“You’re on!” roared Santangelo. “I think he’s going to make it!”
More laughter as the mule brayed and thumped its hooves wildly and thrashed the poor man on its back like a wicked child shaking a rag doll in a dirty clenched fist.
“Here he comes!” Alvarez squealed as the mule and its thrashing rider drew within twenty yards of the fort’s open front gate. “I think he’s going to make it. . . . Ohh . . .
ohhhhh, noooooooh—and here he
came so
cloooose
!” the corporal lamented just after the mule had deposited the padre in a sand patch a few feet in front of the fort’s gaping doors, dust wafting around the poor man who lay writhing on his back, mashing his sombrero into the ground beneath him.
“The poor bastard,” said Santangelo, gaping down from the guard tower. “Look there, Hermano, you old heathen. Look what you’ve done! To a man of the cloth, no less.”
“I guess you’re right, Raf . . . I mean, Sergeant Santangelo. I guess my aim isn’t as good as it was before I visited Nogales.” Alvarez chuckled deep in his throat, showing his cracked, tobacco-stained teeth.
“Come on, you hell-bent son of a demon lobo.” Santangelo slapped his partner’s chest before looping his own rifle around the handle of the Gatling gun that each of the four towers was armed with and dropped down the rickety wooden ladder. “We’d better see how badly you’ve injured the padre. I have a feeling forgiveness isn’t in the cards for you, my friend!”
Santangelo leaped from the ladder’s third rung to the ground. As Alvarez followed close behind, the sergeant pushed through the half dozen Rurale guards who’d gathered inside and outside the open front gates to enjoy the show. The heretics were laughing amongst themselves, slapping each other’s chests or pounding shoulders, while the faithful, of which there were far fewer, stood around in hushed awe, crossing themselves and lifting forgiveness-beseeching gazes skyward.
“Back, swine, get back!” Santangelo ordered, shoving a couple of the gaping men back away from the padre—a big, rawboned, unshaven man with sandy hair and light blue eyes. He was flat on his back, groaning and grunting painfully, but as Santangelo approached him, the big padre pushed up on his elbows and shook his head as if to clear it.
“I apologize for Corporal Alvarez, Father. He has been stationed so long out here in these rocks that he’s gone a little off his nut.” Santangelo glanced up at Alvarez, who was standing behind him and staring sheepishly down at the disheveled stranger.
The big man grunted, stretching his lips back from his teeth.
“Hey, Father, you speak English?” Santangelo squatted beside the man, wrinkling his brows suspiciously. “You know—you don’t look like a Mexican priest to me. You look like a gringo. You speak Spanish? Uh? Let me hear you say something in Spanish.”
The big man’s bleary eyes rolled up toward Santangelo. As though suddenly understanding what the sergeant was saying, he held up the finger of one hand while reaching into a pocket of his robe with the other. He pulled out a wad of small, scribbled notes. He peeled the top note from the wad, and offered it to Santangelo, who took the note brusquely and held it up to his face.
“‘I apologize for not speaking, but the Yaquis cut out my tongue.’”
A couple of the men standing around behind Santangelo and Alvarez clucked or muttered regretfully.
“So you have no tongue, uh?” Santangelo chewed his lower lip. “Really? That’s true?” He shoved his head down closer to that of the padre. “Let me see.”
The padre tipped his head back and opened his mouth about halfway. Santangelo lowered his head still farther and sort of cocked it to one side to see inside the stranger’s mouth. Alvarez did the same, peering over the sergeant’s shoulder while holding one hand over his bad eye and squinting his good one.
“Open wider,” Santangelo ordered the priest. “I can’t see a damn thing in there.”
The priest muttered something. It was like a gargle.
“Huh?” Santangelo said.
Another gargle as the padre’s lips moved slightly while he held his mouth half open.
“What’s that? I can’t hear you, damnit!”
The priest’s blue eyes flickered devilishly. They acquired a cool, bemused cast as he cleared his throat and said in perfectly enunciated English, “Open yours, you smelly son of a bitch!”
Santangelo’s heart leaped into his throat when he saw that the padre had opened his robes and was aiming a sawed-off, double-barreled, ten-gauge shotgun up and out from his broad chest clad in skin-tight, wash-worn red longhandles, at Santangelo’s suddenly gaping mouth. The sergeant had only seen the brief flash of the gut shredder’s left barrel when, on the heels of the cannon-like blast, his head was ripped from his shoulders to fly up and over the still-staring Alvarez, spraying blood and brain goo in every direction before hitting the dirt behind the corporal and rolling up over one of the stunned onlooker’s high-topped black boots.
Alvarez lowered his hand from his milky brown eye, screaming and fumbling with his Springfield Trapdoor. Lou Prophet snarled like an enraged bobcat as he slid his sawed-off ten-gauge slightly left and tripped the second trigger.
Booommmm!
The melon-sized spread of double-ought buck blasted through the scrawny corporal’s filthy tunic, lifting the man three feet off the ground and punching him straight back into three others, laying one out flat before Alvarez hit the ground in a bloody, lifeless, quivering heap just inside the fort’s broad double doors.
He leaped to his bare feet—he’d lost both sandals during the joyride that he’d managed to prolong by grinding his heels into the mule’s flanks, wanting to keep the Rurales as entertained for as long as he could. Now he swept both sides of his billowing robe back to allow access to the two Colt .45s bristling from holsters and a third one wedged behind the two cartridge belts crisscrossed on his waist. The Rurales standing around him were just now recovering from the shock of seeing the sergeant’s head whipping through the air like a Cinco de Mayo rocket and were fumbling pistols from their holsters or raising old-model rifles to their shoulders.
Prophet dispatched one of the soldiers—a fat corporal with a long, tangled beard—before the man could slip his Remington from a shoulder holster, sending him into a bizarre pirouette across the bench. The robe-wearing bounty hunter killed two more with a single bullet each before the Colts leaped and roared four more times, and all seven Rurales were either down or going down bloody, screaming and yipping like coyotes, one blindly triggering his revolver through the cheek of a bellowing compatriot.
As powder smoke billowed around him, Prophet quickly aimed his cocked Colts at the guard tower just left of the open doors, where a Gatling gun bristled like a giant, deadly mosquito, flashing brassily in the late-morning sun. He ratcheted back both hammers but held fire when he saw the guard who’d been manning the tower turn a somersault off the tower’s rickety wooden rail, losing his sombrero and rifle and hitting the ground with a dull thud that clipped his horrified shriek.
His rifle landed with a clatter a half second later.
Two familiar figures stood in the tower—peon-revolutionarios in their traditional white pajamas, serapes, and wagon-wheel sombreros. The younger man held a machete while the older one, known as Tio Largo, or “Big Tio,” grinned delightedly down at Prophet while turning the Gatling gun toward the fort’s courtyard with a squawk of its dry cylinder swivel and squatting down behind it.
Prophet lifted a hand to his temple in salute and dropped to a knee to reload his gut shredder. When he’d filled both tubes and closed the ten-gauge with a loud clack, he jerked with a start as Tio shouted, “Here they come, Lou!” and opened up with the Gatling gun, laying down a deadly line of fire on the courtyard where Rurales in all stages of dress poured out the doors of the prison buildings and stables.
A second later, one of the other Gatlings in another guard tower began roaring as well. Looking up as he shook spent casings from one of his .45s, then filling the empty chambers from his cartridge belt, Prophet saw a dozen or so peon-revolutionarios—all Big Tio’s men whom Prophet had thrown in with in the scrubby hills around Del Rio—whooping and hollering as they spilled down the fort’s east and north walls.
They dangled from ropes or dropped into the courtyard while the men behind the deadly Gatling guns turned the Rurales spilling out of the guardhouses and barracks and big central prison block to a wheeling, screaming mass of bloody carnage tumbling down stone steps or rolling in the hard-packed, straw- and dung-littered dirt of the yard.
Above the din rose a girl’s shrill scream.
Prophet gritted his teeth as he spun the cylinder of his third filled Colt, wedged the gun behind his cartridge belts, grabbed his shotgun, and sprinted between the fort’s gaping doors and into the bloody, smoky melee of the courtyard, bellowing,
“Looo-eeeezzzz-ahhhhh!”
2
RUNNING THROUGH THE gate’s open doors and into the prison courtyard, Prophet threw a hand in the air, signaling Big Tio to hold off with the Gatling gun.
He heard the Mexican revolutionario leader shout the cease-fire orders to the other towers, all four of which had been overtaken by the nimble, mountain-bred rebels while Prophet had diverted the guards’ attention outside the front gate.
The angry, ragtag bunch led by Big Tio had been chomping at the bit to take out the corrupt Rurale contingent stationed here at San Cristobal for several months. The Rurale officer overseeing the headquarters and prison, Major Rudofo Montoya, was in the business of kidnapping young women from the nearby mountain villages and selling them into prostitution in the mining perditions of southern Chihuahua, where isolated rock breakers, more savage than any Apache or Yaqui, paid good money for female companionship. The younger the better.
But while they paid good money for the young women and girls—some as young as eight—they went through them quite quickly, always needing more. Prophet’s sometime partner, sometime lover, Louisa Bonaventure, had been caught in a trap sprung by Major Montoya three weeks ago in the village of Del Rio, and she and the young peasant girls she’d been captured with had been brought here where they were awaiting transportation by mule train into the Sierra Madres.
All this Prophet had learned from Big Tio’s spies. And that was when the American bounty hunter, who’d met Big Tio on a bounty-hunting expedition to Mexico several years ago, had helped the revolutionario leader organize the raid on the prison here at San Cristobal.
Now, as the Gatling’s cover fire died, leaving countless Rurales sprawled and groaning around the big monastery building that Montoya had converted into a prison, Prophet dropped to a knee and extended the sawed-off shotgun from his right side.
Two Rurales had just bolted out of a low, arched doorway in the officer’s headquarters in front of him, one extending a rifle toward Big Tio’s guard tower, the other clamping a hand to a bloody shoulder while cursing loudly in Spanish and raising a pearl-gripped Remington. Prophet tripped both triggers, and the stout weapon leaped and roared in his hands, blowing both officers off their feet and piling them up on the floor of the low stone stoop just outside the door from which they’d emerged.
Big Tio’s roaring laughter carried down from the guard tower. “Lou, remind me to buy that savage popper from you before we part ways again, amigo!”
Prophet snorted and, realizing he was still wearing the cumbersome brown robes, shrugged out of them, letting them drop to the dust. Beneath he wore only his longhandle top and denim trousers, which he’d rolled up nearly to his knees to give the impression that the robes were all he had on. Jerking the cuffs down to his bare ankles, making it easier to run, he leaped a dying Rurale as he headed past the officer’s headquarters, making for the prison’s main doors.
With rifles, pistols, machetes, sickles, and any other weapon the peasants had managed to get their hands on, Tio’s men were cutting down the Rurales who’d dodged the Gatling fire. The gunshots were sporadic but furious. Men screamed and cursed and one dying Rurale was down and wailing near horse stables, from which the frightened screams of the horses sounded above the shooting.
The prison’s main, double doors stood at the top of high stone steps that fairly glowed in the midday sun. At the bottom of the steps, a Rurale guard who’d been shot through the belly was crawling toward his dropped rifle. Prophet drilled a .45 round through the guard’s head from point-blank range then took the steps three at a time, his bare feet slapping the hot stones as he heard once more the shrill scream of the girl inside the mission /prison.
Hearing several of Big Tio’s men running up the steps behind him, Prophet pulled one of the heavy, brass-handled doors open, throwing it wide so the revolutionario behind him could catch it. He bolted inside, his shotgun dangling from the wide leather lanyard around his neck, holding a cocked Colt pistol in each big, calloused hand.
A ways inside the door, a girl sat on the floor against a cracked stone pillar. A tray, a broken bottle of clear glass, and two shot glasses lay nearby. The senorita, only fourteen or fifteen, was barefoot, and her shabby gray skirt was pulled up around her dark brown thighs. Silver hoop rings dangled from her ears. She wore no blouse. Her small, tan breasts peeked out from behind her long, mussed hair, which was the color of dark chocolate.
Her brown eyes flashed in terror when they found Prophet, and her entire body quivered as she crossed her thin arms on her chest and loosed another scream.
Prophet looked around quickly. Spying no other movement in the broad, dark foyer and atop the flagstone stairs that rose on his right, he lowered his pistols and moved inside, gesturing to the revolutionarios behind him to spread out. They needed no further orders; they all knew that their mission here was to kill every Rurale they ran into and to free the prisoners from the dungeon moldering in the bowels of the hideous place.