by John Benteen
“We’re a mite shy on bayonets and sabers. But if you git your hands on a knife, don’t back away from usin’ it. Just remember, keep the blade turned flat, and go in from under, not straight on or down. That way you slip through the ribs without bouncin’ off. You get a man in the gut, turn the knife and rip up, hard. He won’t bother you if his innards are falling out on the ground ...”
“Fargo—”
“Boy, I’m telling you things you may need before the day’s over. You remember ’em. There won’t be time for instruction when the action starts—if it does. What other talents you got?”
Sterling was silent for a moment. “Well, I’m a three-goal polo player and I was varsity baseball pitcher ...”
“Oh, that’s just fine. I reckon you’re a good dancer, too.”
“Why, yes, I am,” Sterling answered promptly.
Fargo sighed. Then he lowered his voice to an almost imperceptible whisper. “All right. We’re gonna make a try, anyway. The worst that can happen is they’ll kill us, and that’s better’n havin’ ’em work us over. Now, what I want to know is, can I depend on you?”
Sterling was silent again. Then he said, “I don’t know. What do you think?”
“I think it’s worth a try,” Fargo said.
“Then I’ll do my best.”
“Fair enough. But you got to take my orders and do exactly what I say. Now, they left you your spurs, didn’t they? They left me mine.”
“Yeah. But they’re cavalry spurs, they’ve got no points, just buttons.”
“So are mine. But they’ll have to do. Take ’em off and then help me pull off my boot.”
“What—?”
“Do what I say,” Fargo answered. “We got to make a weapon we can use. And then I’m gonna show you how to handle it while I’m the bait. Because it’s our only chance.”
~*~
They worked in utter silence, and, a half hour later it was ready, completed to Fargo’s satisfaction. It was not much, when you came down to it, but it was better than nothing. He made Sterling practice with it in the dark. “All right,” Sterling whispered. “I’ve got the feel now. Anytime.”
“The time is now,” Fargo said. “Get over there against the wall, by the door. And remember, if you don’t judge your time right, I’m a dead man.” Sterling did not answer. Fargo heard him moving through the blackness of the cellar. A low hiss indicated Sterling was in place. Fargo went to the door, hammered on the peephole. “Hey, Guiterrez!” he yelled in Spanish. “What about some food and water?”
“Shut up,” Guiterrez answered promptly. “You’ll get some in the morning, if the Patron says so. It’s after midnight. Nobody’s going to cook for you Yanqui bastards now.”
“Bastard, is it?” Fargo said. “Why, you whoreson of a she-goat mother! Who’re you to call me a bastard?”
He heard Guiterez make a startled sound. The peephole slipped open. Fargo stepped aside, at an angle to it out of line with any gun-barrel that might be thrust through it. None was, but a carbide lamp’s beam rayed through, searching the cellar. “Where are you, you—” Guiterrez spat a stream of obscenities. “I warned you, I’ll blow your cojones off!”
“At least I have eggs,” Fargo grated. “More than I can say for any bitch’s offspring who won’t even feed and water prisoners. So I killed your brother this morning? Was he an unspeakable and an obscenity like yourself? Is he roasting where you’re going? In hell, you—?” Fiercely, in a croaking voice, he called Guiterez everything he could think of.
Guiterez was silent for a moment. Then he said, calmly, “You’re trying to provoke me. You want me to shoot you so the Patron cannot torture you. Well, I won’t let you provoke me, Yanqui.”
“Of course not. Your eggs are full of water. I’m telling you now, you cowardly whore-son, bring us food! You—” He rattled off another string of obscenities.
Through the peephole, the light searched the room. “Get over where I can see you,” Guiterez said. “That’s an order.”
“And let you shoot me? Go to hell. With that she-goat’s spawn of a sister-raping brother of yours—!”
The Mexican’s voice was suddenly choked. “That is the end of it. By God, that is the very end of it!”
Fargo’s heart kicked as he heard the key turn in the lock. He moved into the center of the room, stood waiting. The door swung open, Guiterez was there. He stepped across the threshold, rifle slung, lantern in one hand, Colt revolver in the other. The lantern’s beam struck Fargo fully. Gutierrez’s face twisted. In a delirium of rage, he stepped forward. Fargo threw himself to one side as the Colt roared. He heard the slug slap by, ricochet. Then Sterling struck.
Fargo’s sock, stuffed full of dirt dug from the floor with cavalry spurs, made even heavier by having been urinated upon, compacted with the water like a brick, slammed into Gutierrez’s head just at the base of the skull. Guiterez sighed, dropped to his knees as the improvised blackjack jarred his brains. Sterling swung again; the Mexican pitched forward on his face and the lamp went out.
Fargo was already springing like a great cat. He wrenched the gun from the unconscious man’s hand, yanked the rifle from his shoulder. There were footsteps, shouting, upstairs in the church. There was no time to fumble for spare ammunition. Fargo tossed the rifle to Sterling. “It’s a Krag, can you use it?”
“I’ve been familiarized—”
“Come on!” Fargo snapped. “Make every shot count. We’ve got damned few.” He raced up the steps, stumbling in the darkness. Then, at their head, the other door opened.
In the church someone had lit a torch. Fargo saw, in the doorway, a man’s silhouette against the light. The Colt bucked in his hand, thundered in the confines of the stairwell. The silhouette disappeared, with a squall of pain. Another took its place, holding a torch high, peering down the stairwell, pistol lined. Before the man could get off a shot, Fargo fired again, saw the face beneath the torch dissolve in a spray of blood. The body and the torch fell down the stairs. Fargo leaped over the corpse, shoved through the door into the sanctuary. Another torch burned; a woman screamed. Three or four of the men and their women had been quartered here. One of the men, in underpants and naked to the waist, was fumbling for his cartridge belt. Fargo shot him in the flank; he gagged strangely, crumpled. Fargo whirled toward the front door of the church. As he rushed out, he collided with a Mexican hurrying in. Fargo put his gun muzzle tight against the man’s stomach, pulled the trigger. The man screamed, clawed at Fargo.
Fargo stepped aside, the man fell, trailing blood. Fargo snatched his Colt from its holster, leaped across the threshold into the plaza. “Sterling!” he yelled.
“Here!” Sterling’s voice was in his ear. Lights were flaring in adobe huts. The moon was high, the sky star-scattered. Fargo let out a growl of satisfaction at the sight of two saddled horses hitched outside the church. He rushed for them—but suddenly the plaza came alive with winking gunfire. Somebody yelled in Spanish, “There they are! They’ve escaped!”
Lead slapped around Fargo; a bullet twitched his hat brim. “Cover us, Sterling!” he bawled. “Shoot, goddamit!” He snapped the last rounds from Gutierrez’s Colt at the flashes, even as he ran for the horses. The gun clicked on empty and he threw it away. Behind him, he heard the sharp bark of the Krag, as Sterling returned the Mexican’s fire. Fargo unlatched reins, hit the saddle of a horse without touching stirrup. Wheeling the animal, he covered Sterling with the other gun, emptying its cylinder at the flashes as Sterling mounted. “Ride!” Fargo bawled, as the hammer of that gun, too, clicked on empty. He thrust it in his waistband, raked the horse with spurs. Bent low, lead slapping all around, he thundered out of the plaza with Sterling close behind, spraying lead from the Krag behind him.
Then they were out of town, pounding across the flat. But there would be pursuit, Fargo knew, in minutes, and they would be ridden down eventually unless ... Out there on the level, he saw the dark, scattered blots that were sleeping cattle. A night herder yelled in astonishm
ent at the sight of the two riders thundering toward him as Fargo changed direction. He fired, and Fargo heard the Krag go off behind him.
It was, from the back of a running horse, a lucky shot, had to be. But the rider went down. His foot caught in stirrup, his horse panicked, went bucking into the herd. Fargo laughed aloud with satisfaction. Cattle were coming to their feet, now, bawling in surprise and fear. “Shoot into the herd, Sterling!” Fargo yelled. “Empty the goddam gun! But start that herd to running!”
Sterling obeyed. The Krag barked twice, then was silent. A wounded cow bellowed with pain, hoisted her tail and ran. Then the whole herd was on its feet, lumbering into motion. Fargo shrieked like a madman. Another night herder was firing, now, and that made it even better, increased the cattle’s panic. Then, as he and Sterling swept on past, the two hundred cattle were in full stampede, a dark mass lumbering toward the town of San Joaquin with a sound like rolling thunder. Herefords weren’t the runners that old longhorns and wild Mexican corrientes were, but all that beef blundering and galloping through the plaza would be like an earthquake or a tidal wave. In the distance, Fargo heard, above the bawling of the cattle, the yells of men. His grin was like a wolf’s snarl. Anyhow, now, they had a chance. And it would be six hours before the heliograph would work, flashing sun signals to Palo Blanco. He lashed his horse with rein-ends, and Sterling closed in behind him as they raced on through the night.
Five
THIS TIME, they made the mountains. The first glow of false dawn found them holed up in broken ground high in the hills, above a waterhole, where a thin stream of liquid trickled into a basin hardly bigger than Fargo’s hat. “By God,” Fargo jubilated, “we made it! Sterling, you did good!”
Sterling’s voice was steady, deep. “I did, didn’t I? Fargo, I was scared—but not too scared to fight!”
“Long as you don’t get that scared, it don’t matter how scared you are. A man whose guts don’t knot when somebody’s shootin’ at him has got no sense at all. Now, let’s open these saddle rolls, see what’s in ’em. Pray to God there’s some ammo, because we’re flat out.”
He and Sterling unlashed the rolls tied behind their cantles, searched them thoroughly. But they were disappointed, there were only blankets, and in one of the rolls, a big canvas sack, what cowboys called a war bag, holding the small treasures belonging to the owner of the horse, nothing of any help.
Fargo chewed his last cigar. “That makes it rough. Somehow, we got to get some guns and ammo. The question’s how?”
“Right now, I’d settle for some food,” Sterling said. “I’m starving.”
“Me, too. But unless you’re fast enough to run down one of them jackrabbits that comes drinkin’ to that waterhole, we ain’t likely to eat for a while.”
“Jackrabbits drink down there?”
“Everything comes to a waterhole. Rabbits, deer, javelinas—and men. That’s why we can’t stay here long. First thing they’ll do is sweep the waterholes. Hey, what the hell you doing?”
“I’m going to try to get us something to eat,” Sterling said. He was rummaging in a pile of rocks.
“You look out you don’t grab a sidewinder,” Fargo said. “This country’s full of ’em.” He watched Sterling curiously. The young soldier carefully selected a half dozen rocks, each round, smooth, and about the size of a baseball. Then he took up station on the rim of the cut above the waterhole.
The little basin of precious liquid lay in a hollow shaped like a keyhole. Fargo and Sterling had reached it by riding into the flared end of a deep, narrow arroyo that would have been the keyhole’s bottom end, then had passed through a place where the walls of the cut pinched together for a distance of perhaps fifteen yards and were only ten or fifteen feet apart. Then the arroyo flared out again and dead-ended at the wall of rock. Sterling and Fargo had drunk, watered their mounts, and then led the horses straight up the slope beside the water to reach high ground, where they could watch the cut and scan the approaches to it for a distance of a mile of two.
Now Sterling waited, sitting on a boulder, on the rim above the waterhole, his rocks in a neat pile beside him, one in his hand. Fargo, meanwhile, lit the cigar, savored the last smoke he would have for a while, and thought hard.
Their chances were scanty. Run or fight were their only choices. If they ran, unarmed, they would sooner or later be caught and killed. But how could they fight without weapons? His mind, sharpened by excitement and by hunger, flickered over every possibility, examined, rejected, half a dozen ideas. Then he heard Sterling grunt; in quick succession there were strange thumps from the arroyo.
Fargo whirled. Sterling was sliding down to the waterhole. In a moment, he returned, carrying a stunned jackrabbit in either hand. Fargo stared. “With rocks?”
“It wasn’t too hard. I told you, I used to be a varsity pitcher. But—” he looked at them, dismayed. “How do I kill them?”
Fargo showed him how to dispatch them quickly with a sharp blow at the base of the skull with the blade of the hand. “Rabbit punch,” he said. “And it works on people, too—don’t forget that.” He hunted through scrub juniper up the slope until he found a weather-hardened stick with a sharp end. Sliding that under the skin of the hind legs, he tore it loose, stripped it off like a glove, gutted the rabbits, built a fire with one of the last of his matches in a well-shielded spot. Sterling grimaced as, by main strength, Fargo wrenched the heads off the jacks, but when they were roasted, he ate greedily, though they were tough, stringy and unpalatable. “That helps some,” Fargo said, putting out the fire. He looked at Sterling. “How you feel?”
Sterling dragged the back of his hand across his mouth. “Damned if I know why, but I feel fine. Just fine. Better than I ever have in my life.”
Fargo grinned. He knew what worked in Sterling, felt it himself. Only when a man’s life was at risk against great odds—and he had the courage, the inner resources, to meet that risk—was a man ever truly wholly alive. And Sterling was alive right now, out here in these desert hills, in a way that he had never been before, not in college, not playing polo, not in the silk-stocking reserve Army.
“All right,” he said. “You ready for another long chance? I mean a really long one this time.”
“Hell, yes,” Sterling said boldly. “I’m ready for anything. You and me, we can bring it off, whatever it is.”
“Maybe,” Fargo said. “We’ll see.” And then he began to talk. And as he told Sterling what he had in mind, the young man’s face paled, and all his bravado seeped away. His voice was quiet, a little shaky, when Fargo finished.
“Okay. If you think it will work.”
“I don’t know whether it will or not. All I know is that I can’t think of a damned thing else that will give us any chance at all. Now, let’s get busy. If we’re lucky, we can get ’em before they warm up. It’s easier that way.” And he arose and went to get the empty canvas war bag he had found behind the saddle.
With two forked sticks broken off of junipers, the two men in early morning light wandered through the jumbled piles of rock up the slope around the spring, searched the clumps of brush. For the first five or ten minutes, they had no luck at all.
“Fargo, I think we’re on a wild goose chase,” Sterling said at last.
Fargo grinned. “Kid, hard times will have really hit Chihuahua if we can’t find ourselves a dozen rattlesnakes in the next hour. Let’s try that shelf over yonder. That’s the kind of place they den.”
It was a pile of rock with a broad sloping ledge facing east. As they worked around it, something whirred dryly, and Sterling jumped, sprang back. “Judas Priest!”
“Told you,” Fargo said. “They’re there where they’ll catch the first mornin’ sun. Watch your step, kid.”
“They’ll bite, won’t they?”
Fargo laughed. “If they don’t, we’re up the creek.”
He and Sterling cautiously circled the pile of rock, and Fargo made a sound of satisfaction in his throat. A thic
k gray-brown mass lay there on the east-sloping shelf, at least a dozen thick bodied desert sidewinders, short and deadly, huddled together awaiting the first warmth of the sun to thin their cold, night-sluggish blood. At the approach of the two men, myriad heads raised, forked tongues flickering; and upraised rattles began a dry, whirring symphony of warning.
“Stand clear,” Fargo said, and he rammed his forked stick in the mass and flipped, hard.
Snakes went flying as he raked them off the shelf. Hitting the sand, one or two slithered away slowly and sluggishly; most immediately coiled, tails buzzing, heads upraised. “All right,” Fargo said. “Now, the fun begins.” Approaching one, he prodded it with the forked stick. When it struck, he clamped the stick down hard behind its head, pinning it to the ground. “Hold the sack open,” he said. “And when I get the rascal in, you shut it, fast. Keep it out from your body so they don’t strike through it, and keep it shaking so they can’t climb out.”
Sterling said thinly, shakily: “All right.”
Fargo bent, seized the pinned snake close behind the head. When he picked it up, its fanged mouth gaped, its ugly body writhed and twisted. But with that grip, it could not bring its poisoned fangs into play. Fargo shook it hard to daze it, then dumped it in the sack. Sterling quickly, frantically, closed the bag. “That’s the easy one,” Fargo said.
Without wasting time or motion, he went after the other. The trick was not to catch them, but to get them in the bag holding the others of their kind without one of those already caught biting him or Sterling. One by one, he pursued the small, horned rattlers as they struck, missed, then tried to wriggle, with their typical sidewise twist, away. The bag Sterling held was a hissing, rattling, squirming sack of horror, and the young man’s face was clay-colored, sweat rolling down his cheeks. Fargo was sweating too; and the sweat was cold. He was not unaware of the fact that if one of them were struck, they had not even a knife to cut the bite and drain out the poisoned blood.
He straightened up, mopped his head. “Jesus,” he said. “That gets kind of nerve-racking.”