The Cost of Dying

by Peter Brandvold

  It wasn’t going to happen. On his left men were running toward him down another open corridor. Lieutenant Will-John Rhodes was in the lead, holding a pistol in each hand.

  “There!” he shouted, raising both guns toward Prophet.

  Lou raised his own Peacemaker to the girl’s side and cocked the hammer back. “I’ll kill her, Lieutenant! I’ll drill a hole right through both kidneys! Stay back or you’ll have to explain the death of this purty little devil here to the Mad Major!”

  “Hold up!” Rhodes shouted to the men running behind him. He stopped and raised both his Colts barrel-up.

  Prophet heard more footsteps behind him, coming from the direction of the yard. Ahead rose a cracked stone wall. Behind him, more running feet clattered as another pack of Yeats’s wolves was charging hard in his direction.

  His heart pounded. Sweat streaked his face.

  They had him cornered.

  Quickly, he thought through his options.

  Options? Hell, what options? He almost laughed at the thought. He was a dead man.

  If he had any hope at all, it was the main gate. If he could get through the main gate—which was one mighty big if—he might have a chance. A slim one, but what the hell else was he going to do except run in circles until he exhausted himself or one of Yeats’s rannies finally called his bluff on his threat to kill the princess and kicked him out with a cold shovel?

  He swung around to face the men running toward him from the yard. They’d just climbed the top of the stone steps, and now the first men had seen him and were widening their eyes beneath their sombrero brims and raising their guns.

  “Back!” Lou shouted, trying to put as much crazy-wild rebel in his voice as possible, which wasn’t too hard, given where he hailed from and his current predicament. “Back, you chili-chompin’ curs, or I’ll drill the princess here a pill she won’t digest!”

  Chapter 39

  Prophet wasn’t sure if the Mexicans now gathered at the top of the stone steps had understood what he’d said. If not, they’d apparently gotten the overall drift. They looked from the gun Lou was pressing against Alejandra’s side to Prophet’s eyes. They must have seen bloody murder there. Or thought they did.

  A couple of men at the head of the pack gestured for the others to lower their weapons while the pack leaders lowered their own.

  Prophet whipped around toward where Will-John Rhodes was walking slowly toward him, his own small gang close on his heels. “Back, Rhodes!” Lou gritted his teeth and tightened his grip on the Colt’s handle.

  Rhodes stopped and held his guns out flat to each side, and raised and lowered them slowly, indicating the others to stand down, as well.

  Prophet whipped back around toward the gang of eight men gathered at the top of the stone steps. “Back, back!” He moved toward them, keeping the Colt pressed against the señorita’s side. “Back!” he repeated.

  “¡Espalda! ¡Espalda!” yelled one of the leaders, gesturing at the others behind him.

  “Yeah, ¡espalda, espalda!” Lou repeated.

  The group lowered their weapons and began backing or sidestepping down the stone staircase beside which an ancient Spanish cannon rusted, a bird’s nest sprouting from its maw. The cannon reminded Lou of the damn Gatling gun on the wall near the bastion’s main gate. He was going to have to face the blasted thing whether he wanted to or not. He just hoped the fella manning it didn’t have an itchy trigger finger or had been smoking Baja Jack’s locoweed . . .

  “Mierda,” he said, the word in Spanish coming nearly as easily to his lips at it did in his own tongue.

  He moved forward, gritting his teeth, making his eyes blaze, hoping that all the men backing down the steps away from him swallowed his ruse. If just one realized that he had no intention of shooting the pretty girl on his shoulder, his goose was cooked. Yeats would kill him slow.

  The Mexicans edged away from him down the steps and along a short corridor between two crumbling walls then out into the main yard. Prophet stepped out into the yard, as well, the group forming a ragged semicircle around him, backing away from him as though he were a wounded grizzly.

  “Out of the way!” he yelled at two men impeding his way toward the main gate.

  They separated quickly, sidestepping, one tripping over his own feet and almost falling. Lou strode through the opening they’d left, tramping out into the middle of the yard, angling toward the gate ahead and on his left.

  He looked up at the wall to the right of the open gate. That damn Gatling gun was manned, as usual, and the man manning it canted the brass canister down toward Prophet. Lou could hear the soft chirp of the swivel as the man behind the gun swung it slowly, tracking his target. He opened and closed his gloved hand on the crank’s wooden handle, squinting one eye as he aimed down the barrel.

  The skin pricked under the collar of Lou’s buckskin tunic, which was still damp from last night though he wasn’t aware of anything at the moment besides the Gatling gun and the men standing around him, regarding him warily but also shrewdly, wanting desperately to make a play.

  “Alejandra!”

  The bellowing cry had risen from Prophet’s left. A burly, red-bearded man in a red sash, frilly cotton shirt, and jodhpurs stumbled forward from a group standing atop a portico. Yeats ambled down the steps and into the yard, holding his two silver-chased Russians straight out in both hands.

  “Put her down, you dog!” Yeats wailed, lances of raw fury caroming from his glassy blue eyes set deep in his fleshy, sunburned face, behind his sagging spectacles.

  Behind Prophet, Will-John Rhodes said, “He says he’ll kill her, Major! If we don’t give him safe passage, he’ll kill her!”

  “You son of the devil!” Yeats barked at Prophet. He stopped at the bottom of the portico’s steps, keeping his Russians aimed at Lou’s head. He cocked them both at the same time. The ratcheting clicks of the hammers sounded inordinately loud in the funereal silence of the yard.

  “Put the hoglegs down, Major!” Lou swung around to face Yeats, keeping his cocked Colt pressed against Alejandra’s side. “I’ll kill her! I walk out of here, or she and I both die! I’ll take her with me to the smoking gates, Major. I swear I will!” It wasn’t too hard to make his voice sound brittle with desperation.

  Yeats squinted one eye as he aimed down the barrel of one of the aimed Buntlines. “How do I know she isn’t already dead?”

  “You’ll just have to take my word for it.”

  “Suppose I choose not to?”

  Lou thought he saw quick movement to his hard right. He looked that way but saw a dozen men flanking him on that side, standing still but watching him with wide-eyed expectation, some holding guns, others fingering weapons that remained in their holsters. One man was caressing a knife handle as though he were considering a quick throw at the big bounty hunter’s back.

  Lou fired a quick look over his right shoulder. That damn Gatling gun was still aimed at the back of his head.

  Christ, what a mess!

  If on the off chance Lou made it out of this little entanglement intact, he was spending next winter north of the border. Give him a raging prairie blizzard over this bailiwick any day of the week!

  “As you can see,” Yeats said in a maddeningly reasonable tone, “there is no chance of your getting out of here, Prophet! Now, why don’t you put down the señorita? You and I can go inside. We will have a drink together. You can enjoy a last meal with a drink and a smoke. Baja Jack’s wonderful weed will make death less painful for you. I promise to kill you quick. I won’t make you suffer. All right? Do we have a deal, compadre?”

  Prophet continued backing toward the gate. “Put down the Russians, damnit, Yeats!”

  Yeats smiled broadly. “I don’t think you can kill her.”

  Lou’s heart thudded. “What?”

  “I’m calling your bluff, Lou. I don’t think you’re holding a winning hand. I think you’re holding the same hand that Wild Bill Hickok was holding when he suffer
ed his untimely demise—the dead man’s hand.”

  “I’ll kill her!”

  “No, you won’t.” Yeats shook his head slowly, knowingly. “I don’t think you can do it. If so, go ahead. She is a rare beauty, for sure, but there are more rare beauties in the world. True, it takes some looking, but I have plenty of time!”

  Ah hell . . .

  “What the devil’s goin’ on?”

  The familiar voice made Lou stop in his tracks and lurch with a start. He glanced over his shoulder.

  Colter stood in the middle of the open gate, looking blearily toward where Prophet stood holding the girl on his shoulder. The redhead appeared to have just woken somewhere—probably in some puta’s crib. His shirttails were untucked. His hair hung in tangles to his shoulders. He looked pale, his eyes rheumy from the long debauch.

  The kid looked beyond Prophet to Yeats, and he said with grim understanding, “Ah hell.”

  “Kid,” Prophet said with a weary sigh, “you got the worst timing of anyone in the world.”

  Yeats laughed. Lou swung his head back forward. Yeats was drawing a bead on his forehead and, closing his lips together, started taking up the slack in his trigger finger.

  Lou heard a soft snicking sound from behind and above him. A man gasped, groaned.

  Yeats took his eye off Prophet’s forehead to peer up and behind Lou, who turned his head just in time to see the Gatling gunner drop down onto one knee beside the Gatling gun, grimacing, his sombrero tumbling off his shoulder to hang down his back by its neck thong. “¡Dios mio!” He pitched slowly forward, dropped over the edge of the wall, and turned a single somersault before hitting the ground at the base of the wall with a heavy thud.

  The wooden handle of a small cuchillo poked up from his back.

  What in tarnation?

  A figure rose from behind the Gatling gun.

  “Now, then, what do you say we get this dance started right an’ proper!” came the crackling, raspy, crowlike caw. Prophet blinked in disbelief when he saw Baja Jack tip up the Gatling gun’s canister with a loud chirp of the swivel and wrap one small, gloved hand around the crank handle. Just then Prophet realized the furtive movement he’d spied a minute ago on his right had been Jack scuttling along the wall to the ladder giving access to the Gatling gun. No one else had seen him, or paid him any interest, because all eyes had been on Lou and the girl.

  Baja Jack’s buzzardlike face beneath the broad brim of his black velvet sombrero blossomed into a wide-eyed grin of pure jubilation as he began turning the crank with his crooked little arm while cackling like a dozen witches freed from hell. The rat-tat-tats of the revolving rifle quickly drowned out Jack’s crowing though not the screams of the men his first bullets found.

  Prophet cursed in exasperation as he pulled Alejandra down off his shoulder, set her on the ground, and then threw himself on top of her, shielding her body with his. He looked up to see Ciaran Yeats running up the portico steps and then diving through the doorway as Jack hurled bullets in his direction, several plowing into the men around him and hammering the masonry walls to either side of the door.

  Most of the men who hadn’t yet been shot spun and ran for cover, a couple triggering bullets toward Jack as they did. Will-John Rhodes dropped to a knee and raised both his pistols but he got off only one shot before he jerked suddenly as one of the Gatling gun’s bullets plowed into his belly, just above the buckle of his cartridge belt.

  A second bullet walloped his chest over his heart before a third and a fourth drilled his upper chest and then his right cheek respectively, throwing him backward onto the ground already reddened with the blood the bullets had blown out of his back. The lieutenant lay spread-eagle, quivering as he died.

  More men twisted and fell, screaming, as the Gatling gun continued plundering the flesh around where Prophet lay stretched out over the girl, who was regaining consciousness now. He could feel her squirming around beneath him.

  Suddenly, the Gatling gun stopped its cackling. As its echoes faded, rocketing off the wall and the big bastion, Prophet heard the yips and howls and raucous wails of Baja Jack. The Gatling’s swivel squawked.

  Prophet looked at the wall to see Jack rising from behind the smoking maw of the Gatling gun, giving one more raucous roar before turning and yelling over the far side of the wall, “¡Pepe, trae los burros y los caballos, viejo réprobo!”

  Prophet stared at him, frowning. “What the . . . ?”

  Baja Jack stepped to the edge of the wall and looked around, his Colt .44 in his right hand. He looked at Prophet and said, “Cover me, Lou!”

  Prophet looked around again at the dead men strewn around the yard. There must have been at least twenty of them. A few were alive but wounded and writhing or trying to crawl away, clutching bloody wounds. Lou didn’t see any more guards on the front wall. All but the one manning the Gatling gun must have climbed down to investigate Alejandra’s pleas for help. Now they either lay amongst the dead in the yard or were cowering behind cover with the other survivors of Baja Jack’s lead storm.

  Jack ran toward the gate. A ladder leaned against the wall over there. He dropped onto the ladder and descended quickly, his thick little body making the ladder buck and creak. He was breathing hard from excitement.

  Prophet, sitting up and looking around the yard, saw one of the fallen men aim a gun at Jack. Lou dispatched the man with a bullet through his brisket. He could see a few men peering out through the fortification’s arched doorways. One extended a rifle but Prophet discouraged him with a bullet that sent the man cursing back into the shadows.

  Colter was on one knee in front of the open gate, looking around with his Remington extended, also hurling lead here and there where men poked their heads out from behind cover.

  Baja Jack leaped down from the ladder and ran toward the gate, grinning at Prophet, beckoning with his left arm. “Come on, Lou. Come on, old son. We’re burnin’ daylight!” His eyes widened suddenly. He wheeled toward Prophet, raising his .44, and fired.

  Lou ducked. A man behind him grunted. Lou turned to see a man fall near the portico in which Yeats had retreated.

  Jack laughed and twirled the Colt on his finger. “Just like shootin’ rats off a trash heap!” He scowled at Prophet. “Come on, Lou! We ain’t got all day. I killed a good many o’ them rascals but there’s a small army still kickin’ for sure!”

  Prophet looked down at Alejandra. She lay belly down, looking around at the dead men in shock, her red hair blowing around her head in a rising wind off the sea.

  Prophet grabbed her arm. “Come on, sweetheart.”

  She climbed to her feet and turned a withering glare to him. “Go to hell!” She slapped Lou hard across his right cheek.

  Angrily, he crouched, threw her over his shoulder, and hurried after Baja Jack, who’d crossed the bridge fording the moat and was heading down the stone ramp. Colter stood facing Lou, his cocked Remington in his hand. He was frowning, shaking his head. “Would you mind tellin’ me what in the hell’s goin’ on, Lou?”

  Prophet shrugged a shoulder. “Your guess is as good as mine, Red, but I reckon we done wore out our welcome at Baluarte Santiago.” He brushed past Colter and crossed the wooden bridge. “Come on. There’s still some snakes wrigglin’ around in the lair back there, includin’ Yeats.” He had a feeling they were all cowed by the shock of Baja Jack’s sudden attack, but they’d recover soon and organize themselves into a catch party.

  Very soon. And they’d be more than a little hot under the collar.

  Prophet had just stepped onto the stone ramp when he stopped suddenly. He stared at where the old burro wrangler, Pepe, came galloping toward the bastion from the adobe stables. Sitting astride his mule, he led a string of pack burros and horses, Baja Jack’s trigueño, Colter’s Northwest, and Lou’s very own Mean and Ugly.

  Lou poked his hat back off his forehead. “I’ll be damned.”

  Colter stepped up beside him and did likewise. “I’ll be double damned.”


  The horses were saddled. The pack burros were outfitted with their aparejos. The panniers hung from the pack frames, bulging.

  Prophet and Colter hurried down off the ramp toward where Pepe stopped the string of mounts and where Baja Jack was leaping up off the edge of the ramp to shove his boot into a short stirrup hanging from the side of the trigueño.

  Slumped over Lou’s shoulder, the girl cursed and kicked and pounded his back with her fists. “¡Bastardo! ¡Gran bastardo americano feo!”

  Baja Jack triggered a round toward the bastion. “Best hurry, amigos. They’re trying to get back up on the walls. We really prodded the snake, I think!”

  Prophet was glad to see his Richards hanging by its lanyard from his saddle horn, his Winchester in its sheath. Old Pepe had done well. Prophet unhooked the shotgun from the horn and slung it over his shoulder. “Did you hit Yeats?”

  “I think so. Not where I was aimin’, but I think I hit him, all right!” Jack slapped his thigh and squealed a laugh. “Did you see how I shredded that mean an’ nasty Will-John Rhodes?”

  “Yeah, I seen.”

  “Hah—served him right, the cold-eyed son of a buck!”

  “Where’re your guards, Jack?”

  “Probably still curled up with the putas somewhere in the village. Don’t worry about them. I’ll explain later. Vamos, Lou!”

  Lou tossed the girl up onto his saddle, grabbed his reins off the tail of the burro in front of him, and then swung up behind Alejandra, who was still cursing a blue streak in Spanish. “Say, Jack—what’s in the panniers?”

  “It’s a surprise, amigo!” Jack laughed. “Oh, it’s a surprise, all right! A fine one, you will agree. Just now, however, I reckon we’d best haul our freight. When Yeats and his men recover from the shellacking I just gave them, compliments of their own Gatling gun, they will be angrier than a pack of rabid lobos!”