Man From Boot Hill

by Marcus Galloway

  “Looks like you made a little mess there,” Nick said through a smirk. Glancing up to Joseph, however, took that smirk right away from his face. “All right, Joseph. Ease up and let the man talk. He still needs to tell us the quickest way to find his friends.”

  “Anything,” J. D. sniveled. “I’ll tell you anything you want. Please…”

  Nick’s eyes narrowed as he studied Joseph’s face. There was fiery rage in the man’s expression that was all too familiar. “You hear me, Joseph? I said ease up.”

  Joseph stared intently down at J. D. The anger that had flared up in his eyes was receding once more to give way to a coldness, which concerned Nick more than anything else.

  “Hey!” Nick shouted. The sound of his voice was enough to make both of the other men jump.

  J. D. clenched his eyes shut even tighter and whimpered to himself.

  Joseph, on the other hand, looked as if he’d been revived with a splash of water. He looked back down at J. D., but without the intensity that had been in him only moments ago. Twitching out of frustration, he shoved J. D. away and stormed from the fire.

  “There now,” Nick said as he let out a breath. “See how easy that was?”

  “That asshole’s crazy,” J. D. said. He was still letting out the last bit of those words when Nick’s fist cracked into his jaw. After J. D. was knocked to one side, he stayed put as if playing ’possum was the only option left.

  “That man lost his family, and your friends took them,” Nick growled. “You should be praising the Lord above you don’t have a bullet in your head right now.”

  J. D. sputtered and made a weak hissing noise. At first it sounded as if he was trying to spit out the tune he’d been whistling before, but then it sounded as if Nick had knocked a tooth loose.

  After a few seconds of that, Nick sighed and said, “Stop it. If I wanted you dead, you’d be dead already.”

  J. D. kept making the noise. Now he sounded like a whistling teakettle that was moving back and forth from the flame.

  “Pull yourself together.”

  “I can’t…can’t do it,” J. D. cried.

  “Just take a breath and—”

  “It’s two short, one long and one short.”

  Nick stopped and sorted through what he thought he’d just heard. Even after a few seconds, he was still coming up short. “What?”

  “The signal,” J. D. whined. He started making the noise again, but only wound up with his face buried in the dirt out of frustration and exhaustion.

  Nick let out a series of crisp whistles: two short, one long and one short.

  “That’s it,” J. D. said as he lifted his head and nodded. “That’s the signal to get in close to Dutch and the rest of the boys. Otherwise, they’ll shoot you off your horses before you get within a hundred yards. But you probably already knew that.”

  Keeping his best poker face intact, Nick said, “Yeah, I knew that. All I needed was the signal.”

  “Now you have it, just please don’t let that other one near me. He’s gonna kill me, I can see it in his eyes.”

  “Stay here,” Nick said.

  “Oh, God.”

  “Better yet, just leave.”

  “Are…are you sure?”

  “Yeah,” Nick said with an annoyed wave. “Just as soon as you give me those directions. And if I smell a lie on you, I’ll stick you in that fire, myself.”

  J. D. rattled off a string of directions to the places his partners would be going. After he was done, he looked to Nick expectantly.

  “Get the hell out of here,” Nick told him.

  “You’ve got a good heart,” J. D. said as he scurried toward his horse. “I don’t know about that other one, but…I mean…never mind.”

  Nick was headed to where Joseph was standing, but paused long enough to see what J. D. was doing. “Leave the horse,” he said.

  J. D. stopped with one foot in the stirrup and one hand on the saddle horn. “What?”

  “Leave the horse,” Nick repeated. “You can go, but you’ve got to run.”

  “There ain’t much of anything around here.”

  “Run,” Nick growled. J. D. eased his hand away from the saddle and took his foot out of the stirrup. “All right. I guess I’ll be going.” With that, he sauntered away from the camp. As soon as he put some distance between himself and Nick, J. D. broke into a run and quickly disappeared.

  Taking the rifle from J. D.’s saddle, Nick slung the weapon over his shoulder and walked to where Joseph was standing. “That’s a hell of a way to get the most out of someone.”

  It took a few seconds before Joseph even acknowledged Nick’s presence. When he did, it was only with an off-handed, “Huh?”

  “The founder of this feast here was holding out on us, but he spilled his guts after that little display of yours.”

  “I wanted to kill him, Nick.”

  “Really?” Nick said sarcastically. “I couldn’t tell.”

  Joseph looked back toward the campfire. “Where is he?”

  “With the speed he was running, probably getting close to Old Mexico right about now.”

  “Running?”

  “I wasn’t about to give him a horse so he could catch up to his friends before we did.”

  Chuckling under his breath, Joseph said, “You should have just let me kill him rather than leave him stranded out here.”

  “He’s got a better chance than you think,” Nick said. “Outlaw trails like this one have all kinds of surprises. There’s always a few cabins or caves or something like that for them to use if they get lost or followed.”

  “You know an awful lot about that.”

  “Yeah.”

  Turning away from the fire, Joseph looked back out toward the wide-open stretch of rugged land to the north. “You know an awful lot about a lot of things.”

  It wasn’t a coincidence that there was no better-known trail established through there. The land was a harsh mix of jagged rocks, a few clusters of trees and uneven slopes. In the subdued light of dusk, however, those edges were hidden and the wildness of the land could be seen in a less threatening way.

  “Who did you lose, Nick?”

  “What?”

  Joseph glanced over to him and then looked back to the landscape. “You talk about things you’ve seen, but you’ve never said what happened, exactly.”

  “There’s not enough time to say it all,” Nick replied. “Even if there was, I wouldn’t want to dredge it all up again.”

  “I want to stop thinking about my wife and my daughter,” Joseph said quietly. “I know that sounds terrible, but I just wish I could put them out of my head. Just for a few minutes so I can rest.”

  “Now’s the time to rest. Once you do, those memories will…” Nick winced and then corrected himself. “Actually, they won’t ever fade, but they’ll be easier to bear. Carrying out what you want to do when those wounds are fresh won’t end in anything good.”

  Although he could tell that Joseph wasn’t ready to turn around and go back to his son, Nick could at least tell that the other man was listening.

  “You see this?” Nick asked as he held out what remained of the fingers of one hand. “This, and a lot worse, was done by a vicious bastard I used to know. He led a group of killers who called themselves the Vigilance Committee. They’re the ones who cut me up and shot pieces of me like I was target practice.”

  Nick needed to steel himself before continuing. “There were some folks that were kind enough to take me in after I was left for dead. I knew those folks would be in trouble if it got out that they’d helped me. Well, word did get out, and they were in trouble from a group of lawmen who took orders from the Committee.

  “The woman who cared for me…her name was Sue. I can still see her face every now and then. At the time, she was the prettiest thing in my world. She said that everything would sort itself out whether I fought for it or not. Of course I didn’t listen. In fact, I took off and killed enough lawmen to put a p
rice on my head that I’ll never shake. All I wanted was to get my hands on those bastards or anyone connected to them in any way. All I wanted was to make them hurt, spill their blood, kill them or anyone they loved, just to pay them back for what they done. Sound familiar?”

  Joseph nodded slowly. “Sounds to me like they had it coming.”

  “When it was all said and done, I rode off to visit the Committee directly and figured those good folks who cared for me were better off if they never saw me again.

  “I checked in on them some time later and they were gone.”

  “Where’d they go?” Joseph asked.

  Nick slowly shook his head. “I don’t know. Nobody knew. Their house was cleaned out. Their things were gone. The man and his wife…their children…they were all gone. I’d like to think they headed to greener pastures, but I don’t know if that was the case. I do know that I didn’t make one damn bit of difference. The Committee came anyhow and took over just like they did in Virginia City. They rode in like some kind of goddamn army. That family I wanted to protect was driven out…or worse. They might have been killed, or maybe Red made an example of them to discourage anyone else from taking in a wanted man.”

  Nick’s eyes drifted toward the empty land. Rather than linger on the muted edges of rock or the trees huddling together to survive, he looked up to the stars that glittered overhead. “I was one of Red’s examples. Thinking about those good folks and their daughters going through half of what I did tears me up worse than any blade.”

  When he looked at Joseph again, the steely resolve was back in Nick’s eyes. His face looked as if it had been carved from a slab of granite. “There’s plenty of folks out there who deserve plenty of punishment, but all the blood you spill stays on your hands. It doesn’t help tip any scales. Just remember that, no matter how bad things are right now, they could be worse. You’re alive. So’s your boy. Things will work themselves out whether we fight for it or not. Don’t fight to make them worse.”

  Joseph nodded and said, “I just want to make certain they work out the way they should.”

  “We’ll just have to see about that.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  J. D. had built one hell of a campfire. It burned hot enough to cook Nick and Joseph’s supper and kept burning through the rest of the night. As the first rays of the sun broke through the next morning, both men were up and saddling their horses. When he saw Nick standing for a little too long at Kazys’s side, Joseph walked closer and spotted the bottle in Nick’s hand.

  Nick turned and held the bottle out. “You want a sip? It takes the chill out of your bones.”

  Taking the bottle, Joseph shook it back and forth to watch the clear liquid swirl inside. He assumed it wasn’t water and took a sniff from the top just to be certain. His suspicions were correct and the liquor’s scent scorched the back of his nostrils. “What the hell is that?”

  “Vodka. It’s a taste I picked up from my father. Try some.”

  Reluctantly, Joseph put the bottle to his lips and tilted it back. At first, the liquid was cold and even refreshing. Then, the fire hit him as though someone had flipped a match down his throat. The heat traced a path all they way down to his stomach and forced a wheezing breath up from the bottom of Joseph’s lungs.

  Nick watched with a grin and took the bottle back. He kept right on smiling as he took another healthy sip for himself.

  “You drink that?” Joseph huffed. “Seems like it’d be put to better use cleaning out a gun barrel.”

  “I never thought of that.”

  “Just keep it away from me.”

  Nick replaced the cork in the top of the bottle, wrapped it in a towel and carefully set it in his saddlebag. “You just don’t know any better. This stuff is hard to find. Most folks would rather drink whiskey that tastes more like kerosene or beer that was brewed in some saloon owner’s outhouse.”

  “Do you have any kerosene?” Joseph asked. “I could use it to wash this taste out of my mouth.”

  While climbing into the saddle, Nick shook his head and muttered a few words under his breath. Although Joseph couldn’t make out most of them, he did catch vaikeli somewhere toward the end.

  “You see?” Joseph said as he stuffed his bedroll beneath a strap at the back of his saddle. “That firewater made you forget English.”

  “It’s my native language. Something else I picked up from my father. Basically it means…” Nick struggled with the translation in his head. “It’s like calling someone a tenderfoot.”

  “Just because I don’t like drinking that poison? Sounds to me like your father didn’t think of a tenderfoot the same way everyone else does.”

  “Actually…what I said was closer to ‘whiny little kid.’”

  Settling into his saddle, Joseph shrugged and said, “Beats drinking kerosene for breakfast.” With that, he snapped his reins and started riding.

  Nick gave the other horse a small lead before flicking his own reins. Kazys took a few seconds to warm up his muscles, but the horse quickly fell into stride and got moving fast enough to overtake Joseph’s horse with ease.

  The two of them thundered over the rugged terrain, heading east to meet up with the more well traveled trail that led to Perro Negro. It wasn’t a straight route by any means. Every so often, Nick had to turn north or even double back until he was able to find a spot to cross a river or cross a particularly deep gorge.

  As he rode, Nick couldn’t help but think back to Doug and Sue Hemphill. He thought back to the last time he’d been to their house when there was still life and laughter within those walls. The more he thought about his younger self, the more he wished he could reach back and shake some sense into his arrogant head.

  As always, that train of thought led him to the memory of when he’d revisited that house a year or so later. It had been just as he’d described it to Joseph. Actually, it had been worse.

  Talking about how bad the silence was when compared to the laughter of those little girls wouldn’t have helped matters. It would have only rekindled the fire in Joseph’s belly. That fire was for Nick alone. He hadn’t told Catherine or anyone else about the Hemphills. It was almost as if he was just as afraid of putting them in danger now as he’d been back then.

  Some of the vodka’s burn still lingered in Nick’s mouth, but it wasn’t nearly enough to wash away the bloody memories that had revisited him. All Nick could do was try and move along.

  Things would work themselves out.

  Letting those words flow through his mind, Nick could almost hear Sue’s voice. Her tone was gentler now—more comforting.

  Perro Negro wasn’t as much of a town as it was an overgrown mining camp. Ruts in the ground from the carts led into a wall of rock to the southeast. Old storefronts lined the streets and were marked with faded signs advertising supplies that were no longer needed. The town and that rock formation were now very much alike: battered husks populated by vultures that were too lazy to fly away.

  As Nick and Joseph rode through town, the sun was throwing down an orange glow, but it would be night soon. The locals went about their un-seemly business as if they had the full protection of the dark. One man knifed another in one of the abandoned storefronts. Whores pulled down the fronts of their dresses to anyone who looked in their direction. Drunks puked on the warped remains of a boardwalk and then collapsed in their own mess.

  “What are we doing in this dung heap?” Joseph asked. “Looking for an outlaw here is like looking for a needle in a haystack.”

  “More like one particular piece of hay in a haystack,” Nick corrected.

  Joseph shook his head and looked around once more. “Those killers could be anywhere around here. I doubt there’s any law to point us in the right direction.”

  Nick laughed and leaned over so he could speak in a whisper. “I wouldn’t even mention law around here. Besides, the men we’re after aren’t here. They would’ve moved on a while ago.”

  “Then why are we wasting
time?”

  “There could still be something around that can help us. We needed to water the horses, anyway, so we’ll just do that here and look around.”

  “Any suggestions on where to start?”

  Nick rubbed his chin and shifted in his saddle. “I’m not sure. Do you see anyone that looks suspicious?”

  Joseph was clearly not amused. “I think you’ve been drinking too much of your father’s liquor.”

  “Looks like there’s only two main streets,” Nick said. “You poke around at the saloons on this one and I’ll take the saloons on the other. Say you’re looking for work and ask if anyone is hiring.”

  “What kind of work?”

  “You were a rancher,” Nick pointed out. “The men we’re after stole your herd and are probably out to sell it. What kind of workers do you think they’d be looking for?”

  “Probably brand artists, most likely,” Joseph replied without much hesitation.

  “Brand artists?”

  “Yeah. They cover up another ranch’s brand or find some way to change it around. It’s easy enough to spot if you know what you’re looking for. Anyway, that’s the sort of talent someone would need if they’re dealing with all those stolen cattle.”

  Nick nodded and said, “Learn something new every day.”

  “That’s not the answer you were expecting?”

  “I wasn’t expecting anything. You’re the rancher, not me. At least now I know what to ask for at those saloons. See what we can accomplish when you’re not stomping around with your dander up?”

  “Yeah, sure. What kind of information are we asking about?”

  “First of all, it would be good to have a better idea of how many men we’re up against. I could guess, but that won’t get us anywhere. That gang came through here looking to replenish their numbers, so we should try to find out how many took them up on their offer. If there wasn’t many takers, we might be able to ride in on them a bit faster. Also, have you ever heard of San Trista?”