Blood Bond 16: A Hundred Ways to Die

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Blood Bond 16: A Hundred Ways to Die Page 22

by Johnstone, William W.


  The Tombstone trekkers swung wide around the encampment, avoiding detection by the patrol. They worked their way across the countryside, keeping to arroyos where they could, sheltering in those dry washes and riverbeds. They rode below the crest of ridges, careful not to skyline.

  Shadows lengthened, the sun sank, and then it was night. The raiders crossed the plains east of Pago. The town lay on a rise, its spiky outline with its cathedral tower and domed opera house with turrets all a-glitter by starlight in the clear, dry, high desert air.

  The moon had not yet risen.

  Gila Chacon led the way, taking the Tombstoners to his hideout. They circled southwest below the town, then rode north, entering a hilly patch of ground bordering a mesa-studded plain.

  Ahead rose a freestanding butte, whose rocky plateau was crowned by a dwarf pine forest. The spicy, tangy scent of pine needles and resin wafted on gentle night breezes. They advanced, with Gila pausing frequently to take note of local landmarks.

  “Thought you knew your way around these parts,” Geetus Maggard snapped.

  “And so I do, angry little man with mouth so big, but the entrance is hard to find, especially at night. That is what makes it a good hideout,” Gila said patiently, as if explaining things to a child.

  From a distance the west face of the butte looked like a solid rock wall. Nearing it, this proved to be an illusion.

  The rock wall was jagged, irregular, thrusting out buttresses, spurs, and limbs. About one-third of the way north from its southwest corner was a rock spur forty feet high, its stepped face overgrown with trees and brush.

  Gila pointed his horse straight at it and rode on, the others following. Their eyes now were all long-accustomed to darkness and the growing light of moonrise helped. But the Tombstoners would never have found the entrance by night, or even possiby by day, nor noticed that the seemingly solid spur with its heavily wooded face masked a gap in the rock, a cleft narrow at the opening and tall, high, and thick with brush.

  The column halted. “I will go first. My compadres may be quick to fire. Wait for my return,” Gila said.

  He went ahead, brushes rustling as he rode between them. They swallowed him up, man and mount disappearing in the bushy cleft. The others waited, time seeming to stand still, each minute prolonging the suspense and working on their nerves. Hands rested on holstered gun butts and sheathed saddle rifles.

  “Funny if Apaches found the place and are hiding out in there,” Dutch Snyder said absently.

  “We’ll die laughing,” Geetus Maggard returned.

  Ten minutes passed. From somewhere deep within rock walls came the sound of an owl hoot, distant, disembodied, eerie.

  “That’s Gila,” Sam said.

  “How can you tell?” somebody asked.

  “I can tell.”

  “Hell, you’re just guessing,” Maggard said. “I heard plenty of owls myself in my day and that sure sounded like one to me.”

  “No, that’s Gila,” Vern Tooker said. Pima Joe grunted, nodding agreement.

  An answering hoot to the first call now sounded from somewhere deeper in the cleft. Five minutes more passed.

  “Here he comes,” Sam said.

  “I don’t hear nothing, not-a-thing,” Maggard maintained.

  But they all did a moment later: There was the click of an iron horseshoe stepping on rock, the sough of a horse moving through high bush and weeds, the rustle of brush, a twig snapping under hoof.

  Gila emerged from behind the screen of brush.

  “We was starting to worry about you,” Dutch Snyder said.

  “All is well, but there are only a few men there. My muchachos have not yet arrived,” Gila said. “Come.”

  He turned his horse around and once more passed the brush screen, the others following one by one in single file. For the first fifteen or twenty yards the cleft was so tight that a rider could barely pass through without his mount scraping its sides on rock walls. The rocks were worn smooth, polished perhaps by the passage of many others stretching back through dim mists of time.

  There was a smell of moisture, of green growing things. The snakelike passage opened on a box canyon nestled in the heart of the butte. It was an oval park about one hundred yards on its long axis and forty at the beam.

  A spring rose from among the rocks, spilling over into a thin stream trickling across the canyon floor. A small flock of sheep huddled together on a grassy patch.

  A campfire burned. Around it stood an old man, a boy, and a scrawny sheepdog with its ribs showing.

  The Tombstoners stepped down from their horses, looking around, stretching to relieve muscles tired and strained from long hours in the saddle. Some moved to water their horses.

  The old man’s name was Nando. He was white haired and white bearded, looking like a snowy owl, hooded dark eyes surrounded by white plumage. He held a wooden walking staff upright in one hand. He wore a grimy sheepskin vest, clean white shirt and pants, a rope belt and rope sandals. A machete was thrust through the rope belt to hang at his hip. Standing against a rock was his long rifle, an old-time, single-shot, smoothbore musket.

  The boy was twelve years old, thin, dark-haired with wide dark eyes. He followed Nando around, standing a pace or two behind and to the side of the oldster.

  Nando eyed the newcomers with no discernible sign of pleasure or welcome.

  “These are friends,” Gila said.

  “Gringos,” said Nando.

  “They saved me from a hangman’s rope, and will furnish me with a rope to hang Don Carlos.”

  “So! You are welcome, friends.” Nando bared his white teeth in a grin, dark eyes alight with savage joy.

  “My Guardsmen and the rest of the muchachos will be here soon.”

  “I will so tell the sentries, Gila.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Sam Two Wolves and Remy Markand came to town, the town of Pago.

  Pago was important culturally and commercially, having been founded three hundred years earlier. The first building to arise on the site was the presidio, a military fort of massive, Cyclopean stone-block construction built by Indian slaves and convict labor battalions. The presidio squatted on a rocky knob apart from the rest of the town, brooding over the flat plains trending northward to the mountains of the Espinazo.

  Stretching across the flat was the Camino Real, the King’s Highway connecting far-distant Mexico City in the southern interior to the great southwestern desert in the north.

  Pago means “payment,” and the town was well-named, for from earliest times royal officials and military commanders had collected tolls and taxes on all travelers passing by this way on the Camino Real.

  The body of the town was set on a wide, low, flat-topped rise. Its central feature was the zócalo, the plaza, around whose square sides the main buildings had been raised, the heart of the old colonial administrative apparatus.

  On the west side of the zócalo fronting east stood the cathedral, an ornate structure of ash-gray stone with lofty needlelike spires, flying buttresses, octagonal side chapels, pointed arches, steep slanted roofs, and elaborate, decorative stone carvings.

  North stood the Palacio, the royal colonial administration’s headquarters and now the seat of the district’s government. It was a three-story office building housing a tribunal court, extensive historical archives, and the numerous small offices of an arrogant and overbearing bureaucracy.

  The zócalo’s east side held a row of commercial buildings, including an indoor mercado, or marketplace, and a selection of government-licensed shops and stores selling various high-line, expensive goods.

  A wide, flat, square plaza, open on the south side, featured lines of temporary booths and stalls selling a variety of goods and foodstuffs.

  The zócalo and environs comprised Old Town.

  New Town lay north of and apart from the plaza. It was centered around that great architectural and cultural folly, the opera house. Built by Don Carlos’s immediate predecessor and the cause
of his ruination, the opera house was a grandiose baroque pile topped by a domed roof and four corner turrets, surrounded by gardens bordered by iron-spear fences and gates.

  A wealthy residential section had grown up in the neighborhood, a tract of expensive houses bordered by high walls. Most of its denizens were newly rich, owing their affluence to the slave trade brokered by Don Carlos.

  In the center of the plaza lay a fountain and basin. The fountain was broken and the basin was dry. At the basin’s midpoint stood a pedestal atop which sat a monumental, cast-bronze statue of an armor-clad conquistador on a horse. Rider and horse faced north, the conquistador holding a lance. The horse reared up on its two hind legs. Time had weathered the bronze to a pale green hue and disrespectful pigeons had layered it with white guano.

  At eight in the morning, Sam and Markand met their local contact, Pepe Herrera, at the fountain.

  Herrera, a feisty bantamweight, seemed natty and dapper, though his clothes were frayed and threadbare and his boots wearing down to the uppers. He was medum-sized, thin, nimble, with sharp-pointed features and a hooked nose, wide expressive mouth, graying mustache, and chin whiskers. Deep-set eyes burned in a hollow-cheeked face.

  He was one of a staff of temporary workers employed twice yearly at the opera house before, during, and after auction week. A Pago town dweller, he was maintenance man and handyman, a jack-of-all-trades.

  He would arrange for Sam and Remy Markand to take a guided tour of the opera house this morning. Pepe Herrera was one of Gila Chacon’s contacts. He’d been put together with Sam and Remy by the bandit.

  The Tombstone rescue raiders couldn’t do their job blindfolded. They needed inside information, the layout of the opera house, locale of the captives, and disposition of enemy forces.

  An underground resistance against Don Carlos and his slave hunters had long been building in Pago. The would-be rebels had penetrated the operation, planting their people inside. But so far they’d been unable to strike back effectively.

  “Between Don Carlos and Capitán Bravo, they have us outgunned,” Herrera told Sam and Remy.

  “We’ve come to even up those odds,” Sam said.

  Markand would pretend to be a slave buyer, while Sam would pose as his bodyguard. Why Remy Markand? Because he was a French-speaking Creole from New Orleans who could carry off the imposture with style and steel nerves. He would pose as a whoremonger on the buy for fresh young virgins from Mexico. Cultured and educated, yet a onetime Legionnaire and fighting man, Remy could go among the well-heeled heels and pass as one of them. His background was exotic enough to make it stick.

  Why Sam? Because like Markand he was not the stereotypical gringo. There were many gringos in Pago at the moment, most coming from the left-hand side of the ledger, the Dark Trail: slave hunters, gunmen, and bodyguards of top vice merchants.

  Sam, as could be seen at a glance, was no ordinary gringo. Shoulder-length black hair, copper-colored skin, corner eye folds, hawklike nose, and beardless face marked him out as an Indian. Yet he was a university graduate, a man of great depth, fluent in Spanish and French, attributes which would enhance the reality of his role.

  Had he been paired with Matt Bodine, the two might have been recognized as the Brothers of the Wolf who were fast becoming a legend of the West. But teamed with Remy, Sam’s unusual presence would bolster the credibility of both.

  What’s more, Sam was a dangerous man, a cool-nerved killer with all weapons, including his feet and hands. He was walking into a snake pit; if anyone had the skills to go in and come back alive, he did.

  Nando had gone into town before dawn, meeting one of Herrera’s rebel agents who furnished him with a change of clothes for Sam and Remy, to buttress their roles as a New Orleans French Quarter vice lord and his lethally efficient enforcer.

  Behind some bushes, Sam and Remy donned the garments, getting duded up in suits and ties. They kept their own boots, footwear being difficult to get sized right. Pants were worn over the boots. The worn and dusty condition of the parts that showed would back up their cover story of having trailed overland on horseback to attend the auction.

  The jacket was tight around Sam’s shoulders and the pants baggy at the hips, but the garments were new and expensive enough to enhance the masquerade.

  Remy donned a white ruffled shirt with a black satin cravat and pearl stickpin. “We look a pair of fine fops,” he said.

  “I sure hope so,” said Sam.

  They kept their weapons, holstered belt guns. In addition, Remy had a sleeve gun hidden inside his right cuff and a derringer in his left jacket pocket. Sam had a long knife worn sheathed under his left arm and a second short thin throwing knife, little more than a sharp-pointed, keen-edged piece of stamped-out metal worn on a rawhide thong hanging down between his shoulder blades.

  Nando escorted them to the southwest corner of the square, pointing out Herrera, who was crossing toward the fountain from the north. A bright clear day with a cloudless sky, it was already hot in the open sun but still cool in the shade.

  Sam, Remy, and Pepe Herrera stood at the west of the zócalo fountain and basin, in the shadow of the conquistador’s bronze statue. A number of idlers loitered in the plaza, most clad in elegant, expensive garments, well-to-do gentlemen and their ladies.

  A few small knots of young, attractive, and well-dressed women with parasols were most likely fashionable prostitutes of the town. Uniformed soldiers with shouldered rifles stood guard outside the front entrance of the Palacio.

  “Nice day,” Sam remarked.

  “You see that there are few townsfolk abroad enjoying this fine weather,” Herrera said, his tone acid, withering. “Families lock up their daughters and stay closely by their sides when the auction comes around, afraid they’ll be stolen and sold to Don Carlos to round off some consignment of flesh.

  “But enough of an old man’s bitterness. You speak Spanish?”

  “Yes,” Remy said.

  “We both do,” said Sam.

  “That is good,” Herrera said, switching from English to Spanish. “I speak some English, but for where we are going in the Casa it is best to speak Spanish, since everybody in Pago hates gringos as a matter of course.”

  “Including you?” Sam asked with a tight grin.

  “I mean you no offense.”

  “None taken.”

  “I and my compadres welcome all freedom-loving men of good will who have come to help us in the struggle, no matter who they are or where they come from,” Herrera said. “You come well recommended, if Gila Chacon vouches for you. Now to business. You have gold with you?”

  “Some,” Remy said, “enough for now.” A pouch of gold nestled in his jacket’s inside breast pocket, gotten earlier from Arnholt Stebbins to carry out the mission. It had been no mean feat to pry some of Colonel Davenport’s gold from the “fighting bookkeeper,” as Ringo had christened him. But it was a necessary prop and tool to carry out the masquerade.

  Sam had the hundred dollars in gold he’d been advanced at the start of the trek, with a bit extra besides.

  “How much do you need?” Remy asked.

  Pepe Herrera gestured as if brushing the idea aside. “No, no, the gold is not for me, but for them, for the slave masters. No one needs a special invitation to attend the auction. No, the ticket of admission is a pocketful of gold. Hard cash is the only bona fides required.”

  “I’ve got enough to make a fair showing,” Remy said, “with more available for the auction if needed.”

  “Good! Shall we go?”

  They crossed the plaza, going around the Palacio and continuing north on foot toward the opera house. The grounds were enclosed by an iron-spear fence eight-feet high. A cobblestone road led through the main gates, making a looping drive that curved through the gardens to the foot of the marble stairs, then back out again

  “It was made so that the opera patrons could arrive by carriage to the performances. Never used, of course. No opera has ever been staged
at La Casa. No touring company in the world will come to Pago, for fear that their prima donna sopranos and coloraturas will be stolen away and locked in a gilded cage like the veriest songbird,” Herrera said.

  The main gates were open. Inside the gateway on the left stood a guard box.

  The guards were two of Don Carlos’s vaqueros, his riders. They looked more like pistoleros than cattle tenders of the ranchero. They were armed with repeating rifles and gun belts.

  “Good morning, men,” Herrera said. One grunted in acknowledgment, the other nodded. Herrera swept through the gates without slowing and Sam and Remy kept right up with him.

  “That was easy,” Remy said.

  “It gets harder at the opera house entrance. That is the real test,” Herrera said.

  The grounds had once been handsomely landscaped, with lawns, box hedges, flowerbeds, straight and winding paths. There were pieces of marble statuary, nooks with stone alcoves, and small circular ponds.

  All were long neglected now. The grass needed cutting, for it was ankle high. Weeds grew in the cracks between paving stones on the garden paths. The hedges needed trimming. The ponds were empty, dried up.

  The opera house loomed ahead.

  “That’s one of the damnedest things I’ve ever seen. And to find it here in Pago, of all places,” Sam marveled, shaking his head, half appalled, half bemused.

  “It looks like a beached whale, a beached marble whale that washed up in the Espinazo,” Remy said.

  “We call it La Casa de las Lloronas,” Herrera said.

  “The House of Crying Women,” Sam said, nodding.

  “Yes, that is how we name it—in private behind locked doors and shuttered windows, to be free of the spies of Don Carlos and Capitán Bravo.”

  “That bad, huh? Are the spies so many?”

  “Who can say? They don’t wear signs,” Herrera said, shrugging. “That is part of the problem—trust. Who to trust? Is the man sitting at the next table in the cantina working as the eyes and ears of Don Carlos?

 

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