Wild to the Bone (18 page)

When he came to the large, half-dead cottonwood standing at a level spot among the buttes, with the main trail continuing through a crease between buttes ahead and left, he swung the black onto the secondary trail angling off through another crease to the right. The trail was narrow and rocky, almost washed out in places by the rains that came to this country in the spring and late summer.

It was hard, slow going. After a couple more hundred yards, Haskell found himself between two steep, boulder-strewn ridges.

One ridge jutted on his right, blocking the sun and laying out a welcoming wedge of shade over the bottom of the canyon. Haskell stopped the black in the shade, near a single, spindly cottonwood whose branches were tufted with only about a dozen sick-looking leaves.

He'd water the horse here and give the animal a brief rest before continuing on to the Stoveville place.

Bear set the wagon brake. Movement out of the corner of his left eye caught his attention. He reached for the Winchester '66 resting on the leather-padded seat beside him but stopped when he saw the coyote angling down the ridge toward him, weaving between boulders.

The coyote just then swung its head toward Haskell and changed course suddenly. Haskell heard the beast's startled grunt. The coyote—a scrawny, dingy yellow thing with a thick gray tail—ran along the side of the slope past Bear's right shoulder and out of sight among the rocks.

Haskell frowned. He hadn't been the first one to startle the beast this morning. Something else had frightened it down the ridge toward the canyon.

What could that have been?

Or who?

As if in response to the unspoken question, smoke puffed from a shaded nest of rocks near the top of the ridge. A wink later, Haskell heard something sing past his face and hammer a boulder over his left shoulder.

21

T
he rifle's crack hadn't
finished echoing before he grabbed his own Winchester and leaped over the wagon's left front wheel, landing flat-footed and immediately shucking his Yellowboy from its leather sheath. As he did, he glanced up over the iron-shod wheel.

Smoke puffed again. Again, he heard the zing of the bullet before it hammered the same boulder as before.

The black shifted and jerked in the traces, snorting and whickering its discontent at the rifle fire. Apprehension lifted the short hairs along the back of Bear's neck.

If the shooter took down the black, he'd be stranded out here on foot. The horse was only a secondary worry, however. Still, wanting to take the black out of the line of fire, Haskell ran up past the horse and dashed behind another boulder at the left of the trail just as another slug whined shrilly off the same boulder, spraying rock shards and bits of lead.

The flat, echoing crack came a moment later. Its reverberations seemed to be sucked straight up into the faultless expanse of cobalt-blue sky arching over the jagged tops of the crags.

Haskell gritted his teeth as he hot-footed to his left, snaked the Winchester with its brass receiver around his covering boulder, and sent two .44-caliber rounds hurling toward where he'd spied the smoke puffs. His rounds tore into two separate rocks, spraying rock dust but doing no more damage than that.

A hatted head and a rifle barrel appeared above the nest he'd been shooting at. As he pulled his own head back down behind his covering boulder, the dry-gulcher's rifle belched two more times and then a third time, like an afterthought.

The chunks of lead
ping
ed hysterically against the rocks around him, aggravating the hammering in his own head.

Bear jerked his rifle up and fired two more rounds toward where the shooter's smoke was still ribboning through the shade near the top of the ridge, and then, muttering an angry curse, he bolted out from behind his cover, crossed the trail in two long strides, and slipped in among the boulders on the trail's other side.

The shooter opened up on him from above, with two more bullets shrieking around him and screeching off rock. Bear kept moving, climbing the ridge through narrow corridors around the boulders that must have been hurled up out of the earth's bowels a hundred million years ago.

As he climbed between the rocks, he winced when he heard the eerie ratcheting hiss of a diamondback somewhere off to his left.

By the hiss, the snake was close by.

Wind, gunmen, and diamondbacks
, Haskell thought, breathing hard as he climbed the slope.
A fine damn country you sent me to, Allan!

Hoping the snake didn't strike from a rock—all he needed was a pair of razor-edged fangs, slender as fish bones but painful and deadly, digging into his cheek and filling him full of poison—he continued climbing. The shooter must have lost track of him, because all the man's lead was landing several yards wide and several more yards behind his target.

Three-quarters of the way up the ridge, Haskell stopped. He peered between two boulders and over a wiry gray shrub toward where he figured the dry-gulcher was. Sure enough, he could see an elbow and part of a shoulder and the very tip of a rifle protruding from the notch.

Haskell snapped his Winchester's butt to his shoulder and emptied the rifle's magazine at the nest in the rocks above. When he'd triggered his last round, the empty cartridges clinking to the ground behind him and rolling on the gravel, he saw the shooter leap down through a narrow gap on the far side of the nest from which he'd been trying to perforate Bear's hide.

Haskell leaned the smoking, empty rifle against a rock and started running hard straight up the bluff. The shooter would know which direction Haskell's slugs had come from, so he wanted to throw the bastard off by approaching from a different direction.

When he'd nearly reached the top of the bluff, he stopped and, crouching low, his LeMat in one hand, his Russian in the other, his gloved thumbs caressing the revolvers' hammers, he scuttled back along the slope, paralleling the ridge line.

Approaching the nest from which his attacker had fired at him, he slowed and dropped to a knee, looking all around and listening. He spied movement ahead and to the right and glimpsed the shooter for half a second as the man turned abruptly toward his own left and slipped behind a large, pale, pocked and pitted limestone boulder that was the size of a poor prospector's shack. The rock was streaked white with bird shit.

Haskell looked around, found a fist-sized rock, and hurled it high and far over the rock behind which the dry-gulcher had disappeared. He heard the muffled
thunk
of the rock's landing.

A rifle cracked.

Bear took off running toward the large boulder. He ran past it and into the shade of several large boulders sprawled across one another like exhausted lovers.

A minute later, he looked around the left side of one of the boulders in time to see the backside of the shooter disappear behind the boulder's other end, to Haskell's right. The boulder was about ten feet wide. Moving on the balls of his boots, Haskell went to the boulder's other side, slipped around the rear corner and scuttled toward the front, hoping to meet the dry-gulcher at the far front corner.

A grinding rattle rose. Haskell saw the diamondback just as the stone-colored beast, coiled on the near side of a patch of prickly pear, struck. Bear leaped straight up in the air. The snake's head collided with his right boot heel with a dull
thump
.

Haskell gave an involuntary grunt. The only thing he hated worse than snakes was dry-gulching sons of bitches.

He landed on his other foot and pressed his back to the cool side of the boulder, glancing at the snake that was now slithering off, looking vaguely chagrined, around the prickly-pear patch toward a small, dark, V-shaped gap at the base of two abutting boulders. It shoved its head into the notch. Its scaly four-foot-long body traced a serpentine pattern as it slithered into the gap, and the button tail disappeared.

Bear jerked a look toward the front of the boulder against which his back was pressed. Had the shooter heard the snake or his own startled grunt or both?

Most likely.

That's why the man had not yet appeared. He was likely holed up just around the front corner, getting ready to snake his rifle down the side of the boulder and toss a couple of .44 rounds.

Two feet to Bear's left, toward the front of the boulder, a low notch had been weathered out of the rock. Having seen two snakes already on the slope of this bluff, he felt every nerve ending in his body leaping around like striking vipers at the thought of stepping into that notch without investigating it first. But, grinding his molars, that's just what he did, crouching low so his big body would fit.

Quietly, listening for snakes and half-expecting to feel one chomp into one of his calves, he drew back the hammers on both of his pistols and tried to slow his breathing while his heart tattooed a war rhythm against his breastbone. Breathing through his mouth, his chest rising and falling sharply, sweat dribbling down his beard and pasting his chambray shirt against his back, he waited.

There was the nearby crunch of a boot coming down on gravel.

A leg appeared suddenly as the shooter stepped around the corner. That knee bent as the shooter crouched. Haskell saw two gloved hands aiming a rifle from the shooter's right hip. The rifle leaped and roared, flames lapping from the barrel.

As the shooter pumped the cocking mechanism, Haskell slammed his right boot against the neck of the rifle. He wanted
this
bushwhacker alive to answer questions.

The shooter grunted as the rifle flew out of his hands. And then Haskell sheathed his pistols, bounded out of the notch, and had the dry-gulching son of a bitch by the throat, thrusting him back and cocking his own right hand for a savage punch against the man's left cheek.

He'd just started thrusting the fist forward when he stopped suddenly. The shooter had screamed. His hat had tumbled back off his head, and now Haskell was staring down at the greenest pair of eyes he'd ever seen.

They were framed by a curly mess of tawny-golden hair. Rich lips were stretched back from delicate white teeth, one of which was missing, leaving a small gap to the right of the front ones. The bottom teeth were slightly crooked. Those were the only flaws in the heart-shaped face, whose eyes bored sharply into Bear's, cast with animal fear mixed with an innate defiance.

Bear glanced down at the girl's coarse gray wool work shirt. He'd pulled up the collar with his hand, tightening the shirt across her breasts, which rose and fell sharply.

The girl spit out through gritted teeth, “Go ahead and hit me, you fuckin' ape! That'd make you feel like a real big man, wouldn't it?”

Haskell blinked. Shock over finding that a girl had damn near blown his head off had rocked him back on his heels. But now he focused on the part about her nearly having blown his head off, and it didn't seem to matter so much that she was a girl, even a good-looking one with a nice set of breasts nodding at him from behind that shirt.

He clenched his fist again and cocked his arm, glaring at her. “Why the hell shouldn't I go ahead and smack your pretty head down between your shoulder blades, you sassy little bitch? Give me one good reason, and maybe,
maybe
, I won't do it!”

The girl screamed and squeezed her eyes shut, cowering. She jerked free of his grip and stumbled backward, hitting the ground on her butt. She stared up at him, breathing hard, eyes wide as a doe's spotting a mountain lion ready to pounce.

The look took some of the sand out of Haskell's anger. He lowered his fist. “All right, I won't,” he said. “But I should. Why in the hell were you shootin' at me?”

She continued to stare up at him for several more seconds. Gradually, the fear and bitter defiance bled out of her gaze, and she frowned slightly, curiously. “You ain't . . . you ain't Burt Needham.” Her brows furrowed with a deeper befuddlement.

“No, I ain't Burt Needham. Who's Burt Needham, and why do you feel the need to bore him a fresh ear hole?”

“'Cause I figured he was comin' to ravage me. Just like his brother tried to do only last week but got a paring knife in his balls for his efforts. Both of 'em been wantin' me to marry up with 'em for nigh on the past two years. Dirty
prospectors
!”

Haskell studied her. “You Dulcy Stoveville?” Since he was not far from the Stoveville ranch, who else could she be? He doubted there were many young women in the Pumpkin Buttes anymore, even fewer this close to the Stoveville place.

“That's right.”

Haskell sighed. He extended his hand to the girl. She did not take it but continued to glare up at him. If she was mad at him now, he thought, wait till she found out about her brother.

Haskell scowled and hooked his thumbs behind his cartridge belt. He had never learned the proper way to impart bad news, so rather than hesitate all over the place, he just jerked it out from deep in his craw: “Miss, your brother's dead. I killed him yesterday out at the Devil's Creek stage relay station.”

Her lips parted. Slowly, her lower jaw sagged. All the caustic anger bled out of her gaze. It was replaced with slow-growing shock and horror.

Bear kept his eyes down, feeling deeply chagrined despite having had no other option but to shoot the young dry-gulcher. Vaguely, he wondered if bushwhacking ran in the Stoveville family. Or perhaps it was a trait of folks living like wild coyotes in the Pumpkin Buttes country.

He cleared his throat, canted his head toward the trail, and said quietly, “I got him in the wagon.”

He felt like a bug on a pin as the girl continued to gaze up at him. Finally, she seemed to stare right through him at the sky above and behind him, and then she purposefully gained her feet. She started down the side of the bluff but stopped after only a few steps and looked around as though in a trance.

She spotted her rifle, went over and picked it up. She absently dusted it off and, holding it by its receiver in her right hand, started making her way down the slope.

Haskell followed her, feeling grim, meandering around the boulders and twisted clumps of wiry brown brush. The girl did not run but held to a steady stride until she gained the trail. Then she quickened her pace and, approaching the wagon, leaned her rifle against the off rear wheel.

She fumbled with the rusty tailgate latches, cursing under her breath, until Haskell released the latch on the right side of the gate and lowered the board with a jangle of its supporting chains. Dulcy Stoveville climbed into the wagon box and squatted beside the blanket-wrapped body of her brother.

She dropped to both knees and stared down for a time, her hands on her thighs, as though she were working up the courage to continue. Then she opened the blanket and peeled both sides back to reveal her brother's tan face with the half-open eyes staring up dreamily, the edges of the kid's upper teeth revealed in a fine white line beneath his cracked, chapped upper lip.