Arroyo de la Muerte Read online

  “I don’t know. The job’s so fresh, I reckon I haven’t studied on it.” The man lumbered out from around his desk to grab his hat off a peg by the door and stand in the open doorway behind Julia, filling it. “Every time I glance down and see this five-pointed star on my vest, I get the shivers.”

  He stared into the street, his expression one of grave consternation. “Mister Hopkins, you say?” He ran a hand across his mouth and chin. “Him and several other fellas…a natty-lookin’ crew of easterners, by the look of ‘em…rode out of town about an hour ago. They was galloping like the devil’s hounds were nipping at their heels.”

  “They were leaving town?” Julia asked, moving toward the big man in the doorway.

  “Yep.” Again, the flustered man scrubbed a hand across his mouth and chin. “Headed west as though they had somewhere to get to out there. Last night, after the train pulled in, several wagons left town. Big wagons. Ore drays. With a big work crew and a feller who looked like their foreman. Leastways, they must’ve been a work crew of some kind. They come in on the train—big, burly fellas.”

  “What on earth…?”

  “That’s what I thought. Oh, and another thing…” The new marshal of Apache Springs turned to Julia, his eyes round with incredulity. “Hopkins’s gang was led out of town by more men who came in on the train last night.”

  “More men?”

  “And these weren’t just any men. There were a good half-dozen of ‘em. Hardtails, every one. They was gunmen armed for bear!”

  “You mean they were well-armed?”

  “Yes, ma’am. That’s what I mean, all right.”

  “Gunmen?”

  “Hired guns, looked like to me. Hopkins and his pards must’ve hired ‘em as guards.” Again, the big man turned to stare out the door and to the east. “What could they be headin’ for out there?” He moved his head a little. He must be looking at the stout express car Julia had spied on her way over to the jailhouse. “Must be they intend to move somethin’ awful valuable in that big stout iron rail car, too. Somethin’ in need of a whole passel of protection.”

  “Some kind of treasure,” Julia said, stepping up beside the Rio Grande Kid and following his gaze to the east.

  “Yeah, treasure,” the Kid said. “Most like.” His tone thoughtful and more than a little dark, he added, “They must have discovered treasure out thataway…sure enough.”

  The thought obviously nettled him.

  “Well, be that as it may, Marshal,” Julia said, emphasizing the word to remind the man of his duties, “it doesn’t change the fact that John Clare Hopkins murdered Candace Jo. He’s a murderer, and you need to arrest…”

  Julia let the words dwindle into silence.

  The rataplan of fast hoofbeats sounded on her left. She turned her head to see a rider thundering in from the east. It was none other than her own sister, Emma, on an unfamiliar steeldust mare. Horse and rider skidded to a stop before the jailhouse and each woman yelled the other’s name at the same time.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Emma asked as her dust caught up to her, touched with the buttery tones of the early light.

  “I was about to ask you the same thing.”

  “Where’s Yakima?”

  “He rode out earlier to visit Pa.”

  “Ah, hell—I missed him, then!” Emma glanced over her shoulder. “I took a secondary trail…thought Pa might have me followed.

  “Why would he--?”

  “Never mind,” Emma said, her own voice brittle and loud with emotion. “Where’s John Clare Hopkins?”

  Julia blinked, startled. “Why are you looking for him?”

  “Cause he’s up to no good, that’s why!” Emma canted her head to study her older sister with a renewed, deeper curiosity than before, quickly flicking her gaze to the Rio Grande Kid standing beside her. “What’s goin’ on?”

  “Hopkins killed one of my girls. Cut her throat.”

  Emma studied Julia, a wash of mismatched thoughts shunting around behind her pupils. “Where is he?”

  “Left town,” said the Rio Grande Kid, stepping out of the jail office and ambling on down the porch steps. “I was about to get after him.”

  “Good,” Emma said. “I’ll ride with you.”

  “No, you won’t,” the Kid said, heading in the direction of the livery barn. “This is official business an’ you’re just a kid!”

  Emma turned her horse and nudged it in the same direction as the old marshal. “I’ll meet you at the barn. I’m gonna trade this mare back for my buck!”

  “You listen to me, girl. I’m on official business, an’ you’re a mere citizen, so you stay outta my way—you hear me?”

  “Shut up, old man!” Emma said, putting the steeldust into a gallop past the stout marshal, leaping the new rails and heading toward the mouth of a cross street. “We’re gonna do this my way, and you’d best not trifle with me!”

  “Trifle with you? Why, goddamnit, I just the other day taught a whole passel of Cheery-cowy Apaches how it’s me you don’t trifle with, little girl!” He waved his clenched fist at Emma, who just then disappeared around the corner of Senora Galvez’s whorehouse.

  Julia stared after them, crestfallen. One was young and crazy, the other old and feeble.

  She wished Yakima was here.

  Chapter 21

  Emma was also wishing Yakima was here.

  As she canted her prized buckskin along beside the beefy old-timer who ludicrously called himself the Rio Grande Kid, she glanced at the man and had second thoughts about how much help he'd be when she finally confronted John Clare Hopkins and the men he'd apparently called in to plunder the ancient church. The so-called “Kid” must have been pushing seventy, but he’d have a hard time pushing anything but old age, as out of shape as he appeared.

  Each of his thighs, clad in greasy buckskin, were larger around than Emma’s waist. His belly sagged like a gunny sack full of piglets, pushing his checked wool shirt well out over his saddle horn as he rode. His face resembled the side of a falling down barn that had seen way too many hot suns, stiff winds, and cold winters.

  Still, he was all Emma had. Not even she was foolhardy enough to face Hopkins’s crew alone. She had a rifle in her saddle scabbard and a pistol in her saddlebags, but she’d need a whole lot more than that to even come close to evening the tall odds against her.

  She needed someone to back her play, whatever that play would be. She’d learned all too well during her skirmish with the Bundrens how things turned out when she tried to go it alone.

  As they kept their horses to canters, saving the horses for the several miles they’d have to ride, the old skudder and Emma’s unlikely trail partner turned to her, scowling beneath the brim of his badly battered hat. “Where they headed, Miss Kosgrove? You know, don’t you—or I’ve missed my guess.”

  The tracks of nearly a dozen horseback riders and three heavy wagons were plain in the desert caliche beneath the hooves of Emma’s buckskin and the Kid’s beefy sorrel splashed with white spots across its chest and withers.

  “I think I do. I hope not, but I fear like hell I do.”

  “Where?”

  Emma scowled as she studied the vast red desert bristling around them, toward the higher, forbidding bald crags of the heart of the Sierra Estrada, which, Emma feared, is where they were headed. For that’s where the secret canyon lay.

  She shook her head. “I can’t tell you.”

  The old man’s scowl deepened the maze of crevices in his puffy face. “What’re you talkin’ about? I’m gonna find out sooner or later, ain’t I?”

  “I just can’t do it,” Emma said, stubbornly clinging to the notion that she had to keep the canyon a secret at all costs.

  “That’s all right.” The Kid turned his head back forward as they both nudged their mounts into lopes, chewing up more ground more quickly. “I think I know.”

  Emma turned quickly to him, her own frown intensifying. “You do?”
/>   “Yes, I do. And I think it’s all my fault, too. Dammit!” The Kid shook his head in disgust with himself.

  Emma stared at him, incredulous. Was he just trying to trick her into telling him about the canyon, or did he already know? Studying him further while he rode about ten feet off her left stirrup, the wind basting the brim of his old Stetson against his forehead, she decided his claim was guileless.

  The old man seemed a little too soft in the head for guile.

  “Well?” she yelled above the thudding of their horses’ hooves. “Are you going to tell me what in the hell you’re talkin’ about?”

  He glanced at her quickly, nudged out of what appeared a sincere reverie. He slowed his mount to a trot, saving his horse for the longer ride ahead, and Emma did likewise, looking down once more to make sure they were still on Hopkins’ trail. She edged the buckskin a little closer to her partner’s sorrel, so she could hear his raspy voice above the clacking of their horse’s shod hooves.

  “I had a friend. His name was Eddie. This was in my old outlaw days, ya understand.” The Kid cast Emma a smile of pride for days gone by, for the adventure he once had known. “Oh, I was a bad one in them days. Whang tough, an’ make no mistake!” He slapped his thigh. “I was hell on the Texas border, an’ that how they started callin’ me the Rio--”

  “Would you just get on with it?” Emma regaled the wool-gathering old-timer.

  The Kid flushed with chagrin and brushed his sleeve across his nose. “Oh…right, right. As I was sayin’, me an’ Eddie split up on our way back up north from Baja. Our trail was hot. Boy, was it hot!” Immediately catching himself at the head of another digression, he said quickly, “Anyway…Eddie came up through this part of Arizona, trough the Sierra Estrada. I rode up through the Mojave Ridges. Eddie found an old church in a little canyon. Just stumbled on it by accident.”

  He turned to narrow a grave eye at Emma. “He said it was stuffed with more gold and a whole assortment of treasure in an old Spanish treasure box, plus an all-gold cannon, than him and me could ever imagine even if we put both our heads together on it for the next twenty years!”

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Emma muttered, staring in shock at the old man trotting his horse beside hers. Eddie must have stumbled on the canyon one of the rare times Jesus had left it, maybe to hunt or to fetch supplies from Nogales.

  The Kid adjusted the set of his hat, staring straight ahead along the trail, squinting his eyes against the sun. “Eddie drew a map of the area where he found the treasure. He drew it on the back of an old wanted dodger announcing a bounty on himself.” The old man chuckled and wagged his head. “That was Eddie for you. He’d show off that circular to the whores in--”

  “So you ended up with the map?”

  The Kid cleared his throat, a little embarrassed by the whore talk. “Yeah. Not long after me an’ Eddie rendezvoused in Phoenix, we was ambushed. Eddie died soon after, from his wounds, and he turned the map over to me. Before I ended up in the territorial pen, I buried the map. I dug it up after I was let out a few years ago for good behavior. That’s what brought me to this country, ya see. I finally scraped up enough of a stake to come look for that canyon.”

  “So where’s the map?”

  “I lost it! I couldn’t make heads or tails of it anyway…and then I ran into ole Yakima an’ he offered the deputy town marshal’s job, an’--”

  “How’d you lose it, you old fool?” Emma regaled the old blowhard, incensed that he might be the reason that canyon was about to be discovered, if it hadn’t been already.

  The Kid cast her a hurt look. “Now, don’t go talkin’ to me like that. I might have a nasty outlaw past, as bad as the worst, by god, but I got feelin’s just like ever’body else!”

  “How’d you lose the map?” Emma repeated--slowly, so even a moron could understand. Not that he was a moron, but he was old and he did seem a little feeble-minded, not to mention way too much in love with his so-called “outlaw” past. She had trouble picturing the man as much of a firebrand. But, then, she trusted hardly anyone even a few years older than she was, so she knew she probably wasn’t giving the Rio Grande Kid a fair shake.

  She didn’t have time for fair shakes.

  “I socked it away in the back of my Bible,” the Kid told her, grimacing miserably. “I reckon it wasn’t so much of a secret. Hell, Yakima knew about it. I had the Bible stowed away in the desk I shared with Galveston—you know, back in the office. I’d take it out and look at the map from time to time, just sort of worry it over in my head, wondering where that blasted ‘X’ could be, an’ I reckon others seen me. Even prisoners we had locked up the jail cells.”

  He punched his thigh with his right fist. “You got it right, Miss Emma. I am a damn fool, an’ make no mistake!”

  Suddenly, Emma felt sorry for the oldster. She supposed getting old wasn’t easy. The Kid was only trying to keep his self-respect, and some of the manhood he likely felt slipping away from him in the drift of years…

  Still, the map.

  “Who do you think might’ve gotten a hold of it?” Emma asked.

  “Your guess is as good as mine, Miss. I got a feelin’ it was some prisoner who stole it out of my Bible, after we let him out of his cell, an’ maybe he sold it to Mister Hopkins.”

  He shook his head quickly. “Well, anyway…I wasn’t gonna find that canyon even with the map. I couldn’t make heads or tails out of it. I’m out here to bring Mister Hopkins back to town on murder charges.”

  “Right,” Emma said, nodding. “Right…”

  Maybe that would be enough to at least stall Hopkins’ plundering of the church.

  The Kid turned a curious look to her, his shaggy brows now coated in trail dust. “Say…why are you so bound and determined to run down Hopkins, anyways? In all the commotion over the dead doxie, I forgot to ask. Are you after that treasure yourself, Miss Emma?”

  “No, I’m surely not.”

  Briefly, she told the oldster about old Jesus and the Apache witch’s curse on the canyon. Or, more specifically, on anyone who tries to remove the treasure from the canyon. She also told about her vow to old Jesus about keeping would-be plunderers away from the church.

  “Now,” the Kid said, regarding the girl with awe. “That’s a mighty tall order for one young gal—don’t you think, Miss Emma?”

  “Yes, I do. But do it I must.”

  “That’s what you been spendin’ your time doin’ out here—makin’ sure no one finds that church?”

  Emma stared straight ahead. She did not reply. She knew how crazy it all sounded, and it made her feel a little foolish. But only a little.

  “You got a life to live, Miss Emma,” the Kid said, glancing at a rattlesnake that had crossed the trail ahead of them and then curled itself into a coil to the left of the trail—far enough away to be no real threat. When they’d passed the snake, he turned to Emma again. “You can’t spend your whole life like ole Jesus, livin’ in some ancient canyon, tryin’ to protect some ancient treasure that may or may not be cursed.”

  “Oh, it’s cursed, all right. Rusty Tull learned that the hard way.”

  “Rusty who…?”

  “Never mind. I think you were off fetchin’ that prisoner back from Tucson when the Bundrens showed up in Apache Springs.” Emma shook her head in frustration. “Never mind, Mister Kid. You don’t have to believe me. All you have to do is haul John Clare Hopkins back to Apache Springs on that murder charge. That’ll give me time to think of another way to keep the treasure safe. If there is a way,” she added under her breath, feeling her determination waning. Suddenly, what she’d promised Jesus she’d do seemed even more impossible than it had before.

  She and the Kid rode for another hour, stopping their horses once to give them a blow and to water them. The Kid walked to the top of an outcropping to glass the country ahead of them. He walked back down, shaking his head and returning his field glasses to their case.

  “No sign of ‘em. When they le
ft town this mornin’, they were pushin’ hard.”

  Emma rose from the rock she’d been sitting on while her horse had drawn water from her hat. “That means they’ve seen the canyon, all right. They know what’s in there, an’ they’re not gonna waste any time gettin’ the treasure out of that canyon and aboard that express car.”

  The thought made her feel like throwing up.

  A half hour later, she led the Kid into the canyon well-concealed by a rim of rocks and boulders strewn around its lip, so that you had to enter a forest of rock before following a winding, narrow path through even more rock as you dropped into the canyon itself. As she rode, Emma glanced uneasily over her shoulder, habitually wary of revealing the canyon to anyone, much less to a man who’d once been looking for it, hoping to get rich off what the church contained.

  “You have to promise,” she called behind her, their horses kicking up a good bit of red dust that wafted thickly amongst the devil’s toothy mouth of rocks bristling around them, “that you won’t tell anyone else about this.”

  Behind her the Kid wheezed a laugh, and spat dust from his lips. “I think the cat’s been done let out of the bag, Miss Emma. Somehow, it looks like Hopkins found your treasure.” He was gazing at the sloping ground beneath his sorrel’s hooves. The tracks of the recent riders and wagons were as plain as the etchings on a china plate.

  They told a horrible story of Emma’s worst nightmare coming true.

  They rode for another twenty minutes along the narrow canyon’s rocky floor, following the arroyo’s twisting, turning course to the east.

  “Miss Emma?” the Kid said behind her, from where his sorrel followed close off the buckskin’s tail.

  “What is it?”

  “If we’re gettin’ close, you let me take the lead, all right? I’ll deal with Hopkins. The last thing either one of us needs is for you to go off half-cocked.”

  “Well,” Emma said, squinting against the sunlight, staring ahead as the canyon’s left wall fell back and the canyon opened up before her.

  She jerked back on her buckskin’s reins, and her heart leaped in her chest.