Chapter 12

We both woke up in the middle of the night to a crashing, raging, howling storm blowing outside. The rainy season had begun with a vengeance.

We’d fallen asleep without closing the French doors, which were still standing wide open. Gusts of wind came blowing through periodically, causing the curtains to billow up and swirl around the doors. I got up to close the doors and Anna asked me to leave one of them open, so we could hear the rain and watch the lightening.

I returned to bed to find that Anna had gotten up and retrieved the wine and glasses from the fireplace bench. She was sitting on the bed with two glasses of wine, and was holding mine out for me to take. It was a fetching sight.

I took the wine glass from Anna, giving her a deep kiss in return. We sat and sipped our wine as we listened to the sound of the rain falling and watched the lightening bounce from small peak to small peak in the Doña Ana Mountains. One glass of wine relaxed us enough to put us back to sleep, and we slept hard the rest of the night.

We woke up in the morning fully rested and ready for a new day. The storm had blown itself out sometime during the night, but it was still spitting rain, so we did our Tai Chi and practice in the bedroom before taking a shower together.

Anna decided there was at least one more possibility to explore in the shower which I happily went along with. All good things must come to an end, however; and eventually we dried off, dressed, and were on our way down to the dining room for breakfast.

Tom and Yolanda were already sitting at the table drinking coffee when we arrived. “Did you two go out in the rain for Tai Chi?” Yolanda asked as we sat down.

“No, we did it in the bedroom,” Anna replied. Yolanda got a twinkle in her eye and started to say something, but Anna saw the twinkle and realized what she’d just said. “Don’t say it, Yolanda,” quickly shutting her down.

I laughed as Celia brought in coffee for Anna and me telling everyone that breakfast would be ready in ten minutes. Less than five minutes later, Giuseppe, Sofia, their kids, and the Padre came in and sat down. They were soon followed by Raul and Raphael. Breakfast was brought out shortly thereafter and we all ate heartily.

“Tom?” I said to get his attention over coffee. “I want you, me, and Giuseppe to visit the village this morning and see how they’re making out after last night’s rainstorm. From there, I want to check out the dams to see how they’re doing. The last thing I want to check is the macadam road and to have a look at the new quarry, to see if it’s retaining any water.”

“Sounds like a good plan,” Tom said laconically after seeing Giuseppe nod. “When do you want to go?”

“Mid-morning will be fine. It looks like it finally stopped raining completely, and that will give the caliche a couple of hours to drain, so the horses as well as the riders won’t be covered in it during our ride.”

“How’s the river looking?” Raul asked.

“We only glanced at it before coming downstairs this morning, but it was flooding, as is to be expected,” I said over the lip of my cup. “We’ll take a longer look at it from the terrace after breakfast.”

After breakfast, we all trooped upstairs to the terrace. One of the ladies had already been up here, and toweled off the tables and chairs. We all went to the railing and stood looking out at the flooded river.

Giuseppe finally broke the silence. “It’s a shame the rain didn’t hold off another couple of days, so we could use the water control castings the masons have been working on.”

“You need to remember the old Hebrew saying, Giuseppe,” I responded.

He gave me a puzzled look.

“Man plans, God laughs.”

That got a chuckle out of everyone and we turned to go sit down to find Celia and Carla bringing out coffee services with another already on one of the tables. Sitting down, we poured our coffees as we listened to the mockingbirds raising a raucous over something on the upper plateau.

The sun was shining bright and it was already quite warm, so I gave voice to the thought that we may not need to wait until mid-morning as hot as it already was.

“Yep, if it doesn’t rain again before tomorrow night, we should still be okay for our Sunday trip to Las Cruces, too,” Tom observed.

The mockingbirds were still making a racket out on the upper plateau, and I finally got up to go see what was going on. Walking through the house and courtyard, I climbed up to the wall walk, looking out over the wall to where most of the noise was coming. I didn’t see much except the mockingbirds diving and swooping towards the ground a little over six hundred yards away from the gate. I pulled out my monocular and looked to see what they were diving at, but with the tall grass I couldn’t see much.

I left the wall walkway and went down and out through the courtyard door, determined to remove whatever was causing them to make all that noise. As I got closer, I started to make out enough details to tell it was the body of someone, and I started running.

It was a young Apache boy, five or six years old. He was alive but shivering badly with a burning fever. There didn’t seem to be any wounds and I had to wonder how he’d managed to get to the upper plateau without anyone knowing. I stood up looking around to see if there were any other bodies, but didn’t find anyone else.

I was growing more and more concerned. A young Apache would never be out on his own as this boy was. Scooping him up into my arms, I carried him into the Hacienda, passing Anna who’d come looking for me. She took one look at the boy in my arms and led me to the empty room next to ours, telling me to lay him down on the bed.

“Anna, he was all alone out there. After I get some medicine into him, I’m going to go looking for the rest of his family. They have to be out there somewhere.”

She nodded and sat next to the boy on the bed. I went into the bedroom and opened the drawer I kept a small quantity of the twentieth century medicine in, and took out four Tylenol capsules and after a second of thought also took out four penicillin pills.

Back in the bedroom with the boy, I placed both a Tylenol and a penicillin pill in the boy’s mouth followed with a glass of water to wash them down. I was wondering where the glass of water came from when Clara came rushing in carrying a bowl of water with a cloth and a pitcher of water.

“Anna said you needed more water for the boy to drink, and something to clean him up with,” she said, setting the pitcher on the table. Sitting down on the bed with the boy, she began to clean him up with the cloth and water from the bowl she was holding.

Anna came back in and I showed her the two kinds of pills. “He needs to take one of each, every six hours. We need to watch him carefully over the next twelve hours or so,” I said giving her a concerned look. “A small number of people have very bad reactions to the small white pill. If his hands, face, or throat start to swell you need to stop giving them to him and let me know immediately.”

She nodded and asked, “Do you recognize the boy?”

“I don’t think I’ve seen him before.”

“I think he was with one of the families from Alvaro’s group, but I can’t be sure. If they all left, why would he be here?” Anna asked rhetorically.

“I don’t know, Anna, but I’m hoping we can find out,” I said before turning out of the room to the others on the terrace. “Sofia? Yolanda? I found a small Apache boy on the upper plateau. Please go to the bedroom next to mine and tell us if you recognize the boy.” They both got up and rapidly disappeared inside. “Tom, Giuseppe, we need to find the boy’s family. They’re out there somewhere, and are probably worried sick about the boy. Please saddle up our horses for a trip out the back door.” They both nodded and left to get that done.

I let the ladies know the three of us were leaving, got a kiss from Anna, and hurried downstairs to get my large medical kit. Tom handed me my filled camel pack as he passed the study door on his way up the steps. Following him upstairs and out the courtyard, we mounted and rode off towards the boulder trail and the back door into the upper plateau.

Scanning the ground of the upper plateau as we rode through the boulder trail, we again saw neither tracks nor anything unusual. As we came out of the trail onto the backside of the Robledo mountains, we were hailed by the two cousins who were on watch.

We pulled up and waited for them to join us. They came trotting up, and I told them what we’d found on the upper slope. They looked at each other and said they didn’t know of any missing boys, and hadn’t seen anyone coming through the trail. They added that the storm had been so intense last night that they wouldn’t have seen an army if it had marched through!

I nodded and asked one of them to scout around in the boulder field, to see if there was anyone in there. I told the other to come with us to see if the boy’s family was out here somewhere. One immediately turned and ran off for the boulders while the other said he’d look higher up in the hills.

Tom, Giuseppe, and I spread out two hundred yards from each other and started searching the hills down the sides of the mountain. We’d been searching for almost two and a half hours when we heard three shots from much higher up the mountain. The three of us turned our horses in that direction and rode hard up the mountain for ten minutes before hearing another yell. We looked over to the northeast where the yell had come from and saw the cousin standing and waving at us from the top of a large rock a few hundred yards higher up.

We rode over to him and he showed us where a family had camped for the evening. It looked like the rain had loosened enough rocks to start a rockslide above and just to the side of the camp. He’d been looking and, so far, had found an older woman and young girl dead. He was sure from all the debris that there were at least two more out here somewhere, including the man of the family.

There was no hiding the fact that the rockslide had rolled right over most of the camp. The two dead bodies had been clearly crushed in the rockslide but as the cousin had said, there was enough evidence to convince us that that there were at least two more people in the family group. We found the boy’s bedroll off to the side untouched while a second bedroll lying nearby had been partially crushed but there was no body. Climbing a little higher, we spread out in a line ten yards apart before slowly walking down the stone cluttered hill searching for any bodies, living or dead, we could find.

We’d gone about a hundred yards down the slope when Tom stopped us. “I swear I hear moaning coming from our left.”

We all started searching where Tom thought he’d heard the moaning. Ten minutes later, Giuseppe found an older girl - thirteen or fourteen years old - in a small depression just barely big enough for her to lay in, surrounded by mesquite bushes.

It was clear to me that her right arm was broken. Her right leg was a solid mass of bruises from just above her knee all the way up her thigh to her hip. I couldn’t tell if it was broken or not, but it definitely hadn’t been crushed.

“Tom, get my saddlebags please. Make sure you get the metal medical kit as well.” I added as an afterthought, “Giuseppe, you and the cousin start making a travois, so we can get her back to the Hacienda.”

While I was waiting for Tom to get back, I gently probed the girl’s thigh and was relieved to find her femur intact. She might have a hairline fracture and I’d splint it just in case, but it appeared solid. The arm was a different matter altogether.

She had a nasty compound break in the upper part of her right humerus, and heavy bruising around the shoulder. I left the break alone for now, and probed the shoulder to see if I could find anything broken. Again, from what I could tell nothing else was broken. I finally turned my attention to the arm.

There was no fresh blood on the arm although there was quite a lot of dried blood. She had it cradled against her chest, and was holding it in her left hand. As had the young boy, she had a fever. When I tried to move her left hand out of the way, she moaned. Tom came back with my saddlebags and the first aid kit.

I took a Vicodin and a penicillin pill from the first aid kit and put them in her mouth. I added the drinking tube from the camel pack after pulling a little water through it, so the end was wet. Once the tube hit her mouth and she felt the water, she drank heavily.

“Tom, I need you to help me set her arm. We need to be careful while doing it, or we’re just going to make things worse than they already are.”

While we were waiting for the Vicodin to kick in, I took some clean rags out of the kit, soaked them in alcohol, and started cleaning the dried blood off the girl’s arm. I finally moved the left hand out of the way and got the last of the dried blood off.

“Okay, Tom,” I said as I got everything we were going to need laid out, “you hold her shoulders steady as this next part is going to cause some pain, and she’s going to try to fight if she isn’t completely out.”

When he had her well pinned I took the alcohol and poured it over the wound itself being careful to get it over the end of the broken bone as well as the skin. There was little fight from the girl, but I couldn’t tell if it was because she was exhausted, or that the Vicodin had taken full effect.

“That was the easy part,” I said, looking at Tom. “Now comes the hard part. Roll her gently on to her left side and use your arms and legs to hold her in that position.” He did as I’d asked, and I could now work freely on her right arm. “Alright, now take her shoulder in both hands and hold it steady to stop it moving from side to side while also stopping it from giving in to the pull I’m going to put on it. We’ve got to get the bone back under the skin and the ends lined back up.”

Tom was looking quite pale as I finished my description, but nevertheless nodded his understanding. I gave him a few more moments to compose himself, and when I thought he was ready I put my right hand just below her elbow and my left hand up near the wound. Pulling down on her arm with my right hand and trying to guide the bone back into place with my left. It seemed to take forever but eventually I felt the two pieces of bone vibrate against each other and then stop.

The wound had started bleeding again, but it was a small steady stream rather than a pulsing gusher, so I ignored it for the time being. I felt over the humerus to make as sure as I could that the bone was lined up. From what I could tell by touch alone it seemed to be lined up and I told Tom the worst part was over, for now.

I poured more alcohol over and into the wound before making a pad from a folded-up piece of cloth. I put it over the wound, then tied it in place with another strip of clean rag, making a rough compression bandage.

“Okay, Tom, gently roll her on her back but keep her upper shoulder as still as possible.”

When we got her on her back I gently bent her elbow and placed her forearm across her stomach and told Tom to continue holding her shoulder with one hand and use his other hand under her elbow to keep the upper arm from moving. He nodded, and I stood up to find a couple of stout sticks to use as splints. I found what I was looking for without too much effort and was quickly back at Tom’s side. I put the splints along her upper arm as best I could, and then started wrapping strips of cloth around the splints before tightening them. I took the last of the cloth strips I had, and used it to wrap her forearm to her stomach, so she couldn’t move her arm. When I’d tied it off I sat back.

“We’ve done all that we can for now, but we need to get her back to the Hacienda.”

While we waited for Giuseppe and the cousin to get back with a travois, I told Tom I wanted him and Giuseppe to continue looking for the father and any others that may have been with them. I didn’t think they’d find any survivors, but we had to make sure. When they’d searched as best they could, I wanted them to wrap up the two dead in whatever they could find and bring them to the Hacienda so we could bury them tomorrow afternoon. He nodded and told me it would be done.

Giuseppe and the cousin came back a few minutes later, and we gently lifted the girl up and out of the bowl away from all the mesquite before laying her on the travois. Turning to the cousin, I asked him to run to the Hacienda and let Anna know that I was bringing in a young girl with a badly broken arm, and a fever, and ask her to prepare another bedroom. He repeated the message then turned and trotted away at the ground eating pace of a long-distance runner.

We tied the travois to my stirrups straps just above my feet, and then I mounted. I told them to make sure they left themselves enough time to get back to the Hacienda before nightfall as I started the horse towards the boulder trail and the Hacienda at a slow walk.

A little later, I hit the start of the boulder trail. I’d been stopping every so often to check on the girl and give her all the water she would drink. I stopped one last time and gave her more penicillin before remounting and carefully riding through the narrow boulder trail.

I pulled up outside the upper courtyard gate, and the cousin I’d sent to warn Anna appeared out of nowhere. He helped me carry the girl inside, where Anna was waiting to lead us to another bedroom. Celia was inside the bedroom and had the sheets pulled back, so we could put the girl straight into bed. Anna took a quick look at the girls face and told the cousin that they were right, she was another cousin, and had been with one of the families in the group Alvaro led.