Yet he did. He raised his hands high and muttered, “Don’t go shootin’ me in the back.”
“Turn around real slow.”
The world moved as if it were dipped in molasses. The man pivoted, pushed his sombrero back, and faced Barker’s leveled pistol.
The name escaped Barker’s lips like the soul leaving a dying man.
“Nate!”
12
BARKER HEARD NOTHING BUT THE POUNDING OF HIS heart in his ears. In spite of his resolve, his gun hand wavered, then slowly sank so his son wasn’t in his sights.
“Nate, what are you doing here?”
“It might come as a shock, Pa, but I like to take a nip now and then.” Nate laughed. From the sound Barker knew he had been drinking for some time and was more drunk than sober. “When I ain’t round you and Ma, I fall in with bad company. If you call all my friends here bad company!” He threw back his head and laughed. The echoes in the silent saloon mocked Barker.
He slowly raised the six-shooter again.
“You’re wearing a serape.”
“It keeps the dust off when I’m out on the trail, and it’s a damned sight cooler than a canvas duster.” Nate pounded on it and produced clouds of choking dust.
“The sombrero. Why are you wearing it?”
Nate stopped laughing, looked hard at him, then shook his head. He looked around at the others in the saloon and addressed them. “Has my old man been out in the sun too long? Why am I wearing a sombrero? To keep the sun off my head!”
“That sombrero, that particular one,” Barker said, the pistol almost too heavy for him to hold anymore.
“I bought it. I was caught out in the desert and a dust devil took my hat. Whipped it clean off my head and carried it away. It was an old hat and not worth chasin’.”
“The sombrero,” Barker said.
“You’re gettin’ mighty impatient, old man,” Nate said, a nasty tone edging his words. “Might be you know your time’s near and you want to rush everybody?”
Barker said nothing. He lowered the hammer on his six-shooter and slid the Colt back into his holster. Nate wasn’t sporting a sidearm, but Barker saw the shiny patch on his right hip where a holster had been riding. For whatever reason, he had left his six-gun somewhere else while he had come to town to drink.
Barker didn’t like his son drinking or carrying a six-shooter, but at least he had the good sense to get drunk without his weapon. More than one man had misjudged his sobriety—and skill—with a gun.
“You want to know where I got this sombrero? From the same gent what sold me the watch. I happened into him out on the trail not an hour back and I needed a hat. He offered me his.”
“What was he going to use for a hat?”
“How the hell should I know? Might be he needed my money more than he did this fine sombrero.”
“Where is he?”
Nate flared. “Out in the desert cookin’ his damn brains out, for all I know.”
Barker tried to sort it all out and couldn’t. He had seen the vaquero wearing this sombrero. He was sure of that. But why would the vaquero sell his hat to Nate? After the robbery, a few dollars was the last thing the road agent needed. From what Barker could tell, the road agents had gotten away with a considerable amount of money and maybe a U.S. Mail bag, too. More than one soldier received money in the mail from wherever he called home.
“How much?”
“What?” Nate stopped his tirade and just stared at him. “How much?” The confusion on his face mirrored Barker’s own.
“What’d you pay for the hat?” He was even more confused by the play of emotions on his son’s face. There was panic and disbelief and finally relief. All that was pushed down as contempt curled Nate’s lip.
“A dollar. I paid him a whole dollar. That satisfy you?”
Before Barker could say another word, the rhythmic clop of horses—lots of horses—filled the street. He glanced over his shoulder and saw Sergeant Sturgeon riding just in front of his guidon bearer.
“You better go get liquored up with your friends, Pa,” Nate said. The disdain was more than Barker could explain—or tolerate. He saw that the cavalry sergeant led only a squad, not the full platoon. Not sure what that meant, he wanted to find out.
“You stay here. I want to talk to you later.”
“Whatever the deputy federal marshal says.”
Barker started to argue, then swung around and left. He found his horse down the street, captured the reins, and led the mare back to the marshal’s office that had once been his. This was something else he needed to talk to Marshal Armijo about. A federal marshal, even a deputy federal marshal, needed an office. Sharing with Marshal Dravecky wasn’t in the cards, but maybe he could convince Armijo to pay him a stipend and he could call his own house his office. The extra money would come in mighty handy.
“Sergeant,” he called as Sturgeon dismounted. “What brings you to town?”
“Good to see you here, Marshal,” the sergeant said. “I need to have a word with you and the new marshal ...” Sturgeon struggled to find the right name.
“Dravecky,” Barker supplied. The sergeant’s grin of relief was at such odds with the way Nate had faced him that Barker wondered what was wrong in the world when he felt closer ties to a buffalo soldier than he did to his own flesh and blood.
“The lieutenant’s out on patrol and wanted me to spread the word about this gang that’s preyin’ on purty near every ranch in the area.”
Barker quickly told the sergeant about the stagecoach robbery. Sturgeon’s expression hardened.
“They’re gettin’ way more vicious in how they commit their crimes,” he said.
“I’d come to the same conclusion. It won’t be long before the killing’s not enough.”
“What do you reckon they’ll go and do then?” Sturgeon asked.
Barker could only shake his head. He had seen terrible cruelty in his day, and yet he couldn’t begin to understand the mind of a killer for whom the act of murder was a thing of joy.
“’Fraid you’d agree with the lieutenant,” Sturgeon said.
“Smart man, your lieutenant.”
“Seems to be. Better’n we had for a while.” The sergeant took a deep breath and stared at Barker. The intent was obvious.
“I can’t go traipsing off with you to find them,” Barker said.
“You’re the best tracker we got.”
“What happened to the pair that went off with Lieutenant Greenberg before?” He was less interested in that than he was in avoiding going by the widow woman’s ranch again. He had done the right thing, and it had hurt her. He wasn’t sure he could do the right thing twice. He wasn’t a man who gave in to temptation easily, but there was something about that woman that touched his heart. He had a desire to help and knew what was riding high in his mind wasn’t the way to do it, no matter what she wanted.
“One got killed. Accident. He fell off his horse and tumbled down into a canyon. Took a full day to fetch his body off the rocks and bring it to a spot where it could get buried.”
“The other one?”
“He decided he’d had enough of army life and just rode away. Might be he had other reasons since he was half-Apache. The notion of tracking down his own people kept him in the field ’cuz he hated ’em so, but chasing Mexican banditos wasn’t what he wanted.”
“You suppose?”
“That’s just a guess.”
“A good one.”
“What are you really thinkin’, Marshal? I can tell when a man’s thoughts are on something else.”
“How long would we be gone?”
“How long would it take you to track them cayuses to their lair? We got reason to think they are holed up in those canyons.”
“Skeleton Canyon,” Barker said. “I lost the vaquero near there. Nasty place to go hunting. You can be within ten feet of a man and never see him.”
“And there’re dozens of places where he could ambush us.
”
“Not dozens,” Barker said, shaking his head. “Hundreds. That whole place was made for outlaws to hide in. Or Indians. If you don’t ever want to be found, you lose yourself there.”
“You know the country better’n the two scouts we lost.”
“There might be a reward for the outlaws.”
“Me and my boys’re army. We can’t take no reward.”
Barker’s mind slipped and slid in odd directions again. A hundred dollars wasn’t out of the question for a gang of buzzards intent on feasting on the Halliday stagecoaches.
That much money could change lives. Any place where that woman didn’t have to see her husband’s grave every time she went to feed the starving animals was a better place. A hundred dollars could give her that. Or it might give Nate a start on a different life. Then again, with such a reward Barker might hire a handyman to help out at his own place so Ruth didn’t have repairs and chores.
“I’ll send word to my wife that I need to be gone for another week.” He touched the ten silver dollars pressed into his vest pocket, which he’d received for this day’s work. “I need to send her that message and give her something.”
“You want one of my men to take the message?”
“My son’s over at the saloon yonder,” Barker said, making a vague gesture in the direction of the Lucky Lew.
“Good to have family you can depend on.”
Barker looked sharply at Sturgeon, wondering if the man was mocking him. He saw nothing but a guileless black face sheened by sweat from the day’s heat.
“Be back in a few minutes.”
“It’ll take a spell for my men to get provisions, water their horses, and convince themselves to get back on the trail.”
Barker left the squad and walked back to the saloon, vowing this time to find out more about his son’s connection with the nameless vaquero. If nothing else, he wanted the Mexican’s name. It wouldn’t be much, but it might spark someone’s memory out nearer the Peloncilla Mountains. There was no way in hell Nate’s benefactor and the murderous leader of the outlaw gang weren’t one and the same.
He stepped into the dim interior of the bar and looked around. Several men played cards at the rear. Beyond them, making a botch of it, two drunks shoved pool cues at ivory balls and laughed whenever they got near. There seemed to be some bet involved, since in the span of a few seconds, Barker saw each man miss and both of them knock back shots of whiskey.
“Where’d he go?” Barker called to the barkeep.
“Your boy? He left right after you did.”
Barker touched the coins in his pocket. He’d have to send the money to Ruth some other way.
“He say where he was going?”
“Not a word, but he looked to be in quite a hurry. You musta lit a fire under his ass to get him movin’ that quick, Marshal.”
Barker took one last, long look at the men in the saloon and decided none of them knew more than what the bartender had passed along. He stepped back out into the heat. He’d have to take Sturgeon up on the offer of messengering the money to Ruth. He didn’t have to like it, but he saw no way around it.
In a half hour, Barker and Sturgeon rode from Mesilla at the head of the squad, heading due west for the New Mexico Bootheel country.
Barker couldn’t help thinking the area had been misnamed, no matter what it looked like on a map. It wasn’t a bootheel, it was a boot hell. And he had agreed to lead a handful of men into the burning heart of it.
13
“DON’T KNOW NUTHIN’ ’BOUT THE GANG ’CEPT THE name of their leader,” Sergeant Sturgeon said as they worked to pitch camp. It had been a long day’s ride and Barker had gotten the twinges, but he wasn’t going to be seen dipping into the bottle of laudanum to ease his saddle pain. Whenever a man let another know his weakness, it always got used against him. He trusted Sturgeon and the rest of his squad, but one of them might inadvertently mention seeing him use the drug. Whoever might be within hearing of that could do Barker considerable harm. Marshal Armijo wasn’t one for his deputies to be using such potent drugs for any reason.
Barker had to admit the tincture of opium eased the pain, but it also made his hand a trifle shaky at times. The more laudanum he used, the worse the tremors became. While he was at home, that hardly mattered. Ruth thought he was only having the delirium tremens from not imbibing. Sometimes he wished he didn’t read as much as he did. The symptoms were detailed in the book he had gotten on Italy and the Roman emperors.
He was slow to understand what the sergeant had just said. When it penetrated the fog swaddling his brain, he dropped his gear, turned, and demanded, “You got a name? What is it? Who is that son of a bitch?”
“Thought you’d have heard it by now.” Sturgeon finished spreading his bedroll. Somehow he managed to lay out the army blanket without so much as a wrinkle.
“I’ve seen him but don’t have a name to hang on that peg.”
“Don’t actually have a name,” the sergeant admitted. “His gang calls him the Sonora Kid. A youngster, from the sound of him.”
“He’s the one that wears the big sombrero? And the serape?”
“That’s the Sonora Kid. Rumor has it his men are scared of him because he is so wild and free with his bullets.”
“From what I saw at the stagecoach robbery, they can keep up with him shot for shot.” Barker mulled over the name. “Where in Sonora is he supposed to hail from?”
“What’s the difference? He snuck over the border to do harm. The ranchers claim as many as five hundred head of cattle have been rustled since he came north.”
“That’s a fair number, but we saved fifty head. Or is he working up to stealing an entire herd of beeves? A real herd?”
“Wouldn’t put it past him to kill four or five cowboys and take an entire herd when it gets closer to time to drive’em to market,” Sturgeon said, considering a crime of that magnitude. “If he upped and did that, he’d take their horses, too. That could make a man rich in Mexico.”
“That’d make a man rich in New Mexico, too,” Barker said. “But we decided. This Sonora Kid isn’t plying his trade out of need. He enjoys the killing. The notion he is thumbing his nose at the law makes the stealing worthwhile.”
Barker settled down on his blanket and leaned back, fingers under his head as he stared up into the twilight sky. The times he had run afoul of the vaquero confirmed his suspicion. The Mexican was toying with him, giving Nate the watch and then selling him the sombrero. It was the bandito’s way of taunting him. Barker began to wonder if he was only a convenient target or if the vaquero had something personal against him.
That caused a cold lump to form in his belly. If the Sonora Kid had declared his own private war, Ruth and Nate might be in danger. Nate especially, since he and the Sonora Kid had crossed trails twice before. Barker corrected that. At least twice. Nate was turning into a wild stallion. There was no way of telling who he ran with now, after quitting his job at Dooley’s store and leaving home.
“I hope to hell he isn’t,” he said softly.
“How’s that, Marshal?”
“Nothing, Sergeant, nothing at all. I was just thinking out loud how best to track down the Sonora Kid.”
“You have any ideas?”
“I do, but we’ll have to try them out in the morning to see if they’re any good.”
The rest of the camp slowly drifted off to sleep. In the distance a coyote howled, and the crunch of the sentry’s boots on the sand came closer every few minutes. Barker’s nose twitched at the smoke from the dying fire, and he knew he ought to sleep. Tomorrow would be another hard day in the saddle.
But sleep evaded him. There wasn’t any torture too extreme if the Sonora Kid harmed so much as a hair on his wife’s or son’s head.
“USED TO BE MINING THROUGHOUT THE AREA,” Barker said, looking down the middle of Skeleton Canyon. “Most all the silver chloride ore played out. What didn’t get dug up was too dangerous to work.”
“Never found much gold that I recall,” Barker said.
Sergeant Sturgeon handed a pair of field glasses to him. Barker peered through them, not sure they improved his vision. Although parts of the rocky walls were magnified, the amount he could see at any instant proved too limited. He preferred to see a large expanse of land, hunting for movement that shouldn’t be there. More often than not, that movement wasn’t a running buck or a wolf but a man.
He scanned slowly, getting dizzy at the speed at which the land rushed past.
“Keep movin’ real slow or you’ll go cross-eyed,” Sturgeon warned.
“Noticed that.” Barker kept looking, finally finding an abandoned mine halfway up the canyon wall on the far side, maybe a mile distant. He found the real use for the binoculars. The mouth of the mine jumped up sharp and clear and big enough for him to see if anything moved just inside. If the Sonora Kid or any of his gang hid out there, he would see them.
“Don’t see any trace of a fire or that anyone’s been to the mine in a month of Sundays.”
“What was chipped out of the rock?” Sturgeon asked again.
“Silver, like I said. Some gold, but not enough to make it worth hiring a small army to protect the mining operations. This part of the mountains funnels Indians escaping from their reservations down into Mexico, too. That makes it doubly dangerous.”
“Thieves and Indians,” Sturgeon said. “Not what you’d want to deal with if you were a hard-rock miner.”
“Most of the prospectors found their strike, sold out, and moved on. The men who burrowed into the hills were a different lot, greedier and less likely to be run off—if there was a buck to be made here.”
“Gettin’ planted in the ground doesn’t match the reward, no matter how much gold or silver you take out.”
Barker didn’t answer. He had slowly panned down the side of the canyon to the floor, where a small stream meandered along. He had been in Skeleton Canyon a time or two and knew that much of the water was alkali. The stream ran clean enough in the early spring, but that was a month and more behind. As the stream and its feeders dried up, they left only sluggishly flowing water that sucked up the bitter minerals from the ground left as tailings from the mines. After so many years of mining, there was plenty of dross to poison even a stream at full flood.
The Sonora Noose Page 12