Cape Hell Read Free

however, I take it a compliment to my record that I’m included at all. No doubt there’s an ambassadorship for me, in some Godforsaken country on the other side of the world, if I capture Childress.”
    â€œYou mean if I do.”
    He unstopped the bell jar containing the bullet-shaped cigars he ordered from Cuba for six bits apiece and set one afire.
    â€œHow’s your Spanish?”
    â€œBetter than my Greek. I picked up some French on the Barbary Coast, but all that did was snarl up what little Mexican I had.”
    He blew a smoke ring. “You’re trying to talk yourself out of an assignment.”
    â€œWithout success.” I finished my whisky and got up to pour myself another. It was clear I wouldn’t be drinking anything but tequila for a long time.

 
    THREE
    â€œ Childress is an enigma,” Blackthorne said. “Graduated West Point at the top of his class, and in the meanwhile published a slim volume of poetry that drew the attention of the eastern elite; not the helmet-headed, wing-sprouting type of epic you might expect of a warrior, but rather a deep thinker on the order of Emerson. I don’t expect you to grasp the meaning of all these names.”
    â€œI read The Conduct of Life in a lineshack one long winter. Half of it, anyway. The hand who left it used it to start fires.”
    â€œIndeed. I can’t imagine you got much out of it.”
    I let him have his head there. The truth was Emerson might have been writing in Chinese.
    He sat back and contributed to the nicotine stain on the ceiling. “To the men who rode down there with Childress, and to not a few of the locals, he’s something of a god; a man you listen to rather than discourse with, and feel yourself the better for the exchange, however you come away unenlightened by it. Before the war, there was talk of running him for the U.S. Senate.
    â€œHe’s a savant, of sorts; we’re just not sure what: martial, literary, political, or scientific: I’m told he submitted a treatise on galvanization to one of those boards that finds such things of interest. After Juarez’s victory, he sent a letter to the U.S. State Department, recommending we exploit the peons’ near-worship of our civilization to annex Mexico.”
    â€œNo wonder he went underground.”
    â€œNo doubt his comments led to the assumption he’d been executed. He was already under suspicion for switching his allegiance from Emperor Maximilian to the revolutionists. His success in the field spared him punishment, but once he was no longer needed—”
    â€œThat’s the problem with being a born general,” I said. “There isn’t much call for it once peace breaks out.”
    â€œEvidently he agrees. He appears to have spent the last eighteen years assembling his own private army, comprised of former revolutionists, the remnants of his original rebel force, and the Indians who inhabit the Sierra Madre Mountains twenty miles south of the Arizona border. That’s the report, in any case.”
    â€œWho wrote it?”
    â€œA Pinkerton operative, posing as an aimless drifter. He sent a long coded wire to the agency’s headquarters in Chicago and hasn’t been heard from since. Numerous attempts to make contact through pre-arranged channels have failed.”
    â€œThat’s two Americans that country’s misplaced. I didn’t know it was so careless.”
    He picked up the bottle, frowned, then set it back down and rammed in the cork. “The obvious answer is he was found out and eliminated. Now it’s up to us to confirm or disprove the report.”
    â€œWhy us?”
    â€œI volunteered the services of this court, and Washington has generously accepted.”
    â€œThat was white of them. How many men did Sweeney leave us with?”
    â€œIrrelevant. One man may succeed where a regiment would not.”
    â€œI’m supposed to comb all of