Dead Man's Trail (9781101606957) (16 page)

“All right! All right!”

She quickly gathered her clothes, few as there were, and ran out of the room and into the barn's deeper darkness. Yakima slammed the door. He walked over to stand in front of the stove, getting himself warm again before dropping his Colt back into its holster and sagging onto the cot with a weary groan and a grunt.

Gonna be damn good to get out of here
. . . .

Chapter 22

Yakima was up early the next morning, when the dawn was still a faint pearl wash in the east, beyond the frost-crusted windows of the barn's windows.

He didn't bother with a fire but merely dressed in the misty darkness of the little room, then carried his rifle and saddlebags and blanket roll out to where Wolf stood, snorting and stomping in his stall. The black had heard Yakima get up, knew they'd be on the trail again soon, and he, like his rider, was pleased as punch at the prospect.

Yakima set his gear down beside the stall, then walked to the front of the barn and opened the doors. Smoke curled from the chimneys poking up out of the station house's second-story roof. He couldn't see any light on in the place yet, but the smoke meant someone was likely up fixing breakfast.

It was gray and cold. About an inch of feathery snow had fallen overnight, but the faint dark smears of Coble's blood were still visible in front of the barn doors. His boot prints as well as the girl's smaller slipper prints trailed off toward the station house—very faint outlines under the snow that had fallen after they'd taken their leave.

Judging by how close the girl's prints were to the man's, she'd probably helped him back to the station house. Coble's boot toes were pointed inward, and they'd raked across the ground. He likely wouldn't have made it back to the house by himself; he'd have died out here and frozen up like marble.

Yakima knew it was not to his credit that the idea amused him.

He went back into the barn, led Wolf out, tied him to a post, and saddled him. He'd just tossed the saddlebags over the horse's back and shoved his rifle into the boot when a woman screamed. He jerked the rifle back out of the boot and ran into the yard as the woman screamed again. He looked around. The scream had come from behind the station house.

Running that way along the side of the house, he heard men yelling and boots thumping in the house's second story. The screams had alerted others. Yakima ran around behind the station house, skirting a large L-shaped stack of split firewood. Beyond, at the end of a worn path, stood a two-hole privy. Up a low, brushy knoll behind the privy, Glendolene stood in her fur coat, staring farther up the knoll.

At the top of the knoll jutted a large, sprawling, leafless cottonwood. From one of the tree's arcing branches, on its left side, a man hung from a rope, his body twisting slowly in the slight, sighing wind.

Yakima ran up the knoll. Glendolene turned to him, one hand over her mouth, eyes wide. She gave another frightened start when her eyes found him, but then she lowered her hand and pointed toward the man hanging from the tree.

Yakima ran past her and stopped to stare up at the slack body of Mel Coble. The shotgunner's face was bruised and swollen, his lips cut, his left eye swollen shut. That brow had a crusty cut angling through it. His chin was tipped toward his chest, and his wide-open eyes gazed dumbly at the ground, his lower jaw hanging slack.

Coble wore only his long handles and wool socks.

Slowly, he turned from right to left in the breeze. He'd turned nearly a complete circle at the end of the rope when the bartender from last night came running out the back door of the station house, hatless, an apron around his broad waist. His mouth opened beneath his long blond mustaches when he stared up the hill past Glendolene and Yakima at the shotgunner hanging from the cottonwood.

“Glendolene?” Mendenhour called from inside the station house, amidst the thudding of several pairs of boots. “Glendolene, what in holy blazes . . . ?” he said again as he ran out the back door.

He wore only his suit without the jacket, and suspenders. He wore no hat. In his right fist was a Colt .45. He ran past the bartender and stopped five feet from the back door, staring up the knoll at Glendolene and then at Yakima before his eyes widened as they settled on Coble.

The barman said, “Who is that? Is that Coble hangin' there with his neck stretched? Who did that?”

Yakima only vaguely heard the man. He was walking around on the other side of the tree, noting two sets of boot tracks and the lighter prints of stocking feet. Coble's feet. He'd been dragging his toes again, only this time he probably hadn't been conscious when the two men who'd hanged him had dragged him out here, most likely from the privy where he'd probably gone to be sick after the beating Yakima had given him.

Looking up at the dead man again, he saw a bloody splotch at the back of Coble's head. Yakima didn't remember hitting the shotgunner anywhere but on his face. Whoever had hanged him had likely knocked him over the head first, so he couldn't make any noise and alert the others.

Yakima followed the tracks down the far side of the knoll. There were only the boot prints here. At the base of the knoll and in a sparse grove of cottonwoods, he saw where two horses had been tied. The tracks were a couple of hours old; only a little snow obscured them.

He walked back up the knoll. More people had emerged from the station house, including the two lawmen and the army major. They were standing around with Mendenhour, holding pistols or rifles, and looking bleary-eyed and befuddled as they stared up at the hanged shotgunner.

“Any tracks?” asked the lawman named Kelsey. The white of his eyes were mostly red beneath the brim of his Stetson.

“Two horses,” Yakima said. “Two men, two horses. They hanged him and rode out.”

“Who?”

“Him!” a girl yelled in the direction of the station house, and Yakima turned to see the brunette from last night holding a blanket around her shoulders and pointing up the hill at him. “The breed done it! Beat the shit out of Mel last night, but that wasn't enough for him. He had to go an' hang him, too!”

Even Mrs. O'Reilly and the drummers and old Elijah Weatherford were outside now, looking bleary-eyed, confused, and fearful. They all looked at the whore and then turned their heads slowly toward Yakima.

“What's this?” asked the Hispanic lawman named Arenas.

Yakima nodded. “I did that to his face, but only after he tried to feed me a chunk of lead. But I sure as hell didn't hang him. Didn't see the need.”

“If not you . . . ,” said Mendenhour testily.

Yakima walked past Glendolene and over to the privy, circling it slowly with his rifle on his shoulder. When he walked back around to the corner nearest the hang tree, he said, “They followed him out here from the station house. Early this morning. Probably waited till he was done with his business, then beat him over the head and hanged him.”

“Why?” said Glendolene, scrunching her face up, aghast.

Yakima shrugged. “To show what they're capable of. And to show”—he looked at Mendenhour—“what's comin'.”

“He did it,” the whore shrieked, pointing at Yakima. “I swear he did!”

The lawmen, the major, and Mendenhour all stared at Yakima. He looked at the other passengers. They were staring at him, too.

Yakima turned back to the lawmen. “There were two well-armed men in the station house last night. I'm betting they were from Betajack's and Hendricks's crew. And I'm betting they're not all that far away.”

The men standing around the swinging feet of Mel Coble all looked at each other curiously.

Arenas said in his deep, gravelly voice, squinting at Yakima, “Don't know if I'd believe a man with paper on him. Especially one who done that to Coble's face last night. I'd say we have the hangman right here, fellas. Maybe we'd best throw the cuffs on him, haul him over to Broken Jaw, toss him in the lockup, report this business to the prosecutor over there.”

“That's crazy!” Glendolene said. “He wouldn't have hanged this man. Why, he's done nothing but help us. Lee, for goodness' sake!”

Ignoring his wife, Mendenhour glared at Yakima and said tightly, “I believe I told you last night, Mr. Henry, that your services will no longer be required.”

“Pshaw!” said Mrs. O'Reilly. “What kind of way is that to treat a man who saved our lives when he sure as sin on earth didn't have to?”

Boots scraped and thudded inside the roadhouse, and all heads turned to see the stage driver, Charlie Adlard, poke his head out the door, dirty gray hair hanging in his eyes. His weathered, papery cheeks sagged beneath his salt-and-pepper beard.

“What . . . what's goin' on out here?” he asked in his gravelly voice, still a little slurred from all the tanglefoot he'd consumed the night before.

The drummers chuckled at him. The others ignored him.

Yakima ignored him, as well. He looked at Glendolene, who had kept her eyes on him. She was smiling sadly, with understanding, her eyes boring right through him.

Go
, she seemed to be saying.
You've done all you can for us
.

Yakima glanced once more at the lawmen, the soldier, and the prosecutor, then turned and walked away, holding the Yellowboy straight down in his right hand.

Behind him, Mrs. O'Reilly clucked her disapproval.

* * *

Crows lighted, cawing, from a copse of winter gray deciduous trees and a smattering of conifers sheathing a creek at the base of a low sandstone ridge that stood about a hundred yards from where Deputy U.S. Marshal Tom Kelsey and Major Matt Demarest sat their horses.

As their horses foraged freeze-dried clumps of needle grass and brome rising above the snow now glittering like sequins in the early-morning sunshine, both men studied the flock of squawking birds as it rose, resembling a thin black kite, nearly straight up, then flattened out toward the west before banking and careening straight south over the ridge.

“What do you think about that?” Demarest said, nibbling at the frost riming his thick red mustache.

Kelsey lowered his gaze from the crows to the tracks pocking the snow-dusted terrain before him. The two sets of shod hoofprints trailed nearly straight out from beneath him and the major. They rose and fell over the cactus- and sage-pocked hills toward where the crows had lit from the cottonwoods, aspens, and ponderosa pines.

Kelsey and Demarest had left the station house half an hour ago, following the tracks leading away from where Mel Coble dangled from the cottonwood. They'd left Kelsey's partner, Raul Arenas, back at the station house to help cut Coble down and get him buried and then to take the man's place as shotgun messenger aboard the stage.

Kelsey felt as though he had no choice but to follow the tracks, and he was happy when Major Demarest, who was on furlough from Camp Collins in Colorado Territory, south of Cheyenne, had volunteered to ride along. What Kelsey intended to do if he ran into Floyd Betajack and Claw Hendricks's large gang out here, he had no idea. But he'd been outnumbered before, albeit by less seasoned cutthroats, and he hadn't been about to let that deter him.

Especially not when Lee Mendenhour's beautiful, brown-eyed wife had been there to witness any sign of cowardice displayed by the lawman, he mused now with a wry chuff. Tracking two murder suspects, when they could very well be part of a larger, notorious, and particularly savage gang that had been running roughshod around northern Colorado and southern Wyoming territories for years, was the price a man paid for wearing the badge.

“I suspect somethin' spooked them birds,” Kelsey said, reaching behind to poke a hand into his left-side saddlebag pouch, pulling out his field glasses.

He slipped the glasses from their leather case and lifted them to his eyes. Quickly, he adjusted the focus until the trees and the cold creek meandering through them clarified. Breath vapor washed in the air around his pearl Stetson sitting over the white scarf into which Kelsey's girl, Sandra Felix, had crocheted little green Christmas trees, fashioning it for him special in Cheyenne. He'd been heading back that way to spend Christmas with her and her family in their little frame house on Cheyenne's eastern outskirts, but now he'd likely be a day or so late.

That frustrated the deputy marshal, because he'd been looking forward to Mrs. Felix's plum pudding and stealing kisses and a few other things out in the icehouse from the woman's buxom daughter, who was not nearly as chaste as she let on when in the presence of her well-heeled parents and brothers, one of whom was studying mining law in St. Louis.

“Anything?” Demarest asked.

Kelsey shook his head. “Nothin'.” He returned the glasses to their case and dropped the case back into his saddlebag pouch. “I reckon we'd best check it out.” He was about to nudge his buckskin gelding with his spurs but stopped and turned back to the major. “You know, Matt—there ain't no reason for you to be here.”

“What're you talking about? I'm as federal as you are. And aren't there federal warrants out on them coyotes' heads?”

“There are. But if Mendenhour is right and Betajack's gang and Claw Hendricks's gang have gotten together . . .”

“We'll be ridin' into a shit storm.”

Kelsey smiled grimly. The major showed his teeth beneath his mustache. He laughed, and then Kelsey laughed, too. “I reckon there ain't no turnin' back to either one of us. But you know what I think?”

“What's that?” asked Demarest.

“I think the half-breed killed Coble. Not that Coble didn't have it comin'. I never liked the son of a bitch myself. But that breed's a killer. He's killed before, plenty of times. And once killin' gets in a red man's blood, there's just no stoppin' 'im till he's dangling from a tree.”

“What about the two men who obviously rode out from the station house?”

“Prob'ly just got up early to ride back to their outfit. The Steamboat Butte Ranch is out this way, and I believe I remember seein' them two punchers herdin' cattle down around Crazy Dan Creek.”

“You think they just seen Coble hangin' there and rode over to investigate?”

Squinting one eye, Kelsey nodded. “That's what I'm thinkin'. They prob'ly lit a shuck out of fear they themselves would get blamed.”