Renegade 23

by Lou Cameron

  Captain Gringo swore under his breath, then said, “So take the armbands off and arm yourselves, dammit! Do you think anyone up in these hills gives two hoots and a holler about international Jaw? Man, they don’t pay any attention to Mexican law, and as far as Mexico City cares, you guys and gals are completely on your own up here. There’s nobody looking out for this outfit but thee and me, and if thee doesn’t start to make some sense, I’m going on without you! There is no way in hell my pals and me can cover a column this size with our own few gun hands. So what’s it gonna be?

  They had to think about that. So he let them mutter among themselves as he spotted Gaston coming in alone with one mule and went to meet him.

  Gaston wore a puzzled frown as he said, “The girls must not have enjoyed our company as much as I assumed from the way Pilar blew me last night. They took off with the other mule and no doubt their silver.”

  Captain Gringo nodded and said, “They didn’t have any silver.”

  Gaston frowned and asked, “Are you suggesting they were up to some sort of skullduggery, Dick?”

  “Who else stuffed that adobe in our guns, the tooth fairy? The insurance company offered them a lousy four hundred bucks to get us across the border and back alive. We’re worth over a thousand apiece to Mexico alone. So why go to all that work when you don’t really have to?”

  “Merde alors, you might have let me in on your suspicions before I ate both their pussies, Dick!”

  Captain Gringo chuckled and said, “I didn’t have anything to go on but suspicion till they verified it just now by tipping their mitts. But you’ve got to admit there were a lot of funny things going on around those funny dames.”

  Gaston thought before he nodded and said, “Eh bien, I can add the figures, now that I observe the final equation. Either of them slipping out to mayhaps take the pee-pee could have stuffed our gun barrels within a few seconds, and I did find it odd that though they said they were carrying silver to smuggle, they never bothered to check it, after knowing we had been alone with their own packsaddle. The wild sex was of course to keep us contented and off guard, although one hopes they didn’t fake every orgasm, hein?”

  Captain Gringo said, “All but the banana bit back there in the grove when Los Rurales rode by. Pilar needed an excuse to be flat on the ground when she gave out such a good yell. Fortunately, they failed to hear her. They were anxious to meet us at her house, I guess.”

  “Ah, oui, that was the only time she seemed so delicate. But may one assume they’ll pick up their confederate who was trailing us so well on their way back to town?”

  “What confederate? Nobody trails me that good, dammit! I was using tricks I learned in Apache country, the hard way.”

  “But the smoke signals … Ah, how stupid of me.”

  “Don’t feel bad. I wasn’t sure either, until just now. But, yeah, it would have been easy enough for either of ’em to leave a cigar butt burning with its unlit end under a hastily gathered pile of tinder and green wood from time to time.”

  “Perfidity, thy name is Woman. May we assume it’s safe to forget about Los Rurales for now?”

  “For now, probably. They won’t want to go anywhere near Rurales on the trail, after failing. When they said they were nervous about Rurales they were telling the truth, as well as showing common sense. Our oversexed police informers are still petty criminals and Los Rurales are bound to arrest somebody after riding all this way.”

  Gaston stared beyond him at the Red Cross column and said, “Oui, we are well south of the road, and in bandit country where possible victims of Los Rurales tend to shoot back. But that, unfortunately, is all I can tell you. I have no idea how to get to the border from here, do you?”

  Captain Gringo shook his head and said, “No. But don’t tell any of these greenhorns. I just told ’em we were fixing to lead them through the Sierra Madres.”

  “But how, Dick? Their guides betrayed them and our guides were trying to betray us. How on earth are we to lead them anywhere in these hills without one trustworthy guide?”

  “I never said it was going to be easy. I just said we’d do it.”

  *

  The Red Cross workers weren’t all stupid. So a couple of dozen of the men and a couple of the girls decided it would be fair if they carried guns without their red crosses showing. One of the nursing sisters, of course, was little Pam, who turned out to be Canadian and said she’d hunted some with her dad’s old Spencer and knew how to handle a .45 as well.

  Captain Gringo left them to tidy up as he and Gaston borrowed a pair of riding mules to scout upstream, just in case Concepción had fibbed about that box canyon, too.

  She hadn’t. The water came over an imposing sheer cliff at the head of the valley in what would have been a pretty waterfall, if they’d been looking for such scenery. As Captain Gringo sat atop his mule, bareback, staring morosely up at the falling water, Gaston observed, “Eh bien, the trouble with lying women is that sometimes they tell the truth. At least now we know that they were the real guides the company hired and not a pair of ringers, hein?”

  “Yeah. I said I figured they left the silver behind because they didn’t intend to travel all the way with us. That bullshit about old Caballero Blanco was more razzle-dazzle. So watch out for white hats. He could be on either side of the border.” As he wheeled his mule around, Gaston drew his .38 without a word of warning and emptied it into a nearby clump of greasewood. Captain Gringo swore as his mule shied, steadied it, and asked, “Gaston, why in the hell did you do that?”

  “You told me to watch out for white hats. I just spotted a white shirt in those bushes, I think.”

  “You think, you trigger-happy old goat?”

  Gaston dismounted, reloading on the safe side of his mule as he replied. “Cover me if you persist in making such an obvious stationary target of yourself, hein?”

  Captain Gringo dismounted, pronto, and drew his own revolver as the little Frenchman moved in, gun leveled. Gaston circled the clump, lowered the .38 to his side, and said, “Eh bien. I don’t need reading glasses after all.”

  Captain Gringo joined him to see two white-clad bodies sprawled in the dust on the far side of the greasewood. He whistled and said, “Nice shooting, Gaston. I didn’t see a fucking thing!”

  “In truth, I only saw a patch of white. But as you say so often, what the hell. We knew these runaway guides had to have run somewhere, non?”

  “Yeah, and, dammit, neither of them had guns, thanks to the odd views of the late Herr Doktor Fitzke! They were only hiding from us, scared skinny, no doubt. I wish you’d given me a chance to have a chat with them first, Gaston.”

  “Had I known they were both unarmed, I would have. But in these hills one does not meet many such people, Dick. Let us regard what they might have in their pockets, non?”

  They each dropped by a different corpse to pat it down. Both false guides were packing a little pocket change, which could always come in handy. Captain Gringo pocketed his, saying, “Nothing but Mexican money on this guy. Wait a second. He had something in his shirt pocket.”

  Captain Gringo took the folded paper out and opened it as Gaston said, “This one had a couple of Guatemalan coins as well. So, like the girls, they might have known the way, but just did not wish to show it to anyone. Like our own amusing guides, they saw an easier way to make the buck. What is that, Dick, a map?”

  “Yeah. Unfortunately, not a good one. It’s hand-drawn. Shows how to get this far and ends with a big fat question mark above that waterfall over there. This X marks the spot where the bandits were waiting. The sons of bitches really set old Fitzke up in advance.”

  “We knew that already. None of the bandits we shot up just now could have been this species of Caballero Blanco. But if one band of outlaws knew that all these good things, and lovely ladies, were coming this way, who is to say what our gallant Guatemalan liberator knows, hein?”

  “Do you always have to be so fucking cheerful? Hold it. There�
�s a dotted line here. Or there was. Someone tried to erase the pencil marks with a lousy eraser.”

  He held the map at a different angle to the light and said, “Yeah, it’s some sort of trail, leading down into this valley from due east. Those bandits must have taken the next north-south valley down from the main post road through the Sierra, then cut over that ridge to the east and dug in on the west slope to wait for the column.”

  “How sneaky of them. But so what?”

  “If they used another trail in another valley, they must be used to riding it. If we go over that ridge to the east, we’ll wind up on the same trail.”

  “Or perhaps their hideout, Dick? Bandits down here move about like the armies, rebel or official, avec baggage and dependents. They never send their full force on a raid and—”

  “Dammit, Gaston,” Captain Gringo cut in, “I keep telling you I scouted Apache in my misspent youth. I know all too well how the guerrilla bands down here are set up. Naturally we’ll scout ahead before leading our greenhorns over the ridge into quién sabe land. Meanwhile, this box canyon makes a good campsite for us to leave them forted up in. Help me drag these guys over to the stream. Some of the dames might have delicate feelings. But the current will carry them for miles before they start to stink.”

  It only took a few minutes to send the two dead rats bobbing off down the, rio. It took a little longer to catch the spooked mules. But they managed, and rode back.

  When they rejoined the others, Captain Gringo announced, “Numero uno, don’t drink the water until those guides who led you into ambush float by. Shouldn’t take ’em long now. Numero segundo, we’re going to lead you up into the box canyon at the head of this valley, and you ought to be pretty safe there for now. Then Gaston and me are going to scout the way out of here.”

  Someone asked, “Don’t you know the way out, Captain Gringo?”

  Captain Gringo said, “Call me Dick. Do you really want to pop your heads over that ridge to the east without knowing if anyone’s laying for you on the far side with a gun?”

  That made sense, even to a greenhorn. So, having buried their dead, pissed in the bushes, or whatever, they all fell in to follow him as he took the point, with Gaston trailing behind to cover their rear, just in case.

  Captain Gringo walked this time, having resaddled and returned the riding mule to one of the women. The little brunette Canadian girl, Pam, walked her own mule beside him. She was prettier than anything else ahead, and since they’d flushed the two outlaws in the canyon it seemed safe enough. But she kept pestering him with questions he either didn’t want to answer or had no answer for. He lit a claro and spent a lot of time puffing in meditation as he answered her in monosyllables.

  As the path swung near a bend in the stream, Pam gasped and said, “Oh, dear, is that a body I see there?”

  Captain Gringo glanced at the white-clad peon, face down in the water with a damned boulder he’d snagged on keeping his corpse in place, and grunted as he said, “Yeah. Don’t worry. He’s way downstream from where you’ll be getting your coffee water this evening, Miss Pam.”

  “Brrr, you make it sound so clinical. Tell me, what does it feel like to kill a man, Dick?”

  “I didn’t kill him. Gaston did. Oops, here comes his pal around the bend.”

  “Oh, my God, they both look so … so dead. You were the one who machine-gunned those others back there, weren’t you?”

  “I cannot tell a lie. I done it with my little Maxim. Is there any point to this discussion, Miss Pam?”

  “I’ve just always wondered what it would feel like, if I had to kill somebody. How many people have you had to do it to, so far?”

  He shrugged and replied, “Who counts? If you’re asking if I get a kick out of it, the answer is no. It doesn’t feel good, it doesn’t feel bad. I know you’re supposed to feel guilty about it. Maybe I would, if I had to murder somebody. But I’m a soldier of fortune, not a hired assassin. So it’s never come up.”

  “I’m glad. That means it’s not true what they say about you murdering a fellow officer back in the States, right?”

  He took a thoughtful drag on his cigar before he said, “I killed the officer of the day, breaking out of an army guardhouse. They were going to hang me in the morning and he came to gloat about it. I killed him and changed the plans Uncle Sam had for me. I guess you could call what I did murder. I know the U.S. Army does. It felt more like self-defense to me at the time. Since then I’ve killed other guys, because it was me or them. If that makes me an ogre in your eyes, go back and chat with less-exciting guys, Miss Pam.”

  She didn’t take him up on it. She said, “My, you are bitter, aren’t you? Why are you so bitter if it doesn’t bother you to kill people?”

  “Because the bastards keep trying to kill me, of course. Like I said, I don’t shoot at people because it’s fun. I’m a very easy guy to get along with, if you don’t point a gun at me. But there seems to be a lot of that going around, down this way.”

  She sighed and said, “So I just noticed. We were warned in advance the people down here were all pretty nasty but—”

  “You were told wrong,” he cut in, adding, “Ninety-nine out of a hundred people down this way are just as decent as those you’d meet anywhere else. I like most Hispanics. It’s that one out of a hundred you have to look out for. The problem down here isn’t so much the culture as the law, or the lack of it. Leave a mess of poor downtrodden people to fend for themselves as best they can, and some are bound to wind up fending a little more than they really need to.”

  “But the other night in the market, when you had to save us from those awful greasers, Dick—”

  “One reason I had to save you was that you were acting like you thought of them as greasers. The politer term for people down here of mixed blood is ‘mestizo’ in Mexico or ‘ladino’ in South America, with either term likely to be used in between. Blacks are called mulattoes whether they’re part white or not, because they, all say they are. The Creoles of pure Spanish blood are called Castilians, no matter where their ancestors came from, or simply blancos, meaning whites.”

  “A Spanish Creole is a white? In New Orleans they say—”

  “You’re not in New Orleans,” he cut in, explaining, “French colonists picked ‘Creole’ up from the Spaniards and used it, wrong, as a polite word for people they otherwise looked down on. Since the breakup of the old Spanish empire, some pretty dark Latin Americans seem confused about the term, too. So it’s better to avoid ‘Creole’ when you don’t know the local meaning. But if a Hispanic calls himself a Creole, he’s telling you he’s from an old Spanish colonial family, see?”

  She frowned and said, “It’s all so confusing. But I’ll try not to call them anything if they don’t call me a gringa. That’s their insulting term for us, right?”

  “Not really. They’d call you a puta if they really wanted to be nasty. Gringo or gringa doesn’t mean anything at all in Spanish. Some say they got the term from the first American settlers in Texas when it was still part of Mexico. As the wagon trains rolled in, a lot of them were singing Protestant hymns for some reason. An old song called ‘Green Grow the Lilacs’ was a favorite that became the ‘Battle Hymn of the Texas Republic.’ The local Mexicans of course had no idea what a Green Grow could be, but it was easy to say.”

  She laughed and said, “You’re joshing me!”

  He said, “You can look it up. Meanwhile, ride on up into that canyon ahead and we’ll talk about it later. This is where I get off the train for a while.”

  She looked confused. He pointed at a heel print in the mud by the rio and explained, “This is where those bandits forded the stream. So they must have come from the next valley east via that gap in the rimrocks over yonder. They didn’t bring their mounts or adelitas, I mean girlfriends. Lieutenant Verrier and I’d better check it out.”

  She said to be careful and rode on. Captain Gringo stood by the side of the trail, directing others who approached in turn to
follow Pam up into the box canyon and dig in. At last Gaston approached, leading their last mule and yakking in French with an Italian-Swiss and a Swede who didn’t speak English. So Captain Gringo had him chase the Red Cross workers up the trail and told Gaston, “I’m going over that ridge to the east for a look-see. How do you feel about it?”

  Gaston shrugged and said, “When one must go to the dentist, it is better to get it over with, hein? Hopefully they had a lookout posted up in that gap, and, even more hopefully, the adelitas and sissies ran away when they saw the Red Cross was not as helpless as they’d been led to feel. Otherwise, we shall of course be walking into an ambush.”

  Captain Gringo nodded and unlashed the Maxim from the packsaddle again as he said, “When you’re right you’re right. I’ll take the lead. Can you handle that mule and a Winchester at the same time?”

  “I’d rather not. But let’s get it over with. My Italian-Swiss chum just told me they shall be serving French cuisine for supper this evening. So I want to get back in time.”

  They waded across the thigh-deep stream and forged up the far slope with the heavy weapon riding Captain Gringo’s left shoulder. The game trail the outlaws had used wasn’t much more visible in real life than it had been on their map after being erased. But from time to time the big Yank in the lead spotted a boot-heel mark and, once, a broken match stem only someone lighting a smoke could have dropped.

  Going through the obvious pass like a big-assed bird could have been injurious to one’s health. So, near the top, Captain Gringo crabbed to one side on the now steep and treacherous slope to scramble up and flop behind a yucca clump for a peek over the crest.

  The valley to the east was much higher and drier. It was little more than an arroyo just below the ridge itself. A campfire’s ashy remains were still smoldering a hundred yards beyond the notch the bandits had used. There was nothing much else in sight. Captain Gringo stood up and signaled Gaston to move on up through the pass with the mule. Then he trudged down to the abandoned fire to see if he could cut any sign.