by Frank Leslie
The cannonading detonation was followed by a sharp, loud yip from the other side of the adobe wall. The yip was followed closely by the patter of four padded feet running away, the patter dwindling quickly. The bullet had blasted a large chunk out of the thick adobe, widening the crack, but hadn’t gone all the way through.
Wolf and Emma’s buckskin whickered loudly. One of them kicked its stall with a sharp wooden thud.
Yakima gave a snort as he holstered the smoking Colt. The fox had returned. He snapped the keeper thong over the .44’s hammer, chuckling. “Got a feeling he won’t be back tonight, Jack. You can rest easy now, pard. I’ll get you back to Apache Springs in one piece, get you fitted for a wooden overcoat.”
The fox had likely smelled Booth seasoning inside the stable. Apparently, it had stuck its pointed snout far enough through the crack that it had gotten its teeth on Booth’s shirt collar, and was tugging on the dead man while pausing occasionally to dry to dig in under the wall.
Until Yakima had shown it the error of its ways.
Yakima grabbed his bedroll up off his saddle and tossed it onto a lump of old moldering hay on the floor, unrolling it. “Hope you don’t mind a little company tonight, Jack. I also hope you don’t snore. I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in…”
He let his voice trail off as running footsteps rose from outside the stable, from the direction of the shack. The footsteps grew louder before stopping just outside, and Emma said, “Yakima?”
“What?”
“Are you all right?”
“Fine,” he grumbled.
“What was the shootin’ about?”
“The fox came back, was nibblin’ on ole Jack.”
“Oh,” was all Emma said. But she didn’t leave. She stood out there silently for nearly a minute before she said in a voice pitched with intimacy, “Yakima?”
He lay down on his bedroll and turned his saddle over to use the underside as a pillow. “What?”
She nudged the stable door, which he’d barred from inside. “Let me in.”
“No.”
Another short pause before she said more softly, her intimate voice laced with urgency, “You know you want to.”
“Yes, I do. But I’m not gonna do it. Go on back to the shack.”
“Come on.”
“Go to bed, Emma.”
“I want to come to bed with you, Yakima.”
“No.”
“Come on.”
“No.”
Another brief pause. She whacked her fist against the door. Hard. “Let me in!”
Yakima lay back against his saddle and ground his molars.
“Let me in, Yakima, damn you!”
He didn’t say anything. He was fighting off his desire for the beautiful young woman. Why, he asked himself? Because he still thought that maybe he had a chance with her sister?
Maybe deep down beneath just his loins talking he really didn’t want her despite the wildcat that she was. The wildcat in the sack that she was. That’s how much he wanted her sister. For real and true.
“Yakima?” Very soft and pleadingly, her ripe lips held up very close to the stable door. “Just for tonight? No one else will never know.”
He drew a deep breath and stared at the cracked ceiling in the shadows above the lamp’s reach.
“Goddamn you!” Emma screeched.
She pummeled the door with her fists and her boots. She beat it till he thought she was either going to break her hands or feet or the door itself. Finally, the clattering stopped. She wheeled and strode furiously back toward the shack, her crunching footsteps fading until he heard her boots on the stoop and then the shack’s door slamming shut.
Yakima got up and blew out the lamp. He lay back down and curled up on his side.
“’Night, Jack.”
***
Another storm front moved in the next morning just before dawn, soaking the desert and filling the arroyos.
The bad weather kept Yakima, Emma, and Rusty Tull from leaving the cabin till early afternoon. Instead, they sat in the old adobe shack playing three-handed poker for matchsticks while a stripe-tailed scorpion climbed about the cracked walls and the rain streamed from the eaves and drip-drip-dripped through the leaky roof and into a tin pot on the floor.
Yakima and Emma glowered across the table at each other, and Rusty eyed them each warily, like two wildcats meeting up in the same arroyo, tails curled.
They didn’t ride into Apache Springs until early evening, the streets already clotted with drunken miners and prospectors and the track layers still in town to spend the last of the wages they’d received when the final ties and rails were laid, the last spikes hammered into the main street of Apache Springs.
The three riders, worn out and weary of each other’s companionship, rode somberly toward the Conquistador Inn though Yakima pulled up short when the Rio Grande Kid hailed him from out front of Cleve Dundee’s grand and rollicking Busted Flush Saloon. The Kid wore the town marshal’s badge on the upper left flap of his brown leather vest. He’d been keeping it nice and shiny. He had a double-barrel shotgun resting on his right shoulder.
The big older man scowled up in pleasant surprise. “I thought…I thought you’d done hauled your freight out of--”
“Just tyin’ up some loose ends,” Yakima said.
The Kid’s eyes were on the dead man lying belly down over the saddle of the horse Yakima was trailing. “Who’s that?”
“Jack Booth.”
“Oh, he works for Kosgrove, don’t he?”
“That’s who I’m headin’ to see right now.”
Yakima nudged Wolf forward, after Emma and Rusty, who’d gone ahead, riding double on Emma’s buckskin, but stopped when the Kid said, “Marsh…er, I mean, Yakima?”
“What is it?”
“Bad news about Julian Barnes.”
“Tell me.”
“He didn’t make it.”
“Ah, shit.”
“There’s more news about him.”
“Hold it for now, will ya, Kid? I’ll come over to the office after I see Kosgrove.”
“All right—see ya, then.” The Kid watched Yakima ride on up the street, along the right side of the silver rails that glowed in the yellows and umbers of the street-side lamps and burning oil pots. The Kid yelled hopefully, “You gonna stay in town, after all, Yak?”
“No,” Yakima grunted.
He reined up in front of the Conquistador. Emma’s horse stood tied to one of the three crowded hitchracks. Rusty stood beside the horse as though wondering what he should do, where he should go. Emma was just then striding quickly up the Conquistador’s broad front steps, a determined set to her shoulders, chaps flapping about her shapely thighs.
Yakima swung down from Wolf’s back and tied the stallion as well as Booth’s horse to the same hitchrack at which Emma had tied her buckskin.
“Come on, kid,” Yakima said as he strode past Rusty. “Take a load off.”
“What’re you talkin’ about? I don’t got a room here. Hell, I don’t have a room anywhere.” Rusty was hurrying to keep up with Yakima taking the porch steps two at a time, weaving around the nightly revelers, some with gaudily clad doves clinging to their arms.
“I still have a room here,” Yakima told the young man on his heels, raising his voice to be heard above the din. “You can stay in it till you find something else. I won’t be needing it much longer. I’ll make the arrangements.”
Rusty’s quick, wide-eyed glance took in the breadth and opulence of the place, and he said, “I don’t…I don’t have near enough money to stay in a place like this. Fact, I don’t have any money at all!”
“You don’t need any money.” Yakima stopped and smiled dubiously at the young man. “I know the lady who runs the place.” He winked.
Chapter 16
Yakima continued up the veranda steps and into the Conquistador, Rusty on his heels.
He stopped when he saw Emma talking to Julia, who stood near the bar, a tra
y of empty bottles and glasses in her hands. The two continued speaking then Julia turned once toward Yakima, looked away, then jerked her gaze back to the tall half-breed standing in the doorway, the diminutive redhead flanking him.
Julia’s eyes blazed.
Emma stopped talking and followed her sister’s eyes. A faint expression of satisfaction shaped itself on the younger sister’s lips. She walked away from Julia and over to Yakima and Rusty. She continued on past them, saying, “Pa’s out at the house. I’m headin’ there right now.”
“Save your horse,” Yakima said, his gaze on Julia, her gaze still on him.
“I’ll put him up in the livery and rent a fresh one. I gotta know Pa’s intentions.”
“Too dark,” Yakima absently objected.
“I know the trail.” She strode quickly down the steps and into the street choked with clumps of drunken day’s-end revelers.
Yakima walked over to Julia. She turned away from him, set the tray on the bar, and walked around behind it. As she came back up the other side toward the tray, she said, “Did you and my sister have a good time out in the desert?” Her eyes glinted fire. “Where’d you spend last night? The Javelina Bluffs again?”
“Nothin’ happened between us. I made sure of it.”
Julia tossed the empty bottles into a bucket on the floor, flaring her nostrils as she did so, her cheeks flushed with anger. “Tough fight?”
“Never mind that.”
“I thought you were leaving town.”
“Soon.”
Julia stopped what she was doing and stared at him obliquely. “Really?”
Yakima glanced at Rusty standing beside him but gazing around at the game trophies mounted on the walls, which were papered in gold-leaf against spruce green above the varnished walnut wainscoting. “Listen, I got a kid here who needs a room for a while. His family is layin’ dead out in the desert, an’ he doesn’t have any money.”
Julia tossed another bottle into the bucket with a noisy clatter. “I’m neither an orphanage nor a charity.”
“I’m paid up through the month. He can have my room.”
“Are you vouching for his character?”
Yakima chuckled without humor. “All I can tell you it’s a helluva lot better than mine.”
“I don’t doubt it a bit.”
In the corner of his eye, Yakima saw a familiar face. He turned to look directly across the bar at Kosgrove’s dapper English business partner, John Clare Hopkins.
The man was drinking brandy from a snifter and smoking a stout cigar. He gave Yakima a dubious smile and raised the snifter in salute though there was a hard, baleful look in his dark eyes set beneath heavy, groomed brows. Those eyes bored into Yakima. A gold pinky ring winked in the light from a chandelier behind him, before the entrance to the Puma Den.
Pouring a drink for a customer near Yakima, Julia regarded Rusty Tull.
“He seems a tad milder than you. I bet he doesn’t even go on four-day rampage-benders, howling like a gut-shot wolf.” She glanced sidelong at Yakima.
His ears warmed. “Have someone haul water up to my room so the poor kid can have a bath, will you? And a good meal?”
“Anything else?” Julia said with sarcasm.
“That’ll work for now.”
She set the bourbon in front of the customer and scooped the man’s coins off the bar. She glanced at Rusty and then at Yakima. “I’ll take care of him.”
“There is one more thing. He could use a job. Think about it, will ya?”
Julia pulled her mouth corners down, nodding. She studied Yakima with somber fondness. She found it touching that he’d taken the kid under his wing. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thanks. I have to talk to the new town marshal.”
Yakima turned away but turned back when she called his name.
Julia gazed at him, her eyes unreadable, impenetrable. She shook her head. “Nothing.” She mopped at the bar with a towel. “You’re, uh…you’re leaving, then?”
Yakima glanced at John Clare Hopkins again. The man wore a full-on scowl now, regarding Yakima through his billowing cigar smoke.
Yakima returned his gaze to Julia. “Soon.”
He waited for her to tell him to stay though he didn’t know how he’d have responded if she had. They were doomed any way you looked at it. Still, it was hard to just ride away from a woman like this. It had been hard to bury Faith, but he’d had no choice in that deal, since he’d ultimately been unable to save her from Thornton’s men.
Julia, however, was still living and breathing. Her life would go on without him in it, and the thought battered him with a sudden anguish.
How could his go on without her in it?
When she dropped the towel on the bar and turned away to tend Rusty, not offering Yakima the words he wanted to hear, he moved away from the bar again and headed back out of the Conquistador and into the street. She thought that he and Emma had been together again, in the Javelina Bluffs. He supposed they had in a way, every bit as much as if he’d let her into the stable the previous night, for he’d had to fight his desire like a rabid puma.
He was about to cross the railroad tracks when a man stepped out from a small group of burly imbibers and grabbed his arm. He was nearly as big as Yakima. A track layer, Yakima thought. The man’s eyes danced with drunken belligerence but a mocking smile shaped his mouth as he said, “You half-breed son of a bitch!”
He brought a fist up from his knees, bunching his lips with the effort. He didn’t get the hand level with his shoulder before Yakima slammed his right fist into the man’s jaw. It was a stunning, unexpected blow. It sent the man stumbling backwards and unclenching his fist as he threw his arms out for balance.
The man had crawled Yakima’s hump at the wrong time. He might have seen that Yakima no longer wore the badge on his shirt, but the half-breed was a small corral bursting at the rails with big, angry stallions just then. His green eyes blazing with silent fury and pent up frustration, Yakima followed the man back toward the Conquistador, pummeling his shocked, inebriated opponent with resounding lefts and rights, battering his head like a blacksmith toiling over an anvil.
In less than a minute, maybe less than thirty seconds, the man lay wheezing in the street, spitting blood from his smashed lips. Blood oozed from both of his torn brows. Two broken teeth were pasted by blood to his chin whiskers.
“Jesus Christ, Marshal,” complained one of the man’s friends gathered loosely around them in wide-eyed shock. “You’re gonna kill ole Whitey!”
Yakima straightened. He glanced at his fists, both sets of knuckles scraped and bloody though whose blood it was he couldn’t tell in the weak, guttering light from the oil pots. He plucked his hat off the street, brushed it off, set it on his head. He cursed, swung away from his groaning opponent, whom his friends were now tightly surrounding, and brushed his fists across his trousers.
A young boy who stood little higher than Yakima’s cartridge belt walked up to the former marshal of Apache Springs. He was one of the street urchins whose numbers had been growing along with the rest of the population and whose ilk had no curfew but lingered out after dark in hopes of landing an odd job or two for badly needed pocket jingle. Such boys’ parents were largely absent or in no condition, due to alcohol or drug addiction, to adequately tend their offspring, so such children fended for themselves.
The boy spat a wad of snoose to one side, sniffed two streams of dirty snot into his nose, yanked his too-large pants up on his narrow hips and said, “Nice bare-knuckle work, Marshal. I’ll tend Wolf and the fresh beef for a dollar.”
“Your prices are goin’ up, Lonnie.”
“Prices are goin’ up all over town.” Lonnie stuck out a dirty little hand, palm up and with a cockeyed grin on his lightly freckled face.
Yakima flipped the kid a dollar. “Rub ‘em down good.”
Lonnie stuck out his hand again. “That’ll be an extra quarter.”
Yakima raised a
brow.
The boy said, “It’s the railroad! What should I do with the beef?”
“Lay him out in the hay. I’ll come for him first thing in the morning.”
“Gramps says dead men attract vermin.” Gramps Dawson owned the livery barn.
“Tell Gramps to kiss my…” Yakima paused, reconsidered, and said, “Tell Gramps I’ll come for him first thing in the morning.”
Lonnie’s customarily sober features broke into a snaggle-toothed grin.
Yakima flipped the kid another fifty cents and told him to keep the change. While Lonnie led Wolf and the claybank away, Yakima crossed the tracks and continued east to the marshal’s office where the Kid stood waiting for him on the raised wooden gallery, his ubiquitous Greener perched on his shoulder. A half-smoked quirley jutted from a corner of his mouth.
“How’s business?” Yakima asked him.
“All the cells are occupied, and it’s still early. We’re gonna need another jail soon or we’ll have to just shoot all the drunken brawlers, since we won’t have no place to house ‘em.”
“Suits me.” Yakima walked up onto the stoop and ladled water from the rain barrel over each set of knuckles.
“Whose face did you rearrange?” the Kid asked.
“Whitey Ugstead.”
The Kid gave a dry chuckle then turned to walk through the jailhouse’s half-open door. “Come on inside. I know you ain’t officially the marshal no more, but I’m in a pickle of what to do with this.”
Yakima waved his burning knuckles in the dry air and followed the Kid into the jailhouse. All four cells along the back wall were indeed occupied. Most of the prisoners—there appeared around nine—were sleeping and snoring. One Mexican was strumming a mandolin. He saw Yakima and gave a cordial nod as he continued strumming.
“What did Lopez do?” Yakima asked the Kid.
“Started a fight with a gringo by pissin’ in the man’s beer.”
“He cheated me at cards, Marshal Henry,” explained Hector Lopez then continued strumming. “So I salted his beer when he went to the privy.” He smiled beneath his thick, drooping black mustache.
“That’ll teach him.” Yakima turned to the Kid. “What you got for me?”