The lawman’s pistol spat smoke and flames, but the bullet sailed wild.
Lonnie turned his head forward. Casey rode just ahead and to his right. When she glanced over her left shoulder and gave him a wide-eyed, anxious smile but also a smile of relief, he realized it was true. He was free.
Somehow, the girl had saved him.
At least, for now.
But who had cut the rope?
He and Casey hit the outskirts of town and galloped into the country beyond, heading for the mountains.
CHAPTER 42
When they’d had to slow their horses after a quarter mile of hard riding, Casey said, “Let’s hold up here.”
“Why?” Lonnie said, pulling back on the General’s reins.
As if in reply to his question, a wild, raking Rebel yell cut through the air behind them. It was the same yell Lonnie had heard before in town, when the excitement was starting. Now he saw a figure galloping toward them along the trail, silhouetted against the skyline.
The town was a small, dun-colored splotch low on the horizon, behind the horseback rider growing steadily larger.
As the rider approached, Lonnie could make out the gray Confederate campaign hat the rider was wearing. It was battered and weather-stained, the edge of its rim badly frayed. Barreling toward Lonnie on a cream stallion, the rider crouched low in the saddle, glancing quickly behind him then turning his head back forward, the wind pasting the front brim against the man’s forehead.
When the man was fifty yards away and closing fast, Lonnie saw a shaggy, black-and-white collie dog running a ways behind the horse and rider, doing its best to keep up.
Wilbur Calhoun drew rein before Lonnie and Casey, the old ex-Confederate’s dog loping up behind him, tongue hanging down over its lower jaw, tired. Calhoun poked his hat back off his forehead, and grinned at Lonnie. His weathered face was long and angular. It hadn’t seen a razor’s edge in several days.
Lonnie stared in disbelief at the old soldier turned mysterious mountain rider who’d saved his bacon from the fire more times last year than Lonnie wanted to count.
“Wilbur . . . Calhoun?”
“Helluva party they throwed for you, boy,” Calhoun said, breathless. “Sorry I had to be the one to break it up. I was just startin’ to have fun, too!” The ex-Confederate glanced behind him once more, squinting against the dust. “Come on, children,” he said, turning back around. “A posse’ll be after us soon!”
Calhoun galloped on up the trail, the shaggy collie dog loping along behind.
Lonnie gave Casey a curious glance. The girl hiked a shoulder then touched spurs to Miss Abigail’s flanks. “I’ll tell you later!”
Lonnie booted the General after Casey. They followed Calhoun on a winding course into the mountains. They’d ridden for nearly an hour, pacing their horses, before Calhoun led them up the side of a steep, rocky ridge stippled with firs and white-stemmed aspens.
Five minutes later, the three were lying belly down at the top of the ridge, staring down the other side toward the trail twisting up through the forest.
Soon, hooves thundered. The shadows of oncoming riders darted through the trees down the slope beneath the ridge.
The posse grew closer until Lonnie could make out Sheriff Halliday leading the dozen or so men, including Deputy Bohannon, who rode directly behind him, along the trail, passing their quarry from left to right and quickly disappearing back into the forest.
Lonnie had recognized several of the other men comprising the posse—mostly shopkeepers from town.
“Well, that tears it,” Calhoun said. “Kid, they look awful disappointed you didn’t get a stretched neck out of that deal back there. I reckon they’re gonna keep after us, which means we’d best keep ridin’.”
Calhoun climbed to his feet and moved on down the back side of the slope to where their three horses waited near a runout spring, grazing. The collie lay nearby, eyes riveted on its ex-Confederate master. Lonnie and Casey gained their feet. Casey gave Lonnie a brief, reassuring smile. She squeezed his hand, pecked his cheek, and then followed Calhoun down the slope.
Lonnie stared after her, bewildered by her and everything that had happened to him recently, including what had just happened under that gallows in town. He had so many questions that he didn’t know where to start asking.
Anyway, this wasn’t the time for questions. It was a time for trying to stay ahead of Halliday and the posse.
Lonnie moved on down the slope, mounted up, and rode.
The boy thought he knew every nook and granny of this side of the Never Summers, but he didn’t recognize any of the landmarks around him. Calhoun obviously knew this part of the mountains better than Lonnie did. At least, Lonnie hoped that was so. He hoped the old Confederate wasn’t just riding blindly to lose the posse.
That would be a good way to get lost, and no one wanted to get lost out here, in a range so vast. Lonnie himself had been lost, albeit briefly, and it had been a sick, panicked feeling that had filled him from head to toe. That’s why he always took care to mind where he was and where he was heading, taking note of landmarks.
Even then, it was easy to get turned around and lose your sense of direction until the panic gripped you and you were assaulted with the belief you would die alone out here, where no one except wolves and mountain lions would ever find you. Of course, Lonnie usually had his horse and his rifle. If he kept his wits about him, he could live for a time off the land.
Still, the terror of finding himself lost and totally alone was a panic akin to being buried alive.
As he and Casey followed Calhoun through valleys and over ridges, Lonnie kept a sharp watch on their back trail for the posse. There was no sign of them. He didn’t hear any distant hoof thuds or shouts, either. The only sounds were the birds, squirrels, burrowing critters, and the endless soughing of the wind.
Late in the day, Lonnie looked ahead, beyond Casey and Calhoun riding ahead of her, to see that they were climbing a steep rise toward what appeared to be the ruins of a stone cabin wedged between two large, pale granite escarpments sheathed in towering pines. Most of the cabin’s brush roof was missing, but the half-ruined hovel was shielded by an overhanging lip of rock high above.
Lonnie hadn’t seen Calhoun’s dog, Cherokee, for a while, but now the shaggy, burr-laden collie came running down a slope on Lonnie’s left, through patches of sunlight and shade.
The dog obviously knew this neck of the mountains so well it had even found shortcuts not traversable on horseback.
Calhoun stopped his cream stallion, which Lonnie remembered he called Stonewall after the Confederate general. The old soldier removed his battered gray hat and sleeved sweat from his forehead, floury white where the sun rarely reached it. The white was in stark contrast to the near-Indian red of the man’s craggy lower face carpeted in dark-brown stubble threaded liberally with gray.
“Home sweet home,” Calhoun said as he stuffed the hat back down on his head and began stripping his saddle from the cream’s back.
“Home?” Lonnie said, swinging heavily down from his own saddle. “But your cabin’s over to the north, near the base of Storm Peak Pass.” Lonnie remembered the cabin from last year, when Lonnie and Casey had spent a night there, after they’d nearly been killed by not only Shannon Dupree but by a rogue grizzly bear, as well.
Lonnie gave an inward shudder as he remembered that time. But, then, he was now in circumstances nearly as dire . . .
“That’s one of my cabins, all right.” With a heavy grunt, Calhoun set his saddle down against the base of a pine. “This one here’s another. I figure it was built by some old prospector or maybe a sheepherder or some such. I’ve seen tufts of old wool caught on branches around here, and patches of ancient sheep dung. Whoever built this place, it hadn’t been lived in for many years till I came.”
“What brought you here?” Casey asked Calhoun as she stripped her tack from Miss Abigail’s back.
Calhoun looked at her, g
ave a vaguely sheepish grin, then started walking around the stony, needle-carpeted slope, gathering blowdown branches for firewood.
Casey glanced at Lonnie. “So much for indiscreet questions, I guess.”
“I reckon,” Lonnie said.
Calhoun had confessed last year to Lonnie and Casey that he’d accidentally killed his wife while purposefully trying to kill her lover back in Georgia, after he’d returned home from the war to find them together on Calhoun’s own farm. Running from the law, he’d come west to start a new life. But what that new life had entailed, Calhoun hadn’t said.
The lack of explanation in and of itself told Lonnie the man had probably gone outlaw. Why else would a man need more than one cabin in the most far-flung reaches of a far-flung mountain range?
Possibly, Calhoun was just a loner who lived off the land. Maybe his secrecy was due to prospecting, as most prospectors held their cards close to their chest. Or, maybe after all he’d been through both during and after the war, he’d gone crazy.
Maybe the true story was a combination of all those things. Or maybe the truth lay elsewhere entirely.
Lonnie didn’t know. At the moment, more pressing matters were working over his already-battered brain.
When the General was stripped of his tack and rolling in a patch of soft dirt and pine needles, Lonnie sat down on the stone slope, in a patch of warm sunlight filtering through the pine boughs. His head ached and he was tired, not to mention disoriented as well as puzzled.
He looked at Casey. His expression must have been question enough.
The girl sat down beside him, doffed her hat, set it aside, and ran her hands back through her sweat-damp hair.
“When I rode back from the canyon,” she said, “the sheriff was gone. I didn’t know what to do, how to help you. Then I saw Mister Calhoun.” She cast her gaze down to where the lanky ex-Confederate was gathering firewood. “He’d come out of a saloon with an armload of bottles for his saddlebags. I had no one else to turn to. I asked him if he’d help me find you. But then, when we were fixing to ride back to Skull Canyon, you rode in . . . tied to your saddle . . . with Halliday and the two Pinkertons.”
“But the rope. The noose. How . . . ?”
Calhoun, heading back toward them with an armload of firewood, must have overheard their conversation. He chuckled, and said, “I recollect I told you when we first met I was a sharpshooter back during the War of Northern Aggression.”
Lonnie remembered the jerk on the taut rope. That must have been one of Calhoun’s bullets striking the rope but not severing it entirely. The man must have fired a second, more accurate shot, and that was what had sent Lonnie plunging to the ground.
Calhoun dropped the wood in a gap in the stone floor, near Lonnie and Casey. He looked a little sheepish as he said, “Sorry about that first shot. I used to prize myself on never wasting a minie ball.” He scratched the back of his neck, glancing around, still sheepish. “I reckon my peepers ain’t as good as they was when I was nineteen. But the second shot did the trick, eh, boy?”
Casey leaned toward Lonnie and pried up the bandage on his temple to look beneath it. She made a face and said, “Try as we might, me an’ Mister Calhoun couldn’t think of a better way.”
The girl sighed as she rose and walked over to where her gear was piled near Lonnie’s. She glanced back over her shoulder. “But it came down to our hopin’ they’d hang you.”
“Wait a minute,” Lonnie said, staring at the girl in disbelief as he rubbed his sore neck. “You were hopin’ they’d hang me?”
“Sure,” Casey said, scooping her canteen up off her saddle. “After all, there’s never been a boy more deserving.”
She winked as she strode back to him.
CHAPTER 43
With a tin coffee cup, Calhoun scooped out a hole in which to build a fire. Casey was hard at work, cleaning out Lonnie’s bullet-creased head with a short length of flannel dampened with tepid water from her canteen.
“Figured the only way we were gonna save your hard-luck hide, boy, was to wait until you had a little distance between you and Halliday and them two no-account deputies of his,” Calhoun said as he worked.
“Ow!” Lonnie said as Casey rubbed the cut a little too hard.
Casey gave him a dubious look. “You were nearly hanged a couple of hours ago, and this bothers you?”
“You don’t exactly have a delicate touch, girl!”
“Oh, shut up, or I’ll let you clean your own dang wound!” Casey shot back.
Calhoun chuckled, shook his head. “You two have a curious relationship. Anyways, like I was sayin’, we needed to get you some space from the lawmen. Figured a crowd would be good, too. Harder for a lawman to shoot into a crowd. And I knew that Nestor Polk always liked to hang his victims without cuffs or shackles on, so they could dance good for the crowd. So, I took my Sharps Big Fifty, holed up in the loft of the Federated Livery Stable, and waited for you to drop through the hole.”
As Casey continued to clean Lonnie’s wound, the boy gave Calhoun an incredulous look. “If that second shot would have missed, I’d have been doin’ quite a dance for that crowd. And that rope would been movin’ around way too fast for you to make another shot.” Lonnie’s heart quickened as he thought through all the grisly possibilities. “And . . . about now they’d be droppin’ me in a pine box, maybe already shovelin’ dirt on me.”
“Yeah, well,” the ex-Confederate chuckled as he shoved some dried pine needles and crushed pinecones into his fire hole, “it’s best not to look too close at the more delicate smaller workin’s of the past.”
“Delicate smaller workin’s,” Lonnie said, rubbing his throat. He looked at Calhoun. “I’m glad you were there, Mister Calhoun. I reckon if it weren’t for you . . . and Casey . . . I’d be for sure laid out in that box.”
Now that he had time to reflect, the fear came up to wash over him good and hard. His heart was thudding, hiccupping. Fighting back the fear, he turned to Casey, who was pulling some more cloth out of her saddlebags.
“So . . . you did believe me,” Lonnie said, haltingly.
“Oh, of course I believed you, Lonnie. I know you’d never have killed those men in cold blood. I saw right away through Halliday’s lie. I didn’t want him to think I was sidin’ you too hard, though. I didn’t want him to get suspicious and keep a close eye on me. If so, I might not have been able to get over to the feed barn and saddle your horse. I had both the General and Miss Abigail tied in an alley near the courthouse, just as Mister Calhoun and I had planned. Fortunately, Mister Hadley was helpin’ the hangman with the gallows, so I got in and out of the barn without raising suspicion.”
Hadley was the manager of the feed barn.
Casey smeared salve into Lonnie’s wound. As she did, she looked at him.
“What’re you thinkin’ about?” the girl asked.
“You two are now as wanted as I am,” Lonnie said as it dawned on him just how much these two friends—really, his only two friends in the world—had sacrificed to keep him from hanging.
He shook his head as he slid his gaze from Casey to Calhoun and back to Casey again. “You’ll never be able to go back to Arapaho Creek. Not in a million years.”
Casey looked back at him. She’d obviously considered that possibility before the dustup in town. But now it was real. She was as much an outlaw as Lonnie. As much as Calhoun, even. That was beginning to sink into her now, just as all that had happened was hitting Lonnie like a runaway lumber dray.
“I reckon you’re right,” the girl said, a slight tremor in her voice.
“Ah, hell.” Calhoun was crouched low over his fire, coaxing some flames to life by blowing on them. “Towns is overrated, anyways. Too many folks. Too much trouble to get into. You two can live out here with me. When our trail gets hot, we’ll mosey down Old Mexico way. Good place to spend the winter, down there along the Sea of Cortez. There’s a little village down there. Puerto Peñasco, they call it.”
&n
bsp; He made a motion in the air with his hands. “The señoritas down there—they come supple as ripe tomatoes, and filled out like . . .”
Calhoun let his voice trail off as he looked up at Lonnie and Casey staring at him skeptically.
“Well . . . I’m just sayin’ it’s nice down there, that’s all,” the ex-Confederate said, flushing, and continued to blow on his fire.
“No,” Lonnie said, staring pensively off through the trees. “There’s gotta be another way. Halliday can’t win. He’s a killer. He’s the one who’s got to hang.”
“In case you didn’t notice,” Casey said, “we’re a little outnumbered, Lonnie. There were a good dozen men in that posse of Halliday’s. He’s got the whole county convinced you killed the deputy marshal.”
Lonnie shook his head, grimacing. “I know, I know. But there’s got to be another way. I can’t, won’t, let that killer . . . that killer who brained me an’ almost hanged me . . . I can’t let him win. He was going to let me take the punishment coming’ to him.”
He gritted his teeth with determination. “And I won’t let him win.”
“Don’t see how you can’t.” Calhoun laid a couple of large branches on the building flames. He looked at Casey and then at Lonnie. “Look at it this way. At least neither one of you is alone in your predicament. At least you got each other.”
He pulled a hide-wrapped whiskey bottle out of his canvas war bag, and popped the cork. He raised the bottle in salute, and took a drink.
Lonnie glanced at Casey. She returned the glance and then looked away.
Lonnie looked away, then, too.
When they’d eaten a meager meal of wild berries and jerky washed down with coffee, or, in Calhoun’s case, washed down with whiskey, the ex-Confederate hauled his gear into the ruins of the stone cabin, and went to bed. He said that an old man needed even a partial roof over his head, though Lonnie sensed that the real reason he retreated into the cabin was because he wanted to give Lonnie and Casey some privacy.
Curse of Skull Canyon Page 19