Last Ride of Jed Strange (9781101559635)

by Leslie, Frank

  To Colter’s right, a gun blasted loudly. He could see the sudden flash inside an adobe, briefly silhouetting several human figures clad in serapes and sombreros.

  “Hell!” Bethel said with a start, riding off Northwest’s right hip.

  Inside the adobe, a man groaned loudly. There was the raucous scrape of a table across a wooden floor. The adobe fell silent except for the thud of boots and the chime of spurs. A man groaned again, louder, and then a figure pushed through the adobe’s front doorway, the door propped open by a rock.

  He stumbled across a narrow porch, a pistol in his right hand. He triggered the pistol into the porch, flames stabbing down. Colter’s old Remington was instantly in his hand and tracking the big Mexican as he stumbled into the street and dropped to his knees about ten feet from where Bethel sat her dancing pinto, sawing back on the reins.

  The man lifted his head, sombrero falling down his back, and gave a wail that for an instant drowned out the dog’s barks and echoed loudly around the town and surrounding ridges. He looked down at his belly, pressing both hands against the glistening wound, then sagged slowly forward until his forehead hit the ground.

  Behind him, more boots slowly pounded the adobe’s wooden floor as men moved out to see about the wounded man.

  “Come on.” Colter depressed the Remy’s hammer and returned the gun to its holster as they continued along the street.

  A few minutes later they found a big wooden livery barn on the right side of the street, almost directly across from a two-story adobe with several arched windows and doorways and with a second-story balcony. HOTEL was painted across the top of the second-floor wall, vaguely revealed by two oil pots burning on the street fronting the place and the two white-clad figures lounging on the front veranda.

  Colter and Bethel rode their horses up the livery barn’s wooden ramp. Inside they found a shriveled, old, sandal-and-pajama-clad man whom, for a few coins each from Bethel and Colter, somberly led the horses off into the shadows cast by a single, low lantern, nodding and muttering. Bethel knew some Spanish, so she’d done all the talking, what little there was, and as she and Colter tramped down the ramp, Colter burdened with his saddlebags and rifle, he said, “He gonna rub ’em down and feed ’em proper?”

  “Said he would. You never know for sure about anything here.”

  “Hell, I’d just as soon care for my own horse.”

  “And insult that old-timer?” Bethel shook her head. “That ain’t how you get along down here, Colter. If you don’t wanna wake up with your throat cut, you’d best let me do the talkin’ from now on.”

  “You do have a way with words.” Colter looked up and down the street lit here and there by flares and lamplit windows. Normally, he would have bedded down in the barn with his horse, but Bethel could use a bed for a night. It would likely be her last for a while. He glanced at the hotel on the other side of the street. “Come on. I’ll get us a coupla rooms.”

  “Ah, hell, you don’t have to do that. I can sleep in the barn or find me a creek with some nice, soft grass. Trail supplies and payin’ Harlan an’ Vincent a pretrip retainer left me light.”

  “My ass is sore. Come on.”

  He swung around, crossed the street, and climbed the steps of the hotel’s veranda. The two lounging men fell silent and watched them from beneath their broad-brimmed hats, both holding cigarettes in their fingers. Their hats kept the light from their faces, though it touched lightly on the sides of their eyes. Bethel pinched her hat brim cordially to the men, who sat like statues holding their smoldering cigarettes, and Colter followed her inside the hotel.

  The small lobby was appointed with dilapidated leather furniture, a gilt-frame mirror, and a broad oak desk at the back. The walls were papered in dark blue with silver leaves. A middle-aged man with gray hair and a black mustache plucked coins from Colter’s proffered open palm, Bethel chastising him gently when he apparently took one too many before grabbing a lantern and leading them up a narrow stone stairway to the second story.

  The man stuck a key in a lock and opened the door, the hinges squawking loudly in the musty dimness, the lantern offering the only light except for that emanating from under a couple of other doors. When he’d lit a lamp on the room’s only dresser, the gray-haired man gestured for Bethel to enter, then looked at Colter, who frowned. “Which one is mine?”

  “We’ll share this one,” Bethel said.

  “I got enough for us each to have a room.”

  “I don’t want you spendin’ more money than you have to. This room’s got two beds though he’s only chargin’ us for one.” She gave a devilish little half smile. “Since we’re brother an’ sister an’ all . . . and down on our luck.”

  Colter sighed and followed her into the room. Muttering to himself, the gray-haired man drew the door closed, and his slippered feet scuffed away down the hall. Colter dropped his saddlebags on the floor, leaned his rifle against the wall, sat on the edge of the bed abutting the cracked left wall decorated with a garish oil painting of two white horses standing before an elaborate hacienda surrounded by large, green trees, and doffed his hat. A spider was spinning its web down the front of the painting, almost reaching the horses.

  He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and scrubbed his hands through his long, tangled hair. His aches and pains bit him bone-deep, and he realized that he was so tired he didn’t think he had the energy to take his jacket and clothes off and crawl under the blankets.

  With effort, he shrugged out of his coat and tossed it on the floor. As Bethel poured water into the tin bowl on the washstand that stood below the room’s single window, he rummaged around in his saddlebags for his tequila bottle and burlap-wrapped bundle of cooked pork.

  “Hungry?”

  Bethel toweled her face and neck off and sagged down on the edge of her bed. “How much you got there?”

  “Enough for two.”

  Colter held the bundle out to her, and she took a chunk and began picking it apart with her fingers. She still had her coat on. Her face was clean of trail dust, and it fairly glowed red from the scrubbing. Wisps of damp hair clung to her cheeks. In a few years, she’d make a pretty girl—not beautiful but pretty—though likely a bossy one, Colter ruefully, silently opined. Might get a little plump, too, though she sure could use some tallow on her bones now.

  He took a slug of the tequila and coughed as it followed a bite of pork into his belly. Handing the bottle out to Bethel, he said, “Snort?”

  “I don’t drink, thanks.” Her voice owned an uppity tone, and she did not favor him with a glance. “And by the sound of it, you don’t, neither. Why start now? It’s the ruin of otherwise upstanding men.”

  Colter shoved the last of the pork into his mouth, tossed the burlap onto the floor, and leaned back against the wall, facing the window, the bed’s single pillow padding the small of his back. He raised a knee, wagged it, and took another pull from the bottle. “It makes me feel good.” It, did, too—a soothing balm, sort of like the wild mint his mother had used as a poultice for open wounds and the stinging, itching rash of poison oak—all the way to his toes.

  Bethel frowned like an old lady as she continued to stuff small bits of pork into her mouth, keeping her eyes on her hands. “Well, don’t get drunk over there and think about tryin’ nothin’ with me, Colter Farrow. Or I’ll be forced to use my hog leg on you and wishin’ I’d made you fork over good money for a second room.”

  Colter choked on another swallow of tequila. Some of it came up his nose. He coughed, rubbed his forearm across his mouth.

  She looked at him, annoyed. “What’s so funny?”

  “Sorry, Bethel.” He chuckled again, coughed again, closed his eyes, and shook his head.

  “What—you don’t think I could get even a drunk man’s blood up?”

  Holding his bottle on his thigh, Co
lter leaned back against the wall again, the tequila making him want to have some fun with the overly serious girl. “Oh, I reckon if he was drunk enough.” He closed one eye as he appraised the amount of tequila left in the bottle. “I don’t reckon I got enough busthead left for that.”

  She continued to stare at him angrily. “Some boys have come callin’ for me, you know.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “What’s so surprising about that?”

  Colter chuckled, glancing at her sitting across from him, on the edge of her bed, still wearing her coat and the big Army pistol jutting up from her cartridge belt. “Hell, you’re all skin and bones and a stringy tangle of yellow hair.”

  She glared at him, bunching her thin lips and narrowing her blue eyes. “You take that back!”

  “Not only that,” Colter said, glancing once more at the pistol, “but you come armed for bear! What man in his right mind would risk life and limb, sparkin’ you?”

  He threw his head back as the laughter rippled out of him, making his eyes water. The release was almost as intoxicating as the tequila. Bethel didn’t find it all that cathartic, however. She jumped up from her bed and clouded up like a late-summer monsoon squall. She balled her fists at her sides.

  “Take it back, or you’ll pay.”

  Colter couldn’t stop laughing in spite of his beginning to realize he’d taken the joke too far. She hurled herself onto him with such violence he dropped the bottle. He reached for her arms, but in his laughing, drunken state, the blond wildcat was too much for him. Besides, he didn’t want to hurt her inadvertently, so he rolled toward the wall and tried to bury his head in his pillow.

  “Don’t think I don’t know how to fight,” she said. “Because I do!”

  “Prob’ly better than me,” Colter said, giving a howl when she rammed her bony knee into his back and then grabbed his left arm. Her strength took him off guard, and suddenly she had his arm curled behind his back and was twisting it up toward the back of his head so that his already-sore shoulder barked in protest.

  Laughing as he was, and this sudden display of improbable strength causing him to laugh harder, he found himself nearly as helpless as he’d been against Belden, Hobart, and McKnight.

  “Holy shit,” Colter cried. “Where’d you learn that move?”

  “I had a older stepbrother till he was run over by a stagecoach!” Bethel said, pinching her voice with menace as she added, “You gonna take it back or do I have to dislocate your wing?”

  “I take it back!”

  “Honest? Or you just yella?”

  “Both!”

  She gave the injured wing another twist. Pain lanced through his shoulder and collarbone and into his jaw. Then she released it and sank back on her heels at the edge of his bed. He gave another yowl as the blood ran back into his shoulder, reigniting the tender nerves. Rolling onto his back and holding the wrist of his injured arm, heated up by the tussle and feeling a dull hammering in his head from the tequila, he saw her staring down at him, pensive.

  “Did I hurt you?”

  Colter grimaced as he straightened his arm. “I reckon I’ll live.” He looked her up and down, seeing her in a whole new light. She might not have weighed much, but she was two shovelfuls of gravel with a ladleful of rattlesnake venom thrown in. “I’m gonna have to have you teach me that sometime.”

  “It’s my secret weapon against boys who bedevil me.” She paused, glanced at the dark window, nibbling her lower lip, then looked at him once more. “You got you a girl somewhere?”

  His mind flashed back to the girl he’d once known—the chestnut-haired Marianna Claymore—back in the Lunatics. He and she likely would have been married by now, maybe even had a baby on the way, if Bill Rondo hadn’t killed Trace Cassidy, and Colter’s stepmother, Ruth, hadn’t given him the task of avenging his stepfather’s killer. That had set off an explosive chain of events that had led to his branding and his crippling Bill Rondo, and to him on the run with this strange little girl in Mexico.

  He shook his head. “No.”

  She looked at him coolly down across her fair, lightly freckled, wind- and sunburned cheeks. “Well, don’t go lookin’ around here.”

  Slowly, she climbed down off the bed and removed her coat. She hung it on a peg by the door, then quickly unlaced her boots, kicked them off, and crawled under the ratty covers of her bed, pulling the wool blanket up to her chin. Colter leaned over to scoop the tequila bottle off the floor. Most of the tanglefoot had run out, but there was a swallow left. That was all he needed. He’d had enough of the who-hit-john. Suddenly, he felt as serious as he’d been humored only a few minutes ago. And he felt bad for having goaded her on.

  “I’m too old for you, Bethel,” he said, scuttling lower in the bed and resting his head back against the pillow.

  “Pa’s twelve years older’n my ma. I’m just sayin’ if you thought I was anything more than a dumb little girl, there wouldn’t be nothin’ so silly about it.”

  “You ain’t no dumb little girl, Bethel. Hell, you’re tougher’n I am.” Colter glowered at the black window, feeling the cool, foreign night seep in through the rippled glass and leech the life out of him. He could still hear the mandolins and the guitars from the street below, and while they might have been happy sounds to some, they only made him feel cut off and alone.

  And now he’d drunk too much and made fun of this good girl who liked him.

  “You gotta be tough,” she said, “to wear that brand on your face. That pistol of yours proves it, too.”

  “I wear that brand because I got no choice. And the pistol doesn’t mean a damn thing. I’m just fast because there’s something in me that makes me want to keep goin’. Why . . . and what for . . . I don’t know.”

  They were both silent for a time. Then Colter said, “Oh, well,” and got up and stumbled over to the dresser. He leaned over the lamp to blow out the flame.

  “Wait.”

  He looked at her. She was back looking like a little girl again, one whom someone had tucked into her humble bed.

  “Can you leave it on?” she asked.

  Colter nodded. “Sure. Ain’t you gonna get undressed?”

  “Don’t be craven.”

  “Well, I am.”

  She closed her eyes tightly as Colter removed his gun and shell belt and then shucked everything off but his balbriggans. He crawled under the thin sheet and wool blanket that moths had chewed on and rolled onto his side. He was almost asleep when Bethel said softly, “Colter?”

  He turned to her. “Yep?”

  “You think my pa, Jed Strange, is dead?”

  “I honestly don’t know, Bethel. If he’s alive, we’ll find him. I promise.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You got it.”

  “I hope I didn’t hurt you too bad.”

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d just forget about that now, Bethel. It’s one thing having the stuffin’ beat out of me by men bigger an’ more experienced than I am, but it’s a whole other bailiwick havin’ a lit . . . havin’ a girl makin’ me yell ‘give.’”

  Bethel laughed.

  They slept.

  Chapter 21

  From his and Bethel’s second-story window, Colter studied the street in the predawn darkness.

  Bethel snored softly behind him, fully clothed under the blankets and lying flat on her belly, cheek against her pillow. He’d risen a few minutes ago, washed and dressed quietly, and decided to let Bethel sleep while he scrounged up breakfast for them both.

  The street was pearl gray. It had rained softly during the night, and a few small puddles shone in the dung-littered trace curving between rows of wood and mud-brick business buildings. A few drunks slumped on boardwalks. A shopkeeper in a crisp white shirt and black pants and sanda
ls was sweeping off the gallery fronting his small pink adobe shop. A dog slumped in the shop’s open doorway.

  Otherwise, nothing moved down there. If the soldiers led by Brickson and McKnight had followed him and Bethel into town last night, they were nowhere to be seen now. Colter would check out the town thoroughly before exposing Bethel to a possible threat, however.

  He grabbed his rifle from where it leaned against the wall near the head of his bed, set it on his shoulder, and then quietly opened the door. He had no way of locking the door from outside without locking Bethel in, so he left the key inside. She had her pistol lying on the bed beside her; anyone who might try to get to her while Colter was gone would likely wish he hadn’t.

  He went out, shut the door behind him, and descended the wooden steps to the lobby and went on outside to the vacant veranda. The fresh, damp air was perfumed with the smell of sage and cedar. Colter looked up and down the street. There were no pockets of horses that might belong to McKnight’s men, no recent shod hoofprints in the muddy street fronting the hotel.

  Colter’s cautious tension eased, but he kept his eyes peeled as he stepped off the veranda and headed northeast along the main street. He stopped suddenly, squeezing the neck of the rifle perched on his shoulder. But he left the Henry where it was, frowning at a narrow gap between two buildings about twenty yards ahead and on the left side of the street.

  He’d seen a fleeting glimpse of blue. Or thought he had. Maybe he’d only thought he’d seen it because he was on the scout for the blue of an American army tunic. Nothing there now. More slowly than before, and pivoting at his hips to look carefully around him, Colter continued forward.

  Ahead, the street broadened into a bowl shape surrounded by humble wooden or brick structures, with a few cottonwoods and some kind of nut trees gently rattling their leaves that grew silver as the sun climbed. Smoke rose from a wooden building on the other side of the plaza, in the center of which a few trees and a fountain sat, both still darkly wet from last night’s brief rain. A weak stream of water dribbled up from the fountain, the base of which was a cracked statue of Madre Maria. A stone bench sat before it, and mossy rocks lined the patch of grass and the trees.