Mojave (13 page)

“Oh.” Right then, he looked like a boy. He said, “You reckon that's an ambush?”

“It'd make sense.” I pointed at all them rocks, the holes, the cracks. “You put ten, twelve men with repeating rifles”—I recollected the man I'd shot dead had been armed with a Spencer—“that's all Crutchfield would need to stop a whole posse.” Or, I thought, Whip Watson and the boys.

“Who the hell is this Candy Crutchfield fellow?”

“Ain't a fellow, I said. He's a woman.” I rubbed the stubble on my chin. “Yeah. Not hiding their tracks, just racing their horses. Makes sense. Yeah, if I was wanting to ambush Whip Watson, that's what I'd do.” Pointed again at the canyon walls. “Just sit up in them rocks, and wait.”

Problem was, somebody had thought of something different. Because almost as soon as them words had left my mouth, I heard a rifle being cocked right behind me and Peach Fuzz and the Columbus carriage and the two gray Percherons. That's when I recalled the dead shrubs and little sinkhole we'd passed right on our right.

A voice said, “Step out of that buggy, you two, or I'll blow you both to hell.”

Luckily, I recognized the voice, and I reached over to stop Peach Fuzz from trying to get that Barlow knife out of his pants pocket, which would have taken quite a spell since his pants was too tight and he was sitting down.

“Jingfei,” I said. “It's me.”

She said, “I said get down.”

Loved her voice. It had a hint of the Oriental princess that she was, but unlike her betrothed, Lucky Ben Wong, she didn't try to fool nobody by speaking that broken English. She spoke plain.

“Now,” she said.

We got down. Hands up. Turned around real slow.

The porcelain face softened as she recognized me. Didn't lower the rifle, though. Appeared to be studying us, and I hoped that Peach Fuzz wasn't doing no more glaring.

Instead, he asked, “Where's Whip's horse?”

She answered, “Dead.”

That was Whip's rifle she was holding. Whip's two canteens hung over her left shoulder.

Peach Fuzz shook his head. “Whip'll be mad.”

She said something rather indelicate about what Whip could do.

“You shouldn't speak like that,” Peach Fuzz said. “It ain't a-fittin' for—”

“Shut the hell up!” me and Jingfei both told Peach Fuzz, and for once, he complied.

“Back away from the buggy,” she said. “I'll be taking it.”

I backed, but said, “What about us?”

“Watson'll come along.”

Even I didn't fancy having to explain to our temperamental boss how a mail-order bride from Trinidad, Colorado, by way of the Orient, had gotten the jump on me and Peach Fuzz and had stole his Columbus carriage after she had ridden Whip's fine mare to death.

So I pointed toward the canyon pass. “You try to go through that,” I said, “and you'll get killed.”

She said, “I already rode through it, then that black died, and I walked back through it.” She motioned with the Winchester's barrel that she was tiring of our conversation. “And I'm still alive.”

“You're going to get Bonnie, ain't you?”

When Peach Fuzz said that, his voice all whiny like the love-struck boy he was, I seen a softening in Jingfei's face. She took her eyes off me, and locked on Peach Fuzz, and she told him, “You're a nice boy. Bonnie really likes you.” Her head bobbed. “Yes. I'm going after Bonnie and all the others.” She turned back to me. “This isn't what we agreed to.”

Didn't know what she meant, exactly, but I wasn't sure about nothing, so as I eased away from the carriage, and Peach Fuzz reluctantly came with me, and Jingfei moved cautiously toward the buggy, I said, “Rogers Canfield's dead.”

That stopped her, and she and Peach Fuzz both echoed, “What?”

“Watson killed him,” I told them. “It was . . . er . . . self-defense. Aw, hell, Whip shot him down like a dog.”

“He was a dog,” Peach Fuzz said, and I couldn't dispute that sentiment. “I told Bonnie he was a dog.”

“It doesn't matter,” Jingfei said. “My Lucky Ben Wong will be waiting for me.”

“It matters to me,” Peach Fuzz said, “because that drummer ain't fit to get hitched to my Bonnie.”

Jingfei was trying to figure out how to get into the carriage without taking the rifle off me, 'cause she was smart. I mean smart because she didn't trust me. She did manage to sling Whip's two canteens into the back, but that was about all she could do for the moment.

“That carriage,” I pointed out, “won't hold all the girls bound for Calico.”

“Six will fit,” she said, still trying to figure out how to get into that buggy.

“There are twenty-four others,” I told her. She give me a look I can't quite describe, and I could feel Peach Fuzz's eyes boring into me. I gestured south. “Plus the twelve you left back in Whip's camp.”

“Eleven,” she corrected, which was another reason I admired Jingfei so. She could do ciphering real well. I'd forgot to take her out of the equation of the number of mail-order brides back yonder.

“Candy Crutchfield,” I said, and explained to her, “the gal who led the attack on your camp and made off with six of your pals. She struck a deal with Rogers Canfield, too.”

She didn't care for none of what I was saying, but Peach Fuzz appeared interested because he was asking things like “What?” and “Why?” . . . but Jingfei had leaped into the carriage while I was trying to talk some sense into her, and she done it real graceful, slicker than I can deal from the bottom of a deck. She cradled Whip's rifle in her lap, the barrel still pointed at my direction, and her hand that wasn't on Whip's Winchester reached for the brake.

So I sighed. “You need a plan,” I told her.

Which stopped her. Now she give me the look that suggested that she really thought I had a plan, but that's on account that as a professional card sharp, I know how to bluff.

“Get in,” she told both of us.

 

 

This time, Jingfei drove, I rode shotgun, though I didn't have a shotgun and Jingfei wouldn't let me hold Whip's rifle, but I did have my two revolvers holstered on my hips. Peach Fuzz bounced around in the big backseat. His Barlow knife remained inside his trousers pocket.

Course, I bit my lip, ground my teeth, and sweated a whole lot when we rode through that narrow pass, still thinking that would be a right handy spot for an ambush, but we cleared the walls, and the sun was blazing, and we just kept trotting along.

“Easy pace.” I instructed Jingfei the same as I'd told Peach Fuzz how to drive. “These are the only horses we got.”

An hour or two later, I made Jingfei stop to give the two grays a breather, and, once they'd cooled down, made Peach Fuzz fill his hat with some water for the horses.

“Why don't you use your own hat?” he snapped.

“Because mine's full of holes,” I reminded him.

As the Percherons drunk their fill, I unbuckled my rig with the Spiller & Burr and tossed it into the backseat, and settled back down on the comfortable but rather dusty leather.

“What's your plan?” Jingfei asked.

I took off my hat to wipe my brow, but I wasn't sweating because I was afraid of Jingfei. I mean, the temperature had to be approaching a hundred degrees.

“Well . . .” Even Peach Fuzz looked over the horses, waiting to hear my plan. “Need to see how they've set up their camp. How many sentries they got posted. Where the horses are picketed. Lay of the land. Where the girls are. Things like that.”

Peach Fuzz moved to the other horse. Jingfei stepped out of the carriage and studied our back trail. Which was fine with me, as I now had to figure out just what in the hell we was going to do once we caught up with Candy Crutchfield—other than get ourselves killed. Jingfei's joining our pursuit did give us an extra gun. Two revolvers—one of them an old cap-and-ball that was hard to cock and prone to misfires—a new Colt and a Winchester. Up against twenty, thirty, forty men.

“What if they just keep riding?” Peach Fuzz put his waterlogged hat on his head, and moved around the team, back toward the carriage. “I mean what if they just ride all the way to Calico?”

“Can't,” I said. “It's still too far.” Jingfei climbed aboard. “Especially hot as it is, dry as it is.”

“What's this?” Peach Fuzz asked as he crawled into his seat.

I told him it was a .36-caliber Spiller & Burr and I was loaning it to him until all this was over.

He said, “This thing's apt to blow my hand off. Can't I have the Colt?”

Jingfei's whipping of the horses choked down my cussing.

 

 

Thirty minutes later, Jingfei was yanking hard on the lines, and as soon as the team stopped, she and I and Peach Fuzz was jumping to the dirt, and looking back.

“Sounded like gunfire,” Peach Fuzz said, and he decided that now might not be a time to be too particular about what weapons he'd been loaned, so he buckled on my belt that I'd loaned him.

“Because it was gunfire,” Jingfei said. She pushed her hair over her shoulder.

Another cannonade reached us, muffled, pretty far back I'd reckon, but close enough so that we could hear. That didn't please me none. I bit my bottom lip again, loosened my bandanna and used it to mop the sweat off my face, then I took off my hat, tossed it onto the seat, and combed my hair with my fingers.

“We'd better go,” I said.

Jingfei looked at me. “Who cut your hair?”

I blinked. “Ma'am?”

“You're wearing new clothes, too. And that's a new—well, it was a new—hat.”

“Yes'm,” I said. “I bought new duds when I was in Calico.”

We got back into the buggy, and the Percherons continued taking us down the trail.

“You looked awful when Maud found you that night.” She set the whip back in its holder, kept the two grays at the right pace, though they was starting to tire.

I said, “Maud?” I'd always figured it was Whip Watson who'd found me.

“Yes.” Her voice was curt, sad, and she brought up two of those long, wonderful fingers and dabbed at the tear rolling down her perfect face.

That's when I recollected poor Maud Fenstermacher, she of the broken neck who'd gotten pitched out of the overturning Conestoga on account of that lying rapscallion Jürgen Baader who claimed to be a lawman drawing three hundred dollars a month in Calico. I ground my teeth, clenched my right fist.

Maud, Jingfei told me, had gone out to answer nature's call at night when she found my body lying against some rocks. She called out to the guards, but they figured me dead, and went through my pockets to see if I had anything of value. Then she started screaming at the two men, one of whom was the late Conrad and the other who, Jingfei announced, had gotten mortal shot through both lungs during Candy Crutchfield's attack. Maud had called her guards vermin and fiends and ghouls, which they was. Those shouts had drawed Juan Pedro and Whip Watson out to the rocks. It had also drawed Jingfei.

Thing like that causes a fellow to stop and ponder. My life had been saved because a gal had to go relieve herself.

Then I asked, “They sent guards when you had to pee or—”

She cut me off. “Always.”

The way things worked, Jingfei said, was that the women in the train were allowed to do their business only one at a time. With one or two guards. For their own protection, Whip Watson said, but Jingfei knew better. It was so they couldn't escape. That's where Jingfei had been and what she'd been doing when I'd first seen her and she come and finished cooking our supper that night at Whip's camp.

Sudden-like, it struck me that I hadn't seen Jingfei wash her hands or nothing like that before she went to them pots.

My stomach churned about, but that food was long gone, and I hadn't gotten sick, so I said, “Do you think Whip was expecting Crutchfield to attack?”

“No,” she answered. “He was making sure we didn't run off.”

“But you've got a contract,” I said. “You're betrothed to Lucky Ben Wong.”

She turned, her eyes hard, boring right through me, and I realized I'd done blown any bluff I might have been able to try. “How did you know that?” she demanded.

I took off my hat, pointed to my hair.

She grinned. Honest to goodness, she grinned, and shook her head, and slowed the horses down a mite because she knowed something about horses herself, and those Percherons needed another breather. A couple minutes later, we found a shady spot, protected by some peaks of red spires, and she reined in, set the brake. She wanted to rest the horses.

And talk.

“Is he a good man?” she asked.

Hell, I'd only knowed him for a few hours. I know in a lot of towns, the barber knows everyone and everybody knows him, but that was my first visit to Calico and my first meeting with Lucky Ben Wong.

“Seems like,” I said, and I meant it, too. I wondered if Jingfei partook of opium.

Then I realized that I had actually met Lucky Ben Wong in the flesh. He had cut my hair. Fixed my bath. Jingfei hadn't even met the guy in person, and she was gonna wed him.

I nodded. Made up my mind. Some folks, you know almost instantly. “Yeah,” I said softly. “Lucky Ben Wong's a good man. A real good man.”

“Tell me,” she said, “about Rogers Canfield.”

Who wasn't good at all. A dark, black-hearted son of a bitch, but all I told Jingfei was, “He's dead.”

“Yes,” she said. “You said that already. Killed by Whip Watson.”

After my head nodded again, I told her everything I knowed.

“Canfield hired Candy Crutchfield,” I said, and felt Peach Fuzz lean forward and rest his arms on the backs of our seats so he could hear better. “She's bringing in twenty-four brides herself. She and Canfield worked out some deal where Canfield was supposed to make sure Whip and me and Guttersnipe Gary—”

“Where is Guttersnipe Gary?” Peach Fuzz interrupted. “Y'all leave him back in Calico?”

“Yeah,” I answered. “Dead.”

“Guttersnipe Gary?” Peach Fuzz's head shook. “I can't believe he could get kilt.”

“Shut up,” Jingfei said, and, damn right, she was Quiet Not. Peach Fuzz got quiet. Jingfei told me to keep on talking.

So I told her what had happened. How two men had tried to gun me down in her betrothed's bath house, but that I had outshot both of them, and saved Lucky Ben Wong's life. I didn't tell her that Lucky Ben Wong lived in a house made of empty cans of coal oil, and found it hard to picture a goddess like Jingfei living in such filth. Then I told her, and Peach Fuzz, how Guttersnipe Gary had sent one of his two killers to the bad place, and how I had avenged Guttersnipe Gary's death with a pistol shot at seventy-seven yards. I told her how Whip Watson had dispatched his two killers, and then how we'd caught up with Rogers Canfield. I mentioned how Whip had gotten Canfield to confess his arrangement with Candy Crutchfield, and then how Whip Watson had shot him dead.