by Frank Leslie
Thornton’s face had become a blank death mask once more, void of expression. Suddenly, he leaned back, opened the top desk drawer, and hauled out a silver-plated .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver—the one he’d always kept in his desk to deal with customers who’d tried to skin out on their bill, or double-crossing business partners such as freighters who’d tried to charge him too much for a whiskey haul.
For wayward whores he usually reserved his obsidian-handled, seven-inch stiletto. Two quick horizontal slashes across the lips, to brand them and ruin them for the only trade they had. Reducing them to animals so that, thrown back into the wild to which they were no longer accustomed, they’d soon starve or fall victim to the elements.
It was the S&W he clutched now, pointing the barrel at Faith as he heaved himself up out of the chair, red faced and sweating and reeking like a dead animal. As he moved out from behind the desk, he clutched his right side, just above his waist, wincing as though every movement pained him. His robe winged open slightly, and Faith saw a bloody bandage.
“Christ,” she said, awestruck as she slid her eyes up from Thornton’s side to his oily face growing before her.
“Yeah, Christ!” The roadhouse manager leaned down to snatch up a piece of split, stove-length wood that had been leaning against his desk. “That’s your doin’, bitch!”
Faith couldn’t conceal her surprise. “That’s where I shot you?”
Thornton straightened and continued moving toward her, the pistol in his right hand, the wood in his left. The wood was splattered with dried dark red blood. He spat his words out like phlegm-laced marbles, slitting his bulging eyes.
“Must’ve been a poisoned bullet you shot me with. What are you—a witch?”
Faith said nothing. She found herself backing toward the door.
She thought she’d prepared herself for the worst, but there’d been no way she could have prepared herself for the demonic ogre stumbling toward her now, wielding a pistol in one hand, a chunk of bloodstained wood in the other. His death smell made her eyes water.
It was the smell of a cave in which a wild beast had curled up and died.
Horror and revulsion nearly unhinged her. Stumbling backward, she backed into the wall. Thornton moved toward her, blowing his sour breath and raising the revolver, narrowing one eye as he cocked the hammer with a raspy click.
“The half-breed dead, is he?”
“Maybe.” Faith stared at the gun muzzle yawning before her, and her resignation returned. She shaped an icy smile as she tipped her chin toward the window. “Maybe he’s right out there.”
“Follow you, did he?” Thornton slitted a rheumy eye and nodded. “Once a whoremonger, always a whoremonger.”
“You should know, Bill.”
Pressing the revolver to her forehead, he dropped the wood and reached toward her with his left hand, grabbed the collar of her coat, and jerked down. “Get out of them duds, whore! I’m gonna beat you naked!”
Thornton had more strength than he appeared to have. The coat’s first two buttons gave, and Faith stumbled forward, knees bending. “No!”
“Out of them duds!” Thornton ordered again, giving the coat another tug while aiming the gun at Faith’s head.
Buttons clattered to the floor and rolled while Faith, falling to her knees, tried to hold the coat closed against her chest. The coat opened, and as Thornton laughed mirthlessly and grabbed her shirt, Faith bounded up off her heels.
She nudged his gun aside and rammed her left fist, knuckles first, into Thornton’s right side. She could feel the soggy blood and puss and the bandage padding the wound before she withdrew her fist and glanced at Thornton.
The eyes seem to pop out of the roadhouse manager’s head, and, his face turning a shader pale of gray, he threw his head back on his shoulders and yelled like a trapped grizzly. Stumbling back and falling to one knee, he dropped the revolver and kicked it.
The gun spun past Faith toward the settee to her right.
“Ach! Goddamn . . . son of a bitch!” Thornton raged as Faith dove for the gun.
She hit the floor on her shoulder and slid across the puncheons, piling up against the settee and closing her hands over the gun. On one knee, Thornton turned toward her, his face a mask of pain and fury.
“Bitch!”
Thornton looked down, saw the bloodstained log. He grabbed it in his right hand and pushed back to his feet. Wanting a good shot at the man, Faith gained her knees, then raised the revolver in both hands. He bolted toward her, faster than she’d thought possible. She’d just got the hammer cocked back before he was three feet away from her, swinging the log from back behind his shoulder, lips stretched back from his yellow teeth and purple gums.
Squinting one eye and holding her ground, Faith drew a bead on Thornton’s forehead. Thornton was swinging the club forward when Faith squeezed the trigger.
The hammer pinged on a spent chamber.
Shocked, Faith glanced at the gun. Seeing the wood slamming toward her, she ducked slightly, turning sideways. It wasn’t enough of a move to avoid the blow altogether, and a corner of the sharp-edged log caught her right temple with a resolute smack, dimming her vision and making her ears ring as she rose off her feet and flew sideways to pile up hard at the base of Thornton’s desk.
Thornton threw his head back and shouted hoarsely toward the wainscoted ceiling, “Evil, wicked, double-crossing bitch!”
As he moved toward her, wobbling and stumbling over his own slippered feet, Faith, lying against the desk, blinked to clear her blurred vision. She brushed the back of her right hand against her left temple. The knuckles came away coated in blood.
Behind a strange tingling, she felt a throbbing inside her temple, just above her ringing right ear.
Heavily, still trying to clear her eyes, Faith scrambled to her feet. Thornton hauled the club back again for another blow. Faith threw her left arm up in front of her head. The club slammed into it, lifting her up off the floor and throwing her onto the desk.
She screamed as she rolled across the desk, sweeping a pen holder, ashtray, books, and the Tiffany lamp onto the floor with raucous clattering thumps and the scream of breaking glass. As she flew over the swivel chair and hit the floor behind it, grunting loudly as the air was hammered from her lungs, she heard a fiery whoosh and smelled the sharp, piney smell of coal oil.
In the periphery of her vision, she saw flames dancing up the curtains behind her. Both her ears were ringing now and she felt a tingling in her limbs. Rage and terror took over, and she scrambled back to her feet, feeling the heat from the flames pushing against her.
As the flames coiled up the curtains and the wall behind the desk, lighting the room bizarrely and sending smoke tendrils angling toward the ceiling, Faith bounded out from behind the desk. Thornton stepped between her and the door, blood showing thickly on his robe and stretching across his pot-belly.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
He swung the log. Faith ducked. The log sang through the air over her head.
Twisting around, she slammed her right elbow into Thornton’s right side, evoking another thundering howl, and, using both hands and moving quickly, wrenched the log free of his grasp. She swung around toward Thornton, arms stretched out in front of her, both hands on the log.
The end of the log caught Thornton low on his left cheek and carved a long, deep gash across his lips. Thornton’s head flew sideways.
“Butcher!” Faith cried.
Shifting her weight from one foot to the other, she swung the log back in the opposite direction, and it caught Thornton straight across the mouth. Lips bursting like a ripe tomato, Thornton’s head jerked up, and he gave a muffled, exasperated “Hnghah!” as he stumbled back, hands flailing toward the desk edge.
Holding the edge of the desk with one hand, he teetered slowly sideways toward the floor, his eyes fluttering.
Feeling blood dribble down the side of her head, Faith moved toward him, raising the club once more with
both hands. She gritted her teeth and savored the sight of the man—bloody faced and horror-struck—staring back at her beseechingly.
Only his eyes begged for mercy. His jaws slid around brokenly.
“I’m no witch,” Faith snarled, her own voice reaching her ears as if from far away, the roadhouse manager’s image shifting this way and that before her. “All your bad luck you brought on yourself, you simple son of a bitch!”
With that, she raised the log above her head.
Thornton’s eyes grew wide as he silently begged for mercy. His mouth opened but only blood spewed across his lips.
Faith smashed the log down across his skull with a resolute thud. Thornton fell heavily to the floor at the base of the desk—screamless, his slender legs spasming and his broken jaws clattering as they opened and closed of their own accord.
Faith grabbed her pounding head and glanced around. The flames had spread to three walls and were snaking across the ceiling toward the wall bordering the hall.
Smoke hung thick as dirty cotton, stinging her eyes and nostrils.
She turned away from Thornton’s still-spasming body and began moving toward the door. She made it only halfway before her eyes went dark, her knees turned to putty, and she dropped with a gasp.
Chapter 25
Yakima smelled the smoke on the cold wind.
Galloping west along the trail cleaving Thornton’s Canyon, he glanced back at Brody Harms hunched atop his mustang. Since it was twilight, the half-breed couldn’t see much but the last light reflected in Harms’s glasses and his exposed white teeth as he leaned forward with a pained grimace to clutch his wounded thigh.
“I’m gonna race on ahead!”
“I’ll be right behind you!” Harms shouted, his voice taut with resolve.
Yakima heeled Wolf into a ground-eating gallop, firs and pines passing in a blur along both sides of the trail, the silver-glinting stream rushing over rocks and deadfall logs to his left. He passed an abandoned prospector’s cabin grown up with shrubs, and braced himself as he traced what he recognized as the last, long curve in the trail before the clearing in which Thornton’s Roadhouse sat.
An anxious scowl bit into his forehead as he peered skyward, the low, dark clouds touched with flickering umber and tendrils of white smoke. Hunched low in the saddle, he and Wolf raced around the last dogleg in the trail, bringing the clearing up in front of them.
Thornton’s sat to the right, flames licking out a second-story window with white smoke pouring out around them. The flames were leaping up above the window to the roof and down the wall toward the porch below it. Wan light lit the first-story windows, including the large one left of the door and under the porch’s sloping, shake-shingled roof.
Yakima’s chest tightened and his gut rolled as he turned the horse to the roadhouse. Wolf was still lunging forward when Yakima leaped out of the saddle, lost his footing, fell, and rolled.
He came up pulling his .44 out from beneath his coat and running in long strides toward the roadhouse, the dragon’s breath of the flames wheezing and roaring above his head.
He could hear men shouting inside as he leaped up the porch steps in a single bound. Thumbing his Colt’s hammer back, he tripped the front door’s latch perfectly as he smashed his shoulder against the door panel. The door flew open, slamming back against the wall, and just over the threshold, Yakima dropped to his knee and raked his eyes around the dim room into which the smoke from upstairs was seeping.
“Hey!” a man shouted in surprise—a shadowy figure wheeling toward Yakima from near the large, bullet-shaped woodstove.
Cold steel flashed low on the man’s silhouette, and Yakima’s Colt barked and leaped in his hand. The man screamed and stumbled backward, twisting sideways, his own revolver exploding into the ceiling. Another figure at the top of the stairs, wheeling toward Yakima, angled a rifle down the stairs.
The rifle flashed and cracked. The slug barked into the puncheons three feet in front of Yakima. Yakima rolled as another explosion followed the rasp of a cocking lever. The second slug tore into the floor to Yakima’s left.
Yakima rolled onto his belly, angling his Colt straight out from his chest and aiming up the stairs.
Pow! Pow! Pow!
The .44’s explosions echoed around the saloon hall. At the top of the stairs, the man with the rifle grunted. There was a smashing clatter as the rifle hit the floor and the man rolled down the stairs, cursing.
His voice trailed off as he followed his still-rolling rifle down the stairs. He was still rolling when Yakima scrambled back to his feet and bolted forward, yelling, “Faith!”
The dead rifleman hit the floor at the bottom of the stairs. Yakima leaped over the man’s bulky body, gaining the stairs on the third step and taking the rest three at a time, holding his cocked revolver out before him.
He turned at the top and ran down the hall, yelling for Faith and squinting against the smoke and flames seeping around a closed door halfway down the hall. Turning the doorknob quickly, he pushed the door open.
The blast of fresh air from the hall made the burning walls and ceiling inside the room growl like a suddenly aroused lion, instantly gaining intensity. The searing heat pushed against Yakima, soaking his shirt with sweat.
“Faith?”
Crouching, he darted into the room. Two figures lay on the floor—one belly-down, blond hair fanned across her head. Thornton lay beyond Faith. The roadhouse manager was on his side, mouth half open as though in midspeech, his death-glazed eyes orange with leaping flames.
Yakima dropped to a knee over Faith and touched her shoulders. She jerked with a start and a muffled gasp.
“It’s Yakima.” Gently, he turned her over, winced at the blood streaming down from her right temple. “I’m gonna get you out of here.”
Yakima snaked one arm under her neck, the other under her knees, and rose. Tears and sweat from the heat and smoke streamed down his face as he hurried to the hall door. He started out, stopped, and turned back into the room, where Thornton lay seemingly staring at him with glassy, orange eyes.
“Burn in hell, bastard.”
With Faith in his arms, Yakima turned and went out, striding quickly down the smoke-filled hall, then down the stairs, holding Faith secure in his arms. She groaned and turned her head and tried lifting a hand to his face.
“Easy,” Yakima said as he gained the bottom of the stairs.
He stepped over the dead rifleman and, glancing at the tattoo-faced man lying prone near the stove, continued across the saloon hall, out the front door, and onto the porch. He eased down the steps and walked into the hard-packed yard lit by the growing fire in the roadhouse’s second story.
He gently eased Faith onto the ground and leaned over her. His face only inches from hers, he slid her hair back from her cheeks. “Faith. Can you hear me?”
She groaned and coughed as her chest spasmed. Her eyes opened partway. They had a confused, faraway look before they finally focused on Yakima. The corners of her mouth rose, and her gaze softened.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have bought us more time.”
Yakima shook his head and kissed her cheek. “You don’t have anything to be sorry about. We have plenty of time. I’ll get you back to Denver, look up a sawbones.”
She placed a finger against his lips. “I love you, Yakima. I always would have.”
“We’ll go back to Arizona, rebuild the cabin.”
She smiled up at him. Tears shone in her eyes.
“Thornton’s dead. You got him.” Yakima slid his hands under her once more. “I’m gonna get you on a horse, and . . .”