Long Ride Home (Ss) (1989)
Page 16
“No, senor,” Don Pedro’s eyes flashed. “I chase you! And now I have caught you.”
“Or I’ve caught you. Which does it look like?” “I have fifty men!”
“An’ if they make one move, you also have, like I warned you before, a bellyful of lead.”
Don Pedro stood still, raging at his helplessness. His men stood around, not daring to move. “Perhaps you are right,” he admitted coldly. “Because I am not so skillful with the gun as you.”
“You have another weapon?”
“I?” Don Pedro laughed. “I like the knife, senor. I wish I could have you here with the knife, alone!”
Tensleep chuckled suddenly, the old lust for battle rising in his throat like a strong wine, stirring in his veins. “Why, sure! Tell your men we will fight here, with the knife. If I win, I am to go free.”
Don Pedro stared at him, incredulous. “You would dare, senor?”
“Will they obey you? Is your word good?”
“My word?” Don Pedro’s nostrils flared. “Will they obey me?” He wheeled on them, and in a torrent of Spanish told them what they would do.
Cabrizo said, “He tells them, amigo. He tells them true, but this you must not. It is a way you would die.”
Coolly, Mooney shucked his gun belts and placed them on the bar beside Cabrizo. Then from a scabbard inside his belt he drew his bowie knife. “The gent that first used this knife,” he said, “killed eight men with it without gettin’ out of bed where he was sick. I reckon I can slit the gullet of one man!”
Don Pedro was tall, he was lean and wiry as a whip, and he moved across the floor like a dancer. Mooney grinned and his slate-gray eyes danced with a hard light.
Pedro stepped in quickly, light glancing off his knife blade, stepped in, then thrust! And Mooney caught the blade with his own bowie and turned it aside. Pedro tried again, and Mooney again caught the blade and they stood chest to chest, their knives crossed at the guard. Mooney laughed suddenly and exerting all the power in his big, work-hardened shoulders, thrust the Mexican away from him. Pedro staggered back, then fell to a sitting position.
Furious, he leaped to his feet and lunged, blind with rage. Mooney sidestepped, slipped, and hit the floor on his shoulder. Pedro sprang at him but Mooney came up on one hand and stabbed up. He felt the knife strike, felt it slide open in the stomach of Don Pedro, and then for one long minute their eyes held. Not a foot apart, Don Pedro’s whole weight on the haft of Mooney’s knife. “Bueno!” Don Pedro said hoarsely. “As God wills!” Slowly, horribly, he turned his eyes toward his men. “Go home!” he said in Spanish. “Go home to my brother. It was my word!”
Carefully, Tensleep Mooney lowered the body to the floor and withdrew the knife. Already the man was dead. “What kind of cussedness is it,” he said, “that gets into a man? He had nerve enough.” But remembering the Indian, he could find no honest regret for Pedro, only that this had happened.
“Come, amigo,” Cabrizo said softly, “it is better we go. It is a long ride to Wyoming, no?”
“A long ride,” Tensleep Mooney agreed, “an’ I’ll be glad to get home.”