When the Pinkerton had finished the maneuver, he lifted his hat, ran his hand through his hair with a sigh, then set his hat back on his head, giving it a rakish angle, and started following the trail toward the cabin.
Lonnie fell into step behind the man, quickly caught up to him. He kept his voice low as he said, “Stop right there!”
Brocius stopped, shoulders tensed. Lonnie pressed his rifle barrel taut against the man’s back. “If you call out, I’ll shoot you. Now, nice and slow, ease those pistols out of their holsters and drop ’em on the ground.”
Brocius glanced over his right shoulder. “Well, well, if it ain’t the young fugitive.”
“Drop your guns.”
“What’re you gonna do, kid?”
“You’ll know soon enough . . . after you’ve dropped those guns.”
“What’re you gonna do if I don’t?” Brocius asked, a defiant smile quirking his mouth corners. “Kill me?”
Lonnie kept his gaze level, hard. He’d shot Halliday, he told himself. He could shoot this man, too, if it came to that. “That’s right.”
Brocius studied Lonnie from over his shoulder. Lonnie glared at him. Gradually, the smile faded from the Pinkerton’s lips. “All right.” He lifted his two revolvers from their holsters. He held them up and then tossed them underhand. They landed in the yard several feet to his right.
“You got a hideout?” Lonnie asked.
“Nope.” Brocius shook his head, grinning. “Two’s enough for me.”
Lonnie nudged him forward. “Get movin’, then. Inside. Like I said, you call out, I’ll shoot you.”
“Okay, kid, okay. Take it easy. We wouldn’t want that long gun to go off by accident—now, would we?”
“You wouldn’t, that’s right,” Lonnie said.
Brocius started walking slowly forward. Too slowly. Lonnie nudged him again with the rifle. Brocius stopped, swung around in a blur of quick motion, slamming the back of his right hand against the rifle.
The move had caught Lonnie off guard. The rifle bounced off the cabin’s stout wall and landed in the brush growing up along the stone foundation. Brocius continued to wheel toward Lonnie. Lonnie saw the savage glint in the man’s eyes. And then he saw the man’s left fist smash toward him.
It smacked Lonnie’s right cheek, sending the boy flying backwards and sideways. Lonnie’s head slammed against the cabin. Feeling like a rag doll given a thrashing by an enraged child, he dropped in the brush, his face on fire. The blow had kicked up the pain in his bullet-notched head, as well. It was a searing, blinding fury, momentarily paralyzing him.
“Thought you were gonna take the money from us—eh, boy?” Lonnie felt the man’s hands on his back, pulling him up off the ground and lifting him several inches off his feet before slamming him back down on his feet and giving him a shove.
Lonnie lunged forward, hit the ground with a groan, and rolled. When he looked up, Brocius was on him again, the man’s cheeks flushed with fury, his eyes small and round and filled with hate.
“I don’t think so!” the Pinkerton said through clenched teeth, lifting Lonnie to his feet once more.
The man grabbed Lonnie by the back of his shirt collar, swung him around, and threw him toward the cabin’s front corner. Helpless against this big, powerful man, his head on fire, his vision blurry, Lonnie bounced off the cabin. Brocius retrieved his pistols then grabbed Lonnie again and gave him another shove, sending Lonnie lunging along the front of the cabin to the front stoop.
At the steps, Lonnie swung around to confront Brocius, balling his hands into tight fists, but Brocius smashed the back of his left hand against Lonnie’s right cheek.
Lonnie went down hard on the porch steps. His ears rang. He could already feel his right eye beginning to swell.
Brocius pulled Lonnie up by his shirt collar again and shoved him up onto the porch. The Pinkerton came up behind him, gave him another shove. Lonnie kept his feet moving so he wouldn’t fall. He raised his hands as he flew to the door, but then the door opened.
Madsen looked incredulous as he said, “What the hell’s—?”
He stepped back out of the doorway, and Lonnie went stumbling inside and falling across the eating table, scattering plates and glasses. A pan tumbled to the floor with a bang!
“Lonnie!” his mother cried, her back to the range.
Lonnie pressed his right cheek to the table, sliding his boots beneath him.
“What’s going on?” May Gentry yelled.
“Got us a little problem here,” Brocius said to Madsen, as he pulled Lonnie up off the table and hurled the boy into the parlor.
Lonnie hit the braided rug on the parlor floor and rolled up against the stone hearth in which no fire burned. From back inside the lodge, little Jeremiah began squealing loudly.
“My god!” May Gentry screamed, running toward Lonnie.
Lonnie looked up at her. She wore her hair in a neat chignon. It was shiny from a recent brushing. Her nicest house dress—pink with white lace—was drawn taut across her hips and bosom. Her cheeks, lightly rouged, were flushed with shock as she glanced behind her at the two suited Pinkertons standing just inside the parlor, staring darkly down at Lonnie.
Their Pinkerton badges were pinned to their wool vests. What a joke, Lonnie thought.
“Like I said,” Brocius said grimly to Madsen, “we got us a little problem. Found him out back. Or . . . he found me, I should say. Stuck a rifle barrel against my spine.”
“Lonnie?” May said, a vague tone of accusing mixing with the befuddlement in her face. “What are you up to? Where have you been these past several days?”
She looked genuinely bewildered by his absence. Obviously, neither Brocius nor Madsen had told her about the necktie party. She couldn’t have come looking for him because she couldn’t leave Jeremiah. She hadn’t looked overly worried when Lonnie had first entered the cabin, however. It looked as though she’d been preparing a hearty meal for her guests, after she’d prettied herself up a bit.
No, she hadn’t been too heartbroken about her missing boy to enjoy the company of a couple of two crooked Pinkerton agents, who were every bit as much outlaw as Shannon Dupree had been.
“Suppose you didn’t know about that, May,” Brocius said, mildly sheepish. “Your boy here was tried for murder. The judge was about to hang him when someone with a rifle and a keen shootin’ eye saved his bacon.”
“Murder!”
“He killed a lawman.”
“Another one?”
“I didn’t kill him, Ma. Halliday just said I done it . . .”
“Halliday? You mean Sheriff Halliday?”
“. . . because he done it himself—shot Marshal Appleyard, I mean.”
Lonnie’s mother stared down at her son, bereft. “Oh, Lonnie—what kind of trouble have you gotten yourself into this time?”
CHAPTER 49
Lonnie was beginning to think that Skull Canyon’s curse was riding him hard. He’d had a perfectly good year until he’d ridden past that forbidden ground up in those high and rocky reaches.
Then it was as though demons loosed from hell had started chasing him, and even after the four who’d nearly run him down a week ago were moldering on the floor of Skull Canyon, demons of their same ilk were still dogging Lonnie’s heels.
Eventually, one of those demons was going to catch up to him and turn him toe down. Or maybe it would be two demons, like the two staring down at him now from over his weeping mother’s shoulders—Bill Brocius and George Madsen.
Lonnie looked around. A pair of bulging saddlebags lay against the wall to his right, near the old bullhorn rocking chair in which his father had once sat, studying the Good Book on cold winter nights while sipping hot tea, his feet stuffed into elk hide slippers that May had sewn for him, from an elk that Calvin Gentry had shot himself up near Skull Canyon.
Lonnie pushed up onto his elbows and glared at the two Pinkertons. “Is that the loot?”
The two men glanc
ed at the pouches.
“So what if it is?” Madsen said. “We’re takin’ it back to the army.”
“If that’s so, why’d you shoot Halliday and leave him for dead in Skull Canyon?”
The two men glanced at each other. They cast Lonnie a dark, menacing gaze.
“What’s going on here?” May wanted to know. “Someone, please tell me!”
“Nothin’, Mama. You don’t wanna know.” Lonnie looked at Brocius and Madsen. “You two got the loot. Your horses are probably rested by now. There’s feed out in the barn—I’m sure you done already helped yourself to that. Why don’t you just leave?”
May studied each man in turn, bewildered, as though they were all speaking a foreign language.
“And waste all that good food your mother’s cookin’?” Brocius sniffed the air teeming with the smell of roasting elk, drawing a deep breath. “Wild game and onions and fresh bread? No man in his right mind could leave a meal like that!”
“Besides, we kinda like the company,” Brocius added, glancing lasciviously down at Lonnie’s mother.
“Besides,” Madsen said, “we want our horses to be good and fresh when we leave in the mornin’. Got us a long ride ahead. We’ll be takin’ two of yours, as well.”
“With two horses apiece,” Madsen said, “we’ll be able to ride harder and longer . . . until we get all the way to Mexico!”
Cold dread pooled in Lonnie’s belly. He didn’t like the look in these two rogue Pinkertons’ eyes. And the fact that they’d just told Lonnie and his mother where they were heading didn’t bid well at all.
Not at all.
“I don’t understand,” May said, straightening and turning her full attention to the Pinkertons. “What’s this about loot? And . . . Mexico?”
Madsen walked over and picked up the bulging saddlebags. They looked heavy, both pouches deeply sagging. He slung them onto the table with a grunt. There was a dull clinking sound.
Madsen gave Lonnie a sly glance and then opened the flap on one of the pouches. He dipped his hand in and pulled out one of the canvas pouches stamped “US ARMY.”
“Oh, my Lord,” May said, staring darkly at the bulging sack.
Madsen untied the rope from around the lip of the pouch. He turned the bag over. The gold coins clanked and clattered onto the table, glistening in the waning rays of sunlight angling through the cabin’s windows.
May gasped, covering her mouth with her hand.
“You ever seen the like, May?” Brocius asked her.
May stared at the gold, but she didn’t look at all happy to see it. She looked scared, horrified. She sensed the trouble it had come wrapped in.
“Where did that come from?” she asked Lonnie, as though he would know even better than the Pinkertons.
“Skull Canyon,” Brocius told her.
Jeremiah had been squealing since Lonnie had been thrown into the cabin. Now he was screaming even louder. May turned toward her bedroom as though she were hearing the infant’s cries for the first time, and, rubbing her hands nervously up and down her thighs, she strode toward the bedroom door. “I . . . I have to see about the baby.”
She went into the room, glanced worriedly back at Lonnie, and then closed the door, muffling the baby’s cries.
Lonnie started to heave himself to his feet.
“Stay down there,” Brocius ordered, aiming his cocked Colt at Lonnie.
“What’re you gonna do with us?” Lonnie asked, sitting back down on the floor.
His eye was really swelling now but the pain in his head was fading. It had been replaced with the cold fear that these two rogue Pinkertons would kill not only Lonnie but his mother and baby brother, as well.
Maybe he shouldn’t have come here, Lonnie thought. Maybe the Pinkertons would have just taken the horses and left in the morning with the loot, sparing his mother and baby brother.
By coming here and confronting the two men about the loot, Lonnie might have just made the biggest mistake of his and his mother’s lives.
There was nothing to do about that now. He had to keep his wits about him and try to figure a way out of one more mess he’d gotten himself into.
If the curse would let him, that was . . .
When neither Pinkerton answered his question, Lonnie repeated it. “I asked you what you’re gonna do with us?”
Brocius glanced at Madsen, and jerked his head at Lonnie. The men’s faces were hard and blank. “Tie him,” Brocius said. “Tie him good and tight. He has a way of getting out of tight spots, this one.”
“Well, he ain’t gonna get out of this one.” Madsen grabbed a rope dangling from a peg in the front door. “We can’t afford to let him get out of this one.”
Brocius kept his eyes on Lonnie as he said, “What’re you thinkin’, George?”
“What do you think I’m thinkin’, Bill? Make him promise to keep a secret for the rest of his life?”
“He’s just a kid,” Brocius said. He appeared genuinely reluctant to kill a boy. He was probably also thinking about killing the boy’s mother and baby brother, as well. His lean, clean-shaven face was splotched white. He was thinking it all through, and he was feeling grim about it.
As Madsen tied Lonnie’s hands behind a ceiling support post delineating where the kitchen ended and the parlor began, the bearded Pinkerton said, “If you know another way, let’s hear it. I’m open to suggestions.”
“I won’t tell,” Lonnie said, shaking his head, not knowing if he was speaking truthfully or not. But he was desperate to keep his mother and little brother alive. “I promise, I won’t. If it means you not harming Ma and little Jeremiah, I’ll take the secret to my grave. Heck, no one would believe me, anyway. I’m wanted for killin’ a deputy US marshal! I’ll tell ’em I killed Halliday, too! That they’ll believe!”
CHAPTER 50
Brocius crouched down in front of Lonnie. “You really expect us to believe that you’d hold to that story—long after we were gone from here and livin’ high on the hog in Mexico?” He looked at Madsen. “Besides, old Pinkerton himself would figure it all out when we didn’t show up at the home office.”
“Nah, we can’t risk it.” Madsen turned to Lonnie. “No way you’d hold to that story, and there’s a chance someone would believe the truth when you told it. You need to disappear. Folks need to think you killed Halliday and absconded with the loot. No one’ll figure out our part in it for days, maybe weeks, and we need to buy as much time as we can. Sorry, kid.”
As though he’d heard and understood what his older brother’s fate was going to be, little Jeremiah began crying louder in May’s bedroom. Brocius cursed and whipped an angry look toward the closed door on the far side of the cabin. “Dammit, May—will you quiet that child? I’m sick to death of hearin’ that infernal squealin’!”
Lonnie heard his mother cooing to the baby. A few minutes later, when Madsen and Brocius had sat down at the table and poured themselves glasses of whiskey and started building cigarettes, the bedroom door opened. Lonnie’s mother stepped out, holding the screaming, red-faced infant in her arms. May, too, was flushed with anxiety.
“Lonnie’s the only one who can soothe him when he’s like this.”
May looked with beseeching eyes at the two rogue Pinkertons. Little Jeremiah continued bawling, raising his two, tiny, red fists in the air as though trying to squirm out of his mother’s arms.
Both men stared at the woman, incredulous, wincing at every tearing scream issuing from the baby’s mouth.
“Can’t you please untie him, so he can rock little Jeremiah? He’ll get him back to sleep in fifteen minutes. He always does!”
The two men looked at Lonnie then at each other.
“I’m all for it!” Brocius rose from his chair and walked a little unsteadily over to Lonnie. He pulled a big bowie knife from a sheath belted against his back. He held the wide-bladed, savage-looking blade up in front of Lonnie’s face. “One false move, boy . . . once false move. Understand?”
>
He glanced at the blade then looked again at Lonnie, eyes filled with threat. “You’d best consider your ma and that screamin’ little crib rat, too.”
“I’m no fool,” Lonnie said. “I won’t try nothin’. Untie me, and I’ll settle him down.”
Brocius cut through the rope tying Lonnie’s wrists together behind the ceiling support post. When the ropes were off, Lonnie climbed heavily to his feet and walked around the table. He took the baby out of his mother’s hands then, rocking him gently in his arms and cooing to him, he slacked down into his father’s old rocker, the same rocker in which his father had once rocked Lonnie to sleep when he was Jeremiah’s age.
As soon as he started rocking, little Jeremiah’s cries grew less shrill.
“Say, there,” Madsen said as he shuffled a deck of cards, a quirley smoldering between his lips. “Sounds better already.”
“Good to know the kid’s good for somethin’.”
“I’m going to go out and get some firewood,” May said. “I have to keep the range stoked, so the food will cook. We’ll be able to eat soon.”
Brocius grabbed the woman’s hand and pulled her toward him. He stared at her hard, then gave a stiff smile. “No tricks—okay, sweetheart?” He glanced with menace toward where Lonnie was rocking the baby.
“Tricks?” May said, staring at the man as though she didn’t understand the word. “Bill, I swear . . . you have me fit to be tied!” Her lips quivered. Tears dribbled down her cheeks.
“All right, all right,” Borius said, releasing her hand. “Don’t cloud up and rain on us, now. Go out and fetch your wood. Hurry back, or I’ll miss you, honey!”
He gave a wooden laugh as May turned around, rubbed tears from her cheeks with the backs of her hands, and left the cabin, leaving the door half open behind her. She returned a minute later with an armload of wood, which she dropped into the box beside the range. By now, Jeremiah had entirely stopped crying and was fidgeting contentedly inside his tightly wrapped blanket.
Curse of Skull Canyon Page 22