The Old Wolves (17 page)

There was another, short drop. And then Drago stared ahead along the stream that was curving through dark pines and jagged pinnacles of rock. The stream widened slightly and became a flat sheet of dark ink. Fifty yards ahead lay what appeared a beaver dam—a low, jagged, black ridge across the stream.

The whiteness beyond the dam was the water splashing up from its base.

Shit,
the old outlaw thought.
I hope it ain't a very steep drop because I'm almost done for the way it is.

He let the stream carry him however it wanted. There was no fighting it. Sometimes a man had to throw himself into the turmoil. He hardened his jaws and sort of dog-paddled, just keeping his head above the water that wasn't as cold as it had looked from the ridge. But it was cold enough.

The beaver dam swept toward him quickly. He felt the woven branches gouging him, the water pushing him relentlessly against them. They caught his clothes and ripped them and pinched and jabbed his skin.

He groaned and yelped and cursed.

Suddenly he was atop the ridge and about to roll on over when he glimpsed a long, black witch's finger poking out from the left bank. The tree that had been torn out of the bank lay four feet in front of him, just on the other side of the dam, two feet above his head.

Drago screamed as he ground his boots into the dam and threw himself straight up in the air. His chest rammed against the stout branch. He screamed again, cursed, lifted his chin, felt the cords stick out from his neck as he summoned every ounce of his strength to his arms and shoulders.

He wasn't sure if the cracking sound he heard was the branch or his ribs, but by god, he held onto the branch just the same. He wasn't about to give himself back to the monster stream that would swallow him now for sure and spit him out dead.

“Too many years, huh?” he muttered against the hammering pain in his chest, laughing wildly, insanely, hearing his laughter echo off the near ridges. He remembered how he'd left the yellow-eyed, lizard-skinned killer from Texas battered and bloody atop the ridge.

“We'll see about that, Curly Ben!”

TWENTY-ONE

Spurr reined Cochise to a stop in a narrow canyon, scowling in befuddlement.

He stared ahead along the main trail he'd been following, which angled around a bend and out of sight behind a jutting stone belly of rock sheathed in crimson sumacs and chokecherry shrubs. Along the base of the rock, a freshet ran. It was littered with yellow aspen leaves and marked with deer, raccoon, and rabbit prints. But no horse prints.

Spurr swung his gaze left to stare up a narrow, steep trace that forked off the main trail to climb through aspens and scattered firs toward a hidden ridge. No prints along that trail, either. At least, none that he could see from his vantage.

“What is it?” Greta asked, sitting her paint directly behind Cochise.

“No tracks, Greta. The rain last night, this morning wiped 'em out.”

“You said you were finding some.”

“
Part
of some . . . a couple miles back. They done ran out and I don't even know if the gang came this way. They mighta swung south or they mighta swung north. At this point, we're ridin' blind.”

Greta heeled her mare up beside Spurr. She wore her scarf over her ears. Her eyes were angry, accusing. “You just want to give up, don't you?”

“I don't see much point in—”

Spurr heard something on the trail that rose toward the ridge. Spurr shuttled his gaze up through the trees. It had sounded like a man's voice but he could no longer hear the sound above the breeze-rattling leaves and creaking branches.

“Someone's up there,” Greta said, staring up the trail.

“I'm gonna check it out. You stay here.”

“Be careful.”

Spurr muttered a curse and put Cochise up the steep trail, the saddle squawking beneath him and sliding back toward the roan's broad rump. As the horse clomped along the muddy path, Spurr stared through the gray-purple shadows beneath the forest canopy, toward the sky capping the ridge about a hundred yards away.

What the hell was he going to do if he ran into Drago's old bunch? He had one old six-shooter and the two-shot derringer. He supposed he could spit on them.

He wagged his head, chuffed angrily, and held the reins up close to his chest as Cochise turned along the switchbacking trail. Beneath the rattling of the leaves and the thuds of his own horse's hooves, he heard the voice again.

A man's voice. It seemed to be growing slightly louder.

A mule brayed.

Cochise twitched his ears.

Spurr slid his Schofield from his holster and held the gun against his right thigh, gloved thumb on the hammer. As Cochise continued climbing toward a jutting pinnacle of gray rock as large as two small cabins, the voice continued to grow louder. It sounded like two men riding along, conversing.

As he approached the thumb of gray rock, Spurr realized he was hearing only one man. One man conversing with who . . . ?

“. . . I says to her, what makes you think I'll continue to put up with such blackhearted, twisted doin's, Adelaide? You think I got no spine a-tall? You think I'm so soft on womenfolk I won't lift a boot to your backside, next time I see you with that no-account, Henry Philpot? Well, if you do, then you got another think . . .”

Thirty yards up the slope from Spurr, the man stopped the mule he was riding and widened his eyes in shock at seeing another rider on this lonely mountain trail.

“Tarnation!” he said, reaching back for the old rifle in his saddle boot.

“Keep it holstered, old-timer!” Spurr had stopped Cochise at one end of the large rock rising now on his right. “I ain't Henry Philpot.”

He booted Cochise on up the trail. The mule brayed raucously, apparently not used to seeing strangers way out here. Spurr could feel Cochise tighten his muscles uneasily beneath the saddle. The man on the mule sat staring at Spurr slantways, as if one eye was better than the other.

He was a stocky old man with a curly, gray beard and washed-out blue eyes beneath the brim of his felt, bullet-crowned, black hat. His skin was weathered a deep tan, and it sagged on his cheekbones, like stained parchment. He wore a sheepskin poncho and patched canvas trousers.

“Spurr Morgan,” the old lawman said when he'd stopped Cochise in front of the stranger's mule.

“Andrew Jackson Lowry,” the old man said, keeping his gruff, skeptical glance on Spurr, knitting his coarse gray brows over the bridge of his nose. “Spurr Morgan . . . where have I heard—?”

“Never mind,” Spurr said. “You ain't seen a gang runnin' off its leash out here, have you?”

“You're a U.S. marshal. Now I remember where I heard of you. Key-
rist
—you're still kickin'?”

“Will you just answer the consarned question?”

“I seen you once in Santa Fe. Why, your hair was all brown back then, an' so was your beard, and you was roarin' drunk carryin' one girl up the stairs over a shoulder with one more under your arm!” The old man guffawed.

Suddenly, he clouded up and looked about to rain. “Good Lord . . . you got old. And, say, what happened to your nose? Looks just miserable!”

“In case you didn't notice, old-timer, you got old your ownself. Now, you seen 'em or haven't you?”

“Say, she ridin' with you?”

Spurr followed the old man's glittery gaze to the trail behind him. Greta was riding up the hill, toward Spurr and Lowry, her head canted skeptically to one side.

“So what if she is?” Spurr asked the old-timer, his impatience with the old man growing.

“Kinda young, ain't she?” Lowry grinned. “She the one that broke your nose for ya?”

“Mister, you're gettin' on my nerves just awful.”

“No, I never seen no gang. Can't say I regret not seein' 'em, either, if you're after 'em.” Lowry's eyes grew large and he jerked his hand up as something dawned on him. “Say, a gent robbed me yesterday. Maybe he's one of the varmints you're lookin' for.”

Spurr scowled. “Robbed you? Just one?”

As Greta reined her paint to a halt behind Spurr, Lowry said with an angry air, “Sure enough. I was takin' a dip in the creek and some gent slipped up out of the bushes. I didn't see him right away, but when I did it was too late. He was hot-footin' out of my camp with a pouch he took out of my saddlebags. He tried to take old Webster here, too”—he leaned forward to pat the mule's left wither—“but Webster gave him a good kick for his efforts, an' he run off.”

“What'd he look like?”

“I didn't get a long gander at him, but he wore an eye patch and he was old. Old as us. Wore a wolf coat. No hat. Looked raggedy-heeled—you know, like he hadn't a good meal since the last blue moon. Seemed to be limpin'.”

Spurr glanced back at Greta, who parted her lips.

Spurr turned back to the old-timer. “What'd he take?”

“A little pouch of beans and deer jerky, and a tin box of stove matches. Took my pistol, too. Probably woulda taken my rifle, but he must not've see it under my gear, and he was all hepped up about my mule!”

“When was this, Lowry?”

“Like I jest told ya—yesterday around noon.”

“Which creek did you say?”

“Injun.” The old-timer hooked his thumb over his shoulder. “Two draws northwest. Luther St. Peter and his old squaw used to live in there, about a mile on. We used to have some shinin' times, me an' Luther—before he got him a squaw. We come out here from St. Louis together a hell of a long time ago, now. Let's see, we was trappin' for beaver up the Poudre . . .”

“Let's go,” Spurr said, reining Cochise around the mule and pinching his hat brim to the old man. “Thanks for the information, Lowry. Have a good winter.”

“Ha!” Lowery laughed caustically, hipping around to follow Spurr with his gaze. “You try to have a good winter in these mountains. If I could stand the smell and the commotion, I'd head for Cheyenne. No, I reckon I'll die up here. Crows'll pick my bones clean, but I reckon they gotta eat, too . . .”

The old mountain man let his voice trail off as Spurr rode on up the trail, Greta following and asking, “You think that was Drago? The man who stole the old-timer's pistol.”

“Sound like him to me,” Spurr said, touching heels to Cochise's flanks, pushing the horse on up the steep trail toward the brightening cobalt sky beyond the ridge. “One-eyed and raggedy-heeled and in need of a weapon and matches. Sounds like he must have given Keneally an' them the slip somehow.”

He shook his head and nibbled at his scraggly mustache. “Wouldn't put it past him. Crafty son of a bitch—I'll give him that.”

At the top of the ridge, he reined Cochise to a halt. Greta came up behind him and checked down her own mount a ways off Spurr's left stirrup. “You know where the creek is—the one the old man mentioned?” she asked Spurr.

Spurr nodded. “Been through there a time or two.”

“Well, come on, then,” she said, impatiently turning her horse south along the crest of the ridge.

“Hold on, girl! We just put these hosses up a steep climb. They need a blow, and we need to adjust our saddles less'n we wanna end up hangin' down one side!”

Greta checked the paint down again. Her eyes sparked angrily and she opened her mouth to speak but drew her lips together and let the sharp light fade from her eyes. She looked around, the wind blowing up from the treeless western slope to tussle her hair and the ends of her scarf, which was knotted beneath her chin.

As Spurr crawled off Cochise's back and started tightening the latigo beneath the horse's belly, Greta winced as though from a sudden pain inside her, and stiffened, leaning a little forward in her saddle. When the spasm appeared to have passed, she dipped her right hand into the carpetbag hanging from her saddle horn.

She pulled out one of the remaining bottles, popped the cork with a hand clad in a powder-blue knit glove, and took a sip. She closed her eyes as she brought the bottle down and stretched her lips back from her teeth. She swallowed hard and then took another swig from the bottle and swiped her wrist across her lips.

Spurr watched her grimly. “You all right, Greta?”

She glanced at him and smiled. “Sure. I only took a few more men than I'm used to in one night, that's all.”

“Greta . . .”

“That Quiet Ed had a nasty backhand.” She rubbed her purple cheek, touched the cut that ran down her upper and lower lip. “But you know what really burns me, Spurr, is the bastards didn't pay.”

Spurr walked around behind Cochise and tightened her latigo in silence, staring sadly up at the girl and her pretty, battered face. A rage burned in him, but he kept the fire low lest it should burn right through him.

“I'm gonna make 'em pay, Spurr.”

Greta looked around at the countless ridges bulging around them, at the high, rocky peaks in the north, and then she turned to Spurr once more. There was a haunted quality to her eyes now that disconcerted the old lawman. The ravaging and the beating she'd taken had done more than physical damage to her.

She was jumpy and impatient, probably not seeing things too clearly, and he hoped to hell he was strong enough to keep her from getting herself killed.

“That's all I want—I just want to make them pay.”

Despite his growing doubt that they'd ever even see the gang again, Spurr said, “We'll make them pay, Greta.”

“No, I don't mean revenge, Spurr,” she said, shaking her head. She leaned into the fist she was pressing against her lower belly and shook her windblown hair from her eyes. “I mean I want them to pay me what I'm usually paid for my services. Three dollars and fifty cents.” She chuckled. “Only this time, I get to keep it all, not just a lousy two percent like what Reymont and Chaney dole out to me.”

A claw of uneasiness gripped Spurr's own belly. He wasn't sure if she was teasing him. He doubted she was.

He held her gaze, her blue eyes straight and level but opaque with some other, wild thing that he feared would put her life in grave danger. He wished now that he'd been more vehement about refusing to take her on this vengeance quest.

“That's not too much to ask—is it, Spurr? For the money they owe me for my services?” Quirking her mouth corners in a dubious smile, she held up the bottle. “Drink?”

Spurr took the bottle from the girl. He took a deep pull, watching her around the side of the bottle as she stared southwestward, the direction in which Indian Creek lay. She continued to lean into her fist, blinking rapidly against the wind, that frozen half smile on her battered, red lips.

Spurr took another deep pull from the bottle and then handed it back to her. When she'd taken another couple of bracing sips herself, she returned the bourbon to her carpetbag and snapped the top closed.

Spurr touched his heels to Cochise's flanks, moving out along the crest of the ridge. An hour later, as he dropped down into the canyon bisected by Indian Creek—a silvery blue thread of water flashing between wind-brushed aspens in full autumn bloom—a rifle cracked.