the presidio—from which it’s impossible to escape—is on the outskirts and vulnerable to Comanche raids.
When Green Horn hears the news of the Shears-Nepomuceno affair, he thinks that the gringos will ride into Matasánchez in reprisal and liberate him from “these disgusting meals and salsas, these flatulent greasers.” He has to restrain himself from breaking into song.
The jailkeeper—who doesn’t have an official title—is a friend of Carvajal, Nepomuceno’s political rival; he has many reasons to rejoice:
1 At last he has something to distract him from his boredom.
2 The position he’s been given by the mayor is humiliating—he’s no more than a security guard, a lowly post unbecoming to a man of his lineage, but he needs the money. “If I’d bought land to the north of the river when the time was right, I’d be set for life” (which, given the gringo takeover, is not true).
3 He thinks he’s finally got his shot at glory; he’s always been on the sidelines when things happen, but not this time, he’s in the jailhouse and something big’s going to happen here.
The jailkeeper caresses the pistols in his holsters.
No one remembers his name.
His duty done, Gómez, the mayor’s assistant, returns to the office. He arrives to find his boss, Don José María, whose famous family’s surname has been popularly replaced by “de la Cerva y Tana” (meaning “blow gun”, a nickname that mocks his inability to open his mouth without spitting verbal bullets at people), carrying an envelope bearing the central government’s seal. Upon hearing the news about Shears the mayor tears the letter open and tosses it onto his desk, unread, and begins to rant and rave as usual, while folding the envelope over and over again, as though it were the envelope’s fault:
He curses Gómez for bearing the news.
He curses Bruneville.
He curses Shears: “Idiot, good-for-nothing, doesn’t even know how to hammer a nail.”
He curses Lázaro Rueda for being drunk: “Booze isn’t good for him, the violin, on the other hand …”
He curses up and down, left and right.
When he’s vented this string of insults he asks loudly, “And now what are we supposed to do? There’s no doubt that Nepomuceno will retaliate, and how! Where does this leave the rest of us?”
The letter lies on his desk, still unread. It’s signed by Francisco Manuel Sánchez de Tagle. It says, in large, clear letters:
I RECOMMEND THAT THE NEGRO FUGITIVES FROM THE UNITED STATES REMAIN IN THE CITIES ALONG OUR NORTHERN BORDER, AS MUCH TO PROVIDE LODGING FOR THEM WITH DIGNITY AS BEFITS ANY MEXICAN CITIZEN, AS TO PROTECT OUR COUNTRY FROM AMERICAN RAIDS.
In the courtyard of Aunt Cuca’s house, Catalino changes the message tied to another pigeon, Mi Morena, and sets her flying southward.
Mi Morena arrives in the camp of the Seminoles (or Mascogos, as the Mexicans call them). The message is handed immediately to Wild Horse, the chief, and to Juan Caballo, the leader of the fugitive African slaves, an ally of Wild Horse from long before their sojourn south of the Río Bravo.
The message makes the Seminoles anxious. It reawakens their worst fear: the frontier may no longer provide protection against the gringos.
“We left everything we knew,” says Wild Horse, “to escape from the White Cholera. We bade goodbye to the buffalo, the plains, the birds and their songs. Now we risk our lives living in caves where moss grows on our clothes, beneath an unknown sky where no ducks fly, in stagnant air that reverberates with the sounds of unknown insects, on unforgiving land, just to get away from the gringos. Have we changed our world for nothing, only to suffer them again?”
The members of the camp wail and beat their chests. In a few hours they send Mi Morena back. She returns to Matasánchez without a message.
They send their message to Querétaro, via Parcial, Juan Caballo’s pigeon, who flies off. If we were to wait for him to arrive we’d lose the thread of our story, so we’ll leave it there and go back to the Valley of the Rio Grande, the prairie, Indian Territory.
Nicolaso writes out copies of the phrase and entrusts them to several pigeons. We saw the first one fly to Matasánchez with Favorita. The second travels northward on the feet of Hidalgo, the white pigeon. On the Pulla cotton plantation a young mulatto (son of Lucie, the slave they say was mistress to Gabriel Ronsard, the café owner) receives the pigeon, scratches his crotch, and reads the message aloud. The overseer scratches his head and listens. The Negros under his supervision listen, too, scratching their chests and necks in front of a small group of Indians who have come to trade—they’ve brought two tame mustangs they want to exchange for bullets and cotton, which they’ll take back to Indian Territory and exchange for prisoners.
The Indians don’t itch themselves now—the Pulla plantation is infested with fleas—but they’ll be itching later, after they bring the bug-ridden cotton home with them.
For the cautious, vindictive foreman the news is of little interest, no matter how he looks at it he can’t see why it matters.
For the Negros it’s downright scandalous. Nepomuceno is a living legend. According to local lore he was kidnapped by Indians as a boy, an unfounded rumor that was spread by El Tigre, the runaway slave from Guinea who was captured by the Comanches and returned to his owner for a handsome reward. A good-looking, healthy, young Negro with strong teeth who could read and write, he was clean, conscientious, and hard-working, worth his weight in gold. From the day of his arrival he has told stories, many untrue, about Nepomuceno.
Having been kidnapped isn’t the only reason Nepomuceno is a living legend. It’s the stories about his riding, cattle-rustling, skirt-chasing, and fighting, along with his unparalleled roping skills and having been born into money, that make him a living legend; cowards fear him and women dream about him for good reason. There’s no one like Nepomuceno—who’s also a redhead, according to some.
The young mulatto puts Hidalgo in the pigeon loft and begins to pray: “Holy Mother, look after Don Nepomuceno.”
A third pigeon flies the first leg of his trip alongside Hidalgo. When Hidalgo lands in Pulla, the other pigeon continues across a stretch of bare land, where there’s not even one lonely huisache, just stone-hard earth, before landing on the adobe arch that guards the Well of the Fallen.
That’s how Noah Smithwick, the Texan pioneer who leads slave-hunting parties, hears the news. These men make a fortune by returning slaves to their so-called owners for ransom. As you might imagine, Shears’ insult is a joy to Noah Smithwick’s ears. He detests Nepomuceno and anyone else who so much as resembles a Mexican. Mexico ruins his trade, with its nonsensical ideas about property and other crazy notions, which would drive any self-respecting businessman to rack and ruin.
“The Mexicans will never amount to anything, they’re a people without wherewithal, good for nothing but cooking and looking after the horses.”
Two Born-to-Run Indians carry the news northward from the Well of the Fallen.
The news quickly reaches the King Ranch, neither by pigeon nor by Born-to-Run. A godlike horseman (dressed in white, riding a white mare) delivers the news, so quickly, in fact, that it was said to have been delivered by lightning bolt.
The news travels north toward the Coal Gang with the Born-to-Run Indians.
The Coal Gang are bandits who roam both sides of the frontier; they go wherever the loot is. The majority are Mexicans. They have their preferred targets:
1 Gringos. And anyone who looks like them, with the exception of their leader, Bruno, who has the blondest beard in the region—his men say it’s because of the sun, which has bleached it, but those who knew him back when he hid beneath his mother’s dark skirts and the brim of his father’s (very elegant) hat know that he was born with white hair, and skin so white it was almost blinding. But now Bruno is dark as ebony. A