The clock inside him brought him awake when it was cool enough to eat. Somewhere around half past four by the sun. He gave the horse a ration of water and scrubbed out the old Army mess kit with sand, put everything away where it belonged, saddled the horse and untied the hobbles and went on his way into the evening.
In the night three times he came across the bleached bones of travelers who had tried to make the crossing without sufficient experience.
In places the wind had blown the tracks over completely but it was impossible for a thirty- or forty-horse trail to disappear that quickly; a few minutes’ scouting around and he always picked them up again. The trail led him steadily southeastward on the high flats. Mr. Pickett knew exactly where he was headed.
There were a few towns down that way—Sonoyta and some others, scattered around the oases of the plain. Beyond the Border there were mountains and then more desert, although that desert was not as dry or treeless as this one. Mr. Pickett was heading into Mexico as he had said he would. The question was, once in Mexico—where then?
He found shade at nine-thirty in the morning and although it wasn’t fully hotted up yet he decided not to risk another few miles; he ate and bedded down and waited out the heat. He was up before four, eating dried beef and pinto beans and the last of the cornbread, and feeding the horse a nosebag ration of grain and a hatful of water. The canteen was less than half full now. He put a pebble in his mouth and rolled it around with his tongue to keep the saliva going.
At sundown he came upon what he had feared he might find. The tracks began to split up.
By twos and threes and fours, groups of horses peeled away from the main gang and went their own way. All of them headed generally southward but the little bunches were diverging by miles. The main track got smaller and smaller and finally there was no way to know which was the main track any more, and at ten or eleven o’clock that night Boag had to toss a coin. He picked a set of four-horse prints and settled down to follow them south.
He was guessing but his opinion of Mr. Pickett was that in each group of four-horse prints you would probably find two trustworthy old-time Pickett rawhiders, one pack animal loaded with gold, and one relative newcomer to the Pickett-Stryker organization whose potential greed would be tempered by the constant presence of the two old rawhiders who probably slept in shifts and kept both eyes on him. In that manner Mr. Pickett would guarantee, as much as it could be guaranteed, the safe delivery of that portion of the gold to wherever it was destined.
Splitting up this way would be a risk—three men and a packhorse being far more tempting to bandits than an army of twenty-odd men armed to the teeth—but then it did make the track harder to follow and it also provided good odds that most of the four-horse groups would get through.
It was odd the way he kept thinking of Mr. Pickett’s men as old rawhiders. It was the same way he thought of himself as an old soldier. They were mostly in their forties, not old men at all. It was just that they’d been riding with Mr. Pickett for more than twenty years, most of them. They probably averaged six or seven years older than Boag, that was all; by his best reckoning Boag was thirty-seven. In Mississippi they didn’t keep close birth records on field niggers. Boag didn’t know but that he might be a field nigger right now if the war hadn’t emancipated him when he was about fourteen or fifteen by his own reckoning; he had lied about it—he was big, he had always been big—and the Army had thrown him right into its new black horse-regiment, the Tenth Cavalry, because Boag had a natural eye with a rifle and the seat of Boag’s pants fit very well on the back of a standard-size Cavalry horse.
They had fought the Sioux on the northern plains and the Comanche on the southern plains and there had been several years’ garrison duty and then the Army had sent them out under Crook to find Geronimo.
Then when the Indian wars were over the Army decided to cut back about two hundred personnel. They found in the service records of Boag and Wilstach that they’d both been busted back to private several times for various infractions, so the Army discharged them in the middle of Arizona and they found themselves in the desert with no trade but soldiering, no job but drifting, and the road leading finally to the Ehrenburg jail.
Now on Mr. Pickett’s backtrack Boag was thinking about Wilstach and thinking about all that gold. Of course he was just one man and he was a little crippled up by the bullets he’d taken on the river, but he had nothing better to do with his time and you needed some reason to get up in the morning.
There was the revolution going on in Sonora; there always was. Boag expected to have to dodge some combat. In times of rebellion in Mexico anybody suspicious was in danger of getting killed merely as a precautionary measure.
In a midmorning blaze of heat he reached Tanques Verdes where the four horses ahead of him had watered. Under the shade of the towering algodones Boag went from the trading post to the blacksmith’s stable to the saloon asking questions about the three men with the packhorse. An hour’s questioning convinced him that the three men had not been Mr. Pickett or Stryker. As he had guessed there was one relatively young man, a Mexican, and two middle-aged gringos. One of the two gringos had stayed with the packhorse at all times during the six or seven hours the men had spent in Tanques Verdes four days ago. None of them had said anything that anybody remembered about where they were headed. They had eaten supper and ridden into Mexico at sundown.
Boag filled his canteen and replenished his food and rode out after them.
A gauze of dust hung low over the desert. He rode past the heap of stones that marked the international boundary and climbed toward the foothills in Mexico.
The track was vague and intermittent. Winds had blown the prints over, sometimes for hundreds of yards at a stretch. Boag scowled irritably at the earth and often had to guide on flimsy probabilities: an iron-scratched stone, a carelessly broken greasewood branch where a horse had brushed too close. Every fifteen or twenty minutes he would come across a patch on the lee side of some boulders or brush where the prints of the four horses were still identifiable. He hadn’t lost them but he was losing time with all the circling and back-tracking it took to stay with them.
In the past twelve hours he had climbed a steady and barely perceptible incline and was probably two thousand feet higher in elevation than he’d been last night; the difference in sun-temperature was apparent and it was no longer impossible to travel by day. He pushed on through the sun hours and only stopped for half an hour to noon on the north side of a hill.
By now of course somebody back in Yuma would have gone looking for the Uncle Sam and probably they’d found her on the Gila but the tracks had had several more days to blow over and it was not likely any posse would take up the hunt. Johnson-Yaeger would complain to the Territorial Governor at Prescott and in due course an official inquiry would be lodged in Mexico City, probably identifying Mr. Jed Pickett, and as usual it would be put into some dusty drawer and ignored. Mexico City was still busy getting out from under all the problems that had been created by the reign of Maximilian and Carlotta and they didn’t have time down there to poke around looking for gringo fugitives.
He was relieved not to be burdened any longer by the weighty presence of the old woman and the persnickety little Pilar who wanted to be called Carmen.
Angling more directly south than before, the tracks led him up across foothills into a minor range of mountains with which he was not familiar; the Geronimo chase had not taken the Buffalo soldiers this far west in Mexico. There was timber up here, the ground was covered with a silent lawn of pine needles and the late afternoon sun flickered through the pines like a moving signal lamp as Boag climbed toward the high passes, keening the ground.