“You’re sending your men to a cathouse?” Clint asked, finding it difficult to believe such an establishment could be found in the middle of the Arizona prairie.
“Madre de Dios!” Mendez rolled his eyes toward heaven. “If only one was available! After we get the gold from Manning and his bastardos, I think I will buy a casa de las putas so this will not happen in the future.”
“Then what sort of house are you talking about?” Clint inquired.
“What do you care, gringo?” Tomas snarled.
“He should know,” Mendez snapped. “I’m sending Senor Gringo with you.”
“Qué?” Thomas gasped. “What we need him for? The Anglo will just be in the way, Luis!”
“Three reasons he goes with you, Tomas,” El Lobo began. “First, we don’t know how good Senor Gringo handles himself in an emergency. This way we get some idea, no? Second, I want him to be involved in a raid. After he takes part in one he’ll be tied to us and won’t be apt to tell the Anglo federales about us. And third, you’ll take the gringo because I’m telling you do to it! Comprende?”
“Si,” Tomas agreed sourly.
“Now, go get three more men to join the raiding party.”
The bandit lieutenant shuffled away to carry out the command. El Lobo turned to Clint and smiled coldly. Clint wasn’t sure what the bandidos had in mind, but he didn’t think he’d care much for the explanation.
“You’re sending me on a raid?” he inquired.
“A very little raid,” Mendez assured him. “Do not frown so. It will not be dangerous. In fact, it is so safe, I don’t even think we need to give you a gun.”
“In other words,” the Gunsmith sighed, “you still don’t trust me with one, right?”
“Not yet, Señor Gringo,” Mendez replied lightly.
“Maybe later.”
“What are we going to raid that’ll be so easy we can do it barehanded?” Clint asked.
“Just a farmhouse about five miles from here,” Mendez answered. “A scouting team we sent out to check the area found it the other day. They reported that it was a small farm with little of anything worthwhile—except for the yellow-haired woman they saw feeding chickens. In Mexico, we don’t have many blonds and the scout team got all excited about her and brought back exaggerated tales of her beauty. Bah! She is probably a scrawny old vulture, but my men have been eager to get their hands on her since they heard about the farm. If we were in my country, we would have already taken the place, but small farmers in Mexico don’t own guns. Here, everybody can own one. It is much more dangerous for a bandido here.”
“That’s the American way,” Clint shrugged. “The second amendment of the Constitution gives us the right to keep and bear arms. Guess the Founding Fathers didn’t have much consideration for the plight you fellows might find yourselves in when they came up with that one.”
Mendez smiled thinly. “I hope you’re not too fond of your fellow Americans, Señor Gringo, since you’ll be going with Tomas and the men he selects for the mission. None of us like Anglos very much and I think you’ve already noticed that Tomas likes gringos even less than the rest of us. You try to interfere with his raid ... well, he won’t really mind putting a bullet in you if you give him a reason, no? Any kind of reason.”
“Yeah,” Clint agreed. “And maybe I don’t have to do anything except be a gringo to give him enough reason to kill me.”
“Maybe.” Mendez shrugged. “Guess you’ll find out, no?”
Chapter Thirty
Tomas led the small band, riding in front of the others with a coal-oil lantern in one hand to illuminate the path and detect prairie dog holes in the ground. Still, none of the riders attempted to urge their mounts into a gallop due to the treacherous terrain.
Clint rode a weary Morgan-mustang cross-breed without a saddle. Tomas and another bandido named Julio rode in front of him while the other two members of the band—Clint had heard them called as Miguel and Francisco—brought up the rear. All four bandidos were heavily armed with long guns, pistols and knives. Clint assumed all the hardware was to defend against a surprise Apache attack and not intended solely for the raid on a small farmhouse. Certainly, the bandits didn’t feel they needed so many guns just to keep the Gunsmith in line until they reached their goal.
This mission was typical of the mentality of most outlaws and bandits, in Clint’s opinion. Provided Mendez had told the truth, and Clint believed he had, they were only two days ride from a million dollars in gold. Nobody had wanted to risk riding in the night for the treasure which could make every member of the gang wealthy, but when an incident whetted their sex drive, the bandits were ready to take the very risks they’d refused before simply to have a woman for one night.
Bandits and outlaws tended to take such absurd risks for the least logical reasons. Most outlaws were just too plain dumb and lazy to try to work at an honest trade. The majority were illiterate. The Lonny Woods Gang in Omaha had actually tried to rob a library because it “sure looked like a bank” and none of the half-wits could read the sign on the building.
Outlaws were ruled by their passions for sex, strong drink and violence, and they generally wound up like El Lobo’s gang—dirty, desperate men who scratched at flea bites while they waited for an opportunity to plunder their way to wealth.
However, even if Tomas and the other three men signed their names with an X and had to open their trousers to count to eleven, none of them would hesitate to blow Clint’s head off for half a reason, and they were all better armed than the Gunsmith. The odds were still in the bandits’ favor, but now Clint only had to deal with four men instead of the entire gang and none of them knew about his belly gun.
Clint would have to wait for a chance to get the bandits off guard. There was no question about returning to the camp. No better opportunity was apt to come along for him to escape from the gang and he damn sure didn’t relish riding into Yuma with them. He had enough trouble trying to live with his reputation as the Gunsmith let alone trying to explain how he’d wound up with a pack of Mexican hootowls.
At last they saw the farm. It was a simple little spread with a few hundred acres of wheat or barley, Clint couldn’t tell which in the darkness. There was a small one-story house and a slightly larger barn with a corral extending from one side and a chicken coop at the other.
Tomas extinguished the lantern and dismounted. He whispered some orders to his men and they quickly ground hobbled the horses. Clint followed their example. The bandido lieutenant drew one of his three revolvers and explained his strategy to the men and then turned to the Gunsmith.
“You listen close, gringo,” Tomas demanded. “Miguel and Julio are going to approach the house at the front door. Francisco will go around to the side and cover the window there. Me and you go to the back door. You do exactly what I tell you or I kill you. ¿Comprende?”
“I think I can manage to follow your instructions, Tomas ... er, teniente,” Clint replied.
The group moved forward on foot, quickly covering the three hundred or so yards between where they’d hobbled the horses and the farmhouse. Clint half expected to hear a dog bark an alert followed by rifle shots from the farmhouse. Luckily for the raiding party, Clint included, the farm didn’t seem to have a watchdog on duty and there was no activity from the house.
They closed in swiftly, boots hammering the ground without any attempt at stealth. Everybody inside the house—if there was anyone inside—had to be sleeping like a pile of woodchips. Clint had always wondered about the type of people who’d set up a tiny little spread in an area surrounded by hostile Indians, often miles away from their nearest neighbors. If this was an example of the kinds of precautions they took against possible assaults, Clint considered it amazing that they hadn’t been wiped out long ago.
Miguel and Julio hurried to the front of the house while Francisco took his position at the side window. Clint and Tomas moved to the rear entrance. The bandit’s face was aglow with anticipat
ion as he dragged the revolver from his other hip holster and held both guns ready.
“I’m gonna fire a shot to signal the attack,” he whispered to Clint. “Then you just stand back and let us take care of everything.”
“You’re just going to gun down everybody in that house?” Clint inquired, reaching inside his shirt.
“Except the women,” Tomas shrugged.
“What if there are children in there?” Clint asked. “Or old people?”
“If the girls aren’t too young or the women too old we take them,” Tomas replied. “Otherwise they get a bullet.”
Clint cocked the hammer of his New Line Colt as he pointed it at Tomas’s face.
“You first, teniente,” the Gunsmith informed him. “Drop your guns.”
Tomas whirled, trying to train the revolvers on Clint. The New Line barked twice and the bandido’s head snapped back as two .22 bullets drilled into it. He was dead before he could cock the hammer of either gun in his fists.
Moving with uncanny speed, Clint tossed the New Line from his right hand to his left and caught it as he lunged forward. He quickly yanked the third revolver from Tomas’s belt—an S&W .44—before the dead man could fall to the ground. Then he pivoted and kicked the door open.
Miguel and Julio broke through the front door a split second later. The Gunsmith and the bandits stood at opposite sides of an unlit room, facing each other—three vague shapes in the shadows.
Clint didn’t hesitate. He couldn’t afford to. The S&W in his right hand and the Colt in his left snarled. A .22 bullet hit Miguel high in the chest and a .44 drilled into Julio’s heart. The muzzle flash of the weapons lit up the room in an orange glare for an instant, long enough for Clint to see Julio was dead, but Miguel only wounded.
He swung the S&W toward Miguel and tried to squeeze the trigger. Nothing happened. Accustomed to years of using his converted Colt double-action model in a gunfight that required rapid fire, Clint had failed to cock the hammer of the unfamiliar single-action pistol.
Miguel’s pistol snapped off a shot at Clint, the bullet tearing splinters from the door frame behind the Gunsmith. Clint thumbed back the S&W hammer and blasted another round into the bandido’s chest. This time Miguel went down for good.
Glass shattered to Clint’s right as Francisco shoved the twin barrels of a Stevens shotgun through the window at the side of the house. Clint hadn’t forgotten about the last member of the team. He’d already turned to face the window and fired his pistols before Francisco could use his formidable weapon.
A .44 and a .22 punched through the windowpane and did the same to Francisco’s face. As the bandido fell backward, he raised the shotgun and a muscle reaction pulled a trigger. The Stevens bellowed, blasting a load of buckshot into the ceiling. Then the gun barrels disappeared out the window to join Francisco’s corpse on the ground outside.
Clint managed to locate a table in the center of the dark room and placed both the New Line and the S&W on it. He began to raise his hands and was surprised to find they were trembling a bit. The Gunsmith was no stranger to the effects of tension following a gunfight, but he hadn’t had the shakes after such a conflict for years.
His stomach was still knotted up as well and his knees felt weak. The effects were more dramatic than they should have been for a professional with Clint’s experience. He felt almost as badly shaken as he had been as a kid when he’d first killed a man in a gunfight.
“Hold it!” a woman’s voice ordered. “You just keep your hands high or I’ll shoot you dead right where you stand!”
“I put my guns on the table, ma’am,” Clint told her. “I’m about to light the lamp here so you’ll see the men I just killed who’d broken into your home.”
“The lamp?” the woman’s voice expressed horror. “No! Don’t!”
But Clint had already struck a match and held it to the wick of the coal-oil lamp on the table. The room was instantly bathed in yellow light. Clint saw the cause of the woman’s consternation. She was stark naked.
A tall blond with long hair and a beautifully sculptured pair of pink-tipped breasts, she stood at the entrance of a bedroom with an old Henry carbine in her hands. The woman’s flat belly extended to flared hips and long tapered legs with a golden triangle between the thighs. Her lovely face was contorted by embarrassment and confusion that was almost on the brink of panic. She tried to alter the angle of the Henry to use it to somehow cover her nude body.
“Uh ...” she began awkwardly. “What do you want?”
“You really shouldn’t ask that question until you put some clothes on, ma’am.”
Chapter Thirty-One
While the woman retreated into her bedroom, Clint relieved the bodies of Miguel and Julio of their firearms and gunbelts. Then he dragged them out the back door and laid them beside the corpse of Teniente Tomas. After stripping Tomas of his gunbelt and picking up the dead man’s fallen pistols, Clint moved to the side of the house and prepared to add Francisco’s body to the collection. Clint gathered up the bandit’s shotgun and examined it as best he could under the night sky, which was too dark to make a valid inspection possible.
However, an idea had already formed in Clint’s head. He searched Francisco’s body and found a leather pouch full of shotgun shells. The Gunsmith decided to leave the body be for now and re-entered the house with the shotgun in one hand and the other items cradled in his other arm.
The blond had emerged from her bedroom dressed in a quilted robe. She seemed a bit apprehensive when Clint entered with his arms loaded up with weapons, but she wasn’t holding a gun and didn’t seem to feel she’d need one. Clint smiled weakly at her. When he was cleaned up, he was a pleasant-looking man whom many women found attractive despite the scar on his left cheek. However, he still wore the same filthy denim shirt and trousers and mud clung to his hair. The Gunsmith’s face had been burned by hours of exposure without a hat to the merciless Arizona sun. He could only guess what the poor woman thought of him, seeing him in such condition.
“I’m sorry about my appearance, ma’am,” he began, a bit sheepishly. “And I’m even more sorry that I had to resort to violence here in your home. If you’d be willing to let me explain, I’ll be glad to do so, but it’ll take a while. Sort of a long story and I’m not sure about some parts myself.”
The woman just stared at Clint.
“Maybe, it’d be best if I just move on—” he began.
“No!” she said sharply. “Don’t be silly. You probably saved my life and ... well, I would like to hear your story, Mister ... ?”
“Adams,” he smiled. “But please call me Clint.”
“I’m Jenny Parker,” she stated. “Uh, maybe I should fix some coffee, Clint.”
“That sounds fine,” the Gunsmith readily agreed. “And if you can spare enough water, I’d really appreciate ...”
“Oh! Of course!” Jenny replied. “There’s a well outside and a bucket. If you’ll just haul in the water, I’ll heat it up for you and we’ll fill the tub.”
An hour later, Clint felt as if he’d found paradise. His long legs were doubled up to allow his body to soak in the hot bath water as he scrubbed the filth and stink from his flesh and hair. The lye-based soap was a bit harsh on his sunburned face, but that was a small sacrifice for the relief the hot water brought to his stiff, sore muscles.
The tub was located at the back of the house with a wooden screen around it for privacy. Clint had placed a chair near the tub with the S&W on the seat, just in case Apaches or El Lobo’s people made an unexpected visit. He didn’t think either was likely, especially the latter. Luis Mendez was too hardhearted and practical to send out a search party after the first team failed to return. He’d write them off like an accountant checking expenses for an Eastern law firm and use them as an example to the rest of his men not to wander around in hostile Indian territory after dark.
At sunrise, Mendez and the remnants of his gang would move on to Yuma. Clint hoped Guillermo and
Carla wouldn’t go with the bandidos. Maybe if the sad-faced man broke off connections with his brother, he might be able to start over somewhere else and give Carla a chance to be something more than a bandit’s plaything or a whore.
The bath was wonderful. It seemed to soak out Clint’s tension as well as the grime and dirt. Relaxing in the warm water, he was able to put together a plan concerning his own actions after he left the Parker farm at dawn. He still had to move on to Yuma and see to Duke and his wagon—and hopefully to settle a couple scores with Lloyd and the others.
Someone moved toward the wooden screen and Clint reached for the pistol before he saw Jenny slip into the compartment. She carried a blue tin mug of coffee in one hand and a pair of Levis and a checkered shirt in the other.
“Sorry to disturb your bath,” she said with a smile in her voice. “But I figured you might like some coffee now.”
“Jenny, you’re an angel,” Clint replied. He started to move forward a bit in the tub, but then decided he’d better not.
“You got to see me without any clothes on so I didn’t think you’d be so shy.”
“My upbringing, ma’am,” Clint answered. “Where’d you get the clothes?”
“They belonged to my husband,” Jenny said. “He died four months ago.”
“I’m sorry, Jenny,” Clint told her. “You shouldn’t stay out here by yourself. What happened tonight should convince you of that.”
“What exactly did happen tonight, Clint?” she asked. “How’d you get mixed up with those Mexican killers?”
“That’s a long story,” Clint sighed. “It started in Brownsville, Texas and I’m hoping it’ll end in Yuma pretty soon. This is sort of an awkward way to have a conversation. Can we talk after I finish my bath?”
“Sure,” she said. “Oh, there’s a hole in this shirt. I’ll just take it inside and sew it for you while you finish cleaning up.”
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