A wide, rutted trail came down out of the east, to Colter’s left, and split the yard of the place before continuing on up into a jog of low hills in the west. He was looking at a stage relay station, most likely. Maybe one that served food and whiskey. He’d go in out of the sun for a time, give Northwest some water, parched corn, and rest, as well, before continuing on his way.
Colter sleeved sweat from his brow and booted the horse on down the hill.
Chapter 9
Colter turned onto the trail at the bottom of the hill, scattering a few chickens pecking at the edge of the yard in which several sun-blistered buildings crouched amongst dusty yucca plants and tumbleweeds.
A windmill stood in the middle of the yard, the blades turning lazily with a dry breeze, the sun making a lemon on the surface of the straw-flecked water in the stone tank. A small dust devil lifted between the windmill and the station house and died against the house—a long, low, brush-roofed shack with a sagging front gallery decorated with bleached animal skulls. Wooden shutters were thrown back from the windows, a few of which were covered with animal skins scraped thin enough to resemble waxed paper. The sign above the gallery’s roof of ironwood poles announced DELACORTE STAGE LINE RELAY STATION NUMBER 3.
Another sign nailed to a front gallery post offered BEER AND BEANS 10 CENTS. Yet another warned: NO APACHES. NOT EVEN TAME ONES! “Tame” had been underlined twice.
Three saddled horses stood on the far side of the windmill from Colter. As he angled past the windmill and the water tank, he saw a young boy standing with the horses, one hip hiked on the edge of the tank, his sunburned face turned to regard Colter over his right shoulder, squinting one eye.
No, not a boy, Colter saw as Northwest clomped toward the station house, the horse’s hooves kicking up little puffs of dust, some of which the breeze tried halfheartedly to lift and spin into devils. The person with the horses was a sunburned girl in a gray wool skirt and plaid, overlarge work shirt, its tails sticking out. She wore a brown felt hat with a bullet crown, and she had a homemade burlap satchel slung over her shoulder, like a purse.
Colter pinched his hat brim to the girl, who—with her tomboy’s face and bony body, she looked more like a boy in a dress than a girl—stared at him out of frosty blue eyes set wide below a shelf of straight blond bangs. He led Northwest around to the shaded side of the shack. Here, the horse would be out of sight from the front. He’d water the dun later, once the horse had cooled.
As he grabbed his Henry and swung down from the saddle, he noted the abating of the severe ache in his ribs and guts and even around his eyes and lips, and supposed there was nothing like rotgut whiskey and a ride in the hot, dry sun for healing. He threw the reins over the worn, silver cottonwood pole hitch rack on that side of the shack and set his rifle on his shoulder as he walked back around to the front and mounted the gallery steps.
“Hey, bucko.”
He half turned to see the puzzling youngster dropping the reins of the three horses and stepping away from the water tank, moving toward him. Beneath the hem of her long skirt, he saw that she wore brown, lace-up ankle boots like those a boy would wear, which also gave him the vague impression that he was looking at some strange boy in a skirt.
Colter waited as the kid came on, stopping about ten feet beyond Northwest’s switching tail, the coyote dun craning its head around to get a look at the kid, the dun’s expression as skeptical as Colter’s.
“Do me a favor?” Even the voice belonged to a boy.
“If I can.”
“Inside, you’ll find two scoundrels. One fat and old. The other young and skinny.” The girl-boy raised her dimpled chin toward the station house behind Colter. “I’d be obliged if you’d inform them that their employer has directed them to hustle their lazy, worthless carcasses out here to their horses, so we can lift some dust before sundown.” She narrowed her blue eyes, and an angry flush rose in her tanned, lightly freckled cheeks. “Please add that if they continue to imbibe in spirituous liquids and cavort with fallen women, which I strictly forbade at the start of our trek, I will dock their pay if not terminate their employ altogether and continue on to Mexico myself.”
Colter studied the sunburned little urchin, incredulous lines digging into his forehead. He turned, continued up the steps, crossed the gallery, and stepped through the door that was propped half-open with a rock.
Inside, a stocky Mexican sat behind a split cottonwood log bar on the right. He was perched on a stool, softly strumming a mandolin, and humming. A bottle sat on the bar with a grimy glass half-filled with the clear liquid. He had jade green eyes set below heavy black brows, and he let the rheumy orbs drift slowly to Colter as he continued to strum and hum.
His flashy handlebar mustache with waxed ends curling upward toward his nostrils was in sharp contrast to the stained apron he wore over a grimy wool tunic. A fat tabby cat lounged on the bar to his right, eyes closed, head dipping toward its paws, as though lulled by the man’s strumming.
The fat old man and the skinny young one that girl had referred to sat off to the right and back a ways, partially hidden in the room’s dingy shadows. They sat at a square table, the older one with a young, scantily clad Mexican woman straddling his left knee and whispering into his ear. The old man was giggling and caressing the girl’s arms over a sheer, light green wrap that was all she wore except for a faded red corset and black net stockings. The young man was leaning forward in his chair, staring delightfully at the girl on his partner’s lap, also giggling like an idiot as he lightly, eagerly stomped his feet.
Colter cleared his throat and hooked his thumb over his shoulder as he said, “You two are wanted outside.”
Both men looked at him, their eyes bright from drink. The older man wore buckskins and a deerskin vest, with two Colt Navy revolvers holstered on his hips. He had longish, dark brown hair liberally streaked with gray, and a long, horsey face with a thick wedge of a nose.
The young man wore ragged, patched denims and a hickory shirt, with a red bandanna knotted around his neck. A funnel-brimmed Stetson was tipped back off his high, bulging forehead. His close-set eyes and small nose and mouth gave him a ratlike look. He wore a Colt Army wedged into a wide brown belt, and a bowie knife jutted from a beaded sheath strapped to his right thigh.
“Ah, hell,” the old man said, scowling at Colter before turning toward his crestfallen partner. “Why doesn’t she just dry up and blow away?”
“A curse is what she is,” said the young man, bunching his red face, squinting his little eyes furiously, and pointing toward the door behind Colter. “I done told you, Wade—the girl is a curse some old Yaqui witch done hexed us with!”
“Forget her, Harlan,” said the older man, returning his attention to the girl on his knee.
Colter wandered over to the bar, noting that the rest of the dark room was empty. “Sounded like she meant business to me. In fact . . .” He glanced out the window to his right, beyond which the girl was just now stepping off the edge of the windmill’s water tank and into the stirrup of a tall, brown-and-white pinto mare. “I think she’s pullin’ her picket pin at this very moment.”
“Ah, shit,” said Wade.
“Damn that little cockroach,” Harlan said, pounding the table before him. “Just when we was startin’ to have fun!”
Colter gave his back to the two men as the oldster voiced his apologies to the puta on his hip and scraped his chair back with a baleful sigh, the whore muttering her regret and Harlan groaning miserably. The barman continued strumming his mandolin as he glanced at Colter, one brow arched.
“I’d like a bottle of whiskey,” the redhead said. “And I’ll take a plate o’ them beans, too.”
He looked at the big iron kettle bubbling atop the range behind the man. The steam lifting from the pot was rife with the aroma of beans, garlic, and chili peppers. Cor
n tortillas licked out from beneath the lid of a pan on the warming rack above the pot.
Colter’s empty belly chugged.
“No whiskey, senor,” said the barman as he rose from his stool and set the mandolin atop the bar, the cat lifting its head and regarding Colter with eyes as expressionless as two gold marbles. “Tequila. Agave.”
Colter gave a disgruntled snort. He’d just started getting the whiskey down without his belly bucking like a wild stallion. But maybe the tequila wouldn’t be all that different. Possibly not as harsh. He’d never tried it before.
“All right.”
The barman had turned lazily away to dish up a plate of steaming beans. He added two tortillas from the pan on the warming rack before setting the plate on the bar, then grabbing a clear, unlabeled bottle off a shelf behind him and setting the bottle on the table beside the plate. He opened his hands in front of his chest as though to catch a ball and said in his heavy Spanish accent, “One dollah, senor.”
Colter fished around in his pants, glad he’d been paid a week ago and hadn’t had time to spend the twenty-two dollars he’d made for a month of horse-breaking at Camp Grant, and flipped it onto the cottonwood planks. He hauled his rifle over to a table in the room’s rear shadows, near a cold wood stove, then returned to the bar. As he picked up his plate, bottle, and glass, he caught the barman inspecting the S branded on his cheek.
Colter looked at the ostentatiously mustached Mexican, and the man quickly averted his gaze, picking up the mandolin and hiking a hip on his stool. The cat was not so kind—it continued to brashly study Colter with unblinking but sullen, possibly disapproving, interest. The redhead turned away from both the man and the cat, made his way back to the table, and slacked into a chair, facing the door and the two front windows, one on either side of it.
Wade and Harlan had gone out, and they were just now stepping drunkenly into their saddles as the strange girl rode out of the yard the way Colter had come into it, hipping around in her saddle to regard her two slothful employees with bitter disdain. He could hear her yelling something at the men in her croaking, raspy voice, but he couldn’t make out what it was. Wade and Harlan merely glowered like two schoolboys caught roughhousing at recess, and reluctantly booted their mounts along behind her.
Colter quickly downed half a shot of tequila, not minding the taste as much as he thought he would though it was a little like drinking coal oil mixed with fruit juice, then took a break to lead Northwest over to the water tank. When he returned to the station house, he hunkered back down over his meal, forcing himself to eat slowly despite the seemingly bottomless pit south of his breastbone and enjoying the soft, melodious strumming of the barman.
The rataplan of oncoming riders lured his gaze to the front of the station house. The thudding of hooves grew louder until a puff of tan dust swept into view beyond the window to the left of the door, and two riders drew their trotting horses up in front of the hitch rack beyond the window to the door’s right. The riders were soldiers clad in tan or blue kepis or billed forage caps, dark blue tunics, and light blue trousers, some with the same deerskin inseams that Colter wore in his denims, to keep their pants from wearing out as they rode. Three more trotted up behind them, drew rein, and, speaking amongst themselves as the horses snorted and blew, swung down from their McClellan saddles.
Colter nearly dropped his spoon. Renewing his grip on it, still hunkered over his plate, he stared out the window to the right of the door, squinting, trying to get a better look at the soldiers. But the window was obscured with wafting dust that came through to powder the tables near the front of the room, and the men themselves were so coated in the dust that he couldn’t make out much except that they were badly sunburned.
Could he be lucky enough that Hobart was part of this group?
His pulse throbbed like snakebites. As the men batted dust from their tunics and pants with their hats, a low hum rising as they spoke amongst themselves, and boots pounded the cottonwood logs of the gallery, Colter glanced at his rifle. Then he dropped his left hand beneath the table, closed two fingers around the walnut grips of his Remington, and gave the pistol a little tug to loosen it.
He lifted his right hand back onto the table and continued to try to casually fork beans into his mouth as the soldiers dunked their heads in the water barrel outside on the gallery. They stayed out there, talking and washing, occasionally chuckling, until the front door widened suddenly and the first of the soldiers came in, setting his hat back on his now-wet head.
His face was cleared of dust. It was as pink as an Arizona sunrise, and it belonged to Lieutenant A. J. McKnight. Colter dropped his eyes quickly but then remembered that the newcomers likely couldn’t see him, at least not well, sitting back in the shadows as he was. So he lifted his gaze to scrutinize the other soldiers clomping in, wet hair dripping onto the shoulders and breasts of their dust-powdered tunics.
The two men behind McKnight were a corporal and a sergeant, respectively. They were followed a few seconds later by another corporal. Then a tall man with a dripping red-blond mustache walked in, clamping his hat under one arm while he ran both hands through his thick, wet red-blond hair and saying, “Hey, Calderon, a round of your best tequila for me and the boys!”
“Ah, Lieutenant Hobart!” said the bartender, setting his guitar atop the bar planks and rising, grinning broadly at the last of the soldiers. “What brings you to this godforsaken country? Apaches, or”—he slid his gaze to the young Mexican whore sitting back in a chair at the table that Wade and Harlan had vacated—“Pilar?”
Colter had looked up suddenly. Excitement and rage, like boiling water, churned in his belly and danced in his knees.
As the whore ran an emery board across her nails with a desultory air, she looked up from beneath her arched black brows to quirk her lips in an alluring smile at the soldiers.
The soldiers all looked at Pilar, grinning. Finally, Hobart turned to the barman, who was splashing tequila into five shot glasses while the cat gained its feet and arched its back disdainfully at the newcomers.
“Unfortunately, neither,” said Hobart, reaching out suddenly and swiping the cat off the bar. “Good Lord, man, don’t you know those things carry vermin?”
The cat hit the floor behind the bar with a thud and an indignant yowl, then, hissing, tail raised, slinked out from under the bar and on out the half-open front door.
Calderon chuckled and said, “Lieutenant, I must warn you—you have made a nasty enemy in El Fuerte.”
Hobart made a face and lifted his shot glass between his thumb and index finger. “El Fuerte needs a bullet, Calderon. I see that cat on your bar again, I’m gonna feed him one between his eyes.” He raised his glass to his chuckling companions. “Saludos!”
The soldiers tossed back their tequilas. Hobart gestured, and Calderon refilled their shot glasses. “So, if it is not Apaches or Pilar you have come all this way for, mi amigo, what is it, if I may be so rude?”
Hobart threw back half his tequila and stretched his lips back from his teeth sheathed by his wet blond goatee, hissing like a cat and shaking his head as though to clear it. “A kid,” he rasped. Clearing his throat, he added, “A young, lanky redhead with an ugly ‘S’ branded into his right cheek. That’s who we’re after, mi amigo Calderon. Been after him for the past couple days. He killed Lieutenant Belden ’cause he wanted his girl, and then he killed his girl because she was about to tell me where he was holed up.”
Hobart gestured for another round. “He hasn’t come through here, has he?”
Calderon’s swarthy face paled as he stared at Hobart.
Still hunkered over his table, Colter Farrow let his fork drop to his tin plate with a loud, ringing clatter.
Chapter 10
Hobart, McKnight, and the other three soldiers swung around quickly, as though they were all tied to the same
string. Hands dropped to the covered holsters on their hips. Still seated, Colter lifted his Remington from beneath his table, clicking the hammer back. He extended the revolver out over his table and squeezed the trigger.
In the close confines, the explosion echoed like a dynamite blast. Everyone in the room jumped, Calderon cursing in Spanish and stumbling back away from the bar. The whore screamed, bounded out of her chair, and dashed out the door, barefoot. From the corner of his eye, Colter saw her streak past the left front window as she hightailed it around the corner of the station house.
Hobart screamed and crouched as he grabbed his right knee with his right hand, blood oozing out from the shattered knee to saturate his pale blue cavalry slacks. He dropped to both knees and gave another yowl, showing gritted teeth beneath his red-blond mustache, his habitually sneering hazel eyes locked on Colter. His eyes weren’t as sneering now as exasperated.
The other men stood dumbstruck, their hands frozen on their holsters from which McKnight had gotten his Colt Army .44 halfway out.
Colter clicked his Remington’s hammer back again, loudly. Keeping the pistol aimed at the bar, he scraped his chair back casually, slowly rose, picked up his rifle and the tequila bottle, held the rifle atop his left shoulder with the hand holding the bottle, and stepped out around the table. He stopped about ten feet from the blue-uniformed statues at the bar and Hobart, who sat on the floor farthest down the bar on the right, his right leg and knee extended to one side as he leaned on the opposite hip.
Blood continued to gush from Hobart’s wounded knee. His face was crimson, forked veins bulging in his forehead. His eyes were agonized, fearful, incredulous. They brightened with recognition as Colter stepped into the wan light seeping through the windows.
“You son of a bitch!”
McKnight still had his Colt half out of its holster. He blinked in disbelief, then shaped a grim smile. “Kid, you’re one crazy son of a bitch if you think you’re gonna get away with this.”
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