Blood Bond 16: A Hundred Ways to Die

by Johnstone, William W.

  Matt and Sam rode together at the point, Hal Purdy riding up along with them. Remy Markand and Arnholt Stebbins rode side by side, with Ed Dane making up a third.

  Markand and Stebbins had a mutual interest in Colonel Davenport and Dane was fascinated by the idea of the machine gun, pumping Markand with questions about it.

  Dane and Purdy would’ve ridden with anyone as long as it wasn’t with each other.

  Partners Geetus Maggard and Dutch Snyder were paired farther down the line. Howling Jeff Howell and Vern Tooker strung together. Each was a wild man in his own way: Howell the hellraising Arkansas Razorback and soft-spoken Tooker the veteran of countless brawls, knifings, Indian fights, and manhunts.

  Juan Garza and Pima Joe rode at the tail of the column, where horseman Garza trailed the string of packhorses and spares, keeping an eye on the animals and their burdens. Garza and Pima Joe, both men of few words, seemed to take some enjoyment in each other’s laconic company.

  To the column’s right, running north to south, stretched the San Pedro River, a scrub of greenery growing along its banks making a welcome change from the tan and sandy wastes sprawling on all sides.

  The column angled south by southeast, away from the San Pedro, passing far-flung, isolated ranches. A blur in the southern distance gradually resolved itself into the figures of a group of mounted men.

  “Riders up ahead,” Hal Purdy said, frowning. “Three or four, I make it.”

  “Four,” Sam said.

  “They ain’t hiding. They’re showing themselves.”

  “It’s okay, Hal, they’re with us,” Matt said. Sam turned in the saddle, telling those riding behind to pass the word along the column that the quartet ahead were friendlies.

  Presently, the column approached a crossroads. Waiting in the shade of a clump of mesquite trees were Ringo, Curly Bill, Gila Chacon, and Polk Muldoon.

  The road east led to the McLaury brothers ranch. Siblings Tom and Will McLaury were in the inner circle of the Cowboy faction, friends of Ringo and Curly Bill. Ringo, Bill, Gila, and Polk had gone to the ranch after the jailbreak. Ringo and Bill had set the crossroads as their meeting place when they’d made plans with Sam and Matt last night at the Big Sky Saloon.

  The four rode out to meet the column.

  “They’re going with us. Most of you know Ringo, Bill, and Polk. The bandido is from Pago, knows the ins and outs of it. He knows some folks there that’ll help us out,” Matt explained.

  “Why trust him?” Hal Purdy asked.

  “Don Carlos, boss of the slavers, is an enemy of Chacon’s. He sent three men to kill him. That’s why Chacon was caught and in jail, waiting for the hangman.”

  “I don’t like it. What’s to stop him from leading us into a trap or selling us out when we reach Pago?”

  “My gun, Hal,” Ringo said said smiling, but meaning it, too.

  “That’s good enough for me,” Ed Dane said. If Hal Purdy was against something, he’d be for it.

  “We’re Chacon’s best hope—hell, only hope—for tearing into Don Carlos and breaking his power. He needs us, and we can damned sure use him,” Matt said.

  “An excellent basis for trust, señor,” Gila said.

  “How’s this affect the split of the reward, that’s what I want to know,” Geetus Maggard said, scowling, his face bunched up like a clenched fist. “Four more slices of the pie mean smaller shares for the rest of us.”

  “Gila gets no share,” Sam said. “There’s a rope waiting for him in Tombstone and he can’t come in to collect.”

  “Ringo, Bill, and Polk come in for equal shares,” Matt said.

  “Don’t know as I like that,” Maggard said.

  “They run the same risks as the rest of us and come in for an equal payday. Fair’s fair.”

  “For myself, I am glad to have these men with us. We need guns such as theirs,” Juan Garza said.

  “I’ve ridden with Polk and he’s plenty salty. And I reckon everybody here knows what Ringo and Curly Bill can do,” Vern Tooker said.

  The others seemed to agree; in any case, no dissenting opinion was voiced aloud.

  “I s’pose enough of us’ll get killed to fatten them shares back up,” Maggard said grudgingly.

  “That’s Geetus for you, always looking on the bright side,” Dutch Snyder said, laughing.

  Gila turned toward Polk. “We go into dangerous country, amigo. My gun?”

  Sam and Matt exchanged glances, nodding. “Give him his gun, Polk,” Sam said.

  Polk Muldoon raised the flap of his saddlebag and pulled out Gila’s gun belt and gun, handing it to him.

  “Gracias.” Gila smiled, showing strong white teeth. He fastened the belt around his waist, snugging it into place, settling the soft leather holster where it hung down from his hip.

  “Ahh,” he said contentedly, sounding like a man slipping into a hot bath. “I am going to reach for my gun now, to make sure it is in working order. I tell you this so none of you bad hombres gets the wrong idea. I would hate for there to be a tragic misunderstanding before we have a chance to get to know each other better.”

  “You sure would,” Purdy said grimly.

  Gila reached for his gun, slowly drawing it from the holster. Holding it so it wasn’t pointing at anyone, he checked the action. Satisfied, he put it back in the holster.

  “I could use a rifle, too. When someone shoots at you from a distance, it is good to be able to shoot back, no?”

  “There’s extra rifles on one of the packhorses. You can get one the next time we stop,” Sam said.

  “We are stopped now.”

  “What the hell,” Matt said, “give him a rifle, somebody.”

  “I’ll get one. I packed them so it’s less trouble if I get it,” Juan Garza said. He got down from the saddle, going down the line of packhorses until he found the one he wanted. Strong fingers plucked open knotted ropes, lifting the edge of a canvas tarpaulin.

  Presently, Gila Chacon had a loaded rifle in hand. “Winchester! This is very good, señores.” His saddle scabbard was empty. He filled it with the rifle. “Now, on to Pago, eh, muchachos? Vámonos!”

  The four newcomers got into line and the column resumed its forward progress south. Hooves kicked up dust, its yellow plume marking their course. The sun rose higher. The dirt road arrowed across the prairie, narrowing to the vanishing point. The road to Mexico.

  On they rode through the mounting heat of day. Shadows shortened. Small dusty lizards perched on rocks, panting, quivering.

  The column passed Bisbee somewhere on its right, too distant to be seen. The last of the sparsely scattered ranches had been left behind hours ago. Brief stops were made to water the horses and give them some moments rest, before the trek was resumed once more.

  The naked sun turned the sky a seething yellow-white. Buzzards circled in the heights, soaring on the thermals, dipping and gliding.

  The flat began to rise, outcroppings thrusting into the open, black-brown rocks lifting themselves from sandy yellow-gray soil. Sunbaked ground rang to the tread of hoofbeats.

  Matt Bodine rode alongside Remy Markand for a while, studying the other out of the corner of his eye. Markand was an unknown quantity. At least, he knew how to ride. He seemed unfazed by the relentless heat.

  “It’s been a long time since I was in Mexico,” Markand said presently. “Fifteen years. I was here with the Legion, the Foreign Legion, when Maximilian was emperor.”

  “That didn’t work out so well,” Matt said.

  “For Maximilian, no. He died in front of a Juar-ista firing squad. A mad scheme, trying to install an Austro-Hungarian prince on the throne of Mexico. Only a maniac like Napoleon III could have conceived of it.”

  “You were a legionaire, huh? Tough outfit, they say.”

  Markand shrugged. “It suited me at the time. You may have heard what they say in the recruiting offices: ‘You joined the Legion to die, and France will send you where you can die.’”

  “But
you didn’t die,” Matt said.

  “I know. I daresay I was a great disappointment to them,” Markand said dryly.

  They rode farther along. “The landscape is much like that of Morocco, you know. Morocco and Mexico sit roughly along the same latitude line. Similar arid climate, similar terrain, stony desert and mountains,” Markand said.

  “No Apaches in Morocco, though,” Matt said.

  “Morocco has its own savage tribesmen: Riffs, Berbers, Tuaregs. . . . Fine horsemen, fine fighters. Torturers—God help you if they take you alive.”

  “What are you doing here, Markand? I mean, what’s in it for you?”

  “I’m a salesman for an arms maker. This is my chance to give a field demonstration of the Montigny Mitrailleuse. If Colonel Davenport likes the result, he and his associates may buy into the weapon’s North American rights.”

  “That all of it?”

  Markand shrugged. “Perhaps there is something of what you might call desert hunger. I spend much time in banks, offices, and boardrooms. I hunger to experience desert and mountains, sun and stars.”

  Matt nodded. It was a feeling he could understand.

  “Why are you here?” Markand asked.

  “Sam and I have tangled with slave hunters before. I’ve seen their work, the bloodshed and human misery they cause. Anytime I can wipe a few of them off the face of the earth, I’ll jump at the chance,” Matt said.

  “And to get paid for it is even better,” he added.

  FIFTEEN

  The captives were at the end of their rope, almost. At the end of their chain, more accurately. They were fettered to an iron chain bolted to the floor of the covered wagon taking them to Pago in Sonora, Mexico.

  The Black Angus Gang had two covered wagons filled with captive girls. The Bear Paw wagon train had not been the only target. They’d raided lonely ranch houses along the way to the rendezvous at Yellow Snake Canyon, killing all the inhabitants but the young female family members.

  They’d robbed, too, but the loot to be found in such ranches was laughable, next to nothing. The girls were the loot; they’d fetch big money down Mexico way.

  Angus Jones, Carmen Oliva, Sonny Boy Algar, Sime Simmons, Mort Donegan, and Porgy Best had insinuated themselves into McGee’s westbound caravan. The rest of the gang, under the leadership of Quirt Fane, brought an additional five abucted girls to Yellow Snake Canyon.

  Once the Bear Paw emigrants had been wiped out, all but the girls, Jones had picked out three wagons in the best condition and had had them rigged for the trip south.

  Precious human cargo was consolidated in two Conestoga wagons, while a third was filled with arms, ammunition, supplies, and whatever few meager items of value had been pillaged from the wagon train to sell in the mercado, the marketplace of Pago.

  The more mature female chattels, in their mid to late teens, were kept in one wagon, the younger girls in another.

  The senior girls had gotten their growth and were mostly full-bodied, vital, healthy young women in every respect, save for the fact of their being unmarried; this in a society where it was accepted as a matter of course that a maiden of fifteen was of a fit age to be a wife and mother.

  The senior girls also posed the greatest threat of escape. To a slave master, disobedience is the greatest sin and escape the supreme act of disobedience.

  The senior girls included Eva Haber, sixteen; Jenna Rowley, seventeen; Devon Collins, fourteen; and Priscilla Ard, fifteen. All were from Bear Paw. Chained with them were girls taken by the slavers on the road to Yellow Snake Canyon: Gail Merwin, eighteen; Rowena Whitman, fourteen; and Sherry Dubois, sixteen.

  They sat on the floor of the wagon bed with their backs to the long sides of the hopper, three on one side, four on the other. They were as seemingly wretched, miserable, and unhappy a lot of human beings as to be found under the Southwestern sun. A length of heavy chain was fastened to iron staples bolted to the floorboards.

  Each captive had an iron cuff locked around her ankle, and a thinner length of chain securing the cuff to the massive main chain.

  Such leg irons were easily acquired, being in wide use throughout the frontier; indeed, across the nation, being found in reformatories, jails, prisons, workhouses for debtors and the poor, convict labor gangs, and so on.

  “That’ll keep any of you little missies with rabbit blood in you from trying to take it on the run,” said Jones Gang member Slicker Dupree, chortling when the captives were first locked in chains. “It’s for your own good so you don’t hurt yourselves. Where would you run to anyway, in this desert hell? You’d die from heat and thirst, if you was lucky. If not lucky, the Apaches would find you. . . .”

  Sime Simmons drove the senior girls’ wagon. He was the most dependable member of the gang where young female flesh was concerned.

  Long years of backbreaking toil and unremitting danger for little return had left him with a cold heart. All he wanted now was to gain as much gold as he could while he was still strong enough to take it with his own two hands.

  Black Angus could rely on Simmons not to assault one of the virginal captives, thereby drastically reducing her selling price at the slave auction in Pago. If any of the band outraged one of the girls, Angus Jones vowed openly to slay that man.

  “Anybody ruins a gal is stealing money from the rest of us. I’ll kill him, whoever it is. I’ll cut it off at the root first, to teach the rest of you a lesson about the cost of not following orders straight down the line. It don’t matter who it is or what they’ve been to me in the past. Friendship don’t count when it comes to keeping faith with your fellow gang members—it’s a matter of ethics,” he said.

  His woman, Carmen Oliva, rode up front on the wagon’s driver’s seat beside Sime Simmons. She smoked long, skinny, gnarly black cigars that looked like dried twigs and smelled like burning buffalo chips.

  She was an unholy terror to the girls. When one displeased her—and it took very little to get on Carmen’s bad side—a sullen glance, a too-slowness in carrying out a command being enough to trigger her volcanic temper—she set on the offender with the fury of a harpy. Carmen knew how to inflict pain without doing permanent damage, or leaving marks or scars that would knock down the victim’s selling price.

  The second wagon in the convoy held the younger girls, those in their early teens and below. From Bear Paw, they were April Collins, ten; Gretchen Haber, twelve; and Mandy Sutton, thirteen. The others were Emily Jane Bartlett, fourteen; and Dora Hernandez, thirteen.

  Despite their tender years, they too would fetch top prices at Pago. Reflecting on their youth, Angus Jones philosophized, “It’s an investment, like buying a yearling calf. Wait a few years and they’ll get their growth. In the meantime, they can make themselves useful helping out around the house—”

  “The whorehouse, that is, aw-haw-haw-haw!” Sonny Boy Algar leered. His being a nephew and blood kin, Black Angus tolerated the interruption without clouting Sonny Boy.

  “Somebody’s got to build the fires and make the beds and wash the sheets and clean the slops and drudge away in the kitchen,” Jones said.

  The junior girls weren’t kept in chains, most being too slender for leg irons, which tended to slip free of their ankles. No, each was fitted with a high, stiff, thick leather collar, like a choker collar, buckled and locked in place with a small padlock. A length of clothesline ran through rings in the collars binding them all together.

  Moronically cheerful, oblivious as though he’d been struck by lightning, Slicker Dupree drove the second wagon mostly, sometimes being spelled by one of the others. Dupree’s virtue lay in the fact that for him the word of Black Angus was absolute law.

  Mort Donegan piloted the third wagon, the one containing supplies, arms, ammunition, and plundered loot. Donegan was grim, taciturn, and a stolid professional.

  The convoy crossed the border, churning along the road winding through the northernmost mountains of the Sierra Madre Occidental, a line of 800-plus miles of mou
ntain ranges known as the “spine of Mexico.”

  The mountains were made of volcanic rock, spewed up from the internal heat below, molten magma upthrusting through earth’s crust to cool into jagged peaks, pinnacles, promontories, and cliffs. They were honeycombed with barrancas, a twisty labyrinth of canyons, passes, dry washes, and river valleys.

  In the north, the hills were home and refuge to the Yaqui Indians, fierce foes of the hated flatlanders of Spanish descent. They were also the redoubt of renegade bronco Apaches who’d jumped the reservations, now hiding out in the sierra from the armies of two countries, the United States and Mexico.

  Jumbled adobe blocks and cubes that were pueblo villages nestled among the cliffs like crystalline rock formations.

  Dangerous country, and its threat was infinitely magnified during the last year when fearsome Apache war chief Victorio fled the Arizona Territory reservation, taking his tribespeople south into the mountains of Sonora.

  If the Sierra Madre was the spine of Mexico, Sonora’s Espinazo range was the spine of the Sierra Madre. The locals had another name for it: the Spine of the Devil, or the Devil’s Backbone.

  The Black Angus gang regarded themselves as a rough bunch, hardcases who made way for no man, but they walked softly during their passage through the Espinazo en route to Pago. Apache sign was abroad: scourged pueblo villages, abandoned and depopulated, along with burnings and dead bodies.

  The gang skulked as best they were able, creeping cautiously along the trail, mounted men and wagons clustered together as if hunched up in expectation of a fearful blow that might land anytime without warning.

  The outlaws’ usual devil-may-care demeanor, laughing and scratching, drinking and joking, pranks and games of grab ass—were all gone now. They had vanished on first sight of a burned-out village and the mutilated dead bodies of men, women, and children littering the streets: Victorio’s handiwork.

  The badmen’s narrowed eyes restlessly swept the landscape of rocky sierra and sunbaked plains, seeking the Apache. Faces were set in hard lines, their mouths tight, dry, their hands hovering near rifles and holstered guns.