Hangtree gunhawks plowed through the seething horde like sharp knives slicing up suety pudding.
Among the tents where the leadership cadre bunked, the response was better, more orderly. Not a complete rout like it was on the sandy main floor of the box canyon. The Free Company’s inner circle showed fight, running to the battle, not from it.
They were members of Turlock’s so-called Honor Guard, a platoon of picked men whose primary function was to serve as his personal bodyguards and enforcers. They were professional guns, not the saddle tramps and saloon sweepings that made up most of his following.
Rattling bursts of gunfire grew louder and closer, dangerously close.
Turlock experienced the dim realization that he might be in peril. He’d been acting as a spectator, not a participant. He was about to be roundly disabused of that notion.
A gunman rode up to the tents, one of the raiders. He held the reins of his horse between his teeth, had a blazing gun in each hand, and opened up on Turlock’s men as they came racing out of the tents. For each shot fired, a man fell down dead. The raider was mowing them down as fast as they came at him.
Turlock got a good look at his face, experiencing the shock of recognition. It was Johnny Cross, the gunfighter who’d slain Terrible Terry Moran and his men several days ago in Hangtree!
Turlock had made a point while in town of finding out the man’s name, wondering if he was for hire. He’d been unable to connect the smooth-faced young gunman who’d gunned down Moran and his sidemen with the long-haired, bearded, scruffy, unkempt starveling who’d stood at the shoulder of Colonel William Clarke Quantrill in Clay County, Missouri, when Turlock had sought in vain to make an alliance with the Confederate guerrilla leader.
He didn’t know that the Johnny Cross of those far-off days had taken close notice of him.
Johnny’s guns were empty. Leaning over, he tucked them into a saddlebag, and for an instant, he was unarmed.
In that same moment, Jimbo Turlock realized that he held a loaded gun in his hand.
It was his chance to bring down Johnny Cross, a killing that would send Turlock’s prestige soaring sky-high not only among his men but all along the frontier—throughout the West!
Thumbing back the hammer, Turlock swung his gun toward Johnny.
Vic Vargas rode up. Turlock didn’t know who he was except that he was one of the raiders and be damned to him. Vic held a lit bundle of TNT in one hand. Grinning hugely, he pitched it among the tents and amid Turlock’s Honor Guard.
Johnny and Vic swung their horses around, riding away hard and fast.
Jimbo Turlock had a clear shot at Johnny’s back—but there was that bundle of dynamite pitched his way. The package of TNT sticks hit the peaked roof of a tent, sliding down a slanted side and falling off the edge to the ground, dropping into the open square where Turlock stood, the sizzling fuse fast-burning its way to the explosives.
He turned and ran, scrambling to put some distance between himself and the dynamite.
The last thing he heard before the blast was the piercing yowl of a Rebel yell vented by Johnny Cross as he raced off.
The TNT blew up. An irresistible force, it was a combination of light, heat, and pressure. A shock wave picked up Turlock in an invisible hand and tossed him in the air. The dizzying flight was halted when he crashed into a standing tent, bringing it down.
It acted as a kind of safety net, catching him and cushioning his fall. He tumbled head over heels, taking quite a bruising. He found himself sitting on the ground, dazed, senses stunned. Smoke and dust billowed around him, turning men nearby into phantomlike outlines. His ears rang, and he had a bloody nose.
A couple of his men, Honor Guard stalwarts all, recognized him, helping him to his feet, holding him up.
“It’s the Commander! Are you all right, sir?”
Turlock saw the man’s mouth moving but couldn’t make out his words for the ringing in his ears. “I can stand by myself!” he shouted, unable to judge the volume of what he was saying.
He brushed himself off with his hands, flicking off bits of ember and ash, pieces of straw, weeds, and debris. His hair, eyebrows, and mustache were scorched, his face and hands blackened by sooty smears.
Just when he thought he’d regained his composure, the scene was rocked with another earth-shattering boom.
Vic had loosed another blast of TNT. Luckily for Turlock, the explosion hit a different part of the camp. It was jarring and frightening but inflicted no physical damage to him.
The men tending to Turlock remembered that they were supposed to be his bodyguards and started guarding him. They formed up in a loose knot around him, interposing their bodies between him and those who might mean to do him harm.
The raiders were already far away at the eastern end of Sidepocket, readying for the breakout assault on the exit into Wild Horse Canyon.
The tent city bivouac area was an unholy mess. Canvas, rope, and wooden tent poles were a flimsy hedge against TNT. The same went for flesh and blood.
Men and material had been pulverized by the dynamite blasts. The area looked like a tornado had gone through it. The ground was littered with bodies and rubble.
Jimbo Turlock left the scene, bodyguards escorting him inside a loose security cordon so that he was ringed on all sides. He paused on a slight rise overlooking the shallow basin of the center of the canyon, his escorts pausing with him. Sticking close to the commander beat the hell out of trying to give chase to those fighting devils who had ripped through camp.
Turlock’s ears suddenly popped and he could hear again. He all but recoiled at the torrent of noise flooding the encampment—screams, shouts, shots, runaway horses, and running men and women.
The Hangtree raiders dashed out from behind the cover of the rocks to make their breakout, blowing up the barricade and crashing out of Sidepocket Canyon. Galloping north up Wild Horse Canyon, they whooped and hollered, laying down a mocking chorus of Rebel yells as they raced out of sight.
“Lord, how I hate that sound!” Jimbo Turlock said with quivering emotion.
TWENTY-SEVEN
The Free Company was on the march—not that there was any actual marching being done.
The hard core of the outfit, the two hundred or so mounted marauders, rode out in a massed column ten deep, riding north up the middle of Wild Horse Canyon.
They didn’t assemble in any formation or any real semblance of order, with platoons and squads, ranks and files. The Free Company wasn’t that kind of outfit. They were robber bandits, a band of horse-mounted barbarians who wandered from town to town, killing, looting, and burning.
You want military-style precision and discipline? Join the army. That was the marauders’ sneering attitude toward the basics of drill and all martial routine. The last thing in the world they were interested in was military discipline.
Many of them had been in one army or another, the Union Army or the Confederacy, sometimes both at one time or another. Jailhouse recruits mostly, they had joined the military as a judge-mandated alternative to hanging or going to prison.
They soon learned that the army was a kind of jail itself, with the additional hazard of possibly being shot dead by the other side, and deserted as soon as possible, often taking with them stolen weapons, ammunition, and horses. To their surprise, their time in the army proved not to have been a total loss after all.
In the Free Company, a man was his own man, generally. No snotty chicken-squat officers or bullying noncoms to ride his ass about keeping his person neat, clean, and squared away; no falling out for drill at four in the morning; no guff about not drinking on duty, no women on post, or any other nonsense that made army life a chore and a bore.
No rules against robbing, raping, and killing, either. In fact, it was expected. That was the job of a marauder.
Of course, there were certain obligations and duties. A man had to have his own gun and horse and be fairly proficient in the use of both. He had to be able to take c
are of himself and not be pushed around. But hey, brother, where didn’t those basic facts of life apply?
On went the mounted marauders.
Behind them were the foot soldiers, those too damn lazy or incompetent to steal a horse or just too damn drunk to stay on one of the swaybacked nags without falling off. They were the camp followers, a mob of criminal rabble who trailed along in the wake of the robber army to see what they could glean of the spoils. A horde of renegades, tinhorns, thimble riggers, diddlers, dealers in stolen goods, sharpers, sneak thieves, pickpockets, the sly, the sick, and the damned. Male and female, they made up an entire criminal underworld on the hoof, wandering across the countryside in search of what they could steal with little risk.
They were armed with a spectrum of weapons, from rifles, shotguns and six-guns to derringers, blunderbusses, pocket pistols, axes, machetes, knives, meat cleavers, brass knuckles, and blacksnake whips—every instrument and tool that could be used to put a hurt on another living being.
The Free Company was on the move. The robber bandits were going to demonstrate their power and terrible vengeance. They would avenge the indignity of the vicious and unprovoked assault made on the Sidepocket camp.
Their first objective was Cross Ranch on the other side of the cut. They’d kill all they found and strip the ranch clean of livestock and possessions. They’d have a great feasting at a mighty barbecue of Cross Ranch cattle.
Thus fortified, they would continue onward to their next day’s target—Hangtree town. A rich, fat target ripe for plucking!
Most Texas towns hadn’t been doing too well even before the war, their inhabitants barely getting by, eking out a hardscrabble living. It was the frontier, after all, where life was hard. Constant attacks by bandits and Comanches didn’t help.
Come the war and its aftermath, things got worse. Ranches and farms were left untended during the conflict, livestock running off into the wild, cultivated land being reclaimed by weeds and brush.
Most families had lost male kin to the war—fathers, brothers, sons, husbands, and sweethearts. Privation, famine, and disease had taken their toll on the home front, with many a weary returning veteran finding no living family members to return to.
But Hangtree was different. Hangtree was on the boom, cashing in on the rising cattle market economy and prospering as a jumping-off point for westbound wagon trains. Hangtree was fat and sassy, easy pickings, and the Free Company marauders would do the taking.
Banks were heavy with gold and silver, stores were jammed with goods, taverns and saloons were awash in whiskey—good whiskey, not cheap raw rotgut with six rattlesnake heads added per barrel to give it some bite.
All the Free Company had to do was reach out their good strong hands and take it—first killing any and all who got in their way . . . or just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
All these dazzling prospects had been laid out by Jimbo Turlock in a short but rousing speech he’d given to the Free Company and its ragtag auxiliary army of foot soldiers and camp followers.
He had been a politician once, and still retained the breed’s leather-lunged gift for oratory, exhortation, and exaggeration. Not to mention outright downright lying. He’d taken the horde up on the rhetorical mountaintop, verbally laying out all the riches that would be theirs. No mealy-mouthed pie-in-the-sky preaching, brother, this was the genuine, the real goods. A dazzling vision to fuel the fires of avarice and greed.
What the commander neglected to mention to his shocked troops was that he was in the pay of a foreign power—and the wages were good. For him.
The foreign power was represented by agents of Emperor Maximilian, Archduke of Austria-Hungary, whose greedy ally, scheming colonialist French emperor Louis Napoleon, had put on the throne of Mexico. An Austria-Hungarian Emperor of Mexico, of all places. Mexico!
It was outlandish, improbable, but most incredible, it was true.
It took several French armies, the Foreign Legion, and a traitorous cabal of rich Mexican landholders and aristocrats to depose rightfully elected Benito Juárez from the office of President of the Republic of Mexico.
That and an American civil war. With the Union and Confederacy locked in conflict in the War of Secession, there was no federal authority to enforce the Monroe Doctrine and kick Emperor Maximilian out of Mexico.
Maximilian, his cohorts, and their European style of fighting had pretty well already lost the fight with Juárez’s revolutionists.
The War Between the States having been decided in favor of the Union, Washington, D.C., was pressuring the French to get out of Mexico and take Maximilian with them.
The Emperor’s inner circle of French generals and Mexican landholders—the so-called Max Men—were fighting back with a variety of plots. Their secret agents had thronged the Southwest, jumping back and forth across the border to stir up trouble to keep Maximilian in power. Gunrunners shipped wagons of illegal arms shipments to Imperial forces.
Max Men worked with Comancheros to supply the Comanches with weapons and whiskey to encourage them to make war in Texas, diverting valuable U.S. government resources to put down the uprising.
The Free Company plot to overthrow Fort Pardee and sack Hangtree was the product of another Max Men plot.
North Central Texas Comanches had received a serious setback the summer before when Hangtree beat back war chief Red Hand’s so-called Great Raid. Removing Fort Pardee from the board freed the Llano Comanches to spread their war against the Tejanos far to the east.
Sacking and burning Hangtree would destabilize the region, strengthening the renewed Comanche onslaught and hampering the Army in establishing its power and presence in the territory.
Jimbo Turlock had ventured to Weatherford to finalize the deal with some of Maximilian’s secret agents operating in the Lone Star state. He’d been accompanied by his ultimate inner circle—Kale Dancer, Osage Sally Potts, Sgt. Quarles, and Piney.
It was unnecessary for any others in Free Company to know the true purpose of the trip, unnecessary and supremely dangerous. Maximilian’s secret agents were paying Turlock a chest full of gold coins to carry out the mission. It was a mission he would have been only too glad to carry out for free on his own hook.
A cache of gold!
Its existence must remain unknown to the Company. There’d be no controlling the greedy gun wolves once they got a whiff of gold in their nostrils. The Free Company would instantly degenerate into total anarchy, with every robber and killer double-crossing each other in their mad lust to win the prize. Only three had known of the gold—Jimbo Turlock, Kale Dancer, and Quarles.
In light of subsequent events, Turlock assumed Dancer had told the secret to Ashley, probably during some intimate pillow talk following a bout of love play.
They were dead and would tell no tales. But the possibility existed that Ashley had confided the secret to that cunning old witch Malvina.
That chilling likelihood threw its shadow over Turlock’s every waking moment. He had no doubt that Malvina would not rest until she had somehow possessed herself of the chest of gold—all of it. Every last glittering gold coin, every speck of gold dust.
To forestall the attempt that he knew was coming, Turlock had taken precautions to secure the gold against Malvina’s schemes and machinations. During the wild night ride from Hangtree to the Sidepocket camp, the party of Turlock, Quarles, and Piney had paused to hide the treasure. They had buried the chest in a safe place in the wilderness where it would never be found by anyone else.
Piney knew the chest held something of great value, but no matter. Turlock had knifed him in the back, tumbling him into the hole in the ground and atop the chest of gold which lay at the bottom of the excavation. Then the commander and Quarles had filled in the hole with dirt, burying Piney and the treasure. Turlock had no doubts about Quarles. He was loyal. Through long years, over nearly two decades of robbing and plundering, Quarles had had countless opportunities to do away with Turlock and s
teal his loot if he’d wanted to do so.
But Quarles was not so minded, always serving his commander with unquestioning doglike fidelity. It was quite touching, actually, Turlock thought.
He had knowingly turned his back to Quarles a number of times while they were burying the gold. If Quarles had wanted to kill him and keep the gold for himself, he could have easily done so right then and there.
Most would have thought Turlock’s ploy a foolish, dangerous gamble, but the commander believed otherwise. He trusted in Quarles’s loyalty, but even more, he trusted in his own luck, in the mystical workings of that star of destiny which had never failed him, seeing him through adversity and hardship to ultimate triumph.
Once again, he had been proven right. Quarles had not moved against him, despite having had very real opportunities to do so.
As he rode forward, Turlock hoped he would not have to do away with Quarles in the end, once they had escaped to a safe place with the chest of gold and whatever loot he could plunder from Hangtree.
For loyal though Quarles unquestionably was, the unexpected was always something to worry about. Quarles might take sick and rave about the treasure in a fever delirium. He might become boastful when drunk and give away the secret. Not that he ever had been drunk. The man had never touched a drop of alcoholic spirits in all the years since entering the commander’s service . . . but in some unforeseeable future, he might.
Quarles could even get religion someday and decide to reform, endangering his master. Who knew? Stranger things had happened.
Turlock shook his head. But such contingencies lay somewhere over the hill, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow to come. Or maybe never.
He shook his head again to dislodge his musings. He needed Quarles alive and functioning as never before, denied as he was of the able assistance of Kale Dancer. The Cross ranch was to be taken and burned, Hangtree gutted and plundered.
Turlock led the Free Company robber army north along Wild Horse Canyon road toward the pass at Cross’s Cut.
Rebel Yell Page 28
