It took Boag two days to find his way to Caborca town. Distances down here were always endless. The Concepción was as poor an excuse for a river as the Gila; in a lot of places it was only a dry sandy bed with trees on both banks. The river ran underground here and if you had to you could dig down and find it a few feet below the surface. It wasn’t worth the trouble if your life didn’t depend on it because a yard’s depth of loose fine sand was the worst thing in the world to dig a hole in.
Caborca had very tall palms and a big old battered mission church on a square. There were farms around the town, irrigated by ditch water from the river. Boag passed fat women with burdens on their heads and big farm carts with huge wheels made of solid wood. The huts were painted different pale colors. He bought food for his pack and grain for the horse and moved right on down the river after no more than twenty minutes in the town.
Halfway through the following morning he found Almada’s hacienda. The patron was a suspicious man but courteous; he accepted Captain McQuade’s introduction and said in a curt candid way that he had heard of Mr. Pickett but had never had dealings with the man. He said it in a way that persuaded Boag it was true. Almada didn’t know where Boag might look unless it was farther to the southeast in the mountain country where there were half a dozen aristocratic manor-lords who had fallen on hard times and had taken to trading with bandits for a livelihood. Almada gave Boag two names, Felix Cielo and Don Pablo Ortiz, and showed Boag the door.
Two days out of Caborca on his way into the mountains he passed a troop of rurales, provincial dragoons on horseback dragging two little twelve-pound brass cannons on horsecarts. Boag swung wide around them because he was familiar with the tedious suspicions of rurale officers and in the old days riding dispatch during the campaigns he’d sometimes had to spend hours with them establishing credentials. Now he had no credentials and didn’t care to get shot for sport so he cut across behind them and went higher into the timber.
The air got cooler as he climbed into the pines. Here and there he passed empty tunnel mouths and discolored piles of tailings where hopeful hardrockers had tried to strike it rich. It was silver country up here but most of the mines, even the paying ones, had been closed down toward the end of the Maximilian reign and had never reopened because the revolutions against the Austrian crown had spawned hungry battalions of bandits who still prowled the Sierra like dogs gone wild, hunting in vicious packs for scraps. It was easier to give birth to a litter of bandits than it was to get rid of them; the big revolutions were finished now but the bandits still rode, and the mines were still closed, and the owners of the mines were dead or poor or living in exile with their relatives like the old woman he’d left in Yuma.
It was a district that didn’t like questions, any questions about anything, and didn’t like the people who asked them. Boag got strange looks from everyone because he was black, and hard looks from some when he asked how to find Felix Cielo and Don Pablo Ortiz; it took a long time and almost led to two shootings but in the end he got a vaquero drunk enough to direct him to Cielo’s place.
It was a fortified rancho built back in the days of almost daily Indian raids. It had everything but a moat. The walls of the hacienda were five feet thick and slitted with rifle ports; the house was built square around a courtyard and there was a water well in the center of the courtyard so that the Indians couldn’t lay siege to the place and kill anyone by thirst.
In that part of the world you measured the age of a town or a rancho by the size of its trees. Cielo’s establishment was out in the middle of a grass meadow several miles long and almost as wide; the house and its fortified outbuildings sat up on a knoll with command of sixty or seventy square miles of buffalo grass, and the trees around the hacienda threw enough shade to make it likely they had been planted by the grandfather of the present don even if he himself turned out to be a very old man.
There weren’t many cattle in sight, the grass hadn’t been grazed, and Boag saw only two men when he approached the house, both on horseback. They looked less like working vaqueros than like hardcase bodyguards. They converged toward the gateposts so that they had Boag bracketed between them when he arrived. They both had paired revolvers in crossbelted holsters, bandoleros across their shoulders and long rifles across the wide flat wooden horns of their saddles. The rifles weren’t exactly pointed at Boag.
He said he wished to see the don; he said he had been directed here by Almada of Caborca; he kept both hands empty on the pommel. He said it was a matter of business, there was gold bullion involved. He said he thought the don might be interested.
They didn’t say much of anything. They took him up to the house and one of them went inside. The other one kept his eyes on Boag and his rifle handy and managed to express the idea that he didn’t think it would be a very hard job to put a bullet through the third button of Boag’s shirt. Boag dismounted and stood in the shade because it was getting on for the noon hour and the sun was pretty damn hot even at this altitude.
Felix Cielo turned out to be not such a very old man but he might as well have been. He was what remained of an aristocratic horseman, now gone to seed. A thousand gallons of tequila showed in the red veins of his oversized nose. His hands were puffy and his big gut that hung out over his fancy leather belt was not concealed by the intricate woven vest he wore over his stained white shirt. He was somewhere on the sour side of forty and had the eyes of a man who had been kicked more than once and expected to be kicked again. Probably he was drinking up the last of his family fortune and making cheap deals with bandits to postpone bankruptcy.
Boag knew before he started talking that this wasn’t the kind of man Mr. Pickett would deal with. He cut it short, asked his questions and got his negative answers and in the end asked where he might look for Don Pablo Ortiz.
The wagon road trickled down into the valley. There was an old mine off the side of the road, slag piles and grey buildings and two tunnels that he could see, rusty railroad tracks coming out of both of them to abutments where the ore carts would be dumped. A rusty tilt cart on one of them. This wasn’t a mine that had been closed down out of fear; it was a place that was all used up, played out. The earth had been stripped of its goods and the mine had died an honest death.
That down yonder on the plain must be Don Pablo Ortiz’s outfit. It was bigger than the Cielo hacienda but it shared a lot of its qualities: the adobe Moorish shape, the location on a low knoll surrounded by open flats where you could see your attackers long before they got in shooting range, the fortress sense of the layout, and the quality of decay: there were no big crews of vaqueros out herding cattle and there were no cows to herd and the grass had not been eaten.
A windmill sprouted from the central courtyard of the house, looming tall above the place on its rickety wooden trestlework. There weren’t any big trees; the place was probably as old as Cielo’s but either someone had cut all the trees down for better visibility or no one had ever planted any. There were abundant oleanders ten feet high and even an orchard of pruned low apple trees beside one of the barns; there was plenty of greenery but none of it was high or thick. The dons here had wanted nothing that would interrupt their field of fire.