Arroyo de la Muerte Page 19

  Yakima didn’t have to look behind to know that the gunslicks were closing on them fast. The thunder of their horses was getting quickly louder, as was the belching of their rifles. Fortunately, as the coyote dun turned to the right, around a bend in the canyon wall, Yakima saw the Kid’s sorrel standing just ahead, its ears pricked and its tail arched.

  “Quick, Kid!” Yakima yelled. “I’ll cover you!”

  He was about to rip his .44 from its holster but stopped when a voice to his right said, “Keep riding, boys! I’ll cover you both!”

  Yakima looked over to see Emma step out from the base of the canyon wall. She had her buckskin’s ribbons in one hand, her Winchester carbine in the other. She dropped to a knee and aimed her rifle toward where the gunslicks would be tearing around the bend in the canyon wall in about three seconds.

  “I thought I told you to stay on the ridge!” Yakima yelled.

  Emma pumped a cartridge into her Winchester’s action. “I don’t take orders from any man!” As the Kid struggled up onto his sorrel’s back, Emma smiled over her shoulder at Yakima. “They take orders from me!”

  Just then, the first wave of Hopkins’s riders came thundering around a bend in the trail. Emma went to work with her carbine, aiming quickly and shooting. Two riders flew out of their saddles while another sagged back and sideways, blood geysering from the wound in his chest. He dragged his horse to the ground where the screaming mount lay on top of him, flailing.

  Another rider rode up behind the fallen horse and rider, and that horse tripped over the fallen one, and a second later there were two down horses and one down man, raging and screaming. Dust rose thickly.

  Yakima unsheathed his Colt and swung down from the dun’s back. He fired into the roiling cloud of dust, holding the rest of the riders back behind the bulge in the canyon wall.

  He glanced at Emma. “Get on your horse and hightail it to the top of the ridge!”

  “No!” Emma pumped another cartridge into her Winchester’s action and strode toward the roiling dust cloud. “We have to kill them all!”

  Yakima felt an odd shuddering beneath his boots. He glanced across the canyon, to his right, and saw several boulders tumbling down the ridge wall.

  Holy shit…

  Yakima shoved his Colt back into its holster. He grabbed Emma by the back of her neck and the seat of her pants, and threw her up onto the buckskin’s back.

  “This is one man you take orders from today, young lady!”

  “Goddamn you!” she screamed, barely holding onto her Winchester.

  Yakima jerked the buckskin around and slammed his Colt against its left hip. Horse and rider shot up the trail. By now the Kid was mounted. Yakima hooked his thumb at him, indicating up trail.

  “Hightail it, Kid,” he shouted. “I’m right behind you!”

  “You don’t have to tell me twice! Hi-yahhh!” The Kid jammed steel to the sorrel’s flanks, hunkered low over the horse’s mane and barreled up the trail.

  Yakima looked toward the bulge in the canyon wall. At the same time, one of Hopkins’s men snaked a rifle around the bend, aiming at Yakima. Yakima triggered a shot at him. The man cursed and pulled his rifle back behind the bulge.

  Spying movement to his right, Yakima turned to see two more boulders tumbling down the canyon’s south wall, bouncing off the ridge and loosing more boulders in their wake. A loud rumbling grew louder as the rockslide grew in size.

  Beneath his boots the ground shook, and more, even louder rumbling reached his ears. He looked up and his blood froze when he saw a cabin-sized boulder hurling down from the bridge nearly directly above him. He was holding onto the coyote dun’s reins, and the horse screamed and pitched when it heard the roar that was like that of an oncoming locomotive. Yakima felt the wind-whip of the boulders’ passing, and watched it arc out from the canyon wall and plunge into the boulder and cactus-filled arroyo now on his left as he peered up trail.

  A deafening thunder rattled his eardrums and caused the ground to quake beneath his boots as the boulder crashed and bounced and tumbled toward the narrow canyon’s far ridge. Dust roiled thickly, shroud-like, and the air smelled like the inside of a grave.

  More roaring sounded and the ground continued to pitch and shudder as Yakima hurled himself onto the dun’s back. He slapped his reins against the horrified mount’s left hip, and, screaming, the horse ran up the trail as though its tail were on fire.

  Yakima didn’t look up toward the rdgecrest. At least, not directly. In the upper periphery of his vision he could see more and more boulders come crashing down from the canyon’s lip two hundred feet above him. He heard the tooth-splintering cacophony of the large rocks plunging into the arroyo around him. A shadow arced over him, as quick as a blink, and the crashing roar of the boulder striking the canyon just beyond him, on his left, nearly knocked him out of his saddle.

  The dun jerked with a start and lifted its head and gave another terrified whinny, fighting the bit.

  Yakima kept his head down and his spurs rammed up taut against the dun’s flanks. If it wavered or slowed in the slightest, took the slightest misstep and fell, horse and rider were doomed. They were probably doomed anyway, for Yakima could see and hear the canyon fairly collapsing around him, but the coyote dun’s speed was his only chance to make it to the lip of the canyon without being smashed like a bug with a hammer.

  Amidst the roar of boulders behind him and to his left, as more and more rocks plunged down his side of the canyon, Yakima heard the muffled wails and screams of Hopkins’s men caught in the stony torrent. He heard the screaming of the dying men’s horses.

  Around him, rock dust billowed like that of a raging sandstorm. For maybe a hundred or two hundred yards of hard riding, horse and rider rising slowly with the trail hugging the canyon’s north wall, he could barely see ten feet ahead of him.

  He covered his mouth and nose with his arm. It was hard to judge how long he’d been in the saddle, how far he’d ridden away from the church, for all of his senses were oddly scrambled and muted. He couldn’t have been more disoriented had he been in a stagecoach that had caromed off a perilous trail to roll and bang its way down a long steep ridge toward a gorge.

  He and the dun managed to get out ahead of the billowing dust. Instinctively, the horse followed the trail to the right, where the trace sloped up gently toward the ridge on this far northwestern, and shallower, end of the canyon.

  The deep, ominous rumbling continued behind Yakima.

  The dun slowed a little as it approached the crest of the ridge, coming up through the chaparral and widely scattered rocks, near where Emma had encountered the Bundrens and Rusty Tull. He saw her now, sitting her horse just down from the ridge’s lip, staring toward him, concern on her brow and in her almond-shaped, hazel eyes. She was as dusty as any Texas-to-Kansas trail rider, and her hair hung in wild tangles. She still held her carbine down against her thigh.

  “Yakima!”

  She waved the rifle.

  The Rio Grande Kid sat his tired, sweat-silvered, dust-coated sorrel beyond her, on the ridge’s crest. He was staring out over the canyon, his eyes wide, lips moving as he muttered softly to himself, incredulously.

  Yakima put the dun up past Emma and clomped onto the rocky ridge crest. He swung the tired dun back to the east, climbing the rock-strewn slope near the canyon’s cut. A great cloud of dust billowed to the southeast, in the direction of the church.

  The roaring still sounded, but not as loudly as before. He could still feel the rumbling in the ground beneath the dun’s hooves, as though the stirrings of some giant buried beast.

  Yakima swung heavily out of the saddle. He sleeved dust that had caked around his eyes and walked a little farther up the rise, staring back along the ridge to the east. There’d once been a devil’s playground of boulders there, capping the ridge and obscuring the mysterious arroyo. Now, the ground was open, for all of that rock had tumbled, as though pushed from the ridge crest by an angry god’s giant a
rm, into the canyon itself.

  The canyon was no more. Now it was a giant boulder field that reached almost to the level desert on which Yakima now stood, staring with his lower jaw hanging in shock and exasperation. The canyon and the church and all of that treasure was sealed up in a billion-ton sarcophagus.

  Along with the men who’d come to pillage it.

  Footsteps sounded behind him. Emma stepped up beside him, on his right, and cast her gaze out over the canyon—over what had been the canyon only minutes before. More footsteps sounded, spurs sang softly. The Rio Grande Kid shuffled heavily, wearily up on Yakima’s left. He spat to one side.

  The older man stared off over the former canyon that was now just a giant boulder field obscured by an even larger, mushroom-shaped cloud of rock dust. The dusk obscured the sun, so that all three weary riders found themselves in an eerie, artificial twilight world of shadows and dust.

  Emma glanced at Yakima, narrowing one eye. “You believe me now? About the witch?”

  Yakima hiked a shoulder and continued to stare out over the giant boulder field now hiding forever the Arroyo de la Muerte, the Canyon of Death.

  “Believe in her or not,” the Kid said with a long, weary sigh. “She sure knows how to skin a cat—don’t she?”

  He spat more dust from his lips and wheezed a tired laugh.

  Epilogue

  That night, after a long soak in a hot tub and a thick steak with a platter of potatoes, Yakima crawled into his bed at the Conquistador Inn. He’d locked his door and wedged a chair under it to keep out possible callers.

  Callers were unwanted tonight. He intended to hit the trail early, and he needed a good night’s sleep. He hadn’t had a sound night’s shut-eye in a month of Sundays. In fact, he wasn’t sure he’d had one since sinking a taproot, or trying to, in Apache Springs.

  He woke twice to the jiggling of his doorknob. He didn’t know who it was out there in the hall, and he didn’t want to know.

  Of course, he knew. It was either one or both of the Kosgrove sisters. He knew Emma was staying in town tonight, too. She no longer had a canyon and an ancient church to watch over.

  It was going to take a long time for Yakima to forget both sisters. He loved them both in different ways. But he might as well start the forgetting tonight. Apache Springs had outgrown him, become fraught with way too many complications.

  He rose before dawn, skipped breakfast and coffee, and saddled Wolf in the pre-dawn dark, hearing Gramps Dawson snoring in his sleeping quarters in the lean-to off the livery barn proper.

  He rode past the town marshal’s office on the way out of town. He stopped when he saw Galveston Penny sitting on the raised gallery fronting the place, running an oiled rag down his Winchester.

  The young deputy stopped his work to gaze into the pearling shadows at the big, dark, long-haired man sitting the big black stallion before him. Yakima had thrown out the nice suit he’d been wearing while wearing the badge. He’d exchanged it for his old trail clothes--skintight, wash-worn denim trousers, calico shirt, and the bear claw necklace he’d fashioned from a grizzly he’d killed and which had nearly killed him a few years back. He wore it as a talisman of sorts, though he didn’t know if he believed in such things.

  After the treasure-laden canyon, he didn’t know what he believed anymore…

  His stag-butted Colt .44 was holstered on his thigh, his Bowie knife sheathed on his waist, and his short but deadly Arkansas toothpick positioned in the thin leather holster behind his neck.

  His Winchester Yellowboy repeater, a gift from the Chaolin monk he’d once laid track with even longer ago than his meeting with the bear…even before the beloved and unforgettable Faith had come into his life, enriching it immeasurably before she’d died…was snugged down in his rifle boot.

  Galveston cleared his throat and climbed to his feet. “You…leavin’ now, Mar…I mean, Yakima?”

  Yakima nodded. “Been good knowin’ you, Galveston. Take care of yourself. Take care of the Rio Grande Kid, too.”

  Galveston smiled. “I sure will.” He paused, frowned. “Where you goin’…if I ain’t bein’ too snoopy, that is…?”

  “I’d love to tell you…if I knew myself.”

  Yakima smiled, pinched his hat brim to the young man, and rode along the fresh rails. At the edge of town, he met a train howling into Apache Springs, and he poked his fingers into his ears to mute the infernal, caterwauling din.

  God damn “progress”, anyway…

  He headed west, away from the rising sun, as though the sun was his past and there was any way in hell a man could outrun it.

  The End

  Peter Brandvold has written well over one hundred action westerns under his own name and his pseudonym, Frank Leslie. Born and raised in North Dakota, he has lived all over the West. He currently lives in western Minnesota with his dog. Follow him here: facebook.com/peter.brandvold. Follow his blog at: www.peterbrandvold.blogspot.com. Check out a complete list of his westerns at: www.amazon.com.