Webb's Posse (30 page)

By noon, the cantina at Punta Del Sol was packed with men, horses and whores. Pistol shots roared above wild laughter and harsh curses. Bottles crashed against walls. A young woman was hurled naked through a front window in a spray of shattered glass. She sprang to her feet like a cat, screaming, cursing and slinging broken glass from her hair. A fire broke out in a corner of the cantina but was soon extinguished, leaving a black streak of soot up the wall and across the ceiling.

At the bar, Cherokee Rhodes produced a leather bag full of dried peyote cactus buttons and passed it along. The men chewed the powerful hallucinogens and washed them down with mescal, tequila and wine. Fistfights soon broke out. Knives were drawn. One of the scalp hunters who'd eaten a handful of the powerful cactus buttons soon stabbed himself in the thigh by accident, thinking he'd stabbed the man standing beside him. The stairway leading up to the brothel had been torn away from the wall and thrown through the broken front window. Drunken patrons had stacked chairs and tables against the wall and begun climbing hand over hand to the waiting arms of the whores who stood half naked on the balcony, taunting and encouraging them upward.

“Maybe it was a bad idea giving them the peyote buttons,” Cherokee Rhodes said to Moses Peltry. He scratched his jaw, watching the surrounding debacle spin further and further out of control. Goose Peltry threw his head back in a loud shriek of drunken delight as he swung back and forth on a large wagonwheel chandelier. A thick crosstimber in the ceiling sagged a bit and let a stream of dried earth trickle down onto the drinkers at the bar.

“They can handle their festivities,” said Moses, shrugging the matter aside. He picked up two cactus buttons and popped them into his mouth.

“Careful Moses,” Cherokee Rhodes cautioned him. “Somebody's got to stay sane here…to keep an eye on the rest of this bunch.”

“Oh? You've been here long enough you're going to start telling me how to run my gang?” asked Moses.

“Don't mind me, Moses. Sometimes I just talk to make sure my jaws are working good.” Cherokee Rhodes backed off, raising his hands chest-high.

Moses Peltry's eyes followed the trickle of dried earth falling from the ceiling. “If you want to worry about something, worry about this place falling in around us.” He threw back a mouthful of tequila from a large wooden cup. “Where'd Doc Murdock go?”

“He grabbed that whore with the long black hair and carried her out of here over his shoulder,” said Rhodes. “Last I seen, he was headed to the cripple's house with her.”

“Good for him,” said Moses. “If you're smart, you'll drag something away from here yourself. Once we hit the trail, it'll be a long, dry spell before we find another place like this.”

In the late afternoon, Sherman Dahl rode back along the trail to the cliff overhang where he'd left the others waiting while he scouted the ridgeline above Punta Del Sol. Webb, Summers and Teasdale stepped forward as Dahl rode into sight. Monk Dupre sat against the wall of the overhang with his tied hands folded on his lap. “The Peltrys are down there all right,” said Dahl, reining in. “From the sound of things, the town will be lucky if it's still standing when they leave.”

Summers, Webb and Teasdale looked at one another as if all three were asking themselves the same question. Then Summers turned to Monk Dupre and asked, “How far are we from their hideout?”

“It's thirty miles, give or take,” said Dupre flatly. “It's easier to show how to get there than it is to try and give directions.”

“Don't worry, Dupre. We're keeping with you the whole trip,” said Summers. “Just make sure what you tell us comes up right.” He turned back to Teasdale and Webb with a determined expression as Dahl slipped down from his saddle and joined them. “I hate passing up the opportunity to chop them down in the street,” said Summers.

“It can't be helped,” said Webb. “We're about out of ammunition for the Gatling gun. Without it, the four of us don't stand a chance.”

“I know,” said Summers. “We might just as well put it out of our minds for now. We need to get ahead of them and be waiting at their hideout. We're outnumbered. But a good four-rifle ambush can cut them to pieces before they know what hit them, especially if we catch them by surprise coming into their own front yard.”

“Then we need to push on,” said Teasdale.

“I can't go any farther right now,” said Dahl. “That horse I'm riding is ready to drop in his tracks. I've got to either rest him or kill him.”

“All our horses are in the same shape, schoolmaster,” said Summers. “The best thing we can do is make a dark camp here, rest these horses and ourselves and head out tonight around midnight. The Peltrys aren't going to break up their party any time soon.” He looked from one man to the next for their agreement. Webb, Teasdale and Dahl nodded.

“I'll take the first two-hour watch,” said Dahl. He led his horse over beside the horse carrying the Gatling gun and tied its reins around an upthrust of rock.

By the time the last glow of light sank down below the horizon, the men sat eating cold jerky that Abner Webb had taken from his saddlebags and passed around. They ate the dry, stiff meat in silence, washing it down with tepid water from their canteens. With his hands still tied, Monk Dupre looked from one grim, shadowed face to the next as he pried a sliver of jerky from between his thumbnail and spit it away. “I know it's not my place to mention this,” he said in a lowered voice. “Has it crossed any of your minds that maybe it's time to break off here and head back to Rileyville? I mean, nobody can say you men didn't give it your all. But the odds against
you taking down the Peltry Gang was slim to begin with, and it's only gotten slimmer since then.”

Silence loomed until Monk Dupre felt himself grow uneasy. “Not that I can't agree you've got every right to stay here and fight it out after all that's—”

“Keep your mouth shut, Dupre,” Summers hissed. He stood up, dusted the seat of his trousers and turned to Sherman Dahl. “Wake me up in two hours, schoolmaster. I'll take the next watch.”

But in the darkness of night, when the two hours had passed, it was not Sherman Dahl who awakened Will Summers. Instead, it was the cold edge of steel pressed against the side of his throat that caused Summers to open his eyes as his hand reached instinctively for the pistol lying beneath his saddle.

“No, no,
señor,”
said Sergeant Hervisu's gravely voice. His rough boot clamped down on Will Summers' wrist and pinned it to the ground. A lantern glowed in Hervisu's hand, revealing the shadowy forms of numerous
Federales
standing over Abner Webb, Lawrence Teasdale and Monk Dupre with their rifles pointed down in their faces. Beside Sergeant Hervisu stood a young soldier with his rifle cocked and pointed at Will Summers.

“It is over for all of you now,” Hervisu said to Will Summers. “For the sake of your friends there, do not attempt something foolish.”

“I won't,” said Will Summers, easing down a bit, looking around in the flickering light of the lantern. “We've had our play. Looks like you've won.”

“You are wise to see it that way,” said Hervisu. With his boot still on Summers' wrist, he gestured for the
Federale
beside him to reach down and get the pistol from beneath Will Summers' saddle. When
the young man stood up and handed Sergeant Hervisu the holstered pistol, Hervisu looked at it and draped the gunbelt over his shoulder. Then he took a step back from Summers and looked all around in the darkness.

“We're not outlaws,” said Will Summers, “If that's what you're thinking.”

Sergeant Hervisu tipped his chin up and patted his hand on the gunbelt on his shoulder. “I am thinking that you are not gunfighters either.” A trickle of laughter spilled from his men, and he added, “We have taken all of you without firing a shot.”

Summers ignored the insult. “We're a legally sworn posse trailing the Peltry Gang. We didn't come here to break any laws of Mexico.”

Sergeant Hervisu offered a knowing smile and wagged a thick finger back and forth. “But you break the law simply by coming here in the first place. You
Americanos
always think it is
your
border. Why do you never stop and realize that it is
our
border too?”

“You can bet I'll remember that in the future,” said Will Summers. He tried raising himself up, but the boot held his wrist to the ground.

“It is best you speak no more unless you are first spoken to,
señor.
” Sergeant Hervisu looked around again, then said to Summers and the others, “Now then,
señores
…where is the machine rifle? My
capitán
says I must bring it to him right away. He does not like to be kept waiting.”

In the flickering light, Webb's, Teasdale's and Summers' eyes met, each man taken aback by the realization that both the Gatling gun and Sherman Dahl were missing. Thinking quickly, Will Summers said, “We don't have it. We thought you did.”

Sergeant Hervisu quickly turned the tip of his
saber toward Monk Dupre. “You…you are a prisoner here, sí?”

“Yes, I am,” said Dupre. “But I don't know why. I haven't done anything to—”

Hervisu cut him off. “Where is the gun? If you lie to me, I will open your belly here and now.” The tip of his saber came to rest at the center of Dupre's rib cage. Dupre looked down at it, his eyes bulging in fear. Yet he sensed that his best chance at staying alive was to stick with the possemen's story, knowing that somewhere in the shadows surrounding them, the Gatling gun could be poised, ready to fire at any second.

“I—I haven't seen any Gatling gun,” Dupre said, “and that's a fact, so help me God! I was an innocent hostage of the Peltry Gang before these men captured me. They had a Gatling gun when the fight started the other night in the river valley, but that's the last I saw of it.”

Sergeant Hervisu stared at him coldly for a moment as if having difficulty making up his mind. Then he said, “If I find you have lied to me, I will quarter you limb from limb like a roasting animal.” He spun to the
Federale
who had his rifle aimed at Will Summers. “Get them to their feet and chain them together. By morning we will be in Punta Del Sol. We'll see what
Capitán
Oberiske wants to do with them.”

In the wispy gray predawn air, Punta Del Sol slept in its own sour smell like a diseased animal. The cantina was the sore at the center of its disease. Within the ragged walls behind the broken windows and doors, the light of one thin candle glowed amid the low drunken babble of the last two men standing
at the battered bar. One of the whores lay sprawled facedown on the bar top between Flat Face Chinn and Handy Phelps. Flat Face stood naked from the waist down save for his gunbelt and a long knife shoved down behind it. He picked the whore's head up by her hair and said drunkenly, “Wake up…this dance ain't ended yet.”

“Turn her loose, Chinn,” Handy Phelps demanded. “Can't you see she's bleeding all over hell?”

Chinn saw blood on the bar from where she'd passed out earlier with a shot glass raised to her lips. “Damn, what a mess,” said Chinn. He turned loose of her hair. Her head bounced on the bar. She let out a short groan, then lay still. “I don't know about you,” Chinn said in a slurred voice, looking down and kicking a broken guitar out of his way with his bare foot, “but I could eat something hot and greasy…get my guts working again.”

“We et up everything in town last night,” said Phelps. The two weaved back and forth in place, looking across the floor at the half-naked whores and outlaws whose bodies lay entwined in twisted blankets, broken furniture, torn clothing and empty bottles.

“What happened to that spotted hound that kept licking and sniffing around here last night?” asked Chinn.

“I don't know,” said Phelps, “but I don't eat dog except in a pinch.”

“Me neither, I reckon,” Chinn resolved, reaching for a half-full bottle of tequila someone had left standing on the bar. He took a long, gurgling drink and passed the remains on to Handy Phelps. As Phelps turned up a long drink, three young
Federales
slipped inside the cantina and stepped silently over the sleeping bodies on the floor. They spread out,
listening to the drunken conversation between the two outlaws.

“
Sante Madre
,” whispered one of the
Federales
under his breath, looking all around. The body of the cantina owner hung upside down at the end of a rope someone had thrown over a ceiling timber. Looking at the dead, blank eyes, the young Mexican soldier made the sign of the cross, then raised his rifle to his shoulder.

“Every one of you, wake up and raise your hands!” the young soldier shouted. “We have this place surrounded!” Behind him, four more
Federales
stepped through the open door and spread out among the sleeping men on the littered floor. On the floor, a few men moaned and cursed in their sleep, but none awakened.