The Thunder Riders Read online

  His middle finger had been chopped off at the first knuckle, leaving a swollen purple stump of gnarled flesh. Yakima hadn’t meant to cut off the man’s finger; he’d meant to bury the man’s own stiletto in his gut. The Mexican had been faster than he looked, however, and he’d sidestepped while throwing an errant hand toward Yakima’s wrist.

  Not long after the finger had dropped to the floor and been kicked under a table, Speares and three deputies had run into the saloon, armed with Winchesters and a double-barreled shotgun.

  The thin gent said, “You an’ Polly can stay here and hump. Now, get the hell outta the way, Polly—less’n you wanna give the breed one last rut before he hangs.”

  “Shut up, Boyd!” Polly dropped her arms and stalked into the cell where Suggs was quickly dressing.

  Boyd chuckled as he moved forward and right, keeping his rifle trained on Yakima. At the same time, he removed two lengths of braided rawhide from the back of his belt, tossed them at Yakima’s feet.

  “Tie one around your wrists, the other around your ankles. We done seen how you can kick.”

  “And Spanish here done seen what he can do with a pigsticker,” said the man by the door, a weasel-faced little hombre with no front teeth and a pinto vest.

  “Shut up, Squires,” Spanish said, sliding his lower jaw from side to side, like a cow chewing its cud. “’Less you want me to cut off your finger and feed it to you raw.”

  The Mexican moved slowly toward Yakima, holding his rifle up high across his chest.

  “Back off,” Boyd ordered. “Let him put the ties on.”

  Yakima relaxed his shoulder and straightened his spine. “This doesn’t seem very sporting, boys. At least Spanish and I made a fair fight of it.”

  “There’s no fight, breed,” Boyd said. “We wanna watch you dance without your boots touchin’ the ground.” He frowned at the Mexican, whose bushy black brows beetled, black eyes bright with simmering rage.

  “I said back off till he’s got the damn ties on, Spanish!”

  “He can put the ties on after I’ve broken his jaw!” The Mexican thrust the rear stock of his rifle forward, checked the motion, and slashed the barrel toward Yakima’s face. Yakima had leapt back to avoid the rifle stock. Seeing that the move was just a feint, he still managed to angle his head so that the barrel clipped only his left cheek.

  “Spanish!” Boyd shouted.

  The shout hadn’t died on Boyd’s lips before Yakima had lunged forward and buried his right knee in the Mexican’s groin. As the Mexican screamed, Yakima twisted, throwing the big man in front of him as Boyd’s rifle exploded.

  There was a dull whump as the bullet tore into Spanish’s lower back. Yakima wrapped both hands around the Mexican’s rifle and aimed it toward Boyd. Before he could get his own finger through the trigger guard, Spanish tripped the trigger himself.

  “Owwwww!” Boyd cried, collapsing over his bullet-torn belly, knees bending as he dropped his rifle.

  The third hombre shouted, “Son of a bitch!” as he triggered his own Spencer repeater. The slug sizzled through the air over Yakima’s right shoulder and sparked off a cell bar behind him. Yakima jerked the Winchester from Spanish’s grip and, turning toward the door, racked a fresh shell.

  The third hombre screamed like a marauding Indian as he cocked his own repeater and, squaring his shoulders and spreading his feet, extended the Spencer from his waist. He screamed again, toothless mouth wide, and stared down at the Spencer’s jammed action.

  Yakima squeezed the trigger of Spanish’s Winchester. Impossibly, the hammer clicked, empty.

  At the same time, the toothless man and Yakima tossed aside their rifles. As the toothless hombre reached for the butt-forward S&W on his left hip, Yakima crossed the room in two long strides, grabbing the man’s gun hand with one of his own while smashing the other fist across the man’s jaw.

  The jawbone broke with an audible crack, and the hombre yowled. At the same time, Yakima took the man’s gun arm in both his hands and jerked forward and down, lifting the man off his feet to turn a forward somersault and hit the floor on his ass, facing the desk.

  Yakima leaned toward him, wrapped his right arm around the man’s neck, and jerked.

  Crack!

  The man fell sideways to the rock floor without a peep.

  Yakima froze, staring toward the cell in which the redhead was cowering behind the half-dressed Suggs, peeking around the burly man’s shoulder, her eyes wide and glistening with horror. Outside, men were yelling, their voices growing louder.

  Yakima sprang forward. The redhead yelped and pulled her head back behind Suggs, who dropped the shirt he’d been holding and raised his hands, palms out. “Please, don’t . . .”

  As Yakima slung their cell door closed, Suggs and the redhead stumbled back toward the outside wall. The door latched with the loud crack of a rifle report.

  Yakima scooped his hat off the floor, then dashed into his cell for his sheepskin vest. Shrugging into the vest, he grabbed his six-shooter and holster off the peg over the sheriff’s desk and quickly wrapped it around his waist as the voices outside and the thud and ring of spurred boots grew louder.

  He plucked the dead Mexican’s Winchester off the floor, found a box of .44 shells in a desk drawer, and shoved a handful of cartridges into his vest pockets. Running to the door, he glanced outside, thumbing cartridges through the Winchester’s loading gate.

  Several men—it was too dark to see how many exactly—were moving toward the jailhouse, within fifty feet and closing. Lamplight winked off gun iron and steel spurs.

  When Yakima had shoved six shells into the Winchester’s breech, he bolted outside and into the street. He stopped about ten feet out from the hitchrack, planted the Winchester’s butt against his right hip, and levered five shells into the ground in front of the approaching men.

  He must have misjudged one shot and drilled it through a boot toe, because a high-pitched howl rose amid the shouts and curses, one man dropping and grabbing his knee as the others ran for cover on the near side of the street.

  As the men continued shouting and the man with the wounded foot continued howling, Yakima ran straight out from the jailhouse and down a side street, clinging to the shadows on the right side of the street while thumbing more shells into his Winchester’s magazine.

  Above the shouting, howling, and milling behind him, Suggs yelled as though from the bottom of a well, “Don’t let the redskin git away, boys, or Speares’ll have my hide!”

  Another man screamed, “Son of a bitch shot my toe off!”

  Yakima stopped before six horses tied in front of a whorehouse. A girl’s laughter and the squawk of bed-springs rose from behind the red-curtained windows. Yakima quickly ran his glance over the horses, then, picking out a blue roan with straight legs and a broad chest and a sorrel that appeared second-best of the lot, he unwrapped the reins from the hitchrack, backed the horses into the street, and leapt onto the roan.

  In less than a minute, he was on the outskirts of Saber Creek, galloping east through the chaparral, leading the sorrel along behind.

  When he’d pushed the horses hard for a good mile, he checked them down to a trot. No point in risking a broken leg. He was a good twelve or thirteen hours behind the Thunder Riders, but he had to be patient. He’d tracked in the dark before—his eyes were keen and there was more light than one might figure—but he’d have to take his time, riding one horse, then the other, and keeping a close eye on the sign.

  He was trotting through a creosote-stippled flat about three or four miles from town when the thud of hooves— three or four sets—rose behind him. He reined the horses down and turned his head, listening. Voices rose in the silent night, and bridle chains jangled.

  Shit. Men from town were following him.

  He turned the horses off the trail and into a nest of rocks and saguaros. Tying the horses a good thirty yards away from the trail, he ran back to the rock nest and hunkered low, peering above the V forme
d by two boulders.

  He waited, hearing the hoof falls and the occasional ring of an iron shoe. Fifty yards back along the trail, three jostling silhouettes took shape in the darkness, starlight flashing off bridle bits and rifle barrels held across saddlebows.

  Yakima straightened and raised the Winchester to his shoulder. He loosed five quick shots, one after the other, blowing up dust a few feet in front of the horses. The horses whinnied and the men shouted.

  When the echo of the last shot had died, the silhouettes were gone. The thuds of galloping horses dwindled in the hushed night.

  With a satisfied chuff, Yakima turned and walked back toward his own mounts while thumbing fresh shells into the Winchester’s loading gate. He mounted the sorrel, deciding to give the roan a rest, and angled back out to the trail pocked with the shoe prints of a dozen galloping horses and the two ragged furrows of the stagecoach.

  He found the stage a half hour later, a black smudge in the darkness before a mesquite patch. Brush wolves were growling and yammering around the carriage, snapping brush, and Yakima didn’t stay to see what they were fighting over.

  He kicked the sorrel ahead, wrinkling his nose at the smell of blood and viscera wafting toward him from the stage, and continued following the gang’s sign through the rocky desert. Two hours after finding the stage, he switched horses, loosening the sorrel’s saddle cinch and slipping the bridle bit, and continued astride the roan, with the sorrel’s reins dallied around the saddle horn.

  He rode hard all night, losing the trail only twice and having to backtrack to pick it up again. At dawn, he watered the horses at a runout spring, then sat on the ground with his back against a boulder. Fatigue was heavy in his bones. His eyelids drooped, and he was out.

  In a dream, he was standing in the yard of his cabin, digging a root cellar, when Wolf trotted toward him from the corral, head down, a playful cast to his molasses-colored eyes. The mustang nuzzled his neck, the bristled lips tickling.

  Yakima lifted his head sharply, heart beating fast. The roan jerked its head back with a startled snort, turned, and trotted to the end of its tied reins.

  Yakima picked up his rifle, stood, and peered eastward. Rose touched the horizon, dimming the stars and ribbing the high, long clouds with red, purple, and gold.

  He mounted the sorrel, dallied the roan’s reins around the horn, and headed south.

  Chapter 10

  That evening, just as the sun set, the posse’s tracks angled off the desperadoes’ trail into a notch in the rolling, scrub-covered hills. Probably to bed down for the night. Yakima pulled on past.

  He had two good horses; he could keep riding for another couple of hours before the mounts would need rest. The desperadoes would probably hole up soon as well, which meant Yakima would continue gaining on them. He might even catch up to them by morning.

  What he’d do when he did catch up to them, he wasn’t sure. He couldn’t take down the entire gang alone. He would have to wait for dark, steal into their camp, rescue the girl and Wolf, and then get the hell away without getting drilled.

  A tricky maneuver at best.

  Two hours later, he made camp in a dry arroyo, staked out the horses in the sparse grass growing among the cottonwoods. There was no water, but he’d filled his canteens at the last rock tank.

  When he’d let each mount drink from his hat, he unsaddledboth of them, rubbed them down with grass, scrubbing off the sweat foam and dust, then built a small fire and made coffee with the supplies he’d found in the saddlebags. There was little food—only a few strips of jerky and some biscuits—but that with some wild roots he’d dug up near the cottonwoods would be enough to sustain him until he caught up to the gang.

  He slept fitfully for three hours, huddled up in his blankets as the temperature fell to near freezing. Waking and shivering, he built up the little fire again. He heated the remaining coffee and had another cup with his last biscuit before kicking sand on the fire, shrugging into his sheepskin vest, and saddling the horses.

  His breath fogged under the stars. Hoarfrost glazed the rocks, brush, and cottonwood limbs. The thuds of his horses’ hooves seemed loud as gunshots in the cool, quiet air, under the shimmering stars, as he rode up out of the arroyo and back onto the trail of the Thunder Riders.

  It remained cool even after the sun rose. Cresting a steep saddle, Yakima shivered as the chill wind blew up from the valley below, over the ruins of a ragged gathering of crumbling pueblos and rotting brush pens spread across a slope stippled with cedars and ironwood clumps.

  A blocklike adobe church with an empty bell tower stood amid the pueblito’s ruins, its wooden cross lying on the ground before the stout gray doors, which opened and closed gently in the breeze. On the slope behind the church, amid elms and oaks, lay a cemetery spotted with leaning wooden crosses and cracked adobe shrines.

  Yakima scrutinized the village for a time but saw no movement. He gigged the horses down the deeply rutted wagon trail, aiming for the stone well coping in the middle of the main street, riding slowly and raking his gaze across the fire-blackened adobe hovels, pens, and corrals on both sides of the trail.

  It appeared that no one lived here anymore, but Yakima saw the remains of a couple who had—no more than skeletons clad in threadbare white slacks and tunics, Yaqui arrows protruding from their remains. Apparently, the attack, which had occurred a good five or six years ago, judging by the decay and the brush that had grown up around the buildings, had been swift and efficient, leaving no one from the village to bury their dead.

  Yakima stopped the horses near the well. A skeleton lay about twenty feet away, at a corner of the church and beside an overturned hay cart. The dead man’s empty eye sockets stared at Yakima, a thin, faded red bandanna whipping around the neck to which only a few strips of dried brown skin remained. Yakima wrapped the reins around the roan’s saddle horn and turned to the well.

  Though the village appeared abandoned, someone apparently tended the water source, as the wooden bucket sitting upside down on the low stone wall had been patched several times and a new hemp rope attached to the handle.

  Yakima dropped the bucket into the well and pulled it back up, water sloshing over the sides. He filled his two canteens, then set the bucket in front of the horses. He hadn’t yet released the handle when a bullet tore into the ground beside him, the rifle’s crack cleaving the breeze-sweptsilence, the horses whinnying and jerking back with a start.

  Yakima slapped his .44 and wheeled toward the church.

  At the same time, a familiar voice shouted, “Hold it, breed!”

  Sheriff Speares stood just inside the church’s open door. Speares no longer wore the bandage on his face, and his swollen, crooked nose resembled a purple-yellow gourd. He aimed Yakima’s own Yellowboy repeater straight out from his left hip. Movement to the right of the church attracted Yakima’s eye, and he turned to see the deputy U.S. marshal, Patchen, moving up along the church’s cracked adobe wall, snugging the stock of his Henry rifle against his shoulder.

  “Less’n you wanna buy a bullet from your own rifle,” Speares said, “you best pull that six-shooter nice and slow, drop it on the ground.”

  Yakima cast his gaze from Speares to the marshal and back again. He’d been concentrating so hard on the desperadoes, he hadn’t kept an eye on his back trail. The posse had caught up to him.

  He kept his hand on his pistol grips. He didn’t want to kill them, but he wouldn’t let them take him again.

  “Drop it!” Patchen shouted, as though reading Yakima’s mind.

  The man’s echo hadn’t stopped before Yakima at once jerked his stag-butted .44 from its holster and dove behind the well coping. Speares and the marshal fired their repeaters, both slugs slamming into the well coping and spraying chipped rock.

  The horses nickered and pranced and shied away from the well. Speares fired again, and the roan screamed hideously behind Yakima, who snaked his Colt around the coping and fired three quick rounds, two drilling
the church wall near the marshal, the other chewing into the door to the right of Speares and sending the sheriff lunging inside the church’s heavy shadows.

  Yakima rose and wheeled toward the horses.

  The roan was down, legs quivering, blood gushing from the hole in the side of its head, just beneath the ear. Yakima swerved wide of the thrashing horse and ran to the sorrel, which was sunfishing toward the other side of the street. The horse was planting its rear hooves, ready to gallop, when two more shots sizzled over Yakima’s head.

  Sprinting up to the left of the sorrel, Yakima grabbed the saddle horn. The sorrel lunged forward, and Yakima had to fight to maintain his grip on the apple as he hop-skipped on his right foot before kicking his left boot into the stirrup.

  As the horse galloped between two ruined adobes, Speares shouted behind him, “Bring the horses!”