by Tabor Evans
As the smoke thinned out in the pine branches, John realized that what he was seeing was Magnusson and his two daughters gathered at the ridge crest. Magnusson knelt behind the black-haired girl, who was down on one knee herself, letting her old man rest the barrel of his big Sharps on her right shoulder.
The blonde stood to one side, feet spread, fists on her hips, tangled hair blowing around her head. The wolf sat up a slight rise and back a ways, tail curled around its right hind leg, staring toward John.
The heavy-caliber slug whistled softly.
The buffalo gun’s muffled roar reached John’s ears a half second before a searing pain tore through his left side with a jarring thwapp!
“Ohhh, you dirty coyotes!” John roared, wincing and jerking back in the saddle as the dun sidestepped. He slapped a hand to the quarter-sized hole in his buckskin tunic, about four inches up from his left hip. “Fucking dog-eaters!”
Magnusson crouched over the rifle, probably reloading, as the wolf ripped down the hill toward John. Clutching his side, feeling blood begin to seep between his fingers, fighting nausea, John reined the dun westward and ground his spurs into its ribs.
“Fucking goddamn savage dog-worshippers!” he bellowed, crouched low in the saddle, gritting his teeth against the cold-searing pain that seemed to engulf his entire body.
Another muffled roar sounded at nearly the same time another heavy slug tore up sod about three feet left of the dun’s thundering hooves. The mule brayed and jerked at its lead rope. The rope slipped out of John’s hand—the same hand clutching his wound—and the mule angled off to the right, the rope bouncing along the brushy turf behind it.
“Good riddance, you yellow bastard! I’m faster without ya, anyways!”
John spat, looked down at his side. Blood welled between the fingers of his left hand. He felt as though a large rat had dug its teeth into his side and wouldn’t let go.
He glanced behind, seeing nothing but low, brown rises and occasional brushy cuts. Turning forward, he whipped the lunging dun with his rein ends, angling toward the cut in the rimrocks straight ahead.
There was no doubt they were after him now.
He and the dun had to eat some turf.
John stopped the horse in a high mountain meadow, at the edge of a stream trickling over low, rocky falls through pine woods. He looked behind at the pass he’d just descended.
Nothing moved but the green aspen leaves and a splash of red columbine. The breeze creaked the treetops, and a squirrel chittered angrily.
He’d ridden for over an hour, looking back as he’d crested nearly every rise, and hadn’t spied anyone on his trail. Relatively certain that Magnusson and his wolf women had given him up for dead, Comanche John climbed heavily down from the dun, who had already lowered its snout to draw water from the stream.
John cursed, ambled heavy-footed to the edge of the stream, and dropped to his knees. Slowly, he peeled his bloody hand away from the wound. The blood had run down beneath his shirt to soak his right buckskin leg nearly as far down as the knee.
He cursed again, fumbled his Bowie knife from its sheath behind his gun holster, peeled his shirt away from the wound, and poked the pointed tip of the knife through the buckskin. He cut a ragged circle around the bullet hole, exposing nearly half of his flat, pale belly, then dropped the knife in the grass and began cupping water to the wound.
He sucked air through his teeth, squeezing his eye closed, as the cold water bit into the wound, turning his knees to putty.
“Fuckin’ no-account coyotes,” John rasped, probing the wound with his right index finger, finding the gaping hole.
He reached behind him with his left hand and was glad to find the exit hole. At least the ball wasn’t in him, tearing up his innards. He’d been wounded worse, but this one screamed nearly as loud as the Arapaho arrow he’d had to dig out of his shoulder two autumns ago in Kansas.
When he’d thoroughly cleaned the wound, which continued to bleed, though not as fast as before, he gathered a neckerchief full of loam from the streambed and watercress from the woods. He soaked the mixture in the stream, squeezed it together, added whiskey, then pressed the poultice into both the entry and exit wounds. He groaned, squinting his eye shut as the whiskey seared.
When the burn faded, he ripped the sleeves off an old wool shirt, tied them together, then knotted the single length around his belly, covering both wounds.
A half hour after he’d stopped, he took a long drink of water, filled his canteen, glanced behind, and remounted the dun, continuing southwest, heading cross-country toward Magnusson’s second cabin and, hopefully, Longarm.
He rode until dark and camped in a valley beside a wide, flat stream looking like pink scales in the twilight. He staked the dun in the thick grass and bluebonnets growing high beneath the aspens, then built a fire, set coffee to boil, and more thoroughly cleaned the wound in the river.
He noticed that his buckskin breeches were bloody all the way down to his right ankle, and he chuckled. So that’s why he’d grown so damn weak.
When he’d repacked the wound with fresh mud he’d mixed with whiskey and watercress, and had retied the sleeve around his belly, he sat heavily down by the fire. Leaning against a log, he ate jerky and drank coffee laced with whiskey, then just whiskey.
He slept fitfully, rolled up in his soogan, his head on his saddle. He wished he had his fur robes, but those had been secured to the pack mule with most of his food, his cooking supplies, and his lean-to. With most of his hooch and ammunition, as well, damn that mule . . .
Deep in the night, a chill engulfed him. He had trouble sleeping, he was so cold. His clothes and blankets were drenched with cold sweat. All he could do was keep the fire blazing and hunker down as close to it as he could, his bones and teeth clattering.
He fell into a deep sleep sometime around sunrise. When he finally opened his eye, he wasn’t sure what time it was, but the sun quartering over the eastern peaks, silhouetting the tall aspens between it and the camp, radiated the heat of hell itself.
John’s clothes were still damp. He felt parboiled inside them.
He flung off the blankets that smelled of smoke and sweat, and rose to his knees. He looked down at his side. The compress over the entry wound was soaked with fresh as well as thick, clotted blood.
Feeling the heat surge through him, John shucked off his clothes. When he was down to only his balbriggans, he tramped through the aspens along a game trail and stepped into the stream, the cold water chilling him, fighting off the infernal heat threatening to melt the hide off his bones.
His bare feet slipping on the slick, round stones of the riverbed, he splashed out to the middle of the shin-high stream and sat down in a pool, his back to a half-submerged boulder, facing the sun.
He stretched his lips back from his teeth as he lifted his chin to the sun, enjoying the warmth on his face as the cold, sliding water soothed his fever-racked body. The water numbed him and the sun put him to sleep.
As if from far away, voices rose above the river’s constant chuckle. Hooves clomped and water splashed.
John opened his eyes. A horse appeared sixty yards away, clomping slowly through the water in the middle of the stream—a stocky paint horse moving toward him with two riders on its back.
A dark-haired girl and a blonde.
The wolf trotted along beside the horse, its head down, tongue out, eyes regarding John hungrily.
The girls stared at him, too—a serene expression on the black-haired girl’s face, the blonde smiling delightedly over the other girl’s right shoulder. They weren’t wearing much, and their legs and feet were bare.
John straightened his back and turned toward the bank, where he’d left his rifle. He froze. Magnusson was hunkered down on his haunches a few yards from the water—a big, bearlike figure in his buffalo robe and smoke-stained leather hat. His tiny eyes slitted and his white-streaked, cinnamon beard rose as he grinned his snaggletoothed grin at John.
Suddenly, seeing the expression on John’s face, he threw his head back and laughed.
John sagged back against the boulder. He turned to the girls approaching on the paint horse, the wolf staying close beside the horse and showing its long, curved teeth to John.
John looked at the girls. The dark-haired girl’s eyes met his, and she smiled, the V-neck of her deer-hide vest revealing the deep, clay-colored valley between her bouncing breasts.
John stretched a smile as the girls drew up before him, hair billowing over their shoulders, their damp legs glistening in the sunshine, long knives jutting from scabbards on their thighs.
“Well, shit, I reckon it’s my time.” John sighed, his eye bright. “But what a way to go!”
Chapter 16
Longarm scraped his thumbnail across a sulfur-tipped match and touched the flame to his cigar. Drawing the smoke deep into his lungs, he sat back against a tree bole and watched the sorrel and the speckle-gray pack mule draw water from the spring bubbling up from mossy stones.
It had taken him nearly two hours the previous night, after the rogue grizzly had finally ambled away, to retrieve the sorrel from a distant meadow cloaked in velvet darkness and shimmering stars, the saddle hanging beneath its belly but otherwise intact, his rifle still snugged in its boot. He hadn’t found the mule until this morning, cropping young willows along a creek nestled in a deep gorge.
Longarm was on the trail again by ten-thirty and, following Comanche John’s scribbled map, found the second cabin by early afternoon. As he’d expected—because he’d never come across a fresh trail—the taut log structure, perched on a hillside overlooking a small ravine and rolling firs and aspens, had been abandoned, the doors and windows boarded up, a wooden bucket tipped over the chimney pipe, needle grass growing in the adjoining corral and lean-to.
Longarm took another deep drag off the cigar and stared at the rocky twin domes of Ute Peak rising from the pine forest ahead of him, its boulder-strewn slopes and rounded crests stippled with brown boulders and cedars, the trees thicker in the ravines and chutes branching around scarps protruding from its slope like rocky sores.
Ute was the highest peak around, jutting from a pine-choked canyon among other, similar formations a good eight thousand feet above sea level, above the north fork of the Diamondback River twisting at its base.
Longarm couldn’t see the river canyon from here, but crossing several steep rises earlier, he’d heard the rapids. Judging by John’s map, Magnusson’s second cabin lay just over the peak’s low, eastern shoulder, near Neversummer Creek.
He hadn’t figured on riding that far to meet John. If all had gone well, they should have crossed paths by now, but it looked as though Longarm would have to ford the north fork of the Diamondback and try to pick up John’s trail somewhere around the other cabin.
He hoped John hadn’t fallen prey to Magnusson’s wolf women. John could be nettling and tiresome, but Longarm had grown fond of the old codger, and he’d hate like hell to have to tell the Marshal of Diamondback he’d gotten her uncle killed.
Longarm was trail-weary, fatigued from the thin, high-altitude air, the bear debacle, from having to run down his mounts afoot, and from riding up and down these forested ridges, each one looking all too much like the one before it, not to mention ducking under branches and swerving around deadfall and backtracking after his trail petered out in a box canyon.
With a sigh, he stuck the cheroot in his teeth, stood, brushed off his denims, and reached into his saddlebags for his Maryland rye. He lifted it high, smiled with relief to see that the bottle was three-quarters full, then popped the cork and took a bracing pull.
Enjoying the burn in his throat and the restorative warmth in his belly, he returned the hooch to the pouch, grabbed the sorrel’s reins and the pack mule’s lead rope, and swung into the leather.
An hour later, he was walking the sorrel along the shoulder of a grassy slope, when the mule nickered. A half second later, the sorrel threw its head up sharply, snorting and twitching its ears.
Longarm drew back on the horse’s reins, glanced at the pack mule, which had stopped and was bobbing its head angrily.
“What is it, fellas?”
Longarm peered through the trees carpeting the slope below, at the pines and rocks on the incline to his right. Magpies foraged among the branches, and a golden eagle winged around a granite scarp jutting high above the ridge crest. The only sounds were the birds and the river rapids curving along the base of the mountain on Longarm’s left.
Frowning, keeping his ears pricked and dragging his gaze back and forth across the old Basque sheep trail he’d been following from Magnusson’s empty cabin, he gigged the sorrel forward. As he moved into the shaded forest, the mule stopped suddenly, snorting loudly, nearly jerking the lead rope from Longarm’s hand.
The sorrel whinnied.
“What the—?” Peering downslope, Longarm tensed his back and touched his pistol grips.
Where the forest bled out to a steep, sunlit slope carpeted in brome grass, needle grass, and squaw currant, a young woman was hunkered down on all fours, picking currants from the bushes and dropping them into a large basket of woven yucca blades. She wore no top, and her full, pink-tipped, golden tan breasts swayed as she moved, crawling along the slope’s shoulder, plucking berries from the spindly vines.
Fifty yards below her, the rapid-stitched river curved along the base of the mountain.
The sorrel twitched its ears again. As it lifted its head sharply, Longarm leaned forward and, staring at the blonde who had not yet seen him in the forest shadows, closed his gloved left hand across the horse’s nostrils, preventing a whinny.
The blonde probably hadn’t heard him because of the river’s rush below, but the jittery animals appeared ready to pitch and scream.
When the sorrel lowered its head, Longarm removed his right hand from its snout and, touching his revolver’s grips once more, pulled his boot from his right stirrup, preparing to dismount. He’d just begun to swing his right leg up toward the horse’s rump, when something large appeared in the corner of his right eye.
A tooth-gnashing roar sounded like a locomotive’s bellow in Denver’s Burlington yards.
Both horses pitched and screamed. Slamming his right boot back into the stirrup and flinging his right hand toward the saddle horn, Longarm whipped his head toward the up slope.
The grizzly stood on its hind legs at the very edge of thick woods and behind a boulder that rose to the bear’s broad belly. It could be no other bear but the one he’d already danced with, for there could be no other bear that size—or that cantankerous—in this stretch of forest.
The son of a bitch had followed him. It was stalking him.
As the sorrel screamed again and swung sharply toward the down slope, Longarm’s right hand hit the saddlehorn askance. Before he knew it, he was careening off the horse’s right shoulder. He hit the ground on his back, the air squeezed from his lungs in a single rush.
He instinctively dug his fingers into the dirt and pine needles carpeting the steep slope, but gravity grabbed him and pitched him down the mountain.
As he turned somersaults through the thin brush of the forest, grunting and groaning, he watched the arrow-straight columns of the pines whip past. His shoulder glanced off one. The blow turned him slightly.
Then he was rolling, limbs akimbo. With each downturn, he saw the blonde on the sun-splashed slope grow before him. On her hands and knees, she stared up at him, blue eyes wide with shock, breasts dipped toward her berry basket, wild hair framing her chiseled, beautiful face.
She was directly in Longarm’s path.
As he rolled toward her, she swerved one way, then the other, her eyes growing larger. Then he slammed into her. She screamed. Berries flew.
She rolled beneath him, then on top of him, and then they got separated for a while before he rolled on top of her once more, feeling her hair in
his face, then her naked, sweat-slick right shoulder a half second before his hand swept across a full, round breast.
They separated as they flew off the bank and plunged into the river.
Longarm felt the cold water close over him, his right leg entangled with one of the blonde’s. He heard the muffled explosion of a large-caliber rifle.
His back hit the rocky bottom—a dozen hard lumps assaulting him. He got his legs under him and lifted his head from the water as another explosion resounded throughout his skull.
He spit water, shook his head, and opened his eyes. The blonde bobbed up from the pool, gasping and smoothing her hair back from her face, the water cascading down her breasts. Beyond her, a big, bearded man in a buffalo coat and leather hat sat on the riverbank, holding a heavy Sharps rifle in his hands as he stared uphill, grinning.
Up the hill, brush thrashed and deep grunts sounded.
Longarm followed the big man’s gaze, his own eyes snapping wide.
The grizzly tumbled down the hill like a huge boulder loosed by a landslide. The bear was heading toward Longarm and the girl, who stood gazing up at the bear, her lips forming a silent “Wooah!”
Longarm’s body was sore from toe to scalp, and his brain was addled. He was slow to react. As the bear plunged toward him, dust billowing around the huge, bouncing body, the arms and legs flying every which way, Longarm wheeled and threw himself into the blonde.
They flew ten feet upstream, landing on a shallow bar. A wink later, the bear careened over the cutbank and plunged into the river like a gargantuan cannonball, landing where Longarm and the girl had stood staring up at it.
The splash was like a dynamite detonation. Ka-booom!
Longarm and the girl were pelted with sand and pebbles as a wave washed over them. Spitting grit from his lips, Longarm stared at the bear.
It lay on its back, arms and legs spread wide. Blood glistened from two large holes in its chest, webbing like red smoke in the tea-colored water. The bear’s nose and toes stuck up from the surface, its brown, shot-glass eyes glazed with death.