by Frank Leslie
Later that night they rode onto a cougar feeding on a deer, and both men fired several shots as the cat chased them through a shallow canyon. They were riding too fast for accurate shooting, but they must have discouraged their feline stalker, for the savage snarls soon faded after they left the arroyo.
A half hour later they felt safe enough to sheathe their rifles and to turn their attention to the vague horse trail ahead of them.
Noon of the next day found them jogging along the broad main street of a little town perched on a high, windy plain under a mass of low, snow-spitting clouds. Evidently the place had once been a Mexican pueblito. There was a grim-looking adobe church at the far end, but the Mexican mud huts had long since been outnumbered by two-and three-story, false-fronted business buildings constructed of whipsawed pine boards. They stood tall along both sides of the wide street in which frozen mud puddles wore a dusting of new snow.
The town looked deserted except for a few stock ponies tied about halfway down the left side of the street. They fronted a saloon called Lucky Joe’s from which soft piano music emanated, as did a woman’s screeching, raucous laughter. A brick chimney crawling up the building’s far side fed gray smoke to the steely sky, tingeing the brittle air with the spicy, succulent smell of chili.
“Might as well rest the horses for a couple of hours,” Yakima said, angling toward the hitch rail. He didn’t want to stop, but killing the horses as well as themselves would get them nowhere. Besides, they were making good time and were likely halfway to Denver. There’d be no point arriving ahead of the train. “Let’s pad our bellies and get a drink.”
“Didn’t I tell you?” Harms said behind the scarf he’d wrapped around his mouth. “I’ve sworn off liquor. Yessir, riding with you and a hangover did away with the whole notion. I may even rejoin the church!”
“Get yourself a God-fearin’ woman?”
“Don’t push it.”
Yakima gave a wry snort as he looped his horses’ reins around the hitch rail. Wolf had nothing but disdain for the Indian ponies, and the feeling was mutual, so the half-breed tied the horses a good distance apart.
As Wolf and the Apache mounts shared evil sidelong glances, heads up and snorting despite their trail fatigue, he loosened Wolf’s saddle cinch and slipped his bridle bit so the horse could drink freely at the stock tank flanking the hitch rail.
A jellied layer of ice had formed on the water’s surface. Yakima stirred the straw-flecked black water around with a stick, then joined Brody Harms on the saloon’s front porch. Both men glanced at the sky hovering low over the town’s rooftops, wood smoke skeining from brick chimneys as small granular flakes continued to fall.
“Well, it’s winter,” Yakima said with a resigned air, lowering the collar of his jaguar coat and stamping snow from his moccasin boots. “We could run into more of this the farther we head north, so we best be prepared for it.” As he turned toward the saloon, he added, “We’ll lay in some grain before we head out again.”
He tripped the latch of the saloon’s glass-topped door, in which LUCKY JOE’S had been printed in green gold-leaf lettering adorned with grinning leprechauns, and moved on into the saloon, spurs chinking over the puncheons as Harms moved in behind him.
The woman was laughing again, and as Harms closed the door, Yakima removed his hat to sweep snow from the brim. Then he tramped toward the bar running along the deep, low-ceilinged room’s right wall.
As he did, he raked his eyes around, noting the eight men in drover’s garb sitting at two tables to the left of the bar. An enormously fat, round-faced woman in a scanty gown and wolf shawl was perched heavily atop the knee of a red-faced gent with long blond hair, her stout arms wrapped around the man’s thick neck. As her head turned toward Yakima—as all the heads in the room did— her laughter stopped abruptly, and a frown dug into her painted forehead.
“What do we have here?” Yakima heard the woman mutter as he stepped up to the bar.
A tall, lanky gent had been placing bottles on the high shelves of the back bar. Now, as the room fell silent behind him, he glanced toward the door over his right shoulder, his pale blue eyes flicking between Yakima and Harms while acquiring a troubled cast.
“Uh, take note of the sign,” he said, turning full around and pointing with the corked bottle in his fist. Long, thick gray hair hung to his shoulders, and he spoke in a faint Irish accent.
Yakima glanced at a chalkboard nailed to a ceiling joist to his left. On the board the silhouette of an Indian head had been chalked, complete with hawkish nose and feathered headdress. A large X was slashed across the figure and, as though for emphasis, NO INJUNS had been scrawled in poor penmanship below.
The bartender, who wore an open fur coat over a bloodstained apron, sneered. “Drew a picture for those who can’t read.”
He smiled at Yakima.
Harms glanced at his partner and winced. “Oh dear.”
Chapter 19
Yakima stared across the bar at the Irish apron, his face implacable. But his chest was burning. Before he could reach across the bar to grab the man by his shirt, Brody Harms stepped up beside him.
“That’s ridiculous,” the Easterner said with a dry laugh. “Can’t you see Yakima’s green eyes? He probably has as much white blood as you do, my friend!”
From a nearby table, someone growled into the silence, which was relieved only by the crackling, sighing woodstove, “Half-breeds is even worse.”
The woman chuckled.
The burn in Yakima’s chest grew, and his jaws were set so hard they ached. He didn’t want to cause trouble. Faith needed him. But the old fury at being treated like a mongrel cur that had wandered in out of the brush was one he couldn’t deny.
His Colt was in his hand before he could stop himself, bucking and roaring.
The slugs shattered first one bottle standing on a beer keg behind the bar, and then the other bottle standing beside it. Glass and liquor flew against the back bar cabinet. Shards crashed onto the floor.
Dust sifted from the rafters, and smoke wafted.
“Jesus Christ!” someone behind Yakima trilled.
Chairs squawked and groaned as the sitters jerked their attentions to the bar.
The bartender had bounded back to one side, raising his hands defensively. Now he swung his head from the broken bottles and the two bullet holes in the cabinet behind them, to Yakima, his broad, broken-nosed face flushed with fury.
“Just who in the hell do you think—?”
“He’s just a man wanting a drink and a bowl of chili, partner,” Harms said as Yakima stared across the bar at the apron, his revolver cocked and ready to cut loose once more—this time at the apron’s head. “Make it two of each.” He sighed and looked at Yakima. “I’m drinking again.”
The barman’s glance flicked between Yakima and Harms.
Muttering rose from behind. Someone chuckled softly. The woman said, just as softly, “Dirty savage . . .”
The barman’s face softened slightly, his eyes apprehensive. He snarled a curse, then grabbed two shot glasses off a pyramid atop the bar, and filled each with whiskey. He slid the drinks in front of Yakima and Harms, then walked down to where a smoking, grease-splattered iron range sat against the back wall.
He ladled two bowls of chili from a black pot, set those too before the newcomers, then rattled spoons down beside the bowls. Crossing his arms on his broad chest, he fixed Yakima with a belligerent stare. “That’ll be two dollars. I don’t barter or extend credit to . . . strangers.”
Yakima twirled his Colt on his finger, dropped it into his holster, then reached into his jeans pocket. When he’d tossed a few coins onto the counter, he picked up his shot glass, poked his hat back off his bandaged forehead, and sipped. Ignoring the barman still glaring down at him and the stares of the others burning into his back, he leaned forward, picked up his spoon, and began casually eating the chili.
When he’d taken a couple bites, he glanced to his right. Ha
rms stood looking across his shoulder at the men and the woman at the tables, a look of consternation on his bespectacled face.
Yakima reached over and flicked the man’s spoon into the air. It hit the bar top with a clatter that made Harms jump with a start and turn his gaze back to Yakima.
“Eat up,” the half-breed said, glancing briefly at the barman still glaring down at him with his arms crossed on his chest. “He ain’t much for manners, but his chili ain’t half bad.”
Harms made a nervous face, then, glancing once more at the tables, leaned forward and spooned up some chili. When he’d eaten a couple of bites, he threw back his entire whiskey shot and slid the empty glass toward the bartender. “Refill that for me, will you?”
When, chuffing angrily, the barman had refilled the shot glass, Harms took a small sip, then resumed eating. Yakima could sense the Easterner was nervous. He, too, was edgy, though he continued to eat the chili and take small sips from his whiskey as though it were a lazy Sunday noon and he had all day to enjoy his meal.
He detected barely audible whispers behind him; then someone grunted and several chairs scraped across the puncheons. Harms turned his head to look over his shoulder again as Yakima kept his head tipped over his chili bowl. But in the corner of his left eye, he watched three men rise from their chairs and, moving around the near table, saunter up toward Yakima and Harms, their thumbs hooked behind their shell belts.
“Ah, shit,” Harms sighed, dropping his spoon into his half-empty chili bowl. “I feel a bad case of heartburn coming on.”
Yakima swallowed a mouthful of chili, washed it down with the whiskey, then glanced over his shoulder. He arched a brow, as though surprised to see the three men—a big man and two others a couple inches shorter than Yakima—standing behind him, heads canted back on their shoulders, challenging looks on their hard, weathered faces.
Yakima turned full around. As he did, he shoved Harms off down toward the end of the bar with his left hand. Harms stepped away, stopped to grab his chili bowl and his shot glass, then continued scuffing back along the bar, his wary gaze on the three men facing Yakima.
Yakima rested his elbows on the bar top as he blandly regarded the three—the big man in the middle, the shorter gents to each side. The big man had a rectangular head with wide-spaced dark eyes, a handlebar mustache, and a lantern jaw. He wore a sheepskin vest and no hat. His thick, wavy, salt-and-pepper hair hung down over his ears.
The man on the left—a pale, blue-eyed gent with a broad-brimmed black hat decorated with silver conchos—wore woolly chaps and an old Colt Navy revolver positioned for the cross draw on his left hip. A whiskey-damp mustache drooped down over both sides of his mouth.
The man to Yakima’s right wore his long, frizzy red hair parted on one side. He had a matching soup-strainer mustache and opaque gray eyes, one pale lid pulled down low beneath a knotted scar. A necklace of wolf teeth hung from a thong over his bullhide, fleece-lined vest that was as scratched and cracked as a desert playa.
He, too, wore a Colt Navy while the big man in the group’s middle wore two big bowie knives on his hips, with a Colt .45 angled over his belly.
The pale gent on the left angled his head toward the chalkboard. “That rule is townwide. It ain’t just Finnegan’s.”
Yakima returned his stare, expressionless, leaning back on his elbows.
“That means you’re breakin’ a town ordinance, breed,” said the gent with frizzy red hair. His mustache was so thick his lips didn’t appear to move when he talked. “Me an’ Skip and Sundance work for the town marshal on weekends and holidays. So when we tell you to get your red ass outta here, it’s the law talkin’, not just a passel of range riders who don’t like Injuns—mixed breeds or otherwise.”
“Even though we don’t,” added the cowboy who Yakima assumed was Sundance.
Skip hadn’t yet said anything, but just stood glowering at Yakima from his full six feet five inches, a cruel smile pulling at his mouth corners, thumbs hooked behind his cartridge belt.
“I’ll take that under consideration,” Yakima grunted. “Now suppose you fellas take your gorilla and go back and sit down so I can finish my chili. As soon as I’m done, I’ll vamoose.” He hardened his eyes but tried to keep his rage on a short leash. “But not before I’ve eaten my chili.”
He started to turn back toward the bar.
Skip reached toward Yakima’s shoulder. “Who you callin’ gorilla, Red—?”
Wheeling back suddenly, Yakima sank his right fist liver-deep into Skip’s solar plexus, so that the last syllable of “Redskin” burst from the big man’s lips as a sort of “Skawhhhh!” as he doubled over and drew both his thick arms across his gut.
As the man staggered back, head down, Yakima snapped his right knee up against his forehead. The man’s head jerked up, and he stumbled straight back, bellowing like a poleaxed bull.
At the same time, the redheaded cowboy reached for his Colt, but his hand had barely touched the walnut grips before Yakima, jumping up and wheeling two feet above the floor, smashed his right heel against the side of the man’s face.
The connection made a crunching smack.
Screaming, the red-haired gent flew sideways across a vacant table, his lower jaw hanging askew.
Yakima turned left, ready to parry a blow from Sundance. Brody Harms smashed his own right hand down on the hand Sundance was using to raise his Colt Navy toward Yakima.
The man cursed as the gun hit the floor, the revolver roaring and the slug thumping into the ceiling. Harms rammed his left fist against the back of Sundance’s head, then his right against his forehead, dropping him in his tracks.
Sundance raised both hands to his head, shouting, “Goddamn sons o’ bitches!”
Yakima wheeled back the other way, raking his eyes between the barman, who stood red faced and mute behind the bar, pooching out his thick lips with disgust, and the five other cowboys and the whore at the other table about twenty feet away.
One of the men was frozen half out of his chair, hand on his gun, regarding Yakima from beneath shaggy salt-and-pepper brows.
Yakima stared at him hard and the man melted like butter back down into his chair, raising his hands casually above the table, where he picked up a card deck but kept his hate-filled eyes on Yakima. The others stared at him as well, angry and wary.
The whore looked scared—glassy eyed, red faced, and holding her shawl across her enormous breasts, as though she’d suddenly found herself in the presence of a wounded bobcat.
Yakima glanced at Harms. The Easterner stood over Sundance, who was still down and rolling around in pain, cursing.
“Nice one. Grab his gun.”
As Harms reached down to disarm Sundance, Yakima walked over to pluck the Colt from the red-haired cowboy’s holster. The man lay on the floor with his head propped against a ceiling joist. He probed his swelling jaw with both hands, groaning, his mouth sounding as though he were chomping on jawbreakers.
“You . . . you broke my jaw, you bastard.”
Yakima tossed his Colt into a far corner, then walked over to Skip. The big man was on his hands and knees, bellowing, “Goddamnit!” over and over through bloody hands clamped over his nose.
Yakima placed his moccasin boot between the man’s shoulder blades and kicked him belly down against the floor. Then he removed Skip’s knives from his hip holsters and tossed them into a corner. He kicked the man over onto his back, delivering another savage blow to his ribs, and pulled the Colt .45 from Skip’s belly holster. He tossed the gun into the corner with the knives.