“Money!” Vestal screamed. “I’ve got money and it’s yours. Whiskey. Anything you want. Just let me loose.”
The Apaches rolled him on his back.
He looked up, into the hard black eyes of men who did not understand the concept of mercy, but expected a man to die well.
The Hunter was not dying well.
Shad Vestal was hung from the cottonwood by his heels, his head a few inches above the fire. His beautiful hair, his pride, fell over his face and burned, turned black and crisp to the roots, charring his scalp. His sweeping dragoon mustache melted into his face. His eyebrows burned away.
He screamed; then his screams became shrieks and his shrieks became screeches and his screeches became wails.
The Apaches sat in a circle around Vestal, feeding the fire a stick at a time.
The Hunter, who had killed so many of their people, was dying like a woman and this made them deeply ashamed for him.
There are times when fire extends a small mercy. Vestal’s skull could have cracked open, spilling his brains into the coals. He would have died quickly then.
But, as the wind rose and the coyotes called close, attracted by the smell of burning hair and flesh, no such mercy was given.
Vestal suffered for each searing second of his appointed hours, babbling nonsense at the end as his brain baked.
Only when dawn stained the day with light did he die. And then, as one, the Apaches rose and walked away from him.
Chapter 48
Kelly and Clayton rode out of Bighorn Point at day-break.
Clayton rode a rented horse, a big-boned bay with a rough trot and a mouth like iron. For Clayton, the horse’s gait was unfortunate because Benny Hinton had poured them coffee for the trail and most of Clayton’s ended up down his shirtfront.
Kelly, who handled the tin cup without any difficulty, looked at Clayton and grinned. “Having trouble there, Cage?”
“Old coot filled the cup too full,” Clayton said. “Did it on purpose too.”
“Well, well, we’re a tad grouchy in the morning, ain’t we?” Kelly said.
“Yeah, so don’t say anything nice to me or I’ll shoot you right off’n that damned hoss.”
Kelly laughed. “Now, that ain’t likely, is it?”
“What? The sayin’ or the shootin’?”
“Both, I reckon.”
Ahead of them the peaks of the Sans Bois sawed into a scarlet sky and the air came at them clean and clear, scented with pine and grass and the vanilla fragrance of the new-borning day.
Clayton gave up on his coffee, threw out what was left, and made to throw the cup away.
“Give me that,” Kelly said, holding out his hand. “Benny will charge us two bits if we lose one.”
As the lawman leaned back and shoved the cup into his saddlebag, Clayton said, “Why does Hinton dislike me so much?”
Kelly considered that. “Maybe it’s the way you look at a man,” he said finally. “It’s like, well, it’s like you look right inside him to see what makes him what he is.”
“I wasn’t aware of that.”
“Well, you do it. I knew a man like that once, feller by the name of John Wesley Hardin. Heard of him?”
Clayton nodded. “Yeah, gunfighter from down Gonzalez County way in Texas. Last I was told he was in prison someplace.”
“He’s doing twenty-five years in Huntsville, which he don’t deserve. Anyway, Wes was like you. He’d stare right into a man’s soul.”
“So, what does Hinton have to hide that I make him so uncomfortable?”
“Nothing that I know of, unless it’s his cooking. You spook a man, is all, looking at him like that. And what a man doesn’t understand, he fears.”
Clayton smiled. “And do I spook you, Nook?”
“No, you don’t. Ol’ Wes used to stare at me like that all the time over the rim of a whiskey glass, so maybe I got used to it.”
“Well, I’m going to stop looking at folks that way,” Clayton said.
“Ain’t gonna happen, Cage. It’s a thing you’re born with and it won’t ever go away.”
“Hello the house!”
Kelly sat his horse and scanned the building. Windows stared back at him with empty eyes, the bloodstreaked sky caught in their panes.
“Nobody to home,” Clayton said.
“You check the bunkhouse?”
“The hands aren’t there. It’s like they picked up and left in a hurry.”
Kelly stepped from the saddle. “We’ll go inside. I’m feeling something I don’t like.”
Guns drawn, Clayton and Kelly entered the ranch house. There was no sound, only the tick of the grandfather clock in the hallway and a persistent, droning buzz.
They checked a couple of bedrooms, then the parlor. Everything was as it should be.
The buzz stayed with them, growing in intensity.
“Bees in the walls?” Kelly said.
Clayton lifted his shoulders. “I don’t know. Could be, I guess.”
A second hallway met the first, forming a T. They turned right and stepped into the room at the end of the corridor.
Shad Vestal’s fancy duds were still spread out on the bed.
“All ready for his trip, huh?” Clayton said.
“Seems like,” Kelly said. “But where the hell is he? And where’s Lee?”
Clayton checked another room, then stepped through the dining room door after Kelly.
They walked into a charnel house.
Chapter 49
Five men were sprawled across the dining room table and another lay on the floor. Their faces were covered in a buzzing mass of fat flies, black masks that concealed the contorted features of the dead.
The room smelled sweet, of decay, and the tick of the hall clock was loud, already measuring the minutes and hours of eternity.
His stomach an uncertain thing, Clayton left the room and stepped into the kitchen, expecting to find . . . he didn’t know what.
“White men don’t kill like that.”
Clayton turned. Kelly was framed in the doorway.
“This is Apache work,” the lawman said.
“Caught the hands while they were sleeping off a drunk, you think?”
“Looks that way.”
“Then where is Vestal?”
Kelly shook his head, said nothing.
Clayton made a quick search of the kitchen and discovered a heap of bloodstained clothes that had been kicked into a corner.
He picked them up and laid them out on the kitchen table.
“Expensive duds for an Apache,” he said.
Kelly picked up Vestal’s shirt, studied it, frowning as his mind worked.
The kitchen sink still bore pink streaks of blood, as did a carving knife that lay on the floor where it had been carelessly tossed away.
“Whoever killed those men took time to strip off his bloody clothes and wash his hands,” Clayton said. “I never knew Apaches to be that dainty.”
“Then how did it come up?” Kelly hesitated only a heartbeat. “In your expert opinion.”
Clayton let the barb pass. “Could be that Vestal invited the hands here to celebrate his departure for Boston, got them drunk, then cut their throats.”
“Why?”
“Because they knew too much about the business of killing Apaches and the sale of their bodies.”
Kelly seemed to consider that, but his eyes were steel-hard, a man who intended to go his own way, no matter what. “Vestal was a gunfighter, maybe the best there was around after me. Why didn’t he shoot them?”
Clayton smiled. “Think about it, Nook. A gunshot in an enclosed room is loud. Even men dead drunk can wake and go for their revolvers.”
As Kelly had done earlier, he picked up the bloody shirt.
“Vestal wanted the men dead in the quickest, easiest way possible. That’s why he used a knife and not a gun.”
The marshal’s speech slowed, as though he was talking to a child or an obvious dimwit.
“Cage, I told you, white men don’t kill like that.”
Clayton opened his mouth to object, but Kelly raised a hand.
“Listen to me. You’re right. The hands were drunk, and so was Vestal. The Apaches found them that way, cut their throats, but took Vestal away for special treatment. He was the one they hated most and his death would be a lot slower.”
“Look at the bloody clothes, the stains in the sink and on the knife,” Clayton said.
“So the Apaches roughed Vestal up some, maybe cut him. They stripped him naked because that’s one of the ways an Indian shows his contempt for an enemy.”
“Then where is he? And where is Lee Southwell?”
“We’re going to find them. I don’t think they’re far.”
“You reckon they’re still on the ranch?”
“Yeah, I do. What’s left of them.”
Chapter 50
Kelly was a tracker, a skill Clayton did not possess. He stood outside the door where Vestal had been taken and pointed to the footprints.
“I count five men, a couple of them wearing moccasins, the others shoes or boots.” He showed a pair of parallel gouges in the dirt. “That’s where Vestal’s toes dragged across the ground as they hauled him away.”
“And Lee?”
“You can see the tracks of a woman’s high-heeled boots”—he pointed—“there and there. My guess is they let her walk to wherever they raped and murdered her.”
Clayton, a man who had a live-and-let-live attitude toward Apaches, and Indians in general, had met prejudice before. Now he accepted it from Kelly as the words of a man living in his place and time.
“Let’s go find them,” he said.
But he didn’t want to find Lee Southwell.
“Still think Shad Vestal killed those men?”
Kelly, his face like stone, drew his knife and cut the rope that held Vestal’s body. The body thumped to the ground. The head, burned black to the white bone of the skull, raised a cloud of gray ashes when it hit the dying fire.
“Lee wasn’t raped,” Clayton said. He could think of nothing else to say.
“How do you know?” Kelly said. He was restless, his movements quick, a man on edge.
“They would’ve stripped her like they did Vestal.”
Kelly lifted the woman’s skirt and looked. “You’re right. I guess they didn’t.”
The marshal was quiet for a while, then said, “They made her watch Vestal dying, then stabbed her.” He looked at Clayton. “Whose death was the worst, his or hers?”
“There’s no good death, Nook.”
“Seems like.”
Kelly gathered the reins of his horse.
“Mount up,” he said, “we’re going after them.”
“Shouldn’t we bury—”
“No. We’re bringing in the Apaches. I’m going to hang every one of those murdering sons of bitches in the middle of the street in Bighorn Point.”
Clayton hesitated. “Nook, you think that Vestal could have murdered Lee? Maybe that’s the real reason he was leaving for Boston without her.”
He saw it in the lawman’s eyes, a strange mix of cold anger, disgust, and confusion.
“Damn it, Cage, are you a white man?”
“Yes, I guess I am.”
“Then for goodness’ sake start acting like one. Get up on your damned hoss and let’s find those savages. They must be all tuckered out by their night’s work and that means they haven’t gone far.”
Kelly spat. “And stop looking at me like that.”
Chapter 51
The man Vestal had called the Hog was dreaming. It wasn’t a pretty dream, not one of high mountain peaks and blue skies, but one of misery, cruelty, and pain. It was the kind of dream only a man like the Hog could appreciate. Lying back on his leather couch like a gigantic, sweating walrus, he smiled to himself.
Someone tapped on the door.
“What is it?” the Hog yelled, awake.
“A message from your wife, sir. She and Reverend Bates are waiting for you at the church to discuss the roof repairs.”
“Who brought the message?”
“Andy Brown’s boy.”
“Give him a nickel and tell him to inform my wife that I’ll be there in a couple of minutes.”
The Hog stood and primped at his mirror, arranging his thinning hair into kiss curls on each side of his forehead. He smoothed his large mustache, adjusted his cravat and diamond stickpin, and considered himself for a moment.
Yes, he was a fine-looking man. It was no wonder that women gave him sidelong glances when he cut a dash at the church coffee socials.
But he scowled as, unbidden, a jarring thought entered his head. One woman in particular was becoming a problem. Minnie, one of the black girls who worked in town, had been one of his side projects for a few weeks. She was as stupid as a rock, and might let something slip.
The Hog smiled and his reflection smiled right back. No matter, after he got rid of Clayton—the first two incompetents he’d hired for the job had failed him badly—he’d do for Minnie. He might even kill her himself. He’d enjoy that very much.
And who would suspect him of murdering a whore? That is, if anybody cared enough to investigate.
“No one,” he whispered aloud to the smirking fat man in the mirror. “No one in the whole wild world.”
Chapter 52
Kelly followed the Apache tracks south, five men riding unshod ponies and in no hurry to scamper back into the Sans Bois.
Clayton thought their leisurely pace indicated an absence of guilt, as far as Lee and the Southwell hands were concerned, but he said nothing, in no mood for another tongue-lashing from Kelly.
After an hour’s ride through rolling country heavily forested by pine and hardwoods, they crossed Cunneo Tubby Creek, named by the Choctaw for one of their famous war chiefs.
In the shade of cottonwoods, Kelly swung down and crumbled horse dung in his fingers.
He looked at Clayton. “We’re getting close.”
“How do we play this, Nook?” Clayton asked.
“We ride up and arrest them.”
“They’ll fight.”
“Maybe, maybe not. I don’t know how much sand the Apaches have left.”
Kelly straightened. “I reckon a mile ahead of us, no more than that.”
He stepped into the saddle. “Cage, see to your weapons, revolver and rifle. I don’t want a gunfight, but it may come to that.”
Clayton thumbed a round into the empty chamber under the hammer of his Colt, then fed shells into his Winchester until it was fully loaded.
He turned to Kelly. “I’m ready.”
The marshal smiled. “I’ll say you are. Hell, for a minute there with all that artillery, you even scared me.”
Kelly kneed his horse forward, but immediately drew rein.
“Cage, what I said about you not being a white man an’ all don’t go. You’re true blue and I’ve never thought otherwise.”
“Did we ride all this way just for you to talk pretties or to get the job done?” Clayton said.
Kelly nodded. “Just wanted you to know, is all.”
After another mile, Clayton smelled smoke in the breeze.
Kelly pointed ahead of them. “There, among the trees. They’ve made camp.”
A thin string of smoke rose above the tree canopy, tied in wispy bows by the wind.
“We . . . just ride in,” Clayton said, more question than statement.
“Stay on my left,” Kelly said, “and give me room. If the ball opens, it will be fast, close-up work, so go to your revolver.” He looked at Clayton. “Got that?”
Clayton nodded, but said nothing.
“Then let’s get ’er done,” Kelly said.
They rode into the trees and the Apaches rose to their feet.
The old warrior who had taken Clayton captive stepped forward.
“You speak English?” Kelly said.
“I do,” the old
man said.
“Then listen up good.” Kelly’s eyes were never still, measuring the men opposite him, judging who was reckless enough or desperate enough to make a play. “I’m arresting you men for the murder of Lee Southwell, Shad Vestal, and six others.”
He leaned forward in the saddle.
“I will escort you to Bighorn Point, see you get a fair trial, then hang you at the mayor’s convenience.”
Kelly looked beyond the old man to the others. “You men, drop those rifles. Now!”
The youngest Apache was the one who was desperate enough to make the play Kelly feared.
Chapter 53
The young Apache’s rifle came up as he screamed his war cry.
Suddenly Kelly’s Bulldogs were in his hands and he was firing.
Clayton drew, but couldn’t find a target.
Kelly, a horseback fighter, was among them, his guns hammering.
The young Apache was down, as were three others, one on his hands and knees, retching up black blood.
The old man picked up a rifle and stepped to the side, trying for a clear shot at Kelly.
“No!” Clayton yelled.
The Apache ignored him.
Clayton fired and the old man staggered. He fired again, and this time the Indian fell.
Greasy gray smoke drifted across the clearing, and Clayton’s ears rang. He saw everything around him through a black tunnel, unfolding at a snail’s pace, as though time had slowed down.
He saw Kelly fire at the Apache who’d dropped to his hands and knees. The man rolled over on his side and lay still.
Thin and reedy, the badly wounded young Apache’s death song rose above the silence until Kelly stopped it in midnote with a bullet.
After that, the firing ended.
The Apaches lay unmoving in death. The old man’s hair looked grayer than Clayton remembered and the knuckles of his outstretched hands were misshapen and gnarled and must have pained him in life.
As he watched Kelly reload his revolvers, Clayton tried to build a cigarette. The paper shredded in his trembling fingers and the tobacco blew away.
The Stranger from Abilene Page 13