Last Ride of Jed Strange (9781101559635)

by Leslie, Frank

  Colter climbed down off the rocks and started tramping back to where the campfire glowed dully amongst the rocks and bushes. “Good decision, boy,” he heard Jed Strange say behind him, the man’s low, gravelly voice clear in the quiet night. “The only right decision, really. Damn glad my daughter ran into ya!”

  Chapter 28

  The sound of someone kicking a rock jerked Colter out of a deep sleep. Instantly, his Henry was in his hand, and he loudly pumped a shell into the chamber.

  The figure just now entering the camp stopped suddenly in the false dawn, Jed Strange’s slightly stooped figure outlined against the lightening eastern sky. “Damn, boy—you are fast. I’d like to see you shuck a hog leg.”

  “Machado has it.”

  Bethel had lifted her head from her saddle when she’d heard the rasp of Colter’s rifle. Now she looked around curiously, blinking. “What the hell’s all the commotion about?”

  “Go back to sleep, darlin’.”

  “That don’t answer my question, Pa.”

  Strange walked into the camp. He wore a buckskin mackinaw against the high-altitude chill, his breath fogging around his head and green flannel bandanna. Colter assumed the man wore the Indian duds to blend in better with the Apaches, possibly confuse them from a distance. Besides, it was right smart desert attire.

  The old outlaw leaned his rifle against a mesquite, then got down on his hands and knees, lowered his head to the fire ring, and blew on last night’s coals, stirring a dull pink glow.

  “I thought you were out of shells for that,” Colter said, glancing at the old ’67-model Winchester.

  “I was, but I thank you.” Strange shunted his glance to Colter’s saddlebags, where he kept his last box of .44 rounds, and gave the redhead a wink.

  Colter glowered.

  Strange continued to blow on the coals. “Boy, you got your hands full with my daughter. Twelve years old an’ she’s already as sassy as her ma was after fifteen years of marriage.” As a couple of small flames began to lick up around the ashes, he gave Colter a shrewd wink. “But you probably already know that, don’t you?”

  Colter had tossed his covers off him and was pulling his boots on. “I reckon you win the cigar this time, Jed.”

  “What do you mean Colter’s got his hands full, Pa? I don’t like the sound of that. Sounds like you got ideas poppin’ around in your head again, and that scares me somethin’ fierce.”

  Colter wanted no part of the conversation. He grabbed his coffeepot out of his saddlebags, draped his bedroll over his shoulders, and headed down to the river for water. When he returned, the fire was popping and snapping amongst the several mesquite branches lying over the old ashes, and Strange was saddling his horse. Two horses had been picketed with Northwest about twenty yards from the camp, at the base of another scarp. Strange’s second horse, an oddly yellow-eyed grulla, had belonged to his partner, Percy Tarwater.

  “Pa, I just found you,” Bethel was arguing, standing near her father, moving around with him as he saddled his horse. “Damn near left you for dead. If I’m goin’ back to Tucson, then you are, too. If you ain’t, then I ain’t, neither!”

  “Colter’s takin’ you back to Tucson, child.” Strange set his blanket roll on his paint’s back, lashing it behind his saddle. “I’ll be along shortly.”

  Bethel stopped before her father, spreading her feet and planting her fists on her hips. “You can’t make me ride back to Tucson with Colter. There ain’t no way you can keep me from foggin’ your trail to wherever in hell you think you’re goin’!”

  Strange glanced over his shoulder at the redhead, who stood at the edge of the camp, holding the filled coffeepot. Strange had a slit-eyed, knowing expression on his face.

  Colter should have known Bethel would never have gone along with his plan for hightailing it back to the border. Her father had certainly known it. And if she stayed down here with the ailing man, Colter would have to, too. He couldn’t leave her.

  Colter kicked a rock. “Ah, hell!” He shook the coffeepot, sloshing water down its sides and over his hand. To Strange, he said, “You think this gold is worth riskin’ your daughter’s life for, do ya?”

  “No, I don’t,” Strange said. “But she’s here now whether I like it or not.” He grabbed his saddlebags, tossed them onto his horse’s back. “I intend to tuck Bethel away in a safe spot before you and I go after them daggers. If all goes according to plan, and we get the jump on Machado, we should have those two gold daggers by sundown. A matched set of three!”

  He turned to Colter, leaned back against his horse, snaked an ankle behind the other, and grinned.

  Bethel turned her head to Colter. She looked grieved. “Yep,” she said, turning her mouth corners down. “He’s touched, sure enough. But I can’t leave him to die down here alone, Colter.”

  The redhead was kicking dirt on the fire. “Hell, I know that!”

  “Hold on,” Bethel said a couple of hours later, sawing back on the grulla’s reins. “What was that?”

  Riding behind the girl on a switchbacking game trail that wound gradually up the steep mountain wall, Colter stopped Northwest and looked up into the chill gray fog that cloaked the grass, ponderosa pines, and cedars in an eerie gauze that had issued a sporadic drizzle all morning. He heard the loudening thuds, and then a rock bounded out of the gray and tumbled over the slick green-brown grass to pile up against a half-buried boulder about ten feet upslope and ahead of him and Bethel.

  “What’s it look like? It’s a damn rock,” Colter said, grumpy. He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want her to be here, either.

  “I know it’s a rock,” Bethel said, hipping around in her saddle to give Colter a sneer from beneath the floppy brim of her rain-dark hat. “I’m wondering what set it off.”

  “It’s all right.” Strange had stopped his Appy about twenty yards ahead of his daughter and was staring up through the scattered pines. “Just the rain loosed it, most likely. I been watchin’ an’ listenin’, and I’ve detected no ’Paches. Believe me, when you’ve been in Apache country as long as I have, you know where they are and where they’re not. I can smell the sons o’ bitches.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Colter said, sneering, already tired of the old outlaw. “What do they smell like?”

  “Goat!” came the amused retort.

  “Could Machado be up there?” Bethel asked in a dreadful tone, squinting into the gauze.

  “Doubt it. We’re a jump or two ahead of him, havin’ taken that dogleg through that little canyon. Trimmed off about three miles. He won’t be to the crest of this here ridge for another hour.”

  “He won’t come this way?”

  “Hell, no, daughter,” Strange said, turning away suddenly. In the dingy light, Colter thought he saw the man wince, as though stifling a cough. “This is the backside of the mountain. Machado ain’t expecting us to meet him at the top, so he’ll ride the trail on the mountain’s face—a good cart and wagon trail still used by woodcutters from the mission that lies about two ridges to the north.” He looked at Bethel. “You all right? How’s your horse doin’?”

  “He’s doin’ all right, Pa. Purty sure-footed.”

  “That’s why Percy chose him.” Strange stretched his gaze back to Colter. “Colter, how you doin’ back there? You look like someone tossed a dead rat in your morning belly wash.”

  “That’s how I feel about this whole damn thing, Jed. I’ve got enough trouble without huntin’ more.”

  “Damn, boy.” Strange grinned and shook his head before turning around and touching spurs to his Appy’s flanks. “I thought I was supposed to be the one with all the good sense.”

  “That’s sorta what I thought,” Colter groused, booting Northwest on ahead behind Bethel, setting the barrel of his Henry atop his saddlebow.

  As he rode
, he looked up the slope on his right. Most of the time he could see only a few yards up the steep, rocky incline stippled with occasional cedars and pines. When the great cloud capping the mountain thinned, he could see the vast slab of broken granite that sat over the top of the mountain like a lead bullet over a cartridge casing. From a distance, before he and Bethel and her father had started climbing the mountain—Dragon Ridge—the formation at the top had looked like three giant horse teeth—three granite teeth separated by narrow cracks between them.

  Colter heard near footfalls above him, and he tightened his right hand around the neck of his Henry. Then he saw Jed Strange coming toward him on the switchback trail thirty yards up the slope. As Strange rode, swaying easily in his saddle, moccasin-clad feet set loose in his stirrups, Strange pressed his fist to his mouth and coughed softly. His face turned red as he leaned farther forward, and then the man disappeared into a thick snag of pines as he angled farther up the slope.

  The trio stopped just beyond the pine snag, on a relatively flat shelf in the mountainside. “Rest here,” Strange said, climbing heavily down from his saddle, his face not so much red now as pale. They were deep in the cloud again. Colter could see nothing beyond a dozen yards. The pines stood still and dripping, trunks dark and wet in the iron light.

  “What’s that cough from, Pa?” Bethel asked him, stepping up close against her horse to loosen her latigo cinch.

  “What’s that, darlin’?”

  “Don’t darlin’ me. I heard it last night and I heard it several times this mornin’,” Bethel said. “What is it—consumption?”

  “Oh, hell.” Strange hauled his canteen down from his saddle and sat on a rock beside the trail. “Just a little touch of the pleurisy.”

  He removed the cap from the canteen and took a drink, spilling a little when he coughed around the flask’s lip.

  “Pleurisy, huh?”

  Bethel strode over to her father. He wore his buckskin coat unbuttoned, as the coat was a little too heavy for the temperature, which was probably around fifty degrees. Bethel reached down and swept the left flap of the man’s coat back from his calico shirt. Colter winced when he saw the bloodstain on the left center of the man’s chest, beside the hide tobacco pouch that Strange wore on a thong around his neck.

  “What in tarnation?” Bethel said with hushed exasperation.

  Strange snatched his coat flap back, pressed it taut against him. “You’re a damn snoop!”

  “What is that? Bullet wound?”

  As Colter took his own canteen down from his saddle and Northwest started cropping the green grass along the trail, the redhead saw Strange look off, squinting, his cheeks in the dull light appearing hollow and jaundiced.

  Shit, he didn’t have long left, Colter thought.

  Strange shook his head fatefully. “Arrow.”

  Bethel glanced at Colter. “Did you know about this?”

  “Only since last night.” Colter unscrewed the cap on his canteen and took a drink.

  “You shoulda told me,” she said.

  “It wasn’t my place.” Colter lifted his canteen toward Strange, who was still looking off. “It was his.”

  Bethel turned back to her father and said in an incriminating tone, “You’re dyin’, ain’t ya, Pa?”

  Strange looked at her, then stood and brushed past her as he walked over to his saddlebags. “Hell, I ain’t dyin’. I’m too mean to die. I’ll be here when the devil comes, an’ him and me’ll dance in the last flames.”

  He fished a clear bottle out of the saddlebag pouch, popped the cork, and took a deep pull. He looked up at the trees and then all around before taking another pull and returning the cork to the bottle. He shoved the bottle back down in his saddlebag pouch.

  “Come on, girl,” he said, grabbing his pinto’s reins. “I thought I’d like to rest here awhile, but gold’s awaitin’. I’ll rest when I’m dead.” He chuckled and stepped into the leather.

  “Pa?” Bethel was standing in the trail, staring up at the man, tears streaking her cheeks. “I’d like to go home. I’d like to go home right now, Pa. I’m real tired of Mexico. I’d like to sleep in my own bed again.”

  Strange winked at her. “We’ll go home, darlin’, when we’re about forty thousand dollars richer.” He glanced back at Colter, who’d been feeding Northwest a handful of parched corn. “Be a gentleman and help my daughter on her horse, will you, Red?”

  Colter walked over and placed a hand on Bethel’s shoulder. “There’s no stoppin’ him, Bethel. We’ll get what he’s after, and then I’ll see to it we all head north.”

  “Ah, hell,” she said, staring off after Strange, who was walking his horse up the trail, slowly disappearing in the slithering tendrils of mist, “he’s always been part part loco and all bronco. Ma knew it, and I know it. And I reckon it couldn’t hurt either one of us to be rich for once in our lives. He’s always wanted it so bad.” She chuckled, tears still streaking her cheeks, mixing with the light rain. “Just hope he don’t drink it all up now, with Ma not here to see that he don’t.”

  “Come on.” Colter boosted her up into the saddle and lightly slapped the grulla’s rump. She scrubbed her coat sleeve across her face, then bounced on up the trail.

  Colter watched her disappear in the mist. He jerked his hat brim down over his eyes, having a sour, colicky feeling about what would happen once they reached the ridge crest.

  He swung up onto Northwest’s back. The coyote dun glanced back at him, flicking his ears and chewing his bit.

  “Yeah, I know, boy,” Colter said, touching his spurs to the horse’s flanks. “But I reckon we bought chips in the game whether we want ’em or not. Now we gotta play the hand.”

  Chapter 29

  From below, the horse-tooth-shaped formations cresting the cloud-covered ridge had appeared solid and impregnable. From close up now, as Colter followed Strange and Bethel out of the trees, he saw that the monoliths were set farther away from one another than he’d thought. The gap between the two southernmost teeth would give passage to a horse and rider.

  Northwest crested the ridge and followed Bethel and her father into the gap littered with black-flecked gray boulders, a few hardy cedars growing from cracks in the rocks. There were puddles in the gravelly trail. Water dripped from the stone ledges above and landed with a hollow sound in the puddles.

  The clomps of the horses’ shod hooves echoed loudly, water splashing.

  At the end of the gap, away from the steep slope they’d just climbed, Strange lifted his right hand as he stopped his Appaloosa. Bethel rode up beside him and stopped the grulla. Colter rode up on her right and checked Northwest down, as well. He stared straight out from the gap, where a dilapidated stone wall, about five feet high, stood about forty yards away. Over the top of the wall, he could see grave markers of stone and wood beyond. Beyond the graves lay the back of a stout adobe church.

  The church’s rear, wooden door hung from one hinge, and just now a bird was flying out the dark gap. That and the general disarray of the graveyard, littered with tumbleweeds and fallen branches and grown up with cactus and rabbitbrush, indicated that the church and grounds were likely long abandoned.

  Strange looked around, then turned to Bethel. “Darlin’, you lead my Appy and Colter’s horse on over that little rise.” He canted his head toward the rise shrouded in ponderosas and piñons, various stone escarpments beyond it. “Keep the horses quiet and out of sight. You’ll likely hear shootin’, but you sit tight till we come for you.”

  Bethel merely inhaled, her chest rising steeply behind her wool coat.

  Strange glanced at Colter. Colter handed his reins to Bethel and, holding his Henry, stepped down from his saddle. Strange did likewise, palming his silver-chased Peacemaker and rolling the cylinder across his forearm. All the loops in his cartridge belt shone w
ith fresh brass. He shucked his old Winchester and racked a round in the chamber.

  Colter seated a shell in the chamber of his own rifle and off-cocked the hammer.

  Holding the reins of both men’s horses, Bethel stared down at her father from atop the grulla. He turned to her. “Go now, girl. Machado’ll be along soon, an’ you and the horses have to be holed up tight.”

  She glanced at Colter, a dark, dreadful cast to her gaze. Then she puffed her cheeks out as she sighed, reined her horse around, and clomped on over the rise, leading the other two horses behind her.

  Strange walked ahead to the wall. He was limping slightly, favoring his right side, and breathing hard. Colter followed the man, stood beside him, looking over the wall in the boneyard. He was trying to remember the map. All that he’d seen to mark the treasure was the Dragon, which had obviously indicated the ridge they were now on. In addition, there had been a small cross. Beneath the cross were the initials X and F.

  “All right,” Colter said, running a gloved finger down his cheek. “The cross was the church yonder. What did the ‘X’ and the ‘F’ mean?”

  “The grave where Percy and I buried the third dagger. You see, our original camp was right over there.” He pointed toward a dilapidated stone stable and tumbledown corral to the right of the cemetery, hunched in a slight clearing in the dripping pines, barely visible in the foggy mist. “The church is where Percy and me and the young Balladeer holed up nigh on twenty years ago now, when the rurales were scouring this ridge for us. We were given sanctuary by an old priest. Xavier Franco.”

  “Ah.”

  “I’m going to stay here, as the grave is right over yonder. I wanna be close to the son of a bitch.”

  “Which direction will Machado be riding in from?”

  Strange nodded his head toward the church.

  Colter looked around carefully, glancing at the grave with the large stone in which FATHER XAVIER BALTHAZAR FRANCO had been chiseled beneath a small, weathered carving of Christ amongst a flock of little lambs. The grave was mounded with fist-sized red rocks.