“Eat… there is no time for talk.”
He ate hungrily while she removed the bandage and examined the wound. It looked little better. She bathed it and replaced the bandage with a clean cloth.
When he had finished the stew she took the pot to the spring and washed it, then returned with a piece of cotton cloth wrapped around some tortillas and some strips of jerked beef. “No fire,” she warned, “they look for you.”
She started to rise but he caught at her skirt. She looked down at him, her face sullen, revealing nothing.
“Who are you? Where do you come from?” he asked.
“Do I ask this of you?”
“I want to know whom to thank.”
“Tornado.”
“At least your name.”
She said nothing, standing patiently until he released her skirt. She arose with a lithe movement and turned away but he craned his neck to look after her and said suddenly, without conscious thought, “You … you’re beautiful!”
“I think you talk too much… you sleep.” Yet when she reached the ruined wall she stopped. She did not turn her head but when she had stepped over the fallen stones she said, “Maria Cristina,” and was gone.
He listened for some further sound of her going but heard nothing but the trickling of the water. She was risking her life to come here. To most of the Sutton-Bayless crowd the fact that she was a woman would mean nothing beside the fact that she was an enemy.
Jacob Lantz was the man he feared. Lantz was a man with a reputation. He had been one of the mountain men, had scouted for the army against the Indians, had hunted and trapped where his will took him. He had lived much with Indians, not only the Utes who were his mother’s people but with Navajo and Apache as well. He would watch the girl, knowing she lived nearby and knowing she was an enemy. The wounded man would need food and care and if he was to get it at all, it must be from this family. And Jacob Lantz was not an easy man to outguess.
“Maria Cristina.”
He whispered the name, liking the sound of it in his ears. Spanish, certainly. Yet she moved like an Indian and there was about her an innate dignity as typical of the Indian as the Spanish. There was that dignity and a pride of person out of keeping with her surroundings. These things impressed him.
He checked his guns again. There could be no certainty for him. Every moment was a moment of danger. Each hour might be his last. He was leaving no tracks, yet the coming and going of the girl could not long remain unnoticed.
The food he now had was sufficient for a couple of days if he ate sparingly and he knew he must. There was no telling when she could return. Or if she would.
Whatever path she used must be well concealed, yet the fact that his hiding place was known at all worried him. If found, he would have no chance at escape. It was simply a matter of killing until he was himself killed. He could only hope they would come when he was awake.
He lay back, staring up at the rocks. He was very weak and the slightest movement tired him. It must be days, even weeks before he would be fit to travel. And that was long, much too long. Again and again his thoughts reverted to Maria Cristina. A long time ago, in another life, he remembered women who had such poise and bearing. But that had been in the Tidewater region of Virginia when he was a boy.
What could her blood line be? The Conquistadores? Or that even older lineage, of the Toltec kings?
At times he heard riders in the canyon or on the mesa above, so he knew the search continued. And again he watched the evening come, watched the shadows grow long and waited for that lone star above the canyon’s rim.
Only tonight there were two. One hung in the sky, the other was lower down, somewhere on the mesa across the way; but this was a fire, the campfire of watching men.
Chapter Two
Jacob Lantz was beside the fire and it was seven miles from the ledge on which Trace Jordan lay wounded. Jack Sutton was there with him and a half-dozen others. All were tired and the older men disgusted. The younger ones found it a welcome relief from range work but all were determined. Only Jacob Lantz was tasting the bread of bitterness.
For the first time in years he had lost a trail he could not again find. Jordan had eluded him, either escaping clear out of the country or hiding himself securely.
The trail had simply vanished. Nor was it possible to say exactly where it had vanished. Sutton did not believe Jordan had ever mounted the mesa and Hindeman was inclined to agree. Lantz was positive Jordan had reached the mesa but could not explain why he believed it. He had seen only two fresh tracks atop the mesa and neither could be identified as those of the hunted man.
Jordan had lost blood, much blood. Yet he had kept moving and at no time had he failed to use his head. Such a man was dangerous.
Lantz knew nothing of Jordan but he could read a trail and he knew that Jordan knew wild country and how to cover a trail. And he used none of the obvious methods. Nor had he done the same thing twice.
The country through which they moved was wild and broken. It lay upon the border between New Mexico and Arizona to the north and Sonora and Chihuahua to the south. Water holes were few and the country south of the border was without population for more than fifty miles into Mexico.
In the past there had been bitter fighting along the border but only Pablo Chavero had lasted against the hard-fighting Sutton-Bayless outfit and then he too had gone down. Yet if the hunted man were to get aid from any source it could only be that one family.
“Vicente’s yellow,” Mort Bayless said.
“That girl isn’t,” Hindeman said.
“We’d see it if she helped him,” Joe Sutton argued. “This country’s all wide open.”
“Then why don’t we see him?”
Lantz ignored the conversation, considering the girl. She had no love for any gringo, that much he knew. But most of all she had no love for any Sutton or Bayless. The question was: would she risk all they had by incurring the Sutton anger?
She might…
He set himself to watch the girl. Vicente, he soon realized, was worried. It showed in the young Mexican’s restlessness and in the way his eyes kept searching the hills. A man of lesser perception might believe he knew something but Lantz surmised the truth. Vicente wanted no trouble and with the Sutton riders in the hills trouble could come at any moment
Lantz settled himself among the sparse growth above the canyon. He had his glasses with him and he could watch the movement around the house. His was an infinite patience. Neither hours nor days had any meaning when he was on the hunt and his eyes missed nothing.
At dusk he watched Maria Cristina and Juanito bring in the sheep. They were penned near the house, the big dogs were fed and smoke lifted lazily from the chimney.
Vicente came out and chopped wood. Lantz would see the axe rise, then fall and some time later he would hear the sound, mellowed by distance. The setting sun edged the shadows with somber orange as of distant fires blazing. Jacob Lantz lit his pipe and waited. Now would be the time …
Yet nothing happened. The fingered pinnacles grew tall, the deeper canyons swallowed darkness. Maria Cristina came from the house and he poised like a hound at a vagrant scent but she merely checked the corral bars and returned inside. And then that canyon too was lost in darkness. Only the two visible windows glowed. The night grew cool.
Perhaps he was mistaken. Perhaps they knew nothing. Yet he could go closer at night.
At dusk Trace Jordan rolled from his blankets and, taking his time, crawled to the edge of the cliff. From behind the screen of brush he looked into the canyon.
For the first time he could appreciate the situation. Below him the canyon was less than a hundred yards wide but within a short distance it spread out into a flat. The canyon was actually a hanging valley that dropped off, some two miles away, into the vast flat that lay on both sides of the border and it was upon that flat where Sutton-Bayless cattle grazed.
In the foreground, almost in the center of the widest part of the canyon lay the Chavero homestead. The canyon at that point was well grassed and along the lower slopes of the canyon where it was not too steep to be grazed he could see the telltale signs of sheep-fat, antelope bush and other plants that were excellent stock feed.