Widowmaker Jones (4 page)

T
he Circle Dot horse, as he soon came to think of the brown, was full of tricks, although he didn't buck again. Newt plucked the worst of the tiny cactus needles from his tender parts and started walking after the horse. He was not normally a man given to profanity, but the heat of the day and both his wounded body and wounded pride resulted in an exceptionally creative string of vile oaths and death threats aimed at one particular horse.

The last he saw of the horse it was still bawling and bucking and zigzagging out of sight like a mustang bronc. He followed in the general direction it had been headed, assuming it would go after the band of Comanche in order to be with the other horses. However, after a long walk he found the gelding standing three-legged with its head drooped as if it were half-asleep or waiting on him.

Newt caught hold of his rope rein once again and debated on what to do next. The nearby Pecos offered water, but it was still no country to be afoot in. It was a long way to anywhere from where he stood, and even farther if he had to trust to his own legs. He guessed that he might be three days from Fort Stockton, if not farther. What's more, the next bunch of Comanche he ran into might not be so friendly, and without a horse he was going to play hob outrunning them.

And Cortina was getting farther away by the minute.

A bronc rider was the last thing he was. Oh, he could handle a mule team or plow a decently straight furrow through rocky hill country ground, but a cowboy or horseman he was not. But it didn't matter, for he had little choice. He laid his blanket roll across the Circle Dot horse's withers again, gritted his teeth, took a double handful of mane, and swung up on its back expecting the worst.

The horse stood calmly and even bent its head around to look back at him as if to say, “What's the big deal?”

The sudden movement of swinging on the horse took the air out of Newt, and he had to sit awhile until the worst of the pain went away. He half expected the horse to throw him again when he kicked it forward, but it moved off as easy as you please and as if its former actions had never happened.

After a mile or two at a calm, ground-eating walk, Newt decided that the horse was probably decent enough and had only been startled by him appearing above it on the high bank and landing on its back.

Cortina had a big lead on him, and Newt was anxious to close the gap. He tried to stick to a trot at first, thinking it would cover the most miles without burning out his mount, but the jarring stride was too much for his wound and throughout the rest of the day he alternated their pace between a walk and a long, rocking-chair lope. When he finally made camp at sundown he guessed that he had managed thirty miles in less than half a day. Yet, the Circle Dot horse looked no worse for the wear.

Despite their rough start, he was growing more confident in the horse. It responded lightly to the slightest movement of his reins and legs, stood still when he asked, and seemed as eager to travel as he was. In fact, Newt couldn't remember ever having such a horse and had about decided that he was lucky that the Comanche gave it to him. Luck could be an iffy thing, but maybe his had turned for the better.

On the second day the horse balked in its tracks and refused to move an inch. It stopped so quickly and so hard that Newt almost fell over its neck. Nothing seemed to be wrong with it, other than it had decided to stop and couldn't be convinced to do otherwise. Newt kicked it, slapped it on the hip with his hand, and generally encouraged it in ways both kind and not so kind.

It was in the middle of this difficulty that Newt saw the white top of the wagon on the horizon. He quickly decided it was best to dismount and not provide such a tall profile on the horizon. When he stepped to the ground and moved behind a clump of bushes near the edge of the river canyon the horse followed behind him willingly enough.

“Crazy horse,” Newt said. He wondered if his fever had come back or if the sun was getting to him to be talking to an animal.

The wagon was still a good mile away, but he had already spotted the woman out to one side of it. She had a shovel and seemed busy digging a hole. From the mound of earth beside it, he was pretty certain it was a grave.

T
here wasn't a good tree in sight, nor so much as a rock to make a decent shade, and the sun was at its midday worst. It was a country to make you sweat, if nothing else. Accordingly, the woman was sweating profusely and paused to rest against her shovel handle when Newt got close. She was old and thin, but not so old that she hadn't made good work of the hole she was digging. It was already knee-deep.

Letting one hand go from the shovel handle, she placed it on the small of her back as if to stretch the kinks out of it. “If you've come to rob me, get on with it and go ahead and shoot me now.”

Her voice was heavily laden with country twang, but there was also a certain ladylike poise to her bearing. Her straightforward manner and gaze were a little disconcerting, especially for a woman alone out in that wild country. He stopped several feet short of the grave and was at a loss as to how to reply to such a statement.

She brushed a strand of gray hair out from in front of her eyes where it had come untucked from the bonnet she wore, and her sweaty leather glove left a streak of dirt across her forehead. “Well then, if you aren't going to shoot me you can lend a hand with this grave.”

She pitched him the shovel and reached down in the hole for something. When she climbed out she was holding a Sharps big-bore rifle. The gun was as long as she was, with an octagonal barrel and one of those fancy, brass-tubed German scopes mounted on it. It must have weighed fifteen pounds, but she held it as if she knew how to handle it. Where a woman had come by such a thing was beyond him, for such guns hadn't been used since there were still any buffalo left to shoot with them.

Her eyes twinkled and the crow's-feet at the corners of her eyes folded deeply. “Are you deaf, or has the sun got to your head? You dig and I'll see if I can fix you something to eat. You look like you've come far.”

“Yes, ma'am,” was all he managed to say before she went to her wagon and left him alone.

He dropped the Circle Dot horse's reins and stepped down into the hole. The gelding stood where he left it, seemingly well trained to ground tie and content to rest while he worked. After a few shovelfuls of earth, Newt took another look at the woman's wagon. It was one of the big Conestoga kind rarely seen anymore. A matched foursome of gray, medium-sized draft horses were tied to one side, and a spotted Guernsey milk cow with a bell tied around its neck roamed free and followed the woman around while she rustled her cookware beside a chip fire she had stoked up.

There was something white on the ground that the woman and the cow both avoided, and it was about man-sized. Newt guessed the tarp-covered form belonged to whoever he was digging the grave for.

He continued to dig through the afternoon, until she brought him a plate of beans, some fresh ear corn, and two tiny rolls of white bread. He sat on the mound of dirt beside the grave and alternated between the food and his water bag.

“You're a slow digger,” she said.

He pointed at his shirt. The Comanche squaws, despite their mending and washing, hadn't been able to get the bloodstain out of it where the cloth lay over the bullet wound in his chest. “I'm not up to snuff today, but I'd say the grave's about deep enough.”

“Who did that to you?”

“A Mexican bandit. He's riding with about five or six others of his kind.”

Her face took on a strained look. “Was them that shot my Amos. He had ridden down to the river to water his horse and they caught him there. Would have done for me, too, but I heard them shoot him. They were still far enough out that I had time to take up Amos's gun and get off a shot.”

“You hit one?”

“No, but it was enough to make them keep their distance. Amos used to say that Sharps will shoot as far as you can see, and I didn't intend to let them get close enough to make out I was a woman alone.”

“You're lucky.” He regretted the words as soon as he said them, and his eyes drifted to the tarp-wrapped body of her man. “That's a bad bunch. I'm sorry for your loss.”

“Don't be. Me and Amos had a lot of good years. Come to Texas from Missouri back during the war years. Had some good days, but this spring we decided to head west. Amos said it wasn't ever going to rain again here and thought it would be better in the Arizona Territory. Although, from what I've seen, the farther we went the less rainy things looked.”

It came to Newt's mind unbidden. “They say it rains on the just and the unjust alike. But out here, it doesn't rain much on anyone.”

“That's scripture you're quoting, young man.”

“Yes, ma'am. Not that I'm a righteous man, but back where I come from we didn't have much else to read. Ma had a big, black Bible she used to read to us from, by and by, time to time.”

Her eyes drifted to the bloodstain on his shirt again, and then she cast a close inspection over his scarred face. “Maybe not all of that listening took, from the look of you.”

“I've seen the elephant, if that's what you mean.”

“You after those Mexicans?”

“I am.”

She lifted her chin and motioned for him to look behind him. “For a man with far to go you have a strange choice in horses.”

Newt twisted around and saw that the Circle Dot horse was lying down, full out on its side with its eyes closed. Only the heave of its belly showed that it was alive.

“That gelding looks in good flesh and not too hard used,” she added.

“I guess he's tired,” he said. “And I'm coming to think he's a bit peculiar.”

“How did you come by him?”

“Indians gave him to me.”

“Indians?”

“Comanche, I think.”

“Your guardian angel must really be something. I never heard of them doing anyone a good deed.”

He helped her drag her husband's body to the grave. It was something on the order of a miracle that she had managed to get it from the river to the wagon, given how petite she was.

As if she read his thoughts, she said, “I rolled him in that tarp and drug him behind one of the horses. Broke my heart to treat him that way. He was always good to me.”

A bit of the tarp came unfolded, revealing her husband's head. Newt was pretty sure the man was past caring about how he was treated, by his wife or otherwise. One of Cortina's bunch had put a bullet above his left eyebrow and a second one right through his teeth. He quickly covered the man's head before the woman had to take another look at him. It was best that she remembered him as he had been and not how Cortina had left him.

Digging the grave had sapped what little strength Newt had left, and he and the old woman took turns at the shovel, covering the body. She was a scrappy worker.

“Sorry, ma'am. Usually I'm more of a hand than this.”

She nodded. “You've got the shoulders for it. Not bad-looking, either, once you look past all those scars you're packing.”

“Thank you, I guess.”

He took a close look at her again. His first impression was that she was old, but it was hard to tell if she was a well-preserved sixty or a hard-used fifty. She had the mannerisms of a lady, but the sharp, up-front talk of the frontier. His own mother had been a woman like that.

“What's your trade when you're not manhunting?” she asked.

He shrugged.

She laughed, but no matter how she tried, she couldn't hide the sadness in her voice. “One of those, huh? Knock-around man. Jack-of-all-trades?”

“Whatever it takes to put food in my belly and some cover over my head.”

“Speaking of cover. You're going to boil your brains if you don't get a hat.” She reached down on the ground where her husband's hat had fallen when they were dragging him over. “Take this if it fits you. Amos wasn't half your size, but he had a head like a watermelon.”

Newt tried on the hat, and it fit him like he had picked it out himself. It was an odd hat to have belonged to an emigrant farmer—black and broad brimmed with a hitched horsehair hatband. He took the hat off and turned it in his hands, examining it more closely.

“Speaking of occupations,” Newt said, “what was it that your husband did?”

“Kind of a rounder himself. Trying his hand at farming was a recent thing and only because I was tired of him being gone all the time. He was a lawman by calling and trade, you might say. He was a city marshal here and there. We lived most everyplace in Texas you can imagine. Then he was a
U.S.
Deputy Marshal and later he worked for those Rangers some. One of his friends out in Tucson already had him a job as deputy sheriff there if he wanted it. You know, to give us something to help get by until we settled in and found a farm.”

“Sounds like a good man.”

“There isn't a lawman in Texas that didn't know my Amos. He was a well-liked and respected man, even if I sound like I'm bragging.” She dabbed quickly at a tear at the corner of her eye.

Newt wondered if Cortina knew he had shot a lawman, even if a former one. Probably didn't matter one damned lick to that Mexican stickup man.

Newt had to bump the Circle Dot horse in the back with the toe of his boot several times to make him get up once the woman's husband was buried. He followed the old woman to her camp, leading the horse. He and the woman took opposite sides of the little fire.

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

“I'll head to Tucson. That was where I started for, and I don't like changing my mind before I've seen a thing through.”

“I'm kind of that way myself,” he said. “But you might think it over again. I don't know the trail, but I wouldn't recommend it.”

“Because I'm a woman?”

“Tough for anyone, I hear, and the Apache are off the reservations again. Some say they're worse than Comanche. Maybe you can sell that wagon and catch a train west. I don't imagine Apache would attack a train.”

“I tried to tell Amos not to take the southern route, but he never was one to listen. And we would have taken the train in the first place, but he always liked to see some new country from the back of a horse.”

“I can go on with you to Fort Stockton. Shouldn't be too far from here. I've never been there, but I reckon I can find it.”

“I'd be obliged,” she said. “When I first saw you coming I didn't know what to think. If you don't mind my saying it, you look like the devil. Walking dead man if I ever saw one.”

He chuckled. “I don't mind you saying it at all, but don't hold it against me if I don't give up the ghost right here and now. I've got a few more miles to cover, yet.”

She looked around them at the expanse of nothing, as if she thought finding anything in it might be a miraculous feat. “What are you going to do after you help me to Fort Stockton?”

“I'm going to find the one that shot me and your Amos.”

“And then what?”

“I'm going to have a serious talk with him and get back what he took from me.”

“You don't even have a gun.”

“I'll get one. Make do if I can't.”

She rose and went to her wagon, reappearing after climbing in it and rummaging around. When she came back to the fire she was carrying a revolver with the gun belt rolled around it. She pitched the gun to him and he caught it in his lap.

It was a Smith & Wesson No. 3 in a high-cut, double-loop holster. Both the gun and the holster were well oiled, and it was plain that her man had been one who appreciated a good firearm and fine leather. The belt was an ordinary one, but had a double row of cartridge loops along its length, with every one of them stuffed full of short, fat S&W .44 Russian brass and round-nosed, heavy lead bullets. No matter the well-kept nature of the rig, the only thing unusual about it was the little blue crosses inlaid into each of the walnut grip panels. The inlaid crosses were made of some kind of agate or other shiny stone as blue as a jaybird's feathers. Gun oil and time had darkened the walnut until the grips were almost black, and the tiny stone crosses stood out like gems.

She saw him looking at the pistol grips. “My Amos was usually a plain man, except when it came to that pistol and his hat. I asked him once why he decorated his gun so, and he said that a Franciscan friar gave him the idea. He said that maybe those crosses would absolve him of some of the men he sent to hell with it.”

“You believe that?”

“My Amos never shot except when he had to,” she said. “But even so, I don't think there's anything that can wipe the slate clean when you kill a man, no matter what your reasons. My Amos killed men in the line of duty, and he never forgot that. It wore on him so that he even dreamed of it sometimes.”

“If you intend to make it to Arizona alone, you might ought to keep this for yourself.” He hefted the gun before her.

“I'm thinking you'll be needing it more than me,” she said. “You know how to use one of those?”

“I've shot one a time or two.”

“If you're going to carry that, you'd best learn.”

“I aim to.”

A sad look passed across her face that he thought was pointed more at him than it was a reflection on the loss of her husband. She washed the dishes while he sat by the fire, and when she was through she petted her milk cow, obviously lost in thought. After a while, she put her hands to the small of her back, arching and stretching against the sore muscles the hard shovel work had likely given her. Newt couldn't help but notice that for an old woman, her breasts were especially upright and prominent where the front of her dress pulled tight against them. He averted his eyes, ashamed at himself, but it was already too late.