wandered to the water in small groups, then returned to the bedding ground to
graze or rest. They showed no restlessness, and seemed content to hold to the
low spots out of the wind.
I cut some sod with a machete, and made a wall to protect our fire from the
wind, adding just enough fuel to keep some coals. Miguel was worried, which I
could see plain enough, and so was Gin.
Meanwhile I was doing some figuring. Jonas was in prison, and the Tinker might
well be, so that left whatever was to be done up to me. Gin was with us, which
she hadn’t ought to be, the country being torn up with trouble the way it was,
and somewhere close by was that ship filled with gold.
Jonas needed his share to get his mortgage paid off, and the Tinker wanted his.
As far as that goes, I wasn’t going to buck or kick if somebody handed me some
of that there gold.
Around the fire at breakfast, Miguel told me a mite about Herrara. He was a
lieutenant of General Juan Nepomuceno Cortina, usually called Cheno, and part of
the time he was a soldier with a. legitimate rank, and part of the time an
outlaw, depending on who was in power in Mexico and on his own disposition at
the moment.
Of good family, Cortina had become a renegade, but one with a lot of followers.
He was a shrewd fighter, risking battle only when it suited him, and running
when it didn’t. He was a man of uncertain temperament, but dangerous enough and
strong enough to handle the pack of wolves that followed him.
Frequently, they raided across the border into Texas and had run off thousands
of head of Texas cattle. Yet he had good men following him, too, and on occasion
he could be both gallant and generous. But generally speaking, he was a man to
fight shy of. As for Herrara, he was one of the wolves, fierce as an Apache, and
by all accounts treacherous.
Leaving Miguel by the fire, with his horse saddled, to keep an eye on the cows,
Gin and I rode off through the brush, hunting the water’s edge. We hadn’t far to
go. A long gray finger of water came twisting through the grass, leading some
distance away to a larger body of water like a bay. There we could see the
white, bare bones of an ancient boat, much too small for what we were looking
for … which, anyway, was by all accounts down under water.
My Henry was in the saddle boot, and Gin carried one also. But what I kept ready
to hand was that Walch Navy. I liked the feel of that gun.
As we rode we saw nothing—only a low shore of gray-green grass, the gray water
looking like a sheet of steel, the reeds bending under the wind, gulls wheeling
and crying overhead. Whitecaps were showing on the water.
It might have been a world never seen by man. No tracks, no ashes of old fires,
nothing man had built but the stark white ribs of that old boat.
“It’s cold,” Gin said. Her face looked pinched, and the place was depressing
her, as it did me.
Yet, wild and lonely as it was, the country had an eerie sort of charm like
nowhere I’d ever seen. Toward the Gulf I could see the dunes of sand heaped by
wind and wave, and somewhere out there was a long bar that stretched miles away
to the south, a barren desolate land. In spite of this, the place seemed to be
working a charm on me.
“Let’s go back,” Gin said.
We turned and made our start, riding along the shore. The wind was blowing
stronger, the brush and reeds bending before it. A few cold, spitting drops of
rain began to fall.
The place to which we had driven the herd was in a cul-de-sac, with the sea on
three sides-long arms of the sea where the water had flowed in over low ground
or the working of the waves had hollowed it out.
To the east was a long, snake-like arm of the sea that nowhere was over a
quarter of a mile wide. South and southwest the coves were wider.
The grass was good, and the cattle were protected by thick brush from the worst
of the wind. Most of these cattle had at one time or another grazed along the
shore, and like Shanghai Pierce and his “sea lions,” as he called the longhorns
that swam back and forth from the coast to Padre Island, they were used to the
sea and were good swimmers.
“I like it,” I said suddenly, gesturing toward the country around us. “It’s
almighty wild and lonely, but I take to it.”
We drew up and looked back. The sweep of the shore had an oddly familiar look to
it that started excitement in me. I frowned and tried to remember, but nothing
came.
“Pa must have told me about this place,” I said. “I can feel it. This here’s
where the gold is, somewhere about here.”
“Your father must have been an interesting man.”
So, a-setting there in the chill wind, I talked about him as I recalled him,
big, powerful and dark, straight and tall. An easy-moving man who never seemed
in a hurry, and yet could move swift as any striking snake when need be.
“He’d never let be,” I said, “not with him knowing where that gold is. He’d come
back for it. Ma never wanted him to go back.
“You see, before Pa and Ma met, he had trouble with her brothers, the
Kurbishaws, and over this gold. There were three of them, led by Captain Elam.
The other two were Gideon and Eli.
“I never got the straight of it, although from time to time I’d hear talk around
the house, but they were after the gold the same time Pa was, and they tried to
run him off. Pa never was much on running, as I gather.
“Later on, with some of this gold in his jeans, he went to Charleston and cut
quite a swath about town. And there he met Ma. They taken to each other, and it
wasn’t until she invited him home that he met her brothers face to face and knew
who they were.”
“It sounds very dramatic.”
“Must have been, Pa being what he was and those Kurbishaws hating him like they
did. I knew little about it, but I gathered more from talking with the Tinker
and Jonas … that helped me to piece together things I’d heard as a child.”
We walked our horses on, the dun’s mane blown by the wind. It gave me an odd
feeling to know that Pa had more than likely watched and walked this same shore,
maybe many times, a-hunting that gold.
Odd thing, I’d never thought of my Pa as a person. I expect a child rarely does
think of his parents that way. They are a father and a mother, but a body rarely
thinks of them as having hopes, dreams, ambitions and desires and loves. Yet day
by day Pa was now becoming more real to me than he had ever been, and I got to
wondering if he ever doubted himself like I did, if he ever felt short of what
he wished to be, if he ever longed for things beyond him that he couldn’t quite
put into words.
“You’d like Pa,” I said suddenly. “The more I think of him the more I like him,
myself. I mean other than just as a father. I figure he’s the kind of man I’d
like to ride the trail with, and I guess that’s about as much as a man can say.”
Ahead of us I saw a mite of grass bunched up, and I drew rein sudden and felt my
breath tight in my throat. Gin started on, but when she saw my face she stopped.
“Orlando, what is it?”
It was a small tuft of grass kind of bunched up, and some other grass stems had
been used to tie a knot around the top of the bunch. There it sat, kind of out
of the way and accidental-like, but it was no accident. Maybe many men used that
trail marker—no doubt Indians did. But I knew one man who’d used it, and who
knew I’d spot such a thing.
My Pa.
“Gin”—I couldn’t speak above a whisper—”Pa’s been here.”
She looked around, her eyebrows raised a little. “Of course, when he found the
gold.”
“No … recent. Maybe the past two or three days.”
Swinging down, I slid an arm through the loop of the bridle reins and squatted
down to look closer. That marker had been made within the past couple of days,
for the broken grass used to tie around the bunch was still green.