The Lonely Breed : A Western Fiction Classic (Yakima Henry Book 1)

by Peter Brandvold

  Yakima stopped Wolf at the edge of the creek, amid the sun-gilded cottonwoods, and slipped fluidly out of the saddle. He reached up, took Faith under the arms, and lifted her down.

  "You do that like I don't weigh anything," she said, keeping her hands on his shoulders and staring up into his face, a shy smile tugging at her mouth.

  "When you've tossed as much freight as I have, a woman doesn't feel like much."

  Faith removed her hands from his shoulders and turned away with a wry curl of her upper lip. "Thanks for the compliment."

  As Yakima loosened Wolf's latigo strap, Faith cast her gaze along the creek, her dress buffeting lightly around her legs. The day was warm, so she wasn't wearing a blanket around her shoulders. She was as dusty and sweaty as Yakima, which meant she was covered with damp mud from head to toe.

  "I'm gonna see if I can find a hole deep enough to bathe in," she said, fiddling with a chokecherry branch as she turned to Yakima. "You don't have an extra pair of trousers and a shirt, do you? They'd be considerably better for riding than this thin dress."

  Yakima dropped the saddle at the base of a cottonwood and turned to her. She was so sweaty and dusty that the dress clung to every curve, tight as a second skin. Her full breasts were clearly delineated beneath her soaked chemise and the threadbare cotton of the dress.

  Catching himself staring, Yakima flushed and raised his gaze to Faith's. Her cheeks dimpled as she sucked her bottom lip. "Urn ... should I repeat the question?"

  "Huh?"

  Faith chuckled. "I asked if you had an extra pair of trousers and a shirt."

  "In the pack," Yakima said, glancing at the burlap sack he used for a possibles bag, looped over his saddle horn. "Got an extra pair of longjohns in there, too. It's warm now, but it's gonna get cold tonight. You'll want to put them on in a few hours."

  "Thanks." Faith sauntered over to the burlap sack and began rummaging inside.

  Yakima led Wolf to the edge of the creek. As the horse drew water, Yakima rubbed his sweat-lathered coat down with a thick patch of burlap. He couldn't help keeping an eye skinned on Faith while he worked. Ironic, how he'd swamped a whorehouse for nine months and never got his ashes hauled once.

  Thornton had rules against his hired hands—especially half-breeds—trifling with the girls.

  When Faith had found a pair of patched denims, a red flannel shirt, and faded red longjohns, she tossed a blanket over her shoulder and strolled into the trees near Yakima.

  "Thanks for the duds," she said, setting the load down in the grass and reaching behind her back as if to unbutton her dress. "The denims'll pad my bottom a little better than that dress, and I don't mind telling you, your horse has a hard back."

  Yakima scrubbed sweat from the black's right forelock. He'd taken his eyes off Faith, but now he looked back at her. She was, indeed, unbuttoning her dress. He could tell by the way it loosened in front, billowing away from parts of her breasts while clinging to other parts.

  "If we had another horse, another saddle ..." He let his voice trail off. Faith peeled her dress off her shoulders, down her arms. Yakima turned back to his work. “The riding would be easier till we hit the plains."

  Faith cut him off. "Yakima, you could take me into the mountains. I know a banker at Gold Cache who's offered to lend me the money to start my own place—"

  Working on the horse's right hip, he glanced at her. She'd turned partially away from him. She was naked, the dress and chemise bunched around her ankles. As she stooped to retrieve the blanket, her breasts swayed out from her chest.

  "A banker?" Yakima said.

  "He was passing through Thornton's on the stage a few months back. I reckon I encouraged him to stay a whole week." She chuckled as she turned to Yakima, draping the blanket around her shoulders but letting the ends dangle from her shoulders, in no hurry to cover her breasts.

  Yakima turned away and sidestepped to the horse's head, ran the burlap down Wolf's broad snout. "That high up, it'll snow before we get there. Besides, Wolf couldn't carry us both that far."

  "We could buy a horse from a prospector. I've got some money saved up."

  "We wouldn't make it, Faith."

  "We could have fun, you and me, Yakima. You know we could."

  Yakima glanced over his left shoulder. She stood only a few feet from him; the blanket draped loosely over her shoulders. She cupped her breasts with the ends of the blanket, hiding only the nipples. The orbs swelled alluringly. Her legs were bare from her thighs down, her feet fine and delicate in the tough brown grass.

  "I reckon we could at that—till we froze to death." Yakima tossed the burlap down and led Wolf into the deeper grass where the creek curved back toward the bank.

  “Typical man," Faith called behind him. "Don't know a good thing when you see it."

  "I see it," Yakima said, not torturing himself with another look at her, keeping his eyes straight ahead. "I just don't wanna die for it."

  "Come for a swim?"

  Yakima stopped, turned halfway around. He slitted one eye. She stood staring at him wistfully, one foot atop the other, the blanket draped over one arm.

  Her breasts, bronzed by the westering sun, stood proudly out from her chest, nipples jutting. Her long blond hair framed them like sun-gilded corn silk.

  "I ain't taking you to Gold Cache."

  "Maybe I can change your mind." Her cheeks dimpled as she smiled. "But I ain't attaching any strings to it." She wagged a bent knee at him and, throwing her hair out from her shoulders, jogged off through the trees.

  Yakima stared after her, scowling. His loins were heavy.

  Damn her, to do this to him. To make him want her. Ah, hell, he'd wanted her for a long time. But all that exposed skin had made him need her. She was a fine-looking woman. A little skinny, but nicely rounded in the breasts and hips. Now that he'd been invited, his surging blood wouldn't let him turn her down.

  But he'd be damned if he'd take her to Gold Cache. Shit, neither one of them would make it alive, and he wasn't a pimp. He'd been many things since his mother had died. There weren't many things he hadn't done, but he'd never pimped, and he didn't aim to ever do it.

  He snorted as he hobbled the horse. What do you know? There was even a job too low for him.

  When he'd gathered some deadfall branches and built a low fire, he filled his teakettle with water from the creek. Tea had been Ralph's drink—he claimed it lightened the limbs and buoyed the spirit, and Yakima had found it to be true.

  He'd just about talked himself out of going after Faith— what woman didn't attach strings to a free poke?—when her voice rose from upstream, a gentle, glassy keen above the rustling weeds and cottonwood leaves.

  "Yaaa-kima?"

  A siren cry if he'd ever heard one.

  He broke a few of the thicker branches onto the fire and blew on the fledgling flame. She called him again, louder this time. He rose, wiped his hands on his buckskins, and began making his way upstream through the columnar shadows of the cottonwoods.

  "Here!" Faith cried.

  He turned his head to see her lolling on the other side of the creek, inside a sunny horseshoe where the water appeared to be about four feet or more. Faith lay with her back to the six-foot earthen bank behind her, hands grasping old tree roots protruding from the clay above her head.

  Her breasts rode up out of the water. She smiled and kicked a foot.

  "It's cold but very refreshing!"

  Yakima's heart wrenched as he watched the girl frolic on the other side of the creek, bouncing up and down in the water, shaking her wet hair around her head.

  He kicked off his boots and was out of his clothes in less than a minute. He stepped off the bank and began striding across the stream with long, fluid steps, his legs pushing at the steady current, arms swinging stiffly at his sides, as if to pull the water back behind him.

  The cold air numbed him, rose gooseflesh across his shoulders, but did nothing to taint his desire.

  As he moved p
urposefully toward her, splashing water up around his thighs, Faith held herself still by the tree roots behind and above her. She stared at him, her eyes sweeping across his body, her cheeks flushed, eyes bright, full lips slightly parted.

  He didn't slow his pace until he was inches away from her. Then he stopped, the water rising to just beneath his buttocks, and crouched down. He grabbed her shoulders, drew her to him, and closed his mouth over hers.

  She opened her lips for him, and their tongues tangled for nearly a minute before Faith placed her hands on his chest and pushed him back.

  She ran her eyes across his chest, ran her hands over the hublike knobs of his shoulders, down his bulging, vein-corded arms. For a moment, he thought she was reconsidering her offer, but then she dropped lower in the water and pressed her back to the bank. Placing her hands on his buttocks, she drew him toward her and wrapped her legs around his thighs.

  After a few minutes, she cried out softly and groaned, digging her fingers into his biceps and throwing her head back, arching her spine. She quivered for a few seconds, then, breathing hard, lifted her head. Her eyes were soft and heavy-lidded as they met his.

  She didn't say anything, just stared at him obliquely, breasts rising and falling sharply, as she clung to his arms and kept her legs wrapped tightly around his thighs.

  After a time, she shivered and pressed her face to his chest. "Cold ..."

  He lifted her, turned, and carried her back across the creek. He aimed for a patch of bright sunshine between cottonwoods, then climbed the bank, and lowered her gently into the grass. He shook out his own long hair, then lay down beside her, pressed his back to the grass, felt the sunshine begin to penetrate the cold.

  Soon, when the sunlight was a second warm skin covering his body, she rose up on an elbow, stared down at him, ran her hand along his hard jaw, swept her thumb across his lips. She didn't say anything, just stared into his eyes before lowering her lips to his, kissing him tenderly.

  She pulled away, continued staring down at him, a pensive smile pulling at her mouth. "Where do you come from, Yakima?"

  He jerked a shoulder, ran his left hand down the graceful curve of her slender back. "Here and there."

  "I mean, in the beginning. Where were you born, to who?"

  "My ma was an Indian, a Yakima, from the west coast. My old man was a fur trapper. Henry was his name. Zachariah Henry. One-quarter Cheyenne. Don't recollect where he came from. Maybe Ma never said."

  He stopped, saw that she was waiting for more.

  He jerked his shoulder again, uncomfortable at talking about himself. And then, too, there was so much he didn't know. "Pa took her away from her people, and they traveled around the mountains, living in cabins and running trotlines. I was born sometime in there somewhere. Heard they did a little prospecting, but I must have been too young to remember. Pa taught me a few Cheyenne ways, some of the tongue. He died, got sick or something, and then Ma got sick and sent me to a Catholic orphanage in Denver City. I never heard from her after that, so I just assumed she was dead."

  He rested his head back on his bent arm and stared at the sky. The discomfort of talking was tempered by a flood of sensory impressions, wisps of colored smoke, from his past.

  "I remember rain in the mountains and the smell of wet deerskins. One time we had to tunnel out of our cabin, the snow was so deep. I remember a big bald eagle. Pa and Ma, they must have had one for a pet or something, maybe it was injured. I can remember its eyes and how its feathers felt when I petted it, and the choking, croaking noise it sometimes made."

  He traced a high, puffy cloud with his eyes, frowning as he tried to gather larger pieces of his patchwork past, always so frustrating, because they never came together to form a whole image.

  "Ma had a little half-moon birthmark under her left eye. Pa had a thick, curly gray beard. When he died, she went away for a spell, left me alone. Then she returned with her hair cut off, arms and hands hacked up. We wandered for a couple years after that. Sometimes she cooked and cleaned for farmers or for businesspeople in towns, and we'd live in the barn. Sometimes we'd just live in a creek bottom somewhere—through the warm months, anyway—and we'd trap rabbits to eat."

  He remembered certain dogs and horses and trees and creeks and fishing holes. He remembered a banker's large white house with trim at the roof's peaks that resembled the icing on a cake. And there was a black woman, a maid, whom he and his mother had once been friends with.

  He remembered the angry looks and harsh words directed at an Indian woman and her half-breed son, and being run out of places or threatened with beatings—which was why they steered wide of large settlements. But he didn't go on about any of that, because none of it really made any sense to him and he wasn't sure how much was real and how much he'd made up simply because he'd yearned to have a history. No use yakking about it to Faith.

  He looked up at her. She was running the back of her left index finger back and forth along his belt line, a somber expression on her face.

  "What about you, Faith? Where did you come from?"

  She smiled and stared at her finger. "Oh, I don't even remember, and that's just fine with me." She placed a hand on either side of his face, kissed him tenderly. While they kissed, she ran her hand down to his crotch, squeezed and caressed until he was ready for her once more.

  As she straddled him, her shadow fell across Yakima's face, making it impossible for him to see the sun flashing off a spyglass directed at them from a hill on the other side of the stream.

  Chapter Eleven

  Two feet from the crest of the knoll, Alvin Pauk looked at his partner, Leo Salon, staring through a spyglass toward the opposite side of the creek. Salon was grinning beneath the flat brim of his black hat, which he wore cavalry style, tipped over his left eye.

  Salon chuckled.

  "What the hell's so funny?" asked Pauk, keeping his head behind a sage clump beside Salon. "What the hell's goin' on?"

  Salon continued staring through the spyglass, showing crooked teeth as he laughed. "Christ, those two are goin' at it like a coupla minks!"

  "Huh? What do you mean they're goin' at it? Let me see."

  "I don't think so, my friend," Salon said, shaking his head slightly as he kept the spyglass snugged to his right eye. "You ain't old enough to see such carryin's-on as that."

  "Goddamn it!" Pauk reached up and snagged the glass from Salon's gloved hands. "I'm only a year younger than you."

  Salon—who was dressed much like Pauk, in a gaudy gambler's suit complete with a frilly vest, claw-hammer frock coat, and polished black stockman's boots with cow dung forever ingrained in the stitching—poked his shabby bowler hat off his forehead and aimed the spyglass between the sage clump and a rock the size and shape of a shoe box.

  He adjusted the focus until the Indian and the girl appeared on the creek's far bank, framed by willows and partially hidden in the tall, tan grass. The girl straddled the Indian, knees clutching his sides, her back to the creek, her long, wheat-colored hair bouncing on her shoulders. The savage's brown hands gripped her narrow waist, just above her hips.

  Salon and Pauk, down-at-the-heel drovers-turned-gamblers, had spied the pair two hours ago, threading a broad canyon. The idea had come to Salon instantly: They'd steal the pair's fine black mustang and sell the horse in Gold Cache for a gambling stake. Salon and Pauk, who'd learned to play poker in bunkhouses across the frontier, owned the affliction common among bunkhouse sharpies—they overestimated their gambling prowess to such a severe degree that they saw gambling as their way out of the bunkhouse forever.

  They also didn't see that stealing a horse from an Indian and a girl could be considered a crime, only a stunt that no one but the Indian and the girl could begrudge them.

  "Christ almighty," Pauk wheezed, his heart hammering as he stared at the thrashing weeds on the other side of the creek.

  Beside him, propped on an elbow and keeping his head well below the knoll's crest, Salon laughed. "Just like
a coupla minks. Didn't I tell ya?"

  "You know what I think, Alvin?" Pauk swallowed, then parted his lips to breathe through his mouth. "That's a fine-lookin' woman down there. Yessir. I think we oughta go down there and join the fun."

  Salon grabbed the spyglass away from Pauk, his single black brow ridged. "After the savage has had her?" He gave a disapproving chuff and looped the spyglass around his neck, tucking it inside his threadbare wine-colored vest. "Besides, now's our chance to grab the horse."

  He scuttled down the knoll but stopped when he saw Pauk still staring over the crest. "Come on!"

  Pauk looked at Salon over his left shoulder. His thin blond mustache was damp with sweat. "I ain't had me a woman in a good month or more, Leo."

  "Well, you can't have that one. She's done been soiled by the Injun. Besides, we'd have to kill him to get her, and a shot in Ute country is bound to bring trouble." Salon tugged on Pauk's brown boot. "Now, come on. That horse'll bring a good three, four hundred dollars up at Gold Cache, enough to stake us for the winter."

  "Ah, shit!" Pauk spat under his breath, crabbing straight down the back of the knoll. "I reckon there'll be more women up at Gold Cache."

  Salon stood and turned downstream. "I hear the whores up in Gold Cache are some o' the finest you'll see this side of New Orleans. The bordellos have real carpet on their floors and everything."

  "Well, I ain't tinhorn enough to believe such blather as that," Pauk said, stumbling after his partner, shoving shad-bark out of his way with both hands, "but I reckon they might be as purty as that one there, anyways."

  When the pair had walked fifty yards, tracing a bend in the stream, they stopped at the creek's edge. Salon looked upstream and into the willows. The Indian and the girl were out of sight, which meant that Salon and Pauk would be out of sight as well.

  "Come on," Salon said, stepping through the cattails and into the creek, planting his boots firmly on rocks rising above the water's frothy surface. "Easy now, don't make any noise. Injuns got ears like bats."