A figure appeared in the doorway—a big man in a black opera hat and rose-colored glasses. He had a thick cinnamon beard, and he wore a long hair-on-horsehide coat over soiled fringed buckskins. A fat stogie poked out one corner of his mouth. Around his neck he wore a pouch—either a medicine pouch or a tobacco sack. As he stared at Yakima, the half-breed pulled his hand back into the bars and straightened slowly, holding the man’s gaze—or what he thought was his gaze, because he couldn’t see the man’s eyes through the rose-colored spectacles.
From descriptions he’d heard, however, he knew he was looking at Claw Hendricks. The recognition was like an additional cold stone dropping into place in his belly beside the first one.
What in hell was Claw Hendricks, an outlaw leader as notorious as Wyoming Joe Two Wolves, doing this far east?
He’d thought the man restricted his gang to regions farther west and north, in the no-man’s-land around the Wind River Mountains, where he hid out from the army and the U.S. marshals.
As Hendricks stepped inside slowly, dipping his chin to look at Neumiller grunting and groaning and breathing hard on the jailhouse floor, another man walked in behind Hendricks. This was an older, gray-haired man with a paunch pushing out a gray wool vest. He wore striped wool trousers and a quilted elk-hide mackinaw over the vest and work shirt, the heavy coat unbuttoned. A red scarf encircled his neck. He had two pistols positioned for the cross draw on his hips, behind the flaps of his open coat. Two bowie knives rode in leather sheaths across his chest.
When he looked at Yakima, his eyes were flat and colorless. His broad face was pasty pale and framed by roached gray muttonchops. He filled the room with a sickly sweet body odor.
Hendricks said nothing as he stepped over Neumiller’s feet. He removed his opera hat to brush broken glass off Neumiller’s swivel chair, and then he donned the hat again, positioning it carefully, and sagged into the chair, which squawked and groaned beneath his weight. He turned to face the room.
The second, older gent walked into the room and stared down at Neumiller while a third person stepped into the doorway behind him. This was a young, coyote-faced blond man wearing a long wolf-fur coat, the hem of which dangled around his high-topped black boots. There was a wildness about the kid—in his tangled blond hair, in his quick blue eyes and the way he cocked one foot forward and, glancing at Yakima, drew the wolf coat back behind a Schofield pistol positioned for the cross draw on his left hip, behind a sheathed ivory-gripped Green River knife.
Between his thin pink lips, a corn-husk cigarette jutted, and he squinted his blue eyes as he took in the room through the smoke wafting around his head.
“There he is,” the kid said, looking around the older man at Neumiller. “Look at him—looks like a landed fish!” He laughed, showing small brown teeth between his lips from which the quirley bobbed and smoldered. He drew on it, showing a missing eyetooth, and let the smoke dribble out his nostrils.
“Where’s the county’s fearless prosecutor, Neumiller?” he asked, hardening his voice and scowling down at the sheriff.
The old man said, “Shut up, Sonny!” Then he stared down at Neumiller writhing before him, and said, “Where’s Mendenhour? We done checked the hotel, and he ain’t in his room there and we couldn’t get nothin’ out of Humphries. When he seen us walk in, he pissed down his leg and passed out behind his desk.”
The old man’s nostrils flared disdainfully.
The old man dropped to one knee and grabbed Neumiller by his coat lapels and raised his head brusquely up off the floor. “Where is he, Sheriff? Where’s Mendenhour? I wanna see the man who convinced the judge to hang my boy! Now, where is he, goddamn your mangy, rotten hide?”
Yakima stared down in shock at the old man. He let his eyes flick across the almost feminine-looking young man, feral as a wolf pup, then over to Claw Hendricks sitting back in the sheriff’s chair and grinning maliciously behind those rose-colored glasses. Yakima vaguely wondered, as he felt the sand quickly pouring through his hourglass—certainly they wouldn’t leave a witness alive—how Neumiller and Mendenhour had gotten themselves in such a whipsaw.
And how was it that Yakima had gotten himself situated right at the top of the blade?
Chapter 10
“Go to hell, Betajack!” Neumiller raked out, then spat in the old man’s face. He added just loudly enough for Yakima to hear, “Your boy’s waitin’ for you. . . .”
Claw Hendricks threw his head back and laughed, rose-colored spectacles flashing in the light from the broken window over the sheriff’s rolltop desk. The old man smashed the back of his hand against the sheriff’s face, then hauled one of his knives out and poked the upturned tip into the wound oozing blood from Neumiller’s chest.
Neumiller scrunched his face up and howled. A girl had been screaming on the far side of the street while an older woman wailed, and the sheriff’s agonized cry drowned the girl’s screams for a good ten seconds. Old Betajack scowled down at Neumiller as he turned the knife handle this way and that, screwing the tip into the wound. He pulled out the dripping knife tip and held the blade up in front of Neumiller’s face.
“Tell me where the prosecutor is. I know he didn’t go back to his ranch, ’cause we was watchin’ the road. Where’d he go, Neumiller? You tell me, we’ll let you live. You don’t tell me in the next ten seconds, you’re gonna go out howlin’ like a gut-shot lobo!”
The coyote-like kid called Sonny hooted and laughed as he puffed his cigarette.
Neumiller grunted and panted, squeezing his eyes shut as though to clear them. Blood dribbled down over his right arm to puddle thickly on the floor beneath his writhing frame. “Go to hell, you old—!”
He screamed as Betajack shoved the tip into the wound again, scrunching his own face up, eyes flashing wolfishly as he ground the knife a good couple of inches into the tender open wound. Again, Neumiller’s howls drowned out the girl’s squeals sounding from the far side of the street.
Yakima stood behind the closed door of his cell, staring at the grisly happenings, though his green-eyed face betrayed no emotion whatever. He’d seen too much in his thirty-some years for this post-bloodbath torture to bother him overmuch. His only concern was for himself and the gold that caused one of his saddlebag pouches to bulge on the floor not five feet beyond Neumiller’s kicking legs but which none of the killers had apparently seen yet.
He wasn’t sure why he was thinking about the gold, because he’d already decided quite calmly that he’d come to the end of his trail. All he could really hope for was a faster end than the one Neumiller was currently experiencing.
“Stage!” the sheriff screamed so shrilly that Yakima didn’t understand him at first. “He’s . . . he’s on the stage!” The man was panting, sweat glistening on his face, sopping his mustache.
The coyote-like boy with a strangely feminine face laughed in the office’s open door, one hip cocked as he leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed on his chest, smoking. He seemed to enjoy the grisly display to no end.
“What stage?” he called.
“Shut up, Sonny!” the old man said without looking at him. Staring down at Neumiller, keeping his knifepoint ground into the man’s bullet wound, he said, “What stage, Neumiller?”
Out the window behind Claw Hendricks, Yakima could see several men with rifles milling around. A couple were looking in the windows.
Neumiller screamed, panted, kicking his boots loudly against the floor, and said through a long, harrowing squeal, “Belle Foooooooosh, you son . . . son . . . son of a bitchhhhhh!”
“Belle Foooosh!” mocked Claw Hendricks, lifting his chin and howling the town’s name. “Belle Foosh! Belle Foosh! You got it, Floyd!”
Sonny clapped his gloved hands in the doorway. “Good goin’, Pa! Must be the stage we seen pull out just a few minutes ago!”
“Yep.�
� Betajack wiped the blood off his bowie knife on Neumiller’s wool coat, sheathed the knife under his left arm, and planted both his hands on a knee to hoist himself to his feet. “Must be the one, sure ’nough.”
Yakima was not surprised when the man pulled out one of his pistols and shot Neumiller in the head. The half-breed didn’t even blink. He merely stepped back away from the door and sat down on the creaky wooden cot to calmly await his fate. He looked at the saddlebags. He felt no particular emotion at the prospect of Betajack and his wild boy, Sonny, and Claw Hendricks running off with the gold. Maybe a touch of disappointment at his not being able to accomplish what he’d set out to do. But there was no emotion involved other than having to leave Wolf behind.
He’d die now, and that would be the end of it.
“Come on, Pa!” Sonny said, beckoning to the old man who stared down in satisfaction at Neumiller as he holstered his hog leg. “Looks like the boys is headed on over to the Silk Slipper. I’ll race ya there!”
Yakima could see a vague family resemblance in Betajack and the boy. They both looked hard and wild, as if they lived in a den and only came out to hunt.
Betajack turned around without so much as another glance at Yakima and followed his fidgety blond son out of the sheriff’s office and into the street. Claw Hendricks stared at Yakima, who sat on his cot with his elbows on his knees, stoic-faced.
“Well, well, mister.” Hendricks pushed himself out of the chair and hooked his thumbs behind his cartridge belt. “What you in for?”
Yakima said, “I’m told I stole from my ranching partner and raped a white girl.”
“You don’t say!”
Hendricks moved to stand only a few inches from the cell door. “Good on ya, old son!” He laughed. And then, to Yakima’s jaw-dropping surprise, the outlaw leader stepped over the still, bloody form of Dave Neumiller and went out. The half-breed thought the big killer had glanced down at the saddlebags, but he hadn’t done any more than that before he’d walked on out of the sheriff’s office and into the street, where it appeared that his and Betajack’s men were drifting off toward the whorehouse, in no hurry to get after the stage, it appeared.
The stage and the prosecutor, apparently, could wait. They could enjoy themselves for an hour or two and still have no problem running the Concord down.
Yakima straightened, slow to comprehend that he was still alive. Damn, it felt good!
He glanced down at the sheriff staring at the ceiling through half-closed lids. “Sorry, Neumiller.” He half meant it.
Quickly, he went to work stripping the single, moth-eaten army blanket off the cot and using it to snag the key ring and drag it over to the door. A few seconds later, he holstered his Colt, draped his saddlebags over his shoulder, and walked out of the jailhouse, drawing a deep draft of steely-cool air into his lungs and not minding the stench of horse shit and privies. All three deputies lay around him.
So did Lewis, who must have taken a bullet soon after the first deputy had gone down.
Lewis was still alive, piled up in front of the boardwalk fronting the jailhouse, clutching his wounded upper right leg and breathing hard, wheezing. He was facing away from Yakima as he said, “Help . . . help me, gall blast it . . . will you, buddy?” Then he turned his head toward Yakima, and a stricken look fell over his wizened, hawkish features, angular jaws clad in a few scattered, dirt-colored bristles.
Yakima walked over to him, stared down. Lewis sort of cowered, like a dog about to be whipped, but then Yakima continued on past him and walked up the street to Bart English’s Livery & Feed Barn. Bart stood behind one of his thrown-open doors, staring around it and down the main street in the direction the cutthroats had disappeared.
“You got my horse shod?” Yakima asked him.
English shuttled his stricken eyes to the half-breed. His big face was nearly as pale as Lewis’s. “They gone?”
“Took their business over to the Silk Slipper.”
Yakima looked up and down the street once more. CLOSED signs hung in most of the doors, and curtains were drawn across windows. The good citizens of Wolfville were staying indoors until the cutthroat storm had passed. He couldn’t blame them. They were a bad lot.
He looked again at English. “Well?”
The big liveryman/blacksmith scowled. “Well what?”
“What about the black?”
“What about him? In case you didn’t notice, this town was just raided, a girl raped over yonder at the Drug Emporium, and every star packer shot to shit!”
“I noticed.”
“And now who knows what kinda trouble they’re causin’ over to the Silk Slipper?”
“I got an idea.”
“And you’re worried about your horse?”
“I’m burnin’ daylight here.”
“Well, ain’t that convenient!”
“You got that part right.”
Yakima brushed past English as he walked into the blacksmith part of his shop, the forge and anvil and corrugated tin water barrel occupying a lean-to side shed. He dropped his saddlebags against the wall near the water barrel. “Now get to it, Bart. I got a trail to fog.”
Yakima removed his buckskin mackinaw and his hat and rolled up his shirtsleeves. He dunked his head in the water barrel, the water smelling like hot iron but refreshing and cleansing just the same. When he pulled his head up, shaking the water from his long coal black hair, English was still looking warily around his open barn door, his bulky body tense, as though he expected the gang to head this way and do to him what they’d done to the star packers.
Yakima sighed.
He donned his hat, then went over and used a tongs to pull down a raw horseshoe from a nail hanging from a ceiling beam and commenced to shaping his own shoe, pumping the bellows methodically as he did. The work was no problem. He’d forged many of Wolf’s shoes himself using far less than English’s shop had to offer.
When he’d finished hammering the glowing shoe on the anvil—he knew the shape of Wolf’s hooves as well as he knew his own hands—he dunked the iron in the water barrel, making it hiss, then took it and a hammer and four nails over to where Wolf stood in the barn’s shadows, tied to the wheel of a parked buggy.
“What the hell are you doin’?” English said, just now looking at him, his lower jaw hanging.
“What’s it look like?”
Yakima led Wolf out into the light near where English still stood, looking dazed, and commenced hammering the shoe to the black’s right front hoof. “Since when did Claw Hendricks start ridin’ this far east?” he asked English.
“Since today, I reckon.”
“Why’s he ridin’ with old Betajack?”
“Who the hell knows? Maybe they both had the same beef with Neumiller.” English turned to direct his gaze down the street again as Yakima continued hammering nails through the shoe. “The sheriff hanged Preston Betajack just yesterday. Last night, somebody—Betajack, I figure—hanged one of Neumiller’s deputies. The prosecutor’s wife was the one who found him.”
Yakima looked up from his work. “Prosecutor’s wife?”
“Yeah, Mrs. Mendenhour.”
Yakima considered that a moment while holding Wolf’s hoof between his knees. Then he looked at English’s broad back once more. “She the woman I saw in the stage earlier, when they was just pullin’ out?”
“If she was just about the purtiest creature you ever laid eyes on,” English said, “then it was her, all right.”
“And they’re after her husband,” Yakima said, half to himself.
“I’m sure they are.” English shook his head darkly. “What those men do when they run down that stage is anyone’s guess.” He looked at Yakima, narrowing one bushy-browed eye. “But I don’t have to guess what they’ll do to the man’s purty wife.”
&
nbsp; Yakima felt that stone drop in his belly again. Inwardly, he cursed. He cursed the killers and the sheriff and the prosecutor and even the prosecutor’s wife. He cursed them all for the fix they were in. Most of all he cursed himself for being here in the middle of it.
And for not mounting up and taking the gold and riding south to Texas. Maybe Mexico. All the gold he was carrying would take him a long ways, for many years, in Old Mexico.
The good feeling he’d felt only a few minutes ago was gone.
When he’d finished hammering the shoe onto Wolf’s hoof, he tossed the hammer to English, slung the saddlebags over Wolf’s back, and stepped into the leather. He stiffened when he saw Lewis still writhing on the ground in front of the sheriff’s office. The double-crossing rancher was the only living person on the street. All the rest of the town appeared to still be cowering behind closed doors and shuttered windows.
Yakima looked at English and said tightly, “Find Shackleford’s horse. Get him on it and slap him home!”
Then he rammed his moccasin heels against Wolf’s flanks and loped along the street, taking the left tine at the edge of town and following after the stage toward the northeast.
Chapter 11
She’d ridden her sleek palomino, Taos, through the notch in the rocky bluffs and come up through the aspens to see him working in the corral of the old line shack.
He was repairing the corral, with several slender logs lying around him and the white-socked, coal black stallion standing nearby, always close at hand. The two seemed part of each other. He’d taken his shirt off because of the heat; it hung over a corral slat. One log rested across two sawhorses on the corral’s left side, away from the cabin. A tendril of white smoke rose from the cabin’s chimney, unspooling amongst the pines jutting around the scarp to the right of the shack.
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