Last Ride of Jed Strange (9781101559635)

by Leslie, Frank

  “Are quite finished. High time you danced with your father, my dear. You know the old knees are a mite creaky, but the boys told me they’d take it easy on the next waltz.”

  Lenore gave Colter a reluctant, parting glance before placing her hands on her father’s shoulders and letting the bandy-legged old graybeard step her stiffly off into the dancing crowd, safely out of the scar-faced shit-kicker’s reach. Relieved but also embarrassed for the summary dismissal, Colter turned to see many faces regarding him reprovingly.

  The lieutenant, however, was nowhere to be seen.

  Colter fought his way to the front of the dance hall, then, grabbing his tan, flat-brimmed Stetson off a wooden wall peg, set it snugly on his head and walked out the open double doors. As he crossed the roofed veranda, a cloud of rich tobacco smoke wafted around his head, and a familiar voice said, “Where you goin’, boy? Wear out them boots, didja—on the scout for another pair?”

  His fellow horse breaker, Willie Tappin, wheezed a laugh and elbowed the young lady beside him—one of the younger girls from “sud’s row,” the steamy, barracklike buildings in which the fort’s clothes were washed by eight or nine hired women, including the pear-shaped, plain-faced one now standing with Willie, looking as out of place here as Colter felt.

  Willie winked, squinting through the fetid smoke cloud billowing around his long, craggy face. “Now, if you could find you a pair of boots with wings, that’d really strike the fancy of Miss Lenore.”

  “I reckon it would at that. But I’d be too worn out to wear ’em,” Colter said, heading down off the gallery steps to the hard-packed yard where the silhouettes of men stood around, the coals of the cigarettes or cigars glowing in the darkness. “This night’s about done me in, Willie. I’m headin’ to bed.”

  He threw up an arm in parting and headed in the direction of the stables.

  “Hey,” Willie called.

  Colter heard the horse breaker’s boots on the steps, and then the man, a few inches taller than Colter but stooped from too many separated shoulders, was beside him, matching his long-legged stride. “What’s got your tail in a droop, Red? I seen you in there dancin’ with the princess of southern Arizona. Hell, if you didn’t want her, you could have passed her to me!”

  “I reckon I feel like a dancin’ bear, Willie.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Ah, hell—I don’t know what I mean.” Colter slowed his pace, glancing at Willie and jerking his chin toward the long, adobe brick dance hall lit behind them and from which the banjo and violin music emanated clearly on the cool, dry night air of Arizona Territory. “Go on back and enjoy the dance, Willie.”

  Loud, measured clapping and foot stomping sounded and Colter saw through the dance hall’s open doors the silhouettes of the dancers lined up facing their partners for the Virginia reel—the one dance Colter was familiar with and at which he wouldn’t have been as likely to make such a fool of himself.

  Willie scowled at him, then canted his long, horsey face to one side and brushed a thumbnail across his bristled chin. “Red, you did realize she was spoken for, right? You weren’t thinkin’ you were doin’ anything more than just dancin’ with that purty little gal, were you?”

  “Of course I did. I ain’t a cork-headed moron. Now, leave me the hell alone, Willie!”

  “All right, all right. Have it your way, Red!” Willie backed away, raising his hands, palms out, then turned and strode off in the direction of the dance hall.

  “At least,” Colter muttered to himself, feeling like a lovelorn schoolboy, “I thought I did.” There’d just been something so damned intoxicating about the girl that he’d found himself, even while counting his dance steps, wishfully believing there might be something more between them.

  It was a sparkling Arizona night, the cool air like cactus wine in nostrils and lungs. The greasewood and cholla stood like witches’ fingers against the sky lit by a rising powder-horn moon as Colter followed the meandering footpath through the desert, flanking the main part of the fort, out behind the quartermaster’s and commissary storehouses, toward the cavalry stables and hay barn and the sprawl of cottonwood pole corrals.

  The night’s beauty was lost on the young cowboy, who went on into the log barracks abutting one of the stables and that was reserved for the horse breakers. It was more of an Apache-like “jacal” than a genuine building—constructed as it was of upright mesquite logs chinked with mud and straw and roofed with leafed cottonwood branches to keep out the sun and occasional rain.

  He didn’t bother with a lamp but quickly undressed in the dark and slacked onto his lower, ironwood-frame bunk, forcing himself to sleep.

  He was vaguely surprised to find out how easy it was to throw himself into oblivion even after the complicated night with Lenore and after the shootings earlier in the afternoon, his leaving another six men dead behind him. He heard Willie a few moments later when his partner came in and undressed and crawled, rasping and snorting, into his bunk above Colter, making Colter’s own bunk quiver. But he was fast asleep soon after Willie had punched his pillow and settled in—until his eyes opened suddenly, his senses alive.

  He didn’t know how much time had passed, or what had awakened him. Whatever it was, it hadn’t awakened Willie, who snored deeply, whistling, in the bunk above Colter.

  Maybe Willie was able to sleep so deeply because Willie didn’t have a price on his head. Remembering the midget’s warning, Colter reached for the Remington revolver he’d holstered to a bedpost, tossed his covers aside, and dropped his feet to the floor.

  A shadow passed outside a near, moonlit window, and Colter clicked the Remy’s hammer back, his heart thudding slow but hard in his ears.

  Chapter 4

  Colter pulled his jeans on over his threadbare balbriggans and looped the leather suspenders up over his shoulders. He wrapped his shell belt, gun, and holster around his lean waist, donned his hat, and glanced at Willie still sawing logs on his bunk. Colter stepped into his boots and then stole quietly over to the door and tripped the latch.

  He gritted his teeth as the hinges squawked but continued to slowly draw the door open. When he had the door half-open, he stood there, cocked Remington now in his hand, angling a look into the moonlit yard beyond the brush ramada fronting the shack.

  The corrals were forty yards from the shack, their rails looking like black velvet in silhouette though their tops were furred with pearl moonlight. The ground was floury pale. The windmill between Colter and the corrals stood still and silent, the wooden blades unmoving. There were three horses in the corral—three broomtail broncs from California that were up next for breaking—and they, too, stood still as black statues. The water in the stone holding tank glistened like quicksilver.

  Nothing moved. The eerie silence pricked the hair at the back of Colter’s neck. Not even a night bird called, nor did a coyote howl. The coyotes milling around the washes surrounding Camp Grant usually howled nearly all night long.

  Colter caressed his Remy’s hammer with his thumb and ran his tongue across his bottom lip. He’d come down here to Arizona to escape the bounty hunters in Colorado. Could more have followed him here? Maybe he shouldn’t have been so stubborn, and changed his name to an alias. But he’d thought he’d be safe here at Grant amongst soldiers. As remote as the fort was, and as much as he kept to himself, avoiding most towns, surely his name hadn’t spread beyond the fort.

  Who cared about a scar-faced young horse breaker who kept to himself?

  Of course, no matter what he called himself, the scar on his face would give him away. That’s undoubtedly how the midget and the others had identified him at the swing station. It was Colter Farrow’s mark of Cain, and he’d wear it to his grave. But it had taught him one thing, he mused now, as he glanced down at the cocked Remy held steady in his work-thickened left hand. It had taught him h
ow to use a gun—in fact, he’d become about as fast, one Colorado newspaper had claimed, as John Wesley Hardin.

  Of course that same writer had also said he was as mean and crazy as Hardin, that he’d filed his Remington’s front sight off and rigged the hammer for fanning, and that his “demon eyes” matched the “mark of the Devil” on his cheek. You couldn’t put much stock in the words of writers. They just wanted to sell stories—the more lurid and exaggerated, the better.

  But Colter knew he was fast. He had to be or he wouldn’t be standing here now, feeling that sudden, almost unsettling calm float over him again, easing the tension in every muscle and bone, and slowing his heart.

  Colter drew a breath, then stepped quickly out under the ramada, putting his back to the wall beside the half-open door. He swung the pistol from right to left and back again, looking and listening. Nothing. He was about to step forward when something moved in the corner of his right eye, and someone gave a short, soft whistle.

  Colter swung around to face the man-shaped shadow stepping out from behind the shack to stand off the end of the ramada, his gloved hands raised shoulder-high. “Easy, shit-kicker.”

  Behind Colter rose a ratcheting click. The familiar sound froze him as would the rattle of a diamondback. A man on the opposite end of the shack said, “Set the gun down, boy.”

  Colter turned his head a little, saw a tall silhouette in a tan kepi aiming a pistol at him, the moonlight gleaming on the bluing. Colter depressed the Remington’s hammer and set the gun down on the bench abutting the shack’s front wall beside him.

  “What’s this about?” Colter asked.

  The man in front of him, whose pale face he could not make out beneath the square bill of a dark blue forage cap but whose voice Colter recognized as belonging to Lieutenant Damian Hobart, one of Lieutenant Belden’s cronies, said, “The pleasure of your company has been requested behind the corral.”

  Colter curled his upper lip though he had to admit to feeling relieved that it was merely Belden calling and not a passel of greasy bounty hunters ready to take his head back to Sapinero, Colorado, where the mangled Bill Rondo was holed up in a rooming house, his craggy face sporting the same brand as the one he’d given Colter. “Belden wanna dance with me now, too?”

  “Somethin’ like that,” said the man behind him, whose voice he thought he recognized as that of Lieutenant A. J. McKnight. The three could often be seen together drinking and playing cards in the saloon off the fort sutler’s store at night, or heading off to Tucson during weekend furloughs.

  Colter stepped down off the gallery steps. As the two men moved to flank him, he began walking toward the corrals ahead and on his left. A breeze came up to churn some dust, straw, and horse manure, and Colter blinked against it. The windmill blades gave a little squeal. Then the breeze died, and Colter walked around the far corral to the back, where he could see a dark figure sitting on the open tailgate of a hay wagon.

  The three California broncs didn’t move other than to switch their tails, annoyed at being disturbed at this late hour.

  Colter rounded the corral’s rear corner and approached the hay wagon. Belden sat on the tailgate with his legs dangling, ankles crossed. He had a bottle cradled in his lap the way a woman would hold a sleeping child, and a long black cheroot smoldered in his right, black-gloved hand.

  He looked at Colter, dark blue eyes looking white in the moonlight. He didn’t say anything and neither did Colter. Another slight breeze rose, blowing Colter’s long hair out in front of him, brushing it against his cheeks. McKnight and Hobart stood silently behind Colter. He could sense them grinning, and he could smell the alcohol and tobacco smoke on all of them.

  “You know,” Belden said finally, cocking his head to one side and blowing out two smoke plumes through his nostrils, “a kid like you, as scarred up and dumb and ugly as you are, really oughta just stay back here with the horses.”

  Colter shrugged. “Your girl just wouldn’t have it, I guess.”

  Behind Colter, Hobart sighed deeply.

  Belden stared at Colter from beneath the brim of his dark blue cavalry kepi with the gold braid encircling the crown. “Is that supposed to be funny?”

  “I’m just sayin’ she invited me to the dance,” Colter said, putting some steel into his voice. “I didn’t invite her. So I danced with her.”

  “You know why she danced with you—don’t you?”

  “I guess she thinks I’m pretty.”

  “No. She thinks you’re ugly. But, see, she’s always trying to save stray cats and stray dogs. The uglier the better. Even had her a crippled coyote for a time. That’s just what she does. Everybody knows that.”

  “Then what are we doin’ here?”

  “Everybody knows that, it seems, except you.”

  “What if I said I know that?”

  “Knowing that isn’t gonna keep you from starin’ at her all dog-eyed, next time she comes around to watch you bust your broncs. Or keep you from accepting her invitation to the next dance.” Belden set the bottle aside and gained his feet, balling his fists at his sides. “Or thinkin’ you might have a chance, as ludicrous as that would be.”

  Colter chuckled at the absurdity of the situation. Also, possibly, to cover his own chagrin of knowing that there was a kernel of truth in what the lieutenant had said. Part of him had indeed fallen for the girl, and that part of him made the rest of him feel like a damn fool.

  He glanced at Hobart and McKnight behind him. “Three against one?”

  “No, no.” Belden removed his hat and gloves and set them on the tailgate beside the whiskey bottle. “I fight like this, kid.”

  Colter didn’t see the straight left jab hammering toward him through the darkness before it smacked him in the mouth. It seemed to shove his lower jaw back into his skull though he didn’t feel a thing until the ground came up to smack him hard from behind.

  Suddenly, he was sitting in the gravel, his hat tumbling off his shoulder, hair in his eyes. Warm blood oozed from his bottom lip. His head began pounding in earnest though only for about three beats before the pounding dulled and the two images of Belden standing in front of him, slamming his right fist into his left palm, merged into one.

  Fury burned hot and wild in Colter Farrow.

  He glowered up at the lieutenant as, chuckling, the other two men climbed the corral fence behind Colter, hooking their heels over the bottom rail, McKnight removing the cap from a flask and settling in for the show.

  Colter brushed his fist across his lip and spat a gob of blood on the ground. “That was a sucker punch, you son of a bitch.”

  “What’d you call me, shit-kicker?”

  “A son of a bitch. A cheap, yellow-livered bitch.”

  Hobart chuckled but broke it off sharply when Belden flicked his cold gaze at him. Holding his fists out in the bare-knuckle style, Belden shuffled sideways around Colter. “Get up.”

  Colter got his boots under him and heaved himself to his feet. Quickly, he appraised his opponent. Colter had little chance. Dripping wet, Colter weighed a hundred and fifty pounds. He stood an inch shy of six feet. Belden had two inches and a good thirty pounds on him, and, judging by the deftness of that first punch, he’d obviously boxed a few times in the past, and hadn’t let the rules fetter him. Colter had heard rumors about him using the feckless enlisted men as punching bags, and now he believed them.

  Just the same, Colter had no intention of turning tail. He’d get in a lick or two before the lieutenant beat him into a miserable night’s sleep.

  Raising his own fists, mimicking fighters he’d watched in the past, he crouched and shuffled sideways, bobbing and weaving to avoid a sudden strike from his opponent.

  Belden grinned savagely, mockingly. He came at Colter hard and lightning fast.

  Colter tried to duck the first slashing
right, but the more experienced fighter had anticipated the move, and the man’s bulging right fist clipped Colter on the nub of his scarred right cheek. The blow punched Colter’s face into the man’s other fist, which caught Colter on the left side of his mouth. Suddenly, he was stumbling backward once more. Either McKnight or Hobart stuck out a boot and Colter pushed off it, regaining his balance and spreading his feet.

  He didn’t wait for Belden but stepped forward quickly and landed a lucky punch on the lieutenant’s chin. The blow did not faze the lieutenant but only evoked a sneer before Belden came forward once more, and Colter felt like a punching bag that the slashing rights and hammering lefts pummeled with merciless speed and force until Colter lowered his spinning, ringing head, feeling both eyes swelling shut and blood dribbling down from his split lips and across his lower jaw and chin.

  Then Belden punched him hard in the belly—once, twice, three times—before the ground came up with the force of a runaway freight train.

  The wind exploded from Colter’s lungs.

  He rolled, arms crossed on his battered ribs, groaning.

  He tried to stand. His ribs screamed, nearly drowning out the cracked bells clanging in his ears.

  He eased himself onto his back and looked up at Belden staring down at him, the man’s head silhouetted against the milky wash of moonlight dulling the stars scattered like glitter above him. The man’s hair was mussed. That was all the damage Colter had done. Belden’s white teeth showed under his thick black mustache. His jaws bulged.

  “Think you’re done?” He shook his head. “You’re not done.” He glanced at Hobart and McKnight. “Hold him.”

  Belden’s two cronies climbed down off the corral. They each reached down and hauled Colter up by an arm, each twisting a limb behind Colter’s back. He could have fought them off about as well as an injured sparrow could have fought off a hungry wolf pack, for he hadn’t sucked a full breath since Belden’s second, gut-busting blow to his solar plexus.