You can’t let anything distract you. Look at it this way: In any war there is collateral damage. Maybe Ricardo’s’s sister was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“General Ortega, she was only trying to help her brother.”
“Sí, mi amigo, but that’s the way it happens sometimes.”
* * *
The general was right, of course. Mateo could not rewrite the past. What was done was done. The blow to her head—no matter how bad he felt about it—was on his backtrail. He had to move on. He was also right that at this moment their real problem was defeating Díaz’s and the Señorita’s troops, and the survival of Sonora—of all of them—was at stake. A drunken mistake—no matter how tragic—had happened, but that was over now. It could not be altered or recalled.
It was over.
Still he suffered—as did the woman.
Assuming she was even alive.
However, he could conceivably affect the future. Maybe that was the key. Maybe you redeemed past sins by redeeming the future and helping—even saving—those you cared about.
Maybe he could keep the girl’s brother alive. After all, he’d played a dirty trick on him—dragooning the poor boy into the Sonoran rurales. Furthermore, he was starting to like the kid, something he hadn’t counted on, since he was not a man with muchos amigos. Throughout his hard life he’d found compadres to be an unaffordable extravagance. Still almost against his will he was starting to like, even admire, the young man.
Sorry I got you into all this, Ricardo.
Oh well, the past cannot be undone.
It couldn’t, but Mateo could fight for the future. He could fight for Sonora. The girl’s brother would help him, and, in turn, he would watch the boy’s back. Maybe that would help to make up for what he’d done to the young man’s sister—and to Ricardo.
He hoped in his soul it would.
Chapter 27
Bandits were pouring out of the south end of the barranca and charging up the trackbed toward the locomotive. The Gatling had a five-hundred-yard range and was chewing up most of the bandits as soon as they exited the arroyo. Those who made it to the train attempted to press themselves along the sides of the boxcars and position themselves outside the big gun’s line of fire. Only when they spread out from the flatcar were they again in range, and the soldado on the Gatling had a shot at them.
Several of the banditos were squeezing between the boxcars. Scaling the end-ladders, they were crawling over the roofs and sighting in on the two soldados manning the Gatling. One of them shot the soldado manning the big gun. Antonio pushed the gunner off the boxcar and took over. Several bursts from his Gatling sent the bandits scrambling back down the ladders or leaping over the side.
In the meantime two bandits jumped off their horses onto the far end of the flatbed. Close together, they attacked Eléna. With Rachel’s head still in her lap, Eléna eared back the double hammers. She and Rachel were a dozen feet from the banditos, the twin barrels were sawed off at the breech, and their pattern was immense. Eléna blew the two off the car with the first barrel. Seconds later three more took their place. They were twenty feet away, and close enough together that again a single barrel killed all of them.
Breaking open the shotgun, Eléna quickly shook and shucked out the shell casings. Cramming two more into the barrels, she’d eared back the hammers just in time to blow a nearby pistol-waving bandit off his horse, then another, even as additional bandits charged. All the while bodies piled up outside her car and on both sides of the trackbed. When she ran out of shells, she raised her old .44 caliber U.S. Army Colt, a sidearm powerful enough to knock a man off his feet, and it sure as hell did that—knocking bandits off the car as they clambered aboard and off their horses, all of them piling atop the rising sprawl of dead men below.
When the Colt was empty, Antonio tossed her his long-barrel .36 caliber Navy Colt, which she caught two-handed. After emptying the Navy, she had no cartridges for it, but she had time enough to attempt to reload her .44. Flipping open the loading gate, she was ejecting shell casings and shoving rounds into its wheel as fast as she could.
She’d just closed the loading gate when a tall, rawboned bandit in a straw, floppy-brimmed sombrero, a gray collarless shirt, filthy denims, rope sandals—and with a stench that could make a javelina give up a dead buzzard—swung down off his mount and onto Eléna’s car. Kicking the Colt out of her hand, he was standing over her and pointing a cocked pistol directly into her face. Bending over her until they were nose to nose and she could smell his foul breath and wince at his filthy mouthful of broken, missing, and rotten teeth, he said:
“Tell me what hell looks like, puta.”
A pistol rose up under the bandit’s chin and fired so close to Eléna’s head that her ears rung and its side-flash scorched her neck. Covered with the bandit’s blood, Eléna looked down and saw Rachel wide awake, her eyes locked on Eléna’s and the Army Colt smoking in her fist. She had come out of her coma long enough to grab the .44 up off the flatbed and shoot the bandit under the jaw.
And save Eléna’s life.
Then Rachel’s left arm relaxed, and her head settled back onto Eléna’s lap. Her right fist, which had shoved the gun directly under the bandit’s jaw, dropped back onto the flatbed. The pistol remained rigidly locked in her unconscious grip.
Prizing the .44 out of Rachel’s still-clenched fist, Eléna quickly pivoted her head, glancing at both sides of the flatbed, looking for bandits to shoot. To her surprise, there weren’t any.
Then she noticed the silence.
Antonio wasn’t firing the Gatling.
“Everything okay?” she yelled up to him.
He had run up to the next boxcar to get a glimpse of the barranca’s north end and the front of the train. He was back up above the flatbed.
“A couple of bandits took off,” he yelled down to Eléna. “They looked pretty shot up. They were trying to haul away some amigos who looked even worse.”
“Are they coming back?”
“Naw, they’re in bad shape.”
The engineer was jogging up the trackbed toward them.
“Where were you?” Eléna asked.
“Hiding under the locomotive,” he said without shame.
“Muy bueno,” Antonio said. “I’m glad you’re still alive. We need you to take this thing north.”
“To Nogales?”
“No, El Rancho del Cielo,” Eléna said. “We got a very sick woman here who’s going home. You get us there, you’ll have mucho dinero.”
She looked down at Rachel then. To her surprise her eyes were open again. She was staring at Eléna fixedly.
“Gracias,” Rachel whispered. “Muchas gracias, mi amiga.”
PART
