Chapter Four

It was the craziest damn yarn Tucker ever heard. 

He’d have disbelieved every word if he hadn’t heard it from the peasant’s own lips. The simple Mexican’s terror was real. It made the cowboy wonder what they were going up against. He wasn’t exactly sure, but his gut was they were going to earn whatever money they were going to make. 

The sun was now forty-five degrees above them, burning down mercilessly in the iron sky. They’d been on the trail for about an hour now and were feeling the heat of the day. Across the plain, the three gunfighters and the peasant kept at a brisk trot as the Mexican paused the story to sip from his canteen, shuddering at the harrowing memories. Tucker exchanged glances with Fix and Bodie and from the uneasy expressions of his cohorts saw they were just as unnerved by what they’d heard. 

The little man decided the horse had had enough rest, dug his sandals into the flanks of his brown mustang and urged it into canter, and the other riders followed suit. 

It was as if the devil were snapping at the peasant’s heels as he rode hard for a town three hours somewhere ahead. Hooves pounded the parched rocks and pebbles of the trail, shrouding them in a cloak of dust that made the figures of the horses and riders tall silhouettes. All around them stretched unbroken desert until the far-off distant turquoise and purple ridges of the tan and dun Sola Rosa mountains.

Fifteen minutes later they spotted a gleaming blue thread in a chaparral-strewn arroyo south of them. 

Tucker yelled ahead over the loud clop of the hooves at the hunched back of the hard-charging peasant. “There’s a river yonder south! Let’s water the horses!” He had to shout it three times at the top of his lungs before the brown man’s startled, haunted face looked back over his shoulder. The Mexican nodded as he tugged on his reins and reared around his horse to ride back next to the slowing mounts of the others.

“Whoa. Whoa,” Bodie said, patting the side of his stallion’s sweat-soaked neck.

“Take a break,” growled Fix, who never smiled.

“This was some bad idea,” complained the Swede, wiping his sopping hair with his filthy Stetson. “It’s crazy hot out here.”

“Stop yer bitchin’. It ain’t even noon. Then you’ll see hot.” Fix spat a loogie of tobacco juice.

“That’s why we ride in the afternoon and evening and always done since we got south of the border,” griped Bodie.

“Mexican wants to make his town by noon, and that’s the deal we made and it’s what we’re gonna do. Suck it up,” Tucker bossed. “Right now, let’s wash these nags down before they keel.”

Tucker rode out in the lead and they negotiated their way over the uneven ground until they came up a small incline leading past the cactus and boulders down into the draw. A creek trickled past over the gleaming dark damp stones.

Hauling off his hat and hunkering down by the edge of the creek, Tucker felt that dull ache in his leg from the bullet he took a year ago in Arizona. They pulled the slug out but the pain was getting worse, a little each month. How long was he going to be able to ride, he wondered, getting an uncomfortable intimation of his own mortality. Cupping both dirty weathered hands, he splashed some water on his face and enjoyed the refreshing, bracing chill of the fresh creek. The drops trickled down his chin and with one hand he spooned a few sipfuls into his parched lips. Then he dunked his canteen, turning the steel mouth toward the flow of the river, and watched the bubbles percolate up into the rapids. With a grunt, he stood and straightened.

Squinting, the big gunfighter peered to where Fix and Bodie stood chatting a few yards away by their horses that were tethered to the tree batting their noses against each other. Bodie had fired up a cigar and was blowing a cloud of acrid smoke. Just then, the Swede’s colt’s dangling member blasted a huge yellow jet of urine explosively onto the ground and splashed his owner’s legs and boots, resulting in a burst of cussing and flailing from Bodie, who punished the horse by punching it square in the jaw with a clenched club fist. The cowboy hurt his hand more than the horse and yowled, shaking his fingers and dancing around hugging his fist. Fix thought this was funny, and buckled over convulsively in laughter, slapping his knee. Bodie tossed his piss-drenched cigar onto the ground and stomped it to pieces, stalking away, while Fix chortled even harder, until he began to cough and spit. Tucker wasn’t laughing.

The Mexican was gone.

Tensing, Tucker saluted his hand over his brow to block the sun and scanned the area this side of the draw. No sign of the peasant. About to take a walk to start looking, he caught a sudden movement in the corner of his eye. The peasant rose from some drab green mesquite bushes, tying the rope belt around his britches. The small figure started walking back toward the arroyo, keeping his head down, and Tucker eyeballed the smooth, graceful movements he made. This was the prettiest man he’d ever seen, the gunfighter remarked to himself. That brown skin was soft and unblemished even for those people, the lips were soft and full, and the peasant’s smell was sweet and appealing for a man even after at least a day’s ride without bathing. The body odor of the peasant reminded him more of the Mexican whores he’d been with over the last few months. If Tucker didn’t know better… 

The Mexican jumped down the row of small boulders to the rubble near the draw and walked to his horse, untethering its hemp bridle and leading it to the creek, where the unkempt mustang ducked its big head and drank. 

Tucker kept his eyes fixed on the peasant, watching the way the man tenderly stroked and kissed the horse with an almost feminine gentility to his movements.

Yes, if he didn’t know better…

Damn.

“You believe this Mexican’s story?” Fix whispered.

Tucker didn’t notice that his partners had walked up beside him, grouping close and whispering out of earshot of their new saddle buddy.

“The Mexican’s a fool, either ignorant or crazy,” replied Bodie. 

“A fool and his money are easily parted,” Tucker stated flatly. Passing a flask of whisky, they took turns taking pulls and watching the peasant in rags sitting on a rock praying desperately to a cross on a string of beads in his hands. “And it’s easy money, boys.”

“Damn easy.”

“I’ll drink to that.” Bodie chuckled and swigged the hooch.

“Go easy on that. It’s got to last us,” Fix scolded.

“I feel sorry for the sad sunufabitch.” The Swede belched with the smell of corn. 

Not that sorry, Tucker observed, seeing the opportunistic glint in his saddlemate’s blue eyes. Himself, he was having his doubts about the rightness of robbing a sorry wretch like this Mexican. But he and his friends needed the money, and these were tough times. They had fallen hard, he ruminated, things having come to this.

A wave of self-doubt seemed to pass through all three men, who often thought the same thing at the same time. The gunfighters exchanged glances and shrugged it off. Time to act, not think. 

By now it was late morning, and the riders had stopped to rest their horses in the shady mesquite ravine by the burbling creek long enough. Too easy to get lazy and dawdle, when there was work to be done. Tucker, Bodie and Fix wet down their animals one last time. 

“We don’t even know there is any silver,” Fix said.

They looked at each other. It was true.

Tucker shook his head, pondering, his brain masticating over the situation like an itch he couldn’t quite scratch. “That town has come up against something, that’s for damn sure. That wretch is scared spitless, anybody can see that. I say he’s telling us the truth, or least what he thinks is. Likely, it’s just bandits. But bad ones.”

“I got no problem killing bandits,” said Fix. “But we’re keeping the silver. Our regular rounds should do them vermin right nicely.” To accentuate his point, the thin, spare gunfighter drew out his pearl-handled Colt, flipped open the cylinder with a flick of his wrist, checked his bullets, peered down the barrel, shook the gun closed with a metallic whirr and spun it backward on his finger with a blur of speed back into his holster. 

“Then we keep all the silver.” Bodie grinned. “Dumb peasants won’t know the difference.” He pulled his Winchester repeater out of his saddle holster and put it to his shoulder, eyeballing a distant target down the gunsight. His finger tightened on the trigger but he didn’t fire, saving bullets.

The bad men drank to that. They swung back into their saddles. 

Tucker stuck both boots in his stirrups and felt the beginning sting of saddle sores. 

Across the arroyo the little Mexican peasant saw them mount up, giving them a nervous little wave as he tugged himself back up onto his own horse. 

“Hy-Yahh!” Tucker yelled as he slapped his reins against his stallion’s flanks. The other three riders charged after him up the forty-five-degree arroyo grade, powerful hooves kicking down some chaparral and stones. Fix’s horse slipped and regained traction and then they were all four up and over the incline and galloping off toward the trail. Catching the peasant’s gaze, Tucker nudged his jaw for him to ride ahead and lead the way, and filled with purpose, the Mexican retraced the trail of his hoof prints he had left heading into town.

They rode across the Durango plain in the heat of the day. A second ridge of mountains appeared beyond the first, brown in the flat light and spackled with green. The washed out sun had risen a few more degrees, and the day would get hotter yet before they reached their destination. And so the battery escort of hired gun killers flanked the hunched, determined brown man they accompanied. Everyone figured that their newly watered horses were refreshed enough to ride at full tilt for twenty minutes before they slowed again. The outfit was making good progress. 

They all rode together up a small mountain trail of the first butte. 

The humble peasant smiled with simple, pure faith at the three hard men riding along with him.

“You are good men, senors.”

“You don’t know nothing about us,” Tucker said quietly. 

“I do.” The Mexican rode eagerly on ahead, out of earshot. “I do…”

The three bad men eyed him like coyotes. 

“He don’t know the half,” uttered Fix.

“Like we aim to steal that silver, not waste it on no bullets,” added Bodie humorlessly.

“That’s for damn sure,” Tucker said, half-convinced himself.

“Ignorant wretch is letting the wolf into the chicken coop and don’t know no better.” Fix spat tobacco juice onto a passing lizard and scattered it into the rocks. 

Tucker considered the thin, skeletal gunfighter in the black suit and vest covered with dust. He’d ridden with Fix for three years and as long as he’d known him, the other gunfighter was the most pitiless man he had ever met. A good friend, who said what he meant, without question the fastest and deadliest shot of the bunch, but the man had no mercy towards people. John Fix had a fatalistic view of the human condition and his place in it. His tough-mindedness balanced off Bodie’s impulsivity and Tucker’s measured deliberateness. But Fix was a gunsel only, a man who dealt with things as they appeared in front of him, where he struck swiftly and without remorse. He lacked Tucker’s own grasp of the big picture and habit of planning a few steps ahead, which was why Samuel Evander Tucker, late of Dodge City, was the group’s unspoken but unchallenged leader. The three had rode together through the years simply because it seemed like the natural thing to do from the day they first met, never with any specific plan, and every day they seemed to make the decision anew to stick together. When they fought, when their guns came out, they were no longer three, but one, an invincible machine of flying lead, stinking gunpowder and blazing irons, and they killed and shot as one thing with six arms and legs and they never had to talk. These gunslingers were obviously bad men themselves, but they had been through a lot and often and were still alive. If you asked them why they still stuck together, each would have said the same thing. 

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

The shootists’ rode side by side with the peasant across the dusty desert of Durango under the burning sun on the road to Santa Sangre. The full moon hung faint as a ghost in the cloudless sky on the horizon, like a portent.

The trail curved higher around the upper ridge, and the riders slowed to a trot as the horses trod over the uneven ground. The peasant rode in the lead, followed by Tucker, then Bodie, then Fix in steady single-file formation.

They all heard the sudden shrill castanet.

The Mexican’s horse violently reared, front legs bicycling, eyes wide in alarm, whinnying in terror. Its rider emitted a high-pitched scream of surprise, coming out of the stirrups as the mustang rose up on its hind legs in panic. A coiled rattlesnake tensed on the ground directly ahead, the rattler a twitchy blur as it shook its upraised tail, brown and copper head raised, jaw extended, fangs bared to strike. The startled peasant’s horse pitched him from the saddle, arms and legs flailing, where he landed hard on the ground, inches in front of the rattler. The snake’s narrow head was right by his contorted face, fangs curled and deadly sharp as it struck with vital speed.

The head of the reptile disappeared in a fine red mist, the headless red meat of its body dropping in a limp coil on the ground before the Mexican heard the gunshot explode across the desert. 

The peasant screamed like a girl.

Fix had got his pistol out, fanned and fired so blindingly fast his gun was back in his holster before the dead and headless snake hit the ground. 

The viper’s rattle castaneted a final stubborn time, then fell silent and still in the settling dust. 

The Mexican rose to his hands and knees, wiping splattered snake muck from his cheek with the back of his hand. His eyes raised to meet the cowboys in the saddles above him.

All three of the gunfighters gaped, looking down at the peasant.

The Mexican’s shirt had come loose in the fall, and two ripe, nude brown breasts toppled out. With a gasp, she scooped her big naked bosom back into her baggy top, eyes wide in embarrassment and fear.

Now they all knew. 

He was a she and a very beautiful she.

“Hello,” Bodie said, with a slow dawning grin.

“Howdy, ma’am,” Tucker said. He tipped his hat with a wink.

Fix grinned. “Lady, you’d a showed us them melons before, you could have kept the damn silver.”

The hard men laughed coarsely, and the girl flinched in shame and dread. The gunfighters had ridden their horses to surround her on all sides, blocking her escape. Sitting high in their saddles, they were threateningly silhouetted against the mid-morning sun, the white orb blinding behind the sharp outlines of their Stetsons. Pilar crawled on her hands and knees, cringing with fear, expecting the worst. 

In his saddle, Tucker saw what a pretty woman they had been with all morning and understood he’d known her gender all along. The glimpse of her breasts had gotten him aroused. Her round, high, big brown-nippled tits bounced real pretty when she loaded them back under her shirt. No question, on all fours there on the ground, surrounded by the three cowboys, she was theirs for the taking and maybe they’d get a little bonus with the silver. Tucker’s eyes narrowed to circumspect slits as he glanced first across to Fix sitting on his horse staring with sardonic bemusement down at the cowering girl. Then his gaze slid over to Bodie in his saddle and that hungry look as the Swede’s hand passed by his crotch giving it a tug. Tucker smelt the heat of rutting in the air like blood in the water and knew that all three of them could be down on the ground taking turns if he merely gave the word. They were miles from civilization in the middle of the desert and there was nowhere to run and nobody to come to her aid if they descended on the girl and had their way with her. But as the seconds passed, pragmatically, he thought better of it. They could ravish her now, but that would set them back a few hours and the girl might lose her mind and refuse to take them to the silver. Better to get to the silver first, then they could pound that brown body as much as they wanted. If she was that good looking, there might be a lot more fruit in her town ripe for picking. 

In his mind, Tucker had the sudden image of a pack of coyotes, the hateful filthy mangy cowardly scavenger dogs circling their prey, closing in for the kill. At night, the shootists often heard the musical chorus of yipping in the distant hills, soon replaced by the inevitable horrible high-pitched cries of some terrified dying small dog or animal the miserable scavengers would lure out into the hills and then surround to ambush and slaughter, tearing it limb from limb. As the three dangerous men on their big horses circled the exposed, frightened, cringing girl crouching on the ground, Tucker saw the predatory glint in his friends’ eyes as lust burned in their loins and the smell of sexual heat filled the dusty air. He knew they were the coyotes, nothing more than the lowest varmints.

It had come to this, then.

They had fallen that far, sunk to their lowest, become animals.

“No,” Tucker mumbled first to himself, then repeated as an order he issued with quiet authority. “No, not like this, this ain’t what we are, boys.”

“Hey, honey, how ’bout you give my doorknob a little polish?” Bodie said, squeezing his crotch and making a move to unbutton his fly.

“Man has to relax.” Fix grinned.

The girl shut her eyes and dropped her gaze, then opened them with flint in her bold stare as she grabbed a knife from her belt and held it protectively as she rose to her feet, ready to fight. She turned in a full circle, then back again, facing the gunfighters who loomed over her on their horses, ready to cut them if they made a move. 

A twinge of conscience stirred in Tucker’s heart. He felt sorry for the poor damn girl. This Mexican had pluck and smarts, and he understood the considerable tar it must have taken for a woman alone to have ridden out to save her village and stand toe to toe with hard-ass killers like the three of them were. He respected and liked her, right down to the ground.

“Shut up, boys, and step back,” said Tucker. “Ain’t no way to treat a lady. Let alone one who’s payin’ us.”

Fix and Bodie exchanged reluctant glances and nodded, following orders. 

“Do what the man says, Bodie. Get her horse,” said Fix quietly. 

The Swede nodded, trotting a few yards to where the riderless mustang stood casually grazing on a patch of mescal. He retrieved the dangling reins and led it right next to the girl.

Tucker kept his hands up, palms upraised to show he meant no harm, rode unthreateningly over with a clop of hooves, leaned down with a creak and clink of leather and stirrup and offered the girl a gloved hand to help her back into her saddle. The simple peasant considered him in surprise and confusion, naked fear and distrust in her gaze softening into raw relief as she slowly took his hand. Her knife remained in her other hand for a moment, then was returned to her belt as she let him grasp her small palm and tug her foot up into her stirrup and settle her back into the saddle of her horse. Now she was eye level with them, and Tucker held her gaze with gentlemanly grace. “We get it,” he said. “You dressed yourself up as a man ’cause you didn’t know the kind of men we were, and the kind of men you needed were the kind of men didn’t need to know what y’had under them clothes. What’s your name?”

“Pilar,” she said, no longer trying to disguise her voice, her natural timbre pretty and chimelike. 

“Pretty name.”

Tucker grinned. She smiled, dropped her eyes, then raised them to meet his. “I am sorry. To deceive you. It is as you say.”

“Hell, this day is getting more damn interestin’ every minute. Never a dull moment, nossir,” Fix said.

“And daylight’s wasting if we’re making this town by noon,” said Bodie.

Tucker nodded. “Bodie’s right. Let’s ride.” 

As Pilar led the way, riding out of earshot on her shaken horse, Tucker shot a fierce glance to his fellow gunfighters. “Let’s just get the silver, boys. Then we’ll fuck her and her sisters.”

“And her mother if’n she has a set of cans like that on her.” Bodie winked.

They half meant it.

Spurring their horses, the four horses and riders surged across the plain.

 

 

Tucker knew they were being followed.

He could smell them.

It wasn’t much to go on, just a wisp of dust behind them in the far distance, a faint metallic clink that could have been nothing at all somewhere way off. If they were riders, how many there were he couldn’t tell. Durango was afflicted with sudden arid winds popping up and sweeping down the plains whipping up dust devils so he could not be sure. Except for the gnawing tension in his gut telling him someone was out there and closing in. They’d made no effort to conceal their horse tracks during the morning ride, so their sign was right out there for anybody to see. 

Maybe they should have been more careful.

They better be mindful from now on.

The cowboy saw Fix catch him looking over his shoulder a few times, and they shared a glance that alerted the thin gunfighter in black there might be something on their ass and to be ready, but as usual they didn’t need words. All the small, spare gunfighter did was slightly caress the pearl pistol handle in his holster with his worn black glove to protect his hand from the scrape of the hammer when he fanned and fired in the quick draw. The four riders continued into the sun-blasted oblivion. 

The day was getting mean hot, and their destination lay hours ahead. Lizards scampered on rocks. Somewhere far off the razor scree of a hawk echoed into infinity. Then just the lulling clop of their hooves, and a waft of wind in his ears.

Bodie was in the rear, the giant Swede off in his own world, leaning back in his brown saddle, tree-stump legs relaxed, reins held loose in his cow-hoof hands, singing a loud song to himself in his gravelly, off-key voice. He grinned, bearing his cracked yellow teeth with sloppy affability, and laughed at some private joke in his granite boulder of a skull. He may be simple, Tucker felt, but he was so damn strong and there was a open-heartedness about him, so he didn’t see the need to tell the big one about the riders who may or may not be shadowing the four. There was nothing to talk about yet, and Bodie would just forget the minute he was distracted by something shiny. Tucker was sometimes surprised the happy idiot remembered his name.

Ahead, the peasant girl led them along the barren trail, her black shiny close-cropped hair wafting in the wind, and her sweet floral scent drifted back to Tucker. For a few pleasant moments he just rode, closed his eyes, and breathed her in. This girl had sand. That she did. Again, he considered what it took for a young girl like her to recruit dangerous men like the three of them. She must have been very scared, but she’d done what she had to do. Where the hell were the men of her village? Goddamn Mexicans. Only one reason a simple girl like this would take the kind of risks she had. Whatever lay in wait for them at the town must be a hell of a lot scarier than they were. Tucker wanted to know the rest of the story and would ask her soon.

A huge cloud passed across the sun, creating a mile-long shadow that moved slowly across the desert like a scythe, the great darkness passing over them. It shadowed their faces beneath their hat brims in a black curtain against the bright daylight, making them squint. They all experienced a sudden chill, and then it was gone, replaced by the heat of the day as the overhead cloud passed the sun. The wall of shade continued on its relentless trek across the landscape like the shadow of the devil catching souls.

An antsy Tucker was getting tired of the ride. He just wanted to get there, to this town wherever it was, face up to whatever he was up against, do his killing and be done with it. The ride felt like an axe hanging over his head, the waiting worse than the battle. He knew he was a man of action because of this impatience and fierce nature. Waiting gave a man too much time to think and it wasn’t good thinking too much.

“Hold up, boys.”

For the third time on the last twenty miles Fix had found sign.

Tucker and Bodie pulled up their horses with Pilar, as the skeletal gunfighter in black bent from his saddle studying the ground. “I savvy fifteen sets of hoof prints,” he said.

“What does this mean?” Pilar questioned, looking back and forth between her companions.

“Maybe somethin’, maybe nothing,” replied Fix. “They come in front from the north back at where we met up, then doubled back, crisscrossing their own tracks. Eight miles back, the tracks entered a shallow creek and didn’t come out the other side, disappeared like, meaning them riders was heading in single-file formation through the water bed to disguise their movements, and when the creek turned into a river, too tough to negotiate with horses, the tracks finally came out.” 

“We ain’t seen nobody.” Bodie shrugged.

“Doesn’t mean they ain’t out there.”

“Could be we’re being followed,” Tucker said.

“Let’s keep our eyes peeled.”

The peasant girl was worried. “Them, they are after you?”

The gunfighters looked at one another with a shared mutual understanding, but did not respond. It was an answer but no answer. 

“Which them?” Bodie mumbled.

“Were you followed?” Tucker asked Pilar. “By whatever those varmints are holding your town?”

“I don’t think so, Tuck,” Bodie said. “We’ve been retracing her trail due south and Fix just said those tracks started from the north.”

“We can sit around here scratching our balls talking about this all day. If we meet up with ’em we meet up with ’em. Let’s get a move on.” Tucker said. 

His gang nodded. Pilar shrugged, and all four kept riding as the sun raised another few notches like the hand of a clock.

Fix, the signcutter of the bunch, noticed the stagecoach trail first. 

It was two deep ruts in the ground heading east and west that he recognized as the Wells Fargo Durango route. They had happened onto it by accident. The cowboys briefly discussed following it, but Pilar insisted her village lay due south so off they set. 

A mile away they came upon the stagecoach, or what was left of it.

The shattered wheel was the first thing they encountered, but the wreckage was not far off. The wagon had been completed destroyed. The carriage lay in an upside-down heaping pile of broken wooden boards and twisted metal chassis frame. The splintered doors, roof rack and spilled luggage were scattered debris all over the sun-baked rocks. The crushed skeletons of a team of dead horses were like one unrecognizable thing in a mountain of grinning skulls, spines, leg bones, hooves, horseshoes and caved-in rib cages jutting this way and that in a knotted confusion of harness and bridle, bleached clean in the merciless sun.

The horses they rode didn’t like this, not one bit, and strained contrarily against their reins, protesting noisily and rearing so the men had to wrest them under control with a chorus of “woahs” and “easy”. It was a bad place.

“Holy shit,” muttered Bodie. 

Tucker wondered what could have done this. 

Pilar gazed on in knowing horror as the gunfighters took a few moments to ride around the wreckage, taking it all in.

“The stage must have been moving at a clip when it went off the road. What the hell was it doing driving this kind of terrain at that kind of speed? Must have been running from something,” Tucker observed.

“It didn’t just go off the road, boys. It got attacked,” Fix added.

“The bandits around here don’t mess around,” Bodie said, just to say something.

“If it was bandits, why didn’t they rob it?” Fix nudged his jaw down at an open suitcase spilling clothes, a lady’s purse and wad of cash on the ground. Sitting in his saddle, he drew out his carbine and held it by the stock, leaning down to pick up the valise using the long barrel. Confiscating the cash, he flung the empty purse and suitcase back into the dust. “Looks like this ride was already worth our time. We’ll divvy this up later.”

“How long you figure this wreck been here?”

“Judging by those bleached bones, a month, mebbe longer.”

“You boys notice something strange?” Tucker mentioned, bothered, as he studied the rubble. “Where’s the bodies?”

On the ground lay a shattered silver pocket watch on a broken length of small chain. Tucker picked it up and saw the words “John Whistler” engraved inside the bent lid. The name rang a bell and he remembered it belonged to a bounty hunter he had met up with years ago. For sure they would never meet again. The cracked glass cover of the time face showed the hour and minute hands frozen at 8:28, immortalizing the exact moment their owner departed the earth.

A ratty piece of paper fluttering in the dry arid wind caught his eye, and as it was picked up in the breeze he snatched it out of the air. The gunfighter perused it momentarily and squinted with agitation, and when he saw the others looking at him, he quietly passed the wanted poster with their faces on it around to the other two men to whom it pertained. When it got to Fix, the thin gunsel crumpled it in his fist and pocketed the wadded ball of paper before the girl got a look.

“Interestin’,” he said.

“This watch belonged to John Whistler,” Tucker observed. “That stage was heading in our direction and he was on it.”

“Them wanted posters must’ve belonged to him,” Bodie said, stating the obvious with a sense of discovery. “Two and two put together equals he was after the reward.” 

Tucker tossed away the broken pocket watch. It clattered on the rocks and lay still. “Reckon we should probably thank whoever took him out. Whistler was a real bad ass and could have given us big problems.”

“I think we should say a few words over the dearly departed.” Fix spat a blob of tobacco juice with precision accuracy, splattering the watch. “Fuck y’all. Amen.”

“I know what did this,” said Pilar. That was all she said.

“Let me guess,” said Tucker. “Those we’re goin’ up against.”

Her eyes told it all.

They rode on and left the decimated stagecoach in their dust.

Canyon cleaved up several hundred yards ahead, squeezing the trail into an ass crack of a ravine. The dull, tedious minutes passed as the three riders followed the horse of the determined peasant girl. One stallion exhaled with a wet flubber. The rattle of the packs on the saddles squeaked with leather over the clop of hooves as the men ascended the rise and came to a depression in the mesa baking like an oven under the nasty sun. The glare was so bright it hurt their eyes, and their vision swam as they squinted and visored their foreheads with their hands to shield their gaze from the sand that reflected like glass.

Ahead, a black smudge was in the watery waves of heat. 

There were blurry dots in the sky in the molten, undulating thermals rising off the desert. 

The closer they rode, they discerned those hovering spots were black birds. Vultures circling. Many.

Over the next hill, buzzards gathered.

An outpost.

The riders reined their horses.

Vultures continued their overhead circumference.

Over the ridge, the remains of a stagecoach station lay in smoldered ruins. The charred walls looked painted dull red, but on closer inspection the red was not paint.

“This is a bad place,” whispered the girl. “Muy mal.”

The gunfighters dismounted their horses and drew their irons. 

“Easy, boys. This place ain’t right,” Tucker said.

Fix sniffed. “You boys smell that?”

“Like an open grave.” Bodie winced.

The three cowboys carefully approached the gutted ruins of the stage junction a hundred yards before them. The lonely building sat quietly in an open clearing with nothing for miles but a few yucca plants and the worn rutted trail running past it. Tucker led, eyes glued to the area, gesturing with his fingers for the others to come forward when he saw the coast was clear. The building was a one-story brick construction with a wooden porch and a paddock. 

There had been a great disturbance. Saddles and tack lay scattered on the ground, thrown to and fro as if in a savage rage. One of the saddles was raked with four ragged claw marks that had cut deep into the leather, shredding and nearly shearing it in half. The outpost had clearly been torched from the inside, and Bodie kicked away a broken melted kerosene lamp that may have been the cause. There was no sign of life, no movement at all. Just the three figures of the heavily armed gunfighters coming at it on three sides, pistols at the ready, their gunbarrels following their noses. The silence was oppressive, the opposite of sound, a vacuum that felt like it sucked them all in. The men moved steadily forward in a low crouch and passed the corral when they were assailed by a sudden overpowering stench.

Behind the fence, the bleached white skeletons of six dead horses lay in a heaping pile on the ground, their skulls and leg bones torn completely off their bodies, and rib cages broken open to reveal open black holes of their gut cavities. Long, dragging tears of teeth and claw marks marred their skeletal remains. Clouds of flies swarmed in the eyes and mouths of the dead horses’ craniums. Globular eye sockets gaped as if from the unimaginable agony of the horrific way they died. 

“They didn’t have to kill them horses,” growled Fix, who hated cruelty to animals though he didn’t admit it.

“They didn’t just kill them. They scourged them,” observed Tucker. “You boys know any Injun tribes this area do that, a warning mebbe?”

The stretched equine jawbones and jutting teeth were contorted in death’s head grimaces. Some of their dried guts hung draped from the rails of the paddock. The stench of old rot and bile was overpowering.

“None I ever heard of. And this ain’t Injun land.”

“Could be a war party,” added Bodie.

“I don’t know what the hell this is. Exceptin’ that this is Mexico.”

They hunkered by the edge of the corral abattoir and considered the porch to the outpost a few paces ahead. Huge streaks of black char rose up the adobe walls by the splashes of clotted blood as if buckets of gore had been tossed against the structure. The roof beams were incinerated. 

Tucker looked back and saw the peasant girl riding closer after her initial trepidation. The look on her face was not as frightened as he would have expected from a plain and simple girl, it was like she had seen this all before. 

“Stay back,” he called to her.

Shaking her head, the peasant warily climbed off her horse and followed the men as they approached the ominous stagecoach junction. The doors and windows were black and foreboding like the sockets of a skull.

Death was here.

Movement in the doorway darkness caused the three gunfighters to raise their weapons, ready to fire. 

With a bitter caw, five filthy buzzards exploded out the open door and beat a sickening ascent into the searing bleached sky. 

The gunslingers entered the outpost, guns leveled.

Inside the structure, Tucker and Bodie stared at what lay before them in raw horror and these men had seen it all. Even Fix’s eyes bugged out of his head, finger sweaty on his trigger. The large room was dark and gloomy, bright sunlight cutting through the musty air in big shafts that revealed the inside of the building was washed floor to roof with clotted blood. Countless flies were stuck to the dried gore, wings twitching. The decayed skeletons of several people dangled from ropes on the ceiling, hung from their feet, bones rattling in the dry breeze. Swarming flies buzzed.

“Hellfire,” Fix whispered.

The cowboys covered their noses with their kerchiefs, wincing at the horrible stench, their squinty eyes regarding the ghastly scene, then each other. 

Several piles of bones were assembled around the dirt floor. These people had been passengers, waiting for the stage but meeting up with something else instead. The skulls and femurs were immediately recognizable as human. The skeletons had been gnawed clean, and those tidy piles were neat, deliberate. Clothes were heaped in another pile, black with dried blood, so the victims had been stripped after they were killed. Tucker gauged there were maybe eight to ten sets of human remains. Two of the skulls were very small and delicate, a child and an infant, both crushed in like porcelain dolls. A stuffed teddy bear Tucker guessed belonged to one of the children sat slumped over on a wooden table, its black button eyes blank as if erased by what it had witnessed. He saw a heap of emptied suitcases and carpetbags piled in the corner by the small stove. The luggage had been rifled through, valuables filched, robbed. The work of bandits, likely, from the looks of things, but what kind of bandits would do this to people defied comprehension. Then again, Tucker didn’t know these parts, and maybe these looters had showed up after whomever had done the killing. A dead, half-smoked cigar sat on a rusted metal horseshoe ashtray, probably still burning when the killers came. Tucker picked up the stogie, put it in his mouth, and lit it. The smoke drifted out of his lips, and helped wash away the carrion stink of the place as he looked around. 

Fix kicked at a buzzard waddling in.

“Awww God, they killed kids, poor little kids didn’t do nothin’.” 

Alerted by the distress in Bodie’s voice, Tucker slid his eyes over to see the towering Swede crouching under the low roof, his cement-block face crumpled in a distraught expression, huge hands holding the tattered, blood-drenched lace and frill homemade dress of a little girl now just gruesome rags in his thick fingers. The cloth slipped through his hands, dropping with an empty sound on the sodden dirt. Tucker watched the despondent Bodie run his hand in dismay through his hair, clenching and unclenching his repeater rifle in the other until his knuckles grew big and white as pebbles. This was the worst thing any of them had ever seen. The leader felt it too, the same rage they all did, and knew as his friends did that if they came face to face with those responsible, the gunfighters would kill them real slow, shoot them apart piece by piece and watch them die screaming in their own blood and shit all day long. Then they’d cut their heads off and put them on sticks. They’d done it before.

“Those was bad kills,” Fix said.

“Them people was skinned alive,” muttered Tucker.

Bodie shook his head. “Goddamn massacre. Never seen nothing like it. Ever.“ 

“You figure it was the same sumbitches in this town we’re going up against?” Fix worked his jaw.

Tucker nodded. “Reckon.”

“Scalphunters?” Fix spat.

“Nope.” Tucker shook his head, fingering his beard. He indicated the messy mops of grisly matted pelt on some of the faceless skulls. “They’d have took the hair.” 

“Right.”

Bodie shrugged. “Coyotes, then? Rabid mebbe?” 

“Open your eyes, Bodie. Look.” Fix bristled at the other gunfighter’s stupidity. “They’s hung from the rafters.”

Tucker glowered. “Pulled apart limb from limb while they were alive, too, from the looks of things.” He hunkered down by the piles of arm bones pulled off the dangling skeletons and grimaced at the teeth marks gnawed to the marrow. “And eaten.”

“Eaten?” Bodie squirmed squeamishly.

Fix stared impassively. “Nobody should die like that.”

Taking off his hat, shaken to the core, the wiry little gunfighter went outside for air. The other two gunslingers remained, legs weak, as if the empty eye sockets and grinning teeth of los deparacedos, the disappeared ones, wished them to bear witness a few moments longer. 

“Who would do something like this?” Tucker whispered mostly to himself.

“It was them, senors.” The girl stood in the doorway, her arms crossed, her honest gaze grim.

“This was what come to your town?” Fix asked from outside.

“Si.” 

Bodie whistled. 

“Then lady, you got some big problems,” Tucker grunted.

“That’s why I have you,” the peasant answered, a fact simply stated. And he thought he might have seen her smile, just a little.

“What the hell have we gotten ourselves into?”

“Boys,” muttered Fix. “I found sign.” 

The cowboys went outside, glad to get out of the slaughterhouse. The abattoir of an outpost sat festering in the light of day. The vultures, afraid of the armed men, hung back, impatient for them to depart so they could resume their feast.

Tucker and Bodie walked up to Fix, who had squatted down on one knee a dozen yards away by a huge amount of horse tracks heading away from the outpost due south. 

“Must be them.” Fix looked up. “Heading away from us.” 

“They came here before our town. The first night we heard them it was from the north.” Pilar fought tears. “You see? You see what will happen to my people if you don’t help us? Please help us, senors. Please.”

Tucker nodded. “That’s what you hired us for, ma’am. But we better get a move on.” 

They saddled up. All four spurred their horses hard, getting the hell out of there and urging the animals full gallop until they were long gone over the next ridge. The ghastly outpost and its congregation of buzzards fell out of sight, if not out of mind, to their rear. The dry, raw wind of the open desert in their faces washed the stench of death from their noses and mouths, but the taste lingered, until at last they let up on their horses and slowed to a canter on the dusty trail.