With an inarticulate cry that could have been pain or anger or anything in between, Spangel deliberately leaped from the tumbling rig into the cold waters of the river, gripping the Mexican to his chest like a mother with her first-born.
For a moment they both seemed to hang in space, suspended between the air and the water. Then they vanished and the waters closed immediately over both of them. Though Ford and Crow watched for some seconds, neither man came to the surface again.
The wagon rolled and they could hear the crash as its side struck a monstrous boulder, splitting it from seam to seam. A wheel was torn clean off and thrown high in the air by the awesome force of the pounding river. Then, like a falling tree, the rig rolled on its side, showing the bottom to the dawn. It hit another rock sideways on, breaking off another strip of white wood.
Spinning, the pieces smaller and smaller as the waters swallowed them. The canvas top splitting across the top and flapping over the river like a great manta ray, until it snagged on rocks and was torn immediately to a hundred rags and tatters of dull grey material.
The light wasn’t good enough to make out a lot of the details, but Crow watched, imagining that he could see the chests filled with money as the rolling breakers took them, like child’s toys, throwing them into the saw-toothed rocks, splintering them and emptying their riches into the battering waves.
A fortune vanishing before his eyes, and he was powerless to do anything to save any of it. But Crow wasn’t the sort of man to shed tears over anything or anybody. That would have been an empty exercise.
“Sweet Jesus,” said Ford. That’s the end of the biggest dream I ever did hear of.”
Crow eased the hammer down on the Winchester. “When it comes right on down to it, Ben, there’s not a lot of difference between big dreams and little ones. None of them’s real.”
“No. Guess that’s right. None of them.”
It was fast becoming full light.
Chapter Sixteen
“I’m not big on goodbyes, Ben,” said Crow.
“Hell, I’m not too fond of ’em.”
“You got every thin’ you need?”
The ramrod sniffed. “Guess so. Water. Good position to hold them off the bottom of the trail after you. Rifle with plenty of ammunition. Pistol for the last... for the ending.”
Crow looked down at the helpless, crippled man. Wishing that there was some other way out. But there wasn’t. It would have been two deaths instead of one.
“I’ll buy you what I can, Crow.”
“I know that, Ben.”
“Could you straighten out my legs for me? They’re kind of crooked. Wouldn’t want to go out lookin’ a mess, huh?”
“No. Here.” He bent down, letting the bridle trail for a moment in the dirt. Moving the big man’s legs, feeling them strangely weightless. Laying them out behind him. Ford was in a hollow, his sleeping blanket rolled tight in front of him for support. The rifle resting there, ready. Spare ammunition laid out in a neat line, and the pistol cocked down in the hollow.
Crow knew it wouldn’t be long. The rest of the Mexicans would be along within the next few hours. Maybe less. They’d be held up a while, then they’d climb around behind and pick him off. That’d be it.
“Don’t aim to be took livin’, Crow.”
“No. They’d not be kindly.”
It had been the Mexicans who had taught the Apaches much of the skills of scalping and torturing their victims. After taking such heavy losses, they’d be eager for the revenge of blood and pain. Ben Ford wouldn’t let that happen.
“Forty-seven years old, Crow.”
“Doesn’t signify, does it?”
Ford shook his head. “Nope. Doesn’t. This year. Next year. Some time. All the same, I guess.”
“They’ll come soon.”
“We made them pay a damned high price for a few splinters of torn wood and a handful of corpses, huh?”
Crow smiled. “We did, Ben. They’ll recall us and that’s a fact.”
“Was there three in the wagon when it went over?”
“Must have been. Spangel called out he heard three and his ears were better’n most men’s eyes. He killed two. Third must have gone over with the rig.”
“Yeah.”
There was a moment’s silence between the two men. Crow looked down at Ford’s face. An honest, seamed face, carrying lines of experience grained deep. He’d only known the ramrod for a few days, but he’d grown to like him. And trust him. Now he was about to trust him with being the back door. Holding off the Mexicans as long as possible while he made his own way up the steep and winding trail.
“Guess it’s time for you to go.”
“Been good to know you, Ben.”
“You too.”
The handshake was brief but firm. Then Crow walked away to his stallion, looking back once as he made his slow way by the cottonwoods. Seeing Ford lying there, watching him go. The ramrod waved a hand and then looked away, staring unseeing across the white water to the green valley and the stark hills towering beyond.
The shootist didn’t mount up. The climb would be long and tiring and he might need the black fresh for a tough chase. So he walked alongside it, holding the bridle loose in his right hand. The Winchester bucketed at the saddle, Colt stuck in the back of his belt. The sawn-down Purdey safely holstered at his right hip, the narrow retaining thong snug across the hammers.
He turned and looked back once more, to Ford, lying still behind his cover, some eighty feet below.
“You goin’ to fuckin’ die, now, friend. I cut off your cojones and feed them bit to bit.”
Crow turned slowly, hand still on the bridle. There had been three! And this was the third.
Tall and skinny, in patched cotton pants. Hatless, lank hair to his shoulders. Holding a battered carbine in his fists, the muzzle steady on Crow’s chest. He was no more than ten feet away and must have gone up the trail during the excitement over the wagon during the first lightening of the sky. Figuring that he could either pick them off from above or wait, like he had, for them to try a break.
Crow patted his stallion, sensing its nervousness. Resting his hand on its head. Close by its ear.
“You let go horse, friend. Then I give you a gift in stomach. Pay you for friends you kill and other man there. With bad legs.”
Ford couldn’t hear the conversation, above the noise of the river.
Crow knew that if he tried to draw the odds were that the bandit would gun him down.
He patted the black again, letting his hand rest near the top of its head. Holding the long silky ear between his strong fingers.
Pulling it as hard as he could.
Ripping it with pincering nails.
The horse screamed its hurt and reared, so that he let go, knocking him to his knees. Its hooves flailed at the morning air, narrowly missing the Mexican’s head, making him step suddenly back.
Crow’s hand reached for the honed saber, not wanting to fumble with the thong on the scattergun. Drawing the two and a half feet of steel in a hiss of threatening violence. Rolling forwards under the legs of the whinnying horse, slashing up at the bandit. Cutting him across the underside of the right arm, severing flesh and tendons. The fingers opened and the carbine fell to the dirt, unfired.
“Pig-fucker!” screamed the Mexican, holding his right arm in his left hand. Staggering and nearly falling.
Crow was on his feet, past the wounded bandit, turning and coming in again. The tip of the knife flickering like the tongue of a cobra. Flashing in and out again, dappled with bright blood.
The rising sun behind them cast a reddish glow over everything so that the wounds seemed to bleed with a more dashing crimson. The man stepped back, until he was against the wall of the cliff, his hand reaching out in a futile gesture to try and stop the blade cutting him. He might as well have tried to stop a landslide with a woman’s lace kerchief.
Crow was a great knife-fighter. Holding the hilt low so that the
thrusts came up from below the level of the waist, almost impossible to parry.
Within fifteen seconds of Crow tearing at his horse’s ear, the Mexican was bleeding from five different wounds. His eyes were filling with the blankness that comes to a man when he knows that he is suddenly, incomprehensibly, facing death. It didn’t make sense. One moment he was holding the tall, skinny gringo at the end of a carbine, cocked and ready. Then the horse had reared and then he was cut and cut again. Again and again.
Crow had been watching the eyes for that certain sign of defeat. When he saw it he stepped quickly and certainly in, knocking aside the bandit’s left hand with his arm, blocking it with a short, chopping blow. Driving in the point of the cut-down saber with all his strength. So that it pierced the man’s chest, cracking in between his ribs and bursting the walls of his heart. Blood poured out along the blade, splashing on the golden tassels that still decorated the old Cavalry weapon.
The thrust was so savage that the point of the knife came clean through the Mexican’s back, grating against the stone behind. The shootist stepped quickly away, sliding the steel out. Wiping it on the man’s shirt even as he was falling.
By the time the Mexican was dead the saber was clean and back in the sheath. Crow had regained control of the horse, holding the bridle.
Looking back one more time to see whether the fight had disturbed Ford. But the ramrod still lay there, concentrating all his attention across the river.
As the trail snaked backwards and forwards it became more and more difficult to make out details at the bottom of the canyon. The rising sun was throwing deep shadows among the rocks and Crow could soon see only the whiteness of the pounding water.
He was nearly a third of the way up when he heard the first shots. A single crack, then a fusillade of bullets. He quickly looped the reins around a spur of rock and stepped as close to the edge of the trail as he dared, peeking over. Seeing powder smoke drifting around far below him.
“Give it to ’em, Ben,” he said.
From the way the shots were spaced it looked as though Ford had started shooting while some of them were still crossing and he’d thrown the bandits into total panic and confusion.
But it was only a matter of time.
They’d pin Ben Ford down where he couldn’t move, and then they’d kill him.
It was only a matter of time.
Crow just hoped that the ramrod wasn’t badly wounded, unable to kill himself.
Just a matter of time.
He was close to the top, pausing and again tethering the horse to some rocks. Wanting to see the last scenes of the drama. But the overhang of the cliff-face prevented him from looking clean over. The shooting had become more sporadic with Ben’s Winchester barking less and less often.
There was a sudden fusillade, and he could just catch the faint sound of men cheering.
Then came a single shot.
And after that there was nothing but the ominous thundering of the river, the spray tinted the gentlest of pinks by the rising sun.
Crow swung himself into the saddle, ready to ride back north, away from the hostile lands of the border. Ben had bought him an hour or more. Plenty to keep a start on the bandits if they chose to try and pursue him.
He looked out across the endless range of mountains, each one tipped with scarlet. Clean and untouched and perfect. The petty ambitions and killings and brutality of the few men who ventured into the region seemed of a vast unimportance.
He heeled the stallion onwards. “Yeah,” he said, to himself. “It sure used to be a Hell of a good country.”
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CROW the Series
The Red Hills
Worse Than Death
Tears of Blood
The Black Trail
Bodyguard
The Sisters
One-Eyed Death Page 11