by Chuck Tyrell
Guards’ horses came to a semblance of a line between the Gatling guns. Riders held grimly to the reins as the horses jittered and pranced. Dust rose. Smoke rose. Bedlam rose.
Horses in the skirmish line bucked and reared. Dust nearly obscured the scene, but Stryker could see gaps in the line and horses on the ground, some motionless, some kicking their last.
The Gatling chattered for a moment before a Rurales bullet found the man turning the crank. A deadly defect of Gatling guns—the man turning the crank stood straight up, without cover of any sort.
Finally the near Gatling gun began its deadly chatter. Seconds later, shots from above Stryker knocked the soldier manning the Gatling to the ground. Sparrow and Sid Lyle and the Pimas were on the southern heights.
Chaos erupted among the mounted Guards. Shouts of riders mixed with screams from the wounded. When a Gatling fired, the man operating it lasted no more than a few seconds. Guards abandoned their horses and sought cover among the rocks sidelining the trail. Stryker shook his head. A few days of drilling had not turned the Nogales Guards into a cohesive fighting force.
Stryker searched the melee below for sign of Canby, but he saw no officer with a plumed hat. A semblance of order began to show among the Guards. A trickle of pebbles came down from above. Stryker whirled, his Winchester cocked and ready.
“Damn,” Sid Lyle said. “Never was much good at Injuning around.”
“What’re you up to?”
“Figured two guns down here’d be better’n one.”
Stryker gave Lyle a curt nod. “That could be.” He went back to searching the Guards for sign of Canby. He found none. A man led four horses toward the rear. The Winchester came naturally to Stryker’s shoulder. “Dear God, I hate to shoot a horse for no reason,” he said, and pulled the trigger. The nearest horse of the four took Stryker’s bullet in its neck. It reared, blood pumping from a ruptured artery, pulled its reins from the hands of the Guardsman, and galloped away. It stopped, head down, nose to a boulder, and stood, trembling.
“Cain’t see nothing but his butt,” Lyle said. “No good to shoot at that.”
“Damn,” Stryker said.
The horse went to its knees, then slowly toppled onto its side. Blood pooled beneath its neck.
“Damn,” Stryker said again.
Firing was desultory now. The Guards had taken cover. The Rurales were quite secure behind their breastworks. No one could see either the Apaches or the Pimas.
“Wonder if it’s time to palaver with those jehus down there,” Stryker said, then ducked reflexively when a bullet spanged off the rock above his head. “Then again, may not be.” He grimaced a smile, pulled the bandana from his back pocket and swiped at the tears leaking from his eye.
The Yaquis trotted toward the sound of gunfire. The pop of rifles, the chatter of Gatlings, and the screams of horses and men said the battle was hard fought.
They slowed to a fast walk, rifles ready, as they approached the pass. Alfredo listened closely. Firing came from down the pass, and from the heights on both sides. Gatling fire sounded now and again, but only for a few seconds at a time. He motioned Yaquis to his left and right. They spread out in a natural skirmish line and strode toward the firefight.
Gunsmoke lay like a blanket in Zetate Pass. From more than a mile away, Alfredo saw the quartermaster wagons of the Nogales Guards. They stood a good distance from the firefight, and the mounts of the Guards were on a picket line just north of the wagons. Alfredo whistled, then made signs to the Yaqui. They disappeared into the brushy cover.
Four wagons pulled by four horses each. Alfredo took the one closest to the pass. It looked as if the Guards expected trouble from the rear as they took gunfire from three sides. He slipped along the side of the wagon, slid the muzzle of his rifle around the corner as he stepped out to where he could see the high seat. One man sat there, his head turned to the west where the fighting went on.
“Señor,” Alfredo said quietly. He cocked the rifle.
“Wha—”
“Step down, señor, or you will die.”
“Goldam greaser,” the man said.
Alfredo smiled, but there was no mirth to it. “Not so,” he said. “I am Yaqui. You, get off the seat and onto the ground. Pronto.”
“Jeez,” the man said, but he scrambled to obey Alfredo.
“Lo siento,” Alfred said, and smashed the butt of his rifle into the side of the man’s head. He collapsed, unconscious.
Alfredo peered over the side of the wagon. Ammunition! Box after box of .45 Colt, .44 Henry, .45-70 for the Gatlings, and dynamite. He whistled.
Moments later a Yaqui warrior appeared.
“The other wagons?” Alfredo said.
“They belong to us.”
“The horses?”
“They belong to us.”
“The gringos?
“They will not bother us.”
Alfredo nodded. “This one carries bullets. We will drive it away.” “Food?”
“One wagon.”
“Bring it,” Alfred said. “Burn the others.”
“Horses?”
Alfredo chewed his lip. “Good ones?”
“A few.”
“Kill the others.”
The Yaqui squinted and frowned.
“We can’t risk a chase,” Alfredo said. “And taking a herd of horses might be too big a burden.”
“Si,” the Yaqui said. He disappeared.
Alfredo checked on the downed teamster. Still unconscious. He took some cordage from the wagon and trussed the wagoneer. If he was lucky, someone would find him before he died of thirst.
The third wagon in the supply line crackled as flames ate its canvas top and chewed at the wooden bows. Smoke boiled skyward as its contents began to burn. Alfredo stood spraddle-legged at the head of the team hitched to the ammunition wagon. The fourth wagon belched flame.
A warrior appeared at Alfredo’s side. “We have two wagons and ten horses,” he said.
“Tie the horses to the wagon tailgates,” Alfredo said. “Then two men drive the wagons away. Do not stop until you reach Cocorit.”
The warrior nodded and was gone.
Alfredo raided the box of dynamite. He tucked sticks of explosive into his waistband after sticking short fuses in them. He plucked a small black cigarillo from a pocket and lit it with a Lucifer. He grinned. The gringos were in for a nasty surprise.
A Yaqui climbed onto the wagon and took the reins. He chucked at the teams and drove the wagon away, leading five horses on lengths of manila rope. Another followed. Alfredo raised a hand in farewell. Cajeme would be pleased.
He made a fist and raised it above his head. All the Yaquis gathered round. “We go to fight the gringos,” Alfredo said. “Take care. Aim well. Shoot only when you have a good target. And like the Apache, kill horses.”
The Yaquis moved toward the desultory firing to the west. When he could overlook the killing ground, Alfredo saw that many gringos in tan uniforms took cover behind the carcasses of their horses. The Yaquis took advantage of natural cover and waited for Alfredo’s command. He drew hard on the cigarillo, pulled a stick of dynamite from his waistband, applied the glowing end of the cigarillo to the fuse, made sure it sputtered well, and threw the stick as far as he could toward the cowering Nogales Guards.
To Stryker, the smoke rising from the burning wagons said Alfredo and his Yaquis had arrived. The Nogales Guards were in a box—Rurales ahead, Apaches on the right, Pimas on the left, and now, Yaquis behind. He watched for the Yaqui warriors to appear, but he saw none. The Gatling on the north side took to chattering again. Shots came from three sides and the Gatling operator fell, screeching at the bullets in his legs and shoulder. No one took his place.
Alfredo McLaws stood from behind a small creosote bush. He lit the fuse on a stick of dynamite and heaved it a good thirty yards toward the Guards.
The explosion got the Guards attention, and it told them enemy guns now held positions to their r
ear. The rain of rocks and dirt from the blast had hardly settled when Yaqui rifles crashed.
A Guardsman screamed as a .50 caliber bullet ripped into his left leg just below his butt line and ranged upward, nicking his pelvis, plowing through the masses of his intestines and coming to rest in his stomach, a hard and indigestible lump.
A leg pushed from behind a fallen horse, trembled for a moment, digging its toes into the dry earth, then went lax.
No sign of Canby and his ostrich plume.
“I reckon it’s time to see if they’ll palaver,” Stryker said. He mopped away the tears with his bandana. “What do ya think?”
“Now’s as good a time as any,” Lyle said. “They can’t last long in this crossfire.”
“Yeah.” Stryker tied his bandana to the barrel of his rifle. When a little lull in the shooting came, he waved the bandana and hollered. “Hold your fire. I’m coming down.” Firing broke off. Zetate Pass went silent except for the scream of a hawk riding the thermals overhead, and the moans of the wounded. “I’m coming down,” Stryker hollered again, and he started down the incline toward the Nogales Guards.
Chapter Thirteen
Stryker strode toward the jumble of dead Guards horses, his rifle with the bandana tied to its muzzle held high. No firing from the heights. None from the Rurales. The pass was silent except for the hawk and the wounded. “I’ll be wanting to talk to Artemus Canby,” he called. He stopped behind a large waist-high rock. Just in case the Guards didn’t want to talk, Stryker had a cartridge in the chamber of his Winchester with the hammer at full cock. He covered the action with his hand as he held the bandana up. “Where’s Artemus Canby,” he shouted again.
“I’ll get ‘im.” A man with captain’s bars on his shoulder straps stood from behind a dead horse.
“Who’re you?”
“Roberts. Clifford Roberts. Captain of Company A.”
“All right, Roberts. My name’s Matt Stryker. You can see I’ve got no gun on you, but you can believe other people have. Lay your rifle down, if you please, and leave your six-gun, too. Then you can get Canby.”
Roberts nodded and leaned his rifle against the dead horse. He used his thumb and forefinger to lift his SAA pistol from its holster and lay it on top of the horse’s body. “Good enough?”
“Good enough. Where’s Canby?”
“He’s down.”
“Dead?”
“I’ll see,” Roberts said, and strode towards Canby’s dead horse. “Colonel Canby. Oh, Colonel Canby.” His voice held a sneer.
No answer.
“There’s a Mr. Stryker here to see you, Colonel.” Roberts reached down behind the dead horse. Stryker moved to where he could see what Roberts was doing, just in case. Canby lay cuddled against the back of the dead horse, but he didn’t move when Roberts shook him.
“Colonel?” Roberts pulled at Canby’s uniform jacket.
No reaction.
“Turn him over,” Stryker said. “Looks dead to me.”
Roberts used both hands to turn Canby face up. “Shot himself,” he said. “Hell of a note.”
“So who’s in charge now?”
“Damned if I know.”
“Sheesh.” Stryker kicked at a clod. The dead horses and dead men were beginning to smell. “You all ain’t gonna make it outta here alive, you know, unless you surrender.”
“Yeah.”
“Can you get a head count?”
“Try.”
Stryker sat on a stone. “I’ll wait. You might want to bring any officers over here to talk. People watching from the heights, so be careful.”
“Yeah.” Roberts turned his back on Stryker and raised his voice. “Whitney. Swampscott. Miles. Colonel Canby killed himself. We’re it. Come on over here. Mr. Stryker’s got something to say.”
Two men stood up from cover.
“You’ll want to leave your weapons behind,” Stryker said. “Just lay them on the ground.” He glanced at Roberts. “Who are they?”
“Swampscott, Company B, and Miles, Company C.”
“Others?”
“Anyone know what happened to Captain Whitney?”
“He’s dead.”
“Who’s First Sergeant?” Stryker asked.
“Sergeant Kale,” Roberts hollered.
“Yo.”
“Leave your weapons and come over.”
“Yo.” A lanky man in desert tan with black first sergeant’s strips stood up from behind a dead horse. He leaned his rifle against the carcass and laid his pistol on top. “I’m coming,” he said.
“Sergeant Tims,” Roberts called.
“He got it.”
“Reckon that’s it,” Roberts said.
The officers and Kale came over to stand next to Captain Roberts.
Stryker used the edge of the bandana on his rifle to wipe the tears from beneath his eye. “Gentlemen,” he said. “You can see you are surrounded. Given enough time, we could get you all.” He waved a hand at the smoke billowing from the burning wagons. “And I’d say your supplies are all but gone.” He dabbed at his eye again. “Now. As I see it, you’ve got one of two choices. Either you can become guests of the Rurales, or you can walk back to Nogales.”
“She-it,” the captain called Swampscott said. “Not much of a choice. Wagons burned and all.”
“If you choose to go back to Nogales, I’ll make sure you don’t starve. Your horses are dead or gone. You’ll walk, but walking never hurt a man. You’ll be skinnier when you get to Nogales, but you won’t be dead.”
Stryker stood up. “I’ll let you all talk it over. When you’ve decided, send Roberts out with a white flag of some kind. Then we’ll decide what to do.”
“We got Gatlings,” Kale the weapons sergeant said. “They got limbers full of ammo.”
“Sergeant, you’ve got the ammo in your rifle magazines, what’s on your gun belts, and what’s in the limbers. You can use the ammo, but I’m not coming back to negotiate with you.” Stryker faced the Guards sergeant straight on. “Now you’ve got three choices, not two. One. You can take a short walk through the pass and go to rot in the presidio jail. Two. You can surrender to me, walk back to Nogales, and see what happens. Or three. You can try to shoot your way out, and die. That’s it.”
Sergeant Kale shoved his hands in his pockets and stared at the ground. He lifted his eyes to Stryker’s iron-hard face. “Hell of a choice,” he said.
“That’s what you’ve got,” Stryker said. “You shoulda thought about what you was getting into before you took Bills’s money.”
The Guards officers stood silent. None of them would meet Stryker’s eyes.
“That’s it,” Stryker said. “You need to talk to the men, do it.” He stalked away, the bandana still fluttering at the end of the rifle he carried over his shoulder.
“Glad I didn’t have to shoot any of them jehus,” Lyle said when Stryker returned to their cubby hole behind the rocks of Zetate Pass.
“May have to yet,” Stryker said. “Don’t know how stubborn they are.”
The hawk that circled on the thermals above the rocks screeched again, and angled lower. Stryker watched it. Lyle watched the Guards. The hawk came lower as if it had its eye on prey. A pebble rattled. Lyle and Stryker held cocked Winchesters at waist level, pointed at the source of the noise, when Alfredo McLaws stepped from behind a boulder.
“Not like you to make noise,” Stryker said.
“Didn’t want you jittery gringos shooting at me,” he said.
“See you got the wagons.”
“Some. They burn pretty good.”
“Horses?”
“We’ll take the teams,” Alfredo said. “Gonna drive a couple of the wagons back to Cocorit.”
“Spoils of war?” Stryker grimaced a smile.
“Tambien,” Alfredo said.
“Be obliged if you Yaqui men’d stay in place out there. These jehus ain’t decided if they’re gonna fight some more, or whatever.”
“Surroun
ded?” Alfredo lifted an eyebrow. “You figure they’ll shoot it out?”
“I’m hoping not, but who knows?” Stryker turned his attention to the killing field. Nothing moved. The Guards took cover well and their desert tan uniforms made then hard to see from any distance. A smoke rose from the heights on the far side of Zetate Pass.
“Looks like someone’s trying to sneak out,” Alfredo said.
“Norrosso won’t let them.”
A shot spanged from the northern heights. A man grunted and began to keen. The smoke on the heights disappeared.
“Reckon they’re not moving any more,” Alfredo said.
“Fast learners,” Stryker said. He used his bandana to wipe sweat from his face and tears from under his damaged eye.
The Guards lay still under the hot Mexican sun. Stryker and Lyle and Alfredo sat on the shady side of a tall rock. The Rurales had their broad sombreros for cover. No white flag showed from amongst the Guards.
“Can’t see no conflab going on down there,” Lyle said. “Mebbe they think they can shoot it out with the likes of us.”
“Could be.” Stryker had a look at the sun. An hour or so would see it edge over the far side of the pass. “Your people gone, Alfredo?”
“Some. Enough to hold left,” he said.
A scrap of white on a rifle barrel showed. Roberts stood up with the white cloth fluttering from his gun.
“I’ll go see what he’s got to say,” Stryker said.
“Mind if I come along?” Lyle pulled his short-brimmed Stetson down over his eyes.
Stryker gave him a long look. “Sticking your neck out pretty far, ain’t you?”
“Got in the habit of that, working with Ness Havelock over to Saint Johns. You hear about that?”
“I did. Come on, if you’re a mind to.”
Two men climbed down the side of the pass toward Roberts. “You’re Sid Lyle,” Roberts said when they got close.
“I am. So?”
“Canby said something about you joining us.”
“I wouldn’t touch anything Jason Bills’s got his fingers in,” Lyle said. “Besides, Matt Stryker’s a friend. I like to ride with friends.”
“Nuff fat chewing,” Stryker said. “What’s your decision?”