by Jonas Ward
But would I give a thought to my back trail? Buchanan wondered. Every so often would I give a look over my shoulder to see if I was having company along this lonely stretch? Buchanan glanced back himself, saw nothing but empty flatland, and decided that even a man half-cautious would be hard to surprise here.
But within the hour the terrain changed, became hilly, and a few miles further south there was a junction in the trail. A rider had a choice of turning almost due east along level ground or ascending a long, sharp incline if he was determined to continue south. What did a freight driver do here? What was Rig's choice? Did the flat trail eventually work its way southward again? Did the route up the face of this small mountain lose a man time or gain it?
Me, Buchanan decided, I'd take the hills as they came, provided I was still headed in the right direction. He put the undaunted filly to the steep climb. When he reached the top, though, he wasn't so sure. The trail up here was narrower, hemmed in by heavy brush, and didn't look as used as the one below. He followed it slowly, his mind nagged by the certainty that he would eventually have to turn back, start all over again down at the junction. Twenty minutes later he reined in, started to swing the animal around, when the blazing morning sun caught the patch of bright red paint and made it glisten in his eye.
Buchanan kneed the horse to the edge of the trail, peered straight down. There, lying on its side at the bottom of the gorge, was the forlorn wreckage of the wagon. The words DOUBLE-B FAST FREIGHT appeared to mock Buchanan's gaze. He dismounted, started to work his way down the steep, jagged side, hoping against hope that there was no more to the story than the toppled wagon. But there was more. Rig Bogan's lifeless, bullet-riddled body lay fifty feet from his beloved red wagon; half-hidden by the jutting boulder that had arrested his plunge from the trail above, and Buchanan's examination of it was expressionless, unemotional. Six times he had been shot, from the back of the head to the base of the spine, and it was not likely, Buchanan thought, that he had lived long enough to even realize what had happened to him.
A deep, pent-up sigh escaped the tall man's cavernous chest and he turned away from his murdered partner, walked slowly to the ruins of their venture. The mules had been freed from their harness before the wagon was sent plunging into the gorge and Buchanan reflected briefly on the nice difference the bushwhackers placed on animal life and human. Nor had they considered Honest John Magee's cotton to be worth much. A few bales of the shipment still lay in the truck, the rest were scattered over the ground. Scattered, too, was the odd cargo that Rig had scouted up in San Antone and taken on consignment. As Buchanan retrieved a shiny new shovel he could hear Rig's eager voice again, making the deal with the shipper, assuring the man of safe delivery and a good profit.
He carried the shovel to a secluded, semi-shaded spot near the wall of the canyon and began the hard, unhappy chore of digging a decent resting place. The rocky ground yielded very slowly and the sun was in the middle of the cloudless sky before the grave was ready. Buchanan laid Rig Bogan into it with a tarpaulin for a shroud. He picked up a shovelful of dirt.
"Fred Perrott," he said aloud and poured the dirt back into the grave. "Jules Perrott," he said with the second shovelful. "And Sam Gill," he said with the third, passing judgment equally on all three. It was spoken tonelessly, matter-of-factly, and had anyone heard the deep voice they would have known there was no appeal from the sentence.
Buchanan finished his work quickly, as if anxious to be gone, and walked away from the grave without a backward glance. But as he was starting to climb the gorge again he glanced up to find a mounted figure watching him from the trail. It was the girl, Cristy, and how long she had been there Buchanan neither wondered nor cared. When he reached the top again he noted that she was dressed in levis and a shirt, that the blue blanket from her bed was now rolled behind her saddle. He went to his own horse, threw a leg up.
"Was that your partner down there?" Cristy asked him.
"The big winner," Buchanan said. She studied him, marked the cold detachment of his voice and manner.
"It wasn't—an accident?" she asked.
Buchanan shook his head curtly. "They didn't give him a chance," he said, and started off.
"Wait!" she called out, impulsively.
He looked around. "I did my waiting back in San Antone," he said.
"But where are you going now? What are you going to do?"
His smile was bleak and cheerless. "Going to collect some damages," he said.
"Do you know where they went?"
"I'm betting they continued south."
She had ridden up to him. Now her eyes were full on his face. "Can I go along," she asked, "as far as Brownsville?”
Buchanan frowned, then shrugged. "Why not?" he replied.
"Thank you," she said and that reminded him.
"Thank you for the use of your bed last night," he told her. "And the clean shirt."
She colored slightly, smiled at him. "I was—surprised to find you gone," she said, choosing that word at the last moment.
"Yeh," Buchanan said, cutting off any further conversation. "Well, let's ride." He took off abruptly, at a restless trot, and she was some seconds in following. This, Cristy thought, is a different man than the warm and easygoing one she had felt so comfortable with last night. She could remember how he looked when she'd come back to the room and found him so peacefully sleeping, how she'd sat in the chair and been content to observe him in repose for the better part of an hour. Gaze at him and know that for all the strong and proud and fiercely independent men who came in off the trail this one here was what the Mexicans meant by un hombre todo. All man—and, for now, within the four walls of her small room, all hers. Other women who had thought the same? Oh, yes. The battered nose and the crescent scar on his cheekbone had come from men. But the gentle curve at the end of his lips, the smile in his eyes, the caressing tone of his voice —those had been gifts from beautiful women.
She could remember the sharp sense of loss to awake this morning and find him gone. The impulse that had seized her to follow after him, to go wherever he went...
But he was changed now. He was hard and withdrawn, cold and aloof on the outside but consumed by a fire that raged in his mind and his heart. His partner had been killed and robbed. He was going to avenge that even at the cost of his own life. And there was no place in those grim plans for a woman and her feminine ways. She knew that and rode on behind him, keeping silent.
Six
THE WILDEST of the wild towns on the border of the Rio Grande was Brownsville. There were five thousand people living there, mostly Mexican, but it was the Americans and French who raised all the hell. Escaped criminals headed for Brownsville—thieves, murderers, rapists —as if it were second nature. So did the deserters from the army, and discredited gamblers, and swindlers, and scores of other men whose souls were bankrupt. And their women. Women who belonged to everybody and anybody. This is not to say there wasn't law in Brownsville. There was. His name was John Lime. Sheriff Lime had been a captain with the famous Doniphan Raiders during the war, a slim, medium-sized man possessed of outsized personal courage, and though a lot of men wondered how Lime perpetuated himself in office, or how he had come to power in the first place, there were very, very few who had ever asked out loud and lived to hear an answer.
Sheriff Lime, who was forty years old, considered Brownsville as his personal preserve and dispensed his justice on a personal level—without wasting time on juries and judges. Or jails. Oh, Brownsville owned a jail—a door-less, open-air adobe building whose guards were a trio of vicious mastiffs—but John Lime considered confinement a waste of effort except in special cases. A serious crime, such as out-and-out murder, cheating at cards, armed robbery of a merchant or the bank, was punishable by hanging over in Shantytown. Lesser criminals were simply run out of town by Lime's tough, well-disciplined band of deputies.
John Lime enjoyed dispensing the law for its own sake, but there were other compensatio
ns. There were in Brownsville, for instance, a total of fifty gambling houses, saloons and bordellos, and the sheriff was a full partner in every one. He also participated in both the toll bridge across the river to Matamoros and the ferryboat. Nor did a single steamboat tie up at a Brownsville wharf without paying tribute, in the form of a daily permit, to the sheriff's office. His income was considerable, and John Lime was a wealthy man.
But he did like his job and the power, and he did take a proprietary interest in Brownsville—which might just as well have been called Limesville or Johnstown—and when Bert Bronsen and Ezra Owens first thought of their scheme to run contraband cargo past the Mexican customs they were careful to bring it to John Lime for his approval. The sheriff heard them out with a thoughtful expression on his lean, handsome face.
"I have no objection, gentlemen," he said then, "to your wanting a larger return for your labors. But I don't like Red Leech coming in here with his so-called army. I don't like that part of your plans at all."
"Do you know him, John?" Bronsen asked.
"I know his reputation as a terrorist and bully. I've heard of his insatiable lust for women. Keeps a veritable - harem up at that fort of his, so I'm told."
"Yes, we've heard all that, too," Owens said. "But he also has a reputation for licking Mexican armies at their own damned game."
"And without him," Bronsen said, "we couldn't attempt to put our goods across the river. Unless, of course, you'd recruit an army of your own."
Lime put his hand up, shook his head. "That would be out of the question. From an operation such as you gentlemen are planning there are bound to be repercussions. Loud enough to be heard clear to Washington." He flicked the ash from his panatella, smiled at them. "And as you probably all know," he added urbanely, "I may have other fish to fry in that direction."
There was polite laughter. Bronsen and Owens had heard that their youngish sheriff was ambitious to test his
influence outside of Brownsville, that he was preparing to challenge formidable old Sam Houston for his seat in the U.S. Senate and control of state politics.
"Those fish, John," Bronsen said, "can get expensive. Votes cost money."
"All contributions," Lime said, "are gratefully accepted."
"The Merchants Association would be proud to have our own sheriff sitting for us in the Senate," Bronsen said. "And we'd be happy to contribute to his campaign —out of any extra profits we might make in the near future."
Lime blew a cloud of smoke toward the ceiling. "Instead of Red Leech," he asked, "couldn't you bribe the Mexican general?"
"We've tried that," Ezra Owens said, "and gotten badly stung. They're just not to be trusted."
"We need Leech and his gunfighters," Bronsen said flatly.
The sheriff looked at him. "All right," he said. "But on three conditions. Number one, that Leech and his men be quartered beyond the city limits. Number two, that you begin your operation within one week after Leech arrives in this territory. And number three, that Leech and company do not return here when their work is concluded." He smiled. "And to guarantee that I want a bond in the sum of five thousand dollars posted for each condition."
The merchants looked from the smiling man to each other, nodded. Owens got to his feet.
"We'll post the bonds in the morning, Sheriff," he said.
"Good. Of course, they're forfeit in any event."
"I assumed as much," Bronsen said. "Our contribution to your campaign."
"Your first one, gentlemen," Lime said cheerfully. "I'm told that General Houston has almost unlimited resources at his command."
The businessmen left the meeting. The embargo was put in effect next day and the booming trade between the United States and Mexico—via Brownsville and Matamoros—ground to a shattering halt. For sixty days not a shipment crossed the river, not one of any importance, and the eager Mexican buyers who came over to see what had happened were advised to quadruple their orders for cotton and tools and await delivery some dark night in the near future. The Mexicans paid their money and went back home to wait and worry. The goods they'd bought, meanwhile, piled up on the Brownsville docks, filled warehouses to the bursting point.
Red Leech, escorted by Lash Wall and seven unshaven, rifle-bearing bodyguards, rode into Brownsville when the embargo was in its forty-fifth day. And on that same afternoon six spruced-up mules were taking Rig Bogan and his red wagon south out of San Antonio.
Bert Bronsen, Ezra Owens and Ed Boone were a committee of three who took the renegade and his lieutenant to a rendezvous with John Lime. Leech, mellowed by the quart of whisky he had consumed since breakfast, took the slender man's hand and gazed down at him with a benevolent leer.
"So you got this town in your back pocket, do yuh?" he boomed.
Lime withdrew his hand, hooded his eyes. "I enforce the law here, yes," he answered.
"So I hear, brother! And, brother, you know what you did one year ago?" He turned to Lash Wall. "Ain't this the one?" he asked.
Wall, his cool gaze on Lime's face, nodded briefly.
"You know what you did?" Leech repeated.
"What?"
"Why, you sonofabitch, you hung one of my boys!" Leech roared and it was hard to tell whether he was happy about it or enraged. "Stretched poor old Chug Murrow, that's what you did!"
"Murrow?" Lime repeated. "I think he's the one who held up the Diamond Bar and shot Saul Petit."
"Wouldn't be surprised!" Leech agreed. "But, brother, you went and hung old Chug. One of my boys!"
Lime waited patiently until the echoes died away. Then he said, "And I'd do it again, Leech. To any of your gang."
"Me included?" Leech demanded, grinning through his beard.
"You and any man who breaks the law in Brownsville," Lime told him calmly.
Leech thumped him on the back. "Don't bite off what you can't chew, brother," he shouted at him with a great pealing laugh. "And, brother, I'm some mouthful!"
Lime measured the red-haired giant for a moment, glanced at Bert Bronsen. "Have you explained the conditions yet?”
"We, ah, haven't had a chance."
"What conditions, Sheriff?" Lash Wall asked quietly.
"Yeah, what conditions?" Red Leech demanded.
Lime ignored them, gazed steadily at Bronsen. The merchant cleared his throat nervously.
"We have agreed to certain things," Bronsen began. "The first is that you and your men are to stay out of the city. We have a very nice house prepared for you outside town. It's large and comfortable and will make a fine headquarters."
"But we're not good enough to come into your town, is that it, Sheriff?" Lash Wall asked. He smiled then. "Or maybe we're a little too good for you to handle?"
Leech roared an approving laugh. "You tell 'im, Lash! You tell 'im!"
John Lime and Lash Wall locked glances. There was mutual respect.
"Explain condition number two," Lime said to Bronsen.
"We're to begin the operation in one week," Bronsen said. "Will your men all be here by then?"
"My boys are to hell and gone, brother! How do I know when they'll get here?"
"And there's another thing, Sheriff," Lash Wall said. "I want to go over the route foot by foot. Especially where we cross the Rio with these goods. That'll take time."
"How much time?"
"More than a week. Two weeks. Maybe three."
"Two," Lime told him and somehow they had bypassed Red Leech. Lash Wall nodded.
"Two weeks it is," he said. "Any more conditions?"