Ralph Compton Slaughter Canyon (9781101559499)

by Compton, Ralph; West, Joseph A.

  Battles waited, a glistening scarlet pillar with the eyes of a madman.

  “Fight me, you bastards,” he yelled. “You pack of craven bilge rats, fight me.”

  The sword was wrenched from Battles’s hand.

  “You’ve done enough fighting for one day, lawman,” Stuart said. “It’s over.”

  Battles opened his mouth to object, but the words faded in his throat.

  Suddenly the deck rushed toward him ... and he plunged headlong into darkness.

  Chapter 30

  A Ship of Ill Omen

  The sound of birdsong or the face of a pretty woman on the pillow next to him is a pleasant way for a man to wake. But when Matt Battles opened his eyes only to look into the skull face of Hatfield Warful, the experience was far from pleasurable.

  Behind Warful stood Lon Stuart and it was he who spoke first.

  “You look like hell, lawman,” he said.

  Battles glanced around him. He lay on a bunk in a small, narrow cabin with a low ceiling. The place was hot and stuffy and smelled of sweat.

  “You’re in Mad Dog’s cabin,” Stuart said. “He’s got no use for it anymore.”

  “He’s dead?” Battles said, surprised that his voice was a weak, dry croak.

  “And buried,” Stuart said. “We threw him and his pa, what’s left of him, over the side.”

  Battles moved his eyes to Warful. “Where are we?”

  “Off the coast of Peru, according to Judah Rawlings,” Warful said.

  “How ... how long ...?”

  “Five days,” Stuart said. “For a while there we didn’t think you were going to make it.”

  “You lost a lot of blood, you understand,” Warful said. “Mad Dog just about cut you to ribbons.”

  “He’s right about that, lawman,” Stuart said. “You was never pretty before, but now you’ll have scars all over your kisser.”

  “The ladies will love them,” Warful said. “For some reason they do adore that kind of thing.”

  Battles felt the movement of the ship and, as though reading his mind, Warful said: “We’ve had a fair wind for the last four days. The Lila is the fastest bark on the seven seas in my opinion.”

  “How is the crew taking the death of Mad Dog?” Battles said.

  Warful’s face stiffened. “I appointed Rawlings as temporary captain, but he says the sailors are still a bunch of mutinous dogs. That’s why I took their weapons and have armed men on the deck at all times.”

  “Will they try to take over the ship again?” Battles said.

  “Perhaps when we reach port, but not before,” Warful said. “The heart went out of them when you killed Mad Dog, but perhaps they’ll bide their time and wait until our guard is lowered.”

  The man grimaced, an expression that, for him, passed as a smile.

  “You must get well, Mr. Battles,” he said. “Great riches are waiting for all of us at the end of this voyage, and I want you to have your fair share. You surely deserve it.”

  After Warful and Stuart left, Judah Rawlings stepped inside bearing a small tray with a steaming bowl and a couple of ship’s biscuits.

  “How are you feeling, Matt?” he said. “Or should I say, Cap’n?”

  Battles managed a smile. “I’m not the captain,” he said. “You are.”

  “The seamen don’t think that way. By the old pirate law you won the captaincy fair and square when you skewered Mad Dog.”

  “Then you’ll be my assistant, Judah,” Battles said.

  “Beggin’ your pardon, sir, that would be first mate, in seaman’s terms, like.”

  “Then it is first mate you are.”

  He sniffed the bowl. “What the hell is that? It smells terrible.”

  “Portable soup, straight from the cask, for invalids as can’t stomach regular ship’s grub. An’ it’s the same recipe as laid down by Her Majesty’s navy in the time of Nelson and used by seamen of every stripe since.”

  Battles was suspicious. “What’s in it?”

  “Why, bless you, sir, it’s made from water, beef shinbone, bacon hock, anchovies, carrots, celery, and cayenne pepper.”

  “Then it will either cure me or kill me,” Battles said.

  “That it will, sir,” Rawlings said.

  After three days in his bunk, Battles had had enough. His face and sides were still heavily bandaged, but he felt stronger, despite Rawlings’s portable soup.

  According to the acting captain, the Lila was ten miles off the coast of Argentina and he said that, if the trade wind held, they should reach the Horn in another week.

  “As for the Horn,” Rawlings said, “well, no man can predict what will happen. We may get blown all the way back to San Francisco if there are gales in the Strait of Magellan and the williwaw winds are rising.”

  “What’s that, a williwaw wind?” Battles said.

  “It’s a mighty storm wind that blows up without warning,” Rawlings said. “Aye, and it’s sent many a fine craft to the bottom in the blink of an eye and all her crew with her.”

  Rawlings winked. “Still, don’t worry, Cap’n. We might have a clear passage. I say that even though the death of the albatross weighs heavy on me. It was bad luck to shoot the bird, lay to that.”

  After this melancholy intelligence, Battles was cheered by the sight of a beautiful steamship that overtook the Lila to starboard.

  Warful and Judah Rawlings were less enchanted by the steamer when they stepped to the rail.

  “What do you make of her, Mr. Rawlings?” Warful said.

  “She’s a steam frigate of thirty guns, beggin’ your pardon, Mr. Warful, and she’s flying the Argentine flag.”

  “Will she molest us?”

  “Them Argentines don’t trust the British or the Spanish, but we’re flying the Stars and Stripes,” Rawlings said. “The only thing is...”

  “Is what?” Warful said, irritated.

  “Her captain can see we’re low in the water, and he’ll know we’re not carrying ballast in these seas.” Rawlings shook his head. “I’ve heard o’ cargoes being confy-scated by Argentines, but never paid them stories much mind. That is, until now.”

  Several officers on the frigate’s deck studied the Lila with telescopes, but the ship made no attempt to sail closer.

  “She hasn’t beat to quarters,” Rawlings said, “so she probably means us no harm.”

  “Perhaps she’s afraid of us,” Warful said.

  “Dear heart, no,” Rawlings said. “She could lie off a cable’s length and in a trice cannon us into matchwood.”

  To Battles’s relief, the frigate’s stern dipped and she headed south at flank speed.

  “I think our flag deterred her,” Warful said. He stared hard at Rawlings. “Remember, Captain, this ship carries a cargo much more precious than gold—my lady wife.”

  Rawlings knuckled his forehead. “I’ll remember your missus, bless her heart.”

  After Warful stepped away, Rawlings looked at Battles and said: “As though I could forget her, the way she stinks up the whole damned ship.”

  “Will we see that frigate again?” Battles asked.

  “Ah,” Rawlings said. “You feel it, then.”

  “Feel what?”

  “That she’s a ship of ill omen.”

  Battles nodded. “Yeah, I feel it.”

  Chapter 31

  The Rocket’s Red Glare

  “I don’t like a fog,” Judah Rawlings said. “There are sea creatures come out in a fog and the damned souls of old pirates, and they grabs poor sailormen a-screaming off the deck.”

  “I can’t see a damn thing,” Battles said. “And the wind has dropped to a whisper.”

  Rawlings was taking a turn at the wheel, since he was the best helmsman on board and the fear of running aground on a lee shore troubled the sailors.

  “There’s breeze enough to see us through, lay to that,” Rawlings said. “But there’s evil in the fog, damn it to hell.”

  The mist curled around th
e masts and lay so thick on the deck that the seamen on watch moved around like gray ghosts. The shrouded sea was silent, unmoving, so calm that the Lila could have been shored up in dry dock.

  Warful and the gunmen were below, not liking the fog, yet horrifyingly captivated by the tales of straight-faced sailors who related their encounters with sea serpents and the perils of the southern latitudes off the African coast where the Dutchman and his doomed crew lured poor mariners to their destruction.

  Rawlings raised his nose, as though smelling the wind, but when he turned his head to Battles he said: “Hear that?”

  “Hear what?”

  “Listen.”

  Battles, all his senses alert, listened into the somber day.

  “I don’t hear anything,” he said finally.

  “It’s back,” Rawlings said. “The frigate we met yesterday is out there somewhere.”

  Again Battles listened and this time he heard it, the faint chunk... chunk . . . chunk . . . of a slow-turning screw off their starboard bow.

  “Damn it, she’s searching for us,” he said.

  Rawlings nodded. “She’s a pirate, lay to that, but she’ll do it nice and legal like. Her captain can claim the right of maritime law to stop and search any ship within his nation’s territorial waters.”

  “Are we in their territorial waters?” Battles said.

  “No, but an Argentine man-o’-war won’t quibble about feet and inches when there’s booty to be had.”

  Rawlings ordered quiet on deck and the Lila glided silently through the fog.

  When he rejoined Battles at the rail, the marshal said: “I should get Warful and his men on deck. The Argentines may try to board us.”

  “Belay that,” Rawlings said. “One o’ them Texans could take it into his head to do some shooting and draw the frigate right on top of us. No, for now we stay as quiet as a mouse and pray the cat passes us by.”

  The cat did not pass by.

  After a few minutes of tense waiting, Battles heard the frigate’s screw slow and then stop. An eerie silence fell over the sea, made even more unsettling by the fog that settled over and around the Lila like a burial sheet.

  “She’s listening for us,” Rawlings whispered, touching his tongue to his dry top lip. “Stalking us, damn her.”

  Suddenly the man’s weather-beaten face was stained scarlet and his eyes widened with shock.

  The red halo of the flare hung in the sky for what seemed an eternity. Like clouds at sunset, crimson light tinted the gray billows of the fog and for a few seconds a patch of sea near the Lila rippled like molten iron.

  The flare dropped, trailed sparks, then died.

  A moment later a cannon boomed and a shell roared over the Lila at mast height. A few seconds passed, and then another fell somewhere ahead of the ship, its explosion lost in the fog.

  “She’s firing blind,” Battles said to Rawlings. “Hoping we’ll react.”

  Predictably, the gunmen reacted to the sound of firing.

  Led by Lon Stuart, they tumbled onto the deck, all of them with guns drawn.

  Stuart sought Battles in the fog, found him, and loudly demanded to know what the hell was going on.

  Battles hushed the man into silence and said: “The frigate is back looking for us.”

  “Seems like they found us,” Stuart said.

  “They’re firing probing shots,” Battles said. He looked beyond Stuart to the other gunmen emerging from the mist. “You men keep quiet,” he said. “The Argentine doesn’t know where we’re at.”

  That proved to be the case.

  After a couple of other probing shots that came nowhere near the Lila, the frigate started her engines and the sound of her screws faded into silence as she headed back north.

  When he was sure the ship was gone, Stuart said to Battles: “It dawned on me there that a six-gun ain’t much use against a steam frigate.”

  “We were lucky,” Battles said. “The fog saved us, or she’d have boarded us for sure.”

  “We’ve got to come back this way, laden with gold and treasure, if Mr. Warful is tellin’ it right,” Rawlings said. “And she’ll be looking for us, lay to that.”

  Battles smiled. “I’m not going to build houses on a bridge I haven’t crossed yet. I’ll worry about the frigate when the time comes.”

  “Oh yeah?” Stuart said. “Well, in the meantime I’m sure you won’t mind if I do the worrying for both of us.”

  Chapter 32

  At the Slave Port

  Eight days after her brush with the frigate, the Lila rounded the Horn, sailing through the most unforgiving waters in the world.

  But the dire warnings from the sailors about screeching winds and mountainous waves never came to pass.

  Instead, though the sky was overcast, the sea was strangely, glassily calm, the air so clear the Horn was visible off the ship’s port side.

  The Lila was sluggish, her sails flapping for lack of a breeze, and Rawlings ordered out the jolly boats and kept his eye on the weather as sturdy members of the crew attempted to tow her into a trade wind.

  Two days later they were still hard off the Horn.

  Warful was beside himself with anxiety. He constantly berated Rawlings for the lack of wind and hinted darkly that if his lady wife grew much sicker, the captain would pay with his life.

  The gunmen were also irritable, and heartily sick of their salt-beef-and-biscuit diet. Dee O’Day, drunk on rum and boredom, pulled a gun on Durango, and only the fast action of Battles grabbing his wrist prevented a killing.

  Cape Horn does bad things to a man’s mind. The seas around the southern tip of South America are menacing, unpredictable, and he constantly feels uneasy, as if he’s sharing a cave with a hungry grizzly that’s just wakened from winter hibernation.

  But the storms didn’t pounce and on the third day the Lila picked up a trade wind. She rounded the Horn without difficulty and charted a heading northeast in the direction of the West African coast.

  Backed by a fair wind and fine weather in the South Atlantic, the ship made good speed, and after forty-three days at sea, the Lila dropped anchor off the port of Eugene de Montijo.

  “It’s a sight to see, is it not, Mr. Battles?” Warful said as he and his hired gunmen crowded the ship’s rail for their first glimpse of the bustling port.

  The cuts on the marshal’s face and body had healed into scars. If he hadn’t been a homely man to begin with, his good looks would’ve been ruined.

  “It’s a busy place,” he said.

  The harbor was crowded with ships of all kinds, from sleek schooners to the wide-beamed, oceangoing dhows of Arab slave traders.

  Warful looked around him and spoke to his gunmen. “Look beyond the town to the hill, gentlemen,” he said. “The large marble edifice you see is the palace of His Majesty King Brukwe. The red and green flag is the monarch’s personal standard.”

  “An’ that’s where the treasure is, huh?” Dee O’Day said.

  “Indeed it is, Mr. O’Day,” Warful said. “And very soon now it will all be ours.”

  “When are we going ashore, boss?” Luke Anderson said. “I need a woman real bad.”

  “There’s plenty of doves in Eugene,” Judah Rawlings said. “A man can get his barnacles scraped any time he feels like it.”

  “You’ll be ashore soon, Mr. Anderson,” Warful said. “But first I want to reconnoiter, get the lay of the land, like, and find out where the rich Jews live.”

  “I just want the lay,” Anderson said. “The hell with the land.”

  This last raised a laugh among the gunmen and the few listening sailors, but it was cut short when a seaman on the quarterdeck yelled: “Jolly boat coming out.”

  The boat, rowed by two husky natives, bumped alongside the Lila, and a small, fat, and perspiring white man scrambled up the boarding ladder with surprising agility.

  After looking around for a few moments, the little man said: “Is Captain Yates available?”

&n
bsp; Warful stepped in front of the visitor, two feet taller and intimidating.

  “Captain Yates is deceased,” he said. “I am Hatfield Warful.”

  The small man wore a white suit, much crumpled, and yellow arcs of sweat stained his coat at the armpits. He wore a dirty white shirt and a narrow, red and green tie.

  “I’m sorry to hear that the captain’s dead,” he said. “How did he die?”

  “Suddenly,” Warful said.

  “Then I will address you, Mr. Warful.” He wiped sweat from his face with a huge handkerchief, returned it to his pocket, and said: “My name is Marcel Toucey, late of Marseilles Town, and I am—or I was—Captain Yates’s agent in Eugene de Montijo. I trust the relationship I had with him will continue with you.”

  Warful accepted that with a slight bow. “Please go on,” he said.

  “Well, as to the Afrikaner mercenaries,” Toucey said, “they won’t be coming.”

  If Warful was disappointed, he didn’t let it show.

  “Why not?” he said.

  “The British anticipate more trouble with the Boers and are clamping down on them hard. They won’t allow five hundred Boer cavalry to leave South Africa, or even stand by and let that many fighting men assemble in one place.”

  Toucey looked up at Warful and puffed out his plump cheeks.

  “A glass of rum would not go amiss, Mr. Warful,” he said.

  “Of course.” Warful looked at Rawlings. “A glass of rum for Mr. Toucey, Captain.”

  Rawlings gave the Frenchman his rum and after taking a deep swig, Toucey said: “There’s talk of the British building what London calls ‘concentration camps’ for the wives and children of the Boers. The plan is that the Boer men won’t be so eager to fight when they know their families are on starvation rations behind guard towers and barbed wire.” He shrugged. “But, of course, they will fight.”

  For some reason Warful was intrigued. “What a singularly excellent idea.” He held his chin, musing. “Concentration camps could be the answer to the Jewish problem.”

  Toucey was puzzled. “What Jewish problem?”