Chapter 17
They left Lupita with Padre Morales and rode out of San Vicente at first light, three abreast where the road allowed, Will on the dun mare, Isum on the gray and Del on his roan, and they took the west road because it was the only road Vega's people could have taken without passing the church.
"He didn't drive her through town," Will said. "A carriage at night, somebody sees it. He went around."
"West is a lot of country," Isum said.
"Then we'll ask it questions."
They asked at a mescal stand where the road forked the first time, an old man under a brush ramada with two jugs and a dog.
The old man had seen nothing, and Will believed him, and they bought a drink they didn't want and rode on.
Past noon they came upon a goat camp in a draw, a boy and his grandfather and forty goats, and the grandfather stood up when he saw them coming, and Will kept his hands on the saddle horn and let Del do the talking in Spanish.
The grandfather talked for a while. Del thanked him and they rode on.
"Well," Will said.
"Carriage passed in the night, two days ago. Six riders with it. The old man got up to quiet the dog and watched them go by." Del's voice was flat and careful. "They took the Santa Lucia road."
"What's at Santa Lucia?"
"Nothing. A silver mine, played out years back. Nobody drives to a dead mine in the dark." Del looked west. "Unless they're scared and running."
They pushed on through the afternoon. The country rose and roughened, ocotillo, prickly pear, jumping cholla and rock, the road had gone to two ruts with grass in the middle, and Del rode out front with his eyes on the ruts and nobody talked for a long time.
Toward evening they let the horses blow in a dry wash and Del stood holding his reins and looking west, and he said, without turning around, "When we get there, Vega's mine. "
"We'll get 'em out," Will said. "Dead certain."
"That ain't what I said." Del turned around. "He took my wife, Will. He took my son. He had me put in a cell on a lie so he could do it, and he'd have left me in there till I rotted or worse. I mean to settle it."
Will let it sit for a moment. Then he said, "You'll settle it in front of your boy, will you?"
Del didn't answer.
"Because that's where it happens, if it happens.
In that house, with Carlos watching. And after, when it's told, and it will be told, it won't be Vega stole a man's family.
It'll be an American came into Chihuahua and murdered Don Rodrigo Vega, and there's a warrant that already says you're a thief, and that story will fit it like a custom boot. "
Will swung back up onto the dun. "We take him alive, Del. We take him alive, or we're exactly what that warrant says we are."
Isum swung up on the gray. "Man's worth more breathing anyhow," he said. "Dead men don't sign nothin'."
Del looked at the two of them. He didn't agree but he didn't argue. He got on the roan and rode, and Will let it be enough for now, because it had to be.
They saw the headframe which stood black against the last light on a rise maybe two miles off, leaning like a gallows built by a drunk man, and below it a scatter of roofs and one window burning yellow.
Will turned them off the road into a draw and they picketed the horses on a short line and ate cold biscuits and jerky, and nobody lit anything.
"We'll wait a few minutes," Will said. "So relax and get ready, but don't let anybody see you."
At full dark, Isum said, "I'll go have a look."
He pulled his boots and put on the knee-high moccasins he carried rolled in his soogan, and left his hat, and was gone into the dark without any sound that Will could hear over his own chewing.
He was gone for two hours. Will and Del lay in the draw with the horses breathing behind them, and out on the flat a coyote howled and another answered it, and the yellow window burned on.
Isum came back the way he'd left, out of nothing.
"Well," Will said.
"Bellied up on the tailings pile, the whole camp under me like a supper table." Isum hunkered down and began his report. "Two fires and a lamp. I'll tell you where everything sits."
"Tell it," Will said.
"Big house with the porch, that's her and Carlos.
Seen her at the window with a lamp, talking to Carlos.
Vega's in the front room, light burned there past all the others.Bunkhouse east of it, six men.
Four inside, two standing watch. One watch on the horse line, other one's up on the rise south of the house.
Horses on a picket line east, strung between two posts, eight head.
Cook shack behind, woman sleeping in it. Spring further up."
"The watch trade off?"
"Middle of the night sometime. Man on the rise pretty dumb, he's smokin'. I could smell him from a quarter mile away."
Will thought it through. "Horses first," he said. "Any man gets past us, he doesn't ride to Parral for help, he walks. Save one of the horses for Elena."
"Then we take the two on watch," Isum said.
"That's right. Then the bunkhouse all at once, before anybody wakes up brave. Nobody shoots unless they're shot at. Del, the house is yours, but you go in last, after we hold the yard. Vega hears a fight start, I don't want him deciding what a man like him decides with your family in reach."
"Agreed," Del said, and Will was glad to hear the word come easy.
They went in afoot before moonrise, wide around to the east. The picket line stood where Isum said.
He took the near sentry first, the one on the horse line, came up out of the ground behind him and had a forearm across his throat before the man's cigarette hit the dirt, and they tied him with his own belt and bandanna and laid him in the grass.
Then Del walked down the picket line with his knife and cut it at both ends.
He led off one of the horses and tied him to a hackberry tree.
Meanwhile, Will hazed the horses off easy, a hat waved low, no noise, and the seven head drifted out onto the flat and began to graze their way toward Texas.
The second sentry heard the horses moving.
He came down off the rise to see about it, walking loose, expecting nothing worse than a slipped knot, and Will stepped out from the corner of the cook shack and laid the barrel of his Colt flat along the man's head, and caught him, and eased him down before tying him up.
The bunkhouse door had no lock. Will went through it first with Isum behind him and Del at the window, and Will's boot heel came down on the plank floor loud as a shot on purpose.
"Rurales!" Will hollered, because it was the word that would freeze them, and it froze three of them, sitting up in their blankets into the muzzle of Isum's shotgun with their hands already climbing.
The fourth went for the pistol on the chair beside him. Isum crossed the room in two steps and brought the shotgun barrel down across the man's wrist, and the sound it made was like green wood breaking, and the man folded up around his arm and was out of it.
Four men trussed with piggin' strings and set in a row against the wall, and the wrist-broke one moaning to himself, and Isum tied his arm to a shingle to keep it straight, which was a kindness the man had not earned.
"Yard's ours," Will said. "Go get your family."
Del crossed the yard alone. The front room lamp still burned. He went up the porch steps loudly, wanting to be heard, and opened the door.
Vega sat at the long table, dressed, a lamp at his elbow and a bottle of wine unopened before him, as if he had been sitting there waiting for the knock. His pistol lay on the sideboard across the room, and he had left it there, and that was its own kind of statement.
"Se?or Cole," Vega said.
Del came around the table and took him by the collar and hauled him half out of the chair, and the Colt came up under Vega's chin, and Vega did not fight it. He hung in Del's grip and looked at him along the barrel.
"Go on," Vega said. "It changes nothing. The warrant is signed. The warrant will outlive me. You will be a thief and a murderer, and she will be a widow in the end anyway, only slower."
Del's thumb was on the hammer. The room was still enough to hear the lamp burn.
"Del."
Elena stood in the hall doorway with her hair down her back and Carlos behind her, his face at her hip, both eyes showing and both on his father.
"Del," she said again. Just his name. Nothing else.
Del stood there for a long moment. Then he let the hammer down easy, and holstered the Colt, and set Vega back in the chair almost gently, the way a man puts down something he has decided not to break.
"You are one lucky cur," Del said as he looked down at Vega. Then he quickly turned around, and Carlos came across the floor at a dead run and Del went down on one knee and caught him.
Elena crossed to them and put her hand on the back of her husband's neck, and nobody in the room said a word for a while.
Vega sat where he'd been set, and smoothed his collar, and watched them, and there was no triumph in his face, only sadness.
Carlos pulled back to look at his father. "I won the quiet game," he said. "Every night. Mama owes me five stories."
Del tried to answer him and found he couldn't. He pulled his son in again for another hug.