He felt silly, all of a sudden. And a hypocrite—what right did he have being jealous of that black cowboy, after sitting in a love seat with Victoria Hammond?
“Listen,” York said, holding his hands up in surrender, doing his best to sound reasonable, “just try to keep this from exploding for a few days. Raymond Parker is working behind the scenes on this mess, and—”
She frowned. “Parker? How? What does he have in mind?”
“He didn’t share everything with me.” And most of what Parker had shared with Caleb, the businessman wanted the sheriff to keep to himself.
“For now,” York told her, and almost settled a hand on her shoulder, “tell your man Jackson to send some scouts ahead, through the brush and trees on the east side of the creek. They need to keep out of sight, but confirm that the Hammond woman has withdrawn her men.”
“And if she hasn’t?”
“Send a rider to town and let me know, at once. I’ll get right on putting a posse together.”
Her expression was damn near mocking. “Of Trinidad town folk?”
He waved that off. “No. I’ll do what you and Victoria Hammond did—go to Las Vegas and come back with some dangerous dregs.”
“Funny way of keeping the peace.”
“It’s not a solution I’m partial to, but it’s what I’ve got.”
Her eyes tightened again, yet her expression softened, and her voice had hurt in it when she asked, “Caleb . . . why?”
“Why what?”
Now anger came out. “Why did you side against me in this?”
He sucked in air and let it right back out. “Damn it, woman! You talked me into keeping this job and the badge that came with it. Hell, I have two of the damn things now! If I had scurried to your feet like a lap dog, would you have liked it? Loved me for it? Or would you have lost all respect for me?”
She had no answer.
“I’ll say good night then,” he said, and tugged on his hat. He began to go, but paused and said, “Will you promise me one thing?”
“What’s that?”
“You’ll let the men do the fighting.”
She smiled. “Would you love me for it? Or would you lose all respect for me?”
Now he had no answer.
But he went back to her, and kissed her pretty mouth, gently, and so quick she couldn’t return it or refuse it.
Not much of a kiss, in the scheme of things, but as he rode back to Trinidad it occurred to him how much more it meant than that show of passion another woman had forced on him.
* * *
Victoria Hammond supervised in her kitchen, but she was not cooking up a feast, at least not literally.
After all, she wasn’t even wearing an apron. Instead, the dark-eyed beauty was in black, if no longer in mourning; rather, she was decked out in a black leather vest over a black shirt above black gaucho-style pants. High on her right hip rode a Colt Single Action .45 with mother-of-pearl grips boasting an eagle and snake pattern; her heavy Mexican-style leather holster was beautifully tooled and stamped with a floral design.
Few hostesses in the Southwest were more distinctively turned out.
Feast or not, something in this kitchen was cooking, all right, and she did have a chef of sorts, who was sitting midpoint at the eight-foot rustic Mexican table, as were several interested students. Three soup bowls and a larger serving bowl were set out in a horizontal row in front of him. One soup bowl contained a serving of black powder, another shimmered with viscous glue, and the third collected some shreds of tree bark. The larger bowl was empty.
The chef—more like a chief, in his faded blue army jacket, red silk bandanna, and with that ebony hair, parted in the middle, braids to his shoulders—was handsome enough to stir things in Victoria. Those ice-blue eyes, the high cheekbones, and that square jaw—he was a living bronze statue created by a master sculptor. Yet they called this man a kid.
The Chiricahua Kid.
Seated at the table with the Apache were the other two dangerous men the late Clay Colman had hired in Las Vegas: Dave Carson, boyish and skimpily mustached with close-set eyes, making him look dumber than he was; and Billy Bassett, lean and heavily mustached, older than any of the rest of her crop of riders.
“You’re the leader now, Mr. Bassett,” she had told him, after she learned of Colman’s fate at the hands of Caleb York.
“In my mind,” Bassett admitted, “I always was.”
They’d been talking in the library, Victoria behind the desk, the gunhand before her like a soldier reporting to a general.
She asked, “You scouted the position?”
Bassett nodded. “There’s a rise behind the bunkhouse and barn. Not much of one, but enough. Job can be done from there.”
“You took the Indian with you?”
“I did.”
“His appraisal?”
A shrug. “Said it looked okay.”
“Elaborate praise, coming from him.”
“Don’t say much, it’s true.”
The other person at the kitchen table, watching the Kid prepare for what was to come, was her middle son, Pierce. He was wearing an outfit he’d bought back home in Colorado, to prepare for the Circle G and what he saw as his new role as a genuine man of the West—a buckskin jacket with fringed sleeves and matching buckskin trousers and buckskin moccasins.
She did not know whether to laugh or cry.
But at least he was trying. He’d done well for her, arranging at her request the meeting—ambush, really— with Colman at the cemetery; it was Colman who’d fumbled that.
Tonight would be a chance for Pierce to learn about himself. And for Victoria to learn about him, for better or worse.
Bassett, an interested pupil, said, “This the way you savages burned out settlers?”
“Some time,” the Indian affirmed. “Mainly for making signal at night.”
The Kid poured the bowl of gloppy glue into the bigger bowl, then dumped in the gunpowder, like he was overpeppering a stew. With his right hand, he stirred the mixture briefly, then rubbed the residue on his fingers off on a rag. Finally, from a pile of arrows next to the bowl, he plucked the head off one and dragged the wooden shaft through the black powder, tipping the bowl to do so. He never spilled a drop.
The gunpowder was soon coating the wood, as thick as a quarter of an inch around, save for a few bare inches at the bottom of the shaft, which he held on to. With his free hand, the Kid took a strip of bark from the remaining bowl and bit off a bite, as if it were beef jerky. He chewed. He chewed some more. Then he removed the wad of masticated bark from his mouth and dipped it in the remaining gunpowder. He fastened the result to the tip of the stick.
Transfixed, Pierce said, “So then you set that nubbin on fire?”
The Kid nodded.
“How?” Pierce wondered.
“How,” the Indian said, puzzled.
“I mean, do you, uh, rub some sticks together and—”
“No. Kitchen match.”
The Kid repeated the process, making himself half a dozen such arrows. He handed one each to the men at the table to hold by the shaft’s uncoated end and allow the result to dry for a while. Soon Bassett and Carson and Victoria’s son were each holding an arrow in a fist. The Kid was holding up one himself. It looked a little absurd, Victoria had to admit. Like some secret ceremony, or like diners waiting for food to be served and then speared.
Eyes narrowed as he glanced around the table, Bassett asked, “Six? That’s all? Don’t you want a few more?”
The Kid seemed to be thinking about blinking, but didn’t. “Why?”
“In case you miss.”
“Billy, what a lucky man.”
“Who, me?”
The Kid nodded. “You. Kid don’t kill friends.”
Victoria laughed. But was he kidding? Either way, she liked the Apache. With Colman gone, she was getting ideas that went beyond the festivities planned for the evening.
The Kid turned
to Pierce. “Could use your help.”
Pierce’s eyes were big. “Me? Help from me?”
The Kid nodded.
“Right now?”
“No. On hilltop.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“I put arrow on bowstring. Aim. Then lower bow with arrow not shot yet, and you light up tip. I raise bow and let fly. Shoot high. Give time for flame to grow. Arrow comes down and hits where I aim . . . and then, time for another arrow.”
Pierce smiled like Christmas morning. “You trust me with this, Kid?”
“If your mama do, I do.”
His eyes sought her approval. “Do you, Mother?”
She took one of the drying arrows from him and pressed the box of kitchen matches in his hand by way of reply.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
When her foreman got back, Willa Cullen was still sitting on the porch, taking in the quiet of a moon-swept, star-flung night, enjoying the caress of a cool breeze from the south. Shortly after Caleb had ridden off, she had summoned Jackson to take Frank Duffy and Buck O’Fallon, the two remaining shootists from the Las Vegas hiring, to get a clandestine look at the Sugar Creek shoreline.
Now Jackson stood next to his seated employer, hat in hand, and reported.
“York was truth tellin’,” Jackson said, looking like he wished what he was saying weren’t gospel. “There’s two campsites, two Circle G men at each one. Well spread apart. Could be others are posted in the pines, but we couldn’t spot ’em. And with the moon makin’ noon out of the night, I think we likely would.”
She nodded, agreeing with that assessment. “You left Duffy and O’Fallon behind, I take it?”
“Positioned in those woods, each with a view on a campsite. Any activity, they’ll report back.”
“Good.”
Neither said anything for a while.
Then Willa looked up at him and asked, “Can we afford to give this a few days, d’you think?”
He drew a breath, exhaled, then shrugged. “Water tower’s damn near dry. They’s a water hole to the north that may let us stretch things out a bit. This fellow Parker that York talks about—is he an ally?”
She nodded again. “He’s a good man. He and my papa and another man built the Bar-O. If anybody can find a way around this . . . a way out of it . . . it’s Raymond L. Parker.”
Jackson’s half smile was sour. “Well, York only knows one thing—that .44 on his hip.”
She knew that wasn’t true, but said nothing.
“I can’t believe I’m saying this,” she said wryly, “but maybe we should take that Hammond woman at her word.”
They mulled it a while, and then—as if evidence were being presented in the matter—a burst of flame flared out of the darkness, above the bunkhouse, like low-hanging Fourth of July fireworks. She didn’t see it, but Jackson did.
“What the hell . . .” he began.
She turned toward where he was looking. The second burst of flame she saw all right, and then the oversized shack that was the bunkhouse took another hit from what was now apparently a flame-tipped arrow.
In seconds the building’s flat roof was ablaze.
She got to her feet, but Jackson was already on the run, slamming on his hat, heading off the porch and down the steps, and charging across the open hard-dirt apron, his .38 Colt Lightning revolver in hand.
Her first thought was: Does he think he can fight fire with bullets? But her second thought was more apt: We’re under attack!
Here at the far end of the porch, facing the bunkhouse—enough distance between it and the ranch house to make the fire spreading here not an immediate danger—she positioned herself with the .22 Colt handgun her father had given her, years ago.
Apparently more arrows had struck the back of the bunkhouse, because fiery fingers were reaching around both sides of the wooden structure, as if to take it in a terrible searing grip. Jackson was at the door of the shack, struggling to remove a thick branch that had been jammed in through the door handle to block entry . . . or, more importantly, exit.
Someone had managed to sneak around and insert that thing without her seeing it, even as she’d been sitting right here on this porch! It would have taken someone incredibly deft, capable of the sneaking silence of . . .
. . . an Indian. The kind of Indian who could send fiery arrows into the night, and turn a bunkhouse into a charnel house.
Jackson had reported seeing an Indian among the Circle G men at Sugar Creek, and Buck O’Fallon thought it had been the Chiricahua Kid, a notorious renegade Apache turned outlaw.
Could this be his handiwork?
These thoughts raced through her mind, as she watched her foreman working to get that branch loose and out, which he did, casting it aside; but the flames were encroaching his position, the entire building swarming with dancing demons of orange and yellow and blue. Men within were shouting. Screaming....
And by the time he got the door open, the men who came running out through billowing smoke were already burning, glowing, shrieking, probably rushing from the back of the building, where arrows had apparently hit the rear exterior walls, the other men within getting out of the way of the flaming figures, comrades they couldn’t help and hoped to avoid.
The race the burning men were running didn’t last long—they made only a few yards before flopping to the ground and soon the only movement coming from the crisply blackened figures were the flames emanating like a ghastly victory dance. The other men came stumbling out, coughing, hands over their faces. The bunkhouse was lost under the blanket of flickering orange-blue, the roar of the conflagration punctuated by crackling, a din so ear-filling that it took a few moments for the hoofbeats to register . . .
. . . hoofbeats of horses carrying a dozen-plus men, an invading army coming down the lane and charging into the open hard-dirt apron around which the outbuildings and ranch house were arranged. Handguns blazed their own little jagged orange fires as rounds were triggered into the staggering cowboys who didn’t even have time to know how they were dying or at whose hands.
From her perch on the porch, Willa began returning fire and two men tumbled from the saddles, plummeting to the ground, dead or dying, their horses charging on without them. The onslaught was something of a blur, but she recognized certain riders as being of the Arizona rustling bunch, the so-called Cowboys, who’d recently been hired on at the Circle G.
In between the burning bunkhouse and the oncoming riders, on the slight slope where the only thing alive about the charred dead men sprawled on the grass was the flames dancing on their backs, knelt Bill Jackson, cool and steady and still as he carefully picked off intruders, one, two, three....
But from behind the inferno that had been the bunkhouse scurried an absurd figure in fringed buckskin, a young man on foot, boyish but not a boy—wasn’t that one of Victoria Hammond’s sons? Like a refugee from a Wild West show, the buckskin cowboy, gun in hand, drew a bead on the kneeling Jackson, who did not see this ridiculous threat coming.
She screamed a warning, but the whoops and war cries of the invading force—whittled by a third now—merged with the growl of the vortex of flame and drowned her out. The crack of the gunshot got lost in the general clamor, but she saw the spurt of blood, a ribbon of red unfurling, exiting Jackson’s left temple, and he tottered for just a moment, already dead before falling onto his side, like a milk bottle hit by a County Fair ball.
Young Hammond had an awful smile on his face, an odd combination of glee and horror. But he didn’t wear it long. Willa took aim with that .22 in her fist, just as she had when her father taught her to shoot tin cans for practice. She fired twice and both rounds hit the buckskin figure in the chest, and he took the bullets like he’d been shoved there, twice. Not hard. Just shoved.
He looked down at himself, at two black holes that wept single scarlet tears, then gazed across the open area at Willa standing there with gunsmoke twirling like a tiny lariat from her gun barrel. The glee left, the horror remaine
d, and then he took two tentative steps, with the gun still in hand, before falling flat on his boyish face.
Wielding a double-barreled shotgun, plump, white-bearded Harmon emerged from his cookhouse, in a red long john top and britches he’d thrown on—he slept in back—and let one barrel’s worth blow a rider off his saddle. Then he repeated the activity and reloaded.
Over by the horse barn—the burning bunkhouse sending sparks and cinders treacherously its way—lanky old Lou Morgan, the wrangler in charge there, was kneeling with his Winchester taking aim and bringing down more riders, calm as a hunter sighting a deer. And another deer. And another.
Though they were outnumbered heavily—just Willa and the cookie and wrangler and the now dead foreman—the invaders were getting driven back. Or maybe it was just that the attackers had accomplished what they’d set out to, now that every one of the cowhands who’d been in that bunkhouse been sent to heaven or hell, as the case might be.
At any rate, the raiders were gone as quick as they’d come, leaving a stirring of dust by way of farewell.
Willa stood and breathed hard, through the acrid taste and smell of smoke. She assessed the situation, sending her eyes around her property. The shack where those men had once slept before fiery death came knocking was spitting embers and cinders at the nearby barn. It would be only a matter of time before that building caught fire, too—the wind blowing north was the only saving grace thus far—and, of course, that was the structure within which all their horses were stabled.
No more contemplation.
Time to get to work.
She gathered Harmon and they joined Morgan, whom she told, “We need to start leading the horses from the barn into the corral.”
Morgan said gruffly, “Much as I prefer equines, should we first check the fallen?”
“No,” she said. “Our people are dead. Incinerated or shot or both.”
“What if some of theirs is breathing?”
“They can wait their turn. Our horses come first.”
The old boy had no argument with that.
But he did say, “I best at least gather their weapons.”
She nodded. “Do that. Pile them over by the house.”
Shoot-Out at Sugar Creek (A Caleb York Western Book 6) Page 16
