Cutthroats

by William W. Johnstone

  Several men had gathered on the vestibules between the cars, looking around, muttering amongst themselves in the hushed tones of a funeral.

  Slash followed Pecos all the way back along the train to stand by the caboose, staring out over the gorge.

  Only a very small part of the bridge remained, poking a hundred feet out from the opposite ridge. Even as Slash and Pecos gazed at it, however, it lost more of the timbers comprising it. A few seconds later, it hiccupped, shuddered, broke away from the ridge, and tumbled down into the gorge where the rest of the bridge was being washed downstream by the fickle currents of the Animas.

  To the cutthroats’ left, the caboose hung down over the side of the gorge.

  The coupling attaching it to the express car in front of it groaned against the strain of its weight. The sounds were similar to the sounds that had issued from the overheated locomotive only a few minutes before. It made Slash’s and Pecos’s hair stand on end.

  The caboose lurched violently downward. The groaning grew louder.

  The wheels of the express car screeched along the rails as it lurched backward, pulled by the caboose as the couplings on several other cars in front of it banged like drums.

  “Oh, hell,” Pecos said. “She’s gonna go!”

  CHAPTER 37

  Slash turned to where the passengers were dropping slowly down off the train, looking around like aliens from another planet.

  “Everybody off!”

  He waved his right arm, wincing against the strain that the gesture grieved his bullet-battered body. To the men regarding him skeptically, he yelled, “Make sure everybody’s off the train! Looks like she’ll be dropping into the canyon! Get everybody off!”

  Several men leaped back into the train, and soon everybody appeared to be off, the women and children sitting down against the pine-carpeted slope, a few of the men walking slowly toward where Slash and Pecos stood dubiously watching the caboose.

  It lurched again.

  Then again . . . and again.

  Slash and the other men who’d walked over to join them stepped back as the coupling jaws tore away from each other with an enormous, thunder-like peel of tearing iron and steel. The brakes gave, as well. They watched in awe as the caboose fell straight down the cliff wall. It fell and fell and fell, occasionally gouging a boulder or a spindly tree or shrub out of the side of the wall.

  Then it slowly turned backward, flipping butt over teakettle before quickly growing smaller as it plunged toward the Animas, hammering into the river with a loud thudding and tearing sound, which was the water’s distant splash.

  “Jeepers, there goes another one!” one of the other men exclaimed as the Wells Fargo express car rolled backward.

  Everybody including Slash and Pecos stepped back again as the express car’s rear wheels, ripping free of the brake sleeves, rolled backward off the broken rails. The car’s rear end plunged violently. The front coupling roared free, and the car did a very good imitation of the caboose—dropping and dropping straight down toward the Animas winking below.

  Its rear end smashed into the side of the canyon. After that, it rolled wildly as it dropped, like a tossed craps dice, until it too plunged into the river, driven beneath the surface for a few seconds before floating back upward, then rolling slowly on downstream, dragging against rocks embedded in the stream’s bottom.

  Having been pulled toward the canyon, all the other cars were rolling backward now, as well—one by one and hand in hand, the couplings holding, dropping over the side of the cliff and plunging into the Animas like one giant caterpillar.

  Suddenly, except for the gutted and overturned locomotive, no cars remained on the rails. The passengers stared in hang-jawed shock at where the train had stood only a moment before. Even the baby that had been crying shrilly now stared in silent shock from where its mother held it against her chest, opening and closing its little hand as though doing a silent count of the cars that were no longer there.

  A rifle barked once, twice, three times.

  Slash, Pecos, and the other men grouped along the lip of the ridge flinched with starts.

  The rifle shots echoed hollowly, chasing each other over the canyon.

  Pecos raised an arm, pointing. “There!”

  Slash stretched his gaze across the chasm. Five or six horseback riders were gathered on the canyon’s far side, roughly a quarter mile away, outlined against the blue sky behind them. There appeared to also be two beefy horses, maybe mules, outfitted with packsaddles. They flanked the horsebackers, one of whom carried an extra rider.

  Slash recognized Billy Pinto and the blond girl the young killer had taken off the train. Pinto held the girl before him on his saddle. He and the others were facing Slash and Pecos’s side of the canyon.

  The girl was crouched forward as though trying to put as much distance as possible between herself and the firebrand. It wasn’t much.

  Pinto yelled something that Slash couldn’t hear from this distance. The pitch of his voice, however, was taunting. Billy waved his rifle, jeering, mocking the aging cutthroats.

  “That’s Elsie!” said a burly, bearded man in overalls, standing to the right of Pecos, pointing across the canyon. “They got my granddaughter! Those dirty polecats!”

  Pinto waved his rifle again. Slash could hear him laughing. Then all five of the surviving gang of Marauders reined their mounts away from the canyon and disappeared.

  “They got Elsie!” cried the bearded man, who appeared in his mid-sixties. He turned to Slash and Pecos. “They got my granddaughter. Someone’s gotta do something!”

  Slash dropped his gaze toward the canyon floor. His and Pecos’s horses stood on the river’s far side, reins tied to their saddle horns. Pecos’s buckskin was dipping its head toward the river, drawing water. Slash’s Appy stared up toward its rider and the other men on this side of the canyon. The well-trained horses had followed the train, knowing that their riders were aboard.

  “Elsie!” the old man bellowed hoarsely in anguish, leaning forward at the waist. “Elsieeeeeee!”

  “We’ll get her,” Slash told the old man. “Don’t worry, old-timer. We’ll get her back.”

  Pecos turned to Slash. “How do you propose we do that?” He dropped his gaze to the two wounds oozing blood from his partner’s hide. “Even if we didn’t have a river between us and our hosses, you’re in no shape to do anything except head back to that sawbones in Silverton. You got two bullets in you, partner, an’ you’re bleedin’ bad!”

  “We gotta find a way across that stream,” Slash said, shrugging out of his suit coat. “There’s gotta be a way across.”

  “There is,” another man said—a short, stocky gent in a shabby brown and orange suit. Holding a large leather satchel in one hand, he appeared a drummer of some kind. “I once prospected before I turned to sellin’ whiskey. A whole lot easier on an old man’s joints, don’t ya know.”

  “What about it?” Slash had removed his vest and now he was unbuttoning his shirt.

  “I prospected along the Animas back before the Denver and Rio Grande laid rails an’ built that bridge. East along the rim here”—he jerked his head to his right—“the wall drops considerable. It’s an easy way down to the water. A little ways farther east, there’s a shallow ford. You could get across that river and over to them horses in a half hour or so. Maybe forty-five minutes.”

  Breaking open his sawed-off barn-blaster to make sure both tubes were loaded, Pecos looked at Slash. “You stay here. I’ll get after ’em.”

  “Not a chance.”

  “Look at you!”

  “Flesh wounds, both. I can ride. I just need to tie these wounds and kill the pain.” Slash walked over to the drummer. “What you got in your valise?”

  The man frowned down at the satchel, then held it up, protectively, against his chest. “Why, whiskey samples, of course . . .”

  “Just what the doctor ordered.”

  “Wha . . . wha . . . you can’t . . . !”


  Slash pulled the valise out of the man’s hand. He unbuckled the straps and reached inside to see four flat bottles secured by leather loops. “Indeedy,” he said, removing two bottles, shoving one into his back pants pocket, then returning the valise to the drummer. “Just what the doctor ordered.”

  While Pecos and the other men watched him, deeply incredulous, Slash lifted the first bottle to his lips and half emptied it. The busthead was pure rotgut probably brewed in some Denver alley with snake heads and strychnine, and then adorned with a fancy label, but he’d be damned if it didn’t set up a burning glow inside his head and belly and file the teeth off the rabid dog tearing into his arm and side.

  He ripped a sleeve from his shirt, bathed it in whiskey, then wrapped it securely around his arm.

  “You’re crazier’n a tree full of owls,” Pecos said, walking over to tie off the ends of the shirtsleeve around Slash’s arm. “But you still got the hide on—I’ll give ya that.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  Pecos glanced at Slash. “You ready?”

  “Do it.”

  Pecos jerked both ends of the whiskey-damp sleeve taut over the wound and tied it tight.

  Slash tipped his head back, growling like that rabid cur with its foot in a trap and casting aspersions upon his partner’s lineage.

  When he’d taken another couple of painkilling pulls from the bottle, he soaked a portion of the rest of his shirt, then gave it to Pecos, who wrapped it around his waist, covering both ends of the bullet wound that had carved a ragged tunnel through his flesh above his cartridge belt.

  “My granny did no such thing,” Pecos said with mock indignation. “Besides, she hated coyotes!”

  He drew the shirt tight and tied it off behind Slash’s back.

  Again, Slash ground his molars and roared before draining the bottle, then tossing it into the canyon.

  “With that, mi amigo,” he said, sliding his Colt from the cross-draw holster on his left hip and twirling it, still gritting his teeth against the bite of both wounds, “let’s ride like hell, burn the rest of the Marauders down, and let the devil take the hindmost!”

  Pecos shook his head and began walking eastward along the rim of the canyon. “You ain’t gonna make it. You were just shot. Now, you’re shot up an’ drunk to boot!”

  Slash fell into step behind the big man, leaning forward and placing his hands on his broad shoulders. “You lead the way an’ stop chinnin’. I purely can’t wait to kill that kid, an’ it’s gonna be me that gets to do it, by God. He done pulled the sheep over ole Slash’s eyes, pretendin’ he was sweeter’n fresh-spun honey and as innocent as an Amish bride on the eve of her weddin’ night. Instead, he was playin’ me!”

  “He was playin’ us both,” Pecos pointed out, seeing the drop in the wall just ahead.

  “Yeah, but you’re played all the time,” Slash said, keeping his hands on Pecos’s shoulders, leaning into him hard to keep from falling. “Now, Slash, see? Slash don’t get played!”

  “Oh, shut up!”

  “Don’t tell me to shut up, you big galoot!”

  “Shut up!”

  * * *

  Slash didn’t take another drink until they’d descended the canyon by way of that easy drop in the cliff wall and had crossed the stream via a rocky ford, barely getting their boots wet. He was worn out, however, so when he gained his Appy, he fell forward against the saddle and, clinging to the horn by one hand, used the other hand to fumble the whiskey out of his back pocket.

  The first sip braced him.

  The second sip braced him even more, and leashed that flesh-hungry dog that had started nipping at his arm and side again in earnest when they’d been halfway across the river.

  He was so soothed that he felt gracious enough to extend the bottle to Pecos, who’d swung up onto his buckskin’s back, from which he regarded Slash as though he were something a bird had left on his own saddle. Pecos waved off the drink.

  “Suit yourself,” Slash said, grinning, and tossed back another shot. “More for me!”

  “If you keep imbibing like that, you’re gonna be three sheets to the wind by the time we catch up to Pinto an’ them other savages.”

  “Nah.” Slash shoved the bottle back into his pocket. Clumsily, he heaved himself into the saddle, then, getting comfortable, flashed his partner a toothy, drunken grin. “I straighten up at the trigger.”

  Pecos gave a wry snort as he reined his horse around and looked for a way up the canyon wall on this side of the Animas.

  Slash reached instinctively for his saddle boot. Only, his Yellowboy wasn’t there. He remembered watching it bounce off the top of that coach car to fall somewhere either in the canyon or beside the tracks. Likely gone for good.

  “Hell’s bells,” he grouched. “I sure feel naked without my Winchester.”

  “Yeah, you ain’t much good without it, either,” Pecos said. “Why don’t you do the sensible thing for once in your misguided life and ride on back to Silverton before you die out here and I gotta take the time to plant your sorry butt?”

  “You’re green with envy.” Slash used his teeth to tighten the knot on the bandage around his wounded arm. “You know I’m twice as handy as you ever were with a six-shooter, an’ I got these two purty ladies.” He glanced down at his Colts.

  Pecos rolled his eyes as he booted his horse toward a trail he’d spotted angling up the canyon wall. “Come on then, if you’re comin’. If you die, be kind enough to drop in a hole so I don’t have to dig you a grave.”

  “Oh, shut up with all that grave talk!”

  Pecos glared over his shoulder at him. “Stop tellin’ me to shut up!”

  “Shut up!”

  “You shut up, or I’ll kick your scrawny butt!”

  Slash held his tongue. In his raggedy-heeled state, Pecos was right. He could kick Slash’s butt up around his shoulders. Slash had witnessed what the big man could do when riled. He’d left more than a few demolished saloons in his wake as well as howling and toothless men.

  When they gained the crest of the ridge twenty minutes later, they stopped to rest the horses. Slash didn’t dismount because in his weakened condition he didn’t want to have to expend the energy to climb back into his saddle again. Pecos kicked around in the short, wiry, brown grass until he’d found Pinto’s tracks, and the other Marauders’ as well as the pack animals’ tracks, along with several fresh horse apples.

  Slash took another pull from his bottle, enduring Pecos’s reproving scowl. Then they set off once more, following the clearly delineated trail of the men they were after.

  CHAPTER 38

  It was late in the day, mountain shadows stretching out from the west wall of the narrow valley Slash and Pecos found themselves in, when, smelling wood smoke on the cooling breeze, they stopped and swung down from their saddles.

  Ten minutes later, they lay belly down in rocks and boulders, peering toward a small fire in a slight clearing in the aspens before them. Flanking the fire was a chuckling creek, another tributary of the Animas River, which Pinto and the other five riders had been following from Wild Horse Gorge, likely beginning their long southerly trek down toward Mexico where, with all the gold they’d taken from the express car, they could live like kings.

  For a few years, at least. Until they’d blown all their plunder.

  It was Billy Pinto and five other Marauders, all right. The young girl, as well. Slash could see them all clearly through the spyglass he held up to his right eye, sweeping the camp with his gaze.

  Apparently, they’d ordered the girl to cook for them. She knelt by the fire, shoulders slumped, halfheartedly chopping meat for a stew pot beside her. She wore a bandage around the top of her head, likely to doctor the bullet burn Slash had inadvertently given her on the train. Billy Pinto and Cletis Brown were down on one knee, gazing into one of the three strongboxes they’d set out in the trees just left of the fire, near where they’d tied their horses to a picket line tied to two aspen
s.

  Earl Willey and Poncho Davis were just then each hauling armloads of firewood toward the fire. Tex Halstrom stood over the girl, fingering her hair, needling her. Young Elsie was doing her best to ignore the tall, lanky Texan, who wore two pearl-gripped Bisley .44s in shoulder holsters on the outside of his brown leather vest. His rifle leaned against a nearby tree.

  The sixth man, Randall “Doc” Peterson, was at that moment standing off to the right of the fire, evacuating his bladder, leaning back slightly, fists on his hips. Gray smoke wafted from the quirley dangling from between his lips. It was so quiet out here that Slash could hear him singing softly to himself above the chuckling of the stream beyond him, as he dribbled into the grass.

  They were all here, all right. All six surviving members of the Snake River Marauders. They’d posted no picket. They’d done nothing to cover their tracks from the gorge, and they hadn’t picked the most appropriate place to build a cook fire, either. Obviously, they believed Slash and Pecos were still on the opposite side of Wild Horse Gorge, and that no one else was trailing them.

  A tinhorn move if there ever was one . . .

  Slash gave the spyglass to Pecos, then took another liberal slug from his whiskey bottle, draining it. Pecos gave the camp a long, critical gander, then lowered the glass and turned to his partner. He grinned.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “They got your Yellowboy. Leastways, it looks like yours, and I don’t remember any of them carrying a Winchester Yellowboy repeater.” Pecos gave the spyglass back to Slash. “Look at the rifle leanin’ against the tree near Billy.”

  Quickly, heart thudding hopefully, Slash peered through the glass. He focused on the rifle—a Winchester with a brass receiver and cocking lever—leaning against the pine near Billy Pinto, Cletis Brown, and the strongboxes.

  Slash lowered the glass, smiling. “I’ll be damned. Time to thank that little snake for finding it along the tracks! Only, I remember catchin’ him eyein’ that Winchester a time or two. Probably wondering how he could steal it . . .”