Bannerman the Enforcer 8

by Kirk Hamilton

  “Yance!” he bawled.

  Yancey was already reacting. He swept his right arm around and chopped his hand against the girl’s forearm as she triggered. The small revolver exploded and he winced as blazing powder grains seared his face. She lurched off-balance in the saddle and, with lightning reactions, jumped her horse aside out of reach, swaying upright and bringing the animal around so she could shoot again.

  Cato ducked as lead whined off his rock. The second Mexican had his Snider bolt-action rifle to his shoulder and was working the bolt again. Cato fired at him and missed. From the corner of his eye he saw the big gates starting to swing open again. Yancey ducked low as the girl fired and the shot missed. Chuck, frozen until now, suddenly leapt his mount forward with a wild yell, ramming the girl’s horse.

  Rosita cried out as she went down with the animal, momentarily lost in clouds of dust. Then Cato nailed the second guard and, as the man went over his horse’s rump, Yancey drove his mount forward and snatched the rifle from his hands. He kept riding but swung the horse around in a short arc, the rifle blazing at the men in the gateway. Others were running from a building beside the house, shouting.

  Rosita rolled away from her thrashing mount and came to her feet still holding her pistol. She lifted it in both hands, running towards Yancey with her teeth bared, determined to get him, as he concentrated on the men in the gateway. One man went down with a scream. The other ran for cover. Cato heard Rosita’s pistol crack an instant before he shot her. She was knocked sprawling by the bullet and began crawling away from the chaos, a hand pressed tightly against her left side. Cato snatched up his Manstopper and blasted with the shot-shell, knowing it would not be effective at this range but figuring that its thunder would add to the din. Men scattered and he snatched up his spare shells, running for his mount. He leapt into the saddle and rode out onto the trail where Yancey and Brandon were turning their mounts to ride away from the rancho. Yancey turned in the saddle and emptied the rifle into the knot of men pouring out of the gateway, then flung the smoking weapon from him.

  “Ride, Chuck, ride!” he yelled and Cato stiffened at the sound of the name. No wonder that silhouette had looked somehow familiar. ‘Brandon’ was Chuck Bannerman!

  Cato spurred out of the rocks and angled onto the trail where Yancey and Chuck were riding like the wind, crouching low over their mounts’ necks. A volley of shots rattled from behind and he heard the whistling, ‘zipping’ sound of the slugs as they sped close about them. They rode in a group, not speaking, Cato the only one with weapons. When they topped a rise, they paused long enough to turn and look back.

  Pale gold sunlight washed across the plains and they could see a band of riders pouring out of the gateway of the rancho. There were maybe ten men in the group, all with rifles. Cato drew his Winchester from its scabbard and thrust it at Yancey.

  The big Enforcer nodded as he took it, then they spun their panting mounts and spurred away down the far side of the rise.

  It was a long way north to the Rio Grande and they had a lot of hostile country to traverse before they reached the safety of Texas again. Cato figured they would be lucky if they made it past Acuna Parral with that band of cutthroats coming after them.

  ~*~

  Lila Lorrance ducked her head and hurried across the Amarillo street as the rain poured down and the wind hammered the drops against her slicker. She tugged her hat brim lower and a cascade of water poured from it. She was glad of the rain and the excuse to duck her head for she had seen Banker Hines coming out of the bank and she did not want to talk with him right now.

  But he had seen her and hurried out into the rain after her, calling her name, the wind snatching the words from his mouth. Lila pretended she didn’t hear him. She reached the opposite sidewalk and ducked into the first store she came to. She knew it was a mistake, for Hines simply followed her inside and though she tried to hide by busying herself at the rear of the store, he walked straight to her.

  “Good morning, Miss Lorrance,” he said affably enough, though his pinched, pale face was unsmiling. He touched a hand briefly to his hat brim.

  Lila didn’t even bother to pretend she was surprised to see him. She merely looked up wearily and nodded curtly. “Hardly a ‘good’ morning, Mr. Hines.”

  “In more ways than one, I should think, for some folk,” Hines said crisply. He gestured to the window which was misting over. A barrel stove gave out stifling heat in the middle of the room and steam was already rising from their slickers. “Weather’s bad for walking, but good for the ranchers, I should think. It’s been a long dry season.”

  Lila looked at him squarely, her mouth tight. “Yes, the pasture and meadows will be lush and green, the creeks flowing full when the bank takes over my place.” She made no attempt to keep the bitterness out of her voice. “You should have a fine asset, Mr. Hines!”

  “We would much rather you kept your ranch, Miss Lorrance. I see there’s no need for me to remind you that your extension has almost run out.”

  “No need at all!”

  Hines nodded, looking prim, smugly satisfied, as befitted a man who has discharged his duty. “I felt I should make sure. Er, if you can give me your assurance that the reward money has been claimed, I think I probably would be amenable to extending the due date until it arrived ...?”

  Lila looked at him bitterly. “See Sheriff Lacy about that, Mr. Hines! He won’t allow me to make my claim yet!”

  Hines arched his thin eyebrows and shook his head dolefully. “Dear, dear, I must say I am not very pleased to hear that. I dare say you aren’t, either, but it is up to you to make the effort to get that money through in time, Miss Lorrance. You can’t expect the bank to make all kinds of concessions if you aren’t prepared to do your utmost yourself. You must fight, Miss Lorrance! You can’t hope to have things just drop into your lap. You must confront your problems and seek a solution.” He shook his head again. “I’m afraid the bank has gone about as far as it can. The rest is entirely up to you.”

  “You think so, do you?” retorted Lila, a tremor in her voice. “You think I haven’t been almost out of my mind trying to get this money through? Nick Lacy has instructions from someone, he won’t say who, and he simply will not forward my claim!”

  Hines shook his head again. “I’m sorry to have to talk to you like this, but it’s for your own good, young woman. If you want to keep your ranch, you’ll heed my words.” He touched a hand to his hat brim again. “Good-day to you.”

  Abruptly he turned and hurried out with his short, mincing steps. Lila stared after him, frowning, then turned back to the counter. The counter-assistant came down and asked if he could help her.

  “Er, no. I’ve changed my mind. Thank you.”

  The man shrugged as she turned, pulled her slicker closer about her and hurried out into the rainstorm again. Lila ducked her head into the wind and sloshed her way through the mud to the law office. She stomped the mud from her boots on the stoop and went inside. Nick Lacy was standing by the barred window, looking out into the street where traffic was piling up around a bogged ox-drawn wagon. Tempers were short and the cuss words were flying, reaching them faintly. Lacy turned his head slowly and nodded.

  “Seen Hines chasin’ you into Miller’s store. Guess he’s pressurin’ you for that reward money.”

  “You guess right, Nick Lacy. And I want to know just when you’re going to forward my claim.”

  He sighed, leaning on the window, smoking slowly, looking out at the chaos in the street, hoping a fight wouldn’t develop between the wagon driver and the freight man behind him, who was being delayed. He didn’t fancy having to go out in that rain and mud to break it up.

  “Well, Lila, I’ve tried to explain to you that this has gone right to the governor himself. There’s an undercover job in progress and we just can’t jeopardize the safety of the man who’s involved by claiming the reward on Sundance. Once it’s paid, or even claimed, there’s no way to stop word gettin’ out t
hat he’s dead and if it reaches the enemies of the governor’s man, then he’s dead, too, and the whole deal is blown.” He flicked his cigarette through the bars and turned his back on the street scene. The wagon man was taking a swing at the freighter and Lacy simply didn’t want to know about it. “Look, I can lend you a couple of hundred myself, if that’ll stall Hines off until this thing is over and we’re able to put in the claim properly.”

  “Thanks all the same, Nick, but he won’t be stalled off. And neither will I. I warned you, I’d take things into my own hands, and now it’s reached the stage where I’m going to.” She held up a hand as he started to speak. “I should’ve done it long ago, I guess. And before you start sounding off at me, I’ll say right now that nothing you can say will change my mind.”

  “Just what in hell d’you think you’re gonna do?” Lacy snapped. “You could get a man killed, Lila!”

  “I could. But I’ll avoid that if I can. For one thing, you say all this has to do with the governor. Well, does he know my circumstances? You’ve told me his and I’ve gone along with it, cooperated. But I’ve reached the end of the track now. It’s time someone gave me some cooperation.”

  Lacy frowned. “Well, I dunno if he knows about your mortgage or not, Lila, but that ain’t the kind of thing you bother governors with! Judas, he’s got the whole damn State of Texas to worry about!”

  “There are people in Texas, Nick, and I’m one of them! And if I don’t act quickly, I’m going to lose my ranch.”

  Without another word she heeled sharply and swung back out into the street, hurrying down the boardwalk. Lacy swore quietly and ran to the door, calling after her. Then he glanced out into the street and saw the wagon man and the freighter slugging it out, covered in mud and blood, a crowd gathering and yelling. Already there was jostling and heated words as folk argued the whys and wherefores and rights and wrongs of the matter. Lacy sighed, looked after Lila as she made for the livery, then regretfully took his slicker down from the wall peg. Like it or not, he was going to have to get out into that mud and break up the brawl before he had a full-scale riot on his hands. Lila Lorrance would have to wait a spell.

  ~*~

  It was one of the worst deserts Yancey had encountered in all his years of wandering around the frontiers, both north and south of the Rio. The dust was like powder and worked inside a man’s mouth, even if it was covered by a kerchief. Eyes and ears were filled with it. It rubbed flesh raw inside a man’s collar and even his boots. It made the horses wild-eyed and skittish and they tossed their heads constantly, snorting to try and rid their nostrils and mouths of the abrading dust.

  A blazing, cloudless sky, saltpans ahead, lava flats all round, with pumice-dotted land beyond that, and no known water. This was the desert that the Spaniards had named Inferno Blanca, the White Hell. For the glare of the saltpans tended to give everything an overall, blindingly white cast and a man could go glare blind if he wasn’t careful. Already Yancey, Chuck and Cato had rubbed ashes from their campfires, mixed with spittle, under and around their eyes to help cut down the glare.

  On top of all these things, they had a band of fanatical Mexicans pursuing them and the word had spread throughout the north that they were, on no account, to be allowed to reach the Rio and cross back into the United States.

  The governmentas had a lot to lose and were pulling out all the stops in an attempt to keep them in Mexico. Preferably dead.

  Chuck Bannerman had been complaining continuously and Yancey and Cato had ignored him for a long time, saving their breath as they sucked the scorching desert air into their lungs. Then Yancey had ridden in close and backhanded Chuck so hard across the mouth that he had fallen out of the saddle. Yancey and Cato had ridden on at their steady pace, leaving the astonished Chuck sprawled on the hot sand, shaking his head, tasting blood. He had called after them, swearing at Yancey. When they neither slowed nor glanced back, he began to get the message. He had climbed slowly back onto his horse, after spending fifteen minutes catching it again, and then had spurred it along to catch up with the others. He had set it between them and hadn’t spoken since.

  After the shootout at the rancho, they had headed back along the trail to Acuna Parral. They had run into some rear guards just as they entered an arroyo. Yancey had signed for Cato to haul rein and for Chuck to keep riding. The small Enforcer was the only one with weapons and he also had a coiled rope on his saddlehorn. Yancey threw this across the narrowest part of the arroyo, and picked up a fallen branch. Then they had crouched in the shadows of the arroyo’s walls.

  The band of guards came riding in fast, unsuspectingly. The Enforcers hauled the rope tight and the horses reared and whinnied as the rope scraped up their noses and foreheads, caught their riders across the chests and hurled them from the saddles.

  There were five men writhing and rolling on the ground. Yancey and Cato leapt forward. Cato’s gun blasted and one man, getting up with his gun half drawn, slammed over backwards into one of his companions. Yancey cracked the branch down on an arm and heard the bone splinter. The man screamed and Yancey smashed in his skull with a heavy blow, dropped the branch and yanked the man’s Colt from his belt, whirling and firing as another Mexican lunged at him, swinging his rifle by the barrel. The man ran right up onto the gun muzzle as Yancey pulled the trigger. He was blown back three feet, looking like a rag doll with the stuffing ripped out of the middle. Yancey spun and blasted again into a snarling face. Cato kicked the last man in the head and then shot him through the middle of the chest.

  The horses were prancing wildly and they had a job catching them. They managed to get three animals and took what food there was and the water canteens, then collected all the weapons. Only one man had been using a Winchester, the others favoring the Mausers and Sniders that were common south of the border. They stripped off the ammunition belts and took everything along. There was no telling when they might have to fall back on the bolt-action rifles, for there was a long way to go before they reached the Rio.

  They rode out of the arroyo, taking two horses with them as spares. They rode for five miles and couldn’t find any sign of Chuck. It wasn’t until daylight that they picked up his tracks and found him hiding in the rear of a big cave.

  “I—I heard all the shooting,” he told them a mite uncomfortably. “But I didn’t know who’d won.”

  Cato looked at Yancey sharply but the big Enforcer merely nodded, not really surprised by his brother’s actions. Chuck had always been one to look out for himself. Yancey gave him a Mauser rifle, some bandoliers of ammunition and a Whitney pistol, a huge, cumbersome affair with a barrel as round and thick as a broom handle.

  “Where to now, Yance?” asked Cato.

  Yancey looked at him squarely as he built a small fire in the rear of the cave, figuring they had better make the most of the chance to have a hot meal, for there was no telling when they might have their next.

  “There’s only one way out, Johnny.” He pointed with his clasp-knife which he was using to slice some smoked ham they had found in one of the Mexicans’ saddlebags. “Across the White Hell.”

  Cato whistled soundlessly. Chuck frowned.

  “What’s that? I sure don’t like the sound of it.”

  “You’ll like the reality a damn sight less, wouldn’t wonder,” Yancey told him. “It’s the worst desert in northern Mexico and whatever we have now—canteens of water, some grub—is all we’ll have to get us across. There’ll be no stopping, there’s no game to supplement our rations and no waterholes to replenish the canteens. Once we start out, we’re committed.”

  “There must be another way!” Chuck said tightly.

  “Sure. A dozen trails lead back to the border,” Cato told him. “But they’ll all be crawlin’ with Mexes lookin’ for our scalps.”

  “You can take any one of those trails,” Yancey told Chuck quietly. “But you’d be dead before you’d travelled a mile. The only way out for us is across the desert. If it doesn’t kill us, an
d the Mexes don’t catch up with us, we stand a chance of making it.”

  Chuck stared, gray-faced. Cato smiled wryly.

  “Yeah. Then all we got to do is get past the patrols they’ll have watching for us along the border.”

  Chuck groaned softly.

  He had groaned and complained for a long time, until Yancey had knocked him out of his saddle. Thereafter he rode in sullen silence.

  But, at the third night camp in the White Hell, when the water was getting very low and their supper was no more than a mouthful of desiccated beans, Yancey said:

  “You never did get around to telling me what the Texas end of this deal was to be, Chuck. How about putting us in the picture now?”

  “What’s the use?” Chuck murmured, voice raspy like the others’. “We aren’t going to make it. Doesn’t matter anymore. If those goddamn cutthroats behind us don’t kill us, this blamed desert will. Who the hell cares about any deal right now?”

  “I sure as hell do,” Yancey told him flatly. “We’re gonna make it, and don’t you think any different. And when we get back across the Rio, I want to know what the hell Sundance was supposed to be riding into.”

  Chuck looked at him in surprise. “You’re still going to follow this thing through?”

  “Why not?” Cato asked. “Just because a few hombres’ve tried to kill us? Because we’re on the run, just a jump or two ahead of a bullet? Hell, man, that’s normal for any of our assignments. And, like Yancey says, we ain’t done yet by a damn sight.”

  Chuck looked genuinely surprised as he glanced from one man to the other. He wiped dust and grit from his blistered face and grimaced at the small pain the action caused. He picked a bean skin from between his teeth, automatically reaching for his water canteen. Yancey’s hand darted out and steel fingers closed about his wrist. He looked at Yancey, startled, as his brother slowly shook his head.