Crossing Fire River

by Ralph Cotton

  “How would I know?” said Iron Head. “We got here at the same time, remember?”

  “Yeah, I remember,” said Oats. “We follow these sonsabitches for a week, and then some other bastard steps in and takes our prize. Life ain’t fair, and that’s the whole of it.”

  Iron Head looked down where the two bandits’ tracks had intersected with a single set of hoofprints. “We go after the one who took the gold. At least there is only one now.”

  “That’s easy enough,” said Freedus.

  “You’re not real smart, are you, Free Boy?” Oats said with a bitter expression. “Whoever the one is, he just killed two of Jake Goshen’s gunmen. Does that tell you anything about him?”

  Bobby Freedus considered it, then replied, “That he’s a Texan, maybe?”

  “Jesus,” said Oats; he shook his head.

  Iron Head did the same. But he added, “Whoever he is, he must’ve got the drop on these two. But we know he’s out there. We’ll be ready for him.”

  “I sure as hell hope so,” said Oats, sounding none too sure. “Meanwhile, cleave these twos’ heads off. We still got some bounty coming from the government.”

  “About forty dollars,” said Iron Head. “At least that’s something.”

  “But it ain’t the damn gold, is it?” Oats snapped back quickly. “It’s hardly worth the stink and the flies from carrying them around.”

  “We’ll get to the gold,” Freedus offered, not about to try to explain to Oats that the Texas remark had only been a joke. Nobody was in a joking mood; that was clear enough. He stooped down and pulled a bowie knife from his boot well. “So long as we’re carrying a head or two around it shows the federales we’re bounty hunters.”

  Iron Head gave a flat grin. “It shows that our hearts are in our work.”

  Oats let out a breath and calmed down. Freedus was right. If they were ever going to track down Jake Goshen and his gang and get their hands on the stolen German coins, they needed good cover. Bounty hunting for the Mexican government was perfect, for now anyway. “Get to cutting,” he said to Freedus in a friendlier tone. He nodded off toward the black storm clouds in the distance. “We’re going to catch up to him. We don’t need rain washing his tracks out.”

  Chapter 2

  Shaw had not been lucky enough to outride the storm, or outflank it, as he’d hoped to do. In fact, he’d ridden right into it. But that didn’t bother him. Weather played no favorites, he reminded himself wryly as he ripped a corner off a dirty shirt he’d found inside the speckled barb’s saddlebags. Beyond the narrow rock overhang lightning twisted and curled, followed by pounding thunder.

  He wrapped the cloth around a piece of downed tree limb and lit it with a wooden match. Holding the flickering torch before him, he half walked, half crawled into the low open crevice. The sound of a snake’s rattle moved away, deeper under the hillside as he ventured forward.

  “As long as you’re leaving anyway . . . ,” he murmured toward the snake under his breath, his big Colt out and cocked in his right hand.

  Only by a stroke of luck had he happened upon a small cave as he’d put the speckled barb up a mud-slick trail, the other horse and the mule trudging along behind. When water rushing down the trail reached halfway up the horses’ forelegs, he coaxed the animals upward onto a rock ledge where an overhang provided some shelter from wind and water. It was there he’d spotted the black entrance to the cave and saw the weathered leather shoe lying in the dirt just inside the crevice opening. Curiosity had gotten the better of him.

  Torch in hand, he managed to stand in a crouch as the cavern widened, revealing its dusty six-by-fourteen-foot floor. Across from him he saw the last three inches of the rattler’s tail slide away under a rock wall. He looked around carefully in the flickering torchlight, then lowered the Colt back into its holster.

  Seeing a wide drag mark across the dust and a set of fading boot prints leading back toward the entrance, he stepped forward, holding the torch in front of him. As the black shadow gave way to the dim light, he spotted the half-skeletal and half-mummified remains of a man lying beneath a thin cover of dust. He stopped and stared, his expression stoic, as he was not the least bit surprised by his discovery.

  This was not the first dead man he’d found in this desert wasteland, and he doubted it would be the last. Death was too commonplace to cause concern, he thought, looking all around the dusty corpse until his eyes came upon a black leather bag. A doctor’s medical bag . . . ?

  Kneeling over the dusty bag, he reached out a gloved finger and pulled the top open, noting a bare spot where a name had been removed. “All right, whoever you are,” he murmured sidelong to both the corpse and the medicine bag, “let’s hear your sad story. . . .”

  Outside the small cave the storm pounded along the rock lands and roared across the endless desert floor. Shaw held the torch closer to the open bag, tipping it with one hand until its contents spilled freely into the dirt. Among an assortment of gauze and medical instruments he saw a small blue bottle of laudanum and a larger half-pint bottle of what his trained eye identified as rye whiskey. Opening the cork and sniffing the contents confirmed it.

  He recorked the bottle and laid it aside, along with the laudanum. First the flask of whiskey he’d taken off the dead bandit, now this. He shook his head. “Where was everybody when I needed them?”

  He walked in a crouch back to the entrance, then stooped down and looked out at the horses and the mule, seeing the three huddled closely against the rock wall. They were wet but no longer being battered by the blast of wind-whipped rain. It would have to do, Shaw told himself, turning back to the corpse, the leather bag, and the fading boot prints leading back to the entrance.

  In moments he’d scraped together enough twigs and dried scraps of wood and brush from the dirt floor to start a small fire. While the blaze flickered off the jagged rock walls, he searched the corpse’s pockets, noting the thick black stains surrounding two bullet holes in the dry, decomposed chest cavity.

  He finished searching the pockets—trouser, suit coat and shirt—and found nothing. He sat back on his heels and gazed all around again, looking for anything he might have missed. No money . . . Again he was not surprised. But a man dressed in a suit and string tie—a doctor no doubt—carrying no identification? He glanced again at the leather bag, then at the boot prints.

  “Somebody went to a lot of trouble dragging you in here,” he murmured to the skeletal face covered by only the remnants of thin parchment skin. He thought about the two dead bandits he’d simply left lying where they’d fallen, the same way they would have left him had things gone their way. The law of the desert, he reminded himself, reaching out and flipping the leather bag shut with finality.

  Who went to this kind of trouble for a man they’d killed and robbed? Better still, he asked himself, looking at the bottles of whiskey and laudanum lying in the dirt, who killed a man and left good liquor and dope behind? Nobody he knew of, not even himself, and he was no bandit. He stared blankly at the corpse for a long silent moment, then said with a sigh, “All right, Doc, it looks like you’ll be coming with me. . . .”

  By the time the storm had passed and the land had begun drying, the sun had moved over into the low evening sky and lay simmering in a pool of fiery red. Shaw watered the animals in the storm’s runoff and divided a small portion of dried oats he’d found lying loose in the speckled barb’s saddlebags. The barb had brought his attention to the loose grain by poking its nose back toward the bags and stomping its front hoof in frustration.

  “Okay, I hear you,” Shaw said.

  While the animals ate, he’d wrapped the thin, brittle body in a threadbare blanket that lay rolled up behind the barb’s saddle. Dragging the wrapped corpse from the cave, he laid it over the mule’s knobby back and tied it down loosely with strips of cloth he ripped from the blanket’s edge. Looking east toward the border, he envisioned the rocky desert trail leading toward a small supply town he’d passed throug
h over two years earlier.

  “Banton . . . ?” he said aloud, recalling the small dusty border town. He glanced toward the blanketed corpse as if playing a guessing game with the bundle of dry hide and bones. After a moment he let out a breath, considering the long, harsh trail stretched out before him. “Yeah, Banton,” he said to the corpse. “That’s where you’re from.”

  When the speckled barb had finished eating, Shaw stepped over, slipped its bit back into its mouth, picked up its reins and said, “That’s all the handouts you’ll get for a while.” He swung up into the saddle, tapped his boot heels to the barb’s sides and rode away, leading the mule and the bay behind him.

  Shaw rode until the sun had sank below a stretch of sand hills and broken rock west of him. He stayed up above the wet flatlands and skirted the rock hillsides, giving the land its proper drying time. By noon tomorrow he knew the blazing desert sun would have done its job. The streaks of muddy water that he now saw stretched across the rolling sand flats below him would be gone, boiled back up into the endless Mexican sky.

  In the last blue light of evening, a large desert vulture batted down from the sand hills and broken rock to his left and soared off into the darkness above his head. The sound of the large fleeing bird called for his attention. He knew of no animal other than man who could scare a vulture from its roost. Yet instead of looking up along the edge of the hillside he gazed straight ahead.

  Easy . . . If there were someone up there, they weren’t about to skylight themselves to him. He was in no position to let someone know he was onto them. Keeping his head down, he effortlessly quickened the barb’s pace a little, veering slightly upward into a stand of chimney rock and saguaro cactus. Once inside the shelter of rocks he’d have all the time he needed to find out who was dogging him, and why.

  When Shaw and his animals had vanished into the looming darkness, higher up on the hillside, another winged scavenger lifted from its perch on a rock and batted out across the night sky. In the darkness a tall Mexican known as Juan Facil Lupo—Easy John—stepped forward in a black riding duster and a wide black sombrero and turned quietly to the three other men spread out along the rocks behind him.

  “I recognized the two outlaws’ horses, but I do not recognize the man riding Claw’s speckled barb,” said Lupo, in good border English. He searched the faces in the darkness until he found the one he sought, a wiry Scots-Irish gunman named Maynard Lilly. “What do you make of it, Senor Lilly?” he asked, intentionally avoiding the opinion of his scout, the man who had misled them into the hillside of roosting vultures.

  “I say it’s Claw’s horse certain enough,” Maynard Lilly replied. “If that is not Claw Shanks riding it, I say we need to know just who it is.”

  “Si, you are right,” said Lupo. “Perhaps the body on the mule is that of Claw Shanks himself.” He considered something for a moment, then added, “But if that is Claw’s body, where is Paco Zuetta?”

  After a moment of silence, a young Texan named Booth Anson, who wore the fringed buckskins of a trail scout, said, “Why do we even give a damn? If Paco and Claw are dead, our jobs are finished here. I say leave this man alone. You can head on back to Mexico City, send me and Wallick and Lilly home to Texas.”

  “Oh . . . ?” Lupo turned to the cocky young scout. “Perhaps you’d like to stir up some more vultures and send them his way, make sure he knows the four of us are trailing him?”

  Anson felt the sting of Lupo’s words. “He didn’t see us,” he replied.

  “What makes you so certain?” said Lupo, showing the scout more patience than he was accustomed to showing anyone. His fingertips tapped idly on the butt of his holstered Colt as he spoke.

  Anson noted the tapping fingers. Instead of answering Lupo’s question, he responded in his own defense, “How was I supposed to know these hills are full of vultures roosting anyway?”

  The third man, an Arkansan named Wilbur Wallick stepped forward and said in an even tone, “It’s not so much that you should have known they’re roosting here, as it is that you should have had better sense than to stir them up.” He looked at the Scotsman. “Is that what we’re saying, Lilly?”

  Instead of answering, Lilly tipped up his dusty derby hat and stared coldly at Anson, who stood close by. “I say if you were any kind of scout at all, you would not have stirred up this hillside full of gut pluckers and got us seen up here.”

  “I said, he didn’t see us,” Anson repeated insistently, glad it was Lilly he now defended himself to instead of Lupo.

  “Aye, but do you know he didn’t see us?” the Scotsman asked, pushing for the same answer Anson had ignored a moment earlier.

  “I know because I was watching him,” Anson shot back angrily at Lilly. He wasn’t about to take any guff from the older gunman. “I know because he didn’t even look up. I know because it’s my job to know. That’s how I know.”

  Lilly gave a dark chuckle. “Yes, of course you know, you bloody young frisk, ya.” He looked away in the darkness and spit and grumbled under his breath.

  “What did he call me?” Anson asked no one in particular.

  “Don’t act like a child,” Lupo said stiffly, still keeping his temper under control. “Get the horses. Let’s get behind this man and see why he has Claw’s and Paco’s horses. I want to get to him before those bounty hunters do.” He gestured a nod back across the desert floor and added gruffly, “Now get moving, pronto!”

  “All right, but first I want to know what he called me,” Anson insisted, staring hard at Lilly even as Lupo turned and walked away toward the horses.

  “He called you a frisk,” said Wallick. “Now come on, let’s go.”

  “What does that mean?” Anson asked the Scotsman, standing in a way that blocked him from walking toward his horse.

  The Scotsman gave a short, tolerant smile. “It means whatever you bloody well choose for it to mean.” He wagged a finger in warning. “Careful your choice doesn’t lead you to an ugly spot.”

  “An ugly spot?” Anson’s hand drew nearer to the butt of his holstered Colt.

  Wallick tugged at Anson’s arm. “Let it go, it means nothing.”

  “Unhand me.” Anson rounded Wallick’s grip from his forearm. But he took a breath and let his blood simmer a bit. “Whatever I choose for it to mean, eh?” he said to Lilly.

  “Correct you are, laddie,” said Lilly. He stepped past Anson as the young scout gave way for him.

  “So what if I take it to mean that I’m one strapping fine fellow? Is that what it means, then?”

  “I could not have explained it better,” Lilly said, feigning cordiality over his shoulder. Yet as he walked he closed his hand around the bone handle of the big bowie knife he carried holstered just under his left arm.

  Wallick grabbed the young scout’s forearm again. “Let it go,” he insisted, lowering his voice this time and speaking almost in a whisper.

  “I don’t answer to that son of a bitch,” Anson grumbled.

  “No, but you do answer to Lupo,” said Wallick. “We all three do. You best keep that in mind, else you’ll end us all up back in prison with that iron collar around our necks.”

  “I know who I work for, Wallick,” the young scout said harshly, keeping his voice lowered. “As far as I’m concerned, let the bounty hunters have this saddle tramp. We came looking for Claw Shanks, nobody else. If he’s dead, the deal’s done.”

  “We don’t know that Claw’s dead,” Wallick replied under his breath as the two men reached their horses behind Lupo and the Scotsman. “If he’s not, we best find him and take him back to the general alive, the way Lupo said we would.”

  Anson offered no further words on the matter. He swung up atop his horse and gazed in the direction of the border. “Do you know how long it’s been since I seen my own country?” he said to Wallick, not expecting an answer nor waiting for one. “Too damned long.” He gigged his horse forward.

  “Proceed quietly,” Lupo ordered in a hushed tone. But the y
oung scout murmured a curse word under his breath as he rode off ahead of the others.

  Beside Lupo, the Scotsman said, “I have never known a man so irritating as our dear Mr. Anson. I couldn’t blame you were you to lift your long-barreled Colt and empty it into his back.”

  “It was you who told me he is a good scout,” said Lupo. He kept his voice and manner even and under control, as was his custom.

  “I told you he knew his way around on both sides of the border, not that he was a good scout,” said the Scotsman. He arched a brow and added, “A good scout should understand that he can get himself killed quickly out here and never be missed, eh?”

  Lupo didn’t answer, nor did he look toward the Scotsman. “I must get this job done, Senor Lilly. Serving my general and my country is the first and most important thing to me. I must let nothing else bother me or deter me from my task.” He gigged his horse ahead of Lilly and Wallick a few feet to keep from having to converse with them. The Scotsman looked at Wallick and shook his head with a knowing grin.

  “They call him Easy John, huh?” Lilly said under his breath to Wallick when Lupo had ridden far enough ahead.

  “Yep, Easy John is what they call him,” said Wallick. “Easy John, they say.”

  “I’m beginning to see why,” Lilly said with a shrug and a sigh, heeling his horse forward.

  Chapter 3

  Anson had no trouble finding the lone campfire glowing in a clearing on a rocky hillside, even though he could tell the man who built the blaze had taken precautions to not be easily spotted from the trail. “He should have killed that fire before he turned in,” the young scout whispered to Lupo and the Scotsman who stood crouched down beside him.

  “That mighta helped him some,” said Anson. He stared at the small circle of dim firelight as he spoke. “Some pretty good tracking if I do say so myself,” he added a bit haughtily. After his earlier mistake regarding the roosting vultures, he needed to reestablish himself as trail savvy.