by Paul Bagdon
He set the Sharp’s on the ground next to his saddle and took a cigar from his pocket. He scratched the head of a lucifer with his thumbnail, lit the stogie, and continued his pacing. “We got five, maybe six days of ridin’ to get to where we’re goin’. Where that is, is a smelly little Mex town called LaRosa, maybe twenty miles over the border. There’s a saloon there that’s jist perfect for me to meet Flood in.” He paused to look over the gang. “See, that’s what all this is about: Me meetin’ Ben Flood. Anybody got questions?”
“S’pose Flood meets up with his woman an’ rides back to his town with his tail ’tween his legs?” said a buffalo of a man with bandoleers crisscrossing his barrel chest. “What happens then?”
Stone spat into the dirt as if the comment had brought a foul taste to his mouth. “Ain’t gonna happen. Me an’ Flood’s gonna meet in that saloon—only this time, I’m the one who’s gonna walk out.” Ten pairs of reddened eyes fixed on him as he took a long drag on his cigar. “Saddle up. We got ground to cover.”
The men began to move, pulling on boots, draining the final drops out of bottles discarded the night before, rolling cigarettes, moving shakily toward their horses.
“Hold on, gents,” Stone called out. “I forgot to mention a couple of things. There’s a girls’ school in LaRosa run by a buncha nuns, and in the next town ’bout a dozen miles away, there’s a bank that’ll be like swipin’ candy from a baby—an’ since the war ended, the Mexicans aren’t tradin’ in nothin’ but silver an’ gold.”
A hoarse cheer had begun when Stone mentioned the convent school, and the news about the bank doubled the volume. The men moved faster, their hangovers all but forgotten.
Stone smiled to himself. The fact that there wasn’t a bank within two hundred miles of LaRosa made no difference to him. His followers would be satisfied with what they found at the school and in the saloon. There probably weren’t ten men in LaRosa who owned a weapon, and those few would go down first as his gang took over the town. He smiled at the thought.
Lee slept away the hottest part of the day. Then she saddled up and rode to a nearby ridge. Dancer scrambled up the slope as if he’d been bred to it, his rear hooves flinging stones and dirt behind him like a dog digging up a favorite buried bone. Now that the heat of the day had given up and was replaced by a gentle evening breeze, it seemed to Lee that the Busted Backs had taken gigantic strides across the prairie toward her. The peaks of the hills were sharp, delineated crisply by the last light of day.
She stood in her stirrups and looked out over the vastness. Ben had told her that there were two ways through the Busted Backs—one an easy passage but slow, and the other hard and often dangerous but much quicker. Ben, she knew, would take the faster route—or maybe he’d already taken it. If so, waiting on this side of the range of low mountains would accomplish nothing.
Ben would be coming soon. She knew it.
The night was a cool one; she wrapped herself in her saddle blanket and pulled her knees up to her chest to conserve body heat. Coyotes howled to one another, the plaintive clarity of their cries echoing over the prairie. The sound carried without distortion through the night air, and its melancholy texture made her feel completely alone. She prayed silently that the Lord would rid her of the nugget of panic beginning to form in her heart.
Ben sighed with satisfaction. The snake had been large enough—as thick as his forearm—that the ribs were like darning needles and served as superior toothpicks. The skin, with its familiar dusty brown and pale yellow diamond shapes, was buried not far from where he had built the fire. He gave little credence to the old superstition that if a dead rattler, or its skin, was left unburied, its mate would seek it out that night and take revenge on its killer. Still, an Indian friend had told him that snakes had excellent senses of smell; in fact, they located their meals through both smell and by the heat the prey exuded. Didn’t it make sense that a rattler could identify the scent of its mate—dead or alive—and seek it out?
Fat dripped from the chunks of meat spitted on a desert pine sucker, and the embers flared. Tongues of flame touched the meat, which had already turned from pure white to a light, golden brown. Water boiled in the peach can; Ben added a parsimonious handful of the ground coffee, watched the boiling water for a moment, and tossed in another handful. Within a few minutes, the scent of coffee surrounded him, hanging in the still night air like a fragrant cloud.
When the coffee was ready, he manipulated the can from the fire using a pair of sticks and set it aside to cool. It wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy his coffee burning hot; rather, he couldn’t touch the can without raising blisters the size of gold eagles on his fingers. He gnawed at the rattlesnake, grunting at the rich, gamy flavor of the meat, while grease ran down the thickening stubble on his chin. He ate until the skewer was empty, then threw it aside and touched a tentative fingertip to the can, finding he could hold it for short periods of time. The coffee was thick and strong but not bitter, and he sipped at it until both the can and the liquid had cooled enough for him to take longer, more satisfying draughts. He settled back on one elbow, swirling his coffee in the can, and gave his mind over to the life-and-death situation that had started at the Burnt Rock Land and Trust Company.
Ben didn’t consider himself a complicated man; he knew he was neither a theologian nor an academic. He viewed himself as a Christian, a marshall, a good friend to those he cared about, and a man to whom money meant little. His plans—concerning both his work and his life in general—were simple ones. His course, now, was neat and unembellished: to find Stone and his gang, free Lee, and bring the outlaws to justice. Facing them was foolish—almost suicidal. The odds were insane. He’d have to mount his attacks at night, and he’d have to move as quickly and as quietly as a nocturnal bird of prey. But his first priority was to free Lee. He couldn’t begin his assault on the outlaws until she was free and headed back to Burnt Rock.
He sat up and set the empty can aside. He found that his shoulders had grown tight and tense and his palms had become slightly damp. Maybe I’d better get Lee free before I even think about what comes next. God knows what’s supposed to happen—and he’ll let me know when the time is right. Under Snorty’s saddle blanket, he prayed for guidance until he fell asleep.
He woke at first light. The crystal-like clarity of the still-cool air was invigorating and delicious. He coaxed a tiny flame from the remains of the previous night’s fire and fed it with twigs and kindling, filled the peach can with water, and set it on the flame. Before long the water was churning, and he rained coffee into it.
He wasn’t sure how much time he’d lost. He had to make up that time, he knew, and he couldn’t do it at night. Travel then was too unsure; the moon was growing smaller each evening. With cloud cover filtering what little moonlight there was, any gait faster than a walk was a potential disaster. He gazed off toward the Busted Backs, their peaks and foothills sharply visible in the morning air.
He kicked dirt over his fire and saddled Snorty. When he mounted, the animal launched into a series of feelgood hops, bucked a couple of times, and was ready to stretch when Ben nudged him with the heels of his boots. They ran at breakneck speed over the prairie; when Ben reined in two miles closer to the Busted Backs, Snorty was ready to cover ground at whatever pace was asked for. Ben settled into a walk-jog-lope-gallop sequence.
It felt good to be riding with a clear head, to not feel the impact of each hoof in his wound. The furrow on the side of his skull was mending well. The wound was dry, and the scab over it was thick yet slightly supple, moving easily with any motions of his head.
A hunch told him that something important was going to happen that day, and he had learned long ago to trust his hunches. He didn’t know if the event would be good or bad, but he knew it was coming. He drew the rifle from his scabbard and checked its load, even though he’d done that earlier before riding out. He drew his pistol while Snorty was at a walk and spun its cylinder.
Soon the hea
t was pouring from the sky like lava. He stopped and held his Stetson full of canteen water in front of Snorty’s muzzle, looking forward to putting the wet hat back on his head. Suddenly he saw a vague line of trail dust in the distance. He mounted and stood in his stirrups, but the foothills and ridges between him and the line of dust blocked his vision. He figured it was a drifter or a traveler—a peddler, maybe—heading for the short route over the Busted Backs. It could even be a mustang or two that’d been run off from their main herd and were wandering the prairie.
Or it could be another outlaw looking for him—either simply for observation, or to bring him back to Zeb Stone. But why would Stone send out another man? He must realize by now that I killed his first watchdog. But Stone doesn’t think at all like a normal man.
Ben watched the trail of grit inch its way toward the far horizon. He and the other rider were approaching one another as if they were riding to the apex of a wide triangle, each of them beginning from a separate base. Although it was hard to gauge distance through the waves of shimmering heat, he figured their paths would intersect before dark. Until then, there was nothing to do but press on toward the Busted Backs.
Lee kept her eyes on the sky. The rider she saw couldn’t be Ben—Ben would already be ahead of her, perhaps into the range of low mountains. But the unseen horseman might be someone who could give her some food or perhaps some more ammunition for her pistol. Of course, he could be a saddle tramp, in which case there’d be trouble. She was glad Pablo hadn’t discarded his damaged weapon.
It looked as if the two paths would intersect later that day. She was hungry again, but she decided she couldn’t spare a bullet—not until she found out who her uninvited companion was.
An afternoon breeze had long since scattered the dust trails in the sky and whisked away and diffused new ones. Ben was growing increasingly nervous. As much as he told himself that the other rider—if that’s what it was—was innocent, a hunch told him something else.
In the late afternoon, he came upon a water hole and stripped off Snorty’s tack, untying the dead outlaw’s rifle from behind the cantle. He’d adjusted his path slightly while still on horseback, cutting more directly toward where he thought his company would be. Riding closer would make him an excellent target as he topped rises; it was a whole lot safer to walk, at least until he could determine what he was up against.
The march to the first rise was incredibly hot. The water he had drunk at the water hole disappeared from his system in a matter of minutes, and he periodically sipped from the canteen he’d hung over his shoulder. When he was fifteen feet from the top of the rise, he dropped to the ground, crawled to its edge, and peered out.
What he saw was another, higher ridge.
He eased down into the broad pan between the ridges and trudged on, his senses as alert as they could be in the overpowering heat.
Lee had tired of the nagging “what if” images generated in her mind by the rider in the distance, so she hobbled Dancer and left him, walking toward the top of the gentle ridge that seemed to separate her from the stranger. The .38 hung in her right hand, with the hammer resting on an empty space in the cylinder. The climb to the top was deceptively steep. She crawled the last few feet to avoid placing her profile against the sky.
As she peeked over the ridge, she saw a man peek over another ridge. She flinched back immediately and saw the man do the same. When he levered a round into the chamber of his rifle, she drew back the hammer of her .38.
Then what she saw in front of her registered in her mind, and she began running, calling his name, covering the twenty yards between them at a speed that mocked the sun and the heat. She saw his shocked face light up with joy, and then he ran toward her too.
She launched herself at Ben, and he snatched her out of the air and swung her around, holding her close in an iron hug. She couldn’t hold back tears of joy and relief when she felt his heart throbbing against her. They hugged desperately, thankfully, for a long, long moment. When they separated, they both began to speak at once. They laughed, paused, and did the same thing again. Finally Ben released his grip on her arms and stepped back.
“How in the world did you get here, Lee? How did you escape?” He stared into her eyes as she answered.
“I stole the best horse they had a couple days ago while the gang was having a powwow. They didn’t bother to chase me much. I was just bait to Stone, anyway.”
“Bait? I don’t get it. How—”
“Stone has this crazy plan. He talked about it all the time. He wants to meet you in a saloon, just like the two of you did twenty years ago. He’s insane—he’s obsessed with gunning you down in a replica of where the first gunfight took place.”
Ben shook his head. “We can talk about that later—but what about you? Are you all right? Did they hurt you? Did they . . . ?”
“I’m fine, Ben. Stone hit me a couple of times, but nothing else happened.”
Ben’s eyes narrowed, and a bit of the joy went out of them. He nodded without speaking, as if not trusting himself to say anything. “Where are they now?” he finally asked, his voice under control.
“I’m not sure. I overheard that they’re going to cross over the Busted Backs, but that’s all I know.”
Ben glanced down at the pistol still clutched in Lee’s hand. “Where’d you get that?”
“It was in the saddlebag of the horse I grabbed. I . . . I killed a rabbit with it. And I ate it.”
He grinned at her. “Good for you. How’d you build your fire?”
“I didn’t. I ate the meat raw.”
He broke into laughter. “You’re somethin’, Lee,” he chuckled. “And you did exactly the right thing. I got lucky. I picked up some lucifers, and I was able to—”
“Picked up? What do you mean?”
“Stone sent one of his men after me. There was a fight and . . . well, I killed him. I got some things out of his saddlebags, including the lucifers.”
“Oh, Ben—I’m sorry.” She could see the pain in his face. She’d seen it there before for the same reason, and now, just as she had previously, she tried to console him. “It’s your job, Ben. It’s unfortunate, but that doesn’t make it any less true. You did what you had to do.”
As she moved her head, her hair swung away from the blister on the side of her face. Ben stepped back.
“That’s a burn, isn’t it?”
“It doesn’t bother me anymore. Don’t worry about it.”
He took some deep breaths and kept his eyes locked with hers, as if to keep them away from the mark on her face. When he spoke again, his voice was raspy. “They’ll pay, Lee. I promise you that.” He swallowed hard and changed the subject. “Where’s this horse you stole?”
She pointed in the direction from which she’d come. “Back there a bit. He’s a wonderful horse. Fast, bright, willing. You’ll like him.”
“I’m sure I will.” He paused for a moment. “You think he can carry double for a little bit? I thought we’d go get him and ride him back to where I left Snorty.”
“My Dancer could carry the state capitol building on his back if I asked him to. I’m not exaggerating about him. He’s—”
“Dancer?”
“I named him Night Dancer when I was riding full tilt in the dark and he was dancing around rocks and scrub and prairie dog holes.”
He laughed again. “Like I said, you’re somethin’, ma’am.” He took her hand in his, and they began walking. After a short distance, he stopped abruptly and eased her into a gentle embrace. “I was real worried about you,” he said, his voice husky with emotion.
“I was worried about you too. I prayed for you.”
When they began walking again, Ben took her hand as he had earlier. Lee realized that they’d never held hands before. They didn’t talk for a while. The silence felt good to her—as did the slight pressure between their hands.
Ben broke the silence after a few minutes. “Sam Turner was doing good when I left town.
Doc worked on him. His arm’s not gonna be right, but he’ll live.”
Lee looked more closely at him, extending gentle fingers to the wound on the side of his head. “Is this from the fight?” she asked quietly.
“Ain’t much. It gave me some trouble at first, but it’s better now.” He whistled a long note as they topped the ridge beyond which Night Dancer was hobbled, his ears pointing at them with interest but not fear. “He’s a looker, all right,” Ben said. “His legs are straighter’n a ruler, and he’s got a chest on him like a beer barrel. You got a good horse there.”
Lee nodded. “But what’s the legality? Can I keep him? I sure can’t buy him from his owner—the man is dead. Dancer was probably stolen, but finding his true owner would be just about impossible.”
“No brand on him?”
“No. No marks at all.”
“I’d say you got yourself a horse fair an’ square. The way the law works is that any animal I end up with as a result of a felony being committed belongs to the town—and to me.” He looked sideways at her. “Since I already own the finest piece of horse in Texas, I can’t use your Dancer.”
“I guess you forgot to add ‘except for Slick’ after the word Texas,” she said in a teasing tone as she mounted the horse.
Ben smiled. “I didn’t forget the words—it’s just that I didn’t need them.”
He got up on the horse behind her, his hands resting on the rim of the cantle of her saddle. They rode for a while in silence.
“You still back there?” Lee finally asked. “You haven’t said a word in forever.”
Ben spoke after a moment, without the fun that’d been in her voice. “I’m still back here—and I don’t figure on being much farther away from you than this for a while.”