Borderlands by James Carlos Blake Read Free Book Online Page B

and promised I would never ask another: I pleaded with Him to deliver Juan Rojas to me alive. I prayed and prepared for him and I paced, my jaws clenched against the ceaseless urge to howl. And I waited.
    Late one afternoon, nearly two months after Delgadina’s death, one of my vaqueros came back from a visit to the whorehouse in San Lorenzo with the news that Juan Rojas was in jail at the rurales’ outpost in Tres Palmas.
    All the whores had been talking about it, he said. They’d heard the story of the arrest from a rurales sergeant the night before, one of Ochoa’s men. The sergeant said the rurales had been tipped off by a barkeeper from Sahuaro who’d been sentenced to thirty days in jail for watering his tequila. The barkeep had been in the jail only a week when he heard that his wife had run away to Sonoita with a friend of his, and he was enraged. For more than a month he had been permitting this friend, who was in trouble with the law, to hide in the back room of his cantina, and this was how the friend repaid his kindness—by stealing his wife. On learning of this treachery done to him, the barkeeper in turn betrayed the friend to the rurales. The friend was of course Juan Rojas.
    The rurales had gone to Sonoita and entered the pueblo after nightfall. They searched stealthily from place to place, carbines ready, and found him in a cantina, singing to himself with his head on the bar. Although Ochoa had repeatedly assured me that when his boys found him they would do everything possible to capture him alive, I knew the rurales never took chances with their quarry. If he’d made the least show of resistance, they would have shot him a hundred times. The sergeant told the whores he himself eased up behind Rojas and clubbed him in the back of the head with his carbine. He hit him so hard that Rojas didn’t wake up until Sonoita was thirty miles behind them. Chained hand and foot, he made the journey to Tres Palmas in a goat cart. He had now been in jail, my man said, for nearly a week.
    It was after midnight when I arrived in Tres Palmas, my horse blowing hard and dripping lather. I had insisted on coming alone, had shouted down my importunate foreman’s pleas to take an escort with me. I had been wild with exultation and, I admit, not thinking clearly. I had bellowed some half-witted foolishness about the moment being mine , and I would share it with no one. I told the foreman I would kill any man who tried to follow me. But the hard ride through the cold desert night had cleared my mind sufficiently to regret not bringing an escort. It had finally occurred to me that Ochoa had violated his pledge to bring Rojas to me—and, for whatever reason, might yet be disinclined to hand him over.
    Tres Palmas was little more than a scattering of adobe buildings on either side of a sandy windblown street blazing whitely under a full moon. I tethered the foundered horse in front of the jail and slipped my carbine from its scabbard, worked a round into the chamber, and went inside.
    The windowless room was dimly lighted, the air thick with cigarette smoke and fumes from the lanterns on the walls. Ochoa and a couple of his boys were sitting at a table, playing cards and sharing a bottle of tequila. Nobody seemed surprised to see me—or very pleased. Directly behind them, the door of the only cell was shut, but I could make out the indistinct form of someone standing close to the bars. I held the rifle loosely at my hip, the muzzle jutting vaguely in the table’s direction.
    Ochoa looked tired and sad. He returned his attention to the cards he was holding, then threw down the hand in disgust. His eyes were bloodshot. “What, Don Sebastián?” he said. “What is it?”
    I’d never before seen Ochoa drunk, but I was not surprised by the sullen arrogance the tequila effected in him. Strong drink so easily agitates these primitives and sets loose the mob of resentments always lurking in their dark hearts. But I was feeling