Mobley's Law, A Mobley Meadows Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

missed, but this time on target. Dust flew from the rider’s shirt as the bullet impacted his chest and knocked him to the ground. Mobley levered a new round into the chamber and slipped another into the magazine to replace the one fired.
    The remaining riders bolted, like chickens scattering from a fox, running for the safety of greater distance. The leader stood in his stirrups yelling, waving wildly for them to come back. Eventually they did. Mobley began to line up on another, but they all started moving erratically. The leader had correctly judged if they kept moving, their chances of being hit were greatly diminished. Mobley elected to hold his fire until a more propitious moment.
    He slumped back behind his rock, knees up, the forestock of the rifle resting flush against his sharply straight nose and forehead. Stay calm. Exhaling slowly, he watched his breath turn to mist as it swept past the hot metal of the barrel, then spiral off into nothingness.
    Was that to be his fate, to simply disappear on the prairie as if he had never existed? An ephemeral wisp of what once was?
    WHACK! Mobley slapped himself on the forehead with the palm of his hand. Concentrate! There had to be a way out. General Grant wouldn’t be thinking of ephemeral wisps of vapor. He’d be preparing to attack. That’s what he’d always done. But Grant had had the advantage of superior numbers. He ground his opposition down until they could fight no more. A grand strategist; but here, now, was a classic tactical situation. Mobley was outnumbered eight to one. The enemy held the high ground, about to attack from two different directions. He had three choices: stay where he was, try to run again, or like Grant, attack .
    Blast that man anyway, Mobley thought. He’d still be in Tennessee if not for Grant, doing real work for real people who appreciated his sense of justice. On the other hand, who could pass up a lifetime appointment? Even if it did come with a few strings? He was just returning a favor, after all, wasn’t he, not compromising his judicial position? But, somehow, he’d thought a man in Grant’s position could have come up with a better way to do what he needed to do.
    Mobley shucked off his buckskin jacket and laid it across the boulder, thinking it might keep the rifle stock from becoming scratched as it recoiled, then wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before.
    Once again he sighted down the barrel, then began to chuckle. A surprise attack? Take out as many as he could as they came, then charge them back. Like Chamberlain’s bayonet charge at Gettysburg when he ran out of ammunition. A desperation move. He’d probably not survive, but at least he’d go out in a blaze of glory.

CHAPTER 2
    Juan Antonio Lopez was starving. He may have been number uno of bandidos, servant of no man, feared by all, but he was on his last legs, barely able to walk. Which was why he was sitting, knees hugged to his chest, eyes staring unfocused at the smoldering buffalo chip.
    Everything about Juan was dirty, skinny and ragged. His own self-image, that imaginary thing that kept old men looking at girls and old ladies admiring the tight pants of the vaquero, as if they could do anything about it, no longer matched his true state, and he knew it. His cheeks were sunken. He could feel them. His eyes were so hollow they hurt, even when shading them with his hand. And his blood, that precious thing that must be conserved at all costs, now leaked from his gums almost continuously. Worst of all, in his mind, the beautiful curly dark hair that so many women had adored and could not resist fingering, was now pulled back in a tail under a sombrero crawling with prairie lice.
    Staring between his closely held knees, Juan licked his lips and wiped his ragged mustache against the thinning wool fabric of his pantalones , the flared leather and wool trousers of a proud vaquero, silver conchos running down the stripe of each side.
    The rodent sizzled,