Black Valley Riders

On the rear platform of the train’s caboose, two riflemen stood looking off into the line of hills rising up in the Sangre de Cristo Mountain Range. It had been well over an hour since they’d heard the last of the sporadic gunfire resound in the distance, yet that fact offered them no solace. In fact, the lapse of time only made them even more wary, more apprehensive—more expectant of trouble coming their way.

“What are we doing here? None of this makes sense to me,” one guard said to the other, an older man who wore a thick red beard, a permanent tobacco stain down one edge of his mouth.

“Really?” said the older guard. He grinned and spat off the side of the platform onto a bed of gravel lining the tracks. “Say railroad,” he instructed the younger guard.

“See, once you say railroad,” the older guard advised, “you can grab making sense by its tail and throw it right out the window.”

“Is that all you’ve learned, fifteen years with the railroads?” the younger man asked, going back to scanning the hills, the open trails leading upward out of sight.

“It’s all you need to learn, carrying a gun for these people. They didn’t hire us ’cause we’re smart.” The red-bearded guard gestured at the rifle in his hands. “They figure if we were smart enough to understand anything at all, we’d be too smart to work for them.” He spat again and chuckled. “That’s why if you get too smart they’ll fire you, or leastwise jerk your gun out of your hand and stick a pencil in it. They do not want a man armed and smart, huh-uh.” He shook his head.

“Damn railroad,” the young guard said. He paused, then said, “Think about this. We’re sitting dead-still here, exposed, in ambush country, waiting for a safe, so we can put gold in it that we’ve already got locked inside a rail car with armed guards sitting on it.”

“Because the generalissimo Ceballos wants his gold delivered to him in a safe. What the generalissimo wants, he gets these days.”

The young guard shook his head. “They’ve had three presidents in the past year. Mr. Hargrove must figure that General Ceballos is next.”

“It’s no wild guess on Hargrove’s part,” said the older guard. “This gold might just be the thing that cinches the deal.”

“Imagine what making him president will do for Hargrove and his railroads,” said the older guard. He spat and added, “Hell, he might give us goose every Christmas.”

“I wouldn’t count on it,” said the young guard. The only goose he’d give us is his big thumb up our—”

An arrow thumped into the caboose beside his head. “Jesus H. Johnson . . . ! Comadrejas!” shouted the older guard as more arrows whistled past them and thumped into the train. He threw his Winchester to his shoulder and began levering shot after shot at the horde of whooping, yelling warriors riding down on them, following the rails down out of the canyon behind them.

From along both sides of the train, guards leaned out the window and began firing. Clato Charo, the leader of the Comadrejas, waved a recently acquired Spencer rifle above his head and divided his riders, sending half along one side of the sitting train, and half down the other.

The older guard slung open the door of the caboose, shoved the younger man inside and slammed the door as a bullet tore through it and showered them with splinters. “Take the window!” he shouted, gesturing the young guard to a rear window on one side of the door while he took the other one.

As the two guards fired repeatedly and other guards inside the train continued to fight from the open train windows, the front door of the caboose swung open and shut and a former trail scout turned railroad guard stood with his rifle in hand. He gave a thin cavalier smile. “I thought you men might need a hand back here.”

“Oh, I come to fight,” said the buckskinned man. As he spoke he took his time pulling on a pair of gauntlet gloves with Indian bead braiding on their cuffs. His yellow hair hung to his shoulders, William Cody-style. “That’s Clato Charo’s Comadrejas out there. They’re not the best fighters, these Desert Weasels, you know?”

“I will, but first I’m going to try talking to them,” said the former scout. He walked to the door and grabbed the handle. “Hold your fire,” he added coolly, leaning his rifle against the wall.

The buckskinned man threw the door open wide and stood in the open doorway, his left arm raised high in a fist, a show of peace he’d learned years ago on the high mountain range.

Three arrows laced across his chest; two bullets ripped through his belly. A third bullet nailed him squarely in his forehead and sent blood and brain matter splattering all over both guards as they ducked away to avoid it. The buckskinned man flew backward the length of the caboose and fell dead against the front door.

“The most ignorant son of a bitch I ever seen!” said the older guard, wiping a streak of blood from his face as he jumped over to slam the door. “Nobody can talk to Comadrejas . . . all you can do is kill them.”

But as he closed the rear door, he caught sight of two loaded wagons and a number of riders coming along the track beyond the raging warriors, charging them from behind with a barrage of rifle fire. In the front wagon he recognized Papa Dorsey’s white beard. Slamming the door, he leaned back against it with a sigh of relief.

Rolling along in the front wagon, Brayton Shear spread a wide smile and chuckled aloud. As the Comadrejas broke away into a hasty retreat, not even firing back over their shoulders, Shear looked at Ted Lasko, who drove the wagon.

“Sometimes, Lady Luck just jumps up and slaps you cockeyed,” he said, his big black-handled Remington smoking in his hand.

“But this could not have worked out better if we had planned it,” Shear said. He stood up and waved his hat back and forth at the train, where cheers and shouting and waving hats came out of the open windows.

As Lasko rolled up beside the express car, two riflemen and a tall man in a pin-striped suit ran back to meet them. “Goodness gracious, sir! You must surely be angels!” the man in the suit said. He jerked off a black derby dress hat to reveal hair neatly parted down the middle. His brown mustache was heavily waxed and sharply pointed.

“Angels . . . ? No, sir,” Shear said modestly. “Just good men doing what good men do.” He touched his hat brim toward the man and said, “You must Mr. Oaks?”

“Indeed I am, but not to you, sir,” the man said, bubbling over with gratitude. “Call me Ronald, I must insist.”

“Well, Ronald,” said Shear, emphasizing the man’s first name almost playfully, “I’m Byron Braynard, security chief for your very employer, the Great Western Frontiers Railway. You can call me Chief.” He’d seen the name on an identification card inside a dead man’s wallet after they’d ambushed the wagons.

Shear gestured toward the second wagon pulled up behind him, and the armed riders surrounding it. “As you can see, we have brought the safe, all the way from St. Louis, as requested.”

Along the side of the train, two riflemen pulled the body of one of their own from where it lay hanging out the open window, its arms dangling toward the ground, bleeding down the side of the passenger car.

“If you’ll open the express car door, Ronald,” Shear said, “we’ll get under way. I don’t mind saying, this is a most dangerous spot. I look all around and see the potential for terrible consequence.” His eyes slid over his own men as he spoke. He almost smiled.

“Yes, right you are, Chief Braynard,” said Oaks. He hurried over to the large thick express car and gave a series of knocks. At the sound of a steel bolt sliding back inside the door, Oaks grinned at Shear and said, “Had I not given that rapping sequence, the door would still have opened, but when it opened you would not have liked the welcome.”

“Now, that is darn good thinking, Ronald,” said Shear. He looked down at Lasko and said, “Write that down first chance you get. These are the kinds of ideas I want to be hearing from my men.”

Along the side of the train, riflemen had stepped down and began to gather around the wagons. As the big door slid open, Oaks said to the riflemen, “Don’t crowd Chief Braynard and his men.”

Shear said, “Whoa! My goodness!” as the door opened and he found himself staring down the barrel of another Gatling gun, just like the one he himself had set up at Hatchet Pass. “I dare pity those Comadrejas had their attack been successful.”

Seeing Oaks and the rest of the men gathered around the wagon, the man behind the Gatling gun turned loose of the handles and stood. Beside him his loader grinned and took his hat toward Shear and Oaks.

“Chief Braynard . . . ?” the older guard repeated, looking all around at the other riflemen around him. “Hell, he ain’t Braynard—”

“Of course he’s Chief Braynard, you old fool,” Papa Dorsey snapped at the older guard. “Didn’t you hear him introduce himself?”

One shot from Dorsey’s Colt stopped him cold. The bullet hurled him and flipped him so quickly that one of his boots spun up in the air. He lay stretched out dead, a naked toe shining through a hole in his sock.

But even as he did so, Lasko sprang up from the wagon seat and put a bullet in the man standing behind the Gatling gun. He fell forward onto the gun and lay there, his arms dangling.

On the ground, Swean stood with his rifle pointed and cocked at the second man in the express car. “Hands high, loader!” he said.

As the loader jumped to the ground, Swean jerked his sidearm from his holster and pitched it away. “Go stand over there by your railroad pals,” he ordered him.

“You jakes heard him,” said Dave Pickens, gesturing with his cocked Colt, “put your iron in the dirt or we start chopping yas down!”

A couple of heads came out the windows, hands first, raised and empty. Shear grinned and jumped to the ground beside Oaks.

“That’s what I like to see,” he said, “willing participants . . . everybody doing their part to see to it nobody else has to die.” He turned back to Oaks with a dark laugh and smacked him across the jaw with the big Remington. Oaks flew sidelong, but Shear caught him by the shoulder and jerked him back into place.

“Plea-please, sir, no more . . . ,” said Oaks, blood running from a gash the Remington’s front sight made on his cheek.

“All right, Ronald,” Shear said, “what do you think of us angels now?” He shook him and said close to his ear, “Now you tell everybody here to not do anything stupid. If they do I’ll stick this gun straight down your neck and pull the trigger.”

“That’s real good, Ronald. Now you talk to them, tell them how it is.” He gave a dark grin, looking at the Gatling gun, then at the firewood wagon. “Have them get this wagon unloaded. You can even keep the firewood.”

While Oaks explained to the men that to resist would cost them their lives, Shear’s men hurriedly searched the railroad men, collecting their weapons, tossing them in big burlap feed sacks.

“What if we get set upon again by that bunch of Desert Weasels?” a guard asked Longley, knowing once the firewood was unloaded the Gatling gun was going onto the wagon.

“Run like hell, I guess,” Longley said, shrugging, snatching the man’s rifle from his hand. Beside him Papa Dorsey laughed and slapped his leg.

“Dorsey, how can you do this to us?” the railroad man asked. “You’ve been with us every day for all these years.”

When the firewood was unloaded and the railroad men were back in a line, Shear had his men pass the big gun down and set it up. Then he waved the second wagon forward—the one carrying the big safe. As soon as the canvas was loosened and thrown off, the men loosened the chains holding the big safe upright and tight to the wagon bed.

With all their effort four men rocked it back and forth until it toppled off the wagon and landed with an earth-shuddering jar and rolled and slid twelve feet down the gravel-covered hillside.

From the engine, Barnes came back behind the engineer and his fireman, his rifle aimed at their backs.

“Naw, don’t be scared, Ronald,” said Shear, as if he found the thought ridiculous. “We won’t kill you, unless you force us to, that is. We’ve killed so many railroad hogs today, we’re all sick of it.”

One of the guards looked back and forth at how many men the outlaws were keeping covered. “This is humiliating,” he said, stepping forward. “I won’t stand for it!”

Duckwald pulled the trigger on his rifle without so much as lifting it to his shoulder. The man slammed back against the express car and fell dead on the ground.

“If anybody else feels humiliated, now is the time to step forward and get yourself shot,” said Shear. “The buzzards out here will thank you for it.”

As Shear spoke, his men had climbed into the express car and began carrying heavy crates of gold coin and ingots out and stacking them on the empty wagon.

The gunman broke open a crate lid with his pistol butt and raised a handful of gold coins and let them fall through his fingers.

Papa Dorsey had walked to the engine, climbed up and fired blast upon blast of shotgun loads into the boiler lines, blowing them apart. He came walking back with a satisfied smile on his white-bearded face.

When the last of the crates were staked on the wagon, Shear’s men gathered and mounted their horses, three of them carrying burlap bags full of firearms. Before turning to his horse, Shear held his Remington out at arm’s length, the tip of it against Oaks’ head. “Ronald, I wish I didn’t have to do this—”

“Get a grip on yourself, Ronald!” said Shear. “I meant, I wish I didn’t have to say good-bye. You boys have been so hospitable.”

The mounted men hooted and laughed as Oaks’ trembling knees gave out and he fell to the ground. Shear climbed into his saddle and said to the railroaders, as he turned dead serious, “All of you remember, we could have killed you but we didn’t. Think about that before you decide to come after us. We will kill you then.”