The man was waiting for him, but was disconcerted by Yancey’s violent appearance. He lunged up, snapping his six-gun around and down as Yancey worked the lever in three swift shots. Two hit the man and set his body shuddering. The third ricocheted from the wall in a puff of dust. Then the man bounced off the wall and fell flat on his face, unmoving. Yancey spun towards a sound on his right and held his fire as he saw Cato, rifle in one hand, dragging a disheveled, bleeding, limping man with the other.
The man had been hit in the leg and he was bleeding plenty. His face was battered and a long, slim splinter projected from his upper arm. Cato flung him to his knees where the man stayed, head bowed, moaning as he gripped the wound in his leg.
“Tried to run clear through a fence,” the small Enforcer said. “But he ain’t one of the Burdins.”
“Nor is this hombre,” Yancey said, standing now and heaving the dead man over with a boot toe. He raked his gaze around at the Mexicans who were tentatively gathering at the alley mouth, rifle ready. But no one made any hostile moves. Yancey squatted down by the wounded man, twisted fingers in his hair, and yanked his head back roughly, studying the pain-filled face. “Who are you?”
“Goddamn you, whoever you are!” the man hissed.
Yancey wrenched the man’s hair hard that brought a cry from his lips. He shoved the reeking rifle muzzle under the man’s chin.
“You want to keep walkin’ around with your head still on your shoulders, you’ll answer my questions, mister. I’m Yancey Bannerman, Enforcer for Governor Lester Dukes, and this here’s my sidekick, Johnny Cato.”
The wounded man swore softly. “Judas priest! Wouldn’t you know it! You don’t have no jurisdiction down here, Bannerman!”
“Aw, hell, a two-bit frontier lawyer,” growled Cato derisively.
The wounded man snapped his head around. “I’ll tell you who the hell I am!” he gritted. “I’m Ranger First Class Wallis Undine, undercover agent, and you two hombres just blew my assignment to hell and gone! Not to mention my damn leg!”
The Enforcers were rocked by the man’s words and somehow neither doubted him.
“You ran when we showed and you traded lead with us,” Cato pointed out.
“Sure I did! Damn it, I worked for three months to get in with Ringo Crane there.” He gestured to the dead man against the wall. “He’s one of a gang smugglin’ wetbacks into Texas. We were on our way down to meet the leaders an’ you hombres had to show up and blow everythin’ apart!”
“We don’t carry a crystal ball about with us, Undine,” Yancey said. “You started the shooting and you ran. What the hell were we to think?”
“Look, Ringo thought I was on the dodge. I had to run when he ran, shoot what he shot at, though I aimed high, I tell you! I had to make it look good! He picked you fellers for some sort of lawmen the way you rode back and forth through town lookin’ for someone. Aw, hell, Bannerman, someone’ll have your neck for this!”
“Not our fault,” Yancey said. “Just one of those things.”
“Hell almighty! Three months’ work gone just like that and you call it ‘one of those things!’”
“Luck of the game,” Cato growled. “We’re after the Burdin brothers. Know ’em?”
The undercover Ranger had stiffened and he nodded slowly. “Steve and Slim. Where the hell’re they? Both know me. If they show I’m sunk! But you could leave me here now and I might still salvage somethin’. Leastways, I could move on to the next link in the chain. After that it’s anybody’s guess what’ll happen. But you gotta keep the Burdins away from me. That’ll square this, if you can do that, huh?”
Yancey sighed and thumbed back his hat, trading glances with Cato.
“I guess from that, you haven’t seen them.”
Undine frowned. “Here?” He shook his head. “They ain’t showed here. We been hangin’ round for over two weeks waitin’ for word to move on south an’ we only just got it. Nope, the Burdins ain’t been anywhere around these parts, Bannerman.”
The big Enforcer frowned. “Word was they were making for Tenayuca, leaving a string of bushwhackers along the trail. We skirted the usual trail and came in from the north-east. But the Burdins should’ve been here by now.”
Undine shook his head. “Stake my life on it. They ain’t around here.”
The Enforcers were puzzled.
“Best get you to a sawbones, I reckon,” Yancey said and frowned as Undine gave a short laugh.
“Here? None around here, Bannerman. But I’d be obliged if one of you fellers could dig out this slug from my leg and bandage it for me. I’ll get by then and move on along the line towards the meetin’ with the big shots in this wetback combine.”
Yancey regarded him with some respect.
“Could be more dangerous than ever now.”
“Got to take that chance. I’ll tell most of the truth; that you’re a coupla marshals exceedin’ your authority an’ down in Mexico after the Burdins. You weren’t interested in me nor Ringo: we just happened to get in your way. This bullet wound might just get me accepted better’n anythin’ else I could come up with now that I think about it.”
“Could kill you, too,” Cato pointed out. “Easy to get infected if you ain’t got a sawbones to check it.”
“I’ll have one take a look at it when I get down to Mexico City.”
Yancey and Cato carried the man into his dingy room at the rear of the cantina, much to the consternation of the owner.
They got Undine drunk on tequila and Cato hit him flush on the point of the jaw. Then Yancey heated the blade of his clasp knife in a candle flame and cut and dug around in the bloody flesh until he was able to remove the misshapen lead slug. The wound bled copiously and he bound a thick pad tightly over it.
They waited until Undine regained consciousness and, although the man was in a deal of pain, he said he would be fine now and could make his own way. It bothered him that the Enforcers were still hanging around.
“Vamoose out of here,” he gritted. “Leave me. It’ll look better for us all. But I tell you one thing: the Burdins ain’t got this far south. We been watchin’ the railroad, too, and they ain’t jumped any trains farther south. You fellers’ve gotta head back north if you want to get ’em.”
That puzzled the Enforcers but they had to take the undercover Ranger’s word for it. He was a man who had been in this area for two and a half weeks, watching the country all around Tenayuca, and the railroad as well. If he hadn’t sighted the Burdins or gotten some whisper about them, then they sure hadn’t come this far.
“Looks like they pulled a fast one or that hombre was lyin’ back in Texas,” Cato said.
“Reckon he wasn’t lying,” Yancey said. “He told us what he believed the Burdins were gonna do. They must’ve changed their minds or had just told the others that, aiming to pull a double-cross.”
“Well, where the hell does that leave us?”
“With one helluva long search on our hands, Johnny,” Yancey told him resignedly. “One helluva long search ... And the sooner we get started the better.”
There were other cantina towns in the general area and the Enforcers checked these out one by one. They ran into a little trouble here and there and once it had to be settled with guns but after they had shot down four men in a mob who had tried to corner them in a dead-end street, they had no trouble getting free of that town.
By spreading a few pesos in the right places, they found that the Burdins hadn’t been spotted in Tenayuca for some time.
“It leaves just the trail back to the Rio, Johnny,” Yancey said at a cold night camp on a peak in the sierras, just below snowline. “We’ll have to backtrack clear to where they crossed the Rio.”
“Could be that any ambushes they got round to riggin’ will still be waitin’ for us,” Cato opined.
Yancey nodded slowly. “Yeah. That’s Porfirio’s territory, too, I hear. Your old amigo.”
Cato’s mouth was grim. “He swore he’d crucify
me on a cactus with machetes next time we met. Ought to be interestin’ if we run into him.”
“We will,” Yancey told him soberly. “He runs things up that way, now. Moved in on Alvarez so that hombre told me yesterday. If the Burdins had to deal with him to rig the ambushes, chances are they didn’t get past him. If Porfirio sniffed gold, he’d gut them on the spot.”
Cato mounted swiftly. “No use puttin’ it off. Let’s go, Yance. I’m gettin’ kinda tired of the whole blamed thing now. Want it finished some way or t’other. Damn’ Burdins just ain’t worth all this trouble.”
Yancey was inclined to agree but they had the chore and couldn’t return to Austin and Governor Dukes until it was done.
Checking out their weapons carefully, they started back along the trail that would lead them to the border—if they could get by Porfirio’s cut-throats ...
There was no ambushes along the trail and this surprised them to a certain extent. They concluded that if bushwhacks had been arranged in the first place, then Porfirio had called them off, or the Burdins had simply never gotten past the bandits’ camp once they had shown they were carrying gold.
On sundown, they came upon a small encampment of three men on a sandy beach in the bend of a river that wound down out of the rugged Cordilleras. They were Mexicans and it was obvious they were supposed to be on guard but had chosen to stay huddled close to the campfire for it was cold on the slopes when the sun went down. The Enforcers crept in after dark and took the tequila-drinking Mexicans by complete surprise. They professed to know nothing, said they were shepherds looking for strayed sheep, but the crossed bandoliers and the old full-stocked, bolt-action Snider rifles gave truth to their true profession. When they saw Cato stirring the coals and placing the long blade of his hunting Bowie in the fire to get red hot, they decided to be more truthful.
They were Porfirio’s men, supposedly guarding the canyon hidden around the next butte. They told of two gringos who had come to the bandit camp and tried to arrange for two other norteamericanos to be ambushed when they showed. Porfirio had had them both killed, the men told the Enforcers and they were buried where they fell, in the high camp.
Right now, only Porfirio and three men were there; the rest were out on raids, pillaging and raping and murdering in the hills.
The Enforcers securely tied up the three guards, put them in a cave and then rolled three heavy rocks across the entrance. They might eventually get free but it would be long after the Enforcers had been to Porfirio’s camp.
They arrived at noon the next day and spent the afternoon in the hills, watching, counting. As the guards had said, there were only four men, including Porfirio himself, though there were a few women strolling around and the Enforcers knew these could be fighting women; they often were if they rode with the bandits.
But the women ran, screaming, from the camp, when the two Enforcers rode in just after dark, quick-fire rifles hammering like Gatling guns, cutting down the running, yelling, bewildered bandits. Cato whipped his mount around, lunged it after a man who was turning in mid-stride, trying to bring up a six-gun. The small Enforcer rammed into him with his horse and the bandit’s body was flung back several feet, where he hit a rock and lay, dazed.
Then Cato spun in the saddle as there came a wild yell and he caught a glimpse of Porfirio himself leaping at him from a rock, murderous machete raised. Cato palmed up his Manstopper, thumbing the toggle expertly to shot barrel. Porfirio’s body hit his horse’s rump and slid off. Cato jumped his mount around as the bandido leapt to his feet and drew his arm back, ready to hurl the machete. The Manstopper’s hammer dropped and Porfirio was blown to rags by the muzzle blast.
Yancey, meantime, had shot down one man and was drawing bead on the lone survivor. Suddenly, the man threw away his gun and lifted his arms sky-high. He was a fraction of a second too late. Yancey had already released the hammer. The gun bucked and the bandit went down without a sound and never moved again.
They could hear the women in the rocks, clambering higher up the slopes, sobbing with the effort, calling to each other, frightened. Cato dismounted and walked over to the man he had ridden down, stirring the moaning bandit with his boot.
“This one’s still alive—for now,” he called to Yancey.
The big Enforcer dismounted and ran across, thumbing fresh loads into his rifle’s tubular magazine. He placed a boot under the semi-conscious Mexican’s chin and eased his weight forward. The man gurgled, eyes wide and staring in fear.
“I could snap your neck in a second, amigo. The only thing that’ll keep me from doing it is if you tell me what happened to the gringos called Burdin ... ”
The man tried desperately to nod and Yancey kept the pressure on for a second longer, then eased off.
“Porfirio keel ’em,” the man rasped.
Cato leaned down and hauled the terrified man to his feet. He rammed his smoking Manstopper muzzle into his belly.
“Prove it, feller,” he gritted.
The man could hardly walk he was so afraid, but he took them just outside the camp and showed the Enforcers twin mounds of earth that had been dug away in a couple of places by scavenging mountain animals.
“They are buried there,” he gasped.
Yancey flung him forward so that the man dropped to his knees in the dirt. The Enforcer placed his gun muzzle against the back of the man’s head.
“Dig ’em up,” he ordered.
The Mexican looked horrified, began to whimper. But the Enforcers were adamant. They needed proof, needed to see the Burdins’ remains for themselves.
In less than an hour, they had proof that the Burdins were dead and their long search was over.
It was time to return to Texas.
Five – A Different Man
There wasn’t going to be a lot of time to get to Del Rio for Big John Early’s wedding.
Cato and Bannerman were back in Austin, waiting for an audience with the Governor so as to give their personal report on the Burdins. Kate Dukes, the Governor’s daughter, came out of her father’s study, looking smart and fresh in white blouse with ruffled lace front and wearing a dark blue skirt. She was young and vital and there was a special warmth in her smile for Yancey as she stopped in front of the two men.
“Father can see you now. And, Yancey—I’ve reserved a table at the Peacock Theatre for tonight—my treat.” She turned to Cato. “I’m sure you can find some lady to accompany you, John, because you’re invited.”
Cato smiled a little stiffly. “Why—uh, thanks, Kate, but I ain’t sure I can make it.”
Kate looked disappointed but then smiled again at Yancey, slipping an arm through his and briefly hugging him.
“Well, I can’t say that I’ll be too disappointed that we’ll be dining alone, Yancey! It’s been so long! Months!”
It was true. Before Yancey had set out on the Burdin assignment, Kate had been absent, visiting kinfolk in St Louis, and the weeks had turned into months and the long separation had made them both yearn for each other. But now Kate’s smile slowly faded when she saw the big Enforcer’s face.
“Er—I’ll go get started and tell the Governor what’s happened, Yance,” Cato said diplomatically, slipping away and knocking briefly on the big carved doors before entering Lester Dukes’ study.
Yancey and Kate faced each other a mite awkwardly in the passage outside.
“What is it, Yancey? I thought the assignment was over and done with?” she asked anxiously.
“Yeah, well, it is Kate. But—uh—I’ve got to get moving almost right away again.”
“Why, for Heaven’s sake?”
“I’ve got to go back to Del Rio.”
“Del Rio! What—what’re you talking about, Yancey? Father’s just promised me that you’ll have at least two weeks’ leave before your next assignment, and here you are telling me you’ve got to go to Del Rio. I just don’t understand.”
“Uh—well, it’s on account of a wedding I’ve been invited to.”
Kate blinked. “Wedding?” she echoed vaguely.
“Yeah. I’ve been asked to be best man.”
“Oh. Well—look, Yancey, don’t give it to me in bits and pieces. Whose wedding is it? Am I invited?”
“N-no—you’re not invited, Kate. It’s Big John Early’s wedding.”
If Kate had looked puzzled before, she looked positively bewildered now, staring blankly at Yancey. Then her eyes hardened a little as she focused them on Yancey’s face.
“John Early! That wild man getting married! I don’t believe it!”
“True, Kate. Marrying a gal named Conchita Morales. Her father’s one of the old-style hidalgos, got him a big ranch south of the Cordilleras de Cristo. I know you and Big John never got along ... ”
“I should say not! You almost got killed rescuing him from a situation of his own making in El Paso. Then in San Antonio he challenged four men to a fight and you had to go and help him again. You got a broken arm that time, and three fractured ribs. He got drunk in Amarillo, cracked the skulls of two Rangers on guard outside the house where my father was staying because he thought you were inside and he wanted a drinking companion. In Dodge he …”
She stopped and threw up her arms, turning and pacing away a few yards down the passage, turning again and coming back to where Yancey stood.
“In Dodge, it was in a bordello that the trouble happened and I’m still not sure I believe your story about the fighting women tearing most of your clothing off, Yancey!”
He laughed. He couldn’t help it; it was partly the memory of that unforgettable wild brawl in the whorehouse when Big John Early had cut loose because his pockets had been rifled while he had been “otherwise engaged” with one of the ladies. And it was partly the fact that Kate could still get mad at that same memory when Yancey had emerged, bleeding, clothes hanging from him in tatters, a naked girl on his back trying to claw his eyes out and pull his hair out by the roots at the same time. Kate hadn’t been sure that Yancey hadn’t been ‘otherwise’ engaged like Big John and he had deliberately never fully explained that he had been called in to try to quieten John down but had finished up becoming embroiled in the fighting.
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