Webb's Posse (31 page)

“Now, what the hell is this?” Chinn demanded in his drunken voice.

“It's a swarm of bugs,” said Handy Phelps. “Mexican hopping bugs!” He lowered the bottle from his lips and let tequila run down his scraggly beard. “Lord God, I'm never eating no cactus buttons ever again. I swear it!”

“You two, raise your hands quickly!” said the young Mexican, he and the others swinging their rifles toward the strange-looking pair. Beside the naked Flat Face Chinn, Handy Phelps stood missing a boot and his hat. Sometime in the night, a whore had pulled one of her garters down around his forehead.

“Why?” Phelps asked the young soldier bluntly, a look of defiance in his bloodshot eyes. “You bunch of kids ain't going to shoot nobody.”

“That's right,” said Chinn, thrusting his nakedness forward. “You boys want to see something, come take a look at this.”

The young
Federale
looked away, stunned for a second. His face reddened in embarrassment. He nodded at the pair of dirty denim trousers hanging from the bar. “Put on your bitches,
señor
, right now!”

“Ha!” said Flat Face Chinn. “I ain't got a damn thing I'm ashamed of!”

“Careful, Flat Face, these bugs ain't kidding,” Handy Phelps laughed.

“Hell, neither am I,” Flat Face Chinn bellowed, a weird, crazed look coming to his eyes. He reached down and shook himself at the shocked young Mexicans. “I said get over here and take a look at this!” he raged, his free hand grabbing the butt of his pistol.

Across the street, atop the steep trail in Juan Richards'
hacienda
, the volley of rifle fire from the cantina caused Moses Peltry to awaken from a mescal-and-peyote-induced stupor. He batted his blurry eyes and tried to focus on something long enough to stop the room from spinning. “Hey, Moses, wake up,” said Cherokee Rhodes with a dark chuckle, poking a pistol barrel into Moses' chest. “If you sleep late today, you're going to miss an awful lot.”

“Get that damn pistol out of my face,” Moses demanded, swatting the pistol barrel away as if it were a fly. On his right, a young whore lay naked against him, her arm thrown across his chest, his beard wrapped around her forearm like a furry white snake. Moses unwrapped his beard, shoved the woman away and sat up. He wiped his face with both hands and kept his head bowed as he asked, “What the hell was that rifle fire about?”

Cherokee Rhodes looked around at Captain Oberiske with a flat smile. The German officer stood rigidly with his gloved hands on his hips, a riding quirt hanging down his thigh. “I told you that peyote would knock their heads off,” Rhodes said. Then he
looked back at Moses Peltry. “What you heard was Mexican soldiers shooting the hell out of your men, Moses. You best wake up and pay attention here before life decides to pass you by.”

Moses sat slumped for a moment longer, his long beard piled in a random coil in his lap, his forehead in his hands. He struggled, trying to make sense of what Rhodes had said. Finally he raised his face slowly and stared once again into the barrel of Cherokee Rhodes' pistol. “If you shove my pistol away this time,” said Rhodes, “I'll have to shoot you just to keep from looking weak in front of my friend here.”

“Rhodes, you rotten sonsabitch,” Moses hissed. “You've sold us out. You came to me looking for work, and all the time you was setting us up for the law!”

“There you are,” said Rhodes. “I couldn't have said it any plainer myself.”

“So you was out to try and kill me after all,” Moses growled.

“No.” Rhodes wagged his pistol barrel back and forth. “But when Will Summers and his posse came to buy guns, and I later heard he was hunting your gang for bounty, damn if it didn't sound like a good idea!” He tapped the pistol barrel to his head, then leveled it back at Moses Peltry. “It was only after him and his posse killed all the gunrunners that I decided I would help hunt you down. Then I ran into the captain here and explained my intentions, and, well, you know how one thing always leads to another, eh?” He chuckled under his breath. “We've got all your men disarmed and in custody. Captain Oberiske here wants you to hand him over that Gatling gun. I told him you'd more than likely be glad to. Don't disappoint me now.”

Moses Peltry shook his head, wincing against the
sharp hangover pain in his temples. “I've got to disappoint you, Rhodes,” he said, lowering his head again. “I ain't got it. We lost it the other night near the river valley.”

Captain Oberiske stepped forward impatiently, reached out with the tip of the riding quirt and raised Moses' eyes to his. “Do not waste my time, outlaw! I want the truth, nothing less! We gathered many boxes of ammunition from the spot where your wagon crashed. Now, I must have the gun.”

Moses batted his blurry eyes, glancing past the German captain and seeing the armed soldiers gathered inside the door. He saw Juan Richards in his wheelchair behind the captain. Richards' face bore a strange, grim expression. Dark circles lined his sunken, hate-filled eyes. “Let me question him for you, Captain Oberiske,” Richards whispered, his voice deadly calm. “I'll make this pig tell the truth. I owe him and his brother both for what they've done to me, to my home, to this town.”

“Why don't you crawl off somewhere and die, you crippled, legless old poltroon!” Moses snarled. He looked back at Captain Oberiske and asked, “Where the hell is my brother?”

“He's chained up and under heavy guard in the old Spanish mission at the edge of town,” said Oberiske. “Both he and the leader of the scalp hunters. You will be going there yourself. As soon as I find out who has the machine rifle, I will accompany the lot of you to the border and set you free. You can make it hard on yourself or easy. Either way, my only interest is the gun.” He turned, slapping the quirt impatiently against his thigh, and summoned the
Federales
who stood at the door with their rifles pointed at Moses. “Quickly, take him out of my sight.”

“What about me?” asked Juan Richards. “Can't I cut some meat off him…make up some for what they've done to me?”

“Perhaps later,” said Captain Oberiske, appearing to have dismissed the matter. “Right now I am waiting for all parties to stand on the same spot and tell me about the Gatling gun.”

“I already told you. I don't know where it's at,” said Moses Peltry as the
Federales
lifted him to his feet and dragged him toward the door.

“Of course you did,” said Oberiske. “But now I am curious to see what you will say when I stand your men one at a time in front of a firing squad.”

“Whoa! A firing squad!” said Cherokee Rhodes, beaming with a wide smile. “Hear that, Moses? They're going to kill you and your idiot brother just like you were
real
soldiers! You ought to be proud as a painted peacock.” He turned, laughing, and grabbed Juan Richards' wheelchair with both hands. “Come on, crip. You're not going to want to miss any of this.”

Rhodes rolled Juan Richards out behind the
Federales
, hurrying to keep up with them. Moses Peltry spit over his shoulder at him, saying, “You better hope to God I never get loose long enough to get my hands around your throat, you jackpotting sonsabitch!”

Cherokee Rhodes laughed, taunting Moses. “I don't know what's wrong with all these fools, crip,” he said to Juan Richards. “They all know what a low, back-shooting weasel I am, yet they still keep inviting me along.” Juan Richards only stared grimly ahead in silence, his eyes livid in his rage and riveted to Moses Peltry's naked back.

On their way along the dirt street toward the old Spanish mission, Cherokee Rhodes spotted Sergeant
Hervisu and his patrol riding in from the east ahead of a long, glowing shaft of morning sunlight. “Well I'll be double dog damned,” said Rhodes. “Looks like the Summers-Webb posse is still alive and kicking…just not nearly as high as it was before.” He veered Juan Richards' rickety wheelchair toward the oncoming patrol. “Stick with me, Juan. You're going to meet all kinds of new faces today.”

Trudging along on foot in front of the Hervisu patrol, Will Summers said to Abner Webb and Lawrence Teasdale in a lowered voice, “Of all people, look who made it through alive.” With four feet of chain connecting the three men by their wrists, Summers lagged long enough to let Webb and Teasdale close ranks at his back.

“I'd love to hear how he's managed to stay alive,” Webb whispered near Summers' ear.

“Can't blame Cherokee Rhodes for going with what's no more than his nature,” said Summers.

“Yeah, at least we should have expected it from him,” said Abner Webb. “What should we have expected from Sherman Dahl, sneaking out on us the way he did?”

Will Summers' eyes scanned the ridgeline above the western edge of Punta Del Sol, where the sunlight had not reached the long black holes of shadow across the breast of the hillside. “Don't discount the schoolmaster,” he said. “Something must have gone wrong for him back there—who knows what it was. Maybe he saw he couldn't warn us before they got to us. If that's the case, he might've saved our lives letting us get caught in our sleep. Whatever it was, I'll wager my life he'll be back in this game before it's over. Schoolmaster's the kind of man who has to make things right. Nothing else will do for him. He's
a true hero, that schoolmaster. Count on him to always do what a hero does.”

“I sure hope you're right about him, Summers,” said Lawrence Teasdale, trudging along without missing a step. He spit dryly through parched lips and did not bother rubbing a hand across his mouth.

Along the boardwalk out front of the cantina, Summers, Webb and Teasdale saw an old man leaning to one side on his cane. Hector Roderio shook his head, looking back and forth, first at Sergeant Hervisu's patrol with its three ragtag prisoners, then at the half-naked outlaws who spilled blindly through the doors of the cantina and were jostled into a loose line to be herded off to the old Spanish mission.

In the home of Juan Richards, Captain Oberiske stood with the empty feed bag hanging from his right hand, his left hand clasped firmly over his nose and mouth. On the floor, the two outlaws' heads lay amid chips of dried mud that had flaked and broken off when Oberiske shook them from the sack. “What kind of men are these?” he whispered in awe. “How do they live? How do they think? What in God's name makes them do something like this?”

Sergeant Hector Hervisu and old Hector Roderio looked at one another, then stared back down at the heads. Hector Roderio tapped his cane on the wooden floor. “I think you would be wise to kill these men and be done with them,
Señor Capitán.
No good is served by these men remaining alive.”

Captain Oberiske ignored Roderio and looked to Sergeant Hector Hervisu for an answer. But Hervisu only shrugged. “I have seen this means of bounty hunting many times,
Capitán.
Is it any different than a man who takes the pelt of a mountain cat or a wolf for the reward?”

“Oh yes, indeed. I dare say there
is
a difference!” Captain Oberiske replied strongly. “It is not the taking of these outlaws' heads for
reward
that I find profane. It is the very act of chopping off heads, for any reason! Perhaps you must come from an older,
more civilized race in order to recognize the inhumanity of such a deed.”

“
Sí
, that must be it,” Hervisu said, relenting to his superior officer. “My people still have much to learn. Lucky for us we have people like you to teach us.”

Hearing Sergeant Hervisu, Cherokee Rhodes stifled a short laugh and cleared his throat. He had wheeled Juan Richards to the Spanish mission, then returned to the
hacienda
with Sergeant Hervisu, carrying the feed sack with its gruesome contents. “Yep, I think you're both right,” he said quickly, making sure Captain Oberiske heard the gravity in his voice.

Oberiske turned to a guard by the front door and said, “Remove these—these hideous things!” He brushed his hand through the air as if sweeping the heads out the door. “Have them burnt and disposed of in some—”

“Whoa!” said Cherokee Rhodes, cutting in. “Begging your pardon, Captain…but I put a stick to the dirt on this thing and did myself some serious figuring. There's a few hundred dollars on these heads alone. It turns into several thousand if I can put some more of the Peltry Gang with them, especially Goose and Moses themselves. I don't know how much that sounds like to you in Germany money, but in good ole American it's a
whole bunch
, let me tell you!”

Captain Oberiske just stared at Cherokee Rhodes blankly for a moment. Then he batted his eyes as if to clear his head and make sure he'd heard correctly. “What did you say? Did you say
several thousand
?”

“That's right, Captain,” said Rhodes. “It took me a minute or two for it to sink in when I first heard it, but there it is. There's big money in dead outlaws! Will Summers saw a good thing and jumped right on it. Soon as I saw it, I did the same.” He nodded
at the two grisly, mud-packed heads on the floor and said, “I know that machine rifle is mighty important to you, but surely we can work something out between us on all this bounty money, can't we?”