Day of Independence (14 page)

The desert was an inferno of heat that burned sweat from a man's body and, like the exhaust from a blast furnace, the air was hard to breathe and scorched the lungs.

Around Ranger Hank Cannan, the rippled sand stretched into infinity, a vast sea of brush, prickly pear, ocotillo, and dozens of other species, even more vicious, that stabbed and stung and slashed.

To the west, the canyon lands shimmered in the distance, looking like rocky mesa cut through and through by a gigantic saber.

“Enough of this, Cannan,” the man called Esteban said. “The
niña
is long dead.”

“We'll search just a while longer,” Cannan said.

“You are a fool,” the Mexican said.

“A fool who needs a miracle,” Cannan said.

Esteban glanced at the burned-out sky, then consulted his watch. “Gringo, you got another fifteen minutes.”

Cannan smiled. “You're a giving man, ain't you?”

“I don't like you and I don't trust you,” Esteban said, his lizard eyes ugly. “If we quarrel, I'll take you back to Sancho Perez over your saddle.”

In his present weakened state, Cannan was no match for the Mexican, and he sure as hell wasn't as fast on the draw and shoot. Bearing these melancholy facts in mind, the Ranger nodded. “Then fifteen minutes it is,” he said.

Esteban had a way of stretching his mouth, as though he intended to swallow a jackrabbit whole, but Cannan took it as a smile. “Go one minute over and I'll shoot you, gringo,” he said.

The Ranger said nothing. Esteban was on the prod and there was no use in antagonizing the man further.

Five minutes passed, the only sound the soft footfalls of the horses and the creak of saddle leather.

The wind had been blowing when Cannan ran into the woman and her child and all the tracks had disappeared. But using the faint purple outline of the Chisos Mountains as a guide, he hoped he rode in the right direction.

He could barely stay in the saddle, and Esteban watched him like a cold-eyed buzzard, searching for weakness. Cannan had no idea why he stuck to the search. No baby could survive the cool desert night, then the heat of the day, without water.

Or milk. Wasn't that what babies needed? If it was, he had none of that. And Esteban didn't even have the milk of human kindness.

Cannan smiled at that thought as his burning eyes reached out into the arid land. Then he answered the question in his mind. He stuck to the hunt for the child because he was a Texas Ranger and it was his duty. It was as simple as that and there were no ifs and buts about it.

But right about then the Ranger star in his shirt pocket weighed him down like an anvil.

“Five minutes left, gringo,” Esteban said.

“Time flies when you're having fun, don't it, Esteban?”

“You are pleased to make a joke, Cannan. Don't make another.”

 

 

The second hand of the Mexican's watch was ticking toward the twelve-fifteen mark when Hank Cannan heard a soft, thin wail just ahead of him. Was it the baby? Or maybe a wounded jackrabbit? Or his own tormented imagination?

But Esteban's sudden stiff posture in the saddle told him that the Mexican had heard it, too.

The Ranger half-fell from the saddle, righted himself, and led his horse forward.

“What, you think you will find a baby?” Esteban said. “It is the sound of a quail.”

“Maybe so,” Cannan said.

The sand under his feet was soft. And he staggered a little.

All he wanted to do was fall on his face, sink into the desert's warm embrace, and sleep... sleep... sleep...

Then, behind him, the Mexican said, “Yes, it's the baby. Hah, it is as dead as a stone. Now we will go back.”

Cannan ignored the man, dropped the reins, and stepped toward the little bundle on the sand. He took a knee beside the child and lifted her in his arms.

She whimpered like a sick puppy. “She's alive,” Cannan said.

“Then strangle her and let us be on our way,” Esteban said. “I'm hungry and I'll tell Perez that the child is dead.”

“Toss me your canteen,” Cannan said.

The Mexican thought about that, then grudgingly complied.

The infant was wrapped in a crocheted shawl that had fallen across her face and protected her from the worst of the sun. But she was very weak, her kitten-mew barely audible.

Cannan wore a yellow bandana tied loosely around his neck, one of a dozen presented to the Texas Rangers by an army officer, Second Lieutenant James G. Sturgis, who'd later died at Little Big Horn.

The Ranger treasured the bandana, though it was now faded to a dull straw color and frayed in places. Cannan soaked a corner of the bandana in water and held it to the baby's mouth. The little tyke sucked greedily and opened her black eyes and the Ranger grinned.

Still smiling, he turned to Esteban and said, “I think she's going to be all right.”

The child was hungry, because she'd shifted her attention from the water and her wet little mouth sucked on Cannan's knuckle.

“Damn thing stinks,” the bandit said. “Leave it where you found it.”

“It's a baby and babies do stuff,” the Ranger said.

“How the hell would you know?”

“I've been around babies before. Plenty of times.”

“We're not taking it back, Cannan,” Esteban said. “We have too many of them as it is, stinking up the camp.”

“She can ride with me,” Cannan said.

“Stand aside, gringo.”

The words, flat, ice cold, and menacing. Hank Cannan felt their chill. He turned his head.

Esteban had his gun up and ready. Sunlight flashed on the nickeled barrel. “Stand aside,” the Mexican said again.

“For God's sake, she's only a baby,” Cannan said.

“Get away from it or my first bullet goes through your head.” Esteban sat his saddle like a gorilla on a pony. His eyes held nothing but death.

Cannan's hands dug into the sand and he rose unsteadily to his feet.

“You'll burn in hell for this,” he said, stepping closer to the mounted bandit.

Esteban smiled. “Of course I will.” He shrugged. “It will be but a step from one hell to another.”

The Mexican thumbed back the hammer, and Cannan threw the handful of sand he'd picked up into the bandit's grinning face. Cursing, Esteban shook his head to clear grit from his eyes.

Cannan drew and fired.

The Mexican's horse, sensing its rider's distress, reared at that instant, and the Ranger's shot went wild.

Blinking and rubbing at his eyes, Esteban thumbed off a shot. A miss. He swung his horse around and trotted away.

Cannan, no confidence in his skill with the Colt, holstered the revolver and stumbled to his horse.

He yanked the Winchester out of the boot just as Esteban, his vision cleared, screamed a high-pitched war cry and charged at the gallop. The Mexican's gun spat flame and a bullet split the air near Cannan's left ear.

But, levering and firing from the hip, the big Ranger was a good hand with a rifle. Esteban took a hit in the chest... then another... and a third...

A scarlet bib appeared on his white shirt, and he left the saddle at the gallop. The Mexican crashed onto the ground and sand erupted around him as though he'd dived into a rock pool. Not a man to take chances, Cannan pumped two more shots into the man.

The baby, terrified, screamed her little lungs out.

As gray gun smoke drifted around him, looking more than ever like a dejected walrus, Cannan shook his head and said, “You're in a hell of a fix, Hank, with a dead man and a baby an' all.”

But, used up as he was, he had it to do.

The Mexican's bloody body sprawled twenty-five yards away and his horse stood nearby. Just getting there would be a chore.

First the kid needed attention. She sucked more from the bandana, but then started in to screaming again. Trying not to inhale, the Ranger removed the baby's soiled loincloth—he had no idea what its proper name was—and then washed her butt with the warm water from the canteen. The child screamed the whole time and Cannan figured he wasn't doing it right, but all this was new to him.

After washing his hands and drying them with sand, he stood, told the baby to hush, which she didn't, and stumbled toward the Mexican. Esteban's eyes were wide open, but the man was as dead as he was ever going to be. Cannan slowly shook his head, made a tut-tut-tut sound, then said, “Damn it, you let yourself get all shot to pieces and left me holding the baby.”

His face clenched in the stiffness of death, Esteban neither saw nor heard nor cared.

 

 

It took Hank Cannan all of thirty minutes to manhandle the dead Mexican's body across his saddle. Twice he had to let the man thump back to the sand when the baby's cries became particularly clamorous. The second time he covered the child in sand up to her neck to keep off the sun, but the real problem was that she was hungry.

And there was nothing he could do about that.

After Cannan finally draped Esteban across his saddle and roped the dead bandit's feet to his wrists, he was tuckered beyond exhaustion. But he had no time to rest.

The baby had suddenly gone silent, ominously quiet, and he had to get her to Last Chance... and fast. Groaning with every movement of his body, his head pounding like a hammer on an anvil, Cannan picked up the baby and climbed into the saddle.

It wasn't going to work. He couldn't lead the Mexican's burdened horse, rein his own mount, and hold the baby all at the same time.

The Ranger pondered the problem, tugging at his great mustache, and finally came up with a solution that made him smile. “Crackerjack, Hank,” he said. “Just crackerjack!”

Fortunately, he had his saddlebags with him, but unfortunately, he had to climb down from the saddle again. He held the baby in the crook of his left arm, so her head hung one way, feet the other, and made it safely to the ground.

The child fitted an empty saddlebag perfectly, but the flap lay on top of her head and might be abrasive. Cannan solved that problem by making a headscarf of the yellow bandana, tying it under the child's chin.

Outraged, the baby immediately started to bawl again, and the Ranger took that as a good sign.

It was mid-afternoon when Ranger Hank Cannan rode into Last Chance with a dead man and a squalling baby.

A curious crowd immediately gathered and a skinny, stern matron, who looked as though she lived on a diet of scripture, gunpowder, and prune juice, stepped off the boardwalk. She threw up her hand and said, “Halt!”

Cannan, on the ragged edge of a faint, drew rein and said nothing as the woman grabbed the baby from the saddlebag.

She removed the bandana, tossed it at Cannan, and demanded, “What have you done to this infant?”

The Ranger, his eyes half shut, said, “She's hungry.”

“Hungry indeed! Why didn't you feed her?” the matron said.

“I didn't have any milk. But there's beef jerky in the other saddlebag and I guess I could have fed her that. But I forgot about it.”

The woman gasped and took a step back, highly affronted. “Beef jerky!” She turned and called to a woman on the sidewalk, “Did you hear that, Caroline?”

“Yes, I did,” the woman said. She stomped her ankle boot on the boardwalk. “The very nerve!”

“Can... can you get her milk?” Cannan said, his head drooping. He felt as though he was on a painted horse on a carousel ride as the town spun dizzily around him. He thought he saw Roxie wearing a dress the color of a candy cane and Baptiste Dupoix standing tall and elegant beside her, showing white teeth as he lighted a long cigar, thin and black as a licorice stick.

But Cannan wasn't sure.

Men crowded around the bandit's body and demanded to know the dead man's identity and what happened and where. The prune juice woman held the wailing baby to her narrow chest and called out Cannan for “a frontier tough, a child abuser, a ruffian, and a low person.”

The Ranger's world spun round and round him at breakneck speed, but suddenly the carousel came to a dead stop.

Cannan fell headlong off his painted horse.

He hit the ground with a thud... but didn't feel a thing.

 

 

“You really must stop falling off your horse in the middle of Main Street, Ranger Cannan,” Baptiste Dupoix said. “It's embarrassing, and folks are getting mighty tired of picking you up.”

“Where am I?” Cannan said.

“In bed where you belong. Roxie says she'll take a stick to you if you try to escape again.” Dupoix put a new bottle of Old Crow on the bedside table, then said, “Who's the dead hard case?”

“His name is... was... Esteban. He worked for a bandit by the name of Sancho Perez.”

“A gun?”

“Yeah, class.”

“But you killed him?”

“I got lucky.”

“Better lucky than fast.”

“You could say that.”

“The baby?”

“It's a long story.”

“Mrs. Agatha Spooner has the squalling tyke, and she says she'll keep her at home until you're safely out of town.”

Cannan frowned. “Hell, I did the best I could. What do I know about babies?”

“Damned little, according to Mrs. Spooner.” Dupoix held up the bourbon bottle. “Drink?”

“I sure need one. Are the makings still in my shirt pocket?”

“Right here on the table, and so is your soldier-boy bandana. I picked it up off the street right after they picked you up.”

Dupoix tossed the makings on the bed and then poured two glasses of liquid amber. “Tell me,” he said, passing Cannan his drink.

“Tell you what?”

“Everything.”

“Suppose I've got nothing to tell?”

“Then suppose I call you a liar? Your mustache bristles when you're lying and when you have a good poker hand. Did you know that, Hank? Saw you do that in the hell-on-wheels town.”

“Damn it, are you sure I didn't hang you, Dupoix?”

The gambler smiled. “Spill it, Ranger.”

“You work for Hacker.” Cannan lit his cigarette. “Why would I tell you anything?”

“Because right now I'm the worst enemy and best friend you've got.”

“That doesn't make any sense.”

“Nothing about Last Chance makes any sense.”

Cannan drank half his glass of whiskey and let its golden glow embrace him like the wind of a tipsy angel. Then he said, “I know the locust swarm.”

“Mexicans,” Dupoix said. “Just as I told you.” Dupoix lit a cigar. “I saw their tracks in the desert, remember? It was as though a pharaoh's army had passed that way.”

“I wasn't sure I believed you. I figured maybe Hacker had concocted a big windy.”

“You believe me now.”

“Damn right I do. I saw them with my own eyes, more people than I could ever count.”

“They'll come across the river, starving, and lay waste to the land and sack the town,” Dupoix said. “Then, when it's over, Hacker will pick up the pieces.”

“How do I stop them?” Cannan said.

“You can't, big man.”

“You're right, I can't. I can't gun down hungry Mexicans who'll step over their dead and keep on a-coming because they're desperate.” Cannan drank again and drew deep on his cigarette. “The Texas Rangers would hang me.”

“Or the Mexican government would.”

“Then I can't win.”

“Seems like.”

“I can lock up Hacker, put him out of the locust business.”

Dupoix smiled. “That won't work.” He answered the question on Cannan's face. “Through Mickey Pauleen and Sancho Perez, Hacker told a couple of thousand ravenous people they were bound for the Promised Land,” Dupoix said. “Mickey says Perez can barely hold them as it is, and once they start moving they won't stop at the river.”

“And the best crossing is right here, at Last Chance.”

Dupoix nodded. “Yup, Ranger, we're the Red Sea.”

The gambler poured more bourbon, then glass in hand, stepped to the window. It was gone four o'clock, yet the day's heat was still intense. But the street outside was busy, and shirtsleeved men jostled women carrying packages and parasols. A piano player was already at work in one of the saloons and outside the greengrocer's a young female assistant held a struggling urchin by the back of his neck and cuffed his ear, apparently for apple-stealing, since the rosy evidence was still in the boy's hand.

“Folks getting ready for Independence Day,” Dupoix said, without turning.

“If only they knew,” Cannan said.

“They'll know, because you'll tell them.”

“Will they stand in a line on the bank of the Rio Grande and shoot into hungry women and children?”

“A few will. Most won't.”

“None will, especially not on Independence Day. Those are decent people out there, and they won't betray the principles that makes this nation of ours great.”

When Dupoix turned he was smiling. “You should run for politics, Hank.”

“I believe in America and Americans. To slaughter innocents is not our way.”

“And that suits Abe Hacker just fine.”

Cannan made no comment on that, but he said, “You going to drink the whole bottle by yourself?”

Dupoix poured the Ranger another glass. “Mickey Pauleen doesn't talk to me much, but I've listened in on conversations between him and Hacker. And I spoke to Nora Anderson just before you rode into town with your baby girl.”

“She isn't my—”

“And I can give you something to think about.”

“Let me hear it.”

“It may be nothing.”

“Let me hear it.”

“Trivial, perhaps.”

“Damn you, Dupoix, let it out. I'm clutching at straws here.”

“Sancho Perez has a burning hatred for gringos.”

“I reckon that's obvious.”

“He's also crazy.”

“I know. I spoke with him.”

“He's also a very proud man.”

Cannan looked up from the cigarette he was building. “You're giving me nothing, Dupoix.”

“Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.” The gambler grinned. “That's from the Bible, Proverbs, I believe, or so I recall my grandma Henriette told me.”

“I'm not catching your drift. In fact, you're running around in circles like a dog chasing its tail.”

“If you can induce Sancho to attack across the river before he sends over the Mexicans, you might be able to end this thing.”

Cannan let his exasperation show. He was weak, light-headed, and angry.

“So what do I do? Stand on the bank of the Rio Grande and say, ‘Sancho, I know you're tetched in the head, so would you please attack me so I can shoot you down?'”

“Why is it,” Dupoix said, “that the bigger the man, the dumber he is?”

“You ain't exactly runtified your ownself,” Cannan said.

“Hank—may I call you Hank?”

“Seems to me you've been doing it. And no, I sure ain't calling you Baptiste.”

Dupoix let that go. “You play to his pride, Hank,” he said. You tell him he's a coward who's hiding behind the skirts of women, too scared to face real American men.”

Dupoix stared at Cannan over the top of his glass.

“Sancho will not want to lose face in front of his men.”

“Hell, that's as thin as a rail,” the Ranger said.

“It's all you have.”

Dupoix watched Cannan as the big man considered the implications of what he'd just said.

The gambler prodded him. “You won't stop the Mexicans, nothing can stop them now, but killing Perez could make the situation more manageable.”

“And Hacker and Pauleen?”

“Figure that one for yourself,” Dupoix said.

“And you, Dupoix? What about you?”

“Figure that for yourself as well.”

Cannan sat upright in bed, then wiped whiskey off his mustache with the back of his hand. He opened his mouth to speak, but Dupoix got his words in first.

“Your bride will be here day after tomorrow,” he said.

“Yeah, I'm aware of that.”

“Then you know what you should do?”

“No, but I'm sure you'll tell me.”

“Get her back on the stage and go with her. Leave this whole, sorry mess behind. Buy a house with a white picket fence within the sound of a church bell and enjoy married life together.”

“I can't do that, Dupoix.”

“I know, the brave Texas Ranger can't turn his back on trouble.”

“Wrong, I'm not brave. Right, I'm a Texas Ranger.” Cannan was silent for a few moments, then said, “Dupoix I need a favor.”

“From me? The man you aim to hang?”

“Yeah, from you. We'll forget the hanging thing for now.”

“That's white of you. All right, a favor, but with very narrow limits. I'm still drawing wages from Hacker.”

“Visit the cattle spreads. Tell the ranchers that when they come into town for Independence Day they can wear their best goin' a-courtin' suits, but I want them well armed. Tell them to bring rifles and plenty of ammunition.”

“Most of the seasonal hands are paid off,” Dupoix said.

“There will be enough,” Cannan said. “What's left are good men and they'll stand.”

“You're pushing it, Hank,” Dupoix said.

“With the ranchers?”

“No, with me.”

“You already told me you wouldn't stand by and see Last Chance and all it stands for destroyed. Hell, we're defending our corner of the United States of America. Doesn't that mean something to you?”

“More than you know,” Dupoix said. “But when I take a man's wages I ride for the brand.”

“A man can be loyal to the wrong cause. How many southern boys wore the blue?”

“All right, I'll do this for you, Ranger, since you can't ride,” Dupoix said. “But afterward, I go my own way. Understand?”

“You've stated your intentions and I respect them.”

Cannan eased his aching back against the pillows. He felt worn out, as though he'd been up the trail and back.

“As far as I know, the ranches—”

“I know where they are,” Dupoix said. “Two to the west, one east of us.”

Cannon nodded. “I appreciate this, Dupoix.”

“Now you've run out of favors, Hank.”

“Tell those boys to get in early,” the Ranger said. “I don't know when Perez will open the ball.”

Dupoix smiled without humor. “You'll know, Hank. Trust me, you'll know.”