Sidewinders

by William W. Johnstone

  He found not three, but four other kittens. Three were tabby and white, and one was all white. By the time the men got them all back with their mother, she had finished giving birth to the fifth kitten, had cut the cord, and was busy licking it clean. “Good kitty,” Jason murmured, “good momma.” The kitten was tabby and white, too, although with more white than the others.

  Jason and Ward stood up, and Jason held his hand down to the boy. “Guess we’d best get the lot of you back home!” Ward shifted through the stack of saddle blankets and dug out a relatively fresh one, covering the box snugly.

  “But the baby cats can’t go back!” Peter said as he grabbed Jason’s hand and pulled himself to his feet. “Daddy doesn’t like them. He says he doesn’t like the smell of birth.”

  “Reckon he’s just gonna have to get over it,” Jason said, trying to hide a scowl. He didn’t much like the smell of Milcher, either. And if Milcher objected to those kittens in his damned house, then Milcher was going to find himself in jail. For something or other.

  Jason lifted Peter up into his arms, then threw a blanket over him. “You all snugged up in there?” he asked.

  A muffled, “Yessir,” came from beneath the blanket, and with Ward carrying the box of kittens and their momma, the men pushed their way out into the storm again.

  The wind hit Jason like a slap in the face, but behind him, he heard Ward say, “Believe it’s lettin’ up some!”

  Jason didn’t reply. He just forged ahead, toward the Milcher’s place. Thankfully, it wasn’t far, and when he rapped on the church door Mrs. Milcher threw it wide, then burst into tears. “Is he all right?” she cried, pulling at the boy in Jason’s arms. “Is he—”

  “I’m fine, Momma,” Peter said after he wiggled out of the blanket. And then he broke out in a grit-encrusted grin. “Louise had her babies!”

  Ward set the box down and lifted the cover. A purring Louise looked up with loving green eyes, and mewed softly.

  Mrs. Milcher cupped her boy’s face in her hands. “Is that why you went out, honey? To find Louise?”

  “Yes’m. And I did, too! She was in the stables.”

  Mrs. Milcher looked up at Jason. “She always wants to hide when she feels her time is here. What a night to pick!”

  “Mrs. Milcher, ma’am? I know you’ve given away kittens before, and I was wonderin’ if—”

  “Certainly, Marshal! Any one you want!”

  Jason smiled. “I kind of fancy the little white one. Got a name for him already and everything.”

  She cocked her head. “But you don’t even know if it’s a boy or a girl! Do you?”

  “No, ma’am. Wasn’t time to check. But I figured to call it Dusty. Name works either way, I reckon, and I’ll never forget when he was born.”

  Mrs. Milcher smiled back at him. “No, I don’t suppose you will! Thank you, Marshal, thank you for everything. My husband would thank you as well, I’m sure, but he has retired for the night.”

  Jason lifted a brow but said, “I see. Well, take care of young Peter, here, and watch over my kitten until it’s ready to leave its momma.” He and Ward both tipped their hats, and both stepped through the doors at once. But instead of the whip of wind that Jason was expecting, they stepped out into cool, clear, still air.

  “What happened?” Ward said, looking around him.

  “I guess it quit.”

  “Guess so. You wanna go up and get a drink?”

  “Nope. Wanna go home and wash up.”

  Ward nodded. “Reckon that sounds good, too. Well, you go on ahead, Jason. I’ll have a drink for both of us.”

  Jason laughed. “Just one, Ward. You’re on duty, y’know.”

  Jason turned around and started the walk back to his house. The air felt humid, as if rain was coming. He hoped it was. Nothing would feel better right now than to just strip off his clothes and stand out in his front yard, nekkid. He chuckled to himself. Yeah, there’d be hell to pay if Mrs. Clancy saw him, but on the other hand, she wasn’t likely to be awake at eleven at night, was she?

  Jenny’d skin him, though. It was a terrible thing, he thought, to be ruled by women. Then he pictured Megan MacDonald. Well, there exceptions to every rule, he thought, and grinned.

  It did rain, and while Jason was outside, beaming and standing nekkid in his front yard with a bar of soap in his hand, miles away the wagon train was getting the worst of the dust storm. The wagons had been tightly circled and all the livestock had been unhitched and brought to the center, but the wind screeched through the wagons like a banshee intent on revenge. Young Bill Crachit thought that maybe God was mad at them for giving up on the dream of California, and he huddled inside his wagon, praying.

  The Saulk family, two wagons down, held their children close, hoping it would just stop. Well, Eliza Saulk did. Her husband, Frank, had the thankless job of trying to hold the wagon’s canopy in place: the train had lost three already to the torrent of grit and dirt and cactus thorns. He was around the far side when, out of nowhere, an arm of saguaro hit him in the back like a bag of nail-filled bricks. He went down with a thud, but was helped to his feet a moment later by Riley Havens, who yanked the cactus, stuck to Frank by its two-inch spines, free.

  Blood ran down Frank’s back in a hundred little drizzles, soaking his shirt, and Riley helped him back up inside the wagon.

  “Saguaro!” he shouted to Eliza. “Get those thorns out!”

  Never letting go of the children, she moved back to her husband, gasped, “Oh, Frank!” and immediately began to ease him out of his shirt.

  Riley left her to take care of her man and struggled next door, to the Grimms’s wagon. Their canopy had blown off earlier. It had taken four men to chase it down and get it tied back in place. And that had been before the wind came up so damned hard. He doubted they could repeat their performance.

  All was well with the Grimms, except that their dog wouldn’t shut up. He was a cross between a redbone hound and a Louisiana black-mouthed cur, and the wind had brought out the hound side of him, in spades. While he yodeled uncontrollably, the Grimms had covered their heads with blankets and quilts, trying to hold off the noise of him and the storm. Riley hollered, “Shut up!” at him a few times, but it made no difference, and so he moved on to the next wagon and left the howling beast behind.

  The raw wind still raked at his ears, though, even though he’d tied his hat down with one scarf, then covered his nose and mouth with a second one. But the crud still got through somehow, worked its insidious way up his nose and into his mouth. His eyes were crusted with it, and even his ears were stuffed. I must look like hell, he thought, then surprised himself by smiling beneath the layers. The whole world looked like hell tonight. He wasn’t the only one.

  The wind picked up—although how it managed, he had no idea—and one of the horses reared. He felt it more than saw it, because the horses were circled twenty feet away, in the center of the ring of wagons, but he knew what had happened. Somebody’s gelding or mare had fallen prey to another of those thorny chunks of cactus that the wind seemed intent on throwing at them.

  He made his way through the roar, falling twice in the process, but at last reached the distressed animal. Lodged on its croup was a fist-size chunk of jumping cholla, which, in this case, might have jumped all the way from Tucson as far as Riley knew.

  He pulled it free, then pulled out what spines he could see. It was all he could do, but the horse seemed grateful.

  Slowly staggering, he made his way to a new wagon to check in and give what reassurances he could. Which weren’t many. He swore, this was the last train he was going to ferry out or back.

  He was done.

  CHAPTER 2

  Back in Fury, it was still raining come the morning, although it had settled into a slow but steady drizzle. And it didn’t take much water for an Arizona inhabitant to forget the dust, Jason discovered. When he walked up the street to the office, he didn’t pass a single water trough that wasn’t filled to th
e brim. And grimy from gritty, dusty cowhands helping themselves to a free bath. Jason pitied the horses that had to drink from those troughs.

  Surprisingly, there hadn’t been that much wind damage. To the town, anyway. Ward Wanamaker told him, before he went home for the day, that the east side of the surrounding stockade wall looked like God had been using it for target practice.

  Jason didn’t feel like walking around the outside of the town, so he walked past the office and all the way down the central street, to the steps that would take him to the top of the wall. Every wall, his father had taught him, had to have places from which men could defend the interior, and this one did, around all four sides. When he reached the top, he stood on the rails that also ran around the perimeter and looked down.

  Ward had been right.

  Cactus—clumps, arms, and pieces—covered the outside of the wall, and at the base was enough vegetation to start a small forest. If anybody in their right mind would want a forest of cactus, that was. And then he got to thinking that a forest of cactus just might be a good thing for the outside of that wall. He knew cactus would just send down roots and take off, if you threw a hunk of it down on the ground. And they sure had a good rain last night, that was for sure. The stuff was probably rooted already.

  He decided to leave it. It’d be just one more deterrent for Apache, and he was all for that.

  He figured the stuff stuck to the wall would eventually fall off, leaving spines and stickers behind to discourage anyone who might try to climb in, too. If they made it past the cactus forest, that was.

  “Oh, get a grip on yourself,” he muttered to himself. “Stuff only blew in last night, and here you’ve got it six feet tall in your head!”

  Shaking his head, he went back down the steps and started up toward his office. But he paused before going inside. He wondered if he should have a word with Rafe Lynch. He decided he should, but he put it off. Frankly, he didn’t want it to turn into a confrontation, and he was afraid that Lynch could do that pretty damn fast.

  Actually, he was afraid that Lynch could rope, tie, and brand him before he even knew he was in the ketch pen.

  So he turned and walked into the office, expecting one hell of a mess that’d need cleaning up. But to his surprise, Ward had spent a busy night with the push broom and the cleaning cloths.

  Hell, Jason thought, this place ain’t been this clean since we built it! When he stepped out back, he found that even the bedding from the cells had been hung out in the rain!

  “Wash and dry in one move,” Jason said with a chuckle. “That’s Ward.”

  Southeast of town, Wash Keogh was looking like mad for his gold vein, the one he was certain was going to make him rich, and the one of which he carried a goose egg–size chunk in his pants pocket.

  He’d been searching all morning, but nothing, absolutely nothing showed up. It wasn’t raining now, but it had drizzled long enough after sunrise that the desert was still wet, washed free of its usual cover of dust. He had expected to find himself confronted with a shimmering wall of gold, the kind they wrote about in those strike-it-rich dime novels.

  But no. Nothing.

  Had somebody been in here before him and cleaned it all out? It sure looked that way. Maybe the chunk he’d found had simply been tossed away like so much trash. He growled under his breath. Life just wasn’t fair!

  “What did those other boys do right that I done wrong?” he asked the skies. “I lived me a good life, moved settlers back and forth, protected ’em from the heathen Indians! I worked with or for the best—Jedediah Fury, Whiskey Hank Ruskin, and Herbert Bower, to name just three. All good, godly men! I brung nuns to Santa Fe and a rabbi to San Diego, for criminy’s sake, and I guarded that preacher an’ his family to Fury. All right, I do my share of cussin’, some say more. And I like my who-hit-John, but so do them priests a’ yours. What more do you want from me?”

  There was no answer, only the endless, clear-blue sky.

  Another hour, he thought. Another hour, and then I’ll have me some lunch.

  He set off again, his eyes to the ground, keenly watching for any little hint of glittering gold.

  Jason had let his sister, Jenny, sleep in. She was probably tuckered out from the storm—he knew he was.

  The girls—Megan MacDonald was with her—woke at nine, yawning and stretching, and both ran to the window at the sound of softly pattering rain.

  “Thank God!” Jenny said, loudly enough that Megan jumped. Jenny didn’t notice. “Rain!” she said in wonder, and rested her hand, palm out, on the windowpane. “And it’s cool,” she added in a whisper. “Megan, feel!”

  She took Megan’s hand and pressed its palm against the pane, and Megan’s reaction was to hiss at the chill. “My gosh!” she said, and put her other hand up next to it. “It’s cold!”

  Ever down-to-earth, Jenny said, “Oh, it’s not cold, Meg, just cool. I wonder if Jason’s up?”

  She set off down the hall to wake him, but found his room empty except for an absolutely filthy pile of clothes heaped on the floor, dead center!

  “He’s gone,” she said to nobody. Meg hadn’t followed her. Turning, she grumbled, “Well, I hope he had the good sense to take a bath,” and walked up the hall toward the kitchen, where she heard Megan already rooting through the cupboards.

  A little while later, after both girls had washed last night’s grime out of their hair and off their bodies, and had themselves a good breakfast, they walked uptown toward Solomon and Rachael’s store.

  The storm—long gone by now—hadn’t shaken Jenny’s hens, who had taken shelter in the low hay mow of Jason’s little barn, and subsequently laid a record number of eggs. The girls’ aim was to sell the excess eggs and find a new broom and dustpan, which Jenny had needed for a coon’s age, but hadn’t got around to buying yet. This seemed like the time, what with the floors of the house nearly ankle-deep in detritus.

  They had barely reached the mercantile and were standing, staring in the window, when the skies suddenly opened again! Rain began to pelt them in huge, hard drops, and Megan grabbed Jenny’s hand and yanked her. “C’mon!” she hollered.

  But Jenny had put the brakes on, and just skidded along the walk behind Megan, the egg basket swinging from her hand. “Wait! The door’s back the other way, Meg!”

  “Come on!” Megan insisted, and tugged Jenny for all she was worth. “The mercantile’s closed, Jenny!”

  “It is?” Jenny began to run alongside Megan then, and what Megan was headed for wasn’t a very nice place—it was Abigail Krimp’s. But any port in a storm, she told herself. It surely beat standing out here. Her skirt was already almost soaked!

  Abigail was holding the door for them, and they ran directly inside, laughing and giggling from the race, not to mention where it had ended. It was the first time either one of them had so much as peeked inside a place like Abigail’s—just the location made them giddy!

  But Abigail was just as nice as Jenny remembered from the trip coming out. Why, she didn’t look “sullied” at all! That’s what Mrs. Milcher always called her. And then it occurred to her that she didn’t even know what “sullied” meant. And Jenny had the nerve to call herself Miss Morton’s assistant schoolmarm!

  Abigail put a hand on each girl’s shoulder and said, “Why don’t you young ladies have a seat while you wait it out? I declare, this weather of late is conspirin’ to put me outta business!” She led them to the first of three tables and sat them down. “You gals like sarsaparilla ?”

  Jenny’s mouth began to water. It had been ages! She piped up, “Yes, ma’am!” and Megan nodded eagerly.

  But Jenny’s money sense moved in. “We don’t have any money, Miss Abigail. But thank you anyway.”

  Megan looked at her as if she’d like to toss her over the stockade, and Jenny stared down at her hands.

  “Not everything in here’s for sale, you sillies!” Abigail laughed. “I thought we’d just have us a nice, friendly sody pop. Been fore
ver since I just got to sit and socialize.” And she was off, behind the bar.

  Megan and Abigail exchanged glances, but Abigail was back by then, with three bottles of sarsaparilla, three glasses, a bottle opener, and a small bowl of real ice! The ice itself opened up the first topic of conversation, and Abigail told them that she had a little cellar dug far underground, under the back of the bar, where she kept a barrel full of ice when she could get it. This was the last of her current stash, which had come down from the northern mountains with the last wagon train to stop in Fury.

  Jenny was transfixed, but Megan was halfway through her first glass. If you put enough ice in the glass, your bottle was enough to pour out twice. Jenny looked away from Abigail long enough to ice her glass, then fill it with sarsaparilla. It bubbled up into fizz when it hit the ice, and she was giggling out loud, which started Abigail, then Megan, laughing as well.

  Abigail lifted her glass. “To old friends,” she said.

  Jenny and Megan followed suit, then clinked all three together and drank.

  Until her dying day, Jenny would swear that was the best sarsaparilla she ever drank.

  “What the hell’s goin’ on out here? A hen party?” asked a new voice, male and jovial, but pretending to be cross.

  Both Jenny and Megan twisted in their chairs to see the speaker. He was coming out of the mouth of the hall behind him, all clanking spurs and hip pistols and worn blue jeans and nothing up top except his long johns. And his hat, of course. Jenny didn’t understand why in the West, nobody took off his hat, not even to greet a lady. Not even in church. Just a touch of the brim was the most she’d seen since they left Kansas!

  But this man—who Jenny liked already, just on general principle—not only took his hat clear off, but bowed to the table! Then he swept his hat wide, and said, “Good morning ladies! I trust everyone came through the night in one piece?”