Buchanan 18

by Jonas Ward

  All kinds of hell from a man who knew his business.

  Four

  “The pair of queens,” Simon Agry said, “bets ten dollars.” He slid the stack of ten chips into the sizable pot in the center of the poker table and leaned back into his chair with a wheezing sound. Gross was the word for the self-appointed mayor, judge and treasurer of Agrytown. Not big, gross. Simon stood six feet and six inches, without boots, and he needed every bit of it to move his three hundred pounds from one comfortable spot to another. His face was a great round thing, with dark, deep-sunken eyes, a fierce black beard and a head that was completely bald and gleaming now in the flickering gaslight of the chandelier. He was a lot of man, was Simon Agry, and everyone who knew him even passing well hated his ample guts. Including, and especially, his younger brother Lew, who sat across the table from him and was studying the pair of queens showing in Simon’s stud hand and wondering what he had in the hole.

  That was the damned trouble with Si, you never knew what he had in the hole. One hand he’d play conservative, the next wide open. He kept you off balance all the time. You never knew where you stood.

  “I’ll stay,” Cousin Amos announced and Lew shifted his attention to that hand. All red cards, a possible flush. Then the horse buyer from Chicago, Horace Willow, pushed his ten chips into the pile. Willow had been losing as heavily and steadily as Lew himself, and the pair of tens he showed didn’t look like much to the sheriff.

  “Ten,” Lew Agry said, “and ten more.” He had a king on the board and a king in the hole. What encouraged him to raise was that there wasn’t another king in sight.

  “Too steep for me,” announced the man on his left. This was Abe Carbo, the gunman and gambler, and twenty dollars wasn’t too steep for him at all. Carbo was Simon Agry’s man, his Jack-of-all-trades, and in addition to keeping Simon unmolested by various disgruntled citizens he also kept an eye on Brother Lew, a sort of living, breathing reminder not to get too big for his britches.

  Now Horace Willow dealt the cards all around, face up once more, and both Agrys got what they wanted—another queen for Simon, another king for Lew. Hapless Cousin Amos pulled a black trey and threw in his hand. The man from Chicago dealt himself the jack of hearts.

  “The three queens,” Simon Agry said, “bet ten dollars.”

  Willow shook his head, turned his cards over.

  “Your ten,” Lew Agry said, “and my ten.”

  Simon looked at his brother’s kings almost angrily. “Raise it again,” he said, shoving thirty dollars’ worth of chips forward, sitting back and wheezing.

  The sheriff met the raise and Willow dealt the last card, face down. Simon’s enormous hand covered his card and slid it back over the one in the hole. He very deliberately read them. Lew let his new card lie and gave all his attention to his brother.

  “Got the three kings, Lew?” Simon asked harshly.

  “That’s for you to find out, Si. What do you bet?”

  “I check to you.”

  A rare smile touched Lew Agry’s face. He glanced down at his remaining chips and pushed the pile of them into the pot.

  “Ten times ten, Si. I bet a hundred dollars.”

  Simon Agry clamped down tight on the cigar in the corner of his mouth. “I call,” he said, and when Lew’s hand snaked toward his hole card, added: “And bump it another hundred.”

  The sheriff of Agry County was stunned. Immobilized. Simon had checked to him. That could only mean that his brother had the three queens and nothing else. But it hadn’t. The greedy, grinning bastard had trapped him into betting his roll.

  “I call,” Lew Agry said.

  “With what, Lew?” Simon asked juicily.

  “So I’m light a hundred. Don’t you trust me for it?”

  “Sure I trust you, Lew. But what do you say you call my raise with that new stud out to your spread?”

  “What new stud?” the sheriff said, shifting his eyes quickly to Abe Carbo, then back again to his brother. “What are you talking about?”

  “The stallion you picked up across the border last week,” Simon told him. “A fine piece of horseflesh, I’m told.”

  “And worth a lot more than one hundred dollars,” Lew said, the veins in his temples throbbing spasmodically.

  “Then you don’t call my raise? I take the pot?”

  The sheriff turned to Willow. “You’re buying horses. I’ve got a thoroughbred Spanish stallion. How much?”

  Simon Agry lifted his hand. “I don’t think Mr. Willow wants to bid against me,” he said. “That horse is worth one hundred dollars. Fish, Lew, or cut bait.”

  “I bet the horse,” Lew said in a tight, cold voice.

  Simon smiled. “Four queens,” he said, overturning the hole-card lady. “What have you got, Lew?”

  “My bellyful,” was the sullen answer.

  “Abe’ll come by for the stud tomorrow—” The gunfire broke across his voice and he instantly gripped the table in fear. Instinctively his brother and Abe Carbo came to their feet, hands sweeping back to loose-holstered guns. Lew Agry was a mockery of the star on his chest, but there was no fear in him. With Carbo it was different. He was paid to take his chances.

  “Now what?” Lew said, going to the curtained window of the hotel’s card room and peering out into the night.

  “It’s someone after that hardcase,” Cousin Amos said excitedly. “He went and showed that purse full of gold pieces!”

  Lew saw his deputy approaching the saloon. He saw the Mexican kid run out and get himself manhandled. Lew grinned. That Waldo knew how to handle ’em. A form dropped down into view as if from the sky. A big man, running, and there was no mistaking his intent. Then the sheriff moved, moved out of the room and out of the hotel. And as he crossed the street the rage just boiled over in him. It wasn’t only that justice was being interfered with, it was also his anger at his brother, at losing the money and the blood horse.

  He hooked his arm around Buchanan’s windpipe, put the point of his knee into Buchanan’s spine, pulled back with the one while he shoved forward with the other. This was the way he had learned to fight from the Apache. This he had learned the hard way, campaigning with Zach Taylor’s army against that devil Sant’ Anna three years ago.

  Five

  The L-shaped adobe building had once been the guardhouse for a Mexican Army outpost stationed here, and though a section of the flat roof had been demolished by a cannon during the recent war, the place still served as the ten-cell Agrytown jail. On the rough stone floor of one of the cells, over which the roof was firmly intact, the disillusioned ex-revolutionist and soldier of misfortune named Thomas MacGrail Buchanan came painfully back to his senses. The whole experience had a familiarity about it, as though Buchanan were reliving his life, and when he felt of his midsection it was just as it had been on several occasions during the past two years. The belt with its magnificent silver buckle was gone. The purse with its little gold fortune was gone. His body and face were just one long bruise and he was right back where he had started.

  Something passed across his chest and scurried away.

  “Hell!” Buchanan said fervently. “Even the same lousy rats!” Ache as it did to move his head, the big man made himself rise first to a kneeling position and then a full stand. Buchanan was not a delicate type, but he did prefer to be on his feet in the company of rats.

  “Quien es aquí?” asked a quavering, sick-sounding young voice from the utter darkness.

  “Who’s yourself?” growled Buchanan uncompanionably in English. “And keep your bloody distance.” This from previous experience in unlighted jails with many strange derelicts of humanity.

  “I think you are the one who helped me tonight,” Juan del Cuervo said haltingly in Buchanan’s native tongue. Then, reverting emotionally to Spanish. “I am much obliged, friend.”

  “Sure. Are you on a bed, or something?”

  “No. On the ground—on the floor.”

  “You better get up. God
dam rats’ll go for your throat.”

  “I’ll try again,” Juan said, and as he struggled to rise Buchanan began to make out the slim figure on the opposite side of the little cell. He made his way there, reached down and got a hand under the younger man’s armpit.

  “Please, no,” Juan said. “Por favor. I would do this thing myself.”

  “Sure,” Buchanan said, thinking about these Mexicans and their posturing. Even Campos, the night he was gut-shot at Nuri, had snarled when Buchanan tried to help him remount. Proud, ugly bastard had to do it himself. But now, as he listened to this kid’s muffled groans, watched him get to one knee, Buchanan had an embarrassing revelation about himself. Not if he knew it would any man ever have to raise him to his feet. Now what the hell put a crazy thought like that in his head?

  “I made it,” Juan said. “I think.”

  “Good for you,” Buchanan said, made briefly surly by his feeling of guilt. He moved away then toward the third wall, out of memory, and felt for the bunk that should be there. It was.

  “Come on over here,” he said. “At least there’s something to sit on.” He lowered himself gratefully onto the iron cot with its loose straw mattress and made room for Juan.

  “Got any tobacco?”

  “I don’t use it, señor.” There was great sorrow in Juan’s voice and Buchanan shifted uncomfortably.

  “How come you’re in the calaboose?” he asked. “It was you getting the licking.”

  “I killed a man tonight,” Juan said simply. “I am here for that.”

  There it was again, Buchanan thought, with irritation. The dignity.

  “With a knife?” he asked, his voice accusing.

  “With a gun,” Juan said. “Very badly.”

  “What do you mean, badly?”

  “There was an interruption. I did not let Agry draw—”

  “What Agry?”

  “Roy, the son of Señor Simon.”

  “Why, hell, he was drunk.”

  The kid sighed. “I did not know,” he said unhappily. “Even so, it would have made no difference.”

  “You must be a tiger for sure,” Buchanan said. “What’s your handle, anyhow?”

  “Juan. Juan del Cuervo. What is your name?”

  “Buchanan,” Buchanan said negligently. It was not so common a name, Del Cuervo, that you could hear it twice in one day and fail to make the connection. He even remembered this Juan now, the excited one who rode like a young don and took over the arrangements for getting the girl home. He had left the party soon after Juan joined it, taken advantage of a sharp curve in the trail to swing around and get back on the road that led out of Mexico.

  “How’s the little girl?” he asked.

  Juan’s head came up sharply. Now he was remembering. It was all so blurred, so unreal, but after they had finished with Buchanan, after they had kicked and clubbed him beyond humanity, he had thought he recognized that hard and unconquerable face. Then they had turned to him, and the last he remembered was a wheezing voice, a vicious voice that shouted. “Keep him alive. Keep him alive for the rope!”

  “My sister will recover,” Juan said quietly.

  “What made you think it was this Agry did it?”

  “Maria told me,” Juan said and Buchanan knew what the scratches on Roy Agry’s face had reminded him of. It appealed to his ironic sense of humor that he might have killed the buck himself and felt remorse. Seeing the girl again as he had come upon her, abused, naked and near death, he hoped that Agry had been sober enough to know he was paying his bill.

  “You shouldn’t have gunshot him,” Buchanan said.

  “I would do it again,” Juan answered with some heat. “I wouldn’t change anything. Except your trouble.”

  “I mean it was too honest for a bastard like that,” Buchanan said. “It was too easy,” he added thoughtfully.

  “What would you have done, Buchanan?”

  Buchanan—old, thirty-year-old Buchanan—closed his eyes, ran his hands up along the sides of his unshaven face and dreamed he was lying full length in a trough of steaming hot water.

  “What would you have done to Roy Agry?” Juan asked again.

  “Johnny,” Buchanan said, “there are some things that are only for the doing. Not the talking.”

  “Then in your eyes I managed this business badly?”

  “Well, hell! You came all by your lonesome, didn’t you? The least you could of done was to bring somebody with you, boy. Somebody like that Gomez would have filled the bill.”

  “No,” Juan said. “It was against my father’s orders that I rode at all.”

  “How come?”

  “It is a family thing,” Juan said. “My sister is to be married in the spring. Sebastian Diaz is—particular about a great many things. My parents thought it best to postpone justice until after the marriage.”

  “Then kind of ease Mr. Agry out when nobody’s looking?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you lean more to Texas law?”

  “Once I knew it was Roy Agry, a man who had courted Maria within our own house—”

  “You and me both, Johnny,” Buchanan said, slapping the younger man’s knee reassuringly. “Man, I sure wish you’d brought the makings. I could smoke up a storm.” He got up then and began pacing about the little cell restlessly.

  Six

  The new sun had just risen over the hills to the east when a worried and saddle-weary Gomez returned to the hacienda from Agrytown. He knew there could be no delay, and on his instructions Don Pedro was roused.

  “I will speak briefly,” the segundo told the patrón when they were in the study. “A very bad thing has occurred during the night.” Immediately Don Pedro stiffened in his chair and his face became a mask. “The young señor,” Gomez went on, “traveled across the border into Agrytown. There he sought out the son of Señor Simon and killed him with a gun—”

  “Dios mio,” Don Pedro whispered involuntarily.

  “He was captured, señor, beaten and placed in the jail. I have all this of my own knowledge. Also that Juan is to be tried this morning with Señor Simon Agry as the judge and his brother, the sheriff, as the prosecutor.”

  “But why, Gomez? What is the reason behind all this?”

  “That I cannot say for a certainty, Don Pedro. But just before Juan left the hacienda he was in the room with his sister. Tia Rosa tells me that Maria had regained consciousness and was talking.”

  “I see. Then it was the son of Simon Agry.”

  Gomez nodded. “I respectfully suggest,” he said, “that I lead a force to Agrytown immediately—”

  “No. It would fail as it failed in the matter of the stolen horses a year ago.”

  “But, señor! They will hang the boy. It cannot be!”

  Don Pedro’s voice dripped ice. “You are raising your voice, Gomez. It is offensive to me.”

  “A thousand pardons,” Gomez snapped, his first display of anger in Don Pedro’s presence in forty-three years’ association.

  “You will wait outside,” the patrón commanded. “This is a thing that must be solved by deliberation, not emotion.”

  Gomez swung around abruptly and strode on his short, chunky legs to the door.

  “I will summon you,” Don Pedro said.

  “I will be waiting,” Gomez replied.

  The summons came an hour later. During that time Doña Isabel had been awakened by her husband and they had held a private conference. Gomez was sent for.

  “We have decided to purchase our son’s freedom from Señor Simon,” Don Pedro announced.

  “Purchase?”

  “Exactly. At the moment it is most likely that he does not know the circumstances of the case, the mitigating factors. He therefore thinks only of exacting vengeance on Juan and my name.”

  “And that vengeance will be swift,” Gomez warned anxiously.

  “This was an important decision. It could not be hurried. You will now proceed to Agrytown, alone, and arrange payment
of the ransom.”

  “Alone? But suppose Simon Agry refuses?”

  “If my wife and myself have judged the man accurately,” Don Pedro said, “then our offer will be accepted. Señor Simon, we believe, puts material things above all else.”

  “And what is your offer?”

  “Gomez,” he said, “the negotiations are completely in your hands. You, I am sure, know far better what the financial situation is here than we do. Go now, bring back our son.”

  “Si.” Gomez bowed to them both and turned to the door.

  “Old friend,” Don Pedro called in a strangely soft voice. Gomez turned back. “Old friend,” Don Pedro said, “do not haggle over the matter. We have no treasure worth the lives of Juan and Maria.”

  It was, by Agrytown standards, a rather formal trial. The brothers Agry had discussed the procedure at some length during the hours following the shooting, and it was a curious fact that Lew—the uncle rather than the father of the slain man, as well as chief law enforcement agent—was all for hanging both Juan del Cuervo and his accomplice, Buchanan, and then trying them in absentia, as it were.

  But Simon prevailed. Mexican or not, enemy of California or not, Don Pedro del Cuervo still meant something in this whole region. Simon also pointed out that when he was attending to his senatorial duties in far-off Washington he did not want some political rival back here to raise the cry of “lynch law.” Not only did he insist upon a trial but Simon wanted a jury that was fairly chosen and not beholden to the Agrys.

  The sheriff agreed. What else could he do? In the morning the saloon was swept out, the rows of bottles discreetly covered with burlap, a platform was made out of crates to serve as a bench, and the place was made to resemble a courtroom as nearly as possible. The news that there was actually going to be a hanging and a trial caused so much interest that seats inside the place were soon at a premium. Deputy Waldo Peek, acting as bailiff to the court, showed the results of Lew Agry’s training by instituting an admission charge of one dollar, first come, first served. And from among the spectators who were also freeholders a jury was empanelled and sworn in by His Honor, Judge Simon Agry.