Lawless Trail

by Ralph Cotton

  “I didn’t mean it to be,” Rubens said, straightening a little, watching the fire take hold in the kindling and flare up to feed on the dry pine bark. “But you have to admit it’s damn risky,” he added.

  “Don’t worry about them being here,” Wes said. “There’s a reason why it’s not risky. We won’t have to worry about them ever telling anybody.”

  Rubens thought about it, his eyes staring into the growing, spreading flames.

  “You don’t mean we’re going to . . . ?” His words trailed.

  “Would you do that, if I asked you to?” Wes asked quietly.

  Rubens rubbed his palms nervously on his thighs. He swallowed a dry knot in his throat, staring into the flame.

  “I—I think I need a drink, real bad,” he said, instead of answering.

  “I figured you might say that,” Wes said. “Turn around. I’ve got something for you.”

  Rubens turned slowly, uncertain of what to expect. But then his eyes widened at the sight of Wes standing before him holding out a full bottle of rye whiskey.

  “Lord yes!” he said, grabbing the bottle from Wes’ hand. “Much obliged, Wes. Thank you, Jesus,” he said, lifting his eyes heavenward. He hurriedly pulled the cork, palmed it and raised the bottle high in a long, gurgling drink.

  As he lowered the bottle, he let out a deep hiss and asked, “Will you be drinking with me? You deserve a good swig. We all do after this run.” He glanced around, used to Bugs Trent being nearby.

  “Don’t mind if I do, Baylor,” Wes said, taking the bottle.

  “I mean no offense, questioning you just now,” Rubens offered, taking the bottle back after Wes had taken a swig. “And I know you mean no harm to come to the doc and Rosetta.”

  “You’re right. I mean them no harm,” Wes said. He watched Rubens take another deep swig, lower the bottle and wipe a hand over his lips. He looked up curiously at Traybo.

  “So . . . what did you mean, then?” he said.

  “I meant, we won’t be here if anybody shows up looking for us,” Wes said. “There’s too many people getting too close to our lair.” He lowered his voice. “As soon as Ty’s strength is up, we’re shedding the place for good.”

  “For good?” Rubens looked up at him.

  “Yep, for good,” Wes said. “I’m thinking my brother and I might quit the business, move far away from here. Maybe we’ll pull together a ranch up in the north country.”

  Rubens gave him a despondent look.

  “I don’t know nothing but robbing,” he said.

  “Come with us, learn the cattle business,” Wes said.

  “I hate cattle something awful,” said Rubens. “So does my horse.” He pointed toward the other room. “Hell, Ty hates cattle. I’ve heard him say it.”

  “That’s just one thing we can do, Rubens,” Wes said. “It doesn’t have to be a cattle ranch. It could be something else.”

  But the thought had stuck in Rubens’ mind. He took another swig and gazed off in consideration.

  “Cattle ranching,” he murmured, shaking his head with a sad look on his weathered face. “I don’t know how I’m going to tell my horse.”

  “Look at me, Baylor,” Wes said. “You’ve ridden with us a long time. We’ve had the best of it—robbing banks, trains, anything else that suited us. We lived lives most men envy.”

  “Damn right we have.” Rubens gave a proud grin.

  “But we were never killers,” Wes continued. “Now we are. We’ve crossed a line I never wanted to cross. It’s time we back away from it and do something else. You’re welcome to come along, whatever we do.”

  “If it’s time to get out . . . I’ll get out,” he said. He tipped the bottle toward Wes as if in a toast. “Here’s to what it was,” he said. Then he took another long deep swig.

  Rubens and Wes both looked around at Dr. Bernard as the doctor stepped into the room. The woman followed him inside, shutting the door.

  “Your brother, Ty, is doing much better,” the doctor said. “Apparently running gunfights must agree with him.”

  “I might say the same for you, Doc,” said Wes. He looked at the woman, who stopped and stood beside the doctor. “You too, Rosetta. As hostages go, I couldn’t have done better.”

  The two just looked at him.

  Wes drew the same leather pouch of gold coins he’d been carrying inside his coat. Then he drew another pouch he’d taken from a hiding place in the corner cabinet when he’d gotten Rubens a bottle of whiskey.

  “These are for you,” he said, stepping forward and holding the pouches out to them.

  Rosetta took the pouch and held it to her bosom. The doctor started to speak, but Wes stopped him.

  “Doctor, you’ve been tougher than a pine knot. You’ve saved my brother’s life. You fought for us when the odds were stacked against us. But now it’s time for you to go home. If you stick with us any longer, you’ll lose your way out.”

  Dr. Bernard took a deep breath and let it out.

  “Yes, I understand,” he said. He gripped the pouch and hefted it in his hand. He started to protest that it was entirely too much, but Wes Traybo gave him a look that invited no argument on the matter.

  Rosetta quickly put the pouch inside her clothes.

  “Gracias, Wes Traybo,” she said, “for hiring me to take care of your brother and for allowing me to return to my people. I am no longer a puta.”

  “You never were, far as I’m concerned,” said Traybo. “You had to play the hand dealt to you.” He turned to the doctor. “Now get out of here, both of you. Once you’re out, forget your way back, for a few days anyway.”

  Rosetta turned toward the door to the room where Ty was resting in bed.

  “I must say good-bye to Ty first,” she said. She started to turn, but Wes stopped her.

  “No,” he said, knowing now that Ty was getting better, he would never want her to leave. “I’ll tell him good-bye for you.”

  “Come, Rosetta, let’s be on our way,” the doctor said. He looked at Wes and nodded good-bye, then turned with his satchel on his shoulder and led the woman toward the front door.

  Wes watched from the front window as the two departed toward the stone canyon. Before they rode out of sight, he saw the doctor stop his horse all of a sudden, jump down from his saddle and run to a pine standing beside the trail. The doctor bowed against the tree, resting one hand on it, and vomited profusely on the ground at his feet.

  Wes smiled thinly to himself. He watched the doctor wipe his lips on a handkerchief on his way back to his horse, step up into his saddle and continue on.

  “Tough as a pine knot,” he repeated to himself.

  When Wes turned around, he found Ty at the door to the other room staring at him.

  “Rosetta and the doc are gone?” he asked, gazing past his brother, trying to see out the window.

  “Yep, I sent them away,” said Wes. “You don’t need any more nursing. It’ll spoil you.”

  “Yeah, but damn,” said Ty, supporting himself against the doorjamb, “I never got to know her, not in the way I wanted to.”

  “Yes, you did,” Wes said. “She did what needed doing, and you got to know her as much as you needed to. Anyway, she’s got family waiting for her in Guatemala. There’s no place for her with us.” He walked back to where Rubens sat, watching everything, a glazed, whiskey look on his face.

  “Are you going to hog that bottle, Baylor, or share some of it with your pards?” he said.

  • • •

  Riding at a quick clip, feeling pressed to put more miles between themselves and the Ranger, Claypool and Hardaway reached the main trail and turned onto it without slowing down. Doing so was a mistake, one that Claypool realized a second too late as the sound of rifle fire exploded on the hillside above them.

  A barrage of bullets sliced th
rough the air around them; before Claypool could get his rifle raised, his dun whinnied in pain and went down beneath him. At the same time, two bullets hit Claypool, one in his side and one in his chest. Beside him, Hardaway took a bullet that knocked him out of his saddle and sent him rolling off the edge of the trail. He caught himself and crawled back up and returned fire. But in the middle of the trail, Claypool was in big trouble.

  A hard volley of rifle fire erupted as he struggled to his feet and tried to run to his downed horse. The horse lay center-trail on its side, screaming pitifully, flailing its hooves.

  Another bullet hit Claypool as he dived atop the badly wounded animal and spread his arms wide as if to protect it. Blood spewed up from the horse’s side and splattered down on man and animal alike.

  “No, Charlie Smith!” Claypool shouted, seeing where the mud packing had fallen from the graze on the horse’s rump from his run-in with the banditos at the water hole. “What have I go you into!” he shouted, hugging the horse, his rifle gone from his hands and lying fifteen feet away in the trail.

  “Kill that son of a bitch!” Dallas Garand shouted from ten yards up the rocky hillside, having managed to track them there and lie waiting above them in ambush. Hardaway returned fire as the barrage of rifle fire filled the air again. But even as he fired, he saw Claypool buck and twist as bullet after bullet sliced into him. When he saw that neither Claypool nor his dun was reacting to the continued sting of hot lead slicing through them, he crawled backward down from the edge of the trail, leaving a smear of blood in the dirt.

  On the hillside Garand stood in a haze of looming gun smoke and waved an arm back and forth to Fain Elliot and Artimus Folliard. Beside him stood L. C. McGuire.

  “Stop firing. He’s dead,” Garand said. He took a fresh cigar out of his inside lapel pocket and stuck it in his mouth. He looked down at Claypool lying stretched out atop the dead horse. “You two get down there, finish off Hardaway.” Under his breath, he said, “I knew that son of a bitch was with them.” He turned to McGuire and said, “L.C., follow me.”

  He positioned his rifle back over his shoulder and walked up the hillside to where they had left their horses, Rio DeSpain holding the animals’ reins in case they needed to make a fast getaway.

  Elliot and Folliard stood up, looked at each other and started down the hillside through brush and over rock. They looked back and forth along the edge of the trail where they’d seen Hardaway firing at them.

  “Come out, come out, Fatcharack Hardaway,” Elliot called out in a dark laugh. “I will make your thumb into a watch fob.”

  “Speaking of thumbs,” said Folliard, “Claypool’s is all mine. He also took my Starr pistol. . . . I’m taking it back if it’s on him.”

  “Suit yourself,” said Elliot, stepping out onto the trail and walking across it, his rifle pointed at the far edge where they’d seen Hardaway. He called out, “If you make me track you down, it’ll go harder on you.” As Elliot approached the edge of the trail, Folliard veered away and walked to where Claypool lay sprawled facedown, the back of his bloody coat riddled with bullets.

  He took Claypool by his wrist and turned him over, off the horse’s side.

  “There’s my Starr,” he said, seeing the big revolver stuck behind Claypool’s belt. He grabbed the gun, held it up and looked it over with a proud smile on his still battered but healing face.

  But suddenly his smile froze as bullet after bullet from Claypool’s short-barreled Colt ripped upward into his chest, pitching him backward. The fourth shot entered just beneath his cheek and sent a gout of blood and brain matter exploding in the air.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Elliot called out, spinning toward the sound of gunfire, mistakenly thinking it was coming from Folliard’s gun. But as he saw Folliard falling back beneath the upsurge of blood, he turned his rifle toward Claypool just in time to catch two bullets in his chest. As he spun, Hardaway’s rifle barked from the edge of the trail; the bullet pounded Elliot a third time in the chest.

  From up the hillside, Garand heard the short-barreled Colt. He and L. C. McGuire looked down and saw the two detectives lying dead and bloody in the middle of the trail.

  “You can’t kill these sons a’ bitches!” he said as if in awe, his cigar falling from his lips. Without a moment of hesitation, he sprang the rest of the way up the hillside, McGuire right behind him, to where Rio DeSpain stood holding the horses.

  “What’s the deal?” DeSpain asked as Garand leaped atop his horse and jerked it toward the trail. McGuire shrugged and stepped up into his saddle, turning his horse behind Garand.

  “They’re dead—we’re gone,” Garand snapped. “That’s the deal.”

  “Me and L.C. got you covered, Mr. Garand,” DeSpain said, leaping up into his saddle, turning the other two horses loose.

  Seeing Garand and his two men riding away atop the hill, Hardaway struggled against the pain in his lower left side and pushed himself to his feet. He staggered past the body of Elliot, out around the dead horse and saw Claypool lying covered with blood, his short-barreled Colt in his hand, his eyes barely showing life.

  “Damn it, Carter,” said Hardaway, weaving in place. “I wouldn’t have had this happen . . . for nothing.”

  Claypool made the slightest gesture with his eyes, letting Hardaway know he heard him.

  “There just ain’t nothing . . . I can do for you,” Hardaway said. He sank down to the ground beside him, laid his bloody hand on Claypool’s shoulder and patted it. “Go on, close your eyes now,” he said quietly.

  Chapter 23

  The Ranger rode the last thirty yards with caution up from Hardaway’s shortcut and onto the main trail. Having followed the X on Hardaway’s horse’s shoes, he knew it was a pretty good bet that Hardaway was involved in the rifle fire he’d heard. He had only stopped at the old Mexican’s trailside hovel long enough to water the barb, but he’d noted the new set of tracks belonging to whoever had thrown in with Hardaway. He’d also seen the bodies of the three slavers, the old Mexican leading a team of donkeys dragging them to the edge of a tall cliff across the trail from his hovel.

  The Ranger finished watering the barb and led the dusty animal across the trail and stood watching the old man.

  “Qué ha sucedido aquí?” he asked.

  “Ah, it was nothing,” the old man replied in better English than the Ranger expected for such a remote place. He gave the Ranger the account of a norteamericano—a tejano perhaps—offering to buy women from three slavers with worthless money, of another americano arriving in time to save his life from the slavers, and killing the three of them with a short-barreled Colt. His memory on the matter was crisp and clear, yet when it came to recalling any names, his eyes glazed and appeared at a loss.

  “The Traybo brothers’ gang?” the Ranger said, testing.

  “Traybos? No hablo Traybos,” he replied, his English suddenly turning stiff and unmanageable.

  In relating the story of the shooting to the Ranger, the old man stopped at intervals and stepped forward long enough to roll a slaver’s body and watched it sail, bounce, flail, slide and twist into shapes heretofore unattainable to their human skeletal form. At the end of each gruesome exhibition, the old Mexican looked back at the Ranger with his one-toothed grin, his tired eyes sparkling with amusement, and continued his tale.

  After the third body had made its descent, and the old man finished telling the Ranger what had happened, he saw a questioning look on the Ranger’s face and shrugged his thin shoulders.

  “This is hard ground and I have no shovel, no pick.” He gestured out across the deep rocky chasm to where buzzards had begun rising into the sky almost before the bodies had landed and settled. “Besides, los santos teach us it is good to feed God’s creatures, eh?”

  “I can’t argue against the teachings of the saints,” the Ranger replied. Knowing he’d gotten all he was goin
g to from the old man, Sam stepped into his saddle, turned the barb and rode on, stopping only now and then to make sure he was still following the X Hardaway’s horse had left in its wake.

  And he rode on, only quickening his barb’s pace when the onslaught of rifle fire erupted less than two miles ahead of him.

  Now each step of the barb shortened his distance yard by yard from the turn in the trail and the drift of rifle smoke looming above it. When he could smell the strong bite of burnt powder, he stopped and stepped down from his saddle and cocked his Winchester, the rifle already in his hand.

  Leading the barb, he warily rounded the turn and saw Claypool’s dead dun lying stretched out midtrail. As he proceeded closer, he saw Hardaway sitting, swaying slightly, his hand still resting on Claypool’s bloody shoulder.

  “Don’t think I can’t . . . see you coming, Ranger,” Hardaway said painfully, his free hand gripping Claypool’s Colt against his own bloody belly wound. “I could nail you from here. . . . Nothing you could do about it.”

  “Oh . . . ? What’s stopping you?” the Ranger called out, moving slowly forward as he spoke, gaining what knowledge he could of the situation as he moved deeper into it.

  “Gun’s not loaded,” Hardaway replied painfully.

  “That’s a stopper,” the Ranger said. He walked into sight over the side of the dead dun and looked down at Hardaway. “Loaded or unloaded, lay it down, Fatch,” he said in a warning tone, his rifle loosely pointed at Hardaway.

  Hardaway sighed and opened his bloody hand; the short-barreled Colt fell to the ground in the fork of his outstretched legs.

  The Ranger moved in, looking all around. He stooped and picked up the Colt and checked it. He looked at Carter Claypool lying pale and dead, looking small, the breadth and depth of his personal magnitude gone out of him.

  “You’re not lying,” he said to Hardaway, and he stuck the Colt down behind his gun belt.

  “I could have . . . told you that too,” said Hardaway, his free hand going back to his belly wound.