I said, “But we got trouble. We got to get you to a doctor. I just can’t help you. And that is a bad wound you got. Miguel, I got to tell you, right now I don’t know what to do.”
He said, trying to struggle up, “I can ride.”
I stood away from him. Hays came over at that second. We looked around. Ray said, simply, “Well, at least we ain’t short no horses no more.”
I yelled, “Lew!”
He was there in an instant. I said, “Take
Capitán
Davilla and ride east. That son of a bitch has to know where the railroad line is. And the telegraph.”
He said, “He wants to see you. By the way, the bastard speaks English. Some, not much.”
I said, “Get him over here.”
After a moment or two Lew appeared with
Capitán
Davilla. He didn’t look real spruce. His wrist was swollen about twice the size it ought to have been and his uniform was dirty and stained. He walked with the gait of a man who had either drank too much whiskey or had been tied in a saddle for too many hours. I knew which one was the truth. He stood before me, giving me a sullen look. I said, “I hear you speak English. Tell me what you have to say.”
He said, without too much disguise for the contempt he felt, “You let me go. I make ever’body go back.”
I said, “Now,
Capitán,
don’t bullshit an old bullshitter. I let you go, you are going to bring rain around our heads and it ain’t going to be the kind that makes crops grow. Not unless lead is good for corn.”
He said, “You make big meestake.”
I said, “No, you made a big mistake when you treated my brother as you did. Now the best thing you can do is to cooperate with us. Help us. That is if you want to get out of this alive. Do you want to get out of this alive?”
For answer he spit on my boots and said, “You gonna feed some crows. And maybe some wild dogs. Or coyotes.”
I didn’t do a thing. I just said to Lew, “I don’t think you’ve got your prisoner in hand. Y’all take off and find us that railroad as fast as you can and get right back here.”
Well, we were in a hell of a mess. I sat down and eased off my boot. I was expecting the worst but it was nowhere near as bad as I’d thought it would be. The bullet hadn’t even made a hole in my boot, just a deep crease in the leather. There was no wound in my ankle, just a bruise caused by the passage of the slug. Still it hurt like hell and I realized it might handicap me if I had to do any great amount of walking. And it was so considerable better than what Jack and Señor Elizandro had suffered that I gave a silent prayer of thanks. All we’d have needed at that point was for me to be hurt to the point where I couldn’t lead.
I watched Lew and the
capitán
taking off across the plains at a slow lope. I turned around to Hays, who was standing by my shoulder, and said, “Let us hope we are close. We are damn near out of options.”
Lew was gone a good solid two hours. The passage of so much time made me nervous as hell and I kept an apprehensive eye on our back track, but nothing showed up. Actually, the time was handy because it gave Jack some room to get over the shock of what I’d done to him and gave the horses a little rest. It didn’t help Senor Elizandro, but then nothing was going to help him except a good surgeon. And he was about seventy-five miles short of one. I didn’t see how he was going to last that long. Studying him, seeing how he was laying on his back with his hurt arm cradled in to his chest, seeing the pain in his face, I couldn’t see him riding five miles a-horseback let alone the distance to Laredo, which was the nearest help.
And then there was the matter of the horses. They’d been rode hard for twenty-five miles without benefit of feed or water. And out there on that barren plain there didn’t look like hope for neither one.
Lew was mad as hell when he got back. He had Davilla riding beside him, the
capitán’s
bridle tied to his, Lew’s, saddle horn. He said, jerking his thumb at Davilla, “This son of a bitch just took me on a wild-goose chase. That railroad line ain’t no more than a mile east of here. But this bastard—” He paused to strike Davilla a backhanded slap across the mouth. “Wanders me all over hell and back like I ain’t smart enough to see what he’s doing.” He raised his hand again. “I ought to beat him half to death.”
I said, “Wait a minute. Don’t kill him yet. We might can still use him.”
It was a chore getting loaded back up. Everyone was nearly give out, and then there was the problem of getting the two wounded men astride their mounts, especially Miguel Elizandro. Some color had started coming back into Jack’s face, but the señor was looking mighty weak and peaked. But he made no complaint or sound as we put him on his horse. I had taken the remains of my clean shirt and made a bandage of sorts, soaked in whiskey, to place over the wound. After that we’d taken some soft rope we had and bound his injured arm to his chest as tight as we could without it cutting off the circulation. When you lead a rough life in rough country you either learn how to take care of injuries and wounds or you and the people around you just don’t make it. I figured I’d treated just about every kind of hurt that could be done to a man over the long years, but I shore didn’t care for the way Miguel was looking. It made me feel frustrated not knowing what to do. I’d dug a few bullets out in my time, but that had been out of flesh. Near as I could figure that bullet was somewhere in the bone of his shoulder, and that was about three steps beyond me. Nevertheless, if it began to look like he wasn’t going to make it anyway, I figured I might give it a stab.
We left out, leaving the three corpses of Senor Elizandro’s men buried under a pile of brush that his other two hands had gathered up and covered the bodies with. It wouldn’t have fooled a schoolboy, but we didn’t want the
federales
or the
rurales
to know we were reduced in force by the three men, and if they didn’t come right by they’d be none the wiser.
I had asked Miguel if he thought I could trust the other two, but his embarrassment about the betrayal of Benito and the two that had joined him had been so great that he excused himself from making such a judgment. He’d said, “How can I apologize? How can I say what I am sure of? I would have wagered my life on Benito and then he acts thus. He became afraid because he thought the long odds had gone against us. He became a coward. I can tell you no more.”
We rode, about as sad a looking crowd as you’d ever want to see, across the alkaline plain under the unmerciful Mexican sun. I could feel the weakness in my horse. I was racking my brain, trying to think of something to do, some way to improve our position, when Ben rode up beside me. He said, “Don’t look so good.”
“No,” I said. “Don’t.”
He was quiet a moment and then he said, “Trying a getaway on horseback may not have been the best idea. Especially us not knowing the country.”
I gave him a look. “What’d you have in mind, taking the train back? Reckon those police would have been polite enough to have waited for the conductor to have boarded us and give us a good start? I reckon we ought to have planned the jailbreak around a railroad timetable.”
He said, “No. But I think we could have figured something else.”
“Just what?”
He studied for a moment and then he said, “Well, we could have scouted the country out and had us a place to go to ground so that when we run from Monterrey we’d have been damn hard to find and we wouldn’t have worn the horses out or had a running gunfight across this bad terrain. Then, when matters had cooled off, we could have eased on out for the border and nobody the wiser.”
It was good thinking and I told him so. Then I said, “First off you forgot a couple of small items. First, we didn’t go to Monterrey to break Norris out. You’ll remember we were going to try and buy him out. Once we see that couldn’t be done we didn’t have much time because, if you’ll remember, I’m due at a wedding. Mine. And I intend to make it. To do what you figured out would have taken about a week longer and, for all you know, they might have moved Norris to someplace like Mexico City. You think we’re having hell now you figure out what it would have been like to break him out of one of those prisons in the big capital.”
He thought on it for a time, turning it over in his mind. Then he nodded. “I reckon you’re right. I reckon we’ve just got to make this one work.”
“That’s about the size of it,” I said, dryly. “And right now nearly the full ownership of the Half-Moon Ranch is in one hell of a mess out in the bald-ass middle of nowhere. You can’t look back to the last hand, Ben. You got to play the cards you were dealt.”
“Was I sounding like Norris?”
“Just a little more than I care for right now. He ain’t my most popular person at the moment.”
“Justa, he feels terrible about all this. He says you won’t talk to him. He says he wishes you could see his side.”
I said, “He better leave me alone right now. I’m in the mood to see his side, all right—his insides.”
Ben shrugged. He said, “Don’t be too hard on him, Justa.”
We kept going. I don’t recall ever riding a longer mile in my life, but before much longer I could see the railroad. As we got closer I could see that the bed for the tracks had been graded up some three feet off the floor of the plain. I didn’t know how many
campesinos
with pick and shovel it had taken to dig up that caleche soil and elevate that rail bed, but I knew why they’d done it. Country like we were in might not get rain but about once every six months, but when you did get it it might come a gully washer and you could have a flash flood before you could blink an eye. And then there would go your railroad—tracks, ties, gravel and everything else that might be in the way.
We got to the rail bed. I pulled us to a stop and looked up at the telegraph line, a copper wire running from post to post and sailing off into the distance as far as the eye could see. I dismounted tiredly. Everyone else, except for the two wounded men, got down. We stood there looking up at our problem. The posts were a good foot in diameter. We weren’t going to cut them down on account of having nothing to chop with. And I couldn’t see how any of us were going to be able to climb up to the wire even if we’d had something to cut the wire with. I said, trying not to sound so tired, “Ben, you are going to have to shoot that wire in two. A bullet ought to cut it, but I reckon you’ll have to hit it where it’s nailed to the post.”
Lew came up. He said, “Justa, have you got any idea how sound will carry in this kind of country? Hell, why don’t you just send up smoke signals and let them know where we are?”
I shook my head. I said, “Lew, you make a good point. But I got to get that wire cut and I don’t know no other way to do it. If you know, then go right ahead.”
He was silent for a second and then he shook his head and turned away. “I guess,” he said. “Hell, you’re the boss. Something I’m glad I ain’t right now.”
Ben had gone over to get his saddle gun. I stood in front of the post and gave him a shoulder for a rifle rest. It wasn’t going to be any easy shot. That wire wasn’t more than a quarter of an inch thick and, even as close as we were, it was going to take a hit dead center to cut it.
Ben got behind me and rested his rifle on my right shoulder. He said, while he was sighting, “Hell, hold still. You are trembling.”
“Tired,” I said. “Let me take a deep breath.”
I sucked in a lungful of wind and Ben sighted carefully up at the wire. The sound of his carbine going off right next to my ear almost deafened me. I looked up. The wire was the same, undisturbed. “Try again,” I said. “Maybe I moved.”
He fired again and I could see the wire tremble.
“Getting closer,” he said. “I think I cut it about half in two on that shot.”
The wire fell on his third shot. A sort of ragged cheer went up from around the assembled party as Ben’s shot severed the wire. Lew said, “Doubt that it makes much difference. I reckon word has gone out some time back.”
I let us all rest for a few minutes and then I made a resolve. I said, “Hays, pass out the food and water. I know you must have some canned meat and beans or something like that. Surely to the gods you didn’t just get canned apricots and canned tomatoes?”
He said, earnestly, “I got what they had, boss.”
I said, “Well, pass them around. And I want everybody to take one hell of a drink of water, whether they are thirsty or not. We’ve got to do something about these horses.”
Hays said, “I got some bread, boss.”
I gave him a sour look. “Then don’t keep it to yourself. Pass out everything you got. We are fixing to have to start traveling fast.”
We ate, sitting around on the iron rails, looking off into the distance for any pursuit that might have been aroused by Ben’s three shots. Of course, thinking back, I didn’t see what difference it made. Not much more than a mile from where we sat Benito had loosed off a shot and Ben had followed with six more. Hell, if they were on to our whereabouts all we could do was fight anyway. I had four good guns, including myself and not including the two remaining men of Señor Elizandro. If we were attacked in force, given the terrain and our position, we weren’t going to have much of a chance.
I looked down to where Norris was sitting. He had his head down, eating out of a can of beans with a spoon I figured Hays had rustled up for him. He looked jail-weary and trail-worn. I figured he wasn’t altogether too happy with himself right then and there. It come to me to make a sort of gesture toward him that might buck him up a little, but then I hardened my heart. The time was not yet ripe.
I had beans and then I had a can of some kind of stew. I hated to think of what was in it. It might have been all right or nearly edible if it had been heated up, but we had no time and no inclination to make a fire.
When we were through I stood up. I called Hays. I said, “I want you to get them water jugs off the packhorse. Then I want every man to take his hat and fill it up with water and give his horse as much as we’ve got while it lasts.”