El Gato nodded soberly. “Under sail or steam she is muy pronto. Is no paddle wheels. She has a modern screw propeller and one of those keels you can haul up for to tear across shallow water. They must have heard how certain people avoid the official entry port at San Luis Rio Colorado. In any event, is no way for you to leave by sea for at least a few nights.”
Longarm took a thoughtful drag on the claro before he asked,“What if I left earlier? I told you I was in a hurry to get it on up to Yuma whilst the trail of those outlaws is still warm. And seeing they mean to get up a full head of steam before that gale hits at sundown, I have no call to let it go to waste, do I?”
The whore had no idea what he was talking about. El Gato laughed like a mean little kid, and told her she’d best get back to her fat customer.
As the rebel leader locked the door after her, he told Longarm, “Dandolo may be willing. She is almost as loco en la cabeza as yourself. I have yet to grasp why it should be so that people who are not true Mexicanos seem to enjoy our revolutions more than we do!”
Irena Dandolo soon arrived with some of her piratical-looking “fishermen.” She looked like a pirate too.
The sun-and wind-tanned woman of perhaps thirty or so, give or take a rough life on the bounding main, Was tall and wiry for a female but not bad looking, once you got used to the scar on her forehead and her short-cropped dark-brown hair. She was dressed in rope-soled zapatas, white bell-bottoms, and a striped Basque shirt that didn’t really appear as manly as she might have wished. She had quite a pair of chupas for such a lean athletic figure.
She shook hands with a firm grip, and her palm felt as if she knew her ropes. Longarm admired the way she grinned when he told her his plan. He still felt obliged to say, “It’s not really your fight and the odds favor the other side, Miss Irena.”
The female skipper looked hurt and demanded, “Do you take me for a mere woman just because I am a woman? Listen, Yanqui, I am a direct descendant of Enrico Dandolo of Venice! You have heard of him, no?”
Longarm smiled sheepishly and asked, “Should I have?”
She snapped, “Of course. You English-speakers make so much of that boy-buggering mariposa Richard of England when it was the men and the ships of Venice who made all those crusades possible. My ancestor, Enrico Dandolo, led the ladder assault over the walls of Constantinople in 1204. This would not have been so remarkable in itself. He was from Venice, after all. But at the time he was in his nineties, and blind! You think it would have slowed him down if he had been born with a slit between his legs?”
Longarm gulped and declared, “Not enough to matter, ma’am. But how come this blind old hero was attacking Constantinople during one of those crusades. Wasn’t that a Christian town at the time?”
The ferocious old man’s proud descendant sweetly explained that her ancestor had been blinded in a much earlier war with the Greeks of Constantinople, and added, “There were always Moors for to kill. When he saw the chance to kill some old enemies, it was too good for to pass up. He died just a year after he led the assault over the walls of Constantinople. He must have died content, after a life well spent. I would die with a smile upon my lips tonight if I knew I had done something to annoy a most annoying government!”
So later that afternoon, as the streets came back to life after la siesta, under an oddly greenish sky with the taste of brass in the muggy air, the engineer in the hold of El Tiberon Blanco valved a little pressure off as he eyed the gauges of their small but very up-to-date Scottish auxiliary plant. The iron-framed and teak-sheathed cutter was built for short, furious bursts of speed, while intended to cruise under sail as often as possible. She burned oil instead of coal, to keep her light and fast. But oil cost money and it was not to be wasted.
Up in the cockpit, aft the mainmast, under furled sails, the skipper and deck crew were keeping an eye on that discolored sky. It was intolerably hot and damp in port that afternoon, and they were all anxious to put out to sea, where the motion of their vessel alone might offer some cooling breeze. But orders were orders and they had to wait until that storm hit, or until they spied another vessel of any kind putting out to sea ahead of it.
For who but ladrones up to no good would be shoving off this late in the day with storm warnings flying above the harbor master’s watchtower?
Up forward, under the meager shade of the furled jib, the three-man crew of the swivel-mounted Gatling gun were swapping dirty stories as they casually eyed the crowd along the quay.
Nobody drifting in and out of the waterfront shops or simply staring at the boats looked sinister. But when one manned a Gatling for as popular a tyrant as Porfirio Diaz, one kept one eye on the taxpaying public at all times.
Hence it would have been tough to just swagger across the fifty feet of cobblestones from the nearest cover to come aboard the cutter via the one gangplank near the stern.
So just as the sun was setting, where the brassy-smelling sky met a bruised-looking sea of smooth but ominously large swells, considering the total lack of any breeze, Longarm nudged Irena Dandolo, who in turn gave the signal on her bosun’s whistle.
That naturally alerted the government men aboard the cutter, just as Longarm had hoped. So the quay began to clear as if by magic when the deck crew swung the multiple muzzle of that Gatling shoreward, like a deadly pepper shaker sniffing for someone to pepper.
Longarm knew they couldn’t see him as he raised the muzzle of the Big Fifty in the narrow slit between a ship’s chandler and a sidewalk cantina. He drew a careful bead on the one aiming the Gatling and blew him over the low starboard rail with a well-aimed buffalo round.
That inspired two of his shipmates to dive over the far side as the others took cover below decks.
That had been the plan. Yelling like a band of Yaqui with toothaches, the eight men and one woman of the Dandolo crew charged across the open field of fire with Longarm, blazing away with carbines or six-guns as instructed, until they were all aboard with only one of their own lightly wounded, mopping up with guns and machetes at close quarters.
The wounded survivors of the other side were allowed to live, as long as they knew how to swim, while El Tiberon Blanco cast off and steamed across the bar into the sunset, people shouting curses and encouragement from the bewildered shore.
The cutter was a distant dot against the sunset by the time a most chagrined Inspector Gomez climbed up into the harbor master’s watchtower to make certain his second in command had not been drinking.
