“The old fool’s name is Mr. Fallon. My name is Mr. Jordan. Your name is?”
“Rojas!” Rojas shouted.
“Pleased to meet you, Senor Rojas.” Dillinger smiled, extending his hand.
“Enough of this nonsense,” Rivera said. “Get the blackboard loaded. We’ve wasted enough time.”
Dillinger and Fallon stooped to raise one of the packing cases between them. Rojas, to show off, lifted the other easily in his great arms.
“We haven’t got all day to waste while you two fool about like a couple of old washerwomen,” Rojas shouted.
He pushed Fallon out of the way, grabbed at the packing case, and tried to pull it from Dillinger’s grasp. Dillinger held on tight, and with the point of his right boot caught the Mexican on the shin, where a small blow will go a long way. Rojas staggered back with a curse. Dillinger lifted the packing case into the buckboard and turned to face him.
“Sorry, I didn’t see you there,” he said calmly.
The Mexican took a single step forward, his great hands coming up, and Rivera cried, “Rojas-leave it!”
Rojas reluctantly stepped back, eyes smoldering. “As you say, patron.”
“Follow us with the buckboard, Rojas,” Rivera said. He got into the rear seat of the convertible as Fallon slipped in beside Dillinger at the wheel. As they went over the brow of the hill above the railway line, Dillinger offered Fallon a cigarette.
The old man said in a low voice, “What are you trying to do-commit suicide?”
“Rojas?” Dillinger shrugged. “He’s like a slab of granite. Hit it in the right spot and it splits clean down the middle.”
“I hear everything you say,” Rivera said from the back seat.
“I intended you to hear it,” Dillinger replied, winking at Fallon.
Dillinger knew that few men would survive a real brawl to the finish with Rojas. But that in itself was a challenge, something a man like Fallon would never be able to understand. You don’t protect yourself from a bully by kissing his ass.
Dillinger leaned back in the seat, the heat of the day enfolding him, narrowing his eyes. Already the mountains were beginning to shimmer in the haze and lose definition. As they progressed higher into the Sierras, they passed through the tortured land of mesas and buttes, lava beds and twisted forests of stone-a savage, sterile land that, without its gold, was no place, Dillinger thought, for a good, clean-living bank robber.
“I’ve got six cans of gas in the trunk,” Dillinger shouted to Rojas over the roar of the engine, “but they won’t last forever. Where do you get gas out here?”
“You get it from me,” Rivera said. “There is a tank at the hacienda.”
Dillinger made a mental note to get some of that spare gas hidden somewhere. He didn’t want the oats for his horse in Rivera’s exclusive control.
“We haven’t passed another car,” Dillinger said.
“You miss the traffic back home?” Fallon said.
“Miss the paved roads is what I miss,” Dillinger said, laughing. To Rivera he shouted, “When’s this road going to get paved?”
“When hell freezes over,” Fallon said low enough so that Rivera couldn’t hear, and they both laughed.
“What are you two laughing at?” Rivera asked.
They both shrugged their shoulders at the same time. That made them laugh again, and this only aggravated Rivera more. As far as he was concerned, all Americans were just grownup children.
An hour later they came around the shoulder of a mountain and saw an immense valley, a vast golden plain, so bright with heat it hurt the eyes to look at it. At the side was a great hogback of jagged peaks lifting into the clear air, incredibly beautiful in their savagery.
“The Devil’s Spine,” Fallon said, “is what they call it.”
“Looks more like an impregnable fortress,” Dillinger said.
“That’s what it was in the old days. They say there’s a ruined Aztec or Pueblo city somewhere on top.”
Then the shot rang out, its sound dying away quickly. Dillinger instinctively jammed on the brakes. Shading his eyes with both hands, he examined the landscape.
Rivera said, “Probably a hunter.”
“Hunter my ass,” Fallon whispered.
Two Indians came over the hill riding small wiry ponies. They wore red flannel shirts and breech clouts, almost like a uniform, their long hair held back with bands of red flannel. Both of them carried rifles in the crooks of their arms. One of them held the carcass of a small deer across his blanket saddle.