Brian Garfield (13 page)

He kept his back hunched against it and pushed his face against the bars. Smoke wheeled into him and burnt his throat and he thought, while he coughed white hot pain, that if this was what Don Pablo Ortiz endured every time he had a coughing spasm then Don Pablo was a braver man than Boag had thought.

The heat pushed at him as though he were in the fire, not ten feet from it. But paper burned very hot while it burned and he had no confidence it would last long enough to ignite the door; the heat began to drop and so did the blinding light of it and when he looked at it the paper heap was collapsing into a small pile of uncurling papers with grey edges.

He pounced across the room and kicked the paper back up against the door and tried to shove some of it under the crack with the toe of his boot.

He did not want to think about what he was doing to the Bible.

Little flames flickered around the lower edge of the door and he kept crowding the ash toward them because there were still fires in the ashes.

The door was burning. Here and there it turned red at the splinters. The flames had caught and it was not burning high like the paper but it was burning, turning black beneath the flames as the fire crept upward along the cracks where air came through from the corridor and fed it.

He watched the last of the Bible disintegrate. Little patches of blanket-cloth still smoldered and he shoved them all under the door. Then he picked up the single strip of blanket he had saved and carried it back to the window with him and stood there in the clean wind, watching the small fires nibble the wood.

Finally he knew he had it licked when he saw flames sliding in through the cracks from the outside of the door. It meant the fire was climbing up the corridor side of the door. The draft would draw the flames through the cracks to this side and that would keep it burning.

He had been parched before. The smoke sucked the last moisture out of him and he almost strangled dry-coughing; he had to swallow a dozen times in panic before the saliva began to run reluctantly in his throat.

He heard them running down the corridor. The boots clattered to a halt outside the burning door and he heard a voice. “Get buckets—get water!”

Then another voice with the timbre of command. “Never mind, let him fry in there.”

The first voice: “But the door.”

“It will have to be replaced in any case.”

Just the two of them, Boag decided; there were no others. Yet.

He judged the door and it had to be now, he had to hope the fire had weakened it enough.

He made his run.

7

He left the floor halfway across the room, launched himself into a flying dropkick and hit the door fairly low, feet first, expecting the tough old timbers to hold firm and break his feet.

But the wood was dry and brittle and the fire had eaten enough of it. He went through in a tangled crashing of broken wood and angry flames.

He skinned his ankle on the corridor floor and rolled fast; it was a blind lunge but it caught somebody across the shins and the man came down on top of Boag. A voice shouted and Boag slithered out from under the flailing body, found the man's head as it lifted; Boag whipped the length of blanket-strip around the man's neck and yanked it tight as a garotte.

He saw the other one back away fumbling for his revolver.

Boag clamped a one-hand grip on the rag that circled his man's throat; he whipped up the guard's revolver with his free hand but he wasn't fast enough and the man on his feet began shooting. One of the bullets slammed into Boag's man. Boag felt the body lurch against him. He fired past the man's ear and saw the other guard flinch from the shooting; Boag pulled trigger again and it scored. The guard went down.

Flames burned strong around the jagged hole in the door, sucking a wind through that moaned in the corridor. Boag batted his prisoner across the temple with the gun, but it wasn't needed, the man had a bullet somewhere in his guts and there was no fight in him. Boag left him, left the blanket-strip, scooped up the other guard's revolver and ran down the hall with revolvers in both fists.

A guard bolted around the far bend into the end of the corridor. Boag snapped a shot that drove the guard back behind cover.
Remember now you've used two from the left hand and one from the right.
Were they the kind who loaded six or were they the kind who loaded five and left the chamber empty under the pin? Assume that; assume you have seven left.

The gunbarrel was poking around the corner and Boag flattened himself in a doorway. The guard down there sprayed the corridor, shooting blind. Boag let him take his five shots and then Boag was out and running again and he heard the guard retreat in panic. He heard empty shell cases clatter on the floor.

He tried doors as he passed them. Three were locked. The fourth stood ajar but it was only an empty cell. Boag reached the corner and triggered a blind shot around it, burst around the corner, guns up, and saw the guard frantically plugging ammunition into his revolver. Boag sighted and fired quickly but not too quickly. The bullet snapped the guard back against the doorframe and he slid to the floor leaving a blood smear on the wood.

How many more of them and where would they come from? Boag tried to remember the route by which they had brought him into the prison. Where were the exits? He stepped across the dying, guard, scooping up the man's revolver; he crouched to finish the reloading job and took the guard's ammunition pouch with him back into the dark offices.

He made several turnings, moving without sound now; he heard voices shouting in the labyrinth behind him. Some fool fired a shot in some other part of the building and the echoes clanged around in the night.

He tried a door slowly and peered through the crack. It was a side door into the room where they had taken his belongings from him. There was a long counter with locked cabinets behind it.

He didn't have time to seek out his things. But he knew where he was now and he slipped into the room, pulled the door shut behind him and loped across to the far door. Beyond it was a corridor and at the far end of that was a courtyard, and across the courtyard was a gate to the street of Ures.

The gate would be shut of course and there were guard towers up on the walls. It would be impossible to cross the courtyard in the open on foot and even if he did, there would still be the gate, at least ten feet high under its arch of adobe.

But maybe the racket would cause enough confusion. He plunged into the corridor and ran the length of it on his toes, and stopped just inside the open archway in the shadows to look out across the cobbled courtyard.

An alarm bell was clanging above him. The moon in its last sliver was just disappearing downhill to the west and there were clouds across the stars; it was good and dark and perhaps that would confuse their aim. But there was still that gate.

The juices were pumping in him. He felt his lips peel back from his teeth in a rictus of a grin.

He heard running boots inside the jail somewhere; he listened with concern but they didn't seem to be drawing closer. Then he heard a drum of hoofbeats.

It was coming from outside—the courtyard or the street?

He put his head out slowly but there was nothing moving in the courtyard except one guard who was coming down the ladder from one of the watch towers, carrying a flaming torch above his head. There were lanterns set into the wall and the guard took his torch toward one of them.

The hoofbeat racket boiled up and Boag saw the horsemen mill to a halt outside the iron gate. Some yelling was exchanged from the riders to the men on top of the wall. Nobody knew what the alarums were about; there had been shooting inside the jail.

“You'd better let us in then.”

Boag heard the grinding of a chain. That would be the mechanism that opened the gate.

The guard with the torch had reached the first lantern and was touching the lantern with the flame when Boag shot him down. The torch rolled away on the cobblestones and the guard crabbed his way back toward the steps, trying to get away from the light that pinned him. The troops were charging into the compound now and Boag waited for them to get close enough; they started to dismount and deploy and that was when Boag started shooting. It drove most of them toward cover and Boag ran out onto the cobblestones, plunging into the rearing confusion of horses before anybody could get a clear shot at him.

He caught a horse by the reins and lifted himself into the saddle. Laid himself flat across it and whacked the horse's flank with a revolver, hard. The horse reared and he saw its wickedly rolling eye; it came down running and he steered it toward the gate. Over the pound of hoofs and the shouts and the gunshots he could hear the winches grinding and he saw the gates swinging; they were trying to close them, to shut him in, but the horse squeezed through and Boag filled his lungs and bellowed:

“By God old Boag made it!”

And then the rifles on top of the wall opened up and he felt something slam into his back. It almost knocked him off the horse.

Christ I've been shot
.

He clutched the saddle and kicked the beast frantically. The horse swept him into the alleys of Ures and the shooting behind him stopped, and there was no sound but the clatter of the horse's shoes on the stones and the thunder of blood in Boag's ears while the world began to reel.

In a midnight-dark, midnight-silent street he reined in. He could feel the moist warm blood along his flank; the bullet had sliced across the lower part of his back on the right side and traveled through part of his thigh before it went out. This was no time to take stock of that; he would worry later about what vital parts might have been hit—or he would die and not have to worry about it.

He had to give them something else to think about.

The store ahead had a porch roof that ran the length of the boardwalk in front of it. Fish-oil lanterns hung under the porch roof. From the saddle he reached out and plucked a lantern off its hook, unscrewed the filler cap and threw the lantern against the wall. The oil splashed out and a little fire started there. He guided the horse ten feet along the board-walk and picked off another lamp and threw it down too; he went the length of the block throwing lamps on the board-walk and when he galloped away up the street the porch was starting to burn healthily. Give it five minutes and the whole block would be in flames. It was the dry season and there was a good strong breeze.

His head was getting fuzzy.
Have to get out of this town. I lit enough fires for one night.
He felt the blood running and thought maybe they had put out Boag's fire but he wasn't going to give it up before he had to. He whacked the horse to a canter and clung wildly to the pitching saddle and fled the town of Ures.

chapter six

1

Later he had a hard time sorting out the rest of that night in his memory; it never came together in a piece, there were only isolated instants. Like a night battle seen by the light of its artillery flashes.

Ures lay in the slot of a valley with the slopes of the Sierra Madre on both sides of it. The main road out led down the Rio Sonora to the provincial capital at Hermosillo and then to the Gulf. Boag had enough alertness left in him not to take the main road. He remembered putting the horse up into the mountains. He thought vaguely he was heading east but he wasn't sure and it really made no difference to speak of; he had no destination in mind except escape.

It was Yaqui country, bandit country; not many travelers were fool enough to travel it, especially by night. But there wasn't much they could do to Boag that hadn't already been done.

When he got behind the first rising hill and the lights of town were blotted out by the land mass he stopped the horse and stripped off his shirt and made a ragged sort of binding for his wound. He was suffering from shock, he'd seen it in combat and recognized it in himself; chills and a kind of euphoria and a circling faintness with the blood drifting from his head. What you did for a case like Boag's was lay him down somewhere warm and wrap him up in clean bandages and warm blankets and get hot soup down him and hope he didn't die on you.

For a while he tried to persuade himself that if the bullet had cut any important organs he'd have died by now. It wasn't very convincing; he'd known men shot in the guts or the kidneys who'd lasted a week and then expired.

But Boag only had one thing left and that was the knowledge that he wasn't going to give up.

Later he recalled falling off the horse. It took him somewhere between five minutes and two hours to get back on the saddle. First he had to persuade the unnerved horse to stand still and ignore the smell of fresh blood. Then he had to hitch himself up an inch at a time into the saddle, and every inch drove splinters of red agony through all his fibers, and most of the time he believed he was not going to make it because the muscles just didn't have the strength any more; the body was ready to quit before the head was, but Boag forced the body to obey.

The rest of it was mostly blacked out and never came back to him.

Somewhere in the early morning he had a few moments of awareness. The horse had stopped to drink out of a stream. Sunlight flickered through the pine branches and dappled the stream with dancing pins. The sunrise mist hung above the water and there was dew on the ground. It was a very peaceful scene filled with beauty and Boag thought it was probably the approach to the Pearly Gates, which surprised him a little because he didn't expect they were going to let him in there, especially after setting the Bible on fire.

But then he thought,
Hell I'm a good soldier, I'll stand on my record.
He remembered where he was: he had to get back to the troop and get the news to General Crook's headquarters that Al Sieber had found out where the Geronimo bunch was hiding, the
rancheria
in the Sierra. Now which way was it to Captain Gatewood's camp?

He was falling off the horse when a couple of Tenth Cavalrymen caught him and carried him over into the sunshine and laid him down and threw a blanket across him.