.45-Caliber Cross Fire

by Peter Brandvold

  “You ain’t taking me nowhere, old man. Even if you were good enough.”

  “Oh, I’m good enough, and if I didn’t come down here after Beers and Sapp and the rest of them turncoat savages, I’d just do it!” Spurr lifted the quirley to his lips, scrutinizing Cuno closely as he made the coal glow brightly against his face. “How’d you come to throw in with them, anyways?”

  Cuno ducked under the rail and sat down at the edge of the gallery, leaning his back against a roof support post opposite Fire Eyes.

  He crossed his arms and his ankles. “They gave me a hand with the Yaqui a few days back.” He stared at the silently fuming Yaqui queen sitting five feet away from him. She turned her head away sharply to stare out toward the creek. “Then they offered me a job. I had nothing better to do, and my pockets weren’t exactly bulging with pesos.”

  “Where’s your girl?”

  “She’s no longer my girl.”

  “Did you know what they were hauling?”

  “I had a pretty good idea.”

  “That didn’t bother you?”

  “Why the hell should it?”

  Spurr sighed and leaned back in his chair, stretching his stiff back. “Those men were soldiers at Fort Bryce. They sacked the place, killed half the men there, including the fort commander, Major Hammerlich, before running off with seven wagonloads of arms and ammunition. And Hammerlich’s daughter, Flora.”

  “Don’t worry about Flora.” Cuno turned to his head toward Spurr. “Go home, Marshal. Flora doesn’t want or need your help. And going after Beers and Sapp is only gonna get you planted all the sooner.”

  “I’ll be planted soon, anyway.” Spurr leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and took a last deep drag from his quirley, then flicked the stub into the yard, where it hit the ground and bounced, sparking before fizzling out in a puddle. “You think Flora threw in with ’em willingly? That ain’t like the girl I once knew.”

  “You must not have known her very well.”

  Spurr scratched the back of his head and made a face. “Where they headed?”

  “I don’t have the foggiest id—”

  “Montana del Loco Oso.”

  Cuno and Spurr both looked at the girl sitting across from the younger man. She had her head turned toward Spurr.

  “The guns and dynamite,” she added in surprisingly good English, “are to be sold to a Federale general, Arturo Cuesta, for use in blasting a tunnel through Crazy Bear Mountain, a sacred sierra to the Yaqui. The most sacred in all our land. The rifles will be used to kill the Yaqui warriors who try bravely to keep that pig, Cuesta, from blasting our precious mountain and making our god of war so angry that he will abandon our people and allow us to become slaves of the vile Mexican invaders. They would make us toil for nothing but food and water in mines on our own land!”

  Cuno shared a long incredulous look with Spurr, then asked, “Why’s this general want to blast a hole through your mountain?”

  She turned to him, nostrils flaring, showing her teeth like an angry cur. “So that he can build a railroad through the mountain to connect a gold mine to Mexico City. If you hadn’t killed my warriors, Senor Spurr, I would have had the guns in those three wagons to use against the others and to give to my people to fight Cuesta.”

  Spurr just looked at her, as though he were trying to work all that through his brain. Cuno was working it through his own brain. He should have known that anything he got caught up in down here was going to be complicated. And bloody.

  But, hell, he’d just been driving a wagon that someone else would have driven if he hadn’t.

  “How’d you find out about the gun shipment?” Spurr asked.

  “We knew that Cuesta was looking for a big supply of guns and powder—a supply not easily found in Mexico these days. We knew he would look to America for such a supply, though it is not the government’s policy to sell guns to Mexico at this time. So we intercepted telegrams he sent from an outpost near his own private train near Montana del Loco Oso, to a gringo outlaw, Major Beers, at Fort Bryce.”

  Spurr raked a gnarled, brown hand down his face. “Where’s this mountain?”

  Fire Eyes smiled but there was no warmth or humor in it. “Free me and I will tell you. I will even lead you there.”

  Cuno stared at the girl as she stared at Spurr, her upper lip raised slightly above her fine, white teeth. Spurr’s question was the same one Cuno would have asked: “You gonna cut my throat tonight?”

  “All of the warriors I brought with me here are dead—thanks to both of you and the Yankee gunrunners.” She swallowed and lifted her noble head slightly. “I am not too proud to admit that I will need your help cutting off the caravan before it arrives at its destination.” Red flames danced in her eyes once more. “When we have run General Cuesta away from our mountain, however, I cannot promise I won’t kill you, senor, with pleasure.”

  The slap of sandals sounded in the open doorway behind Spurr. The padre stood there, his little dog on his heels. “Supper is served, amigos!”

  Spurr glanced at Cuno and then turned to regard the smiling, half-drunk padre weaving in the doorway. “Set a table for four, will you, Padre?”

  Flora brushed a lock of wet hair from her cheek as she galloped over the shoulder of a low bluff toward a gaping canyon mouth below on the other side. It was nearly dark, but the sandstone ridge shone burnt umber in the last light angling beneath the low clouds, and the canyon was blue-black between the walls.

  Flora glanced behind her at the village that was little more than the size of a thumbnail from this distance and steel blue in the gathering darkness. No one appeared to be following. She turned her head forward, swiped another lock of damp hair from her face, then suddenly drew rein and slid down from her saddle. She ran up the slope on her left and leapt onto a pile of jumbled boulders and stood, thirty feet up, staring back over the broad canyon behind her.

  No one was coming. There was only the slowly dissolving desert and the rain that continued to tick lightly against her hat brim. Flora dropped to her butt, raised her knees, and wrapped her arms around them.

  Her mind was swirling while her heart raced. First the Yaqui and their sputtering Gatling gun that drilled bullets through the barn walls and windows until Flora thought for sure one of the casks of gunpower or crates of dynamite would blow her to kingdom come. Then, just when she thought they’d all been saved by someone from the other caravan contingent, Sapp and the others were cut down in the street with the dead Yaqui!

  Flora hadn’t seen who’d taken over the Gatling gun, but he’d sounded like a white man. Possibly a soldier from Fort Bryce, which would mean there’d been more soldiers, possibly a whole company of soldiers detailed from Fort Huachuca. Fear hammered at Flora, and she pressed her forehead against her knees so hard it began to hurt.

  This could’t be happening. The plan couldn’t unravel like this. She would not go back to the States. She would not give up the guns and ammunition. She and Beers had made a deal with General Cuesta, and she was going through with it, and she was going to be rich with more Mexican gold than she’d need to hide out in Mexico for the next twenty years.

  Flora deserved that money. After all she’d been through, dragged from one remote military outpost to another after her mother died back in Pittsburgh when Flora was only six. Since then, when she’d had to start living with her father in the West, she’d never lived anywhere but a remote military compound beginning with Fort Lincoln in Dakota Territory after the death of Custer. She’d been bounced around to eight different forts since then, each one drabber than the last. She deserved to finally be free of such colorless, cheerless places and the hard, cheerless, militant men—including her father—who populated them.

  Her father…

  Flora chewed her upper lip and felt the tickle of satisfaction, remembering him lying on his office floor, crouched over his belly, trying to hold his intestines in with his arms and his hands. He gurgled and groaned and, lower jaw hang
ing, looked up through his round-rimmed spectacles at the man, Beers, who had shot him from point-blank range.

  Then he had slid his shocked, agonized gaze to Flora, who stood there laughing and pointing a jeering finger at him—the man who had held her captive for so many years, kept her practically chained to his private quarters, allowing her to speak only to certain men and only officers of course, the more boring the better. When her father hadn’t been looking, she’d managed to slip away from the house and mingle with the enlisted men, and they’d at least had a sense of fun, and they’d passed her a bottle now and then. That’s when she started growing more daring, acquired a taste for strong drink and bawdy conversation, and began to see what was possible beyond her father’s picket fence.

  She’d managed to escape the house for longer periods from time to time, and sometimes she saddled a horse and rode away from the fort. But those freedom treks had been few and far between, and mostly only when her father had left the fort on military business.

  Otherwise, she’d been a prisoner. A prisoner forced to take piano lessons and to be tutored in literature, but a prisoner, just the same.

  Until dashing, cunning-eyed Major Beers came along and became Colonel Abel Hammerlich’s second-in-command. Flora, better schooled than her father ever could have imagined in the ways of men, had known Beers was a law dodger right off. And later, after Flora and the major had concocted their plan with Dave Sapp, also a man on the run, Beers had gut-shot Hammerlich while smoking one of his stogies before knocking a lamp onto the floor, offering his arm to Flora, and the two sashayed out into the main compound of the burning fort, where the wagons and saddle horses stood waiting.

  It had been a great plan. But now a total of five wagons were lost. Nearly half the contraband gone. That meant that even if Flora made it back to Beers, their profits would be severely cut.

  Beers.

  Flora looked around. Night was falling fast. She did not know this country. How would she ever find the rest of the caravan?

  Fighting panic, she climbed down off the rocks and swung onto her horse’s back. With one more backward glance, she touched spurs to the calico’s flanks, and horse and rider bounded on up the trail. They galloped down the hill and followed the trail into the canyon mouth. The canyon was dark and dank, and bobcats cried in the brush and rocks off both sides of the trail. Flora shuddered.

  After a half hour of hard riding, she found herself surrounded by steep ridges and with a flooded arroyo before her, blocking the trail. The water was only an inch below the clay bank lined with mesquites and catclaw, and it swirled menacingly, looking like foam-edged tar in the near darkness.

  The flood was moving too fast out of the mountains for her to chance crossing it. She looked to both sides. The arroyo formed a straight line before her, cutting her off.

  Flora felt a sob ripple up from her throat. She choked it down, hardened her jaws against it. She’d plotted to kill her father, sacked an entire cavalry fort, killing dozens and stealing a hundred thousand dollars in army weaponry. She couldn’t turn chicken-livered here. Simply, she’d need to look for a place to camp, then head off in search of Beers at first light the next morning.

  She chose her direction quickly, reining the gelding off the trail’s right side. She walked the horse slowly, looking for a place where she could build a fire to stave off the coming cold. A ridge ahead and to her right looked promising, and fifteen minutes later she was unsaddling the bay under a lip of sandstone. The ground here was relatively dry, and there was plenty of dead wood in the brushy cut at the ridge’s base.

  She found enough dry wood and tinder for a fire and set coffee to boil. She hunkered next to the fire, the calico picketed close by for security—the horse would surely warn her of predators—and nibbled some jerky she’d found in her saddlebags. Consciously, she tried to stave off the fear rippling through her.

  Odd how, after all her years on crowded military forts and wanting only to get away on her own, she found being alone out here, lost, the most horrifying experience of her life. Part of her almost yearned for her bed in her father’s house at Fort Bryce.

  She sipped her coffee, wishing she had some of her father’s brandy to put in it.

  The calico lifted its head suddenly, worked its nostrils, and whinnied.

  “Shit!” Flora kicked dirt on her fire and reached for her pistol.

  16

  FLORA CLUTCHED THE .44 Merwin Hulbert pocket pistol in both hands in front of her chest and pricked her ears, listening. For a time she could hear only the sputtering of the smothered coals and a faint breeze scratching the weeds around her. Then the clatter of a wagon grew slowly louder, as did the clomps of heavy hooves.

  The wagon was coming along the trail from the direction of the village. The clattering grew louder until a man’s distance-muffled voice said, “Hoah.”

  The clattering stopped after a final squeaking of wheel hubs and the clinking of trace chains.

  Silence.

  The driver had no doubt stopped in front of the flooded arroyo. He’d be even less able to cross the flooded ravine than Flora had been. Would he remain there in the trail or go back?

  “Shit!” came the angry cry from the direction of the trail.

  Flora squeezed the pistol in her hands and frowned. The man had cursed in English. Could it be one of the Anglos who’d taken down Sapp and the others? Possibly a cavalryman maybe moving one of the wagons, or maybe all three of the wagons were approaching the arroyo. If so, this place would be swarming with soldiers in minutes!

  On the other hand, he might only be a freighter. There were likely more Yankees in northern Sonora than just her gang and those following her.

  She continued to listen but heard nothing from the trail. Finally, her curiosity nipping like a rabid dog, she rose slowly and, tightening her coat about her shoulders, began walking down the slope and into the cut at the bottom. There she moved even more slowly, crouching, following the cut toward the trail until she could see the vague, pale shape of the covered wagon sitting about a hundred feet ahead of her.

  She stopped and looked around, listening. A few stars flickered through the cloud cover. They offered the only light. Flora continued walking carefully, setting each foot down in turn, squeezing the Merwin Hulbert in front of her belly, until she came to the wagon.

  She studied it closely, saw that it was one of her party’s medium-sized freighters, its cargo covered with a damp, dirty, cream tarpaulin. A chill rippled through her, and her breath came short. She felt as though she were seeing a ghost. The gang members who’d joined her in taking shelter in the village were all dead.

  Who had driven the wagon here?

  She looked around, not wanting to move too much and give herself away. Where was the driver? Had he tramped into the brush somewhere, possibly to make camp?

  She glanced up trail, seeing no movement, hearing no sounds of oncoming wagons. Finally, she moved up to inspect the mules, both of whom studied her closely in turn, obviously recognizing her as she recognized them, for they snorted and nickered but gave no warning cry. One blew loudly, and she froze, drawing her shoulders together, looking around.

  The wagon’s driver’s boot was empty.

  Flora walked around the front of the mules and started back toward the wagon, cocking the pistol and extending it straight out in front of her. “Hey, you—driver,” she said, trying to put some steel into her voice but hearing it quiver. “Where are you?”

  She walked over to the driver’s boot, scruitinized it from this closer vantage, then started walking back along the side of the wagon. Something smashed into both her shins, and she gave a horrified cry as the world turned upside down, and the ground came up to smash her hard. The pistol popped, a red flash in the darkness. The bullet smacked the side of the wagon, and the mules lurched forward, both braying now indignantly.

  Flat on her back, Flora groaned and sucked a breath, feeling the cold, wet gravel beneath her, grinding into the back
of her head. Her mind spun—she was too confused to feel fear. Then a face appeared above her. A familiar face with a dragoon-style blond mustache hiding his lips. Flora blinked. A chill swept her. Dave Sapp scowled, his jaws hard, eyes pinched.

  “Thought I recognized your voice,” he said, his own voice raspy, his silver teeth winking in the ambient light. Blood stained his blue wool tunic over his right shoulder. That arm was in a sling fashioned from a red bandanna.

  “D-Dave… !”

  “Don’t ‘Dave’ me, you little bitch. Where were you when that son of a bitch started crankin’ that Gatlin’ gun? Cowering back in the barn somewhere? Maybe ready to make a deal with the son of a bitch to keep you alive?”

  “How… how… Dave… ?”

  “That first bullet clipped my ear. The second one tore through my shoulder. I made like I was dead, and him and your pal, Massey, didn’t check. Seems they knew one another.”

  “I know. I heard.” Flora pushed up on her elbows. “Oh, Dave—you don’t know how relieved I am to see you.”

  “I bet you are, you poor, frightened little thing.”

  Flora stayed down and glanced at Sapp’s left fist, which he held clenched at his side. His feet were spread a little more than shoulder width apart. He was mad, fuming mad, and if she didn’t want her face bashed in, she best stay where she was.

  “Look, Dave—I didn’t see no reason to walk out into the street with you, because—”

  “Because you might’ve gotten shot with the rest of us.”

  Anger fired through Flora, then, and ignoring the man’s offensive stance, she grabbed her pistol and heaved herself to her feet. “Listen, fool!” She stepped back, raised her pistol, and drew the hammer back, aiming at Sapp’s belly. “Just because I wasn’t dumb enough to believe the fella in the bell tower was one of us, deciding instead to play it cautious-like before I got a good look at him, is no reason for you to get your panties in a twist. So, I made it out of there without getting my head shot off!”