Bardoul threw his head back and laughed. Then his face went slack, and he glared at the girl peeking out from behind Bobby's right shoulder. "Ain't nice—insultin' a man for the way he makes a livin'."
As Bardoul sprang forward, the girl screamed. The bounty hunter swung his whiskey bottle up soundly between Bobby's chap-covered legs, smacking his crotch with a solid thump. Bobby sucked a hard breath and bent forward, covering his crotch with both arms.
At the same time, Bardoul slammed his right knee into Bobby's face.
"Uhhhh-ah!" Bobby screamed, half straightening and staggering off down the bar, the girl giving another shriek and running out from behind him. Bobby left one hand on his crotch while lifting the other to his nose, blood spurting between his fingers, painting his face.
Bobby's partner snarled at Bardoul, "You mangy son of a—"
He began sliding his Schofield from its worn leather holster but stopped when he saw the long barrel of BardouFs .45 an inch from his belly button. He removed his hand from the Schofield's grip and, face blanching, raised his hands to his shoulders.
Bardoul looked at Bobby. The young saddle tramp was down on his knees, cursing, holding his legs close together, and pressing his hand over his gushing nose. The fight seemed to be out of him, so Bardoul holstered the Remy and grabbed the girl's arm. He crouched, slung her over his shoulder like a potato sack, and turned toward the stairs.
"Come on, Jen." Bardoul whooped as the girl kicked and punched his back. "We're gonna have us a high old time, you an' me!"
Chapter Thirteen
Jogging bare-assed naked through the wheat- and needle-grass, hurdling horehound, silverthorn, and rock as he headed back toward his and Faith's camp along the creek, Yakima crested a rise and stopped.
His heart pounded from exertion. His body was slick with sweat. Over and over in his mind he saw Wolf—his magnificent black mustang—looking back as the two thieves led him off through the river bluffs. Fear and beseeching had been in Wolf's eyes.
The stallion and Yakima had rarely been apart.
Bending forward to catch his wind, Yakima spied movement in the direction of the creek. Faith ran toward him.
He waited while she mounted the knoll, only practically conscious of his nakedness, not embarrassed by it. He felt foolish for letting two men sneak into his camp and steal his horse while he'd been in the throes of carnal passion. Outraged at himself was a better word. But his nakedness was a minor thing, only something to be amended so he could take off after the thieves and get his horse back.
Faith stopped before him, clad in his old denims, plaid shirt, and moccasins. The slim leather belt was too long for her, and she'd tied it around her waist, the end dangling. In her arms she carried Yakima's longjohns, buckskin pants, wool shirt, boots, and hat.
She, too, was out of breath. "Did they get away?"
Yakima laid the rifle in the grass, grabbed his underwear, and quickly stepped into the bottoms. "Heading upstream. I'm going after them."
"On foot?"
"Don't have much choice."
"It'll be dark soon. Best wait till morning."
"I might be able to catch 'em if I head cross-country. I know the trail they're on. It wraps around through the buttes for several miles." He shrugged into his shirt, then sat down to pull his boots on. "You stay here. Keep the fire small and keep my pistol handy."
"I wish you'd wait till morning."
"If it rained tonight, or if a wind came up, I'd lose their trail. They're not getting away with Wolf." Yakima stuffed his shirttail in his pants, then stooped to pick up his rifle. He had no spare shells, but he figured there would be eight or nine shots in the Yellowboy's breech.
"You'll be okay," he told Faith as she eyed him warily, her blond hair blowing around in the wind. "I'll be back before daylight. If not, follow the trail south. Sooner or later you'll find a freighter or someone who'll take you out of the foothills to Denver."
He turned and began jogging back into the bluffs. After a few yards, he turned back to her. She stood atop the knoll, watching him, one foot cocked, her arms hanging straight down at her sides.
"You'll be all right," Yakima told her again.
He turned and quickened his pace into the thickening late-afternoon shadows. When he glanced back once more, she was walking toward the creek, holding her hair in both hands above her head.
Faith wasn't sure how long she'd been sitting near the fire, her back to a tree, blankets drawn up to her neck, when she was thrust suddenly from a light sleep.
She blinked and looked around. She'd heard something.
Before her, the fire had burned down to a dull orange glow. She remembered Yakima's pistol and picked it up. With her other hand, she pushed herself to her feet.
Westward, a foot crunched dew-damp grass.
A constriction formed in Faith's throat, and her heart pounded. She looked around. What should she do? Hide or call out for the newcomer to identify himself?
Labored breaths sounded as the footsteps drew near.
Holding the pistol in both hands, a thumb on the hammer, she backed slowly toward the creek.
She was several feet beyond the fire when a voice rose, low but clear. "It's Yakima."
Her muscles relaxing, she lowered the pistol and drew a deep, relieved breath. She tossed several logs on the fire and set the half-full coffeepot, in which she'd brewed green tea, on the glowing coals. A shadow moved in the cottonwoods, and then Yakima stepped into the fire's wan glow, his chest rising and falling sharply, his shirt pasted to him with sweat.
"Thank God," Faith said, wrapping her arms around his neck and pressing her face to his hot, damp chest. He smelled like sage and the night wind. He'd come back for her. Knowing how much the black stallion meant to him, she had begun to think he wouldn't. "Any sign of Wolf?"
Yakima nodded and moved off toward the creek. He disappeared into the darkness, but his voice rose clearly above the creek's tinny murmur. "I went to where the trails fork, one going to Jamestown, the other to Gold Cache. They're headin' for Gold Cache."
Water splashed.
Faith remained by the fire, a blanket wrapped about her, for the night was sharply cool. The sound of Yakima washing in the cold water made her shudder.
Shortly, Yakima strode back into the firelight, his face and hair wet, breath puffing about his shoulders. Crouching over the fire, he filled a tin cup with tea from the pot.
He sipped the hot brew and looked over his shoulder at Faith, a tired smile carving deep lines in his face. "I reckon you're going to Gold Cache, after all."
"We're gonna walk?"
Hunkered before the fire, he sipped the smoking tea. "Walk till we find horses or run into a freight outfit. If we offer cash, someone might give us a ride." He took another sip, and his voice was flat and hard. "Less'n we can catch up to those horse thieves and Wolf before we get to Gold Cache."
He straightened, threw his tea dregs into the weeds, dropped the cup by the fire, and collapsed on his saddle blanket. Resting his head against his saddle, he drew another blanket over his chest and heaved a vast sigh. "Best get some sleep. It's a long walk, most of it uphill."
Faith tossed another log on the fire, gathered the rest of her blankets about her and lay down beside Yakima. She turned, snuggled her face against his chest. "Why did you come back? You'd gained several miles on 'em."
Yakima lay his arm across his forehead. "Couldn't leave my pistol and saddle, could I?"
She lifted her head, regarded him with stitched brows.
He chuckled.
Faith ground a fist into his ribs, rested her head on his chest again, and in a few minutes they were both asleep.
They were on the trail at first light, after a quick breakfast of tea, jerky, and wild berries, and after Yakima hid his tack under rocks and fashioned a sling with which to carry his war bag over his shoulder.
He'd made the sling from the four-point capote he'd carried his bedroll in. He and Faith would need
the heavy coat, which he'd sewn from wool trading blankets and deerskins, when they entered the high country.
He'd hidden his boots with his tack as well, donning deerskin, fur-lined moccasin boots, which were better for walking than the stiff cowhide boots.
Capote sack over one shoulder, his Yellowboy slung over the other, he strode out ahead of Faith, setting a moderately fast pace. She kept up well. He often glanced behind to see her taking long strides on the trail behind him, looking like a small, fine-boned man in Yakima's spare trail clothes, rolled cuffs jouncing about her laced moccasins, leather hat shielding her head from the climbing sun. She'd stuffed her hair beneath the hat. The end of the too long belt flapped about her hip.
Late in the morning they came to where the trail forked. Taking the right fork, toward Gold Cache, they were soon following the rutted freight trail along the north bank of the St. Vrain River, snaking their way ever higher toward the Continental Divide.
Rugged granite peaks shouldered on both sides of the canyon and the quickly dropping river shot through its narrow, rocky bed, frothy as beer foam and raising a steady mist and roar.
They met several prospectors heading out of the mountains for the winter—bearded, owl-eyed gents trailing mules or donkeys, a few driving light farm wagons filled with supplies. One man walked, pushing a two-wheeled cart, a German shepherd trailing with half a dead raccoon in its jaws.
Only one outfit passed them heading for Gold Cache. The two wagons were overloaded, however, and Yakima didn't bother asking for a ride. One of the drivers—a walleyed hombre in a wolf coat and knee-high boots—gave Faith the thrice-over in her men's baggy clothes, then winked and threw his head back, laughing lustily.
After meeting others, Yakima decided that it would be best if they stayed off the trail from then on. No use begging more trouble than they already had.
He didn't have to ask the men they met if they'd seen two men leading a black mustang. He knew Wolf's shoe prints as well as his own, and they were clearly marked in the trail beneath his moccasins.
After the sun sank behind the pine-carpeted western slopes, they camped in a gorge along the St. Vrain, well off the freight trail, and hid their fire among sheltering rocks. They fried the trout Yakima impaled with a makeshift spear, slept soundly, and were on the road again before the sun had lifted from behind the granite knobs.
At eleven o'clock that morning, yells and shouted epithets rose from the base of the hill they'd just climbed, well away from the river. They heard the sharp cracks of a black snake, followed by the indignant brays of mules.
"Another wagon train," Yakima said without turning around. Unused to foot travel, Faith was having a tougher time today, and she was limping from blisters on both feet. "Best you ride now if they're a fit bunch."
"I reckon I'm just slowing you down."
"No point in torturing yourself if you don't have to." He turned now to peer back down the switchbacking trail. No sign of the freighters yet, but by the sounds of the mules and the black snakes and the heated shouts, they'd be along soon.
Twenty minutes later, they were walking along a relatively flat stretch of trail when Yakima turned to see two mules rise over a hill brow, heads bobbing as they leaned into the collars, manes ruffling.
Yakima took Faith's arm, and together they climbed the rocks north of the trail. They were hunkered among in the boulders, thirty feet above the trail and looking down, as the three wagons approached—big Pittsburgs with heavy brakes for mountain grades, and log chains from axles to doubletrees for sharp cornering. Dirty white tarpaulins were stretched taut over their boxes. Dust rose, brassy in the midday light, and the mules' hooves clomped heavily, the wheels screeching like angry hawks.
As the wagons passed, Yakima and Faith tracked them, watching. When the last wagon was ten yards beyond, Faith began to rise. Yakima grabbed her arm, pulled her back down beside him.
"That gent in the second wagon. Bad hombre. Jumped me in an alley down in Alamosa after I beat him and three Texas high rollers at stud." Yakima shook his head, eyes on the rear wagon lumbering into the distance. "You won't be ridin' with them.".
Faith looked at him, a faint smile pulling at her lips.
When the dust had settled over the trail and the breezy mountain silence had once again fallen over the canyon, Yakima hefted his war bag and rifle. "We'd best get a move on."
They continued walking but rested several times, Faith bathing her blistered feet in the stream. She kept up a good face and a joking tone, but she was sunburned and tired. Yakima knew she couldn't put in another day.
An hour after their last stop, after they'd turned away from the St. Vrain, the orange ball of the falling sun was split by a thumb of jagged basalt. Shadows tilted from rocks, and draws were filled with purple velvet.
Yakima and Faith ambled down a hill and into a clearing, low ridges on both sides of the trail. A leaning wooden sign announced devil's gulch in faded red letters, beneath which stables, food, sleep had been printed in black. Beyond, clay-colored boulders and pines surrounded an L-shaped, two-story roadhouse of square, chinked pine logs.
A barn and corrals spread out on the left side of the trail. The three wagons they'd seen earlier were parked in the yard, and the drivers were unhitching the mules. There was another, lighter wagon parked before the corrals, and a big black man—bare-chested and wearing a red bandanna around his neck and a black sombrero on his head—was wrestling a hub off the rear axle.
Yakima walked Faith up the steps of the roadhouse's front porch and through the front door. Inside, a long counter ran along the left wall. Cured meat hung from the rafters. Several tables and a smoky stove stood among cracker barrels and displays of mining supplies.
An old, silver-haired couple, their humble but civilized attire streaked with trail dust, sat at one of the tables, drinking coffee. A beefy, sandy-haired lad, similarly dressed in a bowler and a wool suit coat, sat to the right of the old woman, forking large bites of apricot pie into his mouth.
"Miss, you're welcome. But no Injuns."
The voice came from the back of the room, where a fat man with wavy red hair and a shaggy red beard stood, a broom in his hand.
He glanced at a plaque behind the bar, above the mirror, bearing the painted words: no Indians in rodehouse. At the right end of the plaque was a figure drawing of a broad-nosed, red face capped by a gaudy headdress. A white cross was marked over it.
Faith turned to Yakima, then to the big redhead at the back of the room. She opened her mouth to speak, but Yakima stopped her with a hand on her elbow.
"Easy. No trouble," he said softly. "You stay in here, get a room. I'll go outside, see about getting some horses."
Faith frowned up at him. "But—"
"No buts. And no trouble." Yakima cast her a firm glance, then turned, went back outside and down the porch steps, and crossed the yard at an angle, stepping around the big, sweat-lathered mules the freighters were leading to the barn.
A man with a wooden stump where his left leg should have been sat on a barrel to the right of the barn, whittling an ironwood stick with a barlow knife. He was sixty or so, his face resembling a raisin set back behind a shaggy red beard and framed by woolly red hair streaked with silver. No doubt the father of the younger, bigger redhead inside the roadhouse. His sharp blue eyes regarded Yakima cunningly. A pair of handmade crutches leaned against the barrel.
When Yakima was twelve feet from the one-legged gent, one of the mule skinners stopped to Yakima's right, a wheel hub in his thick hands. It was one of the men Yakima had whipped at stud poker in Alamosa. The man regarded Yakima through slitted eyes, then licked his plump, chapped lips and tilted his head to one side.
"Where I seen you before, breed?"
Yakima looked at him dully. "Alamosa. Last winter."
The man, whose name started with a "D"—Driesen or Drexier?—stared at Yakima for a good ten seconds. Yakima held the gaze, his own eyes bored. The mule skinner blinked first, then
continued toting the wheel hub toward the portable blacksmith forge east of the barn.
As he walked away, he drew the looks of his two stocky comrades and nodded his head toward Yakima. Grumbling, the skinners continued putting up their mules and tack.
Yakima turned to the one-legged gent grinning at him dubiously. "Got any horses for sale?"
The old man hiked a shoulder. "Depends on how much money you got."
"Forty-five dollars."
The old gent cackled. "I don't stable nags here, breed!"
"Rent me one, then. I'll have him back in a week."
"Don't rent out horses. In these parts, it's hard to get 'em back."
Yakima glanced at the four horses milling in the nearest corral. Good horseflesh, all. He saw a long-legged paint that could no doubt eat up the trail to Gold Cache in two, maybe two and a half days. With such a horse, he might be able to overtake the men who'd stolen Wolf before they got to the mining camp and possibly sold him.
Yakima turned his gaze to a stone well with a shake roof and a wooden bucket in a patch of red willows west of the roadhouse. "Mind if I wash, fill my canteen yonder?"
The grin in place, the old man jerked his knife toward a stock tank where one of the mule skinners was letting a mule draw from the hay- and seed-flecked water. "That should do ye."
"It's all yours, breed," the skinner laughed, pulling the mule away from the tank. "Sunshine here's had his fill, but he left plenty!"
Chuckling with the other two skinners, the man led the mule on into the barn.
Yakima moved toward the tank. Doing so, he saw the big black man looking at him, expressionless, as he slid a new wheel onto the farm wagon's axle, his huge ebony arms expanding and contracting as he worked. Yakima1 dropped his gear beside the tank, rolled up his shirtsleeves, crouched over the tank, and cupped the brackish water to his face, scrubbing away the dust and the sweat.
When he lifted his head, he saw a thin shadow slide across the ground to his left, heard a low rasp of something flying through the air over his head. He tensed, but before he could turn around or raise his arms, the lariat loop dropped over his head and shoulders.
The Lonely Breed : A Western Fiction Classic (Yakima Henry Book 1) Page 10