by RW Krpoun
Sunstone
By RW Krpoun
Copyright 2015 by Randall Krpoun
All rights reserved.
ISBN-13: 978-1516847570
ISBN-10: 1516847571
Dedicated to Corene, Nonie, and Joy, three bold travelers whose journeys and adventures are the stuff of legend.
Chapter One
Billy Taylor was going to die.
Seeing the play unfold, I was initially torn between minding our own business and giving a fellow gringo a helping hand. On the one hand getting into an unnecessary gunfight this far into Mexico was not a good idea, but on the other we might be in the area for a while and it would not be wise to let the locals get the idea that killing Yankees was an acceptable policy. 1912 had not been a good year for Mexico so far, and looking weak was not an safe course to follow for anyone, local or outsider.
Then I recognized Billy, and that clinched the deal: he wasn’t exactly a friend, but we had soldiered together. Unlike some I don’t get misty-eyed about the days I spent killing heathens for Uncle Sam, but I don’t regret them, either. The eagle had paid on time in hard currency and that’s about all you can ask for in these modern times.
Billy had aged a lot since he was wearing dirty shirt blue in the old Fourteenth Infantry, more than the actual eleven years that separated us from those days. He was a year or two younger than my thirty-two, but the lines on his lean face and the gray in his thinning hair added two decades to his actual years. He was still the same scrawny runt who had been dwarfed by his Krag on the long march to Peking, though.
Running into an old comrade in a run-down bar a hundred-fifty miles inside Mexico should have been a surprise, but I wasn’t unduly shocked. The revolution was attracting all sorts and it wasn’t a stretch to imagine Billy amongst the idealistic northerners who were helping one rebel faction or another. Here in the state of San Quierto General Hernandez was working overtime to give military strongmen everywhere a bad name and the do-gooders were thick on the ground.
My temper wasn’t the best it could be in any case even before the trouble started. Riding a hundred-fifty miles into a revolution, especially into a deranged warlord’s portion of said uprising, was bad enough before we discovered that the Judge had changed his digs. Being left at sixes and sevens we had adjourned to the local cantina to ponder our next move over a few shots of tequila. Or at least the others were drinking tequila-I had quit drinking a couple years ago when the ghosts had started dogging my heels. Staying sober had helped the ghost business a bit, but not enough.
There were only a few patrons in the dingy cantina when we came in: a scattering of locals who immediately took great interest in their drinks at the sight of three hard-faced Americanos, a fat Anglo in a dusty suit with a leather sample case nuzzling his leg, and a skinny white man in work clothes who was in deep conversation with two peons. Other than a casual glance to ensure that nether of the whites were our man we minded our own business.
Then a meticulously-dressed Mexican in a white suit had strolled in with two rough-looking pistoleros in tow. He took a seat, got his bearings, and then sent his gun thugs over to loom over the diminutive Billy, who appeared to be unarmed. Billy tried to ignore them, but the peons promptly froze like spit in a Dakota blizzard, leaving him no choice but to acknowledge the pair.
I had a perky little whore sitting on my lap chattering away so I didn’t hear what was said, but I knew from the body language the gist of the exchange-I had been on both sides of such discussions in the past. Sighing, I dropped a silver dollar into the girl’s cleavage and lifted her into an empty chair-I may be getting older and seeing things but I am still as fit as I’ve ever been.
Standing, I settled my derby squarely on my head and headed over to the confrontation, moving without haste. I didn’t bother saying anything to the others because it was their job to know what was going on-the Agency hadn’t hired any of us for our boyish good looks. To a man we were tough and clever enough to get the job done, and just dumb enough to choose to do this kind of work.
The fop in the white suit had his eyes on me even as I stood, but the two gun-thugs didn’t notice me until I was three feet away-they were stupid men used to bullying peons.
When they finally noticed me the nearer stepped back and away so I was facing both squarely; Billy took the opportunity to get out of his chair and out of the line of fire. They both gave me the ‘dangerous man’ grin that they probably practiced in front of mirrors, hands on the butts of the cheap copies of Smith and Wesson Russians they were wearing in overly fancy belts and holsters. The bigger pistolero started giving me the ‘what you want senor’ business, but I wasn’t listening to them. They were confident because I was wearing a derby, suit coat, dress trousers, and plain shirt with a tired tie. They knew I was armed by the strap of my shoulder holster which crossed my chest under my coat, but weren’t too concerned because my hands were at my sides. They missed the triangular pin on my lapel, or the way I stood, or that my boots didn’t really go with the suit, or the way I had bumped my left forearm against my side as I approached.
The sleeve-spring smoothly popped the derringer into my left hand, the first .41 rim-fire catching the talker just to the left of his oft-broken nose, the second just above his right eyebrow, dropping him in mid-sentence. The second thug gaped at this sudden development for the split-second he had left to live before Mac shot him twice in the center torso, fast, and then sprayed a halo of brains with an aimed shot. This showmanship annoyed me as his rounds were passing damn close to my person and aimed or not a bullet passing by isn’t good for your heart.
Slipping the derringer off its spring clip and into my coat pocket, I walked over to white-suit’s table and took a seat, thumbing the hammer of my Artillery model Colt Single Action to half-cock and flipping open the loading gate.
“So,” I turned the cylinder, watching the bright cartridge bases pass each in turn. “You don’t like Americans?”
“I am just here for a drink,” he assured me.
“Are you with the government?” I closed the loading gate, set the hammer, and slid the revolver back into my shoulder holster.
“I…am a friend of the Rurales.”
A bounty hunter, then, bringing in rebels for the price on their heads. I displayed my Agency credentials in their leather folder. “I am here on behalf of my organization, which has been contracted by your government. That man there,” I nodded towards Billy, who was helping the bartender and the peons remove the bodies, “Is of use to my investigations. I would consider it a favor if you would leave him alone for today and tomorrow.”
“Of course, senor. May I buy you a drink?”
“Thank you, but I must decline as my stomach has been troubled by my travels.”
Billy came over as I was fitting the reloaded derringer back into the sleeve-spring, hampered in no small measure by the whore, who was deeply impressed by the turn of events. The gun thugs might have been locals but they certainly hadn’t been loved.
“Thanks, Corporal,” he nodded to Mac and Captain as he took a seat. “That was…about to get ugly.”
“Been a while, Billy. Drink?”
“No thanks.”
“Why are you in Mexico, and more importantly, why are you in Mexico and unarmed, Billy?”
“I left them with my horse-I was trying not to attract attention.” He had gray in his sandy mustache, and his eyes were tired and sad.
“We’re too far south to blend. You running guns?”
He shrugged. “Not really. Mostly just trying to help out.”
“Seriously? You’re in the middle of someone else’s revolution because you want to help?”
He didn’t flinch at my stare or Captain’s snicker. “The common people are getting caught betwee
n the rebels and the government. It’s China all over again.”
That wasn’t easy to argue against-you didn’t need a store-bought education, as my father would have put it, to see that the peons were catching it from both sides and a bit extra from the bandits that were made bold by the breakdown in law and order.
“So what exactly are you doing down here?”
“There’s a few of us bringing in needed supplies and teaching the villagers useful skills, that sort of thing.”
“Uh-huh. Bringing in guns and teaching them how to defend their villages, no doubt.”
Billy shrugged. “Some. And medicine, books, that sort of thing. So what brings you down here?”
“Work.” I tapped the pin on the lapel of my suit coat. “Pinkertons. Ultimately we’re looking for a man, but at the moment we’re looking for a contact I know. A fixer, deals in information.”
“Is the man missing or hiding?”
“Hiding. The fixer we’re looking for is a colored guy, goes by Judge, used to stay near here. Heard of him?”
“No, but I’ll ask around. Are you spending the night?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll send word if I find out anything.” He stood, and then paused, hand on the back of the rough-hewn chair. “Thank you, Seth. They would have killed me.”
“Next time carry a weapon.” I think he wanted to impress me with his sincerity, but the little whore was running her tongue along the scar on my face and my attention was not wholly focused on the conversation.
Later I stared up into the darkness and thought about things, the little whore snoring delicately beside me. Killing that pistolero didn’t weigh heavy on my mind-I knew I was going to do it before I moved the girl off my lap. The Agency hadn’t hired me for my formal education nor my good looks, such as was left of them; they had hired me, and promoted me, because I saw things through to the end and didn’t ask unnecessary questions. It was a quality the Army had liked about me as well.
Billy Taylor, now, there was a different bird. He had joined us as a last-minute filler as we shipped out. The Boxers had risen, Peking was under siege, and the Fourteenth Infantry Regiment was marching into a yellow sea of deranged killers.
It was damned hot and while there wasn’t a lot of big fighting on the way to Peking there were plenty of Chinese close by, and men who straggled or went looking for water often died in interesting ways-one of our patrols found some Japanese soldiers nailed to a wall with their eyes gouged out. It was small-scale stuff, really, but you’re just as dead if you get it on a ten-man patrol instead of a history-changing battle.
It didn’t take long before we learned the rules and after that any Chinaman who looked at us funny got a bayonet or a .30-40 Krag for his troubles. The Chinese finally stood their ground at Peking, or at least tried to, but we went through them like a fire through tall dry grass. We went through the city itself the same way after the fighting was done.
Billy hadn’t done all that well through the campaign; he kept asking why this and why that, when a sensible man’s primary interest was in water, shade, and something to keep the damn bugs off. Look to your Krag and your bayonet, I had told him a hundred times, and remember that a Chinese with a .30-40 placed accurately into him was of no danger whatsoever to an honest soldier. All you had to understand was which direction was the enemy and how many cartridges you had left.
The Army didn’t pay you well or feed you decently but it did keep things simple: go where you were sent, kill who you were told. Easy. Billy hadn’t ever gotten that straight in his head, and it had put those lines on his face and the gray in his hair.
I had transferred to the Fourth Infantry in order to get Stateside and ended up fighting in another hot climate not long after I transferred. The Moros in the Philippine Islands rose, having been a thorn in Spain’s side and apparently having decided to adopt the same policy towards the USA. They were Moors, wild tribesmen who built earthen forts they called cottas and fought like devils. They used hemp or opium before joining battle to make themselves fearless, and the worst amongst them chewed coca leaves the Dutch raised in Java, which made them incredibly hard to stop. I made Sergeant the hard way in the Fourth, with bullet, bayonet, and rifle butt.
Absently I rubbed the scar that ran from my center hairline to the ridge over my left eye, then zigged down the ridge, across my cheekbone, and through my left earlobe. A deranged leaf-chewer had done that despite a rifle bullet in his belly and my bayonet through his thigh to the hilt-if I hadn’t gotten the blade in and was pushing him back he would have split my skull like a melon. The day after I got out of the hospital I traded two heavy gold coins from my Peking loot for a Colt revolver-trick me once, as they say.
In the last couple years the ghosts had come for me-I would be walking down the street and see Moros in full regalia out of the corner of my eye, or Boxers with their big swords. They weren’t there, of course, but it was enough to send you grabbing for your sidearm in a cold sweat. Worse were the fits, suddenly being seized by a nameless, purpose-less terror that stripped the world of its reason; the first time it happened I thought I was having a heart attack. The fits and ghosts happened without pattern or warning; over time I had learned how to white-knuckle through the former and coolly ignore the latter but it did nothing for my peace of mind. I quit drinking, which helped, and frequented whores more often, which also seemed to help, although I was still prone to sleeplessness.
In my darker moments I wondered if it wasn’t some heathen curse visited upon me by one set of enemies or another.
The water the cantina-owner provided was only warm but I shaved anyway as old habits are hard to break. The face in the steel field mirror didn’t look as old as Billy’s, but there was a tiredness around the eyes that had only shown up lately. Out of nowhere I wondered if Billy was seeing ghosts, too. It was possible-we had shed a lake of blood in China, and if I had picked up my curse there, he might have as well.
Captain and Mac were just sitting down to breakfast as I came into the common room. Thomas Kaplan is a spare man a half-decade older than I, much seasoned by the sun and winds of New Mexico and Arizona. He had worked cattle before serving with the Rough Riders in Cuba, and been a lawman afterwards before the Agency recruited him. His nickname stemmed from our first meeting-I misheard ‘Kaplan’ as ‘Captain’, and it had stuck.
Richard ‘Mac’ McDonald was a large man, well over six feet and solidly built, with steely gray eyes and the deftness you see sometimes in burly men. He was a quiet sort with a dry sense of humor spiced on occasion with a cutting wit. He was my age, and a Pinkerton man from his earliest days, having been promoted to senior agent of a detail on several occasions, but each time the bad habit of pointing out the shortcomings in his district supervisors got him reduced to the ranks.
We got along well as a team, which was why we were this deep in Mexico trying to locate and recover a fugitive. Neither of the two were inclined to challenge me for leadership and I didn’t bother to do much actual leading. We were by temperament given to controlled violence, loyalty to an organization, and direct resolutions to problems, traits that the Pinkertons found commendable.
Captain had an old newspaper he was studying, so I shoveled scrambled eggs and bits of meat into a warm tortilla and waited, as it was his self-assigned duty to educate us when the written word was available.
“Houston News from July,” he announced.
“Damn, that one’s covered some ground. This is October.”
“So it is. Says that on the first of July one Harriet Quimby was killed in Squantum, Massachusetts. Miss Quimby was flying a two-seater monoplane at the time, and died in the mishap, along with her passenger. Apparently she was a noted theater critic, the first woman in the US of A to have obtained a pilot’s license, and the first woman to fly across the English Channel.”
“I don’t like those flying machines,” I rolled up another tortilla. “The horseless carriages are bad enough.”
; “Women flying,” Mac observed, brushing crumbs from his white-blond mustaches. “Next damn thing they’ll want the vote. World’s going to hell in a hand basket.”
“Modern times,” I shook my head disgustedly.
“Major General Robert Hoke passed away on the third. My father met him during the war. Carried orders to him at Cold Harbor. A good man.”
I didn’t comment because my parents had come over in 1878, which left me with little stake in the War Between the States.
“We ought to try union-busting next,” Mac announced, then lapsed back into his habitual silence.
“I wouldn’t mind. Beats being in Mexico. How many trips have we made here? Five?”
“I like Mexico,” Captain objected, which Mac and I ignored. Captain has a weakness for the ladies and the senoritas were a good deal less work than their northern sisters. Or at least they were for well-dressed Yankees with cash in their pockets. Neither Mac nor I was adverse to a little Latina love, paid or otherwise, but personally I was getting tired of hot climates.
Captain set aside the old paper and launched into his favorite topic of the moment, which was his belief that there was going to be a big war in Europe soon. I didn’t object to his monologues as Mac was extremely quiet, and a little conversation is nice, especially in a foreign country.
A man dressed as a peon entered the cantina and caught my attention immediately-he was no peon, not really. He might have been one once, but his circumstances had changed enough that he couldn’t quite pull off the way of moving. Beside me Mac and Captain shifted slightly, and I knew they had observed the same wrong-ness I had. This was a peon who had learned a trade and lost some of the servile attitude the bottom rung of Mexican society wore as a shield against harm.
He had a gunny sack with something heavy in it in one hand, and as he approached us the other hand was half-raised, the fingers spread. “This is from an old friend,” he set the bag on the table next to my plate. Moving slowly, he extracted a slip of grimy paper from his sleeve. “And this.” He bobbed in a quick bow and headed for the door.
