Deadfall (23 page)

“No, Mr. Charley Sunday,” said an unfamiliar voice. “Your grandson is still crawling around out there in the tumbleweeds trying to find me. But I decided I'd find you first.”

The man slowly cocked his rifle, raising, then aiming it directly at Charley.

“What's your gripe with me, mister?” Charley wanted to know.

“It doesn't really matter, Sunday,” said the man. “I'm just one of the many you put behind bars over the years. It didn't matter to you who I was when you killed my brother and wounded me . . . Now I don't care about you, or that kid out there, either.”

His gloved finger made a move to pull the trigger.

The man's chest was a bloody mess; his body dropped to the ground—dead.

Charley swung his still sightless eyes around, hoping to see what had happened. Within moments, Henry Ellis threw his arms around his grandfather and pulled him close.

“Sorry I couldn't give you any warning, Grampa,” the boy said. “But I saw him moving this way, so I followed as quick as I could.

“Do you recognize him, son?” asked Charley. “My eyesight seems to be coming back to me, but everything's still a little blurry.”

“I don't know who he is,” said Henry Ellis. “But he sure knew who you were, Grampa.”

“I'm just happy to have found out that you have the same instincts as I do, son,” said Charley. “It puts me at ease to know that you can handle yourself when I'm not around.”

 

 

Henry Ellis came out of his reverie to find that Don Sebastian was staring at him from his seat at the other end of the table.

“Did you hear anything I said to you, Chico?” he was asking.

Henry Ellis shook his head.

“Sorry, sir. I wasn't paying attention.”

The Don fluffed it off.

“It really doesn't matter, Chico, my son. Just as long as you are here with me.”

 

 

Several hours later, after the boy had gone to his room to sleep, there was a crash of something falling outside on the balcony, followed by the whistling of heavy wind.

Henry Ellis threw back the covers and got out of bed. He put his feet into his slippers while throwing on his robe. He crossed to a balcony door on the other side of the room and opened it.

The wind whipped in through the open, barred door, blowing out both candles the boy had forgotten to douse before he had gone to bed.

Nearby, he could see that a small table and several chairs had been blown over.

He looked out across the
hacienda
courtyard. A thick dust was being raised by the wind; he could barely see the other structures below. There was light coming from the building where the guards drank and played cards. A softer light came through the windows of the guards' barracks across from that building.

Turning, he could see the regular guards at the gate, hovered over a wind-whipped fire they had built on a flat spot near their lean-to on the top of the wall. The wind was gusting with such ferocity, the flames appeared to go out every so often. They would then burst back to life when the wind let up, just enough to give the fire the oxygen it was gasping for.

Several light drops of rain fell onto the boy's head. He looked up. There was a special sparkle in his eyes. He put his hands together—

“Dear Father in heaven,” he began, speaking softly. “Thank You from the bottom of my heart that my mother and father are finally safe . . . and that my grampa Charley is with them. I don't know how I'm going to get out of this mess . . . but like always, I'm sure You'll end up helping me. You've been very good to me, Father . . . Too good. I only ask that You allow me to be with all of my friends again. Also, could I please see my little puppy again, too? I hope he's all right.”

By then the wind had started to blow even harder. Henry Ellis realized he was surrounded by the dust, so he turned and closed the door.

He took off his robe and slippers, then combing his hair with his fingers, he climbed back into bed. He put his head on the pillows and closed his eyes. He listened as the wind howled outside.
Whatever lies ahead
, he thought,
I'm ready for it.
Henry Ellis was eternally grateful that he now knew deep within himself that he would be able to handle any situation that might arise, however dangerous it might be.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-SIX

Roscoe awoke to the sun trying to break through the clouds.

Charley, who was sleeping a few feet away, turned to his friend and said, “I think I'll sleep in a few more minutes, Roscoe. Think you can handle it without me for that long?”

“You wanna' sleep in, C.A.,” said Roscoe, “you go right on ahead an' sleep in. If anyone deserves to, you do.”

By the time Roscoe had breakfast going, he'd been joined by Elisabeth and Kelly. The women chipped right in and started opening several cans of beans and cutting some lengths of jerky, so when the others began to wake up, everyone would have smelled the delicious aroma of hot coffee drifting on the calm morning air.

“Looks like we had a little windstorm last night,” said Charley as he joined the others by the campfire.

“I heard it,” said Roscoe. “It sure felt good bein' inside my bedroll, thank the Lord. Hey, C.A., I thought you were sleepin' in today.”

“I heard it, too,” said Elisabeth. “But like Kelly, I was just too tired to take a look.”

“The wind stopped about an hour before sunup,” said Kelly, who was preparing to dish out some beans from a wooden bowl they had found at the adobe building days earlier.

“Smells real good,” said Rod as he joined the group.

“Better'n the coffee my old granny used ta make.”

It was Holliday, who had just finished pulling on his boots.

Pennell and Sergeant Stone, who had been guarding not only the camp but the sergeant's three boxes as well, both moved in from opposite sides of the camp. Their mussed-up hair sticking out from under their hats, plus their dusty clothing, showed they had been out in the windstorm during the night, and now they stopped and stood by the rear end of the chuckwagon, staring at the cook's fly where the food was being prepared.

“I'm so hungry I could eat a horse,” said the sergeant.

“I sure hope it ain't horse that yer' servin', Roscoe,” added Pennell as he watched a still dozing Feather, who appeared to be asleep, walking toward the smells of breakfast.

Rod was at the older man's side.

“I caught ol' Feather here sleep-walking, just like he's doing now, last night when I took the second watch,” said Rod. “Instead of carrying the little squirt back to his bedroll, I decided to keep him with me until morning. Unfortunately, I thought he'd be awake by now.”

Rod set the still sleeping Feather on someone's bedroll, then walked away.

“All right, you yahoos,” said Roscoe, “. . . get a move on, yer breakfast is on the table.”

Everyone quickly made up a line, then they began moving past Roscoe and the two women, who served every last one of them. Feather had fallen in at line's end, just in time to get the cooled off dregs from the coffeepot, plus cold beans and jerky.

While everyone was eating, Pennell made a proposal to Charley.

“If you think we could use a few more men,” he said, “I'll ride back to that Black-Seminole camp and ask 'em if they might be up ta givin' us a hand.”

“If you really want to do that,” said Charley, “you had better take Miss Elisabeth along with you.”

“I understand,” said Pennell, nodding. “That's fine with me.”

Elisabeth agreed to accompany Pennell back to the Indian camp. She was delighted she would again be able to see the friends who had rescued her from that creeping desert thirst and eventual starvation, which would have only led to her death.

Within minutes, Mitch Pennell and Elisabeth Rogers were riding away, hoping to reach the Seminole camp before nightfall. To do so, they would be riding hard most of the day.

In the meantime, Charley decided the outfit should remain right where they were, even though Holliday and Feather were raring for a fight.

Across the way, Kelly was playing with the puppy. Sergeant Stone and Rod watched from a distance.

“It's nice to know that I was right when I identified that one toolbox of yours as containing an automatic weapon,” said Rod.

“You seem to know quite a bit about them, but have you ever fired one, Mr. Lightfoot?” asked the sergeant.

“Only once,” said Rod, “during our Rough Rider training. We never had the chance to lay our hands on any during the Cuban skirmishes. But there were others who cleared a path for us several times using those Colt-Brownings. Even though most of us never got the chance to fire one during battle, we were all prepared to use one.”

“Well, you were only wrong about one thing when you guessed at what was in the toolbox,” said Sergeant Stone. “I have two of those Colt-Brownings in that box, not one. I was hoping you might manage one of them yourself, if you had to. That is,
if
Charley ever gets around to letting us use them.”

“I would be more than happy for you to give me even more lessons in how to operate the weapon,” said Rod.

“I will take you away from camp this afternoon, if it's all right with Charley,” said the sergeant. “Once we're far enough away, I will reacquaint you in the use of the M1895 Colt-Browning machine gun.”

“More than likely, we won't have to go that far,” said Rod. I can tell you for sure that Charley won't allow us to use any live ammunition, since we're so close to the
hacienda
.”

 

 

“Did I ever tell ya about the time me, Charley, and Roscoe got ourselves involved in a Texas family dispute?”

Feather was talking to Holliday, Fuerte, and Rod, who sat across from the little cowboy, waiting for the baloney to unravel.

“Well, sir,” Feather went on, “it happened in the late 1870s or '80s when the three of us was rangerin' together. We'd been assigned to ride down into the Big Bend wild country and check on an incident that had taken place down there a week or two before. We was sent down there ta help out the Ranger that was permanently stationed in the Big Bend at that time.

“Ya see, there had been a robbery at the general store at the Hot Springs . . . you know, those old natural hot water baths on the American side of the Rio Grande River there . . . kinda due east from the Study Butte mines on the other side of the Chisos Mountains? Takes about four hours or so by horseback ta get there. It's on the upward swing of the Rio. There's a little Mexican village across the river from it . . . Charley,” he said, “do you remember the name of that little Mexican village?”

“
Boquillas
,” said Charley, who had just joined the others.

Some of his listeners had heard of it, and they nodded their heads so Feather would go on with his story.

“Well . . . me, Charley, an' Roscoe was sent down there because the three of us had such a good record when it come ta trackin' bank robbers.”

“Tell 'em where they put us up while we were there, Feather,” said Charley, who had just seated himself.

“Well, uh,” said Feather, “well, they put us up in this old one-story hotel, they called it, built out a' rocks and stones . . . same kinda natural materials the general store was built out of.

“Nice thing about it was, they let us have our own rooms. Even though it was the season down there fer those that took the waters fer health reasons, there was still enough rooms left for the three of us ta stay there, too, with each of us in his own private room.”

“Tell 'em what them rooms was like inside, why don't you, Feather?” said Roscoe.

Feather shrugged; he hunched his right shoulder.

“Well, them rooms was more like a Huntsville Prison cell than a hotel room. All they was furnished with was one wood an' rope cot. Ya had ta look around outside for weeds and palm leaves to make a mattress fer yerself. Then, on top of that, you had ta use yer own bedroll ta cover up with. Plus, the one outhouse they had favored the general store more'n the sleepin' rooms . . . an' it was one heck of a walk gettin' to the privy at night . . . if you could even find it. An' it was uphill all the way.”

“So what about the robbery?” asked Holliday. “Did you ever catch the thief what done it?”

“Darn right we caught who done it . . . but let me go on with my story if you wanna hear how it happened, in the order it happened,” said Feather.

He continued.

“The Ranger down there, his name was Quisenberry if I remember correctly, plus a man everyone called Little Sammy No-Thumbs, that run the general store an' livery next door to it, gave us some pretty good ideas about who mighta committed the robbery. Well, thank the Lord they were all names of local folks living in the area, or I don't know what we woulda done.”

“Why did they call him Sammy No-Thumbs, Feather?” Holliday wanted to know.

“Oh,” said Feather, “Sammy told us he had been a roper most of his life. One time when he was a kid, he took a dally around his saddle horn just after his loop had caught the horns of a big ol' bull. He had somehow put his hand on the saddle horn before he made his dally and when the slack in the rope jerked itself tight, off popped Sammy's left thumb. Ya see, he had dallied over his thumb and didn't realize he'd done it until it was too late.”

“What about his other thumb, Feather,” asked someone else. “You said they called him Sammy No-Thumbs . . . that sounds like two ta me.”

“Well, ya see,” said Feather, “after ol' Sammy lost his left thumb, he had ta teach himself to rope left-handed. Wasn't that long after he lost his left thumb that he done the same, exact thing to his right.”

“Popped right off like the other one, did it?” said Holliday.

“Like a champagne cork on New Year's Eve,” said Feather with a sigh.

Rod got the conversation back on track.

“Since you had a list of names of the potential robbers to go by,” he said, “it sounds like all you had to do was find out where the robber lived, then go and arrest him. It was that easy, right?”

“Not quite,” answered Feather. “Ya see, they give us several names . . . but no one has addresses down there in the Bend, at least not back then, just post office boxes in the Terlingua general store. Dang near everyone worked at either the Study Butte or the Mercury mines around that area, ya know . . . so they all picked up their mail at the mining company's store there.”

“So you didn't have it so easy after all,” said Holliday.

Feather answered, “Gosh no, Holliday, we didn't. We checked on them post office boxes in Terlingua, and asked about some men who worked for the mining companies. But no one could give us directions to where any one of them fellers was livin'. We finally went back ta the Hot Springs and that Little Sammy feller told us that the local ranger, Quisenberry, had questioned some of the witnesses again and narrowed our suspects down ta three people . . . and all three just happened to be down at the hot springs right then takin' the water at that particular time.”

Roscoe cut in.

“Tell 'em about what I done to help capture them
hombres
, why don't ya, Feather?” he said. “Tell 'em.”

“It was Roscoe's idea that he go on down to the hot water baths ahead of me an' Charley and to play like he was one of them bathers. Then he got inta the water with them robber fellers,” said Feather.

“An' I done just that,” said Roscoe with a big grin.

“But you wasn't grinnin' back then, when one of them robbers recognized that you was a law dog and he drawed down on ya when you was just about ta step inta that hot water wearin' nothin' but yer long johns. You gotta admit, Roscoe, you sure weren't expecting that, now were ya?”

“No, sir, I wasn't,” said Roscoe. “But when you an' C.A. stepped out a' the bushes and ordered those men to drop their weapons, I didn't expect that they'd shoot back at us, either.”

“I dropped one of 'em with a bullet to the wrist,” said Feather. “. . . Then Charley . . . he wounded the other two before they knew what was going on. I had ta pull the three of 'em out a' that hot bath because the water was turnin' red from their blood, an' some of the other folks sittin' in the springs on that day was throwin' up all over the place because of that blood in the water. Anyway,” he added, “that's how we captured them Hot Springs robbers.”

“We got a re-ward, too, plus our pictures in the paper,” said Roscoe.

“Tell them what paper we got our pictures in, why don't you, Feather?” said Charley.

“It was the
Terlingua Star
, a monthly paper they put out fer the locals down there,” said Feather. “Wasn't much—but I still got my copy saved away.”

 

 

Henry Ellis and Don Sebastian were horseback, waiting inside the walls of the
hacienda
for the guards to open the gates. After they'd been allowed through, and the gates were closed behind them, Don Sebastian spurred out into a run while the boy did his best to keep up.

The two of them eventually slowed, then walked their horses as they rode away from the
hacienda
and into the vast farmlands and cattle holdings belonging to the Don.

Wherever they went, there were guards—in the fields, near the grazing cattle, and even on the one street that stretched between the small dwellings used to house the
hacienda
's workers.

It was in front of one of these small adobes that the Don dismounted. Then he nodded for the boy to dismount and follow him.

They stepped up onto a porch, knocking at the door. Within moments, the door was answered by a young Mexican girl around Henry Ellis's age.