“Is it worth arguing about?” Mendez said. “Getting people upset and angry? Sure, they’re wrong. But is it easier to convince them of it or just forget about it? You understand that?”
“I’m learning,” Russell said.
Right there, again, I’d like to have seen what was going on in his mind, because you certainly couldn’t tell from his tone. He had such a quiet way of speaking you got the feeling nothing in the world would ever bother him.
While we were still sitting there, Dr. Favor motioned Mendez over to the bar where he and Delgado were. Mendez stood there talking to them for a long time, while we finished our coffee and had another. Finally Mendez came back. He didn’t sit down but took a drink of the brandy.
“Dr. Favor wants to go another way,” Mendez said. “The road down past the old San Pete Mine.”
It was a road Hatch & Hodges had used years before when the mine was still in operation. It ran fifteen or so miles east of the main road, through foothills and on up into high country past the mine, then it joined the present main road again on the way to Benson. But I had never heard of anyone taking it these days. The country through there was wild and climbing, harder to travel over. That’s why the new road had been put through after the mine shut down. The only thing you could say about the old road was it was shorter.
But was that reason to take it?
Mendez said why not? Delgado was sure the rest of the stations along the main road had already shut down. At least all their change horses had been moved south by now. Delgado was the only one left with any and his would be gone in a few days. If we have only six horses and there are no more stations, Mendez said. Why not go the short way?
That made sense. We’d have to bring extra food and water, though. Mendez agreed to that. He said as long as Dr. Favor was paying for most of this, why not keep him happy? (Henry Mendez seemed very anxious to keep people happy.)
“Maybe he’s a little worried too,” Mendez said. “He was talking to Delgado again about those people who came by here. What did they look like? Did they say where they were going? Things like that.”
“If he thinks they plan to hold us up,” I said, “they couldn’t. They wouldn’t know a stage was coming by here tonight.”
“I told him that,” Mendez said. “He said, ‘If there is a possibility of being stopped, we should take precautions.’ I said, ‘Maybe, but, if this was the regular stage, we wouldn’t even be talking about it.’ ”
“Maybe he is really worried,” I said.
Mendez nodded. “Like something’s after him. And he knows it.”
A little later, after Mendez had seen about the provisions and water bags, we got moving again. Frank Braden was already in the coach asleep with his feet on the seat across from him. We just let him be. There was room enough with John Russell up on the boot now.
Soon we were alone in the night with the rumbling and creaking sounds. We turned off the road about two miles south of Delgado’s and went through a mesquite thicket with the branches scraping both sides of the coach. Then this trail opened up and you could feel it beginning to climb. We would move through trees, in and out of close darkness, all the time following the winding, climbing road that led on and on, two rutted tracks that were overgrown but I guess still visible to Mendez.
About three hours out of Delgado’s, Mendez and Russell changed the teams, giving the two spares a turn in the harness, and watering them. I was the only one who got out of the coach, though I’m sure Dr. Favor was awake too. I had a drink of water from Mendez’s canteen (this was kept in the driver’s boot; three hide bags of water on the back end were for the passengers and the horses) and then we were off again.
I went to sleep after that, wondering for the longest time if the McLaren girl would say anything if I was to put my arm around her. I never did find out.
With the first signs of daylight and down out of a winding, steep-sided canyon, we came to the abandoned San Pete mine. Mendez and Russell were standing there as we got out, everybody stretching, feeling the stiffness from being cramped up so long, and looking around at the company buildings.
The ones near us were built against the slope so that the front verandas were on stilts and high as a second floor. Out across the canyon the mine works were about two hundred yards off: the crushing mill part way up the slope, the ore tailings that humped in hogbacks down from the mine shaft way up higher. Braden was looking at Mendez. “This isn’t the stage road,” he said.
“We took a different way,” Mendez answered. He was at the back untying one of the waterskins.
“What do you mean a different way?”
I noticed John Russell step away from the horses. He watched Braden move toward Mendez who was lifting the waterskin to his shoulder.
“You take any road you feel like?”
“Talk to Dr. Favor,” Mendez said.
“I’m talking to you.”
Mendez had started for the building, but he stopped. “The others agreed on it,” he said. “You were asleep. But I thought, if he wants to come with us so bad then this is all right with him.”
Braden kept watching him. “Where does it lead?”
“Same places,” Mendez answered. He took the waterskin under the veranda and came out again stretching, looking up at the sky that was still dull though streaked with traces of sunlight above the far end of the canyon. “We eat now,” Mendez said. “Then rest for two hours.”
Dr. Favor said, “If you’re thinking of us-”
“More of the horses,” Mendez said. “And me.”
We ate breakfast under the veranda of the main company building, some of the bread and cold meat and coffee Mendez had brought. And after Mendez took his blanket roll to the next house, the only one besides the main one that still had a roof. John Russell went with him and they slept for a couple of hours.
So there was nothing to do but wait during that time. The mud wagon stood alone with the horses grazing farther down the canyon where there was grass and some owl clover. After a while Frank Braden walked out past the coach, gazing at the slope above the mine works, then looking up-canyon, the way he had come. He went on getting smaller and smaller as he crossed the canyon and got up by the crushing mill. He kept going, finally reaching what looked like an assay shack high up by the mine shaft and you couldn’t see him any more. I wondered if he was waiting for Mrs. Favor to come up. That or he was just restless.
Whichever, Braden was back in plenty of time. He had calmed down and he asked Mendez how long it would take to reach Benson. Mendez told him this way was shorter than the stage road, but we had the horses to consider. So maybe it would take just as long, arriving in Benson sometime tomorrow morning if the road was all right and if nothing happened.
Well, we left the San Pete mine before eight o’clock and by midnight the first if came true.
The trouble was not in following the road, a matter of whether or not the road was “all right.” There was just no road to follow. We crossed a shallow arroyo that came down out of the high rocks, and on the other side, where the road should have continued, there was no trace of it.
Wind and rock slides and flash floods had worn the road away or covered it or wiped it clean from the slope. Mendez had no choice. He took the coach down the arroyo, bucking, fighting down through the yellow palo verdes that grew along the banks waiting for water, then south again, out into the flat brush country to circle the dry washes and rock formations that extended out from the slopes.
The land lay dead in the heat of the sun, bone dry and thick with greasewood and prickly pear and tall saguaro that looked like fence posts growing wild. Henry Mendez did a good job driving through this, but it took forever. You would look ahead and see an outcropping of rock or a scattering of Joshua trees that looked only a few hundred yards off, but it would take even an hour to reach them and after passing them there would be other marks on the land, like a strangely shaped giant saguaro or more Joshuas or yucca, that would take forever to reach and finally pass. There was nothing to look at, nothing to look forward to.
We stopped to alternate the horses once during the morning, discovering only two waterskins on the back end. We had left one, more than half full, at the San Pete mine.
We stopped again at noon, all of us standing by the coach waiting for the coffee water to boil, Mendez unhitching the teams and feeding them from morrals, Mendez probably waiting for one of the passengers to say this was crazy and why didn’t we go back to the stage road? Lose a day, but at least not have to put up with this. But no one said it.
It was strange. There was Mrs. Favor saying it was hot, saying it different ways, but not seeming to mind it. She would glance now and then at the McLaren girl, probably still wondering what the Indians did to her, then look at Braden who had turned quiet today and seemed a different person, as if the effects of whisky had worn off him (though I am not saying he showed any signs of drunkenness the day before). There was the McLaren girl, seeming to be the most patient, aside from Russell (how could it bother him to be out here), and Dr. Favor who watched Mendez, trying to hurry him with his eyes. Nobody asked Mendez if we might get lost or break down. Nobody seemed worried at all. Not even about having left some of our water behind at the San Pete.
We went on, and it was afternoon before we got out of that flat country. Mendez saw the road again up on the slope, a trace of it cutting through the brush, and headed for it. You could see the hills getting bigger and clearer as we approached, shadowed and dark with brush and washes, but up above the peaks looked bare and silent in the sunlight.
We got up to the road and followed it easily for a while, but then it started to climb again, getting higher up into the hills, and finally Mendez pulled in the team.
He leaned down and said, “Everybody takes a nice walk. To the top of the grade.”
We got out, all of us looking up, seeing a pretty steep section ahead. Russell was already walking up it, I guess making sure there weren’t any washouts we couldn’t see from here. The slope wasn’t too steep, but Mendez, you could tell, was thinking of the horses.
So we waited until the coach and trailing horses were past us a ways and then started up. Dr. Favor took his wife’s arm as if to help her walking, but I think it was so she wouldn’t wander off. Frank Braden stood there to make a cigarette, so I fell in with the McLaren girl, thinking hard of something to say. But I didn’t have to think for more than a few steps.
She said, “He doesn’t look Apache, does he?” as if she’d started right in the middle of her thoughts.
But even that abruptly I knew she was talking about Russell. No question about it. She was squinting a little in the sunlight, looking at him way up on the road.
“You should have seen him a few weeks ago,” I said.
She looked at me, waiting for me to explain, and I was a little sorry I’d said it. Still, it was a fact.
“He looked like any other Indian on Army pay.”
“Then he is Apache?”
“Well, maybe you can’t answer that yes or no.”
She was frowning a little. “Mr. Mendez said he isn’t. That’s what I don’t understand.”
“Well, he wasn’t born one. But he’s lived with them so long, I mean by his own choice, that maybe he is one by now.”
“But why,” she said, “would anybody want to be one?”
“That’s it,” I said. “Wanting to be one is just as bad as being one. Maybe worse.”
“But wanting to live the way they do,” she said.
“You’d have to see things with his eyes to understand that.”
“I think I’d be afraid to,” she said.
I wanted to say that I didn’t think she’d be afraid of anything after what she’d been through, but then thought it best to stay wide of that subject. It could be embarrassing for her. She had talked a little about it in the coach and hadn’t seemed embarrassed, but still there could be touchy things. It was like being with a person who has a great big nose or something. You don’t want to get caught looking at the nose or even saying the word. (I hope no one reading this who might have a big nose will take offense. I wasn’t making fun of noses.)
The trailing horses were still on the grade, but the coach had passed over the crest and stopped. You could only see the top part of it at first. The road leveled into pinyon and a lot of brush, and on the right side, slanting down at the coach, was a steep cutbank about seven or eight feet high.
“I guess we can get in again,” the girl said.
I heard her, but I was watching Mendez. He was looking up at the top of the bank.
We walked around the trailing horses and I looked up there too. My first thought was, what is Russell doing sitting up there? And where did he get the rifle?
Then I saw Russell, not on the cutbank but beyond the Favors and up by the teams. Near him, at the banked side of the road was another man, holding a revolver. I guess the McLaren girl saw them the same time I did, but she didn’t let out a peep.
What is there to say, for that matter? You walk up a road out in the middle of nowhere and there are two armed men waiting for you. Even though you know something is wrong, you act as if this happens every day and twice on Sunday. I mean you don’t get excited or act surprised. You just hold yourself in and maybe they will go away if you don’t admit they are there. You don’t think at the time: I am afraid. You are too busy acting natural.
The man on the bank came down to the edge and squatted there holding the rifle (it was a Henry) on us until we were up even with the coach. Then he jumped down to the road, almost falling, and as he stood up I recognized him at once.
It was the one named Lamarr Dean who rode for Mr. Wolgast. And the other one up by Russell, sure enough, was Early. The same two who had been at Delgado’s the first time I ever saw John Russell.
What if they recognize him, I thought. Not-what’s going on? Or what are they doing here? But-what if they recognize him? I couldn’t help thinking that first because I remembered so well how Russell had broken that whisky glass against Lamarr Dean’s mouth. Lamarr Dean must have remembered it even better. But he hadn’t recognized him. Early hadn’t either, else he wouldn’t have just been standing there holding that long-barreled revolver.
Mendez, looking down at Lamarr Dean, said, “You better think before you do something.”
“Step down off there and don’t worry about it,” Lamarr Dean said. Mendez climbed down and Lamarr Dean looked over toward us. He waited; I didn’t know why until Braden came up past us and Lamarr Dean’s eyes followed him. He said, “We like to not made it.”
“I kept thinking,” Braden said, “they got some catching up to do once they find the way.”
“When you didn’t come by the main road.” Lamarr Dean said, “we went back to Delgado’s early this morning. I said to him, ‘Are we hearing things or was that a coach passed us last night?’ He said, ‘You must have been hearing things; there was a coach but it wasn’t on the main road.’ ‘Which way did it go?’ I said and that was when he told me you’d taken this other way and I’ll tell you we done some riding.”
I kept looking at Braden all the time Lamarr Dean was talking. Maybe you aren’t surprised now why Braden took the stage in the first place and was so anxious to be on it when we left Sweetmary. It is easy to think back and say I knew it all the time. But I’ll tell you I couldn’t believe it at first. Braden was not a person you liked, but he was one of us, a passenger like everybody else, and, when he showed himself to be part of this holdup, it must have surprised the others as much as it did me. Though at the time I didn’t look to see their reaction. Too much was going on.
Early came over, not saying anything, his face dark with beard growth. He was prodding Russell ahead of him.
Then another man appeared. He looked like a Mexican and wore a straw hat. He was mounted and walked his horse out of the trees, leading two other saddled horses, and stood there in front of the teams. I noticed he wore two .44 revolvers.