Last Ride of Jed Strange (9781101559635) (16 page)

He just stared at her. Movement along their back trail caught his eye, and he pulled Bethel down low beside him. “Maybe it's time you start bein' scared for yourself. More trouble's on the way!”

Chapter 22

Colter pressed his cheek against the side of the knoll, holding Bethel down beside him with one hand. He held his Henry against his chest with his other hand, and now, as the thuds of oncoming riders grew louder from the north, he clamped his knees around the rifle's rear stock and slowly levered a cartridge into the chamber.

Bethel turned her face toward him, her eyes nervous, expectant.

The riders came on until Colter could hear their tack squawking and their fast-moving horses raking air in and out of their lungs.

He gave the girl a hard, commanding look. “You do what I tell you, now, and stay put.”

He heaved himself up suddenly and scrambled to the top of the knoll, planting his boots a little more than shoulder-width apart and holding the cocked Henry up high across his chest. Four riders galloped toward him from the north and curving to his right as they cantered up the steep, rocky slope—three men in cavalry blues, and Brickson in his buckskins and wearing a bloody white bandage around his forehead, beneath his brown felt sombrero. All four jerked their heads toward him, squinting against the dust and bright sunlight.

“Hey!” yelled the soldier wearing sergeant's chevrons and riding behind the dark, hawk-faced A. J. McKnight. The soldier swung up the carbine he'd been holding across his saddlebows, but before he could press the stock against his shoulder, Colter swung up his own rifle and blew the sergeant off his McClelland saddle.

The man hit the dusty, rocky trail with a crunch of cracking bones and a shrill grunt, causing more dust to rise.

The other three men had checked their horses down. The riderless horse bounded past them up the slope, ears back, stirrups flapping like wings. McKnight glared at Colter. So did Brickson and the third man, a corporal with thin red muttonchops and belligerent gray eyes set deep beneath sandy brows. The sun was peeling the skin off all three unshaven faces.

Loudly, Colter ejected the spent cartridge, sent it tumbling back down the slope behind him, and rammed a fresh bullet in the breech. His nostrils flared as he glared back at the three men, his gaze finally settling on McKnight.

“You fellas are real hoople-heads, comin' as far as you have just to die.”

McKnight's right eye twitched beneath the brim of his tan kepi. “You think so, do you, killer?”

Colter offered no response but a grim half smile. That seemed to make his three shadowers even tenser. They all held carbines half up, not quite level with Colter. The corporal's Spencer shook in his hands clad in yellow gloves with gauntlets. Dust dribbled down his brown, red-mottled right cheek.

The sun beat down. Cicadas hummed.

The breeze blew the riders' dust back and forth.

McKnight balled his cheeks and narrowed his eyes as he snapped his carbine to his shoulder.

Colter's rifle belched. McKnight's own shot sailed wild. He screamed as Colter's slug punched him off the far side of his horse and into the rocks. A wink later, both the corporal and Brickson were down, as well, Brickson managing to pop a pill around Colter's boots before he flew down the side of his paint with a shredded heart. He got his left boot hung up in his stirrup, and his terrified horse galloped on up the slope, bouncing the wailing scout along behind it.

The horse's thudding hooves and the dying scout's shrill pleas dwindled.

Colter stared down the slope at McKnight and the corporal, both lying twisted and bloody amongst the clay-colored rocks. He thumbed fresh cartridges down his Henry's loading tube and glanced back at Bethel. She lay flat, looking up at him, her expression not so much frightened anymore as fateful. Maybe a little befuddled at the ease with which this lanky young man with the long red hair and lightly freckled though savagely scarred face could so easily kill.

She'd understand if she'd been through what he had, he thought. Through it all starting with Trace's grisly murder and then Bill Rondo's glowing branding iron shoved toward his face. In the seconds before it had been rammed into Colter's cheek, the smoking iron had smelled like a hot stove. The smell of his own charred flesh would have made him vomit if he hadn't passed out from the burning, unbearable agony.

He looked around cautiously, making sure no one had been attracted by the gunfire, then tramped down the hill, kicking both bodies over to make doubly sure that McKnight and the corporal were dead. Both men's eyes were glassy and sightless, and their wounds were mortal if not instantly killing. Colter leaned his rifle against a rock, chased down both cavalry remounts, and unsaddled them before giving them both water from their riders' canteens and spanking them free. Like him, they'd have to find their way alone.

He took coffee, hardtack, and jerky from the men's saddlebags, and a blanket roll for Bethel. He hadn't owned a hat since the flooded arroyo had taken his, so he confiscated McKnight's, which he found amongst the rocks, and set it on his head. He liked the broad brim even though the sweat moistening the inner band, and the crust of salt around the brim, belonged to a man he hated even in death.

It was an apt trophy.

He adjusted the hat and turned to see Bethel standing near the corporal. She looked around grimly at the blood-smeared rocks and the twisted carcasses, the breeze sliding her bangs around beneath her hat, lifting the tails of her shirt.

Colter tossed the bedroll to her.

“Thanks,” she said.

“Don't mention it.”

“I like your hat.”

“I do, too. Maybe I shoulda joined the cavalry.”

He started up the slope to retrieve their horses. She followed him, asking, “How many more hombres you got behind you, Colter?”

“That's a damn good question, Bethel.” He grabbed Northwest's reins and stepped into the leather.

For the next five days, they followed a rugged trail, indicated by the map, into the lower reaches of the
Los Montanas del Dragones
—a giant dinosaur spine of cracked and twisted stone cliffs, monoliths, and pinnacles that appeared to have been punched upward from deep in the earth's churning bowels many aeons ago. Then as now it had been a violent time, Colter thought, as he and Bethel followed the crooked trail ever higher amongst the rocks in which nothing at all seemed to grow, and where the water holes were few and far between.

Here and there pictographs painted by a long-vanished people showed themselves in the sides of boulders—faded, primitive accounts of stick men stalking or killing stick animals. What must have been dinosaur bones shone like chips of ancient china in many rock walls lining the trail. Diamondbacks shaded themselves along the circuitous, sometimes perilous trace, instantly quivering, coiling, and rattling as the riders passed.

Here and there stone shrines to various saints, adorned with wilted and crumbling parched flowers, spotted the trail.

In the early afternoon of their sixth day in the Dragon Range, they rode into a broad canyon where several adobes hunched in the high-altitude sun. The trail that had led them here was well worn by wide-shod wheels, and now Colter saw a large wooden barn and corral on the trail's left side, under a towering lip of sandstone.

Several large freight wagons sat in the scrub near the barn, tongues drooping. Around the barn were several other buildings, some used, some appearing abandoned, scrub grown up around them. One was obviously a blacksmith shop, because a large, charred man in a leather apron was loudly hammering an anvil just inside the open front doors while chickens and two goats pecked in the yard before him.

He had a silver-framed, fancily scrolled Colt revolving rifle leaning against one of the open barn doors, and he eyed Colter and Bethel warily beneath the brim of his low-crowned sombrero as they continued into the yard.

To the left of the trail, a large adobe with pillars holding up a tile gallery roof hunched beneath a dusty sycamore. Five Arabian horses with fancy Mexican saddles and trimmings stood tied to the wooden hitch rack fronting the place.

A frightening outfit, Colter thought. With a saloon so the mule-skinners and anyone else could cut the trail dust. A sign above the large adobe announced
SALON DE JUAN DOMINGO GUTIERREZ
.

“I don't dance with the devil and I don't patronize saloons, Colter,” Bethel said.

“That's real upstanding, Bethel. It truly is.” Colter angled Northwest toward the hitch rack. “But neither one of us has had anything to eat but rattlesnake for the past five meals. Me—I'm gonna go in and see if I can get a big plate of huevos rancheros and a steak.”

She frowned, pensive. “That don't sound half bad.”

Colter chuckled as he stepped down from the saddle. He looped his reins over the hitch rack, and Bethel did the same, mounting the gallery steps behind him. He moved through the arched doorway, a stout oak door thrown back and propped open with a chair to his left, and instinctively stepped to one side, so the door didn't backlight him.

The place was far humbler inside than outside, as there was an earthen floor and a dozen or so crude wooden tables outfitted with rickety, hide-bottom chairs. There was a long, crude bar on the left, with a rattlesnake floating in a five-gallon glass jug, above a white bed of pickled eggs. Colter scowled, sick of the chewy, nearly tasteless meat he and Bethel had been living on. Shelves behind the bar were crowded with cloudy, clear bottles of several sizes, and there was a big crock on the bar's far left, with a gourd handle hanging down from the lip.

Behind the bar was a large black range, the several pots and pans sizzling atop it being tended by a portly old woman in a shapeless dress, her salt-and-pepper hair secured in a tight bun behind her head. The succulent smells of spicy meat emanating from the range nearly rocked Colter back on his heels. A one-eyed man sat on a stool near the crock, fanning himself with a yellowed newspaper. Long, gray-brown hair hung down from the sides of his head while the top of his head was an ugly mass of knotted scar tissue.

The victim of a scalping, Colter knew. He'd seen the grisly display many times before. In fact, one of the men who'd ridden for Trace Cassidy had sported such a scar inflicted by the Sioux on the Dakota Plains. Roy Gallantly had always said he'd fared some better than Custer, who'd lost a helluva lot more than his topknot.

Toward the back of the room, four men were playing some kind of craps game. They appeared to be throwing small bones around their table with a wooden cup, grunting and sighing and speaking in hushed voices as they flipped coins after each bone toss. They were big, savage-faced men dressed nearly all in leather, with sombreros of different shapes resting on their heads. One had an extra chair pulled up beside him, and on the chair rested a sawed-off, double-barreled coach gun with a leather lanyard.

Most likely banditos. Border cutthroats. They had glasses and two clear bottles on their table, one empty, one cloudy with some kind of Mexican tanglefoot that would likely peel the rim off a wheel.

They regarded Colter and Bethel wryly, the one with his back to the newcomers twisting around in his chair and raking his gaze across the two with grunting interest before turning forward and shrugging his shoulders. Colter walked over to the bar. The one-eyed man regarded him and Bethel dully, as though a branded young gringo and a blond young gringa walking into his saloon were a common occurrence.

Colter doffed his hat, brushed it against his pant leg. “Can we get a couple plates of huevos rancheros and steak?”

The portly woman turned toward him briefly, then continued stirring whatever she had sizzling in an iron skillet. The one-eyed man furrowed the brow over his one good eye—the other was milky and half-hidden by its drooping lid—and shook his head. “No. No.” He continued shaking his head. Glancing at the range, he said something that Colter couldn't understand but which Bethel seemed to pick up. She looked at Colter and nodded.

“Good enough,” she said, tentatively. “We'll just get us a table, then.”

While the man called over to the woman, Bethel canted her head toward the room, and then she and Colter walked over to a table on the other side of a ceiling joist from the four craps players and sank into hide-bottom chairs, Colter giving his back to the bar, the banditos to his left, the door to his right, beyond Bethel.

Colter tossed his hat onto the table. Bethel removed her own hat, ran her fingers through her sweat-damp blond hair, which fell straight to her shoulders, then tossed her own hat onto the table with a sigh.

She looked around with a sour look on her sunburned face. “Hope Mama's not lookin' down on me. She wouldn't approve.”

“Would she want you to starve?”

“No, but she'd think Pa'd been a bad influence on me in the year since we planted her. She warned me to keep my hat straight, and that Pa needed a strong rudder, and I was it.”

“Seems a heavy yoke for a twelve-year-old.”

“I got the shoulders for it.”

The one-eyed man came over with two clear, mineral-stained glasses and a small bottle filled with clear liquid. “
Pulque
,” he said, and splashed some of the liquid into each glass, setting them before Colter and Bethel.

“The devil's elixir,” she said when he shuffled off behind the bar, primly sliding her glass away from her. “No, thank you.”

“All the more for me,” Colter said, sniffing his glass. The coffin varnish smelled about the same as tequila to him.

“You drink that, you'll be seein' purple bears and pink snakes.”

“Don't mind if I do.” Colter sipped the pulque, swished it around in his mouth, and swallowed it. The liquid was stronger than tequila, but when he stopped feeling as though it had peeled off his tonsils and washed them into his left boot, and he was able to draw a breath again, a warm, dreamy feeling sank over him. The light angling through the arched windows was soft and buttery. He wanted to cool his heels in this dingy, aromatic place and drink the Mexican panther piss all afternoon.