Last Ride of Jed Strange (9781101559635) (15 page)

And now he'd drunk too much and made fun of this good girl who liked him.

“You gotta be tough,” she said, “to wear that brand on your face. That pistol of yours proves it, too.”

“I wear that brand because I got no choice. And the pistol doesn't mean a damn thing. I'm just fast because there's something in me that makes me want to keep goin'. Why . . . and what for . . . I don't know.”

They were both silent for a time. Then Colter said, “Oh, well,” and got up and stumbled over to the dresser. He leaned over the lamp to blow out the flame.

“Wait.”

He looked at her. She was back looking like a little girl again, one whom someone had tucked into her humble bed.

“Can you leave it on?” she asked.

Colter nodded. “Sure. Ain't you gonna get undressed?”

“Don't be craven.”

“Well, I am.”

She closed her eyes tightly as Colter removed his gun and shell belt and then shucked everything off but his balbriggans. He crawled under the thin sheet and wool blanket that moths had chewed on and rolled onto his side. He was almost asleep when Bethel said softly, “Colter?”

He turned to her. “Yep?”

“You think my pa, Jed Strange, is dead?”

“I honestly don't know, Bethel. If he's alive, we'll find him. I promise.”

“Thank you.”

“You got it.”

“I hope I didn't hurt you too bad.”

“I'd appreciate it if you'd just forget about that now, Bethel. It's one thing having the stuffin' beat out of me by men bigger an' more experienced than I am, but it's a whole other bailiwick havin' a lit . . . havin' a girl makin' me yell ‘give.'”

Bethel laughed.

They slept.

Chapter 21

From his and Bethel's second-story window, Colter studied the street in the predawn darkness.

Bethel snored softly behind him, fully clothed under the blankets and lying flat on her belly, cheek against her pillow. He'd risen a few minutes ago, washed and dressed quietly, and decided to let Bethel sleep while he scrounged up breakfast for them both.

The street was pearl gray. It had rained softly during the night, and a few small puddles shone in the dung-littered trace curving between rows of wood and mud-brick business buildings. A few drunks slumped on boardwalks. A shopkeeper in a crisp white shirt and black pants and sandals was sweeping off the gallery fronting his small pink adobe shop. A dog slumped in the shop's open doorway.

Otherwise, nothing moved down there. If the soldiers led by Brickson and McKnight had followed him and Bethel into town last night, they were nowhere to be seen now. Colter would check out the town thoroughly before exposing Bethel to a possible threat, however.

He grabbed his rifle from where it leaned against the wall near the head of his bed, set it on his shoulder, and then quietly opened the door. He had no way of locking the door from outside without locking Bethel in, so he left the key inside. She had her pistol lying on the bed beside her; anyone who might try to get to her while Colter was gone would likely wish he hadn't.

He went out, shut the door behind him, and descended the wooden steps to the lobby and went on outside to the vacant veranda. The fresh, damp air was perfumed with the smell of sage and cedar. Colter looked up and down the street. There were no pockets of horses that might belong to McKnight's men, no recent shod hoofprints in the muddy street fronting the hotel.

Colter's cautious tension eased, but he kept his eyes peeled as he stepped off the veranda and headed northeast along the main street. He stopped suddenly, squeezing the neck of the rifle perched on his shoulder. But he left the Henry where it was, frowning at a narrow gap between two buildings about twenty yards ahead and on the left side of the street.

He'd seen a fleeting glimpse of blue. Or thought he had. Maybe he'd only thought he'd seen it because he was on the scout for the blue of an American army tunic. Nothing there now. More slowly than before, and pivoting at his hips to look carefully around him, Colter continued forward.

Ahead, the street broadened into a bowl shape surrounded by humble wooden or brick structures, with a few cottonwoods and some kind of nut trees gently rattling their leaves that grew silver as the sun climbed. Smoke rose from a wooden building on the other side of the plaza, in the center of which a few trees and a fountain sat, both still darkly wet from last night's brief rain. A weak stream of water dribbled up from the fountain, the base of which was a cracked statue of Madre Maria. A stone bench sat before it, and mossy rocks lined the patch of grass and the trees.

Colter headed for the small, lime green adobe from which the aromas of roasting meat and coffee emanated. As he walked, he swung his head around, scrutinizing the thick shadows sheathing the buildings around him, and a small corral on the right in which three mules stood still as statues, one staring over the top cottonwood rail at Colter. A freight wagon with a drooping tongue fronted the corral. White-and-red chickens clucked and pecked in the dust around the wagon for seeds.

Smoke billowed up from a brick chimney of the green adobe, and from inside, behind a brush-roofed ramada, a baby fussed. As Colter approached the building, he could hear meat sizzling on a griddle, and the coffee smells grew thicker, making his mouth water and his stomach rumble. A sign over the ramada announced
CAFÉ DEL LUCILLA
. A man sat in a wicker chair on the ramada—an unshaven peasant in dirty white pajamas, sandals, and a sash, holding a stone mug in a large, dark, callused hand with the tip of one finger missing and the nail curling over the stump. He regarded Colter gravely, and did not return Colter's greeting as the redhead slowly crossed the ramada, cast one more edgy glance over his shoulder, then passed through the wooden bead curtain that served as a door.

Inside, Colter found a plump, pretty woman in her thirties frying goat meat and making tortillas on a large black range while bouncing a small child on her hip. There was a lunch counter and three wooden tables, and spicy-smelling
ristras
hung from ceiling beams. Colter managed to convey to the woman that he wanted to take two burros and a jug of coffee away with him, and then he went outside to stand by the silent peasant man on the gallery, one arm on a ceiling joist, staring into the eerily quiet plaza before him.

A few shadows moved amongst the shops around the plaza—shopkeepers unshuttering their windows or sweeping or moving merchandise onto their front boardwalks. One of the mules in the corral to Colter's left brayed raucously. Another mule chimed in. Colter turned toward the corral and lowered his Henry, but, glancing at the peasant man who stared in the same direction, he did not raise the barrel.

But he slowly, quietly, levered a cartridge into the chamber, then off-cocked the hammer with his thumb.

A mule brayed once more and then they all fell silent.

On the other side of the plaza, behind a large, wooden building that appeared to be a warehouse of some kind, blackbirds lifted from a broad oak and screeched off into the morning's misty shadows, wings flashing.

“
Senor, su alimento esta lista.
”

Colter jerked his head around to see the pretty, plump woman standing in the open doorway behind him, holding out a small burlap bag in one hand, a corked stone jug in the other.

“
Cuanto?
” he asked, holding out some American coins in the palm of his left hand.

She picked out two bits, then gave Colter the food sack and the coffee jug. He held the sack in his left hand and cradled the jug between his elbow and his side, thanked the woman, and turned to face the plaza. As he did, the peasant man rose quickly from his wicker chair and followed the woman inside the café, drawing the wooden door closed on the beaded curtain.

Colter looked around once more. The men who'd been milling around their shops around the plaza had disappeared. The sun had risen, angling a buttery gold light over the eastern ridges, which was the direction that Colter headed now, dropping slowly down the gallery steps and angling across the plaza. His boots made a grinding sound in the sand and gravel, spurs
chinging
softly.

The only other sounds were the distant, intermittent thuds of someone splitting wood to the north. No dogs barked. No birds chirped.

But then a squirrel suddenly chittered across the plaza on Colter's right. In the periphery of his vision he saw a deep blue shadow slide out from a front corner of a dilapidated wood-frame building. When he turned, he saw the rifle barrel leveling on him from beneath the brim of a tan kepi.

Colter lunged forward, dropping the food sack and the stone jug and lighting on a knee as he raised the Henry and clicked the hammer back with his thumb. Smoke puffed from the barrel of the Spencer carbine the soldier was aiming at him. At the same time, Colter triggered his Henry. The simultaneous barks rocketed around the plaza, the soldier's bullet hammering into the stone fountain to Colter's left. Colter's slug tore through the soldier's brisket and drove him back and out of sight, the rifle rising suddenly, then falling.

Another rifle barked. Colter saw the smoke and flames stabbing from another barrel forty yards to the left of the man he'd just drilled. The slug curled the air off Colter's right cheek.

He ejected the smoking cartridge from his Henry's breech, seated fresh, aimed, and fired two shots quickly, one slug tearing into the gallery post the soldier was standing beside, the second one boring through his face and causing his head to jerk back as though he'd been punched hard in the chin.

Only a half second after the second shooter had fired, more rifles belched around the plaza, kicking up dust and gravel around Colter's boots, chewing into trees, and loudly hammering the stone fountain statue. Colter pivoted to his left, diving, and hit the ground behind the fountain, sliding his Henry up from under his right side as he quickly levered another round and glanced toward the plaza's west end.

He could see dust puffs in several places on the other side of the plaza and knew that there was at least one more shooter at the south end, near the place from which the first soldier had slung lead. One of this man's bullets clipped a rowel on Colter's left spur, making it ring.

He returned fire quickly at the three smoke puffs wafting near the corral, in which the mules were buck-kicking and braying wickedly. One man in buckskins—the scout, Brickson, most likely—was firing from beneath the wagon. Colter fired at the scout, his slug kicking dirt up into the man's bearded face, then twisted around to empty his rifle at the shooter slinging lead at him from the other end of the plaza.

That soldier had been trying to run up on Colter, and the redhead landed a lucky shot to the man's knee, evoking a scream. The soldier fell and rolled, clutching his right kneecap and losing his hat and rifle. Colter winced, dropping his own rifle as a bullet slammed into his upper left arm. Sucking a sharp breath through his teeth, he shucked his Remington from the cross-draw holster. He tried to get a shot off, but the other three men fronting him were pounding the ground before him with one slug after another, spraying his face with grit and dirt.

Through the dust, he saw Brickson lift his bearded head beneath the wagon. Another man in soldier blues—tall and lanky and sporting a black goatee and muttonchops, probably A. J. McKnight—leaped from the roof of the wood-frame building beside the café, to a woodpile, and from there to the ground.

Colter raised the Remy and fired, his slug slamming into the rain barrel the man had just ducked behind. At the same time, Brickson shouted something Colter couldn't make out, and the scout's carbine sprouted smoke and flames. The slug barked against the fountain's pedestal statue, tearing several nasty rock shards from Madre Maria's outstretched arm. One of the sharp rock slivers tore into Colter's left cheek, just beneath his eye.

He cursed. McKnight yelled, “Get the son of a bitch!”

Colter brushed blood from his cheek and extended his Remy but held fire when hooves drummed wildly to his right, and a pistol popped from that direction, as well. Colter turned, deep lines of incredulity carving into his forehead. A horseback rider was galloping toward him, leading Northwest. Stringy blond hair flopped on Bethel's shoulders clad in her dark wool coat as she whipped her pinto's reins with one hand, which also held Northwest's reins, and fired her Colt Army with the other.

Crouched low in her saddle, she was screaming and cursing like a drunken parlor girl.

Brickson had just started climbing out from beneath the wagon, but now he cursed and grabbed his right temple as he flung himself back under the dray. The other men shouted and continued firing as Bethel pounded toward Colter, within forty yards now and thundering toward him like a Missouri cyclone.

“Come on, Colter!” the girl screamed. “Let's fog some sage!”

Colt emptied his pistol, raking out, “Get outta here, Bethel!”

When his Remy's hammer clicked on an empty chamber, he heaved himself to his feet. Bethel slowed the pinto but not by much.

Colter shouted, “You're gonna get your fool hide drilled!” before reaching for Northwest's saddle horn and, while the galloping horse nearly tore his arm from its socket, hauling himself into the saddle as several more bullets sliced the air around him.

Bethel looked back at him, her face screened by her windblown hair. “Here!”

She flung his reins out, and he grabbed the twin uncoiling black snakes out of the air. Crouching low, he rammed his spurs into Northwest's flanks and bounded straight across the plaza behind the crazy girl straddling the lunging pinto.

Bullets blew up dust behind and around them and hammered a couple of small adobe casas as they threaded a break between them. Once out of town, Colter took the lead and they galloped south over the rolling hills. They splashed across a stream and mounted a low escarpment stretching out from a sandstone ridge. Colter turned Northwest to the right and checked the horse down in a hollow amongst the rocks.

He slipped out of the saddle and glared back at Bethel. “You're damn lucky you didn't get yourself killed, pullin' a fool stunt like that. Who the hell you think you are—Calamity Jane?”

The haranguing didn't seem to faze the girl. She looked back over her shoulder, then turned to Colter, dropping her eyes to his upper left arm. “You hit?”

Colter had suppressed the ache of the bullet's hot slice across his arm. As he walked past Bethel, he said grumpily, “Stay here and keep down.”

He walked back up the scarp, dropped to his knees about five feet from the crest, and crawled the rest of the way, glancing down the other side and back the way they'd come. Bethel climbed the scarp and dropped down beside him. She unknotted his neckerchief, squinting her eyes as she worked, her cheeks flushed from exertion.

“Don't you listen to anything anybody tells you?” he asked her.

“You ain't the boss o' me, Colter Farrow.”

“I feel sorry for the poor son of a bitch who has that job.” Colter stared at her in exasperation. As she removed the neckerchief and wrapped it tightly, adeptly around his arm, he added, “You sure you didn't run your pa off? Maybe he don't want you to find him.”

“You keep that pulled tight,” she ordered, glancing at the neckerchief wrapped around his bloody arm, “or you're liable to bleed to death. She looked at him, and a pleased light entered her eyes. Her mouth corners rose. She leaned forward and pecked his cheek.

Startled as well as exasperated, he jerked his head back. “What was that for?”

“For bein' scared for me.”