The Killing Breed Read online

  Yakima intended to recon the Apache camp and then, depending on where the bivouac was located and how good a view the Indians had of the surrounding terrain, devise a way to slip into the bivouac and make off with the Apaches’ mustangs.

  The half-breed’s intention was not only to acquire a couple of Indian ponies for Harms, but to secure an extra one for himself. With two mounts apiece, they could ride twice as fast and overtake the cutthroats who’d kidnapped Faith in half the time it would take them with only Wolf and Harms’s increasingly problematic mule.

  “Indeed, it does sound fair,” Harms growled, having removed his spectacles to rub the dust around with his gloved fingers. “But I thought our intention was to get your wife back, not get ourselves killed in the process.”

  “You’re right.” Yakima turned to the stocky, sunburned Easterner hunkered down beside him. “This wasn’t part of the bargain. I’m gonna need an extra horse, but there’s no reason why you should risk your hide. You and your mule head home.”

  Frowning, holding his bowler hat in his thick hands, Harms opened his mouth to speak, but Yakima cut him off with “There’s no dishonor in being smart.”

  Harms looked at him pensively for a stretched second, then turned onto his back, looking around at the penny-colored rocks humping out of the brush around them. “I ever tell you why I came out here?”

  “You said somethin’ about not getting along with your family.”

  “That was part of it. I’ve always been the black sheep in the Harms household, favoring art and music more than the company my father owns. Then, there was this girl I married. I’d loved her since I was eight years old. Looked a lot like Faith. Redefined female beauty.”

  With the back of his hand, he brushed dust from his frayed hat brim. “I came home from my father’s office early one day, and found her doing the mattress dance with a young man she and I had gone to school with. A kid from the wrong side of the tracks, you might say. Turned out she’d always been in love with him, just as I’d always been in love with her. She’d married me because my father convinced her it would be in the best interest of her and her family.”

  Yakima shook his head. “I’m sorry, Brody, but what’s this got to do with stealing Apache horses?”

  “The next day, I packed a bag and a bedroll, left a note on my father’s desk, and jumped the train west. I rode the rails aimlessly for nigh on a month. Didn’t know what I was going to do until, somewhere around Santa Fe, I threw in with some prospectors and decided to head out after my own El Dorado.

  “Now I live alone in a couple of cramped cabins in the middle of this godforsaken desert, drawing pictures of rocks and cactus by lamplight at night, and hammering rocks by day.” Harms turned to Yakima sharply, squinting an eye behind his dusty spectacles. “What you and Faith have is a rare thing. I’d like to help you hold on to it.” He took a deep breath. “Now, let’s show those Apaches how to steal horses.”

  Yakima held his friend’s wry gaze for a moment, then turned to give the Apache encampment another gander. After a minute, he held the glasses out to Harms and said softly, “Take a good look downslope.”

  Harms doffed his bowler, crawled over to where Yakima had been lying between two large boulders, and leaned forward on his elbows, aiming the field glasses between the rocks.

  After a minute, he lowered the glasses and glanced over his shoulder at Yakima. “Got it.”

  “Crab down the other side of this slope. Crawl, I’m sayin’. Belly down against the dirt. At the bottom of the slope, jog up the next one but do it quietly . You see that little snag of brick-colored rocks spiking up atop the hill, just left of the barrel cactus?”

  Harms turned to gaze through the glasses once more. “Yeah.”

  “Stop right there. The Indians should be right below you—maybe twenty, thirty yards down the hill.”

  “You want me to fling some lead?”

  “No. I want you to fling a rock.” Yakima picked up his Yellowboy, rubbed dust from the gold-chased receiver into which two wolves fighting a grizzly had been etched. “But do it gentle-like, like it just rolled down the bank.”

  “Like a mouse nudged it.”

  “You got it.”

  Yakima scuttled backward down the rise, then rose and shouldered the rifle. He stared down the slope toward the trail at the valley’s bottom—a flat-bottomed bowl bristling with creosote, barrel cactus, saguaro, and mesquite thickets surrounded by countless camelbacks and dinosaur spines of sandstone. Plenty of cover, but there was no such thing as adequate cover when you were shadowing Apaches.

  “Give me a half hour to get around behind them,” Yakima said. “Then drop the rock.”

  “Just like a mouse nudged it.”

  Yakima jogged down the slope, heading off in the opposite direction of the Coyoteros before swinging south. He made a broad, slow sweep across the bowl of bristling chaparral, pausing often to look around, making sure he hadn’t been spotted or that the Apaches weren’t breaking camp and heading toward him.

  When he figured he was due west of the Apache camp, he began moving forward, setting each moccasin boot down carefully, looking around for the Coyotero horses. An Apache mustang’s senses were as keen as a jaguar’s; if they winded him, they’d give him away. He doubted the braves would have picketed their mounts very far from their day camp, which meant Yakima probably wouldn’t be able to lead them off without a fight.

  A feather of aromatic smoke touched his nostrils, and his mouth watered as he identified the warm tang of roasting javelina. So that’s why the braves had stopped early. They’d shot a wild pig.

  The smell of the roasting meat grew stronger as he meandered among the rocks and cholla. Hearing a soft snort, he jerked a look into a nest of rocks and cedars ahead and right. A horse with a braided green and white halter peered at him from around a boulder. Yakima gritted his teeth as the horse widened its eyes, laid its ears back, and lifted a shrill whinny so loud that Yakima’s battered head began throbbing anew.

  A shadow flicked across the face of the boulder, and, squeezing the Yellowboy in his gloved hands, Yakima wheeled. A brickred visage clad in dun deerskin and a red bandanna dove toward him off a flat-topped boulder, holding a feathered war hatchet in his right hand, and a bloody butcher knife in his left.

  Yakima lifted the Winchester’s barrel and roared off a shot. The Indian grunted as the slug tore through his belly in midair, blowing dust from his deerskin tunic but doing nothing to check the Indian’s dive.

  Yakima dropped the rifle as the brave continued flying toward him, and wrapped his left hand around the brave’s right wrist, his right hand around the brave’s left, stopping the plunge of both weapons only a few inches from his head. The brave’s momentum threw him straight back, and he hit the ground hard, the brave wailing shrilly while twisting and writhing and pressing the hatchet and knife toward Yakima’s throat.

  Gripping the brave’s wrists, Yakima drove the weakening younker to his left, surprised to find no ground there. His stomach whipped toward his throat as, still clinging to each other and writhing savagely, he and the brave dropped straight down through empty air.

  Beneath Yakima, still gripping the knife and the hatchet, the brave wailed and looked around, coffee-colored eyes wide with shock and rage, the wind from their plunge lifting his coarse black hair from his shoulders.

  The brave’s back smacked the rocks and gravel ten feet beneath the ledge, dust puffing around him. Yakima fell on top of him, pushing the knife blade back against the brave’s own neck. He carved a short but deep red gash over the Indian’s Adam’s apple just before gravity grabbed them once more and flung them down a steep, talus-strewn slope.

  As they rolled together over rocks and sage tufts, branches snapping and rocks clattering, Yakima felt the tension leave the brave’s limbs. The war hatchet dropped from his right hand, and Yakima flung the younker away from him as he tried in vain to check his roll.

  An upthrust of rock moved up qui
ckly from downslope to smack him hard about the chest and shoulders, checking his tumble and evoking a sharp grunt as it smashed the air from his lungs.

  Piled up at the base of the rock, Yakima rolled onto his back and clutched at his throbbing, bandaged head with both hands. Fast foot beats and rasping breaths rose on his left. He turned his aching head to peer upslope.

  Two more braves ran toward him, leaping like panthers and yapping like coyotes. They both held revolvers and knives and their dark eyes sparkled in the sunlight, teeth showing between spread lips—eager for the slow torture and kill.

  Yakima slapped leather, snaked his cocked revolver across his belly, and fired. The brave on the left shrieked as the slug punched through his upper right chest. He stumbled, fell, and rolled.

  The other Indian stopped suddenly with an enraged yowl. Cocking his octagonal-barreled Colt Navy, he raised the revolver and fired.

  The slug barked into the rock above Yakima’s right shoulder, spraying dust and stone shards. Yakima drew a bead on the brave as the Apache spread his feet to steady his own aim.

  Yakima traded shots with the brave, the brave’s slug crashing into the talus in front of Yakima as the half-breed’s own slug drilled the brave through his heart.

  A third shot barked from above.

  As the brave stumbled back up the slope with the force of Yakima’s bullet, his head exploded, spewing blood and brains downslope to his right.

  The brave’s head jerked sharply, twisting the lifeless body and throwing the man’s limbs akimbo. The Coyotero hit the slope with a clattering thud and rolled like a windblown sack.

  Yakima looked upslope. Brody Harms knelt on one knee, aiming his Spencer repeater at the two dead Apaches, smoke from his shot still puffing in the still air around his bowler-hatted head. A figure rose behind him, the Apache’s stocky, broad-shouldered frame silhouetted against the rocky hill behind him.

  As the Apache lifted a spear for a killing stab, Yakima’s heart raced, and he shouted, “Look out, Brody!”

  Harms swung around quickly, half rising, and slammed his rifle against the spear, sending it clattering onto the rocks.

  Yakima’s eyes blurred slightly. They didn’t focus again until he saw Harms and the Indian rolling together down a lower bank than the one from which Yakima and his own Apache had tumbled. Harms and the Indian rolled together like a couple of fighting bears, both snarling, grunting, punching, and kicking.

  Yakima heaved himself to his feet, cocked his Colt, and stumbled across the slope as Harms stopped rolling and gave the Apache a savage kick. The Apache screamed as he rose off his feet and hit the ground on his back.

  The brave turned a fluid backward somersault and came up facing Harms, spitting grit and crouching, his seamed, leathery face a mask of animal fury.

  Yakima raised the Colt but before he could fire, Harms bolted toward the Indian, squared his shoulders, spread his legs, and raised his fists, the backs of his hands facing the Apache as though he were holding his knuckles up for inspection.

  “Brody, get away!” Yakima shouted, holding the shot.

  Harms and the Indian faced each other, the Indian’s uncertain eyes betraying his befuddlement at the white man’s exotic stance. Lips pursed and jaws jutting, arms hooked in front of him like question marks, his big hands clenched into bright red fists, Harms saw his opening.

  The Easterner threw his fists straight forward and up, hitting the Apache square in the face— three solid smacks in quick succession. The Indian’s head bobbed up and down. He stumbled backward, eyes snapping wide with exasperation, blood glistening on his cut lips.

  He gave a wild mew, his features stretched with incredulity, then reached for a large knife sashed on his waist. He hadn’t gotten a hand on the blade’s horn handle before Harms lunged once more. Brody faked a jab with his left fist, then laid two slashing rights in the middle of the Coyotero’s broad, flat face.

  As the Apache stumbled back toward a fir tree, throwing his arms out for balance, Yakima, who stood in skeptical amazement, holding his revolver barrel up in his right hand, saw that the brave’s nose had been smashed flat against his face.

  Tomato red blood splashed in all directions across his cheeks.

  The brave cupped his ruined nose in his hands, giving a nasal yowl. Harms grabbed his own bowie knife from his belt, stepped fleetly forward, and buried the wide blade hilt-deep in the Apache’s belly.

  The brave screamed and fell back against the tree, crouching over the knife that Harms angled up toward the heart, his face, minus its glasses, stretched with fury.

  He pulled the blade out quickly. Blood gushed from the Indian’s middle like wine from a bladder flask.

  Harms stepped back as the Apache dropped to his knees, crumpling as though all his bones had turned to putty. He farted loudly, jerked a couple of times, and lay still.

  Yakima stared at the dead Indian, still not quite believing his eyes, then slowly depressed his Colt’s hammer. Just as slowly, he lowered the gun to his side.

  He looked at Harms, who stood in the fir’s shade, breathing heavily, blood banding off his knife blade as he, too, stared down at the dead Apache.

  Yakima gazed at his Eastern friend, incredulity carving deep lines in his russet forehead. “Where in the hell did you learn to fight like that?”

  “West Point,” the Easterner said. He shot Yakima a wry grin. He’d lost his hat and his glasses, and sweat and dust streaked his broad, handsome face with its expressive brown eyes set under heavy brows. His hair, hacked unevenly, was caked with dust and pine needles. “Before they kicked me out for daydreaming.”

  Harms sighed as he leaned forward to clean his knife on the back of the Indian’s calico shirt.

  “Well, then,” he said, as Yakima continued staring at him in shocked silence. “Since we went to all this work to fetch their horses, I reckon we’d better fetch them and get after your woman.”

  Chapter 12

  Faith stared at the back of the goat-bearded kid, Benny Freeze, who was leading her mare at the tail end of the cutthroat pack, and imagined having a gun in her hand and blowing a neat round hole through the kid’s ratty buffalo coat.

  Her heart quickened at the imagined sound of the gun’s bark and then watching her hand slide around as she blasted the others out of their saddles.

  When all the men were writhing on the ground in imagined death throes, a chill breeze suddenly snapped Faith back to reality. She hunkered down in her buckskin coat, clamping her gloved hands more tightly to the saddle horn, and glanced at the two Colt Army revolvers jutting up on the kid’s hips. His waist-length coat had been shoved back over the revolvers’ grips, to allow for easy access. The grips of the left-side gun had been wrapped with faded rawhide, and into the leather of both holsters, just in front of the gun hammers, he’d carved his initials—BF.

  Faith stared hard at the guns, as if willing them into her hands. If she could only get her hands on one . . .

  Could she kill them all? Probably not. She probably couldn’t kill even two before the others drilled her. Still, it was a game she’d been playing since they’d hit the trail at dawn that morning, to take her mind off what had happened back at the ranch and to quell her own worries about what awaited her at the end of the trail in Colorado.

  Not what, but who . . .

  Bill Thornton.

  The breeze swirled the dust the horses were kicking up. Slitting her eyes, she cast a look behind her, which was another thing she’d been doing all morning—looking and wishing, half expecting Yakima to be thundering after her atop his black mustang.

  Why shouldn’t she expect that? Hadn’t he ridden after her in Colorado, the first time Thornton had sicced a bounty hunter on her, and led her to safety?