The Reverend Charles Spangel was all for fording the river before they camped, but Crow shook his head.
“No point.”
“We will truly be there.”
On the nearer side of the foaming rapids was only a narrow strip of fertile grass, backed by the bottom of the trail. It would be difficult for any attackers to get behind them, but once they were safe across then anyone could circle the single wagon. And Crow still wasn’t at all happy about where those Mexicans had gone. His instincts told him that they weren’t being watched, but that didn’t mean his instincts were always right.
The shootist had a simple philosophy towards his subconscious feelings. If they told him there was danger then he believed it possible. If they told him that things were safe he mistrusted them.
That way he tended to stay alive longer.
Ben Ford agreed with him that it was better to camp for the night on the nearer side of the river, with something to guard their backs.
“How ’bout you, son?” Crow asked Daniel, but the boy didn’t reply. Looking blankly past the shootist, staring at the slick rocks that glistened among the tumbling waters.
“Then I guess we stay here.”
It had shocked Crow when Spangel started to talk about Mary’s death as the sign that he had been waiting for.
“As Abraham was tested and would have given his most beloved son, so has the Almighty seen fit to test me by taking my blessed daughter.”
“So you’ll stay here?”
“Perhaps.”
“How about buryin’ the girl?” asked the ramrod, lying on his blanket by the small fire that Crow had built.
“You can do it in the morning,” said the minister, turning his blind head towards Crow.
“I’m not hired to dig graves.”
“Then let her lie unburied. One day there will be a great monument of Italian marble to her, whiter than the milk at morning. And her likeness shall be carved on the stone and her name shall be sweeter than the songs of all the birds of the skies.”
“Her name might be sweet, Reverend, but after a couple of days she’s goin’ to be smellin’ real strong.”
“I’ll bury her,” said Daniel. Surprising them by the strength of his voice. “I’ll do it. She was my sister. More than my sister. I’ll do it. Here and now.”
Crow rested alongside Ben Ford. The old man was in his wagon and they could hear the mutterings of prayers drifting out into the bright moonlight. Away behind them, close to the sheer cliff, they could also hear the chinking of metal on stone as Daniel labored away at burying his sister’s mangled body.
“Guess you could have helped him some, Crow,” said Ford, and the shootist heard the clear note of reproach in the ramrod’s voice.
“Not my way. Never see the point of breaking your back for someone can’t appreciate it.”
“She mean nothin’ to you?”
“Nothing, Ben.”
“You laid with her.”
“Sure. You?”
A long pause. Then, the voice lower. “Yeah. Yeah, I lay with her. Felt sorry for her.”
“Before the accident?”
“And after. After the girl had to do most of the trail-breakin’, if you take my meaning.”
The two men laughed quietly together.
From the wagon they could hear Spangel’s voice raised louder in his prayers.
“I thank Thee for the sign, most merciful Lord. And truly shall the ark of the covenant rest here in this shaded green valley, marked for us by the sacrifice of my own humble daughter.”
“Don’t he ever stop to draw breath?” said Ford.
“Guess not. You figure to stop him?”
Ford shook his head, the shadows of the moon cut deep around his craggy features, shading out the lines around his mouth and nose.
“Guess not. My Pappy never raised me to have no truck with crazy preachers.”
“Truly is she knocking on the doors of heaven, Lord. Allow her entry, my beloved daughter. Set not her sins and mine in the balance. Leave her not knocking in vain. Knocking. Knocking. Knocking.”
The voice faded and the only sound was earth being shoveled into a hole in the ground, pattering on flesh and cloth. And what might have been a man crying.
Two hours later and Daniel still hadn’t reappeared from the darkness. Crow wasn’t worried by that, figuring that someone should be left alone with their grief for a decent interval.
He and Ben Ford had sat around the glowing fire, passing a bottle back and forth, talking about the old times that they shared. Men they’d fought and killed. The crippled ramrod often turning back further than Crow could recall, naming women in cow-towns across the country. Trying to recapture his own lost manhood through the jumbled memories.
“Nothin’ to fuckin’ look forward to, is there, Crow? Just sinkin’ to a helpless old fool can’t even tell when he’s pissed his britches until he smells it on the wind. Ain’t no way to go out.”
“Might not come to that.”
“Yeah. Hogs might fly! It’ll come. Seen men broke like me. Won’t be long, neither.”
“You can easy put a ball through your own brain, Ben. Go out standin’ tall on your own terms.”
He could see the pale blur of Ford’s face as he nodded. “Yeah. I thought on that. Guess I will. Time comes and I’ll know it, Crow. But I wanted to go a better way. Wife and kin around.” He laughed, self-consciously. “Hell, I once figured it’d be good to go like at the Alamo. Givin’ up your own life so’s someone else could go on living.”
“That’d be a ... Hey, what’s that?” The question was in a hushed whisper.
“What?” Sliding out his pistol and quietly thumbing the hammer back. Peering into the darkness beyond the white water.
“Heard something. Something ’bove the sound of the river. Stone turning under a heel. Thought I ... Look, Ben. Yonder.”
Pointing with the twin barrels of the Purdey, out into the deeps of the valley. Ford followed the direction of the gun and thought he too glimpsed something. Moving quickly near the crossing-place.
“They comin’?”
“Could be. Them or Indians.”
“Which do …?”
“Mexicans. Indians wouldn’t be heard above that damned river.”
“They comin’ cross to get at us?”
“Have to. I looked at that crossin’ and I figure a man could walk it. Chest-deep at the worst. Yeah, they’ll come.”
“All?”
Crow shook his head, concentrating on the place where he’d last seen one of the men. Seeing further movement to the right, closer to the ford. Wondering where Daniel was. If the bandits came in force they’d be damned hard-pressed. He tried to visualize the ground between himself and his stallion, and then to the bottom of the trail up the cliffs. In case it came down to a run.
“Figure they’ll try four or five. Sneak in on us. They can’t see us from where they are. We’ll just he quiet and easy.”
“Maybe if’n we went among them trees to the back of the wagon?”
There was a clump of small cottonwoods, no more than fifteen feet high, with jagged branches. Crow had considered moving among them but to try and shift position at all now could give them away to the approaching Mexicans.
“No. They’d see us ’gainst the rocks. Too much moon for that. No. We stay here and gun them when they get close enough.”
“What if they start firin’ from way back there?”
Crow grinned wolfishly. “Then they’ll miss us, Ben. You ever knew a Mexican could get up in the morning, eat beans without farting or fire a rifle inside a barn and hit one of the walls?”
So they waited.
It was close to midnight when the last of the Mexicans emerged dripping on their side of the river. Crow counted five of them, all carrying rifles above their heads as they forded the water.
Five against two.
The Reverend Charles Spangel had fallen into a fitful sleep in the Conestoga and his son was still somewhere out by his sister’s grave.
Five against two.
Clouds drifted lazily across the hunter’s moon, sending pools of shadow floating over the bottom of the valley. Crow lay still, faking sleep, the reliable Purdey gripped tight under his blanket. Conscious of the tension in Ford at his side.
Both men readying themselves for the violent action that they knew would come. Come as surely as the sun rose far over the Atlantic and disappeared beneath the veiled horizon of the Pacific.
Confident in their sleeping victims, the bandits stood in a group, backs against the river, talking together in quiet voices. Watching the two gringos under their blankets. Crow figured that they couldn’t have been scouting against them, or they’d be concerned where Daniel was. The presence of the boy out of sight, with a pistol at his hip, was a bonus for Crow and Ford.
“Now,” said the shootist, voice no louder than a spring breeze through the leaves of a magnolia tree.
The night exploded in sound and light and violence.
And death.
The range was extreme for the sawn-down scatter-gun, but Crow wasn’t about to let the bandits get any closer to them.
He aimed low, squeezing both triggers at once, trying for maximum effect. The shot starred out in a burst of noise and smoke and he heard screaming, following on the echo of the explosion. Then Ford was firing, levering shots into the group of men from his Winchester, dropping that to pick up the pistol. Crow also holding the handgun, waiting a few moments for some of the smoke to clear, seeing that four of the five were down.
“Three dead, Ben!” he yelled.
“Yeah. There’s one more to the right. Daniel! Daniel, come help!!”
But there was neither sight nor sound of the boy from the dark rocks behind them.
Crow was too busy staying alive to worry about Daniel Spangel. Holding his fire, the surviving Mexicans too far off for a true pistol shot in poor light.
His opening salvo from the shotgun had ripped four out of five off their feet, tearing into knees and ankles and groins. Crippling them, sending them crawling among the pebbles near the water’s edge. Making them easy targets for Ford’s sharp-shooting. His first two bullets both killed a bandit. Both plugged neatly through the forehead as they knelt in their own blood, hugging shattered legs. The third bullet missed, whining off into the night. The fourth killed another man. Hitting him through the center of the throat and leaving him drowning in his own arterial blood.
Crow stood up, seeing one of the bandits also fighting to get to his feet, hands gripping his right thigh, where lead had torn open the big artery on the inside of the leg. Crow took careful aim and shot him through the left shoulder, sending him spinning to the dirt, screaming for help from his compadres. With only one good hand he wouldn’t be able to stop the massive bleeding and he’d be dead within a very few seconds.
Ford snapped off two pistol shots at the Mexican who was standing, paralyzed by the attack on his friends, moving closer towards the wagon.
“Shit!” as both shots missed.
“Daniel! Come help, you son of a bitch!” yelled Crow, trying to rouse the boy. With two bandits still alive and more maybe gathering on the further side of the ford, now was when they needed to hit them as hard as they could.
All together.
But there was no movement from behind them.
The two bandits were both aiming rifles at the attackers, finally recovering from their initial shock. A bullet hissed past the standing figure of Crow, cracking into a boulder at his shoulder, showering him with splinters of stone. Ford reached again for the Winchester and tried to return fire, but it wasn’t easy with bullets howling in his direction. With his legs paralyzed the ramrod couldn’t shift himself away from the fire.
“Jesus, Crow!” he yelled. “Where’s the boy?”
“What are the ungodly?” came the bull’s bellow of Charles Spangel, sticking his head round the corner of the canvas. Pulling it hastily back again when a shot ripped through, narrowly missing him.
“Bust the bastards!” called Ford, heaving himself along with the power of his arms, trying to drag himself free of the entangling blanket, getting off two more shots at the Mexican nearest the river.
Crow couldn’t decide which one to go for, finally picking the one nearest the wagon as being the biggest threat. He set off towards the man, jinking and weaving, so that the rifle bullets missed him, digging into the dirt near his boots.
He waited until the gap between them had shrunk to less than fifty feet, then he stopped dead and held out the Peacemaker in his right hand, steadying himself with the left hand. Drawing it up and holding his breath. Firing three times, the explosions chasing in on each other’s heels.
Seeing the white-shirted Mexican go staggering backwards, heels snagging in the dirt, toppling over. His fingers tightening on the trigger of his rifle as he fell, sending the last bullet he’d ever fire howling futilely into the blackness.
The moon was still bright enough for Crow to see the cluster of black splashes that had appeared in the middle of the bandit’s chest as his shots hit home.
There was no need to follow up with him.
“Ben! You all right?”
“Jesus Christ, Crow. Get that greaser behind the boulder, close to the edge of the water. He’s got me pinned here. Already nipped one across my ribs.”
He saw the flash of the rifle and heard the crack of the bullet smashing into the pebbles near where Ben Ford was lying. But the Mexican was in a good position. Back to the river, covered by a large boulder, bigger than a horse. Crow looked quickly round, seeing how he could get near to the man. It looked like only a matter of time before the ramrod finally gotten hit badly.
The moon slithered out of sight behind some thicker cloud and the shootist made his move. Powering across the camp-site, running behind Ford and behind the wagon. Heading for the river.
Reaching it and pausing a moment, looking back. The thunder of the water so loud that it almost drowned out another shot from the bandit’s rifle. Crow was now around fifty paces from him, upstream. He waded a little way into the river, until the water reached the top of his boots, then started to close in on the Mexican, seeing his pale silhouette gradually becoming more clear. Stopping twice to check that there were no more bandits anywhere around.
It took him less than twenty seconds to close the gap, finally stopping only a couple of yards behind the sniper. Almost close enough to reach out and touch him. The man, short, heavily-built, with a battered Stetson on his long hair, had just fired again and was giggling to himself with excitement. Levering another round into the breech of his gun.
Crow shot him through the back of the head. The bullet driving into the bandit’s skull with such power that it smacked his face forwards against the rock that was sheltering him, splitting his nose from top to bottom and knocking out four of his teeth. The bullet carried on through, exiting just below the right eye, leaving a smear of silver lead on the boulder.
“Got him, Ben,” he called.
“That all?”
There’s the one shot in the leg. Must be about drained by now.”
He wasn’t yet dead, looking up in the renewed moonlight as Crow stalked towards him, pistol steady in his hand.
“Please, señor. Please. I hurt. I no hurt you.”
“Damned right,” said Crow, voice as gentle as ever. “But you hurt the Dutchman and his kids pretty damned good.”
“Please. Please.” The man was so close to death that there was no point in wasting a bullet. Crow would have given a lot to have known how many other bandits there were and where they were skulking. But the man was too far gone for the torture that would have greased his tongue.
So Crow dragged him in the river by the feet, heaving him into the turbulent current. Watching for a moment as the dying man bobbed and struggled, then he slid over the rapids and disappeared.
After checking that Ben wasn’t hurt bad, Crow went on in the darkness to look for Daniel Spangel.