It was about midnight and the traffic had thinned out on the street. Boag put his boots down into the loose dust of the thoroughfare and walked across the way to the dark passage between two red-light houses opposite the saloon. He posted himself in the shadows until Elmer emerged from the saloon and when Elmer turned up-street Boag let him get a block away before eeling out onto the boardwalk and following him.
At the mouth of an alley Boag caught Elmer from behind, clamped his palm over Elmer’s mouth and lifted the revolver from Elmer’s holster. Boag jammed it in Elmer’s back and hissed in Elmer’s ear:
“Eef you don’ keep es-shut op, I goeen to keel you. Onnerstan’?”
Elmer nodded and Boag removed his hand from the man’s mouth. “Now don’ turn aroun’.” He lifted the fat poke from Elmer’s hip pocket and stuffed it into his own.
“Now you es-start walkeen. Es-straight ahead an’ you don’ look back, onnerstan’? You look back an’ I goeen to hahv to es-shoot you. Ahora ve.” He prodded Elmer in the back with the gun muzzle and Elmer walked away unhurriedly, an easygoing fellow who took such things with equanimity. Boag waited until Elmer had traversed most of the length of the alley before Boag wheeled back around the corner and broke into a sprint across somebody’s dark lawn.
He slipped through back alleys for ten minutes before he stopped in a passage behind a thriving saloon. Lamplight spilled out of a high back window, enough for him to see. He emptied Elmer’s poke and separated the coins from the greenjackets; he distributed the coins in his pockets so that they wouldn’t make telltale bulges. The greenjacket bills he stuffed back into Elmer’s poke because paper money was printed up by various local banks and Elmer might be able to identify his own greenbacks, although it was doubtful since he’d just won most of them in the poker game. Still there was no point taking the chance. Boag left the poke, the green-jackets, and Elmer’s revolver in the pile of trash behind the saloon; guns had serial numbers and Elmer might be able to identify that too.
With one hundred and forty-six dollars in coin on his person, Boag climbed into the loft of a horse-boarding stable near the waterfront and fell asleep almost instantly, his leg throbbing only a little.
He had himself clothed and outfitted and ready to go by nine in the morning; by nine-thirty he had ridden beyond sight of the Yuma bluff and was trotting north on the hard-mouthed horse toward the confluence of the Colorado and the Gila.
It was a used McClellan army saddle for which most civilians wouldn’t give ten dollars, which Boag had paid for this one; he was used to the split-tree saddle, he’d ridden them nearly twenty years. The rifle was a .38-56 Winchester with calibrated hunting sights and the revolver was a .45 Colt Theuer-conversion model, ten or twelve years old but the rifling grooves and lands were in good shape and there wasn’t any rust on it and the gunsmith had let him have it for four dollars. He’d bought ammunition moulds and primers and crimpers as well as several boxes of cartridges so he was ready to reload his own if circumstances took him where you couldn’t buy cartridges, especially for the .38-56 which wasn’t all that common a caliber. He’d picked it for its high velocity and long-range accuracy; a steady enough rifleman could keep all his shots within a hat-size circle at four hundred yards with this rifle, and that was a lot better than the Army .45-70 he’d been used to, where you were out of luck beyond two hundred yards.
He had a few luxuries like a flint-and-steel fire-starting mechanism, a rain poncho, a good flat-crown border hat, and somebody’s old heavy plaid flannel riding coat which might keep him warm if he had to ride up into the Sierra. He had spare underclothes and socks and he’d bought a pair of moccasins which were now in the saddlebags along with several days’ worth of food. The canteen was a two-gallon container: heavy, but if you ran out of water in the desert you were dead.
And he still had sixty-four dollars in his new jeans. He’d bought well—all except the horse, about which he was beginning to have his doubts. Thirty-five dollars for a seven-year-old sorrel gelding with the gait of a razorback sow and the mean eye of a wolverine.
But the horse moved along at a good clip and he guessed that would do.
He found the Uncle Sam where he had thought she would be. You couldn’t really hide anything that big. They’d put her where nobody would look for her for a while. It was where she had to be and Boag had no trouble.
They had steamed her up the Gila a few miles to a point where the highway veered away from the riverbank and went around behind the far side of a big hill. They’d anchored her up under the overhang of some big cottonwoods. Nobody would come across her by chance; you had to be looking for her to find her. So far, nobody had any reason to be out looking for her.
Except Boag.
Obviously Mr. Pickett had planned it all pretty well in advance. The buckboard was still on deck, they hadn’t bothered to use it. Boag examined the tracks leading away from the boat. The horse and mule tracks (he assumed they were some of each although from the remaining indentations it was impossible to tell which was which) were too numerous to count but there had to have been thirty or more. They’d probably loaded about two-hundred-and-fifty pounds of gold onto each pack animal. It made for quite a mule train. But that was a lot more maneuverable than wagons would have been.
He followed the trampled mess up around the hill and across the highway, tracking southeast. It had been some years since he’d been down here on Cavalry patrols but he had no trouble remembering how it lay. A hundred miles of dry soda lakes and baked soil that was scorched and cracked and shriveled by a perpetual drought and a perpetual sun. Tumbleweed and cactus and the occasional mesquite and patches of greasewood and organ pipe. Give this country an inch and it would take your life. You had to shake out your boots in the morning before you put them on because if you didn’t you might be putting your toes in with a scorpion or tarantula or centipede or black widow.
He had a look at the horse-droppings. None of them was still moist or green. Hard to say how much wind there had been in the past few days; the extent to which sand had drifted into the tracks was no real indication of how long they’d been gone, but working out the probabilities in his head he judged they had to have three days’ jump on him, possibly closer to four.
He tested the weight of the canteen—a nervous gesture; he’d just filled it in the Gila and watered the horse and drunk his fill—and then he gigged the horse out into the Sonora Desert.
When the cruel sun climbed high he knew he was going to have to surrender to it and take shelter. His cracked lips stung with sweat. If you kept moving in this blast of heat you’d use up too much water on the horse and yourself. There were waterholes down along the Border but they were two days along from here; you had to ration things. Better to travel the cool hours of evening and night and early morning. There would be a moon again tonight, getting on toward last-quarter; enough to track by.
Somewhere deep underground a rock cistern gathered enough moisture to feed the long roots of a clump of mesquite. He hobbled the sorrel and bedded down under the meager shade. Dust motes hung in the sunbeams that lanced down between the branches. He slept; he had the ability to relax completely when there was nothing to do.