by Mark Henry
Clay explained their pursuit.
“Poor girl.” Rollins’s already sad expression took on a wilted look. “That fella she’s with must have taken leave of all his senses. I seen a huge plume of smoke risin’ up over that biggest batch of mountains to the south. What with the wind a-whippin’ so, it’ll be right on top of ’em in no time. If he don’t bring her out, she’s good as dead.”
Trap took a deep breath. It went against his grain to leave the care of someone he loved to anyone else, but he didn’t know the way to the adit. Corporal Rollins, as sharp as he was, would be no match for Johannes Webber’s cruel intellect.
“Corporal, could you take my boy to the adit and see that he’s safe?”
Bandy raised an eyebrow, but gave a nodding shrug. “I’ll carry him. It would be easier on him than riding, but not much.”
“Clay, could you go with them?” Trap looked at his friend.
Madsen let his head loll back and forth. “I could, but I won’t. This mountainous corporal here will have no trouble seein’ to Blake’s safety. I don’t think it would be a good idea for him and me to be together very long. I’d have to compete too much for talkin’ time. Besides, I got as much of a score to settle with Webber as you do. Ky Roman was a good friend of mine if you’ll recall.” He winked at Blake. “Not to mention the fact that Maggie would never forgive me if I didn’t look after your sorry little hide.”
Corporal Rollins took a sniff of the wind and shook his head in disbelief that anyone would willingly go back into the fire.
“I say you all done flipped your wigs.” His hangdog eyes squinted into the smoke. “But I reckon it don’t really matter much. We all apt to get cooked anyhow.”
CHAPTER 28
“I hope you got some idea of where you’re takin’ us, Trapper,” Clay groaned a few yards behind as they forded an ash-choked stream. It was littered with the white bellies of dead trout, killed by rising lye levels in the water. His voice was loud, but Trap could only just hear it above the howling wind. Both men had long since given up wearing their hats and lashed them down firmly behind their saddles.
In point of fact, Trap was only guessing at the route, following natural lines of drift from the ridgeline where Rollins had seen the man and woman. He was haunted by the recurring notion that they were following a couple of settlers gone back to get a milk cow, and not Johannes Webber and Angela Kenworth at all. Tracking over the wind-driven ground was slow and tedious, but he was heartened when he stumbled over a fresh set of horse tracks in a section of bear grass burned over from an earlier fire.
The area had been logged, and dozens of smoking stumps dotted the gently sloping hillside like short quills on a black porcupine. Above the hill was an apron of loose gray talus fanning out from a large mountain to the north. Turned earth in a line to the west of the talus rock, along with the depressions of tents and a split-rail eating table, showed the remains of a fire camp. The fire had swept through only hours before, burning itself out against the rocky bulwark of the mountain. It had been a small blaze compared to the one behind them.
Trap twisted in the saddle to look southwest, and shuddered in spite of himself. An enormous gray-black cloud billowed thousands of feet above the tumble of mountains north of the St. Joe River. Ghostly orange gasses churned inside the cloud, casting menacing shadows as the whole mass rolled toward them at an incredible pace.
“Oh, my Lord!” Trap heard Clay over his shoulder, and turned back to see him dismount and stoop next to a smoldering stump.
O’Shannon urged Hashkee forward to see what had Clay so distraught. When he drew closer, he realized it was no stump but a badly burned body.
Blackened beyond recognition by the searing heat of the previous ground fire, it resembled the stumps around it more than a human being.
“The poor thing’s feet are completely gone,” Clay moaned. “I ain’t certain, but I think it’s a woman.”
Trap slid off his mule and took a deep breath before he got too near the corpse. The body was facedown, its hands drawn up underneath in a sort of fetal position. The head was turned back, as if to watch the fire that killed it.
“Think it could be Angela Kenworth?” Clay let out a deep breath and looked up at his friend, his eyes already glassy with tears.
“Let’s turn her over and see if she’s missing a finger.” Trap scanned the surrounding trees and rocks. He expected to see Johannes looking down at them with a rifle. This would be just like him.
“Oh, no. No, no, no not her . . .” Clay said as they rolled the body over as gently as they could. “Poor sweet, pitiful thing.”
The body was missing not one, but two fingers. Though her face was badly deformed and twisted into a grimace by the fire, the turtle-shell comb Clay had given her earlier and the swatch of green taffeta dress revealed too plainly it was Cora, Clay’s new friend from the Snake Pit bar.
“Why did she have to come up here, Trap? Why couldn’t she . . .” Clay caught himself, breathing heavily. He stood to untie the leather strings that held his bedroll. “Ground’s too hard to bury her. You mind helpin’ me get her rolled into a blanket and leaned up against one of these stumps?”
Trap put a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “That fire’s gonna drive through here again, Clay. It’ll turn what’s left of this place to dust.”
Madsen shrugged. “I know it, Trap. But supposing it doesn’t. We can’t just leave her layin’ here for the coyotes and crows.”
Clay spread the blanket out beside Cora’s body, his back to the wind so it didn’t fight him. He muttered to himself as he worked, sniffing and shaking his head. Trap couldn’t make out everything he said, but he knew the gist of it.
“Poor thing just couldn’t get a break, could you? I hope you had you some happy times in your life, darlin’.” Madsen suddenly looked up at Trap. “You think she ever had any good happen to her at all?”
“She met you. That appeared to make her smile.”
“You reckon life is just that, sadness with a tiny sprinkle of good only once in a great while?”
“What do you mean?” Trap was sorry as soon as he spoke. Asking such a question was like pulling the cork out of Clay Madsen, and only he knew when his ramblings would stop pouring out. Luckily, he kept working as he spoke.
“If you think back on it, can you ever think of a time when everything fit just right—as if the Good Lord might have intended you to be happy once in a while and not just livin in one degree of misery or another?”
“I reckon I been happy enough,” Trap said, helping hold the rolled blanket at Cora’s feet so Clay could tie it with a length of leather cord from his saddle kit.
“I ain’t talking about just not bein’ sad.” Clay snorted and gave an exasperated shrug. “I mean truly, sublimely happy. That moment of perfection when there’s no wind and the sights and the sounds and the company all bundle up together like . . . I don’t know. . . .”
Trap knew better than to get in front of Clay when he was heading off on a philosophical gallop.
“I never thought on it that way, but I guess I been happy like that with my Maggie.”
“Yeah, but what you and Maggie have ain’t even normal. I think that’s what galls Johannes so awful. He always thought he should be the one of us who found that sublime sort of partnership with a woman.”
Trap scratched his head at all the talk of awe-inspiring relationships. His marriage to Maggie was what it was and that was it. Talking about it made him feel uncomfortable, almost naked.
“I know you’ve been happy, Clay.” Trap focused the talk back on Madsen. “I’ve seen you laugh your head off on more than one occasion, if I recall correctly.”
“Laughing don’t necessarily mean you’re happy.” Clay stroked the crown of Cora’s charred head with the tip of his finger. “She laughed. I seen her. But I’d bet you the ranch she wasn’t very happy.”
“Yeah, but you’ve been happy.”
“A few times, I reckon. I
could likely count them without too much effort, though.” Clay sniffed. “Two come to mind. One was when I was married to Inez and we took that little trip out to Sedona. There was this evenin’ thunderstorm followed by the prettiest sunset you ever saw, all bright and yellow orange across the desert—but my Inez, she was even brighter.” Clay wiped his nose with the back of a gloved hand. “I know a man shouldn’t pick a favorite. Inez wasn’t the handsomest woman I married, but she had a way about her that made me feel like I was drownin’ when I wasn’t around her. She was salve to my soul—like Maggie is to you.” Clay rubbed his eyes and blinked to clear them. “Your wife is still alive, you know.”
Trap nodded, fighting back the gnawing ache in his stomach. They situated the blanket roll that held Cora’s body in a seated position next to a smoldering tree stump a few feet away.
“When was the other time?” O’Shannon stretched his back.
Clay was lost in thought, gazing up at the gray jumble of horse-sized rocks on the talus slope above them. “Huh?”
“You said there was another time that came to your mind when your were happy.”
“I did at that.” Clay nodded and turned to face his partner. There was a look of grim determination in his furrowed brow. His eyes sparkled the way they did when a battle was about to be joined. It was as if he’d suddenly been imbued with a double dose of swagger. He motioned toward the horses with a slight nod. Trap followed.
“If you take a gander over my left shoulder, you’ll see a man workin’ his way across the rocks up yonder. He’s carryin’ a long gun, but I’m bettin’ he won’t be close enough to have us in range for a little spell yet.”
Trap looked up the slope. He could just make out a dark form slipping down through the jumble of rocks, a rifle in hand.
“I don’t think I ever introduced you to my newest sweetheart,” Clay said, sliding a long, bolt-action rifle out of the sheepskin leather boot on the off side of his saddle. Trap recognized the Mauser-style bolt action, but hadn’t paid attention to what type of rifle Clay carried. While O’Shannon was perfectly happy with his 1881 Marlin—even loyal to it, any new firearm to hit the military or civilian market was likely to steal Clay Madsen’s eye.
“She’s what the U.S. government calls a ‘Ball Cartridge, Caliber 30, Model of 19 Aught 6.’” Madsen smiled casually and rubbed his hand across the smooth steel barrel as if there were no sniper a few hundred yards away, possibly sighting in at that very moment. “Thirty-aught-six, for short. I just call her Ramona.”
A bullet whined into the charred dust twenty yards in front of the horses. A short moment later, the report of the rifle popped in the distance, barely audible above the wind.
Clay shook his head. “He’s trying to walk it into us, but in this storm, he’s got a better chance of shooting himself. I bet he’s still using an antique like you.” Madsen nodded toward a downed tree and a small hummock of burned ground big enough for two men to hide behind if they lay flat. “Just the same, we best hunker down in case he gets lucky.”
“Why Ramona?” Trap hesitated to ask, but he was too good a friend not to allow Clay time to make the explanation he sorely wanted to give. Madsen had had a habit of naming his firearms from the day Trap met him, and some of the reasons proved interesting.
“Remember that little Mexican whore down in Nogales?” Clay squinted down the barrel, then closed his eyes, feeling the wind. Both men were on their bellies. Trap acted as a spotter, watching the target while Clay worked out his aim. “She had that darlin’ spot of a mole above her upper lip?” His words muffled into the polished wood of the rifle.
Trap grunted, though he didn’t keep a catalog of whores in his brain like Clay did. If he said he didn’t remember, Clay was liable to give him more of a description than he was up for.
“Well.” Clay pressed his cheek against the walnut stock. “I heard tell Bill Cody named his Springfield needle-gun after Lucretia Borgia on account of her bein’ so beautiful and deadly. Well, that Mexican whore, Ramona, was by far the most handsome thing I ever did see—and the most deadly—just like my aught-six here.” Madsen aimed in earnest now. More reports echoed down from the rocks above, but the rounds still fell harmlessly, yards away.
“He don’t have the patience it takes to get a good shot off,” Trap observed when a bullet drove up a dust cloud ten yards in front of them. It was carried away immediately by the wind.
“Or the gun,” Clay said, squeezing off a crisp shot from Ramona. He worked the bolt and rolled half up on his side, a wry smile parting his lips. “Unless I miss my guess, Ramona just gave him a 150-grain lead kiss about where his left hand used to be. If it’s Mr. Feak up there, I reckon that will be a lesson to him about cuttin’ fingers and such off poor folks. What do you say we go talk to him before he bleeds to death?”
* * *
The two trackers approached through the rocks cautiously since Clay figured the sniper might still retain the use of his gun hand.
They needn’t have worried.
Though still alive, Feak was a mess when they found him. Ramona’s kiss had torn away the top two thirds of his left hand where he’d been holding the forearm of his rifle. Ironically, only his little finger was left, dangling by a bloody thread of flesh. Bits of wood from the demolished weapon had lodged in the outlaw’s face and arms, flecking him with blood. Feak lay on his back behind a large rock, panting and staring up at the smoky sky. Bright swatches of blood marred the rocks where he’d thrashed about after the shot—until he’d grown so weak he could do nothing but lay back and wait to die.
Though he would have lost his hand and maybe part of the arm, the wound hadn’t been a mortal one. A quick wrap of a tourniquet would have stemmed the flow of blood. But Feak was shot, and to some people being shot was as good as being dead. Trap was glad Blake didn’t share the same thoughts on the matter. Trap himself had been shot several times, once not even realizing it for several minutes until he noticed a hole in his britches leg.
“Johannes Webber be damned to Hell,” Feak groaned, a pallid sweat forming across his bald head.
Clay kicked Feak’s pistol aside, just to be sure he didn’t get a sudden burst of energy, and looked down at the dying man. “Funny you should say that, mister. You’re readin’ my mind. Did Mr. Webber say where he might be headed?”
Feak snorted, then winced. He squeezed above his shattered wrist with his right hand. His voice was pointed but weak. “You must be Madsen. He said you would be the mouthy one. It ain’t really you he’s after.” Feak lifted his head to get a good look at Trap, then let it fall back to the rock. “It’s O’Shannon he be lookin’ for. He never told me why he had it in for you so bad. Just said it was personal.” Feak’s eyes fluttered and a wan smile crossed his fat lips. The pain was easing. He wouldn’t last much longer.
Trap stooped down next to the outlaw to hear him more clearly. “Did Webber say where he was going, what he had planned?”
Feak shook his head. A small tear formed in the corner of his eye, then dried in the wind before it fell. “He plans to kill you—make you see those you care about die in front of your eyes—then kill you.”
“Is the Kenworth girl still alive?” Trap didn’t like thinking about the grudge Johannes still held for him. Too much guilt still festered in his heart about what had happened all those years ago.
“Last I saw of her she was. Damned little coyote nearly bit ol’ Juan Caesar’s arm off.” Feak tried to chuckle, but the effort was too much for him. “Webber will be waitin’ for you.” The killer coughed like he’d been lung-shot. “He’s a smart one, that Johannes is. I doubt you can take him.”
“Where?” Trap raised his voice to get Lucius back on track. “Where’s he taking the girl?”
“A canyon . . . west of here.” Feak stammered pitifully, “You boys don’t have any water, do you?”
Clay shook his head. “It’s down with the horses. Which canyon?”
“Stone Canyon. It ain’t far—he w
ants you to find him—all part of his plan.” He clutched at Clay’s arm with his blood-smeared right hand. “I’m dyin’.”
Clay jerked away in disgust. “Feak, you blasted boob. There ain’t no reason for you to die just yet unless you have a mind to. Show some backbone for pity’s sake.”
Trap rose. He now possessed the information he needed about Webber’s whereabouts, and saw no further reason to listen to the dying outlaw’s self-pity.
“I’ll be meetin’ my maker soon, boys.” Feak seemed to be talking to someone who wasn’t there. His eyes fluttered. His face and scalp grew pale. “I ain’t long for this world now.”
Clay shook his head and stood. “Well if you’re bound and determined, go ahead on to Hell then. We’ll be sendin’ Johannes your way shortly.”
* * *
“When was the other time?” Trap asked as they mounted to move off down the trail again together.
“What do you mean?”
“You said there were two times that came to your mind when you were truly happy.”
Clay smiled and twirled the thin leather reins in his hands. “I was just bein’ a bawl baby.”
“All right. If you don’t want to talk about it.” Trap knew there wasn’t much chance of that.
Ten feet down the trail, Clay broke the short silence.
“It was when I saw you and Hezekiah on the road there yesterday and we was all back together again. I reckon most of the times back when we was younger, trackin’ bandits and chasin’ outlaws was the finest hours a man could ask for. I was just too young and knot-headed to realize it at the time.
“Hell, I’m even looking forward to burnin’ to death along with Johannes. To tell the truth, I reckon I’m as happy as I can be right now.”
CHAPTER 29
With a raging fire behind them and a bright smear of blood on the alder leaves ahead, Zelinski paused and held up an open hand to slow the column of men sloshing down ash-choked Ruby Creek in the narrow ravine. Something the trackers had told him earlier tugged at the corners of his mind. He’d been so concerned about the death of his friend George White and his crew that he hadn’t taken the time to listen like he should have. The big Texan had said there were renegade Apache involved.