He’d been about to toe his stirrup, but now, holding both the dun’s and the grulla’s reins, he looked toward the casa. Inky, man-shaped silhouettes were spilling down the hill from the house, a couple stumbling down the steps.
Melvin Hansen’s voice, pitched with sneering and thick from drink, said, “Where in the hell you two think you’re goin’?”
Hansen was moving directly toward Hawk and Saradee, aiming a pistol while half a dozen other men flanked him on both sides. A low murmur rose from the casa, and the mandolin, which Hawk had heard intermittently all night, had fallen silent.
Starlight winked dully off Hansen’s revolver and off those that the other men had drawn behind him. Hawk’s gut tightened.
“Melvin, you son of a bitch,” Saradee growled.
“What the hell kinda double cross is this?”
Monjosa was jerking wildly around on the dun’s back and grunting and groaning hysterically behind the gag in his mouth.
“Kill her!” A girl’s shrill cry rose behind Hansen, and Hawk shuttled his gaze to see a slender figure with flared hips and long black hair extend a pistol from her shoulder and aim it at Saradee. April’s voice resounded around the now-silent yard, “They got Monjosa!”
Starlight flashed off the Colt in Saradee’s fist. The hammer clicked, and the gun roared as Saradee screamed, “Don’t ever aim a gun at me, bitch!”
April grunted and fired her own pistol into the dust at her feet as her knees buckled. At the same time, Hansen jerked his revolver up, but before he could snap off a shot, something flashed brightly in the left periphery of Hawk’s vision and a near-deafening roar filled his ears—the thundering rataplan of a Gatling gun being cranked hard and fast.
Blam-Blam-Blam-Blam-Blam-Blam-Blam!
Hawk dropped to a knee as the .45-caliber rounds hammered into the yard in front of him, blowing up dirt and gravel and plunking into bodies, evoking shrieks and screams and howled curses. Melvin Hansen tossed his gun into the air, and went spinning, throwing up his arms. As he turned away from Hawk, he bought two more rounds in his back that thrust him off his feet and several yards back in the direction of the casa.
A handful of others around Hansen were cut down in that first blast, spinning and flying and yowling, several slugs ricocheting off drawn pistols with angry whines.
There was a pause in the Gatling’s thunder.
Through the smokelike dust Hawk saw several men scurrying for cover. Then, as Hawk turned toward the wagon fifty yards off to his left, beyond Saradee’s pitching, screaming buckskin, a bright red light flickered at the wagon’s rear. The thunder resumed, sending the scurrying Monjosa riders and a couple more of Saradee’s gang twisting and turning and crumpling in bullet-riddled heaps.
One man in a steeple-crowned sombrero and flashing spurs almost made it to a jumble of shrubs and rocks at the bottom of the casa’s hill, but before he could dive for sanctuary his sharp miserable yelp rose beneath the machine gun’s thunderous caterwauling, and he threw his arms up and pitched forward, his tall frame disappearing against the velvet black of the ground.
A screech rose from the wagon as the Gatling’s canister swung toward the steps leading down from the casa, and down which several men ran, yelling.
Blam-Blam-Blam-Blam-Blam-Blam-Blam!
As the gun fell silent once more, the men on the steps were left in groaning heaps, some rolling and thumping toward the yard below.
Saradee checked the pitching buckskin down and jerked her head toward the dark wagon, holding her cocked Colt uncertainly above her shoulder. “What in Christ . . . ?”
Hawk swung up onto the grulla’s back. “Ironside.”
As if in response, the big sergeant’s gravelly voice shouted, “This here train’s leavin’ the station, Hawk!” A loud guffaw and then the raspy “Whoo-whoo!” of a train whistle imitated by a giddy, inebriated cavalry sergeant.
Jerking Monjosa’s dun along behind him, Hawk ground his spurs into the grulla’s flanks as another bellow rose from the wagon and the heavy freighter bolted forward, rattling and clattering loudly in the dense silence that had fallen in the wake of the Gatling’s deadly belching.
He passed Saradee, who was still getting her buckskin back on its leash and staring uncertainly toward the wagon.
“What’re you waitin’ for?” Hawk yelled as he passed her.
He cast a glance toward the casa to see what looked like a small army of dark stick figures scurrying around in front of the lit windows behind them, and to hear the exasperated shouting and screaming. “The yard’s about to be swarming with every man in that house, and I’m guessing they’re a mite mad—seein’ as how we busted up their party an’ all.”
“It was a damn good one for a while, too,” Saradee said, managing to put some lasciviousness in her voice as she galloped after him.
“Don’t flatter yourself, woman.”
28.
CARRION CRY
HAWK and Saradee followed the wagon through the ca nyon, watching their back trail that remained eerily empty and quiet.
After fifteen minutes of hard riding, though the trail was wide and easy to follow with the vibrant starlight and a bright powder-horn moon, Hawk galloped up beside Sergeant Ironside, who was hoorahing the team as though the devil’s hounds were nipping at his rear wheels.
“No use blowing out the team,” he yelled above the hammering of the crates in the box. “If riders come, we’ll polish ’em off with your Gatling gun.”
Ironside nodded and checked the team down to a walk. “I reckon you got a point.” He lifted a crock jug from the seat beside him. Starlight flashed off his teeth and drunk-shiny eyes. “Drink?”
Hawk kept the grulla even with the driver’s box, pulling Monjosa’s mount along behind him. The contrabandista rode slope-shouldered in frustrated defeat, his hands tied taut to the horn.
As they clomped along, Hawk said, “How in the hell did you get the mules out of the corral without that stock guard spotting you?”
“Ha!” Ironside threw back a sloppy drink then set the jug down beside him again. “He did see me. Fact, he helped me. I reckon I sorta shamed him—said no hombre worth his beans would leave good equipment out in the weather like that. That wagon and them guns needed to be in a shed. So, he helped me lead the mules over, and I was just done hitching ’em up to the wagon when I heard you smash the poor son of a bitch’s head for him.”
Hawk looked at him, his upper lip curled.
Ironside chuckled and shrugged as he leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “I told you I was gettin’ these guns back to Bowie.”
Hawk gave a snort and glanced back at Monjosa. To Ironside, he said, “Pull ’em down for a minute. I want to get him inside the wagon. We’ll likely run into lookouts farther down canyon, and I don’t want him out in the open.”
Monjosa said nothing as Hawk and Ironside wrestled him up into the wagon, taking the late Kid Reno’s place among the rifle crates and the Gatling gun that Ironside had unpacked, put together, and mounted on its wood-and-steel tripod. The murdering contrabandista didn’t say anything in words, that was.
The man’s cold, black eyes said plenty.
Finding that the man had loosened one band of rope around his wrists, Hawk retied him—tethering his knife-hand behind and to one of his ankles, and his other wrist to a heavy rifle crate that he couldn’t pull more than a few feet around the box. Saradee’s gag and Hawk’s neckerchief were still knotted tightly around his head.
When Hawk had jumped out of the wagon and put up the tailgate, Ironside continued down the snaking canyon trail, along the stream glistening silver in the moonlight. Hawk stepped into his saddle and turned the horse to look once more along their back trail.
Saradee rode her buckskin up close and gave him a smoky smile.
Her voice was raspy. “This remind you of Mexico?”
“What?”
“This? Shooting and running, all hell breaking loose . . . and the other.” She smiled
.
“Damn,” Hawk said. “I can’t remember yesterday, and you expect me to remember Mexico?”
“That’s all right, lover,” Saradee said, reining her fidgety buckskin around, pointing him down canyon. “We’ll have plenty of Mexicos, and I’ll bet you’ll remember one or two of ’em.”
She winked and spurred the buckskin, lunging off after the wagon in a spray of rocks and dust.
Twenty minutes later, riding ahead of the wagon with Saradee now riding behind and keeping an eye on their back trail, Hawk spied movement ahead. He threw up a hand. As Ironside slowed the wagon, Hawk booted the grulla slowly ahead, holding his Henry rifle out along the horse’s right wither.
A silhouette took man shape on the left track of the two-track trail, growing slowly as Hawk approached. A massive saguro stood beside him. He held a rifle across his chest, feet spread a little more than shoulder width apart. Another man stood atop a flat-topped boulder to his right, aiming his own rifle at Hawk from his shoulder.
“¿Quien va alli?” said the man on the rock. Who’s there?
Hawk sensed their tension. They’d likely heard the Gatling’s distant hiccupping but had orders to leave the canyon’s mouth under no circumstances.
Hawk whipped the Henry up suddenly. The rifle crashed twice—ripping, echoing barks. As the man atop the boulder slumped, grunting, he loosed a wild shot past the wagon, causing the mules to jerk and lunge and Ironside to curse. As the man rolled forward off the boulder, the guard in the trail was punched back into the shrubs where he fell into a cat’s-claw mesquite with a crackling thump.
There was a low, liquid sob. Then silence.
Hawk levered a fresh shell into the Henry, and the spent cartridge it replaced made a faint ping as it hit the ground around the grulla’s hooves. He shuttled his gaze left and right of the trail.
Spying no more movement, he said, “All right.”
“I don’t think so.” Saradee’s voice, clear in the silent night, rose from behind the wagon. “We got riders coming from the casa.”
Hawk turned the grulla and heard the rataplan of several horses moving toward him fast. Ironside looked at him.
“Wanna make that cannon sing once more, Sergeant?”
“Be glad to.”
Ironside set the wagon’s brake, wound the ribbons around it, then scurried back into the box. Hawk heard Monjosa groan sharply as though he’d been stepped on. Ironside chuckled, and there was the squawk of a dry swivel as he adjusted the Gatling gun on its tripod.
Monjosa groaned again, this time in heated protest. Hawk toed the grulla to the back of the wagon. Saradee sat her buckskin to the far side, staring along their back trail.
They waited. The horse thuds grew louder.
They were in a good spot, around a slight bend in the trail. Their pursuers wouldn’t see them until it was too late.
Hawk looked at Ironside standing crouched behind the Gatling gun’s brass canister, poking his head out the rear flap. Sweat glistened on the sergeant’s ruddy, bearded face. He stretched his lips back from his teeth, and they, too, glistened in the star- and moonlight.
Hawk looked ahead as the riders stormed around a jumble of boulders and greasewood and low mesquites, and then the Gatling gun set the night alive with its belching roars.
Ironside whooped and hollered. The .45 slugs whistled and plunked through flesh.
Men yelled. Horses screamed. Smoke wafted.
And when it was all over only one of the dozen or so fallen men moved in the trail, and Ironside finished him with a short, raucous burst.
Two horses fled back the way they’d come, neighing and trailing their reins, one also trailing its rider who’d gotten a boot caught in a stirrup but who flopped silently along the ground, probably dead before he’d left his saddle.
Hawk, Saradee, and Ironside waited, but no other riders came from the direction of Monjosa’s casa.
Aside from occasional calls of owls and coyotes, the night was grave quiet. Deciding that no more pursuers were likely, the group at the casa now being so drunk they couldn’t see or think straight, and a leaderless pack of curly wolves soon to be in search of other packs and other quarries, Hawk and his companeros continued up the trail, soon leaving the canyon mouth for the open desert beyond.
They were heading back the way they’d come when, at ten o’clock the next morning, they stopped amid boulders in a broad, black-graveled basin to rest the animals. Ironside climbed heavily, tenderly down from the driver’s box, looking rumpled, peaked, and gaunt in the wake of the long, hard night and a gallon or so of Mexican panther juice.
He looked at Hawk and jerked his thumb toward the wagon’s rear. “What about your friend back there?”
Hawk hadn’t forgotten about Monjosa. He had orders to kill the man, but there was little need to hurry. Monjosa wasn’t going anywhere. Besides, it was never easy to shoot an unarmed man trussed up like a Fourth of July pig.
But then, Knife-Hand was never really unarmed.
Hawk glanced at Saradee. She curled her lip at him.
He rode the grulla over to the back of the wagon and flipped the flap of the pucker back. Monjosa lay inside, in the same ridiculous position Hawk had left him in, looking ragged and sweaty, eyes bright as a trapped bobcat’s. Hawk reached in and untied the neckerchief from around the contrabandista’s head, then pulled Saradee’s panties from the man’s mouth.
Monjosa coughed and sucked air and when he found his tongue, he said raspily, pathetically, “Don’t kill me.”
Saradee, who’d ridden up behind Hawk to peer over his shoulder into the wagon, laughed. “Finish the bastard. I’m gonna ride over to them cottonwoods, see if there’s any water.”
Hawk didn’t look at her gigging the buckskin off through the brush and rocks toward two distant cottonwoods. He kept his eyes on Monjosa.
“Know who sent me?” Hawk slipped Melvin Hansen’s Colt from his holster and aimed the gun at Monjosa’s face.
The contrabandista winced. Fear sparked in his mud-brown eyes.
“The father of a young soldier you gutted.”
Monjosa shook his head slightly. “Don’t. Please, I beg you. Don’t kill me. You’re a lawman, no?”
“I’m a lawman,” Hawk said. “I’m a father, too. We fathers love our sons. Take it right personal when they’re taken from us by privy rats like you.”
A hand tapped his knee. He looked down to see Ironside standing beside the grulla, looking up at him, faint beseeching in the sergeant’s eyes. “He ain’t armed, Hawk. It ain’t right to kill him. Let me haul him back to Bowie. He’ll stand trial there, and they’ll hang him, sure.”
Hawk looked at Monjosa. The man hunkered there against the wagon floor like a frightened animal. His eyes were shiny and damp, and his thinning, brown hair hung over his eyes. He was breathing hard and his throat was working as though he couldn’t swallow fast enough.
Hawk was torn. His orders were to kill the man. On the other hand, why release him from his torment? Hanging him might be a more fitting way to kick him off.
Hawk opened the wagon’s tailgate, then stepped off the grulla into the box, tossing his reins to Ironside. Monjosa jerked back away from Hawk, snapping his eyes wide.
“I’m not gonna kill you.” Hawk fished a folding knife from his pocket. “Not yet, anyway.”
He cut the ropes binding the contrabandista like a frog caught in a cat’s cradle, then tied the man’s knife-hand behind his back. He kicked him out over the tailgate, and Monjosa hit the ground with a wail and a thump.
Hawk jumped down from the wagon and, grabbing his prisoner by the collar, half dragged and half led him into the brush beside the trail. He gave the man a shove, and Monjosa stumbled and fell between a rock and cholla cactus. He twisted around and rose onto an elbow.
The fear was gone from his eyes, replaced with raw fury, his upper lip curled in a sneer.
“I kill you for that, you bastard,” he said softly.
“Take a
piss and get back in the wagon. You try to run, I’ll back-shoot you.”
Hawk stepped back and reached into his shirt pocket for his makings sack. As Monjosa climbed to his feet and the sergeant went about tending his coffee fire, grumbling against the throbbing in his head, Hawk troughed a brown paper between his fingers and sprinkled a line of chopped tobacco along the fold. Ten feet away, muttering angrily, Monjosa heaved himself to his feet one-handed.
Suddenly, as Hawk was about to pull the drawstring on his makings sack closed with his teeth, Monjosa wheeled. The contrabandista bolted toward him, snarling and shouting, “I empty your belly for you, pig!”
He dropped the knife-hand he’d somehow freed from his back and began to swing it up in an underhanded throwing motion, gritting his teeth. Hawk stumbled back in surprise and, dropping his makings sack and the half-built quirley, threw his hands forward, palms down.
The knife whipped toward his belly in a blur of sun-reflected steel. Hawk caught it three inches in front of the buckle on his cartridge belt, wrapping both his hands around Monjosa’s false wrist, just behind the razor-edged blade.
Monjosa grunted and shuffled his boots toward Hawk, his face stretched bizarrely. Wrapping his hands firmly around his attacker’s stout, wooden wrist, Hawk stepped into him and managed to get the blade tilted upward, away from his own belly.
Monjosa snarled and cursed. Spittle frothed on his mustached lips, and his nostrils flared. He was as strong as a bulldog. Hawk couldn’t shove the knife away from him, but, his strength working against Monjosa’s, the knife rose straight up between them, the savagely curved tip moving toward their grimacing faces that were now about seven inches apart.
Behind Hawk, boots thumped. Ironside shouted, “Monjosa!” and there was the ratcheting click of a cocking gun hammer.
“At ease, Sergeant,” Hawk ordered through gritted teeth, his shoulders and arms bulging as he wrestled his opponent, who was nearly as tall, broad, and powerful as Hawk himself.
Border Snakes Page 21