Thunder Over the Superstitions

by Peter Brandvold

  “Who in the hell has a bobcat for a pet?” Miller said in disgust, waving his cocked pistol around, wondering what other surprises lay in store for him here. “Anymore o’ them things?”

  “No, he’s the only one,” the girl said.

  “Any dogs?”

  “No, the old man don’t like dogs.”

  “Any other people here?”

  “Nope,” the old man said, holding his disdainful gaze on the interloper from the other side of the table.

  “Any hostlers out in the barn?”

  “I’m the only hostler here,” the old man said. “The line’s too cheap to hire more.”

  “When’s the next stage due?”

  “Not till tomorrow,” the girl said. “Likely won’t get through till the next day, with this weather an’ all.” She gave a saucy, mocking smile as her hazel eyes raked Miller’s soggy frame up and down. “But I guess you know all about that, don’t you?”

  “Jodi, quit talkin’ to this man!” the old man ordered.

  “You’re the one best shut up!” Miller stomped around the table. His icy glare caused the old man—he had to be pushing seventy—to move his Adam’s apple up and down in his stringy neck and take one step back toward the range.

  Miller set his pistol on the end of the table and picked up the double-barreled shotgun—a cheap, Belgium-made affair stamped Cambridge Arms Co. A twelve-gauge, it was a side-byside hammer gun. Miller breeched it. Both barrels were filled with live shells.

  He snapped it closed, shoved his Remington back down in its holster, and aimed the shotgun at the old man’s pendulous belly. “Now, how ’bout I blow a hole through you, old man?”

  “Ah, shit!” the old man complained, raising his hands to his shoulders. “You got no cause to do that. Take what you want and go!”

  Miller looked at the girl, who was still standing in front of the table. She stood only an inch or so over five feet, but she was about as comely as they came. Not much over seventeen, if that, and her pretty, heart-shaped, hazel-eyed face was framed by thick, tawny curls. She was dressed in a coarse work shirt and overalls, but the body beneath those crude duds was well filled out in all the best places.

  She blushed under the outlaw’s scrutiny.

  “Except her!” the old man snarled. “You can’t have her!”

  “She yours?”

  “Yes, she’s mine. She’s my granddaughter. She belongs to me, and if you touch one hair on her head . . .” The old man seemed to realize the ridiculousness of his threat. He swallowed again and looked at the twelve-gauge in Miller’s hands.

  Miller laughed. Then he shuddered as the cold continued to rack him, and turned to the old man. “Whiskey!”

  “I ain’t got no whiskey!” The old man lowered his voice, and his right eye flashed shrewdly. “I got bacanora. That’ll take the chill out of your bones . . . if you’re man enough.”

  “Oh, don’t give me that shit, you old fool. Break out the bacanora, for chrissakes.” Miller looked at the girl. “Was he born a fool or did he get this way in his old age?”

  “He’s been a fool for as long as I’ve known him.” The girl glanced at the old man jeeringly.

  The old man glanced back at her, swelling his nostrils, as he reached toward a high shelf above the dry sink right of the range. “I told you not to talk to him. You mind me!”

  “You shut up, old man. Just pour me a tall one and sit down at that table and keep your hands up where I can keep an eye on ’em. You try anything, I’ll blast you, and this girl won’t be your concern no more.”

  Miller cut his eyes to her again. Again, her cheeks flushed, though she otherwise betrayed no expression.

  “Oh, I know you will,” the old man said, pouring out the grapefruit-colored agave-derived alcohol into a tin cup and sliding it across the table to Miller. “I know who you are. I recognized you as soon as you came in here.”

  “You did? Who am I?”

  “Pima Miller.”

  Miller sipped the bacanora. It punched the back of his throat like a fist wrapped in barbed-wire then pulverized his vocal chords as it raked down into his belly to burn holes through his stomach lining. He choked out, “No, shit—I am?”

  “Sure, you are.” The old man splashed bacanora into another cup. “And I’ll thank you not to use that saloon talk in front of my granddaughter.”

  “Well, old man, I reckon you have me at a disadvantage.” Miller laughed as he opened and closed his hands around the shotgun aimed at the old man’s belly. “Albeit a small one.” He cut his eyes to the girl again. “And I’ll bet she’s heard worse talk than that.”

  The girl just stared at him. There was no more fear in her eyes. Her eyes were bold, frank, and her mouth was turned slightly up at the corners.

  The old man was about to say something else, but Miller wagged the shotgun at him and said, “Sit down there, and shut up, old man. Drink your busthead. And keep them paws up where I can see ’em.” He looked at the girl. “You—Jodi. Can you sew?”

  “Of course I can sew,” she said. “What do you need sewn?”

  “Me.”

  Miller walked around the table and into the small parlor area fronting the fire. There was a large, braided rug in there, as well as a rocking chair. He sagged into the rocker, and, holding the shotgun slack across his knees, kicked out of his boots. “Fetch a needle and catgut, and if you’re shy, you better avert your eyes. Because I’m gonna get buck naked so I can dry out in front of this nice fire here. Damn, it’s a nice one, too. Lordy, that heat feels good!”

  “You can’t get naked in here!” the old man roared.

  “And bring me a blanket,” Miller said as the girl climbed the stairs to the loft. “Make that two!”

  “She ain’t your slave,” the old man scolded from the table, where he was sitting now and slowly packing his pipe. “And I done told you to keep your clothes on, you owlhoot!”

  “Ah, shit—I know who you are.” Miller was standing and unbuttoning his shirt. “Sure enough—this is the Superstition Station, so you gotta be Old Man Zimmerman. Sure enough, I heard of you.” He glanced at the loft where the girl was moving around and the cat was still staring down at Miller. “Heard of your granddaughter, too.”

  “So you have,” the old man said, glaring over his pipe at the outlaw, who shucked out of his shirt and tossed it down in front of the fire.

  Miller glanced at the pick on the table. The girl appeared to have been greasing a pair of old saddlebags, as well, and also working on a pack frame.

  “You two go off in the desert, I hear,” Miller said, thoughtful. “Up into the Superstitions.”

  “So what?”

  “You lookin’ for that old mine?” Miller grinned. “That old mine that that old Dutchman from Phoenix supposedly found?” His grin broadened. “The lost Peralta diggin’s?”

  “Like I said,” the old man snarled, scratching a match to life atop the table and touching it to the bowl of his porcelain-bowled meerschaum. “So what if we do? Look around. You’ll see we ain’t found nothin’. Nothin’ but coyotes, Apaches, and rattlesnakes.”

  “No, but I’ll bet you two know them mountains like the backs of your hands by now.” Miller shoved his denims down to his knees and sat back down in the rocking chair. He looked at the girl moving down the stairs with a wicker sewing kit hooked over one arm. “Sure enough—I bet you two know every nook and cranny of that country.”

  “Jodi, look away, fer chrissakes!” the old man bellowed, choking on pipe smoke. “Can’t you see this crazy owlhoot’s half nekkid?!” His anger appeared to dwindle quickly as another thought dawned on him.

  He turned to Miller. “Say, who in the hell’s doggin’ you, anyways?”

  CHAPTER 6

  THE MEANEST SON OF A BITCH IN THE TERRITORY

  The next dawn, Miller opened his eyes in the Zimmerman cabin’s loft, and saw a wildcat staring at him devilishly, ready to pounce.

  “Holy shit!” the outlaw screamed, and
reached toward where he usually positioned his pistol when he bedded down either outside or indoors.

  But the gun wasn’t there. Instead, he grabbed a handful of Miss Jodi Zimmerman’s hair, causing the girl to groan and lift her head from her pillow.

  “What the hell?” the girl complained, glancing over her bare right shoulder at him.

  Miller rose to a half-sitting position, drawing the sheet up protectively against his chest while he flailed his right hand for his pistol and stared at the beast that didn’t seem so ready to pounce, after all. Jodi’s bobcat, Claws, lounged atop the mirrored dresser off the foot of the brass bed that took up most of the space in the cluttered loft.

  The cat stared at the outlaw with a vague, almost bored interest, slowly blinking its copper eyes. It curled its tail and flicked it and then gave a mewl as it climbed to its feet, humping its back as it stretched.

  It dropped over the side of the dresser to land on the floor and give another, louder mewl.

  Miller remembered that he’d laid Old Man Zimmerman’s shotgun on the floor beside the bed, and he turned over too quickly, reaching for it. The stitches the girl had sewn his wound closed with barked and showed their own nasty fangs, chewing into him, and he forestalled the effort and clutched his side with a yelp.

  “Turn your horns in,” the girl said in a sleep-raspy voice. “It’s just Claws.” She glanced toward the cottonwood rail running along the edge of the loft, and yelled, “Old man, let Claws out!”

  Miller lay back against his pillow, clutching his side. The girl had sewed it up tight as a drum. It didn’t appear to have bled at all last night. And generally the wound felt better. He probably owed that to all the Mexican busthead he’d drunk the night before, though the dull pain in his head was no doubt the cost.

  Miller smacked his lips together—his mouth tasted like a tarantula had crawled inside and died under his tongue—and said, “The old man ain’t gonna be movin’ around too much this mornin’.”

  He chuckled dryly.

  The girl sat up and swept her tangled hair out of her face. She gave a grunt as she remembered that Miller had ordered her to tie old Zimmerman to his rocking chair before she and Miller had sauntered up to the loft together. She gave her own dry chuckle and said, “I was wonderin’ why it was so quiet down there.”

  She threw the sheet off her naked body and dropped her long legs to the floor. Miller reached for her but she batted his hand away. “I gotta let Claws out, get a fire goin’.” She gave him a sultry glare over her shoulder. “Less’n you don’t want breakfast.”

  Miller raked his cheek brusquely against her right arm. “You behave yourself down there. Keep that old devil tied to his chair and remember I got his shotgun.”

  “You’re a tough one, ain’t ya?”

  The girl spread her hand across his unshaven face, and pushed his head back against his pillow. Then she rose and dropped a cotton nightshirt over her head. It hung down to just below her knees. She swept her hair back behind her head, yawned, and descended the loft stairs to the main room.

  “Throw some grub into a cavy sack while you’re at it!” Miller yelled. “We’re gonna need food on the trail!”

  “What trail?” she said from the main room, padding toward the door.

  “The trail to Superstition,” Miller said, suddenly realizing, by the buttery light angling through the loft’s single, sashed window, that it was way past dawn and he had to get up and get moving before Hawk showed. Miller had no doubt he would.

  The rogue lawman was known for not leaving a trail until his efforts had paid off in the form of dead men. Miller would have to fight eventually, but first he’d lead Hawk into unfamiliar territory. Into rugged territory. And then, when he had the high ground and the upper hand, Pima Miller would rid the frontier once and for all of the loco, upside-down lawman.

  And he’d also pull down the hefty bounty he’d heard had piled up on the rogue lawman’s head.

  Miller rose and stumbled naked over to the dresser and threw back half a jug of stale water. He followed it up with what was left in the bacanora jug, and then picked up the shotgun, hooked his pistol belt over his shoulder, and stumbled downstairs, his knees stiff as half-set mortar from his cold swim in the arroyo. The old man sat in the rocking chair on the other side of the hearth.

  He was awake, his red-rimmed, red-veined eyes open, wrists tied behind his back, ankles lashed together. He’d been gagged with a polka-dotted blue neckerchief. He sat rock-still, glowering up at Miller from beneath his shaggy brows.

  Miller chuckled at him as the outlaw gathered his clothes from where he’d hung them from chair backs in front of the now-cold fire. Miller dressed and then, as the girl prepared breakfast in sullen silence, he cleaned his pistol, found a couple of boxes of .44 shells and an old-model Winchester rifle, and cleaned and loaded that, too.

  Neither Miller nor the girl said anything. Of course the old man did not because Miller kept him gagged. The old man sat facing the hearth but kept his eyes rolled toward Miller in stony, hateful silence.

  When Miller and Jodi had eaten, Miller told her to prepare food for the trail.

  “We can’t go on no trail with you,” Jodi snapped, clearing the table. “We got a stage due today, tomorrow at the latest.”

  “You just shut up and do as I say or I’ll gut-shoot both of you and leave you howlin’!” Miller glanced at the old man. “Besides, who said he was goin’? He’d just slow us down.”

  He looked at Jodi again. “I’ve heard you and him been livin’ out here, running the station and combin’ them mountains yonder for that Peralta gold since you was six years old. Now, I could tell from last night that that was a few years ago.”

  He laughed through his teeth as he turned to the old man, who started tossing his head and grunting furiously. Miller threw back the last of his coffee, rose from the table, walked over to Zimmerman, and jerked the gag down to his whiskered chin.

  “What the hell you want, old man?”

  “I gotta take a piss, you sonofabitch!”

  Miller cursed and went back to the table. He found a folding knife among the girl’s clutter, opened the knife, and held the blade up close against Zimmerman’s leathery neck.

  “How ’bout if I just slit your throat and put everyone whose ever had to have anything to do with you out of their misery?”

  “Go ahead!” the old man barked raspily, lifting his chin to expose his lumpy throat. “I’d just as soon not live no more after what I heard up in the loft last night!”

  Jodi laughed at that.

  So did Miller.

  He untied the old man and kicked him outside to drain his bladder off the stoop. And then he forced old Zimmerman to go on out to the barn and saddle a couple of riding horses, and to outfit them with grub sacks and canteens. He wanted a rifle sheath on one of the mounts, as well.

  “They better be the best mounts in your remuda, old man,” Miller barked, standing on the stoop and waving his pistol at the old man’s back as Zimmerman trudged, bandy-legged and cursing profusely, off to the barn and corral in which several horses milled.

  Miller walked out into the soggy, steaming yard and stared nearly straight south, toward the rusty crags forming what looked like a giant Gothic cathedral but which comprised, in fact, Superstition Mountain. It seemed to rest suspended above the misty horizon, the mountain’s sheer, three-thousand-foot cliffs, pinnacles, and vertical canyons towering over the saguaro-studded desert.

  Miller picked out the slender, finger-shaped peak known as Weaver’s Needle. It was near that formation that the old Dutchman’s mine was said to reside—formerly the mine of one Don Miguel Peralta.

  But Miller cared nothing for the Dutchman’s gold. He doubted it even existed. It wasn’t called Superstition Mountain for nothing. All the outlaw wanted was to lure Gideon Hawk up there into that devil’s maze of clefts, canyons, and washes, and shoot the holy hell out of him.

  Miller looked all around the station yard
, pocked with many mud puddles amid the snaking fingers of steam rising now as the morning heated up, and then he went back inside to hurry the girl. Twenty minutes later, the old man led the two horses back to the cabin, and Miller and Jodi filled their saddlebags and cavy sacks with trail supplies, including the bacon sandwiches she’d made.

  Miller tied the old man up in his rocking chair. There was no reason to gag him. He could yell all he wanted. There likely wouldn’t be anyone to hear him for several hours.

  “He’s gonna catch you, whoever he is doggin’ your trail.”

  “Who is he?” Miller challenged the old man.

  “I don’t know, but whoever he is, to have Pima Miller pissin’ down his leg, he must be good!” Old Man Zimmerman cackled at that, eyes sparking devilishly.

  Miller unsheathed his Remy and clicked the hammer back.

  “He’s a mouthy old bastard,” Jodi said. “But if you kill him, you’re ridin’ alone. Good luck gettin’ into those mountains without knowin’ the way. Geronimo will find you and cook you slow!”

  Miller drew his index finger taut against the Remy’s trigger. He could kill the old man and force the girl to show him the way, but she’d likely run him into a box canyon. She was savvy. Easier to let the old man live, he supposed.

  Miller turned to her. She was holding a cavy sack over her shoulder.

  “Get mounted up!” he yelled, glaring at the old man.

  He depressed the Remington’s hammer, left the cabin, and drew the door closed behind him.

  But he couldn’t stand letting the old man live. When they were two hundred yards south of the station, Miller stopped and dragged the girl off her horse. She fought him, cursing, but he finally got her hog-tied. Then he tied her horse’s reins to a spindly cottonwood.

  “You poison-mean son of a bitch!” she barked at him, lying belly down on the ground, legs and arms drawn up behind her back. Her pretty face was flushed with fury.

  “That’s right!” Miller raked out, laughing. “I’m the meanest son of a bitch in the territory!”

  He galloped back toward the station yard. The trussed-up girl watched him. From her vantage, Miller was a small, brown silhouette by the time he reached the station. She stared through the fog snakes as he dismounted and leapt onto the porch.