Walt Longmire 05 - The Dark Horse

by Craig Johnson

  Sue wanted to get back to the main road, but I gigged her up the hill toward the cemetery. The old iron gate that stretched across the opening was still closed and, with the current atmosphere, the gothic letters that spelled ABSALOM probably should have had another line for ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE.

  There were markers, mostly the small, set-in-the-ground type, but there were also a couple of larger mausoleums with elaborate stonework. A few sun-faded plastic floral arrangements were bowed by the wind and lay close to the ground—they looked like leftovers from the original Memorial Day, if they’d had plastic back then.

  I walked the black beauty along the iron fence with the pointed stanchions and then looked at the two roads—the one that continued on to town and the one that shot due west toward the Barsad place. Nothing.

  I’d just started to turn the mare when my eye caught some movement in the gully that ran underneath the large culvert that circumvented the road a couple of hundred yards away. I steadied Wahoo Sue and looked hard into the shadows, saw movement again, and a familiar figure.

  The Cheyenne Nation.

  I smiled and watched as Henry stood there long enough to make sure I saw him; then he turned and went back into the wide mouth of the corrugated steel opening. I checked the horizon, urged Sue into a quick canter, and then slowed her to a trot, staying on the walking path that brought me down to the drain.

  Henry stood there with Dog, who was sitting on his foot with the nonchalance of a man waiting for a bus. “You have been out stealing horses?”

  “Bringing them back from the dead.” I slowed Wahoo Sue to a walk. “Have you seen the boy?” He looked behind him at a diminutive figure on a small horse in the circular end of the culvert. “Benjamin?”

  He approached, but his horse was limping. The boy raised his hat and looked at me. He was crying, and the tears made rivers in the red dust on his face. I nudged the big black and pulled up opposite him as he reached out with both arms. I swept him up and planted him facing me on my lap. “Are you all right, Mister Bandito Negro de los Badlands?” He nodded but didn’t say anything and buried his face in my shirt, the battered cowboy hat falling backward to hang from his neck by the stampede strings. I wrapped my arms around him and pulled him in close as Henry reached up and patted his back. “It’s all right, Benjamin, everything’s going to be okay.”

  He shivered and sobbed some more, but his face turned sideways and looked up at me. “The dead man, he chased me.”

  “Yep, I know.” I took a breath and smiled. “When’s the last time you saw him?”

  He blurted the words out in a bunch. “I saw his truck and tried to outrun him, but Concho hurt himself, so I brought him under here.”

  “Smart thinking.” I looked down at Henry. “Have you seen the truck since then?”

  He nodded. “He drove over the bridge—twice.”

  “Which direction, the last time?”

  He pointed east toward the road to the Barsad place. I figured about a half-mile in the other direction from town. It would be the safest thing to leave the boy here with Henry rather than risk Barsad catching us on the road, especially with Benjamin’s horse being lame and mine sure to tire.

  Benjamin was staring at the antique rifle in my hands. “Is that Hershel’s gun?”

  In the distance I could hear a train whistle as I nudged the boy’s head back with my chest and looked down at him. “I borrowed it.”

  The little bandit knuckled his fingers into his eyes and wiped them with a sleeve.

  I glanced at the narrow path on the other side of the culvert that clung to the banks of the Powder and could hear the BNSF approaching. I plucked Benjamin up and lowered him into Henry’s waiting hands. “Does this trail go all the way into town?”

  The Cheyenne Nation shook his head. “No, it joins the road at the railroad crossing.”

  “I was afraid of that. How far does it go?”

  “A quarter-mile.”

  A half-mile to a phone but, even with a train between us, my odds were getting better. I just had to keep from getting trapped between Barsad and the train.

  Henry watched as I thought, and as usual, he was reading me verbatim. “We will stay here.”

  Benjamin’s legs straddled the big Indian’s side as Henry continued to hold him, but the boy’s voice carried concern. “Stay here?”

  He looked unsure as we listened to the train pass the crossroads and begin rocking through town. “Henry Standing Bear is Cheyenne. I’m sure you two have a lot to talk about.”

  He looked seriously at Henry and finally nodded. “Okay.”

  I gave him one last squeeze on the shoulder. “You’ve done really well, and we’re all really proud of you.” He continued studying me with the dark eyes, and just for a moment, I studied the likeness between the boy and the man who held him. “You’ve impressed me so much, you know what I’m going to do?” He didn’t say anything until I pulled the piece of metal from my shirt pocket that had been tucked away with the horse treats.

  He looked at it, dull and heavy in the just morning light. “Is that a badge?”

  I nodded, the sound of the train matching the pulse of my blood. “Raise your right hand.” He did as I requested. “Now repeat after me: I, Benjamin Balcarcel, promise to stay in this culvert with the Bear until the sheriff comes back and gets me.” He repeated it. “So help me God.” He repeated that part, too. I pinned the gold-plated star onto his shirt. “But if you leave the culvert, you go back to being a regular citizen and I’m going to be really upset.” He looked uncertain. “You don’t have to repeat that part.”

  “Okay.”

  “You’re deputized; just stay here.”

  “Okay.”

  Henry smiled and lowered Benjamin to the ground and watched as he put his hat back on, walked over and took Dog by the collar, and returned to his horse. Dog wagged, and the bandito saluted and looked down at my badge as the Bear thumped his chest with a fist and then pointed his index finger down—Cheyenne sign-talk for hope/heart.

  I made the same gesture and walked Wahoo Sue past them and onto the narrow, dirt path into the diffused light of the morning where I could see the cars of the coal-laden BNSF flashing by. I glanced back over my shoulder and into the culvert and could see that the boy hadn’t moved from Henry’s side. I turned in the saddle, the mare tripped off into a quick trot, and in no time we were moving briskly.

  The path followed the river pretty closely, and the reflection of the sunrise broke in the shallow and lazy water. We gradually climbed to the surface of the road above and the railroad tracks. Gradual was good because it would give me a chance to look back toward Wild Horse Road and the direction from which Wade Barsad would most likely be coming in his quest to find Benjamin.

  Wahoo Sue wasn’t completely happy with the proximity of the hopper cars pounding by on the elevated tracks, the clanging bells, or the hooded, flashing red lights, and was even unhappier as we grew closer. The trail, thankfully, drew up a good forty feet from the tracks themselves, and I was just as happy to wait a sensible distance away on a slightly skittish horse anyway.

  I turned and looked back east, but the road was empty. With the noise of the train and the claxon bells, there wasn’t much chance of my hearing him, even in the diesel, but I would be able to see Barsad from a long way off. If he did appear from that direction, I’d pretty much made up my mind to shoot right in order to lead him away from the boy, follow the tracks in the opposite direction of the train until I got to the end, then jump across and find a cross-country route into town. That’s what I was planning to do; what Wahoo Sue was planning might be something entirely different, but she’d been awfully well-behaved up to now.

  I glanced past the protective barriers that sat lowered across the road, and then at the cars, trying to gauge how many remained, but with the curve in the tracks I simply couldn’t see. Some of the damn things were four miles long, but a substantial number of the coal hoppers had already passed,
so I figured at most I was only a minute or two away from crossing.

  I looked back over my shoulder again, but with the rising sun, it was getting hard to see through the diffused light from the east. I threw a hand over my brow but, as near as I could tell, the road remained empty.

  I pivoted in the saddle again, and Wahoo Sue took it as a command and turned with me. I took advantage of the situation to give Wild Horse Road my undivided attention. The mare took a few steps, and then planted, to give the road as much study as I had.

  Nothing.

  I looked at her and leaned down to stroke the side of her neck. “So-o-o girl, good girl.” I glanced back, could see that the last hopper car was approaching, and wheeled the dark horse around. She misinterpreted again and thought I wanted to advance into the tail end of the passing train, so she took a few crow-hops sideways and slightly reared.

  “So-o-o girl, easy girl. Don’t worry; we’re not going until the train passes.” I patted her neck with the knotted, black mane blowing over my fingers, and she quieted long enough for the final coal car to rock past, with the small electronic device that had taken the place of a caboose attached to the last coupler.

  And there, idling on the other side of the track, was the red Dodge and the late, great Wade Barsad.

  16

  October 31, 7:00 A.M.

  Wade Barsad looked up at the same time I did, and as surprised as I had been to find him alive, he was just as surprised to see me not dead. Evidently, he’d circled around.

  The bells were still clanging and the arms of the railroad crossing were still down and blockading the road. In that tiniest of seconds before they rose, I considered the two options open to me—raise the .44 or get moving. Evidently, the FBI wanted Barsad alive, so just pulling the Henry and doing more ventilation to the cab of the Dodge was a choice, but one not without possibly unseen consequences, both legal and mortal.

  At Berkeley, during his aborted college career, Henry Standing Bear used to race automobiles on foot for a hundred feet. He would almost always win. He explained to me that unless the vehicle is set up and properly geared for that type of short-distance racing, a relatively capable human being is faster. A driver has the delay of human response but also that of the vehicle. A car weighs at least a ton, so you’ve got to get its weight up and moving, whereas the human being just runs. Henry says he got beat only once, and that was in an ill-advised, tequila-induced race with a ’64 Fair-lane T-Bolt.

  I’m not as fast as Henry, never was, but I had Wahoo Sue, and I don’t think I’ve ever moved my heels faster, despite the pain in my foot, than when I drove them into the mare’s sides. We shot forward like we were racing to beat two minutes at the Kentucky Oaks.

  There was only one direction to go and that was the way Sue and I were already headed—it would take Barsad away from Benjamin and Henry, cause him to have to turn, and get me into town where I might be able to either stop him or get help.

  We shot diagonally through the blockade arms and flashed past the Dodge, the dirt and gravel surface of Upper Powder River Road matching well with the dark horse’s steel shoes. In the blur I could see him scrambling for something in the seat and figured he was going for his pistol, but we were too fast, and the last I saw of him, he’d abandoned that thought and had thrown the big Dodge into reverse.

  There was a slight rise in the dirt road leading to the town proper, the shadow of the grain mill and twin silos overlooking the rest of the place from their roost alongside the railroad tracks. There were a few abandoned buildings on the south side of town, ramshackle structures that had long ago decided to join the horizontal landscape, but the only lights that were on were the few dusk-to-dawn lamps that overhung Absalom’s three blocks.

  Wahoo Sue barreled up the rise, and I took the time to give a glance back toward the tracks to see the Dodge spraying gravel in pursuit. It was at least another three hundred yards to The AR and the center of town, but what was I going to do then? Leap off the horse and run into the bar, leaving her to the mercy of Wade Barsad? As I felt the pain in my foot, wedged in the metal stirrup, running might not be the best option anyway.

  I’d worry about it if I got there.

  I crouched against Sue’s neck, loosened the reins completely, and gave her her head. The mare gained speed as we hit the flat, and she must’ve seen him or smelled him because, even though she should have been absolutely worn out, Wahoo Sue accelerated into that breath-snatching velocity that she’d exhibited on the mesa.

  I shot a look over my right shoulder and felt my right hand stealing onto the brass receiver of the .44 Henry. Barsad was less than a hundred yards away and gaining, the roar of the turbocharged Cummins diesel clattering up the isolated streets; it sounded as if the train had made a U-turn.

  I looked back at the road ahead and the remaining distance.

  No way.

  We were not going to make it and, if we did, he was going to be on us as we got there—we’d just be crushed by the grill guard and run over.

  My mind raced along with us and thoughts streaked across my brain like the chain lightning on the mesa sky. The railroad tracks were to my right, with the majority of town to the left, so there was no chance there, but the interior doors of the granary hung open with a ramp leading inside the cavernous building, and there was a chance there.

  I glanced back again and could see the truck was now only a hundred feet behind us. He’d think we had to stop or that we’d have to veer left and up one of Absalom’s side streets. Instead, I yanked the reins to the right and sailed Wahoo Sue up the ramp. One of the doors hung loosely while the other rested on its side against the building, providing an opening you could drive a horse through or a truck driven at a sensible speed.

  Wahoo Sue trusted my judgment implicitly, and we blew from end to end without hesitation with the diesel breathing down our collective necks.

  Wade wasn’t as lucky—he was going too fast, and with the added wideness of the duellie and the lift of the elevated scales, he clipped the hanging door and a compressor just inside the opening, causing the Dodge to carom off the opposite side and shed a fiberglass rear fender. He fought to correct his trajectory, but with the force of his speed, he tipped a wheel off the ramp and slid sideways another fifty feet with his brakes locked.

  I reined left at the other side, gave the mare her lead again, and we galloped up the road beside The AR toward the tiny library/post office. Another quick glance behind, and I could see the headlights of the Dodge in the sedimentary streams of airborne dust, and the diesel bellowed as Barsad extricated himself from the granary.

  The pay phone outside the log building that served as the library/post office was clearly too far in the open to use. I wheeled Sue around the corner across the dried-grass lot and headed back south out of view of the main street. I pulled her up short. There was no way I could outrun Barsad on the open road, but in the confines of the little town I figured I could use the maneuverability of the horse against him.

  I settled the mare, lathered in sweat and snorting, and I couldn’t help but think that she knew who he was and what the consequences would be if he caught us. She raised her head with the large, soft ears pivoting and listened along with me. We could hear the diesel as it sped up the hill; then I saw the red Dodge pass between two buildings and slow down on the street I’d just left.

  I walked Sue, trying to cool her down a little, countering Barsad’s progress by continuing back around the log structure and down the hill. If I could make it to the bar, I could possibly find a safe place for the horse and make a call.

  I stopped Wahoo Sue at the lower side of the building, and we listened as the diesel continued up the hill and, as I’d hoped, turned left. I continued down and tracked Barsad by listening to the sound of the Dodge’s engine as he turned again, but somewhere a block south.

  I gently kicked her to a canter as I got to the next alley and turned toward the back of the bar. If I could hide Sue behind the building a
nd get inside to make a phone call, I’d be able to get help to all the people who were counting on me.

  I guided her into the lot behind The AR just as the red truck drove by the end of the alley we’d just been on. I wasn’t sure if he’d seen us, but I pulled the horse up to the back-door mudroom and hoped not. There was nowhere else to go. We stood next to one of the decayed, lath privacy fences that sided the dry-grass lot, as well as the thousand-gallon propane tank, which was the size of a small Japanese minisubmarine, sitting along the side of the fence to my left.

  The racket of the diesel continued to echo off the hills and through Absalom. It sounded as if he’d stopped somewhere to my right and was now idling. I pulled my hat down and thought about using the Henry rifle on the Dodge’s tires.

  Sue pivoted her head and began backing up. I hadn’t asked her to do that, and I ducked under the eave of the building as she continued to back away into the narrow walkway between the bar and the unconnected rooms. I wasn’t sure what she was up to, but she hadn’t failed me so far.

  We stood there, and I could feel her legs stiffen. What if Barsad had parked the truck and was now pointing the semiautomatic at us?

  Enough was enough; I raised the .44 and jacked the lever-action. I wasn’t sure what Wahoo Sue’s response to gunfire from close proximity would be, but it had to be better than being shot or run over by a seven-thousand-pound truck.

  I heard the bellow of the diesel, so he hadn’t parked; I pivoted Wahoo Sue in the direction of the alley, but he sounded much closer.

  The fence to my left blew apart as the Dodge crashed through and veered. I spun Sue into a rearing turn at the other side of the walkway as the duellie slid through the lot, occupying it with the front wheels turned toward us. Barsad had the 9 mm out but he miscalculated the distance to the propane tank, and I watched as the impact forced the pistol out of his hand and onto the floorboards where he would have to take the time to look for it. I could see that the utility tank had lurched off its concrete blocks and sat at a thirty-degree angle.