Colter raised his Remington’s barrel. “You fellas ease those pistols out of their holsters, toss ’em over there, on the other side of the room. Do that real slow because I’m just itchin’ to ruin another knee.”
“You’re gonna die, boy,” Hobart hissed through his gritted teeth and the damp ends of his mustache. “You’re gonna die real slow.”
“You, too,” Colter commanded the wounded lieutenant. “With your left hand, reach across and ease that Colt out of your holster and toss it over there.”
He kept his eyes on the others as, glancing around at each other nervously, they finally complied with Colter’s demand. One by one the Colts arced through the air and hit the floor on the other side of the room with heavy thumps. One bounced off a chair and slid up against the far wall. Hobart’s was last. In his weakened condition, the wounded lieutenant couldn’t throw his as far. It hit the floor halfway across the room and skidded beneath a table.
“You’ll never make it, kid,” McKnight said, fear sweat dribbling down his sun-blistered cheeks. “We’re meetin’ up with a whole platoon. They’ll be here soon. Should’ve been here by now, in fact.”
“Good. They can take down that son of a bitch’s confession, too.” Colter hardened his gaze at Hobart. “Go on, Lieutenant. Tell ’em what happened to Lenore.”
“You’re crazy.”
Colter glanced at McKnight. “If you’ll take a closer look at Miss Lenore’s bullet wound, you’ll see it was delivered by a Colt pistol at close range. Not a rifle. I bet it’s ringed with powder and only about twice as big as what a rifle would do.”
McKnight slid an edgy look toward Hobart, who met his gaze with a similar one of his own.
“But you probably already know that—don’t you, Lieutenant?” Colter looked at the two corporals and the sergeant still staring at him in mute fear. “Hobart killed Miss Lenore because she was foolish enough to tell him she knew what really happened back at Camp Grant, a couple nights back. How they held me so Belden could beat me till my bones rattled. How he died was an accident, sort of. I lashed out with a boot, caught him off balance, and he fell and rapped his head against an open tailgate.”
Colter slid his gaze back to Hobart. “Tell ’em that’s true. Even if they don’t believe you, tell ’em.”
Hobart’s face looked like an overfilled water flask, and above the wet goatee it was as red as an Iowa barn. He shook his head, grinding his jaws, his hazel eyes sparking. “That wasn’t how it happened. You killed her ’cause she was gonna sell you out.”
Colter narrowed his right eye as he slid his Remington toward Hobart’s other leg.
“No-o-o!”
The man’s cry was drowned by the Remy’s thunder.
Dust puffed from the blue cloth over the man’s left knee. Hobart jerked as though he’d been struck by lightning. He threw a wail at the ceiling, then dropped over his left knee, covering it with his left hand and sobbing. “Oh, you son of a bitch!”
“Tell ’em,” Colter said quietly. “Or the next one’s gonna raise the pitch of your screams about five hundred notches.”
Hobart glanced at the others, tears and sweat dripping down his face and into his mustache. “I did it,” he said, panting, eyes on Colter’s aimed Remy. “I shot her.”
The barman, Calderon, was leaning back against the shelves behind him, holding his hands shoulder high, palms out. He made a raspy whistling sound as he stared brightly over the bar at Hobart.
“Good enough,” Colter said, starting to move toward the door, keeping his Remington extended at the soldiers and his Henry resting on his shoulder. “I just wanted to hear you say it. I wanted Lenore to hear you say it.” Softly, he added, scowling against the knot growing in his throat. “I think she did.”
He glanced at the sergeant. “You might mention that to the major, when you boys get back to Camp Grant.” At the half-open door, he turned to face the soldiers directly once more. “Fairchild can thank me later for not havin’ to go to all the work of buildin’ a gallows.”
As he stared at Colter, Hobart’s eyes jerked wide. His mouth opened, but before he could scream, Colter blew the top of his head against the bar behind him. The other soldiers screamed and jumped, eyes pinched in horror as they glanced down at Lieutenant Hobart flopping and bleeding on the floor.
“You fellas stay put till I’m outta sight,” Colter told them. “You so much as poke your head out this door, you’ll look like him.”
He jerked his pistol toward the now-lifeless Hobart slumped on his side with his brains oozing out the top of his head, then nudged the door open with his heels and backed out onto the gallery. He crossed the gallery and backed down the steps, then strode toward Northwest waiting by the hitchrack, staring at Colter and thrashing his tail uneasily. Colter walked quickly, turning often to make sure the soldiers weren’t coming after him. From inside the station house came a low murmur of alarmed voices, but he reckoned the soldiers knew he meant business.
None so much as poked his head out the door.
He shoved his tequila bottle into his saddlebag pouch. Keeping an eye on the station house, he slid the bit through the coyote dun’s teeth, tightened the latigo strap, and stepped into the saddle. He swung the horse away from the cabin, looked to the east—the direction from which he’d come—then west.
Dust rose like distant smoke. Beneath the rising cloud was a smudge of blue. Just above the blue was a wavering patch of red and blue, which would likely be the oncoming platoon’s pennant-shaped cavalry guidon. Judging by the size of the dust cloud, there were probably around twenty riders galloping toward him.
Colter swung the coyote dun south and booted him into a gallop, heading between a barn and what appeared a stone blacksmith shop. As Northwest clomped through the sage and yucca, Colter spied something hunkered down near the base of the hay barn. Calderon’s cat, El Fuerte, swung his head to follow Colter and gave his tail a parting flick. Colter pitched his hat brim to the indignant feline, muttered, “My pleasure, cat,” then hunkered low in the saddle, broke out away from the relay station’s outbuildings, and galloped straight south across a flat expanse of sandy green desert rolling up gradually toward a rise of distant blue mountains.
He wasn’t sure where the line was that separated Arizona from Mexico, but he was heading south, so he was heading for it. And when he came to it he’d cross it and he wouldn’t look back.
He figured he’d crossed into Mexico by seven or eight o’clock that night. And, just as he’d vowed, he did not look back. He wasn’t sure if the soldiers would follow him across the line, but he had to assume they would. U.S. troops often chased Apaches deep into Mexico, sometimes as far south as the Sierra Madre, but usually with the permission of the Mexican government.
Would they attain that permission to follow him? Most likely. He was wanted for killing several U.S. soldiers and the daughter of a cavalry major, after all, and that probably made him just about as wanted as any bronco Apache. He doubted anyone would believe—or would want to believe—Hobart’s gunpoint confession.
He gave a grim smile and reined Northwest to a halt atop a small knoll over which a dusting of stars gleamed so crisply in the dry, cool air of a desert September that they looked close enough to reach up and grab. He, Colter Farrow, a young horse rancher from Colorado’s Lunatic Range, was as wanted as an Apache. Hell, maybe he was even more wanted. And here he was in Mexico, once more on the run with soldiers after him, and likely now more bounty hunters than he’d ever imagined.
His chest felt tight with anxiety and uncertainty. He did not know Mexico. He did not know the language. Where would he go, and how, down here, would he ever be able to make a living? He had nineteen dollars in coins rolling around in his pockets and saddlebags, and that would last him a month or two if he lived sparingly, but eventually he’d need money if only for ammo, flour, sugar, and half
a bag of Arbuckles’.
If they even sold coffee down here. Did the Mexicans drink it?
He shook his head and sighed. Here he was, practically on death’s doorstep, and he was worried about where he’d find coffee in Mexico. He must still be addled from Belden’s beating. His ribs hadn’t been screaming with every lurch of his horse lately, but he could still feel the fatigue of his injuries deep in his bones, in every fiber of his being.
He needed a long night’s rest in a bed.
That half-formed thought was what had stopped him here. He stared southwest, where several wan lights glowed amongst the rolling hills, at the base of a low gray wall of ridges that blocked out the stars along the southern horizon. A town of some size, most likely, as there were too many lights for a stage station or a ranch. He’d find a bed there. He’d done his best these last few hours to cover his tracks, avoiding trails and riding where Northwest’s hooves were less likely to leave a print, so he figured he’d bought himself at least a few hours of badly needed rest.
He booted Northwest on down the knoll and after another half hour, when he was half asleep and could tell by the horse’s splay-legged stride that Northwest was nearly asleep himself, the trail rose along a gradual slope, and he could begin to smell the smoke of burning piñon and mesquite on the autumn-chill air. He’d smelled that aroma at Camp Grant, as well. It was the sweetest-smelling perfume, and it seemed to go with an almost eerily quiet, night-cloaked desert landscape and the distant yammering of coyotes.
Lights appeared on both sides of the trail—lamplight dimmed by curtained windows in small, boxlike adobe or mud-brick houses that seemed as one with the rolling hills as the rocks or paloverde trees. As Colter rode on up into the town, a potpourri of smells washed over him—the burning piñon mixed with the ammonia musk of chicken and goat pens and privies, as well as the more inviting aromas of spicy roasted meat.
He rounded a bend and caught a whiff of perfume and tobacco smoke, and he heard the low rumble of conversation mixed with women’s laughter. On the left side of the trail that had become the pueblo’s main street, he saw a three-story adobe with a gallery on the first floor and balconies on each of the two upper floors. On both balconies and on the gallery, he could make out the silhouettes of men and women smoking and drinking and laughing as they sat or stood, the women casting alluring poses, the lamplight from the windows behind them glistening on their brushed black hair and dangling earrings.
On the far right end of the third-floor balcony, away from two other men and one woman, a pair were fumbling and muttering in a lovers’ drunken embrace. The woman was speaking Spanish in scolding tones while she laughed and appeared to be nuzzling the man’s neck while at the same time brushing away his hands that kept lifting her ruffled skirt to expose her brown legs clear up to her rump.
Colter turned quickly away and lowered his hat brim down over his forehead, perusing the buildings around him for a quiet place to hole up. He drew back on Northwest’s reins and stared down into a window on the left side of the street. Just inside what was apparently a café, beyond a warped glass window, the strange blond girl he’d seen earlier at the stage relay station sat at a table with old, rumpled Wade and the rat-faced younger man, Harlan.
Wade sat across the table from her, to Colter’s left. His head was resting on his arms on the table, and he appeared sound asleep. Harlan, facing the window on the far side of the table from Colter, sat straight-backed in his own chair, his eyes closed, head bobbing.
Meanwhile, the strange, little blond girl was hunkered over a paper she’d spread out on the table before her, near a pile of what appeared to be their scrap-laden supper plates. She was jabbing the paper with a pencil, and her lips were moving, which meant she was speaking, though her two male companions didn’t appear to be hearing her any better than Colter could.
Just then she looked up, scowled, grabbed a fork, and rapped it violently against the tin cup on the table before Harlan so loudly that Colter could hear the ringing clatter through the window.
Both men jerked awake, Wade lifting his head and running two thick hands down his face, blinking. The girl jutted her chin angrily across the table at the men, berating them both while jabbing her pencil at the paper before her.
Colter gave a wry snort. Not caring enough about why the girl was here to even wonder about it, he nudged the coyote dun ahead, sleepier than he was hungry, just wanting a soft bed to drop his tired body into.
Chapter 11
He wandered through a dark stretch of street, hearing a man singing a Spanish song off in the night-cloaked hills beyond the pueblo—a sad song from the tone. A Mexican ballad. Colter reined up when he saw a two-story mud-brick building off to his right, south of the main street, on the far side of a sandy wash along which a slender strand of a stream glistened in the starlight.
Most of the windows on both stories appeared lit, and behind one a shadow jostled. The place seemed too large for a private house in this country—at least, he’d never seen one this size yet—and as he crossed the wash and put Northwest up the opposite side, a wooden sign appeared, limned in starlight, over the broad front porch.
HOTEL DE BABYLON.
Through a front window left of the door, he could see four men playing cards by lamplight, a fire dancing in a hearth against the far left wall. No sounds emanated from the place. Figuring he could get a good night’s sleep here, in this quiet hotel at the edge of town, Colter swung down from Northwest’s back and looped his reins over the hitch rack. He’d been hearing the balladeer off in the hills, and now the song was growing louder, and he could hear the accompaniment of slow-plodding hooves as the horse and singing rider moved closer.
Colter stood atop the porch and stared in the direction of the balladeer. A drunk Mex heading to town in search of love, no doubt. He’d always heard the folks south of the border were a romantic lot. Fleetingly, he remembered his old Mexican friend, Cimarron Padilla, who’d run a ranch up in Wyoming and on which Colter had worked for a time, before all hell had broken loose up there, as well. Wishing he could feel half as good as the singing rider sounded, he swung around and pushed through the Babylon’s front door.
He paused just inside, taking note of the thick red rugs on the floor and the warm fire, a polished oak bar on his right, with rows of pigeonholes and key rings flanking it, along with a back-bar mirror and shelves holding bottles and glasses. A humble place with stark, brick walls made comfortable by the polished bar, the rugs, and the fire. There were a half dozen oak tables arranged around stout ceiling joists, and what appeared an old suit of armor, maybe worn by a long-dead conquistador, standing sentinel against the back wall, to the left of a broad, stone stairs rising toward the second story.
The three cardplayers, dressed in short, fancily stitched jackets, colorful neckerchiefs, and leather pants with broad cuffs hanging around polished black or brown, silver-tipped boots, all turned to regard the newcomer with mute interest. Vaqueros, Colter thought. Mexican cowboys. Steeple-crowned sombreros hung down their backs by braided horsehair thongs.
Colter latched the door against the night chill. A stout man with a tumbleweed thatch of gray-streaked black hair ducked out of a curtained doorway flanking the bar. His arms were filled with split firewood. He glanced at Colter, frowning, then continued on around the bar and crossed the room to the fireplace on the other side.
He said something in Spanish, and the three vaqueros laughed as they swung quick, appraising looks at Colter. The man with the thick hair, dressed in a shabby suit with a wide red necktie swelling out over his broad belly, glanced at Colter, then ambled back over to the bar.
“You didn’t understand me,” he said in Spanish-accented English.
“No, sir, I didn’t.”
“I didn’t think you would,” the man said, breathing heavily from his wood-hauling chore. “Gringos never understand
Mexican, as they call our language, down here, while when we are up there”—he canted his head toward the north as though to indicate America—“they expect us to understand American.”
Colter didn’t know what to say to that, so he said nothing, feeling his cheeks warm uncomfortably. It was a lonely feeling, being in a foreign country alone. Now he thought he understood a little better how Cimarron must have felt, up in Wyoming.
The barman leaned an elbow on the counter and studied Colter with fascination. “You are a branded man, Rubio.”
“That’s mighty observant of you, partner.”
“What if I had something against branded men? Down here, you know, branded men are usually wanted men. Or they are not wanted, maybe—by anyone one at all. Which are you?” The thick-haired man lifted his thick upper lip away to show the edges of his yellow-brown teeth, his eyes flicking to the Remington holstered for the cross draw on Colter’s left hip. “Judging by those blue eyes and the shredded beef someone made of your lips”—he ran a hand across his own mouth—“maybe both, uh?”
Colter’s tongue tied in frustration. He was damn tired, but he wasn’t so tired he’d take any shit. He’d hole up out in the country again. He’d just started to swing around when the man said, “You want a woman, Rubio? Is that what you’re here for?”
“I’m here for a good night’s sleep.”
“What’s your name?”
Colter hesitated. The man saw the indecision right away, and that made his lips spread farther away from his teeth.
Defiantly, Colter said, “Colter Farrow.”
“In Mejico alone, Senor Farrow?”
“Look, partner, I’m not here to chin with you. I just need a room and a stable and food and water for my horse out yonder. If that’s too much trouble, I’ll light elsewhere.”
Behind Colter, one of the vaqueros said something angrily in Spanish. Colter glanced over to see one of the men slowly sliding a Schofield pistol from a black, silver-trimmed leather holster thonged to his left thigh. Colter had begun sliding his own right hand across his belly, toward his Remy, when the man before him closed his hand over Colter’s wrist as he turned to the vaqueros and spewed a string of hard Spanish.
Last Ride of Jed Strange (9781101559635) Page 8