Border Snakes Page 16

  Reno told Ironside to do something physically impossible to himself. Ironside ground his teeth.

  “I’m gonna make him promise to walk the straight and narrow from now on,” Hawk said, squinting westward at the low-hanging sun. “If I find he hasn’t lived up to his word, I’ll hunt him down. I’ll know where to find him. Men like the Kid leave a plain trail no matter how light they ride. And when I find him, I’ll kill him.”

  “I give you my word,” Reno said from the wagon box, his voice vibrating with the wagon’s violent jarring. “Matter of fact, soon as you turn me loose, I’m gonna hunt me up a monastery and become a priest. No, not a priest. A monk! That’s what I’m gonna be. Cool my heels in church till the end of my days.

  “Say, I heard there’s a monastery down by Tucson. Go ahead and cut me loose, and I’ll hop on that horse you were kind enough to provide, and head on over there and introduce myself. A lost and weary lamb needin’ shelter from the cold. . . .”

  Ironside told the Kid to do something impossible to himself.

  The Kid pitched his voice with feigned sadness. “Now, that ain’t no way to talk to a man who’s done vowed to give up his evil ways. Come on, Hawk—whaddaya say?”

  “Shut up, Kid,” Hawk and Ironside said at the same time.

  After a moment, Ironside said, “Hey, Hawk. Look at that.”

  Hawk glanced over his shoulder. The sergeant was staring ahead and right of the sandy wash they were following through the canyon.

  The right canyon was falling back as the defile spilled onto an open plain, and a quarter mile northwest a low, sand-colored bluff rose, fringed with black rock. From the other side of the bluff, tan dust climbed into the air, sifting upward toward the slowly darkening sky where the sun painted it pink.

  Hawk looked around. To the left another wash opened, offering good cover. “Pull in there,” he told Ironside, keeping his voice down. “I’ll check it out.”

  He rode up out of the canyon and, a half hour later, came back to where Ironside had stopped the wagon, the grulla blowing and tossing its head after the fast ride.

  “Arizona Rangers,” Hawk said, swinging down from the saddle. “Three of ’em. Probably out on routine patrol, but we’d best hole up here for the night. I don’t want to have to explain this wagon filled with stolen rifles and a Gatling gun. And Reno.”

  Ironside was sitting in the shade by the wagon’s right front wheel. Kid Reno sat with his back against the other wheel, braided rawhide binding his wrists and ankles.

  The sergeant doffed his blue forage hat and ran his finger around the sweatband. “Might not be a bad idea—flashing your badge and asking for a little help.”

  The sergeant had a point. But Hawk’s mission was to kill Knife-Hand, not take him prisoner. Rangers wouldn’t agree to cold-blooded murder. He didn’t have to explain that to the sergeant, however. The guns offered enough of their own kind of trouble.

  “They’d likely think we were gunrunners,” Hawk said, leading his horse toward the shade of an arched dike. “They’d have us shackled and headed toward Yuma by sunup tomorrow.”

  “Hawk’s right,” Reno told the sergeant, smiling. “They’d probably just mistake us for gunrunners.”

  Hawk glanced back at Ironside, who sat staring after him, skeptically squinting one eye and snarling, “Shut up, Reno.”

  21.

  VISITORS

  HAWK, Ironside, and Kid Reno were sitting around a s mall coffee fire long after good dark, under a sequined black parasol of shimmering stars, when a dull voice called out of the night, “Halloo, the fire. Arizona Rangers. We’re ridin’ in.”

  Hawk had flinched at the man’s first words, but he kept his hand away from his guns. He looked over at Ironside, who had started reaching for his Winchester but had stayed the move when the caller had identified himself. To the sergeant’s right, Kid Reno said, “Shit,” over the rim of the coffee cup he held to his mouth in his tied hands.

  “We’re freighters,” Hawk said softly to Ironside as both men stared into the darkness beyond the fire. “Heading from Las Vegas to Yuma. Mining supplies.”

  “What if they look in the wagon?” Ironside said as the thud of slow-moving hooves sounded from the direction of the main canyon.

  “Yeah, what if they look in the wagon?” Reno echoed, his voice taut.

  Hawk glanced at the Kid’s tied wrists and ankles. “Hide those bindings,” he whispered.

  The Kid set his cup down awkwardly, then leaned forward to draw his soogan blanket across his ankles. He picked up his cup again quickly, raising it to his chin, using it to cover the ties connecting his wrists. Hawk’s innards jelled when his mind flitted across the possibility of the rangers recognizing the gunrunner. Kid Reno was notorious throughout the Southwest.

  He hoped these men didn’t recognize him, however. Hawk didn’t want to have to choose between killing lawmen doing their jobs and fulfilling his mission to kill Knife-Hand Monjosa.

  Shadows moved at the far edge of the firelight. One of the horses tied back with the wagon gave an inquiring whinny. A horse of one of the rangers responded in kind. A man’s reprimanding voice hushed the beast, and there was the squawk of tack and ring of spurs as men dismounted, and then two walked forward while the third held the horses—mustached men with high-crowned hats and batwing chaps, one with his thumbs hooked behind his cartridge belts with an air of feigned casualness. They both wore badges, and two pistols apiece, one about five years older than the other.

  The older gent, who wore a pinto vest over a collarless pinstriped shirt, and whose face was nearly as sun-blackened as Hawk’s coffeepot, spoke first. “Howdy.”

  Hawk nodded. “Got about a half pot of coffee here, fellas. Help yourselves.”

  The older ranger shook his head while the younger, surly-looking one stood sullenly regarding Hawk and his cohorts with quick flicks of his large, brown eyes. “We’re gonna keep movin’, ride another hour or so. I’m Ranger Bogarth. This is Dave Walters. Ted Stanley’s holdin’ our hosses.”

  He waited, eyeing Hawk and the other two men around the fire expectantly.

  “Hall,” Hawk said, touching his thumb to his chest. Tossing his head toward the sergeant and Kid Reno in turns, he said, “This here’s Ironside and that’s Ryle. Any trouble, fellas?”

  Bogarth stared at Ironside, said with a grunt, “Them cavalry blues you’re wearin’, Sergeant?”

  Ironside slid an anxious glance at Hawk, and a small tack of anger slid between Hawk’s ribs. The sergeant was a career soldier, and lying to men of authority didn’t come easy to him. Hawk couldn’t blame him, but he sure wished the man had a little of the thespian in him.

  Ironside chuckled woodenly, showing his teeth through his red beard. “Just got out. Ain’t even had time to buy me new duds. Reckon it’ll take me a while to get used to anything but this clown outfit.”

  Bogarth raked his eyes across Kid Reno, giving the gunrunner special study before sliding his gaze back to Ironside and Hawk, and saying in his low, gravelly voice that complemented his wind-beaten, sun-cured face, “What you fellas doin’ this far out on the devil’s dance floor?”

  “Freight haulin’.” Hawk sipped his coffee. “Got us a load we’re trailin’ down from Mesquite for Yuma. Mining supplies, mostly. Dry goods.”

  The younger Ranger said with a faintly challenging air, “Mind if we take a look?”

  “Sure,” Hawk said, not missing a beat and starting to push himself to his feet. “Come on back. I’ll open—”

  “That’s all right,” Bogarth said, instantly easing the nip of that tack between Hawk’s ribs. “You fellas don’t look like gunrunners to me. It’s Apaches we’re chasin’, anyways. A dozen or so burned out a couple of prospectors just north of here, and a freighter workin’ his way down from Utah was spitted over a low fire on his own wagon wheel. Burned good and slow.”

  Reno whistled and shook his head.

  Ironside also shook his head and sipped his coffee, sliding
his deferring gaze to Hawk.

  “That’s Apaches for you,” Hawk said, settling back down on the ground and resting his arms on his knees. “We ran into a party east of here about twenty-five miles. Tried stealin’ our wagon. We fought ’em off, but it was close there for a while.”

  Bogarth said, “East, you say?”

  Hawk nodded. “We saw half a dozen or so.”

  “They were likely part of the cavvy that killed the Utah freighter. Probably split up when they winded us. I reckon we’ll get after the others.” The older ranger glanced at Walters, who continued to eye Hawk, Ironside, and Kid Reno as though there were something on his mind but he wasn’t sure that now was the time or the place to express it.

  “Well, I reckon we best get movin’, Dave. Catch up to our other men at the cabin, and shove off again at first light.”

  Bogarth pinched his hat brim to Hawk’s party, touched Walters’s shoulder, and headed back toward the third ranger holding the horses. Walters continued glaring at Hawk, until Hawk felt his trigger finger twitch against the side of his cooling coffee cup. Then Walters gave his chin a slight dip, turned, and tramped away, spurs chinging, chaps flapping against his thighs.

  When the hoof thuds of the retreating rangers had died, Kid Reno gave a slow, relieved sigh and reached for the coffeepot. Ironside wagged his head and turned to Hawk. “What you suppose that was all about?”

  Hawk hiked a shoulder. “Just rangers doin’ their jobs.”

  “That Walters, though—he sure had the evil eye.”

  “Watch Reno,” Hawk said. “I’m gonna go look around.”

  He circled the camp twice, making sure the rangers themselves weren’t circling around to approach the camp from another direction, and more quietly this time. When he neither saw nor heard anything suspicious, he sat down on a low hump of gravelly ground and stared out across the star-shrouded desert.

  He, too, hadn’t liked the look in Ranger Walters’s eye. Could be the man was just colicky. There was no way they could know of Hawk’s intentions, or know what he was really freighting across the desert.

  No way they could know that.

  Yet a cricket of deep consternation skittered around under his shirt.

  “Hawk, tell me somethin’,” Sergeant Ironside said the next afternoon, as he and Hawk both rode in the wagon’s driver’s boot, Hawk letting the grulla trail along with the other two saddle horses.

  “Let’s hear it.”

  As he leaned forward, elbows on his knees, reins hanging slack in his hands, Ironside squinted an eye at the Rogue Lawman. “Was you gonna kill them rangers last night, if they found the rifles and the Gatling gun?”

  Hawk took a drag from his cigarette and let the smoke dribble out through his nostrils.

  “You was, weren’t you?” Ironside prodded. “You woulda shot them lawmen just so’s you could keep using the guns to bait Monjosa.”

  Hawk took another drag from the quirley and blew it out on the hot wind as he turned to the sergeant still squinting at him in mute astonishment. “Let me ask you somethin’, Sergeant. What’s worth more—the lives of three rangers or the lives of all the folks, including soldiers, Monjosa’s likely to kill in the next year if I don’t snuff his candle?”

  Ironside just stared at him.

  A semi-crazed cackle from Kid Reno sounded in the box behind him. Hawk ignored it.

  “Monjosa buried that knife hand of his in the guts of a son of a good friend of mine,” Hawk said. “A good son of a good man. For that, I’m gonna kill him. And no one’s gonna get in my way. No ranger. No soldier. No Apache. No one.”

  Hawk stared hard at the sergeant, but what he saw was “Three-Fingers” Ned Meade’s kill-crazy grin just before he’d spanked Jubal’s horse out from beneath the scared, baffled child, snapping his neck, leaving Hawk alone and bereft and hunting an unattainable justice.

  “Why,” Ironside said slowly, “you’re mad, aren’t you?”

  “If there were a few more madmen out here, Sergeant, maybe there wouldn’t be so many killers like Knife-Hand Monjosa.”

  Again, Kid Reno’s laugh sounded above the wagon’s rattle and squawk.

  Hawk grinned darkly as he added, “Or Kid Reno.”

  Reno clipped his laugh.

  “Just drive, Sergeant,” Hawk said. “That’s all you have to worry about.”

  “No it ain’t,” Ironside growled. “I think I gotta worry about how I’m gonna get outta this little fiasco with my hide intact, after we kill Monjosa, because I got me a creepy-crawly feelin’ that you haven’t given any thought to that at all. Have you?”

  “One bite at a time.”

  The sergeant had just opened his mouth to respond when his eyes focused on something beyond Hawk and widened slightly, sharpening. “Might be time to start worryin’.”

  Hawk followed the sergeant’s gaze to four riders sitting atop a low bluff about a hundred yards from the trail. Hawk couldn’t see much of the men from this distance, but he could see that they were white men and that they were holding rifles.

  There was movement ahead, and Hawk turned to watch three more men ride out from behind a jumble of large boulders and into the trail, turning their mounts to face the wagon. They were only about fifty yards ahead, and Hawk could see the hard, grim expressions on their weathered, bearded faces—the faces of seasoned desert riders.

  These men, too, held rifles across their saddlebows or snugged against their buckskin- or denim-clad thighs, barrels aimed skyward—shiny new Winchesters, their brass receivers glistening in the desert sun.

  “If we got trouble, fellas,” Kid Reno barked from the wagon box, “turn me the hell loose . . . as per our agreement! You ride me into Monjosa’s camp, I’m a dead man.”

  The sergeant squinted his blue eyes into the sunlit trail ahead and bunched his sunburned cheeks fatefully. He kept the wagon moving as he said softly, “Might be a little late for that, Kid.”

  22.

  A HELLUVA SON OF A BITCH TO THROW IN WITH

  HAWK glanced at the red and the black neckerchiefs b uffeting in the hot wind from the brake handle. Knowing the ways of the Southwest, the sergeant had informed Hawk that the colored neckerchiefs were the traditional signal of contraband for sale. Hawk hoped it had been the neckerchiefs that had attracted the obvious trail wolves to him now and that they were part of Knife-Hand’s band.

  It was time to kill Monjosa.

  Sergeant Ironside drew the wagon up to within twenty feet of the three horseback riders and hauled back on the reins with a sharp, “Whoa, there!” When the horses had settled back into their collars, the three riders toed their mounts slowly forward while the four on the bluff stayed where they were—menacing, rifle-wielding silhouettes on horseback.

  “Cut me loose, Hawk,” Reno urged from the wagon box. “Give me a chance.”

  Hawk twisted around to look behind the wagon. Four more riders had come into the trail and were drawing their horses up to within forty yards, riding abreast and about ten yards apart. All held rifles or, in one case, a pistol with at least a ten-inch barrel—probably a Buntline Special. All four of the trailing riders wore charro slacks and jackets and palm-leaf sombreros.

  “Like the sergeant said—it’s too late, Reno,” Hawk rasped toward the open pucker flap. “You follow my lead and keep your mouth shut, you might have a chance.”

  Damn little chance, Hawk thought as the three riders ahead split up to form a semicircle around the front of the wagon. But all the chance the gunrunner deserved.

  The three riders regarded Hawk and Ironside coldly before the one who’d pulled his steeldust Arabian up to Ironside’s side said in a heavy Spanish accent, “What you got, amigos?”

  He was a tall, rangy Mexican whose ears appeared to have been hacked off with a dull knife; only grisly, knotted scars remained under the brim of his high-crowned straw-sombrero. He wore another savage scar across his mouth.

  Ironside was content to let Hawk do the speaking.

&nbs
p; “Guns,” the Rogue Lawman grunted. “Guns and ammo.” He offered a savage smile. “For the right price.”

  “Let me see.”

  “No,” Hawk snarled. “I don’t do business with lackeys. I want to see el capitan.”

  The earless Mexican rose up in his saddle, his leathery face turning crimson with fury as he shouted hoarsely, “No one sees el capitan until I see what’s in the wagon.” He poked his chest with his middle finger and his black eyes sparked at Hawk. “I see under the tarp or we shoot both you filthy gringos and fill the wagon with lead and take what we want!”

  Ironside glanced grimly at Hawk. Hawk returned the glance, then smiled at the earless Mexican, hiking a shoulder. “You wanna see? All right. Come on back and have a look.”

  Hawk climbed down from the wagon, glancing up at the Mexican who’d pulled his horse off the wagon’s right front wheel and was aiming a carbine at Hawk from his shoulder. Hawk opened his hands and held them out away from his guns as he tramped to the wagon’s rear.

  The earless Mex pulled his horse around from the other side and squinted against his own dust as Hawk lowered the tailgate and threw back the pucker flaps. Glancing inside, he saw Kid Reno sitting on one of the rifle boxes to which his tied wrists were tethered by a five-foot length of rope.

  Reno swallowed, looking sheepish and grim. Sweat runneled his dusty cheeks and pasted wisps of unbraided hair to his forehead. The earless Mex rode up and held the pucker flap open with one hand, aiming his rifle with the other and leaning down to stare into the shadowy cavern that smelled like Reno’s sickness. When he saw Kid Reno, his brows furrowed slightly, and he made a face against the stench.

  He glanced at Hawk, then back at Reno, scrutinizing the outlaw as though he couldn’t quite believe his eyes, and then a look of unabashed delight washed over his face as he turned to Hawk again.

  Hawk said, “Look who I found along the trail.”

  No-Ears looked at Reno again, then dropped the canvas flaps and backed his horse away from the tailgate, laughing. “The boss will be most happy to see his long-lost amigo. Ha! Ha! Oh, he will be quite pleased!” He reined his horse around and booted the gelding up the trail, dust wafting heavily in his wake. “Come on, gringos. Let’s get moving!”