Boag said, “You drive, Captain.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“Look, I’ll turn you loose, it’ll be a couple hours’ walk back here. Ain’t no big thing.”
“Damn it Boag, I need some sleep. If I don’t get some sleep I swear I’m going to perish,”
“We get out of camp here, I’ll drive the wagon. You can sleep. That sound all right?”
Captain McQuade hauled himself up onto the high seat and Boag settled beside him. “I hope they don’t try to follow me,” Boag said. “They ain’t good enough.”
Captain McQuade said to a lieutenant, “I’m doing a reconnoitre with the scout here. I’ll be back sometime tonight. Keep this camp secure and tell them not to shoot my ass off when I get back, all right?”
Captain McQuade lifted the reins and made noises at the horse and Boag put one hand on the edge of the seat to keep from being pitched off. The wagon bucked out of camp and Boag said, “Upstream a ways and then we’ll turn east up the mountains.”
When the fires of the camp fell away behind them Boag took the reins and Captain McQuade leaned forward with his elbows braced on his splayed knees. His head hung down and swayed. By God he really was asleep.
Boag did his best to avoid the big bumps. He rode the buckboard up into the mountains and somewhere around midnight he stopped the wagon and climbed down, went back to his horse behind the tailboard and got the hunk of gold out of the saddlebag. Then he shook Captain McQuade by the shoulder. “This where you get off.”
Captain McQuade gave him a drunken look. “Uh?”
“Come on, Captain.”
“Where the hell are we?”
“You just head west and keep going downhill, you’ll hit the river down there. Turn left, go downstream you’ll walk right into your camp. Take you two-three hours from here.”
Captain McQuade climbed down; Boag gave him a hand. “Here, stick this in your pocket.”
“What’s—?”
“I said I’d pay you for the stuff.”
“Jesus.”
“I’ll get the Gatling gun back to you if I can.”
“This honest-to-God gold?”
“Yes sir. You don’t want to spend it all in one saloon.”
“Right now I could just about do that.”
“Captain you better wake up. You don’t want some bandit taking that hunk of gold away from you. And don’t forget to load up that gun I emptied.” Boag climbed onto the seat and settled the reins among his fingers. “Good luck in your war, Captain.”
Captain McQuade just glared at him and Boag drove the wagon on up the slope.
But after a little while when he looked back he saw Captain McQuade raising an arm to wave. “Good luck in yours too, Boag.”
Morning was a bad time. You woke innocent and then you remembered last night. That had been a bad trick to play on a friend.
And remembering last night you superimposed it on today: you remembered how you had invited getting all shot to pieces by a regiment and you knew the good fortune of the escape might not be granted you again today.
Boag checked out the load on the wagon and tied his saddle horse to the tailboard again and headed the buckboard for the Santa Cruz district.
Last night he had spent a couple of hours wiping out his sign so that if Captain McQuade took a notion to track him he wouldn’t catch up too fast. Boag was hoping Captain McQuade would come to the Santa Cruz to find out how Boag’s war was going. But he didn’t want Captain McQuade’s army showing up before the fight started. Anyhow it was a distant hope at best; he couldn’t count on Captain McQuade coming and even if he did come it didn’t mean he’d help out.
It was about seventy miles up the ridgebacks of the Sierra Madre to the Santa Cruz district and it took Boag all day and half the night to get there, and that was pushing hard; the wagon horse was all used up by the time he stopped in the middle of the night. He got on his saddle horse and rode around the town of Coronado, following Jackson’s directions, and at about two in the morning he found the wagon road that had to head up to the old mine that Mr. Pickett had turned into his fortress.
He stopped along the creek bank and dipped a canteen of water out of the stream; he set it down on the ground long enough for the floating debris to settle to the bottom before he drank out of it. He looked at the night sky; he didn’t see many clouds but he could smell a change in weather coming and he tried to work out ways to make use of it.
The ruts of the old road had once been worn right down to bedrock but years of disuse had rilled them in here and there with enough topsoil to grow weeds. In places the weeds were belly high on Boag’s horse. But they were limp because they’d been crushed down lately by the passage of wagon-wheels and they hadn’t sprung back fully. Heavy wagons, Boag judged. Possibly Mr. Pickett’s big vault, coming up the road in sections.
It was good country up here, a lot of timber and meadows. But when Boag reached the edge of the forest and looked up the road he could see why Mr. Pickett had chosen the spot. It was a mesa, a tabletop mountain with a steep cut running up into it for the road—possibly it was a natural cut because it would have taken a prodigious amount of blasting to man-make it. From the parapet on top of the mountain the sentries would have a clear command of almost a mile of cliffs and open flats. You couldn’t get anywhere near that mountain without being spotted; not on this front approach at least.
Boag turned the horse to the right and began to ride a full circle around Mr. Pickett’s mountain.
He kept inside the fringe of the trees because he didn’t want them to spot him. The route took him along a ragged line, bulging and doubling back with the trees, so that it consumed most of the remaining hours of the night. He found that the trees came up reasonably close to the bottom of the mountain on its back side, to the north, but that was no use because the cliff was too sheer to scale. The mountain was shaped like a stump, as if it had once been the base of a tree forty miles high. Ridges ran out from its base like the roots of a stump and some of them climbed pretty close to the top; but there was always at least twenty or thirty feet of sheer cliff above the ridges, and there was a man-made stone wall above that, and he was sure the rawhiders had rifles in the gunports up there. By the time he got back to his starting point at the foot of the wagon road it was nearly dawn and he hadn’t seen any way in or any way out except for the road cut. Mr. Pickett had got himself a choice spot.
Boag thought of a few ways he might smuggle himself inside, aboard one of Mr. Pickett’s arriving wagons for instance, but the idea didn’t have any real strength to it. You didn’t go into the enemy’s camp when he had you that badly outnumbered.
The main purpose his tour had served just now was to confirm an expectation: Mr. Pickett had found himself a fortress that was damn well nigh impregnable.
But it was also damned hard to escape from. It could nicely be turned into a trap.
A prison for Mr. Pickett?
The idea made Boag grin for a while but in the end he gave up on it. He had no patience for a siege and it would be practically impossible for one man to keep that road bottled up for any length of time. A man had to sleep some time. All they had to do was wait him out and slip past him when he slept and stick a knife in him.
Boag had made a kind of a plan before he’d ever seen this place. Now that he’d reconnoitered and discarded a couple of alternative plans, he saw that his original plan was still the right one.
It was the only one, in fact.