Hell of a Horse

by Barbara Neville

  “Good, might be a way out,” I say, working at her wrist bonds. “Better yet, more than one. An air vent, back entrance. You got a flask?”

  “Don’t make me laugh,” she says, looking around her by the light of my match. “One good thing has come of this.”

  We have each other’s hands untied and are working on our ankles.

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  “I lost that bloody ridiculous cowboy hat.”

  I reach up and touch the brim of mine.

  “They can come in right handy,” I say. “Hells bells.” I wiggle my toes. “Shit. My fucking boots better be here somewhere.”

  “What?”

  “Rat bastard sons a bitches stole ‘em.”

  Zastee’s quiet.

  “Besides needing them to walk around in, they’re fuckin’ custom made,” I say, huffing. “Ma’cho’s brother made ‘em for me to commemorate my survivin’ the jaguar attack.”

  “A jaguar attacked you?” she asks.

  “Yep.”

  She chuckles.

  “Kiss my ass, bitch,” I say.

  Soon, we’re loose. I strike a match. We find Zastee’s pack on a shelf.

  And my boots and spurs are just around the corner, laying askew, like someone dropped them and ran. I knock out any bugs and dirt and slide them on, thankfully.

  The tunnel ends at a cross tunnel. Two choices. Up or down. I strike another match, shielding it from the slight breeze with a cupped hand.

  Some tracks go down.

  “Three, no, four people,” I say.

  The tracks are thick, covering each other. They’ve trod in and out a few times. Hard to read.

  “Wait, five or six,” I say.

  Several have big feet, like mine. Or bigger. Soles worn enough that I can see it’s different people with about the same size boots. I end up too confused to have a real count. To many, in any case.

  We go the other way, up. Odds are the surface will be uphill.

  Maybe.

  The climb is steep in places, we have to scramble over fallen rock and debris. We pass a couple of old broken, battered ladders leading to who knows what. More workings, I imagine.

  “Must have been a glory hole,” I say.

  “A what?”

  “A big mass of high grade ore, they didn’t have to move much worthless overburden, just dug out the rich ore body. Explains the crude shape of the walls, the big caverns and the general steepness of the workings. Big profit,” I say. “Minimal loss. Some of these kinds of deposits have huge nuggets of almost pure gold. They can be pretty damn rich.”

  I strike another match. She picks up a glittering rock and holds it out.

  “Pyrite,” I say. “Fool’s gold.”

  We walk a while longer.

  “How long do you think we were bloody tied up?” she asks.

  I fumble my way through my brain, searching the nooks and crannies for information. “No fuckin’ idea.”

  13 Kabó: The Chase

  By the time Kabó gets there, the pair are long since gone.

  He hurries on down the tunnel, lantern in hand, following their tracks.

  He takes a wrong turn, loses them a while, turns back, finds their tracks again and he’s good.

  He hears their voices just in time and slows.

  They’re coming back toward him. He douses the lantern and turns back himself.

  Walking light footed, he ducks into a side tunnel. And watches as they pass by.

  “We need to stick with these bear tracks, don’t wanna get lost down another dead end like that,” says the blonde. “We’ll either find him and make meat or find the outside world.”

  He couldn’t have asked for better luck.

  Maybe the spirits that his sister believes in aren’t imaginary after all. And, today at least, they’re on his side.

  He waits a while, to avoid being seen by the eagle-eyed girls.

  He’d promised that he’d leave them be and that he’d report his sister as killed to stop other bounty men or assassins from hunting her. Unfortunately, he hasn’t been able to do that yet.

  What can you do? Life gets in the way of well laid plans at the most inconvenient of times.

  Once they’re past, he steps out from behind the big rock and follows in their footsteps.

  14 Ma'cho: Sign

  Ma'cho searches the ground in the barnyard, along the driveway and on the beach, but can’t find any sign of Cha'a’s presence since early on the night before.

  She was riding Ten Spot. Traces of the honest little gelding’s tracks head down the driveway and north toward the Hummingbird Cave, but don’t return.

  The Apache heads back to Güero’s cabin.

  Bigan is in the barnyard, behind the big guy’s horse. He’s unsaddling his mount.

  “Táági here?” he asks, pointing his chin at the black gelding.

  Ma’cho nods. “With news,” he says. “We go soon, leave saddle on.”

  “Okay,” says Bigan, slotting the latigo and leaving the cinch loose.

  “Little kids get off okay?”

  “Yeah, they said that Two Bears is gonna finish fixing that leaky stock tank pipe, then take Góshé up to join them,” says Bigan. “What you got planned?”

  “You see Cha’a last night or today?”

  “No, isn’t she with Güero?”

  “No one see her,” says Ma’cho, in his telegraph English.

  “She’s gone?” asks Bigan, stopping dead in his tracks to stare at his friend.

  Ma’cho shrugs and nods.

  They climb the steps and join Güero and Táági in the cabin.

  “Anything?” asks Güero.

  “Ten Spot only leave last night, go north, not come back,” Ma’cho reports.

  “When she rode to the bloody cave to meet me?” asks Táági.

  Ma'cho nods.

  “When we split up,” Táági says. “She said she was coming home. Turned south along the road. The rain after washed out her tracks.”

  Ma'cho looks back and forth between the three vacant faces and shrugs.

  “I don’t know about you lot,” says Táági. “But Cha’a, the queen of fun, didn’t show up for an appointment to go on a madcap trip with me this morning. That doesn’t bode well at all. I bloody well think that we need to go out and look for her. Post haste.”

  15 Harley: Doggone It

  Hearing the shots below, Harley lays on his belly and waits.

  “Damn, them girls get their guns somehow?”

  He has a pretty good view into the lower tunnel. They have to come this way. It’s the only way left to get to the surface.

  He keeps his six shooter in hand, ready.

  Eventually, he hears someone walk by, but can’t get an angle on them. And can’t move, because the noise will draw their fire.

  Once the footsteps fade, he sneaks carefully back toward the blast wall to check on his new gunhands.

  “Damn.”

  He checks them.

  All are stone dead. He can see where they tried to open up the new rock barrier in a failed attempt to escape alive.

  “Bastards.”

  So much for his new quick draw artists. Not a one worth the cost of the lead in the bullets that killed them.

  Their pockets are mostly empty. No money in their wallets. They must have been carrying some. Their guns are all still there.

  “What the holy hell?” He scratches his head, sure they checked the girls carefully for hideout weapons.

  Jigger, the ore classifier, wears the same size boots. And his are brand new.

  Harley takes advantage. They’re crocodile skin with colorful embroidery on the uppers. And expensive toe tips.

  “Dayum, these are nice,” he says, sliding them on. “Just right.”

  He takes an exploratory walk. The boots feel great. Glory Hole Joe has a fancy pearl gripped revolver in a custom holster rig. He doffs his ragged old second-hand outfit and straps Joe’s on.

  He s
tashes the rest of the spoils in a handy crevice. And stacks some rocks in front, making the guns and other items invisible to prying eyes.

  “Looks like yore misfortune is my fortune. Thanks, Jig and Joe.” He tells the dead men on his way out.

  He heads to the cavern to check on the two prisoners.

  “Shit.” He spits a brown stream of tobacco juice. “They’re gone.”

  He follows the tracks of the killer and the gals. The three sets of tracks are together now. The shooter must be another of Blondie’s bunch.

  Damn it, all they had left to do was load up a freight wagon and leave the country. They were supposed to clear the damn gold out of the mine today, undetected.

  But for the storm dropping all that damned snow.

  Hopefully them gals never saw the stash. There were too many tracks going in and out of the safe room to be at all sure.

  The three hired hands weren’t there for the standoff on the train down in Old Mexico, so they wouldn’t understand what was going on.

  Why he and Angus had to go off and talk alone. It was their gold after all. The other three was just hired help. They were each to get a five percent split. It was enough more than wages that they were protective of the deal, too. Mum was the word for all of them.

  Hell, they’d were already spending in advance, buyin’ fancy boots and pearl handled guns.

  He and Angus couldn’t have explained the rest to them, anyway.

  They and the rest of the Kittridge gang were all ‘known’ to be dead. That ‘fact’ was widely reported in the newspapers.

  The whole damn country believed the Kittridge gang was gone under.

  Blondie’s bunch faked their deaths. Burned up in an Apache massacre. It left them all scot free. The Kittridges and Blondie’s gang were both safe from prosecution after that.

  Kind of a shame that the law didn’t get to finish hanging the other blond. Blondie, Harley calls him. Shorty said that the name they did use, something unpronounceable, was Mex for blond. So, there it was.

  Heck, Uncle Shorty and brother Kit are still laying low out east. And Angus? He’d been laying low since before they tried to hang him. Well, not hang Angus, but hang Blondie.

  The squirrelly sucker’s supposed to be staying out of sight here, too. Not that he is.

  “Damn it,” he says, kicking at a loose rock. “Things was goin’ so smooth.”

  He hates this shit.

  How the hell did the gals from the train ever figure out that they’d be way up here? Had they been tailing him all this time? All the way from fucking Mexico?

  Were they after the gold? Was that whole story about mistaken identity somehow an elaborate ruse?

  No, he saw Blondie there, noose around his neck. They was ready to whip the horse when the sniper’s bullet cut the rope.

  He pulls off his hat and scratches his head. The carbide lamp fizzles out.

  “Julius cripes in heaven.” He looks up toward the sky. “I need help.”

  He takes a drink from his canteen, strikes a match, and picks up the kerosene lantern.

  What a hell of a time to run out of carbide.

  Fiddling with the lantern, he gets the wick set just right so it doesn’t smoke.

  Kerosene only works as long as there’s fresh airflow. Otherwise, it’ll burn up all the oxygen in the air and kill you.

  On the upside, it’s much quieter than carbide. Which hisses as it burns.

  He starts walking.

  The whole deal don’t make any sense at all. Unless, they’re trying to take over his family’s sweet scams.

  How can their arrival here be a coincidence? The dang standoff happened seven hundred miles away.

  “Crimeny,” he whispers.

  He hears a muffled cough, stops and waits.

  If he gets too close, the killer will see his light and bushwhack him.

  He uses his hat to shade the front of the flame and continues slowly on. Careful to keep his distance.

  Damn it. He needs to meet up with his brother soon. With someone to watch his back, they’ll get this all straightened out.

  Easily. Okay, not easily. Harley’s no killer.

  Much as he dislikes shooting, bullets are the quickest solution.

  After another hundred yards, he gets an idea. He gets out a pencil and tears a scrap off his piece of paper.

  He’s found that it’s a good idea to jot down notes after Angus passes out the orders. They can get so damned complicated. So, he always carries an old scrap of newspaper with him to scribble on.

  16 Táági: Breakfast

  “Smells good,” says Táági, refilling his cup.

  Ma’cho walks into the kitchen just as Bigan is leaning over to pull the biscuits out of the oven.

  “Cain’t work miracles on a empty stomach,” says Güero, putting serving spoons in each of the pans. “Fill a plate and chow down. They’s plenty more where this come from.”

  They dish up.

  “It don’t seem right,” says Bigan, filling his plate with food. He sets a fork on the plate and picks it up, steadying it with his hook as he joins the others at the big oak dining table. “Without the babe here.”

  Güero glances at him, quiet for a few seconds; then nods once and goes back to eating.

  “What?” asks the kid, looking at the ranch foreman.

  Güero purses his lips in thought. “Something.”

  “A shiver,” says his twin.

  Bigan glances at Ma’cho. “You, too?”

  Ma’cho catches Güero’s eye, then nods at Bigan, chewing slowly.

  They eat quietly a while. Enjoying a full ranch meal. Fresh laid eggs, bacon from their pigs. Potatoes from the garden, fried up brown and crispy. Smoked venison sausage. Fresh, hot biscuits. Didn’t grow the wheat; they traded some of their beef for the whole wheat kernels a farmer down the way grew. Their Ma, Coati Chaser, ground it into flour with her mano and metate.

  “The first plateful goes down fast,” says Güero, pushing a blonde braid behind his shoulder.

  “Shit’s good,” says Bigan, heading back to the kitchen for seconds.

  “You cooked it, kid,” says Güero.

  Bigan glances back. “Why it’s good.”

  “Snag me another biscuit,” says Güero.

  Bigan sits down with his second helping and tosses a biscuit to the boss.

  “Okay,” says Güero, pouring some hot gravy over it, his third, and digging in. “We need to look for her. We’ll powwow after.”

  Ma’cho and Táági refill their plates, too.

  “You sleep?” asks Ma'cho between bites, looking at Bigan.

  Bigan shakes his head. “Not much. It’s like I missed her before I knew she was gone.”

  Ma'cho and Güero exchange glances once more and nod.

  Bigan watches the pair, taking it in. Saying nothing, he goes back to eating.

  “All three of you bloody bastards lost sleep?” asks Táági. Impressed, as always, by the three men’s increasing skill at silent communication.

  Sure enough, they all nod. Spiritual triplets.

  “She can be rash,” says Bigan.

  Güero compresses his lips considering. He shakes his head. “Cha’a is rash, with backup. Mindful when alone.”

  Bigan stops chewing. Looking off into space. After a few beats, he nods. “Vigilant? Okay, yeah.”

  “Wary,” says Ma’cho, as he cuts a sausage.

  “Okay,” says Güero, plate clean. He sets down his fork and pushes his chair away from the table. “Let’s saddle up and check with Ma. Jest to be sure we ain’t wrong. That Cha’a ain’t just over to their teepees. Not that there’s any reason she would be. If she ain’t, we track her down. Them cows can wait til tomorrah.”

  “I’ll ride over to the teepees while you blokes saddle up,” says Táági. “I’ve not seen your folks in a while.”

  “Your folks, too,” says Ma'cho.

  “You MadDogs are bloody nice to adopt a foreign bastard like me,” says
Táági.

  Ma'cho smiles and nods. “Brit brother not worthy of nice?”

  “Aha. It seems I’ve pulled the wool over your eyes, you bloody savage,” says Táági, grinning.

  The big guy rides across the creek to check with the rest of the family.

  Unfortunately, Coati hasn’t seen her either. Two Bears isn’t around, he’s already out fixing waterline. And the young kids are out with the sheep and goats. Bigan visited them earlier.

  Táági mounts up and trots back to the barn.

  Ma'cho, Bigan and Güero, having heard him coming, are already astride their horses rarin’ to go.

  They head north.

  17 Cha’a: Pickle

  Zastee is in the lead. I’m slower, limping along on the sore knee from the girl fight. Ribs tender from the kicking here in the mine, pinching with every inhale. No doubt hers are, too. Her breathing is definitely ragged.

  I can’t see my hand in front of my face. The tunnel seems endless. Even if we could see, we obviously aren’t in any condition to hurry.

  We’re in a hell of a pickle.

  “Mommy?”

  “What the fuck?” I stop.

  “Right here.”

  “Góshé?” I ask, turning to look behind me. Nothing. I feel around. My hand touches the six-year-old’s head. “What the hell?”

  “Hoss and I followed you in the cave,” he says. “After I touched your leg, I got dizzy and fell down. I heard those men coming and hid out.”

  “Fuck me,” I say, looking down at where the little guy is now hugging my tender legs.

  “No cursing in front of children,” he says.

  “Bullshit, not in my world,” I say, crouching slowly down and giving him a long hug and a big kiss. “Among family you can cuss. We all do. In among strange adults, best not to.”

  He squeezes back, and says, “Hell, yeah.”

  I can hear the grin in his voice.

  “Damn straight,” I reply.

  “What’s he bloody doing here?” asks Zastee.