The Circuit Rider

by Dani Amore

  “Where’s Toby Raines?” she said.

  “Go to hell,” one of the men said. “Or come in, have a drink, and let us take turns with you.”

  The other two men laughed.

  “Trust me, the three of you combined wouldn’t be man enough for the job,” Bird said.

  The man who had done the talking stood up. The other two pushed their chairs away from the table.

  “You’ve got a mouth on you,” the standing one said. “I’d love to see you put it to good use.”

  He reached toward his pants, either to unbuckle or to make a grab for the gun stuck in his waistband. Either way, it didn’t matter to Bird. She drew her gun and shot him first in the crotch and then once in the center of his forehead.

  Neither man at the table had gone for their guns. But they looked at each other, came to an agreement, and tried to draw.

  Bird fired quickly, her thumbs working the hammers of her pistols with a ruthless efficiency.

  One of the men got off a shot, but it tore up wood splinters at Bird’s feet.

  She felt the blow before she heard the shot.

  It felt like a hammer hitting her on the side.

  She spun and dropped to a knee.

  A lasso swung from a man on a horse and tightened around her chest.

  Her eyes locked onto the man’s face.

  The narrow, razorlike line of a jaw.

  The twin black eyebrows, thin and pointed inward like daggers.

  Toby Raines.

  The shock of seeing him in person, after all these years, hit her like a second blow.

  She tried to aim her guns, but her arms were pinned to her sides and she shot low, the bullets kicking up dust on either side of Toby Raines’s horse.

  And then she was lifted from her feet.

  The rope burrowed into her chest and she crashed onto her back, knocking the wind from her lungs. She couldn’t breathe.

  And then Toby Raines whipped his horse and it shot forward, dragging Bird behind it.

  Fifty-One

  Mike Tower heard the shots as he approached the Silvertip, and he laid the quirt to his horse’s rear and kept right on going past the mine.

  He barreled around the corner and saw a man dragging something behind a horse.

  Within a sickening instant, he knew it was Bird.

  The man was too far away to get there in time, so he drew his Winchester from its scabbard, slid from his horse, and took careful aim at the man dragging Bird behind his horse.

  He fired and missed, but the man turned toward him.

  Tower fired again. This time, he saw the man flinch, and Tower knew he had at least winged him. The man loosened his rope and kicked his horse hard for the hills.

  Tower continued firing, but the man was low, and none of the shots found its target.

  Tower leaped back onto his horse and rode at full gallop to the bloody figure sprawled on the ground.

  He covered the distance fast, and by the time he got there the man had disappeared over the hill.

  Tower slid from the horse and rushed to Bird.

  She was covered with blood, and her shirt as well as most of her pants and one boot had been torn from her body.

  But she was alive.

  Tower rolled her onto her back.

  Her eyes opened, and she smiled at Tower.

  “Took you long enough,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Tower looked down and saw that she had no major wounds, no gunshots pouring blood.

  But then he saw the scars of the crude pentagram that had been carved into her chest.

  And Tower cursed at the God it had taken so long for him to believe in.

  Episode Four

  Fifty-Two

  The green of Colorado slowly gave way to the tans and browns of Nevada.

  Bird and Tower rode down from the mountains, through the high meadows crossed with game trails, to the flat, brown plains on the edge of the desert.

  They planned to skirt the outer rim of the Red Crescent Basin, eventually finding their way to Platteville, Nevada. From what they had been told, there was a small outpost there with not much more than a general store and a lonely train depot. But there would hopefully be enough for a quick resupply.

  Bird hefted her canteen. It was at least three-quarters full, about the same level as the whiskey in her bottle in the saddlebag. She eyed the sun, near its peak for the day.

  “It’s going to be hotter than hell today, Mr. Tower,” she said. “I apologize for mentioning your competitor’s headquarters.”

  Tower continued riding next to her, without responding. She thought the comment deserved some kind of response.

  “Something on your mind?” she said. “Usually you’re so damn talkative I can’t stand it.”

  Tower glanced at her. “Just wondering when you’ll share with me what’s on your mind,” he said. “You know, my job is to help people, including those I’m riding with.”

  Bird said nothing.

  She knew what he wanted to talk about, that he had seen the scars on her chest, the pattern drawn directly into her flesh.

  Bird figured Tower would want her to talk all about it, then somehow forgive. Well preacher or not, he could go straight to hell with that kind of thinking. What happened was between her and Toby Raines, and there would be no forgiving, no mercy. He hadn’t shown any back then, had he?

  She had an urge for whiskey, but she decided against it, as it wouldn’t be a good idea in this kind of heat. Tonight, she thought, when it cooled down, she would hit that bottle pretty hard.

  “Bird,” Tower said.

  He really wasn’t going to leave her alone about this, was he? The man had very little to say, unless it was to question her. Well, maybe she should just shoot him. Hell, no one would find his body out here.

  “Bird.”

  She kept her voice even. “Listen. For the last time, I’m not talking about it — ”

  “No, that’s not what I mean,” he said. He pointed ahead and to the west.

  “Looks like we’ve got some folks thinking about joining us.”

  Bird spotted the Indians along the far horizon, maybe twenty horses. It was tough to tell from this distance, but Bird knew this was Paiute country, with a few Shoshone thrown in, too. There were even Apache from Arizona, running from the army for fighting back against broken treaties and broken promises.

  She was definitely no expert, but she had gotten drunk with quite a few Indians over the years; they liked whiskey as much as she did. Her guess was that the newcomers were definitely Paiute.

  And if there were braves from different tribes riding together, that would most likely mean only one thing.

  A war party.

  Fifty-Three

  Tower’s saddle leather creaked as he turned to Bird. He had given the war party a long look, as well as the trail behind them.

  “We’ve got a few choices,” Tower said. “None of them very good.”

  “Let’s hear them,” Bird answered.

  “We can turn around and go back the way we came, but we stayed just ahead of some bad weather, and going back over the mountains isn’t my idea of a good plan.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Or we can stand our ground, try to talk to them,” he said. “But we don’t really have much to trade with.”

  “Don’t even think about offering my whiskey,” she said.

  “Or we can take our chances out there,” Tower said, ignoring her.

  He gestured toward the bleak country to their west.

  Bird studied the Indians again. They were a little closer, and now there was no doubt about it; she recognized at least half a dozen Paiute.

  “A Paiute war party doesn’t do a lot of talking,” she said. “And that’s exactly what we’ve got up there.”

  “From what I hear, they’ve been raiding settlements all over the place. Seems they’re tired of talking,” Tower said. He hefted his canteen. “Half-full,” h
e said.

  “About the same with mine,” Bird said. She pointed west, toward the black desert that showed no signs of life.

  “What do you think about that?”

  Tower sighed.

  “I know it’s mostly a lava field, broken rock and desert for miles on end. It’s probably a quicker way through, but a lot of people have died out there with the same thought.”

  “Here’s how I see it, Mr. Tower,” Bird said. “If we try to talk to them and they aren’t in the mood for talking, we’re dead. But if we take off and head out there,” she said, pointing out toward the black lava desert, “there’s a chance they won’t bother with us. Too much work to chase us out there when there are easier pickings elsewhere.”

  She patted the neck of her Appaloosa. “So I vote to take our chances out there. Hell, if they don’t follow us, we can always turn around and come back.”

  Tower glanced back behind them, then up again at the Indians, who were slowly but steadily coming toward them.

  “I believe I agree with you,” he said.

  “You agree with me?” Bird said. “It’s a miracle. Write it down — maybe they’ll write about it in the next Bible. When are they coming out with a new one, anyway?”

  Tower didn’t answer. Instead, he turned his horse and headed down from the ledge that sloped into the edge of the lava desert.

  Fifty-Four

  Bird had ridden through places like this before. Years back, in southern Idaho, she had been drunk, gotten caught in a storm, and wandered around for a full day in a lava field that stretched as far as the eye could see.

  Luckily, she’d come across an outlaw on the run from a posse who knew the way out.

  The dangers in a lava desert were plenty. When volcanoes had spewed out the rivers of lava hundreds of thousands of years ago, they had done so haphazardly.

  There were pockets of lava rock as thin as paper, others hundreds of feet thick. There were literally bubbles of rock, nearly perfectly formed, that could break and reveal a chasm hundreds of feet deep.

  There was also the occasional oasis — sometimes as small as ten feet across — where grass grew and a tiny stream of springwater gurgled.

  Outlaws loved the fields for two reasons. One, it was very hard to track a horse, or a man for that matter, across bare rock. There were virtually no tracks, at best a slight disturbance in lava dust, that might reveal the presence of a human being.

  Second, in places where the rock had been broken, the edges were as sharp and jagged as knives. They could cut a horse’s legs to ribbons in no time. Same thing for a man forced to walk; a pair of leather boots could be shredded in hours.

  Bird let Tower take the lead, and she followed along behind.

  He had not asked any more questions of her. As they rode, the hours turning into more hours, the sun sinking and the cool chill of night enveloping them, she was thankful for his silence.

  As long shadows began to surround them, it became too dangerous for them to proceed. A wrong turn on the lava field, and a horse and its rider could fall twenty feet to their mutual deaths.

  No, Bird knew there was no reason to risk going any farther in the dark.

  They spotted an overhanging crop of rock, with a narrow vein of grass in a gap in the lava. They let the horses graze and threw down their bedrolls beneath the rock.

  “Are you sure you don’t want a drink?” Bird asked.

  Tower shook his head and leaned back against his saddle.

  “Here’s to our health,” she said and took a long drink from the bottle.

  She was tired but not sleepy. The scrapes and scratches on her body from being dragged by Toby Raines no longer stung. It was only the memory of being under his control once again that continued to burn.

  “So what did you do after the war?” she asked.

  Tower sighed.

  He hates to talk about himself, she thought. Well, that makes two of us.

  “My commanding officer in the army invited me to work for him in Saint Louis after the war.”

  Bird took another drink of whiskey. She had to be careful; it was easy to get dehydrated with only half a canteen of water.

  “And what kind of business did he have?”

  “A private detective agency.”

  “You were a Pinkerton?”

  “No, they’re in Chicago. But same idea.”

  “So how did you switch from a detective to — ”

  “Good night, Bird,” Tower interrupted with a little more force, enough to surprise her.

  Bird took one more drink of her whiskey and closed her eyes. Images of Toby Raines dragging her behind his horse taunted her. She awoke in what seemed like minutes, but the early sun had already crested the far horizon.

  She sat up and found it hard to believe it was morning already. Bird took a small sip of water from her canteen and got to her feet.

  Mike Tower was awake, standing, looking back toward the direction from which they’d come.

  Bird sensed something in the way he was looking at the horizon behind them.

  “What’s wrong?” she said.

  “The Paiute. They’re following us.”

  Bird spotted them, and hid her surprise at how close they were.

  “Looks like they didn’t stop to sleep.”

  Fifty-Five

  They had no choice but to move on. Their shelter for the night offered no protection in a gun battle; in fact, the rock overhang was a perfect place to feed bullets and let the ricochets do the work. Bird knew of some soldiers who had massacred a group of Indians who had made the unfortunate decision to make a rock cave the site of their last stand.

  It hadn’t worked out well for them; the crisscrossing bullets had cut them to shreds.

  This time, Bird took the lead, and she pushed it as fast as she could, at times her heart racing, as she took chances on lava that looked questionable.

  Only once did rock crack beneath her horse’s hooves, but it had only been a single stone and not a thin sheaf of rock camouflaging a deep, deadly ravine.

  For most of the morning, Bird kept the pace as quick and steady as she could. Despite that, she could sense the Paiute warriors behind them. At times, she felt her shoulders tensing, and she realized that she was unconsciously worrying about a bullet or arrow piercing her back.

  The sun was nearly directly overhead when Bird saw that a steeply pitched slab of lava rock made going straight an impossible path, so she pointed her horse south and worked her way through a rough patch of jagged rock. The wall of rock was almost an optical illusion; only a slight disturbance in the rocky sand told Bird that an animal had used this path, probably a little-known game trail.

  The path between the two rock walls was narrow, and there was just enough room for the Appaloosa. She was worried that it might not lead to a way out, and she had no idea how they would turn around.

  “Where do you think this leads?” Tower said from behind her.

  “I won’t even pretend to know,” Bird said. “I can tell you, the Paiute would love to catch us here. It would be awfully easy for them to cut us down.”

  Just when the first tinges of claustrophobia began to prick at Bird’s mind, the trail widened out, the rock walls fell away, and Bird stumbled into one of the largest oases she had ever seen.

  And they weren’t the first people to discover it, because, suddenly, she and Mike Tower were no longer alone.

  A group of a half-dozen armed men stood with their rifles pointing directly at Bird.

  Tower stopped his horse next to her.

  Bird looked at the men.

  “Got any whiskey?” she said.

  Fifty-Six

  The standoff was over as quickly as it started.

  Bird and Tower held up their hands, and most of the men lowered their rifles.

  “Did we all take a wrong turn somewhere?” Bird said to the apparent leader, a burly older man with a full beard and a barrel chest.

  They swung down from their h
orses and approached the men.

  The man thrust out his hand and Tower shook it. He tipped his hat to Bird.

  “Name’s Wilson,” he said. “Tyler Wilson. And, no, we most certainly did not take a wrong turn. I was about to ask you the same thing!”

  The men weren’t there alone. Once they realized Bird and Tower meant them no harm, women and children emerged from behind a series of vertical thrusts of lava that had formed yet another hidden wall.

  “Sir, we aren’t going to lie to you,” Tower said, after they had introduced themselves. “We’ve got a Paiute war party hot on our heels.”

  Wilson nodded. “Oh, we know all about them, Preacher. We were right on course for Platteville until a small group of folks came upon us — they were riding hell-for-leather. Told us there’d been a damn massacre at Platteville. Paiute killed most of the town. They were heading for the mountains, but with these young ones, we had to take cover out here.”

  Bird glanced at the group. There were a half-dozen men, four or five women, and a little less than a dozen children. There were horses and two small wagons.

  “How’d you get those wagons in here?” Bird said.

  Wilson pointed out another man, a cadaverously thin man with a thick black beard. “Hopkins knows these lava fields like the back of his hand, don’t ask me why,” Wilson said. “Maybe from some previous occupation of his that he has now turned his back on.”

  Hopkins gave Bird a shy smile and shrugged his waferlike shoulders.

  “Wasn’t but a few minutes after we’d been warned that these damned renegade Indians on the warpath started chasing us,” Wilson said. “They nearly caught up to us before we could even make it in here!” He spat out a stream of tobacco juice. “We had no choice but to head for this godforsaken place.”

  “Sounds like our story,” Tower said. “In fact, we might have gotten in between you and your Indians. I’m afraid we may have led them right to you.”