Mobley's Law, A Mobley Meadows Novel (3 page)

Watching the riders approach, Mobley adjusted the folding sight on the stock of the rifle to its 200 yard gradient, close to maximum effective range for the new ‘73 Winchester. At such distance, the 44-40 bullet would drop slightly more than two feet. Beyond that, its trajectory would deteriorate so radically only the very best marksman could hope to make a killing shot.

Resting the barrel comfortably on the boulder, he examined his enemies as they loped steadily toward his fort. The chill of impending doom inched up the back of his neck. A bitter metallic taste filled his mouth. Vicious and wild, these men looked as if they had never seen the kindness of a mother. Their clothes were outlandish combinations of weird looking striped pants, breechclouts, and fancy vests. Tall crowned hats bounced hilariously on several heads as they galloped. Some looked white, others dark-Indian or Mexican, he could not tell. Several had bandoliers stretched across partially bare chests. All held shiny new, “Yellow Boy,” model 1866 Winchesters and were exceptionally well mounted.

The horses were unmistakably full-blooded Arabians. The distinctive, graceful and delicate form of the classic small headed black stallion lightly controlled by the leader of the bunch left no doubt. The horse did not just lope. It pranced its way forward, head high, tail cocked, straining at the bit as if it had been trained as a pacer. The other Arabians were of varying colors and shades. Whoever these men were, they were very well equipped. Few breeds could match the stamina of a well conditioned Arabian. Meteor might have had trouble keeping in front. Mobley knew then he’d made the right decision, to fort up.

Mobley began the slow process of concentration, of mental cleansing that would allow him to focus all of his being on the sights of his rifle, the target held in slight blur. He tracked the leader, eye focus shifting subtly now between target and sight.

There was something very strange about these men. They looked mostly Indian, Comanches probably, but the Mexican sombreros on some of them did not make sense. They were hundreds of miles from the nearest Mexican settlements and from what he’d heard, large groups of Mexicans were poorly received this far north.

Wiping sweat from his brow, he allowed his breath to escape slowly. Whoever they were, if they were seriously stupid they would keep riding straight in, hoping to get him with a lucky shot.

Come on, boys. Let’s see what you’ve got in them gourds, brains or prairie chips.

It would take fifteen to twenty seconds at full gallop for the riders to cover the ground between his best range to point blank. In that time, he knew he could accurately fire most of the rifle’s full magazine. If they came straight at him, deflection would be minimal, his fire effective. If not, he was in big trouble.

The riders neither slowed their approach nor spread out. Confident, whooping and hollering, they began to die as Mobley fired carefully and steadily using the boulder as a rest. There was nothing more dangerous; he recalled his grandfather say, than a good shot with a rifle who does not panic. It had been proven during the late Civil War, as studies revealed that in every battle, the most casualties were inflicted by the steady hand of the individual sharpshooter.

Mobley aimed first at those lagging behind, so as not to alert the front riders to the real danger of his rifle until it was too late for them to take evasive action. Two fell hard, blood exploding from naked chests, legs akimbo as they hit the earth, before the leader looked back. He jerked his horse to a sliding stop, then turned and circled away, whacking the black stallion with the barrel of his rifle. The rest began to check rein, but two more fell before they could scatter out of the killing zone.

One of the fallen was mortally wounded but cried out for help as he struggled to get to his feet, blood pouring from the walnut sized hole in his chest. The leader, a pock-faced, dark haired fellow with feathers sprouting from his headband and red paint on his arms and cheeks, was clearly wild with anger. He circled recklessly back to his fallen comrade, casually took aim with a pistol and shot the pleading man through the head.

Bile rose into Mobley’s throat, competing with the massive infusion of adrenaline and its immediate after effect for control of his stomach. As he stared at the furious, murderous leader, Mobley’s mood returned to anger. He could feel his teeth clench, jaw muscles flexing into tight knots. He would not let these rotten vermin win. His blood seemed to burn as his temper flared. He would fight to his last breath.

Rising boldly from behind the protection of his rock, Mobley raised his arm and gave them his best imitation of a lewd Italian street gesture, arm bent and shoving upward
. “HEY, WHAT’S THE MATTER YA ROTTEN PECKERNECKS? YA LOST YOUR TESTICULARS? COME ON BACK, LET’S PLAY SOME MORE.”

Now the riders whooped and screamed. They galloped back and forth firing wildly, waving their arms, yelling at one another until the feather-haired leader managed to restore order. They gathered for a moment, and then two bare-chested Indians rode off in opposite directions along the cliff base. Obviously, they were looking for ways to get above and fire down on him.

“WELL, FOOT!”

Mobley was still blind with anger, but he could feel it fading away, as it usually did. When very angry, his grandmother, who could never have brought herself to use a profanity, created her own vocabulary. “Oh, FOOT!” she would say, and you knew, if you had a brain, to be somewhere else before she came out with a green hickory switch and striped your bottom. Mobley might have said something of a more colorful nature, had he thought hard about it, but he had long ago adopted grandmother Featherheart’s method, rather than be judged a nasty mouthed lout by his more prudish colleagues. Except of course, when someone insulted him or his court, then all pretense of following the rules disappeared.

He dropped back behind the rock to replace the expended cartridges in his rifle. He’d pissed them good, but now they were starting to think. The next attack would be coordinated, with men in front and above. As his mind raced, there was only one thing he could think to do. Reduce the odds even more before they all got into position.

Mobley quickly raised the sight on his rifle to 300 yards. The survivors of the first attack were milling around at about that distance, waving their arms and screaming at one another.

“You boys’d better step back a teensy bit,” he whispered as he once again snugged his cheek tightly against the rifle stock. “It ain’t safe out here.”

Carefully gauging the light breeze out of the southwest, he caressed the sensitive trigger of the brand new rifle, allowing the feel of the weapon and the gentle odors of polished wood and gun oil flow through his senses. Angus Meadows, also an accomplished gunsmith, had delicately filed the sear to reduce the rifle’s trigger pull to slightly less than three pounds. Not so light as to be unsafe, but enough to help an average shooter become a dangerous marksman.

Mobley picked out the largest of the group, focused his attention on the man and the sight, and relaxed as best he could. The key to good shooting was to concentrate on the sight picture without thought as to when the weapon would fire. Just start squeezing and let it happen. Like as not, your target would drop like a stone.

The large man stopped moving laterally long enough for Mobley to settle the sight on the center of his chest. A soft straight back stroke on the trigger, a firm recoil, a comforting,
KA-POCK
. It was a long shot, one easily missed, but this time on target. Dust flew from the rider’s shirt as the bullet impacted his chest and knocked him to the ground. Mobley levered a new round into the chamber and slipped another into the magazine to replace the one fired.

The remaining riders bolted, like chickens scattering from a fox, running for the safety of greater distance. The leader stood in his stirrups yelling, waving wildly for them to come back. Eventually they did. Mobley began to line up on another, but they all started moving erratically. The leader had correctly judged if they kept moving, their chances of being hit were greatly diminished. Mobley elected to hold his fire until a more propitious moment.

He slumped back behind his rock, knees up, the forestock of the rifle resting flush against his sharply straight nose and forehead. Stay calm. Exhaling slowly, he watched his breath turn to mist as it swept past the hot metal of the barrel, then spiral off into nothingness.

Was that to be his fate, to simply disappear on the prairie as if he had never existed? An ephemeral wisp of what once was?

WHACK!
Mobley slapped himself on the forehead with the palm of his hand.
Concentrate!
There had to be a way out. General Grant wouldn’t be thinking of ephemeral wisps of vapor. He’d be preparing to attack. That’s what he’d always done. But Grant had had the advantage of superior numbers. He ground his opposition down until they could fight no more. A grand strategist; but here, now, was a classic tactical situation. Mobley was outnumbered eight to one. The enemy held the high ground, about to attack from two different directions. He had three choices: stay where he was, try to run again, or like Grant,
attack
.

Blast that man anyway, Mobley thought. He’d still be in Tennessee if not for Grant, doing real work for real people who appreciated his sense of justice. On the other hand, who could pass up a lifetime appointment? Even if it did come with a few strings? He was just returning a favor, after all, wasn’t he, not compromising his judicial position? But, somehow, he’d thought a man in Grant’s position could have come up with a better way to do what he needed to do.

Mobley shucked off his buckskin jacket and laid it across the boulder, thinking it might keep the rifle stock from becoming scratched as it recoiled, then wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before.

Once again he sighted down the barrel, then began to chuckle. A surprise attack? Take out as many as he could as they came, then charge them back. Like Chamberlain’s bayonet charge at Gettysburg when he ran out of ammunition. A desperation move. He’d probably not survive, but at least he’d go out in a blaze of glory.

CHAPTER 2

Juan Antonio Lopez was starving. He may have been
number uno
of bandidos, servant of no man, feared by all, but he was on his last legs, barely able to walk. Which was why he was sitting, knees hugged to his chest, eyes staring unfocused at the smoldering buffalo chip.

Everything about Juan was dirty, skinny and ragged. His own self-image, that imaginary thing that kept old men looking at girls and old ladies admiring the tight pants of the vaquero, as if they could do anything about it, no longer matched his true state, and he knew it. His cheeks were sunken. He could feel them. His eyes were so hollow they hurt, even when shading them with his hand. And his blood, that precious thing that must be conserved at all costs, now leaked from his gums almost continuously. Worst of all, in his mind, the beautiful curly dark hair that so many women had adored and could not resist fingering, was now pulled back in a tail under a sombrero crawling with prairie lice.

Staring between his closely held knees, Juan licked his lips and wiped his ragged mustache against the thinning wool fabric of his
pantalones
, the flared leather and wool trousers of a proud vaquero, silver conchos running down the stripe of each side.

The rodent sizzled, sputtered, and popped like gunfire over the smoldering chip. Acrid white smoke swirled about, assaulting Juan’s eyes and stinging his nose. He closed his eyes, but did not turn away. Alone in his pain, Juan languished in a world far, far away. His own world, of his own making.

He was miserable. Not melancholic. A whore in winter without a favorite man, a vaquero lamenting lost love in soulful song; they, were melancholic. Juan was angry and past desperate. Hatred had become his only motivation, staying alive a moment by moment affair.

Chased out of every prairie town he had come upon, uneasily fed and encouraged to leave by fellow Mexicans who saw him a threat to their precarious lives, Juan had struggled on. He was not welcome in Mexico, and a Mexican was tolerated in this part of Texas only so long as he found and stayed in his place. For a Mexican like Juan, who refused subservience and carried his guns in open defiance of bigots and their unwritten law, death waited in each new town. So far, a faster man had not appeared, and Juan had managed to escape the many posses out to avenge the drunken
gringos
who had mistaken him for easy prey. He’d lost count of the number, but not the feeling of anger satisfied as he’d watched them die.

Stroking his bushy, unkempt mustache, Juan sensed a subtle shift in the prairie wind. He opened his eyes and slipped back into reality. The smoke moved away, irritated him no more, but he hated the wind. It never stopped, never left a man alone, at peace with himself. Worse, when it turned humid, as it had for several days, it foretold the coming of towering thunderstorms from which there would be no shelter.

Hurry up, rat
. In the last few days, Juan had been reduced to eating prairie grass, the rodent a windfall. When it was gone, he would have nothing but his anger. He’d considered the despicable and probably final act of shooting and eating his horse, but knew a man stranded on the prairie without a horse could not hope to survive.

Hunched over the fire, smoke drifting back up again and around his destitute sombrero, Juan saw that the scrawny prairie dog was crisp, but found his enthusiasm for the meal waning. His thoughts drifted to the other rat in his life, the great General Santa Anna.
Father
. As his famished mind twisted the memory, the old general was responsible for most of his troubles. His anger toward Santa Anna knew no bounds. He savored it, tasted the bile of it, and took comfort in black thoughts of revenge, of gory murder most foul.

Before the animal’s tiny legs completely burned away, Juan removed the charred creature from the steaming branch and forced himself to eat, carefully nibbling at the stringy meat. It was not mother Smythe’s kidney pie, but better than eating snake, and the Brazos was not far.
I
s
hould be able to catch a possum or raccoon. Anything would be better than eating grass and these damnable prairie dogs.

Kidney pie? Now, there was a thought for a hungry man. He must be the only Mexican in the world with a taste for kidney pie. His thoughts shifted wistfully to visions of his deceased mother, the Lady Madelein Smythe, whom Santa Anna had seduced, betrayed, and ultimately broken.

Juan found himself fondling the Sharps rifle cradled in his arms. The
bandolero
loosely strung across his chest held a mere ten rounds, but in his mind he was ready. Vengeance would come. That, at least, was worth waiting for.

Juan caressed the smooth, well oiled machine. He might be starving, but he’d never failed to care for the rifle. It was family. The rifle had been given him by a dying old bandit who had ridden with him no more than a month before being killed by soldiers. It had changed Juan’s life, turned him into a man of respect. In countless skirmishes along the border, fighting Texas Rangers and troops of the Mexican government, Juan had astonished his compañeros with the accuracy of his fire. He had brought down game at incredible distances, providing food where others had failed.

But now, there was no game to be killed at any distance. Something strange was happening on the prairie. The Buffalo were disappearing, as were the antelope. The stinking
gringos
were devastating the land, stripping it of everything that moved. He hated
gringos
.

Juan scraped the last birdlike leg-bone of meat with his teeth, sucking it out of his mouth with a long popping sound, and tossed the remains onto the fire. He did not realize how bad off he had been or how much he had needed food until the gray fuzz of his peripheral vision began to disappear. His thinking cleared, but the reality of his situation left little to celebrate. Juan considered his chance of survival at little better than fifty-fifty. If his horse could make it. The poor beast was skin and bone. It could not last much longer.

“Well, if you die on me,
caballo
, he said, startling himself and spooking the horse with the first words he’d said aloud for days, “I will eat you for sure. But try to hang on, eh? There will be good grass and plenty of water tomorrow.”

The small stream wandering off in the shallow gulch to his left must empty into the Brazos. All of the land in this area sloped toward a river of some kind. He gathered himself and stood, clothes hanging loose on his whip-thin body. He tightened his gun belt another notch. If he lost any more weight, he’d be unable to keep his pants up.

Gunfire!
Juan stiffened for an instant and ducked.
That was no popping rat
. He’d been hearing it all along, too numb with hunger to track.

Juan’s well developed survival instincts took over. He kicked dirt over the burning buffalo chip, grabbed his bony horse’s rein and ran half stumbling into a shallow watercourse near his camp. He flopped down in the sand, heart pounding in his ears. The firing had come from beyond the gully where it steepened and disappeared from sight. Had he been seen? It didn’t seem so. Whatever was going on was someone else’s trouble.

Rising cautiously to his knees, he whispered, “Maybe we should get out of here,
caballo
. Someone is having a bad day.”

All of Juan’s instincts told him to run, but something else compelled him to investigate. He had always been curious, about men, their motivations, the sky, almost everything. His mother had instilled in him a sense of wonder of life and nature that had served him well over the years. Now, it told him to see what benefit there might be had from this battle.

Juan slithered forward on his belly, brushing salty smelling grass from his path until he reached the lip of a canyon and peered over the edge. The panorama of the Brazos River extended from right to left as far as he could see. A large group of men on horses were scattering toward the river, apparently from the fire of a lone man behind a boulder almost directly below. Clouds of gunsmoke hung over the scene. Several bodies lay on the prairie.

The lone man was a huge, very tall
gringo
, the others looked to be a mixed group of Comanche Indians and ...
Mexicanos?
What were Mexicanos doing way up here? Could they be his old
companeros
? No. They would not dress themselves like that. If nothing else, his friends had pride.
Comancheros?

Half the riders wore cavalry pants, ragged shirts or vests while the others were naked but for breechclouts. Most wore Mexican sombreros. A few displayed feathers on sweatbands or their hats and had painted their faces. Combined, there might be one decent outfit among them. It looked to Juan as if the men had been raiding, helping themselves to anything that would fit, regardless of how stupid it made them look. Stupid looking men, yes. But the horses, they were not stupid looking, especially that black stallion.

Juan fixed his eyes on the horse ridden by the leader of the band. He whistled softly to himself. It was the most beautiful animal he had ever seen. Coal black and shining in the sun like a diamond, the horse held its smallish head cocked high, tail erect, strutting even while standing still.

“
Amigos, you seem to be doing well in this country. Dressed fit to kill. Sitting pretty. Perhaps I will join you, after you kill this gringo. If you can.”

Juan strained to look over the edge of the cliff. He nodded as he took in the scene. His instinct was correct. The
gringo
was no fool. He had chosen his fort well. Water, good cover, grass for his horse, and
food
, if those bulging saddle bags were stocked for travel. He also looked to be very well armed, with a long barreled Winchester rifle in his arms and two white handled pistols stuffed in a wide red cummerbund around his waist, which was itself secured with a military style belt. He also wore a fringed buckskin jacket decorated with what appeared to be Indian beadwork.

Juan noted the dead scattered in front of the man’s fort.
A very good shot
. His assessment of the situation changed. This was a man to respect, a man he might call friend. An equal. Juan knew one good friend or partner was more valuable than twenty hungry bandits. Two men who could shoot well and were prepared to back each other could be formidable even against great odds.

His last real friend had been Ramon Valencia, but they had been separated during a violent battle with Mexican army troops more than two years before. Ramon had not been seen since. Before Ramon, there had been his mother.

SNAP!

Juan whipped his head to the right, then back down on the sand. Someone was coming. He risked a quick look. An Indian crept along the edge of the canyon some twenty feet away. Juan crouched lower into the shallow draw, his face now half buried in the sand. He could not sneak away without being seen and was certain to be discovered soon. In the heat of battle he could expect no mercy from these wild men. If he had more time to approach them carefully, perhaps. The
gringo
, on the other hand, was clearly competent but in need of help. With his back covered, he would likely defeat the rest of these men.

Juan peeked over the edge once more. The Indian was engrossed in obtaining a good position from which to fire down on the
gringo
. The man had but to look behind him to see Juan’s exhausted horse, head held low as it stood spraddle legged in the dry watercourse. Juan’s mind raced with the pounding in his chest.
Decision time.
But still Juan waited. Perhaps this Indian would end the battle with one shot, in which case Juan should permit him to do so.

The Indian cautiously rose, sneaked a peek, and then popped up to snap a shot over the cliff. He was rebuffed by a barrage of rifle fire from below.

As the Indian rose to fire again, Juan decided. There was no real choice. “
Amigo
. Turn around,
por favor.
I do not wish to shoot you in the back.”

The Indian whirled, eyes wide, searching, trying to bring his weapon around, but Juan’s heavy barreled Sharps crashed out its message of death. The 50 caliber bullet struck the hapless Comanche full in the chest. He was propelled several feet backward and fell screaming over the edge of the cliff.

Juan automatically knelt to perform the sign of the cross. A bullet whined past his ear.
Another
Comanche stood across the canyon seventy-five yards away, firing rapid but poorly aimed shots at him with a lever action repeater.

Juan dove back to the safety of the small arroyo, reloaded his Sharps, and with one quick look for range and direction, rose and fired. The Indian’s face exploded.

Juan flopped down to catch his breath.
Miserable shooting. Aim for the belly and hit the face. This is going to get you killed someday, Juan.

A few seconds later, heart pounding, he scrambled to the edge of the canyon and looked out onto the spread of the river plain below. The remaining riders started their final charge. They apparently believed the firing above had come from their companions. They rode forward from several different directions, screaming, yelling, whooping like maniacs.

Juan settled his sight on the man farthest to his right and fired. The man fell hard from his horse, tried to get up, lay still. Juan fired again, another down. The rest fell to the fire of the gringo, all but two; the leader riding the black stallion and one other whose horse had fallen in front of the
gringo
.