The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume 2 (34 page)

Wiping a glass, he added, “When Foss has had a couple, he gets mean. Worst of it is, Bugs Tatum is in town. He declares he'll have your scalp and Pettibone's, too.”

The door pushed open and Josh Pettibone walked in. “Bowdrie, I ain't had a chance to thank you, but Tatum an' Deal are huntin' you, and I've come to stand with you.”

“You go to your youngsters and stay there. Foss Deal wouldn't be above killin' your kids to get even. This is my show, and I can handle it alone.”

The town's one street had suddenly become empty. He knew western towns well enough to realize the word was out. He knew also that more depended upon this than the mere matter of handling two malcontents. Bugs Tatum and Deal were big cogs in the wheel of Nero Tatum's control over this corner of Texas, something the Rangers had long contemplated breaking up.

If he, Bowdrie, should be killed now, what had happened might die with him. Tatum had friends in important places and knew how to wield power, and Bowdrie was essential as a witness, despite whatever reports he had filed.

Bowdrie had lived long enough to know that killing was rarely a good thing, but in this town and this area, guns were the last court of appeal. He had appeared here in the name of Texas; now he had to make his final arrests.

He knew the manner of men they were, and he also knew that not only his life depended upon his skill with a gun, but also those of Josh and his children. The town was waiting to see which would triumph, Texas law or Tatum's law.

He stepped outside and moved quickly into the deeper shadow of the building, looking up and down the street. It was cool and pleasant here, for a little breeze came from between the buildings.

A man whom he did not recognize squatted near the hub of a wheel, his back toward Bowdrie. He was apparently greasing the axle. A door creaked but he did not move. He heard a footfall, then another. The sound seemed to come from the building on his right. As there were no windows on the side toward him, whoever was inside would have to emerge on the street before he could see Bowdrie.

Listening to catch the slightest sound, he saw that the man greasing the axle, if that was what he was doing, had turned his side toward Bowdrie.

A shadow moved in the space between two buildings across the street, and from inside the vacant store building beside him a board creaked. If he had to turn toward a man emerging from the empty store, he would be half-turning his back on the man by the wagon wheel.

The door hinge creaked and Bowdrie moved. Swiftly he ducked back through the batwing doors and ran on cat feet to the back of the saloon and outside. He ran behind the building where he had heard movement and came up on its far side.

As he neared the front, somebody said, “Where'd he go? Where is he?”

Chick stepped from behind the building. “Looking for me, gentlemen?”

The man who had come from the empty building and the one who had come up from between the buildings turned sharply around—Bugs Tatum and Foss Deal.

The situation was completely reversed from the way it had been planned, but as one man they went for their guns. Chick Bowdrie had an instant's advantage, the instant it took them to adjust to the changed situation. His draw was a breath faster, his hands steady, his mind cool.

His right-hand gun bucked, and Bugs Tatum died with his hand clutching a gun he had scarcely gripped. Bowdrie fired at Foss, felt a bullet whip by his face and another kick dust at his feet, fired by the man by the wagon wheel.

Bowdrie fired, and the bullet clipped a spoke of the wheel just over the man's head. The fellow flattened himself into the dust.

Foss Deal had been hit and was staggering, trying to get his gun up. Bowdrie sprang toward him and with a blow from the barrel of his gun sent Deal's gun spinning into the dust.

Bugs Tatum was flat on his face and unmoving. Deal was struggling to rise, but badly hurt. Walking toward him, Bowdrie glanced suddenly toward the man by the wagon. He was on his feet, gun in hand, the gun lifting. A shot came from the direction of the jail and the man by the wagon lifted on his toes, then pitched forward.

The red-haired man who had been guarding the prisoners walked out, rifle in hand.

“Thanks, McKeever,” Bowdrie said.

“You moved too fast for me, Chick. It was almost over before I could get to the door.”

“It was more important you hold the prisoners. I was afraid they'd try to bust them out.”

“You goin' to write the report on this, or shall I?” McKeever asked.

“We'd both better write it up,” Bowdrie said. “We will be in court on this one.”

Josh Pettibone was standing over Deal. “This one will live, I'm afraid, but he won't be eatin' any side meat for a while!”

Dotty was standing in front of the store with her brother, Tom. “Mr. Bowdrie,” she said, “I've got to ask you something. Would you have burned that man's hand off?”

He shrugged. “I don't imagine I would have, Dotty, but I didn't think I'd have to. A man with enough coyote in him to bother a nice girl like you wouldn't have enough sand in him to take it.”

He reloaded his gun. There were things to be done, but all he wanted was to be back on the trail again. He wanted to be out there with the cloud shadows and the miles spread out around him. Folks said there were high mountains out yonder with snow on them, and forests no man had ever seen.

Well, no white man, anyway. The Indians had been everywhere. Someday, when all this sort of thing was over with, maybe he'd ride that way. Maybe even find a place for himself where he could feel the cool winds and look at distance.

Where Buzzards Fly

The Mexican's rifle lay over his horse's body, his pistol near his hand. He had gone out fighting, riddled with bullets. His flat, knife-scarred face was unforgettable, his eyes wide and unafraid, staring up to a brassy sky.

“Well, Zaparo,” Bowdrie said aloud, “it looks like they've washed out your trail.”

His eyes swept the narrow gray gravel-and-sand trail that lay along the bottom of the arroyo, littered now with the bodies of men and horses, all dead.

Fourteen men had gone out fighting, fourteen men killed in what must have been minutes. These had been hard, desperate men and they would not have gone easily. This had been an ambush, of course, carefully planned, perfectly timed.

He who conceived the idea had a mind to reckon with. He was cold, cruel, utterly ruthless. Walking slowly along the line of fallen men, Bowdrie stared bleakly at the litter of bodies scattered along three hundred yards of trail. Above, in slow, patient circles, the buzzards were waiting. They had seen such things before and knew their time would come.

Yesterday, probably in the late afternoon, there had been a moment here of blood-steeped inferno, flashes of gunfire, and the thunder of heavy rifles.

Zaparo had moved fast after his swift raid on the ranches and missions, moving along a preplanned route, but somebody had sold him out. Other men, more bloodthirsty than he, had waited with a welcome of gunfire. It was not a nice thing to see or to contemplate. In the hard world to which Bowdrie had been born and in which he lived, death was an old story, and the possibility of death by violence rode along with every traveler. The death of men in gun battles he could accept, but ambush and murder were another thing. In any event, it was his job.

When he had become a Ranger he had known what lay before him, but this was the worst he had seen. Unless he was failing to read the signs, the betrayer had himself been betrayed. That last man, who hung back behind the others, had left his gun in his holster, and he had been shot in the back at close quarters. Whoever planned this crime had not planned to trust the man who betrayed others. He lay dead along with the rest.

For three hours Bowdrie studied the scene, and he was stumped. There were those who said Bowdrie could trail a snake across a flat rock, but now he could find no evidence.

No cartridge shells remained that could have been left by the attackers, no cigarette butts. All had been gathered up with painstaking care. Every track had been brushed out with mesquite branches. Not one iota of evidence remained, nothing that might lead him to the perpetrators. Yet there is no such thing as a perfect crime. There are only imperfect investigators.

Seated on a flat rock, Chick brooded over the situation.

Obviously the killers had known well in advance, for the site had been well-chosen. There had been, Bowdrie calculated, at least seven men in the ambush party, and those seven must have been among the deadliest marksmen along the border. They had been facing fourteen Mexicans who could and would fight. Hence the seven, if there were that many, had to have been carefully picked. That, he decided, was his first clue.

If he could not trail the killers on the ground, he would trail them with his mind.

Seven dangerous, hard-as-nails men, all ready to kill. To lead them, a man would have to be harder, colder, even more dangerous. He would have to be able to handle the other six, and he would have to enjoy their confidence. Such men were rare.

Scanning in his mind the Rangers' fugitive list, he could find no man that fit. John Wesley Hardin might have been a possibility, but Hardin's killings had never been for profit but were a result of feuds or similar situations. Nor was he a planner such as this man had been.

First he must discover who had been involved. What men had been seen in the country around who might have been involved? He must locate one or two possibilities and track them back through the past few weeks to see if they had come together at any time.

Of course, there was another way.

The betrayer was dead, but his betraying need not be at an end. Mounting his roan, he walked back along the line of battle until he came to the body of the betrayer. Zaparo was no longer important. This man was.

Swinging down, Chick Bowdrie went through the dead man's pockets. Nothing had been taken from him. The man's name was Juan Pirón. It was hand-tooled on his belt. He was short and thick with a ragged scar over an eyebrow, and he had ridden a mouse-colored mustang with one white stocking. Pirón looked like a hard man to get along with.

If Juan Pirón had betrayed Zaparo, he had betrayed him to someone he knew, someone he believed could cope with the bandit chief. At some time in the past few weeks or months they had met, but at sometime in the past few days Pirón must have met the killer boss or one of his men to supply the information as to their route.

There lay a chance. To trail Juan Pirón, check with everyone he had known, to find out where he hung out, what he had been doing.

Mounting his hammerhead roan, Bowdrie let the long-legged horse turn back up the arroyo trail. The roan took his own pace, a shambling, loose-limbed trot, and the miles began to fall behind.

Zaparo's gang had looted two missions and some Mexican ranches of nearly one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in gold and money, most of this altar fixtures from the missions. They had fled across the border to the north, and the Rurales had alerted the Rangers.

The Rangers, as usual, had business of their own, and McNelly detached Bowdrie to see what he could find. What he found was totally unexpected.

It was nearly dusk when Bowdrie rode into the wide ranch yard of Tom Katch's K-Bar. A couple of hands loafed in front of the bunkhouse, and Tom Katch himself, an easygoing man with friendly eyes, was sitting on the veranda. Rangers were always welcome at the K-Bar, and there was always coffee, a meal, and a bed.

“Howdy, Chick!” Katch leaned his massive forearms on the rail as Bowdrie stepped down from the saddle. “What brings you thisaway?”

“Zaparo.”

“He on the rampage again? Somebody ought to round him up with a rope.”

“Somebody has. With a bullet.”

“Dead, is he? What happened?”

Bowdrie dropped into a chair beside Katch and accepted a cup of coffee from a Mexican girl. He dropped his hat on the floor and sipped coffee. Then he put his cup down and explained as briefly as possible, telling only about the ambush, fourteen dead bodies, and the dead horses.

“Clean job,” Bowdrie added. “Not the least hint of a trail.”

“Hey, boys!” Katch called out. “Zaparo's been killed!”

The hands trooped up to the porch. The first one seated himself on the steps, looking toward them. He was a hard-featured, wiry, and whipcord young man. “We ain't met,” he said to Bowdrie. “My name's Ferd Cassidy.”

Katch waved a hand at the others. “Hawkins, Broughten, Werner, and Cadieux. Top hands ever' man of them, Bowdrie, and on this outfit they'd better be.”

Cassidy agreed. “He works the hell out of us. You're lucky to have a job that beats punchin' cows.”

“Well, nobody much cares about a lot of Mexican outlaws,” Hawkins commented. “Who d'you reckon did the killin'?”

Bowdrie shrugged. “No idea who did it. Must be a new outfit. But you're wrong about nobody caring. We care. And an outfit that kills like that might kill anybody. We don't hold with lawbreakers, no matter who they are or who they kill.”

“Some other Mexican outfit could have trailed 'em,” Broughten suggested, “or Apaches.”

Bowdrie nodded. “Could be.” He paused a moment. “Any of you hombres seen a short, stocky Mexican with a scar over one eye?”

Did Hawkins stiffen a little? Or was it imagination? “Can't say I have,” he said, “but I never knowed many Mexicans, anyway.”

“Got a pickup order on him,” Bowdrie lied. “Some shootin' over Concho way. He prob'ly headed east, anyway.”

“Lots of Mexican cowboys workin' this range,” Katch suggested. “Right good hands, some of them.”

         

At daybreak Bowdrie rolled out of his bunk and poured water from a wooden bucket into a basin and bathed his face and hands. He threw out the water and refilled the bucket at the well.

He wiped the dust from his boots and the silver spurs given him long ago by a Mexican he had befriended. He dug a fresh shirt from his pack and donned it, a black-and-white-checked shirt. He wore a black neckerchief and black pants. He checked his Colts, returned each to its holster, and taking up his Winchester, he went outside.

“Better have some breakfast,” Cassidy suggested as he walked past, headed for the corral.

Tom Katch was alone at the table when Bowdrie went inside. Katch was a big man, six-feet-four and weighing a good two hundred and thirty.

“If there's anything we can do, let us know. Cassidy is a good man on a trail and he likes a fight, but all of us are ready to take a hand if we're needed.”

Katch talked while Bowdrie ate, sitting with a cup of coffee over the remains of his breakfast. “That Mexican you spoke of? Did he have a name?”

“We didn't have a name,” Bowdrie said, “just a description. He was a horse thief who got caught and killed a man.” He was making up the story as he went along, not wanting to tip his hand too much. “I can't bother with him now. This ambush is the important thing.”

         

Once he was back on the trail, Bowdrie slowed the roan to a walk. He had little to work with aside from the knowledge that it would require a hard lot of men and the fact that he knew who had betrayed the Zaparo outfit. The loot had been taken away on the pack mules that carried it, and those mules must be somewhere around. He knew they were mules from the hoof-prints at the scene, and he had back-trailed the bandits for a mile or so.

The loot must be hidden for the time, and such a lot of men and mules could not travel far without being seen.

Mentally he shaped a map of the area, bounded on the south by the Rio Grande, and with the arroyo where the ambush occurred as the center. North and west of that arroyo was the range where the K-Bar ran their cattle, and south to the river it was rough, half-desert country where few men ventured. East there was twenty miles of rough country and then the small village of Pasamonte. There was something else. Not over eight miles from the arroyo was the cantina and roadhouse of Pedro Padilla.

The cantina was the favored stopping place for cowhands, wet Mexicans from the Rio Grande crossing, and all manner of wayfarers. Aside from Pasamonte it was the only place a man could buy a drink or a meal.

The cantina was built on the ruins of an old mission, a long, low, rambling building surrounding a stone-paved patio. It utilized two walls and the floor of the ancient building, three sides of which were the cantina, and the fourth was reserved for the Padilla family.

If any news was floating around, Pedro Padilla would have heard it. If any strangers had come into the country, he would know. If mules had passed, he would have seen them. The question was, would he tell a Ranger? Or anybody?

What must Bowdrie find out? Who was the leader of the attackers? Where had they gone from the arroyo? Where had Juan Pirón met with the leader of the ambushers? How had he transmitted the final information as to route, and so on? By what route had the killers arrived at the arroyo?

All could turn on Pirón himself. He was the one link between the bandits and their murderers.

The cantina basked in the hot desert sun. Leaving his horse in the shade of some cottonwoods, Bowdrie entered the spacious, low-raftered room that was the cantina itself. Strings of peppers hung everywhere, and there were two ollas of fresh cold water, each with a gourd dipper. A dozen tables and a bar, a floor of freshly swept flagstones.

Padilla was a paunchy Mexican with a large black mustache and a wary eye, the latter no doubt because he had several attractive daughters. He wore a huge old-fashioned pistol, perhaps for the same reason.

He not only had daughters, Bowdrie perceived, but granddaughters as well, and a wife that would make two of him. Dropping into a chair, Bowdrie ordered a cold beer, suggesting to Padilla that he join him and have one himself.

A desultory conversation began, inhibited somewhat by the Ranger's badge on his vest, a conversation that covered the heat, the lack of rain, the condition of the range and its cattle, as well as the difficulties of conducting a business so far from the law.

“No doubt,” Bowdrie suggested, “many bad men come as well as the good. You are close to the border.”

“
Sí!
They come, they spend money, they go! I know none of them, and do not wish to know!”

One of Padilla's daughters was wiping a table nearby, and Chick watched her.

“Juan Pirón comes here often?” he asked casually, aware that she was listening.

“Pirón?” Padilla shrugged. “I do not know him. He is a vaquero?”

“That, too, maybe.… He is a
bandido,
I think.”

Padilla's daughter had paused an instant at the name. She knew the name, he was sure. More likely that Padilla knew Zaparo.

“It is bad about Zaparo,” he said thoughtfully. He took a swallow of the beer.

Padilla glanced at him, then away. “Zaparo? I have heard of him.”

“
Sí.
It is a bad thing. To be killed is bad, to be ambushed—”

The broom handle hit the floor. Bowdrie's eyes went to the girl. She was staring wide-eyed at him. “Zaparo? He was killed? His men, too?”

“All,” he replied, “all are gone. They never had a chance.”

Padilla was staring, disbelief in his eyes. His daughter dropped to her knees, clasping her apron in her fingers. “Not the young one! Not he of the curly hair! Do not tell me the young one with the smile, the—!”

Bowdrie's memory was good, and no such Mexican had been among the dead. Yet, how could that be? An ambush with one man escaping? The sort of men he had been picturing would never let anyone escape. There was something wrong here, something …