by Frank Leslie
Then Faith’s warmly familiar, reassuring voice yelled, “Yakima?”
“H-here,” he grunted, grinding his fingers into the root while feeling as though his swollen knuckles were tearing slowly apart. “Here!”
Hooves clomped atop the ridge. A horse snorted. Faith’s voice again: “Where?”
Yakima gritted his teeth as his sweat-slick fingers slipped off the root. Wincing, he renewed his hold, trying to grab the root as close to the canyon wall as possible.
He sucked a breath and used it to call as loud as he could, “Down here!”
It was too dark for her to see him, so she’d have to locate him by his voice.
“Down here!” he yelled, louder. “Throw a ro—”
Without warning, the root snapped with a cracking pop. He shot straight down the canyon wall like a stone.
Chapter 4
“Christ!” Yakima rasped, gritting his teeth as he raked his hands along the canyon wall rolling up in front of him like a fast-flowing river seen from above—a blur of shadows and starlit rock and small tufts of wiry brown brush.
He kicked at the wall, desperately searching for another hold.
His moccasins nudged something and slipped on past it. His hands grabbed it—a lip of rock two or three inches wide.
Faith called from above, her voice so shrill with terror she sounded angry. “Yakima?”
He dug at the rock ledge with his fingers, sweat bathing his face and pasting his underwear top to his chest. He ground his teeth together and managed a wry, taut “Yes, dear?”
“Where are you?”
He kicked at the canyon wall, searching for any hold at all. “A few yards farther down from where I was a second ago.”
He wasn’t sure she’d heard him. He was expending so much energy trying to cling by his fingertips to the narrow rock ledge that he couldn’t work up much volume. His stomach sank as his aching fingers began to slip down the curving edge of rock. He continued kicking the wall with his boot toes but found nothing but a sheer rock surface.
“Uhnnnh . . .” He sucked a sharp, shallow breath, his fingers sliding with agonizing certainty down over the dull edge of the rock.
Something slapped his left shoulder and ear with a raking sting.
“Grab the rope!” Faith called.
He glanced to his left. A lariat sloped down the wall above and over his left shoulder. With a curse he channeled his waning strength into his right hand, dug those fingers more firmly into the rock.
He released his left hand from the ledge and grabbed the rope. When he had a hold, he grabbed it with his right hand, too, dropping another foot as his weight ate up the slack.
“Got it?” Faith called.
“Got it!”
Yakima got a good grip on the rope, clutching it as though to wring water from a towel, and when Faith led the horse forward—she probably had the lariat dallied around the saddle horn—he began to rise, walking slowly up the sheer stone wall.
His hands screeched from grappling with the root and the narrow ledge, and the rope burned into his chafed palms, but he hung on. It was a jerky ride, with the horse pulling, and slowly the ridge came into view above, stars winking beyond the arrow-shaped tops of the pines.
“Yakima?” Faith called again, when he was about ten feet from the ridge crest.
“Keep goin’.”
A couple rocks and some gravel broke loose beneath his feet, bouncing and rattling down the wall behind him as he neared the lip, walking up onto the crest as though gaining the top of a staircase.
“Okay.” The word rushed out of him on a feeble sigh.
Yakima slumped away from the canyon and dropped to his knees, breathing heavily and massaging his palms. Faith ran up from the far side of the ridge, where she’d stopped her horse in the pines, and dropped down beside him. She threw her arms around his neck and pressed her face to his sweaty cheek.
“Jesus, are you all right?”
Dropping onto his hands and knees, he sucked air as though he’d sprinted a hundred yards. “Little . . . worse . . . for the wear.”
Faith had a strong, pretty face with almond-shaped blue eyes framed by thick gold-blond hair. She could give you a look that could make you feel like a copper-riveted fool. “What were you doing down there, anyway?”
He chuckled, sat back on his heels, and drew a deep, long breath of cool, high-mountain air. “That damn broom tail’s even smarter than I thought he was. Smarter than me, I know that.”
“He ran you down there?”
Yakima’s face warmed with chagrin, and he shook his head as he glanced at the thumb of rock the bronc had hidden behind. “Bastard drygulched me.”
“He is smarter than you.”
Faith chuckled dryly, grabbed his hand, and leaned close to inspect his arm. His longhandle top was torn in strips across his chest and shoulders, and bloodied. Through his torn denims, his left knee looked like raw meat.
“We best get you back to the cabin and assess the damage, chump.”
“I figured Wolf was the only horse smart enough to pull something like that.” Yakima shook his head, still breathing hard and only now beginning to feel the cold sting of his cuts and bruises. “But that little dun could teach Wolf a thing or—”
A rifle shot cut the night. Before its echo had died, two more shots flatted out from the direction of the ranch. Horses whinnied, and there was the distant thunder of stomping hooves.
“That’s Kelly!” Faith said.
His heart quickening its pace again, Yakima lurched to his feet and stalked down the grade toward Faith’s mare, Crazy Ann, nickering quietly and staring in the direction of the ranch yard. “That damn bronc circled around just like I thought he would!”
“Careful!” Faith rasped, jogging toward him, kicking stones as she descended the ridge.
Yakima jerked the riata free of the apple—he’d retrieve it later—and swung up into the saddle that Faith must have thrown on Crazy Ann in a hurry, using only the rope halter the mare had already been wearing. He held out his left hand. Faith grabbed it, and he swung her easily up behind him and ground his heels against Crazy Ann’s ribs.
He put the horse down the slope through the black pine columns. Faith squeezed his arm and said in his ear, “Yakima, don’t run her—it’s too dark.”
Knowing the woman was right, he held the mare back to a jouncing jog until he hit the wagon trail, then swung the horse left and heeled her into a gallop. The trail rose and fell over the fir-studded knobs and Yakima peered ahead, toward the ranch sitting at the base of Bailey Peak, dark and silent beneath the stars.
There was no more gunfire, and he was relieved not to hear the cacophony of rumbling hooves. All he needed was for the mares to break out of the corral and shadow that crazy bronc to hell and back. Wolf would no doubt do the same, as the corral hadn’t been built that could hold the stallion when his blood was up—and nothing got his blood up more than competition for his mares.
As Yakima and Faith approached the ranch yard, the half-breed raked his gaze this way and that, glad to find the horses still milling within both corrals. A silhouetted human figure sat atop the mares’ corral, near the rails partitioning that corral off from Wolf’s. A pinprick of light showed, and then Yakima caught a whiff of tobacco smoke.
“Thank God,” Faith said as the half-breed turned the mare toward the corrals. “They’re all here.”
Yakima drew the mare up to her brother. Kelly was smoking a quirley atop the corral while scratching Wolf’s ears as the black stallion held his head near the kid, who, at nineteen years old, was three years younger than his sister and, like his sister, had a natural flare for horses.
Yakima felt lucky to have Kelly kicking around the ranch, helping out until he could decide where he wanted to go and what he wanted to do with his life. The boy’s time in the Mexican prison, where he’d been held by a rogue rurale captain on trumped-up charges, had taken a toll on him mentally as well as physically.
Kelly hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “Just like you said, he circled around again.”
“You put a bullet in him?”
“Nah.” Kelly shrugged. “I ain’t much of a shot, and he didn’t give me much of a target, weaving around them pines. I think I scared him pretty good, though. I’ve been listening for him, but I haven’t heard a thing. Less’n he’s just waitin’ out there.”
The kid, who had longish hair nearly the same color as his sister’s, and an angular, handsome face, gestured with his quirley at Yakima’s arm. “Looks like you tangled with a bobcat.”
“Nope.” Faith slid fleetly straight back off the mare’s rear. “The bronc pitched him over the ridge.”
“Jumpin’ Jesus! He’s devilish, ain’t he?”
“The horses around here are some smarter than I am—I know that. I walked right up to him like a damn rube.” Yakima swung down from the saddle, shucked Wolf under the stallion’s chin, and began leading the mare around the corral toward the stable. “Let’s get some sleep. We’ll ride out after that fork-tailed son of a bitch at first light.”
Kelly quickly field-stripped his brown paper cigarette and jumped off the corral. “I’ll put her away, Yakima. You best get inside and let my sister tend them cuts. She got good at doctoring at the home ranch in Wyoming, all them many years ago.”
“All them many years ago,” Faith said jeeringly. She wasn’t yet twenty-three, but it did feel like a lifetime ago since she and Kelly had grown up in the Chugwater Buttes north of Cheyenne.
“I’m all right,” Yakima said. “I’m gonna check—”
“Get in there, chump,” Faith said, striding up behind him and pushing him toward the cabin. “Before you bleed dry.”
Yakima gave a wry chuff and, while Faith tugged playfully on his arm, tossed the mare’s reins to Kelly. “You know what?”
He wheeled, stooped forward, and pulled Faith over his shoulder, lifting her off her feet.
She gave a startled shriek, laughing. “Yak-i-ma!”
“You’re bossy!”
“You need a boss. Now, put me down before you kill us both!”
“Hush.”
As he carried her toward the cabin, Faith punching him and feebly complaining, she called to Kelly, “Rub down Crazy Ann—will you, little brother? I rode her kind of hard out to rescue this worthless man of mine!”
Yakima laughed both with relief that he still had his horses and at Faith’s creative oaths—the girl could curse like a seasoned Irish freighter—as he kicked the cabin door open and hauled the young woman inside and set her brusquely down on the hard-packed earthen floor.
“Idiot!”
Faith swatted his shoulder and grabbed his hand to inspect his arm once more, leaning close to see in the dim light of the lamp she’d lit before leaving the cabin.
Yakima turned toward her, wrapped his good arm around her waist, and crouched to tip her head back and kiss her. She resisted, pushing away from him, but then she relented, opening her mouth for him. She smiled, chuckling, and pushed away abruptly, shaking her hair back from her eyes.
“How many stallions am I going to have to wrestle tonight?” she asked.
“I’ll let you know.”
“Get in there,” Faith ordered, gesturing toward the door leading down a short hall to their bedroom. “I’ll bring some water and bandages. Shuck out of those longhandles. I’ll darn and patch ’em tomorrow.”
“Good woman!” Yakima grabbed a bottle off a kitchen shelf and headed into the dark hall toward the open door of their room.
When Faith and Kelly had come here to live with him, after their Mexican adventure, he’d added two rooms to the back of the cabin—a bedroom for him and Faith and, in the event she might become in the family way, another room for a child. He didn’t voice his reason for the second room to Faith. They’d only been together a few months—too short a time to talk about raising a family—but, just the same, he silently hoped she would stay and that they would raise a family together in the years ahead.
Another reason he didn’t mention the reason for the second room was that he didn’t want to make her feel boxed in. Faith had been a sporting girl for many years, and in spite of living in relative imprisonment by her last employer, Bill Thornton, she’d been a free, independent spirit all her life, as a hard upbringing either breaks you or sets you free.
Maybe she wasn’t ready to settle down for the long haul. Maybe she never would be.
Maybe Yakima himself wasn’t ready to settle down yet, either. He’d been alone since his mixed-bloodIndian mother had died when he was only twelve; his German gold-hunting father had died several years before that. And while loneliness had haunted him as he’d straddled the netherworld between races, ostracized by both white men and Indians, loneliness and self-reliance had become a way of life.
Until a few months ago, it had been just him and his horses. He hoped he continued to feel the way he did now—ready to settle down and grow old with a good woman. He’d just turned thirty, and he wasn’t getting any younger, and the older he’d grown, drifting alone, the lonelier he’d become.
A life should be shared.
Yakima lit a lamp on the dresser—one of the few store-bought pieces of furniture and one he’d hauled by wagon from Saber Creek nearly forty miles away after Faith and Kelly had moved in. He shucked out of his balbriggans and was about to settle into the bed until he looked at his bloody arm and leg, and reconsidered. He sank instead into the hide-bottomed, stag-horn chair beside the bed.
The cool air drifting through the open window dried the sweat on his skin, gave him a slight, refreshing chill and caused the cuts and scrapes to burn slightly. As Faith’s boots thumped in the hall and water sang quietly in a tin basin, he uncorked the whiskey bottle, splashed a finger into a tin cup on the dresser beside him, and threw it back.
Faith turned through the door, and, moving with purpose, set the basin atop the dresser and opened the dresser’s second drawer. She produced a small purple bottle, uncapped it, and shook a couple of drops into the basin.
“What’s that?” Yakima asked, his voice raspy from the whiskey he’d bought for fifty cents in Saber Creek.
“Shadbark powder mixed with balsamroot. Old whore’s cure. Don’t know what it does exactly, but we old whores use it for everything.”
She dropped the bottle back into the dresser, then brought the basin over to Yakima’s left side. She set it on the floor, knelt beside it, and squeezed the water from the sponge.
As she began dabbing at his arm, he reached over with his right hand and slid a handful of hair back from her forehead, and growled admonishingly, “Don’t say that.”
She didn’t look up but continued cleaning the cut as she said quietly, “My old profession . . . it doesn’t bother you?”
After Yakima had helped her escape from Thornton’s Roadhouse, she’d run her own pleasure parlor in the mining camp of Gold Cache. That was before she came down here looking for Yakima to help her spring her brother from the Mexican prison, and stayed.
“I never think about it. Any more than I think about what I’ve done, gettin’ by.”
She squeezed the bloody water from the sponge and continued dabbing at the congealed blood welling from the cuts. She glanced up at him now, the lamplight flickering in her large blue eyes and casting small shadows across her heart-shaped face and her neck with the small, heart-shaped birth-mark. “You ever think about Ace?”