by John Benteen
Picking the gagged and bound man up and slinging him over his shoulder, he carried him out beyond the carretas and lowered him to the ground.
“Now have that sleep, amigo.”
He went after the other guard and found him still unconscious. To be on the safe side, he gagged him too—tearing a strip of cloth from his shirt, since he wore no neck scarf, and then using his rawhide belt, to truss him up hand and foot. He carried him out and laid him down beside his companero.
So far so good, Sundance told himself—knowing the real trouble was yet to come. He returned to the wagon that the two hombres had guarded, pulled himself up over the tailgate, and crept in under the bowed canvas. Wooden cases, oblong in shape and of the size to hold rifles; others of the size to contain boxed cartridges. And ten casks of whiskey. Everything stowed aboad neatly, right in this one wagon. He wondered what the other horse-drawn rig held, and thought it might be provisions and camp gear. Maybe Esteban Montoya liked to live well on the trail. No matter. This is what he had come to find—and destroy.
He laid several of the casks on their sides, feeling for their bungs and placing them topside up. He drew his tomahawk from its loop on his belt, and with heavy blows of its blunt side knocked the bungs into the casks. He replaced the tomahawk, then picked up one of the casks and let the whiskey run out onto the cases of rifles and cartridges. When this cask was empty, he set it aside and turned the other opened casks so that their contents ran out onto the bed of the wagon. He took a match from the pocket of his pants, struck it aflame with his thumbnail and dropped it into the flow of whiskey. The alcohol ignited at once and burned with a blue flame that quickly began to spread over the cases in a vast blossoming of fire.
His act of arson committed, he turned to let himself out over the wagon’s tailgate. That same instant a horseman in a steeple-crowned sombrero and fancy charro attire reined in directly in front of him. Sundance stared at the rider in the glare of the roaring flames. Along with a handsome mustachioed and goateed face, he had a haughty, arrogant bearing of a hildalgo. The half-breed knew that this was Esteban Montoya—Don Esteban, he would be called. The Comanchero stared back at him and let out an angry bellow in Spanish.
“You dare burn my trade goods, you yellow-haired half-breed? Por Dios, I will send you straight to hell!”
He grabbed his six-shooter from his holster and lined it on the still startled, rattled Jim Sundance.
Chapter Fifteen
Realizing he wouldn’t have a chance if he took the split-second of time required to grab out his own gun, Sundance reacted in the only possible way. He dived headlong from the wagon at Montoya. The Comanchero got off a shot, but his aim was spoiled by the half-breed’s unexpected movement, even though the range was point-blank. It was such a close call, however, that powder flame scorched Sundance’s pants. The same instant he slammed into Montoya and wrapped his powerful arms about him. His two hundred pounds of bone and muscle dragged the man off his horse. Together they landed on the ground in a thrashing heap.
Montoya tried to press the muzzle of his six-shooter against Sundance’s body, to fire another shot. But the half-breed caught hold of his wrist and kept him from bringing the gun to bear: With his other hand, he took a viselike grip on the Comanchero’s throat and cut off his breathing. Montoya’s eyes bulged as the frightened guard’s had done earlier, and his sallow, aristocratic face turned livid. He dropped his gun and seized Sundance’s wrist with both hands, and with what remained of his strength he broke the throttling grip. He gasped in air, then yelled to his men for help. Sundance clubbed him to the side of the head, silencing him. He heaved to his feet, leaving the Comanchero writhing and moaning on the ground. Behind him the canvas of the burning wagon was a mass of roaring, high-leaping flames. Time for him to run for it.
As he moved away, he saw a half a dozen or more shadowy figures—some afoot and some mounted—come rushing from the bosque, drawn by the shot and Montoya’s yell. He ran to the carreta beside which he had left his bow and quiver, grabbed them up, and ran on down the valley. Yelling and shooting, the mounted hombres came after him. Realizing they would ride him down in no time at all, he came to an abrupt halt and fitted an arrow to the bowstring and drew aim on the vaquero in the lead. Hell; he hadn’t wanted to kill any of them. They were merely working for wages, after all, and doubtlessly poor wages at that. It was not they but their patron who was getting rich out of the Comanchero game, as was the way of the world. He aimed at the rider’s right shoulder and, with the hope that a wound would stop the man, let loose the arrow.
The vaquero uttered an unholy scream as the arrow drove into his shoulder. He lost his six-shooter and reined his hard-running horse to a rearing halt. The others came on. Two of them. They came shooting, though shooting with handguns while riding at a gallop was a senseless business. They could hit him only by luck. Still, their aim would be better when they pulled up in front of him. He got off two more arrows, and stopped the pair in their tracks. He hit one, also in the shoulder, and the hombre was knocked from his horse. The third arrow missed its mark, but still served its purpose. The remaining rider must have seen it pass close to him in its flight and decided this was too risky a game. He reined his horse about and hightailed it back the way he’d come.
And back there, by the burning wagon, all hell had broken out. Upon realizing that their rifles were going up in flames and smoke, the Indians had thrown caution to the wind and left their cover to charge at the Comanchero crowd. Heavy fighting was underway. Above the racket of gunfire, Sundance could hear the war cries of the Noconas and the shouted curses of the New Mexicans—and the screams of hit men on both sides. Suddenly, adding to the awesome din, the cartridges in the burning wagon began to explode with the continuous popping of hundreds of Chinese firecrackers during a Fourth of July celebration.
A hell of a thing, Jim Sundance thought. He’d kept those rifles out of the hands of the Noconas so they couldn’t be used to raid in Texas, and because of his good intentions men were fighting and dying here in the Valley of Tears. Still, the fighting would have come later even if he hadn’t fired that wagon. Montoya had been bent on showing the Indians that they couldn’t cheat him. Deciding that he needn’t have this bloodshed on his conscience, Sundance set out for the hills at a run to mount Eagle and ride to where he’d left Virginia. It was high time for the two of them to be on their way.
When he arrived back where the girl waited, he listened intently but could no longer hear any sound of guns. He supposed that one faction or the other had suffered heavy losses and withdrawn from the field—or that both sides had had a bellyful of killing.
As he dismounted, Virginia threw her arms around him and cried, “I was so scared, Jim! You stayed so long, and then I heard all that shooting. And that pink glow in the sky, as though something was on fire!”
He told her that he was responsible for the fire and the ensuing fight between Montoya’s men and Nocona’s warriors.
“Though the bloodshed would have happened later, anyway,” he added. When she told him he had taken a terrible risk, he shrugged as though that was unimportant. “I just couldn’t let those rifles fall into Nocona’s hands. But now I’ll be in trouble if Montoya got out of that fight alive and I run into him. He had a good look at me right after I set the fire.”
“But you needn’t fear him—a man like you.”
“I don’t fear any one man, but this hombre hires gunfighters. He’s not likely to come at me alone. Well, we don’t know that he got away with his life. Besides, we’ll head out now and do some hard riding until we get to his ranch. I’ll turn you over to Phil Markham and then go my way. I don’t want a showdown with him for no good reason.”
He went and untied the Indian pony, then gave her a leg up.
Remounting Eagle, he said, “Stay close,” and headed away from the stand of rocks.
They rode to the hills, then turned south to skirt them and avoid the Valley of Tears. They heard no more shoot
ing from there, and the pink glow was gone from the sky. The fighting was over, the fire burned out.
Two hours later they were clear of the hills and in comparatively flat country. Here they came upon the Comanchero trail Sundance had sought before he heard the gunfire from the valley. It was merely a trace that followed the contours of the rugged terrain—rising and falling, twisting and turning. They could look far along it, because of the moonlight, and saw no riders in either direction.
They turned westward down it, and then, after perhaps another half a dozen miles, Sundance decided to stop and rest the horses. They turned off the trail, so they could see from it if the Comanchero and some of his men had escaped the fighting and rode by. He unsaddled Eagle and the paint, staking out the latter so it would not wander too far away as it grazed. He spread his roll of blankets for Virginia, and she sank down wearily.
“I’m so tired I would be glad to get back to civilization, if it weren’t for having to face Phil and my mother,” she said. “I suddenly realize that captivity has been an ordeal for me, after all.”
“Of course, it was,” Sundance said, dropping down beside her. “You were taken away from your comfortable, sheltered way of life and pushed into a rough, primitive existence that would have broken most men. As for facing your mother and your fiancé, do it defiantly. Tell them nothing except what you want them to know.”
“But if they question me?”
Chuckling, he said, “I remember something my father said, whenever, as a small boy, I complained that another boy had mocked me for being a half-breed. He always said, ‘Son, just spit in his eye.’ It was a long time later that I realized he meant that I should show the kid in any way at all that I wasn’t hurt by his taunting me. So if anyone ever comes out and asks you something he or she shouldn’t, you just spit in his or her eye.”
“I’ll do that, though not literally, of course,” she said, laughing. “Even my mother ... I love her, but at times she is impossibly strait-laced. She’ll put me through an inquisition, I know. When she does, I’ll pretend to be indignant—outraged. I’ll say no one so much as laid a hand on me. It would be difficult to convince Phil Markham of such a thing, of course—if I married him.”
“Yes, you would have a time of it with him. Because of a certain lack that he would discover. Are you still decided not to marry him—to stay with your uncle?”
“Yes, I am,” she said with finality.
She untied and loosened the lacing of her Indian dress, baring the upper part of herself. She pulled Sundance down to her, so that his head rested against the smooth, resiliency soft mounds that were her breasts ... Later she fell asleep in his arms. Although he was again pressed by a sense of urgency, a feeling of impending danger, he told himself he would allow her three or four hours. She was done in. All that she’d gone through—and it had been an ordeal, as she now realized—had finally caught up with her.
Long before he was ready to wake her, he heard a drumming of hooves. Not those of a single horse, but of a half a dozen or more. He disengaged himself from the sleeping girl, got his rifle from his saddle, and moved closer to the trail. He saw the riders distinctly in the moonlight: seven horsemen traveling at a lope. He wasn’t sure, but he thought the man in the lead wore the fancy attire of a hidalgo. If he was right, that one was Esteban Montoya—a hale and hardy survivor of the fight at the Valley of Tears. They passed without seeing him and were soon gone from his sight. He returned to the camp and found Virginia awake.
“What is it, Jim? Who were those riders?”
“Montoya and some of his men. At least I’m almost sure it was the Comanchero.”
Alarm sharpened her voice. “Then you’ll be in danger if you take me to his ranch. We mustn’t go there, darling. Can’t you take me directly to Snake-in-the-Hole Ranch?”
He shook his head. “That would mean too many more days of riding horseback for you, and you’re already done in. Besides, Markham is waiting for you there—with some of your own clothes to change into. That’s one thing you’ve got to do as soon as possible ... go back to being the white woman you are.”
“I can’t let you risk your life for me. I’m not letting you take me to Montoya’s ranch, Jim. I just won’t.”
He was touched. “All right, I’ll tell you where we can go—if you’re up to facing some white folks in your Indian outfit.”
“I can face anything to keep you safe. Where will we go?”
“To an army post in the Territory—Fort Sumner,” he said. “I’ll get the commanding officer to put you up and send a message to Phil Markham. He can come there for you.”
“That’s what we’ll do then,” she said. “Shall we ride on now?”
He shook his head. “Not for a little while. We’ll still have to keep on this trail until we’re far into New Mexico. We’ll give that bunch a couple hours to get well ahead of us, so we don’t overtake them on the way.”
“Good,” she said. “Come down with me again and get some sleep. You must be done in, too.”
When he lay beside her, Sundance realized that he was tired—bone tired. He fell asleep at once, but he merely slept by fits and starts. Something deep in his mind kept troubling him. A premonition of further danger to the two of them, he thought when waking fully to ride on again.
Chapter Sixteen
They rode into the trouble Sundance had anticipated soon after starting out at dawn. Coming to a creek, they stopped to let the horses drink and also slake their own thirst. When they got back into the saddle and forded the stream, he discovered that he hadn’t been his usual alert self. A short distance beyond the creek, a group of men were camped to one side of the trail. Some of them were still bedded down, but two were saddling their horses. One of the latter let out a yell in Spanish to wake the others.
Sundance shouted, “Come on, Virginia! We’ll have to run for it!”
Mounted on the superb Nez Percé stallion, he had reason to believe he could outrun any pursuit. But Virginia’s Comanche pony wasn’t up to it. Within a very short distance he looked over his shoulder to see that she was falling too far behind him and that two sombreroed riders were rapidly overtaking her. He reined Eagle in, intending to take her onto the spotted horse with him. He reached out a hand to her as she pulled the paint to a halt beside him.
“Put your arms around me and come over behind me!”
She obeyed quickly, but they had lost precious seconds. The two vaqueros came at them at a gallop. They did not draw their guns. Instead they were letting out their reatas, to use them as weapons. As Eagle started running again, one of the riders came alongside and made his throw. His loop caught one of the stallion’s forelegs, then, as his own horse stopped and braced itself, the rope snapped taut and Eagle went down. Sundance threw himself clear of his falling mount, and Virginia, her arms wrapped about his naked chest went with him. They hit the ground hard, together, and she lay stunned. Sundance rolled over and came to his knees, reaching for his six-shooter. The second vaquero had already thrown his loop, and it dropped neatly over the half-breed’s yellow-maned head. When it snapped tight about his neck, he got out his gun and grabbed at the rope with both hands to try to keep himself from being strangled to death.
The vaquero who had brought Eagle down now got his reata free of the stallion’s leg with an expert flick of his throwing arm. He coiled his rope quickly, then, swinging it, built up his loop for another throw. As Sundance was toppled over backward by the rope about his neck, the loop of the other reata caught his legs. The next moment he was stretched out flat, face down, and totally helpless. When he tried to roll over onto his back, the hombre who had him by the neck simply jerked at the rope and choked him, despite his gripping the loop with his hands. They were very good indeed. He had to admire their skill even though he was their prisoner.
The rest of the group came riding up, and one of them dismounted to take Sundance’s six-shooter, tomahawk and knife. He then jerked the half-breed’s arms behind him so that
one of his companeros, who had also dismounted, could tie his wrists with a piggin’ string. With Sundance bound in this manner, they rolled him over and pulled him to a sitting position. The reatas were removed from his neck and legs.
He looked first for Virginia. She too was seated on the ground and still appeared dazed from the fall.
“Are you all right?” he called to her.
“I’m not hurt,” she replied, her voice off-key. “Just badly shaken up. Oh, Jim ... they’ll kill you!”
He didn’t reply to that, for he was sure she was right.
He looked for Eagle and saw that the stallion had risen and also seemed to have suffered no injuries. Then he looked at the semicircle of men staring down at him, his gaze settling on the handsome, dandified Esteban Montoya. The Comanchero’s mustachioed, goateed face wore a smile that was both smug and nasty. He spoke mockingly in heavily accented English.
“So we meet again, eh, half-breed? And how nice of you to deliver the girl to me. You have my thanks.”
“Por nada, Don Esteban.”
“Ah, you know my name. Is it that I have become famous?”
“Infamous is the better word,” Sundance said. “Well, get it over in a hurry. I don’t want to be talked to death.”
“You think I’m going to kill you?”
“Wouldn’t you, in my fix?”
“Maybe I would,” Montoya replied. “But I have something better in mind—something that gives me more pleasure just to think about than finishing you off with a bullet would. I’ll hold you prisoner, my half-breed friend, and use you to make my peace with Chief Nocona. After all, I did cost him quite a few warriors. And he did in nearly a dozen of my men. I’ll send word to him that I have the man who not only burned the rifles, cartridges and whiskey but also stole the girl—and that he can have you. I imagine that he’ll have some very slow, extremely painful way for you to die.”
