Dillinger stopped the car sideways across the road. Rose took the first shot at the attackers, hitting one of them, whose riderless horse kept wheeling around. Dillinger was afraid to use the Thompson at that distance, so he gunned up the Chevy and, his foot all the way down on the gas, ran it straight at the nearest of the Apaches, who lost his balance trying to get his horse out of the way of the charging automobile and slid from the saddle, only to have Villa’s bullets thud into him as he hit the ground.
It was all over. Miraculously, none of Dillinger’s group had been hurt. Rivera quickly checked out the dead Indians. None of them was Ortiz.
Fifteen
There was no sign of the child at the camp. Rivera was furious. Somehow Nachita had made a mistake. They had followed the wrong group.
Dillinger and Rose left the Chevy at the side of the road down below and climbed up to the camp in the hollow beside the well. Nachita had lit a fire and squatted before it, waiting for coffee to boil. He glanced up, and Dillinger walked past him to the crumbling adobe walls.
It was strangely quiet, the heat blanketing all sound, and then a small wind moved across the face of the plain, rustling through the mesquite with a sibilant whispering that touched something inside him.
Was the kid dead? Was all of this useless? He remembered his own childhood, full of hope. When he’d enlisted in the Navy, his heart was high, but he’d hated the regimentation. He didn’t want to be ordered around by anyone. That’s when he went AWOL, got sentenced to solitary for ten days, his first imprisonment. Was all life like that, the smashing of good hope? Or was he just too damn tired now to think sensibly?
Rose came toward him, the Cordoban hat dangling from her neck. Instinctively, she put an arm around him, a bandage around his pain. When she spoke, there was a strange poignancy in her voice.
“There’s nothing quite so sad as the ruins of a house.”
“Hopes and dreams,” Dillinger said. “Gone.”
He turned, looking out over the desert again, and she moved beside him. Their shoulders touched. She started to tremble.
There were so many things he could have said as he held her close for a moment.
“Let’s go and have a cup of coffee,” he said.
The others were sitting round the fire as they approached. Chavasse and Rivera had obviously been having words.
“What’s wrong now?” Dillinger demanded.
“All at once, everything’s Nachita’s fault,” Chavasse said.
“He’s supposed to be able to follow a trail, isn’t he?” Rivera said.
Dillinger poured coffee into a cup, gave it to Rose, and glanced across to Nachita. The old man smiled faintly. “We followed the right pony, but the wrong man was riding him. A game Ortiz is playing. He knows that I am leading you. That eventually we must meet. He wishes it to be on his terms in a place of his own choosing. And now six of my brothers are dead.”
Dillinger said quietly to Rose, “We think of our side, their side. I thought we just won. But for Nachita it means the opposite when Apaches die.”
Rose squeezed Dillinger’s hand, but Rivera didn’t want to hear any of this. He stood over the squatting Nachita, his voice raised, saying, “Where has Ortiz taken my daughter?”
Nachita shrugged. “Perhaps he will cross the desert to the mountain we call the Spine of the Devil. Near its peak there are the ruins of an ancient city. Men lived there long before my people came from the cold country in the north. In the old days it was an Apache stronghold.”
Villa nodded. “I have heard of this place. Pueblo-or Aztec. They call it the City of the Dead.”
“But to get there Ortiz must stay on the old pack trail across the Sierras,” Nachita said. “The well at Agua Verde is the only water before the desert. If he camps on the trail tonight, he should reach there by noon tomorrow.”
“Then what are we sitting here for?” Rivera demanded.