Lawless Trail (17 page)

“Sounds good to me,” Hardaway said with a slight grin. “We know Dallas Garand doesn't like anybody getting in his way.”

The two eased their horses back out of sight and waited until the hooves of the posse's horses pounded past them in a flurry of dust and disappeared up the trail toward the ruins. As the sound fell away, the Ranger stepped down from his saddle and stretched and took down a canteen and uncapped it. He drank as Hardaway stepped down and stretched and stood beside him.

“I figure a half hour will give them enough time to get into whatever trouble they find up there,” Sam said.

“I'd say so.” Hardaway grinned and took down his canteen and uncapped it. The two bumped their canteens together. When they finished drinking, they capped their canteens, hung them back on their saddle horns and stood listening to the silent trail lying ahead of them.

Captain Torez awakened at the bottom of the high bluff, having bounced and flopped and grazed the side of the rock wall as he dropped through the darkness and finally skidded to a halt. He had lain unconscious for a time, but when he awakened he realized that in spite of his pain, his cuts, scrapes and bruises, he was alive, and that was all that mattered. With the straw sombrero stuck down even deeper and tighter over his head and face—all the way down to his gagged mouth—he struggled to his feet in the purple darkness.

His hands were still bound behind him, and he tried in vain to remove the hat from his face, and with it the tight bandanna from around his mouth, with his shoulder. Yet neither of his encumbrances would give an inch.

After groaning and struggling and finally falling to his knees, he gave up and stared as best he could through the loose and broken straw weaving of the hat's crown. Standing up again, he began making his way up a path leading back to the trail above him.

An hour later, after several slips, falls and slides, he lay gasping for breath on the hillside only a few yards beneath the trail. But as exhausted as he was, he felt a sudden surge of strength when he heard the sound of horses rounding the trail from the direction of the ruins and come charging along the dark path toward him.

Rolling onto his raw, bleeding knees, he managed to shove himself up the side of a young pine and finish his haphazard climb. Staggering on one boot and a bare and bloody foot, he limped sidelong out onto the trail in the shadowy moonlight and jumped up and down wildly as the silhouettes of men and horses pounded hard in the night.

“Mmmmmmmph! Mmmmph!”
he bellowed as loud as he could through his tight bandanna gag.

The riders heard the strange muffled sound—but only barely—above the pounding of their horses' hooves and the creak, rattle and clink of saddles and tack. Their horses neither slowed nor veered as they came upon the grainy, staggering, stumbling figure that had thrust itself in their midst. The captain banked off the side of one charging animal to the next.

The impact of the blows kept the ill-fated captain suspended on his feet. He spun for a moment from horse to horse like a child's toy top until the outshot rear hooves of the last passing animal launched him in the air. He sailed in a high, weightless arc. Then gravity spat him back down, and he hit the ground like a limp bundle of rags.

“
Holy God!
What was that?” shouted Dallas Garand, reining his horse to a sliding halt, then turning it in the darkness as the men bunched and slid and turned their horses, gathering up around him. Garand's horse shivered and chuffed and blew out a breath as he nudged the animal warily toward the dark lump lying in the trail behind them. He raised his rifle from across his lap and cocked it.

“Careful, Mr. Garand,” Detective Folliard whispered, riding close beside him, his borrowed rifle also cocked and ready. “If that thing ain't dead it'll come up charging you.”

“I dare it to,” Garand said. Over his shoulder, he said to the rest of the men, “If it's alive, get ready to put it down.”

Hammers cocked, levers snapped back and forth as the men stepped their horses closer with caution.

On the hard ground, broken, bleeding, barely alive, Captain Torez heard the voices. Dazed, he saw the dark figures through woven straw.

“Mmmph . . . mmmmph—!” he bellowed. But his muffled voice was cut short by a cacophony of pistol and rifle fire that lit the trail in an eerie flicker of blue-orange fire.

“That's
enough
!” Garand shouted amid the roar of gunfire surrounding him. The dark form on the trail jumped and bucked in place as the hail of bullets chopped into him.

“Hold your damn fire!” Earl Prew shouted, his thickly bandaged foot sticking forward out of his stirrup.

The gunfire fell away as quickly as it had started.

“Jesus! Do you think you've killed it?” Garand said to the men with sarcasm. He fanned his hand back and forth through the thick brown cloud of burnt gunpowder smoke looming around them. He stepped his horse forward, his own rifle barrel still smoking from the two shots he'd made.

“Want me to check it out, Mr. Garand?” Folliard asked, wanting to do whatever he could to get back in his boss' good graces.

“Yeah,” Garand growled sidelong. “You too, DeSpain,” he said.

The two men put their horses forward the few remaining feet to the dark lump in the trail, Folliard trying successfully to arrive there first.

“Uh-oh,” he said, looking down at the bullet-riddled body.

Arriving beside him, DeSpain looked at the mangled, battered body, its ragged underwear, the straw hat pulled down over its face, the bandanna wrapped tight beneath its ripped and hanging brim.

“What is it there?” Garand called out, his horse moving toward them at a slow walk.

“It's a man, Mr. Garand,” Folliard said. “But I don't know how to describe him. He's got a—”

“It's some barefoot fool in his drawers,” DeSpain called out, cutting Folliard off. “Either his head's missing or he didn't want to show it.”

Folliard gave DeSpain a dark stare.

“Damn it,” Garand grumbled. As he sidled up to his two detectives, he examined the body and shook his head, baffled. Folliard looked back and forth between DeSpain and Garand, not wanting to be left out.

“Is it one of the Traybos, Mr. Garand?” he asked.

“How the hell would I know?” Garand barked. “Get down there and get that hat off him. What the hell was he thinking—” He stopped short and said, “Are his hands tied?”

Jumping down from his saddle, Folliard turned the body a little and saw the belt wrapped around the dead captain's wrists.

“Yes, sir, he's tied,” Folliard said.

The rest of the men moved their horses up and half circled the dead man in the trail.

“Good Lord,” Garand said, realization beginning to set in.

As Folliard cut the straw sombrero from the dead man's head, DeSpain looked back along the dark trail. He chewed on a wad of tobacco.

“We got riders coming,” he said matter-of-factly. “Hell, boss, they're almost here.” He levered a fresh round up into his smoking rifle chamber.

The rest of the men did the same and stared toward the sound moving in around the turn in the trail only fifteen yards away.

“Damn it to hell,” said Garand. “You cannot fire a weapon in this infernal country. Every son of a bitch must sit around saddled and ready, waiting to hear a gunshot!”

“He's a Mex, Mr. Garand,” Folliard said, jerking the sliced sombrero away from the dead man's face.

“Hell, I'm not surprised,” Garand replied in disgust. “We
are
in Mexico. You can't avoid the sons a' bitches forever.”

As he spoke, he looked at the riders slowing their horses to a walk and coming toward them from the turn in the trail.

“Hola,”
said the voice of the man at the head of the riders. “Lay down your weapons. You are being arrested by Sergeant Malero, under the authority of
Generalísimo
Terrero Pablo Juan Duro García.”

“Say
what
?” DeSpain chuckled under his breath, itching for a fight, ready to start pulling a trigger for the slightest reason. “Damn greaser's got more names than a dozen Christian white men,” he added with a muffled laugh. He spat a long stream of tobacco juice.

“Stand firm, men,” Garand whispered sidelong. To the Mexican sergeant he said, “We're Americans here. Stay where you are. This doesn't concern you.”

“This does not concern us?” said the sergeant as if in disbelief. Ignoring Garand's order to stay back, he rode his horse forward at the same slow, stalking pace. His men followed close behind him. Four soldiers rode double, owing to the fact that Rosetta and Ty Traybo had made off with their horses from the ruins.

“You heard me right,” said Garand. “I'm Dallas Garand with the railroad security. This is
American
business. Unless your chili-sucking
generalísimo
wants to have you stuffed and stood in a corner, you better back the hell off.”

“The land you are on is
Mexican land
,” the sergeant continued, ignoring the threats and insults. He stopped his horse less than ten feet away.

“Today it's Mexican land, Sergeant Malaria,” DeSpain said, deliberately mispronouncing the soldier's name. “But it's getting away from you beaners awfully fast.” He spat another stream.

Again, the sergeant ignored the insults.

“I will have your weapons and hear your reason for being here—” His words stopped short as he drew close enough to look down at the dead face of Captain Torez.

Uh-oh!
Garand thought, seeing the sergeant's face in the pale moonlight.

Backing his horse away quickly, the sergeant stared in black rage at Dallas Garand. He raised a hand and shouted commands in Spanish to his soldiers too quickly for Garand and his men, even those well learned in the language to understand.

“The hell is this monkey jabbering about?” DeSpain asked.

The Mexican soldiers raised their big French rifles to their shoulders and took aim.

“Oh, hell!” said Garand, able to make out some of what the sergeant had said. “We've gone and killed their damn leader here.”

“Heh-heh-heh,” DeSpain chuckled in a dark tone. “That ain't nothing. Watch this.”

“No, Rio!” Garand shouted as DeSpain kicked his horse forward a step toward the angry sergeant. But DeSpain wasn't to be stopped. Taking a deep breath, he rolled the wad of tobacco over onto his tongue and with all his strength blew it in a straight wet line. The projectile, spittle and all, splattered the sergeant's horse squarely between its eyes and sent it into a bucking, twisting, whinnying frenzy.

“Now you've done it, you crazy son of a bitch!” Artimus Folliard shouted at Rio DeSpain as the Mexicans' rifles exploded in the grainy darkness.

•   •   •

Already traveling at a quick pace, Hardaway and the Ranger looked at each other and sped their horses up even faster upon hearing the sudden outburst of gunfire farther up along their trail. As they rode on they saw a flashing blue-white glow standing out on the turn in the trail.

Hardaway shouted to the Ranger above the roar of the thunder of their horses' hooves, “I bet that's Garand introducing his detectives to General Terrero García's soldiers.”

The Ranger didn't answer. But he had a feeling Hardaway was right, judging from the distinct sound of the French-made rifles. He gave Hardaway a nod, the two of them riding hard for a short distance, then drawing their horses down and veering them off the trail as they neared the turn. Around the turn the blue-white light of battle still flashed in the pale grainy light. On the far eastern sky the first thin silver wreath of light mantled the horizon.

Behind the protection of the massive and deeply creviced boulder standing where the trail curved out and around, the two stopped their horses, and the Ranger handed Hardaway his reins.

“Whatever you do, Ranger,” Hardaway said, “I hope you don't get them stirred up and shooting at us.”

Sam just looked at him.

“Pay me no mind. I'm just a little nervous, is all,” Hardaway said, a little embarrassed by his comment.

The Ranger shoved his rifle into its boot. He lifted his big Colt, checked it and slid it back into his holster.

“I won't be gone a minute,” he said quietly.

Hardaway wasn't sure if the Ranger was speaking to him or the barb as he saw him pat the horse's withers.

Sam stood straight up on his saddle and stepped over into the jagged crevice. As if making his way up a crooked ladder, he climbed eighteen feet and pulled himself over onto the boulder's broken rounded surface. He moved to the front of the large boulder, below which the flashing light and the sound of battle stood strong in the fading night. Flattening onto his belly, he inched closer, careful not to be seen and mistaken for a combatant.

On the trail below he saw gun muzzles streaking fire back and forth, ricocheting off rock and whirling and zipping in all directions. In the darkness he caught flashing glimpses of dead men and dead horses. On one side he saw the tan uniforms of the
federales
revealed in quick bursts of flashing gunfire. On the other side he saw glimpses of Garand, his remaining horses and men gathered here and there behind the cover of rock.

“What a waste,” he murmured to himself, looking back and forth in the streaking gunfire.

He lay still for a moment longer, realizing the firing had already waned since he and Hardaway first heard it. Below he saw Garand and his remaining men backing away as they fired—preparing to make a fighting run for it.

He backed away a foot and stood in a crouch, making his way to the crevice in the boulder. By the time he'd climbed down the short distance, he noted the firing had diminished even more.