The Jackals of Sundown (A Bear Haskell Western Book 2)

by Peter Brandvold

  Again Tifflin regarded Haskell in his customarily snotty fashion. “My old man don’t consult with me about the men he hires. I don’t know who Valderrama rides for. Could be my pa. Could be anyone.”

  “All right,” Haskell said, turning to look ahead along the meandering trail, which had him and the kid dropping into a bowl between haystack buttes. “Fair enough.”

  So the Jackal could be riding for Ambrose Tifflin, and the kid wouldn’t know anything about it ...

  Well, Haskell had learned something, anyway.

  He and the kid pushed on for another hour, walking and jogging their horses by turn. They were riding through a long valley between sandstone rimrocks that were turning salmon and orange in the dwindling light, when the ragged patter of gunfire rose in the east, from beyond the ridge on Bear’s right.

  Haskell stopped both horses and reached for his Henry.

  “Ah, shit,” the kid said, whipping his head around to peer in the direction of the continuing gunfire. “You hear that? I wasn’t just whistlin’ ‘Dixie’, was I?” He turned his sharp, pleading gaze on Bear. “Give me my guns, for chrissakes. I need a gun!”

  Chapter Eleven

  “Shut up,” Haskell told Jordan Tifflin.

  Dismounting, the lawman slid his Henry from its scabbard.

  He walked out ahead of the horses and stared toward the orange-hued rimrock rising in the east. Gunfire continued to crackle sporadically. A small battle was being pitched on the other side of the ridge.

  Haskell walked back to where Tifflin sat straight-backed in his saddle, staring anxiously in the direction of the pops and wicked-sounding belches.

  “Climb down from there,” Bear ordered.

  Tifflin quickly swung down from the saddle to stand before Haskell, looking up at the taller man imploringly. “Please! I need a gun! You gotta take these bracelets off!”

  “Like hell.” Haskell reached into his war bag. He withdrew a five-foot length of hemp and pointed the Henry at a rock at the edge of the trail. “Sit.”

  Tifflin looked astonished. “What do you mean—sit?”

  “Look, you little dung beetle. I could be hauling you into federal court for the attempted murder of a deputy United States marshal. You could be sentenced to twenty years hard labor and used as a love toy by men much bigger than you. I’m doing you a big favor by taking your raggedy ass back to your old man for a good, old-fashioned trip to the woodshed. Now, sit down. I’m gonna tie your feet, and I’m gonna cuff your hands behind your back. If you keep complaining, I’m also gonna gag you, to boot!”

  That cowed young Tifflin enough that Haskell was able to tie his ankles and cuff his hands behind his back with no more sass from the spoiled rancher’s son.

  When he was done, he returned the handcuff key to his pants pocket and walked over to where he’d tied the horses to a gnarled cedar off the side of the trail.

  “What’re you donna do?” Tifflin asked in a cowed but wary tone, sitting on the rock.

  “I’m gonna see if I can see who’s shootin’ who. You sit tight and keep your mouth shut.”

  As Bear slipped the bits and latigo straps of both horses, so they could forage and breathe easier, young Tifflin said, “If somethin’ happens to you ... ”

  “You’re gonna be in a bad spot.” Haskell gave a wry wink. “Best send up a prayer for me, huh?”

  Tifflin only gave him a constipated look then lifted his fearful gaze to the ridge.

  Haskell crossed the trail and dropped into a dry, sandy wash that ran along the base of the ridge. He climbed up the opposite bank, pushed through some thorny brush, stepped between two sotol cacti, and started up the slope, meandering between boulders and more brush clumps. The slope was steep enough to get Haskell’s heart thumping quickly, and the muscles bunching in his thighs and calves.

  More sweat oozed from his bores to soak his already damp shirt. His suspenders pulled against his shoulders with each upward-lunging step. He grunted, holding the Henry in both hands across his shoulders, loosing sand and gravel with each step.

  As he climbed steadily, breathing hard and grunting, he kept an eye skinned for rattlesnakes. All he needed was to be in Redfield’s miserable situation! Guns continued to pop on the ridge’s far side, but the reports seemed to be growing more distant, more infrequent.

  Halfway to the top of his climb, Bear paused to catch his breath and give his legs a rest. Leaning against a boulder, he glanced back down the ridge and across the wash.

  Jordan Tifflin sat on the low, flat rock on the far side of the trail, both foraging horses flanking him. Tifflin’s hands were pulled back behind him, his ankles tied straight down in front of him. He stared up in miserable defeat and wariness at Bear. He found himself in the improbable position of pulling for his captor, which meant he must believe that the shooters on the other side of the ridge were foes of his, not friends.

  Since the war out here was between the Rancho San Rafael and a half-dozen other, smaller spreads, why wouldn’t Jordan think that at least one faction of the shooters was on his and his father’s side? If his father’s men knew he was out here, wouldn’t they try to spring Jordan from the lawman? Maybe he did think that. But maybe he also worried there was a chance the men riding for the small ranchers would prevail in their skirmish. If Jordan’s father’s enemies found young Tifflin out here, bound hand and foot, it likely wouldn’t end well for the younker. Bear had to smile at that.

  That had to be what had the kid so scared, he thought. Didn’t it?

  Another brief burst of shooting convinced him to cut short his rest. He resumed climbing, angling around boulders the size of small farm wagons, some as large as cabins. He was heading for the scattered chunks of sandstone capping the ridge, hoping that once he gained the ridge crest he could see down the other side and get some sense of who was shooting at whom.

  A loud snort rose to Bear’s left.

  He stopped suddenly and whipped around, pumping a cartridge into the Henry’s action. He held fire. He was staring at a claybank gelding standing in a large wedge of shade cast by a slanting, tabletop boulder looming over him. The horse was roughly thirty feet from Haskell. It was saddled. Its bridle reins were tied to a stout, hemp-like root curling out of a boulder crack.

  The horse stared at the lawman owlishly, twitching its ears guardedly.

  Something hammered a rock to Haskell’s right. The bullet screamed shrilly as it ricocheted. The scream was followed a quarter-second later by the distant, ragged crack of a rifle.

  The horse gave an angry whinny and pitched.

  Haskell threw himself right and rolled behind a boulder. He waited, keeping his head down. The shot had come from up near the crest. When another didn’t come, he decided to try to draw the shooter or shooters’ fire. He lurched to his feet and, keeping his head down, ran upslope, quartering to his right.

  Two bullets plumed dirt and gravel in quick succession just ahead and to his right. He threw himself down behind another rock. Another bullet screamed off the top of the rock, peppering Haskell with stone shards. He doffed his hat and edged a brief look over his covering rock toward the ridge crest.

  Smoke wafted nearly straight up the ridge, from a spot just beneath the crest and above a small nest of rocks.

  Haskell jerked his head back down. Another bullet buzzed through the air where his head had just been and loudly hammered a boulder downslope.

  The rifle’s belching crack echoed out over the canyon.

  Haskell stuffed his hat back down on his head. He crabbed over to his covering rock’s right side, snaked his rifle up over the top, and hurled quick shots toward the nest of rocks near the top.

  The echoes of his own screeching rifle fire were still chasing each other around the canyon when he scrambled to his feet once more and ran upslope, tracing a serpentine course around rocks and boulders and wind-twisted cedars and dangerous patches of prickly pear rearing their small, spiny heads above cream pools of slide rock.

 
Haskell picked a path with the best cover and continued running despite the bullets slicing the air around him and spanging off rocks and boulders. So far, only one shooter was throwing lead at him. That didn’t mean there weren’t more men waiting for him at the top of the ridge, but it was a chance Bear was going to have to take.

  He knew the shooter wasn’t his quarry, Jack Hyde. If the Jackal had been shooting at him, he’d likely be wolf bait by now. Besides, the shooter wasn’t wielding a cannon of the variety of the Jackal’s Sharp’s hybrid.

  When he could tell he was maybe thirty or forty feet away from the shooter, Haskell dropped and rolled up against the base of a boulder roughly the size of a two-hole privy. He pressed his back against the boulder and drew his knees toward his chest just as two more bullets hammered the gravel inches from his boot toes.

  Rocks and gravel flew. One stone clipped Bear’s left cheek, evoking a snarled curse.

  The reports echoed eerily.

  When they finished their long, slow-dwindling deaths, only silence pressed down to replace them.

  He’s reloading.

  Haskell dropped to his belly and snaked a look around the right side of his covering rock. Several good-sized boulders lay between him and the ridge crest. If Bear stayed low, the shooter couldn’t see him from his, the shooter’s, position. That thought in mind, Haskell began to crawl on all fours—or all threes, for he carried his Henry in his right hand—straight up the slope and into a narrow gap between two large boulders.

  He’d try to sneak up on the ambusher. If the man tried to sneak up on Haskell, they’d likely meet each other somewhere close by.

  Haskell crawled out of the gap and into another one that ran perpendicular to the ridge. He crawled into a hollow carved into the side of a slab of granite, and rose to his feet. He had to bend forward, for the crevice’s ceiling angled low to the outside. Haskell removed his hat, dropped it at his feet.

  As he stood hunched against the rock, the hollow curved tightly about his shoulders, giving him a fleeting, anxious chill as he remembered the coffin inside of which he’d been set sail down the Arkansas only a few short weeks ago.

  No point in hurrying.

  Let the shooter come to him.

  Unless the man had pulled foot, that was, and was looking for his horse. Then Haskell would have outsmarted himself ...

  It wouldn’t be the first time.

  Haskell had just started to wonder if the latter scenario was the case, when a horned lark gave an alarming shriek as it flitted past the gap he was in. A faint crunch of gravel rose. Hard to tell which direction it had come from. The stone gap did funny things to sounds.

  Bear dropped to a knee and leaned forward against the Henry, which he held straight up and down in both gloved hands, the stock pressed against the ground. His heart quickened anxiously when he heard another crunch.

  The man was moving toward him. From his left, Bear thought. But then the breeze fell off, dropping a mare’s tail of dust, tinted orange by the falling sun, to the ground fronting the crevice, and the crunch came again. More clearly this time.

  Definitely from Haskell’s right.

  Bear drew a deep breath, let it out slowly, silently.

  Two, three seconds passed.

  A boot appeared just outside the crevice. A man’s expensive suede leather boot with a square toe and fancy stitching on the upper. Something told Haskell that only a man of the Jackal’s distinction would wear such a fancily cut boot.

  His heart hiccupped with the raw improbability that despite his earlier assumption he’d just run into Jack Hyde himself!

  Haskell grinned eagerly as he raised the Henry straight up and thrust the butt out of the gap and down. It connected soundly with the toe of the fancy boot.

  The shooter’s sudden howl was clipped off by Haskell himself lunging out of the crevice and straight into the man, bulling him over sideways with the sheer bulk of his body. All was shadow where the man had fallen behind a boulder, so Haskell didn’t get a clear look at him, seeing only a swiftly moving blur as the man bounded fleetly off the ground and lunged toward him.

  Bear had been about to aim his Henry at him, but the man was small and fast, like a bobcat. He snarled like a bobcat, too, ramming his head into Bear’s broad chest. Haskell hadn’t gotten his feet set after delivering the body blow, so the much smaller and lighter gent was able to bull him over backwards, Bear’s boots slipping off rocks and odd chunks of ancient wood.

  Dropping the Henry, Haskell hit the ground on his back, grunting against the sharp rocks and cacti chewing into him.

  “You son of a bitch!” his opponent raked out, clawing at his face.

  Haskell grabbed the man by his shirt collar and rolled him over, straddling him. Automatically, Bear shucked his bowie knife from the sheath on his cartridge belt, and laid the blade across the man’s neck. His assailant must have felt the razor edge of the cold steel. He instantly fell still.

  Haskell frowned. The man’s face was covered with a thick spray of thick, honey-colored hair. Two hazel eyes stared out through the mussed curtain. They were riveted on Haskell’s own eyes. It was then that Haskell realized that the supple body he lay atop of was not the body of a man at all. It belonged to a woman. A young one. Practically a girl.

  He pulled the bowie away from her neck, brusquely swept her hair aside with his hand, and stared down in hang-jawed awe at the all-too-familiar, heart-shaped face below his.

  The face of the honey-haired, curvy-bodied young lady who’d invited him to her room in San Saba and unceremoniously threw him out—naked—when she’d had her literal and figurative fill of him!

  “Well, I’ll be a two-headed moon calf,” Haskell intoned. “Princess Uppity-Pants—what in the hell are you doing out here?”

  Chapter Twelve

  “Princess Uppity-Pants, is it?” she snarled, slapping his hand away from her face then shaking her hair out of her eyes. “What am I doing out here? What in the hell are you doing out here, you brute? Are you following me?”

  Haskell was still straddling her, staring down at her in shock.

  He laughed despite his confusion. “Following you? If anyone’s followin’ anyone, Miss Uppity-Pants, that would most likely be you followin’ me, since I’m out here on official business!”

  She looked at him, incredulous. “Official business?”

  Haskell poked a thumb at the badge on his shirt. “I’m a deputy United States marshal.”

  She looked at the nickel-finished moon-and-star, apparently seeing it for the first time. He hadn’t worn it on the train or in San Saba, as it tended to attract unwanted attention, including bullets. She looked up into Bear’s face as though having trouble reconciling the badge with the roughhewn features of the man wearing it.

  Haskell rose, wincing against his many aches and abrasions, and looked around cautiously. He couldn’t hear anymore shooting rising from the other side of the ridge. “You alone out here?”

  “Apparently not,” she said, pushing herself to her feet then lifting her left arm to inspect its underside.

  She winced as she plucked cactus thorns from the sleeve of her white silk blouse. She also wore men’s denim trousers, but she looked a whole lot better in them than any man Haskell had ever seen. Around her trim waist was a shell belt studded with .44 cartridges for the Winchester carbine she’d dropped when Bear had bulled her over.

  “You know what I mean,” Haskell said, eyeing her askance.

  “Yes, I was alone ... until now.”

  “Who’s shooting at who on the other side of the ridge?”

  “I might have been able to find that out if you hadn’t so rudely interrupted me.”

  Haskell gave a dry laugh. “I’d say your interrupting me was a whole lot ruder than my interrupting you. You tried to blow my head off, you crazy polecat!”

  “A girl can’t be too careful in this country. When I spied you on my back trail, I naturally thought the worst. And I wasn’t too far off the mar
k. You still haven’t told me what you’re doing out here. A lawman? Really? I find that incredibly hard to believe!”

  “Why?” Scooping his Henry off the ground, Haskell looked at her again, curling his upper lip. “You don’t think lawmen can make women howl the way I made you howl the other night in San Saba?”

  A rose flush blossomed in the nubs of her cheeks. “Stop talking about that!”

  Haskell chuckled as he brushed dirt from his Henry’s stock. “You still haven’t told me what you’re doing out here. You’d better do so in a hurry or I’m gonna think, as I already do, that you’re followin’ me around like a pony after a carrot, lookin’ for a repeat of San Saba. Only it ain’t a carrot you’re after!”

  “Hush!” She looked around quickly, as though afraid someone might overhear. Keeping her voice low, she said in a tone of grave conspiracy, “I am an undercover operative for the Pinkerton Agency.”

  It was Haskell’s turn to drop his jaw in astonishment. “You gotta be shittin’ me. You?”

  She looked offended. “Yes, me! You don’t think women can be detectives?”

  He favored the twin mounds pushing out her silk blouse with a brazen gaze. “Not women who look like you.”

  Reflexively, she crossed her arms on her breasts. She wasn’t putting much weight on her right foot. “What’re you doing out here ... if you’re not following me?”

  “Oh, Christ—we’re talkin’ in circles like an old married couple.” Haskell glanced to the west, where the sun was threatening to tumble behind ridges it was quickly transforming into dark, saw blade silhouettes. “Gonna be dark soon.” He looked toward the ridge of the slope he was on. The shooting had stopped. The shooters were likely gone. Even if they weren’t, it was likely getting too dark down there to see much of anything.

  Haskell turned to the girl. “I got a prisoner down yonder, and I’m gonna need to find a place to camp for the night. We’ll palaver around a coffee fire.”

  He glanced at her carbine, which still lay where she’d dropped it when he’d knocked her sideways. Her hat was there, as well—a green felt Stetson. “Best collect your rifle and find your horse.”