Chapter 25
“Don’t you shoot my horse, you low-down pile of goat dung!” Prophet choked out.
Mean and Ugly glared at the drunk rurale staggering toward him. Casal dragged his heels across the gravelly ground, spurs ringing hoarsely. The sergeant extended the cocked, long-barreled pistol toward the line-back dun’s head, the horse lowering his head still farther, crouching like a bare-knuckle fighter, pawing the ground with his right front hoof.
“Casal!” Prophet wheezed.
As if echoing Prophet’s own attempted yell, another voice bellowed, “Casal?”
The voice sounded like a frog’s loud croak. It was amplified by the stony ridges surrounding the encampment where the pig still roasted, its juices popping and crackling where they dribbled onto the fire’s flames. The single word, Casal, reverberated around the broad arroyo where it formed a bowl nestled between escarpments that Prophet hadn’t seen in the darkness of the previous night.
Casal froze, looked around.
The other rurales did the same, looking up and around, trying to follow the echoing voice to its source.
“Casal, you dirty pig! You offal of a donkey and the afterbirth of a jackass!” The epithets, also croaked out in a loud, froglike voice in a dirty border version of Spanish mixed with English, were followed by the disembodied laughter of several men. The laughter came from several places amongst the rocks overlooking the encampment. The speaker laughed the loudest. It was almost an effeminate giggle punctuated by snorting guffaws. When the laughter stopped, the froglike voice said, “Put that gun down before I drill you a second hole through your hairy ass, Casal, and leave you sobbing for your mongrel cur of a mother!”
There was the loud, metallic ratcheting of a rifle being cocked.
“Prepare to die, you ugly dog!” the frog croaked again, this time more shrilly.
“Jack!” Casal wheeled, glaring up into the rocks, his eyes bright with rage mixed with fear. “Jack, is that you, you old man-turtle?”
Snorts and giggles drifted down from the rocks.
Casal wheeled again. “Jack!” he screeched, spittle flecking from his lips.
The other rurales had clawed pistols from their holsters or grabbed their rifles from around the fire and were looking around as wildly, as fearfully, as the sergeant.
“Jack!” Casal wailed.
Several fist-sized rocks tumbled down from a jagged rock wall. Casal swung his pistol toward them and fired, the gun’s crack echoing loudly.
“Jack, show yourself, you little turtle!”
“Casal!” the froggy voice yelled again.
“Show yourself, Jack!” Casal wailed, dragging his spurs as he looked around in desperation, a thin tendril of gray smoke curling from his revolver’s barrel. “Show yourself, you ugly little spider!”
More snorts and chuckles drifted down from the rocks.
“Prepare to shake hands with el diablo, Casal, you hijo de puta!”
“Jack!” Casal swung his revolver again and triggered another shot.
His shot was answered by another shot—this one from the rocks.
Casal’s head jerked back. He staggered backward, his gun hand dropping to his side. He twisted around, spurs chinging. As he turned toward where Prophet’s and Colter’s heads sprouted from the sand, Lou saw a quarter-sized hole in the upper left center of the sergeant’s forehead. Casal stumbled farther backward and then dropped to the ground and lay quivering about six feet to Prophet’s left.
Prophet looked at Colter. Colter stared back at him, eyes wide.
Lou scrunched up his face in dread. Ah hell . . .
“¡Mátalos!” came a rumbling roar in Spanish from up high in the rocks. (“Kill them!”)
The rurales began running in all directions, screaming. None took more than three or four steps, however, before rifles began crackling in the rocks around and above them.
Bullets peppered the scrambling rurales, punching through their gray tunics and spitting blood every which way. The rurales danced and hopped and skipped as though a band had just begun sawing a jovial tune, only this dance included tooth-gnashing screams and shrieks and shouted epithets as the dancers’ legs crumpled and the dead men dropped in ragged, bloody piles on the ground around Prophet and Colter.
Because of his confined position, Prophet couldn’t see all of the rurales, but he could see enough to know that whoever was slinging lead at them from the surrounding scarps was doing fast, messy, but decisive work. Blood spurted past Prophet’s left eye to stain the sand before him. Another spurt struck his left cheek and dribbled down his cheek to his unshaven jaw.
Ah hell . . .
A second later a rurale staggered toward him, holding both arms across his belly. He inadvertently kicked sand in Prophet’s face. He dropped to the ground and rolled onto his back to lie belly up between Lou and Colter. He writhed, glanced at Lou, and lowered a bloody hand to the old Remington holstered on his left thigh. Keeping his pain-racked, angry eyes on Prophet, his lips stretched back from his teeth, the rurale slid the Remy from its holster. He cocked the weapon and extended it toward Lou’s head.
“Nah,” Prophet said, dragging the words out in a fateful drawl. “Don’t do that . . .”
The rurale grinned and tightened his finger on the Remy’s trigger. A bullet punched into the rurale’s right temple and tore out a fist-sized chunk of skull over his left ear as it exited and plunked into the now-bloody, brain-splattered ground. The rurale triggered the Remington, but the round flew over Prophet’s head to spang off a rock behind him.
Prophet’s ears rang. Beneath the ringing, he thought he heard the dwindling of the gunfire. He looked over the bloody carcass of the dead rurale. Colter was staring back at him, the redhead’s lips pursed ironically. Colter also had a few blood splatters on his left cheek, over the Sapinero brand. Sand clung to it.
Prophet laughed. “You just can’t beat Mexico for fun and adventure—can you, Red?”
Colter didn’t respond. He was gazing at something over Prophet’s head, something behind Lou and on his left. Because of the ringing in the bounty hunter’s ears, he felt the reverberations of the approaching riders through the ground around him before he heard them. There must be a good dozen of them, judging by the mini shock waves assaulting his back and shoulders.
He grinned over the dead rurale again at Colter. “As they say in the opry houses, reload your pistols for act two!”
Colter kept his eyes on the riders approaching behind Prophet. Lou heard the drumming of the hooves beneath the slowly dwindling ringing in his ears. He saw the first rider in the corner of his left eye as the man rode up on that side of him, stopping his horse maybe ten feet away between the two all-but-interred gringos. Two then three then four then several more galloped into view, drawing back on their wide-eyed horses’ reins and stopping abruptly to stare down at Lou and the redhead.
Prophet kept an eye on those frisky mounts’ prancing hooves. A fella was never more vulnerable than when only his head was sticking up out of the earth.
His poor heart was drumming another frenetic rhythm.
Now, who have we . . . ?
The newcomers staring down at him were a rough-looking lot. About the only difference between them and the rurales was that these men weren’t in uniform. As Prophet’s sidelong gaze swept them, he thought he saw some gringos amongst them.
He shaped an affable grin and said, “How do!”
The newcomers looked at one another as they were still getting their horses settled down. A couple chuckled. One laughed loudly. Then one of them, chuckling, swung down from his saddle and dropped the reins of his whickering Arabian, called a trigueño for its three shades of brown. The mount was looking down skeptically at the two heads poking up out of the ground. Apparently, the horse had never seen such a bizarre spectacle as two heads growing in the desert.
Its rider ambled over toward Lou and Colter. The man was as odd a looking duck as Lou had ever laid eyes on. If he wasn’t a dwarf, he’d missed being one by only an inch or so. Prophet doubted if the top of the man’s head, beneath a black velvet, silver-trimmed, wagon-wheel sombrero, would come up much farther than the bounty hunter’s belt buckle.
When Lou was standing aboveground, that was, and not inside it.
The short man was nearly as broad through the hips and shoulders as he was tall. He was severely bandy-legged. His boots must have been a size five or six; they were black and hand-tooled. He wore a fancily stitched bull-hide vest over a calico shirt, deerskin charro leggings, and a Colt .44 on his left hip, in the cross-draw position. The revolver appeared enormous on the man’s round, child-sized body, which he must have had to have his clothes specially tailored for.
His face didn’t go with his body at all. It was a buzzard face, with a long, hooked nose and two close-set, dark brown eyes. Long, grizzled brown hair laced with gray hung down from beneath the sombrero, and a good bit of it poked out from the little man’s ears, which were way too big for the rest of him. But, then, his head was also too big for the rest of him so maybe his ears didn’t look so out of place, after all.
“What on God’s green earth do we have here?” said the little man, stopping near Prophet and Colter, pinching his leggings up at the thighs then hunkering into a squat, leaning forward to rest his weight on the balls of his little boots. He’d spoken in fluent English though Prophet had a keen sense that he was the same man who’d spoken in fluent border Spanish from amongst the rocks overlooking the encampment.
The little man cut his amused, befuddled gaze between Prophet and Colter, chuckling. He was missing one upper front tooth. The other was crooked and brown.
Prophet’s heart lightened a little as he gazed up at the little man and said, “¿Americano, amigo?”
The little man grinned down at Prophet. If his face was raptorial, his eyes were even more so, one of which was severely unmoored so that it listed to the inside corner of the socket. Both eyes owned the off-putting cast of unbridled lunacy. “In a roundabout way, I reckon. The name’s John Brian Rynn-Douglas, don’t ya know.” He thumped himself in the chest with a thick little thumb. “Baja Jack, they call me down here!”
He gazed at Prophet, apparently waiting for recognition of his handle to show in Lou’s eyes. When no sign of recognition came, the little man turned to Colter, who stared back at him with the skin above the bridge of his nose furled dubiously.
“Jack!” the little man said, throwing his hands out as though to indicate his own diminutive, bizarre-looking self. “Baja Jack! Why, everybody’s heard of Baja Jack!” He paused. “Why, the bean-eaters down here run like frightened children when they hear the name!”
“We’re new down here,” Colter lied. At least, Prophet wasn’t new down here. But Lou had never heard of Baja Jack, either.
“Oh, is that so? Hmmm.” The strange little dwarfish man known as Baja Jack scrutinized Colter’s head, since that’s all there was to look at aboveground. He pointed at Colter’s cheek as though he were the first one to come across the Sapinero brand on the redhead’s face. “Say, that’s a nasty tattoo you got there, Red!”
“Thank you.”
“Say, Baja Jack?” Prophet said.
Baja Jack whipped around with a startled grunt. “Huh?”
“I don’t s’pose you’d see fit to dig us out of here, would ya?” Prophet gave an obsequious grin. “Seein’ as how we’re fellow gringos an’ all.”
“Well, I don’t know,” Jack said. “I see no reason to rush into things. You rush into things in Mexico, you often find yourself just where you two done found yourselves, and worse!” He gave one of his odd, snorting laughs at that. “Why did Sergeant Casal and them other rurale vermin bury you in the first place?”
Prophet saw no reason to lie. Especially since it looked as though Baja Jack didn’t favor rurales any more than Prophet himself did. “We killed several others, including Lieutenant Ruiz, back along the trail a piece.”
“Oh? Really?” Baja Jack fingered the stringy, greasy goat whiskers hanging from his chin. He had more whiskers hanging above his thin upper lip, and they were just as stringy and greasy as those on his chin. “Ruiz, eh? Well, wouldn’t you know Oscar Ruiz was a damn good friend of mine, you two sons of low-down dirty swine sons of putas!”
Baja Jack fairly roared those last words, bent forward at the waist, his face swelling up and turning as red as a Mexican sunset. He grabbed the Colt .44 from the holster on his left hip, held it barrel-up, and, glaring down at Lou, clicked the hammer back.
Prophet’s heart thudded. All hope in him died. Yep, this was his final resting place, all right. Right here near where that javelina was getting cooked down to black ashes.
“Good goin’, Lou,” Colter castigated him.
“Ah hell,” Prophet said with a sigh.
He lowered his gaze to the blood-splashed sand in front of his face, awaiting the bullet. He winced, anticipating the .44’s roar though he probably wouldn’t hear it. He’d probably be dead by the time the report reached his ears.
Snorting laughter sounded.
Prophet rolled his eyes up to see Baja Jack’s shoulders jerking as, still holding the cocked pistol barrel-up in his right hand, his odd, snorting guffaws bubbled up out of his lumpy chest, beneath the two cartridge bandoliers crisscrossed over his buckskin tunic. His raptorial features were crumpled like wadded-up parchment, and tears dribbled down his cheeks.
“Don’t you realize I’m just joshin’ with you fellers?” Baja Jack threw his head back and gave a croaking, rasping yell at the sky, throwing both his stubby arms up and firing a slug into the sun glaring down at him. Lowering his arms, he turned to Lou again and said, “I always did hate that snake Ruiz, and Casal even more. In my book, there ain’t no such thing as a good rurale lessen it’s a dead rurale!”
Baja Jack holstered his pistol and waved toward the men sitting their horses behind him. Continuing to chuckle at his joke, which he’d taken such open delight in, as though it were the best prank he’d ever come up with, he yelled, “Dig ’em out, boys!” He repeated the order in fluent Spanish, ostensibly for those Mexicans in his gang who did not understand English.
Prophet was almost giddy with the prospect of being freed from his earthy confinement. Still, he eyed Baja Jack warily. He wasn’t sure if he and Colter hadn’t leaped from the frying pan into one more fire.
A half-dozen men grabbed the folding camp shovels of the dead rurales and three each set to work digging away the sand from around Lou and Colter. Prophet watched each shovelful as it was scooped up and tossed away. Each shovelful of sand was a stay of execution.
When he could work his arms free of the ground, he clawed at the sand. Baja Jack’s men continued digging around him until he could, with deep grunts of exertion, pull each of his legs free of the sucking ground. He clawed as though out of quicksand away from the hole. So did Colter until they both lay side by side, breathing hard.
Prophet glanced at the sand-caked redhead. “Next time you see me headin’ to Mexico, you might want to try a different direction.”
“Duly noted.”