They rode off, left her choking and coughing on her own blood. It's said that two months later she managed to kill the baby growing in her womb. She tossed it down the well, to poison the brackish water for any other men who might ride past, before digging up her pa's hidden money and his antiquated pistol, shooting the cur, and riding off on the little burro that the Comancheros had overlooked when they stole the horses and the other livestock.
She rode up to San Remo where she waited, knowing they must sometime pass there, sitting all day long outside the wine shop in her dark skirts and blue shirt and black shawl, alert and mournful, humming near-silent tunes. Sometimes she went to the well and drew up water to splash on her face and soak a rag to cover her head from the sun and keep the black flies off. The sun that summer was so intense it parched everything, killed all the flowers and green shoots, made the bare ground crack. And there were more flies than anybody had ever seen. Wind blew in dust from the desert so that whenever she moved dust trickled from the folds of her clothes and from her hair and sometimes even from her little dusky ears and wide nostrils.
For money to feed herself and the burro she sometimes went with men out behind the wine shop; she stood braced against a hitching post by the jakes and let them lift up her dark skirts and hammer themselves deep and hard into that moon-pale body, just like the man with the red ribbons in his beard had. She turned her face away when they tried to kiss her. Nobody in San Remo knew that she'd had her tongue cut out -- they just thought she was a mute.
And lo and behold, as our Holy Book says, one day towards the start of autumn the five Comancheros did ride into San Remo, their hair and beards white with dust from tarrying in those desert wastes, strings of fresh Indian scalps dangling from their horses' withers. They'd come into town to redeem Yaqui and Apache scalps for the dollar a scalp bounty money so as to get drunk and go a-whoring and raise hell. But they were ignorant of the true hell that awaited them. For the tongueless girl had seen these men coming up from far off and quickly hidden herself behind the wine-shop, where she loaded her pa's pistol with trembling fingers.
After delivering their bloody scalps to the sheriff's office and receiving cash payments in clanking silver coin, the men rode over and tied up their horses by the well. Inside, they sat at a big table in the dimness and ordered jugs of red wine and a bottle of tequila and four skewers of roast squab, along with a platter of squash and beans and tortillas. Drunk, they pounded the black oak table with the flats of their hands and roared out songs they'd learned in Mexico, and soon they began to howl for women, of which there were none to be had -- all San Remo's housewives, daughters, and its two full-time whores had gone straight into hiding as soon as the Comancheros rode in. You would have had to tear up floorboards find them now.
The man with the red ribbons in his beard was the first to step out back to relieve an urge. As he stood wobbling, pissing on a wall, he heard the fresh, distinct click of a pistol cocking. He turned without putting himself back into his dusty trousers. There she was -- the tongueless girl, her dark hair wild, legs spread wide in a shooting stance, both hands on the pistol to steady it. He grinned. "You!" he cried.
Inside, the clanging pistol shot brought the other four men to their feet. At the second heart-freezing report, they all pulled out their guns. And now the man with the red ribbons in his beard walked slowly back into the place, his eyes bulging -- he was gushing dark blood from between the legs. Then he staggered and fell flat on his nose, and it could be seen that the rear of his skull was blown off.
His four brothers rushed out through the jakes door. Outside, nothing -- except the empty, stinking jakes and a golden full moon rising over the jagged mountains and the howls and yips of starving coyotes.
But the first bewildered man to turn back into the wine shop got blasted right back out the door, a bullet through the sweating chest. For the tongueless girl had dashed around to the front to come in that way, and now she stepped out into the desert night gripping a pistol in each hand -- her pa's and the one she'd just taken off the dead man with the red ribbons in his beard -- and blazed away at point blank rage, like a real pistolero.
The three remaining Comancheros returned fire with their own guns in the chaos of flashes and noise, the thick smoke-haze and stink of the black powder, but they were blind-drunk and rattled besides by the suddenness of the wrath descending upon them, and so they missed every shot, their bullets only lodging deep in the adobe wall to be dug out later by San Remo's shouting little boys.
She, by contrast, kept a cool head and put them down quick -- one slug each in the chest to knock them flat, one in the head to finish the story. Then she gave the coup de grace to the other man lying in the dirt, went inside and fired the rest of her rounds into the big, sprawled red-ribboned corpse. And so they all died like dogs.
That night she slept on the moonlit bare ground by the well. And in the fresh, pale light of dawn she rode her burro out of San Remo, taking along the dead men's coins, guns and roped-together horses.
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