Chapter 16
They rode out at dark, the four of them, Ruiz in the lead again.
Del was on the gray, which was the stronger horse and less likely to tire if things went long.
He was trailing a horse for Elena. Will and Isum would go into the hacienda and bring out Elena, Lupita and Carlos.
The night was clear and very dark and the desert moved past on both sides without sound.
Ruiz had ridden this road to the hacienda twice in the past two days on business of his own.
He knew where the wall patrols turned at their corners and how long each circuit took.
He put them in a shallow draw four hundred yards east of the gate just before midnight, and they waited there with the horses.
Del sat his horse in the dark and did not speak.
He was dressed in the plain clothes Morales had found for him and he had his own Colt, which Isum had kept in his saddlebag since the night of the jailbreak.
He held it in his right hand with his arm resting across the saddle horn, easy, the way he always held a gun when he was thinking about something else.
As they looked at the hacienda over the gate, Del asked, "Whose room has the lamp?"
"That's Vega," Will said. "North side, second floor."
At twelve fifteen Ruiz touched Will's shoulder.
"Patrol just turned the northwest corner. You have forty-five minutes before they come back around."
Will nodded. He looked at Isum. Isum nodded back.
"Del," Will said.
"I'm here."
"You wait at the gate with the horses. When we bring them out you ride north. Don't wait for us to mount, just ride. We'll catch you."
Del said nothing, which Will hoped meant Del had heard and accepted it.
Will and Isum moved to the gate on foot.
The single gate guard was a young man who was not asleep but was not paying the kind of attention he should have been.
He was looking south toward the hills rather than east along the wall where the two men were coming from.
Will came in from the right and put his forearm across the man's throat from behind and held it there until the man's knees buckled and then lowered him to the ground.
The man would have a sore throat in the morning and would remember very little.
Isum lifted the gate bar from its bracket and pushed the heavy timber door inward six inches. They went through.
The courtyard was still. The forge and stable were dark on the south wall. The main house above the portal showed one lamp burning in an upper window on the north side, Vega's room. The east wing was dark.
They crossed the forty varas of packed dirt at a walk, not running. Running made noise and drew the eye. A walking man in the dark was a shadow. They reached the blue door.
Will knocked twice, soft, the back of his knuckle.
A pause. Then a low voice on the other side, a man's voice, unhurried. "Sí."
The door opened inward and Ortega stood in the frame, a heavyset man in his forties with a lantern turned very low in his hand. He looked at Will and Isum and said, "Se han ido." They're gone.
Will looked at the man, "Gone where?"
"The patrón has taken them to the old silver mine."
"Where is it?"
"To the west at Santa Lucia," Ortega said. "A rider came from Fuentes, and the patrón moved quickly this afternoon."
"?Dónde está Lupita?"
"Upstairs."
Will scaled the stairs and knocked. Lupita opened the door. "What happened?"
"Vega found out Del was out of jail," she said.
"He was frantic. I've never seen him so agitated.
He called his men together and moved Elena and Carlos to his old silver mine thirty miles west of here at Santa Lucia.
They call it El Torreón because of the giant tower that was used to protect the mine workers from the Apaches. "
"Where's Vega?" Will asked.
"He went with them."
"Means all bets are off," Isum said. "He's making it harder for us, but now we gon' have to whip his ass."
"Alright, let's go," Will said. "We gotta tell Del, and he's gon' be some riled."
Lupita grabbed up her little bundle of clothes and followed Will and Isum back to the gate.
When they came through without Elena and Carlos, Del knew something was wrong. "What is it? Where's Elena? Where's Carlos?"
"Fuentes sent word that we broke you outta jail," Will said, "and Vega took them west to a silver mine that he owns. I'm told it's about thirty miles from here."
Vega himself had come to their rooms after supper, with his hat in his hands. He was agitated, the first time Elena had seen him anxious.
"Se?ora," he said, speaking quickly. "I am sorry for the hour, but we have to leave immediately," still trying to maintain some sense of decorum.
Elena stood in the doorway with the lamplight behind her. Carlos was at the table writing something on a small tablet. He stopped with his pencil held steady in his right hand and stared at his mother.
"Leaving for where?"
"West. There has been trouble on the Parral road. Men asking questions in town. Rough men." He turned the hat brim through his fingers. "I would not forgive myself if harm came to you under my protection."
"Your protection," Elena said.
"Yes, se?ora."
"Is that what this is?"
Vega smiled the way he always smiled, with his mouth and nothing else. "Pack only what you need. The nights are cold in the higher foothills where we are going. Bring the boy's coat."
Elena sighed, realizing she had no choice. "I'll gather up our belongings."
Vega put his hat on and walked quickly down the stairs. Through the window Elena watched him cross the yard to where his riders waited with a carriage and a team already in the traces. They had been ready before he ever knocked.
She packed the one valise. She put in Carlos's coat and his spare shirt and her own things, and she folded her gray traveling dress on top where she could reach it. Carlos watched her from the bed.
"Are we going to see Papa?"
"Not tonight."
"When?"
"Soon," she said. "Keep your boots on."
They went out into the dark and a rider handed her up into the carriage.
There was no moon yet. The lights of the rancho fell away behind them and the carriage took the west road at a good pace, and she understood then why they traveled at night.
No one in Parral would see which road they took.
No storekeeper, no drunk outside a cantina, no boy watering a mule.
There would be no one to answer when a tall American came asking.
The night was quite light when the moon rose over the eastern horizon and the stars glistened above them.
Carlos leaned against her arm. She thought he would sleep but he stayed awake, and after a while she began to play a game with him, quietly, the two of them at the window.
"What was that we crossed just now?"
"A bridge over a creek," Carlos said.
"A dry creek. Remember it. What kind of tree was that, back there in the wash?"
"A big one."
"A cottonwood. Split down the middle. The lightning did that. Say it back to me."
"A cottonwood that the lightning split."
"Good. Now watch for the next thing."
They named the country as it went by in the dark.
The dry crossing, the split cottonwood, a shrine of stacked stones where the road forked and the carriage bore right.
She made him say each one back and told him a boy who could remember a road was worth two men who could not, and Carlos took to it the way he took to everything, seriously, his face at the glass.
Across the carriage Vega watched them with his hat over his knee.
"He is a bright boy," Vega said.
"Yes," Elena said. "He is."
"He favors you."
"Mostly he favors his papa," she said.
Vega turned away as if she hadn't said it. The carriage rocked along and the fork fell away behind them and Carlos, without turning from the window, said, "Why is papa not coming with us?"
One of the riders alongside them laughed, a short ugly sound in the dark. Vega turned his head and looked at the man and the laugh stopped like a door shutting.
"Your papa has business," Vega said to the boy. "When it is finished, he will follow."
Carlos looked at his mother. Elena said nothing. She put her arm around him and looked out the window, and her silence rode with them the rest of the way.
They came to Santa Lucia in the last dark before dawn.
She smelled it before she saw it, old smoke and mule and something mineral under everything, and then the buildings stood up out of the gray.
A headframe leaned over a shaft with half its timbers gone.
Tailings spilled down the slope below it, pale as bone.
A row of company houses stood along the flat with their roofs fallen in, all but one, a long house with a porch, and there was lamplight in it and a woman in the doorway.
"The superintendent's house," Vega said. "It is not what you are accustomed to. I apologize for it. The se?ora will cook for you and there is good water from the spring. You will be comfortable."
A rider opened the carriage door. Elena stepped down with Carlos's hand in hers and stood a moment in the cold.
The mine shaft was in plain view of the porch. A black mouth in the hillside, timbered square. Nobody said anything about it. Elena looked at it once. Then she took Carlos inside.
A woman named Refugio showed them to a room, and Carlos lay down and was asleep within seconds. Elena lay down beside him, covered them both, and soon she was asleep.
When they awoke at mid-morning, Elena smelled the coffee. When she and Carlos left their room, she saw flowers on the table.
They were fresh cut, blue and yellow, in a white pitcher, and Refugio was frying eggs and there was good bread and coffee. Vega came in while they were eating and stood with his hat off.
"You slept well, I hope."
"Well enough," Elena said.
"I have sent for fresh meat. And there is chocolate coming for the boy." He smiled at Carlos. "Do you like chocolate?"
Carlos looked at his mother. "He likes chocolate."
"Good," Vega said. "Whatever you need, you have only to say it."