“A couple of days.”
“I can’t move to test for broken bones.”
“Well, don’t be too surprised if you got some.”
“What’s been happening?” Red asked.
“I’ll tell you later. Right now rest up some. You’re as weak as a two-day-old kitten.”
“I’m thirsty, Buttons.” Red said. “Wait, a minute. Hell, you’re all tied up, too.”
“Damn right I am. I bit Papa Mace’s leg and took a beating, kinda like you did.”
Red managed a ghost of a smile. “You bit him?” “Sure did. Hung onto his leg like a Louisiana alligator.”
“I would have loved to have seen that,” Red said.
“The fat man squealed and squealed, and they beat the hell out of me, but I still chomped down on him,” Buttons said.
Red managed a laugh. “Damn, that must’ve been a sight to see.” He tried to stretch, but his bonds hampered him. “Buttons, I’m thirsty. Do we have any water?”
“No, I don’t see any.” Buttons maneuvered his body until he lay on his back, then took a deep breath and shouted, “Hey, you damned heathens. A man in here needs water!”
There was no answer.
Buttons tried again with the same result.
Red said, “Maybe they’ve forgotten about us.”
“I doubt it,” Buttons said. “I’m sure they’ll bring us food and water presently. Can you hold out that long?”
“Food, I don’t need. I can wait for water, even though I’m thirsty enough to spit cotton. Buttons, what the hell have they got planned for us?”
“Pardner, you don’t want to know,” Buttons said. “It ain’t good.”
“Then don’t tell me.”
“I won’t.”
“Where is the gambler feller?”
“Broussard? He escaped.”
“Maybe he’ll come back and rescue us.”
“That’s a good notion, Red. Keep thinking that way.” Buttons yelled again. “We need water in here, you damned savages!”
“I wonder if Luna Talbot made it back to her ranch.”
“I’m sure she did,” Buttons said, though he was sure she had not.
“Right pretty lady, with plenty of sand.” Red’s voice was weak and the shadows under his eyes were as black as soot. “Damn, Buttons, these ropes hurt.”
“You take it easy, pardner,” Buttons said. “Just try to relax.”
Red’s fevered mind wandered, and he said, “Buttons, you recollect that time in Dallas when I climbed out of that lady’s bedroom window . . . what was her name?”
“If it’s the one I’m thinking about, her name was Lizzie. Mrs. Lizzie Schumacher. Her husband was a sea captain as I recall.”
“Remember, I climbed onto the roof with my boots and clothes under my arm and it was winter. All those chimney pots were red-hot, every one of them smoking like a saloon stove with the flue closed?”
“Burned your bare butt, I recall,” Buttons said. “Both cheeks, if memory serves me right.”
“Yeah, I did, and for a week it hurt like hell to sit.”
“You got a bad burn,” Buttons said. “As I recollect, I had to slow down the stage over the rough patches, no bouncing with you up on the seat with a cushion under your ass.”
Red smiled and said, “Do you remember her husband stood in the front yard and took pots at me with a brace of Remingtons and cussed enough that he singed all the grass within ten yards from where he stood?”
“I remember. You were lucky that day,” Buttons said. “If the captain’s old lady hadn’t stood naked in the window, singing ‘Come All Ye Fair and Tender Ladies,’ and beckoned for him to join her, he would’ve plugged you fer sure.”
“She was a pretty lady,” Red whispered. “What was her name again?”
“Lizzie . . . Lizzie Schumacher.”
“Yes, I remember . . . Lizzie . . . Lizzie . . .” Red lapsed once again into unconsciousness.
Buttons said, “Best you sleep, Red.” Then fully aware of what was ahead for both of them, “Best you sleep and never wake.”
“Water!” A male voice bellowed from the mine entrance. “Does somebody want water?”
“Yes, in here, you damned brigand,” Buttons yelled.
A few moments passed, and Mace Rathmore limped inside, a fat bandage on his bitten leg. He held an earthen crock, condensation beading on its sides. “Who’s thirsty? I got cool water here.” His smile was unpleasant, sadistic, bordering on the deranged grimace of the criminally insane.
“Over here,” Buttons said. “Damn your eyes.”
“Certainly.” Papa Mace took a waddling step forward, pretended to trip, and upended the pot, spilling its contents onto the ground. Looking down at the puddle at his feet, he said, “Oh, dear. I tipped out all that nice, cool water, fresh from the spring.”
“You damned animal,” Buttons said between gritted teeth. “One day, I’ll kill you.”
“You’ve said that before. I’m still here and you’re the one that’s all tied up . . . and I must say, dying very slowly.” Rathmore smiled again. “Ah well, never mind. I’ll bring you more water, but not today. Maybe tomorrow or the next day. We’ll see.” He fixed his eyes on Red. “My, my, is he dead already?”
“Not yet, you sorry piece of trash,” Buttons said.
“Looks like he will be soon.” Rathmore grinned. “Until tomorrow, then. Or the next day.”
Buttons watched the fat man go . . . and all of a sudden, he became aware of his raging thirst.
* * *
Maybe she’d been expecting too much too soon. Clementine Rathmore was sure the gambler had escaped, but when would he come back and rescue her from this place? Next week, next month . . . never?
She’d no answer to that question, but she still had an iron in the fire, the Patterson stagecoach driver and his shotgun guard. As far as she knew the guard was dying, if he wasn’t dead already, but the driver was still alive. Could he be the one to bring her the freedom she craved? The word around camp was that because of the wood shortage Papa Mace wanted the prisoners to die of thirst. That was a lingering death, but with her help the strong, stocky driver could yet be healthy enough to make his break. It was a long shot, she knew, but it was worth trying.
Using a sponge she’d bought in Forlorn Hope years before, she stripped naked and began to wash herself all over, getting rid of the sweat stink her husband had left on her. At sundown, Asher was due to go on guard duty at the mouth of the arroyo and would be there until midnight. As soon as darkness came, she’d make her move.
The newspaperman A. B. Boyd always claimed that, on what would be the last day of her life, Clementine Rathmore was certifiably insane. He based his opinion on interviews he conducted in 1935 with two of the surviving Rathmore women who both stated that Clementine was “tetched in the head” and that they both feared for the safety of her children. Admittedly, the women still believed that Papa Mace was some kind of demigod and their evidence may have been biased, but the fact remains that Clementine’s plan had no hope of succeeding. It could well have been the demented act of a crazy woman.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The day wore on, and Clementine Rathmore thought the darkness would never come. In the late afternoon several women talked to her about getting Asher to kill and butcher another of the stage horses for meat, but later they decided to wait for a couple of days until he was no longer on guard duty. Then more gossip—Esther Rathmore was sick with female hysteria and a wandering womb, but she hoped to feel better soon. And one of the men had seen a pack of gray wolves near the arroyo and had scared them off with a rifle shot and . . .
Clementine didn’t listen but nodded in all the right places and waited impatiently for darkness, when she’d wear the gloom like a cloak.
With agonizing slowness, the sun dropped lower in the sky, shadows lengthened in the arroyo, and the light shaded into an ashen gray. She slipped a knife into her pocket and prepared to do what she must, make another bi
d for freedom.
Full dark. The stars were out, and the moon had started its climb into the night sky. Out in the wilderness where scuttling and squeaking things lived, the hunting coyotes were already yipping their hunger. A silence fell over the arroyo and only the fluttering flames under the perpetual cooking pot moved.
Four words, casually spoken, sealed Clementine’s fate that night . . .
“She’s up to something.” Reta Rathmore, one of the women who’d talked to Clementine about killing a horse, said those words to her husband.
“Up to what?”
“I don’t know. But it’s something.”
Women are sometimes more sensitive than men to the emotional state of other women. But Reta had thrown the observation out there as a passing comment at a time when topics of conversation in the claustrophobic atmosphere of the arroyo were few.
Since Papa Mace had a paranoid fear of any of his followers “getting up to something” and challenging his authority, Reta’s husband thought the comment important enough to pass it on to his father.
And so it was that Clementine thought she’d made it to the mine shaft unseen . . . unaware that the night had eyes.
* * *
It was dark in the mine shaft, and Clementine felt her way to the recumbent forms of Red Ryan and Buttons Muldoon. She made out Buttons’s stocky bulk and shook him awake.
“You have to leave,” she said, the knife in her hand. “You must bring help.”
Buttons struggled to regain consciousness. The woman stood over him in the murk, her long hair wild, her face a pale oval, the eyes sunken in shadow.
“Did you bring water?” Buttons’s voice sounded raspy to his ears.
“No water. I’ll cut you free and then bring some. A canteen. I’ll bring a canteen.”
“And a gun,” Buttons said. “Can you find a gun?”
“I don’t know,” Clementine said. “Maybe I can.”
The knife blade glinted in the gloom . . . and then turned the color of bronze as a pair of lanterns splashed the shaft with light. Buttons heard the woman’s sharp intake of breath as she turned and then her body stiffened, frozen in place.
“What the hell are you doing here, woman?” Papa Mace said. He held a Winchester. Asher and another son held lanterns.
Asher spoke. “You were going to free them, wife, weren’t you?”
Her throat paralyzed with fright, Clementine did not respond. After a moment she found her courage, or plumbed her madness, and said, “Yes, I was going to cut them free. I planned to make them say a solemn vow that they’d come back for me and free me from this terrible place and rid me of you, Asher. Yes, above all, rid me of you.”
Asher Rathmore roared his rage and tried to grab the rifle from his father’s hands, but Papa Mace pushed him away. The fat man’s voice was a serrated knife blade. “Woman, out of your own mouth you are condemned, and you must surely die.”
“Let me shoot her, Pa,” Asher said. “She’s my wife and I got the right.”
“I’m the only one with rights here,” Mace said. “If there’s shooting to be done, I’ll do it.”
“Then kill me and get it over,” Clementine said. “I’d rather be dead than suffer this living death any longer.”
Asher’s hate-filled eyes were fixed on the woman. “Pa, it was me jumped the broom with her. I got the right.”
“No,” Papa Mace said. “The women have the right. They are the ones that have been betrayed. Bring them in.”
“Pa . . .”
“Bring them in, Asher, or by God you’ll feel the butt end of this rifle.”
The Rathmores had a firewood shortage, but there seemed to be no lack of wood for clubs. When the six women stepped inside, their eyes immediately went to Clementine, read what had happened, and slowly advanced on her. The eyes of Ella, the youngest and prettiest, were malevolent, her smile wicked.
Buttons Muldoon watched in horror as Clementine was beaten to death. More dreadful still was the sight of Asher Rathmore’s sadistic, grinning face as he savored every blow, took pleasure in every shriek that came from his wife’s mouth.
When it was all over, and the woman’s broken body had been dragged away, Buttons Muldoon, for the first time in years, whispered a prayer . . . for Clementine, for himself, for Red Ryan . . . and for a blessing on the terrible vengeance he intended to bring down on Papa Mace Rathmore.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
“Dust cloud to the west of us, Johnny,” Dave Quarrels said.
“I see it,” Johnny Teague said. “Looks like a herd on the move.”
“Ain’t the Talbot ranch over that way?” Quarrels said.
Crystal Casey drew rein beside the two men. “Yes, that’s the Talbot range. Why would they move cattle at this time of the year?”
Teague said, “Well it ain’t Apaches lifting a few head, so it’s probably rustlers.”
“Any profit in it for us, Johnny?” Slim Porter said.
Teague shook his head. “Nah, I was never much interested in rustling cows. I don’t like them that much. We’ll show some professional courtesy and leave them rustlers to their work.”
“Listen,” Crystal said. “I hear shooting.”
“Yeah, so do I,” Teague said. “Seems like the Talbot hands have caught up with their stolen herd. I wonder if Luna Talbot is there?”
“I reckon she’s still searching for her mine in the Cornudas or digging out gold already,” Crystal said.
Teague said, “I hope she’s found it before we get there. Save us some time and work.”
“The shooting has stopped,” said Daphne Loveshade, now Dumont.
“Time we were on our way,” Teague said. “We’re wasting daylight.”
The two women fell in behind Teague and then Slim Porter, leading the mustang packhorse, fell back to join them.
“What do you think, Slim,” Crystal said. “Will Johnny share the gold we find?”
“If we find it,” Porter said. “But if there’s gold to be found, I’m sure Johnny will split it up in equal shares, and that includes you . . . ah . . . Miss Dumont.”
The girl smiled. “I could be a rich whore.”
Porter laughed. “Lady, if you’re rich you won’t need to be a whore.”
“I know, but even if I’m rich I’d like to keep busy,” Daphne said.
Crystal and Porter laughed at that.
The girl was genuinely perplexed. “What did I say that’s so funny?”
“Nothing, nothing at all,” Porter said. “I’m sure you’re going to make a mighty interesting whore, rich or not.”
Crystal looked at Teague, Dave Quarrels, and Townes Pierce who were riding twenty yards ahead of her. As he always did, Juan Sanchez was out front on point. “Slim, I don’t want Johnny to hear this, but if Mrs. Talbot has found the mine, will there be a gun battle?”
“You mean when Johnny takes it? Yeah, I think that’s possible. But maybe he and Mrs. Talbot can reach some kind of agreement.”
“To share the gold, you mean?” Crystal said.
“Yeah, they may work something out, so it might not come to shooting.” Slim’s smile was grim. “Right now, after what happened with Arch Storm and them, I think Johnny has had a bellyful of gunfighting. At least for a spell.”
“I certainly hope so,” Crystal said. “I wouldn’t like it if something bad happened to Mrs. Talbot.”
“I’m sure Johnny wouldn’t like it either,” Porter said. “We’ll wait until the cards are dealt and play our hand from there.”
* * *
The day was moving toward dusk when Johnny Teague and the others rode up on the Cornudas Mountains. The evening promised to be dreary. Gray clouds dominated the sky and there had been a steady drizzle for the past hour.
“Smoke rising,” Teague said, drawing rein.
“The Talbot woman’s campfire, you think, Johnny?” Dave Quarrels said.
“Seems like,” Teague said.
“How do we play it?” Quarrel
s said.
Teague considered that for a few moments, then said, “We ride in grinning, like we’re visiting kinfolk. Let Luna Talbot make the next move.”
“Johnny, she ain’t gonna welcome us with open arms like we was kissin’ kin,” Quarrels said. “She’ll know we’re there because of the mine.”
“Which maybe she ain’t found yet,” Teague said. “Maybe she’ll welcome the help.” He turned in the saddle. “Hey, Crystal, how will Mrs. Talbot react when she sees us?”
“She’ll either offer us coffee or shoot us. Take your pick.”
“My money is on the coffee,” Teague said.
“Not mine,” Crystal said. “Mrs. Talbot can be a hardcase when she feels like it.”
“So can I.” He kneed his horse forward. “Let’s go find out which way the wind blows.”
Teague found out in a hurry when a volley of rifle fire kicked up dirt around him and filled the air with angry hornets. “What the hell!” he yelled, fighting his restive horse. “They’re shooting at us.”
“Just found that out, huh, Johnny?” Crystal said.
Teague studied the drifts of gun smoke along the rocky slope of the nearest mountain. “Five shooting. Back up everybody, I ain’t riding across two hundred yards of open ground into rifle fire.”
After retreating out of range, he said, “Crystal, go talk to Luna Talbot. She won’t shoot at a woman, and she knows you. Tell her we’re friendly. Tell her anything you like that gets her to stop shooting.”
“I quit her, remember,” Crystal said. “She might plug me out of spite. Besides, there are four other people shooting.”
“And I bet it’s them damned Patterson stage men,” Quarrels said. “Shotgun guards are always handy with a gun.”
“They won’t shoot at a woman,” Teague said. “Now give it a try, Crystal.”
“Johnny, if they put a bullet in me, I swear to God I’ll come back and haunt you.” She took off her hat, shook out her long hair, and finger-combed it over her shoulders. “Now I look like a woman. I hope.”
“Crystal, you could show your tits,” Daphne said, her face serious. “Then they’ll know you’re a woman for sure.”
The Backstabbers Page 16
