Last Lawman (9781101611456) (18 page)

Finally, he went out.

The lawmen and the Pinkertons bunked on the cabin floor, each man taking a turn keeping watch outside. They rose before dawn and ate a hurried breakfast of ham and eggs—both of which they also found in the well-stocked cellar. They washed the food down with hot coffee.

Spurr dropped his fork onto his empty plate, finished his coffee, and glanced at the closed bedroom door. The woman had made no appearance, but when he’d entered the cabin last night to spread his bedroll on the floor, he’d seen that the food he’d left for her was gone. Good to know she wasn’t giving up, he thought.

He grabbed his hat and slid his chair back from the table. “Time to pull our picket pins, boys.”

The others yawned or groaned or threw back the last of their coffee. When Web Mitchell, his arm still in a sling, slid back his own chair, Spurr said, “Not you, Mitchell. We’re sending the woman back with you.”

Mitchell frowned. “Huh?”

“You heard me. You’re no good with an injured wing. Besides, when Mrs. Wilde’s ready to ride, she’s gonna need an escort back to Sweetwater.”

“That ain’t gonna be necessary,” Mitchell said.

Spurr and the others stared at him.

“Hell, I thought you knew,” the Pinkerton said. “I was keepin’ watch on the hill behind the barn, and she came out and saddled a horse and rode out. You boys musta still been sawin’ logs.”

They all continued to stare at him.

Finally, Spurr said, “Which way’d she go?”

“West,” Mitchell said.

Calico Strang said, “Hell, Sweetwater’s east.”

Jimmy was calling for his mother.

Erin Wilde closed her eyes and shook her head as she galloped the steeldust she’d taken from the stable of the dead rancher down a mountain shoulder through widely scattered jack pines and onto a broad flat. Her boy kept calling for her. She knew it couldn’t be possible that she could hear him, because Stanhope was too far ahead of her.

Jimmy was too far away.

Just the same, she could hear her boy’s pleas in her head.

“Ma! I’m scared, Ma! Don’t let the badmen take me!”

“I’m coming, Jimmy,” she heard herself scream beneath the blasting of the wind in her face and the loud thuds of the steeldust’s hooves. “I’m coming! I’m coming! Oh, god, I’m coming for you, Jimmy!”

She closed her eyes and gritted her teeth against the misery the horse’s lunging stride caused her. The pain that the Vultures had inflicted on her, one after another the night before, was now like bayonets driven deep into her battered womb. But the physical pain was nothing compared to the
mental anguish of knowing that Jimmy was in the hands of Clell Stanhope.

She had to get her boy back. She couldn’t lose him now, too. Not after losing Daniel.
Oh, god, how could she live knowing that both Daniel and Jimmy were dead? Leaving her here in this awful world alone?!

After she’d retrieved her son, she would do everything she could to make sure that Stanhope could never cause such horror to herself or to Jimmy or to anyone else again.

She patted the holster on her hip. She’d found it in a trunk in the rancher’s cabin, in the room in which the Vultures had so mercilessly and seemingly endlessly violated her. The pistol was a Remington .44. She knew the make because her brother and father had taught her all about guns when she’d been growing up around Gillette, before she’d met Daniel, who had never been fond of firearms of any kind. In fact, Daniel had never owned a gun, hadn’t even wanted to keep one in the house. Having been raised in an eastern city before coming west with his parents to sell dry goods in Colorado mining camps, he’d been afraid of them. Erin had not held that against him. His delicate sensibilities, so rare on the frontier, had been what had charmed her most about him.

In a land of brutish men, he’d been a rare yet masculine flower.

It had been a while since Erin had fired a pistol, but she felt certain that she could fire one again quite effectively. Anyway, she’d find out soon enough. Because she would not stop until she’d run down the Vultures and rescued her son and blown a hole through the dead center of Clell Stanhope’s vile head.

She had no idea how she would accomplish that task. The complexities and practicalities of it were a strange, mysterious fog behind her eyes. All that was clear to her was that she would get Jimmy back and she would satisfy this raw, burning need within her to kill Stanhope. Slowly, if possible.

Somehow, she’d do so without getting herself or her boy killed. She was certain of this. Only a very remote part of her was at all worried. Mostly, in spite of her physical agony, she felt very powerful indeed. In fact, she felt almost indestructible.

She booted the horse into a lope, keeping her back straight, reins held high against her chest and loosely in her hands. She’d grown up riding horses and was a natural rider. While her body ached from the abuse she’d taken, she knew how to ride to keep the jarring to a minimum.

Occasionally she paused to make sure that she was still on the Vultures’ trail, which was not hard, because they had made no effort to disguise the clear prints of nearly a dozen shod horses they’d left in the sand and gravel of this high-desert country. Ahead, the broad flat she’d been following narrowed into a canyon with high, steep sandstone walls. A stream curved along the wall on her right, and it was lined with aspens whose leaves flashed gold in the sunlight.

As she continued on into the canyon, she began to hear the stream’s rush, and she found herself reining the steeldust away from the Vultures’ trail and over toward the water. Despite the sponge bath she’d taken the night before, with the water the old lawman had provided, she felt as though a million tiny snakes of filth were crawling over her, even coiling and uncoiling inside her.

The cool, clean water—snowmelt water from high in the mountains—beckoned. Chickenflesh of anticipation rose on the back of her neck. She imagined the filth washing off of her like a thick layer of coal dust.

Jim needed her. But she could not ignore the clean chill of the stream, the chance to rid herself of the stench and the slime that Stanhope and the other Vultures had left on her.

At the edge of the woods, she checked the steeldust down and swung gingerly down from the saddle. The horse tried to edge away from her and continue through the trees toward the stream, but she held fast to the reins.

“Hold on, fella,” she said, with one hand brushing her chestnut hair back away from her face and looking carefully around. Making sure she was alone here in this clean, fresh-smelling canyon with only the whisper of the aspen leaves and the murmur of the cold water nearby.

When she saw nothing more threatening than a mule deer doe grazing near where two spotted fawns lay at the opposite edge of the canyon, Erin led the horse into the woods and slipped its bit from its teeth, so the mount could freely draw water from the stream.

She dropped the reins, let the horse continue on by itself toward the water. She strode slowly toward the water, continuing to look around cautiously before removing the serape she’d found in the ranch house. Her dress had been too badly torn to wear; besides, she’d wanted clothes more rugged for the chore she had ahead of her. So she’d taken a pair of balbriggans down from a peg in the ranch house, and she’d donned them under a pair of loose, ragged denims that she’d also found in the ranch house, and the serape that smelled like camp smoke and man sweat but would have to do. The nights were cold this high above sea level.

At the back of a wardrobe, she’d found a pair of beaded moccasins. They were sound except that the soles needed new thread. They must have belonged to a woman or a boy, because they were only a little large for Erin but would in time conform to the shape of her feet. Most importantly, they were comfortable.

And they were quiet, which would come in most handy when she finally ran the Vultures down.

She stopped just inside the woods about fifteen feet from the stream and tossed the serape onto the ground. She stooped to remove the moccasins, then slid the pistol from behind the wide leather belt holding the baggy denims on her lean hips. She set the pistol down on the serape, then shucked out of the denims and the balbriggans and, crossing her arms on her breasts, looked around once more.

There were only the trees, a few peeping chickadees, the stream, and the tan ridge on the other side of it. It rose nearly straight up a good thousand feet from a gravel shore and a thin line of aspens. A few birds—robins and mountain jays—watched her from the trees.

Before her, the river slid, cool and inviting over the rocks. To the right and only a few feet out from the bank was a gently turning, dark pool.

She headed toward it, feeling the brittle grass and gravel under the soles of her feet, which, when she’d been a girl, had been hard and calloused from running barefoot but which now were so tender that she could feel the poke of every grain of sand and every blade of grass. She stepped off the grass and into the water. It was cold. Colder even than she’d expected. The way it numbed her feet and then her ankles and calves was wonderful.

She continued into the water, feeling better, cleaner already. Angling out to the right where the black hole beckoned her near a gouge in the bank, where a tree must have been at one time, she dropped down into it. A smile spread her lips wider and wider as the water moved up past her belly and over her breasts. When it had inched up to her neck, she closed her eyes.

She felt the slime slithering off of her. The grime and the stench washed away in the water sliding around her and continuing downstream as it sent up little tea-colored stitches where it bubbled over rocks.

After a time, she moved up to shallower water, nearer where she’d entered the stream, and lay down on the sandy, gravelly bed. She closed her eyes, letting the sound of the water and the birds and the blowing leaves fill her head, cleansing her brain the same way the water had scoured her body.

The steeldust whinnied.

Erin opened her eyes and lifted her head, turning toward where the steeldust stood on the bank, reins dangling. The
horse was looking across the stream and to the woman’s left, twitching each ear in turn.

She followed the horse’s gaze and gasped, sitting up and crossing her arms over her breasts. A man in a white shirt, suspenders, and broad-brimmed black hat sat a horse near the edge of the stream’s far side. He must have just ridden out of a draw. Another rode slowly up from behind him, from behind a bulge in the canyon wall. The second man was short, and he wore a red plaid shirt and dark trousers stuffed into mule-eared boots.

Both were bearded. They were trailing pack mules loaded down with burlap supply sacks and picks and shovels and other mining implements. Prospectors. The man in the white shirt and black hat was staring toward Erin. He glanced at the smaller gent just now riding up beside him, facing the stream, and jerked his chin in her direction.

Erin scrambled up out of the water, retrieved the serape, and dropped it over her head. The red-and-white-striped garment fell to mid-thigh. As she stooped to retrieve her oversized balbriggans, she saw the first man drop the lead rope of his pack mule and boot his horse into the stream and angle it toward her. He did not come quickly but held his horse at a walk. He canted his head to one side, his eyes slitted beneath the broad brim of his hat. He had a cold, lusty look on his face.

An expression that Erin knew well.

Her heart leapt, and her blood turned to ice.

The snakes of slime were slithering over her again.

She dropped the balbriggans and started running toward the steeldust. She stopped, looked toward the man riding toward her. The other, shorter man was following him. The smaller man had a red beard and a big grin on his thin face.

Erin felt the ice thaw in her veins. Her blood warmed. She turned to where she’d dropped the gun in the grass, walked over to it, and picked it up. Her heartbeat slowed.
Calm inched over her. Certainty. Confidence that she would never again be abused the way the Vultures had abused her. At least not without her pain coming at a very high price to her attackers.

If she didn’t discourage these two men, they’d likely dog her as she trailed after the Vultures and reduce her chances of rescuing her boy from the killers’ savage clutches. Purposefully, feeling the strange calm steal over her just as the cold water had only a few minutes ago, Erin walked to the edge of the stream. The breeze nudged her wet hair. It tickled her shoulders and back.

The rider was within twenty yards of her now, a little more than halfway across the stream, the other man a horse length behind him. Erin took the pistol in both her hands, raised it, and clicked the hammer back with both her thumbs and a slight curl of her upper lip.

She felt her hands shake and willed the shaking to cease.

The man’s eyes dropped to the gun pointed at him. He stopped his horse, as did the smaller man riding behind him. His mouth slackened inside his dark brown beard. His eyes grew hard. “Put that gun down,” he said above the stream’s even rush.