The Good the Bad and the Ugly

big tub of rotten guts. Wake up and walk with me.” A new and more terrifying thought struck. “Wallace, you aren’t dying, are you? You wouldn’t die and leave me here like this. You can’t die when I need you.”

He collapsed across the limp figure, whimpering, tears rolling down his cheeks.

A dark speck appeared suddenly overhead, then another and another. Silently, patiently, the vultures were taking up their vigil in the brassy sky. Somehow they knew, as they always did, that it would soon be time for the feast.

CHAPTER 15

THE new locomotive was officially the BLW Number Nine, but after her trial run the engineer had enthusiastically rechristened her Mighty Maude. She merited the name.

Mighty Maude was not only the newest locomotive on rails but by far the largest, heaviest, fastest and most powerful. She also possessed the loudest whistle. When she flung her wailing hoot across the sere wasteland the engineer’s boast was that coyotes and jack rabbits ten miles away fled in blind panic. The fireman, whose task was to hurl heavy chunks of hardwood from the tender into the gaping maw of her firebox, had a different and somewhat biased reaction.

“That damn hooter uses up too much steam. Every time you toot that contraption the steam gauge drops ten points. I got to heave twice as much cordwood to bring her back up again.”

The engineer dismissed such carping criticism with comments directed at his fireman’s work habits and ancestry.

He would, however, gradingly admit that Mighty Maude did have one fault, albeit a minor one. This was in the design of her cab. When the man who drove her was properly seated at his controls the forward cab window was just a trifle too high. The engineer could are a great distance along the track ahead but nothing closer than five hundred feet in front of the great boiler.

On the straightaway this was no great handicap. But on a sharp or blind curve Maude might plough into anything. The obstacle would be a wagon in the act of crossing the track or—even worse for the train—a herd of wandering cattle whose heavy bodies had been responsible for many a disastrous wreck.

The engineer’s solution to this dilemma was to jerk his whistle cord vigorously and repeatedly at the approach to every curve. This inevitably led to a highly colourful and profane shouting match with the fireman. Since these exchanges had to be carried on over the pounding of the drivers and the thunder of the exausts, both men usually finished their runs too hoarse to communicate above a whisper.

The engineer peered ahead through the shimmering heat waves to where the track curved out of sight behind a great, wind-sculptured mass of red sandstone. He reached for the dangling cord and Mighty Maude’s hoarse scream racketed ahead.

On the far side of the sandstone butte, where the tracks emerged from the blind curve, Tuco lifted his head and listened. In a moment the sound came again, louder and nearer—the unmistakable hoot of a locomotives whistle. His eyes glittered with the light of one reborn.

He scrambled to his feet, took hold of Wallace’s belt and dragged the dead weight up the steep embankment with strength born of desperation. As he dropped the heavy body to the ties and rolled it between the rails the corporal stirred and moaned weakly.

“Don’t wake up now, Wallace,” Tuco panted. “It’s too late to do any good and what you would see would just make you unhappy. Be a good fellow and lie still.”

He flung himself face down at the outer side of the track, stretching the chain of the handcuffs taut across the rail. The hoot of the whistle was earsplitting and above it he could now hear the rumble of the speeding train. The rail beside him bummed and quivered.

Mighty Maude howled into view from behind the sandstone mass, less than five hundred feet away. As the giant locomotive hurtled toward him Tuco flattened himself as much as possible, burrowing his face into the gravel. Beneath him the ground shook and a wave of hot, compressed air buffeted him. Then the speeding engine was upon him.

The tough steel links of the handcuff chain could resist many forces but they proved no match for the sharp wheel-flanges and enormous weight of Mighty Maude. There was a jerk and Tuco’s hand dropped free. He flung himself away from the track, rolling down the embankment as the locomotive flashed past. Above the thunder of wheels and driven he heard a brief bunt of angry yelling from the cab.

He sat up in time to glimpse something that resembled a bundle of red rags hanging under the locomotive’s low-slung firebox and bumping against the lies. The spot between the rails where Wallace had lain was empty. Tuco whirled away from the track and ran in the opposite direction.

A mile or so down the tracks, one of two brakemen standing on the rear platform of the last car suddenly clutched his companion’s arm and yelled, “Goddlemighty, there’s a man, or what’s left of one, lying between the rails. He most have been drug a ways, by the look. Pull the emergency cord.”

“Not me,” the other said firmly, shaking his head. “You pull the emergency stop when we’re makin’ this speed and that engineer’ll climb your frame clean to your shoulders and chew your damfool head off. Besides, there ain’t nothin’ anybody can do for that poor bastard now that the vultures can’t do quicker and cleaner.”

The settlement of Marcosito had been a thriving, bustling community until, overnight, the Confederate invasion turned it into a ghost town. By an accident of geography the town happened to stand in the path of Sibley’s advance force. By a more catastrophic accident it was the place where the Texans encountered the first strong Union resistance.

The Marcositans had retired at night, blissfully unaware that the war was at their doorstep. They awoke in the morning to find the town swarming with enemy troops.

The Texans had paused only long enough to plunder the shops and saloons and raid hencoops before moving northward. The outraged citizens swarmed out on the heels of their departure to curse and commiserate. They were assessing their losses when the sound of heavy firing broke out to the north.

Presently the Confederates reappeared, hard-pressed by Union forces and dearly intending to make their stand in the town They were at the outskirts when a battery of Union artillery opened up and shells began falling on the town. The citizens hurriedly snatched a few possessions—piling them into wagons and buggies or hanging them from saddles—and departed on masse for a less hazardous clime.

Eventually Sibley’s main force caught up to drive the outnumbered Yankees back and the fighting moved on, leaving Marcosito battered and abandoned. None of its citizens ventured to return, nor would they until the war ended or the last Confederate had been driven out of New Mexico Territory.

The day was waning when Sentenza, his six gun-hands and the Man From Nowhere came to Marcasite. They rode down the cannon-pocked street, the clatter of their hoofbeats echoing from the empty buildings.

The scars of the fierce bombardment were evident everywhere. They passed a fire-gutted stable, a house with part of its roof blown off, then picked their way around a pile of debris that had been the high false front of a saloon.

“It looks,” Sentenza remarked, “as though we had the whole town to ourselves.”

The bounty-hunter glanced at him without replying. White lines etched his mouth and his eyes glittered. Sentenza reined in before a rambling two-storey hotel. Most of it appeared to be intact but a shell had tom off an upper corner, leaving heavy roof beams unsupported. Sentenza studied the structure and shook his head.

“I don’t like it A jar could bring those timbers crashing down to kill or trap anybody inside.”

They rode on and halted before the ruins of what seemed to have been a store. Most of the front had been blown off but the structure itself looked sound.

“I like this better,” Sentenza said. “We’ll bed down here for the night We can are any visitors without being seen and either pick them off or fade out by the back door. Bill, you and Andy take care of the horses. Put them up somewhere out of sight”

The gunman named Hank had crowded his horse up beside the bounty-hunter’s. As they swung out of the saddles Hank’s right spur jabbed the flank of the hunter’s horse. It shied violently and the hunter, caught in mid- swing, had to make a frantic grab for the cantle to avoid being thrown under the trampling hoofs. He quieted the horse, dropped to the ground and stepped around to confront Sentenza’s man. He was aware of the other five closing in at his back.