by Jonas Ward
As Juan disengaged himself, Buchanan leaned an arm against the wall to hold himself upright. The temporary paralysis that had seized the entire left side of his body was retreating, leaving him steadier on his legs but paining like hell in the shoulder region.
The pounding and the yelling increased in tempo outside. Something heavy, an iron post or a log, had been brought to bear against the door.
“I found another gun,”’ Juan said, returning to his side.
“How do you feel?”
“Very good. Very scared, too.”
“Yeah. Now when that door gives, aim low and shoot fast. We don’t have a chance, but let’s raise as much hell as we can.”
With that the door did give. The two trapped men threw a withering blast into the opening, felling one of their attackers, who gave an anguished scream, and driving the others back. But even as Buchanan and Juan reloaded, the doors behind them swung open and a second force swarmed inside.
“Low and fast, kid,” Buchanan shouted. “Deal ’em hell till the deck’s gone!”
Gomez’s mind was so full of Buchanan that when the sound of the firing came to him the association was immediate. Who else could stir the hornet’s nest of Agrytown to such a fury? “Andamos!” he roared, roweling his horse, flattening his body over its neck in the way of vaqueros and literally flying over the ground. Ramon and the other two men, catching fire from their leader, made a race of it, and they came down Agrytown’s main street four abreast.
Those townspeople who had just discovered the bank’s front door unexplainedly open poured inside with uneasy minds. Only Mexicans rode with that particular rhythm, and by now they knew that one of the two trapped in there was the Mexican kid. They didn’t like the situation any more, and the quicker-witted among them reversed direction and ran for cover.
“Low and fast, kid,” Buchanan shouted. “Wheel and deal!” He fired at one door and then another, seeing the consternation among their enemies at the front of the building but not understanding it. Then there was a great racket of shooting from the street and all the opposition up there collapsed.
“What is happening?” Juan asked.
“I think it’s your Uncle Coffee,” Buchanan said happily. “Let’s have a look-see.” He sent a steady stream of fire into the rear door, covering their back-stepping progress to the front of the building. The war in the street, meanwhile, had fallen off to nothing.
“Buchanan?” came Gomez’s anxious voice. “Is it you?”
“And a friend,” Juan called back. “Is it clear out there?”
“Safe as a cathedral, señor. The rats have scurried back to their holes.”
The two men stepped to the street.
“Where are your mounts?”
Juan pointed to where he’d parked his down the street, and a vaquero peeled off to get it.
“Where’s yours, Buchanan?” Juan asked, but the big man was leaning his weight against the building, strangely silent. With the stimulus of the battle gone he had been overcome with this irresistible desire to sleep forever. Even as Juan and Gomez approached him his head fell forward on his chest and he sank slowly to the ground.
Fourteen
Amos Agry had been the first to discover his cousin Lew’s death, the first to sound the alarm and the first to quit when the going got hot. But he had a little more incentive than saving his skin. All through the action, in fact, his thoughts had kept wandering back to the scene in Lew’s room.
The big one had been just barely stirring when Amos went in there and glimpsed the damage by candlelight. Buchanan’s fingers gripped the leather purse Amos remembered from the night before, but what really took the clerk’s attention was the cascade of big-denomination certificates that littered the floor beneath the open saddlebag and lay across the arm and chest of the lifeless sheriff. Buchanan had moved then, and Amos fled to get help.
Now he was back in the room, working feverishly, expecting Cousin Simon to arrive hard on the heels of the Mexicans. He stuffed the spilled money back inside the bag, fumbled clumsily with the thongs, finally fastened them and then dragged the heavy burden to the door. He paused there, trembling, sweating clammily from fear and expectation. He opened the door and peered down the hallway. No one should be there, and no one was. The only guest during the past month had been Buchanan. The only persons using the place were himself and Cousin Lew.
Cousin Lew. Amos couldn’t resist the impulse to look back over his shoulder at the grotesquely fallen figure of the man who had ridden so roughshod over him all their lives. See the swaggering bully-boy now. How many times did he call me stupid? Amos asked himself. Who was stupid now—dead, with his sneering mouth agape, his sardonic eyes wide and staring?
“I hope you burn in hell, Lew,” Amos said aloud. “I hope you catch it good.”
He bent down, and with a great effort shouldered the saddlebags and carried them down the hallway. Suddenly he stopped and his knees almost caved in beneath him. Horses! Simon and Carbo were here. All right, stay calm. Take the money out onto the front porch, tell Simon a story about how you had saved it for him.
But wasn’t there still time? Wasn’t this the big chance, the last chance to be everything but a lackey all his life? Simon wouldn’t thank him for rescuing the money; there’d be no reward. All he’d get would be more orders, more dull and dirty jobs to do. His father, the uncle of Simon and Lew, had taken a hand in raising them when their own father had gone to prison. He’d taken the whip to them, as he had to his own children, and it seemed to Amos that his cousins still resented those hidings and were taking it out on him.
Instead of taking the money out to the porch, Amos turned and began climbing the service stairway to the floor above. He halted at the top for a breath, then continued down the corridor until he came to the ladder that led to the attic. He dragged the saddlebags behind him, slid the trap door aside and got the heavy weights up the ladder and onto the attic floor. He didn’t even bother to climb in there and conceal them, but replaced the door and came back down. Amos had just reached the first floor again when the front door of the hotel burst open and Simon charged through the lobby.
“Where’s my brother?” Simon shouted wildly.
Amos pointed to Lew’s room, followed the other man at a respectful distance. Simon stopped in the doorway and stared at the body with the incredulous expression, then went in and stood looking down at it in fascination. After a moment his head came up and his eyes were snapping.
“Who killed him? Who’s got the money from the bank?”
“Buchanan,” Amos told him. “I tried to hole him up in there but he got help from the Mex riders.”
Simon left the room in a rage, went looking for Abe Carbo and found him talking with a group before the open bank building. He motioned to the gunman imperiously, and his anger mounted at the time it took Carbo to break off his conference and saunter toward him.
“Damn it, come when you’re called!” Simon growled, but Carbo didn’t seem to hear. He was, in fact, deep in speculation. Finding that safe broken into had dealt Abe Carbo a rather nasty shock, which would have surprised Simon Agry had he known. Carbo’s bandit heritage had led him to take a proprietary interest in those thousands of dollars, and now he felt a very personal loss.
“Get a war party together,” Agry said. “We’re riding!”
“Riding where?”
“To Del Cuervo’s. Buchanan and Gomez stole my money.”
That didn’t jibe with the answers Carbo had just gotten from the eyewitnesses. They told him that Buchanan had been lifted onto Gomez’s horse, and there was no mention of any heavy money sacks. Besides, the padlock had not been shot away but opened with a key.
“Lew’s got it,” Carbo said, repeating his first thought about the theft.
“Lew’s in his room. Dead.”
Carbo brushed past the fat man and hurried into the hotel. He picked up a lamp from the desk and made his way to the rear room. He turned the body roughl
y over, then pulled it out of the way while he stooped down to peer beneath the bed. He reached in and pulled out the empty sack and suitcase.
“That’s them!” Simon said excitedly from behind him. “By God, it was Lew. And the hardcase killed him and took it away.”
“Could be,” Carbo said, thinking that might have been the way of it. The witnesses had obviously watched from cover. They could have missed the transfer of the money. He reasoned, too, that besides himself only Buchanan had the excuse and the nerve to brace Lew Agry.
“Then what the hell are we waiting for?” Simon demanded impatiently.
Carbo shook his head. “You don’t have the warriors for the job,” he said.
“We beat them last time—”
“As I remember, Lew had a hand in that. Lew, Pecos, Lafe, and Waldo Peek. We got to replace those guns, Si.”
“By hell, Abe, you’re the last man I ever expected to show a yellow streak.”
Carbo regarded Simon Agry thoughtfully. Why not puncture this bag of wind right now and be done with it? he asked himself.
“I spoke hasty,” Agry said into the silence, almost as though he read Carbo’s mind. “This is no time for us to fall out.”
“You’re right, Si.”
“What plans you got for getting back that gold?”
“Like I said, we got to hire some gunhands.”
“Where?”
“I’ll mosey north aways. Be back in a week.”
“A week? Buchanan’ll be out of the country—”
“I don’t think so. Don Pedro is going to want to show his gratitude. And you know how long that takes a Mexican.”
Fifteen
“He is a huge one,” the Indian girl reported to Maria del Cuervo in the morning. “Just as Amaya described.”
“When did he arrive?”
“In the dead of the night. Along with Señor Juan—”
“Juan?”
“Oh, señorita, the stories that are flying! Your brother killed the man who attacked you—”
Maria gasped.
“—and was himself captured and condemned to the gallows!”
“No!”
“And Don Pedro sent Gomez to ransom him. But the big one rescued him. Just as—”
“It seems that he found you, señorita. Not Gomez.”
“Oh!”
“But you were unconscious,” Felice said loyally to the blushing girl.
“But how was I dressed?”
“God knows,” Felice said.
“And him. How is he called?”
“Buchanan,” the Indian said, giggling. “What a funny name.”
“Their names are all very strange,” Maria said. “What does he look like?”
“Ferocious, so Tia Rosa says. And all covered with blood.”
Maria jumped up from the bed. “Blood?” she cried. “Blood!”
“A bullet wound. Tia Rosa cut the bullet out of his body.”
“But he will surely die.”
“That would be better, I think,” Felice said.
“I must see him first,” Maria said, putting a robe over her cotton nightgown.
“Señorita! What are you thinking?”
“He is in my brother’s rooms?”
“But you cannot go there. You are not dressed.”
“There may not be time. It is my duty.”
Maria slipped from the room, and her maid guessed that it was more female curiosity than duty that called her. Doña Isabel, she also guessed, would be scandalized. It was not the custom in this particular hacienda for an unmarried daughter to go calling on guests in their bedrooms.
“Venite,” Juan said in answer to the soft rapping on the door. “Come in.” The door opened, and at sight of his sister’s wide-eyed face peering around he laughed in pure joy.
“Maria!”
“Oh, Juan! I have heard such a tale about you!” She came in, her glance darting in every direction, and when there was no sign of the stranger man she went forward to embrace her brother warmly.
“And what have you heard?”
“The most terrible things. That you killed Roy—that you killed a man. That you were going to be hanged …”
“You are avenged, little sister, and all is well. But you had better leave before my friend Buchanan wanders in from the other room. He is, of necessity, without clothing.”
“But he is dying, isn’t he?”
“El Hombre? Por Dios, no! He is beyond destruction.”
“But the blood?”
“Blood? Buchanan bleeds as I sweat. If I could show you the floor of our cell in the jail—”
“Madre mia! You went to jail with him?”
“He went with me, sister. He sought to free me from the deputy and was himself terribly beaten. Ai, but he repaid them both for that indignity.”
“What—what did he do?”
“When you are married to Sebastian Diaz I will describe the whole adventure. It is not for your tender ears now.”
“What did Buchanan say of me?” Maria asked, unable to stifle the question.
“Of you? Nothing Oh, yes! He inquired after your health.”
“He said nothing of finding me?”
“Nada.”
“Nothing of how I was—how I looked?”
“Nada,” Juan said a little impatiently. “Buchanan wastes few words on what is unimportant.”
“Unimportant?”
“Of course. To El Hombre you are the little girl, as you are to me. Now the little girl had better go. If my friend saw you he would gobble you in one bite.”
Maria stood straighter, indignantly, and it would have been apparent to anyone but an older brother that there was something more substantial than a little girl within the robe.
The door opened behind them and Gomez looked in.
“The don would like to see us in his study,” the segundo announced, and from the look in his eyes he had made good to Ramon about the party in his quarters.
“Tío Café, you are ill!” Maria told him anxiously.
“It will pass, señorita. If God is willing.”
Juan laughed. “Tío Café does penance, Maria,” he told her. “He sins rarely, but then it is a great one.”
This was man talk, and though Maria understood that Gomez was suffering from too much wine it was fashionable to pretend she knew nothing of such things. Juan put his arm around Café’s shoulder then and they left, forgetting her altogether.
The door closed, and the silence was so intimate that it appalled her senses. This, very definitely, was a transgression of the strict code that governed her behavior. To visit a dying man was permissible. To be alone in a room with a brother was allowed. But not this—especially since she had been warned that the stranger might be up and about.
Maria felt properly heady and maidenly as she tiptoed to the connecting door and very, very timidly turned the handle in her trembling fingers. She opened the door the merest crack and put her eye to it, almost afraid of what she would see in there. But all she saw was the back of a man’s shaggy head, the tremendous outline of a giant beneath the blanket.
Buchanan stirred and Maria all but shrieked. He turned over on his back and the blanket fell away to reveal the bandage Tia Rosa had fashioned over his left shoulder. The girl raised her eyes to the man’s face, and quite unconsciously she pulled the door wide and stepped through, moving closer to the bed as though pulled by invisible strings.
Ferocious. Felice’s word came back to her as she stared down at that powerful, angular face with its broken nose, its scars and the wild growth of black beard. A shiver passed through her body as she thought of such a rough one coming upon her helpless and naked in the brush. But the very thought begged its own question: If he was such a fierce type then why had he delivered her to safety? For the first time, Maria was realizing that it was not something she had dreamed. It had been this man’s hands pressing beneath her ribs, forcing the water out of her lungs, making her breathe.
And it was no dream being wrapped in that warm blanket and lifted like a feather. After that she remembered nothing but the vague sound of Juan’s voice in the darkness….
Maria found herself gazing directly into Buchanan’s inquisitive blue eyes.
“How are you?” he asked.
Maria opened her lips but no sound came forth. It seemed to the girl that she was poised on tiptoe, that she was about to plunge headlong into those bottomless azure depths. Then he was smiling at her, smiling with nothing held in reserve, and it showed her the full lips, the generous, good-humored mouth that had been hidden by the heavy beard.
“I am fine, thank you,” she said mechanically. “And you?”
“Hard to say. This your bunk?”
“It is Juan’s bed.”
“Feels awful soft,” Buchanan said. “Thought it was yours, seeing you dressed for bed, and all.”
Maria raised her hand to her throat, closing the top of the wrapper. “I am not dressed for bed,” she said. “I consider myself fully clothed.”
“So do I. Where is Johnny, anyhow?”
“John-ny?”
“The kid,” Buchanan said. “Your brother.”
“You are such an old man then?”
“Going on thirty-one,” he said.
“I will be nineteen years old in July,” Maria said. “That is only twelve years younger.”
Buchanan laughed. “A lifetime,” he said.
“My father is older than my mother by fifteen years. There is not a lifetime separating them.”
“Glad to hear it. But where’s Johnny?”
“He and Gomez are with my father. Is there something you need?”
“My duds,” Buchanan said. “You wouldn’t believe this, but you’re talking to a man that’s naked as a jaybird.”
“You have the protection of the blanket,” Maria said, shocked at her own audacity. “That is more than I had when you found me.”
“Well, that’s true enough.”
“Oh! How could you?”