Valdez Is Coming: A Novel Read online

  “They was two hundred yards when I opened up.”

  “You could have hit one though.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “You could have hit the woman,” Tanner said to him.

  “No sir, I wasn’t aiming at her. No, I couldn’t have hit her. There wasn’t any chance I could’ve. See, I was aiming just at Valdez and he was a good piece from the woman.”

  Tanner looked at the segundo. “Put him against the bank and shoot him.”

  The rider said, “Mr. Tanner, there was no chance I could’ve hit her! I swear to God that’s the truth!”

  The segundo felt the tobacco in his cheek, rolling it with his tongue as his eyes moved from the rider to Frank Tanner, looking at Tanner now but aware of the mounted men behind him and those up on the bank watching. The segundo said, “We lost five now. We shoot our own, that’s six, but the same as Valdez killed him. How many you want to give for this man?”

  “As many as it takes,” Tanner said.

  “Instead of shoot him,” the segundo said, “we make him ride point. The first one Valdez sees if he’s up there waiting. What do you think of that?”

  The rider was watching Tanner. “I’ll ride point. Mister, I’ll cut his sign, too, and get him for you.”

  Tanner stared down from his judgment seat on the bay horse. He let the man hang on the edge for a long moment before he said, “All right, this time,” saying no more than that, but holding his eyes on the man to let him know how close he had come.

  The segundo said to the rider, “Start now, come on.” He was aware of the men on the bank, beyond Tanner, moving in their saddles, a man wiping his hand across his mouth and another loosening his hat and putting it on again. They were glad it was over. They had killed men, most of them had, but they didn’t want to put this one against the bank and shoot him. That would be the end of it. In a few days they would all be gone.

  So that was done. The segundo walked over to Tanner’s bay; he touched the horse’s withers, feeling the smooth flesh quiver and patting it gently. “We have him now,” the segundo said, in a voice only for Tanner. “Yesterday he could take us where he wants with plenty of time. Today he has maybe an hour. He has to run and now he doesn’t have no more time.”

  “Say it,” Tanner said.

  The segundo’s hand remained on the horse, patting the firm flesh. “I was thinking to myself, we got eighteen men here. We got six at Mimbreño. We could send eight or ten back and they could start south with the drive. Then when we finish with him we catch up, maybe lose only two days.”

  Tanner waited. “You through?”

  “I mean we don’t need so many,” the segundo said, but he knew by the way the man was looking at him his words had been wasted.

  “I’m going up the mountain,” Tanner said. “You’re going up the mountain, and all my men are going up the mountain. My men, segundo. You savvy that?”

  “If you say it.”

  “I say it,” Tanner said.

  Through the field glasses he watched them come up the slope: small dots that he could not count yet, spread in a line, all of them moving this way, one dot ahead of the others, far in front, the only one that he could identify through the field glasses as a mounted rider.

  It wasn’t happening the way it was supposed to happen. There was open country behind him and he needed more time, a bigger space between them, if he expected to reach the twin peaks. But they were driving him now, running him and making sure he wasn’t going to move around them.

  It was late afternoon, three hours and a little more until sunset. Three hours to hold them here—if he could hold them—before he could take his two people and slip out. He lay on the ground with good rock cover in front of him and all along the ridge. Next to him were his guns and Davis’s Winchester. Looking at the dots coming up he thought, The Winchester or the Sharps? And said to himself, The Sharps. You know it better. You know what it can do.

  Well, he had better let them know. Pretty soon now.

  He rolled slightly to look at the Erin woman and R. L. Davis. Gay Erin, he said in his mind. Aloud he said, “Mr. R. L. Davis, I would like you to come over here, please, and go down there about fifty feet. You see where those rocks are?”

  Davis stood up awkwardly, his wrists tied to his belt with pieces of rope. His elbows pointed out and he looked as though he was holding his stomach. There was dried blood on the side of his face and in his hair and down the arm of his jacket, which was torn and shredded.

  “What do you want me down there for?”

  “I want you in front of me,” Valdez said. “So I can see you.”

  “What if they come?”

  “They’re already coming.”

  Davis gazed down the slope, squinting. “I don’t see nothing.”

  “Take my word,” Valdez said.

  “Well listen now, if they start shooting I’m going to be in the line of fire.”

  “Behind the rocks, you’ll be all right.”

  Davis stood his ground. “You still don’t believe me, do you? I can prove it by my canteen.”

  “I don’t have your canteen.”

  “You had it. It’s somewhere.”

  “And we’re here,” Valdez said. “Let’s talk some other time.”

  “If I didn’t cut you loose, who did?”

  “You can walk down or I can throw you down,” Valdez said.

  He looked toward the woman. Say it, he thought. He said, “Gay Erin. Gay. That’s your name? Come over here.” He watched Davis moving hunch-shouldered down the slope to the cover of low rocks. He felt the woman near him. As she sank to the ground, he handed her the field glasses. “Count them for me.”

  He raised up to take Davis’s Colt out of his belt. The barrel was cutting into his hip. He placed it on the ground next to him and took the heavy Sharps, the Big Fifty, and laid it on the flat surface of the rock in front of him. He would load from the cartridge belt across his chest. With the stock against his cheek, aware of the oiled metal smell of the gun, he sighted down the barrel. Nothing. Not without the glasses.

  “Seventeen,” the Erin woman said.

  He took the glasses from her. Putting them to his eyes the lower part of the slope came up to him.

  They were still far enough away that he could see all of them without sweeping the glasses. He estimated the distance, the first man, the point rider, at six hundred yards, the rest of them at least two hundred yards behind him. The brave one, Valdez thought. Maybe the segundo. Maybe Tanner. He held the glasses on the man until he knew it was not Tanner. Nor the segundo, because of the man’s dark hat.

  Valdez lowered the glasses. He said, “Nineteen. You missed two of them, but that’s very good.” He looked at her, at her hair in the afternoon sunlight, the bandana pulled down from her face, loose around her neck now. He reached over and touched the bandana, feeling the cotton cloth between his fingers. “Put this on your head.”

  “The sun doesn’t bother me,” she said. She had not spoken since they left the arroyo.

  “I’m not thinking of the sun. I’m thinking how far you can see yellow hair.”

  As she untied the knot behind her neck she said, “You believed I cut you loose. I didn’t tell you I did.”

  “But you let me believe it.”

  “How do you know he did?”

  “Because he told me. Because if someone else did it, he would think I knew who did it and he wouldn’t bother to lie. I think I was dreaming of a woman giving me water,” Valdez said. “So when I tried to remember what happened, I thought it was a woman.”

  “I didn’t mean to lie to you,” she said. “I was afraid.”

  “I can see it,” Valdez said. “If you saved my life, I’m not going to shoot you. Or if you get under a blanket with me.”

  “I tried to explain how I felt,” she said.

  “Sure, you’re all alone, you need somebody. Don’t worry anymore. I know a place you can work, make a lot of money.”

  “If
you think I’m lying,” the woman said, “or if you think I’m a whore, there’s nothing I can do about it. Think what you like.”

  “I’ve got something else to think about,” Valdez said. He studied the slope through the field glasses, past Davis lying behind the rock looking up at him, to the point rider. He raised up then and said to Davis, “If you call out, I give you the first one.”

  He put the glasses on the point man again, three hundred yards away, and held him in focus until he was less than two hundred yards and he could see the man’s face and the way the man was squinting, his gaze inching over the hillside. I don’t know you, Valdez said to the man. I have nothing against you. He put down the field glasses and turned the Sharps on the point rider. He could still see the man’s face, his eyes looking over the slope, not knowing it was coming. You shouldn’t have looked at him. Valdez thought.

  Then take another one and show them something. But not Tanner. Anyone else.

  Through the field glasses he picked out Tanner almost four hundred yards away and put the glasses down again and placed the front sight of the Sharps on the man next to Tanner, not having seen the man or thinking about him now as a man. He let them come a little more, three hundred and fifty yards, and squeezed the trigger. The sound of the Sharps cracked the stillness, echoing across the slope, and the man, whoever he was, dropped from the saddle. Valdez looked and fired and saw a horse go down with its rider. He fired again and dropped another horse as they wheeled and began to fall back out of range. The Sharps echoed again, but they were moving in confusion and he missed with this shot and the next one. He picked up the Winchester, getting to his knees, and slammed four shots at the point rider, chasing him down the slope, and with the fourth shot the man’s horse stumbled, throwing him from the saddle. He fired the Winchester twice again, into the distance, then lowered it, the ringing aftersound of the gunfire in his ears.

  “Now think about it,” Valdez said to Tanner.

  He would think and then he would send a few, well out of range, around behind them. Or he would have some of them try to work their way up the slope without being seen.

  Or they would all come again.

  As they did a few minutes later, spread out and running their horses up the slope. Valdez used the Sharps again. He hit the first man he aimed at, dumping him out of the saddle, and dropped two horses. Before they had gotten within two hundred yards they were turning and falling back. He looked for the two riders whose horses he had hit. One of them was running, limping down the hill, and the other was pinned beneath his dead animal.

  “You’d better move back or work around,” Valdez said to Tanner, “before you lose all your horses.”

  Make him believe you.

  He raised the angle of the Sharps and fired. He fired again and saw a horse go down at six hundred yards. They pulled back again.

  Now, Valdez thought, get out of here.

  They could wait until dark, but that would be too late if Tanner was sending people around. He had to be lucky to win and he had to take chances in order to try his luck.

  He could leave R. L. Davis.

  But he looked at him down there with his wrists tied to his belt, and for some reason he said to himself, Keep him. Maybe you need him sometime.

  He called to Davis, “Come up now. Slowly, along the brush there.”

  The woman sat on the ground watching him. The woman who was alone and needed someone and wanted to be held and got under the blanket. In this moment before they made their run, Valdez looked at her and said, “What do you want? Tell me.”

  “I want to get out of here,” she said.

  “Where? Where do you want to be?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Gay Erin,” Valdez said, “think about it and let me know.”

  Tanner and the men with him had gotten to the ridge and were looking at the ground and back down the slope to where they had been, seeing it as Valdez had seen it. Now they heard the gunfire in the distance, to the south.

  They stopped and looked that way, all of them, out across the open, low-rolling country to the hills beyond.

  “They caught him,” one of them said.

  Another one said, “How many shots?”

  They listened and in the silence a man said, “I counted five, but it could’ve been more.”

  “It was more than five,” the first man said. “It was all at once, like they were firing together.”

  “That’s it,” a man said. “The four of them got him in their sights and all fired at once to finish him.”

  The segundo was standing at the place where Valdez had positioned himself belly-down behind the rocks to fire at them. He picked up an empty brass cartridge and looked at it—fifty-caliber big bore, from a Sharps or some kind of buffalo gun. He noticed the .44 cartridges that had been fired from the Winchester. A Sharps and a Winchester, a big eight- or ten-bore shotgun and a revolver; this man was armed and he knew how to use his guns. The segundo counted fourteen empty cartridges on the ground and tallied what the bullets had cost them: two dead on the slope, two wounded, five horses shot. Now seven dead in the grand total and, counting the men without horses, who would have to walk to Mimbreño and come back, twelve men he had wiped from the board, leaving twelve to hunt him and kill him.

  He said to Mr. Tanner, “This is where he was, if you want to see how he did it.”

  Tanner walked over, looking at the ground and down the slope. “He had some luck,” Tanner said, “but it’s run out.”

  The segundo said nothing. Maybe the man had luck—there was such a thing as luck—but God in heaven, he knew how to shoot his guns. It would be something to face him, the segundo was thinking. It would be good to talk to him sometime, if this had not happened and if he met the man, to have a drink of mescal with him, or if they were together using their guns against someone else.

  How would you like to have him? the segundo thought. Start over and talk to him different. He remembered the way Valdez had stood at the adobe wall as they fired at him, shooting close to his head and between his legs. He remembered the man not moving, not tightening or pleading or saying a word as he watched them fire at him. You should have known then, the segundo said to himself.

  Tanner had sent four to circle around behind Valdez on the ridge and close his back door. A half hour after they heard the gunfire in the distance, one of them came back.

  The man’s horse was lathered with sweat, and he took his hat off to feel the evening breeze on the ridge as he told it.

  “We caught them, out in the open. They had miles to go yet before they’d reach cover, and we ran them, hard,” the man said. “Then we see one of the horses pull up. We know it must be him and we go right at him, getting into range to start shooting. But he goes flat on the ground, out in the open but right flat, and doesn’t give us nothing to shoot at. He opened up at about a hunnert yards, and first one boy went down and then he got the horse of this other boy. The boy run toward him and he cut him clean as he was a-running. So two of us left, we come around. We see Valdez mount up and chase off again for the hills. We decide, one of us will follow them and the other will come back here.”

  Tanner said, “Did you hit him?”

  “No sir, he didn’t look to be hit.”

  “You know where he went?”

  “Yes sir, Stewart’s out there. He’s going to track them and leave a plain enough trail for us to follow.”

  Tanner looked at the segundo. “Is he any good?”

  The segundo shrugged. “Maybe he’s finding out.”

  They moved out, south from the ridge, across the open, rolling country. In the dusk, before the darkness settled over the hills, they came across the man’s horse grazing, and a few yards farther on the man lying on his back with his arms flung out. He had been shot through the head.

  Ten, the segundo thought, looking down at the man. Nine left.

  “Take his guns,” Tanner said. “Bring his horse along.”

  It
was over for this day. With the darkness coming they would have to wait until morning. He took out a cigar and bit off the end. Unless they spread out and worked up into the hills tonight. Tanner lighted the cigar, staring up at the dim, shadowed slopes and the dark mass of trees above the rocks.

  He said to the segundo, “Come here. I’ll tell you what we’re going to do.”

  8

  “Christ,” R. L. Davis said. “I need more than this to eat.” Christ, some bread and peppers and a half cup of stale water. “I didn’t have nothing all day.”

  “Be thankful,” Valdez told him.

  Davis’s saddle was on the ground in front of him, his hands tied to the horn. He was on his stomach and had to hunch his head down to take a bite of the pan bread he was holding. The Erin woman, next to him, held his cup for him when he wanted a sip of water. She listened to them, to their low tones in the darkness, and remained silent.

  “I don’t even have no blanket,” R. L. Davis said. “How’m I going to keep warm?”

  “You’ll be sweating,” Valdez said.

  “Sweating, man it gets cold up here.”

  “Not when you’re moving.”

  Davis looked over at him in the darkness, the flat, stiff piece of bread close to his face. “You don’t even know where you’re going, do you?”

  “I know where I want to go,” Valdez answered. “That much.”

  Toward the twin peaks, almost a day’s ride from where they were camped now for a few hours, in the high foothills of the Santa Ritas: a dry camp with no fire, no flickering light to give them away if Tanner’s men were prowling the hills. They would eat and rest and try to cover a few miles before dawn.

  Ten years before, he had camped in these hills with his Apache trackers, following the White Mountain band that had struck Mimbreño and burned the church and killed three men and carried off a woman: renegades, fleeing into Mexico after jumping the reservation at San Carlos, taking what they needed along the way.

  Ten years ago, but he remembered the ground well, and the way toward the twin peaks.

  Valdez had worked ahead with his trackers and let the cavalry troop try to keep up with them, moving deep into the hills and climbing gradually into rock country, following the trail of the White Mountain band easily, because the band was running, not trying to cover their tracks, and because there were many of them: women and several children in addition to the fifteen or so men in the raiding party. He knew he would catch them, because he could move faster with his trackers and it was only a matter of time. They found cooking pots and jars that had been stolen and now thrown away. They found a lame horse and farther on a White Mountain woman who was sick and had been left behind. They moved on, climbing the slopes and up through the timber until they came out of the trees into a canyon: a gama grass meadow high in the mountains, with an escarpment of rock rising steeply on both sides and narrowing at the far end to a dark, climbing passage that would allow only one man at a time to enter.