The war wagon a gatling.., p.13
The War Wagon (A Gatling Western #5), page 13
“We’ll come to some ranchos and villages on the other side of those mountains.” McNelly talked without turning his head. He obviously enjoyed driving the War Car, and no longer called it a sardine can, a danker, or an iron locomotive.
“What will happen when they see us?” the colonel asked. “Will they run or ride ahead to tell Cortinas?”
McNelly said, “This mountain country is so far from Coahuila I doubt if they know who’s in power. The Governor taxes them, seizes their animals and sometimes their daughters, but they don’t always know who he is.”
“But the men who own the big ranchos must know. They must take sides, belong to political parties.”
“Sure they know. But we’re still about eighty miles from the capital. They know who the governor is, but they won’t know who or what we are if they see us. Somebody is going to see us, and sooner or later Cortinas is going to know about it. We have to be ready for that. We’ll be attacked long before we get close to Coahuila. Another thing, not all the bandits in this state are Cortinas’ bandits. They got two or three groups of insurgentes, as they call themselves, but they’re just bandits too. I keep thinking what it’ll be like the first time they see the War Car. I guess it’ll be like when the first Indian saw men in armor or horses the first time in their lives. We’ll have to wipe them out, Colonel.”
“Naturally,” the colonel agreed.
Gatling was getting sick of being packed into a box on wheels with two other men. Two other men who talked so goddamned much. The colonel always talked a lot, and now that McNelly didn’t have to play the hardcase lawman all the time, he talked just as much. The colonel told McNelly of his adventures on the North West Frontier of India and in Afghanistan. How the Afghans tortured and murdered his only son, a second lieutenant, during the Second Afghan War. And how he avenged his son’s death by slaughtering two hundred unarmed Afghan prisoners who were coming in to surrender.
“What else could you do, Colonel?” McNelly said.
“Goddamn bloody right!” the colonel said.
For his part, McNelly regaled the colonel with stories of butchering Apaches, Comanches, and outlaws in the good old days. “Must have killed fifty men with my own hand, sir.”
“Good show!” the colonel said. “Capital fellow!”
They climbed out of the mountains to a great upland plain it took days to cross and where it was very cold at night. It looked flat as a floor, but it was crisscrossed by deep arroyos that even the War Car couldn’t cross. Time after time they had to backtrack and find another way around. One day just past noon they saw the solid fortress of a big rancho up ahead, a mighty square of black walls with loop-holed towers at the corners and an iron-studded gate. It stood on a slight elevation like a castle.
A telescope flashed and McNelly said, “We’re spotted all right. Could mean trouble. Some of these rancho bastards think they own the world. You better take over, Colonel.”
The colonel got behind the controls and the War Car started to move at top speed. Gatling and McNelly winched up the side plates and got behind their guns, Gatling the pom-pom, McNelly one of the Maxims. As the dust snaked out behind the War Car the gate of the rancho swung open and a line of horsemen rode out fast in a long line. The War Car was past the rancho by now, but the mounted men were gaining on them fast; there must have been fifty of them, all riding hell for leather.
“Ready?” the colonel said to Gatling, behind the pompom, which was front mounted.
“Ready,” Gatling said, and the colonel started the War Car into a wide turn until it was coming back the way it had come. Gatling depressed the firing handles and the pom-pom began its steady drumbeat sound. Pom-Pom-Pom! Shells began to tear into the horsemen, blowing men and animals to bits. McNelly opened up with the Maxim. The Maxim had a different sound; it rattled and chattered. The War Car tore through the line of horsemen, then started another wide turn. It had to turn wide because of its size. Gatling shoved another shell case into the feed and started firing again. Rifle bullets rained on the car’s armored sides with no effect. Roaring back the second time the huge wheels of the car ran over horses and men. Now there was no longer any order to the attack; the horsemen from the rancho were running in every direction, trying to get away from the nightmare machine out there on the plain.
The colonel was turning again; now he was moving the War Car straight at the rancho gate. “Let’s teach the bastards a lesson!” he roared, a mad old man with one eye. Gatling and McNelly kept firing all the way to the gate. The huge gate crashed shut before the War Car reached it, but when it did, the car knocked it down like matchwood. The gate was massive, thick, seasoned wood studded with iron; the War Car turned it to splinters. The War Car roared into the courtyard of the rancho, pompom shells and machine-gun fire chewing up the front of the ancient building. There was a stone fountain in the center of the courtyard, but the War Car ran straight through it. The colonel kept turning the War Car and Gatling and McNelly kept firing. Now the entire front of the building was shell-pocked and burning. Bodies lay everywhere, blown up, shot, or crushed by the terrible steel wheels ...
“For Christ’s sake! Let’s get out of here!” Gatling yelled at the colonel. “Enough! Enough! They’ve had enough!”
The colonel laughed wildly and drove the War Car out the gate and onto the plain. The rancho was still burning when they were many miles away.
Chapter Eleven
“I WILL GUARANTEE you one thing for sure,” the colonel said. “Which is, they will attack no more travelers. Of course, I don’t know what they were. Bandits, by the look of them, I expect. You didn’t see any women and children at the rancho, did you? My guess is they captured the place and killed everyone there. Took it over as their headquarters. What does it matter? It had to be done.”
They were down from the high plain and crossing a desert. By McNelly’s reckoning they were about forty miles from Coahuila. In the late afternoon the desert glowed with light. All around were great cactuses colored, red, blue, purple, yellow. Yellow dust trailed the War Car. A red sun hung over distant mountains, then began its final slide toward darkness. The sky was already darkening with stars; the mountains looked close enough to hit with a stone.
Two hours later they were in the foothills and it was cool there after the fierce heat of the day. Everybody was tired the way men are after killing so much, fighting so hard. The colonel was still talking about the destruction of the rancho. And Gatling was sick of hearing about it.
“Time to make camp,” he said. “What’s left of them could be coming after us and we don’t want to get bogged down in deep sand. That’s what’ll happen if we go on and it gets too dark to see where we’re going.”
The War Car rumbled across the stony desert with the colonel at the controls. Worn out but still gloating over the destruction of the rancho, the colonel wanted to go on as if he couldn’t wait for the attack on Coahuila and more killing.
“It’s not dark yet,” he argued. “There’s plenty of light. Look how bright the desert is. Look at it, will you? Take a look.”
Gatling was sitting behind the forward-placed pom-pom gun. Through the slot in the armored shield he could see the desert ahead of them as well as the colonel. He knew he could see it better because he had better eyes.
“I see the goddamned thing and the light is getting bad, I’m telling you. If a dust blow hits us you’ll be driving at the bottom of a mine shaft. You may know deserts but not these deserts.”
“You’ve never been in this desert,” the colonel shouted back, red faced and furious. “You bloody world traveler, I’ve been in more deserts than you’ve had hot meals!”
The War Car was starting to speed up, lurching from side to side, the colonel was so angry. McNelly, who had been dozing in his gun seat, fell out of it and hit the metal floor with a crash. “What the hell!” McNelly struggled to his feet and stood there swaying, trying to keep his balance. “What the hell is going on?”
Just then the War Car cleared the last of the hardpan and ran into a patch of deep powder, and the motor stopped and everybody was pitched forward. The colonel took the worst fall, and all of the old man’s rage had been knocked out of him when Gatling helped him to his feet.
“It’s all right,” Gatling said, thinking this might be bad if the wheels were dug in deep and there wasn’t something to attach the winch cable to. The car had winches and cable drums back and front; it could use its own power to pull itself out of holes and deep patches of mud or sand, but there had to be an anchor for the cable, a thick tree, a solid rock that wouldn’t move when the motor put on the strain of pulling something that weighed so many tons. But he let that go for now.
“You all right?” he said to the colonel, who looked a little bewildered. “Just an accident. Want some brandy?”
McNelly stood by saying nothing; maybe he knew what Gatling was thinking.
The colonel was not about to take any blame. “Of course I’m all right. It wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t been arguing with me. You distracted me, you oaf!” He didn’t say anything about the brandy because Gatling was already unscrewing the top of the liquor flask. He glared at Gatling while he drank.
“Want me to climb down and crank her?” McNelly asked, his hand on the door lever.
“Wait a minute,” Gatling told him. “We’ll get ’er out in a minute.”
There were metal shelves with raised edges that served as bunks along both sides of the car. “Stretch out for a bit,” Gatling ordered the colonel, who continued to glare at him with his one good eye. He must have been badly rattled because he did as he was told.
“Don’t baby me, you clumsy clod!” he snapped, grabbing the brandy flask from Gatling’s hand; then he took another swig and lay back. The hand holding the flask had a slight tremor in it. The accident had been his fault and he knew it; the sort of man he was, he’d rather die than admit it.
Darkness had come fast and it was hard to see inside the car, though it had no roof; the stars that had dotted the sky were gone. Gatling hoped to hell they wouldn’t be stuck here in this exposed position.
“You take the controls,” he said to McNelly. “I’ll climb down and work the crank. Sand may not be too deep.”
McNelly just nodded.
Gatling was opening the door on the driver’s side when it was hit by a bullet, then a whole rain of bullets. He pulled the door back into position and shoved the lever down in its slot. Son of a bitch! They were in for it now. That much fire, there had to be more than a few of the bastards out there. McNelly had already opened fire and the colonel was down off his shelf, cursing and swearing in the dark. Gatling took the gun from its case and got ready for them to attack. But they didn’t come. The firing went on for a minute or two, then stopped.
“What do you think?” McNelly said. “You think it’s the bunch from the rancho.”
Gatling said, “Most likely it is. They know what we’ve got, so they’re hanging back.”
McNelly was just a bulky shape in the dark. The colonel was behind the other mounted Maxim and hadn’t said anything so far. Gatling guessed he was stewing over the fix they were in. And it was a hell of a fix. They had the kind of weapons that could throw back just about any attack short of dynamite or a whole mess of men coming at them at the same time, but they were stuck where they were; no way to maneuver. They had all the food and water they needed for a long siege, but what the hell good was that? All the men from the rancho had to do was wait, but that wasn’t going to happen. One or two men would go for reinforcements while the main body kept the car pinned down.
Out of the darkness the colonel’s voice came. “We’ll have to take the offensive.”
That’s great, Gatling thought. It was the right idea, but how were they going to do it?
The colonel said calmly, “We can’t wait here while they send riders to fetch Cortinas. Captain McNelly, you say it’s about forty miles from here to Coahuila?”
“Closer to thirty now,” McNelly answered. “We made about ten miles after I said forty. It could be twenty-five. If that’s so, Coahuila is just over the next mountain. It’s a good, wide pass, nothing to hold them up. I’m not saying they sent a rider to tell Cortinas. Most likely they have. They may not be his boys, but they could make a deal with him. There’d be dynamite or blasting powder in Coahuila. That’s what they’d need to blow us open.”
Gatling said, “Colonel, you and McNelly cover me and I’ll see what I can do. Mine is the only gun that isn’t fixed. We have rifles, but they wouldn’t do much good. If I can down them, maybe we can pull the car out before Cortinas or whoever will get here. All right?”
Before the colonel could answer voices began to taunt them from the distance. None of it was in English. It went on for a while, then they got tired of it and the only sound was the night wind. A few minutes later a single voice started up in Spanish with English words thrown in here and there. It wasn’t Border Tex-Mex—and he knew that lingo pretty well—but he got the drift of most of it. It went on and on.
McNelly said, “Man out there wants to make a deal.”
“I got that,” Gatling said.
The gun seat where the colonel was creaked as he moved. “How long are we going to wait?” he wanted to know. The colonel was against dickering with dark-skinned people.
The Mexican voice kept on whining out there in the dark.
“Till they settle down a bit,” Gatling said. “McNelly, when I get the motor going—”
The colonel’s voice cut in, “Damn it, man, I’m the one to drive this car.”
“Then drive it. If the front wheels are in too deep, keep the goddamned motor going. If the car won’t move and there’s nothing to anchor the cable, that’s it.”
The voice that had been offering them a deal now began to call them dirty, stinking Yankee gringo dogs, mother-rapers …
But that stopped too. It got quiet again.
“All right,” Gatling said, picking up the light gun. “I’m going up and over. They’ll hear the door if I go out that way. Colonel, you move over to the pom-pom. Count to a hundred, then both of you let fly. Count to another hundred, then stop.”
Gatling climbed over the top of the car, then dropped into soft sand. Nothing happened. He hunkered down beside the car and checked if the two belts in the feed box were in place. If they got fouled or twisted, then he might as well be carrying a bucket for all the good the gun would do him. The belts were all right and so was the gun. It would become fully automatic after he fired the first activating shot. Holding the light gun across his arms, he crawled along the side of the car until he got to where one of the front wheels was buried. Shit! It was buried in soft sand right up to the axle. Chances were it would dig in deeper when the colonel tried to move the car. Forward or backward, he didn’t think it made much difference.
He was counting himself, and he was up to eighty when he crawled to the front of the car, reached up, and touched the crank handle. He took off his coat and laid the light gun on it. Then half crouched, half standing, with his hand gripping the crank handle, he waited for them to ...
Cannon and machine gun exploded from the War Car. The steady pom-pom-pom, the rattle of the Maxim ... He jerked the crank up. The motor didn’t catch. It didn’t catch with the second jerk of his arm. It caught with the third. It caught just as the firing stopped as suddenly as it started. Its throb seemed loud to him. He waited for bullets to come at him. Nothing happened. He started to crawl away. Then he heard the throb of the motor turn into a roar. He crawled between the huge front wheels as they began to spin in the powdery sand. The great War Car lurched and the front wheels dug in deeper. Bullets from the dark smacked against the wheel. The wheel stopped spinning and the motor fell back to a quiet throb. As soon as the roar of the motor stopped, so did the shooting. Instead of shooting, they were back to jeering.
It was time to find out where they were. By the noise they were making, it looked like they were pretty much close together. If they were survivors from the slaughter at the rancho—and he guessed they were—they had lost their fear of the car. They feared its guns but they knew that if they waited long enough, they would take the guns and destroy the car. Gatling could see their point.
It was a dark night, but now and then the moon broke through the clouds for a few moments. He raised up the next time there was light enough to see. Off to the right was a line of broken rocks; that’s where the yelling was coming from. It was good cover, and he guessed nobody had been hit by the covering fire. Somebody began to sing, and maybe they had some mescal in there. All to the good if they had.
Now the yelling and jeering was starting to taper off; they were beginning to get tired of it themselves. Now and then there were voices and they seemed close; that might be because of the way the wind was blowing. He had to get all the way around and come in from behind.
Here the sand was ashy gray, white in places, and every time there were no sounds at all he wondered if they had seen something. One rifleman might not hit him at night, but if they all opened up together it would be long odds if at least one bullet didn’t hit him. The wind blew up harder and there was sand in it. The light gun was wrapped in his coat, some protection against the blowing sand. How much? But it was a fine gun, the best of its kind.
He passed them in the dark and then he was behind them, coming back in, slithering like a snake. Five minutes later he could see them, some of them, most of them. They lay or sat behind the line of rocks, very well protected from anything coming at them from the front. They should have been spread out more, but he could see their point. What did they have to fear from the monster machine that couldn’t move for all its great wheels and roaring engine. He started to crawl closer. He couldn’t shoot from cover or lying on his belly. It had to be done standing up, moving in, with the sheer force of the jetting bullets, the chattering, murderous gun. He started to raise up. Now he was up and the gun was ready. He’d know in a minute.
