Chapter Twenty
From the ruined, but partially roofed, officers’ quarters, Buttons Muldoon gloomily stared out at the raging thunderstorm and attendant rain that hammered across the old Fort Mason parade ground. Behind him, sitting with their backs to a wall, another eight men were crammed into what had once been a junior officer’s modest parlor but was now a rubble-strewn wreck. There were two Mexican peons, Mr. Chang and Professor Edward Drinker Cope of Yale, Professor Thomas Anderson also of Yale, Professor Algernon Makepeace of Oxford, and Professor Oscar Turner of Princeton. All four were battered and bruised after the beatings they’d taken when Dave Winter decided he didn’t like highfalutin’ professors telling him how outraged they were at his conduct.
The eighth man was a Mexican, their morose guard, a gunman that Dave Winter had referred to as Tijuana. Buttons had heard the name before, and everything he’d heard about its owner was bad. Tijuana was a killer and rapist who, at the age of thirteen, was said to have murdered his farmer parents for their horse, saddle, and fifty-three pesos in savings.
Winter’s orders to the man had been to the point: “Tijuana, if one of these sorry-looking clowns tries to escape, shoot him in the belly. Make him feel sorry, huh? But don’t shoot them all, at least not yet. I need them to dig for Len Blackburn’s buried treasure.” And all Tijuana had answered was an unsmiling, “Sí, señor.”
The Apache girl had been with Buttons and the others for a short spell, but Winter’s men had carried her off, and judging by the roars of drunken laughter now coming from the former adjutant’s office where they’d taken her, Dahteste was now dancing with the devil.
Thinking about the girl filled Buttons with despair and a sense of helplessness. He was unarmed, and the Texas Ranger who might have helped was dead, shot out of the saddle by Dave Winter. He turned his head, pretending to look around the lamp-lit room, but as he expected, the Mexican gunman stared right at him. Tijuana had pegged Buttons, short, stocky, and belligerent, as the man most likely to make a move, and he was ready for him.
A streak of forked lightning followed by a peal of thunder seemed to shake the foundations of the room and that’s when Buttons saw it . . . a flicker of alarm in the Mexican’s black eyes.
Damn it all, it seemed that one of the most feared gunman on the frontier was himself afraid of thunder. Many men who often rode the open prairie had witnessed a lightning strike that killed both a horse and its rider and they had learned to fear thunderstorms. Tijuana could be one of them.
Buttons’s nimble brain worked, coming up with a plan, discarding it, coming up with another. The storm was roaring its way north and would soon be directly overhead. He smiled to himself. What he needed was a bolt of lightning and a big bang at the same time . . . so long as it wasn’t the big bang of Tijuana’s Remington.
For his scheme to succeed, Buttons had to stand by the door and look out as he’d been doing, but he had no way to explain his plot to the others. One of the peons was very sick, but the one who’d tried to run from the ranger was game and he might help if the plan didn’t work and everything fell apart. The Celestial he didn’t know about, but Mr. Chang was smart enough to realize what his fate would be if he remained a prisoner of Dave Winter. The four professors were out of it. They’d tried to stand up to Dave Winter and paid the price and were too weakened from their beatings to help.
Buttons was aware that what he aimed to do would be dangerous and had only a slim chance of working . . . but it was better than what was facing him . . . no chance at all.
He stared into the relentless, rain-riven darkness and waited for a thunderbolt . . . and waited . . . and waited . . .
Lightning lit up the sky and thunder rumbled, but distant, as though the storm, out of spite, had decided to make a detour around Fort Mason. Buttons turned his head slightly and glanced at Tijuana out of the corner of his eye. The gunman sat with his back to the wall and was as alert as ever. With a pang of disappointment, Buttons saw that the man was riding out the storm just fine.
But a couple of tense minutes later Buttons’s big moment finally came.
BOOM!
An explosion of thunder so close that Buttons almost jumped out of his skin. Then, without a moment’s hesitation, he let out a high-pitched shriek and fell to the ground, twitching horribly.
Fear spiked at Buttons Muldoon as he lay on the rough wood floor. In a few more seconds he’d be either dead or alive. His fate was in the hands of the gods . . . and how a ruthless Mexican gunman would react. In his later years when he lived on the Mogollon Rim (1923), he’d tell Zane Grey that his life balanced on the head of a pin that night, and that he never wished to face the like again.
Buttons quit twitching and played dead. He heard the measured chink . . . chink . . . chink . . . of Tijuana’s spurs as the Mexican crossed the floor. Then the footsteps stopped.
Buttons braced himself. He planned to turn on his left side and then dive for the gunman’s legs and bring him down. Uneasy seconds ticked past. He heard the coarse laughter of Winter and his men, and then a girl’s scream. He closed his mind to what was happening in the adjutant’s office. He had to concentrate on the matter at hand . . . downing the Mexican.
But Tijuana was as smart and wary as a lobo wolf. He kept his distance and bent from the waist, his Colt in his hands. He pushed the muzzle into the back of Buttons’s neck and said, his grin thinning out the words, “Thunder doesn’t kill a man. Only the lightning does that. So . . . I’ll count to three, one, two, three, understand? If you don’t get on your feet in that time, I’ll blow your stupid gringo head off. One . . .”
“All right, damn you, I’m moving,” Buttons said.
Tijuana, real name Marco Antonio Suarez, laughed . . . and died with that laugh on his lips.
A fieldstone weighing close to thirty pounds that had been used in the original construction of the building crashed into the back of the Mexican’s head, wielded by the manacled hands of the peon Juan Perez.
Tijuana fell without a sound and was already dead from a shattered skull when he hit the ground. One of the most deadly and notorious gunmen in the West, a desperado with fifteen kills to his credit, fell to a little Mexican peasant who weighed about a hundred and twenty pounds.
Buttons jumped to his feet and recognized the Mexican, the peon who’d fled from Tim Adams, standing in the middle of the floor, staring down at the man he’d killed.
“Hell, you did good,” Buttons grinned. “Little man, you are a mucho hombre.”
The Mexican stared at him with blank brown eyes, having no idea what the hell the gringo had just said.
Buttons had no time to explain. He quickly stripped the dead man of his Remington and gunbelt and buckled it around his own waist. He crossed the floor, picked up the Winchester propped against the wall, and then said, “Right, let’s get out of here.” Sounds of drunken merriment still came from Winter’s men as he added, “Hurry . . . Professors, on your feet.”
Cope, one eye swollen shut, helped his groaning colleagues stand.
Mr. Chang grinned at Buttons and tapped his temple with a forefinger. “Mr. Muldoon, you very clever man.” Then to the peon, “And you very brave.”
Before he was thrown into the Patterson coach back at Fort Concho, the Mexican had never seen a Chinaman before, and he backed away, a little afraid of Mr. Chang.
“Mr. Chang, he doesn’t know what you said to him, but I think he caught your drift,” Buttons said. “Now let’s light a shuck.”
He herded his charges to the door and led them outside into the fierceness of the storm. As the cartwheeling rain instantly soaked him to the skin, Buttons yelled to Mr. Chang, who had his head bent against the wind, “It ain’t a fit night for man nor beast.”
Mr. Chang nodded and put his mouth close to Buttons’s ear. “Shakespeare say that hundreds of years ago. Like Muldoon, he very wise man.”
“Damn right I am,” Buttons said, his eyes fixed on the storm-tattered murk ahead of him.