High and Wild (25 page)

27

T
here was a splattering
sound. When the blood and white bits of Pink Cheatum's skull bone had finished spraying onto the trail, upsetting the mules, the hammering blast of the Big Fifty rocketed around between the ridges before slowly being swallowed by the same canyon that had swallowed Cheatum's wagon.

Still clutching what was left of his head, Cheatum staggered off the trail, making gurgling sounds in his lifeless throat, and tumbled back down the slope.

Haskell shouted, “Everybody down!”

The bullet from the big rifle had come so fast that they were all caught dumbfounded, including Bear himself. As the others scrambled back behind the wagon, Haskell ran across the trail and several yards up the slope toward the shooter. Another bullet hammered the same rock he was heading for a couple of seconds before he reached it, and he lowered his head against the rain of rock shards.

The Big Fifty's blast arrived a full second later, like a thunderclap.

He threw himself against the flame-shaped boulder and hot-footed to the rock's far left side. He doffed his hat and looked up the slope toward the black crag jutting about a hundred yards above, the cobalt-blue sky vaulting cleanly behind it.

There was a notch in the crag. Something moved in the notch. Smoke puffed in the notch, too.

Haskell heard the chilling whine of the bullet and pulled his head back behind the boulder just before the bullet smashed into its far side. Fury burned through Bear. He didn't like being bushwhacked. He'd only been in Wendigo three days, but he was tired as hell of the man who was terrorizing the Ute Field freighters.

“Time to put an end to you, my friend,” Haskell said, clicking the Yellowboy's hammer back.

He thrust his head out to the side of the boulder, pulled it back. Another bullet hammered the boulder's far side. Bear could feel the vibration through the shoulder he was pressing against the cool stone.

Knowing it would take at least five seconds to reload the single-shot rifle, he stormed out from behind the boulder and ran a zigzagging course up the slope, holding his Yellowboy high across his chest. It would be no use triggering a shot from this distance with the Winchester. He'd save his ammo for after he gained the backside of that rock—

A chunk of sod was blown up just over Haskell's right shoulder, lifting the hair on the back of his neck. The Big Fifty roared. Bear kept running, breathing hard as the slope grew steeper. He was heading for the forest capping the ridge on the crag's left side.

He was sixty yards away . . . fifty . . . forty . . .

Another heavy
thump
rose behind him.

The Big Fifty roared.

Thirty feet . . .

Another thump, this one only a foot in front of him, peppering his gray tweed trousers with dirt and sod and bits of a ruined sage branch. As the blast echoed eerily, the finer hairs along his spine also rose, tingling.

But then there was only silence as he slipped into the trees. Here he was out of sight from the shooter's notch on the crag. And although his legs felt like putty, Bear kept running, pumping his arms and legs, until he reached the top of the slope.

The crag was on his right. He fell against it, wheezing, raking air in and out of his lungs, trying to catch his breath. The high altitude was working him over like a cool, savage bare-knuckler. He felt as though he couldn't get enough air into his body for proper nourishment, and his temples throbbed painfully. His heart hammered in his ears.

After half a minute's blow, he jogged fifty feet to the far side of the scarp. He glanced around behind the formation to see a man just then leaping off a lower crag behind the main one.

The man was big, and he was dressed in buckskins and furs, including a fur hat with earflaps. He held the Big Fifty in his right hand.

After he hit the ground with a grunt that Bear could hear on the thin air, he went running along the ridge straight out away from the black crag. He was slightly above Haskell and running away from him, toward another nest of rocks and small evergreens about a hundred yards away, near the crown of another mountain.

Haskell shouted, “Hold it, you bastard!”

The man didn't turn his head to look at him but instead continued running hard, lifting his heavy legs and pumping his heavy arms, earflaps bouncing against his bearded cheeks.

Bear dropped to a knee, raised the Yellowboy to his right cheek, and pumped off three quick rounds, grinding his teeth as the slugs merely blew up sod around the man or blasted shards from rocks just beyond him. Then the man dropped down behind the line of the ridge, out of sight.

Haskell ran toward the nest of small trees and rocks. If he could gain the nest before the killer did, he'd have the high ground.

He was halfway to his destination when the ground blew up under his left boot. Haskell gave a bellowing yell as he lost his footing. Vaguely, he heard the rocketing, dynamite-like blast of the Sharps. The ground leaped sharply on his right.

He dropped his rifle and hit the ground on his left shoulder. He was on a steep hill carpeted in thin, prickly grass and gravel. He rolled wildly straight down the slope, unable to slow his fall at all. Gravity kept kicking him like a kid kicking a rubber ball.

Halfway through every roll, he saw the woods he was heading toward sliding up toward him fast. There appeared to be a bowl dug out of the slope just in front of where the trees started.

Haskell dropped over the slight ledge and into the bowl. He heard a woman's scream and glimpsed a pale, wide-eyed female face a quarter-second before he hit the ground on his chest and belly and heard himself give a great
“
Oofahhhhgahhh!”
as all the air in his lungs went hurling out of him.

The fall and his introduction to the hard ground of the bowl stunned him. He raked air into his lungs, groaned, and stretched his lips back from his teeth as he rolled over to see a familiar, beautiful face, framed in stygian-black hair under a felt hat, staring down at him.

Raven pursed her lips in disgust and shook her head.

“Haskell, you damn fool! What are you trying to do, get yourself killed?”

Another face appeared in Haskell's sphere of vision, beside Raven's. It was a man's pale, craggy face bearing cold blue eyes and a salt-and-pepper longhorn mustache. The gaudiness of the lip fur looked silly against the man's otherwise pasty, fishy features. He had a bandage over his left ear, and a nasty gash shone beneath the brim of his low-crowned black hat.

The gent's thin, chapped lips were pursed with disapproval.

“Yep, I do believe he is,” the stranger said. Then, glancing at Raven: “This your man?”

“My
partner
,” Raven quickly corrected the stranger.

Haskell pushed himself into a sitting position, rubbing his forehead and scowling at the stranger. “Who's he?”

“Friend of mine,” Raven said. “His name's Kane. Won't tell me his first name. It's a secret.”

Haskell lowered his hand from his temple as he stared at the familiar face, the name coming clearer among the cobwebs in his skull. “Kane—like hell!” He laughed without mirth. “Potter, more like. Maurice Potter!”

The gunman scowled as he returned Bear's glower. “Bear Haskell?”

“Maurice, you son of a regulatin' bitch.”

Raven glanced from one to the other. “You boys know each other, it seems.”

Haskell gained his feet slowly, heavily, snarling against the buzzing between his ears. He was dizzy from the roll and his unceremonious collision with the bowl they were all standing in, just above the forest.

When he had his feet under him, his rage at the Sharps-wielding killer, more than his acrimony for Maurice Potter, caused him to bring his ham-sized right fist up from his knees and smash it against Potter's mouth.

The regulator gave a grunt and hit the ground hard on his back.

“You son of a bitch!” Haskell raked out.

The professional gunfighter closed his hand around the grips of the .44 holstered on his right thigh. But Haskell already had his LeMat out of its holster and was clicking the main hammer back as he aimed it at the gunman's head. Potter removed his hand from the Colt and held it up near his chest, palm out.

Raven yelled, “Haskell, whatever anger you harbor for this man's bloody past, he is at the moment on our side, you damn fool!”

“It ain't his bloody past tyin' a knot in my tail,” Bear said. “It's the five hundred dollars he cheated me out of durin' a stud game in Nacogdoches couple years back!”

A bullet thudded into the rim of the bowl upslope from the trio, raining dirt and gravel down on them. Raven gasped and dropped to a knee, as did Haskell.

Potter climbed to his feet and picked up his rifle, racking a round into the chamber. Haskell aimed the LeMat at him again and gave him a lopsided smile.

“Oh, for chrissakes, Haskell,” Potter said, his lower lip bloody. “Do you think we could argue about your poor gambling skills another time?”

Raven was staring at Haskell as though he'd just tracked mule shit onto her new parlor rug.

Bear felt his ears warm. He spit dust from his lips and asked Raven, “You trust him?”

“For the moment, and concerning the issue at hand, I do.”

“All right.” Haskell edged a look up over the lip of the bowl, toward the nest of rocks capping the ridge, and squeezed the LeMat in his right hand. He'd lost his rifle along with his hat during the tumble, but it was the Yellowboy he missed the most. “Bastard ain't gettin' away, that's for sure. And it don't look like he's
thinkin'
about cuttin' out on us, neither.”

Dust puffed amid the rocks at the top of the ridge.

Bear lowered his head and said, “Look out—here comes another one!”

The bullet rocketed over the group and loudly hammered a tree bole behind them, spitting bark in all directions.

As Potter returned fire with his Winchester, Haskell looked at Raven. She wore a leather riding skirt, a leather wool-lined jacket over a blouse, and deerskin gloves. Her raven-black hair was down, whipping in the wind. She smelled like ripe cherries. Even out here, getting shot at, she looked and smelled ravishing. And in any other situation, Bear would have tried to ravish her.

“How in the hell did you find me?”

She was edging a look up the hill toward the nest of rocks concealing the shooter. Potter squeezed off another shot. Haskell heard the
spang
of the regulator's bullet off a rock.

Raven said, “I wasn't looking for
you
. I followed
him
”—she pointed a finger up the slope, indicating the man with the Big Fifty—“out of town after I spied a large-caliber rifle in his saddle scabbard. Goodthunder's deputies and those idiots you roughed up at the Sawatch trailed me, tried to beef me.”

“Slake and Bodeen and—?”

“Rock and Samson,” Potter finished for him after the regulator had triggered another round up the slope.

“The bouncers were looking no better for the wear you gave them,” Raven said. “They're looking even worse now. So are the deputies, thanks to me.”

“Hey, I got one of 'em,” Potter interjected. “When he was about to drill your purty head.”

“Oh, yes, that's right.”

“I saw 'em trailin' her out from town,” Potter explained to Haskell.

Raven pulled her head down as another heavy slug hammered a tree behind them. Potter returned a round from over the lip of the bowl.

Haskell was frowning. “I know I'm thick, but I don't understand all this.”

Staring up the hill, Raven said, “Goodthunder was killed two nights ago. That seemed to get Miss O'Brien's underwear in a twist. She assumed I killed him, although the bullet had obviously come from outside . . . and from the gun up there.”

“Why did she think you did it?”

“Oh, I don't know. Apparently, I was the last one seen with him, and she thought I'd been hired by Pink Cheatum to kill him.” Raven arched a brow at Haskell. “No one seems to trust anyone in and around Wendigo. And while I don't like to spread rumors, I think Miss O'Brien and Goodthunder might have been closer than your usual business partners.”

She winked.

“Of course they were,” Potter said with a laugh, and triggered another round.

“Poor Ben Geist.” Haskell looked at her askance. “
Were
you the last one seen with Goodthunder?”

“I suppose I was.” She held his gaze a moment too long before looking away.

Potter ejected a spent cartridge from his Winchester's breech and said, “He was found butt-naked, head blown off.” He twitched a corner of his thin mouth at the girl.

“His head wasn't blown off,” Raven corrected. “But most of his brains were indeed on the floor by the time I left. Worse mess than your boots, Bear.”