Scorpion (23 page)

“It was a dark day when Captain Pepper ever let the likes of him and Dobbs join up.” Gandy took a swallow from his canteen, rinsed his mouth out and spat. “O’course Dobbs is answering to a higher authority now, I reckon.”

An image came to mind, one of many Ben would remember all his life. Señora Montenez arrived at the top of the stairs with a lamp in hand. In its sallow glow Lucker Dobbs finished bleeding to death from gaping wounds to the chest and throat. The bearded ruffian stared unseeingly at Marita, who delivered a brutal kick between the dead man’s legs. Her cheeks wet with tears, she pummeled the man as long as she had strength.

“Yeah … a higher authority,” Ben said, “or a lower one.” He pictured Dobbs dancing barefoot on brimstone.

“You think the girl was telling the truth about Najera, that we’ll find him at this ranch where you hid out?” Gandy asked.

Ben nodded. According to Señora Montenez, the general had abandoned Marita. Now the Yaqui was a woman scorned, and seeking retribution against the one who had wronged her. “She was telling the truth. Besides, from what I know of this Najera, forcing Josefina Quintero to marry him so he can legally get his hands on her gold sounds like something the general would do.”

“Well, truth or lie, we’ll find out before sunup.” Snake-Eye searched his saddlebag for a leather-tough strip of jerky and managed to gnaw off a morsel. He offered a bite to Ben, who declined the invitation, his mood darkening. “What is it, Brass Buttons? We’ve faced some pretty hard times together.”

With the return of his memory, Ben had been forced to confront some unpleasant facts about himself. He was beginning to miss certain aspects of his recent amnesia. There seemed no middle ground. The events of the massacre could be relived in detail now. And the facts were achingly painful to confront. His sense of exultation became suddenly tempered by the cruel realities of all that had happened and the ugly truth behind the loss of his command.

“I ran, Snake-Eye.” The admission spilled out. McQueen couldn’t help himself. He studied the dirt beneath his feet; it was easier than meeting Gandy’s stare. “When those damn guns opened up to every side and men started toppling out of the saddle, I panicked. A bullet creased my skull and dropped me. I had my gun but I didn’t even try to make a stand. All I wanted to do was live. Something snapped inside. I’d led my men into a trap. They were dying because of me, and I didn’t want to be among them. I ran … crawled … I did whatever I could to reach the rocks at the bottom of the hill. I hid there until it was over.”

“Hmm.” Gandy chewed in silence for a moment. “The way it looks to me, Ned Tolliver and Dobbs did the leading. Still, it was your command. But as for you turning tail and skedaddling, I ain’t your father confessor.” His harsh tone cut through Ben’s self-pity like a knife and caused the younger man to look up sharply, straighten, and pay attention. “So fearless young Ben McQueen found out he’s human after all. Maybe you made a mistake, that ain’t for me to judge, but live with it and go on and do what needs to be done. I figure that’s what the medal you wear is all about.” Snake-Eye clapped Ben on the arm and ambled on down to water his horse.

Ben remained alone with his self-recrimination and his doubts until he decided they weren’t fit company. He knelt and picked up a fossilized shell. He focused on the shell and dredged from memory the words taught him by Raven McQueen, a Choctaw medicine woman and his mother.

“Into stone I place all I did not do.

Into stone I place my shame, and my dishonor.

Into stone I place my heart’s pain

And cast it from me.”

He tossed aside that remnant of an ancient sea and joined the Rangers at the spring. The horses were allowed a brief drink and then brought out onto the prairie, where the Rangers passed the few minutes left before remounting. Ben stood at the edge of the pool with the remaining men who had yet to water their mounts. It took him a moment to realize Tolliver was at his side.

“There’ll be another day, McQueen. I’ll get you for what you done.”

Images again, of Angel Perez and his glowering threats. Something snapped inside Ben. He turned on the prisoner, and grabbed a revolver from his belt, shoved the weapon in Tolliver’s bound hands. At the same time, Ben drew his own pistol and jabbed the barrel beneath Ned’s chin, forcing his head back.

“Go ahead, you bastard,” Ben growled, a crazed expression on his face. He cocked the revolver, his finger curled round the trigger. “Get me!” His breath fanned Tolliver’s face as he spoke as quietly as an undertaker at a funeral. “Take the first shot.”

Tolliver looked into the face of death and blinked, gulped and turned his head aside. He could blow a hole through McQueen’s heart, but he’d die all the same.

“For the love of heaven, McQueen,” Pettibone gasped, retreating out of harm’s way.

“Ben … what the hell?” Gandy called out as he made his way around the pool.

“Go on!” Ben shouted in the turncoat’s face. Ned jumped, then froze again. Ben McQueen lowered his revolver and contemptuously returned his gun to its holster. And still Tolliver didn’t move a muscle, though for the moment he had Ben completely at his mercy. But in one swift explosive burst of temper, McQueen had broken the traitor. Ben reached out and took the revolver from the bound man’s grasp. He leaned in close to Tolliver and said softly, “You aren’t going to
get
anybody, Ned. You’re going to cling to your wretched life right up to the moment the hangman slips a noose over your neck.”

There came a collective sigh of relief from Gandy, Pettibone, and the other few men still gathered around the pool. McQueen took the reins of his mount and walked the sturdy gelding out of the wallow. When he reached the plain, he vaulted into the saddle and galloped off down the wheel-rutted road, a lone rider in the night. But not alone for long.

P
EDRO GALLEGOS SAT WITH
his back against the roof wall and watched with painful fascination as Zion fashioned a tourniquet out of a bandanna and a flintlock pistol, thrusting the gun barrel through a loop in the bandanna and rotating the pistol to tighten the cloth until it closed off the supply of blood to the bullet crease in Pedro’s leg.

“Damn. It would be my good leg,” the ranchero muttered, sweat beading his upper lip despite the cool arid air.

“Lucky for you the ricochet was just about spent,” Zion said. The bullet, fired by a rifleman atop the bunkhouse minutes ago, had glanced off a corner of the wall and plowed a ragged furrow in Pedro’s right leg, just above the knee.

“Ain’t gonna be lucky for anybody the next time they come,” Pedro said. “What the hell is the general up to?”

“He’s waiting out the fires we set,” Zion said. Najera had lost five men during the first attempt at storming the house. After their initial onslaught, the dragoons had fortified themselves in the bunkhouse and the barn, with a couple of marksmen behind the stone walls of the water tank in the center of the ranchyard. From these three vantage points the soldiers had kept up a sporadic assault on the hacienda, peppering the shuttered windows and the roof battlement with gunfire.

“Once the fires burn out and we can’t see to shoot until they’re right up on us …” Zion’s voice trailed off. He saw no reason to go into detail. Pedro wasn’t a tenderfoot. He knew as well as any man what to expect. Zion scrambled away from Pedro’s side to peer over the front wall and inspect the yard. A rifle atop the bunkhouse spat flame, and a bullet struck the wall a couple of feet below the segundo. Zion cursed and answered the shot with one of his own. His rifle boomed and the man on the bunkhouse ducked out of sight. The men by the water tank opened up with their muzzle loaders and forced Zion back down behind the wall, but he’d seen enough to worry him. The fires were nearly spent, the darkness encroaching where flames nearly as tall as a man had leaped and danced and held back the night. Gunshots from the women below spattered the tank walls; geysers erupted in front of the hidden soldiers. Josefina and Elena were holding their own. The women still had plenty of fight left in them.

The trapdoor in the roof creaked open and Isabella poked her head through.

“Stay below,” Zion called out.

“The rooms are full of powder smoke, it stinks downstairs,” the child remarked. Her cheeks were smudged with ashes. She’d tied a bandanna around her head to hold back her hair. A second strip of cloth circled her left hand where she’d been struck by splinters from a bullet-riddled shutter. The girl lifted a canteen for Zion to take. “I brought water.”

The segundo scrambled across the roof to the trapdoor, retrieved the water, then passed the canteen to Pedro, who gratefully accepted it.

“Pedro’s been hurt,” Isabella exclaimed, and tried to climb out on the roof, but Zion pushed her back.

“I’ve looked after him.”

“But I should be here,” Isabella protested.

“You should do what I tell you, little one.” Zion was too strong for the girl and prevented her from reaching the roof. “The soldiers on the bunkhouse won’t think twice about shooting a child. It’s safer for you in the hacienda.”

“But Josefina and Elena won’t let me do anything but load their pistols,” Isabella complained. “I’m a better shot than either of them, I bet.”

“Obey your stepmother,” Zion said flatly, unmoved by her arguments. “Remember what you said to me, my little spitfire. It’s the gentleman’s duty to protect the lady.”

The ten-year-old scowled, caught by her own cleverness. She looked into the segundo’s kind eyes and nodded. Her expression softened. “Is General Najera going to kill us?”

“No,” Zion said. Isabella continued to stare at him with those soft brown eyes that always seemed to be able to look right through him. “Now get below. And mind your footing, a couple of those rungs are slick.”

“I love you, Zion,” Isabella said before she ducked down and disappeared below the edge of the roof.

Zion crawled back to the adobe wall and knelt alongside Pedro. The blood had all but ceased to seep from the leg wound. The ranchero’s lips were drawn back tight against his teeth. He was in pain.

“She is a brave girl. I think you convinced her,” Pedro said.

Zion glanced toward the trapdoor, laughed ruefully and shook his head. “Isabella Quintero? I didn’t fool her for an instant.”

Josefina Quintero abandoned the study window and made her way across the house, into the sitting room where Father Rudolfo was ramming charges down the barrels of the widow’s shotgun. He primed the piece and set it aside as Josefina knelt by a tin pitcher of water and poured herself another drink. As a last defense the widow, Elena, and the priest had built a makeshift barricade at the rear of the front room. Should Najera’s men begin to break through the door, the hacienda’s defenders would seek shelter behind the overturned tables and chairs near the back wall. Josefina hoped it wouldn’t come to that, but if it did, well … She picked up the shotgun and nodded her thanks to the priest.

“I have never been so thirsty in my life,” she said. A haze of powder smoke drifted through the house, irritating the eyes and throats of everyone inside.

“Take courage, señora. The good Lord will not abandon us,” the padre said. At his side, Niño lifted his furry head and wagged his tail, waiting for a scratch behind the ears.

“Just the same, keep praying,” Josefina said. “For we will need a miracle indeed.”

“I prayed when the Comanche took me. Prayed every day. It kept me alive when I wanted to die,” Elena replied, coming in from the dining room for another tin box of musket balls. “The Comanche squaws used to beat me, once or twice a week. They’d break off branches of ocotillo cactus and whip me bloody. That’s when I quit praying and fought back and never shed a tear.” The woman eased her big frame past the priest and helped herself to the water. “If we aim to walk away from this, it will take more than prayer. We must fight like she-wolves. We must get mean.” She drank a cup of water and, seeing Isabella climbing down from the roof, called the girl to her side.

“Isabella, is Pedro all right?”

“He is fine, Elena,” the girl lied. She saw no reason to cause the house servant undue worry. And after all, Zion was there to look after the vaquero. Isabella knelt down and petted Niño, then followed her stepmother into the study. It seemed a lifetime ago to the girl that she had visited her father here in his library. She walked around the desk and sat in the chair, her father’s “throne.” She tucked her legs up under herself and closed her eyes and for a moment could almost feel Don Sebastien’s protecting embrace surround her. A gunshot startled her and shattered her brief reverie. A bullet thudded into the shutter. Josefina ducked out of reflex and then returned fire like a veteran. Her shoulder was bruised from the musket’s recoil but she no longer even winced at the pain. She grabbed the ramrod, swabbed out the barrel, tore open a paper cartridge, poured in the charge, and finally rammed the ball and paper wadding down atop the powder. After fitting an explosive cap upon the nipple, she cocked the hammer and was ready to loose another shot. She awkwardly accomplished the entire procedure without assistance, then, realizing she had an audience, smiled at the girl.

“Can this be your tutor?” Josefina held out the powder-burned, blistered palm of one hand. “Do you remember when I taught you to play the wooden flute?” Now the widow could barely move her fingers, and a trickle of blood could be seen on the side of her neck. Isabella hurried out of the chair and ran to her stepmother’s side. She took Josefina’s hand and kissed the blackened palm.

“Papa would have been proud,” the girl said.

“Of us both,” Josefina said, holding Isabella close to her bosom. Beyond the walls of the hacienda, the world fell ominously quiet. It wouldn’t be long now.

About a quarter of a mile from the hacienda, the Rangers halted to assess the situation. As Ben and Snake-Eye Gandy and the rest of the Texans looked on, the brief exchange of gunfire ceased.

“Looks like we ain’t too late,” Gandy said. “How tall is the wall?”

“We can clear it at a gallop,” Ben said. “That is, if an old fart like you can stay in the saddle.”