Last Ride of Jed Strange (9781101559635)

by Leslie, Frank

  The wind moaned like an agonized giant, lifting dust around Colter and Bethel. Bethel screamed and shielded her face with her arm, holding the pinto’s reins in her other hand. Northwest rose off his front hooves and whinnied, terrified by what sounded like a million demons screeching around him.

  Colter grabbed his hat before it could blow away, tugging it down firmly on his head, then slipped out of his saddle.

  “Hold tight!” he shouted against the bellowing wind. He grabbed Bethel’s reins out of her hands and, pulling his hat down over his eyes against the stinging grit, headed for a rock formation rising on his left. He had to get himself, Bethel, and the horses into some sort of shelter—out of the wind and away from the Apaches.

  Bethel held her head in her arms as Colter led both balking mounts along the cliff wall. After what seemed like hours, he found an opening in the wall, and pulled both mounts into it, instantly finding some release from the pelting bullets of wind-whipped sand.

  He lifted his hat brim and looked around, finding himself in a vestibule of sorts with sheer, eroded rock walls rising two or three hundred feet straight above him, forming funnels and flues and pinnacles of crumbling rock streaked with bird dung and various mineral layers. The sky far beyond was a streaming banner of windblown sand.

  Just beyond him, a corridor angled darkly into the mountain. Maybe, in there somewhere, Colter could find a cave in which he and Bethel and the horses could wait out the storm . . . and hope the Apaches lost interest and hightailed it out of the weather.

  He tied the pinto’s ribbons to Northwest’s tail and led the coyote dun deeper into the dark, narrow fissure, the wind’s keening now sounding eerily distant though cool drafts sifted sand on him from above. After he’d walked for fifteen or so minutes, he stopped where the right wall drew back several feet, forming a natural alcove. If the Apaches came, it wouldn’t be hard to hold them off down the narrow corridor, where there was little cover. They couldn’t want him and the girl badly enough to sacrifice themselves to .44 rounds slung at them down a narrow stone hall.

  They might, however, wait outside, knowing that their quarry had to leave the mountain sooner or later. But that was a bridge Colter would cross when he came to it. For now, he’d secured shelter.

  He reached up and pulled Bethel out of her saddle. She was basted in sand and seed flecks and bits of plants that the wind had carried a long way to pelt them both with. He realized now, out of the wind, that his own face and eyes were caked with the stuff. Grabbing his canteen off his saddle, he poured water over his face, blinking his eyes to clean them. They stung, tears rolling down his cheeks.

  “Here,” he told Bethel, lifting her chin with one hand and pouring water on her face with the other.

  She blinked and blew, shaking her head and blowing the sand from her nose and mouth. While she bent over, spitting, Colter swabbed out the eyes and noses of both horses, using nearly half the canteen. They’d need to replace their dwindling water supply soon.

  He shoved the cork back into the canteen’s mouth, hung the canteen over his saddle horn, and walked over to where Bethel knelt beside her weary, frightened horse, sort of leaning back against the mount and looking fatigued as she scrubbed her face and the back of her neck with a red bandanna.

  “You all right?”

  She lowered the neckerchief and stared back along the corridor. “You think them redskins are gonna follow us?”

  “I’m gonna walk back a ways, check it out. Sit down over there, take a breather.” Colter jerked his head toward the depression in the cliff wall, where a single, flat-topped boulder stood. “I’ll be back in a few minutes. If you see anything from the opposite direction, fire a shot in the air. I’ll come runnin’.”

  Wearily, Bethel stepped between the two dusty horses and sagged down on the boulder, scuttling her rump back toward the wall, extending her legs straight out in front of her, and half reclining. She set her hat on her thigh, rested her hands in her lap, and stared straight out across the corridor.

  Her cheeks were chafed pink from the scrubbing she’d given them, but the paleness shone behind the flush. She looked exhausted. Beaten down in a way Colter hadn’t seen her before. It unsettled him. Throughout the entire journey, she’d been tough as rock salt. Now, having learned of her father’s death, she looked as if the sap had drained out of her. He hoped that her determination to push forward hadn’t bled away, as well. Her flat, wary eyes were not a good sign.

  He pulled his canteen down from his saddle and offered it to her. “Have a drink. Take a long one.”

  “I’m all right,” she said, not looking at him but continuing to stare straight across the corridor.

  He set the canteen down against her leg. “In case you change your mind.”

  He looked at her once more, and worry for the girl turned like a worm in his belly. She couldn’t travel anymore today. They’d have to stay here, as long as the place wasn’t soon swarming with Apaches. . . .

  Turning reluctantly away from Bethel, Colter slid his Henry from its sheath and walked back along the corridor. Ahead of him the wan sun washing down from far above painted the walls a dull red. Through occasional shafts of saffron light, dust sifted like small tan snowflakes.

  Slowly, he made his way back to where he and Bethel had entered the corridor, relief swelling in him when he saw no sign that the Apaches had followed him. A peek outside, squinting against the sandstorm, gave him no indication that they were trying to enter. Promising, but odd. Had they simply given up on their quarry? From the stories Colter had heard about the Indians, he hadn’t thought they’d let something as insignificant as a little wind and sand deter them.

  He waited fifteen or twenty minutes. For whatever reason, the Apaches didn’t try to enter the corridor. Feeling lighter, less weary, Colter turned around and, keeping a vigilant eye on his back trail, tramped back to where he’d left Bethel and the horses.

  Only, Bethel wasn’t where he’d left her. The flat-topped rock was vacant. His canteen, too, was gone. Both horses were wide-eyed and shuffling around nervously.

  Colter raised his rifle in both hands, racking a shell into the chamber. “Bethel?”

  The echo of his voice was the only response.

  He called again. Again, only the echo replied.

  His heart thudded and his hat began to feel too tight for his head. Damn strange for the girl to light out on her own. When he’d left her atop the boulder, she’d been so sapped she could hardly hold her head up.

  Squeezing the rifle in his sweating, gloved hands, he continued on past the horses, making his way farther into the mountain. He could see no footprints in the stone floor, but she’d had to have come this way. There were only two routes leading off from the alcove, and he’d already covered one of them.

  He’d walked maybe sixty yards down the twisting, turning corridor, when the close walls fell back away from him and he walked out in a broad canyon flooded with daylight. Along both sides of the canyon were ruins like those he’d seen several days ago farther north—tiers of cavelike dwellings that had been built long ago by a long-vanished people.

  Birds winged around the canyon, flashing in the sunlight. There was only a strong breeze down here though he could hear the rushing of the wind far above, where the jutting canyon walls touched the tan-blue sky.

  Colter started walking forward. He opened his mouth to call for Bethel and closed it suddenly, frowning. He’d heard something. It came again, from far out across the canyon floor. Someone was singing. Loudly singing.

  Gooseflesh rose along Colter’s back. His sweating hands inside his gloves turned as cold as stones.

  The man was singing a sad Spanish ballad at the tops of his lungs.

  Colter had heard the voice before, the night he’d given Alegria sanctuary from the Balladeer.

  Colter took one more he
sitant step forward, trying to detect where the voice was coming from, muttering, “Who in God’s name . . . ?”

  A spur trilled behind him. He froze midstride. Something hard smashed against the back of his head. The tan dust and rocks sprang up to hammer his face an instant before everything went black.

  Chapter 25

  The same voice that Colter had heard just before the world had died sounded again, echoing in the deep, dark canyon of his unconsciousness. The familiar sound called him up through the muck. As it grew louder, he could feel someone lightly slapping his face.

  He opened his eyes, squinting against the sunlight pushing around behind the big sombrero-clad head hovering in the air about eight inches from his own. He winced at the tequila stench of the man’s breath, and blinked several times against the impossibility of the bearded, heavy-jawed face he was staring at.

  The Balladeer.

  The black hair hanging down from his sombrero was braided and trimmed with beads. It curled around the gold stud in his right ear. The man grinned, showing his teeth inside his beard. His nose was like a broad, crooked wedge, his small eyes like coals. His nose was brick red, while his cheeks owned the color and texture of seasoned saddle leather. Fine red lines etched the whites of his eyes, which were more yellow than white, and gunmetal-colored pouches hung beneath the drink-bleary orbs.

  “El Rojo—it’s you!”

  Colter stared in mute horror, feeling as though he were genuinely staring at a ghost freshly risen from the grave. Maybe all the crazy stories he’d heard about the strange goings-on in Mexico were true. His tone was more shocked than angry. “I killed you, you son of a bitch.”

  He tried to move his arms and legs. It was no good. He looked down the length of his lanky body to see that his ankles were tied to wooden stakes driven into the ground. Glancing up to each side, he saw that his wrists had been given the same treatment. He lay on the ground near the stream he’d seen before and which angled through the floor of the canyon, spread-eagle on his back, like a bug pinned to a wall.

  He could hear water gurgling and churning to his left, only a few feet away. A river or stream . . .

  Around him stood seven or eight Mexicans bristling with pistols and rifles, the bandoliers crisscrossing their chests flashing in the afternoon sunlight. Saddled horses stood around them, grazing the lush green grass lining the stream. Colter was vaguely aware that the wind’s rushing atop the canyon walls had dwindled to a soft whisper.

  The Balladeer’s grin broadened, revealing a silver eyetooth. He placed his hand on Colter’s face once more, pinching his chin between his thumb and hand, and jerked it from side to side. “You tried to kill me, El Rojo!” He laughed loudly, spit bubbles oozing between his tobacco-crusted teth. “The Balladeer—he’s a tough bastardo to kill!”

  The Mexican giant straightened until his full seven feet angled a thick, long shadow over Colter. The Balladeer grabbed the bottom of his red-and-white-striped serape and lifted the filthy garment to his chin. On his chest he wore a steel breastplate like that which Colter had seen on the dead conquistador. The plate hung from the Balladeer’s neck by a stout rawhide thong. Three pale, round dents shone in the dark blue metal—all three bullet marks forming a triangle covering an area of the plate over the Balladeer’s heart no larger than a ten-dollar gold piece.

  Colter lowered his head in defeat and rolled his eyes around once more, jerking at the ropes holding his arms and legs fast. “What’d you do with Bethel, damn you?”

  “What?” the Balladeer said. “Who?”

  “You know who.” Colter gritted his teeth. “You touch a hair on her head, and . . .”

  He let his voice trail off. The big Mexican stared down at him, appearing genuinely befuddled. Again, Colter looked around. Bethel was nowhere near.

  “Oh,” the Balladeer said, nodding finally. He held his hand out, palm down, at the level of his belly. “The rubio muchacha? Sí, sí. I was going to ask you the same thing, El Rojo.” He bent his knees and shoved his face up close to Colter’s once more, the raw, rancid smell of tequila making the redhead’s eyes water. “And about the map.”

  Colter stared at the man. He glanced at the others, who returned his look, eager interest in their eyes. For the moment, Colter placed his concern for Bethel’s whereabouts and safety on a back burner. How had the Balladeer learned about Bethel’s treasure map—if that was the map he was referring to. And what other map was there?

  “I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.”

  The big Mexican didn’t buy it. Neither did the others. A man in a green felt sombrero and eye patch gritted his teeth and growled like an angry cur, balling his fists at his sides.

  The Balladeer stared at Colter, feigning an expression of grave disappointment. He shook his head. “You cannot fool me, El Rojo. I know the girl is Senor Strange’s daughter. Mi amigos who knew Strange in Tucson saw her there with him. He must have sent her the map, and she came down here to find her ole pa-pa. She had to have the map—because you two could not possibly have followed the trail you’ve been following without it. The one that led you here.”

  The Balladeer smiled shrewdly.

  Colter tried to buy himself some time. His skull throbbed from the braining he’d taken from the man who’d snuck up behind him. “How do you know Strange?”

  “Never mind how I know that double-crossing bastard.” Machado leaned down and poked his right index finger three times hard into Colter’s flat belly. “You tell me where the girl’s map is, or you are going to die slowly, Rubio. And very bloody.”

  It suddenly occurred to Colter that Bethel, having heard Machado’s men stalking around, might have grabbed the Bible with the map in it and hid. He had to buy her as much time as possible to either hightail it away from here or find a secure hiding spot.

  “Go to hell,” he said, flaring his nostrils defiantly at the big man. “Besides, you’re here, ain’t ya? What do you need the map for?”

  The Balladeer glanced at the Mexican wearing the green felt sombrero. The man walked over to one of the horses and dipped his hand into a saddlebag pouch. When he pulled his hand out, it was clutching a chunk of rolled burlap. He handed the roll to Machado, who held one end and let the rest of it roll out in the air before him. The burlap was a strip about three feet long. Secured to the burlap with strips of rawhide were two daggers that shone so brightly in the sunlight, stabbing Colter’s eyes, that Colter had to look away and blink.

  When his eyes had adjusted to the glare, he saw that the perfectly tapering, double-edged blades and the hilts of both knives were solid gold. The cylinder-shaped handles were carved turquoise, each inset with one red, precious-looking stone. From end to end each delicate but savage-looking weapon was probably a foot and a half long.

  They were beautiful weapons, both looking as though they’d been handmade only a few hours ago though they both gave off an air of antiquity. Were the daggers what Jed Strange had been looking for?

  “We have two of these precious beauties,” Machado told Colter. “Stolen out of the old bandit’s camp. He hid the third one, we think. The map will tell us where he hid it. And where we might find him . . . unless he is looking for us, maybe.” He grinned in delight.

  Colter looked away from the precious weapons in disgust. As far as he was concerned, treasure hunting was as foolhardy as gambling. If those knives were what Jed Strange had left his daughter to find, and given his life for, he’d been a damn fool. Colter had no idea know how much the daggers were worth, but it wasn’t enough.

  “He ain’t holed up with that third dagger,” Colter said. “And he ain’t lookin’ for you. He’s dead. And there wasn’t any map. We just knew to head for the Dragon Range, hopin’ we’d run into him somewhere hereabouts.”

  “No, no, Rubio,” Machado clucked reprovingly. “You lie. There are many routes int
o the Los Montanes del Dragones, some with more water tanks. But you chose the same one we chose. The same one Strange chose—the one that leads to the treasure!”

  The Balladeer glanced at the man in the green felt sombrero, who wound the burlap around the daggers and returned the bundle to the saddlebag pouch. “I am sorry to have to do this to you, Rojo.” He opened his coat and pulled out a stout, steel knife with a hide-wrapped wooden handle and a brass hilt. Dropping to one knee beside Colter, he cupped the redhead’s chin in one strong hand, holding his head still, while lowering the blade toward Colter’s left cheek. “You have obviously endured much misery”—he glanced at the scar in Colter’s other cheek—“but I am afraid that, until you tell me where the map is located, you will endure much more . . . an even more repulsive-looking mark to wear to your grave.”

  As the Balladeer touched the tip of the knife to Colter’s left cheek, someone yelled in Spanish from somewhere behind Colter. Machado pulled the knife away and frowned back toward the narrow chasm through which Colter had fled the Apaches and walked into the banditos’ trap. Colter heard the sound of horses moving toward him, and spurs trilling.

  Finally, he saw another Mexican leading Colter’s and Bethel’s mounts into the crowd gathered beside the stream. The Mexican—a short man who wore a red bandanna over his head, under a tattered straw sombrero—had Bethel’s Bible in his hand.

  He dropped the horses’ reins and held the Bible aloft, shaking it, with the top of the folded map sticking out of it. He shouted in Spanish, obviously informing his boss of his valuable find. Machado swung away from Colter, grabbed the Bible out of the little man’s hand, slipped the map out of the back, tossed the Bible into the stream, and opened the folded paper.

  He studied it for a time, shaggy brows furrowed, lips moving, murmuring to himself. Finally, he lifted his eyes and his chin, a smile stretching across his large, savage face. He spoke to his men in Spanish, and they all pricked up their ears, expressions brightening. He handed the map to the man in the green sombrero, and then, while the other men drifted off toward gear strewn along the stream bank, he walked back over to Colter. Lifting a gloved hand, the fingers having been cut out of the glove—he pressed a dirty index finger to his lower lip.