Midnight Rider (Ralph Cotton Western Series) (30 page)

“I’m not blaming you for anything,” Casings said. “I want to rob trains, open safes with you, get to be rich desperadoes.”

“Hey! What about Bobby there?” the Giant asked.
They looked over and saw Bobby Kane standing with Spiller’s rifle in his hands, a blank look on his face.

“Bobby, put the rifle down,” Casings called out.

Kane looked at them, confused for a second. Then he nodded and tossed the rifle away. He stepped back and wiped his palms on his trousers. The Giant walked over to him.

“Are you doing all right, Bobby?” he asked in his deep powerful voice.

“Just fine,” Bobby said with a dazed grin. “How’s everybody here?”

“Come on with us awhile, Bobby,” the Giant chuckled. He patted a huge hand on the gunman’s shoulder. “I’m sorry I smacked you so hard.”

“Me too,” Bobby said, still wearing the same dazed grin.

“What now, Rock?” Casings said, the four of them turning, walking along the middle of the dirt street, seeing faces appear in windows and shop doors now that the shooting was over. “You got anything lined up?”

“Not right now,” Rock said. “It’s a good time to lie low awhile, I think, until the dust settles over this job.”

“Are you sticking with us, me and the Giant?” he asked.

“Right now I’ve got to send a telegraph, report in,” Rock said.

“
Report in
?” Casings said. He looked puzzled, but only for a second. “Oh, I get it. You’ve got a woman you’re stuck on somewhere.”

“Something like that,” Rock said, walking on, leading the dun behind by its reins.

“Something serious, is it?” Casings asked.

“Yeah, you could say it’s serious,” Rock replied. “I keep in touch every chance I get.”

He spotted the town telegraph office up the dirt street. He would go there, send a wire to his field office in Denver City, give them Inman Walker’s name and call this case closed. That was that, he told himself.

“Why don’t you and the Giant get out of here, before the sheriff gets back from fishing?” Rock said. “If you get something that looks good, I’ll be in Denver City for a while. You’ll find me there. Ask around at any of the saloons. Meanwhile, I’ll see what I can come up with for us.”

“We could ride there with you,” Casings said.

“No, you two need some rest tonight,” said Rochenbach. “Get your blood back to where it should be. I’m going to take care of my horse, clean my guns and ride out come dark.” He smiled. “Ride
all night.
Nothing stops me. I’ll be onto something tomorrow.”

“Sounds good to me,” Casings said, he and the Giant walking on along the empty dirt street in the waning sunlight.

Arizona Territory

Wildfire raged.

The young ranger Sam Burrack sat atop a rust-colored barb on a bald ridge overlooking a wide, rocky chasm. With a battered brass-trimmed telescope, he scanned beyond the buffering walls of boulder and brush. Long rising hillsides ran slantwise heaven to earth, covered by an endless pine woodlands. He studied the blanketing fire as it billowed and twisted its way north to south along the hill lines. He watched flames the color of hell lick upward hundreds of feet, drifting, blackening the heavens.

Through the circle of the lens he spotted four wolves sitting next to one another along a rock ledge, winded and panting. Their pink tongues lolling, they stared back at the wall of smoke and fire as if numbed, overpowered by it.

At the bottom of the hills, where the woodlands came to an end at the chasm, Sam saw a large brown
bear stop in its tracks, turn, and rise on its hind legs. The beast stood erect with its forearms and claws spread wide and raged back at the fire, ready to do battle. Yet even so powerful a beast looked helpless and frail beneath that which lay spoil to its domain. At the end of its roar, the bear dropped back onto all fours as if bowing in submission, and loped on.

The ranger shook his head, noting how little caution the other fleeing woodland creatures paid it as they darted among dry washes and gullies, and bounded over brush and rock with no more than a reflex glance in the roaring bear’s direction. Even the barb beneath him paid no mind to the bear’s warning until a draft of hot smoke swept in from behind. Then the horse skittered sideways and chuffed and scraped a nervous hoof.

“Easy now…,” the ranger murmured, tightening his hold on the reins, and collecting the animal. “We’re not going to get you cooked.” He patted a gloved hand on the barb’s withers. “Me neither, I’m hoping,” he added, closing the telescope between his hands. He looked down at the sets of hoofprints he’d been tracking for three days and gave the barb a tap of his bootheels.

But the barb would have none of it. Instead, the animal grumbled and sawed its head and stalled back on its front legs.

The ranger picked up his Winchester from across his lap. He gave another, firmer tap of his bootheels, this time reaching back with his rifle and lightly striking the barrel on the barb’s rump.

“Come on, pard, we know our jobs,” he said.

This time he felt the barb take his command and step forward onto the path winding down toward the rocky land below. But even as the animal did as Sam asked, he gave a chuff of protest.

“I know,” said Sam. “I don’t like it either.”

Four hundred yards down, the meandering dirt trail hardened into rock and left the ranger with no sign to follow other than the occasional broken pine needles where one of the four men’s horses had laid down an iron-ringed hoof. But that gave him no cause for concern—the old, overgrown game trail lay down the rocky, deep-cut hillside. And now that the fire had moved in across the thick woodlands, there would be no other logical way north except to follow the chasm to its end.

He knew the bottom trail would stretch fourteen miles before coming to water—twenty-six miles farther before reaching Bagley’s Trading Post. By then the men he followed would need fresh horses. They wouldn’t rest their current horses before riding on.
That would take too much time,
he told himself. Men like Royal Tarpis, Silas “Red” Gantry, and Dockery Latin never wasted time when they were on the move. Out in the open this way, these men moved instinctively as if someone was on their trail, whether they knew it to be a fact or not.

Men with blood on their trail…,
Sam told himself, knowing there was a younger man leading the gang these days. That man was the Cheyenne Kid, and he was known to be ruthless. But now the Kid was wounded and bleeding. He’d shot and killed two
men, a bank teller and the town sheriff, in Phoebe. The sheriff had managed to put a bullet in the murdering young outlaw before falling dead in the street. Sam had picked up the men’s trail the following day, and he’d been on it ever since.

Sure, they know someone is coming…

Sam drew the barb to a halt at a break in the trail and looked to his left, across the chasm where the fire roared, smoke filling the sky. He took off his left glove and felt the barb’s withers. The horse’s coat was dry—hot to his touch. So was his own left cheek, he thought, raising his palm to his face, feeling the prickliness of his beard stubble, noticing the stiff, scorched sensation along his cheek line, the dryness in the corners of his eyes as he squinted them shut for a second, gauging the heat.

Untying the bandanna from around his neck, Sam used it to fashion a curtain beneath the brim of his sombrero, which draped his left cheek. It would help some, he thought.

“I hope I didn’t lie to you, pard,” he said to the horse, recalling his earlier words to the animal.

He picked up his canteen that hung from his saddle horn, uncapped it, swished a mouthful of water around in his mouth and spit the water out along the left side of horse’s neck. He leaned forward in his saddle and poured a thin stream of water down the horse’s muzzle and along its left side, taking in his own leg and back along its flank. The horse shuddered and chuffed and reached its tongue around to lick at its side.

“That’s all for now,” Sam said.

He capped the canteen and rehung it. All right, it was hot, but he’d expected that, he reminded himself. Three miles ahead of him, give or take, he saw the fired had waned on its push southward. In the wake of the billowing inferno stood a few bare and blackened pine skeletons.

But he and the horse were safe. He had calculated the risk before putting the horse forward onto the trail. Had the wind made a sudden shift and blown straight at them before they’d reached the trail’s halfway point, he would have turned back and raced to the top again before succumbing to the heat. Halfway down the trail, he’d realized there was an end to the fire a few miles to the north—the direction he was headed in. From that point, had the wind changed suddenly, he would have raced down the trail.

Whichever way, they’d make it.

And oddly enough, he thought, owing to the rise of heat, it had been hotter atop the trail than it was here below. Still, it had been risky, said a cautioning voice that often admonished him at times such as these.

Yes, it had,
he admitted.
But…
He let out a breath of relief.

“Life is naught without its risks…,”
he quoted to himself.

Who had said that? He shrugged as he nudged the horse forward. He didn’t know. Probably some obscure penny dreadful author who had stood—or had
imagined
himself to have stood—on just such a trail as this.

He started forward along the lower end of the trail,
where he knew the heat would be less intense. As he rode he shook his head. Leave it to men like these to ride into a wildfire, he thought.

Why did they do that…?

But as he asked the question, he had to remind himself that he had followed without hesitation—so closely that he’d had to water both himself and his horse down to keep up his pursuit. What did that say about him? He didn’t want to think about it right now.

He rode on.

Four miles farther down along the chasm trail he felt the heat on his left begin to wane. A mile farther the temperature had subsided enough that he was able to take the bandanna down from his face. Beneath him the rusty barb rode at a stronger gallop. Along their left, beyond the buffer of boulders, dirt and shale, the woodlands lay blackened and ruined, smoke still rising. The smoke was slower now, less intense, but nevertheless engulfed them in a gray, suffocating haze.

Now he had another problem.

He stopped the horse and stepped down from his saddle. He listened to the barb wheeze and choke, its labored breath rattling deep in its lungs.

“Easy, boy,” he said, rubbing the horse’s muzzle. He stepped back to his saddlebags, rummaged a shirt, and shook it out.

He tied the sleeves up around the horse’s head and made a veil of the shirt. The horse resisted a little and whipped its head until the ranger took the canteen and poured water down the horse’s face and threw the shirt onto its parched muzzle. He held the wet
shirt in place, letting the animal breath through it. When the horse felt the good of what the ranger was doing and settled, Sam took his hand off its muzzle.

“Good boy…”

He poured water onto his bandanna and tied it across the bridge of his nose. He led the horse forward by its reins, feeling the thickness of the smoke with every step.

“I make it… seven, eight miles to water,” he rasped, as if the winded horse understood his words and took comfort in them.

Three miles farther, he noted that the smoke had let up, enough that he could make out the blue of the sky. Underneath him the horse breathed easier; so did he. Stopping, he took down the warm canteen and lifted the shirt from the horse’s muzzle. He kneeled in front of the horse and took off his sombrero like a man given to a vigil of prayer.

“You need this worse than I do,” he said, pouring the water into the upturned hat.

The horse lowered its muzzle into the sombrero and Sam let the wet shirt fall around the ensemble.

When the horse finished the water and tried chewing at the hat brim for more, Sam stood and pulled his wet sombrero away and placed it atop his head. Canteen in hand, he climbed back into the saddle and gave the horse a tap of his heels. On their left, among boulder rocks and dry washes, antelope, deer, coyote, and an assortment of smaller creatures still skirted in the same direction, slower now that the threat of death inched farther into the distance.

“It’s up to you now,” Sam said to the horse as the
barb galloped forward, the air, the ground, and the atmosphere already turning cooler around them.

For the next five miles he gave the barb its head, the barb keeping up a strong, steady pace, moving farther away from the raging fire. With the wind in their faces, even with the lingering odor of pine char and brimstone in the air, Sam felt the horse surge with a renewed energy when the scent of water managed to reach into its nostrils.

In the last few hundred yards he had to rein the barb down to keep it from bolting toward the rock runoff tank lying below a steep hillside to their right. The barb muttered and blew and shook its head in protest; but it followed the ranger’s command.

As the ranger scanned the rock tank from fifty yards, a young bear stood up on its hinds and looked at him and the horse, then dropped and turned away. When he was thirty yards away, Sam saw a panther and two cubs begin to slink back from the water’s edge. Grudgingly, with a large-fanged growl, the big mother cat crept backward to the shelter of boulders as the ranger stepped the horse forward. He noted the upper half of the mother cat’s left ear was missing. Dried blood caked down her neck and shoulder. Mimicking its mother, one of the cubs raised its back toward him and let out a hiss—showing its small and helpless fangs. The ranger smiled sadly, nudging his horse forward.

Across the water Sam saw the rumps of a small herd of elk move away into the growth of pine and juniper mantling the rock chasm still running alongside the trail. Odd, he thought, elk, mountain lion,
and bear, all watering within less then thirty feet of one another. Yet odder still was that all three species had cut short sating their thirst at the glimpse of man. The only animals to remain as the ranger rode closer were birds of all sizes and varieties. They sat along the water’s rocky edge, preening themselves of the smell of smoke, and drinking fearlessly, as if knowing that in an instant they could be up and gone should man try any of his dark shenanigans.