by Jory Sherman
“Feels like an old darnin’ egg,” Cal said with a wince that brought a crinkle to his lips. Not quite a smile, but almost.
Mel looked at the riders again. They were leaving the road, heading up the woodcutter’s trail. He could not see their faces. The rising sun was behind them. He raised a hand in a welcomewave. Neither rider responded.
That’s when Mel’s blood began to run cold.
“Darlene,” he said. “You better come back here and take care of Cal.”
Darlene stiffened at the tone of her husband’s voice. There was an edge to it, as if he was concealing something, anger perhaps, worry, or . . . fear.
“Is Cal all right?” she said.
“Those riders. I don’t like the looks of them. You come back here and I’ll get my rifle.”
“Mel, don’t start trouble now,” she said.
“I ain’t. I just don’t like the looks of them two.”
“Oh, you’re suspicious of everybody. They’re probably riding up here to help us.”
“Yeah. Maybe.” But that edge was still there in his voice.
Darlene climbed into the wagon, her skirts hindering her, the cloth catching on the wood. She reached down and pulled herself free, then crabbed back to sit beside Cal. She looked at the two riders. Their faces were in shadow and one of them, the smaller one, didn’t look right.
“Mel, I think it’s a man and a woman,” she said.
He slipped his arms from under Cal’s back as Darlene reached for her son.
“I’m all right, Ma,” Cal said. “Just got me a headache and I feel a mite groggy.”
“You just lie still for a minute, Cal,” she said. “Your pa’s . . .”
“I know what he’s going to do. He’s going to get the rifle. Just in case.”
“Hush now. Those people mean us no harm,” she said.
But there was a note of doubt in her voice, a querulous pitch to it that slipped into Cal’s senses like an overheard whisper from another room. His mother was worried. His fatherwas worried. That was disturbing enough, but when he looked at the two riders approaching, he felt his skin crawl. One was a tall man on a tall horse. The other was short, with large breasts and a skirt that draped down over her left stirrup. A woman, for sure. But she wore a gunbelt and he could see the butt of a pistol protruding from her holster.
Mel scrambled back into the seat. He bent over to retrieve the rifle underneath.
“Mister, you better be looking for a hammer or saw under there,” the man on the tall horse said.
Mel looked up.
“Huh?” he said.
“’Cause if you pull up anything else from underneath that seat, it’ll be the last thing you do.”
There was no mistaking the warning in the man’s voice.
Mel raised up and shaded his eyes from the sun.
He still couldn’t see their faces. But he saw that one was a woman, and she was wearing a pistol. Rifles jutted from their scabbards.
They were not ordinary folks, Mel decided.
Not at all ordinary.
In fact, he thought, as he held his breath, they had suddenly turned dangerous.
He opened his mouth to say something, but his throat was frozen, dry as dust.
The mule brayed and shook its head.
A cloud drifted over the sun and blanketed them all in shade.
Mel saw the man’s face then, and the glint of his eyes.
That’s when the fear paralyzed him, turned his body and his heart to ice-cold stone.
5
Mel saw the look on the tall man’s face and his own eyes watered. For a split second, Mel thought there was a pane of glass in front of his face and that something horrible was clawing to get at him. He heard a gasp from behind him and knew it was Darlene.
Then Cal spoke in a loud whisper. “Ma, I peed my pants. I’m scared.”
“Shhh,” Darlene said, clutching her son tightly to her breast. Both of them stared at the man on the tall horse, not at the woman riding with him.
The man spoke. “Hand over your poke,” he said.
“What?” Mel said.
“You got any cash on you? Gold? Silver? Greenbacks?”
“I ain’t got much.”
“Hand it over. Right quick.”
“You ain’t goin’ to shoot?”
“That depends,” Hobart said.
“On what?”
“On how quick you hand me your poke.”
“Well, I ain’t got none on me. I mean, not in my pockets.” Mel turned around and looked at Darlene. She saw the fear shimmering in his eyes like liquid shadows. “Hand me that wooden box where we keep the money,” he said.
“But Mel, that’s all the money we got.”
“Lady, you better get that box and there better be nothing in it but gold, silver, and paper.”
“I’ll get it, Ma,” Cal said.
“Sonny, you just shut your mouth and sit right still,” Hobart said.
“Yes, sir.”
Darlene released her grip on her son and rummaged through the blankets covering the goods in the wagon. She picked up a small wooden box and leaned toward Mel.
“Here,” she said. “God, Mel, what are we goin’ to do with no money?”
“Don’t you worry none,” he said, his voice quavery as a calm Louisiana lake trembling under the ripples of a cotton-mouth’s wake. “We’ll make it up some way.”
“Your man’s right,” Hobart said. “Now hand it over, Pilgrim.”
Hobart rode in close, stretched out a hand.
That’s when Mel made a very stupid decision.
He dropped the box onto the floor of the wagon, ducked down, and reached under the seat for his rifle. He grabbed it with one hand, jerked it toward him. He saw a flash of movementout of the corner of his eye.
Hobart’s hand streaked downward toward the butt of his pistol.
Darlene and Cal saw a blur of flesh that was Hobart’s hand. The movement was so quick, the shock to them so great, their expressions did not change.
“Bad idea,” Hobart growled as his pistol cleared the holster.His thumb pressed the hammer down so that the pistol was cocked when it came level, its front sight blade lined up on Mel’s body. Hobart squeezed the trigger, just a touch was all that it took, and the pistol barked, spat lead and flame from the muzzle.
The bullet struck Mel just under the right armpit. The impactof the .45-caliber lead ball, traveling at around 900 feet per second, slammed him into the seat, cracking the ribs on the other side. The exiting lead ripped out more of his rib cage and blood spurted from the hole in his side and flowed onto the seat bed.
Darlene screamed.
Cal gasped and tears welled up in his eyes.
Darlene stood up, started to rush to Mel. Her son grabbed at her to pull her back down.
Rosa Delgado, who rode with Hobart, drew her pistol and cocked it.
“Mel, Mel,” Darlene said, her voice full of anguish. Tears flooded her face as she jerked away from Cal.
She took one step toward her husband when Hobart fired again. There was the slow curl of a smile on his face when he fired his pistol. Darlene didn’t see it, but Cal did. He cringed and squeezed his eyes shut when the Colt exploded. When he saw his mother’s body jerk as the bullet struck her in the chest, his face contorted with rage.
He stood up and started rushing toward his mother.
Rosa calmly raised her pistol, sighted down the barrel, and squeezed the trigger. Her shot struck Cal in the throat, blowing out his Adam’s apple, ripping through to his spine. The young man twisted his body in a macabre dance and his eyes rolled back in their sockets. Blood spurted from the hole in his neck. Fragments of splintered bone flew out from his broken backbone and his body turned rigid as it fell, a foot short of where his mother’s twitching and bleeding body lay.
“Good shot, Rosa,” Hobart said.
Rosa smiled. She held her pistol close to her as smoke curled from the barrel. She blew the smo
ke into wisps that glided into shreds and disappeared.
The smell of gunpowder hung in the air as both Rosa and Hobart holstered their pistols.
Hobart rode up close to the side of the wagon. He reached down and snatched up the box that Mel had dropped. He pulled on the latch, opened the lid.
He reached in and fished out a pile of greenbacks. He counted them and folded them, stuck them into his shirt pocket.
“Two hundred,” he said. He scooped out the gold and silver coins and stuffed them into his pants pocket, then threw the opened box on the ground. It made a hollow clatter as it struck a rock and rolled over, forming a small wooden tent.
“Anything in the wagon you want, Rosa?” Hobart said.
“I’d like that mule, but we cannot take him.”
“No.”
“Then, let us go before someone sees us here.”
She turned her horse and started back down toward the road. She pulled a fresh cartridge from her gunbelt, drew her pistol again, and set it to half cock. She opened the gate and rolled the cylinder until the spent cartridge appeared. She pushed the ejection rod and the empty hull fell out. She slipped a new cartridge in the chamber, closed the gate, and holstered her pistol, a Smith & Wesson .38 with pearl handles.
Darlene wheezed, blood spraying from her mouth. Hobart let out a breath, shook his head, and turned his horse to follow Rosa down the hillside. The mule brayed at them and then was silent.
“Were you going to kill them when you rode up there?” Rosa asked.
“I sure wasn’t going to talk that jasper out of his poke.”
“Are you going to give me half of the money you took from him?”
“No, Rosa. A third, for the boy.”
“You are a bastard, Ollie. You know that.”
“I know it,” he said.
The south platte was a ribbon of silver in the glaring sunlight. A hawk prowled the sky above it, sailing on an invisiblecurrent, its head moving slowly from side to side, eyes looking for any small movement. A pair of blackbirds rose from the grasses and gave chase, ragging at the hawk’s tail, diving and darting, batting their wings, avoiding the raptor’s talons.
Darlene turned over on her side, saw her son’s body so near she could reach out and touch him if she had the strength. The pain drove her down into herself as if a huge nail had been hammered through her chest. She could not move, but the blood was starting to clot. Every breath was a struggle, and there was fire in her lungs. One of them was slowly filling up with blood, a slow seep that she could not feel. Her eyes closed and she concentrated on life, not death.
But she could feel it coming, see its dark shape on the insideof her eyelids, feel it envelop her with soft, warm arms.
6
Dynamite didn’t like early morning any more than ben, his rider, did. Ever since John and Ben had left Fort Collins, well above sunup, Dynamite had been exploding.
“You might have grit in your saddle blanket,” John said right after Dynamite had tried to buck Ben off for the third time, fishtailing and snorting, coming down stiff-legged as if his legs were made out of broomsticks.
“No, I shook that blanket out, whopped it against the stall and everything else this mornin’, John. Dynamite’s just feelin’ his oats.”
“What’d you do, put chili peppers in his bin?”
“No, but oats is like fire to this horse. He gets some in his belly and old Dynamite’s fuses start hissing. He’ll settle down after he gets tired of trying to pitch me into the middle of next week.”
John laughed.
The sun was still basking in the darkness before dawn when they rode through LaPorte, north of Fort Collins, where the Cache la Poudre streams into the South Platte. A lamp burned in the trading post, but there were no signs of life. The prairie lay to the east of them, the Rocky Mountains to the right, all in shadow like some deserted landscape. They had spent the night in Fort Collins because John couldn’t track at night and both men were exhausted after their ordeal in Denver.John knew they had little chance of catching up with Hobartand he accepted that.
Now the eastern horizon began to pale. The light ate up the stars as it spread, and the sky turned a pale blue with not even the ghost of the moon as a reminder that there had been a night.
The sun rose above the horizon and drenched them with warmth. The snowy mountain peaks glistened like majestic monuments, so white John could not look at them for long. The chill seeped out of their bones. Dynamite had settled down and was trying to keep up with Gent’s ground-eating easy gait. To John, it was like sitting in a rocking chair riding that Missouri trotter. It made him feel close to his dead father, too, for Gent had been his pa’s horse.
They both heard the reports shortly after the sun had cleared the horizon.
“Pistols, I think,” John said.
“Hard to tell. So far away,” Ben said.
Then, they heard two more shots.
“Something’s up,” Ben said. “And it ain’t good. Nobody I know goes huntin’ with a pistol.”
“Two shots from the same gun. One was from a smaller caliber. Thirty-eight, maybe.”
“That third shot did sound a little funny.”
“Stay on the quick, Ben.”
They hadn’t seen a soul on the Cheyenne road all morning. Now it seemed as if there might be trouble ahead.
A few moments later, a hawk flew down the South Platte, throwing its winged shadow on the hillside. A pair of blackbirdsbroke off and flew back the other way. The hawk scree-screedand veered away from them with just an incline of its wings, banking toward the foothills, its tail lifting and tilting as well.
John listened, but heard no more shots. Not so much as a hoofbeat or a yell.
In fact, he thought, it was ominously quiet. A half hour later, he saw something in the distance, an animal of some sort.
“I see it, too,” Ben said, as if reading Savage’s thought.
“It’s not a deer,” John said, although he was not sure.
“Could be a mulie. Or an elk, maybe.”
“Down this low? Not an elk. Unless something chased it there.”
“Horse?” Ben said.
“Maybe. So much brush up there, it’s hard to tell.”
They rode closer. It was eerily quiet and John felt uneasy.
“You ride out on the plain, Ben,” Savage said. “I’ll come up on this flank. Might be a bushwhacker lying in wait up there. It’s just too damned quiet.”
“I’ll make a wide circle,” Ben said.
The animal had disappeared. Either it was feeding and had lowered its head, or it had lain down, John thought. He crossed the river and urged Gent up the slope. If it was a deer or elk, he reasoned, it would soon catch his wind and bolt out of the brush. If so, he would see it plain. But as Gent scrambled for footing and he tested the wind, the animal became even more enigmatic. Still no sign of it, but he did see the trace of a road higher up, stretching to the top of a hill and beyond.
He looked down, across the river, and saw Ben cutting his circle. By his reckoning, Ben ought to be coming close to where he would be opposite the place where they had seen the unidentified animal. John cut toward the road, figuring he was above the spot where they had seen the long ears and head of whatever it was on that brushy slope.
Something made John begin to tighten up inside. Some familiarmemory circled his mind, triggered by the morning sunshine,the smell of steamed dew rising in the air, the aroma of something else he couldn’t quite define. As he approached the animal, it lifted its head and he saw what it was: a mule. But that did not dispel John’s uneasiness. The mule appeared to be tied or in harness. It was out of place, he knew that, and his senses prickled as if ice water had been poured down his back.
He rode closer, cautious, one hand resting on the stock of his rifle, ready to jerk it from its scabbard. His boots were poised to jab the rowels of his spurs into Gent’s flanks and his left hand gripped the reins, ready to pull the bit tight in his hors
e’s mouth and twist him into a tight turn away from danger.
Then John saw a flap of colored material, something pale blue, like chambray, maybe, such as might be part of a man’s shirt. Closer still, and he saw the outline of a wagon, bundles of clothes inside, a lump on the seat, a shining on something black, like hair.
His stomach knotted up as Gent’s forelegs brought him onto a small knoll above the wagon. There, John saw what he hadn’t been seeing, what he hadn’t wanted to see, and out of the corners of his eyes, a rough, crude road that might have been hacked out by miners or woodcutters. And in the wagon, he saw lifeless bodies, bodies that flooded his brain with memories of the mining camp and the slaughter he and Ben had witnessed on just such a morning.
Dread crept into John’s mind as he rode closer, forcing himselfto look at what he knew he had to see. The lump on the front seat was a man. He was slumped over, unmoving, obviouslydead. In the back, he saw a young man on his back, his throat torn away, replaced by a grisly crimson flower that was turning black. Between the boy and the man was a woman, her black hair shining like a crow’s wing, glinting a shimmering jet obsidian in the sun, almost like a vibrant energy that set his nerves on edge. A wave of sadness washed over John like the tide that had gripped him when he saw the murdered body of his mother. No woman should have to die like that, he thought, so young, with hair like that, like a delicate Spanish fan made of black silk.
He looked away, down at Ben, who had stopped his horse opposite the mule and wagon, and now was looking up at him. John raised his hand and beckoned for him to ride up, not just sit there on Dynamite, gape-mouthed and puzzling over somethingneither of them would ever understand.
A slight breeze tugged at the man’s shirt and that was the hardest part for John. Seeing his clothes like that, encasing his dead body, and the boy’s hair. Invisible fingers of air tousling it. He choked at the sight. Something rose up in his throat and stuck there. And he thought about the young men in the miningcamp, their bloody bodies strewn everywhere like drowned sailors floated to shore from a shipwreck, all lifeless, gone forever, but their voices still sounding in his ears. It was like that, seeing the three people in the wagon, all dead, their lives snatched from them and only their clothing and their bodies to mark their passing, their abrupt stop on a desolate hillside in the shadow of the Rockies.