Dead Man's Trail (9781101606957)

by Leslie, Frank

  “Good! Good!” Mendenhour rubbed his gloved hands together and looked around nervously at the passengers and Yakima, and then said, more quietly as he crouched over the lawmen’s and the soldier’s table, “Do you men think we could have a word outside? We’ve encountered trouble along the trail, and . . .”

  That was all that Yakima heard. Or all that he listened to. Mendenhour was about to request help, and Yakima felt a mild relief tempered by his knowing how many wolves were on the prosecutor’s trail, as well as the breed of wolves. More important to him just now was his horse. He turned, ran into someone standing behind him, and looked down to see Glendolene stumbling back a step.

  “Whoa!” he said, grabbing her arm with his free hand.

  She looked up at him. “Sorry.”

  Unsteady from the long, jouncing ride, she now stepped too far forward and placed a hand on his chest, over his buckskin mackinaw to steady herself. He watched as a flush rose in her smooth, tapering cheeks, and her brown eyes sparkled in the light of a near lantern, beneath the brim of her fur hat. She looked at her hand on his chest, then lowered it and stepped back, but her lustrous eyes remained on his.

  Just loudly enough for him to hear above the rising hum of conversation reverberating around the room, she said, “Are we safe here, do you think . . . Mr. Henry?”

  “Glendolene,” the prosecutor said, turning to her as the two lawmen and the soldier gained their feet, wearing serious expressions now despite the drink-bleariness of their eyes. “Why don’t you and the other ladies inquire about the accommodations while I step outside for a moment?” He moved around Yakima and smiled down at his wife. “I think we’ve just been given an early Christmas present.”

  She glanced from her husband to Yakima, who stepped past her and outside. As he closed the door behind him, Adlard and Coble were moving up the porch steps while three hostlers from the station were leading the spent team toward the large barn on the north end of the yard. The barn’s doors were thrown open, showing light from a lantern inside. A small, crude log shack flanked the barn. Its windows, too, were lit. Likely where the hostlers who worked for the stage company were housed.

  Neither the driver nor the shotgun messenger said anything as they climbed heavily onto the porch. The driver said, “I sure could use a drink,” and walked past Yakima.

  Coble stopped in front of the half-breed. He was a couple of inches shorter. He stared up at him with his customary bulldog scowl.

  “Come on, Mel,” Adlard said wearily. “Get your ass in here and quit spoilin’ for a fight!”

  He was holding the door open. Someone from inside said, “Hey, close the damn door! You born in a barn?”

  The driver went in. Coble brushed stiffly past Yakima, like a dog with his hackles and tail raised, and followed Adlard into the station house.

  Yakima looked around. The stage still sat in front of the station house, where it would likely remain overnight, giving the passengers a short walk from the cabin. Nothing moved around or beyond it except for the hostlers just now leading the team into the barn, one man standing back ready to pull the doors closed.

  He walked into the yard and stood behind Wolf, staring out at the cool, breezy night in which a few snowflakes blew this way and that, and the windmill hummed. The tin cup continued to rap against the wash barrel.

  Yakima stared off across the dark hills to the west, feeling that eyes were on him. Snowflakes brushed his eyes. One stuck in his lashes. Behind him, the station house door opened. Voices spilled out, as did a rush of tobacco smoke and the fetor of beer and whiskey. Yakima glanced behind him to see Mendenhour step out with the two marshals and the major.

  As the other men stopped on the porch to converse, Yakima led Wolf over to the barn. He tended the horse slowly and thoroughly, giving him a good rubdown before putting him up in an empty stall with a blanket thrown over him, to leach the chill from his bones. The hostlers tending the stage horses talked amongst themselves, snorting and laughing in the way of men doing rote work.

  Yakima draped his saddlebags over his shoulder, picked up his Yellowboy, gave the black a parting pat, and left the barn, heading back to the station house. Mendenhour and the others had gone back in. Yakima went in now, too, and walked up to the bar. Earlier, he’d smelled food cooking, and he asked the broad-chested man—flat-faced and with long blond mustaches—behind the bar, if he could get a plate.

  The man planted his fists against the bar and squinted his suspicious, heavy-lidded eyes as he took the half-breed’s measure. “Can you pay for it?”

  Yakima ignored the angry burn behind his ears and blinked slowly. “I can pay.”

  “One dollar for steak and beans.”

  Yakima reached into his buckskins and flipped the man a silver dollar. The man inspected the coin, tossed it into a tin pail on a shelf behind him, and yelled through a door left of the cracked back bar mirror. “Another plate, Rosey!”

  Then he shuffled away to answer the call of a man standing to Yakima’s right.

  Yakima turned and headed for a free table on the room’s far side, noticing a couple of girls in corsets and bustiers working the room toward the stairs climbing to the second story and, presumably, the stage passengers’ sleeping quarters. There was a blonde and a brunette, and colored feathers danced in their hair as they made conversation with a couple of prospective jakes who looked like cowpunchers in their battered Stetsons and woolly chaps.

  Adlard and Coble sat at the table to the right of the one Yakima headed for. The driver was slumped back in his chair, enjoying a beer and a shot, while Coble was hunkered over his own beer and shot, eyeing Yakima devilishly. The man’s eyes drifted from the half-breed’s face to the saddlebags, then drifted away, and he brushed a hand nervously across the thin sandy-brown mustache mantling his chapped pink mouth.

  Yakima ignored the man, though he didn’t at all like the interest Coble had taken in his pouch, which the shotgunner had rightly assumed was filled with gold. That was a particularly vexing complication he didn’t need on top of the other more obvious one.

  He was trying to help this crew to safety, and one of them wanted to rob him.

  Again, a voice pitched with incredulity said in his mind, “What the hell are you doing here, fool? Get the gold to Belle Fourche and hightail it to warmer climes!”

  He sagged into a chair at his table, facing the room at large. He set his rifle on the table to his right, draped his saddlebags over a chair back to his left, and watched the lawyer walk toward him.

  “Ah, shit,” Yakima said, aloud to himself. “Now what?”

  Chapter 21

  Mendenhour looked considerably more confident than he had only a few minutes before. His eyes were shiny, as well. He’d been drinking with his U.S. marshal and cavalry pals, and he was teeming with vim and vinegar.

  It made Yakima’s shoulders contract with edginess.

  Mendenhour stood over Yakima in much the same way he’d done when Yakima had first met the man. His face with its close-cropped cinnamon beard was set with arrogance, and he set the beringed knuckles of his right hand lightly atop Yakima’s table, near the octagonal barrel of the Yellowboy.

  “Mr. Henry,” he said, “while I do appreciate your help with the trouble out on the trail, I’m afraid we’ll no longer be in need of your services.”

  “All right.”

  The prosecutor seemed surprised by the half-breed’s casual response.

  “You may ride on first thing in the morning,” Mendenhour added, as though to make sure the half-breed understood his meaning.

  “Fine as frog hair,” Yakima said as a portly older woman in a shapeless dress and blood- and grease-stained apron set a plate heaped with a bloody steak and smoking pinto beans on the table before him.

  He rolled up his shirtsleeves. Mendenhour remained standing over
him, staring down at him with faint consternation.

  “I just want you to know,” the man added, dipping his head lower and softening his voice so that no one around them could hear, “I’ve seen the way you’ve been regarding my wife, and I disapprove of it.”

  Yakima looked up at him. “Yeah, well, it’s hard not to look at a woman like that. Hard to not want her, in fact. But I do apologize for gettin’ your neck in a hump. Now, maybe you’d best go sit down with your pals over there, before you get in over your head here. Me? I’m hungry.”

  Yakima glanced at the table on the other side of the stove, where the two marshals and the soldier sat regarding him over their shoulders and talking amongst themselves. He pinched his hat brim to them and then took up his knife and his fork and cut into his steak.

  Mendenhour continued to hover over him, ever so slightly unsteady on his feet. Slurring his words just a little, he said, “Kelsey and Arenas say they’ve seen your face on wanted dodgers.”

  Yakima didn’t look up at the man. He’d figured he was wanted somewhere or another, after all the men he’d been forced to turn toe-down. Not many men with Indian blood could kill a white man, however much said white man needed killing, without finding himself wanted by the law.

  “Wouldn’t doubt it a bit,” Yakima said, chewing, lifting his head to cast Mendenhour an insolent grin. “Now, ’less you and your men want to push the matter, I suggest you wander on back to your table. Best get to bed soon. You’re going to need your beauty sleep, Mendenhour. Gettin’ help from them federals is all fine and good, but it ain’t gonna do you much good come tomorrow, when you’re out on the trail with the father of the man whose neck you stretched doggin’ your heels. Your heels and the heels of innocent folks who’ve found themselves in the regrettable position of sharing the same stage with you.”

  “Don’t talk to me in that tone, Mr. Henry.”

  “You know, Mendenhour, Betajack claims his son didn’t deserve that necktie party,” Yakima added, his temper burning as he continued talking and forking beans and meat into his mouth and staring gravely up at the arrogant man glowering down at him.

  Mendenhour’s gaze wavered for a split second. For that half second, doubt shone in his eyes—a weakness in the chinking of the prosecutor’s certainty that he had indeed hanged the right man. Yakima reflected that Mendenhour’s intentions had likely started out honorably enough, but he’d become corrupted by the same thing that corrupted most men. Power. By a totally dunderheaded sense of his own infallibility.

  “I have a feeling we’ll meet again, Henry,” Mendenhour said tightly. “Most likely in a court of law.”

  “We could at that.”

  Mendenhour moved back to his table and sat heavily down in his chair. Yakima continued shoveling his food into his mouth and trying to keep his mind off the man only to have another man piss-burn him nearly as much. It was Melvin Coble, chuckling as he held the brunette doxie on his lap to Yakima’s left and about ten feet away. The shotgunner held the girl’s back tight against his chest, and he was hefting her breasts in his hands, through her pink bone corset trimmed with black lace, and staring over her head at Yakima.

  “Guess you sorta been given the rail, ain’t ya, breed?”

  The girl regarded Yakima crookedly, feathers bouncing in her hair as Coble blew on them and then continued to laugh. Meanwhile, Adlard merely stared disgustedly down at his beer.

  Behind the jehu, the blond whore was pulling one of the two other men in the room up out of his chair. The man resembled a puncher, with his woolly chaps and fleece-lined denim jacket, but Yakima saw now that he was wearing two big pistols in tied-down holsters low on his leggings. When his jacket flapped open, Yakima caught a glimpse of yet a third pistol holstered under his right arm.

  That was a lot of weaponry for a cowpuncher, most of whom had little use for that many guns, and preferred to ride light in their saddles.

  Oh, well—Yakima had had enough. It was time to ride on out of here. He’d do so first thing in the morning. Glendolene had married the man. What could he do if Mendenhour was bound and determined to get her killed?

  Trying his best to ignore the jeering shotgunner, Yakima nudged his empty plate away, rose from his chair, slung his saddlebags over his shoulder, scooped his rifle off the table, and headed for the door.

  “Night, now, breed!” Coble called behind him. “Enjoy the barn!” Less loudly, he said to the whore, “Why, a man like that’s only fit to sleep with hosses. . . .”

  Then Yakima was outside, and the door was closed on the station house din. He walked heavily off the steps, the saddlebags with their heavy bag of gold bouncing against him. Snow was falling harder than before. A white dusting lay on the ground, tempering the night’s stormy darkness. The wind pelted the half-breed’s face with the cold flakes.

  From above and behind him rose a girl’s cackle. As he stepped out away from the station house, he glanced up to see a female shadow jostling with a man’s hatted one in a second-story window. A whorehouse and overnight station. He wondered how much sleep the stage passengers would get tonight.

  As for himself, he figured he’d sleep pretty well despite the edginess clawing its cold fingers up and down his back. Betajack and Hendricks might be close, but he wasn’t going to worry about them anymore. They were after Mendenhour. Let them have him. Now he began to see the ludicrousness of his ever getting involved with Mendenhour and the other passengers in the first place.

  All for a pretty woman he’d enjoyed a few good times with in a remote line shack. A married woman.

  Time to move on, Henry.

  He went into the barn. Using the soft snow light pushing through the open doors and the sashed windows, he lit an oil lantern hanging from a ceiling post. He closed the doors and was heading for Wolf’s stall, intending to throw down with his horse, as he usually did, but he saw a door off to the right of Wolf’s stall. It was a low, brittle wooden door with a steel latch and a scrap of cracked mirror hanging by a tattered length of twine from a nail on the outside.

  There was a small room behind the door—one with a cot and a small, cold, bullet-shaped stove and a long shelf running along the outside wall. There was a blanket and a lumpy straw pillow covered in stained ticking on the cot. A small milking stool and a saddle rack were the only furniture beyond the cot. The pent-up air in here was musty; it smelled like leather, wool, and mice shit. There was enough wood in the box beside the stove for a fire.

  Yakima decided to sleep on the cot, with the comfort of a fire. It was likely to be his last bed in a warm room for a few days, until he reached Belle Fourche. When he’d opened the stove’s flue and got a fire going, he threw his blanket roll onto the cot, kicked out of his boots, and stripped down to his balbriggans.

  He stretched deep, throwing his arms up as far as he could get them under the low, soot-crusted ceiling, and scratched his broad chest through the threadbare underwear top. He gave his head a vigorous scratching with both hands, then hung his shell belt and holstered .44 on a stout nail over the cot and dropped onto the makeshift bed with a weary groan. He drew his blanket up, turned onto his side, and drew a deep breath.

  He froze, the breath still in his lungs, and lifted his head to listen.

  He’d heard something. He heard it again—the crunch of a light foot coming down on straw. Through the cracks in the door’s vertical boards, a shadow moved. Yakima reached for the .44 but froze with his hand a foot away from the horn grips when a girl cleared her voice, and said, “Mr. Henry?”

  “Glendolene?”

  “Who?” the girl said with an amused chitter.

  Then he felt foolish. Of course it wasn’t her. He went ahead and slid the Colt out of its holster, rose from the cot, and walked over to the door. He’d turned his lamp down, but he’d left the stove’s small, dented door open, so there was enough umber light to s
ee the face that appeared in the gap when he opened the door a foot.

  The brunette from inside the station house stood before him, in a long wool coat that she held close at her throat. She still had the feathers in her hair. On her feet were fleece-lined, buckskin slippers.

  “I’m Angie.”

  “So?”

  She chuckled as though delighted by the response. “I thought you might like some company.”

  “What gave you that idea?”

  Her coquettish smile turned into a pout. “Don’t you want company? I’m very cheap. Business was slow tonight, so I’ll give you a roll for a dollar.” She shifted her weight from foot to foot, enticingly rolling her hips.

  “You would, would you?”

  “Sure.”

  “How ’bout fifty cents?”

  She nibbled her upper lip. “Well . . . okay.”

  Yakima threw the door open wider and stepped to one side. “Come in.”

  Smiling up at him alluringly, she sauntered through the doorway. Yakima drew the door closed.

  “If it’s all the same to you, I’d just as soon you’d put the hog leg up. That ain’t the . . . uh . . . instrument you’re gonna need for what I got in mind for you, Mr. Henry.”

  Yakima set the Colt on the shelf to his right. Standing before him, the girl opened the coat from which the buttons appeared to have been torn. She tossed it aside and stood before him in the pink corset that shoved her breasts up nicely. There was a small mole on the top of the right one. She wore a silk choker around her pale neck; it was trimmed with a small turquoise stone set in tin painted to pass for gold. She was a pretty girl for these parts.

  She kicked out of each slipper in turn. Then, staring up at him as though to mesmerize him, she began unlacing the front of the corset. It spilled away from her breasts and dropped to the floor. He watched her as she sat down on the edge of the cot and unsnapped her stockings from her garter belt and slid them down her legs.