Chapter 33
Prophet followed Baja Jack and Colter down the ridge toward the canyon choked with wiry brush, cactus, and boulders.
The trail switchbacked gradually. At the bottom of the canyon, it snaked off to the right before crossing the canyon at the only place the debris would allow. At the other side of the canyon, the trail meandered back along the base of the ridge before climbing the ridge at a steep, forty-five-degree angle.
Mean and the other horses were blowing hard in the hot sun, their coats lathered, by the time they trudged to the top of the ridge upon which the impressive masonry project of Baluarte Santiago sat like the mountain’s capstone. The regal old ruin sat facing the sea, its back to the savage-teeming wilds of Baja, silently sending out its challenges in both directions.
As Lou looked at it now, head tipped back to peer up at the grand old battlement, it looked as abandoned as it likely had been before Ciaran Yeats had moved in. The fort shone with the cracks, dimples, gouges, and discolorations of time. Having weathered the ages not without cost, the guardian of San Luis Point was silhouetted darkly and formidably against the glowing orange sun plunging toward the far western crags.
Now Prophet saw several men with rifles standing atop the stout, high walls. They were dwarfed by the sprawling masonry structure looming behind them, inside the walls.
One of the pickets stood near the wall’s right-front corner, near the snub-peaked defensive turret. The other stood to the left of the large open doorway. Both men were facing the newcomers. The one on the right stood resting a rifle on his shoulder, a cigarro dangling from between his lips as he stood studying the newcomers, head tipped curiously to one side.
“Holy cow—don’t recollect ever seein’ such a pretty sight,” Colter said.
Lou turned toward the redhead, who’d swung his horse to study the ocean lapping against a white sand beach to the east. Near shore the water was more aquamarine colored than the cobalt farther out, the low waves rolling onto the shore, laced in the white of a sparkling froth. Seagulls wheeled, shrieking.
Between the ocean and the bluff the fortification stood on, a village sprawled amongst the rocks and clean white sand—a humble but relatively prosperous-looking village of stone and adobe huts and mud jacales and establos roofed with grass or red tiles. Palm trees and organ-pipe cactus jutted among the pale structures, which appeared to stretch for at least a mile in both directions along the meandering shoreline.
Here and there stout, dark-skinned, colorfully clad women, some wearing straw sombreros, toiled in the surf, cleaning fish that had likely been hauled in from the wooden, single-masted boats that pitched at anchor out where the aquamarine water turned to cobalt. Nearly at day’s end now, the boats were darkening, their masts gilded with the angling rays of the sun.
A gun barked behind Prophet and Colter.
Both men wheeled, closing their hands over their own holstered sidearms, to stare toward the bulwark. Baja Jack and Jack’s men were all staring in that direction, as well, most also with their hands on their guns. Several of the horses sidestepped, jittery. One of the burros brayed, weary from the long ride and wary now, as well.
The gun barked again. Again. Again.
A man screamed.
Another laughed loudly.
Prophet turned to Baja Jack. “What the hell’s that all about?”
Jack grinned edgily and lifted his shoulders in a tight shrug. “Who knows? It is Baluarte Santiago.”
The laughter rose again, even more loudly than before.
It was followed by another thundering report of what sounded like a .45 revolver.
A girl screamed shrilly.
“Jesus Christ!” Prophet said, scowling at the broad, vaguely rectangular opening in the wall at the far end of the stone ramp.
Lou poked his spurs into Mean’s flanks. The horse leaped onto the ramp and moved up the incline at nearly a full gallop, its shod hooves clacking on the stones.
“Lou!” Jack cried. “Wait, pendejo!”
The little man’s admonition was nearly drowned by yet another rocketing pistol report as well as by Mean’s clacking hooves. The horse thundered across the wooden bridge that spanned the wide, dry moat ringing the bastion and hurled itself and rider through the broad open gate in the thick masonry wall.
More clacking and thunder rose behind Lou. He glanced briefly behind him to see Colter and Northwest hot on Mean’s hocks.
“Hey, hey, hey!” yelled one of the guards on the wall above Prophet.
A rifle belched. A bullet plumed dirt in the bastion’s graveled earthen yard several feet ahead of Prophet.
Lou drew back tightly on the dun’s reins and stared to his left. A man lay belly down in the gravel roughly fifty yards away from him. A girl lay in the yard between the prone man and the hulking, multistoried, castlelike structure of Baluarte Santiago rising straight out away from Prophet.
Two men stood on a balcony of that great, sprawling structure. One of the men was leaning forward, crossing his arms on the balcony rail. The other—a big, red-haired, red-bearded man in jodhpurs and a red sash pulled taut over his bulging belly—was holding two big silver-chased Russian revolvers.
The fat, red-haired man was aiming one of the Russians over the balcony rail toward the girl. The gun bucked, flames lapping from its barrel. The bullet tore into the ground near the girl, who screamed and glanced back in horror over her exposed brown shoulder at the shooter.
“Get up, you disgusting puta,” bellowed the Russian-wielding fat man on the balcony. “Run for your life. Go ahead—make a play for it, or I’ll shoot you right where you lay! Drill ya a third eye in the back of your traitorous head!”
The dark-haired man beside him, dressed all in black, threw his head back and roared.
The girl on the ground pleaded for her life in anguished Spanish. A young girl. Prophet didn’t think she was much over thirteen. She wore a short red dress with green and gold embroidering, and that was all. One of the dress’s thin straps hung down her thin, brown arm.
“Hold on!” Prophet shouted then booted Mean and Ugly into a gallop once more.
“Dangit, Lou!” Colter protested behind him.
Ignoring his trail partner, Prophet and the line-back dun dashed toward the Mexican girl in the skimpy red dress.
“Hold your fire, you son of a buck!” Prophet bellowed, checking Mean down abruptly then leaping out of his saddle.
He took two running strides and then dropped to a knee beside the sobbing girl, stretching one arm around her slender shoulders while placing his right hand over his still-holstered Peacemaker’s grips.
A Gatling gun rattled above and behind him. Reacting more than thinking, Lou ripped the Peacemaker from its holster, wheeled, and saw a man crouched over a mosquito-shaped brass gun on the wall near the open gate. The man had centered the machine gun’s maw on Prophet’s chest, the gun’s swivel squawking. He’d just started to turn the Gatling’s crank when Prophet drew a bead on him and fired.
The man jerked backward, firing the Gatling gun into the dirt several feet to Prophet’s left, the hiccupping reports echoing shrilly. The gunner slumped forward, cursing in Spanish, then slid forward down the brass canister and over the wall. He screamed as he stretched out in the air, spreading his arms and legs like wings before hitting the ground at the base of the wall with a loud grunt and a crunching thud.
Prophet spied movement in the corner of his right eye. He turned his head quickly to see another man run toward him, extending a rifle.
Prophet punched a bullet through the red necktie adorning the man’s chest, between the flaps of a hand-tooled deerskin vest.
The man dropped to his knees in the gravel before falling and rolling. He lay on his back writhing briefly and groaning through gritted teeth before he fell silent and still in death. His bloody necktie lay slack against his chest.
Around Prophet rose the metallic rasps of rifles being cocked. Men were cursing in both English and Spanish. A cold stone dropped in Lou’s belly when he realized that he was nearly surrounded by heavily armed men and they were all moving toward him fast.
“Lou!” Colter grunted out somewhere behind him.
He knew what the kid was thinking. Now he’d done it. This time, he’d really done it. Scratch, get a fresh shovel ready . . .
Then a man’s voice shouted commandingly, “Hold your fire! Hold your fire, lads! Everyone, hold your fire and just take it easy one bloody minute!”
Prophet stretched his gaze toward the two men standing on the second-floor balcony. The balcony hadn’t been part of the original fortification. It had been improvised with steel frames and wooden planks. The fat, red-haired, red-bearded man stared over the long barrel of his Russian revolver at Prophet. He was drawing a bead on Lou’s forehead. Lou could feel that bead tickling him just above the bridge of his nose.
The sweat on his back turned cold.
The black-haired man standing beside the red-haired man also held two pistols, normal-sized. He held them down low by his legs clad in black whipcord, outside of the black fustian he wore. He stood scowling over the balcony rail at the disruptor.
Lou lowered his gaze from the massive main building of the bulwark of Santiago, to the men surrounding him. They were dirty and bearded and they were Mexicans and Yanquis and several other races. They smelled bad and they looked even worse, with angry eyes cast with a feral sort of amusement. They edged closer and closer around Lou and Colter Farrow, who had swung down from his horse and now stood holding his reins, looking around as Prophet was.
“Big man,” yelled the fat redheaded gent, who was also bespectacled, Prophet now saw, the lenses of the man’s small, round glasses glinting in the afternoon’s softening light, “who in the bloody hell are you and just who in the bloody hell do you think you are, ridin’ in here, all blood ’n’ thunder, like some bloody knight in shinin’ armor gallopin’ in to save that there damsel in distress? Gallopin’ in on the ugliest horse I believe I’ve ever laid my eyes on, I might add . . .”
Mild laughter issued from the men around Prophet in response to the slight against Mean and Ugly.
He’d spoken with an Irish accent.
That had to be Yeats himself.
Hoof thuds sounded from the direction of the bulwark’s open gate.
“More comin’, Major!” a man shouted from the wall. “It’s Jack an’ his asses!” he added with a chuckle.
Lou and everyone else swung their gazes toward where Baja Jack was leading Pepe and the burros and his dozen guards over the wooden bridge, through the main gate, and into the bulwark’s yard. Jack held his trigueño to a slow, leisurely pace while holding both his hands in the air, palms out in supplication.
He was grinning, showing his bad teeth, that one eye crossing so severely it appeared fascinated with the tip of his beaklike nose.
“Baja Jack, you old devil!” Yeats called, looking at the most recent newcomers but keeping his Russian aimed at Prophet. “Lookee here what the cat dragged in, fellas! You got somethin’ for us, Jack? We been expectin’ you, you old mestizo!”
Jack chuckled, his toothy smile in place. “Just what the doctor ordered, Major! Just what the doctor ordered! As for that fella there . . .” Jack chuckled again and wagged his head, like a father with a child who’d proven an exercise in frustration. “Don’t mind him. He’s a loco gringo friend of mine. He’s with me. Both of these fellas are!”
Jack stopped his horse just beyond the ragged circle of men bearing down on Lou and Colter with rifles and pistols. Jack’s smile became a glare when he peered down at Prophet but his glowing smile was back when he turned again to Yeats, chuckling nervously.
“He’s with you?” Yeats asked, incredulous.
“Sure enough,” Jack said. “I didn’t have nothin’ to do with him ridin’ in here all blood ’n’ thunder—I’d like to make that clear!”
“What in hell does he think he’s doin’?” asked the dark-haired man standing beside Yeats and who Prophet assumed was Yeats’s second-in-command, Lieutenant Will-John Rhodes. Rhodes looked older than Prophet had imagined. But then, so did Yeats, which was understandable, since all the stories about them were a good twenty years old and more.
They’d been down here a long time.
Prophet glanced down at the girl cowering on her hands and knees, her forehead pressed against the ground, then shot a glare at Yeats. “What the hell were you doin’ to this poor girl here, Yeats? Usin’ her for target practice? I don’t know where you come from, but where I come from . . .”
“Where the hell do you come from?” Yeats slowly lowered the Russian, scowling skeptically at the big gringo. “You tend to go easy on your vowels and roll your consonants. . . like a Southern man.”
He’d said those last two words with none-too-vague accusing.