The Wild Breed Page 2

  As the red-bearded gent twisted back, stumbling and raging, the Mexican, on one knee, extended his Colt Navy at Yakima; he chuckled drunkenly, spittle bubbling on his lips.

  He snapped off one wayward shot before Yakima, quickly ejecting the spent brass from the Yellowboy and seating fresh, sent him tumbling straight back off his heels with a dollar-sized hole in his chest. The Mexican threw the pistol straight up toward the ceiling, where it knocked out a hanging lamp with a wicked crash and rain of shattered glass.

  Pistols popped around the wheeling half-breed, one searing a shallow trough along his right cheek. Crouching and levering the Winchester mechanically, he sent the two shooters on both sides of him spinning, rolling, and dying against opposite walls, blood painting the floor and the square-hewn ceiling joists around them.

  Another pistol popped in the shadows at the room’s rear, the slug tearing across the top of the half-breed’s left arm before spanging off an iron pot somewhere behind the bar and evoking another outraged shout from Sanchez. Wafting powder smoke churned so thickly that Yakima could see only a shadowy glimpse of the red-bearded gent about fifteen feet away.

  But in the silence following the gunfire he could clearly hear the click of a hammer being cocked.

  Ignoring the fiery sting in his arm, Yakima snugged the Yellowboy’s butt against his gun belt and, crouching, fired three quick rounds, the empty shell casings clinking onto the floor behind him like the last dying notes of a player piano.

  A shout rose from the smoky shadows. “Son of a bitch!”

  A pistol flashed and barked. Yakima rolled right and came up firing at the bulky shadow bounding toward the stairs. He’d fired only two shots, hearing the slugs bark into wood and plaster, before the rifle clicked empty.

  He blinked through the wafting powder smoke. The red-bearded gent, holding a long-barreled revolver in each hand, stumbled up the stairs. His spurs chinged raucously, his boots hammering the steps. He paused, extended a pistol out over the railing, and shouted, “Dog-eatin’ son of a bitch!” and fired.

  The slug careened past Yakima’s right ear and thumped into the floor.

  The half-breed dropped his rifle, gained a knee, and grabbed his .44 from the holster on his right hip. He fired twice, one shot gouging the adobe wall behind the fleeing redhead, the other clipping the railing near his right-hand gun, evoking a startled yelp.

  The redhead fired twice more at Yakima as he gained the top of the stairs. Yakima triggered his .44. The man lurched forward and dropped to a knee, grabbing his right shoulder. He poked the pistol through the rail pillars, showing his teeth as he glared down the revolver’s shivering barrel.

  The pistol flashed and popped, the slug chewing into the floor and throwing slivers across Yakima’s boots. The half-breed sprinted to the bottom of the stairs, grabbed the newel post, and sprang up the steps two at a time as the redhead scrambled to his feet and bolted off down the hall, bellowing like an ox in an abattoir.

  The half-breed had just gained the top of the stairs and lined up his gun sites on the redhead’s back, halfway down the hall, when the man lunged to his right and pulled a girl out of an open doorway. Screaming, curly brown hair and pink night ribbons flying around her head, the tall, half-dressed dove—Stella was her name—twirled around in front of the man, who snaked a hand around Stella’s neck, pulling her taut against him.

  Aiming his pistol over her shoulder, he marched her down the hall toward Yakima, a savage grin stretching his lips.

  His guffaws echoing off the walls with the girl’s screams, he triggered his six-shooter. Yakima flinched as the slug sliced over him and barked into the railing.

  He aimed as the man and whore drew near, but he couldn’t risk hitting Stella. As another bullet sizzled past his face and over the main saloon hall behind him, he scrambled back to his feet, dropped two steps down the stairs, and pressed his back to the wall.

  The redhead bounded out from behind the wall, glaring savagely over the girl’s shoulder. “Die, ya mangy half-breed son of a bitch!”

  Yakima snapped up his Colt, but before he could fire, the redhead thrust the horrified girl toward him, his six-shooter roaring and blossoming flames over Stella’s tangled, sleep-mussed hair. The slug tore across the top of Yakima’s shoulder, missing his chest only because Yakima’s boot slipped off the step as he threw his hand out for the whore.

  The gun roared again.

  Stella screamed as she flew forward into Yakima. The girl’s head buried in his throat, he fell straight back to hit the stairs hard, one hand flailing for the rail beside him.

  Missing the handhold, Yakima flew sideways, and then the stairs were pitching and rising and falling around him as he and the girl, limbs entangled, rolled together like a single human wheel down the steps.

  The redhead howled and triggered several more shots in their direction before Yakima and the girl piled up together at the base of the stairs, the half-breed half reclining against the wall, the girl sprawled on top of him, her wrapper coiled around her waist, bare breasts pressed against his chest.

  She moaned and lifted her head slightly.

  Yakima blew her hair from his lips and peered up the stairs through the wafting powder smoke. The redhead was gone, heels thundering down the hall above.

  Yakima gentled the girl to one side, scrambled out from under her, surprised to find his right hand still wrapped around his Colt’s stag-horn grips. “You all right?”

  She muttered incoherently as she flopped onto her back, bare breasts jostling. She didn’t appear to have taken a bullet.

  Shaking the cobwebs from his brain, Yakima bounded back up the steps, cursing under his breath as he turned left down the hall, stopped, and extended his Colt.

  “Hold it there or take it in the back, you long-loopin’ son of a bitch!”

  At the far end of the hall, silhouetted by the window behind him, the redhead wheeled, thrusting his long-barreled S&W straight out from his shoulder.

  The Colt in Yakima’s hand leaped and roared, stabbing flames.

  The redhead triggered his own revolver into a half-open door on the left side of the hall as Yakima’s slug tore through his chest and punched him back through the window. The glass crunched and shattered loudly, and the flour-sack curtains billowed outward under the weight of the man’s falling bulk.

  His upper body dropped below the level of the window while his knees hooked over the sill. He ground his heels into the wall, trying to hold himself. His head shot up, and Yakima caught a glimpse of his red hair and beard as he flailed for the sill with his left hand.

  Then the head and hand dropped out of sight, his legs fell slack as the life left him, and the weight of his upper body pulled his dusty, high-topped boots up the wall to the sill and out the window.

  A second later, a wooden, thumping clatter rose from the street, and Yakima winced.

  Apparently, the redhead had landed on a woodpile.

  Someone cleared his throat loudly in the saloon below. Yakima turned. Three big men wearing deputy sheriff’s stars were spread out in a triangle before the bar, cradling shotguns or rifles in their thick arms, staring up at him like schoolmasters who’d found the culprit who’d hidden the snake in the girls’ privy.

  Chapter 2

  Staring down at the three lawmen scowling up at him from the saloon hall, their eyes openly hostile, Yakima Henry opened the loading gate of his Colt .44. He shook the spent brass onto the floor, where the shells clattered and danced around his boots.

  Goddamnit, he couldn’t win for losing.

  “How many times you boys gonna let that son of a bitch wreck my place?” complained the apron, Floyd Sanchez, who came out from behind his bar to inspect the damage. “Good Lord—just look at this mess!”

  Yakima replaced the spent brass with fresh shells from his cartridge belt. He flicked the loading gate closed and spun the cylinder.

  “Don’t worry, Floyd,” one of the deputies said, cradling his sawed-off gut shred
der in his arms and staring like an eager fight-dog up at Yakima. “We’ll put it all to right for ya.”

  Dropping the Colt into its holster thonged on his right thigh, Yakima sighed heavily and, boots thumping, spurs ringing, started down the stairs, glancing into the saloon hall to his left.

  The little man who’d fetched the lawman stood by the batwings, fingering one of the doors as if deciding whether he should stay or leave.

  Sanchez pointed at him. “Speares done banned him from town for a good three weeks, but here he is, tearin’ up my place just like he done twice before!”

  “Once before,” Yakima corrected as he reached the bottom of the stairs. “And I didn’t start that one any more than I started this one.”

  He reached down, scooped his Winchester Yellowboy off the floor, and scrubbed sawdust and tobacco from the brass-chased barrel. When he came up again, he was facing all three sheriff’s deputies, lined out before him as though for inspection, except their heavy brows were bunched and their little eyes were hard.

  Yakima wondered where the sheriff had found this bunch; they didn’t look all that more housebroken than the four he’d just turned toe-down.

  “You boys look real good,” Yakima said with a taut smile. “Speares should be proud he hired such able-bodied lawmen. You look reasonable, too, which means, I hope, you’re gonna let me walk out those doors and fetch my horses without trying to stop me.”

  He started forward between the one on the right and the one in the middle, but they stepped together quickly, closing the gap. He didn’t know their names but, like Sheriff Speares himself, they all had the look of former outlaws, which they no doubt were. One or two probably even had some paper on him.

  Yakima knew that Speares preferred hiring outlaws because they were more honest than most folks, and they weren’t skittish about killing. Besides, deputies were hard to find in this backside of dusty hell. Speares had even offered a badge to Yakima, who’d turned it down as much because he couldn’t stand the thought of living in town as anything else.

  “The Mex is right,” said the one on the left—a hard-bodied, snaggle-toothed hombre holding a Henry carbine across his chest, his funnel-brimmed hat pulled low over his tiny eyes. “Sheriff Speares done barred you from town, breed.”

  “For a month,” smiled the tall, dark man in the middle, who rested the sawed-off barrels of his double-bore shotgun casually on his shoulder. “It ain’t been near a month since you broke up the mercantile and broke the jaws of the mercantiler’s two boys.”

  “I feel real bad about that,” Yakima said. “But they were cheating on my freight bill, and called me a liar. True, they added a diamondback to my wagon box for free, but that still don’t make us even.” He glanced at the dead men around him and continued in a reasonable tone. “I didn’t intend to come in here. I followed them long-loopers in. I didn’t break any laws, either—Mr. Sanchez and Rose will tell you those boys made the first moves—so I’ll be gathering my stock and heading out.”

  The man across from Yakima—pimple-faced and with a patch over one eye, a long, corded rope scar around his neck—took one step straight back and leveled his Winchester at Yakima’s chest. He grinned. Like the others, he enjoyed the power of the tin star on his chest. And, like the others, he enjoyed using it, even when he had no call to.

  “You’re comin’ to jail, breed. When Speares gets back from Tombstone, we’ll discuss what to do with you. Meantime, you can clean up the jailhouse. Me an’ the boys let it get really bad in there!”

  “Hope he can work with his feet shackled,” mused the dark deputy in the middle, mouth corners quirking in a sardonic grin.

  Yakima chuckled as though at a joke between them all. “I can’t even keep my own cabin clean.”

  “Well, you’re gonna have some practice, now, ain’t ya?” said the deputy on the far left, who stepped wide around him, aiming the barrel of his Henry carbine at Yakima’s chest. “Now, suppose you set that rifle on the table there, then lift that .44 up slow, just two fingers.”

  “We all know how you can fight,” said the man ahead of Yakima. “You so much as twitch one of your damn feet, I’ll be paintin’ that wall back there with your savage Injun blood.”

  The one-eyed deputy hadn’t finished the sentence before Yakima bounded straight up in the air, flinging his right boot viciously up and out, the toe slamming against the underside of the deputy’s rifle stock. As the man screamed, watching the rifle fly straight up over his head, Yakima bounded off his right foot, twisted in midair, and slammed the heel of his left boot against the head of the deputy behind him.

  Yakima had moved so quickly—a blur of arms, legs, and buffeting hair—that the deputy had time to blink only once before he was flying sideways, triggering a round into a ceiling joist before tumbling over a table and a chair and falling to the floor in a groaning heap. At the same time, Yakima ducked a punch thrown by the one-eyed deputy, then straightened, rammed both his fists into the man’s midsection, and followed them up with a savage haymaker to the man’s cheek.

  “Crazy bastard!” the tall deputy shouted as, about ten feet to Yakima’s left, he spread his boots and extended the double-bore greener straight out from his belly.

  Yakima was still holding his Yellowboy, but he knew that without Speares around to dampen the town’s rage, a half-breed killing a deputy would only inspire a hang party. Holding the rifle straight up and down before him, he stepped behind a stout ceiling joist from which the piano player’s small tip bucket hung.

  The shotgun’s explosion filled the room like a cannon blast. The bulk of the double-ought buck carved a barrel-sized hole in the far wall while several on the grouping’s periphery blew the empty bucket off its hail and against the far wall with a clamoring clang. Several more tore through the slack of Yakima’s tunic, peppering his left side just above his cartridge belt.

  They felt like a dozen simultaneous bee stings.

  Ignoring the pain, he stepped out from behind the post, grabbed a chair by its back, and flung it across the room, catching the deputy, who’d flung the empty barn-blaster aside and was reaching, across the head and shoulders, for a sidearm. The deputy cursed loudly as the chair, breaking apart, flung him sideways against the piano. Bent forward and groaning and holding his bloody head, he remained there for a few seconds before sagging down, overturning the piano bench, and falling over it. He lolled from side to side and moaned.

  Thumbing cartridges from his cartridge belt into the Winchester’s loading gate, Yakima stood inspecting the damage—two deputies unconscious, one incapacitated, all three looking at stitches, maybe some dental work, wired jaws, and painful days ahead.

  The barman, Floyd Sanchez, sat against the wall near the end of the bar, knees and arms raised defensively, his eyes bright with fear and rage. Though his mouth was halfway open, he didn’t say anything as the half-breed racked a fresh shell in the Winchester’s breech and backed toward the front of the room, kicking a chair out of his way.

  “You all right, Yakima?” Rose asked.

  The little brunette sat where she’d been sitting before, wincing as she glanced at Yakima’s bloody side. Crouched over the table, Stella sat beside her, sobbing into her arms as she wagged her head of disheveled hair and night ribbons from side to side.

  “I’ll live. How’s Stella?”

  Rose glanced at the sobbing whore and ran a hand through Stella’s hair. “She’s just got the jitters…all this on top of what happened last night.”

  “What happened last night?”

  “She got the giggles when some freighter couldn’t get it up, and he chased her around the whole place with a hatchet, threatenin’ to cut her head off and mount it on his wagon. Took four girls and three of the other customers to wrestle him down.”

  Yakima continued backing toward the door. “I reckon I’ll be seein’ ya.”

  “I reckon it won’t be anytime soon.”

  “No, I reckon not.”

  He turned
out through the batwings, planted his rifle butt on his hip and, keeping an eye on the saloon door, cautiously scrutinized the street. A couple of shopkeepers watched him from open doorways, and a barn-swamper regarded him uncertainly from between the open doors of the livery barn as he moved up to his four mustangs at the hitch rail, a shovelful of straw and dung in his arms.

  Spying no imminent danger, Yakima began untying his four horses from the hitch rail—a feisty buckskin, a short-legged coyote dun, a hammerheaded blue roan, and a steeldust with a shredded left ear. None of the four—scarred from rocks, cacti, and tussles over in-season mares—would have won a beauty prize, but the soldiers at Fort Huachucha would be lucky to have such desert-hardy mounts beneath their ball-busting McClellan saddles.

  With the ends of the four lead ropes in his left hand, Yakima swung up onto Wolf’s back. He turned the black stallion into the street and, the four mustangs snorting with habitual peevishness and kicking up dust behind him, reined eastward, galloping through the Mexican part of town with its crumbling, sun-bleached adobes, brush corrals, wailing children, bleating goats, and the supper smells of spicy meat and roasting chili peppers wafting on the warm, dry wind.

  He jogged through the rocky, saguaro-stippled hills at the east side of town, picked up a ragged two-track trail, and headed southwest into even more broken country.

  Pausing on a butte crest to make sure he wasn’t being followed, he dropped down the other side into a broad, shallow canyon choked with mesquite and ironwood shrubs. To his right, a tan adobe casa with a red tile roof perched against the bluff’s steep, rocky shoulder, sheathed in saguaros and flanked by goat pens and a stone chicken coop.

  On a sandy flat before the casa lay a log barn and brush corral in which one fat mule stood, chewing its evening hay and corn husks.

  Yakima put the black down the slope, twisting amidst the cacti and boulders, then reined up in front of the barn. Still mounted, he opened the brush corral’s peeled log gate, hazed the four snorting mustangs inside, then gigged the black in, as well, and unsaddled him. With his saddlebags draped over his shoulder, the rifle in his right hand, he pushed through the gate and headed toward the casa, which glowed salmon in the west-angling sunlight on the shoulder of the hill before him.