Lawless Trail

by Ralph Cotton

  “You might not be needing any,” Claypool said, pressing the blade of his knife along the captain’s throat. “Now keep your mouth shut and keep reminding yourself how bad we all want to kill you.”

  He turned the captain toward the rear window as Wes pulled himself onto the window ledge and held his hand down to help Rubens get a start. Rubens scrambled up the short distance, climbed over between Wes and the window edge and dropped to the ground on the other side.

  From higher up the hillside, above the charging soldiers, they heard two rifle shots fire simultaneously. Wes and Claypool looked at each other.

  “Think the doc is all right up there?” Claypool asked.

  “I believe the doc is all right no matter where you find him,” Wes Traybo said.

  He pulled the captain up and dropped him down to Rubens. The older long rider caught him and pinned his back to the wall with the revolver jammed to his chest. Inside, Claypool threw the sacks of money, one after the other, to Wes, who caught them and dropped them at Rubens’ side.

  As the sacks hit the ground with a solid thump, Rubens grinned close to the scared captain’s face.

  “You son of a bitch,” he said proudly. “You ain’t never been robbed by the likes of us.”

  • • •

  Dr. Bernard fired his last two shots at the shadowy figures moving up the hillside through a tangle of vines and overgrown adobe ruins. As soon as return fire whipped through the foliage, he abandoned the empty rifle on the ground and moved quickly yet quietly around the hillside and down in the direction of where they had left their horses.

  Once he had made his way off the hillside, he looked back at the sudden sound of rifles and saw streaks of gunfire zip through the deep green foliage. He smiled to himself and kept moving, the pistol hanging in his hand, his medical satchel still looped over his shoulder. By the time he reached the hitched animals, he swung his pistol toward the sound of men moving quickly toward him from the direction of the ruins. Dark figures moved into sight against the grainy purple starlight.

  “Who’s out there?” the gruff voice of Baylor Rubens called out to the other dark figures.

  Dr. Bernard crouched and remained silent. Although it was Rubens’ voice, he didn’t know who might be listening in the darkness.

  “Hold it, Baylor,” said Wes in a hushed tone. He asked the silent darkness in a whisper, “Is that you, Doc? It’s okay, we’re all over here.”

  “It’s me,” the doctor replied in the same restrained tone. He straightened some and watched them in the darkness.

  The men moved forward, closer, until Dr. Bernard saw the Mexican captain in his underwear, his balance compromised by his uneven footwear and Claypool’s prodding from behind.

  “Is that you they’re shooting at, Doc?” Wes asked as they gathered around him. Rifle shots still zipped wildly on the hillside.

  “I think so,” the doctor said, all of them turning toward the waiting horses.

  “Glad you made it,” Wes said sincerely, one of the sacks of money on his shoulder. Rubens was carrying the other sack.

  Dr. Bernard looked at the captain as they made their way the few last yards to the horses.

  “You got your money and captured their leader too?” he said, sounding impressed.

  “Yeah, we cleared accounts,” Wes replied. “Thought we’d better bring this one along, just in case.”

  The captain’s hands were pulled behind his back and bound with a belt. Claypool held the long end of the belt like a leash. A bandanna had been drawn around the captain’s mouth and tied behind his head.

  At the horses they mounted up double, Claypool behind the captain, Rubens behind Dr. Bernard, one arm clamped around the money sack. Wes rode alone, in the lead, a sack of money over his lap. As silent as ghosts, they turned their horses at a walk and slipped away down the path and across the main trail. They followed a shallow ditch alongside the main trail for fifty yards until Claypool spotted the woman’s stocky silhouette sitting atop a horse in the shadowy starlight. She held a hastily rigged string of three horses beside her.

  “I have to admit I had some doubts,” Rubens said quietly to the others as Wes led them closer to the woman.

  “I didn’t,” Wes said, seeing the dark outline of his brother sitting slouched in the saddle in front of Rosetta.

  When they stopped, Rubens dropped down from behind the doctor and hurried to the string of horses. The doctor stepped his horse over and sidled up to Ty and the woman.

  Ty opened his eyes and gave the doctor a weak smile.

  “I never seen a man take so long to relieve himself,” he said in a shallow voice.

  “I’ll try to be quicker next time,” the doctor said drily. As he appraised the bloody shoulder wound in the pale moonlight, he swung the satchel around onto his lap and pulled up a roll of medical gauze and a thick cotton pressure pad. Without taking time to remove the old bandage, he had Rosetta hold Ty’s arm up. Then he pressed the pad against the blood-soaked bandage and wrapped a firm three layers of gauze around it, unwinding the gauze roll under Ty’s arm and around over his shoulder.

  “How’s he coming along, Doc?” Wes asked. Rubens and Claypool had gathered in close, Claypool with the captain on the leash. Claypool had picked up one of the straw sombreros lying in the adobe and jerked it down over the captain’s eyes.

  “Not good,” the doctor said. “If you don’t get him to a place where he can lie still long enough to let this wound start healing, he’s going to die, plain and simple.”

  “We’re headed there now, Doc,” said Wes. “We’ll be there by midmorning.”

  “If we’re all through with this bastard, can I go ahead and kill him?” Rubens asked, nodding toward the Mexican captain. The captain whined behind his gag.

  “Do what suits you,” Wes said. “No gunshots, though.”

  “Suits me,” said Rubens. He took the knife and the end of the belt from Claypool and shoved the captain along in front of him to where the edge of the trail cut across a high bluff. There the ground dropped away at a steep angle. The captain whined pitifully, jerking back and forth on his leash as Rubens stood him facing out over the bluff and reached the knife around to slice his throat.

  “Hold still, you coward!” said Rubens. “This is for Bugs.”

  Rubens tried hard to make a deep slice across the captain’s throat, but he found he had no stomach for it right then. After a moment of listening to the captain struggling and whining, Rubens cursed his own cowardice under his breath, stepped back and booted him off the edge. Dead was dead, he told himself, no matter how it came about. He heard the sound of thumps, breaking brush and sliding rocks. Then silence.

  “There you are, Bugs. We’re all square,” he murmured.

  “Baylor, hurry up, come on,” Wes called out in the darkness even as Rubens turned away from the edge and came back out of the darkness at a trot. “Carter says we’ve got riders coming at a run.”

  “They rounded up their horse that fast?” Rubens said, climbing up onto one of the stolen horses.

  Claypool reached over and took back his knife, noting the blade was clean.

  “I don’t think it’s the soldiers,” he said.

  “Who else, then?” Rubens asked, turning the horse to the trail along with the others.

  “I don’t know,” Wes said, gigging his boots to his horse’s sides. “But we’re not sticking around here to find out.”

  • • •

  On the trail a mile below the ruins, the Ranger and Hardaway had pulled their horses to the side and sat looking back in the purple night at the sound of horses running toward them. Across the trail from them, a narrow winding path ran southwest off the hill line.

  “You can bet it’s Garand’s posse,” Hardaway said. “They heard all the shooting, same as we did.”

  The Ranger crossed his wr
ists on his saddle horn and listened ahead toward the ruins. The gunfire had gone silent some minutes earlier. He had a feeling that was the last they would hear of it. Whatever had gone on at the ruins was over and done.

  “What do you want to do, Ranger,” Hardaway asked, “get ahead of them or let them get there first—arrive unannounced so to speak?”

  “We’re not going to try to stop them. The way they’re riding, we’d be lucky if they didn’t run over us,” the Ranger said. “Either the Traybos are lying dead in the ruins or else they got the better of it and moved on. Let’s sit tight here, see what Garand and his men can tell us once we let them pass.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Hardaway said with a slight grin. “We know Dallas Garand doesn’t like anybody getting in his way.”

  The two eased their horses back out of sight and waited until the hooves of the posse’s horses pounded past them in a flurry of dust and disappeared up the trail toward the ruins. As the sound fell away, the Ranger stepped down from his saddle and stretched and took down a canteen and uncapped it. He drank as Hardaway stepped down and stretched and stood beside him.

  “I figure a half hour will give them enough time to get into whatever trouble they find up there,” Sam said.

  “I’d say so.” Hardaway grinned and took down his canteen and uncapped it. The two bumped their canteens together. When they finished drinking, they capped their canteens, hung them back on their saddle horns and stood listening to the silent trail lying ahead of them.

  Chapter 17

  Captain Torez awakened at the bottom of the high bluff, having bounced and flopped and grazed the side of the rock wall as he dropped through the darkness and finally skidded to a halt. He had lain unconscious for a time, but when he awakened he realized that in spite of his pain, his cuts, scrapes and bruises, he was alive, and that was all that mattered. With the straw sombrero stuck down even deeper and tighter over his head and face—all the way down to his gagged mouth—he struggled to his feet in the purple darkness.

  His hands were still bound behind him, and he tried in vain to remove the hat from his face, and with it the tight bandanna from around his mouth, with his shoulder. Yet neither of his encumbrances would give an inch.

  After groaning and struggling and finally falling to his knees, he gave up and stared as best he could through the loose and broken straw weaving of the hat’s crown. Standing up again, he began making his way up a path leading back to the trail above him.

  An hour later, after several slips, falls and slides, he lay gasping for breath on the hillside only a few yards beneath the trail. But as exhausted as he was, he felt a sudden surge of strength when he heard the sound of horses rounding the trail from the direction of the ruins and come charging along the dark path toward him.

  Rolling onto his raw, bleeding knees, he managed to shove himself up the side of a young pine and finish his haphazard climb. Staggering on one boot and a bare and bloody foot, he limped sidelong out onto the trail in the shadowy moonlight and jumped up and down wildly as the silhouettes of men and horses pounded hard in the night.

  “Mmmmmmmph! Mmmmph!” he bellowed as loud as he could through his tight bandanna gag.

  The riders heard the strange muffled sound—but only barely—above the pounding of their horses’ hooves and the creak, rattle and clink of saddles and tack. Their horses neither slowed nor veered as they came upon the grainy, staggering, stumbling figure that had thrust itself in their midst. The captain banked off the side of one charging animal to the next.

  The impact of the blows kept the ill-fated captain suspended on his feet. He spun for a moment from horse to horse like a child’s toy top until the outshot rear hooves of the last passing animal launched him in the air. He sailed in a high, weightless arc. Then gravity spat him back down, and he hit the ground like a limp bundle of rags.

  “Holy God! What was that?” shouted Dallas Garand, reining his horse to a sliding halt, then turning it in the darkness as the men bunched and slid and turned their horses, gathering up around him. Garand’s horse shivered and chuffed and blew out a breath as he nudged the animal warily toward the dark lump lying in the trail behind them. He raised his rifle from across his lap and cocked it.

  “Careful, Mr. Garand,” Detective Folliard whispered, riding close beside him, his borrowed rifle also cocked and ready. “If that thing ain’t dead it’ll come up charging you.”

  “I dare it to,” Garand said. Over his shoulder, he said to the rest of the men, “If it’s alive, get ready to put it down.”

  Hammers cocked, levers snapped back and forth as the men stepped their horses closer with caution.

  On the hard ground, broken, bleeding, barely alive, Captain Torez heard the voices. Dazed, he saw the dark figures through woven straw.

  “Mmmph . . . mmmmph—!” he bellowed. But his muffled voice was cut short by a cacophony of pistol and rifle fire that lit the trail in an eerie flicker of blue-orange fire.

  “That’s enough!” Garand shouted amid the roar of gunfire surrounding him. The dark form on the trail jumped and bucked in place as the hail of bullets chopped into him.

  “Hold your damn fire!” Earl Prew shouted, his thickly bandaged foot sticking forward out of his stirrup.

  The gunfire fell away as quickly as it had started.

  “Jesus! Do you think you’ve killed it?” Garand said to the men with sarcasm. He fanned his hand back and forth through the thick brown cloud of burnt gunpowder smoke looming around them. He stepped his horse forward, his own rifle barrel still smoking from the two shots he’d made.

  “Want me to check it out, Mr. Garand?” Folliard asked, wanting to do whatever he could to get back in his boss’ good graces.

  “Yeah,” Garand growled sidelong. “You too, DeSpain,” he said.

  The two men put their horses forward the few remaining feet to the dark lump in the trail, Folliard trying successfully to arrive there first.

  “Uh-oh,” he said, looking down at the bullet-riddled body.

  Arriving beside him, DeSpain looked at the mangled, battered body, its ragged underwear, the straw hat pulled down over its face, the bandanna wrapped tight beneath its ripped and hanging brim.

  “What is it there?” Garand called out, his horse moving toward them at a slow walk.

  “It’s a man, Mr. Garand,” Folliard said. “But I don’t know how to describe him. He’s got a—”

  “It’s some barefoot fool in his drawers,” DeSpain called out, cutting Folliard off. “Either his head’s missing or he didn’t want to show it.”

  Folliard gave DeSpain a dark stare.

  “Damn it,” Garand grumbled. As he sidled up to his two detectives, he examined the body and shook his head, baffled. Folliard looked back and forth between DeSpain and Garand, not wanting to be left out.

  “Is it one of the Traybos, Mr. Garand?” he asked.

  “How the hell would I know?” Garand barked. “Get down there and get that hat off him. What the hell was he thinking—” He stopped short and said, “Are his hands tied?”

  Jumping down from his saddle, Folliard turned the body a little and saw the belt wrapped around the dead captain’s wrists.

  “Yes, sir, he’s tied,” Folliard said.

  The rest of the men moved their horses up and half circled the dead man in the trail.

  “Good Lord,” Garand said, realization beginning to set in.

  As Folliard cut the straw sombrero from the dead man’s head, DeSpain looked back along the dark trail. He chewed on a wad of tobacco.

  “We got riders coming,” he said matter-of-factly. “Hell, boss, they’re almost here.” He levered a fresh round up into his smoking rifle chamber.

  The rest of the men did the same and stared toward the sound moving in around the turn in the trail only fifteen yards away.

  “Damn it to hell,” said Garand.
“You cannot fire a weapon in this infernal country. Every son of a bitch must sit around saddled and ready, waiting to hear a gunshot!”

  “He’s a Mex, Mr. Garand,” Folliard said, jerking the sliced sombrero away from the dead man’s face.

  “Hell, I’m not surprised,” Garand replied in disgust. “We are in Mexico. You can’t avoid the sons a’ bitches forever.”

  As he spoke, he looked at the riders slowing their horses to a walk and coming toward them from the turn in the trail.

  “Hola,” said the voice of the man at the head of the riders. “Lay down your weapons. You are being arrested by Sergeant Malero, under the authority of Generalísimo Terrero Pablo Juan Duro García.”

  “Say what?” DeSpain chuckled under his breath, itching for a fight, ready to start pulling a trigger for the slightest reason. “Damn greaser’s got more names than a dozen Christian white men,” he added with a muffled laugh. He spat a long stream of tobacco juice.

  “Stand firm, men,” Garand whispered sidelong. To the Mexican sergeant he said, “We’re Americans here. Stay where you are. This doesn’t concern you.”

  “This does not concern us?” said the sergeant as if in disbelief. Ignoring Garand’s order to stay back, he rode his horse forward at the same slow, stalking pace. His men followed close behind him. Four soldiers rode double, owing to the fact that Rosetta and Ty Traybo had made off with their horses from the ruins.

  “You heard me right,” said Garand. “I’m Dallas Garand with the railroad security. This is American business. Unless your chili-sucking generalísimo wants to have you stuffed and stood in a corner, you better back the hell off.”

  “The land you are on is Mexican land,” the sergeant continued, ignoring the threats and insults. He stopped his horse less than ten feet away.

  “Today it’s Mexican land, Sergeant Malaria,” DeSpain said, deliberately mispronouncing the soldier’s name. “But it’s getting away from you beaners awfully fast.” He spat another stream.

  Again, the sergeant ignored the insults.

  “I will have your weapons and hear your reason for being here—” His words stopped short as he drew close enough to look down at the dead face of Captain Torez.