Last Ride of Jed Strange (9781101559635) (20 page)

“Happy sailing, eh,
El Rojo
!” the big Mex intoned, breaking into another burst of untethered laughter.

The box was small and dark, scrunching his shoulders painfully together. He lay there, miserable beyond imagining, hearing the gunlike thunder of the nails being hammered through the box's lid and into the sides, sealing him up like a sardine in a very small tin.

Horror was a coyote wailing in his head.

Buried alive . . . Wasn't that everyone's worst nightmare?

No . . . not buried alive, he realized now, as the makeshift coffin rocked and pitched from side to side. They were carrying him down a steep incline, and then his head slammed painfully against the coffin lid as they dropped him.

There was a splashing sound. The box spun wickedly. It wobbled, floating. Colter felt the chill of water beneath him, the wetness bleeding between the boards of the box to dampen his clothes.

No, not buried alive. At least not in the earth.

They'd dumped him into the stream.

The coffin rocked and swayed. The current caught it and Colter, panting in the tight confines, in the hot, humid darkness, his hands pressed up flat against the coffin lid, felt himself being hurled downstream.

Buried alive in a watery grave.

The coffin pitched and plunged, Colter's belly lurching into his throat as the coffin tipped up, suspended for a moment straight up and down before plunging down a short falls. The end housing Colter's head smashed against a rock with another sound like a gunshot. The box end with his feet flew up over his head.

“
Ahh, shiiiittttt!
”

Then he was horizontal again, rocking on down the stream—belly-down in the cold, wet box.

“Have a good trip,
El Rojo
!” the Balladeer called behind him. “If you're lucky, you'll make it to the Gulf of
Mejico
!”

He and the other men laughed raucously.

Chapter 26

As the rifle crate was hurled down the narrow but fast-flowing stream, Colter, lying facedown in the overturned coffin, pressed his hands against what was now the crate's bottom and humped his back against the top, trying in some way to break the thing apart. Or at least to pry off the lid.

As the crate spun suddenly, causing Colter's guts to spin, as well, he gave up and merely tried to brace himself, gritting his teeth through which he could hear his own panting breaths raking. He could hear the water rushing and gurgling around him. He could smell the piney odor of the green wood but knew he wouldn't be smelling anything soon if he continued to use up his air.

What would be worse, he vaguely wondered—suffocating or drowning?

Water was oozing from the cracks in the lid and from several other cracks between the crate's pine boards. Colter was soaked. Soaked and confined in horrifying blackness, brains and guts churning as the angry stream hurled down its rocky canyon, bouncing off rocks, the violent collisions causing the ringing in Colter's ears to grow louder.

Ah, shit
, he thought. A watery grave in the Mexican desert? He hadn't seen this one coming, and he was glad he hadn't.

Suddenly, the coffin slammed against what he assumed was the stream's stone bank. It must have gotten hung up between rocks, because more water oozed into it, and he could feel a fluttering in the end housing his feet. Just as suddenly as he'd gotten hung up, the coffin jerked free. It spun wildly. Colter groaned and gritted his teeth and squeezed his eyes closed against the water oozing up around him, threatening to cut off his air.

The foot of the crate dropped downward. Colter's head and torso rose, twisted around, and then plunged.

The water in the crate gurgled as it washed this way and that.

Bang!

The true bottom of the crate smashed the stream's rocky bottom, and Colter could hear the crack, feel wood slivers gouging his left thigh. Now he was faceup once more, but the water was coming in fast and filling his nostrils and his mouth. He made the mistake of trying to breathe. The water hit his lungs and burned like coals in a blacksmith's forge.

Only a few seconds left now.

His entire body was submerged.

He was vaguely aware of the crate spinning around him once more. Then
bang!

Both the side and the floor of the coffin gave way. Colter's feet dropped. His knee smashed against a knobby black rock that he glimpsed amongst a feathery spray of tea-colored water. He rolled sideways, the frenzied current sweeping him along.

Air brushed his face. Instinctively, he drew a breath and got part of it down before the water in his lungs exploded outward. He heard himself choking and gagging. His lungs felt as though they'd burst at the seams. While the current swirled him and pushed him downstream, he tried to gain another breath of the refreshing air washing over him between waves of the rushing rapids.

He managed only a teaspoonful as he continued to cough and choke and vomit the water he'd inhaled when he'd been inside the gun crate.

Ahead, a bird winged out over the frothing stream. No, not a bird. He'd caught only a glimpse of it, but he looked again now, turning his head one way while the river turned him another, and saw a rope. Yes, a rope. It extended out from the right bank and was looped over the end of a black log poking up out of the stream.

A pounding sounded from somewhere atop the bank.

A man's voice shouted, “Grab the rope, kid. Grab the
rope
!”

The rope grew in Colter's eyes until he could see the individual hemp strands twisting and straining as the man took the slack out of it. Colter threw up his left arm. He hooked it over the rope that cut into his ribs just beneath his armpit.

He groaned. But he clung to the rope for all he was worth. Staring at the rope and only at the rope, praying the log didn't break free, Colter used his hands to follow the rope toward the right bank. The whitewater beat against his legs and hips. He had little remaining strength. He used every ounce of it to walk his hands along the rope to the bank.

When he'd gained the bank's grassy lip, a big brown hand reached over it. Colter took it. The man's fingers closed around Colter's hand, and he pulled Colter up and over the bank.

The redhead collapsed, water gurgling in his throat as he tried to breathe. A brusque hand turned him over. Then the man grabbed Colter's ankles and shoved his knees up toward his chest. The water came up in several choking spasms, dribbling over his chin and down his chest.

The man dropped Colter's ankles, turned him over on his belly, and rammed his knee into the small of Colter's back. Colter vomited more water. Finally, he drew a breath. It went in more than halfway. Then he drew another and another . . .

He rolled over. A dark man in a calico shirt and a green flannel headband stared down at him, severe features indecipherable. He had dark brown hair and brown eyes, and those eyes boring into Colter's made the life shrink back down into the redhead's waterlogged boots.

Ah, hell
. An Apache.

Then the man's face brightened, brown eyes flashing. He extended his big right hand. “You Colter Farrow?”

Raking air in and out of his lungs, Colter gave the man's hand a halfhearted squeeze, nodding. “Who're you?” he choked.

“Me? Hell, I'm Jed Strange.”

Colter just stared at him. He'd misheard. Too much water in his ears.

Movement caught his eye, and he looked behind the crouching man to see Bethel running toward him, weaving around rocks and spindly shrubs from the direction of a high, basalt ridge—probably the backside of the canyon wall. At the same time, hoof thuds drew Colter's head to his right. Running toward him as well was Northwest, galloping along the streambed, head in the air, eyes frantic.

He must have broken away from Machado when he'd seen the banditos toss Colter's makeshift coffin into the stream, and took off after it. He ran up to Colter now, eyes white-ringed, and rose off his hind feet, giving a relieved whinny.

“I take it you know this hoss,” the man who had called himself Jed Strange said, straightening to regard the pitching coyote dun. He might have looked like an Apache, but he spoke English with a Texas accent. He appeared in his late forties or early fifties—lean and rugged, his shoulders slightly bowed.

Colter stood and ran a soothing hand along the horse's snout, his head still spinning from the ride down the river and his brush with death. He looked befuddledly from the man dressed as an Apache to the girl running toward him.

“Colter!” Bethel said, running up to him, wrapping her arms around his waist and burying her head in his chest. “I thought you was a goner for sure!”

“Bethel,” Colter said, shaking his head slowly, trying to coax his marbles back into place. “Where'd you go? I was—”

“No time for explanations,” Jed Strange said, turning to his own horse, a big-boned Appaloosa standing several yards away eyeing Northwest crossly. “We gotta get mounted and hightail it. I been waitin' to lock horns with Machado, but I reckon it can wait!” He walked toward the big Appy, beckoning to Bethel. “Come on, girl—you're ridin' with your old pa!”

Bethel looked at Colter, grinning, eyes fairly flashing like gold coins in the sunshine. “That's my pa!”

Colter frowned, thoroughly confused. “So I heard.”

“Come on.” Bethel turned and ran off toward her father, who was just now mounting the Appy. “We'll explain later!”

The fire cracked and popped. The two rabbits spitted over it dripped grease into the bed of glowing coals, and sizzle and steamed. The coffeepot sitting on a flat rock to one side of the flames gurgled, spewing smoke from its spout.

It was an old, rusty pot with a dent in its side.

“I just don't understand this,” Colter said, hungrily chewing the succulent meat off the first of the three jackrabbit haunches. “We found your gun on that bandito in the roadhouse yonder. At least, Bethel said it was yours, Mr. Strange . . . and it had your initials on it.”

Bethel had given the gun back to her father, and he now wore it in the holster thonged low on his right thigh clad in fringed deerskin leggings—pistoleer- style. Sitting crosslegged on the other side of the fire from Colter, Bethel on his right, sticking close to her old man, Jed Strange plucked the silver-chased piece from the sheath and twirled it on his finger twice quickly, expertly.

He stared down at it, pensively, his broad, sun-seasoned face bronzed by the firelight. “Poor Percy.”

“Who's Percy, Pa?”

“My partner, Percy Tarwater. Fella whose grave you found, I reckon. I never did know what happened to ole Perc. I gave him my gun because he didn't have one, and he was making a supply run up north to a little village at the north end of the range.” Jed Strange scowled across the fire at Colter. “Who killed him?”

“Some Mexican rawhider we run into at Juan Domingo Gutierrez's place up north along the trail.”

Strange nodded slightly, pursing his thin lips together, and kept his eyes on Colter. “How'd you get my gun back?”

“I reckon Bethel done that.”

Strange turned to his daughter sitting Indian-style, as was the surly-looking old bandit, Jed Strange, himself. She was staring admiringly up at the man. She flushed a little, blinked, and glanced at Colter and then turned back to her father, not sure how to proceed. “I . . . I reckon I shot him, Pa. He said how he cut your throat . . . so I thought you was dead fer sure . . . an' . . . an' . . . I just pulled the trigger. The damn pistol roared like a dragon and lunged like a rattlesnake!”

The deep, dark lines in Strange's leathery face multiplied. “You shot a man?”

“I reckon I did at that, Pa. There were three more of 'em, an' Colter cleaned their clocks before they cleaned mine. It was a helluva dustup.” Bethel shook her head as she stared up at her old man, whom Colter judged to be a little older than he'd at first thought—still strong of body, with only a slight paunch, but his face was a road map of hard years and many trails under an unforgiving western sun. “Tough country down here, Pa.”

Strange set a big, gnarled hand on his daughter's head. “You shouldn't have come, Bethel. I sure never figured on that.”

“You were gone a whole
year
, Pa! You don't know what it was like, livin' with Aunt Kate. Why, she had me goin' to church every Sunday!”

Strange snickered. “Don't doubt it a bit.” He shook his head as he stared pensively into the glowing coals, half smiling. “Ole Kate . . .”

After a time, he raised his eyes to Colter's on the other side of the fire. “Sorry about leavin' you to the wolves back there, boy. There's several hidden passageways in that chasm you and Bethel were in. You wouldn't notice 'em less'n you been in and out of that canyon as many times as I was—me an' Percy. I broke off trackin' Machado a few hours ago, when I seen you two. I glassed you an' recognized my daughter. Them Injuns turned back when I started flinging arrows at 'em.” He glanced at the ash bow and deerskin quiver of arrows leaning against a near piñon. “I reckon you didn't see through the storm.”

“I didn't see nothin',” Colter said, shaking his head as he continued to eat hungrily.

“I snuck in behind you and snatched Bethel away because I figured Machado and his men were in that canyon. I wasn't sure who you were—friend or foe. By the time Bethel had told me you were friendly, and I had her in a secure place, I went back for you, but Machado was already pounding nails in your coffin. I hightailed it out to my horse and tried to run you down.”

“Well, you did, and I do appreciate it,” Colter said, giving another shiver against the bone-deep chill that was still chipping away at him despite the fire's warmth.

“I've been followin' Machado for days. The problem is I'm all out of shells for my Winchester.” Strange flicked the Colt Peacemaker's loading gate open and spun the cylinder, looking relieved to see the brass snugged down in all six cylinders. “Forty-four shells were one of the things Percy was headin' out to buy . . . with the last of our gold dust. We popped the last of our caps at the Apaches that haunt these canyons and been makin' our lives pure-dee hell for the six months we been here in the Dragones.”

Bethel plucked some meat off the half-eaten rabbit haunch on her tin plate. “Is that what's kept you out here so long, Pa?
Gold
?
”

Holding his smoking cup in his hands before him, Strange rested his elbows on his knees. “Not just a few pinches of dust, daughter. But enough gold to see me into my old age and you . . . well, enough to send you back East to a good school. Make a teacher out of you, just like you always wanted.” He smiled. “Though with as much gold as we'll have when we finally ride out of here, you likely won't need to work another day in your life. How'd you like that?”

“I'd like that just fine, but I'd like to have you back home even better.”

“All in good time, girl. All in good time.” Strange ruffled the girl's hair, then glanced at the bedroll spread out beside her, in front of her saddle. “Now, you best finish up and crawl into bed. Big day tomorrow.”

“Doin' what?”

“You'll see.” Strange looked at Colter. “You best hit the hay, too, son.” He slapped the six-shooter on his thigh. “I'll keep watch tonight.”

“All night?”

“I sleep like an Apache sleeps,” Strange said, winking. “With both eyes open.”