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

by Peter Brandvold

  A vague, lonely ache plagued her as she washed, dressed, gathered her gear, and went downstairs. The one-legged man was frying flapjacks, bacon, and eggs at the big iron range, and the man's son was filling coffee cups. The Schaeffers and the three freighters sat at two wooden tables arranged side by side near the stairs, a lamp burning on each table, another on the bar. The smoky room was rife with the smells of the food, boiled coffee, and tobacco.

  As Faith strode to the Schaeffers' table, the freighters turned their heads toward her, then turned away, snickering. Mr. Schaeffer and the younger Schaeffer, whose name was Jules, stood up politely, shyly averting their gazes.

  "Good mornin', ma'am," said the elder Schaeffer in his resonant preacher's tenor. He was tall, bald, and hawk-nosed, with a pious, taciturn demeanor. "I hope you slept well?"

  "Just fine, thank you."

  Chuckling broke out among the freighters. Faith turned her head. They glanced at her, then glanced away, like lewd schoolboys.

  "Don't mind them, ma'am," said Mr. Schaeffer over his cup of steaming coffee. "They just don't know any better."

  "Sure we do, Grandpa," squealed one of the freighters, his lips swollen and blue. "Sure we do!"

  All three laughed, and the one who'd tried to whip Yakima splashed clear corn liquor into their coffee cups.

  The Schaeffers ignored them, and so did Faith, who was glad when the food came so she could distract herself from the freighters and the nebulous ache in the pit of her stomach.

  She felt much lighter when the freighters, having wolfed their food and coffee and filled the room with cigarette smoke, shuffled out to their wagons. Soon after, Mr. Schaef-fer and Jules left to hitch their own two mules to their old Conestoga, and in a short while the Schaeffers and Faith were jolting along the trail that angled deeper and higher into the mountains.

  Snow-mantled peaks rose before them. Along the sun-washed trail, yellow aspen leaves fluttered in the cool breeze. Riding in the back of the cramped, rattling wagon with Jules, Faith pulled her blanket tighter around her shoulders.

  She and Jules were on their third game of checkers, though he was so shy he had yet to say anything except, "Miss Faith, could I interest you in checkers to while away the time?"

  Now Faith slid a black checker forward, jumping one of Jules's red ones. Mrs. Schaeffer, riding on the seat with the preacher, turned her head to the side to speak through the front opening of the canvas cover. "Miss Faith, I've been wondering what could bring such a pretty girl to such a remote place as Gold Cache? Oh, don't tell me if you harbor reservations. I'm just being nosy, of course!"

  Faith tensed slightly, smiled to cover it. "My father has a shop there. A clothing shop. I'm gonna work for him."

  "I see." Mrs. Schaeffer turned forward to watch the trail.

  Jules made a move. Faith countered it. In the corner of her left eye, she saw Mrs. Schaeffer turn toward her again. Again she tensed.

  "Why on earth, dear, were you traveling with that Indian, if I might again be so forward? Couldn't your father provide accommodations?"

  Faith turned to the woman, slid a lock of hair back from her face. She smiled and kept her tone light. "Yakima saved my life, Mrs. Schaeffer."

  The old woman turned to her husband, slumped in the driver's seat. They shared a conspiratorial glance, then faced forward again, and that was the last of the conversation until the preacher turned the wagon off the road and announced, "Water break and a blow. Steep hill ahead."

  While Mr. Schaeffer tended the mules and Jules gathered wood for a coffee fire, Faith and Mrs. Schaeffer walked down to a creek running along the base of a steep, low bank and shrouded in pines. Faith bathed her face in the water, drank, then, smoothing her damp hair back from her face, walked back to where smoke curled near the wagon.

  Jules knelt beside the fledgling fire, blowing on the tinder he'd piled in the middle of an old rock ring. Mr. Schaeffer was draping a feed sack over the off mule's snout.

  Faith moved to the fire ring and reached for the blackened coffeepot standing between two mossy pine branches. "I'll fetch water."

  "You don't have to do that, ma'am," Jules said. "I can get it."

  "Gotta earn my keep," Faith said.

  She'd begun turning away but stopped abruptly when a branch snapped in the woods ahead of the wagon. She turned to see the three freighters step through the trees, moving slowly, their faces tense, rifles in their hands.

  "Everybody just stay right where you are," said the man called Dietrich. He slid his dark gaze to Faith. " 'Ceptin' you, miss. You can come right on over here."

  Faith heard a sharp intake of breath behind her. She didn't turn around as Mrs. Schaeffer exclaimed in a hushed tone, "Oh, for the love of God!"

  "What's the meaning of this?" said Mr. Schaeffer, standing up by the head of the off mule.

  "That girl there—that Injun-lovin' whore—we're gonna take her off your hands," said the freighter whose name Faith had learned was Grayson.

  "Whore, sure enough," said Dietrich, staring at Faith, his eyes bright with lust. "Whore from Thornton's roadhouse. I remembered where I seen her before just a couple hours ago. Me an' the boys ain't had us a woman fer a long time!"

  "Get over here, missy!" said the third freighter, with the smashed lips. His name was Clem something. "We ain't got all day. Git over here now!"

  "This is wrong," said Mrs. Schaeffer, coming up behind Faith. "You can't take this poor girl against her will. I... we won't allow it."

  All three men were walking toward Faith and Mrs. Schaeffer. Mrs. Schaeffer put her hand on Faith's arm. Out of the corner of her right eye, Faith saw Jules still squatting by the fire, looking at the three approaching freighters. He sat so still that Faith thought he must be holding his breath.

  "Listen, gentlemen," said the tall preacher, who'd taken off his shabby suit coat and wore only his vest over a plain white shirt, the sleeves rolled up his forearms, "certainly you won't commit such an atrocity against God, yourselves, and all that's holy on His green Earth?"

  Dietrich stopped suddenly, swung the rifle toward the preacher. "No!" Faith shouted as the rifle boomed, blowing up gravel at the preacher's thick-soled shoe.

  The man jumped back as Jules cried, "Pa!"

  Both mules jerked their heads up, braying, cracked corn spilling from their feed sacks.

  "Get the message, Preacher?" said Dietrich, chuckling as he rammed a fresh shell into his rifle breech, the spent shell arcing over his right shoulder to chink in the grass behind him. He aimed the rifle at Mrs. Schaeffer, who moaned softly and shifted her weight from one foot to the other. "Or how 'bout I shoot the old woman?"

  "No!" Faith said, stepping forward. "I'll come."

  She strode over to the freighters, her heart pounding, and turned to regard the Schaeffers. Mr. Schaeffer stood with his hands raised, palms out, at his shoulders. Mrs. Schaeffer clasped her hands to her throat.

  Jules stood before the fire ring, holding the coffeepot down low at his side, lower jaw hanging, blond hair sliding in the breeze.

  "A ... doxie?" said Mrs. Schaeffer, squinting her eyes at Faith. She turned to Mr. Schaeffer. "Perhaps this is none of our affair, Reverend."

  Schaeffer nodded grimly, his flat eyes moving down Faith's body and up again, as if seeing her for the first time. "I believe you're right, Mrs. Schaeffer." His eyes met Faith's. "We'll pray for your eternal soul, miss."

  "Thanks," Faith said as Dietrich grabbed her arm and began pulling her back through the trees.

  As the other two freighters, laughing, fell into step behind her and Dietrich, Faith turned to see all three Schaeffers staring dully after her. Tears dribbled down her cheeks, and her chest heaved, but she did not cry aloud.

  "Yakima," she said under her breath, tightening her jaws, trying to keep her lips from quivering, "where the hell are you when a girl needs you, you half-breed bastard?"

  Chapter Sixteen

  The freighters' massive wagons were parked along the trail, under a
line of black cottonwoods shaking their silver leaves in the breeze. The man called Dietrich grabbed Faith around her waist—she winced at the sudden pain of his brusque grasp—and lifted her over the right front wheel and into the lead wagon's driver's box.

  "Time you rode in style, purty lady!"

  The freighter called Grayson laughed as he crawled into the driver's box of the second wagon. "Bullshit, Dietrich. You just want your ashes hauled."

  "Not a bad idea," allowed Dietrich, climbing over Faith's legs. "But she ain't gettin' none of my stuff before she's cooked and washed the dishes!" He guffawed, sat down, and removed the reins from the brake handle. "No, sir. No matter how hard she begs me fer it!"

  He threw his head back, laughing as he released the brake and cracked the blacksnake over the mules' backs. As the lumbering beasts moved out, leaning into their collars, Faith grabbed the seat to keep from being thrown onto the trail.

  She'd been a whore long enough, been around dangerous men long enough, that her fear of them didn't last long before it turned to a deep, simmering rage. Some girls couldn't think when enraged, but Faith could. Since the first night Preacher Saudoff had visited her bedroom, when she was twelve years old, back on the farm near the Chugwater Buttes, her indignation and outrage quickly burned down to rational, cunning plans for survival.

  Now that cunning led her to glance to her left, at the rifle that Dietrich had stowed beneath the seat. There was a holstered pistol there as well, but she knew for certain the rifle was loaded. So when the time came, she would appropriate the rifle, make sure a shell was levered into the breech, and shoot him.

  Then she'd shoot the other two quickly before they realized what was happening.

  After that?

  She would unharness one of the mules and ride bareback to Gold Cache.

  Her heart thudded at the prospect, and in spite of the cool breeze funneling around a narrowing of the canyon dead ahead, sweat formed on her brow and above her lip, made her hand slick as it clutched the thin brass rail along the right side of the seat.

  "How much you think you're worth?"

  Faith turned to Dietrich, who was grinning around a fat stogie in his teeth. His low hairline and broad, pitted nose gave him an apelike appearance. When she didn't say anything, he glanced at her, his bushy brows forming a V over the bridge of his nose, then returned his gaze to the trail beyond the mules' bobbing heads.

  "In Gold Cache. How much you think you're worth up there? Assumin', of course, word about you and that savage hasn't made it that far..."

  "In the pimping business now?" Faith sneered, chuckling and smoothing her baggy denims across her thighs. "Well, I don't know. I still have my looks, don't I?"

  Dietrich looked her over, grinning, his eyes taking in her legs, the trim waist, and the full bust tenting the flannel shirt, then traveling back to her heart-shaped face beneath the brim of her man's leather hat. "I reckon you do at that, girl. I heard tell you were somethin' special. How much did Thornton pay for you?"

  "He never told me. Why don't you be your own man, set your own price?"

  "Well, if I'm going to do that, I reckon I'm gonna have to do some investigatin' on my own." Drool dribbled from around his cigar, down his chin, and onto the floor of the driver's box. "And I don't mind tellin' you," he added, running his lusty, bright gaze down her figure once more, "I can't wait to get me a piece of that!"

  Just what Faith had in mind. Men were never more vulnerable than when their peckers were doing their thinking. Inflame their peckers, shrink their brains. But there was no point in being overly eager and arousing the dullard's suspicions.

  "And you call Yakima a savage," she said, peering over the mules.

  Dietrich laughed and cracked the blacksnake over the team, the wagon climbing a hill and bringing a flame-shaped, snow-dusted peak into view. The peak shouldered above several others. In the clear air, it looked close enough to reach out and grab.

  If Faith could spring herself from the freighters in a couple of hours and climb aboard a mule, she might be able to make Gold Cache in two or three days.

  And while Gold Cache would be a far cry from starting life all over again, she could at least start fresh—putting a down payment on her own saloon and brothel with a loan and with the money she'd saved at Thornton's. Her fate would be in her own hands at last.

  Faith discovered a hitch in her plan not long after she'd decided to shoot the freighters with Dietrich's rifle. If she shot the men while they were driving, or anywhere near the mules, the mules would bolt, probably wrecking the wagons, laming or killing themselves, and leaving her afoot. She had to wait until Dietrich and the other men were away from the wagons, probably during a break or early that night, to carry out her plan.

  She resigned herself to sitting quietly while the mules labored along the trail winding through one canyon after another, the blacksnakes cracking like pistol fire, the smell of the animals and the sweaty men assaulting her nostrils.

  "Here," Dietrich said during a short break for the mules, handing her his canteen, from which he'd just taken a long drink.

  She looked at the lip no doubt infested with his filth, inwardly recoiled, and shook her head. He laughed, took another drink from the flask, then put it away and shook the ribbons over the mules' dusty, sweaty backs.

  When they stopped again, at the top of another long, steep hill, Dietrich again offered her the canteen after he'd taken a drink. She curled her nose, revolted, but her throat was so dry that she took the flask and tipped it back, letting the brackish water roll over her tongue and down her throat.

  Dietrich snorted and grabbed the canteen out of her hands. "That's enough, stupid bitch. We won't meet up with a creek again for a couple hours."

  Faith wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. "You're a real gentleman, Dietrich."

  By the time they pulled off the road early that evening, the sun angling low behind the flame-shaped, snow-mantled peak in the west, Faith's back and bottom ached from the hard plank seat. Her eyes and nose were caked with dust. She felt so fatigued by the long wagon ride that she was no longer sure she could put her plan into operation.

  She chased the doubt from her mind. She had to do it. Otherwise, these men would be taking their pleasure. The thought nearly made her gag. She'd slept with some unappealing hombres before, but never with men as apelike as these.

  "Go over and sit down under that tree yonder," Dietrich said, hauling her brusquely off the wagon. "You wander off, I'll chase you down and tie you. Understand?"

  "Don't worry," Faith said, as the freighters set to work unhitching the teams. "I'm too tired to do anything but eat and sleep."

  "You rest up," Dietrich yelled as he crouched to free the doubletree, adding with a laugh, "'cause you and me got business later."

  "Have you ever had a woman you didn't force?"

  Dietrich's head shot up, his face red, tiny eyes pinched angrily. "What was that?"

  "Nothing," Faith said, grabbing a blanket from under the wagon's dusty tarp. "Since I'll be entertaining tonight, I reckon I best go freshen up in the creek."

  "Yeah, you do that. And watch your mouth. No one likes a mouthy whore."

  While Dietrich and the other two freighters cursed the harness buckles, stays, and sweat-shrunk collars, Faith drew the blanket around her shoulders. The lower the sun sank, the colder the canyon grew. She walked around behind the wagon, heading for the tree and the narrow creek murmuring along a basalt bluff on the other side.

  Ten feet from the wagon, she glanced behind her. A rifle was mounted on the side of the wagon, above a grease box and an iron-banded water barrel. It looked old and rusty, no doubt a spare, but it wouldn't be hanging there if it didn't work.

  Faith's heart quickened.

  She slid her gaze to the head of the wagon, where Dietrich was milling among the mules, grousing and cursing and trying to keep them calm while he removed the harness straps and collars. Looking at the two wagons behind, she saw that the ot
her two freighters were similarly occupied. None of them were looking toward her.

  Slowly but purposefully, she moseyed over to the wagon, her gaze jackrabbiting between Dietrich and the other two men. She dried her sweaty hands on her jeans, then, with another quick look around, reached out and placed her hands around the rifle's weathered wood.

  Biting her lower lip, she lifted the rifle from the two rusty steel hooks it hung on and quickly stuck it inside her blanket.

  With one hand, she held the rifle straight down before her. With her free hand, she held the blanket closed at her chest.

  Dietrich's angry voice rose suddenly, and Faith froze in her tracks. "Goddamn it, Rafe, will you get up here and help with this damn buckle you adjusted yesterday? I can't pop it loose fer nothin’!”

  Heart pounding painfully against her ribs, Faith continued into the brush and strolled slowly, nonchalantly, toward the creek. On the far side of the tree, she opened the old Springfield's breech, saw a brass shell in the chamber, and closed it, easing the hammer down to the firing pin.

  She heaved a deep sigh. "Maybe there is a god after all."

  She looked back toward the wagons. Dietrich and Grayson were leading their teams off while the third man, Clem Schultz, was still fooling with his.

  Faith hoped none of the men would miss the rifle.

  She laid the Springfield in the brush beside the rock, brushed dry leaves and pinecones over it, then stood and walked to the creek. She knelt down, removed the blanket, unbuttoned her shirt, and began cupping the cold water to her face and neck. She stole occasional looks downstream, over a jumble of rocks and driftwood, where Grayson and Schultz watered the mules while Dietrich strung a picket line through several stout aspens.

  She'd kill all three when they came over to set up camp. She'd center the rifle on Dietrich's chest, then on the closest man after that, and then the third man. If all went as planned, they'd be dead within seconds. None wore sidearms, and she couldn't give them time to go for their long guns.

  She could handle a rifle. She'd handled them before. In fact, the preacher she'd lived with had had a Springfield just like this one ...