"It's the truth, Kate. Blackmail or running to the law won't bring Mandy back. I just want to get on with my life, and I've decided the best place for me to do that now, the best place to raise a stake, is right here in Gold Cache."
"Do you have money?"
"I'm sure I can find a benefactor among Gold Cache's businessmen." Faith's eyes flickered toward Sebastian, who quickly looked down.
Kate saw the glances exchanged and nodded crisply. "I'm sure you can."
Faith held out her hand. "Peace?"
Kate continued to study her. Finally, she squeezed Faith's hand. As Faith turned toward the door, Kate said, "What about the black horse?"
Faith turned quickly, one hand on the knob. "Wolf?"
"Oh, that's his name." Kate acquired a cunning, speculative air as she crossed an arm over her chest, worrying an earring with the other hand.
"How did you—?" Faith stopped herself. She'd heard of Kate's psychic abilities, and they'd always frightened her. Imagine such a hideous creature with otherworldly powers. "He belongs to Yakima. A couple of drifters stole him." She took a step toward Kate, beseeching in her eyes.
"Well, your Yakima will have to take it up with them, won't he? I bought him, and I don't intend to sell him. Unless, of course, you agree to leave here and never come back."
"But I thought..."
"Or unless you agree to come work for me." Kate turned toward Sebastian. "Look at that, Sebastian. How much would you pay to fuck a body like that? The cape really doesn't do her justice."
Kate lunged toward Faith, reaching for the cape's black bone buttons. Faith stepped back, removed her right hand. She held the .32-caliber pocket pistol straight out from her chest and thumbed the hammer back. She lifted it higher, squinted one eye as she aimed at Kate's forehead.
"You bitch," Kate said, bunching her lips, her dark eyes hawkish. "How dare you bring a gun into my office."
"How dare you kill Mandy! How dare you try to enslave me again like you did before you tried to kill me!"
Faith stepped forward. Kate stepped back, the muscles in her face slackening in fear. Faith felt her fury flow like water from a broken dam.
"I swear, if you make trouble for me, I'll kill you, Kate.
I'm no longer the child I was. I'll open a brothel that'll make yours look like a child's tree house."
Faith glanced at Sebastian, who remained in his chair, leaning back against the desk, fear in his eyes. "Talk sense to her," Faith said. "If I see her within half a block of me, I'll kill her."
"Uh ..." Sebastian stammered.
Keeping the gun on Kate, Faith suddenly saw the possibilities here. They overwhelmed her, made her giddy with power. Crazy Kate was backing away from her. She wasn't half as tough as Faith had thought she was.
Faith glanced again at Sebastian and grinned devilishly, enjoying the terror she saw in Kate's black eyes. "Who's the richest man in town?"
"Uh ..." Sebastian swallowed. "I don't know ... I suppose the owner of the mine ... uh ... Vincent Marberry."
Faith squinted down the pistol's barrel at Kate's haunted eyes. This was better than killing her. "He live here in Gold Cache?"
"Yes."
"Does he like women?"
Perspiration ran down Sebastian's gaunt features, fogging his glasses. His glance darted between the two women. "Of course ..."
Faith's stare held Kate like a moth on the end of a pin. "Thanks."
She stepped straight back, opened the door, sent a cold, parting glance at Kate, and went out.
She closed the door behind her and, holding the cocked pistol straight down at her right side, moved quickly away. Her skin crawled, and her heart pounded. She expected the door to open any minute and for Kate to bound out, screaming and shooting or lunging with a knife.
About a quarter of the way down the hall, Faith slowed her pace, listening for the door but hearing only the sounds of drunken conversation, laughter, and lovemaking.
A calm swept over her. By the time she was descending the stairs, having returned the pistol to its makeshift holster and lifting her billowing skirts above her boots, she was smiling.
She'd won.
Back inside the office, Kate was still glaring at the door when another latch clicked to her left. She turned to see a short, devilishly handsome man with thick blond hair combed to one side step out of her bedroom. His full pink lips shaped a grin as he strolled toward Kate and Sebastian, an unlit cigarette in one hand, a battered brown Stetson in the other.
Only five or six inches over five feet tall, he was thick and lumpy, like a pugilist. He wore the clothes of your average stockman—blue shirt, red neckerchief, bull-hide vest, and denims. A tin star was pinned to his shirt.
"What the hell were you doing in there, Charlie? She might have killed me."
"Nah, she wasn't gonna kill ye, Miss Kate." He grinned, swaggering up to Kate's desk and helping himself to a match. "She was just feeling you out, that's all. Besides, I figure you can take care of yourself."
"No more free fucks, Charlie-boy," Kate said through gritted teeth, "until she's dead."
Charlie Ward had once robbed trains in Nebraska and Missouri before coming here to gamble and hide out from federal marshals. While he was frolicking with the doxies in Kate's fine digs, Kate had convinced him that he'd make a hell of a town marshal—as long as he overlooked rigged gambling tables and discouraged competition. Thus the badge he was wearing now.
Charlie lit his cigar. Puffing smoke, he blew out the match and looked at Kate, surprised. "You want me to kill her? Shit, that's one fine-looking piece of ass!" He laughed and glanced at Sebastian, who sat holding his drink in one hand, cigar in the other, regarding Kate gravely.
"Really, Kate, killing her might be going a little far," Sebastian said. "Why don't we just have Charlie run her out of town? Or, better yet..."
"Convince her to come to work right here at the Pleasure Palace," finished the marshal, grinning into Kate's face from only inches away. Being the same height, they could look directly into each other's eyes.
Though Kate had entertained the same idea, she knew now that Faith was too big a threat. Her looks and her influence on men would make her far too powerful. If she opened her own place—even just a crib behind the Russian's hotel—within months, she'd be the richest whore in town.
With the backing of Vincent Marberry, Adrian Timms, or even Sebastian Kirk himself, she'd soon have the entire camp in her corset, and a bordello to rival that of Alva McQueen's Diamond Stud in Canyon City.
As old as Kate was, with sagging tits and brandy fat padding her middle, she'd be turning tricks for quarters on Burlington Avenue in Cheyenne.
No, since she obviously couldn't be scared away, Faith had to die.
"If you like your job and your free fucks and whiskey, not to mention your free room, Charlie-boy," Kate growled into Ward's face, "you'll arrest her. She came in here with a gun, tried to rob me. You'll haul her and that half-breed bastard outside town, kill them, and throw their bodies in an old placer digging where no one but the wolves and crows will ever find them."
Returning Kate's stare, Ward let the smile sag from his handsome face, a flush touching his fair cheeks behind his two-day growth of blond beard stubble. "All right, Kate," he said, sounding injured. "You don't have to get nasty. Consider it done."
He glanced again at Sebastian, then stepped around Kate as though avoiding a bear trap. Donning his hat and sticking his cigarette between his lips, he opened the door and left.
Downstairs, Faith took a seat beside Yakima, who kept his eyes glued on the two horse thieves playing faro at the far end of the smoky room.
"I think everything's going to be okay," she said. "The only problem is Wolf..."
"Wolf's no problem," Yakima said. "The men who stole him have the problem."
The dark-haired horse thief stretched his head around the faro dealer once more, his long, unshaven face turning toward Yakima. Yakima grinned and waved. The man jerked hi
s head back out of sight.
"Who's that?" Faith asked.
"Friends I'll be buddyin' up with again real soon."
His voice trailed off as he watched a short, blond little bulldog wearing a tin star on his shirt slowly descend the stairs at the far end of the room. The marshal's eyes swept the saloon's main hall, finding Yakima and Faith and holding.
As the man sauntered toward the bar, a good head shorter than most of the other men in the room but broad as a lumber dray—he kept his eyes on Yakima. He finally turned away as he leaned his elbows atop the mahogany and ordered a drink.
"Come on," Yakima told Faith, kicking his chair back and rising. "We best get some shut-eye. I think we got a big day ahead."
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Yakima awoke the next morning at cockcrow. It was literally a cock's crow that woke him, as there must have been a chicken coop as well as a pigpen nearby, and the rooster was announcing the first wash of slate light through the cracks in the mud and straw chinking between the wall's square logs.
As he lifted his head from the pillow, Faith, asleep with her head on his chest, groaned and scissored a leg over his, holding him down. He gently shoved her aside, evoking another, longer groan. Instead of waking, however, the girl rolled over to face the wall, burying her head beneath the quilts.
Yakima had expected trouble from Crazy Kate and the town marshal, so he hadn't undressed before crawling into the Russian's unexpectedly comfortable bed. Rising, he pulled on his boot moccasins, quietly added dry pine needles and cones to the hot ashes in the stove, blowing to coax a flame, then added a couple of small logs.
He donned his capote and hat, picked up his rifle, and slipped quietly out of the room, softly latching the door behind him.
A minute later, he stepped into the front yard of the hotel, wincing at the icy wind lashing his face, and pulled the hotel's timbered door closed before setting the rifle down and fastening his capote's top button against the chill.
Dull light illuminated the buildings along this side street—mostly dilapidated hovels remaining from when Gold Cache was still only a shack town. Most looked abandoned, though some with padlocked doors were probably being used for storage. The chill wind howled between them, whipping tar paper about and sawing under a tin roof somewhere to Yakima's right.
Nothing moved but a few vagrant snow flurries. No footsteps showed in the dusting of fresh snow around the hotel. The new-fallen show only lightly covered the blood the Russian had splashed around while carving up the doe so that a film of pink remained around the front door.
Yakima circled the hotel, finding no tracks or sign of interlopers. He figured that if trouble were going to come from Crazy Kate and the town marshal, whom she no doubt had on her payroll, it would have come at first light.
Maybe Kate and Faith had buried the hatchet after all, as Faith believed.
Yakima could use a quiet day. He'd curry Wolf, trim the black's hooves and reset his shoes, get the stallion ready to pull foot when he was sure that Faith would be safe here. A piece of dried-apple pie would be nice, with fresh-whipped cream and hot black coffee spiked with rye.
He moved up toward the main street, holding the Yellow-boy low in his right hand, the brim of his hat bending in the wind.
When he came to the corner, he stopped beside a brick harness shop and cast his gaze to the right, toward the small stone jail hunkered at the west end of town, at the edge of a frozen creek. He could make out the hovel now, about twenty yards on the other side of a three-story mercantile.
The jail's windows were dark. No one milled around it— at least not in the open.
Directly across the street from the place, a big woman with stringy black hair and a blanket draped over her rounded shoulders split wood in front of a small frame building calling itself, succinctly, cheap food. Smoke streamed from the chimney pipe and hovered low over the shake roof, tossed and torn by the breeze.
Low growls and scuffling sounds rose. Yakima turned left. Half a block away, in the snow-flocked sage of a narrow lot, two coyotes played tug-of-war with a skinned venison haunch they'd scavenged from a cabin yard.
Across the street, Kate's brothel, with its broad front porch and pink-curtained windows, stood silent and dark, the wind ticking snow against its west wall and shuttling an empty bottle to and fro on its third porch step.
Yakima looked to the west again. Still no movement except for the woman splitting wood.
Raising his capote collar and tugging his hat brim low, he started east up the street, deciding to check on Wolf at the livery barn. The coyotes spooked and ran off down the middle of the street, gripping the haunch between them and snarling, disappearing into the gray-blue fog of dawn.
Yakima had walked only half a block before an icy worm wiggled along his spine. He stopped suddenly and glanced back toward the jailhouse.
In the dead center of the street, about ten yards on the other side of Crazy Kate's brothel, three men stood facing him. Yakima could see only their hatted silhouettes, bulky in buckskin coats and mufflers—two tall men on either side of a short, broad-shouldered, slightly bull-legged gent in a battered brown Stetson. They were forty yards away, but even in the wan light, Yakima could see the five-pointed stars on their coats.
In her dark room on the brothel's second story, Kate drew a robe around her bulky body and sidled up to the window near her bed. She slid the pink curtain aside to peer out through the frost-framed, snow-specked glass.
Below her and left, three men stood in the middle of the street, facing east. To her right, a long-haired gent in a black, flat-brimmed hat, green capote, and boot moccasins stepped off the opposite boardwalk. Holding a rifle down low in his right hand, he walked to the center of the street and stopped, facing Charlie Ward and Ward's two tall, beefy deputies.
Kate hadn't realized a soft snicker had escaped her until Sebastian stirred in the bed, under a mound of quilts. His voice was thick with sleep. "What's wrong, Kate?"
Kate smiled as she stared into the street, the soft gun-metal light reflected in her black, downcast eyes. "Nothing, dear. Everything is just fine."
On the street, Yakima felt the cold wind against his face, blowing his hair out from his shoulders. He had to dig his heels into the frozen-rutted, snow-dusted street to hold his ground.
Ward yelled, "You and the girl are under arrest, breed!"
Yakima stared at him, squinting against the snow pellets.
"She went to Kate's room last night, threatened her with a gun. You assaulted two bouncers." The lawman's lips stretched in a smile. "This is a law-abidin' town. That kind of actin' up don't cart wood around here. Now, you gonna come willin', or are me and my boys gonna have to turn our horns out?"
Yakima stood with his feet spread, the corners of his mouth raised slightly, eyes hard. "You should be more careful who you throw in with, Marshal. It's a damn cold day to die."
"That mean you and her ain't gonna come willin'?"
"Nope."
The marshal snapped his rifle across his chest, cocking it, the metallic rasp thinning out on the wind. The two deputies, one on each side of him, followed suit.
Yakima raised and cocked his own Winchester.
The three men began moving toward him, the two deputies splitting off from the marshal, forming a wedge about ten yards across, holding their cocked long guns at port arms.
"Come on, now, breed," the marshal called. "Be reasonable. You're outgunned. What's more, you're surrounded*"
Yakima turned quarterwise, flicked a look behind.
Two more men walked toward him from the east. One held a long-barreled shotgun, the other, a .50 Spencer with an octagonal barrel. They grinned, snaggletoothed.
These two didn't wear badges, and they had the brutish look of seasoned miners. Figuring he might need extra help, the marshal had probably deputized them last night in one of the hophouses.
"What do you say, breed?" the marshal called, within twenty yards now and closing.
"Not another step," Yakima warned, turned sideways to the street and keeping all five men in his vision's periphery.
In the corner of his left eye, the miner in the red blanket coat raised his Spencer and aimed. The rifle barked. Yakima bounded off his heels, throwing himself backward, twisting in midair.
The large caliber round blew up frozen mud two feet in front of the marshal, who lurched back, cursing the miner. Yakima hit the ground on his right shoulder and raised his Winchester in both gloved hands, drilling the Spencer-wielding miner through his right temple.
As the man was punched backward, dropping his rifle, another gun barked to Yakima's right, hammering the frozen turf at his left.
Yakima aimed quickly at the deputy right of the short marshal, and around whose head gun smoke wafted, and fired.
As the deputy groaned and slapped his right shoulder, Yakima leapt to his feet. He ran, ducking and zigzagging, toward the north side of the street as several bullets cracked into the frozen mud and plunked into the boardwalk beyond him, another slug pinking a window in the women's clothing store.
As he dove behind a frozen stock trough, a shotgun boomed, the blast echoing off the buildings as the double-ought buck slammed into the trough, throwing slivers of wood and ice back onto the boardwalk behind Yakima.
Several more rifle rounds hammered the trough and the low pile of split wood beside it. Yakima crawled on his knees and elbows, snaked the Yellowboy around the woodpile. In the middle of the street to his left, the surviving miner was down on his knees, thumbing fresh wads into his broken-open barn-blaster.
Yakima spat a curse and, just as the man snapped the double-bore closed, pulled the trigger. The man jerked his head up and howled as the .44 round burst through his belly and out his back, painting the snow-frosted street behind him bright red.
He dropped the shotgun and looked down, jaw hanging as he loosed another howl.
Yakima crabbed to the other end of the stock tank as two more shots drilled chunks of wood from the trough's lip, pelting his hat with more wood and ice. He peered around the end of the trough.
The Lonely Breed : A Western Fiction Classic (Yakima Henry Book 1) Page 22