Webster—Man's Man

by Peter B. Kyne

“Captain Benavides,” he said suavely, “your cause is lost. If you care to escape aboard the steamer, I will see to it that you are not removed from her before she sails; if you care to surrender to me now, I give you my word of honour you will not be executed.”

Benavides might have had, and doubtless did have, his faults, but cowardice was not one of them. And he did have the ghost of a sense of humour. An evil smile flitted over his olive features.

“Without taking into consideration the bayonets at my back,” he replied, “it strikes me the odds are even now. And yet you patronize me.”

Webster was nettled. “I'd rather do that than kill you, Benavides,” he retorted. “Don't be a fool. Run along and sell your papers, and take your pitiful little sandal-footed brigands with you. Scat!”

Benavides's hand, holding his pistol, had been hanging loosely at his side. With his furious glance meeting Webster's unfalteringly, with the merest movement of his wrist and scarcely without movement of his forearm, he threw up his weapon and fired. Scarcely a fifth of a second had elapsed between the movement of his wrist and the pressure of his finger on the trigger; Webster, gazing steadily into the sombre eyes, had noted no hint of the man's intention, and was actually caught off his guard.

The bullet tore through his biceps, momentarily paralyzing him, and his automatic dropped clattering to the sidewalk; as he stooped and recovered it, Benavides fired again, creasing the top of his left shoulder. The Sobrantean took aim for a third and finishing shot, but when he pulled the trigger the hammer fell on a defective cartridge, which gave to John Stuart Webster all the advantage he craved. He planted a bullet in Benavides's abdomen with his first shot, blew out the duelist's brains with his second, and whirled to meet the charge of the little sandal-footed soldados, who, seeing their leader fallen, had without an instant's hesitation and apparently by mutual consent decided to avenge him.

Webster backed dazedly toward the wall, firing as he did so, but he was too dizzy to shoot effectively, and the semicircle of bayonets closed in on his front. He had wounded three men without stopping them; a second more, and their long, eighteen-inch bayonets would have been in his vitals, when into the midst of the mêlée, from the rear, dashed Don Juan Cafetéro, shrieking like a fiend and swinging his rifle, which he held grasped by the barrel.

Webster saw a bayonet lunging toward him. He lifted his leg and caught the point on his boot-heel while with his last cartridge he killed the man behind the bayonet, just as the latter's next-rank man thrust straight and true in under the American's left arm, while a third man jabbed at his stomach and got the bayonet home in his hip. These two thrusts, delivered almost simultaneously, by their impact carried their victim backward against the wall, against which his head collided with a smart thud. He fell forward on his face; before his assailants could draw back for a finishing thrust, in case the gringo needed it, which they doubted, Don Juan Cafetéro had brained them both.

Standing above the man he loved, with the latter's body between his outspread legs, Don Juan Cafetéro stood for the final accounting, his buttermilk eyes gleaming hatred and war-madness, his lips drawn back from his snaggle teeth, his breast rising and falling as they closed in around him. For a few seconds he was visible swinging his rifle like a flail, magnificent, unterrified—and then a bayonet slipped in under his guard. It was the end.

With a final great effort that used up the last strength in his drink-corroded muscles he hurled his rifle into the midst of his four remaining enemies, before he swayed and toppled full length on top of Webster, shielding with his poor body the man who had fanned to flame the dying ember of manhood in the wreck that drink and the devil had cast up on the Caribbean coast.