Red Moon (3 page)

A full hour later as the storm continued to rage its way past them like an army at war, the Ranger finished drawing the last stitch taut beneath his bloodstained fingertips. When he leaned back and gave the young dove a nod, she patted the man's trembling shoulder and sat back against the coach seat. Across from her the two coachmen sat staring, soaking wet from having searched without success for the other four horses.

“We're all done, Mr. Weir. You're going to be good as new,” she said quietly down to the swollen, battered face in her lap.

“I know it,” he replied in a halting, trembling voice. He managed to reach a hand out in search of the rye bottle. Dawson leaned forward and gave it to him. “I expect I'll be leaving now?” he asked.

“He's out of his head,” Jenny Lynn whispered to the Ranger. Patting Tunis Weir on a shoulder, she said, “You poor dear man, you won't be going anywhere. Lie still now.”

“The stitches have stopped you from bleeding as bad,” Sam said to the wounded man. “But we still need to get you back to Nogales and have the doctor look at you—make sure nothing's broke.”

“Obliged, Ranger,” he murmured through swollen lips. He took a shorter drink from the bottle and handed it to Jenny Lynn, who in turn gave it to the shotgun rider. Dawson took it as he continued staring down at the drummer, engrossed.

“I once sewed up a dog's neck,” he said as if in awe.

“It ain't the same,” Long said sarcastically.

“I know it,” said Dawson. “I'm just saying, is all.” He started to raise the bottle to his lips, but Long yanked it from his hand, corked it and placed it on the seat beside him.

“Keep your head clear, Maynard,” Long said. “We've got plenty to do without you getting
wallowing drunk
on us.”

“Wallowing drunk?” said Dawson. “When did I ever get—”

“Will those two horses pull this stage back to Nogales?” Sam asked Long, cutting Dawson short.

“They'll do it, but they won't be fit for nothing for a week afterward,” Long said.

“We can go search for the others again if you want us to,” said Dawson.

“The longer we sit around here wiggling our toes, the worse the flooding is going to get in every direction,” Long reminded his shotgun rider.

“Don't leave on my account,” Tunis Weir blurted out mindlessly in a half-conscious whiskey stupor.

“Shush
now, Mr. Weir,” Jenny Lynn whispered down to him, carefully stroking his lumpy, stitched-up forehead. “You go on to sleep—let them talk.”

The Ranger and the two coachmen had turned at the drummer's sudden outburst. Now they huddled together at the closed door, the rain lashing at the window cover and pounding sidelong on the wooden coach door. The thunder and lightning quieted down for the moment.

“We can search for the other horses as we go,” Sam said, picking the conversation back up where they'd left it.

“What about that roan? That cayuse of yours?” Long asked the Ranger. “Will he back to a load?”

“I expect he'll do it, but he's not going to like it one bit,” Sam said. “Neither will I.” He looked back and forth between the two sopping-wet coachmen. “I'm going to need him rested and ready.”

“You can stall him there at our relay station a day or two,” Long offered.

“Huh-uh,” Sam said. “Soon as we get to Nogales, I'm heading back out.”

“Out in all this?” Long said as if in disbelief.

“Yep, that's my plan,” Sam said. “This can stop any minute. I'm not that far behind. I don't want to quit his trail.”

“Quit his trail? There's no trail,” said Dawson. “It wasn't raining this hard when Moses built his ark.”

Sam and Long just looked at him.

“Moses?” said Long.

Dawson's face reddened in the candlelight.

“I
know
who it was,” he said. “Anyway, this whole stretch of desert is going to be mud soup for the next week, and that's if this gully washer plays itself out in the next few hours.”

Without reply, Sam crouched and backed out of the stage door. While the wind lulled, he held his bloodstained hands in front of him and washed them in the cold, falling rainwater.

Fifty thousand dollars was a lot of money for a stagecoach to be carrying, all in one run, he considered to himself. But his thoughts were taken from the matter as he noticed the empty strongbox and valuables crate lying in the mud. Strung out a few feet behind the coach were a women's carpet travel bag and a larger man's leather satchel lying half-sunken in a brown puddle of water.

He walked to the two cases, picked up the woman's thinly loaded carpetbag and clamped it up under his arm. Picking up the man's leather satchel, noting a clasp open on one end and the cover flap turned back, he couldn't help seeing the butt of a bone-handled Colt standing in a holster, the gun belt wrapped around it. He glanced through the rain toward the stagecoach, then reached into the satchel, lifted the Colt from its holster and turned it in his hand.

The big Colt glinted in the grayness of the storm. Sam noted the clean, well-oiled feel of the gun as he pulled back the hammer and turned the cylinder with the ball of his thumb. He found the gun's action smooth and firm like that of his own—a well-attended tool of the killing trade. He saw that the gun's front sight had been expertly removed from its barrel, making for a snag-free draw.

A drummer, huh?

He glanced again toward the coach as he slid the gun in and out of its custom low-cut holster, noting how easily the holster gave it up. All right, he reasoned, a drummer might carry such a gun. It wouldn't be the first time he'd seen a man carry more gun than he needed, especially a man who spent much of his life traveling the frontier on business.

He slid the gun into its sleek-fitting holster and shoved the whole rig farther down into the satchel. He carried both wet pieces of luggage back to the coach.

When he opened the coach door and climbed in, Sam pitched the luggage on the floor and looked at Weir and the young dove. Weir sat slumped where Jenny had helped him sit up a little on the seat and leaned him against the backrest. He managed to hold the wet cloth to his forehead.

“I found these in the mud,” he said as the two looked at the dripping luggage, then at him.

“Oh! Thank you, Ranger Burrack,” Jenny Lynn said. “I don't know what I would have done had I left my bag here. It has everything I own in it, modest though that may be.”

“The thieves must have let them fall from on top when they untied the strongbox,” Sam said. He gazed evenly at Weir as he spoke.

Weir returned his gaze, the wet cloth cupped against his battered face.

Finally he said in a strained, halting voice, “Too bad I didn't have this . . . with me. I have a . . . gun in there.”

“Oh?” Sam said flatly.

“Yes, a fierce piece of equipment . . . I won it off a fellow a while back,” Weir said through split and swollen lips.

“Won it, huh?” Sam said with a questioning look.

Jenny Lynn sat quietly, watching with interest.

“Poker . . . ,” said the drummer. As he spoke, he lowered his hand from his head and made a gesture as if dealing cards.

Sam only nodded and stared at him.

“It might be a blessing you didn't have it on, Mr. Weir,” Jenny Lynn cut into the looming silence. “It may well have gotten you killed.”

The drummer breathed in deep and closed his eyes in reflection.

“Yes, that may well be,” he said, raising the wet cloth back up to his head.

The three turned as the door opened and the shotgun rider stuck his face inside, rain running from the guttered brim of his hat.

“We've got both the coach horses hitched and ready, Ranger,” he said. “But your roan is acting ugly about the whole deal.”

“I'll take care of it.” Sam stood crouched and stepped toward the open door. But as he started to step down, he picked up both the carpetbag and the man's satchel. He handed them to Dawson. “Here,” he said, “tie these on top, give these folks a little more room in here.”

As Sam spoke, he turned and looked at the drummer to check out his reaction.

“Much obliged, Ranger,” the drummer said without hesitation, raising the wet cloth back to his face. “I feel safer you carrying a gun than I do myself, the shape I'm in.”

As Sam shut the stagecoach door and he and Dawson walked forward, huddled against a new round of blowing rain, the shotgun rider shook the leather satchel.

“You mean this hardware drummer has himself a gun in here and wasn't even wearing it?” he said to the Ranger. He shook his head. “Why do you think he'd do something as stupid as that?”

“I don't know,” Sam said, staring ahead to where the roan and Long stood in a driving sheet of rain. The roan reared and whinnied and pulled against the reins in Long's hands. “But I'm working on it.”

•   •   •

Night seeped into the black sunless sky almost without notice. The three horses pulled the coach upward onto a higher trail, skirting around a low hillside fraught with deep-cut ravines, sunken boulders and sparse piñon. In front of the two big coach horses, Sam sat atop the roan and led the team and the heavy coach upward. The roan had balked against stepping into the traces, but had finally settled and turned surly and silent as it pulled forward.

Heavy rain fell dart-straight around the Ranger, horses and rig, while on the black horizon the wind had drawn its breath inward, beginning to circle and fashion itself into a funnel, ground to sky. The sky itself roiled atop the mad twisting wind like some mighty beast picked at with a stick, until at length the taunting would once again send it raging mindless across a hapless drowning land.

“You're doing good,” Sam murmured down to the roan's dripping mane. His hand sloshed inside his glove as he patted its steaming withers. Looking behind him, beyond the team of likewise steaming coach horses, Sam saw the silhouettes of Long and Dawson standing blacker than the silver rain-threaded night around them, each coachman driven to occupy his seat only out of one's respect for the other.

In a paler flash of lightning, the two coachmen saw the Ranger half-turned in his saddle looking back at them.

“There's the wide cut right ahead, see it?” Long called out as distant thunder rumbled.

“He sees it,” Dawson grumbled beside Long. “He's been seeing it. We can't miss it 'less the trail's washed out.”

“Don't even say that, joking,” Long replied under the pouring deluge.

“I
ain't
joking,” Dawson said in a lowered voice.

“I see it,” Sam called out in reply, turning forward, his sombrero low and dripping water. As he spoke he saw the wide black void flash on and off again, turning purple-blue in the fleeting ribbon of light. Closer now he caught a glimpse of the gray grainy cliff sprawled jagged and shiny against the night high above them. From inside the black void, he heard the steady crushing roar he'd heard for the past half mile.

A runoff,
he told himself; and no sooner had he recognized the sound than Long had called out this very thought from the driver's seat.

“A big one at that,” Long had said. “I know this cut. A high ledge runs all along this side of it.”

Good enough. . . .

They had sighted the wide cut in the trail forty minutes earlier in the streaks of light. From there, as they had neared the wide break in the hillside, the roar of hard-rushing water had guided them through blackness between intermittent streaks of lightning as surely as all sound guides the blind.

Watch the edge,
Sam reminded himself, catching a glimpse of the rocky outer trail edge as lightning blinked on and off teasingly. The sound of the hard runoff grew closer, more intense as he rode the roan forward. Knowing now that the roaring sound guiding him would mislead him if it resounded above any washout lying closer across the flooding trail, he slowed the roan and felt the team horses and coach slow down behind him.

“By dang, he's gotten us there,” Dawson said in relief, seeing the wide break ahead of them in the recurrent flash of light. Feeling a cold silence from the seat beside him, Dawson added quickly, “The two of yas, that is.”

“Hmmph,” said Long, water running freely from the guttered front brim of his drooping hat.

“Brake them while I check ahead,” Sam called back to the coach seat.

“It's set,” said Long, as soon as he'd pulled back hard on the brake handle and hitched the team's reins around it.

Stepping down from his saddle in a flash of lightning, Sam caught a glimpse of one of the missing coach horses standing in the trail, its eyes locked on him, its back and nostrils swirling steam upward in the downpour.

“Another horse up here,” he called back, keeping his voice measured and above the rain to keep from spooking the animal.