8.
AMBUSCADE IN CHARLEY’S WASH
FLAGG and the six deputies lost Hawk’s trail in a torrential desert rain squall, then picked it up again the next day. At noon, the sun burning through their hats and sucking the moisture from their bodies so that their eyes felt like glass marbles in dry, bony sockets, they let their horses draw water at a runoff spring. Stretching their legs, the men filled their canteens and built cigarettes.
Flagg walked the top of a low knoll and stood beside an ancient, gnarled saguaro. He plucked his makings sack and surveyed the trail ahead—an old trace deep-gnawed by iron-shod ore wagons—through a maze of strewn boulders, broken sandstone pillars, and narrow, twisting ravines rising to blue mountains.
Standing with the other men near the horses, Bill Houston studied Flagg’s back. Finally, taking a long drag from his cigarette, he strode up the knoll and stood beside Flagg.
The tall, gray-haired, hard-eyed marshal stood staring into the high mountains looming darkly against the western sky.
Houston took another puff from his quirley. Blowing smoke, he said, “Tell me somethin’ straight up, will you, Marshal?”
“Haven’t I always been straight with you, Bill?”
“Why do you hate Hawk so much? He was a good lawman at one time. Understandable how he went nuts after his family was killed and a crooked prosecutor sprang the killer.” Houston mopped his brow with a blue handkerchief. “I ain’t defendin’ the man, you understand. He must be stopped. I’m just wondering why you hate him so bad.”
Flagg cut a slit-eyed glance at the tall, angular Texan. “What makes you think I hate him so bad, Bill?”
“The way you flush up every time his name’s mentioned.” Houston paused, held Flagg’s cold gaze. “The harsh . . . measures . . . you’ve taken to find the man.”
Flagg turned away, slipped his own cigarette between his thin lips. “He’s a lawman turned outlaw. Nothing worse in my book, Bill. Every time he deals his own justice, he’s making a travesty of the U.S. Constitution—a travesty of my job and my beliefs.” Flagg rose stiffly on the balls of his feet and exhaled a deep breath, smoke streaming from his nostrils. “I’d say a vigilante of his caliber warranted a few harsh measures, wouldn’t you, Bill?”
Houston stared at him. He smiled woodenly, nodded, then walked back down to where the others stood with the horses. Flagg remained atop the knoll, smoking. Annoyance plucked at him, a parasite squirming deep in his loins.
He hadn’t told Houston the truth.
He hated Hawk, all right. But not only for the reasons he’d given the Texas lawman. Several months ago, Flagg had watched Hawk do away with a gang of killers south of the Mexican border. Flagg had had Hawk in his rifle sights, and he hadn’t killed him, out of sympathy.
Since then, the rogue lawman had eluded Flagg for nearly a year. And because he hunted and killed known criminals with no regard for any law but his own, he was cheered on by the public. In many towns Flagg had visited while stalking Hawk, he’d come upon local lawmen and express agents who’d refused to post Wanted dodgers bearing Hawk’s likeness.
In making a travesty of the bona fide law of the land, Gideon Hawk had become a damned hero.
And bona fide lawmen like D.W. Flagg had become laughingstocks.
Flagg took the last drag off his cigarette and stared at the high, blue mountains. His fury burned anew. He dropped the butt, mashed it out with his boot toe, and walked back down the knoll.
He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Mount up!”
That afternoon the lawmen were climbing out of a shallow canyon between two stark, sunburnt ranges when they heard guns popping to the south.
Flagg halted his steeldust, sat staring in the direction of the shots, one eye slitted.
“What the hell you s’pose that is?” said Franco Villard, sitting his own horse to Flagg’s right.
“That’s Charley’s Wash yonder. When I was deputy sheriff of Tucson, mule trains were always getting am-bushed in there.”
Flagg paused, frustrated. He looked ahead along the trail, ran a gloved hand across his mouth, cursed. “We’d better check it out.”
By the time Flagg reached the base of the ridge, the shooting was growing intermittent, the sporadic shots spanging off rocks and drowning the muffled pleas of wounded men.
As the deputies caught up to him, Flagg swung down from the saddle. He slid his Winchester from the boot, angrily rammed a shell into the breech, and started up the ridge. “Watch your heads. I need every man for Hawk!”
He jerked sideways to avoid a coiled rattler, leapt over a clump of Mormon tea, and spurred himself into a jog.
The shots grew even more sporadic, as if the fight on the other side of the ridge were winding down.
Press Miller squinted against the sun glare. “Mescins, you think, Marshal?”
Flagg was breathing hard, watching where he planted his boots. “No doubt. They kill each other for farting upwind around here.”
“Damn,” Garth said. “I’d like to shoot a Mexican, take his ears home to a whore I know.” He hurried to add, “But only if they’re breakin’ the law, of course.”
Flagg cocked an eyebrow at him.
“She hates Mexicans,” Garth explained. “One gave her a vicious knife scar a few years back in Abilene. Keeps askin’ me if I shot any Mescins. She wants to wear the ears around her neck.”
“If you’re gonna bring Mex ears to a whore,” asked Miller through a grin, leaping a barrel cactus, “what’re you gonna bring your wife?”
A shrill cry rose from the other side of the ridge. “No!” The seven lawmen stopped, raised their rifles, and peered toward the ridge top.
“Please, don’t . . . don’t shoot me!”
The last word hadn’t died on the man’s lips before a pistol spoke twice. From this distance the shots sounded like snapping matchsticks.
Flagg hurried up the ridge, muttering, “Spread out and stay low. I want to know what the hell’s going on before we show ourselves.”
As the others fanned out toward the rocks to his right and left, Flagg doffed his hat and knelt behind a split boulder, peering through the rock’s V-shaped notch. Charley’s Wash—a deep, rocky, brushy cut—lay on the other side of the ridge, choked with boulders washed down by an ancient river.
At the bottom of the wash, the bodies of a handful of soldiers lay sprawled across the rocks, their dark-blue uniforms torn and bloodstained. A dozen men in dusty trail garb milled about the bodies, tearing rings from fingers and peering into mouths for gold fillings. The gunfire had died, but the smoke still ebbed along the arroyo’s floor.
One of the bandits held a pair of saddlebags over one shoulder, the large U.S. markings on both flaps flashing in the sunlight as the bandit stooped to pick up a Springfield trapdoor carbine.
A low whistle sounded on Flagg’s left.
Flagg turned. Galen Allidore stared at him, bushy red brows furrowed. “Army payroll?”
Flagg nodded. The soldiers, probably out of Fort Huauchuca, had no doubt been hauling payroll coins to a remote outpost when the bandits had attacked.
Shouting erupted below, and Flagg returned his attention to the wash. A blue shirt slid through the brush—a soldier making for a nest of rocks and saguaros to the marshal’s right. Behind the man, several bandits yelled and pointed. One raised a rifle, and fired.
The blue shirt dropped behind a paloverde, then reappeared as the soldier continued forward on his hands and knees. Above the incessant whine of cicadas, Flagg heard the man’s sharp grunts and anxious pleas.
The bandit who’d fired the rifle, and two others, descended on him quickly. The man with the rifle kicked him flat. He clamped his boot down on the soldier’s back as he spoke to the other two bandits, one of whom threw his head back and laughed.
The bandit raised the rifle to his shoulder, aiming at the soldier’s head.
Bunching his lips, Flagg snapped his own Winchester up. He aimed quickly and squeezed the trigger.
A half second after the bark, the hard case with the rifle jerked his head up. His rifle came up, as well, the pop reaching Flagg’s ears a full second after the barrel puffed smoke. Dirt and gravel sprayed two feet from the wounded soldier’s head.
The other two bandits snapped their own heads to the man with the rifle, who stumbled forward, tripping over the wounded soldier and dropping to his knees.
“Open up on the sons of bitches!” Flagg barked.
He ejected the spent cartridge, rammed a fresh round into the breech, then slid the barrel to one of the two other men near the soldier.
As the man faced Flagg, crouching and spreading his feet and grabbing the six-shooter from the holster on his right hip, Flagg sent him tumbling into the brush, the wounded outlaw inadvertently triggering his revolver into the head of his dead cohort.
Around Flagg, the deputies’ rifles sent a crackling fusillade into the wash. Like Flagg, all six were expert marksmen, and in that first volley a half dozen bandits were sent sprawling into the chaparral around the soldiers they’d am-bushed.
Several others returned fire, shouting and arguing, then turned and ran. The man with the payroll money leapt a rock as he scrambled south along the wash.
Flagg had run halfway down the ridge, snapping shots with his carbine. Now he stopped, aimed at the retreating back of the man with the loot, and planted the rifle’s sights on the fancy stitching adorning his bullhide vest, between his shoulder blades.
He fired as the outlaw dodged behind a saguaro. The shot plunked into the cactus, spraying dust and cactus bark. Continuing down the wash, the man edged a look behind, then disappeared over a rise. Several of the deputies’ shots kicked up caliche and snapped mesquite branches as the last of the outlaws disappeared over the rise and was gone.
Flagg continued down the rise, thumbing cartridges from his belt and feeding them into his Winchester’s loading gate. He glanced at Press Miller. “You and Hound-Dog fetch the horses.”
Hound-Dog glanced at him. “What about Hawk?”
“Hawk can wait. I know where he’s heading. We’re going after those bushwhacking sons of bitches!”
Flagg repressed a smile. Not only would he bring Hawk to justice, he’d secure the Army payroll. He’d have his name in all the papers. A candidate for the territorial governor’s office couldn’t ask for better publicity.
Shit, he’d be a hero.
“These bushwhackers need to be taught a lesson,” Flagg said, lowering his rifle toward an outlaw writhing in the brush at the base of a saguaro. “And I’m just the teacher.”
The outlaw, bleeding profusely from two holes in his chest, looked up at Flagg, his gray-green eyes pinched with pain. One-handed, Flagg pressed his carbine’s barrel against the man’s sweat-glistening forehead.
The wounded man’s jaw tightened, and his eyes flashed horrifically.
Villard, kicking over a dead outlaw to Flagg’s right, glanced at the man before Flagg, and frowned. “Hold on, Marshal.”
“Deputy Villard, this man appears to be reaching for a pistol—wouldn’t you agree?”
Villard looked at the man. The outlaw stared back at him, his eyes beseeching. He couldn’t be much over seventeen, with jug ears, hollow jaws, and close-cropped, sun-bleached hair. His hands were nowhere near a gun. In fact, both his holsters were empty.
Villard’s eyes returned to Flagg. “We playin’ by Hawk’s rules, now, Marshal?”
Flagg pressed his rifle barrel hard against the kid’s head. “Trying to keep this man alive, when he is obviously mortally wounded, would be a waste of our time. Time better spent hunting that travesty of justice, Gideon Hawk.” Flagg’s pinched eyes flicked toward Villard. “Wouldn’t you agree, Deputy?”
Villard didn’t say anything for a moment. He glanced at Houston and Allidore, who’d both stopped their survey of the wash to regard Flagg incredulously. Villard looked again at the wounded man, bleeding out in the rocks and cactus.
Slowly, the deputy nodded his head. “Appears that way to me, Marshal.”
Flagg squeezed the Winchester’s trigger. The outlaw’s head exploded. The young man slumped onto his right shoulder, kicking his legs and clenching his fists, as if furious at having been killed.
“We got two more over here,” Bill Houston called to Flagg, nodding at two men writhing on the ground between him and Allidore.
“They’re both going for weapons,” Flagg said. “Kill them.”
Houston glanced at Allidore, shrugged a shoulder, then shot his man in the head. Allidore’s rifle spoke two seconds later, drilling a rangy half-breed in a red bandanna through the heart.
Houston and Allidore glanced at each other and chuckled.
Flagg heard screeching and looked up. Already, the shaggy black crosses of buzzards winged in lazy circles over the draw. He turned away from the man he’d shot and walked around the wash, inspecting the other bodies.
The eight soldiers were dead. Flagg found one more living outlaw, the man’s back rising and falling faintly as he lay facedown in a cactus patch. He’d been shot in the side and through one leg.
Flagg shot him in the back of the head.
A horse whinnied, and Flagg turned to see Miller and Hound-Dog Tuttle riding their own mounts down the ridge, trailing the outlaws. As they approached the bottom of the wash, Flagg reached for his reins.
“What about the soldiers?” asked Bill Houston.
“We’ll bury them later,” Flagg said, swinging into the leather. “After we’ve retrieved the payroll money.”
He turned the steeldust in the same direction the other bushwhackers had fled, and gave him the spurs.
Behind him, climbing clumsily into his own saddle, big Hound-Dog Tuttle glanced at Villard. “Think this’ll put him in the governor’s office, Franco?”
“If it don’t get him—and us—killed.” Villard kneed his grulla into a trot.
“That’s ‘doesn’t,’ ” Press Miller corrected. “Doesn’t get us killed.”
The others laughed and galloped after Flagg.
Flagg and the deputies ran their horses hard, following the bushwhackers’ trail—six shod horses splitting wind for the border. Flagg wouldn’t let them make it. He’d be damned if they’d make it.
When they’d ridden for an hour, Flagg could tell from the tracks that the outlaws’ horses were tiring. On a ridge, the lawmen spied a long dust trail stretching out across the flat, chaparral-tufted desert below. The falling sun colored the dust orange, the six horses at the head of it, dun brown.
The lawmen heeled their mounts down the ridge.
“They know we’re back here,” Flagg said. “A couple keep slowing up and turning their horses to look back.”
“Beware a bushwhack,” said Press Miller. “They’re good at it.”
“I’m good at sniffing out a bushwhack, too,” bragged Flagg.
He was. That’s why, following the trail between two low, piñon-studded scarps, he halted his steeldust as he stared down the horse’s left shoulder.
“What is it?” asked Allidore, following Flagg’s gaze.
“There were six horses a moment ago. Now there’re only five.”
A rifle barked angrily. Hound-Dog Tuttle’s hat flew off his head.
As the shot echoed shrilly around the scarp, Flagg shucked his Winchester and, turning the horse with one hand while jacking a fresh shell with the other, snapped the rifle to his shoulder.
Smoke puffed around a thumb of rock jutting out from the scarp’s base. There was the metallic rasp of a rifle being levered, then flames stabbed through the smoke as the shooter fired again.
Flagg cut loose with his carbine, sending lead through the smoke, peppering the scarp. The slugs barked off the rock, whining.
A man screamed, stumbled out from behind the boulder. He dropped his rifle, lost his hat, and danced around, enraged and disoriented. Flagg’s bullets, ricocheting off the scarp, had shredded the man like shotgun pellets.
Hound-Dog and Villard both sent more .44 rounds through him, laying him out flat on his back, twitching.
Flagg turned his horse down trail. “Let’s go!”
They galloped down a hill. Ahead lay a ravine, a purple gash in the fading light. At the lip of the ravine, sunlight shimmered off a rifle barrel.
“Ambush!” Flagg shouted.
A half second later, a rifle snapped. The slug twanged off a rock to Flagg’s left, caused a horse to whinny behind him.
As more shots roared and smoke puffed amidst the brush along the lip of the cut, Flagg turned his mount in a full circle, dodging lead. “Three of you follow me! Three head right! We’re gonna get behind ’em and send some blue whistlers up their assholes!”
Flagg turned his horse left, toward the bushwhackers’ far left flank. Houston, Miller, and Villard galloped behind him, hunkered low in their saddles, dusters flapping like wings. The other three lawmen raced right, returning fire, their silhouetted figures disappearing behind a billowing veil of gun smoke.
Flagg felt a bullet curl the air behind his neck as his horse plunged into the ravine. The horse’s front hooves hit the gravel and tough, brown brush at the bottom, nearly sending Flagg over its head. He grabbed the horn and gave an involuntary grunt as the air whooshed out of his lungs.
Sucking a breath and raising his Winchester, he gigged the horse westward along the draw. After three lunging strides, he saw the shooters lying along the ravine’s northern ridge. Three of the five turned toward Flagg, while the other two, hearing the other lawmen driving in from the west, jerked looks in that direction.
“Goddamnit!” one shouted. It was the man who’d carried the Army payroll bags—a stocky gent in a black vest, with a broad pitted face framed by black muttonchop whiskers.
Flagg jerked back on the reins with his left hand. With his right, he aimed the Winchester, snapped off a shot. The steeldust wasn’t stopped, and the jostling nudged the slug into the bank beside the outlaw’s right elbow.
The man cursed again and fired at Flagg. A quarter second later, Press Miller’s rifle drilled the man through his chin, knocking him back against the bank. He had an amazed look on his face as he clutched his jaw with one hand while holding his rifle with the other.
The other deputies cut into the outlaws, Tuttle’s barn blaster roaring amidst the rifle cracks.
Hearing slugs whistling around him, plunking into the ground before and behind him, Flagg triggered his Winchester, levered, and triggered again. His steeldust was well trained, but not even a well-trained mount would keep its hooves planted amidst this much gunfire.
Still, at least as many slugs found targets as flew wild.
Less than a minute after the deputies had stormed into the ravine, all the outlaws lay stretched out along the bank, dead.
The rotten-egg smell of cordite filled the ravine. The smoke hung like fog. Blood spurted from a dead outlaw’s neck, making a wet sound like water squirting from a highpressure spring.
While the deputies sat their horses, staring sullenly at the dead men flung every which way upon the bank, Flagg gigged the steeldust forward. The horse climbed the bank and stopped beside the dark-haired hard case.
Leaning out from his saddle, Flagg scooped up the saddlebags with his rifle barrel and draped them across his bedroll.
He rode back down to the bottom of the wash, waved powder smoke away from his face, and turned back to regard the corpses.
“We made short work of these bastards,” said Tuttle, chuckling and reloading his shotgun. “Hawk should be a turkey shoot.”
Flagg looked at him. “You think so, do you?”
Tuttle shrugged.
Flagg laughed, reined his horse around, and rode off down the wash.