CHAPTER 6
THE SCARS OF THE SANTA FE TRAIL
Santiago, Elena’s father, was a man carved out by the dryness of Chihuahua.
He had skin as dark as the trunk of a walnut tree and hands that worked the reata — the rawhide rope — with a surgeon’s precision.
He was one of the few who knew every waterhole and every hostile band from the Rio Grande to the Missouri.
“Look well, mi corazón,” Santiago would say to little Elena, who travelled curled up on the box of the family wagon with her baby sister Mia asleep in her lap.
He would point his whip at the straight line of the horizon.
“This land does not belong to the Americans, and it does not belong to Santa Anna’s generals either. This land belongs to the wind and to whoever has the fastest horse. Remember the track of the stars. They never lie to a vaquero.”
Elena learned to read the world through her father’s eyes.
She learned to feel the damp of rain hours before it fell, to hear the tramp of horses on packed ground by laying her ear against the earth, and to understand that silence on the plain was usually the prelude to blood.
But the Santa Fe Trail grew too narrow when white men began drawing borders with lead.
Santiago, weary of watching the caravans plundered by unbadged militias and renegades from both sides, made a decision.
He gathered his savings in silver coin and went south, crossing the Red River into Texas.
All he wanted was a cabin, a piece of ground to plant corn, and the chance to see his two daughters grow up far from the patrols.
He did not know that Texas was breeding monsters of its own.
The end of Elena’s childhood did not come with time; it came with the sound of hooves on an autumn afternoon, four years later, at the small homestead Santiago had raised with his own hands near Bitter Creek.
Elena was gathering firewood by the waterhole when the riders came out of the dust. There were five of them.
At their head was McCready, young, but already showing the fresh and ugly scar that split his left eye.
Just behind him, Kurt, with his broad shoulders and his hyena’s laugh.
They came in the name of Colonel Vance. The order was simple: the Mexicans had to clear off land the Colonel had “bought” from the government of the new Republic.
“This land was paid for with my sweat!” Santiago shouted, coming out of the cabin with an old flintlock in his hands.
There was no fear in his vaquero’s eyes, only the dignity of a man defending the nest.
“Your sweat isn’t worth a thing out here, greaser,” Kurt sneered, hauling back on his reins.
What followed was a symphony of horror that Elena watched frozen in place, her back pressed to the cold stones of the well.
Santiago never even had time to cock the shotgun.
Kurt rode his horse straight at him, knocking the old man down into the dirt.
The sound of the iron barrel of Kurt’s revolver striking her father’s skull echoed across the yard — a wet, violent thud that silenced the man’s protests forever.
Elena’s mother had already been gone for years, of fever. Only she and Mia were left.
Mia, nine years old, with her almond-shaped eyes, came running out of the cabin crying and dropped to her knees beside her father’s bloodied body. McCready climbed down from his horse with a rope in his hand. His eyes shone with the cold arithmetic of profit.
“This one’s worth about two hundred dollars in New Orleans,” McCready said, holding Mia by the hair while the child screamed for Elena.
“Find the other one!” Kurt ordered, wiping Santiago’s blood off his boots.
Elena, shaking, the tears burning her soot-streaked cheeks, made the only decision a girl of sixteen could make in order to live.
She threw herself backward into the darkness of the well, catching hold of the rough bucket ropes.
She hung there, suspended in the damp emptiness, listening to the killers’ footsteps above her head and to her sister’s desperate screams fading into the distance along with the tramp of the horses.
When night came down and the silence returned, Elena climbed the ropes.
The yard was empty. Her father’s body had been left for the buzzards.
With shaking hands and bleeding fingernails, the sixteen-year-old girl dragged an old broken hoe over beside the body.
Under the pale moon, Elena began to dig.
Every stroke into the dry, packed Texas ground tore a piece out of her soul.
She wept so hard that she could barely see the hole she was opening.
When the hoe finally broke, she went on with her bare hands, clawing at the ground, shoving stones aside until the grave was deep enough to lay down the man who had taught her to read the stars.
By the time she finished covering him with the grey earth, the sun was beginning to show.
Elena had no tears left. All she had was the cold that came from inside.
She walked. It was miles of a punishing journey.
Barefoot, the soles of her feet cut open by the sharp gravel of the road and by cactus thorns, she marched toward Bitter Creek.
The damp dress had dried stuck to her body, stiffened with red dust. Her lips were cracked and purple with frontier cold, and every step left a small stain of blood on the ground.
When she crossed the town limits, the few people on the boardwalks drew back, looking away from that miserable apparition.
Elena ignored all of them. Her dark eyes were fixed on the only authority in the region.
She climbed the wooden steps of the sheriff’s office and pushed the door open with the last of the strength she had left.
Sheriff Weaver was sitting behind his desk, drinking hot coffee.
When he saw the ragged, bloodied, foul-smelling girl come in, he made a face of deep disgust.
“Vance’s bunch… McCready and Kurt… they killed my father!” Elena’s voice came out as a thin, cracking yelp, but it was full of a young fury.
“They took my sister! You have to go out there! You wear that star on your chest to make the law!” Weaver did not even trouble himself to stand. He took another swallow of his coffee, wiped his grease-fouled moustache, and looked at her with total indifference.
“Listen here, missy,” Weaver sneered, his voice slow and cruel. “A Mexican’s blood isn’t worth the bullet in my revolver. Go back to your hole and forget this story before the Colonel decides to finish the job.”
Elena’s world caved in, and hatred took the place of grief. She lunged at the desk, slapping her hands on the oak, screaming with the full force of her lungs, calling the sheriff a coward and a damned man.
Weaver lost his patience. He came up out of the chair in one motion, grabbed the girl by the arm, and hauled her toward the door.
On the threshold of the office the sheriff drove a violent kick into Elena’s stomach, throwing her out.
She rolled down the wooden steps and struck the mud of the main street, coughing and unable to breathe.
“Get out of my sight, you little rat!” Weaver bellowed, slamming the door.
Elena lay in the mud, curled up around the pain of the impact, waiting for death to take her right there.
That was when a shadow fell over her. It was not the shadow of an executioner but of an outstretched hand.
The Reverend from the little church, the old clergyman of Bitter Creek, came slowly toward her.
His eyes carried the sadness of a man who knew the rot of that town.
Without saying a word, he covered her with his own black wool coat, helped her to her feet, and took her round to the back of the parish.
There he washed the girl’s wounded feet, gave her a plate of hot soup, and let her sleep under the church roof for several weeks.
The old man was the one ray of light in that hell, but Elena knew charity would not bring her sister back.
She needed money, she needed information, and she needed to survive.
Months later, when the wounds on her body had healed but the ones in her mind had turned to pure iron, Elena walked to the doors of The Broken Spur.
She asked to speak to the woman who owned the place, a middle-aged woman called Do?a Clara.
Clara had skin marked by time, tired eyes, and the bearing of a woman who had already buried three husbands and seen every kind of misery the West had to offer. She looked at Elena’s young, rough beauty and sighed, knowing exactly what desperation was bringing to her door.
Clara drew on her corn-husk cigarette and let the grey smoke go before she spoke, her voice hoarse and as direct as a warning of danger.
“Life in here is not a card game, girl,” Do?a Clara said, pointing at the empty tables of the saloon.
“The men who come through those doors are wild animals. They smell of horse sweat and blood. You’ll have to serve their whiskey, put up with the looks and the stray hands, and smile while your stomach turns.
The women in this place go through things that would make the devil himself cry before bed. Are you sure you want this life?”
Elena looked at her own reflection in the dirty mirror behind the bar. She no longer saw the girl who had wept in the well.
“I don’t have a life anymore, Do?a Clara,” the young woman answered, her voice cold. “I only need somewhere to stay. The rest I can bear.”
Back to the Present
The dry snap of a breaking branch made Elena blink, pulling her back to the cold reality of the Texas hillside.
She breathed in deep, the air freezing in her lungs.
She looked to the side. Nero was there, motionless as a granite statue against the moonlight.
His glacial blue eyes were watching her sidelong, not judging, not asking, but understanding perfectly the weight of the silence around her.
At his feet, the oak coffin held the machine that would collect on every drop of that blood.
Gideon was crouched near the coffin’s wheels, cleaning his goggles on his shirt, wearing the serious expression of a man who knew the hour of the harvest had come.
Elena put her hand to her right thigh, feeling the cold metal of the little Derringer under her dress.
Sheriff Weaver had said a Mexican’s blood was not worth a bullet.
She was about to prove that the lives of every one of Vance’s men would not be worth the lead Nero was hauling in that coffin.
“The main house is at the centre,” Elena said, her voice now perfectly controlled, cold as the steel of Nero’s sabre. “The Colonel sleeps upstairs. The towers can see the road coming in, but the dry riverbed runs right behind the stables. That’s a blind spot.”
Nero settled the long coat on his shoulders, the sound of his spurs giving the final word of consent. He looked at the valley, then at the coffin.
“We’re not going to use the blind spot, Elena,” Nero said, and for the first time a faint, dangerous smile surfaced in his hard features. “We’re going in through the front door. I want every one of them to see what came for them.”
Gideon let out a low laugh, his teeth showing in the dark as he took hold of the bronze crank of the machine gun. The three of them started down the hill. The trail of blood that had begun in Kansas and crossed Bitter Creek was about to end at the Cross Ranch.
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