The Avenging Angels

by Michael Dukes

  The Virginian whirled the black again. Spivey rolled over, bringing his gun up, but Kings was faster, firing down at him with deliberate precision. His first bullet smashed into Spivey’s right shoulder. The second hammered into his left thigh. Then he was gone.

  Regrouping, the horsemen drummed down the street and swung west, leaving the saloon man writhing in the dirt, vowing, “Gonna get his. That sumbitch is gonna get his.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Kings led them west for two days before he was able to suppress the feeling that he’d left a loose end back in Refuge. Brownwell, Creasy, and Davis rode along pleasantly enough, as men who have the luxury of following often do. They dozed for stretches of time and passed short topics of conversation back and forth like a bottle. Every so often, Yeager would raise his harmonica to play a bar or two of “Good Ol’ Rebel” or “The Bonnie Blue Flag.”

  It was just before noon the fourth day out when they came in sight of the Chisos Mountains, a twenty-mile stretch of rock-edged ridges, bluffs, and plateaus that ran along the edge of the horizon. As the riders’ shadows grew longer, the Chisos reared ever higher. The closer they drew, the more apparent it became how green the mountains were with foliage, their craggy faces dotted with the trees that gave the range its name.

  It was getting on to sundown when they passed beneath the Rocking Chair, that massive, vaguely chair-shaped formation that told the outlaws they were almost there. A figure was barely visible at the highest point, crouched with a rifle that caught the dying light of the sun along its barrel. A second flash winked at the encroaching horsemen as the sentinel held up a telescope to discern their identity. That was Dick Osborn.

  Kings took off his hat and waved, and Osborn returned the gesture before ducking from sight. He would be starting down the long ridge to the clump of honey mesquite about a hundred feet below. There, he’d collect his trail-wise mount and let it pick its way down.

  Kings and the others rounded the base of the Rocking Chair to enter a valley between the steep cliffs. A shin-deep creek lined with desert willows wound down the middle, running deeper into this sanctuary. Cottonwoods, live oaks, and huisache abounded in a sea of grama, strong and green with their bluish-purple flags aloft at the stems, and bright orange Mexican poppies mingled with bluebonnets and yellow rabbitbrush. Sage hens scuttled through the grass as the outlaws passed, too lazy or too frantic to take flight, and a small herd of mule deer grazed on the opposite creek bank. A few lifted their heads at the sound of approaching horses, then went about their business.

  The moon was high when at last they saw the log cabins—two long structures flanked by a stand of cottonwoods. With a breezeway between them, the cabins had two doors each, front and back, and nearby was a corral that led back into a pasture, enclosing a barn and a water trough constructed of piled rocks.

  Kings reached the corral first. He dismounted and touched aching feet to earth, then loosened the cinch to give John Reb an easier and well-deserved breath. For a moment he clung to the horn with both hands, murmuring words of encouragement that only his horse could hear. The men dismounted around him, then turned their horses into the corral and trooped with Kings into the first cabin.

  Only Charley Davis lingered by the corral. He let his body sag against the gate, let his saddle raise dust as it slipped from his grip, and watched the horses crowd about the big trough. Submitting only to Kings’s giant black, they banged bodies and nipped at one another. Davis’s bay gelding had not yet watered but was rolling its sweat-stained back and sides in the grass. Despite his exhaustion, he smiled, having always found pleasure in observing four-legged life.

  “Glad to see another human bein’ again.”

  With a hand on his pistol, Davis rounded and peered into the darkness. He made out the short, bowlegged shape of Dick Os-born standing just a few yards off, holding the reins of a rangy grullo horse. The fellow’s ammunition belt sagged with the weight of two heavy pistols, but Davis’s eyes were drawn to the stubby shotgun resting in the notch of Osborn’s arm, its twin barrels sawn down six inches short of the forestock. It wouldn’t have taken much muscle to swing the weapon up into action.

  That wasn’t good, Davis told himself. A man leading a horse shouldn’t have been able to catch him unawares when mountain sheriffs and possemen had never been able to. As it had to Gabriel Kings before, the thought occurred to Davis that maybe he was approaching that proverbial hill.

  “Who’re you?” he asked, hoping to disguise his chagrin. Davis was the only one who hadn’t noticed Osborn atop his station.

  Osborn was the sole member of Kings’s crew who hadn’t served in the war but spent much of the decade hiding out in Mexico, leaving two dead bodies behind him in Brownsville. The primary role he played in a job—if the gang planned to rob a bank—was to ride into town ahead of the rest, scout it out, locate the target, and size up the type of law enforcement that would have to be dealt with. He then passed that information on to Kings, who put it to good use.

  Osborn kept coming, more amused than peeved at Davis’s challenge. “Don’tcha think it oughta be me askin’ that question, amigo?”

  “Who’re you?” Davis said again.

  “Well, so long as you ain’t got a warrant in hand, you stubborn bastard, I got no problem givin’ my name . . . or one of ’em.” Osborn offered his hand and a crooked smile from behind a thick black beard that pointed at the chin. “I’m Dick Os-born.”

  “Charley Davis.”

  “I ever see you ride with this outfit before?”

  “First time.”

  “Thought so,” Osborn said. He stripped the rig from his horse and swung with his toe to hustle it into the corral. He then motioned with the shotgun toward the cabin nearest the corral, where lantern light shone through the windows. “Let’s head inside, Davis. My keister’s sore from crouchin’—yours, no doubt, from ridin’—and I reckon we could both stand a cup.”

  Davis’s pride was still smarting from having been crept up on from the flank, but he found himself taking a liking to the diminutive Texan.

  When Osborn lifted the latch and nosed the door open with the shotgun, Creasy and Brownwell looked up from passing a cloth pouch between them. There was water boiling for coffee, a pleasant sound.

  Across the puncheon floor, Kings sat with his stocking feet extended toward the fireplace. His eyes were closed, and his breathing was even, but there was a tautness to his face that made it clear he wasn’t fully relaxed. The thumb of his left hand was hooked over the handle of his Colt, the fingers steadily drumming the holster. Over the years, it had become almost impossible for Kings to be totally at peace—one part of him was always either at play with itself, seemed like, or tense as a spring wound too tight.

  Brownwell hauled out chairs for the late arrivals. “Have a seat, Os. You remember Bob Creasy.”

  “Sure.” Osborn nodded, dropped into the chair beside Brownwell, and turned his head toward the sound of coffee.

  Creasy patted himself down, searching for a match. “Them others should be ridin’ in by tomorrow night, right?”

  “More or less,” Brownwell answered.

  “Leavin’ soon, Crease?” Kings asked from across the room. It was hard to tell from his tone what he thought about it.

  Creasy nodded. “Yeah, I think me an’ the boys’ll just take our share an’ pull out. I’ve a hankerin’ to see Acuña again.”

  “Acuña,” Kings repeated, as though tasting the sound of the place. Shadows leapt and moved weirdly across the room as he got to his feet with a wince and made his way over. “Might be a good idea, that. Make yourselves scarce, let things blow over this side of the river.”

  “That’s what I had in mind.”

  “Keep a lid on it, though, wouldja? That’s a lotta dirty money you’re gonna be wavin’ around down there, and where there’s filth, there’s flies. Buy one too many whores, too many drinks . . . Folks’re liable to take notice.”

  “I ain’t no greenhorn, Kin
gs.”

  “No need to get ruffled. I just know you an’ your boys like your women and your drinks, and I might need y’all again.”

  Over the past several days Kings had gathered little sleep, and the light of the lamp on the table gave his face a ghostly cast. His advice was sound, though, there was no denying that, and it punched holes in the bravado of a man who, for all his talk, lacked restraint when cash was in high supply.

  Shortly after Kings turned in, Osborn leaned close to Brown-well and whispered, “What the hell’s eatin’ him?”

  “Damn if I know, but he’s gotten worse since we left.” Brown-well drew on his cigarette, the tip glowing a dull red. “I ain’t about to ask him, though, not afore he volunteers the true source, leastways. Had to shoot a fella back in Refuge—get to that in a minute—but I don’t think he’s frettin’ too much about that.”

  “He’s shot fellas before,” Osborn said.

  “He ever said anything about hangin’ ’em up?” Davis asked.

  “Might have, here and there,” Brownwell said, “though I can’t remember one p’tic’lar instance. Then again, I’ve seen the time I thought about that m’self.” He took another drag before continuing. “We’ve been doin’ this a helluva while now, had some narrow scrapes but always come out okay. More’n likely, he’s just tired. Tired and not wantin’ to press his luck with the U.P.”

  In spite of what he’d seen, Osborn was skeptical. “Think so, huh?”

  Brownwell looked down the hall. “Possible, but I been wrong before.”

  Creasy, Davis, and Foss stayed on two days more before they rode out for their base at Ciudad Acuña, south of the border in Coahuila State.

  The canyons were quiet all summer. The men came and went as grown men are free to do, but like young sons, they obeyed Kings’s strict order to behave, as given by a father. Those who went out gambled, drank, and whored, but otherwise behaved as law-abiding citizens. Kings himself rarely left. Once, in July, he’d gone to post a letter to the town of Floral, which was just a day’s ride north of the Jackson spread, and the second time, in early August, he rode northeast and was gone for a week, simple isolation his desire.

  Frank Wingate rode in on a mid-September morning. Kings was out in the yard, chopping wood in his shirtsleeves, and was halfway through the pile when he heard Sam Woods’s voice behind him.

  “Kings? We’ve got company.”

  Wiping sweat from his brow, Kings swept the landscape until his eyes lit on the objects of Woods’s attention. Four horsemen advanced from the west, still several hundred yards off but in no apparent rush to reach the compound. The easy manner with which they rode meant one of two things. Either they were friends—and those were few and far between—or they were strangers, tentative in their approach. Like coyotes drawn by the scent of a smokehouse, their presence was unwanted, maybe even dangerous. And Kings had only Woods to stand with him.

  As far as he knew, Osborn was still asleep in the second cabin. Yeager and Brownwell had taken off early to comb the brush in search of meat for the stores. By now, they should have reached the Santa Elena Canyon, where a leg of the Rio Grande separated American soil from Mexican.

  Zeller and Seward had pulled out three days prior, each with a portion of their cut from the U.P. job saddlebagged. They didn’t say when they’d be back or where they were going, and that was fine with Kings—just as long as it wasn’t Refuge. Kings knew Zeller still felt he had business there. He’d threatened to settle it multiple times over the last few months, but every time, his words proved hollow. Surely, he had more sense than to ride back. No, they wouldn’t have gone there . . .

  Sam was in the breezeway, arm across his chest to the inside left of his coat, gripping the handle of a pistol. “I’m with you,” he called out.

  Kings planted the ax in the cutting stump, then tightened his gunbelts. “Glad for it,” he said over-shoulder, and the words were not uttered lightly.

  Their acquaintance extended back to the latter half of ’63, when Woods came north from Richmond to Harpers Ferry with a depleted cavalry unit. Although he was immediately mustered into General Stuart’s command, he never formally met Kings until eight months before the surrender.

  A slim, dark man who curled the tips of his mustache with wax, Woods, like Dapper Tom, spoke with a particular tone and possessed enough of a vocabulary to suggest an above-average education. He was the surgeon of the bunch, with a rudimentary knowledge of the human anatomy and how to stave off infections. He could pull from Shakespeare and Milton quickly enough, but he was, thankfully, a little quicker with a gun, which counted more for men in their line of work.

  Finally, the riders drew rein with scarcely ten yards between them and Kings. The second fellow on the left was Wingate, lean and hawk-faced, given to coarse language and outbursts of violence. As a direct result of those famous outbursts, he could lay claim to eleven murders, some of which had been committed over the slightest aggravation.

  Smiling amiably under the shadow of a dark-brown slouch hat, Wingate did not speak until his companions had fully assembled on either side. When he opened his mouth, out came an unusually deep and gravelly voice that never failed to make an impression. “Been a long time, Kings. I’d say, what, three years?”

  “Four, to my count.”

  Their last meeting was at a trading post up on the Canadian River. Kings had been on his solitary way back from scouting out a Kansas bank, and though he had crossed paths with Wingate once or twice before, most of what he knew of the man was based solely on his reputation. And Wingate had quite the reputation. He was a road agent and bank robber, an occasional killer-for-hire, and master of a pack of wild dogs just as mean as he was—clearly, the men with him now.

  They hadn’t been with him that night. If they had been, Kings might not have intervened against three men whose leader shouted that a debt was about to be paid. When the smoke cleared, it was the gunman and his cronies who had gone to their Maker, and Wingate and Kings lit out together. Ten miles down the road Kings went his way and Wingate went his. Hats had been tipped but no invitations extended, as far as Kings could recall.

  “Mind if we step down?” Wingate asked now, starting to swing his leg up and over. “Got me a powerful damn cramp.”

  “You wouldn’t have brought trouble to my door, would you, Frank?”

  Kings’s question was tainted with a quality that held Wingate off for the moment. “I shouldn’t be expectin’ a posse to come whoopin’ in here after ya, should I?” Kings persisted. “Or blue-coats out of Fort Davis?”

  “Now, Kings, you oughta know me better’n that. You done me a mighty big favor once, and though I suppose there’s some would call me evil, I ain’t in the habit of doin’ evil unto my friends.”

  A quiet settled over the yard. One of the horses stamped, shook out its mane, and somewhere in the trees behind the cabins a dove called. Finally, Kings spoke again. “Who’ve you got with you, there?”

  Wingate grinned again and gestured to each man in turn, starting with the tall, broad-chested fellow on his right, whom he introduced as Dan Carver. Kings had heard the name, not attached to what was necessarily a compliment. Word was that he had killed more men with a knife than with a gun, that he could pick a fight as easily with a scarecrow as with a troop of soldiers—quite the reputation for a man who couldn’t have been more than thirty-two. He met Kings’s gaze through a pair of sleepy eyes, his mouth half-twisted in a sneer below a heavy mustache.

  To Wingate’s left was Jack Lightfoot, a slender man with milky-blue eyes that stood out against his dark complexion. His straight, hard features, shoulder-length hair tied in a knot, and mismatched manner of dress cast him as some sort of half-breed.

  The last of them, Henry Coleman, was a wiry, strong-looking Negro, with sprigs of black hair jutting in all directions beneath a felt hat with a rolled-up brim. His jaws worked slowly around a cold cigar stub. Sitting his horse two arm’s lengths away from Lightfoot, Coleman appear
ed bored, distant in more than the literal sense.

  At Kings’s approval, Wingate and his men turned their animals into the corral and ambled through the door of the first cabin—all except Coleman. Instead, he squatted by the corral, seemingly content to watch the horses. Woods, distrustful of the Negro, stayed in the doorway, watching him.

  Inside, the three visitors seated themselves and accepted a glass of whiskey poured by Kings himself. Wingate sipped his at first, then squinted with pleasure at the high-quality taste. He downed the rest in one clean motion. “Nice little hideout you got here,” he remarked, examining the room. “Never did find us one, did we, boys?”

  Kings let a moment pass before trying at civilities. “I thought you mighta settled down somewhere in Old Mexico by now, Frank. Got yourself a pretty little mamacita and got baptized, but I guess you’re still pluggin’ along.”

  Wingate chuckled broken-glass laughter. “Pluggin’ along and pluggin’ away, that’s right!” He reached for the bottle Kings had left uncorked. “I figger if it keeps bread on the table, ain’t no reason to call it quits. Honest gun work yields an honest dollar, Kings. Oh, sometimes we hold up a depository or two, same as you fellers, and sometimes we don’t do much else but live out the back of cathouses, but we keep busy. Yes, sir, it’s a wonderful life.”

  As Wingate helped himself to another drink, Kings decided to take the measure of his companions. Aside from the silver-studded gunbelt he wore, there was really nothing about Light-foot that would have made him stand out in any cantina or hash house in the state. Of course, if this was the same Jack Lightfoot that Kings was thinking of, then he could track an eagle through a clear sky.

  He could still feel Carver’s eyes on him and was aware of what the big man was trying to do. Kings saw Carver for the schoolyard bully he’d probably been, and though his means of intimidation had assumed a more dangerous shade since then, Carver still wanted to play kids’ games. A staring contest was the last kind of game Kings wanted to cash in on, though he hated to admit, the man was beginning to agitate him. Five years ago, Kings would have backhanded the look from Carver’s ever-following eyes and booted him out the cabin door, but he suppressed the urge. He reckoned the best way to get Carver’s goat was to deliberately avoid any and all eye contact.