The Mission War (19 page)

A
bandido
appeared from nowhere, directly in front of Jessica and Ki, who were pouring kerosene onto a pile of wood beside the town hall.

There wasn't time for Ki to react and his hands were busy, but Jessica moved. Seeing the
bandido
draw his holstered gun, she threw her knife at him with deadly accuracy. Ki had spent hours showing her how to use a knife and now that training had paid off.

The knife struck heart muscle, and the bandit staggered back, already dead. The gun in his hand exploded with flame and noise, and Ki stiffened, looking at Jessica with anxious eyes.

“That does it,” he said. “We will go. Now!”

“We haven't finished—”

“Now!”

From up the street they could already hear shouts, running feet, broken glass. Jessica took her box of matches from her pocket and struck one. The side of the town hall went up in a roar of red flame and smoke leaping to the skies.

They retreated up the alley, pausing to set the barber shop on fire. The flames crackled and came to thunderous life. Rounding the comer, they could see
bandidos
rushing toward them. Someone shouted and a finger pointed. They ran on, reaching the shelter of a building as a dozen shots rang out.

Fly Catcher had started three fires up a second alley. The flames leaped skyward, licking at the darkness. Ki used another match on the first building they had doused, and then with Fly Catcher on their heels, they raced for the gully.

San Ignacio was ablaze with light. Flames forty feet high painted smoky images against the night. The sound was tremendous. They never even heard the rifle shot that killed Fly Catcher.

The Indian was running beside them and he simply crumpled up as if every nerve in his body had been destroyed by the .44 slug that had ripped through his skull.

He went down and Jessica stopped to help him. Ki grabbed her arm, yanking her away.

“He's hurt,” Jessie shouted.

Ki had had a better look. The top of the Papago Indian's skull was missing. “He's dead. Run or we will be, too.”

Jessie glanced back and then followed Ki up the gully toward the mission. Shots rang in their ears. Once Jessica went down, ripping open a knee on a rock, but Ki lifted her to her feet, and they ran on, Jessie hobbling and in pain. Behind them, the guns died down and the flames increased.

It didn't help when one wild shot was cut loose by someone on the mission wall. Fortunately, there was only the one. If panic had set in and the guns along the parapet had opened up in unison, there was every chance that Jessie and Ki would have been killed.

Diego met them at the side gate. “Damn fool,” he said. “I told everyone to watch what they were shooting at. He just wasn't listening.”

“You didn't tell them we set the fire.”

“No. We'd have a mutiny on our hands. Told them it was reconnaissance.”

“Ki!” Maria was there suddenly and in Ki's arms.

“How did it—” Diego started to ask, but a cry from the wall aborted his question.

“Here they come! It's Mono!”

Ki held Maria's arms for a minute, looking up in disbelief at the sentry. Mono was coming again, now? Ki had expected stealth and care, but if they had already spotted Mono it meant a full-scale attack.

“You seem to have angered him,” Diego said dryly.

Jessica commented, “Let's try to get him a little an grier then. He's making a mistake.”

“Maybe,” Ki said cautiously, “maybe Mono is making a great mistake.”

On the other hand, maybe Mono was right. Maybe hurling all of his force against the mission from out of the night would be enough to send the peons into panic. Both sides recognized Mono's superiority of arms. Every shot of the Mexicans on the wall would have to count, whereas Mono's men could burn rounds of ammunition keeping the sentries' heads down while they stormed the walls.

“Let's get up there,” Ki said. “Quickly.”

Diego hesitated, still looking at the gate. “Where's the Indian? Where's Fly Catcher?” When they told him, he was silent before saying, “I'll get Don Alejandro for him. I swear it.”

There wasn't time to worry about vengeance just then, however; survival was the only matter of importance. After climbing to the top of the thick walls, Ki and Jessie were in time to see the first charge of Mono's
bandidos.

Darkness covered much of their movement, and when the bandit force did appear, it was much closer than Ki had expected. They must have ridden to the mission, but now they had wisely abandoned their horses and were charging on foot toward the front gate.

“Let them have it!” Ki shouted and a barrage of musket fire cut down some in the front ranks of the onrushing
bandidos.
“Don't fire all at once! One rank at a time. Fire and then reload. Take your time when you aim!”

They didn't hear half of it and Ki had told them all of that before. It didn't seem to be doing much good. The Mexicans weren't disciplined soldiers. They were scared men fighting for their lives.

“The gate,” Jessie shouted, and Ki ran that way along the top of the wall, risking a sniper's bullet. The bandits had dragged a heavy pole with them, and now they were using it as a battering ram. The thud of each impact could be felt along the wall.

Brother Joseph was there, his face lighted by the fires burning hotly beneath his ancient iron pots. Inside them, the olive oil was burbling, smoking, moving with heat.

The outlaws crashed into the gate again and the friar looked skyward.

“Pray later,” Ki said, “fight now.”

The friar crossed himself and bent to help Ki. They dumped the scalding oil onto the
bandidos
below, searing flesh and hair. With screams of pain and cries of terror, the outlaws fell back, the oil clinging to their flesh.

A second pot was overturned and the
bandidos
abandoned the battering ram in order to limp and dart back across the dark grass toward shelter. Musket balls took half of the unarmed
bandidos
down. One lay crying to the night for fifteen minutes before his pain was ended by death.

The field was silent.

“They retreated,” Jessie said, wanting to believe it.

“Yes,” Ki said thoughtfully. Then he realized what must be happening. “They won't try the front wall again. Every third man stay here! The rest of you to the side walls!” He cupped his hands to his mouth and repeated the command until they heard him and moved off along the wall to the north and south.

It was none too soon. From out of the night, the bandit guns spoke again and Mono charged the mission from the flanks, his repeating weapons laying down a screen of deadly fire.

A Mexican tumbled from the wall; another turned, his face shot away, and toppled toward the courtyard. Ki snatched up a musket, loaded it, and shot a charging bandit down.

The fire from San Ignacio still blazed and the bandits were clearly visible as they charged from the flanks now.

“Ki!” It was Jessie who first saw what the
bandidos
intended to do. Jessie called out to Ki. Moving through the gunsmoke and hail of bullets, Ki, too, saw it and he cursed.

Mono‘s's men had lashed poles together to form crude ladders. There were a dozen or more of them, and now as the people of San Ignacio spread out to try fighting back, Mono's primary attack concentrated itself once more on the front wall.

Rifle fire kept the heads of the men on the wall down as the bandits rushed the wall, setting up their ladders.

“Keep them back,” Ki shouted.

The first enthusiastic volunteer tried to do just that and was shot through the guts for his trouble. Withering rifle fire from
bandidos
hidden in the darkness sent a hail of lead screaming toward the mission wall, blowing puffs of plaster and brick into the air and ricocheting wildly off the wall and metal pots, and striking the huge bell in the tower.

“Ki!” Jessie looked a frantic question at him.

“Hold them. Hold them for five minutes, just five minutes!” Ki shouted. “Brother Joseph!”

“Yes, Ki.” The friar's eyes were wide but determined.

“The cellars, quickly. Now!”

“But why?”

“Now!”

The bandits were climbing the walls and being fought back. Musket fire answered the chatter of the constant Winchester shots. Ki raced toward the cellars, the friar behind him, his robes hiked high.

“These,” Ki said, pointing out what he wanted.

“What good will they do?” the friar asked.

Ki gestured again and said more angrily than he intended, “Grab a couple of those cans, damn you, and do it now!”

Outside, the fire blazed red and orange against the sky, the shouts of the combatants mingled with the screams of the injured. From below, Ki saw a Mexican trigger his musket off into the face of a bandit who had just achieved the top of the wall. The man's face was washed away in a mask of gore.

Arturo would ride down no more children.

Diego was there, rifle in hands, face blackened by smoke and hair hanging into his handsome face. “What the hell are you doing to do, Ki?” he asked in astonishment.

“Fight! Get our people off the front wall. Have everyone pull back to the inner fortifications. The bell tower. And for God's sake get Jessica off that wall!”

The friar's face was as horrified as Diego's had been. He watched as Ki place the barrels of black powder they had carried up from the cellars along the base of the walal. It was the old powder, unstable and caked, very unreliable.

“I don't know if I want this to work or not to work,” Brother Joseph said. “If it goes up, there won't be much of the mission left.”

“If it doesn‘t,” Ki said from where he was constructing crude fuses of cloth and gun powder, “there won't be any people left to come to the mission church. Hurry now—get back to the bell tower. Now!”

The friar left, reluctantly at first and then hurriedly. He waved his arm and shouted to the men along the wall. The
bandidos
had taken control of the wall. There wasn't a chance at all of holding it now.

Ki looked up, seeing a single peon left, fighting val iantly—Rivera, the alcalde. Then Rivera was shot down and Ki lit the fuses to his kegs and dashed toward the tower.

The short fuse hissed and sputtered, stammering their way toward the ancient powder. When they reached home, the black powder went up with a flash and a thunderous detonation that hurled Ki to the ground. He glanced back to see the wall go, to see the
bandidos
hurled into the air. Others were crushed beneath the weight of the wall. He staggered on, holding a bruised hip.

Leaping the barricades, he climbed the bell tower to where Jessie, Maria, Diego, and the friar stood, watching in awe as the cloud of smoke and dust rose high into the sky.

San Ignacio burned. The mission was nearly destroyed. And the battle had barely begun.

Chapter 17

Ki was exhausted. He crouched against the wall of the parapet around the bell tower, staring eastward and bleary-eyed at the rosy dawn rising and coloring the skies like a bloody memory.

Below them, the wall lay in ruins, and scattered across the courtyard and the field beyond were the bodies of the battle casualties.

Jessie, curled into a ball, slept beside Ki. Maria could not sleep, and so she stood, arms folded and black shawl over her shoulders, looking out over the ruins of the mission, of San Ignacio, of a way of life.

Brother Joseph appeared to be in shock. The friar walked the parapet, lips moving soundlessly, staring at the devastation.

The raiders came again an hour later. Along the parapet the weary defenders began to fire, reloading with painful slowness and answering ten of the
bandidos'
shots with one of their own. The bandits were fewer now, but even if the numbers had been the same, the outlaws would have had the advantage. All Ki and Jessie's army had going for them was position—and how long could they hold out on the bell tower with limited food and limited ammunition?

“No way out,” Diego said putting it concisely. “They'll wear us down in the end.”

The second night attack was beaten off. Mono seemed only half-hearted about the attempt. The
bandidos
out there settled into an unnerving sniping that went on the rest of the night. Bullets crashed into the tower, sometimes striking one of the bells and sometimes catching flesh.

Ki tried hard to keep everyone's spirits up. “They can't get us out of here,” he told them. “Just hold out.” Maybe a few of the more ignorant actually believed him.

“Something like your Alamo, eh?” Diego said.