Payback at Big Silver

by Ralph Cotton

“You got it, Charlie Knapp,” Bour said. He wiped his hand across his lips and looked all around at the brush and the rock cover they stood in on the broad cliff above the trail. “We’ll get Centrila’s boy broke out real quick. The way it looks, this place was made for an ambush.”

  Walking back from where they dragged Gore’s body, Lyle and Ignacio saw the shiny tin flask as Bour handed it back to Knapp.

  “Don’t we get a drink too?” Lyle said when they stopped a few feet away.

  “No,” said Knapp. “You should have been here when it was offered.” He patted the lapel of his riding jacket where he’d pocketed the flask, then turned and walked away. Coco Bour and Jake Testa gave the Cadys a look and walked away behind him.

  “I guess he showed us where we stand, brother,” Lyle said under his breath. “Far as I’m concerned we can cut out of here any time you’re ready.”

  “Let’s keep biding our time,” Iggy replied. “Soon as we ride away without getting into Knapp’s rifle sights, I’m as ready to quit Edsel Centrila as fast as you are.” He looked at his brother closely. “I just don’t want us to get killed doing it.”

  • • •

  Shortly after daylight the barred four-horse Studebaker prisoner transport wagon rolled onto a stretch of trail running through a deep valley of stone. Seated beside the driver, the wagon guard looked up into the morning sunlight to his right and searched along a flat cliff line looming fifty feet overhead. The diver slowed the four horses almost to a walk when the forward guard on horseback stopped his mount thirty yards ahead of them, turned his horse sideways in the middle of the trail and sat staring with his rifle across his lap.

  “What the blazes is he doing, Ernest?” the driver said sidelong to the guard. “This is no place to be stopping. My guts pucker every time I get to this stretch of trail.”

  “Mine too,” said the guard, an elderly former Ranger named Ernest Shule. “Bennie’s just green. He’ll be all right.” He stood up from his wooden seat, rifle in hand, and called out to the forward guard, a young Kansan named Bennie Eads.

  “Bennie, what are you stopping here for?” he called out. “We need to keep this rig moving.”

  Eads didn’t answer; he sat staring back at the two lawmen and their cargo of four cuffed and shackled prisoners. The four stood up and pressed their faces against the warm side bars, trying to get a view of the trail ahead of them.

  “I say he’s lost his mind,” said the driver, a former army scout named Curly Ed Townsend. “He wouldn’t be the first I’ve seen do it out here.”

  “Sit still here, Curly,” said Shule. “I’ll see what’s got into him.” He swung down from his seat and walked forward on the rocky trail, looking up along the cliff line as he went. “Dang it all, Bennie, you couldn’t picked us a worse place to stop this rig if you tried,” he said. “You’re giving Curly the willies . . . me too, far as that goes—”

  He stopped and fell silent as he neared the guard. He watched as Bennie turned his horse and rode off farther along the trail and stopped and looked back again.

  “What are you doing, Bennie?” he called out, hurrying his pace up a little. “Sit still. I don’t aim to walk all the way to . . .” His words trailed to a halt. A dark reasoning swept into his mind, and his eyes cut back up along the cliff line. He looked back at Eads and saw the mounted guard turn his horse again and ride away farther.

  Oh no!

  Shule turned and broke into a full, hard run toward the wagon, waving his rifle at the driver.

  “Back them horses out of here, Curly!” he shouted. “It’s a trap!”

  “Holy Joseph!” said Curly Ed, drawing back hard on the sets of reins in his hands. Yet, before the big wagon horses could even respond to his hand commands, he heard rifle shots along the cliff and saw Shule fall to the rocky ground in a hail of bullets. “I’m coming, Ernest! Hang on!” he shouted, slapping the reins hard against the horses’ backs.

  As the wagon jolted forward, one of the prisoners held tight on to the bars with one hand and grabbed Harper Centrila to keep him from losing his footing.

  “Obliged, Lon,” said Centrila, rounding away from the man’s hand on his shoulder. Along the cliff line rifle shots resounded steadily; bullets thumped on the wooden part of the wagon framing and kicked up dirt and rock on the trail.

  “Yee-hiii!” shouted an outlaw named Bill Seadon. “I love a shooting!” He stamped his shackled bare feet on the wagon bed in a crazy dance and shook his cuffed hands wildly. “When Harper here says he’s got a plan in the works, he ain’t fooling around!”

  Shots sliced through the air around the wagon with the sound of canvas being ripped apart. The other three prisoners hunkered down at the front of the barred rig where a thick wall of wooden planking stood between the driver compartment and the deep wagon bed. But Seadon continued to dance and laugh and hoot aloud. Lon Bartow, the prisoner who had grabbed Harper’s arm to keep him from falling, started to reach out and pull Seadon down out of the gunfire. But Harper gave him a look and shook his head, stopping him.

  “Let the fool dance,” he said. “Maybe he’ll catch a stray bullet instead of us.”

  As the prisoners huddled, the wagon rolled on, the four horses picking up speed as Curly tried to get to his fallen pal lying bloody in the trail amid heavy gunfire. As the wagon neared Shule, Curly Ed swerved the horses just enough to stop the rig between Shule and the riflemen above them. With the bared wagon in their gun sights, the riflemen slowed their firing. Up on the cliff, Knapp raised a hand toward Lyle and Ignacio Cady.

  “Watch your shooting, Cady brothers,” he said. “We don’t want to kill him breaking him out.” He looked down and saw the driver leap down from the rig, grab the fallen guard and help him climb back aboard.

  Back in the wagon seat, Ernest Shule bleeding on the seat beside him, Curly Ed slapped the reins to the horses’ backs and put them forward. Behind the two guards the prisoners cursed and complained while Bill Seadon continued to dance wildly and sing with the utter abandon of a lunatic.

  “They’re here for somebody!” Curly Ed shouted to Shule amid the reduced rifle fire and the sound of the prisoners. “Else they’d still be shooting us to pieces.”

  “Keep us rolling! Get us out from between these cliffs!” shouted the wounded guard in reply. Wrapping a bandanna around his bleeding forearm, he drew it tight with his teeth. Bullets still ripped through the air, but less wildly now. Curly Ed slapped the reins and kept the rig moving forward until he half rose from his seat, seeing the two figures standing in the trail ahead of them, rifles to their shoulders.

  “Uh-oh! Hold on tight and lie low, ol’ pard,” he said to Ernest Shule. “They’ve thought of everything!” He slapped the reins even harder. “We’re not stopping until we’ve plowed through them!”

  Bullets sliced past them from straight ahead as the two riflemen on the trail opened fire.

  “Like hell I’ll lie low!” Shule shouted, raising his rifle, returning fire. “I’m near dead anyway. I’m shooting somebody, long as I’m fit to do it!”

  “Me too!” shouted Curly Ed as he drove the bouncing wagon forward into the rifle fire. He took the reins in one firm hand and reached down and drew his Colt from its holster and returned fire. “Let’s go out fighting!”

  Chapter 8

  Standing midtrail, Coco Bour and Jake Testa fired repeatedly at the oncoming prison transport wagon. They held their ground even as the gunshots from the driver and the guard zipped past them and kicked up dirt around their feet. In the roiling dust behind the wagon, they could see the Cady brothers and Charlie Knapp riding hard, having mounted and ridden down a thin steep path to give chase. In the wagon behind the driver and guard, the prisoners had stopped whooping and catcalling and now pleaded with the driver to bring the wagon to a stop. The wagon had raced out from between the cliffs. On the right a steep rocky hillside fell away hundreds of
feet, much of it straight down.

  “We’ll stop when hell says we have to!” Shule shouted down to them, firing steadily as the wagon rocked back and forth violently.

  The prisoners saw the tops of stone peaks and pines streaking past them a hundred feet below as the wagon rocked dangerously close to the trail’s edge. Bill Seadon still stood balanced against the side bars and reached his cuffed hands out and let the dust from the wheels spray out off his palms.

  “Crazy as a goose flying sideways!” said Lon Bartow. He shook his head. “I never met a Seadon who wasn’t.” He stared at Seadon as the wagon rocked wildly. Huddled with them, a Southern gunman from New Orleans named “Three-toed” Delbert Swank bounced against the barred side wall and landed back beside Bartow.

  “Are you sure they’re here to break you out, Harper,” he shouted at Harper Centrila, “or to kill you before you get to Yuma?”

  “Go to hell, Delbert,” Harper shouted wryly. “This is the best ride you ever had—”

  Harper’s words finished short as the speeding rig’s right wheels hit a sunken rock the size of a large melon and flipped the rig high onto its left wheels. Rolling on, it stayed cocked high and dangerous, as if in defiance of gravity. Curly Ed wrestled with the reins and leaned far right to counterbalance the weight and bring the rig back onto four wheels. Beside him Ernest Shule, wounded and bleeding badly, swung his weight as far right as he could and held on. Even the four horses’ weight swayed against the risen wagon. But all to no avail.

  “Look at this!” said Coco Bour; he and Testa both ceased firing. The two lowered their rifles an inch from their shoulders and stood staring in the cloud of burnt powder hanging about them. Still fifty yards away, the barred wagon snaked and veered and slid in billowing dust. Yet somehow the wagon managed to stay tilted high on its two left wheels and speed forward, its four horses struggling to keep the rig and themselves from being flipped over the edge of the trail.

  As the two ambushers stared, the wagon broke loose from the four horses. The animals ran swaying to the left, the wagon to the right. Atop the rig, both driver and guard flew from the wooden seat and landed thirty feet away, rolling in the dusty trail. The rig went off the edge of the trail and tumbled downward. On the trail behind it, Charlie Knapp and the Cady brothers slid their horses to a halt and sat watching, stunned, mesmerized.

  “What the living hell is this?” Knapp said under his breath in amazement.

  The big wagon rolled and flipped and tumbled and bounced, plunging boulder to boulder farther down the steep hillside. Wooden wheels and frame creaked and broke and flew apart; iron twisted and clanged; bars flew away and twirled through the air. In its fall, the big rig spat out the prisoners one at a time every few yards.

  The last one, Bill Seadon, landed atop a flat-topped rock just before the wagon ran out of hillside and fell spiraling the last thirty yards, crashing on a wide cliff below.

  “That was one powerful run,” Knapp said to the Cadys in the rising dust as the silence fell along the trail and hillside. He stepped down from his saddle; Lyle and Ignacio did the same.

  “There’s Harper. He’s alive!” Lyle said, pointing down the hillside.

  “I see him,” said Knapp. “You two flounce on down the rocks and help him up here.” As he spoke, he drew a Colt from his holster and walked toward the driver and guard lying in the middle of the trail.

  Flounce . . . ?

  The Cadys looked at each other with shared rancor. But they hurried over the trail edge and climbed down to where Harper had risen and stood with his cuffed hands cupping his forehead. A few yards farther down, Lon Bartow rose and staggered and looked all around in wonderment. Farther down still, Three-toed Delbert Swank shoved a section of plank off himself and sat up rubbing his jaw. Bill Seadon had stood up and already started scrambling upward, laughing loudly, his cuffed hands pulling him over rock after rock.

  Reaching the driver and guard in the middle of the trail, Knapp aimed his Colt down at Ernest Shule, who lay bleeding, breathing heavily.

  “The keys, right now,” Knapp said. He wiggled the Colt in his hand.

  Shule eyed him with hatred as he reached inside his rawhide vest and brought out two sets of keys to the shackles and cuffs.

  “My pard’s dead,” he said, gesturing his eyes toward Curly Ed Townsend, who lay with his head at a sharply twisted angle, staring up blankly.

  “Tough knuckles,” said Knapp. “Give me the keys.”

  “Go get them, son of a bitch,” said Shule. He drew back and hurled the iron keys out over the edge of the trail. The keys bounced down out of sight among the rocks.

  Knapp took a deep breath and shot the guard though the head.

  “Now you’re dead too,” he said. He turned and walked to the trail edge and looked down. As he stood there, Coco Bour and Jake Testa walked up, leading their horses and the spare horses they had brought along for Harper and his fellow prisoners.

  “Don’t tell me that was the keys that just went flying out,” Bour said, the two stopping beside Knapp and looking down with him.

  Knapp cursed low under his breath.

  “Yes, it was the keys,” he said. He looked over at the Cadys, who were helping Harper up the rocky hillside. The other prisoners came tagging up behind them.

  “Both of you hurry up,” he said to the brothers. “Get him up here, then get over in the rocks and start searching.” He gestured his smoking gun barrel in the direction the dying guard had thrown the two keys.

  The Cadys looked at each other again. This time Ignacio couldn’t keep his mouth shut.

  “Any chance Bour and Testa can give us a hand?” he called out in a sarcastic voice.

  “No,” Knapp said flatly, “these two didn’t throw the keys, he did.” He gestured toward the dead guard.

  Ignacio said to his brother under his breath, “That doesn’t even make sense.”

  “He knows it doesn’t Iggy,” said Lyle. “He’s just pushing us around.”

  As the two brothers spoke they saw the other forward trail guard walk up to Knapp and the others, leading his horse.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Knapp asked gruffly, eying him up and down.

  “Says he wants his money,” Bour cut in. “I told him he’d have to see you about it.”

  “That’s right,” Bennie Eads said boldly. “I did my job leading them in. I want what’s coming to me.”

  “You’ll get what’s coming to you soon as Harper has his cuffs off,” said Knapp, nodding down the steep hillside. “Now get down there and help find the keys. We’ve been here too damn long as it is.”

  Eads gave Bour and Testa a look as if wondering why they weren’t searching for the keys. But the two returned his look with an unfriendly gaze. Bour snatched the reins to Eads’ horse from his hand.

  “You heard the man,” he said to Eads. “Get down there and find the key. Everybody does their part around here.”

  • • •

  For the next half hour Knapp, Bour and Testa watched the Cadys and the guard search among the rocks with no results.

  “Damn it all,” Charlie Knapp said. He paced back and forth impatiently, rifle cradled in his arm, and took note of the sun reaching higher into the midmorning sky. Harper and the other three barefoot prisoners had climbed the hillside and sat on the edge of the trail sipping water from a canteen and cleaning their cuts and welts with a wet bandanna they’d retrieved from the dead driver and guard.

  “This ain’t worth a damn,” Knapp growled aloud to himself. He turned to Bour and Testa and reached out a hand toward the sets of horses’ reins in Testa’s gloved hand. “Give me the horses,” he said. “Both of you go down and help those phildoodles, else we never will get out of here.”

  Handing him the reins, Testa followed Bour down onto the rocky hillside. Yet after another unsuccessful half hour of se
arching had passed, Knapp stood up from where he’d sat down on the trail’s edge and dusted his seat with his free hand.

  “All of you dog it off. We’re not homesteading here,” he called down to the searchers. “There’s a village, Mejores Amigos, right over the border, less than twenty miles. We’ll get shed of the cuffs there.”

  “Mejores Amigos means Best Friends,” Ignacio Cady offered absently.

  Harper gave him a scorching stare, then looked up the hillside at Knapp.

  “Best Friends my ass, Charlie,” he shouted up at Knapp. “How the hell do you think we’re going to ride with shackles on our ankles?”

  Knapp bristled at the angry tone in the younger outlaw’s voice. But he kept himself in check, turned away and led the horses a few steps away without reply.

  “Let’s get going, then,” he finally called back over his shoulder. “We’ll deal with this the best we can.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that,” Lon Bartow said sidelong to Harper Centrila as the men all started climbing up out of the rocks.

  • • •

  In the waning afternoon, two Mexican men and a middle-aged dove named Dafne, who’d retired from the brothels in El Paso, stood up in the shade of a canvas overhang out in front of a crumbling three-sided adobe. The three squinted and stared as ten riders emerged from the veil of heat hanging over the stretch of white sand between the small village and the distant border hills.

  “This is not good,” said the older of the two Mexican men, noting the handcuffs, the shackles on four of the men who rode barefoot, bareheaded. Two of the barefoot riders, Bill Seadon and Three-toed Delbert Swank, sat sidesaddle, ladylike. The other two rode with their knees bent deep, chains up behind them across their saddle cantles. They squatted like squirrels, or some strange racing jockeys.

  “No, not good at all,” the other, younger Mexican murmured, staring curiously. “Dafne,” he said quietly to the woman standing beside him, “go to your uncle Renaldo until they are gone. I think they see your markings.”