by Tony Masero
GRINGO WADE
Tony Masero
Cover Illustration by Tony Masero
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews. Publishers Note: This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and events except for historical fact are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real person, places, or events is coincidental.
Smashwords Edition
Copyright © 2011 Tony Masero
Chapter One
Gringo Wade saw them from a mile and a half away. Two of them.
He was standing in the shade of a grove of Joshua trees and had good cover for himself and his pony. It was the only cover for miles across the wide expanse of rolling desert except for some scattered yucca and creosote bush. The dunes in between undulated, so that now and again the couple disappeared from view. But they were steadily coming his way.
The two were travelling fast on foot, too fast for the hot Mohave at midday; it was set to fry them like an egg on a flat iron griddle. They had to be running scared.
Gringo took out a paper cartridge from his ammunition pouch, he tore the paper open and dropped the 80 gram black powder charge and lead ball into the musket using the trumpet rod to ram it down to the breech with the paper outing as a wad to stop the ball rolling out.
He pulled back the lock and slipped a copper cased percussion cap loaded with mercury fulminate into place.
There was little else he valued amongst his possessions save his pony and this weapon, the 42 inch, .69 caliber Springfield smoothbore, which was as good at stopping either a man or deer for up to seventy yards. The musket was a brand new model from the Harpers Ferry and Springfield Armory and had cost him plenty of bear and beaver pelt to purchase. When not in his hand or on the move he usually carried the musket hanging down from his saddle horn kept in a waterproof rawhide sock and held fast by a strong leather thong. Right now he rested it easily in the crook of his arm and waited.
They were close and he could see it was a man and a young dark haired boy of nine or ten. By their constant glances behind it was clear to Gringo that they were terrified of whatever lay back there. The older man was tired and yet he helped the boy along and Gringo liked to see that he cared for the lad.
As they came up to him, Gringo stepped out from behind the grove of trees and blocked their path, the musket held at waist height but pointing away from them. His sudden movement disturbed a group of Pinyon Jays nesting in the Joshua’s and they flew off squawking in alarm.
The man stopped suddenly as Gringo appeared, his mouth opened in shock and he dropped to his knees in the dust. With one hand he pulled the exhausted boy to him and looked at Gringo desperately.
“Aii! Senor,” he wailed. “Por favor....” a hand reached out in supplication, he was expecting the worst.
“You need water?” Gringo asked.
The man sagged, a look of relief flooding his features. “Please,” he said. “My son....” he gestured to the silent boy who stood expressionless and limp beside his kneeling father.
The haggard Mexican was a man of some forty years although he looked older. A few days growth of straggly beard didn’t help, that and the sadness that occupied his eyes.
Gringo passed them his canteen and watched as the man gave to his son first, urging him to drink slowly and sparingly.
“Savages!” the man spat out bitterly. “It was an ambush, senor. They stole our horses. Eighteen of the best mares and two prime stallions. There were maybe ten of them, some Jicarilla, I think, I am not sure. They killed my partners right away. Without hesitation, two good men, my friends both dead and gone. Then they took their women. Aiee! Chihuahua!” he paused, his voice softening. “That was bad.”
Gringo waited, he was crouched down beside them the canteen being passed from father to son by his hand. Gringo’s eyes roved the horizon as he listened. Ten Apache on the war trail and nearby too, that was not good news.
“They staked them out, the ladies,” the Mexican went on, his lips trembling and curling in distaste. “They did things to them. Mutilation. Those bad things with the body it is best not spoken of.” He pulled his boy protectively towards him as he said it. “We were the lucky ones, thanks to the Blessed Madonna. The two of us were gone from the camp to catch jackrabbit for the pot. I had some traps set the night before. And then.... out of nowhere....”
“How far?” asked Gringo.
The Mexican looked over his shoulder and shook his head. “Back that way. Five hours, I think.”
Gringo got to his feet, lifted the musket to his shoulder and fired a shot into the sky. The boom of the weapon echoed and rolled across the open plain.
“Don’t worry yourself, senor,” Gringo reassured the Mexican. “You and the boy are safe now. We are a large party, they will not risk attacking a group this size.”
The man had jumped at the sound of the musket shot and again he clutched the boy to him. “Who ... who are you, senor. What do you do here in the desert?” he asked the question nervously, still cautious after the loud noise of the fired musket.
“Given name’s Lucius but your people call me Gringo, Gringo Wade. I’m guide and scout for Captain Le Touquet’s expedition, we’re trappers down here hunting and mapping a trade route across the Mojave and up into California.”
The Mexican ducked his head and held out a hand in introduction. “I am Hermano Ibispo and this is my son, Rodolpho. I must thank you, senor Wade. For your kindness.”
Gringo shook Hermano’s hand and then turned as he heard the jingle of harness coming from behind. A column of men rode briskly into sight, ploughing through a wide cloud of flying dust as they came over the crest of the rolling dunes. Outriders covered their flanks a hundred yards out and every man carried a musket at the ready. They were a rag tag looking bunch, mostly bearded and dressed in a variety of worn clothes with buckskin in the predominance.
“What is it Mister Wade?”
Captain Le Touquet rode in the forefront, he was a tall and slender man of obvious French origin, dressed the most stylishly in a knee length drape jacket and a wide, roll-brimmed flat-topped hat. His hatchet face was framed by long dark, curling sideburns, which did something to soften his otherwise hard eyed and sharp boned features. He was in his thirty fifth year and had a volatile personality that could make him both cruel or gentle by turns, mood swings that were not generally understandable or rational in more civilized surroundings. But his driving force was a quality not in question and he led the band of forty men with regimental strictness but also with determination and grit. Collectively they respected his leadership although individually not always his attitudes.
“War party,” said Gringo. “Ten Apache braves, so this man says. Butchered two of his companions and their women.”
“One woman they took alive,” Hermano squinted up at Le Touquet as he blurted out the information. The Captain was in shadow beneath the wide brim of his hat and with the sun behind him, his face was invisible to Hermano, which gave him an intimidating aspect to the exhausted man.
“Who was she?” asked Le Touquet.
“The red headed lady who had a little girl. She came to us alone with the child.”
Le Touquet growled deep in his throat as he heard that. He had no liking for Indians of any tribe and would shoot them down as soon as look at them. A firm believer in the stricture that ‘The only good Indian is a dead one’. He felt the Native Americans were a hindrance and an annoying intervention in the path of white progress with their insistence on nomadic
ways and nebulous religious beliefs that worshiped sky and earth. If he thought of God at all himself, it was only as a vague background memory locked in some childhood room at the back of his mind.
He looked down at the Mexican and his son, cowering in the shadow that he and his horse cast over them.
“Was she a white woman?” he asked.
“Si, senor. Her name was Senora Lawrence and the child was called Lucy. She came with us for transport to the Gila River, then we leave her there and go on to Sonoita.”
Le Touquet looked away, off to the distant hills. He paused, thinking it through.
“Mister Wade, would you scout ahead? I’ll bring on the column and these two fellows.”
“Yes sir,” said Gringo, mounting his pony in one smooth motion. Without a backward look he rode off fast towards the hills.
Gringo considered himself primarily a man of the mountains. Like the others in this party, he had served his dues in the high country, first as a boy teamster and later as trapper and hunter. A solitary man, he had enjoyed the isolation and freedom that this profession had allowed.
Four years previously he had been there at the very last Rendezvous on the Green River back in 1840 when the tombstone had finally been raised on the grave of the fur trade. Beaver pelt had fallen from six to three dollars a pound and it signified to all the mountain trappers and traders that the end was in sight. That, and the changing fashion to silk hats back east, along with cheaper nutria pelts imported from South American, both of which had only hastened the demise.
It was then that Captain Le Touquet, late military surveyor and cartographer, had arrived and hired him and the other men. All of them had been left with little more than debts after the failure of the fur trade and, being collectively hungry for income, they had joined up willingly.
Gringo had been sent on ahead into Mexican controlled territory to scout out a route prior to accurate maps being drawn and after eighteen months of arduous and dangerous travel he had returned having acquired passable Spanish and some Indian sign and was ready to lead the main party down.
His twenty-eighth birthday had passed unnoticed by him in this year of 1844. He lived by the seasons and by no other measurement of time than the position of the sun in the sky. Not tall but a fit and supple man, with a silence and solemnity about him that some mistook as boorishness although that was far from the truth. His dour outlook was more to do with the fact that he was far removed from any social refinements offered by the large settlements and towns, and he displayed himself without any need for such pretensions.
A humble and honorable soul, his personality had been formed from youthful hardship and poverty when his father had died suddenly at an early age leaving Gringo to care for his mother and two younger sisters whilst still not more than a child himself. He accomplished the task without bitterness or regret, accepting it as his lot, and that was how he had continued, slaving away as a cooper’s lad and then saddle maker until the age of fourteen when he had taken leave of his family and headed for the mountains.
He travelled easily now, a lean figure in fringed buckskin and moccasin boots. Under the buckskin he wore a thigh long muslin shirt decorated with Indian beads that he had traded for from a split-nosed Arapaho whore up at Fort Hall. A possibles bag and powder horn strapped across his breast and a devilishly sharp butcher knife cinched in his belt alongside his ammunition pouch. A flintlock pistol lay cross-draw at his waist in the leather loop of a hand made holster. The weapon was a Simeon North, .69 caliber, muzzle loading, fully stocked pistol and he trusted its accuracy over a short distance but no further, for that he relied on his musket.
The pistol was an old army model. The last made at the Berlin Armory, but its practicality forgave it its age. The pistol carried the same gauge as his musket and this allowed him to prepare a simpler variety of lead ball for both weapons.
Gringo tugged down the battered brim of his high crowned hat as the slipstream attempted to pull it free from the shoulder length locks of dark hair that flowed out from beneath it. Unusual amongst the mountain men, Gringo was clean-shaven, using his keen knife blade to complete the ablution each morning when possible. He had a rugged square face with a determined set to the jaw. He looked older than his years though. The skin of his face was seamed and tanned like old leather from years of living in the open and squinting under the light of a bright sun.
The passage of the same sun overhead told him now how many hours had passed, which he equated and adjusted with the Mexican’s assessment of his time on foot and he slowed his pace as he approached the estimated site of the ambush.
Overhead, turkey vultures circled lazily, their ugly faces intent on the carrion below but their farsighted eyes cautiously keeping them at a distance as they spotted the scout’s approach. Gringo smelt the scent of death carried on the hot air and knew it was time to dismount and approach the killing ground carefully on foot. Breaking cover over a low rise he looked down on the remains of the campsite.
The place was a sad scene of wreckage, the pack animals slaughtered and panniers broken open, their contents scattered. Already the dead were beginning to swell under the intense heat and the flies were feasting in swarms on the thickly congealed dark stains that lay on the sand. The stripped bodies of the men lay where they had fallen, taken by both lance and many arrows. Gringo knew it was not the custom of the Apache to scalp but to mutilate was common, any savage imperfection being enough of an insult to forbid the victim entry into the sprit world.
Although hardened, the sight of the women staked out and abused so, caused Gringo to compress his lips and tighten his jaw. He found ripped canvas sacking and torn blankets amongst the strewn contents of the panniers and covered the corpses with these. They would bury the remains more properly later.
He quartered the ground looking for sign and found plenty amongst the ruins of the campsite. Moccasin tracks in different sizes, the torn fringe of a loincloth and the unshod hoof prints of many horses. The Mexican had been right, enough different moccasin impressions to make up the number of attackers to ten braves. He was pleased to see some broken casks of liquor. The Indians had drunk their fill and left the remainder to drain away and he guessed their senses would be slowed as a result. The worst of it was that the Indians had picked up the men’s firearms and were now carrying something more deadly than their normal fire hardened spears and flint tipped arrows.
It was an easy trail to follow, the ponies left a wide path as they were driven off and it was obvious the Apache thought they were safe from any pursuit as they rode in plain sight and avoided a more circumspect route. Gringo loped after them, leading his horse to keep it fresh should the occasion arise. He knew he could run like this for the whole day, just as well as any Indian brave if the need arose.
The desert here rose and fell in small sandy hillocks covered with brush and Gringo was aware that if he kept below the skyline where he was able, it was unlikely the Indians would spot him approaching.
He had been running for two hours when he saw their dust ahead, he was making better time than they and he surmised that the alcohol and slow moving herd probably had a part to play in this.
Gringo almost fell over her.
She lay in a shallow pass between two low hills, lying in the direction the trail of stolen ponies led. She had been fleeing he guessed. Making a desperate dash for it with the child. They had ridden her down and a stone club had ended her days. There was little left at the back of the woman’s skull, it had been caved in and only a soft tangle of blood soaked reddish hair blew over a cavity that stared back darkly at Gringo like the remains of a broken eggshell.
He found no trace of the little girl and it saddened his heart to think of her fate. There was a rag doll made from scraps lying to one side of the trail. A poor thing, hand stitched and made of brown linen stuffed with raw cotton balls and wearing hair braided from yellow wool. A crude face had been painted on, two overly large eyes and red Cupid’s bow lips. The nake
d thing was all that remained of the child and Gringo tucked it into the breast of his shirt before turning back to the mother.
The woman had been trampled by the stolen herd, which, coming up along their path of flight, had been driven uncaringly over where she lay and this was probably how the Indians had missed the woman’s bag.
A slender shoulder satchel lay under her body and Gringo turned its out contents to ascertain if this was indeed the same Mrs. Lawrence the Mexican had spoken of. A tiny buttoned purse with four gold half eagles tipped out, a small delicately embroidered handkerchief, a mirror, comb, a pair of scissors, a travelling sewing kit and a cut out silhouette portrait of a man in an oval frame with the name James Lawrence written in a looping copperplate hand underneath. Tucked into an inner pocket was a letter, neatly folded and still in its envelope.
It was addressed to Mrs. Idela Lawrence and was from her husband James, who, it appeared, had arranged with the Mexicans to grant her passage to the Gila where he ran a trading post. He looked forward, he wrote, to seeing little Lucy again as it was four years since her fourth birthday and he had not seen her since. Lucy Lawrence, eight years old and prisoner of the Apache. Gringo knew what that meant for the child. A harsh life of drudgery and slavery until she was of a childbearing age.
Gringo sighed at the thought. There was something else in the satchel stuck by its corner he discovered. He plucked it out.
It was a slender soft covered book.
The buff colored booklet declared that it was ‘Beadle’s Pocket Library’ in ornate headline lettering and that this was the third edition of the history of ‘Gringo Wade, Indian Fighter, Explorer and Hero of the Far Frontier. A Stalwart Strong for Liberty’. The illustration which covered almost two thirds of the cover depicted an athletic looking bearded man in coonskin cap and fringed buckskins with a long rifle held in one hand and a wretched looking Indian brave grasped by the throat in the other. At his feet lay a fainting female, one hand held up protecting the small child in her arms.
