Elmore Leonard: Valdez Is Coming

“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 Mimbreno 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.”

“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.