by Frank Leslie
“Well, there’s a good bit of luck.”
Yakima glanced at Harms. “What’s that?” His mind was on nothing now but the trail ahead, and his woman at the end of it.
“Nothing.”
Yakima adjusted his holster on his thigh and spurred Wolf into a lope. “Let’s ride!”
The half-breed winced as the wind lashed him, then raised the thick collar of his jaguar coat. He gave Wolf his head. The black mustang and the vinegar dun had perked up after the rest and the handful of oats he’d given them. Also, the cool air, hovering right around freezing, seemed to invigorate them, and they made good time for the rest of the day.
They stopped after dark in a small mining village—really just a large camp of tents and stone-and-log hovels, with goats and a couple of pigs running free. There, while they were watering their horses at the creek, a stout Italian widow sent one of her two shy, gangly boys out to invite them to supper.
They’d only stopped to rest the horses, boil some coffee, and chew some jerky, but Yakima and Harms gladly accepted the jovial woman’s invitation.
As there were only four other families in the camp, isolated in the mountains just northeast of Taos, New Mexico, Yakima figured she was lonely for company. Finished with their small but hearty helpings of mountain goat stew, they were forced to parry the beseechings of the old widow, who insisted they stay till morning. They thanked her, left some coins on a stump outside the shack, and once more continued their northeastward journey between mountain ranges and known Indian camps.
Continuing to switch mounts every hour, they kept up a brutal pace. The snow turned to a light rain as they rode out of the mountains, and a couple hours later, the rain stopped and the stars appeared.
During a treacherous river crossing, Yakima nearly lost the vinegar dun when the horse started at a prospector’s sluice box drifting past in the glittering black water. Not long after someone took a couple of shots at them—Yakima figured it was stockmen riding night herd and mistaking them for rustlers. He and Harms didn’t return fire, but only kept their heads down and continued loping through the starlit night given voice every once in a while by owl hoots, coyote yips, and wolves howling from pine-studded scarps.
They gained the Santa Fe’s north-south line when they spilled out of the mountains the next morning, just east of the rollicking mining camp of Colorado Springs.
It was a haggard, half-asleep pair that followed the tracks into Denver.
It was virtually a pair of corpses—wind- and sunburned, famished, and exhausted, their bones nearly literally disjointed by the long, hard, jarring pull—who didn’t so much dismount as tumble out of their saddles at the stock corrals near Denver’s bustling Union Station.
“Gotta question for ya.” Harms sprawled over a top corral slat, his arms hanging down the other side and his cheek snugged up to the rail’s weathered top. His glasses hung halfway down his nose.
Yakima tried to walk but dropped to his knees beside Wolf, the black stallion hanging its weary head and standing there, duck footed, dusty, and sweat silvered. One of the Indian ponies dropped and rolled, blowing hard.
“What’s that?” Yakima said.
“In our conditions, how in the hell are we going to get Faith away from those killers?”
“That’s a good question.”
Wincing, Yakima dug his heels into the cinder paving beneath him and heaved himself to his feet, steadying himself with one hand on Wolf’s back. He reached under the horse’s belly to fumble the saddle cinch loose.
“I’ll let you know when I got her figured. Right now I’m gonna go on into the station, see when . . . if . . . their train got in.”
“You do that,” Harms said as Yakima began stumbling his way through the stockyards and warehouses, heading for the vast sandstone depot hulking up above the maze of corrals and bellowing cattle in the east. “I’ll be right here when ya get back.”
Harms dropped to his back and tipped his hat over his eyes.
Yakima was frustrated to learn at a ticket window in the marble-floored station that the last train from the south had pulled in four and a half hours ago.
That meant that Faith’s kidnappers had no doubt acquired horses and continued their trek north toward Thornton’s Roadhouse between then and now. If they’d decided to lay over in Denver until tomorrow, he had only a slight chance of finding them in this boisterous ranching and mining town of nearly thirty thousand souls, with nearly that many rail or stage travelers passing through at any given time.
He and Harms stabled their weary mounts in the first livery barn they ran into, then pondered their situations in a Chinese eatery across the alley, over roast beef sandwiches and thick, dark beer that the Chinaman who ran the place hauled in wooden buckets from a nearby Irish saloon.
They didn’t mull the situation long, half asleep and made sleepier by the food and beer, before they realized there wasn’t much to ponder.
They and their horses were too trail beat to continue their trek until at least the next sunrise. All they could really do that night by way of trying to locate Faith was stumble around Denver’s main thoroughfares, keeping an eye out for her kidnappers in the event they’d decided to lay over for some tavern crawling or whoremongering.
When, by nine o’clock that night, Yakima and Harms had had no luck finding Faith or any of the gang that had kidnapped her, they hunted down a room with a double bed, shared a couple of drinks from a bottle, rolled under the coarse wool blankets, and slept like dead men.
They were awakened at cockcrow by the indignant screaming of a drunk whore in the alley behind the little flophouse in which they’d rented a room, not far from their horses.
After a hasty breakfast in the same Chinese eatery in which they’d taken supper last night, they mounted up and headed west before the sun was up, the only traffic on the cobbled streets being that of milk and coal wagons, the only sounds that of roosting pigeons, sniffling paperboys, and the snick-snicks of the street sweepers’ brooms.
Yakima had spent time in a Denver boarding-house after his mother died, and he’d hauled freight around and prospected in the Front Range of the Rockies, so he knew this country. And having hauled freight for Thornton himself, he knew the shortest route between Denver and Thornton’s Roadhouse northwest of Boulder and Camp Collins. He had no idea if Faith’s captors knew the same route, but if he and Harms didn’t overtake them on the trail, they might get there ahead of them.
Following old stage and Army trails, and even a few ancient Indian routes still visible beneath the prairie bromegrass and needle grass, they loped northwest into the shelving foothills. The sun touched Long’s Peak and then, gradually, Bierstadt, the Twins Sisters, and the other lesser peaks standing around them.
Yakima was beaten and battered, and he ached in every muscle and bone. It had been a brutal couple of days. He rode wearily, but he rode hard, and Harms, who had no stake in this claim except friendship, did the same.
When he had Faith again, they’d head back to Arizona, and he’d harbor no more misgivings about their future. They’d rebuild the cabin as well as their remuda, and they’d continue selling horses to the Army outposts around the territory.
They’d savor each day they had together, and they’d let fate take care of the years. Because he loved her, and Harms was right. Love was rare.
The high crests quartered off to the south and east as he and Harms, angling northwest, left the rolling prairie and plunged into the rugged, pine-and aspen-studded mountains by way of one of many stream-carved canyons—one that Yakima knew was the shortest route to the canyon in which Thornton’s lay.
Riding to Yakima’s right, Harms cursed sharply through his teeth and lunged slightly forward in his saddle, grabbing his right thigh.
Yakima, holding the vinegar dun’s reins taut in his left fist, turned to his partner, frowning. “What—?”
He cut off the question himself when a rifle crack flatted out over the canyon around th
em, echoing sharply and sending magpies screaming from a cottonwood standing tall along the stream to Yakima’s left.
He jerked his gaze up a rock- and juniper-studded ridge. Halfway up the ridge lay a slag pile from an abandoned mine, below the mine’s coal black, wood-framed portal. Sluice boxes ran downslope from the portal toward the stream—weathered gray and grown up with weeds and shrubs.
On the slope above the slag pile, smoke puffed. There was a loud thwhack! and the Indian pony beneathYakima screamed shrilly and leaped straight up in the air. As the rifle’s report reached Yakima’s ears, the vinegar dun landed on all four hooves before swaying sharply left, its legs seeming to melt beneath it.
Watching Brody Harms tumble off the back of his own pitching, whinnying Apache mustang, and knowing his dun was going down, Yakima released Wolf’s lead line and threw himself forward over the dun’s left wither.
He hit the slope on a shoulder and rolled as two more rifle reports cracked from atop the slag heap. When he stopped rolling and looked up, the mustang was on its side at the edge of the trail above, lifting its head, screaming, and thrashing its legs while blood pumped onto the dry brown grass around it. At the same time, the other three horses, including Wolf, galloped straight up the trail, buck-kicking and screaming.
From his angle, Yakima couldn’t see Harms but he could hear the man groaning back up on the trail, on the other side of the wounded dun.
“Shit!” Yakima stared after the horses kicking up dust as they dwindled into the distance beyond a small miner’s shack about fifty yards up the trail. Yakima’s Winchester was in his saddle boot.
As more rifle cracks echoed around the canyon, the bullets plunking into the trail and slicing into the grass around Yakima, he grabbed his Colt. The ambushers were too far away for accurate shooting with a revolver, but he triggered two quick shots as he dug his heels into the grassy slope and bolted back up onto the trail.
Harms was lying beside the thrashing Apache pony, just out of reach of the dying horse’s lunging hooves. Yakima drilled a bullet through the dun’s head, ending its misery, and flung another slug toward the slag heap.
He dropped to a knee beside Harms.
The Easterner had taken a bullet in his right thigh, and blood, glistening crimson in the cool golden sunlight washing down between wintery mountain clouds, soaked his trouser leg above the knee.
Yakima winced as the shooters flung two more rounds into the trail around him. “How bad?”
Harms clutched his leg and stretched his lips back from his teeth. “I’d like to tell you it’s just a scratch, but I’m afraid the bastards pinked me good.”
Chapter 23
Yakima triggered another shot up toward the slag heap, then flung Harms’s right arm around his shoulder and pulled the man to his feet. The Easterner balked, cursing.
Yakima adjusted the man’s weight on his shoulder and lunged forward. “I’m gonna get you up to that shack yonder!”
Half dragging, half carrying Harms, Yakima sort of shuffle-jogged up the trail, staying to the right side where a cutbank capped with cedars and junipers partially concealed them from the shooters perched on the slag heap.
The half-breed’s chest swelled anxiously.
If the men on the slag heap were Faith’s captors, Faith was up there, as well.
Several more shots barked from up the slope, spitting gravel and cedar twigs onto the trail or ticking off Yakima’s and Harms’s hats. As they approached the cabin—doorless and windowless and missing shakes from its roof, its stovepipe rusted and dented—another shot from above plunked into a boulder flanking the place. Another careered off the roof, spraying splinters, before whining off over the canyon toward the stream.
Yakima gentled Harms down against the cabin’s front wall, helping him stretch his legs out in front of him. Harms tipped his head back against the wall, sucking air through his teeth and squeezing his thigh with both hands.
“Leave Apache country only to get bushwacked by white men in Colorado,” Harms growled. “My father was right—I’m a damn fool.”
“Shut up.” Yakima ripped off his green neckerchief and slipped it under his partner’s bloody thigh. “I didn’t expect them to know this trail—nor for us to catch up to ’em so fast. They must have lingered in Denver, and they know the country.”
Harms was breathing heavily, sweat rippling down his ruddy cheeks, his body heat fogging his glasses. “If it’s them, Faith’s up there. How’re you gonna get to her? It’s three against one now.” He added quickly with a wince, “Goddamnit!”
“Ain’t sure. I’ve only heard one rifle so far.” Yakima drew the bandanna taut around Harms’s thigh, just above the wound, and tied it. “I’m gonna fetch my Winchester, then go up and take a look, make sure it’s not just owl hoots wantin’ our horses.”
He slipped his revolver from its holster, knocked out the spent shell casings, and thumbed fresh ones from his belt through the Colt’s loading gate. “Keep that knot tight and don’t move around much, or you’ll bleed out. I’ll be back soon.”
“I reckon I’m not going anywhere,” Harms rasped as Yakima peeked out around the corner of the cabin.
The shooter, who’d fired only one more shot since Yakima and Harms had taken cover, triggered his rifle again now, smoke puffing atop the slag heap. The slug barked into the side of the cabin with a sharp, echoing thump.
Yakima returned the bullet and bolted out from behind the cover, running up-trail in the direction the horses had fled.
He sprinted across thirty yards of open ground, the shooter squeezing off only one close round, blowing up dirt on the far side of the trail and behind Yakima, before the cutbank rose again to Yakima’s right. He continued, keeping his head beneath the cutbank upon which the pines were now growing taller and thicker, giving good cover.
Finding Wolf standing owl eyed in a meadow horseshoeing out toward the stream sheathed in aspens, ash, and cottonwoods, he eased up to the jittery stallion, holding his hands out placatingly. The Apache horses were grazing about sixty yards west, in the shade of the trees near the edge of the water.
Behind Yakima, the rifleman was continuing to jack rounds into the cabin, the bullets sounding like flat hammer blows from this distance. The stallion flinched with every crack, peering behind, its black eyes wary.
“Thanks for runnin’ out on me back there, you son of a bitch.” Yakima slipped the Yellowboy from the saddle boot. “’Preciate that.” He was talking mostly to himself, distracting himself from his worry that the shooter or shooters, knowing he’d left his wounded partner behind, might be moving down the slope toward Harms.
Holding the rifle in one hand, he swung up onto Wolf’s back and heeled the black into a lope back toward the main trail. He crossed the trail, rode a few yards back toward the cabin, then swerved sharply left, plunging up a narrow ravine lying perpendicular to the stream and rising up the gently sloping ridge.
When he’d ridden a good hundred yards, the ravine beginning to angle westward, away from the mine and the slag heap, Yakima dropped out of the saddle and left Wolf shaking his head and blowing angrily, ground-tied. The half-breed racked a shell into the Yellowboy’s breech, pushed through a shadbush thicket, and climbed the side of a low ridge, following the intermittent rifle barks south and east.
A few minutes later, he climbed the slope flanking the slag heap, pulling himself up around mossy boulders, piñons, and junipers. Several yards down from the slope’s crest, he stole along the hill’s north shoulder until the mine portal opened above and to his right, on the east side of the rocky slope. The mine’s black entrance looked like a gap between teeth, the rocks, gravel, and boulders of the slag heap slanting down beneath it.
Yakima stopped and looked around at the boulders and brush clumps, with junipers and potentilla growing out of the rocks and gravel. The shooting had stopped, and there was no sign of the shooter atop the slag heap before him, though several brass cartridge casings winked amongst the clay-c
olored rocks, where they’d been ejected from a rifle chamber.