by Ralph Cotton
“Weasels?” Sandoval asked.
“Yes, Desert Weasels,” Sam replied in a hushed tone, readying himself at the edge of the firelight. “Their numbers have grown bigger and bolder of late.”
“Then we must do something about that,” Sandoval said matter-of-factly.
Thorn also stepped out of the firelight, yet he did so standing tall, his big horse pistol out at arm’s length, cocked, his feet planted firmly beneath him. “You there,” he demanded in a booming voice, “advance, and be recognized.” He held the big Mameluke sword in his left hand, the blade dipped back, ready to strike.
“Ha, you make me laugh, you damn white man,” said the voice.
Thorn homed his senses toward the strange sounding voice. “I’m happy that I amuse you, sir,” he said, the big Colt horse pistol tensed in his hand as he searched the cliff line in the darkness. “Now do as you’re told,” he said forcefully. “Come forward and be recognized. That is an order.” Behind him Sandoval cocked his Colt quietly.
“You give me no order! You do not tell me what to do,” said the enraged voice. “This is mi desierto. I tell you what to—”
Thorn locked on to the sound of the voice. His pistol bucked in his hand and silenced it. “This is my desert now,” he shouted.
A thrashing of brush and rock resounded as the man tumbled backward down over the edge of the cliff into the engulfing blackness. A cacophony of war cries rose from the brush alongside the trail. Thorn took a quick step to the side as a long spear sliced through the air past his ear. His thumb cocked the pistol again as the ranger and Sandoval unleashed their Colts toward the flashes of gunshots in the darkness.
The ranger fired repeatedly into a flood of ragged warriors who stormed upward over the edge of the dark cliff onto the flat rock plateau. Bullets zipped past him. Yet, even as he fired and moved sidelong farther away from the glow of the campfire, he saw Thorn raise the sword and wave it forward. As if following an order to charge, Sandoval pressed forward, firing as a hail of bullets sliced past him.
Sam stopped and moved forward with them as he fired, seeing that the three of them had actually begun to press the stunned Comadrejas back over the edge and down the steep rugged hillside. In the dim edge of firelight, he saw Sandoval drop his empty Colt. He quickly switched the sword into his right hand and put it into play. Sam swung his rifle in reflex and fired in time to keep a screaming warrior from firing a pistol into the young bounty hunter’s face at point-black range.
Sandoval moved forward into three warriors, swinging the short deadly sword with expert precision, each slash leaving behind it a trail of blood.
“We’ve got them. Push them back!” Thorn shouted, dropping his empty horse pistol and using the big Mameluke sword with skillful accuracy until the remaining attackers turned, ran and leaped over the cliff edge into the darkness.
Sam advanced, casting his empty Winchester to the ground and firing his Colt as the Desert Weasels made their howling, screaming retreat. At the edge of the cliff, he stared down, seeing only black shadows dart back and forth as they fired wildly up at him and the bounty hunters.
“Ranger, look out!” shouted Sandoval.
Sam turned in time to see a warrior run toward him from behind wielding a long war ax. But upon hearing the bounty hunter, the warrior turned quickly and swung the ax in Sandoval’s direction.
Sandoval dodged the powerful blow from the ax. He spun in a full circle with his sword and laid the Comadrejas open with a deep lethal slash across his sternum. As the warrior staggered backward with a loud scream, Sam grabbed him by his wrist, below the war ax, and swung the man out over the edge of the cliff. The darkness swallowed him, leaving only a long shriek resounding down the black hillside.
“Hold fast, men,” said Thorn, still standing tall and straight, his bloody sword high in hand. “They’re retreating.”
The ranger looked all around in surprise. A haze of gun smoke loomed eerily in the glow of firelight. Dead Comadrejas lay strewn on the rocky ground.
On the dark hillside, gunshots still popped and blossomed wildly as the warriors bounded down on foot, their horses tumbling and sliding along with them. But the fight had ended as suddenly as it had begun. Sam held his fire, hurried back and picked up his Winchester from the ground and called out to the bounty hunters, “Are either of you hit?”
“Yes, I am,” said Thorn, “but nothing serious. Sandy, how about you?”
“Same here,” Sandoval said, his sword hanging loosely in his hand. “Ranger, what say you?” he asked.
“I’m all right,” Sam said, ignoring a bullet nick on his forearm, another on the left side. “We best reload and be ready, in case they come back at us.”
Thorn and Sandoval gave each other an approving look in the dim circling glow of firelight. “Indeed, Sandy,” said Thorn, the bloody Mameluke sword still raised in his fist, “Ranger Burrack knows these weasels’ ways better than we do.” His voice sounded rejuvenated by the short, fierce battle.
“Behind you, Captain,” said Sandoval, seeing a wounded Comadrejas struggle to rise to his feet.
Thorn stepped over and drew the sword back, prepared to deliver a hard fatal swing. But he stopped as he looked down into the man’s frightened face.
“Please do not keel me, monsieur, mon ami, por favor! Please do not keel me,” the man begged with tear-filled eyes, in a delirious mixture of bad Spanish, bad French and broken border English. He squeezed his right hand around his left forearm, squeezing a bloody gash made by Sandoval’s short sword.
Thorn gave him a curious look; Sam watched to see what the bounty hunter would do.
Instead of swinging the big sword, Thorn flashed it back and forth quickly, skillfully, and rested its sharp tip against the Comadrejas’ chest. “Get up,” he commanded.
He held the tip of the sword in place as if it were raising the struggling man to his bare feet. “Who is your leader?”
The frightened man looked back and forth warily among the three before answering. “He—he is Charo . . . Clato Charo,” he said.
“You go tell Mr. Charo that Captain Cadden Thorn and his expedition will be using this disierto for as long as we choose to, without paying him in either horses or whiskey,” Thorn said. He gave a faint grin. “Comprenez? Comprede? Understand?” he asked in French, Spanish and English.
“Yes, I will tell him, mon ami,” the man said, eager to leave now that he saw his life being spared.
“Do not call me your friend, in any language,” Thorn said, slapping the sword blade flat-sided against the man’s shoulder. “Now go on. Get out of here.”
The ranger and the two bounty hunters watched the wounded Comadreja stagger and limp over to the edge of the cliff. He climbed down out of sight through a sound of breaking, thrashing brush and sliding rock. When they knew he was far down the hillside, they walked over and stood near the edge of the cliff. Gazing down at the dark flatlands below them, in the pale moonlight, they watched as tiny dark silhouettes moved out of the black shadows on the hillside and gathered and rode off across the grainy purple night.
“That was interesting,” Thorn said with a sigh as the last of the Comadrejas vanished from their sight. “From the direction they are riding in, I take it they won’t be coming back tonight,” he offered.
“Not tonight,” Sam agreed, his Winchester hanging from his hand, reloaded, as was his holstered Colt. “But I doubt we’ve seen the last of them. Lucas and his buggy load of whiskey had gotten them stirred up. They’re not the best of fighters, but they are determined, especially when it comes to acquiring whiskey or horses.”
“They didn’t have the fight in them that I expected,” said Sandoval. “That many men should have dispatched us handily.” He looked to Thorn for comment.
“Right you are, Sandy,” said Thorn. “They were nothing like some Turkish pirates I could name.”
“Or some Portuguese Proscritos I might mention, or some Korean mountain bandits we’ve run into,”
said Sandoval. He had finished reloading his Colt. He shoved it into his holster. “Fortunate for us,” he added, looking at the dead lying on the ground.
The ranger watched and listened; the two bounty hunters did not talk with the surprise of men who had expected to be overrun and killed. Nor had they fought like men too outnumbered to survive. They’d fought like men who’d accepted the odds being against them and had managed to turn those odds to their advantage. They had not taken a defensive position, he noted to himself. Instead they had rallied instantly and attacked their attackers.
Now, in reflection, the ranger noted that there had been no boastfulness in their recounting of the battle, only comparisons of past opponents, made for the sake of future skirmishes.
“We hit them harder than they expected,” Thorn said quietly. “The next time they will know us better. They won’t overestimate themselves.”
“How far do they range across these badlands?” Sandoval asked the ranger.
“As far as they choose,” Sam said. “If they think we have something they want, they’ll hound us until they get it . . . or until we kill enough of them to change their minds.”
Thorn said, “Well, we can’t have them diverting us from our business at hand, can we, Sandy?”
“No, sir, Captain,” said Sandoval, inspecting his rifle, “we can’t have that.”
Chapter 6
Tinnis Lucas had stopped the bareback buggy horse and turned on the narrow trail, forcing Rudy Duckwald and George Epson to have to stop abruptly behind him. “Damn it to hell, gambler!” Duckwald cursed. “Either keep up or drop the hell out.”
Ignoring the angry gunman, Lucas said, “Listen . . .” He’d gazed back through the darkness back toward the distant sound of gunfire. “Bless their hearts.” He gave a wicked grin in the shadowy moonlight. “That’s the sound of Charo and his Comadrejas de desierto. They’re killing our enemies for us.”
“Says you,” Espon growled. He’d had to jerk his horse to the side to keep from bumping into Duckwald or the gambler.
“Yes, says I indeed,” Lucas retorted. “Planting that whiskey along the trail, I put the Comadrejas right up the three law dogs’ shirts for us, gentlemen.”
“I thought they were two bounty hunters and the territory ranger,” said Duckwald, as if skeptical of Lucas’ whole story.
“Jesus, what’s the difference?” said Lucas. “Bounty hunters, rangers. They’re all law dogs if they’re out to nail us to the wall.”
“I wouldn’t brag about anything I did with the Desert Weasels,” said Duckwald. “They are about as low and cowardly a bunch as hell ever collected.”
“But good at killing law dogs,” Lucas pointed out, not the least fazed by the burly gunman’s sarcasm.
“Like hell you planned any of that,” Elmer Fisk said over his shoulder, stopping when he’d heard the three horses bunch up behind him. “You got drunk and lost most of your load. Now you say this so you don’t look so foolish.” He spat to the side in contempt. “Damn the Comadrejas.” He turned back to the dark trail ahead.
“Yeah? Well, anyway,” said Lucas, “they just took care of our trail hounds for us. No need to thank me, though.”
“From what I heard, it couldn’t have been much of a gun battle,” said Fisk without looking back. “It didn’t last as long as a shirt in a bear fight.”
“That’s right,” said Lucas, heeling his bareback horse on in front of Duckwald and Epson. “Clato Charo has too many warriors for a couple of bounty hunters and a ranger to stand up to.”
“Says you,” Epson repeated behind him.
Lucas shook his head. Grinning to himself, he lifted a shiny metal flask he’d filled from one of the bottles of rye. In a toast to himself, he raised the flask and drank from it. Without offering the flask to the two riding behind him, he capped it and put it away.
“Gentlemen, I see that this lackluster conversation is going nowhere,” Lucas said, adjusting himself on the buggy horse’s back. “Please awaken me when we get to where we are going.”
“Like hell, I will,” said Epson. “I ain’t your manservant.”
“God forbid.” Lucas grinned.
“Leave him be, George,” said Duckwald. “When the drunken sumbitch walks his horse off a cliff, let him fall.”
“Yeah, George, let me fall. . . .” Lucas chuckled to himself behind closed eyes as the four rode on through the grainy night.
At the lead, Elmer Fisk led the three men a full hour farther along the high trail. As Lucas slept, Fisk turned onto a narrower winding trail and continued downward in the darkness. When another hour had passed, the riders meandered with caution around the side of a steep craggy hillside until they stood before a tall, thin crevice at the end of a sloping cliff overhang.
“Man, oh, man,” said Duckwald, staring out through cloud-swept darkness. The sloping cliff fell away sharply for forty feet, then lay broken off above a yawning black hole. “If a man’s horse lost its footing up here, it’d be a week before he’d hit bottom.”
Epson said, “I best wake this fool before we ride around this edge.” He reached out and started to shake Lucas by his arm.
But Fisk grabbed his hand and shoved it way. “Let’s let him sleep.”
“But what if—?”
Duckwald cut his brother-in-law off, saying in a whisper, “You heard him, George. Let the man sleep.”
George heard the two give a dark chuckle. Beside them Lucas snored softly.
Elmer grabbed the reins to Lucas’ bareback horse and jerked it forward onto the steep sloping cliff. The animal protested with a loud whinny, but bolted forward as Duckwald slapped its rump with his leather riding quirt and shouted, “Hee-iii!”
“Jesus!” said Epson, watching the frightened neighing animal make a short circle in the pale moonlight, its ironclad hooves slipping and clacking, raising sparks on the stone cliff.
Lucas let out a yelp as the animal began to quickly lose it balance. But he had no time to hurl himself from its back before it started a wild, deadly dance off into the bottomless blackness.
As the three sat staring in the darkness, the clacking of the horse’s hooves fell silent. A short scream came from Lucas; a terrifying neigh resounded from the animal as it plunged downward through thin air. For what seemed like a long time, they heard only the waning scream of the horse as it thrashed and twisted futilely in thin air. Then they heard the cracking, splitting, breaking of pine boughs echo up to them from a thousand feet below.
“I bet that sobered him up some,” Fisk said quietly, a cruel grin on his stony face.
“You’d think,” Duckwald said.
“Jesus . . . ,” Epson repeated, his gaze fixed on a wisp of low cloud looming at cliff’s edge.
“I never liked the son of a bitch much,” Fisk said, turning his horse carefully to the dark crevice.
“Me neither,” said Duckwald. “I’ve wanted to kill him ever since I first laid eyes on him.” He turned his horse behind Fisk and followed him into the thin black crevice.
“But what about Shear?” Epson asked, turning his horse and booting it along behind Duckwald.
“What about him?” Fisk asked over his shoulder.
Before Epson could answer, Duckwald said, “It would be different if we left the gambler lying on the flatlands with his belly in his hands.” He chuckled. “But hell, any drunk can ride his horse off a cliff in this kind of country.”
“Yeah, besides,” said Fisk, “everything he told me, I can tell Big Aces myself. I could have shot this turd anytime. I just thought hearing him scream might be a little more fun.”
Stopping his horse a few feet inside the narrow pitch-black crevice, Fisk said, “Give me your reins. Get back there and sweep out our tracks with some brush.”
“This rock shelf doesn’t leave much tracks anyway,” said Duckwald.
“Are you going to argue with me?” said Fisk.
Duckwald and Epson handed him their horses’ reins and did as they
were told. When they returned, tossing aside their handful of dried brush, they stepped back into their saddles. “Good enough?” said Duckwald.
Fisk didn’t answer. He struck a long hearth match and spotted a row of three short-handled torches leaning on a rock ledge. He took one down and rolled its blackened tip back and forth in the match’s flame until the fire took hold.
“Holy Moses . . . ,” Epson said, awestricken, he and Duckwald looking past Fisk and forward down a steep rock path. The corridor of rock lining the trail was barely wide enough for the horses to pass through. “I’ve heard rumors about this place, but I never thought I’d see it.”
“Neither did Lucas,” Duckwald said with a dark laugh, his voice sounding strange rolling along the rocky passageway, “but he was right.”
“Hold this,” said Fisk, handing Duckwald the burning torch.
Duckwald held the flickering light while Fisk rummaged through his saddlebags. Fisk took out a fresh short-handled torch and laid it up on the ledge beside the other two for the next Black Valley Riders who rode through the crevice entrance toward the Black Valley hideout.
“How far is it from here?” Epson asked, staring along the crevice, the closeness of it causing an unsteady feeling in his chest.
“It’s still better than a day’s ride once we reach the end of this path,” said Duckwald.
“Does it—does it get any wider than this?” Epson stammered, trying not to sound too concerned.
“No,” Duckwald replied over his shoulder to him with a dark grin. “But don’t worry. It doesn’t get any tighter either.”
“I wasn’t worried,” Epson said grudgingly, “just curious is all.”
“Hear that, Elmer?” Duckwald said to Fisk riding along slowly, ahead of him.
“Shut up, both of yas,” Fisk said almost in a whisper, watching a rattlesnake wind its way out of sight when the glow of torchlight crept onto it.
The three rode on, circling downward on the narrow path for over a half hour before Fisk stopped and put out the torch and laid it on another rock shelf at shoulder level. Heeling his horse forward, the two men close behind him, he stopped a few yards ahead as Duckwald and Epson felt the coolness of fresh air on their faces.
