Flintlock

by William W. Johnstone

  “He won’t take any sass,” Fong said. “I can tell you that.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  “We’re getting close,” Jack Coffin said.

  “How close?” Abe Roper said.

  “Close enough that I can sense a presence . . . something young and something very ancient, the one the Mexican peons call the Angel de la Muerte.”

  Roper turned in the saddle. “Sam’l, have you any idea what the hell he’s talkin’ about?”

  Sam Flintlock shook his head. “We’re not catching your drift, Jack.”

  The breed stared ahead of him at the gently rising ridge of Pastora Peak and its mantle of pine, juniper and winter oak.

  “I don’t know the reason for my feelings or what they mean,” Coffin said. “But by and by, we will all find out.” He looked at Roper. “The golden bell is guarded by the Angel of Death. To see and touch the bell is to die.”

  “And you’ll lead us right to it, huh?” Roper said. His eyes were greedy.

  “Yes. I’ll lead you to the bell, and to the one who protects it.”

  “Don’t bother yourself about no damned angel of death,” Roper said. “He gives us any trouble an’ I’ll gun him.”

  Flintlock’s attention was caught by the Chinese girls. Usually they chattered to each other in their own tongue, but now they were strangely quiet and had been since the peak came into view.

  The older girl felt Flintlock’s eyes on her and she stared at him with frightened black eyes. Then she said, “Si shen.”

  “What does that mean?” Flintlock asked her.

  The girl answered in her own tongue, and Charlie Fong, his face troubled, translated. “I don’t speak much Chinese, but the gist of what she said is that we are entering the realm of Si shen, the Grim Reaper.”

  Abe Roper overheard and he said to the girl, smiling, “Don’t you worry your pretty little head about that, honey. I’ll gun that Si shen sumbitch as well.”

  Then the Mexican woman stepped into their path. She held a gray horse by a lead-rope.

  Abe Roper drew rein and looked around him, his head moving fast from side to side. He slid his Winchester from the boot and said, “Look sharp, boys. This could be an ambush.”

  The peasant woman was very old, her face wrinkled, eyes milky white.

  She held the horse by a halter and said nothing.

  Flintlock helped Ayasha to the ground and propped the Hawken upright on his thigh. He rode beside Roper and said, “You’re thinking Carlos Hernandez, huh?”

  “Damn right I am,” Roper said. “Just like that Mex to use an old woman as bait and then bushwhack us. He’s a sneaky one, is Carlos.”

  “I don’t think so, Abe,” Flintlock said. “The Mexican would bushwhack us all right, but sending an old woman as bait isn’t his style.”

  Coffin rode up and said, “There is only the old woman and the horse.”

  “You sure?” Roper said.

  But then the woman spoke and expelled all doubt.

  In passable English, she said, “You will take the caballo as a gift and go away from here.”

  Roper sat erect in the saddle, and said, “Who are you, old woman? Speak now. Be up-front, mind. We’re white men here.”

  “I am nobody,” the woman said. “The gray horse is for you.”

  “Woman, who gives us this fine horse?” Coffin said.

  The younger Chinese girl gave a little yelp of fear and Flintlock turned and looked at her.

  “A great lord,” the woman said. “You must take his gift and go back from whence you came. Go home and never return here again.”

  “Woman, who is this feller?” Roper said. “This great lord ranny?”

  The old peasant’s face showed no emotion.

  “He is the one all of us fear,” the woman said. “He is a great lord, but his heart is as cold as ice and there is no pity in him.”

  “Si shen!” the older Chinese girl called out.

  Suddenly Roper was angry. “Well, lady, you go back and tell Carlos Hernandez that the first time I see him I’ll put a bullet into him. Great lord my ass. He’s a damned, low-down, thieving outlaw.”

  “Pot calling the kettle black, huh, Abe?” Flintlock said, grinning.

  “I’m a professional, Sammy, a gentleman highwayman who robs banks and trains. I don’t steal frijoles out of the mouths of Mexican children.”

  Without waiting to hear what Flintlock had to say, Roper said, “Charlie, grab the gray. That’s one good-lookin’ hoss.”

  “No, Charlie, leave it be,” Flintlock said.

  “What the hell, Sam’l?” Roper said.

  “Look on the left shoulder, Abe. See the red handprint?”

  “Yeah, I see it. So what?”

  “It’s the mark of death, made in blood. Let the horse go back.”

  Roper shook his head. “Damnit, Sam’l, you’re as bad as the Chinese gals. Charlie, go grab the horse.”

  “After what Sam just said, not me, Abe.”

  “The horse has been ridden by demons,” Jack Coffin said. “That is why it bears the mark of death.”

  Roper cursed loud and long, then said, “What a bunch of women! I’ll get the damned hoss my ownself.”

  He kneed his own mount forward....

  And then the wind came.

  And the rain.

  As Sam Flintlock would recall later, the tempest originated at the top of Pastora Peak and drove downward. Shrieking its fury, the wind shredded leaves and branches from the pines and oaks and drove a hammering rain before it.

  Abe Roper’s horse reared, frightened arcs of white showing in its eyes, and the outlaw was thrown. He hit the ground with a thud and lay there stunned as his mount galloped past him.

  The rain was torrential, coming off the mountain in raking sheets, and the noise of the storm was tremendous, like the rumbling roar inside a railroad tunnel as a deadheading express rackets past.

  “Into the trees!” Flintlock yelled. The wind snatched the words from his mouth and tossed them away with the blowing leaves.

  Charlie Fong herded the Chinese girls deeper into a pine thicket and Flintlock jumped out of the saddle, grabbed Ayasha around the waist and followed.

  A series of splintering crashes sounded from higher up the mountainside as the wind freed a rain-loosened boulder and set it rolling down the slope. Above the peak, lightning scrawled across the tumbling sky.

  Flintlock heard a woman scream, then realized it was Ayasha. He pulled her close to him and she buried her face in his chest, tree branches and fluttering leaves cartwheeling around them. A few feet away the Chinese sisters huddled against the base of a pine, Charlie Fong, with outstretched arms, doing his best to protect them.

  The storm climaxed in a bellowing, clashing uproar that Fong would later describe as sounding like the finale of a Russian overture he’d once heard in a San Francisco concert hall.

  Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it was over.

  The clouds parted, the sun came out and a few random raindrops ticked from the trees.

  There was no sign of the old woman or the gray horse.

  Abe Roper groaned and got to his feet slowly and painfully.

  He saw Sam Flintlock step toward him and said, “What the hell happened?”

  “Storm,” Flintlock said.

  Roper put his hands on his hips and arched his back, working out the kinks. “Where’s my damned hoss?” he said.

  “He’s around somewhere,” Flintlock said. “He won’t have gone far in all that wind and rain.”

  “Just sprung up, didn’t it?” Roper said. “It just came out of nowhere.”

  “Yeah,” Flintlock said. “Strange, that.”

  “Big storms happen all the time in the mountains,” Roper said. “Squalls hit out of the blue. Damn, I’m soaked to the skin.”

  “Me too,” Flintlock said. “And I guess everybody else. I’ll get a fire started and we can dry out our duds.”

  “And keep a watch for Hernandez.
He didn’t fool us this time, but he’ll try again.”

  “Don’t you think that storm was a little odd, Abe?” Flintlock said.

  “In what way?” Roper had taken off his shirt and was wringing water out of it.

  “I mean, just blowing up like that.”

  “I told you, Sammy, sudden storms happen in the high country all the time.” Roper flapped his shirt, trying to get it dry. It made a slapping noise. “They last for a few minutes then move on.”

  He looked over to where Charlie Fong stood with the women. “Everybody all right, Charlie?”

  “Seems like,” Fong said. “But we’re soaked.”

  “Yeah, we’re all soaked. Where is the Injun?”

  “Right here, Abe.” Jack Coffin stepped out of the trees, his wet hair hanging lank over his shoulders.

  “The squall’s got Sammy spooked,” Roper said. “Thinks maybe it was sent by boogermen, I reckon.”

  “You should have taken the horse,” Coffin said. “You should’ve gone home.”

  “Hell, now don’t you start,” Roper said. “Listening to Sammy is bad enough.”

  “You should have taken the old man’s gift.”

  “I tried to take it, but then the storm came down.”

  “The storm was sent by the old man who guards the bell,” Coffin said.

  Roper’s face lit up. “Then we’re close, huh?”

  “Too close,” Coffin said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  “Asa, I have news and it’s bad,” Captain Owen Shaw said.

  “A hanging?” Asa Pagg said. He looked anxious. “Don’t tell me it’s hanging. I’d rather be shot.”

  Shaw hesitated as though he was trying to soften the blow, then said, “It’s the Rogue’s March, I’m afraid.”

  “What the hell is that?”

  “It’s a punishment the army reserves for scoundrels of every stripe, thieves, deserters, slackers and all the rest. You’ll be drummed out of the post.”

  Pagg smiled. “Is that all? Hell, I’ve been thrown out of better places than this.”

  “It could be bad, Asa,” Shaw said. “Depending on what Colonel Grove has in mind, it could be real bad.”

  Now Pagg was suspicious. “What are you telling me, Captain?”

  A shrill bugle call razored through the quiet of the morning.

  “Assembly,” Shaw said. “I have to go.”

  “Wait! Damn you, wait!” Pagg called. “How bad?”

  But Shaw was already gone, walking under a lemon-colored sky to where the troops, mounted and foot, were already falling into line.

  Now Asa Pagg was a worried man.

  Getting thrown out of the fort didn’t trouble him in the least, but would they give him his horse and guns? And a few dollars in his pocket?

  Pagg took some comfort from the fact that Shaw would see to all these things. He gritted his teeth. He’d better. Or he was a dead man.

  The guardhouse door swung open and a huge cavalry sergeant stepped inside, a squad of riflemen behind him.

  “All right, sonny Jim, it’s time,” the soldier said, in a strong English accent.

  “What’s going on, damnit?” Pagg said. “I’ve got a right to know.”

  “You’ll get thirty, and then be drummed out,” the sergeant said.

  “Thirty what?”

  “Lashes, man,” the sergeant said. His smile did nothing to soften his coarse, cruel mouth. “Think yourself lucky, you could’ve got a hundred, and after that little lot, I’d have to scrape up what was left of you with a manure shovel.”

  Asa Pagg was a big man and he wasn’t going anywhere without a fight.

  He swung at the sergeant’s chin, but the Englishman was no bargain. A veteran of the French Foreign Legion he’d later served three years as a first mate on the New York hell ships. He’d learned his skull-and-knuckle fighting in a hard school and now he proved it.

  The sergeant slipped Pagg’s wild swing, then brought up his own right in a vicious uppercut that landed square on the outlaw’s chin. Pagg crashed onto his back. He was hit hard but still conscious and cursing and he kicked out at the soldiers who rolled him on his belly and tied his hands behind him.

  But for Asa Pagg worse indignities were to come.

  His boots were removed and then the soldiers used their bayonets to cut his clothes from his body. He was hauled, naked and bleeding, to his feet and bundled out the door.

  The timber punishment frame had been removed from outside the guardhouse and now stood in the middle of the parade ground. X marked the spot of Asa Pagg’s coming degradation.

  As he was dragged toward the whipping post sand burrs tormented Pagg’s bare feet and as he got closer he saw affixed to one of the uprights a painted sign that read:

  I am a

  RAPIST

  Pagg cursed and struggled as his wrists were lashed to the frame, then the soldiers stepped back and a silence descended on Fort Defiance.

  Close by, Pagg heard a bird singing and he craned his head to see what was going on behind him. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a group of civilians, McCarty the sutler, a couple of men he didn’t know, and a fainting Winnifred Grove supported by the widowed Maude Ashton.

  There was no sign of Dean and Harte. All Asa Pagg saw that morning were scores of enemies and no friends. Even Shaw was nowhere to be seen.

  The big sergeant stepped beside Pagg, a coiled, braided leather whip in his right hand. His face set and grim, the man looked expectantly in the direction of the headquarters building.

  Pagg heard Colonel Grove yell the command, “Music to the front!”

  Then, “Thirty, Sergeant Fuller! Carry out the sentence!”

  A snare drum rattled into life and Fuller shoved a chunk of wood between Pagg’s teeth. Then a moment passed as the whip uncoiled and . . .

  Crack!

  The plaited leather cut deep and Pagg flinched as pain bladed across his naked back.

  Now a single fife accompanied the drum, piping out the jaunty air of the “Rogue’s March.”

  As the whip cracked and tore into flesh, some of the older soldiers, who’d seen this many times before, chanted the words to the tune, unchanged since the colonists had borrowed them from the British during the Revolutionary War.

  “I left my home and left my job,

  Went and joined the army.

  If I knew then what I know now,

  I wouldn’t have been so barmy.”

  The whip ravaged Pagg’s back and he shut his eyes and bit hard into the wood, his breath coming in short, agonized gasps.

  “Poor old soldier, poor old soldier.

  If I knew then what I know now,

  I wouldn’t have been so barmy.”

  Pagg turned his head and through a scarlet haze of pain he saw Winnifred Grove watching him intently, her thin lips wet. The woman shuddered . . . smiled . . . shuddered again . . . and Maude Ashton looked at Winnifred, her face taking on a look of dawning horror.

  “Twenty,” Sergeant Fuller said, loud enough for Pagg to hear.

  Pagg groaned, pain and humiliation now the entire focus of his being.

  “Gave me a gun and a big red coat,

  Gave me lots of drilling.

  If I knew then what I know now,

  I wouldn’t have took the shilling.”

  The soldiers had no sympathy for Pagg since he was only a civilian and not one of their own, but a few of the younger recruits seemed glad when the last lash was delivered by Sergeant Fuller, every bit as vicious as the twenty-nine that had gone before.

  For the moment the fife and drum lapsed into silence, as did the chanting of the soldiers.

  “Water, Sergeant Fuller, if you please,” Colonel Grove said.

  The big noncom threw a bucket of water mixed with salt and vinegar on Pagg’s back and the outlaw gasped as another kind of pain burned him like fire.

  “Cut down the prisoner!” Grove ordered.

  Pagg’s bonds were cut and he collapsed t
o his knees. But Fuller and a couple of soldiers dragged him to his feet.

  Trying desperately to hang on to consciousness, his back aflame, Pagg watched Grove ride closer. The colonel drew rein and said, “Bind him.”

  Pagg’s wrists were again tied behind his back, then Fuller took the sign from the top of the frame and hung it around the outlaw’s neck.

  “Drum him out, the rogue!” Grove yelled.

  The fife and drum took up the march again as soldiers with fixed bayonets prodded Pagg toward the perimeter of the fort. He staggered forward to the chants and jeers of the troops.

  “Sent me off on a real old boat,

  By Christ she was no beauty.

  So far across the sea we went,

  Afore to do my duty.”

  “Youngest soldier forward!” Grove roared above the rattle of the snare drum and the tinny fluting of the fife.

  As was traditional, when Pagg reached the perimeter of Fort Defiance, the youngest soldier present, a beardless but booted cavalry trooper, kicked him hard in the ass.

  Pagg staggered forward and fell . . . and the derisive laughter of the soldiers followed him as he struggled to his feet and stumbled into the uncaring wilderness.

  That fine summer morning, the whipping and humiliation changed Asa Pagg forever.

  Before he had been a badman, a killer and robber . . . now he was a monster.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  “They did not take the gray horse, lord,” the old woman said. She bowed low. “I have failed you.”

  The old man smiled and put his hand on the woman’s white head.

  Once she had been a great beauty, but that was more years ago than she or the old man could remember.

  “The fault was mine,” he said. “When men lust for a great fortune in gold, a horse is not much of a prize.”