“So it’s an insult,” Benedict said softly. “So if you hang around a dump like this long enough, you’d get insulted every morning before breakfast. Besides, he looks like bad news to me.”
“I’ll ...”
Brazos broke off as Cindy, one of the dancers, came undulating out of the crowd to take them by the arm. “Come on, caballeros,” she purred, giving Brazos a little tickle in the ribs, “it is bad manners for the hosts not to drink with the guests, is it not?”
Brazos didn’t know enough about manners to fit in a bug’s ear, but he did know that little Cindy was a country mile better looking than old hatchet-face in the corner. He shot the silent figure one final look over his shoulder, then grinned at the girl and gestured towards the bar.
“Why, lead the way then, little lady, lead the way. I’d rather be a dead coon in a post hole than bad mannered, wouldn’t you, Reb?”
“Oh, any time, any time,” Duke Benedict agreed, and arm in arm they sashayed up to the bar where Big Fats had their drinks already waiting, a whisky for Benedict, beer for Brazos, gin for pretty Cindy.
And nothing for the man in the corner.
Two – Cold Steel
By the time the ten dollars had cut out and everybody was drinking on his own money, it was plain as paint that it was going to be a big night. It wasn’t the sort of thing that could be planned, but once it got under way there was no holding it. In Sabinosa there were nights when you had to laugh, nights when you had to cry. And there were nights too, whether you be impoverished towner, weary vaquero, drifter, bum, whore, dice-player or money-saver, lover, misfit, hero or innocent, you just busted loose.
This was such a night.
Within an hour, the cantina’s big night was picking up real momentum. The room rocked with argument, rough laughter, voices lifted in song, the twang of Spanish guitars, the drum of dancing feet. Duke Benedict, with pockets nicely bulging, got up to perform as stylish a fandango with little Abrana as one could wish to see. Brazos played a sad cowboy song on his harmonica that brought big round tears to sentimental Big Fats’ eyes, while Pas Gregorio, feeling no pain after half a bottle of free tequila, got up on the bar and did an erratic, but courageous jig.
It was only when one of Gregorio’s boots spilled his whisky that Boyd Larsen decided it was time to leave. The man was weary and spent from travel. He had meant to spend the night at Sabinosa before heading on to Summit. But whisky had revived him somewhat, and he was in no mood for hilarity. If he headed out now, he decided, putting on his hat, he could be in Summit by noon.
Somebody jostled the man as he headed for the doors. He looked into the black, hostile eyes of the scar-faced man whom he’d seen come in an hour back.
“Sorry, friend,” he murmured and made to move on.
“Gringo pig!”
Larsen stopped again. He was a tall, raw-boned man of forty with a lean, hard face. His work often took him into danger and he wasn’t a man to back away from trouble.
“I said I was sorry, friend.”
Salazar’s scarred face twisted in a snarl.
“You gringo cochinos may trample us in your towns, but here you should tread more carefully. Here it is not wise to be so careless.”
A silence began to spread out from the two men now, engulfing the sounds of revelry. There had been arguments aplenty in the past boisterous hour, but they had been drunken, light-hearted incidents, all stemming from high spirits. This sounded like something different.
“What’s eatin’ you, Mex?” Larsen growled in the growing quiet. “You lookin’ for trouble?”
The Mexican was hunting trouble, but it was the kind of trouble ridiculously out of proportion to a bump in a crowd.
“I grow weary of being bullied by gringo scum!” Salazar hissed, fingering the butt of the wicked-looking knife in his belt. “Perhaps a man should take a stand somewhere.” He nodded his head as if coming to a decision. “Si, a man should take a stand ... now. Tell me, gringo scum, can you use that gun you carry, or is it just there to make cowards of us who cannot afford such fine weapons?”
By this, there was scarcely a sound to be heard in the whole puzzled saloon, and none was more puzzled than Boyd Larsen himself. For Larsen suddenly realized that this was not just a drunken Mex looking for diversion, but a man out for blood.
But why? The question posed itself in his brain, but before he could air it, the scar-faced Mexican spat full in his face.
Larsen’s fist dropped to his gun butt as he whipped his coat-sleeve across his face. “You filthy greaser,” he snarled. “By God if you were totin’ iron I’d kill you for that!”
Salazar smiled a lethal smile and backed away. Men jumped aside to give him room. Ten feet from Larsen he halted, again fingering the hilt of his dagger.
“A gun is your weapon, gringo, the blade is mine.” His voice was soft but there was an edge to it sharper than any knife. “Let us commence.”
“You’re ... you’re goin’ to fight me with a knife?” Larsen said incredulously. “A knife against a gun?”
“Please,” pleaded Big Fats, a man who had seen Salazar and that blade at work once before. “Please, companeros, let us have no more ...”
“Shut your fat mouth!” Salazar snarled, and now his voice was no longer soft as he spread his feet and touched the handle of the knife as if it were a live thing. “Defend yourself, scum!”
Boyd Larsen’s hand blurred fast. It closed over the walnut butt of his Colt, wrenched it from leather. He swung the gun up, conscious of the Mexican’s whipping right hand, his chilling smile. Something flashed in the yellow light like a darting insect, and a white-hot lance of pain pierced his chest, transfixing him. He was only dimly aware of the thud of his gun hitting the floor, had no way of knowing he was staggering like a drunk with both hands clasped helplessly about the scrolled haft of the dagger embedded to the hilt in his chest. All he was really conscious of, was the grinning scar-face swimming in a haze of fierce yellow light, the incredible pain that filled the world.
Then nothing.
Nobody moved, nobody seemed to breathe as the thud of the falling body faded away. They were all accustomed to violence here, and Duke Benedict and Hank Brazos even more so. But this was something else, and the two manhunters were as stunned as anybody by what had happened.
Until Salazar jingled forward to jerk his knife free and wipe it on the dead man’s jacket.
Only then did Brazos give vent to a dangerous growl, toss his drink aside and start towards Salazar. Benedict, standing some short distance away, read his companion’s expression and leapt forward, snaring him with a restraining hand.
“Back off, Reb,” he rapped. “This is no concern of ours.”
“But dammit, you saw how he killed that man, Yank. With a stinkin’ knife.”
“It was a fair fight.”
Brazos growled again, but held back, knowing Benedict was right. The two men had fought by the rules of a code he himself lived by, and the man with the gun had had his fair chance. But by glory, it left a dirty taste in a man’s mouth to see a fellow-American cut down by a dirty Mex knifer, even if it had been a fair fight.
Salazar’s eyes moved to the tall Americans as he came erect, sheathing the blade. There was mockery and challenge in the sharp smile he flicked at them. Then without a word, he turned and jingled to the doors, shouldered through and was instantly gone, the sound of his spurs swallowed by the howl of the wind.
Everybody stood silent as Benedict and Brazos went to the dead man. He’d been American their faces said; it was better Americans should see to him.
“Is there an undertaker in this town?” Benedict said finally after closing the staring eyes.
There was, they assured him, Manuel Chaves, three doors up the main stem. Benedict nodded to Brazos, they hefted the dead man and carried him out.
They were half-blinded by dust and sand by the time they reached the funeral parlor to find the undertaker absent. They carried the corpse int
o a small, shuttered room and stretched him on a marble-topped bench.
“Shore don’t seem right to see a man done in thataway,” Brazos muttered, folding his arms across his steel-ribbed barrel of a chest and looking down at the dead face. “Wonder who the hell he is?”
Silently, Benedict put his hand in a blood-soaked pocket and extracted a leather wallet. Wiping the wallet dry with a kerchief, he opened it and tugged out a card. It read:
BOYD LARSEN – SOUTHWEST INSURANCE – SUMMIT
Benedict grunted and leafed through a small diary. “Seems as if he was investigating a claim on rustled stock on ...” He paused to decipher bad handwriting. “On Rancho Antigua it looks like.”
“Yeah, that’s one helluva big place down south of here nigh the border. Anythin’ else?”
Benedict scanned several more pages crammed with notes and dates. It wasn’t until he came to the very last page that he stiffened.
“What is it, Yank?” demanded Brazos. He peered intently over his shoulder at the notebook, despite the fact that he could neither read nor write. “What’s it say?”
Benedict shook his head wonderingly as he read: “May 23rd. Interviewed Keechez at Candelaria. Fifty pesos for information. Named Rangle. Difficult to believe, but man seems genuine. Warrants personal visit back to Summit.”
“Rangle!” Hank Brazos breathed. “You sure that’s what it says, Yank?”
Benedict took another look. “Dead sure.”
“Well, I’ll be a dirty name.”
“Why, so will I, Reb, so will I.”
It was an hour later when Benedict and Brazos came out of Arriba’s again and beat their way across the street through choking clouds of wind-tossed sand to the creaky timber edifice that only in Sabinosa could have been called a hotel. They went directly to Benedict’s room, turned up the grease lamp and lit up.
“Well?” grunted Brazos. “What’d you come up with?”
“Not a great deal. Big Fats says that this Salazar is a notorious thief and killer from the south. He has only seen him once or twice before.”
“He know where he hails from?”
“Just Spanish Valley he said.”
“That’s a big place. Arriba have any idea why he killed Larsen?”
“No. But he did say Salazar doesn’t particularly need a reason. Our worthy saloonkeeper enlightened me with the rather memorable information, that Salazar once cut a man’s throat for breaking wind.”
“Nice feller.”
“A prince. How did you get on at the livery?”
Brazos leaned back in his rickety chair.
“Miguelito the liveryman said Larsen hit town about half an hour after us. Larsen’s hoss was played out and he told Miguelito he aimed to stay in town the night to spell his cayuse. The Mex said Larsen looked like he needed a good spell himself.”
Benedict drew thoughtfully on his fine Havana. “I believe Salazar came here specifically to kill Larsen,” he said at length. “He most likely trailed him up from the south.”
“Does it matter a damn one way or the other?” Brazos challenged, pacing slowly up and down with the table lamps flinging his shadow huge on walls and ceiling. “It’s Bo Rangle we’re interested in, not any greaser knifer.”
Indeed it was, Duke Benedict acknowledged with a nod of his dark head. It was a long and dangerous trail that had brought them to Sabinosa on the faint scent of former guerilla leader Bo Rangle. Six months back at a bloody place called Pea Ridge, Georgia, in the dying days of the War of the States, Federal Captain Duke Benedict’s unit had attacked Confederate Sergeant Hank Brazos’ platoon attempting to get clear of the battle zone with two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of Confederate gold to Mexico. Both squads were all but decimated, when Rangle’s Raiders struck and bore the fortune away. By chance, in the days of turmoil following Appomattox, the two men who’d fought so savagely against each other, then even more fiercely together against Bo Rangle, had met and joined forces to search for the gold, which was believed to be still intact in some secret cache, where Rangle had as yet been unable to return.
The trail had proven long and hard, for Bo Rangle, killer, traitor and thief, was a man of infinite guile and cunning, and this was their first whiff of a decent lead on their quarry in too many searching weeks.
As such, they meant to make the most of it, though until Duke Benedict laid out the plan of action, Brazos didn’t know exactly how. The one thing the big man was ready to concede about the “Yank,” apart from his unquestioned reserve of guts, was that he had a tolerably good head on his shoulders—for a tinhorn gambling man with a foreign accent, that was.
“We’ll ride up to Summit tomorrow and see Larsen’s superior at Southwest Insurance,” Benedict decided after a thoughtful half-cigar of silence. “He should be able to fill in the gaps of what we don’t know.”
Brazos shrugged. That was okay by him. He was happy enough just so long as things were moving. It was sitting about that got him in a twist.
“After we’ve seen the insurance company,” Benedict went on, stubbing out his stogie, “why, I do believe we shall find ourselves heading south to take a first-hand look at Rancho Antigua? That sound all right to you, Reb?”
It did, and later when he’d returned to his own room, fed Bullpup, his dog, and shucked off boots and gunbelt and stood by his closed window looking out at the blowing night, Hank Brazos was aware of an old familiar tingling in his blood. The last time he’d felt that sensation had been in a little Colorado cowtown named Daybreak, just before they’d flushed Bo Rangle from hiding and buried half the town when he finally got away again.
Brazos drew deeply on his weed and his thoughts drifted back to that crimson day of battle when so many sons of the brave South had died because of Bo Rangle—and of all those who’d died since—as Boyd Larsen most likely had.
He hoped that tingle in his bones wasn’t fooling. If it wasn’t, then maybe this would be the trail that would finally lead them, not only to the Confederate gold, but to vengeance.
Henry Gordon had a nice little wife who mothered him, a sensitive stomach, a great deal of money and an insurance company. He also had a surprise awaiting him when he reached his office in Summit that morning after wiring funds to Sabinosa to cover the burial of his murdered agent, Boyd Larsen.
Gordon’s manner was heavy and preoccupied as he pushed through the frosted glass doors of his office and made his way down the aisle between the rows of desks where his female clerks were already at work. Had he been less preoccupied, Gordon would have noticed that there was more than a suggestion of distraction amongst his staff. As it was, he didn’t become aware of anything untoward until he was opening the little gate that led into the railed-off area occupied by his two private secretaries and almost tripped over a monster sprawled out leisurely on the rug.
Henry Gordon’s uncertain stomach flipped and he’d gone a good three feet backwards in one startled jump before he realized that it was only a dog.
Or at least it looked like a dog, though unlike any dog he’d ever seen in his life. It was a massive-shouldered creature of a dirty white color, marked by big brown splotches. Its great head was a combination of bulldog and mastiff, its mouth looked about a foot across and two yellow eyes set towards the top of its head stared up at the trembling Gordon with a bleak and challenging hostility.
Somehow the managing director of Southwest Insurance managed to drag his eyes away from the incredible beast as his two private secretaries, plump and pretty Miss Hunter, and skinny and spinsterish Miss Mathews came hurrying forward.
“Oh, Mr. Gordon,” the elderly Miss Mathews greeted him, plainly distressed. “Thank heavens you’ve arrived. We’ve been having an absolutely terrible morning!”
“Oh, it hasn’t really been that bad,” Miss Hunter disagreed. She stepped around the dog and opened the gate for him. “Come on in, Mr. Gordon, he won’t hurt you.”
The girl reached for his arm to guide him around the dog, but he pulled
away and made his way gingerly around the beast unaided. Only now, as he recovered from the shock of finding a man-eater sprawled across his secretaries’ floor at nine-fifteen on a Monday morning, was Henry Gordon growing aware of the fact that everybody seemed to be staring at him expectantly instead of getting on with their work.
Adjusting his spectacles and putting a calming hand on his alarmed stomach, he fixed his secretaries with a severe stare.
“Miss Mathews, Miss Hunter— just what is going on here?”
Before either woman could reply, Gordon received his second rude shock in as many minutes when the door of his private office swung open and two total strangers stepped out.
Gordon bristled. This was too much!
“Miss Mathews,” he snapped angrily. “Who are these persons?”
“Benedict is the name,” said the tall, black-haired man in the suit, stepping forward. “Mr. Gordon?”
“Yes, this is Mr. Gordon, Mr. Benedict,” young Miss Hunter supplied, and Gordon couldn’t help but notice how she dimpled at the man. “Mr. Gordon, Mr. Benedict and his friend have been waiting to see you since 8.15. We, well I really mean Miss Mathews, decided to have them wait in your office as they seemed to be distracting the staff.”
Gordon could believe that. The man named Benedict was handsome enough to distract a convent full of holy nuns, while his towering, ox-shouldered companion in the purple shirt was eye-catching to say the least.
“A great pleasure, Mr. Gordon,” Benedict said with a flashing smile and gave a little bow. He gestured negligently. “My ... er, associate, Mr. Hank Brazos.”
“Howdy,” drawled the giant.
Henry Gordon took a neatly folded silk kerchief from his breast pocket and gently patted his forehead— then jumped a foot as the dog which he’d just about forgotten barked at nothing in particular and shook the room.
“Shut up, ugly,” Brazos said. Then with a grin to Gordon. “He don’t like bein’ indoors. Makes him ornery.”
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