The outlaw kicked him in the side, leapt forward to stomp on his face, but Yancey pulled his head aside and the boot heel thudded down beside his ear. He snatched at the loose cloth of the man’s trouser leg, dragging hard, pulling the outlaw off-balance so the man had to dance on one leg. Yancey got his own legs under him and heaved upright, lifting his hands and the man’s leg. The outlaw crashed over backwards onto the trail and Yancey went right after him. The man rolled onto his shoulders and spilled to one side, leaping to his feet in time to meet Yancey’s charge. They both staggered with the impact and Yancey’s fists hammered at the man’s face and head. He took two hard body blows that made the breath bark out of him and then he twisted aside to dodge a third, swung back, using the momentum to throw a punch into the middle of the other’s bearded face. He felt the nose go and the man stumbled back, his legs buckling.
Yancey moved in, shoulders hunched, arms going, putting his weight behind each blow. The outlaw was brought up short by a boulder and his head jerked back against the rock. Yancey hit him again and again, rapping the man’s head into the rock each time, and then abruptly shifted his attack to the body, slamming hard at the ribs and belly. The outlaw was almost out on his feet and Yancey stepped back to let him fall. The man dropped to his knees and spilled forward, his hands going out instinctively to support his upper body. Yancey kicked away his arms and the man grunted as he spread out on his face and lay there, groaning.
“Yancey!” yelled the girl and Yancey dived to the left in an instinctive lunge, seeing his Colt lying at the base of a boulder as he was in mid-air.
A gun roared and he heard the bullet ricochet from the rocks behind him as he lit hard, snatched at his Peacemaker and fumbled it up and across his chest, shifting his grip so that he could cock the hammer. He caught a glimpse of the man who had been holding Anya earlier, on his knees, aiming his smoking gun at Yancey for a killing shot. Yancey triggered and rolled and came up onto one knee, firing a second time as the outlaw chopped off two swift shots. The edge of his hand on the hammer spur jerked the gun’s muzzle and his lead went over Yancey’s head, but the big man’s bullet sped true and smashed squarely into the outlaw’s chest. He went down as if kicked by a mule and his heels drummed, his body jerked and twitched, and the breath rattled harshly in his throat before he died, right at the feet of the pale-faced Anya.
Yancey got up fast, glancing at the half-conscious man he had beaten with his fists, and went to the girl, hauling her to her feet. She stepped past the dead man without looking at him and Yancey could feel her trembling as she moved close to him.
“What happened?” he asked, keeping an eye on the man who was slowly sitting up, feeling gingerly at his busted and bloody nose.
“I—I don’t know. I hid in the rocks when you went ... Then suddenly they were there with guns, pulling me to my feet, snatching my carbine and revolver … ”
Yancey and the girl ducked instinctively as a shot suddenly rang out and a bullet ricocheted from the ground a yard from their feet. Yancey crouched, looking up towards the sound of the shot, gun hammer cocking back. He saw that someone else was on the guard-platform up there, but abruptly realized the shot was merely a diversion to make him look away from the secret rock entrance beside the defile.
“Okay, Banner ... ease down that hammer or I’ll blow your kid brother in half!”
The girl gave a gasp as Yancey spun towards the rocks at the defile entrance and saw two men standing there, one holding a double-barreled shotgun, both hammers cocked back. There was no arguing with that he reckoned as he eased down the hammer and dropped the Colt at his feet, lifting his hands slowly.
“Looks like they’ve got the drop this time, kid,” he said and Anya slowly raised her own hands shoulder high.
The man with the shotgun stepped forward and Yancey saw that he was a half-breed, with a gold ring dangling from the lobe of his left ear. He wore a colored bandanna around his head beneath his battered hat and there was a jagged scar on his right cheekbone that looked like it had been put there with the end of a broken bottle. He was slim, about as tall as Anya, but there was a deadly light in his black eyes that was almost bordering on madness. He glanced at the dead man and the battered one.
“Looks like you’re as big a heller as rumor has it, Banner,” he said with an accent that Yancey couldn’t quite identify, likely some hangover from his Indian ancestry. He ran his eyes over Anya and she instinctively moved closer to Yancey. “Can’t say that your kid brother is gonna follow in your footsteps, but maybe there’s time yet. You know who I am?”
“Sure,” Yancey said quietly. “You’re the only man I’ve met who’s uglier than folk say. You’re Hondo Sackett.”
The ’breed looked dangerously at Yancey and, for a moment, the big man thought he had gone too far, but then Sackett peeled his lips back from stained and worn teeth and Yancey figured it was as close to a grin as he would ever get.
“Don’t be too tough, Banner. Where’s this sidekick of yours, the one they call ‘Colt’?”
“He’s—uh—no longer with us,” Yancey said, being deliberately enigmatic. “He didn’t like the idea of my kid brother getting a third share. We kind of talked things over and—” Yancey shrugged. “Colt ain’t worried about how anything’s shared out from now on.”
Hondo looked levelly at Yancey for a long minute, then flicked his gaze to Anya. She jutted her chin and looked back defiantly. After a spell, Hondo turned his gaze back to Yancey. “How come no one’s ever heard of you before this here army payroll deal, Banner?”
Yancey smiled crookedly. “Mainly because this is our first job ... and our last.”
Hondo’s face showed nothing. He grunted and slowly lowered the hammers on the double-barreled shotgun.
“Okay ... you better come on up to the camp. Bring your broncs through here. That defile’s only so’s we can keep an eye on who’s comin’ up the mesa. Trail’s a heap wider this way, once you get around this here boulder.”
Yancey agreed that it effectively screened the side trail and as he went to grab his horse’s reins and Anya picked up those of her work pony, the man with the broken nose staggered past, holding a blood-spotted kerchief over his face. He shoved by Hondo and moved around the boulder to the secret trail up the mesa. Hondo gave that small grin again.
“Don’t pay any mind to him. He ain’t off to a very good start. Hasn’t long joined my bunch and he’s riled because he loused up the first job I gave him, which was to bring you and the kid up to camp. Maybe you’ve heard of him? Lem Slade?” Hondo watched their faces closely and Yancey cursed silently as Anya stiffened and her mouth opened a shade as she snapped her eyes to the trail where the man was staggering along. Her knuckles whitened about the reins.
“We’ve heard of the Slade brothers,” Yancey said quickly. “Lem and Reno ... ride with a Mex and another feller named Mundy, don’t they?”
“Used to,” Hondo said, jerking his head for them to proceed up the trail ahead of him. But he was looking thoughtfully at Anya as she pushed past ... very thoughtfully, Yancey figured.
Chapter Seven – Deadlight’s Brand
Cato found Jiminez and Mundy sooner than he figured. As he had told Anya, there was really only one safe trail leading across the Territory to the Missouri Line. He had never travelled it before but had studied official Federal Survey maps with Yancey long before setting foot in the Indian Nations. He had a retentive memory and could pick out landmarks from maps with hardly an error. And so he had lost little time finding his way along the trail to Missouri.
Even so, he hadn’t figured on sighting the outlaws’ camp quite so quickly as he did.
Cato did not know that Mundy had never travelled this way before, either, and so had taken a wrong turning that had landed him and the Mexican right in the middle of hostile Comanche territory. The Indians had let them ride for a spell unmolested but when the white men had come to a sacred burial ground and unknowingly ridden across a section, they had swept in in a scre
aming, whooping bunch.
Jiminez and Mundy were not greenhorn travelers, engaged’ in their first Indian fight. They knew exactly what to expect if they were captured alive and neither of them had any desire to be stripped and staked out on an anthill, with their eyelids hacked off and the sun blazing down while the squaws poured honey over their private parts ... They each kept one cartridge aside from the rest of their ammunition: for use on themselves in the last extremity. They had fought like demons, as savage as the Comanches, asking no quarter and giving none. They made each shot count. At first they found it hard to pick off the redskins as they tore past, hanging down the sides, of their mustangs, shooting beneath the animals’ arched necks. They didn’t have a lot of ammunition and couldn’t afford to waste any. So Jiminez had started picking off the Indians’ horses and, as the dazed warriors had staggered to their feet, Mundy had nailed them one by one. Soon there were only four Indians left and they figured they had had enough and rode off, no doubt to get other Comanches to help them.
Jiminez and Mundy didn’t aim to stick around and wait for them to come back. They leapt into leather and rode like the wind out of there, back along the way they had come until, finally, they reached the fork they had mistakenly taken. Mundy had done a little sun-sighting and, that night, located the Pole Star and he saw where he had gone wrong. By mid-morning next day they were back on the trail to the Missouri Line. They kept watch along their back trail, expecting that the Indians might well pursue them but there had been no sign of them.
Jiminez had been on watch when he spotted a lonely dust spiral out there on the plains, dead along their own trail. Lying amidst the hot rocks, he had prodded the dozing Mundy in the ribs and pointed.
“Only one rider,” Mundy said, squinting, “so it ain’t the Comanche. But he’s goin’ lickety-split and seems to know the trail. I reckon we better wait here till he shows and see what he’s got to say for himself.”
And so they waited until Cato loomed into sight and could be identified as a white man. They saw the heavy gun strapped to his thigh and even from that distance could see that it was no ordinary six-shooter.
“Know him?” Mundy asked as Cato slowed his mount before the boulder field.
Jiminez shook his head, rifle at the ready. “Might as well finish him to make sure he don’t bother us.”
Mundy’s arm flashed out and he pushed the Mexican’s' rifle down. “Hold it! He rides like a man who knows just where he’s going. Can’t say the same for us. He might know the trail better than we do and he wouldn’t be ridin’ but here unless he was on the dodge.”
The Mexican looked dubious. “I’d rather not chance it, Chet,” he said.
“Hell, there’s two of us, ain’t there?” Mundy pointed out and he stood up, rifle cradled easily in one arm as he waved down Cato with the other. “Hold up there, stranger!”
Cato reined down with one hand, the Manstopper whispering into his right and snapping into line with Mundy. The hammer made an audible click as it cocked. “Tell your pard to stand up, too!” ordered Cato.
Jiminez was impressed by the speed of the man’s draw and slowly stood up, a little dazed at the way that gun had miraculously appeared. Cato rode his mount slowly up the slope, keeping his face blank as he recognized Mundy and the Mexican from the descriptions he had been given.
“Howdy, gents ... Kind of dangerous showin’ yourselves that way to a man out here, ain’t it?”
Mundy grinned, his mouth a little tight around the corners. “Guess you’re right ... Man, you sure got that weird-lookin’ gun out fast! What is that second barrel? Shotgun?”
Cato nodded. “You fellers layin’ for me?”
“Hell, no! We lost the trail few days back and had a run-in with some Injuns. Seen your dust and figured they might still be after us. We were kind of glad to see it was only a lone white man. Name’s Chet Mundy. This here’s Jimi Jiminez.” Cato ran hard eyes over them both before saying curtly, “Johnny Colt.”
The Mexican kept his face blank but Mundy reacted. “Hell, we heard about you and a couple other fellers holdin’ up an army payroll!”
Cato said nothing.
“Well, step on down into camp and have some java,” invited Mundy. “Too late to be movin’ far along the trail now. You headed for the Missouri Line, too?”
“Yeah,” Cato said, hesitating a little longer before holstering his gun and stepping down, keeping his mount between the men and himself. But they made no hostile moves and walked into the circle of boulders where there were the coals of a banked fire. Mundy squatted and stirred them up, setting the blackened coffee pot at the edge. The Mexican set down his rifle and squatted beside it, back against a rock, cleaning his fingernails with a wicked-looking knife-blade. Cato sat on a rock that was just high enough to allow him to get onto his feet again in a hurry if he had to. He glanced at his left hand and the scratches left by that one-eyed cat at the old agency. They had become infected, were swelling and red. His hand was stiffening a little and he flexed his fingers, testing them. Mundy nodded to the hand, spotting the movement.
“What happened?”
“Damn cat,” Cato said, then dropped the hand down to his side, dismissing the subject. “Dunno if I’m doin’ the right thing, quittin’ this Territory where the law can’t touch a man. But there’s a gal in Missouri I want to see. Been pinin’ for her a long time now.”
“Same as me,” Mundy said. “Which way did you come?”
Cato didn’t want Mundy to think he had been following him so he said, “Up the old Shawnee trail out of Texas, across the Arkansas and then cut across the Territory at an angle.”
“Way you was ridin’, you seem to know where you’re headed.”
“Been this way before,” Cato lied, aware suddenly of a tension in the Mexican and he saw Jiminez’s black eyes studying him closely.
“You didn’t come by the old Indian agency then,” the man said, making it a statement not a question. “Couldn’t have, comin’ the way you said.”
“That’s right. I was nowhere near the old agency,” Cato answered, wondering what was bothering the Mexican and, even as he thought about it, he knew: the cat scratches on his hand. There were certainly more cats than old Deadlight in the Indian Territory, he reckoned, but it would be kind of coincidental for a man to be toting cat scratches out here just the same.
He knew he was right when the Mexican held out his left hand and showed him the back where it was crisscrossed with scratch marks. “Got that from a mangy goddamn cat called Deadlight at the old agency,” Jiminez said quietly. “Where’d you get yours?”
“Some settler’s sod hut down by the Arkansas,” Cato said, trying to make it sound easy, but he was tensed for action.
Jiminez was already shaking his head. “That’s over two weeks’ ride away. That hand would’ve been black by now and you’d be loco with gangrene. So we got ourselves some kind of a liar here, Chet. My guess is he’s a lawman …”
In mid-sentence, Jiminez suddenly reversed his hold on the knife and his hand blurred like a striking snake and Cato went over backwards off his rock, the knife standing out of his left shoulder, buried almost to the hilt. He dragged out his Manstopper and fired wildly as the two outlaws snatched up their weapons. Cato rolled, dizzy with pain from the knife in him, and he saw as if through a mist the Mexican leap atop the rock he had just been sitting on, levering a shell into his rifle as he swung the muzzle down to cover Cato. The small man instinctively thumbed the toggle on the hammer that changed the striking surface to the firing pin of the shot barrel and he brought the Manstopper across his belly and fired. The gun almost bucked from his hand and Jiminez’s body was flung through the air by the strike of the charge of buckshot, screaming.
The shock of the explosion had frozen Mundy and now he wrenched himself out of his daze, fired two fast shots at the rolling Cato and hunted cover himself. Cato had flipped the toggle back to normal now and he blasted at Mundy as the man ran behind a high bo
ulder. The bullets gouged dust and whined away into the dusk.
Cato dragged himself towards a low rock for cover, left hand holding the knife protruding from his flesh. He hugged the ground, hauling himself along with elbows and knees, waiting for Mundy to pick him off, but no shots came. He made the shelter of the low rock safely, panting, sweating. Still no gunshots came and then he heard it: the sounds of hoof beats and he knew why Mundy wasn’t shooting back at him. He had taken the mounts.
With an effort that wrenched a cry of pain from him, Cato heaved to his feet and staggered forward and around the big rock where Mundy had disappeared. He sagged against its rough surface, seeing Mundy astride his mount, leading the Mexican’s and Cato’s own horse, racing back the way Cato had come ... The small man lifted his gun, steadying it as well as he could with his numbed left arm, squeezed off three fast shots.
He pushed away from the rock, stepping out of the cloud of powder smoke and he saw Mundy reel in the saddle, almost fall, but somehow manage to right himself again. The man was hit, but he continued to ride off into the dusk and he was still leading the other horses.
Cato was afoot now and there was only the blackened coffee pot by way of food or drink: everything else had been in the saddlebags. And he was wounded, the blood coursing down his arm in a thick red stream. He pushed off the rock and took one step. His legs collapsed under him and he spread out on his face in the dust, the Manstopper skidding away from his hand. Oblivion closed down around him ...
~*~
Yancey was worried about the way the girl kept looking at the Slade brothers in the outlaw camp. He figured that she might lose control and try to kill them on the spot.
There were only six men in Hondo’s bunch, counting Reno and Lem Slade. Yancey had figured there would be more but when he got a look at the men, he reckoned six was probably enough. They were the meanest bunch of outlaws he had ever seen. He recognized every one of their faces from Wanted dodgers. As part of his job as enforcer for Governor Dukes he had to keep himself familiar with all the wanted men, both in the State and out. There was Hondo Sackett himself, definitely meanest of the whole bunch; Reno and Lem Slade, only a shade less evil, he’d judge; Hank Garcia, a mestizo without a tongue, or mercy, by the looks of his eyes; Brazos Bennett, a gunfighter who notched his gun butts and was showing eleven nicks in the walnut handles so far; and, finally, a bestial type known simply as Vulture. He looked like something out of the Stone Age, Yancey reckoned, hairy, unwashed, coarse-featured and massive, with the strength of a grizzly.
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