Terror Trail Read online

  So far, her target practice had been limited to rattlesnakes and empty bottles lined along a fence, but when she thought about facing a human enemy, Dolores felt no fear.

  This morning, she expected to be challenged on that point.

  Manuelito Obregón was still ringing the brass alarm bell of the porch, although it seemed that no one living could have missed that racket or the gunfire that threatened to drown it out. Scanning the yard in front of her, Dolores searched for targets, picking out her family’s vaqueros whether mounted or afoot, distinguishing the raiders from employees of the ranch by torchlight. Moving toward the barn and seeking cover there, she had not traveled far before she saw her father standing in the open, looking almost humorous in boots and nightshirt, while his rifle tracked one of the trespassers.

  Dolores waited for his muzzle flash, a body spilling from its saddle, but before that could occur, her padre staggered, reeling, dropping to one knee, and clutching at his shoulder. Fresh blood, black by moonlight, welled between his fingers as he toppled over backward, sprawling in the dirt.

  “Papa!” she cried out, sprinting to reach him. She was almost at his side when a bandido galloped up and bent down from his saddle, leveling a six-gun at her father’s supine form.

  Dolores fired her Colt without a heartbeat’s hesitation, barely taking time to aim from forty feet while on the run. Her bullet drilled the mounted gunman’s left shoulder and pitched him from his saddle, and he twisted in midair as he went down.

  A hit, but not a kill.

  Cursing in Spanish, the bandido struggled to his hands and knees, retrieved his gun, and saw Dolores rushing at him like a raging harpy from mythology. He swung the pistol toward her, cocking it, but her Colt’s double-action feature saved a crucial second from the confrontation. When the pistol bucked against her palm again, Dolores saw a dark vent open in the gunman’s forehead, spurting as it overflowed with blood, masking his startled face.

  That was a kill.

  She knelt beside her father, cradling his head with her free arm, while the right still held her weapon poised and ready to defend the pair of them.

  Trying to reach him through his pain, she told him, “Hang on, Papa! You are safe now.”

  Even as she voiced that lie, it seemed to scald her tongue. Instead of daring to repeat it, she cried out for help from someone, anyone, beginning with her siblings in the dark. “Eduardo! Sonya! Help me! ¡Dense prisa!” And repeated it for emphasis in English: “Hurry up! For God’s sake, hurry now!”

  No answer reached her ears over the crash and rattle of gunfire, men shouting curses in two languages, horses squealing in panic as they raised dust, running to and fro. The absence of immediate response did not dismay Dolores. She was terrified, if only for her father’s sake, forgetting any danger to herself as she applied herself to aiding him.

  At last, when more shrill cries for help had gone unanswered, she decided to take action on her own. Gripping her Colt’s warm barrel in her teeth, she slid both hands beneath her father’s armpits and began to drag him yard by yard, duckwalking backward, toward the cover of their foreman’s humble home.

  * * *

  * * *

  Eduardo Aguirre was late arriving in the farmyard, after grappling with his boots and trousers in a dream-daze, then belatedly arming himself. Outside at last, he stood aghast at the chaotic scene before him, horses racing all around while riders whom he did not recognize attempted to direct them southward in a rush.

  Watching that grim tableau, Eduardo wished that he had grabbed a weapon other than his Model 1866 Winchester “Yellow Boy” rifle, so called after the hue of its receiver’s bronze-brass alloy, also know as gunmetal. Granted, the weapon held fourteen .44-caliber rimfire rounds inside its magazine, but as he faced the swarm of shouting raiders now, Eduardo wished that he had something better. Something more.

  A Gatling gun, perhaps, six barrels fed by a top-mounted magazine and powered by a smooth hand crank.

  “¡Ridículo!” he muttered to himself before the whim had even finished taking form.

  It was ridiculous, of course. The Gatling functioned only when it sat atop a wheeled support vehicle, and it burned through ammunition at prodigious rates. Worse yet, it would have slaughtered men and horses indiscriminately, many of the animals belonging to his family and promised to the U.S. Cavalry for sale next week, bringing top dollar into the Aguirre bank account at Las Cruces.

  Better to make do with what he had in hand, as the vaqueros roused from sleep were doing now. Eduardo spared a passing thought for his father and sisters, wondering where they were in the midst of so much gunplay, but he had no time to seek them out.

  He hears Dolores then, her shrill voice stuck somewhere between anger and fear, reverting to the first language the Aguirre siblings learned at home. “¡Padre, no te mueras! ¡Quédate conmigo!”

  Translating the strident plea: Father, don’t die! Stay with me!

  Scanning for its source, Eduardo spots his sister backing toward the foreman’s quarters, dragging something in her wake. A body, by the look of it, and from her words, he understands it is their father, even though he cannot recognize the man who gave them life.

  Eduardo starts off in that direction, jogging for the first few yards, then escalating to a sprint. He was about to call his sister’s name when something strikes him from behind, with all the force of a pickax. The bullet shatters on his shoulder blade, its fragments boring tunnels through his back and chest, ripping his lungs, his spine, slicing through the aorta where it joins his heart’s left ventricle.

  Already dead before he drops, Eduardo stumbles, falls, a puppet with its strings cut, impact with the soil raising a little cloud of dust.

  * * *

  * * *

  Sonya Aguirre, slow to wake from an alluring dream at the first sounds of gunfire, threw aside her goose-down comforter and scrambled out of bed, grabbing a robe, belting its tie around her waist before she grabbed a Springfield Model 1903 rifle from its slot between her mattress and nightstand.

  Shooting meant danger, and she did not plan to miss it for the world.

  The Springfield was a military weapon, introduced in the United States after the “splendid little war” with Spain. A bolt-action man-stopper, it weighed nine pounds loaded with five .30-06 rounds in its magazine. The rifle’s flip-up graduated sights were calibrated to a range of twenty-seven hundred yards, but in the early-morning darkness Sonya knew she would be lucky to achieve a solid hit within one quarter of that distance.

  Still, one solid hit should be enough for any man.

  Taking no chances, Sonya yanked the top drawer of her nightstand open and removed three five-round stripper clips, dropping them into the right-hand pocket of her robe. Instinct told her that if she needed more than twenty shots, this night—or morning, rather—would most likely be her last.

  Sonya had never shot a man before, but knew it was an ever-present possibility while dwelling so close to the Mexican border, where rustlers and bandidos crossed the Rio Grande at will, with little interference from the county sheriff’s office and less yet from the New Mexico Rangers, a tiny force of eleven mounted officers created five years earlier, tasked with patrolling 122,000 square miles occupied by some 327,000 settlers.

  Those odds were virtually hopeless, leaving each man and woman to defend him- or herself against predators, human or otherwise.

  Rustlers had preyed on the Aguirre family before, though few had profited from the act, and this morning’s attack—for what else could it be—was alien to Sonya’s personal experience.

  She was prepared to do her part, however.

  That, at least, was what she told herself as she stepped into moccasins and left her home behind, clearing the porch to find a battle underway.

  Manuelito Obregón, still clanging the alarm bell, saw her clear the tall front door and cautioned Sonya, �
��You had best remain inside la casa, señorita.”

  “Is my sister still inside?” she answered back, and brushed on past the houseman, jogging down three wooden steps into the yard.

  As soon as she arrived on level ground, Sonya hoisted her rifle, snugged its butt against her shoulder as she cranked its bolt action to chamber a live round. With horsemen racing here and there, some firing pistols, others ducking bullets, Sonya had to time her shot precisely and make sure she did not wound one of her family’s vaqueros by mistake.

  No sooner had she formed the thought than a stranger appeared in front of her. He was a burly mexicano whom she did not recognize as an employee, mounted on a prancing dun, aiming a shiny pistol toward the porch and Manuelito Obregón. From thirty feet, she barely had to aim the Springfield, squeezing off a tad too hastily in her excitement.

  As the rifle bucked against her shoulder, Sonya heard the gunman shout a curse in Spanish, doubling over, clutching at the spot where she had drilled him through the fat on his left side. Yelping, he wheeled away and gouged his mount with spurs, already dwindling into dusty darkness before she could work the Springfield’s bolt and try again.

  She chased him with another wild shot, nonetheless, cursing the miss almost before she pulled the rifle’s trigger.

  It was then that Sonya heard her sister’s voice, coming from her left, crying, “Papa! Hold on! We’re almost there!”

  Spinning in that direction, she beheld Dolores dragging a limp figure toward the foreman’s quarters, struggling against its deadweight.

  Papa!

  Instantly forgetting about any danger to herself or to the herd, Sonya Aguirre ran to help.

  * * *

  * * *

  ¡Rápido, hombres!” Pancho Villa shouted as he raced along beside the herd of captured horses, flanked and trailed by the vaqueros who had managed to escape from the Aguirre ranch unscathed, or at the very least able to travel with their wounds.

  There had been no time yet for counting either stolen animals or the survivors of his border raid. He guessed, from prior experience, that five or six men had been left behind, all dead or dying from defensive gunfire. More concerned about the horses, Villa estimated that his raiders had escaped with three fourths of the herd. Call it fifteen hundred animals that he could sell across the border, after skimming off a few, replenishing his own remuda for the hectic times ahead.

  To Villa’s left, along the eastern skyline over Texas, gray light had begun to infiltrate the desert sky. They would be at the Rio Grande soon, no reason to expect a federale welcome party waiting for them on the river’s southern bank. No one from the Aguirre rancho could have spread the news so quickly, and their first impulse would be to reach out for the sheriff’s office in Las Cruces, wasting further precious time.

  If he had staged his raid across the territory’s eastern border, Texas Rangers might have rushed across the border to pursue his company, but Pancho Villa was no fool. He understood the sorry state of law enforcement in New Mexico, and its governor’s ambition for advancement to the hallowed halls of Washington, D.C. Governor William Mills was well past sixty years of age and dared not rile his party’s leadership by sending his pathetic force of rangers into Mexico.

  As for the U.S. Cavalry, if they chose to pursue the horses they had lost this night, they would be far too late.

  Events were heating up in Mexico, and Villa sensed that he would be caught in the middle of it soon. Now, however, he could only think about this morning and the boost his reputation would receive from pulling off the greatest border raid in history.

  He would be satisfied with that for now and think about tomorrow when it dawned.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Pale dawn crept over the Aguirre ranch like a sneak thief approaching a deserted market stall.

  Not that the hacienda was abandoned; far from it. All hands still fit to walk, ride, work, or to defend themselves had plunged into a whirlwind of activity as soon as the intruders who had struck the spread were out of sight. Pursuit was futile in the early-morning darkness, and the prospect of an ambush on the trail made chasing after the attackers doubly dangerous.

  Four members of the rancho’s staff were dead, two others wounded and requiring a physician’s care. Alejandro Aguirre was one of the wounded, drilled through the shoulder, in and out. His daughters had managed to stanch the bleeding, dress his injury, and wedge his arm into a sling, but they could not restrain him from prowling the grounds, confirming all they’d lost within the scope of half an hour, maybe less.

  Aside from human deaths and injuries, the worst loss came to fourteen hundred eighty-seven first-class horses slated for sale to the U.S. Army at $300 apiece, for a total exceeding $446,000 all told.

  But the loss Alejandro grieved the most, together with his two surviving offspring, was the murder of his son—the twins’ brother—Eduardo, shot down in the farmyard by some unidentified gunman. His twenty-fourth birthday was two weeks off, but Eduardo would never see it now, would never marry, would never give his father grandsons to perpetuate the name Aguirre in New Mexico.

  For that alone, vengeance was mandatory, but his shoulder wound meant Alejandro would not be a part of seeking it.

  Repayment of a blood debt could not wait that long.

  Off to the northwest, well beyond the larger of the rancho’s two red barns, Aguirre saw a team of his vaqueros digging graves for those who’d fallen in the raid. Not the bandidos, who had been hauled off in wagons to the farthest limit of the hacienda’s property and dumped into a gully as coyote food. For all Aguirre cared, their bones could bleach there. Sometime soon, before they finally were gnawed away, he might ride out at sunset to their final resting place and curse them all to everlasting hell.

  But for the moment, he was more concerned with tracking down the man behind the sneak attack, likely well into Mexico by now. That villain, nameless at the moment, must be hunted down and slain, even if searchers could not locate all the rustlers who had joined him on the raid.

  That was a debt Aguirre owed his murdered son.

  A debt he owed himself and generations of his bloodline never to be born.

  And if he could not pay that debt himself, he must see to it that a man he trusted saw it through.

  Clint Parnell was approaching, likely bearing more bad news. Aguirre raised his one good arm to flag the foreman down.

  * * *

  * * *

  Necessity meant rushing through the funerals with no priest in attendance, little in the way of normal mourning rituals except for women weeping at graveside. Two had lost husbands in the firefight, one had lost a lover, and the fourth, a son. There were no words of scripture that could comfort them, and Alejandro—speaking for the remnants of his family—made no great effort to achieve that goal.

  The urgent need was to observe law and propriety unless those mainstays of society were proved inadequate.

  First, because the stolen horses had been spoken for by Uncle Sam, although not yet paid for, the army’s nearest representative must be informed of the attack and loss. Likewise, since all relationships with foreign nations were the purview of the U.S. State Department, only Washington could lodge a formal protest or attempt to bring the horses back from Mexico.

  Under the law, that was. But if pursuit of justice through established channels failed . . .

  Aguirre, flanked by his twin daughters, watched the gravediggers begin to cover his son’s casket, but a portion of his fractured thoughts was miles away. The nearest army outpost, Fort Bayard, was barely staffed by fighting men—only enough to guard the fort’s perimeters against outside attack—and would be useless in pursuit of the bandidos who had made off with his stock. Aguirre knew the man in charge, Lieutenant Colonel Isaac Stern, and recognized him as a weak man who preferred avoiding contact with armed adversaries.

  If the State Department, in its wisdom
, should decide upon retrieval of the stolen herd, a hunting party would be ordered up from some other outpost, possibly Fort Whipple, former capital of Arizona Territory until 1881. A three-week journey from Las Cruces at full gallop—which would guarantee none of Aguirre’s horses were recovered.

  There was an alternative, of course, and Alejandro had discussed it with his foreman, but preferred to trust his government.

  Up to a point.

  His secondary plan would be a last resort, with long odds against ultimate success.

  But one way or another, Alejandro swore that he would be avenged.

  Women were trailing past the graves now, strewing wildflowers and mumbling prayers. Turning away from them, Aguirre and his daughters moved back toward their home, its façade pockmarked by bullet holes inflicted overnight. Both girls, still shy of their twenty-first birthday, insisted that they should join Clint Parnell on his ride to Fort Bayard, starting soon.

  Without members of the Aguirre family on hand to plead their case, why should Lieutenant Colonel Stern treat them seriously? Why even consider what their father had in mind?

  Relenting finally, aware that one or both might ride away without his blessing, Alejandro urged them both to caution, needlessly reminding them that only they remained of their familia. That brought the sisters close to tears, but they were resolute and would not be dissuaded.

  Finally, with Papa Alejandro tucked up in his bed to rest and under guard, the twins rushed off to change their clothes for traveling and arm themselves.

  Few men who glimpsed their carbon-copy faces in that moment would have dared to intervene.

  * * *

  * * *

  The preparations for departure took an hour following the funerals, despite the fact that only three survivors of the raid were traveling. Dolores and Sonya Aguirre made up two thirds of the team, while Clint Parnell was riding as their chaperone, his post as foreman on the ranch filled temporarily by top vaquero José Esperón.