Men milled around them, several eyeing Faith with keen male interest, smiling and pinching their hat brims. Even in her bulky coat and men's clothes, she cut a fine, delectable figure. No doubt the best-looking filly this town had ever seen.
Yakima suppressed a pang of jealousy. He opened the doors and stepped into the barn's aromatic interior, shielding his eyes from the outside glare with one hand. "Hello the barn!"
Leading the paint, he'd taken four steps inside when a fierce, bugling whinny rose from the barn's pungent rear shadows. There was the thunder of hooves beating the earthen floor and the squawks of hemp drawn taut.
"Shut up, you goddamn demon beast!" a man shouted somewhere to Yakima's right. "Jesus Christ, I never seen such a horse!"
The man appeared out of the shadows, blinking against the light behind Yakima—a lanky, long-faced man with sandy hair, a weak chin, and one arm in a sling. "What can I help you with?" he asked above the horse's caterwauling and the thunder of its hooves.
Yakima peered toward the rear of the barn, past the stalls and ceiling joists hung with halters and bridles, past the two supply wagons and the single leather buggy. His eyes were adjusting to the darkness, and now he could see a big, dark horse rearing in the hay-flecked darkness.
He glanced at the liveryman, then dropped the paint's reins, and strode slowly down the barn's main alley, moving past the wagons and into the dense shadows, smelling ammonia, greased leather, and hay.
The whinnies rose in volume until Yakima's ears ached and rang. In a stall in the barn's left rear corner, a regal black horse reared and pitched against the two stout ropes looped around its neck and tied to posts at front and rear corners of the fifteen-by-fifteen-foot stall.
The ropes were drawn taut, keeping the horse in virtually one place while it slammed the earthen floor with its front hooves and hammered the stout rear partition with its back ones. A feed sack had been drawn up over its eyes and looped over its ears, effectively blinding the creature.
Yakima didn't need to see the horse's head to know it was Wolf. He'd know those long, corded legs and that white-splashed barrel chest anywhere.
"Wolf," Yakima called, feeling a thickness in his throat.
Instantly, the horse stopped pitching. He stood facing him, blowing into the bag, sucking it in and out as his chest expanded and contracted heavily, withers rippling. He shook his head and nickered, stamped one hoof eagerly.
Footsteps rose behind Yakima. "Mister, you don't wanna go near that horse. He'll tear your head off. I can't let him into the corral, 'cause he'll go over the damn fence. Crazy he is, plumb loco!" Sidling up to Yakima, the liveryman raised his injured arm. "Look how he done me. Damn near stomped one of my hostlers to mush and fine powder!"
Faith walked up behind them and peered into the stall. "Wolf!"
Yakima planted his right hand atop the stall partition and hoisted himself over.
"What I tell you, feller?" shrieked the liveryman. "That horse will take your head off!"
Yakima walked up to Wolf, who stood frozen before him. Yakima placed his right hand beneath the horse's long, fine snout. "It's me, feller." He removed the feed sack and tossed it into the straw, then stared into the stallion's inky eyes.
Wolf nodded vigorously, twitching his ears and stomping his feet. Yakima smiled as he patted the black's neck and whispered in his right ear, "I'll get you outta here soon."
The liveryman stood staring, spellbound. "I'll be goddamned. You know that horse?"
"It's his," Faith said, tears in her eyes as she watched Yakima remove the two ropes from the horse's sleek neck.
"Hey, leave those be!" yelled the liveryman. "He might be all right with you around, but as soon as you're gone—"
Yakima stopped and turned to the man, his jaw set. "He'll be all right now that he knows I'm here. Who brought him in?"
The man shrugged. "A couple fellers. Gamblers, I think. They sold him to Crazy Kate over to the main brothel in town, and I don't think..." His voice trailed off, and he shuttled his puzzled gaze between Yakima and Faith, who looked at each other knowingly.
Faith turned to the liveryman. "Crazy Kate?"
"She bought the horse off the two gamblers," the man said haltingly. "I don't know what she needs a saddle horse for. She never goes ridin'. Hardly ever leaves the brothel, but... feller, I sure would feel better if you'd leave that horse tied up like you found him."
Yakima threw the ropes in the straw atop the feed sack. "The horse is mine." He kicked open the stall door.
The liveryman's eyes widened, and he stumbled sideways out of the way, watching the horse fearfully. His angry voice trembled. "Now, goddamn it, Crazy Kate Sweney done bought him, and it's my job to keep him stalled."
"You can't buy a stolen horse," Yakima said, striding into the alley, heading for a set of double doors in the side wall. Wolf followed him eagerly, snorting and bobbing his head.
"You got papers on him?"
"Nope."
"Well, then, goddamn it, I'm gettin' the sheriff!"
"Do what you gotta mind for." Yakima lifted the wooden bar from the doors, kicked both doors open. As blue daylight flooded the barn, Yakima led Wolf out into the side corral, where half a dozen horses milled. They watched the black moving toward them cautiously.
"I'm warnin' you, goddamn it!" the liveryman shouted, following Yakima to the door but no farther.
Faith grabbed his arm. "Listen, mister, you don't want that horse around here, anyway, do you?"
He looked at her. She smiled agreeably up at him. His eyes softened. "Well, no, I don't. But it ain't my choice. Crazy Kate's payin' for his livery and feed, and—"
"You let us handle Crazy Kate. She doesn't realize she bought a stolen horse. When she does, I'm sure she'll take the matter up with the gamblers who hornswoggled her."
"If he don't have any papers on that horse, there's no damn way—" The liveryman stopped as he turned his head toward the corral. About twenty yards away, the black stallion stood facing Yakima, holding his head down as if listening intently to every word the half-breed was saying.
The liveryman glanced, befuddled, at Faith, then returned his gaze to the corral.
Yakima's lips stopped moving. He patted the horse's neck. As the horse lumbered off, rippling his withers and lowering his head to draw water from a stock trough, Yakima strode over to the liveryman and stopped.
"He'll be all right as long as you don't try to hog-tie him again. Leave him out here. I'll be back for him soon."
"Jesus Christ, I—"
Yakima stripped his pack off the paint and slung it over his shoulder, then shucked his Yellowboy from the boot. "Stable these animals, will you? I'll need my paint taken back east. You know of any freight outfits heading that way soon?"
The liveryman scratched his head, a befuddled expression on his deep-lined face. "Well, I reckon."
"Good."
Yakima flipped the man a few coins. He took Faith's arm, and they strode away.
Chapter Twenty-Six
As Yakima and Faith headed west along Gold Cache's main drag, looking for a hotel that might accept a white woman and a half-breed, Faith paused on the raised boardwalk before a women's clothing shop—the only one they'd seen so far.
She looked at Crazy Kate's brothel a few buildings up on the other side of the street, then glanced at Yakima with a devilish smile. "I could use a new dress. Will you wait for me?"
Yakima looked her up and down. He supposed her soiled, smoke-blackened trail garb was better suited to the trail than to the town in which a girl sought employment. He shrugged and leaned his rifle against the wood-frame building's front wall as Faith opened the door, its bell jingling, and disappeared inside.
He squatted on the boardwalk beside the street, rolled a smoke, and watched the wagon and foot traffic, mud splashing where the fires had melted the snow. Dogs ran loose, and so did a pig, which was hazed off the opposite boardwalk by more than one broom-wielding, cursing store owner.
>
A good many Chinamen passed, hide coats over their traditional dark pajamas, queues hanging from hand-knit caps to brush against their shoulders. A slender Chinese girl hauled a big wicker basket to the bathhouses and barbershops, gathering laundry. Market hunters weaved shaggy horses up and down the street, their pack mounts draped with bloody, field-dressed game.
The doorbell jingled. "How do I look?"
Yakima rose on his stiff legs and turned. Faith walked lightly down the store's three front steps, holding a black, tasseled cape away from her shoulders to reveal a low-cut purple dress with white lace around the puffed sleeves, shoulders, and bosom.
She wore a black choker set with a tiny emerald, the green stone setting off the purple dress and the sky blue of her lustrous eyes. Barely revealed by the buffeting, pleated skirts were a pair of fawn half boots with ornate gold buckles. Her hair was piled high atop her head in rich, golden swirls.
Yakima's eyes kept returning to her half-revealed breasts pushing up from the corset-like heaping bowls of freshly whipped cream. "I'll be damned."
"Does that mean you like it?"
Yakima looked her up and down once more. Someone on the street whistled. Yakima had forgotten how absolutely, incredibly queenlike she could look in a low-cut dress and choker. He remembered many nights at Thornton's when he couldn't take his eyes off her and hated the men she led upstairs.
When he didn't say anything, she chuckled. "I'll take that as a compliment."
Ignoring the stares of passersby, she stepped back into the store, reached around the door, and grabbed three large parcels tied with string, one of which she gave to Yakima. "I bought a few extras."
"I see that."
When she'd balanced the other two parcels in her arms, she glanced at him coquettishly. "I hope I didn't keep you waiting too long, but a girl has to look her best."
Yakima snorted, hefted his rifle in his right hand, adjusted the saddlebags over the other shoulder, and clamped the parcel tightly under the same arm.
"Hey, lady, is the breed bothering you?" someone called from the other side of the street.
Yakima didn't look to see whom the voice belonged to. He'd seen them before, and it didn't do any good to look at them. He'd end up pummeling or getting pummeled senseless and being thrown out of town. Faith looked, however, her eyes hardening.
She'd opened her mouth to respond when Yakima took her arm. "Forget it." He led her up the boardwalk, toward a hotel he'd spied when they'd ridden into town, one that looked like it might take a half-breed and a white woman.
"Please, Kate, I can't stomach any more of that tarantula juice!" pleaded the young, tawny-haired whore named Emily as, sitting at the edge of her bed on the third floor of Crazy Kate's Saloon and Pleasure Palace, she clutched a sheet about her pale, naked, sweat-soaked body. Her hair was pulled back in a loose bun, and her eyes were red-rimmed, her ashen cheeks streaked with tears.
Kate gave the greenish-brown liquid one last stir, then lifted the shot glass from the girl's cluttered dresser and turned to her. "You got two more days. The Chinaman says it won't take effect until you've had three whole days of it."
"But I don't want any more," Emily sobbed. "Kate, I want this child!"
"I ain't havin' no critters runnin' around my place, so you can forget that right now." Kate nodded at the two brawny bouncers, Randall and George, standing before the room's closed doors, like waiting pallbearers. "Hold her down and open her damn mouth. I'm sick and tired of this bullshit!"
The bouncers, wearing the required suits with wrinkled shirts, ties, bowlers, and spats, strode quickly to the bed. Emily screamed as the men, practiced in the art of helping Ma cram her Chinese herbal concoctions down impregnated whores' throats, grabbed the girl with little fuss and laid her out flat on the bed. George held her legs while Randall, grinning evilly, thoroughly enjoying his job and the view of the naked girl's squirming body, held her arms.
Holding the thick, cloudy brew in one hand and wrinkling her nose against the rancid stench, Ma leaned over Emily. She cupped the girl's chin in the palm of her hand while squeezing her cheeks to lever her jaw open. With one quick motion, she poured the "eleesir," as the Chinaman called it, down Emily's throat.
The girl choked and coughed, spitting a good bit of the foul concoction back into Kate's face. Kate slapped her with the back of her hand. "You little bitch!” She wiped her face with an edge of Emily's sheet. "I oughta leave that little bun in your oven; see how much you'd like that critter screamin' and chewin' your titties!"
Chuckling, the bouncers crawled off the bed and left. Emily turned toward the wall, bringing her knees to her chest, sobbing into her pillow.
Flushed with fury, Kate turned to set the empty shot glass on the dresser. Doing so, she glanced out the window, glanced away, then jerked her gaze back to the frosted pane, quickly sliding aside the curtain and staring down into Gold Cache's cramped main thoroughfare.
Her heart thudded, and she pressed a hand to her chest as a tall, broad man in a black hat and a fur trapper's green capote threaded through the wagons and fires and vendors' tents, heading eastward while swinging his gaze from left to right along the street. He had long black hair and, from what Kate could see of his face under the hat brim, light brown skin.
Behind him, on a pack mule, rode a slender young woman in men's trail clothes and a rabbit hat. Long honey-blond hair swirled down her back. Kate couldn't see the girl's face, but even beneath the bulky winter coat, the girl's willowy, full-busted body was evident. When the girl and the dark man ahead of her stopped on the street before Kate's brothel and tipped their heads back, giving the building a cool, searching appraisal, Kate saw her face.
Faith.
The dream came back to her as though someone had shoved a tintype in front of her. In the same dream, a dusky-skinned man had hovered in the shadows, atop a tall black stallion.
As the disparate pair continued along the street, Kate's heart fluttered wildly, and she stumbled back and plopped down in a chair before Emily's dressing table. She could no longer hear the girl's sobs, could no longer hear anything but a high-pitched ringing in her ears.
She sat sorting through her thoughts for several minutes while staring at the frosted window;
"Oh, gawd!" Emily howled, rising up on an arm. Her strained voice came at Kate as though from the far end of a long tunnel. "I'm gonna be sick!"
Kate turned to her dumbly, then rose from the chair. "Thunder pot's on the floor. Aim true or you'll clean it up yourself!"
With that, Kate staggered toward the door, steadying herself on the furniture, her fleshy, heavily painted face bleached masklike, and left the girl's room.
Kate hurried down the hall, her amber, brocaded hoop-skirt swishing as she moved, full bosom heaving beneath her whalebone corset, and made her way down the stairs. In the saloon's main hall, several groups of men were clustered around the gambling tables.
Kate hurried to the L-shaped mahogany bar, vaguely startled by her own harried image in the mirror, black hair framing her waxy face under the bright red lipstick and pink rouge.
"Max, give me a bottle and a glass, and fetch Sebastian."
The barman was mopping the floor behind the bar, a lock of thick black hair winging over his right eye. He looked up with surprise. Crazy Kate hardly ever showed herself downstairs before evening, as the light of day did not flatter her features.
"I beg your pardon, Miss Kate?"
Kate dug her jeweled fingers into the bar top and breathed deeply. "Set a damn bottle up here, and fetch Sebastian!" She hadn't meant to shout, and now she glanced sheepishly around the room, at the men and doxies regarding her skeptically, then returned her eyes to the swarthy barman.
Max set a bottle on the bar, then plopped a glass down beside it, glancing at the woman dubiously. "I'll fetch Mr. Kirk right away, Miss Kate!"
When Max had trotted out from behind the bar and disappeared outside, heading for the mine office, Kate plucked her bottle and
shot glass off the mahogany. Ignoring the puzzled glances being shuttled her way, she made for a table before the broad front window to the right of the door and sank into a chair.
She set the bottle and glass on the table, popped the cork. Her hands shook as she splashed whiskey into the glass and peered up the street in the direction Faith and the half-breed had ridden.
She'd thrown back three full shots by the time Sebastian Kirk strode quickly past the window, clad in his bear coat and beaver hat, and pushed through the saloon's heavy door. He'd seen her in the window, and he walked over to stare down at her, the smell of smelter smoke on his clothes.
"What is it, Kate?" He removed his foggy, silver-framed spectacles. "Max said you were distraught. I dropped everything—"
"The blonde from my dream just rode into town."
Sebastian wrinkled the bridge of his nose. He appeared owl-eyed without the glasses. He'd never been sure what to make of Kate's dreams.
"Her name is Faith. She used to work for me."
"Are you sure it's the same girl you saw in your dream?"
Nodding, Kate nervously turned her glass in her hand. "She rode in with some half-breed. Somehow, they're both connected to the black horse. They were heading toward the livery barn."
Sebastian just stood there, his spectacles in his hand and an incredulous look on his pale, horsey face.
She slapped the table. "Sit down, Sebastian!"
He doffed his beaver hat and sat down to her right. Kate had Max bring over another shot glass. She filled the glass, shoved it toward Sebastian, and turned to stare out the window as if dreading a violent storm.
Watching her, Sebastian said, "What do you think she wants?"
"I don't know. I tried to kill her once."
"Oh... well..." He sipped the whiskey. "You think she's here to return the favor?"
"I have no idea what she's here for. All I know is that she's up to no good. She's most definitely a threat. I smelled camphor in the dream, and whenever I smell camphor or wormwood—sometimes mushrooms—I know the person I'm dreaming about has it in for me."
The Lonely Breed : A Western Fiction Classic (Yakima Henry Book 1) Page 20