The Black Bulls (A Neal Fargo Adventure Book 10)

by John Benteen

  His mouth twisted; his finger tightened on the trigger.

  Fargo threw the shotgun and whirled away. Von Stahl flinched instinctively, and the shot went wild as the Fox slammed against the doorjamb by his head. Then he lined the pistol again, as Fargo came back on balance, pulled the trigger once more. Fargo, tensed for the impact of lead, heard the faint, dry click. The gun was empty; von Stahl must have used all the other slugs firing at him as he’d galloped across the yard.

  Curiously, no dismay showed on the German’s face. He laughed, flung the Luger away. “The hell with it. I prefer the saber anyhow!” Then he charged, with blade lifted.

  At the same instant, Fargo’s eyes shifted to the wall behind the desk. The second of the pair of swords still hung there. His hand flew up, seized the hilt, dragged it down, and he ducked just as the honed edge of von Stahl’s blade slashed at him. It missed by a half inch; then Fargo kicked the chair behind the desk and sent it crashing into von Stahl’s knees and jumped back.

  Now he had room, von Stahl recovered, backed away. Both men came out from behind the desk.

  Von Stahl laughed. “Oh, so you will fight me with my own weapon? Now, this will be sport! This will make up for everything!” All at once his face was a dusty mask of savagery, and he came in swiftly and lightly and his saber blade was a shining blur before him, thrusting, darting, slashing.

  Fargo recognized a master of the weapon. He himself had not used a saber in years, and never against another one. He saw at once that von Stahl possessed a technique that could chop him to ribbons. He raised his own weapon; and von Stahl’s advantage did not matter then. A cold fury was on him; he was armed and his enemy was within range.

  He dodged away; steel rang on steel, as he parried that winking, dazzling, deadly blade of the German. He had no chance to take the offensive; it demanded every bit of strength and speed left in him to protect his gut.

  Von Stahl recognized that, truly, he had the advantage and came in harder. In his hands, the saber was a fantastic instrument, flickering like a snake’s tongue. Fargo backed, sweat pouring down his face as he sought desperately to fend off thrust after thrust. The German’s ice-blue eyes gleamed now with confidence and killer lust. “You see?” he panted. “You’re finished, Fargo! Finished!” And he bore in and Fargo retreated again.

  Now it was as if bells rang constantly in the room, as blade met blade, and still Fargo could get no chance to take the offensive. Worse, von Stahl was forcing him along the wall, toward a corner. When the German got him there, penned him—

  Fargo kept his own blade moving, using all the strength in his right arm. Von Stahl struck; he caught the blow; their blades locked; for a moment they were hilt to hilt, staring into each other’s eyes. Then, with a deft, wrenching maneuver, the German broke the lock, stepped back, came in again, knocked Fargo’s blade aside. Fargo held on, kept the sword from being pulled from his grasp, but he had to dodge the next thrust; that put him closer to the corner; and remorselessly, the German struck again and once more Fargo sidestepped, and now he was penned up in the angle of the wall, with no more room for maneuver, and von Stahl did not hesitate an instant. “Finished—” he rasped. “And I’ll still get what I want from Hierro—” and he came in for what might be the death stroke.

  In that instant, Fargo played his last card. As von Stahl lunged, he shifted the sword’s hilt from his right hand to his left. Changed his balance, with the smoothness born of being ambidextrous. In that one clock tick of time, von Stahl’s guard was open; his defense against Fargo’s right hand was not proof against his left. Desperately, Fargo thrust with the saber, and at the same moment jerked his own torso to the left, raised his right arm high, von Stahl’s saber blade bowed slightly as its point slammed against the wall between Fargo’s body and right arm. At the same instant, Fargo felt his own point slide into flesh and grate on bone.

  He lunged forward, twisting his wrist.

  And then his hilt guard was tightly against von Stahl’s flesh, and he and the German were eye to eye, their faces only inches apart, and von Stahl’s mouth was open, gaping, and he stared at Fargo in amazement. “Why … ” he said. “Why, you have killed me...”

  Fargo twisted the blade again. Its length, protruding from between von Stahl’s shoulder blades, revolved. The German’s sword clattered to the floor tiles, von Stahl’s blue eyes flared with terror; blood gushed in a torrent from his mouth; and then the look of death erased all expression from his face, turned it blank.

  Fargo let go the saber hilt.

  The German reeled backwards, fell. The weight of his body, landing on the blade protruding from his back, shoved it forward, out of the wound beneath his breastbone. Fargo seized the shaft again and pulled it free.

  Von Stahl did not move.

  Fargo stood over him for a moment, trembling with reaction. Then he whirled. There were footsteps on the veranda. Men were running through the entry. He raised the sword, his only weapon. Maybe, he thought, even after all this, he was finished, but, if so, he’d take some with him. He put his back against the wall, held the saber ready.

  Then they were there, in the office door. Theo Braga, in their lead, skidded to a halt. Behind him, half a dozen men, dressed not as gauchos, but as Mexican vaqueros, stared over Braga’s shoulders at von Stahl’s body. “Neal,” Theo gasped. “Are you all right?”

  Fargo could only nod mutely.

  “Hierro’s men! We need guns—”

  Fargo managed to raise the saber blade. “Upstairs,” he croaked. “In von Stahl’s bedroom.”

  “Andale!” Braga snapped; the men whirled away and ran for the stairs. Fargo stood there trembling with relief and reaction for only a second. Then he ran after them.

  Chapter Nine

  There were plenty of guns. Not his own; they had indeed been stolen by someone. But there were rifles, shotguns, and boxes of ammo. The Mexicans, gaunt and ragged, with the look of men long imprisoned and abused, eyes lit with a cold desire for vengeance, snapped them up eagerly. Fargo scooped up a handful of ten-gauge buckshot shells and it was like having had a blood transfusion as he crammed rounds into the breech of the retrieved Fox.

  While they armed themselves, Braga spoke swiftly, tersely. “I don’t know what the hell’s going on out there, but those cattle are loose and they’re chasing the German’s gauchos to hell and gone. Now’s the time to clean out this bunch.”

  “Where did you come from?” Fargo snapped the shotgun closed, rammed shells into his pants pockets. He thrust a loaded Colt .45 automatic in his waistband.

  “We were locked up in the estancia jail. That’s where von Stahl kept these Mexican cowboys except when he needed them to handle the bulls. Then somebody unlocked the door, let us out. An old man who looked as if he’d been through hell—his hands ruined; he could hardly work the key. Hierro, they said.” He shook his head impatiently, laughed as he raised a Winchester, sighted it, then lowered it again. “We’ll talk it over later; right now, I’ve got a score to settle and so have these hombres. Ready, muchachos? Then come on!” His flat, dark face sliced with an evil grin, he ran down the stairs. Like so many wolves, the armed vaqueros followed him.

  Fargo came behind. It had been a long time since he’d eaten or drunk, and the ordeals of the day had drained him of strength. As the Mexicans disappeared through the front door, he edged to it warily, shotgun up. Then he sucked in a long breath at the sight that met his eyes.

  The yard out there around the corrals and tienta ring was a shambles. In the battle between men and bulls, the beasts had won the day. The great black animals, bellowing and bawling, roamed back and forth, tossing heads, shaking horns that, in many cases, were crimson. The bodies of gauchos lay sprawled in the dust, some hardly recognizable as human.

  But they had taken their toll of the Hierro cattle, too; the black bulks of dead animals littered the yard. Even as Fargo watched, gunfire from the huts of the village dropped another bull.

  He saw the vaqueros, led
by Braga, dodge around the corner of the main house; it would be death to cross that space under the fire of rifles and through those blood-maddened cattle. Theo was going to circle wide around, come up behind the huts. Fargo grinned thinly. Braga knew his business...

  A flicker of motion caught his eye. He stepped through the door, turned. “Cimarron!”

  At the sound of his voice, the big stallion whirled, reins trailing. It had not gone far from where he’d left it when he dodged into the house. Now it came trotting toward him, ascended the veranda, hooves clattering on the tiles. Fargo ran toward the horse, swung into the saddle.

  He took a second to let his hand caress the lathered neck. He did not know, probably never would, whether the horse had come to his rescue out of love or whether, excited by the sound of combat, the stallion had simply charged the men on the fence, his charge carrying him over into the bull ring and all the rest of it had been accident, sheer luck. Either way, when the horse had been needed, he was there ...

  Now Fargo swung him off the veranda, sent him down into the yard at a gallop, among the dangerous, excited cattle.

  More than one of them charged the stallion, but Cimarron was alert and swift, fast on his feet as any cutting horse. He dodged the first attacker, knocked the second flat with his shoulder. Fargo clung with his knees as Cimarron weaved and shuttled across the yard, toward the tienta ring, where a figure lay prone on the seats, sheltered from gunfire.

  As he neared the ring, bullets whined about him from the village; then there was a sudden explosion of gunfire from that direction. Fargo grinned; Braga and the vaqueros had reached their objective. No more lead came at him, and then he had reached the ring. He left the saddle, stepping from it to the top of the wall, ran along it to the crude seats fastened there. As he came, bent low, the shotgun in one hand, the figure on the seats lifted its head; Fargo let out a breath of relief; Carla was safe.

  He came up beside her. “Keep down,” he snapped. His eyes flickered into the ring, as, from it, came the savage bellow of a fighting bull, a deep, ferocious tone that he knew only too well.

  Down there, El Diable Negro was on his feet, standing spraddle-legged over what had once been the body of Jorge, and which was now something bloody and indescribable. The collision with the stallion had broken one horn, and it dangled by a few fibers across the bull’s forehead, trickling blood. There were bloody rips, too, on flank and neck, where Cimarron’s hooves had caught him. But the Black Devil still had plenty of fight left in him, and even as Fargo watched, he gored and stabbed with his one good horn at the ragged thing between his forefeet. A few cuts, a broken horn: but he would live to sire a lot more calves.

  Fargo crouched beside Carla. “Don Caesar. Where is he?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. It ... all happened so fast. That big horse—And then you went over the wall. And I thought he, Don Caesar, was past thinking, past acting, after all that torture. But suddenly he came to life. While everybody was staring at you, shooting at you, he jumped down into the ring, took a pistol and something else off Jorge’s body. Before the bull could get up, he ran through the toril gate. After that, I caught a glimpse of him opening the bars of the corral, letting out the Hierro bulls.”

  “So he was the one.”

  She sucked in breath, nodded. “Yes. Von Stahl left one man with me; he and the rest jumped off the wall and chased you. Then the bulls hit them like a wave ... They were knocked all around, trampled, gored, except those that took cover in the village. A gun went off; the man with me fell … ” She rubbed her eyes, still dazed by it all. “I saw von Stahl—He was like a madman. He ran straight through the bulls. He shot them as they came at him, with his pistol. He went into the house—”

  “Yeah,” Fargo said. “He’s in the house. Dead.”

  “Dead?”

  “I killed him.”

  “Thank God,” she whispered.

  Now, from the village, the sound of the guns rose to a crescendo. From this vantage Fargo could see the vaqueros dodging from house to house. The squat figure of Theo Braga seemed everywhere at once, like a hound after game, pausing to fire through window, door, then running on. A gaucho burst from one house, rifle in hand, fled like a deer down the village street. Braga threw up his gun, aimed, fired; the man sprawled. As if that death were a signal, suddenly the racket of the guns began to dwindle and died away. One after the other, the last of von Stahl’s gunmen emerged from the huts, hands lifted. There were few left.

  Then, except for the bellowing of the bulls, fifty of them still dangerously ranging the yard, there was only silence.

  “All right,” Fargo said softly to Carla. “It’s over. You can stand up. You’re safe. You’re going to be all right.”

  She got to her feet, and he helped her. Then she swayed against him, dizzily. “Thank God,” she whispered. “Oh, thank God.” Suddenly she was crying. “I want to go home. I want to go home to Mexico.”

  Fargo held her tightly. “Don’t worry,” he said. “That’s where you’re going. I’ll take you there.”

  ~*~

  Hierro. Iron, all right, Fargo thought. He looked at the old man sitting behind the desk in the main house of the estancia with admiration. Don Caesar’s clothes, the rich garments of a Mexican charro, hung on his thin frame loosely; the estanciero’s infected hands were bandaged; but the dullness, the incomprehension, was gone from his eyes and they were keen and sharp.

  “The main thing,” Don Caesar said, “is to be strong enough to stay alive. As long as one lives, there is always the chance ...” He smiled bitterly. “I stayed alive by pretending that the torture to which the German subjected me had ruined my mind. Men grow careless around an idiot, and I played the part of the idiot as best I could. Because of that, when you made your escape they left only one man behind to guard me. He did not think me capable of anything; I was in the ring, had Jorge’s gun and the keys to the carcel where Braga and the vaqueros were locked before my guard had a chance to shoot. I knew you could not survive unless I could create a diversion; and the fighting cattle of Hierro make a damned good army.”

  “They sure as hell do,” Fargo said, remembering the long struggle even the trained vaqueros who understood the bulls had had to get them penned again.

  “I let out the bulls; then I released the vaqueros. And—” his smile widened “—I accounted for at least one of von Stahl’s men, the guard left with Carla. It was a fair shot for a man with a sore trigger finger if I do say so myself. Then I hid until the battle was over, knowing I was too weak to do more.”

  “You did plenty,” Fargo said. Two days had passed since the fight: time enough for everyone to recover a measure of strength. He tipped back the cavalry hat, retrieved, somewhat the worse for wear, from the bull ring. His guns had been found hidden in one of the village huts, and he wore them, now, for he’d be traveling soon. “Your share and more; iron against steel, and the iron won.” He arose. “Theo here will choose more gauchos for you in Dos Caminos and send them to you.”

  Braga nodded. “Good men, honest, but fighters as well as workers.”

  “Excellent,” Don Caesar said. “And you shall be my foreman, in place of the one killed by von Stahl.” He looked at Braga. “I owe you much. You have a place here as long as you live.”

  Braga laughed. “I’m not much for staying in one place. But I’ll try it for a while, anyhow. Until you’re back on your feet.”

  “Now,” Fargo said, “about the Hierro cattle ... ”

  “Ah, yes. The ganado. That will be another battle, getting them to the railroad and thence to Buenos Aires. But when the new gauchos come, we’ll manage it, with the vaqueros supervising. The black cattle are hard to drive, but not impossible, if they are led by tame white oxen. Still, I think the drive will be quite an event. Will you be here for it, Señor Fargo?”

  “No. I’m taking Carla on to Buenos Aires. We’ll go as far as Dos Caminos with Braga, take the train from there.” He turned to the girl. “Wh
en will you be ready to ride?”

  “I am ready now.” She wore a flat-brimmed sombrero, velvet jacket over white blouse, long black skirt and boots. Two days of rest and safety had erased the fatigue and despair from her face, and she was lovely. When Fargo ran his eyes over her, hers did not shift away. They would be together, Fargo was thinking, for six weeks, more or less. Time for them to get to know each other better. In fact, probably very well indeed.

  He nodded briskly. “Then the sooner we start, the sooner everything else goes forward. Theo?”

  Braga nodded, hitched at the wooden scabbard of the Mauser on his belt. “Let us ride,” he said.

  Don Caesar came forward, clasped Fargo’s hand in his own bandaged ones. “My friend—” His voice broke.

  Fargo’s ugly face twisted in a grin. “Save it,” he said. “I’ll see you in Buenos Aires, when you bring the bulls. Adios, Don Caesar.”

  Carla went to the old man, embraced and kissed him long and hard.

  Don Caesar was on the veranda when they mounted, Fargo swinging into the saddle on Cimarron’s back, after helping Carla mount the sidesaddle on her gelding. He was still on the porch when the three of them rode off down the lane that would take them to the Rio Carmen road and then east and home.

  ~*~

  In the hotel room in Buenos Aires, Carla lay back with the sheet pulled over her and watched Fargo dress. Her eyes lingered lazily on the scarred torso so familiar now to her. “It is very strange,” she murmured. “I had known no man before von Stahl, and he took me by force. And never had I any pleasure from what he did to me. But with you—” Then she broke off. She knew him well enough by now to know that nothing she could say would hold him; that she had exactly as much time left with him as it would take to get them to her father’s ranch in Sonora; no more. And she was wise enough to accept that. She watched him button his shirt, then strap on the harness of the shoulder holster. He adjusted the gun in its scabbard beneath his left arm, donned the tropical jacket that would conceal it, clamped the campaign hat on his white, close-cropped thatch. “I wish you would tell me where you are going.”