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

by Peter Brandvold

  “Shit,” he said, breathing hard.

  He drew another chestful of air, heaved himself to his feet with a grunt, and continued running, swinging first right and then quickly swinging left and then back again. Atop the rise, more smoke plumed. Flames lapped toward Haskell.

  This time he threw himself to his left. When he rolled off his left shoulder onto his belly, he saw a dogget of dry grass and sand fly up about eight feet to his right. It was followed by the snarling crack of the big-caliber rifle.

  Hair pricked across the back of Haskell’s neck.

  He threw a glance toward the outcropping. The son of a bitch was trying to lead his quarry the way he’d lead a running deer or a buffalo. Hyde had wrongly assumed that Haskell, seeing the rifle’s smoke and flames, would throw himself right. If the Jackal had been correct, Bear’s shaggy head would likely still be rolling along the ground about now, back in the direction from which he’d come.

  Fortunately, Hyde had gotten it wrong.

  Next time, however, he might get it right.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Haskell leaped to his feet and continued running, suppressing the growing pain in his side. When smoke and flames shone again atop the outcropping, Bear straightened out his course and ran directly toward the rise, hearing a resolute thud and seeing out of the corner of his left eye several pulverized prickly pear ears fly.

  Haskell smiled as he ran.

  “Fooled you again, you son of a bitch!” he wheezed.

  He stopped.

  He could see the outline of the shooter atop the outcropping now, in a niche between the sand-colored rocks capping the mound. He could see the long, slender barrel of the long rifle move as Hyde reloaded.

  Haskell raised his Henry to his shoulder, clicked back the hammer, aimed quickly, and fired.

  Dust plumed in front of one of the rocks capping the rise, a few feet from the silhouette of the Jackal’s head. The Jackal pulled his head back with a jerk. Haskell snarled, “There you go—how do you like?” as he pumped another cartridge into the Henry’s breech and sent three more .44-caliber rounds whistling toward the escarpment.

  The echo of the third shot hadn’t died before Haskell rose and continued running hard, pumping his left arm.

  He was closing on the escarpment—within fifty yards now ... forty ... thirty ... .

  He stared at the ridge, the rocks up there grew larger and larger. He waited to see Hyde’s head again, the barrel of his cannon. When he did, Bear would stop and throw more lead. But neither the head of his mysterious assailant nor the rifle appeared.

  Haskell gained the base of the ridge. He was winded, but he started climbing anyway, zigzagging between large rocks. Occasionally, he stopped, crouched, and aimed the Henry toward the crest above him.

  Still no sign of the shooter.

  Haskell stormed the rest of the way to the ridge crest, stopped, and aimed his rifle into the niche in the rocks.

  Hyde was gone.

  Empty brass shell casings winked in the light from the sun that was now poking up above the eastern ridge.

  Haskell pivoted, swinging his Henry around, raking his gaze along the crest of the ridge. Nothing.

  Breathless, his legs and chest aching, his dropped to a knee, lowered the barrel of the Henry. While he caught his breath, he continued to look around. Footprints scored the sand anywhere from three to five feet down the sandy backside of the ridge, near the spent shell casings. The prints were small. Little larger than the sign left by your average woman. There were several fresh, brown, tobacco-flecked plops of chaw juice, as well. The Jackal had spat on one of his empty shell casings, which had rolled up against a jagged-edged rock.

  Haskell felt more hair prick across the back of his neck.

  Studying the Jackal’s sign was like studying the tracks of a reclusive, rogue beast of the wild or a ghost. Few people but those who’d hired Jack Hyde to kill for them had ever seen him since he’d broken out of prison nearly twenty years ago. Those who’d hired him had rarely spoken of him. Naturally they hadn’t wanted to admit they’d hired him. Many had hired him long-distance—through the mail or by telegram.

  So what Bear was staring at now were the leavings of what was for all intents and purposes a ghost, albeit a human one.

  Or maybe the Jackal wasn’t human. No one knew enough about him to know for sure. There were times when Haskell had wondered if the man actually existed anywhere outside of legend.

  But now he himself had encountered him.

  He’d been shot at by the man’s legendary Sharps.

  His fingers tingled as he looked around carefully, searching for the Jackal. He couldn’t be that far away. Only a few minutes had passed since Bear had last seen him.

  Then he saw a thin sliver of dust rising along the base of the eastern ridge. The man was following the wash north along that ridge. He was maybe a quarter mile away and moving fast.

  Another horseman was galloping toward Haskell, this one from the northwest. Horsewoman, rather. Honey-blond hair danced across Arliss Posey’s shoulders as she swung her clay in a slow arc toward the backside of the escarpment. She rode the clay bareback, with only a bridle, and she held her carbine across the horse’s buffeting mane.

  Haskell hurried down the escarpment. He reached the bottom just as Arliss pulled up, looking harried. “Where is he?”

  Haskell jerked his chin in the direction the Jackal was headed. “Over there, but you can’t see him from here.” He strode over to the claybank. “We have to get back to camp fast. I gotta get my horse and get after him!” He leaped off a rock, swinging his right leg over the clay’s back, plopping himself down behind Arliss.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” she said, peevish as usual.

  “You don’t expect me to walk after him, do you?” Haskell pecked her cheek.

  “You do that again, and I’ll—”

  “I know—you’ll gut shoot me. Come on, darlin’!” He batted his heels against the clay’s flanks, causing the mount to lunge into an instant lope. “We got the Jackal on the run!”

  ~*~

  While Arliss broke camp, limping on her bad foot, Haskell rolled Jordan Tifflin in his saddle blanket and tied him belly down over his saddled horse. Then Haskell saddled both his own and Arliss’s horses. They mounted up and galloped around the escarpment from which the Jackal had fired at them.

  It didn’t take long for Haskell to pick up the man’s tracks, his heart beating anxiously, relieved and thrilled to finally be on the trail of one of the most wanted federal criminals in the history of the frontier west.

  His relief and his thrill were literally doused with cold water when, forty minutes north of the escarpment, mountain-sized clouds rolled in and piled up, dropped fast, and hurled raindrops the size of silver dollars sideways on a chill wind. Haskell and Arliss had been following the wash, but now they had to leave it in a hurry, for it was beginning to flood. The Jackal’s tracks were quickly, thoroughly obliterated. Haskell and the Pinkerton rode up the side of the eastern ridge and took cover from the deluge under a rock overhang.

  “Shit!” Haskell barked, standing at the overhang’s edge and glaring out at the tempest.

  He looked at the muddy, roiling, tea-colored water now sweeping driftwood and cow bones down the wash that had been bone-dry only a half an hour earlier. “That bastard has some higher power looking out for him, I swear!”

  Arliss, too, was frustrated. Seated on the ground beneath the overhang, knees raised, she worked her own exasperation out on a mesquite stick with her pocketknife.

  “He was headed north,” she said. “The San Rafael is north.”

  “Working for Tifflin,” Bear said as he plucked an Indian Kid out of his shirt pocket and snapped a match to life on his thumbnail.

  Puffing the cheroot, he walked over to where the horses stood ground-tied ten feet to his left, and rummaged around in one of his saddlebag pouches. He pulled out a hide-wrapped bottle, left the hide in the pouch,
and took the bottle over to where Arliss sat. He sat down beside her and popped the cork on the bottle.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked, scowling at him with her customary reproof.

  “I’m gonna have a drink.” Haskell took a couple of deep pulls then wiped the bottle’s lip with his hand and offered the bourbon to his comely partner. “Join me?”

  Her scowl deepened. She opened her mouth to give him a harsh rebuke. But then she closed her mouth, looked at the bottle, sighed, and grabbed it. “Why the hell not?”

  She tipped back the bottle. Her lovely throat moved twice, and then she jerked the bottle back down, gagging. “Oh, God—that’s terrible!” She gave Haskell another incriminating look.

  “Yeah, well, that’s about all a feller can find this far out in the high and rocky.” Bear chuckled as she continued to gag, leaning forward with her head between her knees. “You gonna be all right?”

  Arliss dry retched a few more times then lifted her head, swallowed, drew a deep breath, and ran the back of her hand across her mouth. In a pinched, raspy voice, she said, “No thanks to you!”

  “Ah, hell, it’s not that bad.” Haskell took another swallow, then one more. “Sorta grows on a feller.”

  She looked at him, frowning. “It does?”

  “Yeah.” Bear offered the bottle. “Try again?”

  “Maybe I just took too big a sip.” Arliss took the bottle and lifted it slowly, tentatively to her lips. She closed her lips over the lip of the bottle. Her mouth was still wet from her previous swig. Staring at her lips, Haskell felt a stirring in his pants.

  Arliss lifted the bottle gently. Haskell saw the liquid slosh up through the brown neck. When it started to run into the young woman’s mouth, she lowered the bottle almost immediately, and swallowed, pursing her lips and making a face.

  She held the whiskey down this time. After a few seconds, she turned to Haskell with a vaguely pleased look in her pretty, hazel eyes.

  “You’re right. It does sort of grow on you.”

  “See?”

  “Good grief,” she said with a snort. “You’re gonna make a drunk out of me.” She lifted the bottle again and took another very small swig, swallowed, and handled the bottle back to Haskell. “I’ve never been much of a whiskey drinker,” she said. “But it feels good ... on such a day as this.”

  She stared out at the rain and the churning wash.

  Haskell leaned back on his elbows and studied her as the cool wind blew in under the overhang, sliding her hair back behind her face.

  Since there wasn’t anything else to do, he finally asked the question that had been nibbling at the edges of his mind since he’d first encountered her on this same ridge, only a couple of miles south of here. “How in the heck did a pretty girl like you get into this business, anyway? Chasin’ after scalawags like Jack Hyde ... ”

  She turned her head to study him skeptically for a time, her scrutiny dancing between his eyes. She appeared somehow suspicious of the question, as though she suspected he might have some ulterior motive for asking it.

  Haskell hiked a shoulder and took another pull from the bottle. “All right, never mind. I didn’t mean to crawl your hump. We’ll just sit here and watch the rain.”

  “That would be preferable,” she said, turning her head forward again.

  After a time, without looking at him, she reached out her hand for the bottle. Haskell gave it to her.

  From the side, he watched her lift the bottle to her pink mouth and take another tentative sip. She took one more small sip. A little of the whiskey dribbled out from her bottom lip and ran down her chin. Haskell felt another stirring in his loins. He remembered how sweet her lips had tasted the other night in San Saba. He yearned to taste them again now, to lick the whiskey off of them. But as she handed the bottle back to Bear, she brushed the trickle of whiskey from her chin with her hand.

  Staring at the rain, which was coming down with slightly less vigor than before, she said quietly, “I’m from Illinois. Farm family. My great-grandfather and his wife came through the Cumberland Gap during the Revolutionary War. He wanted to make a fresh start, free of King George. Instead, he ended up fighting the Shawnees who had sworn allegiance to the Tories. Anyway, he was killed in a duel just after my grandfather was born.”

  “Tough stock,” Haskell said. He didn’t mention that he shared a similar, frontier-fighting history.

  Arliss said, “My father was a farmer and a blacksmith. He also owned a saloon. He got into a feud with a rival saloon owner. One morning I woke to smoke filling my bedroom.” She turned to Haskell, her gaze tinged with remembered grief. “I still dream about that night. I was only twelve. I tried to get my mam and pap out of their rooms, but I couldn’t wake them. I grabbed my baby brother from his crib and ran outside, but he was already dead.”

  She stopped as she turned back to stare at the rain. A tear dribbled out from the corner of her left eye. She shook her head as though to clear the emotion and continued with, “I was taken in by mother’s brother. A bad man. He mistreated me ... in vile ways. One night he came to my room and I cut him with a butcher knife. Cut him in a way that made sure he’d never treat another girl the way he’d treated me again.”

  She gave Haskell a quick, foxy, self-satisfied grin.

  Haskell winced. “Don’t doubt it a bit.”

  “Then I ran north to Chicago. I was eighteen. Penniless. I found work in restaurants and bawdy houses. I never did any work on my back though the bawdy house owners wanted me to. I would only swamp the place out, wash the linens and empty cuspidors and slop buckets. Disgusting work.

  “But it was in one of those bawdy houses I was befriended by a kind man—a man who had lost his wife recently and frequented the bawdy houses to relieve his loneliness. The gentleman was an associate of Mister Allan Pinkerton. It just so happened that Mister Pinkerton needed an operative on the crime-ridden streets of Chicago. There was a spate of kidnappings at the time—outlaw gangs from the riverfronts preying on the silver-spoon folks from the wealthy neighbors. Mister Pinkerton figured that a young woman prowling those riverfront bordellos and eateries could get more information about criminal transactions, including kidnapping plots, than any of his male operatives. And he was right.” Arliss gave Haskell a saucy wink over her left shoulder.

  “It must’ve been right dangerous work,” Haskell said.

  “It was.” Arliss nodded. “But I took to it like a pig to mud.” She snorted. “That was one of Pap’s expressions. Anyway, after a year or so, I’d sort of worn out my welcome on the streets of Chicago. The gangs were onto me. So Mister Pinkerton sent me out here to the frontier. It’s here that I work now, busting up rustling gangs and fraudulent confidence schemes, tracking killers and kidnappers and illegal whiskey peddlers. You name it, I do it.”

  She stopped. She was silent for a time and then, scowling, turned to look over her shoulder at Haskell again. “That must be your whiskey talking. I’ve never said that much to any one man in my entire life.”

  She looked a little terrified. “You can’t tell anyone about any of that!”

  Haskell chuckled. “Darlin’, if you can’t trust a deputy U.S. marshal, who can you trust?”

  She squinted an eye at him. “I’m still not sure about you.”

  “You seemed to be sure enough the other night.”

  She bunched her lips in anger, drew her hand back behind her shoulder, and flung it forward. Haskell grabbed her wrist before it could crack against his face, and held it between them. He doffed his hat, then hers, tossed them aside, and leaned toward her.

  He expected her to pull back away from him, but she didn’t.

  He closed his mouth over hers, amazed to find her lips opening for him and pliant, her tongue pressing against his own. He kissed her harder. She groaned and wrapped her arms around his neck, opening her mouth still farther and kissing him with every bit as much fervor as he was kissing her.

  He drew his head away from hers,
jerked off his leather gloves, and began unbuttoning her blouse. While he did, she reached down and pressed her right hand against his crotch. He was already hard, but the feel of her warm hand against him made his manhood throb crazily.

  He opened her blouse then pulled her chemise up to her neck. Her breasts swelled out from her chest, the pink nipples immediately pebbling as the cool, moist air touched them. Haskell cupped each firm orb in his hands and drove his nose and mouth into the deep valley between them, sniffing, reveling in the warm female scent of her.

  “Get out of your pants,” she urged, breathless.

  Haskell unbuckled his cartridge belts, quickly coiled them together, and set them aside. He cast a cautious glance outside the overhang. What he and Arliss were about to do was damned dangerous, but he figured that the Jackal was a good ways ahead of them and likely holed up out of the weather the same as Bear and Arliss were.

  He pulled his pants down to his ankles and then turned to the pretty, flushed Pinkerton, who’d pulled her own pants down to her boots. She grabbed Bear’s hard on and pumped it, nibbling his chin.

  Her small, sharp teeth and warm breath enflamed his desire. Groaning, Arliss lay back against the hard stone floor and spread her legs wide, the tangled hair between her legs opening to reveal the red flesh of her womanhood.

  Haskell mounted her.

  Arliss gave another, louder, deep-throated groan as he slid inside her moist, fleshy portal, and she thrust her hips up to meet his.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Haskell rolled off of Arliss sometime later, his breath rasping in and out of his chest, and lay back against the slope’s stone floor. Arliss lay beside him, breathing just as heavily as he was. He rolled back toward her, kissed each of her breasts in turn, then lay back once more.

  “That, darlin’,” Bear said, chuckling, “was one hell of a way to wait out a rainstorm!”

  “Indeed,” Arliss wheezed.

  “You know what’s even better about it?”

  “What’s that?” she said, leaning over to plant a kiss on his dwindling manhood.