Dead Man's Trail (9781101606957) (14 page)

Mendenhour glanced at Yakima. “What the hell are they doing?”

“Hold on,” the half-breed repeated slowly as one rider moved forward from the pack.

This rider walked his horse, a steeldust, toward the stage, lifting a rifle. A white flag had been tied to the barrel.

“I'll be damned,” Yakima said wistfully. “Looks like we got us a truce.”

Chapter 19

Oh, sweet mercy, Glendolene thought as she watched the lone rider moving toward her and the others, raising the white flag. Now what?

A crawling sensation between her shoulders told her the man wasn't about to make peace. She looked at her husband, who stood slightly ahead of her, holding the rifle up high across his chest in his gloved hands. Lee Mendenhour was a capable man. As he himself had said, he'd grown up out here, and he knew how to ride and shoot as well as most men.

Still, she felt comforted by the presence of the man whose name she hadn't known until yesterday, Yakima Henry. She'd been horrified to see him out here, away from the shack, removed from their intimate time together, but then she'd realized what he'd done. Without him, they'd likely all be dead.

But why was he remaining here, in harm's way? He didn't need them. He had a horse. He could have left them a long time ago, possibly been halfway to his destination by now.

She glanced at him. He was looking at her. She shrank from his gaze. Sometimes, the awkwardness of them being here together in Lee's presence was too much for her to bear. But she kept her eyes on his, trying to read his mind.

Why?

* * *

Yakima stared back at Glendolene as the rider with the white flag moved toward them slowly, with maddening steadiness. Mostly, Yakima was here for her. She was a beautiful white woman, but she was much like him in many ways. Separate from the others, including her husband. Maybe even partly separated from herself.

She was alone.

Her dark brown brows wrinkled slightly as her eyes bored into his, trying to decipher his own thinking. Yakima turned away from her. He was about to touch his moccasin heels against Wolf's ribs, intending to ride out and meet the man with the white flag away from the group, when Mendenhour said, “Hold on. I want to hear what he has to say.”

Yakima eased his weight in the saddle. He swept the area around him with his gaze, making sure they weren't being surrounded. But, then, there were nearly a dozen riders out there beyond the man riding toward him. That man was Betajack, he saw now, as the outlaw rancher rode within fifty yards and kept closing, his pale breath tearing in the wind, the tattered white swatch buffeting wildly at the end of his rifle barrel.

Betajack drew back on his steeldust stallion's reins about thirty yards from the group. His red face, sandwiched between roached gray muttonchops, was expressionless. It looked like a dark red inverted V, with his two eyes appearing colorless near the top of the V, just beneath the black brim of his Texas-creased Stetson under which he wore a thick red scarf covering his ears. The scarf was knotted behind the man's left ear.

“Say what you have to say, Betajack!” Mendenhour yelled above the steady rustling of the wind.

“Here it is!” the old man with a killer's cold eyes returned. “We're leaving the outcome of these unfortunate events up to you, Mendenhour. We want only you and you alone. If you turn yourself over to me and my boys before sundown today, we'll let the others in your party go free. They can continue on to their destinations without further harassment from us. They'll live to see Christmas.”

The old outlaw leader shook his head slowly, ominously. “If you don't turn yourself over to us before the end of the day, we're going to kill every last one of you people.” He threw his free arm forward, extending an angry finger. “Including the women!”

He slid his angry his finger toward Yakima.

“And I don't give a shit how many notches that redskin has on his belt—he won't be able to save you!”

Betajack began to turn his horse.

“Hold on, Betajack!” Mendenhour started forward. “You got no right—”

“I got every right!” the rancher shouted shrilly, face turning even darker. “You killed the wrong son, you son of a bitch. My boy was not rustlin' them horses. He bought 'em and paid for 'em!”

“That's not what the man he stole them from said!”

“That's because Denton Calhoun was told to lie for the good of your precious county!”

“Hold on, goddamn it!”

“That's all I got to say, Mendenhour!” Betajack gave a single fierce nod. “Sundown today or everyone dies.”

He reined the steeldust around and hammered his spurred heels into the horse's flanks. Horse and rider galloped away, hoof thuds dwindling beneath the wind's steady sigh.

Yakima and the others watched as Betajack rejoined his crew. He rode through the group and continued riding west, the others turning their horses and following him until they disappeared into a distant swale.

Yakima looked at Mendenhour. The others were looking at him, too. The attorney continued staring toward the killers.

“Well, that seals it,” he said with what Yakima detected as a melodramatic air. “I'll stay here. All you people, including you, Glendolene, go ahead and board the stage.” He looked at the driver. “Charlie, get these people out of here!”

“No!” Glendolene grabbed his arm. “Lee, you can't. They'll hang you!”

“That seems to be the idea, yes,” said Mendenhour.

“Mr. Mendenhour, you simply can't,” said Mrs. O'Reilly. “You can't let those brigands win. You ran for office on the platform of law and order. By turning yourself over to those men, you'd only be allowing them to win the battle. Why, if Betajack hangs you, he'll think he owns this county again. He'll terrorize us all the way he was doing five years ago. We won't be able to hire
a single decent lawman
!”

Mrs. O'Reilly swept her gaze across Adlard, Coble, Weatherford, and the two drummers, Kearny and Sook, all of whom were looking around sheepishly, obviously reluctant to get behind the two women.

“Charlie, you tell him!” Mrs. O'Reilly said. “Tell the man to get on board the stage and stop this foolishness.” She looked at Coble. “Mr. Coble, surely
you're
not considering allowing Mr. Mendenhour to remain here so those brigands can
hang
him?” She looked at the others, including Yakima. “Why, what kind of men
are
you,
anyway
?”

Yakima looked at the other men. They all fidgeted like boys caught trapping rattlesnakes in the girls' privy at school. Mendenhour waited, staring west, a false look of bravery on his face. His doubtful eyes and mottled pale cheeks gave the lie to it.

Glendolene turned to Yakima. “Please,” she said. “Yakima . . . don't let him do this.”

“It ain't my decision,” he said.

“Glendolene, please,” Mendenhour said halfheartedly. “Get aboard the stage. All of you, please. Adlard . . . ?”

“I . . . I reckon we'd best all get aboard the stage, Mr. Mendenhour,” the jehu said, unable to conceal his eagerness to get moving.

“Yeah, I reckon,” said Coble in much the same tone, unable to meet the castigating gaze of Mrs. O'Reilly. He glanced at the two drummers, who merely stood staring at their shoes. “Reckon we'd all best get back on the stage, Mr. Mendenhour.”

Weatherford chuckled as he blew cigarette smoke out his nose. They all looked at him dubiously.

Glendolene turned to the driver. “Mr. Adlard, you can't do this. You cannot leave my husband behind! What kind of a
man
are you?”

Mrs. O'Reilly said, “Indeed!”

Adlard looked stricken. He stared back at Glendolene and then, flushing deeply, he glanced at Coble, who gave a ragged sigh and cast his troubled gaze into the distance.

“Ah, shit,” muttered one of the drummers.

Adlard looked at Mendenhour. “I reckon we'd
all
best get aboard the stage, sir.”

Mendenhour scowled, pretending to think it over. Finally, as though he were outnumbered, he said, “All right, all right!” With exaggerated reluctance, he took his wife's arm. “Glendolene, let's get you on board. You, too, Mrs. O'Reilly.”

Meanwhile, Sally Rand was weeping on the stage's other side, in the arms of her honyocker husband, Percy.

As he led his wife around the rear of the stage, Mendenhour stopped and looked up at Yakima. Yakima returned the gaze, saw the fear and humiliation painting white splotches across Mendenhour's windburned cheeks. The half-breed found himself feeling sorry for the man. If he were in Mendenhour's place, he would send the stage on and go down fighting. He'd be damned if he let them hang him.

But Mendenhour was a civilized man. And he was scared shitless.

Betajack had really done a job on the attorney. On the stage passengers, too, who now had to wrestle with their own courage or lack thereof. The old killer was one crafty son of a bitch.

Mendenhour said, “Will you stay with us, Mr. Henry?”

Glendolene's eyes were on him, faintly beseeching. But he'd already made up his mind. He might not share the prosecutor's views, but he wouldn't throw him to the wolves. After all, he himself had been saved by a man who hadn't even known him.

“I said I would, didn't I?”

He touched heels to Wolf's flanks, put the black on up the trail.

Chapter 20

It was dark when they pulled into the overnight Hamburg Station on Seven-Mile Creek, in the foothills of the Big Horn Range. Yakima rode in ahead of the stage, putting his tired horse up to the hitch rack fronting the two-story, boxlike adobe brick shack sitting to the right of a broad wood-frame barn and several corrals.

Surrounded by a stone water trough, a windmill rose from the hard-packed front yard, the blades clattering in the brittle breeze.

A lamp hung outside under the station house's porch beams, swinging, shunting shadows across the porch's weathered boards and the half dozen saddled horses standing at the two hitch racks, heads hanging. A man was laughing inside, the sounds muffled by the breeze sawing against the shack's brick walls and at the edge of the shake-shingled porch roof, causing a tin cup hanging by a string from a nail to bang irregularly against a tin washtub mounted on a wooden stand beside the closed front door.

Judging by the number of horses and the sounds from inside, the overnight station doubled as a trail house of sorts. Yakima could smell the whiskey and the stale beer and tobacco smoke of the place as he swung down from Wolf's back and looked around.

He hadn't been surprised that he and the stage had traveled throughout the day, making their slow, steady way toward the Dakota line, unharassed by Betajack and Hendricks. The outlaws would live up to their word. They'd probably enjoyed the tension that even Yakima could sense inside the stage amongst the passengers traveling with the man who could very well get them all killed if he hadn't turned himself over to the killers by sundown.

The driver, Charlie Adlard, and the pugnacious shotgun messenger, Melvin Coble, had displayed grave, brooding looks as they'd maintained their perches atop the rocking, swaying coach, bandannas lifted against the choking dust kicked up by the six-hitch team. They'd gone through three team changes that day, finding little help for their predicament at any of the remote swing stations. The men and women who worked at such places were mainly stalwart, workaday folk, some young, some old—and none up to the formidable task of helping fight back the breed of wolf that was trailing Mendenhour and the others.

If it had been earlier in the year, the women, and maybe even some of the men who didn't mind losing face, might have stayed at one of the stations and simply awaited the next coach through. If they'd had the money for prolonged lodging, that is. And if they didn't have families waiting for them. But there wouldn't be another stage through until after New Year's, and the trail could be socked in with snow at any time, so they all felt compelled to continue on in the small, dusty Concord that some of them, if not all, must have been starting to see as a wheeled coffin.

It was good dark. Time had run out for the prosecutor as well as the others. Yakima could see that now in the faces of Adlard and Coble as they pulled the stage into the yard and the shunting light of the swinging oil lamp found them, their eyes harried. Adlard swung the coach up close to the station house and hauled back on the ribbons, standing up in the driver's boot and yelling, “Whoooo-ahhhhhhhh, now!”

The horses lurched forward against their harnesses, eager to get to the barn. But the jehu yelled at them again and set the brake, snugging the wooden blocks taut against the left-front wheel.

Adlard had wanted to get the coach as close to the station house as possible, so the passengers could get inside quickly without being overly exposed to possible snipers. He likely hadn't thought about the possibility of Betajack and Hendricks awaiting them inside. Yakima had. That's why, as the passengers began tensely destaging, the half-breed shucked his Yellowboy from his saddle boot, levered a round into the chamber, and mounted the porch steps. He opened the door and moved on inside the smoky, dark, cavelike room before him, holding the Winchester's butt against one hip, thumb caressing the hammer.

The place was filled with shadows, and even as his eyes adjusted to the murky, smoky twilight, he could still see only mostly shadows of men hunched around tables to his right, around and beyond a large stove that stood in the middle of the room and slightly to his left. To the far right was the bar, and three men in unbuttoned fur coats stood chatting, elbows on the planks stretched across several beer kegs.

At least, they had been chatting until Yakima had come in. Now most of the men near the room's front were looking at him, including two civilians and one army officer with a thick dark red dragoon mustache playing cards at a table between Yakima and the stove. One of the civilians—a blond, freckled man with a handlebar mustache—wore the moon-and-star badge of a deputy U.S. marshal.

“Stage here?” he said, critical eyes raking Yakima's tall, broad frame.

“Tom Kelsey!” The prosecutor had stepped in behind Yakima. Mendenhour walked around him now, striding toward the seated lawman. “Tom, you don't know how good it is to see you!”

“Mendenhour!” the blond lawman said. “Or I reckon I should say
Prosecutor
Mendenhour!”

He laughed affably, showing square yellow teeth beneath his mustache as, closing the fan of cards in his right hand, he slid his chair back and rose, twisting around to face Mendenhour while canting his head toward the other civilian and the army officer. “Raul Arenas.”

“Ah!” Mendenhour said, leaning forward to shaking the hands of the other civilian—a tall, dark man with a black mustache flecked with gray. “Another law dog—just what we need!”

As this man rose from his chair, Yakima saw that he, too, was wearing a deputy U.S. marshal's badge, and that he sported at least two pistols, one positioned for the cross draw on his left hip. Both federal lawmen also had rifles leaning against the table, near their chairs, while the redheaded soldier—a major—had a Spencer carbine resting across an empty chair flanking him, between him and the dark-eyed badge toter, who appeared to have some Mexican blood and also wore a nasty scar across the side of his nose.

“Major Demarest!” Mendenhour said when he'd shaken the dark lawman's hand. His voice was rising with even more unbridled relief. “Matt, what are you doing this far from Camp Collins?”

“Headin' north to spend the holidays with my brother at Fort Lincoln,” Demarest said, rising and smiling around the quirley that dripped ashes onto his playing cards as he gained his feet awkwardly. There were several shot and beer glasses on the table, as well as a half-empty bottle.

“Hope I can make it before the snow flies.” Major Demarest canted his head toward the open front door behind Yakima, through which the other passengers were entering the station house warily, stiffly tentative. “I take it the stage is here. Good. I'll be hoppin' aboard tomorrow. See no reason to ride horseback all the way to Mandan.”

“Good! Good!” Mendenhour rubbed his gloved hands together and looked around nervously at the passengers and Yakima, and then said, more quietly as he crouched over the lawmen's and the soldier's table, “Do you men think we could have a word outside? We've encountered trouble along the trail, and . . .”

That was all that Yakima heard. Or all that he listened to. Mendenhour was about to request help, and Yakima felt a mild relief tempered by his knowing how many wolves were on the prosecutor's trail, as well as the breed of wolves. More important to him just now was his horse. He turned, ran into someone standing behind him, and looked down to see Glendolene stumbling back a step.

“Whoa!” he said, grabbing her arm with his free hand.

She looked up at him. “Sorry.”

Unsteady from the long, jouncing ride, she now stepped too far forward and placed a hand on his chest, over his buckskin mackinaw to steady herself. He watched as a flush rose in her smooth, tapering cheeks, and her brown eyes sparkled in the light of a near lantern, beneath the brim of her fur hat. She looked at her hand on his chest, then lowered it and stepped back, but her lustrous eyes remained on his.

Just loudly enough for him to hear above the rising hum of conversation reverberating around the room, she said, “Are we safe here, do you think . . . Mr. Henry?”

“Glendolene,” the prosecutor said, turning to her as the two lawmen and the soldier gained their feet, wearing serious expressions now despite the drink-bleariness of their eyes. “Why don't you and the other ladies inquire about the accommodations while I step outside for a moment?” He moved around Yakima and smiled down at his wife. “I think we've just been given an early Christmas present.”

She glanced from her husband to Yakima, who stepped past her and outside. As he closed the door behind him, Adlard and Coble were moving up the porch steps while three hostlers from the station were leading the spent team toward the large barn on the north end of the yard. The barn's doors were thrown open, showing light from a lantern inside. A small, crude log shack flanked the barn. Its windows, too, were lit. Likely where the hostlers who worked for the stage company were housed.

Neither the driver nor the shotgun messenger said anything as they climbed heavily onto the porch. The driver said, “I sure could use a drink,” and walked past Yakima.

Coble stopped in front of the half-breed. He was a couple of inches shorter. He stared up at him with his customary bulldog scowl.

“Come on, Mel,” Adlard said wearily. “Get your ass in here and quit spoilin' for a fight!”

He was holding the door open. Someone from inside said, “Hey, close the damn door! You born in a barn?”

The driver went in. Coble brushed stiffly past Yakima, like a dog with his hackles and tail raised, and followed Adlard into the station house.

Yakima looked around. The stage still sat in front of the station house, where it would likely remain overnight, giving the passengers a short walk from the cabin. Nothing moved around or beyond it except for the hostlers just now leading the team into the barn, one man standing back ready to pull the doors closed.

He walked into the yard and stood behind Wolf, staring out at the cool, breezy night in which a few snowflakes blew this way and that, and the windmill hummed. The tin cup continued to rap against the wash barrel.

Yakima stared off across the dark hills to the west, feeling that eyes were on him. Snowflakes brushed his eyes. One stuck in his lashes. Behind him, the station house door opened. Voices spilled out, as did a rush of tobacco smoke and the fetor of beer and whiskey. Yakima glanced behind him to see Mendenhour step out with the two marshals and the major.

As the other men stopped on the porch to converse, Yakima led Wolf over to the barn. He tended the horse slowly and thoroughly, giving him a good rubdown before putting him up in an empty stall with a blanket thrown over him, to leach the chill from his bones. The hostlers tending the stage horses talked amongst themselves, snorting and laughing in the way of men doing rote work.

Yakima draped his saddlebags over his shoulder, picked up his Yellowboy, gave the black a parting pat, and left the barn, heading back to the station house. Mendenhour and the others had gone back in. Yakima went in now, too, and walked up to the bar. Earlier, he'd smelled food cooking, and he asked the broad-chested man—flat-faced and with long blond mustaches—behind the bar, if he could get a plate.

The man planted his fists against the bar and squinted his suspicious, heavy-lidded eyes as he took the half-breed's measure. “Can you pay for it?”

Yakima ignored the angry burn behind his ears and blinked slowly. “I can pay.”

“One dollar for steak and beans.”

Yakima reached into his buckskins and flipped the man a silver dollar. The man inspected the coin, tossed it into a tin pail on a shelf behind him, and yelled through a door left of the cracked back bar mirror. “Another plate, Rosey!”

Then he shuffled away to answer the call of a man standing to Yakima's right.

Yakima turned and headed for a free table on the room's far side, noticing a couple of girls in corsets and bustiers working the room toward the stairs climbing to the second story and, presumably, the stage passengers' sleeping quarters. There was a blonde and a brunette, and colored feathers danced in their hair as they made conversation with a couple of prospective jakes who looked like cowpunchers in their battered Stetsons and woolly chaps.

Adlard and Coble sat at the table to the right of the one Yakima headed for. The driver was slumped back in his chair, enjoying a beer and a shot, while Coble was hunkered over his own beer and shot, eyeing Yakima devilishly. The man's eyes drifted from the half-breed's face to the saddlebags, then drifted away, and he brushed a hand nervously across the thin sandy-brown mustache mantling his chapped pink mouth.

Yakima ignored the man, though he didn't at all like the interest Coble had taken in his pouch, which the shotgunner had rightly assumed was filled with gold. That was a particularly vexing complication he didn't need on top of the other more obvious one.

He was trying to help this crew to safety, and one of them wanted to rob him.

Again, a voice pitched with incredulity said in his mind, “What the hell are you doing here, fool? Get the gold to Belle Fourche and hightail it to warmer climes!”

He sagged into a chair at his table, facing the room at large. He set his rifle on the table to his right, draped his saddlebags over a chair back to his left, and watched the lawyer walk toward him.

“Ah, shit,” Yakima said, aloud to himself. “Now what?”