* * *
Bloody Zeke The Younger slowed down his mount—the bay had so much heart it would run till its heart burst—but Zeke had let some sense creep back into his mind and his heart. He wasn’t about to ride into Moses Butcher’s camp with his hands in chains and without any bullets in his Army Colt.
The woman, apparently, did not think about such details.
He looked back and saw the others loping along. Swearing, he kicked the bay into a full gallop. Cactus and rocks zipped past as he gained on the woman. Hooves kicking up sand and pebbles in a winding wash, his horse was larger, stronger, older than the mustang the girl rode.
And Zeke had been on horses a lot longer than she had. He came up alongside her.
“Stop!” he barked.
She did not listen.
“Idiot.” He wasn’t sure he meant the redhead or himself, but he brought the reins to his mouth, let his teeth clamp on them, and leaned toward her. Holding his breath, he reached out with his manacled hands. She saw him then, and leaned up in the saddle, trying to pull the reins away from his grasp. She did, but that turned the mustang sharply, and she felt herself falling, and heard herself cursing Bloody Zeke The Younger, Ben Butcher, and herself.
* * *
Stars blazed orange and red and purple behind her closed eyes. She felt her lungs sucking in air and blocked the pain in her head and back. She wiggled her fingers. Then her toes. At least, she thought she did. She heard hooves clop as she bent her left leg up, then her right. She lowered her legs back to the ground, rolled over, pushed herself up, spit blood and sand onto the dirt, and came up to her knees.
Only then did Mary Lovelace open her eyes.
She was alive. She had broken neither neck nor spine, only split her lip and banged up her head a bit. Her vision cleared, and she came to her feet, reaching for the Remington in the holster and praying.
Her fingers touched the hot grips.
It’s still there!
She drew it and turned toward the sound of the hooves. The .44-40 pistol came up and the hammer clicked loudly as she pulled it back.
“Lot of good it’ll do you, you stupid girl,” Bloody Zeke The Younger told her. He had caught her mustang and led it back. “You’re empty.”
She did not argue. Did not bluff. It did not matter.
“You were going after him with an empty gun.”
“And then I let reason take hold.” He gestured down the wash. “The rest are coming.”
She turned, spit out more blood, and sighed. Sure enough, there rode McMasters and the others. She started to holster the Remington, but Bloody Zeke stopped her.
“Check it for sand. Make sure the cylinder will spin. And make sure the barrel’s not clogged with dirt or anything. You don’t want that blowing up in your face.”
She did as he had instructed her and watched as the riders neared. When the others stopped, McMasters came ahead of them, stopping a few feet in front of Mary, who’d holstered the Remington .44-40 and wiped her busted lip with the back of her hand.
“You’ll want bullets for that,” McMasters told her and then nodded at Bloody Zeke. “You, too, I suspect.” He pulled back the unfastened leather covering of one of his saddle bags, straightened in the saddle, and stood in the stirrups, letting the reins drop over the chestnut’s neck but keeping a firm grip on the twelve-gauge.
Mary did not have to turn around. She knew what he was seeing and studying—the dust from Ben Butcher and the others.
“Let’s not tarry,” the gambler said. “This close, I’d hate to lose them.”
“We won’t lose them, ” Mary said as she walked toward McMasters then reached inside the saddlebag and withdrew a handful of cartridges. The rimfires she let slide back inside, rattling like rain on a roof as they dropped onto others. She found a Winchester round and slipped it into the cylinder. “I know where they’re going. So does Zeke.”
“That’s a fact,” Bloody Zeke said. “But they won’t be there for long.”
Mary stepped away from McMasters and finished loading the revolver, and backed away as Bloody Zeke came to the bag to find bullets for his Richards conversion. 44. She noticed that McMasters swung the shotgun into an easier-to-handle position while Zeke loaded his pistol.
“You got a plan?” Bloody Zeke asked McMasters.
* * *
Sound carries a great distance in the desert. Especially gunshots.
“Trouble?” Dirk Mannagan shot a glance at Moses Butcher, who had stepped out of the adobe hut and stared off in the direction of Goldfield.
“That ain’t nobody huntin’ quail.” Butcher cursed bitterly. “Make sure all the cinches are tight,” he told Greaser Gomez. “Zuni”—he found the half-breed—“take that Sharps and a couple bandoleers.” He pointed. “Make your way up. You know the spot. If that dumb ass brother of mine leads a posse here, you’ll have to keep them occupied. Then we’ll meet you at the canyon north of Bisbee.”
The half-breed drew the big buffalo rifle from the scabbard, nodded without speaking, and grabbed the bandoleers before he turned and began jogging silently up the incline. Butcher watched him until the shadows swallowed him.
“It could be something else,” Mannagan said, then corrected himself. “Somebody else.”
“That’s why we ain’t runnin’.” Butcher drew his revolver, opened the gate, set the hammer to half cock and spun the cylinder on his forearm, checking the cartridges. He always kept six loads. Most folks kept only five, leaving the chamber underneath the hammer empty for safety. Safety, to Moses Butcher, was a fully loaded six-shooter. He swore again and leaned against the doorway, staring at the bed. “If that brother of mine started a ruckus over some petticoat to bring back here, I’ll skin the bastard alive.”
There was nothing to do, but wait.
* * *
A long while later, Butcher saw the dust, and jacked a round into the Winchester he carried. “What do you make?”
Standing to his side, Greaser Gomez shrugged. “Four.”
“Ben better hope he’s the one dead on the floor of some brothel in Goldfield.”
“Five men.” Dirk Mannagan slid off a rock and offered Butcher the spyglass. “Four horses.”
“Son of a bitch!”
“They’re riding for us,” the Mexican said.
Butcher swore again.
Mannagan brought the telescope back to his eyes and scanned the desert floor before him. “Boss, as far as I can tell . . . nobody’s following them.”
That grabbed Butcher’s attention. He stepped away from the shack, shifted the Winchester to his left hand, and held out his right for the telescope. He let Mannagan take the Winchester and peered through the brass spyglass. He could not make out the two riders on the one horse, but he could see his brother whipping his already lathered horse into a deadly run. But that was not what Butcher wanted to see. He looked past them, following the dust on a straight line toward the faraway hill on which Goldfield lay. No dust. No posse.
“They’ll still be able to follow their trail,” Mannagan said.
“No.” Gomez pointed, and Mannagan and Butcher followed his finger.
At first, Butcher thought the Mexican was pointing at the thunderclouds, expecting another monsoon to wipe out any trail. But rain could not be predicted, even during the wet months. He saw more dust in front of the dark clouds. He lowered the spyglass and handed it back to Mannagan.
“Dust storm.”
Then Moses Butcher laughed. Shaking his head, he looked up toward the heavens and laughed again. “This is how you reward my idiot kid brother? You spare his hide with a merciful dust storm?” He took the Winchester and eared back the hammer. “I might,” he said in a deadly whisper, “kill that fool anyway.”
Hanks and Page rode in first, neither bothering to dismount but busying themselves by reloading their weapons. Their horses blew heavily, but despite the lope across the Sonoran range, they weren’t finished. Milt Hanks and Bitter Page knew how to ke
ep an animal game enough to give them twenty more miles.
“Wasn’t our fault,” Milt Hanks said.
When Butcher spit and began to speak, Hanks snapped the chamber gate shut on his Colt. “Wasn’t his, either.”
Bitter Page did the explaining, saying how they were walking into the saloon when some tinhorn came out with a hostage. “Once we backed out of the saloon to let whatever was about to happen play out between the cardsharper, his patsy, and the good folks of the boomtown, some stupid hussy across the street started screaming and shooting . . . at Ben. The rough lot with her took up the fight, too.”
“Some wench?” Moses Butcher asked.
“Redhead. That’s about all I saw,” Hanks said.
“If she was shootin’ at Ben, then it was Ben’s—” He didn’t finish as Miami and Cherry rode in next.
Cherry slipped off the back of the horse and rolled over on the ground.
“Gawd a’mighty, Gawd a’mighty, Gawd a’mighty.” He brought his hand away from his side. Blood stained his fingers and his vest.
“Hell,” Butcher said, and motioned for Mannagan to help the wounded outlaw.
A half-minute later, Ben Butcher galloped up the slope and behind the rocks. Moses Butcher raised a finger and started to swear, but his kid brother got in the first shots.
“Don’t start that with me. This is your damned fault. You want to know who it was that started that ball? Not me. None of us. It was that damned bitch you brought here all those years back. Remember? The redhead? That little witch?”
Moses Butcher spit. “I’ve brought a lot of hussies here. And gave them to you after I’d tired of ’em. And all of ’em is buried in the rocks—” He stopped. He remembered.
Ben Butcher spit and began reloading his pistol. “I mean Mary Elizabeth Carmen. The one you sold to that gambler.” He shoved his pistol into the holster. “You thought it was funny. Well she wasn’t laughin’ when she spotted me.”
“Hell.” Butcher stepped around the corner, picking up the telescope Mannagan had laid on a rock. He looked carefully yet still saw no dust. He swung to the north, found the clouds and the thick churning dust moving southwest, and back toward the path his men had traveled.
He snapped the brass spyglass shut and shoved it into his pants pocket. “We can’t chance it. That dust storm could play out. It might not. We ride out. I don’t give a damn if that fiery witch happened to spot you or not, Ben. If you’ve led the law to the best resting place I’ve had in ten years, I’ll stake you out in front of an ant bed.”
“We’re short one horse,” Hanks said.
“Zuni’s better on foot than on a horse.” Butcher gestured up the rocky mountain. “He’ll keep them pinned. If they come. If they don’t, he’ll steal a horse and meet us in the canyon.”
Mannagan helped Cherry to his feet. He had stuffed a handkerchief in the hole in the fool’s back, and wrapped it tightly with strips made from the sleeves of the wounded outlaw’s shirt.
Moses Butcher looked across the desert, and, seeing no sign of a pursuing posse, he and his men went to work to break camp. They would hide their trail, brushing away the tracks with leafy branches, but careful enough so that most eyes would not notice the signs made by the leafy branches. They would not run. “Never run,” sweet Auntie Faye used to say, “lessen you didn’t have no other damned choice. The last way you oughts to die is with a bullet in your back.”
They broke camp, mounted their horses, and prepared to leave.
Cherry, leaning over in his saddle from the pain of the bullet in his back, straightened, coughed, and flew down from his horse, landing in the cactus with a thump. His groan, as he rolled over, was drowned by the report of a rifle shot that echoed and died in the wind.
CHAPTER 31
At first, Butcher thought Zuni had double-crossed them, had blown Cherry out of the saddle. Then he understood that the shot had come from the opposite direction. Another bullet kicked up sand in front of him, almost causing his horse to bolt. It would have, but his kid brother snatched up the reins and held the horse tightly.
“That shot came from the other direction!” Milt Hanks spurred his horse and took off to the east. Miami followed him.
Beside Cherry, Mannagan cursed as another bullet blew spines off the arms of the pointing cactus. Yet another tore off Ben Butcher’s hat.
Grabbing the reins to his horse, Moses Butcher drew his pistol and fired in the general direction of the second gunman.
“Get out of here!” he yelled to his brother, who needed no more encouragement.
“Why ain’t that damned breed doin’ nothin’?” Mannagan shouted as he snagged the reins to his own horse.
Too many answers to that question, Butcher thought as he dismounted and squatted by Cherry. Another bullet kicked up dust about ten yards in front of him. A shot from behind whined off a rock. But Moses Butcher, remembering his favorite aunt, remained calm. He drew Cherry’s pistol from the holster, pried both of Cherry’s hands from the ugly wound in the kid’s gut, and put the big Schofield in his right hand. Then Butcher drew his own Colt and placed it in Cherry’s left hand.
“Son,” Butcher told him as two shots ricocheted near him. “They’ve killed you. You know that. Just take as many of those bastards with you as you can.”
Then, Moses Butcher swung into the saddle, leaned low, and let the horse take him through the desert, following the rest of his gang. Bullets buzzed past him and his horse. He just prayed that none hit him in the back. If that happened, Auntie Faye would be disgusted with him when she greeted him at the gates of hell.
* * *
Emory Logan lowered the Colt Burgess rifle, and slid down the sloping rock, dropping into the saddle and gathering the reins. “They’s runnin’. Looks like Carter got one of ’em. They left him behind.”
Standing in the stirrups, McMasters could see the dust caused by the fleeing outlaws. Lowering the binoculars, he let them hang from his neck by the strap and drew the Remington from the saddle scabbard. “Let’s ride.”
That was all the encouragement Mary Lovelace needed. She spurred her mustang and took off across the rocks and desert toward Butcher’s camp. McMasters and the one-eyed killer from Missouri followed.
They had split up, McMasters, Logan, and Lovelace circling around south and east; Alamo Carter, Bloody Zeke The Younger, and Marcus Patton coming around from the north and west. Zeke and the redheaded woman knew the location of Moses Butcher’s hideout. McMasters—from his experience catching wild horses and mustangs—and Carter—as a scout for the U.S. cavalry—knew how to cross the desert without raising dust or being seen. It helped that a dust storm was blowing in behind them. That, they’d guessed, would make Butcher relax . . . or keep his attention there.
Besides, the outlaws would expect a posse to come barreling across the Sonoran like a cavalry charge led by George Custer, following the trail and the dust Butcher’s kid brother and his cohorts were leaving. They would not expect anyone to sneak up on them like Apaches.
From what Bloody Zeke and Mary Lovelace had said, McMasters knew that sneaking up on Moses Butcher and his bunch in camp would be practically impossible. They would not stick around anyway. McMasters’ plan had been to drive the killers into running. Then his posse would pursue, catch them, and kill them. Every mother’s son of them.
Guns in hand, Mary, Logan, and McMasters galloped toward the camp. He saw the dust coming from the far base of the mountain and knew that would be Alamo Carter, the gambler, and Bloody Zeke also making for Butcher’s hideout. One rider loped off toward the east, hugging close to the edge of the mountains. That would be Alamo Carter, making sure he did not lose sight of the running outlaws. Or at least keep on a warm trail.
“Toward the hideout!” McMasters yelled above the thundering hooves.
Mary Lovelace turned in the saddle and glared.
“I’m not leaving a man behind us!” he snapped.
“He’s dead!” she called back.
“What if he’s not?” McMasters yelled, and thought of something else. “What if he’s Moses Butcher?”
She frowned, but tugged the reins and veered toward the cactus, the hill, and the twin rocks.
Reaching the cactus, McMasters brought the chestnut to a stop, swung out of the saddle, and quickly wrapped the reins around a rock. He came up quickly, shotgun ready, and scanned the long way up toward the hidden fortress. “Stay with the horses.”
“Like hell,” she replied.
“Stay,” he snapped. “If it’s Butcher, I’ll bring you up.”
She did not argue.
McMasters nodded at the one-eyed Reb and they took off running, keeping low, and pointing their long arms toward the rocks. McMasters could see the gambler and Bloody Zeke swinging off their horses, too, but those two had a lot more ground to cover.
McMasters pointed off in the distance as he ran. At the rock, he braced his back against it. He could see the brown dust storm as it moved across the desert basin, heading toward Goldfield. That might keep the town posse out of his hair . . . for a little while, at least. Logan was already creeping toward the north and east, so McMasters, checking to make sure the twelve-gauge was not in its SAFE mode, went the other way. He wet his lips, dried his hands on his pants, and moved carefully but quickly. He did not want to give Moses Butcher too much of a head start.
He reached the edge of the rock, held his breath, and looked across the desert toward the slowly approaching Zeke and Patton. He listened, then removed his hat, and held it out with his fingertips. No one shot it out of his hand, but only a greenhorn would have done that. The hat returned to his head, and he dropped to his knees, and then dived away from the rock, landing on the ground, aiming the shotgun at the figure sitting up against a rock. Something told him not to squeeze the trigger.
McMasters was up then, on his knees, keeping the barrels of the 1894 Remington aimed at the man before him. Two pistols lay at his side, but both hands clutched his stomach, blood spilling between the fingers and flowing down his body into a lake between his legs.
Remington 1894 Page 24