Dead Man's Trail (9781101606957) (7 page)

Chapter 9

“He does, does he?” Yakima glared at Lewis standing behind the hitch rack, grinning.

Sheriff Neumiller said tautly, “You'd best ease those saddlebags to the ground, Henry. And I'll be taking the six-shooter.” Keeping one hand on one of his own Colts, he extended his hand toward Yakima, palm up. “Nice an' slow.”

“I didn't rape his daughter, Neumiller. In fact, it was closer to the other way around.”

“That's a damn lie an' he knows it!” Lewis yelled, pointing a long, crooked finger. “My Trudy wouldn't lie with no Injun!”

Yakima kept his narrowed eye on the sheriff. “And the gold in these saddlebags doesn't belong to either one of us—Lewis
or
me. And I'll be damned if I'm gonna turn it over to you to give to
him.
”

“I'll be damned if you're
not.
” Neumiller glanced over Yakima's shoulder. There was the quick, loud, metallic rasp of a cartridge being levered into a rifle breech.

Yakima glanced behind him. One of Neumiller's four deputies stood crouched behind a hitch rack off the near front corner of the mercantile, aiming down the Winchester he had propped over the rack's crossbar.

Yakima turned forward and saw two more deputies taking up positions on either side of the street, the one on the left with a rifle, the one on the right holding a double-barreled shotgun in his crossed arms and grinning. The one on the left, standing in front of the Wolfville Drug Emporium, loudly cocked his rifle and aimed with squint-eyed menace from behind the rear wheel of a parked stylish black buggy.

A young woman wearing a cream rabbit hat, from which blond sausage curls dangled toward her slender shoulders, stood in the drugstore's open door behind the deputy, staring wide-eyed. An older woman drew the young one back inside the drugstore and slammed the door. A C
LOSED
sign jounced in the door's curtained windowpane.

The deputy standing behind the buggy wheel grinned, his sandy mustache pushing up hard against his broad, sunburned nose. “Let me drop the hammer on him, Sheriff. We got no time for muckin' around with this half-breed.”

Behind Yakima, the second deputy piped up with “We escorted him out of town once, Sheriff. I see no reason to do it a second time. 'Specially if he soiled a white girl.”

“Shut up—all of you,” Neumiller drawled. “The judge'll decide the half-breed's fate. I hate to spend the money feedin' you, Henry, but I'm gonna have to jail you till the circuit judge rides through again in two, three weeks. Now, with two slow fingers, slide that pistol out of your holster and set it gently in my hand.” He gave a foxy smile.

Yakima glanced once more at Lewis smiling jeeringly behind the hitch rack, then let the saddlebags drop to the ground. Dust blew up around them. He unsnapped the keeper thong from over his Colt's hammer and, using two fingers, pulled it out of the holster and dropped it into the sheriff's hand.

The sheriff stepped back, and, aiming Yakima's own gun at him, canted his head toward the sheriff's stone office building standing a half block up the street on the right. “Move.”

As Yakima started walking up the street, Lewis ducked under the hitch rack and ran toward the saddlebags. Neumiller placed an open hand on Lewis's chest. “Leave it, Shackleford. Judge Vining will decide what happened to your daughter, and he'll decide the fate of the gold, as well.”

As Lewis scowled his disappointment, Neumiller looked at the deputy now walking up from the mercantile. “Larry, bring the bags to my office.”

“You got it, Sheriff.”

As Neumiller fell into step behind Yakima, Lewis ran hop-skipping up to the sheriff and said, “That gold's mine, Sheriff. I think I oughta be able to take it back to my ranch with me right now. Why, it's my word against a damn dog-eater's!”

“Forget it,” Neumiller said.

“Nice try, Lewis,” Yakima said. “You lyin' son of a bitch.” To the sheriff, he said, “There's a letter in them bags along with the gold that'll help prove who that gold belongs to, Neumiller.”

“That's
Sheriff
Neumiller to you, breed!” the man said, stepping in front of Yakima to open the door of his office. “And I'll give the judge both the gold and the letter, and he'll decide. Now get in there and shut up.” He slanted a cautious eye around the street. “I've got bigger fish to fry than you and Shackleford's fallin'-out.”

The man's wariness made Yakima wonder what that was. As he stepped through the open door, he cast his own cautious glance toward the other side of the street.

“Move!” Neumiller said, ramming a fist against his back and sending the half-breed stumbling into the small office lit by a potbellied stove in the middle of the room. Yakima ground his teeth against his rage. It took a powerful act of will to keep from swinging around and smashing his right heel against the man's face. He knew he could do it. And he could likely take the three deputies just now moving toward the office, too, before they even knew what had happened to their boss.

On the other hand, the one carrying the gut shredder looked as though he enjoyed using it. . . .

His name was Hannibal Howe, and he stood filling up the doorway with that shotgun in the crook of his arm. Neumiller grabbed a ring of keys off a roof support post near the smoking woodstove and opened the middle of the three cells lined up along the building's rear wall. He stepped aside, waved Yakima in, then closed the door and turned the key in the lock.

Yakima glanced behind him to see Lewis standing outside on the rotted boardwalk fronting the place, staring through the window over the sheriff's cluttered rolltop desk. Another deputy was walking toward the office behind Lewis, holding his Winchester on one shoulder and puffing a long cheroot while flicking lint or maybe tobacco flecks off the front of his black frock coat.

As Neumiller glared through the bars at Yakima, he said, “Make yourself at home, Henry. You'll be here awhile, I 'spect.”

Yakima looked behind him once more in time to see the deputy walking toward Lewis stumble forward. At least, Yakima thought the man had stumbled forward. But he didn't catch himself, and at the same time that his knees hit the ground, there was a loud
crack
from the far side of the street.

Yakima lifted his gaze to see a man with a rifle hunkered atop the harness shop, smoke wafting around his Winchester's barrel as he pumped another shell into the chamber. Lewis turned around quickly, as did Neumiller, yelling,
“What . . . ?”

There was a
plink
as a bullet hammered the window. Neumiller screamed and flew back against Yakima's cell. He caromed off the doors and dropped to the floor a few feet in front of it, grunting and groaning and clutching his upper right chest from which blood oozed thickly. Outside, several rifles were popping and men were shouting and screaming.

Another deputy ran toward the jailhouse's open door, twisting around to trigger his rifle. He was only six feet from the door when one slug punched through his chest at the same time another hammered the side of his head.

Blood flew as he rose off his feet and, dropping his rifle, piled up, quivering, on the boardwalk fronting the open door with a heavy thud of breaking bones and cracking wood. Hannibal Howe had turned around with his gut shredder, facing the street and shouting,
“Where are they, goddamn it. Where—?”

More rifles thundered.

Howe was blown into the office near Neumiller with two gushing holes in his chest. He tried to sit up, but another shot blew off the top of his head. He tossed the shotgun to his left and it piled up against the wall in front of the door.

There were several more shots as Yakima, crouching and gripping the bars of the locked door in front of him, stared in disbelief out the open door and the broken window, unable to see much more now than wafting powder smoke. He looked down at Neumiller, who lay flat on his back about three feet in front of Yakima's cell.

The man was pale, breathing hard, lifting his hatless head to stare out the door. Yakima's pistol lay around the man's boots, near the ring of keys.

Hearing foot thuds and men's voices growing louder outside, Yakima dropped to his knees and stuck his arm through the cell door, trying to stretch his hand out for the key ring. No good. He was several feet short.

“Neumiller,” Yakima said. “Toss me them keys.”

The man merely grunted as blood continued to pump out of his chest. He laid his head back against the floor and stared up at the ceiling.

“Neumiller,” Yakima said again, more insistently, “hand me the damn keys!”

Neumiller shook his head slightly, though Yakima couldn't tell if it was in response to his demand or a death spasm. His chest continued to rise and fall sharply.

Yakima looked out the door, glimpsed a man walking toward the jailhouse holding a Winchester on his hip, a tan duster buffeting about his buckskin-clad legs. Meanwhile, a girl was screaming shrilly on the other side of the street. A couple of men in dusters were hauling a kicking and screaming girl into the drugstore while another woman screamed inside the place. There were hoof thuds as horses approached the jailhouse, and through the broken window, from his kneeling position, the half-breed saw several bouncing, hatted heads of oncoming riders.

A cold stone was growing colder in the pit of his gut. This wasn't how he wanted to die—unarmed in a cage.

He reached for the pistol protruding from Neumiller's right holster, but he could get his hand to within only three inches of the walnut grips, and that was with nearly ripping his shoulder from its socket. Outside, horses blew and stomped. Spurs
chinged
.

A figure appeared in the doorway—a big man in a black opera hat and rose-colored glasses. He had a thick cinnamon beard, and he wore a long hair-on-horsehide coat over soiled fringed buckskins. A fat stogie poked out one corner of his mouth. Around his neck he wore a pouch—either a medicine pouch or a tobacco sack. As he stared at Yakima, the half-breed pulled his hand back into the bars and straightened slowly, holding the man's gaze—or what he thought was his gaze, because he couldn't see the man's eyes through the rose-colored spectacles.

From descriptions he'd heard, however, he knew he was looking at Claw Hendricks. The recognition was like an additional cold stone dropping into place in his belly beside the first one.

What in hell was Claw Hendricks, an outlaw leader as notorious as Wyoming Joe Two Wolves, doing this far east?

He'd thought the man restricted his gang to regions farther west and north, in the no-man's-land around the Wind River Mountains, where he hid out from the army and the U.S. marshals.

As Hendricks stepped inside slowly, dipping his chin to look at Neumiller grunting and groaning and breathing hard on the jailhouse floor, another man walked in behind Hendricks. This was an older, gray-haired man with a paunch pushing out a gray wool vest. He wore striped wool trousers and a quilted elk-hide mackinaw over the vest and work shirt, the heavy coat unbuttoned. A red scarf encircled his neck. He had two pistols positioned for the cross draw on his hips, behind the flaps of his open coat. Two bowie knives rode in leather sheaths across his chest.

When he looked at Yakima, his eyes were flat and colorless. His broad face was pasty pale and framed by roached gray muttonchops. He filled the room with a sickly sweet body odor.

Hendricks said nothing as he stepped over Neumiller's feet. He removed his opera hat to brush broken glass off Neumiller's swivel chair, and then he donned the hat again, positioning it carefully, and sagged into the chair, which squawked and groaned beneath his weight. He turned to face the room.

The second, older gent walked into the room and stared down at Neumiller while a third person stepped into the doorway behind him. This was a young, coyote-faced blond man wearing a long wolf-fur coat, the hem of which dangled around his high-topped black boots. There was a wildness about the kid—in his tangled blond hair, in his quick blue eyes and the way he cocked one foot forward and, glancing at Yakima, drew the wolf coat back behind a Schofield pistol positioned for the cross draw on his left hip, behind a sheathed ivory-gripped Green River knife.

Between his thin pink lips, a corn-husk cigarette jutted, and he squinted his blue eyes as he took in the room through the smoke wafting around his head.

“There he is,” the kid said, looking around the older man at Neumiller. “Look at him—looks like a landed fish!” He laughed, showing small brown teeth between his lips from which the quirley bobbed and smoldered. He drew on it, showing a missing eyetooth, and let the smoke dribble out his nostrils.

“Where's the county's fearless prosecutor, Neumiller?” he asked, hardening his voice and scowling down at the sheriff.

The old man said, “Shut up, Sonny!” Then he stared down at Neumiller writhing before him, and said, “Where's Mendenhour? We done checked the hotel, and he ain't in his room there and we couldn't get nothin' out of Humphries. When he seen us walk in, he pissed down his leg and passed out behind his desk.”

The old man's nostrils flared disdainfully.

The old man dropped to one knee and grabbed Neumiller by his coat lapels and raised his head brusquely up off the floor. “Where is he, Sheriff? Where's Mendenhour? I wanna see the man who convinced the judge to hang my boy! Now, where is he, goddamn your mangy, rotten hide?”

Yakima stared down in shock at the old man. He let his eyes flick across the almost feminine-looking young man, feral as a wolf pup, then over to Claw Hendricks sitting back in the sheriff's chair and grinning maliciously behind those rose-colored glasses. Yakima vaguely wondered, as he felt the sand quickly pouring through his hourglass—certainly they wouldn't leave a witness alive—how Neumiller and Mendenhour had gotten themselves in such a whipsaw.