Streets of Laredo: A Novel (55 page)

"Well, I'll be going," Goodnight said.

"Much obliged for the news. Once I've seen what's left of the manburner, I guess I'll go home. Captain Call done the job I ought to have done ten years ago." "He done it, but he was lucky," Hardin said.

"If you see him, tell him that for me." "It might have been luck, and it might have been preparation," Goodnight said. "Call was always known for his careful preparation." Hardin laughed his whinny of a laugh, again.

"He can prepare till doomsday. What he needs to do is shoot a little better," Hardin said.

"He was just fighting louts. If he thinks he can saunter up to the Garza boy and be that lucky, then he ought to retire. The Garza boy will pick him off before Call even knows he's there." "Have you met this boy?" Goodnight asked.

He didn't necessarily believe what Hardin was saying; on the other hand, what he was saying couldn't be lightly disregarded. Wesley Hardin had been in several penitentiaries, and undoubtedly knew something about killers.

"Why, yes, he showed up in Crow Town," Hardin said. "That was before the whores left. I found him rather standoffish. I started to kill him, but then I decided it was the wrong day for hostilities." "Why?" Goodnight asked.

"Well, it just was," Hardin replied.

"I've got to the age where I don't tempt fate. At least, I don't if I'm drunk, and I was drunk." He cackled, lit a cheap cigar, and left.

Goodnight looked around; Hardin was the kind of fellow who prompted you to watch your back. But all he saw was a quick arc of red. Hardin had thrown the cheap cigar away.

Two days later, Goodnight found the gully and inspected the remains, which were a little scattered by that time. The buzzards had helped him locate the correct gully, in a country where there were many.

Hardin had been right. The manburner was dead.

There was also a dead horse a few hundred yards from where Mox Mox lay; run to death, Goodnight felt sure. Mox Mox wore a noticeable belt--the belt buckle had a red stone of some kind set in it. Goodnight took the belt and put it in his saddlebags. When he next ran into Call, he planned to give him the belt. If Mox Mox had run far enough to ride a horse to death, Call might not even know that he had killed him. The belt ought to convince him.

Then, since he had ridden that far to see one body, he rode another twenty miles to the camp where the battle had taken place. He didn't have to search, either. He could see buzzards the whole way.

Goodnight had surveyed many battle sites. He could usually figure out what had gone on and what mistakes had been made, from looking at the scattered cartridges, the lost hats, and the dead bodies. In this case, he dismounted and inspected the area carefully. He was forced to conclude that John Wesley Hardin had been correct in his assessment: Woodrow Call had been lucky. Probably only his willingness to keep pumping in bullets while his opponents were confused, had saved him. There was cover within a few steps of the campsite. If one or two of the men had had any presence of mind, they could have quickly dug in and made a fight of it.

They had horses, too; a couple of them could have flanked Call and cut him off.

They hadn't, though, and that was that. Looking around, Goodnight found something surprising--a small rag doll, such as a little girl might have. Mox Mox must have had captives and was probably going to indulge in his favorite pastime. But Call had killed him in time, and had probably taken the children to safety.

Goodnight debated going to look for Captain Call. What John Wesley Hardin had to say about the abilities of the Garza boy weighed on his mind. But after a time, he decided to let it be. Mox Mox, not Joey Garza, had burned his cowhands. He himself was not a manhunter, and he had a ranch to run. Woodrow Call was the manhunter. He had accepted the job; let him do it. If he couldn't, some posse would, eventually.

Besides, Goodnight had been brooding during the whole ride about the insolence of Muley, his ranch cook. He had decided to go home and fire the man, even if it did mean a trip to Amarillo and an irksome search.

Goodnight didn't like leaving men unburied.

That had never been his practice, unless the fight was so hot that he couldn't afford to stop and attend to the civilities. He buried the scraps of Mox Mox. The meanness was gone now, and just bones and flesh remained. Goodnight unstrapped his little shovel and did the same for the six dead men.

Then he turned back north, toward the Quitaque. It was time to hang up the rifle.

The manburner was dead.

In the fight with Mox Mox, Call had somehow wrenched his neck. It began to pain him badly as he rode south with Lorena. At times it was as if his nerves were on fire, and he had to grit his teeth against the pain as they rode. He could hardly turn his head to the right at all, and he had to be cautious about turning it to the left, or a streak of fire shot up from his shoulder blade almost to his ear.

"It's just a nuisance," Call said, when Lorena asked whether he was well. She could see the strain in his face.

"We should have bought some liniment, when we had the chance," Lorena said. "Pea Eye's always getting sore in his back. He can't lift hay like he once could." Call could not rid himself of the conviction that they were being followed. He had no evidence, but he could not relax. Every time he turned his head to scan the horizon behind them, the pain shot up his neck.

On the evening of the third day, they met a small horse herd being driven north by two cowboys. One of the cowboys, a tall fellow named Roy Malone, had a drooping mustache that reminded Call of Dish Boggett, the excellent Hat Creek cowboy who was now selling hardware in Lincoln, New Mexico.

By coincidence, the horse herd was bound for the Chisum Ranch, not far from Lincoln.

"You're welcome to stop the night with us," Call told Roy Malone, but the cowboy shook his head.

"You don't stop for the whole night, if you work for Mr. Chisum," Roy said. "He likes things to happen prompt, if not a little sooner." Call would have been relieved to have some help.

As it was, he stood watch himself most of the night.

Lorena proved a competent traveling companion. They had bacon and coffee, acquired in Fort Stockton, and she had coffee made and bacon fried not long after they made camp. In the morning, she cooked them a bite of breakfast before first light.

"That cowboy reminded me an awful lot of Dish," Call said, as they ate. "I'd like to see Dish sometime. I never expected him to go in the hardware business." "I wonder if he married?" Lorena said. Dish had been in love with her once; he had stayed in love for several years.

It was a love she couldn't return, though--she just couldn't. Some traveler told her that Dish had taken a sledgehammer and used it to smash a heavy barrel of horseshoe nails, in his surprise and disappointment, when the news reached him that she had married Pea Eye. The traveler said that people in Lincoln were worried that Dish would lose his mind from disappointment, even though by that time, she hadn't so much as seen him in over three years.

Lorena didn't know what had kept her so stiff with Dish. She had just got stiff. For a time in Nebraska, he had brought her flowers and given her little presents, but it hadn't changed anything.

Then she fell in love with Pea Eye, who would never have ventured to choose a present for her, or pick her a flower, either.

"I guess I should have left Pea Eye at home," Call said, after they ate. "Then you wouldn't have had to make this long trip." "It won't matter, once I get him back," Lorena said.

The way she said it made Call wish they could hurry along a little faster, or that Pea Eye would get wind that his wife was coming and ride to meet them. He felt he had run a miserable expedition so far; it was the most ineffective of his life. Three families had been inconvenienced, with as yet no progress at all in the matter of Joey Garza. Rumor in Fort Stockton had it that Joey had gone back to Coahuila, but no one really had the details, and Call didn't know how much credit to give the rumor. Now he regretted that he had taken Brookshire with him, or Deputy Plunkert, either. Colonel Terry would rightly be incensed at the long wait and the absence of results.

Brookshire had lost his wife while on the trip, and Pea Eye had lost time from his farming.

Lorena had to take leave from her schoolteaching.

When they got to Presidio, he meant to send everyone home. From that point on, he would hunt Joey Garza alone.

Call wished his neck would ease up. He had rarely felt a pain more intense than the fire that shot up his neck if he moved his head a little too quickly. He also wished the cold would abate.

In the morning, his hands were so swollen that he had increasing trouble doing the packing. Lorena saddled her mount and was ready to go before he could complete his chores.

When they got ready to start, Call noticed two horses standing a fair distance to the northwest of their camp.

"I wonder if those cowboys lost some horses," he said. "If they did, there'll be trouble when they get to John Chisum's. He's the kind of man who counts his horses, and he expects a full count." He finished his coffee. Lorena was about done with her packing. Their breaths made clouds of steam; it was hard to see the knots they had to tie to secure their duffle.

"I think I'll just ride out and check the brands on those horses," Call said. "I don't know why those men would let those horses stray. They seemed like competent men." He put his horse into a short lope. Before going a quarter of a mile, he surprised two mule deer, a doe with a fawn. They had been bedded down, but jumped up and scampered off. In the clear air he had misjudged the distance to the horses a bit; they were farther from camp than he thought. While Call was watching the mule deer, his horse shied at a badger that waddled out from behind a sage bush, practically at the horse's feet.

The horse crow-hopped a time or two, just enough to cause Call to lose a stirrup.

He had the horse almost calmed down and was searching for the stirrup with his foot when the first bullet struck him, low in the chest. Careless, he thought; too careless, and now I'm shot. He whirled his mount and yanked his rifle from the saddle scabbard, but his hands were so stiff with cold that he dropped the weapon. Just as he did, a second bullet smashed his knee and evidently went through and wounded his horse, for the horse squealed and began to buck. A third shot hit his arm. Call was trying to hang on; he couldn't afford to be thrown, not with the bullets coming so fast and so, accurately.

They seemed to him to be coming from under one of the stray horses. Careless, he thought again. He's shooting from under the horse, and I rode right out to him. Then he lost his seat and was thrown hard, in the direction of the rifle he had dropped. Fortunately, he was able to reach the rifle. He had to work the lever with one hand, but as soon as he could sit up he began to fire in the direction of the horses.

One of them raced away, but the other stood exactly where it had been, hobbled, probably, so the rifleman could shoot from underneath it, hidden by the sage.

There was a final shot--it brought down Call's horse.

All he could do then was wait, in the hope that the killer would be foolhardy enough to come and try and finish him off. After the shot that killed his horse, there was not a sound from the northwest. Call knew he would have to try and staunch his bleeding soon. He had been hit three times, and the bullets were heavy caliber. His left arm and right leg were smashed for good; the arm was practically shot off. When he looked at his knee, he saw bone fragments through the hole in his pants. The first wound, the one in the chest, was bleeding more than it should. If he didn't staunch it soon he might faint, and if he fainted, he was lost, and probably Lorena, too.

Call raked up a little sand and covered the chest wound with it, pulling aside his shirt. The sandy poultice quickly grew muddy with blood, but it was the only way he had of staunching the blood flow; he kept raking sand and patting it onto his chest.

He raised up only high enough to see that the hobbled horse was still there. Any higher he couldn't risk.

He felt a deep shame when he thought of Lorena, back at the camp alone. She would have heard the shots, and he hoped that she would run.

There were ranches to the south. Perhaps she could survive long enough to reach one of them, if the killer didn't strike her, too. He had brought her with him, and then failed to protect her--the very thing he had mentioned, and the very thing he had feared. Now he himself might be dying. The chest wound probably involved a lung. He could feel the bullet like a nut inside him when he coughed. Call knew he should not have let the killer know that he'd got his rifle--that was another mistake. Now there was little hope that the killer, Joey Garza probably, would expose himself at all, and even if he was reckless and let himself be seen, Call knew it would only be luck if he could hit him, shooting one-handed.

He had botched the matter completely; everything was his fault. He had known in his gut that someone was following them, someone so clever that unending vigilance was essential. But the fact that the cowboys had apparently lost two horses, a normal thing, had distracted him to such an extent that he had just ridden out casually, as he would have under normal circumstances, to have a look.

Now a clever boy, shooting from under a hobbled horse, had done what all the fighters he had engaged with over four decades--Kicking Bird, the Comanche; the Kiowa Pedro Flores; and outlaws of all description, both Mexican and American--had failed to do. He was hit, and hit soundly. Probably only the fact that his horse was restive caused the first bullet to miss his heart. It hadn't missed it by much, at that, if it had missed it. Perhaps it was his heart's blood he was pumping out.