Widowmaker Jones

by Brett Cogburn

  She stood beside her white horse, adjusting the cinch on her saddle. She had swapped the dead bandit’s saddle to the black draft horse, and they had lashed their bedrolls and other equipment to it to lighten the load on their saddle horses.

  Finally, she could find nothing else to busy herself with and needed to say something, anything. “What were you looking for on those dead outlaws back at the presidio?”

  Newt didn’t answer.

  “He was looking for his gold,” the judge said. “Didn’t you know that the Widowmaker here is a mining tycoon?”

  “I was looking for what Cortina stole from me,” Newt said.

  She reached into the bandit’s saddlebags on the black, and held up a rusty tobacco can. “I found this in his saddlebags last night.”

  “What’s in it?” the judge asked.

  She pitched the can to Newt and he caught it and pried the lid off. Inside it was a white coffee sack. It seemed empty, but Newt could feel something at the bottom in one corner. He turned the sack up and dumped a little, crudely poured gold ingot into his palm. It was roughly two inches long and quarter that thick.

  The judge leaned closer and peered at what Newt held. “So that’s the fortune you’ve been after.”

  “There was more than this. A lot more.” Newt put the little gold bar back in the sack.

  “I wouldn’t be ashamed,” the judge said. “Why, there must be a hundred and fifty dollars in that sack. That’s well worth riding down here into Mexico and risking your life.”

  “I had twenty of those ingots. Me and Yaqui Jim paid a man down at the stamp mill to pour them for us on the sly.”

  “Well, one of them is all you’ve got now. Better that than a sharp poke in the eye.”

  “Cortina could have the rest of them.”

  “Or he might have spent his share already.”

  “That’s what I aim to find out.” Newt poured out the last of the coffee and tied the empty pot to the black’s saddle. Then he mounted the Circle Dot horse. “You coming?”

  The judge swallowed his last drink and rubbed the inside of the cup clean with a handful of sand before going to his own horse. “Reckon I will.”

  Newt rode past Kizzy and looked her full in the face for the first time that morning. “Thank you.”

  They turned into the road to Las Boquillas before daylight, with Newt riding far in the lead and none of them talking. The judge waited for the sun to come up before he rode up beside Newt. Kizzy remained well behind them, leading the black draft horse and seemingly content to have some time to herself.

  The judge looked behind him to make sure she was out of earshot before he whispered, “Don Alvarez might have already let those rurales have her brother.”

  “I know it,” Newt said. “But she doesn’t know that, and don’t you bring it up.”

  “She thinks we’re going to ride back to Zaragoza and hand over Cortina’s head to get that boy out of the calaboose.”

  “I don’t see anyway around it.”

  “We ain’t riding back there. My mother didn’t raise any fools,” the judge said with his voice rising a little too much. He lowered his voice to a whisper again. “You help me take Cortina alive, if we can, and get him back to Langtry, and I’ll pay you a hundred dollars.”

  “Cortina is mine.”

  “You gave me your word, or I wouldn’t have let you loose in the first place.”

  Newt glanced at the dog trotting alongside his horse and then turned to the judge. “Like you gave Don Alvarez your word that you would bring Cortina or his head back to him.”

  “Worst thing you could do is to go back there. He wants your head, too,” the judge said. “You keep on the straight and narrow with me and don’t waste your time fretting over that Gypsy girl back there, nor her brother, either. Me and you had a deal first.”

  “I’ll figure it out. Cortina is going to get what’s coming to him, one way or another.”

  “I done had a hanging post put up. There’s the principle of the matter to think on. Cortina’s head down here doesn’t do me any good. I want him hanging up in Langtry for everyone to see.”

  “It’s been my experience that we don’t always get what we want.” Newt took his hat off, slapped it against his thigh to knock some of the dust off it, and wiped at the sweat on his brow before setting it back on his head. “I think you’re kidding yourself if you think we could take Cortina alive.”

  “Try is all I’m asking.”

  “You’re asking too much.”

  “You cross me, Widowmaker, and I won’t forget.”

  “Get in line with the rest of them that want my hide and wait your turn.”

  Newt pulled his horse up. Somebody was coming down the road from the north raising a big cloud of dust. After a short wait he recognized it was a herd of sheep driven by a man and two stock dogs.

  Kizzy called Vlad over and tied a rope to his collar and secured it to her saddle horn, fearing he would fight with the two strange dogs. Newt waited beside her while the judge went up the road and conversed with the sheepherder.

  Newt and Kizzy bided their time and then swung wide of the bleating sheep. The judge met them in the road on the other side.

  “That sheepman said he came from Las Boquillas yesterday morning and hasn’t seen anyone on the road between here and there,” the judge said. “But he did say he heard horses passing east of him last night on the foot of that mountain yonder.”

  “Maybe the best thing we can do is to beat Cortina to Las Boquillas and wait for him, if you’re positive that’s where he’s going,” Newt said.

  “Oh, he’s headed back to Texas. You can bet your hat on it. Could be he intends to cross the river into Texas elsewhere, but he’s headed north,” the judge said. “A lot of the Rio Grande runs in a canyon hereabouts, but leave it to him to know where he can cross.”

  “The trouble is going to be finding his trail again.”

  The judge shook his head solemnly. “We won’t have to track him. That sheepherder said that there’s an old trail that goes to the east of those big mountains you can see there to the north. Said that trail goes to an old logging camp and then on to Las Boquillas the back way. Said there’s nothing left of that place but an old church and some ruins, but there’s plenty of water there.”

  The mountains to the north sat alone and separate from the other mountains to the east. In places they rose straight up for a thousand feet, and their tops were shrouded in dark green timber, in sharp contrast with the brown scrubland below. From a distance, the mountains looked more like an island floating in the sky.

  They cleared the herd’s dust, and the judge waved his hand in front of his face. “Damned Mexicans and their stinking sheep.”

  “You are a prejudiced man,” Kizzy said.

  “Prejudiced? Hell, I’m married to a Mexican woman.”

  “I didn’t know you were married,” Newt said.

  The judge grunted and tried to look insulted. “What? A fine-looking man like me, and you think some pretty woman didn’t latch on to me?”

  “I didn’t see a wife back in Langtry,” Newt added.

  “She lives in San Antonio. I ride up to see her once or twice a year, and the kids stay with me sometimes.”

  “That doesn’t seem like much of a marriage,” Kizzy said.

  “We have a perfect marriage, as long as we keep plenty of distance between us.”

  Kizzy let her dog loose, and it loped out in front of them, scouring the brush for rabbits.

  The judge watched the dog work and pointed at it after a time. “Did I ever tell you about an old coonhound I had when I was a boy that could count to five?”

  Newt looked at Kizzy and shook his head. The two of them spurred forward, leaving the judge behind.

  “Hold on there,” the judge called out. “I haven’t finished my story.”

  * * *

  The trail the sheepman had spoken of was hard to miss, as it was cut deep with ruts from the two-
wheeled Mexican carts that must have traveled it in some bygone day. Those ruts followed a winding route, climbing through a narrowing valley, crossing over low foothills, and diving off into deep, narrow canyons. The higher they climbed, the more the land changed. The scrubland turned to low ridges covered in grass and scattered oaks. Higher still, they rode through stretches of piñon pines and fir trees, and the terrain became rockier and more challenging. Dogwoods and other trees not seen on the desert below grew in the shady canyons.

  Twice they flushed mule deer in front of them, and a startled black bear sent rocks rolling as it fled across a mountainside above them. A lone eagle drifted on a thermal high above them for much of their ride, and high at the top of a dizzying tower of rocks Kizzy spied some kind of animals that the judge said were bighorn sheep.

  “What do they call these mountains, Judge?” Newt asked while they were taking a break to let the horses blow on a particularly steep stretch of the trail.

  “Maderas del Carmen,” the judge answered.

  “What does that mean?” Kizzy asked.

  “Timber gardens, or some such like that.”

  The constant weariness and worry and all the hard miles behind them weren’t enough to make any of them blind to the grandeur around them.

  “It’s a beautiful place,” Kizzy said. “Like a Garden of Eden in the middle of the desert.”

  “Old Adam and Eve never rode such high country,” the judge said.

  An hour later they found the rurales, or what was left of them. The dog stopping in the trail and growling warned them of what lay ahead, and they soon saw the bodies lying in the grass and strewn along the trail on an open stretch of ridgeline. All of them looked to have died hard, and all of them were stripped and mutilated.

  “There’s your Garden of Eden,” the judge said after riding through the bodies. “Apaches caught them unsuspecting coming over this ridgeline, easy as pie. That’s the way Apaches like their ambushes. Easy, and no trouble for the killing.”

  Newt didn’t stop his horse, not wanting Kizzy to look on the dead men any more than she had to. He had heard stories of what the Apaches did to their victims, but he couldn’t have imagined it would be like that. All of the rurales were stripped, and most of them had been slashed and cut all over their naked bodies. Body parts were removed and cast aside, like some wicked child’s playthings. He was a man with a strong stomach, but what he saw was hard to look upon.

  Only one of the rurales’ horses was left, and it was as dead as the men. The Indians had obviously taken the rest of the horses, along with the rurales’ firearms and everything else of any use.

  The judge rode a wide circle around the massacre site, leaning from the saddle and searching the ground for sign.

  “What do you think?” Newt asked when the judge came back.

  “Don’t know how many of them there were. It’s hard to tell with Apaches. They’ll travel different trails in little bunches, or even in singles. Then they’ll meet up someplace and raise hell and filter off in their little bunches again when they’re through,” the judge said. “I’d guess they hit the rurales sometime yesterday evening.”

  Newt recognized a couple of the dead men as those who had been in Zaragoza. “How did the rurales beat us here?”

  “I imagine Don Alvarez sent them through the pass to patrol the road and to block Cortina to the west.”

  “Can’t say I’m going to miss those rurales, but I wouldn’t wish that back there on any man.” Newt scanned the ridgeline ahead of them, and the mountainsides above them. “Those Apaches could be up there anywhere. I don’t like the thought of riding into an ambush.”

  “No, it’s not a pleasant thought. Damned Mescaleros keep leaving their reservation up in the New Mexico Territory and raiding down here until they’ve raised enough dickens to suit them. Then they go back to the reservation and act like good Injuns. Those Injun lovers in Washington ought to know that you can’t tame an Apache, and thinking you can make farmers of them is pure foolishness.”

  “How far to this old church? What did you call it?”

  The judge cleared his throat. “Saint something or other. They’ve got more saints down here than you can shake a stick at, and they all get to running together on me so that I can’t keep them straight in my head. We should reach it about midday.”

  Newt looked at Kizzy. “Maybe you should turn back. The judge could ride with you back to the main road and take you to Las Boquillas.”

  “Like hell,” the judge said.

  Kizzy straightened in her saddle and stared straight ahead to avoid looking back at the dead men. “No, Indians or not, I’m going on with you.”

  “Those Apaches won’t care that you’re a woman,” the judge said.

  “There’s no need to scare her,” Newt said.

  The judge jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the dead men behind them. “I think it’s a little too late to worry about scaring her.”

  Newt checked his Winchester to make sure there was a cartridge in the chamber and then started his horse along the trail. “Miss Grey, you’re putting me in a hard spot. No man that’s any account would drag a woman along on a trip like this. If those Apaches hit us, it will be my fault if some harm comes to you. Same with Cortina if he starts shooting our way.”

  “You’re not dragging me anywhere. I’m an adult, and it’s my right to go where I please.” She rode past him, intending to put an end to any more such conversation.

  “Those Apaches might have already done for Cortina,” the judge said. “Killing Mexicans is an Apache’s favorite sport. Apaches hate Mexicans as bad as Mexicans hate Apaches.”

  At midday, the trail crossed a narrow stream pouring down from high on the mountainside, and they found the tracks of three horses at the water’s edge. A little farther on the trail passed through a thin stand of pines. Their horses made little sound on the bed of pine needles blanketing the ground, and there was nothing but the creak of saddle leather when they pulled up at the edge of a high meadow with the ruins of the church on the far side. The church wasn’t the multistoried, adobe affair with a bell tower that Newt had come to expect in Mexico, but instead, it was a low, rambling building of stacked stone. The only thing that testified to its being a church was the weathered wooden cross mounted on its roof above the front door.

  The church and the rest of the abandoned logging town butted up against a sheer rock bluff made of enormous slabs of stone that rose high above the meadow. The same stream they had crossed earlier ran through the meadow, and near the church there were the ruins of other dwellings lining its banks.

  They sat their horses in the edge of the timber, watching and debating on whether to ride out of the timber. There was no way to reach the church without crossing two hundred yards of open ground. Newt debated on leaving his horse and going on foot along the foot of the bluff, but the cover there was scant enough that he was still going to be easy picking for anyone on the lookout in that old church. The meadow extended well past the church, so there was no option to come at it from behind. There was no smoke rising from the church, or any other sign of habitation, but the thought of crossing that meadow wasn’t a pleasant one.

  “It could be that Cortina has already moved on, if he was ever here in the first place,” Kizzy said.

  The judge snorted. “And it could be that he’s got a rifle propped in one of those church windows waiting for some unsuspecting soul to come riding into his sights.”

  “We could wait until nightfall,” she added uncertainly.

  Newt rode out of the timber, his rifle butt resting on his right thigh and the barrel pointed at the sky.

  “What’s he think he’s doing?” the judge asked. “Sometimes he hasn’t got enough good sense to pour piss out of a boot . . . Begging your pardon, ma’am.”

  “Why don’t you go with him?” she asked.

  “I believe I’ll sit here and watch.”

  “Coward.” Kizzy trotted forward until she caught
up to Newt. When she looked back she was pleased to see the judge riding from the timber and taking a course paralleling their own several yards away.

  They went across the meadow at a walk. A beaver dam had turned much of the middle of the meadow into a shallow pond, and Newt and Kizzy skirted the dam and splashed through the marshy ground, starting up the far side. The judge rode up the other side of the pond, with him and Newt occasionally catching each other’s eyes. It was a slow, cautious ride, where every second each of them expected the worst.

  They were within fifty yards of the church when Don Alvarez’s daughter called out to them. Rather, she screamed at them. “¡Deténgase! Para sus caballos! ¡Vete!”

  Newt stopped his horse behind the stone foundation and the collapsed log walls of a cabin. “What’s she yelling about?”

  “She said for us to leave.” The judge had dismounted behind a stone fence and was peering over the top of it.

  “Yeah, I kind of guessed that,” Newt called back.

  The woman inside was still shouting, and they could hear what sounded like crying between the things she shouted at them.

  “I’m guessing they left her behind,” the judge said.

  Newt had been thinking the same thing. There wasn’t a horse in sight, and if there was anyone else in the building, Cortina or the other bandit, they would have long since fired on them. He stepped off his horse, dropped a rein on the ground, and started for the church.

  “You be careful,” the judge said. “She might have a gun, and there’s nothing worse than a crazy woman with a gun.”

  Newt stalked toward the church. The front door was barely hanging by one hinge and propped wide open. Through the dark eye of the open doorway and behind the shuttered windows the woman’s voice became more frantic. He didn’t have to speak Spanish to understand that she was threatening him and warning him not to come inside.