by Ralph Cotton
He turned and walked back to where he’d left the horses. When he took up his reins and the lead rope and went to step atop the roan, the horse balked and pulled away from him.
“Easy, boy,” Sam said. “What brought that on?” Even as the roan continued to resist on its reins, the Ranger noted the other two horses turning restless and hard to deal with on the lead rope. His first reaction was to look all around on the ground for any sign of a rattlesnake. Seeing none, he made a quick glance along the path beneath the overhang for wolves, or any other predators. Nothing . . . , he thought.
But as he turned back to the roan, he heard the first deep whir of wind on the far horizon and looked off toward it. He noted that the sky had settled; the wind appeared to have drawn its breath and held it. A yellowish pall lay beneath the low black sky—a suddenly dead and silent sky, he observed. Beyond the flat silence the whir of wind grew quickly into a roar. He felt his ears pop. The roan pulled harder against the reins in Sam’s hands and chuffed and nickered restlessly. The other horses huddled but scraped their hooves and chuffed and grumbled along with the roan.
“All right,” Sam said, “I hear it.” He looked closer at the horizon and watched the whirling spinning black mass of air rise, twisting into sight on the edge of the earth like some mad monstrous being risen from the lower realm with old scores to settle. “I see it too.”
He led the horse quickly to the deepest part of the overhang and looked all around. This would have to do, he told himself. He looked the horses up and down, seeing they had settled a little. There was no way he’d get all these three horses down at once, let alone hold them in place while the twister ran its course. He felt pain race through his wounded shoulder as he stripped off his swallow-tailed coat and ripped it into three pieces.
“Fellows, it’s going to get rough as a cob any minute,” he warned the horses as if they understood him. With no room to turn them facing the rocky wall, he huddled them side by side as close to the wall as he could. Then he slung a length of his ripped-apart coat around the roan’s head, covering its eyes, and tied it snug behind its neck. “You’re not going to want to see this,” he said, giving a quick rub on the roan’s muzzle while the roar of twisting, snarling wind grew louder, fiercer, moving closer from the distance.
“Easy, now, everybody gets one,” he said to the next horse, stepping in with the makeshift blinder raised for its eyes. Keeping his tone low and even, as soothing as a lullaby, he said, “This’ll all soon be over and you’ll feel foolish for letting it scare you.”
When he’d placed the blinder on the third horse, he kept a firm grip on the lead rope and the roan’s reins and stepped back and forth, still talking, saying anything beneath the growing roar.
The animals jerked and twitched as the storm encroached with the crunching of trees and cactus.
In the worst of it, he stood braced, his hat off and clamped beneath his left foot, the horses’ heads huddled and gathered to his as if in secretive planning, or desperate prayer. The horses jerked and twitched and nickered; the roan raised and cocked a rear hoof as if to threaten the wind away.
There’s a good chance you’re gonna be sucked out of here and blown away, a dark voice said inside him. The Ranger spoke to the horses in almost a whisper, feeling the twister pull at him, drawing his shirt so taught across his chest that he felt buttons pop off and fly away.
He disregarded that voice, staring down at his foot and the hat held beneath it. He held on to the horses and asked that dark voice in return what man or woman alive didn’t run that same good chance of dying every waking day of his or her life?
And there it is, he concluded; he drew a breath and let it out, taking on a feeling of strength somehow, from the horses, from the ancient stone hillside, from the wind itself, and in some odd way the smallness and fragileness of his and all other life around him no longer mattered.
“Courage,” he whispered to the roan’s twitching, nervous muzzle, as if sharing wisdom hard learned. He felt the horse’s hot breath on his hand, reassuring him, while the twister howled and whistled and chewed and ravaged its way along the rocky valley floor below their perch under the narrow overhang.
Chapter 14
At the town limits, a large wooden sign was propped in the ground, half-covered with mud. WELCOME TO TRADE CITY, it read.
A blast of a Mexican shotgun had taken out part of the phrase below, but one could still make out the words: IT’S DAMNED NEAR AMERICA. Floodwater running down from a hillside west of the town had formed a slow-moving creek across the trail that led to the town’s main stone-tiled street.
In a straight-falling rain, Orez and his sore and disheveled contingent stopped at the muddy water’s edge and stared across, along streets piled with downed roofs, strewn furniture and other less identifiable rubble the tornado had left behind.
“This answers the question of whether or not they got hit,” Orez said, staring along the street. He handed Rosa an old unloaded revolver he carried in his saddlebags. “Carry this. You’re one of us,” he said. He chucked his horse forward into the shallow muddy water. “Stay close to me,” he told her. “These folks see you with us, they won’t likely be your friends anyway.”
“I wasn’t going to try to leave,” Rosa said, putting her horse forward beside him, the big pistol in hand, resting on her lap.
Orez only glanced at her through caged eyes.
It was true, she told herself. She had not thought about leaving, not right then anyway. She was not one of them; she knew she wasn’t. Yet, for reasons she could not even begin to understand, she felt drawn to this man, to some strange and silent pain that seemed such a deep-grained part of him. His darkness seemed to pull at her and close in around her. She felt safe near him, even as she warned herself that he held her life or death in his hands. She caught herself straightening in the saddle and staring definitely at the devastated town laid fallen before them.
Behind Orez and Rosa, Hardin rode forward into the shallow water at a walk, leading Manning’s muddy horse by its reins. Freeman Manning sat wobbly in his saddle, a dazed look of uncertainty on his battered, blood-streaked face. Across the floodwater, a small red-haired boy and a spotted dog ran up to them. He and his dog passed Orez and Rosa in the street and fell in running, splashing alongside Manning and Hardin. The wet dog barked and snarled and snapped at Hardin’s horse’s hooves.
“My pa says if you ain’t come to help, keep moving,” the boy said up to the pair of beaten, muddy, battered gunmen.
Orez and the woman didn’t even look around.
“Tell your pa to go straight to hell, you little son of a bitch, take you and your yapping dog with him,” Hardin said flatly in a harsh tone of voice. Water ran from the sagging brim of his hat.
Hardin gave a quick jerk on his horse’s reins, and the animal released a sharp, muddy kick that sent the dog rolling and yipping. Finally the boy was able to scoop the dog up in his arms. He ran shrieking into an alley between two piles of fallen rubble.
“Pay attention up here,” Orez said back to the pair of bedraggled gunmen.
When the four came to a place where the new bank had stood only a couple of hours earlier, three townsmen with shotguns who stood watching stepped in closer and bunched in around a buckboard wagon. The wagon held four iron boxes with chains around them; big shiny locks kept the chains in place.
A man in a black, mud-smeared suit and a black string tie stepped into sight from around the side of the wagon. The rain held his hair plastered down to his bare head. His eyes looked vacant and stunned.
“We’re closed,” he said. He wiped his face with a palm of his hand.
“You look it,” Orez said.
He and the woman stopped. Hardin and Manning spread out abreast of him. The four looked down at the pile of debris. All that was left standing was a large black safe, its door ajar to accommodate two more men who h
auled out money and transferred it to another iron box. Two men stood by the safe’s door, bags of cash in hand. Water poured freely from their hat brims.
“I’m the bank’s manager, Lucas Turnbolt,” said the man in the wet black suit. He looked at the canvas money bags similar to his own hanging over Orez’s saddle cantle.
Orez only stared at him, his long hair plastered in strands across his face.
“Of course if you brought money here to deposit for safekeeping, I’ll gladly take it and write you a receipt for it,” said the bank manager.
“Safekeeping . . .” Orez looked away, off up the street where only a building had been left standing here and there. “Your bank does not look that safe to me,” he said.
Along the street townsmen hurried back and forth clearing pathways through the debris to their respective businesses. Mexican and Anglo townsmen alike stood in rubble waist-deep, drinking in the falling rain at an oak long bar left standing after the saloon had blown away around it. Two doves wearing rain slickers sat in chairs at a table that had somehow gone undisturbed.
The manager gave a shrug, used to defending his bank’s security and reputation under any circumstance.
“Oh, you’re referring to all this?” he said, gesturing a hand toward the fallen building. “This can happen to any bank, anytime. It’s true we never saw this coming, but your money is otherwise as safe here as it is anywhere on the border frontier. These men are ready to fight and die if need be to ensure our depositors’ holdings.”
“I bet they are,” said Orez. He stared back and forth at the riflemen slowly.
“So, about that deposit?” said Turnbolt. He tried to straighten his wet hair a little and offered a wide banker’s smile.
“Do I look like a depositor to you?” Orez asked. He pulled his wet hair off his face and hiked it back behind his ear. Water dripped from the tip of his nose.
One of the riflemen’s faces turned pasty and pale.
“My God, it’s Orez,” he said in a hushed tone.
“Yes, it is,” Orez said, “and we’re taking all this money off your hands before it all gets washed away.”
The other gunmen braced, shotguns in hand, rain falling, splattering steadily around them. The two men at the safe door stood frozen, holding bags of money, their rifles leaning against the side of the safe. The bank manager started to say something, but before he could, a gruff voice called out from the middle of the muddy street behind them.
“What cowardly son of a bitch’s horse kicked my boy’s dog?” said a large man who stepped forward throwing his rain slicker aside and rolling his sleeves up over his thick forearms.
Turning in his saddle to face the big red-bearded man, Hardin swung a long-barreled Colt from its holster, cocking it, and held it out arm’s length. Water dripped from its barrel.
“That would be my horse,” he said. “He is a kicker.” The dripping gun hammer dropped with an orange-blue explosion. Hardin’s gun hand bucked high as the red-bearded man took the shot in his right shoulder and spun in a muddy spray of blood. The man splashed down flat so fast that Hardin’s next shot only whistled through the air above him.
“All right,” said Orez almost matter-of-factly, his rifle already swinging around one-handed in front of him. “Kill everybody.”
“Wait! Don’t rob us!” Lucas Turnbolt shouted. “We’ve just got hit by a twister, for God sakes!”
“That ain’t the half of it,” said Orez, dropping him in the mud with his first rifle shot.
Around the buckboard, the riflemen moved against the robbers, but they didn’t move quick enough. As bullets whizzed back and forth, they fell one at a time beneath Orez’s and Hardin’s guns. Buckshot from one of the shotguns sliced across Rosa’s coat sleeve. When she let out a short scream, Orez singled out the man and dropped him with a bullet through his heart.
On the muddy ground the wounded man with the red beard shouted along the street, “They’re robbing the damn bank! Come running, all of yas!”
“Damn it, are you still alive?” said Hardin, turning again in his saddle and firing at the wounded man as the man scrambled away while shot after shot kicked up muddy water at his fleeing heels.
Orez swung down from his saddle and handed Rosa his reins. He walked through a looming cloud of gun smoke, toward the two men who still stood frozen, the money bags in their hands.
“I’ll take those bags,” he said. But when he saw both men glance toward their rifles as if preparing to make a move for them, he shot each of them in the chest, then walked up and took up the bags no sooner than they hit the ground. Turning, he held the bags up and showed them to Hardin. “This is a nice place to rob,” he said.
Hardin looked up the street through the smoke and saw men running toward them with guns.
“Uh-oh, here comes the town,” he said, already returning fire as bullets began zipping past them.
“Keep them busy,” Orez said to Hardin. He nodded at Manning. “You’d better get Manning to help you if he expects to get a share of this money.”
“Come on, Freeman, you heard him,” said Hardin, reaching over and shaking Manning by his arm. “Get to shooting! We’ve got all kinds of money, ours for the taking.”
Manning seemed to perk up a little. He drew his Colt from his holster, aimed it in the direction of the townsmen and fired. In spite of his dazed condition, a townsman fell, the bullet slicing through his chest.
“I’ll . . . do my best,” Manning said.
On the ground, Orez jerked his horse over, then Rosa’s, and hitched their reins to the rear of the buckboard.
“Climb down,” he said to Rosa. “We’re riding the wagon out of here.”
Rosa jumped down from her saddle and climbed into the wagon while gunfire exploded back and forth between the townsmen and the three outlaws. Orez ran to the front of the safe and picked up the two money bags the riflemen had been holding. Running back through a hail of bullets, he threw the bags up onto the buckboard, jumped up into the driver’s seat and slapped the reins to the backs of the two team horses.
“Stop them, shoot them! They are robbing us blind!” a Mexican townsman shouted, firing a long-barreled Colt as the wagon circled out onto the muddy street. The wagon fishtailed sideways in the mud, straightened and raced away through the falling rain, splashing back across the muddy runoff water out of town.
Behind the wagon, Hardin and Manning turned their horses and started to race away, but the red-bearded man appeared out of nowhere, snarling like a bear. Enraged, his shoulder covered with blood, he grabbed Hardin by his leg and tried to pull him from his saddle.
“Need a little help here, Freeman!” Hardin called out, trying to get a shot down at the man as bullets sliced through the rain and past his head.
Manning seemed to snap out of his dazed trance. He circled quickly to Hardin’s side and swiped a hard blow across the man’s head with his pistol barrel. The man went down to his knees but was still conscious, cursing and snarling, fresh red and pink blood running down the side of his head.
“Get out of here!” Hardin shouted above the roar of pistol and rifle fire. The two gunmen righted their frightened horses, turned them hastily as one and pounded across the shallow water out of town. Riding in the muddy spray left behind by the fleeing wagon, the two rode hard through the pouring rain until their horses fell in along-side Orez, who sat bowed forward in the driver’s seat.
Orez looked up at them, then stared back through the rain at the flooded trail ahead.
A mile farther along the trail, he looked around at the two splashing beside him.
“We have too much money,” he said. He nodded toward a nearby line of low hills and reined the team of horses off the trail toward them.
The two gunmen looked at each other. Hardin grinned widely in the pouring rain.
“We’ve got too much money, Freema
n,” he repeated to Manning. “Can you imagine that?”
“I’m feeling queer all over,” Manning said flatly, seeming to give no regard to what Hardin had said. “I’m going to stop and lie down a spell.” He started to veer his horse away. But Hardin grabbed the animal by its bridle.
“Lie down a spell? Like hell you are,” Hardin said. “Buck up, Freeman. Don’t you go dying on me now. We’ve got too much money for you to do something like that.” He looked Manning up and down. “Jesus, come on,” he said, seeing fresh blood trickle from his partner’s ear. He took the reins from Manning’s hand and led him on through the rain in the buckboard’s muddy wake.
• • •
On a jutting cliff made up of broken boulders sunken into the low hillside, Wilson Orez stood atop the tallest rocks and watched the two horsemen catch up to him and the woman. Before climbing down, he looked back in the direction of Trade City, seeing only a short ways before a swirl of gray rain cloaked the town from sight. Killing the townsmen guarding the buckboard had awakened a need for blood within him. His hand gripped and ungripped the handle of his big knife.
He clenched his teeth and fought down the urge to lift the knife from its sheath and slash out with it—cut something, anything. Hash something deep and mercilessly, he thought. But he calmed himself and thought about the money lying in the wagon below. A faint smile came to his rain-streaked face. He had money, he had a woman—everything most white men wanted, he told himself with a sense of disgust.
He looked up at the low swollen sky and felt rain fall into his open eyes. It was evening now. Soon it would be night. He needed the moon, he told himself. He had not seen it since the storms had moved in across the desert hill country. His Apachean spirit was of the water and of the moon. Water had cleansed and readied him; to be complete he needed the moon to course through him.
