The Spanish Bride

Five

Don Estaban was not at all perturbed by the couple’s announcement; prepared, perhaps, by his wife, he was hardly surprised. He shook Adam’s hand warmly and kissed Valenzuela on both cheeks.

“We must have a grand party to announce your engagement,” he declared. “All our neighbours will be invited, and people will come from miles around to join in the celebration.”

Donna Marguerite smiled and nodded with satisfaction at the match, and Cousin Laurencia, when she was told, shed a few tears of joy. Only Charlo, of all the household, was less than enamoured at the prospect of Adam joining the family.

Adam studied his reflection in the mirror. Was his face really that of a man in love? That of a man willing and ready to commit himself to one woman for the rest of his life? He wasn’t certain. He had expected to see it written large on his face, plainly displayed for all to see – a light shining out of him. He didn’t look any different, and, what was more, the tawny eyes that gazed right back at him were dark and doubtful.

To be sure, he hardly looked like himself at all. Bathed and shaved with his black hair oiled and neatly brushed, he wore a new, midnight-blue suit cut in the Spanish style, snow-white linen and a cravat of brighter blue silk at his throat. Tonight was the night of the party, and everything was prepared. The kitchens had turned out enough fine food to feed a battalion, and the hacienda was decorated with streamers and coloured lanterns and filled with laughter and music – people had been arriving for the past several days, and the celebration was already well begun.  Every window was graced by a candle, or spilled pale lamplight into the night so that the house, on its hilltop, shone like a beacon.

Don Estaban had written to Valenzuela’s father in far-away Spain: a long and involved missive that had introduced Adam fairly and explained the situation without recourse to excuse. Adam had been permitted to read the letter and had found nothing there to object to. It lay now, signed and sealed, on the rosewood desk in Don Estaban’s study, awaiting only dispatch.

Adam had tried to write home himself, to explain what had happened to his father, but every time he came to the word ‘marriage’ it just didn’t look right on the paper. Perhaps, he thought, it would be best to surprise him. Just how Ben would react when he arrived back on the Ponderosa with his own Spanish bride remained to be seen.

Adam pulled the short jacket down over his midriff, not at all comfortable in the tight fitting clothes. He turned sideways on to the looking glass, a frown on his face. The coat accentuated the breadth of his shoulders and nipped him in at the waist. He wasn’t at all sure of the embroidery that trimmed the collar and cuffs – they somehow didn’t seem right for a man.

“You look very handsome and dashing,” Miguel said from the doorway. Dressed in black velvet with silver braid trim, he had assumed his customary reclining position against the doorframe. “Valenzuela will be the envy of every woman on the rancho tonight, and you are a very lucky man.”

Adam returned the smile ruefully. “Do you think I don’t know it?”

Miguel winked at him. “Come my friend. They are all waiting for you downstairs.”

“Don Estaban must have invited half of Mexico to this party.”

“My grandfather is an important man in these parts, and his parties are legendary. He is also as wily as a sly old fox. Tonight we will celebrate your forthcoming wedding. Tomorrow, while all the men are still gathered together, he will discuss with them the defences we shall need to make against the bandidos.”

Adam pulled at the jacket again and glanced one final time in the mirror. It seemed there was nothing he could do to the thing to make it look right. “Your grandfather is a very clever man, but I thought the threat of the bandits had receded.”

Miguel gave a typical shrug. The smile was still on his face, but his eyes were suddenly darker. “We’ve heard nothing more of them, but that doesn’t mean they’re not still around. We have to take precautions and organise some sort of defence. Now is the ideal opportunity – but all that can wait ‘til tomorrow. Tonight is for you and for your beautiful lady.” He stepped aside to let Adam go before him out of the door.

The house was crowded, and more people were still arriving. A steady succession of varnished carriages with men on horseback riding in close attendance had been coming all day. In all, more than thirty proud and influential families had gathered for the celebration. The great room was alive with the buzz of conversation, laughter and the music of a small, Mexican band. Glassware sparkled; lace fans fluttered and bright dresses swirled beneath the chandeliers.

The menfolk were dressed just as grandly as the ladies. Don Estaban, resplendent in silver and red, had gathered most of the men together around a long table and was ensuring, expansively, that everyone was served with a drink. Adam and Miguel descended the staircase side by side. Adam was greeted by cheers and a small round of applause. Some of the people, house guests for the past several days, Adam had already met; Miguel introduced him to the new arrivals, and, before very long, his mind was awash with new names and faces. He knew for certain that he would never remember them all.

With a glass of wine in his hand he looked around, searching for Valenzuela. Miguel shook his head in reproach. “You do not yet understand the way of the Spanish woman. She will not appear until the very last moment before the announcement is made. Then she will make the magnificent entrance from the top of the stair. Her beauty will steal away the breath of the men and make all the women green with envy. Don Estaban will make the official announcement of your engagement, and then you will be betrothed.”

Adam’s mouth went dry. He sipped at his wine. He was well aware that his eyes still held that hunted, haunted expression that he had seen in the mirror. He wondered that nobody else could see it. Like so many a good man before him, he found himself swept away on a tide of events that he could no longer control. He was filled with questions that he couldn’t answer and emotions that he didn’t quite understand. Miguel turned away to talk to some friends. Adam was glad of the moment to regain his composure.

“Cartwright, I want to talk to you.”

The voice was Charlo’s, and it came from behind him.  Charlo, as always, was garbed in unadorned black. He had made no concession at all to the gaiety of the occasion.  His face wore its habitual scowl. Adam looked him over with dubious speculation. He’d been expecting this. Ever since the first announcement of his intention to wed Valenzuela, Charlo had redoubled his attempts to split them apart, slighting Adam and his ancestry at every opportunity and heaping insult upon insult. “I’m listening,” Adam said simply. 

Charlo inclined his head. “Outside. In the garden.”

The tall glass doors stood open to admit cooler air. Adam was glad to oblige. He put down his glass on a table and followed Charlo out into the night.

The garden was deserted. Everyone else was inside enjoying the party and meeting their friends and neighbours and awaiting Valenzuela’s appearance with keen anticipation. The two men had the outside space to themselves. They stood face to face. Adam saw the dislike in Charlo’s eyes. He had no doubt at all that his own face mirrored the expression precisely. He and Charlo would never be friends, but he sensed within himself the need to come to some understanding. He guessed that the other man felt the same way. “What do you have to say?”

Charlo’s face worked. He had obviously thought about this long and hard. “I am assuming that you are a reasonable man. I am not rich, but my father is very wealthy. He will pay you well to step out of Valenzuela’s life.”

Adam grabbed a hard hold on his temper. “I can’t be bought off, Marrinez.”

“I try only to protect my sister!” Charlo’s voice trembled with rage. “Ride away now, tonight! Swear that you will never see her again.”

The muscles in Adam’s jaw clenched. His rage was so intense that, had he his pistol with him right there and then, he might have shot the man dead. Before he could make a measured response, Miguel stepped out of the shadows. “Enough!” For once his enduringly cheerful face was enraged. His gaze switched back and forth between them, favouring neither above the other, treating them both with equal contempt. “I can see that nothing is going to stop you tearing each other apart, but you won’t do it here and disgrace my grandfather in front of his guests.”

Adam and Charlo continued to glare at each other. Neither one was prepared to back down. “I think we have to settle this before the engagement is announced,” Adam said tightly. “I don’t want Valenzuela drawn into the argument any further.”

Charlo pointed a shaking finger; “I don’t want to hear her name on your lips!”

“All right!” Miguel held out his hands as if he would, physically, keep the two men apart. “You can settle it if you have to – but away from the house. And no knives and no guns,” he added ominously. “You’ll do it with your bare fists – and I’m coming along to see that you don’t kill one another.”

It seemed a reasonable stipulation to make. Adam nodded once in agreement and saw Charlo do the same. White faced and silent, the three of them went to the stable to saddle their horses.

With her primping and preening before the looking glass finally complete, Valenzuela rose to her feet. She half turned and lifted a finely drawn and perfectly arched eyebrow at Cousin Laurencia.  “Tell me honestly, how do I look?”

Laurencia caught her breath and then let it out in a long drawn out sigh of pure admiration. She clasped her hands in front of her in sheer delight. The young woman before her was a vision of beauty. Richly gowned in ivory satin and lace, her throat adorned with pearls, she was every inch the grand Spanish lady. Her golden skin glowed with health and happiness; her hair, piled on top of her head, was held in place by a high, Spanish comb. Tiny pink rosebuds, culled fresh from the garden, peeped out from among the dark curls. Her form was truly lovely, with a huge sash at her slender waist and her breasts pushed high and proud against her bodice. The long train of her dress trailed on the floor behind her.

But it was in her face that her real beauty lay. Her strong, Spanish features were flawless, symmetrical and perfectly proportioned. Beneath the fine olive skin her high cheekbones were tinged with an underlying pinkness like the flush of the roses she wore. Her lips were lightly coloured, and joy shone out of her eyes. The image of unrivalled loveliness she presented was an exact replication of that of the youthful Donna Marguerite, whose exquisite portrait hung in the great room downstairs.

“You are utterly lovely, my dear,” Laurencia told her wistfully. “Adam Cartwright is a very fortunate young man.”

Valenzuela laughed and blushed, just a little. To cover her confusion she snatched up her ivory fan and used it to cool her flushed cheek. “I believe that, perhaps, I am the fortunate one. I am told that, as Señora Cartwright I will command a great deal of respect and be the envy of many American women.”

Laurencia put out her arms and hugged her, but carefully, so not to rumple the dress. “My dear, you have every right to happiness. No one could do anything but wish you well.”

The women walked arm in arm to the head of the staircase. Valenzuela stepped forward and stopped with her hand on the ebony rail. She looked down at the confusion of colour and motion in the great room below her. Gradually, all movement ceased and faces turned towards her. The noise level dropped to near silence. The men’s faces glowed with admiration. The expressions that the women wore were more complicated by far. Valenzuela waited a long, quiet moment, ensuring that everyone had looked his or her fill before she took the first step.

She descended slowly, her head held high. Her fingertips brushed the rail only lightly. In her right hand she gathered her satin skirts, lifting them out of her way. The men clapped their hands and called out “Bravo!” The ladies nodded and smiled their approval. Don Estaban stepped forward to meet her at the foot of the stair. He offered his arm.

“My dear, you look utterly charming!” He smiled and patted her fingers. “Come and greet your Aunt Marguerite and let her see how lovely you are.”

Valenzuela nodded and smiled to Don Estaban’s friends and allowed her uncle to escort her to where Donna Marguerite sat in her wheelchair. They embraced with affection. Marguerite smiled, seeing the reflection of her own perfect youth faithfully reproduced in her niece. Valenzuela kissed her Aunt on the cheek and then looked about her. “Where’s Adam?”

Don Estaban turned, scanning the assemblage. People were starting to gather about them chatting and laughing, their faces aglow, all in a state of excitement as they waited to hear him make the expected announcement. Then, of course, they would come forward throughout the evening in small family groups and present the young couple with their formal congratulations.

Adam was nowhere in sight, which puzzled Don Estaban. “I saw him a few minutes ago. He was with Miguel.” He gestured quickly to a passing servant and asked some questions. The man shook his head. Don Estaban dispatched him with whispered instructions to find the young men and tell that they were awaited. Then he turned a reassuring face to Valenzuela, “I expect he’s just stepped out for a moment. He won’t be long. Now, let me introduce you to one or two friends…”

Miguel insisted on riding all the way to the lake. He wouldn’t hear of stopping sooner. Perhaps he thought that an hour in the saddle and the fresh air that lifted up from the water might cool the other man’s tempers. In that he was disappointed. They didn’t talk much on the trail, riding in silence and in single file, exchanging only a grunt or a curt word when they had to. The moon had now grown to half full and rode high in the sky; its silver light and that of the stars were just enough to brighten the landscape. The trees stood motionless, untouched by the wind: looming monoliths lightly brushed by the moonlight. The darkling water, silver sheened, lay under the sky with scarcely a ripple to show that it still lived and breathed.

Miguel rode right to the water’s edge and then followed the bank for a while. Turning inland again, for just a few yards, he came to a spot he knew well: a place not far from the clump of waterside trees that Adam and Valenzuela favoured. Although the land looked no different, to the untutored eye, than any one of a dozen other patches of ground they had passed on the way, Miguel had determined from the outset that this was where they were headed. The ground was level and even, with a small depression more or less in the centre: a natural amphitheatre on a very small scale. He stepped down from his saddle, and Adam and Charlo, eyeing each other warily, did the same.  

Miguel slapped the horses away, sending them off to graze down by the water and out of the way. He looked from one man to the other, his face flat with annoyance.

“If you still want to beat each other bloody, then this is the place to do it. But this will be the end of it. I will not have my cousin’s life blighted by your constant feuding. The first man that can’t get back to his feet will be the loser and must agree to the other man’s terms.”

Charlo pointed an accusing finger. “You do not love my sister, Cartwright. I, Charlo have seen this! And she does not truly love you.”

Adam wasn’t hearing his words. By now, he was barely thinking. Pumped full of red-hot adrenaline all he heard was the challenge in Charlo’s voice; all he felt was his own growing rage. He took off his coat and the fancy cravat and tore his shirt open. Tiny white buttons spun into the night.

*******

There was a sudden commotion at either end of the room. Don Estaban broke off his conversation and turned his head sharply as men holding guns poured in through the front and the back of the house. More came in from the garden. Men shouted and stumbled as the unarmed guests were herded together. Crystal glassware shattered. Somewhere close by a woman squealed, and a table was overturned. Then all turned into confusion – people cried out and milled around in alarm. The gunmen pushed and shoved and yelled orders, suppressing the burgeoning panic with practised ease and turning it to their advantage. With a swift, stern word, Don Estaban commanded a frightened Valenzuela to stay close to her Aunt and went to confront the intruders.

He pushed his way through to the front of the crowd, offering a calming word of assurance here and there where he could. The invaders, a mismatched mixture of men of several colours and creeds, were already carrying out their objectionable business, snatching the jewels from the ladies throats and the golden watch chains from the men’s waistcoat pockets. Anyone who resisted was pushed and jostled and threatened at gunpoint. Don Estaban’s hackles rose. He looked around for the man in charge, and it didn’t take long to find him. The bandit leader was holding court at the front of the house. A big man, powerfully built and generously proportioned, he was perched precariously by one meaty buttock on a delicate, spindly-legged table. In an elaborate, but well worn and dirty suit and a very large hat, he was smug and smiling and almighty pleased with himself as he watched the pillage taking place all around him.

Don Estaban drew himself up and stepped forward boldly; his anger was barely under control. “Who, by the devil, are you, Señor? How dare you come bursting into my home!”

The bandit’s smile became even broader, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes. “You have to be Don Estaban Padro, the master of this hacienda and all this magnificent rancho. I am Embule Torak; your humble servant, Sir.” Without rising from the table he made a low, mocking bow from the waist.

Don Estaban’s nostrils flared. He tried to ignore the thievery that was going on all about him, the obvious distress of his guests and the damage that was being done to his home. He found himself in a very difficult and dangerous situation; his main concern was to avoid anyone being killed. “I demand that you leave these people alone and get yourselves out of my house!”

A glimmer of annoyance crossed Torak’s wide features. For just an instant the wide smile faltered, then re-established itself. “I don’t find that very hospitable, Don Estaban. After all, you are having a party. I fear we did not receive our invitations – but that was an oversight, eh?”

Don Estaban took the time to look around him – at the pale and frightened faces of the people he had invited to a celebration and who now were in fear of their lives. The gunmen were gloating. There were fewer in evidence now; some were off somewhere ransacking the house. He decided that it was best, perhaps, to lower his demands. “You seem to know a great deal about my business,” he said with an air of defeated defiance. “Why don’t you take what you’ve stolen and go?”

Torak’s joviality faded. “I know everything about your business, Estaban Padro. Two young men told me a great deal about you – before they met with unfortunate and very sad accidents. You are a very rich man, eh? With many fine and valuable possessions.”

Don Estaban knew his reactions were being carefully watched. He tried very hard to control them. He had been right when he’d said that Mallory and Davies had run into the bandits. They had been tortured until they revealed what they knew about the local area and its population – he doubted it had taken long – and then murdered to ensure their continued silence. “So what do you intend to do?”

At that exact moment, before Torak could answer, another man arrived at his side: a Mexican smaller by half than the bandit leader, unshaven and wearing grubby, sweat stained clothes. He was smoking a small, black cigar; “There’s a safe in the library,” he announced without preamble.  “It’s locked.”

Torak gave him a sideways glance – one of half-amused exasperation. “Idiota! Of course it is locked. Don Estaban is a careful man. I would wager my finest horse that he has the key in his pocket.” He turned his dark eyes on the ageing rancher. “I would suggest, Sebron, that you ask him for it.”

Equanto Sebron stepped around him and confronted Don Estaban directly. He thrust his face forward – so close that the Don smelled sweat and rancid food and the taint of a rotting tooth as well as the stench of the cheap cigar. Sebron snarled at him around the cheroot, “Hand it over, old man.”

With the muzzle of Sebron’s pistol pressed hard against his belly, Don Estaban was disinclined to argue. He reached inside his jacket and handed over the key. Sebron snatched it and favoured the Don with a sneer of unrivalled contempt before he turned back towards the library.

“Sebron,” Torak called after him. “Remember, take only what we can easily carry. We need to travel quickly, and we need to travel light.”

Sebron tossed the brass key in the air, watched it flash in the light as it turned end for end, and caught it again. “We can always carry gold,” he said lightly and laughed.

Torak laughed along with him and slapped his thigh. “Don’t worry, Don Estaban! You can afford it.”

Don Estaban ground his teeth. “The money doesn’t concern me. Just leave these people alone.”

“But of course!” Torak got off the table. He was an even bigger man than Don Estaban had supposed, and only a small proportion of him was blubber. He made a wide, expansive gesture to include the whole room. “We have no wish to harm anyone. We simply stopped by to take advantage of your hospitality as we were passing through and, perhaps, to relieve you of a few trinkets, eh? We knew you would be delighted to provide us with your fine horses and supplies for our journey.”

It was framed almost as a question but Don Estaban wasn’t fooled. He knew that Torak and his unsavoury crew would take anything and everything that they could carry away with them. There was nothing he could do to prevent it.

Another ripple of disturbance went through the crowd. A lank-haired half-breed in white-man’s clothing with a feather in the band of his fedora hat emerged from the now strangely silent press of people. He dragged Valenzuela along with him, holding her wrist in one vice-like hand. Her face was contorted with rage and hatred. She fought with him every inch of the way. She struggled and spat and tried to kick out at him. The sleeve of her gown had already been torn and her hair comb twisted awry. “I found the girl,” the half-breed grunted. “This has to be the one.” He gave Valenzuela's slim wrist a savage twist that made her stumble and almost fall.

“Carefully, carefully,” Torak said mildly. “We do not want to damage the lady. She will be worth a very great deal to us.”

Alarmed and angry, Don Estaban leapt to his Valenzuela’s defence – or tried to. “Leave my niece alone!”

Torak planted a palm on his chest and pushed. Don Estaban’s lame hip gave way, and he went down backwards, landing hard on his rump on the floor. As one man, the crowd stepped back from him. No one was willing to help.

Sorronoso, the half-breed, pulled Valenzuela ‘round in front of him and held her firmly by both upper arms. His iron hard fingers dug into her flesh, and the bruises were already spreading. Although she still struggled valiantly the harshness of his grip effectively put an end to her resistance. Torak stepped towards her and took her hand. “Ah, Señorita Marrinez. I have been waiting to make you acquaintance. I was told that you were beautiful, but you are more lovely than words can describe.” He lifted her fingers up to his lips.

Valenzuela spat in his face.

Everyone, including Don Estaban, held their breath and stared, wondering just what the bandit leader would do. Even Torak was taken by surprise. Still holding her hand, he gazed at her in something like wonder. Apparently unnoticed, the fat gob of spittle ran down his cheek to his chin. For a space of time it seemed he might strike her. Indeed, his fist clenched. Valenzuela lifted her head with all the defiant pride of her Spanish ancestors. She returned his gaze angrily; her eyes flashed with dark fire.

Sorronoso, still standing behind her, still holding onto her, laughed. The sound broke the tension, and Torak started to chuckle as well - but without any real amusement. With a snarl and a sudden lunge forward he grabbed the woman behind the head, turned her face upwards and kissed her mouth hard. His face crushed her lips back into her teeth, and his eyes glared into hers. Restrained by the guns and the gunmen, people could only watch in white-faced horror. Some of the women turned their faces away. Valenzuela fought him as best as she could, but he was bigger and stronger, and, in the end, she had to submit. By the time Torak drew away from her she was breathless and bruised.

Torak grinned and filled his great chest with air. “A woman with spirit!” he declared to all those who listened. “I see that we are going to have a most interesting time.” He gestured to Sorronoso. “Put her on a horse, and tie her on well. We must be on our way.”

“No!” Don Estaban struggled to rise from the floor. His bad hip hindered him. “You cannot take her!”

Torak pushed him down with the sole of his boot. “There is nothing I cannot do, Señor.”

“I will give you gold – horses – anything you ask of me! Just leave her alone!” Don Estaban was desperate as he saw his niece pulled away.

Leering over him, Torak shook his great head. “There is nothing you can offer me that would be nearly enough. I am told the lady has a very rich father in Spain. Write him a letter. Tell him that his so-beautiful daughter has been abducted. Tell him it will cost him half a million American dollars to get her back again.”

It was a truly prodigious amount. The thought of it left Don Estaban speechless and stunned. Laughing at his expression, Torak called to his men, “Come, compadres; it is time to be on our way!”

In ones and twos and little groups, and not making very much noise about it, the bandits disappeared from the room, melting back into the night the way they had come and taking their booty with them. Torak was left with one other – one of his lieutenants, Equantor Sebron, loitered at the back of the room. Torak leaned down and grabbed Don Estaban by the front of his ruffled shirt. He hauled him onto his feet, not ungently, and allowed him to regain his balance before he let go. He waved the barrel of his pearl handled pistol under the rancher’s nose. In his huge fist the weapon looked like a tiny toy, but that made it none the less deadly. From the gleam in the big bandit’s eyes, Don Estaban didn’t doubt for a moment that he was prepared to use it.

“Remember what I said,” Torak told him. “The woman will be kept safely until the spring. By then I will expect you to have some news for me concerning a large amount of money, eh?” He breathed spice and wine into Don Estaban’s face. “In the meantime, we will leave you with something to keep you occupied while we ride away. I wouldn’t want your men to come after us.” He gave some sort of signal.

At the back of the room, Sebron overturned a lamp. The room filled up with the smell of spilled coal oil and then with smoke! Women screamed and started to panic as pale flames spread, and the big house started to burn.

Adam and Charlo locked eyes with each other, each man summing up the other’s strengths and weaknesses. Both were big, powerful men, evenly matched in height, weight and build. Adam thought he might just have the edge in fitness; long hours spent in the saddle and work on the range had equipped him with iron hard muscles and a deep well of stamina, He hoped that Charlo’s more relaxed and indolent life style had left him a little soft, but he wasn’t counting on it. He expected the Spaniard to be strong and quick on his feet, and he didn’t for one moment doubt his intelligence. His hope was to wear the man down with the relentless application of violence and wait for him to tire, and then to try to out-think him. One thing was certain: both were determined and had a tremendous capacity to soak up punishment. No matter who emerged the victor, neither of them would come out of this unscathed. Adam wound his hands into balls of hard, white bone.

Miguel stood between them, still keeping them apart. His handsome, scarred face was resolute, but his eyes were anxious. Despite the fact that the violence was unavoidable, he didn’t want to see anybody hurt. “I don’t care if you beat each other to pulp,” he reminded them; his voice cracked with tension. “Your disagreements end here. The man left standing imposes whatever sanctions he wishes on the other – even to ordering him out of the country. Do you both understand?”

“I understand perfectly,” Charlo said with ridged disdain. “I agree to your terms.” Adam merely nodded.

“Very well.” Miguel stepped back. “Do what you must.”

It was a very hard thing to do, even with that deep pit of anger boiling away inside, to simply hit another man hard in the face. Adam moved to the right: one or two steps, still eyeing his opponent warily. Charlo turned with him. Each man watched the other, waiting for an opening, a gap in the other’s defence, a chance to make the first move. For them, Miguel and the moonlight and the rest of the world had ceased to exist.

Again Miguel stepped between them. He held up his hands. “One moment more, mi amigos.” He lifted his face. Adam and Charlo both turned to look. Beyond the hill, an orange glow lit the sky. Miguel raised his arm and pointed. “Fire! The rancho is burning!” The fight was abandoned, and all three men ran for their horses.

That ride through the night was like a bad dream, the sort that haunted childhood and lingered on through the adult years. Riding close to the tail of Miguel’s horse and somewhere in front of Charlo, Adam dug in his heels and pushed his horse as hard as he could. In the dark – the dark that grew deeper as the moon set in the west – the well-know trail became unfamiliar with forks and bends that he didn’t remember. He rode careless of the horse’s safety and of his own. He concentrated only on sitting tight in the saddle and let the animal run. He trusted the gelding to see the path a whole lot better than he could. His breath burned in his chest, and his mouth was bone-dry; the pound of the hooves matched precisely the thundering beat of his heart. It was hard working keeping up with Miguel. The Mexican rode like a madman, leaning low on his horse’s neck; he stayed on only by instinct and headed for home just as fast as he could.

The trail climbed over the ridge and dipped down into the valley. Adam swore it was longer and rougher than it had been before. It became a rutted cart track and then the road that led to the ranch. Miguel didn’t slow his horse down - if anything, he kicked harder. By now they could see many fires; half the village was burning. One of the horse barn roofs was well alight; the flames leapt high and drowned out the starlight. Shadowy figures ran about frantically as they tried to rescue the horses. Only when he reached the first of the buildings did Miguel slow the pace, and then not by much. He had no intention of stopping.

Adam saw the scene in a rapid succession of images – like pages flipped in a book. The houses, build of adobe, were mostly untouched, but the sheds and the workshops had been constructed mainly out of timber, and many of them were on fire.  Men ran and shouted in the nameless language of anger and fear. Children, weeping, clung to the skirts of their mothers. Two dead dogs and a cow lay in the lane. In the deepest unsteady shadow cast by the firelight, a man sprawled on his face in the dirt. Miguel kept on riding right through the town and turned up the hill.

By the time they arrived at the hacienda, the fire in the main house was out, ‘though the air was still thick with smoke and the rank smell of burning. The walls were still standing, and the building retained its roof. In fact, half the house and the entire upper storey seemed barely damaged except for the soot-stains that marred the smart clay-facings. Adam saw in a glance that the main room was gutted and open to the air. Its palatial grandeur had been completely destroyed by the flames and the smoke and the water that had been used to put the conflagration out. Most of the other rooms were surely damaged to a lesser degree. It would be a while before they were habitable again.

The yard was filled with tired, dirty men in waistcoats and shirtsleeves. Once the bandits had made good their escape, Don Estaban’s guests had rallied themselves and helped fight the flames. Beyond the men, at the fringe of the crowd, the women were tending the injured, bathing and binding small cuts and burns. Don Estaban stood in front of the house directing operations. His shirt was torn, and his angular face was blackened with smuts. He looked close to exhaustion, and his expression hardly lightened at all when he saw the three young men come towards him. He reached out to touch each of them as if to assure himself that they were, in fact, real. “I was afraid that you had run into them. I thought they might have killed you too.”

Charlo looked up at the damaged house. “The bandidos did this?”

“Indeed.” Don Estaban nodded. “There were thirty of them, maybe more,” he said wearily. “They all had guns, and none of us were armed. There was nothing that we could do to stop them.”

Miguel was stricken. “I should have been here! I could have done something!”

“No,” Don Estaban said firmly. He touched the young man’s arm in a gesture intended to comfort. “It is best that you were away: all of you. You young men would have been a threat to them. I am sure that they would have harmed you.”

Adam picked up on something the Don had said earlier; “You said we might have been killed too. Who is it that’s died?”

With a great and sorrowful sigh, Don Estaban gazed at each of them and then turned. His grey face was lined with anguish. Adam, Charlo and Miguel all looked in the same direction. Donna Marguerite’s wheelchair stood empty and askew at the foot of the steps. “She was alive when we carried her out,” Don Estaban told them. “But she had breathed too much smoke. She died soon afterwards.”

Miguel’s face contorted. “No! Not Grandmother!”

Don Estaban held on to him, his eyes two deep wells of grief. “There was nothing that we could do to save her. And there’s worse…” He turned his head to look at Adam and Charlo. “The bandits have taken Valenzuela. They are holding her for ransom: more money that you can ever imagine.”

Adam’s world started spinning. Thunder roared in his ears. His gut churned with a half-dozen different emotions that he didn't have the time to sort through, and his muscles burned for action, but in that same moment, his mind became as clear and cold as glacial ice. 

From the jumbled descriptions of the raiders that the people around him were blurting out, he knew them to be the same lethally dangerous band that he had encountered in the desert.  Why hadn't the three of them run into the vandals on their way back to the house?  Where was their winter hideout; would they hold Valenzuela there?  Possible routes and distances began to click through his head, while a list of needed supplies, weapons, ammunition, horses and men began to drop into place like beads on an abacus.

He was making for his room intent on gathering his guns and changing into trail gear when Miguel caught his arm. Their eyes met, and he saw there the image of his own thoughts.

“In the morning,” Miguel said. “At first light. We can't track them in the dark, and it will take some time to gather what we must have.”

Grinding his teeth edge against edge, Adam shook his head. He was weighed down with responsibility. His handsome face twisted into a mask of grim determination. “I’m not waiting for morning. Every minute I wait they’re getting further away. I’m setting out after her now.”

Miguel shook him, but gently. “They already have a very long start. It will do you no good to go chasing around in the darkness; wait until the sun comes up and spreads new light on the world.”

It made sense, even while every instinct cried out for immediate action. “Yes, at dawn. We should rest, drink all we can,” Adam said, his voice as flat and cold as his eyes. 

They were interrupted by Don Estaban’s call, “Miguel, your assistance! It’s Charlo.”

The man was out of control, calling wildly for a gun and a horse and striking out at those who tried to restrain him. Adam and Miguel both went to help.

As Adam had surmised, Charlo was a powerful man, and he fought like a tiger. It took the strength of four men to subdue him, and they ended up by holding him down on the ground. At first it seemed that he had gone completely out of his mind with rage and grief. His face was contorted, and he took in his breath in great, heaving sobs. Only gradually, as he tired, and his struggles weakened, did he come back somewhat to his senses. His face was streaked with tears although he hadn’t really been crying. They waited until all the fight went out of him before they deemed it safe to let him go.

He finally regained his composure. He sat on the ground with his head hanging and his wrists rested on his widely spread knees. He was dishevelled and dirty; his clothing was tattered, and his hair hung down over his face. Adam, his own emotions torn and battered, was angry at the display of passion, but in a way, he almost felt pity. He stood with his hands on his hips and looked down at the Spaniard while he caught his own breath.

Miguel squatted down in front of Charlo. His eyes were haunted with grief and concern. “Tomorrow when the sun comes up, we will go after them, Adam and I. We will get her back.”

Charlo lifted his head and looked at him, and then up at Adam. “I shall ride with you. Valenzuela is my sister. I will not leave her in the hands of these men. It is my responsibility to rescue her.”

Miguel sighed as if he saw problems ahead. “Very well. You shall come with us. Eat. Rest. Sleep if you can. This could turn into a long, hard chase. We’ll leave with the first light of day.”

Adam found himself torn in two different directions. He wasn’t at all sure he wanted Charlo along, but didn’t know how to deny him. Valenzuela was his flesh and blood, and the man had his rights, after all. He met Miguel’s eyes and nodded, and the three were locked together in an uneasy alliance.

Six 

With a sudden start of returning awareness Valenzuela lifted her head – then lowered it again, slow and careful, with a long exhalation of breath. Behind her closed eyelids, secure in the darkness if only for a brief time, she could pretend that the fear filled events of the night before simply hadn’t happened. In the short moment that spanned sleeping and waking, she imagined that she was a girl again, at home in the villa that clung to a Spanish hillside, in her bedroom that overlooked the shining blue bay. She held on to that thought desperately, willing it to be so, but her waking dream was only illusion; it quickly faded and left her alone with cruel reality.

The outside world intruded, invading her awareness one fragile sense at a time. She discovered, first of all, that she was cold. She had only the torn remains of the satin dress to cover her, and the chill of the pre-dawn hours was intense; it numbed her through to the bone. She’d slept where she’d settled with her back to a rough-edged boulder: the deep dreamless sleep of exhaustion. Now, there were small sharp stones under her buttocks that hadn’t been there when she’d sat down and something digging into her shoulder. Her whole body hurt. She ached with pain as if she’d been beaten, and all the new bruises throbbed.

The noises of a desert night were all around her: the studied silence of rock, soil and shale, the slip and slither of crawling things as they dragged their bellies on stone, a cricket that chirruped, alone and unanswered, among the sparse, dry grasses.

Valenzuela knew that she wasn’t alone. She attuned her hearing with care and heard the soft rub of metal on leather as men moved about, the subdued tones of their voices in low conversation ‘though she couldn’t make out the words, and the snort and stamp of a horse. She smelled horse dung, wood smoke and coffee on the cold desert air.

Reluctantly, she opened her eyes. Despite her wishes and her fervent prayer, it was all exactly as she had feared. The memories of every terrible moment from when she had been dragged bodily from Don Estaban’s house and the nightmare ride through the night-shrouded village while the bandits shot at shadows and set fires right and left as they rode, were absolutely true. Then came the wild and reckless gallop across country as her abductors put distance between themselves and any possible pursuit. They had ridden hard all the way to the fringe of the desert before they had stopped to rest their horses and their own tired bones.

Valenzuela, weary beyond belief, had dropped to the ground as soon as she’d got off the horse. In spite of her terror, she’d gone to sleep where she’d fallen and slept for nearly an hour. It was now almost dawn. The faint, silver light in the sky above the eastern horizon heralded the birth of a brand new day: one filled with questions and uncounted fears. She made good use of those first, still moments to take stock of her situation and dispel her confusion. An intelligent woman, she knew the peril she was in, and she was afraid, but she was the daughter of conquistadors, and now that her first panic was over, she wasn’t stricken with terror. While it wasn’t likely that she could soon engineer an escape, her agile mind started at once to seek a way out of her predicament.

Moving only her eyes beneath shuttered lids, she looked all around her. Here, on the very edge of the desert, at the fringe of a vast sea of shale, stone and sand, huge rocks were all jumbled together, oversized pebbles rolled by the tide of time to the shore line, leaning one against the other in wild disarray. Not far away from her sheltering rock, a small fire burned. Its pale flames were shielded from direct view by a carefully constructed hearth built of stones and surrounded by a low earthwork. From just a few yards away its light was almost invisible. The men she had heard were gathered about it, warming their hands and their faces; their features were cast into sharp angles and planes by the firelight. Beyond them, just visible in the slowly strengthening light were the dark bulks of the picketed horses.

The woman’s cramped limbs had stiffened. Trying to move in absolute silence, she stretched and shifted position. The big muscle in the back of her thigh knotted and tightened. She avoided a moan of pain, but the hiss of her breath betrayed her. The men at the fireside all turned at once and looked in her direction. One man spoke in a guttural grunt and another answered in kind.

A few more quick, quiet words were exchanged and somebody sniggered. A man-shape, long, lean and corded with muscle in that first, early light, got up, stretched and yawned. With a final, ribald word to his companions, he took the few steps to the rock where Valenzuela huddled.

Wide eyed, she murmured a prayer to her sweet lady in Paradise that the rock would swallow her up. As with her previous supplication, it fell on deaf ears. The figure loomed over her. A face, angular and quite remarkable for its ugliness leered; it was a face she knew well. The man was the same degenerate half-breed that had snatched her from the hacienda, the one who claimed a Comanche name. His huge, coarse-skinned hand reached down and grabbed her. She gasped at the pain. Her wrist was already sore from the ropes that had bound her and blue with bruising. Ignoring her protest and her discomfort, he pulled her bodily onto her feet. Valenzuela bit down on her lip to keep herself silent.

Using her arm as a lever, Sorronoso drew her in close to his chest. “You are a very pretty lady,” he grunted in some sort of bastardised Spanish. “You will make me a very happy man.”

Valenzuela pulled her head back from him and twisted her face away from his lips. “Let go of me!” The sight and the smell of him were repulsive. His eyes, so close to hers, were bright and wide open, very black, and his lips slack and moist. His whole body reeked of sour sweat, and the gust from his stomach was putrid. She smelled cheap liquor, tobacco and the universal dental decay that afflicted the country mixed with the fishy stench of his food. She felt his free hand on the small of her back as he pulled her closer.

Torak’s voice growled from the fireside, “Bring the Señorita over here. She is valuable property. I do not want her damaged.” His voice held no inflection: he might as well have been talking about a mule or a pair of boots, but the half-breed reacted to the half-disguised threat. He went back to the fireplace and dragged Valenzuela along with him. His grip was a strong one; struggle and twist as she might she couldn’t break free.

A heavy man, Torak got to his feet and tipped the dregs from his coffee cup into the fire where they hissed and spat. In the steadily gathering daylight, his broad, rounded features were amenable, but his eyes were black splinters of ice. He bobbed his head in a short, perfunctory bow. “Señorita Marrinez, I think it necessary that we come to some understanding.”

Valenzuela drew herself up to full height; she stood taller than Torak’s shoulder. Her face filled with indignation. “I want no understanding with you, Señor. I require you to return me at once to the hacienda of my uncle. If you are very fortunate, he will allow you to escape with only a beating.”

Torak’s chuckled gurgled up from somewhere deep down inside him and erupted onto his face in full-fledged laughter. Taking his lead, the other men joined in the merriment until the night rang. Valenzuela’s cheeks flared with hot colour. As the general amusement subsided, Torak reached out to stroke her face with thick, stubby fingers. “It is my intention to return you unharmed to your father, Señorita, and still of - shall we say, marriageable quality? But you know how it is with men of this kind; they are ill mannered and lustful, and with such a beautiful woman as yourself close at hand…” He gave an eloquent shrug of the shoulders. “Without your co-operation, I fear I cannot guarantee the sanctity of your person.”

Valenzuela flinched from the rough touch of his skin. She would have recoiled had not the half-creed Comanache retained his firm grasp on her arms. Instead, she hissed at Torak, and her eyes glowed with hatred. “You will not prevail, Señor! My father will send an army from Spain. He will hunt you down like the dog you are, and then I shall have the pleasure of watching you hang! It would be better for you to release me at once.”

“An army from Spain!” Torak laughed again but this time with more scorn than amusement. “That will be a fine thing to see. I’m sure we will be able to provide them with adequate entertainment – should they ever appear!” His hand tightened abruptly on her jaw, holding her face in a vice-like grip. Hot and hungry, his eyes swept over her statuesque body in the ruins of the beautiful dress. “Before his arrival however, we have a long way to travel over rough, hard ground. You will need something more suitable to wear.” He turned his head and spoke to one of his men, “Saverio, there is a spare shirt in my saddlebags; fetch it for Señorita Marrinez.”

Valenzuela pulled her head away. The deep marks left by Torak’s fingers filled up with blood. “I want nothing from you!”

Torak’s eyes glittered. “Señorita, if you want to live to return to your family, you will learn quickly to do as you are told.” He pulled out a knife.

Sorronoso’s powerful hands gripped her arms by the elbows - in spite of her struggles, she was held firmly. Torak bent down and slashed away at her satin skirts. He chopped them off at about knee level and threw the fragments of silken fabric into the fire where they curled and crisped until they were no more than ashes. The shirt that he gave her was almost clean. It was a faded reddish-brown in colour and of gargantuan, tent-like proportions that drowned her shoulders and came right down to her knees. Someone gave her a belt to cinch it in to her waist. They put her in the saddle of a big, bay horse. She had lost her high-heeled slippers somewhere in the escape from the house, and her silken hose were in tatters. They tied her feet to the stirrups and her wrists to the saddle horn; unused as she was to riding astride, it was impossible for her to fall off.

Valenzuela was surprised to find that the party now consisted of only half a dozen men. The rest of the bandits had melted away during the hours of darkness, vanishing into the black desert night. The fire was extinguished and the scorched stones and the ashes and all other signs of the camp were buried so that no trace remained. Sorronoso picked up the reins of Valenzuela’s horse and the group moved off into the wilderness. The red fire of sunrise lit up the landscape with a soft, rosy glow while strange formations of stone and sand cast grotesque, shifting shadows over the desert floor.

*******

It was an easy task to follow thirty horsemen through the fertile valley bottoms. As the made good their escape, the bandits had ridden hell for leather across the landscape and left behind them a trail that a child could have followed. It was when they reached the rim-rock that formed the northern boundary of Don Estaban’s land that everything changed abruptly. It was here that the desert began, and here that the outlaws entered an element that they might properly call their own. Within half a mile of entering the dry, dusty badlands, all trace of their passage disappeared. Adam wasn’t really surprised. He remembered from his previous encounter with Torak and his band of very bad men how it was that they travelled: riding spread well apart on the rock and the shale, they left no indication at all of which way they had gone.

Adam, Miguel and Charlo, riding with three other hard, grim faced men and trailing a long string of horses behind them, had pushed the pace hard. Now they found themselves slowed to a walk, searching for sign in an empty and desolate landscape that shimmered beneath a bright, morning sun.

There was nothing to find, not the scrape of a horseshoe nor a fresh fall of dung, nothing at all to indicate that men and horses had passed that way at any time in the last hundred years. The would-be pursuers found themselves crawling, like ants in a dustbowl, crossing and re-crossing their own confused tracks as they tried to pick up the trail.

Sometime just before noon, Miguel, who was in charge of the expedition, called a halt. They had reached the place where the desert properly began. Dry scrub and thorn bush and parched, yellow grasses gave way to dust and stone and harsh sunlight. He wiped his face with his sleeve and examined the damp patch critically before he called out to the other men; “This is a good place to stop, amigos. This is the last piece of shade for a good long way. We will make the most of it.” He gestured to the lee-side shelter of some large, jumbled rocks that stood in their way.

“No!” Charlo dragged his horse to a halt alongside him. Just like his rider, the big black beast was agitated, wet with sweat and wild eyed. Charlo held him on a very tight rein that made him dance in the dust. “We must go on! Every minute that we waste here, they are getting further ahead of us!”

Miguel had already dismounted and was easing the straps of his horse’s harness so that the animal could rest in comfort and, maybe, doze in the sun. “I very much doubt that. The bandidos must also take shelter from the afternoon sun. In any event, it would be stupid and pointless to ride our horses to death and maybe to kill ourselves as well in a hasty and ill considered pursuit.”

Charlo twisted in his saddle and looked around as Adam rode up behind him. Adam had caught the last part of the conversation and was well able to determine the rest of it. His own face was wet with sweat and, like the others, covered in a mask of whitish dust. His eyes were dark with determination.

Charlo called to him; “Miguel wants to stop!” He made an angry gesture that made his horse prance again. “I vote we go on. We have the chance to make up some time on them.”

Adam gazed at him. His tawny eyes were bruised and sunken from lack of sleep. He was already weary, annoyed and impatient. He wanted to agree with Charlo; he knew just how the man must have been feeling: all churned up and sick inside. He wanted to ride on at full gallop into the desert, to push his horse ‘til it dropped in the hope of getting the chance to break a few heads. That was a primordial instinct. The intelligent, reasoning man, the clever, experienced westerner knew a whole lot better than that. He had to agree with Miguel. "There’s no point in killing the horses,” he said simply. He stepped down from his saddle and started loosening cinches. For comfort and the ease of familiarity, he had abandoned the high, Spanish saddle and switched back to his own for-and-aft rig.

Miguel’s dark eyes switched from one man’s face to the other. His look held a distinct hint of irritation, and his voice had an edge. “I wasn’t holding an election,” he said shortly, and started for the cleft in the rocks. His back was ridged with righteous irritation and his stride, in his high-heeled riding boots, quick and over-long. His gelding trailed wearily behind him on a long, loose rein.

With a sigh, Adam lowered his stirrup back into place and gave the horse a pat. He turned his face up to Charlo, still sitting high on the back of his rangy mount. “Come on, Marrinez, give yourself a break. At the rate you’re going you’ll burn yourself out before you’re two days into this trip.”

He didn’t wait for response. He picked up his reins and followed Miguel into the somewhat dubious shelter of the leaning rocks. Charlo snarled after him, “I don’t need your advice, Cartwright!” Adam chose to ignore the remark and kept on walking.

Using the barrel of his long gun as a probe, Adam poked about for sleepy snakes and scorpions. Then he spread out his blanket in the shade of a rock and sat down on it. On the whole, he considered himself fortunate. Despite his room being thoroughly ransacked, he had found his belongings intact. He had his own guns and most of his own equipment and had added his own big bay saddle horse to his string of borrowed animals.

They had left the hacienda in the first of the light: a small, compact body of bleak-faced men. Miguel hadn’t stayed for his grandmother’s funeral, scheduled for later that day. “More important to rescue the living than grieve for the dead,” he said with a typically stoic practicality and added, only softly, “There’ll be time for grieving later.”

They rode in sombre procession through the burned and shattered village. The bodies of the dead, three brave men who had given their lives defending their homes and a woman who had been fleeing with her children and had tripped and simply got in the way, had been gathered up and carried away to the little chapel on the hillside. The carcasses of the animals still lay in the street where they’d fallen. They were already starting to bloat. The haunted eyes of women and children watched the men ride past. Adam wondered if he would ever forget the expressions etched in their faces. One thing was certain: the laughter had died; the rancho of Don Estaban Padro would never be the same place again.

He took a long drink of water from his canteen, then lay down with his arm under his head for a pillow. Not expecting to sleep, he closed his eyes against the glare of the sky. Not far away, the Mexican wranglers were talking together, their voices a low, constant drone as they played some obscure game with polished white stones. Adam heard the jingle of silver as money changed hands, occasional laughter and a muffled, good-natured curse as somebody lost. He was more tired that he expected. As his mind drifted on the dull edge of sleep he tried to summon Valenzuela’s face. Instead, to his intense disquiet, his found himself confronted by the vision of another, very different but equally beautiful woman: that of his mother, serene and smiling softly just as she appeared in the exquisite enamelled miniature that sat on his father’s bureau at home in Nevada. As he fell further into sleep, he thought that she spoke to him, calling his name, telling him something he needed to know, but he couldn’t quite hear her. The dream faded as his sleep became deeper and left him confused and bereft.

Miguel refused to move on until late afternoon, making quite sure that horses and men were thoroughly rested. By then, Charlo was almost out of his mind with impatience and threatened to ride off alone. Feeling detached, Adam watched the heated argument that developed between them with grim amusement and an emotion that felt disagreeably like satisfaction. Was he really that shallow and mean? He finally interrupted them and pointed out, in a voice as cold as a blizzard in spite of the heat, that they were merely wasting more time.

The stone of the desert was quietly roasting beneath a sky turned to burnished bronze. It was hot, airless and uncomfortable, but the direct heat of the sun was gone. Back in their saddles, the men rode on more quickly not bothering so much to look for illusive sign but heading generally northwards, following, by guesswork and intuition, the path they thought the bandits had taken. They didn’t talk much; men on a quest, all three were tight-lipped and silent, each of them out of sorts with the others and thinking his own, deep flowing thoughts.

They stopped only when it was too dark to see the treacherous ground in front of them. All the light had fled from the sky, and the moon had not yet risen. They set up their camp by starlight. Miguel lit a lantern, and he and Adam went over the horses inch by inch, treating small cuts and abrasions and paying particular attention to the animals’ legs and feet. The rapid pace across stone and shale was taking a heavy toll. Miguel selected all those that showed signs of incipient lameness to start back home with one of the wranglers first thing in the morning. At the farthest end of the picket line, well away from the other men and any chance of being overheard, Adam took the opportunity to talk to his friend.

“Tell me honestly, how long will it take to track these men down?”

Miguel forced a chuckle. “You are anxious to get to the marriage bed, eh, amigo?”

“That’s not what I had in mind.”

Miguel patted a dusty, chestnut rump. “Forgive me. I did not mean to be insensitive.” It took him a moment to meet Adam’s eyes and then it was with obvious reluctance. “It could take a very long time, my friend. I have lived close to this desert all of my life; I know its moods, and I know its dangers; I know how to survive. But these men, these outlaws, have made the desert their home. They can use it and manipulate it to their own advantage. They know where to find water and where to find food and how to disappear into the afternoon haze as if they have never been here at all. They travel through this desolate wilderness and live in its harshest places as easily as you and I live in our own front parlour. I had hoped we might overtake them quickly, but now…” He shrugged and patted the gelding again.

Adam finished it for him, “It’s going to be a long, drawn out affair.”

“So it would appear. We don’t know for certain where they’re heading. North, certainly, but where? To the east or the west? Where will they cross the border? We do not know. All we can do is follow and hope that at some point we will cross their trail.”

Glancing back towards the campsite, Adam saw the flames of the campfire dancing, the long wavering shadows of the men as they moved about; he smelled coffee and wood smoke on the still evening air and knew that supper was being prepared. It was a scene that lent an air of normalcy to a world suddenly turned topsy-turvy about his ears. He sucked in a breath. “What about Charlo? Is he going to hold together, or will he go off half cocked?”

Miguel chuckled disarmingly and put his head on one side. “I think he is wondering the same thing about you. That is a stream that we will cross when we reach it, eh? Come on, let’s go and eat.” He slapped Adam on the shoulder, and they walked, side by side, back to the campsite.

Supper that night was a very creditable affair. Despite the speed of their unexpected departure, Don Estaban’s kitchens had put together a large and varied selection of food for the men to take along with them. There was a strongly flavoured fish stew with seasonings hot enough to re-ignite hellfire. They drank it direct from huge metal mugs and dunked chunks of brown, grainy bread fresh baked in an oven sunk in the coals of the fire. They had pork and potatoes fried in a pan: the juices thickened into a rich, meaty sauce and lots more bread to mop it all up with. To finish the meal was a solid lard cake, thick with dried fruits and candied peel and thickly thatched with a coarse and crunchy brown sugar coating. There was lots of hot coffee to wash it down. Altogether, there was enough wholesome food to fill all the men’s stomachs, and they made sure that nothing was wasted.

Afterwards, the Mexicans cleared things away, using dry earth to scour clean plates, pots and pans. Miguel made a last check on the horses. Adam spread out his bedroll and sat down, his back to a rock. His whole body ached, and he was bone tired, but, for the moment, his mind was too active to allow him to sleep. Across the fire from him, Charlo sat cleaning his gun. Adam had never seen the man armed before, and he’d never seen a weapon quite like it.

Charlo felt his gaze on him and looked up. The flat planes of his face were stark in the firelight, his jaw line shadowed with stubble. His eyes, bright and resentful, reflected the flames. “What can I do for you, Cartwright?”

Adam swallowed a great hunk of pride. “An unusual pistol. Do you mind if I look?”

Charlo hesitated, but not quite long enough to be impolite. He gave the barrel a final wipe with the cloth and handed Adam the gun. It was a six shot revolver of anything but a standard design. It was bigger by far than a Colt and much heavier than Adam had expected; it pulled his hand down. Despite its weight, it was beautifully balanced. The solid, wooden stock was inlaid with silver and mother of pearl, and the barrel, hexagonal in section, looked like it belonged to a much larger gun and had been sawn off short. Adam had no doubt at all it could punch a hole right through a brick wall and would make one hell of a mess of a man. Because of its weight, Charlo generally carried it in a holster attached to his saddle.

“It was made for me by a friend of my father: a master armourer in Spain.”

Adam sighted along the barrel into the darkness. He eased the hammer to half cock, then pulled it all the way back. The cylinder turned smoothly with barely a sound. It was a beautiful piece of craftsmanship. Adam was impressed and wasn’t afraid to say so; “It’s a magnificent gun. The workmanship is exquisite.”

Charlo smiled. Adam saw his white teeth in the light of the fire. “My father’s friend also taught me how to use it.”

Adam heard a note in his voice – or, perhaps, he only thought that he did. Were the Spaniard’s words a lightly guarded warning or purely justifiable pride? He couldn’t make up his mind. He eased the hammer back down on the chamber and gave the big gun back. The two men watched each other’s faces over the embers. “What will you do when this is over?” Adam inquired.

“As soon as I have hunted these bandidos down and rescued Valenzuela, I shall, of course, take her back with me to Spain.”

Adam kept his voice level; “Perhaps we should let the lady decide what she wants to do.”

“There will be no deciding.” Charlo’s retort was sharp. “She cannot remain here. This is a barbarous country.”

“You can’t tar all men with the same brush, Marrinez.”

Again he saw that white flash of teeth but this time displayed more in a snarl than a smile. “Can’t I?” Charlo leaned a long way forward; the firelight lit his face from below. “Exactly what are your feelings for my sister, Cartwright? Have you bothered to think them through?”

Adam struggled to contain his burning temper. There was something about this man that set him aflame. Before he could formulate a measured, articulate response, Miguel returned to the fireside, crouching down to warm his hands on the flames. Any further words between Adam and Charlo remained unspoken, their conversation curtailed. Adam knew that Miguel was watching them both very closely. He had only the success of their expedition and the rescue of Valenzuela close to his heart, and he wasn’t prepared to stand any nonsense from either of them. Given sufficient provocation, like an out and out fight, he was quite capable of ordering them both to go home with the horses. Adam knew that he wouldn’t go, and he didn’t believe for one moment that Charlo would ride away without attempting to rescue his sister. In that alone, they were alike. The situation was ripe for trouble; one tiny spark would set it off.

A short while later they banked up the fire and retired to their blankets. With his head cradled in the bow of his upturned saddle, Adam closed his eyes and invited slumber, but despite the ache in his bones and the weariness of his spirit, sleep was reluctant to come. Charlo’s words came back to him, hauntingly clear. How did he feel about Valenzuela? Was he in love with her? Or was he merely enchanted with the thought of being in love: the idea of having a wife and children and a home and a hearth of his own? He remembered too well that, not very long ago, he had decided he wasn’t a marrying man. He was the same man now as he had been then – had he honestly changed his mind? Was Charlo right after all? It was something he would have to give serious thought to…but later. First of all he must rescue Valenzuela from Torak and his dangerous band and get her to safety… And then…

Adam awoke from an uncomfortable, restless sleep. The moon was up, a fat wedge of tarnished silver drifting above the eastern horizon; above his head the night sky was black and sprinkled with hard, bright stars. Adam lay on his back and listened. Not far away he heard the even breathing of men as they slept; two of the Mexicans were snoring in tandem. There was the shift and stamp of a restless horse. No other sound intruded. He judged the hour to be sometime shortly after midnight. Adam was accustomed to sleeping out of doors, and, wrapped in his blanket on ground that still radiated the warmth it had accumulated during the day, he wasn’t uncomfortable. Nevertheless, possessed of a restless energy, he was no longer tired and knew he wouldn’t sleep again that night.

He eased himself up on one elbow and looked beyond his feet at the fire. The flames had burned low, and the smouldering ashes glowed orange and red. The watch-hour was Charlo’s, but the rock that the Spaniard had occupied earlier was vacant, and the man was nowhere in sight. Adam disentangled his legs from his blanket and got soundlessly to his feet. On the ground beside him, Miguel slept on undisturbed. Beyond him were the noisy Mexican wranglers, mouths open, flat on their backs, their eyes tightly closed. The crack of doom might not wake them.

Adam felt the strong call of nature, Not bothering to strap on his holster, he tucked his gun into the belt of his pants and found a private place among the rocks to relieve himself. Beyond the outcrop of large, jumbled stones where they’d made their encampment, the desert was utterly still and breathlessly silent, jealously keeping its secrets. He wondered how far away Valenzuela might be and if she had a chance to look at that self-same sky. Was she even alive - or had the bandits decided she was too great a liability and killed her? What would Torak do when he discovered that angry men were riding hot on his trail? That was a chance that they all had to take.

Readjusting his clothing, he went to check on the long line of horses. Most of the animals dozed, asleep on their feet. A soft snicker from his own, big bay saddle horse welcomed him. The gelding nuzzled his hands, looking for treats. Adam stroked the soft velvet muzzle and patted the neck. “I don’t have anything for you, you know that?” Undaunted, the horse lifted his head and lipped at his face and his neck. With the snuffling animal so close to his ear, he didn’t hear the soft footfall behind him. The first he knew of Charlo’s approach was the muzzle of the Spaniard’s gun jammed hard up against his backbone and the hiss of his breath on his neck.

The Spaniard had the drop on him. With both his hands on the horse’s neck, Adam was caught stone cold; there was nothing he could do to defend himself. He couldn’t reach for the Colt in his belt or for the Bowie knife under his shirt. He turned his head to look back over his shoulder, trying to glimpse the other man’s face. “Is this how it finishes, Charlo? With a bullet in the back?”

Charlo gave it some thought. “It would be very easy to kill you, Cartwright,” he said softly, “and might even give me some pleasure. I could say I saw a man creeping about among the horses. The light wasn’t good. How should I know it was you?”

Small spiders of fear crawled over Adam’s hot skin on icy cold feet. For a moment, he thought the man might even do it. “Do you think Miguel would believe you?”

“But why would I want you dead?” Carlo crooned.

“You know the answer to that as well as I do.”

Adam sensed Charlo’s shake of the head. “You don’t understand me at all, do you? I have no wish to see you dead, especially not now. I might need you to help save my sister.” Adam heard the soft shift of the gun’s mechanism as he lowered the hammer back into place.

Adam turned ‘round. The two men stood toe to toe and looked into each other’s faces. Adam could understand the other man’s reasoning and his motives but not his emotions. “Why didn’t you shoot me when you had the chance? You would have gotten away with it.”

Charlo snarled, “I am not a barbarian, Señor. You think that, because I do not smell like an English woman’s armpit that I would shoot a man from behind? Now is not the time to settle our private disagreements. Later, I will confront you, and we will finish what we began.”

Adam bristled and ground his teeth. He might have gained some small insight into the man’s point of view, but there was still something about him that made his hackles rise. “I’ll be ready and waiting,” he responded dryly. “Just say the word.”

Charlo smiled a very thin smile. “That is very good. At last we begin to understand one another.” He slapped Adam hard in the chest with the back of his hand. “In the meantime, I believe the watch is now yours. I am going to get some sleep.”

Adam watched the Spaniard’s broad back as he made his way along the line of tethered horses towards the campsite. He had the uncomfortable feeling that in that encounter, he had come off the worse. Somewhat bemused, he followed more slowly back to the camp to gather his rifle and feed some more sticks to the fire.

The night was a long one; the hours dragged by slowly, but Adam, engrossed in his own, deep thoughts while the other men slept, was taken by surprise by the morning. He built up the fire and set water to boil for coffee. In the first, early light, a wide circuit of the encampment and another check on the horses were all he had time for before breakfast. When he got back, Miguel was up and about, cooking bread, beans and bacon, and the wranglers were packing their gear. Charlo had taken himself off into the rocks somewhere on his own, personal business. Adam poured himself coffee and speared his share of the bacon onto a plate; it was cooked to crispness, just the way he enjoyed it.

“So, which way are we going?”

“North.” Chewing, Miguel sopped up bacon juices with a large hunk of bread and stuffed it into his mouth. He seemed in no doubt about the decision.

Adam eyed him uncertainly. “What makes you think they went north? They could have gone anywhere from here.”

Miguel swallowed his mouthful and washed it down with a large draught of coffee. He looked over his shoulder, checking that Charlo wasn’t around. “They could have gone anywhere, but I think they went north, heading straight for the border. They know we’ll be following them. They’ll plan to lose us in the badlands before they reach their winter encampment. We need to catch up with them before they get there.”

Very carefully, Adam put down his cup. “What if you’re wrong? Supposing they’ve done something we don’t expect - like doubling back?”

“I’m not wrong. What we have to watch out for is a trap.”

Adam looked at him sharply. “You think they might lie in ambush?”

“It is a distinct possibility.” Miguel shrugged. “It’s what I would do.”

As soon as the sun clawed its way above the horizon the men were all in their saddles and ready to ride. Miguel dispatched one of the wranglers with four of their horses and enough food and water to get them all home. The rest of the party continued north. Without taking time to search for the bandit’s trail, they rode through the ever-shortening shadows, driving the animals as hard as they could. They formed a long line of tiny figures racing against time across a landscape vast, cruel and majestic in its hostility.

Every hour and a half, Miguel called a brief halt. Grim faced, gritty, hard-eyed men swapped their saddles onto fresh backs and drank tepid water from their canteens. There was little time or breath for discussion before they rode on.

It was shortly after midmorning, and the sun was high in the sky when Adam heard a shout from behind. He was riding second in line behind Miguel, concentrating hard on keeping up and watching his gelding’s footing as they crossed a steep slope of shale and slippery scree. He took the time to look back over his shoulder. Charlo’s horse was down; the man was out of the saddle, and both were sliding ignominiously and unstoppably downwards in a fall of loose rock, sand and soil. Man and horse arrived at the bottom in a small avalanche, and neither one got up.

Adam yelled ahead to Miguel and dismounted. He slipped and slithered his way down the hill, hitting the foot of the slope in a dead flat run, fighting to retain his balance. Charlo still wasn’t moving. Adam picked his way through the jumble of broken stone towards him. His feelings were ambiguous. How badly had the man injured himself in his long tumble? Would he be able to carry on or would he have to go back? Did the expedition stop here because of one man’s incapacity? Or might he even be dead?

The Spaniard groaned and opened his eyes as Adam turned him over. All his limbs were intact. There was fresh blood on his cheek and temple where he’d scraped his face on the shale, and he was dazed by the fall, but, otherwise, he was undamaged. Adam found himself relieved and promptly resented the feeling. Rather more roughly than was necessary, he helped the man into a sitting position. Miguel came sliding down the slope to join them, arriving in a rush in a fresh scatter of stones. He carried a canteen in his hand and wore a scowl of concern on his features. He addressed Adam shortly, “Has he hurt himself?”

It occurred to Adam that Miguel had the same concerns as himself. “I figure he’s all right,” he said abruptly as he straightened up. “Just shaken up a little.”

Charlo glared up at him, his dirty, blood smeared face dark with resentment. “I can answer for myself, Señor Cartwright.” He looked at Miguel. “It would seem I am undamaged.”

Miguel thrust the canteen into his hands. “What happened?”

“The cursed horse lost his footing and stumbled.” Charlo pulled hard at the water. “I couldn’t get him back on the trail. Before I knew what was happening, he had fallen, and I was out of the saddle.”

All of a sudden, Adam needed to get away. There was a whirlwind of emotion boiling up inside him, and it threatened to get away. He didn’t know how to handle it. He was glad, deep down inside, that Charlo hadn’t been injured. He might dislike the man, but he didn’t hate him. That wasn’t Adam Cartwright’s way.

He walked to where Charlo’s horse lay on its side in the rubble of the landslide, one hind leg in the air, kicking feebly. The animal was still alive, but he had broken his shoulder. There was only one thing to be done for him. Adam drew his gun and thumbed back the hammer.

Miguel shouted, “Adam, no!”

Adam turned in surprise as his friend hurried up. The Mexican pushed the six gun aside. “Don’t shoot him. The sound of a shot will carry for miles in the desert; it will tell the bandidos exactly where we are. Put away your gun.”

Adam holstered the Colt. Miguel moved past him. He crouched at the horse’s head and spoke to him: soft, crooning, senseless words than meant nothing at all but conveyed love and comfort. He covered the horse’s eye with his hand. One swift, stabbing stroke of a broad bladed knife cut through the tough hide and severed the main artery in the bay horse’s neck. Dark blood spurted, hot, with a hot-iron stink. The horse was dead in less than a minute. Miguel stood up; the blade vanished into his sleeve as swiftly as it appeared. Adam hadn’t known that he carried it.

Adam was angry. “That was a waste of a damn good horse.”

“It was an accident. You heard what Charlo said. The animal lost his footing and fell.”

“He should have been more careful.”

Miguel looked at him oddly. “You’ve seen horses die before, Adam. Ten, twenty times? Maybe more. It could have been you or me who took that fall. Charlo is not such a very bad man.” Now he avoided Adam’s eyes. “Come, mi amigo; we are spending time that we cannot afford.” Charlo was up on his feet, swaying a little. Miguel helped him climb up the hill, boosting him from behind.

Adam carefully unclenched his fists. Miguel, with his uncanny insight, had struck right to the core of his problem. He knew he was in the wrong about this. It was an accident, nothing more. There was no one to blame; it was nobody’s fault. How much else was he wrong about? It was one more thing he had to think out. One of the Mexican wranglers came to recover Charlo’s saddle and bridle, and Adam got out of his way.

Once past the scree slope, they came to an expanse of rough, broken land. Miguel wiped the sweat from his face with his sleeve and squinted into the distance. There was no shade or shelter for as far as he could see. He turned in his saddle and called out to the other men, “It is time to eat and take a siesta. We will rest here until it becomes cooler.”

Adam saw the look of fury that crossed Charlo’s face. Somewhat to his relief, the Spaniard said nothing. He was learning, at last, to control his tongue and his temper. They set up a camp on the open ground, using blankets and the canvas half sheets from the pack animal’s loads to create small patches of shade: one for each man to relax in. It was far too hot for sleeping. They feasted on bread, cheese and stale water, and Miguel checked the horses again. This time, he selected half of the animals, deeming them unfit to continue. He designated one of the wranglers to take them home, using a longer and easier route. It was his intention, by the end of the day, to have only the fittest and toughest animals left. Later, much reduced, the party rode on.

******* 

The bandits made camp in a long dry and wind-eroded gully. Valenzuela found it hard to believe that the ancient riverbed had ever held water or that it was ever likely to do so again. It was choked up with rocks and rubble and old, broken branches that must have washed from a hundred miles away. The timber was dried and bleached by the sun, silver with age and made ideal firewood. It burned briskly with plenty of heat and no smoke at all to speak of. Torak’s men wasted no time in gathering a large supply. At a level some ten feet below the general floor of the desert, the campsite was out of the cold night wind and, from the bandit’s point of view, had the added advantage of concealing the light of their fire.

Valenzuela now found it hard to tell exactly how many men there were in the party. All through the day, riders had wandered in out of the desert, simply appearing out of the shimmering haze in odd ones and twos to join with the group; others had drifted away. The only constants were Torak, a veritable giant of a man who seemed to know where they were going and led the way on a spotted grey horse and the half breed, Sorronoso, who seemed to Valenzuela more beast than man, who had tied her securely into her saddle and led her horse on a short length of rope. She was sick and tired of the sight of their backs.

Every bone in her body was aching. They had ridden throughout the day, stopping only for a few, brief hours when the sun was at its most merciless. Torak was worried that someone was close behind them, and he pushed the group hard. Although she enjoyed an occasional gallop, Valenzuela was used only to the sedate paces of social riding; she had never before spent so much time on the back of a horse, and this saw-backed sorrel was particularly painful to ride. She was tired to the point of exhaustion: hot, hungry and thirsty and covered with grime. Her eyes were sore from staring into the reflected glare of the sun. The small of her back and her shoulders and neck were hot-beds of agony, and the lower bones of her pelvis had ground for so long against the hard leather of the saddle that she was raw.

Sorronoso untied her wrists from the pommel of the high, Spanish saddle and her foot from the stirrup iron. He walked around the back of the horse to the other side. Valenzuela felt the last rope fall free. Looking down, she saw that the reins, loosely knotted, lay on the horse’s neck. Valenzuela knew an opportunity when she saw one. Before the loathsome half-breed could reach up and drag her out of the saddle, she snatched up the reins, drove her bare heels hard into the horse’s ribcage and shrieked in his ear.

With a squeal the animal set off at a gallop. He sprinted through the encampment, scattering men and belongings in every direction as he went. Someone lunged at him, making a grab for the bridle. Wild-eyed, the horse shied away. He shied again at the newly lit fire and plunged away into the gloom of the gathering night.

In those first, vital seconds of headlong flight, Valenzuela didn’t try to guide the horse at all. She was a little shocked and surprised herself at the speed of their departure and trusted his eyes to see the way better than she could. She simply held on to the reins and clung to the saddle horn while she kept her head low and out of harm’s way. Within moments, the confusion and noise of the disrupted camp were left far behind. Valenzuela gathered the reins more closely and leaned forward, settling down to ride for her life.

At first the horse refused to respond to her touch. He was running wild: his eyes were wide and showing the whites, and his ears were laid back; his hooves were flying over the ground. Gradually she steadied his pace and got him into a more even rhythm. She found she was riding along the dry riverbed, following the course of the dried up stream. She had no idea which way she was going, only that she needed to get away.

She tightened the reins still further and started to guide the horse around the larger obstacles that loomed in their path. The horse responded, swerving right and then left at her urging. For a moment in time she was all alone in the world with the galloping horse under her and the freshly dark sky overhead. All she could hear was the hiss of breathing, his and her own, and the sound of his thundering hooves. She knew very well that Torak and his gang of cutthroats and thieves were bound to come after her. She chanced a look back over her shoulder. They were a whole lot closer than she’d imagined - several big men on powerful horses, riding hard on her heels. She kicked her mount harder and felt him respond.

The bed of the dried up river got deeper; the banks on either side grew. Valenzuela began to wonder just where she was running too. The horse, already tired after a long day’s work in the sun, began to falter under her. His breath was coming harder now, as was her own. In front of them, the way was blocked. One riverbank had slumped downwards, filling the streambed with a jumble of earth and stones and water-washed debris. She had galloped into a trap. Valenzuela hauled the horse to a prancing, dancing stop. The animal’s sides were heaving, and his neck was white-foamed with sweat. She looked right and left. She had only seconds before her pursuers arrived.

The collapsed bank offered the one possible route to salvation. In the faint light that remained a path revealed itself, leading upwards towards the desert floor. Desperately she pulled the horse ‘round and drove him to make one more effort. He started to climb, making the ascent in a series of great, lunging strides. Unable to do more than sit tight in the saddle, she called out encouragement; her voice was lost in the sob of her breath and the scramble of his iron-shod hooves on the rock. She looked behind her. The men hadn’t followed; they were milling about down below. One of them shouted – she thought it was Torak – a harsh, male voice ordering her to surrender.

For a moment, she thought they might make it, but the bank, composed mainly of loose earth and stone, had broken and crumbled away. The pathway, such as it was, was steeper than it first appeared, and they were only halfway to the top. The horse lunged again: a last, gallant effort. The ground broke under his feet. He stumbled and staggered and started to fall.

Valenzuela tumbled out of the saddle. The reins slipped through her fingers, and she was thrown clear of the horse. For a long, breathless moment, she was airborne, falling, while the world revolved ‘round her, and then she hit the ground hard. All the breath was knocked out of her body. For several long seconds she lay stunned by the force of the fall. She heard the men shouting to one another and the sounds of their horses coming closer. She couldn’t get up. Not far away from her, the sorrel gelding scrambled back onto his feet and trotted off, reins flying and the stirrups flapping free at his sides. He was unhurt and, she realised, so was she.

Without a horse she had no chance to get away, but the thought of recapture filled her with horror. She got up and stared to run.

Sheer terror sustained her long past the limitations of physical strength. She ran along the face of the landslide with no clear idea of where she might go. The horsemen came after her; she heard their shouted comments and their laughter. They didn’t hurry. They knew she couldn’t escape. Torak, it seemed, was happy to just let her run. He rode alongside her, his grey horse keeping pace. Valenzuela veered away from him and started to climb. If she could get to the top of the landfall, then the horses couldn’t follow. The bandits would have to go the long way around, and she could hide in the rocks.

Soil and stones fell on her. She couldn’t get a purchase on the loose, sliding earth and quickly slid back to the bottom. She started to run once again, but her legs wouldn’t work right. She stumbled and slipped to her knees, got up and stumbled once more. The stones were sharp, and she had no shoes. Her feet were cut in a dozen places and bleeding. She fell again and couldn’t get up. She couldn’t run any further, and her mind barely functioned at all.

Torak pulled up his horse and turned and rode back to her. She knew he was smiling. She could see his teeth in the night. He swung out of the saddle and reached down and grabbed her, lifting her bodily onto her feet. Valenzuela was shaking – with fear and exhaustion and righteous anger. She wouldn’t let herself cry; the tears in her eyes were the tears of rage. She yearned to spit and scream and claw in fury, to tear his smug face to shreds with her nails, but she was a Spanish lady, and she still had her pride. She drew herself up to full height. Dirt-smeared and dishevelled with her long, dark hair flying loose and in wild disarray, she was still a beautiful woman. High points of colour defined her cheekbones in a face otherwise bloodless and pale, but her dark eyes burned with unquenchable fire.

Torak held both her wrists in just one of his huge hands. He used them to shake her until her head swam.

He looked her over, and his eyes smouldered. In the oversized shirt, now torn at the shoulder, and the sad remains of the satin dress, her body was statuesque. As her breathing gradually steadied, so the heave of her chest. He lifted his free hand and touched her cheek and her chin; he brushed the roughened tips of his broad, spatulate fingers over her lips. “It was very foolish of you to try to run away, Señorita.” His voice was a purr but she sensed the tension that ran underneath. “You think we are taking a little ride in the country, eh? Where did you think you were going? Back to you uncle’s hacienda, perhaps.”

Valenzuela glared up into his face. “I would go anywhere and do anything to get away from you, Señor!”

A mixture of emotions crossed Torak’s face in rapid succession: incredulity, anger, amusement. “There is nothing out there but desert. Within a day you’d be dead.”

“Better death than dishonour!” she snapped.

Torak smiled a grim smile. “Or, perhaps, you expected your friends to ride to your rescue?” Valenzuela stopped trying to twist herself free and stared at him, shocked. Torak jerked his head in the direction of the desert. “I know they’re out there. Not a large force: perhaps three or four men, but they are hard and determined. I have no doubt that Don Estaban would send the best men he had to recover his favourite niece, eh?”

Lips parted and eyes open wide, Valenzuela stared at him. She knew in her heart that he didn’t lie, and she knew who the men would be: Adam, Charlo and Miguel coming after her, riding, perhaps, to their deaths. Torak saw her expression. “I know when I’m being followed – I get this itch in my back. You should hope they turn back; if they keep coming, I shall be forced to kill them.”

Valenzuela snarled at him, “You are an animal!” She started to struggle again, but her strength was as nothing. He held on to her easily, retaining his grip without trying.

He pulled her closer and lowered his face. She smelled his breath. She thought he might kiss her, but he did not. She felt the heat of his body radiating out through his clothes. The moonlight reflected on his silver buttons, but his eyes were deep, dark wells in which no light dwelt. “I have a great deal of time and trouble invested in you, Señorita, but if you defy me, I will beat you,” he said softly, so that only she could hear. “And if you try to escape me again, I will throw you to my men like a common whore.”

Valenzuela knew that he meant every word. Without giving her the chance to resist him, he boosted her into the saddle of his broad-backed horse. He climbed up behind her and put his arms round her waist to gather the reins. Holding her tightly, pinned against the barrel of his chest, he walked the horse slowly back to the camp.

*******

Lifting his face, Miguel sniffed at the wind. It had risen, like the hot, blood-tainted breath of a beast, in the space of an afternoon. It stank of time and distance and dust and sun-heated stone. The light was strange. He raised his eyes to the sky. It was darker, although it was not yet evening. He looked at Adam and beyond him, at Charlo. There were only the three of them now. Each man had his own saddle horse, the toughest and fittest of the bunch, and they had one small, wiry packhorse to carry all their belongings. “There’s a storm coming,” he told them. “Blowing in from the west. They tend to be bad when they come from that direction.”

Charlo was sceptical. “What makes you think so? There isn’t a cloud to be seen.”

“The clouds are up above the dust, kept high by the rising heat.” Miguel gestured towards the empty horizon. “That storm is coming in our direction and moving in fast. It will be on top of us before it gets dark.”

Adam studied the rock-strewn expanses in front of him. The ground was even rougher than that they had travelled through. It was fissured and creviced and broken with sharp upthrusts of yellowish-grey stone. It was insupportably hot. Adam took off his hat and mopped his brow with a big bandanna. “I don’t see anywhere to shelter. There’s nothing out there but rocks.”

“I guess that sums it up,” Miguel agreed grimly. “Nothing but rocks for as far as a man can see. From here, the going gets tougher.”

Charlo shot Adam a look of contempt. “What does it matter if we have shelter? After all this dryness, a little water might be good for a man. We can put up an awning and sleep underneath."

Adam shook his head. He couldn’t help a grim smile. ”It won’t be that sort of storm, Marrinez. There’ll be no rain, but lots of thunder and lightening. It wouldn’t be good to be caught in the open.”

“Adam’s right,” Miguel said with a nod. “I know of a place we might shelter a few miles from here: an old abandoned aldea. I haven’t been there for many years. There may be a wall or two standing if the wind hasn’t blown them away.”

Adam wiped the bandanna around the inside of his hatband and put the hat back on his head. With one more glance at the bruised looking sky, he picked up his reins. He was glad to have his own horse under him: the tough, desert-wise bay that he’d started out with all those weeks ago. “Perhaps we’d better get moving.”

Charlo, as always, was prepared to voice and objection, “That will take us miles out of our way. We will never catch up with the bandidos if we keep making detours.”

Adam merely gave him a flat, sideways look and didn’t bother to argue. He pulled his hat down over his eyes. With his head held high, he kicked the bay into motion and followed Miguel down the hill.

*******

Embule Torak pulled back on the reins and stopped his huge, dappled grey horse at the top of the rise. He turned in the saddle and gazed back at the way they had come. There was nothing there but the vast, empty wastelands they had crossed in the last several days. Hard as he stared into the lengthening shadows he could see nothing moving. It was a land he knew well. There was nothing alive to concern him. It was a place of scorpions and snakes, salamanders and dead, rotting bones. Still, he frowned.

Sorronoso, astride his rangy black gelding and leading Valenzuela’s horse by the reins, rode up beside him. With his eyes, he followed the direction of Torak’s gaze. He instigated his enquiry with a grunt. “You still look for the men who follow?”

Sighing, Torak inclined his head. “They are persistent, eh? They do not give up.”

“They are still a long way behind.”

“But they get closer all the time.” Torak shifted uncomfortably and wriggled his shoulders as if he would like to scratch that unreachable itch. “They are determined men and there is a keen mind leading them. One who knows this country almost as well as I. I do not think that they will turn back.”

Sorronoso turned slowly; keen Indian eyes scanned the horizon. The yellow light of the evening lit the flat planes of his face and cast the sharp angles of jaw and cheekbone into sharp relief. “Soon we will leave them behind. We have reached el denonio’s cocina. They cannot follow us there.”

In front of them, the land had undergone a massive upheaval ten thousand years in the past. The earth itself was folded and creased into mile-deep ravines and sheer-sided gullies interspersed by high, rocky spines. A desolate region of near-waterless, dead-end canyons blocked by great walls of stone, of trails that led nowhere or ended in steep, deadly drops and of mazes of twisted and tortured rock that were littered with the bones of lost and foolish men, it was a place justifiably called ‘The Devil’s Cookhouse’ by all those who knew it well. Bitterly cold in the depths of the night, hot enough to roast the meat off a man’s bones in daytime, it was a spot designed by the Lord for neither man nor beast to inhabit: the landscape of hell with the fires put out.

The afternoon glare had faded away to become the more mellow glow of the evening. The heat rose up like smoke from the canyon below. The pinnacles and spires of twisted stone were still bathed in bright sunlight; dust obscured the furthest peaks. In the fathomless depths, night had already fallen. Men filed by on the narrow pathway, angling downward, out of God’s ken and the sight of men.

Sorronoso turned his eyes onto Torak. “Do you want me to kill them?”

Torak’s face became thoughtful as he considered the possibilities. He gazed into the desert with far-focussed eyes as if he could see beyond the dust and the heat haze into the hearts of the men who pursued him. He came to a conclusion, “Yes. I think it is time. Kill them.”

Valenzuela’s eyes widened. She had listened to the exchange with growing horror. Now, an exclamation was torn from her throat, “No!”

Turning, Torak observed the emotion that was etched on her face. “Would you have me spare them, Señorita? If they try to rescue you, I shall have them killed in front of your eyes: peeled out of their skins and left out in the sun to dry. And you already know what will happen to you.”

Valenzuela saw the half-breed’s eyes glitter. She didn’t trust herself to answer in case she betrayed her fear. Bound hand and foot to her saddle, she drew herself up as tall as she could. She knew it was useless to plead and it would only give the Mexican more satisfaction.

Torak’s attention switched back to Sorronoso. “Kill them all. Take whatever men you need.”

A sinister grin spread over the half-breed’s face; his teeth were discoloured and broken. He handed Torak the braided reins of Valenzuela’s horse and yanked the head of his gelding around with a cruel jerk of the bit. He lifted his rifle high in the air so that the barrel shone in the sun and shouted: loud, ugly words in a harsh and barbaric tongue. Four men broke out of the slow-plodding line. Every one was a half-breed like Sorronoso himself, cast in the same, savage mould. They all had the faces of eagles. They gathered into a group around Sorronoso and conversed in guttural grunts. Sorronoso spoke a few words to them and waved his gun in the air. As one, they wheeled about, and the group spurred their tough, stringy horses and rode off into the gathering gold.

Valenzuela found Torak watching her. His eyes held amusement and lust. A new and abiding hatred kindled inside the proud woman’s heart. Torak saw it burn in her eyes. He picked up his reins and nudged the grey gelding hard with his heels. Leading Valenzuela’s horse, he rode down into the canyon.

******* 

The abandoned village resembled nothing more closely than the classical ghost town except, perhaps, that it was in an even worse state of repair: all ancient, broken timbers and crumbling adobe walls. It possessed a sinister aspect in the deepening, discoloured twilight: a scattered collection of derelict buildings unevenly spaced along a single, meandering street. Adam half expected to see tumbleweeds bowling along and to hear the slam of an unhinged door. As they rode into town, all three abreast with the packhorse trailing behind them, the storm, which had been gathering steadily all afternoon, finally broke in earnest. Thunder rumbled and rolled round the sky, and jagged streaks of blue and white lightening leapt from the clouds to the ground. The charnel house wind blew much stronger, ruffling the horse’s manes.

After some looking, Miguel located a ruin that had two rooms still standing and retained a small portion of roof. They led the horses in through the shattered doorway and stabled them in the room at the back. Adam rationed out water and grain and dried grasses and started to check the animals over. Miguel came up behind him, holding the lantern so he could see. “How are they doing?”

“Not good.” Adam applied ointment to a cut on a fetlock. “Pushing them as hard as we are in this sort of country’s taking its toll.” The animals were certainly suffering. Their ribs were starting to show through their hides. It wasn’t possible to carry enough feed to keep them in any sort of condition.

“It’s inevitable.” Miguel put his hand on the horse’s leg, feeling for the heat of infection. “As long as they don’t go lame we’ll still be able to ride them.” He slapped Adam hard on the shoulder. “Stop worrying. Come and eat.” It was the first flash of Miguel’s innate good humour that Adam had seen in a good long while.

In the smaller room at the front of the building, the one that was nearer the street, Charlo had gotten a small fire going, feeding it bits of the broken doorframe until he had a good blaze. A much-welcomed pot of coffee was already warming. He set out their supplies. Their diet was not as rich and as varied as it had been before. They still had dried fish, smoked cheese and bacon and rock-hard, twice baked bread, but soon they would be reduced to eating the dried strips of meat that tasted like leather and hard-tack biscuits, washed down with stale water. To make the oil last longer, Miguel put out the lantern, and they ate their meal by firelight while the wind moaned outside, and the thunder crashed across heaven.

Outside, unnoticed, night had fallen. The storm raged harder than ever. Thunder rolled continuously, and there was a constant flicker of lightening: sometimes nearer, sometimes further away. The air was charged with a strange tension that made their skins crawl. Charlo still fretted over lost time and distance, but even he was glad to be under some sort of roof.

Lit by the uncertain light of the fire, all their faces were dirty, unshaven and showing the strain of the journey. There was no water to spare for washing, and all of them stank. Adam scratched at his cheek and his chin. His three-day old stubble was starting to itch. He considered shaving dry with the razor sharp edge of his knife. It wasn’t a pleasant operation and always left his face raw, but looking around at his companions, he decided that the discomfort might almost be worth it. They began to look like a bunch of bandits themselves.

Tired as they were, there was no point in trying to sleep. While the violent forces of nature did not intimidate them, the storm was too noisy, too immediate, too intimately close to be ignored. Instead of sleeping, Adam and Miguel swapped tales of the mountains for those of the desert, and Charlo told them of summer in Spain.

Around about midnight, Charlo went outside to relieve himself. Adam and Miguel regarded one another over the embers of the fire.

“Tell me honestly,” Adam said quietly. “What are our chances of catching up with them? In all this vast boneyard, with the horses failing, will we ever find Valenzuela?”

Miguel poked a stick into the fire and watched the sparks jump around it. “Dead or alive, we’ll find her, although what her condition might be when we do…” He looked up at Adam. His dark eyes swallowed the light. “That’s something you have to prepare yourself for, my friend.”

Adam knew what Miguel was saying. It was a thing he had been thinking about for some time, and it was a subject that didn’t make for comfortable contemplation. Torak and his rough crew of bandits and desperados did not have a reputation for treating women with respect. The four walls and the fragment of roof formed an oasis of calmness around him, but they did little to shelter Adam’s troubled soul.

Charlo’s bellow brought both men scrambling onto their feet. They grabbed their guns and hurried outside.

The electric storm raged all around them but, in between flashes of lightening, the dark was complete. The hot wind lifted the dust and blew it into their faces, blinding their eyes. Adam looked this way and that and called out to Charlo. The boom of the thunder drowned out his voice. As the lightening flickered again, he saw the scene in a succession of starkly lit images: the broken windows and doorways, the crumbling walls. In the centre of the street, away to his left, Charlo was down on the ground. Adam thought he was fighting with two, savage animals. He touched Miguel on the arm and pointed. The two men started to run.

As they got closer, they saw that Charlo’s assailants were men, although, indeed, they did fight like beasts. Adam kicked out at one of them and caught him squarely under the chin, knocking him backwards and all but breaking his neck. The man landed flat on his back in the dirt. In the next flash of lightening, Adam got a look at his face. He had ugly, Indian features twisted into a bestial snarl by hate. He wore a dirty white man’s shirt and a grubby breech-clout over his trousers. With a snarl, he lunged up at Adam, straight off the ground. There was a glint of steel in his hand. Adam found a broad bladed knife driven straight at his belly. He stepped aside and shot the man in the face.

A second shot sounded close behind him. He swung around. Miguel was holding a smoking pistol. The Mexican was sweating and looked vaguely sick. The second attacker lay sprawled at his feet, the back of his head blown away. Both the dead men were Indian types with sharp, well-weathered features and black braided hair. Their clothes were a mixture of Indian and Mexican garb, and they both carried guns, hatchets and knives. They had been out to do murder and had come equipped for the task.

Adam offered Charlo a hand and pulled him onto his feet. The Spaniard had put up a fight for his life, and he was covered with blood. There were several long, shallow cuts on his rib cage and another along the length of his forearm. He was bleeding profusely from elbow to wrist. He didn’t whimper or whine. Angrily, he shook the blood from his fingers. “They came up behind me,” he said with a snarl. “There are more of them. They vanished into the shadows” His words were echoed by thunder.

The lightening flashed. Someone shot at them out of the ruins. The bullet ploughed into the ground between Adam and Charlo and made the earth spurt. The three men dived in three different directions and scrambled for cover. Adam and Miguel still had their six guns in hand. They slid into the shelter of the broken buildings, each of them, by unspoken agreement, going his own, separate way. Charlo made a bolt for the house where they’d made their encampment. His gun was still on his saddle and he felt a strong need to recover it.

Adam ducked ‘round a corner, slipped to the left and then to the right. He moved like a big, rangy cat: in his dark trail clothes, a shadow in the deeper darkness dodging the flashes of light.

He rounded a corner that took him out of sight of the street, then paused to gather his wits and to steady his breathing, and to get some idea, in the dark, of his bearings. So, Torak had sent his renegade ‘breeds to kill them. That had to say something about the man’s state of mind. Perhaps they had gotten closer to his hidden stronghold than they had supposed. It didn’t worry Adam at all that his opponents had Indian blood in their veins. The months he had spent living with the Shoshone and with his Pauite friends had taught him the ways that an Indian thought.

He quietened his breathing and calmed his heartbeat and listened to the sounds of the night. He heard the lonely wind whisper its secrets; it sighed for the souls of the dead. Thunder grumbled a long way away. He thought for a moment that storm might be moving off. Then the lightening flickered right overhead, and the sky-gods roared. He heard nothing else; nothing closer; nothing to tell him that danger was close at hand.

Very carefully, he stuck his head ‘round a corner, following it up with the gun. A long stretch of wall reached into the darkness. With his back to the brickwork, he ran, swift and silent on the balls of his feet, to the next corner and sidled around it. Now he approached the street from a different angle, along an alley between two, ruined walls. Each wall had a gaping doorway, minus its door. Adam crept up to one, his eyes intent on the other. He wasn’t about to take any chances. He listened again and heard nothing: not the soft sound of a footfall nor the slide of leather on stone, nothing other than his own quiet breath, the pulse of his blood and the omnipresent storm.

The street was deserted. Adam went down it on soft, soundless feet. In Indian fashion, he watched every which-way at once. The Colt in his hand was a big responsibility. He had friends out there as well as enemies, and he couldn’t afford to shoot the wrong man.

At the end of the street was a maze of small buildings in worse repair than the rest. No wall stood more than shoulder height, and many had fallen into loose piles of rubble, their substance and structure returning to the desert from which they came. The ground was loose and granular, threatening to crunch underfoot. Adam moved even more carefully. The short hair rose on the back of his neck, and sweat trickled under his shirt. There was someone moving somewhere in front of him; he could sense it. He tasted it on his tongue.

He slid around one wall, edged his way past another. He saw two men in front of him. Both had their backs turned to him and were looking away. He levelled the Colt, aiming carefully at a point between the nearest man’s shoulder blades. Then he let out a breath and lowered the gun. The two men were Miguel and Charlo. They were intent on something in front of them that was out of Adam’s sight and had no thought at all for anything that might be behind them.

Adam saw a figure move. His clothes were much the same shade as the walls and the rubble, a fringed leather shirt and dusty grey pants. Lank, black hair hung down from beneath a soft, felted hat. He moved with a stealthy, lethal grace, unheard above the constant noise of the storm. He had a rifle in his hands, and he aimed it at Charlo’s back.

Adam yelled a warning. At the same time, he stepped to one side to clear his own shot. The half-breed fired, but he was already dead when he pulled the trigger. The bullet went high in the sky, and the man who had fired it pitched forward onto his face.

The three men stared at the body while the thunder echoed the gunshot. A flare of flickering lightening lit the scene up. Another man moved in the bright, blue-white light, firing a snap shot upward from the cover of a half-tumbled wall. Adam spun round and shot straight from the hip. At that range he couldn’t miss. The ambusher’s chest exploded in a dark flower of blood.

“Adam.” Charlo called out his name.

Adam turned. What he saw he would never forget. Miguel had been shot. He was down on the ground, and he wasn’t moving. Adam went to him, his heart in his mouth, not really believing, not wanting to understand. Miguel was unconscious, breathing in great, snoring gasps. Crouching down at his side, Adam reached out to touch him. His hands came away wet with blood. He stared at them in something akin to amazement, as if he’d never seen blood before. A great wave of emotions swept over him, shock, grief and horror foremost among them. How would he ever tell Don Estaban?

“Adam! Watch out!” Charlo’s yell split the night.

Adam’s head came up, his eyes wide with surprise. Sorronoso the half-breed loomed over him, his sharp-edged hatchet held high in the air. His face was contorted with hatred and rage. The Colt forgotten on the ground at his side, Adam stared his death full in the face. He started to rise. Sorronoso screamed as he leapt from the top of the wall.

Charlo’s big gun spoke twice, a loud, booming bark. Both balls went in through the half-breed’s chest and burst out of his back. The force of the impact carried him backwards. He was dead before his head hit the ground.

Adam unfastened Miguel’s blood-soaked clothes. The bullet had torn its way into his belly: a neat, second navel alongside the first. It had angled upwards, glanced off bone and exited out through the back somewhere just under the heart. The exit wound was a huge, jagged crater that kept on filling with blood.

Adam tried to push the blood back with his hands, but it just wouldn’t stop. It overflowed and ran through his fingers and dripped off his wrists to the ground. He closed his eyes tight in agony. Miguel was dying and nothing he could do would prevent it.

Working closely and carefully together, Adam and Charlo carried Miguel back to the shelter of the four, standing walls. By the light of the fire, Adam packed the wounds with cloth and bound them up tightly. The bleeding slowed but it didn’t stop. Miguel’s skin was already grey and cold to the touch. Only the scar on his face was livid.

Miguel never really woke up. He moaned and groaned with the pain of his wounds, and, once or twice, he opened his eyes, but he didn’t see the men who were with him, and he didn’t respond to his name. His strength faded with that of the storm as it drifted away to the east. He died just before dawn: simply sighing and going away. He left Adam behind with a great gulf of emptiness and a vast all-consuming rage: at himself, at Miguel, at the whole world in general. Adam took steps to contain the emotion, burying it deep down inside. It was something he’d work through later.

They interred Miguel in a shallow grave at the edge of the village and covered it over with rubble and rocks. It was all there was left to do for him. Adam turned his horse loose in the hope he might find his way home. Both he and Charlo were shocked and saddened and anxious to get away. They didn’t find much to say to each other, just a few taciturn words as they packed their gear and saddled their horses. The sun was a finger’s breadth above the horizon when they rode away.

Seven 

Adam and Charlo stood side by side and stared down into the canyon. Adam had seen badlands before but never anything quite like this; he had the strangest notion that he was peering over the edge of the world. Below him were a thousand levels of wind-carved stone, a thousand slight variations of colour and tone, myriad shades of pink, gold and brown. Every level was different in density, hardness and structure and each had weathered in a different way. There was an infinite variation of fanciful forms.

The fissure, deep, wide and long, was filled up with sunlight. The sun hung directly over the two men’s heads and cast few shadows down in the chasm that opened up at their feet. Bright light and distance rubbed out the detail, but Adam thought he saw tumbled boulders and stubs of broken pathways here and there among the fallen debris of ages gone by. The bottom was a long way down.

As if to emphasise what Adam was thinking, Charlo kicked a pebble over the edge. The two men watched it morosely as it fell down and down, bounced off the eroded walls and skidded away out of sight. The sound lasted longer; the oddly metallic echo rebounded back and forth long after the small stone had reached the canyon floor. “Every chink of harness will be heard for miles,” Charlo said grimly.

“Then we don’t chink harness,” Adam responded. “And we muffle the horse’s hooves.” He was well aware of how far the ring of an iron-shod hoof against rock could travel, given the ideal conditions that they had here. His eyes were already searching along the broken rim, seeking signs of a trail leading down.

Again, Charlo’s thoughts mirrored his own. “And you think this is where they brought Valenzuela?”

It was a curious thing, Adam reflected, how the Spaniard managed to make the simplest question sound like a challenge and convert a statement into a personal affront. He supposed that, by now, he should be getting used to it. “It’s what I’d do. A man could hide an army in these canyons, if he could find himself a water hole and a little fodder for his horses. There’s probably a whole community hiding out down there: men, women and children.”

“You mean they live down there?” Charlo grimaced and made a gesture. “In a hole in the ground?”

“Outlaws have families too.” Adam couldn’t resist the dig, “We’re all barbarians, remember?” He turned on his heel and walked back to where the horses stood hitched to the ground. After a few moments more staring into the depths, Charlo followed him.

Back in their saddles, they rode along the edge of the canyon. They walked the horses only slowly, not working them hard in the full heat of the sun. Adam knew he should stop and water the animals if nothing else, but he had a devil riding his back, and the devil had spurs on his heels. He’d stop, he told himself, just as soon as he located a way to get down.

The route he eventually found was little more than a crumbling track: a place where an ancient landslide had broken away and left a steep slope of tumbled rocks and loose, sliding stone. Charlo pulled up beside him. “Are you planning on riding the horses down there?”

“No.” Adam climbed out of the saddle. “I figure on walking – and I suggest that’s what you do too.”

Charlo stepped down, but he still wore a doubtful expression. “Shouldn’t we rest up here for a while? Go down when it’s cooler?”

Adam looked at him over his horse’s back; his tawny eyes narrowed. “You sound like you’re scared, Marrinez.”

Hot temper blazed in Charlo’s eyes, was replaced at once with resentment, amusement and then calculation. “I’m not afraid of anything, Cartwright. If you can do it, so can I.”

Adam nodded, accepting the claim at face value. He figured he’d explain himself, just a little: just enough so that Charlo understood that he knew what he was doing. He was, after all, a reasonable man. “I’m going down now so that I can see where I’m going. When the sun starts to go down, these canyons fill up with shadows blacker than the inside of Satan’s hat. I don’t fancy climbing down in the dark.”

Charlo wasn’t about to take Adam’s word for anything. He looked at the sky and then at the western horizon, calculating the angles. “I see what you mean.”

Adam picked up his reins. “One thing you ought to know before we go any further; this is our point of no return. From here, if we’re careful, we’ve got just enough food and water to get back. If we go on…” He left the sentence unfinished. He figured Charlo could work out the rest for himself.

For a second or two, Charlo considered it, then gathered his own trailing rein. “Why don’t you lead the way, Cartwright?”

The first few yards were very steep. Adam quickly discovered that high-heeled riding boots were not the ideal footwear for climbing. The rock had degraded to slippery shale that slid away from under his feet. The big bay horse balked at the edge and then followed, his ears laid back and showing the white of his eyes. The packhorse, tied by a long lead line to Adam’s saddle, refused to go at all until Charlo twisted his tail and started him down. Adam soon found that what he’d thought was a trail was in fact a thin fault line where two immense blocks of stone had shifted apart in the far distant past. There was a path - of sorts - but it was narrow and treacherous underfoot; in places it had fallen away entirely, and he found himself out on the scree slope with the horses sliding away from him and his own balance more than a little precarious. Each step created a small avalanche that tumbled all the way to the bottom.

As nearly as he could, he followed the shoulder of the rock fall. He was quickly drenched in sweat; his heart was pounding inside his chest and his hands were covered in blood, cut to ribbons by the sharp edged stones. He paused to look back, to catch his breath and to see if Charlo was coming. The Spaniard was true to his word. Grim faced, he was scrambling after him, leading his horse by the reins. Looking up, he met the challenge in Adam’s eyes with comparative composure.

A devil’s-breath wind, hot and dry and carrying the stink of doom rose up into their faces. The sun beat down without mercy, baking their backs. A vast cloud of dust, stirred up by their feet, drifted around them. Adam questioned the wisdom of his own decision. The dust was a give-away. Any bandit who chanced to look over his shoulder would know their position instantly. Perhaps he should have waited until nightfall and tried the descent in the dark. It might have been suicidal. In any event, the commitment was made, once started on the downward path there was no turning back. There was no place to stop and no place to rest; they had to keep going right to the bottom.

Adam arrived on floor of the canyon in a slide of stone and loose earth. He was breathless and sweating and bloody and flushed with success. Both his horses were trembling and flecked with white foam, but both had made it down safely. A moment later, Charlo landed beside him in a shambling, uncontrolled run. Adam grabbed his arm as he went by and saved him from falling over. Looking back the way they had come, it was nothing short of miraculous that they made it at all.

Adam checked the horses’ legs carefully, looking for fresh cuts and bruises and searching for the signs of incipient lameness, while Charlo tried to work out their bearings.  It wasn’t an easy task. The canyon ran from somewhere more or less northwest to somewhere southeast. The sun, their one true means of telling time and direction, had disappeared over the western rim. Night already filled the valley floor, and, as he watched, it crept stealthily up the eastern escarpment.

“So,” The Spaniard asked finally, ”Where in all of hell are we?”

It occurred to Adam that Charlo’s assessment of their position might not be all that far wrong. He straightened up briefly and squinted around him, not really expecting to find a sign post but looking, just the same. “Somewhere north of the border,” he said at last, turning back to the packhorse. “These badlands don’t start in earnest until you get out of Mexico.”

“Which way do you propose we go?” To Charlo, all the vague and broken paths looked the same.

Finished with the horses, Adam dusted off his hands. “North,” he said, without hesitation. “That’s the way they’ve been headed all along. I see no reason for them to turn around now.”

“You seem very sure of yourself. If you’re wrong, you’re taking a risk with Valenzuela’s life.”

Adam pushed his hat back on head and pulled a long breath. He planted both hands squarely on his hips and thought about it. How could he explain to Charlo about that special feeling a man got in his gut when he knew he was right? Whatever happened, he was taking charge of things now, and it was just about time that Charlo figured it out. He looked around him at the bright blue sky and the night-shrouded rocks. “Let’s just say that I know this country a whole lot better than you do.”

That was a point that Charlo conceded. He made a vain attempt to brush the dust from the front of his pants, then swung himself up and settled his butt in the high Spanish saddle. “You lead the way then.”

Adam mounted the bay and turned its head northwards, pulling the packhorse with him. He didn’t intend to go far. He was tired and so were the horses. He didn’t look back, but he was well aware that Charlo fell into line just behind him.

It wasn’t long before he found the spot he was looking for: something less than an hour. It was a place where they could make their camp in the shelter of the canyon wall without any danger of being overlooked. Wind-borne grit and dust had carved out a smooth hollow in the rock, and there was an overhang to dissipate the smoke of their fire. They heated water for coffee and, by mutual consent, cooked the last of their bacon and beans. Adam fed the horses: there wasn’t a great deal of fodder left, and he was concerned. The animals hadn’t eaten well for a week, and he wasn’t happy with their condition. It wouldn’t be long before their strength began to falter.

By the time they had completed the trail-camp chores and prepared their evening meal, the sky had changed from blue to silver-grey and then to an ever-deepening purple; soon, it would be velvet black. In the depths of the canyon it was already totally dark and silent. There were not even the soft sounds of the desert night to intrude on the absolute quiet. They found they were talking in whispers. Adam and Charlo sat either side of the fire and, as they ate, watched the dance of the firelight on each other’s face.

Both men had changed. They had lost weight; their faces were gaunt and their eyes were haunted. Their conversation over the meal was monosyllabic and incidental. Charlo waited until his plate was empty before he said what was on his mind. “How much longer before we find them?”

Adam mopped up his plate with his last piece of bread. “Perhaps tomorrow,” he said without looking up. “Perhaps the day after.” He wondered how the devil he was supposed to know. He did know for certain that they’d better find the bandit’s stronghold soon. Their supplies were almost exhausted, and neither they, nor their horses, could go on for long without food or water. He figured he didn’t need to spell it out for Charlo chapter and verse; they had already discussed the state of their resources, and the Spaniard wasn’t a fool. Charlo, however, had other things on his mind besides the sparcity of their provisions. His question had merely been an opening gambit.

“I think we need to discuss tactics, Cartwright. What do you plan to do when we get there?”

Adam chewed his last mouthful of food carefully before he swallowed it down, then followed it with the remains of his coffee. It gave him a few seconds to put his thoughts into order. “We’ll have to sneak into their camp at night and steal food and water: enough to get the three of us out of this desert. But first we’ll have to study the lay of the land, figure out how their camp is laid out, where they post their watchmen, where the men sleep and where they keep Valenzuela.”

Charlo sat very still. Adam wondered if the man even bothered to breathe. He saw his eyes glitter in the light of the dying flames. “You seem very practised at this.” 

Adam chose to ignore the remark. “When we’ve got her, we’ll steal fresh horses from their picket lines. If we’re lucky, we can run the rest off: slow down the pursuit some. We might have to fight our way out.”

“You think they’ll come after us?”

Adam almost laughed in his face. “Marrinez, you can bet your life on it.”

Adam took the first watch himself. Wrapped in his blankets, Charlo slept soundly. He didn’t toss or turn or thrash about. It was the deep, still sleep of the innocent and the just. Adam wondered at it. Adam took his rifle and moved away from the glowing embers that were all that remained of the fire. If unwelcome visitors came sneaking around, he had a better chance of spotting them from out in the rocks. Besides, it wasn’t cold, and he felt the need to be by himself.

He discovered a halfway comfortably spot between two wind-worn boulders, checked it out carefully for snakes and settled in for a very long wait. While he waited, he considered their situation. It wasn’t good. There were pretty long odds against being able to snatch Valenzuela out from under Torak’s nose, even with Charlo along to help. There was a damn good chance that both of them would end up shot before they got out of these canyons. It was a prospect he viewed with a certain amount of equanimity. He guessed he’d accepted death as a probability the day he’d started out on this trip. One thing he knew for absolute certain, he didn’t mean to start back without the woman he intended to make his wife.

Around one in the morning, he woke up Charlo and the two men changed places. The Spaniard found his own place among the rocks while Adam wrapped himself in his blanket and settled his head into the bow of his upturned saddle. He had a very hard time getting to sleep.

Morning. When Adam woke up, early sunshine was creeping down the western escarpment. He smelled coffee. Charlo had used some of the last of their water to make up a brew. Adam couldn’t object. His eyes were gritty and his mouth was as dry as the dust.

After a meagre breakfast of bread and cold beans, they saddled up and moved on. They rode only slowly, picking their path through the twists and the turns of the canyons and heading, generally, north. Adam rode out in front, letting his instinct lead him; Charlo followed behind with the packhorse. As small and insignificant as tiny, blue backed beetles on the face of creation, they rode deeper into the ferocious, fractured and harshly beautiful expanse of badlands that was called, variously, ‘The Devil’s Kitchen’ and ‘The Cauldrons of Hell’. It wasn’t easy riding. There were no true trails to speak of - just vague suggestions of pathways that meandered around the twisted formations and disappeared beneath the rock piles.

The horse’s hooves, wrapped up in canvas, made little sound on the shale. It was so quiet that the sound of their breathing was loud. Adam didn’t like it one bit. The sun was pitiless. At this time of day it shone directly into the canyon. The heat bore down like a physical force on his back. He wiped his hand over his mouth and looked all around him. The canyon was filled up with heat haze and the sharp smell of hot stone. He couldn’t see anything moving, but he had that inexplicable itch centred squarely between his shoulder blades that told him with unerring certainty that he was being watched.

He pulled up his horse. The end of the canyon closed up in front of him and the path he was following petered out. He gazed up at the rock wall before him. It was crumpled and broken; rock falls slumped from either side. There was no way out. Charlo rode up beside him He didn’t look at Adam but stared at the blocked way ahead. Adam narrowed his eyes and glanced across at him, daring him to criticise – to make any remark at all. Charlo had the good sense to stay silent, but the accusation on his face was quite plain enough.

“It’s another dead end,” Adam said, unnecessarily stating the obvious. It was the third of the morning. “We’ll have to turn back.”

Charlo stood up in his stirrups, taking the weight off his butt. He had shown remarkable stamina, but both men were starting to suffer from the long, hard days in the saddle.

“The trail forked about half a mile back; it was narrow, but we might be able to force our way through.”

Adam conceded. It was a reasonable suggestion and right there and then, he couldn’t think of a better idea. He moistened his mouth with the tepid water from his canteen. There was no longer any to spare for the horse. Then he reined the animal ‘round. “Let’s go take a look at it.” Carlo fell in behind him, and they rode back the way they had come.

The cleft that Charlo had spotted was certainly narrow, and the bottom was littered with shattered rocks and rubble and the accumulated debris of a thousand years of attrition: the war of weather on stone. Restricted though the passageway was, winding its way between two vast upthrustings of rock, it did provide access to another, wider canyon that led off in that same, north-westerly direction that Adam wanted to go.  Working together, it took the two men an hour of hard, backbreaking labour to manhandle the reluctant horses through.

The sight that greeted Adam’s sore eyes as he led his saddle horse around the last, house-sized obstruction fairly took his breath away. The floor of the canyon was a mile-wide desolation of broken stones: great jagged slabs stacked one on the other to form towers that teetered and monuments that leaned and banks of sliding shale that shone in the sunlight. Standing close to his elbow, Charlo lifted a hand to point; “It that a trail down there?”

Adam screwed up his eyes against the glare. He saw the feature that Charlo referred to: a lighter line that switched back and forth through the jumbled landscape; sometimes it passed out of sight between a larger boulder; sometimes it was obscured by the dirt, only to re-emerge a little further along. Was it a track, or just a paler striation in the earth? Adam just wasn’t certain.

Charlo didn’t give him the chance to make up his mind. “Come on, Cartwright, let’s get moving.” He swung onto his horse, kicked it hard in the ribs and rode off down the slope.

Adam snatched at his breath. He almost shouted a warning, to call Charlo back, but he hesitated, afraid of attracting attention. In any even, he doubted the Spaniard would listen. He was riding out of the shadow into the sunlight, making himself a sitting target for anyone who might have a rifle pointed in his direction and the inclination to shoot.

Poised undecided between fight and flight, Adam was ready to ride to the rescue, ready to turn tail and run. He watched Charlo’s progress with baited breath. He half expected the desert to open up at the Spaniard’s feet and swallow him whole. He was most surprised when nothing of the kind happened. Charlo reached the foot of the slope without any harm and walked his horse back and forth for a bit, looking down at the ground. Then he lifted his head and waved his arm in the air, calling Adam down. Adam couldn’t see the expression worn on the handsome face, but he could imagine; it would be something just short of contempt. He gathered his reins and stepped into the saddle. Leading the packhorse, he set off down the hill.

An animal track or a natural feature, Adam couldn’t decide. It could have been either or, perhaps, some of each. There was no indication that men ever used it. The trail, if that’s what it was, wandered on up the valley, just showing itself here and there. Because it made travelling easy, Adam decided to follow it. The horses were starting to stumble, and the men were starting to sway. He wiped his face with his bandanna and then tied it loosely around his neck. With the packhorse still trailing behind him, he set out in front.

The vague trail narrowed eventually and became more distinct. Adam was sure now that he was on the right track. It dipped down sharply between two large boulders and turned abruptly left. Adam drew rein and studied the ground. He wasn’t absolutely certain, but he thought he saw hoof prints, faint in the dust and partially brushed away.

Charlo’s mount crowded the packhorse from behind, pushing it into the big bay’s rump. “What do you see?”

“I’m not certain.” Adam pulled breath. “It might be what we’re looking for.” He clicked to his horse with his tongue. Leaning a long way out of the saddle, his eyes on the ground, he nudged the bay forward.

The world erupted around him with the flash and thunder of gunfire. Adam was stunned by the noise. It came at him from everywhere at once: from in front, from behind, from the rocks above the path. He got no chance to recover. The packhorse was hit twice in the neck by flying lead and went down squealing. His lead rope, looped around Adam’s saddle horn, snapped tight and jerked the bay off balance, pulling him round. That probably saved Adam’s life. With a waspish whine, a rifle bullet sped by his head.

Adam heard the thud of lead into flesh and felt his horse shudder. He cast the rope loose. Then they were falling end over end as the bay fell off the trail onto rough, broken ground, sliding down the hill to the bottom. He didn’t know what happened to Charlo, ‘though he saw his dark horse down on the ground, kicking.

The bay landed hard on his side and couldn’t get up. Shot in the chest, he was dying. Adam was trapped in the saddle with his leg underneath. The Colt was still in his holster and his rifle was under his knee. Both were pinned to the ground by half a ton of dead meat; there was no way on earth he could get to either.

There was grit in his mouth and dust flying all ‘round him. He couldn’t see anything. He wasn’t in very much pain and nothing was broken, but he was simply and effectively trapped. He couldn’t make out why he wasn’t dead.

Adam kicked at the horse with his free leg, urging it to one final effort. The animal didn’t respond. Adam thought he was dead. A shadow fell over him. Adam blinked the dirt out of his eyes. A familiar face hovered somewhere between him and the far-distant sky. He squinted his eyes into focus and found himself gazing, as he had expected, into the broad Mexican features of Embule Torak.

Smiling a welcome, Torak hooked his thumbs on his gunbelt. “Well, if it isn’t my horse thief friend from north of the border. I always knew we would meet again. I hope you find yourself well, Señor?”

Adam gritted his teeth and sucked in his breath. He had to control his temper. For all his apparent bonhomie, Torak was a violent, volatile and unpredictable man. Adam knew that if he wanted to stay alive, he must put all thoughts of what might have happened to Valenzuela out of his mind and sit on his anger. He let out the breath in a long, soft sigh. “Torak, get this damn carcass off of my leg.”

Torak’s over-friendly grin widened to display his profusion of big, blunt teeth: the bright, white smile that Adam remembered. “Si, si, Señor Cartwright. It will be my pleasure. But first you will oblige me by putting both of your hands behind your head, eh?” Pinned under the horse as he was, Adam found himself with no choice but to comply.

Charlo had survived being thrown from his horse. Apart from some scrapes and some bruises he was unhurt. At least, he hadn’t stopped lead, and he could still stand up -although not without swaying. It occurred to Adam that the ambush was not exactly as it had first appeared. The bandits had been shooting at horseflesh, cutting the animals down in a hail of hot lead and aiming to capture the men alive. He had to admit their plan was effective; they had succeeded admirably.

The two men were searched and disarmed. The bandits were brutal about it. With their arms bound behind them at the wrists and the elbows, they walked the last, rough mile to the stronghold. Adam got his chance to look the encampment over, ‘though not in quite the way that he had intended.

The settlement was a good deal larger and more complex than Adam had anticipated and had obviously occupied its present site for a very long time. Its squalid urban sprawl filled one entire end of the canyon, while, in contrast, the multi-coloured, wind-carved walls formed a magnificent backdrop that made it look small. Tents and hide-covered tepees and crude canvas shelters all the shades of dirt and dust intermingled in a haphazard fashion with more solid structures constructed of low, mud walls and sun silvered shingles. It had more the frenetic, disorganised appearance of a raw, frontier township than of a temporary encampment of outlaws. That air of permanence was greatly enhanced by the presence of founding industries: carpentry, iron working and distilling. Smoke rose lazily from smokeholes and crude, misshapen chimneys. Adam smelled wood smoke and roasting meat, hot iron from the forges and the sour stench of fermenting grain, cheap woman’s perfume, tobacco, human sweat and excrement and a faint, underlying scent of general decay.

At the far side of the canyon, where the ground fell away, there was water: the well spring and life force of the small community – it simply bubbled up out of the ground. Cattle and horses grazed on the sparse, desert grasses.

The narrow, uneven streets, roughly paved, were alive with the sounds of children laughing and crying and being comforted by soft, soothing voices; men shouted, women sang, there was even a stray strain of music. There were yellow, cur dogs that yapped and sniffed and urinated at every corner, brown-feathered chickens and snowy white geese, lop-eared burros and wide-backed mules and picketed horses harnessed in fine Mexican leather with silver trappings, and a big, lazy, tabby cat asleep in the sun.

There was certainly a cosmopolitan population. The abrupt and unannounced arrival of prisoners in their midst caused a stir of excitement, and the curious gathered to watch them pass by. Adam and Charlo had been escorted closely by their captors and harried at every step. Stunned by the comprehensiveness of their capture, the men found it hard to resist. Torak’s men tormented then with insults and laughter and took a savage delight in nudging them with their horse’s shoulders to make them stumble and fall. Adam had gone down several times, and both men were bruised and bloodied. Adam had lost his hat, and the sun made him giddy and somewhat confused. He found that the inquisitive, thrusting faces revolved around him in slow and stately procession: ugly faces that laughed and taunted and jeered. It was going to be hard to find a friend in this place, and, right now, a friend was just what he needed.

There were a great many half-breeds and Indians among the crowd – half a dozen different tribes were represented – Mexicans and white men of every description and a scattering of Negroid types. He saw men, women and children of every age from venerable grey beards to babies in arms. They all showed an absorbing interest in the exhausted, shambling men.

Torak allowed his people to jostle and push the two men into a small, partially paved square. Lifting his head, Adam saw a smile on the big bandit’s face. Torak was content, so it seemed, to let them be mauled, punched and pummelled just as long as they weren’t too badly hurt. From the expression on his face, he rather enjoyed it. Adam’s senses reeled as a hundred voices heaped scorn and derision in Spanish, French and English down on his head. The noise flowed over him in a dizzying wave and carried him down.

The amusement value in beating the daylights out of two bound and helpless men was a transient thing, and it quickly faded. It was evening; the canyon was darkening as the sun slid into the west. It was time to eat, and food was a greater attraction. The crowd lost interest and gradually drifted away. Adam and Charlo were left with Torak and ten or a dozen of his most favoured men.

Torak rode close on his tall, grey gelding. Legs wide apart, Adam stood swaying. He felt blood on his face, running freely from a fresh cut on his temple. For a moment he though that the bandit would ride him down. Torak leaned a long way out of the saddle. His dark eyes were hard. “So, Señor horse-thief, where is my good friend Sorronoso and his companeros, eh? Did you kill them, you and your friend? Is that why they haven’t come home?”

Neither Adam nor Charlo made answer. It was their expressions that gave them away, and besides, Torak – a wily old desert fox – had already guessed the truth. He grunted. Their silence gave him his answer. In the gathering gloom, he stepped out of the saddle and the grey horse was led away. The bandit leader wasn’t taking any chances. He pointed to a spot on the ground. “On your knees, gentlemen. Both of you.”

Someone shoved Adam hard in the back. Trussed like a turkey for a thanksgiving meal and with a strong man behind him forcing him down, Adam had no choice but to bow his head and obey. With Charlo beside him, he knelt down in the dirt.

Torak prowled back and forth in front of them. “You are a determined and resourceful man, horse-thief. I knew this the first time I met you. Now I find that you are also intelligent and persistent – a dangerous combination. You have cost me some very fine men.”

Charlo’s sharp eyes arrowed from one to the other as he tried to make sense of the conversation. “How is it that you two know one another?”

With a long, slow release of breath, Adam explained, “We’ve met before.” This wasn’t going the way he had planned it. He raised his face. “I guess you’ve got the upper hand, Torak. What are you going to do?”

The large, amazingly white teeth appeared again, this time in a vulpine grin. “Much as I like you, I can hardly let you go – not this time. I must, of course, kill you – but there is no hurry. I think that tomorrow will do. In the meantime, there is someone you really must meet.” He made a swift gesture. Equantor Sebron stepped out of the twilight pulling Valenzuela with him by the wrist.

The woman’s beauty was undiminished by the harshness of her ordeal, but her appearance was changed. Gone was the fair skinned, sophisticated, grand Spanish lady. Her fine complexion was no longer porcelain-pale but tinted a light golden brown. Her black hair, long and unfastened, flew in wild disarray. One of the Mexican women had loaned her some clothes: an ankle length skirt in a coarse brownish material and a simple, peasant blouse. Her magnificent breasts strained against the thin fabric as her chest lifted to pull in her breath. Teeth bared and dark eyes burning with anger, she fought with Sebron every inch of the way.

Adam saw the men gathering, raw anticipation plain on their faces. He had a terrible sense of foreboding. His heart climbed into his throat and threatened to make him vomit. Laughing, Sebron shoved Valenzuela in Torak’s direction. Her bare feet stumbled against the ground. Torak caught her deftly and spun her around to face in the captive’s direction. Adam saw her stricken expression.

Lightly bearded, covered in dirt, sweat and blood, they were scarcely recognisable. Valenzuela knew them at once. With a cry, she tried to wrench herself free, but Torak’s grip was too strong. He held her easily in his big hands.

“You’ve come a long way to visit the lady. I wouldn’t want you to die disappointed.” Torak studied the two men with some speculation, reading the desperate looks in their eyes. “I can see that she means something to you.” He dragged Valenzuela hard against him, crushing her close to his chest. “I told you what would happen if your friends tried to take you away.” He threw her down to the ground.

“No!” With a bellow, Charlo lunged to his feet. From close behind, someone laid a gun-barrel along side his head and he dropped, senseless, into the dirt. He was the lucky one.

Adam was witness to what happened next. He turned his head away and tried not to look. Sebron jammed the muzzle of his pistol under his chin. “Keep your eyes open, Señor; blink, and I’ll blow your head off.”

Adam knew that he meant it.

*******

Equantor Sebron lit his habitual, small black cheroot and lifted the flap of the tent. The small, roughly paved area outside had cleared and was all but deserted now that the excitement was over and the prisoners had been hauled away. The golden gloom of the evening had deepened into a silvery night. The stars and the new-risen moon were bright in the sky; on the ground, watch fires and lamplight brightened the bandit encampment. Somewhere, a woman was singing a love song as a man strummed on a guitar. The night had an almost mystical quality of peace and tranquillity with an underlying thread of tension that couldn’t be concealed or denied: it flowed like a slow, deep river with a furious undertow. The aesthetic aspect was entirely lost on Sebron. He had other things on his mind. With the cigar clamped firmly between his teeth he allowed the flap to fall into place and went back inside. His youthful, handsome features were aglow with a fierce anticipation.

Within, the tent was aglow with the light of several ancient and somewhat battered lanterns and noisy with conversation, laughter and the rattle of dice. Although it was crowded with men eating and drinking and dancing with satin skinned, dark eyes women, Embule Torak had claimed a table all to himself. A piled plate was in front of him and a tankard of wine at his elbow. Sebron hitched his thumbs onto the edge of his gunbelt and sauntered over, chewing the cigar. “Why don’t you let me kill them now? You know that I made the Americano a promise.”

Torak tore chicken meat off the bone with his big, blunt teeth. When he spoke, it was around the mouthful of food. “You are too impetuous, my young friend. I am in no hurry to deal with the horse thief and his companion. First, we will see if he lives up to the reputation he claims.”

Sebron’s eyes narrowed. His lips worked around the cigar. “I don’t see the need to take chances.”

Torak laughed and sprayed bits of chicken; “Where’s your sense of adventure, eh?”

“Just what are you planning, Torak?”

“Tomorrow you will see. All the arrangements are made.” Torak emptied the tankard and banged it down on the table. With a wave of his arm, he called to a serving girl, “More wine here! Hey! Bring more wine!”

A copper skinned wench with a wicked smile came over with a flagon and poured out more drink. Torak reached under her skirt and ran his hand over her rounded bottom. His eyes on the girl, he said, “Tomorrow, the fun will begin in earnest. We will find out just how much entertainment Señor Adam Cartwright can provide.” His broad face split into a smile, and he pulled the serving girl onto his knee.

*******

It was dark in the shelter. Little light filtered in from outside. It was cold, and it smelled of hide and leather, musty old cloth and lingering pain. For the two men who lay bound hand and foot in the darkness, it was both a prison, with guards stationed outside the makeshift door, and a retreat from torment. Both men had taken a beating, but Charlo had fared the worse. Instead of absorbing the punishment and blotting out the pain, he had roared defiance and fought like a tiger. It had made him more interesting to their abusers. Both of his eyes were blackened with bruises, and his lips were swollen and split. Adam could hear the rasp of his breathing – and of his own. From outside, and a lot further away, came the sound of men’s voices raised in some kind of drunken celebration.

Adam was empty: mind, heart and soul; he was totally drained of emotion. He didn’t want to start thinking again – didn’t want to remember. He lay on his back on a pile of broken harness with his bound arms trapped under him. His belly hurt from the punches he’d taken and from growing hunger, and his mouth was woolly with thirst. Men had looked in on them from time to time, but no one had provided food or water.  Something sharp jabbed him hard in the shoulder. He welcomed the pain. It gave him a focus for his attention: a physical discomfort to lessen the mental hurt.

He heard Charlo shift and groan in the darkness. The rhythm of his breathing changed as he tried to alter his uncomfortable position on a heap of half-empty sacks. Disembodied, his voice came out of the gloom, “Cartwright? Are you still alive?”

When he tried to answer, Adam discovered that his teeth were clenched tightly together. It took a conscious effort to unlock his jaw. “I’m alive.” Saying it made him acknowledge it really was so and unlocked the floodgates to pain.

In obvious discomfort, Charlo moved about some more. Then, “Cartwright – did they..?”

Adam chose not to answer - to let his silence speak for him. Instead he stared without seeing into the dark. He heard Charlo swallow followed by a harsh, gasping sob and he knew that the other man cried. Eventually, the noises subsided. Charlo said, brokenly, “I should have stopped them. I should have done something. I would rather be dead.”

A disjointed phrase sprang into Adam’s mind: one of his father’s adages from a very long time ago: ‘Be careful of what you wish for; the Lord might be glad to oblige.’ “We might not get a choice about that,” he offered dryly. He tested the ropes that bound him. There was no give in them at all. The man who had tied him up had done a professional job.

“Why does Torak call you ‘horse thief’?” Charlo inquired.

“It’s a long and involved story.”

“We seem to have plenty of time.”

So Adam told him the bones of it: his previous trip through the desert and his encounter with Torak’s band. He realised now, somewhat ruefully, that he should have left Torak to drown.

Charlo pulled in a deep, shuddering breath. “So how do we get out of this?”

Adam examined the future as it reshaped itself in front of him. He didn’t much like what he saw. “I’m not sure that we do.”

“You’re one tough hombre, Cartwright.” It was the closest Charlo would ever come to a complement.

Adam smiled grimly, although his head ached. “You too, Marrinez.”

The silence between them extended. Beyond the walls of the shelter, the raucous, drunken singing faded away as the bandits found their beds or sought out other amusements. The hour grew late. Adam allowed his mind to drift lightly over the later events of the evening. Once again, Torak had stood by with a benevolent smile on his broad featured face and allowed them to be rough-housed and beaten, but he had stepped in and put a stop to the violence before any serious damage was done. It occurred to Adam that the bandit leader had something special planned for their demise – something to make it interesting for everyone concerned. He doubted that it would be pleasant. The sharp jab in his shoulder became a positive pain and sudden cramp in his legs was agony. He made a big effort to roll off his back and made the pile of harness creak underneath him.

“Cartwright!” Charlo hissed at him loudly. “Somebody’s coming!” Adam lay still and both men held their breath.

An eternity passed before the sound came again. Adam wondered if Charlo had dreamed it. Then he heard it himself, a soft, stealthy scrabbling outside the door, and then a furtive footfall. The men prepared to do battle: to offer what resistance they could. The blanket lifted and a woman’s form, silhouetted briefly against the paler night sky, slipped inside.

Both Adam and Charlo knew without sight of her face or sound of her voice that it was Valenzuela, although how or why she came to be there, Adam couldn’t for a moment imagine. They struggled to sit up, and Charlo whispered her name, “Valetta!”

The woman carried a shuttered lantern, which she set down on the floor. As she opened the single panel, the lamplight fell on her face. Adam caught his breath and held it until he was giddy. He was shocked at the sight of her. Her eyes were deep and lightless, sunken into her skull; her cheekbones jutted. There were bruises all around her mouth, and the marks on her shoulders were livid. Adam’s emotions surged in his blood: rage and outrage, grief and unleavened hatred, compassion and something akin to disgust.

Charlo started again, “Valetta, are you..?” It was a stupid question and he bit it off short.

Valenzuela lifted her chin and gazed at him with those dark, empty eyes. Her lips didn’t quiver. “They have done nothing to hurt me.” Her voice was no more than a whisper. “I am a woman; what they have done, I will survive.”

In the dim, yellow light of the lantern, Adam and Charlo met each other’s eyes. They admired her courage and her savage resistance. “How come you’re here?” Adam asked softly “Did Torak’s men let you go?” If it was true, he could hardly believe it.

Valenzuela turned her gaze towards him. Her expression was all but unreadable. Her eyes were fathomless, but her spirit still dwelt in their depths, brave and indomitable. He knew that all her emotions were buried deep down inside, locked away to be dealt with very much later. It was the way he handled trauma himself.

“I made friends with some of the women,” she said simply. “They helped me get away long enough to help you escape.” She shrugged off the shawl that covered the torn top of her blouse and produced a short-bladed dagger. Adam saw that her nails, as she clasped the leather-wrapped hilt, were torn and bloody, evidence, if any were needed, of the fight she’d put up for her honour. She started to saw at the ropes that bound Charlo’s arms. “You have to get away from here now, just as fast as you can. In the morning, Torak will kill you for what you did to his men. He intends to skin you alive and stake you out in the sun.”

Adam hadn’t really expected less: it would take a strong man a long hour to die. “We’re not leaving without you.” He offered his wrists to the blade of the knife and within just a few seconds the woman had freed him. He started to pull at the cords on his legs and then rubbed the circulation back into his calves and his ankles.

Valenzuela shook her head, causing her dark hair to fly. “I have to go back. Soon, they will miss me, and then they will come after you.”

“They’ll do that anyway,” Adam told her quietly. “You must come with us.”

Her cheeks flushed hotly under the tan. “I will only slow you down.”

Charlo stood up on legs that still quivered and gathered her into his arms. “You took a great risk, coming here to save us.”

Valenzuela’s face was full of fear and defiance. For a moment she snuggled into her brother’s chest. “Not as great as the risk you took, coming after me to rescue me.”

Adam felt he should gather her up and offer her the love and the comfort that she deserved: the love that Charlo so unselfishly gave her. For some reason he couldn’t properly account for, the emotion just wasn’t in him. This was neither the moment nor the place for it, he told himself; they simply didn’t have time.

Charlo stroked the silk of his sister’s hair with his fingers and made soft, crooning noises; “There will be no argument. You are coming with us, mi querido, my darling, or we shall die where we stand.” Adam said nothing, but his eyes signalled agreement.

Valenzuela hesitated, but only briefly, before she made up her mind. It was clear to her that neither man would attempt an escape without her. “Then we must go quickly. The men who were set to guard you are drinking and playing dice. The women made sure they have plenty of wine.” For an instant, her old smile sparkled in the midst of her ruined face. “Every one else is sleeping.”

Adam didn’t believe that for a moment. “There’ll be guards on the guns and the horses and more men watching the trails.” Already, his back had developed an unaccountable itch.

Charlo gazed into his sister’s face with an absolute adoration that Adam envied. “The first thing is to get Valenzuela safely away. Then we’ll discuss a plan of campaign.”

Adam decided he didn’t have time to argue. He stepped past Charlo and lifted the blanket to peer outside. He judged the hour to be shortly after midnight. The moon was just setting over the canyon brim. The bandit’s encampment lay very quiet – too quiet to Adam’s thinking. It was mostly in darkness under the stars, although a few fires still burned here and there. Not all the bandits were safely asleep in their blankets; a slow moving figure was still to be seen, wending his sleepy way home. A yellow dog howled: a long, lonely sound that was broken off short by the abrupt and cruel application of the toe of somebody’s boot. A man’s voice was raised in a furious shout, and a woman answered him sharply: a short, loud argument, quickly quelled, that ended in violence or passion.

Not far away, four men sat ‘round an open campfire. They were talking loudly, laughing and drinking, passing the bottle around. One of them was clearly already asleep, his chin tucked into his breast. Of the others, Adam glimpsed fire-flushed faces and drink-glazed eyes beneath the large brimmed, Mexican hats. Apparently forgotten in the fervour of their celebration, their rifles stood stacked up beside them.

Adam lowered the blanket carefully back into place. His palms had sweated. He dried them off on the legs of his pants. His glance travelled quickly around the inside of the shelter. Made from crudely cured hides on a rough, wooden frame, it served as a storehouse for some of the goods the bandits had stolen, as well as a temporary prison. Saddles, bridles, blankets and heaps of old clothes were piled up on the ground. In vain, he searched for another way out.

He held out his hand to Valenzuela; “Let me have the knife.”

Using the dagger, he sawed through the crudely sewn seam that stitched two horse hides together. He made a hole just large enough for a man to step through. He gestured to Charlo. “You lead the way. Keep low and stay out of sight. I’ll help Valenzuela.”

Charlo glared at him angrily “I’ve a better idea, Cartwright. You go first. I’ll help my sister.”

Adam bristled briefly, just enough to make it look good. It wouldn’t do for the Spaniard to realise that he had been duped. Adam had always intended to go out first, and now he had got his own way.

With great stealth, he climbed through the hole. Even with the moon hidden behind the western escarpment, the sky was still bright. On swift, silent feet he crept to the front corner of the shelter. The Mexican guards were now very drunk. Two of them argued in Spanish about who would fetch the next bottle. The sleeping man was now curled on the ground, his feet to the fire. None of them looked in Adam’s direction; they seem to have forgotten what they were there for. It suited Adam’s purpose admirably. Without making the faintest whisper of sound, he slipped back to the hole he had made and helped Valenzuela step through. Charlo followed a trifle clumsily, ripping the stitching a little bit more. He was a big, dark hulk of a man who loomed in the night. His marred face was strangely stark in the moonlight; Adam saw his eyes glitter.

The night had grown cold as the heat stored in the rocks leaked out of the canyon and was lost in the depths of the sky. Valenzuela suppressed a shiver at the increasing chill and drew her shawl more tightly around her shoulders. Adam picked up her hand. Her bones were small and fragile and her fingers icily cold. He put his finger close to his lips to caution them both to silence. With a swift look about him, he selected a direction and set off down the slight hill.

The bandit’s stronghold encampment, hidden as it was, in the heart of the badlands, had been erected without any of the bothersome concepts of town planning; it had simply grown in a haphazard fashion out of the canyon floor. There was no rigid grid work of streets or neat market squares, Each man or woman had unloaded their gear and constructed their dwelling in the spot they preferred. While it was true that the shelters of Torak and his most favoured lieutenants were gathered together on the higher ground, furthest away from the water and the grazing animals and the tormenting flies, the other shanties, tepees and tents stood cheek by jowl with each other in no particular order at all.

The inhabitants were not the tidiest of urban dwellers. The ground space between the various structures was littered with the detritus and clutter of a human existence conducted almost entirely out of doors. There were tumbledown stacks of broken boxes, the contents of bales strew over the ground, tethered goats and donkeys and penned up fowl. Treading carefully, Adam used them all as cover, drawing Valenzuela with him. Charlo followed behind.

A cur barked sharply as the passed by and was soundly cursed into silence. A woman moaned as a man stroked her flank. One woman laughed and another sang a fretful child into slumber. At a certain point, as he went down the hill, Adam’s sixth sense warned him of danger. He grabbed hold of Valenzuela, pulling her close to his side and hunkering down close against the wall of a leaning building constructed of old wood and canvas. An instant later the rickety door creaked open and a Mexican stepped outside. He was all but naked and sleepy eyed. Short and stout, his belly hung over the drawstring waist of his drawers – the only garment he wore. Adam felt Valenzuela stiffen beside him and tightened his grip on her arm. He looked at her and found her face pale, her lips parted and slightly trembling, her eyes wide open and staring.

The Mexican stretched and yawned and lit a cigar. The flare of the match illuminated his features. He was an unlovely man with small, porcine eyes and full rounded cheeks adorned by a drooping moustache. He puffed his cheroot into cherry-red life and waved out the match. Idly, he scratched at the sparse grey hair of his chest and at his pendulous belly. Then he fumbled beneath it and turned and watered the wall in a steady tinkling stream. His spindly shanks were inches away from their faces. They could smell his hot urine, and Adam thought he might feel the spray.

The Mexican shook himself dry and tucked himself back in his pants. Then he stood in the doorway and filled his lungs with cigar smoke. Valenzuela was rigid with terror, and she was starting to shake. Adam could feel the uncontrollable tremor building up in her body as she pressed hard against him. Crouched almost directly at the Mexican’s feet, it could only be a matter of seconds before they were discovered.

The Mexican stood in the doorway and smoked his cigar while he made a long and leisurely survey of the sleeping village around him. Adam wondered, but only briefly, if it might be possible to rise silently to his feet and bury the little dagger in the fat man’s heart before he could raise the alarm. At once, he decided against it. To get to him, he would have to step over Valenzuela; he didn’t think he could make it in time.

With another long breath drawn through the cigar, the Mexican exhaled a great cloud of smoke, turned and went back in the shanty. Adam kept still. He held Valenzuela tightly against him with an arm round her waist and lent her some of his strength. He listened. Through the thin wall he heard a rumble of conversation: the voices of the Mexican and his wife, the groan of the bed ropes as the big man lowered his bulk down beside her. Then, everything went quiet.

Adam lifted his head and looked for Charlo. He found him crouching a few yards away. The Spaniard’s face was twisted into a snarl; his teeth were bared and vividly white in the darkness. He had a large rock in his hand for a weapon and murder very much on his mind. Adam thought that he wouldn’t have like to have been in the Mexican’s place if the threat to Valenzuela had materialised. He helped the woman onto her feet, and, stepping very quietly, they went on down the hill.

Most of the horses were picketed close to the water, and they were heavily guarded. Small groups of armed men manned watch fires at either end of the long, tethered rows. It was almost as if they were expecting some sort of trouble. Adam wondered at that. Certainly they were more alert and watchful than their comrades had been. They were sober, talking quietly together and not staring into the flames. Adam fully appreciated that they were taking care to preserve their night vision – it was something he would do himself. They kept their guns very close to their hands and seemed ready and willing to use them. 

Using the main trail was out of the question; they would be too much in the open, too exposed to scrutiny and the other men’s guns. The alternative was a long, steep slope of loose soil and stones retained by a rough wall of large, broken timbers. Adam left Valenzuela in Charlo’s keeping, warning them both with gestures and facial expressions to stay silent and to keep out of sight. Adam tried to get down the slope quietly but soon lost his footing and slipped and slithered all the way to the bottom, arriving rather sooner, and with rather more noise, than he had intended in a shower of dry earth and stones.

A pair of the guards turned in his direction, peering into the dark. Adam crouched down behind the broken end of the wall and held his breath. He heard the crunch of the gravel under their heels and heard their voices as they exchanged a few comments in Spanish. They came so close he could smell them: a rich, ripe mixture of spices and scented oils and cigar smoke, horses and leather and sweat. Adam gritted his teeth and grimaced with pain. The pebbles he knelt on were hard and sharp and cutting into his knee.

Dislodged by his somewhat precipitate passage, a few more stones thudded down on his back. He kept very still. From what he could see all around him, gravel and stones and some larger rocks fell down this hill all the time – that was why this wall had been built in the first place. After a minute or two, when nothing else happened, the two guards spoke again, joked together and dismissed their fears. Sharing a match, they lit cigarettes and finally wandered away.

Adam’s breath sighed out through his teeth. Keeping low, he looked around the end of the wall and studied the long line of horses – they were still fifty yards further on and quite out of reach. With the stealth he had learned from his Indian brothers and all the luck in the world, to spirit just one animal away would be the next best thing too impossible - and they would need several in order to get away. He chewed on his lip and thought hard.

Charlo and Valenzuela arrived at his side. Using more initiative than Adam had given him credit for, Charlo had looked for, and found, an easier way down. Adam had to concede that the Spaniard wasn’t a fool. Charlo took a long look at their situation as Adam, speaking in whispers, explained their problem. “So, what do we do now?”

Adam studied the sky. It had grown darker at moonset, and he could see stars. By his estimation, there was only an hour until morning. They had run out of time, and once again his plans were going astray. “I want you and Valenzuela to hide out here while I go back for some guns. It looks like we’ll have to fight out way out.”

“Adam, no!” Valenzuela put out her hand to him; it looked very small on his arm.

Charlo hissed at him, “Cartwright, you’re going to get us all killed!”

One long and steadying breath was all that Adam allowed himself. His eyes glittered dangerously. “Do you have a better idea, Marrinez?”

He never found out. At that exact moment a furore erupted up-slope at about the place they had come from. Adam had been expecting it. Someone had, at last, gone to check on the prisoners and discovered their escape. Men turned out of their shelters and wigwams in various states of undress, pulling on shirts and buttoning trousers and putting on hats. All of them carried their guns. Men started shouting and running about and firing off shots in all directions. They were shooting at shadows, Adam supposed.

The sudden commotion had a galvanising effect on the men who were guarding the horses. They kicked out their fires to reduce the likelihood of becoming a target and snatched up their rifles. Adam’s chances of stealing even one animal from under their noses had now reduced to a lot less than zero.

Angry men began to run in their direction; someone had figured which way they’d gone. Unarmed and defenceless except for his wits, Adam felt a swift surge of fear. Charlo seized the moment and the initiative. Awkwardly, he grabbed Valenzuela and pushed her into Adam’s arms. “Take care of my sister, Cartwright. I’ll lead them away.”

Valenzuela cried out to him, “Charlo!”

Adam snarled, “Don’t be a fool, Marrinez!” But Charlo had darted away. His hands full of voluptuous, struggling and amazingly strong young woman, there was nothing that Adam could do to stop him.

Charlo didn’t look back. Doubled over, he ran to the far end of the wall. He took a quick look around, then crossed the trail in open view and disappeared into the gloom on the other side. An animal howl went up and a whole bunch of men charged down the hill and went after him.

Valenzuela’s struggle was brief. At least, she had the good sense to keep quiet. She clearly wanted to go after her brother, but Adam just plain couldn’t let her. He held her tightly against his chest and kept her hidden behind the wall until she stopped fighting him. He felt her shudder. Her beautiful face, already bruised and dirty, was twisted with raw emotion. Several men ran by on the far side of the wall. Charlo had succeeded in what he had set out to do and taken the angry, violent men on a chase that led them away from his sister. It might be, Adam thought, that he had succeeded too well for his own continued survival. It was all down to him now to get himself and the woman out of there without being seen.

He checked again and found the horses still closely watched. There was no escape there. None of the guards were looking in his direction. He took Valenzuela by the arm and led her away, moving stealthily in the other direction to the one in which Charlo had gone. He wasn’t about to squander the opportunity that the Spaniard had given him. Very soon, they found themselves beyond the edge of the encampment, among the jagged rocks that littered the canyon floor. Adam noticed that the sky began to grow lighter. Stumbling, he tried to pick up the pace. He felt a driving need to put more distance between himself and Valenzuela and the inevitable pursuit. They hadn’t gone far when a great shout went up behind them. Men started yelling and firing guns. They both stopped and looked back.

With a cry, Valenzuela broke away from Adam’s grasp. “Charlo!” She started to run back the way they had come. Adam went after her and caught her in just a few strides. He grabbed her by the arm and the waist. “Valenzuela, wait!”

She fought to be free; “But Charlo needs help!”

“There’s nothing right now that we can do to help him.” Adam wouldn’t let go of her. Instead, he turned her and held her against him until her struggles weakened and ceased. He felt her sob. “Charlo will be all right. He knows how to handle himself.” He hoped what he said was true. “He’ll catch up with us later. Don’t be afraid.”

The rising sun turned the sky to lilac and then to shades of apricot-gold. The canyon flooded with sunlight. Their situation wasn’t the best. They were afoot in an inhospitable country with no food or water, not even a hat to keep off the sun. Valenzuela’s bare feet were cut and covered with blood. In the white-hot heat of their escape, Adam had completely forgotten that she had no shoes. “They kept me barefoot to stop me running away,” she told him. She didn’t complain. Instead, she kept running as fast as she could.

It was clear that they couldn’t go on any further, and, before very long, men on horseback would be hunting them down. Adam searched around for some sort of shelter. In all that wilderness, it wasn’t easy to find. Eventually, he discovered a hollowed out place under a fallen slab of rock. The entrance was narrow and low to the ground. They had to get down on their bellies to crawl inside. Adam helped Valenzuela get inside, then carefully brushed out all trace of their tracks before he crept in alongside her. She reached out bruised and torn hands to him. “Adam, I’m frightened – and I’m so, so tired!”

Adam settled beside her – there wasn’t the headroom to sit – and put his arms round her, drawing her close. “Try not to worry. It’ll be all right. I’ll get us both out of this.” It was all the comfort he could offer, and, in truth, he had no idea how he was going to carry out his pledge.

Valenzuela snuggled up to him as a small child might. Despite her distress and discomfort and her concern for Charlo, she was already almost asleep. Adam himself was close to the point of mental and physical exhaustion. He needed to eat and he needed to drink and he needed to rest. He eased himself out full length on the ground. With his arm for a pillow and the woman curled into his side, he stared at the underside of the rock, just inches above him. It was scored with circles and spirals left behind by an ancient people now long gone from the world. One hour, he decided: one hour to rest, and then he would address the rest of his problems. With that first decision behind him, he closed his eyes.

Eight

Adam hadn’t intended to sleep, but he did – and for something more than the allotted hour. When he woke up, the morning was already well advanced. The sun was peeping over the eastern brim of the canyon and the sky was a flawless, periwinkle-blue. Adam stifled a groan. His tongue and his lips were swollen with thirst, and his throat was on fire. He lay there in the half-light and worked his mouth for saliva, but there wasn’t much to be had. He was starting to suffer badly from the effects of dehydration. If he didn’t get water soon, his internal organs would start to shut down and death would follow soon after. He tried to turn onto his side to ease his position and, this time, couldn’t suppress a moan. His joints had stiffened from the beatings he’d had, and his muscles ached with pain. His movement disturbed the woman who slept beside him, curled into his side. 

Valenzuela make a soft mewling noise and tried to sit up. She almost cracked her head on the low rock ceiling. “Charlo!” she whispered, still half asleep. Adam motioned her to silence. Had it been a sound that had awakened him? He wasn’t certain. Was it Charlo wandering about among the rocks, exposed to the sun and searching in vain for his sister, or were Torak and his men investigating the area? Had he been careless in his haste and confusion and left some trace of their passage out in plain view: a trail that a skilled scout could follow? There were half-breeds and Indians who could follow a white man’s spore with his nose, simply by the smell of his sweat. He shifted around so that he could look out of the narrow entrance.

There wasn’t much to be seen. He had a snake’s-eye view of a small piece of the canyon floor, a limited vista of rocks and gravel and, if he twisted his neck, a patch of the sky. Nothing moved in his line of sight and there was no further sound. Had he imagined it? Had it been merely a few stones falling, a natural event of erosion? He guessed it was time to find out - after all, a man couldn’t hide forever.

Valenzuela put her hand on his arm. “Adam, don’t go! Don’t leave me alone.” Her eyes were big, dark and frightened.

“I’m not going far. I’m just going to look around outside.” He covered her fingers with his own hand, squeezed them and set them aside.

With scarcely a sound or a trace of disturbance, he eased himself through the low opening. Bright daylight revealed a landscape as desolate, dry and deserted as any he had yet seen. The rocks and stretches of glittering, crystalline rubble seemed to go on forever. His eyes ached for the sight of something green. There was no sign of anything living. They might have been alone in the world. Valenzuela crept out of their shelter and huddled close to him. “What shall we do now, Adam?”

Adam touched his tongue to his swollen lip and the two stuck together. The thin skin of his lip tore as he pulled them apart, and he tasted his blood. He made a decision: the only one that he could.  “I have to go back to Torak’s encampment.”

“Adam, no! You’ll be killed!” Valenzuela clung to him desperately,

Adam squinted into the sun as he tried to figure the time. “I don’t have a choice. We need food and water, horses and guns. It’s the only place we can get them.”

Valenzuela was frantic. “But they’ll be waiting for you!”

“Maybe not. With luck, they’ll think we’re out in the desert and still running hard, trying to make a getaway. In any event, I don’t have an option. A couple of days in this wilderness and we’ll both be dead.”

He made a move to get up. Valenzuela still clung to his arm. “Let me go with you. Don’t leave me here.”

Adam shook his head. “This is man’s work.” He saw the determination flare in her eyes. “I’ll go faster and quieter on my own – and I want to know that you’re safe.” In spite of her injured feet she was in a lot better shape than he was. She had been watered and fed in the last eighteen hours. If she stayed in the shade, he figured she’d easily last out the day. “I want you to stay here and wait for me. Keep out of the sun. I’ll make sure I’m back by sundown.”

Valenzuela looked at her toes, bare, bloodied and bruised. She saw the wisdom of what he was saying, but she didn’t much like it. “Torak took your guns into his shelter. It’s the one with the red blanket hung outside as an awning, right at the top of the hill.”

Adam nodded and sucked in his breath. It was information he needed. All the bandits would be carrying their own guns with them, armed to the teeth. He couldn’t expect to find any weapons just lying about. He got to his feet and stood swaying. His head felt light and his legs were heavy. He straightened his back and the breath hissed in through his teeth, Valenzuela clutched at him “What about Charlo?”

Adam met her eyes squarely. The truth of it was, he just didn’t know. “You have to face it, Charlo might be dead.”

“I know that.” Valenzuela kept her voice level and gave him a long, steady stare. “But if he isn’t dead, then we can’t leave him. Torak will kill him horribly.”

Adam struggled with conflicting obligations, then made up his mind. Whatever he might think of Charlo on a personal level, there was no way he could leave him to Torak’s tender mercies – or, worse, to those of the Indians that ran with the pack. He made Valenzuela a promise; “If I find him alive, I’ll bring him back with me.”

He ran a hand through his hair and wiped the last residue of sleep from his eyes. It was all the preparation that he could make. He made sure that Valenzuela was well hidden, completely concealed by the sheltering stone. Then he meticulously eradicated every trace of their presence before starting back towards the bandit’s encampment.

The two Mexicans rode side by side, so close together that their knees almost touched. Adam couldn’t see their faces, hidden as they were beneath the brims of their hats, but he could tell from the sound of their voices that they weren’t very old, certainly no older than Adam himself, and they were already bored with the search. It was clear from their conversation and from their laughter that their had other things on their mind; things they would rather be doing than searching down a man and a woman afoot in the desert, starving and dying of thirst. They had a jug of liquor that they passed back and forth between them, each drinking out of the neck. Adam kept a huge boulder between them and himself, moving around it as they rode by and keeping the bulk of the stone in between them. From what he could hear, their talk centred around the skills and physical attributes of a certain, sloe eyed Mexican wench whose favours they had both enjoyed the previous evening and who they were looking forward to sharing again. They rode on through the rocks with never a glance in Adam’s direction.

The stronghold encampment resembled a nest of red ants that had been stirred up with a stick. Adam crouched by some rocks at the edge of the village and watched for a while, getting his bearings and judging his moment to move. It was the first real opportunity he’d had to see the place in full daylight. Riders were coming and going. Men galloped about, waved their arms and shouted out orders that no one seemed to obey. It occurred to Adam that the disruption and the confusion was out of proportion, but he thought, if he were careful, he might be able to use it to his advantage

He had arrived at a place close to the spot where the water bubbled up out of the ground. He could see it and hear it and smell it. His body yearned for it. His first instinct was to break out of cover and make a dash for the pool, plunge in his face and drink ‘til his belly burst. The reasoning part of his mind told him that he’d never make it. Women with leather buckets, cattle and horses, children and dogs not withstanding, the water was guarded by men who had guns. Adam wiped the back of his hand over his gritty, dry mouth and looked in another direction.

Moving with care, he slid around the back of a ramshackle hut that, from the smell of it, served as an outhouse. The nearest shelter was not far away. Adam’s luck held. He reached the doorway without being noticed, and, when he lifted the flap, he found nobody home.

There was a canteen half filled with water, warm, slightly brackish and very sweet. Adam decided not to wait for an invitation and helped himself. He tried to sip slowly but, in the end, filled his belly and then struggled not to be sick. He borrowed a wide brimmed hat and a bright banded blanket which he draped ‘round his shoulders. He hoped that his broad shouldered build and a confident stride would save him from discovery.

Stepping into the sunlight, he found no one was looking in his direction. It seemed too good to be true. He rationalised - nobody had expected him to come back the same way he’d gone. Moving quickly, as if he had business, he made his way up the hill.

The life of the settlement went on around him. Concealed in his makeshift disguise he was absorbed by the population. A baby wailed in an outdoor cradle, ignored by its mother, while a sibling tried vainly to quieten it. Yellow dogs squabbled over bones on a rough piece of ground. Older children played ball with a rag-stuffed bundle and a rough game of chase, tagging and dodging around Adam two or three times before running away. He smelled bread and bacon and hot meats roasting and remembered that he hadn’t eaten since yesterday’s dawn.

Men rode by on galloping horses. Hooves pounded the dirt into dust, and the dust flew up to sting Adam’s eyes. There was a whole lot of squealing as three laughing women cheerfully slaughtered a pig. Adam smelled the hot blood and felt his gorge rise.

Torak’s shelter was easy enough to find, marked as it was by the red blanket awning that Valenzuela had described. It stood slightly apart from the others on the highest part of the hill. Its back was to the steep slope of shale that leaned against the canyon wall, fully half a mile away. Adam didn’t dare hesitate. He walked with a long hurried stride as if he were a man whose affairs might be urgent – as indeed, he reflected, they were. His mouth was dry with apprehension as well as the renewal of thirst. His body found sweat to moisten his spine. At every moment he expected a challenge, a shout or a bullet. None came. He paused outside the shelter. There was no sound within. Ducking down, he lifted the leather flap and went in.  

Torak wasn’t there, but the inside of the leather and wood walled shanty bore the indelible stamp of his rich and divergent personality. In was warm and airless, simmering gently in the heat of the midday sun. In the dim light that found it way in, Adam could see a huge, brass bedstead of unusual design with knobs at each corner that glowed like burnished gold. The bed, unlikely and incongruous in its setting, occupied half the available floor-space. It was heaped high with finely woven blankets in vivid combinations of colour, well-stuffed pillows and beribboned cushions and a brocaded coverlet with a fringe like a woman’s yellow hair.

The rest of the single, misshapen room was filled with the assorted bric-a-brac of a successful bandit’s existence: the accumulated, second-hand wealth of a magpie thief. Among the tangle of bedding and discarded clothing, Adam spied odd jewelled trinkets and painted Chinese boxes, long, silken robes and embroidered slippers piled together in disorganised heaps. It all smelled of leather and scented oils, spices and perfumes, old semen and sweat.

In amongst the confusion he found his own gun – the Colt .44 was still in its holster – and Charlo’s big pistol which he tucked in his belt. With the weight of the weapon strapped to his thigh, he felt a little less naked. He uncovered a broad-bladed knife, which wasn’t his own but would do just as well and a hat that fitted. A second, soft felt hat that would fit Valenzuela, he folded up and tucked inside his shirt.

He visited several more likely shanties on his way down the hill. As he went stealthily from one to another, he appropriated two fresh loaves of bread and some meat, pounded to pulp with berries and spices in the Indian manner and dried in the sun until it resembled slabs of tough leather, a canvas bag filled with dried apricots and, most important of all, he found several canteens full of water. Without compunction, he stole them.

It took a long time to locate Charlo. Adam had despaired of finding the Spaniard alive. He suspected his one-time companion had been shot and now occupied a shallow, unmarked grave somewhere among the rocks, already stinking and starting to rot. In the end it was the guards that made him think differently. They were two hard-bitten Mexican types with business-like pistols on their belts and rifles cradles lovingly in their arms. They had quick, watchful eyes. They were standing close together outside a low walled shelter, talking and smoking cigarettes.

It occurred to Adam that they had to be guarding something: either a treasure or a prisoner. He had to know which. He hung back in the shadow of somebody’s wall and estimated his chances. He didn’t think they were good. The shelter had no back door, and he couldn’t get past the guards. He couldn’t get close enough to use the knife and one shot would rouse the encampment. What made matters worse, his backbone was starting to burn.

He was still hesitating, chewing at the sore spot on his lip in an agony of indecision, when the two guards reached some conclusion and moved off laughing, leaving the shelter unwatched. Adam looked this way and that, hardly believing his fortune. No one was watching. Carrying his bags and the stolen canteens, he went to the doorway and ducked inside.

The circular floor had been dug three feet down to the bedrock and the sides of the pit lined with mud brick walls. There was just enough room under the roof for a man to stand up. It was several degrees cooler under the earth than in the sun-baked village outside, and darker. It took Adam’s eyes several seconds to adjust to the gloom; what he saw when they did shocked him. In the exact centre of the room, Charlo was bound to the post that held up the roof.

The Spaniard had been beaten again and, this time, severely. There was blood on his face and ribbons of it spilled down his shirtfront. His nose had been smashed and it looked like he’d lost several teeth, although it was hard to be certain. A gag was tied round his mouth and he slumped against the tight leather throngs.

Charlo was conscious. Although they were closed by the bruises, Adam saw his eyes glitter. He dumped his ill-gotten gains by the door and eased the rag out of the big man’s mouth. Charlo snarled at him; would have spat if he’d had the saliva. “Cartwright, for God’s sake get away from here! Can’t you see it’s a trap!”

Adam turned on his heel. There was no one in the doorway. He took a long look outside, but there was no sign of undue excitement. The camp had settled down for its midday siesta. He went back to Charlo and started to saw at the leather with the edge of the knife.

Carlo was furious. “Leave me alone” Get my sister away from here!” His speech was slurred but decisive. Fresh blood sprayed from his mouth and ran down his chin.

Adam had one eye on the doorway and one on what he was doing. “Valenzuela won’t leave if she knows you’re alive.”

“Then tell her I’m dead!”

“I’m not that good a liar.” Adam continued to cut.

Charlo was bound tightly at wrists and elbows and knees. The rawhide was tough. His wrists and his hands were swollen and made the job harder. A braided tether was tied round his throat just under his chin in order to keep his head up. It took several long minutes to sever them all. As the last one came free Charlo staggered and slumped; Adam had to catch him and hold him up. The Spaniard gasped “Careful there, Cartwright. I’ve broken a rib.”

Adam left him to catch his breath and restore some circulation while he checked outside again. Everything was quiet. This escape from disaster was all too easy and Adam didn’t trust it – not one little bit. He couldn’t put his finger on just what was wrong, but he felt he was dancing to another man’s tune. Charlo came up beside him. He looked even worse in the light of the day. He face was misshapen and cut, blackened with bruises and covered in blood.

“It looks quiet,” he mumbled through split, swollen lips.

Adam passed him his pistol. “It’s too goddamned quiet. Someone’s helping us get away.”

Charlo gazed at his with open disbelief. “Tell me why they’d do that?”

Adam just shook his head; he didn’t know and this wasn’t the time to discuss it. Charlo sipped water and spat out more blood. Replacing the stopper, he slung the canteen over his shoulder. The movement cost him some pain. He hefted his pistol. “So let us see how far they’re prepared to let us get.” Adam held back; his guts told him something was wrong. Charlo tried a grin that the damage to his face turned into a grimace. “Have you a better idea, Señor Adam Cartwright, or are you afraid?”

Adam pulled in a breath. “Oh, I’m afraid all right, Marrinez.” In truth, he was sweating. “But right now, I can’t think of anything else.” He gathered the rest of his newly acquired belongings – things that made the difference between life and death – and went first through the doorway.

Three steps later, he was surprised at still being alive. No one had shot at him; no one had shouted. With Charlo close on his heels, he headed down hill. They moved quickly now, running whenever they could. The time for stealth was over, and they were in fear of their lives.

Saddled and bridled, the horse stood all by himself behind a crooked, timber-built hut, tied to an upright post by the reins. He was a big animal, liver chestnut in colour with four white socks on his feet and an intelligent, white painted face. Adam couldn’t have chosen better; the horse was the ideal type: short in the body with powerful quarters and shoulders and a massive, deep chest. He wouldn’t be fast, but he looked like he’d go on forever.

Charlo tapped Adam on the shoulder “That’s our ticket out of here.”

Adam knew better. “We need more than one horse.”

“It looks like all our compadres are prepared to allow us. At least Valenzuela can ride. You and I can walk if we have to.”

Casting a sideways look at Charlo’s face and hearing the rasp of his breath, Adam rather doubted that the Spaniard could manage to walk much further at all, let alone home. He shook his head “I still don’t like it.” Still, with one horse, perhaps he could steal another.

Charlo gave him a look “We have a saying in my country – don’t look at a gift horse’s teeth.”

At Charlo’s urging Adam stepped forward. The horse lifted his head and watched him warily, one ear laid back. Adam gave him a pat and a word of encouragement. He hitched his gear to the saddle, an elaborate, high backed Spanish affair, much like an armchair, thought Adam, with elaborate, silver trim. He lifted the stirrup to check on the cinch. Sweat trickled down his back, right between his shoulders. From behind him, Charlo hissed at him, “For God’s sake, hurry, it up!” Adam reached for the reins.

Two men emerged from a shanty further uphill. They wore big, Mexican hats and carried long guns. They stopped and stared at Adam and Charlo. Adam and Charlo stared back. The Mexicans pointed and yelled and started to run, heading in their direction. Charlo raised his pistol and fired three shots. All of them missed, but the two men dived into cover.

Adam shouted at Charlo, “Get on the horse!”

Charlo turned to reach for the saddle. The Mexicans both started shooting. Charlo slammed into Adam’s back and then into the side of the horse. He didn’t cry out but Adam caught sight of the stricken look on his face.

Adam fired twice and had the intense satisfaction of seeing both the men drop. By now, the camp was in uproar, men were shouting and running and grabbing their guns. All of a sudden, this wasn’t a healthy place to be. Adam holstered the Colt and turned to Charlo. There was fresh blood on the Spaniard’s shirt: a whole lot of blood. A bullet, almost spent, had lodged in his back. Adam grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and shoved him against the saddle, then boosted him onto the horse’s broad back. Without the help of the stirrup, he jumped up behind him and reached past him to grab at the reins. He yanked the horse’s head around and kicked the beast hard in the ribs.

The ride was a wild one. Charlo, slumped in the saddle, lay on the horse’s neck. His body was a dead weight in Adam’s arms. Adam thought he was unconscious or, maybe, dead. There was no way of telling. Bullets flew by his ears so close that he heard them whine. By the miracle of God’s intervention, the gelding didn’t go down. The horse proceeded in odd leaps and bounds, knocking armed men out of his way with his shoulder and charging them down.

Adam did nothing to steer him: just sat tight in the saddle and allowed him to run. In less than a minute they were beyond the last shanty and galloping hard into the maze of twisted pathways that led among the jumbled rocks and boulders that littered the canyon floor. They’d gone a mile before Adam drew rein. He pulled the red horse to a dancing stop, then sat and listened, watching their back trail. All he could hear was the grunt of the horse’s breathing and the rasp of his own, the hammering pound of his heartbeat and the iron-shod hooves on the stone. There was no sign of pursuit, but he knew that it couldn’t be far behind and had to be catching up fast. They wouldn’t be that hard to track. Charlo was leaving a blood trail behind that a blind child could follow.

Adam steadied the gelding with his hands and heels, then neck reined him off the main trail, heading, by an indirect route, back to the hollow where Valenzuela was waiting.

It took a while to find it - all the rocks looked the same - but Adam had the place marked fairly well in his mind. He slid off the horse and half lifted, half-pulled Charlo down. The Spaniard’s eyes were closed and his breathing was shallow. He slumped to the ground. Adam went down with him to break his fall and lowered his head carefully – not that he thought it would make any difference; the writing was plain on the wall. Valenzuela came running to meet them; “Charlo! Charlo! Adam, is he..?

Adam caught her a moment and held her, his hand on her arm. “He’s not dead, but I think…” He let his face tell the rest of the story.

Valenzuela knelt down at her brother’s side. She touched his ruined face with her fingers: his cheeks and his lips and his chin. Her head hung down, and her tangled, dark hair hung forward, concealing her face. Adam thought he saw her shoulders shake, but when she looked up at him, her eyes were quite dry.

“Adam, please help me get him inside and out of the sun,” she said simply.

Adam did as she asked and, with her help, carefully manoeuvred the unconscious Charlo into the hollow under the rock. He made a second trip to leave a canteen of water, then concealed the horse among the rocks and set about hiding their trail. He had no chance at all of fooling the Indian trackers, but he did what he could.

When he returned, Valenzuela was bathing Charlo’s face with a moistened strip of her skirt. Her face was bloodless and strained.

“Let me look at him.” Gently, Adam moved her aside.

His examination was rapid and not especially thorough. It didn’t need to be. The bullet had torn its way in just under the line of the belt, angling upwards, and lodged somewhere deep in the body. Dirt and debris had been carried into the wound, and, from the blood and the fluids running out, Adam suspected a kidney had burst. Valenzuela made up a pad and Adam pushed it into the wound. He knew that it wouldn’t help much, but it was all he could do.

There wasn’t really the room for all three of them to hide out under the rock. Adam made room for Valenzuela to squeeze into the restricted space at her brother’s side and laid his weary, battle worn body in the narrow entrance and wondered if he would sleep.

He must have dozed. When he opened his eyes again, the sun had moved in the sky. Before, it had shone directly into his face. Now, it was out of sight behind the overhanging rock, and the afternoon shadows had started to lengthen. His throat was parched, and his mouth had the texture of carpet. He shifted his shoulders and stifled a moan. His muscles had stiffened. Then he froze. The sound came again: the one that had awakened him: the faint chink of a horse’s shod hoof on stone. A shivery sensation crawled over his body.

Ignoring the protests of much abused bones, he wriggled backwards as quickly as he could. “We have guests,” he hissed at Valenzuela. “You’ll have to keep Charlo quiet. Make sure he doesn’t cry out.”

Valenzuela’s eyes were huge and dark in the pale-gold mask of her face. “Charlo won’t make any noise at all,” she said softly. “Charlo is dead.”

Adam reached past her to touch Charlo’s face. The skin was waxy and unresponsive. The chest didn’t rise. There was no doubt about it: Charlo had gone. His soul had slipped silently away into the afternoon shadows and left all his pain behind. Adam sucked in his breath. He felt a wave of emotion. While never a friend, Charlo had been a companion for many a difficult mile. They’d been galls under each other’s saddles, but they’d saved one another’s lives. For all the bad blood between them, he was sad that the big Spaniard had died.

He didn’t have time to offer condolence. He merely touched the woman on the arm to convey his feeling and wriggled back to the door.

Two men were walking their horses up the trail towards him. Adam ducked out of sight. He drew his Colt and pulled back the hammer. He had three bullets left.

The horsemen came close, riding in single file. They were Mexicans; Adam could tell by the hats. As they came closer he held his breath, afraid that the thundering beat of his heart and the song of his blood would betray him. The horsemen stopped right outside, where the trail widened and they could sit side by side. In the dark space below the low ledge of rock, Adam lay very still. He caught a whiff of cigar smoke: the strong, familiar and unwelcome scent of ‘Old Stogie’, the smoke that Sebron preferred. He heard the two men talking in Spanish although he couldn’t make out the words. All he could see from his ground-level viewpoint was the white-stockinged legs of their horses.

Adam weighed the Colt in his hand. He knew he could get both of them with two quick, snapped shots, but he would never be able to catch their horses, and how many more of their kind would the gunfire attract? Ten, endless minutes later both men climbed out of their saddles and relieved themselves on the rocks. Remounted, still talking, they rode slowly away. His eyes open, unfocused, Adam followed the sounds of their passage until they were out of his hearing.

Adam stripped Charlo's body. It wasn't a pleasant undertaking, but it was something that had to be done. The Spaniard's clothes were sticky with blood, but there was no way to wash them. He handed them to Valenzuela. "You'll have to wear these."

She stared at the crumpled, blood stained bundle with undisguised horror; "Adam, I can't!"

"You have to. If you're going to survive in the desert, you'll need the protection a man's clothes can give you."

It made perfect sense, but at first he thought she was going to rebel. Then she bit her lip and nodded mutely. She blinked back a tear. "I understand."

Adam turned his back to allow her to change in private. He studied the distant canyon wall. "We'll leave tonight, as soon as it's dark."

Valenzuela struggled with the unfamiliar clothing. "But Adam, we've only one horse."

"We'll have to make do." Adam didn't fancy his chances of stealing another. "We'll travel at night and rest up in the day."

"What about Charlo?"

This was the question Adam had been dreading. He turned to look at her. Now, she was dressed. She looked absurd in the oversized clothing. She had rolled up the sleeves of the shirt and the cuffs of the pants. There' weren't enough holes in the leather pants belt, so she'd tied the ends in a knot, cinching the whole thing together. The boots were a mile too big. Adam rested his hands on her elbows, holding her lightly. "I'm afraid we'll have to leave him," he said quietly.

"But can't we bury him - or, at least, cover him up?"

"I'm sorry. We don't have a shovel." He didn't bother to add that the floor of the canyon was virtually solid rock. "And we don't have the time or the strength to spare to haul rocks." He pulled her close to him, and she pressed her face into his chest. He tried to offer some sort of comfort; "I don't think Torak's men will find him. They've checked this place once; they might not come back for a while." It was hardly complete reassurance.

*******

They set out in the faint afterglow of the day. The sky had changed in colour from gold and apricot to pink and violet and mauve and then to ash grey. The floor of the canyon was already in darkness. The woman rode on the horse, sitting high in the Spanish saddle. The man went on foot. They left Charlo's body behind them under the rock, guarded by the spirits and the symbols of a vanished people, his soul commended to God.

The night was cooler than daytime, but not really cold, and the walking kept Adam warm. It was only in the early hours of the morning that it became chilly. Adam took the blanket from under the horse's saddle for Valenzuela to wear 'round her shoulders. He didn't know how far they travelled. He had only his innate sense of direction to guide him - that, and the less than familiar stars.

They stopped sometime shortly before dawn and hid out in the rocks. Adam didn't dare light a fire. Instead, they huddled together against the pre-dawn chill and shared their personal warmth.

On that first day, the country swarmed with Torak's men. They rode in pairs or groups of three, criss-crossing the landscape in search of a track. Once or twice, they came so close that Adam could have reached out his hand and touched them. They knew the terrain a whole lot better than he did. On the second day, there were less of them.

Walking was hard and not without danger. The broken, wandering pathways were pitted with holes and littered with rocks. Adam stumbled often and sometimes fell. The darkness was peopled by perilous denizens: diamond backed rattlesnakes five feet long and as far around as Hoss Cartwright's arm, small yellow scorpions that hid, by day, in holes underground and grey Gila monsters with their fiery, venomous bite. Adam pushed the pace hard, knowing their luck couldn't last. That night they reached the canyon wall, and, within a mile, he found a way up.

A deep fissure angled upwards between two wind-carved buffs. It was a steep narrow crevice that looked, at first, like it might be blocked, but, with a quick reconnoitre, he found a way through. It was too dangerous to climb in the dark. Adam decided to wait until daybreak. Both he and Valenzuela were weak from hunger and suffered with thirst. Of necessity, they had strictly rationed their supplies right from the outset, and their strength was starting to fail.

In the last hour of the night, Adam located a cave. The various layers of the rock had collapsed and fallen in on themselves, making a cavern of considerable proportions with an entrance large enough to lead the horse right inside.

It was very dark in the cave, and cooler. With the horse in the darkness behind them, they sat in the entrance and watched the stars fade. They finished the last of the bread, and each ate a handful of fruit washed down with water. It was the best meal they had eaten for days.

They talked for a while. He described in detail the bustle of San Francisco, the beating heart of the nation, how a snow-fed river became filled with leaping silver fish in the spring and the way the forest-clad mountains of western Canada swept straight down into the sea. In return, she talked in soft, wistful tones of the grand dress balls held by the King of Spain in a palace, of the ruins of ancient civilisation recently unearthed on the shores of the Grecian sea and the magnificence of the newly opened, three-tiered library in Rome.

But Valenzuela was exhausted. Using her blanket for her pillow, she lay down on the ground, and soon, she was fast asleep. Adam settled his back against the rock and watched the first light of the new day creep into the sky: a mixture of pink, cream and gold. Long shadows leaned towards him; the eastern ramparts remained inky-black.

The last time he had come this way, he had been in hot pursuit of the men who had stolen the woman he meant to marry. Now, the positions were exactly reversed; he had stolen her back, and now they were pursuing him.

The new light etched patterns of pain into the sleeping woman's face. Her experiences had scored deep lines around her mouth and her eyes; her cheeks were hollow and her cheekbones jutted. Her eyes had sunken into her skull. He wondered if she would ever regain that smooth, youthful beauty that had stolen his breath away, her lively exuberance for living. Certainly her innocence was gone, her trust in the world and her faith in the future.

Adam examined his feelings. Something fundamental had changed. He was no longer driven by the twin passions of anger and indignation, but rather by duty and responsibility - to Valenzuela, to Charlo, to Don Estaban and to himself - and the need to finish what he had begun. He looked at the sleeping woman. If, by some chance act of providence, they should escape this ordeal in the desert, where would their futures lie? Together, or separately? After all they had been through, he found his emotions were clear. As he studied her sleeping face, he felt sympathy and respect for her strength, admiration and a certain affection, but not romantic love.

When the light was stronger, Adam went to the back of the cave to strap their belongings back on the saddle. The horse nuzzled him anxiously, looking for food. He was beginning to suffer; his ribs showed clearly through his red hide and his hip bones jutted. Adam had no fodder to give him.

The cleft was even steeper than Adam had anticipated and almost too narrow for the gelding to get through. Adam went first, slipping and sliding on the loose stones, leading him by the bridle. Valenzuela scrambled after, grasping the horse’s tail. It took them an hour to climb all the way to the top, and every moment Adam expected a shout from below, or a bullet from the rim of the canyon above. When he finally clambered over the edge, hauling the horse along with him, he still wouldn’t stop but kept going another half mile, until they reached a formation of rocks that afforded some sort of shelter. Five leaning boulders made a stone circle. He put Valenzuela and the horse inside, drew his pistol and went to study their back-trail. No one emerged from the bright glare of the morning to try to overtake them. He had to assume that Torak and his band knew of an easier trail and were moving ahead of them, intent on cutting them off. Right now, there was nothing he could do about that; he just had to grin and bear it.

Valenzuela had settled herself in a diminishing patch of shade. Adam undid the cinches and took the saddle off the red horse’s back, then joined her. He opened their last canteen of water. “Here, take a drink.”

When she lifted her head there was a tear on her cheek – the first one he’d seen her shed. Like most strong men, Adam was completely bemused and bewildered by the sight of a woman weeping. He didn’t know how to deal with it. He no longer had a handkerchief to offer. “What is it?” he asked stupidly. To his amazement, Valenzuela started to laugh.

“My feet hurt!” she cried.

Adam blinked at her. “Your feet?”

She grinned and sniffed and nodded. Adam laid the canteen aside and eased off her boots. She had stuffed her brother’s footwear with the rags of her discarded skirt in an effort to make them fit better. It hadn’t helped much. Both feet had blisters of immense proportions on the toes and the heels: blisters that had broken open and bled. Although he sympathised with the pain, Adam came to the same conclusion that his father had reached many years before him: no matter how long he lived, he would never truly understand women. After all the terrible things she had gone through, she cried because of her feet.

Adam used the torn strips of cotton as makeshift bandages to bind up the blisters. She watched him, her head on one side. When he had finished, she smiled at him sadly. “You are a very kind man, Adam.” Adam got the feeling it about summed up how she felt.

That day turned out to be the hottest they had endured so far. The sun beat down on them without pity and burned into their eyes even when their eyelids were closed. It sucked every last drop of moisture out of their skin. Their patch of shade shrank until it didn’t exist, and, for an hour, they were fully exposed. It was too hot to sleep in the heat of the day; it was only towards evening that Adam managed to doze. The sun had set by the time he woke up, and it was dark before they moved on.

Two days later, their food was gone, and they were down to the last of their water. Adam had lost track of the time and his sense of direction. He had only the vaguest idea of how far they’d come and where they ought to be going. He knew they were nearing the edge of the desert. Here and there he saw small barrel cactus, all leaning east-west – he knew the Apache could extract water, but all he found was a bitter sap – and there were clumps of grey-green desert grasses, well spaced as if planted out by some heat-maddened gardener in even ranks. Adam had tried chewing on the bleached, white bases of the wiry stems in the hope of extracting some moisture. They were tough and dry, and he only succeeded in cutting his mouth.

Valenzuela had ridden for part of the way, but now she walked alongside Adam: the brave chestnut horse was starting to stagger. Adam was loath to leave him behind but he couldn’t see much help for it. Afoot, it became increasingly hard to keep going. Walking together, holding each other up, the man and the woman could only travel for an hour or two in the evening, and in the early morning, before collapsing, exhausted, onto the ground

Behind them, the hunters still followed, but their numbers were much reduced. Adam guessed that there were two or three determined men left. He saw little of them: just an occasional glimpse afar off through the vagrant heat haze. He considered, once, lying in wait for them and trying to pick them off, but they never came close enough for the waste of a precious bullet. They were playing with him, a fine game of cat and mouse, waiting for the heat and the hunger and thirst to wear down his resistance. He didn’t think they’d hold back much longer.

When dawn broke, on that second day, the only shelter he could find was a gravel-lined hollow on the side of a dusty, dry hill. Valenzuela dropped to her knees. “Adam, I can’t go on any further.”

Adam looked around him. He wiped his hand over his face, then knelt down beside her “We’ll rest up here a while,” he said, not looking at her, looking at the distant horizon with the face of a haunted man. “When you feel better, we’ll go on for a way before it gets hot.”

She gazed at him with empty, lack-lustre eyes. “We’re going to die in this desert.”

Adam’s face tightened. “I wouldn’t give Torak the satisfaction of finding us dead.”

Valenzuela managed the ghost of a smile. Adam sat down beside her, and they shared a mouthful of water.  Despite his fine intentions, he didn’t have the strength to get up again - not just then. Instead, he closed his sore eyes for a moment to rest them and fell into a doze.

Some time after noon, Adam’s sixth sense awakened him from a fitful, uncomfortable sleep. He opened gritty eyes and lifted himself onto an elbow. Always cruel, unforgiving and beautiful, now, the desert presented a different aspect. An odd, creeping light cast strange shadows. The wilderness played tricks on his eyes. Everything was hazy and out of focus, as if someone had drawn a muslin curtain over the landscape. A hot wind blew over the ground from the east. Adam scrambled quickly and somewhat painfully onto his feet and looked in that direction. As he lifted his head, a sudden gust blasted grit in his face. The air was a whole lot denser and harder to breathe than it should be.

Adam reached down and shook Valenzuela awake. “Come on! We’ve got to be on the move!” Even as he spoke, the fine, airborne dirt found its way into his mouth.

“What is it?” Valenzuela stirred and sat up. She was slow and unresponsive. “What’s happening?”

Adam grabbed hold of her by the arms and pulled her up. “There’s a dust storm coming!” He shook her awake. “It’ll be here in minutes!” Already, he could hear the rising wind and feel its sting on his neck.

Valenzuela gathered her wits. She blinked at the closing horizon: the steadily advancing wall of dry, airborne soil and sand. The eddying wind whipped hair over her face.

They had no time to stand and stare. Adam took the woman by the elbow and the horse by a very short rein and led them both over the hill. The wind in his back pushed him along.

There was nowhere to offer them shelter, Adam pulled the horse down onto the ground on the lee side of the hill and covered his head with their blanket. It was all he could do to protect it. He and Valenzuela took shelter behind the bulk of the big horse’s body.

Adam was only just in time with his makeshift preparations. The moan of the wind rose to the howl of a woman in torment as a semi-solid mass of dirt and debris broke over the top of the hill and swept down upon them. Visibility dropped abruptly to nothing. Adam pushed Valenzuela’s head down, holding her tightly against him and covered his head with his arms. He tried to maintain a small space to breathe in. He felt the vortices within the storm tug at his hands and his hair and pull on his shirt. A dull vibration throbbed in his bones; a hollow drumming transmitted through the earth.

His world contracted until it was constrained solely within the dimensions of his own body. Blinded, he was confined in darkness with the howl of the storm in his ears and the hiss of his blood and the regular thud of his heartbeat. All that kept him sane was the sure and certain knowledge that this wouldn’t last forever. He lost all track of the time, but soon, it became hard to breathe. Every lungful of air was laden with dirt. It clogged his mouth and his nostrils and sifted into his ears. It got under the collar of his shirt and into the tops of his boots.

An hour later, it was over. Adam felt the wind lessen and fall away. Valenzuela stirred alongside him, emerging, at last, from her own, personal prison in hell. He lifted his head and saw the last dust settle. The desert was the same, and yet, it was subtly changed. Before, it had been silent; now, it was hushed. The sounds of their breathing were loud. He had the faint satisfaction of knowing that the storm had covered all sign of their tacks.

He helped Valenzuela onto her feet. “Are you all right?”

“I think so.” She sounded shaky. She vainly brushed at the dust on her clothes and shook it out of her hair. Her cheek was scratched and, somehow, the sleeve of her shirt had been torn, but she was essentially undamaged and her spirit unbowed.

The red horse was dead. Whether he had suffocated in the storm or if his great heart had simply given out, Adam had no way of knowing. He took the canteen from the saddle. When he shook it, it rattled. It contained, perhaps, four mouthfuls of water – two each. With his hand beneath the woman’s elbow to offer her support, he picked out his direction, and they started to walk.

So, now, it became a battle of wits: one Adam feared he was losing. He played hide and seek with the hunters around the low hills and the boulders and among the jagged, upthrusting rocks. The hunters had the advantage: they were the better equipped, and they knew where he was headed. He had no idea where they were, but he sensed they were close. Keeping Valenzuela near to his side and helping her when she stumbled, he kept moving south.

They rested often. Starved of vital water, they no longer sweated. They sucked on small stones to draw the last of the moisture out of salivary glands and into their mouths. It became painful. Adam found it increasingly hard to maintain concentration. His mind wandered to thoughts of his home and his family. Had Hoss finally married his Mary? Was his father back from his trip? Had Joe’s arm mended well, and was he back in the saddle? Were they things he would ever know? The dry, rocky hills began to dance in front of his eyes.

Valenzuela fell and took Adam down with her. They landed on hands and knees in the dirt. She looked at him and her eyes spoke volumes. Adam unslung the canteen and handed it over.

“Have a drink.”

She took out the stopper and had two, big swallows before she gave it back. Adam took the last mouthful and swallowed it down. He felt it run all the way to his stomach in a stream of cool, molten fire. He hung the empty canteen from his shoulder by its strap, just in case, by some chance, they should find water or a miracle might occur, and it would actually rain. He got up and pulled the woman onto her feet. “Now, we walk, and we don’t stop until we’re out of this desert.”

Valenzuela drew on a deep, inner strength. “We walk,” she agreed through split, swollen lips.

The sky, still filled with a very fine dust, turned brassy in the late afternoon. Adam wouldn’t stop, and Valenzuela wouldn’t suggest it. They both knew that if they sat down they would stay in that place forever. Adam began to hallucinate. He heard music and laughter and the roar of a crowd. Bright lights flashed in front of his eyes; he smelled cigar smoke.

Adam stopped dead in his tracks. He did smell cigar smoke on the afternoon air. He grabbed Valenzuela by the arms and manhandled her roughly and fast into the shelter of a nearby outcrop. She bit her lip at the pain of his grip. “Adam – what..?”

He hushed her quickly. “Sebron’s here –and not far away.”

Her eyes grew wide in alarm. She looked around her in panic. “Where..?”

Adam pulled Charlo’s pistol out of his belt and pressed it into her hands. He knew it contained two loaded chambers. “Do you know how to use this?”

“I know how.” Valenzuela touched her tongue to her lips. She clasped the big gun in both her small hands.

“Stay here with your back to the rock. Don’t let him get behind you. If he comes near you, shoot him.” Adam gave her a grimace that was meant to convey reassurance, but Adam had murder in mind.

He left her there and went stalking, his gun in his hand.

As the light faded, he suddenly felt more aware, more alert and more alive as his final reserves recharged his system. Swift and silent on the balls of his feet, he made a wide sweep through the hills. Sebron had threatened to kill him a long time ago, and now he was here to carry out his threat. If it came down to a duel between them, Adam was determined that he wouldn’t lose.

Her back to the rock as she had been bidden, Valenzuela was horrified to see a horseman silhouetted against the skyline. He rode slowly down the hill towards her, allowing the horse to pick its own way. She didn’t know if he had seen her. She didn’t think that he had. She shrank back against her sheltering boulder, licked her lips with her sore, dry tongue and kept very still. Sebron came close, riding slowly, swaying easily in the saddle and studying the ground. Silently, Valenzuela offered a prayer.

Now he saw her. His head came up, and he pulled his horse hard around. She heard him cry out, “Aha, Señorita!” and his round face slit in a grin. With a whoop that carried a long, long way on the evening air and started Adam running, he kicked the horse into a gallop.

Valenzuela saw the evil smile and the glitter of eyes beneath the brim of the hat. Terror welled from deep down inside her. Forgetting all about the pistol in that sudden surge of fear, she started to run. Sebron rode after her, crowing with cruel delight. She heard the thunder of his black horse’s hooves and heard the grunt of the animals breath close on her heels. She didn’t dare to look back. Running as fast as she could, she tripped and fell in the oversized boots and sprawled headlong.

She heard the horse coming closer. She rolled frantically out of its way. Sebron was bearing down on her; he leaned far out of the saddle, ready to snatch her up in his arms and carry her away. The grin on his face was insane.

Valenzuela brought up her brother’s gun and held it in both shaking hands. She fired twice, and then the hammer fell on an empty chamber as she pulled the trigger again. At that range, she couldn’t miss. Both balls went through the man’s body, front to back. Adam, arriving just a fraction too late, shot him again, in the head. Sebron pitched out of the saddle and the black horse galloped on by, dragging the body by the left foot trapped in the stirrup, the ruined skull bouncing along on the ground.

Adam picked Valenzuela up off the ground and held her against him while she cried out her shock and her fear.

“Horse-thief? Where are you hiding, horse-thief?” The voice was Torak’s, and it came from not far away.

Adam looked all around him, but the Mexican was nowhere in sight. These low hills and rock formations played peculiar tricks on a man’s perceptions. He shoved Valenzuela back into shelter. “Stay here.”

Torak’s voice rang down the valley, now sounding more distant. “Come out, little horse-thief! I know you can hear me. It’s time to end our little game.”

Keeping his head down, Adam climbed the flank of the dusty hill. From the top, he could see into the next shallow valley. The bandit leader was a good way off, sitting his dappled grey horse and looking in the other direction. His hackles rising, Adam crouched down to watch. His clothes, now the exact same colour as the grey, desert dust, were the perfect camouflage. If he kept still, he doubted that Torak would see him.

“You think you escaped me, eh? I let you go! You have led me a merry dance through the desert and cost me many good men. Now it is time for you to die!”

Adam ground his teeth. It was as he had suspected all along. He hadn’t escaped from the bandit’s encampment at all. Torak had been instrumental in letting him go. In frustration he wiped a hand over his mouth. He resented very much being used as a toy for someone else’s amusement, but he wasn’t about to let his annoyance overcome his better judgement. He didn’t underestimate Torak, his intelligence or his savagery; the last thing Adam needed now was to get careless.

Torak turned his head slowly. His dark eyes scanned the hills. “You give to me the woman, eh?” he suggested. “I will make for you a quick, easy death. You make me search for her, and I guarantee that you will take a long time to die.”

Torak was riding down the valley, walking his horse. It was clear that he had no real idea where Adam was. Adam chewed on his lip. He couldn’t shoot a man down in cold blood – not even a man like Torak, but he wasn’t about to be chased any further. Perhaps if he took out the horse… It was a very long shot for a handgun. He had to get closer. Moving with care, he started to ease down the hill.

“Maybe I hand you over to the Apaches,” Torak suggested, addressing the distant skyline. “Those red savages really know how to make a man die. Perhaps I will give them the woman also, when my men have finished with her. They might give me a better price than her father.” His laughter was loud.

Adam took aim. The light was fading fast, and his hand shook more than he liked. He wrapped one hand over the other and steadied the gun in both, hard-clenched fists as he squeezed the trigger. At maximum range the ball went wide by two or three yards, but the sound of the shot, and the puff of smoke from the muzzle gave away his position.

Torak’s head snapped around and his eyes narrowed as the grey horse pranced. Adam ducked down but he had no hope, now, of remaining undetected. The big bandit laughed at him across the width of the valley. “I see you now, horse-thief!” he yelled, and spurred the grey horse in Adam’s direction.

With Torak coming right at him, Adam stood up and pointed the six-gun directly at the Mexican’s chest. He pulled the trigger. This time there was no buck or explosion. He heard the dull, dead click of a misfire and knew, with a sinking heart, that the dirt had worked its way into the mechanism and jammed it. It was his last shot.

Adam didn’t waste time on a curse. He started a staggering run – it was all he could manage. Torak came after him, driving his horse as hard as he could, intent on riding the fleeing man down. Adam heard the horse coming closer. He knew that he couldn’t outrun it. With no clear plan in his mind, he headed for a place that he’d scouted earlier: a place where the ground dropped sharply away.

Adam’s breath hissed in through his teeth. His chest was burning; his legs felt like lead. It seemed he moved slower and slower. He turned to run along the edge of the ridge. The soft soil crumbled from beneath his boots and he heard the stones fall away. The horse was close behind him. He felt its breath on his neck. He heard Torak’s laughter. Sliding on loose soil and stone, Adam dodged sideways, out of their path.

He heard the sound of a small avalanche and heard Torak yell. He chanced a glance back over his shoulder and saw horse and rider go over the edge. The grey horse tumbled end over end. Torak was thrown from the saddle but continued to fall, contained in his own, personal landslide. He arrived at the bottom first and the big grey rolled over him the high cantle of the Spanish saddle digging deep into his ribcage. Torak lay perfectly still. Unconcerned, the grey horse got up and ambled away.

Adam pulled his knife from under the back of his belt and slid down the slope, careful to keep his balance. One way or another, he was going to finish the job if it fell short of cold blooded murder.

Torak was lying flat on his face, arms and legs akimbo. Held in place by its corded string, his hat was still in place on his head. It hid his face. Adam grabbed him by a wide flung arm and flipped him over. Kneeling, he put the point of the knife to the soft spot under the Mexican’s chin and prepared to drive it into the brain with a thrust from the heel of his hand. “You listen to me, Torak,” he snarled. “This is as far as it goes!”

Torak opened his eyes and looked at him from just a few inches away. His breath rattled and rasped inside his chest. “So you are the winner after all, little horse-thief!” he said with the ghost of a grin. “I told you right at the outset – you are a very good man.” His chest creaked again and he coughed. Blood spattered and foamed from his mouth: a bright, bright red. Adam sat back on his heels and watched the life fade out of his eyes. Then he stood up and slid the knife back under his belt. He picked the Colt up from where it had fallen and slipped it back into his holster. Without looking back, he walked away.

Everything a man could want was attached to the grey horse’s saddle – a treasure chest of riches. Adam found food – a bagful of biscuit, dried meat and dark, dried fruit, ammunition to fit Torak’s fancy, pearl handled pistol, even a bottle of whiskey. Most important of all, Torak had left them a canteen more than half filled with water and a canny, desert-wise horse.

Nine

The roses in the walled Spanish garden were dusty and tired. No one had seen to their care in a very long time. Adam stood in the archway and gazed towards the distant, dry hills. He was clean and clean-shaven and dressed in fresh, dark trail clothes. His body was as hard and lean as it had ever been and burned to a deep, nutty brown. There were hollows and lines in his face that would take a long time to fill.

It was a week since they had stumbled out of the desert: a man and a woman, staggering, on the very brink of starvation, with a dappled grey horse leading the way. Adam was rested and fed and his body was healed, but it would take a long time to put his ordeal and the bloody and violent deaths of his friends behind him. He ached for their loss and their shadows haunted his eyes.

A sound from behind him turned him around. Valenzuela had come into the garden from the door in the side of the house. Clad in a simply styled, olive-green dress, she was very much thinner, pale and drawn beneath the golden tan of her skin. She was still very beautiful and her face was serene. She held herself straight and regally tall. She smiled at him; “Adam!”

Adam took off his hat. “I wanted to see you. I wanted to say goodbye.”

Valenzuela’s sad smile became sadder. “I’m sorry you have to go.”

“Don Estaban has loaned me two of his best men to help get my horses home. If we don’t start out now, we won’t get through the badlands before winter.”

“You know Don Estaban has decided to sell the hacienda?”

Almost embarrassed, Adam fiddled with the brim of his hat. “I know. He tells me he already has a buyer.”

“With Donna Marguerite and Miguel both gone, this place holds too many painful memories.”

“What are you going to do? You can’t remain here.” Adam made a vague indicative gesture towards the house. The hacienda was being repaired, but the work proceeded only slowly. Understandably, Don Estaban’s heart wasn’t in it. Many of the rooms were still stained by smoke and not fit for habitation.

“I’m going to the mission at San Alvatore. I shall stay there a while with The Sweet Sisters of Mercy. I shall not be alone. I shall have cousin Laurencia there to look after me.”

Adam shifted awkwardly and looked at his feet. He felt sick and confused, but he knew what a man ought to do. He lifted his head and confronted her bravely. “Valenzuela…”

She held up her hands to stop him, then clasped them demurely before her. “Adam, you are a kind and generous man.  But you must know that I release you from your promise.”

Adam felt his cheeks colour. “What happened doesn’t matter to me,” he said quietly. He wasn’t quite sure that it was absolutely true, but he needed to believe it, and so did she.

With a trace of a wry smile, Valenzuela shook her head. “We must be honest, Adam – with ourselves and with each other. You never loved me, nor I, truly, you.  Not in the way a man and a woman need to love if they are to spend their lives together. We were both in love with the idea of being in love.”

Adam didn’t like to think it, but in his heart, he knew it was true. He had known it, deep down, for a very long time. Although he was prepared to do the honourable thing and fulfil the pledge he had made, he understood that she had removed that obligation. “Will I see you again?”

“I don’t think so.” Valenzuela gave him a courageous smile. “You must return to your life in Nevada, and when Don Estaban has completed the sale of the hacienda, I shall return with him to Spain. He will live with my father in the big house by the bay.”

“And you?” he asked gently. “What shall you do?”

“I think I shall enter the convent at San Rosa Christa for a while. Who knows, I may even become a nun.”

He took a long step towards her and stopped. He wanted to reach out and touch her, to draw her to him and hold her close, but his hands remained at his sides. Although his heart ached, somehow it wasn’t an appropriate thing to do. Already, whole worlds stood between them. He had to ask her one more time for the sake of his own peace of mind. “Are you sure about your decision?”

She put her head on one side and her dark eyes glimmered with just a hint of her former joyous mischief. “I’m quite certain. I wish you well, Adam.”

Adam bowed to her; “Goodbye, Valenzuela.”

Halfway across the yard, Adam looked back at the fine hacienda. From here, the damage didn’t show. The pale walls glowed gold in the bright, early sunshine; the red roofs burned like fire. It was a sight he would always remember. He turned to his horse and stepped into the saddle and rode slowly away into the morning light.  

* Mexican/American war 1846 – 1848.     

References:

‘Cassell’s Dictionary of Modern American History.’

‘America’ by Tindale and Shi.

‘A History of the American People’ by Paul Johnson.

‘The Penguin History of the USA’ by Hugh Brogan.

‘Down Mexico Way’ Web Site.

‘The Mexican Kitchen’ Web Site.

‘The Sonora Desert (Flora and Fauna) Web Site.

‘Surviving the Wilderness’ Web Site.

‘Ray Mear’s Survival’ (The Arizona Desert) Television Documentary: BBC 1 Television.

‘World Encyclopaedia’

‘Encyclopaedia Britannica’

Potter’s Bar 2002.