The two men paced away from each other until Diaz called “Quince!” and then they whirled and fired. But even as he spun around, Louis Little—who had been a guerrilla fighter with Bloody Bill Anderson’s wildwood Missourians in the war of the American states and thereby learned everything on earth there was to know about pistol fighting—dropped to one knee and Salgado’s bullet passed above and to the left of his head as his own round hit the lieutenant in the chest and staggered him rearward into a tree. Julian collapsed to a sitting position with his back against the tree trunk and the revolver yet in his hand, and Louis Little, still crouched, shot him three times more, cocking and firing as fast as he could, the first of these bullets passing through Julian’s head and pasting the tree with blood and the next two striking his unbeating heart even as he was toppling onto his side.
Captain Anderson had always said to make sure they were finished, that he’d seen more than one man killed by another assumed to be dead.
Louis Little stood up, the revolver cocked on the remaining round, and he studied Julian’s still form. Satisfied the man was dead, he uncocked the Kerr and went to Diaz and handed it to him. The general tucked it and his own pistol into his pants.
Your father tells me you are from Louisiana, Diaz said.
Yes.
They must have some interesting duels in Louisiana. Here the rule is that a man must stand his ground during the exchange of fire and the rule is understood to mean that he should stand it upright. You stood your ground, yes, but somewhat, well, gymnastically, let us say.
Louis Little stared at him. He had not known Diaz very long and wondered if he was one of those bossmen who purposely didn’t tell you all of the rules just so he could have the pleasure of charging you with breaking one that you didn’t know about. He’d had a bossman like that in a timber camp when he was sixteen years old, his first job after leaving home following his mother’s death. The bossman had not liked him for some reason and made things hard for him at every turn. One day the man upbraided him loudly in front of a crew of witnessing timberjacks for breaking some rule Louis hadn’t heard of. The bossman said ignorance was no excuse, that Louis would have to pay him a fine of a day’s wages and if he argued about it he’d give him a hiding to boot. The contretemps concluded with the bossman on his back and his head in bloody mud with Louis’s timber axe wedged in his skull to the sinuses. Louis then mounted the bossman’s horse and galloped off to places unknown.
The War Between the States was then in its second year and he was soon riding with William Clarke Quantrill and his confederate guerrillas, whom many regarded less as military irregulars than as a band of outlaws using the war as pretext for their depredations. When dissension broke up Quantrill’s company, Louis chose to ride with Bloody Bill. Then the war was lost and so he went west and roamed without purpose and here and there took employment as a marshal and once as a train guard and on various occasions killed men either for the bounty to be collected or over an insult of some sort or, most often, in some drunken argument whose particulars he would not remember. Finally he did as a few other die-hard rebels had done and went to Mexico. The republicans were still at war with Maximilian and there was no shortage of opportunity for a man of Louis’s skills. Because the imperialists were invaders, he saw them as akin to Yankees, and he hired on with Juarez. But he had got there at the tail end of things and had been in Mexico but six weeks when the war ended.
One afternoon, shortly after the liberation of Mexico City, he was drinking in a cantina and wondering what he might do next when he overheard the name of Edward Little mentioned in a group of American roughnecks at a nearby table. He bought a round for the bunch and asked about Edward Little and learned that he was General Diaz’s chief scout and was at present in the central hospital with a bad chest wound.
An hour later he was at Edward Little’s bedside. He introduced himself as Louis Welch and asked if he remembered a woman in Louisiana named Sharon Welch. “It was a long time ago,” Louis said. “Momma said you were on your way to Texas and yall didn’t know each other but the one night, so you might not recall. She told me about it when I was twelve. Said she wanted me to know who my daddy was, even if she didn’t hardly know more than your name. She said she liked you an awful lot.”
Edward Little remembered young Sharon Welch. She was sixteen, as was he, on the cold evening she sneaked out of the house and into the barn where her daddy had permitted him to spend the night. In the years since, he had at times thought of her. He was sorry to learn she was dead but was glad to make the acquaintance of the son he had not known they created. He offered his hand and the young man accepted it. The next day he introduced Louis to Porfirio Diaz, who seemed more amused than surprised to learn Edward had a son. That had been two weeks ago.
Don’t worry, kid, Diaz said. I didn’t specify what the rules were, did I? You were free to use the rules of Louisiana. And I have to say, you handle a pistol very well.
Louis smiled back. Thank you, general.
Diaz went over to Julian and retrieved the other revolver. I feel sorry for this one’s fiancee, he said. A widow before she was even a wife.
In his bad Spanish, Louis Little said he intended to make things right for her.
Really? Diaz said. Tell me. I would like to hear about this intention.
Louis told him, not sure if the way Diaz smiled as he listened was because of what he was hearing or the way it was being said. But he listened carefully, and when Louis finished explaining what he had in mind, Diaz said, I have only one question. Do you want to do this because you feel guilty for killing her man? Louis assured him it wasn’t guilt. It was what he wanted the minute he saw her. He gestured at Julian Salgado and said maybe now what he wanted would be easier or maybe impossible. Diaz clapped him on the shoulder and laughed. There’s only one way to find out, my friend. Goddammit, I should have known by the way you looked at her when you were dancing. “Pero que cosa fantastica es el amor, no?”
In the ballroom, the first two shots—which all of the woman and even some of the officers in the room had taken for one, so closely together did they sound—had stopped the music and hushed all talk, and Gloria squeezed Sofi’s hand so hard it would ache the next day. Almost immediately behind those first shots, there came three more reports in rapid sequence, and one of the officers said, Well, I’ll bet somebody just killed the hell out of somebody.
There followed long minutes of buzzing speculation before the garden door finally opened and Diaz and Louis Little reentered the room. There were low groans from the bet losers and chuckling from those few who had backed the gringo. No one saw Edward Little return his gun to its holster under his coat.
Diaz handed the guns to one of the officers and gave low-voiced instructions to some others and they nodded and went out to the garden.
As Louis Little headed for the bridesmaids’ table where Gloria sat and watched him approach, Diaz gestured at the others sitting there and they all got up and moved away—except for Sofi, until Gloria hissed, “Vete,” and she sighed and left too. Then Louis was at the table and asked Gloria’s permission to sit beside her and she nodded. He sat down and leaned toward her and spoke in a voice so low she had to lean towards him too, their heads almost touching, and to every eye in the room they looked like longtime intimates. Louis Little spoke without pause for about a minute and was done. Gloria stared at him a moment more and then smiled and said something in response and he grinned and took her hand and turned to look at his father, who smiled in his own maimed fashion and raised his glass in salute.
“Bravo!” Diaz said. He leaped up to the dais and called for everyone’s attention and proclaimed the impending marriage of Louis Little and Gloria Blanco.
The room erupted with applause and cheers and copious wisecracking about the ball-and-chain and the poor gringo’s excessive punishment for the simple crime of shooting a man, and so on. The smiling couple stood with their arms around each other and Louis Little bent to Gloria’s ear and said something and her smile widened. She was beaming.
Diaz called for Father Benedicto and someone shouted that the old padre was passed out in the bar adjoining the ballroom. Diaz joined in the laughter and said to rouse him and bring him up there, to carry him if they had to. While the revived priest was being assisted in making his unsteady way across the room, Diaz announced that the funeral for Lieutenant Julian Salgado Ordonez would be held in the garrison cemetery tomorrow afternoon. He expected every officer in the room to attend. Lieutenant Salgado was an honorable soldier who fell in a honorable contest and he would be shown every respect.
Sofi stood bewildered. Julian Salgado was lying dead in the garden while in this boisterous ballroom her sister was smiling in the arms of the man who’d killed him. A man she had only just met and would marry in the next few minutes.
