The Long Road to Mesilla

Matt Keene had been watching the ground since sunup. Four years of soldiering had taught him to pay attention to country before it gave a man reason to wish he had. The trail cut through low, broken country west of the Rio Grande, gravel and creosote and long stretches of caliche that threw the morning light back hard enough to make a man squint even with his hat brim pulled low. He rode a little ahead of the other three, not because he had appointed himself anything, but because somebody had to keep an eye on what lay in front of them, and none of the others seemed inclined to do it.

The track came just past midmorning, cutting the trail at an angle where no track should have been. A single horse, unshod, had moved from the broken hills to the north, crossed the road, and gone back into them again, as though whoever rode it had wanted only a look at the trail and nothing more. Matt reined up and studied what the hard-packed ground would give him, which was not much. No rider's boot heel showed anywhere near it. Whoever it was had not gotten down.

Parker came up alongside him, canteen in hand, and squinted where Matt was looking. “What is it?”

“Track.”

“Indian?”

“Could be.” Matt straightened in the saddle and looked north, toward the rise of broken hills where the ground climbed into stone and thin brush. Nothing moved there that he could see, but that told him little. Men who did not want to be seen in country like this generally were not.

Willis rode up on the other side, a heavyset man with a red face that never seemed to take a tan no matter how many weeks he spent on the trail. “You seen sign like this before?”

“Some.”

“Don't sound like it worries you much.”

“It worries me,” Matt said. “I just don't see much profit in saying so twice.”

Hale, the Missourian, said nothing. Matt noticed him turn his horse half around and look back the way they had come before studying the country ahead again. Hale had spent enough time around stock to know the usefulness of watching before talking. Of the three, he was the one Matt trusted most to keep his head if trouble came, though trust was a strong word for four men who had thrown in together at a stage stop eleven days earlier because four guns looked safer than one crossing that country.

They rode on. A mile farther the trail dropped into a shallow draw thick with mesquite and scrub willow along a dry wash, and it was there that the birds went up. A dozen of them, maybe more, quail by the look of their flight, broke upward out of the brush all at once and scattered low across the draw before dropping again farther on. Matt had seen enough of that sort of thing to know it did not always mean a man was near. Sometimes it was a coyote. Sometimes there was no telling what had disturbed them. Taken together with the track, it was enough.

“We ought to move,” Matt said. “Not stand here jawing over feed and water. Just move, and keep moving.”

“Move where?” Parker asked. He had a young man's face, unweathered yet despite the trail, and a habit of asking questions that left the deciding to somebody else.

“West, same as we're going. Just faster, and closer together, and with our eyes open.”

Nobody argued the sense of it, but neither did anyone hurry. Willis took a pull from his canteen before capping it again, unhurried as a man watering stock in his own dooryard. Hale checked the rifle where it rode across his saddle, more from habit than need, since Matt had seen him check it not two hours before. Parker kept looking north toward the hills.

They had gone perhaps half a mile at a harder pace when Parker's voice came sharp from behind. “There. Up on the rocks.”

Matt turned in the saddle. Far off along the ridge line, distant enough that a man's shape was only a dark mark against pale stone, sat a rider on a horse, unmoving and watching them from where he had all the distance he needed. Matt could make out nothing beyond horse and rider.

“Leave him be,” Matt said. “He's too far off to do us harm, and we've no cause to give him one.”

Parker already had his rifle coming up.

“Put it down,” Matt said, sharper now. “You'll not hit him from here, and you'll tell him plain enough that we mean trouble.”

Parker fired.

The report cracked hard across the open ground and came back off the hills in broken pieces. The distant rider disappeared over the rise before the echo had finished rolling back at them, gone quickly enough that Matt knew the man had not been caught by surprise. He had simply finished looking.

Matt looked at Parker once. There was no profit in saying anything more about it now. The thing was done. He checked his own rifle and studied the ground ahead, where the trail ran on through low hills and scattered rock.

“Ride,” he said. “And keep moving.”

They rode hard through the worst heat of the day, the sun climbing high and flattening every shadow until the country seemed empty again. Matt did not trust the quiet. He kept his eyes moving from the trail ahead to the higher ground on either side, watching for a patch of brush moving wrong against the wind, a bird lifting where no bird ought to be disturbed, or the brief shine of metal among the rocks.

It was well past noon when the attack came, and it came fast. One moment the four of them were riding through a stretch of low rock and cholla with the trail narrowing between two shoulders of stone, and the next a rifle cracked from somewhere above and to the left. Willis's horse screamed and went down hard, throwing the heavy man clear into the brush.

After that there was no order to any of it. More shots came from two directions, maybe three, the reports overlapping until Matt could not have said how many rifles were firing or exactly where they were. Hale's horse bolted sideways in a panic and nearly unseated him. Parker had already turned and was riding hard back the way they had come, bent low over his horse's neck and shouting something Matt could not make out.

Matt caught movement among the rocks above the trail and fired once. The figure disappeared. Another shot struck close enough to throw dirt against his horse's forelegs, and then the animal went down beneath him without warning, its front legs folding as though the strength had gone out of them all at once.

Matt pitched forward and rolled clear more by instinct than any decision he made. He came up on one knee in the dust with his ears ringing and the smell of burnt powder sharp in the hot air. One look told him the horse was finished, shot through the chest and already still.

He did not waste time on it. Matt pulled his rifle free from where it had fallen half beneath the animal, took his revolver from its holster, and got the canteen strap over his shoulder along with one saddlebag, the nearest one. There was no time to be particular about what he saved.

The broken ground to his right offered the only cover within reach, a jumble of fallen rock and low brush where the hillside had shed itself sometime in years past. Matt went for it low and fast, boots finding purchase where they could and slipping where they could not. A round struck rock somewhere close behind him and screamed off into the brush, and he kept moving.

He gained the rocks and dropped behind a shoulder of gray stone the size of a wagon bed, breathing hard. For the first time since the horse went down, he had a moment to see something besides the next few yards in front of him. Below and to his left, out across the open stretch of trail, Willis's horse lay still in the dust. Near it, half hidden in scrub, what might have been Willis himself had not moved. Of Hale and Parker there was no sign. The country had swallowed them, or they had ridden clear, and there was no way for Matt to know which from where he crouched with his rifle across his knees.

The firing had slackened, though it had not stopped entirely. Somewhere off to the north a shot cracked now and again, spaced out and patient. Matt replaced the cartridge he had fired and made himself count what remained in his belt and saddlebag. It was not as much as he would have liked. A man rarely liked the number once he began counting cartridges.

He moved deeper into the rocks as the afternoon wore on, working from one piece of cover to the next, always keeping some notion of where west lay. Twice he thought he heard hoofbeats off through the brush, and twice he held still and let them pass without learning whether they belonged to one of his companions, one of the men who had attacked them, or a riderless horse.

He found no more sign of Willis and none of Hale or Parker. By the time the sun had dropped low enough to throw long shadows from every rock and mesquite clump, Matt understood that he was alone and on foot, with less water and ammunition than he would have chosen for either condition.

Near sundown he found two slabs leaning together with enough room beneath them to get out of sight. It was not much of a shelter, but it gave him a place to rest his legs and listen. He sat with his back to the stone, rifle across his knees, while the country settled toward evening.

The light went from white to gold and then to a deep red along the western hills. Insects began among the brush. Somewhere farther down the slope, loose stone shifted.

Matt lifted his head.

Nothing followed.

He waited.

A minute passed. Then another stone moved, not loudly, but where he had heard no animal working through the rocks.

Matt stood, put the canteen over his shoulder, and took up the saddlebag.

He had seen nobody for the better part of an hour, but he did not need to.

Somebody had taken his trail.