Dead Man's Trail (9781101606957)

by Leslie, Frank

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “They still out here, you think?”

  “Yeah. You got a place to throw down tonight?”

  The kid jerked his head back and hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “Line shack just west of here. I already got my mavericks corralled over there.”

  “Best head back to ’em, then. The crew that killed these fellas are nasty sons o’ bucks, so take her easy and don’t stop for no one.”

  “All right, then.”

  Donny tossed Yakima the two sets of reins.

  “Sorry about your friends, mister. I hope you don’t end up the same.”

  “Yeah, me, too.” Yakima doubted that Donny had heard him above the thudding of the chestnut’s hooves, though he heard the kid’s raised voice when he called as a final, parting thought:

  “Merry Christmas!”

  * * *

  Later that night, on her cot in the rear sleeping quarters of the Hawk’s Bluff Overnight Station, Glendolene Mendenhour slid her hands inside the coarse wool blankets, inside her silk nightgown, and over the firm, warm mounds of her breasts. She cupped each orb gently, the way Yakima Henry had cupped them when he’d made love to her in the remote line shack far, far away from the odd stranger who was her husband.

  Far from the ranch and the whole rest of the world. . . .

  She ran her thumbs across her nipples, remembering him lying between her spread knees on that cot so similar to the one she lay on now. He’d thrust against her rhythmically, nuzzling and then caressing her breasts, softly kissing her forehead, her nose, cheeks, lips, ears. His mouth left a hot dampness wherever he pressed it against her.

  Her belly was filled with warm, sweetly churning, tingling nectar. Sheathed in the hot, tangy, leathery smell of him, feeling his calloused hands tenderly roaming across her body, instinctively knowing where to go to pleasure her so sweetly, she was ensconced by his muscular arms and powerful legs in a gradually building orgasmic fire.

  She’d breathed deeply, sighed, sobbed as she’d enjoyed the almost unbearably thrilling caress of his maleness sliding in and out of her, the ironlike yet yielding strength of his legs and arms and hips bouncing her lightly up and down, her bent knees and her feet lurching wildly with each exquisite, savage hammering.

  After a time, she gave an especially loud groan of sensual agony, swept the pillow out from beneath her, and pressed her head hard against the cot, turning her face to one side, squeezing her eyes closed, and biting her lower lip until it hurt.

  He stopped suddenly. She looked up at him. His eyes were dark, far away, jaw tight.

  He tensed his long, hard body, gritting his teeth, and then he began shuddering and bucking savagely against her, causing her to gasp and scream as he filled her to overflowing, until her own sweet honey boiled up out of her like a warm rain boiling over the banks of a spring arroyo.

  Here in the station house in Wyoming, beneath her palms, her nipples jutted hard as pebbles.

  Her own muffled scream of orgasm rose.

  “Glen, what is it?” Lee’s voice, so harsh and unexpected.

  She gasped, lifted her head with a start, realizing that one of her hands had drifted lower, that it had become his hand—Yakima’s hand—and that she hadn’t merely imagined that she’d screamed.

  “Just a dream,” she said. “Just a dream, Lee.” She was trying to quell her own raspy breaths raking in and out of her lungs. “I’m sorry if I woke you.”

  The cot to her right squawked, and she saw him rise to a sitting position and reach across the dark space between them. Automatically, she recoiled at the prospect of him touching her.

  “Glendolene, for chrissakes . . . !”

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, hearing the snores of another passenger—probably Weatherford—beyond the curtain partition to her left. “Just a little jittery, I guess.”

  Something moved in the darkness ahead of her cot. Ambient light from the room’s two windows winked on what looked like a gun barrel. Suddenly, the blanket curtain was pulled back and a figure lurched into the Mendenhours’ sleeping crib.

  “Quiet, both of you!” one of the drummers hissed, extending a revolver at Lee, whom Glendolene heard gasp as he jerked his head back, sitting propped on his outstretched arms. “One sound, and I’ll go ahead and drill a hole through Mendenhour’s head!”

  Glendolene’s heart hammered. For a few seconds she couldn’t catch her breath or wrap her mind around what was happening. The reek of moldy fur coats, sweat, and alcohol wafted against her. To her left, old Elijah’s snores faltered and then resumed their long, regular sawing. At the same time, the shorter, plumper drummer—the older man, Kearny—took another step until he was standing over the end of Lee’s cot. Another shadow moved, and then Glendolene saw the young drummer, the bespectacled Sook, step quickly into the crib behind Kearny and extend a pistol straight at Glendolene’s head.

  The whiskey stench grew stronger, burning her nostrils.

  She stifled a gasp, lurching back against the wall behind her, banging her head slightly, covering her mouth with her hand. “Oh, God!”

  “Shut up,” Sook rasped. “One peep out of you, Mrs. Mendenhour, and Mendenhour is gonna buy a bullet through his head. You got it?”

  Glendolene stared at the round, nickel-sized hole of the pistol barrel held level with her nose. She nodded.

  “What the hell are you two men up to?” the prosecutor whispered, his voice quavering with fear and exasperation.

  “All you gotta do is get up and throw your coat and your boots on. That’s it. One more word, and I’ll shoot you. Either of you yell for help, you’re liable to get someone else killed.”

  “It’s just easier this way, see?” said Sook. The gun he held on Glendolene shook in his clenched fist. “You just stay here and keep quiet as a church mouse, Mrs. Mendenhour. All right? Nod if you understand.”

  Glendolene hated the fear that paralyzed her. Sobbing into her hands she held cupped over her mouth, she nodded.

  “Christ!” Lee raked out, sliding his enraged gaze between the two men.

  Glendolene’s heart hammered and her hands shook as she watched Lee fling his covers back and drop his legs to the floor. Helpless and horrified, she sobbed silently into her hands as her husband dressed in jerky, angry, defiant movements. Sook held his gun on Glendolene, and Kearny held his on Lee until he’d thrown his long sheepskin coat on over his long underwear and pulled his boots on. He reached for his hat.

  “No need,” whispered Kearny, wagging his gun at the open doorway behind him. “Let’s go.”

  Lee glowered at the two men. He glanced at Glendolene. Kearny gave him a shove out the door. Glendolene sobbed louder into her hands. She wanted to call out for help from the others, but Kearny and Sook, being drunk and obviously feeling desperate, might shoot anyone who tried to stop them.

  Gradually, she got herself calmed down. She dropped her feet over the side of the cot and reached for her coat. She had to follow them. Whatever Lee might or might not have done, she had to do what she could to keep him from being thrown to the killers. She started through the opening in the blanket curtain, remembered something, and turned back.

  Lee’s pistol jutted from a holster hanging from a nail in the wall near his cot. Glendolene stared at it. She hadn’t fired a gun in years, but she grabbed it, hefted it in her hand, then lowered it to her side and walked out of the crib.

  * * *

  Sook opened the dark station house’s front door and gave the prosecutor a hard shove. Mendenhour stumbled over the threshold and out into the yard dusted with new snow. The wind bit him, blew the tails of his coat around his legs clad in only his long handles.

  As he got his feet back under him, he spun around, rage searing him, and said, “Goddamn you cowards to hell!”

  Kearny stepped
toward him and rammed the butt of his pistol against Mendenhour’s jaw. The prosecutor gave a cry, spun forward, and dropped to his hands and knees, raking the heels of his hands in the sand and gravel fronting the low-slung station house.

  Mendenhour groaned. Fear, desperation hammered him. He’d never known terror this intense, though he’d started to be aware of it when he’d seen Betajack, the man who most wanted to kill him, riding toward him under that white flag.

  And now he realized, to his own added horror, that what in the past had allowed him to act so bravely in the face of rampant crime had been knowing that he had his own father, Wild Bill himself, and Neumiller and other lawmen behind him. Now, out here in this vast, stormy land, he had no one, and the horror conjured a strained sob from deep in his thundering chest.

  His eyes filled with icy tears that dribbled down his cheeks, and, as he remained on his hands and knees, wanting only to stay here and not have to face that dark, snow-stitched horizon beyond, where his killers waited, he heard himself blubber, “Please . . . please . . . I’ll pay you.”

  “You’ll pay us?” Sook said with a laugh that the wind strangled. He kicked the prosecutor hard in the ass with the toe of his boot, and Mendenhour flew forward with a yelp of agony. He lay belly-down on the hard, snowy ground. “You’ll pay us to die for you? Ha!”

  “Too late to try to buy your way out of this, Mr. Lawyer,” said Kearny, squatting beside Mendenhour, “even if you did have enough money on you to pay us to die with you. You heard old Betajack. He gave you one day to turn yourself over to him, or he’d not only kill you, but he’d kill us all.”

  “Get up!” Sook snarled. “Get your ass up and get out there. The way we see it, we got nothin’ to lose. Betajack might just be so happy to get you he’ll leave me an’ Kearny alone, since we’re feedin’ you to him, an’ all.”

  Numb with trepidation, Mendenhour climbed to his feet. Tears dribbled down his cheeks. He stared straight off at the horizon that was a purple-black robe threaded with the violently tumbling snowflakes. Somewhere off to his right, a loose shutter hammered against one of the outbuildings. One of the horses stabled in the barn, afraid of the storm, gave a shrill whinny that the prosecutor barely heard beneath the wind.

  Sook gave him a violent shove, and he stumbled forward with another groan. He started walking. His legs felt as though two-by-fours had been shoved up his thighs. His calf muscles ached. His heart raced. Sweat broke out on every inch of him beneath his thin layer of clothes.

  What was worse than the fear was his sudden awareness of what he thought he’d probably always known about himself—he was a coward. He could afford to act brave because he’d been raised by a tough man who’d loved him and would back him in anything he did. But one thing Wild Bill Mendenhour had not done for his son was allow him to stand independently against adversity, and thus nurture his own courage.

  So easy, he vaguely thought now, as he walked stiffly toward that dark horizon, like a man walking a ship’s plank to the cold waters of a stormy sea roiling with sharks. So damn easy to harbor the ideals he’d harbored. Not so easy to stand behind them when it was only himself standing there.

  And he’d allowed himself the even worse conceit of alienating the one man who might have saved him. Who might have saved them all. Why? Because he, Mendenhour, had taken offense at the way the man had regarded his wife, and how she, quite understandably, had regarded him in return.

  When they’d walked out through a crease between the low hills, Kearny said, “That’s far enough.” Then he walked around Mendenhour, keeping his pistol trained on him, and shouted into the wind: “Beta-jaaaack! Got your man here, Betajack! Hendricks! Got the lawyer here! Come an’ get him!”

  Chapter 25

  “Ah, God . . . please!” Mendenhour’s knees buckled; he dropped to the ground, hanging his head and his shoulders in defeat. “Don’t do this. Oh, Christ, don’t do this.”

  Both Kearny and Sook walked around, yelling up and down the wind, yelling for Betajack and Hendricks.

  “Please, don’t let them take me,” Mendenhour said, sobbing, icy tears dribbling down his cheeks to freeze in his beard. “They’ll . . . they’ll hang me!”

  “Hold it!” A woman’s yell barely audible above the wind.

  A vaguely familiar voice though oddly pitched. Mendenhour lifted his head.

  “Told you to stay back in the cabin!” Kearny shouted behind Mendenhour, who turned now to see whom he’d shouted at.

  “Drop those guns, both of you,” Glendolene said, holding her own pistol—Mendenhour’s Colt .45—in both hands straight out in front of her.

  Mendenhour stared at her, only half able to comprehend his pretty young wife standing before him, wielding a pistol, trying to save his life. For her part, Glendolene didn’t comprehend it, either. She merely gave free rein to her impulses as she repeated the order, trying to quell the shaking of her hands holding the gun.

  “We’re just tryin’ to save all our lives,” Kearny yelled above the moaning wind and ticking snow at the woman. “Don’t be a fool, Mrs. Mendenhour. Put the pistol down.”

  Glendolene shook her head. “I mean it.” She gritted her teeth as she clicked the revolver’s hammer back.

  “Look at him!” shouted Sook, pointing at Mendenhour. “He ain’t worth it. Why, he’s been crying like a little girl, beggin’ for his life! He’s a simpering fool who don’t give a damn if he gets us all killed.”

  Kearny shook his head angrily, desperately, holding his own pistol out to his right side. “Hell, it even sounds like he mighta hanged the wrong man!”

  “That was just Betajack talking,” Glendolene said, shivering, shaking her head. “Lee, get up. Get back to the cabin. I’ll cover you!”

  Mendenhour just knelt there, looking half dead, his head hanging, shoulders slumped. His lips moved as though he were talking to himself.

  Glendolene screamed shrilly, “Lee!”

  Just then Kearny swung his gun toward her. Glendolene glanced up as she edged the Colt toward him and jerked the trigger. Their guns exploded simultaneously, Kearny’s slug screeching past her right ear so closely that she could feel the heat of its passing.

  Glendolene gave another shrill scream as the kick of the big Colt sent her stumbling backward at the same time that Kearny staggered back two steps and sat down hard on his butt. Glendolene’s right heel kicked a stone, and she twisted around and fell on her right side, dropping the gun.

  “Christ!” Sook cried, staring down at Kearny sitting there with a large wet spot growing on the front of his ragged coat, just left of his heart.

  Kearny stared expressionlessly at Glendolene, his features slack. He looked down at the hole in his coat through which blood was beginning to dribble, and then he looked at Glendolene again, eyes widening his shock.

  “She . . . killed me.”

  His eyes rolled back in his head. He sagged backward, hitting the ground with a thump, and lay with his legs bent in front of him, his knees quivering. Glendolene stared at him, her ears ringing with a shock similar to Kearny’s own. Mendenhour stared dumbly at the dead man, too. Sook stumbled backward, as though from a coiled rattler, then turned toward Glendolene, his face a mask of horror and fury in the darkness.

  “You stupid bitch! Now see what you done?”

  He swung his pistol toward Glendolene. She screamed, lifted an arm to shield her face, and threw herself belly-down on the ground. At the same time, a gun blasted. The wind tore at it, muffled it. Glendolene jerked, feeling as though a pin had poked her left side.

  She lay tense, the shock of her imminent death numbing her. Only half-consciously she was aware of the thud of a body hitting the ground nearby. Several windy seconds passed, and then she realized that the pain in her side wasn’t getting any worse. In fact, it was fading. She’d imagined it. She lifted her head and l
ooked to her left.

  Sook lay on his back, his head turned toward Glendolene. His lower jaw hung slack. His vacant eyes blinked rapidly, lips moving quickly, as though he were muttering. His shoulders twitched out of sync with each other. Glendolene frowned when she saw the round hole in his right temple. Something dark stained the snow-dusted ground around his head.

  Glendolene stared at the dead Sook. He was just another part of the recent happenings that merely confused her shocked brain. Something moved in the darkness beyond her and Mendenhour, who knelt as before, his head and shoulders down, wind whipping his auburn hair about his head.

  The large shadow moved again in the west. It grew larger. Glendolene stared at it, trying to comprehend at least this aspect of the improbable chain of recent events, until her brain told her that several horses were moving toward her.

  “Oh, no,” she heard herself whisper, another wave of dread washing over her. “Oh, God, no. Here they come.”

  But then she saw that there were three horses but only one rider. The rider continued riding toward her on a black, blaze-faced horse. The two other horses trailed along behind him. He wore a black hat tied to his head with a gray scarf, and a buckskin mackinaw. He held a rifle straight out from his right hip.

  “What the hell?” shouted Yakima Henry as he pulled back on the several sets of reins in his left hand.

  He looked around, then dropped the reins, lifted his right boot over his saddle horn, and leaped to the ground. He ran past Mendenhour to Glendolene, squatted beside her.

  “You all right?”

  She nodded dumbly, glanced from Sook to her husband and then to Kearny. “I . . . don’t . . . know. . . .”

  “What the hell happened?”

  She was deeply confused, but when she finally managed to start speaking, he said, “Never mind. Let’s get you inside. Christ, with all that racket I don’t doubt Betajack and Hendricks are headed this way!”