At the lowest point of his bow, Ki heard the grating of the gate’s hinges and the snorting of the bull as it came charging out at full speed. The pounding of its hooves on the packed sand allowed Ki to judge his timing. Just as Lita screamed a warning, Ki sprang straight up. As the black shape of the bull passed below him, he caught the animal’s hump of shoulder muscle with a sideways chop of his steel-hard feet, and used the impetus given him by the blow to carry him past the animal’s tail and land upright on the sand.
As Ki landed near the center of the ring, he heard behind him the crash of the bull’s horns hitting the sturdy wall of the arena. Ki whirled and saw the bull head-on for the first time when it finished swinging its massive body around after its collision with the thick boards that formed the ring’s wall.
Only now did Ki realize that the description given him of the Mendoza toros bravos had been understated. The bull he faced was midnight-black; even its shining horns and deerlike hooves were ebony-hued. Its head was broad, with a massive swelling at the base of its outspread horns. Set in the huge head were eyes as black as the horns and hooves; except for a thin rim of white around them, they would have been invisible.
It was the bull’s horns that Ki noted most carefully during the few seconds while the animal stood swinging its head from side to side. Ki guessed the bull was getting ready for another charge, and held himself in readiness while he examined its gleaming black horns.
They were as thick at the base as Ki’s muscular forearm. Their spread was wider than his chest, and the horns tapered symmetrically in a forward arc to menacing points. The neck of the bull was short, and it bulged with taut muscles. Behind the neck was the muscular hump of which Don Almendaro had spoken. The mound of muscle rose like a hillock on top and tapered down the bull’s shoulders to merge with the animal’s surprisingly thin, almost spindly legs.
While Ki’s quick eyes were noting the body formation of the bull and contrasting it with that of the range bulls with which he was familiar, the great black animal charged again. Unlike bulls Ki had observed on the range, it did not paw the ground or lower its head and snort threateningly before moving. One instant the bull was standing where it had stopped at the end of its turn away from the wall, and in the next second it had covered half the distance to where Ki stood waiting.
As quickly as the bull moved, Ki moved faster. He saw the bull beginning to turn its head to impale him on one of its horns, and rose straight into the air again. When the bull’s head was passing below him, Ki’s foot lashed out in a kick that caught the muscle of the animal’s neck on the side opposite the one he’d hit before. In the fraction of a second that his foot rested on the bull’s neck, Ki flexed his knees and leaped. The jump carried him over the bull’s body and he landed erect on the sand, only inches behind the still-moving bull.
Ki waited with his back to the bull, confidently expecting to hear a crash that would tell him the bull had hit the fence on the opposite side of the ring. When he did not hear the clash of horns on wood, his instinct told him to leap aside instantly. It was Ki’s first lesson in the speed with which a bull bred for the ring can turn and charge. His leap carried him out of danger, but barely so. The needle-sharp tip of the bull’s horns tore through the loose fabric of his shirt, and Ki felt the cold horn when its curve behind the tip brushed against his skin as the bull thundered past.
Knowing now how quickly the bull could turn, Ki whirled at once to face its next charge. The bull was already turning to come back at him, its legs bunched like those of a deer about to spring while it swung its massive head to one side in order to provide extra momentum that would pull its body around faster and in a tighter turn. Ki could see no sign that the two blows he’d administered with his hard feet had affected the bull in any way.
As quickly as he’d formed his strategy of attacking the bull by weakening its shoulder muscles until it dropped its huge head and gave him a clear blow to its neck, Ki changed his tactics.
When the bull’s charge brought him within range of its horns, and the animal moved its head to one side to bring the swordlike tips of the horns in line with Ki’s body, Ki feinted a move that would have sent him beyond reach of the horn aimed at him. The bull began to shift its head to spear Ki with the opposite tip.
In the instant when the bull’s horns were centered, its head and Ki’s chest exactly in line, Ki dropped into a compact ball and rolled toward the bull.
In the split second that passed before Ki touched its glistering wet muzzle, the bull could not reverse the direction in which it had begun to move its head. It lowered the massive horns to butt at the swiftly rolling ball that Ki’s body had become, but lowered them too late. The horns were past Ki. He was now in the small triangle between the bull’s widespread front hooves and its lowered muzzle.
Safely behind the lethal horns now, Ki unrolled his body in the same fluid motion with which he’d folded it. When he stood erect, the bull’s neck was even with Ki’s chest, and as Ki rose, he raised his arms high, clasping his hands together and going on tiptoe to give him a valuable inch or two of added height.
His fingers locked together, the toughened heels of his palms a single entity, Ki focused every muscle in his body into his sinewy arms. He brought his locked hands down between the base of the bull’s horns and the hump of shoulder muscle, on the single three-inch gap that left the bull’s vertabrae vulnerable.
Ki’s hands hit with crushing force. They struck the key point for which he’d aimed his blow with the impact of a sledgehammer. The bull had swung its head fully to one side now, and the spinal cord that ran through the channel in its vertabrae was stretched tight. Ki felt the bones of the spine crushing under his blow. Then, with a small wet-sounding pop, the bull’s spinal cord snapped, cutting of the vital impulses from the animal’s brain to its muscles.
Though the bull was dead the instant its spinal cord broke, the momentum of the charge it had begun carried its body forward for a few more seconds. Ki used those few seconds to jump backward, carrying his body away from the bull. He turned and looked just as the black beast’s forelegs began to bend. The bull slowly leaned forward. Its hind legs were still pushing it, responding to the impulse transmitted from its brain a split second earlier. The pushing of its legs speeded the bull’s collapse. Its back arched as the rear hooves tried to move its huge chest ahead. Under the driving of its hind legs, the animal’s forelegs bent and buckled.
Its head sagging now, the bull lurched into an ungainly heap and toppled forward to the sand. Its eyes were still open and glaring, throwing out tiny spears of light from the high noon sun until their pupils were covered with the film of death.
Ki was facing the fighting bull when it crumpled and fell, and he did not look away from the carcass until he was sure the animal was dead. Then he turned toward the stands, where Don Almendaro and Jessie and Lita were watching. He saw that they’d risen to their feet. Lita was holding her father’s arm, and the two were arguing. Ki extended his arms, his hands spread wide.
“Don Almendaro!” he called. “I have proved to you that I could do what you said was not possible! Now tell your riflemen that I am free, and I will leave your ranch!”
Don Almendaro glared down at Ki, and his arm moved upward. Jessie, standing beside him, grabbed the hacendado’s wrist, but he shook her hands away. He started down the tiers of seats to the wall of the bullring. As he jumped from one row of seats to the next, he pulled a heavy revolver from beneath his coat.
“Brujo! Bastardo!” he shouted. “Hijo de puta! You have blackened the fame of the Mendoza bulls.! What my brave bull could not do, I will do myself!” Bringing the pistol up, the enraged hacendado leveled it at Ki.
Ki had dropped his arms after his appeal to Mendoza. He had no time to free his surushin. Snapping his right forearm sharply downward, Ki clasped the shuriken -that slid from its spring-loaded sheath into his hand. He saw Mendoza’s finger on the trigger of his revolver and knew that if he threw the shurik
en to cut into the hacendado‘s arm, he could not stop that finger from tightening. Ki took the only alternative he had.
Before Don Almendaro could bring his pistol to bear on Ki, the star-shaped steel disc was singing through the air, its razor-sharp edges glittering in the bright noonday sunshine. The shining blade sliced into the hacendado‘s right eye, smashed through the fragile frontal bone of his temple, and cut deeply into his brain. The revolver sagged from the dying man’s hand and fell to sand of the bullring while Don Almendaro was crumpling in death.
Ki glanced quickly around the seats. Neither Jessie nor Lita nor the riflemen had moved. The shuriken had sailed so swiftly to its target that it had been almost invisible, a gleam flashing through the sunlit air. In a mere instant it reached its target and performed its deadly mission in total silence. Only Jessie understood what had happened. Lita and the two riflemen were still staring at Don Almendaro. They saw him drop his gun as he bent and lurched forward before he fell, but until a stream of blood began pouring from his head, they did not realize that he was dead.
Lita understood before the riflemen did. She stifled the small shocked scream that rose in her throat, stared for a fleeting second at Ki, who still stood in the ring beside the dead bull, then started toward her father. Jessie grabbed Lita’s arm and stopped her. She leaned forward and began speaking. Ki could see her lips moving, but the distance between them was too great for him to hear what she was saying.
Lita’s eyes were still fixed on her father’s prone form, and she struggled to break away until Jessie slapped her sharply. Lita had her arm raised, ready to strike back, before the reality of the moment came home to her. She stopped struggling then, and just in time. The riflemen stationed to kill Ki if he should try to run from the bull had been standing watching, waiting for their patrón to stand up.
When the seconds passed and Don Almendaro continued to lie motionless, it dawned on the two marksmen that through the same form of black magic that had brought death to the brave bull, their master had been killed by the man standing in the bullring. They started to level their rifles.
Jessie spoke quickly to Lita, and Lita raised her voice in a quick command to stop the men from shooting.
“Perez! Aleman!” she called. “No les tiran! Obedecen! Mi padre es muerte! Soy ahorita la dueña de la casa de Mendoza!”
Slowly the men lowered their guns. They stared wide-eyed at Ki, who still stood calmly, his arms folded now, in the center of the bullring.
One of them called out, “Señorita! El hombre en la plaza es brujo! Permiteme matele!”
“No, Aleman! Vedate! Ahorita, tu y Perez dicen a la gente de la casa que he sucede. Dicen preparales el funeral.”
Aleman said insistently, “Pero el brujo, Señorita Adelita—”
Lita cut him short. “No tengo miedo del extranjero.” Then her inheritance from Don Almendaro showed in Lita’s voice as she added curtly, “Obedecen!”
Slowly, with every movement showing their reluctance to leave Lita unprotected from the man they were sure had killed Don Almendaro by some witch’s trick, the two men went to obey her command, to tell the ranch’s people that their patrón was dead.
Lita waited until they had gone before saying to Ki, “Come up to the fence, Ki, where we can talk without shouting.”
Ki did as she asked, and as he came closer, Jessie moved unobtrusively aside. Ki looked for hatred or disgust in Lita’s face, and saw nothing except calmness. He said, “I’m sorry, Lita. I killed him only to save my life.”
“You don’t need to apologize to me, Ki, or feel sorry about killing my father.” Lita’s voice was as calm as her face. “While my mother was alive, he made her life unendurable, and he’s done his best to make mine the same way since she died.”
“I could see that you two didn’t get along well . . .”
“Be truthful, Ki. I hated my father and he hated me. All the people on the rancho know it. Most of them served him out of fear, or because their families have been Mendoza servants for two or three generations.”
“If that’s the case, then—”
“It is,” Lita interrupted. “If my father had been a man of honor, he could have kept his solemn oath and freed you after you killed the bull. He dishonored his oath, and earned his death. What more can I say to you, Ki?”
After a moment’s thought, Ki replied, “Very little, I suppose. And now that things have happened as they did, perhaps it would be best if Jessie and I left at once.”
Unexpectedly, Lita shook her head. “No, Ki. Jessie has told me that you suspect the Rancho Tres Cerros is being used by the cattle rustling gang you and she came to Mexico to find. Will you stay long enough for the two of you to ride to Tres Cerros with me, so that I can see for myself?”
“Of course, Lita. Jessie and I would have gone there with or without you, but you should go and see for yourself what the situation is.”
“I intend to. And I intend to find out what the arrangement was that Father had with Guzman. My eyes are open wider than they ever were, Ki. And as long as I am responsible for the Mendoza interests, I intend to keep them open.
Chapter 16
They saw the dust cloud long before they could make out the identity of the rider. Ki, Jessie, and Lita were riding abreast in front of the three men who were left of the dozen Lita had taken from the Rancho Mendoza to clean out any corruption they might find at the Rancho Tres Cerros. It had not been a difficult job. The mayordomo of the Tres Cerros and all but two of the ranch hands had disappeared. So had all the ranch’s records.
Lita was at a loss to understand why until Ki had taken a ride across the property. What he found confirmed the suspicions that had brought him and Jessie to Mexico. In a canyon at the edge of the ranch, he’d discovered the Box B market herd; about half the steers’ brands had been changed to “B House” by using a running iron to add a wide inverted V at the top of the box. He’d driven two of the steers, one with the original brand and the other with the altered version, back to show Lita.
“My father was more than a dishonorable man,” Lita had said bitterly. “He was dishonest as well, and I was too blind to see it. When you asked me about the parcel he sent me to get from Guzman the night we met, it did not occur to me that Guzman was sending my father his share of the mordita that had been collected from the people there. Now I am shamed again to find him a common thief, no better than those who stole the cattle!”
Jessie and Ki had agreed before leaving the Rancho Mendoza to avoid telling Lita of their more serious suspicion, that Don Almendaro had been an agent of the cartel, and had quite probably been acting in league with Captain Guzman and his corrupt rurales in other areas besides cattle theft.
“What I can’t understand is how Mendoza got involved with the cartel,” Ki had said to Jessie while they were discussing what they should do.
“Owning a great deal of land doesn’t make a man rich, Ki. I wonder if his toros bravos might not have been his downfall. He’d have made a deal with the devil to get bulls from one of the famous breeders in Spain.”
“That’s a possibility,” Ki agreed. “The cartel may have offered him some kind of deal like that as bait.”
“I’m sure there’s a lot more Lita will find out,” Jessie had said. “But she’ll learn about it in time, and she has enough sadness to bear right now. Lita won’t take the path Don Almendaro did, I’m sure. The cartel can’t offer her enough to make her put a fresh stain on the family name.”
Now, within a half-dozen miles of the Rancho Mendoza, the dust cloud warned them that still more problems loomed ahead. No one rode that hard on a hot afternoon just to stir up a breeze.
Aleman spurred up from the rear to ride beside Lita. “Es Raúl que viene. Hay apuros al rancho, no?”
“Quiza que si, quiza que no,”Lita said. “Descubrimos pronto a pronto.”
Raúl pulled up beside them and touched the brim of his hat to Lita. “Señorita!” he gasped. “Guzman y su rurales vienen al ran
cho!”
“Cómo conoces?” Lita asked. She was as calm as though she’d just been told that it might rain soon.
“De mi primo. Llegarse a media hora, y digame.”
“Cuándo viene Guzman?” Lita asked, still unperturbed.
“Sale de San Pedro en la mañana,” Raúl replied.
“Bueno,” Lita told the man. “Estamosde vueltan prontito y decederamos que hace.”
When Raúl had dropped back to ride with Aleman and the other men, Lita said to Ki and Jessie, “You understood, of course?”
“Yes,” Ki said. “Guzman’s moved earlier than I thought he could. I really didn’t expect him to show up so soon.”
“You expected him, Ki?”
Jessie joined their conversation. “Of course, Lita. That’s why we hurried so to wind things up at Tres Cerros.”
“You might have told me,” Lita said reproachfully.
“You’d just have had one more thing to worry about,” Jessie replied. “And we couldn’t be sure Guzman could organize an attack, considering the condition they were in.”
Ki said, “At least he’s not leaving San Pedro until tomorrow morning. That’ll give us time to get his reception ready.”
“We’ve done everything I can think of, Lita,” Ki said.
He and Lita were standing on the roof of the main house, looking along the winding road from San Pedro. Less than a half hour had passed since one of the lookouts posted to watch the road from town had galloped in to report that Guzman and his rurales were nearing the sentry post.
Ki had estimated that the attackers would cover the distance in about the same time the lookout had required. He and Lita had now been watching for ten or fifteen minutes, so unless his judgment was bad, the rurales should appear very soon. He looked again at the sun, low now on the jagged western horizon, and still there was no sign of Guzman and his rurales.
“I still wish we had more men,” Lita said nervously. “If we just hadn’t left those hands at Tres Cerros, we’d be in much better shape to stand off Guzman.”
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