“And Mr. Cobb was dressed funny,” Pete said, grinning.
“Eat your oatmeal, Pete,” Kate said. “You’re a growing boy.” And to Moses, “I’m retiring to my room, Moses. Please tell Jazmin that I won’t require any lunch today.”
Kate’s rosary was already in her hand before she and Flossie reached the stairs.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Hot-air balloon flying was still in its infancy when Josiah Mosely and Cloud Passing soared skyward on what was destined to be their last adventure together. Cautious balloonists flew only when the weather was close to ideal, normal winds and clear skies. Storms were always a hazard, as were very strong winds. Both could wreck the balloon, one with lightning strikes and the other by sending the flimsy craft cartwheeling across the sky, throwing the occupants of the basket to their deaths.
Mosely was well aware of these hazards as he clawed for altitude and tried to catch a favorable wind. After vainly battling an air current that pushed the balloon north for at least twenty miles, he finally landed and anchored near a stand of wild oak.
“We’ll pick up a south wind tomorrow,” Mosely said. “Look at the trees.”
Cloud Passing nodded but said nothing. Unlike Mosely the Cheyenne seemed content to go in whichever direction the wind blew him. They shared a supper of roast chicken and bread that Mosely had brought along in one of his carpetbags and then spent an uncomfortably cold night. At first light Mosely lit the burner and once again the balloon ascended.
This time at a height of several hundred feet they caught a favorable wind that by late afternoon was still blowing strong. When Mosely brought the balloon down he estimated that they were halfway to the mission.
“We’ll get there just before nightfall tomorrow,” he said. Then, “Cloud Passing, when we land you stay with the balloon, you hear? What I have to do is none of your business. I don’t want you getting hurt, so be a good Indian and don’t come after me.” He rummaged in his bag and found a pint of whiskey. “I don’t hold with Indians drinking, but tonight I’ll make an exception.” He offered the bottle to Cloud Passing. “Take a little nip against the cold.”
To Mosely’s surprise the Cheyenne refused. He rocked back and forth and from side to side and circled a forefinger near his temple. “Busthead no good for warrior. Get drunk and lose too many fights.”
“I don’t want you to fight,” Mosely said. “You will stay with the balloon.”
“Why are we here?” Cloud Passing said.
“I plan to kill men, bad men.”
“Why?”
“They are enemies of my friends.”
“You are not a warrior, Mose-ly. Why do this thing?”
“Because when I look back I want to spit on my life. Now I need people to remember that at least my death was noble and they will say my name with honor.”
Cloud Passing said, “Ah, it is good to be brave. No one remembers a coward. In battle the Dog Soldier stakes himself to the ground so that he cannot run away. If he is killed, his death is a noble thing. Tomorrow you will you stake yourself to the ground, Mose-ly?”
“Yes. I will.”
“Then I will make a song about you and sing it to my people. You will be remembered as long as there are Cheyenne left to remember.”
Mosely smiled. “I didn’t think you could speak English so well, so eloquently.”
Cloud Passing made a face. “Faugh, the less the white man knows about the Indian the better.” He grabbed the bottle from Mosely’s hand and tossed it into the darkness. “Whiskey courage is just another name for cowardice.”
“Ah well, no whiskey, no coffee, no food, we might as well get some sleep,” Mosely said.
“I have one more thing to say to you, Mose-ly,” Cloud Passing said. “Do not tell a Dog Soldier that he cannot go to war. It is like talking to winter winds.”
“Then we’ll die together,” Mosely said.
“No, I will not die. Not in this fight,” Cloud Passing said. His black eyes glittered. “But you, sky warrior, will find the noble death you seek.”
* * *
The south wind that blew cold off the Chihuahuan Desert stranded the balloon where it was, on flat scrubland that offered little. Josiah Mosely and Cloud Passing kept the craft anchored, a difficult job since it constantly tugged on the ropes, eager to be airborne. Fat white clouds like a herd of sheep migrating north scudded across the sky, impossibly high, effectively roofing over Mosely’s hopes of chasing friendlier winds.
He considered his options, such as they were.
He could wait with the balloon until the wind changed or leave it anchored here and make the rest of the journey on foot. After some thought, Mosely decided on the latter.
He told Cloud Passing of his decision and said, “You will stay with the balloon. I will not be back.”
The Cheyenne shook his head. “You are my friend, Mose-ly. I will be with you at the end of your life and sing your death song.”
Mosely knew further argument was useless. “Get the canteen,” he said.
After the Indian did as he was told, Mosely took the pair of British Bulldogs from the carpetbags, checked the loads, and then hefted the revolvers in his hands. Heavy. They’d drag his pants down, but that couldn’t be helped. He dropped a Bulldog into each of his pants pockets and then made a pile of the burner fuel in the bottom of the basket. He set the straw alight and stepped back, firelight reflecting red in his glasses he watched the basket and then the envelope go up in flames. After a few minutes nothing remained of the balloon but a few pieces of metal and the discarded hydrogen cylinder.
“Now we walk,” Mosely said.
Cloud Passing glanced at the sky. “It is good, Mose-ly. The stars are out to show us the way.”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
It was almost noon when a hot, dusty, and exhausted Josiah Mosely caught sight of the mission. “This is the place,” he told Cloud Passing. “Unless there are two missions around here.”
The Cheyenne’s sharp eyes scanned the area around the ruin, and after a while he said, “Many people were here and now gone. Look like Pawnee village after long winter. Faugh! It is a dung heap.”
“Then it’s the place we’re looking for,” Mosely said. “I’m going in alone, Indian. After the shooting is over, wait a while, and if you see two white men still standing get away from here a-running. Do you understand me?”
“I will do what I will do,” the Cheyenne said.
“Damn it, you can’t come with me,” Mosely said. “You don’t even have a gun.”
“This is your fight, Mose-ly, your death, and I will not be a part of it.” Cloud Passing laid his hand on Mosely’s thin shoulder. “I will not steal your honor this day.”
Mosely smiled. “It’s been good knowing you, Indian. You take care now.”
He removed his plug hat, poured some water from the canteen onto his unruly hair, and then parted it in the middle with his fingers and smoothed it down flat on both sides. His glasses were lopsided as always and he left them that way. Holding his hat in his hand Mosely figured he looked like a harmless rube lost in the wilderness. It was the only edge he had.
The Cheyenne had no word in their language for good-bye, but they did let others know that they were sad to see them leave, and Cloud Passing looked downhearted as Mosely walked away from him. After a while Mosely turned and waved, a small, insignificant figure all but lost in a vast landscape. Cloud Passing stood still, staring at Mosely, but didn’t move. The Cheyenne didn’t wave good-bye, either.
* * *
Josiah Mosely stopped, tested his taped-up gun hand, and found it painful and stiff but flexible enough to get the job done. He walked, holding his hat, toward the mission. The rear part of the building’s roof still existed, but the mud brick walls of the façade and sides had been mostly torn down. Mosely guessed that Trace Kerrigan was somewhere under the roofed section, probably trussed up and unable to move. As he stepped closer he tossed his hat into a heap of rubble, slouched, and thrust h
is hand deep into his pockets, his fingers closing over the graceful, curved butts of the Bulldogs. Now that the time had come, Mosely was scared, not of dying but of dying badly. Or uselessly. Or without honor.
Three broad limestone steps led to what had been the mission door, and a fire burned on the top one, a smoking coffeepot on the coals. Mosely had his foot on the bottom step when two men appeared from somewhere inside the ruin. His heart thumped in his chest and suddenly his mouth was dry. The men were tall, slender, handsome, and wore their guns as though they were a part of them. Clad only in pants, boots, and frilled white shirts, the top buttons open revealing the tanned Vs of their broad chests, they were the sort of men Mosely once dreamed of being before he was faced with small, scrawny reality.
Bat Boswell’s cold eyes studied Mosely for long moments before he grinned and said, “What the hell? Where did you come from?”
“North,” Mosely said.
“You walked?”
“Part of the way.” Then, to justify his being there, “My horse up and died on me.”
“What the hell are you, boy?” Sky Boswell said. “One of them traveling preachers?”
“No. I’m just me.”
“And that sure ain’t much,” Sky said.
Bat said, “Get out of here, boy. We got nothing for you.”
“Hold on just a minute, what you got in them pockets?” Sky said.
“Nothing but my hands,” Mosely said.
“Maybe you got a poke,” Sky said. “Struck it rich somewhere, huh?”
“I have nothing.”
“Then we’ll take a look,” Sky said.
Mosely took a step back. “I heard you were hunting me,” he said.
Bat Boswell scowled. “Now who the hell would hunt a pissant pipsqueak like you?”
Mosely smelled the freshness of the morning and the welcoming tang of boiling coffee. From horizon to horizon the sky was eggshell blue and the Rio Grande glittered in the light of the rising sun. It was a good day to be alive. “Name’s Josiah Mosely,” he said.
The Boswell reaction was not what he expected.
Both gunmen stared at him for a moment, unbelieving, then both burst in to derisive laughter. Finally, Sky recovered enough to say, “Who told you about him, boy? Who told a little runt like you about Josiah Mosely the New Mexico draw fighter? If you’re he then I guess I must be the pope of Rome.”
“Hell, Sky, I ought to gun the rube for telling a big windy,” Bat said.
Sky nodded. “I like you, boy, you think big,” he said. “But I reckon we’re bound to kill you for lying to us, and that’s a natural fact.”
“Where is Mosely?” Bat said. “Did he put you up to this as a good joke?”
“I am he,” Mosely said. “I killed them all, Hawley, Brett, Lusk, and that piece of human garbage Jesse Tobin.”
For a moment the Boswell brothers were too stunned to react. And that was all the edge Mosely was going to get. He pulled the sweaty British Bulldogs from his pockets and at a range of six feet cut loose with both hands, shooting well despite the spiking agony of his broken finger.
Mosely had the element of surprise on his side and had drawn down on two skilled gunmen who’d fatally underestimated him. He scored a center body hit on Sky and shot Bat in the right forearm just above the wrist, effectively crippling his gun hand. Sky, hit hard, gasping from shock, returned fire. Mosely took Sky’s bullet in his left shoulder and a split second later another slammed into his chest. Meantime Bat held his Colt in his left, and he and Mosely fired at the same time. Mosely aimed well, a solid chest hit that penetrated deep. Bat, shooting with his weak hand, missed, fired again, and hit Mosely where the left side of his neck joined the shoulder. It was not a killing wound, but it momentarily paralyzed Mosely’s arm and forced him to drop the Bulldog. Sky was down, mortally wounded, coughing up black blood. He was out of the fight and out of time.
“I’ll kill you, by God!” Bat yelled as he raised his Colt to eye level.
Once again he and Mosely shot at the same time. Mosely was hit a fourth time, a glancing wound to the side of his head, but firing double action he emptied his revolver into Bat. Dying rapidly, the tall gunman dropped to one knee and gasped, “Who the hell are you?”
“Josiah Mosely. Or I was.”
“You’re a damned liar,” Bat Boswell said. He dropped on his face, groaned once deep in his throat, and then died.
Mosely looked at the two dead men, at the carnage he’d created. “I am Josiah Mosely,” he said. Suddenly the limestone step rushed up spinning, to meet him and he stumbled and then fell headlong into darkness.
* * *
Josiah Mosely woke to the concerned, bronze face of Cloud Passing. The Cheyenne held Mosely’s head in his arms, and above him the sky had turned cobalt blue in the late afternoon light.
“Hell, I thought I was dead already,” Mosely said, his voice barely a whisper. “I’m shot through and through.”
“I saw you fall and then I came,” the Cheyenne said.
“How—How long . . . have I been . . .” Mosely said.
“Not long,” Cloud Passing said.
“You’ve been out for no more than five, six hours.”
That last from another voice, a white man’s voice, the voice of Trace Kerrigan.
“You’re alive?” Mosely said.
“Yes. Thanks to you and Cloud Passing,” Trace said. “I didn’t think one man could break the cellar door down, but he did.”
“Hurt shoulder, hurt back, and then saw key hanging beside door,” the Cheyenne said. “That was a bad thing. Loco Indian.”
“I’m glad you’re safe, Trace,” Mosely said. “Now I can die in peace.”
“You saved my life, Josiah,” Trace said. “I won’t let you die.”
“I’m shot all to pieces,” Mosely said.
“You’re such a skinny little feller the bullets didn’t stay inside you,” Trace said. “Now you have to keep breathing until I can get you to a doctor.”
Mosely shook his head. “No, it’s all up with me. This is how my hand played out.”
“The hell it is,” Trace said. “You’re going to get well again and fly that balloon of yours.”
“Cloud Passing told me I would die,” Mosely said. “He’s an Indian and he knows these things.”
Trace glared at Cloud Passing. “Now why did you tell him something like that?” he said.
“Indian is usually right,” the Cheyenne said. “But sometimes Indian is wrong. Maybe Mose-ly live. Maybe that will be.”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Slide McKenzie threw the tin plate of bacon and beans at the cookhouse helper who’d brought it to him. “You expect me to eat in this stinking cage?” he said. He’d untied his chin binding and his swollen jaw hurt like the dickens. To add to his misery, the plate had clanged against the bars, bounced back, and splattered him with most of his dinner.
“Suit yourself,” the helper said. He was a stove-up puncher named Slattery and he didn’t take sass or backtalk from any man. “You’ll be mighty hungry afore I bring you another plate, lay to that.”
“You go to hell,” McKenzie said, but Slattery was already out of sight.
Dripping beans, McKenzie cursed as he pondered his harsh fate. How was it that bad things always happened to him? His jaw was broke. Kate Kerrigan, that damned bitch, had refused to pay the ransom money and there was a strong possibility that he’d get hung. The only bright side was that the Boswell brothers would see to it that Trace Kerrigan died, and her son’s death would cause his uppity mother plenty of pain of her own.
McKenzie stayed with that thought, since it brought him a deal of pleasure, and he smiled as he once again tied up his throbbing jaw.
A few hours later, three-thirty in the afternoon by the ornate French carriage clock in Bill Cody’s tent, McKenzie saw the woman he’d recognized in the crowd that morning. As she walked past the cage wagon, soap and towels in her hands, he called out to her.
“Remember me, missy,” he said, each word lockjaw tight. “Ol’ Slide McKenzie as ever was.”
The woman stopped and her face paled. “You know me?” she said.
McKenzie untied his bandage. He was prepared to bear the pain if it offered him a chance to escape.
“I remember you just fine. And I mind that time down on the Cimarron,” McKenzie said, grimacing as each word punished him. “Now what was the name of that little burg?”
“Post Oak,” Ingrid Hult said.
“That’s right, Post Oak. And I was bartending that day in Ryan O’Hara’s saloon, remember that dive? I always figured you was a magnificent sight, the way you come into the place and just blazed away. I can’t recollect the cowboy’s name, but it will come back to me.”
“Dooly Baker,” Ingrid Hult said.
“Yeah, that’s the ranny. Emptied a six-gun into ol’ Dooly, huh? Six shots in the back. Dropped him like he’d been hit between the eyes with a hickory ax handle.”
“What do you want from me, McKenzie?” Ingrid said.
McKenzie held his aching jaw in place as he said, “Something about rape and a suicide, wasn’t it? I mean, the thing that started all the trouble. That’s what I heard anyways.”
“What do you want from me, McKenzie?” the woman said again.
“I want you to get me out of here.”
“And if I don’t?”
“I know it happened in Kansas, but murder is murder. I wonder what Bill Cody will say when I tell him what I seen that day in Post Oak? Or Mrs. Kerrigan? That lady might just hang you.”
“Let me think about this, McKenzie,” Ingrid said. “You’ve taken me by surprise.”
“Don’t think too long or I’ll do some talking.”
“I’ll be back with an answer as soon as it gets dark.”
“See you do. I’m not a patient man. And make sure your answer is the right one.”
McKenzie watched the woman leave. Real pretty. Swings her hips nice. Hey, maybe he could parlay the killing of Dooly Baker into something besides the escape. He tied up his jaw and decided that his talking was done for a while. Now it was all up to the woman.
Hate Thy Neighbor Page 19