“I’ve been followin’ Machado for days. The problem is I’m all out of shells for my Winchester.” Strange flicked the Colt Peacemaker’s loading gate open and spun the cylinder, looking relieved to see the brass snugged down in all six cylinders. “Forty-four shells were one of the things Percy was headin’ out to buy . . . with the last of our gold dust. We popped the last of our caps at the Apaches that haunt these canyons and been makin’ our lives pure-dee hell for the six months we been here in the Dragones.”
Bethel plucked some meat off the half-eaten rabbit haunch on her tin plate. “Is that what’s kept you out here so long, Pa? Gold?”
Holding his smoking cup in his hands before him, Strange rested his elbows on his knees. “Not just a few pinches of dust, daughter. But enough gold to see me into my old age and you . . . well, enough to send you back East to a good school. Make a teacher out of you, just like you always wanted.” He smiled. “Though with as much gold as we’ll have when we finally ride out of here, you likely won’t need to work another day in your life. How’d you like that?”
“I’d like that just fine, but I’d like to have you back home even better.”
“All in good time, girl. All in good time.” Strange ruffled the girl’s hair, then glanced at the bedroll spread out beside her, in front of her saddle. “Now, you best finish up and crawl into bed. Big day tomorrow.”
“Doin’ what?”
“You’ll see.” Strange looked at Colter. “You best hit the hay, too, son.” He slapped the six-shooter on his thigh. “I’ll keep watch tonight.”
“All night?”
“I sleep like an Apache sleeps,” Strange said, winking. “With both eyes open.”
Chapter 27
Jed Strange poured himself a fresh cup of coffee, then bid his daughter and Colter good night once more and walked out away from the fire’s shimmering light, toward the dark wall of a stony ridge.
Colter finished his rabbit and stared over the fire at Bethel. She was staring back at him, a dubious look in her eyes. She tossed a quick glance behind her, then returned her anxious eyes to Colter, leaning forward slightly and keeping her voice down. “You think he’s gone off his nut?”
Colter sipped his coffee. “The desert does strange things to people. Add treasure to the mix . . .”
Colter remembered the gold daggers Machado had shown him. Did Strange have the third one? Machado himself was after the third one. If Strange was after the other two, Colter and Bethel had just landed atop a powder keg with a sparking and sputtering fuse.
“Well,” Bethel said, wiping her hands on her skirt and leaning back against her saddle. “At least, he’s still kickin’. I thought for sure I’d lost him, and, aside from Aunt Kate, he’s all I got.” She paused a moment, staring at her hands laced on her chest before lifting her eyes once more to his. “And you, I reckon.”
Colter tossed another log on the fire. “You don’t have to reckon about that, young lady.”
Bethel rolled her eyes in frustration. “Dang it, I done told ya—I ain’t all that young!”
Colter chuckled as he climbed to his feet and stepped into one of his boots drying by the fire. “Good night, Bethel.”
“Where you goin’?”
“Private business.”
“Oh.” She curled up on her side. “Good night, Colter.”
He tossed another mesquite branch on the fire, hitched his empty pistol belt higher on his hips—Machado’s men had taken his Remy, but he didn’t feel so naked wearing the shell belt and holster—and walked off into the darkness beyond the fire. When his built-in prudence told him he was far enough from Bethel, he unbuttoned his fly and loosed a steady stream. He’d drunk nearly a gallon of hot coffee while drying himself and his clothes out by the fire earlier, and he swore he still had a few gallons of river water swirling around inside him.
Out beyond him in the darkness, someone coughed. It was a rattling expiration. Jed Strange spat, cursed. The coughing came again, lasting longer this time but more muffled, as though the man were coughing into a handkerchief. Colter stared off toward where the man was apparently keeping watch, frowning as the coughing continued.
Colter buttoned up and walked off through the rocks and cedars, in the direction from which the coughs had come. A quarter moon was kiting over the southeastern ridges, limning the shrubs and rocks around him in silver. Ahead stood a low escarpment. Strange was silhouetted against the violet sky, one knee up, one arm draped over the knee. A cigarette made a pink dot at the end of his hand.
“Mr. Strange?” Colter called softly.
Another rattling cough. A sniff. “What it is, Mr. Farrow?”
“You all right up there?”
Another pause. A muffled half cough. Then Strange’s pinched voice. “You hear me back at camp?”
“I was off taking a piss.”
“Come on up here, boy.” Strange beckoned with his hand holding the quirley. “Let’s palaver.”
Colter continued to the base of the scarp and climbed up the side, stepping into the cracks and ledges. He sat down on a rock beside Strange and planted a boot on the one in front of him. “Nasty cough,” he said. “Sounds like pleurisy.”
“I wish it was pleurisy.”
Strange stared off into the night, beneath the gradually rising moon. They were about five miles from where Colter had so unceremoniously taken leave of Machado’s gang, in a shallow canyon surrounded by nearly impenetrable walls of granite and limestone. Strange had a camp here. He seemed to know every inch of this end of the Dragones.
Strange took a drag off the cigarette. That started him coughing again into a balled-up bandanna. When he’d stopped coughing, he ground out the quirley beneath his moccasin. “Reckon I’m gonna have to stop smoking those.” He kept grinding the cigarette in frustration, shaking his head. “No, hell, it ain’t pleurisy. A few months back I took a Yaqui arrow. Percy got the shaft out, and he dug around for the head but couldn’t find it. I know where it is, all right.” He thumped his upper right chest with his fist. “Right here—in my wind sack.”
Colter didn’t say anything.
“I don’t want Bethel to know this, Colter, but . . . I don’t think I have long left. Every time I cough I give up more blood than last time I coughed, if you get my drift.”
“You need to see a doctor.”
“I got no time for pill rollers. I have to get what I came down here for.”
“The daggers?”
Strange jerked a surprised look at him.
“He showed me the two he had,” Colter said. “He’s looking for the third one. He took Bethel’s map out of her Bible, and he figures the map shows him where that third one is.”
Strange chuckled and stared off for a time, stifling another cough. “Good,” he said. “Good. Good. Damn good!”
“What’s so damn good about it?”
“I got the third dagger. Apparently, he don’t know that. Which means I know where he’ll be lookin’ for it.”
Colter studied the man for a time. “Mr. Strange, you got me baffled.”
“Call me Jed.”
“Jed, you got me baffled.”
Strange laughed, coughed into the bandanna, and wiped his mouth. He lowered the bandanna, spat to one side, and said, “I want all three of those daggers for my daughter, Colter. And when I get them, I want you to take her on back to Tucson. Will you do that?”
“What about you?”
“Never mind about me. I’ll pay you a thousand dollars to see my daughter and those three daggers back to Tucson.” Strange paused, narrowed a grave eye at the redhead. “You see, I know you’re an honest man. I know I can trust you even when there’s gold involved. Not many men you trust with gold.”
“How do you know you can trust me?”
“Because my daughter fancies you. Oh, hell, I can see that.” Strange laughed again, and thumped his chest with his fist. “And Bethel is a very good, albeit merciless, judge of character. Just like her mother.”
Colter flushed.
“I hear you’re good at killin’.”
Colter’s face turned hotter, and he looked at the man, tongue-tied.
“She told me while we were gatherin’ wood and you were dryin’ out. Said you shot Machado. Next time, aim lower.”
“Good advice,” Colter said. “Yeah, I’ve killed a few. But only because I’ve had to.”
Strange’s moonlit, dark eyes flicked to Colter’s scar. Then he said, “You want to help me kill a few more? And kill Machado again, only this time make it stick?”
The conversation was moving too fast. Trying to slow it down, Colter said, “Where’d those daggers come from, Jed? How is it that both you and Machado know about ’em, and how much you think they’re worth?”
Strange gave a ragged sigh and stared off across the moonlit Mexican desert cut by the shimmering snake of the fast-dropping river, lumpy with black, sawtooth ridges. “A long time ago, I rode with a gang down here along that river—the Rio Yaqui. We called ourselves the Rio Yaqui Raiders.” He paused to give a rueful snort. “Anyway, we robbed a bank south of here, in a pueblo called Rio Agave. The bank held mostly loot acquired by several wealthy hacendados who got rich rustling cattle on the other side of the border, so we sorta saw it, the way young tough nuts do, as an act of patriotism.
“Anyway, we robbed the bank in Rio Agave, and in the safe we found those three gold daggers. I’ve seen such pieces before though not in such good shape—treasure looted from the graves of conquistadores, mostly. Or found on the men buried in the desert. You can find such stuff all through Mexico and as far north as Nebraska.”
Strange paused to clamp the bandanna to his mouth, stifling another cough. When he pulled the cloth away, he looked at it, shook his head, and continued.
“A passel of rurales got onto our trail about forty miles east of here, shot our group up bad. In fact, four of the gang was shot out of their saddles, leaving only three—me and Percy and one other rider. The rurales had extra horses, so we knew they were gonna run us down. After we’d gotten across the Rio Yaqui, our horses were done for, blown out, but the rurales were still comin’. Knowing we’d have to split up and try to make it on foot, we each hid a dagger after we crossed the Rio Yaqui and were climbing into the southern reaches of the Dragones. We drew a map on the back of a wanted circular, tore it in thirds, and split up.”
Strange wiped a hand down his face and turned to Colter. “I never saw either of those other two men again until about a year ago, when I ran into Machado outside Tucson.”
“Machado?”
“He was the third rider. Just a lanky wisp of a young, stringy-haired peon then, a poor bean farmer tryin’ to make a name for himself as a bandito, and chasin’ all the tail he could find. Had a voice on him, he did. The senoritas loved to hear him sing, and he could hold a right purty tune. But he couldn’t shoot for shit.”
Strange chuckled, fondly remembering.
“I barely got out of these mountains alive, figured Machado and Percy were long dead. I hung around awhile, waited to see sign of ’em. When I didn’t, rather than venture back into the mountains alone, I gave up and headed home. Hell, that was close to twenty years ago, now. A long twenty years that included a stint in Yuma Pen. Last year, I heard Machado was runnin’ guns across the border, and I was so damn down and out and tired of bein’ a night deputy to a drunken old reprobate of a sheriff that I threw in with him for some easy money. Once we were down in Mexico, guess who else I run into?”
“Percy Tarwater.”
“Give the boy a cigar! And he still had his third of the map. So did Machado, by the way. Been carryin’ it around with him all these years. But we’d torn the map into thirds in such a way that anyone going back for the daggers would need all three pieces to find them all. So after we sold the rifles to the so-called revolucionarios we’d hauled ’em to, Percy an’ me stole Machado’s third of the map and lit out after the treasure.”
“You double-crossed him.”
“Sure we did. Before he double-crossed us. Shot us and stole our sections of the map. Bound to happen. You saw him. The Balladeer ain’t the scrawny little, silver-tongued peon boy no longer. Hell, no—he’s a cold-blooded killer. Shoot you as soon as listen to your spurs sing!”
Colter just stared at the old outlaw, not at all sure what to make of the man’s story. His sweet daughter, Bethel, had a bona fide old outlaw for a father. And now that she and Colter had found him, Colter just didn’t know what to think about him.
Or his quest to retrieve property that did not belong to him.
Strange studied Colter and quirked his mouth corners up, as though he’d been reading Colter’s thoughts. “Probably worth around twelve, fifteen thousand each.”
“What’s that?” Colter said.
Strange had removed a dagger from inside his coat, and was caressing the gold blade with his hand holding the quirley. “I’d say, judging by the ruby in each hand-carved handle, and the grade of gold, each one of them daggers is worth about fifteen thousand American dollars. Fifteen thousand, give or take. Leastways, that’s what Bethel could probably sell one for back East.” Strange narrowed an eye at Colter. The gold and the red ruby in the dagger’s handle shimmered in the moonlight. “Make sure she has them gold buyers figure in the foreign market. These might be worth more somewhere over in Europe. Spain, say. Make sure she don’t get gypped.”
“You really think you’re not gonna make it, Jed?”
“I do believe, son, that getting those two daggers back from Machado’ll do me in. I won’t have enough gravel left in my craw to get me back to Tucson. Even if I did, I’d be a goner soon after.”
Colter blew a ragged sigh and doffed his cavalry kepi. He ran a hand through his hair, the thin strands of which were still crusted with grime from the river water, then set his hat on his knee and followed Strange’s gaze out across the desert. “How’d Machado get those two daggers?”
Strange cursed and tucked the third dagger back inside his coat. “It was a simple matter of him sneakin’ into me an’ Percy’s camp just before we was gonna ride on out of these mountains and head home. Him and his boys snuck into our camp when we was fishin’ and stole ’em out of our gear!”
Strange laughed without mirth. That started him coughing again in earnest, holding the bandanna taut against his mouth with both hands, not wanting Bethel to hear how sick he was.
“Percy had the third one on him,” he said after a time, in a pinched voice, stifling more coughs. “Kept it to marvel at while he was fishin’. Wish I’d done the same with the other two. Then we’d have all three.”
“What happened to the third one?”
“We hid it, Percy an’ me. Hid it good, because Machado was on our trail. When we managed to slip away from him with the help of some marauding Apaches, I drew us each a map, rode up to Senor Gutierrez’s saloon, and put mine in the mail. Sent my copy to Bethel back in Tucson, in case anything should happen to me. I figured she could maybe hire someone to come down an’ fetch it—one of her uncles on her ma’s side, say. They’re good Christians and not too money-hungry, and were good Indian fighters once. Figure I could trust one o’ them. Percy an’ me didn’t want to keep the dagger on our persons no more for obvious reasons. Believe me, we intended to run into Machado again. And we was gonna get those two daggers back or die tryin’. We been playin’ cat ’n’ mouse with the old Balladeer for nigh on four months now. These is big mountains, and the Apaches have us pinned down half the time.”
Strange jerked his head around when a coyote began yammering from a nearby ridge—an eerie, ghostly sound. Turning back to Colter, he said, “Havin
’ a snake like Machado on your trail makes ya jumpy. A few weeks back, I could hear the bastard singin’ all hours of the day and night.” He snickered. “’Specially after we double-crossed him. Like teasin’ a coiled diamondback. You musta run into him when him and his boys split up after a run-in with rurales. They probably needed fresh horses and supplies.”
After a time, Strange drew a rattling breath. “I picked up his trail again two days ago, been shadowin’ him ever since . . . till I spied you and Bethel. I’m glad he’s back. Damn glad. We’ll run into him again, and I’m gonna need some help gettin’ those two daggers back.”
“How come you got the third one on you now?”
“I fetched it back from where we buried it after Percy never came back from his supply run. I thought maybe Percy got a notion to dig it up himself and ride off alone. No honor amongst thieves, you know.” He laughed. “We’ll follow Machado up to where Bethel’s map leads him. Since he found the map, he must think I buried the third dagger, likely ’cause I didn’t trust Percy any more than I trusted him . . . and we’ll ambush the sneaky bastard there. He won’t be expecting me to try to dig it up until I have the other two. Good place for an ambush, atop that ridge. Hope you got enough ammo. Like I said, I’m out of forty-four rounds.”
Colter threw up his hands. “Hold on, Mr. Strange . . . Jed . . . I never agreed to this crazy scheme. And I’m sorry, sir, but that’s what this is.” He stuffed his hat back on his head. “Machado is one angry killer, and he’s got seven other angry killers ridin’ with him.”
“Seven against two. I’ve faced longer odds!”
Colter started climbing down off the rocks. “Sorry, Jed. Your game will only get you an’ Bethel whipsawed, and me, too, if I bought chips in it. Which I ain’t. I’ll be headin’ back north with Bethel. I’ll see to it she gets safely back to Tucson.”
After what he’d been through down in Mexico, he figured he was probably as safe north of the border as he was south of it. Maybe he’d elude the bounty hunters and anyone else after him by heading north to Dakota, or to Canada, say.
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