by Judd Cole
“You know they’ll escape into Mexico,” Bill said. “Their stolen silver’s hidden down there somewhere.”
Pinkerton tried not to gloat as he realized he’d hooked his fish.
“They will,” he agreed. “That’s another reason why Governor Jacobs can’t rely on U.S. authorities. An official pursuit into Mexico requires a signed letter of marque to waive international law. But the political situation between us and Mexico is at low ebb these days. It’d take time and money to bribe it through their bureaucracy.”
Bill nodded. “Wouldn’t matter much anyway. Signed papers from Mexico City don’t cut much ice with the northern provinces. It’s snake eat snake in Mexico. Best to fight shy of everybody, papers or no.”
Bill’s eyes cut to Josh. “There’s a hoodoo on me, Longfellow. Must be Jane’s curse.”
“There’s a private train waiting for you right now,” Pinkerton said. “It’ll take you to Gila Bend. You’ll have to ride in from there.”
“Best get over to Thompson’s livery,” Bill told Josh, “and pick up our horses and rigging. Take them to the freight siding. And wipe that grin off your pan, kid. You ain’t locked horns yet with the Danford gang. We got some more dirt to shovel. Some deep dirt.”
Even as Wild Bill boarded his private train in Denver, two worried men met seven hundred miles away at Jim Paxton’s ranch north of Yuma.
“Any more word from Pinkerton yet?” Paxton asked.
“Not yet,” Governor Jacobs replied. “But he assured me he’d talk to Hickok immediately and then wire me back.”
John Jacobs was short and stout, with a big, square, solid jaw that matched his tenacious business sense. But right now there were big pouches like bruises under his eyes. He was gnawing himself inside over his decision to let his wife and sister-in-law travel the notorious Old Federal Road.
“When I requested a military escort,” Jacobs said yet again, “I expected at least four seasoned troopers. Not just one shave-tail lieutenant fresh from West Point! Besides, how could I figure on a prison break?”
“All that is smoke behind us now,” Paxton reminded him. “The point now is the time we’re wasting while we wait for Hickok to surface in some Denver whorehouse. Anne and Connie’s chances decrease with every hour we waste.”
Paxton, like his shorter and stouter friend, was around forty. Some men mellow with age and prosperity, as Jacobs himself had done; others, like Paxton, get hardened and narrowed. He was a man of strong feelings, but also a muddy thinker.
“The point,” Jacobs corrected him, “is to do the best we can to get our women back alive.”
“Alive ... and untouched. I’m damned if I’ll marry any woman the Danford gang has sullied.”
The two men were alone in the main parlor of Paxton’s ranch house, a sumptuous room featuring varnished oil paintings in gold scrollwork frames and red plush furniture with fancy knotted fringe.
“Purity doesn’t amount to a hill of beans,” Jacobs retorted, “in a dead fiancée.”
Thus reined in by logic, Paxton returned to the subject of Wild Bill Hickok.
“The man’s an arrogant, self-indulgent peacock! His people back in Illinois are as common as your uncle Bill. Yet Hickok swaggers it up big. He can’t stick to his own class of women. Always bedding some foreign princess or ... actress. And these fawning magpies in the press egg it on.”
“His personality be damned,” Jacobs told his friend. “Hickok’s good at what he does. The best. That’s all I care about. You worry too damn much about his ‘temporary marriages.’”
“Easy for you to say, John. You’re safe from his tomcatting. Anne’s comely, all right, but Hickok will fix his fancy on Connie. And mister, mark my words—Jim Paxton doesn’t take any man’s leavings, least of all a puffed-up swell like Hickok.”
Jacobs shook his head in frustration. “Our women could be dead right now, and all you can harp about is Hickok putting horns on you. You’ve got your priorities hindside foremost, Jim.”
“I do want Connie back safe,” Paxton insisted. “If Hickok can do it, fine and dandy. I can’t abide the man, but I’ll gladly match whatever you pay him. But sending Bill Hickok to protect beautiful women is like sending a fox to guard the henhouse.”
“Better the fox than the butcher,” Jacobs said. “And Fargo Danford’s gang is four butchers.”
Chapter Four
La Cola was a tiny, dusty, desert-flats pueblo located ninety miles south of the U.S.-Mexico border in Sonora.
Its name, Fargo Danford assured his men from his stubbled deadpan, was local slang for the ass end of the world. La Cola possessed only alkali water, one road that was more like a goat trail, and no reason whatsoever for going there except to end your life.
Long ago the place might have dried up in the desert winds, but for one reason—various Spanish and Mexican generals found it valuable as a far-north staging area. A rear base for troops and supplies during campaigns against the Tejanos, the gringos, or thieving indios like the Apaches and Comanches.
But nowadays it had become an outlaw haven for men on the dodge along the vast, desolate stretch of borderland. It belonged to no nation, was in fact a third nation, La Frontera, with its own laws and its own crimes, its own harsh code of survival.
But La Cola also had the Danford gang’s hidden silver barras. Twenty of them, thirty pounds each—six hundred pounds of the purest, finest silver from the mines near Vera Cruz. They would fetch $40,000 American, cash money over the counter and no questions asked. Ten thousand dollars for each member of the gang, at a time when most men survived on less than $400 a year.
Several times Danford reminded his men of these key facts. So the escapees moved steadily southeast from the Yuma Desert, showing good discipline and letting brisk desert wind and shifting sands obliterate their sign.
Danford had decided to take a direct route to La Cola rather than waste time and effort laying down false trails. Well-armed soldiers were safe, but few men were fool enough to enter La Cola. Danford himself dreaded the idea. Since the silver was not in town, but nearby, he meant to avoid the pueblo.
Their prisoners were increasingly miserable and frightened, but Danford refused to let the women’s suffering slow his group. At least there were enough horses. The gang added the dead officer’s well-trained sorrel to their string. And the stagecoach team turned out to be combination horses, broken to bridle or trace. This left the Danford bunch two extra mounts to use as remuda and pack animals.
Early on, Danford had expected trouble over the women—fighting among his men. But other troubles kept them occupied at first.
Almost as soon as they crossed into Mexico, they encountered a group of ragtag freebooters terrorizing travelers in the border country. Thanks to their captured Army carbine, Danford’s gang were able to kill several horses and scare the marauders shy of them.
But there was also the constant threat from horse stealing Comanches in this range. The Indians had learned it was far easier to steal a good horse than to capture green ones and break them.
On the grassy expanses near water, the wild mustangs themselves—”scrubs,” as the gringos called them—were sometimes dangerous. Some had become man-killers and attacked, led by vicious, long-maned stallions. Once, Danford’s gang was forced to set a hasty grass fire to drive off an aggressive herd too numerous to shoot.
“Jesus! I’m dried to jerky,” Lorenzo complained toward the end of their busy second day in Old Mexico. “One of you greedy-gut bastards has been hogging extra water. Or else giving it to them society bitches.”
Lorenzo rolled his head back in the direction of the two prisoners. They rode side by side behind him, each astride one of the blood bays stolen from the coach line.
“Fair trade, ain’t it?” remarked Coyote in his flat monotone. “A sup of water for a sup of titty.”
Despite their empty bellies and aching muscles, everyone except the women laughed at this. But Danford knew their water situation was n
o laughing matter. Even the most dependable desert dirt tanks were dry or nearly dry—nothing left but little tepid puddles full of dead bugs.
However, food, too, soon became a problem. The malnourished men had made short work of their beans and tortillas back at the way station. On that second day, toward sundown, Coyote shot a wild horse—a fat young colt.
He rough-gutted it and roasted it whole, brains and all, in a big, shallow pit, tossing in a few wild onions and some marrowfat to season it. Weevil-infested prison food had taught the gang to savor horsemeat. But both women refused to eat it, or even to look at it.
Coyote watched the women, huddled at the far side of the fire pit. The air had cooled off dramatically after the sun went down. Coyote winked at the rest of the men.
“Mm-ramra!” he called out, making sure the prisoners could hear him well. “Ain’t nothing touches roasted colt meat.”
“Better than beef,” Willard agreed with his mouth full, juice streaking off his chin. “Real tender.”
“And easy pickin’s?” Danford said. “Hell, a colt is so friendly it runs right up to a man just like a pup will! One good shot behind the ear.”
“Use a hammer,” Coyote suggested, “saves you the bullet.”
“Shut up!” Connie Emmerick shouted at them, unable to bear this sick cruelty. “Can’t you just eat it without all the crude gloating?”
“You best learn to stomach horse meat, ladies,” Danford taunted them. “That’s all there’ll be.”
“No,” Coyote said quietly, standing up and wiping his greasy hands off on his shirt. “I believe tonight there’s going to be something else on their plates.”
Connie tried to make herself smaller as she saw the half-breed walking toward her, smiling his horrid turtle-mouthed smile. She knew he was part Yaqui Indian, a tribe of northern Mexico known for their fierce independence. Her husband had told her once the Yaquis were very different from the friendly, submissive tribes of central and southern Mexico.
Then again, Coyote must be very different from anyone, she feared, seeing the smoldering sickness in his eyes now that he was drawing so close. All these men frightened Connie terribly, but especially Fargo Danford and this mad Coyote. Neither brute, she was convinced, could take a woman without hurting her—hurting her bad. She could read meanness in a man’s face, and Coyote’s had it in spades.
“Hey? If Coyote is gettin’ some,” Lorenzo said, also standing up, “then by God, so’m I! Matter fact, I got first share on the young one. Damn me if I’ll take leavings from a ‘breed.”
“First share, my ass!” Willard called out. “Make ‘em snooty bitches choose the first bull to mount!”
Both women flinched hard when Danford’s side arm spat a red fire-jet from its muzzle.
“Just hold it right there, boys!” he commanded in a tone of unquestionable authority. “I told each and every one of you when you joined up with me—it’s my road or the high road! You’ve all seen what it’s been like these two days on the run. Freebooters, Comanch’, killer herds.”
“Sure,” Coyote said reasonably. “That’s why we need a little fun now, see, boss?”
“Nope, I don’t. Lissenup, all you! No foofaraw until we get to a safer place. We can’t have no distractions, no fightin’ ‘mongst ourselfs, else we’re all up Salt River! None of that sweet stuff until we get holed up near La Cola, hear?”
“I don’t like that rule,” Lorenzo complained.
“Tough. I’ve seen this happen too often. The woman hunger gets in a man, it ruins his common sense. I’ve seen men kill each other fighting over whose goddamn turn it is! Just wait until we get the swag and got us a safe camp. You hear me, Coyote?”
“I hear you.”
But Coyote finished crossing to the two women and knelt in front of them. Connie almost retched when she felt his leathery hand grip her chin. He forced her to stare into his bone-button eyes. He trailed a reek of rotgut whiskey, stolen from the dead coach driver.
“Maybe I’ll cut you too, huh?” he whispered with sinister softness. “Take my use of you a few times, then just cut your pretty skin open from belly to throat, hanh? You being so famous, you can act like you’re dying!”
A sob got past her will to resist him. It hitched in her chest, and Connie buried her face in her sister’s velvet traveling jacket. Coyote laughed long and hard in the gathering darkness, then finally walked away.
Early the next morning, fate intervened to change Danford’s plans.
Two hours after sunup, they were skirting a huge, irrigated ejido, or collective farm, at Weeping Woman Springs. Danford spotted a group of unarmed workers talking in a distant alfalfa field.
“Coyote, you talk good Mex,” Danford said. “Ride over and find out why those dirt scatterers are jawing it like old ladies at a church social. Might be about us, so play it easy.”
Coyote followed orders and soon returned. A tense glint had settled into his eyes—as if he didn’t know whether to be angry or amused.
“What?” Danford demanded. “What the hell is it?”
“Could be a rumor,” Coyote said.
“What, damn you!”
Coyote fired the word at him like a bullet. “Hickok!”
And like a bullet it struck. “Hickok?” he repeated woodenly, the force of it addling him.
“Sure. Those men say Mexican authorities are mad that the famous gringo has entered their country illegally to save two beautiful and famous women.”
At first, hearing his enemy’s name so abruptly spoken, Danford tasted the acidic bile of fear and rage. But that moment passed quickly. A warm glow of elation took its place.
“Good,” he said with conviction. “This is our best chance, boys. Hickok’s bragged for years now how he marched us to prison with empty shooters. They put it in the newspapers, even. Hell, our own families laughed at us for fools.”
Danford took the lead again. “We’ll still go to La Cola. But for now, we leave the silver be. Going near it’s too damn risky until Hickok is planted deep.”
“You seem cocksure,” Lorenzo said, “that we will plant him. Plenty have tried.”
“Sure. Tried it up north. That’s Hickok’s home range. This is Mexico. He’s been down here before, but most of it’s new to him.”
Briefly, Danford explained about the time he was imprisoned for six months up in Santa Fe for beating a man so hard it left him crippled for life. While locked in the city carcel, Danford whiled the time by reading books about the old Spanish generals in Mexico. The ones who succeeded, he told his men now, always made damn sure they first established several haciendas as support bases.
“We’ll take a lesson from them. See, Hickok can’t trust a priest down here. Everybody down here knows about the reward that Texan put on Hickok for killing his son. Hell, his head’s worth ten thousand Yankee dollars—that’s a load of pesos!”
Coyote nodded, liking the sound of all this. “I take your drift. Hickok don’t have no place he can rest. We do.”
Connie felt her skin crawl as all four men turned to stare at her and Anne.
“And when we get to them rest places,” Lorenzo said, speaking for all of them, “we’ll have us some female comfort.”
Chapter Five
“This border stretch spells trouble for any traveler,” Bill explained to Josh. “The worst desperadoes from both countries are drawn here like flies to syrup. ‘Law’ down here, is pretty much the gun and nothing else.”
“Which means,” Josh said, “it’s especially dangerous for us because of that open reward on your head.”
Bill nodded, his gunmetal eyes sweeping the barren landscape. Already, sun and dry wind had cracked his lips deep.
“Word is out that I’m over the border,” Bill said. “Every two-penny gunsel in the area will be looking to cash in.”
Hickok met Josh’s eye and shrugged. “We all gotta die once,” he remarked amiably. “But we don’t have to rush it, so you’re welcome to cut loose, kid. No sens
e both of us ending up in a nameless grave.”
Josh tilted his hat against the progress of the broiling sun. “A grave’s a grave, I s’pose. I ain’t particular.”
He reached for the canteen dangling by a strap from his saddle horn. Bill stayed his hand.
“Kid, you don’t survive down here unless you play by careful rules. The first one is about water. Never drink when you’re in the sun. It’ll just turn to sweat before your body can use the fluid. One swallow in the shade is better than a quart hogged in the sun.”
Reluctantly, Josh left the canteen alone. He had gotten his first nasty taste of North American deserts even before they crossed the border into Mexico near San Luis. Their private train from Denver could only take them, by way of a remote spur line of the Central Pacific Railroad, within seventy miles of Yuma. So they had ridden horseback the rest of the way.
“How’d you like Governor Jacobs and his cattle baron friend?” Josh inquired. They’d met both men briefly at Jim Paxton’s luxurious ranch.
“The gov seems all right,” Bill replied, “far as stump screamers go. But Paxton is a fool who somehow got rich. Worst kind. He might be trouble before we’re done. He hates me on principle.”
“A lot of men do.”
“The way you say,” Bill agreed.
The two men stopped at least once an hour to breathe the horses. The Danford gang’s trail was hit and miss, depending on the drifting sand. But Josh realized Bill was hardly bothering to look down for sign. He obviously knew right where the group was aimed.
“Their bridles are pointed toward La Cola,” he told Josh. “For one thing, they know damn good and well no sane man would follow them into that mare’s nest.”
“No sane man—but we will?”
Wild Bill’s teeth flashed under his dusty mustache.
“Cowards to the rear, Longfellow! But I think the main reason they’re heading to La Cola is because their swag is hidden around there. Nobody ever found it, far as I know.”