Read William W. Johnstone Online
Authors: Savage Texas
William W. Johnstone (9 page)
Most shooters find a horse’s back an unstable platform for shooting, compared to having both feet on solid ground. Not Johnny Cross. Years of riding and raiding with Quantrill made the technique second-nature to him. Gunshots hammered as if they were being ground out by a mill with machinelike precision. The chestnut horse danced a little, just a little, with no effect on the accuracy of Johnny’s shooting.
Twin streams of lead burned down Monty and his gang. Monty was the first to fall, the others dropping in rapid-fire succession. Few of them lived long enough for their guns to clear the holster.
Shots, shouts, shrieks—bodies whirling, flailing, and flopping to the ground. Sudden silence.
Smoke curled from the muzzles of Johnny Cross’s guns. The chestnut pawed the earth, sidling a bit. Johnny holstered one gun, freeing a hand to take up the reins. Luke sat stupefied in the saddle, slack-jawed, and with mouth gaping.
Two of the fallen stirred in the dirt, moaning and groaning. Johnny fired twice. The two stopped thrashing and lay still. Dead still.
It was done. Johnny hadn’t even needed the pair of guns shouldered under his arms. Luke’s mouth opened wider.
“You’re catching flies, hoss,” Johnny said. Luke’s jaws closed with an audible click, only to open them again to exclaim: “Damn, that was fast!”
Johnny shrugged, smiling with his lips.
“I didn’t even have time to shoot,” Luke said. “Damn it, I wanted to get Monty myself!”
“Sorry,” Johnny said, looking sheepish. “Once I start shooting it’s hard to stop. Force of habit, I reckon.”
“Well, what’s done is done,” Luke grudgingly allowed.
Johnny stepped down from his horse, walking it to the corral and hitching it to the top rail of the fence. He went to the campfire, where the savory beef carcass was roasting on a spit. “Smells good,” he said. “Tonight we feast.”
Luke got down off his horse, no easy process for the one-legged veteran. He was aided by the tremendous upper body strength he’d developed after a year of getting around on crutches. Placing both hands on the saddle horn, he lifted himself out of the saddle and got down on the horse’s right-hand side.
He loosed the tree-branch crutch where he’d fastened it to the saddle flap above the scabbard where he’d sheathed the carbine. Wedging the crutch under his left arm, he planted himself firmly on solid ground while hitching the horse to the rail.
Luke limped over to join Johnny at the campfire. The beef carcass was nicely roasted, fat dripping from the seared flesh to fall on the hot embers of mesquite firewood, each droplet vaporizing in a hissing puff of smoke. Luke’s mouth watered.
“It’s chow time,” Johnny said. “If we look hard enough I’m sure we can find a whiskey bottle or ten to wash down the grub.”
“It was all I could do to keep from tripping over the empties,” said Luke. “Loan me your pocket knife.”
Johnny handed it over. Luke went to Monty’s body and sat down on the ground beside it. Luke unfolded the jackknife, opening the blade.
“What’re you fixing to do, Luke?”
“Some dental work.” Luke pried open Monty’s jaws and set to work with the knife. A moment’s labor and he was done. He gripped his prize between thumb and forefinger, holding it up to the firelight: Monty’s gold tooth. Solid gold, too.
“I promised myself I was gonna make a watch fob out of that gold tooth of his. Now all I got to do is get me a watch,” Luke said.
“Mebbe you’ll find one on one of the deaders,” suggested Johnny.
“I’ll look later. Right now I got to get me some food. Only thing I et in the last day and a night and a day was that beef jerky of yours.”
Luke pocketed the gold tooth. He unfolded the knife and put it away. He put his hands flat on the ground and rose to his knees—his left leg had been taken off below the knee. He got the crutch under his left arm, bracing it into the ground at an angle. He straightened out his right leg, pushing up at the same time until he was standing upright.
He went to the campfire.
“Didn’t you say something about coming back home for some peace and quiet?” asked Luke.
“It’s peaceful enough now.”
“Welcome home, Johnny.”
“It’s the kind of homecoming I should have expected—with gunfire,” Johnny Cross said, looking around at the dead bodies sprawled on the ground.
“And you know, Luke, that suits me just fine,” he added.
The ranch house was a wreck, a hollowed-out shell of a ruin. The inside was filled with the rubble of the collapsed timber roof. The structure was probably a haunt for snakes, but Johnny and Luke had no intention of finding out tonight.
Johnny’s bedroll was tied behind his saddle and Monty’s gang had left plenty of blankets behind. Johnny and Luke made up their bedding beside the campfire. The corpses had been dragged off to one side, downwind and out of the way.
Monty’s gang had left behind plenty of whiskey, too, including an unopened case. Johnny and Luke each took a bottle with them as they sacked out on their makeshift beds on the ground near the fire. A stack of firewood, enough to keep the blaze alive throughout the night, was heaped up beside the fire.
After filling their bellies with loads of barbecued beef washed down with red whiskey—a real Texas meal—Johnny and Luke had gone back to the mouth of Wild Horse Gulch to fetch the string of horses from Mace’s Ford. The animals now resided in the corral, adding their numbers to the ten horses penned there by Monty’s group.
Now, Johnny and Luke lay stretched out by the fire, heads propped up on saddles serving for pillows as they smoked Johnny’s long, thin cigars and sipped whiskey. Their guns were right at hand.
A purple-black sky was speckled with stars that glittered like diamond dust. A waxing, bone-white half-moon hung at the zenith. As was the way in early Texas spring, the day had been hot but the night was cool. The campfire warded off the chill. Flames crackled, embers occasionally popping.
Luke puffed on a cigar, thoughtful. “We should’ve searched them bodies. Thieving bunch like this probably got some money laid by,” he said. “Lord knows honest folk ain’t got a pot to piss in nowadays.”
“I’m too full of meat and redeye to move. Tuckered out, too. We’ll search ’em tomorrow—they ain’t going nowhere,” Johnny said.
“Not unless coyotes git ’em and drag ’em away.”
“Fire’ll keep the coyotes off.”
“I dunno, they’s bold rascals,” Luke said. He drank some whiskey. “I feel bad that I didn’t fire a shot tonight. I was about as useful in the showdown as teats on a boar hog.”
“Don’t vex yourself. From the looks of things in Hangtree County, there’s plenty of hombres who need killing,” said Johnny.
“Ain’t that the truth.”
“Maybe we’ll tie into some sooner than you think.”
“How so?”
“You catch how Monty said something about ‘the hideout’? That was right before one of his boys recognized you and things started getting hot.”
Luke sat up. “Now that you mention it, I do recollect him saying something along those lines. I forgot about it till now.”
“They saw us riding out of the gulch, so the hideout must be out there in the Breaks,” Johnny said.
“You could hide an army in there.”
“Mebbe somebody has. We was able to come up so close on Monty’s bunch because they thought we were part of the same outfit, whoever that might be. By the time they knew different, it was too late.”
Luke nodded. “Makes sense.”
“Others from that outfit must be in the habit of riding back and forth between the hideout and here,” Johnny said. “We’d best sleep light in case some come by.”
“Okay by me. I don’t sleep too good anyhow, what with the pain in my stump,” said Luke. “Come sunup we can make tracks for my place, if you’re of a mind to. Stay as long as you like.”
“Much obliged, Luke, but I believe I’ll stick. This old place ain’t much but it’s mine and nobody takes what belongs to Johnny Cross.”
Luke nodded. “Figured you’d say that. If you need somebody to cover your back, count me in.”
Johnny laughed. “And I figured you’d say that.”
“Hell, this peacetime thing ain’t working out too good for me anyway.”
“Glad to have you aboard, partner.”
“Let’s drink on it.”
They clinked whiskey bottles together in a toast and drank. Drank deep. Somewhere in the darkness, a coyote howled.
N
INE
INE
Torture!
Sam Heller lay stretched out across a long wooden table while a raven-haired beauty worked on him with knives and sharp-pointed instruments. A gang of men held him down. He lay spread-eagled on his back, bare from the waist up. The men gripped his limbs, pinning him to the table.
It was a struggle. Sam was big and strong, and even in his weakened condition he was a handful. A couple of times he came close to throwing them all off and breaking loose.
He was drunk, too. The better part of a bottle of tequila had been poured down his throat. It burned in his veins, belly and brain. Frontier anaesthesia.
Sam was already off his head thanks to his wound, feverish and delirious. The treatment he was getting didn’t help any. It was a living nightmare.
He was in a white room: white walls, white ceiling. One white wall held a tall oblong that was a deep-set window opening on a night-black sky. Above were wooden rafter beams, black-brown, dark with age and smoke. A wheel of light hung from the ceiling. A wagon wheel, suspended by a rig of black iron chains. It had been turned into a kind of chandelier by attaching lamps at fixed intervals along the rim.
The men holding Sam down were of Mexican descent, vaqueros. The woman looked Mexican, too.
Standing at the head of the table, leaning over it, looming large, was an ogre. He stood behind Sam’s head, pawlike hands gripping Sam’s shoulders on either side of his neck, pinning them down to the table. His face was upside-down from Sam’s point of view, adding to its grotesqueness and distortion.
The ogre was a fat hulk—hard fat—with shaggy, curly gray hair, dark eyes, and a straggly irongray beard. He was grinning.
The vaquero holding down Sam’s right arm had dark, almond-shaped China eyes in a nutbrown, clean-shaven face. A golden ring pierced his left ear. He looked like a pirate, a Gypsy pirate. A pirate Gypsy.
The ogre, the Gypsy—Sam remembered seeing them riding with the bunch who’d swept down on him on the plains before he’d blacked out.
The other men holding down Sam’s left arm and legs had black hair, brown skin, strong hands. Vaqueros, too, no doubt. They might have been part of the bunch that rode him down, but he had no specific memory of them.
Two women stood at the table, a knife-wielder and a lamp-holder. The knife-wielder had ridden at the head of the vaquero band. No forgetting her!—not even in fever dreams fanned by tequila drunkenness.
Temptress: golden skin, dark liquid-orb eyes, high cheekbones, a hawklike nose and a ripe, red-lipped slash of a mouth. The face of an angel for Satan and a body to match.
She wore a white blouse and tight black pants. Her sleeves were rolled up above her elbows, baring her arms below. The top buttons of her blouse were open, showing a golden V of flesh and a tantalizing glimpse of the soft fullness of the tops of her breasts each time she leaned over Sam to resume work on him.
She held a long, thin, sharp-pointed instrument that looked like something between a stiletto and a silver knitting needle. It glittered and glinted in the lamplight.
She worked the needle point into the puckered bullet-wound in Sam’s left shoulder, digging, probing.
Her face was carefully composed, neutral, showing only intense concentration on her work. Sometimes she leaned in so close that Sam could feel her breath on his face. It was warm, sweetsmelling.
Standing behind and to one side of her was an aged crone: small, shriveled, almost sexless. She was white-haired, her face a nest of wrinkles, with a wide, flat nose and lipless, toothless mouth. Black marble eyes were shiny and alert. A living mummy.
In one hand she held a lamp, a tin candleholder with a thin, round disk of shiny, polished metal behind the candle flame. The disk was a reflector, focusing the candlelight and beaming it in a ray of brightness that shone on Sam’s wound. Despite her appearance of extreme age, her hand remained motionless, holding the lamp in place without twitch or tremor.
Sam Heller had a head full of fire and a body full of pain. The tequila heightened the derangement of his senses. A node of pulsing awareness in some corner of his brain remembered the beauty’s voice murmuring, “It will ease your pain, gringo,” as the tequila was being poured down his throat earlier.
His vision swam; above, the lights on the suspended wagon wheel fixture rushed toward him and receded away from him.
His body was taut, rigid; each muscle, vein and tendon of his powerfully built physique standing out in bold relief. His upper body was marked by old wounds: knife scars, a scattering of raised, clawlike burn streaks, and several nasty-looking dimples in the flesh that were long-healed bulletholes. The planked wooden tabletop was slick with his blood and sweat.
The vaqueros holding Sam down were enjoying the show. It was something different, a break in the routine. It was interesting to watch the gringo suffer and see how much he could take; amusing, too. They were hard men steeped in strength, tenacity, the ability to endure pain; they appreciated those qualities in others. They watched the spectacle avidly, faces intent with cruel relish.
All but the Gypsy. His features were composed, masklike, except for alert, dark eyes; his emotions unreadable.
Sam was determined not to give his tormentors the satisfaction of seeing him suffer or hearing him cry out. His frozen face was a grimace of silent pain, breath hissing through clenched teeth. The hissing increased in volume as the probe went deeper. The point touched a nerve or something.
Sam spasmed, thrashing around on the table. At a few words of command from the beauty, the men holding him down tightened their grip, immobilizing him.
“Ah,” the woman said. She withdrew the probe. Its absence brought Sam blessed relief, a release from his writhings on the white-hot griddle of agony. The respite was short-lived.
The raven-haired woman took up a long, thin needle-nosed instrument resembling an oversized pair of tweezers about twelve inches long. It smelled of the tequila which had been poured on to disinfect it.
The woman rested her free hand on the bare flesh surrounding the wound to steady Sam. She worked the tips of the tweezers into the ugly punctured crater of the bullethole, cold steel burrowing into living flesh.
She dug deep, twisting and probing for what seemed like an eternity. Finding what she was looking for, she battened the gripping jaws around the object and retracted the instrument. Generating a supreme high note of pain as it stretched and mauled tortured nerves.
It popped free from Sam’s flesh, bearing its prize with it. Clutched by twin tips of the tweezerlike instrument was a shapeless lump of lead trailing bloody tendrils of tissue. The woman held it in front of Sam’s face. A number of hammering heartbeats passed before his pain-dulled eyes focused on the object.
“The bullet,
hombre
,” she said.
hombre
,” she said.
Sam’s nod of recognition was almost but not quite imperceptible. In a husky, rasping breath he manged to gasp, “
Gracias
. . .”
Gracias
. . .”
He didn’t hear the metallic chinking sound as the bullet was dropped into a tin cup. He had passed out.
The woman who’d dug the bullet out of Sam straightened up, stretching. The muscles in the back of her neck, shoulders and upper back were stiff from tension. She put her palms at the small of her narrow-waisted back and leaned backward, stretching to work some of the kinks out.
Her name was Lorena Castillo. “You men can take a break but stay where I can find you later. I’ll need you to move the gringo after I’ve finished cleaning the wound and stitching him up,” she said.
The vaqueros grouped around the table nodded, several saying, “
Sí, Señora
.” They went to the door, opening it and filing outside for a stretch and a smoke. They spoke among themselves:
Sí, Señora
.” They went to the door, opening it and filing outside for a stretch and a smoke. They spoke among themselves:
“The gringo took it well, no?”
“For a gringo.”
“Bah, he’s drunk.”
“You get drunk and see if you can stand it.”
“I would like to get drunk,
sí
.”
sí
.”
“The gringo is
duro
, tough.
Muy hombre
.”
duro
, tough.
Muy hombre
.”
“We will see,” said the ogre with shaggy gray hair, breaking his silence to join the conversation. His name was Hector Vasquez, the ramrod of Rancho Grande.
Inside, the withered crone was at Lorena’s side, handing her a square of fresh white linen. Lorena said, “Thank you, Alma.”
“It is nothing, my lady,” said the old one.
Lorena used the linen to blot some of the sweat off her face. They were in a workroom of a storehouse at the Castillo ranch, Rancho Grande. The structure was a thick-walled one-story rectangle, square-edged, flat-roofed, its stone-and-timber walls plastered with stucco and whitewashed.
A polite knocking sounded on the outside of the door through which the vaqueros had exited into the plaza. One of the vaqueros stuck his head inside. “Señora Lorena? Don Eduardo is outside. He wishes a word with you,” he said.
“Tell him that I will be there in a moment, after I have washed up. I would not come to him with blood on my hands,” Lorena said.
“
Sí, Señora
.” The vaquero stuck his head back outside, easing the door shut.
Sí, Señora
.” The vaquero stuck his head back outside, easing the door shut.
“Though bloody hands are nothing new to the
padrone
,” Lorena said when the messenger was gone.
padrone
,” Lorena said when the messenger was gone.
Alma pursed her lips, her only reaction to the comment. She stood next to a side table on whose top sat a washbasin and a pitcher of water. Lorena went to it, stood facing the basin. Alma poured water over her mistress’s hands into the basin. Lorena made brisk handwashing motions. The water filling the washbasin took on a red tinge.
Hands clean, Lorena dried them with a towel handed to her by Alma.
“Clean the gringo’s wound, Alma. I will return presently to finish stitching it up in a moment,” Lorena said.
Alma nodded.
Lorena crossed to the door, opening it, and stepped out into the night. The vaqueros who’d been holding the gringo down stood at the corner of the storehouse, smoking and talking in low voices. They fell silent until Lorena was out of earshot.
She crossed the plaza toward the hacienda of the Rancho Grande, one of the largest and oldest established ranches in Hangtree County, Texas. Or in this part of the state, for that matter.
It occupied many acres of prime grazing land bordered on the north by the foot of the Edwards plateau, the east by Swift Creek, the south by the upper branch of the Liberty River, and the west by a tributary stream that came down from the plateau to join that same upper branch of the Liberty.
This had been Mexican land when first settled by the Castillos a hundred and twenty-five years ago, given to them as a land grant by the king of Spain’s imperial viceroy in Mexico City and registered in the Royal Archives in Madrid. A proud and ancient line, the Castillos.
The plaza was a wide, unpaved circular space ringed by the storehouse, the bunkhouse for the unmarried vaqueros, a mess hall where the men ate, and similar structures. At its center was a fountain and basin.
Dominating the space from the north end was the hacienda, a fortified Spanish Colonial–style mansion housing Don Eduardo Castillo, his family and servants. A two-story building that fronted south, it had a ceramic-tiled peaked roof and a hulking, thick-walled construction that had successfully repeated assaults by Indians, bandits and marauders over the decades. Its imposing white bulk gleamed in the moonlight. It was trimmed with ornate black iron grillwork.
Lorena entered through the high, arched portal of the front double doors, crossing the tiled floor of the entryway and passing under an archway into the Great Hall.
The hall was long, with a lofty ceiling. It was centered by a long banquet table with chairs. On the right-hand side, a long wall was lined with portraits of Castillo forebears and distinguished ancestors. Some of the paintings were several hundred years old and had been brought over from Spain.
The opposite wall was lined by tall, narrow windows that opened on a western view. The windows were each hung with a double set of dark, ironbanded wooden shutters several inches thick, thick enough to stop bullets. The shutters were now open and folded back against tan stucco walls, framing the windows like pairs of dark wings. The walls between the windows were decorated with religious-themed paintings and carved wooden statues of various saints.
At the opposite end of the hall was a stone fireplace big enough for a grown man to step into without bowing his head. It could hold a blaze mighty enough to heat every inch of the spacious room, but tonight only a modest-sized fire was laid there, sufficient to heat that end of the hall. Several thronelike armchairs were grouped around the hearth.
The fireplace was flanked by a pair of suits of antique armor worn by the conquistadors, complete from helmeted head to iron-booted toe. Armatures inside the suits held them upright. On the wall above the top of the fireplace was mounted a crossed pair of spear-bladed lances. The lances bore banners, one the flag of Spain and the other bearing the Castillo coat of arms.
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