The Warlords Read online

  Maddox rolled himself a cigarette. “The only saving grace was them folks in Santa Maria.” He popped a match on his thumbnail and lit up. “Least they killed three of the bastards—which is more’n we did.”

  “Lots more,” Gordon agreed. “I’ve been thinking about Pizana.”

  “What about him?”

  “How he murdered Scrivner and his sons with a firing squad. What kind of a man kills young boys?”

  “You’ll recollect Vasquez hung Earl Stovall and his boy. Given a choice, I’d sooner be shot.”

  “You know what I mean,” Gordon said. “I’m talking about the cold-blooded nature it takes to do something like that.”

  “Well, pardner—” Maddox exhaled a wad of smoke—“revenge is a way of life on the Rio Grande. Vasquez had a score to settle with Stovall, and the same goes for Pizana and Scrivner.” He flicked an ash off his cigarette. “All this horseshit about liberation just gives ’em an excuse.”

  “I’d like to treat them to some of their own justice.”

  “So far, we’re a day late and a dollar short in that department.”

  The hotel desk clerk entered the dining room. He spotted them and hurried over to their table. “Mr. Gordon. Sergeant Maddox,” he said importantly. “Somebody just called from General Parker’s office. He’d like to see you as soon as possible.”

  “Thank you kindly,” Maddox said. “We’ll trot on over there muy pronto.”

  “You don’t mind my asking—” the clerk hesitated, then pushed on. “All this stuff I’ve heard about the Army of Liberation and how they run around killing people. You think they’re serious about driving white folks out of Texas?”

  “That’ll be the day!” Maddox snorted a puff of smoke like an angry dragon. “Montezuma and a goddamn army of peons couldn’t take Texas. Don’t worry yourself about it.”

  “Nosir, I won’t,” the clerk said, backing away. “Figured it was just a bunch of hogwash. Glad to hear you say so.”

  Gordon waited until the clerk was out of earshot. “You think it’s hogwash?” he asked, watching Maddox. “Considering it’s the Germans and not Montezuma?”

  “Who the Christ knows?” Maddox said with a grim laugh. “I’m just a Texas Ranger.”

  The morning was overcast, a smell of rain in the air. The parrots on the walk to Fort Brown seemed huddled into themselves, perched almost motionless in the trees. Sergeant Major Daniel O’Meara was waiting in the orderly room, and looked as though he was grinding his teeth to contain his anger over last night’s raids. He ushered them into the post commander’s office.

  General Parker was standing at a window, hands clasped behind his back. He turned as they entered the office. “Good morning, gentlemen,” he said, his manner solemn. “Pardon the meeting on such short notice. I know you’ve been up all night.”

  “Quite all right, General,” Gordon said. “We just got back to town an hour or so ago.”

  “Please, have a seat.”

  They took chairs before the desk and Parker remained standing. “I understand you were at Santa Maria,” he said. “Is it as bad as I’ve been told?”

  “Yessir, mighty bad,” Maddox acknowledged. “ ’Course, you have to hand it to the folks there. Way they fought back took some sand.”

  “Indeed.” Parker paced to the tall chair behind his desk, and stopped. “I’ve exchanged wires this morning with General Funston, at departmental headquarters in San Antonio. He’s posed a question I haven’t yet answered. I’d like your opinion.”

  Gordon and Maddox waited, holding his gaze. Parker squared his shoulders. “Do you believe this so-called Army of Liberation will raise sufficient forces to threaten Texas? Not just raids, but a concerted military attack?”

  “We honestly don’t know,” Gordon said. “Our best intelligence indicates Garza is trying to raise a substantial force in Monterrey. But we haven’t yet determined if he was successful.”

  Maddox cleared his throat. “General, we’d be a damn-sight better off assuming the worst. Like they say, better safe than sorry.”

  “I’d have to agree,” Gordon added. “Garza meets daily, sometimes twice a day, with Otto Mueller. The Germans won’t be satisfied with these guerrilla raids.” He paused, his eyes narrowed. “In my opinion, they’re planning a full-scale military action.”

  “I regret to say I concur.” Parker nodded, as if weighing some inner decision. “I will so advise General Funston, and request an additional five hundred troops. We must be prepared for any eventuality.”

  “Way it looks to me,” Maddox said, “Garza and the Germans are still pulling things together. We’re gonna see more of these raids before anything big happens.”

  Parker’s features darkened. “I’ve written a directive to my field commanders. In the future, there will be no excuse for not interdicting the rebels.” His jaws clenched, his mouth a tight line. “They must be stopped at the border.”

  “I’d vote for that,” Maddox said with a tired smile. “Hate to admit the Rangers have only caught ’em once, and that was mostly luck. They’re slippery devils.”

  “One more thing,” Parker told them. “I’ve ordered fiveman details to ride guard on the trains day and night. Perhaps we can put a halt to railroad bridges being destroyed.”

  The statement was met with uneasy silence. Neither Maddox nor Gordon believed army troopers riding trains would have any effect on bridges being blown. Their hunch, which would later prove to be correct, was that the railroads, through long-standing political connections, had brought pressure to bear on the army. Parker seemed unaware of the skepticism implicit in their silence.

  “Mr. Gordon.”

  “General?”

  “We are in desperate need of better intelligence. Would it be possible for your operatives in Matamoras to step up their efforts?”

  “I’ll certainly speak with them, General. Maybe we can come up with a new gambit.”

  Gordon thought generals casually sent men into harm’s way. The perspective from behind a desk in Brownsville was different than that in Matamoras. Particularly for Martinez and Vargas.

  Any added risk might very well endanger their lives.

  The land shimmered under the radiance of a luminous half moon. From his front porch, Alfred Austin could look out over his cornfields, the tall stalks buttery in the golden light. He thought himself the luckiest of men.

  In the house, he could hear his wife puttering around in the kitchen. Mary was still attractive, even after twenty-six years of marriage, and he felt blessed by their union. She was a marvelous cook, a woman of deep religious beliefs, and she’d given him a fine son. No man could ask for more.

  Austin considered himself fortunate in many ways. His farm, a thousand acres of rich topsoil, was located outside Sebastian, some thirty miles northwest of Brownsville. He was a deacon in the First Methodist Church, a major shareholder in the local bank, and owned a mercantile store, which was managed by his son. People looked upon him as a leader in the community.

  The door opened, and his son, Charles, stepped out onto the porch. Every evening, after supper, they generally retired to rockers on the porch and discussed events of the day. Austin’s one disappointment in life was that Charles hadn’t yet married and given him grandchildren. He’d married at nineteen, and felt that Charles, pushing twenty-five, was long overdue. He had hopes the boy would quit sowing wild oats, and settle down.

  “I’m plumb stuffed,” Charles said, dropping into a cane-bottomed rocker. “Ma’s peach cobbler takes the blue ribbon.”

  Austin idly wondered if his wife’s cooking was why the boy hadn’t left the nest. He tamped the dottle in his pipe and fired up with a kitchen match. “What’s the talk in town?” he said between puffs. “Heard anything more about them renegades?”

  “Nothin’ new,” Charles allowed. “Looks like they got away clean, even the ones at Santa Maria. The army’s about as much use as teats on a boar hog.”

  “Terrible thing,” Austin s
aid, snuffing the match. “Just last night all them people was alive and well, and now they’re dead. God works in mysterious ways.”

  “Dad, I don’t know that it’s got a lot to do with God. Not unless He’s set a bunch of stinkin’ Mexicans on the warpath.”

  “Well, the rascals better steer clear of our neck of the woods. They come nosin’ around here and we’ll give ’em a hot old time.”

  Austin was the leader of the Sebastian Law and Order League. He’d formed the group several years ago, to combat Mexican bandits who crossed the border to rustle livestock. The membership was comprised of farmers and ranchers, and they prided themselves on having summarily hanged every bandit they’d ever caught. Following the July 4 raids, and subsequent killings, Austin had urged the members to renewed vigilance. At every opportunity, he’d expressed his contempt for the Army of Liberation. He called them the “Child Killers.”

  Charles shared his father’s views. But his principal interests were in running the store and chasing girls without promise of wedlock. He was perfectly content to live at home and add to his considerable girth on his mother’s cooking. All this talk of Mexicans driving Texans from the land seemed to him preposterous, and he dreaded yet another lecture from his father on bandits posing as liberal idealists. He moved to change the subject.

  “Drummer called on me today,” he said. “His company’s come out with the latest thing for women. They call ’em brassieres.”

  “Brassieres?” Austin echoed blankly. “What’re they for?”

  “Well, the idea come over from Europe. The name sounds sort of French, don’t it? They’re a little halter contraption that lifts up a woman’s bosom.”

  “How’s that again?”

  “Don’t you see, it’s an improvement on a corset. Woman straps on this brassiere and it holds her bosoms nice and pert.”

  “No, by gum,” Austin said indignantly. “We’re not stockin’ a thing like that in my store. Sounds downright sacrilegious.”

  “C’mon, Dad,” Charles said. “We’re livin’ in the modern age. Time’s change.”

  “Not while I’m—”

  Austin stopped, sitting forward in his rocker, and peered out at the cornfield. A man stepped through the thicket of willowy stalks, followed by another and another, then thirty or more leading horses. As the men advanced across the moonlit yard, he saw that they were Mexican. He jumped to his feet.

  “Don’t do nothing foolish,” the one in the lead yelled. “You try to run and I’ll shoot you.”

  “Who are you?” Austin said in a stern voice. “What d’you riffraff want around here?”

  “I am Captain Luis Vasquez, field commander of the Army of Liberation. We are here to deliver you from your evil ways.”

  “You’ll play hell deliverin’ me from anything. Get off my land!”

  “No, I think not, señor.”

  Austin knew he was doomed. He considered trying a run for the house, and a gun, but realized he would never make it. Then his wife stepped through the door and moved onto the porch, stopping beside him. Her eyes squinched with concern.

  “Alfred, who are these men?”

  “You get on back in the house, Mary. I’ll handle this.”

  “Your husband is right, señora,” Vasquez said with a cruel chuckle. “What we do tonight is not for women.”

  Five minutes later the house went up in a blazing inferno. Mary Austin was left standing in the yard as her husband and son were marched out onto the road. Sebastian was only a mile north of the farm, and Vasquez fully intended to occupy the town. Last night, when he’d attacked Santa Maria, he hadn’t been prepared for armed resistance by the townspeople. The oversight had cost him three men.

  Tonight, he led a force of fifty raiders. Upon reaching Sebastian he split them, half on either side of the main street. His attack was orchestrated, carried out with quick precision, every man assigned a task. The windows of Austin’s store were smashed and the building torched, billowing smoke and flame. Townspeople who ventured into the business district were driven back by volleys of gunfire from the raiders’ rifles. Austin and his son, their arms bound, were positioned beneath a telephone pole.

  Vasquez had been ordered to make a public example of Alfred Austin. The Sebastian Law and Order League was the largest citizens’ organization in southern Texas, widely noted for its harsh treatment of Mexicans. A message was to be sent tonight, discouraging anyone who might have similar ideas. As nooses were slipped around the necks of Austin and his son, Vasquez halted in front of them. The ropes were tossed over the bars of the telephone pole, three men on each rope.

  “Alfred Austin,” Vasquez said in a loud voice, “the Army of Liberation has convicted you of crimes against the Mexican people. The sentence is death.”

  Austin glowered at him. “You’re nothin’ but a bunch of heathen murderers. I damn you and God will damn you.”

  “You can’t do this!” Charles screamed frantically. “I haven’t done anything wrong. I don’t deserve to die!”

  “You are your father’s son,” Vasquez said. “And you belong to his Law and Order League. You have convicted yourself.”

  “Please, God, don’t let ’em do it! Please!”

  “Charles, shut up,” Austin told him. “Beggin’ a greaser won’t change anything. Get hold of yourself.”

  “Atención!” Vasquez ordered. “Ahora, pronto!”

  The men on the ropes heaved at his command. The Austins, father and son, were hauled off the ground and pulled halfway up the telephone pole. Their legs flapped, desperately trying to gain a foothold in midair, their features dark and contorted as they strangled to death. When the men tied off the ropes at the base of the post, the bodies hung limp, necks crooked at a grotesque angle. The stench of voided bowels carried on a vagrant breeze.

  Sporadic gunfire filled the night as townspeople began trading shots with the raiders. Vasquez swung into the saddle as his men raked the street with a withering volley, then another and another. He led them south from Sebastian, flames from the blazing store lighting the sky. His strident shout rose above the thud of hoofbeats.

  “Viva liberación! Viva independencia!”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Ranger headquarters was in an annex at the rear of the courthouse. The room was small, with a desk and filing cabinets, and a rack of long-guns on the floor. A wall clock ticked on toward seven-thirty-eight.

  The call had come in from Sebastian a few minutes after seven o’clock. According to the town marshal, Alfred and Charles Austin had been hanged, their store and farmhouse burned down. The Mexican raiders were last seen riding south out of town.

  Gordon and Maddox had been summoned from the hotel. They were gathered around the desk with Ranger Captains John Sanders and Clell Morris. Bob Ransom stood behind the desk, a map of the lower Rio Grande Valley spread before them. He looked from man to man.

  “Here’s what we know so far,” he said. “A man named Austin and his son were hung on a telephone pole right in the middle of Sebastian. Their store was burnt out, along with their house outside town.”

  “Anybody else killed?” Morris asked.

  “Nope, just the Austins.”

  “Hold on, Cap’n,” Maddox interrupted. “Are you sayin’ they were only after the Austins? Nobody else?”

  “That’s the way it looks,” Ransom said. “Alfred Austin, the father, was head of a vigilante group around Sebastian. I suspect it was revenge for the way he’d treated Mexicans.”

  “And the Mexicans just got clean away?”

  “Well, that’s where it gets interesting. The town marshal says there was fifty, maybe more, in the raiding party. They kept folks pretty much pinned down till they rode out.”

  “Fifty,” Gordon mused aloud. “From what we know, they have a hundred men or less at this point. Why would they commit half their force to one action?”

  The Ranger captains were not yet aware of the German conspiracy. Gordon and Maddox, in concert with Gene
ral Parker, had decided that Monterrey, and a possible invasion force, was still supposition. Until the facts were borne out, there was no need to spread alarm.

  “Got no idea as to the ‘why,’ ” Ransom said. “What’s important, we’ve got a chance at fifty of the sonsabitches. Might just be our lucky night.”

  Gordon nodded. “Where are we now?”

  “Army’s already been notified, and they’re gonna redouble their patrols between here and Reynosa. I wired Jack Fox in Laredo, and he’s on the move with Ranger Company B. They’ll coordinate with the army up that way.”

  Ransom paused. His many years on the border gave him the tactical expertise to run a field operation. But everyone in the room knew Gordon spoke for the president of the United States and had the authority to override any decision. They waited for his reaction.

  “Sounds good to me,” he said. “What’s next?”

  “Cover our bases.” Ransom indicated the map. “Send Company C to San Pedro and Company D to La Paloma. That’ll put ’em in position if the army flushes anybody.”

  Gordon gave him a quizzical look. “What do you have in mind for Company A?”

  “You remember where we waylaid them that first time? The night of July fourth?”

  “The river crossing west of Los Indios?”

  “One and the same,” Ransom said, thumping the map with a thorny forefinger. “They’ll think we think they won’t use the same ford again. But that crossing’s on a beeline south of Sebastian. I figure we’ll catch ’em there.”

  Gordon studied the map. Sebastian was some twenty miles due north of the river crossing. He calculated time and distance, confident the rebels would not run their horses at a gallop for twenty miles. All things considered, he estimated the raiding party would reach the ford somewhere around nine o’clock, maybe slightly later. He finally glanced up at Ransom.

  “We need to coordinate this with the army.”

  “Already got it covered.” Ransom said. “Talked with General Parker’s adjutant and told him you’d call him after our powwow. He’ll get the word to their field units.”