Part 15 (1/2)
”d.a.m.n,” Yakima said, shuttling his gaze from the burning man to a spurred boot lying at the edge of the firelight to the dead man behind the fire nearest Patchen. ”They only sent three. I was hopin' for a few more.”
As Patchen moved forward, lowering his rifle, Speares cursed. ”You used us for bait, you son of a b.i.t.c.h!”
Yakima shook his head, peering cautiously into the darkness. ”I just set a couple fires.”
”You're a crazy son of a b.i.t.c.h, Henry.” Patchen's gut burned. He was getting to be as big a fool as Speares, and he wasn't learning a d.a.m.n thing from his foolishness. ”How'd you know they wouldn't all come?”
Yakima shrugged. ”I wouldn't send my whole gang to check out three campfires. Especially if I had gold to keep track of.” Yakima racked a fresh sh.e.l.l into his Winchester's breech and off-c.o.c.ked the hammer. He regarded the two lawmen with vague distaste. ”If you two are gonna hang around, you might as well make yourselves useful. I've got a hidden hidden camp up yonder in the hills. Fetch your horses.” camp up yonder in the hills. Fetch your horses.”
He turned, started away.
Speares laughed caustically. ”You gotta lot o' d.a.m.n nerve!”
Yakima continued walking away. ”It's gonna take nerve to take down the Thunder Riders.”
”How do you you propose to do it?” Patchen said, resting his rifle barrel on his shoulder. propose to do it?” Patchen said, resting his rifle barrel on his shoulder.
Yakima turned, stared at him. ”The Apache way.” A faint smile touched the hard, shadowed plains of his face. ”The Cheyenne way.”
He turned and disappeared in the darkness.
Flanked by the rest of the gang, Considine and McKenna stood before the ancient Indian ruins, at the edge of the steaming River of No Return. They stared toward the three campfires on the dark hillock north of the canyon, watching the sudden fourth blaze die as gradually as the echoes of the gut-wrenching howl that accompanied it.
The men around the gang leaders murmured among themselves.
McKenna turned to Considine. ”Sounded like Prewitt.”
Considine, who had sent Prewitt, MacDonald, and a northern gunslick named Belknap to investigate the three fires, which had appeared suddenly on the hillock a mile or so away, said nothing as he stared through the snaking steam, thumbs hooked in his pistol belt.
Apprehension trickled a single bead of sweat down the middle of his back.
He kept it out of his voice as he glanced at McKenna. ”If the boys don't come back, take a couple of the others out at first light.” He turned and walked back toward the gang's own campfires flaming here and there around the ruins, toward his bedroll and Anjanette.
Ben Towers stepped up beside McKenna, who continued staring at the distant fires. ”What'd he say, Boss?” Towers asked.
McKenna sighed, glancing at the tall black man. ”He said that if them three don't show by sunup, he wants you to take Hayes, the Apache, and Joolie up to investigate.”
With that, Mad Dog clapped Towers on the shoulder and followed Considine's path toward the gang's campfires.
Meanwhile, picketed with the rest of the gang's horses, but with a gunnysack tied over his head and all four feet hobbled with thick strips of braided rawhide, Wolf arched his neck suddenly. Through the burlap, he'd caught a familiar scent on the night breeze.
A recognizable man-smell drifting across the steaming water . . .
The smell was faint and fleeting. Still, the black stallion twitched his ears and snorted, his giant heart quickening.
Chapter 18.
Just after sunup the next morning, Yakima, Patchen, and Spears lay belly down atop a low tabletop mesa, staring through rocks and brush toward the hillock where Yakima had set the three fires and killed the three Thunder Riders.
Yakima checked the hillock with his spygla.s.s and saw four other desperadoes now gathered there. Three of them kicked around the brush, while one-a tall black man in a low-crowned brown sombrero and a deerskin jacket-knelt over one of the dead men. The black man held a Spencer rifle in one hand and looked around with the quick, cautious movements of one accustomed to tracking and being tracked.
”Well, they sent one more than last night.” Yakima pa.s.sed the spygla.s.s to Patchen, who raised it to his bruised, sunburned face, adjusting the focus.
”Sent an Apache this time,” Patchen said, staring through the gla.s.s. ”Yasi, known as Kills Gold-Hairs for his preference for gold-headed white girls. He's so depraved that even his own people won't have anything to do with him.”
”Kills Gold-Hairs?” Speares said with interest. ”I heard there's over a thousand dollars on his head alone.”
”Lawmen and army trackers have dusted his trail,” Patchen said, handing the gla.s.s to Speares. ”No one's even come close to him, though several have died b.l.o.o.d.y.”
”I reckon we're gonna get our chance.” Speares lowered the gla.s.s and stared with his naked eyes across the rolling chaparral. ”They picked up our tracks, headin' this way. Just three. The fourth seems to be headin' back to their camp at the river-to report to Considine and Mad Dog, no doubt.”
Yakima reached over Patchen and grabbed the spygla.s.s from Speares. ”Remember the plan. Spread out and give 'em plenty of sign but not so much they sniff the trap.”
He looped the spygla.s.s's lanyard around his neck and began crabbing straight back along the mesa. When he was behind the mesa's brow, he rose and hoofed it back down the opposite slope.
Their three horses waited at the mesa's base, tied to scrawny willows. Patchen and Speares followed, grunting at their aches and pains, loosing dust and gravel down the steep bank behind them, spurs singing softly.
Yakima leapt atop the buckskin and turned toward the other two men reaching for their saddle horns. ”We meet back here. Don't get lost. It's a big desert.”
He heeled the buckskin southwest, cutting through a sharp draw between mesas. Behind him, Speares turned to Patchen. ”He's got one h.e.l.l of a mouth for a half-breed.”
Patchen swung into the saddle with a great creak of dry leather. ”You tell him that, Sheriff.”
Chuckling, the marshal turned his own mount north and galloped off around the base of a low pinon-studded mesa.
An hour later, Speares hunkered among boulders spilling down the right shoulder of a rocky scarp sheathed in creosote and gnarled elms. He stared down the other side of the hill, into a tangle of low pines and barrel cactus growing around another split outcrop of black volcanic rock.
Around him, birds and squirrels chattered. There'd been a javelina snorting around behind him somewhere, but it had drifted off not long after Speares had settled into the rocks.
A black widow spider crawled out of a crack in the scarp beneath his rifle, and Speares watched it, a tiny white dot on its tail, crawl up over his rifle barrel, just in front of the receiver, and disappear among pine needles and decaying leaves.
Less than a minute ago, a hoof thud had sounded from the split scarp ahead. Since then, Speares had lain cheeked up to the rifle stock, breathing shallowly through slightly parted lips, staring at the scarp, his heart thudding rhythmically in his chest.
Another thud, and the sheriff increased the tension on the rifle's trigger.
A bobbing horse head appeared-a blaze-faced dun with a Mexican-style bridle, braided and inset with hammered silver disks. As the dun moved out from the narrow notch in the scarp, the black man in the saddle swung his head around slowly, his back taut but still moving fluidly with the horse's choppy steps.
His face was shaded by the broad brim of his brown sombrero, but Speares saw a short beard, a slender nose, and a wide, pale scar on his neck. The man moved his head back and forth, skittish as a mule deer in bobcat country.
Drawing a bead on the man's short buffalo coat, Speares continued easing back on the trigger until horse and rider slid suddenly behind the hill's brow, heading toward Speares's left.
Speares swore silently, pulled his head and rifle back behind the scarp, and scrambled as quietly as he could to the other side of the rock. He crawled atop the hill's shoulder, left of the projecting rock, and aimed down the slope.
The black man and the dun appeared, rising up out of the hill as though from the earth itself. The rider turned his head away from Speares. The sheriff's heart pounded as he held his breath and settled the rifle's foresight into the notch above the receiver, bearing down on the side of the black man's head.