The Thunder Riders

by Frank Leslie

  Two more rifle shots sounded, one slug drilling a rotting rain barrel just off the sorrel’s right hip, the other grinding into the faded pink adobe wall on Yakima’s left.

  The horse traversed the gap in four long strides, then Yakima neck-reined it left, avoiding an old privy pit, and they shot west, paralleling the village’s main street.

  Behind him, Yakima heard men shouting and horse hooves thumping, Speares’s voice booming above the others.

  Yakima crouched over the sorrel’s stretched neck as they galloped off across the brush-tufted slope. When they were clear of the village and an old placer digging, Yakima glanced over his left shoulder. The posse was gathered in front of the church, a tall man in a tan duster holding the reins of Speares’s horse as the sheriff swung into the saddle. Already mounted, Patchen was pulling away from the group, elbows flapping like wings as the steeldust lunged toward Yakima.

  Yakima hipped forward. Ahead, a notch in the northern ridge opened. He reined the galloping sorrel into it, hoping it wasn’t a box canyon, and the sorrel tore up red gravel along the bottom of an ancient riverbed.

  A couple of old stone shacks sagged along the low banks, and the horse’s drumming hooves startled a small herd of Sonoran deer, which bounded up the left slope, disappearing among the rocks and piñons.

  The sorrel followed the riverbed’s slow curve westward. Yakima cursed, hauling back on the reins when the bed of the ancient river disappeared under a towering wall of wagon- and cabin-sized boulders. Tufts of brown and faded green grama grass pushed up between the rocks, and a couple of stunt pines twisted, leaning as though under a heavy wind.

  Yakima jerked a look behind. Speares’s posse was out of sight around the bend, but the clattering of shod hooves on rock grew steadily louder.

  Turning toward the ridge, Yakima picked out a narrow game trail angling up the side to the left, meandering around boulders.

  He rocked forward, grinding his heels into the sorrel’s flanks. “Go, horse!”

  The horse hit the slope on the run and dug its rear hooves into the sand and gravel along the trail, flinging its front feet out for purchase. Yakima crouched low and gripped the horn with both hands, batting his heels against the mount’s ribs.

  A shrill laugh rose from below, amid the grinding of hooves and squawk and rattle of tack. “Boys, we got us a duck on a millpond! Aim and fire at will!”

  Yakima jerked a glance down the slope. The posse, led by Speares and Patchen, was storming toward the base of the ridge. Speares flung himself out of the saddle and shucked the Yellowboy from the boot. Yakima was a long way from the ridge crest, and well within range of the posse’s rifles.

  The horse was moving so slowly, it made a good target. Without the horse, Yakima was doomed.

  He slid his left foot from the stirrup and dropped down the horse’s side. He was about to ram his rifle butt against the horse’s hip, hazing it up the ridge—he would catch up to it later, after he’d discouraged the posse—but a bullet fired from below did his work for him.

  The sorrel leapt with a start and lunged up the trail, lifting dust and loosing gravel in its wake. At the same time, Yakima rammed a fresh shell in his carbine’s breech and ducked behind a boulder.

  Shots cracked from down the slope, one bullet slamming into the boulder, another ricocheting off a flat rock to Yakima’s left. He doffed his hat and edged a look toward the riverbed. The posse had dismounted, one man leading their horses back down the canyon while the others spread out among the rocks.

  Speares leapt a boulder, heading for another. As several rifles puffed at the ridge base, Yakima drilled a round into the boulder Speares had just ducked behind, then another at a man wedging himself between a cedar and an arrow-shaped rock on the right side of the gravelly gorge.

  He pulled the rifle back behind his own cover and glanced up the trail weaving away to his right. The sorrel was a good sixty yards away, and not far from the ridge crest, but it had slowed to a walk, looking back down the ridge behind it.

  Yakima drilled a round into the rocks near its rear hooves. The horse buck-kicked, whinnied, and galloped up the ridge, heading for the crest and, he hoped, down the other side to safety.

  Bullets tore into the rock and gravel around him. He returned several shots, then looked around, choosing a path up the ridge. He returned several more shots, bounded out from behind his cover, and ran several yards up the ridge before ducking behind a petrified tree root, a slug blowing sand across his boots.

  Someone yelled from below, the words unclear beneath the sporadic gunfire and ricocheting lead. He peered around the petrified root.

  Speares was zigzagging up the slope on Yakima’s left, holding the Yellowboy straight up and down before him. Patchen was lunging up the slope on his right, his tan face framed by his silver sideburns, sunlight winking off his rifle barrel. The other posse members remained at the ridge’s base, covering the lawmen, slugs whining around Yakima’s head or grinding into the root before him.

  Yakima pressed his cheek against the root, brushing sand from his right eye.

  When he began hearing the clatter of running feet, he fired three rounds downslope, then bounded up toward the ridge. He zigzagged for thirty yards and, as a bullet nipped the heel of his right boot, dove into a hollow amid several wagon-sized boulders.

  He rose to his knees, snaked his rifle barrel around the right side of the rock. Patchen was running toward him, breathing hard, holding his rifle across his chest. When he saw Yakima bearing his aim down on him, his eyes snapped wide.

  Yakima’s rifle exploded. The marshal gave a yelp as the bullet tore into his left thigh. Mustachioed lips stretched back from his white teeth, he pushed off his right foot and dove into a rock nest shrouded in prickly pear and Mormon tea.

  The rifle fire from downslope had ceased, as the other posse members couldn’t see over the curve of the slope.

  Hearing boots and spurs coming up the slope on his left, Yakima ejected the smoking shell from the carbine and sidestepped into a narrow gap between several large boulders. He continued through the gap, turned right around the back of one of the boulders, turned right again and worked up the side, circling back toward the front, intending to slip up behind Speares.

  When he was nearly back to where he’d started, he saw the sheriff step into the large gap between the boulders, aiming the Yellowboy from his shoulder.

  Yakima snugged his rifle against the back of the sheriff’s sunburned neck.

  Speares froze.

  “I’ll take my rifle, Sheriff.”

  Holding the rifle he’d appropriated from the jailhouse in his left hand, he held his right hand out where Speares could see it.

  Speares’s back twitched, his head turning slightly to the right.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Yakima warned.

  “You’ll kill me anyway.”

  “Maybe.” Yakima snapped his fingers. “The rifle.”

  Speares remained frozen for a few seconds, and then his shoulders slumped slightly. He held out the Winchester Yellowboy, and Yakima wrapped his hand around the rear stock. The smooth, familiar walnut and remembered weight of the brass receiver felt good in his palm.

  He prodded Speares’s back with both rifle barrels. “Belly down. Nice and slow.”

  Speares growled, “What’re you gonna do?”

  “Belly down!”

  Speares dropped to his knees, glanced over his left shoulder, his eyes dark with dread, then kicked his legs out and fell to his belly. Again he turned his head to peer over his shoulder. His shaggy blond hair flopped over his forehead.

  Yakima crouched to remove Speares’s revolver from his holster. He tossed the Remington in the rocks, then aimed the Yellowboy at the back of the sheriff’s neck. “If you can’t take me down, how do you expect to take the gang down?” He angled the Yellowboy at a mole behind Speares’s right ear. “Face the dirt.”

  Speares winced, set his chin on the ground. “Please . . . don’t.” His
heart thudded and all the blood in his body seemed to rush to his battered nose. He hated the pleading tone in his own voice. “Goddamn it, I’m unarmed. Don’t shoot me.”

  He squeezed his eyes closed, pressing his chin and knees to the ground, every muscle taut, waiting for the bullet.

  A voice sounded along the slope before him. “Where the hell is he?”

  Speares lifted his head sharply. Patchen lay twenty feet away, aiming his Henry rifle out from behind a rock and a stunted cedar, squinting down the barrel. His red face was pinched with pain and fury.

  Speares turned to look over his left shoulder. Only sun-bathed rocks and brush behind him.

  The breed was gone.

  Chapter 11

  Thirty miles south of Yakima and the posse, the Thunder Riders rode in a long line, two abreast, up a winding mesa trail sheathed in creosote, sage, and ocotillo, with large boulders pushing up around the lone oak or elm. Jack Considine sat astride Wolf, while Anjanette rode a claybank gelding off Considine’s right stirrup.

  She wore a fringed leather vest over a blue plaid shirt, and the small silver crucifix nestled in her cleavage winked occasionally in the crisp winter sunlight. Her man’s Stetson was secured to her head by a horsehair thong swinging free beneath her chin, her rich hair flowing across her shoulders.

  She’d appropriated the clothes from the saddlebags of the young outlaw she’d been forced to shoot. She had blood on her hands, but she’d been forced to kill before, when she and Old Antoine had been prospecting in bandito-infested mountains. The pleas of the young gunslick were little more than whispers.

  She was glad to be away from the choked confines of Saber Creek, the tavern, and her owly, alcoholic grandfather.She felt a sense of freedom riding into the misty blue distances of southern Sonora toward an outlaw hideout known to the Americans as Junction Rock with the infamous, heart-wrenchingly handsome Jack Considine and his notorious Thunder Riders.

  From there, Jack had promised, they would make their way to the coast and set sail for Cuba—just him and Anjanette—where Considine had often dreamed of buying his own sugar plantation.

  As they rode, the men of the gang smoked and talked in desultory tones, one man chuckling at a joke. Another was cleaning the rifle resting across his saddlebow. The only other female in the gang, Toots, rode with one leg hooked around her saddle horn. She was trimming the nails of her pudgy, curled toes with a pocketknife.

  The group crested the mesa and their horses continued through the scrub, passing a small adobe shrine along the trail and scaring up an armadillo. The mesa spread before them—a table surrounded by layers of distant blue mountains and high purple clouds between which golden sunlight angled.

  A couple of hundred yards beyond, what looked like a modest-sized hacienda sat in the middle of the mesa, sheathed in green high-desert scrub and surrounded by ruined stone buildings and brush corrals. Smoke gushed from the stone chimney on the near end of the house.

  Considine turned to Anjanette. “You will have a soft bed tonight, Chiquita. O’Toole keeps the best roadhouse in Sonora.”

  She smiled, her tapered cheeks dimpling. “We will have a soft bed tonight, my love.” She leaned toward him, wrapped her left hand around his neck, and was about to kiss his cheek when the black mustang, sensing the rider’s distraction, suddenly put his head down and kicked his back legs out, snorting like a mule, trying to unseat his rider.

  “Goddamn beast!” Considine shouted as the horse leapt suddenly, sunfishing.

  Wolf’s hooves hit the ground. He half turned and, throwing his head forward, bucked savagely again.

  Considine had wrapped one hand around the saddle horn, but he hadn’t been prepared for the viciousness of the horse’s pitch. His butt rose high out of the saddle, and his boots shot out of the stirrups. Flying over the horse’s lunging left shoulder, he turned a somersault before hitting the gravelly ground left of the trail on his back.

  “Jack!” Anjanette dropped out of her saddle.

  “Woo-hooooah, boy!” shouted Considine’s partner, Mad Dog McKenna, gigging his own mount up and reaching for the pitching black’s reins.

  Wolf jerked his head away, and the reins slipped out of Mad Dog’s reach. McKenna cursed. Wolf bounded off his back hooves and galloped forward and right of the trail, tracing a broad circle to head back the way they’d come.

  “Git after him, boys!” McKenna shouted.

  As a half dozen of the other riders booted their mounts after the fleeing black, trying to cut him off, Anjanette dropped to one knee beside Considine. The desperado winced and lifted his head from the ground, his thick auburn hair in his eyes, mustache caked with sand.

  “You okay?” Anjanette asked, one hand on his shoulder. “Maybe you better lie there a minute.”

  Considine shook his head as if to clear it, then sat up, lowering his head and massaging the back of his neck. “Somebody catch that damn beast!”

  Mad Dog McKenna chuckled. “Hey, Jack, you want me to ride that black from now on? Maybe he’s too much horse for you, amigo.”

  Considine told his scarred, earring-wearing partner to do something physically impossible to himself.

  Toots checked her own mount down closest to Considine and dropped out of her saddle with a grace odd for a woman her size. “Or maybe me, huh, Jack?” She smiled as she knelt on the other side of the desperado leader from Anjanette, snuggling close and massaging the inside of his thigh with her hand. “I can always ride a stud!”

  She laughed, locking stares with Anjanette.

  Turning to Considine, who was still rubbing his neck as if to work some knots out, Toots softened her voice. “You okay, good-lookin’?”

  Considine was grumbling and cursing as he pushed away from both women and stiffly gained his feet. “I’ll be just fine when I get my hands on that goddamn horse!”

  Toots picked up Considine’s hat, dusted it off, and held it out to him. Considine turned toward the large dust cloud down the trail a good fifty yards, where three desperadoes had their riatas looped around the stallion’s neck and were trying to lead him back.

  When the men finally got him turned, with English Cooper slapping his quirt against the black’s ass, they put their mounts into gallops, heading toward Considine. Wolf galloped reluctantly, head up and snorting, eyes flashing small lightning bolts of fury.

  Considine donned the hat and stepped forward, shucking his pearl-gripped Remy from his holster. “Only thing for a horse like that’s a bullet.”

  Anjanette caught up to him, put her hand on the gun, pressing it down. “Don’t shoot the horse, Jack.”

  Considine eyed her suspiciously. “Why not?”

  Anjanette hesitated. “Think of the money you’ll make on him at Junction Rock.”

  Considine snorted as the three riders reined up before him, swinging sideways while holding their lariats taut. The black stopped a good twenty yards away, hanging its head, its black eyes sharp with fury.

  “The girl’s got a point, Jack.” Mad Dog McKenna came up beside Anjanette, hitching his threadbare cavalry breeches higher on his hips, the silver hoop rings dangling from his sun-black ears. “That horse’ll bring five, six hundred dollars at Junction Rock. Now, I know we got the gold, but you know how long we all can hold on to a poke.” Considine’s partner chuckled and dropped his eyes to Anjanette’s prominent bosom. “Never know when you’re gonna have to exchange the horse for a woman.”

  “A real woman,” said Toots, grinning up at Considine.

  “He’s got a woman,” Anjanette snarled. “But you can never have too much money—isn’t that right, my love?”

  Considine walked up to the black, grabbed the dangling reins. “I’m not gonna kill him. My anger’s done passed.” Suddenly, he raised his pistol and swung it down hard against the horse’s fine black snout, raking the front sight along the side of his nose.

  As the horse jerked his head up, then lowered it, Considine raked the gun barrel across the other side of Wolf’
s snout, carving a thin line from which bright red blood oozed.

  “Remember that next time you decide to throw me, you hammerheaded, snake-eyed son of a bitch!”

  Holding tight to the reins, just beneath the bridle and glaring into the horse’s dark eyes, Considine holstered the revolver. Wolf’s nostrils opened and closed. He chuffed and snorted angrily against the ropes, twitching his ears and rippling his withers.

  “Now, then,” Considine said, easing around the horse and reaching for the horn. “We gonna be pards?”

  As Considine swung into the saddle, Anjanette stepped forward, raising a gentle hand to the long cut along the horse’s snout.