of theirs.
After they had gone there was nothing we could do but ride herd on our cattle,
and wait. Sometimes a man is a fool, and I had a feeling that when I left my
mare to go traipsing after gold money I’d been more of a fool than most. I’d
sure enough be lying if I said I wasn’t scared, for that Herrara shaped up like
a mean man, and we were in his country where he was the law.
Miguel took the first ride around, bunching the cattle for night. They seemed
willing enough to rest, being chock full of good grass like they were. Me, I
kept looking up trail toward the border and a-hoping for those riders.
What if Jonas and the Tinker couldn’t make it? What if Herrara spotted them as
escaped prisoners themselves?
“Miguel,” I said, when he stopped by on his circling, “come daybreak we’re
pushing on, riders or no riders. We’re going to head for the border.”
He nodded seriously. “It is wise, amigo. That Herrara, he is a bad man.”
The place where we were was a meadow four, five miles out of Santa Teresa and on
an arm of the sea. There was brush around, and some marshy land.
“That prisoner,” Miguel said, “he will not be taken easily. He killed a guard in
escaping, and he has been much tortured. It is said, senor”—Miguel paused
expressively—”that he was believed to know something of a treasure.”
“A treasure?” I asked mildly.
“Si, senor. It is a treasure much talked of, a treasure of the pirate, LaFitte.
For thirty years and more men have sought it along the shore to the north. Most
of all, Antonio Herrara and his father, the commandant of this area.”
What could a man say to that? Only it made me itch all the more to get that herd
moving. “Miguel, an hour before daylight we will start the herd. Twenty miles
tomorrow.”
“It is a long drive, senor,” he said doubtfully.
“Twenty miles—no less.”
When the moon lifted, the cattle rose to stretch their legs and move around. Far
off, there was a sound of coyotes, and closer by we could hear the rustle of the
surf. The waters of the Laguna Madre were close by, the sea itself lay out
beyond the bar, at least twenty-five miles away.
Miguel came in and, after coffee, turned in. Mounting the dun, I circled the
cattle, singing softly to let them know that they were not alone, and that the
shadow they saw moving was me. Nevertheless, there was a restlessness in them I
could not explain, but I put it down to my ignorance of cattle.
With the first gray of dawn I stopped by to wake up Miguel.
He sat up and put on his hat, then pulled on his boots. He reached for the big,
fire-blackened coffee pot, and shook it in surprise. “You drink much coffee,
senor.”
“One cup,” I said. “I was afraid to stop for more. Something was bothering the
cattle.”
He emptied out the pot into his cup. “There were at least five cups in this,
amigo. No less, certainly. I made the coffee myself, and know what we drank. It
is a pot for ten men.”
“Pack up,” I said, “let’s move ’em.”
They seemed willing enough to go, and an old blue-roan steer moved out and took
the lead, as he had done all the way from the hacienda. As they moved, they fed;
and we let them for the first two or three hours. Then we stepped up the speed a
bit, because both of us wanted distance between us and last night’s camp.
Most of the time I rode with a hand ready to grab a gun. From time to time I
reached for that Walch Navy, and the butt had a mighty friendly feeling. Nothing
feels better when trouble shapes than the butt of a good pistol.
We kept scanning the trail ahead, hoping for a sign of our riders. Lucky for us
the cattle seemed to want to get away from that place as much as we did. There
were no trees. Meadows of grass appeared here and there, and sometimes there’d
be grass for miles, but between the trail and the sea there was a regular forest
of brush. Here and there were signs that the sea had on occasion even come this
far. The last time must have been the great hurricane of 1844. If there had been
another of such power since, we hadn’t heard of it, but the one of ’44 was well
known.
The cattle drifted steadily. The heat rising from their bunched bodies was as
stifling as the dust. Only once in a while did one of the steers cut loose and
try to stray from the column. But for two riders it was too many cattle, and our
horses would soon be worn to nothing.
Off to the right was the sea … that was east. As far as we were from it, I
turned again and again to look that way, for though we had been close a time or
two, I had never yet seen the ocean. It gave a man an odd feeling to known all
the miles upon miles of water that lay off there.
Somewhere out there, lying on the bottom close in to shore, was a ship loaded
with gold and silver, with gems maybe, and suchlike. Pa had found it and brought
gold from it, and Pa must have come back again after he left me. It would be
like him to let on he was going for fur, then to trail south where the gold was.
Why trap for skins, when the price of thousands of them lay off that coast in
shallow water?
It set a man to sweating, just to think of that much gold. It had never really
got to me until now. And after all, that was what we’d come for. We hadn’t
really come for a few hundred scrawny Mexican steers … I wondered how long it
would take that Herrara to figure that out.
Not that a few folks weren’t buying Mexican stock. With the prices offered in
the railhead towns, it was a certain what folks would do to lay hands on a few
steers. But this gold, now. LaFitte, he wasn’t only a pirate and slave trader,
he was a blacksmith in New Orleans with a shop where slaves did the work, and he
and his brother … now how did I know that?
Had the Tinker mentioned it? Or Jonas? Jonas, probably, when we were talking.
Yet the notion stayed with me that I’d heard it before.
Now I was imagining things. I couldn’t call to mind any mention of Jean
LaFitte—not before we came up to that plantation house after leaving San
Augustine. Not before we met Jonas.
The dun was streaked with sweat and I could tell by the way he moved that he was
all in. We hadn’t come twenty miles, either. Not by a long shot. Miguel dropped
back beside me, and that horse of his looked worse than mine.
“Senor,” he said, “we must stop.”
“All right,” I said, “but not for the night. We’ll take ourselves a rest and
then push on.”
He looked at me, then shrugged. I knew what he was thinking. If we kept on like
this we’d be driving those cattle afoot. We should have a remuda, and Jonas was
supposed to be bringing one south. We weren’t supposed to drive these cattle not
even a foot after the vaqueros left us.
We turned the herd into a circle and stopped them where the grass was long and a
trickle of water made a slow way, winding across the flatland toward the dunes
that marked the lagoon’s edge.
We found a few sticks and nursed a fire into boiling water for coffee. Miguel
hadn’t anything to say. Like me, he was dead beat. But I noticed something: like
me, he had wiped his guns free of dust and checked the working mechanism.
“I ain’t going to no prison,” I said suddenly. “I just ain’t a-honing for no
cell. That there Herrara wants me, he’s got to get me the hard way.”
“We have no chance,” Miguel said.
“You call it then,” I said. “Do we fight?”
“We try to run. We try to dodge. When we can no longer do either, we shoot.” He
grinned at me, and suddenly the coffee tasted better.
I don’t know why I was so much on the shoot all to once, but lately I’d heard so
many stories of what happened in those prisons that I just figured dying all to
once would be better. Besides, I didn’t like that Herrara, and I might get him
in my sights. Why, a man who could bark a squirrel could let wind through his
skull. That’s what I told myself.