He squatted there like a patient Indian until the rumbling line of prairie schooners had vanished. When he rose and made his pigeon-toed way towards the gully where his horse was tied, he had decided he could wait just a little longer until a chance presented itself.
Chapter Seven – Night of Blood
BY MID-MORNING they had had their first taste of desert heat and by noon they were deep in the furnace of Dead Horse Desert.
Dead Horse Desert was the main reason why the town of Tarbuck remained isolated from the outside world. This isolation had made the Tarbuck Council, at the request of the miners, advertise for wives for its lonesome citizens. Circled in the south, east and west by the ramparts of the towering Winding Stair Mountains, and barricaded to the north by the desert, Tarbuck was no place for a person to go on a whim.
Before the day was half over, the travelers understood why Tarbuck was regarded as being so inaccessible. Keef Hurble had warned that the desert would be uncomfortably hot, and it was that and more as the sun shimmered down from a brassy sky on wagon tops, mules, sweating horses and dust-coated men.
In the sandhills flanking the trail they saw clusters of hissing rattlesnakes. Two buzzards trailed them all day long, and when they made camp that night at the base of a great butte, the carrion birds perched high and hopefully atop the stone spire, happy to wait until Dead Horse Desert took its toll.
It was almost dark when the Indians appeared.
Big Rosie spotted them first; a silent line of paint daubed redskins seated astride their ponies along a broken-backed ridge. Endowed with uncommonly powerful lungs, Rosie announced the sighting with a scream that sent an immediate wave of panic through the camp, startling Hambone so much that he came perilously close to tumbling into a simmering cauldron of stew. Herbie Pitt dived for the cover of his wagon and Mick Potter and Keef Hurble had their rifles at the ready when Brazos came running from the remuda.
“Don’t shoot!” the Texan bellowed. “They’re not dangerous!”
Hurble and Potter gaped at him. The frightened women stared. Even Benedict looked astounded.
“How the devil can you tell they’re not dangerous?” Benedict demanded.
“On account of we can see ’em,” Brazos announced calmly, unbuckling his gunbelt.
“So?”
Brazos passed Benedict his gun rig. “The dangerous kind you don’t see until it’s too late,” he declared. “Hold this while I mosey out and see what they want.”
What the six Cheyenne of the Winged Foot tribe wanted was horses. Thumping their chests and looking incredibly fierce to the watching women, many of whom had never seen even tame Indians, the braves told Brazos they wanted six horses. Brazos offered them one. The haggling and bluffing that followed occupied thirty minutes, resulting in the redskins riding off quite happily with two horses, leaving Hank Brazos to return to a hero’s welcome from everybody, even including Benedict.
“I’m blessed if I know how you can debate with those heathen and know when they’re bluffing and when not,” Duke declared as Hurble poured the three of them a shot of whisky at his campfire.
“It helps to grow up with Comanches livin’ just over the hill,” Brazos replied dryly, then he drained the glass with a flick of the wrist, waited for the warmth to hit his stomach, then grinned as he held out his glass for a refill. “It also helps to have a few good men at your back with rifles, just in case you guess wrong.”
Hurble sleeved sweat from his forehead and shook his head. “I don’t give a damn whether it was easy or hard for you, Hank,” he said frankly. “I’m just glad I brought you along.”
Sipping his drink, Brazos studied Hurble over the rim of the mug and frowned. He was a good man, Hurble—honest, gutty, straight as a string. Perhaps there had been more danger in the Indian situation than Brazos was inclined to let on, but there was no room for doubt concerning the potential danger in which the entire train would find itself if Kain Ketchell should show up. The fact that Hurble didn’t know about Ketchell and Libby Blue had bothered the Texan on and off during the journey, but never more so than now as he looked into Hurble’s honest, trusting and grateful face.
Brazos sighed and took another pull on his whisky. Maybe it was best that none of them knew, he reflected. Time enough to reveal the truth of the set-up if and when the killer showed up. There had been no sign of anybody following them since that fleeting glimpse of a distant figure at moonrise the previous night. During the afternoon, Brazos had scouted several miles north and south of their trail without cutting any sign. He was beginning to wonder if that dark shape he’d seen had been Kain Ketchell.
When Hurble was finally called away to supper by Agatha, he left the bottle with Benedict and Brazos. They poured themselves another shot apiece, then took a stroll around the site to check on the sentries.
As they returned to the wagons, they saw Libby Blue and Gloria la Rue perched on the wagon tongue of Smiley Dunn’s Conestoga, talking animatedly. Gloria was an ex-actress, a little over the hill but still attractive at thirty-five. On impulse, she had abruptly decided to give up the life of “tinsel and sham” and accept the more mundane but rewarding role of a miner’s wife. The actress seemed to hit it off quite well with Libby, Brazos had noted; it seemed she was the only one who did. Easy friendships had sprung up among the Tarbuck-bound women, but with the exception of Gloria this didn’t include Libby. For some reason the women seemed to distrust her—Big Rosie most of all.
“A woman knows about other women, boyo,” she had told Brazos during the noon rest. “Call it intuition, black magic or whatever pleases you—but they know right enough. And every one of us knows there’s somethin’ mighty strange about that one.”
“Somethin’ mighty pretty, too, Rosie,” Brazos had countered.
“So she’s pretty,” had come the stern reply. “The most dangerous ones are always the prettiest, you poor, trustin’ yabbo. But you just be for heedin’ my warnin’—she might be as young and dewy as an Irish rose, but she’s been around this old world, indeed she has. She knows more than you do, you blue-eyed Texan ... and it wouldn’t be surprisin’ me if she even knows more of the wicked ways of the world than that friend of yours with the name of the holy saint who hasn’t any more saintliness in him than Luther.”
“Who’s Luther, Yank?” Hank asked suddenly now as they left the wagon behind.
“Luther?” Benedict frowned. “Luther who?”
“Ahh, never mind,” Brazos replied, halting by Hurble’s fire again. Rosie was just plain jealous, he told himself. And jealousy was the simple reason why the women refused to accept Libby.
Yet, if that were the case, a small voice nagged Brazos, what was the explanation for those faint doubts he himself experienced from time to time when he found himself in Libby Blue’s company? He couldn’t put those down to jealousy.
Suddenly it was time for Brazos to relieve Brunk Doolin on watch. As Brazos sauntered past the Dunn wagon, where the women were getting ready for bed, Libby Blue’s musical voice came to him through the velvet darkness.
“Goodnight, Hank.”
“’Night, Libby,” he called back. Then, smiling, he felt his uncertainty about Libby vanish as if it had never existed.
The dim starlight was reflected on Rogan St. John’s bald dome as he stared intently at Jimmy Lee and Alvin Page who had just returned from a scouting mission up Eagle Valley.
“One man, you say?” he growled. “How far ahead?”
“About three miles, Rogan,” supplied Page as the other members of the bounty-hunter band grouped around to listen. “He’s camped at the base of a yeller butte up there.”
“Ketchell?” breathed St. John, putting into words the immediate thought that came to every mind.
Tall Alvin Page thumbed his dusty hat back and shook his head. “We don’t rightly know, Rogan. We didn’t dare get too close. But he’s a tall feller mounted on good horseflesh and—”
“And he’s followin’ the wagon train,
” bullet-headed Jimmy Lee broke in.
“You sure of that?” St. John asked after a long pause.
“No doubt about it, Rogan,” Page said emphatically. “He’s a long way behind the train, goin’ by the sign, but he’s mighty intent on the trail. Matter of fact, we reckon it was on account of he was so busy watchin’ the way ahead that he never sighted me and Jimmy when we come over a ridge about a mile behind him.”
Everybody looked at Rogan St. John. Then back-shooter Joe Trower said with sudden conviction:
“It’s got to be Ketchell! Nothin’ else makes sense. This feller is followin’ the train, but goin’ on what Billy and Alvin say, he’s not tryin’ to catch up yet. You said yourself that we’d catch up with Ketchell doggin’ the train and waitin’ his chance. What more proof do we want?”
Rogan St. John knew what was holding him back. It seemed too easy. He’d anticipated that taking Kain Ketchell’s scalp would be a highly dangerous business; he certainly hadn’t anticipated they might be given the opportunity to take him so easily. But if that was Ketchell out there, alone and unsuspecting, then it would be the easiest ten thousand dollars he had ever made.
“Saddle up,” he ordered without a trace of uncertainty now. “We’ll go take a close look at this man.”
“Do we take him dead or alive, Rogan?” asked new man, Tracy Nelson.
Rogan St. John didn’t bother to answer, but he shook his big head as he strode towards the remuda with Fargo at his side.
“The new boys sure ask some dumb questions, don’t they, boss-man?” the gunfighter drawled.
St. John grinned. “We know better, though, don’t we, Fargo?”
“Dead right, boss-man. Dead right.”
Nash’s hands didn’t always smell of coffee, but they did tonight. There was good reason for this, for the marshal had diligently rubbed a spoonful of grounds into his palms before taking up his watch at his cold camp. Now he sat on a stone slab waiting for moonrise, frequently lifting his hands to his face and inhaling deeply. A passionate lover of fine coffee, Nash had always found this the most difficult part of the manhunting business, the many times when a man couldn’t make a fire and brew up. Coffee smelling wasn’t much of a substitute, but it helped a little.
After a time, Nash took out his old pipe and stared down at it thoughtfully in the starlight. He knew he couldn’t risk a fire, but mightn’t he smoke a pipeful or two?
His eyes drifted out over the darkened landscape with the buttes faintly outlined against the stars. Even the flare of a match could be seen at a great distance on such a dark night. Regretfully, Nash slipped the pipe away into a breast pocket—and stiffened.
A sound had disturbed the quiet.
Immediately alert, the lawman dropped belly-flat and took a firm grip on his rifle. He strained his ears, but the faint sound was not repeated.
He looked southward. No sign of the moon yet. The night seemed to have grown darker since he’d heard the noise. The early breeze had died and the valley had grown warmer, almost balmy. Unusual for desert country. The butte that towered above him he felt rather than saw in the gloom. Close by was a twisted Joshua tree.
The tree moved.
Nash cocked his rifle, drew a bead, then sucked air into his lungs.
“Who’s there?”
Instantly the figure by the tree dropped flat. Nash’s finger curved on the trigger. “Who’s there?” he shouted again, then another voice spoke and it seemed as if the man had said, “Ketchell.”
Ketchell! Nash’s jaws locked. Maybe it was Ketchell out there, with backing. He couldn’t take any chances on letting them work in closer. He squinted down the length of the barrel and pulled trigger.
A red tracer of fire leapt towards the Joshua tree. A man’s scream was swallowed by the blast of the shot. Instantly other guns churned from the blackness, wicked crimson blossoms blooming in the night with the bellow of the weapons slamming up against the butte and rolling away across the sleeping valley.
The marshal’s heart hammered painfully against his ribcage as he worked the action of his smoking rifle. They were all around him. Bullets whined close and he felt the heel rip from his boot. He glimpsed a dim shape to his left, froze his sights on it and was jerking trigger when the world fell in on him.
He was dimly aware of the rifle dropping from his hands and the sound of the shot that killed him. Tumbling forward on his face, he heard his wife call him for breakfast and smelled the good aroma of Arbuckle’s coffee. He lay odd-angled against the stone and didn’t feel the rough hands that reached out to turn him over.
A match flared and lean Fargo panted, “Is this him? Is this Ketch—” The gun packer broke off abruptly as the light gleamed off the brass star on the dead man’s vest.
“Judas!” gasped Todd Essex. “That’s Marshal Clanton Nash out of Whiplock!”
“Son of a bitch!” St. John rasped as he drew up, breathing heavily. “What the hell did he have to cut loose for?”
“Who gives a damn?” Fargo said, bitterly disappointed. “We lost Smith and Nelson got winged—all for nothin’.”
Essex said soberly, “We’ve killed a federal marshal ... and that’s a mighty serious business no matter how you look at it.”
“We gonna quit, Rogan?” Zeke Denver asked, afraid.
“Like hell,” came the immediate response. “What we’re gonna do is swear to keep our mouths shut, bury this jasper deep, then get on with the business of earnin’ our ten grand. Seems to me that we weren’t the only ones who reckoned Ketchell would be after that girl.”
They nodded their heads and briskly set about the business of getting the dead into the ground. Bound together by greed before, they were now bound even closer by their complicity in a lawman’s death.
The moon had risen by the time they had retrieved their horses and moved on.
It was almost morning and the night creatures of Dead Horse Desert were surrendering their domain to approaching day as Hank Brazos rode into sight of the wagon circle.
The appaloosa blew softly through his nostrils and jingled his bridle chains as a light pressure on the reins brought him to a halt. Building himself the cigarette he had denied himself over the past two hours he had spent scouting the backtrail with Bullpup, Brazos let himself relax in the saddle.
With sunrise at his shoulder, Brazos finally pushed on to be greeted by Benedict who stepped out from between the Conestogas with a poncho draped across his shoulders.
“See anything, Reb?”
The Texan shook his head. Several hours earlier, they’d heard a distant rumbling to the north that could have been thunder—or a brief flurry of gunshots. Standing lookout together now, Benedict and Brazos had waited an anxious hour without the sounds being repeated. Then, concerned that it may have been gunfire they had heard, and aware that the sounds had come from the direction Marshal Nash would be traveling, the Texan had decided to scout back a little.
Brazos had covered a considerable area, but could have thrown his net much wider had he not had the security of the train continually on his mind. There had been no sign of Nash, nothing but moonlit wastes and the lonesome sound of a coyote yipping from the hills.
Though still very much concerned about Nash’s safety, Brazos and Benedict agreed they had no option but to push on, and within thirty minutes the Tarbuck train was once again rolling steadily towards the rising blue line of the Winding Stair Mountains.
The long day passed uneventfully and sunset found them a solid twelve miles closer to their destination when they raised the tinajas, or rock pans, of Red Feather Springs.
Hurble was irritated when Brazos and Benedict insisted the springs should be checked out before the wagons went in. Though well aware that this was dangerous country, and that the springs, surrounded as they were by looming shafts of basalt stone could conceivably conceal ambushers, the wagon master was still prepared to head straight in. The day’s heat had been brutal and the animals had the scent of the water and wer
e acting up. Keef Hurble was a weary and impatient man.
Benedict and Brazos remained impervious to Hurble’s protests. They were also tired, but they had seen men make fatal errors through weariness and were not about to take foolish risks at Red Feather Springs. Too played-out even to argue with much force, Hurble finally threw his hands in the air and walked off, leaving Benedict and Brazos to decide who would undertake the inspection.
It was finally agreed that Brazos was better suited to the task. Hefting his rifle, he started down towards the springs on foot. Bullpup padded after him, but seeing that the hound showed some signs of footsoreness, the Texan waved him back to the camp and continued on alone.
Halting when he reached the first line of basalt columns, he looked about him. Finally he grunted in satisfaction and moved on. Deep yellow sand hissed under his boots. The stone columns, some fifty feet high, rose on either side of him. Stepping around a canting stone, he saw a short, steep slope ahead, and at its base the deep, clear pools.
Brazos licked dry lips as he stood motionless for a full minute letting his eyes play over every inch of sand and stone, ears keened to pick up the slightest sound. Finally assured that all was as it should be, he moved down the slope, dropped to one knee at the spring’s edge and scooped up a handful of water.
He tasted it and nodded. As pure as could be. He glanced around again, then removed his hat, dropped belly-flat and drank. Like a wary animal, he lifted his head frequently to peer about between drinks. His powerful thirst finally slaked, he pushed himself to his knees and turned to reach for his rifle.
A chill ran down his spine. He was staring at a scuffed and dusty range boot that rested on the Winchester’s stock.
His gaze went up. He saw long, denim-clad legs, a wedge-shaped torso in a travel-stained shirt—and then the face itself.
“Ketchell?” Brazos said.
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