Thunder Over the Superstitions

by Peter Brandvold

  “Don’t let the coffee boil over,” the girl said, rising and heading off into the brush on the far side of the horses.

  “Where the hell you goin’?”

  She disappeared among some boulders. He could hear her thrashing around, grunting softly. When the coffeepot started to boil, Miller used a swatch of burlap to remove it from the flames.

  He dumped a handful of ground Arbuckle’s into the water, let it return to a boil and then removed it from the flames again, setting the hissing pot on a rock to the right of the fire. Miller jerked his head up when the girl strode back into their little camp. She had a pocket knife in her right hand and a mess of what looked like cactus pulp in the other.

  “Hey, where’d you get that knife?” Miller asked, scowling at the open blade in her hand.

  “Slipped it into my boot before we left the station. Figured it might come in handy. Don’t get your shorts in a twist. Open your shirt and I’ll smear this prickly-pear pulp on those stitches. It’ll take some of the pain away and keep it from festering.”

  Miller knew the remedy, as he’d been married to a Pima girl and lived among her family for a year. Those people could make a meal out of a single cholla branch. Keeping his eyes on the barlow knife in Jodi’s hand, Miller jerked his shirttails out of his jeans, and pulled the shirt up to expose the wound she’d stitched closed. The wound appeared relatively clean, but some yellow fluid was leaking out through the seam in his puckered skin, between the stitches that looked like clipped cat whiskers.

  As Jodi used her finger to smear the pulp into the wound, Miller sucked a sharp breath through his teeth.

  “Easy!”

  “Stop your caterwauling.”

  When she’d coated the wound with the cactus pulp, Jody brushed the excess on her trouser leg.

  “I’ll take that,” Miller said, and reached for the knife.

  She pulled it away and, grinning, sort of did a two-step around the fire before bending over and sliding the barlow back into the well of her right boot. “I haven’t stuck you so far, have I?”

  “You little bitch.”

  “Chicken shit!”

  Jodi laughed and then sauntered back over to the coffeepot.

  She added cold water to settle the grounds then poured them each a cup while Miller scowled at her, knowing he’d be sleeping even lighter at night than he usually did. He’d be wondering if she was going to slip the blade of that knife between his ribs. Deciding he’d deal with the knife later, he accepted a cup of steaming coffee from her, sat on a rock, and stared along their back trail.

  Jodi warmed some beans and rabbit meat in a small skillet, and while they ate their burritos around the fire, she said, “Who’s behind you, killer?”

  Miller had been chewing and staring off toward the mouth of the canyon again. He looked at her, swallowed, sipped his coffee, and grunted, “What?”

  Sitting on a rock on the far side of the fire, the girl took a big bite of her burrito and said around the unladylike mouthful, “You’re nervous as a doe with a newborn fawn. What wolf you got nippin’ at your hocks, killer?”

  “Stop callin’ me killer or I’ll backhand you.”

  She laughed and shook a lock of her gold-blonde hair out of her eye. “Who’s doggin’ your trail?”

  He didn’t like her mocking tone. He was starting to think he should have killed her when he’d killed the old man. Trouble was, he didn’t know the Superstitions. He needed a guide.

  “What’s it to you?”

  “Well, if he’s doggin’ your trail, he’s doggin’ mine, right?”

  “Fella called Hawk.” Miller turned his head to stare back down the canyon. “The rogue lawman, they call him.”

  “No kiddin’?” Jodi pitched her voice with pleasant surprise, which also riled Miller. “I’ve heard of him.” She chewed another bite of her burrito and then chuckled again as she said, “What’d you do to get him on your trail?”

  “None of your business.”

  “Where we headin’—you figure that might be my business?”

  Miller turned to her. He chewed and sipped his coffee for a time and then he ran his sleeve across his mouth and drooping mustaches and said, “I want you to take me to high ground. Maybe a canyon like this one, but higher up in the mountains. Some place good to set a bushwhack.”

  “You’re gonna kill him? This rogue lawman?”

  “Yeah, I’m gonna kill him.”

  “From bushwhack?”

  Miller’s ears warmed with anger. He glared at her, chewing, and then he swallowed and pointed at her with what remained of his burrito. “You get that tone out of your voice. I don’t like it.”

  “You can threaten me all you want, Pima,” the girl said saucily. “But if you don’t treat me right, I’m liable to lead you into a box canyon, let that rogue lawman fella ride right up on ya. Geronimo hides out from the army up around Weaver’s Needle, but I know how to work around him—when I want to. Hell, I could lead you into a nest of diamondbacks. Plenty of those out here, and I know where more than a few of ’em are. A prospector named Dunleavy dug into one o’ them nests, started screamin’ somethin’ awful. About six baby rattlers little bigger than this finger was clingin’ to his arms. One dug its fangs into his cheek!”

  She laughed and shook her head. “He was dead in an hour, but let me tell you—that was one hell of a long, loud hour, if you get my drift!”

  “You done?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Yappin’. You done?”

  Jodi brushed her hand across her mouth, shook her hair back from her head. “Oh, be a sport. I’m just funnin’ with ya. I’ll help you out . . . as long as you tell me what’s next after this.”

  “What do you mean—what’s next?”

  “What’re you gonna do after you kill this rogue lawman?”

  “I’m gonna have you lead me out of the mountains to the south. Then, you’re clear. You can go back to the station, and I’ll head for Mexico.”

  Jodi swallowed the last of her burrito and curled her upper lip at Miller. “And then you’ll work back north and retrieve the money you took out of the Kingman bank.”

  Miller chuckled dryly. “We didn’t get more than a few hundred dollars out of that bank. We hid the money along the trail. Too little to risk goin’ back for. Don’t worry.” Miller grinned, happy to think she thought he might have the upper hand on her for a change. “I ain’t holdin’ out on ya. I’m broke. All I got is the shirt on my back and my gun, and that’s about all.”

  Jodi considered that for a time. She sipped her coffee. “I might have an idea.”

  Miller had turned to stare back down the canyon again. Now he looked back at Jodi, whose eyes were wide and grave and missing their customary mockery. “What idea?”

  “Just an idea. I’ll tell you more after you back shoot this rogue lawman fella.”

  “I didn’t say I was gonna back shoot him!”

  “Back shoot, bushwhack. Same difference.”

  Miller’s dark eyes glinted angrily. “You know—I was just startin’ to think I might could like you.”

  “Easy, killer.” Jodi tossed her cup down, rose from her rock, and walked around the fire. She stopped before Miller and thrust her shoulders back. Her pointed breasts jutted behind her shirt. “You be nice to me, I’ll be nice to you.”

  Giving a smoky smile, she knelt down between his spread knees and reached for the buckle of his cartridge belt.

  CHAPTER 10

  “DRAG THAT SOGGY BOOT BACK NORTH AND LIVE TO PISS ANOTHER DAY, FRIEND!”

  Deputy US Marshal Whit Chaney eased his chestnut around a bend in the wall of the canyon he and his two partners had been following throughout the day, and jerked back on the horse’s reins. He frowned as he stared ahead, not liking what he was seeing.

  Not liking what he was seeing at all.

  The ground rose sharply about seventy yards ahead. A broad jumble of black volcanic rock studded with desert flora appeared
to block the trail. From his vantage, he could see no way through it.

  Had the man they’d been tracking led them into a box canyon?

  He turned to his partners.

  The tall, blond-headed Alvin Teagarden rode a buckskin on a parallel course about fifty yards to Chaney’s left, on the other side of a dry arroyo that ran down through the canyon’s center. Ralph “Hooch” Mortimer rode his dapple-gray nearest Chaney, along a game trail following the arroyo’s near side. Both men had seen Chaney stop, because they too had halted their horses and were looking at him warily, apparently wondering what had spooked him.

  Chaney lifted his chin toward the steep hill of jumbled rock and tangled cacti ahead of him. And then he looked down at the trail in front of his horse. About twenty yards back, he’d lost sight of the shod hoofprints he’d been following. He saw no sign of them here, either.

  Those two troubling facts—the steep wall of boulders ahead of him and the sudden disappearance of the rogue lawman’s sign—made Chaney’s heart skip. As were most lawmen throughout the frontier, Chaney was well aware of Gideon Hawk’s reputation. The man hunted bad men mercilessly. But he showed the same lack of mercy to any lawman who stood between Hawk and his prey.

  And he was very, very shrewd.

  Shrewd and merciless.

  Bad combination.

  Chaney looked toward his two compatriots once more, and raised a waylaying hand. Then he stepped down from the chestnut’s back, tied the reins to a low shrub, and, slowly and quietly levering a live cartridge into his carbine’s action, began walking forward.

  He moved one careful step at a time, looking all around him, up and down the gradual, rocky ridges sloping toward the canyon on both sides. He followed the trail around a cabin-sized block of cracked volcanic rock, and stopped.

  Ahead of him stood a saddled horse. A grulla. It was tied to a willow at the edge of the arroyo. The horse turned to look at Chaney. It twitched its ears and switched its tail and whickered softly. It stomped one of its rear hooves. That hoof and the other three hooves were wrapped in deer hide.

  Chaney’s heart leaped into his throat.

  Movement above and to his right.

  He whipped his head in that direction to see a tall, mustached man in a dark frock coat and black hat standing beside a boulder about thirty yards up the slope, on the northeast side of the canyon. The tall man shook his head gravely, jade eyes flashing in the afternoon sunlight, and pressed his cheek to the rear stock of the Henry rifle he was aiming into the canyon.

  Flames lashed out of the Henry’s octagonal barrel.

  When Chaney heard the rifle’s coughing report that whipped around the canyon like a thunderclap, he was already on the ground. He felt like someone had slammed a sledgehammer against his upper-left chest.

  The rogue lawman lowered the rifle slightly and ejected the spent cartridge, which careened over his right shoulder to clatter off a rock behind him. He pumped a fresh round into the chamber and stared through his own powder smoke wafting in the air before him at the man lying supine in the canyon, grinding his spurs into the gravelly ground as he arched his back, death spasming through him.

  He’d lost his hat. The high-crowned Stetson with a Texas crease lay several feet away to his left. He lifted his bald head and round face toward Hawk, his deputy US marshal’s badge flashing in the sunlight from where it was pinned to his black bullhide vest over a white, blue-pinstriped shirt. He gritted his teeth beneath his gray-brown mustache.

  Hawk cursed.

  The man had jerked just as Hawk had fired, fouling the rogue lawman’s aim. He’d meant to kill the man outright. He felt he owed him that much—for working a damned hard job for low pay, if for no other reason.

  Hawk aimed again. His second shot blew the top of the man’s head off and lay him flat down on the ground, boots shaking with the last of his death spasms.

  Beyond him, on the other side of the large, black boulder, men shouted. A horse whinnied.

  Hooves clacked on rock.

  Hawk racked a fresh round into his Henry’s breech. A second later, the clattering died. A horse whickered down the canyon a few yards. Hawk crouched low, holding his Henry up high across his chest, waiting.

  Silence.

  A hot, dry breeze blew against his back. It lifted dust along the canyon floor beneath him, and swirled it. When the mini-cyclone died, a hatted head and the end of a rifle barrel slid out from the left side of the large, black boulder.

  Hawk slapped the Henry’s butt plate to his shoulder, aimed quickly, and fired.

  The hatted head jerked back violently. The man’s entire body was revealed to Hawk as he staggered away from the boulder, to its left side, throwing his arms out and dropping his rifle. He stumbled over a rock behind him, and fell hard. Arms and legs akimbo, he jerked as his life left him.

  Hawk pursed his lips with satisfaction. That man had likely not even heard the shot that had blown his lamp out.

  Pumping a fresh round, Hawk dropped to a knee beside his covering rock, looking around, waiting. The third lawman was out here somewhere. He’d glassed all three on his back trail. If the lawman was smart, knowing that his two partners were dead, he’d mount up and ride off.

  But if he’d been smart, he wouldn’t have headed after Hawk in the first place.

  Hawk held his position for ten minutes, growing impatient. He didn’t want to have to kill any more lawmen. He wanted to be after Pima Miller. But he could do nothing until he’d scoured the third lawman off his trail.

  Something moved along the slope on the canyon’s west side. Hawk drew back behind his boulder as a slug slammed into the opposite side of it, spanging wickedly. At the same time, the belching report reached Hawk’s ears. It screeched around the canyon for several seconds.

  Then the man fired again. And again.

  After the last echo had died, Hawk doffed his hat and edged a look around his boulder. His keen eyes picked out the silhouetted hat and rifle barrel halfway up the canyon’s west slope. Smoke was wafting in the air around the silhouette.

  Hawk snaked his Henry around the side of his covering boulder and snapped off two quick shots, driving the shooter back behind a rock. Then Hawk donned his hat, bolted out from behind the boulder, and dashed around boulders and cacti, heading toward the opposite side of the canyon.

  He wove through his cover like a stalking cat. The third lawman, Alvin Something-or-other, flung lead at him from the canyon’s west slope. The shots screeched off rocks and plunked into saguaros and barrel cactus, raking several stems from a clump of Mormon tea. As Hawk jogged steadily along the canyon’s north slope, which was the wall creating a box canyon, drawing nearer his quarry, Alvin grew more and more desperate.

  His shots came faster and faster. They also came wilder and wilder.

  Then there was a lull during which the man was probably reloading.

  Hawk turned along the crease forming the canyon’s northwest corner and began angling back downcanyon but also climbing the western slope at a slant, toward where he’d last seen Alvin’s gun smoke waft. He heard the rifle crash again but could not see it from his current vantage. As he rounded a boulder and a one-armed saguaro, he saw the muzzle flash and the smoke puff.

  The slug curled the air off Hawk’s left shoulder.

  Hawk dropped to one knee and raised his Henry. He fired just as the third lawman snapped his eyes wide in fear and pulled his head back behind a nub of rock protruding from a bed of black shale about forty yards farther up the slope.

  Hawk’s slug hammered the side of the rock nub, keeping the third lawman back behind his cover. Hawk lowered the Henry, and, levering another round into the sixteen-shooter’s chamber, ran up the slope, zigzagging between saguaros and boulders and piles of porous volcanic rock blown out of the earth’s bowels eons ago.

  The shooter fired two more rounds at him. Both flew wide. Hawk kept scrambling up the slope toward the shooter’s cover. He wended his way through rocks and prickly pear
, ran up past Alvin’s boulder and threw himself to the ground, aiming his Henry at the backside of the rock from where Alvin Somethingor-other had been shooting.

  Alvin wasn’t there.

  Hawk saw him scrambling up the slope toward the ridge crest. He had his rifle in one hand. His boots were slipping on shale, and he was pushing off the ground with his other hand.

  Hawk heaved himself to his feet, sent two quick rounds after the third lawman, and then ran up the slope behind him. Alvin glanced over his right shoulder at Hawk. His eyes widened. He was grunting and cursing under his breath, breathing hard.

  He threw himself behind a rock little larger than a gravestone. Hawk saw the end of the man’s rifle barrel snake around the side of the rock.

  Hawk dropped to his belly and raised the Henry. A ratcheting hiss rose from ten feet in front of him, on the upslope. The diamondback was tightly coiled, button tail raised. It was sliding its flat head toward Hawk, forked tongue extended, its little, colorless eyes like tarnished pellets.

  Just as the serpent appeared about to strike, Hawk blew its head off. Its headless body struck, anyway. The bloody, ragged end where its head had been fell into the dirt and gravel about a foot in front of Hawk, writhing.

  The rogue lawman pumped a fresh cartridge and took aim again at the shooter’s rock.

  “Hold on!” the man screamed.

  He’d come out from behind the rock, moving backward up the slope. He tossed his rifle away and continued stumbling backward.

  “Don’t shoot me!” Alvin screamed.

  He’d lost his hat and his curly blond hair was caked with dust and bits of foliage. Sweat ran down his narrow cheeks. Hawk lowered the Henry, aiming it out from his hip, and strode up the slope. By the time Hawk reached the third lawman, Alvin had reached the flat, gravelly top of the ridge, a barrel cactus rising on his right.

  Buzzards were circling high but quartering over the canyon in which the two dead lawmen lay.