The town wasn’t much—maybe thirty, thirty-five log and mud-brick shacks ringing a business section of half a dozen bulky frame, false-fronted trade shops. Just now the sun had slipped down beneath the cap of pewter clouds, and it spread a fiery salmon glow across the humble dwellings nestling there in the four or five inches of new-fallen snow, with blond prairie grass and sage spiking above its icy crust.
The fading light colored the snow a dusty rose. The buildings were copper. The smoke issuing from their chimneys was charcoal threaded with salmon. Gradually, the colors deepened as the sun fell behind the Wind River Mountains in the west.
As he continued walking Wolf along the trail and starting down the long grade toward the town, Yakima glanced behind. The stage appeared around a shoulder of the bluff. Adlard had the team galloping, his bearded face painted yellow by the western sun, Arenas looking grim beside him, holding his Winchester barrel-up on his right thigh. The deputy U.S. marshal had his broad-brimmed tan hat tipped low against the light. Old Elijah Weatherford just then poked his head out of the coach’s right side, looking around Yakima at the town beyond him, and his own wizened, bib-bearded face acquired a relieved expression.
Yakima heeled Wolf into a lope, keeping ahead of the stage. As he dropped down the hill, corrals and stock pens pushed up on both sides of him. Beyond, the stage trail became the town’s main street. It wasn’t yet dark, but no one appeared to be out. He couldn’t even see any horses tied in front of the town’s two saloons that he could recognize from having pulled through here a few times in the past.
He glanced to his left. An old man in coveralls and a wool-lined coat was forking hay to a couple of mules in a pole corral. A log shack stood about fifty yards to the right of the corral. An old woman in a long gray dress, bulky coat, and red scarf had been beating a rug with a broom, but now she was turning slowly, heavily toward Yakima, shading her eyes as she gazed at the stage rattling and lurching around down the hill behind him.
A German shepherd had been running around near the old woman, dashing from one side of a woodpile to another, obviously hunting a mouse or a rabbit, but now the dog turned toward the stage, as well. It raised its tail and started barking, showing its fangs.
As Yakima approached, following a horseshoe curve in the trail as it leveled out in the bowl, the old woman turned toward the old man in the corral and yelled something in what sounded like German. The old man responded in the same tongue.
The old woman turned her pale, pinched-up face toward Yakima and the stage again, moved her mouth in apparent disgust, then turned and shuffled hurriedly toward the log shack. She called to the dog, who stopped barking instantly, then wheeled and followed the old woman into the cabin.
The old man stood leaning on his pitchfork handle, staring grimly over a hay pile toward the stage. Yakima stared back at him and then, as he trotted Wolf on past the cabin and into the town, the hair under his collar stood up taller and straighter. The old man’s and the old woman’s reactions told him something was wrong.
He glanced behind.
It was too late to reroute the stage. Adlard was only just now slowing it as the lunging team hit level ground and drove to within forty yards of Yakima, entering the edge of the Broken Jaw business district and continuing forward, the team walking and blowing and snorting, shaking their heads, ready for hay and oats and a warm barn.
Yakima’s face was a stony mask of apprehension as he continued forward, the tall, false-fronted buildings rising around him, casting purple shadows over the broad, hard-rutted, lightly snow-dusted main drag. He scanned the boardwalks and porches and rooflines on both sides of the street, not liking how still and quiet everything was. The stores appeared as though they’d been closed for some time, curtains drawn over their windows. Only a few had smoke lifting from their chimneys.
Even the two saloons—one nearby on the right side of the street, the other farther up and on the left—appeared shut down. The oil pots on their verandas had not been lit against the growing darkness. The stage depot was on the left on Yakima’s side of the second saloon. It was a long, low, wood-frame building with a signboard over the shake-shingled front porch announcing Andrews & Meechum Stage Line.
The place sat on a broad lot; it was flanked by a barn and three corrals. The depot’s windows were curtained. A CLOSED sign hung in the front door on the far right side of the porch. Behind it, the barn was closed up. Horses milled in one of the corrals, all looking attentively toward the main street.
Yakima stopped Wolf in front of the depot. He reached forward and pulled the Yellowboy from its boot and racked a shell one-handed before planting the brass butt plate on his right thigh.
They’re here.
Behind him, the stage clattered to a stop, Adlard yelling, “Whoahhh!” at the tops of his lungs, standing in the driver’s boot and holding the ribbons up close against his chest.
The driver and Arenas looked around gravely, suspiciously. Neither one said anything. They could tell something was wrong. Yakima kept turning his head from left to right and back again, hipping around in his saddle to cast his anxious gaze behind him and the coach, squinting against the dust cloud now catching up to the stage. The top of the cloud was tinged with the coppery light of the setting sun. Below, it was purple-gray.
The street was as quiet as a cemetery at midnight. Even the spent team was silent, looking around, sensing trouble.
Yakima turned his head toward the right. On that side of the street sat the county sheriff’s office—a low stone building fronted by a wooden veranda. Three rocking chairs sat atop the veranda, one with a bobcat hide hanging down the back. A small shingle nailed to a porch post announced in red letters against a green background: SHERIFF B. W. MCALLISTER.
The office’s deeply recessed windows were dark. Yakima had just scrutinized them when the half-closed curtain in the window just right of the front door moved slightly. From inside the building came the muffled scrape of a boot heel. The door burst open and a big man wearing a five-pointed star on his leather vest bolted through it and onto the porch, his face red, eyes bright with exasperation as he shouted, “Ambush, Charlie! Ambush!”
He’d gotten as far as the veranda’s top step when something exploded inside the office behind him. The buckshot blasting through the open door caused his chest to blossom like a bloodred rose; it lifted him a foot off the porch and hurled him ten feet into the street. He hit the ground and rolled, flopping his beefy arms.
Yakima snapped the Yellowboy to his shoulder and aimed at the open door beyond which a shadow moved. Just then, another shadow rose above the slightly peaked roof of the jailhouse. Yakima raised the Yellowboy higher and fired twice, hearing the yell amidst the Winchester’s explosions as the shooter flung his rifle out to one side and flew back out of sight behind the roofline.
“Hi-yahhhhh!” Adlard shrieked, flicking the ribbons across the backs of his six-horse hitch. “Mooove, you mangy cusses. We’re pullin’ fooooottttttt!”
The stage bolted forward so quickly that Arenas, who’d just fired at the roof to the right of the jailhouse’s, was caught off guard. The lawman slammed back against his seat with a surprised wail and then rolled down the far side of the stage from Yakima. Amidst a sudden cannonade of guns opening up all around him, Yakima heard the crunching thud of the lawman’s body hitting the street.
The stage thundered past him as Yakima whipped his head around to see smoke puffing and flames stabbing from alley mouths and rooftops up and down the street. Arenas was in the middle of the street, rolling onto his side and wincing, his hat lying beside him, a wing of his thick salt-and-pepper hair flopping over his forehead.
Yakima picked out two shooters and fired, one bullet merely hammering the rain barrel behind which one killer crouched, but he managed to punch a .44 slug through the knee of his other target standing on the rooftop of the Old Blue Hound Saloo
n. At the same time, he rode over to where Arenas was just now gaining his feet and firing his Winchester from his hip while several slugs blew up dust around his feet.
Yakima winced as a slug sliced across his ear while another kissed nap from his hat brim, and flung a hand out to the lawman. “Here!”
Arenas lunged toward him, taking his carbine in his left hand and throwing his right one at Yakima. The half-breed grabbed the man’s wrist. Wolf pitched as Arenas leaped against the horse’s right hip, not having enough spring in his leap to gain the horse’s back. Yakima triggered his own Winchester with his left hand as he tried to pull the lawman onto the horse behind him.
Arenas jerked forward with a groan, blood spraying from his upper-right chest. He bounced off Yakima’s right leg and dropped to his knees in the street. “Forget it,” he wailed. “Go! Save the others!”
Yakima hipped around in his saddle, using both hands now to fire and lever, fire and lever, but Wolf was sidestepping crazily, and all his lead flew wide. He turned back to Arenas, who was down on both knees. Just then another bullet slammed into the back of his head, finishing him, and Yakima cursed loudly and ground his heels into the black’s flanks.
Horse and rider galloped off down the street, Yakima snaking his rifle behind him to squeeze off two parting shots. As he headed for the town’s other end and the stage jouncing in front of a roiling tan dust cloud about a hundred yards away, several slugs screeched through the air around his head and slammed into hitch racks and tore through window glass.
Then the town fell back and he passed a couple of shanties, a windmill, and a tipped-over wagon grown up with weeds that had probably served as a barricade against the town’s last Indian attack. He dropped down a grade into open country just as the sun sank below the western horizon.
The air instantly cooled. The sky turned to spruce, and a vast purple stretched over the earth.
He felt as though the sun and all the stars had burned out and he was riding through a dead world. He kept seeing the bullet hammering into Arenas’s head, blowing out his right eye in a wash of blood, brains, and bone, and, while the air continued to cool, Yakima felt the heat of a calm, killing fury gradually intensify.
He galloped Wolf down the grade and then up a slight rise through scattered pines between buttes. The trail turned between mesas. Ahead, the coach had slowed as it climbed another rise. Yakima caught up to it, rode up to the driver’s boot. Adlard stared down at him anxiously. “What happened to Arenas?”
“He’s dead.”
“Shit!”
“How far’s the next relay station?”
“Almost thirty miles. We’ll never make it. These hosses is blown!”
Old Elijah Weatherford poked his head out the stage window. “Bottom of the second rise, swing into the canyon there. There’s only a horse trail but it’s wide enough for the stage. I know an old ranch-stead there burned out by the Sioux about twelve years ago. Far as I know, no one’s moved back.”
Yakima looked at Adlard. “Do it. I’ll meet you there later.”
Yakima stopped Wolf, began to swing the horse back around. Adlard said, “Hey, where you goin’?”
“Back to Broken Jaw.” Yakima pressed heels to the black’s loins. “Unfinished business!”
He and the reluctant stallion galloped back toward town.
Chapter 28
There was only a rose and periwinkle blue wash of color in the western sky when Yakima rode back into the outskirts of Broken Jaw. He checked Wolf down to a walk, staring ahead into the misty darkness and listening. Faintly, he heard the sounds of revelry likely emanating from one of the saloons.
He hadn’t figured the gang would come after him and the stage in the dark. Betajack and Hendricks were in no hurry. They were enjoying themselves. Besides, they knew that the stage with its hitch of blown horses couldn’t travel much farther, anyway.
He figured they’d be content to wait until morning to resume stalking Mendenhour. Judging by the sounds, Yakima had been right.
He continued ahead for a few more steps. Then Wolf stopped. Yakima felt the horse tensing its muscles, and knowing from experience what was coming, he lunged forward to wrap his right hand over the horse’s snout, forestalling a warning whinny.
Ahead, against a faint wash of light from the main street’s left side, a shadow moved. Yakima caught a brief glimpse of the silhouetted outline of a horse and rider. Instantly, he reined Wolf down the trail’s left side and into some brush where a few of the town’s original cabins humped darkly, the bases of their stone foundations showing the whiteness of wind-drifted snow. He rode to the far side of one of the cabins and stopped, pricking his ears to listen.
A breeze stirred. On it was carried the slow clomps of an approaching horse. The sounds grew gradually louder. A sage or juniper branch made a soft snick as it scraped a stirrup fender. The man had apparently seen Yakima and was moving into the brush to investigate.
Yakima reined Wolf away from the cabin and rode slowly south through the brush and boulders and the remains of several stock pens, privies, and cabins. He drew rein behind a falling-down chicken coop, the door of which the slight, chill breeze nudged against its frame with whispery scrapes.
Yakima swung down from the leather. Holding one hand over Wolf’s snout, he shucked his rifle with the other. He gave the horse a hard look, commanding the stallion to keep quiet, and then edged a glance around the back of the chicken coop. Horse and rider were moving toward him. He could see the man’s broad-brimmed hat with a cord swinging down beneath his chin, and the ambient light silvering his fur jacket.
Yakima jerked his head back behind the chicken coop. The slow hoof clomps continued. They stopped. A short silence, and then, softly: “Hey, Clesh—that you over there? It’s Sonny.”
Yakima tensed, waiting, breathing regularly through parted lips. He stooped to pick up a small rotted board that had fallen off the chicken coop, and tossed it over Wolf. It bounced off the side of a dilapidated corral about thirty yards away.
There was another short silence, and then the near killer said louder, “Clesh?”
The hoof thuds started again. They were drifting away. Yakima edged another look out around the chicken coop in time to see the tail of Sonny’s horse just before it disappeared behind the coop’s far side. On tiptoes, he moved out around the rear of the little building and came up behind Sonny. The man’s horse had just started to lurch when the half-breed reached up and jerked sharply back on the man’s coat.
Sonny grunted and fell back across his saddle cantle, boots stuck in his stirrup. The man’s wild eyes and mouth opened wide. His scraggly little mustache pushed up against his long, almost feminine nose. Just before he could scream, Yakima smashed his Yellowboy’s brass butt plate against Sonny’s forehead with a solid smack!
Sonny’s tense body slackened. His hat fell off his head to hang across his shoulder by the chin thong, a messy tangle of greasy, blond hair drooping down the horse’s hip. The horse gave a surprised nicker as it bolted off around the front of the chicken coop, Sonny flopping unconscious, possibly dead, across his blanket roll and saddlebags.
Yakima paused, standing tense, squeezing the repeater in his hands, listening. There was only the casual sigh of the wind, the dwindling thuds of Sonny’s horse, and the muffled sounds of revelry emanating from the Old Blue Dog Saloon. Yakima went back to where Wolf stood nervously staring toward where Sonny’s horse had disappeared to the south.
“Easy, boy,” the half-breed whispered as he swung up into the leather.
He rode out around the chicken coop and across the trail where it entered town. He made a slow, quiet, cautious circle, weaving amongst shacks and stock pens, and then rode back toward the main street and the saloon from the north. He stopped Wolf well back from the main street, tied him to the tongue of a hay wagon, in the shadow
of a large woodshed, and walked south until he was staring straight across the street at the Old Blue Dog from an alley mouth. Left of the saloon sat the dark stone sheriff’s office. The local lawman remained in the street where he’d been thrown by the buckshot—a dark, twisted hump in the darkness. Light from the oil pots flickering on the saloon porch shone red on his upturned cheek.
The Blue Dog had three stories. Yakima remembered that the two upper floors were rented out and that customers who’d first rented one of the girls from downstairs were given a discount. A couple of the second- and third-story windows were lit, as were the two large plate-glass windows on either side of the halved-log front door.
Yakima could see the indistinct images of men moving around inside the place, one dancing arm in arm with a woman while another danced by himself and several others clapped and someone played a raucous mandolin. When the dancing man spun the dancing woman toward the front of the place, Yakima could see that she wasn’t smiling but had a nervous, tense expression.
There were no lights on in any of the other buildings up and down the street. The rest of the house, knowing it was under siege by Betajack and Hendricks, whose reputations had likely preceded them even this far north of their usual stomping grounds, were likely huddled behind locked doors, clutching shotguns and pistols, awaiting the Grim Reaper.
He waited ten minutes, making sure no other scouts were anywhere near the outside of the saloon, then ran across the street and into the break between the saloon and the sheriff’s office. Slowly, he mounted the veranda, stepping over one of the oil pots, whose warmth felt good against his cold legs, and crouched beside the big window left of the door.
Just then, the dancers—a young blonde in a green dress, a tall man in a wolf-skin cape and with a long-barrel silver pistol holstered on his thigh, and a short blond gent with long, braided chin whiskers—stopped dancing. The woman looked relieved. The taller man staggered to a table and tipped a bottle back, taking a long pull. The shorter man ambled to the bar. Most of the gang appeared to be here in the Old Blue Dog, spread out across seven or eight tables. They were a motley crew—savage-looking with their sneering, self-satisfied faces and all manner of armament bristling off them. The chubby barman stood behind the mahogany looking as edgy as the girl who’d been dancing with Hendricks’s tall killer.
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