PISTOLERO
A Prequel
William E. McClintock
Copyright 2016 by William E. McClintock
All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in any form, in whole or in part, without written permission from the author.
With profound gratitude to my friend and de facto editor, Joe Grove, whose newspaperman’s eye was critical on so many levels and caught a gaffe or two... And also to mi buen Tombstone amigo Jim Brown, whose knowledge and love of the West helped get this book over some rough spots. Then there was Bill Nelson...
"Certain it is that many of his stern deeds were for the right as he understood that right to be."
– from the obituary of Texas gunfighter Clay Allison;
The Kansas City Star, July 1887
Chapter One
- 1 -
The boy was dead. Just a poor, black-haired little Mexican boy, five, maybe six years old. He lay on his back in the dirt, barefoot, in threadbare trousers and no-button shirt, the shirt flung open wide at the front. There was a blood-red hole the size of a quarter dollar in the center of his little chest.
The body of a man lay forty or fifty feet away, on the other side of a small, roofed, rock well. There were rough sandals on the man's bare feet, and he wore homemade cloth trousers with a length of rope for a belt. A large caliber bullet had taken part of his head off, and he lay face down, a cloud of flies buzzing about the black, gaping cavity.
Cole Matthews twisted in the saddle and looked all around. A Winchester '76 with a heavy, octagonal, sharpshooter's barrel lay under his left knee, a sawed-off ten-gauge hung in a scabbard right of the saddle horn, and a Sharps long-range Creedmoor was under his right leg. He rested his right hand down on the ivory grip of the .45 caliber Smith and Wesson Schofield that was on his hip.
A tiny house with adobe walls and a flat, dirt roof sat forty or fifty yards from the well, and alongside that, a small, neat garden plot fenced in with sticks and string. Further back, a thrown-together little shed for a barn and a ramshackle corral with a few goats milling about, and some chickens. His eyes returned to the little stone well. A pair of fully saddled horses – a gray and a pinto – were tied to one of the well roof posts, and stood flicking at flies with their tails. He looked back to the house. The front door was open wide. He had stopped just to water his horse and found all this.
The day was hot, the sky was cloudless and blue, and but for the buzzing of the flies, it was quiet.
He pulled the Winchester and got down off his horse. The bay looked at him curiously, then dropped his big head and munched at a clump of grass.
He knew the horse wouldn't wander, so he let the reins fall to the ground. Somewhere a blackbird cawed. He levered the Winchester, bringing a round of .45-75 under the hammer.
He stepped around the body of the dead boy, the rifle in his left hand, and made his way cautiously toward the little house, toward that open front door. One of the goats in the corral gave out with a tiny baa-aah-aaah, and he glanced briefly that way.
As he got closer, he could hear the rough sound of a man's grunting, and the sound of another man's soft laughter. He stepped into the doorway and pushed the plank door open a little further with the barrel of the Winchester.
Inside, down on the floor, pretty much what he had expected to find: a man with his pants down around his knees and a woman on her back, her legs spread wide. The man grunted hard as his bare, brown ass bumped and pounded, and another man crouched at the woman's head, holding her by a knot of hair with one hand and clasping the other over her mouth.
The one at the woman's head tightened his grip on her hair and laughed softly again and said, "Geev it to her, amigo," then looked up at the sound of the rusty, squeaking hinges on the plank door. His eyes widened just as Cole Matthews raised the Winchester one-handed, like a revolver, and shot him. The big slug split his sternum and punched him two feet back; he fell into the corner, where he slumped sucking hard for breath, and quickly died.
The other raised up a little and had just begun to turn when Matthews splintered his skull with the walnut stock of the Winchester. It was somehow unthinkable to shoot the man while he was still inside the woman, seemed like maybe it would be the ugliest violation of all, so he swung the rifle like a baseball bat, heard the skull crack, and the man went sprawling. Then he levered the Winchester and shot him.
The man lay on his side, his pants at the knees. Dead or just unconscious, Matthews didn't know or care, but he knew a skull fracture would kill him if the nugget of .45-75 didn't; cerebrospinal fluid was already trickling from the man's nose. He glanced from one to the other. They were dressed in the rumpled brown khaki of the Mexican Army. A cap with a leather visor lay on the floor next to the one in the corner.
He turned to the woman. Her eyes were closed. She was struggling to breathe. The dress she wore had been ripped open at the front and she lay completely exposed, her legs cocked wide apart. Blood gurgled from a crimson, dime-sized hole just under her right breast.
He leaned the Winchester against an adobe wall, then knelt down and scooped her up off the floor. He held her in his arms for a moment as he looked around the tiny place.
One room held it all: a small, rough-hewn table with a kerosine lamp on top, a few chairs scattered about, a cook stove that no doubt heated the place come January, a few cooking and eating things, a neatly made bed in one corner.
He went to the bed and laid her down on the covers. She looked up at him through half-lidded, unfocused eyes and said something soft and unintelligible in Spanish, then she closed her eyes again and her breathing became a little more shallow.
He turned and crossed the room, went out the door and to his horse. There was a bottle of mescal and a small leather box in one of the saddlebags. Injuries and wounds of one sort or another had been a part of his life for as long as he could remember, and in the little box he carried a few concessions to that: some rolled muslin bandages and a curved suture needle and some thread. He took the bottle of mescal and the leather box and returned to the woman's side.
She had been battered worse than he had seen at first. One of her eyes was puffy and beginning to swell shut, her nose mashed and a little misshapen. A trail of dried, crusty blood ran from one nostril down onto her lip. He could see he was going to have to set that nose.
He pulled the cork on the bottle with his teeth and poured mescal down onto the wound in her chest. She groaned softly and made little fists and shifted a little on the bed, more unconscious than not, and he knew that was a mercy at the moment.
He sat down on the bed beside her, set the bottle on the floor and the little leather box next to his leg on the bed, then reached across and lifted her by the shoulders. He brought her in close and her head fell onto his own shoulder. She groaned and murmured softly, like before.
He put a hand inside her dress and felt all up and down her back, searching for an exit wound. Nothing. Just smooth skin, moist with sweat. There was still a bullet somewhere deep inside.
He laid her gently back down, then pulled a short-bladed gambler's push dagger from inside the front of his gunbelt. He bent over and took the bottle of mescal and poured it over both sides of the blade, then brought the little knife to his mouth and gripped it by the handle with his teeth. He poured mescal over one of his hands, then the other, set the bottle down, and rubbed his hands together all around. He took the dagger from between his teeth, reached for the mescal again, and swallowed a mouthful straight from the bottle.
He set the bottle back down
on the floor. He slid further onto the bed, closer to the woman; their hips came together, and he leaned over. Her breathing had a reedy sound through the broken nose, and came ever more shallow. She half opened delirious, unseeing eyes again. He inserted the little finger of his right hand into the wound hole beneath her breast. Just the tip at first, tentative and careful, then he pushed deeper and wiggled it slowly about, probing as gently as he could for a one-ounce chunk of lead.
- 2 -
He found a shovel in the little barn and set to work burying the two Mexican soldiers. He dug a deep hole in the soft dirt that was the floor, then went back to the house and dragged the bodies out and into the barn. He threw the rifles and bandoliers in first, then rolled the bodies in, one on top of the other. The rest of the gear went in on top – saddlebags, saddles, and tack – and then he shoveled it over and covered the fresh dirt with straw. The horses, with the RM brand of the República de México on their flanks, he shooed off into the desert.
The péon and the boy he buried under a scrubby Joshua tree near the well. He found some sticks and fashioned a pair of crosses.
- 3 -
He was sitting on one of the wood chairs by the kitchen table reading Plutarch's On the Malice of Herodotus when she stirred. Both her eyes were blackened, and one remained swollen shut.
He closed the book and laid it down, rested an arm on the table, and looked across the room at her. He had positioned her in a half reclining, half sitting position, a pillow behind her back, to keep pressure off the stitches, and she struggled to sit a little more erect.
He extended a cautionary hand. "Easy," he said.
She eased back into the pillow and sat with one eye partly open, one swollen shut, and as tears came, he could tell that she knew her man and her boy were dead.
He had no idea what to say, or how much of it she would understand anyway, so he just sat looking back at her.
She raised a hand and put tentative fingers on the bandage that lay across her nose, then looked down and took note of the fact that her dress had been pulled back together and buttoned up. She put a hand between buttons and started to reach for where it hurt.
Cole Matthews leaned forward with another admonishing hand. "No," he said, shaking his head.
Her hand froze just inside her dress, and she lay looking at him. After a few moments, she whispered, "Los soldados?..."
He drew a hand across his throat, and she nodded.
She lay looking at him for a few moments more, then closed her unswollen eye again. "Gracias," she whispered, and went back to sleep.
~
She stirred and opened the eye that could be opened, and found him at the table, reading.
He lowered his book and looked at her over the top. She had been dozing for about an hour.
"Yo soy Isela," she said softly.
He had no idea what that meant.
"Isela," she said again, more slowly. EE-suh-la. Speaking was difficult, and came as something of a croak, something of a whisper. She raised a hand and put a finger on her chest. "Mi nombre es Isela."
Ah. Her name was Isela. He smiled. "Muy bonita," he said, using two of the small handful of Spanish words he knew. Very pretty.
She tilted her head slightly. A small, shy look of thanks.
He pointed with a finger at his own chest. "Cole," he said.
"Cole..." she mumbled, and closed her unswollen eye again.
~
When the bandage came off her nose and the bruising and the swelling began to go down, he found that she was a pretty woman. Not a great beauty by any means, simply pretty, with a kind of sweetness behind the sad, brown eyes.
And she was a tough one, he reflected. In every way. She healed quickly and without complaint, and he took the stitches out after about a week. The wound looked good – no pus, no inflammation – but he splashed it with some more mescal just to be sure. It would pucker up into a waxy little scar, like so many of his own, he knew, and she would have a permanent, daily reminder of something better pushed out of mind and left far behind.
~
They sat at the little table together, sharing a meal of fried rabbit and beans. He had not only shot a jack, but found some flour in a can on a shelf in the kitchen, and had made biscuits.
There was butter in a little dish on the table, and he wondered about that, but figured since there was a goat outside, there had to be a churn somewhere. He slathered half a biscuit, then held the knife aloft. "Knife," he said.
She nodded, and her eyes showed understanding.
"Knife," she repeated, then said, "Cuchillo."
He put the biscuit on his plate and reached down inside the front of his gunbelt. He pulled the little push dagger from its concealment, and sat with a butter knife in one hand and a killing blade in the other. He extended the little dagger. "Cuchillo," he said.
An open smile for the first time. "No," she said, shaking her head. She took the butter knife from his hand. "Cuchillo."
She nodded at the dagger in his other hand. "Navaja."
He sat back in his chair and held up the push dagger. "Ah," he said. Navaja. Interesting. One word for a table knife and another for a fighting knife. That knowledge seemed useful. Get it wrong, get the two mixed up, and the vaqueros would be laughing their asses off behind your back.
Still with a little smile, she began buttering a biscuit half of her own.
Chapter Two
- 1 -
He rode in with a mule deer slung over the saddle and found her kneeling by the graves under the Joshua tree. She had gathered some wild desert flowers, red and yellow prickly pear and cholla blooms, had arranged them in two little bunches, and had put one under each of the crosses he had made. She looked up at him as he rode slowly past, and he could see the grief in her eyes and the tracks of the tears in the dust on her cheeks. He looked down at her wondering how much longer he was going to stay here, and what he was possibly going to do with her.
He had gone out chiefly to reconnoiter, which he did every day or two, to look for any sign of an army patrol that might be seeking a pair of deserters. There had been no trace of the army, but he had chanced on a little desert mule deer.
He nudged the bay toward the little barn where the soldiers were buried, and where he would skin out and dress the deer.
~
She followed him inside and stood watching as he released a slip knot and let the deer fall to the dirt floor, and then she watched as he crouched down and loosened the cinch on the bay. He glanced back over his shoulder at her and could see her suck in her breath a little as her eyes wandered over the weapons on his saddle, the Winchester and the Sharps and the sawed-off Greener.
She walked up behind him, then was at his side. She put gentle fingers on the soft, fuzzy end of the horse's nose. "Su caballo es muy guapo," she said.
He rose to his feet, walked around behind the bay, and came up on the other side. He looked at her over the saddle.
She cupped the bay's bristly muzzle with one hand and stroked his forehead with the other. "Su caballo," she said again. "Muy guapo."
He pulled the Sharps from its scabbard, walked back around, and rested the big rifle up against the shed wall, by the open door. Then, back to the saddle; he pulled the seventy-six, then the ten-gauge, and leaned them up against the wall, by the Sharps.
She watched him make his way back to the bay.
He hoisted saddle and blanket together and laid them over the top of a stall, then turned to her, a little surprised the big horse was letting her take him by the muzzle and step in so close.
>
"Pistolero..." she said very softly, still stroking the bay's forehead but looking directly at Cole Matthews now, looking directly into his eyes, "tú también eres guapo."
He hooked a thumb over the top of his gunbelt and stood looking at her with absolutely no idea what she was thinking or talking about.
- 2 -
He sat on the floor, on his bedroll, his back against the wall, with legs stretched out and feet crossed at the ankles. He held his book in both hands. The kerosine lamp was on the floor next to him casting a weak, flickering glow throughout the room, and beside that was a cup of some hot, tea-like drink the woman had made with water and honey and cactus, and it wasn't half bad. He brought it to his lips, took a sip, and returned the cup to the floor. The Schofield lay on the bedroll next to his right leg.
He turned the page on his book, thinking to read just a little more of the Plutarch before putting out the lamp and going to sleep.
From the bed, across the room, she called softly to him. "Pistolero," she said.
He looked up.
"Ven a la cama. No dormir en el piso más." She threw back the covers.
His Spanish was enough better that he knew she was saying, Come to the bed, don't sleep on the floor anymore, or something like it.