Last Ride of Jed Strange (9781101559635) (6 page)

Chapter 8

“What is it?” Lenore said, her voice still trembling, fearful.

“Don't know, but I spied movement down-canyon a ways.”

Colter flicked the Remington's loading gate closed, then went over and grabbed his rifle and his saddlebags. He set the saddlebags down, leaned his rifle against them, and pulled his ancient, brass-chased spyglass out of a pouch. He glanced at Lenore, who sat on her knees, hunkered low behind him, hands on her thighs.

“You shouldn't have come here.”

The girl said nothing as Colter, staying low, raised the spyglass. The canyon below was a devil's maze of stone escarpments forming several winding corridors. He'd studied the terrain for nearly a minute before he saw a blue-clad soldier atop an army bay ride around a bend in the wall of a corridor straight out from the cave and about seventy yards away. The man was moving fast and staring in Colter's direction, showing his teeth inside a shaggy blond goatee. Colter recognized the man a second before the horse and rider disappeared around another bend in the corridor he was following toward Colter's cave.

“Hobart,” he muttered.

Behind Colter, Lenore said, “He and Lieutenant McKnight were leading a patrol out before I left the fort this morning. They were heading straight south. I came east, following Mr. Tappin's direction, and . . . I thought I'd made it through without being seen.”

Colter continued to stare through the spyglass. “They must have split up. Probably several groups around here now.”

Lenore said in a voice pitched low with self-disgust, “I'm sorry, Colter.”

Colter turned to her. Her eyes were still bright with the shock of seeing four men die before her, but the color in her cheeks had returned. She'd been raised on military forts throughout the West, and, while she might never have seen men killed up close, death could not have been new to her.

Colter returned the spyglass to his saddlebag pouch. “I'm obliged for the grub. Without it, I might not have made it a mile from here.” He placed his hands on her shoulders, something he'd only dreamed about doing before this day. Odd, how easy it was now, the emotion compelling it being his desire to send her away. “Leave here,” he said with passion. “Go now. Before they get here and the bullets start flyin'.”

“But what. . . . ?”

“I'm pullin' out.”

Quickly, despite the ache in his ribs and other sundry bruises, cuts, and abrasions, he began gathering his gear.

“I'll help you,” she said, starting to roll his rumpled blankets.

He grabbed her arm and shoved her brusquely toward her horse, now standing to the right of the cave, rooting for some spindly brown grass growing amongst the rocks. “No, go!”

“All right,” she said, stepping over the dead sergeant as she strode to her horse, a purposeful flush in her cheeks. “I'll go and try to waylay Hobart and the others. “That's the least I can do.”

She grabbed the cream's reins and swung into the silver-trimmed Texas saddle. Colter whipped his head toward her as he tied his blanket roll. “Lenore, go back the way you came. Steer wide of Hobart!”

She swung the cream around and turned once more to Colter. “Good-bye, Colter.” She studied him, her thin brown eyebrows furling slightly above her penetrating gaze, as though she were seeing a different person than the one she'd thought he was. She tapped heels to the cream's flanks, and the hooves clattered on the rocks as the gelding began picking its way down the slope, lifting copper dust behind it.

Colter continued to gather his gear, gritting his teeth and muttering against the dreadful feeling in his gut. Quickly, he retrieved Northwest from the horse's stone alcove and threw his tack onto the horse's back, adjusting buckles and tightening straps while his heart tattooed a dire rhythm against his breastbone and he stared down the rocky slope.

Lenore had reached the bottom and disappeared behind a pinnacle of towering rock.

Colter shoved his Henry into its scabbard and swung gingerly onto Northwest's back. He put the horse down the slope, following Lenore's path for fifty yards and then, finding a natural corridor angling south across the side of the slope, swung onto it.

A pistol cracked, the report echoing. Colter jerked his head to look over his left shoulder.

Hobart sat his bay in a sandy-floored, horseshoe-shaped bowl in the canyon floor about a hundred yards away. Lenore's cream was there, as well—pitching wildly and whinnying as Lenore flopped down the horse's left side. Colter blinked his shocked eyes as though to clear them, but when he held his gaze on the clearing in the canyon, he saw Lenore fall from the cream to land on the ground. The lieutenant held a pistol in his right hand as he sat staring toward the girl.

Colter thought that the lieutenant had triggered a shot at him, Colter, and that the bay had been startled by the shot and thrown the girl. But a look of keen horror and disbelief slid across his face as he realized that that was not what had happened.

Hobart had shot Lenore.

“
You son of a bitch!
” Colter screamed, reaching for his Henry and heeling Northwest across the slope in Hobart's direction.

The lieutenant snapped his head up, facing Colter, and then he turned sharply to stare behind him. As he followed Hobart's gaze, Colter pulled back on Northwest's reins, and the coyote dun's rear hooves skidded across a talus sliding, nearly losing his footing and going down. Behind Hobart, rounding a bend in the canyon, several blue-clad riders were galloping toward the lieutenant. Hobart shouted something that Colter couldn't make out from this distance. Then he saw Hobart jerk his arm and his pistol sharply toward Colter.

As Hobart faced Colter, Colter could make out the shouted cry as the lieutenant waved his pistol at him, “. 
. . killed the major's daughter!”

Raw fury was a pack of blood-hungry wolves charging through every vein in the redhead's body. He slid his Henry from its sheath, held Northwest steady, and planted his sights on Hobart's chest.

Ka-bam!

Rock dust puffed from the slope just left of Hobart. The lieutenant jerked his head down and threw an arm up with a start, then cast his exasperated gaze toward Colter. At least, Colter figured it was an exasperated gaze. From this distance he could see only a pale oval beneath the brim of the killer's tan hat. He hoped the look he cast back toward Hobart was as easily read despite the distance between them, because it was Colter's sincere promise that he would kill the man no matter what it took.

He wanted Hobart to know that Lenore's killer was going to die bloody. Like a rabid wolf, he was going to die howling.

Now the six or seven other soldiers put their mounts into ground-eating gallops, heading toward Colter and disappearing amongst the steep stone walls of the canyon. Hobart, recovering from the shock of Colter's near miss, shouted something else that Colter couldn't hear and gigged his bay after the others.

Colter stood with his rifle butt pressed against his thigh, his eyes hard, his nostrils contracting and expanding as he stared at Lenore sprawled belly-down on the ground where the soldiers had left her. He felt a knife twist in his chest, tears of fury glaze his eyes.

Lenore . . .
dead.
He sat feeling slack and dead in his saddle, his shoulders weighing down on him like a yoke. How could such a sweet, kindly, and beautiful girl be dead? Killed so savagely?

Colter would have faced all the soldiers now if he thought he'd had a chance. But they'd likely get around him, and others would come, and he'd be dead and Hobart would still be alive, spreading his lies.

So he reined Northwest around and continued following the path across the shoulder of the hill and down toward the canyon floor. He'd stay ahead of the soldiers for now, until the time was right. And then he'd turn to face them, and they'd wish like hell they'd never known him.

He spent that night in a long-abandoned stone shack a good ten miles from the cave. The shack, likely belonging to a Mexican farmer or goatherd at one time, was hidden in a deep crease between two hills. Its covered well still held cool, sweet-tasting water. There was an old garden patch long since grown up with weeds.

It was a cold, bitter night despite the fire he'd built inside the roofless hovel and the whiskey he'd thinned with the cool well water and sipped from a tin cup to dull his sundry aches. The memory of Lenore lying in a lifeless pile at the bottom of that canyon was crisp in his mind, firing him with a fury he hadn't known since he'd crippled and branded Bill Rondo.

It was a killing fury. He sat with his blankets draped about his shoulders, sitting near the fire but facing the dark night beyond the shack, sipping his whiskey and trying to replace the image of the beautiful, dead Lenore with pictures of a dead Hobart.

No. Of Hobart howling as he died . . .

He ate the last sandwich Lenore had made for him, and for which she'd given her life to bring to him, finished the whiskey and water, and swiped a fist across his nose, trying to puzzle it out.

Lenore.

Such a senseless, tragic killing. Why?

But Colter knew why. She'd been a headstrong girl, and in her zeal to stop more killing she must have told Hobart that she knew the real story of Belden's death. To keep her from revealing his and McKnight's lie, Hobart had shot her. How easy it had been to blame Colter for her death, to say that she'd been killed by the man she'd ridden into the desert to see.

How easily one lie led to another.

Now, because he'd danced with a pretty girl, the pretty girl was dead and Colter was on the run for his life.

He slept fitfully only a few hours, his dreams tormented this time not from pain, but from images of Hobart's gun blasting into Lenore. Rising early, when dawn was a pale, shallow streak behind the eastern ridges, he ate some beans and jerky washed down with water and whiskey, saddled Northwest, and headed out.

He saw no sign of the cavalry all that morning and into the afternoon. They wouldn't give up on him, he knew. He was wanted now for killing not only the major's intended son-in-law but the major's daughter, as well. He especially hoped that Hobart didn't give up on him. Likely, a contingent had taken Lenore's body back to Camp Grant, but there would still be a goodly portion of Grant's soldiers combing south-central Arizona for him.

Something told him he'd see Hobart again soon. The lieutenant would want to make sure that Colter died, so that no one could contest his and McKnight's claim about the night of Belden's death and that it was Colter who'd killed Lenore.

Willie's whiskey made the ride easier on Colter's ribs. But when he stopped in the midafternoon to take a swig, the bottle slipped from his hands, and it shattered on a rock, giving Northwest a start. The loss of the painkilling whiskey grieved him, but he smiled with relief when, an hour later, he crested a low butte and stared down into a hollow before him in which a collection of log and mud-brick buildings squatted in the Arizona sun. Likely, he'd find a replacement bottle there. A stagecoach was pulled up to the side of a barn, its tongue drooping, and there were ten to fifteen horses in the corral off the barn's other side.

A wide, rutted trail came down out of the east, to Colter's left, and split the yard of the place before continuing on up into a jog of low hills in the west. He was looking at a stage relay station, most likely. Maybe one that served food and whiskey. He'd go in out of the sun for a time, give Northwest some water, parched corn, and rest, as well, before continuing on his way.

Colter sleeved sweat from his brow and booted the horse on down the hill.

Chapter 9

Colter turned onto the trail at the bottom of the hill, scattering a few chickens pecking at the edge of the yard in which several sun-blistered buildings crouched amongst dusty yucca plants and tumbleweeds.

A windmill stood in the middle of the yard, the blades turning lazily with a dry breeze, the sun making a lemon on the surface of the straw-flecked water in the stone tank. A small dust devil lifted between the windmill and the station house and died against the house—a long, low, brush-roofed shack with a sagging front gallery decorated with bleached animal skulls. Wooden shutters were thrown back from the windows, a few of which were covered with animal skins scraped thin enough to resemble waxed paper. The sign above the gallery's roof of ironwood poles announced
DELACORTE STAGE LINE RELAY STATION NUMBER 3
.

Another sign nailed to a front gallery post offered
BEER AND BEANS 10 CENTS
. Yet another warned:
NO APACHES. NOT EVEN TAME ONES!
“Tame” had been underlined twice.

Three saddled horses stood on the far side of the windmill from Colter. As he angled past the windmill and the water tank, he saw a young boy standing with the horses, one hip hiked on the edge of the tank, his sunburned face turned to regard Colter over his right shoulder, squinting one eye.

No, not a boy, Colter saw as Northwest clomped toward the station house, the horse's hooves kicking up little puffs of dust, some of which the breeze tried halfheartedly to lift and spin into devils. The person with the horses was a sunburned girl in a gray wool skirt and plaid, overlarge work shirt, its tails sticking out. She wore a brown felt hat with a bullet crown, and she had a homemade burlap satchel slung over her shoulder, like a purse.

Colter pinched his hat brim to the girl, who—with her tomboy's face and bony body, she looked more like a boy in a dress than a girl—stared at him out of frosty blue eyes set wide below a shelf of straight blond bangs. He led Northwest around to the shaded side of the shack. Here, the horse would be out of sight from the front. He'd water the dun later, once the horse had cooled.

As he grabbed his Henry and swung down from the saddle, he noted the abating of the severe ache in his ribs and guts and even around his eyes and lips, and supposed there was nothing like rotgut whiskey and a ride in the hot, dry sun for healing. He threw the reins over the worn, silver cottonwood pole hitch rack on that side of the shack and set his rifle on his shoulder as he walked back around to the front and mounted the gallery steps.

“Hey, bucko.”

He half turned to see the puzzling youngster dropping the reins of the three horses and stepping away from the water tank, moving toward him. Beneath the hem of her long skirt, he saw that she wore brown, lace-up ankle boots like those a boy would wear, which also gave him the vague impression that he was looking at some strange boy in a skirt.

Colter waited as the kid came on, stopping about ten feet beyond Northwest's switching tail, the coyote dun craning its head around to get a look at the kid, the dun's expression as skeptical as Colter's.

“Do me a favor?” Even the voice belonged to a boy.

“If I can.”

“Inside, you'll find two scoundrels. One fat and old. The other young and skinny.” The girl-boy raised her dimpled chin toward the station house behind Colter. “I'd be obliged if you'd inform them that their employer has directed them to hustle their lazy, worthless carcasses out here to their horses, so we can lift some dust before sundown.” She narrowed her blue eyes, and an angry flush rose in her tanned, lightly freckled cheeks. “Please add that if they continue to imbibe in spirituous liquids and cavort with fallen women, which I strictly forbade at the start of our trek, I will dock their pay if not terminate their employ altogether and continue on to Mexico myself.”

Colter studied the sunburned little urchin, incredulous lines digging into his forehead. He turned, continued up the steps, crossed the gallery, and stepped through the door that was propped half-open with a rock.

Inside, a stocky Mexican sat behind a split cottonwood log bar on the right. He was perched on a stool, softly strumming a mandolin, and humming. A bottle sat on the bar with a grimy glass half-filled with the clear liquid. He had jade green eyes set below heavy black brows, and he let the rheumy orbs drift slowly to Colter as he continued to strum and hum.

His flashy handlebar mustache with waxed ends curling upward toward his nostrils was in sharp contrast to the stained apron he wore over a grimy wool tunic. A fat tabby cat lounged on the bar to his right, eyes closed, head dipping toward its paws, as though lulled by the man's strumming.

The fat old man and the skinny young one that girl had referred to sat off to the right and back a ways, partially hidden in the room's dingy shadows. They sat at a square table, the older one with a young, scantily clad Mexican woman straddling his left knee and whispering into his ear. The old man was giggling and caressing the girl's arms over a sheer, light green wrap that was all she wore except for a faded red corset and black net stockings. The young man was leaning forward in his chair, staring delightfully at the girl on his partner's lap, also giggling like an idiot as he lightly, eagerly stomped his feet.

Colter cleared his throat and hooked his thumb over his shoulder as he said, “You two are wanted outside.”

Both men looked at him, their eyes bright from drink. The older man wore buckskins and a deerskin vest, with two Colt Navy revolvers holstered on his hips. He had longish, dark brown hair liberally streaked with gray, and a long, horsey face with a thick wedge of a nose.

The young man wore ragged, patched denims and a hickory shirt, with a red bandanna knotted around his neck. A funnel-brimmed Stetson was tipped back off his high, bulging forehead. His close-set eyes and small nose and mouth gave him a ratlike look. He wore a Colt Army wedged into a wide brown belt, and a bowie knife jutted from a beaded sheath strapped to his right thigh.

“Ah, hell,” the old man said, scowling at Colter before turning toward his crestfallen partner. “Why doesn't she just dry up and blow away?”

“A curse is what she is,” said the young man, bunching his red face, squinting his little eyes furiously, and pointing toward the door behind Colter. “I done told you, Wade—the girl is a curse some old Yaqui witch done hexed us with!”

“Forget her, Harlan,” said the older man, returning his attention to the girl on his knee.

Colter wandered over to the bar, noting that the rest of the dark room was empty. “Sounded like she meant business to me. In fact . . .” He glanced out the window to his right, beyond which the girl was just now stepping off the edge of the windmill's water tank and into the stirrup of a tall, brown-and-white pinto mare. “I think she's pullin' her picket pin at this very moment.”

“Ah, shit,” said Wade.

“Damn that little cockroach,” Harlan said, pounding the table before him. “Just when we was startin' to have fun!”

Colter gave his back to the two men as the oldster voiced his apologies to the
puta
on his hip and scraped his chair back with a baleful sigh, the whore muttering her regret and Harlan groaning miserably. The barman continued strumming his mandolin as he glanced at Colter, one brow arched.

“I'd like a bottle of whiskey,” the redhead said. “And I'll take a plate o' them beans, too.”

He looked at the big iron kettle bubbling atop the range behind the man. The steam lifting from the pot was rife with the aroma of beans, garlic, and chili peppers. Corn tortillas licked out from beneath the lid of a pan on the warming rack above the pot.

Colter's empty belly chugged.

“No whiskey, senor,” said the barman as he rose from his stool and set the mandolin atop the bar, the cat lifting its head and regarding Colter with eyes as expressionless as two gold marbles. “Tequila. Agave.”

Colter gave a disgruntled snort. He'd just started getting the whiskey down without his belly bucking like a wild stallion. But maybe the tequila wouldn't be all that different. Possibly not as harsh. He'd never tried it before.

“All right.”

The barman had turned lazily away to dish up a plate of steaming beans. He added two tortillas from the pan on the warming rack before setting the plate on the bar, then grabbing a clear, unlabeled bottle off a shelf behind him and setting the bottle on the table beside the plate. He opened his hands in front of his chest as though to catch a ball and said in his heavy Spanish accent, “One dollah, senor.”

Colter fished around in his pants, glad he'd been paid a week ago and hadn't had time to spend the twenty-two dollars he'd made for a month of horse-breaking at Camp Grant, and flipped it onto the cottonwood planks. He hauled his rifle over to a table in the room's rear shadows, near a cold wood stove, then returned to the bar. As he picked up his plate, bottle, and glass, he caught the barman inspecting the S branded on his cheek.

Colter looked at the ostentatiously mustached Mexican, and the man quickly averted his gaze, picking up the mandolin and hiking a hip on his stool. The cat was not so kind—it continued to brashly study Colter with unblinking but sullen, possibly disapproving, interest. The redhead turned away from both the man and the cat, made his way back to the table, and slacked into a chair, facing the door and the two front windows, one on either side of it.

Wade and Harlan had gone out, and they were just now stepping drunkenly into their saddles as the strange girl rode out of the yard the way Colter had come into it, hipping around in her saddle to regard her two slothful employees with bitter disdain. He could hear her yelling something at the men in her croaking, raspy voice, but he couldn't make out what it was. Wade and Harlan merely glowered like two schoolboys caught roughhousing at recess, and reluctantly booted their mounts along behind her.

Colter quickly downed half a shot of tequila, not minding the taste as much as he thought he would though it was a little like drinking coal oil mixed with fruit juice, then took a break to lead Northwest over to the water tank. When he returned to the station house, he hunkered back down over his meal, forcing himself to eat slowly despite the seemingly bottomless pit south of his breastbone and enjoying the soft, melodious strumming of the barman.

The rataplan of oncoming riders lured his gaze to the front of the station house. The thudding of hooves grew louder until a puff of tan dust swept into view beyond the window to the left of the door, and two riders drew their trotting horses up in front of the hitch rack beyond the window to the door's right. The riders were soldiers clad in tan or blue kepis or billed forage caps, dark blue tunics, and light blue trousers, some with the same deerskin inseams that Colter wore in his denims, to keep their pants from wearing out as they rode. Three more trotted up behind them, drew rein, and, speaking amongst themselves as the horses snorted and blew, swung down from their McClellan saddles.

Colter nearly dropped his spoon. Renewing his grip on it, still hunkered over his plate, he stared out the window to the right of the door, squinting, trying to get a better look at the soldiers. But the window was obscured with wafting dust that came through to powder the tables near the front of the room, and the men themselves were so coated in the dust that he couldn't make out much except that they were badly sunburned.

Could he be lucky enough that Hobart was part of this group?

His pulse throbbed like snakebites. As the men batted dust from their tunics and pants with their hats, a low hum rising as they spoke amongst themselves, and boots pounded the cottonwood logs of the gallery, Colter glanced at his rifle. Then he dropped his left hand beneath the table, closed two fingers around the walnut grips of his Remington, and gave the pistol a little tug to loosen it.

He lifted his right hand back onto the table and continued to try to casually fork beans into his mouth as the soldiers dunked their heads in the water barrel outside on the gallery. They stayed out there, talking and washing, occasionally chuckling, until the front door widened suddenly and the first of the soldiers came in, setting his hat back on his now-wet head.

His face was cleared of dust. It was as pink as an Arizona sunrise, and it belonged to Lieutenant A. J. McKnight. Colter dropped his eyes quickly but then remembered that the newcomers likely couldn't see him, at least not well, sitting back in the shadows as he was. So he lifted his gaze to scrutinize the other soldiers clomping in, wet hair dripping onto the shoulders and breasts of their dust-powdered tunics.

The two men behind McKnight were a corporal and a sergeant, respectively. They were followed a few seconds later by another corporal. Then a tall man with a dripping red-blond mustache walked in, clamping his hat under one arm while he ran both hands through his thick, wet red-blond hair and saying, “Hey, Calderon, a round of your best tequila for me and the boys!”

“Ah, Lieutenant Hobart!” said the bartender, setting his guitar atop the bar planks and rising, grinning broadly at the last of the soldiers. “What brings you to this godforsaken country? Apaches, or”—he slid his gaze to the young Mexican whore sitting back in a chair at the table that Wade and Harlan had vacated—“Pilar?”

Colter had looked up suddenly. Excitement and rage, like boiling water, churned in his belly and danced in his knees.

As the whore ran an emery board across her nails with a desultory air, she looked up from beneath her arched black brows to quirk her lips in an alluring smile at the soldiers.

The soldiers all looked at Pilar, grinning. Finally, Hobart turned to the barman, who was splashing tequila into five shot glasses while the cat gained its feet and arched its back disdainfully at the newcomers.

“Unfortunately, neither,” said Hobart, reaching out suddenly and swiping the cat off the bar. “Good Lord, man, don't you know those things carry vermin?”