by Jonas Ward
A cowboy at the back of the crowd called out, “Dust cloud down there. Thirty or forty horses, maybe.”
Reo said to Buchanan, “You see? Ain’t no time to make a run for it anyway, you big stupid bastard.” He grinned and strode into the house.
It broke the others loose; suddenly there was a fast shifting and milling of men rushing off to gather supplies. They poured into the ranch house and moved swiftly from room to room, battening the heavy siege shutters, laying out rifles by the decade-old gun ports. Race Koenig stood by the front door until the last man was inside; he slammed the heavy door and bolted it. “We’ve held off bigger gangs than this one,” he said, and gave Marinda a false grin and a squeeze of the hand.
They could hear the faint roar of Indian voices, rising to high-pitched war whoops. Buchanan moved to a window and peered out through the small rifle port. He’d had enough Indian fighting to last him the rest of his life, he figured, but there wasn’t anything for it but to fight this through to the finish. He had no hatred for those Apaches out there; he wished they would turn around and go in peace.
He saw them, some distance away, leaving their horses and flitting forward on foot. These were Apaches, not Plains Indians, and there was no riding around in circles or breast-beating. Apaches were clever fighters and had a healthy respect for the value of their own skins. They would belly forward to the outbuildings of the ranch and filter from cover to cover. There wouldn’t be any easy targets. It promised to be a long siege.
Koenig came by Buchanan’s post and said, “We’ve got plenty of food, and the well’s in the center patio where we can get to it. We can outlast them—all summer if we have to. And if I know them, they’ll quit after a while.”
“And take every head of stock you own with them,” Buchanan said.
“Can’t be helped.”
“It can if we take the fight to them.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll have to work it out,” Buchanan said, and squinted upward through the gun port. “Maybe three hours left to sundown. We can’t make any moves until after dark.” He poked his rifle though the port and fired at the distant shape of a dodging Indian. It was the first shot of the battle. The Indian ducked for cover; and guns began booming all around the fortified adobe house.
It wasn’t long before the house stank with the acrid fumes of powder smoke.
Steve Quick sat in a corner of an empty bedroom, hands tied and feet tied. He was brooding over his misfortunes when Johnny Reo turned into the room, gave him a single, desultory glance, and went to the window. Reo stood there awhile, then lifted his rifle and fired through the slot.
“Missed the bastard,” Reo said without heat. He glanced at Quick.
Quick said petulantly, “Quit looking at me like I’m some special kind of bug.”
“You’ve got a lively imagination,” Reo said. “I was only thinking you must’ve been pretty stupid to blame that killing on Buchanan.”
“How was I to know you’d get back alive?”
“I reckon you don’t know me and Buchanan very well.”
“Maybe not,” Quick conceded. “How good a gun is Buchanan, anyway?”
“Good enough, I reckon. You can’t get deader than dead.”
“What about you? That’s a fancy gun you’re scratching those matches on.”
Reo held the flame to his cigarette and shook out the match. His smile was a steel bar. “I got a way with a gun,” he admitted.
A light of calculation burned in Steve Quick’s eyes. He said slowly, “I hope you don’t believe everything Race Koenig tells you about me.”
“Amigo,” said Reo, “I got a habit. I don’t believe everything anybody tells me.”
Something was running through Steve Quick’s mind—something Trask had said to him a few days ago. Reo? He’d set fire to his own mother if he could get a good price for the ashes.
Reo’s rifle snaked up to the window; he squinted and squeezed. The rifle boomed and recoiled. Reo hauled it down with a grunt of satisfaction and shook his head. “What mortals these fools be,” he muttered, and chuckled.
“You hit one of them?”
“Uh-huh.”
Quick studied him over a stretching period. Finally he said tentatively, “Maybe you and me could strike up a bargain, Reo.”
It made Reo look at him. “Why should I bargain with you when I got a corner on the market? You ain’t in no position to make deals. You got nothing left to bargain with.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Quick said. “Mosey on over here where I don’t have to shout.”
Reo glanced out through the gun port, fired once, and looked back at Quick. With a shrug and a loose grin, he came over and hunkered down by Quick. “I’m listenin’. Better say it right the first time, though, because you may never get another.”
Antonia moved through the sulphur-smoky parlor handing out fresh ammunition. Men were coughing in the blue haze. Concussion from all the gunfire had blown out all the lamps, and the room was in half darkness, with all its shutters closed and the only light filtering in through the slitted rifle ports. Rays of light sliced through the smoke.
She gave Buchanan a handful of cartridges. “Kill some for me,” she told him.
His red-shot eyes shifted toward her briefly. She admired the jut of his big jaw, the man-sized heft of him, the go-to-hell smile that never seemed very far from the surface.
But all he said to her was, “If you can find Koenig in this steam bath, ask him to drift over here when he gets a minute.”
She moistened her lips and smiled, but it was wasted; he was aiming down his sights through the port again. She pouted and moved on.
She found Marinda stripping away a cowboy’s sleeve to wash and bandage a bullet wound. Marinda looked up, without particular expression, and pushed hair out of her eyes. Antonia’s eyes flashed. She jerked her head in a gesture and waited for Marinda to come over to her.
Marinda stood up. “What is it?”
“I just want you to think about this,” Antonia hissed. “If you think you’ve got everything you wanted, you’re wrong.”
“Why, what do you mean?”
“You’ll see,” Antonia said angrily, and wheeled away into the smoke.
She stopped by Race Koenig and said, “Buchanan wants to talk to you,” and went on, distributing the last of the cartridges. That brought her near the hall door. She glanced around to see if anyone was watching; she hiked up her skirts and ran quickly down the hall.
When she pushed the door open, she found Johnny Reo sitting on the floor near her husband.
Quick looked up and grinned. “Hi, honey. Looks like we got some help.”
“I was coming to cut you loose,” she said.
“Shut the door, then.”
Reo uncoiled his lanky frame and went over to the window. He peered through the slot for a bit, didn’t seem to see anything to shoot at, and turned back.
Quick said, “A quarter-interest, Reo. One-fourth of the whole shebang. All it takes is three bullets. Koenig, Marinda, and Buchanan if he gets in the way.”
Reo said, “Buchanan’s sort of a friend of mine.”
“Scared of him?” Quick sneered.
“No, I ain’t scared of him,” Reo said.
“Funny. I had you sized up as a man who measured his loyalties in dollars and cents. A sensible man. One-fourth of the Pitchfork, Reo. Think about it.”
“I’m also thinkin’ about how far I can trust you to pay off on your promise,” Reo said. “And so I’ll say this. I’ll be sticking to you like a burr until I get paid off in cash, and it won’t bother me much to shoot you to pieces if you don’t come across.”
“Then you’ll do it?” Quick demanded.
Reo shrugged. His eyes had gone bleak. “You only get one shot at life. Ain’t no point in doing it stony broke.”
“That’s what I always say,” Quick agreed.
Antonia’s eyes shone. She hip-swayed across the r
oom and pressed herself against Reo. She kissed his mouth, grinned, and went back to Quick. Her knife flashed; she began to saw at the ropes that bound his hands.
“Hurry up,” Quick complained.
Reo said, “I don’t mind throwing down on Koenig. Don’t like him much anyhow. But I don’t ordinarily make war on women.”
“You backing out?”
“I’m going to have to think on it,” Reo said. He turned to the window and took aim—and at that precise moment all three of them were shaken by an ear-splitting explosion that rocked the walls of the house.
Sixteen
The blast knocked Buchanan flat against the wall. He virtually had to peel himself off. He blinked and got his balance, then hacked his way through the billowing smoke. The groans and cries of men filled the confinement of the room. The stink was suffocating. Buchanan bowled into someone in the swirling fog—Race Koenig.
“What the hell?” Buchanan said.
Koenig coughed. “They must’ve got their hands on that keg of blasting powder in the tack shed.”
A six-foot halo of light streamed where the bolted front door had been. Buchanan saw shapes weave into sight—unmistakable by their shoulder-length hair, the flopped-over tops of their knee-length moccasins, the squat, broad shapes of their bodies.
The Apaches had blown down the front door. They were coming in.
Buchanan had lost his rifle somehow in the explosion. His hand whipped down, brought up the six-gun, and balanced it on the flat, wide shape of an Indian in the swirling light. He fired and saw the man go down.
Another silhouette took the place of the first. Koenig fired twice, and the silhouette staggered back. Shoulder to shoulder, Buchanan and Koenig stood in the center of the room and braced their withering fire against the weaving Indians who appeared, half vague, in the light.
Within seconds other cowhands joined in. A vicious volleying blasted through every square inch of the opening.
It drove the Apaches back, stumbling over the corpses of their comrades. Some stooped to drag fallen friends away with them. Buchanan reloaded feverishly and stalked toward the doorway. Beside him, Race Koenig was cursing in awe. “Jesus. Looks like the set of the last act of Hamlet out there.”
Somebody said half hysterically, “It’s all that readin’ that done made Race nearsighted. I allus knowed that.” A cackle of laughter drifted eerily through the smoke.
Buchanan flattened himself just inside the jagged edge of the blown-out door. He peered around cautiously.
What he saw stiffened all his joints.
Rumbling toward the doorway like a ghost wagon was a coach full of flames.
The Apaches were pushing the Pitchfork buckboard straight toward the open doorway. Piled high with hay and set afire, the buckboard was a wheeled dreadnaught, spouting flames twenty feet into the sky.
Buchanan wheeled into the doorway and began to fire with grim, deadly fury. His bullets whizzed under and past the buckboard, chopping down legs, pinking arms, drilling through any half inch of flesh visible. Koenig rushed out and added the roar of his gun to the loud confusion. The searing heat of the flames burned hot against Buchanan’s smoke-blackened face. Above the charred cheekbones, his hard eyes burned like jewels. His gun blasted with deliberate, unhurried anger; and before the hail of bullets from Buchanan’s and the others’ guns, the Apaches who’d been pushing the wagon broke and ducked away to find the nearest cover.
Buchanan’s slug found one of them, pitched him rolling to the ground. Then his gun was empty.
Johnny Reo shifted into the doorway beside him, beside Koenig. Reo slip-hammered his six-gun, carving a wicked hole in the ranks of the running Apaches, Buchanan distinctly heard Reo’s grim, low-pitched laughter.
The wagon, its momentum built up, kept coming. It rolled ponderously forward, straight for the doorway; above the rumble of its wheels crackled the roar of the fire, blue-hot and raging, whipped up by the wind.
“Come on!” Buchanan roared hoarsely. Ramming his gun into holster, he sprinted for the wagon and butted his shoulder against it, digging in his boots. The wagon almost capsized him; but then Koenig and Reo were with him, bending their weight against the buckboard. Flames licked around them. Somewhere Reo had lost his hat; his hair was indistinguishable in color from the flames. Buchanan felt his eyebrows singing. From the doorway half a dozen guns of the Pitchfork crew provided a heavy covering fire.
The wagon squeaked to a stop. Buchanan yanked the sleeves of his companions and made it back to the house on the run. A bullet scored the edge of his boot; an arrow thwacked into the adobe not six inches from his shoulder; and then, propelling Reo and Koenig ahead of him, he was pitching inside the smoky house. He fell over a crouching cowboy and slammed onto the floor.
Someone picked him up—Reo. Reo’s grin was broad and white against his burned flesh.
“Jesus,” someone said.
Buchanan wheeled. He saw the cowboy named Boat, laid out unnaturally on the floor just in the center of the doorway. An arrow had hit him in the face. Boat’s right eyeball was hanging out on his cheek by a string of tissue.
Johnny Reo swallowed. “Christ, what an ugly way to die.”
“Johnny, there are no pretty ways,” said Buchanan. His eyes searched the stinging billows of smoke. He saw Marinda’s blonde hair; she was unhurt. Koenig was with her. Cowhands stood just beside the jambs of the jagged doorway, keeping watch. There was a stretch of silence, uncanny and strange after the holocaust. Now and then a single shot boomed.
Buchanan loaded his gun and stepped to the door. He had a look outside. Down past the barn the Apaches were regrouping. He saw a sawed-off figure in a tall stovepipe hat, arms waving, voice lifting in husky rage, injecting bitter wrath into his speech with wild thrusts of his arms.
“We’ve got to stop this,” Buchanan said. He took a rifle from a man beside him. “I’m sorry, old man,” he muttered. He braced the rifle against the door jamb, calculated the elevation for extreme range, and killed Sentos with one clean-placed shot.
Buchanan’s eyes were bleak and hollow. Haggard and morose, he stood in the dusty yard with the rifle dangling at arm’s length. He was watching the disgusted remnants of the Apache war party scatter across the desert.
Race Koenig said, “It’ll take them a while to pick themselves a new chief. And by that time they’ll be cooled off enough not to come back.”
Buchanan was glad the Apaches had taken Sentos’ body with them. He wouldn’t have wanted to have to bury the old warrior.
Cowhands limped across the yard, carrying their wounded. Three or four men were dragging Apache bodies out of the yard. Nobody went near the burning buckboard, nobody had energy enough to try putting out the fire. It would burn itself out.
In the house shutters slammed, coming open. It would be days before the house could be aired out. To build a new massive front door would take considerable time.
Johnny Reo came outside rubbing his hip. “Judas Priest. Empty shell cases like glass marbles all over the floor in there. I about busted my butt.”
Buchanan nodded, bounced the rifle in the circle of his fist, and turned back into the house. Three men were cleaning up the debris in the parlor. It looked as if an earthquake had hit. Buchanan put the rifle down and went back toward the kitchen, figuring to wash his face and hands at the pump.
When he pushed the kitchen door open, he found before his eyes a tableau that shocked him more than anything he had seen in this battle-packed day.
Marinda was at the sink, wringing cloth bandages under the pump. And behind her, moving stealthily, Antonia was raising a long-bladed kitchen knife, ready to plunge it into Marinda’s unsuspecting back.
To distract Antonia, Buchanan slammed the door as hard as he could, and in the same motion he leaped forward.
Antonia jerked around with a start. Her mouth sprang open; and then Buchanan was on her, wrenching her arm down, yanking the knife out of her gasp.
“You big son of a
bitch,” she snarled, “you’ve spoiled everything you could, ever since you set foot on this place.”
“You don’t look so pretty when you get mad,” Buchanan told her. He tossed the knife aside.
Marinda was watching it all, not yet comprehending entirely. She said, “What...?”
Antonia’s heavy, sensuous lips curled back. She spat at Marinda. “You. I wish those Indians had raped you and burned you at the stake with no clothes on. If it hadn’t been for you, this ranch would have been mine. It should have been.”
Marinda frowned at her, puzzled. “What?”
Antonia’s big breasts heaved with anger. She tossed her dark hair defiantly. Which was when two men came into the room—Steve Quick and Johnny Reo.
Antonia wheeled away from Buchanan and began to curse in low monotony. “Kill them,” she said. “Kill both of them.”
Quick’s eyes widened. He snapped his glance toward Reo. “They’re all that stands between us and Pitchfork, Reo.”
Reo licked his lips. “You’re crazy.”
“I’ll make it a half-interest in the place,” Quick said in sudden desperation. “Half of the whole kit and caboodle.”
Buchanan’s smoke-dusty face was working into a frown. “I wouldn’t do it, Johnny. I wouldn’t even think about doing it.”
Marinda said angrily, “What’s gotten into all of you? Steve, you’ve gone too far.”
“I was born too far,” Quick said tautly. “Go on, Reo.”
Buchanan said quietly, “Forget it, Johnny. I’ve taken a liking to you. We’ve gone through a lot together—too much to let gold get in the way.”
“Half of the whole works, Reo,” Quick breathed. His pale eyes were wide with excitement and fear; he was backing up against the wall, his hand hanging near his gun.
Reo said, “Sorry, Buchanan. Money speaks louder than words.” The familiar brash grin flashed across his cheeks.
