by Jonas Ward
Emerson grinned at Pecos and Buchanan, toothlessly and maliciously. “Well, now,” he said. “Who’s the law, and who ain’t?”
“Invite ’em in,” Pecos said. “But I’d be strictly neutral, old man. Remember, you ain’t been paid yet.”
“We’re comin’ in, Emerson!” shouted the voice outside.
“Suit yourself, Deputy.” Emerson left the door ajar and removed himself to the corner of the room protected by the chimney. Buchanan placed his back against the wall beside the open door.
“I place the voice as Hamp Home,” Pecos said in a quiet undertone. “Should I parley with him outside?”
Buchanan nodded. “I’ll cover you through the door.”
Pecos went on out into the night. Immediately there was surprised recognition.
“Pecos! Now what the hell you doin’ here?”
“Eatin’. Who you got there, Hamp?”
“Me and Waldo and Ivy brung the Mex kid out to light a spell.”
“I figured he’d be hung and buried by now.”
“Complications. Seems the kid’s old man ransomed him off of Simon. But that left Lew out and now he’s in the ransom business his own self.”
“Buckin’ the big man, is he?”
“Had to come one fine day.”
“You say Waldo’s along?”
“Yeah. He’s on the trail waitin’ to meet up with you. Waldo wants to get back to town real bad. He fixed it with Lew that you was to take his place watchin’ the kid.” Hamp, a lean, nondescript type, dismounted. “Lafe,” he said, “can find Waldo and explain that you’re already here …” His voice trailed off foolishly as he looked beyond Pecos’s shoulder to the form of Buchanan filling the doorway.
“Lafe is dead,” Pecos said. “That hombre with the gun in his big fist is my new partner.”
“What’s that supposed to mean to me?” Hamp asked.
“It shouldn’t mean nothin’, Hamp. Not unless you want it to.”
Buchanan could not be sure whether he saw the other deputy make a hostile move, or whether he sensed it. But the Colt jumped twice in his hand and Ivy Storrs twisted in the saddle and plunged headlong to the ground.
“That’s enough,” Hamp Horne said when the same gun swung his way.
“Drop your belt, then, and march inside.”
Horne quickly obeyed.
“What about the kid?” Pecos asked.
Buchanan was already walking to where the wrist-bound Juan sat his horse. From Buchanan’s first unbelievable appearance in that doorway to his presence now had consumed too little time for the whole startling sequence to fully register.
“Didn’t expect to see you again, Johnny,” Buchanan said, unknotting the rope.
“Are we both dead, amigo? Or what?”
“You’re both gonna be,” Pecos said, “unless we make some plans about Mr. Waldo Peek out there. I’ve tracked with that one and he ain’t human.”
Buchanan handed Hamp’s discarded gunbelt to Juan. “Might as well borrow the horse, too,” he suggested. “That Agry sure don’t provide decent transportation for his guests.”
A laugh burst joyously from Juan’s throat, bubbling up out of him contagiously. Even Pecos grinned at the sound, and realized how long it had been, and how much had intervened, since he himself had felt as unconstrained as that. He was just as quickly sobered by the thought of Peek, alerted by the gunshots and waiting for them in the darkness.
But Waldo wasn’t waiting. Hearing the firing from the main trail, he had put it down to a surly greeting from old man Emerson. Then, to head off an unnecessary ruckus, he had located the wagon path and made his way toward the house at full gallop.
He and Buchanan met head-on as he rode into the midst of the group in front of the shack with the impetus of Peek’s bigger horse and greater speed driving Buchanan sideways into Pecos and knocking the drawn Colt from Buchanan’s hand.
“Hamp, god damn it!” Peek bellowed, and in the same instant recognized Buchanan in the darkness. He fired from a rearing horse, missed, and fired again.
“I’m hit,” Pecos groaned at Buchanan’s back. Buchanan, weaponless, closed with Peek recklessly. He got his hands on the man’s powerful shoulders and launched himself from the stirrups.
“Peek,” Buchanan said, low as a whisper, “I’m not going to kill you but when I’m through you’ll wish I had.”
Peek resisted the first charge, but the momentum of Buchanan’s body bore him backward and down. Nearly five hundred pounds of fighting men made the earth around them jar as they hit and rolled over and over, Peek working his knee like a piston. Buchanan immobilizing the wrist that held the gun while his thumb sought Peek’s windpipe.
Peek brought his head up in a sudden butt that Buchanan felt to the soles of his feet. Peek sensed his advantage and butted again. But instead of Buchanan’s bleeding nose, the target was Buchanan’s indestructible forehead, and the advantage was quickly reversed.
Buchanan tossed a leg over Peek, came to his knees in a mounted position. His fists beat down remorselessly on that face below him, watched it change shape, felt the bones snap, stopped hitting only when he was too arm-weary and knuckle-sore to continue. He rolled off Peek’s body and lay full length on his back, sucking in great gasps of air.
“Buchanan, can you hear me?”
“Sure, Johnny.”
“Your friend has a wound in the stomach. I cannot stop the bleeding.”
Buchanan made his way to Pecos’s side. Not only was the wound pouring blood, but the Texan was hemorrhaging from his mouth and nostrils.
“He has only minutes to live,” Juan said quietly.
“I know. God damn it, kid, I know.”
Eleven
The sound of the horses pounding in the street outside brought Lew Agry hurrying to his office window. But the tongue-lashing he planned for Pecos and Lafe died aborning. It was not his deputies hurrying past but Gomez and three Del Cuervo vaqueros.
Now what? the sheriff thought irritably. According to Simon it was going to take Gomez forty-eight hours. What was he doing here tonight? Had Don Pedro reneged? Was there a counter offer? He swung back to the desk and poured liquor into his glass. Whatever it was, they’d have to come to Lew Agry. Lew held the trumps this time around.
That thought flowed effortlessly into another, one not so satisfying, and for the tenth time within the last hour he glanced at the wall clock and wondered where his missing men were. And that brought his mind full circle to the big worry: Abe Carbo.
Lew knew he could handle the gunman. If it came to that, he’d take him. He slammed the glass down. But why should it ever have to come to that? What the hell did he have all those deputies for, anyhow? By hell, they’d feel his spurs when they showed up.
Abe Carbo heard the same horsemen five minutes later, heard them turn into the entrance to Simon’s house. He was out on the protected veranda in an instant, to see what was going on and to see what Simon called the Home Guard. Not bad, he thought, seeing the dozen guns that both confronted the riders and covered them from the low roofs of the adjacent buildings. Not good, either. These were third-rate fighters at best, a motley collection of drifters and dodgers that he’d had to prime with raw whisky to drive off the Del Cuervo outfit last year.
But they were all that Simon Agry would let him buy. He said he couldn’t afford to pay gun wages to a first-class crew. He said he wasn’t the governor of California, he was only a private citizen. He said.
The fat man was afraid. Afraid of the past, afraid of the future. Afraid of his brother, of his kid, of Carbo—especially of Abe Carbo, who guarded his life for him….
“Carbo! What’s going on out there?” Simon demanded.
“The ambassador from Mexico is calling,” Carbo answered with his insolent drawl. “You want to see him?”
Simon stepped heavily onto the veranda.
“What’s he doing back here tonight? Who’s that with him?”
“I don’t know. But
the vaqueros are his safe-conduct pass when you turn over the kid.” Carbo suddenly laughed. “Look at them.”
Gomez and his men pretended to have trouble halting their snorting, high-spirited mounts before the semi-circle of armed men. Almost as one, the four horses reared back on hind legs, scattering the line, then wheeled and came back on all fours with their rumps presented contemptuously to Simon Agry’s Home Guard. Gomez alone dismounted, glanced at the riflemen on the roofs, spit at the ground and bore down on the pair waiting on the veranda. The segundo was reliving Agry’s horse raid, the galling rout at the border when Don Pedro had not let his vaqueros regroup and redeem themselves. Gomez was mad as a hornet.
“Step back inside, Si,” Abe Carbo said, without taking his eyes from the approaching Gomez. “Hold it right there, Mex!” he called out, his voice a crackling warning, the drawl gone.
Gomez halted, feet planted wide apart, challenge in every muscle of his solid little body.
“You come to dicker or fight, hombre?” Carbo asked coldly, but less belligerently. He would accommodate Del Cuervo’s envoy with anything he wanted, but he knew that neither he nor Gomez would profit by a meaningless shoot-out. And he seemed to have reached the other man’s basic good sense.
“I have come with the ransom for Juan del Cuervo,” Gomez said stiffly.
“Come on in then, amigo.”
“Is the boy in there?”
“No. He’s in the jail.”
“Then I will deliver the ransom at the jail. Amigo.” Gomez turned his back on Carbo and the big house, returned to his horse, remounted, and with a sharp order led his men out of the courtyard.
“What was that all about?” Simon Agry said peevishly, his manner once more important.
“He’s just feeling the strain,” Carbo said.
“He is, is he?”
“I wouldn’t ride him, Si,” the gunfighter advised. “And I wouldn’t keep him waiting at that jail.”
Simon snorted his impatience. “Bring the carriage around,” he ordered. Carbo relayed the order, then went among the crew and gave specific riding instructions. Four men immediately mounted and rode out ahead. Four more went singly to take up strategic positions near the sheriff’s office, the livery and the hotel. The remainder awaited the surrey and trailed it and Abe Carbo to the jail.
A gaudy show of force, Carbo reflected as they moved along. But if he didn’t have quality troops, then he had to make do with quantity and bluff. Give him that pair Lew had, that Pecos and Lafe. Those two and the bull, Waldo. Hell—let him work with that big boy on trial this morning, the one with the quick-looking hands. A rare smile touched Carbo’s eyes as he thought of Buchanan and how the two of them could take over this Agry County setup between breakfast and dinner. West Texas, he had said. Well, that was where they grew them.
Carbo knew about all there was to know about that breed. All about Texas, West and East, also New Orleans, Memphis, Pensacola (where he’d been born), Chicago, New York City, and wherever else gambling and gunplay lured a restless man in a restless country.
Carbo was a native son, but his roots and his motivation were European. His father was Gino Carbo, a Sicilian, member of an ancient and legendary family whose only professions had been banditry, kidnapping and hired assassination. Gino Carbo, at seventeen, had come to America for the sole purpose of raising a war chest for his beleaguered kin, then engaged in a disastrous vendetta.
After three years he had none of the needed gold, but enough of the language to court and win a Georgia belle. Their son was named for Gino’s father-in-law, Abraham Cooper, and when the boy was six his father was killed in a gunfight. Lily Carbo had no understanding of her fierce-eyed, terrible-tempered son, no hold over him. When he was twelve Abe Carbo had made his way to New Orleans, shipped aboard a river boat, and during the next eight years learned all there was to know about cards and dice, all there was to know about guns and fighting, and how to make that temper work for him and not against him.
By the time he was twenty Abe Carbo already had the reputation of a scrupulously honest gambler, but a killer who looked for and took every advantage. It was a reputation that made others uncomfortable in his presence, that kept Carbo constantly on the move in search of new places, new faces. In the vast land called Texas, this reputation made his gun craft much in demand. He had sold his skill and his nerve in the Territory for a decade. Now, in his fortieth year, he was in California.
And this was where he was going to stay. The boom in the north held no interest at all. He felt uncomfortable now in crowded, bustling gold towns. He had met too many faces to remember them all, had made too many enemies to defend himself against the ambushes and back-shooters. This country, this Agry County, had space and distance. Abe Carbo worked for a fraction of his regular wages because he saw how easily the Agry brothers could be toppled.
Give him Buchanan, and the land would be theirs between breakfast and dinner.
They were passing the sheriff’s office, and for a fleeting moment he had glimpsed Lew Agry’s face at the window. A strange place for Lew to be when he should be at the jail to make delivery of the prisoner, he thought. Now they wheeled toward the jail building, and Carbo touched spurs to his horse to ride ahead and get the picture. Gomez waited there, impatience in the set of his shoulders, a smoldering look on his face. And a crowd had gathered, a wary Agrytown crowd that wisely stood out of the line of possible fire.
The surrey drew up within ten yards of the waiting Mexicans, and Carbo pulled his horse up close beside it.
“Do your talking from here,” Carbo said to Simon, and the man in the carriage looked at him nervously.
“They wouldn’t dare try a play here,” he said. “Not just the four of them.”
“We see four,” Carbo said. “But get down if you want to. Gomez won’t.”
That made it all right. Simon could see the propriety in not having to look up to a man on horseback.
“Let’s have the papers, Gomez,” he commanded for all to hear.
“Let us first see the boy,” Gomez answered.
Simon waved his arm. “Bring the Mex kid out here,” he said, and when no one jumped to carry out the command he looked around for particular faces. “Where’s the sheriff?” he demanded. “Where’s the jailer?” Still no movement, no answer. Abe Carbo raised his hand and the four he had dispatched to the jail emerged from among the onlookers.
“Get Del Cuervo out here,” Carbo said. The men went inside the building, stayed there for tantalizing minutes and came back outside. A murmur swept the crowd when there was no Juan del Cuervo with them.
“Gomez?” Carbo called out quickly.
“I hear you.”
“Keep your head. We know nothing of this.”
“I warned Señor Simon,” Gomez said heavily. “He assured me that he could control the sheriff.”
“By hell, if Lew is tampering with my plans—”
Carbo shut him off. “We will go together to the sheriff’s office,” he said to Gomez. The surrey and its guard swung around and proceeded toward Lew Agry’s headquarters with the suspicious Del Cuervo contingent following.
Lew Agry watched the ominous cavalcade approach, all alone. Gone from his mind were those hard, clever answers he was going to give his brother. Gone was that sure, firm touch with which he was going to control the situation. Quickly he loosened his gunbelt, put the weapon conspicuously on a wall hook. He put the bottle out of sight, lit a cigar with a hand that trembled expectantly, and planted himself firmly in the chair behind the desk. Wild horses wouldn’t drag him out of this office.
The door burst open and Abe Carbo stood there, a mocking smile on his thin lips. Carbo’s eyes roamed from Agry’s sullen face to the gun on the wall. Then he stepped forward, a signal to Simon, who entered stormily.
“Where is he, Lew?” he roared. “Where’s the kid?”
“No need to take the roof off, Si. The kid is safe and sound …”
“Where?”
“I was worried about some hotheads, some friends of Roy’s busting in for a lynch party—”
“You liar!”
The sheriff looked hurt. “I don’t figure you, Si,” he said. “You own a very important piece of property in that kid, but you’re content to leave him unprotected.”
“Thanks, Lew, from the bottom of my heart. Now, damn it, where is he?”
“Out at Emerson’s,” the sheriff said.
A dry laugh sounded from Abe Carbo’s throat. “Now there’s a safe spot,” Carbo said.
“What’s this got to do with you?”
“Hook that belt back on, Lew, and I’ll debate it.”
“There’ll be time for that, Abe,” Simon Agry said. “Let’s get to Emerson’s pronto!”
Carbo followed the fat man to the door, glanced back once at Lew Agry and was gone. A moment later both parties of horsemen were off for Emerson’s place on the river road.
Twelve
“Hold up, Johnny-boy,” Buchanan said. “Company com-in’.” The oncoming sound had reached his ears over the pounding of their own horses’ hoofs, telling Buchanan something of their number and making him cautious. By this time, anything bound out of Agrytown made them jumpy.
“We can leave the trail here,” Juan said, spying a bypath. They ducked out of sight and waited, handguns out and ready.
A minute later they made out the solidly packed outline of a dozen horsemen and the silhouette of a surrey. Faces were unrecognizable in that blackness, but the passenger in the carriage could be no one else but Simon Agry. Then Juan cried out.
“What’s the matter?”
“It was Gomez, and some others of our riders!”
“You sure?”
“Amigo, my first memory is that of Tio Café in the saddle. It is as if he is part of the horse.”
“Then they’re off to find you and pay over the ransom. Which makes it twice as important that you ride on straight to your ranch.”
“No, Buchanan. It is as I said back there when we covered the face of your friend. My father must see you and hold your hand. It is a thing of great importance.”
