Colter headed for the small, lime green adobe from which the aromas of roasting meat and coffee emanated. As he walked, he swung his head around, scrutinizing the thick shadows sheathing the buildings around him, and a small corral on the right in which three mules stood still as statues, one staring over the top cottonwood rail at Colter. A freight wagon with a drooping tongue fronted the corral. White-and-red chickens clucked and pecked in the dust around the wagon for seeds.
Smoke billowed up from a brick chimney of the green adobe, and from inside, behind a brush-roofed ramada, a baby fussed. As Colter approached the building, he could hear meat sizzling on a griddle, and the coffee smells grew thicker, making his mouth water and his stomach rumble. A sign over the ramada announced CAFÉ DEL LUCILLA. A man sat in a wicker chair on the ramada—an unshaven peasant in dirty white pajamas, sandals, and a sash, holding a stone mug in a large, dark, callused hand with the tip of one finger missing and the nail curling over the stump. He regarded Colter gravely, and did not return Colter’s greeting as the redhead slowly crossed the ramada, cast one more edgy glance over his shoulder, then passed through the wooden bead curtain that served as a door.
Inside, Colter found a plump, pretty woman in her thirties frying goat meat and making tortillas on a large black range while bouncing a small child on her hip. There was a lunch counter and three wooden tables, and spicy-smelling ristras hung from ceiling beams. Colter managed to convey to the woman that he wanted to take two burros and a jug of coffee away with him, and then he went outside to stand by the silent peasant man on the gallery, one arm on a ceiling joist, staring into the eerily quiet plaza before him.
A few shadows moved amongst the shops around the plaza—shopkeepers unshuttering their windows or sweeping or moving merchandise onto their front boardwalks. One of the mules in the corral to Colter’s left brayed raucously. Another mule chimed in. Colter turned toward the corral and lowered his Henry, but, glancing at the peasant man who stared in the same direction, he did not raise the barrel.
But he slowly, quietly, levered a cartridge into the chamber, then off-cocked the hammer with his thumb.
A mule brayed once more and then they all fell silent.
On the other side of the plaza, behind a large, wooden building that appeared to be a warehouse of some kind, blackbirds lifted from a broad oak and screeched off into the morning’s misty shadows, wings flashing.
“Senor, su alimento esta lista.”
Colter jerked his head around to see the pretty, plump woman standing in the open doorway behind him, holding out a small burlap bag in one hand, a corked stone jug in the other.
“Cuanto?” he asked, holding out some American coins in the palm of his left hand.
She picked out two bits, then gave Colter the food sack and the coffee jug. He held the sack in his left hand and cradled the jug between his elbow and his side, thanked the woman, and turned to face the plaza. As he did, the peasant man rose quickly from his wicker chair and followed the woman inside the café, drawing the wooden door closed on the beaded curtain.
Colter looked around once more. The men who’d been milling around their shops around the plaza had disappeared. The sun had risen, angling a buttery gold light over the eastern ridges, which was the direction that Colter headed now, dropping slowly down the gallery steps and angling across the plaza. His boots made a grinding sound in the sand and gravel, spurs chinging softly.
The only other sounds were the distant, intermittent thuds of someone splitting wood to the north. No dogs barked. No birds chirped.
But then a squirrel suddenly chittered across the plaza on Colter’s right. In the periphery of his vision he saw a deep blue shadow slide out from a front corner of a dilapidated wood-frame building. When he turned, he saw the rifle barrel leveling on him from beneath the brim of a tan kepi.
Colter lunged forward, dropping the food sack and the stone jug and lighting on a knee as he raised the Henry and clicked the hammer back with his thumb. Smoke puffed from the barrel of the Spencer carbine the soldier was aiming at him. At the same time, Colter triggered his Henry. The simultaneous barks rocketed around the plaza, the soldier’s bullet hammering into the stone fountain to Colter’s left. Colter’s slug tore through the soldier’s brisket and drove him back and out of sight, the rifle rising suddenly, then falling.
Another rifle barked. Colter saw the smoke and flames stabbing from another barrel forty yards to the left of the man he’d just drilled. The slug curled the air off Colter’s right cheek.
He ejected the smoking cartridge from his Henry’s breech, seated fresh, aimed, and fired two shots quickly, one slug tearing into the gallery post the soldier was standing beside, the second one boring through his face and causing his head to jerk back as though he’d been punched hard in the chin.
Only a half second after the second shooter had fired, more rifles belched around the plaza, kicking up dust and gravel around Colter’s boots, chewing into trees, and loudly hammering the stone fountain statue. Colter pivoted to his left, diving, and hit the ground behind the fountain, sliding his Henry up from under his right side as he quickly levered another round and glanced toward the plaza’s west end.
He could see dust puffs in several places on the other side of the plaza and knew that there was at least one more shooter at the south end, near the place from which the first soldier had slung lead. One of this man’s bullets clipped a rowel on Colter’s left spur, making it ring.
He returned fire quickly at the three smoke puffs wafting near the corral, in which the mules were buck-kicking and braying wickedly. One man in buckskins—the scout, Brickson, most likely—was firing from beneath the wagon. Colter fired at the scout, his slug kicking dirt up into the man’s bearded face, then twisted around to empty his rifle at the shooter slinging lead at him from the other end of the plaza.
That soldier had been trying to run up on Colter, and the redhead landed a lucky shot to the man’s knee, evoking a scream. The soldier fell and rolled, clutching his right kneecap and losing his hat and rifle. Colter winced, dropping his own rifle as a bullet slammed into his upper left arm. Sucking a sharp breath through his teeth, he shucked his Remington from the cross-draw holster. He tried to get a shot off, but the other three men fronting him were pounding the ground before him with one slug after another, spraying his face with grit and dirt.
Through the dust, he saw Brickson lift his bearded head beneath the wagon. Another man in soldier blues—tall and lanky and sporting a black goatee and muttonchops, probably A. J. McKnight—leaped from the roof of the wood-frame building beside the café, to a woodpile, and from there to the ground.
Colter raised the Remy and fired, his slug slamming into the rain barrel the man had just ducked behind. At the same time, Brickson shouted something Colter couldn’t make out, and the scout’s carbine sprouted smoke and flames. The slug barked against the fountain’s pedestal statue, tearing several nasty rock shards from Madre Maria’s outstretched arm. One of the sharp rock slivers tore into Colter’s left cheek, just beneath his eye.
He cursed. McKnight yelled, “Get the son of a bitch!”
Colter brushed blood from his cheek and extended his Remy but held fire when hooves drummed wildly to his right, and a pistol popped from that direction, as well. Colter turned, deep lines of incredulity carving into his forehead. A horseback rider was galloping toward him, leading Northwest. Stringy blond hair flopped on Bethel’s shoulders clad in her dark wool coat as she whipped her pinto’s reins with one hand, which also held Northwest’s reins, and fired her Colt Army with the other.
Crouched low in her saddle, she was screaming and cursing like a drunken parlor girl.
Brickson had just started climbing out from beneath the wagon, but now he cursed and grabbed his right temple as he flung himself back under the dray. The other men shouted and continued firing as Bethel pounded toward Co
lter, within forty yards now and thundering toward him like a Missouri cyclone.
“Come on, Colter!” the girl screamed. “Let’s fog some sage!”
Colt emptied his pistol, raking out, “Get outta here, Bethel!”
When his Remy’s hammer clicked on an empty chamber, he heaved himself to his feet. Bethel slowed the pinto but not by much.
Colter shouted, “You’re gonna get your fool hide drilled!” before reaching for Northwest’s saddle horn and, while the galloping horse nearly tore his arm from its socket, hauling himself into the saddle as several more bullets sliced the air around him.
Bethel looked back at him, her face screened by her windblown hair. “Here!”
She flung his reins out, and he grabbed the twin uncoiling black snakes out of the air. Crouching low, he rammed his spurs into Northwest’s flanks and bounded straight across the plaza behind the crazy girl straddling the lunging pinto.
Bullets blew up dust behind and around them and hammered a couple of small adobe casas as they threaded a break between them. Once out of town, Colter took the lead and they galloped south over the rolling hills. They splashed across a stream and mounted a low escarpment stretching out from a sandstone ridge. Colter turned Northwest to the right and checked the horse down in a hollow amongst the rocks.
He slipped out of the saddle and glared back at Bethel. “You’re damn lucky you didn’t get yourself killed, pullin’ a fool stunt like that. Who the hell you think you are—Calamity Jane?”
The haranguing didn’t seem to faze the girl. She looked back over her shoulder, then turned to Colter, dropping her eyes to his upper left arm. “You hit?”
Colter had suppressed the ache of the bullet’s hot slice across his arm. As he walked past Bethel, he said grumpily, “Stay here and keep down.”
He walked back up the scarp, dropped to his knees about five feet from the crest, and crawled the rest of the way, glancing down the other side and back the way they’d come. Bethel climbed the scarp and dropped down beside him. She unknotted his neckerchief, squinting her eyes as she worked, her cheeks flushed from exertion.
“Don’t you listen to anything anybody tells you?” he asked her.
“You ain’t the boss o’ me, Colter Farrow.”
“I feel sorry for the poor son of a bitch who has that job.” Colter stared at her in exasperation. As she removed the neckerchief and wrapped it tightly, adeptly around his arm, he added, “You sure you didn’t run your pa off? Maybe he don’t want you to find him.”
“You keep that pulled tight,” she ordered, glancing at the neckerchief wrapped around his bloody arm, “or you’re liable to bleed to death. She looked at him, and a pleased light entered her eyes. Her mouth corners rose. She leaned forward and pecked his cheek.
Startled as well as exasperated, he jerked his head back. “What was that for?”
“For bein’ scared for me.”
He just stared at her. Movement along their back trail caught his eye, and he pulled Bethel down low beside him. “Maybe it’s time you start bein’ scared for yourself. More trouble’s on the way!”
Chapter 22
Colter pressed his cheek against the side of the knoll, holding Bethel down beside him with one hand. He held his Henry against his chest with his other hand, and now, as the thuds of oncoming riders grew louder from the north, he clamped his knees around the rifle’s rear stock and slowly levered a cartridge into the chamber.
Bethel turned her face toward him, her eyes nervous, expectant.
The riders came on until Colter could hear their tack squawking and their fast-moving horses raking air in and out of their lungs.
He gave the girl a hard, commanding look. “You do what I tell you, now, and stay put.”
He heaved himself up suddenly and scrambled to the top of the knoll, planting his boots a little more than shoulder-width apart and holding the cocked Henry up high across his chest. Four riders galloped toward him from the north and curving to his right as they cantered up the steep, rocky slope—three men in cavalry blues, and Brickson in his buckskins and wearing a bloody white bandage around his forehead, beneath his brown felt sombrero. All four jerked their heads toward him, squinting against the dust and bright sunlight.
“Hey!” yelled the soldier wearing sergeant’s chevrons and riding behind the dark, hawk-faced A. J. McKnight. The soldier swung up the carbine he’d been holding across his saddlebows, but before he could press the stock against his shoulder, Colter swung up his own rifle and blew the sergeant off his McClelland saddle.
The man hit the dusty, rocky trail with a crunch of cracking bones and a shrill grunt, causing more dust to rise.
The other three men had checked their horses down. The riderless horse bounded past them up the slope, ears back, stirrups flapping like wings. McKnight glared at Colter. So did Brickson and the third man, a corporal with thin red muttonchops and belligerent gray eyes set deep beneath sandy brows. The sun was peeling the skin off all three unshaven faces.
Loudly, Colter ejected the spent cartridge, sent it tumbling back down the slope behind him, and rammed a fresh bullet in the breech. His nostrils flared as he glared back at the three men, his gaze finally settling on McKnight.
“You fellas are real hoople-heads, comin’ as far as you have just to die.”
McKnight’s right eye twitched beneath the brim of his tan kepi. “You think so, do you, killer?”
Colter offered no response but a grim half smile. That seemed to make his three shadowers even tenser. They all held carbines half up, not quite level with Colter. The corporal’s Spencer shook in his hands clad in yellow gloves with gauntlets. Dust dribbled down his brown, red-mottled right cheek.
The sun beat down. Cicadas hummed.
The breeze blew the riders’ dust back and forth.
McKnight balled his cheeks and narrowed his eyes as he snapped his carbine to his shoulder.
Colter’s rifle belched. McKnight’s own shot sailed wild. He screamed as Colter’s slug punched him off the far side of his horse and into the rocks. A wink later, both the corporal and Brickson were down, as well, Brickson managing to pop a pill around Colter’s boots before he flew down the side of his paint with a shredded heart. He got his left boot hung up in his stirrup, and his terrified horse galloped on up the slope, bouncing the wailing scout along behind it.
The horse’s thudding hooves and the dying scout’s shrill pleas dwindled.
Colter stared down the slope at McKnight and the corporal, both lying twisted and bloody amongst the clay-colored rocks. He thumbed fresh cartridges down his Henry’s loading tube and glanced back at Bethel. She lay flat, looking up at him, her expression not so much frightened anymore as fateful. Maybe a little befuddled at the ease with which this lanky young man with the long red hair and lightly freckled though savagely scarred face could so easily kill.
She’d understand if she’d been through what he had, he thought. Through it all starting with Trace’s grisly murder and then Bill Rondo’s glowing branding iron shoved toward his face. In the seconds before it had been rammed into Colter’s cheek, the smoking iron had smelled like a hot stove. The smell of his own charred flesh would have made him vomit if he hadn’t passed out from the burning, unbearable agony.
He looked around cautiously, making sure no one had been attracted by the gunfire, then tramped down the hill, kicking both bodies over to make doubly sure that McKnight and the corporal were dead. Both men’s eyes were glassy and sightless, and their wounds were mortal if not instantly killing. Colter leaned his rifle against a rock, chased down both cavalry remounts, and unsaddled them before giving them both water from their riders’ canteens and spanking them free. Like him, they’d have to find their way alone.
He took coffee, hardtack, and jerky from the men’s saddlebags, and a blanket roll for Bethel
. He hadn’t owned a hat since the flooded arroyo had taken his, so he confiscated McKnight’s, which he found amongst the rocks, and set it on his head. He liked the broad brim even though the sweat moistening the inner band, and the crust of salt around the brim, belonged to a man he hated even in death.
It was an apt trophy.
He adjusted the hat and turned to see Bethel standing near the corporal. She looked around grimly at the blood-smeared rocks and the twisted carcasses, the breeze sliding her bangs around beneath her hat, lifting the tails of her shirt.
Colter tossed the bedroll to her.
“Thanks,” she said.
“Don’t mention it.”
“I like your hat.”
“I do, too. Maybe I shoulda joined the cavalry.”
He started up the slope to retrieve their horses. She followed him, asking, “How many more hombres you got behind you, Colter?”
“That’s a damn good question, Bethel.” He grabbed Northwest’s reins and stepped into the leather.
For the next five days, they followed a rugged trail, indicated by the map, into the lower reaches of the Los Montanas del Dragones—a giant dinosaur spine of cracked and twisted stone cliffs, monoliths, and pinnacles that appeared to have been punched upward from deep in the earth’s churning bowels many aeons ago. Then as now it had been a violent time, Colter thought, as he and Bethel followed the crooked trail ever higher amongst the rocks in which nothing at all seemed to grow, and where the water holes were few and far between.
Here and there pictographs painted by a long-vanished people showed themselves in the sides of boulders—faded, primitive accounts of stick men stalking or killing stick animals. What must have been dinosaur bones shone like chips of ancient china in many rock walls lining the trail. Diamondbacks shaded themselves along the circuitous, sometimes perilous trace, instantly quivering, coiling, and rattling as the riders passed.
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