Marshal Jeremy Six #8

by Brian Garfield

  A drop of rain struck the metal roof of the warehouse.

  Up in the loft across town, the two men silently laid out their three repeating rifles, took a last drink from their canteens, and arranged their ammunition. They hoped fervently that the sun would stay hidden behind the clouds. If the sun appeared it would be shining right in their faces. One of them said to the other, “It is one minute yet.”

  Down at the foot of the canyon, among the rocks, a rebel soldier took two sulphur matches out of his pocket and held them with heads together, ready to strike them against a rock and touch them to the fuse of the blasting sticks he held in throwing position in one hand. His eyes rested on the hands of his watch and his ears listened for the confirming signal from the town two miles above.

  On the flat beyond the canyon mouth, Carlos Santana sat his horse at the head of his silent army, stretching in march formation behind him. He lifted his hat.

  Eighteen

  “No more than three minutes,” Six warned. “Then we hightail. All right … move.”

  It was the point of four o’clock. The warehouse doors scraped open across the dusty floor and they rolled the Gatling gun into the opening. It faced the vulnerable backside of the barricade. A thousand soldiers were before them. Steve Lament began to crank the big handle before Six and Ybarra had fully settled the carriage in place.

  Only a hundred feet from the nearest part of the barricade, the Gatling gun sliced into the loyalist line and shredded it. The gun stammered, broke off once, and resumed its deafening chatter with a deadly monotony of sound while Ybarra, muscles heaving, slowly swung the carriage from side to side, to increase the radius of the aiming arc. Six and Jericho Stride stood behind the gun in the shadows, firing their rifles steadily. The Gatling’s three-hundred-grain bullets rammed into the loyalists, caught them in stunned shock, and methodically ripped them to pieces.

  In the bell tower of the town hall, the thin youth heard the stutter of the Gatling and squinted. He had already chosen his target and now he squeezed the trigger unhurriedly. The Sharps rifle boomed. Its muzzle smoke drifted away and far up the left-hand hillside he saw a man’s tiny figure outstretched. The thin youth reloaded and fired again, and again, and kept firing with steady speed, picking targets among the trees. His mission was to demoralize the hidden troops who waited to ambush Santana’s charge.

  In the stuffy loft across town, the two men fired their Winchesters as rapidly as they could pull triggers and jack levers. One of them laid aside his rifle long enough to ignite the fuse of a blasting-powder stick and toss it down upon the knot of crowded soldiers who swung away from the barricade to charge toward the two blazing rifles. The explosive roared among them, knocked them down and drove them back.

  At the far end of the canyon, among the rocks, sudden great explosions rent the silence with the rapid pounding regularity of a heavy artillery barrage. The earth shuddered under an onslaught of giant-powder that ran like a string of mammoth firecrackers across the canyon. Through a choking cloud of smoke flew an appalling shrapnel of hats, guns, human limbs.

  And on the flats, Santana’s army began to move.

  Beyond the ends of the barricade at the foot of town, the sloped canyon walls ran upward at a steady steep pitch to their crest far above. Scores of rebels spilled over those crests from their hidden gathering-places beyond; whooping and firing, they descended at great bounds through trees and rocks, carrying the attack right up to the barricade.

  The Gatling gun drove men before it like wind roughing up a heavy sea. Soldiers shouted, leaped, ran in blind circles. They scrambled over the sandbags and went running down-canyon, abandoning their arms; they wheeled and crouched and tried to shoot back at the smoke-shrouded doorway from which the ten-barreled machine vomited lead. They found themselves pinned between the gun and the attacking rebels who swarmed down the slopes at either end of the barricade.

  None of them had ever seen anything like the Gatling gun. Sticks of giant-powder roared along the barricade, tossed by Six or Jericho Stride or the thin youth in the bell tower or the men in the loft; the dusty explosions contributed to the confused furor. An officer bawled orders at the top of his lungs but no one listened. A hundred bodies lay dead or near-dead at the base of the crumbling barricade; a hundred men staggered or limped away and gently supported their injuries.

  As the gun’s wheeling barrels heated up, Ybarra took a soaked rag out of the waiting water-bucket and draped it sizzling over the barrel assembly. Every few seconds the rag fell off the revolving metal; Ybarra caught it and replaced it. Six and Jericho Stride stood flanking Steve Lament, feet braced, firing rifle bullets into the wake of the gun’s chattering destruction.

  The youth in the high bell tower was also cooling his weapon with a water-soaked rag. He ran a fresh oiled patch down the bore and resumed fire. He had fired thirty-five shots in the space of two minutes and figured, by his own calm estimate, to have pinked or killed nineteen men. His eyes were dull. In all the confusion the soldiers below him in the streets had not yet made the discovery that he was above them. He had volunteered for this task, although he could not have said why he had done so. There was no retreat from it. The staircase that descended within the tower opened out into the town hall, which was filled with a press of officers and couriers. There was a constant rushing of men in and out of the building.

  In the loft across town, one of the two riflemen lay sprawled dead. His companion had but a single stick of blasting powder left. Below the loft the street and the end of the barricade lay drenched in death. The surviving rifleman had a bubbling slow stream of blood running down his left arm from a wound near the shoulder; he fired his rifle with one hand until it was empty and then clawed for a match to ignite the charge. Coming down the slope, only a hundred yards distant now, he could see the advance wedge of the small rebel column that had worked its way up there. The rifleman tossed the fused sputtering charge and wheeled to put his back to the wall and be away from the window. Now he had his revolver, five shots.

  Throughout the length of the canyon, unreasoning confusion took hold of suddenly frightened men. Among the trees, men died mysteriously from the scattered bullets of an undiscovered sniper who killed men at ranges up to six hundred yards, and whose bullets stung the air beside men’s ears at almost twice that distance. Down the head of the road, rushing headlong or staggering blindly or limping painfully, fled hundreds who had seen the licking tongues of the Gatling gun. Midway along the canyon men looked up and found scores of riflemen pouring gunfire down on them from positions higher along the precipitous canyon walls. Far down in the mouth of the long canyon, where Santana’s advance guard rammed its massed attack against a shattered and frightened opposition, the saboteurs had done their job: craters pitted the boulder-fields and smoke hung thick over an earth that trickled in crimson.

  By the open warehouse door, the Gatling’s drifting pall of smoke obscured vision and Jeremy Six’s voice cut powerfully over the roar: “Let’s pull out.”

  But Lament did not seem to hear him. Lament’s lined face showed no expression at all. He locked a magazine into place and turned the crank, swinging the muzzles slowly. From one side a bellowing soldier rushed forward; Jericho Stride’s rifle cracked and the man fell flat. Six’s ears rang steadily. A bullet made a soft whacking thud against Ybarra’s chest and he fell without uttering a sound.

  In the big office deep within the town hall Governor Orbea stood amid a sweating squad of armed men and shouted Colonel Sanderos’ name time after time until the gaunt colonel presented his drawn face at the door. Orbea screamed at him:

  “What has happened? What has happened?”

  “Our trap has turned upon us,” Sanderos said, and went away with a revolver in his hand.

  Down the canyon walls on either side came a line of rebel soldiers, beating the bush, driving the loyalists from cover. The bulk of the loyalist army retreated toward a central silence in the canyon, trapped by the Gatling gun and guerilla
s at the upper end, by the descending rebels on the slopes to either side, and by the mass of Santana’s main advance at the bottom. The loyalist army broke up like a piece of moist cake dropped into a boiling caldron.

  In the bell tower the thin young man wrapped a wet cloth around his left hand to hold his rifle. It had grown too hot to touch. He adjusted his sight and brought down a running figure two hundred yards away at the near edge of the trees.

  In the smoky loft the rifleman with the wounded arm sat listening to a squad of soldiers tramp up the stairs toward his trapdoor. He walked over to it and fired four shots through it with his pistol. He put the pistol in his mouth but then he took it out again, cocked it, and trained it on the trapdoor, waiting for it to open. He glanced once at his dead companion.

  A wizened old woman fell from a second-story window with a bullet in her heart.

  In the town hall a young beardless lieutenant had discovered the sniper in the bell tower. He gathered a group of soldiers and led them up the spiral stair toward the tower door.

  At the lower end of the canyon a bull-throated officer commanded order among his loyalist troops and organized them rapidly to make a stand against the advance of the rebel force. He was outnumbered three to one. Santana’s men had threaded to either side into the trees instead of marching up the road; now the fighting was hand-to-hand and rifle-to-rifle among the trees. Slowly the loyalists lost ground, backing uphill. Coming down toward them were the half-thousand who had fled the Gatling gun.

  The gun chattered a final time, firing blindly in a wide arc through the dense choking fog of its own smoke. Lament coughed raspingly and Six’s powerful hand ripped him away from the crank-handle of the empty gun. Ybarra’s corpse lay silent on the warehouse floor. Six bled profusely from a superficial wound: a bullet had neatly pierced his right earlobe. The side of his face was a ghastly red mess. With a shove he propelled Lament across the floor; he stooped and heaved and dragged the Gatling back from the doors. Jericho Stride rode the door shut with his shoulder and dropped the heavy crossbar in place. Lament got to his feet and stood as if stunned. All of them coughed steadily. Six shook him by the shoulders: “Disarm it.”

  The glaze faded from Lament’s eyes and he nodded jerkily. It took him a moment with a small tool to remove the Gatling’s firing-pin, thus rendering the weapon useless. Jericho Stride fired a rifle empty through the closed door to discourage an attack on it. Then the three tall men stumbled choking through the room and heard behind them the pounding of oncoming boots: with the retreat of the Gatling, the remnants of the army were quick to respond. Lament pocketed the hot firing pin and they edged past the wagon that blocked the open back door.

  The two men with moustaches, who had guarded the back of the warehouse, lay dead in the corral. The four spavined mules ran around squealing, kicking up dust. One of them bled at its neck. Somewhere a man’s voice was shouting orders. There was an intense volley of rifle fire not far away.

  A slight drizzle began. A pair of soldiers walked up to the gate in the far fence and shouted in alarm. Six fired and Jericho Stride’s rifle spoke just beside him; Six fired again and the two soldiers retreated, one of them limping. Faintly they heard a hard battering against the barred warehouse door. “On the run!” Six called, and they ran dodging along the wall toward the fence corner.

  In the bell tower the thin youth cursed the thickening rain, which obliterated his distant targets. He heard boots climbing the stairs toward him and he turned with a stick of blasting powder, lighting it with one swift motion while he flung the door open. He tossed the sputtering charge out, slammed the door, and propped a timber against it.

  The blast shook the tower; the bell reverberated faintly and plaster crumbled onto the youth’s hatless head. There was a rending, splintering sound and a long series of loud crashes. Someone screamed in a falsetto voice. Dust puffed in around the seams of the door. After a moment the youth kicked the prop away and opened the door, his revolver ready.

  The explosion had blown down the staircase. A heap of tangled bodies lay in the debris forty feet below at the base of the tower.

  The youth left the door open and went back to his post at the sill. A squad of soldiers darted nervously from building to building in the street below. He loaded his Sharps and began to pick them off deliberately. At the head of the street he saw an officer whipping up his horse, galloping out of town.

  A splashing wall of rain descended, damping down the smoke. Out of a blast-shattered building stepped three men in bloodied loyalist uniforms. One of them had a bleeding ear; another had a ragged bandage tied about his head, concealing all of his face but the eyes. The first man, the tallest, growled at him in English: “Get those Goddamn black hands out of sight.”

  The man with the bandaged face grinned unseen under his bandage. He put his rifle on his shoulder by its strap and rammed his hands into his pockets. The third man looked anxiously both ways. Presently the three slipped across a narrow street and climbed the hill, falling in with a wildly staggering group of unarmed soldiers fleeing up into the wilderness by the smelter. What they fled from was not clear; the Gatling gun was silent and Santana’s advancing army was still half a mile down the canyon, attacking against resolute but badly outnumbered lines. At the foot of the alley an officer stood with his legs apart and tears in his eyes, bawling up at the fleeing men. But he found himself ignored.

  The youth in the bell tower saw the ragged group of soldiers streaming up the hill. They were obviously in flight; most of them had no guns. He let them go. They slowly disappeared upward into the driving rain.

  In the canyon forest roared the boom of gunfire. The thick sting of smoke was held down by the rain. Loose lines of men surged and swelled, moving fragmentarily through the trees. Here and there men died. Carlos Santana rode among his men, shouting and firing his revolver, urging them on. He seemed oblivious to the fact that he presented a clear target, a big-chested man tall on horseback, conspicuous and bold. No bullets found him but finally his horse was shot out from under him; thenceforth he led his men afoot. They rallied around him and pressed forward through the gray gloom of the wet and violent afternoon.

  In the road those who had fled the Gatling gun met those fleeing uphill from Santana’s advance. The two groups met and milled in confusion. One man fainted of his wounds; boots trampled him and no one heard his weak cries. The body of men, eight hundred strong but leaderless, found itself surrounded by Santana’s men, who had simply walked past them through the trees. A few loyalists fired in panic and were quickly silenced by their own comrades, who had lost their stomach for the fight. No officer could be found who cared to surrender and so, after a disorderly consultation, a tall sergeant of infantry formally surrendered the eight hundred into Santana’s hands.

  Rebels filtered down the canyon sides into the town itself and through the waning afternoon a score of single encounters took place as the rebels swept from building to building. Santana’s main body of troops crossed the barricade unchallenged at sundown, herding their prisoners before them. The monotonous rain fell heavily, soaking them all.

  A last ring of defense held out at the town hall for another full hour, other than that, the battle was over except for sporadic bursts of firing in scattered quarters of town and canyon. Catacamas had fallen. Jeremy Six and his two partners came down out of the hills to rejoin them. On Six’s ear was a makeshift bandage, soaked and stiff with blood. A volley of fire erupted lower down the canyon and over their footsteps sounded Steve Lament’s voice, quoting a fragment:

  “ ‘… Where ignorant armies clash by night.’ Matthew Arnold, I believe.” He sounded in good spirits. The streets were brightly lamplit and patrolled heavily by squads of men.

  A troop of prisoners sweated in the pitch-black rain, guarded by rifles: the burial detail, digging long trenches. Two padres walked angry-faced through the streets, kneeling here and there by the dead. A field hospital had been set up in what had once been loyalist barracks.<
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  Almost two thousand loyalist soldiers were unaccounted for. The dark and the rain made for easy escape.

  A man on the town hall roof flung up a weighted rope, which was caught by the youth in the tower. It had no stairway. The youth climbed down the rope, carefully carrying his Sharps rifle. He had fought alone from the tower for fully four hours but not a single bullet had touched him. He was fed and given dry clothes and was then brought before Carlos Santana, who personally shook his hand. Afterward he spent half an hour cleaning his rifle, which was still warm to the touch.

  The town hall had fallen and in the alcalde’s office sat Governor Orbea, composed and silent. He had surrendered his guard when the hopelessness of resistance had become apparent. He drank wine and smoked long Turkish cigarettes and spoke to no one.

  Colonel Sanderos was nowhere to be found.

  Nineteen

  A shawl over her head, Elena knelt before the altar. Her lips moved soundlessly. She crossed herself and stood up and went back along the aisle. The padre stood in the open door looking out at the rain. In a corner, Holly Moore sat on a wooden bench underneath a flickering candle. Elena went to her and sat down. The two women looked at each other and attempted to smile.

  A horseman came forward out of the rain. Hoofs clattered to a stop and a rasping voice spoke:

  “Padre, I need clothes and food and a fresh horse.”

  The padre’s head jerked back. After a moment he said, “Come inside.”

  Boots scuffed the steps and a gaunt disheveled figure appeared: Colonel Sanderos, bleeding at the chest. Elena’s eyes widened and her hand went to her mouth. Sanderos swayed on his feet; he had not seen the women. The padre said, “You are hurt.”

  “I must get on, padre. Bring me what I need.”

  Colonel Sanderos’ eyes were hooded and dim. He turned and his glance fell upon the women. If he was surprised he did not show it. He stood back and rested wearily against the wall, his head back and his eyes almost closed. The padre stood where he was, his expression uncertain. Sanderos’ eyelids fluttered open and he said harshly, “Move, man!” His head turned and settled and he said to Elena, “You are Santana’s woman.” His stare was like a lizard’s. Without warning he lifted the revolver from his holster. He said something unintelligible. Holly shouted a warning and tried to draw Elena aside. Colonel Sanderos’ revolver wavered; he pulled the trigger.