“Which is why we search her every day.” They started at a trot toward the mustangs. “I wonder if that dead man knows what a blessing he gave us. Maybe he saved our lives. And let us peer at a goddess as the rays of dawn bathed her in all her morning glory.”
“Hell, Sean,” Breen said. “I never knew you were a poet.”
“But now you know it.” He laughed at his rhyme, and nudged his horse to the rear of the herd.
* * *
So the days went, morning after morning—even the occasional surprise search during a noon stop. The widowmaker called them paranoids, and Breen explained that word to Keegan, too. When Keegan pointed out that they had found nothing on her person in two weeks, McCulloch ordered that the German start stripping, too.
“Matt,” Keegan pleaded. “I don’t think there’s any need for that.”
“She killed that rustler somehow,” McCulloch roared. “She can do us the same way, and I’m not dying like that.”
“But do we have to search that Kruger’s clothes?”
“Yes, damn it. Do you want to cough out all the blood in your body?”
“There’s no blood, left, me boy. It’s nothing but whiskey and a pint or thirty of good stout porter beer.”
“Kruger strips. All the way.”
Keegan sighed. “And I suppose we have to search his clothes the same way.”
Breen laughed. “Don’t worry, Sergeant. I’ll make sure you get the murdering Hun’s underdrawers.”
* * *
When they turned west, they slowed the animals. The wind blew thick clouds of dust, and riding into the sinking sun in the afternoons practically blinded them. This was tough country for anyone, even those like Keegan, Breen, and McCulloch who lived in tough country.
Breen developed a theory that Poison Platte found her killer herbs or powders in the desert, but that maybe they had passed where such poisonous plants no longer grew.
“Don’t give Matt any ideas,” Keegan chimed in. “There’s not a bloody thing to see in this whole country, so please don’t deny me—or any of us—our one look at pure beauty.”
McCulloch did not. He would not. He knew she had poison somewhere, but damned if he could find it.
“You could search her cavities,” Breen suggested.
“Her teeth are perfect,” Keegan said.
“That’s not what I meant,” Breen said.
Understanding, Keegan chuckled and looked at the former Ranger.
“I don’t want to touch her anywhere,” McCulloch said, “just in case her damned skin is covered with poison. But I’ll be damned if I’m sticking my fingers anywhere indecent.”
“What do you know about decency, you lout?” the murderess said.
Matt McCulloch’s eyes ripped through her like a. 45 slug. “What do you know about decency? You murdered that rustler.”
“And you’re damned glad I did. For he would have killed you, too.”
“Maybe. I doubt it. He wasn’t very good at rustling. But you also poisoned fifteen miners in Arizona. That’s why there’s a five thousand dollar reward on you. Imagine it would have been even higher if seven of those lucky fools hadn’t survived.
“I shoot a man when he’s facing me. Always. You put something in their food, coffee, or whiskey. You didn’t give those poor men a chance at all.
Breen corrected McCullock. “Two were women. Well, one was a woman. The other was a girl.”
McCulloch swore with venom.
“I had my reasons,” the widowmaker said.
“And I have mine,” McCulloch said. He drew his revolver. “Take off your clothes. Again.”
* * *
The next morning, McCulloch realized the mistake he might have been making. After the search, and after breakfast, and when nobody began bleeding profusely from the mouth, and fell over, gagging, crying, and begging to be put out of his misery, McCulloch made her strip again.
“A grand idea, Matt,” Sean Keegan said. “Two peep shows in the morning. Maybe we should do it at night again.”
“We might,” McCulloch said.
The woman fumed, but she took off her clothes, which once again McCulloch and Breen went through meticulously without finding anything. They tossed the clothes back to her.
“You’ll never get to Precious Metal if you keep up with your damned perversions. Like you say”—she shoved on her hat—“we’re burning daylight.”
“Yeah,” McCulloch said. “So in the morning, you take off your clothes the minute you wake up, then you go attend to nature’s call, and you get dressed before we leave.”
“You’re all sick puppies,” she said. “Haven’t you any decency?”
McCulloch tipped his hat. “Most jackals don’t, ma’am,” he said, before turning around to climb into his saddle.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Annie Homes was riding in the wagon with her father. She rarely got to sit up there with him, seeing the wonders of the new country for the first time. Usually, she rocked about in the back of the covered wagon or walked along outside next to her father’s wagon. She didn’t get quite the view of the wild, new, glorious country when she walked—mainly because she kept her head down looking out for centipedes, scorpions, cactus with long sharp thorns, or whatever they were called, so hard they could poke right through an Arkansas woman’s shoe. And snakes. Another mule had been bitten two nights ago, and that evil man Linton had cut its throat. Said he had to, to put the poor thing out of its misery, but Annie figured the scalawag simply liked killing things.
Annie spotted Linton riding his horse too hard, too fast, and using his spurs with the giant rowels too cruelly. It was times like these when she wished the sun and dust and wind had not worn her mother out and sent her to swap places with her daughter so that she could take a nap.
Linton reined in sharply, almost pulling his horse to its knees, and turned around quickly, to ride alongside the Homes family wagon. “Well, now, ain’t this a fun surprise.” He cut in front of her father’s draft animals, and turned around so that he was riding alongside Annie and not her father. “You got enough gumption to talk to me, you dark-haired angel, now that you done crawled out of your cave?”
“I don’t recall hearing you ask permission to speak to my daughter, sir.”
Annie smiled at the look that flashed across the brutal man’s face. Her father slapped the leather against the oxen’s hide, and Linton rode away. Not far enough, though. She thought—indeed, she prayed—that the louse would ride back to wherever he thought he had business, but a moment later he began walking his horse alongside Annie’s father.
“Well, Mistah Homer,” the man said as he shook out the makings to roll a cigarette. “I do—”
“It’s Homes, sir. Walter Homes.” Her father kept his eyes on his team, the trail, and the wagon in front of him. The eyes of the little Randall girls poked out. Annie gave them her best schoolteacher scowl and waved them back behind the canvas. They were too young, too precious, to listen to anything a man like Linton had to say.
“That’s right. Homes. The good daddy leading his family and right handsome daughter to better homes. In Rapture Valley.” Laughing, Linton spit the tobacco flakes off his lips and tongue, wet the paper, and slipped the cigarette between his lips. It took a while for him to find a match, but he did, then blew it out and held it up for Annie’s father to see. “You gots to make sure the match is put out.” He laughed. “Don’t want to start a fire. Fires can be downright devastating in this part of the country.” He spit at the match, dropped it, laughed and shook his head. “I’m sure sorry, Mistah Homes, if any of my spittle hit you. Just had to make sure that match didn’t start no fire.”
“Your spit cannot hurt me, sir.” Still, her father stared ahead.
“Yeah. Lots of folks like my spit. My tongue. My mouth. And other . . .” He was staring at Annie, who saw his lecherous look out of the corner of her eye.
She felt herself repulsed and shamed. Even felt what she thoug
ht might have been . . . hatred.
“Do you have somewhere to go, Mr. Linton?” her father asked.
Linton drew hard on the cigarette, removed it, and exhaled. “Yes, sir. That’s why I was ridin’ down to spread the word.” He nudged the horse up even with the closest oxen. Pointing, he said, “There’s a tradin’ post a mile up. North side of the trail. Figure it’d be good to stop there, make camp.”
Walter Homes glanced at the sun. “There appears to be a lot of daylight left.”
“You got a good eye there, Homer,” Linton said, looked at his cigarette, and drifted back until he rode just behind Annie’s father, so he could keep his eyes on Annie herself. “This is rough country, and once we get into the Arizona Territory, it’ll get hotter and dryer and much, much, much meaner. So I thought it’d do the boys, and the animals some good. And especially the ladies, especially the prettiest of the lot, to relax. Enjoy. Hell, for all I know, ol’ Homer, it might be the Fourth of July. You folks might want to have a dance or two. Save one for me, will ya?”
He started to turn the horse around, to ride back to tell other people about the unexpected delay, but Annie’s father said, “Yes. Perhaps you are right, sir. I am sure many of us could stand to buy some new supplies.”
Linton coughed on his spit and the smoke from his cigarette. He coughed, then laughed, and pitched the cigarette—without crushing it out, Annie noticed, and without calling attention to herself that she was studying the man in buckskins.
“Well, ol’ Homer, I ain’t exactly sure what they sell at that tradin’ post is what you’d care to have. Can be risky business in that little place. But, hell, I’m one tough ol’ bird. But don’t forget. If it is Independence Day, you tell your missus and that baby girl of yours that I’d be most honored to have the opportunity to shake a leg with ’em both. I’d even pay the fiddler to play something long and slow.” Laughing again, Linton kicked the horse, turned it around, and loped to the end of the wagons.
“I do not like that man,” Annie said tightly. “He gives me the willies.”
“I care nary a whit for him, either, my child,” her father whispered, “But he has gotten us this far, and that is what he is paid to do.”
“How much father to Rapture Valley?” she asked.
He sighed. “I fear I have no idea. I am like our guide Mister Linton. It could be the fourth of July. It could be May, June, August, or September. Time vanishes on a trail, on a journey such as ours. For all I know, it could very well be the year of nineteen hundred.”
She laughed. “I can say, as long as we have been traveling, and as many bruises as have been formed on my feet, thighs, and even my buttocks”—she made herself more comfortable on her mother’s cushion—“and no matter how much I have eaten, this is not the year of Our Lord nineteen hundred.”
Walter Homes laughed and slapped the leather again. “You are right, daughter, for you are perceptive and observant. I misspoke. This has to be the beginning of the twenty-first century.”
They laughed.
Yet no one even smiled when they stopped and saw the so-called trading post that awaited them. Well, Hawg’s jaw dropped, and he licked the dust off his thick mustache, but before he could make his joke or say something he might have thought would have gotten men to laugh with him, the hard-hearted Linton spoke with finality.
“That ain’t no place for tenderfeet and greenhorns, folks. And like I told my ol’ pard Mistah Homer over yonder, I’ve ordered this stop for you folks to rest before we start crossing tough country.” He pointed toward the bright yellow ball that slowly tried to hide beyond the country that they faced. So you get to eat your vittles and rest up.” Linton had not dismounted. He grinned, nodding at the Reverend Sergeant Major Homer Primrose III. “Padre, these are your people, so I’m asking you—and that fellow you pray to all the time—to give us some help. You better ask him for more than blessings on yer supper tonight. Ask him to guide us through the desert.” He turned his horse and trotted to that . . . that . . . trading post?
Trading for what? Annie didn’t know if she’d have appetite to eat any supper.
“And while ya be prayin’, padre,” Linton called back, “Ask him to deliver me a full house, kings over aces, when everybody else has got nothing higher than an ace-high flush.”
She had heard of sod houses. This must be one of those, a miserable, poorly constructed hut of dirt and stones, with a roof of canvas covered with more dirt and stones. No smoke came out of the chimney, for it was too hot. Whatever food they served in such a place would not be fit for human consumption. That would not bother Linton any since he had never shown one ounce of humanity.
Maybe, Annie thought, Linton might be murdered inside.
She tensed at the thought, but there were two other horses tethered to the hitching rail in front of that . . . trading post.
Still, she told herself to ask God for forgiveness when she prayed that night before bed. Linton was an evil man. She knew this. But he would pay for his sins whenever the Good Lord decided it was his time. Still, Annie thought, it would not be so bad to encourage the Lord to make it Linton’s time.
“That man is something else.” Hawg laughed as he turned back to find his wagon.
“He is evil,” Annie heard someone say. She even thought it might have been her, but her lips had been flattened into a frown.
“Why, Mizzus Homes,” the Reverend Sergeant Major Homer Primrose III said in a slight rebuke, “That is not the kind of words I expected to be spoken by a good, God-fearing Christian woman like yourself.”
“I do not like the man,” Harriet said.
Annie decided to side with her mom because it did not look like anyone else would. “Nor do I.”
“You don’t like anybody,” Hawg said, having stopped because he was lazy and hoped someone else would do his chores, most likely.
“That’s enough, Hawg,”
Annie might have smiled if not for how sick she was at listening to that evil, evil man for what felt like ten thousand miles—or more than a century. Good for Winfield Baker, coming to Annie’s defense.
“Well, I don’t know if he’s good or evil,” Betsy Stanton said with a giggle. “But he sure is interesting.”
“Hush,” Annie’s father said. “Whatever Linton is, he was right about one thing. We should rest. Make sure our animals are tended to, make sure our families are nourished.” He pointed to the sinking sun. “Let Linton do his ill will inside that hovel. I do not know what the date is, but we shall call it Independence Day and have merriment this night. Dance—except for you Baptists—and sing songs of devotion and merriment.”
“Independence Day!” Hawg barked. “I will never celebrate that damned Yankee holiday.”
“Then celebrate Christmas,” Walter Homes said. “Or your birthday. Or my birthday. Or September twenty-fifth.”
“What in heaven’s name of a holiday is September twenty-fifth?” asked the Reverend Sergeant Major Homer Primrose III.
“I have no idea,” Walter Homes said, suddenly giddy, as if he had been to that dirt structure first and had consumed far too much Taos Lightning. “But let us celebrate it anyway . . . and every other holiday and special day. For we do not know how many more days, birthdays, Christmases, holidays, or anniversaries any of us might live to see again.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
The Mexican behind the bar—if one could call it a bar—looked to be the size of one of those old Conestogas some of these pilgrims from Arkansas had brought along. In fact, he was so big Linton wondered how the hoss had fit through the only door to the dusty old watering hole, but he was not about to mention that. The muscles on his arms and neck told Linton that he probably could pull two of those sodbusters’ wagons and not even work up a sweat.
“Whiskey.” Linton shook the dust off his hat, and gave the bartender his friendliest grin.
“Dinero,” the Mexican said.
“Whiskey.” Linton settled the hat back on his head.
>
“Dinero.” The big man held out his hand, palm up and open.
“I pay for my whiskey after I’ve tasted it,” Linton said. “Make sure you don’t water it down.” He thought like there is any water in this hellhole to water anything down.
“Dinero.”
“Whiskey.”
“Dinero.”
“Whiskey.”
It might have gone on like that for another hour or week until Linton got tired of the joke and plugged the big Mexican with several slugs. Just one, even in the right spot, might not kill that giant quick enough.
But Bruno just said, “Dinero,” one more time, and Linton opened his mouth to speak again.
But someone in the corner of the miserable building filled with dust and cigarette smoke said, “Bruno, give this stranger the tequila you serve me. And put it on my account.”
Linton moved one of his eyes to the dude in the corner, but made sure big Bruno stayed in his peripheral vision. Big as the barkeep was, he still might prefer to knife one in the back or put a ball in the back of an American gringo’s head. The dude speaking looked like, well, a dude. A Mexican dude by the duds, pale blue coat trimmed in red and yellow, and pale blue pants trimmed along the sides with the same colors, but with silver conchos sewed onto the legs up to his knees. His shirt was white linen, with frilly fabric like the trim on some dance-hall gal’s dress. A tightly wrapped red silk neckerchief was around his throat. The boots were polished black, and his spurs were the big kind, with rowels even bigger than Linton’s. His face was bronzed and neat with a well-groomed mustache and goatee that matched his even salt and pepper hair. It hung underneath his fine hat of Panama straw with a flat brim and crown, and a fine black band around it, also buttoned with silver conchos.
He sure looked like a Mexican. But he wasn’t. Not from that accent. And the man with the dude wore the outfit of an Americano. An Americano who had left the states because the law wanted to hang his hide from the closest tree. That man wore two guns. The one who had asked to pay for Linton’s drink, wore none.
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