Percival Helton soiled his britches.
Hank Benteen squatted beside him, jerked the undertaker halfway up, and slammed him against the counter.
“You just left him there, didn’t you? You pipsqueak. You left him with the ashes of the gallows and even the damned rope they hung my cousin with.”
“Brother. Your bro—”
Hank Benteen slapped the cowardly undertaker savagely.
“You left him outside. All night. All day.”
“Yes . . . sir . . . but . . .”
Helton heard the spurs singing as Benteen rose then squatted back down. Opening his eyes, Helton saw the beaker in the killer’s right hand.
Benteen’s left hand grabbed Helton’s shirtfront and slammed him harder.
“Drink your juice, undertaker.”
“P-please. That’s got—”
Helton tried to remember the ingredients. Mercury. Arsenic. Some wax that would harden. And blue ink. A few other ingredients, but the first two were the ones that would kill him.
“No . . .” He choked, then felt the fluid entering his throat. He tried to spit it out, but Hank Benteen released his hold and slammed a fist into his stomach, causing Helton to spit out some embalming fluid before he had to suck in a deep breath. That caused him to suck down a lot of his own invention, his own concoction. He swallowed. Then without thinking had a second helping.
Over his gagging, convulsing, and spitting out blood, A. Percival Helton heard the spurs chiming as Hank Benteen walked away. He even heard the bell ring as the front door opened and closed.
He tried to spit out the fluid, but just spit out more blood. It just wasn’t right, he thought. Not with business so good. But at leas—he started to relax—he could see the silver lining. His teeth were perfect. Whoever worked on him would not have any gold fillings to dig out of his mouth.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
On his fifth attempt at trying to throw a loop around the neck of a colt that had sunk into the muddy bogs of the shallow, ugly, but dangerous Pecos River, Jed Breen cursed to himself for this damned stupid decision to get to Precious Metal, Arizona Territory, driving forty ornery, malicious, vindictive, and headstrong mustangs that were nothing but a nuisance. Hell, he could have been bouncing around in a Concord stagecoach, maybe playing a friendly game of blackjack with a pretty lady gambler. Or gambling with a drummer with a kit of liquor samples.
“You need help?”
Breen gathered up the rope, and snapped at that tough nut Matt McCulloch, always holier than thou when in his element—and this was that damned old Ranger and horse swindler’s element. It certainly was not Jed Breen’s.
“No!” Breen snapped back without looking at the opposite bank. He might not be doing something he did well, but, by the saints, he had his pride. He wasn’t about to become the butt of jokes for the next ungodly number of miles, having to listen to Matt McCulloch and Sean Keegan ridicule his cowboying skills. Hell, that teenage Comanche kid with the badly broken arm would be laughing, too. Not to mention the prisoners Breen was hauling in for a couple of nice rewards.
“Then get to it!” McCulloch fired back. “We’re—”
“Burning daylight,” Breen finished the rest of McCulloch’s sentence, though he whispered it under his breath. Hell, McCulloch had been saying that all morning. Before morning actually, when the night remained pitch black and the only daylight to be found came in the smell of the coffee that McCulloch had started cooking thirty minutes earlier when everyone else—every person who hadn’t lost his damned mind—had been trying to sleep just a wee bit more.
The lariat came up, Breen began swinging out a loop, letting his horse carry him a few rods closer in the water but not close enough to get caught in that mud trap. Hell, that would be more than McCulloch—and Jed Breen—could take in one day. He sighed, almost whispered a prayer, and let the rope sail. The head of the bay colt ducked, snorted, twisted this way and that, and Breen swore again. He’d miss again. He ought to just draw the double-action Colt and empty every bullet into that son of a gun’s head.
Then the world moved in as though only Jed Breen, the horse he rode, the rope, and the colt remained. It slowed like the minute hands on a clock, barely perceptible. The head of the bay colt turned away from the rope, but the rope just hung in the air. The head lowered, the young horse’s nose grazing the reddish-brown water, came up. Breen swore he could see the drops of water falling from the horse’s lips and snout, dripping every so slowly and plopping between the waves the frightened, struggling animal kept making. The rope stood still, until the colt’s head jerked back up.
Breen barely noticed a damned thing for it all happened so fast. The loop sailed right over the colt’s head. Tightened as though the horse Breen rode had pulled back instinctively, which the bounty hunter suddenly realized, it had. He heard the zip as the wet hemp tightened, a snug fit against the muscular neck of the bay.
“Son of a gun!” Breen shouted. “I roped that son of a—”
Hell broke loose.
The colt tried to sit. Breen’s horse pulled back. Somehow, the bounty hunter realized to wrap the rope tightly around the horn of his saddle. That almost cost Breen a couple of fingers, which would be a severe hazard for a man who made his living with a gun. Looking back, he saw the bay’s eyes bulge and flame with anger, and the horse tried to bite at the rope, tried to pull itself out of the mud that had caught him like a bear trap.
The lariat went taut and Breen’s horse lunged away from the furious, screaming colt. For a second, Breen knew he had lost the stirrups, felt his butt lift off the saddle, and he pictured himself being plunged into the Pecos River. Not only that, he could see himself standing up in the shallow water, only to be knocked down by this horse. The rope—one end around the colt’s neck, the other wrapped tightly to the horn of Breen’s saddle—singing loudly with a zing and the rope breaking, almost slicing Breen’s head off. But that would not be the worst of it. The worst would be watching that horse take off with Breen’s saddlebags and that high-powered, straight-shooting Sharps rifle he carried in the scabbard. Taking off and loping right into a party of Comanches, Kiowas, or Apaches. They’d make off with his horse and long-distance rifle with the brass telescopic sight, leaving Breen to hear the jokes all the way to Precious Metal.
Praise the saints, that didn’t happen. He came down hard in the saddle, hard enough that he thought he might double over in agony and never entertain a lady friend again. Hard enough that he knew he would have to, secretly, check for ruptures or at least bad bruises, when he had some privacy in the camp that evening. His knees bent, his legs kicked away, and his horse bucked just a little, sending Breen’s feet back, and his boots slid perfectly back into the stirrups.
The horse turned around. Head low, it began churning, while behind Breen, the colt lunged and fought against the thickening mud. The rope pulled even tauter, and Breen leaned forward in the saddle, barely aware at how he kicked and spurred the fuming, pounding, driving horse beneath him.
He felt an amazing burst of freedom, suddenly aware that he was loping across the Pecos toward the disappearing herd of horses on the far bank, and the colt ran after him—out of the mud and into the shallows, then surging up onto the wet, sandy banks that quickly gave way to more rocks, more cactus, and more of the rough, harsh Texas land that stretched northwestward into New Mexico Territory.
On the shore, Breen pulled on the reins and let his horse stop. The colt, exhausted, shook off its wetness, shivered, and forgot all of its rage. It just stood there, allowing Breen to ride close to it, reach over, and lift the coiled, wet loop over the tired animal’s head. Breen backed his own horse up, gathered the rope, coiling it, and strapping it back underneath the horn of the saddle.
Something splashed behind him, and Breen turned suddenly, reaching for the holstered revolver but stopping when he saw the mawkish, almost obscene splinted arm of the Comanche boy. Wooden Arm stopped his pinto and grinned at Breen.
For the life of him, the bounty hunter couldn’t figure exactly why, but he laughed out loud. “Pretty good show, eh?” he heard himself saying. “Folks in St. Louis would pay twelve bits to see that in an opera house.” He twisted in the saddle to find McCulloch riding back through the cut in the slopes. His horse slowed, and the old horse trader stood in his stirrups. Breen wished he were closer so he could memorize the expression on McCulloch’s face.
A few moments later, McCulloch stopped the horse, studied Breen, the Comanche, and the bay colt. “Hell.” He shook his head. “I wasted time riding back here to help you.” He stuck his jaw out toward Wooden Arm. “Did he help you?”
“No,” Breen said, silently fuming. He had pulled that horse out himself, even made the loop over the wild animal’s neck, and he didn’t have one witness. It reminded him of all those times he had brought in dead outlaws who had not given him any chance but to use his Colt or his Sharps. And all that time, all that frustration, telling judges and solicitors and coroners and newspaper reporters over and over and over again what had happened, that it was a clear-cut case of self-defense. Well, McCulloch was a former Texas Ranger. He didn’t trust anyone.
Wooden Arm began speaking in that harsh Comanche tongue, and using the fingers on his good hand, flashing this and that to McCulloch, who shook his head, whistled, and turned back to Breen.
“The boy says . . . not exactly in these words . . . that you’ll make a top hand after all.” He spit between his teeth at a yucca plant. “Hell, I wish I’d seen it.”
“Well, boss man,” Breen said with a smile, “You didn’t know you were getting a top hand when you hired me on. You just thought I was a top gun.”
McCulloch almost turned into a verifiable human being. “Un-huh,” he said, and turned his horse around. “Maybe that cook you made me hire will make you up a special dish. To celebrate. If you got the guts to eat it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“Son of a gun,” Sean Keegan said, chuckling as he watched Breen push the colt into the herd, then ride to the camp Keegan had been left in charge of.
McCulloch rode in with the young Indian kid, who took the first watch and began circling the herd of ponies and mustangs. Breen slowed his horse to a walk, easily dismounted, and began unsaddling his horse.
“Hell,” the Irishman said, spitting into the dirt, and looking back at the outlaw with the scarred face and the buxomly woman who stirred a pot filled with stew. It’s a good thing, Keegan thought, that he wasn’t betting real money. He had figured Breen would come limping in, dead to the world, hardly able to stand after four days of rough riding since leaving Purgatory City. But the son of a gun looked like he had been riding horses in the United States Cavalry practically as long as Sean Keegan had . . . which annoyed the hell out of him.
McCulloch spurred his horse to the covered wagon, but he left his horse saddled. That was fine. He would ride out to spell the Comanche kid after he ate his supper. Keegan turned around and looked at Otto Kruger as he helped Charlotte Platte fix supper.
He raised his canteen and drank. A moment later, McCulloch’s spurs signaled his approach, and the tall, broad-shouldered Texas hard rock with the narrow hips and bowed legs, stood at Keegan’s side. He, too, looked at the killer who used guns and the killer who used arsenic and anything else she could get her hands on.
“You kept an eye on them the whole time, didn’t you?” McCulloch said.
Keegan gargled with the hot water from the canteen and spit it onto a lonely prickly pear. “Hell, Matt, we’ve been out with them four days and we have yet to be taken with sickness and die a ghastly death.”
“I’d like to keep it that way.”
“We’ll do like we’ve been doing, me laddie,” Keegan said as he corked the canteen. “Make them eat first.”
“The poison could be something she rubbed on the bowls.”
“We can shuffle the bowls so no one knows what’s what.”
“Charlotte Platte might be mean enough to be willing to die and kill all of us.”
“Nay, laddie. She likes the kid.”
McCulloch turned. “The kid? What kid?”
“Your adopted Comanch, of course. Wooden Arm.”
McCulloch’s hard eyes tried to weed out the joke Keegan had to be playing, but the old horse soldier was deadly serious.
“She dotes on the boy. Rubs salve over his bad arm, then laces the splints back together. Bloody hell, Matt, have ye not been looking at them all the time since we rode out for Precious Metal?”
“Well, I told Breen . . . well, there’s—Hell, I have enough on my mind, Sergeant.”
“It ain’t sergeant no more, Matt. Ye ought to remember that.”
“I’ve known you too long to call you anything else.”
“Except an ornery old fool and crotchety Irishman. And those are all ye can say in front of polite company. There’s also—”
“I’ll try to call you Sean.”
Keegan laughed. “How’d ye do helping our friend the bounty killer get that colt out of the quicksand?”
McCulloch shook his head. “He did it on his own.”
“Bloody hell.”
McCulloch nodded in affirmation. “I got back to the bank, and he had the rope off the colt’s neck, and his clothes—as you can see for yourself—are dry enough to know he didn’t lose his seat and take an unscheduled bath.”
“Bloody hell,” Keegan said again. Why, if he had been gambling for real, he’d already be out of chips and heading back to the bank to pay for some more blues, reds, and whites. Good thing he was stuck in the middle of nowhere.
* * *
While the prisoners finished cooking, the three men gathered in the shade beside the covered wagon as the sun began to creep behind the distant horizon.
Matt began drawing a line in the dirt, making observations as he went. “We’re here. Should cut through the red bluffs tomorrow, be in New Mexico Territory by the time we pitch our next camp.” The line weaved through sand. “Here’s the tough spot. Seven Rivers. Though there’s really no such thing. Hell, I doubt if you could find seven rivers in the entire territory that anyone who lived somewhere other than New Mexico would call a river. But it’s trouble.”
“Yeah,” Breen said. “They all it rustlers paradise. Home to every horse thief and every cattle rustler in this part of the country.”
Keegan looked at him. “You ever bring in a rustler?”
“Hardly. Just by accident.” At least Breen rubbed the insides of his legs.
That gave Keegan some satisfaction.
“Stock detectives usually work the rustlers. Not enough money in it for a professional like me.”
“You might be working rustlers with me,” McCulloch said. “But not for any reward. Just to keep the herd moving.”
Breen found a flask, drank, pitched it to McCulloch. “My reward is over yonder, cooking supper for us. I’ll collect on both in Precious Metal.”
Nodding, McCulloch continued his line. “From here to”—he moved the stick and made a long, meandering way about six or seven inches—“ here there’s a whole lot of nothing. A good spring, but that could mean a lot of Mescalero Apaches. Or bandits from Old Mexico.”
“Or it could be dry,” Keegan commented.
Breen nodded. “Or it could be dry.”
“It damned well better not be dry,” McCulloch said. He drew the line toward the tongue of the covered wagon. “This is what’s left of Fort Sumner. Get from there and the country turns tolerable.”
“Aye,” Keegan said. “North of there is lovely Las Vegas, New Mexico Territory. A paradise for gamblers, Breen. I’ve wrecked many a saloon. We’ll—”
“We’re not going that far north.” McCulloch drew the line sharply toward a dead scorpion.
“Bloody hell,” Keegan said.
“Save your carousing and destruction of private property for Precious Metal, Arizona Territory,” McCulloch said. “We move west.”
“I d
on’t recall a bloody trail,” Keegan said. Ye follow the Pecos to Vegas, then down to Santa Fe, and over to—”
“We’re making our own trail. our way, the established way, is a lot of wasted time.”
“But there’s water,” Keegan argued.
“There’s water here, too.” McCulloch smiled underneath his dust-caked beard stubble. “If you know where to look.”
“Do you know?” Breen asked.
The old Ranger’s head rose and tilted toward the grazing mustangs. “He does.”
Keegan knew he meant the Comanche with the wrecked arm.
“You mean,” Breen spoke softly, “We’ve got to trust a damned injun, and a pup of one at that, to find us water.”
“You mean,” McCulloch said even softer, “We’ve got to trust a murdering devil and a bank robber named Kruger and a woman who poisoned more men than Otto Kruger has probably killed to help us get across this harsh, violent land?”
Sighing, Breen glanced at the Comanche boy with the horses, then at the prisoners he had brought along.
McCulloch drew the line farther. “There’s a pass in the Southern Rockies about here. That gets us to the western part of the territory.”
“And the territory of more Indians,” Keegan said.
“And men who are worse than Indians,” Breen said.
The line moved more. “We’ll be in the Malpais about here.”
“Malpais,” Breen said with a soft whisper. “Bad country. Badlands.”
“Bad people, too,” Keegan said, and drank from the flask that came to him. “Even worse than us jackals.” He tossed the flask to Breen, and filled his mouth with a sizeable chaw of tobacco he bit off from a plug.
The line stretched on. “There’s a fort about here. And another a little more north. Make it that far, and we’ve hit Arizona Territory.”
“Where’s Precious Metal?” Breen asked.
Lifting the stick, McCulloch glanced again at the chefs they had, then at the boy wrangler with the broken arm and hair the color of Otto Kruger’s black heart. He jabbed a point far beyond the dead scorpion.
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