“No ketchum on the Macho last night,” he remarked. “Anything hot on your beat?”
Hank shook his head.
“In that case you better ride in with me today. The chief—” McPhail hated to lie, but if old Hank was guilty, as he suspected, of tipping off the smugglers, he’d better get him in to the Chief without arousing his suspicions. The Chief would give Hank his chance to explain, but as for his own report, he’d have to make it. The Border Patrol couldn’t survive double-crossing in its own ranks.
“The Chief,” lied McPhail, “wants all hands in for a confab, see?”
Old Hank grunted. McPhail thought he looked nervous.
“All right,” he said. “Soon’s we git some breakfast. I was goin’ in anyhow, today or tomorrow.”
He mumbled something about personal business.
On the trail in, old Hank rode slumped down in his saddle, his grizzled face gloomy. After awhile he began to talk.
“Don’t never git married, Mac,” he said. “An’ if yuh do, don’t have no kids; an’ if yuh do, don’t have no boys; but if yuh do, by God, whale the hell out of ’em, Mac, whilst they’re, still little enough to learn somethin’ frum it! Raise ’em right, fer if yuh don’t—”
Gragg McPhail, turning in surprise at Hank’s unexpected jump into the subject of matrimony, topped a little hill all unprepared for what smacked up into his face from down in the next draw. It was the crack—crack—crack of rifle fire. The bullets fell a little short, sputting into the gravelly sand just ahead of him.
One look as he whirled his horse back out of sight, told him what was up. They had stumbled onto a southbound pack train loaded with firearms and ammunition, like as not, to be traded in Mexico for dope or liquor; four pack mules and four riders with them, all in broad daylight! Even as he yanked out his rifle to answer their fire, McPhail remembered grimly that this was on Silent Hank’s beat. It confirmed his suspicions.
Of course, he couldn’t count on Hank any more now. He would be tackling them practically single-handed, for like as not old Hank would only stall at helping him, just to make a showing. Then suddenly he realized that Hank was clearing out—already getting out of his sight.
For half a second he hesitated over whether to go after him or the smugglers. Then with a grim, short-clipped oath, he kicked the hooks to his horse, slanted up the ridge and crossed it. The next instant he was charging down a shallow draw toward the smugglers, partially protected from their bullets by its banks.
The pack mules were on the move now, at a high gallop, rushed forward by the whacking of two riders behind them. The other two smugglers had dropped into the gully and with their rifles speeding lead in the direction of the charging Border patrolman, were covering the retreat of their pack train.
McPhail reined to an abrupt stop, stepped down from his horse, flung himself flat behind a bank of the arroyo and opened fire in answer. He could not see the two men in hiding, so he sent his bullets whizzing after the two with the pack train.
Already they were out of easy range. McPhail saw his first few shots miss. Then one of the pack mules went into a somersaulting tumble and lay kicking. Almost at the same instant McPhail became aware that somebody had opened fire on him from somewhere back in the sandhills to his right. He wondered if it could be old Silent Hank, throwing in with the smugglers against him. Even in the excitement the idea gave him a sort of a sinking, sorrowful ache inside, rather than anger. He had always liked Silent Hank—and respected him.
But Patrolman McPhail had no time now to give to his feelings. Bullets showered around him like hailstones. Apparently the hidden hombre back to the right, whether Hank Johns or a rear guard of the smugglers, was shooting with a six-gun, instead of a rifle, for his bullets were falling short. But with every volley they came closer. With no cover from that side, McPhail saw that he would have to move out. With a last shot from his position back of the bank, he leapt down to the arroyo bottom where his horse was and jumped into the saddle.
Sure-footed, jumping and zigzagging over the rough spots like a mountain goat, his horse sped down the side arroyo to the main draw. The shooting had stopped. McPhail could hear nothing except hoof sounds. When he came out into the open sand-flat, trying to watch both directions at once, his first glimpse showed him that all four of the smugglers, driving their remaining three pack mules before them, were fleeing at a gallop down the main draw Borderward.
It was like trying to aim at running jackrabbits, but McPhail nevertheless swung up his rifle, yet he did not fire. Almost simultaneously with the pow of a six-gun somewhere back of him, his eyes seemed to see a sudden ball of fire, then blackness. Down he tumbled, gun and all, onto the sand-flat. There was a hole in his hat where a sluggish bullet had torn through, struck his head at an angle and glanced off, leaving a little blood-oozing rip in his scalp.
* * * *
It was nearly five minutes before McPhail came to. When finally he staggered to his feet, his head throbbed so that the gripping pain seemed to clamp his eyes down into a blurred squint. Even if he had been able to see clearly, he would have caught no sight of the smugglers. They were gone.
Dazed as he was, McPhail was not too woozy to feel his former pity for old Silent Hank changing now to an anger that was as grim and cold as a blue gun barrel. He wanted to kick himself for not disarming the treacherous patrolman and taking him in a prisoner—even dodging these smugglers and passing them up in order to make sure that the Patrol should be rid of its snitcher. But now there was nothing left to do but take one more whack at these smugglers.
He didn’t know how long he had been “out,” but there was still a faint haze of dust in the air where the last smuggler had passed from the sand-flat down into another hilly break-off. His horse had not left him. There still might be a chance to catch them. McPhail wobbled to his horse, got on somehow, hung to the saddle horn with one hand and rein-lifted him into a lope with the other. Within a hundred yards the gait became a dead run. In another jiffy he was joggling down the steep trail where the broad sand-flat funnels into a narrow arroyo.
Two minutes later he heard shots ahead. If he had been himself he would have slowed up and approached cautiously. As it was he rounded a curve to gallop almost headlong into the midst of the smugglers, five of them now. Even so, the advantage of surprise was his more than theirs. They had left him for dead back on the sand-flat—one “maldito oficial” out of the way for good. But the chief reason that McPhail’s charge hit them on their blind side was that they were busy. Crouching behind boulders and bushes, they were talking back sharply to some hidden gun on down ahead behind a cliffy narrows in the arroyo.
McPhail left his horse in a swift leap that sent him tumbling, but his hand grabbed the rifle from its scabbard as he leapt. In a tenth second he was on his feet, shooting. One smuggler, turning to fire at him, went down with a thirty-thirty slug through his middle. A second leaped up to scramble for cover on the opposite side of his boulder, and the next second a bullet from the hidden gun down at the narrows stretched him out.
McPhail wondered grimly who the hell his help could be coming from. At any rate he—or they—savvied how to shoot. It wouldn’t be long now. Just three of them left and—
All at once bullets began to spang into the rocks from behind him. McPhail’s right leg went suddenly out from under him. He felt a sickish sensation at the pit of his stomach. They’d get him now—got him already, maybe. He shook his head violently as if to clear it of its foggishness, and raised himself to his elbow. The crouching figure of a man, a familiar figure, appeared from up the draw. McPhail knew him well enough. Behind him came another. McPhail knew him, too. There was no doubt which side of the fight they were on. One of them had furnished him a bullet wound already. But evidently, seeing him go down, they thought they had him.
Swiftly they edged in behind a brush clump. McPhail eased up his carbine, centered the brush clump in his sights and pulled the trigger. A man leapt out like a shot rabbit an
d fell prone.
McPhail felt a grim satisfaction at the success of his blind shot. But he knew now that, for him, the jig was up. They would be closing in on him in a jiffy from both directions. If he could have gotten up he would have preferred to take it standing, but he couldn’t. A bullet spurted up the sand at his very nose.
Like a suddenly loosened log on a steep hillside, McPhail rolled over and over. In a jiffy he was over the edge of a pebbly little pothole in the arroyo, and down he went. Of course, they’d get him sooner or later, but from here he might well crack down one more of them first as they came.
Even in this last-minute pinch that seemed to promise him certain death, McPhail felt strangely relieved in one respect: at any rate, he had been saved the painful duty of reporting suspicion of one of his own comrades for treachery.
Then another thought occurred to him: the smugglers might get him in another minute or two, but he wasn’t dead yet. And as long as he lived duty was duty. Grimly he fished for notebook and pencil, found them and started to write. Maybe some of the boys would find the notebook when they checked up on this battle—which they would be bound to do within the next few hours—or days. He would make his report and stick the whole notebook under a rock. He began to write, hurriedly.
The sounds of shooting, lulled for a moment, broke out anew up in the draw. McPhail felt himself getting dizzy again.
“Attacked smuggler train,” he scrawled. “Think Hennepin, Solano outfit. Check up close on Patrolman Johns, because—”
There was a sudden movement up beyond the edge of the pothole. McPhail dropped pencil and notebook and tried to grip his forty-five. It wobbled in his hand. The end of a rifle barrel appeared over the edge of the bank. But Patrolman McPhail did not see it. A dancing wall of dizziness seemed to spring up before his eyes. The world went black. The forty-five dropped from his hand. He did not even hear the pow of a forty-five somewhere up over the bank, perhaps not two dozen yards away.
When Patrolman McPhail came to, somebody was mopping his forehead with a wet bandanna. The face that bent over him was grizzled, weather-lined. It was haggard and streaked with blood. There were other streaks down from the eyes, too, that looked like tears might have made them. It was the face of old Silent Hank Johns. He grinned a sort of wry, twisted grin as McPhail opened his eyes, and patted him gently on the back. But he said nothing.
“Hank? Hank? You—you—I thought you—” McPhail’s puzzlement showed plainly through the grime on his face.
“Yeah, I did. Ditched yuh. Then I seen frum a ridgetop back aways how yuh flew into ’em all by yerself an’ it kinder got me. So I circled south an’ headed ’em off here. Aimed to hold ’em, drive ’em back or go to hell tryin’. When you showed up, I figgered we had ’em—till ol’ Bat an’ Tito come bustin’ in back of yuh frum up the draw. Then I seen yuh go down. That’s when I started crawl in’ up on ’em. Jest in time, too, I reckon. Ol’ Tito was jest pokin’ his gun over the edge here to pot yuh, when I plugged him. He was the last ’un. We cleaned ’em out, Mac—all seven of ’em!”
There was a strange mournful note in old Hank’s voice.
He helped McPhail out of the sinkhole, set him up against some rocks and dressed his wound. Then he went shuffling, stoop-shouldered, among the dead smugglers. Six of the bodies he let lie. One, that of the first smuggler McPhail had brought down, he picked up and placed tenderly under the shade of a brush clump. He took off his own shirt and spread it gently over the dead boy’s face. Then he came back to McPhail. He looked older and more haggard than ever, but his bloodshot eyes looked his fellow patrolman square in the eye.
“Listen, Mac,” he said. “I seen what you wrote in your notebook. Yuh had it figgered right, Mac. I’ve been tippin’ off to Bat an’ Tito. Twice. Throwed ’em the word on Macho Gully, last evenin’. Soon’s you kin ride, yuh better take me in to the Chief. I was goin’ in today myself to resign. But now I’ll take my medicine. You’ll git a promotion outa this an’—”
“Damn the promotion!” McPhail’s eyes were steady, too, now, and beginning to clear. “What I want to know is why the hell yuh done it? You ain’t the kind that’d—”
“Mac,” interrupted Hank Johns, “if you had a son that’d growed up wrong, took to outlawin’, smugglin’, maybe shot a man or two, an’ somebody—say, like Bat Hennepin—was goin’ to deliver him in if yuh didn’t come through with a snitch or two fer him, an’ you knowed it’d mean hangin’ fer the kid if yuh didn’t come through, then—”
“You mean that’s him—that you just covered up?” McPhail nodded gravely toward the dead smuggler lying under old Hank’s shirt.
Silent Hank nodded.
McPhail reached for the notebook that Hank had stuck back in his pocket. He ripped out the leaf he had written on down in the sinkhole. Facing almost certain death, Patrolman McPhail had considered duty above his own personal feelings. Now he tore the little sheet of paper into bits. Somehow, now that he understood, now that the cause of Silent Hank’s defection lay dead here on the sands of the Border, now that Hank Johns stood ready to go in and take his medicine like a man, Patrolman McPhail changed his mind. He did not believe that there would be any more smuggler tips from this man who, knowing his own son was among them, had, in the pinch, headed off these smugglers, stepped out into the midst of their smoking guns and wiped them out.
Patrolman McPhail decided to take this matter of his duty into his own hands.
EL TIRO DI GRACIA, by Colin Cameron
In he sun-baked flag station of Palomas, Bob Gilroy sat on the edge of the loading chute of the cattle corrals and smoked a brown paper cigarette. Half an hour before, the crawling freight had picked up the five carloads of steers he and his ranch hands had loaded that afternoon, and his Mexican foreman and three cowhands had accompanied the cattle southward to Torreon. Presently, after resting, smoking and cogitating, Bob Gilroy would also depart, heading home straight across country for his rancho. It was a forty-mile ride and a rough one at best.
Meanwhile, he watched the languid preparations of Juan Urbalejo, his Yaqui herd boss, and two Indian cooks make ready to depart for the hacienda. It would be an all-night drive for them, with their two mules and the chuck wagon.
His muscles relaxed in pleasing lassitude, his Stetson hat pulled well down across his eyes to shade them from the westering sun, Bob Gilroy leaned back against the lip of the loading chute and meditated pleasantly on the fact that he had prodded two hundred bawling longhorns into the dinky cattle cars of the Mexican National that day. And that was that. A smile touched his lean, weather-bitten face as he tossed away his cigarette and climbed stiffly down from the corral.
Making his final notations and checks in his notebook of the shipment, he gave a few last directions to the Yaqui range boss, saddled his pony and prepared to depart. He would cut straight across country, lessening the forty miles to his rancho considerably. But his way would lie across that brassy oven of Coahuila known as El Valle del Diabolo, a harsh, unlovely and lonely plain, dotted with sage, cactus and yerba santa, and home of prowling coyotes and lobos. Hard pan it was, an impassable slough in wet weather, now arid and parched by a splintering sun.
Gilroy lifted his pony into an easy lope. Faraway to the west loomed his home beacon, two solitary buttes on the horizon that reared their jagged heads into the sunset. They rose crimson as blood in the dying rays of the sun; long lances of gold lay across the valle, the scent of sage and yerba santa came pleasantly to his nostrils. A Shambo thrush whistled faintly, far across the plain.
Gilroy filled his lungs with the scents of the sage as he swung rapidly across the pan. He was getting a little showing for his two hard years in Mexico; that shipment of steers should bring him a pretty penny in Torreon. And besides, he was thoroughly pleased with the bargain he had made for his pony.
A damn good bargain, that. He certainly liked its comfortable, easy gait—this little roan who was an Irish hunter crossed with a Hermosillo range pony. Idly he
wondered why Doc Koons had sold it to him so cheap; had sold it at all, in fact. Doc was a pretty astute dealer where horse-flesh was concerned, and he made shrewd bargains over there in his corrals at Monclova. And fifty dollars. . . . Oh, well, it was an ill wind that had blown him some good, at any rate. Doc probably needed the money; in debt again, he supposed. Tugging his hat lower across his forehead, Gilroy leisurely rolled and lit a cigarette.
Might as well try the little cow-chaser out a bit; he hadn’t had him long. Urging the roan into a faster gallop, he bent it to the right and left, using his weight alone, never touching the reins. The horse responded without a fault. Sitting well back in his saddle, he suddenly slowed down with a firm rein. And again a smile spread over his bronzed face. Koons had schooled the animal perfectly. But why had he sold it so suspiciously cheap? Gilroy shook his head in mystification. Doc was persistently short of dinero—anyhow, it didn’t matter. He had the pony.
Leaning forward, he patted the pony’s neck. And its forelegs went from under it as if suddenly lassoed by a rope. Gilroy had one fleeting glimpse of the hard pan leaping up to smash his face and swiftly flung himself backward, tugging at the reins with all his strength.
The pony floundered along on its nose and knees for a few yards and then recovered its balance. Gilroy pulled up and glanced behind him for the crack or outcrop that had thrown his mount. There was none; the track was as smooth as a garden path. His face darkened with anger, an oath slipped from his lips as swift realization dawned.
Now he knew. Koons had sold him a “pup,” a confirmed stumbler. They were the curse and bane of cowmen. He should have suspected, known this—an unblemished, well-trained, good-looking three-year old for fifty dollars! A cursed pony that tripped over its own shadow! He would get his own back for this—when next he saw the astute Koons in his corral at Monclova.
Carefully he examined the roan. Its nose was a trifle grazed, but its knees were unbroken, and only slightly dusted. As long as the damned death-trap did not actually hit a stone it could go on falling on the plain three times a day for the rest of its life without showing a betraying mark, he thought savagely. He eyed the pony uncertainly.
The Western Megapack - 25 Classic Western Stories Page 16