Chapter 18
Will came in and stood by the door, taking the room in, Vega at the table, the family on the floor by the hall.
"Anybody hurt?"
"No," Elena said. "We are well."
"Then I'll trouble you for the table, Elena. Don Rodrigo and I have business."
They sat across from each other, Will and Vega, and Will laid out paper he'd brought folded in his coat, and pen and ink he'd found on the sideboard by the pistol Vega hadn't reached for.
"Here's how I see your situation," Will said.
"Your six men are tied up or run off. Your horses are grazing their way to the Rio Grande.
Come sunup, I can throw you over a saddle and deliver you to the jefe político in Parral trussed like a calf for branding, and every man, woman and burro on the plaza can watch Don Rodrigo Vega carried in on his belly like a common criminal.
I expect the story would travel. Stories like that always do.
I expect President Diaz himself would laugh when he heard the story.
Vega said nothing.
"Or," Will said, "you can write, in your own hand, that on such a date you took Elena Cole and her son Carlos from Parral and held them at the Santa Lucia mine against her wish, and that Delbert Cole had no part in any horse theft, and that the charge was a total mistake, for which you apologize.
Date it and sign it, and the padre's name will go on it as witness when we pass back through. "
"And in exchange."
"In exchange you walk out of this the same man you walked in. On your own feet, in your own clothes, with no story about the plaza. That's the whole trade, and it's better than you would have given him."
Vega looked at the paper for a long time. Then he drew it to him and picked up the pen.
"You understand this paper is nothing in Chihuahua," he said as he wrote. "Fuentes holds the warrant. Fuentes is not mine to call off. The wire has gone out already, se?or. It went the day you broke your friend out of jail. You will find that out."
"Maybe so," Will said. "But I still want the paper. It'll give the lie to the warrants. Sign it."
Vega signed it. Will blew on it, waited for the signature to dry and read it through before folding it into his coat, against his chest, where his money rode.
They put the six men afoot at first light with their boots on and as many canteens as they could carry. Isum emptied their guns and reluctantly threw them down the shaft, where they made a long falling clatter and then nothing.
"Man, I hate to throw them Winchesters away," he said, "but we got to do it."
The wrist-broke vaquero they set up in the shade with his arm sling.
Vega stood on his porch in his good coat and watched Will's party mount up.
He did not curse them or plead but stared steadily at Elena, who looked east along the trail, refusing to give Vega the satisfaction of even a passing glance.
It was thirty miles to Vega's hacienda, and a good walker could make it in eight or ten hours, except for one thing, the Chihuahuan desert, which would suck their will to walk fast before an hour was up. It would take more like two days to get there.
They rode out at full sunup, Elena on one of the recovered horses with Carlos up before Del, and as the mine fell away behind them Elena began the game again, quietly, in reverse.
"What will we come to first?"
"The shrine," Carlos said. "The stacked stones, where the road forks."
"And then?"
"The cottonwood with the lightning split. And then the bridge over the dry creek."
"And then?"
"Parral. And then home."
"Yes," Elena said. "Say it all back to me again."
He said it all back. The road she had learned going in carried her family out, landmark by landmark, and by eight that morning the headframe was gone from the skyline behind them and the country ahead was open desert.
They headed straight for San Vicente, where they picked up Lupita and thanked the good Padre Morales for his help. Will asked for and got his signature on the document Vega had written. From there, they struck north avoiding all towns.
Two days in they came into the village of San Isabel with a church and a well and a livery, and it was at the livery they learned how much trouble they were in.
The liveryman was old and bowlegged and glad of the custom. While he forked hay he talked, the way livery men do, and Del stood in the runway and listened with his hat pulled down.
"Rurales had been through twice this week," the old liveryman mumbled.
"Paper from Capitán Fuentes in Parral, gone out on telegraph to every post in Chihuahua.
Lookin' fer an American, tall, dark headed with a black cavalry mustache, riding a blue roan, wanted for horse theft, and there's a hundred peso reward.
"The corporal read it out on the plaza, recited every word." Then he looked at Del's roan standing in the runway and then at Del, and went on forking hay.
"He knows," Isum said outside.
"He knows," Del said. "He also kept forking hay."
"He won't keep quiet forever. Not with a reward out there."
They gave the old man ten dollars, more than he'd seen in a long time. They thanked him for his help and rode out within the hour to make a dry camp north of the village.
When they'd settled their horses, Will had been thinking about their problem, and when they stopped to give the horses a blow, he laid the problem out for them like a hand of cards.
"Fuentes doesn't need to catch you," he said.
"He's already everywhere you're going. That wire beat us north before we ever left the mine.
Every station, every post, every plaza. We're racing a thing that's already finished the race. "
"The wire is faster than any horse ever foaled," Isum said. "My granddaddy said the same about steamboats and he was right then too."
"So here's what we do," Will said. "We stop being what the warrant describes. It says a lone American on a blue roan. So there's no lone American and we get rid of the roan."
The next day, they traded the roan at a rancho for a plain bay gelding and ten dollars to boot, and Del stood a minute with his hand on the roan's neck before he let the halter go, and he took the bay and rode on and didn't look back.
The name went the same night, around the fire.
"Delfino Hidalgo," Elena said. "My family's name. You have as much right to it as any man alive, and the letter carries it already."
The letter was Padre Morales's doing, written before they'd ridden west, in the padre's own square hand with the parish seal below it, commending to all authorities the Hidalgo family of Parral, traveling north to the se?ora's people, and asking Christian courtesy for them on the road.
Will had carried it folded with Vega's paper and thought it might never be needed. He handed it across the fire to Del.
"Delfino," Will said, his Mexican accent perfect.
"It was my grandfather's name," Elena said. "He was a hard old man and lived a long life."
"Well," Del said with a laugh. "That's some kind of recommendation."
They settled the rest of it plainly. A family of four, wife, husband, child and aunt, all respectable, traveling north to a sick relation, and two Americans on the same road who did not know them, close enough to watch and no closer.
They would strike the railroad at Santa Rosalía and ride the cars to Chihuahua City and on north to El Paso, because Carlos was worn thin and Elena was worn thinner, and there was no sense riding four hundred miles of Rurales country on horse when the train ran through it in two days.
"Santa Rosalía," Will said. "Small station. We'll be off the horses and onto the cars inside an hour if it goes right."
"And if it don't?" Isum asked.
"Then we'll go to plan B."
"What plan B?"
"I don't know," Will said with a chuckle. "You'll think of sump'm, and that'll be plan B."
Isum laughed out loud. "Isaac Jones, the planner. That's me alright."
They came into Santa Rosalía midday with the northbound due inside the hour, and the town was dusty and busy and smelled of the smelter, and the station stood at the foot of the street with the crowd already gathering on the platform.
They came down the street in their order, Del and Carlos, Elena and Lupita ahead, a family with two valises they'd bought, Will and Isum behind and apart, leading their horses like men with time to kill.
Del had shaved his mustache and wore a coat Elena had brushed till it passed for better than it was.
Carlos rode his father's shoulders and had been promised he could see the engine.
They'd left the horses in the stable, prepared to abandon them.
Will spotted the Rurales first.
At the platform gate, a Rurales corporal in the gray and silver, a paper in his hand, and two troopers with carbines slung, and they were working down the line of waiting passengers man by man.
Not the women. Not the Mexicans, hardly a glance.
Every American man they stopped, and the corporal looked from the paper to the face and from the face to the paper, and the line shuffled and waited, and out on the grade the northbound blew a mile out.
"Del," Will said, just the one word, quiet, from behind.
Del didn't stop walking and didn't speed up.
He turned as if he'd forgotten something, a man remembering an errand, and said something to Elena that any watcher would read as a change of plans, and she took his arm, and they came back up the street at a walk, Lupita included.
Carlos opened his mouth to ask about the engine and Elena pressed his hand twice, and the boy shut it and rode his father's shoulders like a stone rides a wall.