And the man had been on the Kid’s trail ever since the Kid had wreaked holy vengeance on the American cavalry soldiers who’d killed his Chiricahua Apache family and the Apache girl he’d intended to marry, and a two-thousand dollar bounty had been put on his head by President Grant himself—the very man the Kid had fought so nobly for in the Great Rebellion.
El Leproso called from the darkness: “The General wants his beloved very much alive, Kid! You see, he wants to give her to his men for a few magical nights in their bunkhouse and then watch them shoot her down like a hydrophobic dog in front of his garden wall!”
The Kid aimed at the place from which the man’s voice had come. The Winchester roared four times quickly, the slugs squealing through the darkness, screaming off rocks and ancient shrines.
The Kid hunkered down behind the marker, listening, waiting.
Silence closed over him, louder than before. His heartbeat quickened hopefully. Had one of his slugs taken down the bounty hunter?
As if in response to his silent query, a laugh rose—shrill and far away but as mocking as before.
“We’ll meet again, soon, Kid!” called the Leper. “Please tell the girl she is most beautiful, even more lovely disrobed. But she must die just the same!”
Howling laughter.
Presently, hooves thudded. They dwindled quickly as El Leproso rode off in the night, and silence like a dark ocean tide washed in behind him.
A shadow flickered over the Kid’s head. He jerked with a start, started to raise the Winchester. But it was only the ghost-faced owl lighting on a tombstone a few feet away—a small, gray apparition in the darkness, about the size of a dove.
The owl turned its pale face to him. Its small eyes glowed as though from a fire within.
“You might’ve warned me a little earlier in there,” the Kid grouched, canting his head toward the church.
The owl gave a sharp cry and flew away.
“Same to you,” the Kid said.
CHAPTER 8
TAINTED WATER
Pancho Montoya stood on the brush-roofed gallery fronting his remote stage relay station, near the door he’d propped open with a rock to let some of the stove heat out. He’d finished serving menudo and tortillas to the small batch of passengers who’d just pulled in on the stage, and now the stocky, apron-clad station manager was about to enjoy a cigar.
To that end, Pancho started to scratch a lucifer to life on the clay ojo hanging from the rafters to his right, but stopped when something caught his eye. He scowled off across the desert directly east of the station.
The wicked desert wind had been blowing all day, kicking up sand and grit and tossing tumbleweeds this way and that. So it was difficult for Pancho Montoya to see who was approaching the station, the horse and its rider slowly taking shape amid the jostling veils of windblown sand.
Odd for a man to be riding in from that direction—across the desert as the hawk flies, where there were no trails except a few ancient Indio trails but mostly only banditos, renegade Yaqui, and rattlesnakes. Why not take the relatively well-maintained stage road that swept into the station from the north and continued on beyond it to the southwest?
But, then, earlier that day, two others had come from that same direction . . .
Holding his stove match in one hand in front of his chest, his cigar in the other hand, Montoya scowled into the barren, wind-whipped desert at the oncoming rider. Gradually, the station manager was able to see that the horse was a fine, coal-black Arabian. Its rider was a tall man in a gray duster that flapped in the ceaseless wind. He wore a thick lanyard across his chest, and the barrel of a rifle or shotgun jutted up from behind his right shoulder. He batted tall black boots against the horses’ sides as he held the sleek mount at a steady lope. Moving as one, they swam up out of the storm like a murky mirage.
The stranger was a pale man wearing a bullet-crowned black sombrero, which was thonged tightly beneath the rider’s chin to keep it from blowing off his head in this maddening wind.
No, thought Montoya. Not a pale-faced man.
A man wearing a mask. Because of the wind, of course.
But then another thought occurred to Montoya as horse and rider continued to ride through the buffeting veils of blowing sand. As he continued to stare, riveted, at the gray-masked rider who was now within seventy yards and closing quickly, a dark apprehension nibbled at the edges of Montoya’s consciousness.
The station manager crossed himself with the unlit cigar.
“Mierda,” he whispered. “Santos, por favor perdõname.” Saints, please spare me.
Montoya heard the horse’s dull thuds as it entered the yard, its tall, masked rider checking it down to a trot. The stranger passed the stagecoach sitting before the station house, tongue drooping, awaiting the storm’s end and a fresh team. He reined to a halt before Montoya, who winced at the knot of pulsating nerves at the back of his neck, hard as an oak knot.
“Senor Montoya,” said El Leproso as he swung down from his silver-horned Spanish saddle complete with a garish, three-point breastplate, each of the points being a hammered silver Spanish medallion. The Leper wrapped his reins over the hitch rack and looked up at Montoya, his dark eyes hard to read through the dusty flour-sack mask. “We meet again.”
The eyes were red-rimmed. One sat slightly lower than the other, and, as Montoya had noted before, the left one tended to wander slightly. The Leper’s lips were also red. Thick and red and oddly, irregularly shaped. And they smiled, showing the grimy, yellow teeth behind them.
The knot at the back of Montoya’s neck grew tauter, but he suppressed a shudder of revulsion and turned his wince into a smile. “El Leproso, welcome!”
The Leper slipped his horse’s fancy silver bit from its teeth, so it could draw water from the stock trough fronting the hitch rack, and then came up the gallery steps. He was a tall, lean man, and Montoya had to tilt his head back to look up at him.
The bounty hunter still wore that wet, red smile as he said, “Don’t shit an old shitter, Pancho. Just tell me how long it’s been since that half-breed and that redheaded girl passed through here.”
Montoya’s knees turned to putty. He stammered.
The Leper stared at him, canted his head one way and then the other, waiting. Montoya looked at the two pistols holstered on the bounty hunter’s hips, behind the duster, and the shotgun jutting up from behind his right shoulder.
He’d heard it was loaded with rock salt.
“You’re gonna tell me now, or you’re gonna tell me later,” the Leper said softly, the burlap mask buffeting against his nose as he breathed, his flat, walleyed stare as menacing a thing as Montoya had ever seen. “But you’re gonna tell me.”
“Two hours.”
“Headed where?”
“I thought I heard the girl mention San Gezo.”
The bounty hunter frowned behind his mask. Then he nodded and his thick, misshapen lips shaped another grin. “I see,” he said wistfully.
He turned to the clay ojo hanging from the rafters, beside Montoya. As he plucked the gourd dipper from the water pot and scooped up some water, he glanced at the station manager once more. “I don’t care that you’re not all that happy to see me, Pancho. I’m so damn happy to see you again, after all these months, mi amigo, that it makes up for the tenderness you so sorely lack with regards to my pretty ol’ self.”
Montoya wasn’t sure what the bounty hunter had just said, and he didn’t think it mattered. So much of what the killer said was mere nonsense that probably came from a man riding alone so much for most of his life. The station manager had heard that the man he knew only as El Leproso had contracted his hideous disease long ago, when he was very young.
For some reason, possibly because of some demon’s curse on humanity, it hadn’t yet killed him.
What Montoya was most concerned about now, however, was the precious water that the man had dippered up from the ojo and was holding about six inches from his disfigure
d face with its red lips rimed with dust.
El Leproso stared at Montoya as though reading the disgust in his mind. The bounty hunter swung the dipper out slightly, water sloshing onto the gallery’s scarred wooden floor at his boots, and said, “Drink?”
Montoya smiled tensely and shook his head.
“You don’t mind if I take a little, do you?”
Montoya looked down, the smile painted on his face, and shook his head though his guts writhed like snakes until he thought he would gag.
“Gracias, amigo.”
The Leper drank loudly, slurping the water up through the hole in his mask, sounding like a dog. When he was through with one dipperful of the water, he scooped up some more and continued to drink loudly until he’d had his fill.
Then he dropped the dipper back down in the pot with a splash, and wiped his mouth with his dirty duster sleeve. He hitched his double cartridge belts and two black holsters on his hips. Each ornately tooled sheath contained a silver-chased, pearl-gripped Navy Colt .44. He adjusted his sombrero’s chin thong as he dropped down the gallery steps and plucked his reins from the hitch rail.
When he’d swung up into the saddle, he pinched his dusty hat brim to the station manager.
“Till next time, Montoya . . . when I can stay longer and enjoy more of your delicious water.”
He swung the sleek black Arabian around and rode away.
Hoof thuds died beneath the sighing wind.
Montoya turned his head slowly to the ojo, and grimaced.
CHAPTER 9
SHADOWS IN THE WIND
Atop a wind-battered ridge, the Rio Concho Kid stared through his brass-chased spyglass.
A ragged shadow moved out on the darkling plain.
Thunder rumbled. The Kid glanced at the sky. A vast, arrow-shaped cloud mass nearly as dark as night but with its belly laced with thin wisps of cottony white was edging toward him from the southwest, the same direction the wind was from. Again, thunder rumbled, causing the gravelly ground to vibrate. From the same direction, a vast shadow was sweeping across the land.
The Kid directed the spyglass once more to the northeast.
The gray shadow remained, flickering between curtains of windblown sand. The Kid lowered the spyglass, felt his jaws tighten.
That’s right, El Leproso. You keep comin’. I’d like nothin’ better than to scour your ugly visage from my back trail once and for all!
How many years now, off and on, had the Leper been after him? Four? It felt like ten. He’d seen the man only a few times, mostly up north of the border.
The Kid glanced at the girl sitting a ways down the ridge behind him, the lower half of her face covered with a checked bandanna against the blowing dust. Her hair blew out behind her shoulders.
The air had cooled, and she wore a fringed elk-skin jacket, which, she said when she’d unwrapped it from her bedroll and donned it earlier, had belonged to her lover, Ernesto Alabando, a wandering vaquero who had ridden for a time for her father, before there were no longer any cattle to tend at La Colina de Rosa.
She yelled from behind her neckerchief and above the wind, “San Gezo is just over the next pass!”
“Still a half day’s ride.” The Kid shook his head. “We’ll never make it before it rains and turns these arroyos to rivers!”
He looked down the ridge past Tomasina and their ground-reined horses to the abandoned goat herder’s shack in the crease between this ridge and the next. “We’ll spend the night here, finish our journey in the morning.” He offered a wan smile. “Don’t worry, senorita, you’ll be with your beau again soon.”
She smiled with her eyes, crawled up to him, and rested her hand against his cheek. She held his gaze for a time, and again he felt the heat of the girl penetrating every cell in his body. At the same time, a dark cloud swept through him, for he knew that all the pent-up passion inside her was reserved for Ernesto Alabando.
She would do anything, even lie with another, compromise her purity, to see her lover again.
She lowered her hand from the Kid’s face.
“He’s out there, isn’t he?” she asked, letting her gaze flick toward the eastern plain. “El Leproso.”
“Yes.”
“Will we be safe here?”
“As safe here as anywhere.”
Thunder boomed violently, and the rain began to fall at a slant—heavy raindrops the size of silver dollars.
She smiled again, confidently. “You have a plan, don’t you?”
He grinned devilishly. “Of course, I do, Tomasina.” He climbed to his feet and took her hand. “Come on. Let’s get inside before we have to swim for it!”
Hours later, when the rain had dwindled to a steady cadence on the stone shack’s leaky brush roof, the Kid turned from where he’d been cleaning his guns at the stout wooden table.
He looked at Tomasina where she lay on the cot near the scorched stone fireplace. A fire danced and popped and smoked against the raindrops tumbling into it through the chimney. It cast a gentle glow upon the girl’s right cheek and shone in the highlights in her hair.
She was even more beautiful in repose than she was awake. Asleep, she looked like a child. A sweet and tender, copper-haired, rose-lipped virginal child, eyelids pale as a dove’s wings.
And then it wasn’t Tomasina whom he was gazing at but his own life’s one true love, the beautiful Apache princess Elina, whom he’d met when he’d returned to Arizona Territory after the war.
After rising to the rank of first lieutenant and witnessing so much killing, Johnny Navarro had yearned for the healing that he thought he could find only with his mother’s people, the Chiricahua Apache, though his mother herself had died several years before from pneumonia. His father, Wayne Navarro, had been a rancher from the Great Bend country of Texas, and he’d disowned the Kid when the Kid had joined the Union army to fight against the Confederacy.
“Elina,” the Kid whispered, reaching out to close his hand over the sleeping girl’s shoulder. “Elina . . .”
She’d been killed by a drunken cavalry patrol—her and the rest of her small band, the People of the Ghost-faced Owl, when they’d been camped just north of the border in New Mexico Territory, in their traditional hunting grounds. The patrol had assumed they were the Apaches who’d been harassing the freight road between Lordsburg and Las Cruces, and they’d slipped into the canyon one night, set up their Gatling gun, and killed Elina and her entire band, while they’d slept in their wickiups.
The Kid had gone to Las Cruces with two braves for supplies. When they’d returned and the Kid saw the results of the massacre, he went as mad as a bruin fighting his way through a wildfire.
When the heavy clouds of insanity had parted, he’d stalked and killed every soldier in the patrol, some with the Gatling gun they’d used on the people who’d adopted him. He’d hacked out their eyes and cut out their hearts with his bowie knife, so that in the next world they would have no eyes to see with, no hearts to pump their blood with.
He’d left the killers’ hearts and eyes for the coyotes and bobcats to fight over.
The ghosts of the killers would linger forever in the nether world, blind and hollow as scarecrows, wailing their eternal regrets for what they’d done to Johnny Navarro’s people and Elina, his life’s one true love . . .
And for two years following, he’d killed every soldier and lawman who came after him. Now it was mostly bounty hunters dogging his trail. He’d culled the herd until he was down now to the most dangerous stalkers—men like El Leproso . . .
His hand must have tightened on the girl’s shoulder. She groaned, opened her eyes, turned to him. Her gaze shifted to something behind him. Her lower jaw sagged, and then the owl gave its raucous scream.
CHAPTER 10
TRICKERY BY STARLIGHT
The Rio Concho Kid swung around, his gun in his hand, clicking the Schofield’s hammer back. The owl sitting on the ledge of the window behind him merely blinked its little eyes that re
flected the crimson flames of the fire dancing in the hearth.
The Kid lifted the revolver’s barrel, depressing the hammer.
“Does he follow you everywhere?” the girl asked.
“Pretty much.”
The Kid rose and walked over to the table where his freshly cleaned and loaded Winchester lay.
Tomasina flung her blanket back and sat up, dropping her long legs over the edge of the cot. She was staring at the strange gray owl staring back at her from the window ledge.
“He’s saying something . . . with his eyes. What?”
“He’s telling me I need to keep my head clear. A real pain in the old caboose sometimes.”
The Kid donned his hat and walked to the door.
“Is he out there?” Tomasina asked, her voice quavering slightly.
“That’s what I’m gonna find out.” He placed his hand on the leather-and-steel latch. “You stay here, keep your head down.”
“Kid?”
He looked at her. She leaned forward, arms on her knees. “What was her name?”
He hesitated, turned to the door, felt a knot grow in his throat. “Elina,” he said, and then opened the door and went out.
He took a moment to draw a deep breath, to suppress the clinging, gnawing grief and sorrow, the frustration of knowing that his life should have turned out so much differently from all this killing, all this lone wandering and running. He and Elina should be together. They should have a child, maybe another on the way.
They should have a small rancho along the Rio Concho, so many good years ahead . . .
He looked carefully around the old goat herder’s shack, finding no boot prints but his own and the girl’s in the clay mud. After he investigated the old lean-to stable and found both horses calm and undisturbed, he walked up the east ridge and hunkered down at the top.
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