Cord wasn’t sure what that meant, but before he could ask, Kelsey spit out the rest in a burst. “We was ready to settle down, but then there was Ryker again. He had us good.”
“How do you mean?”
“He knows something that can hurt us, me and my partner. Something bad, I won’t tell what. Bad enough so we are only free if he is dead.”
“Something like us, maybe,” Cord muttered. Chi pursed her lips but did not contradict him.
“I can give him to you,” Kelsey said urgently. “I can put that Enos Ryker in your gunsight.”
“How did you find us?”
Kelsey shook her head impatiently, as if that were not to the point. “After we robbed that bank we rode west out of town. You guessed right, and I spotted you on our trail ten miles out of town, maybe less. I got good eyes. I didn’t tell my partner.”
“Why not?”
“Never mind that now. What happened was we made camp and after he was asleep, I doubled back.”
“Your partner must sleep like death.”
“He was drinking.”
“Sounds like it,” Cord said. “So you rode out on him.”
“I left a note. We’d fixed on a place to meet if something went wrong and we got split up. I told him I’d be there, sometime tomorrow.”
“Be where?”
“I’m not telling.” Kelsey went on quickly. “Not until you agree to my plan. I will lead you to my partner, and once he learns you are dead against Ryker he will throw in with us, because he can’t do nothing else. He is in thrall to the man, and must get free.”
“Keep to the track, girl,” Cord said sharply. “What do we do once we get to your secret place?”
“We wait. Mr. Earl will follow our sign, lead Ryker into our trap. We’ll be four guns by then, rifles too, and we will slaughter them, like shooting hogs in a sty.” She smiled at the picture.
She was a mite changeable for Cord’s taste. “That leaves us one step back of where we started,” he said. “Still wanted for robbery and murder, with an extra dead lawman tossed in.”
“Tell me a better plan, Mr. Cord,” Kelsey said with surprising vehemence. “You got no hole card, you two. There may be some way you can get away from Ryker for good and true, and clean clear of the murder charge to boot, but I don’t see it. And another thing you don’t want to hear—”
“Then don’t say it,” Chi snapped.
Kelsey did not even look at her. “Ryker means to kill you. So you got to settle it once and for all, because till then you are walking dead. Every time you turn a corner, there is Ryker with his finger on the trigger of that sawed-off shotgun. He won’t forget.”
Cord was startled: did she know about that first meeting between them and Ryker, five years back? “Enough,” he said.
“Make the best of a bad situation,” Kelsey suggested, and went to see to her horse.
Cord stared after her. The girl took some dizzying turns. “We’ll move on,” Cord decided. “A few more miles, so we know we are making the effort.” He smiled weakly at Chi to take the tension off.
“And mi hermana?”
“For now she is with us.” Cord watched the girl check her cinch. “I think better in daylight.” He went down to the creek and got the bay and the mare, still saddled as a precaution against rude surprises.
“You do need me, you know,” Kelsey said as he passed.
“Don’t be a nuisance,” Cord said. He checked his own cinch and Chi’s, then swung into the saddle. Stars speckled the cloudless sky.
Kelsey paused with her left foot in the stirrup. “There is one more piece of news you should know: we did not kill that deputy town marshal.” She looked at the stars, as if the constellations illustrated the scene in her mind: the aging lawman’s chest exploding with blood and then the frozen moment when he lay face down in the street.
“Ryker ordered us to kill somebody,” Kelsey said. “A lawman if we could. We told him to go to hell. We wanted no part of that. So Ryker rigged up a pistol support and hunted up a spot on the roof of the dry goods store across the street from the bank, did the deed himself. It was only a thirty-foot shot, and in all the brouhaha nobody noticed where it came from. But I saw him there, the moment before he killed that deputy. I had an eye on him, case he decided to go for us.”
She climbed onto her horse. “My partner and me, we may not be all white, but we never killed nobody.”
“That’s a comfort,” Cord said, but he happened to believe she was mostly telling the truth. She had to be, or they were all fried.
Thirteen
Hours later, as the moon was touching down to set, they cut the Bridger Trail where it swung north of the breaks country known as Hell’s Half Acre. Casper was some fifty miles to their back now, and Cord was considering the wisdom of halting for shut-eye. Neither they, nor the horses, could keep up this pace much longer—especially them, Cord thought tartly, listening to his muscles groan and his joints creak. Getting old, he thought, old and soft. Bridger was sixty the year he mapped this route, romping in the saddle like a youngster. Had three wives one at a time, all Indian. Maybe there was strength in that part of it, the women...
A horse length ahead, Chi and the girl Kelsey rode side by side, leaned in their saddle with heads close together. Cord heard the murmur of their low voices but could not make out the words. Chi had been hard on the girl, but that was Chi’s way of cutting through the crap to any real threat, if it existed. Apparently Kelsey had passed the test.
Chi was taking the girl under her wing. Cord had seen it happen before. A couple of winters earlier it had been an addled child named Aggie, in an awful barren west Kansas town called Weed. Chi shot down the man who hurt her, but it wasn’t enough; the girl killed herself anyway, and something in Chi as well. Chi had been weeks getting out of her sorrow. Now she was taking to this Kelsey in something of the same way. Cord thought, she is old enough to be the girl’s mother, and was startled and a little frightened. How had the time gotten away?
Cord felt a bit left out, and he thumped the gelding and rode up between the two women. Chi glanced at him curiously. “You did not tell one part,” she said to Kelsey. “The part about the money?”
“Money?” Kelsey echoed artlessly.
“How much did you take out of that bank?”
“Don’t know. We were riding hard, it was dark, he was drinking...” Kelsey kept her head down.
“Hermana?” Chi said reproachfully.
“About twelve thousand,” Kelsey admitted. “We rough-counted it before we bedded down.”
“Give it over,” Chi said.
The girl looked surprised. “I left it... with him.”
“You trust your partner?”
“Do you?” the girl snapped.
“Lo siento,” Chi murmured. She got another idea. “But you never meant to keep that appointment with Ryker in Casper. You had better ideas about that bank money.” Kelsey reined up. “You’d think about it, same as we did. But we gave the idea up. Couldn’t see any sensible way around to do both, get the money and stay clear of him.”
“Until you spotted us on your back-trail,” Cord said.
“The only way we could run out on Ryker is if he was dead, and we don’t know nothing about killing.”
“But we do, right?” Cord said. “We could do your killing for you.”
“Why sure,” the girl said happily, oblivious to Cord’s irony.
“We kill Ryker,” Chi said, “and you get the money.”
“We got to have it. We need a ticket out of this life, me and him.”
“Twelve thousand dollars,” Cord said. “That’s one goddamned expensive ticket.”
Kelsey gave him a coy shrewd look. “You can have half.”
“Much obliged,” Cord said solemnly.
“That’s right,” Chi said with disgust. “If we do your killing, you got to pay. Cord, what is our price for gunning down a U.S. marshal?”
But Cord had stopped liste
ning. He was staring up the trail and seeing trouble. Off to the south maybe a mile across the flats there was a little settlement, Waltman by the map. Cord could see the vague shapes of the hamlet’s three structures—a mercantile, a stockyard, and a barroom, most likely—and a few ranch houses scattered about a half mile out.
Several hundred yards ahead, as the trail skirted north of the little encampment, it threaded down through a brushy, sloped natural cut. At its foot, before the trail widened again, Cord saw light. He blinked, trying to will his eyes to make out detail, at the same time weighing the degree of danger against the disadvantages of instant flight.
“The train,” Cord muttered, mostly to himself. It was the freight he had heard passing north of the trail a few hours earlier. The crew had spread the word all along the track by now, how the notorious Cord and Chi were worth government reward money, breathing or stiff. Who could guess how many bands of ham-assed farmers were roaming the countryside this minute, dreaming of glory in the service of order and decency, and more money in one night than they could make in three wet years in a row?
What this looked like was a roadblock. The point of light resolved into the flare of a pitch-soaked pine-knot torch. A buckboard was crossways in the road and four men stood alongside.
Damn them anyway, Cord thought. He was out of patience and too concerned for the horses to turn and run. But then it was decided, because behind them a raspy half scared voice said, “Freeze right there.” Behind them were two men with old Henry .44 lever-action rifles.
“Do it,” Cord said. “We don’t need some dryland farmer’s blood on our hands along with everything else.”
The old man was about fifty, bare-headed and bald; the kid was in his early twenties, but as hairless as his pa, and slack-jawed to boot. Both wore faded coveralls. “Hands up,” the old man said in his cracking tone.
“Goddamn, Daddy,” the kid said. “It’s them, sure as hell. Goddamn if we don’t got ’em.”
“Shut up, Tector.” The old man jabbed his Henry at Cord. “I’ll shoot you dead.”
Jesus, Cord thought with cold panic, the old fool is going to do it. His leg muscles tensed as he readied to dive from the saddle. But then the old man waved the rifle and said, “Ride on down to that wagon, and keep ’em high all the time.” Cord relaxed only relatively. There was nothing so dangerous as a weapon in the hands of a frightened amateur.
There was more of the same waiting at the wagon, another dirt-buster and his three drooling sons, each of them wide as a door. The father had the torch and the two older boys waved big old-fashioned single-action horse pistols. They stared at Cord and the two women as if this was the raciest sight in these parts since the tent show with the Egyptian dancers came through, two years ago next May.
“Gather in them guns, Tector,” the old man ordered. He was puffing a mite in front of his friends.
“Hold up,” Cord said, and tried a smile. He was temporizing. Running without their rifles was bad enough; if they lost their revolvers they were finished.
“We know you.” Tector had a high whiny voice. “Yes we do.” The three teen-aged boys nodded solemnly, their frayed straw hats bobbing in unison. “We got the word.”
“And now we got you.” The farmer at the head of the buckboard waved his torch. The two-horse team shied from the flame, and the tug chains rattled. “Two thousand on each of them is what the conductor said. That’s...” He frowned, stared at his fingers. “That’s plenty, even split six ways.”
“Two ways is how it gets split,” the old man on the horse snapped. “One share for each family, that’s fair.”
“Says you, Keets, you damned old fool.”
“Shut up. You watch your boys, is what you do, watch your boys and shut up. Now, Tector, do as I say and get their goddamn guns.”
Tector looked doubtful. Kelsey probably struck him as the least dangerous, because he sidled around and moved his horse up beside hers. Watching her face, he groped for the butt of her scabbarded Winchester. At the same time, Cord bent and jerked the torch from the farmer’s hand, and the two horses reared in panic. Cord whirled and threw the flaming pine-knot at the man’s three sons, jerking desperately on the reins at the same time, as the bay gelding had not been educated to the vagaries of fire. One of the horse pistols went off and a juvenile voice screamed, “You shot me in the goddamned foot!”
Chi yanked the Henry away from old man Keets. Kelsey pulled her revolver and whipped it across Tector’s face. Blood flecked from his cheek and Tector fell out of the saddle without a whimper.
“Go!” Cord hollered and they did, at a low flat-out run. Behind them another of the farm boys fired his pistol, but by then they were out of the old gun’s range, which was about a foot and a half.
Cord called a halt within a mile, soon as they were over a rise and out of sight. That crew had other things on their minds besides chase now, and they had to save the horses at all costs.
Chi pulled up beside Cord and began to laugh. “Yeah,” Cord breathed, seeing the tangle of confused and damaged farmers, and began to laugh with her. Kelsey sat her horse to one side, watching them as if the tension of the encounter had driven them crazy.
Cord drew a breath and got himself stopped. It was not so much funny as pointless, which was something like the same thing. You could survive a lifetime of facing up to fast guns and tenacious lawmen, to get your ass blown off by a cluster of panicky hayseeds armed with rusty museum pieces. There was never going to be a smart way to die, but goddamn what a stupid way that would have been—and it could have happened, almost did.
“Stop that,” Kelsey said sharply.
Chi checked her laughing. “Are you afraid?”
“I was. I’m not now.”
“Good.” Chi smiled at Cord. “Mi hermana.”
“Sure,” Cord said. “She did fine.” He studied the sky. “Let’s find a rock to crawl under. I got a feeling tomorrow is going to be a long day.”
Fourteen
Cord felt the pressure of a hand on his shoulder and opened his eyes to look up into Chi’s face.
His first groggy thought was about how fine it would be to awaken every morning to that touch, that sight—and then he remembered where he was, and why.
“What?” he muttered.
“Take a look.”
Cord felt the warmth of her hand through his clothing. There was a tiny delta of wrinkles in the corner of each of her eyes; Cord had never noticed them before. Her olive skin was smooth over her high handsome cheekbones, and her thin lips were parted a bit to show straight ivory teeth.
She shook her head very slightly and took her hand away. Cord kicked the saddle blanket off and stood, unsteady for a moment, rubbing the sleep from his eyes with the side of his fist. He never used to sleep so soundly on the trail, Cord thought. But she had been on watch...
They were holed up in a little nest of rocks, a couple of hundred yards above the trail up one of the creek draws that cut the foothills of the southern leg of the Big Horn Mountains. The road had forked a half dozen miles back, Bridger’s branch cutting north toward the Big Horn Basin while Price Hunt’s trail dipped down toward Atlantic City and South Pass. Kelsey turned them to the right at the fork, though she stayed cagey about exactly where they were supposed to be heading. She lay in the shelter of a boulder, curled up with her knees drawn to her chin, sucking at a knuckle in her sleep.
Stars still blinked in the direction of the mountains, but the eastern sky was beginning to lighten. Cord pulled on his boots and followed Chi, feeling stiff and still a trifle muddle-headed, with no coffee this morning either. He fished out his pouch, then decided he did not want a smoke badly enough to take the trouble to roll one. Chi led him up the gravel bed of a tiny spring-fed trickle to a shelf of rock, both of them staying low.
“There.” Chi handed Cord his spyglass. From the rock shelf he could see about a mile down the swale cradling the main leg of the trail. A sliver of sun glared into his eyes at the hori
zon line. Cord squinted into the brightness.
Ten minutes away, Ryker and company were coming up the swale. Ryker was leaned forward in the saddle with his hands crossed on the forks, so his high-crowned hat was aimed at them like a huge bullet. The three Payne boys were drowsing horseback, but Bernard Pearl was bright-eyed and looking nervously around.
Mr. Earl was crouched on his haunches in the road, staring into the dirt like some old Roman inspecting the entrails of a sacrificed goat. The ridiculous-looking Indian said something over his shoulder to Ryker, then pointed directly at Cord and Chi.
They were behind cover and there was no way he could see them, but still it was eerie. “One thing we can’t do is hole up and hope they ride past,” Cord muttered. “That Indian is too uncanny. He’d follow our track up here like it was a city sidewalk.”
“Let him.” It was Kelsey, crawled up behind them.
“Get back,” Cord ordered.
“We can take them,” she insisted. “Finish them off here and now.”
“Is that what we can do?” Cord said. At this early hour he was easily irritated.
“Cord!” Chi said.
Cord scowled and felt like a cranky old coot who had no patience for nonsense before coffee. “Let’s just see to the horses,” he grumbled, and edged back from the lookout.
“So we are running out again,” Kelsey pressed.
“That is right, girl, and every minute we waste comes off our head start.”
Chi did not argue. She knew the alternatives as well as he. This draw closed out somewhere above; if they stayed put they would play into Ryker’s plan to bottle them and wait until they got hungry enough to eat dirt. Even if Cord and Chi could provoke the fight, they were still outgunned, outnumbered, and pinned down.
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