He was alone, that was all that he was certain of, lost in the grasses, trailing, he hoped, in the opposite direction from Pip.
It felt like he was the only man alive in the world. He was the army of good against the unknown evil that searched for him as eagerly as he searched for it. He knew he was outmanned, could feel it deep in his bones. Killing a Ranger would only buoy the shooter’s spirits, make him a hero in Cortina’s camp. Especially once Josiah’s identity was made known.
It wasn’t the first time Josiah had felt that way, alone in the world, alone in battle, left to fight for all he owned and believed in. But somehow, this felt different, like it was really the truth, like he really had been left to his own devices. McNelly and the boys were miles away, and he had never fought with Pip at his side, didn’t know if the man was a good shot, full of courage or fear, or what. Especially now that his horse was downed.
Oddly, Josiah felt himself missing Scrap.
At the very least, Elliot had his back, most of the time, when he wasn’t half-cocked and bent on a rage about something or another. Still, Josiah wished the boy was alongside him. The shooter surely wouldn’t have had a chance then.
He stopped about ten yards into his trek. The world had remained silent. Disturbingly so. There wasn’t an insect, outside of the local flies and mosquitoes, or a bird within a mile, at least not one that was willing to offer a chirp or a peep of happiness or need. Josiah could hear his own breathing and his heart beating and nothing more.
He peered slowly up over the top of the grasses and saw nothing either way.
All that remained of the incident behind him was an indentation in the grass where the chestnut mare lay, waiting for whatever scavenger would come along and devour it.
A pair of vultures appeared in the sky overhead, circling silently, watching and waiting for the right opportunity to glide down from their heavenly perch and partake in the sustenance left to them by one of Cortina’s men—at least, Josiah assumed it was one of the rustlers that had fired the deadly shot. It could have been anybody with a grudge, uncertain of their cause. Still, it made sense to him that it was one of Cortina’s men. Who else would shoot first without any other provocation? Who else, indeed?
Just as Josiah dropped down to the ground, another gunshot crackled in the distance. Only this time, it wasn’t so distant. Maybe fifteen yards north of him.
Another gunshot answered the first one. Most likely Pip returning fire from behind him. To his credit, Pip didn’t stop with just one shot. He emptied his chamber, fired off all six rounds, in rapid succession, just like Josiah had. Both men wanted to avenge the horse’s death.
All Josiah could do, at that moment, was lie on the ground and hope like hell one of the bullets didn’t find him.
It would’ve been a shame to die from a bullet fired by a friend and compatriot after all of these years, after all of the battles he’d fought in. Bad luck would surely have a last laugh. Fate would howl with glee at the irony of it all. Truth be told, Josiah should have been a dead man a long time ago, and he knew it. He knew his luck was running thin.
But none of the bullets found Josiah. And the thunder and crack of the Colt Dragoon that belonged to Pip died away.
Silence quickly returned to the open grass plain, but at least this time around Josiah had lost the feeling of being alone. Pip was still in the fight, shooting from behind him. It gave him a bit of confidence that he’d been lacking.
With that new fuel and comfort, Josiah set out again, crawling slowly in the direction of the shooter.
It only took a journey of about five yards before he heard a rustling in the grass ahead of him. Josiah stopped and froze. There was nowhere to hide, nowhere to run to, as far as he knew.
He had a cartridge chambered in the Peacemaker, the hammer pulled back. Sweat dripped down his forehead, running into his eyes, stinging them, blurring his vision. But Josiah didn’t feel any fear. He didn’t feel anything. He was just focused on the movement ahead of him.
Whoever, or whatever, it was, it was coming closer.
Surely, if it was a man standing up walking, then Pip would have had a clear shot and taken him down. Save Josiah the trouble. But as it was, Pip seemed to have vanished.
A shadow dropped over Josiah, and for the first time, he could see boots pushing through the grass toward him. The man was bent down in a crouch, keeping as close to the top of the grass as possible.
It only took Josiah a second to see that he didn’t recognize the man, and another second to pull the trigger of his gun.
CHAPTER 29
The bullet caught the Mexican in the right shoulder, propelling him backward with a surprised scream.
The shot had unsettled the man, but he hung on to his six-shooter as he tumbled to the ground. As soon as he hit the ground, the Mexican rolled on his side and started shooting. Luckily for Josiah, the man was just as disoriented as he had been deep in the grass, and his shots were off about five feet. It only took a heartbeat for all six cartridges to be spent, and none them had found their target.
Josiah lunged up onto his feet in a crouch, shooting, using his last bullet. For a moment he was lost—until the man jumped him and wrestled him back to the ground.
The smell of hate, fear, and blood overwhelmed Josiah, and his breath got caught in his throat. The wind had been fully knocked out of him when he’d hit the ground.
Josiah didn’t panic. He fought back. Without any hesitation or thought, he pushed up and swung at the Mexican, whose brown eyes were wild and bulging with anger. Drool ran out of the corner of the attacker’s mouth, mixed with blood and hate. He must have bit his tongue.
The punch missed, caught nothing but air. The man had anticipated Josiah’s reaction and cocked his head out of the way just in time.
It was then that Josiah saw the knife in the man’s hand. It careened downward toward his throat with all of the Mexican’s might behind it.
Josiah rolled out of the way, and the knife blade, glimmering and at least ten inches long, stabbed into the ground less than an inch away from his skin. He felt the wind of metal and was almost blinded by its silvery reflection.
The Mexican let go of the knife and jumped onto Josiah, straddling him, pinning his feet to the ground with all of his weight. He reared back then and punched Josiah in the cheek as hard as he could with a balled fist.
Josiah’s teeth rattled, and his brain felt like a cantaloupe in a bucket that had just been dropped to the ground. The hit dazed him, and the Mexican knew it—he followed up with his other fist on the opposite side of Josiah’s face.
Josiah wasn’t sure if he yelled out. He thought he did, thought he heard himself scream, then groan with pain, but he didn’t lose control of all his senses. Pain ricocheted through his body, but he didn’t lose consciousness. The pain just made him angry, more determined to fight back. There was no question that the Mexican had the advantage at the moment, but Josiah was going to do everything he could to change that.
With as much force as he could muster, Josiah jammed his knee upward, catching the Mexican directly in the crotch, sending him spiraling backward in immediate agony. His thrust had been on target, creating an opening the Mexican hadn’t considered and hadn’t protected himself from.
Josiah twisted to the side and grabbed the man’s knife. He pulled it out of the ground and jumped up, searching for where the Mexican had come to rest.
All of Josiah’s primordial instincts had taken over now. This was war. Hand-to-hand fighting. Death was close. He could taste it, smell it, feel it. Every vein was wide open inside his body. His blood was pumping at full capacity, orchestrating as much opportunity and physical edge as possible. Adrenaline drugged him into believing he was invincible, that he couldn’t be hurt, that he wasn’t going to die. Not today. He had too much to live for, too much life in him to surrender to one of Cortina’s thugs for nothin
g more than a few stolen cattle.
His life didn’t pass before him. Unresolved memories and heartaches had no place in this fight. All that mattered to Josiah was his immediate and ultimate survival—and the only way he could be certain there would be another tomorrow for him was to kill the Mexican, before the Mexican killed him.
Even the flies and mosquitoes had found the sense to flee the melee. If silence had been the norm in the grass plain before the fight started, it had been elevated to dead silence now. There was only the fight—the heavy breathing, the groans and moans of life and death, of two men determined to kill each other—and nothing more.
There was no sign of Pip.
The Mexican was up on his knees now, scrambling forward, pushing off the ground with the all the energy he had, looking over his shoulder, trying to escape.
Josiah dove forward, the long knife firmly in his grip. His vision and accuracy were clouded by the shadows on the ground and the hurriedness of his jump. He missed the Mexican’s leg by an inch. But that didn’t stop him. He yanked the knife from the ground and pushed forward with as much rage as he could channel.
He could hear the Mexican struggling to breathe. He hadn’t realized how big a man the attacker was. There wasn’t time to size him up, to judge his opponent’s skills. There was only the attack. Now it looked as if the man’s size and lack of physical prowess were proving to be the Mexican’s downfall. He had a thick belly the size of a beer barrel and stubby legs that had never had any hope of speed or coordination. He was a workhorse, if that, not a beautiful runner—like the one he had killed.
They were both scrambling. The advantage had turned in Josiah’s favor, but that didn’t promise to hold.
The Mexican was fumbling with his gun, a short-barreled Colt, trying to load one cartridge while attempting to gain his footing and run off.
Josiah leaped forward and brought the knife down into the back of the Mexican’s thigh with as much force as he could push into it. He felt the blade tear into flesh and careen off bone. There was a slicing, sucking sound that met with a loud exclamation of pain and surprise from the Mexican. Josiah twisted the knife out of the man’s leg, causing as much damage and pain as possible.
The attacker hadn’t stopped scrambling or given up because of the pain. He tried even harder to escape, to get out of Josiah’s reach.
The knife was covered in blood, the glimmer and perfection of the honed steel gone, as if it had never existed. Josiah thrust the knife down again, penetrating the back of the man’s calf. The meat of his calf was more compact, harder than the thigh, and required more pressure to push through. Somehow with the force of the stab, the blade escaped out the other side of the Mexican’s leg.
There had been very few times in Josiah’s life that he’d heard a scream so loud and full of pain. The only way the wound could contribute to the man’s death was if he bled to death, if the sharp knife had sliced a big vein of some sort. But Josiah had seen more than one man left to die on the battlefield from wounds less than the one he’d just delivered to the Mexican.
He pulled the knife out again, with another twist. The Mexican collapsed face-forward to the ground, continuing to yell and scream—all in Spanish, words that Josiah didn’t understand, but he knew they were words of rage and anger, not retreat and surrender.
Josiah stopped for a second, regained his breath.
The Mexican started to crawl away. It was a slow escape, like he had a ton of bricks piled on his back. The leg was useless, limp and favored, blood pumping out of it in quick spurts. The faster the man’s heart pumped, the more the ground turned red.
Flies and insects couldn’t resist any longer and attacked almost in swarms. The air was suddenly filled with focused buzzing, and overhead, more vultures had joined the original two. Shadows danced from the sky as the long-winged black birds passed in front of the sun.
Anyone within a mile could have heard the screaming and shouting.
Josiah wondered about Pip, and then Clipper’s fate, but pushed away any concern as he watched the Mexican gain strength, or at least effort, as he climbed to his knees.
Josiah jumped up as well and dove again at the man. The knife led into the calculated fall, zeroing in and coming to rest just where Josiah aimed: the nape of the man’s neck.
The knife went all the way through the neck, cutting the spine, the tip popping out just underneath the Mexican’s Adam’s apple. Guttural sounds and blood exploded everywhere, covering Josiah with warmth and stickiness.
He jumped back with the knife, letting the Mexican fall forward. The man twitched and hit the ground in a hard, final thump. Death was instant. If not humane, at least it was over. The fight ended, and somehow, with his own wounds, pain, and disabilities, Josiah had survived.
Nothing else around him mattered. The world had stopped turning. His heart beat rapidly, and he could taste the Mexican’s blood on his tongue, feel it trying to invade his skin, covering his face and hands.
This was not the first victory for him. Hardly. But it was the most recent. He’d been a young man the first time he’d had to fight a man to the death. He had vomited then, felt a hole tear in his soul, felt regret, fear, and revulsion. Now he was only glad to be alive.
He had no pity for the Mexican. He’d engaged Josiah from the start, known what the risk was, what was at stake—he’d taken his life into his own hands and lost. That’s all there was to it.
Josiah drew in a deep breath, sighed, wiped his face with the back of his sleeve, and stood up.
He hadn’t been paying any attention, had lost himself in the fight and forgotten where he was.
A gunshot in the distance greeted him. It didn’t come from the direction Pip had fled, but from the direction where the Mexican had first attacked.
Just like flies, where there was one Mexican fighter, there were more. Josiah had only fought a battle in a war that promised not to relent. And he stood in an open field, unsure of where his gun was, where his horse was, alone and spent, certain that if he was faced with another fight like the one he’d just fought, he would surely lose, surely die a miserable death, like the Mexican who lay before him.
CHAPTER 30
Another gunshot quickly followed the first, urging Josiah to drop to the ground for cover. But he didn’t move, he stood gazing into the distance, trying to comprehend what he was looking at.
He’d found himself on a slight rise, allowing him to look down into a dip in the earth, a slight roll just as the land reached out and met the calm ocean. The sun glared off the water like a mirror, hurting his eyes, causing him to look away.
The ground rumbled under his feet, and then another familiar sound met his ears: screaming cattle, scared out of their heads, pushing and bucking to get away from something. Josiah knew what a stampede sounded, and looked, like. He’d been in the midst of one earlier in the year, just outside of Corpus Christi. That stampede had been started with intention, and he wasn’t so sure that this one wasn’t started the same way.
Each gunshot spooked the cows more, causing them to run up along the coast, some staying huddled together, like a swarm of birds trying to outmaneuver a diving hawk, while others strayed off, running on their own, taking their chances in the grass plains that skirted the sandy beaches.
All of the cattle were running in the opposite direction from Josiah. The gunshots were not for him but for something else. That, at least, was a mild relief. He wasn’t sure if he could stand for another fight on his own.
Cortina had employed some vaqueros to herd the cows, all longhorns, to the steamer, but they were not doing the shooting, either. They were riding hard, too, trying to outrun a company of oncoming Texas Rangers.
McNelly was easy to identify, leading a hard line of the boys from camp, obviously having found the herd without Josiah’s and Pip’s help. The captain was doing his best to rescue the cows, to fulfil
l his duty.
Some of the vaqueros were on foot, running full out, trying to escape the onslaught of Rangers. Even with the rumble of the ground and the fearful cries of the longhorns, Josiah flinched as the sound of crackling gunshot met his ears. Small puffs of gray smoke erupted in the air above the rushing horses. A man-made storm that promised both death and destruction. If nature had no conscience, then she was surely outmatched by man’s taste for war and battle. The worst tornado or hurricane was no peer to the human desire to conquer and kill.
The man Josiah had killed must have been riding the perimeter, scouting a broad circle around the herd. There were so few men in Cortina’s band of rustlers, he must have been the only one to the north of the herd. It was a matter of luck for Josiah. Two men would have been impossible to fight. He would have been a dead man, instead of a man still alive, trying to regain his strength and reestablish his bearings.
He had no choice but to join the company of men now, even though there was more of a fight coming than he was up to, all covered in blood, the taste of death still rattling around in his mouth. Avoiding the battle was out of the question. The company needed him . . . and he knew he needed them. Being out in the open, remaining alone, was dangerous and stupid, and he knew it.
Josiah turned then, any thought of acknowledging the physical pain he felt pushed quickly out of his mind. He needed to find his gun and his horse. And there was the question of Pip’s safety. He hoped that the man hadn’t met a fate similar to the Mexican’s, that he hadn’t come across another scout who’d fought him hand-to-hand to the death, too. It was entirely possible that his fellow Ranger had met his maker, that the smell of death that inhabited the inside of Josiah’s nose was not only the dead Mexican and the roan mare, but Pip, the hard-riding stranger who never seemed to lose a race.
The Gila Wars Page 15