IT WAS BETTER when Sainty was ranting and raving than when he was all clamped-up and bitter-looking the way he’d been since the disaster at the Sister Nina.
So they’d lost some boys and had failed to even get a look at the gold. Was this the end of the world?
The new men just didn’t understand. Slotter and Avis, on the other hand, understood only too well. Hate and revenge. Sainty would have come away from the Sister Nina a happy man even without one piece of gold in his hot little hand, had he left big Savage behind with nine or ten bullets in him.
But Savage had carved them up with that big chunk of artillery, denying Sainty any kind of success and racking up yet another victory which doubtless the whole damned country would know about by this.
Seated upon that boulder with a Durham in his mouth, a flask dangling from his fingers and blood in his eye as he gazed out from their mountain retreat over the mighty rolling acres of Rancho Tejano, Sainty was thinking of murder. He envisioned Savage hanging, drowning, buried alive in a mine cave-in or staked out by savages and hacked to pieces by their little children with big knives.
Yet even the outlaw realized the futility of it all.
He’d had his golden opportunity and botched it. It left a bad taste in his mouth and a cramp in his belly which just wouldn’t go away.
But the head was clear. And it was telling Sainty that with men dead and yet another failure to chalk up against his name, things were getting desperate.
Out of money, four men dead and no immediate prospects.
If that didn’t spell out the looming dissolution of the gang then he couldn’t read sign any longer.
But such was the depth of his mood that he had still failed to come up with a solution when redheaded Slotter came across to where he sat in solitary gloom, to offer a suggestion.
“Mebbe the old ways are the best ways, Sainty?”
“Huh?”
“Mebbe it’s time to go back to what we do best.”
Sainty brightened a little. He loved explosives, derived a huge thrill from watching people, places or things getting splattered all over the horizon, as had been the case with the train. Then he slumped again. “Blow up what?”
“No.” Slotter’s gesture embraced the vast green richness of the range below. “We started off rustlin’, never did nothin’ better to my way of thinkin’. An’ there are more cattle and horses down there than I’ve seen since we left Texas. What do you say?”
Sainty agreed. He was ready to agree with just about any suggestion as he fell prey to the most un-Sainty-like fear that maybe he simply could not execute a successful job any more.
Rustle some primes and run them down to Castillo. Why not?
But Sainty was losing the grip. In the old days of big-scale rustling in Utah and Nevada, he would check out a ranch for days or weeks on end, assessing their strengths and weaknesses. He would plan the whole thing from beginning to end, consider every problems and solve them before actually going into action.
He failed to do this despite the fact that they were eyeing-off one of the largest and most heavily-guarded outfits in the province. And that could be a big mistake.
In doubling his nighthawks in some sectors of the spread, Don Luis was not displaying the gift of clairvoyance, merely responding to circumstances.
Twenty-four hours earlier, a large gang of armed robbers had attempted to plunder the Sister Nina Mine less than twenty miles from Rancho Tejano’s southern borders.
To the Don’s way of thinking, this represented a threat to everyone in the region. He took steps accordingly, even going so far as to order his sulking son to take command of the largest complement of vaqueros whose task it was to night-guard the spread’s finest herd of primes at Carlitos’ Water.
Still suffering from his set-to with Yaqui Joe at the valley, Rodrigo undertook the chore with massive bad grace after a huge argument which was eventually won by the don.
Rodrigo was beginning to hate his father, believing it time the don stepped down and he took over. He had no way of knowing as he set out on the five-mile ride for the herd on dusk that at long last he might be given the opportunity to show everyone, himself and Don Luis included, that he just might be up to the top job after all.
Despite his foul mood and aching body, Rodrigo Vega took pains to deploy his men to best advantage should anything threaten the three hundred head of primes bedded down at Carlitos’ Water.
There was ample cover here comprising thick brush thickets and a curving line of low ridges cupping the graze on two sides, offering concealment to the thirteen heavily-armed vaqueros he’d brought with him.
Staking out but two mounted nighthawks, Vega had the rest of the party concealed, comfortable and alert when alien sounds were picked up by the nighthawks sometime after midnight.
When these sounds were quickly identified as muffled hoofbeats, Rodrigo put his men on full alert and brought in his riders.
The rustlers appeared minutes later, wary and silent but still too eager. The herd was larger and of a much higher quality than anticipated and the excitement of finding such a bunch unguarded was too much for them.
Sainty signaled his men to get around behind the herd on the ridge-side of the graze ground and get ready to haze them into the mountains.
They didn’t make it.
It was like shooting fish in a barrel and within a crimson minute all lay dead but Sainty.
He was racing away on his big brown horse and making for the ridge when stampeding stock veered his way. Shots rang out and his horse fell. Sainty leapt clear but the horse rolled on top of him, squashing him into the spongy earth, threatening to cause his liver to pop out of his howling mouth before the animal stopped rolling.
Sainty was still alive as howling vaqueros came pouring from the ridge to prise him from the earth’s embrace, leaving his spreadeagled impression embedded in the grass.
He looked such a mess that it was some time before they realize who they’d caught. And tall Rodrigo smashed him across the mouth because he felt so good.