The Guns of Santa Sangre. Eric Red

in a burst of cussing and flailing from Bodie, who punished the horse by punching it square in the jaw with a clenched club fist. The cowboy hurt his hand more than the horse and yowled, shaking his fingers and dancing around hugging his fist. Fix thought this was funny, and buckled over convulsively in laughter, slapping his knee. Bodie tossed his piss-drenched cigar onto the ground and stomped it to pieces, stalking away, while Fix chortled even harder, until he began to cough and spit. Tucker wasn’t laughing.

      The Mexican was gone.

      Tensing, Tucker saluted his hand over his brow to block the sun and scanned the area this side of the draw. No sign of the peasant. About to take a walk to start looking, he caught a sudden movement in the corner of his eye. The peasant rose from some drab green mesquite bushes, tying the rope belt around his britches. The small figure started walking back toward the arroyo, keeping his head down, and Tucker eyeballed the smooth, graceful movements he made. This was the prettiest man he’d ever seen, the gunfighter remarked to himself. That brown skin was soft and unblemished even for those people, the lips were soft and full, and the peasant’s smell was sweet and appealing for a man even after at least a day’s ride without bathing. The body odor of the peasant reminded him more of the Mexican whores he’d been with over the last few months. If Tucker didn’t know better ...

      The Mexican jumped down the row of small boulders to the rubble near the draw and walked to his horse, untethering its hemp bridle and leading it to the creek, where the unkempt mustang ducked its big head and drank.

      Tucker kept his eyes fixed on the peasant, watching the way the man tenderly stroked and kissed the horse with an almost feminine gentility to his movements.

      Yes, if he didn’t know better ...

      Damn.

      “You believe this Mexican’s story?” Fix whispered.

      Tucker didn’t notice that his partners had walked up beside him, grouping close and whispering out of earshot of their new saddle buddy.

      “The Mexican’s a fool, either ignorant or crazy,” replied Bodie.

      “A fool and his money are easily parted,” Tucker stated flatly. Passing a flask of whisky, they took turns taking pulls and watching the peasant in rags sitting on a rock praying desperately to a cross on a string of beads in his hands. “And it’s easy money, boys.”

      “Damn easy.”

      “I’ll drink to that.” Bodie chuckled and swigged the hooch.

      “Go easy on that. It’s got to last us,” Fix scolded.

      “I feel sorry for the sad sunufabitch.” Bodie belched with the smell of corn.

      Not that sorry, Tucker observed, seeing the opportunistic glint in his saddlemate’s blue eyes. Himself, he was having his doubts about the rightness of robbing a sorry wretch like this Mexican. But he and his friends needed the money, and these were tough times. They had fallen hard, he ruminated, things having come to this.

      A wave of self-doubt seemed to pass through all three men, who often thought the same thing at the same time. The gunfighters exchanged glances and shrugged it off. Time to act, not think.

      By now it was late morning, and the riders had stopped to rest their horses in the shady mesquite ravine by the burbling creek long enough. Too easy to get lazy and dawdle, when there was work to be done. Tucker, Bodie and Fix wet down their animals one last time.

      “We don’t even know there is any silver,” Fix said.

      They looked at each other. It was true.

      Tucker shook his head, pondering, his brain masticating over the situation like an itch he couldn’t quite scratch. “That town has come up against something, that’s for damn sure. That wretch is scared spitless, anybody can see that. I say he’s telling us the truth, or least what he thinks is. Likely, it’s just bandits. But bad ones.”

      “I got no problem killing bandits,” said Fix. “But we’re keeping the silver. Our regular rounds should do them vermin right nicely.” To accentuate his point, the thin, spare gunfighter drew out his pearl-handled Colt, flipped open the cylinder with a flick of his wrist, checked his bullets, peered down the barrel, shook the gun closed with a metallic whirr and spun it backward on his finger with a blur of speed back into his holster.

      “Then we keep all the silver.” Bodie grinned. “Dumb peasants won’t know the difference.” He pulled his Winchester repeater out of his saddle holster and put it to his shoulder, eyeballing a distant target down the gunsight. His finger tightened on the trigger but he didn’t fire, saving bullets.

      The bad men drank to that. They swung back into their saddles.

      Tucker stuck both boots in his stirrups and felt the beginning sting of saddle sores.

      Across the arroyo the little Mexican peasant saw them mount up, giving them a nervous little wave as he tugged himself back up onto his own horse.

      “Hy-Yahh!” Tucker yelled as he slapped his reins against his stallion’s flanks. The other three riders charged after him up the ninety-degree arroyo grade, powerful hooves kicking down some chaparral and stones. Fix’s horse slipped and regained traction and then they were all four up and over the incline and galloping off toward the trail. Catching the peasant’s gaze, Tucker nudged his jaw for him to ride ahead and lead the way, and filled with purpose, the Mexican retraced the trail of his hoof prints that he had taken into town.

      They rode across the Durango plain in the heat of the day. A second ridge of mountains appeared beyond the first, brown in the flat light and spackled with green. The washed-out sun had risen a few more degrees, and the day would get hotter yet before they reached their destination. And so the battery escort of hired gun killers flanked the hunched, determined brown man they accompanied. Everyone figured that their newly watered horses were refreshed enough to ride at full tilt for twenty minutes before they slowed again. The outfit was making good progress.

      They all rode together up a small mountain trail of the first butte.

      The humble peasant smiled with simple, pure faith at the three hard men riding along with him.

      “You are good men, señors.”

      “You don’t know nothing about us,” Tucker said quietly.

      “I do.” The Mexican rode eagerly on ahead, out of earshot. “I do ...”

      The three bad men eyed him like coyotes.

      “He don’t know the half,” uttered Fix.

      “Like we aim to steal that silver, not waste it on no bullets,” added Bodie humorlessly.

      “That’s for damn sure,” Tucker said, half-convinced himself.

      “Ignorant wretch is letting the wolf into the chicken coop and don’t know no better.” Fix spat tobacco juice onto a passing lizard and scattered it into the rocks.

      Tucker considered the thin, skeletal gunfighter in the black suit and vest covered with dust. He’d ridden with Fix for three years and as long as he’d known him, the other gunfighter was the most pitiless man he had ever met. A good friend, who said what he meant, without question the fastest and deadliest shot of the bunch, but the man had no mercy towards people. John Fix had a fatalistic view of the human condition and his place in it. His tough-mindedness balanced off Bodie’s impulsivity and Tucker’s measured deliberateness. But Fix was a gunsel only, a man who dealt with things as they appeared in front of him, where he struck swiftly and without remorse. He lacked Tucker’s own grasp of the big picture and habit of planning a few steps ahead, which was why Samuel Evander Tucker, late of Dodge City, was the group’s unspoken but unchallenged leader. The three had rode together through the years simply because it seemed like the natural thing to do from the day they first met, never with any specific plan, and every day they seemed to make the decision anew to stick together. When they fought, when their guns came out, they were no longer three, but one, an invincible machine of flying lead, stinking gunpowder and blazing irons, and they