Peacemaker!, page 11
‘You use different guns,’ said Iron Shirt. ‘The other one uses the old kind. You have the new one that the blue-leg soldiers carry.’
Ryker nodded. ‘Zeb uses the Colt Dragoon. That’s a cap and ball pistol. I got a new Colt: the Single Action Army model.’
‘You show us the difference.’
Iron Shirt tossed Ryker’s Colt on to the ground. Followed it with a single shell.
At the far end of the watching columns a brave set one of Zeb’s Dragoons down, resting a ready-made paper cartridge alongside together with a fulminate cap and a small stick of grease.
The two Americans were about twenty feet apart.
‘This ain’t fair,’ Zeb yelled. ‘It ain’t fair at all.’
‘Life’s tough,’ Ryker called back. ‘But that’s the way it goes. Up or down. According to God an’ Colonel Colt.’
‘I will give you both a signal,’ said Iron Shirt. ‘When I drop my hand you will load your pistols and fire. Whoever lives can go free.’
He backed off, selecting a position towards the center of the twin columns. It was easy to see him because he had banded a circlet of feathers about his helmet and no longer carried the lance. Instead, he held a coup stick, heavy with scalps.
Ryker watched him.
So did everyone else in the basin.
He raised his coup stick. Ryker tensed.
The hair-hung pole came down.
Ryker dropped to his knees, grabbing for the gun. As he lifted the weapon and snapped the loading gate open he saw that the Indians had failed to understand the new loading system: the Colt was fully-loaded on all six chambers. Exactly as he had left it.
He picked up the cartridge and made a pretense of checking over the cylinder before pocketing the shell.
At the far end of the column Zeb was shoving a readymade into the front of the Dragoon’s cylinder. Ryker smiled and stood up. Zeb stared at him, still working the ramming lever of the big Dragoon.
Ryker cocked the Colt, taking it slow and easy and sadistic.
Zeb began to moan as he lifted the cap.
Ryker aimed carefully, balancing the gun in both hands to compensate for the uplift of the discharge. He pulled the hammer back. Sighted down the grooved top strap of the frame, lining notch and foresight fin on Zeb’s face.
Deliberately, he waited until the hired gun had the nipple capped on the big Dragoon.
Then he squeezed the trigger.
The Colt bucked in his hands, the discharge lifting the pistol while the smooth grip slid it back and down into his fist, so that his thumb was lined on the hammer as the muzzle fell back into sight, carried there by its own weight.
Zeb’s face exploded as Ryker dragged the hammer back for a second shot. The .45 caliber slug exploded a hole through the gunman’s forehead that began as a dark widening of his skin and then became a massive outpouring of crimson flecked through with the white of bone and the grey of brain as the exit hole opened behind the face and spilled Zeb’s skull over the grass.
The Dragoon—not yet capped properly—fell away to the side.
Ryker’s second shot took Zeb in the throat, hitting the underside of his face as he pitched back. It tore through his jaw and the roof of his mouth. Ripping upwards through his brain before it spurted clear of his skull on a fountain of blood-soaked hair and fragments of bone.
The corpse was hurled back by the force of the two shots, bending over from the kneeling position Zeb had assumed when he began to load the Dragoon.
Ryker laughed and fired again, emptying the pistol as Zeb’s body jerked and twisted over the ground in an obscene rhythm danced to the thundering tune of the Colt’s discharge. The grass darkened as blood flowed from the holes in the killer’s body, attracting flies that settled in swarming clouds on the wounds.
The Comanches stared in amazement, shouting to one another and pointing at the corpse. Ryker flipped the loading gate open and began to eject the spent cartridges. His hours of practice paid off, because he emptied the Colt and got five new shells into the cylinder before Iron Shirt turned to stare at him.
‘You were given only one bullet.’ Under the shadow of the helmet his eyes were puzzled. ‘How could you shoot six times?’
Ryker holstered the pistol, grinning. ‘I understand these guns. You don’t.’
‘You will teach me.’ Iron Shirt walked over to face the gunslinger. ‘These are the kind the blue legs use. Show me how they work.’
The bows and the old weapons pointed at Ryker emphasized his lack of choice. ‘Will you let me go free then?’
Iron Shirt nodded. ‘I gave you my word.’
‘Then watch,’ said Ryker, ‘and I will show you.’
He drew the Colt again, taking it slow. Taking care to point the muzzle at the ground. He flicked the gate open and began to work the ejector spring, jumping cartridges clear of the cylinder. When the pistol was empty, he stooped down to collect the unused shells. Checked each one for dirt and then dropped them back into the chambers. He snapped the gate closed and looked up at the Comanche chief.
‘Now the gun is ready to fire again.’
‘Show me.’ Iron Shirt pointed his coup stick at Zeb’s body. ‘Show me how fast it fires.’
Ryker cocked the hammer and squeezed the trigger. Once again, he was impressed by the superb design of the gun. Its entire construction was based on the premise of solidity and ease of usage: each shot lifted the barrel up, but the design of the grip—based on that of the earlier Colts—served to slide the butt down the hand so that the hammer was dropped under the thumb, the weight of the revolver and the action of cocking the hammer again serving to align the barrel back on the target.
Clouds of flies erupted from Zeb’s body as the bullets hit, disturbed by the impact of the slugs and the sudden spurts of bloody cloth that flew up each time Ryker fired.
He emptied the gun, the force of its shots driving Zeb’s corpse back over the grass.
Then he opened the loading gate and began to eject the spent shells. Iron Shirt peered past his arm, grunting in amazement as the smoking cartridges fell clear.
‘It is a good gun,’ he said. ‘It fires much faster than the other ones.’
Ryker was caught in his own fascination with weaponry. He had heard of the experiments being made by Smith & Wesson and by Colt into the production of a rapid-fire handgun, but the sheer efficiency of the Colt still surprised him. Gave him a warm glow of pleasure to use so fine a weapon, even though he was a prisoner.
He wondered what Ruby or Engell might have thought as he began to explain the machinations of the revolver to the Comanche chief.
‘This here’s the Colt Single Action Army model, designed for use by the United States Cavalry. It’s got a barrel length of seven an’ one half inches, which makes it almighty accurate if you can handle the weight. That’s around two pounds an’ a half. It’s calibered in .45 so that you can use the same shells in the new Winchester rifles.’ He pointed at the one Iron Shirt’s son—at least he assumed it was the chief’s son—was holding. ‘The standard load is twenty-eight grains of black powder, an’ I think the slug’s around 250 grains in weight. That means you stop what you hit up to about fifty yards. Fifty to sixty paces, that is. The gun is built solid: there ain’t much can go wrong with it. I heard the Army gets it as standard issue now, but that ain’t gonna do you no good at all.’
‘Why?’ Iron Shirt had followed the discourse with a degree of attention that revealed a far greater understanding of English than Ryker had suspected. ‘Why not?’
‘Two reasons.’ The gunslinger watched nervously as the Comanche handled the pistol. ‘First is, it ain’t on sale. So far, the only people who get the guns are Army men.’
‘We can take them!’
Iron Shirt cocked the pistol and squeezed off a shot that landed three feet to the side of Zeb’s body. He roared with laughter and fired again, discharging all six chambers. He hit the corpse three times, then began to fumble with the unloading mechanism.
‘Maybe,’ said Ryker. ‘But after that? You can’t exactly walk into a store to buy shells.’
Iron Shirt passed the pistol back, telling Ryker to explain the unloading procedure. ‘We can take the shells, too.’
Ryker shook his head. ‘Army issues just so many to each trooper. By the time you killed enough to take their guns, they’ll have used up all their loads. You might get a few, but you’ll never have enough cartridges.’
Iron Shirt grunted and said, ‘The Mexicans—the Comancheros—trade weapons with us. We pay them in silver and gold and cattle. They sell us guns.’
‘Cap an’ ball.’ Ryker gestured at the antiquated firearms pointed in his direction. ‘It’s a whole lot easier to buy powder than it is to buy brass jacket shells.’
‘The other white man used the old gun,’ said Iron Shirt. ‘He carried two of them.’
‘He’s dead,’ said Ryker. ‘Proving my point.’
Iron Shirt gestured towards his tipi. ‘I would talk more of this. I must understand these things if I am to fight you white men. You will tell me about the difference between the old guns and the new ones.’
‘Yeah,’ said Ryker, moving in the direction of the rawhide tent as a lance prodded his back. ‘Sure.’
‘A cap an’ ball pistol has three separate loading actions, more if you use powder instead of ready-made cartridges. ’ Ryker spoke slowly, choosing his words with care so that the Comanche chief and the four other men listening to him would understand. ‘Now you said the Comancheros supply you with powder an’ ball. Right? Well, you want to load a pistol that way you first got to point the barrel up while you measure the powder into the cylinder. You got to be careful how much you put in, on account of it might blow the whole cylinder when you fire.’
A barrel-chested Indian nodded enthusiastically, waving a right hand from which index and middle fingers were missing.
‘After that, you got to load the ball. Then you got to ram the ball tight against the powder. If you don’t plan to fire off straight away, you got to grease the chamber. Best to do that, anyway: it stops flash fire. Then you got to turn the pistol around and cap the nipples. You got to be real careful on that, because those caps go off almighty easy.’
The same Indian waved his hand again, nodding agreement.
‘Now paper cartridges make the whole thing faster,’ Ryker continued, ‘because you can drop the powder an’ the ball down in the one movement. But you still need to ram an’ cap.
‘You got a new Colt, then you can use the brass-jacket shells. Load all in one: just drop the cartridge into the chamber, turn the cylinder, and be ready to fire.’
‘But you say that we cannot get these new bullets.’ Iron Shirt lifted the Springfield from beside his position and thrust the carbine at Ryker. ‘Why not use the same as this?’
‘They don’t work the same,’ said Ryker. ‘You got an Army Springfield that fires off .45 ammunition like the Colt. But you got an old model: it uses a linen cartridge and needs a percussion cap. You can’t use the same cartridges.’ He opened the breech, pointing at the gap. ‘You can’t fit a brass shell in there.’
‘We buy guns like yours,’ said Iron Shirt. The Mexicans will find them for us.’
Ryker sighed. ‘They might be lucky enough to find you a few, but they won’t get the shells to go with them. What will you do when you run out of bullets?’
There was a long pause. A fly, gorged fat on Zeb’s blood, eased lazily past Ryker’s face. He slapped it away, wondering what would happen next.
Then Iron Shirt’s face split in a wide smile and he slapped both hands against his chest, producing a hollow echo from the armor.
‘You will find them for us!’
‘Me?’ Ryker’s mouth dropped open in surprise. ‘Why me?’
‘We listened to you talking,’ said the Comanche, ‘so we know the blue-leg chief stole your guns. We will help you get them back if you help us.’
‘How?’ Ryker wondered what kind of crazy idea was working itself through the old man’s mind. ‘How can I?’
‘We let you go.’ The chief leant forwards, staring at Ryker. ‘You go back to the fort and tell the blue legs how we killed the men who took you away. You tell them you escaped, but you saw a big camp. When they come looking for us we will kill them all, and then come to the fort. You will be inside so you can open the gates.’
‘They’d not risk attacking this place,’ said Ryker. ‘It’s too hard.’
Iron Shirt chuckled. ‘You will tell them we are camped somewhere else. Somewhere on the plain. Somewhere we can kill them easily.’
‘Suppose I don’t?’
Iron Shirt turned his head, looking towards the body of the dead gunman. The camp dogs were gnawing at the corpse now, tearing loose long streamers of flesh.
‘He died very fast. He was lucky.’
Ryker took the point. ‘But I could agree to that and then tell the soldiers what you plan. They might set a trap for you.’
Iron Shirt chuckled some more and shouted orders in his own language. Two warriors stood up and went into the chief’s tent. They emerged a few moments later with a wooden box held between them. The weight of it bent them both over. They set it down beside Iron Shirt.
‘White men work for the thing you call money.’ It sounded like mahnee. ‘I have much money. Look.’
He opened the box, revealing a pile of loot. There were gold and silver coins; several bars of solid gold; rings and watches and bracelets: a fortune in looted goods.
‘You take this.’ The Comanche passed Ryker a gold bar and a handful of jewelry. The gunslinger guessed he was holding around a thousand dollars’ worth of metal and precious stones. ‘If you do what I say, I will give you twice as much again. After.’
Ryker stared at the wealth spread on the ground between his feet.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll take it.’
Chapter Twelve
THE NEXT DAY Iron Shirt showed Ryker the place selected for the ambush. From the readiness with which the old war chief took him to the spot, and the way he explained the details, the gunslinger guessed that it was something the Comanche had had worked out for a long time.
The site was a wide depression in the prairie about two days’ ride clear of Fort Quitman. When the land was first formed, some cataclysmic scoop had dug a bowl from the soil, about a mile across and a mile long. It was around a thousand yards deep, with a spring feeding a side water of the Rio Grande at the center, the narrow rivulet trickling away between high-edged flanks of sandstone at the western margin. The rim was pure yellow, though a few yards below bushes of creosote and wild cherry formed a green ring like a herbal balcony. Grass grew around the center of the depression; a small herd of mustangs grazed on the verdancy.
Iron Shirt called an order, and the horsemen with him descended into the basin and began erecting makeshift tipis. They erected the wigwams and then set to gathering wood, laying out the green timbers to dry in the sun, ready to stand in for cookfires.
Ryker watched, fighting to hold his face impassive as he realized the extent of Iron Shirt’s preparations. Within the space of a few hours the empty basin was built up like a Comanche camp. The mustangs had departed at the first sign of approaching riders, but now tents and fires spread along the course of the spring.
‘Later,’ explained the chief, ‘we shall bring some of our own horses here. And dogs, too. The white commander will think it is an easy place to attack and ride in to kill us. He is a coward, the one called Mengers, so it will be easy to fool him. When you tell him what you have seen, he will send out a patrol. I shall leave a few braves here to convince the blue legs that they have found my camp. Then, when the blue-leg chief brings all his men out, we shall wait and trap them down in the basin.’
Ryker nodded and Iron Shirt chuckled.
‘After that I shall send a few men to enter the fort. It will not be difficult to get inside when you open the gates, and no more difficult to kill the blue legs. Then we shall take what we need from the house where they keep the guns.’
‘The armory,’ said Ryker. ‘That’s what it’s called.’
‘Yes. The ah-more-hee.’ Iron Shirt smiled. ‘You take your guns from the blue leg chief and I take my guns, too. Then I will give you twice the wealth you already have.’
‘Thanks,’ said Ryker. ‘That sounds like a good deal.’
‘Better than dying,’ said Iron Shirt.
‘Yeah,’ nodded Ryker. ‘Better’n that.’
He reached Fort Quitman three days later. The troopers posted on the gates made him wait until Lieutenant Austin could be found and brought out to identify the rider. Austin gave the order to open the gates and let Ryker in.
‘Christ Jesus!’ He kept his blasphemy soft as he hurried Ryker across the parade ground. ‘I thought you was dead.’
‘No thanks to that bastard major,’ snarled the gunslinger. ‘He sold me out for those matched Colts.’
‘Tell me later,’ urged the lieutenant. ‘Right now it’s best to get you under cover.’
He left Ryker waiting in the shadows outside the stable while he frightened the trooper on duty into accepting the black stallion, then led the way over to the adobe houses spreading out from the sutler’s. He knocked on the yellow door.
‘Maria?’
‘Sí ¿Que es?’
‘Dick Austin. Open this goddam door.’
The door opened and Austin stepped inside, dragging Ryker behind him before the gunslinger had any chance to see the interior. He heeled the timber closed and waved a hand around the room.
‘Take a seat.’
Ryker saw that the place was little more than a single room with an alcove at the rear. Most of the interior space was taken up by the huge brass bed set against one wall. There was a washstand and a chair, and the alcove looked like it contained a small stove and a wardrobe. He sat down on the bed, and looked at Maria.
