Mojave (12 page)

“Or Whip's horse!” Bug Beard was trying to get back on Whip's good side.

Whip, of course, was yelling louder than anyone else. Then he shrieked like a girl. “Get her. Get that Chinese girl! Get her! Get her!” He punctuated his orders with a lot of cusswords. “But don't kill her!”

The problem, of course, was that Mr. Clark and three of the men had yet to round up any of our horses, including my Lucky, and Jingfei had already topped the ridge. I figured we wasn't getting Jingfei no time soon, but then Peach Fuzz was whipping those two gray Percherons with a whip that wasn't as fancy or as black and wicked as Whip Watson's. Peach Fuzz's Columbus carriage angled down the hill, and he had to pull hard on the lines to keep from running over those six dead girls.

I heard him yell, “I'll fetch her, Mister Watson! I'll fetch 'em all!”

I've never been one for planning nothing. I just go on instinct, or foolish notions, and that's what I done. Having some practice at running to catch moving boxcars as the train leaves a station, I run ahead as the Columbus carriage raced by, and I gripped one of the little bars that come down from the canopy, and it just so happened that it didn't break, and somehow I didn't go dropping underneath the wheels and getting killed, and I even managed to swing myself into the back floor, and bounced around some before coming up to my knees, and then, as the buggy started uphill, I got slammed down into the rear leather seat that smelled of fresh wax.

Ain't sure which hurt more, getting tossed over Lucky's neck at a full gallop, or almost breaking my neck as I got tumbled and bruised trying not to get chucked out of that buggy being driven by Peach Fuzz. Got a look-see behind me, once I got jerked off the seat, onto the floor, and almost into the Mojave, but spied only dust. Then I was jostled back inside, felt the rear wheels of the coach come off the ground as we went over a hill, or boulder, or something, hit the floor, the seat, then managed to grab hold of the back of front seat, and found myself sitting in the center of the backseat, watching Peach Fuzz whip those grays.

Now, for all you stampede-string-wearing proponents, here's another true statement: My hat was still on my head. Flattened a bit, and the brims bent and one side even torn, but it hadn't come off.

“Slow down!” I bellowed at Peach Fuzz.

He didn't even look at me, and sure didn't listen.

I repeated my instructions, and hollered, “Jingfei can't get far. Whip's horse is worn out.”

Got flung back against the seat, but it was a comfortable seat, yet I wouldn't expect less from a coach that cost three hundred dollars in Dallas.

Peach Fuzz's whip popped the air.

“I don't give a damn about that yellow-skinned girl!” he yelled back at me. “It's Bonnie I'm a-savin'!”

Wanted to ask him
Who the hell is Bonnie?
only my teeth was already hurting from the pounding I'd taken, and I was already howling on account we had started down another hill.

About then, at the bottom of the hill we was barreling down, I spied the other Conestoga. The oxen was still hitched, but the wagon wasn't moving. Didn't see Jingfei, didn't see Whip Watson's black horse, and I didn't see none of Candy Crutchfield's vermin.

Thinking about all that I didn't see, I was trying to reach some conclusion as to what it all meant, or didn't mean, but then Peach Fuzz was bracing hisself, tugging hard on those lines, even setting the brake, and we slid to a stop without wrecking or killing the Percherons or ourselves. Peach Fuzz had a better grip, though, and unlike me he didn't bounce off the back of the front seat, and then off the backseat, and didn't land on the floor.

Heard him jump out of the rig, heard him running around the desert, crying out, “Bonnie? Bonnie? Bonnie?”

I fell out of the carriage, and tried to find my land legs. I weaved this way, then that, managed to grip the side of the carriage as the grays blowed real hard, and Peach Fuzz kept calling out that girl's name. He jumped up, peered through the canvas cover, then ran to the front. While he was running like them chickens is always doing when they get their heads cut off, I started moving—real gingerly—toward the picket line that I'd spied and the mounds of horse apples that had been left behind.

“She ain't here!” Peach Fuzz wailed. “Bonnie's gone.”

Lots of horse tracks I seen. And some small prints that would likely have been made by women.

“What are you lookin' at?” Peach Fuzz rubbed the tears out of his eyes with his fists, and staggered over to where I held a fresh horse turd.

My jaw jutted toward the team of oxen. “A wagon like that, hauled by a team of oxen,” I said, “don't move fast. They knowed they could never outrun Whip Watson. So they left some boys here with horses.” I pointed at the picket line they'd left. “Kind of a relay station. Got the girls out of the wagon. Mounted them up. Took off.” I flung the turd toward the north, the way the tracks headed.

“Who?” He knelt beside me. “Who kidnapped Bonnie?”

“Candy Crutchfield, appears to me,” I said, and looked for some recognition in his eyes. There wasn't nothing in them except tears.

“Who's that?”

“Hell if I know.” I pointed at another set of tracks. One that had whipped right past the Conestoga and hardly even slowed down.

“Candy Crutchfield?” Peach Fuzz asked, his eyes following the tracks.

“Jingfei,” I said. Hell, I even smiled. The girl whose name meant Quiet Not had plenty of gumption. She wasn't trying to escape Whip Watson. She was going after the girls, her friends—or maybe even they was just acquaintances—that Candy Crutchfield had woman-napped.

Peach Fuzz was already moving. “I'm a-goin' after her,” he said, and I knowed that he did not mean Jingfei. I also knowed that I was, and that meant tagging along with him. Besides, it suddenly struck me that Peach Fuzz wasn't all that bad of a sort, and that maybe he could get his Bonnie, and I could get Jingfei, and we could get away from Whip Watson, Candy Crutchfield, Calico, and the whole Mojave Desert. Hide out. Forget all about Lucky Ben Wong, even if I had give him my word that I'd bring Jingfei to him. Settle somewhere peaceable. Tombstone, Arizona, maybe. I'd heard it remained a top place for a gambler.

As Peach Fuzz got into the wagon, and put his hand on the brake, I put both my hands on the harness between them two big gray horses, and watched his eyes get rid of the tears and harden over with the look of the reaper, or maybe of a lovesick fool. His right hand picked up that horsewhip.

“Get some sense, boy,” I told him. “You got any water?”

The whip rose.

“You run these horses to death, and you'll never find Jing—I mean, Bonnie.”

The whip reared back.

“And if Whip catches us . . .”

He lowered the whip. I pointed to the Conestoga.

“It'll take a while before our
friends
have gathered the horses Crutchfield run off,” I said. “We got some time. We can take some oats from the wagon, water. Just enough to get by.”

His head nodded like I was making sense, and, for once, I was. Then he said, “Do you know where they's a-headin'?”

“No. But there's too many of them so they can't hide their trail.”

Course, that also meant that, once they got them horses, Whip Watson and company could follow us real easily. Maybe he already had, come to think on things. I mean, if Peach Fuzz and I had pursued the bad guys in a Columbus carriage, they was two more of them conveyances back at the camp. Course, if Whip happened to catch up with us, I could just tell him that we was after that women-napping woman Candy Crutchfield, and he'd likely believe me. As long as Peach Fuzz didn't blurt out that he was in love with a gal promised to some idiot in Calico.

“You know what Whip will do to you if he finds out you're sweet on one of his girls,” I told Peach Fuzz as I brought a sack of grain and dropped it in our buggy.

Peach Fuzz, pretty strong for a kid his size, slung over a bladder of water. “I remember Conrad,” he said, and returned to the big wagon.

Wished to hell I could forget Conrad.

As we come back with another haul, I told Peach Fuzz: “Best thing would be for you to let me go, you stay behind, forget all about that girl.” On account that the way I had things figured, I could likely catch up with Jingfei on a hard-blowing black mare that had already covered a lot of ground, then load that Chinese princess in the buggy, and skedaddle. That plan wouldn't likely get me killed. But if I had to go with Peach Fuzz and try to sneak a girl named Bonnie out of a camp run by the notorious Candy Crutchfield, whoever the hell she was, and with maybe thirty or forty gunmen . . . well . . . that plan didn't appeal much to me.

Peach Fuzz didn't answer. He was climbing into the driver's seat, and I had the brains this time to get right beside him.

I pointed.

“Just follow the tracks. Steady pace. The horses have had a rest, and they shouldn't be as winded as the ones we're after. You don't drive like a lunatic, we can catch up with Jingfei, then Crutchfield and your Bonnie.”

He was gripping the whip in his left hand, and staring at me like he couldn't believe what I'd said. He wet his lips after a spell and said, “You sound like you know what you're doin'.”

I grunted. Not many folks ever said that about me.

“I've had some experience,” I told him.

“Chasin' bandits?” he asked.

“Being chased,” I answered.

 

 

Hazel-eyed Bonnie Little was five feet, four inches tall, twenty-two years of age, fair-skinned, honorable, brown-haired, modest, liked the opera, grew up as a Methodist in Fort Smith, Arkansas, amiable, her pa had gotten struck by lightning and her ma had succumb to diphtheria, had never been married, was a virgin, and only wanted to live a respectable life and be remembered as an ornament to society.

“She told you all that?” I asked when Peach Fuzz finally stopped long enough to suck in some oxygen.

He shrugged. “Some of it was in the
Matrimonial News
advertisement she showed me.”

“Even the virgin part?”

He glared at me. “That,” he said stiffly, “she mentioned to me.”

“No takers?” I asked.

Peach Fuzz glared harder.

“From the ad?” I explained.

He shrugged. “Rogers Canfield.”

“I see.”

I didn't, not really, but Peach Fuzz flicked the lines, and I glanced out behind us. Only dust I saw was our own, so I turned back and looked at the tails of the two grays. Peach Fuzz was talking again.

“Canfield says that he's found the right man for Bonnie, but he ain't. Do you think a whiskey drummer is right for a girl like my Bonnie?” I hadn't even finished my shrug when Peach Fuzz said, “Of course, he ain't right. Whiskey drummers don't like the opera, do they?”

Which got me to singing:

But all that did was get Peach Fuzz to glaring again, so I stopped singing. Hadn't seen many operas, but one time in Leadville, me and Big Tim Pruett had snuck into the opera house to see
Our Island Home,
and I sure liked that pirate chief named Captain Bang.

“She don't love him,” Peach Fuzz told me.

“Hell.” It was my turn to glare at him. “She ain't even met the guy.”

“That's right. But she has met me.”

I shrugged, about all I could do in a conversation with Peach Fuzz, settled back into that comfortable, clean, shiny, well-waxed leather.

“Besides,” Peach Fuzz said, “she comes with her own dowry.”

I give him one of my looks that wasn't a shrug.

“Five hundred dollars,” he said, and flicked the lines again.

“Not too fast,” I told him. Then I asked, “She's bringing five hundred dollars with her?”

“In a money belt. Beneath her corset.”

Which got me to thinking scandalous thoughts that maybe Bonnie wasn't no virgin no more. As Peach Fuzz was holding that buggy whip, I didn't voice my thoughts. His glares was bad enough.

“She paid her own expenses to get to Prescott, right?” I asked.

He didn't glare, just give me a funny look.

“And Rogers Canfield said he'd pick up the rest of the expenses from Prescott to Calico. As a marriage present.” That I didn't ask. Just said it like I knowed it was true, because I did know it.

“Who are you?” Peach Fuzz asked.

“Micah Bishop,” I said.

“Did Bonnie tell you all this, too?”

I laughed. Peach Fuzz was all right as a buggy driver and Columbus-carriage-seat-waxer, and maybe even as a rescuer of damsels that is distressed by Candy Crutchfields, but he weren't much when it come to brains. And that's coming from me.

“Never even seen her, Peach—son.”

“I ain't your son.”

“Hope not. I ain't that old.”

I waited for him to tell me his name, or whatever name he was using this summer, but he didn't. Just glared some more, and kept the Percherons and the Columbus carriage moving at a good but not too taxing pace.

Maybe I've mentioned this before, but if not, let me put it down in pencil that I ain't one much for planning. It's kind of like how you play poker sometimes, let the cards fall where they fall. As we drove deeper into the Mojave and as that sun climbed up higher and got real hotter, I taken a drink from a pot we'd found in the Conestoga and had filled it with water from the barrel, and let Peach Fuzz have a drink, and then I looked at Peach Fuzz's waist.

“Where's your gun?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “I was a-fryin' up a mess of bacon when they hit us. Hadn't gotten around to gettin' full dressed.”

“You got any weapon?”

“Barlow knife.” He tapped his trousers' mule-ear pockets.

“You planned on rescuing Bonnie from thirty or forty gunmen with a pocketknife?”

He shrugged. That boy was smitten.

Me? I'd left that Winchester rifle with Zeke. So I had a Colt Peacemaker with a shell belt full of bullets, and a Spiller & Burr with a pouch of caps and paper cartridges. No long guns. Not a hell of a lot of water. No food, unless the two Percherons didn't mind us sharing their grain. I pushed my hat up. Well, the buggy would seat Bonnie and Jingfei. All we had to do was get them, and go for a Sunday drive in a fine carriage.

“Stop,” I said.

He was perfecting his glares.

“Damn it,” I said, “stop this buggy.”

Could tell he didn't cotton to the idea, but he tugged on the lines, and the Percherons was glad to take a rest. I pointed. Peach Fuzz stared. Ahead of us was a canyon, a right tight fit, but we could make it.

Peach Fuzz leaned out, looked at the path, then snapped at me, “Them tracks lead right into that canyon.”

“That's what Custer said,” I barked back, even though I doubted if Custer had said anything like that, but my words sank through Peach Fuzz's thick skull.