Last Ride of Jed Strange (9781101559635)

by Leslie, Frank

  Silence.

  All three of the other cutthroats were down. Two were groaning. Powder smoke hung in thick clouds over the dingy room.

  Colter looked at Bethel, who lay on her side and was just now lowering her arms from her head, her cheeks pale, eyes haunted by the prospect of her father’s demise at the savage hands of these four killers. Quickly, Colter flicked open his Remy’s loading gate and shook out the spent brass, replacing them with new from his cartridge belt. He thumbed the gate closed and heaved himself to his feet, clicking the pistol’s hammer back and aiming in the general direction of the three banditos piled up around their overturned table.

  One of the men sighed and fell still as Colter approached. Another heaved himself onto hands and knees and reached for his pistol lying on the floor a few feet away. Colter put a bullet through the back of the man’s shaggy head, then turned to inspect the third man, who lay on his back beneath an overturned chair, blood bubbling up from his chest as well as his mouth, matting his long beard, his eyes staring sightlessly up at the low ceiling.

  Colter spied movement through the smoke and swung around to see the portly woman and the one-eyed man rising from behind the bar, both scowling warily, angrily. The woman bunched her face in anger and cut into a Spanish tirade directed at Colter, waving her arms at the mess and pointing and making bang-bang sounds.

  Colter looked around, saw a sack spilling gold coins on the floor beneath the banditos’ table. He scooped the coins back into it, drew the drawstring closed, and tossed it to the woman, who caught it in both hands against her ample bosom with a grunt.

  “There you go,” Colter said, walking toward Bethel. “That oughta cover the damage.”

  The woman fell silent as she set the pouch on the bar, and she and the old man began counting the coins. Bethel was on her hands and knees beside the bandito she’d drilled. She held the fancy, pearl-gripped Peacemaker in both her hands in front of her face. As Colter approached, she lifted her face to his. Her eyes were brightly tear-glazed.

  “This is my father’s gun,” she said softly, showing Colter the big popper. “They took it from him.”

  “How do you know it’s his? Colt probably made a hundred guns in that style.”

  She turned the gun around and showed him the brass plate at the bottom of the pearl grips. Into the brass had been etched the initials JS.

  Colter said gently, “That don’t mean he’s dead, Bethel.”

  “They couldn’t have gotten this gun off old Jed Strange unless they killed him,” she said, looking down at the gun once more, as though it were her father’s spirit she held in her hands.

  Sandals scuffed and Colter turned to see the one-eyed man walking toward them. His one eye owned a grave cast as he stopped before Colter and Bethel. In English so broken that Colter just barely made it out, the man said, “The man who owned this gun—he is your papa, chiquita?”

  Bethel sniffed and straightened, still holding the pistol in both her small hands. “Sí.”

  The one-eyed man gestured toward the front of the room, then shuffled out the door and under the ramada. Colter and Bethel followed him out. “The man who owned that gun.” The one-eyed man gestured toward a dark, serrated ridge looming like a distant, massive storm to the southwest, which was the general direction that Colter and Bethel had been traveling. “He is buried there. Two days’ ride.” He pointed his right foot. “Paseo de la Rana. How do you say?” He paused, thinking hard, and snapped his fingers. “Frog Ridge.”

  “At the foot of it?” Colter asked.

  “Sí.” He nodded twice. “Two days’ ride.”

  “Who buried him there?” Bethel asked.

  “I did, little one.” The one-eyed man jabbed his thumb against his chest. “I found him. Dead along the trail, near his wagon. Gringo prospector. He was here two, maybe three days before. I ride down to Soledad for supplies, find him . . . bury him. I mark his grave with a cross.”

  The one-eyed man’s sole eye sadly, regretfully regarded Bethel. She stared off, dry-eyed now, steeling herself against the pain that threatened to overwhelm her, and nodded. “Muchas gracias, senor.”

  The one-eyed man glanced at Colter, shrugged fatefully, then shuffled back inside the roadhouse. Colter looked at Bethel, feeling a large rock growing larger and harder in his gut. He stepped forward, awkwardly set a hand on the girl’s shoulder, feeling helpless against her sorrow.

  She shrugged it off, ducked beneath the hitch rack, and grabbed her pinto’s reins. “I came all this way to find him, so I reckon I’ll find him. Follow his last ride. Say a few words over him.”

  Colter ducked under the hitch rack and laced his fingers together, making a step for the girl. She stepped into his hands, grabbed the horn, and heaved herself into the saddle. She began neck-reining the horse away from the rack, giving her gaze to the blue ridge in the southwestern distance. “It’ll likely just embarrass him, but I don’t wanna go home without seein’ where he’s buried, recitin’ the Lord’s Prayer over him.”

  “I know it don’t mean much, but I am sorry, Bethel. I was really hopin’ we’d find him alive.”

  She turned to him now, and a single tear rolled down from her otherwise dry right eye. “You didn’t think we would, though, did you?”

  Colter just looked at her.

  She sniffed and sleeved the tear away. Her voice pinched into a faint screech as she batted her heels against the pinto’s ribs. “Me, neither.”

  She galloped off across the yard, toward a trail branching south. Colter mounted Northwest and headed after her, deeper and deeper into the rugged, rocky sierra. When the freight trail dead-ended in a small village built against the side of a mountain wall, they paused only to fill their canteens from the village’s single, covered well before continuing along a fainter wagon path that the boy who tended the well assured them would take them to Paseo de la Rana. It was the same trail, it seemed, that would lead them eventually to the dragon drawn on Jed Strange’s map.

  Though now it appeared there was little reason to push that deep into the unforgiving sierra, a maze of dangerously deep canyons and towering gothic cliffs.

  That night they made camp in a shallow wash surrounded by steep, boulder-strewn slopes. Colter managed to snare a jackrabbit just before the sun went down—he didn’t want to risk attracting attention with a rifle shot—and spitted it over the small fire that Bethel built from the wood she gathered.

  While the meat cooked and the stars sharpened in the darkening sky above the jagged, black velvet ridges around them, Bethel laid out the bedroll she’d confiscated from one of the soldiers Colter had shot and lay back against her saddle, hands entwined behind her head, staring at the sky.

  “Meat’s done,” Colter told her, dragging out a couple of plates from his saddlebags.

  “Ain’t hungry.”

  Colter didn’t push her. He didn’t blame her for not being hungry. He hadn’t eaten for days after his blood father and then his foster father had died. Pulling the hot meat off the rabbit bone with his fingers, he ate and sipped the coffee he’d brewed from the Arbuckles’ he’d also confiscated from the dead soldiers.

  When he’d finished, he cleaned his hands on his trousers and poured another cup of coffee, hearing the coyotes starting to yammer on the ridges around him. He glanced across the fire. Bethel lay as she had before, both her eyes open and staring into the firmament.

  He set the coffee back on a rock near the crackling flames and leaned against his saddle, holding the smoking cup in his hands. He wished he could think of comforting words to share with the girl, but none would come, and he didn’t want to pretend he knew anything more about assuaging her pain than he did. Which was nothing. All he knew was that time would dull the ache though it would never obliterate it, but that would be little comfort for her now.

  “Colter,” she
said after a time, turning to face him from the other side of the fire. “You got anyone back to your home in them Lunatic Mountains?”

  Colter sipped his coffee. “My foster ma’s there—Ruth—and David and Little May.” Marianna was there, as well, though two years older since he’d left and most likely married to someone else by now. He didn’t mention Marianna, however, because there was no point in twisting that knife in his gut.

  “You ever thought about goin’ back to ’em?”

  Colter shook his head. “I’d just lead bounty hunters right up to their front door, if I did. Oh, it’d be nice to see ’em all again, but I can’t for a long time. Maybe someday.”

  Bethel turned her face back to the sky. After a long time, when Colter’s cup was nearly empty, she turned back to him once more. “You get lonely?”

  “Always.”

  “It never goes away?”

  “Oh, it fades after a fashion. But it never goes away for good.” He saw no point in lying to her. It was a tough road she had ahead, without her father and mother. Expecting it to be easy only made it tougher. “At least, you got your aunt.”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “No, it ain’t.”

  He finished his coffee and stomped off with his rifle to have a look around their camp. When he was sure they were alone, he checked on the horses hobbled in some nearby scrub, then returned to camp and picked up his saddle and bedroll and carried them over to Bethel’s side of the fire. He set his saddle down beside hers and spread out his blankets in front of it.

  He removed his pistol and shell belt and coiled the belt around his saddle horn. Lying down beside Bethel, he rested his head back against his saddle and nudged his hip up close to the girl’s. She rolled toward him, her eyes bright now, tears clinging to her lashes. She threw an arm across his belly and rested her head atop his shoulder. He wrapped his own arm around her, gave her a comforting squeeze, and pressed his lips to her temple.

  Bethel sighed raggedly. She closed her eyes. Gradually, her breaths grew deep and even.

  Colter fell asleep then, too.

  Chapter 24

  Anyone stumbling across Jed Strange’s grave would most likely have mistaken it for a natural buckling of stones and rocks between a spindly mesquite and a large barrel cactus marked with several gaping holes carved by birds. The grave was set about fifteen yards back of the faint, seldom-used cart trail, and the crude wooden cross that the one-eyed man had erected at its head had been knocked over by the wind or some passing creature.

  The grave lay in a broad, sloping valley on the shoulder of a mountain on which virtually nothing but the single mesquite and barrel cactus lived, with two pillars of rock jutting from the crest of the slope to the right of the grave, and a jagged fist of cracked basalt rising toward an even higher, sheerer ridge on its left.

  It was a rugged moonscape of sand, gravel, and solid rock torn and blasted by time and weather.

  Bethel had searched hard for the small, wiry bits of wildflowers that she now placed atop the mounded stones that marked her father’s final resting place. She knelt there for a time, her head bowed, while Colter stood on the trail with the horses, in a trapezoid of shade offered by a wagon-sized boulder. Finally, Bethel rose, straightened the crude cross with heavy stones, then stood beside it, staring down at the grave once more and muttering a prayer the words of which Colter couldn’t hear above the sifting breeze.

  Northwest lifted his head suddenly, nickered, and worked his nostrils in agitation. Colter studied the horse, frowning. “What is it, boy?”

  The horse stomped and turned his head slightly back to sniff the building breeze. Colter tied both horses to a knob of rock jutting out from the boulder, then walked off the trail opposite the grave. Thirty yards from the trail, a deep valley opened, its floor about a hundred and fifty feet below where Colter now stood, casting his gaze around the tan and gray landscape, the breeze bending the brim of the tan kepi he’d taken off McKnight’s corpse.

  He squatted suddenly, detecting movement down along the canyon bottom, on the same trail that he and Bethel had taken before they’d ascended the mesa they were now on. Squinting, he made out five or six riders. From this distance, he couldn’t tell much about them except that they were dark-skinned, all had black hair held back with colorful bandannas, and they also wore bright, probably calico shirts.

  Apaches, possibly Yaqui. Either way, if they were following Colter and Bethel’s trail, he and the girl were in trouble.

  He straightened and walked back toward the horses. Bethel was walking back onto the trail, staring toward him, her own eyes becoming wary when she saw the fear in his own. “What is it?”

  “Injuns.”

  “You think they’re after us?”

  Colter helped the girl onto her horse. “No way to tell. One thing I do know,” he said as Bethel settled herself in her saddle, “is we can’t go back the way we came. We’re gonna have to keep followin’ this trail and hope we can shake ’em.”

  Colter stepped into his saddle and looked at Bethel sitting beside him, her face still pale from shock and sorrow beneath her tan. “You get enough time with your pa?”

  She nodded bravely. “I said good-bye.” She swiped a sleeve of her wool shirt across her cheek.

  Colter tapped his spurs against Northwest’s flanks, and the horse lunged off its back hooves, barreling into a gallop up the gravelly slope, tracing a meandering course amongst the rocks and boulders. They crested the slope and galloped down the other side and into more of the same kind of harsh, barren, up-and-down country they’d been traveling since they’d started into the Los Montanas del Dragones.

  They rode as hard as they dared over the treacherous terrain for a good hour before checking their mounts down to rest them. Colter slipped out of the saddle and tossed his reins to Bethel. “Stay here while I have a look behind us.”

  He slid his Henry from its boot, racked a round into the chamber, off-cocked the hammer, and hiked back up the hill they’d just descended. At the top, he dropped down amongst some rocks and stared into the broad, angling ravine below, and chewed his upper lip. Far off down the ravine, the riders came toward him, winding around the rocks and sparse tufts of catclaw that littered the wash’s floor. The wind was picking up, and occasional curtains of windblown dust obscured his view of the Indians.

  But as soon as the dust dwindled, there they were again, clinging to Colter and Bethel’s trail like hungry, stubborn coyotes.

  Colter cursed loudly, squinting against a gust of windblown grit. The jerk of his head saved his life as an arrow whistled past his face to hammer into the rock beside him. He swung his head left. Just then a shrill war cry filled his ears as an Apache bolted toward him from behind a rock, flinging down his bow and swiping the stone-bladed war hatchet from the red sash encircling his waist. Propelling himself off a low rock, he dove toward Colter, who managed to get his rifle raised, hammer fully cocked, and trigger tripped.

  The rifle thundered.

  The Apache’s cry grew shriller as the bullet took the shirtless brave through his lower belly. The hatchet thudded to the ground. Colter threw himself sideways, and the Apache bounced off his right shoulder to pile up in the rocks, groaning and frantically reaching for the hatchet. He’d just grabbed it when Colter, shoving his back up against a boulder, quickly pumped a fresh round and shot the brave through his breastbone.

  As the brave dropped the hatchet once more and staggered backward as though drunk, Colter turned to see three more dark-skinned figures running toward him down the sandy slope, all three running in a side-skip motion, the fringes of their high-topped moccasins jouncing, as they nocked arrows to their bows. Colter pumped the Henry again, aimed, and fired three rounds toward the oncoming Indians, plunking one bullet through one brave’s thigh. As that brave yowled and dropped, rolling, the
others dove behind rocks. They were all yowling like enraged mountain lions.

  Colter bolted to his feet. There were likely more Apaches where those four had come from. He didn’t think he’d ever run so hard in his life, holding the rifle in both hands across his chest, pumping his knees, and leaping rocks as he descended the hill toward where Bethel waited with the fidgeting horses, a look of bald terror in her eyes.

  He’d never fought Indians before. And, after hearing the soldiers’ stories at Camp Grant, he’d never wanted to. Fighting the dark-skinned aborigines was just as the cavalry boys had described it—like tangling with a rabid cougar in a one-room, locked cabin.

  Wide-eyed and even paler than before, Bethel tossed him his reins, then leaped onto a rock from which she stepped into the fancy saddle of her pinto. Colter hurled himself without aid of his stirrup onto Northwest’s back. Hearing the shrill, animal-like wails behind him as the Apaches came after him, he rammed his spurs hard into Northwest’s flanks. Horse and rider lunged down the trail with ground-chewing speed though Colter wished he could fly.

  As he rode over the hills, plunging into the troughs between them, he slowed only to turn around natural formations and to cross shallow but steep-sided washes. Occasionally, he looked over his shoulder to make sure he hadn’t lost Bethel, who rode nearly cheek to cheek with the lunging pinto, the brim of her old hat pasted against her forehead by the wind.

  They’d ridden hard for fifteen minutes when Colter’s ears filled with an eerie chugging sound. It sounded like a freight train about to run him down. He looked around to see a thick brown buffeting curtain hurdling toward him from a vast tableland opening down the long slope on his right.