Jory Sherman: Blood Sky at Morning

“You have the imagination of a chicken,” Valdez said.

“Why not?” Delgado said. “He has the brains of a chicken.”

Valdez laughed. Diego did not laugh.

Delgado stood up. He did not dust himself off, but continued to stare at the approaching rider. Valdez and Diego got to their feet as well, slowly, knives still gripped loosely in their hands.

“You there,” Delgado called to Cody, “what brings you this way?” He spoke in English.

“I have a message for you,” Cody said.

“See?” Diego said. “He has a message. El es un mensajero .”

“You are full of the shit, Manuel,” Valdez said.

“Be quiet,” Delgado said.

Zak drew closer. “What message do you bring?” Delgado asked.

“I will tell you in a minute,” Zak said.

“Tell me now, mister. Do not come any closer. It is very dangerous here.”

Zak kept riding.

“Oh, yes, it is dangerous here,” he said. “Dangerous for you. Are you Delgado?”

“Yes, I am Julio Delgado. You have news for me?”

“If you are Julio Delgado, I do have news for you. And for your companions as well.”

Zak rode up to the three men and reined in Nox. He looked down at them. Delgado’s knife lay on the ground, but Valdez and Diego still clutched theirs, more tightly than before.

“And what is this news that is so important that you ride out all the way from Tucson?”

“I did not ride from Tucson,” Zak said. “I rode out of the night on this black horse. My message is this: If you and your companions will bury your dead and ride back to Tucson instead of catching up to Trask and Ferguson, you will live another day. Maybe many more days.”

Zak’s words hung there like black bunting in a funeral parlor. Delgado cleared his throat. Valdez and Diego looked at each other.

“He is loco,” Valdez said in Spanish.

“He said he rides out of the night? What does he mean?” Diego asked, also in Spanish.

“Why do you want us to go back to town?” Delgado said to Zak. “Are you going to kill us if we do not do this?”

“Yes, Delgado,” Zak said. “I’m going to kill you if you try and join up with Ben Trask. I am going to kill him, too.”

“Who are you?”

“I am Zak Cody.”

“You are the one they call the Shadow Rider?”

“Some call me that, yes.”

“I am not afraid of you, Cody. Did you kill my wife? A man told me that you did.”

“I killed your wife, Delgado. And I killed Chama, too.”

Delgado’s neck swelled up like a bull in the rut. His face purpled with rage. The blood drained from the faces of Valdez and Diego. They both looked as if someone had come up to them and kicked them in the nuts.

“Hijo de mala leche.” Delgado spat. Then, in English, “You bastard.”

“He is only one. We are three,” Valdez said in Spanish to the others.

“He might kill one of us,” Diego said.

“I will kill him,” Delgado said. “For what he did.”

Zak understood every word.

He slid quickly from the saddle, slapped Nox on the rump and squared off to face the three men.

“What do you wish, Delgado?” Zak said in Spanish. “To bury your wife and ride to the town alive, or leave her body to the buzzards while you join her in sleep?”

“You talk very brave, gringo.”

Diego and Valdez squeezed the handles of their knives. Cody was too far away. Diego let his knife slide through his fingers until he grasped only the tip.

Zak saw the move and waited.

Delgado licked his dry lips. A buzzard squawked, impatient. There was a silence after that, a silence buried deep in a soundless well.

“You are a dead man, gringo,” Delgado said in English. “You do not tell me what to do.”

“Delgado, it is your choice. But I will tell you this. The last sound you hear on this earth will be the voice of my Walker Colt.”

Delgado’s face grew livid with rage. He went into a crouch and clawed for the butt of his pistol. Diego started to draw his arm back to throw his knife at Cody. Valdez stabbed his hand downward to jerk his pistol free.

A single second splintered into fractions. Four lives teetered on the fulcrum of eternity. All breathing stopped. Sweat froze. Eyes crackled and sparked like tiny flames deep in men’s souls. Time no longer existed in that place. Somewhere, out of sight, a small door opened just a crack and there was a darkness beyond, a limitless darkness where no light could shine.

Cody’s hand was a flash of lightning, his pistol a thundercrack in the mute firmament. The blue sky seemed to pale as fire belched from the barrel of his pistol and the hornet sound of his Colt fried the still morning air. Delgado sucked blood from the hole in his throat and his arms flew upward, his hands empty.

Cody sidestepped as he hammered back and his pistol roared again. The bullet caught Diego just as he hurled his knife and before Diego hit the ground, Cody knocked the hammer back on the Colt with the heel of his left hand and swung the barrel toward Valdez, who had his pistol nearly out of its holster. His lips were pressed together as if he were under a great strain.

“ Hijo…” he breathed as Cody’s pistol roared with the exploding sound of doom. The bullet smashed into Valdez’s chest with the force of a pile driver, cracking bone, crushing flesh and veins into raw pulp, and his eyes clouded up as tears shot from ducts like a salty rain.

Valdez collapsed to his knees and struggled to draw breath into lungs that were clogged with blood and bone. Then the feeble light in his eyes fled through that open door, into the darkness.

Zak cocked his pistol again and looked at each man sprawled on the ground, the smoke from his pistol rising like a fakir’s cobra from a wicker basket, the air reeking of burnt powder.

He heard a noise then, the clattering of rocks, the crash of brush. He turned to see Hugo Rivers running headlong down the slope of the hill, his rifle held high over his head, his feet moving almost too fast for his body to follow.

“Hey,” Rivers yelled, “you done it all. I didn’t have a chance to help.”

Zak opened the gate on the pistol and began ejecting the brass hulls. He had filled the empty cylinders with fresh cartridges by the time Rivers reached his side, out of breath and panting. In the distance, he saw Scofield running toward them at a fast lope.

“Boy, sir, I never saw nothin’ like that. I mean, one minute they was three men bracin’ you, and you plumb beat ’em all to the draw and dusted them off like they was flies on a buttermilk pail.”

“There is an old saying about the quick and the dead, Rivers.”

“Yeah, what’s that, sir?”

“If you aren’t quick, you’re dead.”

“Never heard that.”

“I just made it up. You’d better get your horses and Miss O’Hara. Don’t let her see any of this, though. I’ll meet you on the other end of the hill, the top end.”

“Yes, sir. Right away, sir. But I’m still tryin’ to figure out how you was so much faster than any of them. They wasn’t slow.”

“When a man goes for his gun, Rivers, he’d better not have anything else on his mind. Those men were so busy trying to figure out what to do about me, they forgot I was there.”

“Well, no, sir, they knew you was there all right. That one boy, the one you shot first, well, he went for his gun long before you did.”

“He might have gone for it, Rivers, but I was already there, about two seconds ahead of him.”

“About a half second, I’d say.”

“Well, who’s counting? Now get going. We’ve some riding to do.”

Rivers started to salute, then realized that Cody wasn’t in uniform and awkwardly dropped his arm. He trotted off to climb the hill he had just come down, and ran right through a pair of buzzards that flapped and squawked as they hopped out of his way.