She was so far away that to Spurr’s lusty eyes her breasts were vague jostling shadows between the flaps of her vest, but alluring just the same. To his old ears the splashing sounded like mere ripples on the river’s surface.
When the girl had finished her brief bath, she stood and closed her vest, stepping back onto the shore and lifting her rifle, which she’d leaned against a rock, and swinging it by its lanyard over her shoulder. As she began walking over to where the Yaqui bucks were tending their horses, she stopped suddenly. Just as suddenly, she turned her head toward Spurr.
The old lawman gulped and mashed his chin into the dirt, cursing softly under his breath. He’d caught only a glimpse of the girl’s dark eyes, but dark they were. And they had a sharp savageness about them. They were also likely as keen as a hawk’s.
Had she seen him?
Vaguely, he wondered what the punishment would be for spying on a Yaqui queen’s bath, and quickly vanquished the grisly possibilities from his mind.
After a half minute had passed as slowly as an hour, Spurr lifted his chin and cast a look into the gorge. The Yaqui queen was twenty feet from where she’d been when she’d stopped, and was taking long, sexy strides toward the bucks, her hair rippling down her slender back.
Spurr heaved a relieved sigh and brushed a gloved hand across his forehead. Then he held his ground and watched until the bucks and the girl, who’d swung easily onto the back of the beautiful cream stallion, had turned their horses away from the river and galloped south across the desert. The seven bucks followed the queen in a loose pack, keeping a good thirty-foot gap between her and them, as though she were not to be sullied by their smelly, sweating male presence.
Spurr stared after the war party—and that’s what they were, judging by their arms and the paint on several of the braves as well as on the horses. Finally, he blew another, relieved sigh, feeling his nerves leaping around like little snakes trapped beneath his skin.
With a grunt, he pushed himself to his feet, donned his hat, and headed back down the trough between the buttes.
He needed a drink.
9
WHEN HE RETURNED to the cottonwood, he thought Hammond was dead. The outlaw hung unmoving down both sides of his horse. Neither his back nor his shoulders were moving.
“Hey, Hammond,” Spurr said, nudging the outlaw’s head with a moccasin toe. “You ain’t dancin’ the outlaw two-step with El Diablo, are you?”
Hammond did not stir.
“Hammond?”
Spurr bent down, grabbed the outlaw’s collar in his fist, and twisted his torso around so he could see his face between the flaps of the burlap scarf. Hammond’s eyes were slitted, and they were sharp with rage.
“You son of a bitch,” he bit out just loudly enough for Spurr to hear.
“You keep callin’ me names,” Spurr said, leaning his rifle against a tree, then sliding his bowie knife from its sheath, “you’re liable to go to bed without your supper.”
He reached under the dun’s belly and cut both ropes that tied Hammond’s wrists and ankles together. Then he reached up and grabbed Hammond’s cuffed hands, and grunting with the effort, pulled the outlaw down out of the saddle none too gently.
Hammond hit the ground with an indignant grunt and groan. He rolled onto his side and raised his knees toward his belly.
“You’ve killed me, you son of a bitch,” he rasped. “You done killed me.”
“You’ve done killed yourself. And if I don’t know by tomorrow where your friends are headed… and what they’re leadin’ me into… you’re gonna be a lot more dead than this. Hell, you’ll be rememberin’ this day as a Sunday afternoon ride in the country with a yellow-haired girl!”
While Hammond lay on the ground, groaning and trying to work some blood back into his legs, Spurr unsaddled both horses, watered them, rubbed them down with a scrap of an old saddle blanket, and tied them back in the brush with feed sacks draped over their heads.
He gathered some wood while it was still light enough to see, piled it up in the trees and rocks, where a fire wouldn’t be so apt to be spotted from the low country to the west, then grabbed his two canteens as well as Hammond’s two. He didn’t bother tying the half-conscious outlaw. Even if his hands hadn’t been cuffed behind his back, Hammond was too beaten up from the ride to go anywhere.
“I’m lightin’ out for water. Don’t pine for me too loud. Yaqui in the country.”
“Ah, Christ,” Hammond said, rolling over to cast his beseeching gaze on Spurr, who’d started walking away with the canteens. “You can’t leave me here alone, you bastard! Not cuffed like this. Not without a gun!”
“That’s the price for killin’, my boy,” Spurr said and tramped on off toward the south, hoping to find a way down to the water. He hadn’t run into much water so far, and he had to take advantage of whatever he did find.
It took him nearly a half hour to find a way down to the stream, but it was not a hard way down as the cliff wall dropped to nearly ground level about two hundred yards south of where he’d left the horses and Hammond. It was just after sunset when, sweating and footsore, he dropped beside the stream, set his rifle and canteens down, doffed his hat, and stretched out to plunge his face into the cool, refreshing liquid.
He took several deep swallows, thrashing his face around to rid his dry, sunburned cheeks and beard of the trail grit. When he finally lifted his chin, water dripping from his beard and sculpting his chin whiskers into the shape of a spade, he glanced toward the other side of the stream. He frowned, staring. Finally, he heaved himself to his feet, then, leaving the canteens but not his rifle lying on the shore where he’d dropped them, he waded across the shin-deep river to the other side and stared down.
Before him were the unmistakable tracks of a heavy wagon with double-wide wheels. A midsized freighter of some sort. Could the tracks belong to the California rack beds that had been stolen from Fort Bryce?
He looked around and found several more sets of tracks where the wagons had swung in from the northeast and stopped here for a time before swinging back away from the spring and continuing south across the desert. As he stomped around, he found several more sets of wagon tracks, but also the large, shod hoof tracks of mules and also those of horses and the footprints of many men.
He also found a rock ring mounded with cool but relatively recent ashes. Strewn about the ring were cooked deer and quail bones, airtight tins, and empty whiskey bottles.
The old lawman’s heart began to wheeze and heave almost as much as it had when he’d been watching the Yaqui queen bathe in the stream.
He swung around and stared southward. The light was fading fast, but the burnt-orange rays still shone the indentations the wagons had made when, traveling abreast, they’d headed on off to the south.
The same direction the Yaqui had headed.
Were the Yaqui following the wagons?
“I hope so,” Spurr muttered, still staring after the tracks. “Go ahead, my beautiful Injun girl. Go ahead and dog their heels then run ’em down like the purty little she-coyote you are. Make ’em scream.”
Spurr scratched his beard, grinning, amused at himself.
But then he wondered what she’d do with all those guns and ammunition, and his belly flooded with bile. Many innocent folks would die hard, as the Yaqui were cutting a wide swath across Mexico—almost as wide as the one the Apaches were cutting across the American Southwest.
He hurried back across the stream, filled all four canteens, swung them over his shoulders, then tramped back up into the buttes. At the camp, Hammond was sitting against a cottonwood, his legs spread out before him, looking dour as he stared at the fiery sunset behind coal-black ridges. His head was canted back against the tree, and his arms hung slack at his sides. His red neckerchief glistened in the last rays of the tumbling sun.
Spurr stopped.
Hammond hadn’t been wearing a red neckerchief.
A figure in the trees beyond Hammond swung
toward Spurr as the old lawman dropped all four canteens, took his rifle in his left hand, and slipped the Starr .44 from its holster with his right. Automatically, he shifted his feet, putting his right shoulder toward the bearded Mexican who’d been going through Spurr’s saddlebags but who’d now risen and stood holding his Spencer repeater out from his right hip, the maw aimed at Spurr.
The Mex, who was obviously a bandito, wore a ragged-brimmed black sombrero and a leather jacket and charro slacks adorned with silver conchos. Two cartridge bandoliers crisscrossed his chest. A loosely rolled, wheat-paper cigarette smoldered between his lips.
Hooves clomped behind the man, and Spurr saw another bandito moving into the camp with both Spurr’s roan and Hammond’s coyote dun in tow. He, too, was smoking a quirley, and when his dark eyes found Spurr, they widened as he gave a surprised grunt and stopped suddenly, reaching for one of the two Colt Navy revolvers holstered for the cross draw on his hips.
Something moved to Spurr’s right, and he slid his eyes to see yet another man walking into the camp from behind it, a Springfield Trapdoor rifle resting on his shoulder, Spurr’s whiskey bottle in his other hand. He was tall and wore a bleached tan walrus mustache, and he had his straw sombrero tipped back on his nearly bald head.
The three men stared grimly at Spurr as he held his cocked Colt on the man who’d been going through his saddlebags and who now continued to hold his Spencer on him. The carbine wasn’t cocked, but the bearded man’s gloved thumb was on the hammer.
“Those saddlebags ain’t yours to go through, amigo,” Spurr said tightly, softly. Shifting his gaze only slightly, he added, “And that’s my whiskey. For all you know, the hombre whose throat you cut could have been a friend of mine. And you killed him. If we was friends, that might stick in my craw.”
The three banditos stared at him with mute interest, wrinkling their foreheads. Likely, they hadn’t understood a word of what he’d said. That was all right. Spurr had only wanted time to figure out which one he was going to kill first and last.
The bearded man holding the carbine on him glanced at the man holding the two horses, and then he turned his head back to Spurr, and he started to laugh. He laughed as though at the funniest joke he’d ever heard, though he kept the carbine he was holding on Spurr steady.
Spurr waited about ten seconds, and then he smiled. At the same time, the bearded man suddenly stopped laughing, and just as his thumb started to draw back his Spencer’s hammer, Spurr shot him. He shot the man holding the whiskey bottle next, and then he shot the man holding the horses. He swung his smoking .44 back to the man who’d dropped and shattered his bottle and blasted another slug through the man’s neck as he tried regaining his feet while blood oozed out the hole in his leather cartridge belt.
Seconds ago, Spurr had sensed more than heard someone moving up on his left, from the direction of the open country, and now he dropped to the ground and turned to see a fourth bandito, who’d likely been off looking for the owner of the big roan, kneeling beneath a mesquite and triggering a Colt Navy. Smoke and flames jutted from the Colt’s barrel, and the slug spanged off a rock in the fire ring as Spurr triggered his last two shots and sent the fourth bandito spinning around and screaming beneath the mesquite.
Spurr slid the empty pistol into its holster and levered a shell into his rifle. He looked around quickly.
The bearded bandito and the one who’d stolen and broken Spurr’s only bottle were down and bleeding and not moving, eyes glassy in death. Cochise and the coyote dun had run off when the guns started blasting, and the man who’d been nearest them was nowhere in sight. Blood splashed the rocks where he’d been standing, and there were several scuff marks leading northward from the camp and into the darkening desert.
Spurr strode across the camp and into the scrub and rocks. He climbed up and over a low rise. On the other side, he spied the bandito stumbling, crouched forward, into some rocks jutting out from the side of a chalky butte. Spurr glanced down to see gobbets of bright, frothy blood staining the desert gravel and creosote. The bandito was lung-shot.
Spurr jogged toward the rocks and stopped when a round, brown, clean-shaven face and two brown eyes stared out from a notch amongst the tangled boulders. A gun came up in the bandito’s hand, and Spurr dove sideways and rolled as the younker’s pistol barked twice, kicking up dust and gravel behind the old lawman. Spurr rolled onto his chest, leaned into his rifle, aimed hastily into the notch though he could no longer see the kid amongst the bluing shadows, and triggered three rounds quickly.
Rock dust flew. Spurr fired two more rounds, heard a scream. He got a creaky knee beneath him, but it took him several seconds to get the limb, which he’d bruised when he’d hit the ground that seemed to get harder and harder with every passing week, to cooperate and straighten.
“When’s it time to retire, Spurr?” he asked himself aloud, aping the words of Chief Marshal Henry Brackett, spoken three or four times every year upon Spurr’s return from assignments looking more and more bedraggled.
He shambled forward, feeling as though spikes had been driven into his knees and hips and also feeling as though the shoulder he’d landed on had been partially dislocated, and continued on through the kid’s nest in the rocks, when he saw the kid run out the other side, screaming shrilly in Spanish, “I’m blinded! I’m blinded!”
Spurr squeezed through the tight gap and stepped out the other side. The kid had fallen and was twisting around, showing his bloody face that must have been sliced up from flying rock shards, and was trying to jerk a hideout pistol out of a shoulder holster under his cracked, bullhide charro jacket.
“You blinded me, pendejo!” he shouted in English.
As the kid managed to snake a .36 Remington pocket pistol out of his coat, Spurr kicked it from his hand and aimed his cocked Winchester from his shoulder, gritting his teeth and narrowing one cool eye. “Couldn’t have happened to a nicer little feller,” he said and squeezed the trigger.
The kid’s head bounced off the ground once, like a rubber ball thrown by an angry child, before it slammed back down and remained still, the ragged-edged hole in his forehead leaking blood, eyes blinking wildly several times. His silver-tipped boots jerked from side to side before they fell still.
Spurr looked around to make sure there were no more banditos out here trying to draw a bead on him.
Then he walked back into his camp, looking around at the dead men and the blood—there was even blood on his saddlebags, the contents of which the bearded bandito had spilled onto the ground beside the fire ring—and the broken whiskey bottle. Finally, he looked down at his dead prisoner Del Hammond, blood from the savage slice across the blond brigand’s throat bibbing his shirt and denim jacket.
Spurr poked his hat brim back off his forehead and spat. Shaking his head, he walked out away from the camp and was relieved to see Cochise and the coyote dun grazing in the desert nearby, silhouettes in the pearl-blue wash of the Mexican dusk. He turned and looked to the south, thinking of poor Flora Hammerlich, tugging at his beard.
“I sure hope you’re still kickin’, little darlin’. Or I’ve come a far piece… and likely died… for nothin’.”
10
CUNO PULLED HIS blue bandanna up over his nose and blinked against the dust kicked up by the freight wagon hammering along about fifty yards ahead of him. He glanced to his right and left, saw the other three drivers cracking their blacksnakes over the backs of their two-mule hitches.
They were rambling along a dusty playa, an ancient, alkaline lakebed, to try to make up the time they’d lost when they’d spent nearly three hours earlier that morning, Cuno’s second day on the trail with the so-called soldiers and whatever they were hauling so desperately into southern Sonora, waiting for another contingent of wagons that had never showed.
Two more wagons, Cuno had heard, though no one told him much of anything about what they were doing out here. Two scouts had been dispatched to look for the missing team. If and when th
e two missing wagons showed up, there would then be a total of eleven, with twenty-two mules that it was getting harder and harder to find grass and water for.
Cuno had asked Bennett’s second-in-command, Sapp, what they were hauling and where, and Sapp had only given him a dead-eyed stare. He saw no point in asking any of the others or probing Lusk further, as no one but Lusk had said more than five words to him since he’d accepted the job from Major Beers. Even Lusk now gave him little time when they stopped to eat and make coffee and to rest and water the mules and to wait for the wing riders to return from scouting the area they were traversing for trouble in the form of Indians or Rurales or even large bands of roving banditos, who could often be nearly as formidable as the Yaqui.
Everyone in this party of obvious cutthroats treated him like he was carrying the smallpox, regarding him, when they looked at him at all, with suspicion at best, hatred at worst.
It was further evidence, he thought, that while these men might have been soldiers once, they were soldier-outlaws now. What they were doing down here Cuno did not care. What they were carrying and who they were carrying it to, he did not care. He had nowhere else to go, nothing else to do. He had no one waiting for him at home, if he had a home, which he did not, and the money Beers was paying was nothing to scoff at. All he had rattling around in his pockets were a few lonely pesos.
These men may have looked on him with suspicion, treated him like they wanted to stick a sharp knife in his back, but they were the only company he had except Renegade, and down here even bad company was better than no company. He’d learned that two days before when he’d first been introduced to Sapp and Lusk and was about the width of one war hatchet blade away from snuggling with diamondbacks.
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