Herne was torn between anger at the woman and a dreadful fascination in the scenes of the Mexican camp. He tore his eyes away for a few moments.
‘What the Hell are you doin’ here?’
She was panting with tension, her own eyes going past him to look down through the darkness into the bowl of light.
‘I couldn’t wait. Not on my own. Truly, I’m sorry, Jed. But … Oh, Blessed Jesus! Look at that.’
‘I’m looking.’
‘Can’t you?’
His face was bitter. The voice cold as the midnight wind through a deserted graveyard. ‘Could have done. Maybe. Something. But with you here ...’
‘I can’t go back.’
‘Hell, I know that.’
Both of them stopped talking, each wrapped in the visions from the camp in Lost Woman Canyon.
There were several fires there, some for cooking, but some simply to give light for the bandits’ pleasures. Jed had automatically counted the men. Ten left. Most of them drunk, or perhaps high on mescal.
The assortment that he’d suspected. There were five Mexicans. Three breeds, all dressed like the first sentry had been in traditional Apache clothes. The ninth man was a negro, very tall, lounging back, strumming at the guitar, a half-empty bottle at his side.
And the tenth was El Poco himself.
Jesus Maria Diego.
Shaped like a malevolent nightmare. Less than five feet tall and fat. A round head set on top of a round body, like a child’s drawing, with a thin moustache and eyes that looked black from a distance.
Herne and Carola Ray were barely thirty yards from the nearest of the fires, but the shootist knew that they were reasonably safe. Just as a man in a well-lit room can see little of movement beyond his windows, so the bandits would be able to see nothing beyond the bright circle of their own fires.
They were close enough to see everything, and to hear most of what was happening.
They could particularly hear Jesus Maria Diego. He laughed a lot. A girlish giggling, that seemed to bubble up from some obscene deeps within his body.
El Poco was stylishly dressed in a silk shirt, marked down the front with whiskey, buttons torn where his belly had put too great a strain on the material. His pants were elegantly cut, but they were stained. The bandit leader was very drunk and the fly buttons gaped open, revealing a monstrous penis. Though he might be a dwarf, there was nothing dwarfish about his sexual equipment. It seemed close on a foot long, bouncing against his thighs as he jigged to the music of the guitar, thick as a baby’s forearm.
He laughed a lot.
‘Jed?’
‘Yeah. What?’
‘Where’s Ike and Thad? I don’t see them.’
She was squinting, shading her hand, her voice an insistent whisper above the crackling of the fires and the calling and laughing of the bandits. Jedediah had seen the two prisoners, but he wasn’t sure that he particularly wanted the woman to see them. Not until she had to
‘Carola.’
‘What is it, Jed?’
‘Get a good hold on yourself.’
‘Why?’
‘Just keep quiet.’
‘I am.’
‘Then look yonder.’
From where she was, a couple of yards lower on the ledge, it was difficult for her to see where the shootist pointed and she levered herself up to look in the direction of ...
‘Noooo!’ The cry was muted, barely a ripple of sound, yet its intensity vibrated through her body She lowered her face to her arms and lay there, unmoving, fighting to steady her breath.
Herne had caught rumors of El Poco and his unusual tastes, but he hadn’t realized how far they had gone through the rest of the gang.
Thaddeus Ray was tied naked, spread over a rough framework of branches. His legs were forced apart and his ankles bound to the bar that ran across the base while his hands were lashed behind his back, a further cord pulling them up tight to his neck. The position meant that his buttocks were forced unnaturally high.
The fire glistened on the back of his thighs, giving mute evidence of the way that the Mexicans had been using him for their own vicious pleasures, darker streaks of blood telling their own story of agony. A hank of rag was tied in his mouth, forcing the jaws apart, stopping him from screaming.
Isaac was a few yards round to the right, nearer El Poco himself. He was also naked, and tied. Bound with rawhide thongs into a kneeling position, head strained by having his wrists brought up behind his back in a similar way to his brother. Even as Herne watched one of the breeds staggered up to the helpless man, calling something out to one of his fellows, bringing a burst of rowdy laughter. The man unbuttoned the thin cotton pants, spreading his own legs to make sure he was at the right height. Grabbing Ike Ray by the hair, tangling his fingers and tugging to force the prisoner’s mouth open wider.
Herne watched silent, ignoring the sobbing from Carola Ray. As long as she wept quietly, her reaction didn’t concern him. There was a temptation to take his Sharps and put a bullet through the skull of the breed, but there was little point. If he was to try and save the lives of the two men it had to be planned. Carefully planned.
But he marked the Apache down, noting that he wore a shirt of bright red flowers against a white background. Herne would remember him.
After he had finished using Ike Ray the breed gave his hips a final contemptuous jerk, wiping himself on the white man’s hair. Giving him the final insult of urinating in his upturned face before swaggering away.
El Poco had watched the degrading spectacle and called out to his man in his thin, sniggering voice.
‘What did that cur say, Jed?’ asked Carola, finally forcing herself to watch.
‘He said it would soon be time for the horses to change and take a turn about.’
‘You mean Thad is to … Oh, Jesus Christ, help me now and spare them from this suffering. Smite down these ungodly bastards and send them spinning to eternal suffering in the flames of Hell!’
Herne looked around the camp, trying to ignore the two Ray brothers, seeing that the bandits had built themselves a rough shelter of branches against the back wall of the canyon. Presumably that was where they would all be sleeping. Though there was a smaller hut by the further cliffs, which must be where El Poco would take his own rest.
Was it worth waiting until they fell asleep, or would that be too late for Thad and Ike?
‘Is that blood on Ike’s face?’ asked Carola, straining up on one elbow to see better, her initial revulsion overcome by a morbid fascination.
‘Yes.’
‘They have beaten him before using him to?’ But she couldn’t finish the sentence.
‘Sort of.’
‘What does that mean, Jed?’
‘Means that I guess they knocked out all his teeth first.’
‘Why?’
He looked at her for a moment, seeing the tautness of the skin across her cheeks, the eyes blinking with nervous strain. ‘So as he don’t bite them.’
For a moment he thought that she was going to throw up over the edge of the narrow trail, but she managed, with a visible effort, to control herself.
~*~
An hour passed.
The shootist still hadn’t seen anything approaching a chance and his plan was still dependent on all the bandits falling asleep and leaving Thad and Ike somewhere that he might sneak in to rescue them.
He knew damned well what a long shot that was.
And like most long shots it didn’t come off the way he’d hoped.
El Poco had been waddling around the camp, drinking from the neck of a green bottle, his arm around the waist of a young boy. Sometimes around the waist, and sometimes inside his pants.
During the hour that Carola and Herne had been watching, Ike and Thad had mostly been left alone. Nobody further had come to use the photographer brother and only once had Thad been sodomized, by another of the breeds. The negro had approached Thaddeus, still carrying the guitar, but had passed on by to where one of the bandits was ladling out what smelled like a chili stew.
Most of the band seemed tired and Herne noticed that several of them were already making their way towards the hut, disappearing and not coming out again. His guess was that the time must be easing close towards midnight.
Jesus Maria Diego and his young catamite walked towards the helpless Thaddeus and Herne eased the barrel of the Sharps over the edge of the ledge, ready to shoot the dwarf down. El Poco drew his pistol, flourishing it at his prisoner, whispering something to his lover, who laughed and kissed his leader on the lips, stooping low to reach him. The bandit waved the gun around once more and then bolstered it. Herne noticed that it looked like a silver-chased, pearl-gripped Peacemaker.
He pulled back the rifle, relaxing again for a moment. Carola laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘What was happening, Jed? Why were you going to shoot him down just then?’
‘Somethin’ I heard ‘bout El Poco.’
‘What?’
‘Doesn’t signify.’
‘Tell me. Please.’
‘No. Talking never gets it done.’
‘I want to know.’
‘Just a tale I heard ‘bout him and a priest.’
‘What?’
The shootist rolled on his elbow and looked at her again. Seeing that despite the appalling strain she was enduring, there was nothing in her face that told him she might give in.
‘You’ve seen what a sick bastard he is?’
‘Good Lord, yes! I would rather have a dying leper in my bed.’
‘He did his usual game with this priest. Old man, they say. The priest cursed him all the time, while he was taking his pleasures with him.’
‘And?’
‘Señor Diego had his men hold the priest, while he drew that pretty pistol of his.’ It seemed for a moment that the woman was going to stop him. She opened her mouth to protest and then closed it again. ‘Rammed it up the old man and pulled the trigger six times.’
‘He is the Devil himself!’
‘Me … Guess I’d rather meet the Devil than El Poco any day of the week, including Sundays.’
~*~
So Herne waited with the woman.
~*~
Further down the canyon, sitting in a patient circle, Geronimo and his warriors also waited.