by John Benteen
He tried to pierce the darkness of the grove with his eyes, but it was futile; a layer of cloud had veiled the moon and there was not even any checkered silver to illuminate the clump of trees. Hernando, now, still sitting cross-legged, was absolutely motionless and absolutely still.
Cutler’s hands were tight on the Krag’s stock. He thought of how a jaguar came, concealed, slow, patient, stalking. Then, sure of its prey, one final deadly rush, swift as lightning. One shot; he was likely to have that much chance; not much more. He wished to hell he had the twelve-gauge that he’d had to sacrifice at the trigger-trap last night; a shotgun was better for this kind of work than a rifle.
Then he quit thinking entirely; now he was nothing but a bundle of senses, all tuned, honed, strung almost to the breaking point. In that instant, he was as much primitive, savage animal as that big cat out there, wherever it was. And where it likely was, was stalking Hernando Fernandez through the darkness of the cottonwoods. Somewhere there in the shadow, maybe even now crouching for the final rush.
He waited, lost in that intensity.
Five minutes passed.
Then it happened all at once; Hernando struck the match, touched it to the torch of fat pine and cottonwood bark. The yellow flame flared high, and in its sudden light, Cutler saw the jaguar. Behind Hernando, twenty feet from him, it was crouched for its sudden rush. Its eyes were gleaming emeralds, its bared fangs ivory, its yellow, black-rosetted hide beautiful in the glare of the torch, as Hernando jumped to his feet and held it high.
Then the jaguar launched itself in a spring of incredible swiftness and Cutler, catching his sights by fire glow, lined the Krag and pulled the trigger.
The thunder of the gun was startling in the silence. The jaguar, spring unchecked, hit Hernando and knocked him over, and then, the torch spinning from his hand, the old man’s body was covered by that of the great beast. Cutler’s finger tensed on the trigger to fire again, but instead of savaging the body beneath it, the great cat lay motionless.
There was the longest second Cutler had lived, and then the jaguar’s body rolled limply aside, and Hernando Fernandez scrambled to his feet. He reeled drunkenly, and Cutler saw a spot of red on the shoulder of his shirt. But he did not hesitate. He dashed for the blazing torch and stamped it out with his sandaled feet.
Suddenly, once again, the grove was in total darkness.
Then Hernando’s whisper sounded. “Juan!” He was at the foot of the tree. “Help me up!”
Cutler leaned down, extending the stock of the Krag. Hernando seized it, and Cutler gave a mighty pull; clinging to the gun, Hernando scrambled up the cottonwood and, as Cutler made room, fell across the limb, gasping.
“Madre de Dios!” he breathed. “Close. I heard and smelled him behind me just in time. You got him in the head; he was dead before he hit me—”
“Hush.” Cutler clasped him close; the old man was trembling. From the cantina somebody yelled, “Hey, what the hell! I heard a gun!”
Gorman’s voice roared, “Outside! See what the hell is . . .”
And then it was drowned in the sound of the explosion.
Two miles away, but it lit the night as the whole powder dump went up. And it made a noise like kingdom coming, a great thunder that echoed and re-echoed through the silence. Even before it died, Preacher Gorman was trumpeting frantic orders. “The mine! Somebody’s blown the mine! Hit the horses, you bastards! You spawn of Satan, they’ve blown our mine! After them!”
Crouched close together in the darkness of the grove on their tree limbs, Cutler and Hernandez laughed in silent jubilation. “It worked, Juan,” Hernandez whispered. “Oh, it worked . . .” They turned, saw the street of Villa Hermosa swarm with utter confusion. Horses were being led out, saddled; Preacher Gorman’s black coat swirled as he ran back and forth yelling commands. “Hurry up, there! Let’s ride!” Somebody brought him a tall, gray horse, and he swung up in the saddle, jerked the carbine from the scabbard. “Come on, you hell’s bait! Follow me!” Then he spurred the animal.
Perez, fat, easy to spot in white linen, ran out into the street. “Gorman!” he shrieked in terror. “The shot near town. What about . . .?”
His words were drowned in another explosion from the mine. Gorman reined his horse around. “Come on, you fools! You want to lose a fortune in silver— °” Then he lined the gray out again, and now the whole battalion of Gunhawks thundered after him.
“Gorman!” Perez screamed, but the rest of it was lost in the sound of nearly a hundred hooves. Perez stood there helplessly for a moment; then he whirled, waddled back into the cantina, slammed the door.
Cutler and Hernando clung tightly to the tree until the hoof beats faded into distance. Then Cutler said, “Now,” swung off the limb, dropped the twenty feet, landing lightly as a cat himself. Hernando let himself down, and Cutler caught him. When they were on the ground, Cutler ran to the jaguar. He moved his hand over its soft fur in the darkness, until Hernandez tapped him on the shoulder. He pressed the match cylinder into Cutler’s hand and Cutler took one out and struck it and sucked in his breath in awe at the great beast lying there dead before him, its skull smashed by his single bullet.
An ordinary male jaguar could easily weigh two hundred pounds. This one, he knew, would go half again that much. “For a moment, I thought I was dead,” Hernando whispered. “Then I knew my trust in you was not misplaced.” He touched Cutler’s arm. “Go to the cantina, see to the girl. I will find Mansilla. He has been loyal to me, he will help. We’ll drag the body to the village well in the plaza. But hurry. In any event, we must save Hitchcock’s daughter!”
Cutler dropped the burning match. “Yeah,” he said. “I’ll meet you at the well.” He ran toward the cantina, as Hernando faded into darkness.
Inside there, the lights had all been quenched; the place was in darkness. Cutler threw his weight against the front door; it was barred. He hammered on it with the butt of the Krag. “Perez!” he roared. “Open up! This is John Cutler! Open up if you want to live—”
“No!” Perez’s voice was a shriek. “Go away, you understand? It is all a mistake. I am not with Gorman! I only ... Go away, you hear?”
Cutler lunged against the door. It held. He drew back. Then, from inside, a gun roared. “I said,” Perez screamed, “go away!” Bullets from a large caliber rifle smashed through the wood. One sliced Cutler’s shirt as he drew back. Then, from inside the cantina, there came a terrible scream of a different kind, a man’s shriek of agony. “Puta!” Perez howled. “You have killed me . . .” His voice died away into nothingness.
Then a woman’s voice yelled, “Cutler! Wait!” He heard the rasp of the door’s bar slipping. Then the cantina was open, and the girl stood there in its entrance.
“Sharon,” Cutler snapped. “You all right?”
“I’m all right.” Her voice was strangely dead, numb. “I just killed a man, but I’m all right. Come in.” And she stepped aside.
Gun up, Cutler entered the darkened room. A match scraped and then a lantern flared. In its light, Cutler saw two things: the corpse of Perez with a butcher knife protruding from its chest, and Sharon Hitchcock.
Gorman had been using her roughly tonight. The dancehall floozy’s dress was torn, one breast almost entirely naked. Her copper-colored hair was tangled, hanging across her face, her eyes were huge, motionless with shock. In addition to the bruise on her cheek, there were others on her arms and shoulders.
“When he tried to shoot you,” she said, still in that dull voice, “I found the knife and killed him.”
Cutler went to her, put his arm about her, held her close to him. “You’re all right, now,” he said. “You understand? You’re all right. Your father’s still alive, and he’ll be coming for you in a little while. Before tomorrow night, Gorman will be finished. He’ll never lay a hand on you again. I’ll guarantee that.”
Her body was still like something carved from stone in his embrace. Then suddenly it melted and she sagged aga
inst him, coughed oddly and began to cry. “Dad’s alive? They said they’d killed him—”
“I said, he’ll be here in a little while.”
She clung to him. “And find me turned into a ... a whore. Gorman’s whore.” Her voice was choked.
“Shut up,” Cutler said. “Don’t talk like that. You’re alive, and that’s all that counts. You’re alive and Gorman won’t be, soon . . . He’ll pay for whatever he did to you.”
She did not answer that. She just clung to him and went on crying. Cutler held her for a long time until the crying stopped. When it did, he let her go, held her gently at arm’s length. “Come on,” he said. “You need to wash up and change clothes before your father gets here. Get yourself put together.” He reached behind the bar, found a bottle of tequila, jerked the cork with his teeth. “Here, take a swig of this.”
She choked some down; it steadied her. Cutler took a long drink himself. Then he threw the bottle away and with his arm around her led her to the door.
When they reached it, he halted. Outside, the street swarmed with people, the men, women, children of the village. Torches flared, lighting Villa Hermosa with their bright, eerie light. The crowd surged toward the well in the plaza.
“Senora Mansilla will take care of you,” Cutler said, “but first you’ll want to see this.” He led her down the street, as the crowd surged forward faster. “He is dead!” people yelled. “The devil, the witch, the spirit, is dead!”
Then they had reached the plaza, fanned out around the well, and suddenly they stopped, the whole great crowd of them. All at once, they were totally hushed. What they stared at was the great body of the jaguar, stretched out in death before the well’s stone rim and Hernando Fernandez’s gaunt, small, dirty white-clad figure standing on it, as if it were a platform. Beside him, Jose Mansilla held high a torch.
Hernando raised his arms high. “People,” he said. “People of Villa Hermosa. Here is the killer. He lies dead beneath my feet.”
Silence. Then a man stepped forward. “And how is this possible?” He looked from the jaguar to Hernando. “How can the jaguar be dead and you alive? We were told by the Padre Gorman that you two were one and the same.”
“Gorman is no Padre. He is a false priest and a liar and a thief, a rapist and a killer. I give you your question back: how could I be the jaguar if I am alive and the jaguar lies dead?”
Another man stepped forward. “Then Gorman lied?”
“Si. He wanted only the silver that rightfully belonged to you. So he turned you against me, so that you would yield to him. And you see the result. You are enslaved, and you no longer have the silver that is yours. Gorman has it all . . .”
The first man blinked. “I still do not understand. You must explain it—”
“I shall . . .” Sharon leaned against Cutler wearily as Hernandez went on talking. He spoke in simple terms, trying to make it all clear to them. Then he broke off. “But there is little time left to talk. Either you believe me or you do not. You know what it feels like to be enslaved. Would you know what it feels like to be free again?”
The second questioner called out, “Free? I would give my soul, my life, to have things as they were before Gorman came, when we were happy.”
Another man called out, “One of Gorman’s men took my wife. Before my very eyes . . . Made me watch him, as if I were not a man at all—”
All at once, the crowd was in an uproar. Hernando held up his arms again. “Silencio! Listen to me! Gorman is gone, but he will be back, he and his Gunhawks. When he comes, which will be soon, would you follow me against him—for your freedom, for the lives of your women and your children?”
“You tried to burn this man once, because of Gorman’s lies!” Mansilla bellowed. But me, I would follow him to hell itself against that false priest!”
“I too!” one of the questioners yelled. “But how can we fight Gorman? He has so many weapons, and we have none. He has taken all of ours!”
“We have friends with weapons!” Hernando yelled back. “The great John Cutler, there—” he pointed “—who came a thousand miles to kill this jaguar! Another Anglo gunfighter who is very good. Don Hitchcock . . . And you will have your own guns. Guns enough, anyhow, to make a stand against Gorman and his men!”
“And where will they come from—?”
But Sharon Hitchcock answered that question. She was the first to see the two men walking out of darkness into the torch lit plaza, leading the heavily loaded mule. Her scream pierced the silence. “Dad!” Then she wrenched free of Cutler and ran across the plaza, through the crowd, and into her father’s arms. Billy Calhoon, his face somehow changed, older, his eyes sunken into his head, looked at her, then looked away as Hitchcock held her to him.
Chapter Eight
It seemed to John Cutler forever before the tumult subsided and he could call a council of war. Actually, it was only fifteen minutes—as long as it took Hernando and Calhoon to pass out the weapons loaded on the mule.
Meanwhile, Hitchcock, still holding Sharon, told Cutler what had happened at the mine. “It went just like you planned. That Calhoon, he’s cold as ice. He and I used our garrotes on the two guards outside the oar dump. Once, I thought they had us, but we both froze like you showed us and they thought it was just a night bird in the bushes . . . Then we hit the house. The two of them in there were asleep. We used our knives ... I got the key to the powder house, we loaded the mule, and after that we waited . . . The only thing that scared us was the shot; it was so faint we couldn’t be sure. I wanted to wait for another one, but Calhoon had the nerve and brass to go ahead. ‘That’s Cutler, I tell you,’ he said, and so we blew the powder. Twice. Then we hightailed it out of there in a circle, headed for the village and we were gone before Gorman could get to the mine. Hotfooted it straight here, like your instructions. And it was worth it . . .” His face twisted and he held his daughter tightly. “It was worth it just for this minute . . .”
“Which is about all we can spare,” Cutler said. “The hunting’s not over yet, for this night. Gorman’ll realize the futility of makin’ a search in darkness; he’ll be back here before long.”
“Right,” Hitchcock said. “And we gotta be waitin’ for him.”
Cutler strode back to the plaza. “Calhoon.”
The young man turned, staring at Cutler with those changed, sunken eyes. His shirt front was crusted with dried scarlet. Cutler pointed at it. “Not yours.”
“No. The guard’s.” Calhoon’s voice shook. “Jesus, Cutler, that wire nearly cut his head off. He bled all over me and died . . . died with me holdin’ him . . .”
Cutler said, “You hired out to kill. Don’t let it shake you. The worst is still to come.” He tapped Hernando on the shoulder.
Fernandez turned.
“Does everyone have a weapon?”
Hernando’s eyes glowed eerily. “All armed again. And each eager to use his gun to repay a thousand abuses and insults from the Gunhawks.”
“That’s well and good, but we’re talking about twenty or more experienced gunmen armed with repeating weapons. We’ve got a hundred villagers who never get a chance to practice and mostly have old muzzle-loaders or single-shot breechloaders. That just about squares the odds. All we’ve got left is surprise.” He surveyed the torch lit village. “I want all the fighting men in the houses around this plaza. I want the women in the houses at the far end of the street. I want the torches out and the doors locked and the windows shuttered. Put your best marksmen on the roofs, the others inside the houses around the plaza.” He grinned coldly. “Then we’ll put up the bait.”
Hernando blinked. “The bait?”
Cutler nodded. “Sometime between now and dawn, Gorman and his men will come riding back. They’ve got to pass this well, come through the plaza. The one thing they won’t expect to see is the jaguar’s body hanging over the well.”
Hernando stared at him, then he grinned, too. “Yes. That will stop them. For a full minute, a
nyhow, that will stop them, right in the plaza. All bunched together.”
“And that’s when the people open fire,” Cutler said.
“It’ll be done.” Hernandez turned, snapped orders. Men hustled to the jaguar’s body. Over the well, there was a roof and a windlass, both supported by posts. It took four strong men to do it, but they managed to hoist the jaguar and tie its spotted corpse to one post by its hind feet, so that it dangled head down beside the well. Then Hernandez’s voice crackled again, and people scattered. Torches were extinguished as women and children hurried down the street. The houses around the plaza filled up with men carrying ancient weapons; those with more modern arms scrabbled up to the thatched roofs and burrowed down into the dried grass.
Meanwhile, Cutler turned to Hitchcock. His voice was gentle. “Man, you’ve earned your pay tonight. You go with Sharon on down the street and look after her while we fight this battle.”
“I’ll be damned.” Hitchcock’s voice rang with rage. He touched the bruise on Sharon’s cheek. “Look what that bastard did to my daughter. You think I’m not gonna make him pay?” He unbuttoned a strangely lumpy shirt. “I didn’t blow all that dyno at the mine. I’ve got nine sticks left, three bombs. Capped with short fuses. I figured if they caught us on the way I’d use it to blow them to hellandgone.” There was no yielding in his tone. “I fight with you.”
“All right,” Cutler said. “Then send Sharon on down with the women.”
The girl drew herself up. “I’m not going anywhere,” she said. “I can use a gun, too. I’ve known how for years. And if somebody will give me one, I’ll guarantee I’ll make it do its business.”
“Damn it,” Cutler snapped, “we can’t be hampered with a woman!”
Sharon Hitchcock looked at him steadily. Then she said, “Of all you here, I think I have the biggest debt to collect from Preacher Gorman. I intend to try to do it. Who’ll give me a gun?”
There was silence. Then Billy Calhoon stepped forward, opening his shirt. He drew out an ivory-butted Colt, passed it to her. “You can shoot a pistol?”
