A man came into view, one of Don Carlos’s men, a guard, running across the platform at the top of the high wall. He ran toward the gate, holding a gun in his hand. He was shouting something. Don Carlos couldn’t make out what it was.
A stone staircase on the inside of the wall connected the platform with the courtyard. The guard went halfway down the steps and opened fire, shooting at two men who stood side by side, pulling the gate door inward. It was already open. They were opening it wider.
The shots were loud, explosive. Don Carlos flinched with each report, his hand a claw clutching the curtain which he had parted.
One of the two men at the gate was hit, and went down. The other turned, drew, and fired at the guard on the staircase.
The guard was hit. He cried out, falling off the steps into the courtyard. It was a modest fall, no more than a man’s height. He placed his hands on the ground and raised his upper body, groaning.
The shooter who had knocked him off the stairs stepped away from the gate door for a better shot, pointing his gun at the downed man. The guard raised an open hand in front of his face, shouting, “No, don’t—!”
The shooter fired. The guard cried out as he was hit. He flopped facedown in the dirt, arms and legs working. He screamed for mercy. The shooter fired another slug into him, finishing him. The guard stopped thrashing and lay still, motionless. Silent.
The other man at the gate, the one who’d been shot by the guard, was not dead. He got his legs under him and rose shakily, clasping a hand to the shoulder of his other arm as if it had been hurt.
His partner started toward him. The wounded man waved him away, staggering to the staircase. He sat on the steps, propping himself up against the wall for support. He used his good arm to draw a holstered gun. He rested his gun hand on top of his thighs, pointing the weapon at the interior courtyard, covering it.
His fellow holstered his own gun and went back to the gate door, hauling away at it. The door was heavy, made of stout oak planks and beams reinforced with iron bands. The shooter gripped one of the metal flanges used to hold a bar to secure the door and used it as a handhold. He leaned back, digging his heels in, using his weight to help open the door wider.
The drumming of hoofbeats grew louder, nearing. The shooter finished wrestling the gate door open. He stepped back in time to avoid being trampled by a line of riders racing through the open gateway into the courtyard.
They were many—ten, no, twice that. They filled the courtyard, reining their horses in hard. Some of the animals upreared, rising on hind legs for an instant before touching all four legs down.
Hooves dug into the dirt, kicking up dust. The dust cloud climbed out of the courtyard above the walls, looking ghostly in the moonlight.
For an instant, Don Carlos dared hope that his vaqueros had returned, turning back from their Pago-bound course for some unaccountable reason, coming to the rescue in the nick of time.
The rescue? His rescue!
A second glance was enough to disabuse him of that notion. His vaqueros were hard, tough men, professional guns, killers. But this group was of a whole different order of being, a ragged, wild-looking crew.
A glimpse of them through slowly settling dust clouds was enough to tell that. They shrieked, whooped, and fired their guns in the air.
Apaches? No, they wore sombreros and serapes and fired six-guns, looking like outlaws, bandits—
A gang of bandidos was what they were, that was plain to see.
What of his men, defenders of the rancho? Where were they? Some began to show themselves, running out of the bunkhouse toward the edges of the courtyard and the spaces between outbuildings, not coming straight on, but scrambling to the sides, dodging, running for cover, snapping off a few quick shots.
They were more concerned with protecting their own miserable lives than doing their job of protecting him, Don Carlos, their paymaster and padrón! Worse, their numbers were depressingly few, a sparse handful.
They popped some shots at the boiling black mass of rowdy invaders. Gunfire sparked in the shadows, in thin fiery lines.
The bandits had something to shoot at now and were quick to make the most of the opportunity. How dare they?!
They dared. They were doing well, too, making a good account of themselves, better than that of the defenders. Skilled horsemen, they wheeled their mounts about to exchange shots with the guards, some breaking apart from the mass to charge full tilt at an opponent, blasting away at him.
A few guards stood atop the platform of a long side wall, shooting down into the mass. A bandit was hit, and knocked off his horse. Some of the bandits returned fire at the men on the wall.
Hit, a guard pressed hands flat against his chest, stumbled forward, and pitched headfirst off the rampart, tumbling into a tool shed and falling through the roof, collapsing the structure. The shed came apart, vertical planks and beams falling outward from the center, opening like the petals of a flower.
The pale gray haze of dust was threaded by lines of light that were muzzle flares from the bandits’ blazing guns.
Fresh shooting burst forth from much closer, seemingly from inside the hacienda itself. A house guard stood in the front doorway shooting at the outlaws.
A bandit was hit and fell shrieking from his horse. His foot caught in the stirrup as the horse bolted toward the gateway and outside. The bandit was dragged off down the road, screaming.
A couple of outlaws fired back at the man in the doorway, tagging him. He cried out, falling backwards into the front hall and out of Don Carlos’s sight, though not out of hearing. Now unseen, the newly wounded man called out for help, his cries echoing hollowly through the halls.
Breaking glass sounded below as windowpanes were knocked out to allow the hacienda defenders to thrust rifle barrels through the frames, opening fire. Their shots were few, tentative, half-hearted.
Bandits began shooting at the hacienda in earnest, pouring a volley into the front of the house. Don Carlos shuddered, flinching violently from the impact of each hit tearing into the building. Gunfire from within the house, never strong, fell away fast.
A round fired high tore through the window at which Don Carlos stood immobilized. He fell back, tripping over his own feet, still clutching the curtain as he crashed to the floor. The drapes tore loose from the curtain rod, spilling around him in folds.
Don Carlos crouched on hands and knees, fighting loose of the gauzy curtain enveloping him like a shroud. He realized that he hadn’t been hit. He released his grip on the curtains. He still had his gun, and he kept hold of that.
Crawling on hands and knees to the cover of his massive desk, he rose shakily on rubber legs to a half-crouch, turning toward the door.
A flickering shadow at the edge of his vision made him look up—a figure loomed in the doorway.
Don Carlos jerked his gun up. A shot sounded, not his, simultaneously with a smashing hammer blow to his gun hand as the weapon was shot out of his hand. It fell to the floor a half-dozen paces away.
Don Carlos screamed, clutching his maimed hand to himself. Broken fingers jutted at odd angles, blood spurts jetted. He staggered back into the desk, its support alone propping him up, keeping him on his feet.
The mystery gunman stood framed in the doorway, a hauntingly familiar figure—where had Don Carlos seen him before?
A line of black pom-pom rebozos dangled from the brim of his sombrero, jiggling back and forth over the stranger’s slitted, burning eyes. Serape folds hid the lower half of his face.
His smoking gun was held hip high with seeming nonchalance, giving the illusion that the difficult trick of shooting the gun out of Don Carlos’s hand had been tossed off almost negligently.
Don Carlos now recognized the shooter as one of the three messengers, the bearers of bad tidings—the one who’d been the least forward, remaining in the background.
He stepped forward into the room, his gun covering Don Carlos.
“Who are you?!” Don Ca
rlos cried.
The stranger’s free hand pulled down the serape, uncovering his face. Don Carlos’s cry crescendoed into a peak of terror:
“Gila Chacon! ”
“The massacre at the opera house was so exciting that we had to race here to tell you the good news. Good for me, that is, not for you.” Gila smiled. “The other two? My men, sí, but new to the gang. None here know them to recognize them. So obliging of you to open the gates and let us in—Gracias, señor.
“But then you were always mindful of the little niceties, Don Carlos. I still carry the scars from our last encounter to remind me. We three took care of the guards you had set over us with the strangler’s cord and the knife, so as not to disturb you. So you see, Don Carlos, the Chacon is mindful of the social courtesies, too.
“The other two opened the gates to let the muchachos in. I came in through the kitchen, to pay my old friend a visit. It is a meeting I have been waiting for for a long time.”
“W-what—How did you get away from the Tombstone jail?” Don Carlos stammered.
“You made a big mistake when you sent your slavers north across the border. I had a rope around my neck—thanks to you, señor—but the gringos of Tombstone wanted their girls back alive more than they wanted the Chacon dead.
“I made a grand bargain with them, my life in exchange for leading them here into your stronghold of Pago so they could destroy you. I put them together with some of the many here who have long had reason to wish you dead. Much as I would like to take credit for your downfall, in all honesty I cannot. I helped load the gun, sí, but others pulled the trigger.
“And now the deed is done, the bargain is complete. The gringos have their girls back—and I have you.”
Don Carlos’s mind whirled with desperate scheming to get him off the hook. “Don’t be hasty, Chacon. Think! Before you pull the trigger, think!
“The slave market is a big thing now, taking in much gold. Our customers are some of the best people in the land, the best and the biggest. The richest. I need a partner. You have the men and guns. I have political pull and connections, influence all the way to the highest levels of government. I operate con permiso, with permission, do you understand?”
“Sí, very much so.”
“Then we’ll do business together—”
“No. I have something else planned for you, Don Carlos, old friend. . . .”
Gila Chacon was the last to ride out of the Rancho de la Vega, all his men having exited through the gates before him. They left well before dawn. Gila would have liked to have lingered, but he couldn’t afford the luxury of indulging himself.
There was still Captain Bravo and his troops to deal with. When they returned in the morning, exhausted from their wild-goose chase searching for Victorio’s nonexistent war party they had been duped into believing massacred their patrol by the river, they would find a surprise waiting for them: the Chacon and his band in possession of the town, at the head of an ambush that would tear into them like the fangs and claws of the jaguar.
Gila regretted that the gringos had taken their devil of a machine gun away with them on their flight north. What he could do with such a weapon! He considered racing after them with his men and taking it from them, reluctantly putting aside the thought.
Men such as Matt Bodine and Sam Two Wolves were not to be taken lightly. Nor Ringo and Curly Bill, and all of the others. The least of the raiders was a deadly gun—why, even the bookkeeper could shoot!
It would be madness, too, to charge the machine gun, knowing what it could do, the destruction it sowed. No, best let them go their way and consider it a bargain made and kept.
With men such as those, and a weapon such as that, though, the Chacon could make himself a power in Sonora, perhaps the supreme power in the state, and beyond. Thoughts of other bandits and strongmen who had risen from obscurity to command a nation whirled through his head, opening dizzying prospects. Fate was strange. Who knew but that he and the Brothers of the Wolf might someday meet again?
Only time would tell.
For now, he and his outlaw band and the rebels of Pago had firepower enough and more to shoot Bravo and his men to pieces.
Gila and the muchachos did not leave Rancho Vega empty-handed. Saddlebags and pockets were stuffed to bursting with gold coins. Packhorses and mules were heavily laden with sacks of gold and silver plate and jewel boxes filled with precious gems, pearl necklaces, and gold trinkets.
A wagon and several ox carts were heaped high with plunder: firearms, boxes of ammunition, hundreds of bottles of fine wine and vintage brandies, boxes of cigars, heaps of handsome garments, bolts of expensive fabrics, valuable antiques, and much more. Don Carlos’s stable of fine-blooded thoroughbred horses were enlisted as part of the caravan of pillaged loot.
The bandits rode out one by one, each afforded an opportunity to bid a final farewell to Don Carlos. Indeed, it was virtually impossible for them not to.
For Don Carlos Mondregón de la Vega hung by the neck at the end of a length of yellow hempen rope, suspended from the center of the archway spanning the tops of the gate posts.
An instructive sight, if not a pretty one. Staring eyes bulged in a swollen purple face, blackened tongue extended, the rope of the noose buried deep in the flesh of the neck.
Don Carlos hung at such a height that the bottoms of his feet were almost at a level with the tops of the hats of the mounted bandits filing out through the gates. His feet were bare—his expensive custom-made boots had been stolen, too.
The muchachos had to duck or tilt their heads sideways to keep from having their sombreros knocked askew by the dangling man’s feet. As they passed, they inadvertently seemed to bob their heads in acknowledgment of the generosity of their unwilling host.
Or so Gila Chacon saw it as he sat his horse inside the courtyard watching his men file out, savoring the sight of his deadly enemy Don Carlos suffering the fate he had intended for the bandit chief.
For such was the justice of the Chacon.
TWENTY-TWO
The convoy of Tombstone raiders and two wagonfuls of freed young females rushed north along the Camino Real, through the narrow gorge of La Garganta and out of the Espinazo.
Beyond lay a flat stony plain. At its far end, a wall of mountain peaks was broken by the mouth of a canyon pass stretching north between them. Breaking dawn found the convoy halfway to the pass.
South, a plume of dust showed, closing fast, nearing. It resolved itself into a band of mounted men.
“I make it about twelve, maybe fifteen men. That how you see it, Joe?” Sam Two Wolves asked.
Pima Joe nodded.
“We can’t outrun them, not with the wagons,” Matt said.
“Outrun, hell! I say let’s have it out with ’em and kill ’em,” Curly Bill said.
“Can’t risk any of the girls getting shot, Bill,” Ringo said gently.
“Right, right, of course! What do we do, then?”
“Send the wagons on ahead while some of us stay behind to tangle with the hombres chasing us,” Matt offered.
“Now, that’s a plan I like,” Curly Bill said, flashing a big grin. “I’ll stay, of course.”
“Me, too,” Ringo said.
All the raiders with the exception of Geetus Maggard were eager to stay behind. The Mitrailleuse machine gun would do no good here, where there was vast space for the pursuers to peel off and swing wide, clear of the weapon’s field of fire. Then they could converge to hit the convoy’s flanks or even outrace it to cut off the wagons.
It was hastily decided that the rear guard would consist of the best mounted pistol fighters: Matt, Sam, Ringo, Curly Bill, Jeff Howell, Hal Purdy, and Ed Dane. The others would escort the wagons to the safety of the north pass.
“I was hoping to be in on the finish,” Remy Markand said seriously.
“Once you get to the narrow confines of the pass you can bring the machine gun into play, if they should get by us,” Matt said. “I want men
I can trust to bring the girls the rest of the way home if we don’t make it, men like you.”
“I concede the logic of your argument, but I don’t have to like it.”
“Hell, Remy, you got to solo with the machine gun onstage at the opera house last night. Let the rest of us have some fun, too.”
“If that’s how you want it, Matt.”
“That’s how it adds up. Better get moving. Those riders are coming fast and the girls have to be out of shooting range.”
“Good luck!”
The wagons raced north, driven by Dutch Snyder and Geetus Maggard, escorted by Remy, Polk Muldoon, Juan Garza, Vern Tooker, Pima Joe, and Arnholt Stebbins.
Breaking dawn sent long, radiant yellow shafts of sunlight slanting across the pebbly, purple-gray plain. The rear guard formed up in a loose line facing south, toward the oncoming riders. They started their horses forward.
“Damned if that don’t look like Black Angus hisself,” Jeff Howell said.
“It is Jones, along with his gang and some other jaspers they must’ve picked up along the way,” Curly Bill said.
Black Angus Jones and company had outstayed their welcome in Pago. Being slave hunters, not buyers, and not particularly desirable company to boot, they’d been excluded from the theater hall when the shooting started, allowing them to escape with their lives, guns, and horses, if little else.
Some hours had passed before they realized that the situation had changed irrevocably and Pago was to them a closed book. The Tombstone convoy had a good head start but the wagons slowed them down, allowing Black Angus to catch up with them in the plains north of the Espinazo.
“Let’s put them down for good,” Matt said.
“It won’t be for bad,” Sam said.
“Dorado is mine,” Ringo said.
“Not if I beat you to him,” Curly Bill said.
“Quirt Fane, too.”
“Getting’ kinda greedy, ain’t you, John?”
Blood Bond 16: A Hundred Ways to Die Page 29