Dead Man's Trail (9781101606957) (6 page)

“I did that once. Don't intend to do it again.”

“What happened?”

“Nothin' good.” He meant the end hadn't been good. In fact, it had been hell. But everything before that had been as close to bliss as any man ever had.

“Wouldn't have to be like that with us, Yakima.”

“No, I suppose it wouldn't. Not if we took the gold and headed—where? San Francisco?”

She moved her hand again. “Anywhere but here.”

“An eighteen-year-old white girl and a half-breed.” He chuckled wryly as he blew smoke over her head toward the snapping flames. “We might be a little conspicuous.”

“With the gold, we could buy us a nice big ranch. That's what we both know. Horses. We could build it somewhere no one would ever find us.”

“I did that before, too.”

“The horse ranch?”

“Yep.”

“Where?”

“Arizona. Take your hand away.”

She smiled and looked up at him. “You like my hand.”

Yakima held her gaze. “He wasn't really going crazy, was he? And you weren't really running away from him. You're just running away. Figured you'd find me and the gold here.”

She took her hand away, scowling. “Was I that bad?”

“No, you were a hell of a lot better than I expected. But that gold is going to Belle Fourche, and that's all there is to it.” He flicked the quirley stub into the fire, where it bounced off a log and dropped in front of it with a dull thump. It quickly became a burning worm.

“You go to hell.” With a haughty chuff, she turned away from him, curling into a ball.

“Been there.” Yakima paused, staring at the ceiling. “And that pistol you got ain't loaded.”

Her voice was muffled. “What pistol?”

“The Colt you took out of my holster when I banked the fire. I unloaded it in case you weren't happy with how things went tonight.”

She didn't say anything. Then she rolled toward him, bounded up quickly, and swung the Colt at him butt first. Yakima threw up his right hand, grabbed her fist. He pulled her across him. She snarled like a wildcat, kicking, until he jerked the gun out of her fist and returned it to its holster hanging from the near bedpost.

“Bastard!”
she squealed.

Then she flopped back down, gave him her back, and sobbed herself to sleep.

Chapter 7

Lee Mendenhour rolled off his wife.

Glendolene closed her legs, pushed her nightgown down around her thighs, drew her knees toward her belly, and turned onto her side. Lee dropped his long legs over the side of the bed, ran his hands through his thick, wavy auburn hair, and glanced over his shoulder at her.

“You might have at least feigned a little pleasure from that.”

“I could say the same thing to you.” She drew a ragged breath. “Maybe you got all the pleasure you needed over at the Silk Slipper last night.”

He scowled though the nubs of his handsomely sculpted cheeks flushed slightly beneath his brown eyes. “Don't be ridiculous. I don't partake of what the females are selling. I play cards and I drink. I socialize with my friends. That's all.”

She wondered if he was telling the truth. Funny how she'd never wondered about that before. They were drifting apart, so that neither could really tell what the other was thinking. At least, she couldn't tell what he was thinking. Maybe it was because she didn't care anymore.

After only three years of marriage?

Guilt was a bone in the pit of her stomach. He'd given her so much—wealth, a sprawling Victorian-style house, several servants who helped her tend the place and the large irrigated garden behind it. Her aunt and uncle had a story-and-a-half shack a couple of miles outside Belle Fourche, and they'd been married—happily, as far as she could tell—for over fifty years.

She'd fallen in love with the Lee Mendenhour she'd met in Council Bluffs four years ago—the precocious, somewhat freewheeling, and romantic young man reading for the law in Iowa, where she'd been attending a teacher's college. They'd met at church, and he'd visited her at her boardinghouse bearing flowers he'd picked along the river; they'd picnicked on weekend afternoons in the country, sharing their life's stories, their dreams.

He'd wanted to be a lawyer—a prosecuting attorney—and eventually a judge. He'd wanted to bring law and order to the lawless land he'd grown up in. The land in which his mother had been killed by a stray bullet fired by rustlers stealing horses from the Chain Link corral.

Glendolene had wanted to be a teacher, but she'd fallen in love with the dashing young Westerner, and his dream had seemed more important than hers. So she'd come to Wyoming with him, where they'd been married in the house Lee had grown up in as an only child. Those first few weeks, his father, Wild Bill, had openly scrutinized her as though she were a mare bought for one of his Morgan steeds.

She'd never measured up for Wild Bill. She'd once heard the gruff, bandy-legged old man telling his son that she was too pretty, her hips not stout enough. She didn't have the sand it took to raise tough sons out here.

“Oh, well,” he'd muttered. “The first flu of next winter will likely take her.”

She stared at her husband's bare back now as he walked over to the window and, crouching, slid the curtain aside with the back of his hand. Gray morning light washed into the room, silhouetting Lee against it. She watched his profile as he stared across the street. She'd once known him to smile more, but he was smiling less and less these days, and his sense of humor had all but vanished. That had been replaced by a steely, self-satisfied, often overbearing determination coupled with an acerbic glint in his brown eyes. Which was why she was taken aback by the expression she now saw in his eyes—or thought she saw:

Fear?

“What is it?” she said, sitting up in bed. “Don't tell me they've hanged another of Neumiller's deputies!”

He glanced at her sharply, embarrassed. He let the curtain drop back into place and reached for the pitcher on the marble-topped washstand. “Of course not,” he said with what she perceived to be a feigned casual air. “And who do you mean by ‘they'?”

He poured water into the washbasin and reached for a washcloth and soap cake.

So he is afraid. . . .
The revelation startled her. She'd never seen that before in him. It would have been endearing, had he not tried to hide it so well, had he allowed it to become a bridge between them.

Glendolene sank back against her pillows, crossing her arms on her breasts over the sheet and quilt. “Who else would have done such a thing?”

“Oh, you think Floyd Betajack slipped into town, cut his son down, and hanged Harrison?” Lee chuckled as he scrubbed his face with the soapy cloth.

“Don't you?”

“Betajack doesn't have that much imagination. Or, forgive my language, balls.”

“Who does have that much balls?”

Lee gave her a quick look of reprimand. He hated when her language verged on risqué, as though he thought she might carry it over into dinner parties with his respectable associates. “My guess is some man or men around town had a bone to pick with Harrison and took advantage of this whole affair with Betajack to shoot him and hang him. Neumiller is probably right now going over the list of men he's had in jail over the past couple of months.”

He lifted his head to scrub his long neck. “Former prisoners or friends of former prisoners, most likely. Maybe friends or kin of one of the other rustlers we've hanged in recent weeks. I'm not worried about it.”

“Don't you think you should be? You would have had a hand in those killings.”

“Killings?” Lee turned to her, scowling again with his particular brand of haughty disapproval that made her recoil like a sensitive child. “Good Lord, Glen. That isn't what you think I'm doing, is it?
Killing men?
Dear, I am
executing
convicted stock thieves and killers.”

She drew another ragged breath, not wanting to get into an argument, because she knew she couldn't win but only be made to feel smaller in his eyes than she already was. Still, she couldn't help saying, softly, “I guess it depends on what you'd like to call it, doesn't it?”

“Of course it doesn't!”

“All right, Lee.”

He walked over to the bed and sat down on the edge of it, half turned toward her. “Bringing law and order to this chunk of Wyoming is what I intended to do, Glen. And that means hanging killers and stock thieves. I'm sorry if it seems savage to you, but sometimes savagery is the sword that is needed to bring savagery to ground.”

“You don't think savagery begets savagery?”

“No, I don't.” Lee shook his head vehemently, drilling her with those assured, wide, dark eyes, his brown, carefully trimmed mustache and beard set against the ruddiness of his otherwise long, narrow, young-looking face. “Crime is down in Wolfville, as well in the country surrounding it. True, Claw Hendricks is still running wild south of here, with his ragtag band of renegade Utes and Arapahos, but he's mostly wreaking his havoc on the mining camps in Colorado. He rarely ventures into Wyoming,” Lee added with a shrewd, self-satisfied smile, “because he knows if he does, I'll bring hell down on him. Neumiller doesn't have enough men to bring the gang in, but after Christmas I intend to bring in U.S. marshals and the military to run a dragnet through the Mummies.”

Lee rose and walked back to the washstand, where he resumed his sponge bath. “By Easter, we will be hearing no more of Claw Hendricks and his wild savages.”

As it usually did after one of their discussions, confusion rippled over her, and she found herself once again feeling as though she didn't understand life's harsh realities. And that she'd been spoiled by the life this ambitious young man had given her.

“I do apologize, Lee,” she said with a weary sigh as, finished washing, he was now methodically dressing. “I shouldn't be talking about things that I don't really understand.”

He looked at her as he sat down in a chair to pull on his black wool socks over his wool long handles, and offered a charitable smile. “You never need apologize to me, Glen. It's your provincial innocence that has always drawn me to you.”

“Perhaps, Lee,” she said, pausing to choose her words more carefully. “Perhaps . . . I should go on alone to Belle Fourche.” Before he could object again, as he did the first time she'd mentioned it, she said, “I do hate to take you away from your duties here in Wolfville, and I just know how absolutely bored you're going to be at my aunt and uncle's place. It's a very small farm, Lee—it's not a ranch. I don't think there's a horse on the place. Just a few cows and plow mules!”

Guilt for her disingenuousness added to the flux of emotions within her. The truth was, she wanted some time away from the man. To think about their future. To decide if there
would be
a future. She glanced down at the sheet and quilt covering her belly.

She needed time, as well, to consider the child she was carrying inside her. She'd been convinced that she was barren but after three years was finally pregnant. . . .

“Nonsense, Glen,” he said, standing up and pulling on his shirt. “I'd have to be half savage myself to let you board that stage alone. The country north of here is still riddled with outlaws and Indians of the same caliber as Betajack and Hendricks. The travel will be good for me. I need some time away. I've brought plenty of papers to keep me busy, and I have those letters to the army and the U.S. marshal's office to draft. Besides”—he smiled at her as he stepped into his steel gray wool trousers—“it's Christmas.”

She formed a smile as manufactured as his own. She wasn't thinking about Christmas, or about him, but about another man—a red-skinned man with a tangle of long night black hair, large gentle hands, and jade eyes—the memory of whom she hoped to sort through and resolve, along with all her other problems, on her trip to Belle Fourche.

Someone rapped loudly on the door. Glen gasped. Lee jerked with a start, fumbled a pearl-gripped derringer off the dresser, and aimed it awkwardly at the door.

“Mr. Mendenhour?” It was Luther Morning Lake's deep, flat voice.

Lee relaxed, flushed with embarrassment, as he glanced at the derringer in his hand. “Yes, what is it, Luther?”

“The stage for Belle Fourche'll be pullin' out in forty-five minutes.”

“Thank you, Luther.”

Lee sighed and set the derringer on the dresser. He glanced at Glendolene, who studied him curiously, feeling all the other feelings she'd felt that morning giving ground to a rising apprehension.

“Well, you heard the man, dear,” Lee said, turning away as he knotted his four-in-hand tie around his neck. “The stage will be leaving soon. You'd best get dressed, don't you think?”

Chapter 8

If he wasn't being followed, he wasn't a half-breed son of a bitch.

Yakima stopped Wolf at the top of a low rise between two rimrocks, and, staring along his back trail from beneath the brim of his flat-crowned hat, he reached into his saddlebags and pulled out his brass-chased spyglass. He raised the glass and telescoped and adjusted it, bringing up the trail he'd been following along the meandering bed of Snake Creek, dry this time of the year.

A fine snow falling out of a high gray sky dusted its rocky banks. Despite the weather, Yakima could see fairly clearly for almost a mile down the canyon the stream had cut, and if someone was shadowing him, they'd slipped behind cover.

Maybe he was wrong. But he'd been on the run often enough—hell, half his life—to have developed a sixth sense, an instinct for knowing when someone was tracking him. It was really little more than a tightening of the muscles between his shoulders, but that tightening had saved his life enough times that he'd come to abide by it.

“You're out there, aren't you?” he said to himself, lowering the glass and ramming it against his open palm to close it. “But who are you?”

He had a pretty good idea. The hombre he'd left alive last night after that man and his three fellow brush riders had jumped Trudy. Again, he considered whether they were part of Claw Hendricks's bunch, and nixed the idea. They hadn't been well enough armed, and if Hendricks's men had wanted revenge for what Yakima, Lewis, and Delbert Clifton had done—leaving a good eight or nine in bloody piles at the base of the ridge from which Clifton had fired his Big Fifty—they'd have found a more efficient way of doing it.

The men who'd jumped Trudy were part of another group. Or maybe they were their own group. A motley crew of common mine thieves, most likely, who'd been tracking Clifton with the intention of jumping him and taking his gold. The man behind him now was likely the survivor, too stubborn to leave the gold well enough alone.

Yakima would have to expend a bullet on him.

That was all right. He intended to lay in some more—along with other trail supplies—in Wolfville. It would be a long pull to Belle Fourche, northeast of Wolfville in the Dakota Territory, and he'd need plenty of everything including oats for Wolf.

He dropped the spyglass back into the saddlebag, swung up into the leather, and put the black stallion up and over the ridge, heading northeast through low dun hills stippled with piñons. Lines of wolf willows followed slender watercourses. When the clouds parted and the sun shone, the Snowy Range loomed straight ahead of him, west of Wolfville—lime green and brown mounds with ragged crests mantled in white.

He'd ridden another mile when Wolf's right front knee buckled slightly, and Yakima saw one of the stallion's shoes roll out away from the mount and clank against a rock. With a curse, he swung down from the saddle and replaced the shoe temporarily with a couple of nails he found in his saddlebags, hammering them back into the hoof with his pistol butt. The remedy wouldn't last, however. He'd have to have a new shoe forged in Wolfville, before lighting out on the trail to Belle Fourche.

He looked around. The sky was lightening in both the east and the west. It looked as if the good weather was holding. He hoped it held for a few more days. He wanted to get to Belle Fourche as fast as possible and then head back south before true winter set in. Since he no longer had a reason to stay north, he'd get as far south as possible. He'd winter in New Mexico, maybe Texas. It was a hard time of the year to find ranch work, but he'd have to find work of some kind to feed himself and his horse, then maybe head north again come spring.

Almost as bad as the northern cold and snow was the southwestern summer heat and sun.

Keeping a sharp eye on his back trail, he walked Wolf ahead and entered Wolfville an hour later. It was midmorning, and the sun bathed the motley-looking town and the smoke issuing from stone chimneys and stovepipes. He was just pulling over toward the Bart English Livery & Feed Barn, knowing that Bart English was also a blacksmith, when a red-and-gold Concord coach pulled away from the Wells Fargo office on the street's opposite side. A face appeared in one of the stage windows.

Yakima glanced at it once, turned away, then looked at it again, frowning. It was a pretty face beneath a woman's black fur hat. The woman's brown hair spilled over her shoulders. He was too far away to see her clearly, for him to be sure of who she was, and then she abruptly turned away from him and jerked back in her seat, facing forward, as the six-hitch team lunged into a thundering gallop, the middle-aged, bearded jehu in a long muskrat coat whom Yakima recognized as Charlie Adlard standing up in the driver's box and yelling and cracking his blacksnake over the horses' backs.

Yakima stared after the coach, jade eyes riveted on the rear luggage boot until the coach turned onto a left fork in the main street, which became a trail at the edge of town, and disappeared, the creaking and clattering of the stage wheels and the thunder of the team's hooves dwindling quickly.

Dust sifted. A collie dog sniffed the recently gouged furrows in the well-churned dust of the street and then got distracted by a cat poking its head out of an alley mouth and gave chase.

“Bad damn luck.” This from Bart English himself, who stood with his big fists on his hips as he stared after the coach. He was a large man—taller than Yakima by a good three inches—with long, frizzy gray hair tumbling down from his shabby bowler hat, and wearing a long leather apron.

“What's bad damn luck?”

“Startin' out with a cracked felloe,” English said, still staring after the coach. “That's bad damn luck, startin' a run that way. They had to limp back so's I could fix it. That means two more bad things is gonna happen before they make their destination.”

Yakima continued staring northeast, as did the blacksmith. He'd only half heard what the man had said. He was thinking about the face he'd seen in the window, wondering if it had been her, whoever the hell she was. She'd insisted they not exchange names, though they'd exchanged everything else a man and a woman possibly could in the line shack he'd shared last night with Trudy.

“Ah, hell!”

Yakima looked at Bart English. The man was scowling at him, big fists still on his hips.

“What?” Yakima said.

“Not
you
!”

“Why the hell
not
me?”

“Yakima, goddamn it, I was in the Longhorn the night Neumiller and his deputies threw you out. They rode you of town and told you not to come back or they'd throw your half-breed ass in the hoosegow and mail the key to God!”

Yakima raised his hands palm out. “That was a simple misunderstanding. Your Mr. Andrews said I was cheatin' because he didn't want to pay up the money I'd won that night playin' cards. Well, I was drinking the devil's nectar that night—and of course that part is
my
fault. I know better than to do that, especially when there's pretty women and dishonest mucky-mucks hovering around—and I took offense at the man's demeanor, not to mention him callin' me a cheater. And then when he started wagging that little popper around in my face . . . Say, did they ever get that derringer dug out of his nose?”

“They did, but it took some doin',” the blacksmith said, unable to choke back a delighted chuckle. “Took the doc and his wife and a Chinese assistant to dig his nose out of his cheek and sew it back together. The whole town heard Andrews's howls till pret' near dawn, and the doc says that nose will always be about the size of a wheel hub.”

“At least they got the gun out of it. Nice little popper.”

The blacksmith wiped the grin off his broad, bearded face and scowled up at the half-breed. “Damn it, Yakima, Andrews runs the Big Horn County Bank, and he's got more friends than the whores over at the Silk Slipper. Sheriff Neumiller is one of 'em. Now, you'd best head back out to Shackleford's ranch an' stay there.”

“Me and Shackleford ain't friends no more.”

“Oh, boy.”

Yakima swung down from his saddle, tossed his reins to the blacksmith, and grabbed his saddlebags. “Wolf here needs a new front shoe. Forge me one, will you, Bart, while I head over to the general store and lay in some trail supplies?”

“Yakima, if Neumiller sees you—!”

“Check the other shoes, too, Bart.” Yakima hitched his shell belt higher on his lean hips as he strode toward the mercantile. “Got a few days' travel ahead.”

The blacksmith grunted his disapproval as Yakima continued across the side street. He mounted the wooden steps rising to the mercantile's porch and paused to glance once more toward the northeast, where the stage was just now climbing the shoulder of a bluff. White smoke drifting from a near chimney slightly obscured it. It was about the size of his thumbnail from this distance, the brown team pulling the red-and-gold stage that shone in the weak morning sunlight. Distantly, Yakima heard the snaps of the blacksnake poppers as the jehu flicked the whip over the team's back.

He felt the urge to inquire about her, to at least find out her name. But he wouldn't. A half-breed—especially one who'd been shepherded out of town by the local law—could only cause folks to question her reputation. The only ranch within twenty miles of the line shack, however, was the Chain Link owned by Wild Bill Mendenhour and his son, whose name Yakima couldn't remember. She was likely from there.

No point in thinking about her anymore. The reason they'd had such a good time together was that they hadn't known anything about each other, and that's the way it would stay. He'd likely never see her again, but he'd keep her memory in a quiet corner of his mind for revisiting on lonely nights stitched with distant wolf howls and the crackling of his coffee fire.

He mounted the porch and walked into the mercantile, causing the bell over the door to rattle. “Shit, what the hell are you doin' back here, Yakima?” said the mercantiler, Curt Findlay. “I done thought—”

“Yeah, I know, you thought I was run out of town on a rail. But I'm back for trail supplies. I'm hopin' I can sneak in and out without Neumiller gettin' his back up, so the faster you can fill this order for me . . .” Yakima walked to the back of the shop, where Findlay was arranging canned goods on a high shelf with a long pole that bore a hook and a steel hand on the end of it, and set his order on the counter, beside a large glass pickle jar filled with rock candy. Beside the list scribbled on lined note paper, he set his saddlebags.

“Neumiller's gonna boil over like an old black pot if he sees me doin' business with you,” Findlay said, scowling over the counter as he set down his pole. He was stocky, with a big gut pushing out his apron, and his face was as pockmarked as a coffee can used for target practice.

“Come on,” Yakima said. “Where the hell am I supposed to get supplies? I just rode in to do a little business. I'll be ridin' out again in twenty minutes.”

“Where you headin'?”

“North.”

“Why?”

“Why the hell are you askin'?”

“Because I'm curious—that's why,” the mercantiler said, picking up the grocery list and smoothing it against his bulbous, rock-hard gut. “And because I don't have to do business with you, Henry!”

“Belle Fourche.”

“No shit?” said Findlay, studying the list. “That's where the stage is headed. Damn near the end of the line. It'll return once more, and then that's the end of stage travel in these parts for the season.”

As he started shuffling around the store, filling the order, Yakima almost asked him about the woman but caught himself. He spent the next ten minutes, while Findlay stuffed the possibles into his saddlebag pouches, sucking on a chunk of rock candy and otherwise keeping his mouth shut. When the order was filled, he paid the man, draped the saddlebags over his shoulder, pinched his hat brim, and walked out.

He was halfway across the side street, heading for the blacksmith shop from which the clangs of English's hammer rose sharply, when he spied movement across the main street on his right and ahead about forty yards. A wiry little man with a long, hawkish nose under a floppy canvas hat brim was hurrying along the boardwalk toward Yakima, who cursed. Lewis! Behind his former partner was none other than Sheriff Neumiller in his brown suit and bowler hat and with his sheriff's badge pinned to his left lapel, twin Colts tied low on his thighs.

“There he is!” Lewis shouted, pointing. “There he is right now. I told you I followed him to town! Arrest the half-breed son of a bitch, Sheriff!”

Lewis hung back as Neumiller left the boardwalk and walked toward Yakima, canting his head to one side, his handlebar mustaches blowing in the chill morning breeze. Both hands were touching the walnut grips of his Colts.

“
Arrest
me?” Yakima said. “On what charge?”

Neumiller stopped a few feet away from Yakima, the sheriff's brown eyes hard, his pale, freckled face set in a scowl. He jerked a thumb toward Lewis remaining safely behind a hitch rack near the boardwalk on the far side of the street. “This man says you stole a cache of gold from him and raped his daughter.”