Journey of the Dead by Loren D. Estleman

Author:Loren D. Estleman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2011-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

Wildy Well

“Now I know why they call this the Journey of the Dead.”

Kent Kearney, slender and mild-eyed, uncorked his canteen and looked out across the dunes of naked gypsum for which the White Sands was named. The frozen waves put him in mind of a chart of the surface of the moon he had displayed on the corkboard in his old classroom.

“The Dead’s on the other side of the San Andres,” said Pat. “I prefer it to this.”

Privately, the long man, who loved New Mexico in all its many moods, loathed this stretch, eighteen miles long and three miles wide, between the foothills of the San Andres and the Sacramento range. By day the sun hammered the white hills, bringing to a boil even the cold blood of the rattlesnakes that burrowed deep into them to escape the heat. By night grains of gypsum blew across the naked dunes in fine clouds like ground glass, changing the shape of the terrain like an ocean. He was unmoved by the crippling heat and the heart-emptying bleakness of the frozen waves of inescapable white; he simply had no use for country he couldn’t track a man through.

The five men, mounted well and heavily armed, had drawn rein to drink from their canteens and look out across the bloodless plain. They included Pat, Kearney, a former schoolteacher who had joined the posse out of a commitment to his community, Jose Espalin, a Mexican who had shopped his gun on both sides of the border, and Clint Llewellyn and Ben Williams, Doña Ana deputies who had proven themselves enemies of county politics.

Kearney, who revered Pat Garrett’s reputation, had expressed reservations about Espalin. The Mexican, tall and darkly handsome until his lips parted to show his missing front teeth, had blue eyes with all the depth of cheap silver plate. No one seemed to know what went on behind them: Not Pat, who appeared sometimes to place a man’s abilities ahead of his motives, and not Oliver Lee, for whom Espalin had ridden in the past and was rumored to have taken part in the bushwhacking murder of Frenchy Rochas in Dog Canyon. When Kearney had asked Pat why he’d brought the Mexican along, the long man had shrugged and said, “He puts me in mind of Billy Bonney.”

“But you killed Bonney.”

“I never didn’t like him.”

From Chalk Hill the posse retraced the path Colonel Albert Fountain’s buggy had taken on his way home to Mesilla, shortly before he and nine-year-old Henry had dropped off the face of the earth. It had not rained nor snowed heavily since that day, and the ruts their wheels had cut were still visible. They found the place where the buggy had swerved off the road, five miles short of San Augustine Pass. The sun had faded the discolored circle of earth and grass nearby, but the horses caught the scent of old blood and balked, tossing their heads and shaking their manes in protest.

“There’s Ascarate’s paint,” Llewellyn said.

Pat studied the terrain, then pointed at a clump of mesquite atop a stationary dune.

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