Last Ride of Jed Strange (9781101559635) (22 page)

Strange jerked his head around when a coyote began yammering from a nearby ridge—an eerie, ghostly sound. Turning back to Colter, he said, “Havin' a snake like Machado on your trail makes ya jumpy. A few weeks back, I could hear the bastard singin' all hours of the day and night.” He snickered. “'Specially after we double-crossed him. Like teasin' a coiled diamondback. You musta run into him when him and his boys split up after a run-in with
rurales
. They probably needed fresh horses and supplies.”

After a time, Strange drew a rattling breath. “I picked up his trail again two days ago, been shadowin' him ever since . . . till I spied you and Bethel. I'm glad he's back. Damn glad. We'll run into him again, and I'm gonna need some help gettin' those two daggers back.”

“How come you got the third one on you now?”

“I fetched it back from where we buried it after Percy never came back from his supply run. I thought maybe Percy got a notion to dig it up himself and ride off alone. No honor amongst thieves, you know.” He laughed. “We'll follow Machado up to where Bethel's map leads him. Since he found the map, he must think I buried the third dagger, likely 'cause I didn't trust Percy any more than I trusted him . . . and we'll ambush the sneaky bastard there. He won't be expecting me to try to dig it up until I have the other two. Good place for an ambush, atop that ridge. Hope you got enough ammo. Like I said, I'm out of forty-four rounds.”

Colter threw up his hands. “Hold on, Mr. Strange . . . Jed . . . I never agreed to this crazy scheme. And I'm sorry, sir, but that's what this is.” He stuffed his hat back on his head. “Machado is one angry killer, and he's got seven other angry killers ridin' with him.”

“Seven against two. I've faced longer odds!”

Colter started climbing down off the rocks. “Sorry, Jed. Your game will only get you an' Bethel whipsawed, and me, too, if I bought chips in it. Which I ain't. I'll be headin' back north with Bethel. I'll see to it she gets safely back to Tucson.”

After what he'd been through down in Mexico, he figured he was probably as safe north of the border as he was south of it. Maybe he'd elude the bounty hunters and anyone else after him by heading north to Dakota, or to Canada, say.

Colter climbed down off the rocks and started tramping back to where the campfire glowed dully amongst the rocks and bushes. “Good decision, boy,” he heard Jed Strange say behind him, the man's low, gravelly voice clear in the quiet night. “The only right decision, really. Damn glad my daughter ran into ya!”

Chapter 28

The sound of someone kicking a rock jerked Colter out of a deep sleep. Instantly, his Henry was in his hand, and he loudly pumped a shell into the chamber.

The figure just now entering the camp stopped suddenly in the false dawn, Jed Strange's slightly stooped figure outlined against the lightening eastern sky. “Damn, boy—you are fast. I'd like to see you shuck a hog leg.”

“Machado has it.”

Bethel had lifted her head from her saddle when she'd heard the rasp of Colter's rifle. Now she looked around curiously, blinking. “What the hell's all the commotion about?”

“Go back to sleep, darlin'.”

“That don't answer my question, Pa.”

Strange walked into the camp. He wore a buckskin mackinaw against the high-altitude chill, his breath fogging around his head and green flannel bandanna. Colter assumed the man wore the Indian duds to blend in better with the Apaches, possibly confuse them from a distance. Besides, it was right smart desert attire.

The old outlaw leaned his rifle against a mesquite, then got down on his hands and knees, lowered his head to the fire ring, and blew on last night's coals, stirring a dull pink glow.

“I thought you were out of shells for that,” Colter said, glancing at the old '67-model Winchester.

“I was, but I thank you.” Strange shunted his glance to Colter's saddlebags, where he kept his last box of .44 rounds, and gave the redhead a wink.

Colter glowered.

Strange continued to blow on the coals. “Boy, you got your hands full with my daughter. Twelve years old an' she's already as sassy as her ma was after fifteen years of marriage.” As a couple of small flames began to lick up around the ashes, he gave Colter a shrewd wink. “But you probably already know that, don't you?”

Colter had tossed his covers off him and was pulling his boots on. “I reckon you win the cigar this time, Jed.”

“What do you mean Colter's got his hands full, Pa? I don't like the sound of that. Sounds like you got ideas poppin' around in your head again, and that scares me somethin' fierce.”

Colter wanted no part of the conversation. He grabbed his coffeepot out of his saddlebags, draped his bedroll over his shoulders, and headed down to the river for water. When he returned, the fire was popping and snapping amongst the several mesquite branches lying over the old ashes, and Strange was saddling his horse. Two horses had been picketed with Northwest about twenty yards from the camp, at the base of another scarp. Strange's second horse, an oddly yellow-eyed grulla, had belonged to his partner, Percy Tarwater.

“Pa, I just found you,” Bethel was arguing, standing near her father, moving around with him as he saddled his horse. “Damn near left you for dead. If I'm goin' back to Tucson, then you are, too. If you ain't, then I ain't, neither!”

“Colter's takin' you back to Tucson, child.” Strange set his blanket roll on his paint's back, lashing it behind his saddle. “I'll be along shortly.”

Bethel stopped before her father, spreading her feet and planting her fists on her hips. “You can't make me ride back to Tucson with Colter. There ain't no way you can keep me from foggin' your trail to wherever in
hell
you think you're goin'!”

Strange glanced over his shoulder at the redhead, who stood at the edge of the camp, holding the filled coffeepot. Strange had a slit-eyed, knowing expression on his face.

Colter should have known Bethel would never have gone along with his plan for hightailing it back to the border. Her father had certainly known it. And if she stayed down here with the ailing man, Colter would have to, too. He couldn't leave her.

Colter kicked a rock. “Ah, hell!” He shook the coffeepot, sloshing water down its sides and over his hand. To Strange, he said, “You think this gold is worth riskin' your daughter's life for, do ya?”

“No, I don't,” Strange said. “But she's here now whether I like it or not.” He grabbed his saddlebags, tossed them onto his horse's back. “I intend to tuck Bethel away in a safe spot before you and I go after them daggers. If all goes according to plan, and we get the jump on Machado, we should have those two gold daggers by sundown. A matched set of three!”

He turned to Colter, leaned back against his horse, snaked an ankle behind the other, and grinned.

Bethel turned her head to Colter. She looked grieved. “Yep,” she said, turning her mouth corners down. “He's touched, sure enough. But I can't leave him to die down here alone, Colter.”

The redhead was kicking dirt on the fire. “Hell, I know that!”

“Hold on,” Bethel said a couple of hours later, sawing back on the grulla's reins. “What was that?”

Riding behind the girl on a switchbacking game trail that wound gradually up the steep mountain wall, Colter stopped Northwest and looked up into the chill gray fog that cloaked the grass, ponderosa pines, and cedars in an eerie gauze that had issued a sporadic drizzle all morning. He heard the loudening thuds, and then a rock bounded out of the gray and tumbled over the slick green-brown grass to pile up against a half-buried boulder about ten feet upslope and ahead of him and Bethel.

“What's it look like? It's a damn rock,” Colter said, grumpy. He didn't want to be here. He didn't want her to be here, either.

“I know it's a rock,” Bethel said, hipping around in her saddle to give Colter a sneer from beneath the floppy brim of her rain-dark hat. “I'm wondering what set it off.”

“It's all right.” Strange had stopped his Appy about twenty yards ahead of his daughter and was staring up through the scattered pines. “Just the rain loosed it, most likely. I been watchin' an' listenin', and I've detected no 'Paches. Believe me, when you've been in Apache country as long as I have, you know where they are and where they're not. I can smell the sons o' bitches.”

“Oh, yeah?” Colter said, sneering, already tired of the old outlaw. “What do they smell like?”

“Goat!” came the amused retort.

“Could Machado be up there?” Bethel asked in a dreadful tone, squinting into the gauze.

“Doubt it. We're a jump or two ahead of him, havin' taken that dogleg through that little canyon. Trimmed off about three miles. He won't be to the crest of this here ridge for another hour.”

“He won't come this way?”

“Hell, no, daughter,” Strange said, turning away suddenly. In the dingy light, Colter thought he saw the man wince, as though stifling a cough. “This is the backside of the mountain. Machado ain't expecting us to meet him at the top, so he'll ride the trail on the mountain's face—a good cart and wagon trail still used by woodcutters from the mission that lies about two ridges to the north.” He looked at Bethel. “You all right? How's your horse doin'?”

“He's doin' all right, Pa. Purty sure-footed.”

“That's why Percy chose him.” Strange stretched his gaze back to Colter. “Colter, how you doin' back there? You look like someone tossed a dead rat in your morning belly wash.”

“That's how I feel about this whole damn thing, Jed. I've got enough trouble without huntin' more.”

“Damn, boy.” Strange grinned and shook his head before turning around and touching spurs to his Appy's flanks. “I thought I was supposed to be the one with all the good sense.”

“That's sorta what I thought,” Colter groused, booting Northwest on ahead behind Bethel, setting the barrel of his Henry atop his saddlebow.

As he rode, he looked up the slope on his right. Most of the time he could see only a few yards up the steep, rocky incline stippled with occasional cedars and pines. When the great cloud capping the mountain thinned, he could see the vast slab of broken granite that sat over the top of the mountain like a lead bullet over a cartridge casing. From a distance, before he and Bethel and her father had started climbing the mountain—Dragon Ridge—the formation at the top had looked like three giant horse teeth—three granite teeth separated by narrow cracks between them.

Colter heard near footfalls above him, and he tightened his right hand around the neck of his Henry. Then he saw Jed Strange coming toward him on the switchback trail thirty yards up the slope. As Strange rode, swaying easily in his saddle, moccasin-clad feet set loose in his stirrups, Strange pressed his fist to his mouth and coughed softly. His face turned red as he leaned farther forward, and then the man disappeared into a thick snag of pines as he angled farther up the slope.

The trio stopped just beyond the pine snag, on a relatively flat shelf in the mountainside. “Rest here,” Strange said, climbing heavily down from his saddle, his face not so much red now as pale. They were deep in the cloud again. Colter could see nothing beyond a dozen yards. The pines stood still and dripping, trunks dark and wet in the iron light.

“What's that cough from, Pa?” Bethel asked him, stepping up close against her horse to loosen her latigo cinch.

“What's that, darlin'?”

“Don't darlin' me. I heard it last night and I heard it several times this mornin',” Bethel said. “What is it—consumption?”

“Oh, hell.” Strange hauled his canteen down from his saddle and sat on a rock beside the trail. “Just a little touch of the pleurisy.”

He removed the cap from the canteen and took a drink, spilling a little when he coughed around the flask's lip.

“Pleurisy, huh?”

Bethel strode over to her father. He wore his buckskin coat unbuttoned, as the coat was a little too heavy for the temperature, which was probably around fifty degrees. Bethel reached down and swept the left flap of the man's coat back from his calico shirt. Colter winced when he saw the bloodstain on the left center of the man's chest, beside the hide tobacco pouch that Strange wore on a thong around his neck.

“What in tarnation?” Bethel said with hushed exasperation.

Strange snatched his coat flap back, pressed it taut against him. “You're a damn snoop!”

“What is that? Bullet wound?”

As Colter took his own canteen down from his saddle and Northwest started cropping the green grass along the trail, the redhead saw Strange look off, squinting, his cheeks in the dull light appearing hollow and jaundiced.

Shit, he didn't have long left, Colter thought.

Strange shook his head fatefully. “Arrow.”

Bethel glanced at Colter. “Did you know about this?”

“Only since last night.” Colter unscrewed the cap on his canteen and took a drink.

“You shoulda told me,” she said.

“It wasn't my place.” Colter lifted his canteen toward Strange, who was still looking off. “It was his.”

Bethel turned back to her father and said in an incriminating tone, “You're dyin', ain't ya, Pa?”

Strange looked at her, then stood and brushed past her as he walked over to his saddlebags. “Hell, I ain't dyin'. I'm too mean to die. I'll be here when the devil comes, an' him and me'll dance in the last flames.”

He fished a clear bottle out of the saddlebag pouch, popped the cork, and took a deep pull. He looked up at the trees and then all around before taking another pull and returning the cork to the bottle. He shoved the bottle back down in his saddlebag pouch.

“Come on, girl,” he said, grabbing his pinto's reins. “I thought I'd like to rest here awhile, but gold's awaitin'. I'll rest when I'm dead.” He chuckled and stepped into the leather.

“Pa?” Bethel was standing in the trail, staring up at the man, tears streaking her cheeks. “I'd like to go home. I'd like to go home right now, Pa. I'm real tired of Mexico. I'd like to sleep in my own bed again.”

Strange winked at her. “We'll go home, darlin', when we're about forty thousand dollars richer.” He glanced back at Colter, who'd been feeding Northwest a handful of parched corn. “Be a gentleman and help my daughter on her horse, will you, Red?”

Colter walked over and placed a hand on Bethel's shoulder. “There's no stoppin' him, Bethel. We'll get what he's after, and then I'll see to it we all head north.”

“Ah, hell,” she said, staring off after Strange, who was walking his horse up the trail, slowly disappearing in the slithering tendrils of mist, “he's always been part part loco and all bronco. Ma knew it, and I know it. And I reckon it couldn't hurt either one of us to be rich for once in our lives. He's always wanted it so bad.” She chuckled, tears still streaking her cheeks, mixing with the light rain. “Just hope he don't drink it all up now, with Ma not here to see that he don't.”

“Come on.” Colter boosted her up into the saddle and lightly slapped the grulla's rump. She scrubbed her coat sleeve across her face, then bounced on up the trail.

Colter watched her disappear in the mist. He jerked his hat brim down over his eyes, having a sour, colicky feeling about what would happen once they reached the ridge crest.

He swung up onto Northwest's back. The coyote dun glanced back at him, flicking his ears and chewing his bit.

“Yeah, I know, boy,” Colter said, touching his spurs to the horse's flanks. “But I reckon we bought chips in the game whether we want 'em or not. Now we gotta play the hand.”