Dead Man's Trail (9781101606957) (18 page)

Chapter 24

Yakima set his cup on a rock, then rose and stepped far wide of the fire, keeping the pistol aimed toward where he'd heard the call.

“Name yourself,” he said.

“Donny Pearl. I'm friendly as long as you are. Seen your fire. Got a question for you, mister.”

“Ride in slow.”

The thud of several sets of shod hooves sounded. To Yakima's left, Wolf nickered and stomped, pulling against the short picket line his rider had strung between two ponderosas. One of the approaching horses whinnied. The stranger said, “Now, Winslow, you act your manners. No one wants to hear a lick out of you this night.”

Shadows grew back where the hollow opened. They came on through the trees until the rider drew rein on his blaze-faced chestnut gelding, whose brown eyes glowed in the firelight. The rider was a young man in a blanket coat and cream-colored woolly chaps that were missing several tufts of wool, showing the sheepskin beneath. The kid—clean-shaven, sandy-haired, not yet twenty—had an old carbine in the brush-scarred scabbard on the chestnut's right side, but all he held in his hands were the horse's reins and the reins of two horses he trailed.

The two spare horses flanked him; Yakima could make out only their outlines. Packhorses, they appeared; packs were slung over their backs.

“What're you doin' out on such a night, Donny Pearl?” Yakima asked the young man.

“I'm a maverick hunter for the Five-Star Ranch over west.”

The kid stopped, expressionless. Since he appeared to be waiting for Yakima's prompting, the half-breed said, “All right.”

“What about yourself?” the kid asked, haltingly, a little tense about asking a stranger—especially a big one holding a cocked Colt in his fist and who obviously had a good bit of Indian blood—impertinent questions.

“Fair enough,” Yakima said. “I'm Yakima Henry. Makin' my way to Belle Fourche.”

“Fer Christmas?”

Yakima had to snort at that. The kid obviously felt much more strongly about Christmas than he did. Than he ever had, most likely, since he'd spent most of his Christmases alone. “Well, I was hopin' to make it before Christmas, but at the rate I'm goin', I'll be lucky to make it before
next
Christmas.”

“Last Christmas wasn't much, but this Christmas Mr. Condit—he ramrods the Five-Star—said he's gonna turn ole Winslow here over to me. Winslow's from Arizona. Fact, I named him when I was trailin' him up here. He was just a colt.”

“Congratulations,” Yakima said, realizing that the boy was prattling on because he was nervous about the pistol held in his hand, though he'd depressed the hammer.

He dropped the popper into the holster but kept the keeper thong free, still wary of a trap to be sprung by Betajack and Hendricks. “He's a fine horse. What're you trailin' back there, if you don't mind me askin'?”

Donny Pearl glanced over his shoulder, making the frozen tack squawk. “Thought you might know about these two fellas I found strapped over their horses. Thought maybe they was ridin' with you. They're shot up bad. So bad they're dead,” he added without humor.

Yakima moved slowly forward. He wouldn't put it past Betajack or Hendricks to send a few of their hard cases in to bushwhack him. Slow-talking Donny Pearl seemed like a thirty-a-month-and-found cowpuncher, but Yakima had known men who talked just as slow with plenty of blood on their cold-blooded hands. Keeping the kid in the periphery of his vision, ready for any sudden movements from him or the two men draped over the horses behind him, Yakima stopped in front of the buckskin that was directly behind the chestnut, which stood with its tail arched.

The man wore no hat. His head and arms hung down over his horse's left front stirrup. Yakima squatted, lifted the man's head by his hair, was taken by no real surprise when the slack-jawed face of Deputy U.S. Marshal Tom Kelsey stared back at him, eyes half rolled back in his head. His neck was bloody from a ragged hole in his throat. The blood was frozen. His face was pale blue.

Yakima walked over to the second horse. He didn't have to lift the man's head. The red hair dusted with dandrufflike snow granules, and his dark blue cavalry uniform told the half-breed that the carcass belonged to Major Demarest of Camp Collins in the Colorado Territory.

“Yeah, I know who they are,” Yakima told the kid, looking off into the darkness and pricking his ears. Nothing out there, as far as he could tell, but the wind and the faint ticking of the steadily falling snow.

“Sorry about that,” the kid said. “That's a rough way to go. You know who shot 'em?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“They still out here, you think?”

“Yeah. You got a place to throw down tonight?”

The kid jerked his head back and hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “Line shack just west of here. I already got my mavericks corralled over there.”

“Best head back to 'em, then. The crew that killed these fellas are nasty sons o' bucks, so take her easy and don't stop for no one.”

“All right, then.”

Donny tossed Yakima the two sets of reins.

“Sorry about your friends, mister. I hope you don't end up the same.”

“Yeah, me, too.” Yakima doubted that Donny had heard him above the thudding of the chestnut's hooves, though he heard the kid's raised voice when he called as a final, parting thought:

“Merry Christmas!”

* * *

Later that night, on her cot in the rear sleeping quarters of the Hawk's Bluff Overnight Station, Glendolene Mendenhour slid her hands inside the coarse wool blankets, inside her silk nightgown, and over the firm, warm mounds of her breasts. She cupped each orb gently, the way Yakima Henry had cupped them when he'd made love to her in the remote line shack far, far away from the odd stranger who was her husband.

Far from the ranch and the whole rest of the world. . . .

She ran her thumbs across her nipples, remembering him lying between her spread knees on that cot so similar to the one she lay on now. He'd thrust against her rhythmically, nuzzling and then caressing her breasts, softly kissing her forehead, her nose, cheeks, lips, ears. His mouth left a hot dampness wherever he pressed it against her.

Her belly was filled with warm, sweetly churning, tingling nectar. Sheathed in the hot, tangy, leathery smell of him, feeling his calloused hands tenderly roaming across her body, instinctively knowing where to go to pleasure her so sweetly, she was ensconced by his muscular arms and powerful legs in a gradually building orgasmic fire.

She'd breathed deeply, sighed, sobbed as she'd enjoyed the almost unbearably thrilling caress of his maleness sliding in and out of her, the ironlike yet yielding strength of his legs and arms and hips bouncing her lightly up and down, her bent knees and her feet lurching wildly with each exquisite, savage hammering.

After a time, she gave an especially loud groan of sensual agony, swept the pillow out from beneath her, and pressed her head hard against the cot, turning her face to one side, squeezing her eyes closed, and biting her lower lip until it hurt.

He stopped suddenly. She looked up at him. His eyes were dark, far away, jaw tight.

He tensed his long, hard body, gritting his teeth, and then he began shuddering and bucking savagely against her, causing her to gasp and scream as he filled her to overflowing, until her own sweet honey boiled up out of her like a warm rain boiling over the banks of a spring arroyo.

Here in the station house in Wyoming, beneath her palms, her nipples jutted hard as pebbles.

Her own muffled scream of orgasm rose.

“Glen, what is it?” Lee's voice, so harsh and unexpected.

She gasped, lifted her head with a start, realizing that one of her hands had drifted lower, that it had become his hand—Yakima's hand—and that she hadn't merely imagined that she'd screamed.

“Just a dream,” she said. “Just a dream, Lee.” She was trying to quell her own raspy breaths raking in and out of her lungs. “I'm sorry if I woke you.”

The cot to her right squawked, and she saw him rise to a sitting position and reach across the dark space between them. Automatically, she recoiled at the prospect of him touching her.

“Glendolene, for chrissakes . . . !”

“I'm sorry,” she whispered, hearing the snores of another passenger—probably Weatherford—beyond the curtain partition to her left. “Just a little jittery, I guess.”

Something moved in the darkness ahead of her cot. Ambient light from the room's two windows winked on what looked like a gun barrel. Suddenly, the blanket curtain was pulled back and a figure lurched into the Mendenhours' sleeping crib.

“Quiet, both of you!” one of the drummers hissed, extending a revolver at Lee, whom Glendolene heard gasp as he jerked his head back, sitting propped on his outstretched arms. “One sound, and I'll go ahead and drill a hole through Mendenhour's head!”

Glendolene's heart hammered. For a few seconds she couldn't catch her breath or wrap her mind around what was happening. The reek of moldy fur coats, sweat, and alcohol wafted against her. To her left, old Elijah's snores faltered and then resumed their long, regular sawing. At the same time, the shorter, plumper drummer—the older man, Kearny—took another step until he was standing over the end of Lee's cot. Another shadow moved, and then Glendolene saw the young drummer, the bespectacled Sook, step quickly into the crib behind Kearny and extend a pistol straight at Glendolene's head.

The whiskey stench grew stronger, burning her nostrils.

She stifled a gasp, lurching back against the wall behind her, banging her head slightly, covering her mouth with her hand. “Oh, God!”

“Shut up,” Sook rasped. “One peep out of you, Mrs. Mendenhour, and Mendenhour is gonna buy a bullet through his head. You got it?”

Glendolene stared at the round, nickel-sized hole of the pistol barrel held level with her nose. She nodded.

“What the hell are you two men up to?” the prosecutor whispered, his voice quavering with fear and exasperation.

“All you gotta do is get up and throw your coat and your boots on. That's it. One more word, and I'll shoot you. Either of you yell for help, you're liable to get someone else killed.”

“It's just easier this way, see?” said Sook. The gun he held on Glendolene shook in his clenched fist. “You just stay here and keep quiet as a church mouse, Mrs. Mendenhour. All right? Nod if you understand.”

Glendolene hated the fear that paralyzed her. Sobbing into her hands she held cupped over her mouth, she nodded.

“Christ!” Lee raked out, sliding his enraged gaze between the two men.

Glendolene's heart hammered and her hands shook as she watched Lee fling his covers back and drop his legs to the floor. Helpless and horrified, she sobbed silently into her hands as her husband dressed in jerky, angry, defiant movements. Sook held his gun on Glendolene, and Kearny held his on Lee until he'd thrown his long sheepskin coat on over his long underwear and pulled his boots on. He reached for his hat.

“No need,” whispered Kearny, wagging his gun at the open doorway behind him. “Let's go.”

Lee glowered at the two men. He glanced at Glendolene. Kearny gave him a shove out the door. Glendolene sobbed louder into her hands. She wanted to call out for help from the others, but Kearny and Sook, being drunk and obviously feeling desperate, might shoot anyone who tried to stop them.

Gradually, she got herself calmed down. She dropped her feet over the side of the cot and reached for her coat. She had to follow them. Whatever Lee might or might not have done, she had to do what she could to keep him from being thrown to the killers. She started through the opening in the blanket curtain, remembered something, and turned back.

Lee's pistol jutted from a holster hanging from a nail in the wall near his cot. Glendolene stared at it. She hadn't fired a gun in years, but she grabbed it, hefted it in her hand, then lowered it to her side and walked out of the crib.

* * *

Sook opened the dark station house's front door and gave the prosecutor a hard shove. Mendenhour stumbled over the threshold and out into the yard dusted with new snow. The wind bit him, blew the tails of his coat around his legs clad in only his long handles.

As he got his feet back under him, he spun around, rage searing him, and said, “Goddamn you cowards to hell!”

Kearny stepped toward him and rammed the butt of his pistol against Mendenhour's jaw. The prosecutor gave a cry, spun forward, and dropped to his hands and knees, raking the heels of his hands in the sand and gravel fronting the low-slung station house.

Mendenhour groaned. Fear, desperation hammered him. He'd never known terror this intense, though he'd started to be aware of it when he'd seen Betajack, the man who most wanted to kill him, riding toward him under that white flag.

And now he realized, to his own added horror, that what in the past had allowed him to act so bravely in the face of rampant crime had been knowing that he had his own father, Wild Bill himself, and Neumiller and other lawmen behind him. Now, out here in this vast, stormy land, he had no one, and the horror conjured a strained sob from deep in his thundering chest.

His eyes filled with icy tears that dribbled down his cheeks, and, as he remained on his hands and knees, wanting only to stay here and not have to face that dark, snow-stitched horizon beyond, where his killers waited, he heard himself blubber, “Please . . . please . . . I'll pay you.”

“You'll pay us?” Sook said with a laugh that the wind strangled. He kicked the prosecutor hard in the ass with the toe of his boot, and Mendenhour flew forward with a yelp of agony. He lay belly-down on the hard, snowy ground. “You'll pay us to die for you? Ha!”

“Too late to try to buy your way out of this, Mr. Lawyer,” said Kearny, squatting beside Mendenhour, “even if you did have enough money on you to pay us to die
with
you. You heard old Betajack. He gave you one day to turn yourself over to him, or he'd not only kill you, but he'd kill us all.”