Читать книгу The Guns of Santa Sangre - Eric Red - Страница 8

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.

Tucker hauled off his hat and hunkered down by the edge of the creek. He 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.” Bodie 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 ninety-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 that he had taken 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, señors.”

“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.