The Red Sombrero
Page 14
The Mexican looked up at him curiously. “There is something wrong?” he asked, passing the container beneath his nose and sniffing cautiously.
Reno’s hand came against the mozo’s shoulder and squeezed it. “No, amigo, it’s the kind of thing to make a fool feel seven feet tall but I’ve decided to have a try at being a man for a change.”
“Man?” Juanito said. “What kind of man is that?”
“The kind my family could approve of.”
• • •
The wind carried a faint sound of shouting across the yard and the both of them stiffened. Reno, remembering the horses he had heard, bent his head beside the fat man’s, staring through the broken glass into the outside darkness. The guard’s black shape was turned toward the house and from the shadow of the gate a man’s voice called, “What passes?”
“Quien sabe?” answered Felipe, raising up on his toes as though to see better. “Three come from the house.” He said something else which the wind snatched away as he moved out of their sight past the corner of the cabin.
Juanito caught Reno’s arm. “Where do you go?”
Reno pulled away. He got the windows open. The Mexican said, “You have no boots and the ground is covered with glass.” He levered his weight out of the bunk and came into the wind’s raw breath to stand beside the American.
They stared at each other through an interval of complete silence.
A door slammed someplace and the fat man nodded his head, understanding. Dropping a hand, he bent with sundry gruntings and, breathing heavily, came erect. He reached out and found the American’s fist, pressing into it something that was warm, hard and heavy. “The gun of her father. With God, amigo.”
• • •
Cordray, in the general confusion, slipped into his office, quietly closing the door behind him. With an ear against the panel he listened tensely until assured his absence had gone unremarked. Carefully then he felt his way across the room, eyes stabbing the shadows, mind prowling the wreckage of his plans for something stable.
He sank into his chair, trembling and more shaken than he would ever have believed possible. “Damn him — damn him — damn him!” he cried bitterly; and then his head came up to a sudden thought. The signed paper — it was still in the room where the man in the crash of his own schemes had thrown it… .
Cordray’s mind started working. It might not yet be too late to retrieve at least something. And the reward on this bastard was good dead or alive and there was a gun in this desk, the gun he’d taken from Reno. The one with RD stamped into the butt.
The girl was in her room. Tuerto and someone else — the second courier? — had gone clanking and muttering out into the night. Sierra would be alone with his fuming… .
The desk drawer was locked and Tuerto had taken his keys but there was a broad knife above the corner fireplace. He got it and went to work on the lock. A few moments later it snapped. He eased open the drawer and put his hand on the pistol.
His lips peeled back off his teeth in the darkness as he pictured Sierra with five bullet holes through him, a beautiful vision that made his blood race with triumph.
He got out of his chair, crossed the room to the door. But with his hand on the latch he went suddenly still, hearing with caught breath the nearing rumor of horses. Then he smiled again bleakly, remembering the five men Sierra had sent off with Bennie to bring back the gold from the linecamp. Good! He’d have that, too. This would be his vaqueros under Paco Pedrazos.
He chuckled deep in his throat and quietly lifted the latch.
• • •
Reno knew there were more dorados with Sierra than the five he had sent off with Bennie to the linecamp, yet he stood by the corner of the bunkhouse several moments without seeing anyone. The brightening east behind the shapes of the Portrillos warned that dawn was not far off; and he was filled with impatience to come to grips with this thing. But he knew better than to rush in blindly.
There was a shifting blotch of heavier darkness in the gloom near the edge of the light from the windows, and he turned that way for this was where the door was that opened into the dining-room. He was halfway across the yard when the falling wind brought the hoof sound of riders and he stopped a moment, listening. Seven or eight, he guessed. Didn’t seem to be hurrying. He lengthened his stride and got near enough to discover the dark blotch was a ground hitched horse — the same one, likely, that second courier had come on.
Those riders coming up from the south were getting closer; he could catch the blurred murmur of voices now. Probably the dorados who had gone off with Bennie. He had a moment of surprise that he could think of their trip and purpose so completely without interest.
He guessed, feeling desperate, it would be touch and go trying to get the girl out of here; and that was when he saw the shape come out from the shadows of the kitchen wall moving into the yard on a line with the bunkhouse.
He didn’t want to go after the fellow. He wanted to find Linda, put her on a fast horse and get her headed out of this. There was no way of going about the thing cleverly and, even if there were, he hadn’t the time — not with that bunch coming up from the linecamp. He half lifted the pistol and, scowling, brought it down again, knowing that to fire would be to give the show away. Knowing likewise if the fellow reached the bunkhouse what would happen.
A bitter twisting fury was in him but he couldn’t leave this fellow loose to rouse the camp. Especially with no way of guessing how long it might take him to locate Linda. Even with that graying strip of sky in the east — perhaps because of it, the starlight was tricky, and in the deeper gloom of the whooshing cottonwoods he thought for a moment he had lost that elusive shape. Half panicked, gun tightly clenched in the grip of his fist, he abandoned caution and cut directly for the shack.
Almost running, he ducked around the bole of the grove’s thickest tree and the shape was abruptly in front of him, blackly limned against the grayness, whirling with a sharp inhalation of breath even as Reno lunged to bring that lifted gun smashing down.
Some belated combination of intuition and awareness caused him to deflect the heavy barrel. They crashed into each other, struggling and gasping in a welter of arms and legs. “Quit it, Linda — ” he panted, and she cried: “Reno!” and clung to him, sobbing and shaken.
He held her so for a long precious moment with the scent of her hair biting into his nostrils and the goodness of the feeling like a coming home deep inside him. A sharp challenge from the gate fetched them back to reality. “Quien es? Who is it?” a voice cried, and crashing over it and through it came the tumult of guns. A horse screamed and there was shouting and muzzle light winked from a forward corner of the house.
“Quick!” Reno growled in her ear — “the stables!” They broke and ran for it.
They were less than forty seconds from the entrance when gunflame belched from the black of its maw. No shriek of lead whined past them but Reno swerved the girl and they ran toward the blotch of the horse he’d seen earlier, the one before the house that stood hitched to the ground. It was shaking its head and trembling with fright but it didn’t shy away and Reno saw, inwardly groaning, that all the run was beaten out of it.
He caught Linda’s arm and shoved her panting toward the door, blackly cursing the bitter fate which had forced them back to the very place he wanted her away from. He snarled when they found the massive door was bolted shut. He caught her about the waist and rushed her breathless toward the kitchen with bullets knocking adobe from the plastered wall behind them.
Luck found the kitchen door unlatched and they burst into the room with the uproar still raging. “You all right?” Reno gruffed.
He saw the bob of her head against the gray rectangle of the window. She gripped his arm. “I was on my way to see if I — ” and broke off, conscious of the quiet; they both caught the flutter of departing hoofs. Reno brushed her aside, bending to peer out the window, the shape of his eyes narrowing down as he watched.
> “Whatever it was,” he grunted, “it’s finished. Those gents got all they wanted of that stuff.”
“It must have been the Tadpole vaqueros,” Linda thought. “It couldn’t have been anyone else unless rustlers …” She looked at him doubtfully. “Why are you smiling?”
“Aren’t they one and the same?” Reno’s lifting hand pointed. “They’ve got back their gold — Sierra’s bunch. That one’s Tuerto. See — there comes Felipe. Guess he was doing that shooting from the stables.”
“What will he do now? Sierra, I mean.” She told him what had happened after he’d gone, about Columbus and Palomas, of Perron hanging in the plaza.
“Go back to the brush, I reckon. Back to being plain bandit. Kind of too bad in a way. He’s pretty violent but …”
“Don Luis — ”
“Yeah,” he said, turning. “That reminds me.”
Sudden fright looked out of her eyes. “Reno — No!”
“I’ve got a little bone to pick with that gentleman.” He considered her a moment, wholly grave yet somewhat wistful. His nod was brusque almost to curtness. Pulling open the door he stepped into the hall, pistol in hand, eyes hard as glass.
The low growl of Sierra’s voice came to Reno and Reno’s score against Cordray, in the light of problems posed by Sierra, appeared extravagantly childish. Sierra would take care of Tadpole’s owner as he undoubtedly intended to take care of a certain gringo colonel, but there might yet be a chance to get Linda clear.
The pale gleam of a lamp shining out of the dining-room cast a pattern of shadow across the floor and opposite wall. It was Sierra’s abrupt mention of Cordray’s stabled horses which suddenly inspired Reno and he was turning, thinking to rejoin Linda, when the pattern of shadow changed, assuming deadly significance.
Two strides carried Reno into the arch. Sierra was still talking. He had his head thrust out of a window. It was Don Luis whose shape had changed the pattern of shadow. He was crouched with a lifted pistol, and as Sierra brought his head back inside the room the barrel tipped to grim focus.
There was no time for finesse, for the niceties. “Cordray!” Reno shouted. The ranchman spun, face twisted, furious. Both guns spoke at once but Reno’s aim was true.
Sierra stared at the fallen man and then looked fishily at Reno. He brushed past the American, quitting the room without a word, spurs harshly jangling. He was back in less than a minute, shoving Linda ahead of him. Black eyes bored into Reno’s with a glare that was like hot coals, and swept a look at the frightened girl. “This is your man?”
“Yes,” she said clearly, defiantly. “Yes.”
Sierra, suddenly chuckling, shouted: “Tuerto! Fetch the priest!”
THE END
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Copyright © 1954 by Nelson Nye. Copyright © renewed 1982 by Nelson Nye.
Published by arrangement with Golden West Literary Agency. All rights reserved.
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This is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
ISBN 10: 1-4405-4886-2
ISBN 13: 978-1-4405-4886-4
eISBN 10: 1-4405-4884-6
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-4884-0