“Butcher hurt you that much,” McMasters said. “You could be in Mexico or New Mexico or on a train east or west, north or south, a long way from the reach of Arizona law. But that’s not what you want. You’re here, with me, because of Moses Butcher. He hurt you so much that the only thing you want is to see him dead. And you’re hoping that he’ll somehow manage to kill you, too. Revenge. Followed by suicide. That’s your plan.” His head shook. “Isn’t it?”
She stared at him, but did not answer and did not even blink. He waited, but then he looked away, knowing that she would not respond. She did not have to. He knew. He looked at the fire. The coffee cup felt cold in his hand and he had never cared much for cold coffee. He did not even care to drink. Or eat. Or anything.
“Well, you’re one to talk.”
It took a while before her words registered. She had spoken. To him. He looked up, surprised, and then he understood what she had just said.
Mary Lovelace emptied the cup, dipped it into a bucket of hot water, turned it over, and laid it on a flat rock to dry.
“We’re seeking the same damned thing, John McMasters,” she said before she turned around and walked to her own bedroll. “Aren’t we?”
Saying nothing, he watched her go. He was too tired to argue . . . or even agree. He sat there a long while. Exhaustion worried him, and he poured another cup of coffee but could not stifle a yawn.
Over the rain, only a drizzle that would soon be nothing more than the dripping from rocks, limbs, brush and cacti, a dry laugh bounced across the cavern’s walls. McMasters looked over the fire at Bloody Zeke The Younger.
“Old man,” the dark-skinned man said, “what you think’s gonna happen when you fall asleep. I mean, it’s been a long time since you slept, old feller, and, well, you had a right grueling day.” He laughed again.
“I won’t sleep.”
“No?” Bloody Zeke shook his head.
McMasters set the cup on the rock and stood. He moved stiffly to his saddle and saddlebags, and brought out the twist of barbed wire he had found at the abandoned homestead. Once he returned to the campfire, he settled into a comfortable position—but so everyone in the cave could see him—and removed his hat. He brought the strand of wire around his neck and secured it. The barbs pricked just enough, not so deep that they would cause him to bleed. At least, not now. But later, in the depths of night, when he could not stay awake any longer, his head would drop and the barbs would cut deep and painfully, enough to snap his head up and come full awake.
Seeing that and understanding everything, Bloody Zeke shook his head and laughed a bitter laugh of resentment. “I hope that gives you gangrene.” He squirmed into his bedroll, positioning himself into a comfortable spot, pulled the hat over his eyes, and soon began snoring.
CHAPTER 25
A man would be hard-pressed to find the little adobe hut Moses Butcher had picked. It blended in with the yellowish-brownish rocks of the Superstition Mountains. That’s why he had picked it. The hut could not be seen until you came right up to it.
To get there, you had to climb up the hill, first through the brittlebush, snakeweed, and creosote, watching for rattlesnakes and scorpions. If those didn’t bite you, then the cactus—barrel and cholla and hedgehog and prickly pear—would stick you good. And that didn’t even include the saguaro. The rocks—granite and basalt and other types some fellow had told him about—would trip you, too.
The man had called himself a geologist . . . and he’d told Butcher that those mountains had been formed by a volcano millions and millions of years ago, that he was standing in a calderas. But he did say that, most likely, a fellow might happen upon a deposit of gold—which seemed much better than ash, lava, and welded tuff.
Butcher shook his head has he rode up the hill. What the hell is a geologist? And a calderas? What the hell is that?
He still wouldn’t know welded tuff if he stepped on it.
The saguaro’s arm pointed the way, but he would have found it anyway. He saw the lone column shooting up off to the west, the garden of boulders leading to the twin flat rocks that stood as guardians to the big, rugged mountain just behind them.
“Come on.” He eased his horse up the steep incline and around the creosote. Picking a path through the rocky garden, he felt as though the damned pit remained a volcano in full eruption. Once he maneuvered around the flat rocks at least thirty feet high and a dozen feet thick, the sun disappeared and the air cooled off. He swung out of the saddle and tied the reins to the ironwood rails he had hauled in years ago.
He always rode in from the back. He never lit a fire. There was no fireplace. Besides, smoke gave away hideouts, even in a place as remote as the Superstitions.
No corral. No need. He always left his horses saddled at that camp.
He pushed open the door of the hut, and the air inside told him that no one had been there since he had last hid out. One porthole peered at the desert to the south and west. Anyone traveling across that country and looking in that direction would see only rocks and more rocks. The shack blended in, and the horses, especially at that time of day, would be hidden in shadows.
He stepped through the doorway and saw the straw-stuffed mattress. One bed. One water bucket, which would be empty after all that time. A woman’s camisole, a reminder of the last woman he had taken there. It made him smile.
“How long we staying here, Brother?” asked Ben from the doorway.
Butcher’s smile disappeared, and he moved toward the porthole, watching the last of the riders—his men—as they rounded the corner. He looked beyond them into the distance and saw nothing but desert.
“Not long.”
A rat moved about in the roof, a mix of paloverde and mesquite, cholla and saguaro skeletons, topped with dried brush. The only part of the cabin, other than the door, that would burn. Well, the mattress would, too, if the blood had all dried.
Ben moved to the bed and began bouncing.
Cherry went in next, removed his hat, and began fanning himself... or trying to get some fresh air into the stifling shack.
“From appearances, you never found that Dutchman’s mine.”
Behind him, loosening the girth on his saddle, Greaser Gomez laughed.
The bed had little bounce to it. Dust rose from the blanket, causing Cherry to curse and fan his hands.
Butcher turned from the porthole and motioned Ben and Cherry back outside then followed them out.
“I don’t come here for gold,” Butcher informed his men. “I just let folks think that.”
“There ain’t no gold here,” Bitter Page said.
“Well, that town on the other side of those hills yonder,” Milt Hanks said, “didn’t just spring up because of the view.”
A few others chuckled.
“Speaking of that town, I think we should ride in for a drink or two, a woman or three, and a card game or twenty.”
“That boomtown,” Cherry said, “has to have a bank.”
Folks said that Moses Butcher could give a look that frightened even the hardest of men. Part Lucifer, part rattlesnake, part Death himself, it was the look he gave Cherry, Ben, and the rest.
“We don’t rob banks around here. This is where we rest.” Rest. Butcher never said hide. Hell, he didn’t even care for the word hideout. Made a body feel like he was a yellow coward. “Go to Junction. Go to Goldfield. Go to some miner’s camp for coffee, and even then you offer him for what you drunk or ate. Rob a bank? That gets the law. The law comes lookin’ for us. We rest here for a day, two, maybe even a week. All the posses looking for us between Holbrook and Payson and clear down to Tombstone or Nogales don’t expect to find us here. That’s why we’re here. You get that? You understand that? You break that rule . . . I break your neck.”
“We get it, Brother,” Ben said. “Cherry wasn’t meaning nothing.”
“Right,” Cherry agreed.
“Good.”
“It’s just that there ain’t nothin’ to do ’r
ound here,” Cherry said.
“Hell. Go look for that lost mine if you want.” Butcher turned back toward the door.
Greaser Gomez chuckled.
Milt Hanks, however, was all business. “We left Holbrook at a high lope, Moses. And we didn’t get much from either that family of horse breakers or that tired ol’ mountain man and his Apache squaw and bucks. Need oats for the horses. Coffee. Bacon.”
“A fresh deck of cards,” Dirk Mannagan said.
“That ain’t marked,” Bitter Page added with a snort.
Grinning, Ben Butcher looked at his brother. “Ain’t there something you need from town, Brother?”
Butcher gave his brother The Look again. The kid lacked all the good sense Moses and his mother had tried to get through that thick skull. On the other hand, Milt Hanks had a point. As usual.
“All right,” Butcher said. “Half of you ride into town tomorrow. Get supplies. Not too much. And not at one place. You go to different stores. And you drink in different saloons.”
“Ain’t but one place to drink in the Junction,” Dirk Mannagan said.
“Don’t go there. Go to Goldfield. And don’t none of you do nothing stupid.” Butcher stepped inside and stared out the porthole once again.
* * *
“Good Lord.” Mary Lovelace pulled a handkerchief out of nowhere and crossed the cave toward McMasters.
“I’m all right,” he said as he removed the barbed-wire necklace.
“Like hell.”
He nicked his left thumb as he put the strand in his saddlebag, cursed, and stuck his thumb in his mouth.
“Tell me he’ll bleed to death, senorita,” Bloody Zeke said, laughing as he threw a saddle onto the blanket covering the black horse’s back.
She dipped the piece of silk in the bucket they had used to rinse their dishes, and dabbed the puckered scabs across McMasters’s throat.
He flinched from the pain as the water touched the first cut.
“You’re a stubborn son of a bitch,” she told him then moved on to the next wound.
“I’m alive,” he said.
“How many times did you jerk yourself awake?” She softened her touch. When he did not answer, she moved to the final wound, and slowly, carefully, did her best to cleanse it. “You could use some whiskey or something to clean this up better than dishwater.”
“I could use whiskey somewhere else,” he said.
She pulled away and looked up. He smiled. She shook her head, trying not to grin, but could not stop it. They stared for a second, and then she moved to the bucket to rinse her handkerchief and bathe the cuts once more.
“Deep as you cut yourself,” she whispered, “this won’t work much longer. You’re going to fall asleep, no matter how hard your head drops. Or you’ll just cut your jugular and bleed out like a hog in November.” She went over the wounds again, and then removed the silk rag she had been using to keep dust out of her mouth, nose, and eyes. This she also rinsed—not in the bucket, but from her canteen—and tied it over his neck, close to the cuts made by the barbed wire.
“You need help,” she said in a soft whisper that only he could hear then stood up. The smile and the tenderness out of her eyes gone, she went back to saddle her own horse.
“That wire hurts, don’t it?” Emory Logan said with a snicker. “Ya gonna have so many holes in ya, McMasters, I won’t need to find no lead for that big rifle to put through ya. Ya ain’t gonna be no target at all afore long. That bob wire it—”
“Shut up about the damned wire,” Marcus Patton said. “Just don’t even mention the damned thing.”
No one mentioned barbed wire after that. But he could not get it out of his mind as they rode out that morning, through the canyon, and up and down the rocky, winding road until they finally cut away from the river and headed into the Superstition Mountains.
Wire. Not just the wire, but that stupid homestead they had passed. Farmers. Sodbusters. Idiots.
He never could figure out why a man like his father, who’d had a good farm in Alabama, would shuck everything and move west. Oh, he knew what his pa had always said . . . about Alabama and all of the South, and how hard things were after the War for Southern Independence for a man who’d worn the gray. But it could not have been as hard as things had been for the Patton family in Nebraska after the war. One homestead, one miserable one hundred and sixty acres, had failed. His father found a job, but just long enough to feed the family and come back and file on another worthless quarter-section of dirt . . . in Nebraska and Minnesota and the Dakota Territory and Kansas and even into Colorado. Marcus Patton had grown up moving from one farm to another. Nothing could please that stupid father of his.
His thoughts returned to the barbed wire . . . and the summer of 1878 when he was twelve years old.
* * *
The family landed on a patch of ground in Kansas somewhere between nothing and Dodge City on something called the Great Western Cattle Trail. The first cattle herds came through, marching right over their crops, and the ramrods herding those mangy, raggedy-ass Texas steers refused to pay any damages.
Pa up and bought some barbed wire. “I’ll show those fool Texans.”
He made Marcus and his brothers help him string it up. “I will laugh in those cowboys’ faces when they come up next time.”
They came up. Cut the wire. Stampeded the herd through the fields and over the sod hut his father and older brothers had cut into the little bluff, causing the hole in the ground to collapse. It buried Marcus’s baby sister. And his mother. And then the cowboys shot Pa in the stomach and shoved the wire into his throat. One brother, Andy, turned to run, and they roped him and dragged him through the vandalized field to the wire. Elmer, Marcus’s big brother was a fighter and came at two of the cowboys with an axe. Two bullets from Colt revolvers stopped Elmer dead—really dead—in his tracks.
A lanky man with a walrus mustache and about two months’ growth of whiskers on his cheeks and chin spotted Marcus. “We gonna let you live, boy . . . unless you want to try your hand. With this.” He reached into his war bag and pulled out a relic of a pistol, an old Navy Colt in .36 caliber, and dropped it onto the stomach of Marcus’s dead father.
Marcus just stood there, heard them laugh, and watched them ride away.
A day later, he found Andy wrapped in the damned strands. They had made him eat some wire, too. He buried his family—except for his mother and kid sister. The cowboys had done that job for him. He picked up that Colt. And he walked to Dodge City.
Marcus met Lucas Alabaster, who drove a medicine wagon from town to town, hawking Doctor Alabaster’s Cure-What-Ails-You from Ponce de Leon’s Fountain of Youth. The bottles sold for a dollar each, but he made more playing card games with the sporting element among the hayseeds. He hired Marcus to do the cooking, refill the bottles, and maybe stitch up a few knife cuts when the local hayseeds didn’t appreciate how Patton played various games of chance. Before he was shot dead by a jealous husband in Elizabethtown, New Mexico Territory, Alabaster taught Marcus about cards. And how to shoot that Navy .36.
He decided to avenge the murders of his family . . . and would do it his own way.
* * *
Patton’s horse jerked suddenly as it climbed upward, shaking him out of his reverie. He looked around. Seeing nothing but rocks, his thoughts returned to avenging the murders and the ten men he’d killed since 1880.
* * *
In a saloon in Trinidad, Colorado, a cowboy called him a cheat . . . which he was. So good, though, he rarely got caught. He didn’t think the waddie—a terrible loser—actually saw anything, but he shot him anyway.
In Julesburg, he killed another dealer, the saloon owner, and a beer jerker who pulled a shotgun from underneath the bar. He spent almost two years in the prison in Cañon City, Colorado for those killings. Since the victims weren’t considered much men, his lawyer won an appeal that called for a retrial, but he had already moved on and did not return for that second tri
al.
A cowboy in Jacksboro, Texas, reminded him of those who had wiped out his family . . . and he shot him in the back. That was about the only real murder he had ever committed.
A few others he mostly forgot.
The most recent . . . the last two in Phoenix . . . he claimed self-defense. And it might have been, once they started shooting at him.
In the hot Phoenix courtroom, the judge asked,
“Do you have anything to say for yourself before I pass sentence?”
Patton winked. “Judge, I never lose.”
And he meant it.
He was sentenced to forty years.
CHAPTER 26
They heard the bustle, the whistles, even a gunshot long before they ever saw the town atop a hill that jutted above the desert floor between the Superstition Mountains and another mountain range in the Sonoran Desert.
“Hold up there,” John McMasters called out then waited until the riders ahead of him stopped. He looked up from the dusty trail, feeling confused. It was not Apache Junction—unless that little speck on a map had up and moved . . . and grown substantially. The Junction should be a bit farther down the road . . . and it had never been on top of a brown hill. It was nothing more than a few houses, a trading post to get tequila and sometimes, a warm beer, with a barber who also patched up bullet wounds.
The gambler in the yellow vest turned in the saddle and grinned. “What’s the matter, old man?”
McMasters ignored Patton.
“You ain’t never heard of Goldfield.” Patton chuckled.
So that was it. Another gold strike. If McMasters kept going up the road, he would likely come to Apache Junction—if anything remained of that small village. When gold was discovered, nearby claims or trading posts or towns or even cities could disappear overnight. Folks would pull out what they could, be it walls or rafters or windows or just canvas and tent poles and head to the latest boom town. Goldfield certainly was booming.
“I ain’t heard of no Goldfield,” Emory Logan said.
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