Six moved back, straightening up. He felt unsteady on his feet, rocked and wheeling. He looked across the shelf at Elena; she was moving forward hesitantly. Vargas, instinctively, had moved to her. Hands tied, he could not put his arms around her, but Vargas loomed by the small girl like a bear, protecting her with the shell of his mass.
Six saw how it had been. She had been right in Lament’s line of fire. If Lament had missed by an inch, or if the bullet had gone through Six—as it had gone through Clarissa’s bouncer—it would have struck Elena. And Lament had chosen to die, rather than take that chance with her life.
He said to Holly, “I aimed high,” as if in apology.
Holly said, “Good thing you did.”
“He’s all right?”
“Nobody,” she said, “is all right when he’s just had a forty-five bullet through him. But I think he’ll pull through. Will you quit breathing over my shoulder, Marshal? I’ve patched more bullet holes in my time than I care to remember. You just let me take care of him.”
“Uh,” Six said, baffled.
Steve Lament coughed quietly and said in a hoarse voice, “Jeremy, damn it, it’s all right. I’m not blaming you. It had to happen, that’s all … it was all written down in the book this way before you or I were ever born.”
“Look, Steve, I made a mistake. A lawman can’t afford to get mad … and I got mad. It almost cost you your life.”
“You wanted revenge for Clarissa. If it’d been me I’d have done the same.”
“There’s a difference. You’re not a peace officer. Do you know how many laws I broke coming down here after you?”
“Jeremy,” Lament breathed, “it just doesn’t matter now, don’t you see that?”
“Not yet,” Six murmured. And not for quite a while yet, he suspected. He put a hand on Holly’s shoulder: “Do a good job with him.”
Holly only snorted. “Get out of my way, Marshal.”
Jericho Stride came into camp at a trot. Six was waiting in the shadows with his gun lifted; there had been enough surprises for one night. When Stride appeared, Six stepped into the open, holstering his gun.
Stride said, “I heard a shot.”
Six nodded toward Lament. Stride said, “He make a break for it?”
To save time, Six only nodded. Stride said, “I barely heard it where I was. I doubt those loyalists heard it at all, back over the mountain where they are.”
“It was a loyalist camp, then?”
“Yeah. Twenty soldiers and a Gatling gun.” Stride walked over to Lament and looked down past Holly’s shoulder. Lament grinned weakly. Stride said, “Made a fool play, did you?”
“I guess I did,” said Lament.
“Might do you good … bleed some of the poison out of your system.”
“Amigo, I think that’s just what it did.”
Stride patted Holly on the head and said, “At least you’ve got the best bullet-hole nurse this side of New Orleans.”
“I’ve been appreciating that,” said Lament. “Did I hear you say something about a Gatling gun?”
“Yeah.”
Six had come up; Vargas and Elena stood near, watching Holly minister to the wounded man. Jericho Stride said, “Wish to hell I could figure out what they were up to with a Gatling gun way back here in these mountains.”
Six said, “It could have come in by ship, into Puerto Naco down on the coast. If the loyalists wanted to get it through to Guadalquivir, they’d have to go right through Santana’s country unless they brought it all the way around this way. Maybe they’re trying to get it past Santana’s lines into Guadalquivir.”
Steve Lament said, “That’d make sense. The Governor must know that eventually Santana’s going to have to attack Guadalquivir. It’s the only way to decide the revolution. I reckon Colonel Sanderos wants to fort up that Gatling gun across the trail in front of the city. He could cut a rebel charge to pieces with that gun. They’d cut across the Sierra here with it because it saves them two days over the seacoast route, and Santana’s less likely to stumble across them this far north.”
Vargas moved into the shafted moonlight and spoke with rumbling contempt. “Twenty men, one gun. What difference can one gun make? Is it a cannon? What is this Gatling gun you talk of?”
Steve Lament said in a calm level voice, “Ten barrels around a circular core. It’s mounted like a field piece on a two-wheel cart, carries a fifty-shot magazine that sticks up from the breech. You work it with a crank. It fires several hundred times a minute if you can keep it fed.” He paused and said in a lower voice, “You can cut down a hundred men before they have time to run ten feet. One gunner can do that.”
“One gunner,” Vargas echoed. “None of our people have ever seen such a weapon. I do not think many men would ride into the teeth of such a gun as you describe.”
Jericho Stride said softly, “Steve, you know how to work that thing?”
“I’ve handled them for Army Ordnance,” Lament said. “I can work it. Why?”
In the darkness Vargas’ big voice was almost disembodied: “Please … we must not allow this gun to reach the Governor.”
Six looked at them, each in turn. There was a slow silent interval; they were all looking at him. He took the sheath knife from his belt and stepped around behind Vargas. “In any case,” he droned, “we won’t need to hold each other prisoner any more.”
He cut Vargas’ hands loose.
The big man stood rubbing his wrists, breathing loudly. Steve Lament said, “I hired out to do a job down here, Jeremy. If it was up to me I’d try and get that Gatling away from the loyalists and deliver it to Santana, and show him how to use the damn thing.”
Six said in a low voice, “You’re in no shape for that kind of thing, Steve. But you all can decide to do whatever you want. I won’t stop anybody.”
Jericho Stride said, “Holly and me, we made up our minds a while back. We can’t stay alive in this country if Orbea and Sanderos keep control. They want us dead. That’s why we were headed for Santana’s.”
“I thought you didn’t mix in politics,” Six said.
“I was wrong,” Stride said.
“I guess we’ve all made some mistakes,” Six murmured. Stride turned his head and studied him. “We’re all standing around here thinking the same thing. If we can take those soldiers by surprise and turn their own Gatling gun against them, maybe we can get it away from them and deliver it to Santana. What about it, Jeremy?”
Six returned his gaze, not speaking for a moment; Stride added, “Maybe we’ve got no right to ask – but we’re kind of short of manpower right here. Vargas and me, we couldn’t pull it off by ourselves. Needs your help, Jeremy.”
Not my line, he thought automatically – the same thing he had said to Santana’s invitation. But he owed them all something, most of all he owed Lament something; and he had stood aloof too long, he knew. He had seen Santana, taken his measure, and he had seen Colonel Sanderos and Sergeant Mendez and the other representatives of the Governor’s faction. It was not, strictly speaking, Six’s fight … except that for a law man, any fight for justice ought to be his fight.
“I have got some mistakes to make up for,” Six said in a slow voice of careful thought. He looked down at Steve Lament, propped up with his back against a boulder; he said, “How’re you makin’ it, Steve?”
“I don’t think you punctured anything vital,” Lament said. “Weak as a kitten, that’s all. Put me on a horse and I guess I can ride. Put me down by that Gatling gun and I can work it for you.”
Six looked up at the others. It was a situation unlike any other in his experience; his duty, as he saw it, pulled him both ways at once.
Jericho Stride said softly, “Remember old Juano, Jeremy? He was an old man, blind. I keep remembering how they had him so scared he killed himself to protect Santana. Santana means a lot to these folks.”
“I guess he does,” Six muttered. “I guess he does.”
Stride suddenly utte
red a burst of barking laughter. “Hell, listen to me. I never talked like this in my life. Christ … I hate heroes!”
Holly drawled, “Which is why you love reading Buffalo Bill dime novels, I’m sure.”
“Anybody ask you?”
“Pipe down,” she snapped, and grinned at him.
Six drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go get that Gatling gun.”
An enormous grin split Vargas’ huge face. He clapped a thick arm across Six’s shoulders. “Hombre,” he said: “¡Amigo!”
“Saddle up.”
Holly said, “We’ll all go.” She looked at Elena, who smiled shyly and nodded.
Stride exploded: “Are you crazy, woman?”
Holly said, “If you all get killed, our lives won’t be worth anything anyway. Those soldiers would find us. We’ll come along – you may need us.”
“I can shoot,” Elena said tentatively.
“Oh, for God’s sake!” said Stride.
“Wait,” Six said. “Holly may be right. If we manage to get our hands on that Gatling gun, we can’t drag it back through here anyway. We’ll have to go the other way with it. You two will have to come along with us as far as the far side of the pass, and wait there. If the fight goes the wrong way for us, head straight for the coast and on down to Puerto Naco.”
“If the fight goes the wrong way,” Holly answered, “I won’t much care which way we go.”
Fourteen
And so they left, riding across the mountains in silent file. An hour’s travel brought them to the summit of the cliff and its precarious down-pitching trail; dismounted, they led their horses downslope at a crawling pace. Steve Lament moved without complaint; no one could tell whether his wound pained him … he claimed it did not, but Holly expressed her concern.
Once a horse kicked a loose stone over the edge and it fell clattering to the black unseen bottom. They halted; a horse snorted; they waited while time stretched. When nothing moved in sight or hearing, Six began the descent again. Finally they reached the bottom and the four men readied their horses, leaving the women standing silent in the shadows. Six looked back once.
At four o’clock with false dawn still twenty minutes away, they halted in the trees at almost the exact spot where Stride had tied up his horse on his earlier foray. There was no need to talk. They left the horses and crawled across the rock flats until they lay four abreast overlooking the camp. The fires had died out; a single glowing coal made a red dot. Six’s hand moved and in response Jericho Stride slid away into the rocks, swallowed up almost immediately. He moved without sound. A moment later Six himself crawled away.
Reaching the edge of a grove of pine, he looked back. Lament and Vargas were nothing more than two lumps amid a strewn clutter of boulders. Six faded into the grove and moved downslope toward the picketed horses.
He settled himself by a tree not fifteen feet from the huddled horse guard and waited. His breathing was measured; he had made a quarter circle within the trees to come upon the horses from downwind, and none of them detected his presence. The guard, squatting on his haunches with a rifle tilted against a tree, rubbed his hands together for warmth and adjusted the blanket that was draped around his shoulders. Six looked eastward.
A faint gray band began to appear in the sky. Six moved forward an inch at a time. He took out his knife, picked up a six-inch dead pine branch, and tossed it against the face of the nearest horse.
The horse jumped and rolled its eyes; the guard came erect, staring around, and stooped to grab up his rifle.
He was like that when Six rammed into him, knocking the wind out of him, pinning him down, setting the keen edge of the knife against his throat. Six did not speak. He thrust the guard’s rifle aside and, without moving the knife, stuffed a wadded rag into the man’s mouth. Then, presenting his knife at the guard’s face, he lifted several lengths of rope from his belt.
By the time, the gray strip of sky began to color, the guard was trussed and gagged. Six glanced past the horses at the outline of wheel-spokes and rims of the Gatling carriage. Two shadows were moving out of the trees toward the gun. Up above, beyond the camp on the hillside, a squat figure stood up in sharp outline: light glinted off a raised rifle. That was Jericho Stride, signaling that he had silenced the upper sentry. There was another guard across the camp on the downhill side, but there was neither time nor manpower to silence that man; he was out of sight of all four of them now.
With the brightening sky, sleeping men began to stir. Deliberately Six sighted the sentry’s rifle on the single glowing coal in the second of the four dead campfires. He eared back the hammer of the rolling-block rifle and fired its single shot.
The cheap rifle went inches wide of its mark, but it was no matter. The shot, solitary and loud in the strengthening light of dawn, served its purpose.
Every figure in the camp moved. Some sat bolt upright; some rolled around and blinked; some dived for the pyramid stacks of rifles. A great shadow rose from the earth near the Gatling gun and shouted a bull-throated roar in Spanish: Vargas, calling for surrender. A big .45-70 repeating rifle hung in Vargas’ hands like a toy.
Some of the scrambling troopers had reached the stacked rifles and now, with methodical precision, Jericho Stride’s rifle opened up on the higher rock-slope, firing with nerveless regularity. Around the weapon stacks his shots took effect among the confused, uncertain soldiers. Six sat on one knee, grimly sighting along his revolver barrel, choosing it in preference to the sentry’s inaccurate rifle. By the Gatling gun Vargas uttered hoarse
bellows between his shots, standing fully in the open, legs spread apart, choosing his targets with deliberate care. Steve Lament moved painfully around the Gatling, trying to get it loaded.
A soldier dived into a stack of rifles, knocking the weapons asprawl; grabbed one up, fired, and began to toss rifles to comrades. An officers wild shouts for order went unheeded; a bullet from Vargas’ repeater cut off the officers voice in mid-cry and knocked the officer down, still waving an unfired pistol, clad only in unfastened tunic and long underpants.
Beyond the camp another rifle began to talk at long intervals: the third sentry, firing his single-shot rifle as fast as he could reload and aim. Up on the hill Jericho Stride switched the concentration of his aim to drive that sentry under cover. By Six’s position, horses were milling and wildly rearing, restrained from flight by the picket rope. Six began to sidle to his right as he fired, moving closer to the Gatling gun, farther from the horses; he wanted to give the soldiers the chance to get to their mounts. He had no stomach for a massacre. The air filled with acrid gunsmoke, the shouts and shots of battle, the scream of a horse stricken by a stray slug. Through the smoke he saw men’s shapes weaving, milling, dodging. Surprise had caught them at an hour when they lay half drugged with sleep; but now, fifteen seconds after the opening shot, order was establishing itself. These were no raw recruits. A sergeant, talking in a loud but level tone, had rallied half a dozen armed men around him and these were now advancing steadily from tree to tree toward the Gatling gun, which stood defended only by Vargas’ hot rifle: Lament had yet to load the ammunition.
A cry of pain went up from the farther sentry. Jericho Stride’s rifle went quiet for a few seconds as he reloaded; then he began to put his shots into those six advancing men. One of them went down soundless; another wheeled, propelled by the impact of a bullet in his shoulder blade; a third, his leg knocked out from under him by Six’s well-placed pistol bullet, closed the rolling breech of his rifle and continued toward the Gatling on hands and knees until Vargas flattened him with a chest shot.
Six moved aside out of the pall of his own gunsmoke and stood behind a pine long enough to reload. There was a lull in the firing; he ran a dozen yards closer to the Gatling gun and saw Vargas, slightly unsteady on his feet, moving out in front of the gun as if to protect it with the bulk of his own body. Six shouted at him to take cover; the giant paid no heed. Lam
ent came up, sweating and panting, from a heap of packsaddles, with a heavy rectangular metal tin in his hands; he crouched beside the gun carriage and began to claw off the lid of the magazine tin.
More troopers had joined the attack on the Gatling; they were too seasoned to cut and run. Six saw his plan beginning to collapse. His lips peeled back from his teeth in an involuntary grin of tense rage and fear. The magazine tin slipped from Lament’s sweat-damp fingers and he grabbed for it. Jericho Stride was moving downhill, advancing with his rifle going steadily, trying to draw off the massing troopers. Six reached the Gatling just as Lament lifted a magazine from the opened tin and stood up behind the right-hand side of the Gatling’s breech to set the magazine into its vertical position above the firing pin. Vargas stood before the gun, firing the last shot out of his rifle, and dropped it in favor of his revolvers, which he lifted and began to fire alternately toward the advancing troopers, no more than twenty feet in front of him. Smoke and dim light made for poor shooting; but Six saw dust puff away from Vargas’ vest and plainly heard the thud of bullets finding flesh. Vargas lurched and swayed but the revolvers still talked in his great fists. The roar of his voice lifted above the din of fighting:
“¡Viva Santana!”
Steve Lament spoke with cool economy: “All right.” His eyes were clear, his hands steady on the uplifted crank of the Gatling’s firing mechanism. Six dived past the gun, rammed bodily into Vargas, and carried the big man down with him under the muzzles of the Gatling gun as Lament swung it around and depressed the barrels and began to crank the handle.
The Gatling blazed with an ear-shattering fifty caliber rattle. At point-blank range it sawed across the thin rank of onrushing soldiers and cut them down like a scythe mowing wheat stalks.
The attack broke. Four men collapsed, all but cut in half; another eight or ten wheeled back, wounded or not, and staggered away in the rising smoke. Six got to one knee and braced his revolver. He had one shot left in it; he tried to see through the gray-black swirl of smoke and dust and semi-darkness.
Marshal Jeremy Six #8 Page 11