Dead Man's Trail (9781101606957) (5 page)

She scowled up at the silhouetted form of the man hanging from the rope, twisting this way and that in the chilly winter wind. Again, something flashed on Preston Betajack's dead body. Up near his right shoulder.

Something compelled Glendolene to get a closer look.

She took several more steps, staring up at Betajack, hearing the rope above his head creak and groan. Only, the man hanging from the gallows was not the man she'd seen hanged earlier. It was not Betajack. Betajack was no longer here.

The man here now was a stocky blond gent with a thick blond handlebar mustache. He wore a brown suit, and on the right lapel of his brown tweed suit coat, a deputy sheriff's badge flashed as the body turned, catching the light from the Silk Slipper.

Glendolene stumbled backward, fell. “Lee!” The shout got tangled up in her throat and came out as a hoarse whisper. “Sheriff Neumiller!” she said again, a little louder this time, but the words were still lost in the wind.

The man hanging before her stared down at her through half-open eyes, his swollen tongue poking out one corner of his slack-jawed mouth. He seemed to be leering at her.

Glendolene cleared her throat, tried again: “I think . . . I found Deputy Harrison. . . .”

Chapter 5

“Pshaw—he can't read!” intoned Old Judith.

Ignoring the woman, Yakima smoothed the letter onto the table. He positioned the flickering oil lamp so that the shadows slid aside, and the buttery light bathed the large, rounded, flowing, female script before him. Yakima cleared his throat and, using the year of schooling in a Denver boardinghouse for Indian boys and then his own self-schooling afterward, haltingly but relatively smoothly, he read:

Dearest Husband,

The children and I feel so blessed that you will be home for Christmas this year, and that you are bringing a very special present. It was so wonderful to receive your last letter and to read in it your most welcome news! I am relieved that you will be staying home from now on, and that you have managed to find a way to buy the hotel. We will all work together, the four of us side by side, and be happy that we are all together at last. Jimmy's become a strapping lad in this past year. He can haul two buckets of water from the well at once, with Mr. Whiskers on his shoulders! Caroletta is a beautiful young lady, Del, and she is Mrs. Overholser's best student in both reading and math. Just like her pa. Ha!

Travel safely home to us, Del. Today, we are cutting a tree in the hills and will have it decorated by the time you arrive! This will be a most special Christmas!

Bless you, my husband. I and the children will be eagerly awaiting your return.

Your loving wife,
Annabelle-Day Clifton

“Who's that letter for?” asked Old Judith, staring over her glasses at her son, unmoved by the missive's sentiment. The fire popped behind her.

Yakima refolded the letter and slipped it back into its envelope. “The man who saved our hides.”

“I wasn't talkin' to you!” Old Judith cawed like an angry blackbird, pinching up her wizened face behind her reading glasses that had slipped lower on her nose. It was, in fact, the first time she'd addressed Yakima directly.

“Well, that's just too damn bad,” said Lewis, ignoring his mother. “So the Negro was goin' home for Christmas. Hell, I am home for Christmas.” He fumbled beneath the table and brought up his old Colt conversion revolver. As he slid his chair back and stood awkwardly, placing one hand on the table to steady himself, he ratcheted back the pistol's hammer. “And I'll be keepin' my cut of the gold. You can do with your share of it whatever the hell you wish.”

“There you go, boy!” said Old Judith, adjusting the wolf skin draped around her spindly shoulders. “I don't care who that money belonged to.” She balled up her tiny red fists. “It's here now, and here it will stay less'n someone wants to come fightin' for it!”

“Grandma,” Trudy said, eyes aghast, “it's Christmas!”

“It ain't Christmas yet.”

“Yeah, but those poor people.”

“They're black people,” Lewis said. “And they're used to doin' without. Just like this red nigger standin' here before me.” He wagged the pistol at Yakima. “You leave the gold there. Go on. Pull your picket pin. You done wore out your welcome here, dog-eater.” This last he bellowed, red-faced: “Saddle up and fog the damn sage!”

Yakima looked up from the dark maw of the old Colt shaking in Lewis's fist, to the man's beet red face, the nostrils of his long hawk's nose flaring, upper teeth showing through his snarl. Calmly, Yakima reached for the gold sack, untied the rawhide strings from the neck, and emptied his coffee cup onto the floor.

He stared hard at his former partner, not sure whether the man would shoot him or not, or, if he did squeeze the trigger, if the slug would land anywhere near him. With the way the half-breed's luck was holding, it would likely punch out his heart, but his hands remained steady as he poured the gold dust into his tin cup until the cup was filled to the brim. The granular flakes glistened in the lamplight.

He retied the neck of the sack. “That there is more than you deserve. Call it a Christmas present from Mrs. Clifton.”

“Don't you dare, goddamn you,” Lewis bit out as Yakima rose from the table and, feeling the muscles writhing like snakes beneath the skin of his back, turned to drop the gold into the saddlebags. He buckled the flap over the pouch, then donned his flat-brimmed, low-crowned black hat and his buckskin mackinaw. He draped the saddlebags over his shoulder, went to the door, and opened it.

“I'm warnin' you, goddamn your red hide!”

“Pa!” Trudy screamed.

The gun cracked, its explosion filling the room. Old Judith gave an exasperated bellow. Yakima looked over his shoulder at Trudy wrestling the smoking gun out of Lewis's gnarled hand. There was a hole in the middle of the table. Trudy gave another scream as she pulled the pistol out of the old man's hand, and Lewis cursed sharply as he fell over his chair. The chair slid out from beneath him, and he hit the floor with a loud thud and an angry wail.

“You're drunk, Pa!” Trudy stepped back away from her father, whom Yakima could no longer see from his vantage at the door. Voice shaking, Lewis's angry bellows dying gradually, she said, “You'll thank me in the mornin'.” She glanced at Yakima, her eyes cold and hard.

Yakima went out and drew the door closed behind him, standing there on the stoop for a moment, feeling a cold rock in the pit of his stomach.

* * *

Yakima saddled Wolf and rode out to an old, seldom-used line shack in the hills above the Shackleford ranch-stead. He wanted to ride farther, but it was a dark night. Wolf was tired from the earlier ride, and Yakima didn't want to risk injuring his prized stallion in the dark. Lewis wasn't worth it.

He wasn't worth the gold Yakima had given him, either, but it made him feel better to leave that filled cup behind as he lit out for Belle Fourche. At least, in the direction of Belle Fourche. He wasn't sure how long it would take him to reach the little town up northwest of Deadwood in the Dakota Territory. With winter coming on fast, which could mean snow at any time, the trip could take anywhere from several days to a week.

What the hell? He didn't exactly have anything else lined up, as he'd figured—foolishly, he realized now—on spending the winter on the Shackleford Ranch, breaking horses and trapping more as the weather permitted.

The small brush-roofed log line shack sat against the shoulder of a broad, low hill, with an escarpment rising off its eastern side. There was a dilapidated corral in front of it and a small stable and a corral in better condition attached to its west side. The half-breed was glad to see no lights in the windows, no smoke issuing from the rock chimney. There were no actual trails except wild-horse trails through this remote country, so he didn't doubt that he'd been the last visitor here.

He and the woman.

He tried to press her image to the back of his mind, still unsure she hadn't been a ghost that his own lonely, lusty imagination hadn't conjured, because she'd told him so little about herself, wanting to know nothing about him. They'd met by accident out here at the line shack, and one thing had led to another. Then they'd met here a few times before she'd said she wouldn't be back and simply ridden away. Toward a near ranch, he'd assumed.

Yakima rode up to the cabin and looked around, always cautious, always wary. Occasionally, he had men hunting him—bounty hunters paid by those who'd felt they had been wronged by him in one way or another, on his many wanderings throughout the frontier as he'd searched for something he hadn't yet found and doubted he ever would.

It was his old Shaolin monk friend, whom he'd called George because he hadn't been able to pronounce his Chinese name, who'd once told him while teaching him Eastern fighting techniques that we all searched in vain, because we'd long ago found what we were looking for—the secret was in knowing what that thing was.

“So, what is it, George?” he'd asked, incredulous.

“Oh, you are the only one who could answer that, my friend!” George had said, chuckling, drawing on his perpetual, crudely rolled cigarette and then taking a pull from his ever-present whiskey bottle.

Odd man, George. Yakima had understood only about one-quarter of the man's riddles, though he'd appreciated the way he'd taught him to fight and hone his senses to a razor's edge. He brought those senses into play now as he looked around and felt a prickling between his shoulders. Whatever he'd sensed, Wolf had sensed it, too. The stallion raised his head and nickered softly, pricking his ears.

Yakima curveted the horse to stare along his back trail, a faint, pale path dropping down the hill and disappearing in a crease between black granite dikes. A sickle moon had risen, limning the tops of the dikes with silver but also casting velvet shadows.

“What is it, boy?” Yakima said softly, holding the black's reins taut.

A wolf gave a mournful howl from one of those dikes. The horse jerked with a start at the sound of its ancient blood enemy. Yakima continued to sit the horse quietly, watching and listening, and when the horse's muscles relaxed beneath him, he assumed that what they'd both heard behind them was the prowling wolf and swung down from the leather.

He led the horse into the stable, went into the cabin to make sure he was alone, and lit a hurricane lamp. He tossed his gear on a bunk and went out, rubbed Wolf down carefully with a scrap of burlap to cool him down, then watered him from a rain barrel and draped a feed sack with a scoop of oats over his head. As the horse ate, Yakima went into the cabin. He had gotten a fire going with the kindling and split pine logs he'd left piled in a crate near the fireplace, and was leaning down over the small stone hearth to blow on the fledgling flames when a gun cracked in the distance.

The shot echoed and reechoed over the hills. In the stable, Wolf stomped and nickered.

Yakima blew out the lamp, grabbed his Yellowboy off the table, and went into the stable to calm the horse, who stared bright-eyed over the corral toward his and Yakima's back trail. Yakima stared in the same direction, cooing to the horse softly while patting Wolf's left front wither and gently racking a shell into the Winchester's breech with one hand.

“Easy, now, boy. Easy.”

He stepped away from the horse, knowing the well-trained mount would heed his admonition. As he ducked through the corral and into the yard in front of the cabin, another shot reverberated shrilly. There was no thud of a slug landing anywhere near the cabin. Yakima wasn't surprised. The shooter was too far away to be shooting at him.

But if not him, who?

He moved slowly out away from the cabin and sidestepped over to the escarpment rising just east of it. He followed the scarp down the gradual slope, heading in the direction from which he'd come, toward a dark gap between the slab-sided dikes.

When he came to the end of the gap, he ran on down the hill, crouching, holding the Yellowboy low so that the moonlight wouldn't reflect off its brass receiver. He paralleled the horse trail he'd followed here, staying wide of it, until he gained the bottom of the hill. The crease was tight here, and he had no choice but to follow the trail between the large, granite boulders pressing close on each side, spewed here eons ago by some volcano blowing its lid here between the Mummy and Snowy ranges.

Yakima had run several yards down the trail when another shot rocketed around him, much closer now, and a girl screamed.

Chapter 6

“Get her outta there, Colby,” a man said in the brush somewhere ahead of Yakima. “Get her the hell out of there!”

“I'm tryin'!” yelled another man.

The same voice shouted, “Get out here, you little bitch, or I'll shoot your damn ass off. And this time it'll be for real!”

Yakima had walked into a notch in the escarpment on the trail's north side, and now he hunkered down behind a fallen tree to see several shadows thrashing around in the brush before him. They were obviously searching for someone beyond them. Off to the left, several horses milled, nickering nervously.

“We just wanna know where the half-breed went, little girl,” one of the men said. “That's all we wanna know. You tell us that, and we'll let you go!”

“I don't know where he went!” came Trudy's high, angry-fearful scream. “I don't know where he went, I done told you. I'm just out here on the run from my drunken pa!”

“Bullshit!” retorted one of the men moving about thirty yards ahead of Yakima. “You left not ten minutes after the breed lit out, so we know you're after him. What we're thinkin' is, you see, is you and him got the gold!”

Yakima wished he could get a better fix on the three or four, possibly five men before him. It was too dark in this notch in the rocks and brush, and all he could see were the occasional flashes of moonlight off gun steel. Trudy must be holed up in a particularly thick snag, because it seemed her stalker had only a general idea about where she was.

“Got the gold and were plannin' on meetin' up someplace,” said another man off to Yakima's right.

A gun blasted, flames stabbing skyward. Yakima heard the screech of the ricochet off a rock somewhere high on the scarp. Trudy screamed again, and shouted, “Stop shootin' at me, goddamn your eyes. You got no right to be stalkin' a girl alone out here when she's tryin' to get away from her drunken old man!”

One of the men chuckled and said as though to one of the others: “She's got a point, boys. Maybe we oughta let her go.”

“
You
let her go, if you've a mind,” said another man. “The way I see it, it's too damn dark to track the breed, but I know this little Injun-lovin' whore knows where he's headed and that they planned to take all the gold fer themselves and meet up somewheres.”

“I got her!” one of the men shouted amidst a loud thrashing and crackling of brush.

Trudy cursed shrilly, and then all the shadows appeared to converge on a spot somewhere ahead and right of Yakima. The half-breed had waited long enough. He stepped forward, dropped to a knee beside an aspen, and said loudly, “Let her go. The jake you're after is right behind you.” He'd spoken softly but loudly enough to be heard above the thrashing in the brush ahead of him.

The thrashing stopped.

“Yakima!” Trudy cried.

Suddenly, the darkness in front of Yakima lit up like Saturday night in Sonora. He pulled his head back behind the tree, shouting above the thunder of what sounded like four pistols, “Trudy, get down flat and stay there!”

The slugs chewed bark from the far side of the tree. The flashes gave him a pretty good idea where each man was shooting from, so as soon as there was a lull in the fire, he stepped out from behind the tree and, hoping like hell that Trudy was following his orders, cut loose with the Yellowboy. He aimed as high as he could while still hoping to hit his targets. From the grunts and groans and clipped squeals as well the crackling of brush beneath falling bodies, he was doing all right.

He kept shooting until the Yellowboy's hammer pinged on an empty chamber. He ejected the last spent cartridge, heard it clatter into the brush behind him, then lowered the rifle and palmed his Colt, ratcheting the hammer back. One of the men was groaning. He heard another give a wheeze, and then there were the thuds of someone running off, stumbling through the brush to Yakima's left.

He dropped to a knee, aiming the pistol straight out in front of him, half expecting one of the shooters to fire another round at him. He had no way of knowing just how well his ploy had worked, though he suspected he'd given them all at least one pill they couldn't digest.

“Trudy?” he said.

“Uh-huh,” came the girl's thin reply.

“Follow my voice. Come to me, get around me fast. Don't dally.”

He heard her give a grunt and a groan and there was more crackling of brush as she gained her feet. A slender shadow moved before him, and then he saw her in her man's felt hat and torn, knee-length buckskin coat stumble toward him, breathing hard. She stopped beside him, turning toward her fallen stalkers, and then Yakima shoved her back behind him and opened up with the Colt until he'd fired four more shots. He heard Trudy leap back away from him with a gasp.

The echoes died. If the men he'd brought down had had any intention of getting up or of firing at him from cover of darkness, they didn't now.

As the pale powder smoke wafted in front of Yakima, a horse whinnied to his left. Running foot thuds rose. A man cursed, and the horse nickered. Yakima ran toward the man and the frightened horse, leaping deadfalls. He bulled through low branches and brush and when he came out the other side, horse and rider were bounding away from him, toward a charcoal gray escarpment wall.

Yakima raised the Colt and triggered the two remaining shots as horse and rider bolted around the wall and out of sight, one of Yakima's slugs slamming the wall with a shrill whine. Hearing the dwindling hoof thuds, Yakima turned and walked back to where Trudy stood in the darkness. He walked past her to stare down at the dark shapes of four fallen men, blood glistening in the starlight. None was moving.

“You know these bastards?” he asked Trudy, keeping his voice low in case any more stalkers lurked in the darkness.

“Never seen 'em before in my life,” she said, staying where she was. “They musta known about the gold. Seen you leavin' the ranch.”

“And figured I had it,” he said, half to himself, prodding a boot of one of the dead men with the toe of his moccasin.

The boot he prodded was a low-heeled cavalry boot with worn spurs. The man's pants were dark blue army-issue, though his coat was a brown-striped, cream-colored blanket coat, and his hat was a dirty Stetson. Yakima looked at the other men, finding nothing about them he recognized or that stood out.

Quickly, staring down at the dark shapes before him, he reloaded his Colt, wondering who these men were and how they'd known about the gold. Likely claim jumpers who had had their sights on Delbert Clifton for some time. They must have been trailing the man, intending to jump him for the gold before he reached Wolfville. Yakima and Lewis had spoiled their plans. He wished he could have taken one of them alive, but he hadn't wanted to risk getting Trudy shot.

He turned to her now as he clicked the Colt's loading gate closed and spun the cylinder before dropping the pistol into its holster and snapping the keeper thong over the hammer. “What're you doing out here?” he asked gruffly, walking toward her.

“Pa's goin' crazy,” she said, her voice quaking slightly as she continued staring toward the dead men. “You saw how he can get. When he gets like that, only Old Judith can handle him. I usually light out for the line shack. Figured on spending a couple nights there and ridin' back to the ranch after he had a chance to sober up and sweat it out.”

“Those fellas jumped you?”

She nodded. “They musta been trailin' you, and then I came along, and they got around me. Scared the pure hell out of me, too!”

“Yeah, well, it's that kind of night.”

“I didn't even know you were out here. You headin' for the line shack?”

Yakima picked up his rifle and began reloading it. “I reckon we had similar ideas.” When he'd loaded the Yellowboy, he set it on his shoulder, then turned and started walking back toward Wolf. “Come on, let's go find your horse. Gettin' cold.”

As he walked back through the brush, Trudy gave a groan behind him. He turned to her. She stood where she'd been standing, favoring one foot and wincing.

“I think . . . I think I twisted my ankle when I fell off my horse,” she said. “Would you mind giving me a hand?”

He walked to her and looked down at her right foot that she wasn't putting much weight on. “How bad is it?”

“Just twisted. It'll be all right in the mornin', I'm sure. I have thin ankles, and they twist easy. I've done it before.”

Yakima gave a sigh and handed her his rifle. “Take that.”

When she'd taken the Yellowboy, he leaned down and picked her up in his arms and carried her through the brush and back to the trail. His Winchester lay between them, the barrel angling up past her shoulder. “Sorry to be so much trouble,” she said as he began following the trail up through the crease toward the cabin.

“I reckon it's the gold that's the trouble. That much in one place is bound to be, and I'll be happy to be rid of it.”

“Are you really going to take it to Belle Fourche and give it to Mr. Clifton's family?”

“Look,” he said, breathing hard with the climb, “I ain't no angel, in case you haven't noticed the lack of wings and a halo. It's just that I've done enough bad things in my life that I reckon it's time to start makin' up for a few before I visit my maker. I can't stand the smell of butane.”

“And you think that's the right thing to do?”

“Don't you?”

“I reckon.” Trudy's breath came hard as she jounced in his arms, her own arms encircling his neck. He felt her sort of squirm against him as she said, “Seems like a lot to go through, though. For people you don't even know.”

“He went through a lot for me. And—”

“I know, I know. You got some makin' up to do.” Trudy paused. “I reckon we all do.”

“What would you have to make up for—a girl of your few years?”

“They ain't all that few. I'm almost nineteen, you know. When I dress up, Pa says I'm goin' on thirty.” She smiled.

“Yeah, well, still.”

“You can set me down and take a breather, if you want.”

“Don't need one.”

“Impressive.”

Yakima walked across the clearing and kicked the cabin door open. He paused just inside to let his eyes adjust to the darkness, then set her down in one of the two ladder-back chairs at the table.

“Foot feelin' any better?” he asked her.

“It's my ankle and no, not really,” she said, leaning back in the chair and lifting her right boot off the floor. “I think it's swelling a little.”

He set his rifle on the table. “I'll get the fire built back up and take a look at it.”

“You can look at pretty much anything I got,” she said.

Yakima looked back at her, startled. “Huh?”

She was looking at him with a lusty grin, cheeks dimpled. “You heard me.”

Yakima gave a wry chuff and then rebuilt the fire until the flames were leaping and dancing. “What would Old Judith say about that?”

“Old Judith ain't here.” She narrowed an eye at him as he knelt in front of her and set her right foot on his knee. “And you wouldn't be my first,” she added.

Yakima sighed, not liking the direction the conversation had taken. He was a red-blooded man, susceptible to the weaknesses of his ilk, and he didn't want the temptation. It was a cold, dark night, and they were alone here in the cabin in which he thought he could still hear the sighs and laughter of another woman he'd met here. In such a situation, a man could easily make the wrong decision.

“That hurt?” he said, gently moving her boot around.

She sucked a sharp breath through her teeth, scowling. “Yess!”

“Sorry.”

“You're gonna pay for that, mister!”

Yakima looked up at her. She was smiling down at him, her eyes sparking in the firelight.

* * *

Yakima dropped his bare feet to the floor. Trudy groaned and reached for him, but her fingers only lightly raked the back of his thick upper right arm as he rose from the cot and walked naked to the fireplace.

The fire had nearly gone out again while he'd allowed himself to be seduced—what the hell was he supposed to have done, when she'd practically thrown herself at him like that?—and now he built it back up with several split logs from the crate.

She stirred on the cot behind him. “Was I all right?”

On his knees in front of the fire, he peeled some damp bark off another log and glanced over his shoulder at her. She lay on her side, head propped on an elbow, the blanket pulled down to reveal her pale breasts sloping toward the cot.

“You were fine,” he said, irritated at himself now for indulging himself against his better judgment. Trouble was, he was used to taking comforts when and where he found them. While they were not necessarily few, they were sometimes far between.

She gave a caustic snort. “You sure know how to make a girl feel special, Yakima Henry.”

“Don't let it go to your head.” He used the last log to arrange the others so they'd burn long and hot, then went over to the table and dug his makings sack out of his saddlebags. He had only his own saddlebags now, and the gold was in the same pouch as the makings. He'd left Clifton's bags in the Shackleford barn. The bulge in the pouch was reassuring, but he'd be glad to be rid of it.

He stood at the table, the girl watching him, and rolled a rare smoke. He went back to the fire and used the burning end of a twig to light the quirley, then, puffing smoke, walked back over to the bed. He stood over Trudy, who quirked her mouth corners as she reached up and touched him.

“Take me with you.”

He glanced over his shoulder at the bulge in his saddlebag pouch, then shook his head. She wrapped her hand around him. His loins burned. He swatted her arm away, crawled under the covers, and leaned back against the wall at the head of the cot. She rested her head against his chest, left her warm hand on his thigh, and didn't say anything for a time before she said forlornly, “Come on. Let's get hitched. What the hell?”