A Stone Creek Collection Volume 1

by Linda Lael Miller

  Sam headed back toward the single passenger car, trying to be thankful that there weren’t a hundred corpses, instead of sixteen. Except for the locomotive, which had plunged nose-first into the river, the rest of the train lay in a pile in about eighteen inches of water. “Like I said before,” he called in reply, fixing to climb through a hole in the side of the car, “they’re waiting for dark.”

  “They have to know there are only two of us,” Vierra said as Sam looked back at him through the opening. The Mexican moved to look down at the bloody bodies of the woman and her daughters, made the sign of the cross.

  “For all they can tell,” Sam replied, buying a few moments before he had to wade through all those dead folks again, “we’re scouting for a posse. Half the U.S. Cavalry could show up any minute, or a hundred federales.”

  Vierra didn’t answer, just shook his head.

  The grim work went on, and all the while, Sam knew he wouldn’t be able to bury the bodies. There were no shovels, the ground was stony, and it was getting late in the day. When night came, he and Vierra would probably have all they could do to stay alive themselves.

  He had brought the last federale out—a boy no older than seventeen—slung over his right shoulder like a sack of grain, by the time the sun started to dip behind the rocks to the west. The outlaws hadn’t shown themselves in all that time, but Sam knew they were watching by the prickle under his hide.

  He wished he had blankets, or even coats, to cover the remains of those unfortunate wayfarers, but except for a few lap robes, which he’d spread over the first woman and her daughters, there was nothing. He did find a crate of dead chickens in a freight car, along with bags of mail and some staples, like sugar and flour and rendered lard.

  On the shore, well away from the line of corpses, he busied himself plucking and cleaning two of the birds, as best he could, using his pocketknife and the muddy river water, a little ways upstream from the wreck. Vierra gathered a pile of driftwood and plucked some sagebrush from the hillside for a fire, but Sam noticed the other man’s gaze kept straying back to the train, and he didn’t have to wonder what he was thinking.

  Vierra’s mind was fastened tight on the gold.

  Meanwhile, the horses grazed on patches of grass sprouting between river rocks. Though they weren’t tied or hobbled, they didn’t stray within twenty yards of the bodies.

  The sun slipped lower in the sky.

  The chicken carcasses roasted, succulent and snapping, on a spit over the low fire. Sam wasn’t hungry, but he knew he had to eat to keep his brain alert and his gun hand steady. He had a powerful hankering for coffee, made strong on his little stove in the room back of the schoolhouse, and waited resolutely for the desire to pass.

  “How much gold do you think there is?” Vierra asked. He was lounging next to the fire, watching the chicken cook, but he had his pistol drawn, resting on the ground beside him. Every once in a while, he felt for it with one hand, as though he thought it might have grown legs and sneaked off.

  “No idea,” Sam said evenly, stirring the fire with a stick. “I saw a strongbox. I didn’t open it.”

  Vierra assessed him. “Why not?”

  “I was a little busy. Anyway, it’s got a lock on it. One of those dead federales probably has the key in his pocket.”

  “You sure were in a hurry to get the corpses all laid out neat and tidy on the riverbank,” Vierra observed. “It’s not like it was going to make any difference to them.”

  Sam had been keeping his body busy, so his mind could work unimpeded, but he felt no compunction to explain that, or anything else, to Vierra. They’d been thrown into this assignment together, for reasons Major Blackstone hadn’t bothered to clarify when he’d issued Sam’s orders, but they were still strangers. Sam didn’t trust Vierra much more than the outlaws who had done this horrendous thing, and now, with nightfall less than an hour away, by his estimate, he was prepared for just about anything—including the possibility that Vierra might have been in on the robbery all along. That could be why the others had yet to come after the gold. And it could be why he and Vierra hadn’t gotten here on time to stop the disaster in the first place; Sam only had Vierra’s word for it that the train wasn’t due to reach the trestle before noon.

  The theory that Vierra might be a member of the gang had one hole in it, though. Why involve an Arizona Ranger? Vierra knew who he was. Granted, he, Sam, was just one man, but it still didn’t make sense. He was a complication, and it would have been far simpler to leave him out of the equation in the first place.

  Just then a rock rolled downhill behind them and Vierra was on his feet in an instant, crouched, his pistol in one hand. Sam had drawn his .45 without rising from his seat by the fire, and thrust it back into his holster when he spotted a jackrabbit skittering across the wall of the ravine.

  Maybe Vierra was what he claimed to be, Sam reflected.

  And maybe he was putting on a show.

  “We ought to haul that gold out here,” Vierra said when he’d calmed down a little. “Where we can keep an eye on it.”

  “The gold’s fine where it is,” Sam said evenly. “The water’s shallow, and that car’s sunk as far as it’s going to.” He tested the chicken with the point of his knife, figured it for done, and took the spit off the fire. Kicked river dirt over the flames to douse them. A fire in the daylight was one thing, and it was another in the dark. No sense providing a beacon.

  The two men ate in silence, both watchful, both listening.

  The shadows thickened as the sun finally dipped behind the top of the ravine.

  Sam fetched his ammunition belt from the pile he’d made when he unsaddled the gelding. He was going to have to name that animal one of these days; couldn’t just keep addressing it as “Horse.”

  Vierra watched curiously, his hand resting on the butt of his pistol, now holstered. Sam smiled to himself, figuring his companion might be having some of the same thoughts he’d had earlier, only in reverse. Maybe he reckoned Sam for one of the robbers.

  “What are you doing?” Vierra asked, his eyes narrow as he watched Sam check his bullet supply.

  “We’re likely to live longer if we do our shooting from inside that railroad car,” he said, eyeing the chamber of his pistol even though he knew it was fully loaded.

  “What about the horses?” Vierra asked, but his face relaxed a little, it seemed to Sam. He surely saw the sense in taking cover behind all that iron, crumpled as it was, but it was probably the chance to get close to the strongbox full of federal gold that smoothed his feathers. Neither man mentioned the obvious: that the car would provide shelter from the outlaws’s bullets, but it might also turn out to be a trap. Taking cover was the lesser of two evils.

  “We’ll stake them on the other side of that pile of boulders,” Sam said, pointing downriver, “and hope to hell they don’t get caught in the crossfire if there’s a shoot-out.”

  Vierra looked around again, straightened his shoulders and set about taking care of his horse. Sam did the same for his own, grateful for the solace of ordinary tasks.

  After that, they made their way into the passenger car, standing on seats torn loose from the floor in the crash so they could look out through broken windows.

  “There’s something wrong,” Vierra advised when they’d been keeping watch for the better part of an hour. It was full night now, though twilight still played at the top of the ravine, and the inside of the car was dark, smelling of fear and death and something foul in the water. It came to Sam, with a chill, that there might be more bodies pinned underneath the car, a lookout, maybe, crouched on the catwalk on the roof, or someone with the misfortune to be moving between cars when the trestle gave way.

  “You sound,” Sam observed, thrusting those images forcibly out of his head, “like a man with reason to expect things to go a certain way.”

  He felt Vierra’s sudden stillness. “You think I’m one of them?”

  “I’ve seen stranger things h
appen,” Sam said.

  “If you weren’t a lawman, I believe I’d shoot you right here and now, just for defaming my character like that.”

  “You could try.”

  Vierra chuckled in the gloom. “You think you’re faster than I am, gringo?”

  “Might be that I am,” Sam allowed. He’d been in plenty of skirmishes in his time, and he was still alive, which said all that was needed about his prowess with a gun. On the other hand, the same could be said of Vierra.

  “That would make things too easy for the banditos, if we shot each other,” Vierra surmised. A brief wisp of moon glow illuminated his profile. “I am not one of them.” He paused and spat, as if the idea had caught on his tongue and soured there. “But some of that gold is mine, if I bring los diablos back to a certain rancho alive.”

  “You told me it belonged to the Mexican government,” Sam pointed out. “And given that I carried six dead federales out of this passenger car, I believed that much of your story.”

  Vierra stiffened, gazing out the window, and cocked his pistol, a cold, decisive click in the dark. “Here they come,” he whispered, and, sure enough, four riders were making their way down the cliff trail, shadow creatures, part man and part horse.

  Sam’s palm sweated where he gripped his .45. Dead or alive. Just bring the bastards in. But put a stop to the thieving and killing. Those were the major’s orders, but even after what the gang had done, the worst of it lying still on the shore in mute witness, Sam couldn’t bring himself to shoot those men out of the saddle.

  As he and Vierra watched, the riders gained flat ground. Three of them held back, cloaked in darkness, their hat brims down over their faces. The fourth man rode to the forefront.

  “We been watching you,” he said. “You might just as well come out of there and let us have what we’ve come for.”

  Sam didn’t recognize the voice, but he thought he should have. All he knew for sure was that whoever the ringleader was, he wasn’t Rex or Landry Donagher. He was too slightly built for that, though he sat a horse as though he’d been born to it.

  Vierra spewed a stream of Spanish invective and fired a shot over the bandits’ heads, striking the ravine wall and bringing down a shower of small stones.

  The trio at the rear scrambled down off their horses and took cover in the rocks, and Sam waited for a volley of retaliatory gunfire, but it didn’t come. The man up front had raised a hand to forestall it.

  “Save your bullets, you damn fool!” Sam rasped at Vierra.

  Vierra cursed again, but he didn’t fire. “Women!” he shouted to the men on the bank. “Little children! Look at them, lying there, you bloodthirsty cowards!”

  The man still on horseback turned his head in the direction of the bodies. He reined his mount toward them, and Sam thought he might have ridden right over the lot if the animal hadn’t balked. Except in a blind panic, no horse would deliberately step on anything, lest it lose its footing.

  “We tried to stop the train in a canyon,” the rider answered, “a mile or so south of here. That engineer kept right on coming, pouring on the coal. His bad luck that we’d posted a man up ahead, in case of that very eventuality. At a signal from us, he blew up the trestle.”

  In case of that very eventuality, Sam repeated in his head. He’d never known a cowpoke or a drifter who talked like that. Who the hell was this, and why did he figure he ought to know the answer to that question already?

  “Just give us the gold,” the man called, “and we’ll be on our way. Leave you to bury these good dead. Say a few kindly words over them, if you please, as a favor to us.”

  Vierra shouted another insult.

  Dead or alive. Sam went so far as to take aim on the man in the lead before his conscience snagged him. The major didn’t give a damn how he accomplished the task, he reminded himself, and neither did the Territorial government, as long as the murdering, rustling and robbing ended, north of the border. But Sam wanted to see the four of them tried, sentenced and hanged, and he’d bring them in for the purpose, if he had to whip the lot and Vierra in the bargain to do it.

  “We’re not inclined to do you any favors,” Sam replied.

  Another faint wash of moonlight swept the riverbank, and Sam strained to recognize any or all of the men, but it was too dark. They were mere shapes, clad in long coats. He did make out that they’d all drawn rifles.

  “There are only two of you,” the leader said with cold cordiality. “How long do you think you can hold us off?”

  Sam had been considering that question all along, and no answer was forthcoming. “It would be easy enough to even the odds,” he responded. Damn, but it would be easy. Shoot the sons of bitches, drape them over their own saddles and lead their burdened horses out like a pack string. Leave the gold for Vierra to do with as he chose.

  Trouble was, unlike the killers, Sam had a conscience, and he knew his own mind. If he shot those men without real cause, he’d see them falling in his mind, over and over again, for the rest of his days, whether his eyes were open or closed. And he’d wish he’d done things differently.

  It would be burden enough that he couldn’t bury those bodies.

  “Just throw that strongbox out here,” the leader cajoled, “and we’ll ride out. No harm done.”

  No harm done. All those corpses lying on the bank, and at least one more in the locomotive. Vibrant, flesh-and-blood lives, cut short, stolen. Sam could barely comprehend the kind of fear those people must have felt when the train plunged into midair; just thinking of it made his stomach churn. And God knew how many others had been left behind to mourn and to imagine what their loved ones must have gone through in those last terrible moments.

  “I’ll rot in hell first,” Sam vowed.

  “Then I guess we have a standoff,” replied the spokesman with resignation. He swung down out of the saddle and, seeing only the outline of him in the darkness, Sam was struck, once again, by a frustrating sense of familiarity.

  The man bent over one of the bodies, and Sam heard the tearing of cloth.

  “We got more dynamite, boss,” one of the men in back said. “We could blast them out of there.” Rex or Landry Donagher for sure, Sam thought, though he couldn’t have said which one.

  “Shut up, you damned idiot,” answered the boss man. In the moonlight, Sam saw him tie a bit of bloody cloth to the stick they’d used to roast the rabbit, and jam it into the ground. After that, he took to picking up driftwood from the bank.

  Sam had considered the possibility that the outlaws might have more explosives, but it didn’t worry him. Sure, they could blow up the car easily enough, and scatter Sam’s and Vierra’s body parts from here to kingdom come, but the contents of the strongbox would go up with them and rain down in that river like salt. They’d play hell gathering it all up if that happened, and the gold, after all, was the whole point of the enterprise.

  “We buried your brother the other day,” Sam called to Rex and Landry, hoping to get a rise out of either of them. “Your old man is in jail for it. Came into town with Garrett’s blood and brains splattered all over his clothes, Mungo did, and admitted to the whole thing.”

  A thrumming silence ensued and Sam knew he’d struck a chord. Waited.

  One man stepped out from behind his rock. “You’re lyin’,” he accused.

  Dead-center, Sam thought.

  The leader paused in his firewood-gathering to curse.

  “It’s the God’s truth,” Sam pressed. “According to Mungo, he caught Garrett with Undine, put a pistol to the back of his head and pulled the trigger. I saw the body myself.”

  The man who’d spoken seemed to cave in on himself. Even in the gloom, Sam saw how his shoulders slumped and his fists slackened at his sides. “That can’t be,” he said.

  “Shut your trap, Landry!” Rex, no doubt. It was a confirmation of sorts, and satisfying for that reason, though Sam couldn’t see where it made much difference in the moment. He’d suspected all along that the D
onaghers were involved in the spree of robberies and murders plaguing citizens on both sides of the border, and he and Vierra were sweating in an upended railroad car with limited ammunition, no food and no water. Sam wasn’t about to drink from that river.

  The leader whirled on his men in a rage. “If either of you says another word, I’ll shoot you myself!”

  Landry moved to take shelter behind his rock again, then found some new resolve among his undoubtedly meager inner resources and stepped forward instead. Went right past the boss and waded into the water. “Give us that goddamned gold!” he shouted.

  Vierra’s response was Anglo-Saxon in origin.

  Landry, having left his rifle behind, reached for his pistol, drew and fired. The bullet pinged off the side of the railroad car and Vierra shot him in the right foot for an answer.

  Donagher bellowed with pain and affronted rage, and would probably have emptied his pistol on Sam and Vierra if the leader hadn’t reached out and slammed down his gun hand.

  Landry cursed and limped, bleeding, back to his hidey-hole.

  “Nice shot,” Sam told Vierra. “Stupid, though.”

  Vierra chuckled grimly, lowering his gun to his side. “The patrons said they wanted these sidewinders alive. They didn’t specify that they couldn’t be crippled in the process.”

  There had been a shift on the riverbank. The boss squatted to build a fire on the spot where the first one had been, and the other three must have been busy with Landry Donagher’s wounded foot. Sam braced a shoulder against the wall of the railroad car and relaxed a little, though he was still watchful. He and Vierra had another vulnerability—their horses, and while the idiot trinity back of those rocks probably hadn’t thought of it, he was sure the boss man had. He was just biding his time, that was all; knew it was on his side.

  “What do you plan to do with your reward?” Sam asked idly without glancing at Vierra. “Provided you manage to get the drop on me and take in all four of those outlaws, that is.”

  “There is a woman,” Vierra answered, surprising Sam by his direct response. “Her name is Pilar Montoya. I want to marry her, and she wants the same, but her papa—well, he is of a slightly different opinion. He prefers a man of means for his Pilar, and I, at present, do not qualify.”