by Evans, Tabor
“Me too,” Whitfield said, voice hoarse with desire. “At the very worst, we could screw her for a few days and take all that jewelry she wears. I wouldn’t doubt that she’s also carrying plenty of cash.”
Hunt sleeved sweat from his bloodshot eyes. Up here on the Navajo reservation the dirt was red and fine, and there was alkali mixed in as well, and that was painful to the eyes. “Let’s get on our horses and get up ahead to that ambush place you were talking about.”
Whitefield thought that was a fine idea. He desperately wanted to kill the federal marshal who had once shot his brother to death. He’d wanted to kill the marshal in Flagstaff, even more after the bastard beat him up, and now his need for revenge was almost at a fever pitch.
Once they were on their horses, they kept the low, sage-covered hills between themselves and the federal marshal and made sure that they didn’t push their mounts hard enough to raise a dust trail.
“You know something,” Al said, “I got me a hard one just thinking about that blond woman and how much fun we’re going to have riding her while she hollers for mercy. I want her first, Carl. I got to have her first.”
“We’ll flip a coin for that,” Carl Whitfield said, feeling his own manhood swelling at the thought of the pleasure they’d be taking from the rich woman in just another day. “ ’Cause I want her real bad, too.”
Al Hunt gave his cousin a hard look, which the liveryman didn’t even notice, but Al saw that there was a twisted smile on his blood-crusted lips.
Two hours later, Whitfield suddenly raised an arm and pointed to a gap in the hills just a mile ahead. “That’s the place.”
Hunt pulled his hat brim low and squinted into the dry, colorless distance. “You sure?”
“I’m dead sure. We’ll ride around to the north and take our shooting positions on both sides of the gap. When the marshal comes through, he’ll be in both our rifle sights, and it’ll be like a shooting gallery. Thing to remember is, don’t shoot too high and risk hitting each other and we damn sure don’t want to accidentally put a bullet in the mare.”
“I’m a better shot than you are,” Al Hunt said. “I’ll take the first shot, and if he’s still alive, you open fire.”
“Fair enough,” Whitfield agreed. “But we can’t let the mare race off, because sure as hell she’ll run all the way back to the Flagstaff and that stable where she’s been kept for years.”
“She’d run that far on her own?”
“Maybe,” Whitfield said, hedging. “But we just can’t take the chance on it. She’ll be spooked and might even be covered with the marshal’s blood. We’ve got to make sure we catch her up, even if she’d only run as far south as the trading post.”
“I don’t see that as being a problem,” Hunt snapped.
“Well, I do,” Whitfield argued. “Because I’ve seen the mare run and I know she’s a hell of a lot faster than the horses carrying our carcasses.”
“And you said I was a big worrier,” Hunt drawled. “Well look who is the worrier now.”
Carl Whitfield had never really liked this cousin, but he knew the man had killed before and wouldn’t hesitate to do it again in order to make some big money. Add that to the fact that Al was already salivating over the thought of repeatedly raping the blond woman in some sandy arroyo until she fainted or was dead, and he knew that his cousin was in this all the way.
But Al Hunt had one major shortcoming that could not be ignored. He drank too much and too often. And when he got drunk, he got yappy and he liked to brag. If they came into a lot of money off the dead woman and a Hopi horse race, Whitfield was pretty sure his cousin would go on a bender for weeks, and sooner rather than later he’d be spilling his guts about raping the marshal’s wife and how they’d killed both the marshal and the blonde.
That, Whitfield knew, was something that would put a noose around his own neck. So any way he looked at this, only one of them was going back to Flagstaff, and he was going to make sure it was his own suddenly much wealthier self. And while he’d suffer some remorse and even feel some guilt about betraying his cousin Al, remorse was something that faded with time. Getting hanged was something that gave a man no time.
“I’m gonna shoot him in the head,” Hunt said, more to himself than to his companion. “Or better yet, the throat. I never shot a man in the throat, but I heard they die choking and flopping around like a chicken with its head lopped off.”
“Shoot the marshal in the chest,” Whitfield ordered. “Put your first bullet through his heart.”
“Not much fun in doin’ it that way.”
“The hell with fun!” Whitfield snapped. “Just kill him with the first shot. If he’s still alive, you can scalp him or cut off his balls. Slit his throat…hell if I care. But put the first bullet through his chest.”
“All right,” Hunt said, not looking very happy. “But you had better catch the mare.”
“I will. Now, let’s just shut up and start gettin’ our minds right on what we’re about to do to that big bastard who killed my brother.”
“No offense, Carl, but your brother was meaner than a rattlesnake and—”
“Shut up!”
Al Hunt clamped his jaw tight, and his hand went to the smooth stock of his rifle. Maybe, he thought, I could kill Carl too and take the woman, the buckskin, and all the money for myself. Ride off with her to California or up to the Comstock Lode, take my pleasures wherever they might be found. Sell the blond bitch to a high-class whorehouse when I tire of her.
Yeah, Al thought, that was something to consider all right.
A short time later, they drew rein north of the gap, and Whitfield said, “All right, you get first shot and you’d better make it count.”
“I will. All you have to worry about is catching up that buckskin race horse that you been braggin’ about so we can take her on over to the Hopi Reservation and win us a big horse race.”
“I’ll do it,” Whitfield vowed. “Just wait until he’s right in the middle of the gap there and can’t go nowhere but forward or backward.”
“He ain’t goin’ forward or backward,” Hunt snapped. “The only place that big son of a bitch is going is down! Straight down into everlasting hell.”
Whitfield nodded and set off at a trot that would take him around to the other side of the gap between the sun-baked low hills. Al was the better marksman, but it didn’t hurt to be ready with his own rifle in case the man should happen to miss his kill shot.
Chapter 9
Longarm’s full attention was directed northward, and his mind was on how to handle what he might encounter up ahead. Billy Vail had told him that the stakes were very high and that Judge Milton Quinn and his young wife were friends of the President of the United States. It all sounded bad to Longarm; even worse after learning that three riverboat men had been murdered. And then there was the matter of Heidi…and how to keep her safe from harm.
So as he rode into the gap between the low, barren hills, Longarm wasn’t as fully alert to danger as normal. And if it hadn’t been for the buckskin mare suddenly twisting her head around and pointing those small, black-tipped ears at something off to his right, Longarm would have been drilled through the heart.
But the mare’s slight hesitation of movement and the snort that exploded from her nostrils caused Longarm to glance from side to side just as the man he instantly recognized as Carl Whitfield and another smaller man on his left jumped up with rifles.
“Ya!” Longarm shouted, bending low in the saddle and sending the mare into a hard run in order to escape his death trap. “Ya!”
The mare shot forward like a cannonball, ears flattening against her head, neck stretched out, and legs reaching out to cover ground. The ambushers were caught by surprise, unprepared for the mare’s explosive burst of speed. They both fired and missed.
Longarm drew his six-gun and as he passed the two men, he opened fire, emptying his gun at the closer and larger target, Carl Whitfield. The liveryman staggered
, dropped his rifle, and collapsed, even as his partner fired a shot that struck Longarm high up in the back and nearly knocked him from his saddle.
“Ya!” Longarm shouted, dropping his gun and desperately grabbing for his saddle horn.
The buckskin mare ran like the wind and Longarm heard one last rifle shot, then he was out of range and hanging on for his life. The mare had veered off the road and was crashing through brush and leaping over rocks. On and on she ran, until at last Longarm was able to exert some pull on her reins and she stopped, heavily lathered and breathing hard.
“Dammit,” Longarm weakly whispered, trying to reach around to his back and feel the bullet hole.
He couldn’t quite reach that far behind, but the back of his shirt was wet with warm blood and he knew that he was in desperate shape and would bleed to death if he didn’t get the wound plugged.
Longarm gazed around him and saw nothing but rock-strewn hills, a few struggling piñon and juniper pines, sage and rabbit brush. While the mare struggled to regain her breath, Longarm sat in his saddle growing weaker by the moment, as his mind whirled an endless circle trying to figure out what he had to do in order to stay alive.
After several minutes, he glanced back over his shoulder to see if the other rifleman had followed his erratic trail into this wild and barren country. Longarm couldn’t see anyone, but that didn’t mean at least one of the ambushers wasn’t on his trail.
Had he somehow managed to kill Carl Whitfield? Longarm knew that if he had fatally shot the liveryman, it had been out of dumb luck. He’d been under heavy fire and on the back of a racing horse when he’d unloaded his pistol toward Whitfield. But maybe he had really gotten lucky and killed the bastard, and that would make it a little easier if he was about to die out here on this vast and desolate Navajo reservation.
His head was nodding lower and he was gripping the saddle horn with both fists, knowing that if he fell off the mare, he was as good as dead. Suddenly, Longarm heard the ominous sound of a rattlesnake close by. He looked down and saw the viper not six feet away, coiled up in the shade of a rock, ready to strike out at the mare’s leg. The buckskin jumped into the air and hit the ground running. Longarm managed to hang on, but only for a moment, and then his strength was gone and he let go of his saddle horn and went spiraling down into darkness.
Two miles back at the gap, Al Hunt knelt beside his dying cousin. “You’re an unlucky bastard,” Hunt said. “That big federal marshal was hit and shootin’ blind. No way should you be gut-shot like this. You just had some terrible luck is all.”
Carl Whitfield stared up at a blue and cloudless sky, trying to hold on to life. “I was never lucky,” he gasped. “And now I’m going to die out here in this hell.”
“Yeah,” Al Hunt said rather matter-of-factly, “I’m afraid that’s the way it’s going to happen. You’re gut-shot, and there ain’t a thing to be done for it except for you to just up and die.”
Whitfield grabbed his cousin’s wrist and gave it a powerful squeeze. “That marshal couldn’t have gotten very far. He was hit bad and bowed up in his saddle. I saw the blood gushin’ out of his back.”
“I killed him for sure,” Hunt said, feeling very proud of himself. “No doubt about that.”
Carl Whitfield was a big man and he wasn’t dying easy. “Al!”
“Yeah?”
“After I die, take me back to Flagstaff and use my thirty dollars to give me a decent burial.” Wild fear captured his battered face. “Swear that you won’t leave my body out here where the animals will eat me!”
“I’ll take you back,” Al solemnly promised. “And I’ll see you get buried near your brother, only with a better headstone.
“And…” Whitfield was struggling for his last breath and they both knew it. “Al, you gotta do something else for me.”
“Name it.”
“Write on the headstone that…”
Whatever Carl Whitfield wanted on his headstone was lost as his voice and his heavyset body shivered into a deathly stillness.
Al Hunt wasn’t a big man, but he was cunning and deadly. He was also practical, and he was already thinking about that rich blond woman that he and his rifle had just made a widow. Why couldn’t he still take her? And now there would be no question of who would hump her first.
“Why not?” he asked himself out loud as he stood and surveyed the inhospitable and empty landscape. “But first I’ll have to get rid of Carl’s body. Git rid of his horse and saddle too. Leave no trace of what happened here and head for the stagecoach stop and just wait for the woman to show up. She’s never seen me. I can still have her and her money if I play my cards right.”
A smile formed on his ferretlike face, and he snorted with nearly gleeful anticipation. All his life he’d been the follower, the one that sucked hind tit. Carl had been the smart one who had bought the livery and made a decent living. Now, by gawd, he could have someone write a last will and testament giving him the Flagstaff stable and anything valuable that went with it.
“Ha!” Al Hunt laughed, seeing how everything was going to fall into his hands. The rich, blond woman, her money, expensive jewelry, and even his cousin Carl’s Flagstaff stable.
He’d have it all!
Al hurried over to the horses. He was a damn good cowboy and had a rope tied to his saddle. He gathered both of the horses up and led his cousin’s bay over to Carl’s body.
“You’re too damn big for me to lift you up and over your horse, so I’ll have to drag you a ways off.”
Al tied one end of the rope to the saddle horn and the other around Carl’s ankles just above his boots. The boots were pretty nice, so Al took a moment to try them on, but they were much too large for his small feet. So he put his own down-at-the-heel boots back on, remounted his horse, grabbed the reins of Carl’s horse, and looked back at his cousin’s blood-soaked corpse. “Carl, you sure do look like shit,” he said, leading both horses out of the gap in the hills then up through the sagebrush. Twice, Carl’s big body got hung up in brush and Al had to dismount and drag it sideways, grunting and cussing. But eventually, he dragged the corpse for almost two miles, until he found a deep and obscure arroyo.
“This ought to do,” he said to the battered and gray-faced man. “Ain’t quite a nice grave in Flagstaff, but you won’t know the difference and I don’t rightly care. Why waste the money on a dead man that always tried to boss me around?”
Al untied the rope and tethered both horses to a stunted piñon pine tree. He collected his cousin’s six-gun and money then spent an hour covering his body with a heavy mound composed of rocks, sticks, and pieces of deadwood. When he was satisfied that the body would never be found way the hell out on the reservation, he mounted his horse and led Carl’s bay a few miles out into the wilderness, where he reluctantly shot the animal.
Al was tough as rawhide, lean as a desert coyote, and quick as a cat. He rolled a smoke and studied the dead horse, wishing he could have taken it over to that Hopi trading post at Keams Canyon and sold the animal, but that would have tied him to the death not only of his cousin, but also of the missing federal marshal.
“This way, I’m free and clear. Just got to find someone to write me up Carl’s last will and testament and get me some of that blond woman. Ought not to be too hard, I reckon.”
Al Hunt rode back to the gap where they’d waited in ambush. He found a dead limb from a tree and took his time wiping out all evidence of the ambush and the death of his cousin. Satisfied, he backed up to his horse, wiping out his footprints as he went, and mounted his horse.
“Let’s go,” he said, pushing the animal into an easy gallop. “We got to get to that stagecoach station and have a little fun before the real party begins!”
Chapter 10
The Navajo shepherd, his sixteen-year-old son, and two thin black-and-white dogs were moving their small flock across the dry and seemingly desolate reservation. The sheep were long-haired and produced excellent wool in addition to being a
source of meat to the People…the Dine. It was a warm afternoon, and when they pushed their vocal flock over a rocky ridge, they heard a single rifle shot off in the distance.
Thinking it might have been one of their own people in trouble and in need of help, the father left the son and rode his pony toward the sound of the shot. What he saw next was very troubling. A man on a horse was jamming his rifle into his saddle boot and riding away to the north while a horse on the ground was in the middle of its death throes.
The old man did not understand this, and something told him that there was a great danger if he were seen by the departing horseman. So he rode behind the hill and waited a little while, and then he trotted over to the dead horse, dismounted, and examined the animal. He would, of course, take the good saddle, which was much better than his own, and the bridle, saddlebags, and the rope. But as he examined the dead horse, he could see nothing wrong with its feet or legs, and he could not understand why anyone would kill such a valuable and healthy saddle horse.
The old man needed help to remove the saddle, the off stirrup of which was pinned under the weight of the dead animal, so he rode back to his son, whose name was Henry, and explained the situation.
Henry listened without interruption and then said, “The dogs will protect the flock. I will come with you and we will get the saddle. This is a good day for us, eh, Father?”
“It might be a good day, but it also might be a very bad day. Something is not right.”
“Did the rider see you?” Henry asked, concerned about his father.
“No.”
Henry was a handsome, confident young man. “Then there is nothing to worry about.”
So the father and the son rode their ponies over to the dead horse, and after a great amount of pulling and scraping away dirt, they removed the saddle. Henry looked up and saw buzzards circling. He rode a short loop around the dead horse.
