dr. Favor and took a good drink, more even than Favor had, so that Dr. Favor reached for it and pulled it out of Mendez’s mouth.
“You said keep it even.”
Then he handed the canteen to the McLaren girl.
She took it, her eyes right on Dr. Favor and hesitating just a little before she put it to her mouth. If this surprises you, look at it this way: they could drink it all while you sat there obeying Russell’s rule. All right, if they were going to have some, a person would be dumb not to take his share. That’s why I took a drink right after she did. I’m sure she was thinking the same way.
Dr. Favor was still looking at her, more sure of himself than ever now. He said, “If you want to tell him when he gets back, you just go right ahead.” He was even smiling then.
What could she say? On the other hand, knowing her, she might have said something at that. But she didn’t.
Everybody settled down again. For a little while there was peace. Then Dr. Favor came over to me.
Right away he said, “That’s some Indian chief we got,” meaning Russell of course.
“Well,” I said, “I guess he knows what he’s doing.”
“He knows what he wants. That much is sure.”
If he thought Russell wanted the money, that was his business. But why talk about something you couldn’t prove? I just said, “Maybe he’s the best chief we got,” kind of joking about it.
“Only we’re not his braves,” Dr. Favor said, and he was serious, his face close to mine and staring right at me.
“If somebody has another idea,” I said, “I’ll listen.”