Dust settled on their faces and necks. Jordan felt his neck growing raw from the chafing of his collar, stiffened as it was by sweat and dust. His head ached, his mouth was dry, yet they pushed on and the heat waves moved in closer around them, blotting out the distance, leaving only a vast shimmering waste.
Twice, for short times, they rested. Each time the dust clouds seemed closer.
“You know this country?” he asked.
“Down here? No.”
“There is a place, the Canyon de Los Embudos,” he said. “Do you know it?”
“It is an Apache place.”
“There is water,” he said, “and a place to hide.”
The country became increasingly broken and again they mounted. Yet before many miles had passed Sutton’s horse began to stumble. The big red horse Jordan rode had rested well and fed well. The distance seemed as nothing to him. They dismounted again and walked on but Sutton’s horse fell and lay there in the sun.
“Take the food and the rifle,” Jordan said. “We’ll leave him.”
“He will die?”
“No … after the sun goes down he’ll get up. He will find water then or join them when they come up.”
So they walked on but his strength had not returned and after a while the horizon began to weave and dance before him and the mountains became like liquid and he went to his knees. He got up at once and started on, tearing his collar wider. The gun belts and pistols chafed his thighs.
They looked back and there were no dust clouds. He looked ahead and three Apaches on ragged ponies stared stone-faced into their eyes. It was too late for the rifle and he did not know if his hand was strong enough to hold a gun.
From under his black hat brim he looked at them. Three tough men of the desert, their finely muscled bodies shaped like the land itself, of rock and sinew. Being Apaches, they would have seen the dust clouds and they would be wondering about them.
Jordan gestured at their back trail “Enemy,” he said, then indicated Maria Cristina’s battered face and touched his gun.
They were impassive, their black eyes studying him. He was sunburned and as dark as any of them, only his eyes were gray. Maria Cristina looked at them but said nothing. Her man was talking and this was man’s business.
“Indio?” An Apache pointed at her.
Jordan gave the sign for half, then indicated himself with the same sign. This last was not true but he had the features and could have been and the idea might help.
The Apache with the red headband turned and pointed. “Embetdos,” he said.
“Si,” Jordan replied and when the Apaches drew aside, they went on, walking slowly. Neither of them spoke, neither made a sound until they were hidden in an arroyo. Then he swung quickly to the saddle and with Maria Cristina behind him rode rapidly until several miles were behind them.
Hours later, his feet aching and his body utterly exhausted, he was still moving. Yet now the terrain had changed. They had entered a weird jungle of Spanish dagger, cholla and Joshua, all broken by the remains of an ancient lava flow. The spaces between the cacti and the fallen black chunks of kva were crowded with brittle bush.
For what must have been six or seven miles they inched their way through this barrier, at times at a loss as to how to go forward; then, mounting a hill amid a thick forest of cholla, they suddenly looked into a ravine that was startlingly and incredibly lovely.
Below them was water. Not a little water but a large clear pool surrounded by jutting kva. Shading the pool were sycamore, ash, willow and buckthorn. And down near the edge of the pool were several small open places where they could see the remains of old fires.
Dismounting, Jordan led the way down the steep path to the water’s edge. Following along the shore under an overhang of lava they came to a small clearing among the trees, completely shaded and masked from view by a curtain of willows. Here they stopped. With almost the last of his strength Jordan stripped the saddle from the red horse and put him on a picket rope.
Then without a word he stretched out and went immediately to sleep, a sleep through which horses raced and guns barked and where he was endlessly falling over blocks of lava into acres of cholla.
When he awakened it was dark and cold but a blanket had been thrown over him. Faintly he smelled a wood fire. He rolled over and sat up.
“There is food,” Maria Cristina spoke from die shadows. “By the fire.”
He stumbled to the edge of the pool and bathed himself, mopping his face and body dry with his shirt. Wrapping himself in a blanket, he went to the fire.
There was a pot of stew and he ate hungrily, then ate from a stick of tortillas. Then he sat down, looking at the moonlight’s reflection on the dark water, listening to the night sounds and drinking coffee.
“Suppose Lantz knows this place?” he asked.
“Who knows?”
She was silent for a time. “He is a devil … but not so bad as the rest.”
They needed rest, the horse needed rest. To go on in the night was out of ihe question. They would just take a chance. They must stay.
“My father … he knew of this place. It is a place of ihe Indies, of the Apaches. They come here to make talk — but not often, I think.”
He got up stiffly, every muscle complaining, and going to his saddle he got his bed roll. He spread out his blankets and took off his boots.
When he had stretched out he said, “I am sorry about your face.”
“It is nothing.”
“The man I killed?”
“Si … Jack Sutton.”
He drew the blanket about his shoulders and settled down to rest. Once, lifting his head, he glanced around. She sat unmoved and unmoving, her profile etched sharply against the sky beyond the lake. He started to speak, then changed his mind and lay down. In a moment he was breathing deeply and steadily.
Maria Cristina hunched the blanket around her shoulders and looked at the water. She said nothing; she thought nothing; she was at this moment an Indian, at one with her world.
Fifteen miles back, huddled under an escarpment of sandstone, Hindeman and his men made dry camp. It had been a day of defeat, of heat, dust and cacti.
At dawn they had found Jack Sutton. He had been shot dead and it had been good shooting. His gun, unfired, lay near his hand. Looking down at the body, Buck Bayless felt a moment of shock, of near terror. What kind of a man was Jordan?
Wounded unto death, he escaped. Days later he came from hiding and left not a ghost of a trail and now he had slain Jack Sutton. Buck Bayless felt his courage draining from him. He felt sick and whipped.
Wes Parker touched his tongue to his lips and stole a careful look at Hindeman. Yet he knew Hindeman would go on. It was a trait of Hindeman’s that he had admired. Now he cursed it
Ben Hindeman could feel no remorse. Sooner or later he would have had to kill Jack Sutton himself or be killed. Now the man was dead, finished. “Woman crazy” he said aloud. “If he left her alone, he’d be alive.”
“She’s a curse,” Buck Bayless said resentfully. “Shell be the death of us all. Let her go, I say, and good riddance.”
Ben Hindeman was angrily impatient “We can let her go,” he said, “but we can’t let him go. If one man can wipe his feet on the Sutton-Bayless outfit, we won’t last out the year. We kill him or we all go.”
He swung a wide arm at the country. “There’s fifty outfits in Arizona and New Mexico who want our graze. There’s two or three mighty near strong enough to do it. Like John Slaughter… that’s why I kept Jack and Mort from going that way.”
They were still there when Mort Bayless came in with four men. These were the tough ones, the men with a reason to want Trace Jordan dead. Mort Bayless had used an argument they could understand. “We got him runnin’,” he said. “You think he’ll let up if we quit? Not by a damn sightl
“He’ll bide his time an’ he’ll come back. Folks will talk; he’ll know who got his horses. He’ll hunt down every man-jack of us, you’ll see!”
He knew men-fears because he knew his own. This was a danger they understood. Jordan was a tough man and they had been fools to listen to Jack Sutton. Beside the fire they hunkered down and made war talk.