Mexico as he had said he would. The question was, once in Mexicoâwhere then?
He found shade at nine-thirty in the morning and although it wasnât fully hotted up yet he decided not to risk another few miles; he ate and bedded down and waited out the heat. He was up before four, eating dried beef and pinto beans and the last of the cornbread, and feeding the horse a nosebag ration of grain and a hatful of water. The canteen was less than half full now. He put a pebble in his mouth and rolled it around with his tongue to keep the saliva going.
At sundown he came upon what he had feared he might find. The tracks began to split up.
By twos and threes and fours, groups of horses peeled away from the main gang and went their own way. All of them headed generally southward but the little bunches were diverging by miles. The main track got smaller and smaller and finally there was no way to know which was the main track any more, and at ten or eleven oâclock that night Boag had to toss a coin. He picked a set of four-horse prints and settled down to follow them south.
5
He was guessing but his opinion of Mr. Pickett was that in each group of four-horse prints you would probably find two trustworthy old-time Pickett rawhiders, one pack animal loaded with gold, and one relative newcomer to the Pickett-Stryker organization whose potential greed would be tempered by the constant presence of the two old rawhiders who probably slept in shifts and kept both eyes on him. In that manner Mr. Pickett would guarantee, as much as it could be guaranteed, the safe delivery of that portion of the gold to wherever it was destined.
Splitting up this way would be a riskâthree men and a packhorse being far more tempting to bandits than an army of twenty-odd men armed to the teethâbut then it did make the track harder to follow and it also provided good odds that most of the four-horse groups would get through.
It was odd the way he kept thinking of Mr. Pickettâs men as old rawhiders. It was the same way he thought of himself as an old soldier. They were mostly in their forties, not old men at all. It was just that theyâd been riding with Mr. Pickett for more than twenty years, most of them. They probably averaged six or seven years older than Boag, that was all; by his best reckoning Boag was thirty-seven. In Mississippi they didnât keep close birth records on field niggers. Boag didnât know but that he might be a field nigger right now if the war hadnât emancipated him when he was about fourteen or fifteen by his own reckoning; he had lied about itâhe was big, he had always been bigâand the Army had thrown him right into its new black horse-regiment, the Tenth Cavalry, because Boag had a natural eye with a rifle and the seat of Boagâs pants fit very well on the back of a standard-size Cavalry horse.
They had fought the Sioux on the northern plains and the Comanche on the southern plains and there had been several yearsâ garrison duty and then the Army had sent them out under Crook to find Geronimo.
Then when the Indian wars were over the Army decided to cut back about two hundred personnel. They found in the service records of Boag and Wilstach that theyâd both been busted back to private several times for various infractions, so the Army discharged them in the middle of Arizona and they found themselves in the desert with no trade but soldiering, no job but drifting, and the road leading finally to the Ehrenburg jail.
Now on Mr. Pickettâs backtrack Boag was thinking about Wilstach and thinking about all that gold. Of course he was just one man and he was a little crippled up by the bullets heâd taken on the river, but he had nothing better to do with his time and you needed some reason to get up in the morning.
There was the revolution going on in Sonora; there always was. Boag expected to have to dodge some combat. In times of rebellion in Mexico anybody
He found shade at nine-thirty in the morning and although it wasnât fully hotted up yet he decided not to risk another few miles; he ate and bedded down and waited out the heat. He was up before four, eating dried beef and pinto beans and the last of the cornbread, and feeding the horse a nosebag ration of grain and a hatful of water. The canteen was less than half full now. He put a pebble in his mouth and rolled it around with his tongue to keep the saliva going.
At sundown he came upon what he had feared he might find. The tracks began to split up.
By twos and threes and fours, groups of horses peeled away from the main gang and went their own way. All of them headed generally southward but the little bunches were diverging by miles. The main track got smaller and smaller and finally there was no way to know which was the main track any more, and at ten or eleven oâclock that night Boag had to toss a coin. He picked a set of four-horse prints and settled down to follow them south.
5
He was guessing but his opinion of Mr. Pickett was that in each group of four-horse prints you would probably find two trustworthy old-time Pickett rawhiders, one pack animal loaded with gold, and one relative newcomer to the Pickett-Stryker organization whose potential greed would be tempered by the constant presence of the two old rawhiders who probably slept in shifts and kept both eyes on him. In that manner Mr. Pickett would guarantee, as much as it could be guaranteed, the safe delivery of that portion of the gold to wherever it was destined.
Splitting up this way would be a riskâthree men and a packhorse being far more tempting to bandits than an army of twenty-odd men armed to the teethâbut then it did make the track harder to follow and it also provided good odds that most of the four-horse groups would get through.
It was odd the way he kept thinking of Mr. Pickettâs men as old rawhiders. It was the same way he thought of himself as an old soldier. They were mostly in their forties, not old men at all. It was just that theyâd been riding with Mr. Pickett for more than twenty years, most of them. They probably averaged six or seven years older than Boag, that was all; by his best reckoning Boag was thirty-seven. In Mississippi they didnât keep close birth records on field niggers. Boag didnât know but that he might be a field nigger right now if the war hadnât emancipated him when he was about fourteen or fifteen by his own reckoning; he had lied about itâhe was big, he had always been bigâand the Army had thrown him right into its new black horse-regiment, the Tenth Cavalry, because Boag had a natural eye with a rifle and the seat of Boagâs pants fit very well on the back of a standard-size Cavalry horse.
They had fought the Sioux on the northern plains and the Comanche on the southern plains and there had been several yearsâ garrison duty and then the Army had sent them out under Crook to find Geronimo.
Then when the Indian wars were over the Army decided to cut back about two hundred personnel. They found in the service records of Boag and Wilstach that theyâd both been busted back to private several times for various infractions, so the Army discharged them in the middle of Arizona and they found themselves in the desert with no trade but soldiering, no job but drifting, and the road leading finally to the Ehrenburg jail.
Now on Mr. Pickettâs backtrack Boag was thinking about Wilstach and thinking about all that gold. Of course he was just one man and he was a little crippled up by the bullets heâd taken on the river, but he had nothing better to do with his time and you needed some reason to get up in the morning.
There was the revolution going on in Sonora; there always was. Boag expected to have to dodge some combat. In times of rebellion in Mexico anybody
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