Dead Man's Trail (9781101606957)

by Leslie, Frank

  They slid their eyes to each other, and then the man on the left, a beefy white man with a cream felt sombrero shoved back off his broad forehead, said haltingly, “We . . . we’re just—”

  No point in letting him waste time making up a lie.

  “Forget it. Where’s Betajack and Hendricks, the rest of your bunch?”

  They slid eyes around again before the Indian said, “Who, mister?” His voice was low, toneless.

  “I want a straight answer from one of you in three seconds, or that racket I just mentioned is going to occur in half a pull of a whore’s bell.”

  The beefy man said, “West, fer chrissakes! You wanna go over and say hi?”

  “How far west?”

  “Half mile. Hell, I don’t know. Maybe a mile.”

  “We didn’t measure it,” said the black man, holding his gloved hands about around his black hat brim.

  “All right, good,” Yakima said, sliding the rifle barrel from the black man to the beefy one, then slowly back again. “Here’s what I want you to do. . . .”

  The Indian’s eyes widened as he dropped a hand toward the big bowie knife he wore in a beaded sheath against his belly.

  The Yellowboy roared.

  The Indian jerked backward, grunting as he continued to slap at the knife handle.

  Yakima levered another shell and fired again, watching dust puff from the dead center of the man’s sheepskin. The slug blew him off his heels before he twisted around and fell on his belly, grunting and jerking.

  The other two had just closed hands around gun handles when Yakima’s second spent cartridge clinked off the rock behind him, and he aimed down the barrel of the freshly cocked rifle, planting a bead on the center of the beefy gent’s ruddy forehead.

  That stopped them both. They stared wide-eyed and tight-lipped at Yakima.

  The half-breed looked at the Indian, who lay belly-down on the fire’s far side, quivering as though he’d fallen on a nest of rattlesnakes. “Nope,” he said, “that wasn’t what I had in mind.”

  He planted the Winchester’s sights on the black man’s wrinkled forehead. The black man raised his arms higher above his head, as did the beefy gent. “Now, see all the racket that made?”

  “Shore did,” said the black man solemnly.

  The beefy white man shifted his weight from one knee to the other, fidgeting.

  “I know why you three are here,” Yakima said. “Because it’s easier for three to move in on a camp on a night this quiet. Which means you know where me an’ the others are camped.”

  “What’s your piece of this, breed?” asked the black man with frustration, spreading the fingers of his hands thrust high above his head. “What’s your stake in it? We’re just after Mendenhour. What the hell you care what happens to him?”

  The beefy gent said, “Mendenhour hanged the wrong Betajack, see? We ride for Betajack, and we know for certain sure that young Pres did not rustle them hosses, like the prosecutor said he did. The man Pres bought them horses from done lied and Neumiller and Mendenhour believed him because they been wantin’ to make an example of Betajack ever since he got elected.”

  Yakima stared at him. He didn’t really care what was true or not true. At this point, it didn’t make any difference. He’d bought chips in this game, so he had to play it out.

  Yakima cursed as he walked over to the black man. Keeping the gun leveled on his belly, he reached down and pulled the man’s saddle blanket out from beneath his saddle. He tossed it down in front of the fire, kicked the corners wide so it lay flat. He ordered the two men before him to disarm themselves as well as the dead Indian, and to toss the Indian’s and their own pistols and knives onto the blanket.

  They did so reluctantly.

  Just as reluctantly, they tossed over their and the Indian’s carbines.

  “Now your boots.”

  “Now our what?” said the black man.

  Yakima just stared at him.

  When both men had kicked out of their boots and stood there glaring from across the dwindling flames at Yakima, who stood behind the blanket heaped with guns, knives, and boots, the half-breed said, “When you see ’em again, tell your bosses I aim to kill ’em.”

  The two men glanced at each other, incredulous. The beefy man squinted one eye and arched the brow over the other eye at Yakima. “Tell them what?”

  “Tell ’em I’m gonna kill ’em if they keep comin’. Tell ’em Yakima Henry sent you. I’m the man who beefed about six of Claw Hendricks’s men the other day, and I intend to finish off the whole damn bunch of his men and Betajack’s men . . . if you keep movin’.”

  The beefy white man laughed. “That’s what they said about you. They aim to cut your ears off, breed. And I think they got a better chance because, hell, you’re only one man!” He laughed again.

  “You’ll see how many men I fight like if your bosses keep comin’.” Yakima narrowed a hard green eye. “You tell ’em that . . . when you see ’em again.”

  Quickly, keeping his rifle aimed on the two cutthroats, he folded the blanket into three points and then tied the points together with a strip of rawhide he found among the cutthroats’ gear. Rifle barrels and rear stocks stuck out of the pack as he tossed it over his shoulder, gave a parting glance at the two men before him, then backed over to where their horses grazed from picket pins.

  He cut the ropes tying the horses to the pins and fired two shots over the horses’ heads. The mounts whinnied and galloped off into the night.

  Yakima strode toward the west end of the ridge. He looked back toward the fire several times. The two bootless cutthroats hadn’t moved. They continued staring at him in hushed awe until he’d disappeared along with their horses in the night.

  * * *

  Yakima stopped Wolf west of the stage trail. Ahead, the stagecoach sat silhouetted in the darkness, moonlight glistening on the brass rail that ran around the roof. He’d heard something—the slightest squawk of a thoroughbrace in the coach’s undercarriage.

  A figure squatted atop the roof. A gun flashed against the figure, and Yakima threw himself off Wolf’s back to hit the ground on his shoulder. He came up firing his Colt, purposely missing his target, watching the man give a terrified scream and drop to the stage’s roof, squealing.

  Wolf gave a shrill whinny, turned sharply, and, trailing his reins, galloped wildly off to the north. His hammering front hooves missed Yakima by mere inches. “Hold your fire! Hold your fire!” shouted another man crouched behind the stagecoach’s slanting tongue. “Goddamn it, that’s Coble!”

  “I figured.” Yakima heaved himself to his feet, pistol smoking. He glanced to his left. Wolf was still galloping, though beginning to slow, snorting angrily.

  Fury was an exploding keg of dynamite in the half-breed’s chest. He stared through his pistol smoke wafting around him toward the stage, where the shotgun messenger was rising to his knees. “Who’s that?” he asked.

  Charlie Adlard said angrily, “The breed, goddamn it!”

  “Well, hell,” Coble said, “how was I supposed to know that?”

  “You weren’t,” Yakima said, his calm tone belying his fury. He was walking toward the stage, shaking the spent shells from his Colt’s wheel and replacing them with fresh from his cartridge belt. “You were just supposed to start shootin’.”

  As he stopped in front of the stage, the shotgun messenger stared down at him, holding his pistol down low but aimed cautiously at Yakima. His voice was slow, defensive, as he said, “Figured you’d pulled out.”

  Yakima reached up quickly, grabbed the man’s left ankle, and jerked it out from beneath him. “Hey!”

  Thump!

  “Ah, you son of a bitch!” Coble yelled, writhing around supine on the coach’s roof. His pistol bounced off the roof, as well, and dropped ov
er the edge to land at Yakima’s feet.

  “What the hell is going on over here?” It was Mendenhour, stepping out around the far side of the stage to stand beside the driver. “Don’t we have enough trouble without you men shooting at each other?”

  His wife walked up behind him, though Yakima could only see her silhouette in the darkness. Because of the shooting, she was sticking close to her husband. That was wise. Yakima didn’t like it in some vaguely primitive way, but there it was. He didn’t like anything about this night. Or the past three days . . .

  “I think he broke my back!” complained Coble, leaning forward on his knees and hooking an arm behind him.

  Yakima looked from Mendenhour’s wife to the prosecutor to the driver. “You’ll find a blanket full of guns and knives out there where my horse left it. I suggest you haul it in and do something useful with them.”

  “Such as?” Mendenhour asked.

  “Make sure everyone’s armed. And I’d move your camp. The horses, too. They know where we are. No more fires.”

  Yakima walked away to the northwest.

  “Where’re you going?” the driver said.

  “To fetch my horse,” Yakima said, staring forward. “Where the hell you think I’m goin’?”

  * * *

  When Yakima had walked down Wolf, he rode back to his niche in the rocks on the far side of the crease between the hills. He watched as the others doused their fire and moved their camp farther north along the crease, their jostling shadows disappearing behind him.

  He sat there atop the scarp, his legs hanging over the edge, his Yellowboy across his knees. The cool air kept him awake. That and the knowledge that Betajack and Hendricks could be stealing up on him and the others from any direction.

  He knew that his message to the cutthroat leaders could very well be taken as a challenge, and it likely would be. But it would also give them something to chew on, too. Some men knew his name, as he’d had to kill quite a few men in his thirty-odd years. Some of the living might think twice—or at least one and a half times, anyway—about taking him on.

  It might make Betajack and Hendricks hesitate. Men who hesitated were easier to take down than men who didn’t. He’d become one of those who didn’t. Not when the chips were down and all players were showing their cards. Word had gotten around.

  It was a quiet night.

  The morning was a little louder.

  “Hey, breed,” Melvin Coble said, yelling up from the bottom of the scarp. “Come down here. Wanna have a little chat with your half-breed ass this mornin’.”

  Chapter 17

  “Someone’s comin’,” said a man squatting atop the cutbank, across from where Floyd Betajack, Claw Hendricks, and their near-dozen men were lounging around two small cook fires.

  It was sometime in the very early morning.

  Some of the men were snoring under animal skins and hats; others were playing cards. One—Miguel “Wolf” Calabasas—slowly strummed a mandolin with surprising sonorousness for a man who’d killed enough men to make him wanted in nearly every territory west of the Mississippi and in several Mexican provinces.

  He was the best of Betajack’s men—one of about seven he still had on his roll. An old gun hand from Santa Cruz, he was even a better killer than Albert Delmonte. Betajack was getting too old to do much bank, train, or payroll robbing or rustling anymore, so he’d been legitimizing his ranch business, actually bringing some seed bulls over from Missouri, until Dave Neumiller had arrested Betajack’s oldest son, Pres, for stealing horses after the sheriff had killed two of Pres’s partners. A trumped-up charge, that. Cold-blooded murder.

  Now the veteran of the War of Northern Aggression needed every good gun he had left on his roll, and on Claw Hendricks’s roll, too, though Betajack had grudgingly partnered up with the man. Betajack saw Hendricks as a wild grizzly, mostly rogue—one of the younger breed of outlaw with few principles. Claw hired men like himself—dull-witted, cold-steel artists—who were better at murder and rape than stealing. Send the pistoleros to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, was how Betajack saw such nonsense.

  You didn’t need men who were randy as hogs and fast with a gun. You needed men who could shoot straight without hesitating when the chips were down.

  The old war veteran and train robber scoffed at the whole affair, and grunted as he heaved his old, creaking bones up out of his deerskins, cursing his age. It was cold out here, and his fifty-three-year-old marrow felt frozen solid. He hitched his double-gun rig around his ever-broadening waist, under his long buffalo coat, slid his knives into the sheaths strapped to his chest, and walked over to the base of the bank.

  “Who is it?” he asked the man squatting there, beside a gnarled cedar.

  They had only one man on scout, because they had three more positioned closer to the stage passengers’ camp. It was highly unlikely any of the passengers, including the half-breed, would try to turn the tables and bushwhack them, Betajack and Hendricks.

  “Two men,” said Wiley Scroll, one of Hendricks’s boys from Oklahoma. The lone scout stood and walked out a ways from the cedar and the dry wash, cradling his carbine in his crossed arms. The vapor of his breath jetted around his hatted head.

  Claw Hendricks yawned and came over from his own spread gear, smoothing a lock of dark red hair back from his scarred, freckled forehead and donning his black opera hat. He thumped his rose-colored glasses up his nose, and said, “Prob’ly grub-line riders out of work since the roundup. Send ’em on their way, Scroll.”

  “If it’s grub-line riders,” Scroll said, “they ain’t ridin’. They appear to be walkin’.”

  Hendricks had started to turn away, but now he turned to face northwest again. He glanced at Betajack, but the old train robber squinted into the night, even his old ears now picking up the soft thumps of men walking toward him. His old eyes picked up the silhouettes of—sure enough—men walking toward the wash. Two men. Walking about ten feet apart. White socks shone in the darkness.

  “What the hell . . . ?” said Sonny, coming up behind his father, tucking his tangled blond hair under his hat.

  Sonny climbed the bank in three strides. Betajack climbed halfway up, but he lost his footing and lurched backward. Throwing an arm up, he said, “Help me here, damn it!”

  Hendricks half turned and he and Sonny quickly grabbed the older man’s arms and pulled the grunting, wheezing Betajack on up the side of the wash. “You all right?” Hendricks asked, chuckling wryly as the older outlaw caught his breath.

  Betajack gave a caustic snort, jerked his arms out of the younger men’s grips, and walked forward until he was standing left of Scroll. Hendricks walked up to stand left of Betajack, as did Sonny, all four staring at the two men now walking heavily toward them, the vapor of their strained breath visible. They were sighing and grunting and breathing hard, dragging their feet. One of the socks of the man on the right had curled down over the end of his foot, and he was half dragging it as he walked.

  The two stopped about ten feet in front of Betajack, Sonny, Hendricks, and Scroll. The others were moving up out of the wash to stand around behind them, curious. Calabasas had stopped strumming the mandolin he took with him everywhere.

  Hendricks placed his fists on his hips as he said, “Simms? Soot? That you? Where’s your damn horses?”

  The beefy gent in a low-crowned sombrero merely hung his head, leaning forward, slouching wearily, thick arms hanging straight down before him.

  The black man, Soot Early, said, “Got caught unawares, Mistuh Claw.”

  “You got caught with your pants down, you mean!” This from Betajack, who stared at both men with his lower jaw hanging.

  Sonny laughed.

  “Shut up, Sonny,” said Betajack.

  Sonny scowled.

  “You fellas were supposed to be watc
hing that stage so’s you could let us know when they pulled out!” Hendricks had lunged forward like an angry bulldog, barking the words. “You were supposed to sit tight, keep an eye on them people!” He pointed in the general direction of the stage passengers’ camp. His face was concealed by the darkness, but Betajack knew the man was embarrassed by the negligence of his crew so far, when he’d been wanting so hard to prove what a great outlaw he was. A great outlaw himself and a leader to others.

  Simms said nothing. He stood with his chin dipped toward his chest, his broad hat covering his face. Soot Early doffed his own hat and held it over his chest as though in supplication to a couple of higher powers. “Mistuh Claw, Mistuh Betajacks, suhs, we wasn’t jumped by just anybody. We was jumped by the green-eyed half-breed.”

  “So?” said Betajack and Hendricks simultaneously, scowling their exasperation.

  “His name’s Henry, suhs,” Simms said, the whites of his eyes reflecting the light of the fire flickering behind Betajack, Sonny, Hendricks, Scroll, and the other men who’d spread out along the bank of the wash. “Yakima Henry.”

  Betajack looked at Hendricks. “Mean anything to you?”

  “Nah,” said the big man in the top hat, shaking his head slowly as he stared at the two men standing before him like castigated schoolboys. “Nah, I never . . .” He let his voice trail off before raking his thumb back and forth across the nub of his chin. “Wait a minute. . . . Yeah . . . yeah, I’ve heard of a Yakima Henry. A gun wolf. Damn near wiped out an entire gang of desperadoes down in Arizona, because they stole his horse. Did some work down in Mexico, too, against the Rurales, I heard. Really piled up the bodies.” Hendricks nodded slowly. “Yeah, I heard of him.”

  “All right, so you heard of him. And you left him alive when you could have blown them two green eyes out of his head back in Wolfville!”

  “Ah, hell, it don’t matter,” said Hendricks, holding up his hands, palm out, trying to soothe the old man’s ruffled feathers. “He’s just one man. A man like any other. True, I made a mistake and he’s caused us some problems, but I’ll make it good, Floyd. I’ll make it good!”