by Ralph Cotton
“You better drop your guns right now, boys,” the Ranger said, leveling the pistol, moving it back and forth. “This is gonna get awfully bloody in about a second or two.”
Maria’s eyes darted to the Ranger. “Sam…?” She looked stunned.
“I’m here, Maria. This is your play. I’ll back whatever move you make. You just call it.”
She stood staring at him in disbelief, but collected herself quickly. She turned to the Parkers. “You heard him—it’s over. Give it up. Let the boy go.”
“Ha! Nothing’s over!” Payton Parker shouted. He raised his voice to Liam Bowes and Chance Edwards. “You boys gonna drop your guns, like this woman and this damned Ranger lawdog told you to?”
“A Ranger?” Liam Bowes half turned toward him, the shotgun leveled in his bloody hands, still keeping an eye on the Parkers. “A Ranger, over here? In Mejico, where’s there’s no law to be found? You’re the man with the big rifle?” Bowes managed to keep his voice strong in spite of his wounds and his loss of blood. “The one who butted heads with us at Diablo Canyon? Killed some men of ours?”
“I’m the one,” the Ranger said.
“Good show, Ranger,” Bowes said. “You should feel honored that the men you killed were among some of the finest—”
“Better kill him, Bowes,” Payton Parker called out, stopping Liam Bowes from finishing his words. “We’ve got the gold…once the little lady takes us to it. You’re in for a part share. Just get with me here.”
“Turn the boy loose,” Maria said to Payton Parker. “There is still time.”
McCord stood rigid, his pistol drawn and cocked. Beside him, Leo Parker chuckled. But as Payton spoke, the Ranger noticed he had taken a couple of short steps back, pulling the Mexican boy with him. “Did you hear me, Bowes?” Payton Parker said. “Let bygones be bygones. We’re talking gold here.”
“Gold?” Bowes mused, shooting Chance Edwards a glance. “But don’t you see, Payton, we came here to kill you. What do we need with gold?” He started to level the shotgun back toward the Parkers.
“Don’t do it,” the Ranger warned Bowes, hoping beyond hope to keep this gun battle from raging—for the boy’s sake, for Maria’s sake. “Drop the gun…do it now.”
Liam Bowes breathed deep, smiled sidelong at Chance Edwards, and said to the Ranger, “Do either of us look to you like men who have ever dropped a gun in our lives?”
Chapter 25
No! The boy! Wait…! But the Ranger had no time to say the words as they spun through his mind. Liam Bowes turned from the Ranger as if he weren’t there—a peaceful, trancelike stare on his face, the shotgun swinging toward Payton Parker. Maria saw it coming as Payton Parker backed away, dragging the boy. Bowes pulled the trigger, and a belch of fire and the loud exploding ring of nail heads spit forward through the morning air.
But Bowes staggered as he fired, the Ranger getting off a shot that caught him high in his shoulder and kicked him back a step. The shotgun went off to the side, the nail heads missing Payton Parker, but lifting Leo off the ground and slamming him backward, his pistol going off toward Maria. Maria dove headlong into the dirt street at the sound of the shot. A shot from her own rifle slammed into McCord’s chest as he screamed above the melee, “Wait!” But even as he’d screamed, his pistol fired, hitting Chance Edwards.
“Leo! Damn it!” Payton yelled, firing with his pistol. Hernando was still at the tip of the shotgun barrel, being slung back and forth, his bare feet stirring up dust. “Do something, Leo!”
Leo pitched upward onto his knees like some demon risen back from its grave, his chest riddled with nail heads, his face a mask of torn pulpy flesh. “Brooother!” He screamed loud and long, firing his pistol blindly, one of his shots hitting Chance Edwards, spinning him against Liam Bowes, as Maria put another rifle shot into Leo’s bloody chest. Payton moved sidelong now, dragging Hernando, moving behind Leo and back toward the cantina.
The Ranger tried taking aim on Payton Parker but couldn’t risk hitting the boy. A shot from Liam Bowes’s pistol careened past the Ranger’s head. He ducked, spun, and fired, Bowes taking the round in his chest, flinging backward into Chance Edwards, the two of them seeming to be all that held one another up, bullets pounding them in place. Their bodies jerked in time to the sound of each shot from Maria’s rifle, from the Ranger’s pistol—two broken, twisted marionettes on strings held tight by the hands of a madman.
Payton fired from the door of the cantina, Leo facedown in the dirt street now. McCord was on his knees, his arms spread wide, his pistol down in the dirt, a long string of red saliva swinging from his open mouth. “Turn him loose, Payton!” Maria yelled. In the street, Bowes and Chance Edwards staggered back-to-back, Bowes with an arm behind him around Edwards, steadying them both.
“Like hell!” Payton screamed, then jerked the boy to one side and said, “You want him? Here he comes!” He pulled the trigger on the shotgun as Hernando begged in a frenzied jumble of words.
Maria winced, squeezing her eyes shut. “Noooo!”
The Ranger ran forward and crouched. Nothing would save the boy now. All he could do was make sure Payton fell dead behind him. But then the Ranger skidded to an abrupt halt as the shotgun in Payton’s hand clicked on an empty chamber…and an eerie silence fell upon the bloody street. Even the plumes of rising dust seemed to stop in the air.
“Shitfire!” Payton said, breaking the deathly silence. His voice had gone flat and weak, looking at the empty shotgun in his hand. Damn it…! Why hadn’t he checked it first? It was too late now. Hernando slumped straight down, his legs giving out beneath him. Payton turned him loose and ducked inside the cantina among the screaming townsfolk as a shot from Maria’s rifle whined off the door frame in a spray of splinters.
“Out of my way!” Payton Parker shouted, waving his pistol, moving across the dirt floor as the old peasants scurried from beneath the rear window. He dove headlong, crashing through the glass, taking out frame and all, and rolled to his feet still running. The Ranger came through the door of the cantina, his big pistol cocked. He saw the broken window and turned, knowing full well that the man would head straightaway for the small stable at the end of the dirt street.
“Sam!” Maria held on to the door frame with her free hand, her rifle hanging limp. Dark blood spewed from her thigh with each beat of her pulse.
“Maria! You’re hit!” He grabbed her as she fell forward against him, then lowered her to the dirt floor.
“No, Sam…go get him! He must not get away!” She clutched his forearm.
“You’re bleeding bad. Hold on.” He stripped her bandanna from around her neck, tore open her trouser leg, and pressed his thumb firmly against the flesh above the wound. The bleeding lessened. He turned to the townsfolk. “Bandages, please, hurry.” He looked back at Maria. “You’ll be all right…we just need to get a tourniquet around your leg.”
Outside, the sound of a horse’s hooves pounded away behind the cantina, headed toward the trail across the sand flats. “He is getting away, Sam.”
“He’s not getting very far,” the Ranger said, thinking about Willis Durant out there somewhere, on his way here, maybe right outside the town by now, having heard all the gunfire. “Don’t worry about Parker—he won’t get very far. You’re all that matters to me.”
The Ranger stayed by her side, helping the women of San Carlos dress the gunshot wound until at length they found a way to let him know that he must either attend to Maria’s wound himself or else get out of their way while they did it. One of the old women shook a weathered finger at him and pulled up a wooden stool for him to sit on. But no sooner had he sat down when Hernando’s grandfather limped through the cantina door on a walking stick and told him that one of the men in the street was still alive.
“I really should go check on everybody,” the Ranger said, looking a bit embarrassed, his sombrero in his hand. “I should have as soon as it was over.”
“Sí,” Maria said. She smiled, glancin
g down as one of the women carefully laid strip upon strip of clean fresh bandages around her thigh. “It is not like you to let things go.”
“I know,” he said, taking a step to the door. “As soon as you’re able, point out the spot were the Vanderman woman is hidden. I’ll go get her.”
The Vanderman woman…Maria nodded—she had a lot to tell him—and watched the Ranger move out onto the dirt street among the dead and dying. “These two are dead for certain,” Hernando’s grandfather said, jabbing his walking stick into Leo Parker’s bloody ribs. He wobbled on his feet and Hernando grabbed him to keep him from falling. The old man spat a white foamy wad on Leo Parker’s mangled face.
“Come, Grandfather, they are dead…let us forget them,” Hernando said, his face ashen, his eyes swollen and puffy from lack of sleep.
“Un momento.” The grandfather turned and spat the same way on McCord, who lay at a twisted angle, one arm stretched out toward a pistol in the dirt. Flies had already moved in. They danced and buzzed above his bloody head. The spotted dog stood a foot away, lapping at the spill of dark blood puddled on the street.
As the Ranger, Hernando, and his grandfather walked to the bodies of Liam Bowes and Chance Edwards, who sat upright back-to-back in the dirt. Hernando’s grandmother came leading both burros out from between two adobes. The old grandfather hurried to her, calling out her name. Hernando turned to the Ranger with a questioning look, and the Ranger said, “Go on, young man, see to your family.”
With his big pistol reloaded in his hand, the Ranger walked on to Bowes and Edwards, seeing Bowes’s bloody hand rise an inch on his lap and then fall over onto the dirt, palm up. The Ranger stepped around first to Chance Edwards, saw the large hole in the side of his forehead, then moved around to Liam Bowes and kicked the shotgun away from him. He got down on one knee in front of Bowes and looked into his eyes.
“Are you needing anything?” the Ranger asked.
“No, not a thing.” Liam Bowes struggled with his words, shaking his head slowly. “Both Parkers…dead?”
“One is. The other soon will be,” the Ranger said. “Are you sure I can’t do something for you?”
“I’m sure.” With much effort, Liam Bowes moved a bloody hand down his own length. “I daresay…I’ve taken more shots…than anyone I know.”
The Ranger looked at the many wounds on his chest, his shoulders, and his neck. “You’ve taken your share, that’s for sure.”
“So tell me, Ranger…what does a man…have to do…to die around here?” He spread a thin, wasted smile.
The Ranger didn’t answer. Instead, he picked up the dusty battered hat from the dirt, shook it off, and placed in on Bowes’s head. “I’ll tell them to leave you be for a while.”
Liam Bowes nodded and dropped his chin to his chest.
The Ranger stood and walked toward the cantina, waving back a few townsfolk who’d moved barefoot along the dirt street near Bowes and Edwards. “Stay back from him,” the Ranger said. “He won’t be but a minute.”
“Ranger, por favor!” Hernando called out, waving him toward him and his grandparents beside the two burros. “Come listen. She says the other woman is gone!”
“It is true, she is not up there,” the old grandmother confirmed as the Ranger walked up to them. Doing so, he caught a glimpse of Maria limping out of the cantina, a crutch under one arm. “I find the spot where Maria sent me.” The old woman made the sign of the cross, then kissed her thumb. “But she is gone, and the body of Paschal the Frenchman is lying there, half naked. It is terrible! His throat, it is…it is…” She grimaced, running hr thumb beneath her chin.
The Ranger turned and looked at Maria as she came up to them. “There are things I must tell you all about her,” Maria said. “First of all, she is not who you think she is….”
“Oh? Then tell me out of the sun.” The Ranger steadied her with a gloved hand on her forearm, and turned her back toward the cantina. “Am I going to have a problem keeping you off your feet for a few days?”
She managed a tired grin and shook her head. “No, but you must listen to me….”
* * *
Even with the wound in his side, Willis Durant had taken the woman and her horse down in a spray of dust, leaping down on them like a mountain cat as they’d rounded a turn beneath a tall standing boulder. Perhaps she would have stopped for him anyway. But he couldn’t risk it. He knew she was one of the women from the train. She had made her getaway, and for all he knew, she could have been hysterical—could have bolted away and left him afoot in the morning haze.
But now he had a horse beneath him. That was the main thing. He’d been walking long enough, his own horse having come up lame as he’d pressed it hard toward San Carlos the hour before dawn. This woman and her horse had come to him like a gift from the heavens. He’d held her against his chest for the past half hour, his arms around her, holding the reins, she in the saddle, he behind her, pushing the horse in the final stretch toward the sound of gunfire.
At the sight of the lone rider two hundred yards away headed in the opposite direction, Durant slowed the horse down and spun it around. Was that who he thought it was? “See! There goes Payton Parker!” She spoke fast. “I told you, don’t go to San Carlos! Please!”
He hardly heard her as he focused on the lone rider, the man bowed forward in his saddle, moving fast, leaving a tall-standing sheet of dust behind him. Jesus! It is him! Payton Parker’s face turned toward them, his hat brim stand-up-flat-in-the-air; even at this distance, Willis Durant recognized the face, the build, even the aura of Payton Parker. Judging from the way the man ducked his face forward at the sight of him and slapped the reins across the horse’s sides, Durant knew Payton Parker had just recognized him as well.
“You’re right, ma’am!” Durant turned the horse and batted his boots to its sides. “We’re not headed to San Carlos. Hang on!”
Prudence braced herself against him, letting him take her closer to the gold, away from everything else. She knew Maria would have her hands full back there once daylight came. Had she not been snatched by the big Frenchman, a knife held to her throat, she would have stayed and waited for Maria to return. But that hadn’t been the way it worked out.
Things had gotten out of hand, the light winking out in the adobe window—something had gone terribly wrong there. Then the big Frenchman came ready to cut her throat. How dare that bastard, she thought. Well…he’d learned a hard lesson there. She’d put the straight razor to him as soon as she got the chance, then taken his big strong horse, and headed out. She wasn’t ashamed of it. In fact, she wondered if maybe Maria hadn’t told her about the true spot where the gold lay buried as an added incentive to get out of there should things start going wrong for her. That was something she would always wonder about.
When this man had sprung down and taken her and the big horse to the ground, she’d thought for a second that the game was over. But here she was, still headed for the gold, almost as if it was meant for her to have it. She smiled, seeing Payton Parker ahead of them, their big horse gaining on him. Run, you son of a bitch! But keep running in that same direction…
Somewhere along the trail of dust and heat, Prudence lost all sense of time. By the time this man handed her the reins and raised the Frenchman’s long rifle from its boot, the sun seemed to have leaped from its spot on the eastern horizon, standing white hot above them. “Keep it steady,” Willis Durant said near her ear.
She nodded, feeling the stock of the rifle on her shoulder, his left arm coming up across her bosom, taking the front stock in hand. She felt the jolt of the explosion and felt the rifle rise off her shoulder, the horse pounding on beneath them. Well, of course he’d missed. How could anyone make a shot like that? she thought.
But as she squinted into the sun’s glare, feeling Durant take the reins from her hands, she saw Payton Parker’s horse sway in the distance, its bellowing brown wake twisting back and forth, then coming to an end altogether in one large puff
of dust. In another second, the wake of dust had drifted, and she saw Payton Parker struggling on foot, scrambling upward on a sandy rise.
“You shot the horse! My God! How did you manage to—?” She turned in the saddle, looking up at Durant’s face, his features shadowed beneath the brim of his hat, his beard wild and untrimmed and full of road dust. He slowed the big horse down, reached a hand forward past Prudence, and rubbed the horse’s withers.
“I was aiming for the man,” Willis Durant said.
She saw his eyes fixed resolutely on Payton Parker as he stopped the big horse altogether and got down from the saddle. “Climb down,” he said. “We’re going to walk for a spell.”
Ahead of them, Payton Parker struggled upward. All he needed to do was get to cover somewhere—make a stand. Hell, Willis Durant wasn’t going to kill him. He’d find himself a dark spot on this white blazing inferno and pick el Negro’s eyes out. No problem, he thought, getting to the crest of the sandy rise. But then something hit him hot and hard at knee level from behind. “Christ!” he screamed, going down hard on the burning sand. Then he heard the explosion and knew what had happened. “Damn it all!” He twisted around in the sand, struggling up on one leg, his hand clasped around the gush of blood where his kneecap used to be. “Why, Willis? You son of a bitch!” He spread his free arm out as he yelled. “In the knee? You can do better than—”
His free arm jerked back, struck by a hot jolt of lead. He saw the puff of blue smoke and fell back from the impact just as he heard the explosion. “Well, shit!” He caught a glimpse of them walking toward him out there in the haze, leading a big horse. Frenchy’s horse? That figured. Payton Parker rolled down into the dry wash on the other side of the sandy rise and lay there catching his breath, his arm bleeding freely down his side, his right kneecap all but missing.
Back on the trail, Prudence looked up into Durant’s dark caged face. “You’re torturing him? Why? For God sakes, man. Don’t take him apart like this, one piece at a time! Either kill him or take him alive!