The Good the Bad and the Ugly

TUCO put his hat on the ground at the crest of the ridge overlooking the river. He carefully parted the bushes. The Man With No Name sat beside a fire in a small clearing on the riverbank. A smoke-blackened coffee pot squatted on the embers and the hunter idly examined an empty tin cup while he waited patiently for the coffee to boil. His saddled horse stood at the edge of the clearing, cropping grass.

Tuco wriggled back below the ridge line, put on his hat and scrambled down to where four men waited beside tethered horses. They were a gun-tough quartet, brawlers with hard, brutish faces.

“The set-up is perfect.” Tuco breathed hard. “He’s hunched over his fire, waiting for his coffee. He’s so sure no enemies are near that he does not even bother to look behind him. Red, you and Scar creep up from that way. Juan and Pedro will close in from the other side. When I call to him he will jump up with his back to you. Hit him then—make sure you come out shooting. Don’t give him a chance to get out his gun. He’s a dead shot.”

The man called Scar grinned wolfishly.

“Don’t worry, Tuco. The dead shot’ll be just dead—and we’ll split the four thousand dollars bounty on his head.”

“Three thousand,” Tuco corrected. “I take one thousand and you split the rest. Ah, to kill a hated enemy is sweet—but to kill him and make a profit is sweeter still.”

The hunter lifted the boiling coffee pot off the coals on the river bank. Still holding the shiny tin cup, he reached into the open saddlebag beside him and took out another cup, this one old and battered from long use. He poured coffee into this one and set it aside to cool.

Not once had he bothered to glance at the thick underbrush behind him. There was no necessity to swivel his head mound. The shiny bottom of the first cup was a micror. By moving it slightly he could maintain a constant watch on the underbrush at his back.

The mirrored surface showed a stir of movement, then a fleeting glimpse of two heads briefly raised. He turned the cup slightly and caught a similar glimpse on the opposite side.

The voice of Tuco came from in front of him, somewhere beyond the screen of shrubbery.

“Hey, Whitey, are you so selfish you don’t invite your old friend and partner to share a cup of coffee?” The hunter was on his feet and spinning around as the four broke through the brush. His palm slapped the hammer of his gun.

The four shots blended.

Deep in the woods, safely sheltered behind the thick trunk of a tree, Tuco also heard the four rapid shots. They were followed by silence. He blanched, whirled and ran frantically to where he had left his horse.

The Man With No Name paused in the act of reloading his gun. He cocked his head, listening to the pound of swiftly receding hoofbeats.

A faint smile stirred his lips.

“Goodbye, old friend and partner,” he murmured.

He glanced at the four sprawled belies, shrugged and squatted down to sample his cooling coffee.

Sentenza had spent most of the morning working his way up the mountain to avoid the Union forces holding the canyon and pass below. Close to noon he sat down to rest and catch his breath. He glanced idly around and his eye caught a flash of dark blue among the grey-brown of the rocks. He sprang up and moved cautiously towards the spot.

He found the body of a Union sergeant huddled in a shallow niche under an overhang of rock. The man apparently had been mortally wounded in the fighting that had surged up the flanks of Glorietta Pass and had crawled here to die.

Sentenza squatted and went through the dead man’s pockets. Inside the jacket he came upon an order, assigning Sergeant Allen Crane to adjutant duty at Battleville Prison Camp. Sentenza’s pale sorrel eyes glowed with satisfaction.

Luckily the sergeant had been no small man. His uniform jacket was full enough to conceal the long-barrelled pistol at Sentenza’s left hip. Sentenza buttoned the jacket and strapped on the dead man’s army Colt over it.

“Excellent,” he murmured, looking down at himself. “Now, if you can only remember how to salute properly, Sergeant Crane, you may wind up yet with two hundred thousand in gold.”

The scene had been duplicated too many times. The swarthy prisoner slumped in his saddle beneath the gallows beam, the hangman’s noose around his neck. The sheriff stood at the horse’s flank, holding his whip. The judge finished reading the list of charges.

“Therefore, with the powers vested in us by the law, the aforesaid Thomas Larson, commonly known as Shorty, has been duly condemned to hang by the neck until dead. May the Lord have mercy on his soul.”

Some two hundred yards down the street, in a narrow alleyway, the hunter steadied his rifle across his left aim and took careful aim at the gallows rope. The sheriff raised his whip. The hunter’s finger tightened on the trigger.

The barrel of a gun rammed hard into his back and the voice of Tuco biased, “Eh-eh-eh—not this time, Whitey.”