Gin made herself comfortable on my bed. I stirred up the fire and finished off what coffee the three of us hadn't drank, and ate a couple of cold tortillas.
At daybreak the wind was off the sea, and you could feel the freshness of it, with a taste like no other wind.
Wide awake, I thought of those initials of pa's. Pa had left that sign, and he'd left it for himself, or mayhap for me. He was a planning man, pa was, and one likely to foresee. ... I think he taken time deliberately to teach me where that gold was. The trouble was, I'd gone ahead and forgotten.
Some things I did remember. He'd taught me to mark a trail, Indian fashion. Now, suppose he had marked this one? If he had, he would have added his own particular ways to it, but meanwhile, I planned to look around. If I found no sign I was going to drive that herd where I felt it should go, with no scouting for grass, or anything. Maybe out of my hidden thoughts would come the memory of what pa had taught me, to guide our way.
I taken a circle around camp, and I found no sign--nothing left by pa that I could make out.
That isn't to say I didn't find sign of another kind, and when I seen that track I felt a chill go right up my spine that stood every hair on end.
What I found were wolf tracks, but wolf tracks bigger than any wolf that ever walked-- any normal sort of wolf, that is. These wolf tracks were big as dinner plates.
Well, I stopped right there, looking down at those tracks, and the other two came over to look.
Miguel's face turned white when he saw the tracks, and even Gin kind of caught at my arm.
We had both heard tell of werewolves, and certainly Miguel knew the stories about them.
Me, I was thinking of something else. I was thinking of where those tracks were. Soon I scouted around, and a far piece away, like whatever it was had been taking giant strides, I found another track, this one set deep in the sod.
The tracks circled about the water hole at the spring. Whatever it was, it was trying to get to water, but the water had been lighted by our fire, with one of us setting awake.
All of a sudden I saw something that made me forget all about werewolves and ha'nts and such.
Far as that goes, I'd never heard tell of a thirsty ghost.
What I saw was something back in the brush, and at first it didn't look like much of a find, except that there was no reason for it being where it was. It was a broken reed, and it lay right on the edge of a bunch of mesquite.
Taking up the reed, I drew it out, and you know, there were several pieces of reed stuck one into another until they were all of eight or nine feet long. Stretched out, they reached from the spring's pool to the brush nearby.
'What is it?' Gin asked.
'Somebody wanted a drink, and wanted it bad, so he made a tube of these reeds, breaking them off to be rid of the joints and putting them together so he could suck water through them. He must have siphoned water right out of the pool into his mouth while I was just a-setting there.'
Nobody said anything, and I nosed around a mite, studying the brush, and finally finding where the man or whatever it was had knelt.
There, too, I found the wolf tracks.
'Two-legged wolf,' I said, 'wearing some kind of coarse-woven jeans or pants. See here?' I showed them the place in the brush. 'That's where he knelt whilst siphoning the water.'
Following the tracks back from the brush, I said, 'He's big--look at the length of that stride. I can't match it without running.'
I studied the reed tube again. 'Canny,' I said. 'Like something the Tinker might do.'
'We should go,' Gin suggested.
'No,' I said, 'not without what we came after.
We have come too far and risked too much.'
'But how can you hope to find it?' Gin said.
'You've no idea where to look.'
'Maybe I have. Maybe I am just beginning to recollect some things pa told me.'
The wind was blowing harder and the sky was gray and overcast. The cattle wandered to the water in small groups, then returned to the bedding ground to graze or rest. They showed no restlessness, and seemed content to hold to the low spots out of the wind.
I cut some sod with a machete, and made a wall to protect our fire from the wind, adding just enough fuel to keep some coals. Miguel was worried, which I could see plain enough, and so was Gin.
Meanwhile I was doing some figuring. Jonas was in prison, and the Tinker might well be, so that left whatever was to be done up to me. Gin was with us, which she hadn't ought to be, the country being torn up with trouble the way it was, and somewhere close by was that ship filled with gold.
Jonas needed his share to get his mortgage paid off, and the Tinker wanted his. As far as that goes, I wasn't going to buck or kick if somebody handed me some of that there gold.
Around the fire at breakfast, Miguel told me a mite about Herrara. He was a lieutenant of General Juan Nepomuceno Cortina, usually called Cheno, and part of the time he was a soldier with a legitimate rank, and part of the time an outlaw, depending on who was in power in Mexico and on his own disposition at the moment.
Of good family, Cortina had become a renegade, but one with a lot of followers. He was a shrewd fighter, risking battle only when it suited him, and running when it didn't. He was a man of uncertain temperament, but dangerous enough and strong enough to handle the pack of wolves that followed him.
Frequently, they raided across the border into Texas and had run off thousands of head of Texas cattle. Yet he had good men following him, too, and on occasion he could be both gallant and generous. But generally speaking, he was a man to fight shy of.
As for Herrara, he was one of the wolves, fierce as an Apache, and by all accounts treacherous.
Leaving Miguel by the fire, with his horse saddled, to keep an eye on the cows, Gin and I rode off through the brush, hunting the water's edge.
We hadn't far to go. A long gray finger of water came twisting through the grass, leading some distance away to a larger body of water like a bay.
There we could see the white, bare bones of an ancient boat, much too small for what we were looking for ... which, anyway, was by all accounts down under water.
My Henry was in the saddle boot, and Gin carried one also. But what I kept ready to hand was that Walch Navy. I liked the feel of that gun.
As we rode we saw nothing--only a low shore of gray-green grass, the gray water looking like a sheet of steel, the reeds bending under the wind, gulls wheeling and crying overhead.
Whitecaps were showing on the water.
It might have been a world never seen by man. No tracks, no ashes of old fires, nothing man had built but the stark white ribs of that old boat.
'It's cold,' Gin said.
Her face looked pinched, and the place was depressing her, as it did me.
Yet, wild and lonely as it was, the country had an eerie sort of charm like nowhere I'd ever seen. Toward the Gulf I could see the dunes of sand heaped by wind and wave, and somewhere out there was a long bar that stretched miles away to the south.
A barren desolate land. In spite of this, the place seemed to be working a charm on me.
'Let's go back,' Gin said.
We turned and made our start, riding along the shore. The wind was blowing stronger, the brush and reeds bending before it. A few cold, spitting drops of rain began to fall.
The place to which we had driven the herd was in a cul-de-sac, with the sea on three sides--long arms of the sea where the water had flowed in over low ground or the working of the waves had hollowed it out.
To the east was a long, snake-like arm of the sea that nowhere was over a quarter of a mile wide. South and southwest the coves were wider.
The grass was good, and the cattle were protected by thick brush from the worst of the wind. Most of these cattle had at one time or another grazed along the shore, and like Shanghai Pierce and his 'sea lions,' as he called the longhorns that swam back and forth from the coast to Padre Island, they were used to the sea and were good
