by Ray Hogan
It was standard procedure, and under ordinary circumstances usually effective. But like most officers who went strictly by the book, Bernal was misjudging the situation, convinced he would have little difficulty in overpowering so small an enemy.
Not only was he ignoring the disadvantage of charging an opponent entrenched on higher ground, but he was also failing to reckon with the firepower of the improved rifles being used by Rait and his men.
Adam watched the forming ranks in silence. After the first wave struck, he would have some idea of their chances. Until then he could only hope. He swept the teamsters and their reinforcements with a final glance; there was no conversation, only a complete hush. Below, in the wash, a bugle sounded. Hammers clicked along the ridge as rifles were cocked.
“Here they come,” someone said quietly.
“Hold your fire until they’re in range,” Adam warned.
Malachi Lee lazily turned half around. “Now, how’ll we be knowing when that is?” he drawled. “Ain’t none of us ever fired one of these newfangled irons.”
“That hump of rocks and weeds,” Rait said, pointing to a rise some fifty yards below. “That’s your deadline.” He repeated his words in Spanish for benefit of the Juáristas.
“Ain’t that a mite close?” Darby Sims wondered.
“It’s this first round that’ll count,” Adam replied.
The bugle blared louder, slicing through a burst of yelling. The first wave of cavalrymen hit the bottom of the near slope, started up. The shouts increased and scattered shooting began as the line of horsemen began to break its exact regularity on the rough grade.
“Wait,” Adam cautioned.
The cavalry thundered on, dust now churning up in boiling clouds. Off to the left Rait could see Bernal, saber swinging overhead, whipping back and forth.
“Fire!”
He gave the order the exact instant the riders reached the clump. Immediately gunshots echoed deafeningly along the line of wagons. Half the riders in the first wave buckled in their saddles. Several fell to the ground, bounced limply, and lay still. Others, clawing at leather, curved off to make way for the second line.
The follow-up troopers did not withhold their fire; they opened up immediately. Bullets thudded dully into the wagons, sang off the iron tires, ricocheted against the rocks. Ben Tipton muttered a curse, fell back, plainly dead. Gunshots continued to crackle steadily from the rim. More cavalrymen sagged, fell, or wheeled off, clutching their wounds.
Hernando Bernal had halted and was staring up the slope. He appeared startled, but he did nothing to stop the third wave of charging soldiers, now rushing into the merciless blast of the teamsters’ guns.
Adam, firing mechanically, peered through the layers of dust and smoke drifting across the hillside, waited for the sound of the bugle to call retreat. Surely, Hernando Bernal would not be fool enough to keep coming.
But the wave closed. The guns of the teamsters crackled again, drowning the reports of the troopers’ weapons. More cavalrymen wilted, fell away. And two more of the crouched drivers jerked back, cursing. The one to Adam’s left—Jules Bundy—continued to swear in a steady monotone as he sought to stuff his bandanna into a fountain of blood in his groin. The other man, face down, lay quiet.
And then the bugle’s shrill notes rolled out over the hillside, echoed against the butte. Bernal had decided to withdraw. Rait could see the shadowy figures of cavalrymen cutting about in the haze, starting down the slope. Yells went up from the teamsters. Adam turned slowly, looked toward the horses. Angela was all right.
“Is that Larsen, lying there with his head shot off?”
Someone moved past him, stepped to the teamster lying face down, and rolled him onto his back. It was Larsen; a bullet had caught him in the forehead. Rait began to check further. Four more dead: Oliver Cook, old Malachi Lee, and two of the Mexican recruits. There were three wounded, including Bundy. They had done well, exacting a penalty of four or five to one from the ranks of Bernal’s Imperial Guards. Adam’s hopes began to lift.
“Here they come again!”
Rait whirled. The Mexican officer had changed his tactics. No longer was he hurling his entire command straight up the front slope. Instead, he had thrown them out in a wide line and was approaching the fortifications on the ledge from all three sides.
“Spread out!” Adam yelled, seizing some of the men by the shoulder, pushing them toward the ends of the flat, where their concentration was thinnest.
The line of blue surged up the slopes, the expertness of their training evident in the almost perfect shoulder-to-shoulder formation they maintained.
“Hold for my signal!” Rait shouted.
His judgment must be right, he knew. Unless Bernal’s men were met with a concentrated fire at just the correct moment, the ends of the teamsters’ line of fortifications, far weaker than the center, would be quickly overrun.
He waited, trying to see through the dust. Straining, he saw the first of the line reach the marker he had earlier employed on the front slope. Raising his rifle, he counted off ten seconds.
“Fire!”
All along the grade that flowed from the butte the line of blue faltered. Men yelled in pain, horses went down, thrashing wildly. A few answering shots sounded, but they were a weak response to the steady, rapid shooting of the teamsters and the Juáristas, now accustomed to their new weapons.
Rait peered into the rolling clouds of smoke and dust. He could not locate Bernal, could see only bodies littering the three sides of the slope. The firing dwindled and came to a halt. Slowly, the thick haze drifted away. A yell went up from the teamsters. The assault had failed again; Hernando Bernal’s cavalrymen were gathering in the sandy wash once more.
“You reckon that’s it, Cap’n?” Ed Vernon called from the far end of the ledge.
“Stay where you are!” Rait answered quickly. The general could make another final, desperate attempt. He glanced toward the wagons. Angela and Sancho were busy with the wounded. He wondered how many more had fallen. He had seen only one man stumble and fall—Kiowa Jack, he thought.
Activity in the wash caught his attention. Three soldiers, one bearing a white flag, rode forward, halted a few yards up the slope.
“We withdraw!” the officer in the group shouted. “With your permission we will gather our dead and wounded.”
Adam moved to the edge of the flat. He pointed to the cavalrymen, mounted and waiting. “Order your men to retreat. Then you may proceed.”
The officer turned, gave a command. The troopers, with the exception of those delegated to assist in the grisly recovery, wheeled and slanted across the wash for the distant hillside.
Those remaining began to climb the slopes. They first loaded the wounded onto their horses, sent them to where the cavalrymen were assembling. When that was done, they collected the dead, draping the bodies over saddles, lashing hands and feet together to hold them secure.
General Hernando Bernal was one of those …
THE END
About the Author
Ray Hogan was an author who inspired a loyal following over the years since he published his first Western novel, Ex-Marshal, in 1956. Hogan was born in Willow Springs, Missouri, where his father was town marshal. At five the Hogan family moved to Albuquerque, where they lived in the foothills of the Sandia and Manzano Mountains. His father was on the Albuquerque police force and, in later years, owned the Overland Hotel. It was while listening to his father and other old-timers tell tales from the past that Ray was inspired to recast these tales in fiction. From the beginning he did exhaustive research into the history and the people of the old West, and the walls of his study were lined with various firearms, spurs, pictures, books, and memorabilia, about all of which he could talk in dramatic detail. “I’ve attempted to capture the courage and bravery of those men and women that lived out west and
the dangers and problems they had to overcome,” Hogan once remarked. If his lawmen protagonists seem sometimes larger than life, it is because they are men of integrity, heroes who, through grit of character and common sense, are able to overcome the obstacles they encounter, despite often overwhelming odds. This same grit of character can also be found in Hogan’s heroines, and in The Vengeance of Fortuna West (1983), Hogan wrote a gripping and totally believable account of a woman who takes up the badge and tracks the men who killed her lawman husband by ambush. No less intriguing in her way is Nellie Dupray, convicted of rustling in The Glory Trail (1978). One of his most popular books, dealing with an earlier period in the West with Kit Carson as its protagonist, is Soldier in Buckskin (1996). Above all, what is most impressive about Hogan’s Western novels is the consistent quality with which each is crafted, the compelling depth of his characters, and his ability to juxtapose the complexities of human conflict into narratives always as intensely interesting as they are emotionally involving.
