Twisted Cross

Blas seldom talked about Brother David anymore. He patted a pony between the eyes while he talked to Sal, never looking him straight in the face. 

“I don’t know where he is, and I don’t care,” Sal said. He pitched a fork of hay in the corner of the stable and wondered for the one-hundredth time if he could boil some of the grass for extra food. They knew now that the Bishop had forced Brother David to leave them behind. But he didn’t even send word to them. It hurt to think he never really cared.

“We ought to think about how we’ll get out of here,” Sal said. He lost patience with Blas, who seemed resigned to talk to the horses all day. He had the nice animals to take care of; Sal’s ten were mean and pushy. “I’m going to talk to the other stable hands tonight. At least they’ve got good stories to tell,” Sal said.

He now knew most of the men who worked the other pens. Their stories were mostly lies, the kind desperate men told to pass the time. But those hombres found a way to share a bottle every night and played poker, too. Sal even recognized the same bragger from their voyage to Vera Cruz, the man they called Coronel Jimenez.