With that, he pinched his hat at Faith, reined his horse away from the fire, and touched his spurs to its flanks. In a minute, all five were drifting over the crest of the northwestern hill and into the woods on the other side.
Faith stood and turned to Yakima as he continued striding down the hill to her. Her chest rose and fell sharply. "Well, that was a little rattling."
"You all right?"
"Getting to be so a woman can't trust anyone in these parts." She looked off across the fire. "Think they'll be back?"
"I wouldn't bet against it." Yakima reached down, removed the teapot from the fire, and kicked snow over the flames.
They traveled just below the ridges, sometimes climbing above timberline, then plunging through snow-socked valleys before climbing to another pass, until the sun had fallen and an impenetrable chill had descended from the starry, black sky.
Yakima built a fire in the hollow of a large, uprooted spruce, the tree's massive, curling, snowcapped roots forming a wall to one side, blocking the wind and the view of the fire from down the sloping ravine.
That was the direction from which trouble would come, if it came. Yakima was relatively certain it would come. At least, you always had to assume so.
While the horses pawed for grass beneath the deep snow, Faith made coffee and roasted the rabbits Yakima had snared.
That night, he sat atop the spruce trunk, above the fire, holding a steaming cup of tea and whiskey in one hand as he stared down the ravine, his right hand holding his rifle around the brass receiver. The whiskey was more booty from the freight wagons. Yakima's legs were curled beneath him, Indian style. The ravine was a trough, with towering spruces and tamaracks studding its slopes under a cold, black velvet ceiling dusted with stars.
Behind him, the small fire popped and the teapot wheezed.
"Yakima?"
He turned to Faith, who sat huddled beside the fire, a blanket draped over her coat, a tin coffee cup steaming between her mittened hands. "Shh."
She whispered, "Yakima?"
"What?"
"How much farther to Gold Cache?"
"Not far." He kept his ears pricked to the night and replied, "We should be there tomorrow, late."
Silence. An owl hooted and a tuft of snow, warmed by the fire's updraft, fell in a clump up ravine of the camp.
"Yakima?" Faith whispered again.
He lowered his cup from his lips. "What?"
"How long are we gonna have to whisper?"
"As long as we keep talking."
"You think they're really that randy for me?"
In spite of himself, he turned full around and cracked a smile. "If they have blood in their veins."
She chuckled without mirth and sipped her toddy. After a while, her whispers rose to him again above the cracks and pops of the fire. "We'll have us a fine place in Gold Cache, Yakima. The banker I know told me anytime I wanted to go into business on my own—if I ever got away from Thornton, that was—he'd back me any way he could. I've got a recipe for beer an old German gave me. He said—"
"Quiet!" Yakima rasped, staring intently down the ravine. He'd heard something. The soft snap of a twig beneath snow.
Bracing himself with one hand, he swung down from the spruce trunk, dropping soundlessly onto the cleared ground, and hunkered beside Faith.
Her wide eyes regarded him worriedly. He squeezed her arm. "Just like we said."
She swallowed, nodding.
Grabbing her Winchester carbine, she stood and crept off into the brush on the other side of the fire, into the snag of another downed tree. Listening to the faint rustle and snaps of the brittle twigs as she burrowed deep under the prone trunk, Yakima squatted beside the spruce and pressed his back to the roots rising a good eight feet above his head.
He glanced across the fire. He and Faith had piled their blankets and robes over a couple of long wood chunks, then scattered their spare clothes beside the mound. It looked like two people "bundling" together against the cold, enjoying each other's warmth.
He hoped the renegades would think so. If that was who'd made the sound he'd heard.
He'd waited ten minutes, breathing through his parted lips, when his horse nickered softly up the ravine.
He squeezed the Henry in his gloved hands and stared into the woods beyond the fire, not wanting the flames to ruin his night vision.
After another couple of tense minutes, boots crunched snow along the wooded slope to his right. More crunches and weed snaps rose from down ravine. Very faintly, he felt the roots behind him vibrate, as though someone had stepped onto the fallen trunk.
A shadow moved to his right. The man came down the slope and sidled up to a fir about ten yards from the fire. The fire shone red on the high cheekbones above his scruffy gray beard and reflected off the brass housing of the Winchester in his hands.
Footsteps grew behind Yakima, faintly crunching snow.
There was a phlegmy sniff, as of a man with a head cold. The roots jostled faintly against Yakima's back, and bark scraped under boot heels straight above his head.
He could hear breathing up there, see the vapor puffing in the air above the roots.
On the slope, beside the fir, the other man waited, his forehead shaded by his hat brim. The hat was canted down toward the mound of blankets and quilts.
In another few seconds, they would realize it was a trap.
Yakima stepped out away from the roots. He pivoted, saw the man looming over him, a rifle in his hands. He reached up with one hand, grabbed the man's cartridge belt, and pulled.
The man gave a startled cry as he flew forward over the tangled roots, snapping off several as he plummeted into the camp and landed facefirst in the cook fire. The teapot clattered on the rocks. Steam from the spilled tea sizzled. The man screamed and rolled out of the fire ring, his arms and legs flailing as the flames chewed at his fur coat and buckskins.
Fluidly, Yakima raised the Yellowboy to his shoulder, drawing a quick bead on the man who'd been standing by the fir. The man had just snugged the Spencer to his shoulder when Yakima's Winchester boomed.
The Spencer coughed at the same time Yakima's bullet plunged through the man's deerskin coat, throwing him straight back against the fir with a strangled scream.
Though Yakima couldn't hear much but the screams of the man fighting the flames from his clothes by the fire, he knew the third man was bolting toward him along the spruce's prone trunk.
With few movements, Yakima slipped around the opposite side of the root ball, leapt atop the bole, and hunkered on his haunches.
The third man now stood where Yakima had been a moment ago, yelling, "Where'd you go, ya goddamn savage?"
A voice rose from the black slope to Yakima's left. "On the tree, Bill!"
The voice hadn't died before Yakima fired twice through the spruce's roots, drilling one neat hole through Bill's star-tied face, then one through his right ear as he turned away, falling.
Rifles snapped on the slope, blue-red flames stabbing toward the camp. One bullet plunked into the spruce just below Yakima's fur-lined moccasins. Another cracked a stubby branch to his right.
Yakima ejected a smoking shell, the brass casing clattering on a rock below the tree and raised the Yellowboy to his shoulder as he seated a fresh cartridge. He could see no movement amid the velvet black of the wooded slope, but he keyed on one of the two gun flashes and fired.
A half-second later, both rifles flashed again, the reports following as both slugs whistled just shy of Yakima's head.
Squatting on the spruce trunk, Yakima cut loose with the Yellowboy until five more casings littered the snow beneath the tree, sizzling softly. By his third shot, the small fusillade from the slope had died, and now in the quiet night—the burning man's cries had died to a low, intermittent keening as the flames engulfed him—he heard crunching snow, thrashing brush, and the rasps of labored breathing.
The two shooters were fleeing up the slope.
Yakima l
eapt into the snow beneath the spruce, instinctively zigzagged to the base of the slope, and bolted up through the woods, lifting his feet high above the snow and the brambles grabbing at his moccasins.
Ahead and to the left, a shadow moved.
Yakima stopped, raised the Yellowboy, and cocked it. The shadow was gone. Yakima aimed a little ahead of where he'd last seen the shadow, between the black columns of the birches and firs, and fired.
"Eeenggg!" the man cried. There was the crunch of a body dropping into the snow.
Yakima couldn't see the wounded man. It had been a lucky shot, but he'd take them any way he could get them. If these two got away, they might try to avenge their companions.
He ran forward, hearing the other man's strained breaths ahead and to the right. Seeing the dark shape on the snow before him, between two pines and tangled in brambles, Yakima crouched over the man.
He lay facedown, trying to push himself up on his hands and knees. Yakima couldn't tell where he was shot, but he could smell the warm, metallic odor of the blood in the cold air.
Yakima looked around, then leaped atop the man's back, forcing him down to the ground with a low groan, and rammed the brass-shod butt of the Yellowboy hard against the back of his head.
The skull cracked. The man loosed a long sigh and lay still.
Crouching atop the dead man, Yakima cast another quick glance around. He saw nothing but the inky black tree columns and nebulous bramble thickets, but he heard the other man fleeing up the slope to his right. He was probably about fifty yards away.
Yakima wanted to let him go, to return to the camp and Faith. But bushwhackers, like wild dogs, had to be turned under.
Yakima leapt into the snow and continued running uphill, taking long, fluid strides as he angled to the right. He dodged around pines and firs, leapt deadfalls, swerved around snow-flocked boulders.
He saw the short figure beside the lightning-topped birch just in time. As the rifle flashed, Yakima threw himself behind a spruce.
The bushwhacker's shot shattered the night.
Yakima rolled off his right shoulder on the other side of the spruce and came up firing the Yellowboy from his right hip.
Boom-rasp! Boom-rasp! Boom!
Silence. Slowly, Yakima ejected the hot shell and slid another into the chamber.
The acrid odor of cordite wafted around his face. He stared through the smoke.
The short figure had fused with the taller tree and dropped to its knees, head hanging. A rifle lay several feet away.
Slowly, Yakima approached, stopping three feet in front of the slumped figure.
The man lifted his head, the flaps of the rabbit hat hanging straight down on either side of his face. His long chin whiskers wisped around in the breeze. Blood oozed out one corner of his mouth, glistening in the starlight reflecting off the snow.
The man's face bunched with pain. "Who... are you, breed?"
Yakima stared down at him, his chest rising and falling heavily, the medallion winking in the night's ambient light. Yakima raised the Yellowboy to the man's forehead. The man stared up at him fearfully.
"Go to hell wondering, hombre."
The rifle barked. The man fell straight back in the snow, kicking.
Yakima turned and started jogging back down the hill toward the camp.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The gunshot flatted out across the lonely, star-capped ridges, echoing faintly and setting several coyotes to howling.
Ace Higgins turned to Bardoul and Brindley, standing along the ridge of the low hill beside him, their breath wreathing in the chill night. "Came from straight north," Higgins said, pointing over a jog of pine-covered rimrocks limned by starlight.
No one said anything. They stood staring across the snow-basted bluffs, shivering at the slight breeze sliding icy hands beneath their coat collars and tied-down hats. In the hollow down the hill behind them, their campfire made a small orange smudge in the aspen copse.
"We can't be that far off the trail," said Brindley as the howling of the coyotes faded.
"Well, how the hell would we know without a map?" Bardoul said, ramming the back of his fist against Brindley's shoulder. Brindley staggered sideways, grabbing his upper arm and casting the bounty hunter an injured look.
Earlier that day, Brindley had hunkered down beside their coffee fire to study the map. He'd turned his head away for a time, peering into the distance. When he'd turned back to the map, he saw that he'd let the paper hang too close to the flames. It had caught fire, and by the time he'd stamped it out, the map was little more than brittle ashes flung about on the wind.
"I done told ya I was sorry, Bardoul!" Brindley could barely see through his swollen right eye, which Bardoul had blackened when he saw what remained of the map Gillespie had drawn of the old Basque shepherds' trail. "You could do with a little forgiveness, you know that? It was an honest mistake. Don't tell me you haven't made 'em before!"
Bardoul stepped toward him, raising his fist and gritting his teeth. Three shots echoed quickly, one after another. Bardoul jerked his head northward once more, letting his clenched fist sag to his side.
Again, they all stood listening as another shot flatted out across the glowing night.
After nearly five more minutes of hearing only the coyotes and the breeze combing the new-fallen snow, Higgins turned to Bardoul. "It ain't necessarily the breed and the woman. Could be a mountain man or a prospector."
Bardoul ran his gloved hand across his runny nose. "This late at night?"
"Maybe someone's huntin' a bobcat," offered Brindley meekly. "Or, shit, maybe—"
"Shut up!" Bardoul turned to him sharply and flung an arm toward the camp. "Saddle the horses. We're headin' north."
Higgins stared at him. 'Tonight? In the dark?"
"We done lost enough time chasin' shadows because of this goddamned lead-headed tinhorn here," Bardoul said, glancing at Brindley, who leapt back like a frightened doe, raising his hands defensively. "We're gonna make up that time tonight, so get movin'!"
He jerked forward, threatening. Higgins and Brindley jumped up and, tramped toward the campfire like scolded schoolboys.
Bardoul turned northward and stared. "It's you, ain't it, breed? You half-wild savage, you." He sucked at the chaw in his lip and spat, then licked the remains from his beard. "Yeah, it's you."
Bardoul turned and followed Brindley and Higgins into the aspens.
When Yakima had jogged back down to the camp, where the burning bushwhacker was still burning, he found Faith safe in her hiding place beneath the deadfall. He doused the burning man with snow, then dragged him and the other two dead men a good fifty yards down the ravine from the camp and rolled their bodies into a brush-choked gully.
Food for the carrion eaters.
He and Faith had a cup of tea, then rolled into their blankets and robes, their limbs entangled, and slept till dawn.
They made good time the next day, until around noon when the mule threw a shoe. Yakima built a fire and brewed tea. Faith sat on a rock and sipped the tea as Yakima removed the mule's other three shoes. The beast could go without shoes in this snowy terrain at what seemed to be the top of the world, blue-green pine forests rolling away in all directions, relieved only by occasional rocky scarps and frozen lakes appearing like rare pearls studding a lush green carpet.
There was another short delay while they waited for a snow squall to blow through. When the storm had drifted southeast, leaving another foot of powder on top of the already deep snow and a good twenty-degree drop in temperature, they moved on toward the distant conifer-stippled saddle. On the other side of the saddle lay Gold Cache, only fifteen or so miles as the crow flies but another seven or eight hours away via snaking valleys, stream fords, and canyons.
Yakima figured that Thornton's men had lost their trail. Still, he kept a keen eye skinned.
It was during a habitual sweep of their back trail, as they traversed a deep, pine-studded ravine, that he sp
ied two men jogging through the trees they'd just left. The men were heavily bundled and carrying rifles, and they were obviously trying to gain position on Yakima and Faith.
Yakima reined his horse to a sudden halt, turning the paint sideways as he stared at the edge of the clearing. The men had disappeared behind tree boles.
"What is it?" Faith asked, riding the mule behind him.
Yakima reached behind and grabbed the reins from her hands. "Hold on!"
He heeled the mare into a lunging gallop, jerking the balky mule along behind. They'd galloped twenty yards through the deep, scalloped snow before two shots resounded, one after the other. Yakima glanced over his left shoulder.
Smoke puffed amid the trees. There were three more erratic shots, but the shooters were too far away now to have much chance of hitting two fast-moving targets.
The thought had no sooner passed through Yakima's mind than something tore into his upper left arm. The bullet had come from ahead and to the right. Yakima cursed and sagged back in the saddle, gritting his teeth as cold fire engulfed him.
Faith jerked her head toward him. "Yakima!"
"Go!" With his right hand, he tossed her the reins. When she'd caught them, Yakima reached for his rifle.
Before he could slide the Yellowboy from the boot, another bullet spanged off a rock two feet before the paint's left front hoof, and the report echoed sharply off a snow-blanketed scarp towering over the ravine's right, pine-studded wall.
The horse screamed and reared. Yakima was holding the reins in his left hand as he'd reached for the rifle with his right, and he didn't grab the horn in time to brace himself. Before he knew it, he was falling off the horse's left hip, hitting the snow and rolling downslope.
"Yakima!" Faith cried as his horse raced past her. She was turning the fiddle-footing mule toward him, her face etched with terror.
Yakima looked ahead. A sombrero-hatted man in a heavy buffalo coat squatted atop a rock-studded hillock, aiming a rifle at Yakima. The rifle stabbed smoke and fire, and the bullet tore up a gout of snow and sod a foot from Yakima's left knee, the heavy-caliber slug sounding like a cannon blast as it echoed off the scarp.
The Lonely Breed : A Western Fiction Classic (Yakima Henry Book 1) Page 17