Dead Man's Trail (9781101606957) (9 page)

Chapter 12

Yakima jerked sharply back on Wolf's reins. As the horse ground its front hooves into the turf with an indignant whinny, the half-breed shucked his Winchester from his saddle boot and leaped out of the leather.

Ahead of him, rifles cracked and pistols popped as a pack of Floyd Betajack's and Claw Hendricks's killers whooped and hollered, galloping toward the stage. The coach was stopped along the trail ahead and left of Yakima, about thirty yards away. The killers were on his right, galloping toward him and the stage. Both parties were below his perch on the shoulder of a steep bluff.

Half an hour before, he'd been surprised to see the gang ahead instead of behind him. Apparently, they'd done fast work at the whorehouse and then taken a shortcut through rough country to work ahead of Yakima, getting between him and the stage. Soon after he'd seen them, he'd done his own working around. Now he dropped behind a boulder along the side of the bluff and planted a bead on one of the three riders racing toward the stage, expertly firing their rifles while at the same time steering their horses.

Yakima squeezed the Yellowboy's trigger. The rifle leaped and roared. The middle rider released his reins and his rifle at the same time and rolled off the back of his striding cream stallion.

Again, Yakima fired and watched in satisfaction as the second of the three lead riders lurched sharply sideways, losing his own rifle as he reached for his saddle horn. His gloved right hand slid off the horn, and he gave a scream as he careened down his right stirrup and bounced along the trail behind his swerving roan.

The third rider had only just glanced over his shoulder at his still-bouncing and rolling companions when Yakima unseated him, too, and turned his attention to two more riders galloping behind the first three, with the rest of the dozen-man pack feathered out behind them for nearly a hundred yards.

Yakima had just planted a bead on a fourth killer when the man's horse rammed a knee against the head of one of the first three riders Yakima had downed. The horse gave a shrill whinny as the knee buckled and it turned a somersault over the downed man while launching its own rider high in the hair to be battered by the horse's flailing, scissoring hooves.

Yakima drew another bead, but a bullet crashed into the boulder a few inches to his right, and his next shot sailed wide of the rider who'd shot at him—the next rider in the pack. Yakima cocked the Yellowboy once more and shot true this time, his bullet hammering through the rider's face and snapping his head back sharply.

The man's arms fell slack. His hat blew off behind him. He sat suspended in the saddle for several seconds before he turned slowly to his left, then fell down that side of his horse, his left boot getting hung up in the stirrup. The rider's horse dragged its dead rider along past Yakima's position and then off the trail beyond him, swinging east.

Yakima racked another cartridge into the Yellowboy's chamber but held fire. The other riders were turning back, shouting and waving their arms at those behind them, apparently believing they'd been caught in a trap—one likely set by more than just one man.

Since he was only one man against an entire pack, Yakima was glad they'd made the mistake. He doubted, however, they'd make many more.

He turned to the stage sitting fifty yards away, two passengers crouched over a fallen one. The fallen one appeared to be a woman. A redhead, not a chestnut-haired beauty, as he knew the county prosecutor's wife to be. Two men whom Yakima assumed were the driver and the shotgun messenger were each hunkered behind separate rear wheels, aiming rifles toward the pack that had attacked them, but also turning their heads slightly to frown curiously at Yakima.

The half-breed glanced once more at the retreating killers, hearing their hoof thuds dwindling quickly, dust sifting, then turned back to the stage and waved his rifle in the air above his head.

“Haul ass!” he shouted.

The driver and the shotgun rider looked at each other. Then the jehu, Charlie Adlard, shouted, “Who the hell
are
you?”

Yakima cursed and then shouted louder, “Haul your asses the hell out of here
now
!”

Shoving fresh cartridges through the Yellowboy's receiver, Yakima walked back to where Wolf cropped at patches of still-green grass amongst the dried-up yellow buck brush, on the far side of the bluff, and mounted up. He slid the Yellowboy back into its boot and sat staring in the direction the riders had gone.

They'd disappeared into a low area between him and a rise of dun hogbacks shrouded with leafless aspens. He thought a thin tendril of smoke lifted from around the base of the hill, but he couldn't be sure.

What the hell are you doing? he thought. You got out of one mess in Wolfville to put yourself into another one out here. You should aim Wolf at the Dakota territorial line and powder some sage, get the gold to Belle Fourche before you get caught out here in one storm or another, likely a lead storm.

He knew from experience that those were even worse than snow.

Yeah, I should.

“But I'm not,” he grumbled aloud.

Not only because of the woman he'd thrown down a few times with in the line shack. But because he couldn't just ride on and let the killers do what they intended, because other innocent people besides her were likely to die. He owed Mendenhour nothing. But Betajack and Hendricks would likely make everyone else on the stage suffer for what they saw as the prosecutor's transgressions. They'd leave no witnesses.

Yakima would follow the stage as far as Jawbone simply because, with the lawmen in Wolfville dead, there was no one else to help. The jehu would find a lawman in Jawbone, another day up the line, and the law could take over the guiding duties, or hire a posse to see the coach safely to Belle Fourche.

Yakima glanced at the sky. There were some broad masses of thin pewter clouds high above him, but around that benign mass was blue sky. Maybe he'd still get south to warmer weather before the snow boxed him in.

He touched heels to Wolf's flanks and put the stallion up and over the hill and down the other side, heading for the stage trail. He wasn't thinking about the woman—about how she'd smelled and how she'd smiled and how the light from the line shack fire had glowed in her chestnut hair.

He wasn't thinking about her at all.

* * *

“Here they come,” said Claw Hendricks, looking across the dry wash as he held a steaming coffee cup between his large gloved hands. He wore a ring on his right middle finger, over the glove. It was a symbol of success and prosperity, and after the meagerness he'd come from, he saw no reason why he shouldn't show off a little.

Floyd Betajack thought it looked prissy, but he'd said nothing about it and he said nothing now as he looked over the flames of their coffee fire to the rise of land beyond the wash. Sure enough, the gang composed of his own six men and six of Hendricks's men from his hideout in the Mummy Range was galloping toward him.

“Uh-oh,” said his younger and sole remaining son, Sonny, rising. “I don't see Mendenhour amongst 'em, unless that's him ridin' with Albert, but that don't look like the man I seen in Wolfville that time.” He glanced at Hendricks and threw his shoulders back, trying to look tough. “Him an' Neumiller braced me, tried to run me out of town, but I told 'em to eat rat shit and I was a citizen with rights, and I was no dog to poke with a stick.” He snickered, chew dribbling down his thin lower lip. “They let the matter lie.”

“They did, did they?” said Hendricks.

“Sure enough, Claw,” Sonny said, flaring his nostrils. “Don't you believe me?”

“Oh, I'm sure they took one look at you and knew they had the tiger by the tail,” Hendricks said.

Sonny glowered at him, fair cheeks flushing with anger.

“That's enough,” Betajack said, feeling the burn of his customary anger as he tossed the dregs of his coffee on the fire and grabbed his Henry repeater. “I told you to lay off Sonny. He can't help it he's full of shit.”

Hendricks snorted. Sonny turned his wrathful gaze on his father but held his tongue. He knew better than to respond to his father's bile, and the old man was full of bile now in the wake of Pres's murder.

Betajack moved around the fire to get a better look at the dozen riders riding toward the temporary bivouac. They were fanned out left to right for fifty yards.

“What'd you bring him along for, then?”

“Because I go wherever Pa goes!” Sonny said defiantly, his voice acquiring a harsh rake, yellow javelins firing from his girlish eyes. His fierce temper had an almost feminine haughtiness to it. “I ain't no wet-behind-the-ears shaver who stays home to tend the chickens while Pa an' Pres go off raisin' hell! Hell, I'm a
killer
!”

Hendricks just stared at the bizarre man-child, not saying anything to rile Betajack further.

Betajack himself said distractedly, “That's enough, boy.”

He shouldered his rifle and walked across the dry wash—a big man with cold gray-blue eyes and a clean-shaven face set harshly between thick tufts of roached muttonchop whiskers. He was middle-aged now and gone to tallow, though with a muscular strength beneath the fat. But he'd been a demon for the Confederates during the War of Northern Aggression. Men who knew his reputation for Rebel savagery, and that included most of Claw Hendricks's men, sort of saw Betajack as a hero. Hendricks saw him as a mentor. If anything in the years since the war, Betajack had gotten meaner and more rebellious against authority.

Especially Yankee authority, which meant government authority. Which meant any kind of
civilization
, truth be known.

That's why he and his boys and his outlaw gang had thrown in with Claw Hendricks when Hendricks had started branching out from Boulder and Jamestown in the Colorado Territory, and moving their sundry nefarious doings up into Wyoming, where new mines were opening up in the Wind River and Big Horn ranges, and in the Buckskin Buttes. The riders reined to a halt in a long line in front of Betajack, Sonny, and Claw Hendricks, who was walking up behind the old rebel cutthroat and his strange, girlish son.

“I see you're missing a few men,” Betajack said, his disapproval rumbling up from deep in his chest.

“What the hell happened?” asked Hendricks.

“You ain't gonna believe it, Mr. Betajack,” said Albert Delmonte, Betajack's first lieutenant, who sat his paint horse in front of the old Rebel outlaw, an injured rider astraddle the same horse behind him. “There was someone else there. Looked Injun. We didn't see him till we'd started firing on the stage and he started firing on us behind cover.”

“One man?” asked Sonny, incredulous.

“At first we thought there was more, 'cause he was shootin' so damn fast. But . . .”

One of Hendricks's men, a half-breed Ute named Lyle Two Moons, said in his deep, guttural voice, “A green-eyed warrior I'd seen before, hunting horses in the Mummy Mountains.”

Hendricks shoved his rose-colored glasses up his nose with his beringed middle finger, then cocked his shaggy head as though to hear better. “You mean you let this green-eyed redskin get the better of you?
One man?
”

Lyle Two Moons wore a heavy, short buffalo coat, a bullet-crowned black hat, and black-checked orange twill trousers with hide-patched knees. He held a Winchester carbine across his saddlebow, thumb rubbing nervously against the uncocked hammer. His chocolate eyes held Hendricks's wry, indignant gaze.

“He fights like five men,” Lyle said quietly.

“Ah, hogswill!” Betajack steered the conversation back to the task at hand. “You didn't get Mendenhour like you was supposed to. A simple job for twelve men. And you didn't get him. Instead, you let one man deplete your numbers by . . . how many?” He lifted a finger, counting the number of riders before him. “Four?”

“Four, boss,” said the rider crouched behind Albert Delmonte. “I'm still kickin'.” He hardened his jaw as he said over Albert's left shoulder, his wavy, dirt-crusted brown hair hanging over his forehead, “My horse only kicked me, but I'm still game for a fight.”

Sonny planted his small fists on his hips and ran his wild eyes from one end of the chagrined pack to the other. “Let me get this straight,” he said, wanting very much to be part of the conversation. “A whole passel of our men and Claw's men were turned back by
one
man?”

“Wait a minute,” Hendricks said, fingering the spade beard hanging six inches below his chin. “Did you say a green-eyed half-breed?”

“That's right,” Albert said, who looked a little Indian himself, though, being a nephew of Betajack, he owned the Scotch-Irish blood—and emotional disposition—of his uncle and cousin. “Green-eyed half-breed in buckskin pants and mackinaw. Black hat with a flat brim. You know him?”

Hendricks's broad face paled a little. He furrowed his brows above his rose-colored spectacles.

Betajack turned to him. “The fella in the jailhouse with Neumiller fit that description.”

Still, Hendricks said nothing. He turned to Betajack blandly, sucking his cheek pensively.

“I figured you'd kill the son of a bitch,” Betajack said. “But come to think on it, I never did hear a pistol shot.”

Hendricks said, a tad defensively, “I asked what he was in for, and he said he was a thief and a rapist of uppity white women. So I figured why kill him? Hell, I would have given him a cigar if I'd had one.”

“A real upstandin' citizen,” said Sonny snidely.

“You're one to talk,” Hendricks said, pitching his voice low with menace.

“What's that mean?”

“I seen you over at the Silk Slipper.” Hendricks gave a foxy grin.

Sonny wrapped his hand around one of his six-shooters and opened his mouth and squinted his eyes for a typically blasphemous retort, but his father closed his own hand around the firebrand's wrist, shoving the pistol back down in the leather. “That's enough! Let it go. Remember, boy, we threw in with this man because we didn't have enough of our own.” He looked at Hendricks. “I reckon we gotta allow a few missteps . . . since we got Pres to think of.”