by Tess LeSue
He called Micah every name under the sun. “I’m trapped out here, in the middle of nowhere, naked, with no water, being hunted down by the most murderous men in the whole west, and you’ve blinded me!”
“No one is going to know you have blue eyes now,” Micah said. He easily kept out of reach, because Deathrider couldn’t see him to hit him.
“What if I’m blind? For good?” He felt panicked at the thought. His eyes burned like someone had shoved hot coals into them; first his vision had blurred, like he was seeing the world through oilcloth, and then his eyes had closed over completely until he couldn’t see anything. He felt a surge of pure black terror.
For the first time he really felt he was going to die out here.
“No one will know your eyes are blue if they’re swollen shut,” Micah said. The idiot sounded proud of himself. “And I’m here. You’ll be fine. I’ll make sure of it. I can lead you.”
“What if something happens to you?” The terror intensified. Hell. He was in the worst trouble he’d been in since that time he’d been shot in Kearney.
“Nothing’s going to happen to me,” Micah scoffed. He went silent for a minute. Deathrider imagined he might have been considering his own position: the nakedness, the lack of water or food, the fact that they were lost. “It’s this or die of thirst,” Micah said eventually, throwing Deathrider’s own words back at him.
“How am I going to walk?” Deathrider asked. He took a couple of steps. It was like being on the edge of a cliff—he felt like he might fall. The ground was uneven, treacherous. “Hell, Micah. I’m blind.”
“Oh, calm down, you baby. It’s only stinging nettle. My sister got it in her eyes once—”
“You did it to her too?”
“No, she just rubbed her eyes after touching some. And she was fine. It’s nothing to worry about.”
“This is completely different. You rubbed a whole plant in my eyes.”
“She didn’t go blind,” Micah told him. “She just got all swollen up like that for a day or so. It went away.”
“It hurts like a bitch.”
“Yeah, she did cry a lot.” Micah sounded more cheerful again. “This can count as me punching you, if that makes you feel any better.”
It didn’t.
Micah had to lead him like he was a child. Even then Deathrider stumbled a lot, once hitting his hip so badly on a boulder that he almost gave up and sat down and refused to move again. He felt his bare skin burning in the sun and the lack of water was starting to tell. His confidence was shaken, and he felt like death.
“I can see that Hunter up ahead,” Micah told him, completely unsympathetic to his plight. He was stupidly confident that Deathrider would get his sight back. Deathrider wasn’t feeling at all the same way. The burning had given way to searing pain; his eyes were streaming tears, and it was hard to breathe. He was exhausted by the past few days, and his mood was maybe the lowest it had ever been.
“I’m going to tell him the Chiricahua attacked us.” Micah paused. “Which is true. If he asks who we are, I’m going to say we’re vaqueros. I can say they ambushed us for our cows.”
“It would take more than two men to drive a herd of cattle,” Deathrider told him.
“So, I’ll say the Apaches killed the other cowboys. We managed to get away . . . We both look pretty beat-up . . . you more than me . . . so it’s believable.” Another pause. “If I had a gun, I wouldn’t bother with all this talking, but because of you, I don’t have a gun.”
Deathrider didn’t dignify that with a response.
“I’ll feed him that story you told the army too, if you want. About how you killed the whore. Not you, because you’re not supposed to be you right now. I mean, I’ll tell him the story about how the Plague of the West killed the whore. I’ll say we heard it from the army.”
“But you were telling him the Chiricahua attacked us, not the army.”
“Stop picking holes!” Micah gave his arm a yank and dragged him on.
“What are our names going to be?” Deathrider asked, wincing at the stones underfoot. “He’s going to ask, and you can hardly tell him the truth.”
“I’m Trevor and you’re Nesbitt.”
“I don’t look anything like a Nesbitt.”
“Yes, you do. Now shut up, Nesbitt, and let me do the talking. You’re not only blind. You’re mute.”
“I am?”
“Yes. It’s simpler that way. No one is going to think you’re the Plague of the West looking the way you do right now; you can be my blind, mute little brother.”
“We don’t look anything alike.”
“Who can tell with all these bruises? And your face looks like an overfull water bladder. Now, shut up or I’ll make you eat nettles so you you’re actually mute, and not just pretending.”
“You already made me eat them,” Deathrider grunted. It was hard to talk with his swollen lips and tongue.
In the end, Micah did a better job than Deathrider would have given him credit for. He let out a piercing whistle to get the Hunter’s attention and then, before the man could so much as greet them, launched into a monologue about being set on by Apaches and robbed; they were just two poor Mexican vaqueros and Look what they did to my brother. . . .
It was quite a performance. And Deathrider had the feeling that Micah was rather enjoying himself.
Luckily for both of them, Pete Hamble was a sociable man. Crazy as a fox but sociable. He could talk the hind leg off a mule, they discovered, as he invited them to camp with him for the night. Deathrider wished he could see what the man looked like. But he was trapped in miserable darkness.
Worse, he was in pain in miserable darkness.
Hamble tossed them each a horse blanket to cover themselves with but didn’t have spare clothes for them. Even if he’d had them, he said, he wouldn’t lend them to a couple of strangers. Deathrider didn’t see the blanket coming, and it hit him hard in the shoulder, right where he was bruised and tender from falling off the horse.
“I’ll want them blankets back in the morning,” Hamble said. He had a gravelly voice. The voice of a man who’d been out in the wind and dust a long time; the voice of a man who’d drunk a lot of pure corn liquor. “I’ll be needing them to get the animals through winter.”
Deathrider let Micah push him into place by the campfire and arrange the blanket over him, but then he was left to his silent darkness. All he could do was take the mug of bad coffee pressed into his hand and listen to Micah and Pete Hamble gab. The horse blanket was rough against his sunburn. If he hadn’t been so battered and blind, he’d have taught Pete Hamble to show a little respect.
Although he was a bigot, Hamble seemed glad they’d stumbled into his camp. Trailhounds were used to strangers, and they relished a chance at conversation after long hours on their own, and Hamble proved to like conversation more than most. Once he opened his mouth, he never closed it again. Their nakedness didn’t upset Hamble, nor did their tattoos or long hair. He obviously thought they looked the way vagabonds should look. He wasn’t the first white person Deathrider had met who couldn’t tell the difference between a Plains Indian and a Mexican. Even though they looked nothing alike.
Over the crackle of the fire, Hamble’s voice rose and fell through the night. He told them about the to-do in San Francisco when LeFoy had announced the Hunt, describing the crowd, mentioning at least a dozen cold-blooded killers by name. He was a man who liked to take his time with a tale; as he named each of the Hunters, he went into their entire life histories. He droned on into the night, his voice becoming a low lullaby.
The burning in his eyes began to subside, and Deathrider found himself dozing. But then Pete Hamble got onto a topic that snapped him awake. Ava Archer.
Deathrider jumped like he’d been shot with an arrow at the sound of her name.
“She was ther
e,” Hamble enthused. “I saw her myself. Standing up on the bar.” Hamble gave a low whistle. “And, boy, was she a looker. Did you know she was a looker? Because I sure didn’t. Tall, you know? Must have legs like you wouldn’t believe under those clothes. And she has lips like a bee stung them. And a redhead. God, I love a redhead. She’s not pretty, not in the least. Pretty suggests a kind of gentleness, which that woman sure don’t have. She’s got something else. If pretty is a kitten, this woman is a jaguar. I saw her all but scratch Kennedy Voss’s eyes out. Can you imagine? I bet she’d be a wildcat between the sheets.”
Hamble’s words painted a picture in Deathrider’s head. He imagined a redheaded vixen standing on a bar. Brazen. Mean eyed. Haughty.
Pete Hamble was describing the woman who’d ruined Deathrider’s life.
“She and Kennedy Voss have teamed up.” Pete Hamble sounded glum as he said it. “Voss was always going to be hard to beat, but the two of them together . . .” He let out a low whistle.
Deathrider coughed. He was supposed to be mute, so he couldn’t ask any questions, but he desperately wanted to know more about the Archer woman. When Micah didn’t follow up with any questions about her, Deathrider coughed again. And again. Damn Micah and his wool-headedness.
“Your friend sounds in a bad way,” Hamble observed.
“He always sounds like that.” Micah was clearly still enjoying needling Deathrider.
“He contagious?”
“No.”
“’Cause I had a cousin had a cough like that, and he killed his whole family with it.”
Later, Deathrider realized the coughing had probably saved him. And doomed Micah. Although maybe Hamble had already decided Micah was the one who’d made a better trophy. Because, as Micah had observed earlier, no one would ever believe that the beat-up blind man was the Plague of the West. He looked too bedraggled, too pitiful. Too weak.
He was too weak. There was next to nothing he could do to save Micah when the trouble started. Hamble waited until they were good and relaxed, full of food (not good food, but anything was welcome after the miles they’d walked on empty stomachs), dozy from the campfire and Hamble’s endless tales. Deathrider and Micah were exhausted, drained from a series of ridiculous events, battered and bruised and just plain tired; they were easy marks.
Deathrider was asleep when it happened. Usually he was a light sleeper, and usually he also had Dog to warn him when something was wrong. But tonight he was so bone weary, and his body so desperately needed the rest, that he’d fallen into sleep like a stone dropped to the bottom of a lake. When he woke, he woke suddenly. The world was black. He was disoriented and couldn’t remember where he was, could barely remember who he was. There was the sound of grunting and scuffling. A thud. And then silence.
He rolled over, able to feel the roughness of the thirsty earth beneath his hands and knees—but he couldn’t see anything.
Blind. I’m blind.
Nettles.
Micah!
He’d never felt so vulnerable in his life—not even when he’d been shot and bleeding in Kearney and Matt Slater had thought he was going to die. Blindness was infinitely worse. It was difficult to tell where the sounds were coming from in the darkness. He could hear breathing, the sound of something being dragged, grunting. . . .
“Don’t you move from where you’re at, you blind bastard.” Hamble’s raspy voice came out of the darkness. “I got no trouble with you, and you ain’t worth a bullet. You’re half-dead as it is, so there ain’t any point. Firing a bullet into you would be a flat-out waste of money. Nature will finish you off quick enough.”
Deathrider rose to his knees. He felt a lick of fury. “Micah?” he called. His voice was still thick from his swollen tongue and throat.
“Mute, my ass . . . although you might as well be. You don’t sound like you got two wits to rub together.” Hamble lifted his voice and started talking to Deathrider like he was impaired. “Get off my blanket, you bastard. And you stay down. I don’t want to waste a good rope tying you up or a good bullet putting you out of your misery, but I will if you make me. It’ll just piss me off to do it.” Deathrider felt the cold touch of iron as Hamble held a gun to his head.
“What about Micah?” Deathrider wasn’t used to the hot shameful feeling of impotence that flooded him. It was poisonous.
“Your friend’s a notorious criminal—did you know that?”
“He’s not.”
The gun pressed harder into Deathrider’s forehead.
“Yeah, buddy, he is. He’s Deathrider. Rides with Death. The Plague of the West. And he’s going to make me a very rich man.”
“His name’s Trevor,” Deathrider said flatly. His mind raced. If he reached out, he could probably grab Hamble by the legs and topple him.
“It’s Deathrider now. No one’ll pay me a cent for a man named Trevor.” And then Hamble had been true to his word and not wasted a single bullet. Instead he’d thwacked the barrel of the gun into Deathrider’s head. And left him for dead in the middle of the desert.
12
THEY’D CAUGHT HIM. Ava reeled at the news. She and Voss had found a bunch of the straggling Hunters as night was falling. They’d been on the trail for weeks when they’d seen the smoke from their campfire and gone to investigate. The evening was lushly purple, the angles of the cacti indigo against the deep plum-colored sky. Their campfire was a sharp flicker of orange in the clear desert air and the Hunters’ voices carried in the stillness.
“They might have some news about where old Deathrider is,” Voss had said, pulling Ava’s horse by the lead, which he refused to relinquish, even though Ava could manage her horse just fine without him.
And he was right. The straggling Hunters did have some news. News that Ava had been dreading.
Deathrider had been caught. . . .
Her stomach felt like it had turned itself upside down and inside out at the news.
She didn’t know any of the stragglers—they were just a bunch of cowboys who’d joined the Hunt for a lark. They were dusty and sunburned and too cheerful about Deathrider’s capture for Ava’s taste. They’d been at their moonshine as they were skinning rabbits for their evening meal and, by the time Voss and Ava had found them, they were well and truly in their cups. They were also downright gleeful that the Plague of the West had been defeated so quickly.
The cowboys had fallen into a stunned silence when Kennedy Voss and Ava Archer had ridden into their midst, and then they set up a-howling and a-hollering, all laughing fit to bust. They were thigh slapping and red-faced at the hilarity of Kennedy Voss finding out he’d lost from them.
“You missed out, Voss. It’s over already!”
Ava’s heart thundered in her ears. Over? What did that mean? Was the Plague of the West dead? The thought made her head spin.
Kennedy Voss took the news in his stride. He dismounted and then offered to help Ava down. She ignored him and got herself down.
“We thought for sure you’d get him, but looks like Ortiz beat you to it.” One of the cowboys held out a jug of moonshine to Voss, grinning like a fool.
“Poor old Carson here bet on you too!”
That set them all off, poking fun at Carson, who frankly didn’t seem too upset. The moonshine had clearly dulled his pain.
Voss took the jug and downed a swig. “Ortiz, eh? He was always going to be stiff competition. Did he take the bastard alive or dead?”
“Alive, if you can believe it.”
“Not sure if I can,” Voss said cheerfully.
“There were witnesses. Everyone’s talking about it. A bunch of ’em went tearing after him, hoping to swipe the Indian right off him.”
“How . . .” Ava’s voice cracked, and she took a minute to collect herself. Painfully aware of how closely Kennedy Voss was watching her, she cleared her throat and tried again: “How
did it happen?”
“Don’t forget your notebook,” Voss suggested. He offered her the moonshine jug, but she refused it. “You’ll want all the details.” He handed the jug back to the cowboys and turned his attention to settling his animals for the night. “Make sure you give her the details, boys. She likes details.”
The cowboys were happy to oblige. Ava’s pencil was a blur as she tried to keep up. They were so drunk, they repeated themselves often and got into fights when they contradicted one another. But they told quite a tale. About Ortiz coming upon Deathrider as he camped with the Apaches; about how he fought it out with more than a dozen seasoned warriors; about how he took the Plague of the West alive and immediately rode hell for leather for San Francisco, determined to claim the bet.
“The bet,” Voss murmured to Ava, “but not the prize.” He winked at her.
Ava shuddered. Kennedy Voss sober was frightening enough, but Kennedy Voss drunk on moonshine was something else again. Something unspeakable.
She was starting to have serious doubts that he’d keep his hands to himself for much longer.
“Reckon we’re headed for San Francisco, then,” Voss told her, his gaze beginning to roam her body.
“You think Ortiz really has him?”
“Yeah, I think he does.” Voss betrayed his annoyance. “You heard them; there was too much detail for them to have made it up.”
“But he might not have the right man . . .” Ava hoped so anyway. “You said there was nothing stopping a man trying to make a false claim . . .” This whole thing was such a nightmare. How was she even here? Look at these cretins. What had she come to, sharing a campfire with men like these, a prisoner of Kennedy Voss . . . ?
And how on earth was she talking about Deathrider being captured?
“Ortiz might not have the right man?” Voss looked disappointed in her as he shook his head. “This is Ortiz. If he’s got someone, it’ll be Deathrider. Ortiz is no fool.” Voss leaned back to look at the stars. “Lucky for me, I have you.” He yawned. “We’ll catch up to him, and you can tell me for sure if he has the right man.”
