Yester's Ride

by C. K. Crigger

  “Oh, but . . . I’m hurting you.”

  “Try again,” he insisted. He reached in a pocket and drew out a small wash-leather pouch filled with some heavy substance. “Use this.”

  Filled with misgivings, she received the bag and, without even thinking, shook the contents onto the floor.

  Kuo snorted. “That’s gold, you know. From my own claim. You’re mighty careless.”

  “Gold?” Ketta frowned. The little pile didn’t look like much. Certainly not the glittering mass she expected of something as valuable as gold. This had almost as much black grit in it as yellow.

  Anyway, why wasn’t Kuo angry? Big Joe would’ve knocked her from here to heaven’s gates if she’d done such a thing.

  But then an idea struck her. He probably didn’t figure he would live long enough to spend the gold, that’s why.

  This time, fingers covered by the bag and dry, when she pulled on the inch-long piece, it came free. Fancying she heard a small sound as suction around the wound released, Ketta fought the awful churning in her belly. More blood rushed down Kuo’s face, spreading into a red mask. His eye closed now, but showed through a hole in the lid. Ketta nearly cried.

  Nearly. But not quite.

  Kuo took the pouch and pressed it against the wound. It didn’t do much toward stemming the flow of blood. And probably nothing to stop the pain, as he lurched from the chair and went to sit with his back against the wall. There, he closed both eyes, quivering with reaction.

  To stop her own tears, she took Kuo’s place in observing the outlaws in the yard. They milled around, ducking behind cover where they found it, shaking fists in the air and yelling. Finally, in plain sight, they grouped together and appeared to be having a discussion. Gleeful at its conclusion, Dunce headed over to the woodpile, while Beaver built the foundation for a campfire.

  “Why are they starting a fire?”

  She didn’t realize she’d spoken out loud until Kuo answered.

  “Gonna try to burn us out, I expect.”

  “Burn us out? You mean start the cabin on fire with us inside?”

  Kuo gave a short huff of laughter—or something like. “One of Milt’s favorite things to do.”

  “Like he did at our . . . Big Joe’s place.”

  “Yes.”

  “What are we going to do?” she asked, deep worry in her soft voice. “I don’t want to burn up.”

  “No. Me, either.” Kuo raised a slight smile at her admission. “You watching them?”

  Horrified by the thought of being burned alive, she’d forgotten for a moment, but at his reminder, she glanced out the window again. There were Milt and Heller, standing together and letting—no, demanding—the two younger outlaws do the work of starting the fire. Beaver was over close to the trees, gathering a light armload of brush, while Dunce . . .

  Ketta peeked around the window again, catching just a glimmer as Dunce, in his filthy green shirt, seemed to sink into oblivion behind the woodpile. When a figure rose and darted around the corner of the cabin, the shirt was blue.

  Ketta blinked.

  Blue?

  Yes, the same funny color of blue a shirt of Yester’s had turned when it inadvertently got washed with a new red neckerchief belonging to Big Joe. Anyway, Yester’s shirt was now a color more intense than spring lilacs but on the same order. A color Mama had smiled over, saying it a good thing the shirt had turned color and not the neckerchief.

  Ketta agreed. Yester wore the shirt without complaint. Big Joe would’ve stomped his neckerchief into the ground.

  Could there be two shirts of that color? Ketta didn’t think so.

  All of a sudden her stomach turned a somersault, and what felt like a bubble rose up in her throat. She barely suppressed an excited squeal.

  Yester was here. He’d come for her.

  This time her stomach turned upside down and stayed that way.

  Was Yester alone? She sure didn’t see anybody else. And what could her brother do all by himself? What if Heller or Milt, or even that awful Beaver, shot him? Her beautiful brother?

  “Kuo?” she said in a soft, quavering voice.

  He sat pressed against the round log walls of his cabin. His hand held the little cloth bag against his eye although the wound still bled. “What is it, child? Are they coming? Maybe you’d better take my pistol.” His upper lip quirked. “I remember you tried to shoot Milt once before. This revolver will fire. Just be careful where it’s pointed.”

  “Kuo?” she said again, hearing his words but not making sense of them.

  He opened his good eye. “What is it?” He sat a little straighter.

  “I think . . . I think my brother has come for me.”

  At this, Kuo went so still it was as if he stopped breathing. “Your brother? That handsome boy?”

  Ketta’s insides trembled. With fear? With joy? “Yes.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: YESTER

  Yester ran straight into Nat as he rounded the corner. Literally. Nose to nose. He skidded to a halt, Nat’s knife, unsheathed and at the ready, just missed poking him in the gut.

  “Yester! Damn. I almost cut you.” Nat’s face had turned a shade or two paler than its usual light brown.

  “Yeah, I noticed.” A shaky grin twerked Yester’s lips. “Glad you’re here, but I gotta say I’d just as soon not get stuck.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “Luck. Anyway, I’ve got a present for you.”

  “A present?” Nat started, but Yester was already proffering the revolver he’d taken from the outlaw he’d heard the others call Dunce. “Where’d you get it?”

  Yester nodded back from whence he’d come. “One of the outlaws. Here. I got some extra cartridges for it, too.”

  Nat stared at him, then at the pistol. “Did you kill him?”

  “No. Should’ve, probably, but I just clubbed him over the head a couple times.” Yester gave his own head a rueful shake. “It might’ve been three times. I think his skull is like a petrified dinosaur.”

  “Huh.” Nat took the handful of cartridges and, like Dunce, stuck them in a pocket. “Thanks. From the looks of things, I might need this.”

  “I figure so.”

  “The thing is,” Nat said, “how many of these galoots do we have to fight? These four for sure—or maybe three, on account of you taking care of one—but what about whoever it is in there with Ketta?” He nodded over his shoulder at the cabin.

  The same thing Yester had been asking himself. “Don’t know about him,” he said at last. “About her . . . her father. But I think he’s trying to keep Ketta away from the rest of them, so maybe we’re fighting on the same side.”

  “Wish he knew it.” Nat’s face puckered as the information sank in. “I’d hate for him to shoot one of us by mistake.”

  “Well, yeah, but you and me, we’ve got an advantage. We ain’t penned up inside a cabin that some folks are fixing to set on fire.”

  Like a man settling in on a hard job, Nat clubbed his hair behind his head and tied it with a string from his pocket. “We can’t let them do that.”

  “Didn’t plan on it. Least not until Ketta is safe. Let me think a minute on how to get her out.”

  Nat was peering around Yester to where the outlaws were hooting and hollering and dancing around like a bunch of wild men. “Better think fast. Looks like they got the fire kindled, and they’re piling on the wood.”

  Yester turned and studied on the men building the fire to dire heights. A column of smoke rose in the air. He didn’t like what he was seeing. Not one bit. “Think they’re just gonna leave Dunce laying there?”

  “I don’t care one way or another,” Nat said, shrugging.

  “Naw. Me, either.”

  He wasn’t very good at this thinking business, Yester reflected. He couldn’t for the life of him figure on how to get Ketta out of the cabin without either him, or Nat, or Ketta herself being gunned down. Nat reported that he’d already scouted behind the house, squeezing himself
between its walls and the rocky bluff. No door there, he informed Yester. Nor window. No way out at all as far as he could see.

  “Hell,” Yester said and kept on pondering. “Nat, what we ought to do is take down the gunslinger. Do that, and I figure the others will give up.”

  Nat wasn’t so sure. “I dunno, Yester. The old man looks like he’s the one giving most of the orders.”

  Yester grunted. Nat had a point. “So, we take him down first. Then the gunslinger.”

  But how? They couldn’t depend on luck. Nat, though, had an answer for that, too.

  “I recollect you saying—bragging—what a good shot you are, Yester. Why don’t you just shoot him from here? Shoot them both? You’ve got good cover.”

  “You mean, from ambush?” Yester could hardly believe this was Nat talking.

  “Why not? They’d ambush you.”

  Yeah, he knew they would. The idea of an ambush stuck in his craw even though he’d put the idea forward earlier.

  Puffed-up talk that had turned serious, he acknowledged.

  He noticed his shirt was wet, sweated through and through, and the hand holding his rifle slippery. Standing here in the shade, it felt kind of chilly when a breeze stirred.

  Breeze or fear? He didn’t like where this was going.

  A spate of gunfire from the cabin took the thought from his mind.

  “What . . .”

  Nat flopped onto the ground and crawled forward until he had a decent view of the happenings out front.

  “The guy holed up inside, he’s the one shooting,” he reported to Yester. “Looks like he might’ve nicked the young one in the leg. I see blood.” He paused a moment. “Not much. Too bad. Made him drop his firebrand in the yard, and now they’ve got some dry weeds flaring up.” He laughed. “The old one is making the young one piss on them. Guess they don’t want to set the woods on fire.”

  “Not until they get what they came for,” Yester said sourly. He knelt down behind Nat. Sure enough, there was the bucktoothed one, standing with a twisted look on his face. Guess he didn’t like exposing himself, there in the open.

  As Yester debated taking a shot, more gunfire erupted. The outlaws, this time, laying down a covering broadside into the cabin until the grass fire was extinguished and Bucktooth darted back to cover. Sure enough, he was limping, proving Kuo was on the job inside the cabin.

  Excitement over for the moment, Nat retreated and sat up. “What are we going to do?” he asked Yester.

  “We’ve got to get Ketta out. I don’t care about those men, aside from hoping they kill each other off. But if we don’t work fast, Ketta is apt to die right along with them. All that shooting they’re doing . . . well, they can’t keep on missing forever.”

  “Right.” His brow puckered, Nat pondered. “What if I go back to where the meadow opens into the canyon. When I get there, I’ll yell. Draw the outlaws off. Then you can call out to Ketta. See if her father will let her go. If not—”

  “If not, what?”

  “Shoot them.”

  Yester kind of liked the idea, except for one thing. It put Nat in too much danger. If either of them tried such a half-baked stunt, it should be him putting himself on the spot. And if the plan worked, drawing some of them away, even this group of outlaws couldn’t be stupid enough to leave the cabin unguarded.

  He shook his head. “Not you. I’ll do it. You see if you can contact Ketta. Besides, you’ve scouted the area better than me. Once you have her out of there, you can get her away without getting caught.”

  Nat looked like he wanted to argue but finally nodded. “All right. Let’s get started, then. And, Yester?”

  Yester swallowed down on his fear. “What?”

  “Be careful.”

  Yester forced a grin. “Now you sound like my ma.”

  “Yes. Mine, too.”

  Dreading the dash between cabin corner and woodpile, Yester spent a few seconds working up his nerve. He’d done it once, he could do it again, he told himself. Watch for a moment when all the outlaws were looking the other way. They seemed to do that quite often. All it’d take was a little unexpected something to draw their attention.

  He waited, breathing like he was already running. Finally, the chance came. The flight of a few birds, as it happened, a small flock set in motion by the stone Nat judiciously tossed into their midst.

  Then Yester dashed into the open, five, six steps, until he hunkered down behind the woodpile where he’d left Dunce. Unseen and unheard. He wiped sweat from his brow with a hand that shook.

  Dunce still lay there, a small trickle of blood oozing from a gash at the back of his head. Yester knew he was alive by the way his chest rose and fell. Relieved not to be hobnobbing with a corpse, he cocked an ear towards the outlaws.

  “On three,” the one called Milt said, “each of you boys grab a torch and run up close to the cabin. Beaver, you take one side of the window. Heller, you take the other. I’ll stay right here and shoot if I see anybody moving inside. That’ll do’er. They either come out or they fry. Don’t matter all that much which.”

  “Okay, Pa,” the buck-toothed lad said, “but I hope they come out. I want me that girl.”

  “Stand in line, sonny.” Dismissing Beaver’s concerns, the gunslinger stared hard at the ugly, older man. “Plan is all right. Up to a point.”

  “What point?”

  “The one where two run up with lighted torches. Ain’t gonna be me. Has to be you and Beaver, here.”

  “Well, say, Heller, I ain’t so young as I used to be. Getting crippled up. You do it. You’re young and spry.”

  Heller leaned forward. “And a helluva lot better shot.”

  Right here, Yester thought. This was the best place for him. He had clear shots at all three of them. Provided his old rifle didn’t jam up like it did sometimes. Wait until two of them had torches in hand. That’d put a damper on them fighting back. For a few seconds, at least.

  His mind raced, telling him what to do. It had him so stirred up that, at first, he failed to notice the sounds behind him. Right up until hands like a vise grabbed onto his ears and mashed his head right down into his neck bones.

  “Pa, Pa,” Dunce yelled, happy as a skunk in a henhouse. “I got me one.”

  “Dunce? That you?” Ugly didn’t sound all that happy his son had awakened. “You got one what?”

  Idiot, Yester mournfully answered for him. Just before he started fighting back.

  KETTA

  “I really did!” Ketta jumped to her feet and broke into an excited little dance. “I saw him. My brother is here. He’ll save me. Save us.”

  Why didn’t Kuo look happier? They could depend on Yester’s help. She knew it.

  “How did he find this place?” Kuo demanded, maybe talking to himself.

  Ketta answered, anyway. “Yester is smart,” she said proudly. “And he’s stubborn. He keeps after things until they turn out right.” It was true. He did, but she didn’t know as he’d ever done anything like this before. Most of his experience involved finding lost stock or chasing down game.

  Kuo made some kind of funny sound deep in his throat. Disbelief? Surprise? Anger? But why should he be angry? “Smart, eh?” he repeated.

  Ketta’s joy faded. Silly girl. Of course, her father wasn’t pleased. After all, he’d stolen her away from her family in the first place. He’d probably rather she died or got sold into slavery than be rescued by her brother.

  With all her heart, she wished she could snatch those revealing words back. Keep Kuo in the dark as to Yester’s presence. If he and Yester were to come face to face, how would they react? Friends or mortal enemies? Better, perhaps, if they didn’t meet. If she were able to—

  “We don’t need smart,” he said, interrupting her soaring thoughts as he rose to his feet. “We need somebody good with a gun. Maybe several men good with a gun, given that is Burk Heller out there. Not one half-grown boy who thinks he’s an avenging angel.”

  “Another
outlaw?” she said, even as she wondered if Yester did think of himself as an avenging angel? It didn’t sound much like her brother.

  “An outlaw who’s fighting on my side.” Kuo’s correction sounded a little bitter.

  “Like Tug, I suppose.”

  “Yes. Like Tug.”

  Outside, the outlaws were prancing about like schoolchildren on a cold winter morning instead of this hot summer day. Beaver kept darting to the front and shooting off his gun as if he had all the bullets in the world. And although the fire itself was out of her line of sight, Ketta smelled it well enough and observed smoke spreading across the clearing.

  Moment by moment, her fear grew. She hadn’t forgotten the way the outlaws had set her home afire. Not by a long shot. And left Mama to burn up.

  Why, oh, why didn’t Yester do something?

  Standing beside the window, the glass all shot out by now, Ketta kept her eyes peeled for another glimpse of her brother. And for the outlaw attack, too. She doubted Kuo’s ability to twist himself far enough to see, given his damaged eye. But he, she knew, heard them well enough. The catcalls and the promise to burn them out.

  A sudden burst of curses resounded. More, Ketta realized, than before. What was happening?

  Kuo, his expression grim, reached down a box of ammunition from a shelf and set it beside him. “You know how to load a gun?”

  Ketta looked around at him. “Yes.” She’d seen Yester and Big Joe do it often enough. When she’d tried to use Big Joe’s broken pistol back at the ranch, her failure hadn’t been because of ignorance. Or not entirely, at any rate.

  “Well, then,” Kuo said, “get ready. They’ll start shooting any minute. I have my rifle and this revolver. When one is empty, I’ll hand it to you to reload, and I’ll use the other. They won’t be expecting that.”

  A long shiver started in Ketta’s belly and didn’t let up. “All right.”

  “They’ll be shooting their guns at the same time they’re trying to throw a fire brand into the cabin. If they succeed with a torch, you see if you can put it out. Got water in a bucket. Use that first. Then smother it with the bear hide off the bed. If that don’t work—”