by Ralph Cotton
The animals lunged forward against the heavy load, then righted themselves onto the thin trail. Prudence Cordell was a user, interested only in herself and her personal well-being. But then, what could she expect, Maria thought, knowing where this woman came from and how she’d made her living.
She glanced at Prudence, looking her up and down as the animals struggled forward with the heavy load. From now on, she would keep a closer eye on this woman. Maria would not abandon her—that was unthinkable. But from now on, Maria would have to be more careful. Now that she’d had a close look at Prudence’s true nature, she must not put herself in a position where Prudence’s actions would jeopardize both their lives.
The mules pressed on slowly and steadily. Prudence moved about restlessly on the wooden wagon seat and looked over her shoulder. “At this rate we might just as well get off and walk. Can’t you make these mules go a little faster?”
“No, not in the dark, on this kind of ground. It would be foolish to push them.” Once more she looked Prudence Cordell up and down. “How did you kill him without getting blood on your dress?”
“Who said I was wearing a dress?” A silence passed, then Prudence spoke in a low, confident tone. “I’m very good at what I do.” Her eyes met Maria’s. “It’s all about staying alive, isn’t it? Wouldn’t you have done the same?” When Maria didn’t answer, Prudence added, “Well, if you wouldn’t have…then maybe you’re not as tough as you think.” She gazed off into the darkness and absently rubbed her hands together in her lap.
Chapter 14
When the Parkers, McCord, Juan Verdere, and Paschal rode into the federale camp, a guard met them and escorted them to a stocky captain named Marsos Gravia, who had been sleeping on the hard ground beneath a cottonwood tree. Gravia awoke agitated, having already waited far too long for Zell to bring the ammunition. He rolled up from a dirty, rumpled blanket and smoothed a hand down the front of his wrinkled tunic, turning from the men long enough to put on his hat.
When the captain turned back and faced them, Payton Parker had stepped forward closer than the others. He grinned at the captain and said in an offhand manner, “Hate to wake you from your beauty sleep, but we need to get settled up on this ammo deal.”
The captain looked around at his aide and said, “Who the hell is this hombre? Why did you bring these men to me without first waking me?”
“But he rides with Juan Verdere. They say it is most urgent they met with you—”
“Don’t get your drawers in a knot, Capi-tan,” Payton Parker cut in. “Me and my partners don’t stand on too many formalities.”
The captain’s face grew tight, enraged. But he needed the ammunition, and he kept himself in check and wiped a hand over his face. “If you have the ammunition as promised, then let’s settle up and be on our way.” He looked from Payton Parker to Juan and Paschal. “Why is this so different than all the times before? I have never had to wait this long on Major Zell. Where is he?”
Once again, before Juan Verdere or Paschal could answer, Payton Parker cut in, “Zell is what you call indisposed at the moment. But it don’t matter. He sent us. So if ya want your bullets, hike your galluses and get a move on. We ain’t got all night.”
The captain glared at him, stunned with outrage.
McCord winced, seeing the harsh way Payton Parker was conducting himself with this officer. Juan looked at the captain with an apologetic shrug. “Very well,” the captain said, keeping himself in check. “We have the gold. All that remains is for us to—”
Again cutting him off, Payton Parker let out a short laugh. “All right then. I like you better than I thought I would, Cap-itan.”
“I hope you know who you’re fooling with here,” McCord whispered to Payton Parker as the captain turned and walked toward the horses, waving his men in with him.
“Can’t you see, they’re eating out of our hands?” Payton whispered back to him. “Let met handle these boys. They like it when you down-talk ’em.”
They all left the camp, and when they’d ridden a few miles out through the rugged rock-patched land, the captain had drawn Juan Verdere and Paschal up beside him at the head of his nine-man column. Ahead of them by twenty yards, Payton, Leo, and McCord rode on in the darkness, barely distinguishable in the pale moonlight.
“I do not like doing business this way,” the federale captain said to Juan Verdere and Paschal. He took a furtive look at his troops behind him, then across his horse’s rump where the heavy saddlebags carrying thirty thousand in gold coin lay. “What do we know about these Parkers? Why is Zell himself not here? This could be some sort of trick, eh?”
“If it is a trick, mon ami,” Paschal said, “it is not of our making. I can only apologize for this insolent pig and ask you not to judge us on his behavior. We are on your side, Captain Gravia, as always.”
“You better be,” the captain said, kicking his horse forward ahead of them. He rode in beside Payton Parker with a hand on his pistol. “How much farther is it.”
Payton Parker spit and waited a second before answering. Then he said, “A couple miles, more or less. You can ride that far without falling off your horse, can’t ya?” He snickered, spit again, then added, “Don’t worry, we ain’t out to double-cross the Mexican army, right, boys?” He grinned at Leo and McCord in the pale moonlight. They only nodded, McCord wishing Payton wouldn’t act so cocky with these men. So far things were going their way. He didn’t want Payton Parker blowing the deal by pushing too hard.
“Of course, if that gold is getting too heavy for yas,” a smug Payton Parker said to the captain, “we’ll be glad to take it now…save you the trouble.”
“You have a smart gringo mouth,” the federale captain huffed, then let his horse stay back a few steps.
“Why don’t you quit aggravating everybody, Payton,” McCord said as the captain fell back out of sight. “Why make things hard on us? We’re about to get everything we want here.”
“I can’t help it,” Payton chuckled. “It just does me good to know we’ve out-foxed everybody—Zell, Bowes, the whole damn bunch of them. Don’t that make you want to jump up and down?”
“No,” McCord said. “It makes me want to keep my mouth shut and see this thing through. It’s all about the gold for me. I didn’t do it just to see if I could out-fox somebody.”
“Yeah? Well, that’s the kind of humble thinking that’ll keep you from ever amounting to anything,” Payton Parker said. “Me and Leo here have slicked our share of folks the past year or two. Nothing humble about us, right, brother?”
“Come on, Payton,” Leo said in a hushed tone. “Keep your voice down. Somebody will hear ya back there.”
“Shit.” Payton adjusted his hat brim and gazed ahead into the darkness.
“He’s right, Payton,” McCord said. “This is serious stuff.”
“Naw, he ain’t right.” Payton looked over at McCord. “I’ll tell ya what’s wrong with my brother. He’s been scared for the past year, thinking there’s a big Negro hunting us down.” He laughed and moved his horse ahead of them a few steps.
“What’s he talking about?” McCord looked at Leo.
“Nothing,” Leo said with a curt nod. “Mind your own business.” They rode on the last mile and a half to the campsite.
Sitting on the ground with a wet handkerchief pressed to his shattered jaw, Delbert looked up as the men rode in and circled about him. He saw Payton Parker and the others crane upward in their saddles and look all around the glowing circle of fire. “My God, Delbert, where’s the wagon? Where’s the women?”
But Delbert’s crushed cheek kept him from raising his voice. He mumbled something as he rose to his feet. Payton Parker saw the federales fan out around the campsite, suspicious, searching the darkness for some sort of trap. “Take it easy now, Capi-tan,” he called out. “We’ve got a minor setback here!” His eyes flashed to Paschal and Juan Verdere. “Juan! Frenchy! Tell them everything’s okay!”
“But we ar
e not okay,” Paschal hissed, moving his horse in close to Payton, his hand raising the rifle from his lap and cocking the hammer. “Where is the ammunition?” Around the campsite, rifles cocked in unison.
“Delbert, boy! For God sakes, what’s happened?” Payton Parker’s once confident voice now sounded high and shaky.
McCord had jumped down from his saddle and run over to Delbert. Raising him to his feet, he called out to Payton Parker, “Damn it, Payton! You can see what’s happened…them woman have busted his jaw all to hell and took off!” He looped Delbert’s arm across his shoulder and struggled with him, bringing him over for the captain to see. “They can’t have gone far, Captain. Let’s not lose our heads. You want that ammunition—help us get after them.”
The captain looked skeptical. Leo Parker moved his horse closer to him. “It ain’t no trick, Captain. I swear it ain’t. Payton didn’t mean nothing, needling you the way he did. Help us find that wagon and let’s get this straightened out.”
Payton Parker tried to get a word in. “What he’s saying is—”
“Shut up, Payton,” Leo snapped. “You’ve said too much already.”
Payton clenched his jaw. “Damn it then! Sit here all night if you want to…I’m going after them.” He sawed his reins and straightened his horse out behind the wagon tracks.
The captain fell his horse among three of his men. He reached back, unfastened and saddlebags full of gold coin, hefted them off his horse’s rump, and let them fall to the ground with a heavy thud. “You three men stay here. Guard these with your lives.” He stood up in his stirrups, looked at Juan Verdere and Paschal, threw a suspicious glance at McCord and Leo Parker, then called out to his troops, “The rest of you follow me. We must have that ammunition.”
Maria and Prudence hurried to lead the wagon off into a slip of brush alongside the trail. As soon as they’d unhitched the mules, keeping one to ride and shooing the others away, Maria pulled a four-pound keg of black powder from beneath the canvas tarpaulin and trotted back to the horse with it under her arm. “We’ll need this,” she said, passing Prudence, who stood tying a short rope around the mule’s muzzle. “Hurry! Please!”
“I am hurrying,” Prudence snapped. “Surely, you don’t plan on using that stuff. It’s too dangerous.”
“Sí, of course we will use it. When the time comes, we will make a bomb of it.”
“Do you know anything about it? Have you ever made a bomb before?”
No, but only because I have never had to.” She gave Prudence a determined look and led the horse from behind the wagon up to her. “And you have obviously never made a bridle before.” She brushed Prudence’s hand aside, took the rope from the mule’s muzzle, and hastily fashioned it into a one-rein bridle. “This will do. The mule knows more about walking a high trail than we do. Just use this to keep him going.”
Prudence looked at the bridle, then nodded. “Okay, I see what you mean.” Maria held the mule while Prudence slipped up onto its knobby back. Prudence reached down and took the rope from her. “Don’t worry, I catch on quick.”
“Good.” Maria replied as she stepped up onto the horse. “Now we go high into the rocks and head back. By the time they find the wagon, we will be in position to fight.”
“Fight—?” Prudence’s voice stopped short. “You said we would take what water and food we need from them.”
“That is true…and they will not let us without putting up a fight.” She turned her horse, the small powder keg laying in her lap. “We are going to do whatever we must to stay alive.” She reached out and slapped a hand on the mule’s rump and sent it forward.
They moved upward into the cover of rocks. When the animals picked up an elk trace in the pale moonlight, they followed it back overlooking the wider trail sixty feet below them. Less than two miles down the trail, they heard the sound of horses moving along the lower trail, and Maria stopped the horse and caught the mule’s rope bridle as it plugged forward. They sat in silence for a moment. When the horses moved away toward the wagon, Maria whispered, “They have brought the others with them. We must hurry now. It will take them a little while to find the wagon and come back with it.”
“Hurry? On this trail?”
“As much as possible, yes.” Maria pulled the mule forward alongside her, then slapped it hard, feeling it jerk forward as Prudence cursed under her breath. They moved on along the narrow rocky trace, darkness engulfing them as they passed in and out of crevices in upthrusts of rocks, brush, and thorns that scratched Prudence’s naked legs. When they reached a point on the trail where they could see the faint glow of firelight in the distance below them, Maria stopped once more, this time letting out a breath as if giving thanks. “Now we go to work,” she said.
In the campsite below, Delbert still sat in the circle of light with a wet rag to his swollen jaw. Dark blood had dried down the side of his throat, and he glared back at the three federales who kept their eyes on him. The saddlebags of gold lay between two of them in the dirt. “The hell are y’all looking at,” Delbert snapped to them in a weak, slurred voice. “I suppose the same thing ain’t happened to every one of ya sometime or other? No woman ever busted you in the jaw with a rock?”
One of the soldiers looked at the other two and whispered something in Spanish. Muffled laughter stirred among them. “That’s it, laugh, go ahead,” Delbert said, “deny it if you want to. I ain’t ashamed. It’s happened to me every single galdamned time I ever tried fooling around with a woman…that’s why I don’t, not very often anyways.” He grimaced as a sharp pain ran down the length of his throbbing jaw.
Sixty feet above them in the darkness, Maria’s eyes moved from Delbert, to the saddlebags and the soldiers, then back to Prudence beside her. She whispered, “So, you killed him, eh? Cut his throat?”
“All right, I lied.” Prudence hissed. “I wanted you to think I was tough. So what? It got us freed, didn’t it?”
Maria looked down at Delbert and saw the canteen of water as he poured some of it onto the rag in his hand. She looked back at the soldiers, and at their horses standing beside them, also with canteens hanging from their saddle horns.
“So you boys are afraid I’ll waylay ya and make out of here with the gold?” Delbert asked, pressing the rag to his cheek. “Well, don’t worry…I ain’t in no shape to pick those bags up, let alone ride off with them.”
Maria whispered to Prudence without raising her eyes from the campsite, “So there it is, the gold they have been waiting for.”
“Where?” Prudence craned for a better look, her voice going a bit higher in excitement; but Maria caught her shoulder and pulled her back.
“Shh, they will hear you,” Maria whispered. “We have to hurry before the others return.” She rolled the small keg between them, turned onto her side, and judged the weight of it by hefting it up on her palm.
“How will you make a fuse?” Prudence asked, her voice a whisper now.
“Perhaps I will not need a fuse.” Maria looked back down at the low flickering flames in the middle of the campsite, hefting the three-pound keg in her palm, judging the distance and the odds of tossing it down into the fire.
Prudence looked at the soldiers below, then over to Delbert close to the fire. “Oh, my. Poor ole Delbert,” she whispered. But her eyes widened in fear as she added, “What if you miss?”
“Then we will have to make a run for it. I only have four rounds in the rifle and five in the pistol. Not nearly enough.”
Prudence slumped and shook her head. “Then let’s slip away and make a run for it, before it’s too late—take our chances on finding water.”
“No. Here we have only a small chance, but out there without water we have no chance at all.” She rose onto her knees and hefted the small keg in both hands. “Go hold the animals. And get ready.”
Chapter 15
The Ranger and Durant had stopped for a few moments, resting their tired horses alongside the thin trail when the sound of the explosio
n rolled in through the darkness. They both turned toward it at once, catching the flicker of light that flashed pale gold on the horizon. “Did you see that?” Durant asked, already reaching for his reins as he scrambled to his feet, dusting the seat of his trousers.
“Yep, I saw it. Let’s go,” the Ranger replied, rising at the same time.
Durant turned his horse beside the Ranger. “What do you make of it? Do you think it’s Zell’s men. Or the Parkers?”
“I don’t know,” the Ranger said. “But it looks like somebody just dealt out a wild card. We’re going to play it.” He gigged the white barb forward.
Earlier, less than two miles ahead, old man Dirkson had met up with Zell, Bowes, and the others. He’d come upon them riding slumped in his saddle, his shoulder wound broken open, bleeding down his chest. When Zell’s men had dressed his wound and propped him against a rock, the old man drank from a canteen of tepid water and told them in a labored voice how the Parkers had shot him and taken the wagon and the women hostages.
He’d just finished telling Zell about the Ranger and the black man, and how he had escaped from them in the night, when the explosion rumbled and flashed upward from the distant canyon. The men swung toward the sound of it, then looked at Zell, Dirkson, and the shadowy riders gathered in the darkness behind them.
“That came from Diablo Canyon,” Bowes said.
“Indeed it did,” Zell replied, studying the darkness for a long moment after the echoes of the explosion had faded. “Who would have done such a thing, and why?” He turned to old man Dirkson. “What condition were the hostages in when the Parkers took them?”
“Same as before, Major. The dark-haired one was cocky as ever. The Vanderman woman was worn out from the road, but otherwise all right.”
“I see…” Zell sat quiet for a second longer, Bowes beside him getting restless, keeping his eyes turned to the spot from where the explosion had come. When Zell spoke again, he said, “No Ranger loses a wounded prisoner—unless he wanted it to happen. If this Ranger is who I think he is, we may have our hands full.”