The Killing Breed

by Frank Leslie

  “Bill, no—it was the wind!” Ruby cried as she wheeled and ran off down the hall, bare feet slapping the musty auburn carpet runner.

  Slowly, clenching the club tightly in his bony fist, Thornton climbed the stairs.

  Chapter 21

  Watching Yakima shot out of his saddle and then dragged by Wolf into the hills beyond the ranch had nearly stopped Faith’s heart cold.

  Seeing him fall from the passenger car’s roof to roll off down the graded right-of-way, out of her reach once more, had been twice as jolting. She thought that her heart had really stopped beating for a couple of seconds, only to be shocked to life again by Lowry Temple grabbing a handful of her hair and pulling her straight back away from the window.

  He’d jerked her around so brusquely, and tossed her back into her seat with such violence, that she’d nearly lost consciousness. Vaguely, she heard the outlaw leader laugh and announce, “Sorry you had to witness that little display, folks. But, ya understand, the woman’s my wife and that half-breed ya saw in the window . . . well, let’s just say their union wasn’t sanctioned by the Lord, seein’ as how they’ve made a mockery of our marriage vows!”

  A few of the traveling women seated around Faith and Temple clucked their disapproval. A couple of the men gave their own opinions about how cheating women should be punished—especially women who cheated with savages—and Temple said, “Don’t none of you worry. It looks like my cousins took care of the problem. I’m taking the little woman home to her pa, see if he can’t do somethin’ with her.”

  Faith looked up, her head and heart aching, fury kindling inside her once more, as Temple stared down at her, shaking his head with mock disapproval. “I figured I’d let the old man try to whip some sense into that pretty, whorin’ ass of hers. I’ve done tried!”

  One of the men—a drummer of some sort, judging by his cheap suit, pale skin, and derby hat— wished Temple luck as he castigated Faith with a look. Slumped in her seat, she stared straight ahead, reliving over and over the sight of Yakima’s bloody face in the window, then his body tumbling down the hill below the tracks.

  She bit her lip but could not hold back the sob bursting from her chest.

  Temple, brushing soot and ashes from his jacket and hat, stood across from her as Benny Freeze and Kooch Manley entered the coach door behind him, both looking windburned and exasperated. Manley held a hand to his scratched ear.

  “You just go ahead and cry, woman,” Temple said loudly enough for about half the car to hear over the roar of the iron wheels made louder by the sudden opening of the vestibule door. “Cry your eyes out over that heathen. Me, I’ve had it up to here with you!”

  He sat back down in his seat across from Faith, furtive mockery in his gray eyes. Freeze and Manley sidestepped between him and Temple and sagged down in their seats, adjusting their holsters on their hips and looking around cautiously.

  Manley, seated next to the window beside Temple and fishing a handkerchief from a pocket, leaned toward the outlaw leader and cast an accusatory glare at Faith as he said softly, “Chulo bought it, boss.”

  “I know, fool,” Temple grumbled out the side of his mouth, staring straight ahead at Faith. “I saw . . . along with everyone else in the friggin’ car!”

  “He tried to fight that breed,” Manley said, dabbing at his creased ear with the handkerchief. “The fool shoulda shot him, but you know how Chulo is.”

  “Was,” corrected Benny Freeze, grinning to Faith’s left. “I’m sorry Chulo’s gone an’ all. I mean, we was bonded partners.” He hiked a shoulder and broadened his grin. “But I reckon with him gone, we can cut that bounty pie into bigger pieces. . . . ”

  Faith didn’t hear the rest of the conversation. She curled up in her seat and turned inward, tending her grief, sorrow, and rage in a dreamy, brooding silence.

  If Yakima was still alive after another violent encounter with her captors, it was unlikely he’d be able to sniff out her trail again. The man was as good a tracker as Faith had ever known—and she’d known many in her years as a working girl on the frontier—but he probably had no clue as to where Temple was taking her.

  Besides, trains weren’t all that regular in this neck of the frontier, and he’d be stranded out here without even a horse. . . .

  She hadn’t realized she’d fallen asleep until someone grabbed her coat and jerked her awake.

  “Git up, you cheatin’ bitch.” Temple grinned down at her, his rifle scabbard in one hand, his saddlebags thrown over his other shoulder. “Time to switch trains.”

  Faith dropped her feet to the floor and rose from her seat, only half feeling the aches in her sore, cramped muscles. Out the train windows, a thick, oily darkness—it must have been the middle of the night—was relieved by the fuzzy aura of bull’s-eye lanterns and the crimson glow of cheroots and cigarettes.

  She and the men disembarked from the train and moved with the crowd toward the brick station house on the brick-paved platform. A sign tacked to the depot announced BELEN, NEW MEXICO TERRITORY.

  The wind howled—a bitter wind biting into her core. Smoke was torn to and fro across the frigid darkness.

  As Faith moved like the undead, hollowed out by helplessness and grief, she gave little thought to beseeching assistance from the crowd.

  As she approached the station house behind a pair of drummers in long wolf coats, mink hats, and leather grips, she saw an old man with a walrus mustache and a tin star pinned to his ratty buffalo coat. The constable leaned against a rain barrel, talking and laughing with a black porter while puffing a hand-rolled quirley.

  As they approached the lawman, Temple squeezed Faith’s arm warningly, but Faith had no intention of causing any more killings.

  They waited out the ninety-minute layover in the depot house in which two potbellied stoves did battle with the bone-splintering, high-altitude cold. Then, when the Denver flier rolled in from the south, Temple ushered her onto the vestibule between a passenger car and a Pullman sleeper.

  Temple turned left, opening a door of the sleeper car while pulling Faith along behind him.

  “You got Pullman tickets?” Manley said, frowning incredulously at the outlaw leader while Benny Freeze moved up the steps behind him. Their breath puffed in the chill night air woven with unlit cinders.

  “Me and the girl got the last compartment,” Temple grunted around the cigar in his teeth. “Gonna keep her outta the crowd so we don’t have any more embarrassing incidents.”

  As Manley and Breeze grumbled indignantly behind Faith, she let Temple pull her into the Pullman car in which all the compartments had been made up and a couple of kerosene lanterns smoked on the thinly paneled walls. Snores sawed through the sour, musty quiet as did a girl’s soft chuckle.

  Temple opened a compartment door, jerked Faith in behind him. Nodding to a uniformed attendant passing along the hall, Temple closed the door and locked it.

  He lit the single bracket lamp, then doffed his hat, hung it on a wall hook, and canted his head toward the double bunk beneath the window. Faith doffed her own hat and sagged back on the cot, the warmth from the charcoal brazier on the floor to her right feeling good against her legs.

  She’d been so cold in the depot that the heat took her mind a little ways from her enervated fatigue. But when she looked up and saw Temple standing there in the half darkness against the door, running his hands through his hair and staring down at her darkly, she felt the old rage kindling inside her once more.

  Her eyes dropped to the revolver jutting up from beneath his coat. Could she find a way to snatch it? She’d only get herself beaten or killed, and she’d never know what had happened to Yakima.

  The outlaw chuckled. “Well, well—alone at last. Ain’t this cozy, Mrs. Temple?”

  “Diddle yourself.”

  “Got a sharp tongue on you.” Temple sat down beside her on the double bunk. “My women don’t speak to me that way. I don’t allow it.”

  “I’m not your woman.”


  She gasped with a start as Temple pulled her toward him by her coat. He kissed her hard on the mouth, letting his lips linger over hers before he pulled back but continued clutching her coat in his fists. A devilish grin twisted his features, slitting his iron gray eyes. “Been wantin’ to do that for a while.”

  Faith ran a sleeve across her mouth, revulsion churning in her gut. “I thought you didn’t use force.”

  “That was just to see what’s got that half-breed in such a goatish frenzy over you—riskin’ life and limb to get you back.”

  Faith could feel the man’s own goatish heat, see the lust in his eyes as he stared at her, the lewd grin frozen on his face. Suddenly, he drew her toward him once more and closed his mouth over hers.

  She snapped her hands to his shoulders and began to push him away. She stopped, then flattened her palms against his shoulders. Though his rancid breath nearly made her wretch, she opened her mouth for him slightly, let him slip his tongue between her lips.

  He pulled away slightly, his eyes meeting hers from two inches away—so close she could see the grime in the lines of his face, the tattoo in his foreheadthe color of old rifle bluing. “That’s more like it.”

  He chuckled and kissed her again. Letting herself be kissed, she could feel the heat building in him as he mashed his mouth against hers, holding her painfully, his fingers gouging her back and arms. He slid one of his hands inside her coat and began unbuttoning her blouse, working hastily, grunting and sighing and wincing as he kissed her, his lust consuming him.

  When he had her blouse unbuttoned, he shoved her away, grabbed the low neck of her camisole in both his fists, and tore it straight down the middle in one violent jerk. She leaned back against the curtained window, throwing her shoulders back, breasts out.

  He knelt on the edge of the bunk, staring at her, his nostrils expanding and contracting, breath wheezing up from his throat.

  As he moved toward her once more, his hungry eyes on her breasts, she sat up suddenly and flung her open right hand against his face.

  The solid smack resounded about the small compartment.

  Temple’s head jerked with the force of the blow, his hair brushing down over his eyes. Rage burned in those dark orbs, replaced quickly with befuddlement.

  “You can have me,” Faith said just loudly enough to be heard above the car’s slowly clacking wheels as they pulled away from the station. “But first I want your promise that you’ll let me off the train at the first water stop.”

  Temple glowered at her, swaying and jerking slightly with the rock and pitch of the car. The bracket lamp cast shadows into the hollows of his cheeks, turned his eyes to coals on either side of the cross tattoo.

  Faith held her breath, waiting.

  If he gave his promise, he’d keep it. He was a man of honor, however dubious.

  Unexpectedly, the outlaw leader’s lips spread into a grin. He chuckled. The chuckle turned into a laugh, and he threw his head back on his shoulders, guffawing.

  When his laughter had dwindled, he looked down at her once more and shook his head. “Once a whore, always a whore. Ain’t that right?”

  The words hit her like a clenched first. Frustration combined with anger made her tremble. Tears dribbled down her cheeks.

  “Please,” she begged, her voice quaking. “I’ll do anything. . . .”

  “Why?”

  She stared at him, brushed tears from a cheek with the back of her hand, and hardened her voice with bald disdain. “You could never understand, Temple.”

  He narrowed his puzzled eyes at her, cheeks flushing with fury, as though in a losing battle not only with her but with something in his own mind. “You’re a fool. You could have any man you wanted. But you chose that half-breed, and now look where you’re headed.”

  Shaking his head, he got down off the bunk and grabbed his hat off the wall hook. He snugged his hat on his head and opened the door to the sounds of snoring and the train’s endless muffled roar. As he glanced back at Faith, she drew her blouse across her breasts and raised her knees to her chest.

  “I’m goin’ out for a smoke, but I’ll be watchin’ the door.”

  Temple stared at her, frowning as though trying to see inside her brain. Finally, he snorted caustically, shook his head, and dug around in his shirt pocket. He flipped a fifty-cent piece onto the bunk beside Faith.

  “There you go—that’s for the look. I’ve never cheated a whore in my life, and I ain’t about to start now.”

  Temple winked, his eyes still bright with a confused, toxic mix of humiliation and barely contained fury, and went out, closing the door behind him.

  Faith wrapped her arms around her legs, rested her head on her knees, and succumbed to her misery.

  Chapter 22

  Yakima waited until he was good and full of the Irish barman’s chili before he tossed a fifty-cent piece onto the counter for the refills of both chili and whiskey.

  “’Bout time.” Harms stood beside him, where he’d been standing tensely, glancing at the owl-eyed cardplayers flanking them as he sipped his whiskey and waited for Yakima to finish his meal. Ironically, the prospector said, “Are you sure you don’t want some more?”

  “Nah.”

  Yakima pinched his hat brim at the Irishman who stood off down the counter, scowling at him and Harms while rubbing a towel around the inside of a beer schooner. “The horses have had a fair blow. Let’s get some grain and pull foot.”

  “There’s an idea,” Harms grumbled as he followed Yakima to the door, casting one more wary glance at the men behind him, all of whom stared back moodily over the pasteboards in their hands. “I’m tired of that big red target on my back.”

  As Yakima stepped out onto the porch, the cold wind blowing the fine, slanting snow in his face, boots thumped to his left. He turned to see a bearded, potbellied gent in a worn wool coat, vest, and pin-striped trousers approach the saloon door, scowling. A sheriff’s star hammered from a peach tin glinted on his vest. His eyes were rheumy, his breath reeked of drink, and there was a smudge of women’s face paint on his right cheek.

  The sheriff sized up Yakima and Harms quickly, and licked his chapped lips, peeved at being called away, no doubt, from a whore’s crib. “Someone said they heard shootin’ over here. What’s the trouble?”

  “No trouble, Sheriff,” Yakima said, continuing on past the man and descending the porch steps. “Just a little rule change is all.”

  Yakima grabbed Wolf’s reins and the vinegar dun’s halter rope from the hitch rail and began leading the horses at an angle across the broad main street in which the mudded wheel ruts had frozen and acquired a thicker snow dusting than before.

  Snugging his hat down tight on his head, he headed for a large sign announcing GABRIEL’S GRAIN. Harms followed, glancing over his shoulder to see the sheriff staring after him and Yakima, scowling as he fingered his thick gray beard.

  The Easterner was certain that the sheriff, after finding out about the unseemly events in Lucky Joe’s Saloon, would come calling on him and Yakima. But, to his pleasant surprise, he saw nothing of the sheriff again until after he and Yakima had bought a sack of oats, a couple of boxes of ammo, two pounds of jerky, and were mounted up and heading out of town into a light but chill, snow-spitting breeze.

  Harms spotted the sheriff moving in the same direction they were on the street’s left-side boardwalk.

  As he and Yakima passed, the sheriff glanced toward them, eyes wary. The man paused, scrutinizing them with wary speculation. Choosing the doxies over a possible lead swap with strangers when he was probably making only twenty a month—and this cold was aggravating his rheumatism—he turned into a pink-curtained, plank-board shack and closed the door quickly behind him.