Widowmaker Jones

by Brett Cogburn

  “You check into it and you’ll find Cortina is around,” Newt said. “And you’ll also find I’ve been telling you the truth.”

  Don Alvarez said nothing, as if he were weighing the matter.

  “I’m getting tired of standing here,” Newt said. “Why don’t we sit down and talk this out over a drink or two? There’s plenty of time for other things later if you still don’t believe me once you’ve heard me out.”

  “I’m afraid it is not so simple a matter. My men, they are very passionate, and the one you killed was well liked.”

  “You ride back up the road and you’ll find a dead white horse,” Newt said. “Cortina’s bunch stole that horse and several others from a pair of circus people I came to town with. One of Cortina’s men was riding that horse, and your man and another were riding with him.”

  “You tell a good story.”

  “I’m telling you the truth.”

  “But you have not said all, such as how you come by that horse you ride?”

  “What business is that of yours? I brought that horse with me out of Texas.”

  Don Alvarez’s look turned mean again. Not hot mean, but the cold kind of mean, like something simmering and building to a boil.

  “That horse you ride belonged to my son. He left here five years ago riding it, and it was the last time he was ever seen.”

  Newt said nothing, and his own breath sounded loud to his ears.

  “These men will see to it that you talk. Maybe it will take a while, or maybe it won’t take so long, but you will talk in the end,” Don Alvarez said. “But, first I would like to know your name. I have thought about this day for a long time, and what your name might be when I finally found you.”

  Newt reached over and took the jug off the table and turned it up to his lips. He felt the mad rising up in him and flowing through him like the liquor sliding so smoothly down his throat. It was the old anger that had been his curse for so long. No matter how hard he fought it, it was always there, like a tool waiting to be used. He set the empty jug down on the table with a thump and straightened himself to his full height, shoving the building fury down inside him.

  “Newt Jones.”

  “Jones, it is a common name for an American criminal, no?” Don Alvarez shook his head pitifully. “But suit yourself. Do me the courtesy of telling me where my son’s body lies, and I will see that you die quickly.”

  “That horse was given to me by an Indian up in Texas. I’ve never laid eyes on your son that I know of,” Newt said slowly and carefully.

  Don Alvarez studied his face, as if he could read something there. “You are an Indian trader? I don’t think so.”

  “Cortina left me for dead and stole something that belongs to me. I started walking after him and met some Indians. They doctored me up and gave me that horse you’re talking about. We heard Cortina was headed here, and that’s why I’m standing here now.”

  “We?”

  “A judge from up in Texas. Roy Bean.”

  Don Alvarez seemed startled. “He is here? Hand over your gun, and we will go talk to him.”

  “I’m not giving you my gun. You either kill me or leave me be.”

  It was at that instant when someone came through the back door. And Newt knew before he even twisted around that it was more of Don Alvarez’s men with guns leveled on him.

  Newt let out a deep breath and tried to relax his hands. He realized that he had been clenching them into fists. He held his arms high and wide while one of the men lifted his pistol from its holster.

  Don Alvarez said something to his men in Spanish, and one of them poked Newt between the shoulder blades with the barrel of a rifle. They marched him out the front door with their patron leading the way.

  “Where is Judge Roy?” Don Alvarez asked.

  For a moment, a little ray of hope hit Newt as squarely as the midday sun hitting him in the face. He adjusted to both of the feelings with a squint. “Are you and the judge some kind of old friends?”

  Don Alvarez laughed bitterly. “Not quite. The last time he was here I tried to kill him.”

  Everything had to be the hard way. Always had been and always would.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Newt wouldn’t tell them where the judge and the circus people were, but they found the wagon anyway. A couple of the vaqueros didn’t take well to his reluctance to give up the judge’s whereabouts and had seen fit to club him over the head with a pistol barrel and give him the boot or two, or three, while he was down. He almost laughed at them if they thought he hadn’t taken worse before.

  The first thing Newt saw when they reached the wagon was that the rurales had found it first and that they had Fonzo up against its rear wheel, working him over. It looked like the rurales had been interrogating him for a while. A large gash above one of his eyes was already pouring blood, and his mouth was busted.

  Kizzy was seated on the ground against the adobe wall in front of the wagon, with three of the rurales standing guard over her. Newt had the impression she had been thrown there. She leaned around their legs to see what was happening to her brother and screamed for them to stop.

  Don Alvarez said something loudly in Spanish, and had to say it again to get the rurales’ attention. They quit hitting Fonzo, but kept him pinned against the wagon wheel while the one in charge came over to converse with the rich rancher. Whatever it was that Don Alvarez was telling him, the rurale didn’t like it. After a bit, Don Alvarez went inside the wagon, but came back out quickly.

  “What’s wrong with him?” he asked Newt.

  “Scorpion stung him,” Newt answered.

  Kizzy tried to get up and go to her brother, but one of the rurales shoved her back down. Newt took a threatening step forward, but was rewarded with a rifle barrel punched into his kidney.

  “Fine sorts you have for lawmen down here.” Newt stared at the man who had struck him while he readjusted his hat on his head.

  “That boy killed a rurale captain,” Don Alvarez said.

  “Maybe, but what did the woman do? I wouldn’t have thought a grande like you would tolerate such.”

  “You are in no position to dictate these things.”

  Don Alvarez glanced at Kizzy, and Newt could tell that he didn’t like how she had been treated any more than he did. Don Alvarez rattled off what sounded like more orders, and whatever importance he carried was enough that the rurales begrudgingly helped Kizzy to her feet. She ran to her brother, ignoring the men surrounding him and shoving them aside. Fonzo fell to a sitting position as soon as the rurales let go of him, and she crouched beside him, examining his face and whispering things to him.

  The leader of the rurales and Don Alvarez held another conversation off to the side, and when it was over one of the rurales went to his horse and gathered two sets of manacles out of his saddlebags. When he came back he gestured for Newt to hold out his hands and snapped the wristbands closed on each of Newt’s wrists.

  Newt looked down at the instruments of his bondage while the rurale went to Fonzo and secured him in the same manner. The handcuffs were crude iron things with two-inch bands and with the forge work and the blacksmith’s hammer dimples still showing. A half a foot of heavy chain coupled them together, and crude locks functioned with a key so old it might have unlocked a castle keep or a torturer’s dungeon. The steel was turned coal black with age, or maybe stove blacking, so as to appear ancient in its misery, and flecked with speckles of what might have been dried blood. Newt wondered how many men had worn the handcuffs.

  Don Alvarez’s vaqueros and the rurales marched them back up the street with Kizzy under their watch, but striding unbound beside her brother. The chain between Newt’s hands rattled and clinked like wagon traces, except it was a far more solemn sound to Newt’s ears, like a hearse rolling slow during a funeral procession.

  After a long walk they came to what served as a jail, which was nothing more than a low-roofed adobe with a tiny front room containing a jailer�
�s cot and an old office desk, and two cells in the back on either side of a narrow corridor. They threw Fonzo in one cell and Newt in the other. Despite Kizzy’s protests, they wouldn’t let her come inside.

  The jail bars that made up the wall of the cells along the corridor were the same black as the handcuffs. Newt held out his hands to be freed of his manacles, but the rurales ignored him and locked the cell door. Fonzo didn’t ask to have his hands freed, and fell on the floor as soon as they shoved him into his cell. Newt wasn’t sure that Fonzo wasn’t hurt badly.

  Newt’s cell hadn’t been used in a long while, for cobwebs spanned every corner or hung down in silky strings as white as cotton in the little sunlight pouring through the single tiny window. The floor was littered with old straw and a coating of fine dust, and from the tiny black pellets there Newt assumed that someone had once kept a goat in the cell.

  Don Alvarez gave an order, and the rurales and his men strode out of the back room with purpose. Only the don remained behind.

  “I will come back tonight or tomorrow, and then you will talk to me more about the horse you ride,” he said.

  “What did you do with the girl?” Newt asked

  “She is free to go. She will not be bothered again.”

  “What about the judge?”

  “We have no doctor here, but one of the priests is skilled in such things and will see to him as best he can. I have things to say to Judge Roy, as well. Things I have waited long to say.” Don Alvarez turned to go.

  “You’re going to your ranch to check on your daughter, aren’t you?”

  Don Alvarez stopped, but kept his back to Newt. “I have warned you once not to mention my daughter. If I do not find Cortina at my home as you say he is, I will come back here and kill you myself for the insult, if nothing else.”

  Newt folded the single moth-eaten blanket into a pad and sat down on the rope-laced cot that was the only furniture in his cell. He listened to the sound of the horses leaving the jail at a high gallop, and then some time later Fonzo took hold of his cell bars and pulled himself up to lean against them.

  “Do you think he meant what he said?” Fonzo asked.

  Newt struggled to work up some moisture in his dry mouth and finally spat on the litter between his feet. He stared at the sunlight coming through the little window and listened to the horses’ hoof falls fading away.

  “He meant it.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  It was the next morning before Don Alvarez returned. He left the rurales and his vaqueros sitting their horses in front of the jail and went inside alone. Newt was standing at his window looking out at the church bell tower in the distance, but didn’t turn around when he heard the sound of the man’s spurs in the corridor between the two cells.

  “Face me,” Don Alvarez said. “I want you looking at me.”

  Newt slowly turned. The morning sunlight hitting him in the back made him seem taller. “Did you catch Cortina?”

  “No.”

  “But he had been there, hadn’t he?”

  Don Alvarez ignored the question and paced the corridor with his hands clasped behind his back and his head bowed. Finally, he stopped, facing Newt again. “I loved my son very much.”

  “I told you how I came by that horse. I don’t know a thing about what happened to your son.”

  “There was a time when that horse you ride was young, and every one of my vaqueros wanted him as their own. They wanted him even after we tried to break him as a four-year-old, and he threw every one of my best riders.”

  Newt leaned against the adobe wall, looking over the don’s shoulder. Fonzo had risen to a sitting position on his cot and was listening to the story, if for no other reason than it prolonged what the young man’s eyes showed he thought was coming for them when Don Alvarez stopped talking.

  “My son wanted that horse, but I feared that he would be hurt. I put the horse in the string of my best vaquero. He was a man of patience and skill, and I thought maybe he could gentle the horse, train it, and then I would give it to my son.” The tone of Don Alvarez’s voice was a weary one. “The horse showed promise, after a time, and then one day it returned with no rider. We found that vaquero in the brush with a mesquite limb stuck through his throat. From the way the ground was torn it looked as if the horse had tried to buck him off and then thrown a runaway.”

  Don Alvarez seemed unaware that Fonzo was on his feet and very near to the cell bars right behind him. Newt wondered if Fonzo could grab the man through the bars, and if there was enough slack in the handcuff chains to give him the reach needed. Maybe they could bargain their way out of town if they had a hostage.

  “The horse was bad luck. Everyone knew it,” Don Alvarez continued.

  “I doubt the horse had much to do with it,” Newt answered. “Many a man has been killed on the back of a perfectly good horse.”

  Don Alvarez shook his head. “Coincidence, you think? I thought so, too, and then the next man to take that horse roped a bull on him. We found that man, the horse, and the bull tangled in the rope among the brush. I can only imagine the struggle. But what matters is that the man and the bull were broken and strangled to death, but the horse was fine.”

  “I would say the bull might have had more to do with that, or a man foolish enough to rope a grown bull alone.” Newt wished Fonzo would look at him and wished there were some way he could know what Fonzo was thinking. Taking hold of the don was about the only chance left to them.

  “Do you know how that horse came to wear that brand? It is not my brand. My son thought he was too fine-looking a horse to mar his flesh with a hot iron,” Don Alvarez said.

  “He was wearing it when I got him,” Newt answered.

  “He was stolen from my ranch during an Indian raid.”

  “Apaches?”

  “No, there are other renegade Indians in the mountains to the west. Tribes with names so old that no one remembers them. You can’t imagine how primitive they are. They live in tiny, remote villages and sometimes in caves high up and hard to find. Sometimes they come down and raid us. Usually they only steal our crops or kill a beef or two, but that time they took the horse. It was two years before we saw the horse again. Some soldiers found him on the road west of Ciudad Chihuahua, and one of them had worked for me and recognized him. When the soldiers brought him to me he was wearing that brand.”

  “It’s an unusual brand. What’s with the circle and the dot?”

  Don Alvarez shrugged. “Some of the Indians who worked for me thought it was a medicine wheel or maybe an eye.”

  “An eye?”

  “A power symbol. Whatever it was, they were sure it was meant to mark the horse in some way. Not for ownership, but for something else.”

  “How did your son finally end up with the horse?”

  “Two of my vaqueros got into a fight over which one of them should have the horse in his string. The loser was cut very badly with a knife. I was going to have the horse killed, but my son took him away and hid him. We thought the horse had run off, but weeks later my son rode up to me on that horse. He said there was nothing wrong and that it was a fine horse. I could never say no to my son.”

  Fonzo seemed hypnotized by staring at Don Alvarez’s back and wouldn’t look away from it for Newt to catch his eye and pass some kind of signal. Newt wondered if Fonzo had nerve enough to take action, or if the idea of grabbing their captor had even passed through his mind. He could only hope that Fonzo was as desperate as he was. And then there was a chance that the don didn’t have the cell keys. And the chances of that were high. Those men outside would shoot them down in their cells without batting an eye for laying hands on their master.

  “How did your son disappear?” Newt asked.

  “He rode that horse for a year, and everyone almost forgot about the things that had happened before, except for the whispers of a few of those Indians who worked for me. The rest of us soon agreed that it was the best horse on the ranch, and maybe the best h
orse we had ever seen.” Don Alvarez swallowed and looked away. “My son rode north one morning with his saddlebags full of money to pay for a set of American bulls I had purchased in Brownsville. We searched for a month when he didn’t come back, but I never saw him again.”

  “Someone probably knew he was carrying that money.”

  “Yes, that is what I thought. Maybe some banditos waited for him on the road, or maybe the Americans killed him.”

  “That was what, five years ago? And you think I was the one who did it, and then was foolish enough to come back here on your son’s horse?”

  “I never got to bury my son.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss.” Newt tried to catch Fonzo’s attention. Don Alvarez wasn’t going to talk much longer.

  “The rurales want to put you against a wall. This boy behind me, also.”

  “Those rurales stole our mules,” Fonzo said. “They are no better than thieves. I killed that captain, but only after he would not give our mules back and threatened me with a knife.”

  Don Alvarez turned so that he could see both of them, and any chance for Fonzo to grab him was gone.

  “Your sister tells the same story. She is quite persuasive.”

  “Cortina robbed us, and then those rurales did the same,” Fonzo added. “We are only simple show people.”

  Don Alvarez ignored Fonzo and shifted his attention back to Newt. “What would you do if you caught Cortina?”

  Newt stepped forward and took hold of a cell bar in each hand, his face only inches from the don’s. “I intend to kill him.”

  “What did he take from you?”

  “That doesn’t matter. What did he take from you?”

  “My daughter. I have men out after them this moment, but a messenger came only a little while ago and said they have lost Cortina’s trail.”

  “I could get him.”

  “What could you do that so many men can’t?”