The Thunder Riders

by Frank Leslie

  Yakima stared back at the man, his chest rising and falling sharply. He wanted to take a chance, dodge right, and snap his rifle up, but Speares had him dead to rights. And Yakima would be no good to either the girl or the horse if he was dead.

  He crouched, set the Yellowboy in the street, then, holding his hands shoulder-high, palms out, turned, dropped to his knees, then leaned forward and planted his chest and belly in the dust.

  “Hands to the back of your head!” Speares shouted.

  As Yakima did as he was told, another voice said in a horrified, bewildered tone, “What . . . what a horror. They took the stage . . . and the strongbox. . . .”

  Speares said, “Shut up, Franklin” and moved toward Yakima. Out of the corner of his left eye, Yakima watched the sheriff crouch beside him, lift the Colt from his holster, then stand and wedge the revolver in his cartridge belt.

  The sheriff had just opened his mouth to speak when one of the bodies near the harness shop moved. The desperado—a beefy man with long red hair and a beard—spat a curse from clenched teeth as he rose up on his arms, as though he were about to attempt some exercises. Blood and viscera stringed down from his bulging belly.

  Speares swung his rifle around, taking three steps back from Yakima—out of Yakima’s kicking range—and fired the Winchester. The bullet carved a black hole through the redhead’s cheek, throwing the man sideways onto his back, where he expired with a loud fart and a deep sigh.

  Speares swung back toward Yakima, loudly ejecting the smoking shell and seating fresh. “If you don’t want the same, get up and start movin’ toward the jailhouse.”

  “Christ,” the man called Franklin said bewilderedly, as Yakima gained his feet. Yakima didn’t have to look to know he was the dapper little man who’d been in the tavern last night with Speares. The banker. “So many . . . dead.”

  “I told you to shut up, Franklin. Less’n you wanna be one of ’em.” Speares poked his rifle barrel into Yakima’s back, prodding him forward.

  As Yakima began moving toward the jailhouse, at the east end of the street, he stared ahead at the chaparral-covered hills beyond the town. The sun had not yet risen, but there was enough gray light that he could see his black stallion, not much more than a slim shadow from this distance of three hundred yards, crest a low hill stippled with sage and saguaros and disappear down the other side.

  His stomach contracted anxiously, and he glanced over his left shoulder at Speares. The man was too far away to attempt a kick. Even with Yakima’s finely honed abilities, he would only buy himself a bullet. The banker followed at a distance, looking around at the carnage, lower jaw hanging, his gray muttonchops glowing in the early morning light.

  Yakima would bide his time, find another way out from under the sheriff’s thumb. . . .

  As Yakima approached the jailhouse, the banker strode up quickly behind Speares, his shoes grinding dirt and gravel, his voice shrill. He held his black bowler in one hand, revealing the pink crown of his head. “They got the gold, Speares. Every damn coin! What the hell are you going to do about this?”

  Speares stopped and wheeled toward the banker, keeping the Winchester aimed at Yakima, who stopped before the jailhouse’s closed door and turned halfway around.

  “I’m gonna throw this damn half-breed in the slammer, and then I’m gonna gather a posse,” Speares said tightly. “There ain’t much more I can do, now, is there? Less’n you want me to sprout wings and fly after ’em.”

  He glanced across the street. The liveryman, Suggs, poked his head out the livery barn’s doors, a wary expression on his face, his hair still mussed from sleep. Shouting, jerking his head back toward Yakima standing before the closed jailhouse door, Speares ordered Suggs to round up every man in town who could shoot halfway straight.

  “Have them meet me, mounted and with a couple days’ trail provisions, in front of my office in one hour.”

  The liveryman looked to his left. A man stood before Stendahl’s Tonsorial Parlor in a faded red robe, night sock, and slippers, the parlor’s bullet-pocked door standing partially open behind him. He shuttled his eyes between Speares and Suggs, then jerked as though he’d been slapped and shuffled back into the barbershop, slamming the door behind him.

  Yakima snorted softly.

  Speares’s eyes bored into his, and he raised the rifle toward Yakima’s head. “Get on in—”

  Hoof thuds rose up the street, from the direction of the bank, and both Yakima and Speares cut their eyes in that direction. A man astride a blaze-faced dun rode between the bank and the tavern, turning the horse around the dead men sprawled in the street and gazing down at each one, as if counting them. He held his jittery horse’s reins tight in his gloved right fist. When he looked up and gigged the horse down the street toward the jailhouse, Yakima saw the saddle-leather skin of the man’s face between pewter sideburns and the copper star winking on his buckskin coat.

  Inwardly, Yakima cursed. The marshal. Yakima’s luck was draining fast.

  The man reined up before Speares and shifted his gaze between the sheriff and Yakima. The right side of his face was swollen and purple, with a two-inch gash where Yakima had kicked him, over which blood had jelled. The marshal jerked a thumb over his shoulder, indicating the men lying dead in the street. “How long ago?”

  “Not fifteen minutes,” said Speares, staring at the man curiously.

  The man looked at Yakima again, recognition narrowing his flat eyes, then switched his gaze back to Speares. “Name’s Patchen.” He shifted his weight. His sweat-lathered dun hung its head with fatigue. “Deputy U.S. marshal out of Prescott.”

  “Well, you’re about fifteen minutes late,” Speares said smartly.

  “You gettin’ a posse together?”

  Sneering, Speares canted his head toward Yakima. “Soon as I lock up this son of a bitch. The breed here’s the only one o’ the gang that didn’t buy a bullet or light a shuck.”

  “I’ll be ridin’ with you soon as I get a fresh mount and trail supplies.” Patchen favored Yakima with another flat stare. “Watch his feet. Bastard kicks like a damn mule.”

  Patchen reined the dun toward the livery barn. Speares turned toward Yakima, wagging the rifle barrel. “Inside.”

  Yakima glanced east again, where the gang had disappeared into the chaparral, and shot his angry gaze back to Speares, his jaw hard. “Every second you waste on me, they’re gaining ground.”

  Speares’s chest rose sharply, his face reddening, nose swelling even larger. “Inside!”

  Yakima threw the door open and walked into the nearly dark office. From the door, Speares said, “Take the key off the desk and open the cell door. The one on the right. Make one wrong move, and I’ll drill a hole through your spine. I’d just as soon watch you dangle from a hang rope, but droppin’ the hammer on you wouldn’t break my heart.”

  “You’re a damn fool, Speares,” Yakima growled as, having snatched the key ring from the desk, he poked a key in the door of the far right cell.

  He opened the door and turned to Speares once more, clenching his right fist at his side. The sheriff stretched his lips back from his horse teeth in a mocking grin and squinted one purple-rimmed eye down his Winchester’s barrel. Yakima snorted and stepped into the jail cell.

  Speares stepped forward and threw the door closed with an echoing clang. He turned the key in the lock, and the bolt clicked home. Speares withdrew the key, lowered the rifle, and shoved his face up close to the bars, sneering.

  “I’ll accompany Miss Anjanette to your hangin’. You’ll wanna take care not to soil your trousers.”

  Yakima threw his right fist forward. Speares pulled his swollen nose back from the door an eye wink before Yakima’s fist slammed against the bars, rattling the cage’s entire front wall.

  Speares’s eyes snapped wide. Then he smiled as Yakima rubbed his sore knuckles in his left palm. He’d torn the skin across the middle knuckle, but he kept his eyes on the sheriff, who slowly backed away from
the cell, laughing.

  When Speares left the jailhouse, Yakima sucked a deep, edgy breath, wrapped his hands around the bars of the cell door, and shook the door on its hinges. It rattled loudly, dust sifting from the low stone ceiling, but held firm.

  Yakima turned and saw a window in the outside wall—a small rectangle with four iron bars. He wrapped his hands around two of the bars, and held his breath as he pulled back and down, the veins standing out in his neck and forehead.

  Finally, when he could hold his breath no longer, he dropped back to the floor, his chest heaving, and cursed. No give in the window, either.

  He turned back to the cell door, slumped down on the cot, and lowered his head to his hands. He kept hearing Anjanette’s angry cry and Wolf’s defiant whinny as he sat there on the edge of the cot, at once berating himself for not slipping free of Speares and trying to figure a way out of the cell and onto the trail of the girl and the horse.

  He had no faith in Speares’s abilities. Even if the sheriff found a way to rescue the girl, he’d leave the horse. Wolf meant nothing to him.

  Yakima pulled his hair and stared at the earthen floor between his boots. Silly, probably, to worry about his horse when so many men had been killed and a girl’s life was at stake. But the only things Yakima had—all that he valued—were his Yellowboy Winchester, a gift from an old friend, and the black mustang he’d traded an old Ute for when Wolf was just a colt.

  As light in the cell grew, so did the sounds outside. Occasionally Yakima would look up to see a ranch wagon pass or a couple of men carrying a bloody body eastward, probably to the dead man’s home. From time to time Speares’s voice rose, shouting orders, and horseback riders began appearing out the jailhouse window— green, edgy-looking townsmen armed with Spencer or Springfield rifles. Most looked as much at home in a saddle as they would in a kid’s tree house, and they looked like they wanted to be here as badly as ten-year-old boys wanted to be in church.

  Nearly an hour after he’d locked up Yakima, Speares threw the office door open and strode inside. He was carrying Yakima’s Yellowboy repeater in his right hand. The U.S. marshal, Patchen, followed him into the office.

  Patchen was smoking a long black cigar, holding his own Henry over his right shoulder, the high crown of his snuff-brown Stetson nearly scraping the ceiling, his stovepipe boots clomping along the floor. Out the open door behind him, the posse men waited atop their fidgety mounts, grumbling among themselves.

  Yakima rose and wrapped his hands around the cell bars as he stared at Speares. “That’s my repeater, Sheriff.”

  Speares opened a desk drawer, glanced at Yakima. “Damn fine gun. Too fine for a breed. Besides, you ain’t gonna be needin’ it where you’re goin’.”

  He glanced at Patchen, and both men laughed.

  Speares set several boxes of .44 shells on the desk. “Help yourself, Marshal.” He chuckled as he began thumbing cartridges from a box into his cartridge belt. My shells are your shells—long as the marshal’s office reimburses me, that is.”

  Patchen stepped toward the desk, nodding his head at Yakima. “Who you got guarding him?”

  “Me.” A bulky figure in a blue shirt and calfskin vest slumped through the jailhouse’s open door, holding his double-barreled shotgun, broken open, under his right arm. The liveryman, Suggs. “Fifty cents a day, right, Sheriff? Till you get back?”

  “That’s right,” Speares said, feeding shells into the Yellowboy’s breech. “Till I get back. Which shouldn’t be long—if’n we can cut off that gang before they get to the border and lose themselves in the Sierra Madre.” He reached into the same drawer from which he’d produced the cartridges, and set a corked bottle on the desk. “Drink for the road, Marshal?”

  “Don’t mind if I do.”

  Speares grabbed a tin cup off the stove in the middle of the room, scrubbed it out with a gloved finger, set it on the desk, and splashed whiskey into it. He held the bottle up to Patchen. “Luck.”

  Speares tipped the bottle back, and the bubble slid toward the bottom as the sheriff took several heavy swallows. Patchen watched him, one pewter brow arched.

  When Speares lowered the bottle, sighed, and corked it, the marshal said, “I hope you plan on staying clear, Sheriff. This gang—the Thunder Riders, they’re called along the border—is nothing to trifle with.”

  “I don’t aim to trifle with ’em, Marshal. I aim to kill ’em.” Speares chuckled and ran his sleeve across his whiskey-moist lips and mustache. “But without a little medicine to dull the pain in my beak—thanks to that son of a bitch right there!—I wouldn’t make it to the edge of town on horseback.”

  Patchen raised the cup. “Touché. It does look a mite on the sore side.” He threw the whiskey back, set the empty cup on the desk. He stuck his cigar between his teeth, shouldered his Henry, and made for the door.

  Speares told the liveryman, Suggs, to stay in the jailhouse with the prisoner as much as possible and to keep away from the cell except to pass a food plate once a day through the slot in the bars. “And whatever you do, don’t open that door. I don’t care if the damn town’s on fire! Understand?”

  “I understand,” Suggs said, thumbing wads into the shotgun’s tubes as Speares headed for the door. “Don’t forget—you promised a half-dollar a day.”

  Speares cursed and left. He stepped out from under the brush arbor into the sunlight, heading for his zebra dun tied to the hitchrack. One of the posse men milling under the arbor—a tall bearded man in a cloth cap and checked shirt—lifted his rifle onto his shoulder and swung around toward his own horse.

  As he did, the end of his rifle clipped the sheriff’s nose.

  Speares gasped as he pulled his head to one side and clapped his left hand over the swollen appendage. “Uhhhnnnn!” He froze there, chin down, holding his hand over his nose. From the window, Yakima could see his shoulders trembling slightly.

  A few of the others muttered, but Yakima couldn’t hear what they were saying.

  Speares lowered his hand and turned his head sharply left. His voice owned a pinched, nasal twang. “Goddamn it, Hank, watch where you swing that rifle!”

  “Sorry, Sheriff.”

  “Sorry, hell.” Speares made a sour face as he sucked a breath through his lips. “Anyone comes within six feet of my damn nose, they’re gonna be prying their rifles out of their assholes—understand?”

  When the posse men had grumbled their affirmative, Speares mounted up. He and Patchen swung out away from the jailhouse, and the others—about a dozen men by Yakima’s rough count—followed them east of the jailhouse and out of sight, the drumbeat of the horses’ hooves dwindling behind them.

  Suggs snapped his shotgun closed, sauntered over to the door, and looked out. He left the door open. Except for the one small window to the left of it, and a couple small ones in the cells, the door provided the only light—a trapezoid of molten copper laid like paint across the earthen floor just inside the threshold.

  Suggs sat down in the squeaky swivel chair at the desk and held his shotgun across his chest, caressing the forestock.

  “Well, breed,” he said through a self-important sigh. “Fine mess you got yourself in, now, ain’t it?”

  Chapter 7

  The leader of the Thunder Riders, Jack Considine, crested a low rise and, giving the horse its head while holding Anjanette down across the mount’s withers with his left hand, glanced over his shoulder. The stage was a good half mile behind him, as were most of the other desperadoes—keeping pace with the gold, afraid to let it out of their sight.

  Those boys didn’t have a single trusting bone in their bodies.

  Considine grinned under his silver-trimmed Stetson as he turned his head forward. At the same time, the girl twisted toward him, one hand on his saddle horn, her face taut with anger. She swung her arm up, whipping the back of her hand toward Considine’s face.

  The desperado leader laughed as he grabbed her wrist.

  “Let me off, you son of a
bitch!” the girl screamed.

  “Want down?” Considine slid out of the saddle, grabbed her by the back of her skirt and one arm, and pulled her brusquely off the mare.

  The girl’s feet hit the ground, and she yelped as her momentum drove her stumbling backward into a mesquite thicket. She tripped over a clump of Mormon tea and fell on her butt, red-brown dust blowing up around her, her wide black eyes glistening with fury beneath her calico bandanna.

  She picked up a rock and threw it hard. It bounced off Considine’s right shoulder and landed in the dirt at his boots.

  He stood frozen for a moment, taken aback, his cobalt blue eyes darkening slightly in spite of the early sunshine bleeding out from behind a high eastern peak. His brown mustache hung down both sides of his mouth, rimed with trail dust and blood from a bullet burn across his lower right cheek.