Onslow was glad he had Linda placed back somewhere safe. He wasted no time telling Ramon that he needed more guns and stronger defenses.

  ‘Why?’ asked the older man. ‘We have lived here for years. For decades. The peons know I look after them. Why would they turn against me?’

  ‘They could own your land,’ said Onslow. ‘They could work it for themselves.’

  Hoyos laughed. ‘How? They don’t know how to organize a ranch or how to sell cattle. They’d be cutting their own throats.’

  ‘That’s an old argument,’ Onslow countered, ‘one that doesn’t bear much weight when you see a man riding in a carriage an’ you’re afoot.’

  ‘I look after them,’ said Hoyos. ‘They live well. My ancestors fought for this land and now my family own it. No one can take that away from us.’

  Jonas Strong cleared his throat and glanced at Onslow. He grinned as he began to speak.

  ‘Señor Hoyos,’ he said, ‘there’s people been saying the same thing for a long time. My folks was slaves. They were owned, body an’ soul. They got told what to do and got whipped if they argued. There was some decent slaveowners, but they all got lumped in with the bad ones. The same’ll happen to you when the time comes. The difference here is that your peons got guns and they’ll kill you stone dead if they get the chance an’ there’s someone like Villa or Batista telling them it’s all right to do it.’

  ‘You speak like a revolutionary,’ said Hoyos. ‘Were you not the friend of Cade Onslow, I should think you a Villista yourself.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Strong. ‘Maybe I sympathize with them because I got some kinda idea of how they feel. How much land you own, señor Hoyos?’

  Ramon shrugged, looking a little confused. ‘On all the holdings? Or just here? Why, anyway?’

  ‘You don’t have to answer,’ smiled Strong. ‘I was just trying to make a point.’

  Hoyos frowned. ‘About ten thousand acres in Sonora,’ he said. ‘Maybe fifteen with the Verrano holdings. I have seven and a half thousand acres in Chihuahua and Sinaloa.’

  ‘And mines?’ Strong urged. ‘Oil fields?’

  ‘A silver mine and an oil field near here.’ Hoyos sounded reluctant to reveal his full wealth. ‘There’s a copper mine as well; two more in Sinaloa. I own a half share in an American oil field in Coahuila. Why?’

  ‘How many men work for you?’ asked Strong.

  ‘I don’t know. Nearly a hundred men on this ranch alone. There’s about seventy working the silver mine and the same number on the copper.’

  ‘How about the oil field?’ said Strong.

  ‘I have no idea,’ said Hoyos. ‘I leave that kind of thing to the managers.’

  ‘The Verrano ranch?’

  ‘Twenty, thirty men? Torreon looks after it.’

  ‘The mines in Sinaloa?’

  Hoyos shrugged, looking irritable.

  ‘I have no idea. I employ managers—jefes—to handle that side of the operation.’

  ‘How many men does it take to work a silver mine?’ Strong’s easy purr had flattened to a vaguely menacing harshness. ‘Fifty? A hundred? How many?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Hoyos looked confused and angry. ‘Why? How does it concern you?’

  ‘Just asking,’ said Strong, letting the softness come back into his voice. ‘I wondered how well you know your people.’

  ‘I look after them,’ grunted Hoyos. Defensively. ‘They get paid and fed. I cannot account for them all.’

  ‘No,’ said Strong gently. ‘You surely can’t.’

  Hoyos turned to Onslow.

  ‘Cade, I dislike your sergeant’s tone. He is welcome as a guest of yourself and Linda, but he should learn to speak in turn, not out.’

  Onslow smothered a grin and set to placating his father-in-law.

  ‘Jonas was only trying to gauge our defenses.’ He emphasized the ours. ‘Way things are shaping, you could need every man you employ. Fact is, we got a plan.’

  ‘Yes?’ Ramon sounded grateful for the change of subject. ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘Well,’ said Onslow, ‘with a war brewing up you’ll need guns to defend your property.’

  ‘I have guns,’ said Hoyos. ‘Every vaquero working for me has his own pistol and rifle. They all buy their cartridges at the lowest possible cost from my stores.’

  Strong hid a snort of disgust in his coffee cup. Onslow spoke fast to cover the cynical whistling noise.

  ‘That won’t be enough, Ramon. Not if the Villistas are using machine-guns and stealing American cattle to buy more. You’re gonna have to match them. You’ll need guns and ammunition and men. The kind that know all about war. The kind that know how to use guns; not cowboys.’

  ‘So?’ asked Hoyos. ‘What miraculous answer do you suggest?’

  ‘Let me buy them for you,’ said Onslow. ‘Me and Jonas. We both know guns and the right men. You give us the money to do it, an’ we’ll seal up your ranches so damn’ tight there won’t be a flea crawlin’ through, let alone a Villista.’

  ‘You think it’s that bad?’ said Hoyos.

  ‘We watched your cows going by,’ said Onslow. ‘I killed three men because they killed a friend of mine. They were carrying new carbines and one had an automatic pistol. There were close on a thousand cows in the herd. Around fifty horses, all told. Yeah: it’s that bad.’

  Hoyos nodded, reaching for the brandy as he calculated the price of weapons and the market value of stolen cows. It was a frightening equation for a hacendado accustomed to ruling his domains like a king. But Ramon Hoyos was, if nothing else, a realist. He was able to see the dangers of the revolutionary movement and the ensuing confusion of civil war. He had already lost cattle to the so-called rebels, the Villistas. The damned bandits, might they be cursed forever! His vaqueros had put up a brave fight, but they hadn’t been able to save the cattle from the north range. Nor had the rurales done much about it. In fact, the only people to come anywhere close to the bandits were these two men facing him across the table with their preposterous plan.

  Or was it so preposterous? Was Onslow talking sense? Did the black man have a point?

  Maybe they did. At any rate, Ramon Hoyos was too canny to dismiss a chance out of hand.

  ‘Tell me more,’ he said. ‘Tell me what you want to do.’

  ‘Defend your land,’ said Onslow directly. ‘Me an’ Jonas both know all there is to soldiering. You give us the money and we’ll find you guns. The men to use them, too.’

  ‘In America?’ asked Hoyos. ‘You can’t go back there.’

  Onslow shrugged. ‘I can grow a moustache, and there won’t be too many people know me outta uniform. Besides, there’s folk along the border who don’t ask many questions when money’s concerned.’

  ‘And your friend?’ Hoyos glanced at Strong. ‘Will he pass unrecognized too?’

  Strong chuckled. ‘Who looks at a black man?’ he said. ‘I got a disguise painted right on my skin.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Hoyos. ‘I’ll do what you suggest. How much will you need?’

  ‘About five thousand dollars American,’ said Onslow. ‘As much again when we deliver. The men’ll want more by then.’

  ‘Done,’ said Hoyos. ‘I’ll get the money tomorrow.’

  Onslow and Strong spent the next two weeks kicking their heels around the ranch. There was a whole new lot of news came in from day to day, mostly about how Carranza was building his army and making overtures to Pancho Villa. That might have been the reason there were no more attacks, though Onslow doubted that explanation. Feeling was mounting inside Mexico that America should stand clear and let the southern end of the continent settle its own affairs. Three American oilmen were attacked and beaten in Aqua Prieta. The attackers got away unharmed.

  Onslow grew a moustache and spent fourteen nights with Linda.

  That made a total of twenty in nearly two months of marriage.

  It was late May and full summer was beginning to settle over the high plateau of northern Mexico. Hoyos’ cattle were fattening up on the grass, the early branding was finished and the most the hands had to do was watch out for wolves or cougars taking out the weaker animals. It was a period of calm, of nervous tranquility, and if the men laughed a little too loud and a little too easily, it was because they were glad there was no more fighting.

  Onslow sent word through Hoyos’ agents to the towns on the American side of the border. Word came back slowly, in bits.

  There was a dealer in El Paso who could get hold of two Hawkins machine-guns complete with ammunition.

  A man in Bisbee had fifty Mannlicher-Carcano rifles for sale.

  In Tucson, so the word went, there was a crate of grenades and two of mines.

  The border telegraph brought fresh promises daily, once it was known there was money up front for weapons.

  Men were a new problem.

  Hired guns were easy to find and cheap to buy in most of the towns spread out along the US-Mexico line. There were gunfighters old enough to remember the Lincoln County War, younger men had followed the black powder trail, Indian scouts, cowboys with nothing left to sell except their expertise with a pistol or rifle. They weren’t what Onslow wanted. The professionals were mostly too old and tired and slow, the youngsters too green, too hot-headed. The kind of men Onslow needed were a breed apart.

  He discussed the problem with Strong one evening as they sat watching the sun go down.

  The air was very still, warm and filled with the clicking of the cicadas. The sky was faded from blue to pale purple, struck through with long, wide bands of red where the sun hit cloud before disappearing behind the Sierra Madre. A skein of duck crossed the sky, the harsh crying muted by the heaviness of the air. From inside the hacienda there came the smell of cooking and the chatter of the cocineras. It was calm, peaceful, the kind of evening when a man leans back in his chair and sips a drink while he thinks about how good life is.

  ‘There’s Brady,’ said Strong. ‘I heard he was in Tombstone.’

  Onslow shook his head. ‘He got married. Got a kid now.’

  ‘How about Billy Greaves? He used to be good.’

  ‘Not anymore.’ Onslow poured a measure of tequila into his glass, topped it with lemonade, and dropped in two chunks of ice. ‘He went up against some kid and took a gut shot. Last I heard, he was in hospital in Tucson.’

  ‘I never knew that,’ said Strong. ‘Abbot?’

  ‘Got shot robbing a bank in Nevada.’

  They sat and drank in silence. Then Onslow said:

  ‘Tyler used to be reliable. You know where he is now?’

  ‘Yuma,’ grunted Strong. ‘In the pen. He killed a man in Douglas. I thought you knew.’

  ‘No.’ Onslow shook his head. ‘I never heard about that. What happened to Jim Kane?’

  ‘Last I heard he was in Canada. Said he was on his way to mine gold.’

  ‘Shit! Who’s left?’

  ‘You an’ me?’ said Strong quietly.

  Onslow reached over and picked up the bottle. He leaned towards Strong, tilting the neck to spill the clear liquor into the out-thrust glass. He topped his own and set the bottle back in place.

  It was very quiet.

  The red bands faded out of the sky and gave way to the purple. The purple got darker and tiny pricks of brilliant light began to shine through the haze. A thin, pared-down moon stood up high to the east. Somewhere a long way off a dog barked. It was answered. After a while the barking stopped and a whippoorwill called.

  There was a sadness in the air that reminded Onslow of age and death and wasted lives. Brady and Greaves, Vance Abbot, Kane; all of them were dead or married or in prison or gone. It wasn’t the same anymore. Nothing was the same. It was a tale of the times. Onslow could remember when the land was open and free. When the railroads were still new and wonderful; when the telegraph wires were just going up and it all seemed like civilization was taking a big step west. Now the wires and the rails had cut the land through, all the way to the quick of the life beat. Killed it. A whole new world had come riding in on the same iron rails that had sent the buffalo away and broken up the tribes. The land was parceled up into tidy sections that got fenced off behind barbed wire. And the railroad companies owned most of the land, or dictated prices to the ranchers and the farmers who still clung onto what was there before. The telegraph carried words across thousands of miles of country faster than a horse could run. Texas and New Mexico and Arizona were getting filled up with the angular skeletons of the oil fields, like dead ground picked over by gigantic carrion-eating birds. There were automobiles and telephones; gaslight. Shares and stocks and bonds. Businessmen had replaced the cowboys and the horse was getting replaced by the automobile.

  It was a time of change.

  Onslow felt it in his gut and in his bones. He felt it like a page was turned and all the old words blotted out under the new, blank sheet. And there were new people writing the words on that sheet. People who didn’t know about the old frontiers. People who cared less. People who were interested only in the balance of profit and loss, to whom cows and men and land were just figures to be juggled on some adding machine in a city with high buildings and street lamps and no soul. People who never carried a gun because no one had ever tried to kill them. People who couldn’t understand why a man needed a gun. People who were too far away to understand or care or even worry about what they were doing.

  It was, Onslow supposed, civilization.

  But he didn’t have to like it.

  Strong interrupted his thoughts.

  ‘That kid we knew in Texas. What the hell was his name?’

  ‘Who?’ Onslow turned, wondering if it was booze or age or too much thinking that fogged his mind. ‘Who d’you mean?’

  Strong sniffed and stared out over the empty landscape. ‘Mean little bastard that tried to cut me with that knife he always carried. That was in Texas. Be about 1909, maybe 1910. He was a pure demon with explosives. You gotta remember.’

  Onslow shook his head. Strong sipped his drink, straining his memory for the name, for more information.

  ‘He got discharged after a mine blew up on him. Took half his face away, so he was sent off to hospital in Houston. Came out scarred and took his pension. I heard he worked the mines around here for a while. Explosives expert.’

  Memories clicked inside Onslow’s head. Faces flashed past the eye of his mind. He said:

  ‘Jamie Durham.’

  ‘That’s the name,’ agreed Strong. ‘Jamie Durham.’

  ‘So?’ Onslow wondered what Jonas was getting at. ‘Why him?’

  ‘We’re taking part in a war,’ said the Negro. ‘Wars mean defenses. Defenses mean planning. Mines and traps an’ that stuff.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Onslow, ‘you’re right.’

  He wondered why he was so slow to understand. Maybe it was age creeping up on him. Maybe it was the peace of the evening. Maybe it was the thought of settling down and living happy with Linda. Then that part of his mind that was trained by nature and the US Army to make fast decisions clicked into gear.

  ‘He’d be useful. How the hell do we find him?’

  ‘I heard he was with some oil company in Chihuahua,’ said Strong. ‘There was word he got fired off the rig and went back north. Last I heard, he was hanging round El Paso.’

  ‘How long?’ Onslow doubted the news was fresh.

  Strong surprised him. ‘I got word about six weeks ago. Never thought about it until now. If he got fired, he might still be there.’

  ‘All right,’ said Onslow, ‘we’ll ride over to El Paso and see. There’s two Hawkins up there, anyway.’

  ‘Right on,’ said Strong. ‘That makes sense.’

  ‘Might be right off,’ grinned Onslow, ‘but we’ll try it.’

  They stood up and went inside to where Linda was calling them for dinner.

  It was a good meal. Avocado pears in a vinegar sauce followed by prime steak with sweetcorn and tomato salad. Pumpkin pie with cream. Wine from the Hoyos cellars washed it down and brandy imported from France when Maximilian still ruled Mexico. Then coffee.

  Onslow felt good as he took Linda up the stairs to the big, cool bedroom where the wide bed was clean and welcoming.

  They had been married for almost three months now, and it still felt as good as the first night.

  Chapter Four

  JAMIE DURHAM WAS dreaming.

  It was a good dream, about his father’s farm and the girl who lived twenty miles away on the neighboring homestead. She was the first woman Jamie had known, and though there had been others since her, he always enjoyed this particular dream.

  He was walking through the lower meadow, down the slope towards the creek dividing the Durham farm from the Riley homestead. Willow and aspen grew thick along the creek, sprouting from the rich, dark soil to form a small wood that wasn’t really worth the bother of clearing. Mary was waiting for him amongst the trees. Her golden hair shone bright through the sun-dappled shadows in the clearing and her wide, full lipped mouth parted in a smile as she saw him. In the dream Jamie smiled back and ran towards her. He kissed her, hard, feeling the contours of her body pressed against him, her arms wrap round him. They sank to the soft, sweet-smelling grass and suddenly they were naked. Jamie touched her breasts, her thighs, her hair. Mary smiled and moaned and pulled him over on top of her warm, inviting body.

  Then there was a great explosion of light inside Jamie’s mind and he cried out in his sleep. Sweat beaded his face, ran thick and salty over his chest. He writhed, tangling his legs in the grubby, damp sheets. He rolled onto his left side, pressing his face down into the pillow. His knees drew up to his chest and he folded his arms tight across his midriff as he began to shiver. A low, animal moaning broke from his lips.

  Suddenly he screamed and sat up, eyes wide and staring into the dimness of his room.

  Something hit the floor with a glassy clatter and he swung his legs off the bed, reaching down more from habit than conscious decision. He fumbled on the dirty planks and he found the thing that had fallen, set it carefully on the crate that acted as his table.