Scorpion (8 page)

There had been seven of the hated Texas Rangers leading the column of gringo soldiers, Rincón explained. Najera, to show his contempt for them and to put fear in the hearts of those who might come after, had cut off the heads of the Rangers and placed them in the jars. Fourteen months ago, Najera had given the same treatment to a party of cattle thieves he had caught in the act. The general’s stock had not suffered a theft since.

The dragoons had made the rounds of the cantinas and brothels surrounding the
mercado,
displaying the general’s “spoils of war.” Arriving back at the Casa del Noche, Najera’s men prepared to place the jars alongside their counterparts in a niche in a courtyard wall fronting Market Square. Counting the cattle thieves, there were eleven jars now. The general’s collection was mounting. Raúl had to admire Najera’s audacity. Mutilating the corpses of the Texas Rangers was an act akin to hurling a gauntlet in the faces of these border riders who had proved such a nemesis to the Mexican populace. By his actions, Valentin Najera showed he was unafraid. He was even daring the Rangers to come and avenge themselves. Indeed, Valentin Najera looked forward to such a visit. After all, jars were plentiful in Saltillo, and the courtyard of the Casa del Noche had space to spare.

V
ENTANA, TRUE TO ITS
name, was a window onto the stark, vast beauty of the Sierra Oriental, the east arm of the Sierra Madre, eight hundred miles of wooded ridges and wind-scoured peaks running from northwest to southeast. The hacienda was a single-storied adobe structure whose roof was topped by a wall tall enough for several men to hide behind and, if need be, fire down at any attackers. The main house, the barn and corral, the stone bunkhouse, and the low wall that formed a square around the site, dominated the center of a gap in a grass-covered ridge that rose like a barrier four hundred feet from the valley floor. Here was the only approach to the Orientals for many miles. Don Sebastien’s land grant encompassed the entire valley, spanning the gap and reaching all the way to the cordilleras, more than thirty miles away. Quintero’s cattle, bearing a double slash Q brand, should have been grazing the wild grasses that carpeted the meadow.

Several miles to the north the desert took hold and the landscape became stark and ancient-looking, home to the spirits of the Old Ones, whose passing had preceded the coming of Cortez and the conquest of the Aztecs, and foretold the demise of the mountain tribes and the death of their culture.

Here in Quintero’s valley, bright yellow trumpet flowers heralded the advent of summer, and warm breezes wafted through the chino grama grass, stirring swarms of bees and dragonflies and lifting hawks to lofty heights. But the ranch that should have been bustling with activity sat strangely silent. The mid-afternoon heat of July and August was weeks away. It was not hot enough to warrant taking a siesta, yet the bunkhouse, barn, and hacienda appeared abandoned. Where were the vaqueros, where were the housekeeper and her husband?

Zion muttered his concerns to the disguised man sitting beside him on the wagon seat as they halted the wagon before the thick heavy-looking front doors of the hacienda. Even more puzzling, there was no sign of any trouble.

“What are you waiting for?” Isabella asked. “I’m tired of this wagon.” She climbed over the side and hopped down onto the hard-packed drive that circled in front of the hacienda. Zion started to caution her, but when Josefina joined her adventurous daughter, he realized there was no holding them back. The women were home. They felt safe here. The fact that the ranch appeared deserted did not seem to faze them in the slightest.

“We’ll bury my husband in the family plot after we’ve all refreshed ourselves with a cool drink.” She wasn’t wasting any time. And judging from the heat and the condition of the casket, that was all to the good. They’d plugged the bullet holes as best they could, but despite their efforts, Don Sebastien’s earthly remains had begun to smell a little ripe.

Ben didn’t care if the place was a ghost town. All that mattered to him was that they had safely reached their destination. Zion no longer needed his skills. The women were home, and the sooner Ben could quit their company, the better. As for the coffin, let the dead bury the dead. A scruffy-looking herd dog poked its head around the corner of a hog pen, and recognizing the new arrivals, darted past a chicken coop, took a shortcut through the empty corral, and came loping toward Isabella, who greeted the excitable animal with open arms.

“Niño!” she called out, and the dog placed its front paws on the girl’s shoulders and proceeded to lick her face while she laughed. The front door of the hacienda opened and an unusual couple in their mid-fifties emerged from the cool interior of the house and stepped into the sunlight. Elena Gallegos was the housekeeper, a tall rail-thin woman. Her long hair hung in two thick braids in the fashion of the Comanche women she had lived with during an eleven-year captivity that had robbed her of her childhood. Her plain features, burned brown from the sun, brightened with a smile as she recognized the wagon.

“My little ones … my poor little ones,” she exclaimed, and left the shade of the porch to gather Josefina and Isabella in her embrace.

Pedro Gallegos, Elena’s husband, held back at first sight of the coffin in the wagon and the stranger in chains clambering down to stand alongside Zion in the yard. He was carrying a shotgun. His sombrero was tilted back to reveal a shock of steel-gray hair. Shorter than his wife by six or seven inches, Pedro looked to have been a feisty ranchero in his youth, and still pulled his own weight about Ventana, despite an injury that had left him with a permanent limp and too stove-up to earn his wages astride a horse.

“Looks like we made it,” Ben said. He held up his manacled wrists, but Zion, preoccupied as to the whereabouts of the other ranch hands, ambled across the yard to join Pedro in the shade of the tile roof that shaded the front windows of the hacienda. The flooring beneath the overhang was a layer of crushed stone that crunched beneath Zion’s boots as he approached the man with the shotgun. “Hey!” Ben called out, to no avail. He turned and found the three women staring at him. Elena appraised him with measured concern.

“And who is this?” the housekeeper said.

“A friend who helped us,” Josefina replied.

“His name is Alacron. That’s the name we gave him,” Isabella interjected. She shook her head and sighed. “He doesn’t know his real name.”

“Ma’am,” Ben said, reaching up to touch the brim of his sombrero as he faced the housekeeper. The chain fastened to the black iron links about his wrists rattled as he raised his hands. Elena’s eyebrows arched, her gaze fixed on the manacles.

“A friend?” she asked incredulously. Then the housekeeper’s expression changed and she moved past Ben to stand alongside the wagon. Oddly enough, Elena did not seem surprised by the presence of the coffin and what it implied. “Then it is true,” she said. The housekeeper reached out and gripped the iron wheel rim for support. When she turned to face the newly widowed mistress of Ventana, her eyes were moist with tears.

“You knew? How?” Josefina asked.

“Father Rudolfo came to dinner two days ago and told us the terrible news. The cousin of Juan Medrano, the blacksmith, came through Saltillo on his way. He came from Linares and brought word of the accident. Juan told the padre and the padre told us.” The housekeeper blessed herself with the sign of the cross. “I prayed to Our Lady that the good padre was mistaken. Yet I knew in my heart he spoke the truth.”

Zion, after a brief interchange with Pedro, stalked away from the hacienda and headed for the barn. Ben rounded the wagon and tried to head him off. His long-legged stride quickly brought him abreast of the black man.

“You forgetting something?” Ben asked.

“I’m not forgetting anything,” Zion growled. “You can bet on it!” His eyes blazed with anger. He reached the side of the barn where someone had leaned a pair of shovels, a spade, and a pickax against the weathered wall. “C’mon.” He tossed a shovel to Ben and selected one for himself.

“Not till you take this iron off,” Ben snapped. “Get your vaqueros to dig the grave.”

“Not a man on the place,” Zion said. “General Najera’s taken every rider for his army. Left a bunch of worthless damn vouchers for over a hundred head of cattle, too. And said he’d be back for more.” Zion retraced his steps to the wagon. “You’ll help me with the burying or by heaven I’ll toss the keys to those shackles down the well.” The segundo spoke without slowing his stride. He was furious at this turn of events. Ben supposed he couldn’t blame the man. After all, from what McQueen had seen of Ventana and heard Zion tell, a twenty-man crew would have their hands full running the spread. A man alone was in a bad way.

But Ben reckoned it was none of his concern. All that mattered now was Don Sebastien’s grave. Then the man called Alacron would be on his way, to his own journey’s end.

They buried Don Sebastien beneath a purple sky. While the sun teetered on the crest of the Sierra Oriental, faint wisps of clouds fine as angel breath gleamed an incandescent gold. Soon would come the bats to dive and dart and sweep through the fading light, feasting on insects and nightcrawlers. But for now, the mourners at the gravesite had Ventana to themselves.

Josefina read from Psalms over an ever-increasing mound of fresh earth. Ben and Zion shoveled the last of the soil into place, closing the final chapter in the life of Don Sebastien Quintero.

“The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. The Lord is good to all and His compassion is over all that He has made.” Josefina spoke the words with care. The newly widowed woman struggled with “gracious and merciful” as if she doubted the veracity of her own words. She faltered for a moment, then regained her composure and finished the psalm. Then she closed the worn leatherbound Bible that had been her mother’s and looked around at the people at the gravesite.

Elena and Pedro were standing alongside one another, their elbows touching as if connecting for support. Worry lines creased their features, their spirits numbed by grief and uncertainty. What would happen to them now? The ranch was stripped of its vaqueros and the haciendado who had ruled their lives with a just and firm hand. What did the new señora know about running the ranch? With the current state of war, she might just sell Ventana and return to the Estados Unidos, leaving the loyal housekeeper and her husband to fend for themselves. These were bad days to be without some means of support. Ventana had been their lives for more than three decades. It was difficult to even consider being anyplace else.

Zion leaned on his shovel, his coarse cotton shirt matted to his compact, well-muscled physique. In the fading light he looked to be made of iron. Ben McQueen waited in respectful silence. Nearly a foot taller than the black man, with eyes that flashed with green fire, Ben intended to allow these people their time of grief. He hadn’t known Quintero, but there was something to be said for a man who could inspire devotion like Zion had exhibited. Still, Ben’s patience was at an end. The chains were coming off now or blood would flow.

Isabella was absent from the gravesite. The ten-year-old had not attended her father’s burial. She had flatly refused, and nothing Josefina could do or say had changed her mind. Even Elena had tried to win the girl over, but she had resisted the kindly housekeeper’s best efforts. At last Josefina had recognized an impossible situation and abandoned her attempts to change Isabella’s mind. She allowed the girl to choose for herself just when and how she would bid her father farewell.

The widow brushed a strand of hair fine as corn silk away from her features and glanced around at the others who had gathered to pay their last respects. She thanked them all. It did not faze her in the least that one of the four, the man called Alacron, had certainly not attended of his own free will. She took no notice of his chains.

The Quintero family plot was located southwest of the hacienda, just within the low wall that encompassed the ranchyard. A lone oak tree offered its shade to those good Christian souls awaiting resurrection beneath the sod of Old Mexico. Josefina turned away from the gravesite and started across the empty yard. The others fell in step.

“Pedro, fetch a ham from the smokehouse,” Elena said, and the vaquero nodded and limped off toward the barn. The smokehouse was located on the north side of the barn, the chicken coop and hog pens on the other. Ben figured that way the hogs wouldn’t have to look upon their eventual fate, all day, every day, till the butcher came. “We’ve bread and wine left over from yesterday’s meal. I should have had something better ready …”

“Nonsense, Elena, that will be fine,” Josefina replied. She looked over her shoulder at the two men behind her. “Please join us, Zion. You too, Señor Alacron.”

“We’d be happy to, ma’am,” Zion said.

“We have some unfinished business, segundo,” Ben said, catching the smaller man by the arm.

“I reckon we do, amigo.” Zion nodded and motioned toward the wagon. “The key’s in my saddlebag.”

The two men walked side by side toward the wagon and the pair of horses they had tethered just beyond the stone wall that bordered the burial ground. The women left them and continued on to the hacienda while Ben waited for Zion to climb aboard the wagon and return with his saddlebags. A moment later he had the key in hand.

“I’m sorry I had to do this. But the woman and the girl were my responsibility. I had to see them safely home. You understand?”

“Sure, I would’ve probably done the same thing if I had been in your boots.” Ben held out his wrists.

“Glad you see it my way.” Zion worked the key in the iron lock and twisted. For a moment the catch refused to turn and Ben experienced a momentary panic. Then suddenly it clicked, the iron wrist cuffs opened and the chains fell away. Ben sighed and rubbed his wrists where the shackles had irritated the flesh.

“No hard feelings,” Zion said, offering his hand in friendship.

“None,” said Ben. “Well, maybe just a few …” His fist shot out in a vicious uppercut that caught the segundo beneath the chin and snapped his head back. The force of the blow lifted Zion a foot off the ground and deposited him on his back in the dirt alongside the stone fence. Ben leaned down and retrieved his Patterson Colt from the prone man’s belt.