“The sonovabitch has sand,” the man said, “I’ll say that for him.”
“Crippled Charlie and Koler,” one of the men said.
The man who had taken Jody said: “Is that a fact?”
A boot-toe caught Jody in the ribs and a voice said: “Git up on your feet, boy.”
Jody rolled onto his front and rose groggily to his hands and knees. When he tried to gain his feet, the world swayed and pitched. He thought he would go down. But strong hands caught hold of him and held him on his feet.
The man who had taken him said: “I nigh knocked his fool head off, but this one sure is a trier. Was I you I’d tie his hands.”
The man who did it, did it well. He tied the left wrist with a peggin string and pulled it up over his chest to shoulder height, then he twisted the right arm behind his back and tied it to the other over his left shoulder. The result was pure agony. The rawhide cut into his flesh and he felt as if his right arm was breaking. By the time they had shoved and pulled him into the house, he was burned up with fury, pain and hatred. They pushed him into the big room where he had first seen them all and he stood blinking in the bright light of the lamps. Linda Aragon was on her feet, alarm and despair on her face. Gregorio lay on the floor apparently in the same frame of mind as Jody himself.
It was the man sitting at the head of the table who took his attention.
This man smiled the deadliest smile Jody had ever seen.
“Three of us,” the man said. “You hit three of us. One in the back, one in the arm and one in the leg. Not so bad for a doggie like you, boy, still wet behind the ears.”
Jody stood and glowered at him, head singing, brains addled and feeling as if he had been run over by a band of mules.
“But,” this man said, “the last trick’s ours, I reckon.”
Jody said: “Only trouble is, you can’t be none too sure it’s the last trick till I’m planted.”
The man toyed with his quirt on the table in front of him.
“Maybe we can accommodate you soon or late,” he said. “For now, we keep you alive. If we locate Mart, could be we’ll send him one of your ears to show him we have you an’ mean business.”
Jody didn’t know when he had taken to a man’s line of conversation less. He thought it advisable to keep out of it for a while.
“Tie his feet, Dale,” the man said.
The man with the buckteeth came forward, took hold of the thong that bound Jody’s hands together and kicked his feet out from under him. Jody knew then what it felt like to be falling timber. He hit the floor without being able to save himself and it felt as if the few bones in his body that were still whole had been broken. Dale Brophy reached for a rope and bent to loop it over Jody’s ankles. Jody’s action was involuntary. He paid the man for some of the agony he was suffering by swinging his boot up into his face.
Considering Jody’s condition, the kick was a fair effort. It knocked the man off his feet and across the room. He hit the wall and fell to the floor.
Somebody out of sight started laughing as if his amusement would be the death of him. Then another laughed. Even Styree at the head of the table chuckled.
Brophy was slow to rise. When he did so, there was blood on his face.
Gregorio said: “Brave, little gringo.” It was little more than a hoarse whisper because he was near strangling.
Slowly, Brophy wiped the blood from his face with the back of his hand.
“I aim to kill you for that,” he said.
“No,” Styree told him. “Not yet, any road. Jest tie his feet, Brophy, an’ try your best not to get kicked in the face again.”
The man who had laughed so hard, held his sides and said: “Jesus, I never laughed so much in all my life, I swear.”
Brophy looked at him hard, showing his buckteeth.
“Some day, Maddox,” he said, “I’ll have your lights.”
Maddox stopped laughing and said: “You’d have to do it from behind.”
“Cut it out, boys,” Styree said. “We don’t have all the time in the world.”
Brophy lifted a foot and stamped down on Jody’s belly. The wind went out of him like air out of a church organ.
Brophy said: “Try kickin’ me again, Storm, an’ I’ll stomp you through the floor.”
Jody lay still while the man lashed his ankles together. When that was done, Brophy dragged him by the ankles across the floor and passed the rope through an iron ring high in the wall. He heaved on the rope so that Jody’s feet were a couple of feet off the ground, then he tied the rope off.
“By the time I git around to killin’ you,” he said, “you ain’t goin’ to be feelin’ too chipper.”
Styree rose to his feet.
“Brophy,” he said, “watch ’em. Vince, bring the woman. This is where we start to show a profit.”
He headed for the door. Stoddard took Linda Aragon’s arm and dragged her after him. The rest of the men followed. They climbed the stairs, turned left and walked along the corridor, two of the men lighting their passage with lamps. A moment later, they entered Linda’s private room.
None of them had entered here before and for a moment, they all stood and looked around them.
“Where’s the safe?” Styree said.
A man walked to a curtained alcove and pulled back the curtain. The lamps were held high and they lighted the heavy iron safe that stood there.
Styree said: “Maddox, here’s a chore for you. You claim there ain’t a safe in the world you can’t open.”
Maddox, the man who had laughed when Jody had kicked Brophy, eyed the safe. He looked grave now, like a surgeon viewing a serious case.
“She’s a beauty,” he said. “Give me time and I can break her gentle. If you’re in a hurry, I can blow her and break her quick.”
Styree clicked his fingers with impatience. He turned to Linda Aragon.
“Do you have explosive?”
“Gunpowder,” she said.
Styree looked at Maddox. The man shook his head.
“We’d blow this side of the house out,” he said.
“What’s so wrong with that?” Styree demanded.
“It could also destroy the safe and what’s in it. Do you know what’s in it?”
Styree demanded of the woman: “What’s in it?”
“Open it and find out.”
Cold rage turned Styree’s face bleak. The men there drew in their breath, thinking that he would strike her. But he didn’t lift a hand.
“Get started, Maddox,” he said quietly.
Maddox started to peel off his coat.
“I want dead silence in here,” he said. “You’d best all clear out.”
They looked at each other, the same thought in their minds. Suspicion was one of their weapons of survival.
Maddox knew their thoughts.
“Stand outside with your guns in your hands for all I care,” he told them.
They shuffled their feet.
“Out,” Styree told them.
They filed silently to the door. Styree and the woman stayed. Maddox began to roll the sleeves of his shirt. He looked at the safe as if he were hypnotized by it. He seemed unaware of Styree until the man cleared his throat, then Maddox turned and stared at him.
“What’s the matter, Styree?” he said. “Don’t you breathe.”
Styree needed this man. Now. Later, he could dispense with him.
“Get on, Maddox,” he said. “You won’t know we’re here. I don’t take my eyes off that safe nor the woman.”
Maddox said: “Just remember—this isn’t like firing a gun or holding up a bank. This is an art. I mustn’t be distracted.”
“Go ahead. We won’t make a sound.”
Maddox took a handkerchief from his pocket. The woman saw that it was spotlessly clean. Carefully, he wiped his hands on it, paying particular attention to the tips of his fingers. When he was through, he turned and looked at her, smiling and said: “The brain has to be in the fi
ngertips. They have to think. These are the best fingers in the business.”
She watched him, fascinated, knowing that this man’s skill could rob her of every one of her most valued possessions, everything her father Had risked his life for. A large part of it had actually cost him his life. In some way, this man threatened to take her father away from her. If he opened that safe, she was finished here. It was the treasure in that safe that kept her community together. The lives of all those who depended on her lay within those stout iron walls. The key lay in the small dial to which Maddox would now search out the secret. She found that she was shaking. She was facing utter defeat. She prayed silently that the combination would beat him, that his skill was rusty, that his fingers had lost their expertise.
Styree said: “You want to change your mind and save yourself a heap of grief, girl? Jest turn that dial.”
“No,” she said.
“I could make you.”
“No.”
“You open that safe an’ you could save this place,” he told her. “I ain’t a patient man at the best of times an’ I’m gettin’ mighty fretful standin’ here sweatin’. You leave Maddox to waste time openin’ that an’ I’ll burn this hull goddam place to the ground. Hear?”
Maddox said: “You’re gettin’ yourself all riled up to no purpose, Styree. I’ll open it sure as sure.”
The woman said: “The man isn’t born who can open that. You’re wasting your time.”
Maddox smiled gently.
“Sure am sad to disappoint you, little lady.”
He was on his knees in front of the safe like a man about to pray to the god of gold.
“Hush up, now,” he said. “You’re watchin’ a master.”
He put his ear close to the dial and those long slender sensitive fingers started work.
Chapter Eight
At about that time, two things happened.
In the kitchen, Serafina, the housekeeper, who had considerable weight to spare, had lost a number of pounds through the sweat of fear. Which was understandable enough. To have a gun-battle break out in what she had always considered to be a haven of security was enough to arouse acute anxiety in anyone. Seated at the kitchen table, sipping brandy which the lissome Juanita Gomez had poured her, she saw in her mind’s eye herself being both raped and murdered by the barbarian and unbelieving Anglo savages. She would have fled to the safety of the brush in the valley had not her immense legs been bereft of strength and had she not been too afraid to even venture from the room.
The brandy, however, did some good work on her vast in sides and helped to clarify her mind. How, she asked herself, could she prevent atrocities taking place? If she was unable to prevent them herself, if she was unable herself to run fleetly to summon help, then somebody else must do so in her stead. And that someone must be the lissome Juanita.
She knew that the fearsome gringos would have by this time overpowered or murdered the armed vaqueros. The shooting had now died down and Juanita, who had ventured out under the fierce commands of her superior to spy out the land, had reported that the barbarians had seized the supposed undefeatable Gregorio, had captured the new young guest who had arrived so short a time before and had even gone so far as to take the señorita herself. This last was so unthinkable that poor Serafina felt herself giving way to hysterics every time she thought of it.
So, she thought, taking more brandy to clear her head still further, the only help that could be obtained was from her mistress’s friend, the gringo, John McCord. He was a man of standing and power, held in great respect by both Mexican and Navaho alike. McCord would know what to do. Her poor brain could not fathom how one man could outwit and defeat so many armed and dangerous men, but she clung to the belief that McCord could save all.
She therefore told the young Mexican girl that at all costs she must obtain a horse from the corral and ride to McCord’s house.
“But they will kill me,” Juanita objected, not without reason on her side.
“Do you then think that you are of such value?” Serafina demanded.
“But if I am killed what good will I do by trying to get a horse and ride to the gringo?”
“I have noticed that you have grown impertinent lately,” Serafina cried angrily, finding that anger somehow dampened down her fear. “It is because the men are starting to take notice of your growing breasts and that wobbling backside of yours. But one day, my girl, you will be fat like me. Now, do as I tell you. Catch a horse and ride as you have never ridden before.”
“Serafina, I have never ridden before.”
“Don’t bandy words with me, girl. When I say you will ride, you will ride and that is the end of it. Now, off with you.”
“Please, dear Serafina, I am more afraid of the horses than of the gringos.”
“Then find a mule or a burro. But find something that will carry you out of here like the wind.”
“I will get one of the men.”
“Do you not think that the gringos have not taken care of our men? Fool—do as I say.”
There followed now some choice Mexican words that showed clearly that fear had not robbed Serafina of a fine vocabulary. The upshot of the flow of words was that the girl, crossing herself and asking the Mother of God for protection, slipped out of the kitchen and along the side of the house. As she approached the corrals, however, she knew that she would never be able to catch a horse and get on its back. Being a simple girl who followed her instincts (sometimes to the detriment of her morals, let it be said), she got it into her head that somewhere out there in the great valley, she would find help. So into the valley she went, running on her bare feet as if the devil himself were after her.
The other thing that happened was that Martin Storm, having hobbled his Sonora mule on good grass, had ridden in closer to the house, for reasons of which he was not too clear. Maybe it was the gunshots and for fear his nephew might get himself into something he couldn’t get out of, maybe it was because he couldn’t get that damned woman out of his mind and was drawn by some power toward her.
It does not matter really. What matters is, that he rode to within a mile of the house and stopped his horse to ponder on the extraordinary state of his mind and, while doing this, he heard the approach of some creature through the brush.
He dismounted hastily and tied his horse, held the animal’s nose so that it would not betray his position and listened. After a moment or two, he became aware that if he stayed where he was the creature would pass by some fifty yards to his left. By this time, he was certain that it was human and that it ran either on bare feet or wearing moccasins.
He took his hand from the muzzle of his horse and set off through the moonlight to cut off the fleeing human. Within minutes, he espied the flutter of cloth and saw that, running toward him through the moonlight, was a girl.
He hailed her so that he would not scare her and at once did just that. She gave a cry of alarm and changed her direction. Having heard the popping of guns and knowing that something was wrong at the big house, it didn’t take a brilliant mind to surmise that this girl was fleeing from the makers of the gunfire. He caught her not without trouble, for he soon found that she could run like a jackrabbit and change her course as adroitly. He could, however, when he needed to, move in a pretty sprightly way himself and finally brought her down with a flying tackle.
She started a scream, but he managed to clap a large hard hand over her mouth.
“Easy now, sweetheart,” he said in Spanish. “I mean you no harm.”
He released her mouth and took a look at her. He saw at once that he lay with his arms around the girl who had waited upon him at the big house. He ruminated that he did not think to get his arms around her delicious body in this fashion.
“Juanita,” he said.
She looked at him.
“Oh, señor,” she cried, “you are my savior,” flung her arms around his neck and wept.
It was not an unpleasant experience for Mart and he
made the most of it. For his part, Juanita could have wept all night.
She did not oblige in this, however, and, after experiencing the warmth and comfort of Mart’s arms and body, reinforced by a kiss or two, for a number of minutes, she composed herself enough to tell him what little she knew of the happenings at the big house. So far as Mart could see what it all amounted to was that Aragon had been taken by the men it sheltered. Although he was sorely tempted to remain right where he was to enjoy the comforting of this tasty morsel of Mexican womanhood, he showed his strength of character and purpose by ranging his mind over the situation while he held her in his arms, both of them still prone upon the ground.
He knew he had to do something on several counts. There was the reason for him and Jody coming into this country in the first place. There was the fact that his nephew was in big trouble, if the hardcases had not yet killed him. And there was the fate of the woman Aragon herself. This played no small part in his reckoning.
Finally, he helped the girl to her feet, kissed her rather more lengthily than comfort alone demanded, cursed the fact that he had the opportunity of enjoying her further yet was not allowed the time and said: “Juanita, you have to be very brave. There are only the two of us and it looks as though we face a small army.”
Under Mart’s ministrations, the girl had lost some of her fear. She hugged herself tightly against him and declared that she was ready for anything. Mart sweated gently at the temptation and said: “We have to go back there and we have to save Aragon. It’s as simple as that.”
“But how can just two of us do that, señor? I am nothing more than a helpless woman.”
“Helpless, my ass,” Mart said in English. In Spanish, he said: “Nonsense, little one, you will take your courage from me. Together we shall put the whole situation to rights.” She clung to him. He patted her shoulder. “We shall creep down upon them like Indians in the night.”
Taking her by the hand, he led her back to his horse. He stepped into the saddle and swung her up behind him. He then rode down toward the house with her breasts pressing warmly and delightfully against his back. By heavens, he thought, if he didn’t conquer the mistress, he would have the maid as a reward for the hazards he was facing in this distressingly dangerous operation.
The Storm Family 6 Page 9
