The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard - Elmore Leonard [82]
“Leave this Blood of the Saint or thus your souls shall plunge to the hell of the damned!”
His arm swung back and the torch soared out into the night and down until it hit far below on the slope in a shower of bursting sparks. The figure was gone in the darkness.
Quiet settled again, but a few minutes later gunfire came from down the slope. And shortly after that, the sound of horses running hard, and dying away in the distance.
The rest of the night Struggles asked himself questions. He sat unmoving with the dead cigar stub still in his mouth and tried to think it out, applying logic. Finally he came to a conclusion. There was only one way to find out the answers to last night’s mystery.
At the first sign of morning light he rose and started to climb up the slope toward the ledge.
This would answer both questions—it was the only way.
He was almost past caring whether or not the American and his men were still below. Almost. He climbed slowly, feeling the tenseness between his shoulder blades because he wasn’t sure of anything. When he was nearing the rim, a hand reached down to his arm and pulled him up the rest of the way.
“Juan.”
The Indian steadied him as he got to his feet. “You came with such labor, I thought you sick.”
And at that moment Struggles did feel sick. Weak with relief, he was, suddenly, for only then did he realize that somehow it was all over.
He exhaled slowly and his grizzled face relaxed into a smile. He looked past Juan Solo and the smile broadened as his eyes fell on the torn blanket with the pieces of rope coiled on top of it.
“Padre, you ought to take better care of your cassock,” Struggles said, nodding toward the blanket.
Juan Solo frowned. “Your words pass me,” he said, looking out over the slope; and added quickly, “Let us find what occurred with the American.”
Struggles was dead certain that Juan knew without even having to go down from the ledge.
Not far down the grade they found him, lying on his face with stiffened fingers clawed into the loose sand. Near his body were the ashes of the cruciform, still vaguely resembling—even as the wind began to blow it into nothingness—the shape of a cross.
Struggles said, “I take it he didn’t believe in the friar, and wouldn’t listen to his men who did.”
Juan Solo nodded as if to say, So you see what naturally happened, then said, “Now there is plenty of time for your silver, Señor Doctor,” and started back up the grade.
Struggles followed after him, trying to picture Tomas Maria, and thinking what a good friend the friar had in Juan Solo.
9
The Rustlers
Original Title: Along the Pecos
Zane Grey’s Western, February 1953
MOST OF THE time there was dead silence. When someone did say something it was never more than a word or two at a time: More coffee? Words that were not words because there was no thought behind them and they didn’t mean anything. Words like getting late, when no one cared. Hardly even noises, because no one heard.
Stillness. Six men sitting together in a pine grove, and yet there was no sound. A boot scraped gravel and a tin cup clanked against rock, but they were like the words, little noises that started and stopped at the same time and were forgotten before they could be remembered.
More coffee? And an answering grunt that meant even less.
Five men scattered around a campfire that was dead, and the sixth man squatting at the edge of the pines looking out into the distance through the dismal reflection of a dying sun that made the grayish flat land look petrified in death and unchanged for a hundred million years.
Emmett Ryan stared across the flats toward the lighter gray outline in the distance that was Anton Chico, but he wasn’t seeing the adobe brick of the village. He wasn’t watching the black speck that was gradually getting bigger as it approached.
All of us knew that. We sat and watched Emmett Ryan’s coat pulled tight across his shoulder blades, not moving body or head. Just a broad smoothness of faded denim. We’d been looking at the same back all the way from Tascosa and in two hundred miles