The Thunder Riders

by Frank Leslie

  As he grabbed the bottle off the table and began leading Anjanette toward the stairs at the back of the room, he said, “Are you having an adventure yet, Chiquita?”

  Chapter 12

  By the time Yakima had climbed the ridge above the posse, leaving Speares to soil his trousers among the boulders, it was late afternoon. He caught up to the sorrel grazing along the opposite slope and traced a winding course through the darkening canyons, hooking up with the desperadoes’ trail a few miles southwest of the burned-out village.

  He rode for a couple of hours and camped that night under an overhanging lip of layered limestone. He built a small fire and a makeshift spit, upon which he roasted the two large jackrabbits he’d killed with a Jesus stick. The fire was well concealed by boulders lining the bivouac. Waiting for the meat to cook, he hunkered on his haunches, his Yellowboy standing between his knees, and stared down the slope and across the valley cloaked in velvety darkness at a pinprick of flickering orange light growing brighter as the darkness thickened.

  The posse’s fire.

  They were a persistent bunch—he’d give them that.

  Yakima sat staring across the star-capped desert, hearing the fire crackle and the rabbit skins sizzle and split. Absently, he fingered the rifle’s smooth barrel.

  An idea occurred to him. He’d been wondering how he was going to rescue Anjanette and Wolf from so large a group. Why not let the posse try to take them down first? While the desperadoes were distracted by Speares and Patchen, Yakima would steal up behind them, grab Anjanette and the horse, and hightail it back toward the border.

  The tactic made as much sense as anything else he’d come up with.

  When the rabbits were done, he ate one hungrily, tearing off large chunks with his hands and licking the grease from his fingers, washing the meat down with hot black coffee. He wrapped the other rabbit in burlap, stuffed it into his saddlebags for tomorrow, then enjoyed one more cup of coffee before kicking dirt on the fire and rolling up in his blankets.

  The distant keen of a cougar lulled him to sleep.

  He woke at first light to a fine layer of frost on his blankets and on the hat brim pulled low over his eyes, his breath puffing in the gray dawn air. Flinging his blankets aside, he rose, grabbed a spyglass from his saddlebags, and leapt atop a flat boulder at the edge of his campsite.

  Squatting, he trained the glass down the slope, toward the cactus-studded valley below. Two hundred yards away, a tiny pink flame guttered amid the scrub. Shadows flickered around the fire, and in the misty gray light, Yakima saw the horses tied to a picket line between two cabin-sized boulders.

  Since the posse was taking time for breakfast, Yakima would, too.

  He went back to his fire ring, built a low blaze with crushed sage branches, and made coffee, which he sipped while he nibbled on the bones of the cooked rabbit. He kept a close eye on the posse. Ten minutes after they’d moved out, heading southwest along the trail of the dozen hoofprints scoring the desert floor, he doused his fire, packed up, saddled the sorrel, and followed.

  He trailed the posse from five hundred yards throughout the morning, slowing when they slowed, stopping when they stopped. Near noon, trouble. When pulling the sorrel away from a small spring bubbling around mossy rocks, a loud, ironlike clatter rose from below.

  Dread scalding his gut, Yakima glanced down. The horse’s left front shoe dangled from its hoof. Slipping out of the saddle, Yakima crouched to inspect the shoe. Only one nail remained, and the shoe itself was cracked. What was worse, after examining the hoof, he found that the frog was swollen and tender. The horse couldn’t be ridden until the hoof was wrapped for at least six hours with a cool mud pack and then reshod.

  Yakima removed the shoe, tossed it into the brush, and glanced ahead, his jaws set with frustration. Shit.

  The only thing he could do was lead the horse along the posse’s trail and hope he came upon a village or estancia where he could trade the horse for a fresh one. Barring a trade, he hoped for a portable forge and blacksmith’s tools where he could pack the hoof and shape a new shoe. He would lose valuable time, maybe lose the gang’s trail, but there was little choice.

  He wished he had his moccasins to make the walk easier, but the soft-soled shoes were in his saddlebags atop Wolf. By the time he reached a settlement, his own feet would no doubt need as much attention as the sorrel’s.

  As he led the horse along the desperadoes’ trail, overlapped by that of the posse, minutes stretched to hours. The stockman’s boots drew taut around his swelling feet, and he could feel the skin on the balls of both feet tearing, then oozing inside his socks, grieving him with every step.

  After a couple of hours he sat down on a rock, removed his boots and socks, and cut away the loose skin on his feet with the Arkansas toothpick he always carried in a makeshift ankle sheath. He had nothing to pad the boots with, even if he could have squeezed in anything besides his socks and his swollen feet, so he donned the socks, slid his feet back into the boots, and continued walking, fixing his attention on the flora and fauna—the creosote shrubs and mesquite snags and occasional white-throated swift darting about the chaparral— to keep his mind off the ache.

  He crossed a valley, then a low saddle, before traversing a maze of ancient arroyos so choked with brush and boulders that it became difficult to stay on the riders’ trail. From a distance, he saw two cougars, a lynx, at least fifty turkey buzzards feeding on a rotting bear carcass, and a half dozen wolves snorting around an old deer kill.

  Luckily, no Indians.

  At about six o’clock that evening, he followed a winding trail up the side of a broad tabletop mesa, then continued following it to the edge of an open area in which a large rectangular adobe sat to the right of several crumbling barns and corrals.

  An old rancho, by the look of the place. The twang of a guitar and celebratory voices rising from inside the house, in addition to the half dozen Arabian horses tethered to the hitchrack out front, bespoke a roadhouse. Smoke puffed in deep gray clouds from the chimney on Yakima’s side of the house, rife with the smell of roasting pork.

  A slender brown-haired girl stood at the stock tank at the other end of the yard, dipping a wooden bucket into the water. She wore a flour-sack skirt and, despite the evening’s chill, a low-cut blouse, one strap hanging down an arm barely bigger around than a shotgun barrel.

  Barefoot, lugging the sloshing water bucket in both hands before her, she shuffled back toward the roadhouse. She didn’t turn her head toward Yakima. She kicked up dirt as she went, long hair blowing in the wind.

  Yakima gave a gentle tug on the sorrel’s reins and started toward the roadhouse.

  “Hold it right there,” a man’s Irish-accented voice growled to his left. “One more step and I’ll blow you all the way to the rock gods!”

  Yakima turned to see a short, pudgy man with close-cropped gray hair and a gray-bristled beard move out from the open door of the adobe-and-log barn on his left, aiming an old Springfield trapdoor rifle straight out from his shoulder.

  “I don’t allow ’Paches. . . .” The pudgy man let his voice trail off as he sidestepped slowly up to Yakima, keeping his cheek snugged against the Springfield’s stock, as if facing a mountain lion in its own den. He grunted uncertainly. “You ain’t ’Pache, are ye? Too damn tall. What the hell are ye, then?”

  Yakima glanced at the sorrel flanking him on his left. “I’m looking for a trade. He’s got a bum hoof, but it’ll heal with tending.”

  The Irishman lowered the rifle from his cheek but held the barrel steady on Yakima’s chest, slitting one eye skeptically. “You with that posse that tore through here a few hours ago?”

  “Do I look like one of them?” Yakima didn’t wait for an answer. “I need that horse. . . .”

  “I don’t have no horse, just a big mule I use for skidding wood up from the draws. He don’t carry riders, and he ain’t for trade. But I got a forge and bellows in yonder you can shoe him with.” The Irishman
canted his head toward the barn on Yakima’s left. “But I gotta make a livin’. . . .”

  “You have some burlap I can wrap his hoof with?”

  “Sure do. And you can even sleep with him in yonder.”

  “Mighty pale of ya. How much?”

  The Irishman lowered his rifle and grinned. “For three dollars—or you can split me a cord of ash and cottonwood over yonder, keep my fire goin’ tonight. I’m entertainin’ Don Garcia-Viejo’s segundo and his greaser riders, and I’m slow-roastin’ a sow hog. Like to make a good impression on the local gentry, don’t ya know!”

  Yakima glanced at the two-foot logs scattered among the sage near the barn, then turned back to the Irishman. “I’ll split your wood. But you better throw in a warm bed and grub.”

  “Hell, I’ll even throw in a fat whore. That wood-splittin’ grieves my rheumatism!”

  “Save your whore for El Segundo, but I’ll hold you to the rest.”

  They shook.

  After the man who’d said his name was Mick O’Toole had returned to the roadhouse, Yakima set to work firing up the blacksmith forge in the barn. While the forge heated, he applied a compress of cool mud and whiskey to the sorrel’s hoof, wrapping it tightly, then set to work on a shoe. When he’d hammered one to the shape of the hoof, he left it on the anvil, ready to be applied first thing in the morning, after he’d removed the compress.

  The horse needed a good two- or even three-day rest, but overnight would have to do. Yakima had to get after Speares’s bunch and the Thunder Riders. Hopefully, he would find someone willing to trade mounts with him farther along the trail.

  Finished with the horse, which he stabled in the barn’s shadows with measured amounts of oats, hay, and water, he took his boots off and applied some of the mud and whiskey to the bottoms of his own feet, sucking air through his teeth at the alcohol sting. He wrapped both feet lightly, then set to work splitting the firewood north of the barn.

  He was weary from the long walk and the work in the barn, but hefting the mallet and smashing the blade down through the logs, working up a rhythm, loosened his back and arms and focused his mind, distracting him from wondering how Anjanette and Wolf were faring among the outlaws. He’d half expected to find the girl dead in the desert, and hoped he could get to her before the gang tired of her and cast her off like trash.

  The desert air turned crisp, drying the sweat on his back. An especially large wolf pack yammered in the hills north of the mesa, and Yakima vaguely wondered what had stirred them into such a frenzy.

  When he had a half cord of wood split, he gathered an armload and started toward the roadhouse shining like a rough, well-lighted jewel in the starry darkness. A fiddle had replaced the guitar, making more squawking noise than music, and several more horses stood before the hitchrack, swishing their tails or drawing water from the stock trough before them.

  Yakima mounted the porch steps, pushed through the batwings, and looked around through the smoky shadows in which three or four groups of Mexican men clumped, some playing cards while a few merely sipped from stone mugs and sat back in their chairs with dreamy, drunk expressions, enjoying the fiddle music of the skinny vaquero in ragged trail garb.

  A couple of fat whores were at the table where five well-dressed vaqueros sat, smoking and drinking. One of the whores sat between two tall Mexicans, laughing and twirling a pudgy finger around in her shot glass while one of the men leaned toward her, whispering in her ear.

  The other whore was bent forward over the table while another Mexican—the best-dressed one of the lot, with a white streak slashing through his thick black hair—spanked her with his black-gloved hand. Yakima knew enough Spanish to know the man was chastising her for being fat—“Why in the hell don’t you stop eating, woman?”

  She laughed, going along with the chiding but wincing a little with each slap.

  The Irishman, Mick, watched the table from behind the bar, wearing a strained smile as he ladled pulque into mugs.

  Yakima dropped his load of wood near the fireplace, in which two shanks of hog sizzled and sputtered.

  “Bring in another load, and I’ll fill you a plate,” Mick told him as he hustled the two stone mugs of pulque out from behind the bar, heading for the table with the well-attired vaqueros and the fat whores. He shook his head, muttering, “What I don’t put up with to stay on the don’s good side . . .”

  Yakima glanced at the Mexicans’ table again, then went back outside, where he split a few more logs, then headed back to the cabin with another armload. Near the corner of the dark barn, he stopped suddenly as a girl’s scream rose from inside the roadhouse. There was a sharp slap, and a man shouted in Spanish, “Bitch, you’ll do as I order!”

  Yakima continued forward as the Irishman’s voice sounded in placating tones from the other side of the batwings. The fiddle had fallen silent, and all Yakima could hear from the roadhouse was the first man’s angry voice booming above Mick’s.

  A horse snorted as Yakima passed the hitchrack and mounted the porch steps, the patter of running bare feet growing louder. He was a foot from the doors when he heard a girl’s sobs, saw a small, slender, long-haired silhouette growing out of the shadows before him. It was the girl he’d seen earlier at the water tank, her eyes now silver with tears.

  The enraged voice rose again behind her. “Get back here, puta!”

  Yakima lunged to the right as the girl flew through the batwings, hair streaming out behind her. She ran across the porch and leapt off the steps and into the yard, heading for the barn.

  Yakima turned back toward the door. The tall man with the white streak in his hair was striding toward the batwings, boots pounding the flagstones.

  Yakima leapt back to the right, a log falling from the pile in his arms.

  A wink later, the Mexican burst through the batwings like a bull from a chute. “I warn—”

  Instinctively, Yakima kicked his left leg out in front of the doors. The Mexican’s left boot hooked under Yakima’s ankle, and the man gave an indignant cry as he flew across the porch, fell down the steps, and rolled into the yard.

  Groaning and cursing, the man pushed off his chest and lifted his head toward Yakima, still standing to the right of the batwings with the split wood in his arms.

  The man spat, ran a sleeve across his mouth. His voice rose shrilly, shouting in Spanish something like, “That better have been an accident, friend, or you have made a fatal mistake!”

  Chapter 13

  Yakima hadn’t wanted any trouble here. He’d only wanted to tend his horse and light out free and clear the next morning, to get back on the trail of Anjanette and his mustang.

  The delay itself was galling, knowing that the Thunder Riders were pulling farther and farther ahead. But the added complication he now found himself in was about as welcome as a blow from an Apache war hatchet.

  He hadn’t meant to get involved in the girl’s trouble. His boot had leapt out in front of the batwings as though of its own accord.

  Now he stood in the shadows of the roadhouse porch, facing the well-dressed Mexican with the white streak in his hair—the vaquero segundo whom the Irishman had mentioned earlier, Yakima assumed. The man was climbing heavily to his feet before the porch, looking around wildly and snarling. His head swung toward Yakima, and he froze.

  He chuffed with indignance. “Did you trip me, Senor?”

  Yakima pushed back against the roadhouse wall as though trying to merge with the adobe. “Sorry, friend. My foot slipped.”

  The man chuffed again, louder this time. “Your foot slipped? I don’t think so, Senor!”

  Yakima sighed. Shit. Holding the wood in his arms, he stepped out from the wall. He kept his voice reasonable. “I meant no offense. Just seemed the girl was tired of your company is all.” Yakima’s eyes shifted slightly. The slender shadow stood by the open barn door, facing the roadhouse.

  The Mexican laughed caustically, curling one hand around his revolver. “You are in error, Senor.
It is merely a game she plays. And just to show you how big a mistake you have made . . .” He slid his revolver from his holster with self-assured negligence.

  Just as the barrel cleared leather, Yakima dropped his arms, his right hand coming up and grabbing a split log from the top of the falling stack. As the wood thundered onto the porch, Yakima swung the log back behind his shoulder and slung it forward with a clipped grunt.

  “Ack!” El Segundo screamed as the log slammed into his right wrist with a dull smack and the gun hit the ground with a thud.

  Out of the corner of his right eye, Yakima saw a couple of silhouetted faces peering over the batwings. The smoke of strong tobacco laced the air. He sidestepped to the edge of the porch as the segundo looked up at him, hissing and growling like an enraged cur guarding a prized bone.