Robert Butler - The Hot Country

I started to move. He held up his hand to stop me. He reached for the Winchester leaning against the wall next to him.

This was prudent. I holstered my Browning, took a step toward him, and he tossed the Winchester to me clean and slick, vertical all the way, and I caught it and he lifted his Mauser and pointed it out the window. I broke for the front door, giving a quick look over my shoulder to the door behind me as I came into its line of view. It was empty.

I pulled up at the front and checked outside and I was clear here too and I stepped through and beat it along the front of the casa . I stopped at the corner, checked again, and then sprinted the length of the house, pumping the lever on the Winchester, ready for my first shot. There still was steady gunfire inside and I arrived at the crucial back corner. I crouched low.

I had to make sure I drew a good bead on the first one I tried to take out.

I slowly opened my line of sight beyond the corner, and long before I could look down the house toward the door, I saw the stables a hundred yards off, and about halfway between, cantering this way on a chestnut, was one of the three colorados . I pulled back out of his view and I stood and backed away from the corner a couple of steps, a bit more than the length of my raised barrel, and I took two steps to my right, pulling the Winchester up to my shoulder, hoping it was sighted properly, and I went quickly to my set position and found him along my barrel and he still didn’t notice me and I had him and I tracked with him and I squeezed the trigger and absorbed the kick and even from where I was I could hear him go “Ooff,” which may have meant he was only winged, but he was falling backward anyway, he was off his horse and going down.

I’d have a few seconds of confusion from the other two if they were closer to the house. They probably heard the man’s sound but they had to turn and find him and I was still not showing to them and they wouldn’t have a fix on the direction of the shot and maybe it even got lost in the other gunfire going on from inside, and I strode forward past the corner into full view and spun left and crouched flat-footed as low as I could get and I set myself for a shot even before I took in the targets and the nearest colorado had just come down off his horse and the other was vanishing into the rear door of the casa —he was about to do some damage in there — but I wouldn’t let him have any back-up in the meantime: the guy just off his horse was snapping his head toward me, having just looked in the direction of the man I shot and the spooked chestnut that was rushing his way, and he saw me now and my initial set was off and I was swinging my rifle toward him and he happened already to be holding his rifle pretty much directly at me, for all the rotten luck, and I squeezed off a shot a little bit quick and I winged him in the side, and his horse — a nice-looking pinto — reared and whinnied in pain, my bullet having grazed the colorado and entered his horse’s side, and it bolted away and I centered the man before he could get back to me and I plugged him in the gut, which I didn’t mean to do either. He went down and he wouldn’t be killing me, but he wouldn’t be dying really promptly either, and I regretted both horse and man, and I knew that taking time to regret was the biggest danger to my own life at the moment and I put all this away, put it all out of my head because this was a goddam war that I was in the middle of and I wanted to survive it and I was upright once more and I sprinted to the doorway and stopped. The empty room was around the corner of this doorway and the courtyard action was beyond, but the guy who went in may have known something was wrong behind him, though he couldn’t have seen the fall of his fellow colorado who was supposed to be at his side by now — that one was moaning behind me, away from the door — but the guy inside maybe saw the pinto bolt. This was a corner I was not wanting to peek around. But it had to be done. I did it quick. And what I saw made me look again.

The man who went in was lying dead on his back in the center of the floor, halfway to the doorway to the inner galleria. Standing in that doorway was the mustachioed Villista I kicked in the balls yesterday. He was surprised to see me. I stepped full into the doorway and raised my Winchester into a vertical position. I gave the rifle a little lift and I said to him, “I took care of the other two.”

The Villista was holding a Colt revolver in each hand and I was sure something in him wanted to use one of them on me. But I’d made it clear that I was on his side and had even been useful, and his eyes moved to my left arm, which reminded me that it was hurting like hell. He nodded minutely, but he crossed to me and I stepped aside, thinking he wanted to pass. He did, but he stopped first and looked at the wound again. Then he looked me grimly in the eyes. “I’m good with the needle and the thread,” he said, and he cracked me a grin.

“No goddam way,” I said, and his grin turned into a laugh, like we’d been spending the last hour getting chummy-drunk together. He stepped past me and looked out to the first colorado I hit, who was lying real still and was probably dead. And then the Villista and I both heard the other guy start a new round of moaning from his gut shot. We turned to him. Before I could say a word, the Villista stepped to the man on the ground, lifted his pistol, and shot him in the head.

It took much of the morning to prepare to decamp. We buried the dead. Eight of ours. Sixteen of theirs, four of whom were wounded and were still alive and were summarily dispatched where they lay. Slim made it clear that we were burying the colorados only because we might want to use this hacienda again and it was easier to deal with their bodies now. Our men went into individual graves, the colorados went into one, and six of their heads went up on the spikes of the front gate with their identifying red bandanas tied on them like they were peasant girls.

We tended to our own half dozen wounded. Two were in bad shape, but we dug out their slugs and cleaned and bound their wounds and filled them with whiskey and strapped them to their horses, and a couple of the religious among us said a prayer for them.

My new-buddy Villista did indeed get a shot at sewing up the arm of the guy who kicked him in the balls. Hernando Soto. He told me his name and I told him mine and he did not even smile as he doused me with the fire from a phial of iodine and then he focused on my wound with absolute concentration, protruding and gently biting his tongue through the whole process. He sewed me up with a meticulous delicacy that I could only describe as feminine.

And when he was done, I said, “ Gracias, mi amigo .”

And he said, very softly, “ Viva Mexico .”

“ Viva Mexico, ” I said.

And we rounded up the riderless horses and packed them with loot from the train and the canteens of the dead for the dry and sun-emblazoned ride before us, and we gathered in front of the hacienda, many of us still on foot, and we were ready to ride. But suddenly all the men of Pancho Villa’s train-robbing gang gathered around me, including those already on their horses, who came down to stand with the others.

Slim stepped forward. In his hand he held a sombrero the gray-green color of maguey leaves, the base of the crown rimmed in darker green from sweat, the front of the brim pinned up. He unclasped the pin and threw it aside, straightened the brim. He held the hat out to me.

I hesitated for a moment, and he identified the hat. “The colorado you killed for me,” he said.