CHAPTER SEVEN
“Well, I’m for heading for Old Mexico, but I’m open to suggestions,” Clay Kyle said to the gunmen squatting around the fire. “Damn his eyes, Chance Hurd gave us bad information on the Calthrop place. Now if we don’t salvage something, we crossed the Brazos for nothing.” He scowled and nodded in the direction of Pitman’s sprawled body. “First . . . Shadow, move that. Drag it into the dark, away from the camp.”
“Sure thing, boss,” Beck said. He motioned to another man. “Loco, give me a hand here.”
Loco Garrett was a vicious killer and hired gun, originally out of the Kentucky hill country. Certifiably insane, it was he who’d scalped Grace Calthrop. Her once beautiful hair decorated the bridle of his horse. He said, “Hell, he ain’t heavy.”
“He’s heavy enough,” Kyle said. “Help him.”
Garrett cursed under his breath, and he and Beck dragged the corpse into the darkness. They returned with Garrett carrying Pitman’s boots, Colt, and gunbelt. “Coyotes out there,” he said, resuming his place by the fire. “I didn’t see them, but I heard them.” He examined the boots closely, grunted, set them beside him, and tossed the gunbelt and holstered Colt to Beck.
“Them hungry coyotes ain’t gonna find much meat on Pitman,” Kyle said. The men laughed and he waited until they settled down and then said, “All right. Suggestions?”
“Hell, Clay, you’re the boss of this outfit. You make the call.”
This from a one-eyed man named Morris Bennett, out of Arizona’s Mogollon Rim country. He still had his shooting eye and had killed four men, one of them the gun-handy, sometime Indian Scout Jeb Walsh, said to be the meanest and hungriest sidewinder on the frontier. The newspapers at the time claimed that when Walsh worked as a teamster, he got snowed in on the Sierra Nevada’s Carson Range spur one winter. Starving, Walsh killed and ate his partner, a man named Roberts or Robertson. After he was rescued, Walsh never denied the murder, but was found not guilty by a Nevada court since he’d eaten all the evidence. Two years later, he and Bennett got into an argument over a woman in a saloon in El Paso that ended with guns drawn. The opinion of all present was that Walsh never cleared leather before Bennett put two bullets into his chest. It was also said that Walsh bled two shades of red that night, his own and the man’s he ate, though the El Paso Herald reporter who covered the gunfight didn’t mention that phenomenon.
Taking Bennett’s colorful rep into consideration and the rakish patch over his left eye, Kyle said with a measure of respect, “Y’all heard my man Morris. What do the rest of you say?”
To a chorus of approval, Bennett said, “You make the call, Clay. We’re listening.”
“Suzie,” Kyle said, “what about you?”
“I don’t call anyone my boss,” the woman said. “But I’ll pay heed to what you have to say.”
Susan Stanton had just killed a man but it made little impression on her. There was a coldness in the woman, cold as ice, as she stood in the flickering firelight, wild as a Celtic warrior princess. Her red hair streamed in the wind and scarlet strands clung to her face like sword cuts.
Kyle said, “Then all I got to say is this . . . we cross the Rio Bravo into Coahuila and then head into the Sierra del Carmen Mountains where the man they call the Sheik has his hacienda. We’ll sell the girl to him. I’m told he’ll pay top dollar for a white woman.”
“Clay, I hope you have no big ideas,” Susan said.
This brought a burst of guffaws from the men, and Kyle said, “None about you, Suzie. I need your gun too badly.”
“Sheik . . . hacienda . . . Clay, what the hell are you talking about?” Susan said.
Kyle fell silent, got his thoughts in order, and then said, “All right, listen up, all of you. An old Chinaman doing twenty years for killing a railroad section hand with an iron lining bar told me the Sheik is an Arab and his real name is Bandar al-Salam and he’s as rich as Midas. His fort is bursting at the seams with gold. He bathes in a golden tub, dines off of golden dishes, and his two hundred concubines wear shackles of solid gold. And here’s where it gets interesting . . . the Sheik is so fat he’s lowered on top of his bed partners by a system of golden ropes and pulleys.”
“Now I’ve got a picture in my mind I didn’t ever want to see,” Susan said, frowning. “Where did this man acquire all that gold? And how do you know that the Chinaman wasn’t telling you a big windy?”
“Because the old man was dying, and dying men don’t lie,” Kyle said. “The Sheik made his fortune from piracy on the South China Sea. I spent six months in Leavenworth listening to the old Chinaman’s story. He was a gunner on one of the Sheik’s junks, and, a week before he died, he told me that the Sheik was the right-hand man of the Chinese Supreme High Admiral . . . now let me get his name right.” Kyle reached into his shirt pocket and produced a small tally book. “I never could figure why, but they let me keep this in Leavenworth,” he said. He leafed through the pages and said, “Ah, yeah, here it is . . . Shap-ng-tsai . . . I wrote it down. It’s a right fancy name for a pirate rogue.”
Kyle said that although the Sheik was an Arab, the Admiral admired the Sheik’s ability as a people-killer and gave him command of twelve armed junks and eight hundred cutthroats. He captured a dozen British opium ships and held them for ransom, and hundreds of villages up and down the coast paid him tribute rather than see their frail wooden houses flattened by cannon fire.
“And pretty soon Sheik Bandar al-Salam was a rich man,” Kyle said.
Susan Stanton made a face. “For God’s sakes, Clay, get to the point.”
“I’m getting to it,” Kyle said. “The Chinese government finally cracked down on piracy and the British, upset about their opium ships, brought in a fleet of ironclads and sank every junk they came across, both guilty and innocent.”
“And then?” Susan prompted.
“And then Admiral Shap-ng-tsai quit the piracy profession and the grateful government made him an Admiral in the Chinese army,” Kyle said. “But before that Bandar al-Salam lit a shuck and my Chinaman went with him, so that’s how I know what happened. The Sheik spent three years in Mexico, moving from place to place; he built his redoubt in the Sierra del Carmen Mountains and filled it with gun-savvy hard cases that answer only to him. The Chinaman went along as a cook.”
“Clay, why are you telling us all this?” one-eyed Morris Bennett said.
“Because the Arab has too much gold and we’re going to relieve him of most of it,” Kyle said. He grinned and added nothing else.
But his wild statement drew a cheer that Susan Stanton silenced when she said, “Now that Pitman’s dead, there are seven of us.”
“Six,” Shadow Beck said. “I’m out.”
“All right, six,” Susan said. “Five men and a woman aim to steal tons of gold from a man who lives in a fortress and is guarded by an army. How difficult can that be?”
Kyle angled a hostile glance at Beck and said, “Shadow, you ain’t out. Nobody’s out. And, Suzie, you’re right. We’d face a bunch of gunmen that outnumbered us at least ten to one. No, we don’t brace the Sheik head-on. We take something very precious from him and hold it hostage.”
“Like what?” Susan said.
“Like his only misbegotten son, the spawn of the Sheik and one of his concubines,” Kyle said. “The Chinaman told me the boy was six years old and that was four years ago, so he’ll be ten now.”
“So we just walk into the Sheik’s castle, grab the kid, and walk out again?” Susan Stanton said. She made a face. “Great plan, Clay.”
“A ten-year-old boy is never still,” Kyle said. “He’ll be all over the place. We hole up somewhere and grab him when we can and then exchange him for gold.”
“It’s thin, Clay, mighty thin,” Doug Avila said. “I reckon you’re trying to buck a stacked deck. It’s a pity we can’t talk to your Chinaman. Why did he leave the Sheik?”
“He told me he saw the man hang six Mexican Rurales who’d gotten too close to his place,” Kyle said. “Since the Sheik paid President Portofino Diaz handsomely to look the other way, the murders were never investigated. But the Chinaman had seen enough. He managed to escape the Sheik but a year later killed another Chinese man in a Dallas alley . . . a knife fight over a black whore. The law didn’t care that much, but the judge gave the Chinaman two years in Yuma anyway, just to square things up. The Chinaman was a skinny little cuss, with a story to tell, so when he got out, I befriended him and found him a place to live in Wichita, since I was the deputy marshal of Sedgewick County at the time.”
Kyle sat, his head bowed over tobacco and papers, then light flared on his face as he thumbed a match into flame and lit the cigarette. He looked up and said, “Well, who’s with me?” he said. “I know it’s thin, but if we can grab the kid, we’ll all end up rich men . . . and woman. Damn it, boys, it’s never been done before. A kidnapping is something the Sheik will never expect and that’s why we got a chance to hit him with his guard down.”
“Like we hit the Calthrop place,” Susan Stanton said.
“Yeah, just that,” Kyle said. “Like we hit the Calthrop place.”
“They were all dead afore they knew it,” Morris Bennett said, his one eye glittering.
“We drew a blank with the Calthrops,” Kyle said. “But we won’t with the Sheik’s brat.”
“It ain’t much of a chance, but I’ll stick,” Avila said.
“Me too,” Loco Garrett said. “I’m willing to buck the odds. I done it plenty of times afore this.”
“Hell, I’ll give it a try. I got nothing else to do,” Morris Bennett said.
Shadow Beck didn’t say a word. He saw Kyle stare at him and nodded. “I’m in.”
“Good, then it’s settled. We head for Mexico and become rich men,” Kyle said.
“Damn right,” Loco Garrett said.
* * *
Susan Stanton lay awake, her eyes hidden, curtained by dark fans of lashes. She lay beside a sleeping Jenny Calthrop, so close they shared body heat.
Susan watched Shadow Beck silently saddle his horse and then lead the buckskin into the gloom of the night. He’d walk the animal until he was well clear of the camp and then mount and head for . . . wherever. It didn’t much matter. Susan Stanton smiled a knowing smile . . .
Shadow Beck was already a dead man.