Ash couldn’t decide whether to take him seriously. “Then why are you about to drink?”
“For the same reason I must breathe.” Broken Nose swallowed in long gulps, his Adam’s apple bobbing. When he finally lowered the bottle, a third of the whiskey was gone. Smiling, he belched and cradled the bottle in the crook of an arm. “I hate all whites for my weakness.”
“Oh, sure, blame us,” Ash said, half in jest.
Broken Nose shifted and picked up a blanket. Draping it over his shoulders, he took a slow sip and sighed in contentment. “Before you whites came to our land I was happy. I had a good wife. I had children. I lived in a fine lodge and had more than fifty horses.”
“That’s quite a herd.”
“For a Ute, horses are riches, and I was rich. My people looked up to me. They respected me. They asked my advice on important matters. I was high in their councils.”
Ash let the old warrior talk. He was in no hurry.
“Then the beaver men came, the whites who trapped our rivers and streams for furs. We traded with them. Furs of our own for guns and knives and . . .” Broken Nose hefted the bottle. “Firewater.”
“You got so you couldn’t go without.”
“Yes,” Broken Nose admitted. “From my first swallow. I had never tasted anything like it. When I drank I felt good. I felt happy. I felt strong. I could not get enough.” He gazed about the empty teepee. “I would do anything for a bottle. I traded all the furs I had. I traded my horses. I was always drinking. It upset my wife. She asked me to stop and when I wouldn’t she took our children and went to live with her mother and father.”
“She couldn’t stand living with a drunk. Not many women can.”
Broken Nose looked at him. “She said it was her or the white man’s bottle. I chose the bottle. It’s why I hate you. Why I hate all of your kind.”
“Where are your wife and children now?”
“That was thirty winters ago. Another warrior took her for his woman and she lived with him until four winters ago when she died. My children want nothing to do with me.”
“God and his knives,” Ash said.
“Eh?”
Ash briefly mentioned his talk with the parson, summing it up with “He didn’t like it when I said God isn’t like most folks make him out to be. God isn’t love. God is a knife in the gut.”
Broken Nose chuckled. “I like that. What you call God, my people call Coyote, the trickster.”
They looked at one another.
“Why do you want to die?” Broken Nose asked.
“You know about the—,” Ash began, and caught himself. The Ute couldn’t possibly know about the lead lodged in his chest. “Oh. You mean the Frazier brothers.”
“They kill people.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“White or red, yellow or black. They will kill you as quick as they would kill me or the black man who sweeps out the livery.”
“Not if I kill them first.” Ash produced a roll of bills. “I’ll pay you one hundred dollars to help me find them.”
“No.”
“It’s a lot of money. You could buy enough whiskey to last you the rest of your days.”
“You will buy the whiskey.”
“Me?”
“The whites in Kester only let me have a bottle at a time.” Broken Nose grinned. “They do not like it that when I drink I throw rocks at windows and kick dogs and say things about white people they do not like to hear. They called the sheriff on me.”
“And I bet he hauled you before a judge as a public nuisance.”
“The judge was a good man. He let me go with a warning. Now I only drink here in my lodge where there are no windows to break or dogs to kick or whites who do not like to hear how whites are.”
“How much whiskey will it take to hire you?” Ash was thinking a case, maybe two cases at the most.
“Enough to full a wagon.”
Ash threw back his head and roared. “You think awful highly of yourself. Do you honestly expect me to cram a Conestoga with red-eye?”
“The bed of a buckboard will do.” Broken Nose smiled. “For what you ask, that is not much.”
Ash reckoned that a case of whiskey would cost him between twenty and thirty dollars depending on the brand. “How about brandy instead?” To the best of his recollection, it was going for fifteen dollars a case.
“Brandy is for women.”
“Beer, then?” Ash recalled that a case could be had for two dollars.
“I do not drink horse piss.” Broken Nose upended the bottle and another third disappeared.
Ash needed the old warrior’s help. He was confident he could find the Fraziers on his own but it would take a lot longer. “A buckboard full of whiskey it is. But I want you sober when we head out and you’re to stay sober on the trail. Is that understood?”
Broken Nose took another drink and indulged in another belch. “I am sober now.”
“We have a deal, then. Let’s shake on it.”
“A white custom. I prefer my way.” Broken Nose spit in his own palm and held his hand out to Ash. “Bend down so I can rub this on your forehead.”
Ash didn’t much like having spit smeared on him but he had never been particularly squeamish. “This is a Ute custom, I take it?”
“No. I just wanted to rub spit on you. I hate whites, remember?”
Ash grabbed Broken Nose’s wrist but it was too late. His brow was wet. Broken Nose laughed, and despite himself Ash laughed too. Once he started he couldn’t stop. He laughed until his sides ached. Doubled over, he realized he was the only one still laughing and he glanced up. Broken Nose was studying him.
“Another good omen.”
“What is?” Ask asked between gasps.
“You did not hit me.”
Ash would have laughed harder but his chest abruptly flared with pain. The pressure returned, returned terribly, and he writhed on the ground in agony.
“What is wrong?”
In too much torment to respond, Ash turned. He needed the hypodermic. He tried to rise but his chest exploded like a keg of powder. Unable to keep from crying out, he crawled toward the flap. The pain came in waves, each harder to bear than the last. Sweat peppered his body. He was aware of the Ute beside him.
“Are you sick?”
“Saddlebags,” Ash groaned, and choked down a scream. He could barely think for the pounding in his head. It was the worst attack ever, far worse than the earlier ones. Digging his fingers into the earth, he sought desperately to reach his horse.
Suddenly his saddlebags were in front of him. Ash fumbled at the flap and got it open. The kit weighed tons. His vision swimming, he opened it. His arms were shaking so badly he couldn’t hold the needle still. Somehow he got it over a vein just as a veil of black descended.
Humming woke him. Ash lay still, listening. A wonderful lassitude had come over him, the familiar bliss of the morphine in his blood. The pain and pressure were gone. He touched a finger to his chest over his heart and said, “Not yet, you bastard.”
“Are you a doctor?”
Ash remembered the Ute. He moved just enough to see him and the nearly empty whiskey bottle. “What makes you ask that?”
Broken Nose pointed at the needle where it had fallen from Ash’s limp fingers. “I have seen the white healer use one of those.”
“I’m no sawbones,” Ash said. “I need it to get by.”
“That happens often?”
“More than I like it to,” Ash admitted. He told him about the slug lodged near his heart.
“I was right about you being crazy. You want us to go after the Fraziers, the most vicious white killers in the mountains? Me with my bottle and you with your needle against them with their guns and their knives? They will kill us and leave us to rot.”
“You’ve changed your mind about tracking them?”
“Did I say that?” Broken Nose grinned. “Whites are always saying I am crazy. It pleases me to meet
a white as crazy as me. We will hunt them, my crazy white brother. We will hunt them and we will die.”
“Why come along if that’s how you feel?”
Broken Nose drained the last of the whiskey. “As you whites like to say, it should be fun.”
“Damn,” Ash said. “I think I’m starting to like you.”
“Is that bad or good?”
“I don’t want to like anyone these days. It will only make the dying harder.”
“Dying is easy,” Broken Nose said. “It is the living that is hard.”
Chapter 15
The ground squirrel was cute. It scampered every which way, its tail erect, a boundless fountain of vigor and vim. Now and then it stopped and chattered as if offended by the empty air.
“I know how you feel,” Asher Thrall said, and chuckled. He was in the grip of morphine, as he had been every day for the past week. He had no choice. The attacks wouldn’t stop.
Ash was getting used to them. He was getting used to the morphine too. It had gotten so he actually looked forward to the injections. He looked forward even more to floating in a pool of pleasure.
Now he sat with his back to a pine and watched the ground squirrel, marveling at its silly antics. Or are they silly? he asked himself. Maybe the squirrel had it right. Maybe there was no point to life other than running around and doing nothing of any importance, and then you died.
A profound notion, Ash reflected, and chuckled again. He had hardly ever used words like “profound” before. The morphine not only helped his body, it helped him think better.
Then out of nowhere Broken Nose was beside him, a half-empty bottle in one hand. “I have been to Kester as you asked.”
“And?”
“There is no word of the Fraziers.”
“Good.”
“It is costing you a bottle a day,” Broken Nose reminded him.
“It’s my money.” Ash wished the Ute would go away and leave him to his bliss. “They need to strike again for us to pick up their trail.”
Broken Nose glanced at the ground squirrel. “You admire your little brother.”
“There’s more to the little bastards than I reckoned,” Ash admitted. “I used to think they were as stupid as tree stumps.”
“Yesterday you sat and stared at ants.”
“I never noticed how hard they work. Work, work, work is all they do. They are more like people than I gave them credit for.”
“The day before that you sat and watched the red hawk and its mate fly back and forth over the valley.”
“Is there a point to this?”
“You do a lot of sitting.”
“I do a lot of thinking too. More than I ever did. I think it’s the morphine. It’s doing something to my brain.”
Broken Nose took a swig and gave a sigh. “I do the opposite. I drink so I will not think. I drink so I will forget the wife I lost and the children and grandchil dren who shun me.” He grinned. “I drink because I like to drink too.”
“I’ve been meaning to ask,” Ash said. “Where did you learn to talk the white tongue so good?”
Broken Nose took a longer swig. “I made the mistake of going to the missionary school. I thought if I was going to drink like a white I should think like a white.”
“We’re back to thinking.”
“You can do all you want. It hurts my head when I think too much.” Broken Nose headed for his teepee. “I will be inside forgetting if you want me for anything.”
Ash looked for the ground squirrel but it had disappeared. Disappointed, he closed his eyes and drifted on tides of languor. He was so deep inside himself that when someone coughed he was reluctant to open his eyes. He expected it to be Broken Nose. Instead it was a white man, broad across the chest and shoulders, with a square jaw and skin burned copper by a lot of time in the sun. The man wore a high-crowned hat and a slicker and chaps. He also wore a Colt revolver on his right hip.
“I’m Rin Templeton.”
The man said it as if it should mean something but the name was new to Ash. “Cowboy?”
“Rancher. I own the Box T, the biggest ranch in these parts. Word has got out that you are after the Frazier brothers.”
“Damn.” Ash didn’t want the Fraziers to hear that he was after them or they might dig a hole and cover it over them. Then again, given their reputations, they might decide to come after him. “I’m not so sure I like that.”
“I don’t blame you,” Rin Templeton said. “But that’s what happens when you partner up with a drunk Injun. He told a few folks and they told a few more folks and it got back to me through one of my men who stopped at the Kester saloon.”
“Why are you here?” Ash was eager to sink back into the morphine.
Instead of answering Templeton said, “Is there something the matter with you?”
“Why do you ask?”
“You have a funny look about you.”
“It’s my medicine,” Ash said.
“You’re sick?”
“I have a condition. It’s not anything I talk about.”
“I don’t blame you. A man’s business is his own.” Templeton paused. “I’m here to make you an offer. Me and my pistol and my rifle.”
“For what?”
“To help you hunt the Fraziers. I am no brag when I say you’ll find me more than competent.”
“Why would a rancher turn man-hunter? Are you after a share of the bounty money?”
“You can keep all the reward for yourself. I just want the Fraziers dead.”
“I’m listening,” Ash said.
Templeton’s blue eyes glittered like quartz. “Two years ago those sons of bitches rustled some of my cattle. A puncher of mine was shot and died. I chased them for pretty near two hundred miles and recovered some of my cows but the Fraziers got away.”
“Now you want revenge.”
“I want justice. For a while I offered my own reward but no one claimed it. No one wants to go up against them. Or didn’t until you came along.”
“I don’t know,” Ash said. He knew nothing about this Templeton. The man could be a hothead and a nuisance on the trail.
“Why not? I can ride better than most and I shoot straight and I can fend for myself as well as you and better than that drunk Injun.”
“I’ll thank you to stop calling him that. His name is Broken Nose.”
Rin Templeton frowned. “Let’s get something straight. I don’t like Injuns. My grandpa was killed by Sioux. I tangled with the Utes a few times over the land I claimed for my ranch. They should all be on reservations or dead.”
“We don’t need your help,” Ash informed him.
“I’m not done. I don’t like Injuns but I get along with them well enough when they don’t give me cause to shoot them. I will be civil with your pet redskin if that’s what it takes.”
“He’s not a dog or a cat. He’s a man.”
“Fine. Have it your way. He’s a man. A man who is nearly always drunk. You need someone who isn’t. You need someone you can rely on. You need a man like me to watch your back when your back needs watching.”
The rancher was right. Back when he wore a tin star Ash always had a deputy to back his play. “You have a point.”
“I can come, then?”
“So long as you understand that I’m in charge. You do as I tell you or you turn around and go back to your cows.”
Templeton’s cheeks colored and he balled his calloused fists. “I don’t usually take that kind of talk but this is your shindig and I admire you for being blunt. Yes, I’ll do as you want. I have to ask, though. Do you know what you’re doing? The Fraziers aren’t amateurs.”
“I was a marshal once.”
“That tells me nothing. Some lawmen are worth their badge, some aren’t. You could have been one of the useless ones.” Templeton smiled. “I can be blunt too.”
“If at any time you think I’m not fit to lead the hunt, you’re welcome to cut and go.”
; “That’s fair enough.” Templeton came over and offered his hand.
It was like shaking a block of iron. Ash had an urge to check if his fingers were broken. “How do I get word to you when I’m ready to ride out?”
“You walk over to the other side of that teepee and tell me. I’m making camp there and will stay until we do.”
A bay and a packhorse were over by the lodge. A rifle stock poked from a scabbard on the bay.
“You have come prepared. I like that.”
“My pa didn’t raise slackers. Idle minds and idle hands don’t get a man anywhere in this world. It’s work and sweat that do.” Templeton turned. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll tend to my animals.” His spurs jingled as he walked off.
Ash hoped he hadn’t made a mistake. He got to his feet and went to the teepee and ducked under and in. Broken Nose was on the bearskin, staring blankly at the opening at the top. “A man has come.”
“The rancher. He is hard, that one. I have seen him a few times. He does not like me.”
“You knew he was here?”
“Firewater goes down my throat, not in my ears. I heard him when he was an arrow’s flight away and looked out.”
“He has asked to join us.”
“How did you answer? You told me it would be you and me.”
“He’s a hard man. You said it yourself. The Fraziers are hard men. We can use someone like him. Hard against hard.”
Broken Nose’s gaze drifted from the opening to Ash. “What about you, Walking Dead Man? Are you hard enough?”
“What did you call me?”
“The new name I have given you. Your Indian name. Walking Dead Man.”
“That’s a hell of a handle.”
“You told me you could die any time. You are as good as dead, you said. A walking dead man is what you are.”
“How about if I start calling you Drunk as Hell. I bet that would stick in your craw.”
Broken Nose chortled. “I would like that very much. It is better than the name I have.”
“How did you break your nose anyhow?”
“I was kicked by a pony when I was a boy. I have hated my nose ever since. I am not fond of ponies either.”
“Do me a favor, then. Don’t tell the rancher about my condition and don’t call me Walking Dead Man in front of him.”
Fatal Justice Page 11
