1
Maxie Berger sat back comfortably on the dirt, using his blanket roll to cushion his back. He had his black hat pulled back on his head and his boots were off. He was enjoying a smoke while waiting for the coffee to boil. A high blaze of fire hugged the side of the pot, making the boil imminent. Maxie’s attention was caught by a bird attacking its rival in a fight that took them to the ground and back up in a cottonwood tree. They arced over the tree and quickly away.
He smiled because he liked birds.
He caught the cigarette in his lips, preparatory to getting up with the intent to rinse out a tin coffee cup. As he put his chin up a simultaneous rifle report and the destruction of the cigarette took place. The wiry cowpoke dove to the inadequate cover of a bush. He wished his rifle was not so far away.
A second shot zinged past his ear so near that if a bug had been sitting on top of it the bullet would have taken it away.
Maxie smiled. Just one man could shoot like that. “Mexican Red,” he called. “Come out from where you’re hiding.”
He returned to his goods and located a second cup. As he busied himself cleaning them out and then pouring the coffee, a giant of a man silently approached. The man though Spanish-dressed had the red hair of a Scot. His clothing had been fancy in its early days, but months of hard riding had taken its toll. Two fancy pistols always caught the eye of people when he approached them. Red pushed back a sombrero and smiled. “One of these days I’m just going to miss. You’re going to look funny with no lips and ears.”
“That’s the day I would have to plug you,” Maxie joked. “How much are you worth?”
Red watched his friend pour out the coffee into the cups. “Nearly ten thousand, I think. At least.”
“That much? Don’t ever turn your back on a friend. Any friend,” Maxie cautioned.
Red took his coffee. He ambled to Maxie’s blanket roll and had a seat. “What are you doing in these parts? I thought you had a stake in that lady’s ranch,” he said casually enough.
“Still got it,” Maxie replied. “I’m just shaking out my legs. Married life keeps me nervous.”
“I would have thought the town saloon would be the place to relax that off,” Red allowed.
The two sipped their coffee until it cooled enough to drink right down. Then Red produced two fine cigars. “Like a smoke?” he said. “A real one?”
Among Red’s friends, these cigars were famous. There was no finer tobacco to be had in the southwest. The two smoked in silence.
At last, Red spoke again. ”I’m told there is a posse being made up in my honor. A day’s ride from here.”
Maxie grinned. “Wouldn’t be surprised,” he said.
Red too grinned. “It’s a lot of money,” he said.
Maxie’s composure slipped, little by little, and then it crashed. “I’m busted, Red. She took up with Billy Pearsall. Together they ran me off with naught but the bills in my britches and this horse and saddle. I got nothing and no place to go.”
“You thought to take it out of my hide? Look, I can stake you several hundred if that will make you more sensible. That much ought to carry you until you get a situation somewhere. I will give you a few extra of my cigars even.”
Maxie’s pride would not let him accept such an act of charity. “Say I take it. What kind of a man does that make me?”
“Alive, for one,” Red said gently.
“Alright. I’ll give it up. But I don’t want your damn charity,” Maxie insisted.
He was getting annoyed little by little that Red had taken his resting spot away from him. He finished the cigar and dropped it near his feet. He took the tin cups, now empty, and rinsed the coffee grounds out of their bottoms. Playing through his mind was the thought, “While he’s down like that. You could kill him.”
He knew better than that. Red was the sort of wizard who would always come out on top. He would only ever be taken when finally surrounded with no way out. When he turned toward Red he saw the man had shifted his position. He had drawn one leg around, making it easy to access the gun on that hip. Their eyes met and Maxie saw that Red was reading him perfectly.
Then Red came to his feet. He stood before Maxie and looked down at his face. “You took my free cigar. Why not my money?”
Maxie pulled on his chin whiskers, thinking. He knew it was different, just didn’t know how it was different. With a short little shake of the head, he said, “I’m ’bout to break camp.”
Under Red’s watchful eye, the abashed cowboy began gathering his goods. He rebooted his feet. Then as he unhobbled his pony, he glanced around to find the outlaw was gone. He stared at the empty space where Mexican Red had been.
“It was a good cigar,” he said at the emptiness. “Thanks.”
He settled his gear on the pony and took to the saddle. Having no place better in mind to be, he continued his journey to the settlement where the posse was being formed. He didn’t know if it had a name yet. It really didn’t matter. There he could ask around for work. At worst he could refill his water before heading on southward.
At the Buford fork, he found the way diverted by bob wire. It cost him nearly half a day of extra riding. He considered bob wire a curse. He understood that his world was being transformed by seemingly small things, all multiplied and irreversible. The wire changed the world for everybody and everything. It restricted buffalo from grazing land and water. It blocked food for many who lived off the land. It made him feel less free. He felt a little threatened to know somebody might invent a horseless carriage. He supposed if they did it with trains and boats they could do it with carriages. His melancholy lifted a bit when eventually his path returned to the original trail. The settlement could not be far off.
As he approached the outskirt of the settlement by early afternoon he saw a new sign. “Parched April, population 412.” The number had been altered already, more than one time. Well, first things first. He still had about twenty dollars in his pocket. He hoped the saloon would have food.
Like all buildings in Parched April, the saloon had been tacked together with no thought of making a permanent presence. No one tried to put in a wooden walkway, probably not thinking it worth the trouble for a temporary enterprise. The settlement was originally a gathering spot for railroad workers. Then a few men opened some mines and kept it going. Maxie watered, then tethered the pony and went inside.
Inside, the saloon was equally crude, with a dirt floor covered by what appeared to be peanut shells.. The bar was a makeshift of planks laid over barrels. There were shelves of bottles but no mirror on the wall behind. One could stand at the bar or sit at a table on a bench. Maxie saw the group in the far corner who likely were members of Red’s posse. He found the barkeep.
“Where can I get some food?” he said.
The barkeep wore a croupier’s visor. With four days worth of growth on his face and a torn shirt he looked more like a bum than a respected businessman. He said, “You want biscuits and gravy I can get ’em. Everything else, down the street at Ma’s House.”
“Get ’em,” Maxie said. “First give me a bottle and a glass.”
The barkeep, whose name was Sam Harmon, barked at a snoozing fellow leaned over a table, “Fred. Get the man some biscuits.”
Maxie caught the bottle and glass between an arm and his body and used his free hand to drag a table next to the ones the posse occupied. After settling the items on the table, he got himself a bench and took his seat. He saw one familiar face, a pock-marked visage with mixed white and black hair and eyebrows and a persistent slack jaw. A peculiar squint that drew attention to one eye being glass.
“Hey, Waco Jimmy. I thought you was dead,” he said by way of greeting.
Waco Jimmy pulled a pair of heavy-rimmed glasses from his shirt pocket, slipped them over his eyes, saw it was Maxie speaking, and turned his head back to the conversation. “There’s no way to run Red down and take him,” he continued saying as he moved the glasses back inside his shirt. “We are going to have to set up a trap.”
Sitting across the table from Waco was Jesse Swaggart, a handsome ex-railroad worker looking to make an easy dollar. “So we’ve heard you say four times already,” Swaggart said impatiently. “If you have a plan lay it out or shut your mug.”
The rest of the group, a sober-faced ex-sheriff, and a dusty-looking wrangler, nodded assent, tired of the talking.
Waco Jimmy talked on, unperturbed, as his face took on a sly leer. “I’ve got a friend coming today. He knows Mexican Red’s weakness. It’s a senorita that lives near Del Lobo. He says if we hold her he is bound to give hisself up just to free her.”
The ex-sheriff, Bo Higgins, said, “In the event he does surrender we’ve got to kill him immediately. Because if he goes to jail he is damn well going to escape and hunt us down one by one.”
On that point they all agreed. Whether Mexican Red had his breathing permanently cut off or walked in on his own, the reward money stayed the same. And the money would be no good if no one was alive to appreciate it.
Maxie had received his biscuits and gravy but was having a hard time eating them while listening to these men plan an attack on a member of the female sex, coupled with outright murder. He knew that even with his pledge to Mexican Red not to ride he would have forsaken these coyotes. He drank a few hurried drinks of whiskey and stretched the familiar stretch of the weary.
“Anybody know a place I can stretch out for free?” he said. He turned to Sam Harmon. “Do you?”
Harmon, looking annoyed, said, “I have a cot in the back I sleep in. You can do it until I get tired. Tomorrow you could pay me by working a few hours.”
Maxie shuffled off without a farewell to the posse. Going around the bar and to the door-less opening. “Obliged,” he said before slipping through, scratching himself as he went.
He found the cot tempting. Maxie instead sneaked out the back entrance. His recall told him a telegraph wire was attached to a shack just where the street began on the way in. Taking a track behind the line of buildings, he came to the shack and pushed inside. The telegraph operator sat drinking coffee while perusing a month-old newspaper from Tombstone. He pushed back his specs to look at the intruder. “Yes?”
Without speaking, Maxie took a sheet of the operator’s paper and wrote out a message addressed to the town of Del Lobo. The pinch-faced telegrapher tried to read as he wrote, but it was not possible. Even after the note was finished the telegrapher had to clarify the cowpoke’s meanings.
“It will cost you a nickel for me to send all of that,” the telegrapher explained.
Maxie dropped his nickel into the man’s palm and went outside to retrace his path to the room at the back of the saloon.
He was sleeping soundly when a pair of rough hands spilled him out on the floor. He struggled to see the man attached to the hands. The rough hands belonged to Jesse Swaggart.
Maxie feigned innocence. “Not funny, Jesse.”
“You wrote a message at the telegraph office.”
Jesse wadded the sheet Maxie had written his message on and dropped it on Maxie.
“Get up,” he said.
“Don’t push me too far,” Maxie responded.
He knew himself to be the man’s inferior regarding physical strength, but, despite his backing down before Mexican Red he was good with his gun. That made them equal, for the moment.
Three more of the posse crowding through the entry canceled his chances. “Bring him out front,” snarled Waco Jimmy.
The cowpoke meekly arose and went with the crowd into the barroom section. At the posse’s table sat the pinch-faced telegraph operator drinking beer. He studiously avoided looking in Maxie’s direction. Maxie wondered if the man had paid for the beer with his nickel.
After Maxie was installed on a bench, the posse leered at him.
Waco Jimmy said, “We’ve got two ways we can deal with this bastid. One is to take him along until we have Mexican Red in our sights. The other is to kill him out on the trail. Makes no never what you boys choose.”
Bo Higgins insinuated his gun from the holster.
New with the posse was Andy Carroll, who had been fired for his laziness from the ranch where the targeted female worked as a housekeeper.
“I say we kill him,” Andy said.
Bo nodded his assent.
Maxie shook his head to indicate his disagreement with that decision.
Pouring himself a drink, Waco Jimmy expressed the opinion the posse could finish the day, then sleep comfortably before heading out before daybreak.
Maxie spent the night on the floor behind a bench, bound hand and foot. The posse had bullied Sam Harmon to lock up with them sleeping inside the bar.
2
Waco Jimmy astride his pony looked like a classical fierce warrior waiting for the others of the posse and Maxie to mount up. Cold winds were raking the plains this morning, signaling perhaps an early fall. Bo Higgins and Andy Carroll were next to arrive and Jesse Swaggart rode alongside Maxie. Bo Higgins led the pack mule.
Once they set out the terrain was dry. The stiff winds eased off. Bo insisted the horses have water at regular intervals even if it meant rationing themselves. No riders disagreed. As they left the plain and came on the rocky hills Maxie began looking for places to fall off of his pony and lose himself among the rocks. He doubted his captors would want to utilize a great deal of time searching when he would likely die out there on his own.
Andy Carroll took them to a waterhole at the foot of the hills. When Maxie fell on his knees beside his pony to put his face in the pool, Jesse pushed him over.
“How about it, boys?” he said, with his iron pulled half out of the holster. “Should I plug him here? He’s about to waste water.”
“Let him drink,” said Bo. “Don’t put him down at the waterhole to stink it up for the ones next to come here.”
Waco Jimmy came up from watering himself. After wiping his sleeve across the lower part of his face he said, “I’m thinking now we ought not kill him. We don’t need illegal blood on our hands.”
Maxie scrambled back to the water’s edge and plunged his face in the coolness. Then he drank deeply. As he pushed himself to a stooping position Andy Carroll presented him with the perfect chance to escape. Andy pulled his pony back from the water and in so doing presented his backside to Maxie. His gun butt presented itself perfectly to Maxie’s hand.
Grabbing the iron as he came to his feet, he said, “Nobody move.”
Waving the weapon, he demanded they throw down their guns. The posse awaited their cue from Waco Jimmy, who waited stoically without moving to comply. “I would put that gun down, old son,” he said. “You may kill me but I swear I will take you with me. And while you are dealing with me one of these bastids is going get his gat out in time to fire.”
With his free hand, Maxie readied his pony.
“Just you try going for it,” he said to Waco Jimmy. “I got a start on plugging at least half of you before I go down.”
The pony shied as Maxie attempted to mount. He lost his train of sight only momentarily but it was enough to make Waco Jimmy braver. By the time he could see him good enough he had cleared leather. Waco Jimmy’s draw was quick. Maxie’s response was quicker. His bullet pierced Waco Jimmy’s neck below his chin. The dying man’s bullets went wildly flying and could be heard to ricochet among the rocks.
Maxie steeled himself for further action, but the rest of the posse remained still.
“One’s enough dead,” said Andy Carroll. “But I swear I’m going to test you again if you don’t lower that weapon.”
“We can’t let you ride out of here,” said Bo. “If a bloodbath is what it takes, we will have one right now. Put it away and ride with us or start your action.”
As he spoke the posse went for their guns in a single motion. Maxie was able to mortally wound Bo and Andy Carroll. He and Jesse traded less lethal wounds and were rendered unable to finish the war. After losing their guns they stood regarding each other weighing the possibilities before them. At last, Andy spoke.
“You know we are going to need each other just to survive and get back to town?”
Maxie nodded yes. “I have rawhide to tie off the wounds,” he said. “Where did I get you?”
“Upper arm. Cracked the bone, likely.” Andy’s attempted grin turned into a grimace.
After putting a tourniquet on Andy’s arm, Maxie looked to his own wound. Turned out he was painfully grazed and barely bleeding. He regarded Andy a minute, rolled a cigarette and handed it, lit, to him.
“I’ll take care of the horses,” he said.
He stripped the saddles and bridles off of the dead men’s ponies, then set them free. He helped Andy to mount his before taking to the saddle. He wondered how Mexican Red would have viewed his handling of an entire posse as the great outlaw had been known to do.
