THERE WAS A SAYING old Sees-The-Fox had once told him when he was still a boy, scarcely blooded, with only two raids to his credit and a single stolen pony to his name.
A bunch of Comanche had mounted a daring raid on a rancheria deep into New Mexico. Run off close on twenty head of Chiricahua ponies and killed six warriors. The survivors had asked Azul’s rancheria for help, and a band of twenty men went off in pursuit. They caught up with the Comanche after five days of hard riding, and ran the horse-thieves into a dry wash. The Comanche forted up. It was unusual, for they would normally choose to fight in the open, relying on their superb horsemanship to fend off their attackers. There were only fifteen of the Texas Indians, but all of them possessed rifles; mostly single shot Henrys, though-at least three had the new lever-action carbine introduced by Henry in 1860.
The Chiricahua were armed mostly with bows and a few handguns; two owned rifles.
Sees-The-Fox, who was leading the party, decided that a frontal attack would be suicide and told his warriors to spread out and wait. At first, Azul found it difficult to understand why. But then—after two days of watching the Comanche—it became obvious. The thieves began to run out of bullets and water in equal measure.
When they were totally devoid of water and beginning to replace their rifles with arrows, Sees-The-Fox ordered an attack.
‘Sometimes it does not pay to rush in headlong,’ he explained, ‘because your enemy will kill you. But if you can wait and judge your time, then you can whittle him down like a stick under the knife. Patience is a virtue; and so is the choosing of the right moment to strike.’
The Chiricahua had gone in quietly, in groups of two or three. They picked off the Comanche riders one by one, until only seven were left. Those seven came out at a full gallop with their empty rifles slung on their saddles and bows and lances in their hands. The Apache killed them to a man.
The advice still made sense: Azul decided to move against Fogarty.
He timed his arrival so as to reach Comstock soon after midnight.
The town was quiet, the streets mostly empty and only a couple of saloons still open. He checked the street running through the center, then left his horse out by the stockyards and moved in on foot.
He headed for the sheriff’s office.
There was a light showing inside, though thick drapes had been pulled over the windows. Azul listened for a moment at the door, then ducked into the alley running down the side of the wooden building and the brick jail behind. Between the jail and the office there was a connecting walkway, roofed over and stepped at the front end to lift up the main building. The steps were wood, and old. They creaked as he climbed them and someone inside the jail shouted for water. Azul swung into the shadows, huddling against the wall of the office until the shouting stopped. There was no sound of movement inside.
The door was made up of planks with a series of zigzag cross-members holding them in place. The hinges were on the far side, and the hole of an ancient lock showed on the outside.
Azul drew his Bowie knife.
The blade fitted easily between the ill-fitting door and the upright, the tip jamming against the lock. He turned the knife, gouging into the woodwork of the door so that a shallow indentation got scooped out. Just deep enough to angle the blade round into the socket. Holding the knife with his left hand, he slammed the heel of his right palm against the hilt.
The door flew open.
He caught it before it struck the wall, moving inside with the Bowie transferred to his right hand.
There was a room with a single window too dirty to let in much light. The sound of creaking springs hid his footsteps as he paced over the dusty floorboards, squinting as he tried to see through the darkness. There was a door set into the opposite wall, with light coming under the frame, and a bed against the right-hand wall. The creaking springs came from there: a man was asleep, stretched out on a bunk with a dirty blanket tugged over him.
Azul cat-footed across the room, leaning over to study the sleeper’s face. It wasn’t Mengers.
He sheathed the knife and reached down to grasp the deputy’s neck. The man stirred irritably as the half-breed’s fingers clamped against the base of his throat, where the big spread of the trapezius muscles lifted from his shoulders to his skull. Azul pressed down hard, sinking fingers and thumbs deep into the web of muscle. The deputy’s eyes blinked open and his jaw gaped. The forward part of Azul’s grip cut off his cry so that it was merely a grunt. Then the man stiffened and began to reach up. But before his hands had time to touch the half-breed’s wrists, the nerve-deadening force of the grip paralyzed him, cutting off the flow of oxygen-carrying blood to his brain. His eyes got very wide, then blank. Then closed. His body went limp.
Azul released the body, letting go the killing grip. The deputy was still alive, though a few more moments of that pressure would have sent him down into an endless sleep. He was lucky: Azul wanted only Mengers this night.
The man called Breed used the deputy’s own bandanna as a gag; his belt and sheet for ropes. He left the man tied securely to the bunk, still unconscious.
And paced cautiously over to the door.
He drew his Colt, then swung the door open.
The main office was lit up by four kerosene lanterns, as though John Mengers was afraid of the dark. The fat lawman was slumped back in a swivel chair with his feet on the desk and a bottle on the floor beside him. His pistol was hiked round to the front of his belly so that the butt wouldn’t get in the way of his arm when he lifted the whiskey, and the remains of a meal were cluttering the desk and his beard. His eyes were glazed, and it took him time to focus.
It took him no longer to get his mouth open and try to shout. And by then Azul was beside him, pressing the muzzle of the Colt’s Frontier hard against the flabby cheek.
‘One sound.’ The half-breed’s voice was guttural with hate. ‘And it’s the last you ever make.’
Mengers’s watery eyes got wide and very frightened. They angled round, trying to see past the gun to Azul’s face.
‘What d’you want?’ His voice was suddenly as watery as his eyes, the words distorted by the pressure of the Colt’s barrel. ‘What the hell you want?’
‘You,’ Azul grunted. ‘Where d’you keep your horse?’
‘Stable out back. Why?’
‘We’re going for a ride.’ Azul watched the sweat run down the lawman’s face. ‘I want to talk to you.’
‘Talk here.’ Mengers glanced down, trying to see his gun past the spread of his gut. ‘I got nothin’ to say to you, anyway.’
Azul saw the movement of the eyes and stepped round behind the sheriff. He reached over Mengers’s shoulder to haul the Peacemaker clear of the holster, then stepped back and holstered his own gun. Mengers’s pistol was unused, so the brass shells slid easily from the chambers as the half-breed snapped the loading gate open and began to turn the cylinder with the muzzle pointing up at the ceiling. Mengers started to turn as he heard the cartridges hit the floor, and Azul clubbed him lightly on the back of the neck. Then he slipped the empty gun into the peace officer’s holster and dragged Mengers to his feet.
‘We’re going out to your horse.’ He backed away as he spoke, shooting the bolts on the outer door. ‘You’re going to mount up and ride with me. If you try anything, I’ll put a bullet in your fat gut. If we meet anyone, tell them a good story, because if it doesn’t sound right to me you’re dead.’
Mengers swallowed hard and nodded.
Azul motioned for him to go out the back way. Mengers walked slowly to the inner door, rubbing at his bruised neck. There were tears in his eyes.
They went over to a shed built alongside the jail and the half-breed watched as Mengers saddled his own horse. Then he walked behind the lawman as he led the pony through the back streets of the darkened town round to the stockyards.
They went mostly unnoticed, pausing only twice when voices called from dark windows to enquire what the sheriff was doing out so late with his horse. Each time Azul fell back into the shadows, listening as Mengers explained that he was planning a circuit of the town. It seemed to go down well enough, because they got to the place where Azul had left his horse without any trouble.
The half-breed mounted up and watched while Mengers hauled his bulk into the saddle. The sheriff had a Winchester carbine in a bucket slung rearwards of his seat, and as he mounted his hand brushed against the stock.
‘Remember what I told you,’ Azul rasped. ‘You try anything and you’re dead.’
Mengers nodded dumbly and followed Azul’s directions out of Comstock.
It was a clear night. The moon shone clean and lonely from a dark blue sky streaked over with thin cloud and sprinkled with stars. The grass crunched frostily under the hooves of the horses, the silvery dusting of the night’s chill reflecting the light of the moon.
It was cold, a hint of impending winter, but the chill invigorated Azul. He watched his breath frost in the air before his face, and felt that curious excitement that comes at the change of a season.
It was the time when the clans of Apacheria would be leaving their rancherias to drift south, following the sun and the moving game. The buffalo—the few that were left from the pinda-lick-oyi hunts—would be head southwards, and some of the tribes would linger long enough to pick off the stragglers. The wild horses, too, would move down towards the border. And those groups of Apache who had chosen to stay on would be laying up supplies for the winter.
It was a time for stories, for reminiscing over the summer raids. A time for mending equipment in readiness for winter, or for fresh excitement in the warmer lands to the south.
It was a good time to kill a hated enemy.
Outside of Comstock, about two hours’ ride from the town, there was a deep bowl in the mountains. It lay north and west of the Taggart spread, a place where some violent movement of the ground had split the naked rock apart to leave a cleft about twenty feet deep. The bottom was flat, bare rock, twenty feet from one end to the other, perhaps fifteen feet from side to side. The walls were smooth and steep, lifting up from the base at sheer angles that offered no hand or footholds.
Azul had found the bowl by accident. Out hunting one day, he had heard a curious sound: a dangerous sound. His mustang had shied when he tried to steer the pony towards the source and he had been forced to go onwards on foot. The cleft was hidden by a thicket of aspens and cottonwoods, approached only by a narrow trail that skirted along the edge of the twenty-foot drop.
The sound became louder as he got closer, and he recognized the source: the bottom of the cleft was filled with rattlesnakes.
Whether they had fallen into the bowl and lived by preying on the animals that made the same mistake, or whether there was some kind of tunnel out of the place, he could not tell. What was certain was that thirty or forty of the deadly snakes covered the floor like a live, writhing carpet. At least, those he could see. The largest was close on five feet in length, a massive thing with a serpentine body as thick as a man’s arm. The smallest—that he could see beneath the wriggling mass—was a baby little more than six inches long.
He had pitched a stone down, and then watched as the shivering mass lifted up as though each snake could sense his presence and sought to lure him down into the ghastly pit. Their cold, blank eyes had stared at him above the flickering, forked tongues, and even though he knew they could not see that far, it was as though they tried to hypnotize him. The rattles decorating their tails had shaken and whirred like a weird drum band. And the largest serpent had writhed a good four feet into the air.
On the bottom of the snake pit, partially covered by the twisting coils, he had seen the whiteness of old bones.
He had thought no more of the place at that time than it was a thing to avoid, for fear of coming too fast down the trail and slipping by accident into the waiting jaws. Like the deer he had seen on the bottom. Or the two human skeletons.
It was a good place for John Mengers.
Azul halted both horses far enough away that they wouldn’t be panicked by the sound of the diamondbacks and ordered Mengers to dismount. Scared, not yet comprehending, the sheriff climbed off his pony. Azul picked up the reins and tethered both animals to a cottonwood. Then he told the lawman to walk down the trail.
‘Why?’ Mengers’s voice was pitched midway between fear of the now and fear of what might come. ‘What you plannin’ to do?’
The Colt appeared in Azul’s hand.
‘Kill you. What did you think?’
‘Why?’ Mengers’s voice took on a whine. ‘What for?’
Azul smiled. And as he did so, a shaft of moonlight came through the trees and lit his face. It turned his sun-bleached hair to ghostly silver, shadowing the high cheekbones and emphasizing the whiteness of his teeth. He reached back to lift his rope from the saddle of the grey Arab-bred horse. Mengers stared at him, shaking his head and moaning softly, his whole body starting to tremble.
‘Because you work for Fogarty,’ murmured the half-breed, his voice like the cold night wind. ‘Because you tried to have me killed. Because you let Fogarty send Bulmer and Hook to kill me.’
Mengers lifted his hands as though trying to fend off some invisible force that was pressing against him. He shook his head, ignoring the spittle that flecked his lips and beard. Even in the moon’s wan glow, his face looked unnaturally pale, and when he spoke again his teeth rattled together.
‘I couldn’t help that.’ He seemed to have difficulty shaping the words, his throat dry for all the foam on his lips. ‘I never had no choice.’
‘Fogarty had you in his pocket,’ Azul grunted, moving forwards. ‘Snug as a dirty sock in a boot.’
Mengers said something that got lost in a strangled groan and turned away. He began to run down the narrow trail, ignoring the night-frosted branches that whipped against his face and hands.
Azul ran after him, anxious that the fat lawman should not run headlong into the pit.
The snakes stopped Mengers. They heard the sound of boot heels pounding, and the rasping breath of the frightened man, and woke from their sleep in nervous warning.
Mengers halted as the dry rattling filled the night. He stared around. Took a few paces farther down the trail, then cut off into the undergrowth.
Tried to cut off, because the trees and underlying shrubs were too thick and stopped him long enough for the half-breed to catch up.
He screamed as Azul reached out and yanked him backwards by his collar. Screamed again as the blond-haired man threw him to the ground and ripped his shirt open. Then stopped screaming as Azul’s fist landed against his teeth.
‘Stand up!’ The half-breed slapped the coiled rope twice over Mengers’s face. ‘Get up on your feet!’
The sheriff climbed awkwardly to his feet, spitting blood from his mouth. He wiped at the sides of his face, rubbing on the burns left by the rope.
‘I don’t like snakes.’ His voice was pitched high, like a child’s. ‘I never have.’
‘Nor do I,’ Azul rasped. ‘Undress.’
Mengers nodded and tugged his torn shirt clear of his pants, ripping the cuffs away before fumbling with his belt.
He wore longjohns and sat down on the ground to pull off his boots and pants so that he could get them away from his body. The front of the heavy cloth was stained with a dark patch that gave off an acrid smell in the cool night.
The fat man stood up shivering. His body was pale under a matting of thick hair, and his legs shook as he tried to cover himself. Incongruously, his member sprang erect. At the same time, he moaned and began to weep openly, voiding his bowels as the cold and the full extent of the fear hit him.
Dark brown stains spread over the backs of his legs, clogging in the hairs and filling the night with the nauseating stench of his body.
‘Turn round.’ Azul’s voice stayed the same flat, ugly tone, even though his nostrils puckered at the vileness of Mengers’s fear.
Mengers turned, and the half-breed swung a loop under his arms, keeping as far away as was possible. He drew the noose tight, then ordered the naked man to walk on down the trail.
‘Snakes.’ Mengers’s teeth rattled together with cold and fear. ‘Not snakes.’
He halted, folding his arms across his flabby chest. Azul holstered the Colt and drew the Bowie knife. He reached forwards, driving the point into Mengers’s right buttock. The lawman yelped and jumped forwards. Azul kept up the prodding until they were at the turning of the trail with nothing in front but the pit.
Mengers stopped there and turned to face the half-breed. Azul glanced sideways, remembering the tree he had picked out earlier. He hitched the end of the rope around the bole and got a knot fixed as the fat sheriff ran towards him. Mengers was crying and moaning, making no more use of his arms than to cover his face.
Azul stepped aside from the rush and sliced the Bowie over Mengers’s buttocks. The peace officer screamed and fell down. Azul kicked him hard in the groin. Then, as Mengers doubled up over the pain, the half-breed grabbed his ankles and hauled him over to the edge of the snake pit.
He eased the legs over the rim, hoping that he had the length of his rope calculated right.
Mengers stared up at him, digging his hands into the dry ground and whimpering. Azul shoved him farther over.
‘No! NO! NO! Not snakes! NO!’
Mengers bled urine and excrement in twin floods of fear as he fought to hold on to the ground.
His nails broke as he slid backwards, carried by his own bodyweight. They dug furrows through the soil, leaving behind ten sticky trailers of blood. More blood pulsed from under the torn-up nails, but he managed to dig them deep enough into the ground that he halted ‘bis descent for a moment, clutching the very edge of the pit.
He was hanging—literally—by his fingertips.
Then Azul stepped forwards and ground Hs left heel very slowly and carefully against the torn, bleeding hand. The fingers on Mengers’s right hand crunched and broke under the moccasin, the pressure of the half-breed’s foot gushing fresh spurts of blood from the ravaged fingers.
Mengers screamed and let loose his right hand.
The movement twisted his body, spinning it round in a semi-circle, exerting terrific pressure on the tips of his left hand. It aroused more of the rattlesnakes so that the sound of Mengers’s screaming was almost drowned under the clatter of the warning tails.
Mengers’s fingertips got white where they dug into the ground, the blood around the nails appearing black in the moonlight. Raw terror lent the man unnatural strength and he dangled from the edge of the pit by one hand.
But he was a large man: out of condition and carrying too much fat. Not even his fear of snakes could imbue him with sufficient strength to hold on for long. His hand began to tremble with the effort. Then, abruptly, it opened and he pitched downwards with a strangled, high-pitched shriek bursting from his mouth.
Azul had calculated the length of the rope exactly. Mengers’s descent was suddenly halted a foot above the farthest reach of the monster diamondback. The big snake reared up, jaws spread wide and tongue flickering. Venom dripped from the needle-points of its fangs and its hissing could be heard even through the kettle drum rattling of the others. It stretched up to its full height, striking at the lawman’s flailing feet. The darting mouth landed against the rockface, a little under a foot below Mengers.
Azul got down on his belly, easing over the rim so that he could see the hanging man.
Mengers was reaching up to clutch the rope, trying to drag himself back from the snakes and at the same time lift his legs away from the gaping, venomous jaws. His eyes were closed, screwed up tight, and his lips worked soundlessly. Vomit stained his greying beard, and fresh spurts of fear-prompted urine splashed periodically over the hissing reptiles.
The half-breed glanced up, noticing that the sun was beginning to rise, dispelling the misty chill of the dawn. He grinned and stood up, walking back to the horses to fetch a canteen. Then he lowered himself back over the rim and called to the sheriff.
‘Mengers. I want to talk to you.’
‘Haul me up! For God’s sake! Haul me up.’
‘No,’ grunted Azul. ‘I want to talk.’
‘About what?’ Mengers’s voice was hoarse, terror-ridden. ‘I’ll tell you anything.’
He writhed around some more, then jetted a stream of urine into the pit, irritating the diamondbacks, which set pp a louder rattling, a greater susurration from their lipless mouths.
‘I can’t hear you,’ rasped the half-breed. ‘Don’t make the snakes hiss.’