The Thunder Riders Part 15

"d.a.m.n," Yakima said, shuttling his gaze from the burning man to a spurred boot lying at the edge of the firelight to the dead man behind the fire nearest Patchen. "They only sent three. I was hopin' for a few more."

As Patchen moved forward, lowering his rifle, Speares cursed. "You used us for bait, you son of a b.i.t.c.h!"

Yakima shook his head, peering cautiously into the darkness. "I just set a couple fires."

"You're a crazy son of a b.i.t.c.h, Henry." Patchen's gut burned. He was getting to be as big a fool as Speares, and he wasn't learning a d.a.m.n thing from his foolishness. "How'd you know they wouldn't all come?"

Yakima shrugged. "I wouldn't send my whole gang to check out three campfires. Especially if I had gold to keep track of." Yakima racked a fresh sh.e.l.l into his Winchester's breech and off-c.o.c.ked the hammer. He regarded the two lawmen with vague distaste. "If you two are gonna hang around, you might as well make yourselves useful. I've got a hidden hidden camp up yonder in the hills. Fetch your horses." camp up yonder in the hills. Fetch your horses."

He turned, started away.

Speares laughed caustically. "You gotta lot o' d.a.m.n nerve!"

Yakima continued walking away. "It's gonna take nerve to take down the Thunder Riders."

"How do you you propose to do it?" Patchen said, resting his rifle barrel on his shoulder. propose to do it?" Patchen said, resting his rifle barrel on his shoulder.

Yakima turned, stared at him. "The Apache way." A faint smile touched the hard, shadowed plains of his face. "The Cheyenne way."

He turned and disappeared in the darkness.

Flanked by the rest of the gang, Considine and McKenna stood before the ancient Indian ruins, at the edge of the steaming River of No Return. They stared toward the three campfires on the dark hillock north of the canyon, watching the sudden fourth blaze die as gradually as the echoes of the gut-wrenching howl that accompanied it.

The men around the gang leaders murmured among themselves.

McKenna turned to Considine. "Sounded like Prewitt."

Considine, who had sent Prewitt, MacDonald, and a northern gunslick named Belknap to investigate the three fires, which had appeared suddenly on the hillock a mile or so away, said nothing as he stared through the snaking steam, thumbs hooked in his pistol belt.

Apprehension trickled a single bead of sweat down the middle of his back.

He kept it out of his voice as he glanced at McKenna. "If the boys don't come back, take a couple of the others out at first light." He turned and walked back toward the gang's own campfires flaming here and there around the ruins, toward his bedroll and Anjanette.

Ben Towers stepped up beside McKenna, who continued staring at the distant fires. "What'd he say, Boss?" Towers asked.

McKenna sighed, glancing at the tall black man. "He said that if them three don't show by sunup, he wants you to take Hayes, the Apache, and Joolie up to investigate."

With that, Mad Dog clapped Towers on the shoulder and followed Considine's path toward the gang's campfires.

Meanwhile, picketed with the rest of the gang's horses, but with a gunnysack tied over his head and all four feet hobbled with thick strips of braided rawhide, Wolf arched his neck suddenly. Through the burlap, he'd caught a familiar scent on the night breeze.

A recognizable man-smell drifting across the steaming water . . .

The smell was faint and fleeting. Still, the black stallion twitched his ears and snorted, his giant heart quickening.

Chapter 18.

Just after sunup the next morning, Yakima, Patchen, and Spears lay belly down atop a low tabletop mesa, staring through rocks and brush toward the hillock where Yakima had set the three fires and killed the three Thunder Riders.

Yakima checked the hillock with his spygla.s.s and saw four other desperadoes now gathered there. Three of them kicked around the brush, while one-a tall black man in a low-crowned brown sombrero and a deerskin jacket-knelt over one of the dead men. The black man held a Spencer rifle in one hand and looked around with the quick, cautious movements of one accustomed to tracking and being tracked.

"Well, they sent one more than last night." Yakima pa.s.sed the spygla.s.s to Patchen, who raised it to his bruised, sunburned face, adjusting the focus.

"Sent an Apache this time," Patchen said, staring through the gla.s.s. "Yasi, known as Kills Gold-Hairs for his preference for gold-headed white girls. He's so depraved that even his own people won't have anything to do with him."

"Kills Gold-Hairs?" Speares said with interest. "I heard there's over a thousand dollars on his head alone."

"Lawmen and army trackers have dusted his trail," Patchen said, handing the gla.s.s to Speares. "No one's even come close to him, though several have died b.l.o.o.d.y."

"I reckon we're gonna get our chance." Speares lowered the gla.s.s and stared with his naked eyes across the rolling chaparral. "They picked up our tracks, headin' this way. Just three. The fourth seems to be headin' back to their camp at the river-to report to Considine and Mad Dog, no doubt."

Yakima reached over Patchen and grabbed the spygla.s.s from Speares. "Remember the plan. Spread out and give 'em plenty of sign but not so much they sniff the trap."

He looped the spygla.s.s's lanyard around his neck and began crabbing straight back along the mesa. When he was behind the mesa's brow, he rose and hoofed it back down the opposite slope.

Their three horses waited at the mesa's base, tied to scrawny willows. Patchen and Speares followed, grunting at their aches and pains, loosing dust and gravel down the steep bank behind them, spurs singing softly.

Yakima leapt atop the buckskin and turned toward the other two men reaching for their saddle horns. "We meet back here. Don't get lost. It's a big desert."

He heeled the buckskin southwest, cutting through a sharp draw between mesas. Behind him, Speares turned to Patchen. "He's got one h.e.l.l of a mouth for a half-breed."

Patchen swung into the saddle with a great creak of dry leather. "You tell him that, Sheriff."

Chuckling, the marshal turned his own mount north and galloped off around the base of a low pinon-studded mesa.

An hour later, Speares hunkered among boulders spilling down the right shoulder of a rocky scarp sheathed in creosote and gnarled elms. He stared down the other side of the hill, into a tangle of low pines and barrel cactus growing around another split outcrop of black volcanic rock.

Around him, birds and squirrels chattered. There'd been a javelina snorting around behind him somewhere, but it had drifted off not long after Speares had settled into the rocks.

A black widow spider crawled out of a crack in the scarp beneath his rifle, and Speares watched it, a tiny white dot on its tail, crawl up over his rifle barrel, just in front of the receiver, and disappear among pine needles and decaying leaves.

Less than a minute ago, a hoof thud had sounded from the split scarp ahead. Since then, Speares had lain cheeked up to the rifle stock, breathing shallowly through slightly parted lips, staring at the scarp, his heart thudding rhythmically in his chest.

Another thud, and the sheriff increased the tension on the rifle's trigger.

A bobbing horse head appeared-a blaze-faced dun with a Mexican-style bridle, braided and inset with hammered silver disks. As the dun moved out from the narrow notch in the scarp, the black man in the saddle swung his head around slowly, his back taut but still moving fluidly with the horse's choppy steps.

His face was shaded by the broad brim of his brown sombrero, but Speares saw a short beard, a slender nose, and a wide, pale scar on his neck. The man moved his head back and forth, skittish as a mule deer in bobcat country.

Drawing a bead on the man's short buffalo coat, Speares continued easing back on the trigger until horse and rider slid suddenly behind the hill's brow, heading toward Speares's left.

Speares swore silently, pulled his head and rifle back behind the scarp, and scrambled as quietly as he could to the other side of the rock. He crawled atop the hill's shoulder, left of the projecting rock, and aimed down the slope.

The black man and the dun appeared, rising up out of the hill as though from the earth itself. The rider turned his head away from Speares. The sheriff's heart pounded as he held his breath and settled the rifle's foresight into the notch above the receiver, bearing down on the side of the black man's head.

The man whipped around so suddenly that Speares didn't realize what had happened until his hat had been blown off his head and the rifle report was echoing around the near ridges.

He stared, mouth agape, at the black man's smoking Spencer. The Spencer's stock was snugged to the man's right cheek, and he was twisted slightly in the saddle, aiming the rifle at Speares.

The sheriff's Winchester boomed.

The bullet slammed into the desperado's upper left arm, splitting the coat seam and throwing the man sideways. The horse screamed as the desperado tumbled down the right stirrup with a loud grunt, jerking the horse's reins and twisting the horse's head so sharply that the horse fell hard on its right side, as though its hooves had been cut out from under it.

The man groaned as the air burst from his lungs, and then the dun screamed again, thras.h.i.+ng and shaking its head and scissoring its hooves as it climbed up off the desperado and galloped away, buck-kicking and trailing its reins.

Behind the horse, the desperado writhed about in the dirt and gravel, rolling over several times, groaning, clutching both hands to his arm. His rifle and smashed hat lay several feet away.

Speares ejected the spent sh.e.l.l and rose slowly. The black man lay at the base of the slope, on his back, groaning and wagging his head from side to side. Speares leveled the rifle on him and scrambled down the hill, keeping his eyes on the still, dark form in the brush.

Where the man and horse had fallen, the dust and brush were flattened and blood-flecked. Blood followed the man's trail several yards down the slope, to where he now lay, belly rising and falling sharply, round eyes staring skyward, blood frothing from his nose and lips and down his chin, forming a red bib on his chest.

The desperado's eyes rolled toward Speares, the pupils expanding and contracting slowly.

Staring down, the sheriff grinned. "Sure wish I had time to cut your head off and haul it back to Tucson for the bounty, Towers. With that kinda money, a man wouldn't have to work a real real job for months." job for months."

The man's eyes were flat and gla.s.sy, but his right hand moved feebly over the grips of the old-model Colt riding high on his hip. Speares leaned down, grabbed the gun out from under the limp hand, and tossed it down the slope.

The black man's mouth opened and closed several times, blood continuing to spill over his lips, before he was able to rasp, "Finish . . . me. . . ."

Grinning, Speares shook his head. "I'm gonna need all the lead I got for the rest of your gang." He turned, climbed the slope, and stooped to pick up his hat. Frowning, he poked two fingers through the hole in the crown and glared down at the dying desperado.

"d.a.m.n your hide! That was my best hat!"

Big, blond-headed Latigo Hayes reined his claybank to an abrupt halt and canted his head, listening to the rifle report. The echo of the first shot hadn't died before another boom echoed across the ridges.

Hayes sat the stout claybank tensely, his heavy jaw hard under its thin coat of curly blond whiskers and dust, wondering who'd gone down-one of his men or one of theirs, whoever "theirs" were. When the second echo had faded, followed by only the chittering of birds and squirrels,the big desperado glanced down at the hoofprints he'd been following.

They'd been leading him into the high, pine-studded hills east of the Canyon of Lost Souls. Lifting his eyes from the fresh tracks, he looked around warily, his thumb on the off-c.o.c.ked hammer of his rifle. Seeing nothing but heavy brush and occasional pines and cacti, but needled by the feeling that a rifle barrel was aimed squarely on the back of his neck, he touched his spurs to the claybank's ribs.

He followed the tracks into a narrow canyon muddied by a runout spring. Watching the tracks carefully but also keeping an eye skinned on the rocks and brush around him, he followed the tracks out of the canyon and into another, where a small stone shrine nestled between two pines, the faceless figure of the Virgin Mary swathed in tree roots. A spray of wildflowers lay atop the shrine- brown and brittle as the dead leaves and pine needles around them.

The man Hayes had been following had stopped here. His shod hoofprints were set deep in the clay.

Looking around again and turning up the collar of his blanket coat-the air was cool though the sun was bright-Hayes gigged his horse up canyon. He followed the canyon into a wide valley, then into another canyon and through a gorge, taking a circuitous route that led nowhere. The big man's chest tightened, and his hands grew slick inside his gloves.

Tracing yet another, narrow canyon, he drew back on the clay's reins once more and found himself staring down at the same shrine he'd stopped at a half hour ago.

"What the-"

To his left, a horse whinnied. As his own horse answered the whinny, he shot a sharp glance up the ridge and into the pines rising beside him, the sun peeking through the columnar shadows.

Hayes's bowels churned with fear and fury.

He gritted his teeth, looking around wildly. "Where are you, you son of a b.i.t.c.h?"

A calm, deep voice sounded behind him. "Here."

Hayes jerked his horse sideways. Squatting atop the low canyon wall was a man with a high-crowned Stetson, silver muttonchop whiskers and mustache, and a copper star pinned to his buckskin mackinaw. The lawman grinned down the barrel of the Henry rifle aimed at Hayes's chest.

"You ain't Considine, but this is for my Peg just the same!"

Hayes sucked a breath to scream, but he hadn't finished inhaling before smoke and flames stabbed from the Henry's barrel, obscuring the toothy smile of the face at the other end.

Yakima knew the Apache was on his trail, because the Apache pony he himself was riding continued to sniff the breeze and snort, as though it smelled a familiar scent.

Having an Apache on your trail-especially one as infamous as Kills Gold-Hairs-was like having a rogue grizzly on your heels. Yakima couldn't move quietly enough, see or hear clearly enough. And every brush rustle or falling pinecone sent ice through his veins.

He'd been leading the Apache steadily up and over several relieved ridges for nearly an hour before he found a low saddle with sheltering rocks from which to effect an ambush. He tethered the buckskin on the saddle's backside, well hidden among pines, willows, and rock outcrops, then made his way back to the saddle and hunkered down in a notch on its rocky spine.

Holding his Winchester up high across his chest, he leaned against a rock and stared down the saddle through sage, scattered pines, and occasional berry shrubs.

Minutes pa.s.sed like hours. Clouds shepherded shadows across the slope and the distant blue ridges darkened as the sun angled west.

Yakima had just begun to wonder if the Indian knew where he was and was going to wait for him to poke his head out of the rocks-n.o.body could wait like an Apache-when a coyote's howl rose from somewhere downslope and to the right.

It was a wild, manic yammering. It went on for several minutes, lifting the hair along Yakima's spine. Yakima had heard young coyotes, strayed from their pack, kick up such a ruckus. But his gut told him this was no coyote.

Kills Gold-Hairs knew Yakima was here, somewhere among these rocks, and was trying to lure him out, to pink him from cover.

Yakima hunkered down, pressing his right cheek against the stone wall. He edged a look down the slope with his left eye, careful not to angle any shadows on the ground before the notch.

Another long minute pa.s.sed.

Down the slope, a horseback rider appeared, the man's long black hair buffeting in the wind. Astride a white-speckled dun, Kills Gold-Hairs moved up the hill toward the saddle, clad in denims and knee-high moccasins, red and black calico s.h.i.+rt with a beaded medallion hanging around his neck, and a floppy-brimmed brown hat.

Two revolvers hung in shoulder holsters. Two knives were snugged up tight against the man's hips, and he carried a Winchester carbine with a leather lanyard across his saddlebow.

The Apache moved easily in his white man's leather saddle, with almost insulting ease, a faint smirk on his face, eyes slitted. He zigzagged the horse through the scattered pines and shrubs, batting its flanks with his moccasined heels.

Suddenly, about fifty yards shy of the saddle, the Indian stopped the horse. He threw his head back on his shoulders, squeezing his eyes closed, opening and closing his mouth until the coyotelike yammering rose up the ridge to Yakima's ears.

The bizarre cry made Yakima's scalp tingle. He eased down his Henry's barrel, snugged his cheek to the stock, and rested a bead on the Apache's calico s.h.i.+rt.

Just as he was taking up the slack in his trigger finger, the Apache threw himself out of the saddle, hitting the ground on his shoulder and rolling. Yakima jerked the Henry's trigger back.

Ka-peewww!

Dust puffed from a bleached log.

The Indian bounded to his feet and ran through the trees and shrubs to Yakima's left. He dove over a low rise as Yakima fired another round. The slug plunked into the short gra.s.s a foot off the Apache's left moccasin.

And then the Indian was out of sight behind the brow of the hill, dust from the second strike scattering on the breeze. The riderless horse galloped back the way it had come, screaming and trailing its reins.