Tworivers
Copyright© 2025 by Harry Carton
Chapter 15: Santa Fe
Santa Fe’s crumbling adobe walls shimmered in the midday heat as Dawson’s caravan crested the final ridge. Helmut squinted at the distant plaza – too quiet. No merchants, no donkeys laden with trade goods. Just a single vulture circling the abandoned mission tower. Dawson’s fingers drifted to his Beretta as Sky Eagle rode ahead.
“Smoke,” the warrior murmured, pointing to thin tendrils curling from the governor’s palace. Not cook fires – too centralized. Dawson smelled it before he saw it: charred wood and something acrid beneath. Gunpowder residue.
Helmut dismounted, pressing his palm to the sun-baked earth. Fresh hoofprints overlapped older ones in chaotic spirals. “Spanish horses. Shod.” He rubbed dirt between his fingers. “Blood here. Two days, maybe three days, old.”
Sky Eagle returned at a gallop, his pony’s flanks heaving. “Comancheros dead in the plaza,” he rasped. “Throats cut Crow-style, but...” He held up a brass button stamped with a Habsburg eagle. “Austrians did this.”
Dawson’s gut tightened. His German “merchants” had gone rogue. He gestured the warriors into flanking positions just as a metallic click echoed from the mission tower. Every musket swung upward – but the figure silhouetted against the bell tower was Austrian. The man leaned on a crutch, his left leg ending at the knee. Wind stirred his greasy blond hair as he leveled a rifle with casual menace.
“Guten Morgen, Herr Yellow Hair,” called the stranger in a thick Bavarian accent. His free hand flicked toward the plaza where a dozen similarly ragged Europeans emerged from shadowed archways. Their weapons were mismatched – Spanish muskets, other European smoothbores, one Prussian jaeger rifle – but all barrels glinted with fresh oil. The man with the crutch grinned. “We kept your town warm.”
Helmut stepped forward, fingers spread in the universal gesture for hold fire, but his other hand signed behind his back: Ambush right flank. Dawson spotted movement in the mission’s shattered window – but it was only Karl, Fritz and Bernd. The crutch man’s smile widened. “The governor’s wine cellar makes good surgery. We took turns with the bone saw.” He patted his amputated thigh. “Spanish steel bites, ja?”
Sky Eagle’s pony stamped nervously. The Bavarian’s rifle didn’t waver. “Your Crow friends tried taking our silver. Now they fertilize cornfields.” He jerked his chin toward the northwestern hills where dark shapes wheeled – not vultures. Ravens. Hundreds. Dawson’s nape prickled. The Europeans hadn’t just slaughtered Comancheros. They’d built scaffolds.
The crutch man’s voice dropped to a growl. “We want proper guns.” His men edged closer, their boots scuffing blood-caked cobblestones. “Not Spanish trash. Your Apache-made rifles.”
Helmut’s fingers twitched near his knife. Dawson kept his face blank, but his pulse hammered. The Austrians had been bait. These were the real wolves – battle-hardened, organized, and watching their backtrail for Thomas’s war party. The Bavarian’s crutch creaked as he shifted his aim toward Helmut’s head. “No more trading,” he said. “Now we take.”
Behind Dawson, a Comanche war lance thudded into the adobe wall – right between two crouching Austrians. Then another. And another. The Bavarian whirled just as Night Scout’s voice echoed from the alleyways: “Wrong wolves, Herr.”
Dawson didn’t wait. He body-checked Helmut behind a water trough as the first volley of musket fire shattered the plaza’s silence. Sky Eagle’s warriors melted into side streets, their arrows already finding throats in the governor’s palace windows. The Bavarian howled – not in pain, but laughter – as he swung his rifle toward the new threat.
Comanche war cries erupted from three directions at once. Painted riders surged through Santa Fe’s broken gates, their ponies’ hooves kicking up centuries of dust. A Comandhe warrior had Spanish cavalry sabers strapped to both thighs. He rode straight for the Bavarian’s crutch, slicing it clean through with one downward slash.
The amputee collapsed sideways, still laughing as he fired his pistol point-blank into the Comanche’s ribs. The warrior somersaulted over his pony’s head, dead before he hit the ground – but five more took his place, lances glinting.
Dawson rolled behind a shattered cart, tasting blood where he’d bitten his cheek. Somewhere to his left, Sky Eagle’s war club crunched through a Bavarian’s teeth. The metallic symphony of clashing weapons drowned his shouted orders — this wasn’t battle anymore, just slaughter in three directions.
A musket ball splintered the cart near Dawson’s temple. He spun, Beretta drawn, and found the crutch man dragging himself toward Helmut’s sprawled form using a dead Austrian’s belt. The Bavarian’s stump left a dark smear across the cobblestones. Dawson put two rounds through his shoulder before realizing the man wasn’t armed — just reaching for Helmut’s fallen spectacles with hooked fingers.
“Scheiße,” – shit — Helmut hissed, blinking through blood-matted eyelashes. He clutched the bent wire frames like a holy relic. “My eyes ... I need to see--”
Dawson kicked the spectacles away just as a Comanche war axe embedded itself in the cobbles between them. The amputee howled – not from pain, but fury. Dawson glimpsed the man’s pupils then: milky white, threaded with burst capillaries. A gunpowder burn victim.
Helmut seized the distraction, rolling to snatch up a fallen Spanish dagger. He drove it upward into the Bavarian’s armpit, twisting until the man’s scream cut off with a wet gurgle. Blood pattered onto Dawson’s boots as he scrambled upright, scanning the chaos. He grasped the spectacles in his hand, fitting them on his face.
The Comanches had formed a loose crescent, herding surviving Europeans toward the governor’s well – where Sky Eagle’s warriors waited with raised tomahawks. A Prussian lunged for a dropped pistol, only to collapse with three Comanche arrows bristling from his back. Dawson grabbed Helmut’s arm. “The silver — where’s their stash?”
Helmut didn’t know for sure what a ‘stash’ was, but he wiped blood from his split lip, nodding toward the mission. “Cellar trapdoor. They’ve been melting it down.” His fingers traced a bullet graze along his ribs. “But that Bavarian wasn’t lying about the scaffolds.”
Dawson sprinted past crumpled European corpses – some still twitching – toward the abandoned mission. The wooden trapdoor splintered under his bootheel, revealing rough-hewn steps descending into darkness. Gunpowder and rot wafted upward.
The cellar reeked of death and molten metal. Crucibles sat abandoned near a forge, their surfaces crusted with silver residue. But it was the alcove that made Dawson’s breath catch – thirty Austrian muskets stacked against the wall, their locks freshly oiled. Beside them, ingot molds bore the Habsburg crest.
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