Gun Country

By the time the wagons were loaded, sunlight had begun to glow in a silver wreath along the eastern edge of the earth. Corio watched as Shaw and Tuesday walked back to the flatcars. To Jordan he said quietly, “Here comes our new partner now.”

“Good for him, then,” said Corio. “Maybe the whore will keep him on top of his game, the way she seemed to do with Dangerous Dexter.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Jordan said grudgingly. “As whores go, I’ve seen worse looking. She’s young, strapping and robust. I like that.”

“As do I myself,” said Corio, watching the sway of Tuesday’s hips as she walked nearer. “Maybe we’ll save her for ourselves when we’ve finished this job. Have a celebration of our own.”

When Shaw got closer, Corio said down to him from atop the flatcar, “As soon as we get across the border, we’re going straight across the desert to the hill country. Once the wagons make it there without the federales spotting them, it’ll be easier traveling until we have to come back down.”

“It is time for me know which way for these wagons to run if my drivers get hit by an ambush crossing the hill trails.”

“No matter where the wagons are,” said Corio, “my men and I will be a level above them. They will be in our gun sights at all times. If they get ambushed, we’ll cover them and pull them through it. You have my word on it. Don’t forget what this cargo is worth to me . . . to all of us.” He stepped onto the iron rung of the flatcar ladder and climbed down the four rungs to the ground.

“I have no reason not to trust his word,” said Shaw. “I’ll be riding up there myself, making sure my drivers are covered.”

“Your men are covered, Shaw,” said Corio, gesturing a hand toward the line of five loaded wagons. “See for yourself.”

Sheer and Sax had climbed up into the first wagon, one driving and one riding shotgun. In the second wagon sat Jimmy Bardell and Earl Hardine. Behind them in the third wagon sat New York Joe Toledo and Able Hatcher. In the driver seat of the fourth wagon, Bell Mason sat alone, a shotgun propped against his leg. The fifth wagon carried two of Corio’s men, the Shagin brothers, Lindsey and Boxer.

“Show us something, Boxer,” Jordan called out. Before the words were out of his mouth, Boxer Shagin scrambled over the seat into the wagon bed and threw a green tarpaulin off a mounted Gatling gun and crouched behind it, ready to fire.

“Feel better, partner?” Jordan asked, stepping down from the flatcar himself and dismissing Boxer Shagin with a short wave of a hand.

Shaw didn’t reply. Instead he looked at the faces of the men on the wagons, making sure they were satisfied with the setup. Seeing them give him a short nod, he looked toward Tuesday Bonhart, who came running from where she’d watched over him on the blanket until his pain had subsided and his dull stupor had worn off.

“Wait for me!” she called out, adjusting her clothes as if she’d just thrown them back on. Giggling, she gave Shaw a suggestive look and wiggled up hurriedly into the wagon seat beside Bell Mason. “My goodness, Fast Larry, give a gal time to catch her breath!” She picked up the short-barreled shotgun from against Mason’s leg and ran her hand back and forth along its barrel with a glowing secretive smile.

Shaw looked at Corio and said, “All right, ready when you are.” He walked to where Bardell had formed all of the wagon drivers’ horses into a string in a column of twos. He took up the lead rope, gathered the reins to his speckled barb and climbed up into the saddle. The pain in his head was gone. His mind felt clear and focused. He gigged the barb forward and rode along beside the wagon where Tuesday sat with the shotgun lying across her lap.

While Corio and his men mounted and headed up into the hillsides surrounding them, Shaw looked down at Tuesday and said, “Obliged, I needed that.”

Knowing Bell Mason could hear them, Tuesday giggled and replied, “No more than I did, Fast Larry.” She rose from the wooden seat, reached over to him and said with a laugh, “Lift me onto your lap. I want to see if I left anything behind.”

Mason gave an excited sidelong glance as Shaw drew her from the wagon onto his lap. She threw her arms around his neck and nuzzled her face close to his ear. “The arms are going to Sepio Bocanero.”

“Bocanero, the rebel leader?” Shaw pulled her away from his neck and looked into her eyes, amazed. “How did you find that out?”

She giggled coyly. “How do you think?” She pressed her large warm breasts against him and rolled her shoulders slowly back and forth.

“It doesn’t take a gal long, not with these randy gunmen,” she said. “It’s all right isn’t it, I mean you don’t mind me doing that?” she asked, moving back close to his ear.

“Tuesday, I’m not your boss,” Shaw said, riding along with her pressed against him. “I won’t tell you what you can or can’t do.”

“I know, and that’s what I like about you,” she cooed in his ear. “Dex was a stupid jealous prick. I’m glad he’s dead.”

“What about Sepio Bocanero?” Shaw asked, changing the subject from the late Dexter Lowe. “Did you happen to hear where we’re supposed to meet him?”

“No,” she said. “But I figure with the federales hunting for him and his men, he won’t stick his head up for long. I thought you’d want to know. Did I do good?”

“How about you? Are you sure you’re feeling all right?” she asked as Shaw started to lift her back over to the wagon seat.

“I’m sure I am, thanks to you,” Shaw said in almost a whisper. “You keep your eyes open and your head down. Be ready for anything. I expect the worst out of Madden Corio.” He left her on the wagon seat and nudged his barb forward behind Corio and Jordan. He followed a good distance behind them.

On his way past the engine, he saw the body of the engineer and the fireman lying sprawled in the dirt beside the tracks. The engine sat with its headlight black, silent in the gray morning light, except for the metallic click and thump of the cooling iron boiler.

By midmorning the wagons had ridden down into a stretch of lower-lying hills and crossed the border. Once across the border, Shaw stayed up inside the cover of scrub juniper and cholla cactus, keeping a watch on the five slow-moving wagons below as they ambled along on narrow switchback trails.

At noon the wagons had made good time and stopped to rest and water the horses at a thin runoff stream. Shaw looked all around and watched Corio’s men scout upward and ride away into the rocky hillsides. Looking down at the wagons, he gave Tuesday and the wagon drivers a signaling wave. When both Sonny Sheer’s and Tuesday Bonhart’s return wave told him everything was all right, he turned his barb and rode away, taking the opportunity to scout farther along the high trail and the sand flats that lay ahead.

From across the ridge, Bert Jordan and Madden Curio watched Shaw ride forward. “There goes our partner ,” said Jordan. “What do you say?”

“Adios,” said Jordan with a wicked grin. “It’s about time.” He jerked his horse around and batted his boots to its sides.

Corio waited a full ten minutes longer before he took out a palm-sized piece of a broken shaving mirror and expertly cocked it at an angle against the noonday sun. A moment passed as the flash of white light glistened out three hundred yards across the jagged ridges. Then, with no show of surprise, Corio watched as three of Sepio Bocanero’s rebels eased forward from the cover of juniper and dry bracken and looked down on the wagons below.

Corio waited until he was certain Bocanero’s rebels had seen him. He gestured a hand toward the wagons below, letting them know to tell their leader that the arms were here, that he was ready for Bocanero to take possession of the shipment. He said as if the Mexicans could hear him from two hundred yards across the canyon, “Tell him his guns have arrived, gentlemen, as promised.”

Corio lowered the angle of the mirror away from the rebels as they turned and vanished back into the rocky hillside. He cocked the mirror in a different angle and sent the white light flashing down onto the trail below where Boxer and Lindsey Shagin sat in the wooden seat sharing a canteen of tepid water. “Time to get it done, men,” he said quietly to himself.

Lying stretched out in the dirt and leaning back against the wheel of his wagon, Dan Sax saw the beam of mirrored sunlight streak across the toe of his scuffed boot and said to Sonny Lloyd Sheer lying bedside him, “What the hell was that?”

“I don’t know, but I saw it too,” said Sheer, scrambling to his feet as he capped the canteen he’d been drinking from.

At the next wagon, Jimmy Bardell and Earl Hardine saw Sheer and Sax stand up quickly, and they did the same. Behind them Toledo and Hatcher followed suit, Toledo with his shotgun in his hands. “What’s going on?” Tuesday asked Bell Mason as she hurried to her feet, grabbing the shotgun on her way.

“Injuns!” said Mason, his eyes bulging with fear. He reached over into the wagon and snatched a rifle he’d kept lying beneath the wooden seat.

“Indians? You’re crazy, Bell!” said Tuesday. “That’s not Indians!” Yet even as she spoke she crouched near the wagon wheel and looked all around on the ridges lining both hillsides above them.

A tense dead silence gripped the narrow valley for a moment as each of the wagon divers looked back and forth along the rock walls and ridges surrounding them. But the silence was suddenly broken by the rustle of the tarpaulin being slung off the Gatling gun. The next sound they heard was the clank of an ammunition stack slamming into place atop the gun as it swung around toward them.

“A trap!” shouted Bell Mason. But before the words left his mouth, a rifle shot from the hillside above them nailed him in the chest and sent him flying backward, a ribbon of blood curling in his wake.

As if the rifle shot that killed Mason had been a signal, the Gatling gun began its wild, deadly chatter. Huddled beside the fourth wagon, splattered with Bell Mason’s blood, Tuesday screamed, “Shaw!” But her words were engulfed by the exploding gunfire. As bullets whistled past her, she dove under the wagon and hugged the ground.

A half mile ahead on a higher trail, Shaw did not hear Tuesday’s scream, but he did hear the endless firing of the Gatling gun and the cacophony of rifle fire from the rocky canyon walls. Turning the speckled barb quickly, he raced back along the trail toward the sound of raging battle. But before he’d gone a quarter of a mile, he caught a glimpse of one of the rebels in a dirty white peasant shirt looped with a bandoleer of bullets.

The man rose quickly from the rocks alongside the trail. He heaved a lit grenade toward Shaw, then flung himself out of sight before the iron sphere hit the middle of the trail and rolled and bounced closer. With no time to turn the barb and ride out of the grenade’s blast, Shaw did the only thing he could; he jerked the reins hard to the side, veered the barb sharply and sent both horse and himself plunging headlong off the edge of the trail.

Even before the steep hillside rushed up and met them, Shaw felt the bone-crushing blast of the grenade lift dirt and rock from the middle of the trail and launch it like buckshot in every direction. He felt it pepper him and the barb in that split second before the two of them dropped out of sight.

The sound of the grenade blast was quickly taken over by the barb’s long whinny as horse and rider separated in midair. The two of them rolled and bounced, thrashed, slammed and slid, finally coming to a stop in a spray of dust, broken juniper branches and loose rock, on a ledge over a hundred feet below.

Shaw landed on his chest and felt the air explode out of his lungs. Twenty feet away the barb’s long terrified whinny turned to a low guttural chuffing and spluttering as the battered animal tried to catch its breath and struggle up onto its hooves.

On the edge of the trail, two of Sepio Bocanero’s rebels, both wearing dirty white shirts and bandoleers of ammunition, stood looking down the hillside through a dusty haze. “I think he must be dead, this gringo,” one said to the other. He took off his straw sombrero and fanned it in front of him, stirring a cloud of thick dust.

“I will make sure,” said the man beside him. He took another grenade from inside his loose dirty shirt and hefted it in his hand, grinning. “God bless the wonderful French, eh, Migio?” he said to his cousin in his native tongue.

“What are you doing, Paco?” the first one called out loudly. He saw the man strike the fuse on the grenade and light it. It was too late to stop his comrade from heaving the sizzling grenade, but his shouting had distracted the man enough that his throw went awry. The grenade fell short and far to the right of the ledge where Shaw and the barb had landed.

“Yii-hiii,” shouted the one who’d thrown the powerful hand bomb. Down the rocky hillside a spindly fifteen-foot pine took the brunt of the blast at its trunk base. It lifted straight up over a foot, toppled down and slid a feet few before it lodged against another tree.

“We can’t be wasting these, Paco!” said Migio. “We have been ordered to use only what we must.”

“Sí, and he is dead—that much is certain,” said Paco, turning and putting his sombrero back on. “Come—we must help with the wagons.” The two walked away toward the place on the hillside where their horses stood hitched to a creosote bush.