“All that don’t make no never mind now, son. Them miners are drunk and they’re riled. You led those three thieving women here and if they catch you they won’t ask no questions. They’ll just string you up, probably right here in this barn.”
“Ethan, I’m beholden to you,” Garrett said.
As the old man waved a dismissive hand, Garrett kicked the grulla into motion and left the barn at a gallop. He swung toward the gate, hearing the drunken shouts of angry men around him.
“There’s one of them!” somebody yelled. “Stop him!”
The gate was twenty yards away. Guns banged and a bullet tugged at Garrett’s sleeve. Another cut the air by his left ear—and ahead of him a couple of men were running to close the gate!
Raking the grulla with his spurs, Garrett charged. One of the men had closed his side of the gate, but the other half was still a third of the way open. Luck was with Garrett. Instead of closing the gate fully, the man to his right left off pushing and went for his gun instead.
As Garrett reached the opening, the miner fired. But whiskey and the crowding darkness did nothing for his aim and the bullet went wide. Just to keep the man honest, Garrett drew and slammed a couple of shots into the dirt at his feet. The miner jumped back a step, cursing, then tripped and fell on his rump—and Garrett was through the opening and flapping his chaps for the trail.
Behind him there were more angry shouts and guns fired. A few bullets came close, zinging viciously past his head. But the night quickly swallowed him and the shooting came to a ragged halt.
The grulla’s pounding hooves beat like a muffled kettledrum on the hard-packed dirt of the trail as Garrett headed south in the direction of Verdigris Coulee. The moon was rising alone in a purple sky, and every bush and clump of bunchgrass was touched by silvery light.
Garrett scanned the land ahead of him, looking for the white spruce where Temple Yates said he’d be waiting. Aware of the shots he’d fired at the fort, he reined in the grulla and reloaded his gun, filling all six cylinders. He might well be grateful for that extra round when he met up with Yates.
The coyotes were calling around him as Garrett rode up on the spruce at a walk, the tree’s spreading branches black against the brightness of the night sky. Where was Yates?
Swinging out of the saddle, Garrett let the grulla’s reins trail as he stepped to the spruce and looked around into the darkness, his gun in his hand. “Yates,” he whispered, “are you here?”
The answering silence mocked him. The coyotes had fallen into quiet, but now, as Garrett scouted the area, they began to talk again.
Suddenly the grulla lifted its head, its ears pricked forward, listening to the night.
“Easy, boy,” Garrett whispered. He stepped to the horse and gathered up the reins. “Yates, is that you? Show yourself, damn it.”
The grulla snorted and pranced backward, up on its toes, white arcs of alarm showing in its eyes. Uneasily Garrett looked around him, trying to penetrate the threatening shadows that angled across the moonlit prairie.
A stealthy rustle near the base of the spruce.
Garrett’s Colt came up, hammer back and ready. “Step out where I can see you,” he said. “I got me a finger lookin’ for a trigger here.”
A few moments slipped past as Garrett stood alone in his small world of silence and darkness. Then the night parted and a huge gray shape emerged by the base of the spruce. The wolf Mingan stopped and watched him, its eyes burning with a golden fire.
Now that the predator was closer, the grulla whinnied in fear and reared on its hind legs, ready for fight or flight. Garrett fought the horse, holding tight to the reins as it plunged and bucked, attempting to turn and run. Finally the grulla calmed down enough that Garrett could throw a glance over his shoulder at the spruce. The wolf was gone and only the darkness remained where it was.
Garrett stepped into the saddle and swung the horse away from the tree. In the distance, heading toward him through the gloom, bobbing torches glowed like scarlet stars and men’s angry voices were raised, yelling back and forth to each other.
The miners were coming after him and they’d be carrying hemp.
Time was running out on Luke Garrett, but he forced himself to fight down his clamoring panic and think.
Jenny and the other women had obviously decided to keep all the miners’ money for themselves—but in doing that had they made a fatal mistake? Yates could have taken advantage of the darkness to move closer to the fort and he could have seen them leave. He might even now be chasing them. If that was the case, Jenny was in mortal danger.
But what direction had the women taken?
To the west lay Blackfoot country and the formidable barrier of the Rocky Mountains. It was unlikely they’d headed in that direction. If they’d ridden east they could swing south into the Sweet Grass Hills country and link up with the Whoop-Up Trail. Fort Benton would present a problem because Charlie Cobb was there. But it was unlikely he’d try to harm three young women with the vigilante committee watching his every move. Jenny and the others would be free to thumb their noses at Cobb and board an eastbound steamboat at the levee. And nobody would know that better than Temple Yates.
The risks were great, but the stakes were high because each of the women was gambling on her future, especially Jenny, with her dreams of being an artist.
Yates must know he could not let the women reach Fort Benton alive. He had to overtake them, kill them and take the money. It was a simple, effective solution to the problem and it was the gunman’s way.
The burning torches were closer now, and the miners had spread out to cover more ground. Garrett moved the grulla to the east, swinging away from Verdigris Coulee back in the direction of the fort. He held the grulla to a walk, worried that the noise of its hooves on the bone-dry ground could betray him.
Garrett rode steadily for ten minutes, crossing a shallow creek lined with cottonwoods and drooping willows before the land ahead of him leveled out, flat and featureless. The torches of the miners’ posse were now just pinpoints of light as they fell behind him. The riders were headed for the Whoop-Up Trail, guessing that a man on the run would flee in that direction.
The moon was dropping lower in the sky, the shadows deepening, as the flat land gave way to gently rolling hills, raw outcroppings of rock visible on their grassy slopes.
Around Garrett the land was quiet and nothing moved, the only sound the creak of his saddle and the soft footfalls of the grulla. But he was uneasy, with the feeling a man gets when he’s being watched by unseen eyes.
Was Yates out there somewhere, stalking him?
Riding high in the saddle, every nerve in his body alert, Garrett rode down the steep slope of a coulee, crossed its sandy bottom and drew rein before allowing his horse to scramble up the opposite side. He sat his saddle and listened.
He heard only the silence. Even the coyotes had ceased their yammering. Then, very close, rose the howl of a hunting wolf, the sound that makes a man sit bolt upright in his blankets in the dead of night and search the darkness with wary eyes.
Garrett listened and wondered, the grulla shifting uneasily under him. Mingan was staying close. But why? He owed the big wolf his life, but in turn, the animal was beholden to him for nothing.
Shaking his head in bafflement, Garrett urged the grulla up the slope of the coulee, its hooves slipping on loose rock until they topped the rise and regained the flat.
It had been the wolf that had been watching him, but for what reason Garrett could not even guess.
After another hour of riding, he decided the night would yield him nothing. And there was always the chance he could stumble into Yates’ gun in the darkness. He fetched up to a dry wash that carried floodwater from the Milk River during the spring melt and made a dry camp. At first light he would saddle up again and resume his search for Jenny.
If Temple Yates didn’t find her first.
Chapter 26
Just as the gray dawn light
was shading into the pale blue of morning, Garrett found the body of Abbie Lane.
The girl’s life had been hard, her death no easier.
She was naked, lying on her back, her body scratched and bruised by Temple Yates, the result of his frenzy to tear off her clothes. Her left eye was swollen almost shut—by a backhand slap, Garrett guessed—and her shoulders were bitten, arcs of the man’s teeth still livid red on her white skin.
Abbie had not been shot. She’d been strangled, her windpipe crushed by a man with much sinewy strength in his hands.
Near the body lay the purse the girl always carried, a treasured possession that she pulled closed with a pink ribbon drawstring. The bag’s contents had been strewn over the grass, but if Abbie had been carrying money, it was now gone.
Garrett picked up a cheap silver-plated locket and opened it. Inside was a hand-colored photograph of a man and woman, their cheeks unnaturally rosy. The man was solemn and bearded, a farmer probably, and the worn-looking woman could only have been his wife.
Abbie’s parents? Garrett guessed they had to be. As to whether or not they were still alive, he did not know. He closed the locket and slipped it into the pocket of his chaps. Maybe one day, if he could track them down, he would return it.
There was no doubt in his mind that it was Yates who had raped and killed the girl. Her pony was grazing nearby, and when the animal moved it favored its left foreleg. Abbie’s horse had pulled up lame. As far as Garrett knew, neither Jenny nor Paloma was armed. It looked like Abbie had dropped behind and Yates had caught up to her. The other women, hearing the girl’s screams, had panicked and fled.
Now Jenny and Paloma were out there, running scared, with Yates close on their trail. Garrett knew he had to ride, and ride fast, but he could not bring himself to leave Abbie the way she was.
Awkward and fumbling with women’s fixings, he managed to dress her as best he could, not wishing others who might pass this way to see her nakedness as he had done. Then he took off his hat and bowed his head. But having none of the words, he stood in silence for a while, remembering what little he could of her, the skin that always peeled on her nose, her freckles, the sound of her voice and her laughter.
When it was over, Garrett settled his hat on his head, knowing what he’d done for Abbie Lane was little enough.
The saddle on the girl’s pony had shifted and was hanging under the animal’s belly. He removed the saddle, threw it aside, and remounted the grulla. There was no fear in Luke Garrett now, only a hot, killing rage.
He raised his face to the blue sky and roared his hurt into the quiet of the morning.
He was telling the world how badly he wanted to smash and destroy Temple Yates.
Garrett rode east until noon. The tracks left by the women and Yates still scarred the grass and were easy to follow. Some twenty miles north of the Milk River, the tracks swung south, toward the upper reaches of Elkhorn Coulee.
This was game country, and Garrett startled a large herd of antelope watering at a narrow stream that seemed to have its origin a ways farther west in the Cypress Hills. Coveys of up to fifty quail ran from his horse, fluttering into the air for only short distances before landing again in a flurry of wings. Once he saw a ragged and skinny coyote skulking around a stand of prickly pear, ready to pick off an unsuspecting mouse.
But he saw no sign of Yates.
Jenny and Paloma would keep on riding for as long as they could stay in the saddle. But eventually they’d have to stop to rest their horses. Yates was heavier and his mount would tire faster, and he was enough of a frontiersman to know that he couldn’t push his horse indefinitely. The animal would need to be unsaddled and given time to graze.
For his part, Garrett walked more than he rode, leading the grulla across gently rolling country thick with grama, coarser buffalo grass growing on the top of the rises. The day was hot, the sun merciless, and there was no breeze. The buzzards were riding high currents, looking like black flies against the pale blue window of the sky, and thin brushstrokes of white cloud showed to the south.
The land was dry, and with a pang of unease, Garrett realized he and his mount were raising dust, visible for a long distance.
Temple Yates might already know that he was being followed.
Sliding his Winchester from the scabbard, Garrett balanced the rifle across his saddle horn, his eyes restlessly scanning the distance ahead of him where the heat waves were already dancing.
By the time the still far off peaks of the Sweet Grass Hills came in sight, the day was beginning to shade into night. An arroyo offered Garrett shelter, and after drawing rein and studying the place, he rode into the narrow flat between its eroded slopes. The grulla was tiring and once it stumbled as a rock rolled under its hoof on the sandy bottom. After half a mile, Garrett rode up on a green oasis of cottonwood, willow and a few mesquites, tall grass growing among the roots of the trees. Through the branches he caught a glimpse of water. The grulla saw it too and quickened its pace, tugging at the bit. But Garrett reined in the horse and levered a round into the chamber of the rifle. He waited, listening. A night bird called from one of the cottonwoods and he heard the chirping of an insect in the grass.
Warily, he rode between the trees and came up on a small, shallow pool, the grass around it dark green. There was no sign of life. This was a remote and isolated place that Garrett had stumbled on by accident, and if humans had ever visited here it had been a very long time ago.
A weariness in him, he stepped from the leather and stretched the aches out of his tired body. He dropped the reins and let the grulla drink, then unsaddled the horse and led him to the grass around the pool.
There was dry wood aplenty around the bases of the trees and Garrett built a small fire. He filled his new coffeepot with water, threw in a handful of Arbuckle and set the pot on the coals to boil. He found a niche in the slope of the arroyo that protected him on two sides, sat and built a cigarette.
Relaxed by the smell of boiling coffee and tobacco and the small sound of the grazing horse, Garrett’s thoughts returned to Jenny.
It would be easy to ride away from her, abandon her to her fate. He loved her, but it seemed that she did not love him enough in return. She’d made that clear when she’d drugged him and then left him alone at the fort. But Garrett’s love for the girl was unconditional, his whole world reduced to a single person.
He thought about how much he loved her, an emotion he’d never in his life felt before. He figured there is love like a lamp that goes out when the oil is gone, or love like a high meadow stream that dries up when the spring rains end. But there is also a love that goes on forever, a spring gushing out of the heart of a mountain that keeps flowing endlessly and is inexhaustible.
That was what his love for Jenny was like and why, after all that had happened, he still had a willingness to forgive and forget. He did not question how he felt. He just knew it existed. That it was.
One day, in a future he could not yet see or dare to imagine, they would be together. In the meantime, his love could only help him grow and become stronger.
Garrett smiled and shook his head. He was getting sentimental in his old age, mooning about a girl he might never have, like one of those pale poets with lank hair and a quill pen that writes his verse about lost love, then curls up and dies.
He could die, and very soon. But it would not be from love—it would be from a .45 bullet fired by Temple Yates.
After all his brooding about love, the down-to-earth practicality of that thought made Garrett laugh out loud, so loud that the grulla lifted its head and stared at him.
Still smiling, he rose and poured himself coffee as the darkness of the night crowded around him and the sleepless coyotes began to talk.
Garrett was in the saddle again at first light. He left the arroyo, then spent fifteen minutes cutting for sign before he found his first track. He rode southeast toward the Sweet Grass Hills, sitting high in the saddle, alert for any sign of trouble
.
Around him the bad luck country rolled away forever, featureless except where shadows gathered in the arroyos and scattered stands of juniper and mesquite showed up a darker green than the surrounding grass.
The sun was just beginning its climb when Garrett saw buzzards sliding across the sky in the distance. This time they were much lower, gradually losing height as their endless circles narrowed.
Buzzards are regarded as caretakers of the dead, but on occasion they will attack and tear apart a living animal if it is wounded or sick and unable to fight back. They will also readily shed their fear of humans and rip at a weak and dying man, first going for the eyes and kidneys. And they’ll do the same to a woman.
Fear spiking at him, Garrett pulled his Winchester and eased back the hammer. He rested the butt of the rifle on his right thigh and swung in closer, his intent gaze constantly scanning the silent land around him.
Now the buzzards were almost directly overhead, unhurried, knowing that no matter what, their time would come.
Garrett saw the dead horse first. He stood in the stirrups and studied the ground around the animal, flat grassland with clumps of prickly pear and a few yellow cactus. He walked the grulla closer, the horse acting up as it sensed death, and caught the smell of blood. The carcass still wore its saddle.
Paloma Sanchez was lying facedown and still. She was partially hidden by the long grass, but there was no mistaking the midnight black of her long hair. A round-shouldered buzzard crouched several feet away from her. The bird flapped into the air when Garrett stepped from the saddle and walked to the girl’s body. He got down on one knee and read what had happened.
A bullet had crashed into Paloma’s back, neatly placed between her shoulder blades, where it had broken her spine. Garrett rolled the girl over. Her eyes were shut and her beautiful face was tranquil, as though she was asleep. Paloma had been dead when she hit the ground and probably never knew what hit her.
The Tenderfoot Trail Page 18