Dead Man's Trail (9781101606957) (10 page)

“We'll get him,” Hendricks said, turning away to cover his embarrassment. “Don't worry. The half-breed's as good as dead. His ears and his scalp will be dangling from my neck by sundown tomorrow. I'll do it myself this time”—he glanced over his shoulder at his seven surviving riders, Betajack having five—“since I obviously ain't got the breed of men I
thought
I had! Only the kind that's a goddamn embarrassment.”

His pack of tough-jawed, bewhiskered white men, half-breeds, and one black man, whose name was Soot Early, merely looked off, too proud to show any more than the most subtle signs of incredulity.

Hendricks angrily kicked dirt on the coffee fire, giving the coffeepot a good kick as he did.

Betajack turned to the man, Delvin Torrance, riding behind Sonny. “Torrance, how bad you hurt?”

“Horse kicked me in the head.” Torrance grinned. “Woulda hurt me worse if he'd stepped on my foot.”

“Since you don't have a horse, I should shoot you now.” Betajack narrowed his pewter eyes at the man who sat behind Albert Delmonte without a hat, blood dribbling from the large, blue lump rising on his right temple. “Under most circumstances, that's exactly what I'd do. Because that's the price of bein' a damn fool.”

Sonny snickered.

Betajack ignored him, continuing with “But since we obviously need all the guns we can get, you'll have to switch off ridin' double until we can find you another horse.”

“Yessir, Mr. Betajack,” Torrance said, holding the old Rebel's gaze with a determined one of his own. “Yes, sir, that's not a problem. I'll secure one at the next stage relay station. Not a problem.”

“All right, we're done mucking around here chewin' leather,” Betajack said, walking back to where his steeldust stallion milled with Hendricks's and Sonny's mounts, on the other side of the wash. “Let's get a move on. I got a county prosecutor to kill, goddamn it!”

He mounted up and galloped off, whipping his horse savagely with his rein ends. Glancing back over his shoulder and grinning wolfishly, he said, “After Claw cuts off that half-breed's ears, that is!”

He laughed as he rode away.

Sonny shrugged and shook his head as he swung up onto the back of his coyote dun. “Preston was a sad price to pay for it, but I do believe the old coot's feelin' pecker-high in yellow clover again!”

Chapter 13

Yakima saw the stage climbing a hill ahead of him. He galloped Wolf on up to it and passed it on the driver's side. The driver and shotgun messenger had spied him a ways back, and they eyed him suspiciously, the old driver narrowing one eye beneath a grizzled gray brow.

“Who the hell
are
you, man?”

Yakima knew who the driver and messenger were, because he kept his eyes and ears open, but they wouldn't know him. Being a half-breed, he was invisible to most whites—and that wasn't always a bad thing.

“It ain't me you need to worry about, Adlard,” Yakima said as he put Wolf on past the stage and the team leaning hard into their collars as they continued up the hill. “It's them boys who hoorawed you.”

“Who were
they
?” called the shotgun messenger, who was a good fifteen, twenty years younger than the driver. His name, if Yakima remembered, was Mel Coble.

Yakima was beyond the team now. “Best talk to the prosecutor about that, Coble!”

Then he continued up and over the hill. Another mile farther on, he rode into the yard of the Eagle Butte Relay Station. An old man in a black wool coat, deerskin mittens, and earmuffs was leaning against a corral post, smoking a cigarette. He squinted at Yakima as the half-breed rode past him and turned his horse toward the corral's gate, where a tall young man in woolly chaps stood with a pitchfork, eyeing the big half-breed with the same suspicion the older gent had.

Yakima dismounted the black and tossed the boy the reins. “Tend him for me, will you? I'll be pullin' out with the stage.”

The kid's lips barely moved as he said, “Who're you?”

“Me?” He shrugged. “I'm Yakima Henry.”

The half-breed strode over to the low-slung, brush-roofed cabin and went on inside. He was sitting at a table in the rear shadows, eating beans, eggs, and ham from a large wooden bowl, when the stage came jouncing into the yard behind the weary team. The driver brought the coach right up to the cabin, and Yakima watched out the window right of the door, the thinly scraped deer hide stretched over the window frame giving a distorted view of the yard, as the driver and the shotgun messenger guided a redheaded, middle-aged woman in a blanket coat out of the coach. She was slumped forward, the front of her coat bloody. One on each side, they led her up the steps and then through the screen door and the winter door.

The woman who ran the place, a stocky, dark woman in a shapeless wool skirt over which she wore a ragged bobcat-skin cape, her salt-and-pepper hair in a tight bun atop her head, came out from around the bar. Her black eyes danced. “Good Lord—were you
robbed
?” She had a slight accent that Yakima thought was French.

“Nope, we wasn't robbed,” said the old driver. “Mrs. O'Reilly took a bullet, though, Yvette. She thinks it went all the way through. Can you sew her up?”

“Bring her on back!” called Yvette, hurrying on ahead of the two men and the woman, who was wincing and breathing hard but otherwise holding up well.

Yakima lowered his eyes when the man he took to be the prosecutor, Mendenhour, wearing a beaver hat and a long, elegant-looking coat of elk hide trimmed with rabbit fur and black leather gloves, followed his wife into the cabin. It was relatively dark in the cabin, and neither saw Yakima right away.

He looked them both over carefully, and then his eyes held on hers, which had found him back in the shadows. They stared at each other for several seconds, her expression for the most part indecipherable, as he assumed his was, before he lowered his eyes to his bowl once more and continued eating hungrily.

“Lee,” he heard her say, noting the familiarity of her voice—the voice of a woman he'd never expected to see again after that third and final meeting in the line shack. “I'm going to go back and help with Lori.”

“All right, Glen,” the woman's husband said, “but stay close.”

She removed her gloves and took them in one hand as she strode around the tables, passing Yakima without looking at him, and continued to the rear of the room and through a blanketed doorway in the back wall, beneath an impressive set of deer antlers. He couldn't help turning his head to watch her, noting the familiar smell of her on the breeze she'd made when she'd passed him.

As the other stage passengers—another couple, an old man in a watch hat and with a gray bib beard, and two middle-aged men who looked like drummers in felt bowler hats, cheap suits, and age-worn wool coats—came into the station and gravitated toward the potbellied stove, the prosecutor continued standing in front of the door. He stared at Yakima almost suspiciously. For a moment, the half-breed considered whether she'd confessed her sins to him. The man slowly removed his gloves and then his heavy scarf as he walked slowly, arrogantly toward Yakima's table, and for a few seconds Yakima wondered if he'd have to shoot the man himself.

Mendenhour stopped a few feet away, staring down as Yakima continued forking food into his mouth, the half-breed's sun-bleached black hat on the table beyond his plate and coffee cup. His rifle lay there, as well. His saddlebags were slung over the back of the chair to Yakima's right.

“Who are you?” the prosecutor asked, an officious tone in his voice.

Yakima stared up at him. He was tall and handsome. A moneyed man. Yakima wasn't surprised that she would have chosen one like the young attorney, though he couldn't help wondering now why she'd also chosen
him
, Yakima—at least for a little nasty fun in the line shack. He'd never thought of it before, but maybe she was a harlot. She hadn't looked or acted like a harlot, but he'd seen enough in his life to know he hadn't seen it all.

He knew the assessment wasn't fair, and that it was evoked by natural male, petty jealousy, but there it was.

“I asked you a question,” Mendenhour said, lightly wrapping the knuckles of his pale white hand on Yakima's table.

Yakima swallowed a bite of food and followed the man's slender arm up to his handsome face. “I was in the jail in Wolfville when Betajack's men rode in and shot hell out of your lawmen.”

The prosecutor's thin auburn blows furrowed slightly as he continued staring at Yakima, his brown eyes dubious.

“Betajack's and Claw Hendricks's men,” Yakima added. “After that, I didn't see a good reason to hang around. 'Specially since I got business up north.” He forked another bite of food into his mouth and continued to hold the glowering stare of the prosecutor, who was resting the tips of his knuckles on Yakima's table.

“Good . . . God . . . ,” Mendenhour said finally, when Yakima thought he was incapable of saying anything more at all. “Betajack and . . . ?”

“Hendricks, yep. Got her right. You poked your snoot in the wrong henhouse, amigo.”

“That isn't for you to judge,” the man said tightly.

Yakima shrugged.

“They're all . . . dead?”

Yakima nodded. “Bushwhacked.”

Looking stricken, the prosecutor slumped into a chair across from Yakima. As Yvette came out of the back room, she said, “I'll bring you all some food and coffee, folks. Looks like you'll be here an hour or so . . . on account of Mrs. O'Reilly. She'll be okay, though. The bullet just creased her!”

She got to work at the cupboard and chugging range behind the plank-board bar. The young couple who appeared to be married sat at their own table, talking in hushed tones. They were dressed like a young farm couple in mismatched, heavy clothes. The old prospector sat at the same table as the two middle-aged men who looked like drummers. He was smoking a quirley and not taking part in the heated conversation the drummers were having. He was staring oddly at Yakima, almost as though he had a secret he was thinking about sharing with the half-breed. Or maybe he'd just been in similar situations, and he wasn't surprised by any of this at all.

Mendenhour continued to sit sideways at the table, one elbow propped on it as he stared anxiously at the floor, ankles crossed beneath his chair. “I thought for sure Neumiller knew what he was doing. Thought for sure . . . he could hold Betajack off.”

“I reckon he didn't figure on Betajack throwin' in with Claw Hendricks.”

“No,” Mendenhour said, shaking his head, trying to puzzle it through as he continued staring at the floor, “I never would have figured on that, either.” He looked at Yakima, his eyes sharp, fervent. “How many . . . ?”

“I counted a dozen. Managed to whittle 'em down by four, maybe five.”

“Well, maybe you've discouraged them.”

“I wouldn't count on it.”

“I wouldn't count on it, neither,” said the driver, who'd just pushed through the blanketed doorway at the back of the room.

The bearded jehu, in a long wool-lined sheepskin coat and with a thin salt-and-pepper beard carpeting jaws so sun-seared that they looked like beef charred on a hot spit, came over to Yakima's table. He was trailed by the younger shotgun messenger, who held a Winchester repeater on his shoulder and had a snide, peeved look on his rugged face.

The driver looked at Yakima. “I heard you mention the names Betajack and Hendricks. That who's behind us?”

“That's who.”

The driver and the shotgun messenger both looked down at Mendenhour with concern. They didn't say anything. Their looks said it all. The prosecutor raked his gaze across both anxious men, then looked uncomfortably over his shoulder and through the thin scraped-hide window to the front yard lit by weak, gold-hued winter light.

There was a rustling behind Yakima. In the periphery of his vision he saw the prosecutor's wife step through the blanketed doorway. She stopped just inside the main room. Yakima glanced at her. She did not look at him but held her gaze on her husband.

“I reckon you fellas best think through your options,” Yakima said, scraping his chair back, rising, and picking up his Yellowboy. He donned his hat. He set the rifle on his right shoulder and slung his saddlebags containing the gold over his left shoulder, pinched his hat brim to Mrs. Mendenhour, and sauntered past the others, who'd stopped talking to watch him gravely, curiously.

He moved on outside and down the porch steps, past the kid he'd seen earlier and two other ones of different ages—all under eighteen—leading the fresh team of six horses toward the stage.

The young men looked at him with wary suspicion.

Yakima ignored them. He walked over to where Wolf stood in the corral with the blown stage horses, facing Yakima and flicking his ears curiously. His bridle was slipped and his latigo hung loose beneath his belly.

Yakima draped the saddlebags over the top of the corral, then reached over and ran his hand absently down the black's long snout that wore a white blaze in the shape of Florida. The horse stared at Yakima, as though eager to light a shuck.

“Yeah, I'd like to,” the half-breed grumbled, staring past the black and the other horses that were still cooling down, steam rising from their backs, and waiting for the young hostlers' tending.

No sign of Betajack and Claw Hendricks. They were back there, though. They might even be nearer than they appeared. He could imagine them breaking up and circling the relay station. That's how he'd do it, if he wanted to kill Mendenhour badly enough. He'd circle around and maybe take a shot at him from one of those brushy knolls.

Would they settle for only the prosecutor? Or did they want his wife, too? Did they want her dead or did they just want her? They were men, after all, and they likely knew what the prosecutor's wife—was her name Glendolene?—looked like. How much woman she was.

Most likely, the killers intended to shoot everyone who saw them, eliminating all the witnesses.

Yakima drew a long, ragged breath and looked at the black still watching him with his tobacco brown eyes. The horse was wondering what they were doing here when they had a mission to bring the gold back to Delbert Clifton's family and then, as they did or tried to do most years, head south to warmer weather.

Or, hell, maybe Yakima just imagined that was what Wolf was thinking, because he was thinking the same thing himself.

Behind him, the cabin door scraped open, hinges squawking softly. Men's voices sounded. Boots thumped on the porch. Yakima turned to see Mendenhour and the driver and shotgun messenger stepping down off the porch steps and, looking around cautiously, walking across the yard toward Yakima.

“Any sign of them?” the prosecutor asked as he approached.

“Not yet.”

“Damn,” said the driver, Adlard, tugging worriedly at his beard. “Floyd Betajack and Claw Hendricks? You sure that's who's trailin' us, Mr. Mendenhour?”

“That's who this man said he saw in Wolfville.” The attorney scowled at Yakima. “You never told me who you were.”

“Said his name was Henry,” the shotgun messenger said, the brim of his weathered cream Stetson bending in the chill breeze. Coble's eyes were faintly jeering. “What was it—Yakima Henry? Injun name, I'd say.”

Adlard raked his eyes up and down Yakima with faint distaste, then said, “His pa musta been a white man.”

“My family history is the least of your worries, you mossy-balled son of a bitch.” Yakima smiled to cover the angry burn that had so suddenly wrapped itself around his heart.

“Say,” said the stocky shotgun messenger, swaggering forward, “you got no call to talk to Charlie like—”

“That's enough, Coble,” intervened the prosecutor, giving the man a commanding look, then turning back to Yakima. “What's your piece of this, Henry?”

The burn stayed with Yakima, and tightly he said, “You mean—why did I save your bacon back there? Well, now, I don't rightly—”

He was cut off by the scrape of the cabin door again. Looking past the three men standing before him, he watched her move on out of the cabin to stand over the porch steps. She placed a hand on the roof support post beside her, staring toward him.