Dust of the Damned (9781101554005) (33 page)

“You see somethin’, Jesse?”

“In your head or elsewhere?” Angel added with a faintly wry note.

“Nah.” Jesse glanced over his left shoulder, then swung his head forward again. “I just got a creepy-crawly feelin’ between my shoulders, like someone’s starin’ a bull’s‑eye on my back.” He managed to turn it into a joke, grinning at Angel. “Used to think it was one Marshal James Coffin. Couldn’t be him now, though, could it? Not in the daylight!” He stretched his lips wider, showing his small yellow teeth.

Zane glanced at Angel. Even through the windblown grit, and even though she tried hard to hide it, he could see the injured look in her eyes. And the rage. He felt it himself, and before he fully realized what he was doing, he’d drawn the Colt Navy from his cross-draw holster. The click of the hammer was nearly drowned by the wind.

He aimed the pistol at Jesse’s face. “I do believe you’ve outworn your welcome, James. Time to ride on over the divide with Cole and Frank an’ the boys.”

“Hold on!” Angel rode over and nudged Zane’s right arm down. “I’ll fight my own battles, mister. And we’re going to need all the guns we have against the Angels. If he makes it through the battle, I want the pleasure of watching him hang.”

She reined Cisco around and gigged him on up the right-
forking canyon. Hathaway cast his white-ringed gaze between Zane and Jesse. “Boys, boys, boys…”

Zane depressed the Colt’s hammer and slid it back into its holster. As Hathaway gigged his mule after Angel, Zane held his hard gaze on that of Jesse James, whose pale eyes had grown uncustomarily apprehensive when he’d seen the big pistol bearing down on him.

“You keep riding her,” the ghoul hunter warned the Missouri outlaw, “and not even she’s gonna be able to save your worthless hide.”

Jesse frowned, tipped his head to one side. “You an’ her…?”

“She goes her way; I go mine.” Zane nudged his hat brim down once more, reined General Lee around, and put the big palomino into a trot along the right-forking canyon trail.

Not far ahead, Angel’s and Hathway’s mounts stood riderless in the middle of the corridor. Angel and the scout were crouched over what looked like rubble from a collapsed cutbank littering the canyon’s right side.

Zane rode over, was about to ask what had caught their interest, when he saw a bloody, brown, tattooed arm sticking out of the rubble. Beyond, a brown eyebrow peered up from its bed of loose, red dust and clay. Hathaway was looking into a horseshoe-shaped alcove cut into the canyon wall just beyond the collapsed cutbank.

He wandered around for a time, Angel following him, her red hair blowing wildly in the wind. Zane walked into the alcove, saw a few more bodies hastily tossed among the boulders that littered the alcove’s floor.

“Three more,” Angel said. “With the four someone tried to bury under the bank there, that makes six.”

“Six who?” Zane crouched over one of the bodies—a young man wedged between two boulders, where he likely wouldn’t be easily seen by someone passing through the main canyon. He wore crude deerskins with dyed designs that Zane had never seen. On the top of each of the young man’s moccasins was a red wolf’s head about as big around as a gold eagle coin.

“I was gonna say ’Paches,” Hathaway said. “But I ain’t never seen Apaches painted so.” He stood over Zane, fists on his hips, and shook his head slowly. “I seen several of them wolf heads. One over there had it tattoed on his chest. Never heard of no ’Pache, Pima, Papago, Navajo, or Yaquis tribe with such a totem as that—just like the wolf heads we seen in the canyon yonder.”

“Whoever they are,” Zane said, “I see no firearms of any kind on ’em. Some bows and arrows.” He brushed dust away from the leg of the young brave before him, uncovering a long, slender sheath with an engraved gold handle jutting up against the youth’s sharp hip bone. He wrapped his hand around the handle and drew the sword, staring in wide-eyed awe at the solid gold, razor-edged blade.

All up and down the length of the blade had been etched the figures of wolves engaged in hunting or mauling various creatures—rabbits, deer, mountain lions, bears, and, most fascinating of all, faintly comical caricatures of fleeing humans.

“Here’s another one,” Angel said, holding the blade she’d found in both hands, staring down at it in wonder.

Jesse had dismounted when he’d seen the gold and was pulling up another sword from the dirt and gravel of the collapsed cutbank, grunting against the pain in his wounded thigh. He ran his hands down the blade he’d found, his eyes fairly dancing
as he scrubbed away the grit and saw the pure, glistening gold beneath.

He shook his head and laughed. “Frank, this breaks my heart.” Tears beaded in his eye corners. “It purely breaks my heart, brother, that you and Cole and the boys ain’t here to see this.”

Zane lowered the golden sword, and willed himself to let it drop back down where he’d found it. Even at such a dire time, gold had an intoxicating effect. One sword would probably be worth as much bounty money as he’d earned in the past five years.

“Leave ’em.” He slapped his hands together. “We got more important work ahead of us.”

“Leave gold?” Jesse laughed, tears now streaking the dust on his cheeks. “I don’t think so! I’m gonna take me one of these here pigstickers in case we don’t make it back this way. You know how much this is worth?”

“Think about Frank and Cole, Jesse,” Angel said, knowing the way to the emotional Confederate’s heart. “How would they feel—you droolin’ over gold when their killers are still pounding the trail?”

Jesse looked at her, blinked the tears away, squinting against the dust blowing in under his hat brim. Angrily, he held the blade out before him in both hands. “You got a nasty side, Marshal.” He dropped the sword, swung away as though it caused him great pain, and grabbed his buckskin’s reins.

He’d just swung up into the leather when Zane, also walking toward his mount, Angel and Hathaway behind him, saw the outlaw flinch. In the grit haze kicked up by the wind, he thought he saw something sticking out of Jesse’s back, just below his right shoulder. Jesse stiffened and lifted his chin, gritting his teeth.

“Gnah!”

His cry was obscured by the wind.

Zane froze. It saved his life. An arrow whistled through the air about six inches in front of his face and clattered against the rocks to his right. He jerked a look to his left where several horseback riders were galloping up the canyon toward him—five dark little men with long, black hair, all triggering arrows expertly as they rode. More arrows clattered among the rocks, while another slammed into the side of Hathaway’s mule. The beast immediately began pitching and braying indignantly, though Zane had seen the arrow bounce off its stirrup and clatter onto the canyon floor.

“Company!” Zane shouted, palming both his Colt Navies, dropping to one knee, and beginning to trigger each pistol in turn.

He dropped one of the Indians with his first shot, as the brave leaped off his galloping mount—a lucky shot that sent the warrior spinning and cartwheeling to the ground, whooping wildly. The others commenced yowling then, as well, and Zane dropped another just as the man triggered an arrow that sliced just past the ghoul hunter’s left cheek.

His bullet plunked through the brave’s upper arm. As he reached for it with his other hand, dropping his bow, either Angel’s or Hathaway’s bullet plowed into the side of his head, blowing him back off his heels and laying him out, quivering. The fusillade of bullets was too much for the natives. The two survivors of the attack ran back down the canyon, one pausing only to trigger one more arrow before wheeling and sprinting off after the others and their fleeing, buck-kicking mustangs.

Zane holstered both his empty pistols and ran over to grab Jesse as the outlaw sagged dangerously backward and sideways
over his skitter-stepping buckskin’s right hip. Wrapping both arms around the outlaw, he pulled him easily out of the saddle; the wiry Missourian couldn’t have weighed much more than a slightly hefty woman.

As Hathaway walked a ways down canyon to make sure their attackers were gone, Zane set Jesse down against the cliff wall, the outlaw grunting against the pain of the arrow fletched with brown and black hawk feathers protruding from his right shoulder, the stone point sticking out his back. Blood stained his denim jacket and duster.

“Leave it to a goddamn redskin to fill me with misery!” Jesse cried, kicking against the pain. “Pull the goddamn thing out, Zane! Pull it out!”

“If you’ll hold still, I will.”

Zane shoved one of the man’s fumbling, flailing hands down, then with his own hand grabbed the six inches of arrow protruding out the man’s back. With his other hand, he grabbed the front to hold it steady, then broke off the back part with a dull crack.

“Ahh!” Jesse kicked his legs and tightened every muscle. “Christ, could you give me some warnin’? We might have our differences, Uriah, but we’re brothers of the Confederacy, fer cryin’ out loud!”

Zane kept a firm hold on the front of the arrow and jerked it forward. It slid out smoothly, blood dribbling out from the hole it left in the outlaw’s shoulder. Crouched on the other side of Jesse, Angel immediately stuffed the outlaw’s own neckerchief into the hole, clamping it down hard.

Jesse said, “Oh, mercy!” His eyes closed, and his head sagged to one side as he lost consciousness.

A voice rose on the wind. “Confederates?”

There was a pause during which Zane thought the voice must have been a trick of the wind itself. He and Angel looked around, frowning.

The disembodied shout came again, louder this time, as though its owner was moving nearer from the opposite wall of the canyon. It was a man’s voice, shrill with exasperation.

“Did you say ‘Confederates’?”

Chapter 32
    

JERICHO TURNIPSEED

Zane straightened tensely, quickly thumbing cartridges from his shell belt into one of his Colts. A figure appeared on the far side of the canyon, materializing out of the blowing grit as he ran a sort of shambling, stumbling run, open fur coat slipping down his shoulders.

He held an old, rusted trapdoor Springfield carbine in one hand, barrel up. The gun was held together with wire and rawhide. He was tall and thin, and at first Zane thought he had no hat, but then he saw it dangling down between the man’s shoulders, blowing in the wind.

Zane flipped his Colt’s loading gate closed and spun the cylinder, holding the pistol halfway out from his belly, half threatening. “Hold it there!”

The man stopped about ten feet away. He had a long face and a bulging forehead. Thin, curly brown hair lay sparsely atop
his head, blowing wildly. His eyes were yellow brown, incredulous. He held the rifle and his other hand out to each side in supplication. “I’m friendly if you folks are. I got me a good set of ears, and I thought someone mentioned Confederates!”

“Some of us are.” Zane glanced at Angel, who stood a few feet to his left, caressing the.45 on her right hip with one hand, squinting into the grit at the raggedly clad stranger. A prospector, Zane thought. Desert rat. There was a bright, crazy cast to his brown eyes. No sane man would approach a party of strangers this far out in the high and rocky without considerably more caution than this gent had showed.

The man grinned and, ignoring Zane’s uncocked Colt aimed at his belly, walked slowly forward. “Uriah Zane!”

Zane scowled, trying to place the man. A name came to him, swirling up from the gale of his distant past. “Jericho?”

The man laughed and clamped a hand thick and hairy as a bear’s paw on the ghoul hunter’s shoulder. “You remember after all these years!”

“For Christ’s sakes—I figured you and your boys were all dead in the War.”

“We’ll talk later.” Jericho looked both ways along the canyon, glanced from Zane to Angel and then to Jesse sitting unconscious, head to his shoulder, against the canyon wall. He gave a start when he saw Al Hathaway walk out of the windblown grit and hesitate, raising his rifle in both his hands and studying the stranger uncertainly.

“He’s one of us,” Zane said.

“Come on, then. Bring your injured friend there and you’re horses. Ain’t much time. There’s more guardians where those there came from.” He glanced out to where the dead Indian lay
sprawled as though dropped from the sky. “And they’ll be some piss-burned when they see how many they done lost in the past couple hours. They ain’t a large tribe to begin with!”

In the corner of his left eye, Zane saw Angel glance at him apprehensively. He had to admit that while he’d grown up knowing Jericho Turnipseed as a good, God-fearing Carolinian who’d sharecropped on Zane’s family’s plantation before the War, in which Jericho and his three sons had proudly enlisted, he hadn’t seen the man since sixty-one, nearly fifteen years ago.

Men changed in less time than that, and the years had not been kind to his old friend, whose shoulders were stooped, legs skinny and bowed, eyes a little foggy. But Zane didn’t see that he had much choice in the matter.

“It’s all right,” Zane told Angel, then swung around and hauled the unconscious Jesse James up and over his shoulder.