Chapter 22
Abe rode south through the dark with the bad leg propped stiff in the stirrup and his eyes down on the ground, reading what the men who’d burned the town had left him to read.
It was poor light for the work but he took what the stars gave him and bent it to his purpose.
The country south of Colinas Rojas ran dry and cracked and pale under the thin starlight, mesquite and the low black shapes of brush and the long flats of caliche between, and a body of horses driven hard across ground like that left a thing a man could follow if he wanted it badly enough.
Not clean prints. The ground was too dry and too hard to take a clean print and hold it.
But the churn of passage, the broken edge of a cut where a shod hoof had come down driving and torn the baked crust of the earth, the scuffed places, the bruised brush where a horse had shouldered through rather than gone around because the men on them weren’t picking their way, they were running.
He read it off the ground a length at a time, leaning down out of the saddle where the light was worst, and built the picture of it as he went.
Eight horses. Nine, maybe. Run south at a pace that told its own story, because men who had done what these men had done in that town and then heard a single rifle take their leader’s hand off in the dark of the timber did not ride home easy and unhurried across the river.
They ran. And they kept their heads turned over their shoulders while they ran, watching the dark behind them for the thing that had cost Flores his hand.
A man who rides looking backward rides slower than a man who rides looking ahead, and gives the thing behind him time to close. Abe knew that. He was the thing behind them, and he meant to close.
He’d been at it perhaps an hour, the leg settling down into its long steady fire and the glow of the burning town fallen away to nothing behind him, the country gone wholly dark and empty around him but for the trail under the horse, when the thunder came.
It came up off the hills to the north and the west, a low long roll of it that he felt come up through the horse and into his own seat before his ears rightly made it out. He lifted his head off the ground and looked at the sky and found it changed while his attention had been down in the dirt.
The thick crowded stars of the early night were gone now across better than half the bowl of the sky, blotted out behind a wall of cloud come down off the high country, and inside the wall the lightning was walking, pale soundless flares that lit the cloud from within and showed its shape and were gone.
He’d seen this weather before. He and Marielle had near been caught out by this same storm days back at the river, had stood on the rise and read the milk-white look of the sky and run the horses for the house ahead of it, and he’d taken it after for a thing that had threatened and passed.
It hadn’t passed. It had only been late to the appointment.
It had spent these days gathering itself up in the hills, building its strength off the whole high reach of the country, and now it had finished the gathering and come down off the heights to collect what it was owed, and Abe and the men he hunted were all of them out under the open sky directly in the path of the collecting.
The first of the rain reached him cold and heavy and scattered, a drop and then another, fat as grapes, dark stars opening one at a time on the pale dust.
And then it wasn’t scattered at all. It came down all at once, the way it came down in this country when it troubled to come at all, as though a great tipped basin had been emptied over the whole of the land in a single motion, and the dry cracked ground that had drunk the first few drops greedily now quit its drinking, filled past taking, and let the rest run off the surface in fast braided sheets.
The trail Abe had read so carefully a length at a time began to soften and blur and stand full of water under his eyes, the broken edges rounding, the bruised brush rinsing clean, the whole story he’d been following washing back down into the anonymous ground faster than he could read it.
He pushed the horse to a harder pace. There was no following a trail through this and a fool would know it, and his one chance now was to close the gap to the men ahead before the rain rinsed them out of the world entirely.
So he rode the last line the trail had given him before it died and trusted the men he chased to keep running the straightest road home to the river, the way frightened men mostly ran, the body wanting the known thing, the way back, and he gave his horse its head on that line and let it eat the wet ground.
The river found him before he found it.
He came down off a low rise through a moving gray curtain of rain and there it was below him in the dark, the Rio Grande, and it had changed near past knowing.
The brown low summer thread he’d lain in the brush above and watched these past days, the water pulled back off its own banks and a man able to throw a stone across the narrow stretches of it, was gone.
In its place ran a thing swollen and loud and visibly climbing, the rain off the whole watershed above it pouring down into the channel at once and the river rising to take it, brown and fast and carrying torn brush and whole small trees riding and turning on the surface of it.
And across it, on the far bank, the Mexican bank, four riders sat their horses in the downpour and looked back at him through it.
He knew the build of the man in the front of them even at the distance and through the rain between.
Broad through the chest and the shoulders, but sitting his horse wrong, sitting it off-balance and one-handed, the way a man sits who is holding a ruined arm hard against his own chest and cannot trust it to so much as steady a rein.
Mateo Flores. Alive, then, and across the water, and stopped there in the storm on the safe far bank to look back across the rising river at the man who had taken his hand off him in the timber.
For a long moment the two of them held there, a bank apart, the climbing river roaring in the dark between them, each looking at the other through the rain.
And Abe felt rise up in him the hard clean want to do the one thing he could not do, to lay the rifle across that water and end the man and the whole of it from where he sat, and the range of it and the rain and the black light all said no to him at once and together, and he knew them right, and he held.
Then Flores wheeled his horse away and rode, and the three men with him put their own mounts down off the bank and into the swollen river behind him, and the horses balked and were driven and went in, and Abe watched three dark struggling shapes and three dark heads hauled hard sideways downstream by the current as they swam it, fighting for the far country and the dark canyon-cut hills that stood beyond the southern bank.
Abe took his own horse down the near bank to the edge of the water.
It balked, and any horse with a grain of sense would have balked, and this one had more than a grain. It set its forefeet in the mud at the waterline and threw its head and rolled its eye white at the brown roaring thing in front of it and wouldn’t go in.
Abe sat the horse a moment in the pouring rain and talked to it, low, steady, the way David had stood in a firelit road a lifetime back at the start of all this and talked a spooked horse down out of its terror with nothing but the sound of him.
But the talking that had served David in the road didn’t serve Abe at the water’s edge, the horse past the reach of a voice now with that sound in front of it, and so he gathered the rein and set his heels to it hard and laid the leather across its neck and took the choice away from it.
The horse went off the bank into the river in a great lurching plunge that drove the both of them under to the chest and drove the breath clean out of Abe with the cold of it.
The current took them at once. Hard, and harder than it had looked from the bank, the way fast water always was once you were down in it instead of above it, and it swung them downstream and the horse’s head went up and back, nostrils wide, and its legs began to churn under the surface, and Abe felt the whole vast indifferent power of the swollen river take hold of the two of them and set itself to having them.
He did the one thing there was to do.
He got himself out of the saddle without leaving the horse, slid half off it on the downstream side and got a fist wound deep in the mane and let the animal swim unburdened of his full sitting weight, and he kicked along beside it in the brown water and hauled its head a little upstream of the place he meant to land, aiming high of his mark the way a man crosses fast water, knowing the river would carry him down onto it while he aimed above it.
And the river climbed even as they crossed it.
He could feel it climbing under them, the channel filling, the current quickening by the minute as the rain off the hills arrived in a rising wall, and there came one long terrible stretch in the brown middle of it where the horse for all its laboring quit gaining ground and only held, swimming with the whole of itself and not advancing a foot against the water, the far bank no nearer, and Abe in the cold roar of it thought the river had taken them after all and meant to keep them.
Then the horse’s hooves struck the bottom of the far shallows, and it lunged, and lost it, and lunged again and found it, and came heaving and scrambling up out of the brown water onto the Mexican bank, streaming, blowing great gouts of breath, trembling in every limb.
Abe hauled himself back up into the wet saddle and got his seat under him and put his heels to the shaking animal once more before it could so much as think of quitting on him, and they went up the bank and into the rain after the four riders, the leg be damned, the cold be damned, the river roaring at his back and the trail of the men he hunted laid out fresh and unwashable now in the soft ground of the far bank.
He had them in sight and ahead of him and he closed the lead they’d bought with the crossing, because his horse, for all the river had cost it, was the fresher animal, not having burned its bottom out running scared the whole night long the way theirs had.
The four led him south and west off the river, away from the green bottoms and up toward the dry rocky shoulder of a mountain that stood dark and streaming against the lightning-lit cloud.
There, in the flank of it, a canyon opened, a dry cut driven back deep into the rock, and Flores and his three men rode hard for the black mouth of it and went in.
Abe came on behind them through the downpour and into the throat of the canyon after them, into the close dark of the stone walls with the rain hammering straight down between them and the swollen river falling away to a roar at his back.