‘It’s Charlie Hedges,’ he yelped, dancing a little in his agitation.
‘Charlie,’ she declared in wonder at the miracle and lowered the butt of the gigantic percussion gun to use it as a crutch to help her groan and wheeze her vast weight to its feet. ‘Aw, Charlie.’
She staggered toward him and he almost ran to greet her. A moment later his spare frame was enveloped in her great arms and he almost disappeared into the infinite volume of her breasts. After she had nearly suffocated him with hugs and kisses, she held him helpless at arms’ length, tried vainly to focus her myopic eyes on him and declared to the mountain tops: ‘Aw, darlin’, it’s goddam good to see you.’
When he had regained his breath, which he almost despaired of doing, he told her: ‘Annie, I was never more pleased to see you in my life’.
She smote him jovially on the shoulder and nearly floored him.
‘This is just wonderful, Charlie,’ she bellowed, ‘I’m that goddam randy for a man I got to fancyin’ my mule. Why, boy, we can have a real whangaroo right out here. Ain’t that really somethin’?’
‘Yeah, it’s really somethin’, Annie, I got to give you that, honey,’ he agreed. ‘But right this minute there’s somethin’ come up that’s a mite more urgent than a whangaroo.’
She looked affronted.
‘What could be more urgent than a whangaroo, Charlie?’ she bawled. ‘Hell, you ain’t gone peculiar in them hills or somethin’, did you?’
‘For God’s sake keep your foghorn voice down, woman,’ he told her. ‘I’m bein’ followed.’
She seized him by the arm and cried: ‘Followed?’
‘There was this feller spying on my camp.’
‘You mean we’re about to be murdered?’
‘There’s men’d cut your throat for a poke of dust, you know that, Annie.’
‘You bet your goddam boots I know it, Charlie.’ She looked around furtively, squinting, screwing up her face. ‘Christ, I wish to God I wasn’t so goddam shy of wearing my specs.’
It was a funny thing, but now that Charlie was in the presence of this formidable woman, he was scared of the men following him.
‘Annie,’ he declared, glaring at her with a brow of thunder, ‘you put them damn specs on your nose, at least so you can see the end sights of your rifle. Can’t you realize we have a fight on our hands?’
She looked at him emotionally—‘You mean you run to ole Annie for pertection? Goddam me, Charlie, if you didn’t touch me plumb to the heart.’
She handed him her massive gun and started to rummage in the voluminous skirt, cursing until she produced an ancient pair of steel-rimmed spectacles. Her great tanned face flushed, she slowly and reluctantly placed them on her bulbous nose and hooked them behind her eyes, knocking her battered man’s hat crooked as she did so. The lenses enlarged her rheumy eyes grotesquely. She now looked drunk as well as crazy. She gave a great shout of triumph and amazement, so loud that little Charlie Hedges stepped back from her in alarm.
‘These things is a natchel miracle, ole timer. Christ, vanity is a mighty limitin’ commodity an’ no mistake.’ She turned her suddenly clarified gaze on to him and it was her turn to start back in alarm. ‘Great God Almighty, man, but you’re a runt an’ no mistake.’
‘All right,’ Charlie told her, ‘so at last you saw sense and you can see. Now I’ll trouble you to get off’n this trail so we can take up a defensive position.’
She looked at him admiringly—‘Charlie, you find them words like you find gold.’ Now she switched her attention from him to his burros and said: ‘Them critters of yourn sure look like their legs is about to give out on ’em. You got rocks in them packs?’
‘I got gold in them packs, woman,’ he informed her. ‘Why the hell else do you think I’ve been walkin’ these days with my chin on both shoulders?’
Her admiration now turned to awe.
‘Judas priest, you mean ...? You struck it rich?’
‘That’s about the size of it, girl.’
‘Wa-al,’ she said, ‘you’n me, we ain’t so goddam fast, not with my mule an’ your donkeys. So we’d best fort up and fort up good.’
‘I got a better idea’n that, ole girl,’ said Charlie. ‘If there’s more’n one of ’em, we got to use a smart of guile an’ then some.’
‘What’s that mean?’
‘It means,’ said Charlie, looking like the original sage of the West, ‘we gotta catch ’em with their pants down an’ then pro-ceed to blow their asses off.’
‘Just what do I have to do?’
‘You keep them specs on, girl, an’ don’t you dare take ’em off. You got some rare shootin’ to do.’
Pepe Inclán’s elation increased as time passed. Looking forward to what he was about to do gave him a sense of power that fed his innermost vanity. To kill a man for his gold and at the same time to outwit and rob his own friends gave him a feeling of heady superiority. He told himself that the good God must love him very much to send him such a wonderful opportunity. Such heavenly kindness made him feel humble and grateful. He crossed himself devoutly as he rode, and offered up a small prayer of gratitude.
He found himself at the mouth of a shallow canyon and the heat caught in it struck at him and seemed to snatch his breath away. It was a dry and arid place, strewn with rocks and scattered with dry brush. All seemed still and dead in here and there was something about the atmosphere of the place that filled him for a moment with a strange sense of foreboding.
But he thought of the gold and the old man and how quickly such an old man could die under the gun. By God, Pepe could be a rich man within minutes of this very moment. The thought gave him resolution. The starving paisano boy who had fled his birthplace like a coyote in the night would return to be respected and sought after. This time around, the last would indeed be first.
He stopped and looked at the burro droppings. They were fresh. The gold really was almost within his grasp. The thought seized him by the throat with an excitement akin to that experienced at the sight of a beautiful woman. The lust of possession almost choked him.
His eyes lifted to the sky. He assessed time, the distance between himself and his partners, the distance between himself and the Mexican border. There were many days of hard riding before him, but the gold would buy good horses, the best. Night was near. If he killed the old man in daylight and hid all trace of him, slaughtering the burros too and hiding them, he would have all the hours of darkness before him to gain a long lead on his vengeful friends. He would ride, as his people said, between the days -and they would never find him.
Dismounting, he took the scarf from his neck and tied it around the nose of his horse, not enough to stop it breathing, but enough to discourage it from neighing. Stepping into the saddle again, he urged the horse forward in a walk.
He had not gone a hundred yards when he heard the bray of a burro. He at once drew rein and halted. Now he found that he was sweating profusely and not just because of the heat. Turning his horse back the way he had come, he found that he was trembling.
You fool, he told himself, it cannot be because you are about to kill a man.
He rode out of the canyon and slipped from the saddle once more, leading his horse into the cover of rocks. Loosening the girth, he ground-hitched the horse by dropping one line and securing it under a heavy rock. Again he checked the sky, measuring time. Now, he climbed and made his way as silently as he knew how along the rimrock of the canyon. Pretty soon he saw the telltale smoke of a small camp fire and, a moment later, he saw a couple of the burros below him in a small break.
Easing himself over the rimrock at a convenient spot, he began to work his way cautiously down the side of the canyon. It was not easy going down without causing loose rocks to roll, but he came in sight of the old man without making more noise than a stalking fox. The old fellow was fast asleep on his back with his face half covered by his battered old hat. His rifle reclined against a boulder a good ten feet away.
Pepe could not help smiling to himself. He thanked God for having created so many fools.
He took his time. This was a sweet moment and he enjoyed the taste of it.
I shall not shoot him, he told himself. My friends would hear the shot. Nor shall I kill him as he sleeps. This foolish old man shall know that it is Inclán who kills him. That is only right and proper.
Balancing himself on his right foot, Pepe delicately kicked the sleeping man’s leg. Old Charlie slapped his lips together a few times and slowly opened his eyes which, upon seeing the Mexican before him, were filled with horror. I might add that, under the gaze of those very eyes, Pepe drew his long and keen-edged knife from the rear of his belt and held it poised above his proposed victim’s heart.
Charlie first gulped and then he quavered.
‘Don’t do it,’ he begged.
‘Why not?’ demanded Pepe, all good-humor now that the gold was so close and the old man was so patently helpless.
With a rather grand and pathetic air, Charlie said: ‘I’m not in a fit state to meet my Maker.’
‘Ah,’ said Pepe, nodding, ‘I must tell you, with regret, that most men that I kill are in the same condition, but that has never prevented me from dispatching them.’
‘I’ll give you anything you want,’ Charlie promised him.
Pepe smiled on him as if they were two men sharing the same secret and said: ‘When I have killed you I shall take anything I want.’ He braced himself for the death thrust, at the last moment wondering if he should not cut the old fool’s throat. He remembered down in Sonora once getting a knife blade jammed irritatingly in a fellows’ ribs. At that moment, he heard a small metallic sound behind him. A warning chill touched his spine. His thoughts raced. Something was wrong? Where had he made a mistake? There could only be this old man here, for he had followed his tracks with great care.
Wait. He had not followed the tracks right into the canyon. There could be a second pair of footprints immediately below this spot on the trail.
He turned his head and his eyes met a sight that froze the blood in his veins. The most gigantic gringa woman was standing, legs planted like great oaks, her massive hands holding the biggest saddlegun he had ever seen in his life. The small sound he had heard was this veritable cannon being cocked.
While there was life, there was hope of prolonging it. Pepe was a mover if he was nothing else. He dropped the knife from the right to the left hand and, in the same fraction of a second, he turned and tore his fine Colt’s revolver from the scabbard at his right hip. Even as the weapon cleared leather, it was cocked, but no man can move faster than a lead ball propelled over a short distance by a full charge of black powder. Even as that cannon belched black smoke, the heavy ball caught him in the side under the right arm, ripped him off his feet and hurled him past the old man and into the rocks beyond.
Pepe died as only a gunman knows how. The will to exterminate his enemy was with him until his immortal soul left his body. As his life blood flowed from the huge dark wound in his side, as his right hand grew almost too weak to keep the barrel of the Colt up, he waited for the man and the woman to come and deliver the death blow. His weak thumb fought to heave back on the hammer to cock the gun, for he had fired it at nothing as he went down.
But he never did get that gun cocked. The old man appeared as if by magic, brisk as you like, simply raising his gun and shooting Pepe through the head. The fine Colt’s gun clattered down among the rocks. Charlie picked it up at once, declaring: ‘Well, here’s a bonus, old girl. I always wanted one like this.’ At which moment, his legs failed him and he sat down abruptly.
Businesslike, Annie was cleaning and reloading her cannon, cursing and declaring they didn’t know that a dozen more of such varmints were not in the vicinity. When the gun was loaded, she noticed Charlie.
‘Christ Almighty,’ she said, ‘you look as pale as a virgin’s tit, man. You et somethin’?’
‘I just killed a man,’ Charlie told her, ‘or didn’t you notice?’
‘I killed a man,’ she declared. ‘All you done was the coo dee grass. Now leave us you’n me rattle our hocks outa here.’
‘We have to bury this feller,’ said Charlie.
Annie bawled: ‘I don’t bury no goddam varmint.’
Sternly, he told her: ‘Annie, Christian folks should ought to bury even a mad dawg.’
He braced himself for an angry tirade, but it never came. Instead Annie put a smile of sugary sweetness on her face and said: ‘I reckon that’s real noble, Charlie. And, Charlie, you ain’t thanked me yet for saving your life.’
His faintness passed abruptly.
‘Saving my life,’ he howled, ‘my God, you took your goddam time pulling that fool trigger, woman.’ He jumped to his feet. ‘Come on, throws some rocks on this son-of-a-bitch and let’s break down timber.’
Annie sighed ecstatically—‘Aw, what it is to have a man’s decisiveness in camp.’
Six
Duke rose to his feet and slapped his leg with his silver-mounted quirt. ‘Maybe you fellers trust that Mex, but I’ll be goddamed if I do.’ The distant boom of the big rifle still hung like a faint shadow of sound over the land.
They reined in their horses and listened. Brazos Bill Weyland said: ‘Maybe he ran into trouble.’
Duke said: ‘Where the hell’s the difference? That shot could mean our gold’s in trouble.’
Ike Mannion was never one to hang around for talk. He didn’t have the patience for it. The only thing that would ever relieve the terrible tension of his nerves was action. The more violent the action, the more the tension was eased. He raked his horse with the gads and sent it downhill at a reckless pace. The others urged their horses after him, the loose horses staying with them, excited by the sudden rush of movement. Only one of the riders hung back. This was Duke, who saw the wisdom of being able to pull out of any situation this crazy charge might get them into. The sound of that shot had spelled out a Sharps Big Fifty to him and he didn’t see the sense in riding down the barrel of a gun that size.
It was one thing to go hunting a fight, another to find it in country that big. The conditions slowed their pace and they were forced to hunt around for signs. Pretty soon, they came on the Mexican’s prints and once more lifted their pace, following along them. Every man now had a gun in his hand and was prepared to shoot either at Pepe who had betrayed them or at the man who might have bested Pepe.
In a canyon, they picked up the sign of a small string of burros and, then, after some searching, they came on the Mexican’s horse. This alarmed them. If Pepe had shot the prospector and gotten his hands on the gold, he would have been in the saddle and headed south at a fast run by now. They untied the horse and started looking—this time with great care, nobody there wanting his head blown off by the gun that made all that noise. They scattered out, Ike Mannion and Lon Southey mounting to the rimrock to get a bird’s eye view of the canyon, Duke Dukar and Bill Weyland carefully edging their way up-canyon.
They were almost through it and going through the exit to the west, the gateway that would lead them into the mountains, when the shot came.
Every man there knew it was that big gun again. But nobody knew for sure whence the shot had come, for canyons play tricks with sounds—all except Ike Mannion up on the canyon’s edge, who gave a loud cry that he had been shot at. He flung himself down into cover, yelling that some bastard had tried to murder him.
Duke shouted: ‘Do you see any smoke, Lon?’
Up on the rimrock to the south, Southey crouched forward, peering down into the depths of the canyon. At which moment somebody down below fired at him with a smaller rifle. Smaller it may have been, but it was just as capable of killing a man. Lon showed his respect for it by following Ike’s example and flinging himself into cover.
Down on the canyon floor, Bill Weyland, who had ground-hitched his horse and was now advancing cautiously up-canyon, rifle in hands, bawled out: ‘Lon—where’re they a
t? Take a look for crissake.’
Southey’s voice floated back to him—‘You think I want my goddam head blowed off?’
Duke shouted: ‘We can’t do a damn thing if you can’t locate ’em for us.’ There was no doubt in any of their minds that they had two men to deal with.
Duke and Weyland leapt for cover when that big gun boomed again and a shot howled past so close to Weyland’s ear that he felt the wind of it. They crouched and waited until they heard a shrill whistle followed by Ike Mannion’s bellowed: ‘I see smoke. There’s one of ’em yonder.’
They raised their heads to see Ike pointing to the rocks ahead of them. The man with the lighter rifle fired again and they both ducked back into cover.
The single shot was followed by an almost hysterical burst of firing from Lon Southey to the south, blazing away with his repeating rifle like a man insane. Ike shrieked: ‘Hold your goddam fire. We ain’t made of shells.’ Ike now started to lay down a steady fire at the rocks below him, but the steep downhill shooting was terribly difficult and his failure to put a bullet in living flesh soon had him cursing. However, his shooting encouraged the two outlaws below to start working their way forward. Bill Weyland was more than slightly discouraged when a shot from the big gun split a rock which had provided protection for his head—or so he thought. The splinters struck him like stinging bees and half-blinded him. He lay back on the ground, holding his bleeding face. Duke, who thought he was mortally hit, ran to him at great danger to himself, but when he reached him Weyland swore and said: ‘That goddam rock blew up in my face. My God, that rifle must be as big as a cannon.’
Lon Southey called down: ‘Is Bill killed dead?’
‘No,’ Duke shouted back, ‘he’s all right. Let’s get on with it.’
Just the same, Duke took a rest and gave the situation a little thought. He would like to know just who was up ahead in the rocks there. Nobody had been directly hit yet, but the shooting had been pretty good and he didn’t ever hear that old Charlie Hedges was good with a rifle. He faced the fact that this fight was going to be no walk-over even though Ike and Lon were above the enemy up on the rimrock. Soon or late that big rifle was going to knock a hole in somebody big enough to drive a stage and six through.
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