CHAPTER 48
When Beartooth opened his eyes again, he was no longer numb. Pain knifed through him, from his head on down his neck and into his shoulders. He held back a scream but could not suppress a loud groan.
A grinning face swam in front of him.
“What’s the matter, Deputy? Regret now that you disregarded my simple warning? I never harmed a single soul in your stinking town, you ungrateful bastard, and all you had to do to keep it that way was to hold off your chase for a little while. Now a young life has been wasted and more are on the line, including yours. All because you insisted on playing the big, bold hero.”
The face came into focus. A man with a long, thin nose and a pencil mustache. Angry eyes.
Beartooth could still hear the wind howling, though none was blowing against him. Overhead he could see a slice of the sky still holding some streaks of daylight. High, smooth stone walls all around. Not a cave, but a natural crevice cut into the side of the passage, out of the wind; similar to the one where he’d huddled with his posse not long ago, but much larger. A quick sweep of his eyes as he blinked them more into focus showed Oberon Hadley’s bulk sprawled nearby him. No sign of Gabe Hooper. Straight ahead, on the other side of the man with the pencil mustache, was a dark-haired woman draped in a tan duster. She was holding a short-barreled pistol. Beside her, hunched forward with his hands tied in front of him, squatted Rupert Shaw.
The man with the pencil mustache reached out and cuffed Beartooth alongside the head. Not hard, just to get his attention. “How many more are trailing behind you?” he demanded. “Don’t insult me by trying to make me believe you came after us with only a three-man posse.”
Beartooth tried to lunge for the man, but all he managed was to shove himself up on one elbow before the pain streaked through him again and he fell back, gasping. The slice of sky overhead became smeared by another wave of dizziness.
“Not so tough now, are you, hero?” sneered Pencil Mustache. “You’re going to die. You know that, don’t you? The only question is whether or not you die quick and without more pain if you tell me what I need to know—or if you make us do it the hard way and you suffer greatly before telling me anyway.”
“You go to hell,” Beartooth snarled.
Pierce Torrence raised his hand to strike him again when Shaw blurted out from behind him. “There’s an easier, quicker way!”
Torrence stayed his hand and spun around. “What are you talking about?”
Shaw inclined his head, indicating Hadley. “The big one there. Roust him back to consciousness and he’ll reveal anything I tell him to. He’s totally devoted to me. He’ll talk for certain.”
“And then what?” Torrence sneered. “I suppose you’ll expect me to leave him alive in return.”
“I don’t care one way or the other. He will have served his purpose. All I want in return is one thing,” Shaw said. He inclined his head again, this time toward Beartooth. “Him. I want that piece of backwoods trash dead. And I want to be the one to do it. You can add another five thousand dollars to the ransom money if you put a gun in my hand long enough to let me plant a bullet in his scurvy heart.”
Leticia cast a startled glance in his direction.
Before Torrence could respond, two forms came ducking hurriedly out of the wind and into the chasm. Black Hills and Romo pulled the neckerchiefs down off their faces and inhaled some deep breaths of still air.
“We went back quite a ways without spotting anybody else,” Black Hills reported. “If there’s anybody back there, they’re back a long way.”
“I find it impossible to believe they sent only a posse of three!” Torrence insisted.
“Believe what you want,” Black Hills said, scowling. “All I’m sayin’ is that if there’s more, they ain’t close. I’m the one who spotted this bunch by scoutin’ our back trail, ain’t I? I think I know what I’m lookin’ for.”
“Yes, yes, Black Hills, no one is questioning your skill at that sort of thing. But it’s a matter of practicality. It simply makes no sense to have sent such a small posse.”
“Maybe there was a bigger posse but these three got separated from the others in that damn blinding wind,” Leticia suggested.
“Or maybe,” Romo said, “some of ’em went down that other fork back a ways.”
“Yeah,” said Black Hills, turning on him with a hard frown, “and maybe they scattered farther back after hearing gunshots because you decided to start blastin’ away at that third hombre instead of just clubbin’ him like I did these two.”
“Never mind that for right now. What’s done is done,” growled Torrence. “But thanks to our helpful Mr. Shaw, just before you two returned we were on the verge of finding out exactly how many posse members are back there. Black Hills, get that big fellow awake. Be careful, he’s nearly the size of you. Romo, you stand ready with your gun drawn. Letty, my dear, eject all but one shell from your gun and have it ready for Shaw to use as his part of the bargain if he’s able to get the information out of the ox.”
Beartooth listened to all of this, his heart pounding, trying to keep his breathing under control. The dizziness seemed gone and his pain felt manageable. But he didn’t know if he had the strength to rise up suddenly or if he’d collapse again as before. And even if he did make it up, what chance did he have against four armed varmints—plus that piece of scum Shaw—scattered across the width of the giant crevice?
He’d fallen back in such a way that his head was turned toward Hadley. He watched helplessly as they splashed some water on the big Englishman’s face and then shook him and gave him some light slaps to bring him around. Hadley’s eyes opened and he blinked several times, appearing at first disoriented, befuddled, then quickly forming into a glare . . . until they came to rest on Shaw.
“That’s right, old chum,” Shaw said with an encouraging smile. “I’m still okay. As are you. A bit roughed up perhaps, but nothing we can’t handle, eh? We’re going to get out of this. I promise. I’ve arranged everything.”
Shaw rose rather awkwardly from his sitting position and moved forward in a low crouch until he was directly in front of Hadley. He dropped to his knees and leaned in close to the big man. “But in order to save ourselves, we’re going to have to cooperate with these fellows. I’m afraid they’ve got the drop on us, as they say in those lurid thrillers you’ve been reading. It’s the only way. You must reveal how many men started out in that posse with you and where are the rest? There must have been more than just you and two others, correct? Where are the rest?”
Hadley blinked rapidly some more. “Others? Posse?”
With his bound hands, Shaw grabbed him impatiently by his shirtfront. “Damn it, man, clear your head. Think! Our lives depend on it, can’t you see? Where are the others?”
Hadley’s blinking slowed, and then stopped. “Oh. You want to know where the other posse members are.”
Every eye in the chamber was focused on the big man’s gloriously battered face, waiting for the next words to come out of it.
Starting soft and low so that everyone had to lean closer to hear, Hadley said, “We . . . we left the rest of them . . . up your mother’s bloomers, ye yellow wanker!”
The final sentence came out in a full-throated bellow, with Hadley’s face jammed so close to that of his ex-captain’s that it left the formerly pampered cheeks dotted with spittle. And as an exclamation point to the words, there came the muffled roar of a firearm. Shaw jerked backward. As he did so, his smoldering vest pocket was ripped away due to Hadley’s hand being shoved in it. Gripped now in the former sergeant’s big paw was a smoking over-under derringer.
With one chamber still to be discharged in the confiscated weapon, Hadley thrust his arm in the direction of Black Hills, whom he reckoned to be the most immediate remaining threat, and fired the second barrel. The slug slammed into the middle of the big outlaw, a few inches to the left of his belt buckle, and spun him partway around. It didn’t knock him down but it d
id send him staggering into Romo and momentarily prevented the latter from aiming his already drawn gun.
That moment was all it took for more gun blasts to echo deafeningly in the stone-walled chamber. Bullets poured out of the deeper shadows toward the back of the crevice. A couple ricocheted in piercing whines, but far more thudded into meat and bone. Behind this burst of gunfire, the faces and shapes of Miguel, Big Thomas, and Russ Overstreet came charging out of the blackness. The bank robbers never stood a chance, never got off a shot. All three men went into lurching, spinning death dances that ended with them toppling to the ground. Only Leticia, whom the shooters swarmed over and nearly trampled, knocking her gun out of her hand, was spared a bullet.
* * *
“This crevice, this huge crack,” Miguel explained after the shooting was over and everyone was trying to piece together exactly what had happened, “runs clear over to the other passage that forked off back up the trail. We discovered it just as that other way was narrowing to a dead end. We wouldn’t have paid it much attention, not realizing how far in it reached, except when we were getting ready to turn around and go back, we heard voices coming through it. Like you said, Señor Beartooth, sound travels funny in the mountains.”
“So, since we saw this big ol’ crack was goin’ toward the way you took and there was the voices comin’ through and all, we started followin’ it in,” Overstreet said.
“It was mighty tight goin’ in a couple places and dark as Hades part of the time, too,” Big Thomas added. “But those yammerin’ voices—not that we could rightly understand what they were sayin’—kept lurin’ us on.”
“Well, you’ll get no complaints out of me that you allowed ’em to. That’s for sure,” said Beartooth. He was sitting up now. The dizziness and pain had mostly subsided and he felt like he could probably stand, but right at the present there was no need to hurry it.
“We came to the edge of the opening but still back in the shadows just as the hostage was presenting his idea for getting Señor Hadley to tell about other posse members,” Miguel said, picking up the narrative again. “But then the other two came in and stood too close to Señor Hadley and you, one of them with his gun already drawn, so we could not make a rush right away for fear of one of you catching a bullet.”
“But then ol’ Hadley cut loose,” said Overstreet, wagging his head partly in amazement and partly in admiration, “so all we could do was follow his lead and come blazin’ out.”
“I guess it was a bit of a reckless move,” allowed Hadley, who was also in a sitting position next to Beartooth. “But after I heard the captain make a deal for himself to kill the deputy here while at the same time offering me up for sacrifice . . . well, I knew he had to die and I knew I should be the one to do it. I’d been laying there awake for quite a while, you see, listening and waiting for some kind of opening.”
“How did you know about the derringer in his vest?” Beartooth asked.
“He always carries it there,” Hadley answered. “I didn’t know the robbers hadn’t relieved him of it, though, until he came close and grabbed me by the shirtfront. I felt it against my arm. That’s when I decided how I was going to use it, what I was going to do.”
“If the robbers never found it and he had that hideaway gun all this while,” said Overstreet, “why didn’t he use it himself to try and escape? His hands were only tied in front—he could have got to it in that vest pocket if he’d wanted to.”
“But he didn’t want to. Because,” Hadley said, a great sadness suddenly flooding his expression, “Captain Rupert Shaw was a coward. I refused to believe that for all these years, railed against the rumors and charges against him as the petty work of those who were merely jealous and seeking to get even. I guess I even looked away a time or two when I saw signs of it firsthand. Not wanting to admit it because, if I did, then I’d have to admit I’d been wrong in my judgment and maybe even that my defense of him was due to having gotten a taste of the finer things in life by being in his employ and not wanting to give that up.”
Beartooth shook his head. “I think it was simply a matter of loyalty. Blind loyalty, maybe, but not for any reasons that were dishonorable. And one thing’s for damn certain—you’ve proved beyond any doubt that none of Shaw’s cowardice rubbed off on you.”
Hadley met his eyes with a look of gratitude. “Once I made up my mind to try for that derringer, I would have gone through with it regardless, figuring neither you nor I had much chance anyway. But just as I was getting ready to make my grab, I looked past the captain’s shoulder and caught a glimpse of Miguel back in the shadows. I didn’t know why or how he got there, but I knew his presence meant we had a chance after all, if I just went ahead and set things in motion.”
“And boy, did you ever do that,” remarked Overstreet.
“The only thing that bothers me about it,” muttered Miguel, “is that you were able to spot me. I must be slipping.”
Beartooth’s expression turned bleak. “You got no call to be bothered. I’m the one who walked into an ambush—got me and Hadley a couple busted skulls, got young Gabe killed.”
“Don’t do that to yourself, man,” Big Thomas protested. “What with the poor visibility due to the wind and dusk comin’ on—”
“Then if I wasn’t up to dealin’ with it,” Beartooth cut him off, “I shouldn’t have pushed so hard and insisted on catchin’ up. We could have waited until tomorrow, and Gabe would have been alive to see it.”
“Tomorrow comes with no promises for anyone,” Hadley told him. “It never has and never will. And young Hooper knew the risks when he agreed to join this posse. In fact, he was bursting with pride over it. Don’t diminish that by acting now as if you should have coddled him or not included him at all, just because he got caught by some bad luck.”
Now it was Beartooth who reacted with a look of gratitude. Sighing raggedly, he said, “I guess it’s like my pal Firestick is fond of sayin’, what’s written is written.”
Nobody had a response to that.
After a minute, Beartooth pushed to his feet. Big Thomas reached to steady him. Glancing up through the open top of the crevice at the sky that had by now gone full dark, the lawman said, “I guess we’ll be campin’ here tonight. We’ll need to gather up the bodies, wrap ’em in blankets, and put ’em off to one side in some decent way . . . especially Gabe’s, which we’ll find back down the trail. Then, first thing in the mornin’, we’ll tie ’em on horses and start back down the mountain to Buffalo Peak.”
Overstreet and Big Thomas left to go get Gabe.
Beartooth stepped over to Leticia, who sat glaring silently in pretty much the same spot where she’d been nearly trampled when Miguel and the others charged over her. He took a pair of handcuffs from his belt and shook them loose. “And don’t think I’m forgettin’ you, sweetheart. You’ll be goin’ back down the mountain, too. In these.” He tossed her the cuffs. “Clamp ’em on and start gettin’ used to the idea of chains and bars. Because they’re gonna be a part of your life for a long time to come.”
CHAPTER 49
“Why not let me take care of it, Josh?” Charlie suggested in a low voice, his forehead deeply puckered. “You take the gals and walk a ways on ahead. Don’t look back. I’ll catch up when I’ve done what needs doin’.”
Josh didn’t lift his gaze at the words from his longtime partner. He just kept staring down at the gray mare who lay near where he stood with his rifle in his hands. The horse blew in a nervous, confused way.
“I’m obliged for the offer, Charlie,” Josh said woodenly. “But it ought to be me. She’s my horse. Been mine for nigh on to seven years. Ever since . . . well, you remember.”
“Yeah, I remember. She’s been an awful good horse to you.”
“That she has. Never let me down. Not once. Not until she stepped wrong in that hole and busted her poor leg practically in two.” Josh paused, swallowed hard. “Look at her, lying there in pain. She’s gotta be hurtin’ something f
ierce, but she’s puttin’ on a brave act. And if I asked her to, she’d do her darnedest to get back up again.”
Cleo stepped up beside Josh, looking almost as forlorn as him. “Ain’t there anything you can do to fix it—her leg, I mean?”
“Not really. Especially not way the heck out here.” Josh’s grip tightened reluctantly on his rifle. “Nothing for it but to put her out of her misery.”
“That’s so sad and awful,” Cleo said, her voice now just a whisper.
“I know. But it’s the only way.” Josh sounded like he was reminding himself as well as trying to convince her. “Now go on over with Charlie and Miss Kate. Don’t watch. It’ll be quick and then she won’t be sufferin’ no more.”
Cleo did as he suggested. She, Kate, and Charlie turned their backs and gazed off blankly. When Josh’s rifle cracked they each winced involuntarily.
After a minute, Josh walked up level with them. He was carrying the saddle he’d stripped off the mare earlier. His rifle was shoved back in its scabbard. He took the saddle and swung it up on the packhorse, situating it so that it would ride secure on one of the bundles.
Without looking at anybody, he said in a thick voice, “We’d best get a move on. We’re in Texas now, but the goin’ is gonna be slower from here on since we’re minus a horse and we still got a long stretch before we get to Bright Rock.”
Blood and Bullets Page 28
