Terror Trail

by Lyle Brandt

  Accepting their decision, Alchesay ordered, “Mount up! We ride to victory or death!”

  * * *

  * * *

  The attack began with shrieking war cries from beyond the tree line where Clint Parnell’s enemies had opened fire ten minutes earlier. If it had been Clint’s call, he would have had his fighters try for a surprise assault, instead of telegraphing their intent, but when the riders broke from cover, quickly recognizable as Chiricahua, their technique was easily explained.

  Scanning the field before him with his Browning Auto-5 shouldered, Clint saw ten riders charging out of cover, toward the jumbled rocks and fallen trees where his party had taken shelter under fire. The horsemen rode with skill and courage, rifles blazing as they closed the distance from their chosen enemies, their painted faces howling in a bid to terrify the travelers they had mistaken for a group of easy marks.

  “Wait for my signal to open up,” Clint called to his companions near the lake’s shore. When you fire, make each shot count!”

  It took a certain strength of nerve to watch the mounted Chiricahuas charging forward, firing long guns in an effort to expose their enemies. Clint wondered how it must have felt to the attackers, galloping headlong with no immediate response. When they had crossed the midway point between their first position and Lake Guzmán, right around the line of no return, Parnell decided they had traveled far enough.

  “Now!” he bellowed, and depressed the trigger of his Browning Auto-5, his deer slug drilling one of the advancing Chiricahua, spilling him backward across the taut rump of his pony, landing crumpled on the yellow grass now stained crimson with blood.

  Along the shoreline, ten more long guns joined the deadly fusillade. Their firing did not last long, since each shooter was a fair hand and only a couple of them had to fire a second time. By then, the grassy field was littered with corpses and dying braves, some of their ponies bolting from the battleground while others trotted aimlessly about, as if seeking their fallen riders. Clint’s Mescalero volunteers moved out from cover then and passed among the wounded, speeding up their deaths with knives or tomahawks to keep from wasting any further ammunition.

  That done, Nantan’s tribesmen claimed the body of their fellow villager, Bimisi, and prepared to bury him. Unlike some other Native tribes, most nomadic Apaches preferred to bury their dead underground without protracted rituals. When tribesmen died near home, their lodges and other belongings would be torched to ward off evil spirits, but that aspect of Bimisi’s funeral would have to wait until his fellow Mescaleros had arrived back in their village.

  If they ever did.

  One day across the Rio Grande, and Clint had lost one of his party, whittled to eleven members now. He was relieved that Sonya and Dolores had emerged unscathed from the engagement, but it worried him that losing one Apache early on might sow dissension among the remaining four. Would they desert him now that one of them was gone, an object lesson in the danger of their quest?

  Clint hoped not, but he never had been able to predict the future and was not beginning now. If the remaining Mescaleros chose to leave, he would not risk the lives of the Aguirre sisters or their ranch hands trying to prevent a rift within their company.

  He left that up to fate, hoping that it was past time for his luck to change.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Southeast of Ascensión, Chihuahua

  Pancho Villa sat astride his black stallion, left hand shading his eyes beneath the brim of his sombrero, staring skyward as a red-tailed hawk circled a hundred feet above his head in clear blue desert sky.

  “A hunter much like us, eh, Javier?” he asked his chief lieutenant seated to his left side on a grulla mare.

  “Sí, jefe,” Javier Jurado answered, “but we hope for bigger game.”

  That much was true beyond the shadow of a doubt. At best, the hawk might bag a kangaroo rat or a desert cottontail, but Villa and his men were after gold. Specifically, they had been tipped by an informer to a federale payroll shipment moving through their territory, passing by the point where they were staked out on this very afternoon. The troops were running late, but that was customary for the quality of officers and men Porfirio Díaz employed these days.

  Villa removed a watch from his vest pocket, opened it, and saw that it was well past two o’clock. Frowning, he put the watch away and reached down for a leather case that dangled from his saddle horn. Unbuckling its lid, he lifted out a pair of French binoculars made out of brass with a scratched-up black enamel finish.

  Thinking of the former francés officer he’d slain to get them, with a Lebel Model 1886 rifle that soon ran out of ammunition and was useless to him, Villa had to smile. At least the field glasses had served him well enough over the past few years, and no one to his knowledge ever missed their first owner, a rootless mercenary hired to train Díaz’s federales in pursuing bandits.

  Clearly, he had failed to learn that lesson well enough to save himself.

  Scanning the long road southward from his place atop a bushy rise, Villa saw dust rising around a short column of horses—possibly a dozen but no more—advancing toward the point he had selected for his ambuscade.

  “At last,” he told Jurado. “I’d begun to think the tontos might have lost their way.”

  “How many packhorses, jefe?” Javier asked.

  “I only see the one, but it is carrying two wooden chests.”

  “So, not a wasted effort, then.”

  “Let us hope not,” Villa replied, turning away to rouse his other men where they sat dozing in the desert heat. “¡Arriba, muchachos!” he ordered, and his riders scrambled to their feet, leaving whatever shade cactus and spiky Joshua trees had offered for their wait. They drew rifles from saddle boots, pistols from holsters on their belts, and formed a skirmish line below the sandy crest, awaiting Villa’s order to proceed.

  Villa alone did not reach for a weapon. He was the commander of this operation and would supervise in case it started to unravel unexpectedly. His force was nearly triple the eight federales sent by Díaz to defend his rural payroll, and he estimated half the soldiers would be killed or suffer wounds during the first barrage of fire his men unleashed upon Villa’s command. Beyond that they would stop the army packhorse one way or another, either leading it back to Ascensión or off-loading the treasure from its carcass, opening the chest, and doling out the riches waiting inside.

  In that case, Villa had no fear that any of his caballeros would attempt to pilfer from their take. All knew the penalty for stealing from the gang. All had observed the punishment for that infraction and would fear it more than God’s wrath from on high.

  “¡Prepárense!” he commanded, answered by the click-clack sound of rifles being primed and cocked. “Hold your fire until instructed otherwise.”

  He did not have to glance along the line to see them nodding in agreement. These were good men. Villa trusted them at least as far as he could see them—or, if need be, to the distance of his pistol’s range.

  * * *

  * * *

  Sublieutenant Rigoberto Valdés de Castillo eyed the winding track in front of him through the oval green lenses of fragile sunglasses that were designed to cut the desert’s glare but were useless when it came to sparing him from heat. Sweat glistened on his forehead underneath the bill of his peaked cap and streaked the dust he could not escape upon his cheeks.

  Valdés was recently promoted through the efforts of an uncle who did business with the government in Ciudad Juárez. The single brass bar on each of his red-rimmed khaki epaulets was still untarnished, but Valdés knew that he must soon begin the nightly ritual of polishing them, with his riding boots and the buttons on his tunic, to present himself before superiors in the best light available. Later, say when he had been promoted to first captain, there would be a lowly private to perform such tiresome chores on his behalf, but in the meantime he knew that appear
ances were everything.

  The payroll transfer was his first significant assignment, and it worried Subteniente Valdés, conscious as he was of brigands wandering around Chihuahua, sometimes exercising more influence on the peasantry than any federales fielded by Porfirio Díaz. He had no reason to believe any should be waiting for his party on their journey to Nuevo Casas Grandes, but the sheer uncertainty of it was grating on his nerves.

  Valdés was leading nine men, seconded by a grizzled corporal in his midforties who had spent a lifetime in the army, mostly chasing hostile Native tribesmen or abusing hapless campesinos when he had the chance. The rest were privates, two of them first class, the latter placed in charge of managing the packhorse and its precious cargo in four-hour turns.

  Each private carried a Mondragón Modelo 1908 rifle chambered for 7×57mm Mauser ammunition, the first self-loading semiautomatic combat rifle adopted by an army. Corporal Eugenio Elias packed a venerable Sharps carbine older than he was, while Valdés wore a holstered 9×19mm Parabellum Luger P08 designed in Germany. In a firefight, Valdés knew the military saber sheathed on his left hip would be no use to him at all.

  There was no reason why he should expect an ambush, but superiors had warned him that the moment when he least expected trouble might be the most dangerous of all.

  “Un momento, subteniente,” Corporal Elias called out from his place a yard or two behind the leader’s horse.

  Valdés reined up, half turning toward his second-in-command. “What is it?” he demanded.

  Peering toward a nearby ridgeline, Elias frowned through the stubble of a three-day beard and answered, “There is something—”

  But he never finished, as his whiskered face imploded, spewing blood and mangled tissue, while his rumpled campaign hat took flight with a good portion of his scalp inside it.

  A split second later, when the echo of a rifle shot reached Valdés, he could almost smell his dreams of swift advancement through the army’s upper ranks evaporating into gun smoke.

  * * *

  * * *

  Over gunsights, Pancho Villa watched the nearly headless federale slither from his saddle, dead before his body flopped onto the sand and gravel surface of the narrow road. The officer in charge, a young subteniente, recoiled from the sight of sudden death, then fumbled for his holstered sidearm as Villa’s bandidos raked the army column with a storm of rifle fire.

  “¡El oficial es mío!” Villa shouted to be heard above the crackling fusillade. “The officer is mine!” He waved his smoking rifle overhead for emphasis, to make sure his guerrillas understood.

  Downrange, some of the federales tried returning fire with their Mondragón rifles, but some immediately jammed, perhaps from shoddy maintenance or careless loading of their ten-round magazines. The soldiers who managed to operate their guns were poor shots under pressure, and their Mauser bullets, traveling at some 2,700 feet per second, fired at awkward uphill angles, barely grazed a pair of Villa’s snipers before those behind the guns sprawled into dusty death.

  Only the young lieutenant still remained upright astride his mount as Villa galloped down the sandy incline toward him. Grappling with his awkward full flap holster, situated backward on his left hip for a cross-hand draw, the officer was clearly having trouble with it until Villa fired his rifle from a range of thirty feet and pitched the federale from his horse, into the dirt.

  It was not meant to be a killing shot, but rather left the sublieutenant squirming on his back, reminding Villa of a capsized tortoise. Khaki cloth was going crimson from a shoulder wound, disabling the officer’s right arm, putting his pistol permanently out of reach unless he tried to draw it backward with his left hand.

  And he had no time to try that now, as Villa cantered up to him and leaned across his saddle horn, assessing the damage he had inflicted on his enemy.

  “You are finished I think,” he told the wounded officer.

  “I’ll live to see you face a firing squad,” his victim answered back, words rasping from between clenched teeth.

  Villa could only smile at that. “Your courage does you credit, but your mission is a failure. Díaz would not thank you for it, had you lived.”

  The sublieutenant’s eyes widened when he heard that, and he made another fumbling effort at his holster, cursing, before Villa got there first. Francisco did not waste another rifle bullet on the federale, going for his Mauser C96 “broom-handle” pistol instead.

  The weapon was a semiautomatic made in Germany and sold worldwide, to governments and individuals alike. Chambered for 7.63×25mm Mauser rounds, it held ten cartridges in an internal magazine set forward of the trigger and could empty out that load in under fifteen seconds flat, with an effective firing range around 150 feet.

  Today, Francisco fired it only once, at a barely eight-foot distance from his target.

  When the bullet struck, it punched a dark hole in the sublieutenant’s forehead, just above his left eyebrow. The federale’s head bounced off the roadway’s surface, then the third eye at his brow line filled with blood that ran in streamers down his face and up into his hairline, painting him as if he were a clown made up for Día de los Muertos. His recumbent form went slack and he was simply . . . gone.

  “Retrieve the packhorse,” Villa ordered no one in particular. “And do not touch the payroll chests. We open them together in Ascensión, and anyone who tries to crack them earlier está muerto. ¿Me escuchan?”

  None of his riders answered, but they heard and understood their leader well enough.

  It would be close to sundown when they reached their temporary headquarters, and they could well afford to wait.

  * * *

  * * *

  Hidalgo del Parral, Chihuahua, Mexico

  “It is a miracle that we have come this far, jefe,” said Alfonso Soberon.

  Sipping cold coffee at his chief lieutenant’s side, Emiliano Zapata Salazar nodded his agreement silently. Although raised by ardent parents to revere the Holy Mother Church, Zapata had no faith in miracles these days. He and his men had reached the farthest southern border of Chihuahua more by luck and cunning than by any help from God on high. Along the way, they’d fought two skirmishes with federales serving President Díaz, and they would all be sleeping under blankets without any fire tonight in case the soldiers were still hunting them beyond sundown.

  Tomorrow was another day, if they survived that long, and they were still some eighty miles southwest of Ascensión, where Pancho Villa was supposed to meet them with the horses he had stolen from New Mexico. Zapata’s solitary scout had found him on the road, reporting back that Villa had the animals but grew impatient waiting for Zapata to arrive.

  That was unfortunate, but with his thirty-odd riders, Zapata would still need the best part of a week to reach his destination, even if his men were not ambushed by federales while en route. And if they were . . .

  In that case, he might have no further use for horses in this life—or any life at all.

  At thirty years of age, Zapata sometimes felt like an old man. The previous year, he had succeeded aged José Merino as chief elder of Anenecuilco, a village in Morelos, elected by a landslide over two competitors. His pledge had been continuation of Merino’s budding land reforms, but he was blocked at every turn by the aristocrats supporting el porfiriato and Díaz. Finally, in desperation, he had opted for another course of action, hoping that some of the country’s leading brigands, Pancho Villa first among them, might be converts to his revolutionary cause.

  But first, Zapata had to meet with Villa personally, close their deal for horses, and take a reading of the man himself. A late arrival in Ascensión—or failure to arrive at all—would not be an auspicious start for their relationship.

  The other side of that scenario was that if soldiers met Zapata on the road north, executing him on orders from el presidente, then he had no future and it would not matter a
nyway.

  “More coffee, jefe?” Soberon inquired.

  Zapata shook his head, dumping the dregs from his tin mug into the desert sand. “I’ve had enough,” he answered. “We should try to get some sleep before sunrise.”

  “I’ll just sit up a little longer,” Alfonso replied.

  “Como desees, amigo,” said Zapata, rising from the rock where he was seated. “As you wish, friend. Our caballeros must be ready at first light.”

  * * *

  * * *

  Ascensión, Chihuahua

  Pancho Villa was no fool. He recognized that his bandidos were primarily in business for themselves but followed him as long as he put money in their pockets and did not appear too greedy when he cut his own slice of the pie. Accordingly, when he was counting out the federale payroll they had liberated, he formed thirty stacks of Caballito pesos on a weathered table outside a run-down café.

  Each coin was solid silver, weighing twenty-seven grams. Stamped on the front side was the year and a depiction of Miss Liberty holding a torch and olive branch, riding sidesaddle on a stallion. In the background, framing her, a rising sun dispersed its rays. On the back side was an eagle with its wings spread and a snake clutched in its talons, perched upon a mountaintop or boulder—Villa could not say with certainty—beneath an arch of words reading estados unidos mexicanos.

  Villa was irritated that his native country’s coins were cast to mimic silver dollars minted in the USA. In time, when Mexico was truly liberated from all foreign influence, he hoped the men in charge might demonstrate greater originality. But in the meantime, he was happy to relieve the Díaz government of any cash it handled carelessly by placing it within reach of his hands.

  Francisco formed the stacks of coins methodically, on terms his caballeros had agreed to in advance. From each pile of sixty-three coins he kept four as his own, stacked three for Javier Jurado, and left two for each of his twenty-eight riders. By the time he finished counting, each vaquero walked away with sixty-four pesos, his second-in-command had ninety-six, and Pancho kept one hundred forty-four. He thought that fair enough, since his share bought supplies to feed his men and horses, as well as information for the planning of their future raids.