The Killing Breed (19 page)
Authors: Frank Leslie
Garza swung toward Faith but stopped when Temple grabbed his arm. “I didn’t ride all this way for nothin’. Besides, you can’t blame her for tryin’ to get away. We should have been ready for this.”
“Only a pack of damn tinhorns would ride into that ambush.” Holding a neckerchief to his head, Manley swung his canteen over his shoulder and headed toward his horse. “Tinhorns! I say we’re lucky it’s only Miller that bought it.”
While Manley strode off into the loosely clumped horses down the slope behind Faith, Temple dropped to a knee before Miller. He gave the wounded bounty hunter a meaningful look. “You ain’t gonna make it, Frank.”
Miller lowered his pain-pinched eyes to his bloody middle. “Leave me my horse . . . my canteen. I’ll wait it out. If I think I can make it, I’ll try to ride back to the roadhouse.”
Temple nodded, stood, and walked over to his horse. The others followed him, glancing back at Miller, who lay slumped against a boulder beside the trail.
When Temple had led his horse and Faith’s into the trail, he brusquely hauled Faith into her saddle and tied her hands to her horn. He mounted up, rode over, and dropped Miller’s canteen between the stocky blond’s spread legs.
“There ya are, Frank. Benny tied your horse. See ya around maybe, huh?”
Miller just cursed and plucked out the canteen’s cork with his teeth.
Temple swung his horse around and jerked Faith’s mare off in the direction they’d been heading before the ambush. “Come on, fellas. Let’s lift some dirt. We got a train to catch!”
Chapter 15
Moving quickly, now riding the two mustangs they’d stolen from the Apache remuda, Yakima and Brody Harms pushed hard up the rocky Mogollon Mountain trail and into the shade of towering pines. Yakima led Wolf on a lead line while Harms led a second Apache mustang.
The Easterner had slapped his mule home, and the mule hadn’t hesitated.
Wolf nickered and shook his head, smelling something he didn’t like. Yakima looked closely over the horse’s twitching ears, then drew sharply back on the reins. Riding behind him, Harms followed suit, his leather squawking as he rose in his saddle to take his own gander.
Ahead, a man lay off to the right side of the trail, his head resting on his arm as though he were napping. Blood oozed from a couple of wounds in his chest and belly. On his vest, exposed by the open flaps of his fur coat, was an Arizona Rangers badge.
Harms’s voice rose sharply. “Yakima!”
The half-breed jerked his gaze to his right. Two more men lay unmoving nearby, but Yakima fixed his gaze on a man with short blond hair and a stout neck reclining against a boulder at the base of a stone dike, a canteen propped between his legs. Staring at Yakima and Harms and gritting his teeth, the blond was fumbling a revolver from the holster jutting on his right hip.
Bright red blood soaked his belly, staining the dirt beneath his crotch, between his spread legs.
“Goddamnit!” he grunted, finally jerking the revolver free of its holster.
“This way!” Yakima shouted, neck-reining the vinegar-dun Indian pony off the trail’s right side.
Harms cursed and followed suit, then cursed again as the blond’s revolver barked, sending a slug buzzing through the air before spanging off a rock. There was another
pop
but not before Yakima, Harms, and their trailing horses were moving back behind a scarp, then up the slope toward the rimrock.
pop
but not before Yakima, Harms, and their trailing horses were moving back behind a scarp, then up the slope toward the rimrock.
Yakima checked the Indian pony down behind a lightning-topped fir, and swung down from the saddle. Harms reined down his own two horses and shucked his Spencer from its saddle scabbard.
He scowled red-faced at Yakima. “You think . . . ?”
“It’s one o’ them.” Yakima slid his Yellowboy from its scabbard. “I want him alive.”
He racked a fresh shell, then quickly tied the Indian pony to a fir branch. Harms did the same and then both men jogged back down the slope toward the scarp.
“Move around from the right,” Yakima said. “Make some noise but stay out of sight.”
He bounded up the wall of the scarp, using clefts and cracks to pull himself up. The scarp was low, and he made the crest in seconds, crouching as he took his rifle in both hands and stared down the other side.
The stocky blond man was down on an elbow, jerking looks toward both ends of the scarp, his cocked pistol in his bloody right hand. A stone arced out from the right side of the cleft, landed with a soft bark, and rolled a few feet, drawing the outlaw’s attention. Turning toward the rock, he held still long enough for Yakima to draw a bead on the hand holding the pistol.
The Yellowboy cracked.
The blond gent howled and dropped his revolver, grabbing his right hand with his left. Blood oozed from the bullet hole and dribbled into the dirt. The hardcase glared up at Yakima, who lowered the rifle and leaped down the scarp to stand in the clearing near one of the dead Rangers.
Shivering with pain and fury, the blond gent lay back on an elbow, squeezing his hand and cursing between clenched teeth. As he studied Yakima, recognition sparked in his eyes.
Yakima reached down, grabbed a Colt from the blond’s second holster, and tossed it away. He planted the sole of his moccasin boot against the man’s chest, and pushed him back against a rock. “Is my woman all right?”
The blond stared up at Yakima, tears of pain rolling down his cheeks, lips quivering. A savage smile quirked his mouth corners. “Yeah,” he drawled mockingly. “She’s just fine.”
“Where are they taking her?”
Through the sharp fog of pain, the blond mulled his answer. He sucked a sharp breath through gritted teeth and renewed his grip on his shaking right hand, which was dribbling scarlet blood into the darker stuff sopping his belly. “Thornton.”
The answer made his eyes dance briefly as he stared up at Yakima.
The name grabbed Yakima like a fishhook deep in his belly, and he nodded. “Had a feelin’.”
The blond tipped his head back, eyes rolling back into his head. “He’s . . . got plans for her . . . Thornton does.”
Harms said, “Who’s Thornton?”
“An old friend of ours—Faith’s and mine.”
Yakima looked down at the outlaw writhing before him, and pressed his boot more firmly against the man’s chest. “Thornton still in Colorado?” There was the chance the pimp had made the trip to Arizona, was holed up waiting for Faith in Phoenix or Prescott.
The blond gent nodded and ground a boot heel into the dirt, groaning.
Yakima jogged past Harms on his way back toward the horses, yelling over his shoulder, “They’re heading for the train rails north of here!”
“This, uh, Thornton . . . ,” Harms said as he jogged, breathing hard, behind Yakima. “I assume he has a bone to pick?”
“I should have gone back and killed the bastard,” Yakima growled.
He switched saddles quickly and leaped onto Wolf’s back. As he and Harms galloped down the slope and onto the trail where the dead Rangers lay around the wounded blond, the bounty hunter screamed, “Breed!”
Yakima glanced over his shoulder. The blond man was reaching for the revolver Yakima had tossed into the trail. The gun was about two feet beyond his reach.
“Kick that gun over here, will ya? Last request of a dead man.”
The man wanted to end his suffering.
Yakima nodded at the hide-wrapped bowie handle jutting from a sheath on the bounty hunter’s left hip. “Use your knife, you son of a bitch!”
Then he and Wolf and the Apache bronc tore off down the trail, the dying outlaw raging like a trapped coyote behind him.
It wasn’t long after leaving the canyon that they came upon a stage trail. The outlaws’ prints marked the trail, and judging by the texture of the horse apples, they were only about an hour ahead. But if they hopped a train, they’d be out of reach in no time.
Yakima ground his heels into Wolf’s flanks, and he and Harms shot down the trail through the cedars, sage, and occasional cottonwood thickets, until they could see a town ahead, bleeding purple shadows onto the coppery plane. He didn’t know the town’s name—if it had one. It had probably sprouted up with the coming of the rails. Steeple Rock, blue and misty, its west side touched with gold, loomed just beyond.
Yakima couldn’t see much except a few corrals and brick walls jutting above the cedars, but when he and Harms topped a rise he saw the rails— freshly laid on their cinder bed and stretching from east to west like twin streams of quicksilver over the low, toffee-colored hills.
At the town’s east end, inky black smoke bled into the air. At the base of the smoke hulked a bulky black Baldwin locomotive with a diamond-shaped stack.
Yakima’s shoulders tightened. The thickening smoke meant the fireman was stoking the boiler, preparing to pull out.
Yakima released the Indian pony and leaned low over Wolf’s head. “Giddyap, Wolf! Haul ass!”
The black stretched his stride, blowing hard, pasting his ears back against his head. Yakima, crouched low and forward, felt the muscles rippling like snakes beneath the saddle, saw the black withers slick with silver lather. Brody Harms and the Indian pony dropped gradually back on Yakima’s right, as Yakima and the black stallion shot up the trail, lifting the town out of the salmon-tinged rocks and scrub before them.
Wolf dropped into a low area, and Yakima gritted his teeth when he heard the locomotive’s dinosaur wail. Rising out of the hollow, he looked east. The train was crawling forward, great clouds of black smoke and glowing cinders wafting from the stack, steam rising from the heavy iron wheels.
Yakima cursed as he approached the town’s first corrals and plank-board, tin-roofed shacks and cow pens. He checked Wolf down and turned as Brody Harms thundered up behind him, the Easterner’s dusty bowler tipped low over his equally dusty spectacles.
“I’m gonna try to catch it!”
Yakima turned Wolf off the right side of the trail and into the scrub.
“You don’t know for sure they’re on it!” Harms yelled, his words dwindling into the distance behind Yakima, as Yakima and the black stallion pounded through the cedars and scrub junipers.
They angled around the few stock pens and shacks outlying the town, and the tent frames remaining in the wake of the railroad crew, and traced a northeastward arc toward the screeching, panting locomotive. The glistening iron horse was pulling a tender car, a couple of flatcars, and four passenger cars, with a bright yellow caboose bringing up the rear.
The engine continued to blow its shrill, bugling horn, black smoke broiling from the wide-mouthed stack as though from a barn fire. Yakima hardened his jaws as it increased its speed, singing in an ever-increasing tempo—
Whoosh-whoosh-chug! Whoosh-whoosh-chug! Whoosh-whoosh-chug!
as it slipped off away to the east, the caboose opening more and more space behind it and the freshly painted depot building and the pole corrals, which were so new that Yakima could still smell the pine resin.
Whoosh-whoosh-chug! Whoosh-whoosh-chug! Whoosh-whoosh-chug!
as it slipped off away to the east, the caboose opening more and more space behind it and the freshly painted depot building and the pole corrals, which were so new that Yakima could still smell the pine resin.
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