The Eye of the Hunter (15 page)

Frances hesitated, then let him glance into her bedroom, trim, white-walled, and fragrant with the sachet he now associated with her. A mandolin lay on a chest of drawers, and Rip Parrish's overdecorated carbine leaned against the wall beside the bed. There were cattails and peacock feathers in a vase, photographs on the walls. He decided to please her by closely examining the photos of her father and asking some questions about him. In return, he got an encyclopedia of information as well as a couple of quotations from Tennyson.

Turning to leave, he decided that the room was so orderly, it might be a sort of refuge for someone whose life was a den of snakes.
And this goes here, and that goes there, and there you have it!
In perfect order, unlike someone's mind.

As the days passed, his strength came back like a pasture greening up. Working under the sun was good medicine, and helping Alejandro conquer stone with two of nature's miraculous elements, fire and water, was heartening: it reinforced his belief that there was a natural solution to most of life's dilemmas.

With bare hands they were ripping a shallow trench right through a steel-hard rampart of ancient rock.

Sometimes, while he was feeding the fire or dragging in dry fuel, he would hear Frances plucking her mandolin, the music floating through an open window. Was she healing her desperate hurts, as his body was curing his? Realizing he must soon ask her about Father Vargas's story, he sighed.

Late in the afternoon of the fourth day, he and the Mexican boy chipped the last bits of granite from the stone dike, cleared away all the debris, and the water began to trickle down the cliff.

Camp Logan now had sweet springwater to drink.

They rode from the ranch yard an hour after dawn the next morning.

Leading a pack mule heaped with gear for a night in the open, Henry felt strong and cheerful, drawing the thin cold air into his lungs and feeling his muscles tingle with energy. He wore some of Rip Parrish's clothing, a double-breasted shirt, jeans, a denim jacket. In the hatband of Rip's John B. Stetson 5X beaver, he wore the owl feather.

Brown as old buckskin, the range began to break up into canyons divided by low ridges. Frances followed a cow trail he could scarcely see, riding confidently across bald ridges and up brushy canyons in a southwesterly direction.

Once, from a ridge, Henry's eye was caught by a flash on a hillside to the south. He pulled his old brass spyglass from its case and focused on the spot where it shone, then relaxed and put the scope away. He had merely seen the sun flashing on a cow's horns.

The episode brought something to mind.

“Where are your cattle?” he asked. “I take it you're resting this pasture?”

“My cattle,” said Frances, “are in some gambler's pocket, as far as I know. Richard went on a lot of buying trips, but somehow never brought any home. I believe there are forty or fifty Mexican steers out there somewhere. All horn, hoof, and hide.”

At high noon, in the shade of a blackjack oak, they devoured some of the big wheat-flour tortillas of Sonora, along with cold beans, Mexican coffee cakes, and cold coffee. Then they rested a few minutes, and Frances reminded Henry to take his quinine. With no whiskey to wash it down, he groaned, beat his breast, and panted as it filled his system with an unendurable bitterness. Frances laughed, lying back against a boulder under a hackberry tree and shooing gnats with a small branch.

“Too bad, but you have to take the stuff, Henry, or suffer the consequences.”

“Did you think I'd take it for any other reason?”

She pointed into the sky with the branch. “Look! That's a golden eagle. He's on our coins, you know.”

Henry found the huge bird tilting in the blue sky above a mesa. “Who told you that? That may be a golden eagle, but the one on the coins is a bald eagle.”

“Then Rip lied to me. He was such a talker. He knew everything there was to know.”

Henry saw a chance to make a move. “Did he know about cleaning guns?”

The branch, tracing huge white clouds, went suddenly still. “He was absolutely persnickety about it. Why?”

“Persnickety people,” said Henry, lying on his side now to observe her reaction, “don't put their favorite hog legs away dirty. That Peacemaker of his was fired once and then not cleaned. That's like not changing a baby's diaper, except that talcum powder won't take pits out of steel. Why didn't he clean it?”

Frances turned also and lay facing him. The dark blue eyes searched his face. He longed to stroke her cheek and trace her lips with his fingertips. He saw her breast rise and fall to a half dozen breaths before she spoke. She said: “Don't rush me, Henry.”

“Why didn't he clean it?”

“He couldn't.”

“Why not?”

“It was in the cabin, with me. You see ...”

Then her eyes squeezed shut and she turned her face away.

Henry placed his hand on her cheek and gently stroked it. “Anything you tell me,” he said, “is in confidence. Consider me your priest—Father Logan. Father Logan has more secrets than a graveyard. But I have to know whether your husband is dead. People are insisting on knowing. People he owes money to.”

She shook her head.

He went on: “When I know exactly what happened, then I can advise you, Panchita. By the way, what's Panchita mean?”

“Francie. Frankie.”

He kissed her cheek. “I like Panchita, or even Francie, better.”

“Considering what happened to Johnny, I do, too.”

“And I really love Frances.”

No answer.

He went on, briskly then. “So if you ... well, think you may have killed him, then you might should stay in Sonora while I get a lawyer working on it. In fact—”

She looked at him. Henry chuckled.

“We could go to Central America and live, if things are hopeless.”

“Oh, they're hopeless, all right, but what would we, I live on?”

“I think I have some money waiting for me down there. In Costa Rica.”

“Well—anyway, I didn't kill him!”

Well, Catalina Cachora says you did, but who'd believe a prostitute? Not Father Logan.

Frances sat up and began tucking in her hair. “I fired the gun. I'll show you the bullet hole—and it isn't in Richard. But first we've got to get there, and I'll tell you the story when you can see what I'm talking about. I can tell you this much right now: He was digging for treasure and living with a Mexican woman. I caught him out. I didn't care—I was through with him, anyway. I just had the bad luck to—to— Let's go, Henry.”

* * *

His first glimpse of the church made him draw a breath of pure pleasure. He thought the narrow wash under the clear sky beautiful, and the glimpse of crumbling adobe walls on a bench above them spoke excitingly of the ancients who had built the church here in the wilderness. But he was not so charmed as to forget the Hunter, and while he looked things over with his spyglass, they held their horses and the pack mule at the edge of a foot-deep stream in the gorge that was only forty yards wide. Clear and whiskey-colored, the stream flowed silently over a bed of garnet pebbles. The afternoon was silent except for the music of a breeze in the stiff-needled little piñon trees. For such small trees, they made a powerful lot of noise. The horses put their muzzles in the stream and sucked at the water, pawing at the gravelly streambed. The cliffs reared up steeply, and the bench with the church walls loomed like the prow of a ship.

Henry used the glass then to study all the higher ground. Near the wash, volcanic towers and domes rose from the trees, looking like old rust-streaked fortifications. What interested him particularly was a bald half dome on the south side of the wash, looming hundreds of feet above the dark green trees that hid its base. Chalky and fissured, it was fringed with oak brush at the top, and halfway down he picked out a bench that looked accessible. But from here he could see no trail to the top of the dome. If a trail existed, it must be in the back. That top would be a fine lookout, though—a sniper's dream.

Frances pointed to a small grove that ran up against the base of the dome. “There's a little meadow in there,” she said. “It's the delta of a side canyon. You can't see it, but someone built a rock wall across it to hold cattle in the canyon.”

“And where's the so-called Lost Mine of the Padres?”

“Just beyond the wall. I don't think you'll be impressed by it. Bats love it, though.”

Henry looked things over once more, removed and replaced Rip's fine Stetson, and said, “Let's look at that church first.”

“Yes.” Frances sighed. “I think a prayer might be a good way to start your investigation.”

Henry was awed by the scope of the ruin. He stood before it with his carbine over his shoulder, like an infantryman. Frances took shelter beneath an old pear tree in the ancient fruit orchard, Rip's carbine in her hands. Weeds and small shrubs grew on the deep mud walls of the church; nothing remained of the roof, and there were no doors. Of the windows only a dozen square openings were left intact, preserved by rotting frames and rusty iron bars. But the structure had been solid and probably beautiful. A portico still stood at the entrance, fifteen feet high, built of rock and mud and with scabs of plaster clinging to it.

He poked around the church like a sightseer, picking up fragments of broken china, thick and blue-figured shards of pottery. He found a large copper penny, black with corrosion. He saw some horse manure which, he was pleased to see, was at least a month old. Finally he decided that things on this side of the wash looked innocent enough. The most sinister indications were an impressive number of glory holes where treasure hunters had dug.

He joined Frances, and they walked through the cemetery. Among the weeds were stone markers and rotting wooden crosses. Some of the graves had sunk a foot or more, leaving shallow troughs. But one of them caught his eye. It was heaped a few inches higher than the earth around it, and the weeds that grew on it were small annuals, not tough years-old shrubs. Someone had been buried here not too long ago. Yet the wooden marker was already rotting. He paused to study it while Frances waited.

“What do you see?” she asked.

“I was just thinking.... You know those assay slips of your husband's? Well, it seems to me they prove that he was finding silver out here.”

“Pooh,” Frances said.

“For a rich widow,” Henry said, “you don't seem very interested in your buried treasure.”

Frances said, “I have seen armies of poor devils march into this county with their maps, and march out barefoot. Every so often, some Tucson printer runs off a batch of treasure maps and sells them, and the poor fools go out there and dig. Richard had a dozen. All anyone ever finds are pieces of broken blue-willow plates like I saw you picking up.”

“But I've seen proof,” Henry said, “that Rip was finding silver.”

“Proof! What proof?”

“A silver candlestick he gave Father Vargas. It's dated 1723 and looks dented enough to be the real thing.”

“That's impossible! He hated churches, especially Catholic churches.”

“Well,” Henry said, “I saw it.”

“Oh, I don't deny that. I just think he bought it somewhere in California, had a date engraved on it, dragged it behind his horse or something, and gave it to Father Vargas to buy God knows what—forgiveness?—probably for some monstrous sin I haven't heard about yet.”

“You don't trust him, do you?”

“If Richard were a clerk,” Frances said, “he wouldn't know the truth if it were filed under
T
.”

Henry laughed. Her head raised haughtily, Frances went on through the cemetery to the trail to the wash. But Henry went to one knee and with his pocketknife dug at the loose earth of the recent grave. Then he dug at the earth a few feet away, and found it much harder.

He read the inscription on the wooden cross:
R.I.P. VALENTINE O'BRIEN, A NATIVE OF BEDFORD, MASS.
1858-1885.

Rest in Peace, Valentine
, he thought,
but I'm fearful that somebody's been digging in your resting place. Because R.I.P. spells Rip, and that was Richard's nickname, and I think if somebody were to dig here, he would find Rip Parrish lying on top of you. What a perfect place to hide a corpse! Somebody with a sense of humor has been here with a chuckle and a shovel
.

When he reached the edge of the bluff, Frances was already halfway down the trail. From his vantage point he studied Rip's little camp. What he could see of it looked like the lair of a hunter or trapper. Traps and ropes and branding irons hung from the limbs of a tree, and there was a small rusty sheet-iron oven. A huge stump near a fire ring had been cut into the shape of a barber chair. A small rock house was crowded so closely against the cliff that the bluff itself formed its back wall.

He raised his gaze beyond the camp to the small meadow where the side canyon emptied into the wash. Hardly fifty yards wide, the canyon was sealed by a fieldstone wall running from east to west.

From the bottom of the trail, Frances was waving at him. Henry put the '95 Winchester on his shoulder and headed down the bluff, feeling tired after the long ride, and apprehensive at the thought of what he might be about to learn from Frances.

When he reached the camp, she was already busily throwing off the diamond hitch across the pack mule's load. She let him help her but had no intention of quitting. She had energy. She also possessed beauty, played a musical instrument, and could quote poetry. What more did a ranchwoman need? A man, obviously.

“It's going to be dark in an hour,” she said, “and we don't want any light here. Why don't you look at that big stump while there's enough light to see it? That's where I think Richard died.”

“Oh, so you do think he's dead?”