West of Tombstone (3 page)

‘It's all right,' Stony said. His teeth flashed white in the light of the growing starlight. ‘They're friends of mine.'

What a blessing it would be to find himself under a roof, Cam was thinking, as they started down the brushy slope, making their way through manzanita and greasewood. They would have some sort of rough meal to offer as well, whoever they were. Possibly even hay, at least some sort of fodder for the weary horses. And water!

It was his great luck that he had managed to fall in with Stony Harte, he reflected. He might have wandered aimlessly on the desert behind them. Worse, he could have encountered the Jicarillas on his own, or simply died from lack of water. Stony was a godsend, this desert nomad who seemed to know every pond and pass, secret trail and mountain divide.

Why then, as they approached the cabin from out of the darkness did Cameron find a cold creeping trepidation pass over him like a warning wind?

Stony halted his horse again when they were fifty yards or so from the small cabin. Putting his cupped hands to his mouth he sounded two owl hoots and was answered from somewhere in the darkness beyond the cabin. Smiling, Stony nodded to Cameron Black and they started on.

Cameron caught a glimpse of a man with a rifle moving toward them slowly from the oak grove, and he wondered briefly why such precautions were necessary. The answer was so obvious that his unease was banished by embarrassment at his own doubts. These people were, after all, occupying a country where the Apaches ranged.

Cameron saw the front door to the cabin open a crack. Then it was flung open, lantern-light flooding the porch as a grinning man without a hair on his head stepped out, pistol in his hand.

‘We'd given you up, Stony,' the stranger said cheerfully.

‘You know better than to count me out, Slyke,' Stony answered, swinging down from Dolly. He looped the gray horse's reins over the crossbar of the hitch rail and stood, hands on hips, as the man who had emerged from the oaks sauntered up to him.

This one, Cameron saw by the light flooding from the cabin's smoky interior, was tall, red-haired, wearing only his trousers, boots and long john shirt as if he had been roused quickly and dispatched quickly.

‘Hello, Willie,' Stony Halle said without offering his hand. The red-head's eyes were black in the darkness and they were fixed on Cameron. His nose, Cam saw, had been badly sliced at one time and had been stitched on carelessly, leaving it crooked and grossly flabby.

‘Who's this?' the man named Willie asked.

‘Cameron Black. He's a fellow-traveler,' Stony replied, with a small gesture that could have meant anything.

Swinging down from the paint pony's back, Cameron nodded to the two strangers. His uneasiness had returned, but he did not know why. No matter, if they were friends of Stony's, these men had to be accepted. No matter that they appeared tough and cautious. Most men in this territory were understandably cautious around those they did not know.

‘Got any coffee?' Stony asked, untying the piggin strings that held his saddle-bags.

‘Coffee and white lightning,' the bald man, Slyke, answered.

‘Then why are you boys making me stand out here in the dark!'

He inclined his head and Cameron followed him into the poorly built shack. Without sawn lumber to be had it had been constructed of whatever was at hand. Adobe clay over poles with a brush and pole roof. Cameron had slept in worse places; he paid no attention to the packed earth floor or darting mosquitoes.

‘About time!' said the voice from beneath the Indian blanket in the corner. The blanket was spread over a roughly made low bed with a thin mattress of ticking. When it was thrown back, the woman in the black dress emerged with a quick smile for Stony and a narrow-eyed appraisal of Cameron Black.

‘Who is this?' she asked tightly.

By the smoky glow of the kerosene lantern Cameron could not make her out well. Her voice was gravelly and low-pitched. She was quite short and fairly stout. Her hair was a haystack tangle of dark, gray-streaked locks. ‘My God!' she murmured, still staring at Cameron. She picked up a brush from a rickety table and began working at her hair with a sort of nervous authority.

‘I know, Emily,' Stony said to her. He then tossed the saddle-bags from his shoulder onto her bed and told Slyke, ‘I'll have some coffee now. Let me have a straight shooter of that gump you call whiskey first to clear the dust.'

Willie nodded and walked to a corner stove constructed of a few bricks and a sheet of rusty steel. He poked at the smoldering fire and startled a few flames to life. Then he handed Stony a pint jar with an inch or so of pale liquor in it. Cameron was offered nothing.

‘What happened to the boys?' Willie asked impatiently. He rubbed at his deformed nose and stared at Cameron as if challenging him to say something about it. Cam's unease had returned, and now it was based more solidly on something beyond suspicions. He had somehow blundered into a band of dangerous men.

Stony drank a neat ounce of poisonous white lightning and shook his head. ‘The shotgun rider got Billy even before we had them halted. Some dude inside the stage took it into his head that he was a gunfighter. He leaped out of the Concorde and blasted away at Indian Joe. Missed the first two shots, got him the next.'

‘How many did you get, Stony?' the woman asked, her eyes bright with the excitement of the tale.

Stony shrugged and took another drink of the poor whiskey, wiping his lips on his cuff. ‘I'm here, ain't I? I got all three of them. I took the shotgun rider with a snap shot; I took my time with the passenger. I always liked Indian Joe. The driver played possum, pretending he'd been hit: I knew he hadn't, so I hit him for real.'

‘Only you, Stony,' the stout woman said with frank admiration.

‘The trouble is that I think there was another passenger. He bolted out the far door and took to the brush. I didn't have time to search for him – no telling who the shots would bring. I grabbed the payroll and got out of there. I dumped the silver. For its weight it isn't worth that much and I was alone and needing to travel fast. I burned the army scrip. That's worthless. Especially if we decide to head out for Mexico. The gold …' He nodded toward the saddle-bags resting on the Indian blanket.

Cameron Black felt himself sway slightly. His worst fears had been realized. He had wandered like a child into the camp of a band of murderous thieves.

‘Strange, ain't it?' the woman said. ‘The resemblance, I mean,' she said, stepping nearer to Cameron to look at his face. ‘Eerie, is what it is – the way he looks like you.' She still held her tortoiseshell brush in her hand. Now she lifted it as if she would tap it against Cam's chest, but she did not. She turned her back and went to Stony and whispered something that made the outlaw grin.

Slyke was seated near the saddle-bags Stony had brought in and now his hand fumbled with the clasps. Stony Harte saw the motion from the corner of his eye and he whirled, his hand on the butt of his pistol.

‘Leave that be for now!'

‘It's part mine, isn't it?' the bald man said sulkily, but he didn't like the look in Stony's eyes and he rose to turn away.

‘Why'd you bring the kid along with you?' Willie demanded, watching Cameron.

‘Why do you think?' Stony answered.

Slowly Willie came to understand. His eyes brightened with low intelligence as he looked from Stony Harte to Cameron Black.

‘He is,' the woman, Emily, said, ‘isn't he? He's a dead ringer for Stony.'

‘Dead ringer,' Willie said with a crooked smile. He tugged involuntarily at his bent nose again.

The misgivings Cameron had felt growing mushroomed into stark fear. He knew now what they had in mind for him. He backed away half a step, but Willie moved behind him, clamped a big, broken-knuckled hand on his wrist and removed his Colt .44 from his holster, tucking it behind his belt.

Cameron tried to feign indifference, as if taking his gun was only a precaution on the outlaw's part. He tried fixing an expression of amiable unconcern on his face and suggested, ‘How about if I put the horses up and rub 'em down, Stony?'

Stony didn't bother to answer. His eyes were hooded and bleak. There was no doubt in Cameron's mind now what his fate was to be. Only a pawn in a dangerous game, he would have to be sacrificed. He shrugged and half-turned as if he were part stupid. Then he bolted for the doorway. He threw a fist into Slyke's stomach, pawed at his gun which he could not recover, stumbled past Willie and was banged against the door jamb then broke free into the yard.

Cameron ducked as the first shot was fired from the cabin door, tried for the paint pony's reins and could not catch them up as the startled horse shied. Then he broke into a weaving, panicked run. Two more shots were aimed his way, missing him again.

Another bullet was loosed from one of the .44s behind him and this one did not miss. It caught him on the side of the skull like a sledge hammer, his limbs turned to rubber and Cameron Black came undone, sprawling onto his face against the cold, hard Arizona earth. One bright, volcanic light flashed through his head and then fizzled to darkness, leaving him falling into a deep, silent abyss.

‘Good work, Pocomo,' a man was saying from out of a long, light tunnel. Someone answered in a strangely inflected voice.

‘I say catch 'em, I catch 'em.' There was a pride in the words. Cameron felt a boot toe jar his ribs roughly. Someone was standing over him. Opening one eye a mere slit he saw the sun, high and white glaring down on the ranch. He closed his eyes tightly; the glare was intolerable. His head was raging with pain. There was matted blood in his hair, scabbed across one eye. He pawed at it with the web of his hand, tried to rise and fell back to the hot earth.

‘Get up!' someone commanded, and Cameron was jerked to his feet by hands under his arms and at his belt.

‘You sure this is him?' a third voice asked.

‘It's him.'

‘I track that horse thirty miles,' the man with the odd voice said. Squinting again into the terrible sunlight, Cameron saw that this one was an Indian, perhaps a Cherokee. His face was covered with white alkali dust, streaked with rivulets of sweat. ‘I know that horse tracks.'

‘So do I, Pocomo,' the big man answered. ‘Name's “Dolly”, isn't it, Stony?'

Cameron shook his head wearily. His neck seemed to have no strength. He couldn't answer, his mouth was so parched. The big man, the one who seemed to be in charge, was shaped like a barrel, with stubby legs and thick arms attached. He wore twill trousers and a faded red shirt.

There was a badge attached to his shirt front.

‘Well, you ought to know,' the other man, the one who remained mounted on a black gelding, said, tilting back his hat. ‘Ask him where the money is. That's all Wells Fargo wants. After that you can do with him what you like.'

‘I'll ask him,' the lawman said. His voice was very ugly. He grabbed Cameron by his hair and jerked his head up, pushing him roughly against Dolly's flank. ‘Come clean, Stony. It might save your life.'

‘I'm not Stony Harte,' Cameron said, with a mouth that felt as if it were clogged with dust. The lawman laughed and glanced at his companions.

‘See! He knew Stony's last name and no one had mentioned it.' For something to do, it seemed, more than out of anger, the sheriff bunched his big fist and drove it into Cam's ribs, forcing his breath out in a sudden rush. ‘Give up the payroll, Stony. I might be able to keep you from hanging, or at least cut a few years off your sentence.'

‘I'd co-operate was I you,' the man on horseback told Cameron Black. He was narrow, his face deeply tanned and lined. Apparently he was a Wells Fargo detective from what Cam had overheard. ‘I'd hate to let Sheriff Yount loose on you. Save yourself some trouble and a lot of pain.'

‘Others all ride. Fast across river,' the Indian tracker told them. ‘No tracks in river. Too much sand and rocks for good sign.'

‘It doesn't matter,' Sheriff Yount said, with a shrug of his heavy shoulders. ‘We've got their leader now. He knows where they're bound, I guarantee you.'

‘Why don't we look through the cabin again, Barney?' the Wells Fargo agent suggested.

‘You do that … there could be a place to cache the money,' the big sheriff said, breathing roughly as he stood in front of Cameron Black, his eyes feral and cold. ‘Pocomo, whyn't you see if you can't cut sign somewhere along the river? That might give us an idea where the gang is headed, though my guess is Mexico.'

‘Long time gone now,' the Indian said with a small shake of his head. ‘Try.'

When the other two had moved slowly away on their horses, Pocomo toward the river beyond the live oaks, and the Wells Fargo man to the cabin, the sheriff pulled a twist of tobacco from his pocket, bit off a wad of it and faced Cam deliberately.

‘You got bad trouble, Stony.'

‘I'm not—'

‘No. And I'm a canary bird. Whose hat is that?' he demanded, moving his boot to nudge Stony Harte's doeskin hat with its unique silver and turquoise band. The sheriff bent down and picked it up, jamming it on Cameron Black's head. ‘Fits pretty good, don't it?'

‘First of all—' Cameron tried again. The sheriff would not let him speak.

‘What's that gray horse's name?' he asked slyly.

‘Dolly, but … if you'd listen to me for a minute!'

‘Dolly was thirty miles south the day before yesterday, Harte. Pocomo is a tracking fool. He never lost your sign. Not only that, we have an eye-witness who saw you gun down a shotgun rider and a passenger on the Wells Fargo Tucson link. Know what else?' the large man asked, standing nearer so that his raw road scent of perspiration, stale tobacco and whiskey was rank in Cam's nostrils. ‘You talk like a Georgia boy, did you know that? I spent six months down there occupying Rebel land for Sherman. I can hear Georgia all over you.'