Longarm and the Wolf Women (18 page)

He fired just as Magnusson wheeled and began shuffling toward the corral, barking curses and bellowing orders at the women.

John's slug blew up dust a good right of Magnusson's right foot.

“Ah, shit!” John rasped, watching the two girls sprint past the snarling, tearing wolf and screaming newcomer, and bolt up the hill, heading toward John.

“Shit, shit, shit!” John castigated himself, throwing his rifle and free arm out for balance as he scampered down the slope toward the horse and the mule.

He could hear the wolf women snarling like female bobcats on the other side of the bluff, closing on him fast.

John ripped the reins from the cedars and pulled himself into the saddle as the horse sidestepped away from the slope. He tugged on the mule's lead rope and ground his spurs into the dun's flanks.

“
Gee-yaaaa!
”

The horse buck-kicked at the mule, who gave an indignant bray, then bounded off its rear hooves, stretching itself into a thundering gallop. The mule shook its head, balking and braying, and John cursed it and gave the lead rope an enraged tug.

Seconds later, the mule was galloping off the dun's right hip, its panniers bouncing and flapping, the implement handles jerking. One of John's shovels slipped out from behind its rawhide tie and fell with a tinny clank, spooking the mule, who sidestepped slightly, jerking its lead rope taut, before resuming its position off the dun's right flank.

When he'd ridden sixty yards through a fold in the buttes, John jerked a look behind him. Both girls stood at the crest of the butte he'd fired from, staring toward him.

John guffawed and threw up an arm. “You won't be stretchin' this ol' hide, you fucking bitches. No sir! This child's hide's gonna stay right where it is!”

John threw his head back, laughing, as another hill shouldered between him and the staring girls, and he turned the dun slightly into a broad cut between high, pink rimrocks, heading southwest.

He'd probably meet up with Longarm somewhere near Magnusson's second cabin, up near Ute Peak, and bring the lawman back to throw a long loop around those murdering bitches and their plug-headed old man.

John sobered as he headed toward a notch in the sandstone wall looming before him. That poor drifter hadn't seen it coming. Just wanted to wet his stick and ended up getting fileted. Wasn't right.

Just wasn't right . . .

At least John had gotten away. He grunted a wry laugh, relief washing over him. It was close, but he'd slipped out of their clutches, and just by the hair on his ass!

John's mood soured when, forty-five minutes later, he realized the notch he'd been headed for wasn't the pass he'd remembered. It was only a small, inverted V that reached a mere third of the way down the sandstone escarpment looming over him, cliff swallows swarming among the nests they'd built against the sheer stone wall.

In his excitement, he'd headed for the wrong landmark. Peering straight west over the blue green hills flanked by high, snow-tipped peeks, he saw the pass he remembered between two
other
rimrocks a good five miles farther on.

He cursed and reined the dun and the mule back the way he'd come. He'd have to backtrack through these rocky scarps and low mesas for a good mile, then turn west up Neversummer Creek. He was somewhat comforted by the fact that if Magnusson and his wolf women had saddled horses and come after him, they'd still be at least
three
miles away.

Still, John wasted no time heading back through a serpentine crease in the brushy ridges. When he crossed a dry creek bed and threaded a break in the hills, with Neversummer Creek twisting through the tapering prairie a hundred miles north, he halted the dun.

Both animals were blowing hard, sweat-lathered, foam bubbling around their bridle straps and harnesses.

John turned the dun to look back in the direction of Magnusson's shack while the mule stood hanging its head, facing north, its broad belly expanding and contracting as it sucked air into its lungs. John peered across the grassy bowl he was in, toward a couple of near, low ridges spiked with cedars and gnarled pines.

At the same time that his eye picked out three silhouettes perched atop one of those low ridges—three silhouettes clustered so closely together that they appeared one body with three heads—smoke puffed as though from a rifle breech.

As the smoke thinned out in the pine branches, John realized that what he was seeing was Magnusson and his two daughters gathered at the ridge crest. Magnusson knelt behind the black-haired girl, who was down on one knee herself, letting her old man rest the barrel of his big Sharps on her right shoulder.

The blonde stood to one side, feet spread, fists on her hips, tangled hair blowing around her head. The wolf sat up a slight rise and back a ways, tail curled around its right hind leg, staring toward John.

The heavy-caliber slug whistled softly.

The buffalo gun's muffled roar reached John's ears a half second before a searing pain tore through his left side with a jarring
thwapp!

“Ohhh, you dirty coyotes!” John roared, wincing and jerking back in the saddle as the dun sidestepped. He slapped a hand to the quarter-sized hole in his buckskin tunic, about four inches up from his left hip. “
Fucking dog-eaters!”

Magnusson crouched over the rifle, probably reloading, as the wolf ripped down the hill toward John. Clutching his side, feeling blood begin to seep between his fingers, fighting nausea, John reined the dun westward and ground his spurs into its ribs.

“Fucking goddamn savage dog-worshippers!” he bellowed, crouched low in the saddle, gritting his teeth against the cold-searing pain that seemed to engulf his entire body.

Another muffled roar sounded at nearly the same time another heavy slug tore up sod about three feet left of the dun's thundering hooves. The mule brayed and jerked at its lead rope. The rope slipped out of John's hand—the same hand clutching his wound—and the mule angled off to the right, the rope bouncing along the brushy turf behind it.

“Good riddance, you yellow bastard! I'm faster without ya, anyways!”

John spat, looked down at his side. Blood welled between the fingers of his left hand. He felt as though a large rat had dug its teeth into his side and wouldn't let go.

He glanced behind, seeing nothing but low, brown rises and occasional brushy cuts. Turning forward, he whipped the lunging dun with his rein ends, angling toward the cut in the rimrocks straight ahead.

There was no doubt they were after him now.

He and the dun had to eat some turf.

 
John stopped the horse in a high mountain meadow, at the edge of a stream trickling over low, rocky falls through pine woods. He looked behind at the pass he'd just descended.

Nothing moved but the green aspen leaves and a splash of red columbine. The breeze creaked the treetops, and a squirrel chittered angrily.

He'd ridden for over an hour, looking back as he'd crested nearly every rise, and hadn't spied anyone on his trail. Relatively certain that Magnusson and his wolf women had given him up for dead, Comanche John climbed heavily down from the dun, who had already lowered its snout to draw water from the stream.

John cursed, ambled heavy-footed to the edge of the stream, and dropped to his knees. Slowly, he peeled his bloody hand away from the wound. The blood had run down beneath his shirt to soak his right buckskin leg nearly as far down as the knee.

He cursed again, fumbled his Bowie knife from its sheath behind his gun holster, peeled his shirt away from the wound, and poked the pointed tip of the knife through the buckskin. He cut a ragged circle around the bullet hole, exposing nearly half of his flat, pale belly, then dropped the knife in the grass and began cupping water to the wound.

He sucked air through his teeth, squeezing his eye closed, as the cold water bit into the wound, turning his knees to putty.

“Fuckin' no-account coyotes,” John rasped, probing the wound with his right index finger, finding the gaping hole.

He reached behind him with his left hand and was glad to find the exit hole. At least the ball wasn't in him, tearing up his innards. He'd been wounded worse, but this one screamed nearly as loud as the Arapaho arrow he'd had to dig out of his shoulder two autumns ago in Kansas.

When he'd thoroughly cleaned the wound, which continued to bleed, though not as fast as before, he gathered a neckerchief full of loam from the streambed and watercress from the woods. He soaked the mixture in the stream, squeezed it together, added whiskey, then pressed the poultice into both the entry and exit wounds. He groaned, squinting his eye shut as the whiskey seared.

When the burn faded, he ripped the sleeves off an old wool shirt, tied them together, then knotted the single length around his belly, covering both wounds.

A half hour after he'd stopped, he took a long drink of water, filled his canteen, glanced behind, and remounted the dun, continuing southwest, heading cross-country toward Magnusson's second cabin and, hopefully, Longarm.

He rode until dark and camped in a valley beside a wide, flat stream looking like pink scales in the twilight. He staked the dun in the thick grass and bluebonnets growing high beneath the aspens, then built a fire, set coffee to boil, and more thoroughly cleaned the wound in the river.

He noticed that his buckskin breeches were bloody all the way down to his right ankle, and he chuckled. So that's why he'd grown so damn weak.

When he'd repacked the wound with fresh mud he'd mixed with whiskey and watercress, and had retied the sleeve around his belly, he sat heavily down by the fire. Leaning against a log, he ate jerky and drank coffee laced with whiskey, then just whiskey.

He slept fitfully, rolled up in his soogan, his head on his saddle. He wished he had his fur robes, but those had been secured to the pack mule with most of his food, his cooking supplies, and his lean-to. With most of his hooch and ammunition, as well, damn that mule . . .

Deep in the night, a chill engulfed him. He had trouble sleeping, he was so cold. His clothes and blankets were drenched with cold sweat. All he could do was keep the fire blazing and hunker down as close to it as he could, his bones and teeth clattering.

He fell into a deep sleep sometime around sunrise. When he finally opened his eye, he wasn't sure what time it was, but the sun quartering over the eastern peaks, silhouetting the tall aspens between it and the camp, radiated the heat of hell itself.

John's clothes were still damp. He felt parboiled inside them.

He flung off the blankets that smelled of smoke and sweat, and rose to his knees. He looked down at his side. The compress over the entry wound was soaked with fresh as well as thick, clotted blood.

Feeling the heat surge through him, John shucked off his clothes. When he was down to only his balbriggans, he tramped through the aspens along a game trail and stepped into the stream, the cold water chilling him, fighting off the infernal heat threatening to melt the hide off his bones.

His bare feet slipping on the slick, round stones of the riverbed, he splashed out to the middle of the shin-high stream and sat down in a pool, his back to a half-submerged boulder, facing the sun.

He stretched his lips back from his teeth as he lifted his chin to the sun, enjoying the warmth on his face as the cold, sliding water soothed his fever-racked body. The water numbed him and the sun put him to sleep.

As if from far away, voices rose above the river's constant chuckle. Hooves clomped and water splashed.

John opened his eyes. A horse appeared sixty yards away, clomping slowly through the water in the middle of the stream—a stocky paint horse moving toward him with two riders on its back.

A dark-haired girl and a blonde.

The wolf trotted along beside the horse, its head down, tongue out, eyes regarding John hungrily.

The girls stared at him, too—a serene expression on the black-haired girl's face, the blonde smiling delightedly over the other girl's right shoulder. They weren't wearing much, and their legs and feet were bare.

John straightened his back and turned toward the bank, where he'd left his rifle. He froze. Magnusson was hunkered down on his haunches a few yards from the water—a big, bearlike figure in his buffalo robe and smoke-stained leather hat. His tiny eyes slitted and his white-streaked, cinnamon beard rose as he grinned his snaggletoothed grin at John.

He was leaning on John's Spencer.

Suddenly, seeing the expression on John's face, he threw his head back and laughed.

John sagged back against the boulder. He turned to the girls approaching on the paint horse, the wolf staying close beside the horse and showing its long, curved teeth to John.

John looked at the girls. The dark-haired girl's eyes met his, and she smiled, the V-neck of her deer-hide vest revealing the deep, clay-colored valley between her bouncing breasts.

John stretched a smile as the girls drew up before him, hair billowing over their shoulders, their damp legs glistening in the sunshine, long knives jutting from scabbards on their thighs.

“Well, shit, I reckon it's my time.” John sighed, his eye bright. “But what a way to go!”

Longarm scraped his thumbnail across a sulfur-tipped match and touched the flame to his cigar. Drawing the smoke deep into his lungs, he sat back against a tree bole and watched the sorrel and the speckle-gray pack mule draw water from the spring bubbling up from mossy stones.

It had taken him nearly two hours the previous night, after the rogue grizzly had finally ambled away, to retrieve the sorrel from a distant meadow cloaked in velvet darkness and shimmering stars, the saddle hanging beneath its belly but otherwise intact, his rifle still snugged in its boot. He hadn't found the mule until this morning, cropping young willows along a creek nestled in a deep gorge.