Wooden Arm stood in the corner, amazed at just how drunk two white men could get. Even more shocking was how these white eyes treated their women and ugly-faced men. They threw them in a dark room with rough beds and iron doors, with just one bucket for drinking water and another bucket to do their business in. He grinned at the thought of what might happen if they mixed up their buckets.
Once McCulloch had the second pot of coffee inside the bellies of Jed Breen and Sean Keegan, he opened the bottom drawer of the sheriff’s desk and pulled out a bottle of tequila about three-quarters full and poured himself a morning bracer.
“The hell—” Breen had to choke back something god-awful rising in his throat. Once he had it headed back where it might exit his body through a lower orifice, he continued. “Where did you . . . find that?”
“Where Juan has been keeping it since he was first elected seven years ago,” McCulloch answered. He held the glass toward Breen, who jerked away as though he had been offered arsenic.
“Tequila,” Sean Keegan muttered, “Is the devil’s brew.” He brought the coffee cup up to his lips.
Thirty minutes later, McCulloch had learned all that he was going to until someone with sense and sensibility—and not three bottles of eighty-six-proof in their bellies—could tell him. The Benteen Gang had raided Purgatory City in a failed attempt to free Tom Lovely, alias Tom Benteen, from his date with Lucifer for one final dance on the trapdoor of the gallows. Those gallows were a pile of ash and charred timbers, in the back courtyard of the county courthouse as well as the annex from nine months back. Tom Lovely was dead.
The hangman was dead. The town marshal was dead. A few other citizens were dead, but the undertaker had a free hand to make his rent and get some good folks planted since he didn’t have to worry about burying Tom Lovely.
Sheriff Garcia had led a posse of about two dozen able-bodied men out in search of the Benteen Gang. Whether due to dedication or the fact that an election would be coming up next year, it wasn’t known. The Texas Rangers based in Purgatory City had taken off southeast in pursuit of the Krugers.
The marshal of the town, Rafe McMillian, had caught a bullet through the body, another slug through both lungs, and a shotgun blast of double-aught buckshot in his back. The undertaker, the lousy excuse for a human being A. Percival Helton, would have a challenge making him presentable to St. Peter.
What all this boiled down to was the Rangers were searching for the Kruger brothers and the most of the troops from Fort Spalding were chasing Indians across West Texas.
McCulloch slapped Breen’s face hard. “Are there any good hands left in this whole damned county?”
“I wouldn’t bet my poke on it, Matt.”
McCulloch made the bounty hunter drink more coffee. He looked at poor Wooden Arm and almost laughed aloud but steeled himself and signed to the Comanche I need more time.
Moving to the one-time army soldier, McCulloch slapped Keegan’s face and said, “Keegan, here’s my problem. I have forty rank mustangs that should bring me a good chunk of change if I can break them and sell them. Now . . .”
For a drunken lout, Keegan was ahead of McCulloch, “Matt, me brother, or at least a man I love like me brother . . . don’t take that the wrong way, laddie, for they hanged my brother in County Cork thirty-seven years ago last Monday . . . I testified agin the bloody traitor. But where was I? Matt, do ye really think the colonel, Ol’ Lard Arse Hollister, would buy mounts from ye?” He chuckled, sucked down more coffee, spit out a mouthful, swallowed the rest, and laughed.
“The army won’t buy nothing from you, laddie. Not in Texas.”
McCulloch sipped coffee himself, and after he had swallowed, asked, “What about New Mexico Territory? Fort Marcy? Fort Bascom? Fort whatever the hell they call it down Mesilla way?”
“What about . . .” Keegan said with a mischievous grin, “Fort Wilmont?”
“Wilmont?” McCulloch demanded.
“Arizona Territory, me lad. Beautiful country. Glorious country. The northern part of the territory. Just outside the big burg of—”
“Precious Metal,” Breen slurred.
“Why Fort Wilmont?” McCulloch asked.
“Because, laddie, there are no horse breeders in that part of the territory,” Keegan said. “There’s nothing but miners and stagecoach jehus.”
“Hell no,” Breen slurred, “Stagecoach, we won’t go!”
Ignoring the drunken bounty hunter, McCulloch leaned closer into the stinking Irishman’s face. “Wilmont?”
“Apaches!” Keegan snapped. “Bloody hell, Matt, don’t ye read the papers or hear the gossips outside the striped poles of barbershops?” He burped, shot down another swallow of retched coffee, and continued. “The Apaches be raising more than their share of Cain these days, Matt, me son. And the army can’t keep up with them. An Apache afoot can cover more ground than can a bluecoat like meself do on the back of an army horse.”
Keegan drank again, burped a finale, and grinned. Then he stretched his right hand out and gripped McCulloch’s shoulder. “Did ye hear what I said, Matt? An army horse. Not”—he laughed—“Not, by the love of Jesus, Joseph, and Mary or whatever order ye want to put them in, not a Matt McCulloch horse.”
Breen nodded. “Your reputation crosses all the way to the Colorado River, Matt. I’ve been to Precious Metal. Just passing through, mind you, but it looked like a damned nice town.”
Standing up, without even realizing he had moved, McCulloch turned toward Wooden Arm. He signed,. I will return as fast as my legs can carry me.
An hour later he was back with a pot of café coffee, a pot of beans, and a bottle of castor oil.
* * *
Some hours after daybreak, and two more pots of coffee, McCulloch rolled three smokes, passing one to Jed Breen, another to Sean Keegan, and the last to Wooden Arm. He struck a match across the rough edge of Sheriff Juan Garcia’s desk and lighted the smokes.
“The army at Fort Wilmont will pay forty-five dollars in minted gold for a good horse,” McCulloch said, waving the telegraph reply he had received that morning. “Matt McCulloch horses, that is.”
“Wilmont?” Breen held his head as though it was about to fall into a million pieces. “Isn’t that . . . ?”
“Outside of Precious Metal,” Keegan answered.
That’s all it took to sober Jed Breen up. He grabbed the cup of coffee, swallowed about half of it, and pitched the cigarette onto the floor. Wooden Arm had the presence of mind to crush out the butt with the heel of his Comanche moccasin.
“You want us to ride with you?” Breen asked.
“My understanding is that you want to deliver a couple of parcels to the sheriff in Precious Metal,” McCulloch said.
Breen grinned, sipped more coffee. “How many horses?”
“Mustangs,” McCulloch corrected. “Barely broken. Some of them not even broken. Forty. At forty-five a head, you do the math.”
“You do the bloody math,” Keegan said. “My head’s still pounding like me brothers buildin’ that awful railroad north of here all those years ago.”
“Not that many years, Sean,” Breen corrected, but then his head slumped into his hands.
“It’s eighteen hundred bucks,” McCulloch said. “If we make it. The Indian and I will take fourteen hundred. You two split the difference.”
“How do you figure it?” Keegan asked. “Getting there? Southern route and up?”
“No,” McCulloch answered immediately. “Hans Kruger will want his brother. He’ll be expecting us to go south. I figure we follow the Pecos River to Fort Bascom in New Mexico Territory, then travel straight west, following the stage route.”
“That country’s filled with Comanches first, then Apaches, then the bloody Navajo, and then more Apaches,” Keegan said.
“Plus bandits of all colors,” Breen added.
“Which,” McCulloch said, “Is why my pard and I are paying you two hundred dollars a piece. Providing we don’t lose one damned horse.”
“Well,” Keegan said as he turned back to stare at the horseman, “They say there is strength in numbers crossing lawless territories.”
“Yeah,” McCulloch said. “Numbers. One former Texas Ranger with a Winchester. A bounty hunter with nothing but profit on his mind. And a one-time soldier boy who wore the blue and hasn’t spent hardly a sober day in his life.”
“Don’t forget him!” Keegan wailed and pointed at the teenage Comanche brave who suddenly didn’t look so much like a warrior but like a frightened teenager who didn’t know what the devil he had gotten himself into.
“I can add to our numbers,” Jed Breen said, pointing awkwardly at the jail cells. “Kruger will fight if it means keeping his topknot. Nobody in his right mind wants to be tortured to death by Apaches.” He laughed. “Even better than that, my friends, my old fellow Jackals, I’ve got the jim-dandiest cook you’ve ever seen.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“There it is,” Walter Homes said from the wagon seat. Harriet turned around and beckoned Annie to climb through all the debris, furniture, and foodstuffs from the back of the bouncing wagon to come see.
When she stuck her head through the opening in the canvas cover, both mother and father pointed to the southwest.
“Our first mountain,” Walter said.
Annie found it in the distance, a mound of red, orange, and white against the pure blue sky.
“Papa,” she said with a smile. “It’s not our first mountain. The Ouachitas were practically in our backyard in Arkansas.”
Her father laughed and urged the horses to continue pulling. They were climbing, which Annie found a relief after all those desolate days crossing the western plains of Texas and that abysmal Panhandle region.
“Honey,” her father said. “It’s our first Western mountain.”
“Papa, if someone lived in Baltimore, Maryland, or even Memphis, Tennessee, he or she would have said the Ouachitas were western mountains.”
Her father chuckled, but her mother chided Annie. “Goodness gracious, child, what has gotten into you?” Harriet tilted her head toward the lone butte, and said, “You never saw anything like that in Dead Trout, Arkansas, or the Ouachitas, now did you?”
She decided to play nice and relented. “No, ma’am.” Besides, it was a wonderful sight to behold, the flatness of the Panhandle making way for a rugged terrain of red rocks, red dirt, red dust, and blue skies, with short trees sprouting on the lower levels of the butte and the surrounding countryside.
“Are we still in Texas?”
“Not if I have my bearings right,” Walter Homes said. “We should be in the Territory of New Mexico by now.” He gestured to the north. “Fort Bascom should be somewhere in that general direction.”
“Where the smoke is?” Annie asked.
Her father almost dropped the heavy leather lines to the team pulling the wagon. Jerking his head around, she lifted her arm so he could see exactly where she had detected the smoke.
Walter said nothing, but his mouth that had been turned upward over the sight of his first Western mountain, suddenly reversed course, frowned briefly, and turned into a rigid flat line.
“Looks like a series of nice fluffy white clouds,” Annie’s mother said.
Annie refrained from calling her mother an idiot.
“Well,” Walter said, “I suppose that’s smoke, all right. Maybe from Fort Bascom. It could be anything, my family, because . . .” He trailed off.
Winfield Baker was riding his mule toward them, coming from the lead wagons ahead. They saw him slow down beside the Carter wagon, then the Stanton wagon, where to Annie’s jealous fit, he turned the mule around and rode alongside, likely letting that shameless hussy Betsy Stanton flirt with him, or perhaps even roll him a cigarette. Then he said something, pointed toward the smoke, turned the mule around, and finally made a rather leisurely way to the Jeffries wagon. Since that family had no girls, Winfield Baker spoke with them only a few moments, though he did point out the smoke, and then gesture toward a dry creek bed up the trail and down a ways.
At length, he rode to the Homes wagon.
“Sir,” he called out. “The Reverend Sergeant Major Homer Primrose III suggested that I have a word with you, Mr. Homes.”
“I see.” Annie’s father kept the wagon moving, but her mother was clutching the cross of German pewter than hung from her neck, her lips moving in silent prayer, and her face paling as she looked at another puff of white smoke on the far horizon.
Well, Annie had to give Winfield Baker some credit. He turned his mule around and rode alongside their wagon just as he had done with the Stantons’ Studebaker—and that harlot daughter of theirs.
“That smoke over there could mean trouble, sir,” Winfield said as he bounced up and down on the mule’s bare back. He had only a rawhide hackamore to guide the animal, too.
“Annie just pointed it out to us, Winfield,” Walter Homes said. “I’m surprised the good reverend even noticed it.”
“Actually, I saw the smoke first, Mr. Homes,” Winfield said. “I told the reverend.”
“Well, that’s a jim-dandy job, son,” her father said.
“Oh, it was nothing, really.”
“Well, you have keen eyes.”
“Thank you, sir.” Winfield stared briefly at Annie before swallowing and regaining his focus. He pointed to that spot off the trail. “Since the reverend thinks that smoke might be from Indians, he has ordered the wagons to turn off the trail at the cut—there. You can see the first wagon making its way down now.”
Indeed, the Reverend Sergeant Major Homer Primrose III large wagon had made the turn and was following a narrow trail toward a rocky bed that cut deep into the country.
“How long do you think we’ll have to wait?” Walter asked.
“The reverend did not say, sir.”
“Is he planning on sending out a party of men to investigate this smoke?”
“I don’t know, sir. I just told him about the smoke, and he saw the place down there, and he said we should circle the wagons and wait this danger out.”
“Then he thinks there is danger.”
“Well, I guess so. But, well, you know, sir. We’re—”
“Alone?” Annie finished the sentence for him.
“Well . . .” The boy began to get flustered. “I need to—” He turned around sharply, sitting erect and looking with a deep intensity toward the smoke. “Did you hear something, Mr. Homes?”
Annie glanced briefly at her father, and tried to see where exactly Walter was looking.
“No, son, I can’t—”
“There!” Walter snapped, and leaned so far he almost toppled off the mule.
Annie heard it then, a faint rolling. Echoes of...
“A gunshot?” her father asked. He looked off toward the smoke with keen purpose.
Another low rumble followed. And another.
“Maybe,” Annie’s mother said wistfully, “It’s just thunder.”
“Without a cloud in the sky, Mama,” Annie pointed out.
“Well . . .” Harriet nodded as though she had discovered the undebatable answer. “Fort Bascom. They must be firing off their cannons.”
No one looked at Annie’s mother, but her father turned back and urged the mules a little closer.
“You see the trail, sir,” Winfield Baker said. “Just follow the other wagons, and I’ll see you in the camp.” He grabbed the hackamore tighter. “I must let the other folks know, Mr. Homes.” He tipped his hat at Annie’s mother, then tipped his hat and blushed at Annie. Kicking his mule, he trotted off toward the Simpsons’ wagon.
“He’s such a nice young boy,” Annie’s mother said, forgetting about those darned cannons that must have been going off at Fort Bascom.
Mama sure hit the nail on the head,
Annie thought. Winfield Baker was a fine young boy.
* * *
In the arroyo below the trail, with the wagons in a tight circle and all the animals inside, Annie Homes suddenly felt a cold dread. She had mocked her father, mocked her mother, and Betsy Stanton—but that witch deserved it. Annie had even picked on poor Winfield Baker. Yet now she wished she was surrounded by the safety and the closeness of the Ouachita Mountains and not that deadly, barren butte that looked as though it had been bathed in blood.
Actually, she’d have given anything if she could see the mountain, red as blood and pale as death or not. But she saw nothing but the blackness of the New Mexican desert. She had prayed and prayed and prayed that the moon would rise and bathe them in light, but a few minutes ago, she heard Mr. Stanton tell someone that it was the new moon. There would be no moonlight. No stars. And under orders from the Reverend Sergeant Major Homer Primrose III, there would be no campfires, no cookfires, no pipes, cigars, or cigarettes being smoked this night. Every man in camp held a rifle. A few women held guns, too. Her father had even given Annie a folding knife, and had locked the main blade open before he slipped it onto her sweaty hand.
“Just in case, darling,” he said. Then he had grinned, and tried to make a joke. “I figured you might want to pass your time this evening vittling, sweetheart.”
“Do you mean whittling, Papa?”
He had laughed, before wandering into the depths of blackness.
It might have been bearable had the coyotes not started. Laughing, howling like hyenas, mocking those poor, foolish travelers from Dead Trout, Arkansas. For several minutes, they sang their mocking song at the wayfarers until . . . silence.
Deathly still. Nothing but blackness all around them. The wind did not blow. The coyotes did not howl. The livestock so close to them all made not one sound.
Until a voice called out that almost made the frightened Annie Homes stab herself with her papa’s knife.
“Hello the camp. Mind if I come in?”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
A heated debate quickly took place among the men who considered themselves lieutenants to the Reverend Sergeant Major Homer Primrose III, while Annie watched her father as he studied the darkness that surrounded them.
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