‘‘Then let’s take a stroll.’’
The sky was ablaze with stars and the ascending moon wore a halo as the two men made their way down the slope and onto the flat. A mist wreathed through the silver trunks of the aspen and twined like a great gray snake across the low grassland, soundless as a ghost.
Closer now, McBride could make out the shape of the cabin, even see the smoke from the chimney, tied into bowknots by the wind. The air smelled of trees and the tang of frying bacon and his mouth watered and his stomach rumbled the more.
He followed Prescott as the man, crouching low and keeping his distance, scuttled past the front of the cabin. Two windows showed to the front, rectangles of orange light in the gloom. From inside McBride heard a man laugh loud and harsh and thump a table with the flat of his hand.
To the right of the cabin was a smaller building, a windowless shed with a slanted roof. The door was locked shut by a heavy wooden bolt. Beyond the shed was a pole corral where four horses dozed, and pulled up next to it was a freight wagon. Behind the seat, a massive iron cage took up the entire bed.
Those were Trask’s men in the cabin all right. McBride tightened his grip on the Winchester as he took a knee beside Prescott. He pointed to the cabin and whispered, ‘‘Trask’s boys.’’
The gunfighter nodded. ‘‘Figgered that.’’ He rose to his feet. ‘‘Let’s go be sociable, just like we were visiting kinfolk.’’
Before McBride could protest, Prescott strode toward the cabin, his rifle hanging in his right hand. When he was twenty feet from the door he stopped and yelled, ‘‘Hello the cabin!’’
As McBride joined him he heard the scrape of a chair across a wood floor and a moment later the door swung open. A huge man stood silhouetted in the doorway, what looked to be a shotgun in his hands. ‘‘What the hell do you want?’’
Firing from the hip, Prescott shot him in the belly.
Chapter 18
The man screamed and slammed against the door-frame. His knees buckled and as he started to go down, Prescott shot him again.
Learning nothing from the death of his partner, a second man appeared in the doorway, a Colt flaming in each hand. He was shooting blindly into the darkness, but he was outlined against the greasy yellow glow of kerosene lantern light.
Prescott fired, levered his rifle and fired again.
McBride saw a sudden arc of blood and brain fan above the man’s head. He staggered back out of sight, the staccato thump of his bootheels loud on the pine floor. A grinding crash of metal, then a wild yell from inside as burning logs scattered across the wood floor from the tipped stove.
McBride had been seeking a target. Now he found one. He fired at the lantern hanging just inside the cabin window. A miss. Cursing under his breath, he tossed the rifle aside and drew his Smith & Wesson. He raised the gun to eye level in both hands, aimed and fired again. The lamp exploded and instantly flames shot up behind the window.
A frantic voice came from somewhere near the smoke-filled doorway. ‘‘We’re done! We’re coming out.’’
‘‘Put your mitts up where I can see them,’’ Prescott yelled. ‘‘And make sure they’re empty.’’
Two men tumbled, coughing, out through the cabin door. The one to Prescott’s left was big and bearded, while the other was smaller and younger. The little gunfighter shot the bearded man and he went down shrieking, a bullet smashing into his breastbone a few inches below where his neck met his chest. Prescott fired again, this time a careful belly shot into the younger man.
‘‘I want that one!’’ Prescott hollered at McBride. ‘‘Let him be.’’
For his part, McBride had no intention of shooting. He was stunned by the suddenness of the violence and Prescott’s cool skill with a gun. He’d downed four men in less than a couple of minutes. Nothing McBride had ever experienced had prepared him for that, not even growing up on the tough streets or his years in the New York police, when he’d served with many hard men.
For the first time he appreciated what it had taken for Prescott to enter the top rank of gunfighters and become a named man. Looking around him at the dead men and the youngster screaming and slowly dying, he knew he wanted no part of it. For a few minutes there, Luke Prescott had teetered on the outer rim of madness and no one could have pulled him back from the precipice. McBride never wanted to find himself there. . . . Unless . . . he suddenly thought of Shannon and realized that Prescott’s bloody, insane road was one he might well have to soon travel himself.
The towheaded boy on the ground was speaking, looking up at Prescott with agonized, pleading eyes. ‘‘I’m gutshot. . . . Damn you, end it.’’
‘‘I will. But first I want to ask you a question, for my own satisfaction, like.’’
‘‘Then ask it and be damned to ye. My belly’s on fire.’’
Prescott got down on one knee beside the boy, who looked to be about seventeen or so. Behind Prescott the cabin blazed, sending smoke and flames into the sky, and he was outlined in fire.
‘‘Why did you hang the little Chinese gal?’’
‘‘I . . . I had no part in that. It was Dawson and the others who did it.’’
‘‘Charlie Dawson?’’
The boy bit back his pain until his lip bled. ‘‘Yeah, him an’ Hank Ross an’ Jess Worley.’’
Prescott spoke to McBride from the scarlet-streaked darkness. ‘‘A few years back Charlie Dawson rode with Sam Bass and that wild bunch down Austin way. He was the worst of them.’’
McBride made no answer as the boy yelped, ‘‘You’ve asked your question—now end it.’’
His voice level and matter-of-fact, Prescott said, ‘‘I’m still waiting for an answer. Why did Charlie hang the Celestial?’’
Again the boy bit back a scream. ‘‘She . . . she ran away. When we caught her, Charlie hung her as an example to the others. Made . . . made them look at it.’’
‘‘There are others?’’ McBride asked. ‘‘Where are they?’’
‘‘In the shed. Four . . . four of them.’’
McBride looked at the boy, then said to Prescott, ‘‘Is there anything we can do for him?’’
‘‘Sure there is.’’ The gunfighter rose to his feet, drew his Colt and shot the boy in the head. ‘‘That’s what we can do for him.’’
Prescott read the tightly knotted expression on McBride’s face, a mix of horror and disgust. He punched out the empty shell from the Colt and reloaded from his gun belt. When he spoke his voice was flat, without emotion.
‘‘John, we’re in a hard, merciless business. You want to take down Gamble Trask and so do I. You want to save your woman and so do I. But we can’t do it without killing, a lot of killing. Turning the other cheek is for preachers and them as don’t know any better. Now, you either make up your mind to the killing part or we say adios right here and now and go our own ways.’’
‘‘I’ve killed two men,’’ McBride said, ‘‘and at the time I understood the necessity for it. But you just shot a boy.’’
Prescott shrugged. ‘‘War prefers its victims young. But he was man-grown enough to carry a gun and ride with wild ones. He took his chances, but the deck was stacked against him, maybe from the day and hour he was born.’’ The gunfighter stepped closer to McBride. ‘‘We don’t have much time. If there are Celestials in the shack yonder, the fire could spread from the cabin and we’ll have more dead young ones on our hands.’’ He hesitated a moment, then: ‘‘Have you made up your mind?’’
‘‘I’ll go along with the killing if there’s no other way.’’
‘‘There is no other way. Our talking is done, John. From now until we come out on the other side, we let our guns speak for us.’’
‘‘Then that will be the way of it. Now let’s get those girls out of there,’’ McBride said. ‘‘Before they burn to death.’’
The cabin was an inferno of smoke and flame that tinged the sky red. Inside the corral, the horses were wild-eyed, trotting in circles, snort
ing, tossing their heads, terrified of a predator that was worse than any other. The shack was about ten paces from the burning cabin and when McBride reached the door the heat was intense. As a torrent of sparks cascaded around him, he slammed back the wooden bolt and opened the door.
It was dark inside, but the light from the blazing cabin splashed a triangle of flickering orange on the dirt floor, revealing a pair of slippered feet. As his eyes became accustomed to the gloom, McBride made out the shadowy shapes of four women cowering against the far wall. They made no attempt to get to their feet.
Prescott stepped beside him and took in the situation at a glance. ‘‘Out!’’ he yelled.
The frightened women clung closer together but did not move.
‘‘Out!’’ Prescott yelled again, to no effect. ‘‘What the hell is Chinese for ‘out’?’’ he demanded. Smoke was rapidly filling the shack and the heat was growing more intense. ‘‘Outee!’’ Prescott hollered.
‘‘Drag them out, Luke,’’ McBride said. ‘‘They won’t move by themselves.’’
The girls were tiny, small-boned and light as birds. McBride and Prescott lifted them one by one and carried them outside, well away from the cabin. A few minutes later the shack caught fire.
Made ragged by heat, the wind gusted, fanning the flames of both cabin and shack. Prescott turned the frantic horses out of the corral, trusting that they would not run long and far. He and McBride got on each side of the wagon and pushed it well away from sparks. When they returned, the girls were still sitting where they’d left them, faces blank, black eyes reflecting the flames of the fire but nothing else.
One by one, McBride pushed up the sleeves of the girls’ tunics and saw what he’d expected, the track marks of a needle, like insect bites on their smooth skin.
He turned to Prescott.
‘‘I didn’t see any drugs in the shack, did you?’’
The man shook his head.
‘‘Probably burned up in the cabin.’’
‘‘You ever seen a heroin addict who can’t get the drug any longer?’’ McBride asked.
‘‘Can’t say as I have.’’
‘‘I did, a couple of times. It’s nasty. In a few hours we’re going to have our hands full with these women.’’
Luke Prescott laughed.
‘‘Women? They’re only children. What age do you make them out to be?’’
McBride took a knee and cupped his hand around the chin of one of the girls, lifting her face to the dying light of the cabin fire.
‘‘Twelve.’’ He moved to another. ‘‘About the same age.’’ Another. ‘‘Thirteen maybe.’’ He looked at the last girl awhile longer. ‘‘This one is older. Fifteen, I’d say.’’
‘‘Trask likes them young,’’ Prescott said, smiling without humor.
McBride remembered Hell’s Kitchen and the brothels of the Four Corners. ‘‘The men Trask sells them to like them young. It’s their business—they cater to perverts.’’ He turned bleak eyes to Prescott. ‘‘In some brothels I’ve known, a man can rape a girl, then beat her to death if that’s his inclination, just so long as he has the money to pay for it.’’
‘‘Glad I’ve always steered clear of big cities,’’ Prescott said. ‘‘I didn’t even know men like that existed.’’
McBride’s laugh was bitter. ‘‘They exist all right, and the men who supply them with what they want are just as bad.’’
‘‘Like Trask?’’
‘‘Just like Trask.’’ McBride was silent for a few moments as he studied the vacant faces of the four girls. Then he said, ‘‘Now we’ve got them, what do we do with them?’’
Prescott had been building a cigarette. Now his eyes lifted from tobacco and paper to McBride. ‘‘I’ve been studying on that. We can’t take them back to High Hopes, but I know a man who might shelter them for a spell, if you pay him enough.’’
‘‘Where is he?’’
‘‘About ten miles north of here on Cucharas Creek, a mountain stream that runs over bedrock across some pretty wild country. The man’s name is Angus McKenzie. He’s a trapper, sometime prospector, and he lives with a Kiowa woman in a cabin up there.’’
‘‘Can we trust him?’’
Prescott sealed his cigarette, placed it between his lips and thumbed a match into flame. He lit his smoke and flicked away the dead match before he answered McBride’s question. ‘‘Do we have any choice?’’
‘‘No, I guess not. We can’t be burdened with four young girls when we come up against Trask.’’
‘‘You said that right,’’ Prescott observed. He rose to his feet. ‘‘Now we got work to do.’’
He and McBride pulled the corral apart and threw the pine poles into the smoldering cabin, where they blazed immediately. Both the cabin and shack were now blackened ruins and there was little else damage to be done.
‘‘I’d like to see Trask’s face when he hears about this,’’ Prescott said, watching the poles burn. ‘‘Four of his men dead and this place in ruins.’’
‘‘He can always rebuild and hire more men,’’ McBride said. ‘‘Unless we stop him.’’
‘‘We will, John. Trust me, we will.’’ Prescott smiled. ‘‘Unless we’re dead, of course, and that possibility is just as likely as the other.’’
Later they ate the last of the salt pork and drank coffee. The Chinese girls refused both, huddling together, their wide almond eyes revealing nothing.
McBride and Prescott took turns guarding the girls throughout the night, fearing that they might run. But as the darkness shaded into the gray dawn, they had not moved, sitting dull and compliant, making no sound. After McBride rose and stretched, working the kinks out of his still-hurting back, the oldest girl reached out her arm and said something in Chinese he could not understand. But her meaning was clear—she needed heroin.
McBride felt a stab of pity as he shook his head. The girl dropped her arm, saying nothing. She shivered violently and moved closer to the girl beside her, cold, not from the cool morning, but from the lack of the drug.
He and Prescott rounded up the horses and hitched a pair to the wagon. Then Prescott saddled a rawboned bay for himself and a paint for McBride. ‘‘You can tie him to the back of the wagon until we get to McKenzie’s place,’’ he said.
But McBride refused. ‘‘Just throw the saddle into the wagon. I’ll stick with the mustang.’’
Prescott laughed, but did as he was told, leaving McBride to brood about his ability to drive a horse team. The little gunfighter returned a few minutes later, a small brick of a tarry brown substance in his hand. ‘‘I threw the saddle into the wagon like you said and it sure made a hollow sound to me.’’
‘‘A false bottom?’’
‘‘Yeah, and when I took out a couple of boards, I found this, and maybe another forty just like it.’’
‘‘It’s raw opium,’’ McBride said. ‘‘Gamble Trask’s opium. We’ll burn it.’’
Prescott used some fallen beams to kindle a blaze in the glowing embers of the cabin. Then he and McBride began to toss the opium bricks into the flames.
Prescott turned to McBride and smiled. ‘‘Hey, John, you know we’re burning money here, don’t you?’’
‘‘Luke, that’s all I’ve been thinking about for the last thirty minutes,’’ McBride said sadly as he threw the last brick into the fire.
Chapter 19
Ralph Compton: West of the Law Page 14
