Bowdrie's Law (Ss) (1983)

by L'amour, Louis

  The Comanches feinted a charge, the Rangers fired, and then the Comanches struck in force. And the Rangers with their repeating weapons continued to fire. Outnumbered four to one, Hays's Rangers defeated the Comanches, leaving almost half of them dead upon the field.

  Later, after taking part in the war with Mexico, Hays led an expedition west along the border to San Diego, California. He made several attempts to make a treaty with the Apaches without any great success. He had made contact with a white renegade living among the Apaches, but an unexpected attack by Mexican soldiers made the Indians suspicious.

  In San Francisco, Walker was elected sheriff, still later he led an armed force against the Paiutes and defeated them in a battle near Pyramid Lake.

  Colonel Jack Hays died peacefully on San Jacinto Day in 1883 in Oakland, California, a city he had had a hand in founding.

  Although Cullen Baker is usually credited with the invention of the fast draw as a tactic, Jack Hays killed a barroom toublemaker with a fast draw in 1836. I do not know that he ever used it again.

  *

  WHERE BUZZARDS FLY

  The Mexican's rifle lay over his horse's body, his pistol near his hand. He had gone out fighting, riddled with bullets. His fiat, knife-scarred face was unforgettable, his eyes wide and unafraid, staring up to a brassy sky.

  "Well, Zaparo," Bowdrie said aloud, "it looks like they've washed out your trail."

  His eyes swept the narrow gray gravel-and-sand trail that lay along the bottom of the . Rroyo, littered now with the bodies of men and horses, all dead.

  Fourteen men had gone out fighting, fourteen men killed in what must have been minutes.

  These had been hard, desperate men and they would not have gone easily. This had been an ambush, of course, carefully planned, perfectly timed.

  He who conceived the idea had a mind to reckon with. He was cold, cruel, utterly ruthless. Walking slowly along the line of fallen men, Bowdrie stared bleakly at the litter of bodies scattered along three hundred yards of trail. Above, in slow, patient circles, the buzzards were waiting. They had seen such things before and knew their time would come.

  Yesterday, probably in the late afternoon., there had been a moment here of blood-steeped inferno, flashes of gunfire, and the thunder of heavy rifles.

  Zaparo had moved fast after his swift raid on the ranches and missions, moving along a preplanned route, but somebody had sold him out. Other men, more bloodthirsty than he, had waited with a welcome of gunfire. It was not a nice thing to see or to contemplate.

  In the hard world to which Bowdrie had been born and in which he lived, death was an old story, and the possibility of death by violence rode along with every traveler.

  The death of men in gun battles he could accept, but ambush and murder were another thing. In any event, it was his job.

  When he had become a Ranger he had known what lay before him, but this was the worst he had seen. Unless he was failing to read the signs, the betrayer had himself been betrayed. That last man, who hung back behind the others, had left his gun in his holster, and he had been shot in the back at close quarters. Whoever planned this crime had not planned to trust the man who betrayed others. He lay dead along with the rest.

  For three hours Bowdrie studied the scene, and he was stumped. There were those who said Bowdrie could trail a snake across a flat rock, but now he could find no evidence.

  No cartridge shells remained that could have been left by the attackers, no cigarette butts. All had been gathered up with painstaking care. Every track had been brushed out with mesquite branches. Not one iota of evidence remained, nothing that might lead him to the perpetrators. Yet there is no such thing as a perfect crime. There are only imperfect investigators.

  Seated on a fiat rock, Chick brooded over the situation. Obviously the killers had known well in advance, for the site had been well-chosen. There had been, Bowdrie calculated, at least seven men in the ambush party, and those seven must have been among the deadliest marksmen along the border. They had been facing fourteen Mexicans who could and would fight. Hence the seven, if there were that many, had to have been carefully picked. That, he decided, was his first clue.

  If he could not trail the killers on the ground, he would trail them with his mind.

  Seven dangerous, hard-as-nails men, all ready to kill. To lead them, a man would have to be harder, colder, even more dangerous. He would have to be able to handle the other six, and he would have to enjoy their confidence. Such men were rare.

  Scanning in his mind the Rangers' fugitive list, he could find no man that fit. John Wesley Hardin might have been a possibility, but Hardin's killings had never been for profit but were a result of feuds or similar situations. Nor was he a planner such as this man had been.

  First he must discover who had been involved. What men had been seen in the country around who might have been involved? He must locate one or two possibilities and track them back through the past few weeks to see if they had come together at any time.

  Of course, there was another way.

  The betrayer was dead, but his betraying need not be at an end. Mounting his roan, he walked back along the line of battle until he came to the body of the betrayer.

  Zaparo was no longer important. This man was.

  Swinging down, Chick Bowdrie went through the dead man's pockets. Nothing had been taken from him. The man's name was Juan Piron. It was hand-tooled on his belt. He was short and thick with a ragged scar over an eyebrow, and he had ridden a mouse-colored mustang with one white stocking. Piron looked like a hard man to get along with.

  If Juan Piron had betrayed Zaparo, he had betrayed him to someone he knew, someone he believed could cope with the bandit chief. At some time in the past few weeks or months they had met, but at sometime in the past few days Piron must have met the killer boss or one of his men to supply the information as to their route.

  There lay a chance. To trail Juan Piron, check with everyone he had known, to find out where he hung out, what he had been doing.

  Mounting his hammerhead roan, Bowdrie let the long-legged horse turn back up the arroyo trail. The roan took his own pace, a shambling, loose-limbed trot, and the miles began to fall behind.

  Zaparo's gang had looted two missions and some Mexican ranches of nearly one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in gold and money, most of this altar fixtures from the missions. They had fled across the border to the north, and the Rurales had alerted the Rangers.

  The Rangers, as usual, had business of their own, and McNelly detached Bowdrie to see what he could find. What he found was totally unexpected.

  It was nearly dusk when Bowdrie rode into the wide ranch-yard of Tom Katch's K-Bar.

  A couple of hands loafed in front of the bunkhouse, and Tom Katch himself, an easygoing man with friendly eyes, was sitting on the veranda. Rangers were always welcome at the K-Bar, and there was always coffee, a meal, and a bed.

  "Howdy, Chick!" Katch leaned his massive forearms on the rail as Bowdrie stepped down from the saddle. "What brings you this away?"

  "Zaparo."

  "He on the rampage again? Somebody ought to round him up with a rope."

  "Somebody has. With a bullet."

  "Dead, is he? What happened?"

  Bowdrie dropped into a chair beside Katch and accepted a cup of coffee from a Mexican girl. He dropped his hat on the floor and sipped coffee. Then he put his cup down and explained as briefly as possible, telling only about the ambush, fourteen dead bodies, and the dead horses.

  "Clean job," Bowdrie added. "Not the least hint of a trail." "Hey, boys!" Katch called out. "Zaparo's been killed!"

  The hands trooped up to the porch. The first one seated himself on the steps, looking toward them. He was a hard-featured, wiry, and whipcord young man. "We ain't met," he said to Bowdrie. "My name's Ferd Cassidy."

  Katch waved a hand at the others. "Hawkins, Broughten, Werner, and Cadieux. Top hands ever' man of them, Bowdrie, and on this outfit they'd better be.
"

  Cassidy agreed. "He works the hell out of us. You're lucky to have a job that beats punchin' cows."

  "Well, nobody much cares about a lot of Mexican outlaws," Hawkins commented. "Who d'you reckon did the killin'?"

  Bowdrie shrugged. "No idea who did it. Must be a new outfit. But you're wrong about nobody caring. We care. And an outfit that kills like that might kill anybody. We don't hold with lawbreakers, no matter who they are or who they kill."

  "Some other Mexican outfit could have trailed 'em," Broughten suggested, "or Apaches."

  Bowdrie nodded. "Could be." He paused a moment. "Any of you hombres seen a short, stocky Mexican with a scar over one eye?"

  Did Hawkins stiffen a little? Or was it imagination? "Can't say I have," he said, "but I never knowed many Mexicans, anyway."

  "Got a pickup order on him," Bowdrie lied. "Some shootin' over Concho way. He prob'ly headed east, anyway."

  "Lots of Mexican cowboys workin' this range," Katch suggested. "Right good hands, some of them."

  At daybreak Bowdrie rolled out of his bunk and poured water from a wooden bucket into a basin and bathed his face and hands. He threw out the water and refilled the bucket at the well.

  He wiped the dust from his boots and the silver spurs given him long ago by a Mexican he had befriended. He dug a fresh shirt from his pack and donned it, a black-andwhite-checked shirt. He wore a black neckerchief and black pants. He checked his Colts, returned each to its holster, and taking up his Winchester, he went outside.

  "Better have some breakfast," Cassidy suggested as he walked past, headed for the corral.

  Tom Katch was alone at the table when Bowdrie went inside. Katch was a big man, six-feet-four and weighing a good two hundred and thirty.

  "If there's anything we can do, let us know. Cassidy is a good man on a trail and he likes a fight, but all of us are ready to take a hand if we're needed."

  Katch talked while Bowdrie ate, sitting with a cup of coffee over the remains of his breakfast. "That Mexican you spoke of?. Did he have a name?" '

  "We didn't have a name," Bowdrie said, "just a description. He was a horse thief who got caught and killed a man." He was making up the story as he went along, not wanting to tip his hand too much. "I can't bother with him now. This ambush is the important thing."

  Once he was back on the trail, Bowdrie slowed the roan to a walk. He had little to work with aside from the knowledge that it would require a hard lot of men and the fact that he knew who had betrayed the Zaparo outfit. The loot had been taken away on the pack mules that carried it, and those mules must be some where around. He knew they were mules from the hoofprints at the scene, and he had back-trailed the bandits for a mile or so.

  The loot must be hidden for the time, nd such a lot of men and mules could not travel far without being seen.

  Mentally he shaped a map of the area, bounded on the south by the Rio Grande, and with the arroyo where the ambush occurred as the center. North and west of that arroyo was the range where the K-Bar ran their cattle, and south to the river it was rough, half-desert country where few men ventured. East there was twenty miles of rough country and then the small village of Pasamonte. There was something else. Not over eight miles from the arroyo was the cantina and roadhouse of Pedro Padilla.

  The cantina was the favored stopping place for cowhands, wet Mexicans from the Rio Grande crossing, and all manner of wayfarers. Aside from Pasamonte it was the only place a man could buy a drink or a meal.

  The cantina was built on the ruins of an old mission, a long, low, rambling building surrounding a stone-paved patio. It utilized two walls and the floor of the ancient building, three sides of which were the cantina, and the fourth was reserved for the Padilla family.

  If any news was floating around, Pedro Padilla would have heard it. If any strangers had come into the country, he would know. If mules had passed, he would have seen them. The question was, would he tell a Ranger? Or anybody?

  What must Bowdrie find out? Who was the leader of the attackers? Where had they gone from the arroyo? Where had Juan Piron met with the leader of the ambushers? How had he transmitted the final information as to route, and so on? By what route had the killers arrived at the arroyo?

  All could turn on Piron himself. He was the one link between the bandits and their murderers.

  The cantina basked in the hot desert sun. Leaving his horse in the shade of some cottonwoods, Bowdrie entered the spacious, low-raftered room that was the cantina itself. Strings of peppers hung everywhere, and there were two ollas of fresh cold water, each with a gourd dipper. A dozen tables and a bar, a floor of freshly swept flagstones.

  Padilla was a paunchy Mexican with a large black mustache and a wary eye, the latter no doubt because he had several attractive daughters. He wore a huge old-fashioned pistol, perhaps for the same reason.

  He not only had daughters, Bowdrie perceived, but granddaughters as well, and a wife that would make two of him. Dropping into a chair, Bowdrie ordered a cold beer, suggesting to Padilla that he join him and have one himself.

  A desultory conversation began, inhibited somewhat by the Ranger's badge on his vest, a conversation that covered the heat, the lack of rain, the condition of the range and its cattle, as well as the difficulties of conducting a business so far from the law.

  "No doubt," Bowdrie suggested, "many bad men come as well as the good. You are close to the border."

  "Si! They come, they spend money, they go! I know none of them, and do not wish to know!"

  One of Padilla's daughters was wiping a table nearby, and Chick watched her.

  "Juan Piron comes here often?" he asked casually, aware that she was listening.

  "Piron?" Padilla shrugged. "I do not know him. He is a vaquero?" "That, too, maybe .... He is a bandido, I think."

  Padilla's daughter had paused an instant at the name. She knew the name, he was sure.

  More likely that Padilla knew Zaparo.

  "It is bad about Zaparo," he said thoughtfully. He took a swallow of the beer.

  Padilla glanced at him, then away. "Zaparo? I have heard of him."

  "Si.

  It is a bad thing. To be killed is bad, to be ambushed---" The broom handle hitithe floor. Bowdrie's eyes went to the girl. She was staring wide-eyed at him. "Zaparo.?

  He was killed? His men too?"

  "All," he replied, "all are gone. They never had a chance." Padilla was staring, disbelief in his eyes. His daughter dropped to her knees, clasping her apron in her fingers. "Not the young one! Not he of the curly hair! Do not tell me the young one with the smile, the I"

  Bowdrie's memory was good, and no such Mexican had been among the dead. Yet, how could that be? An ambush with one man escaping? The sort of men he had been picturing would never let anyone escape. There was something wrong here, something...

  "Fourteen men were dead on the ground, Chiquita," he explained.

  "The Rurales?" Padilla asked.

  "No, it was other bandidos, gringo bandidos perhaps. I do not know." His eyes studied the innkeeper. "Zaparo is dead, sehor, and you were his friend, I think. Now it does not matter except that I must find those who killed him. A killing is an evil thing no matter who is killed, and his killers were evil men."

  He paused. "I think this Juan Piron betrayed Zaparo." He caught Padilla's wrist.

  "Do you know who that someone was, amigo? Have you seen Piron talking to someone? Even here, perhaps?"

  There was a brief flare of realization in Padilla's eyes, but he merely shrugged.

  "Perhaps he talks here. I do not remember."

  Bowdrie glanced at the girl, still on her knees where she had fallen. "Chiquita, if your lover was a man of Zaparo, and if he looked as you have said, he was not among the dead. I remember each face, each man. He was not among them."

  "'Gracias, senor.

  She got to her feet, eyes bright with happiness. Padilla got up suddenly and left the room. Chick caught the girl's hand. "Chiquita, you can help me.
Zaparo was not a good man, yet not so bad as some. He stole precious things from churches in Sonora.

  They must be found and returned. Your lover was not killed, so he will come to you, no? If he does, send him to me. He can help me."

  "You would not betray him, sehor? To the Rurales? We are to be married soon."

  "I wish to speak to him, that is all. What he has done was in Mexico, but now he can change. Zaparo is dead, but those who killed him must be found. Your man can help me."

  Bowdrie awakened suddenly, hours later, lying across his bed above the cantina. Music sounded from below, but it was not that which awakened him. A dozen horses were tied at the hitching rail outside the gate of the patio. From where he lay he could see across the patio and into the lighted window opposite.

  Ferd Cassidy suddenly appeared in the room, but moving as if he had just risen from a seat. Then Broughten came into the room with Hawkins. Only nine or ten miles from the K-Bar this was undoubtedly a hangout for the men from the ranch.

  Bowdrie went to the basin, still in the half-light from the window opposite, and splashed cold water on his face. Then he combed his hair before picking up his hat.

  As he started for the door, a surreptitious movement arrested his attention and he froze in position, watching.

  The Mexican girl, Chiquita, was leading a saddled horse toward the gate, obviously not wishing to be discovered. He waited an instant, then stepped out into the night.

  The girl was outside the gate, where she slipped into the saddle and started walking her horse along the trail.