by Lyle Brandt
They charged into the breaking rank of federales, whooping as they fired at point-blank range, one of them—Sonya thought it was Nantan Lupan—flailing at his adversaries with a tomahawk instead. She saw the hatchet’s blade slice through a peaked cap, opening the wearer’s skull, bathing his face in crimson as he died.
At the same time, Sonya heard another blast from Parnell’s shotgun, saw one of the army horses going down, pinning its wounded rider underneath its thrashing weight. The young man, also wounded, screamed as his left leg was crushed and ground into the sand. Grimacing, she fired a mercy round into his head, and that left three more .38 Specials before she had to switch that revolver out for the second pistol tucked inside a left-hand saddle holster.
Time slowed to a crawl in Sonya’s mind, and she could almost see herself, as if standing outside her body on the battle’s sideline. She was barely conscious of her actions as she aimed and triggered her revolver once again, rushing the shot and barely grazing her intended target. Yelping at the pain, that federale swung around to face her with his rifle shouldered, but he never got the chance to put her down. A bullet fired by someone else ripped through his jaw just then, twisting his whole face out of shape, and sent him tumbling to the ground, unconscious if he was not dead on impact.
Cursing in Spanish, Sonya wheeled her varnish roan around and sought another target in the midst of swirling dust and gun smoke.
* * *
* * *
Dolores pumped the lever on her Winchester, three aught-six rounds already gone, with one remaining in the rifle’s chamber and another next on tap from its internal magazine. Of three shots fired so far, she’d definitely hit two federales, likely killing one who’d fallen from his mount and failed to rise, with one clean miss counting against her.
Shooting in the maelstrom of close-quarters combat was a hazard, bullets flying everywhere, some fired in panic with no serious attempt to aim. Her snowflake Appaloosa was not gun-shy under normal circumstances, but this chaos, with horses and their riders racing back and forth, exchanging shots or savage blows at arm’s length, would have taxed the bravest man or animal.
She had already seen two of the federales try to flee, deserting under fire, and had dropped one of them herself, the other blasted from his saddle by some shooter she could not identify. Gun smoke had formed a patch of fog around the duelers, worsened by the rising dust from horses’ hooves and bodies dropping to the arid ground. Her ears were ringing, as if she were trapped inside a giant bell with someone on the outside hammering its sound bow till her head was ringing and the shouts of fear or fury rising all around her sounded muffled to her ears.
The fight was too intense to last, and while it seemed that time slowed down around Dolores, moving with a nightmare sluggishness that cast each bloody detail into sharp relief, she knew that only moments had elapsed before the gunfire ceased, its echoes fading out across the desert flats and into dusk. Clutching her horse’s reins, she swung it in a counterclockwise circle to survey the battleground, littered with human corpses and the bulky carcasses of animals caught in the crossfire.
There were no surviving federales, all of them shot down or finished off with knives and tomahawks once they were on the ground. Checking the members of her own team, she saw two of them had dropped to rise no more. One was a Mescalero, Goyathlay, a fragment of his skull detached by impact from a Mondragón Modelo’s Mauser bullet, spilling brains.
The second body took a moment longer for Dolores to identify, before a pang knifed through her chest. She had been fond of Paco Yáñez—more than fond, if truth be told, remembering his gentle kiss on recent moonlit nights, although they’d gone no further than propriety and Papa Alejandro would permit. Paco had fallen from his liver chestnut stallion, both gunned down while on the gallop, laid out on his back with sightless eyes staring into the lowering blue shades of nightfall.
Could those soft brown eyes see anything beyond the earthly plane? Dolores hoped so, prayed that the religion of her youth was accurate in promising good men a place in paradise, but it was not for her to say while she remained alive, somehow unscathed.
Clint Parnell’s voice cut through the ringing in her ears, distracting her from Paco and the grief she felt.
“We need to get our people out of here and underground,” he said, “then patch the wounded up as best we can and put some miles behind us while there’s still enough daylight.”
Glancing around once more, Dolores saw that two more members of their party—Joaquín Cantú from the hacienda and Kuruk, leader of their Apache allies—had received flesh wounds that ought to heal with proper treatment, if they could prevent infection from setting in. Putting her private thoughts away, Dolores joined in wrestling their two dead aboard surviving horses, then mounted her snowflake Appaloosa once again and joined the remnant of their band on a southeastern route of march.
“Where are we going?” she asked Clint, when she was close enough to speak without raising her voice.
“Should be a village up ahead called Agua Fria,” he replied. “After we finish with the spadework and the patching up, I’m hoping we can stay there overnight.”
* * *
* * *
Agua Fria, Chihuahua
“You know the people of this village?” asked Dolores.
Clint understood her doubt, the hesitancy after what they’d been through recently, and did not want to raise false hope. He gave it to her straight.
“I passed through some years back,” he said, “before your father took me on. Stayed overnight and had a home-cooked meal. I can’t swear anybody will remember me, but if they have the same headman, an old guy named Guillermo Alcazar, there is a chance he might. Don’t know how he or any of his people feel about Apaches, though.”
“You think that it is worth the risk?” Dolores pressed.
Clint mulled that for a moment. Said, “I think we run a greater risk by camping in the open, on our own. Those federales may be overdue somewhere, for all we know. How fast their officers start looking for them will depend on when and where they were expected back in camp.”
Dolores said no more, but Clint could feel her eyes upon him, with unspoken questions hanging in the air. As foreman of her father’s hacienda, he had known about her closeness to Paco Yáñez and could imagine what Dolores must be feeling now, at least to some extent. Parnell had never lost someone he cared about in that way to an act of violence and hoped he never would. With Yáñez’s death coming so close behind her brother’s death and Papa Alejandro’s injury, Clint hoped the anguish would not break her down.
And if it did, what then?
That was another worry weighing on Clint’s mind, despite the fact that he could do nothing about it. Only time healed wounds like those, and who knew how long the remainder of their party would survive in Mexico?
So far, they had lost three men on their first day in Chihuahua. Whatever might follow on the heels of that bloodshed remained a mystery.
For now, only Clint’s pledge to Alejandro kept him on the trail, hoping tomorrow’s sunrise would illuminate some path to the bandidos who had looted the Aguirre rancho and the horses they had stolen, threatening the family with poverty if they were not retrieved.
Agua Fria, when they saw it standing on the edge of night before them, looked like what Americans might call a one-horse town. In fact, as Clint recalled from his brief visit there, the village had no horses, although he remembered several burros kept for hauling carts or drawing plows through arid desert soil.
A cry went up from somewhere in the village as Clint’s party closed their distance to a quarter mile, some sharp-eyed lookout already on duty for the night. Before the party reached the first of ten to fifteen squat adobe buildings, most of Agua Fria’s population had turned out to meet the new arrivals, half a dozen of the men carrying hoes and axes as if they were just proceeding to a day’s work in the
nearby cultivated fields.
Out front stood a familiar couple, old Guillermo Alcazar and his wife Beatriz, the village elders, neither one elected to a formal post but honored for their wisdom drawn from life experience. Parnell suspected that if he could add the venerable couple’s ages they’d be working on their second century.
But would their memories hold any trace of him from years ago?
Clint doffed his hat as he approached the line of villagers, a gesture of respect, and spoke directly to the man in charge. “Don Guillermo,” he said, “I don’t know whether you remember me . . .”
“Of course, amigo,” the old man replied. “You spent a night with us some time ago. The date, I must admit, escapes me now.”
“And me as well, jefe.”
“You were alone last time, but now arrive with friends,” Don Guillermo observed. “Including three young Mescaleros.”
Parnell nodded. Said, “If that creates a problem for you, we can move along.”
“No problem comes to mind,” Guillermo said. Then asked, “How long might you remain with us this time?”
“Same as the last,” Clint said. “Just overnight. And we can pay for food, for water.”
Guillermo frowned slightly, as if Clint’s offer insulted him, but Beatriz spoke up before her husband could reply. “Nonsense,” she said. “We give freely, expecting nothing in return for Christian charity.”
“That’s mighty kind of you,” Clint said. “We’re out tomorrow at first light, I promise you. People to see and business to conclude.”
“You all look weary from the road,” Don Guillermo advised. “I see two of your friends have suffered injury.”
“A little disagreement with bandidos on the trail,” Clint lied.
“We can attend to them,” said Beatriz. “Then una comida caliente while the young ones take care of your horses.”
“Much obliged, señora,” Parnell answered for his crew at large. “A hot meal sure would hit the spot.”
* * *
* * *
Agua Fria, Chihuahua
A coward at heart, Diego del Paso was trembling with fright but determined to proceed regardless of the risks his plan entailed. He dared not think of how the gringo visitor and his companions might react—let alone the Mescaleros—if they knew about his treachery, much less the other people of his village, if and when they learned he was responsible.
Greed drove him forward, even though his hands were trembling as he led one of the village burros out of its corral and crept through darkness toward the south side of the village, waiting until he was well beyond its limits before mounting up and pressing out.
The plan had come to him full-blown while Diego eavesdropped on a private conversation held between Guillermo Alcazar, the gringo, and the two young women who had ridden at his side when their strange group arrived suddenly. Spying was not difficult in Agua Fria for a lifelong sneak, although del Paso had missed certain details of the story when voices were lowered, nearly whispering.
It was the women who had drawn him to the headman’s home initially. Diego, just turned twenty years of age, had never laid his eyes on twins before, much less a pair that stirred his loins so strongly, giving him sharp visions of desire. At first, he’d merely hoped to shadow them, perhaps catch glimpses of them partially undressed as they prepared for sleep, but once he overheard their words, Diego understood that it was time for thinking bigger, reaching out to grasp a prize he would not have to share with any of his fellow visitors.
Indeed, it might just be his key to getting out.
The gringo and his friends were from New Mexico, across the Rio Grande. They were riding through Chihuahua seeking vengeance and a herd of horses stolen by bandidos from an hacienda there, and they had suffered hardship on the trail so far, ambushed by a Chiricahua raiding party first, then clashing with a troop of federales, wiping out the small patrol and taking losses of their own.
That told del Paso there was money to be made, and he did not intend to share it with his fellow villagers.
He knew a place where soldiers camped, a few miles south of Agua Fria, and Diego reckoned they would pay for information that would lead them to the slayers of their comrades. If Diego asked them nicely, groveled properly, their comandante might allow him private time with one or both of the beguiling twins, before they faced the mandatory firing squad.
But if need be, Diego would be satisfied with gold, enough for him to reach a major city—Ciudad Juárez, perhaps, or possibly Victoria de Durango—where he could make a fresh start and the villagers who looked upon him with disdain in Agua Fria could not track him down.
That is, if any of them should survive once federales learned they were responsible for sheltering a gang of killers from el norte.
Determined not to fail, Diego climbed aboard his stolen burro, flicked its rump with a Texas persimmon switch, and moved on through the desert night.
CHAPTER TEN
Captain Isidro López-Dóriga smiled to himself as he pictured his comandante pinning a Medal of Military Merit on his tunic, or perhaps even a gilt-edged, red-enameled Decoration for Heroic Valor for tonight’s action. He might even be promoted if he pulled the mission off successfully, perhaps to wear a major’s golden star or two for a lieutenant colonel.
On the other hand, if he should fail . . .
Captain López-Dóriga pushed that thought aside, determined that he would succeed in tracking down and punishing the outlaws who had traveled to Chihuahua from New Mexico and killed a dozen federales while pursuing horse thieves. He had brought along the stool pigeon from Agua Fria, under guard in case he tried to break away, and anything that happened once López-Dóriga’s men reached Agua Fria would be based upon the information that Diego del Paso had sworn to at gunpoint and under oath.
The whining campesino had resisted coming with López-Dóriga to his native village, but the captain needed him to single out the fugitives and finger those who’d made them welcome when they turned up on the cusp of sundown. In López-Dóriga’s mind, all residents of Agua Fria shared in that complicity, and if he had to wipe their village off the map, so be it.
Those who made bad choices suffered the consequences.
And sometimes those who just got in the way must suffer, too.
That was the state of life in Mexico today, and all around the world, from what Captain López-Dóriga understood.
Riding to the captain’s right, Lieutenant Jacobo Ferriz asked, “How much farther to the village, comandante?”
López-Dóriga answered with a question of his own. “Have you not been there before?”
“There has been no occasion for it until now, señor.”
“Five miles, perhaps. No more than six. You’ll find it much like any other clutch of campesino hovels in Chihuahua.” Turning toward Diego del Paso, the captain said, “Remind me of the headman’s name in Agua Fria, pig.”
Cringing, the informador replied, “Guillermo Alcazar, jefe.”
“I thought he would have died by now,” López-Dóriga sneered, remembering the old man whom he had confronted on his last pass through the village.
“Not unless he’s passed on since I left tonight,” del Paso said, forcing a smile.
“You find humor in this?” López-Dóriga snapped at him.
“No, jefe! Not at all!”
The traitor’s mood had switched in a split second from attempted jocularity to cringing fear. López-Dóriga liked the latter more, and he could not resist adding, “That’s good, because tonight may yet turn out to be your last.”
Del Paso nearly whined as he replied, “I came to you in good faith, capitán, to help you and report the murder of your men.”
“You came to help yourself, hoping there would be a reward,” López-Dóriga countered. “If you’re muy afortunado, that reward may be your worthless life. If not
. . .”
“I only wish to serve you, capitán,” del Paso fairly whimpered.
“And you shall,” López-Dóriga answered back. “In one way or another.”
The captain left del Paso sniveling and fighting not to show it. Truth be told, he would have no use for the spy once he was finished with the night’s business in Agua Fria and had already determined that whatever else might happen in the village, his informer would not live to see another sunrise. There were two reasons for that: López-Dóriga personally hated tattletales, although he made use of them in his work, and it would look better for him—improve his prospects for promotion—if he solved the massacre of troops himself, without an intervening middleman. His coronel at headquarters need never know that fate had dropped that gift into López-Dóriga’s lap without a hint of work on his part.
Heroes were not made that way, and he had learned during his first year with the federales that they did not share the credit for their deeds with anybody else who might detract attention from themselves.
So be it, then. Whatever else transpired in Agua Fria on this night, however many enemies were slain, Diego del Paso was taking his last breath beneath a pale moon whose light made the desert seem an alien landscape, where mortal danger lurked in every shadow.
Suppressing a brief shiver down his spine, Captain López-Dóriga called an order back along the marching column to his men. “¡Preparen sus rifles!”
They responded instantly, in unison, snapping the bolts back on their Mondragón self-loading rifles, each man chambering a Mauser round that would soon find its way into some human target’s flesh.
* * *
* * *
Agua Fria, Chihuahua
Despite her weariness after a day of riding through the Chihuahuan Desert and the battles she had fought, Sonya Aguirre found that sleep eluded her. She could not stop her mind from racing, haunting her with images of combat, the companions she had lost that afternoon, and strangers she had helped to kill.
