Brian Garfield by Tripwire Page A

had the troops and the money; it was clear he also had the military brains. Boag wondered what kind of suicidal lunacy had persuaded Captain Shelby McQuade to join up with the losing side. Captain McQuade had always been reckless but he’d seldom been stupid. But now he wanted to kick over the pail and he didn’t seem to realize the pail was too full; he wasn’t going to kick it over, he was going to stub his toe against it.
    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.

2
    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