Lone Star 01

by Ellis, Wesley

  “Forgive me ... forgive me ...” Daphne murmured crushing her lips against his mouth before he could respond, then pulling away as abruptly as she’d clung. “You must think terribly of me, Ki, and I don’t blame you. But, oh, I wanted you ... needed you ... I still do ...”

  A shaft of waning sunlight filtered through a crack in the wall, illuminating her face under him, and revealing a smile that was sad, and yet warm and tender. Ki wanted to tell her now that he didn’t think less of her, only of himself for having given in to the risk of being caught like this. And to tell the truth, he didn’t even care much about that. Their coupling somehow seemed natural, even though the circumstances were unnatural; their joining had served to release their dangerously pent-up emotions.

  But Ki was a fighter, not a poet. He found it impossible to voice what he only dimly perceived in his instinctive reaction to her sensuality. He drew her to him instead, answering her fears in his own way, by hungrily kissing the smoothness of her lips, her neck, the swelling nipples of her breasts.

  “Ki ... Ki ...” Daphne cried, while her naked flesh began to tingle with renewed excitement. Tears blurred her eyes, and her voice was thick with desire and fright. “Don’t leave me, don’t ...”

  “I won‘t,” he assured her as he tongued one nipple.

  “Take me with you. Please, take me away from here.”

  “If I can.”

  “And don’t die for me, Ki, live for me ...”

  “I’ll keep living ... living as I am now.”

  And he was alive, he had to admit wryly. He could feel himself harden within her, swelling into stiff, reinvigorated passion. He tentatively thrust deeper into her.

  Daphne gasped with delight. “You can’t ...!”

  “I am,” Ki chuckled throatily. “Hai Ti Chên.”

  “‘Needle at Sea Bottom,’ it is indeed,” she sighed, arching and writhing underneath him—then she suddenly screamed, freezing rigid.

  Ki twisted his head sideways to see what had shocked her into mortal terror. And he just kept on twisting, withdrawing from Daphne and swiveling around in an upright crouch, readying to strike.

  The shed door was open. Not by very much, but enough to admit Volpes. “I thought I heard that squawk of yours,” he snarled at Daphne, stepping closer as she scuttled into an almost fetal position. “So I was real quiet about unlocking and sliding the chain loose, and I’m glad I was. But shit! I could’ve fired a cannon off in here and not disturbed you, the way you were bucking and snorting!”

  “I—I’m sorry,” she whined. “I’ll never do—”

  “You’re right, you won’t.” Volpes loomed menacingly over her; and Ki, who’d been cursing himself for being as blindly preoccupied as Daphne, made a motion to stop Volpes from touching the girl. Volpes, pivoting and drawing his pistol, yelled out, “Boys!”

  The door swung wider and three more men rushed in, grinning rapaciously and bristling with revolvers. Ki tensed to take them on too, but then thought better of it; Volpes now had his pistol aimed at Daphne, and he looked ready to shoot her at the slightest provocation.

  “No, I wasn’t ignoring you,” Volpes told Ki with a sideways glare. “I was saving you. Killed one of my men, I hear. Just bashed his head in. And now you’ve been dipping your wick in my woman. You’ve got brass balls, boy.” He glanced at his men then, ordering, “This chink so much as breathes, blow those balls off.”

  There was a chorus of lewd snickers, while the girl huddled naked and cringing.

  Volpes, concentrating on Daphne again, shouted, “Get up, you slut!” And when she didn‘t, he holstered his revolver and wrapped his hand in her hair, whipping her upright. “You fuckin’ li’l whore!” With his other hand, he smashed a brutal fist to her jaw, and she sagged limply, still held standing by her hair.

  Volpes dragged her to the nearest two men. “Take her out,” he said contemptuously, dropping her into their eager arms. “You know where—same place I’m taking this here squint-eyed bastard.”

  Volpes palmed his revolver again and, with the third man, marched Ki outside, a few steps behind the two who were carrying Daphne. Down along the side of the cabin they went, and openly across the clearing. Daphne had begun to regain her senses by now, groggily staggering between the two men, whimpering as they fondled her breasts and fingered her loins, still damp from Ki’s secretions.

  The clearing lay bleak under an overcast sky, cooled by a leaden drizzle and shadowed by the advance of evening. Only ten or so rustlers were out of their shacks, most of them milling about the fire to warm themselves. Whey they glimpsed Daphne and Ki being paraded naked past them, their first reaction was one of astonishment. But when they saw how the two nude prisoners were being mauled and manhandled, they quickly began jeering and hooting obscenities.

  “Get an eyeful now, fellas,” Volpes yelled back, “‘cause this’ll be the last you’ll be seeing of ’em!” Then, jabbing Ki in the spine with the muzzle of his revolver, he said in a lower but nastier voice, “Ryker’ll fart a blue streak when he finds out. But I’ll just tell him you were too tricky to let run around loose.”

  They entered the scrub at the other side of the clearing, where thorny vines and briars scraped Ki’s bare legs as he was prodded up a rocky defile. He walked without giving resistance, without showing any defiance, while his mind worked swiftly to figure out when and where to make his stand. But mainly he walked feeling sadness for Daphne and bitterness toward himself. The gleam in Volpes’s eyes was of pure malicious hatred—the implacably murderous kind that Daphne had warned him Volpes would feel—and that now was directed against them both. Yet Ki understood this kind of hatred, and in a sense he could not blame Volpes for it. In fact, he held a certain rueful respect for it.

  Fifty yards from the clearing, Volpes called a halt in a wide spot of the defile. The ground was relatively soft here, a bit sandy and fit only for grass and stubby weeds—and for three oblong mounds of earth, just beginning to sprout fresh growth.

  A rusty shovel was stuck like a grave marker at the end of one of the mounds. Volpes crossed over; still covering Ki with his revolver, and with his free hand he wriggled the shovel loose.

  “Here,” he ordered, handing Ki the shovel. “Now dig.”

  Chapter 15

  Ki took the shovel and rubbed his hands along its rough wooden handle. He considered it in terms of a weapon; and then he wondered about the three victims already buried here, who they’d been and if they’d thought the same thing about the shovel while digging their own graves.

  “Go on, start digging,” Volpes snapped. “Right where you’re standing will do fine, I reckon.”

  Ki glanced fleetingly at Daphne, who still needed to be held upright, her face a mask of mute terror. Then he began to dig. Under the thin top layer of soil, the shovel struck clay pan, and his digging became more difficult. The evening lengthened; Ki’s naked chest and back soon became beaded with sweat, which rivuleted down his flesh and mixed with the drizzly rain. By the end of an hour, he had gouged a three-by-six pit to the depth of a foot.

  “Keep digging,” Volpes growled. “But I’ll let you off easy. You don’t have to dig two holes, just make yours double-wide.”

  The two men flanking Daphne chuckled snidely; they were smugly relaxed after an hour of waiting, and Daphne was giving them no trouble. She was slumped in despair between them, speechless and glassy-eyed with her mounting horror. The third man was leaning against a boulder directly across the pit from Ki, holding his pistol lazily in his lap and appearing to be bored stiff. Volpes was a couple of yards to the near side of the man, facing Ki as alertly as ever, keeping his revolver leveled and taking no chances that his prisoner might attempt a break.

  Ki continued digging. When the dual grave was a foot deeper and wider, he was positive he and Daphne would be shot firing-squad style and dumped into it, to be covered over and never found again. Whatever he was going to do, he’d have to do in the next few seconds.

  “Enough
digging,” Volpes said suddenly, as if reading Ki’s thoughts. “Okay, boys, bring the bitch over next to him.”

  The two hauled Daphne closer, while the other man, now holding his pistol firmly, rose and moved beside Volpes. Daphne was now mewing and writhing feebly, and when Ki said to her sharply, “Tao Nien Hou,” he couldn’t be sure whether she was nodding with understanding, or merely shuddering with mind-numbing dread. But it was too late to repeat; it had either sunk in or not, and if not, they were both virtually dead. Volpes and the man beside him were foolishly close together, but that still left Ki’s back exposed to the two men holding Daphne.

  “That’s it,” Volpes was snarling in response to Ki’s words, “Say your yaller prayers.” And he thumbed back the hammer...

  And Ki dove across the pit, gripping the shovel lengthwise by its handle. A thunderous flash exploded before him, the heavy .45 slug whispering past his ear as it sped harmlessly into the woods. Before Volpes could trigger again, before the man beside him could fire his own pistol, Ki had leaped the short space and flattened Volpes with a combination of shovel to the face and flying kick to the chest. The wooden handle smashed between Volpes’s upper lip and nostrils with a driving upward thrust, shattering his nose and spearing shards of bone and cartilage into his brain. This, while Ki’s driving feet were crushing his chest, snapping ribs into his lungs and rupturing his stomach and kidneys.

  Volpes was dead before he hit the ground, and Ki was attacking the other man. He seemed to pivot in midair, using the shovel again to swipe the man’s gun-wrist with a lightning sideways chop, and all in the same motion, as the pistol dropped and discharged, he added a thumb-jab to the man’s neck. The man began wilting, his brain bursting from the eruptive pressure on his carotid artery. Lurching, spinning, dying, he fell backward into the open pit.

  Again Ki swiveled, bracing himself against the expected fusillade of bullets from the men behind him. But Daphne had heard him, had understood, and with courage born of hope and desperation, had reacted the instant he’d sprung into action.

  She had been forced to the edge of the grave by the man on her right, who was pulling her by the wrist, and the man on her left, who had a grip on her elbow. In response to Ki’s barked command, she had applied Tao Nien Hou—the T‘ai-chi maneuver that translates as “Step Back to Repulse the Monkey.” She simply let her left elbow relax, dropping it into the man’s grip—which, by removing all resistance, threw him immediately off balance, causing him to stumble. At the same moment, she placed all her weight in her left leg, extending her right palm in a forward thrust to the chest of the man holding her wrist. He had been pulling her, so the last thing he expected was for that hand suddenly to come toward him with lightning speed, as it now did. He also stumbled, and let go of her wrist.

  Confused, the two men pounced for her again. Daphne barely had time to ward off one by striking his face with her left palm, when the other closed with a bear hug. She evaded his right arm by pushing it aside with her left forearm, and then, swiftly following through with the Shih Tz Shou or “Cross Hands” movement, she simultaneously stabbed her right hand forward over her left forearm, her extended fingers rupturing the man’s trachea just below the thyroid gland. The man clawed at his neck, strangling ...

  But his partner, swearing, was bearing down on Daphne with his Colt .44-40, squeezing the trigger before she could turn ...

  And Ki came launching across the pit again in a tomoenage whirl, caroming into him, sending the man sprawling on his back. Desperately the man tried straightening, aiming the pistol he still gripped tenaciously in his fist. Ki feinted with a kick, as if to knock the pistol away, and the man responded as Ki anticipated, rolling back to gain more space. Half through his roll and facedown, the man suddenly felt Ki jump on his back, and then he felt excruciating pain, and then nothing, as Ki grabbed both his ankles and pulled violently up and backward. A scream, a dull cracking noise, and the man died, his back broken and his spinal cord severed.

  Daphne rushed to Ki, almost collapsing with relief into his comforting arms. “Oh, I was so terrified,” she whimpered, clinging tightly to him.

  “You did beautifully,” Ki soothed her, cradling her head to his chest. “You’re a little rusty with your timing, but you did just fine.”

  “I know. I should practice more. My father would be ashamed.” She drew away then, her eyes bright disks of fear and excitement. “Ki, we’ve got to get out of here, and fast!”

  Before Ki could answer, other voices starting filtering from the clearing:

  “Boss?”

  “Hey, you all right?”

  “Boss, what’s going on there?”

  Then came the noise of boots approaching through the brush.

  A low word came from Daphne’s lips. Ki touched her to warn her that silence was necessary, holding on to her right arm as he guided her out of the defile and into the sheltering woods. But he was aware that she was right. The very compactness of the pocket would make any possible refuge out of the question for long. Daylight would, of course, make them easy game for the remaining rustlers.

  “Crap, looky here!”

  “They got the boss!”

  “They got everyone!”

  Ki dropped low to the ground, Daphne stretching close beside him. “If we can, we should circle back to the shed,” he whispered in her ear, “and try for our clothes. What there is of them.”

  “Goddammit, they’ve escaped!”

  “Where?”

  “They can’t have gone far. They gotta still be in here someplace, so let’s block the hole before they can get out it.”

  “Yeah, four of us can do that.”

  “Me an’ Clyde, we’ll stake out that shed.”

  “Good idea. Some of you help me build up the fire so we can see ‘em, and then let’s spread out, track ’em down.”

  So much for getting out the simple way, Ki thought glumly, or for getting back to the shed for their clothes. “We’d better find a good place to hide,” he said to Daphne.

  In a crouching run, they wormed through the low scrub and trees toward the nearest slope of the pocket, ducking before they reached it and lying down prone, motionless, as four men trampled past, heading for the entrance hole.

  The campfire was flaring briskly now, as kindling, brush, and tree limbs were tossed on it. Across the pocket, Ki and Daphne reached the steep, rocky wall, anxiously watching the growing flames brighten the encroaching night darkness. They moved along the slope, exploring the stone with their hands and bare feet, hoping, praying to locate enough rubble to hide in. The light was growing in the pocket, casting reflections almost to the walls. In a few more minutes it would be light everywhere. They must be undercover by then.

  Cautiously they continued groping along. The pile played out, and for the space of a hundred feet, they encountered no more loose rock at all. Growing desperate, Ki went straight down the side wall and around to the one supporting the land-bridge that concealed the pocket. Daphne kept close beside him, touching him occasionally as if for support. Nothing. Nothing at all. Still they moved on, hurrying more, running out of time.

  They almost bumped into a rough jumble of boulders that seemed to jut out of nowhere. Signaling Daphne to wait, Ki moved around it, searching its contours with his fingers. He came to a narrow crevice that angled in to the face of the wall like a wedge.

  “I think we might have found a hiding place,” he whispered to Daphne when he returned. “Maybe it won’t last long, but it’s something.”

  He also thought they must be so close to the land-bridge that any guard posted up on its rim would surely notice them when the fire rose full enough. That there would be a guard, or guards, was something Ki could almost certainly count on; Volpes couldn’t have lasted as long as he had, if he hadn’t taken elementary precautions like that. Yet by shifting some of the stones, Ki was able to fashion a place for them to lie flat. No part of the pile of stone was high, but it would conceal them from a distance.
>
  The rustlers were already divided up into teams, and were impatiently scouring the pocket from one end to the other. One group, reaching the exit that led through the land-bridge, called out, “Hey, Johnson! McCully! What’re you doin‘—sleepin’?”

  “Hell, no!” a loud bellow replied. “We’re right here on this side of the hole, and Winnie and Sam are on t‘other. A field mouse ain’t gonna get by us. What’s up? You lost ’em?”

  “Naw, we just ain’t found ‘em yet, is all.”

  “We’ll ride this pocket till we root ‘em out,” another of the group shouted, as the men turned and moved on through the brush.

  The roaring blaze from the campfire was strong enough now to illuminate the entire area, even high up the walls of the pocket. Hidden in the rocks, Ki kept surveying the slope they were against, curious about a line of blackness along it. A slight crown cast shadows far above it, but something lower down, not ten feet over their heads, also drew his close scrutiny.

  After a long study, Ki decided that what he was seeing was a fault line running up the wall, a thin slice of softer stone that had eroded, crumbling, forming the rubble they were lying in now, and leaving a depression in the otherwise sheer surface of the wall.

  Ki wondered if it could be climbed. Probably not, but on the other hand, they couldn’t stay where they were forever. A losing proposition, no matter how he chose. He chose to try.

  Touching Daphne on the shoulder, Ki slipped from his bentover crouch and began inching laborously ahead of her into the fault. She promptly, unquestioningly, followed his lead. Slowly they worked their way up the fault which was like a stovepipe cut lengthwise down the middle, bracing themselves against the thin sides of the depression with elbows and knees, exerting all their strength to retain a hold in what time-scalloped chinks they could find. They climbed and climbed, and then climbed some more, clawing with broken fingernails and tensed feet, realizing that if they should slip now, their height would guarantee a grisly death.

  A second bunch of riders trotted up, and Ki and Daphne froze while the men exchanged a few words with the four guarding the hole. Then one of them stretched in his saddle to yell out, “Tait!”