The Red Sombrero (2 page)

G
ENERAL
D
ESCARDO
was so fond of his red hat, it was said, that in ten years of banditry and two of the Revolution he had never been seen without it. Although this report has likely been somewhat exaggerated — like that which maintains he even went to bed in it — there is no doubt whatever but that this much discussed headgear had come to be regarded on both sides of the border as a symbol of everything most deplorable and frightening. Mothers hushed their children with it, old men used it to embellish their windies and not even border politics were ever wholly free of its corrosive shadow.

Descardo had a right to be proud of his bonnet. It was his brand and trademark, the main prop of his reputation and no one could have promoted it more assiduously than its wearer. Reno had seen enough in six month’s service with Sierra to feel a definite chill every time the man came near him. The general was not smart but he was — in addition to being an unmitigated bastard — extraordinarily cunning in the pursuit of things which ensnared his interest. It is the concern of a man’s thoughts which most truly reveals his real inward nature and Descardo’s imagination would have put to shame a cougar’s. El Rojo was the name troopers gave to him and this had nothing to do with the color of his hat.

Laguna Guzman, viewed by moonlight, was a vista of exquisite beauty. A fantastic place in an incredible land whose inhabitants expressed a community of interest in almost everything they did, including copulation. Sierra’s army traveled light and a woman who could work a rifle was never looked upon as excess baggage. There were many at Laguna Guzman and no man had to go hungry in that camp.

Reno, more comfortably plastered than he had been in some while, sat propped against a rock close enough to the main blaze to keep the night’s chill off him. At all the roundabout fires Dorados were busily melting golden plunder for the peculiar ornamentation which had caused them to be dubbed The Golden Ones. It was the only means they could find of carrying their paychecks around with them until, like the general’s hat, the habit had become a recognized trademark.

Sierra was some place climbing the Mount of Venus with the latest chiquita to share the pleasure of his name and the cooks were quartering carcasses to provide the morrow’s grubstake. Only Descardo of those entitled to be resting now was off by himself in the blue-black shadows following his bent in the places most likely to provide gratification.

The hour was late. Distance mellowed the fading sound of the guitars and the murmur of jaw wagging which still sporadically rose about camp fires, now burnt down to where little was discernible beyond the red glow of coals. Far out in the moon-dappled darkness a coyote lifted his lonesome voice while the general stalked the post of the sentries.

At the Number 4 stretch Descardo’s prowl was rewarded. No tramp of feet was to be heard, no moving shape was visible. Beneath his bristling mustache the general’s thin lips grinned.

Like a lynx he crept through pear and catclaw, rigid when Number 3 went past, on the hunt again when the man’s shape faded. No sound came out of the gloom from Number 5. “Jesus!” Descardo whispered — “two of them!” and wet his lips in anticipation. Minutes later he was crouched above a shape that tiredly snored. There was a brief glint of metal as the general’s hand appeared to merge with the sleeper. The snoring quit in a convulsive gurgle. Descardo wiped his blade on the soldier’s ragged pants.

• • •

Boca Grande was a settlement of less than thirty families and it was not to be wondered at, Reno decided, that when at last they were able to look down upon its rooftops there was no evidence of life to be anywhere seen. Only two hours past, the sun had dropped behind the rimrocks but the place was as still as though even the crickets had been run off with the livestock which would otherwise have managed to have made itself heard by this time.

The peones had fled and Descardo cursed. The day had been hot and tryingly tedious and all through the long hours the general had sustained himself with looking forward to the sport he invariably got from fools who surrendered. He was a man who liked to see a little blood run and no one yet had gotten blood from a turnip.

Last night, at Laguna Guzman, he’d been reasonably affable. But all this day his irascible temper had been feeding on disappointments when neither Perron nor Reno would rise to his pointed barbs, until now, with this place looming black as a stack of stovelids, he was in a mood to strike his mother.

Reno yawned, rubbed his eyes and took a pull at his bottle — the last he’d fetched with him — indifferent to the scope of the general’s abusive language. It was Reno’s belief that every man had a boiling point; some like Sierra, were able to let off their steam in recurrent orgies of the flesh. But this was denied the general. For Descardo women, as females, simply did not exist.

The general’s first rude jolt of the day had come with the dawn when Sierra had summoned the pair of them before him. Descardo, Tano said, was to accompany Reno and a number of picked troopers on a trip to the Cordray ranch where they would pick up the new repeating rifles their army must have if they were to advance on Agua Prieta with any likelihood of success.

Descardo said gruffly the chore did not require a general. “A child could pick up those rifles — even such a dimwit as this borracho jellybean.” This he said in English, jerking an insulting thumb at Reno. Switching to Spanish he said, “I’ll be needed when you take Palomas. You’ll want news of the Federals and who can pry news out of prisoners like I can? God’s blood! Send the gringo.”

“And who’s to make sure he doesn’t ride off with our money? Those rifles don’t come three for a dollar and Cordray’s ranch is across the Line. You’ll go with him, taking ten of your Dorados, the fiercest fighters you can find. You will lead the attack on Boca Grande, General. Take the four biggest guns. When the town has ceased defiance you will fortify the pass to cover my advance with the infantry. Is this clear?”

A man went only so far with Sierra; and Descardo, seething, jerked his head in a sullen nod.

The Liberator picked at his teeth, eyeing Reno. “Very well,” he said, glancing again at Descardo. “You will then gather such animals as you may require to remove the rifles. Leaving Perron in charge of affairs at Boca Grande you will push on with Reno and your Golden Ones to Cordray’s ranch where you will give him these bags of money, load up the cases and immediately return. Time is of the greatest significance, General. I will be in Las Palomas. Go with God.”

Small wonder the Butcher was boiling; nor had the-day’s many harrassments with this artillery improved his outlook. Humiliated even to be sent on this errand, to be coupled in the chore with this drunken fool of a gringo was a slap in the face vain Descardo bitterly resented. But it was the knowledge of Reno’s favor with Sierra which twisted the screw right into the quick. It tied his hands and near set him crazy. Then all that waiting on the guns! He was a cavalry officer and it laid raw his spirit to be continually chafed with requests from Colonel Perron to have the goodness to rest his horses a little so the men with the guns could bring them up with the column. The terrain was rough, frequently precipitous and rocky; delay after stubborn delay had been occasioned by the weight and unwieldiness of those bastardly cannons and their complement of shot.

Reno, sensing these things, could feel the man’s suffering and, in a moment of impulse, generously held out his bottle.

Descardo struck it from his hand.

Reno with a frantic bleat fell out of his saddle, much too late. He pawed around in the reek with little whimpers of agony while the general loosed his first laugh in twelve hours. “Yai!” he roared, slapping his breeches. He rocked in his saddle like a dark chunk of gelatin, convulsed with derision for the shame of this gringo who could use the best Spanish and reel out strings of words not even Sierra could wholly understand — for the shame of such a one groveling upon the ground like any pelado borracho whelped without his full complement of buttons.

And then the shame hit Descardo, and he shouted. “Get up on your feet — get into the saddle you filth of a whore! Must you cry like a baby? Get out of the dirt! Get up — get up!”

His voice was deep and strong as a bull’s but it made no impression on the gringo at all. The night was dark, but not too dark with the moon coming up through the naked branches for those who were nearest to see him scrabbling in the wet place with his cut and bleeding fingers — not too dark for ears to catch the animal cries that came out of his blubbering, whisker-stubbed lips.

“Mother of God!” With a snarl of disgust Descardo set back his horse with its front feet waving high and black above the American. But at the final instant, in the last split second before those shod hoofs slashed toward earth, he wrenched the stallion’s head around, not daring to complete this calculated savagery. Remembrance was too strong, the remembrance of this fellow’s favor with the Chief. Instead he drove his rowels deep, the black mass of his bunched riders tearing recklessly after him across the rocks of the slope in a whooping howling descent upon the squalid hovels which men called Boca Grande.

Reno’s half wild horse, reins flying, departed with them.

The American scarcely noticed. He was too prostrated with the enormity of his loss to have even a passing interest in things which went on about him. He cowered there, moaning like a new-made widow, completely oblivious to the cracking of rifles. He saw the muzzle lights hurl their flares from the town’s dark doors and glassless windows and as these continued Reno pushed himself up, arrested, watching. Even to him it must have been apparent the general’s men had ridden into an ambush. It must have finally got to him also, as the racket of battle rose to new, fiercer heights, that this was something more than the work of the clods who lived there. Despite their obvious surprise. Descardo’s dorados would have slaughtered mere farmers long before this; agrarians never could have pinned them down as they were pinned down, cut off and immobilized behind their dead and dying horses. This was slaughter; quite as quarterless and deadly as the Butcher himself was wont to manage.

The moon, silvering, climbed higher. Reno, bottle forgotten in what was happening to Descardo, slunk back into the deeper shadows of brush-fringed outcrops, there to squat on his heels, beset by queer notions, appalled by the almost incredible swiftness with which the general’s wild horsemen were being reduced to lifeless bundles of rags. Those Federalista rifles were taking revenge for a lot of things down there and Reno suddenly became aware that had Descardo not smashed his bottle he would himself have been caught in that payoff.

It was a sobering thought and the American shuddered, and became abruptly aware of other, nearer sounds heavily slogging through the clamor of the diminishing tumult below. He twisted his head around, staring like a fool at the black laboring shapes working frantically behind him, men twisting wheels, sweating, panting, cursing as they swung the heavy trails into positions, others anchoring them.

Perron’s guns!

Light and shadow blurred in bewildering patterns as powder-and-shot men sprang to their places and cannoneers twirled the wheels of their spindles. The whole mountaintop rocked as flame and smoke belched from the muzzles of the four fieldpieces. The stench was abominable. For frightening moments the gasping American, knocked flat by the airlash, could neither hear nor see anything. Then, with ears ringing and livid rings like halos dancing before his flickering vision, he got a piece of a look at what had happened below him.

Through dust flung up by targeted adobe, Federalista infantry was scrambling from the hovels in wildest confusion, milling like rounded-up range stock, diving every whichway, clogging alleys, a few of them still firing into writhing clots of grounded dorados, some flinging aside their arms to run faster, a ragged wave of them scuttling for the brush beyond town. One house had collapsed in its entirety; two more had been partially demolished and many had gaping cracks showing in them, made plain by the moonlight. Even as Reno stared, Perron’s guns spoke again; and he remembered the bags lashed behind Descardo’s saddle.

Flat on his belly he wriggled into the comforting blackness of manzanita and mountain laurel. Even though the strength had been shaken right out of him he continued to move, sometimes crawling, sometimes sliding, but dropping always lower, roughly paralleling the course recently taken by Descardo. There were obstacles. Rocks and pear and cholla with detachable joints compounded the hazards of his travel yet he kept doggedly at it, wheezing from the unaccustomed exertion, cursing between these labored gusts of tortured breath as cruel thorns ripped through his clothing. Twice while he was crawling he put a hand down on joints of the cholla cactus and the pain nearly set him crazy till he had worried these loose with a piece of stick and pulled out what needles he could find in the darkness. Once a ricochet almost tore off his hat but he kept going.

He kept going until the nearest part of the street was not more than a short run ahead of him. Across the rubble of collapsed buildings he could see the sprawled shapes in its moon-silvered dust. Spitting flashes of muzzle light still occasionally leaped from the deeper black of a door hole as something twitched in the street but the big guns were silent now and no return fire lanced from the ugly mounds of dead horses.

Having approached as near as he dared for the moment the American squatted in the gloom of a mesquite’s drooping branches, satisfied to catch his breath while he waited for the remaining Federalistas to slip away. He knew what Perron would do. There was no swagger about that one. He had been a small town cobbler before joining Sierra; a humble man who was content to obey orders, leaving glory to the fools who craved it. He’d been sent with the general to hold this town and he would stay where he was until Tano came up with reenforcements and new orders.

For a long fifteen minutes after the last rifle flash Reno emulated Perron and remained where he’d stopped. When he could stand this inaction no longer he crawled out from under the thorny branches and, working forward through the shadows lest some of those snipers had not yet departed, came to the edge of that silent street, scanning those still shapes closely.