The Loner: Inferno

Chapter 19

Taking the scalps obviously had cheered him up, but Valdez still wasn’t happy when he found out The Kid was throwing in with them. “You can’t trust this damn gringo!” he protested to Kelly.

“Chess and I are gringos,” Kelly said.

“Sí, but that’s different. This one kicked me in the cojones!”

“You drew a knife on him. He could have shot you.”

Valdez continued to scowl, but after a few seconds he shrugged. “This is true.” He turned to The Kid. “I may have to work with you, gringo, but I don’t have to like you!”

“Feeling’s mutual,” The Kid said.

Kelly rubbed his hands together. “Now that we’ve got that all squared away, let’s get moving. I don’t want those savages to get too far ahead of us.”

Valdez stored the scalps away in a canvas sack he hung on his saddle horn. From the ugly, faded brown stains on the sack, The Kid could tell that it had been used for that purpose in the past, probably often.

They led their horses up the ledge on the south wall of the canyon. Valdez and Mateo stayed behind to scalp the Apaches who still lay dead on the ledge at the site of the ambush.

“They’ll catch up to us,” Kelly told The Kid. “It won’t take long for Lupe to lift those heathens’ hair. He’s had plenty of practice.”

When they reached the top, The Kid, Kelly, and Chess swung into their saddles and rode south, still following the war party’s trail. Less than a quarter hour later, Valdez and Mateo galloped up from behind to join them.

The sack bulged even more, and fresh bloodstains were soaking through the canvas.

“Tell me more about this Guzman hombre,” The Kid suggested as he rode alongside Kelly.

“Sure,” Kelly said. “Like I told you, he deals in slaves. Indian, Mexican, white ... it doesn’t matter. As long as somebody’s willing to pay, Guzman can supply the merchandise. Say you own a mine in the mountains, and you want some cheap labor to work it. Guzman can get you all the Indians you want, and once you’ve paid him, the only cost for that labor is a little bit of food. Damned little, if you get my drift.”

The Kid nodded. “The mine owners work them and starve them to death.”

“Well, if there’s one thing there’s plenty of in this world, it’s poor Indians,” Kelly said with a grin. “Or say you own a whorehouse and some of your customers have a liking for young girls. Really young girls. Guzman’s your man. He can find Mexican families who can spare an extra mouth or two that need to be fed. Or if he can’t find any who are willing to sell their niñas, he can always just steal ’em.”

“The youngest of these captives I’m looking for is seventeen or eighteen,” The Kid pointed out.

“Yeah, but they’re white. There are rich men in Mexico City who’ll pay a pretty peso for white women they can do anything they want with, and Guzman has contacts with those men. He’ll find somebody who’s willing to pay his price for those gals once he’s traded for them with the Apaches, you can count on that.”

“What’s he going to trade for them?”

“Rifles, maybe. Ammunition. Liquor. Whatever the savages want, Guzman will get it.”

“You make it sound like he does all this out in the open.”

“Well, that’s pretty much true,” Kelly said. “Most folks in northern Mexico know about Guzman.”

The Kid shook his head in amazement. “Why haven’t the Rurales gone after him?”

That question drew a startling response from Kelly. The man threw his head back and boomed a hearty laugh. The other three chuckled, as well.

“I said something funny?” The Kid asked tightly.

“You just don’t know,” Kelly said. “The reason the Rurales haven’t gone after Guzman is because. . . Guzman is a Rurale. A captain of Rurales, in fact. He’s the commander in charge of this whole district.”

The Kid tried not to stare. He had known the Rurales had a bad reputation, but he hadn’t expected that an outright criminal was in charge of them in these parts.

The news made the task facing him that much more difficult, he thought. If he couldn’t get Jess and the other women away from the Apaches before they reached Guzman, he would have to try to steal them away from the Rurales, which might be even harder.

“So you think the Apaches are headed for Guzman’s headquarters?” The Kid asked Kelly.

“I’m sure of it.”

“Where is that?”

“The Rurales barracks are in a village called San Remo, in the mountains southwest of here. Mateo thinks the Apache stronghold is in the same direction, only deeper in the mountains. They can stop and make their deal with Guzman on their way home.”

That sounded reasonable and plausible to The Kid.

The scalp hunters stopped from time to time to rest their horses, but not for a meal. They gnawed pieces of jerky while they were in the saddle. Kelly shared some of his with The Kid.

“Least I can do, seeing as how you helped us out back there,” he explained.

The trail continued south, even though Kelly had said it would angle toward the mountains when they got closer. In the middle of the afternoon, the five men came to a broad wash veering to the southwest.

Kelly reined in and pointed along it even though the tracks of the war party continued almost due south. “That’s the route we’ll take. It’s a shortcut to the foothills. With any luck it’ll put us ahead of the Apaches.”

“What if they don’t go the way you think they’re going to?” The Kid asked. “We’ll have to double back, and that’ll just cost us time.”

“You don’t know Kelly,” Valdez said with a sneer. “His plans are never wrong.”

Kelly smiled. “I appreciate that vote of confidence, Lupe. I’m not always right, but I’ve been tracking down those savages long enough that you can trust me on this, Morgan. They won’t keep going south. There’s nothing in that direction except badlands. But in the mountains there are villages and farms and haciendas they can raid, along with Guzman’s headquarters. That’s where they’re going, all right.”

The Kid realized he had no choice but to go along with Kelly’s plan. Working with these men, no matter how repugnant he found them, still gave him his best chance of rescuing the prisoners. “Fine. You’re the boss, Kelly.”

“Now that’s what I like to hear,” the Irishman said with a grin. He sent his horse down the wash’s sloping bank. “Come on.”

It didn’t take long for The Kid to realize why the Apaches hadn’t taken that route. The bottom of the wash was littered with rocks and gullies and clumps of brush. The riders had to weave around the obstacles, and it was slow going.

“Are you sure this is going to save us some time?” The Kid finally asked.

“Count on it,” Kelly said. “I know it’s slow, but this way is ten miles shorter. Also, we’re deep enough into Mexico now that the Apaches won’t be in any hurry at all.”

“When those bushwhackers they left behind don’t come back, they may start to worry.”

“Not for another day or two,” Kelly insisted.

Down in the wash, The Kid could no longer see the mountains, so he couldn’t judge their progress. “Are we going to get where we’re going before it gets dark?”

“No, but that’s all right. We’ll reach the foothills sometime tomorrow morning, and the savages probably won’t get there until the middle of the day, maybe later.”

All The Kid could do was hope that Kelly was right.

They traveled until it was too dark to go on through the rugged arroyo, then made camp. Since they were down where flames couldn’t be seen for miles around, Kelly declared it was all right to build a fire so they had a hot meal. The Kid shared the last of his salt pork with his companions.

As they sat around the dying fire drinking coffee, Valdez got a bottle of tequila from his saddlebags. “You can’t have any, gringo,” he said as he poured some of the fiery liquor in his cup. “Because of you, my cojones still ache like the very Devil himself!”

“That’s fine,” The Kid said. “I don’t much cotton to that cactus juice, anyway.”

Kelly laughed. “I prefer Irish whiskey myself. I have a bottle in my saddlebags, Kid, if you’d like a taste.”

“No, thanks. Anytime there’s a chance I might be attacked by a bunch of howling savages, I’d rather have a clear head.”

Kelly waved off that sentiment. “Those Apaches don’t have a clue we’re here!”

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” The Kid said. “They were careful enough to set up that ambush in the canyon. They’re bound to know about this shortcut. Maybe they split their forces again and sent some men this way just to be sure nobody tries to use it to get ahead of them.”

He was just talking off the top of his head, but as he spoke, he realized that he might have hit upon a real possibility.

He wasn’t the only one who thought that. Chess said, “Morgan might be right, Kelly. Maybe we shouldn’t have built this fire.”

“It’ll be out soon,” Kelly snapped, sounding like he didn’t care for having his thinking challenged. “And setting up that ambush at the canyon was different. The savages are cunning enough to do that. They won’t think about setting a trap in this wash.”

The Kid wasn’t willing to bet his life on Kelly’s opinion. “It still might be a good idea to stand guard.”

“That’s exactly what we’re going to do,” Kelly said. “We would have, anyway. It never hurts to be careful.”

That allowed Kelly to save face, The Kid thought, and he let it go at that. He didn’t have any wish to challenge Kelly for the leadership of this bloodthirsty gang of scalphunters.

Each of the five men agreed to take a two-hour turn standing watch. Kelly decided the order of the shifts, and again, The Kid didn’t argue. He was given the third shift, the deepest, darkest hours of the night.

Even though he wasn’t a frontiersman by birth, he had spent enough time out there in recent years to develop many of the traits of one. Most of the time he dropped off to sleep easily and quickly when he had the chance, and when he woke up, he was fully alert as soon as he opened his eyes.

Chess had the turn before him. The man knelt beside The Kid and pulled back a hand from touching his shoulder.

“Your turn, Morgan,” Chess whispered.

The Kid sat up and reached for the shell belt coiled beside his bedroll. “Anything?”

“Quiet as it can be,” Chess replied.

That was good. The Kid stood up, buckled on his gunbelt, and picked up his rifle. Chess had already stretched out. The Kid walked over to where the horses were picketed and turned his head to take a look around. Light from the stars and a three-quarter moon was scattered across the wash, but there were a lot of thick shadows.

He searched those shadows for movement and didn’t see any. He frowned as Valdez rolled onto his back and began to snore loudly. That racket would make it harder to hear if anyone was trying to sneak up on the camp.

The Kid was thinking about going over there and prodding Valdez with a boot toe, when a rock rolled down the bank of the wash behind him. He recognized the tiny sound.

As he whirled toward it, something launched off the top of the bank at him, blotting out the stars like a giant bird of prey.