One of the gunmen gasped, dropped his weapon, grabbed for his riddled belly, and fell over. Claude’s men were turning their full firepower on the other two survivors. They cut them down in a hail of lead. When the last man dropped, Claude gestured frantically for his men to run back into the protective shelter of Springville’s buildings. They needed no second urging, but they were slowed considerably because there were three wounded men among them who had to be picked up bodily and lugged back.
Claude was impatient. He had in mind what must now be done, and was among the first of his men to get back where the other defenders were yelling encouragement and gesturing in grim pleasure at the success out there on the desert that the defenders had achieved. Men jumped forward to congratulate Claude. He brushed them aside and yelled for Newt and Arch. All his companions of the outward battle were back among their friends before Newton Douglas and Arch Clayton came trotting up.
“Horses!” yelled Claude. “Get a-horseback! We cut him all to hell. Now we’ve got to go after him and finish him off. Fetch your best men and meet me down at the livery barn. And don’t waste time talking. Just move and move fast!”
Chapter Eighteen
When Claude spurred southward out of Springville some fifteen minutes later, he had Newt Douglas, Arch Clayton, Jack Mather, and several of Newt’s range riders with him. He’d sent the much larger force under Hank Smith and Barney Whitsun out of town to the southeast toward Dead Man’s Cañon. He reasoned that Bríon, with probably half his men killed or shot up too badly to resume the fight, would withdraw now as fast as he could, and head straight for the border.
The question of whether Fernando Bríon would gather up another little army and return, or whether he’d abandon his urge to get that old Spanish treasure, Claude neither knew nor cared. As he told the others, when they were running downcountry through the still, hot night, the only important thing now was to catch Bríon before he reached the border.
Springville dropped away behind them. Only the rough, menacing desert lay on all sides as they pressed along straight southward on the rutted old stage road. The men were sore and roughed up and grim as death. Behind, they’d left enough aroused, furious townsmen to fend off another attack upon the town if such an unlikely thing might occur. And also back there they’d left five dead men and nine wounded ones, which made it improbable that if they caught up with Bríon, they would show any mercy.
This was the world of raw nature, of the unrelenting desert; it shaped those who lived in its hard environment to be exactly as it also was—dry and hard and merciless.
Clayton said, when they slowed for a mile or two in order to rest their mounts, he thought Bríon would be expecting pursuit. He added to that Bríon couldn’t have more than possibly six or eight men left with him, which was far too few for him to lose time establishing an ambush to slow his pursuers. Newt agreed with that.
Claude wasn’t very concerned. “Hank won’t ride into any bushwhack,” he told the others. “Barney might, but not Hank. He’s an old hand at this kind of work. Used to be a Ranger years back. That’s why I sent him with Barney instead of someone else. Anyway, we can’t do all the sweating. Our job’s to reach the border ahead of Bríon. Now follow me and don’t make any more noise than you have to.”
He left the stage road where it began to curve southwesterly, struck out through a dense sage field, and emerged upon the far side of it, riding swiftly on a diagonal course that was calculated to put them on a collision course with anyone emerging from Dead Man’s Cañon down where it touched the border and flattened out over into Mexico, forming the Tamaulipas Plains.
They had traveled fast thus far, and according to Claude’s calculations, even with the quarter to half hour start Bríon had back at Springville, they were either parallel to him now or perhaps ahead of him. The trick, Claude explained and the others also knew, was not to lose time but to gain it, even though they were traveling on a diagonal course while the men they were pursuing would be going straight south.
“If he doesn’t pick up any sound behind him,” opined old Newt Douglas, “chances are pretty good we’ll be in place along the border before he gets there. If he does hear the riders coming, we’ll hit the line about neck and neck.”
Arch Clayton said softly as they began picking up speed again, “And if he does go over the line … that’s not going to stop me.”
Claude looked around. He’d heard that remark. But Claude said nothing and neither did Arch. In fact, no one had anything to say for a long while, and during that time the men concentrated on hard riding.
It seemed they’d been riding half the night before Claude eventually hauled back down to a steady walk again, and occasionally turned, gazing northward. Off in the east there was a very faint brightening to the underside of the sky. In the west, night was still fully down. The desert, however, was beginning to take on shape and substance as that pale light filtered out over it. They passed several little cairns of whitewashed stones.
“The border,” said Newt, and straightened in the saddle. “Hear anything, Claude?”
Rainey shook his head and pointed his horse on a course that stayed always on the upper side of the international boundary, and which bore straight along it. He rode like that, constantly listening, looking, peering for tracks upon the mealy ground, until Arch Clayton said, “Whoa up!” Then Claude and the others stopped.
“Listen hard,” advised Arch. “Real hard.”
Neither Newt nor Claude heard anything, but one of the younger range riders with them nodded. “Horses,” he said. “But they’re a considerable distance off.”
Claude strained harder. He screwed up his face, puckered his lips, and at the same time that Newt said he heard the sound, Claude finally detected it.
“Horsemen, all right,” he agreed, and at once fell to searching for cover.
There was plenty of underbrush down here, but precious little tall enough to conceal horses, so Claude sent all their mounts back a mile or two with one of Newt’s cowboys, and led the others along on foot with just their carbines and six-guns.
“If it’s the posse from town,” he confided to Arch, “and not Bríon, I’m going to give up the ghost.”
The men finally strung out in the underbrush. Those oncoming riders were swiftly approaching. It struck Claude that he might have been wrong in his estimate of how many men Bríon might have with him. It sounded like a lot more than six or eight riders coming.
Then he saw them as the sky steadily brightened. There weren’t anymore than he’d thought—mounted—but there were another seven or eight loose horses following along behind them with looped reins and riderless saddles.
Claude was to give the signal when to attack, as he’d done back at town. He waited; he wanted Fernando Bríon eyeball to eyeball with him right down the barrel of his carbine. The riders came into full view, looking tired, vanquished, and gaunt. Behind them that amethyst predawn sky backgrounded each rider perfectly.
Claude arose from behind his bush, carbine up, head and shoulders bunched up around it. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t have to; those oncoming men saw him plainly enough. Whether all of them recognized him or not is another matter, or whether they saw the badge on his shirt front, but no one could have mistaken Claude Rainey’s stance. He was going to kill.
What he did seemed foolhardy to Arch Clayton and Newton Douglas. He didn’t have to prove to Fernando Bríon that Claude Rainey, cow-town sheriff, was Bríon’s match; he’d already proved that back at Springville. It was pointlessly bold to do what he was doing—unless his fury and need for vengeance was so deep he couldn’t finish the fight without forcing Bríon to face him.
One of the bandoleros riding behind Fernando Bríon gave a loud sigh, almost as though he knew something the others didn’t know, and went for his six-gun. Claude fired, swinging his barrel just a fraction to get this man. The Mexican sank softly
down the side of his horse and fell in a little tired heap. On all sides guns erupted. The hidden men from Springville tried to nail a bandolero before Bríon and his men hurled themselves to the ground, but except for the one Sheriff Rainey had killed, no one else succeeded right then.
Claude dropped from sight the moment he killed that vaquero and ducked back and forth, heading up through the tangle of desert growth for the area Fernando Bríon had jumped into. Bullets cut here and there, never actually very close but near enough in their blind flight to be heard. Claude observed Newt and Arch and the cowboys with them ground sluicing over through the underbrush and thought that was about what he’d have told them to do. When an enemy is hidden and invisible behind dense thickets that may hide a man but that can’t deflect bullets, the best way to kill without being killed is to pattern fire right through the underbrush, and allow no respite, otherwise the enemy seizes the initiative and reverses the process.
Claude could tell by listening that his companions not only held the initiative, but were not going to relinquish it. He heard a Mexican cry out a ragged breviary. The man had been hit, there was no doubt of that. The gunfire back there didn’t slacken even once. Claude was sure Arch, Newt, and the others had tacitly managed to keep some of the guns going while the other guns were being reloaded.
Ahead of him and to his right someone tried a ground-sluicing shot. Claude was certain that was Bríon out there, for although he’d moved considerably to the right and slightly southward, Bríon had been the only one of his party who had tried running away. The others were back there, standing fast and fighting.
His enemy tried again, closer this time, forcing Claude to stop, turn, and resume his advance with less recklessness and more silent stealth. He knew where Bríon was from that last shot, moved in closer, sank down to one knee, raised the carbine, and patiently waited. Bríon moved. Claude fired. There was no great and deadly final combat, nothing spectacular or deathless or dramatic. Bríon didn’t know Claude knew where he was, and Bríon tried to continue on around his friends and enemies alike so he could escape across the border while his men detained his enemies. Claude Rainey, on the other hand, had sighted movement. He had never, since the initial attack on Springville the previous night, meant to give Fernando Bríon any quarter. He’d for the most part kept that promise to himself, then, when he’d seen movement over there through the brush and he fired.
He walked over, gazed downward, grounded his carbine, and made a smoke. Elsewhere, there was no more gunfire. It was almost as though Bríon’s men knew their leader was facedown dead. When they surrendered, there were only two unhurt survivors and one wounded survivor of all that little bristling army Fernando Bríon had led northward, except for Sheriff Rainey’s prisoners back at Springville.
Until Claude heard the catcalling back and forth he had no clear idea why Bríon’s men had given up so meekly. Barney and Hank with another fifteen men were converging from behind the beaten vaqueros. Newt, Arch, and the other men who’d come southward on the grueling ride with Claude, were in front of them.
Barney and Hank led their men up and dismounted, asking where Claude was. Clayton and Douglas had a pretty good idea. They’d heard those shots off to the southwest. While their men were making certain of the dead and mauling the survivors, Arch, Newt, Barney, and Hank Smith went brush beating until they found what they sought.
Claude’s smoke was just about finished when they got over there. Hank, the blacksmith, went forward, toed Bríon over callously with his boot, and bent to make certain. The light of dawn was adequate. Hank nodded. “It’s him, all right.” He bent down, yanked away Bríon’s pistol and carbine, tossed them to Claude, and stepped back, looking dispassionately at the dead man.
Clayton and Newt Douglas had their look. Arch looked longest. Up until Bríon had attacked the town, Archer Clayton’d had more legitimate reason to want to see Fernando Bríon dead than anyone else. Now, though, no one had that exclusive feeling, so they all looked at him, glad that he was dead, saying nothing for a while, and in this bleak interval a new day arrived, delivered up out of the desert’s spiny east with all the silent fanfare of invisible and unheard trumpets, its pleasant brightness changing the world, if not necessarily the mood of all the men inhabiting the world.
“Did he have a wife?” Newt Douglas asked.
Claude looked up. He didn’t know. He didn’t care.
Arch shook his head. He among them was the only one who’d been south of the border into Bríon’s particular territory. “No. He was a sort of feudal lord down there. I reckon he has kin somewhere, but he had no immediate family. I heard that much in Rosario while I was keeping an ear to the ground to learn what I could.”
“Well, then, we might as well bury him right here,” tough old Newt stated.
Claude threw his old friend a wry look. “What do we dig with?”
Newt slowly nodded about that. They had no digging tools. “Haul him back then,” muttered Newt, and scowled at the corpse. “I just don’t like the idea of him lying over in the Springville Boot Hill graveyard with men like Clayton’s partner.”
“We’ll set that to right,” grumbled Claude, turning to seek their men. “We’ll rebury Arch’s partner with a decent marker. After all, if we’re going to name our new schoolhouse for him, he’s got to be buried respectable-like. Let’s get the dead tied on, the wounded patched up, and head for home, boys. In another couple hours it’s going to be almighty hot out here. Besides, I’m about half worn out.”
They got Bríon like his dead companions tied belly down with a minimum of talk. It was a grisly chore and no one especially enjoyed it even though they felt no pity for the dead men. The wounded men weren’t tied but when the cavalcade turned northward, men were handily placed beside them, not to guard them as much as to be sure they didn’t pass out and fall to the ground.
They had suffered no casualties at this last furious, brief skirmish, so their minds turned to the condition of their friends back at Springville. Sheriff Rainey said he thought they should auction off the horses, saddles, and weapons of the attackers to defray medical and nursing expenses for their wounded back in town, and to pay for the cost of burying their dead.
Everyone favored this. Arch, riding slightly ahead with Claude, leaned over and said, “We can do better than that, Sheriff. I’ll stand the cost of decent headstones and the best plots. If there are widows, I’ve got the means for seeing they’re taken care of, too.”
Claude smiled one of his very rare little smiles. He shoved out a grimy right hand. “Boy, why don’t you just sell that land of yours up at Raton and come settle amongst us down at Springville? I tell you, frankly, this is my last big manhunt. We’re going to need a sheriff to replace me. After all, I’m better’n fifty-five years old. That’s a tad old for this kind of monkey business, wouldn’t you say?”
Arch didn’t answer. He rode along in thoughtful silence for a long distance and meanwhile the sun rose higher, turning steadily hotter. Eventually, when Springville was again in sight, he said, “Claude, I just might take you up on that.”
They rode into town red-eyed, dirty, disheveled, and taciturn, to be met by armed men who stood, silent and motionless, watching them pass up the roadway from the southward desert. Springville had triumphed. It had paid a good price for its safety, but it had also very adequately demonstrated its resolute toughness. No town on the desert could survive so close to the lawless border unless it was tough, and unless it had tough lawmen, for in that raw, merciless world of heat and malevolence, there was no place for the weak or the timid.
the end
About the Author
Lauran Paine, under his own name and various pseudonyms, has written over a thousand books, and was born in Duluth, Minnesota. His family moved to California when he was at a young age, and his apprenticeship as a Western writer came about through the years he spent in the livestock trade, rodeo
s, and even motion pictures where he served as an extra because of his expert horsemanship in several films starring movie cowboy Johnny Mack Brown. In the late 1930s, Paine trapped wild horses in northern Arizona and even worked as a professional farrier. Paine came to know the Old West through the eyes of many who had been born in the nineteenth century, and he learned that Western life had been very different from the way it was portrayed on the screen. “I knew men who had killed other men,” he later recalled. “But they were the exceptions. Prior to and during the Depression, people were just too busy eking out an existence to indulge in Saturday-night brawls.” He served in the US Navy in the Second World War and began writing for Western pulp magazines following his discharge. It is interesting to note that all of his earliest novels (written under his own name and the pseudonym Mark Carrel) were published in the British market and he soon had as strong a following in that country as in the United States.
Paine’s Western fiction is characterized by strong plots, authenticity, an apparently effortless ability to construct situation and character, and a preference for building his stories upon a solid foundation of historical fact. Adobe Empire (1956), one of his best novels, is a fictionalized account of the last twenty years in the life of trader William Bent and, in an off-trail way, has a melancholy, bittersweet texture that is not easily forgotten. In later novels like The White Bird (1997) and Cache Cañon (1998), he showed that the special magic and power of his stories and characters had only matured along with his basic themes of changing times, changing attitudes, learning from experience, respecting nature, and the yearning for a simpler, more moderate way of life.
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