“I’m okay,” said Rose.
“Let’s inspect the damage.”
The tire was in shreds, but worst was the fact that the rear axle was jammed across a sizable rock.
“Jesus!” Villa said. “The horse is dead.”
“Not so fast,” Dillinger said, getting down on his hands and knees and inspecting the situation. He glanced up. “It seems to me that if we raise her on the rock with the jack and give her a good push, she should roll clear soon enough.”
It was a solution so ludicrously simple that Rose laughed out loud in relief.
Dillinger got the jack from the trunk and positioned it under the part of the axle that was free. Villa started to pump. Gradually the Chevrolet lifted.
“Okay,” Dillinger said. “Let’s try.”
It took both of them and Rose all their strength. For a moment, it looked as if the plan wasn’t going to work, and then the jack tilted forward and the Chevrolet ran free.
Dillinger had a spare, and the tire change took only minutes.
“Okay, let’s push on.”
Villa said, “One thing, my friend. I know Rivera of old. Even if we succeed in this matter, he will send me back to prison to face a firing squad.”
“And me?” Dillinger said.
“My observation tells me that it would be unwise to turn your back on him.”
They got back into the car. Dillinger said, “So why don’t you make a break for it while the going’s good?”
“Because there is the child to consider. Because I am a man, and Rivera is not,” Villa said simply. “The same for you, I think.”
Dillinger smiled. Knowing Rose was listening to their exchange, he said, “It’s what we think of ourselves that’s important.”
He pressed the starter and drove away, singing another of the Hit Parade tunes that reminded him of home, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”
Sixteen
Dillinger waited for Villa beside the Chevrolet, the Thompson ready in his hand. There was the sound of falling stones, and the Mexican came down the slope through the brush above him, his clatter waking Rose in the back seat.
“Nobody there,” Villa said. “We’ve beaten all of them to this place, amigo.”
“Great,” Diliinger said. “So what if Ortiz and his band arrive first? Long odds for the two of us.”
“Three of us,” Rose said.
“True, but the only well is inside the chapel,” Villa said. “He will need water before trying the desert. If we are inside and he is out…” He shrugged.
“Okay. What about the car?”
Villa glanced at the steep walls of the arroyo on either side. “We leave her here and go the rest of the way on foot.”
“The hell you say. Look, Villa,” Dillinger said, “those Apaches find this heap, they’ll burn it or kick it to death. I want this car. I love it.”
Rose had wandered around a bend. “Hey, car-lover,” she called out. “Come and see.”
Villa followed Dillinger past the curve to where there was a huge recess between the stones, a shallow natural cave. “Drive your true love in here,” Rose said. “If you throw a few branches over it, they’ll never see it unless they smell the gasoline first.”
It was, both Villa and Dillinger agreed, a perfect hiding place. Dillinger impulsively kissed Rose on the cheek. “Leave it to a woman.”
Dillinger drove the car in as far as he safely could, and then the three of them, like kids, threw brush and branches on it till it nearly disappeared from view.
“Let’s go,” Dillinger said.
“Our leader leads,” Rose said to Villa.
“I mean it,” Dillinger said. “We don’t want to get caught here, the three of us against a mob of them.”
And so, over the barren mountainside, through brush and shale, they finally came over the rim of an escarpment. With a rush of feeling, Dillinger saw the chapel.
It stood foursquare to the winds, firmly rooted into the ground at the very edge of a small plateau perhaps twenty-five yards wide and bordered by a few scattered pines and a tangled thicket of greasewood and mesquite.
The chapel itself was built of granite with a roof of overlapping stone slabs about twenty feet above the ground. The door was of heavy oak bound with iron, and there were two narrow arched windows on either side and a row of similar windows under the eaves.