Arroyo de la Muerte

by Frank Leslie

  Yakima sighed as he stared down at the dead man. “I’ve a mind to leave this son of an ambushin’ buck to the raptors.” He rubbed his jaw, thoughtful. “On the other hand, it would be fun to see the look on Hugh Kosgrove’s face when I tossed one of his men to him—dead. One of the men who killed the Bundrens and tried to do the same to us.”

  He glanced at Rusty staring gloomily down at Jack Booth. “Come on, boy. Let’s round up this fella’s hoss. We’ll come back for Booth then get to town. We’d best have Doc Sutton check out your arm.”

  “Mister Henry?” Rusty asked as he followed the former town marshal of Apache Springs back toward the Bundrens’ grave.

  “Yakima.”

  “All right…Yakima?”

  “What is it?”

  “What’s Miss Emma mean about a ‘curse’?”

  “Oh, hell.” Yakima gave another weary sigh. “Why don’t you ask her? She’s just crazy enough to make it sound convincing.”

  He gave a dry chuckle then, stepping out of the chaparral, whistled for his horse.

  Chapter 14

  Trailing the dead Jack Booth tied belly down over Booth’s own horse, Yakima put Wolf up the last stretch of sloping ridge and onto the lip of the canyon.

  Emma and Rusty Tull came up behind him, riding double on Emma’s buckskin.

  Yakima halted his two horses to rest them after the hard climb in the early fall heat, and Emma stopped her buckskin beside him. There was more wind up here than down below. Beneath the soughing of the wind was a low rumbling roar, like that of a distant train.

  “What’s that?” Rusty asked, the boy’s long, rust-colored hair blowing back from his face in the warm, dust-laden breeze.

  Yakima felt a pinch of anxiousness and a nettling frustration. He pointed a gloved finger toward what appeared a dark wall in the northeastern sky—or a heavy, charcoal-colored curtain edged with an eerie, pulsating rose and lemon yellow. “That’s what that is,” he said.

  “Huh?” said Rusty.

  “Sand storm!” Emma said.

  Yakima whipped a hard look at her. “Javelina Bluffs!”

  He poked spurs against Wolf’s flanks, and the horse lunged into a gallop. Yakima jerked Booth’s claybank gelding along behind him and glanced over his shoulder to see Emma leaning forward as her own buckskin broke into a dead run, as well, the girl casting quick, frequent glances toward the wall of wind and sand approaching fast from the northeast.

  A sandstorm was nothing to get caught in. Some could be deadly. Men and horses had been known to get so sandblasted that they’d suffocated, their bodies found poking out of fresh dunes, sand-basted feasts for swirling buzzards.

  As the wall of sand grew closer, the train-like rumbling growing louder and louder, Yakima rode Wolf around a jutting finger of broken rock and turned him straight west toward the low bare ridges of the Javelina Bluffs rising straight ahead. He’d lived out there for several months when he’d first come to this country, having won a gold claim in a poker game and having nowhere else to go after killing the deputy U.S. marshal in a little town up in Kansas—a man who’d needed killing, by the way.

  Several months hadn’t been long enough to know this vast and varied country so intimately that he never got turned around in it. It happened again now, when he was confronted by two arroyos curving ahead of him, each bending off in opposite directions.

  He slowed Wolf, frowning, trying to remember which course would take him to his old cabin. Emma galloped past him. “This way!” she yelled, and bounded off down the arroyo on the left and which hugged the base of a haystack butte as pale as alkali and capped with several rocks resembling horses’ teeth.

  Yakima grumbled with fleeting chagrin. But, then, Emma had grown up out here—as wild as a diamondback. Yakima whipped Wolf after the young woman and the rusty-headed boy.

  Ten minutes later they leaped up and over the arroyo’s left bank, and the brush-roofed adobe shack lay before them in a flat clearing ringed with rock-strewn hogback buttes. A stable constructed of ironwood uprights and a corral of woven ocotillo branches lay to the left of the shack. A well fronted the hovel, ringed with mortared stone and roofed with ironwood planks and brush.

  The storm reached the shack’s yard just as Yakima reined Wolf to a skidding stop outside the stable. Leaping out of the saddle, he opened the rickety door, which was missing a few slats in the bottom, and jerked with a start when a gray creature about shin-high bounced off his right leg and dashed off into the brush behind the stable. The creature had stolen a quick, frightened glance up at Yakima through its small, liquid-amber eyes, before taking its hasty leave.

  Desert fox.

  The harmless critter had kicked Yakima’s ticker into fast motion.

  He threw the stable’s single door wide and waved Emma and Rusty in ahead of him. The storm was howling like seven witches out of hell, basting the old shack and stable with sand that bit like blackflies. Yakima held his hat on his head with one hand as he followed the other two and the buckskin into the stable, pulling his own and the dead man’s horse in behind him. He shut and latched stable door then doffed his hat and shook sand from his hair.

  So did Rusty, looking up at Yakima with red-rimmed eyes. “This sorta thing happen often out here?”

  Emma was already stripping tack from her buckskin’s back. “I been caught in a desert duster more times than I can count.”

  “You oughta stay home more,” Yakima told her with a grunt, unbuckling Wolf’s latigo strap then pulling the blanket and saddle off the stallion’s back.

  Emma whipped a glare at him, eyes flashing in the stable’s dense shadows. “And dress up in white linen and taffeta, tie ribbons in my hair, an’ sit in front of the parlor piano, playin’ Mister Chopin for Father?”

  Yakima grabbed a swatch of burlap and began rubbing Wolf down. “Took the words right out of my mouth.”

  “You can kiss my--”

  He returned her glare with an admonishing one of his own. “Not in front of the boy!”

  Rusty gave Yakima a rare grin.

  ***

  When they’d tended the horses, giving each a few inches of water from their canteens and a bait of oats, and Yakima had lain Jack Booth out against the stable’s back wall, he closed and latched the stable door and led Emma and Rusty to the shack, one wall of which was bowed precariously inward.

  The wind howled and moaned, sounding like a cheap whorehouse on a hopping Friday night on the border. The sand blew in dun waves, some waves denser than others. The sky was a washed out dark yellow color tinged with a sickly greenish red. The brush atop the cabin was bent nearly flat against the mesquite poles of the roof.

  Yakima was glad to find that the only tenant that had taken up residence in and around the humble little earthen-floored shack was the fox. He’d closed the hovel up tight when he’d last left it, and it was still tight. A little too tight.

  He’d placed a coffee tin weighed down with a heavy rock over the stovepipe. So now he endured the wind-blown sand to climb up and remove it. Holding a blanket over his head and shoulders, he also braved the storm to fetch water from the well.

  When he’d built a fire and put the sulky Emma to work making coffee, he cleaned the bullet burn he’d given Rusty, and wrapped the boy’s arm with a whiskey-soaked sleeve of an old shirt he found hanging from one of the many wall hooks in the shack, which he’d assumed had been built well over a hundred years prior and been lived in by one desert rat prospector after another.

  He’d been the last resident.

  “There ya are,” Yakima said, knotting the bandage taut around Rusty’s shoulder. “Might hurt for a bit, but you’ll be good as new in a day or two.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t thank me. I’m the one that shot ya.”

  “I almost shot you,” Rusty reminded him from where he sat the shack’s single, small eating table, on a rickety chair minus its back.

  “Oh, that’s right.” Yakima gave the kid a warm
smile. “Don’t worry—I don’t hold grudges. If I want revenge on a fella, I do it right away or sic Emma on him.” He winked.

  Rusty gave a wan smile of his own then turned to gaze through a crack in a stout shutter closed over the window across the table from him. Yakima knew what he was thinking about. His uncle and cousins, all three of whom he’d buried under rocks.

  “Don’t worry,” Yakima told the kid, laying a big hand on the back of Rusty’s neck and giving it an affectionate squeeze. “They’re in a better place.”

  Emma gave a wry chuff where she sat at the opposite end of the table from Yakima, blowing on the coffee she’d just poured. She’d poured one each for Yakima and Rusty, as well. The steam rose in the shack’s shadows, limned with the weird yellow light angling through cracks in the shutters. The air was richly flavored with the bracing aroma of the fresh Arbuckles.

  Emma fixed Yakima with a caustic sneer and said, “That’s real helpful—what you told him. You must’ve studied to be a preacher.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s all I got.”

  Emma sipped her coffee, swallowed, and slid her own sullen gaze to the young man. “It’ll be all right, Rusty. You’re better off without those three scurvy devils.”

  It was Yakima’s turn to snort. “That’s much better. Fresh from the nunnery, are you?”

  “I’m all alone now,” Rusty said. “Chickasaw...Uncle Collie...Cash an’ Dewey—they was all I had in the world.”

  “Yeah, well...like I said,” Emma said as she lifted her hot tin cup to her lips with both gloved hands, and took another sip.

  Yakima sipped his own coffee and turned to the young man. “You’ll get by, Rusty. I’ll see to it. I’ll get you set up with a job in Apache Springs, and in no time you’ll be on your feet and fittin’ right in. Hell, Apache Springs is a boomin’ place. You’ll soon have a stake of your own and probably even start wearin’ a three-piece business suit.”

  He glowered as he blew on his coffee and added wryly, “Though I don’t intend to stick around to see it. There’s already too many three-piece suits in Apache Springs for my taste.”

  “You can say that again.” Emma looked at Yakima. As though to remind him of what they’d learned before the storm hit, she said, “Pa knows about the church. The canyon.”

  “Looks like.”

  “What’re you gonna do about it?”

  “I don’t know.” Yakima looked at her sharply and with no little irony. “You want me to kill him?”

  “Of course not. The old bastard’s my pa.”

  Rusty glanced at her skeptically.

  Understanding the dilemma, Emma pulled her mouth corners down and stared at the scarred surface of the old cottonwood table. “Somethin’s gotta be done, though. If anymore treasure is taken out of that canyon...”

  She let her voice trail off.

  Rusty frowned curiously at her. “What’ll happen, Miss Emma?”

  Emma told him about old Jesus and the curse. The story held the boy rapt, eyes as wide and round as silver dollars though the color of copper pennies.

  “So...that’s what happened to Chickasaw? That snake came crawlin’ out of him on account we took the treasure from the church?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Maybe,” Yakima stepped in. The story had sounded all the more absurd for the truncated way Emma had explained it to the boy.

  “Sure as hell!” she fairly yelled across the table at Yakima, causing Rusty to jerk so far back in his backless chair that he nearly fell off of it and had to throw his arms out for balance, spilling some of his coffee.

  “Whoa!” he said.

  “It’s a fable, Emma. A tall tale. Old Jesus just wanted to protect that church, keep it from bein’ looted. So he told you that story.”

  “You’re sayin’ he lied to me?”

  Yakima hiked a shoulder and sipped his coffee.

  Emma smiled shrewdly. “You don’t believe that.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Nope.”

  Yakima took another sip of his coffee.

  “You know how I know you do?” she asked.

  He swallowed his coffee and stared across the table at her.

  “You haven’t taken a thing out of that church.”

  “I have no use for trinkets.”

  “Everyone has use for ‘trinkets’. At least one, maybe two. You could have dropped one of the trinkets from atop the altar into your saddlebags and ridden off with a nice stake for yourself.”

  Yakima felt a little warmth rise in his face. Maybe she was right. Maybe he was afraid of the curse. Still, he didn’t want to think so. He didn’t want to believe in it. He didn’t like thinking that there might be even more hoodoo at work here on earth than the hoodoo of good old-fashioned men and women. That was enough hoodoo for him.

  Emma and Rusty stared at him.

  He turned away in annoyance and poked another log into the wood stove. “Why don’t you make yourself useful, girl, and make supper?” He closed the stove door and crouched to peer through the cracks in a window shutter. The storm was still thrashing this hollow in the bluffs. “Looks like we’re gonna be here awhile.”

  Emma cursed as she rose from her chair, scowling at him. “If it’ll make you feel better.”

  Yakima dug his makings out of his shirt pocket and set to work rolling a smoke. He thought it might quiet his mind a little. But it didn’t. All the different strands of the mess he’d gotten himself into here in Apache Springs kept entangling themselves. He wondered if he’d ever get himself entangled and be able to ride out of this crazy country in one piece.

  Chapter 15

  Emma wasn’t much of a cook, but she found a couple of airtight tins, one of beans, the other of beef, and heated the grub together in a cast-iron skillet. They made a satisfactory meal for the humble circumstances. The food took the edge off Yakima’s hunger though he saw that neither Emma nor Rusty did much but fork the vittles around on their tin plates.

  Their minds were elsewhere.

  Not long after Yakima had finished eating, the wind died. The storm rumbled itself out like a train running out of steam on a steep upgrade.

  Suddenly, the moaning stopped, as did the ticking of the sand against the adobe walls and shutters. Yakima stepped out onto the rickety stoop to a clear sky down the western horizon of which the sun was plummeting. Shadows grew long and dark.

  It was too late to ride back to Apache Springs, so after the sun had gone down, and Yakima had scrubbed the plates and pan at the well, and he and Emma and Rusty had spent a quiet hour sitting on the stoop, watching the bayonets of sunlight in the west change colors then fade, he tramped behind the shack to evacuate his bladder then slouched off to the stable for some shuteye. There were only two cots in the cabin. He’d leave them to the younkers. He felt like being alone, anyway. He wanted to be nowhere near Emma after dark.

  “There’s a dead man out there!” Emma called to him as he approached the stable door.

  “I ain’t afraid of dead men,” Yakima said, his quiet voice carrying clearly in the post-storm silence. There wasn’t so much as a whisper of a breeze. “It’s the livin’ ones that give me the fantods.”

  “I’ll come out an’ tell you a bedtime story,” Emma called again.

  He pulled a stable door open and glanced back at her. She smiled crookedly at him from where she sat on the stoop, one boot hiked on her other knee. Hands entwined behind her head, she leaned back in her chair, letting her shirt stretch taut across her breasts. She gave him a lusty wink.

  “No chance,” he said, and pulled the stable door closed.

  There was only one window in the stable, on the east side, opposite where the sun was setting, so he stumbled around in the shadows before he found the old railroad lantern hanging from a wire looped over a moldering wooden ceiling beam. While he did, he heard a shuddering sound from the stable’s west side. The horses were whickering quietly with subdued concern, so the sound concerned him, as well.
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br />   He lit the lamp, closed the soot-stained mantle, and held it high, tilting its light across the hay-flecked earthen floor toward the western adobe wall, which was badly cracked in places. He’d lain Jack Booth out against that wall. The dead man was still there. He was moving a little, a fact which made one of Yakima’s ribs—one close to his heart—turn cold.

  He held the lamp a little higher, scowling into the weak watery yellow light it shed against the base of the western wall. Sure enough, Booth was shuddering as though deeply chilled.

  His head lay very close to the wall’s base, farther over than Yakima had carelessly positioned it. It almost looked as though Booth were pressing an ear to a crooked crack in the wall to eavesdrop on doings on the other side. The rest of his body lay slack but quivering slightly, his stiffening fingers trembling atop his thighs.

  His open eyes dully reflected the lamp’s glow. It was an eerie sight to see—a dead man trembling like that, his eyes glowing between lazy lids.

  It was as though the body were housing a demon of some kind.

  Yakima’s throat went dry. His tongue swelled. His boots grew heavy.

  The curse.

  Could it be that the old Apache witch had…?

  He let the thought trail off. It was too impossible as well as terrifying to dwell on. Still, he stared down in silent horror at the dead man’s quivering carcass, his heart quickening.

  Then the shuddering stopped.

  There was a scratching noise down somewhere near the body. The shuddering started again. Stopped. Started again. It stopped and was replaced with the scratching sound.

  Yakima drew a deep breath and felt a smile tug at his face. “Oh…Christ!”

  His heart slowing with relief, his muscles relaxing, he let the lamp hang from its wire and strode forward. He unsnapped the keeper thong from over his Colt’s hammer, drew the big piece from its holster, clicked the hammer back, aimed at the crack in the wall just above Jack Booth’s broad nose, and fired.