The Backstabbers

by William W. Johnstone; J. A. Johnstone

  “Damn you. What about my pack?” Loveshade yelled as Sanchez and his bride rode away.

  The breed turned his head toward the girl. “Well, señora, what about your husband’s pack?”

  “He can shove his pack up his ass,” Mrs. Daphne Loveshade said, from under the meager shade of her parasol.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Buttons Muldoon leaned over in his seat and called into the coach, “Cornudas Mountains in view, Mrs. Talbot. And a pretty sight they are too.”

  Luna Talbot looked out the window and then said, “Will we reach them before nightfall, Mr. Muldoon?”

  “Unlikely,” Buttons said. “Looks like the shadows are halfway up the mountain slopes already.”

  “Where is Mr. Broussard?”

  “He rode ahead on a scout.”

  “Does he think we’re in any danger?” Luna said.

  The stage bumped over some rocky ground and Buttons raised his voice a little to be heard. “No danger. Red did see dust behind us, but he reckons it was only a pronghorn. Don’t worry, Mrs. Talbot, Broussard is a right careful man.” He sat back in the seat and studied Red Ryan for a moment. “Never seen you white-knuckle that Greener afore in open country. You expecting trouble?”

  “Nope, I’m not expecting trouble, but I don’t want to be fooled is all.”

  “You sure you ain’t got them Irish feelings of your’n again, seeing things happen that ain’t happened yet?” Buttons said.

  “My ma was an O’Leary, and she had the gift of second sight,” Red said. “She called it the dara seal-ladh, and she often saw the coming of sudden death to her kinfolk and even strangers.”

  “Hell, Red, don’t say stuff like that,” Buttons said. “Do you have the dara see . . . sela . . .”

  “No, not like my ma had.”

  “Well thank God for that,” Buttons said. “For a moment there you had me all affrighted thinking about sudden death and us feeding the buzzards.”

  “Where the hell is Broussard?” Red’s voice was so edged that Buttons stared at him in surprise.

  And then in equal bewilderment he stared at his guard’s continuing death grip on the scattergun. “Red, I’m sure he’ll be back directly.”

  “I hope so. Hey, it looks like thunderheads moving in over the mountains. Black sky over there.”

  “Nah, it’s just passing clouds,” Buttons said. “I reckon we’re in for a spell of dry weather. We passed a flock of quail out in the open, and that’s always a sign of no rain.”

  Red said, “I didn’t see any quail.”

  “Well, sure enough, they were there,” Buttons said, blinking.

  * * *

  Arman Broussard avoided the worst of the downpour by sheltering under a rock overhang in a shallow arroyo overgrown by brush and cholla. He saw no alternative but to wait out the storm, especially since out in the desert a mounted man would represent a tall target for a stray lightning bolt. Above him, the sullen sky looked like curled sheets of lead. He lit a cigar and waited. Nearby his horse grazed on bunchgrass and didn’t seem to mind the thunder and relentless rain.

  The storm passed quickly, but by that time the sun had fled the sky and the day was shading into evening. Broussard led his horse to the mouth of the arroyo and in the murky distance to the south he saw two bobbing lights, the sidelamps of the Patterson stage. The gambler decided to wait where he was until the stage arrived . . . a decision he’d later regret.

  * * *

  “Wherever we find graze for the horses is where we’ll camp,” Buttons Muldoon said. “Plenty of trees growing around there, so we’ll do all right for firewood.”

  Red said “Strange we’ve seen no sign of Broussard.”

  “He probably waited out the storm someplace.” Like Red, Buttons wore his slicker, and again like Red, a slightly worried expression. “Bill Stanton says there are a couple of underground springs in the Cornudas. Be good to camp near one of those.”

  “Seems like.” Red’s eyes restlessly searched the distance ahead.

  And that worried Buttons even more. “Hell, Red, are you seeing things again?”

  “Before the rain started, I thought I saw smoke.”

  Buttons groaned. “First dust, now smoke. Red, there ain’t nobody in them mountains. Trust me. People don’t live there, and I doubt the Apaches ever did.”

  “Well, I thought I—” Red shook his head. “You’re right. It couldn’t have been smoke.”

  “Damn right, I’m right. And I’d appreciate it if you quit choking that Greener. You’re putting the fear of God into me again.”

  “I still got a strange feeling though, Buttons.” Red removed his plug hat and shook rainwater from the brim. “Like there’s somebody watching me, studying my every move.”

  “A bad-intentioned somebody?” Buttons said. “Like road agent somebody?”

  “Maybe.” Red replaced his hat and smiled. “Or the ghost of some old miner.”

  Buttons let out with an exasperated snort, leaned over, and yelled into the stage window, “You hear that, Mrs. Talbot?”

  “Hear what?” the woman said.

  “Red’s hair is standing on end. All of a sudden, he’s sceered of ghosts and ha’nts an’ the like.”

  There was a pause, then Luna said, “I feel the same way, Mr. Muldoon. It’s as though there are eyes on me.”

  “Because it’s getting dark,” Buttons said. “Lots of folks see scary things in the dark, usually wolves and bears an’ the like.”

  “Yes, that must be the reason,” Luna said. “Because it’s getting dark.”

  * * *

  Arman Broussard watched the stage roll closer, coming on slowly, the tired horses at a walk. He threw away the dead stub of cigar and prepared to mount, figuring he’d ride out to meet the others. He never made it. Hearing a sound behind him, the shuffle of feet, the gambler spun around, his hand instinctively reaching for the gun under his coat. Before he could draw, something hard slammed into the back of his skull, and suddenly he was falling headlong into a black abyss that had no beginning and no end.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  An arc-shaped clearing surrounded by high rock walls promised grass for the horses, and Buttons Muldoon reined the team to a halt. “Take a look, Red. They don’t need much feed, just enough.”

  Red nodded and climbed down from the seat. Buttons was wary enough that he passed his guard the Greener. “Take care.” He glanced at the sky. “The moon is coming up. Give you some light over there.”

  “Not much. It’s as black as the bottom of a dry well.” Clutching the scattergun, Red walked into darkness.

  Luna Talbot exited the stage and looked up at Buttons. “Why have we stopped here, Mr. Muldoon?”

  “I think there’s grass over there, ma’am. If there is, I’ll let the team graze and we’ll set up camp. It’s rocky, uneven ground and I don’t want to bring the stage any closer. I could lose an axle quicker ’n scat.”

  “Where is Mr. Broussard, I wonder?” Luna had taken her gun rig from her carpetbag and had slung the holstered revolver over her shoulder. The ivory handle of the Colt was white in the gloom.

  Buttons didn’t comment but thought she was a careful woman. He also noticed that she was prettier than a woman had a right to be after spending most of the day in a hot, dusty stage. “I reckon Broussard can take care of himself, but he should be here. He must’ve seen us coming.”

  “Yes, it’s a worrisome thing,” Luna said, frowning.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Buttons said. “It sure is.” But he wasn’t worried. Not really.

  “I’m thirsty,” the woman said.

  Buttons handed down a canteen, holding it by the canvas strap. “Take a stingy drink, Mrs. Talbot. If we don’t find a spring, that’s our coffee water, and I’m a coffee-drinking man.” He smiled. “Why, here’s a little story. I recollect the time back in the winter of ’seventy-eight when I was driving for the old Anderson and Lawson company. Me and a guard by the name of Lonesome Charlie Wagn
er got snowed in for a two-month at a settler’s cabin up in the Kansas Flint Hills country. Well, me, Charlie, and the settler ran out of conversation after the first week, coffee after the second, and I thought I was like to die.”

  “I’ll only have a little,” Luna said, smiling. She took a few sips and handed the canteen back to Buttons.

  He laid the canteen beside him on the seat and said, “Lonesome Charlie came to a bad end, got hung for a mule thief in El Paso. I don’t know what happened to the settler. I guess he’s still sod-busting. Anyhoo, talking about coffee, I recollect another time back in—”

  A shotgun blasted apart the night quiet, roared again, and then came a scream.

  Buttons jumped down from his seat and, Colt in hand, hit the ground running. “Stay there,” he yelled over his shoulder to Luna Talbot before he vanished into darkness.

  The woman drew her gun and stood with her back to the stage, her eyes probing the gloom. The team was restive, and the leaders tossed their heads, their harnesses chiming. Out in the desert scared coyotes no longer talked to the rising moon.

  A long minute ticked past . . . then another . . . and another.

  Luna felt the rapid thump-thump of her heart, and she found the night air hard to breathe. The stillness was profound, the deathlike silence ominous and threatening, full of malice. Her thumb lay on the Colt’s beautifully curved hammer and she shivered as the desert rapidly cooled. Finally, she called out, “Red . . . Mr. Muldoon . . . are you there?”

  The moon was well above the horizon, and a wan white light stained the outcrops of rock on the slopes of the peak nearest to her. As though she’d just remembered, Luna took a cartridge from her belt and slipped it into the empty chamber that had been under the hammer. It was a test, that was all . . . a test to see if her hands shook. She was pleased that she hadn’t fumbled . . . hadn’t trembled. Good. She was tense, but not scared. Not scared of the dark or the hush . . . just . . . cautious.

  “Is anyone there?” Luna called. “Mr. Ryan? Mr. Muldoon?”

  Nothing. Behind her the horses stirred, jostled, pawed the ground.

  “Oh, hell,” the woman said aloud, taking comfort in the sound of her own voice. “I’m not standing around here all night.”

  She stepped out in the direction taken by Red Ryan and Buttons Muldoon. What had happened to them? Standing somewhere jawing to each other probably. Women were always accused of talking too much, but men were just as bad.

  The darkness enveloped her, and she stared down at the rocky ground as she stepped, careful not to put a foot wrong and stumble. After twenty or thirty yards—she’d later say that she couldn’t remember how far she’d walked—Luna stopped and called out, “Red? Red Ryan, are you there?”

  Then footsteps behind her. Luna turned, smiling, expecting Buttons or Red. She saw neither . . . only the hate-twisted face of Elijah Rathmore. The man jumped on her, and his weight forced her to the ground. Her Colt flared in the darkness as she managed to get off a shot. But then she was overwhelmed by other members of the clan, men punching her, women clawing her. Luna was forced onto her belly, and rough hands bound a rope around her ankles and she was dragged behind the Rathmores. At least six of them, men and women, had a hand on the rope.

  “Let me go, you damned animals,” Luna yelled. Her back and hips bumped across the rocky ground and her canvas skirt rode up over her thighs. A younger man with a slack mouth bent over her, leered, and then backhanded her hard across the face. The blow hit her on the right side of her jaw and knocked her into unconsciousness.

  By the time they dragged the senseless woman into the arroyo, the Rathmore males were already arguing about who would have her first.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “I send you on a scout and you come back with a woman,” Johnny Teague said. He was highly amused. “Sanchez, where in hell did you find a woman in this wilderness? Even a downright homely one like her?”

  Sanchez shrugged. “She was traveling with her husband, a preacher, and wanted to come with me. She doesn’t like her husband much, I think.”

  “Have you done her yet?” Teague said.

  “No.”

  Teague ran unenthusiastic eyes over the disheveled, sunburned Daphne Loveshade. “Yeah, well, there’s no rush, is there?” Then, “Here, you didn’t gun her old man, did you?”

  “No.”

  “Bueno. Killing a preacher is bad luck.”

  Tom Racker, looking mean, said, “Sanchez, did you do what the boss told you to do, huh?”

  “Yes. The stage with the Talbot woman is headed for the Cornudas Mountains,” the breed said.

  “That would make sense,” Teague said. “I’ve always figured there was gold in them mountains.” He smiled. “Along with plenty of others who figured the same thing.”

  “And that’s why there’s a map,” Crystal Casey said.

  “We only got the breed’s word for it,” Racker said, on the prod. “For all he knows they could’ve headed into the New Mexico Territory. He should’ve stuck on their trail for a while longer instead of picking up a woman.”

  “Racker, you doubt my word?” Sanchez said, speaking low, slow, and tight.

  Racker heard the tone, saw the devil in the breed’s eyes, and decided he wanted no part of him that morning . . . or any other morning come to that. “I was just saying—”

  “Saying what, Racker?” Sanchez said, pushing it.

  “Saying that they could be headed anywhere north of here.”

  “Sanchez claims the stage was bound for the Cornudas,” Teague said. “I don’t see any reason to doubt him. I’m willing to bet the farm that the Lucky Cuss gold mine is somewhere among them peaks.”

  “Then l say we saddle up and get ’er done,” Racker said. “I’ve had enough of this damned desert to last me a lifetime.”

  “Suits me, Tom,” Teague said. “But have a cup of coffee first. You ain’t had any yet, and it’s making you downright unsociable. You, too, Sanchez, and the woman looks like she could use a cup.”

  “What about the woman?” Racker said.

  “We’ll take her with us. She can ride Sam Canning’s horse. Sam don’t need it no more.”

  As the Teague gunmen stood around smoking and drinking coffee, Crystal Casey revealed that impulsive compassion that some whores possess. She put her arms around Daphne Loveshade’s shoulders, found a place for her to sit, and gave her coffee. Within five minutes the two were conversing like old friends, and an eavesdropper might even have heard Crystal talking about the ups and downs of the oldest profession and advising Daphne to consider it as a future career path. The girl seemed more than interested, her face alight as the possibilities of such a glamorous life overwhelmed her.

  * * *

  Johnny Teague and his nine gunmen and two women broke camp before noon and headed north, leading a mustang packhorse. Since he considered Daphne Loveshade a new pet that had to be protected at all cost, Juan Sanchez rode between the women. He had no sexual intentions toward the girl, mainly because he considered the dogs and cats he’d owned at one time or another all a sight prettier than she was.

  Daphne was blissfully unaware of the gunman’s attitude toward her, but if she’d known, it might have put a damper on the newly minted vocation that called her to the whoring profession.

  Teague and the others rode under a blue sky and a hot sun.

  There was little talk among the men, and for some reason Tom Racker was still brooding, nursing his ill temper of the morning. There was little reason to believe that Racker sensed something amiss, that his bad luck was about to turn blacker.

  Former gang member Dave Quarrels always insisted that the gunman knew death was stalking him. “Later that day, I reckon he went into the gunfight with Arch Storm and them knowing he was a dead man,” Quarrels said during his 1936 interview with newsman A. B. Boyd. “Hell, after that battle even Johnny Teague was never the same again. That’s my opinion and you can take it to the bank.” Asked by Boyd if he though
t the Lucky Cuss mine was jinxed, Quarrels said, “Of course it was hexed. You know all the bad things that happened in them mountains because I told you about it yestidy. But the fight with Arch Storm and them other three was before all that. Now, you tell me this . . . if’n that wasn’t an ill-starred mine then why did Arch catch up with us while we were on our way there? Huh? I’ll tell you why. Because the Lucky Cuss brought nothing but death and destruction to everybody who was ever associated with it, an’ that’s a natural fact. It was cursed . . . cursed by God and the devil, an’ there’s the truth of it.”

  Quarrels had maintained that the Teague/Storm gunfight erupted because Arch had wanted to avenge the death of his brother, killed by Johnny Teague in a Dallas poolroom. But that was hogwash. Arch Storm once did have a brother, but he’d died of scarlet fever when he was seven. No, the one and only reason for the gunfight was that Arch had wanted the women.

  Arch Storm was forty-seven years old that summer. He’d been a buffalo hunter and an army scout and made a precarious living as a wolfer. With him were Noble Hunt, Jud Epps, and Benson Egan. Like Storm, the three had been buffalo hunters. Epps had been a New Mexico Territory lawman for a spell, and Hunt had just spent two years in Huntsville for rape.

  All four were big men who affected wolf skin capes, fur hats, and miners’ boots, and collectively they smelled like a gut wagon. Epps had a slight reputation as a pistolero. The others favored the .44-40 Winchester, with which they were extremely skilled.

  Taken together, they were men to be reckoned with.

  Johnny Teague was the first to spot the freight wagon that had halted on the trail, a couple of mounted men flanking it. As Teague and his boys rode closer, two men jumped down from the wagon and stood watching them, rifles across their chests. Always on the lookout for a fast profit, Teague correctly pegged the men as wolfers and doubted that they carried much money, but the two draft animals and the horses ridden by two of the men were worth something.

  The stink of the pelts in the wagon and the stench of the wolfers themselves became unpleasantly apparent as Teague and his gunmen drew rein at a distance of five yards.