Widowmaker Jones

by Brett Cogburn

  “I already turned his horses loose,” Newt answered.

  “Listen to me, Cortina,” the judge said. “Don Alvarez is going to be here before long. You know what he’ll do to you. You come with me and I’ll see to it that you get a fair trial.”

  “Trial for what?”

  “For burglary and theft and anything else I can find on you in the state of Texas.”

  “What, because I stole your jaguar hide?”

  “Nobody steals from me.”

  “You are nothing.” There was a period of silence before Cortina spoke again. “No, I tell you how it’s going to be. I stay here, and if I see you I will put a bullet in your cabeza.”

  “Suit yourself. Old Don Alvarez will be along, and you’ll wish you had surrendered when you had the chance.”

  Newt could hear Cortina moving around and could tell that the man had changed positions to the window on the far side of the front door. He took the opportunity to step up onto the porch, and peered into the open window Cortina had just vacated. He could see only a slice of the gloomy room inside, and he waited with his pistol ready for Cortina to come into sight.

  And then he heard the horse inside the tavern, its hooves loud on the floor. The double doors of the tavern were painted a bright green, with huge wrought-iron straps to reinforce them, and no doubt barred from the inside with more such blacksmith work from back in the days when the place had been a trading post. Both doors were made to swing to the outside, and to prop open on warm days.

  Newt had taken only one step toward them when both doors burst open, the near one crashing into him and knocking him backward. Cortina charged out of the doorway on the back of a white horse, ducked in the saddle to avoid the porch roof over his head, and with a pistol blazing in his fist. He didn’t know Newt was nearby, and focused his aim on the judge’s position.

  The judge’s shotgun boomed again, and Newt could hear the buckshot rattling off the tavern front as Cortina’s horse leapt high into the air off the porch and landed in the street. The bandit’s move was so bold and unexpected that Newt barely had time to right himself and snap off a single shot from his Smith. Before he knew it, Cortina was racing away toward the river.

  Newt holstered the Smith and ran for the Circle Dot horse. The judge was hobbling across the street toward him, shoving two more shells down the barrels of his shotgun. There was blood all over his lower right leg.

  Newt swung into the saddle and slapped the Circle Dot horse across one hip with his hat. The horse squatted for an instant on its hindquarters and exploded forward in a dead run like he was shot out of a cannon.

  It was two hundred yards to the river, and Cortina was already splashing across the other side by the time Newt rode into sight of him. The bandit spurred his horse up a break in the side of the escarpment on the Texas side of the river, raising a trail of white dust up the steep slope. A bullet splashed in the water next to Newt, as he charged the Circle Dot horse into the shallows. He was almost across the river when he looked up and saw Cortina on the rise above him with his pistol aimed down at him.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Kizzy flinched when she heard the sound of the first gunshots. The Alvarez girl at her feet yawned and rubbed sleepily at her eyes with doubled fists. Kizzy listened to the men shouting back and forth down the street, and went to the horses and checked their saddles and tightened their cinches.

  “What are you doing?” The Alvarez girl had come fully awake, and there was the hint of panic in her voice.

  “We might need to run.”

  The Alvarez girl rose to her feet. She recognized Cortina’s voice calling out to the judge and tried to run toward him. Kizzy caught her by the wrist and jerked her back. The girl swung wildly and clawed at Kizzy’s face. Kizzy pivoted and swung her by the arm against the fence. A gush of air went out of the girl’s lungs at the impact, and that gave Kizzy time to kick her ankles from under her. The girl landed on her rump.

  “You stay put.” Kizzy shook her fist in front of the girl’s face.

  “Javier will kill your men, and then he will come for me.”

  “You little fool.”

  Kizzy shushed her and listened to the fight going on up the street. The gunfire had gone quiet. After a while she heard a horse coming her way. She couldn’t see anything of the village beyond her position, for the high fence blocked her view. All she could see was the road leaving the village to the south. Maybe it was Newt or the judge coming back for them.

  When the horse was near she could make out bits of it through the cracks in the picket fence. It was a white horse.

  She drew her right-hand pistol and backed nearer to the Alvarez girl. A man appeared around the fence corner. He was riding Solomon, and there was blood all over the bandit’s right side, from his thigh to the side of his face.

  He saw her and turned his horse out of the road and came toward her at a walk. He held a pistol dangling at the end of his wounded arm, and he rode slumped and weary in the saddle. She recognized the fat bandit as the one Cortina had called Miguelito, and she wondered if the leer he gave her was meant to be a smile.

  “You, me. We meet again,” Miguelito said in bad English.

  Kizzy raised her Colt to shoulder level and pointed it at him.

  He stopped the horse. His breathing was heavy and ragged. He looked down at the Alvarez girl and then back at Kizzy. “You come with me.”

  “Go away,” Kizzy said.

  He studied the pistol she held, still smiling as if the weapon were a toy and she were a small child offering it to him. “You shoot good, chica. But can you shoot men?”

  “Leave now, or I will kill you.”

  Miguelito shook his head somberly. “I don’t think so. You no have the guts to kill me.”

  “I said for you to leave.”

  “Javier, he stingy with the women. He have this Consuela, but he don’t share her with us. Now, maybe, I have two señoritas, and I don’t share with him.”

  The Alvarez girl dug her heels into the sand and shoved herself against the fence, looking up at the bandit with loathing and fear, as if she already knew things about him.

  Kizzy stared down the top of her Colt, sighting it on the bandit’s forehead. She tried every way possible to force her finger to pull the trigger, but she couldn’t do it.

  Miguelito laughed at her. “You gonna make me some good loving. You drop that pistola and get on your horse.”

  Again she told herself to shoot him then and there. He was no better than a mad animal that needed to be put down.

  His pistol rose slowly at the end of his bloody arm. “Put your pistola down.”

  She dropped the Colt Lightning and it clattered on the ground.

  “See, not so hard,” he said. “Now get on your horses.”

  Kizzy helped the Alvarez girl to her feet and they walked to the horses tied to the fence. The Alvarez girl looked back at Miguelito.

  “We can’t go with him,” she said. “He tried to buy me from Javier.”

  “She can’t help you. She’s too scared,” Miguelito said. “I told Javier we should have taught her a lesson at Piedras Negras, but those rurales interrupted us. Now I have time. She gonna love me now. You both gonna love me. When I get tired of you I’m going to sell you to the Indios.”

  Kizzy turned and faced him, and the Alvarez girl fell at her feet, crying and clutching the fence as if she couldn’t be pried away from it.

  Kizzy stepped away from her horse. “You go on before the Widowmaker comes back.”

  “The Widowmaker? He don’t scare me.” He nodded down at his bloody wounds. “I’ve been shot many times, but no bullet can kill me.”

  “I won’t go.”

  “Then I shoot you and take Consuela.” Miguelito’s aim had sagged due to his wounded and weakened arm, but he started to raise the pistol again, still smiling like a madman.

  Kizzy’s left-hand Colt jumped from its holster and she shot him between the eyes. He tottered in th
e saddle with his head tilted backward and his arms hung limply at his sides, like something impossibly balanced and teetering at the whim of a breeze. The startled horse beneath him took an unsure step forward, and he fell from the saddle, dead.

  Kizzy caught the horse’s bridle, hugging it to her and staring at the dead bandit. She had practiced drawing and firing her pistols thousands of times, shooting at glass balls, tin cans, and paper targets. But never at a living thing. Never at a man. She wasn’t a killer, yet now she was. It was more horrible than she ever imagined it. She holstered her pistol, stooped to pick up her other, and forced the Alvarez girl to stand, all the while avoiding looking at Miguelito’s body.

  “I can’t believe you killed him,” the Alvarez girl said.

  “Come on. Newt and the judge might need our help.”

  Kizzy put her up on the horse Miguelito had been riding. The gelding was the one the Grey family called Mithridates, slightly smaller than the others and the least steady, but her father’s personal favorite.

  She mounted Herod, and the Alvarez girl followed her onto the street. She could see the judge standing ahead of them on the street, looking at something in the direction of the river.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Cortina fled across the desert, and Newt followed him. The white horse Cortina rode was faster than the Circle Dot horse, and during the first half hour, Newt lost sight of anything but his occasional dust trail or glimpses of him in the distance. Cortina seemed willing to risk running his horse to death in an all-out attempt to leave Newt behind in an initial sprint. But the Circle Dot horse was tough. His hooves hammered on in a steady rhythm, through the tortured windings of the canyons, beneath the high, eroded mountains streaked with chalk and bloodred smears, and across the scrub-dotted desert basins with the fine dust of the land adhering to his dark, sweaty hide, and the laboring of his lungs and the pound of his heart like a steam engine piston chugging away.

  The sun moved toward high noon, and the air burned like the insides of an oven, until heat waves danced everywhere you looked. By that time, the chase had changed into less of a mad dash and more of a long, grueling test of endurance. Cortina alternated his pace between a trot and a long lope. Newt’s mind was lost to anything but the thought of the man and horse ahead of him, and even if he wasn’t gaining on them, the distance between them was remaining the same. Once, on a long stretch across a valley floor that went for miles, he could plainly see Cortina trotting a mile ahead of him, like a ghost shimmering tantalizingly out of reach, and perhaps not a real thing at all.

  Cortina then took to the roughest country, perhaps hoping that the fear of him waiting somewhere in ambush would cause Newt to hesitate and fall behind, or perhaps seeking a way to lose him. But Newt came on, paying little heed to places where Cortina might waylay him, and risking everything to bring it all to an end. Occasionally, he stopped to give the Circle Dot horse a drink from his canteen—little handfuls poured into his palm, or to wipe its nostrils clean with a cool, damp rag. He sipped sparingly from the canteen himself, knowing the horse needed the water most. And then the canteen was empty.

  When the sun was tilting over in the furnace sky, Newt followed a set of white-scarred hoof marks on the face of a red rock slope. The Circle Dot horse was heaving and lathered by the time they reached the top of the climb, and Newt slid from the saddle. His legs were rubbery after so long in the saddle, and he leaned against the blowing horse.

  He took the saddle from the horse and left it behind to lighten the animal’s load. It had come to the point where every pound mattered, and he was a big man.

  He rode bareback off the little mountain and down into the maze of buttes and tabletop mesas stretching miles before him. A half hour later, and the Circle Dot horse couldn’t be kicked into anything faster than a walk. The calves of Newt’s pants legs were soaked in horse sweat, and the sweat salt running off his brow stung his eyes. As it was, it took him a bit to recognize the white horse lying in the mouth of a canyon only a few yards ahead of him.

  The horse wasn’t dead, but it wasn’t far from it. Its rib cage rose and fell slowly, and it lay with its neck outstretched on the ground and the one eye he could see was closed. It was so dehydrated that there wasn’t a wet spot on its hide, even lying in the full sun. When the horse breathed he could hear the raspy roaring from its windpipe and lungs. Even if it lived, it would never be worth riding again. It was wind-broken and perhaps foundered. He pulled his pistol and shot the horse between the eyes, rather than let it suffer any longer. The gunshot echoed off the badlands, dying away in the far distance.

  He rode on, more carefully now, and came to a narrow canyon, more a crack in the side of a low, bald mountain, breaking it into two fingerlike buttes. The way up the slash was choked in places with scattered brush and littered with slabs of stone slid down from above. He left the Circle Dot horse at the foot of the slide and went forward on foot, climbing or crawling when and where he had to. The top of the mountain and the head of the little canyon loomed hundreds of feet above him.

  Sweating and cursing under his breath, he eventually found where the rains from an occasional thunderstorm had worn a smooth trough into a long sheet of solid sandstone at the bottom of the canyon. Giant boulders had come to rest on its surface, and he picked his way through them. The sun in the west was shining right in his eyes, and he squinted at the heights above him, searching for Cortina.

  “Here I am,” Cortina called to him softly.

  Cortina stood above him near the head of the canyon, atop one of those big slabs of stone only thirty yards away. He stood with his legs wide apart, and with the hot wind blowing across the desert lifting the flaps of his open wildcat vest. In the instant Newt looked up at him, Cortina’s pistol was already roaring.

  Cortina was fast on the trigger, but he was too angry and wild in his urgency to put Newt down. As it was, his first bullet spanged off the rock to one side of Newt, and seeing that he had missed, he cursed in Spanish.

  Newt dodged a step to the right, and his hand went to the butt of the Smith while he was still on the move. A second shot stung him with rock fragments, but by then the Smith was already lifting to shoulder level. Newt couldn’t recall drawing his gun, and it seemed to do so on its own, as if it were a live thing with a deadly will of its own.

  A third shot from Cortina went wilder than the previous two, and Newt forced himself to hold steady and to lock the soles of his boots into the smooth stone beneath his feet, as if he were an indomitable thing as steady and immovable as those giant slabs of stone around him. He was sure he was going to die, but he intended to take Cortina with him. One shot might be all he was going to get, and come hell or high water, he was going to make that one shot count.

  He turned slightly sideways with his right shoulder turned to Cortina and the Smith held at the end of his arm like a duelist or some target shooter, instead of a man in a frantic, deadly fight to the death. His eyes watered and strained against the sun burning before him atop the mountain. The long barrel of the Smith shifted ever so slightly and the front sight found the bandit outlined and skylined with the sun behind him, like a glowing shadow drawn on a canvas of sunlit, blazing sky.

  The Smith bucked hard in his hand, and Cortina hunched over as if punched in the guts. Newt waited for his recoiling pistol to fall back on target again and drove a second shot into Cortina. Cortina’s body sagged, and his pistol clattered on the rocks below him. He remained standing, for only a brief instant, teetering and staggering slowly at the edge of the boulder top. Another gust of wind blew up from the valley floor and Cortina reeled before it, until he finally toppled headfirst off his perch.

  Newt climbed up to his body, the Smith held ready for another shot. But there was no need to shoot again. His first bullet had punched into Cortina right above his gun belt, and the second one had hit him dead center in the breastbone. Beneath Cortina’s body, blood was sleeping slowly out onto the rocks, as if the stone itself were bleedin
g. And Cortina stared up at him, his eyes wide open, yet not seeming to recognize Newt standing there. Newt had heard tales of bold bandits dying with reckless smiles on their faces, at least that was the way the newspapers always wrote about such men’s demises. But there was nothing but pain and hard living on Cortina’s face. He let out one more sigh and then he was dead.

  Newt fell to a sitting position beside the bandit, wrists resting on his upraised knees, and looking down the mountain. In time, he searched Cortina’s body and found a single gold ingot in the bandit’s vest pocket. He hefted the gold trinket in his palm and stared off the mountain once more, thinking about what he needed to do, and knowing that no good man could do such a thing at all.

  * * *

  He waited until the cool of darkness before he came down the canyon. He found the Circle Dot horse waiting for him and led it back to where the body of the dead white horse lay. He took Cortina’s saddle, and when he was through cinching it on the Circle Dot horse, he tied Cortina’s spotted vest behind it. The other thing he carried, he put in the saddlebags.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  The judge and the women were waiting for him when he crossed the Rio Grande again and rode back into Las Boquillas a day later. They stood on the porch of O’Malley’s tavern, watching him ride down the street, with Kizzy shading her eyes to better make him out. The judge was sitting in a chair with his bandaged leg propped up on a nail keg and his shotgun laid across his lap. Down at the far end of the village, at least twenty horses were tied in front of a house, and several of Don Alvarez’s vaqueros loitered about, watching him. None of the village’s regular inhabitants were to be seen anywhere, as if they knew the trouble coming and weren’t about to be caught on the streets.

  Newt dismounted wearily and untied the spotted vest and his saddlebags. He pitched the vest to the judge and set the saddlebags on the porch. He led the Circle Dot horse to the back of the tavern and turned it in the corral and forked it some hay from the stack there. When he came back to the porch he was carrying his Winchester, and he took up his saddlebags and went inside without a word. Kizzy followed him.