Last Ride of Jed Strange (9781101559635)

by Leslie, Frank

  Here and there stone shrines to various saints, adorned with wilted and crumbling parched flowers, spotted the trail.

  In the early afternoon of their sixth day in the Dragon Range, they rode into a broad canyon where several adobes hunched in the high-altitude sun. The trail that had led them here was well worn by wide-shod wheels, and now Colter saw a large wooden barn and corral on the trail’s left side, under a towering lip of sandstone.

  Several large freight wagons sat in the scrub near the barn, tongues drooping. Around the barn were several other buildings, some used, some appearing abandoned, scrub grown up around them. One was obviously a blacksmith shop, because a large, charred man in a leather apron was loudly hammering an anvil just inside the open front doors while chickens and two goats pecked in the yard before him.

  He had a silver-framed, fancily scrolled Colt revolving rifle leaning against one of the open barn doors, and he eyed Colter and Bethel warily beneath the brim of his low-crowned sombrero as they continued into the yard.

  To the left of the trail, a large adobe with pillars holding up a tile gallery roof hunched beneath a dusty sycamore. Five Arabian horses with fancy Mexican saddles and trimmings stood tied to the wooden hitch rack fronting the place.

  A frightening outfit, Colter thought. With a saloon so the mule-skinners and anyone else could cut the trail dust. A sign above the large adobe announced SALON DE JUAN DOMINGO GUTIERREZ.

  “I don’t dance with the devil and I don’t patronize saloons, Colter,” Bethel said.

  “That’s real upstanding, Bethel. It truly is.” Colter angled Northwest toward the hitch rack. “But neither one of us has had anything to eat but rattlesnake for the past five meals. Me—I’m gonna go in and see if I can get a big plate of huevos rancheros and a steak.”

  She frowned, pensive. “That don’t sound half bad.”

  Colter chuckled as he stepped down from the saddle. He looped his reins over the hitch rack, and Bethel did the same, mounting the gallery steps behind him. He moved through the arched doorway, a stout oak door thrown back and propped open with a chair to his left, and instinctively stepped to one side, so the door didn’t backlight him.

  The place was far humbler inside than outside, as there was an earthen floor and a dozen or so crude wooden tables outfitted with rickety, hide-bottom chairs. There was a long, crude bar on the left, with a rattlesnake floating in a five-gallon glass jug, above a white bed of pickled eggs. Colter scowled, sick of the chewy, nearly tasteless meat he and Bethel had been living on. Shelves behind the bar were crowded with cloudy, clear bottles of several sizes, and there was a big crock on the bar’s far left, with a gourd handle hanging down from the lip.

  Behind the bar was a large black range, the several pots and pans sizzling atop it being tended by a portly old woman in a shapeless dress, her salt-and-pepper hair secured in a tight bun behind her head. The succulent smells of spicy meat emanating from the range nearly rocked Colter back on his heels. A one-eyed man sat on a stool near the crock, fanning himself with a yellowed newspaper. Long, gray-brown hair hung down from the sides of his head while the top of his head was an ugly mass of knotted scar tissue.

  The victim of a scalping, Colter knew. He’d seen the grisly display many times before. In fact, one of the men who’d ridden for Trace Cassidy had sported such a scar inflicted by the Sioux on the Dakota Plains. Roy Gallantly had always said he’d fared some better than Custer, who’d lost a helluva lot more than his topknot.

  Toward the back of the room, four men were playing some kind of craps game. They appeared to be throwing small bones around their table with a wooden cup, grunting and sighing and speaking in hushed voices as they flipped coins after each bone toss. They were big, savage-faced men dressed nearly all in leather, with sombreros of different shapes resting on their heads. One had an extra chair pulled up beside him, and on the chair rested a sawed-off, double-barreled coach gun with a leather lanyard.

  Most likely banditos. Border cutthroats. They had glasses and two clear bottles on their table, one empty, one cloudy with some kind of Mexican tanglefoot that would likely peel the rim off a wheel.

  They regarded Colter and Bethel wryly, the one with his back to the newcomers twisting around in his chair and raking his gaze across the two with grunting interest before turning forward and shrugging his shoulders. Colter walked over to the bar. The one-eyed man regarded him and Bethel dully, as though a branded young gringo and a blond young gringa walking into his saloon were a common occurrence.

  Colter doffed his hat, brushed it against his pant leg. “Can we get a couple plates of huevos rancheros and steak?”

  The portly woman turned toward him briefly, then continued stirring whatever she had sizzling in an iron skillet. The one-eyed man furrowed the brow over his one good eye—the other was milky and half-hidden by its drooping lid—and shook his head. “No. No.” He continued shaking his head. Glancing at the range, he said something that Colter couldn’t understand but which Bethel seemed to pick up. She looked at Colter and nodded.

  “Good enough,” she said, tentatively. “We’ll just get us a table, then.”

  While the man called over to the woman, Bethel canted her head toward the room, and then she and Colter walked over to a table on the other side of a ceiling joist from the four craps players and sank into hide-bottom chairs, Colter giving his back to the bar, the banditos to his left, the door to his right, beyond Bethel.

  Colter tossed his hat onto the table. Bethel removed her own hat, ran her fingers through her sweat-damp blond hair, which fell straight to her shoulders, then tossed her own hat onto the table with a sigh.

  She looked around with a sour look on her sunburned face. “Hope Mama’s not lookin’ down on me. She wouldn’t approve.”

  “Would she want you to starve?”

  “No, but she’d think Pa’d been a bad influence on me in the year since we planted her. She warned me to keep my hat straight, and that Pa needed a strong rudder, and I was it.”

  “Seems a heavy yoke for a twelve-year-old.”

  “I got the shoulders for it.”

  The one-eyed man came over with two clear, mineral-stained glasses and a small bottle filled with clear liquid. “Pulque,” he said, and splashed some of the liquid into each glass, setting them before Colter and Bethel.

  “The devil’s elixir,” she said when he shuffled off behind the bar, primly sliding her glass away from her. “No, thank you.”

  “All the more for me,” Colter said, sniffing his glass. The coffin varnish smelled about the same as tequila to him.

  “You drink that, you’ll be seein’ purple bears and pink snakes.”

  “Don’t mind if I do.” Colter sipped the pulque, swished it around in his mouth, and swallowed it. The liquid was stronger than tequila, but when he stopped feeling as though it had peeled off his tonsils and washed them into his left boot, and he was able to draw a breath again, a warm, dreamy feeling sank over him. The light angling through the arched windows was soft and buttery. He wanted to cool his heels in this dingy, aromatic place and drink the Mexican panther piss all afternoon.

  “Go easy on that stuff,” Bethel warned. “That one sip’s got you grinnin’ like a schoolboy after his first poke.”

  “Dang.” Colter stared into his glass. “I didn’t even realize I was grinnin’.”

  The woman hauled several sizzling plates over to the bone-throwing banditos. A few minutes later, she carried half a dozen sizzling, steaming plates and bowls over to Colter and Bethel’s table and plopped them all down in the middle. The one-eyed man outfitted them with plates, crude wooden forks, and a bowl of corn tortillas.

  Colter and Bethel stared down at the food.

  The man started to turn away and follow the woman back behind the bar, but he stopped and regarded the two norteamericanos skeptically. “Como e
sto,” he said, and ripped one of the steaming tortillas in half.

  He took a spoon and smeared some goopy green sauce onto the tortilla, following it up with a plop of peppers, onions, and tomatoes from another bowl. To that he added what smelled and appeared like small chunks of goat meat. Onto the goat meat he smeared a goodly portion of what could only have been—try as Colter might to convince himself otherwise—fried insects.

  Beetles, to be more precise.

  Fried in bits of green leaves and red chili peppers.

  The man dropped the pie-shaped tortilla onto Bethel’s plate. “Entienda?” he said, slapping his hands to his thighs, then turning and walking away.

  Bethel stared down at her plate for a long time, then glanced up at Colter, showing her little white teeth through a grimace. “Them what I think they are?”

  “I can make out their little heads and their little feet, so I reckon they are. Nothin’ goes to waste in Mexico. Go ahead and give ’em a try. I’ll wait a couple minutes, and if you don’t start floppin’ around on the floor, I’ll throw in, too.”

  “Very funny.” She glanced over at the one-eyed man and then at the woman, both of whom had retaken their respective positions, the man watching her and Colter expectantly. Not wanting to offend the man, she reluctantly picked up the tortilla with both her hands and held it in front of her mouth, eyeing it distastefully. “That rattlesnake’s beginning to look a whole lot more appetizing ’bout now. Well, here goes.”

  She bit into the tortilla and chewed, her eyes gradually brightening. She swallowed the morsel, hiked a shoulder, and shoved the rest into her mouth. “It ain’t a bloody T-bone, but I reckon it’ll do.”

  Colter ripped a tortilla apart and fixed his the way the one-eyed man had shown him and, seeing that Bethel appeared to be thoroughly enjoying her own meal now, quickly bit into it. He’d expected the fried beetles to crunch more than they did. They did not taste bad at all—in fact, they tasted spicy-hot and salty and they went well with the goat meat and the green goop. Colter ate his first bit quickly and then made another, larger burrito, washing every other spicy bite down with the soothing pulque.

  As hungry as they were, it still took Colter and Bethel nearly twenty minutes to finish the hearty meal and to swab out the remains at the bottom of the empty bowls with the last bits of tortilla. Colter swallowed the last bite and sank back in his chair, stuffed, his head light from the drink.

  He looked across the table at Bethel. He didn’t like the look on her face as she stared beyond him, toward where the four cutthroats had been eating loudly and hungrily but from where now only silence issued.

  Silence except for the creak of leather and the squawk of a chair as though a man were rising from it. Colter saw something arc toward him from his left, and he gave an instinctive start, reaching for his Remington, as a rawhide pouch landed on his empty plate with a jingling thud. He kept the pistol in its holster, squeezing the worn walnut handle, as he stared down at the lumpy pouch on his plate.

  Bethel frowned down at the pouch, then slid her cautious gaze to the men to Colter’s left. Colter looked that way, too.

  One of the men grunted, sated by food, and a spur chinged as he moved away from his chair and ambled leisurely toward Colter and Bethel’s table, the flared bottoms of his scratched leather charro slacks buffeting around his high-heeled, black boots.

  The cutthroat stopped across from Colter. A very tall man, only about a head shorter than Santiago Machado had been, he had broad jaws covered in a two-day growth of spiked black stubble, and two chins though he was not otherwise fat. His mustaches were long and silky. His dark eyes were dull beneath the brim of his gray sombrero, red-stitched with the outlines of naked senoritas.

  Colter lowered his eyes and squeezed his hand harder around his pistol’s grips as he saw two pistols—an impressive Colt Peacemaker and an older-model Schofield—wedged behind the man’s wide brown belt, and the bowielike knife with a wooden handle curved in the shape of a curvaceous naked woman sheathed under his left arm. He kept the gun where it was, as the big cutthroat didn’t seem to be in a hurry to go for his own.

  He jerked his chin toward the hide sack he’d tossed onto Colter’s plate. “For the girl. Mexican gold. A hundred of your American dollars’ worth.”

  He slid his dark eyes toward Bethel, who looked as though she’d swallowed an entire lemon and shrank back in her chair.

  Chapter 23

  Colter kept his hand on his Remington but tried to smile, trying to pass off the offer as a joke, as he said, “Oh, the girl ain’t for sale. Wouldn’t be worth that much even if she was.”

  He chuckled.

  Bethel hardened her jaws at him.

  The big man stared mutely down at Colter and the girl. An eerie silence had fallen over the place. Colter could hear the big man breathing raspily through his nose, his broad shoulders rising and falling behind his red-and-black calico shirt and leather jacket adorned with tooled silver ornaments.

  Colter stared up at him, feeling an ache growing in the back of his neck. Bethel stared fearfully up at the cutthroat, as well. Finally, the man’s face broke into a broad smile, and he showed nearly an entire set of crooked, broken teeth as he laughed, jerking his shoulders. He slid his gaze toward his friends, who also broke into laughter.

  They all laughed hard, thoroughly enjoying themselves. Tears dribbled down the big cutthroat’s cheek, and he placed his big hands on the edge of the table, leaning forward and shaking his head as he laughed.

  Colter laughed, then, too, hoping that he and Bethel were only being the target of some odd Mexican joke, and that the big man wasn’t really trying to buy her for a hundred dollars in Mexican gold.

  “Amigo,” he said finally, still laughing, tears dampening his beard stubble, “we offer you a hundred dollars.” He flung a hand toward Bethel. “That is better than one dollar a pound!”

  He and the others laughed even harder.

  “You can forget it, amigo,” Bethel snapped at him loudly, her face reddening with rage. “I ain’t Colter’s to sell, and even if I was . . .” Bethel let her voice trail off as her gaze dropped to the big cutthroat’s belt and the two bristling pistols. She frowned. “Hey, where’d you get that hog leg?”

  For an instant, he appeared befuddled. Then he followed her gaze down to the Peacemaker wedged behind his belt. “Huh? This?”

  Bethel said louder, “Where’d you get it?”

  He slipped the gun from behind his belt, twirled the fancy, silver-chased, factory-scrolled, pearl-handled piece on his finger, grinning.

  Bethel slid her chair back and stood tensely, her wide eyes riveted on the pistol in the bandito’s hand. Her face had paled, and now she swallowed, lips trembling. “That’s my father’s gun, you son of a bitch!”

  “Que?” the cutthroat said, still twirling the gun, showing off.

  Bethel grabbed her own Colt Army from behind the cartridge belt encircling her slender waist and extended it in both hands toward the cutthroat’s belly.

  “Bethel,” Colter said, sliding his own chair back from the table and slipping his Remy from its holster, shuttling his frantic gaze between the big cutthroat before him and the three others, who’d just now started reaching for their own weapons. They froze, one half out of his chair, as Colter aimed the Remy at them, loudly clicking the hammer back.

  The big cutthroat did not look worried. He stopped twirling the impressive Peacemaker, but he grinned jeeringly at Bethel, who was aiming her Colt at him, her hands shaking visibly.

  “That’s my father’s gun!” she fairly screamed, narrowing her eyes. “What’d you do to my father, you big bastard?”

  The cutthroat held the Colt against his chest. He leaned mockingly, defiantly toward Bethel and suddenly shaped a slack expression, sticking out his tongue, and swiped the index finger of his
left hand across his throat. Straightening, he guffawed and glanced over at his cutthroat pards. The others laughed tensely, sliding their eyes between the big bandito and Colter’s cocked Remington.

  Bethel screamed and squeezed her eyes closed. The Colt in her hands thundered and bounced. The loud report caused the woman behind the counter to shout and drop a pan. Dust sifted from the rafters over Colter’s head.

  The big bandito took two stumbling steps backward, his laughter instantly dying, as did his mocking, toothy grin. He stared at Bethel as though she’d said something he hadn’t been able to understand. And then his eyes lowered to the smoking Colt in her trembling hands. His expression became one of disbelieving exasperation as he continued to drop his gaze to the blood leaking out of the ragged, round hole in his calico shirt, two inches below the hide tobacco pouch hanging by a rawhide thong.

  He made a gurgling sound. He appeared to try to lift his head, but his strength was gone. His knees buckled. Blue-black blood welled from the hole in his shirt, thick as tar. As he dropped straight down to the floor, his head banged against the end of Colter and Bethel’s table, bouncing, his hair flying wildly, before he sagged sideways onto the hardpacked earthen floor.

  One of the other three banditos bolted out of his chair, reaching for the Smith & Wesson jutting from his shoulder holster and shouting, “Mate a esa pequeña puta!”

  Colter shot the man in the chest.

  As the other swung toward him, also reaching for iron and shouting loudly in Spanish, Colter flung himself across the table and into Bethel, still standing there, staring down in shock at the dead bandito. She hit the floor beneath Colter, groaning, and Colter used his right boot to haul the table down in front of them for a shield as two bullets plowed through it and bored into the floor dangerously close to both him and the girl.

  “Stay down!” Colter shouted at Bethel, ratcheting the Remy’s hammer back.

  He placed one hand on the floor to brace himself as he lifted his head and snaked his Colt over the top of the table, wincing as bullets ripped slivers from the edge of the table and sprayed them into his face. He picked out one man just as the man’s pistol blossomed smoke and flames, and fired the Remy. The man screamed. The others were stumbling around, half drunk and shooting wildly, and in a matter of seconds, Colter had emptied his pistol.