speaking to him. He wondered, in a detached way, whose voice it was.
He returned to Muerto and remounted. It was better to be absolutely sure of Carson’s intentions. The two would have to come down off the lava field at some point. And that’s where Nye knew he could pick up the track.
He decided to ride along the northern edge of the lava first. If he didn’t pick up the trail, he’d cross the lava field and ride along its southern edge.
Within half an hour he had found the pathetic marks in the sand where Carson had tried to brush away their tracks. So the voice was right: They had turned north, after all. There was a regularity to Carson’s sweepings that set them apart from the irregular patterns of windblown sand. Nye painstakingly traced the brushed marks back to where the trail began again, as clear in the deep sand as highway markers, heading straight for the North Star.
This would be easier than he thought. He’d catch Carson around sunrise. With the Holland & Holland, he could take Carson down from a quarter mile. The man would be dead before he even heard the shot. There would be no final confrontation, no desperate pleading. Just a clean shot from six hundred yards, and a second one for the bitch. Then he would finally be free to find the one thing that meant anything to him now: the Mount Dragon gold.
Once again, he did the calculations. He had done them innumerable times before, and they felt comfortable and familiar in his head. The amount of gold that could be carried on a pack mule was between 180 and 240 pounds, depending on the mule. In either case, well over one million in bullion alone. But the gold would probably be in the Pre-Revolt stamped bullion bars and coinage of New Spain. That would drive its worth up ten times or more.
He was free of Mount Dragon now; free of Scopes. Only Carson—Carson the traitor in the dark, Carson the sneak thief—stood in his way. And a bullet would take care of that.
By three in the morning, the sharpness in the air had intensified. Carson and de Vaca came over a rise and rode down into what appeared to be a broad, grassy basin. It had been almost two hours since they passed the glow of Mount Dragon on the horizon, heading north. They had seen no sign of lights behind them. The Hummers were gone for good.
Carson drew to a halt. He dismounted and bent down, feeling the blades of grass. Side oats grama, high in protein: excellent for the horses.
“We’ll stop here for a couple of hours,” he said. “Let the horses graze.”
“Shouldn’t we keep going while it’s still dark?” de Vaca asked. “They might send helicopters.”
“Not over the Missile Range,” Carson said. “In any case, we won’t travel far in daylight without finding a place to hole up. But we have to take full advantage of this dew. You’d be surprised how much water the horses can take in grazing dewy grass. We can’t afford to let this pass. An hour spent here will give us an extra ten miles, even more.”
“Ahh,” said de Vaca. “A Ute trick, no doubt.”
Carson turned toward her in the darkness. “It wasn’t funny the first time. Having a Ute ancestor doesn’t make me an Indian.”
“A Native American, you mean,” came the teasing reply.
“For Chrissakes, Susana, even the Indians came from Asia.
“Do I detect defensiveness, cabron?”
Carson ignored her and removed the lead rope from Roscoe’s halter. He wrapped the cotton rope around Roscoe’s front hoof, tied a knot, gave it two tight twists and looped it around the other hoof, tying a second knot. He did the same to the other horse. Then he took off the flank cinches and looped them through the O-rings on the halters, so that the buckled ends dangled loosely together.
“That’s a clever way to hobble them,” de Vaca said.
“The best way.”
“What’s the
“Listen.”
They were silent a moment. As the horse began to graze, there was a faint sound as the two buckles of each cinch clinked together.
“Usually I bring a cowbell with me,” said Carson. “But this works almost as well. In the still of the night, you can hear that clinking three hundred yards off. Otherwise, those horses would just vanish in the blackness and we’d never find them.”
He sat back in the sand, waiting for her to say something more about Ute Indians.
“You know,
“How’s that?”
“Well, you’re a hell of a fine person to cross the Jornada del Muerto with, for one thing.”
Carson blinked in surprise at the compliment, wondering for a moment whether she was being sarcastic. “We’ve still got a long way to go. We’re barely one-fifth across.”
“Yeah, but I can already tell. Without you along, I wouldn’t have had a chance.”
Carson didn’t respond. He still felt there was less than a fifty-percent chance they’d find water. That meant a less than fifty-percent chance of survival.
“So you used to work on a ranch up there?” De Vaca spoke again.
“The Diamond Bar,” said Carson. “That was after my dad’s ranch went broke.”
“Was it big?”
“Yep. My father fancied himself a real wheeler-dealer, always buying up ranches, selling them, buying them back. Usually at a loss. The bank foreclosed on fourteen sections of patent land that had been in my family for a hundred years. Plus, they got grazing leases on two hundred sections of BLM land. It was a hell of a big spread, but most of it was pretty burnt up. My father’s fancy cattle and horses just couldn’t survive in it.”
He lay back. “I remember riding fence as a kid. The outside fence alone was sixty miles, and there were two hundred miles of interior fencing. It took me and my brother the whole summer to ride fence, fixing it as we went. Damn, that was fun. We each had a horse, plus a mule to pack the roll of wire, staples, and stretcher. And our bedrolls and some food. That jack mule was a mean son of a bitch. His name was Bobb. With two
De Vaca laughed.
“We’d camp out as we went along. In the evening, we’d hobble the horses and find a low spot to lay out our bedrolls and light a fire. The first day out we always had a big steak, carried frozen in the saddlebags. If it was big enough, it’d just be thawed out by dinnertime. From then on, it was beans and rice. After dinner we’d lie around, faces to the stars, drinking camp coffee as the fire died down.”
Carson stopped talking. It seemed like a vague dream of centuries ago, those memories. And yet the same stars he’d looked at as a kid were still there, above his head.
“It must’ve been really hard, losing that ranch,” de Vaca said quietly.
“It was about the hardest thing that ever happened to me. My whole body and soul was part of that land.”
Carson felt a twinge of thirst. He grubbed around in the sand and found a small pebble. He rubbed it on his jeans, then placed it in his mouth.
“I liked the way you lost Nye and those other
“They’re idiots,” Carson replied. “Our real enemy is the desert.”
The offhand comment made him think. It had been an easy task to lose the Hummers. Surprisingly easy. They hadn’t turned off their lights while tracking him. They hadn’t even divided up to search for the track when they reached the edge of the lava flow. Instead they had just barreled southward like lemmings. It surprised him that Nye could be so stupid.
No. Nye wouldn’t be so stupid.
For the first time, Carson wondered if Nye was with the Hummers at all. The more he thought about it, the
