The Cost of Dying

by Peter Brandvold

  Prophet supposed the kid had a point. What did they have to lose in their current unfortunate states for not telling the rurales whom they were after? Why keep getting assaulted by Casal’s boot?

  Casal looked for a moment as though he’d been slapped. He drew his head back sharply then frowned incredulously down at the redhead, who rolled his eyes up and to one side, to regard the man standing over him.

  “Who did you say you were after?” the sergeant said.

  “Ciaran Yeats,” Colter said, a tad slower this time.

  Casal stared down at him. He slid his frowning gaze to Prophet. “Yeats?”

  Prophet didn’t say anything.

  Casal shuttled his gaze between Lou and Colter once more. “You two are after the Mad Major?”

  Prophet gave a wooden smile.

  “The two of you,” Casal said as though not believing a word of it. “You two gringos . . . alone . . . are going after Ciaran Yeats . . .”

  “You want us to draw you a picture, amigo?” Prophet glared at the redhead. He didn’t say anything, but his eyes were shouting, Shut up, ya damn fool!

  “A picture?” Casal glowered at Colter. “Why would I want you to draw me a picture? Of Yeats?”

  Apparently, while the sergeant’s English was nearly fluent, he didn’t have a good command of sarcasm. Which was damned lucky for Colter Farrow, and likely for Lou Prophet, as well.

  “You know the hombre, I take it?” Prophet asked, changing the subject.

  Casal bunched his lips and tipped his head to one side in a shrug of sorts. “I know him well enough to know that you two are crazy to think that you . . . just the two of you . . . are going to capture Ciaran Yeats.” Chuckling, he turned to his men, most of whom were standing around behind him now, trying to follow the conversation—to no avail, it appeared. For most of them, at least. In Spanish, he informed them what Lou Prophet and his scar-faced amigo were up to down here in Baja.

  They all looked from Lou to Colter, and broke out in unrestrained laughter.

  Casal laughed, too. When he stopped laughing, he drained his bottle then threw it against a rock, smashing it. The violent movement nearly caused him to trip over his own feet and fall. He regained his balance at the last second, and, wobbling around drunkenly, he turned to Prophet and said, “Do you know how many men Major Yeats has around him, Lou?”

  “I’m betting quite a few.”

  “Sí, sí. Quite a few. Quite a damn few!”

  “You know where he is, Sergeant?”

  Again, Casal shrugged. “Sí, I know where he is. It is the rurales’ business to know where everyone is . . . once they cross the border into Méjico.” He’d added that last part loudly, with meaning, his eyes nearly crossing with disdain for his foreign visitors.

  Prophet had a feeling that not only did Casal know where Yeats and his men . . . and Alejandra de la Paz . . . were holed up, but that the rurales were in league with Yeats’s bunch. How else would an American army major survive so long in Mexico, running off his leash with his small army of American men, than by sharing the fruits of his nefarious doings with the rurales and the federalistas and anyone else in positions of power down here?

  “You know what I think, Lou?” Casal asked.

  “I got a feelin’ you’re gonna tell me.”

  “I think you are a very stupid man. I used to think you were shrewd and slippery and even smart in the way that you knew how to make money where most other men wouldn’t see the slightest opportunity. But this . . . this tells me you are very stupid. To think that you and El Rojo over there”—he pointed at Colter—“are going to ride into my country and capture a close friend of mine and—what?—take him back across the border and turn him in for any bounty he may have on his head? That tells me you are in fact eres un pendejo de mierda!”

  “Oh, he has plenty of money on his head,” Prophet said. But he was really wishing now that Colter hadn’t brought up Ciaran Yeats. It hadn’t occurred to him that the rurales were likely in league with the Mad Major from California, but he should have. It only made sense.

  Yeah, this whole little mess just got a whole lot messier. This hole Lou was standing in was likely his grave. A few more shovelfuls of sand, and . . . dust to dust.

  He doubted, however, that Casal was a close friend of Yeats. Ruiz, maybe. But not Casal. Not the lowly, dog-faced sergeant, a notorious tequila drunk even by Mexican standards. A man like Yeats wouldn’t give the time of day to Sergeant Casal.

  “You know what, Lou?” Casal said.

  “I got a feelin’ you’re gonna tell me.”

  “I think I’m going to leave you right there to die slowly in the sun.”

  “I was thinkin’ maybe we could discuss other options.”

  “No, no. I think I am going to leave both you silly gringos right here in the sand. It is the just punishment for two gringo fools who have come down here seeking riches in such foolish ways, not to mention that you killed Lieutenant Ruiz.” Casal clucked and shook his head, feigning sadness. “That was very unfortunate, Lou. Very unfortunate to kill such a wonderful man.”

  Prophet quelled the urge to laugh at the sergeant’s poor acting. Casal wasn’t grieving Ruiz’s demise. Casal was the lowest kind of man there was—the kind that didn’t give a damn about anything except lining his own pockets. He’d come after Ruiz’s killers only because it was expected that he do so. And because doing so might get him promoted a rank or two.

  “Hey, that’s my hoss!” Colter yelled suddenly.

  The redhead was staring off to his right, Prophet’s left. One of the rurales was holding Northwest’s reins and trying to climb onto the coyote dun’s back. The horse wasn’t having it, however. He was pitching and sidestepping. The rurale was furious, slashing the horse’s snout with a leather quirt and cursing at the tops of his lungs.

  “Stop it!” Colter bellowed though it didn’t come out very loudly. There was something about being buried that kept a fella from being able to raise his voice. “Stop it, damn you! That’s no way to treat a horse!”

  Casal kicked Colter’s ear again.

  “Ow!”

  “Who is this scar-faced gringo, Lou?” Casal asked Prophet. “He is as ugly as el diablo’s dog.”

  “That there is Colter Farrow.”

  Colter shouted—or at least tried to shout—“You tell that son of a bitch to stop beating my horse or so help me . . .”

  Casal laughed. “He’s got spirit doesn’t he?”

  “Yes . . . yes, he does,” Prophet remarked. Then, seeing a man carrying Lou’s own saddle out of the camp, intending to place it on another horse standing nearby, rage burned through the bounty hunter’s veins. “Hey, that’s my saddle!” The man carrying his saddle also had Prophet’s Richards coach gun slung over his shoulder.

  Yet another rurale was spinning Prophet’s Colt Peacemaker on his finger and grinning mockingly.

  More fury boiled through Prophet. “Thievin’ devils!” he bellowed, or tried to bellow.

  “Shut up!” Casal kicked Prophet’s left ear.

  “Ow!”

  “You have no more use for your belongings,” Casal said. “Not to worry. We will put it all to good use. Your horse, however . . .”

  Casal had turned to gaze toward where Mean and Ugly stood a distance from camp. Mean didn’t look happy. He stood glaring at the gray-clad interlopers. He resembled an angry bull, his bridle reins drooping, head down, his ears peeled back against his skull. His tail was arched. His large, copper eyes were ringed with white, and they flashed fire. Prophet thought he could even see smoke jetting from the enraged gelding’s nostrils.

  “Your horse, however . . .” Casal moved out away from Prophet and Colter. He slowly slid a long-barreled Smith & Wesson revolver from the holster hanging low on his right leg. “Your horse, however, is not only worthless . . . but quite dangerous.”

  “Leave that hoss alone, Casal!”

  “What that horse needs is a bullet between his eyes,” said
the sergeant, raising the revolver and clicking back the hammer.

  Chapter 25

  “Don’t you shoot my horse, you low-down pile of goat dung!” Prophet choked out.

  Mean and Ugly glared at the drunk rurale staggering toward him. Casal dragged his heels across the gravelly ground, spurs ringing hoarsely. The sergeant extended the cocked, long-barreled pistol toward the line-back dun’s head, the horse lowering his head still farther, crouching like a bare-knuckle fighter, pawing the ground with his right front hoof.

  “Casal!” Prophet wheezed.

  As if echoing Prophet’s own attempted yell, another voice bellowed, “Casal?”

  The voice sounded like a frog’s loud croak. It was amplified by the stony ridges surrounding the encampment where the pig still roasted, its juices popping and crackling where they dribbled onto the fire’s flames. The single word, Casal, reverberated around the broad arroyo where it formed a bowl nestled between escarpments that Prophet hadn’t seen in the darkness of the previous night.

  Casal froze, looked around.

  The other rurales did the same, looking up and around, trying to follow the echoing voice to its source.

  “Casal, you dirty pig! You offal of a donkey and the afterbirth of a jackass!” The epithets, also croaked out in a loud, froglike voice in a dirty border version of Spanish mixed with English, were followed by the disembodied laughter of several men. The laughter came from several places amongst the rocks overlooking the encampment. The speaker laughed the loudest. It was almost an effeminate giggle punctuated by snorting guffaws. When the laughter stopped, the froglike voice said, “Put that gun down before I drill you a second hole through your hairy ass, Casal, and leave you sobbing for your mongrel cur of a mother!”

  There was the loud, metallic ratcheting of a rifle being cocked.

  “Prepare to die, you ugly dog!” the frog croaked again, this time more shrilly.

  “Jack!” Casal wheeled, glaring up into the rocks, his eyes bright with rage mixed with fear. “Jack, is that you, you old man-turtle?”

  Snorts and giggles drifted down from the rocks.

  Casal wheeled again. “Jack!” he screeched, spittle flecking from his lips.

  The other rurales had clawed pistols from their holsters or grabbed their rifles from around the fire and were looking around as wildly, as fearfully, as the sergeant.

  “Jack!” Casal wailed.

  Several fist-sized rocks tumbled down from a jagged rock wall. Casal swung his pistol toward them and fired, the gun’s crack echoing loudly.

  “Jack, show yourself, you little turtle!”

  “Casal!” the froggy voice yelled again.

  “Show yourself, Jack!” Casal wailed, dragging his spurs as he looked around in desperation, a thin tendril of gray smoke curling from his revolver’s barrel. “Show yourself, you ugly little spider!”

  More snorts and chuckles drifted down from the rocks.

  “Prepare to shake hands with el diablo, Casal, you hijo de puta!”

  “Jack!” Casal swung his revolver again and triggered another shot.

  His shot was answered by another shot—this one from the rocks.

  Casal’s head jerked back. He staggered backward, his gun hand dropping to his side. He twisted around, spurs chinging. As he turned toward where Prophet’s and Colter’s heads sprouted from the sand, Lou saw a quarter-sized hole in the upper left center of the sergeant’s forehead. Casal stumbled farther backward and then dropped to the ground and lay quivering about six feet to Prophet’s left.

  Prophet looked at Colter. Colter stared back at him, eyes wide.

  Lou scrunched up his face in dread. Ah hell . . .

  “¡Mátalos!” came a rumbling roar in Spanish from up high in the rocks. (“Kill them!”)

  The rurales began running in all directions, screaming. None took more than three or four steps, however, before rifles began crackling in the rocks around and above them.

  Bullets peppered the scrambling rurales, punching through their gray tunics and spitting blood every which way. The rurales danced and hopped and skipped as though a band had just begun sawing a jovial tune, only this dance included tooth-gnashing screams and shrieks and shouted epithets as the dancers’ legs crumpled and the dead men dropped in ragged, bloody piles on the ground around Prophet and Colter.

  Because of his confined position, Prophet couldn’t see all of the rurales, but he could see enough to know that whoever was slinging lead at them from the surrounding scarps was doing fast, messy, but decisive work. Blood spurted past Prophet’s left eye to stain the sand before him. Another spurt struck his left cheek and dribbled down his cheek to his unshaven jaw.

  Ah hell . . .

  A second later a rurale staggered toward him, holding both arms across his belly. He inadvertently kicked sand in Prophet’s face. He dropped to the ground and rolled onto his back to lie belly up between Lou and Colter. He writhed, glanced at Lou, and lowered a bloody hand to the old Remington holstered on his left thigh. Keeping his pain-racked, angry eyes on Prophet, his lips stretched back from his teeth, the rurale slid the Remy from its holster. He cocked the weapon and extended it toward Lou’s head.

  “Nah,” Prophet said, dragging the words out in a fateful drawl. “Don’t do that . . .”

  The rurale grinned and tightened his finger on the Remy’s trigger. A bullet punched into the rurale’s right temple and tore out a fist-sized chunk of skull over his left ear as it exited and plunked into the now-bloody, brain-splattered ground. The rurale triggered the Remington, but the round flew over Prophet’s head to spang off a rock behind him.

  Prophet’s ears rang. Beneath the ringing, he thought he heard the dwindling of the gunfire. He looked over the bloody carcass of the dead rurale. Colter was staring back at him, the redhead’s lips pursed ironically. Colter also had a few blood splatters on his left cheek, over the Sapinero brand. Sand clung to it.

  Prophet laughed. “You just can’t beat Mexico for fun and adventure—can you, Red?”

  Colter didn’t respond. He was gazing at something over Prophet’s head, something behind Lou and on his left. Because of the ringing in the bounty hunter’s ears, he felt the reverberations of the approaching riders through the ground around him before he heard them. There must be a good dozen of them, judging by the mini shock waves assaulting his back and shoulders.

  He grinned over the dead rurale again at Colter. “As they say in the opry houses, reload your pistols for act two!”

  Colter kept his eyes on the riders approaching behind Prophet. Lou heard the drumming of the hooves beneath the slowly dwindling ringing in his ears. He saw the first rider in the corner of his left eye as the man rode up on that side of him, stopping his horse maybe ten feet away between the two all-but-interred gringos. Two then three then four then several more galloped into view, drawing back on their wide-eyed horses’ reins and stopping abruptly to stare down at Lou and the redhead.

  Prophet kept an eye on those frisky mounts’ prancing hooves. A fella was never more vulnerable than when only his head was sticking up out of the earth.

  His poor heart was drumming another frenetic rhythm.

  Now, who have we . . . ?

  The newcomers staring down at him were a rough-looking lot. About the only difference between them and the rurales was that these men weren’t in uniform. As Prophet’s sidelong gaze swept them, he thought he saw some gringos amongst them.

  He shaped an affable grin and said, “How do!”

  The newcomers looked at one another as they were still getting their horses settled down. A couple chuckled. One laughed loudly. Then one of them, chuckling, swung down from his saddle and dropped the reins of his whickering Arabian, called a trigueño for its three shades of brown. The mount was looking down skeptically at the two heads poking up out of the ground. Apparently, the horse had never seen such a bizarre spectacle as two heads growing in the desert.

  Its rider ambled over toward Lou and Colter. The ma
n was as odd a looking duck as Lou had ever laid eyes on. If he wasn’t a dwarf, he’d missed being one by only an inch or so. Prophet doubted if the top of the man’s head, beneath a black velvet, silver-trimmed, wagon-wheel sombrero, would come up much farther than the bounty hunter’s belt buckle.

  When Lou was standing aboveground, that was, and not inside it.

  The short man was nearly as broad through the hips and shoulders as he was tall. He was severely bandy-legged. His boots must have been a size five or six; they were black and hand-tooled. He wore a fancily stitched bull-hide vest over a calico shirt, deerskin charro leggings, and a Colt .44 on his left hip, in the cross-draw position. The revolver appeared enormous on the man’s round, child-sized body, which he must have had to have his clothes specially tailored for.

  His face didn’t go with his body at all. It was a buzzard face, with a long, hooked nose and two close-set, dark brown eyes. Long, grizzled brown hair laced with gray hung down from beneath the sombrero, and a good bit of it poked out from the little man’s ears, which were way too big for the rest of him. But, then, his head was also too big for the rest of him so maybe his ears didn’t look so out of place, after all.

  “What on God’s green earth do we have here?” said the little man, stopping near Prophet and Colter, pinching his leggings up at the thighs then hunkering into a squat, leaning forward to rest his weight on the balls of his little boots. He’d spoken in fluent English though Prophet had a keen sense that he was the same man who’d spoken in fluent border Spanish from amongst the rocks overlooking the encampment.

  The little man cut his amused, befuddled gaze between Prophet and Colter, chuckling. He was missing one upper front tooth. The other was crooked and brown.

  Prophet’s heart lightened a little as he gazed up at the little man and said, “¿Americano, amigo?”

  The little man grinned down at Prophet. If his face was raptorial, his eyes were even more so, one of which was severely unmoored so that it listed to the inside corner of the socket. Both eyes owned the off-putting cast of unbridled lunacy. “In a roundabout way, I reckon. The name’s John Brian Rynn-Douglas, don’t ya know.” He thumped himself in the chest with a thick little thumb. “Baja Jack, they call me down here!”