Oh, well—he’d sleep once he was free of these killers, who would surely kill him after they reached Martín’s cabin and found out that he, Drago, had lied about stowing the money beneath the kitchen floor.
Feigning disgruntlement over having to play the kitchen help to this group, most of whom he’d once led, Boomer threw his blankets aside, rose with a heavy grunt, and dragged his shackled feet over to where Keneally lay against his saddle between Quiet Ed, who had not yet stirred, and the lizard-skinned, yellow-eyed Curly Ben Williamson, who lay belly up and grinning at the gang’s disgraced leader.
The young wolves were thoroughly enjoying their downtrodden former alpha male’s humiliation. However, they and Drago himself had known he’d mostly been a figurehead. He’d commanded respect because of his age and his reputation, but Keneally had for over a year been the gang’s true leader before they’d all gotten together and relegated Drago to holding the horses’ reins while the others pulled the holdups.
Drago had sensed that the green-eyed killer had been about to either kick him out of the group entirely or, more likely, kill him just before Drago had killed Rufus Teagarden and George White and ridden off with the loot they’d stolen from the bank in Stove Prairie.
Now Drago gave another snarl of feigned indignity and knelt down by the gang’s new leader. Keneally smiled at the older man jeeringly as he dug the keys, which he’d taken from Spurr Morgan’s coat pocket, out of his boot and removed Drago’s handcuffs.
When he’d removed the clevis pin from the shackles, freeing Drago’s ankles, Drago felt his heart quicken. Keneally narrowed an eye at him, as though reading his mind.
“Stay close, now. Don’t try to run, old man. You know you can’t get far, and I’d hate to have to drill such a notorious old outlaw between his shoulders.”
Drago drew a ragged breath, scowling down at Keneally, and rose and stepped into his boots. His breath frosted in the chill air around his head as he pulled his wolf coat on and donned his hat. He glanced around at the lumpy shapes of the other gang members, most still snoring beneath their army blankets or ragged quilts.
Keneally lay against his saddle, hands behind his head, grinning, enjoying the older man’s humiliation. He seemed the only one awake now, as Williamson had closed his eyes, his belly rising and falling slowly, regularly. Quiet Ed was only quiet when awake. Sleeping, he snored as loudly as a hibernating grizzly.
Drago spat and raked his eye across the blanketed mounds once more, feeling the fires of fury kindle in him as he remembered Greta. Saw her running, trying to get away from them while they pulled at her clothes, stripped her naked. Then she’d screamed more shrilly as, one by one, they’d taken the poor girl on the hillside west of the camp . . .
Boomer muttered angrily under his breath. He drew air into his lungs, and got himself settled down. He wanted to kill these men, or at least as many as he could before they killed him, but that would have to wait.
First, he had to get himself free . . .
He looked around the clearing along the side of the hill they’d camped on, above the Crow River that ran along the hill’s base, in the lower slopes of the Mummy Range. There’d been a wildfire through here several years ago, so most of the trees were dead and black, and there was lots of down wood strewn around boulders.
Just beyond the trees west of the camp—forty or so yards away—a canyon dropped off sharply toward the river.
Drago gathered a couple of armloads of wood nearest the camp first, and piled the wood near the fire ring. He started away for one more load of wood, and his heart increased its pace even more. As he walked toward the trees up the slope beyond him, he stared through the shadowy aspens at the lip of the canyon. He couldn’t see the river from here, of course, but he’d seen it last night when he’d been off gathering wood at the top of the slope.
The night-dark water, slick with the salmon light of the autumn moon, had slithered along the bottom of the canyon about thirty feet below the ridge.
Not such a hard drop into water. At least, it wouldn’t have been a few years ago.
Still, at sixty years old, Drago could weather it. He still had some sinew and muscle holding his old bones together. And he could swim. The only thing he wasn’t sure about was how deep the river was this time of year, and how many rocks might impede its—and his—path. He’d feel like a damn fool if he made his escape only to be brained by a river rock.
He glanced over his shoulder. He couldn’t tell from this distance in the hazy, dawn light, but he thought Keneally might have fallen back asleep.
A hard, throbbing pulse drummed in the old outlaw’s temples.
To make it look good, in case Keneally was watching from beneath his hat brim, he stopped to pick up a charred deadfall from where it leaned against a fallen fir. He cradled the two branches in his left arm. He continued walking at a slant up the slope, wending through the trees, his boots crunching the short grass and fallen leaves.
He stooped to pick up another branch. He added it to the two in his arm. And then he reached the crest of the hill. He looked over the lip and into the dark water below.
It swirled gently around a couple of barrel-sized rocks. It was dark and cold-looking. It would probably stop Drago’s heart the moment his boots broke the surface. If not, he might hit bottom and snap his spine. But the darkness of the water told him it was deep enough that he wouldn’t hit bottom.
His mouth was dry. His knees trembled slightly. His heart hammered in his ears.
He almost laughed at his trepidation. What the hell was he worried about? If he didn’t die here on his own terms, he’d died tomorrow when he led the gang to Martín’s cabin in the northern apron slopes of the Never Summers, in the shadow of Crow Mountain.
When they discovered that not only was the money not hidden beneath the floorboards but that there were not even any floorboards in the old outlaw Martín de Segura’s ancient cabin, where they’d holed up once to cool their heels two years ago after robbing a payroll shipment outside Laramie, they’d probably gut-shoot Drago and toss his slow-dying carcass to the wolves in the nearest ravine.
He glanced a cautious look over his left shoulder. He drew a short, sharp breath through his nose, and hardened his jaws.
His heart hammered like a locomotive’s pistons.
Curly Ben Williamson was strolling toward him, grinning. The yellow-eyed killer in a long, ratty, deerskin duster over a sheepskin vest was thirty yards away, just now entering the trees at the top of the slope, and closing slowly. He had his pale thumbs hooked behind his double cartridge belts. His cut-down holsters were thonged low on his slender thighs clad in black denim, the cuffs of which were stuffed into the tops of his black Cheyenne boots.
“You’ll never make it, old-timer. You’ll hit one o’ them rocks. That’d be a bad way to go out, after all you been through.” Williamson spoke in a soft, cold voice though he continued to smile, showing the even line of his teeth between his thin, pink lips.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I seen you pondering that stream last night. You didn’t think I was watching, but I was.” Williamson kept coming, pausing to nonchalantly kick a rock, as though he were taking a slow, dawn walk to gather his thoughts.
“Shit,” Drago said, feeling water pool in his belly as Curly Ben stepped up beside him and dropped his chin to stare down into the shallow canyon. “Kid, you give me too much credit.”
“Yeah, well, I gave you credit for not double-crossin’ us, too. Killin’ two of your loyal partners and makin’ off with nearly fifty thousand in scrip and specie.”
Williamson narrowed a yellow eye at the old man beneath the brim of his black hat. “I didn’t think you’d do such a corkheaded thing as that, too. And then be stupid enough to get caught by some bounty hunter while you was throwin’ the wood to some whore in Idaville.”
He s
hook his head. “You’re old and washed up. Too many miles in the saddle. Too many cases of clap. Too much whiskey and too much tobacco. Too many times you’d been throwed on your head. Ah, shit—just too many years, Boomer.”
Williamson laughed softly, keeping his mouth closed. He didn’t laugh long. When he saw the chunk of wood arcing toward his head, his eyes nearly popped out of their sockets. He opened his mouth and raised his arm to shield himself too late.
Thunk!
The branch Boomer was wielding smashed across Curly Ben’s left temple, flattening his hat brim against his forehead.
Williamson screamed and flew backward, stumbling.
Gritting his teeth, hatred flaring in his lone eye, Drago walked after him. The old outlaw smashed the branch across Williamson’s left cheek.
Curly Ben cursed and tried to grab one of his pistols from its holster but then he was sent stumbling back again when Drago hammered his right jaw on the backswing, cracking the branch in two, the half not in his hand winging off through the trees.
One of the other outlaws shouted. As Curly Ben rolled up against the base of an aspen, squalling, his face and head bloody, Drago cast a quick look toward the camp.
Three of the other men, including Keneally, were scrambling out of their bedrolls, yelling and reaching for their guns, one climbing into his boots and grabbing his Winchester. Drago turned to the lip of the canyon. He stared down at the water. It looked like oil, its skin dappled gray in the gradually strengthening light.
Drago stepped off the ridge into thin air, stretching his arms out to both sides. As his body dropped, his heart leapt into his throat. He drew a deep breath and stopped when his boots hit the water.
He broke through the surface and jetted toward the bottom as the current instantly grabbed him and swept him downstream. The water ensconced him like a frozen hand, squeezing. His heart was a hammering war drum. He could feel it pounding in his feet as well as his head.
A rock slammed into his left knee but then the sweeping current thrust him back to the surface, and his head broke through the frigid skin to cold air. He gasped, drawing a deep breath, but he sucked water into his lungs, too, and he started coughing while at the same time trying to breathe.
He wondered if Keneally’s men were shooting at him from the ridge but he was too busy trying to keep his head above water to look upstream, though he doubted the current would even let him.
The canyon dropped quickly. The water moved faster, thrashing boulders jutting out from both canyon walls. Drago tried to give himself over to the water and not fight it—because it was one battle he could not win—though he knew he couldn’t stay in the cold stream long without it jellying his blood and drowning him.
There wasn’t must use in trying to swim. The fast-moving current kept his head above water. Drago held his arms above his head to cushion himself from the rocks the current dashed him against.
There was another, short drop. And then Drago stared ahead along the stream that was curving through dark pines and jagged pinnacles of rock. The stream widened slightly and became a flat sheet of dark ink. Fifty yards ahead lay what appeared a beaver dam—a low, jagged, black ridge across the stream.
The whiteness beyond the dam was the water splashing up from its base.
Shit, the old outlaw thought. I hope it ain’t a very steep drop because I’m almost done for the way it is.
He let the stream carry him however it wanted. There was no fighting it. Sometimes a man had to throw himself into the turmoil. He hardened his jaws and sort of dog-paddled, just keeping his head above the water that wasn’t as cold as it had looked from the ridge. But it was cold enough.
The beaver dam swept toward him quickly. He felt the woven branches gouging him, the water pushing him relentlessly against them. They caught his clothes and ripped them and pinched and jabbed his skin.
He groaned and yelped and cursed.
Suddenly he was atop the ridge and about to roll on over when he glimpsed a long, black witch’s finger poking out from the left bank. The tree that had been torn out of the bank lay four feet in front of him, just on the other side of the dam, two feet above his head.
Drago screamed as he ground his boots into the dam and threw himself straight up in the air. His chest rammed against the stout branch. He screamed again, cursed, lifted his chin, felt the cords stick out from his neck as he summoned every ounce of his strength to his arms and shoulders.
He wasn’t sure if the cracking sound he heard was the branch or his ribs, but by god, he held onto the branch just the same. He wasn’t about to give himself back to the monster stream that would swallow him now for sure and spit him out dead.
“Too many years, huh?” he muttered against the hammering pain in his chest, laughing wildly, insanely, hearing his laughter echo off the near ridges. He remembered how he’d left the yellow-eyed, lizard-skinned killer from Texas battered and bloody atop the ridge.
“We’ll see about that, Curly Ben!”
TWENTY-ONE
Spurr reined Cochise to a stop in a narrow canyon, scowling in befuddlement.
He stared ahead along the main trail he’d been following, which angled around a bend and out of sight behind a jutting stone belly of rock sheathed in crimson sumacs and chokecherry shrubs. Along the base of the rock, a freshet ran. It was littered with yellow aspen leaves and marked with deer, raccoon, and rabbit prints. But no horse prints.
Spurr swung his gaze left to stare up a narrow, steep trace that forked off the main trail to climb through aspens and scattered firs toward a hidden ridge. No prints along that trail, either. At least, none that he could see from his vantage.
“What is it?” Greta asked, sitting her paint directly behind Cochise.
“No tracks, Greta. The rain last night, this morning wiped ’em out.”
“You said you were finding some.”
“Part of some . . . a couple miles back. They done ran out and I don’t even know if the gang came this way. They mighta swung south or they mighta swung north. At this point, we’re ridin’ blind.”
Greta heeled her mare up beside Spurr. She wore her scarf over her ears. Her eyes were angry, accusing. “You just want to give up, don’t you?”
“I don’t see much point in—”
Spurr heard something on the trail that rose toward the ridge. Spurr shuttled his gaze up through the trees. It had sounded like a man’s voice but he could no longer hear the sound above the breeze-rattling leaves and creaking branches.
“Someone’s up there,” Greta said, staring up the trail.
“I’m gonna check it out. You stay here.”
“Be careful.”
Spurr muttered a curse and put Cochise up the steep trail, the saddle squawking beneath him and sliding back toward the roan’s broad rump. As the horse clomped along the muddy path, Spurr stared through the gray-purple shadows beneath the forest canopy, toward the sky capping the ridge about a hundred yards away.
What the hell was he going to do if he ran into Drago’s old bunch? He had one old six-shooter and the two-shot derringer. He supposed he could spit on them.
He wagged his head, chuffed angrily, and held the reins up close to his chest as Cochise turned along the switchbacking trail. Beneath the rattling of the leaves and the thuds of his own horse’s hooves, he heard the voice again.
A man’s voice. It seemed to be growing slightly louder.
A mule brayed.
Cochise twitched his ears.
Spurr slid his Schofield from his holster and held the gun against his right thigh, gloved thumb on the hammer. As Cochise continued climbing toward a jutting pinnacle of gray rock as large as two small cabins, the voice continued to grow louder. It sounded like two men riding along, conversing.
As he approached the thumb of gray rock, Spurr realized he was hearing only one man. One man conversing
with who . . . ?
“. . . I says to her, what makes you think I’ll continue to put up with such blackhearted, twisted doin’s, Adelaide? You think I got no spine a-tall? You think I’m so soft on womenfolk I won’t lift a boot to your backside, next time I see you with that no-account, Henry Philpot? Well, if you do, then you got another think . . .”
Thirty yards up the slope from Spurr, the man stopped the mule he was riding and widened his eyes in shock at seeing another rider on this lonely mountain trail.
“Tarnation!” he said, reaching back for the old rifle in his saddle boot.
“Keep it holstered, old-timer!” Spurr had stopped Cochise at one end of the large rock rising now on his right. “I ain’t Henry Philpot.”
He booted Cochise on up the trail. The mule brayed raucously, apparently not used to seeing strangers way out here. Spurr could feel Cochise tighten his muscles uneasily beneath the saddle. The man on the mule sat staring at Spurr slantways, as if one eye was better than the other.
He was a stocky old man with a curly, gray beard and washed-out blue eyes beneath the brim of his felt, bullet-crowned, black hat. His skin was weathered a deep tan, and it sagged on his cheekbones, like stained parchment. He wore a sheepskin poncho and patched canvas trousers.
“Spurr Morgan,” the old lawman said when he’d stopped Cochise in front of the stranger’s mule.
“Andrew Jackson Lowry,” the old man said, keeping his gruff, skeptical glance on Spurr, knitting his coarse gray brows over the bridge of his nose. “Spurr Morgan . . . where have I heard—?”
“Never mind,” Spurr said. “You ain’t seen a gang runnin’ off its leash out here, have you?”
“You’re a U.S. marshal. Now I remember where I heard of you. Key-rist—you’re still kickin’?”
“Will you just answer the consarned question?”
“I seen you once in Santa Fe. Why, your hair was all brown back then, an’ so was your beard, and you was roarin’ drunk carryin’ one girl up the stairs over a shoulder with one more under your arm!” The old man guffawed.
The Old Wolves Page 16