by JR Roberts
“What was that, Don?”
“Nothing.”
Clint shook his head. “I can’t believe it. The two of you really did have some kind of moment back in town. What happened? Did you both share an epiphany over a bottle of whiskey?”
“No! Well … there was whiskey involved but not a lot. He was civil and let me have a drink.”
“Now there’s a man who knows how to treat his prisoner,” Sven grumbled.
Clint gnashed his teeth together, wondering if it would be easier to knock them both unconscious or just stuff bandannas in their mouths.
“Jarred said that horse thieves are treated worse than killers,” Don continued.
“Is that a fact?” Clint said.
“He said most men care more for their horses than they do for their fellow man.”
“Is that a fact?”
“Yes, indeed. He also said that some killers have more of a chance at trial than a horse thief. Every once in a while, a man accused of killing someone may be turned loose. A man accused of stealing a horse is usually strung up right away.”
“Is that a fact?”
Don let out an exasperated breath. “You ain’t even listening to me.”
“I’m listening,” Clint said. “I was just checking to see if you were actually hearing what I said or if you were just spouting off about all these convoluted theories of Hall’s. By the way, you do know that he’s a bounty hunter who’ll profit from bringing you in, right? Most likely, it doesn’t even matter if you’re alive or dead.”
“Yeah, I know. He did make some good points, though.”
“Then maybe you can discuss them with him,” Clint said.
Clint had spotted the rider on the trail ahead a few moments ago and was preparing himself for the worst. Now that they’d closed the distance between each other, he could tell it was Hall galloping straight toward him. The bounty hunter reached him in a short amount of time and fell into step beside Clint.
“What did you find?” Clint asked.
“It was more or less what I thought it would be,” Hall replied. “The tracks led off to a good vantage point for scouting. Nobody was there.”
“That’s good.” After a few seconds of silence, Clint looked over to him and studied the other man’s face. “What else was there?”
“Not much.”
“Did you catch sight of the men we’re after?”
Hall shook his head.
“Then what the hell is it?” Clint asked. “It’s plain to see there’s something wrong.”
“I didn’t see any of the men we’re after, but the spot I did find … well … it looked like those men probably visited it more than once.”
“I don’t mean to be cross,” Clint said, “but I’ve had my fill of roundabout talk with these two while you were away. If you’ve got something to say, just spit it out.”
“What I found was a cave,” Hall said.
“A cave?”
“That’s right.”
“You think they used it to hide out or make camp?”
“No.” Hall took a deep breath and let it out. “They used it as a grave.”
“A grave? For who?”
“For horses.”
Clint snapped back on his reins with enough force to make the animal beneath him whinny. After calming the horse down with a few pats to the side of its head, he asked, “There were dead horses?”
“Yeah.”
“How many?”
“I didn’t stop to count them,” Hall explained. “There were a good number, though. Could have been more of them deeper in, but the freshest ones were up front.”
“How fresh?”
“Adams, there’s no—“
“How fresh, dammit? Answer me!”
For the first time all day, neither of the two prisoners were of a mind to say a word. They held their tongues, doing their best to stay low until this storm blew over.
“I went in to have a closer look,” Hall told him. “I wasn’t about to count the carcasses or wade in all the way back, but I didn’t see any Darley Arabians.”
“Are you certain? He’s black with a white spot on the nose.”
“I’m certain.”
Clint let out a relieved breath, but didn’t take much comfort from it. “Maybe I should go and look for myself.”
“I know what I saw, Adams, and there’s no need to turn back. If anything, we should pick up our pace to catch up with these men even sooner. Most of the horses I saw didn’t look like they just keeled over of natural causes. They were probably put down for being too cantankerous or otherwise difficult to control during a long ride. There sure as hell weren’t that many horses that got sick or broke a leg. I just wanted to prepare you because most Arabians I’ve ever heard of are rather spirited.”
“Yeah,” Clint said. “I know. But Eclipse isn’t just spirited. He’s smart. He’ll know when to go along for the sake of saving his own neck.”
“That’s giving a whole lot of credit to a horse, don’t ya think?”
“No,” Clint replied sharply. “I think that’s giving credit where credit is due.”
“All I’m saying is that the cave I found probably isn’t the only spot of its kind along these outlaws’ route. If we take too long and that horse becomes too much trouble for them . . .”
“I understand,” Clint said. “Just look me in the eyes and tell me one more time Eclipse wasn’t in there.”
“Why would I lie about such a thing?”
“To make certain I stay on this ride to help you get these horse thieves.”
Hall met Clint’s gaze and said, “He wasn’t in there. I checked. I waded deeper into that god awful mess than I wanted to but I checked.”
“All right then. But don’t try to argue when I tell you we’re riding as late as we can and starting again early in the morning if need be.”
“Don’t worry,” Hall said. “After seeing that cave, I want to find these sons of bitches just as bad as you do.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
The tracks they followed took them straight through the rest of West Texas and across the New Mexico state line. Along the way, there was plenty to see but it wasn’t anything Clint or Hall were looking for. Several times, they spotted small groups of riders in the distance; heard shots fired, and even found a few discoveries even more gruesome than Hall’s cave.
It was late afternoon on the third day of their ride. Clint took a turn scouting ahead and had fired a shot in the air to catch Hall’s attention. When Hall arrived, he found Clint standing near a small cluster of tall trees that bore some very unusual fruit.
“What the hell is this?” Hall asked as he swung down from his saddle.
“Jesus Christ,” Don said. “Oh Jesus, I knew it!”
Clint was closest to the tree and had barely had enough time to holster his Colt before the others rode up on him. His eyes were trained on the bodies dangling from the nooses tied to some of the upper branches and his feet did their best to avoid the bodies that were piled on the ground.
“Quiet,” Clint said.
Not only did Don keep blabbering but Sven joined in as well. “Good Lord! We gotta turn back,” he said. “We can’t see this! We gotta turn back.”
“You heard the man,” Hall said while climbing down from his saddle. “Shut the hell up. Both of you!”
The sight was so terrible and so peculiar that Clint couldn’t take his eyes off of it. There were no fewer than seven bodies hanging from the thickest branches of a tree that looked to have been there since the soil itself. They swung back and forth, knocking against each other like wind chimes fashioned from jerked meat. Most of the bodies were unrecognizable due to the amount of flesh that had been picked from their bones. Some still wore ragged remains of clothing while others were just bones held together by thick strands of sinew that was too tough to be eaten by the vultures.
“What is this?” Hall asked.
“I don’t know,” Clint said
in a low, reverent tone. “I was hoping you could tell me.”
“What’s there to tell?” Don cried. “It’s a goddamn lynching tree! Are you blind?”
Clint shook his head. “No. This is something else. Something more.”
Lowering to one knee, Hall reached down to examine one of the bodies piled on the ground. Those dead men were in even worse condition than the one still dangling from the branches, mainly because not a single one of them was still in one piece. “He’s right,” the bounty hunter said. “I’ve seen plenty of lynchings. I’ve held a few of them. This ain’t like anything I’ve ever seen before.”
When Clint looked away from the tree, it wasn’t out of disgust. He was looking toward the one man in the group who’d said the least thus far. Sven’s eyes were wide and his face was paler than usual. “What’s on your mind, Sven?” Clint asked.
Twitching as though he’d just been shaken from a deep sleep, Sven nervously licked his lips. “They’re horse thieves.”
“How can you tell?”
“Because I’ve heard about trees like this one here. This is where horse thieves, robbers and any other undesirables are put after they’re rounded up.”
“Rounded up?” Clint asked.
Before an answer could be given, Don wailed, “There are other trees like this one?”
Sven nodded to both men.
Clint approached the horse shared by the two prisoners so he could pull them both down. At the start of their journey, that had been a cumbersome process. After the last few days of making camp and helping them down for meals and such, he and Hall had it down to a science. Once Don was down, Clint shoved him toward Hall and said, “Do something to calm him down.”
“All right, fella,” Hall said as he took hold of Don’s elbow. “Let’s stretch our legs a bit.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Once the other two had moved away, Clint untied Sven’s ropes. The lanky prisoner’s leg wound was healing nicely but he was still in no condition to make a run for his freedom. Even without the wound, however, he was in no condition to fight.
“Take a breath,” Clint told him.
Sven did.
“Now tell me what you know about this.”
After steeling himself, Sven said, “I heard that men were rounded up for breaking the rules.”
“The rules. You mean the law?”
“Not the government’s law. New Mexico’s law.”
“How’s that different?” Clint asked.
“Because the government ain’t the one enforcing these rules. When I first heard it, I thought it was just a bunch of talk. You know … like a bunch of outlaws sitting around trying to sound like bad men? But these men did more than talk. Now that I see this, I can tell it’s a whole lot more.”
“Who did all this talking?”
“Victor Howlett, mostly. He said that they did things their own way in New Mex. That anyone who wants to say any different will get hung out for the vermin to pick their bones. He made it sound pretty bad. But this … this is worse than I imagined.”
“I thought Howlett was just a horse thief,” Clint said.
“He’s a thief and a killer. With things getting so bad for thieves in Texas, men like him gotta adapt to survive. That’s what he always said.”
“What else did he say about this?” Clint asked while pointing to the tree. “And don’t give me any tough talk spewed around a campfire.”
The glassy look in Sven’s eyes was replaced by cold fear which didn’t fade in the slightest when he looked away from the tree and over to Clint. “He said that things would start to be handled differently in New Mex and that soon it would be handled what way in other places too.”
“What other places?”
“Everywhere. I’m just telling you what he said. It may have been around a campfire but it was more than just tough talk. He truly believed it.”
Instead of badgering the prisoner, Clint draped an arm around Sven’s shoulders and led him away from the tree. After a few steps, they were no longer stepping on crumbled remains. It would take a lot more walking to escape the smell, however.
Calmly, Clint asked, “What did this have to do with bodies swinging from trees?”
“Howlett said that government’s law was no good. That it either punished the wrong men or it didn’t punish them the proper way. He’d go on and on about how much better things would be if folks truly knew they couldn’t take their chances with a jury that could get it wrong or a judge that could be bought and paid for.”
“Vigilantes have been spouting off like that for a mighty long time.”
“He wasn’t just talking about enforcing the law a different way. He talked about having no law.”
“What about those rules you mentioned?” Clint asked.
“Howlett mentioned those but he didn’t exactly dwell on them. What he spoke about more than anything was how folks would either step in line with the way things should be or they’d wind up piled up beneath the hanging trees.”
“Go on.”
“That’s how we’d know when the new world was being forged,” Sven said as if he was reciting something he’d committed to memory when he was a child. “The enemies of the righteous would swing for all to see. Those trees would grow from mounds of death and everyone who saw them would know.” Sven’s eyes had been glassy and not focused on anything in particular. He stared hard at Clint when he added, “They’d know that it was time to either step in line with the new way or be piled up with the rest.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Clint, Hall and their two prisoners rode the rest of the day in relative silence. After seeing enough dead bodies to turn their stomachs for a year, there simply wasn’t a lot for them to say. Their day only got worse after they left that spot. They found two more similar trees that day. The last one showed on the horizon as they were headed toward several narrow columns of smoke rising from looked to be a large mining camp. Although there were fewer bodies hanging from or stacked beneath the branches of that last tree, there was no mistake that they were put there by the same group.
“You sure it’s a bunch of men?” Hall asked as they rode away from the last tree they’d discovered. “It could just be the work of one mad dog killer.”
“This is too much killing for one man to do.”
“We both know that’s not the case, Adams.”
“These trees had to be set up fairly recently. Otherwise, someone would have pulled down those bodies and buried them properly.”
“We didn’t.”
Clint flinched at that. “We would have if we didn’t have more pressing matters. Time is a factor and I’m not just talking about reclaiming my horse. Sven swears that one of those thieves is connected to what we found today. Wasting time with anything other than tracking them down only lets them get farther away.”
“We agree on that much,” Hall said. “I noticed something else about them trees. They were all set up more or less the same. Almost like it was some sort of ritual.”
“Or a message.”
“Yeah. One that’s delivered like a club to the back of your head. Someone doesn’t want anyone in New Mexico and they want to make certain that folks are too scared to cross the state line.”
“Seems like there’s more to it than that,” Clint said. “The trees we’ve found were pretty evenly spaced over several miles. Kind of like a border. Or a line in the sand.”
“More like an animal marking its territory,” Hall said distastefully.
“Whatever it is, plenty of folk are taking it seriously. Nobody’s cleaned up those disgraceful messes. Not the law, nor any concerned citizens. I don’t like the sound of that.”
“Are you buying all that garbage Sven was trying to sell?”
“It wasn’t him selling it,” Clint said in a voice that was quiet enough to remain strictly between him and the bounty hunter riding next to him. “He said all that talk came from someone else and I believe him.”
> “Still doesn’t bring us any closer to knowing for certain just what the hell is going on around here. All we had before was rumor, wild stories and speculation. Now we’ve just got more of it.”
“You could say the same thing about following a set of tracks,” Clint pointed out. “Use what you’ve got, make sense out of what you can and wait for it all to point you somewhere.”
After mulling that over for a few moments, Hall nodded. “I suppose that makes sense. Better than the alternative, anyway.”
“Which is?”
“That we’re blindly following a trail marked in blood that any fool in his right mind would avoid.”
Clint nodded. “Yeah. I like my version better.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
The camp they had found consisted of several dozen tents spread over the land that could normally be occupied by a small town. Some of the tents near the center of camp were larger and supported by wooden frames while the ones on the periphery were barely large enough for two people to use for shelter with their feet sticking out from one end. Even if the tracks they were following hadn’t led to that place, Clint would have been tempted to stop there for the night.
“You smell what I smell?” Clint asked.
Hall tipped his hat to a small cluster of ladies standing outside one of the larger tents. Judging by the way they were dressed, they were either soiled doves or one hell of a welcoming committee. “I don’t smell it yet,” Hall said through a leering grin, “but I imagine it’s pretty sweet.”
“Not that,” Clint snapped. “Smells like some of the best cooking I’ve found in months.”
“You chase your pleasures. I’ll chase mine.”
“Don’t forget why we’re here.”
“I didn’t,” Hall said. “The last tracks I found were so fresh, I’d wager that wagon is probably parked somewhere in this camp as we speak.”
“I’m sure it doesn’t hurt that you could sleep on a bed with a warm body next to you instead of stretched out on the ground.”
“You’re damn right it doesn’t. But I’m a professional, Adams. I want to catch these horse thieves just as much as you do.”
