Widowmaker Jones

by Brett Cogburn

  “That cauliflower ear of yours—most men I’ve seen with such are regular brawlers like yourself, or have spent time in a boxing ring.”

  “I fought for prizes, time to time. Seemed like a lark at first. I never was any great shakes at it.”

  “You said your pappy was a woodworker. How come you didn’t go into the trade back there instead of coming west?”

  “Pa’s heart quit him when I was fourteen. Found him behind his plow mule and drug to one end of a furrow. We didn’t have much of a place and never could afford any bottom ground. You know, rocky, thin mountain ground.”

  The judge nodded, as if he really did know.

  “There were three of us boys and a baby sister for Ma to feed. My oldest brother went to work with a timber crew, sending money back home from time to time until we heard he drowned walking a log raft on the Mississippi River up in Minnesota. Things got worse after that. My younger brother was the best farmer, but no two-bit, hardscrabble farm like we had was going to grow enough to feed the family, much less turn any profit. So, I thought about it some, and one morning I left out to lighten the demands on our table.”

  Newt regretted having said the little he said. There was no way the judge could understand, and he was probably laughing at him the whole time he rambled on. Newt lay down and stared at the stars overhead, the sky a canopy that seemed to go on and on forever. A man could change. Because he was one thing didn’t mean he couldn’t be something else if he put his mind to it. He was tired of scrapping and tired of waking up every morning no farther along than he had been the day before. Always doing someone’s dirty work or being done dirty.

  He’d left home for the opportunity to do things, and to show them all he could find his fortune. The people going west said there were fortunes to be made out there, and all it took was a man with gumption. He had plenty of gumption, but it turned out things out West weren’t much easier than back in the mountains he left. Oh yes, there were gobs of money being made in ore, timber, railroads, and cattle, but none of it fell his way. Seemed like the only thing he had to offer the world was the muscle on his stubborn bones. Every time he was down on his luck, somebody came along and offered him a fighting job. It seemed like the only thing he was good at, but he was tired of fighting and tired of living like some attack dog kept chained to a post until its owner needed to sic it on someone. And he was tired of being ashamed of what he had become. The gold he had found should have fixed all of that and given him the chance he wanted.

  “Judge?”

  The judge didn’t answer him.

  “Judge?”

  The judge’s breathing was already deep with sleep. Newt continued to stare at the night sky, lost in his thoughts until he finally fell asleep. He woke with someone kicking him in the sole of the foot.

  “Wake up,” the judge whispered. “Somebody’s coming down the road.”

  Newt got to his feet and struggled to get his mind awake and working. “Who is it?”

  “Don’t know. Might be anybody or it might be somebody we’re interested in.”

  The marsh reached almost to the edge of the road. The horseman, or horsemen, was going to be visible quite a ways off, and so was their camp to whoever was coming. A lone clump of mesquite brush and low oaks barely big enough to hide a couple of men lay on the other side of the road a few yards away.

  “You take a stand in that little thicket, and I’ll lead our horses out in the cattails,” the judge said.

  Newt finished saddling the Circle Dot horse and slapped it on the hip as the judge led it off. The judge and the horses waded into the tall water grass and cattails at the edge of the marsh.

  “I’ll be right back,” the judge called over his shoulder.

  Newt could see the rushes bending and hear them splashing through the mud and the judge’s low cursing even after they disappeared totally from sight. He ran to the clump of mesquite and found the best cover he could. He could barely make out a rider in the distance, but that didn’t last long. It was three men, and one of them was riding a white horse.

  Newt cast another glance in the direction the judge had gone, but there was no sign of him. The riders were only a hundred yards away and closing at a long trot. They were close enough by then that Newt could tell the one in the middle on the white horse was Miguelito.

  Newt gave up on the judge getting back in time to help and stepped out in the middle of the road with his pistol drawn and hanging down at the end of his arm beside his leg, turned slightly with his left foot forward so that the pistol was hidden from them. The riders saw him in an instant and slowed their horses to a walk.

  “Good morning,” Newt said because he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  All three men looked around for signs of anyone else with Newt or evidence of how he had appeared in the road before them.

  “Buenos días,” the one to Newt’s left said. He was wearing a straw farmer’s sombrero with a tattered brim, and wasn’t a man Newt had seen before.

  All three of the Mexicans stopped their horses less than five yards in front of him. He didn’t recognize the man on the other side of Miguelito, either, but it didn’t set well with him that the man had a Remington rolling-block carbine laid across his saddle swells and his thumb on the hammer.

  Miguelito said something in Spanish, and when Newt couldn’t answer, the man in the straw hat translated.

  “Did you lose your horse?” he asked.

  Newt kept a close watch on Miguelito. “He broke loose last night and left me afoot,” Newt said.

  Miguelito edged his horse forward two steps and said something again.

  “He don’t believe you,” the one in the straw hat said. “He thinks maybe you were with the judge back in Piedras Negras.”

  “Judge?”

  “El juez viejo malo. Bean.”

  The men were still looking for someone else with Newt, as if they didn’t trust the setup.

  “We think you lie,” the man in the straw hat added. “Where is the judge? We would like to talk to him.”

  “Kill him,” Miguelito said. Apparently, he did speak a little English.

  The man with the carbine was the first to get his gun up, but his horse lunged forward and shied, frightened at his quick action. He was slow getting a bead on Newt because of it. Newt cocked the Smith pistol and brought it around and leveled it on the man with the rifle. It felt like he was handling the pistol entirely too slowly and that he was going to die long before he got it into play.

  His bullet struck the man with the carbine in the center of his chest and toppled him over the back of his saddle. Newt felt the Smith buck in his hand and recocked it on the downfall. The dead man’s horse veered wide, but the other two bandits were charging forward straight at him. Something whipped past his right ear and another bullet kicked up dust at his feet. His second shot missed Miguelito and there was no time for a third. The two bandits were already on top of him.

  Miguelito fired down at him point-blank, and although his shot missed, he lashed out with his boot at Newt’s face. Newt ducked and staggered sideways, right into the path of the other rider. The horse hit him at a dead run, knocking him down. A flying hoof struck him a glancing blow in the back of the head, and he was slow to get to his feet. He expected the bandits to pull up and turn back to finish him off, but both of them were fleeing down the road.

  He scrambled to find his pistol where it had been knocked from his grasp. He dug it out of the powdery roadbed, but already knew that the bandits were far out of his effective range. The judge came running out of the marsh carrying the Sharps buffalo rifle Matilda Redding had given Newt.

  “Where were you?” Newt asked.

  “Thought it was best that I hung off to the side and covered you.” The judge was breathing hoarsely from his exertion.

  “You left me alone with three of them.”

  The judge gave him a sheepish grin. “Wasn’t sure how many were coming, so I thought it best to look thing
s over before I committed to anything.”

  “You told me to stop them.”

  “I told you to take cover in that thicket. What did you think they were going to do? Ask you to sit down to a tea party?”

  The judge went to the clump of trees and rested the Sharps on a mesquite limb, aiming down the road. Miguelito and the other survivor were already two hundred yards off and rapidly increasing the distance.

  “How’s this gun sighted in?” The judge pitched his sombrero on the ground and put his cheek to the gunstock and peered through the brass tube of the scope.

  “I don’t know. Never shot it.”

  “Have to do a little guessing then,” the judge said. “There now, a little Kentucky windage and proper elevation is all it takes.”

  Before Newt could say anything else the Sharps boomed.

  Chapter Twenty

  The buffalo gun bellowed and the white horse staggered, took three more lumbering strides, and then flipped end over end.

  “Shoots a little low at that range.” The judge had the Sharps’s breech open and was thumbing another finger-length cartridge in it.

  Miguelito was on his feet and he moved fast for a heavy man. He swung up behind his partner on their remaining horse and they were running again by the time the judge fired his second shot. It was a clean miss; no more dead horses and no more dead men.

  “Held a little high that time.” The judge ejected the spent shell and slung the Sharps over his shoulder. “This Sharps kicks like a mule, but my God she’ll reach out there and touch them.”

  Newt appraised the distance to the dead white horse. It was at least four hundred yards away.

  The judge was standing over the man Newt had killed. He booted the body in the ribs. “You drilled this one center. Thought for a minute there you were going to try to talk them to death.”

  “Those two that got away—Cortina is going to know we’re coming for sure.”

  The judge found the dead bandit’s pistol and he jerked the gun belt from the corpse. He pitched the rig to Newt. “Take that. It might come in handy.”

  It was an old Remington-Beals cap-and-ball Navy converted to take brass cartridges, with the grips worn slick and the long barrel mottled and freckled with rust. A handful of .38 rimfire rounds were tucked into the dry-rotted loops on the gun belt.

  The judge picked up the dead bandit’s carbine. It was equally old and in the same poor condition. The judge frowned over it in a disappointed manner and then took a piece of latigo string from his pocket and tied it around the stock’s straight grip so that he could hang it from his saddle horn later. “Not worth much more than five dollars.”

  “I would have thought a professional outlaw would have better guns,” Newt said.

  “Bad decisions like that probably led him to a life of crime. It’s been my experience that most bandits ain’t the thinkers you’d expect them to be,” the judge said. “Why don’t you go get the horses while I look his body over for evidence?”

  “Evidence?”

  The crafty look came over the judge’s face like a mask. “Might have something on him that will tell us the whereabouts of young Cortina.”

  Newt followed the bent and broken growth to the horses, getting his boots soaking wet in the process. He led the horses back out onto dry ground in time to see the judge putting something in his pocket—something he had taken off the body.

  “Looking for an extra peso or two?” Newt asked.

  The judge frowned at him, but didn’t reply.

  Newt handed over the judge’s horse and mounted his own. The dead man’s horse was standing not too far off. He rode over and caught the flighty gelding with more than a little difficulty. The judge eyed the horse he was leading when he came back, and a sly grin cracked his face again.

  “Looks like you came off far the best when it comes to salvage operations,” the judge said. “That ain’t much of a horse, but he’ll still bring twenty or thirty dollars, and that saddle a few dollars more.”

  Newt dismounted again and hung the dead bandit’s pistol belt on the Circle Dot horse’s saddle horn, “Help me load the body.”

  The judge looked at the dead bandit. “No need to bother with him. Leave him lay. You ride into Zaragoza with that body and you’re asking for trouble. He might have friends there that wouldn’t take kindly to those that had done for him. Might be all kinds of trouble involved that you can’t even guess at. Been my experience that associating with dead folks has all kinds of ramifications.”

  “It was a pure case of self-defense. Maybe the law there has papers on him,” Newt said. “What about you, Judge? Thought you were the upstanding sort. Law and order every time, right?”

  “Boy, you don’t know anything about Mexico. It ain’t civilized down here,” the judge said. “We get in the wrong situation, and they won’t think anything about executing two gringos. No trial or nothing.”

  “What if somebody comes along behind us and finds his body?”

  “And what about the one we left back in Piedras Negras? We’re putting together a pretty good string,” the judge said. “Most down here won’t mind us thinning out a few undesirables, but some won’t see it that way. Been a lot of years of trouble on the border, and there are those on both sides of it that judge a man on the color of his skin.”

  “What do we do with him?”

  “Throw him in the lake,” the judge said. “And on second thought, throw his saddle in with him and turn his horse loose. I hate to lose the sale of that horse, but it might cause us more trouble than we’d make off it.”

  “Lend a hand—we’ve still got to load him.”

  “He doesn’t look too heavy, but I’ve got a trick back. Goes out on me sometimes if I strain wrong.”

  “Come over and help me.” Newt took hold of the dead man’s armpits and lifted half of him off the ground.

  “If we had a shovel you could bury him.”

  “Take hold of his legs.”

  “You could put a rope around his heels and drag him over there.”

  “Talking won’t get it done. Take hold.”

  “That’s why I went into the bar business and then into the legal business. It was to get away from such labor.”

  They wrestled and heaved until they had the body draped facedown over the dead bandit’s horse. Newt cut a few short lengths off the riata hanging from the man’s saddle horn and secured him as best he could.

  “You ought not cut up a good riata like that. We could sell it for a dollar or two should we run across a man that can rope. Cowboys and vaqueros set store by a good rope.”

  Newt didn’t say anything and mounted back up and led the other horse behind him. He rode out into the edge of the marsh again, deep into the cattails, and drew his knife and cut the body loose. It slid off the saddle and beneath the waist-deep water and muck. Newt undid the cinch and let the bandit’s saddle fall, and then rode back to where the judge waited. He pulled the bridle from the bandit’s horse and cracked it across the rump with the reins. The horse bolted and ran along the road toward Piedras Negras.

  “Somebody might wonder who that horse belonged to,” Newt said.

  “It was probably stolen in the first place, and anybody that finds it will only be glad they have a new horse.”

  They rode in silence to where the white horse lay far up the road where the judge had shot it. The bullet had taken it under the root of its tail, driving lengthwise into its vitals. Other than a little pool of blood on the ground, there was little evidence as to what had laid the animal low. The horse looked like it could have been struck by lightning, died of a heart attack, or been smitten down by an act of the heavens.

  “That’s what we down here call the old Texas one-hole shot,” the judge said.

  “It was a fine horse.”

  “Yeah, shame. Wished I had held a little higher and plucked that Miguelito off his back.”

  “What’s that I hear?” Newt cocked his head, trying to interpret the
faint sound in the distance.

  “Church bells,” the judge said. “We’re not too far from Zaragoza.”

  “And this sweetheart of Cortina’s lives there?”

  “Her daddy’s rancho is about a half-hour ride to the north on the river.” The judge dismounted and began to open the saddlebag pouch on the exposed side of the dead horse.

  “You have no shame,” Newt said.

  “Spoils of war and the price old Miguelito’s paying for thumbing his nose at the law.”

  “You ain’t the law down here. Might be best for us if you would quit saying that.”

  “You don’t quit being one thing just because you ride across some river or boundary. The arm of Lady Justice is long and she’s blind. Ain’t you ever seen the image of her? She wears a bandanna over her eyes so that she can go where she pleases without question.”

  “The blindfold is meant to show that justice is impartial.”

  “Huh?”

  “Fair and square. Treats everyone the same.”

  “What do you know about such? Learn that in school?”

  “I went to school some, although not much. Had a teacher who taught me that. He was going to teach me to read some Latin next, but spring was on and it was time to put in the crops.”

  “Know what you mean. I never went to school more than a month at a time without having to quit and go to work. My pappy put me to work full-time when I was ten, and I never saw a schoolhouse again.”

  “Get on your horse. Maybe we can get some breakfast in Zaragoza.”

  “Could be those pictures of Lady Justice holding up her scales with that bandanna over her eyes ain’t like that teacher of yours thought,” the judge said. “Maybe she was covering her face and about to rob a train.”

  “Are you going to stand around all day blabbing, or are you going to get on your horse?”

  “This scholarly thinking has my bowels upset,” the judge said. “Ride up the road a piece. My guts won’t work right if I think you’re watching me.”

  Newt rode off about fifty yards while the judge went behind a clump of cactus. He was there a long time, and Newt grew tired of waiting.