Thunder Over the Superstitions

by Peter Brandvold

  CHAPTER 2

  THE RIO CONCHO KID RIDES

  The big Mexican must not have heard the Kid’s indictment, for he slid his long-barreled Colt from its holster and was thumbing the hammer back when the Kid’s own revolver roared like close thunder, causing the earthen floor to jump and the ceiling to buffet.

  “Ah, Mariett-ahhhh!” the barman cried, lurching straight up out of his chair, still half asleep.

  Dust sifted from between the herringbone pattern of cottonwood and mesquite branches to the floor.

  The big Mexican, Chacin, squealed pig-like and fell back against a table, clutching the hole in the dead center of his chest. The hole was pumping blood like a geysering spring. He got his boots beneath him, held himself upright though listing badly to his left, regarding the Kid with shock and fury blazing like lamps in his dark eyes.

  The girl backed away from him, covering her mouth with both her gloved hands. Chacin squeezed his eyes closed and fell with a heavy thump to the earthen floor, and lay with one leg quivering as he finished dying.

  “Dios!” exclaimed the barman, Paco Alejandro Dominguez, crossing himself as he looked over the bar to the big man on the floor.

  The Kid clicked his Schofield’s hammer back and aimed at the two men who’d entered with Chacin. They both stood in crouches, hands on their holstered weapons, staring at the Kid apprehensively. One of them was slowly inching his walnut-gripped Remington up out of its black-leather holster thonged low on his right thigh. His hand was shaking.

  He stared at the Kid’s gun. Smoke slithered like a little gray worm from the round, dark maw.

  Chacin’s men looked at each other, wide-eyed. Then, keeping their hands on their holstered weapons but keeping the weapons in their holsters, they shuffled backward through the batwings to fade away in the dark, wet night.

  “Kid!” said Dominguez, his rheumy eyes round with fear. He jutted a gnarled finger at the big, dead Mexican on the floor. In Spanish, he said, “That is Chacin Velasco, General Constantin San Gabriel’s right-hand man!”

  The Kid turned to the girl who was still staring down at the dead man, both hands closed over her mouth. She turned to him slowly, lowering her hands. She said in a voice the Kid could barely hear above the pattering rain, “Muchas gracias, senor. It is unfortunate that I cannot give you my life, which I owe you for saving, because I am afraid I have just cost you yours.”

  Boots thumped on the porch. The Kid turned toward the front of the cantina once again, just as Chacin’s two men, apparently realizing that they themselves were dead men unless they killed the man who’d killed Chacin, came bursting through the batwings like Brahma bulls through a loading chute.

  Their gloved hands were filled with iron.

  The Kid’s Schofield thundered twice, sending both men bounding back through the doors, triggering their pistols into the cantina floor, and into the cool, wet night. They dropped with heavy smacking thuds, causing the horses to whinny and nicker and pull against their reins.

  The Kid turned to the girl who stood smiling at him. The smile irritated him nearly as much as his having to kill three men just now when he was merely wanting to drink himself drunk and then to stagger out to Dominguez’s stable and to sleep long and hard, old Antonia’s somnolent breaths lulling him into peaceful dreams.

  “What the hell is this about, senorita?”

  She still had that nettling smile on her face. Her eyes were dreamy. “It’s about love,” she said. “What else is there?”

  The Kid scratched the back of his head with his gun barrel. He was beginning to think she was soft in her thinker box. “Huh?”

  “Love is a powerful thing. There will be more men where these men came from,” she said, sobering and glancing at Chacin who lay still now in death. “I apologize, but it is true. If you help me to safety, you will be well rewarded.”

  Her eyes were smoky, insinuating, vaguely desperate, and she thrust her shoulders back slightly, impulsively, like a girl who knew exactly how desirable she was and used it to her best advantage.

  The Kid looked at Dominguez. The old barkeep arched a brow at him.

  “Get your horse,” the Kid told the girl, breaking the “topbreak” Schofield open to reload. “I’ll fetch mine from the barn and meet you on the trail.”

  When he’d replaced the revolver’s spent cartridges, he dropped it into its holster, snapped the keeper thong over the hammer, and walked toward the cantina’s back door, casting incredulous glances at the beautiful girl behind him. He went out into the misty darkness laced with the smell of pinyon smoke and wet sage. He went into the adobe stable flanking the cantina—it was little more than an ancient, brush-roofed ruin—and found old Antonia snoring softly in her stable by a pile of aromatic hay.

  A moody sorrel with gray spots sprayed across her hindquarters and a white star between her copper eyes, Antonia blew and stomped, cranky about being saddled so late, and in this weather, to boot! And the Kid said, “Know just how you feel, girl.”

  When he’d stuffed his old-model Winchester down into his elk hide saddleboot trimmed with Chiricahua beads, he mounted up and rode out, Antonia’s hooves clomping dully on the wet ground. The girl sat her horse, a rangy Appaloosa, near some rocks and brush along the trail. The Kid saw her outline against the stars that were trying to break through the thin clouds that rolled across the sky like ink-stained tufts of gauze.

  “Come on.” He said it quietly, but the moody night was so strangely silent that it sounded like a yell. “I know a place.”

  CHAPTER 3

  LA PISTOLA SAYS IT BEST

  A long, keening wail rose on the night’s damp wind, ensconcing all of Hacienda del la General Constantin San Gabriel in wretched torment and poignant misery.

  Around the hacienda’s walled grounds, the peons prayed in their tiny, thatch-roofed hovels while babies cried, dogs howled, goats brayed, and pinyon logs snapped in fieldstone hearths, the gray smoke ribboning like halfhearted prayers up sooty chimneys.

  Inside the sprawling, cavern-like, tile-roofed adobe casa, the General himself lay moaning in blood-soaked sheets. He groaned as he chomped down on a swatch of leather cut from a boot as his gray-bearded, one-eyed attendant, Juan Mendoza, stitched the nasty knife wound in his side.

  Kneeling in a dark corner near a crackling stove, Padre Vicente, cloaked in ragged shadows, muttered over his prayer beads while a fat black cat washed its face on a window ledge beside him.

  “That bitch! That bitch!” the General moaned. “I demand her beautiful, conniving head on a platter!”

  The priest’s muttering grew louder as he clutched his silver crucifix in both hands before him, occasionally pressing his lips to it.

  “Si, si,” said Juan Mendoza, pinching up the skin around the ragged, bloody wound. “Chacin will bring her kicking and screaming, General. She will get her comeuppance for what she did to you. Imagine such an insult . . . on your wedding night, no less!”

  Mendoza squinted his lone eye, poked the fire-blackened point of his needle through the pinched skin, and drew the catgut taut.

  The General threw his bearded head back on his pillow and bellowed at the herringbone rafters.

  “The worst of it is,” he cried, “I loved that red-haired bitch!”

  When Mendoza had finished stitching the wound and was dabbing at it with arnica, hoof thuds rose beyond the window. Horses splashed through puddles and blew and shook their bridle bits.

  “Chacin!” the General hissed, lifting his head from the pillow and staring out the arched window. His eyes glowed with emotion as he stared into the night. He rose still higher and yelled in his weak, pain-pinched voice, “Chacin—report to me! Did you bring her?”

  Outside, there was only the clomping and snorting of the horses beyond the wall of the General’s wet garden.

  “Chacin!”

  General San Gabriel flung his covers away and dropped his pale feet to the cold flagstone floor.

  “General!” admonis
hed Juan Mendoza, placing a hand on the General’s shoulder. “You must rest!”

  The General brushed the man’s hand away and heaved himself up off the bed, gritting his teeth against the searing pain in his side, where that bitch stuck the knife in just when he’d disrobed her fine body and was going to reward her with his own ...

  He stood, his broad torso bare, and grabbed his fleece-lined, red velvet robe off a chair back. The General was a tall, regal man with an impeccably trimmed mustache and goatee, hawk nose, and close-set, flinty eyes—the hard, shrewd eyes of a veteran of the bloody Mexican-American War and many, even bloodier battles against the hated Apache and Yaqui Indios.

  For all of his sixty-two years, the General’s coal-black hair and beard owned not a single strand of gray. His body was straight and, in spite of a slight paunch, as hard and sinewy-strong as that of an old warhorse.

  With Mendoza and Padre Vicente hovering nervously around him, voicing their objections, the General drew the robe around his lean hips, and stepped into a pair of wool-lined doeskin sandals. He grabbed a Navy Colt conversion .36 off a low table beside his favorite, brocaded chair, quickly checked the loads, and dropped the brass-framed piece into a deep pocket of his robe.

  He walked, cursing under his breath, through an arched door that gave access to his garden that was impeccably cultivated by the peons who’d come with the land he’d been granted by the government in Mexico—thirty-thousand acres of prime grazing land as payment for his near-lifelong service in the Mexican army.

  His slippers clacked and scuffed against the flags as, holding one hand to the freshly stitched wound, he shuffled across the dripping garden and through an opening in the six-foot-high adobe wall into the soggy, muddy yard bordered by the hacienda’s several barns, the bunkhouse, and many pole corrals.

  Lights from the peasants’ shacks shone down the southern hill in the wooly darkness. A fine mist continued to fall, though several stars winked dully through the clouds.

  Several riders sat their horses in front of the bunkhouse on the far side of the broad dirt yard from the General—part of the posse he’d sent after his bride. The riders were speaking in conspiratorial tones to four other vaqueros who stood smoking on the bunkhouse’s brush-roofed gallery, the bunkhouse door open behind them and showing the flickering orange light of a fire.

  Breeze-brushed, rain-beaded lanterns hanging beneath the gallery roof tilted shadows to and fro.

  “Chacin!” the General bellowed, mindless of a pecan branch dribbling cold raindrops on his head and down his back. Mendoza and Padre Vicente stood in the opening in the wall behind him, cowering against the rain and hissing their disapproval of their patrõn’s impetuousness.

  The three riders whipped their sombrero-mantled heads toward the General. They glanced at each other dubiously and then, with a reluctant air, galloped over and stopped their horses in the hock-high mud before the patrõn. Chacin Velasco was not among them.

  Frowning, the General looked around. “Where is Chacin? Where is the girl? Where is my wife?”

  “General, Lieutenant Velasco is dead!” intoned the vaquero known as Rubio something-or-other, his eyes concealed by the broad brim of his flat-crowned straw sombrero. “Him and two others were gunned down by a man as fast as God’s angry fist from heaven!”

  As if to punctuate the man’s testimony, his horse whinnied and tried to buck, but the rider kept the wild-eyed barb on a tight rein.

  General San Gabriel glowered at the man, his pain-addled brain slow to comprehend the information. Lieutenant Chacin Velasco, his most loyal officer . . . dead? It couldn’t be. Chacin was not only proficient and quick with a gun, but he’d been the fiercest fighter the General had ever known. And he’d known a few!

  Chacin had killed more Apaches than even the General himself!

  “Nonsense,” the General said though the shocked, apprehensive stares of the men before him tempered his resolve. “You must be mistaken. Who could kill Chacin? Surely not that little bitch who stabbed me when my defenses were down!”

  Rubio and the man sitting the horse next to him both turned to the third rider, who said, “The Rio Concho Kid!”

  “Who?”

  The third rider repeated himself. And then in a few hastily spewed sentences, he filled his boss in on the rest of what had happened at Dominguez’s cantina barely two hours ago. He and his two partners had ridden up to the cantina, where they were to rendezvous with Chacin, only to find Chacin and the two other vaqueros dead as tombstones.

  Paco Alejandro Dominguez had informed them about who had done the killing only as an admonishment to let the man go. To go after such a man they’d need an army!

  General San Gabriel stared up at the riders before him, silently fuming. “And you three listened to that old reprobate and did nothing but turn tail and run?”

  “Jefe, you may not have heard of the Rio Concho Kid.” The stocky man sitting in the middle of the small group shook his head slowly, darkly. “He is very deadly. He was just back from the War Between the States when he killed thirteen soldiers—American soldiers!—and desecrated their bodies in the most horrible way imaginable. Very deadly, boss. The Rio Concho Kid. It is said that wherever he rides a demon follows in the form of a ghost-faced owl. This winged demon looks after the Kid.”

  “An owl?”

  “Si, si! The Apache bird of grace and deliverance. You see, the Kid avenged the murders of his Apache brothers and sisters—he is half Apache himself though he more resembles his Anglo father—and, once they were avenged, the spirits of the dead sent the owl to follow and protect him until the Kid, too, enters the world of the spirits.”

  “The Rio Concho Kid,” said the General, eyes sharp with fury. “Owls! Spirits! Apaches! Let me tell you what I think of you three, riding off and leaving Chacin’s body to molder in that fetid cantina . . . unavenged!”

  “No, General!” Rubio shouted as the old warrior pulled the Colt Navy out of his robe pocket and raised it, clicking the hammer back.

  Rubio raised both his hands in front of his face a half second before the General’s roaring Colt blew a hole through Rubio’s right hand and into his right cheek, just beneath his eye.

  Pow! Pow!

  The other two riders flew off the backs of their horses to hit the ground with wet thuds. All three horses wheeled, whinnying shrilly, and ran off across the yard, buck-kicking wildly.

  The General walked over to the stocky vaquero who was still writhing and groaning. “But why waste words when la pistola says it best?”

  He aimed the smoking Colt down at a slant and triggered a finishing round into the vaquero’s broad forehead.

  Behind the General, Mendoza stood hang-jawed in shock.

  Padre Vicente sobbed, clutching his crucifix to his breast and staring toward the stars as though praying that God had not witnessed this atrocity.

  Presently, hooves thudded.

  The General turned his attention from the dead men sprawled before him toward another rider, this one with his face bizarrely masked in white, riding into the yard from the north.

  CHAPTER 4

  SATAN RIDES TO US THIS EVENING, AMIGOS!

  The Rio Concho Kid brought his mare to a halt beside a jutting escarpment near the brow of a night-capped ridge. Leaning forward in his saddle, the Kid looked up at the top of the hill where an old Spanish mission church hulked, pale in the rain-scoured starlight.

  An orange light flashed in the church’s bell tower, over the black square of the broad open doorway. The Kid jerked his head back as the bullet hammered the front of the escarpment, inches from his face, the ricochet’s shriek nearly drowning the rifle’s flat report.

  Behind the Kid, the girl gasped.

  The Kid raised his own rifle and sent three rounds screeching toward the bell tower and the shadow crouching inside. The rifle in the bell tower flashed again, but this time the orange flame lapped toward the ground.

  As the Kid pulled his rifle down while pumping a
fresh round into the chamber, he watched as the shadow in the bell tower slumped. The bushwhacker screamed a Spanish epithet, and then he fell forward out of the bell tower, his black silhouette turning a somersault against the cream tan of the adobe church.

  There was a resounding thud and a splash as he struck a mud puddle. The lookout’s rifle clattered to the muddy ground beside him.

  Harsh voices rose from inside the church as did the metallic rasps of five or six rifles being cocked.

  The Kid leaned forward in his saddle once more, clamping his rifle under one arm, raising both hands to his mouth, and shouting in Spanish, “Flee, you dogs. The Rio Concho Kid’s come calling. He aims to take up residence here this evening, and he’s not in the mood for company!”

  A man’s girlish shriek echoed inside the church. Boots clomped. Spurs rang.

  A man shouted, “Satanas cabalgo con nosotros esta noche, amigos!”

  A shrill Spanish curse.

  More boot clomping and spur ringing. A few minutes later, while the Kid waited back behind the escarpment with the girl, hoof thuds rose from behind the church. They dwindled away to silence.

  “All right,” the Kid said, touching spurs to old Antonia’s flanks and riding out from behind the scarp and onto the ridge.

  The man he’d shot lay sprawled a few feet from the front of the block-like adobe church squaring its shoulders against the starry sky from which the storm clouds had disappeared. The damp air was cool and fresh, smelling like wild rose and cactus blossoms and brimstone.

  “You sure know how to clear out a place.” The girl stopped her horse suddenly. The Kid halted his own mount, turned toward her.

  It was hard to see her face in the darkness, but he thought she was appraising him dubiously. Her long, red hair fluttered in a vagrant breeze.

  “The Rio Concho Kid . . . ,” she whispered.

  Just then something gray flickered off to her left. She gasped as she turned her head and saw a ghost-faced owl wing past her. Its eyes glowed like umber coals in the darkness. The small, dove-gray bird gave its raucous, unsettling cry, which echoed harshly off the front of the church, before lighting on the front ledge of the bell tower and lifting a wing to preen.