by Lyle Brandt
“I will convey your words precisely,” said the young man.
“And I will expect,” Villa replied, “that my next conversation on this matter shall be with Emiliano, speaking for himself. Vaya con Dios, chico.”
* * *
* * *
Los Tríos, Chihuahua, Mexico
The village of Los Tríos was not large, but after miles of empty desert since Clint Parnell’s party crossed the border, it seemed like a fair first stop, where they could fill canteens, water their horses, and perhaps obtain some useful information. In a settlement that size, the recent passage of bandidos driving more than fourteen hundred stolen horses should have been remembered until something more exiting came along.
The foremost question in Clint’s mind was whether any locals would see fit to speak with strangers, particularly when an Anglo rider led the group and it included five Apaches.
Clint reined in his dapple gray gelding atop a low ridge spiked with cactus, signaling the others do likewise. No one spoke as he reached back into his saddlebag and retrieved a small spyglass, extending it before he raised it to his right eye, squinting with his left.
He knew nothing about the settlement beyond the fact that its name translated to English as “The Three.” Three what? It might be anything from streams of water, precious in the desert, to enumeration of the first explorers who had put down roots and built adobe structures on the spot. From what his telescope revealed at half a mile distant, Clint saw the settlement consisted of two dozen buildings with a dirt road passing through the midst of them, the town divided roughly into halves.
Its central feature, like so many other villages in Mexico, was a well built out of stones. The largest structure was a weathered church, across the central square from a cantina and a blacksmith’s shop that opened on the dusty thoroughfare. He saw no townsfolk on the street, but instantly picked out two dozen federales, presently dismounted, beating dust out of their khaki uniforms while watering their horses at the fountain.
“Soldiers,” he told the other members of his team. “Looks like we won’t be stopping here.”
“Can we not wait until they leave?” Dolores asked him.
“Two problems there,” Clint said. “First thing, we don’t know if they’re passing through or staying overnight. It could be hours yet before we figure that out, one way or another, then we’ve wasted half a day and have to circle round them in the dark.”
“But if they do leave soon,” Sonya chimed in, “we could ask questions, ¿sí?”
“We could,” Clint granted, “but we might be stirring up a hornet’s nest. These villagers aren’t stupid. They could take one look at us, riding with Mescaleros, looking for a bandit gang and lots of horses, then they think about the federales. All we need is one guy tipping off the soldiers, maybe hoping for a small reward, and they’d be hunting us. Might even have some kind of deal with the bandidos, given how things are down here these days.”
“So, what then?” asked Dolores.
“Best idea that I can think of is to ride around Los Tríos while the federales are distracted. It’s a couple miles out of our way, but maybe we can happen on a farm, even another settlement, and ask our questions there.”
Nobody argued with Clint after that. The Mescaleros riding with his party did not have to understand Clint’s words to realize that soldiers dawdling in their path meant trouble, and the rest—aside from the Aguirre twins—were long accustomed to obeying orders from the hacienda’s foreman.
Clint flipped a mental coin, deciding that it made no difference whether they circled to the west or east in circumnavigating Los Tríos. He chose the latter, reined his dapple gray back down the far side of the ridgeline, placing it between his riders and the settlement. The others followed him, unspeaking, hands on weapons casually but prepared for anything.
Clint reckoned that the best outcome for this encounter with the army would be no contact at all. The time might come, and soon, when they would have to face down soldiers, bandits—anyone at all, in fact—and when that happened, Parnell was prepared to join the bloodletting. But if they could avoid it for the moment, even put the killing off until they overtook the raiders who had stolen Alejandro’s herd, so much the better.
On the other hand, what if they never found the horses or their rustlers in the vastness that was northern Mexico? What would he tell his jefe then?
Forget that, Parnell thought.
He was not going back without the herd, some part of it, or at the very least an explanation of his failure to perform as planned. In that case, he would quit and leave his job, the rancho, all of it behind.
And in that moment, Clint decided he would rather go down fighting than to turn back empty-handed, knowing Alejandro’s trust in him had been a hideous mistake.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Laguna de Guzmán, Chihuahua
Twelve figures lay concealed in shadows cast by a long row of Texas pinyon pines, watching the lake below them, to their north. Fed by the Casas Grandes River, Lake Guzmán—located at an altitude of some 3,885 feet, between the Sierra Tapalpa and the Sierra el Tigre —was glassy flat under the late afternoon sun. Its waters would be clear and cold, the perfect draw for varied species of high-desert prey.
The band of Chiricahua hunters, led by one Alchesay (“warrior chief”), had waited since midmorning for a bear or deer to show itself, and the Apaches were becoming restless, though a stranger could not have divined as much from simply watching them. Young men, they had learned patience during boyhood, hunting small game for their families, but gladly tackled larger targets when they were available.
The warning, when it came, was whispered to the others by Sahale, whose name translated to English as “falcon,” a tribute to his keen long-distance eyesight. “Riders!” he alerted his companions, pointing off to the northwest of Alchesay’s selected hiding place.
The rest followed Sahale’s gesture and beheld a line of thirteen horses, twelve with riders, the thirteenth laden with what could only be supplies. Along the line of prostrate bodies, eyes narrowed and muscles tensed, each man weighing the odds and wondering whether they could take the travelers, how many of their own would suffer wounds or worse before the issue was resolved.
The other Chiricahuas in the band were Bodaway (“fire maker”), Cassadore (“angry”), Taklishim (“gray one”), Diablo (“devil”), Tarak (“star”), Jlin-Litzoque (“yellow horse), Calian (“warrior”), Illanipi (“amazing”), Elan (“evergreen”), and Baishan (“knife”). All had been hunted by the federales in their time, and all had managed—so far—to survive.
Alchesay scanned the line of riders, noting that a white man led them, followed by six Mexicans, two women and four men. The women instantly intrigued him—both attractive and apparently identical—twins being rare among his own people. The last five riders—clearly Mescaleros, the ancestral enemies of the Chiricahuas, although white men generally lumped them all together as Apaches—made Alchesay scowl. The final red man in the lineup held the reins of the approaching party’s packhorse loosely in one hand, the pinto mare obliging him without resistance.
“What should we do, Alchesay?” Bodaway inquired.
“We have one more rifle than they do,” Alchesay replied. “And two of them are women.”
With a sneer, Diablo added, “Half of them are Mescaleros,” spitting his contempt onto a bed of pine needles.
“It is decided, then,” their war chief said. “Be ready on my signal.”
For Alchesay, being ready simply meant he had to cock his venerable Henry lever-action rifle, drawing back its hammer with his thumb. The forty-five-inch weapon weighed nine and one quarter pounds with fifteen .44-caliber rimfire rounds in its tubular magazine and one more ready in the firing chamber. Unlike the newer Winchesters, it had no wooden forearm to protect a shooter’s left hand if the barrel overheated during combat, but the
under-barrel magazine served well enough in that regard, provided Alchesay used normal caution.
His companions carried a motley collection of rifles—Sharps carbines, stolen Winchesters, and a breech-loading Remington Rolling Block model that Diablo carried, taken from a settler’s homestead, chambered for the .45-70 Government cartridge, capable of dropping man-sized targets at six hundred yards. Lake Guzmán lay within effective killing range for all of them, but accuracy was required, as much as for the targets they desired to miss, as in the case of those the warriors meant to kill.
The mexicana women, for example, interested Alchesay. Although both carried weapons, he was not convinced that they could hold their own in battle. And if captured, they could offer brief amusement to his fighters before they were bartered in Juárez as slaves.
But first, the men must be eliminated.
Staring one-eyed down the Henry’s twenty-four-inch barrel, over open sights, Alchesay slipped his index finger through the rifle’s trigger guard, drew in a breath, and held it as he started taking up the slack.
* * *
* * *
You never hear the shot that kills you.
Clint Parnell had heard that statement uttered time and time again, keeping his peace although he knew it was not true. Most individuals who died from gunshot wounds, in his experience, were not killed instantly by bullets ripping through their hearts or brains. Gut wounds, particularly, were renowned for causing slow and agonizing deaths. Even a bullet to the arm or leg could bleed a body dry if it severed a major vein or artery, and sepsis from neglected wounds might claim a victim’s life days later—sometimes even weeks, if gangrene should set in.
The first shot angled toward his riders from a nearby tree line, therefore, made Clint flinch, before he heard a cry of pain behind him that told the foreman someone else was either hit or startled badly by the gunfire’s echo. Seconds later, even as Clint turned his dapple gray toward the lake’s shore and the cover he had spotted there, made up of silver spruce, Durango juniper, and jumbled boulders, gunfire was crackling around him, bullets humming through the air like hornets swarming to defend their nest.
“Follow me and go to ground!” he shouted to the others, without looking back immediately to find out if they obeyed. Some of his party were returning fire without clear targets, but the hoofbeats closing in behind his gelding told Parnell that most of them, at least, were following his lead.
He thought about the sisters, glancing back just as he reached the screen of rocks and trees he hoped would shelter them, and saw both twins stampeding toward the lake, hunched over their respective saddle horns, to make their bodies smaller targets for the unseen snipers. Close behind them, his vaqueros followed, galloping, with Nantan’s Mescaleros and their packhorse bringing up the rear.
No, wait! One of the tribesmen’s horses ran without a rider on its back. It was a rabicano, meaning that Bimisi, whether wounded or just clumsy, had lived up to his slippery name and tumbled from his mount, lost somewhere in the rush for cover.
Clint dismounted, found cover behind a man-sized boulder, crouching with his Browning Auto-5 in hand. Before departing Alejandro’s hacienda, he had switched the shotgun’s normal buckshot load for full-bore slugs with rifling stamped into the nine-ounce lead projectile, compensating for the Auto-5’s smooth barrel interior. Fired through the Browning’s twenty-eight-inch barrel, slugs transformed the gun into a deadly hunting rifle, accurate out to seventy-five yards, more than doubling the weight of a standard .30-06 projectile.
Thus armed—his other riders crouched along the tree line to his right and left, their horses trotting toward the lake’s shore—Parnell settled in, awaiting the assault that would decide whether they lived or died.
* * *
* * *
Sonya Aguirre knelt beside her twin, their shoulders almost touching, staring toward the tree line opposite where gun smoke rose like wisps of lake mist, sending rifle bullets crackling overhead. Their cover was the trunk and upthrust branches of a lightning-struck Tarahumara oak, fallen sometime last winter from the state of its decay, but still a decent bullet stop.
“I count a dozen rifles,” Sonya told Dolores. “You?”
“The same.”
Outnumbered by a single sniper, then, since they had lost one of the Mescaleros to the first barrage. His body lay exposed in no-man’s-land, where he had tumbled from his mount, facedown in yellow grass with fresh blood soaking through his buckskin shirt. They could survive those odds, perhaps, assuming that their unknown enemies got restless soon and risked a foray toward the lake across the intervening open ground.
Sonya was ready for them with her Springfield Model 1903 rifle, Dolores sighting down the twenty-eight-inch barrel of her Winchester Model 1895, loaded with .30-30 rounds. Both sisters had the skill to pick off riders at one hundred yards, but only if their enemies were visible.
So far, no luck on that.
Sonya decided she could spare an aught-six round to test their would-be killers, but with no clear view of them, she had to count their puffs of rifle smoke again, selecting one almost directly opposite her hiding place, and sighting on a point where she surmised the shooter must be hunkered down.
Calculating range, she raised the Springfield’s flip-up rear sight, waited for her unseen enemy to fire again, and stroked her rifle’s trigger before she could hear the sharp crack of the shot fired from the tree line toward Lake Guzmán. Riding out the Springfield’s recoil while her bullet flew downrange, Sonya could not be sure if she had hit her man or only frightened him, but after one full minute counting puffs of hostile rifle smoke, she could have sworn that there was one less on their adversaries’ firing line.
She kept that supposition to herself and shifted for another try. Sonya had learned throughout her life that boasting of uncertain victories often resulted in embarrassment and endless teasing by her two siblings.
Only one, of course, now that nameless enemies had killed brother, Eduardo, robbing Sonya’s father of his cherished heir.
Determined not to let that loss go unavenged, she heard her sister’s Winchester unload a shot beside her, to her right, while lining up her Springfield’s sights to see if she could score another long-range hit.
Perhaps a hit, she instantly corrected in her mind, hoping their unseen enemies would tire of dueling from a distance and either attack in force across the open ground before her or retreat to lick their wounds and wait for other prey.
In Sonya’s heart, she hoped that they would charge and let her have a chance to repay blood with blood.
* * *
* * *
Alchesay half turned from his prone position on the tree line, glancing to his left, and saw Diablo twitching on the grass where he had fallen, bleeding heavily from a wound in his upper chest. His fellow Chiricahua’s tremors were already fading, telling Alchesay the gunshot had been fatal or had stunned Diablo to the point where he was losing consciousness.
In either case, the steady outpouring of blood marked his companion for an early death.
Off to Alchesay’s right, a yelp of pain distracted him. He spun in that direction to find Calian clamping a hand against his scalp above his left ear, rivulets of crimson trickling from between his fingers where they pressed against his skull.
That was a graze, survivable, but Alchesay guessed that his war party would only suffer further injuries by staying where they were, exchanging gunfire with the party marked as easy victims, only to be proven wrong.
As leader of the band, Alchesay had a choice to make within the next few moments. They could either slip away defeated, carrying their dead and wounded from the field, or else attack their chosen adversaries in a screaming charge against their fortified position by the lake. The first choice was humiliating and might jeopardize his place as war chief, while the latter could amount to suicide.
But if they charged and pu
lled it off . . .
Before he fled from the San Carlos Apache Reservation up in Arizona Territory, slipping into Mexico and living as a renegade, Alchesay had been no one, going nowhere. Twelve braves had dared to follow him, two of them killed before this morning’s hunt, while prowling through Sonora toward Chihuahua, raiding isolated farms, and killing solitary mexicano travelers. The ten survivors—nine now—had accepted him as their leader and pledged to follow him as long as he proved worthy.
Now, however . . .
Alchesay decided he would put it to a vote, rather than forcing his companions who were still alive to sacrifice their honor by retreating, or to throw their lives away on what might prove to be a foolish move. Calling along their ragged line, he managed to achieve a momentary ceasefire, speaking in their native tongue and confident that even if his enemies might overhear some of his words, the meaning would escape them.
There were Mescaleros on the other side, of course, but variations in their dialect reduced the sometimes hostile tribes to using Spanish or sign language on rare occasions when they tried communicating with each other.
“Brothers, we have lost Diablo,” he informed the warriors who had thus far failed to notice. “Calian is injured, but perhaps can fight.”
On hearing that, Calian nodded in agreement, wiped his bloody hand along his buckskin pants, and scowled his willingness to carry on.
“Shall we retreat?” Alchesay asked his braves. “Or shall we finish what we’ve started, even at the risk of life itself?”
He scanned the firing line, meeting nine pairs of eyes in turn. Each nodded toward their chief, although a couple—Bodaway and Taklishim—delayed just long enough to make Alchesay wonder whether they would vote to cut and run. At last, though, all agreed to join his bold action that would either leave their band victorious or else give inspiration for a warrior’s song no other living voice might ever sing.