The derringer barked in her right hand, the slug plunking into the ground dangerously close to her feet.
Hattie tried to scream, but someone grabbed her tightly, placing something, maybe a hand, over her mouth. Arms snaked around her, and two men, whom she could hear laughing devilishly, picked her up off the ground and began carrying her quickly—in which direction, she did not know.
She was badly disoriented. Her heart was back racing again in terror. She could barely breathe in the tight sack, and what little air she was able to suck into her lungs was fetid with the pine-tar smell of burlap. She felt as though she were drowning inside the sack, and she fought desperately, kicking, trying to punch her assailants, but to no avail.
One of them held her arms fast against her sides, while the other held her legs.
They carried her maybe a hundred jostling feet, turning sharply once, then stopped and set her brusquely down on something. Whatever they’d set her on, it was all sharp edges and very uncomfortable. Mixed with the smell of the burlap was the verdant, piney aroma of wood. They’d set her on a woodpile.
“Pull the sack off,” ordered a low, dull voice that Hattie thought sounded vaguely feminine. “Hurry up, Vernon, dammit!” the speaker added, sounding even more like a female, but a female with a low, hoarse, unpleasant voice.
Vernon pulled the sack off Hattie’s head. She raked in a deep breath as her hair fell back down around her shoulders, tumbling against her face. Cool, fresh air pressed against her. She drew it into her lungs and looked around, squinting into the murky, dawn shadows.
Sure enough, she was sitting on a woodpile inside a small shed. Four people stood in a ragged semicircle around her. One was a woman. The other three were men. They wore trail gear and pistols. The woman’s stout body was clad in a knee-length wool coat secured with a wide, brown belt to which were attached two holsters housing long-barreled revolvers. She wore high men’s riding boots. On her head was a floppy-brimmed felt hat. A chin thong dangled down her lumpy chest.
Hattie thought she might have been in her early thirties, maybe a little older. Her cheeks were fat enough to be smooth, the eyes darkly shadowed beneath her hat brim. Long, tangled, dark-brown hair hung down the woman’s shoulders. Her nose was doughy; her eyes were flat and mean as they studied Hattie, the woman’s upper lip curled disdainfully.
“Who’re you?” she asked.
Hattie spat sharply to one side, to try to rid her mouth of the awful, cloying smell of moldy burlap. “Took the words right out of my mouth.”
The woman stepped forward, bunched her lips, and slapped Hattie hard across her left cheek.
“Oh!” Hattie cried, falling onto her right side against the lumpy, sharp-edged chunks of split wood.
The men standing to each side of the rotund woman grinned beneath the brims of their own weather-stained Stetsons.
“Let’s try again,” the woman said. “Who are you?”
Hattie sat up, caressing her stinging cheek and regarding the woman angrily. “Go to hell!”
The woman bunched her lips again and cocked her arm for an even harder blow.
“Wait!” Hattie cried, raising her left arm up in front of her, shield-like. “The name’s Hattie. Hattie Dunbar!” Dunbar was her mother’s maiden name.
“Who the hell on God’s green earth is Hattie Dunbar?” the woman asked.
“I’m from a cabin east of here,” Hattie said, deciding to go with the same story she’d given Clifford Hicks.
“Who’re those two old hornswogglers that Red Ingram has locked up in his jail?”
“What?” Hattie said, not having to feign surprise.
The mean-eyed woman glanced at the men around her. “Forget it. Let’s take her back to the ranch. Daddy’ll wanna have a talk with her.”
“Wait!” Hattie said. “You’ve got no right to take me anywhere. I work here—in the Honeysuckle.”
“We’ll see about that.” The fat woman glanced at a man standing to her right.
The man held his hand up. “Look here,” he ordered.
Hattie looked at the man’s hand. As she did, the woman lifted a block of wood and smashed it against Hattie’s right temple.
Hattie crumpled, and everything went as dark as the darkest night until she found herself again with the sack over her head, lying sprawled on what felt like feed sacks. She must have been in a wagon, because the sacks were jostling around violently beneath her, while she bounced around on top of them.
Her hands were tied behind her back, and her ankles were tied as well. She couldn’t move much or pull the sack from her head, which felt as though someone had driven a stout-bladed knife through it, from just above her left eye to the back of her neck.
It throbbed as though a big, tender heart was now where her brain used to be.
She felt the sun on her body, still clad in her nightgown and robe. She’d lost her slippers, so her feet were bare, and she could feel the warm sun on them as well. It was stifling hot and stinky inside the burlap sack, which pushed in and out as she breathed, sucking air through the coarse fabric.
Grunting, wincing against the ever-present throbbing pain in her head, Hattie sat up, working her head around, trying to finagle the sack off her head.
“Settle down,” came the toneless voice of the mean-eyed woman. “Or I’ll bullwhip ya!”
“Where are you taking me?” Hattie cried out.
“Shut up or I’ll bullwhip ya!”
Hattie recoiled at the notion. She couldn’t imagine what a bullwhipping would feel like on top of the braining the mean-eyed woman had given her. She lay back down, gritting her teeth against the wagon’s every pitch and sway, crying out in agony when one or two of the wheels slammed hard into a chuckhole.
It was a long ride. Hattie supposed it seemed longer than it really was, given her physical agony, but she knew by the way the sun slid from one side of the wagon to the other that they were on the trail for at least a couple of hours. She could hear the clomping of other shod mounts, probably horses, behind her, and she occasionally heard men talking in a desultory fashion.
The second hour was an exercise in pure, unmitigated misery, and Hattie had to set her jaws and grit her teeth to get through it, though she thought for sure that at any second her tender brain would swell up and explode.
Tears streamed from her eyes, dampening the inside of the sack.
Torture. The ride was pure torture . . .
She grew hopeful when the wagon started to slow.
She blew a slow sigh of relief when it stopped altogether, hoping that it would not start up again after a short pause. Twice the woman had stopped the wagon to rest the mules. Hattie knew that at least two mules were pulling the wagon, because she’d heard them bray a time or two.
“Well, here we are, little girl,” said the mean-eyed woman in her low, toneless voice. “Home again, home again, jiggidy-jag!”
Hattie sighed and slumped against the feed sacks.
“Franklin!” the mean-eyed woman called. “We got somebody up at the mine?”
“Kentucky and Giff are pullin’ duty at the mine, Gerta,” came the response in a male voice from a distance.
“Good,” Gerta said. “Fetch Daddy! Tell him we got trouble!” In a lower voice, which Hattie could tell was directed at her, Hattie, the mean-eyed woman said, “But no more trouble than you got, little girl!”
CHAPTER 32
Slash raised his field glasses to his eyes and adjusted the focus.
He was still breathing hard from the climb up the side of the windy ridge that he and Pecos now lay belly down upon, at its crest, and his breathing made his hands shake. He drew a deep breath, silently cursing the thin, high-altitude air, and steadied himself. Bringing the glasses up against his face, he gazed down into the valley below him, to the northwest.
A small ranch headquarters sat in a bowl-shaped clearing roughly five hundred yards from the base of the ridge. It lay at the upper end of the long valley that Slash and
Pecos had followed away from Honeysuckle, clinging to a trail that followed the windy ridgeline roughly halfway between the valley bottom and the ridge’s bald crest. The trail was the only one out here, and it was deeply carved, though it appeared to have carried more traffic in the past than it had recently.
At one time, it had been traversed by heavy wagons, probably ore wagons, though in more recent months it had seen only horse and light wagon traffic. The deep ruts had been eroded and filled in with grass and rain-washed gravel.
A mile behind where the two former cutthroats now lay belly down on the ridge, the trail had forked, one tine angling north, leading down into the valley. An ancient, wooden sign had identified the descending trail as leading to the SPANISH BIT RANCH.
The other tine had been marked SPANISH BIT MINE. Another, newer sign beside it warned: STAY OUT! TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT! This secondary trail, which Slash and Pecos had followed, was fainter than the main trail and had continued following the ridge.
They’d followed this secondary trail leading to the mine because it clung to the high ground, and they’d wanted to find a vantage from which they could get a better lay of the land, which was what they were doing now.
“Can you see anything with them old peepers of yours?” Pecos asked.
“I can see plenty.”
“Let me have a look.”
“Hold your water.”
Slash stared through the glasses, moving them slowly from side to side, up and down, sweeping the ranch headquarters with the single sphere of magnified vision. He brought up the single, two-story log house with a broad front veranda and a long log bunkhouse, a pair of big barns, and several corrals, including a circular stone corral with a snubbing post. That would be the breaking corral.
He perused the small, squat, double-doored building sitting off by itself, to the right of the cabin. That would be the blacksmith shop, though it was hard to tell for sure. Both doors were closed, and no smoke rose from the stone chimney running up one wall, which would be where the bellows was situated. On most working ranches Slash had been on, the blacksmith was working almost around the clock, keeping implements in good repair and all the horses shod.
There were woodpiles, trash piles, privies, and several outlying buildings nearly buried in overgrown willows and other brush. He thought there was a hangdog look to the other buildings, as well. Even the main lodge. Shakes were missing from the roof, and some of the windows were shuttered, as though maybe the glass was gone. Tumbleweeds had blown up to form a bristling rampart against the foundation.
“What is it?” Pecos said.
Slash lowered the glasses. “What’s what?”
“You got that look on your face—sorta like the one when you’ve found out your favorite girl in a parlor house is occupied.”
“Oh, shut the hell up an’ have a look yourself, eagle eye.” Slash shoved the glasses against Pecos’s chest.
Chuckling ruefully, Pecos took the binoculars in his gloved hands and raised them to his eyes. While he gave the ranch the twice-over, Slash leaned back against a rock, dug out his makings sack, and rolled a smoke. He knew he shouldn’t. He felt a stone-sized chunk of tar in his throat, kicked up by his lungs during his trek up this haystack butte, but he was too old to give up his bad habits.
He scratched a match to life on his thumb, touched the flame to the quirley, and drew the smoke deep into his chest, enjoying the brief exhilaration and the taste of the tobacco.
“Well, what do you think?” he asked Pecos before taking another deep drag off the cigarette.
Pecos lowered the glasses. The skin above his long, broad nose was pinched up. He shrugged. “Well, they don’t take real good care of the place. And I don’t see no hands . . .”
He let his voice trail off, frowning.
Slash had heard it too—the sound of a wagon clattering in the distance.
Slash grabbed the glasses out of Pecos’s hands and, rising up on his knees once more, trained the binoculars on the ranch headquarters again.
“You could say ‘please,’ you old catamount!”
“Please.”
“I mean before you grab ’em out of my hand, ya peckerwood!”
Slash stared down at the yard, into which a wagon was just then clattering, trailed by three horseback riders. “Shut up.”
“Don’t tell . . .” Again, Pecos let his words trickle to silence, for with his naked eyes, he’d spied the wagon pulling into the yard.
Slash followed the wagon with the field glasses. What he at first thought was a man driving, he now saw was a woman—a stout one in man’s clothing, including a long, wool coat. She wore a man’s Stetson with a long neck thong and a big pistol holstered on her waist.
Slash had at first thought the ranch was deserted. Now, as the woman drew the wagon to a halt in front of the house and on the far side of a windmill and stock tank, where it was now partially hidden from his vantage, several men walked out of the bunkhouse in a slow, languid way, as though they’d been lying around or maybe playing poker, as one was still holding cards in his hand, while a cigarette drooped from between his lips.
A big man and two other smaller men stepped out of the house, also moving slowly, in a desultory way, as though they’d been doing little more than the men in the bunkhouse. As they all gathered around the wagon, Slash lowered the glasses.
“What’s goin’ on?” Pecos said.
“See for yourself, Melvin.” Slash shoved the glasses at Pecos, who lifted them again to his eyes and peered through them. He hadn’t gazed long at the ranch yard before he lowered them and turned to Slash. “Well, at least we know someone’s home.”
“Yeah, someone’s home, all right. Don’t know much about ’em, though.”
“Did you see what they were carryin’ in the back of the wagon?”
Slash shrugged a shoulder. “Looked like feed sacks, maybe dry goods. They must not have been far behind us on the trail.” He sat back against a rock, poked his cigarette between his lips, and took a drag. “There’s somethin’ off about this place, though.”
“What’s off about it?”
“The buildings look run-down. Here it is the middle of the week, and until a minute ago, no one was out in the yard doin’ a damn thing. There’s damn few horses in any of those corrals, and, more important, did you see a single cow down there or anywhere down the valley? That’s all ranch graze, but I didn’t see a single bovine tuggin’ at the needlegrass.”
“Sure enough, I seen all that,” Pecos said, a tad defensively but also sheepishly. He raked his fingers down his cheek and glanced sidelong at Slash. “So . . . what’re you thinkin’?—since you got such a good head on your shoulders.”
“I say we ride on up and take a look at the mine. Maybe that’s where they’re concentrating their efforts. Hell, maybe they’re pulling so much gold out of the mountain up there”—he jerked his chin toward a nearly bald hogback peak to the east, which he figured must be where the Spanish Bit Mine lay—“that they sold off all their cattle and they’re just runnin’ the mine.”
“Hmm,” Pecos said. “Maybe. But they musta found a different trail for haulin’ it out, ’less they ain’t haulin’ much out anymore. There’s been damn little traffic on this trace.”
He lifted the glasses again to gaze down into the ranch yard. “Wait,” he said.
“What?”
Pecos stared through the glasses, holding them steady in his big hands. He adjusted the focus slightly. “Well, ain’t that peculiar?”
“What?” Slash asked again, with more heat this time, sitting up with interest.
“Never mind.”
“Never mind what?”
“I was just wonderin’ what two o’ them ranch hands down there was carryin’ into the house. I thought it was movin’, but when I looked again, I seen it was just a big feed bag.”
Slash gave a mocking snort. “Eagle eye.”
“Oh, shut up!”
“Come on, eagle eye.”
Slash field-stripped his smoke, then climbed to his feet. “Let’s check out the mine with them eagle eyes of yours. If we don’t find that gold soon, there ain’t gonna be no place for us to run or hide that ole Bleed-Em-So won’t find us.”
Pecos started following his partner back down the hill toward where their ground-hitched horses waited. “Quit mockin’ me, or I’ll kick your scrawny butt!”
* * *
Heading northeast, they climbed up and over a steep divide.
At the bottom of the divide, the trail swung to the left and opened onto a windy, rocky bench. Slash figured they were a thousand or so yards up from the ranch, which lay below to the west, on their left. Ahead, at the foot of the hogback hunk of what appeared to be limestone and granite, lay several old log buildings resembling little more than trash out here on this moonscape of rocks and stunted cedars and junipers.
An egg-shaped mine portal, fronted by mounded gray tailings, gaped in the wall of the mountain a good hundred yards above and to the right of the buildings.
A cold wind blew, and clouds were starting to gather, quickly shunted this way and that by a wind that didn’t seem to know which direction it wanted to blow, so it tried all four at nearly the same time. Tumbleweeds and grit blew around the rocks. The wind moaned and whistled and made the buildings groan as Slash and Pecos approached, lowering their heads and hat brims against the blowing dust.
They drew rein before the buildings. The hovels appeared to be the remains of a small town, but they were likely part of the old mine compound. Since the place was so remote, it was like a small town of sorts.
There was a saloon, a mercantile, even a restaurant and a barbershop. Bunkhouses and possibly the mine superintendent’s office flanked these few business buildings—several two- and three-story log structures with boarded-up windows.
In fact, all of the windows that Slash could see had been boarded over.
Up the hill on his right, he saw no activity whatever around the mine. Several rusted ore cars sat like the derailment of a miniature train outside of the gaping mine portal. The stamping mill, at the foot of the tailings, teetered to one side, like a windmill that had been battered by a stiff wind. The big iron stamping ball lay on the ground, its cable still attached; Slash could see it through the mill’s wooden stilts.
A Good Day for a Massacre Page 25