“Yes, ma’am. Dangerous ones too.”
The girl flushed slightly. Her chest heaved, full breasts pushing at the rough wool shirt. She dropped her eyes to the six-shooter thonged on his right thigh. “You kill many people with that?”
Cannady slipped the gun from its holster, raised it barrel-up, and spun the cylinder. “Oh, only about a hundred.”
“A hundred? I don’t believe you!”
“Well, maybe only eighty-five or ninety. I lost track around fifty.” Cannady chuckled, dropped the pistol back in its holster, and leaned toward the girl, resting his forearm on his thigh. “What’s your name?”
“Aubrey.”
“Aubrey, the slanty-eye behind me is Li Mei. She’s a captive. A war trophy, you might call her. I’m taking her to a whorehouse in Sundance ’cause the man who owns the place, a cousin of mine, likes slanty-eyed whores. I owe him a whore ’cause I killed one of his. Anyways, I’m tryin’ to keep Li Mei in as good a shape as possible, so I sure would appreciate it if, when I’ve done tied her to that little willow tree yonder, you’d bring her a cup of water.” He grinned. “Would you do that for ole Cannady?”
Aubrey glanced at Li Mei, then slid her combatant gaze back to the outlaw leader. “Who’re you to give me orders?”
“The man who done killed upward of a hundred people, half of those women who sassed me.” Cannady winked. “That’s who. Now, you do as you’re told, girl, and maybe I’ll give you a couple sips of whiskey around the fire tonight. How’d that be?”
The girl stared at him, the flush in her cheeks growing slightly. Her eyes flicked to his pistol, then back to his face. Sweat glistened faintly on her forehead.
Cannady pinched his hat brim. “See you later, Miss Aubrey.” He reined his horse around and gigged it toward the barn.
When Cannady and the other men had unsaddled their horses in the barn, then turned them into the corral, Cannady tied Li Mei to the willow between the yard and the creek. He pinched the girl’s cheek and gave her a brusque kiss on the lips, telling her not to fret and that she should thank him, Cannady, for not killing her after what she’d done to Paxton, or turning her over to his men.
“They’d make an awful mess of your delicate face,” he said, caressing her cheek with the knuckles of his right hand, her fearful, bruised eyes canted down. “What a surprise you’ll be to ole Len Owen. I don’t understand it myself, but he likes you slanty-eyes. Apparently, the miners in Sundance do too.”
He shrugged, spat, picked up his saddlebags and bedroll, and headed toward the fire pit in the middle of the yard, where the other men were throwing down their gear—tired and dusty and happy to be stopping early for the night.
Li Mei watched him throw his saddle down beside that of the man called Crockett, kicking Crockett jokingly and telling him he’d better not snore as loud as last night or Cannady would fix his throat with a Green River knife. Crockett responded with something Li Mei couldn’t hear because the other men were gathering around them, laughing and joking and punching each other lightly, a couple pretending to be fighting over which one was going to get which of the prospector’s three daughters later.
Li Mei didn’t care that she couldn’t hear Cannady. She’d only been listening to distract herself from her own misery—her bruised face and her wrists into which the ropes had cut deeply.
She’d probably never see her father again.
Her mother was dead, buried back in New Mexico after dying from smallpox, and now her father would be alone, as Li Mei would be alone, earning her keep by spreading her legs for filthy miners in a whorehouse in a town she hadn’t known even existed until two days ago.
She’d heard stories of such women.
Women who often died from disease or lived beyond their attractiveness and were thrown like refuse into the streets.
Poor Papa.
As she thought of him, the tears came, Li Mei’s lower lip quivering. She leaned as far forward as the ropes tying her wrists behind the tree would allow. Then she merely sobbed, her long, black hair hanging like two raven wings on either side of her face.
Lost in her own misery, she didn’t know how much time had passed before soft footsteps rose above the din of the talking, laughing renegades. A shadow moved before her, and she snapped her head back, terrified that one of them was going to…
“Easy,” said a girl’s voice coldly.
Li Mei opened her eyes.
Before her crouched the blond girl Cannady had talked to. She squatted before Li Mei, holding a battered tin cup of water. The girl had put on a dress and combed her hair, drawing it back in a French braid, and she’d scrubbed the dirt from her face. Li Mei glanced at the hand holding the cup six inches before Li Mei’s chin. Aubrey had even dug some of the dirt out from beneath her fingernails.
“Drink it,” Aubrey said, her voice sharp with impatience. “He wants you to drink, so drink. I got work to do.”
Li Mei peered over Aubrey’s left shoulder. The girl’s sisters, who were still dressed as they had been when the gang had ridden into the cabin yard, were digging old ashes from the fire pit. The men lounged around, leaning against their saddles and passing bottles, leering at the girls and offering lewd comments. Shoveling ashes into a wheelbarrow, the girls ignored them.
Li Mei shuttled her glance back to the cup, tipped her head toward it. The girl lifted the cup slightly, and Li Mei drank half the water, surprised by her thirst, feeling somewhat refreshed by the cold creek water.
“All right, you had your drink, ya damn heathen.” Aubrey stood, shaking out the last few drops from the cup. “Papa said your kind worships the devil—that true?”
Li Mei stared up at her, too distraught to respond. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t heard such questions before. Papa had said that in the land where he and Li Mei’s mother had come from, before Li Mei was born, they weren’t bothered by such questions, and the girl often wondered what that would be like.
Holding the cup down against her thigh, Aubrey glanced back toward the men sitting around the fire pit. “You lay with him—Cannady?”
Li Mei recoiled slightly, nauseated, and shook her head quickly.
“How come? He might go easier on ya if ya pleasure him right.”
When Li Mei didn’t respond, Aubrey said, “Is it the eye?” She chuckled. “Gotta admit, he ain’t real pleasant to look at, but I’d lay with him. Hell, to get outta here I’d lay with the devil himself.” Aubrey stared down at Li Mei coldly, then chuffed and turned away. “Nice chattin’ with ya.”
As Aubrey headed back through the yard, weaving around the men, Cannady spotted her and jerked down the bottle he’d been drinking from. “Hey, there’s my girl!”
He reached out and gave Aubrey’s dress a tug. Aubrey leapt away, laughing, and jogged off to the cabin, her hair falling from the French braid and spilling about her shoulders. Cannady and several other men whooped behind her.
A large bonfire was built, the goats roasted on a high, iron spider which the prospector, Mason Llewellyn, had forged from wrought iron and wagon wheel scraps. He and the girls served coffee and beans to go with the meat the men grabbed from the spit and ate with their fingers, stumbling around drunk, howling and joking and expostulating the ways in which they’d spend the money they intended to rob from the bank at Sundance.
One of the men played rousing numbers on his fiddle in spite of one broken string, singing along when he could remember the words.
Seen from afar, the shindig before the cabin would have looked like some otherworldly barbaric frenzy, possibly one of unmentionable witchery or human sacrifice. All that was needed were buxom barbarian wenches strolling the crowd in bare feet, pouring ale from pewter pitchers, to complete the picture.
All the gang had, however, were the “yellow devil wench,” whom Cannady had deemed untouchable, and the prospector’s three daughters, only one of whom seemed, when her father wasn’t casting admonishing looks her way, to enjoy the festivity.
The
blond Aubrey strolled about the crowd with a bean kettle or coffeepot, taking furtive sips from Cannady’s bottle or puffs off his cigarette, as she refilled the men’s cups and tin plates. It wasn’t long before she was stumbling over gear and tack, giggling and laughing and no longer swatting the men’s brazen hands away from her breasts and ass, letting her dress hang open halfway down her chest to reveal a good portion of her corset-lifting cleavage.
It was only nine o’clock, but good dark, when the prospector shuttled his other two daughters into the cabin, to the whining protests of several hard cases.
When both daughters had disappeared inside, Llewellyn turned from the cabin door, one hand on the knob, gazing across the crowd milling in the shadows shunted this way and that by the fire.
“Aubrey?”
The girl didn’t hear him. A couple of horses had gotten out of the corral because someone hadn’t latched the gate, and Brown and Crocodile Burdette were drunkenly hazing them back in, making a ruckus, the horses stomping around and nickering loudly. Meanwhile, Aubrey was sitting beside Cannady, knees drawn up to her breasts, holding a near-empty bottle by the neck.
Cannady, resting one elbow on his saddle, caressed the girl’s face with a hay stem.
“You mean,” Aubrey said, slurring her words, her eyes heavy, “you boys’re sorta like the James and Younger gangs in the illustrated newspaper…?”
“Ha!” Cannady ran the end of the hay stalk between the girl’s full lips. “They’re kinda sorta like us! But not quite. They’d like to be just half as ornery and mean as—”
“Aubrey, goddamn your hide, girl!” It was the tall prospector, stumbling through the reclining men toward Cannady and Aubrey. He clutched a rusty, long-barreled shotgun in both hands across his chest. “What the hell you think you’re doin’ out here? Didn’t you hear me callin’ you?”
Cannady snapped his head at him, the tattoo under his milky eye turning bright green against the crimson planes of his savage face. “Light a shuck, old man. Can’t you see I’m talkin’ to your daughter?”
“Filth!” Llewellyn shouted. “Pure filth. An’ I won’t put up with you carryin’ on with my whore of a daughter on my own property!”
“I told you to light a shuck, you old bastard,” Cannady raked out through gritted teeth. His expression softened, his lips curling a mirthless grin. “Me and your daughter are discussin’ our future together.”
“Future, hell!” The old man stepped back and lowered the shotgun. “I’m warnin’ you, Cannady!”
“I ain’t gonna warn you!” Cannady had slid his .45 from its holster. He extended the pistol casually in his right hand, thumbing the hammer back and leveling the barrel at the prospector’s gut.
Aubrey cast a horrified glance at Cannady. “Wait! No!”
The Remington leapt in Cannady’s hand, the resolute crack echoing flatly. Llewellyn’s shirt puffed and smoked. The man, who had begun cocking the single-bore’s hammer, stumbled back as if punched. His eyes snapped wide, and the shotgun sagged in his hands.
“Papa!” Aubrey screamed, dropping the whiskey bottle and lurching forward.
Cannady grabbed the girl by the back of her dress, pulled her against him. “Get down here and spread your legs, bitch!”
She flailed her hands toward her father as Cannady grabbed her around the waist. “Let me go!”
Several of the men chuckled. One of the horses, whose head stall was held by Brown, gave a frightened whinny.
“Jesus, Cannady!” mockingly exclaimed Ned Crockett. “That ain’t no way to treat our host!”
As Llewellyn dropped the shotgun and fell to his knees, the cabin door creaked open. The head of the oldest girl poked out. Her voice was tentative. “Papa?”
Llewellyn fell face-forward in the dirt.
“Papa!” screamed the prospector’s oldest, bolting out of the cabin and running toward her father. The other girl came out as well, following her sister with halting footsteps, a terrified light in her young eyes.
While Cannady wrestled Aubrey down to his blanket roll, tearing at her dress, El Lobo tripped the oldest daughter. She sprawled in the dust beside her father. The Indian, Young Knife, gave a whoop and threw himself atop the screaming girl.
Several of the other men began stalking toward the cabin, ten yards in front of which the youngest girl had stopped to regard them owl-eyed. Cannady slapped Aubrey hard across her face and ripped her corset open. As the girl sagged back across his saddle, his eyes glistened down at the two firm, pale mounds of nipple-tipped flesh jutting up at him.
He gave another pull at the dress, the wash-worn fabric ripping away from her bare legs.
Cannady howled. Kneeling between the girl’s spread legs, he began unbuckling his cartridge belt. Someone grabbed his shirt from behind, gave it a couple of irritating tugs.
“Cannady, look!”
He glanced at Germany Sale standing behind him. The big, red-bearded man was staring back along the trail, where a dozen or so blazing torches jounced toward the cabin yard, growing larger and larger in the darkness.
Cannady’s hands froze on his belt buckle as he stared at the crowd moving toward him.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Cannady said, wistful. “Looks like we got comp’ny.”
14
HEARING THE SINGLE gunshot from the direction of Llewellyn’s cabin, the nine torch-bearing prospectors from the plundered camp stopped on the trail as a group.
They stared toward the bonfire stabbing its six-foot flames at the stars—an orange, ragged glow in the pitch-black night.
The creek gushed through the rocks on their left—a steady, liquid whoosh punctuated by the hollow chugs of the riffle over Dan’s Trough on the far side of the cut. Their wind-battered torches roared like dragons’ breath, rife with the stench of tar and coal oil.
Behind the men, their own and the other prospector families had finally stopped reassembling their camp to build a few small supper fires. They’d have to resume the cleanup the next day—thanks to the renegades who’d thrashed tents and board shacks and strewn the families’ meager belongings out of sheer wickedness.
One man was dead. Two more wounded.
As if life wasn’t hard enough.
“Did ye hear that?” said Chet Hurley, turning toward his tent mate, Junior Duffy. They’d been tent mates before their tent had been knocked down and torn to shreds, that is. “Pistol shot.”
“Think I’m deaf?” grunted Duffy.
The group stood frozen, holding their old-model rifles in their sweat-slick hands. Only one man—Dwight Pearson—had a new Winchester repeater. Johnny Reinhold had an old, brass-framed Confederate pistol, heavy as a clothes iron, which he backed up with a rock pick in his other hand, the long ash handle wound with rawhide.
Finally, Bill Anderson, standing at the group’s rear, chuffed impatiently. Carrying his double-bore Greener in his right hand, his torch in the other, he pushed his way to the front of the group. In spite of his injured leg, sprained neck, two black eyes, and a variety of cuts and bruises over his entire body—all incurred when the gang leader had dragged him behind his horse—Anderson bulled between Hurley and Duffy and limped ahead along the trail, striding toward Llewellyn’s cabin.
“What’d you expect ’em to be carryin’, you damn fairies—feather dusters?”
“Come on,” said Finn McGraw, the stocky man standing behind Hurley. The gang had pulled his tent down on top of him while he’d been napping, and a bloody bandage covered his left ear, which had nearly been sliced off by his chimney pipe. “Those sons o’ bitches can’t get by with what they did to our camp. And them throwin’ down in Llewellyn’s yard, rubbin’ our noses in it!”
“I never did care for Llewellyn,” said Magpie Henderson, the newest man in the group, who was also married to the prettiest girl in the camp. “He’s got airs, preferrin’ to live alone and all…”
“It ain’t about Llewellyn or his daughters,” said Reinhold, bulling ahead of the group a
nd following in Anderson’s footsteps. “They shot my brother!”
As Reinhold’s shadow moved off toward Anderson, whose vague, limping silhouette flickered against the distant fire in Llewellyn’s yard, the other group members glanced at each other, their expressions hovering somewhere between rage and terror.
They swallowed, wiped sweat from their faces, renewed their grips on their weapons and their torches, and resumed their trek up the trail toward the cabin.
Anderson was the first one in the yard. He stopped at the edge of the firelight, looking around at the saddles, bags, and other gear cast willy-nilly around the fire.
The fire itself had burned down to half the size it had been when Anderson and the others had left their own camp. Around it, the hard-packed yard was deserted. The only sounds were the fire, the chickens clucking around their pen, and the horses blowing and stomping inside the corral on the other side of the barn.
Anderson tossed his torch into the fire, gripped his shotgun in both hands across his chest, and glowered into the shunting shadows. Scuff marks and two parallel furrows, like those of a dragged body, curved around the cabin’s left wall.
Footsteps rose behind him as the others gathered to either side, breathing hard, their tension almost palpable.
“Where are they?” Reinhold said, a faint trill in his voice.
“Their gear’s here,” said Hurley, moving forward to kick a saddlebag while casting his gaze about the yard.
“It’s a trap.” Finn McGraw held his rifle straight out from his belly, sliding the barrel this way and that as he sidestepped around the fire. “Someone check the cabin. We’ll cover you.”
“I’ll do it,” grunted Anderson, limping around the fire toward the cabin’s front door.
The other men strode slowly behind him, stepping wide of the fire. They’d all tossed their torches into the flames and, all except for Johnny Reinhold, held their weapons in two hands. Reinhold held his old Spiller & Burr revolver in his right hand, the pick straight up in his left.
.45-Caliber Deathtrap Page 11