Dead Man's Trail (9781101606957)

by Leslie, Frank

  He touched heels to Wolf’s flanks and put the stallion up and over the hill and down the other side, heading for the stage trail. He wasn’t thinking about the woman—about how she’d smelled and how she’d smiled and how the light from the line shack fire had glowed in her chestnut hair.

  He wasn’t thinking about her at all.

  * * *

  “Here they come,” said Claw Hendricks, looking across the dry wash as he held a steaming coffee cup between his large gloved hands. He wore a ring on his right middle finger, over the glove. It was a symbol of success and prosperity, and after the meagerness he’d come from, he saw no reason why he shouldn’t show off a little.

  Floyd Betajack thought it looked prissy, but he’d said nothing about it and he said nothing now as he looked over the flames of their coffee fire to the rise of land beyond the wash. Sure enough, the gang composed of his own six men and six of Hendricks’s men from his hideout in the Mummy Range was galloping toward him.

  “Uh-oh,” said his younger and sole remaining son, Sonny, rising. “I don’t see Mendenhour amongst ’em, unless that’s him ridin’ with Albert, but that don’t look like the man I seen in Wolfville that time.” He glanced at Hendricks and threw his shoulders back, trying to look tough. “Him an’ Neumiller braced me, tried to run me out of town, but I told ’em to eat rat shit and I was a citizen with rights, and I was no dog to poke with a stick.” He snickered, chew dribbling down his thin lower lip. “They let the matter lie.”

  “They did, did they?” said Hendricks.

  “Sure enough, Claw,” Sonny said, flaring his nostrils. “Don’t you believe me?”

  “Oh, I’m sure they took one look at you and knew they had the tiger by the tail,” Hendricks said.

  Sonny glowered at him, fair cheeks flushing with anger.

  “That’s enough,” Betajack said, feeling the burn of his customary anger as he tossed the dregs of his coffee on the fire and grabbed his Henry repeater. “I told you to lay off Sonny. He can’t help it he’s full of shit.”

  Hendricks snorted. Sonny turned his wrathful gaze on his father but held his tongue. He knew better than to respond to his father’s bile, and the old man was full of bile now in the wake of Pres’s murder.

  Betajack moved around the fire to get a better look at the dozen riders riding toward the temporary bivouac. They were fanned out left to right for fifty yards.

  “What’d you bring him along for, then?”

  “Because I go wherever Pa goes!” Sonny said defiantly, his voice acquiring a harsh rake, yellow javelins firing from his girlish eyes. His fierce temper had an almost feminine haughtiness to it. “I ain’t no wet-behind-the-ears shaver who stays home to tend the chickens while Pa an’ Pres go off raisin’ hell! Hell, I’m a killer!”

  Hendricks just stared at the bizarre man-child, not saying anything to rile Betajack further.

  Betajack himself said distractedly, “That’s enough, boy.”

  He shouldered his rifle and walked across the dry wash—a big man with cold gray-blue eyes and a clean-shaven face set harshly between thick tufts of roached muttonchop whiskers. He was middle-aged now and gone to tallow, though with a muscular strength beneath the fat. But he’d been a demon for the Confederates during the War of Northern Aggression. Men who knew his reputation for Rebel savagery, and that included most of Claw Hendricks’s men, sort of saw Betajack as a hero. Hendricks saw him as a mentor. If anything in the years since the war, Betajack had gotten meaner and more rebellious against authority.

  Especially Yankee authority, which meant government authority. Which meant any kind of civilization, truth be known.

  That’s why he and his boys and his outlaw gang had thrown in with Claw Hendricks when Hendricks had started branching out from Boulder and Jamestown in the Colorado Territory, and moving their sundry nefarious doings up into Wyoming, where new mines were opening up in the Wind River and Big Horn ranges, and in the Buckskin Buttes. The riders reined to a halt in a long line in front of Betajack, Sonny, and Claw Hendricks, who was walking up behind the old rebel cutthroat and his strange, girlish son.

  “I see you’re missing a few men,” Betajack said, his disapproval rumbling up from deep in his chest.

  “What the hell happened?” asked Hendricks.

  “You ain’t gonna believe it, Mr. Betajack,” said Albert Delmonte, Betajack’s first lieutenant, who sat his paint horse in front of the old Rebel outlaw, an injured rider astraddle the same horse behind him. “There was someone else there. Looked Injun. We didn’t see him till we’d started firing on the stage and he started firing on us behind cover.”

  “One man?” asked Sonny, incredulous.

  “At first we thought there was more, ’cause he was shootin’ so damn fast. But . . .”

  One of Hendricks’s men, a half-breed Ute named Lyle Two Moons, said in his deep, guttural voice, “A green-eyed warrior I’d seen before, hunting horses in the Mummy Mountains.”

  Hendricks shoved his rose-colored glasses up his nose with his beringed middle finger, then cocked his shaggy head as though to hear better. “You mean you let this green-eyed redskin get the better of you? One man?”

  Lyle Two Moons wore a heavy, short buffalo coat, a bullet-crowned black hat, and black-checked orange twill trousers with hide-patched knees. He held a Winchester carbine across his saddlebow, thumb rubbing nervously against the uncocked hammer. His chocolate eyes held Hendricks’s wry, indignant gaze.

  “He fights like five men,” Lyle said quietly.

  “Ah, hogswill!” Betajack steered the conversation back to the task at hand. “You didn’t get Mendenhour like you was supposed to. A simple job for twelve men. And you didn’t get him. Instead, you let one man deplete your numbers by . . . how many?” He lifted a finger, counting the number of riders before him. “Four?”

  “Four, boss,” said the rider crouched behind Albert Delmonte. “I’m still kickin’.” He hardened his jaw as he said over Albert’s left shoulder, his wavy, dirt-crusted brown hair hanging over his forehead, “My horse only kicked me, but I’m still game for a fight.”

  Sonny planted his small fists on his hips and ran his wild eyes from one end of the chagrined pack to the other. “Let me get this straight,” he said, wanting very much to be part of the conversation. “A whole passel of our men and Claw’s men were turned back by one man?”

  “Wait a minute,” Hendricks said, fingering the spade beard hanging six inches below his chin. “Did you say a green-eyed half-breed?”

  “That’s right,” Albert said, who looked a little Indian himself, though, being a nephew of Betajack, he owned the Scotch-Irish blood—and emotional disposition—of his uncle and cousin. “Green-eyed half-breed in buckskin pants and mackinaw. Black hat with a flat brim. You know him?”

  Hendricks’s broad face paled a little. He furrowed his brows above his rose-colored spectacles.

  Betajack turned to him. “The fella in the jailhouse with Neumiller fit that description.”

  Still, Hendricks said nothing. He turned to Betajack blandly, sucking his cheek pensively.

  “I figured you’d kill the son of a bitch,” Betajack said. “But come to think on it, I never did hear a pistol shot.”

  Hendricks said, a tad defensively, “I asked what he was in for, and he said he was a thief and a rapist of uppity white women. So I figured why kill him? Hell, I would have given him a cigar if I’d had one.”

  “A real upstandin’ citizen,” said Sonny snidely.

  “You’re one to talk,” Hendricks said, pitching his voice low with menace.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “I seen you over at the Silk Slipper.” Hendricks gave a foxy grin.

  Sonny wrapped his hand around one of his six-shooters and opened his mouth and squinted his eyes for a typically blasphemous retort, bu
t his father closed his own hand around the firebrand’s wrist, shoving the pistol back down in the leather. “That’s enough! Let it go. Remember, boy, we threw in with this man because we didn’t have enough of our own.” He looked at Hendricks. “I reckon we gotta allow a few missteps . . . since we got Pres to think of.”

  “We’ll get him,” Hendricks said, turning away to cover his embarrassment. “Don’t worry. The half-breed’s as good as dead. His ears and his scalp will be dangling from my neck by sundown tomorrow. I’ll do it myself this time”—he glanced over his shoulder at his seven surviving riders, Betajack having five—“since I obviously ain’t got the breed of men I thought I had! Only the kind that’s a goddamn embarrassment.”

  His pack of tough-jawed, bewhiskered white men, half-breeds, and one black man, whose name was Soot Early, merely looked off, too proud to show any more than the most subtle signs of incredulity.

  Hendricks angrily kicked dirt on the coffee fire, giving the coffeepot a good kick as he did.

  Betajack turned to the man, Delvin Torrance, riding behind Sonny. “Torrance, how bad you hurt?”

  “Horse kicked me in the head.” Torrance grinned. “Woulda hurt me worse if he’d stepped on my foot.”

  “Since you don’t have a horse, I should shoot you now.” Betajack narrowed his pewter eyes at the man who sat behind Albert Delmonte without a hat, blood dribbling from the large, blue lump rising on his right temple. “Under most circumstances, that’s exactly what I’d do. Because that’s the price of bein’ a damn fool.”

  Sonny snickered.

  Betajack ignored him, continuing with “But since we obviously need all the guns we can get, you’ll have to switch off ridin’ double until we can find you another horse.”

  “Yessir, Mr. Betajack,” Torrance said, holding the old Rebel’s gaze with a determined one of his own. “Yes, sir, that’s not a problem. I’ll secure one at the next stage relay station. Not a problem.”

  “All right, we’re done mucking around here chewin’ leather,” Betajack said, walking back to where his steeldust stallion milled with Hendricks’s and Sonny’s mounts, on the other side of the wash. “Let’s get a move on. I got a county prosecutor to kill, goddamn it!”

  He mounted up and galloped off, whipping his horse savagely with his rein ends. Glancing back over his shoulder and grinning wolfishly, he said, “After Claw cuts off that half-breed’s ears, that is!”

  He laughed as he rode away.

  Sonny shrugged and shook his head as he swung up onto the back of his coyote dun. “Preston was a sad price to pay for it, but I do believe the old coot’s feelin’ pecker-high in yellow clover again!”

  Chapter 13

  Yakima saw the stage climbing a hill ahead of him. He galloped Wolf on up to it and passed it on the driver’s side. The driver and shotgun messenger had spied him a ways back, and they eyed him suspiciously, the old driver narrowing one eye beneath a grizzled gray brow.

  “Who the hell are you, man?”

  Yakima knew who the driver and messenger were, because he kept his eyes and ears open, but they wouldn’t know him. Being a half-breed, he was invisible to most whites—and that wasn’t always a bad thing.

  “It ain’t me you need to worry about, Adlard,” Yakima said as he put Wolf on past the stage and the team leaning hard into their collars as they continued up the hill. “It’s them boys who hoorawed you.”

  “Who were they?” called the shotgun messenger, who was a good fifteen, twenty years younger than the driver. His name, if Yakima remembered, was Mel Coble.

  Yakima was beyond the team now. “Best talk to the prosecutor about that, Coble!”

  Then he continued up and over the hill. Another mile farther on, he rode into the yard of the Eagle Butte Relay Station. An old man in a black wool coat, deerskin mittens, and earmuffs was leaning against a corral post, smoking a cigarette. He squinted at Yakima as the half-breed rode past him and turned his horse toward the corral’s gate, where a tall young man in woolly chaps stood with a pitchfork, eyeing the big half-breed with the same suspicion the older gent had.

  Yakima dismounted the black and tossed the boy the reins. “Tend him for me, will you? I’ll be pullin’ out with the stage.”

  The kid’s lips barely moved as he said, “Who’re you?”

  “Me?” He shrugged. “I’m Yakima Henry.”

  The half-breed strode over to the low-slung, brush-roofed cabin and went on inside. He was sitting at a table in the rear shadows, eating beans, eggs, and ham from a large wooden bowl, when the stage came jouncing into the yard behind the weary team. The driver brought the coach right up to the cabin, and Yakima watched out the window right of the door, the thinly scraped deer hide stretched over the window frame giving a distorted view of the yard, as the driver and the shotgun messenger guided a redheaded, middle-aged woman in a blanket coat out of the coach. She was slumped forward, the front of her coat bloody. One on each side, they led her up the steps and then through the screen door and the winter door.

  The woman who ran the place, a stocky, dark woman in a shapeless wool skirt over which she wore a ragged bobcat-skin cape, her salt-and-pepper hair in a tight bun atop her head, came out from around the bar. Her black eyes danced. “Good Lord—were you robbed?” She had a slight accent that Yakima thought was French.

  “Nope, we wasn’t robbed,” said the old driver. “Mrs. O’Reilly took a bullet, though, Yvette. She thinks it went all the way through. Can you sew her up?”

  “Bring her on back!” called Yvette, hurrying on ahead of the two men and the woman, who was wincing and breathing hard but otherwise holding up well.

  Yakima lowered his eyes when the man he took to be the prosecutor, Mendenhour, wearing a beaver hat and a long, elegant-looking coat of elk hide trimmed with rabbit fur and black leather gloves, followed his wife into the cabin. It was relatively dark in the cabin, and neither saw Yakima right away.

  He looked them both over carefully, and then his eyes held on hers, which had found him back in the shadows. They stared at each other for several seconds, her expression for the most part indecipherable, as he assumed his was, before he lowered his eyes to his bowl once more and continued eating hungrily.

  “Lee,” he heard her say, noting the familiarity of her voice—the voice of a woman he’d never expected to see again after that third and final meeting in the line shack. “I’m going to go back and help with Lori.”

  “All right, Glen,” the woman’s husband said, “but stay close.”

  She removed her gloves and took them in one hand as she strode around the tables, passing Yakima without looking at him, and continued to the rear of the room and through a blanketed doorway in the back wall, beneath an impressive set of deer antlers. He couldn’t help turning his head to watch her, noting the familiar smell of her on the breeze she’d made when she’d passed him.

  As the other stage passengers—another couple, an old man in a watch hat and with a gray bib beard, and two middle-aged men who looked like drummers in felt bowler hats, cheap suits, and age-worn wool coats—came into the station and gravitated toward the potbellied stove, the prosecutor continued standing in front of the door. He stared at Yakima almost suspiciously. For a moment, the half-breed considered whether she’d confessed her sins to him. The man slowly removed his gloves and then his heavy scarf as he walked slowly, arrogantly toward Yakima’s table, and for a few seconds Yakima wondered if he’d have to shoot the man himself.

  Mendenhour stopped a few feet away, staring down as Yakima continued forking food into his mouth, the half-breed’s sun-bleached black hat on the table beyond his plate and coffee cup. His rifle lay there, as well. His saddlebags were slung over the back of the chair to Yakima’s right.

  “Who are you?” the prosecutor asked, an officious tone in his voice.

  Yakima stared up a
t him. He was tall and handsome. A moneyed man. Yakima wasn’t surprised that she would have chosen one like the young attorney, though he couldn’t help wondering now why she’d also chosen him, Yakima—at least for a little nasty fun in the line shack. He’d never thought of it before, but maybe she was a harlot. She hadn’t looked or acted like a harlot, but he’d seen enough in his life to know he hadn’t seen it all.

  He knew the assessment wasn’t fair, and that it was evoked by natural male, petty jealousy, but there it was.

  “I asked you a question,” Mendenhour said, lightly wrapping the knuckles of his pale white hand on Yakima’s table.

  Yakima swallowed a bite of food and followed the man’s slender arm up to his handsome face. “I was in the jail in Wolfville when Betajack’s men rode in and shot hell out of your lawmen.”

  The prosecutor’s thin auburn blows furrowed slightly as he continued staring at Yakima, his brown eyes dubious.

  “Betajack’s and Claw Hendricks’s men,” Yakima added. “After that, I didn’t see a good reason to hang around. ’Specially since I got business up north.” He forked another bite of food into his mouth and continued to hold the glowering stare of the prosecutor, who was resting the tips of his knuckles on Yakima’s table.

  “Good . . . God . . . ,” Mendenhour said finally, when Yakima thought he was incapable of saying anything more at all. “Betajack and . . . ?”

  “Hendricks, yep. Got her right. You poked your snoot in the wrong henhouse, amigo.”

  “That isn’t for you to judge,” the man said tightly.

  Yakima shrugged.

  “They’re all . . . dead?”

  Yakima nodded. “Bushwhacked.”

  Looking stricken, the prosecutor slumped into a chair across from Yakima. As Yvette came out of the back room, she said, “I’ll bring you all some food and coffee, folks. Looks like you’ll be here an hour or so . . . on account of Mrs. O’Reilly. She’ll be okay, though. The bullet just creased her!”