by Lyle Brandt
Meanwhile, under President Díaz, a Mexican father of four would count himself fortunate to earn fifty pesos per year from backbreaking labor, most families having lost 90 percent of their ancestral land to wealthy planters under the corrupt porfiriato system’s banner of orden y progreso—“order and progress.”
To Villa and like-minded others, that meant Díaz gave the orders and his cronies monopolized the progress, while the campesinos were abused and robbed by venal federales.
But a change was coming. He could smell it on the desert wind.
“Not bad, jefe,” Jurado said as Villa finished doling out shares to his gunmen.
“All right for fifteen minutes’ work,” Villa agreed, “but we should do much better from the horses.”
“Sí,” Jurado answered. “If Zapata ever gets here.”
That could be a problem, Villa realized. The longer he delayed in selling off the stolen herd, the greater were his odds of being run to ground and killed or captured. He could spare another day or two, perhaps, but after that he would be forced to relocate the herd or make other arrangements for its sale, and that would drive a wedge between Zapata and himself.
Villa had enemies enough already, as he realized, to last him for a lifetime—or to end it, if he ever dropped his guard.
The next few days were critical, but he could not hasten Zapata’s pace across Chihuahua, where no end of dangers lay in wait.
“Enough talk of Emiliano for today,” he told Jurado.
“Then perhaps tequila, eh?” his strong right hand replied, smiling.
Villa returned the smile, saying, “I thought you’d never ask.”
CHAPTER NINE
We should camp soon,” Clint Parnell told the Aguirre sisters, after glancing westward, where a radiant sunset was burning down in shades of pink fading toward violet.
“I’m ready,” Sonya said, and Parnell saw Dolores nod silent agreement, though she wore a frown.
“Got something on your mind?” he asked the slightly older twin.
“You mean besides the killings? Or the fact that we’ve achieved nothing today?” Dolores answered.
“Nobody ever thought we’d find the herd our first day out,” Parnell reminded her. “As for the rest . . . well, everyone signed on with eyes wide open and expecting trouble.”
“I know that.” Her tone stopped just a fraction short of being bitter. “But I thought if someone died it would have meaning for the task we’ve undertaken.”
Parnell could have said the obvious, that they’d been ambushed by Apache raiders, had fought through it in the end, and that their Mescalero volunteers were not complaining of the battle’s outcome. He refrained because Dolores knew all that without being reminded and she didn’t need to hear it. She was venting her frustration that they had no solid leads on the bandidos they were hunting, and Clint didn’t mind—unless a spirit of defeatism infected the surviving members of their team.
Clint reined his dapple gray and turned to face the men strung out behind him. Raised a hand to signal for Kuruk, the leader of their four remaining Mescaleros. When Kuruk caught up to him, Parnell said, “We’ll be camping soon. It’s time to call the scouts back in.”
He had dispatched two of the Mescaleros earlier, Nantan Lupan and Goyathlay, to ride a couple miles ahead and search for any useful tracks or obstacles across their path. Kuruk nodded but did not urge his blood bay on or call Itza-chu forward to run the errand Parnell had requested.
Rather, with the bare ghost of a frown, Kuruk announced, “They are returning now. Both riding hard.”
Frowning himself, Parnell turned in his saddle, facing southward. In another moment he could see the two outriders raising dust, both bent over their ponies’ necks and racing back to join the team they’d left behind. Clint wondered whether that meant they had found something, some trail suggesting that a herd had passed, or—
Kuruk cantered forward now, to meet his fellow tribesmen. One of them, Nantan Lupan, spoke urgently to him in muted tones, accompanied by hand gestures. Some thirty seconds later, Kuruk doubled back toward Clint and the Aguirre sisters, scowling as he said, “There is a troop of federales heading this way, possibly a mile behind.”
“How many?” Parnell asked Kuruk.
“A dozen, maybe more.”
Clint swore under his breath and scanned the desert, looking for a place where he could hide eleven riders with their mounts and loaded packhorse. There were no gullies nearby, and he could barely glimpse the closest range of weathered hills, perhaps two miles away to their southeast.
No place to shelter, then, and that meant trying to avoid the troops on open ground. Even with nightfall coming on, Clint did not like their chances of success for that.
“Okay,” he said at last. “We can’t outrun them on the flats. The best thing we can hope for is to bluff them. Have some kind of story ready for their comandante.”
Sonya spoke up, reminding him, “That might work for the three of us and our vaqueros, but the Mescaleros . . .”
Parnell had already thought of that. The odds against a squad of federales letting armed Apaches pass them by were slim to none.
“You’re right,” Clint granted ruefully, “but there’s a chance . . .”
He faced Kuruk. Said, “If you take your men and lag behind a bit, while we ride on, hang back until you’re nearly out of sight, you can be ready when we need you.”
Thinking of the sisters foremost, and the likelihood that federales would try something with them, in the guise of an arrest or a flat-out assault, Parnell was counting on another fight, hoping that strategy could see them through.
Or most of them, at least.
Up close, at point-blank range, there would be casualties. Clint could only hope to strike with greater speed and force than his opponents, hoping that before they glimpsed the trailing Mescaleros it would be too late.
It was a half-baked battle plan at best, but all he could come up with at short notice. When the smoke cleared, if he was alive to see the end of it, Parnell reckoned more ghosts would haunt him during the remainder of their journey.
And if this turned out to be the end, he would have failed his boss and friend, likely cost Alejandro his last two surviving children and the herd Aguirre counted on to keep his spread running through winter and into spring.
Failure would mean the end of everything.
Clint’s only consolation was that if disaster came to pass, he would not live to see its brutal end.
* * *
* * *
Are you certain they were Mescaleros?” asked Lieutenant Jesús Ahumada of the federales. He did not entirely trust his sergeant’s eyesight, even though the man was only ten years older than himself, a fairly youthful-looking forty-two.
“Estoy seguro, teniente,” Sergeant Lázaro Velázquez answered with a hint of irritation in his gravel voice. “I’m sure of it. There is no mistaking Mescalero war paint.”
“But we’ve lost them, then, sargento?”
“No, not lost, señor. They turned and ran. If we make haste, I’m confident that we can overtake the two of them.”
Lieutenant Ahumada, for his part, was not convinced of it. Worse yet, considering his rank, he was not sure that they should even try. Regardless of their tribe, Apaches were well known for laying traps for federales on patrol, as they had done for generations with unwary travelers. The two Velázquez had seen—assuming he was right when he identified them—might have parted company by now, expecting Ahumada to divide his meager force, or else they might have joined with reinforcements waiting up ahead to spring an ambush.
If Ahumada failed to follow up and overtake the stray Apaches, Colonel Gaspar Islas would find out about it when the squad returned, and he would have no end of questions about Ahumada’s failure to pursue and kill or capture them.
To that end the
patrol was galloping after the riders he had barely glimpsed, uncertain in his own mind whether they were indios or campesinos mexicanos. Either way, once he caught up with them, Lieutenant Ahumada meant to seize their horses and any weapons they were carrying, along with anything else that he deemed worth confiscating.
There would be no protests from his victims after they were dead and left as carrion for vultures.
Suddenly, at a distance of two hundred yards or less, Lieutenant Ahumada saw riders raising a pall of dust in front of him. From the hats they wore, the horsemen did not look like Native tribesmen, nor were they attempting to evade his men. In fact, they were advancing on a hard collision course with the patrol.
“So, who are these?” he challenged Sergeant Velázquez. “Not Mescaleros, surely.”
Suddenly uncertain, Velázquez craned forward in his saddle, using his right hand to shade his narrowed eyes. “I would say mexicanos,” the sergeant replied, forgetting military courtesy, “except their leader seems to be a gringo. And the two who ride on nearest beside him are mujeres.”
“Women!” Ahumada made no effort to disguise his skepticism. “Now I know your eyes are failing you, sargento.”
“Wait and see, señor,” Velázquez answered.
A long, tense moment later, Ahumada knew his second-in-command was right. The leader of the group approaching his patrol was certainly a gringo, flanked by two young women whose faces seemed precisely to resemble one another’s.
Was Ahumada going mad? Had riding all day through the desert heat and skimping on water from his canteen addled his brain?
The teniente pushed those thoughts aside and concentrated on the riders drawing closer to him, even as he signaled with a raised hand for his troops to halt in place. He counted seven riders, including the women, all but the leader being mexicanos. The four trailing horsemen all wore wide sombreros, but the slanting sun from Ahumada’s left still clearly showed their faces underneath. Two of them cultivated horseshoe mustaches, a third wore the Vandyke style with a moustache and goatee, while the last one in line had been clean-shaven prior to going on the road, some two or three days earlier. The young women wore their hair tied back, while matched serape shawls did little to conceal the ripeness of their pulchritude beneath.
It was the gringo leader who concerned Lieutenant Ahumada most, however. Why would half a dozen Mexicans be trailing him through the Desierto de Chihuahua, southward bound on such a fading day as this? What was his business with them when he so clearly was not a mexicano?
Noting the long gun braced across the leader’s pommel, even though he did not recognize its caliber or model, Ahumada half turned toward Sergeant Velázquez, ordering, “Prepare the troops, sargento. Cautiously.”
Without raising his voice, Velázquez called back down their line of federales, ordering them, “Prepárense.”
Be prepared.
Lieutenant Ahumada heard his men drawing their rifles clear from saddle scabbards, cocking them, but knew that none of them would raise their weapons. They were mostly young recruits, but none of them were fool enough to give the game away.
At least, the teniente hoped not, because when shooting started—and he felt a nagging certainty that they were in for some—he would be caught between two groups of blazing guns.
* * *
* * *
They’re getting ready for us,” Clint Parnell advised, voice muted, speaking from a corner of his mouth.
“We see them,” Sonya answered, using a hand gesture, down beside her right leg, to alert the trailing riders if they had not seen the federales drawing rifles from their dusty saddle boots.
Clint knew the moment was approaching that sharp tipping edge where planning yielded to frenetic action, blood was spilled, and lives not ended in the first exchange of fire might still be changed forever. He was tired of all the recent killing, going back four nights to the attack on Alejandro’s hacienda, but it was not over yet.
And would not be until his mission was completed or he died in the attempt.
Holding the dapple gray’s slack reins in his left hand, Clint braced the Browning Auto-5 across his thighs, snugged up against his saddle horn. He had reloaded it with buckshot rounds after their skirmish with the Chiricahua at Laguna de Guzmán, a whim that he had not fully considered at the time but now saw might be helpful with the federales waiting for them up ahead.
In Parnell’s mind, there was no question of avoiding conflict with the soldiers. He knew the army’s sordid reputation: cruel at best, no more than uniformed bandidos at their worst. The officer in charge was bound to question Clint and his companions, asking where they’d come from and where they were headed, eyeballing their mounts and weapons, focusing particularly on the twins who flanked him as the gap narrowed between his party and the khaki-clad patrol.
Whatever else occurred, he could not leave the two Aguirre women in the federales’ hands.
From fifty feet or so, the officer in charge of the patrol called out, “¿Cuál es tu negocio aquí?”
Clint understood him well enough but offered up a lie, still closing in on the patrol. “Sorry, but I don’t know much Spanish.”
The lieutenant frowned, translating his query. “What is your business here?”
At thirty feet, Parnell replied, “Looking for horses on the cheap. Some breeding stock.”
His answer was not wholly false that time, it simply dodged their true purpose for being in Chihuahua. If Clint told the federale they were chasing rustlers from New Mexico, the next step would be shouted orders to arrest them all.
But if he bought a little time by talking, while he closed the gap a few more yards . . .
“Where do you hope to find these horses?” The lieutenant almost sneered his words.
Parnell shrugged casually, wearing a bewildered smile as might befit a gringo facing down armed soldiers in the fading light of dusk. “Still looking,” he replied. “I don’t suppose you’d know of any nearby ranchos that might have a few to sell?”
“Our people need their animals, señor. Where have you come from on this búsqueda inútil?” Calling it a futile quest and letting Parnell know that he could recognize manure when a gringo shoveled it his way.
“A ways up north of here,” Clint said, the knuckles of his right hand blanching as he tightened up his death grip on the Browning Auto-5.
“How far north, gringo?” the lieutenant pressed him.
“Since you ask . . .”
Clint raised his shotgun, angling its muzzle toward a point midway between the troop’s commander and his sergeant, bracing for its recoil as he squeezed the trigger. Buckshot pellets spewing from its muzzle caught both federales, toppling the sergeant from his saddle, while the officer in charge managed to keep his seat somehow, despite blood soaking through the right side of his khaki uniform.
Parnell’s shot sent one empty cartridge spinning from the Auto-5’s ejection port and fed a live round to the firing chamber in the split second before gunfire exploded all around him, federales and Clint’s riders all unloading weapons in a blaze of close-range fire. Bullets swarmed around him in the dusky desert air, one plucking at Parnell’s left sleeve, his dapple gray gelding trying to turn away before Clint gripped its reins and held them fast while lining up another hasty shot.
* * *
* * *
Sonya Aguirre left her Springfield rifle in its saddle scabbard when the shooting started, whipping out a Smith & Wesson Model 1899 revolver from its quick-draw holster fastened to the right side of her saddle horn instead. The double-action weapon with its four-inch barrel held six rounds of .38 Special hollow-point ammunition, with its rate of fire restricted only by the strength of Sonya’s hand.
The hollow points were specially designed to “mushroom” upon impact with a target, peeling back each bullet’s soft indented nose, causing extreme internal damage as they c
hurned through flesh and bone, rarely opening an exit wound, disabling her chosen mark without harming whoever stood nearby.
Her first shot, fired a heartbeat after Clint’s initial shotgun blast, traveled no more than thirty feet before it slammed into a slender federale private’s face, drilling his cheek beside a small flat nose and punching his head backward as if he’d been smitten by a sledgehammer. The soldier tumbled over backward, sprawling from his saddle, managing to fire a wasted rifle shot into the graying sky before he landed on his back, immediately trampled by his rearing horse.
The sharp crack of a rifle shot behind Sonya and to her left told her Dolores had decided to use her Winchester. Distracted by her own part in the battle, Sonya did not see whether the .30-06 bullet from her sister’s rifle found its mark, but she trusted her sister’s marksmanship as being equal to her own. Their little band’s vaqueros, fanning out to keep from shooting one another by mistake, had joined the melee with their own rifles or sidearms, while the soldiers still alive returned fire from their semiautomatic Mondragón Modelo weapons, most of them too startled for precision aiming.
Sonya chose another mark and fired her .38 again, a gut shot this time, doubling the federale over in his saddle as he clutched at his wounded abdomen and cried out before he spilled into the dust. He landed on his head, stifling that wail of pain, just as raised voices from the north began to shriek out battle cries.
The Mescaleros had arrived to join the fight.