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

by Peter Brandvold

He set the knife and the whetstone down and leaned toward her, wrapping his arms around her and kissing her. He pulled away, but she dug her fingers into his upper arms and moved against him.

  In minutes, they'd wrestled out of their clothes, and Yakima had joined her under the blankets and furs. He kissed her passionately as he lowered himself between her spread legs, and she reached down and gently guided him inside.

  "I'm not going back to whoring," she said absently, when they'd finished making love and lay tangled together, Faith sprawled atop him beneath the robes, her head on his chest. She stretched her arm out with his, running her fingers along his bicep and the corded muscles of his forearm. Her body felt warm, her breasts soft, her nipples like small buds against his belly.

  "What're you gonna do?"

  "Ain't sure, but not that. Don't think I'd have the stomach for it anymore."

  He ran his hand through her long, silky hair.

  She rose up suddenly and stared into his eyes. "I've been thinking about this for a long time, and I just decided. I'll buy a saloon, and you can help me run it. I thought about opening a brothel and running it without doing any entertaining myself, but Gold Cache already has one whorehouse. I know the madame, and she wouldn't like the competition, anyway. But she wouldn't be as piss-burned if I just opened a tavern."

  "And ran it with an Injun?" Yakima said. "A half-breed?"

  "It'd work in a wide-open town like Gold Cache. Hell, those miners don't care who's serving their beer as long as it's good and the whiskey isn't watered down or laced with gunpowder. When we start making money, we can hire entertainers, like opera singers and play actors and the like."

  Yakima wrapped his thick arms around her and stared back at her.

  She pinched his thumb. "What do you say? We partners, or what?"

  Yakima chuckled, smoothed her hair away from her face and kissed her softly. "I reckon I'd better stick around, make sure you stay out of trouble."

  "I'll make it worth your while." Her eyes sparkled devilishly, and she lowered her head to his chest, kissing him every inch or so as she moved down to his belly and beyond.

  As her lips closed over him, his body tensed.

  He sighed and pressed his hands flat against the ground.

  Chapter Eighteen

  "We gotta stop!" Brindley shouted above the wind as he drew up to the bounty hunter's right stirrup. "Can't go on any further. Snow's getting too deep!"

  Wit Bardoul ran a deerskin-gloved hand down his face, dislodging the thick snow from his brows and eyelashes, and drew back on the big Appaloosa's reins. He'd wrapped a muffler over his head under his sombrero and tied it beneath his chin. Still, his cold ears felt as though someone had stabbed each with a fork.

  "We gotta stop and build a fire," said Higgins, checking down his dapple gray on the other side of Brindley, barely discernible behind the slanting veil of wind-whipped snow. "I'm froze clean through, Bardoul!"

  "Shut up, both of ye, and stop your goddamn whining before I send you back to Thornton belly down across your saddles!"

  Bardoul looked at the trail disappearing into the dense pine woods before him. He hated to admit it, but the tinhorns were right. The trace would no doubt be impassable in just a couple of hours. If that long.

  The storm had roared down out of the northwest—a real high-country ass-kicker. The sun would probably come out tomorrow, making the sky as clear as a preacher's conscience, but the ravines and canyons would be socked in for a good long time.

  Bardoul pounded his saddle horn and cursed. Just a few hours ago, before the snow had started covering the trail, they'd had that damn Injun and Thornton's whore in their sights!

  The bounty hunter booted his horse ahead and turned him right, into the ravine's mouth. The ravine was sheltered from the brunt of the wind, and the wagon trail following the ravine's right shoulder hadn't yet been erased by the snow. Following the trace while hunkering deep in his coat, Bardoul looked behind him.

  The hostlers followed, their horses stumbling and shying at the gusting wind, manes buffeting. The mounts' brown eyes were wild and fearful. Brindley and Higgins were gray shadows hunkered atop the frightened mounts strung out in a shaggy line behind the bounty hunter, the wet snow sticking to their coats, hats, and saddles.

  Bardoul turned forward to follow the trail with his eyes. Last time he'd been through this country, on the trail of those owlhoots who'd intended to hide in the mountains after robbing a string of stagecoaches in Kansas, he'd stumbled on a cabin at the far end of this ravine.

  At least, he thought it was this ravine. When you'd been up and down as many ravines as Wit Bardoul had, they tended to run together.

  He followed the canyon for a good quarter mile before, rounding a bend, he blew a long sigh. Where the ravine widened into a valley fifty yards before him, two lighted windows shone through the gauzy air, and the smell of woodsmoke tickled Bardoul's nostrils. Sure enough. The cabin—just a little log box with a sod roof and a lean-to shed and corral off its east wall.

  "Hey, look!" Roy Brindley shouted behind Bardoul. "A cabin!"

  Bardoul snickered and glanced at Brindley over his shoulder. Brindley's railroad cap was tied down with a heavy red muffler covering his ears and knotted beneath his chin. "Roy, you're just about as smart as they come in these parts, ain't you?"

  Ignoring the bounty hunter, Brindley glanced over his right shoulder at Ace Higgins, riding with his head down, one hand holding his blanket coat closed. "Hey, Ace! Take a look! We done found a cabin!"

  "We done found a cabin," Bardoul growled, turning his Appy toward the cabin and giving an involuntary shiver, the prospect of a warm fire pointing up how cold and wet he was. And, hell, wasn't that venison riding piggyback on the woodsmoke?

  Bardoul's stomach growled. At the same time, a door latch clicked loudly and hinges squawked. A short man, a fur coat hanging off his stooped shoulders, stepped onto the narrow porch holding a double-barreled shotgun. Gray hair swirled around the bald top of his head.

  His voice sounded hoarse and angry. "Who's there?"

  "We're friendly, old-timer," Bardoul said, drawing his horse to a halt before the stoop. "Got caught in the storm. Can we hole up here for the night?"

  The old man—he didn't appear to weigh much over a hundred pounds—cast his close-set, mean eyes about the other two men flanking the bounty hunter. "What's your business in these parts?"

  "Don't worry, we ain't after your claim. We're trackin' a half-breed who kidnapped a girl from Thornton's road-house."

  The old man held his rifle across his sparrow's chest, considering the information. Finally, he spat downwind. "I don't run a hotel, but I reckon it wouldn't be Christian to turn men out in a storm. Put your horses up in the corral, and you can spread your hot rolls on my floor." He said this last as he stepped inside, punctuating the sentence by slamming the door.

  Left of Bardoul, Ace Higgins chuckled at their good fortune. To Bardoul's right, Brindley tipped his chin back and drew a deep breath. "Somethin' sure smells good!"

  "Well, why don't we put our horses away before we freeze to death?" Bardoul glowered at Brindley. "Less'n you wanna spend the night here smellin' the smoke."

  When they'd turned their horses into the corral with two mares and a mule taking shelter beneath the lean-to roof, they slogged through the deepening snow to the cabin's front door.

  Bardoul knocked, tripped the latch, opened the door a foot, and peeked inside, tentative. You couldn't be too careful around these isolated prospectors. Some would as soon shoot you as serve you a handful of dried beans and steal your hardware and horses. This wasn't exactly the most prosperous country for rock farmers.

  Seeing the old man sitting at a table to the right in the dim, earthen-floored room, his shotgun leaning against the table's far end, Bardoul pushed the door wide and stepped inside, Brindley and Higgins following, stamping their feet and breathing hard, teeth chattering.

  Bardoul dropped his tack in the nearest corner a
nd raked the room with his eyes—instantly taking in the sparse, mean furnishings including a table, a couple of chairs, burning lamps and candles, and a sheet-iron stove. Over a rack in the fireplace, an iron kettle bubbled and steamed, sending the smell of venison stew across the room.

  A slender, full-figured girl stood at a small table in the kitchen area of the cabin, rolling dough and giving the newcomers the twice-over. She was neither pretty nor ugly but had the tired look of a girl who worked too hard and would rather have been anywhere but where she was.

  After a single sweep of the cabin, Bardoul thought there were only the old man and the girl here, but then he saw the figure slumped in a rocking chair on the other side of the fireplace, cloaked in shadows. By the size, it had to be a man, but the person was so covered in blankets and quilts, with a night sock pulled over its forehead, that the bounty hunter couldn't tell for sure.

  The girl's Southern accent brought Bardoul's gaze back to the kitchen. "Supper's gonna be a while. Take off those wet clothes and sit up by the fire. Don't expect me to dish up your plates. When the food's ready, you'll fill your own."

  "Obliged, miss," Bardoul said, Brindley and Higgins offering their own thanks as they dropped their tack and began struggling out of their coats.

  "Hang your duds on that line back there," the girl said, turning her head so that her stringy chestnut hair danced away from her neck as she continued working the dough. "Back there by Karl. Don't mind him. He won't bother you if you don't bother him."

  Bardoul, Brindley, and Higgins cast their gazes at the blanketed figure in the shadows beyond the fireplace. The chair moved a little, as did the figure, in a jittery, jerking way, as though the person were vaguely agitated.

  "We ain't here to bother no one, ma'am," said Brindley, chuckling uncomfortably. "We're just here to get warm. And if you got extra vittles, we'd be obliged."

  "I told you supper ain't ready yet," the girl snapped, rising onto the balls of her feet to give the dough a good working with the heels of her hands.

  Bardoul removed his coat and hung it on the line, eyeing the figure in the rocking chair warily, seeing little more than what he'd seen from the door. When his coat was secure and Brindley and Higgins were hanging up their own, Bardoul turned to the old man, who was laying out a solitaire game at the table, the shotgun still close by his side.

  "You folks mind if I break open a bottle to help kill the chill?"

  The girl said nothing, only continued working the bread dough, but the old man snapped his head up eagerly, blue eyes flashing. "Whiskey?"

  "Good whiskey."

  "Only if you'll share."

  "Wouldn't have it any other way, Mr...."

  "Gillespie. Mike Gillespie. That's my daughter, Helen. The one in the chair—what's left of him after the mule kicked him last month—is her husband, Karl."

  As Bardoul retrieved his bottle from his saddlebags, Gillespie plucked four stone mugs off a shelf above the range. He hobbled back to the table and set the mugs down before his card game. Bardoul popped the cork on the bottle and began splashing whiskey into each cup, introducing himself and the two Thornton hostlers.

  Gillespie sat back down in his chair, lifted the cup to his lips, and sniffed. "Smells all right." He took a sip and smacked his lips. "Tastes all right, too. I been outta hooch 'cause with my bum leg I can't make it down to Thornton's my ownself, and ol' Karl there is ... as you can see... about as handy as a goddamn cigar store Injun."

  Helen turned sharply from the table where she was shaping the dough into buns. "Papa, you git your consarned mouth off Karl. He can hear you, and when he gits better, he's gonna give you a floggin' like you never had since the Yankees whupped your behind and sent you runnin' for Dalton!"

  Gillespie's face shot toward her as if pulled by a string, and he slammed both fists on the table as if ready to leap from his chair. "Heed your mouth, girl, or so help me Christ, I'll come over there, and—!"

  "And what?" she yelled, grabbing a knife from among several others in a stone crock on her worktable. She held the knife out before her, showing the blade to the old man, slitting her hazel eyes devilishly over the curved tip.

  Bardoul had hauled a chair over to the fire, and he stood behind it now, watching the old man and the girl with sheepish fascination. Brindley and Higgins stood behind him, having finished hanging up their coats, and he could hear them breathing back there in the shadows, both no doubt wearing expressions similar to his own—that of a child who'd just stepped into the schoolhouse late and been caught by the teacher.

  Helen let a silence draw tight as fence wire as she stared over the knife at the old man, who just sat there, glaring back at her, fists on the table near his game, saying nothing.

  Finally satisfied she'd gotten her message across, Helen dropped the knife back into the crock with the others, then picked up the Dutch oven containing the baking powder biscuits and, not so much as glancing at the old man, Bardoul, or the others, brought it over to the fireplace.

  Bardoul pulled his chair back out of her way, and when she'd hung the Dutch oven on the rod beside the stewpot and returned to her worktable, Bardoul and the others sat down in front of the fire.

  They didn't say anything. They sat and drank and stared at the flames, hearing the Dutch oven creak and the stew kettle bubble and hiss as the gravy dribbled out from beneath the lid to fall on the glowing coals below.

  The smell of the charred gravy made Bardoul's stomach chug hungrily.

  In the shadows to the right of Brindley, Karl just sat and fidgeted, occasionally lifting a big hand to his face and running it across his mouth or bristled cheek before returning it to his lap and muttering incoherently.

  At the table, the old man sipped his whiskey and played solitaire in moody silence.

  The silence continued through the meal, all of them except Karl squeezed in around the table. The only sounds were the snap and pop of the fire, the wind howling outside, snow pelting the cabin like sand, Karl muttering frenetically, the tink and scrape of forks, and the click of the stone mugs being set down on the table. Ace Higgins groaned softly with every bite.

  Helen brought Karl a plate and stayed with him, feeding him several mouthfuls, getting him started, then leaving him to feed himself while she returned to the table and filled a plate of her own.

  "Y'all can wash your own dishes," she said when everyone was finished and she'd scraped her chair back from the table. "The pump and the washtub is right over yonder, plain as day." She dropped her own dishes into the corrugated tin tub hanging from the pump spout, then turned to Bardoul. "And you, Mr. Bardoul, can help me fetch wood from the lean-to. The way this storm is shapin' up, we're gonna need plenty less'n we all wanna freeze by mornin'."

  "It'd be a privilege, Miss Helen."

  She strode across the cabin to retrieve Karl's half-finished plate. Heading back toward the kitchen, staring straight ahead, she said, "You can split while I drag out the driest logs from down inside the stack."

  While the other men carried their plates to the washtub, Bardoul grabbed his coat off the line and shrugged into it. The woman grabbed a coat off a hook by the door, stepped into a pair of fur-lined boots, and pulled on a wolf cap with earflaps, leaving the flaps to hang loose along her cheeks.

  She opened the door and went out, Bardoul following and pulling the door closed behind him.

  It was dark now, and the snow was drifting up against the cabin, a good three inches frosting the porch. The chill wind sucked the breath from Bardoul's lungs as, shrugging down deep in his coat and pulling his damp, shrunken gloves on with his teeth, he followed Helen off the east end of the stoop and ducked through the corral's unpeeled pine poles.

  The wood was stacked against the cabin wall at the far end of the deep lean-to, past where the horses stood, facing the cabin, their hindquarters spotted with snow. As Bardoul grabbed the wood-splitter from the chopping block, Helen said, "Forget that. I've got enough wood split."

  He looked
at her as she stood facing him. "Huh?"

  "Pull your pecker out."

  Bardoul blinked as he stared at her. Then he laughed. "Say again?"

  "Pull your pecker out. I'm gonna show you what a great lay I am."

  "Ma'am, I don't know what the hell you're talking about, but..."

  The bounty hunter let his voice trail off as Helen climbed into a niche in the woodpile, squirming around to get comfortable, and began hiking up her dress.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Wit Bardoul stared at the young woman, dumbfounded, as she hiked up her dress, wincing and sighing with the effort, then peeled her men's longjohns down to her ankles.

  "Not bad, huh?" she said saucily, holding the skirt up with one hand and regarding the bounty hunter proudly.

  Involuntarily, Bardoul's loins responded, in spite of the wind funneling under the lean-to roof and dancing stray snowflakes about his ankles. In spite of the piercing cold and the cabin behind the girl—the cabin in which her husband and father were housed not twenty feet away.

  "What the hell you got in mind, woman?"

  "What the hell you think I got in mind, you dumb bastard?" Helen laughed caustically and dropped her eyes to the bounty hunter's crotch. "Pull your pecker out and give it to me."

  "What about Karl and your old man?"

  "Karl's limp as a coat hanger." Her voice suddenly turned snidely suspicious as, still holding up the dress to reveal her furred love box, she turned her head to one side. "And what are you insinuating about me and my old man?"

  "Nothin'. They're right in there!"

  "The walls are thick and Pa's hard o' hearin', anyway. Now, you wanna do it or don't you? Make up your mind."

  She jerked her legs up and down, groaning impatiently. "We don't have all night."

  Bardoul looked around. Only the horses and the mule were watching them. The animals provided nearly as much heat as a wood stove, but the wind funneled in behind them.

  Still, Bardoul cursed and unbuckled his cartridge belt. As he let the belt drop to the ground, he began unbuttoning his pants, cursing. Someday his pecker was going to be the death of him.