The Red Sombrero Read Free Page B

into an ambush. It must have finally got to him also, as the racket of battle rose to new, fiercer heights, that this was something more than the work of the clods who lived there. Despite their obvious surprise. Descardo’s dorados would have slaughtered mere farmers long before this; agrarians never could have pinned them down as they were pinned down, cut off and immobilized behind their dead and dying horses. This was slaughter; quite as quarterless and deadly as the Butcher himself was wont to manage.
    The moon, silvering, climbed higher. Reno, bottle forgotten in what was happening to Descardo, slunk back into the deeper shadows of brush-fringed outcrops, there to squat on his heels, beset by queer notions, appalled by the almost incredible swiftness with which the general’s wild horsemen were being reduced to lifeless bundles of rags. Those Federalista rifles were taking revenge for a lot of things down there and Reno suddenly became aware that had Descardo not smashed his bottle he would himself have been caught in that payoff.
    It was a sobering thought and the American shuddered, and became abruptly aware of other, nearer sounds heavily slogging through the clamor of the diminishing tumult below. He twisted his head around, staring like a fool at the black laboring shapes working frantically behind him, men twisting wheels, sweating, panting, cursing as they swung the heavy trails into positions, others anchoring them.
    Perron’s guns!
    Light and shadow blurred in bewildering patterns as powder-and-shot men sprang to their places and cannoneers twirled the wheels of their spindles. The whole mountaintop rocked as flame and smoke belched from the muzzles of the four fieldpieces. The stench was abominable. For frightening moments the gasping American, knocked flat by the airlash, could neither hear nor see anything. Then, with ears ringing and livid rings like halos dancing before his flickering vision, he got a piece of a look at what had happened below him.
    Through dust flung up by targeted adobe, Federalista infantry was scrambling from the hovels in wildest confusion, milling like rounded-up range stock, diving every whichway, clogging alleys, a few of them still firing into writhing clots of grounded dorados, some flinging aside their arms to run faster, a ragged wave of them scuttling for the brush beyond town. One house had collapsed in its entirety; two more had been partially demolished and many had gaping cracks showing in them, made plain by the moonlight. Even as Reno stared, Perron’s guns spoke again; and he remembered the bags lashed behind Descardo’s saddle.
    Flat on his belly he wriggled into the comforting blackness of manzanita and mountain laurel. Even though the strength had been shaken right out of him he continued to move, sometimes crawling, sometimes sliding, but dropping always lower, roughly paralleling the course recently taken by Descardo. There were obstacles. Rocks and pear and cholla with detachable joints compounded the hazards of his travel yet he kept doggedly at it, wheezing from the unaccustomed exertion, cursing between these labored gusts of tortured breath as cruel thorns ripped through his clothing. Twice while he was crawling he put a hand down on joints of the cholla cactus and the pain nearly set him crazy till he had worried these loose with a piece of stick and pulled out what needles he could find in the darkness. Once a ricochet almost tore off his hat but he kept going.
    He kept going until the nearest part of the street was not more than a short run ahead of him. Across the rubble of collapsed buildings he could see the sprawled shapes in its moon-silvered dust. Spitting flashes of muzzle light still occasionally leaped from the deeper black of a door hole as something twitched in the street but the big guns were silent now and no return fire lanced from the ugly mounds of dead horses.
    Having approached as near as he dared for the moment the American squatted