by Jonas Ward
"But you are the sergeant!"
"I resign! Aguirrez, you are the sergeant!"
"Then I surrender!" the other man said immediately. "Basta." he yelled at the top of his lungs. "Basta."
"Hold it," Buchanan said to Lash Wall. "Somebody's giving up."
"Givin' up?" Big Red said, disappointed. "Hell, we just got here! Come on, let's lay it on 'em." Buchanan reached out, tipped Leech's carbine skyward. "Why not give 'em a break?" he suggested. "The poor bastards probably don't even know what the shootin's all about."
"They started it, didn't they? Plugged a good horse right from under me! Take your goddamn hands offen that rifle."
"Hell, Big Red," Wall the peacemaker put in, "where's the profit in shooting some soldiers? We got a big load of freight to be moved."
"You and this ranny seem to agree on most everything, don't you?" Leech demanded suspiciously.
"Big Red," Wall said, "I agree with anything that gets us closer to the end of this work and nearer the payoff."
"All right," Leech said grudgingly. "We'll let the buggers give up."
The terms of the surrender were short and sweet. Throw the guns in a pile, tether the horses, and start walking due south. Leech promised that a patrol would be sent to check them within two hours. Any stragglers would be shot.
The Mexicans buried their six dead, took off with their wounded toward Matamoros. Leech had lost one man and his own horse in the half-an-hour skirmish. Word went back across the river to start moving the wagons and the smuggling was officially underway.
"That was a good stunt, Big Red," Sherm Moore told the leader while the escort waited for the flatboats. "What was?"
"Slippin' in behind them. Man, you sure took the pressure off us boys in the water."
“The head man's supposed to do the thinkin'," Leech said, his voice low and out of Buchanan's hearing. "Thafs why he takes the extra cut. You didn't tote a jug across* by any chance, Sherm?"
"Hell, no, I didn't!" Moore laughed. "But I'll scout you up one. That was a real good stunt, Big Red."
The convoy was finally assembled on Mexican soil and the trek began inland toward the first of the pre-arranged rendezvous outside San Fernidino. There a representative of the Brownsville merchants would be waiting with the Mexican buyer to check the delivery of the contraband.
And in his headquarters at Rio Rico, General Cueva was impatiently awaiting a report on what the firing was about downriver. No report came and so the general sent Captain Luis Maximo to investigate with a full company.
Maximo was the pride of the general's staff, a young man with a great career ahead of him in the military. Why, in Strategics-and-Tactics in the military academy, Maximo had scored an unprecedented one hundred per cent. He knew by heart all of Julius Caesar's campaigns in Gaul, could trace the great battles fought by Alexander, Hannibal, Napoleon. And, in a much-discussed treatise down in Mexico City, the brilliant tactician had proved on paper how Santa Ana could have defeated Zachary Taylor by simply positioning one regiment differently and making better use of his cannons and mortars. It was titled: "How I Would Have Won At Buena Vista."
Captain Maximo knew just about everything there was to know about military warfare, and if Big Red Leech had only read the same books the outcome would never have been in doubt. Unluckily for Maximo, however, the ex-U.S. Army cavalry sergeant from Missouri had never read a book about anything. Leech's strategy in a battle was to kill you before you killed him, kill you any damn way he could manage it and no holds barred.
The two forces made their first contact about midnight, somewhere north of San Fernidino. A Mexican patrol, led by Sergeant Esteban Zapata, sighted the convoy and reported immediately to Captain Maximo. Zapata was three-quarters Indian, also unschooled and uninterested in the science of maneuvers. He merely reported what he had observed on the trail—some fifty-odd wagons in a train that was escorted by an armed guard spread out haphazardly every thirty or forty yards on either side.
Also, Zapata reported, there was a huge man with a voice that boomed like a cannon and he seemed to be in charge. Moreover, the armed escort seemed to be well supplied with liquor.
The capitan smiled. This was going to be nothing more than a simple textbook problem, something the Romans had devised against Hannibal two thousand years ago; The enemy's convoy should be approached as individual units and destroyed piecemeal, attacking the rear units first and working forward, causing great consternation in the mind of the enemy's commander because he is naturally loath to leave his forward units unguarded in the event of a secondary attack there.
A simple problem, Maximo decided, and issued the proper orders to his three platoon leaders. The company, half mounted, half on foot, went forward with confidence in their commander.
Except that Sergeant Zapata's reconnaissance patrol had itself been spotted by three of Leech's outriders and their presence in the neighborhood relayed to Big Red.
"Ride up the line, Hancock!" he ordered. "Pull the boys back here." He spoke without a moment's consternation, no worry at all about leaving his forward wagons exposed. "I know them backbiters," he said to Buchanan. "Try to take us- tail-end first."
"More'n likely," Buchanan agreed.
"Well, say now! Don't tell me I'm actually doin' somethin' you ain't got no goddamn complaints about?"
"Still don't know what you find to holler about so much," Buchanan told him. "I ain't in the next county, you know."
He was grinning across his saddle as he spoke, but the other big man couldn't tell that in the darkness.
""By Jesus," Leech thundered, "come down offen that and let's settle this thing once and for all! I don't take sass from nobody!"
"You're goin' to take a Mex slug in the seat of your britches," Buchanan told him mildly, "unless you attend to business."
"Come on, Big Red," the ever-present Lash Wall said, "let's get back there in case any trouble pops."
"It's comin', bucko!" Leech told Buchanan. "You and me are gonna tangle!" He looked around at the gathering forms of his gunfighters. "Company expected down the line!" he told them. "Spread yourselves, but don't let a goddamn thing through!"
They didn't. Captain Maximo led his column toward the wagon train expecting to find two, possibly three men riding rear point. Led the company with the bland assurance that he was the attacker, that he had the advantage of surprise. All at once he found himself in the middle of hell's hottest acre, overwhelmed by gunfire from everywhere at once, and the oddest thing about it was that in the first few seconds of the unorthodox assault, Luis Maximo truly became a soldier. Even as he was driven from the saddle with a shoulder wound his mind was clearly and coldly rejecting everything he had ever read or been taught on the subject of war and battle. And that paper he'd written on Buena Vista. These gringos had changed things completely.
The captain went down and his company was routed, one hundred and twenty men thoroughly drubbed by thirty. Some got away in the night, some picked up permanent mementos of the fight, the rest just gave up. Buchanan, who had marked Maximo heading the column and winged him, now brought the officer to Big Red Leech. Maximo, who was considered a tall Mexican, looked from one of his captors to the other and felt that he must be standing in a deep hole.
"How many boys you got along the border, anyhow?" Leech demanded.
"I am not required," Maximo answered stiffly, "to give you any information." Leech stared down as if he had come across a puzzling bug.
"And I ain't required to waste time!" he shouted, turning to Sherm Moore. "Sherm, take this jimdandy and turn him into a good injun, will you?"
"Sure will," Moore said, taking Maximo in one hand, unholstering his .45 and hammering it back with the other. "Walk over here a ways, general," he told him persuasively.
"Wait!" Maximo protested, almost in disbelief. "I am a prisoner of war! You are not permitted to shoot me."
"Hell, mister, this ain't war!" Leech roared. "This is strictly business! Go on, Sherm."
<
br /> Buchanan leaned close to Maximo's ear. "Better speak your piece," he advised. "The man ain't foolin'."
"Que diablos." the captain muttered, shaken.
"Come on, brother, come on!" Leech insisted. "How many in your army and where they posted?"
Luis Maximo named numbers and places. Lash Wall copied them down, fired an occasional question as a test for the truth. The answers were the same as the original statement.
"Well, this is going to help," Wall said happily. "We can raise hell where they are and slip across where they ain't. Ought to save us a good week's work."
"That's for me, brother!" Big Red said. "All right, Sherm, go shoot him!"
"Hold it, hold it," Buchanan put in, a Little wearily. "A deal's a deal, Leech."
"What deal?"
"He traded you information, that's what deal."
"So now I just send him back to headquarters, that what you're sayin'?"
"Pack him along with us," Buchanan said. "When we get back across the river, lock him up till the job's done."
"The hell with that! Sherm ..."
"I thought it was a deal, too, Big Red," Moore said.
"I guess we all did," Lash Wall added. "Say, what's goin' on in this outfit, anyhow?" Leech fumed hotly. "Am I runnin' things, by damn, or ain't 1? And if I ain't, then let's see the boyo who thinks he on walk in my boots!"
""Sure, you're running the show, Big Red," Wall assured "But you've also got a rep for the fair and square."
Leech looked at his lieutenant for a long moment. "And you all figure I made a deal with the Mex here?" he asked.
"That's how it seemed, Big Red."
"All right!" the red-haired giant conceded. "Pack the scudder onto a wagon and let's roll!" He mounted to his saddle. "But I'm puttin' out a warnin'!" he said then. "This is the last vote that goes agin me! The last one." He raised his great fist. "Next time you can disagree with this!" and it looked very much like he shook it at Buchanan.
It was just a dull ride after that to San Bernadino, over to Linares, down as far south as Ciudad Victoria. Both the waiting Americans and their Mexican customers were overjoyed to see them arrive and quickly unload the goods. The Mexicans, for their part, were getting nearly twice as much cotton for the same money. The Americans were doubling their profits. It was, undoubtedly, a good deal for everyone but the Governor of the State and his cronies.
Lash Wall was all for turning the empty train around pronto and going back across the river for the next load. Big Red, spying a cantina still open for business at two o'clock in the morning, overruled him.
"We earned some money tonight!" he said boisterously. "Now let's spend a little of it!" So in they went to the oasis, startling the half a dozen natives who were practically asleep in the place. Leech led the way to the bar with a clomp of bootheels that set the overhead chandelier swaying perilously.
"Set 'em up, amigol" he told the old bartender. "Just put the bottles out and we'll do the honors!"
"Yo no sabe, senor," the ancient said, shaking his head at Leech and the whole hard-bitten crew. "No sabe ingles."
"Whisky!" Leech bawled at him, and then a female voice spoke.
"Licor por los hombres," she translated. "Las bofellas." A black-haired, black-eyed girl in a short skirt and cotton blouse, she walked into the center of the room with a saucy swing of her torso.
Big Red slapped his palms together, beamed down at her like an expectant wolf.
"Well, come over here!" he said juicily. "Ain't you a flower in the desert!" She came right to him, smiling. "For the wheesky," she said. "You got the dinero, no?" Hell, yes, I got dinero," Leech said. "Whatta you take me for, a deadbeat? Lash, put some money on the bar!" Wall reached into his moneybelt, dug out two ten-dollar coins and laid them down. The girl scooped them up, bit them hard between her gleaming little teeth, smiled again and handed them to her grandfather.
Big Red roared his enjoyment at her distrust, uncorked a bottle of the Taos lightning and handed it to the lady. She shook her head.
"How much you pay," she asked him, "eef I show you dance?"
Leech roared again. "Depends how much you gonna show!" he told her and the rest of the gang laughed with him. Even Buchanan, who lifted a second bottle and a glass from the bar, turned and walked with it to a quiet table in a dark corner.
The girl raised the skirt above her shapely knee. "I dance flamenco," she said tauntingly. "How much you pay?"
Big Red reached down to raise the hem of the skirt higher. She jumped nimbly out of the way. "You pay," she told him, "then you see." "What?" Leech said. "Me, buy a pig in a poke?" His voice was a bellow of good humor.
The girl shrugged. "Then you no see," she said and abruptly turned away, started for the door.
"Hey, come on back here!" Leech ordered. "Let's see that dance of yours."
She stopped, looked back over her shoulder. "How much?"
"Five dollars!" he told her. "But it better be worth it."
"Ten," she said.
"For a dance?"
"The flamenco," she said. "
"I'll chip in a dollar," Frank Hancock said. "Whatever the hell a flamenco is."
"Me, too," another gunman said. "Sounds special." Leech raised his hand and scowled at them. "This is my party and I'm payin'," he said. "Lash, hand over another coin." Wall sighed, but did as Leech said. The girl took the gold and dropped it into the neck of her blouse. She went around behind the bar, then, came back with a Castanet and a tambourine, moved to the center of the dimly lighted wooden floor and kicked off her flat-soled shoes. A silence fell over the place as she stood there with the Castanet held above her head, body poised and erect.
The Castanet clicked, clicked again, began a smooth, rhythmic rattling. Her bare shoulders moved, then her breasts and her slim hips. She raised up on the tips of her toes and gave the tambourine a staccato whap! That began the dance. She glided sideways, as if on air, moved back again, came toward Leech provocatively, retreated when he made a playful grab for her. She did that one more time then pirouetted. The skirt ballooned outward, showed enough of her legs in a brief instant to whet Big Red's appetite for more. Now she increased the tempo with the castanet, struck the tambourine on her elbow, her knees, her backside, began writhing and wiggling her body in wild abandon.
Not so wild, though, that she didn't manage to keep out of Big Red's reach. She spun away from him, skirt flying above her thighs, and Leech began to stalk her around the room, grinning wickedly and egged on by his gang at the bar. The dancer whirled around faster and faster, her figure almost a blur in the dimness, and Leech closed in.
The dance, or whatever it was, came to an abrupt end when the girl spun herself down into Buchanan's big lap, threw her arms around his neck in friendly fashion.
"Hola, guapo.'" she told him.
"Hello, yourself," he said.
"You take care of Rita, no?"
"Well . . ." He raised his glance to the hovering figure of Big Red Leech.
"Hand her over, brother!" Leech demanded.
"No, no!" Rita answered. "Dance ees over. I'm weeth heem now."
"Like hell you are!" Leech reached down for her and she put a bare foot in the center of his belly, pushed hard.
"Dance ees over!" she yelled sharply. "Go way now."
Buchanan, the innocent bystander, took a casual pull at his glass of whisky.
"I'm gettin' more'n that for ten dollars!" Big Red stormed down at the girl in his lap. "Leggo that wench, bucko!"
Buchanan showed him the drink in one hand, the other holding nothing. The girl settled closer against him, tightened her grip around his neck.