All his life Wes had felt slighted, put down by the people who counted. Probably it had something to do with growing up poor. He had always envied people with money, had always been determined to have it for himself. Now he had it in abundance. Unlike his brothers, who were only interested in women and cards, Wes had learned to imitate the respectable people, to copy their clothes and manners. He had done such a good job that he was close to becoming respectable himself.
All he needed to make everything perfect was a family. He’d always been so busy taking care of Vance and Lee, of planning for the gang, that he’d never had much time for women. But now there was Estella, the beautiful daughter of a ranchero outside Arispe in Sonora. Estella and her father had no idea what Wes really did. If he worked it right, they never would know. He would continue to run the gang out of the ranch, with Lee taking over much of the day-to-day responsibilities, while he would live with Estella and the children in town. They would become Topaz’s most prominent citizens. The life Wes had always dreamed of was about to become a reality.
First, however, he had to get Vance back. Then he had to settle with Clay Chandler. He couldn’t understand Chandler. He had given the man every chance; he had gone out of his way to be accommodating, to be friends. And this was how Chandler repaid him. Very well, then, Chandler would get to see another side of him; and it was a side the marshal was not likely to enjoy.
* * *
Charity Price was looking out the front window of her house, at her once immaculately manicured garden, now ruined by the storm. She was thinking about all the work she would have to do that day cleaning imp, wondering how she could keep the children occupied while she was busy. She saw Wes Hopkins walk down the street and turn up her front path, kicking aside a whitewashed garden stone that had been blown out of place.
Wes Hopkins was not a frequent visitor to Charity’s house. She would not permit such a thing; she had standards to uphold. She knew they had to put up with him, though, especially since he had done so much for her husband, so she tried to be polite as she opened the door to his knock. “Mr. Hopkins,” she said, affecting pleasant surprise. “Good morning.”
“Where’s your husband?” Wes said brusquely.
“He’s breakfasting in the next room, but he doesn’t wish to be disturbed. Perhaps if you—”
Wes brushed past her and went to the dining room. Charity stared after him, flabbergasted. “Well!” she huffed.
Wes barged into the dining room. “Price?”
The mayor stood from the table. “Wes. I’d prefer it if you didn’t come to my—”
“They’re gone, Price. Vance and that damned marshal.” Price went pale. Behind them Charity said, “Really, Mr. Hopkins, I’ll thank you not to swear under my roof. ”
“I’ll swear wherever the hell I want, lady. If you don’t like it, you’d best leave. It’s liable to get worse.”
Charity looked at her husband, expecting him to defend her honor, but he merely nodded for her to leave the room, which she did, flush-faced. To Wes, Price said in a low voice, “They’re gone?”
“You heard me. They got out during the storm.”
“And you don’t know where they are?”
“If I did, I wouldn’t be here, would I? I'm disappointed in you, Price. I gave you a chance to prove your friendship, and you bungled it. Your man Grady was supposed to be good. What went wrong?”
Price hesitated. If Chandler had really escaped with Vance, it could be the best way out of this dilemma for everyone. Let them go and be done with it. It would no longer be the town’s problem. He had to be careful how he answered, though. “I—I don’t know, Wes. It was bad luck, I guess. I did my best.”
“Well, your best wasn’t good enough. Vance is my family, and by Christ, if anything happens to him, I’ll make sure something happens to your family as well.”
“Wait a minute, Wes. You got no right to drag my family—”
“I got every right. This ain’t business, Price, it’s personal. I’d hate to hurt your wife and kids, but I’ll do it. So you better get your ass out there and start looking for Vance and Chandler—your friends, too, if they know what’s good for them.”
Wes turned and walked out of the room. By the door he passed Charity, who still attempted to maintain the norms of propriety. “Good morning, Mister—”
He ignored her, slamming the front door as he left the house.
* * *
Outside, Wes started back to the street. As he did, Lee came running up. “Wes!”
Wes stopped. “You found them?”
Lee was out of breath. “No, but you know Fountain—the cobbler? Has a shop on the comer of Tucson and Second? He says he saw three men leaving town last night, during the storm. Says he happened to look out his back window just before the fire started—saw them in the alley.”
“Three men—he’s sure?”
“Pretty sure—it was hard to see because of the rain.”
“It has to be them,” Wes swore. “That sonofabitch Chandler.”
“Where would they be going?”
“Tucson. It’s the only place they could go. He sure ain’t taking Vance to Mexico. All right, mount the men. Make sure those two Mex trackers are with them. Have each man bring a spare horse, and tell them to load up on ammunition.”
“The bridge is out,” Lee said. “The river’s still up.”
“We’ll find a crossing. We’ll swim the horses over if we have to. We’ll build a goddamn boat if we have to. They have a lead on us, but we’ll catch them. We’ll use the extra horses and we’ll ride them into the ground.”
18
Clay, Essex, and Vance rode all day in the blistering July heat. They left the foothills and entered the mountains. Weary as they were, they remained alert, on the lookout for Apaches. Late in the afternoon, Clay found a campground. He led the party halfway up a rocky hillside—he didn’t want to be skylighted against the horizon—to a bench with a rocky escarpment at its back and a drop-off in front. There they would be protected against surprise attacks from two sides.
“It’s about time,” Vance moaned as they dismounted. “My ass is killing me, my head hurts, and I’m sick. I’m going to have my lawyer charge you all with prisoner abuse. I just want to lay down.”
“Hold out your hands,” Clay ordered. Vance did, reluctantly, and Clay slapped the cuffs on him. “Now you can lay down.”
While Vance sprawled in the scant shade of the rocks, Clay and Essex unsaddled the horses, rubbed them down with empty grain sacks, and began the laborious chore of picking cholla needles from the animals’ legs. “We should make Tucson about this time tomorrow, or a little later,” Essex guessed.
“That’s what I figure,” Clay said.
“Ain’t cut no Apache sign. You think they’re around?”
Clay wrinkled his brow. “They were a week ago. They could still be here, or they could be five hundred miles away by now. You never know with Apaches.”
The talk about Apaches brought Vance to life. “I'm scared as hell of Apaches,” he said, looking around fearfully, as though he expected a war party to materialize out of the solid rock. “Cochise and his men caught one of our wranglers once.” He shivered at the recollection and said, “I’d rather hang than fall into their hands.”
“That’s the plan,” Clay said genially.
“It ain’t my plan,” Vance growled.
While Essex guarded Vance, Clay led the horses down the hill to a stream. Most of last night’s rainwater had drained into the sand, but there was enough left to water the animals. Clay grained the horses and set them out to graze, then he and Essex cleaned and oiled their weapons, which had received a thorough wetting in the rain. Metallic shells and paper ammunition cartridges were laid out to dry. Afterward, Clay hobbled the horses for the night in a brushy draw on the far side of the hill, a half-mile from camp. That way, if the Apaches found the horses, they might still miss the men.
Later Clay built a fire am
ong the rocks. The fire was concealed so it wouldn’t be visible from a distance, small enough that an enemy would almost have to walk on top of it before seeing—or smelling—it. Clay had learned to build such fires during his lonely months of prospecting these mountains. When the fire was ready, Clay made coffee, and he and Essex ate the leftover food from the picnic hamper.
Licking his fingers, Clay helped himself to more cherry pie. He looked over at Vance. “What’s wrong, Hopkins? You ain’t eating.”
“Not hungry,” Vance muttered. He sat against the rocks, his back to the other two, like a petulant child.
Clay shook his head. “This food sure is good. We’ll thank your girlfriends for it when we get back to Topaz. It’s a cinch you won’t be seeing them for a while.”
“Go to hell, Chandler. It’s you that won’t be seeing nobody—not after Wes and Lee get through with you.”
Essex was attacking a fried chicken leg. “This white girls’ food ain’t bad, I guess, but I could really go for some kush. ”
“You mean commeal fried up with onions and peppers?” Clay said.
“Yeah, that’s the stuff. You heard of it, huh?”
“Used to eat it all the time back home.”
Essex chuckled. “Man, you was rich, wasn’t you?”
Clay washed down the pie with some coffee and looked into the darkness. “Rich? Not in money. We were hardscrabble farmers, raising corn and pigs, and in a good year there might be a few dollars left to buy flour. We wore homemade clothes and Pa drank homemade liquor. What little learning I have, my ma gave me. I never even had me a pair of shoes till I was fourteen—and they was hand-me-downs from Pa.”
Essex was unimpressed. “You still had me beat by two years—Massa Woodbine wasn’t big on giving his niggers no shoes. Figured we’d use them to run away in.”
Clay went on, remembering. “My pa was a hardworking, Bible-reading man. Ma was old before her time—lost four children before they was ten. We were happy, though—the happiest I ever been. ” He took a deep breath and looked at Essex. “Then we lost it all—because of a war that never should have been fought.”
Essex was incredulous. “What do you think—we should have stayed slaves?”
“Slavery wouldn’t have lasted ten more years,” Clay told him. “It didn’t work.”
“You might feel different if you was the one supposed to stay a slave them ten more years.”
Clay’s voice rose. “Was ten years worth all the lives that were lost, all the other lives that were disrupted, the homes destroyed? The whole thing could have been settled peacefully. Instead, my folks are gone, died of grief and illness. My sister Molly was widowed, then remarried and moved to Atlanta. After Sherman burnt the place, we never heard from her again. Then there was my brother . . . Alvah, his name was. He was three years younger than me, a great kid. Ma said the sun shone anywhere Alvah went—he had that kind of personality. Followed me everywhere. Followed me to the war, too. I told him to stay home and take care of Ma and Pa, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Didn’t want to miss all the fun, he said.
“He got himself shot in a picket skirmish during the retreat from Gettysburg. Minié ball shattered his thigh. They cut off his leg and took him to the rear. He was a tough kid, so he hung on a long time, wasting away. I saw him once before he died, at a hospital in Richmond. He weighed about eighty pounds, but he still had that same sunny smile. He was still cheerful.”
Clay waited a moment, then said in a low voice, “The worst part was, I made him go on picket that night. He said he was sick, but I was his company commander, and I didn’t want the men to think I was playing favorites.”
Essex said, “You expect me to feel sorry for somebody died fighting to keep my people in chains?”
“He was fighting for his country,” Clay said.
Essex didn’t care. “Far as I’m concerned, he got what he deserved.”
Clay slugged Essex in the face.
Essex fell backward and Clay leaped on top of him. The two men rolled in the dirt, punching and pounding. Vance laughed, suddenly revived. “Go on, kill each other. Save my brothers the trouble.”
Clay and Essex paid him no mind. They got to their feet and moved toward each other in the darkness. “Damn nigger,” Clay said.
“I warned you ’bout calling me that,” Essex replied. Clay swung his right hand. Essex ducked the blow. He hit Clay with a right to the stomach and followed it with a left to the temple that put Clay down.
Clay lay on the ground, shaking his head. “The overseer teach you that trick, too?” he sneered.
“No, I taught it to—”
Before Essex could finish, Clay scrambled to his feet and rushed him, catching him around the waist. Clay’s momentum drove the two of them off the rock bench and they rolled downhill, banging themselves on sharp rocks, being tom by cactus and brush.
They slid to a halt about halfway down the hillside. They lay for a second, about twenty yards apart, making sure nothing was broken. Slowly, they stood, wincing from the pain caused by the rocks and by the cactus needles sticking in them. They looked for each other in the darkness.
“Come on,” Clay taunted.
“Here I am,” Essex said, moving forward.
The two men exchanged punches, each staggering the other. Then Clay hit Essex in the jaw with his left hand and knocked him down. As Essex got up, Clay laughed and aimed a sweeping, two-handed blow, trying to take off the black man’s head. He missed, grunting with the effort.
Essex butted Clay in the stomach and he went over backward. Essex jumped him, but Clay pushed Essex over his head with his feet. Essex slammed onto his back. Both men lay there for a second, the wind knocked out of them. Painfully they pushed themselves upright, their breathing loud in the darkness. They moved forward, swinging their fists at the same time. Essex hit Clay beneath the eye. Clay hit Essex on the side of the head. “Ow!” yelled Clay, shaking his hand. “You broke my hand!”
“I’m gonna break your neck, you piece of shit,” Essex said. He hit Clay with a left hand that sent Clay spinning around. As Essex rushed in to follow up his advantage, Clay desperately threw out an elbow that caught the black man in the nose.
“Shit!” Essex said. He bent over, blood gushing from his nose, down the front of his shirt.
Both men staggered around in pain. Clay said, “Had enough?”
“No. How ’bout you?”
They grappled again, slipping and sliding on the rocky hillside until they fell. They lay side by side, breathing heavily. Essex tilted his head back to lessen the bleeding from his nose. “Now that we killed each other, maybe we should save some energy for the Hopkins gang,” he suggested.
After a minute Clay stood up. “Come on,” he said.
The two men climbed the hill, huffing, stumbling on unseen rocks, aching and bleeding in a hundred places, poked full of cactus needles. Halfway up, they heard the sound of hoof beats from the brushy draw on the far side of the hill.
“Shit!” Essex yelled again.
They ran the rest of the way up the slope, their hurts forgotten. They reached the fire and their campground, and they looked around.
Vance was gone.
19
“Christ,” Clay moaned in frustration.
“You white trash fool,” Essex said. “This is your fault.”
“My fault?”
“You hadn’t started that fight, he wouldn’t have been able to run off.”
“If you had stayed in Topaz like I told you, there wouldn’t have been a fight to start.”
Essex wiped his bleeding nose on his sleeve. “Damn. Ain’t no arguing with somebody as stupid as you.”
“Vance has got a good lead on us,” Clay said. “Let’s stop blaming each other and get after him.”
In the dim light provided by the fire, the two men gathered their weapons and ammunition. “He took his pistol with him,” Essex said, searching in vain for it. “Damn, I liked that pistol.”
&nbs
p; “Why? You didn’t know how to use it.”
While Essex loaded the Henry repeater and filled his pockets with spare shells, Clay loaded the sawed-off shotgun and completed the longer process of loading his cap-and-ball Colt revolver. Essex said, “I wonder why he didn’t take the guns, come down the hill and shoot us?”
“He probably figured it would be hard to find us in the dark down there, and there was too much of a chance one of us would get him. He probably didn’t want the noise, either. If there’s Apaches around, gunfire would bring them sure as hell.”
Clay finished with the revolver and holstered it. “Let’s go,” he said.
They started down the far side of the hill toward the brushy draw, feeling their way in the dark. Every step brought pain to their cactus-punctured bodies. “Shit! ” Essex swore, stepping gingerly. “I got more needles in me than a damn porcupine.”
They reached the mesquite bosque where they had tethered the horses. “They’re all gone,” Clay said, looking around. Two saddles and bridles were still there.
Essex said, “I wonder, did he have sense enough to take them other two horses with him, or did he just run them off?”
“With those cuffs on, he’d have trouble managing a lead line and two horses. With luck, he let them go. Besides, he’s stupid.”
“We got to catch him before he gets back to Topaz.”
“First we need the horses.”
“You leave that to me,” Essex said, taking the lariat from his saddle. “Give me your rope.”
The Lawmen Page 10