She waited, listening intently and sweeping her gaze along the front yard, holding the rifle in one hand, her coat closed with the other.
The cold pushed against her like an icy bath, burning her lungs. She shivered, hoping against hope that the mule had only spooked at some harmless beast. An elk or a moose, maybe. Even a black bear or a wolf she could handle.
Just don't let it be men.
Chapter Twenty-Four
In the corral, the mule bobbed its head and brayed. At the same time, a shadow moved at the far side of the yard. Faith watched a man stumble out of the brush and, rifle held across his chest, begin trudging toward the cabin across the snow-scalloped yard, a hitch in his gait.
Faith's back tightened painfully, and she hunkered low, but not so low that she couldn't keep an eye on the man from around the woodpile's right edge. He was medium tall, with a blanket coat and a billed hat tied to his head with a muffler. The cuffs of his duck trousers were stuffed into the high tops of his mule-eared boots.
Recognizing him, Faith almost snorted despite her fear. Yakima had been right. Thornton had sent Brindley along with Bardoul. The third man was probably Ace Higgins. She remembered how the two hostlers had ogled her lasciviously, too bashful to speak but not too timid to undress her with their beady eyes, snickering at their own secret jokes.
Now the chuckleheads were scurrying around in the middle of the night, trying to bushwhack her and Yakima.
Faith glanced around, looking for Higgins while wondering how the pair had survived the avalanche.
In the yard before her came the rustle of snow and the raking of Brindley's labored breaths. She looked around the woodpile. The lumpy-coated hostler was moving more slowly now as he approached the cabin.
Faith took one more glance around. Maybe Higgins had died in the avalanche, she thought as she moved around the woodpile. She had Brindley in full view about thirty yards out from the cabin.
She thumbed the rifle's hammer back, raised the stock to her shoulder, sighted down the barrel.
Brindley turned his head toward her as she took up the slack in her trigger finger.
The report flatted out across the silent night, its echo sounding like a chill wind funneling through a narrow canyon.
Brindley grunted. His right foot flew out from under him. As he threw the rifle out to his side, his other foot swung up, and he fell on his back, arms akimbo. He drew several sharp breaths, lifted his right arm, like an injured bird trying to take flight, and dropped it.
"What the fuck?” sounded a voice somewhere above Faith.
Heart thudding, she levered a fresh shell into the rifle, stepped out away from the woodpile, and spun toward the cabin. Her left foot came down on an icy patch, and she fell.
At the same time, a gun flashed above the snow-tufted roof. The bullet chunked into the snow just behind where she'd been standing. She thrust herself up onto her butt, raised the rifle, and aimed at the bulky, buckskin-clad silhouette of Ace Higgins staring down from the roof at her, mouth agape beneath the brim of his high-crowned hat.
Faith's Winchester sneezed.
"Ughh!" Higgins dropped his rifle and grabbed his belly. He stumbled back, then dropped to his knees. His hat tumbled to the roof, rolled, and dropped to the ground. "Christ!" he cried, his eyes pinched with disbelief. "I come all this way to git kilt by a whore!"
Faith glared up at him, her upper lip curled. "I ain't a whore no more, Ace."
Higgins looked down at his gut. Blood gurgled out around his hand and between his fingers. He lifted his head to stare once more at Faith. "Once a whore, always a whore!"
Leaning forward, he pitched over the roof's edge, knees bent, his hands clutched to his belly. He looked like a meal sack tossed from a barn loft.
He hit the ground with a muffled thud, rolled onto his right side, groaned, and lay still.
A gun hammer clicked loudly. Faith turned to see Yakima standing at the cabin's front corner, extending his cocked revolver at her—a spare he'd taken from the freighters. He wore his four-point capote and boot moccasins and not a stitch more. His hairless, tan, well-muscled legs were bare.
"I was taking care of some pesky varmints," Faith said.
Yakima depressed the Colt's hammer with a soft snick, lowered the revolver, and walked over to where Ace Higgins lay dead, blood blackening the snow around his belly.
When he'd inspected Higgins, he pulled Faith to her feet, then walked out and crouched down beside Brindley. Faith strode halfway between him and the cabin, and stopped, holding her rifle across her thighs.
"Wonder how they made it out of the avalanche."
"Probably didn't get caught in it." Yakima straightened. He yawned deeply. "If you're done shootin', I think I'll go
back to bed." He walked to the cabin and disappeared inside.
He slept deeply and without dreams.
He lay on his side on the cot; the robe pulled up over his head. He'd been hearing a quiet commotion for some time, but fatigue and the painful left arm held him just beneath consciousness.
He pulled the robe down low enough that he could peek out into the cabin lit by streams of golden sunshine slanting through the fogged, grease-paper windows. The woodstove popped, blue smoke leaking out through open seams, filling the cabin with the smell of burning pine.
Faith was pouring steaming water into a corrugated tin tub sitting on the earthen floor in front of the stove.
She wore only her moccasins and a thin chemise hanging off her shoulder, exposing half of her full left breast. Her steam-damp skin glistened in the sunlight, the sheer silk clinging to her wet breasts and hips and belly like a second skin. She'd pinned her hair up, and vagrant blond wisps pasted themselves to her cheeks and neck.
When the tub was half full, she returned the tin bucket to the stovetop. Yakima watched her secretly from beneath the robe, feeling his desire grow as she turned back to the steaming tub. Kicking off her moccasins, she slid the chemise's right strap down her arm.
She slid the left strap down the other arm, and the wash-worn garment fell down her breasts, snagging on the nipples, then tumbling over them, jostling the deep orbs slightly before pooling around her waist.
Faith wriggled her hips until the chemise had fallen to her ankles. Lifting one foot into the tub, she winced. She pulled the foot out for a second, then, balling her cheeks painfully, set it down in the tub and drew the other in beside it.
Setting her hands on both sides of the tub, she slowly lowered her bottom into the water, cupping the steaming liquid over her arms and shoulders, the vapor curling up around her, wreathing her like a gauzy shroud gilded by sunlight.
She reached over, grabbed a cake of soap off the table, and began soaping herself, scrubbing hard beneath each arm, running her soapy hands along her belly and over her breasts until each one glistened with soap bubbles.
Yakima grunted.
Faith brought her left foot toward her chest to soap it and turned toward the cot. A sultry smile lit her blue eyes. "Enjoying the show?"
"You could give a man a heart seizure."
He flung aside the robe, swung his feet to the floor. Her eyes ran up and down his naked form, pausing at his crotch.
Her voice was husky, the words automatic. "Easy, partner. You need your rest."
He gripped the edge of the cot as the room pitched slightly, dimming, then brightening, and shook his head.
Her eyes were on him as he walked toward her. He stopped, let her fondle him for a moment, her hands sending a shudder through his loins.
Moving around behind her, he knelt, dropped his hands into the tub on either side of her. He ran his palms up her sides slowly, caressing, then across her flat belly and up and over her breasts. He kneaded them gently, savoring the warm, supple flesh, squeezing and fingering the nipples, which hardened under his touch.
Her head fell back on her shoulders, and she groaned as she nuzzled his neck. She moved her lips up to his, raising her hands to his cheeks,
holding him gently, kissing him. Her tongue slid into his mouth, and then she rose up in the tub, keeping her lips pressed to his, turned, kneeling, and wrapped her arms around his neck.
Slowly, she straightened.
He rose with her, lifted her out of the tub, grabbed a flour sack off a chair back, and carefully dried her arms, shoulders, and breasts, then knelt and dried each leg, taking his time, admiring the long ovals of her thighs tapering to her calves and slender ankles and long, narrow feet.
Faith stepped away from him and lay down on the far side of the cot, patting the bear robe spread beside her.
He lay down, and she ran a hand across the twin slabs of his chest, then, her nipples jutting, breasts swaying, she crawled on top of him, straddling him. She rose up slightly and adjusted her position, using one hand while bracing herself with the other.
"Oh!" she cried, throwing her head back.
As she slid over him, Yakima reached up and unpinned her hair, let it spill across her shoulders.
"Beautiful," he said, as they began moving together slowly.
When they'd finished, and she'd lowered her head to his, pressing her damp breasts against his own sweat-soaked chest and burying her face in his neck, he ran the tips of his fingers lightly up her side. He felt a small scar just below her rib cage and pressed his fingers gingerly against the knot.
"What's that?"
She rose up and looked down at her side. He could see the scar clearly—a small, star-shaped twist of white skin surrounded by tiny stitch marks. Yakima lowered his hand a few inches, and she rubbed the scar with her index finger, a pensive expression darkening her gaze.
She was silent for a long time. Then she turned to him and placed her hands on both sides of his face, staring down at him seriously.
"Yakima, I should have told you this already, but I thought you'd try to talk me out of continuing to Gold Cache if I did."
He didn't say anything.
"The woman in Gold Cache I mentioned," Faith said. "I have a history with her, if you get my drift."
Yakima touched the scar on her side. "This history?"
Faith straightened, her hair tumbling down both sides of her face. Her nipples were like tender pink rosebuds.
"A few years ago, when I was first starting out, I worked for Crazy Kate Sweney at Crazy Kate's in Laporte. Makin' a long story short, Kate killed a deputy sheriff one night in the brothel, and, by accident, I saw it.
"The deputy wanted a payoff. Kate and the local law rigged the gambling tables and divvied the profits. Kate had been trying to fleece her partners. The deputy lived for a few days, and he told the sheriff he'd seen me pass by Kate's office just when Kate stuck the stiletto in his neck in a rage."
Faith tossed her hair back with the back of her hand and laughed caustically. "I was only sixteen and scared out of my wits. So when the sheriff called me into his office, I told him everything I knew. Kate fled town but not before ordering two of her bouncers to kill me."
Yakima didn't say anything. The stove popped, a log shifting with a muffled thud. Outside, birds chittered in the snow-flocked pines.
"They burst into my room the night after Kate left and shot my best friend, Mandy, while she slept, thinkin' she was me." Faith turned to stare pensively at the popping stove. "Killing Kate was my original intention."
"What about now?"
She thought for a moment, then turned to him with a slight, cunning smile. "More killing won't bring Mandy back. Now I reckon I'll settle for any place of my own. On Kate's turf, of course."
"I'm not taking you up to Gold Cache to get you shot or stabbed by some crazy brothel queen."
"Have some faith." Faith grinned and rubbed her breasts on his chest, touching her nose to his and wriggling atop him seductively. "I can be right congenial when I set my mind to it. Why, I ain't hard to get along with at all."
As she wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him hungrily, Yakima allowed she wasn't. But as they began making love once more, making the log bed creak like a firewood dray with ungreased wheels, he also speculated that there were going to be plenty of fireworks in Gold Cache.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Yakima and Faith lay around the cabin for the rest of the day, resting, healing, eating, and making love. Faith cooked a large supper of sonofabitch stew and biscuits, and they washed it down with wild currant wine she found hidden away and forgotten in a hole beneath the woodpile at the west side of the cabin.
They were up before dawn the next morning.
Yakima had regained most of his vigor, and while his left arm was sore, he'd recovered most of his strength in that hand. The last stars were still twinkling in the violet western sky as they headed away from the cabin, Yakima taking the lead and booting the paint toward the timbered high reaches, heading southwest.
He rode quietly, picking his way along the old Basque shepherds' trail through the pine forest, up and over saddles, the trail marked here and there by rock cairns or cabin ruins or frayed strips of colored rawhide tied to branches. A dark mood haunted him. The closer they got to Gold Cache, the closer they came to the time he and Faith would have to part.
It was all clear to him now, and Yakima silently chastised himself for believing it could have been otherwise.
How could they stay together—a half-breed drifter who'd never spent more than nine months in any one place in his life, tied to no one but his horse and a beautiful white woman?
He could maybe stay with her for a time in Gold Cache, but he'd never be anything more to her there than a silent partner, a servant. The townspeople wouldn't let him be anything more. Soon, Faith would grow to despise him for his servitude and inability to become anything more, and he would hate her for being a queen in the eyes of other men.
There was no denying that Yakima loved her, and he could tell by the way she looked at him and made love with him that she felt the same. But it was easy to love each other when you were the only people around, when you'd seen the elephant together, and you depended on each other.
In Gold Cache, after the torpor of everyday life set in, their love wouldn't last more than a few weeks.
Such thoughts were as raw as the cold, dry air. They sent him reeling in gloominess, cursing the fate that set him apart while wanting only to grab Wolf as soon as he could and bolt free over the mountains, maybe hole up in some abandoned trapper's shack down south, in the San Juans.
In the spring, he'd ride east and try to pick up enough ranch work to see him through another summer...
Faith.
He was worried about her. Crazy Kate sounded like the genuine article, a real demon. Faith might have a powerful benefactor in the banker waiting for her in Gold Cache, but had she thoroughly considered what she might be riding into? Brothel madames could be as territorial as Texas stockmen.
He wondered if Faith's quest for revenge was clouding her judgment.
Yakima knew it wasn't any of his business. She was her own woman. But the thought of anything happening to her was a knot of coiled snakes in the pit of his stomach. He'd die before he'd see her harmed by anyone.
In the middle of the afternoon, Gold Cache appeared, nestled in the gulch below the bench they'd been traversing, flanked and shaded by a blue-green pine ridge veiled in woodsmoke, spotted with shaft houses and ore tipples. They continued past sporadic diggings and cabins, then wound down the canyon and into the town from the north end, assaulted by the smell of latrines and rotting trash and horse shit tempered by fragrant woodsmoke wafting on vagrant, frigid breezes.
Gold Cache was about three blocks long, the snowy main street lined with smart-looking whipsawed business establishments with high, ornate false facades. Firewood was stacked nearly everywhere, draped with hides or burlap and choking the street in many places, causing bottlenecks in the wagon traffic. Cook fires burned along the street, and bearded, heavy-coated men sat around them, sipping steaming liquid from tin mugs.
Dogs barked. Burly men laughed, swillin
g beer on the boardwalks or woodpiles or the backs of wagons. Somewhere, a baby cried, and there was the perpetual, metronomic thunder of a mill stamping ore into dust, and the regular thuds of someone chopping wood.
A big, unpainted barn with several sprawling corrals sat at the other end of town. That's where Yakima was heading, weaving around drays and wagons, when Faith called behind him, "Hold up a minute."
Yakima turned in his saddle. Drawing the mule up close to the right boardwalk, behind which was a whitewashed bank with grilles over the windows, she leaned toward a man sitting on a bench and holding a kitten in the folds of his bulky buffalo coat. A corncob pipe sagged from the right corner of his mouth.
"Does Mr. George Underhill still own this bank?" Faith asked.
The man knocked his pipe against the bench. "Underhill died of a heart stroke last month." The man grinned devilishly, jerked his head to his right, and wheezed a laugh. "At Crazy Kate's place, don't ye know?"
Faith looked as though she'd been slapped. She stared at the old-timer. "Are you sure?"
"I helped haul him outta there, ma'am. Rest assured, he died with a smile on his face!"
When Faith had brought the mule up beside Yakima's buckskin, her face was white. "That's all right," Yakima said. "Winters get too long in these parts, anyway." Maybe she'd ride on out with him. They had no future together, but he'd feel better leaving her somewhere safer than a gold camp where a brothel madame had it in for her.
"I'm not that easily deterred," she said stubbornly, heeling the mule forward along the street.
They had ridden only fifty more feet when they'd spied Crazy Kate's Saloon and Pleasure Palace just beyond a lumber mill and across from a small hophouse. They ran their gazes up and down the ornate spruce green and yellow facade, with the scrolled porch pillars, second-story balcony, and pink curtains in the windows.
They rode on to the livery barn. Reining up at the broad front doors, Yakima slid out of the saddle, then walked back to lift Faith down from the mule.
The Lonely Breed : A Western Fiction Classic (Yakima Henry Book 1) Page 19