by Lyle Brandt
Guillermo Alcazar had made room for the sisters in his own home, shared with his wife Beatriz. They had no children living in the village any longer, while their age and status in the village made them perfect chaperones for two young women they assumed were maidens, thus subject to separation from the male riders they had accompanied across the Rio Grande. The spare room where they slept was small but clean, their straw-filled pallets soft enough to insulate them from the ground beneath.
Prepared for anything, Sonya was wrapped up in a blanket with her Springfield rifle and her brace of Smith & Wesson pistols, ready to defend herself if need be. No more than a yard away, Dolores slept with her Winchester and the Colt she favored when it came to potting targets and for self-defense. Unlike her sister, though, Dolores, softly snoring, had found respite from their tiring day in dreams.
Sonya, for her part, was afraid of dreaming as she lay in strange surroundings, thinking of her brother and the men whom she had sent to join him in the afterlife that day.
Before that week, her mother’s death aside, she had not given much thought to wherever souls wound up once they departed from their earthly shells of flesh and bone. The church she had been raised in offered four options. Aside from paradise and hell, it spoke of limbo, set apart for spirits of unbaptized infants, and purgatory, an intermediate state after physical death where marginal souls lingered during expiatory purification. That arrangement seemed unnecessarily complex to Sonya, and she did not like the thought of being trapped somewhere, perhaps for centuries, after her death.
Where would the bandits and the federales she had helped kill over the past few days wind up, if all of that were true? What of the Chiricahua warriors and the Mescalero volunteers her group had lost so far? Were any of them Christians, or did Native tribesmen wind up somewhere else, sent to some other place that Sonya’s people could not understand?
It was too much for her to ponder in the darkness of their strange bedroom, but while those thoughts increased her weariness, they did nothing to help her fall asleep. She thought of counting livestock leaping over fences, something that had helped lull her as a child, but now, at half past midnight, that only reminded Sonya of the horses stolen from her father’s hacienda and the pressing need to take them home again.
Disgusted, she was on the verge of rolling over, hoping that a shift might help her, when a rifle shot tore through the night outside. A heartbeat later, as she scrambled to her feet, prodding Dolores close beside her, Sonya heard a man’s voice bellowing, “¡Despierta y sal afuera!”
Who was demanding that the villagers awake and go outside their homes?
Two possibilities immediately came to Sonya’s mind, bandidos or marauding federales. And just now, between the two, that seemed to be no choice at all.
“Who do you think that is?” Dolores asked her sister, whispering.
“There’s only one way to find out,” Sonya replied.
Their bedroom had no window, but there were two exits from the Alcazar home, front and back. Before the sisters left, choosing the rear exit, they heard Guillermo and his wife departing from the front door, facing on the village square. Outside, the same male voice was now shouting, “¡Rápido ahora! ¡Fuera de sus casas!”
Quickly now! Out of your homes!
The sisters hastened to obey, holding their weapons ready for whatever happened next.
* * *
* * *
Clint Parnell slipped from the adobe hut he had been sharing with vaqueros Arturo Lagüera and Ignacio Fuentes. He held his Browning Auto-5 shotgun, Colt Peacemaker riding leather on his hip. The other two Aguirre riders carried rifles, backed by handguns of their own.
The outdoor gunshot, followed by barked orders, had supplied a rude awakening from fitful sleep in strange surroundings. Now, outside the small house where he had been lodged, Clint saw a troop of mounted federales formed up in the village square, their Mondragón Modelo rifles covering the town’s surprised inhabitants. Up front, an officer wearing captain’s three gold bars upon his epaulets was brandishing a Luger pistol vaguely angled toward Guillermo Alcazar.
Clint cursed under his breath, counting the soldiers, seeing that his people were outnumbered by their enemies in uniform. He knew their party’s three remaining Mescaleros had preferred to camp outside of Agua Fria, but he could not see them at the moment, wondering whether they would stay to fight or slip away into the darkness while they had the chance.
As for himself, Lagüera, and Fuentes, it seemed they had no choice.
And what of the Aguirre twins? Clint looked for them but could not pick them out among the shadows lying black between the huddled houses and the small church where the local campesinos pledged their faith at Sunday morning mass. He hoped the federales would not see them, fearing that the scene would quickly take a more disturbing turn.
Would the remaining villagers—civilians, if you like—join in a fight against the soldiers, or were they too long accustomed to subservience, bowing and scraping in the presence of authority? In any case, Clint knew he couldn’t wait for them to make a move if the intruding federales started searching house to house for him and his companions.
Parnell was pondering what to do next when someone from the crowd of villagers shouted a name he did not recognize. “¡Mira, es Diego!”
Parnell looked as he had been directed, following a single pointed finger, quickly joined by others and an angry growling in the central square of Agua Fria.
“¡Traidor!” someone shouted. Other voices joined the chorus with “Turncoat!” and “He’s betrayed us!”
Clint’s eyes picked out a small man slouching on a burro, close behind the captain of the federales, head ducked down as if he hoped the brim of his sombrero might conceal his face. Clint did not recognize him, but the angry shouting told him that the lone civilian rider, dressed in peasant garb, had slipped away sometime during the night and led the soldiers back.
For what? To Parnell it could only mean that he had run to spread the tale of strangers in his village, hoping for some payoff in return, but now he found himself before a jeering mob.
In the front rank of the gathering, Guillermo Alcazar shook a bony fist at the defector, shouting, “¡Desgracia! You have no home here any longer. We spit on your name and memory!”
Some of the villagers were doing that exact thing when the federale captain bellowed out at them, “¡Silencio! I give the orders here! Give up the murderers or suffer for betrayal of your government!”
In answer to his shout, a rock flew out from somewhere in the raging crowd, sailed past the captain’s face with mere inches to spare, and struck the huddled villager behind him on one shoulder, jolting him but failing to dislodge him from his mule.
Outraged, the captain half turned toward his men, keeping his Luger trained upon the crowd before him as he ordered, “¡Fuego, hombres!”
All along the line of mounted soldiers clad in khaki, rifles snapped into position, shouldered, aiming toward the village crowd that had been rousted out of sleep into a waking nightmare.
Clint Parnell could think of only one response that fit the situation. Whipping up his Browning Auto-5, he squeezed its trigger, blasting buckshot pellets toward the federale firing squad.
* * *
* * *
Dolores Aguirre swung her Winchester Model 1895 toward the federale capitán but missed him by a second, maybe less. Somebody else had fired a shot before her and had either grazed the officer or frightened him enough that he fell over backward from his saddle and hit the ground while her .30-06 slug passed through empty space where he had been a heartbeat earlier.
The shot was not a total waste, however. The projectile traveled on to strike a federale private in the shoulder, impacting at 2,500 feet per second, nearly ripping the soldado’s right arm from its socket with 3,036 foot-pounds of energy, flinging his Mondragón Modelo rifle off to st
rike another startled private in the face. That soldier toppled from his horse as well, stunned as he hit the dusty ground.
Two federales dropped with one shot, although neither of them had been killed. One would most likely bleed to death in minutes, while the other would be groggy as he struggled to his feet and tried to retrieve his weapon, making an attractive target with his back turned to the crowd of villagers.
Those were dispersing now, running for cover, their initial anger at a traitor from their own community lost in the boom and crackle of gunfire. The frightened federales still apparently had no idea of who was firing at them, and in consequence were blasting Mauser rounds into the fleeing campesino ranks. Dolores saw Beatriz Alcazar go down, shot in the back, her husband turning to help her if he could, at least two soldiers sighting down the barrels of their Mondragóns in his direction.
She was faster, pumped the lever action of her Winchester and fired again, shifting her aim a trifle to the left and toward the closer of the two infuriated riflemen. The Model 1895 bucked hard against her shoulder, but she held it steady, saw her target crumple from the horse he sat astride, blood spurting from his khaki-covered chest.
A kill or a disabling wound, which would amount to the same thing.
Dolores swept on, cranked the Winchester again and fired almost without aiming this time, her rifle firing at the same instant when smoke burst from the muzzle of the second federale’s Mondragón. Her bullet struck this one beneath his jawline, snapped his head back with sufficient force to send his peaked cap flying. Glancing farther to her left, she saw Guillermo Alcazar still on his feet, assisted by another man in hoisting Beatriz, retreating toward their squat adobe home, but she could not tell whether the dying soldier’s bullet had flown on to find another mark.
How many enemies remained before her? Counting quickly, making an allowance for the leaping horses and the rising dust their hooves stirred up, Dolores estimated that a dozen still remained, firing wildly among the frightened villagers. Their capitán was on his feet and had retained his pistol somehow as he fell, now pumping random shots at strangers running for their lives.
Dolores pinned him in her rifle’s sights, but once again she was too late. A shotgun blast thundered from somewhere to her left, perhaps Clint’s Browning Auto-5, and the captain received a charge of buckshot in his chest, hurled backward as if unseen puppeteers had yanked his strings. He landed on his back, spread-eagle, shuddered once, and then lay deathly still.
A second later, chaos in the village was compounded as their party’s three remaining Mescaleros joined the battle, running in among the federales’ horses, whooping war cries, firing rifle shots at point-blank range. Their entry to the fight appeared to turn its tide, even Kuruk—despite his wound from earlier that day—dispatching one soldado with a stomach wound, then pouncing on him as he fell, swinging a tomahawk to crush the young man’s skull.
Dolores now felt giddy, from inhaling dust and gun smoke, dropping to one knee and finding better balance as she cocked her Winchester once more and sought a target in the swirling knot of enemies. Among them, trying to escape aboard a frightened burro, she beheld the villager Guillermo Alcazar had vilified as their betrayer. Shoulders hunched, he was retreating from the battle line, kicking the burro viciously to make it travel faster.
Deadeye and coldhearted now, Dolores sighted on the turncoat, steadying her aim. She did not wish to shoot the burro by mistake, as it was innocent, nor did she wish to kill the coward outright if he could be saved for questioning. She drew in a breath and held it, hands rock steady as her index finger found the rifle’s trigger and she fired.
* * *
* * *
Lieutenant Jacobo Ferriz was terrified. He’d seen his comandante fall, first from his horse, then blasted into grim death after he regained his feet and tried to fire his pistol at the raging villagers. Ferriz himself had fallen when his mount reared, panicked by the roaring gunfire all around it, and had lost his rifle in the process, kneeling helpless while the young soldados serving under him were cut down one by one.
It crossed his mind that they had found the killers they were seeking on the ride to Agua Fria, and that notion almost made him laugh hysterically until Ferriz choked on the sound emerging from his throat and clapped a hand over his mouth.
The only goal remaining for him now was to survive whatever happened next, and from the nightmare scene surrounding him, the teniente reckoned that might be impossible.
A bolting stallion, riderless, brushed past Ferriz and knocked him sprawling in the dust. He cursed it impotently, even as it galloped out of earshot, knowing that his words were wasted on an animal. While struggling to his knees, he saw the stallion trample a wounded corporal, its shod hooves fracturing the young man’s ribs and face, sending his body into spasms as the horse rushed into outer darkness and was lost to sight.
What now?
The teniente’s eyes fell once again upon Captain López-Dóriga’s corpse, sprawled on its back, no further use to anybody with his orders and contemptuousness. He might still help Ferriz in one way, though, his limp right hand stretched out beside him, fingers pointing toward his fallen Luger pistol on the ground.
As an oficial in the army of Porfirio Díaz, Ferriz was trained to use all the weapons recently acquired from Germany and elsewhere. While no pistol had been issued to him, he had practiced firing it until he was proficient and familiar with the Luger P08, properly designated Pistole Parabellum in the land where it was manufactured. Parabellum meant “for war” as Ferriz understood it, and also described the weapon’s 9×19mm ammunition, eight rounds slotted into a detachable box magazine that loaded through the Luger’s butt for semiautomatic fire. A unique toggle-lock action on top relied upon a jointed arm to lock, unlike the slide actions of other semiautomatic pistols, with an estimated rate of fire in practiced hands reported as one hundred sixteen rounds per minute.
That, of course, depended on how many magazines a shooter had available and how much time his enemies allowed him for reloading. Still, Ferriz saw that he had no other options at the moment and should settle for whatever slim chance fate had offered him.
He scrabbled toward Captain López-Dóriga’s body, leaned across it, groping for the Luger, nearly sighing with relief as he took hold of it. Ferriz had no idea how many cartridges remained inside the pistol’s magazine and could not check without removing it, a waste of precious time that might well cost his life. Instead, he simply checked the Luger’s safety switch, relieved to find it in the “off” position, and turned back to bring his adversaries from the village under fire.
Instead, he found a tall, broad-shouldered gringo rushing toward him, glaring down the barrel of a semiautomatic shotgun aimed at the lieutenant’s face. Squealing, Ferriz almost released his captain’s pistol then and there but knew he could expect no quarter from his enemies after the blood they had already spilled today. The gringo and his various companions had to know they would be hunted to extinction in Chihuahua or wherever they went next, after annihilating two army patrols.
In short, Jacobo Ferriz had nothing to lose and saw no prospects of survival if he should surrender, pleading for his life.
Instead, he could at least attempt to take one of the outlaws with him as he died.
Bracing the Luger in both hands, the teniente found its curving trigger with his index finger, was prepared to squeeze a round off, when the shotgun’s muzzle belched a cloud of smoke, flame, and buckshot no more than two feet from his face. Ferriz was conscious of a stunning pressure from the impact, then his world dissolved into a cloud of swirling atoms, fading swiftly into deepest everlasting black.
* * *
* * *
Diego del Paso imagined he was dying when the rifle bullet creased his skull, plowing a bloody furrow just above his left ear, and he tumbled from his burro, landing in a slack heap on the ground. It took another moment, hearing shout
s and gunfire all around him, watching federales fall, before he realized that he was somehow still alive.
Alive but wounded, warm blood spilling down his face into one eye from his scalp wound. It was miraculous, but he had no spare time for thanking God, the saints, or anybody else while he was in harm’s way, with bullets hissing all around him, finding other targets, rending flesh, unleashing screams.
Unarmed and stuporous, Diego struggled to all fours and started crawling off haphazardly across the battlefield. He sought escape, perhaps a dark gully where he could hide, but then an eerie silence told him that the fight was over. Glancing to his left and right, del Paso calculated that the soldados had lost.
Tears streaming from his eyes to mingle with the blood from his head wound, Diego had not traveled far on hands and knees before the sound of rushing footsteps overtook him and he was surrounded. Looming legs in trousers and concealed by peasant skirts surrounded him as if a sturdy fence had dropped from heaven, cutting off his progress.
From above, a man’s voice speaking English asked, “Is he the one?”
A second man, familiar sounding, answered in Spanish. “Sí. Este es el traidor.”
They had him now, the traitor in their midst who had brought death and misery upon them. As his stomach suddenly convulsed, surrendering its meager contents, spattering his dusty shirt and hands, Diego knew he had run out of time.
He had lost his sombrero in the fall from his burro, and now felt bony fingers clutching at his hair. Their owner drew Diego’s head back, forcing him to stare into the anguished visage of Guillermo Alcazar.
“My wife is dead because of you!” the village headman snarled. His free hand rose before del Paso’s eyes, clutching a butcher’s knife.
Diego’s hopeless babbling for mercy was cut short when someone else—the gringo who had led the mismatched riders into Agua Fria around sundown—stopped Guillermo’s hand from plunging steel into del Paso’s throat.