The Thunder Riders Page 23

Click!

  He glanced at the aimed Colt in horror.

  He’d fired all six shots. His eyes flicked back toward Considine. The desperado’s lips bunched with fury, eyes blazing.

  There was a bark, and as the revolver flashed and smoked behind Anjanette, she jerked as though struck by lightning, her eyes snapping wide. The bullet opened her shirt and flung the crucifix straight up in the air as it hammered out of her chest and nipped Yakima’s right arm before careening into the darkness behind him.

  “No!” Yakima shouted.

  As the girl was punched forward and off to Yakima’s right, crumpling, Yakima leapt toward Considine. He grabbed the wrist of the desperado’s gun hand, shoved the revolver out to his left as Considine tripped the trigger. The pistol’s bark was still echoing as Yakima bulled the outlaw straight back and down, ramming his fists blindly at the desperado’s face.

  The hill dropped sharply behind them, and Yakima found himself, his own limbs entangled with Considine’s, rolling down the hill through sand, gravel, and sage, cacti nipping at his arms and legs and shoulders. Halfway down the hill they bounced off a boulder, separated, and continued rolling down side by side until both piled up at the bottom, at the edge of a dry creek bed.

  Blood oozing from cuts and scrapes, his head swimming from the fall, Yakima gained a knee and peered along the bank. Considine struggled to his own knees, grunting and wheezing. He reached down toward his right boot, straightened with a pistol in his hand.

  There was a ratcheting click as he thumbed the hammer back.

  Considine’s shoulders rose and fell as he caught his breath, and his lips stretched, perfect teeth flashing. He straightened and turned to face Yakima, raising his gun hand heavily.

  Hoofbeats sounded suddenly, quickly growing louder. The ground trembled beneath Yakima’s knees. He and Considine glanced toward the hill. An enormous ink-black figure plunged off the side of the hill like a tidal wave.

  Considine screamed and raised an arm above his head. With a bone-chilling shriek, the black stallion bulled into Considine, lifting the outlaw two feet straight up and then punching him back into the riverbed, hat and revolver flying in opposite directions.

  “Aaghhhhh!” Considine groaned as he smacked the dry creek bed’s rocks with a thunderous thump, then rolled as the horse’s scissoring hooves kicked and dragged the outlaw into the middle of the wash.

  “No!” the outlaw screamed as Wolf galloped toward the opposite bank, then spun and headed back toward the writhing desperado.

  Considine lifted his head and ground his heels into the rocks, trying to crab backward on his butt. “Call him off! Call him off !”

  Wolf pitched with an enraged scream, wide eyes glowing with reflected starlight, mane buffeting wildly. He drove his front hooves into the man’s gut and chest and groin, then bounded up on his back legs to repeat the maneuver until Considine’s shrieks subsided to guttural sobs and then, finally, silence.

  Holding his right hand over his wounded arm to stem the blood flow, Yakima gained his feet and moved to the edge of the streambed. Wolf continued pitching, snorting, and blowing, shaking his head wildly, mercilessly pummeling the outlaw with his front hooves.

  On the rocks, Considine looked like a smashed scare-crow, half stripped, broken, and bloody. He moved only when the horse’s hooves hammered him, his dead body bouncing up and down and rolling among the rocks.

  Yakima walked into the streambed, placed his hands on the horse’s neck. Wolf, about to bound off his front hooves once more, froze. He turned his head toward Yakima, pupils expanding and contracting, vapor jetting from his nostrils, ears twitching. Blood matted the top of his head, rippling down the white blaze on his snout.

  “Easy, boy,” Yakima said, running his hand up the horse’s sweat-lathered neck toward his head. “You nailed him, pard.”

  He held Wolf’s head still as he inspected the wound behind his ear. There was a lot of blood, but it appeared the bullet had ricocheted off the horse’s skull.

  Yakima chuckled as he probed the inch-wide gash with his fingers, holding the horse’s snorting head still between his arms. “That hard head of yours saved your life, you stubborn son of a bitch.”

  He grabbed the reins, adjusted the saddle, and swung heavily into the leather. He gigged the black back up the hill, plodding slowly. When he saw the dark figure in the grass, he stepped down from Wolf’s back and knelt beside Anjanette. She lay twisted on one side, her face in the grass, hair fanned out around her head.

  The wound in the middle of her slender back had made a large black stain. He placed his hand on her shoulder, about to turn her over, but stopped. Instead, he lowered his hand to her lush hair, caressed the back of her neck.

  Footsteps down the hill jerked his head up.

  When Patchen announced himself, Yakima rose slowly, removed his neckerchief and wrapped it around his arm. Stooping, he snaked his arms under the dead girl, then straightened and laid her body facedown across his saddle.

  Patchen moved up on his right, glancing at the body. “Who killed the girl?”

  Yakima began leading the horse down the hill toward the ruins. “I reckon I did.”

  Epilogue

  Yakima and the lawmen built a fire in a ravine half a mile from the ruins, trying to avoid desperadoes, Indians, and other predators possibly summoned by the gunfire and the smell of fresh carrion.

  Patchen and Yakima dug the bullets out of each other’s hides and sutured the wounds. Because Patchen had lost the most blood and was thus the shakiest—he’d been wounded twice and had lost a finger—Yakima set to the task of sterilizing his skinning knife and digging the three rounds out of Speares’s neck, thigh, and upper right chest.

  Sitting against his saddle, Speares guzzled whiskey and cursed every time the knife point penetrated a bloody, ragged wound.

  “Shit, breed,” he rasped as Yakima stitched the neck wound closed. Firelight flashed off the bloody needle. “I believe you’re enjoying this!”

  Yakima grunted and shoved the needle through another pinch of bloody skin. Speares groaned and threw the bottle back.

  The next morning, Yakima tended Wolf’s head with mud and whiskey, then buried Anjanette on the ravine’s lip, arranging rocks over the grave and erecting a small oak cross. He saw no reason why the others should know that she’d thrown in with the Thunder Riders, so he kept the fact to himself, tucking it back with his guilt at not having turned his gun over to Considine and thus causing her death.

  Knowing that Considine probably would have killed them both did little to temper the pain. And knowing that she’d gone willingly with Considine did little to lessen his sorrow that he would never hear her raspy, husky voice again, or glimpse the devilish, earthy glint in her wide brown eyes.

  He and the men, having secured the strongbox and the mule they’d need to haul it back across the border, spent three days wallowing in the warm, healing waters cleaving the Canyon of Lost Souls. Wolf ran loose, staying close to Yakima but taking frequent rolls in the stream and, to relieve his growing boredom with the bivouac, bedeviled the men with his attempted shoulder nips.

  Yakima and Patchen built a travois for Speares, who couldn’t yet ride astraddle. At sunset of their third day in the foggy canyon, they harnessed the travois to the mule and started northward. They rode at night to avoid banditos, rurales, federales, and Indians. Not wanting to risk a gunshot, Yakima hunted rabbits and prairie chickens with his Jesus stick and snares. It was a slow, tedious trek, but by the time they reached the border Speares was able to ride his own horse.

  They pulled into Saber Creek around two o’clock on a pitch-black morning, the town’s dark buildings falling in around them, a dog growling from an alley mouth. The main street was as still as that of a ghost town, though a torch burned on the porch post of one of the brothels and a piano’s faint tinkle came from the second story.

  “As soon as I secure the strongbox, I know where I’m headin’,” Speares said as he angled his
horse toward the stone jailhouse. “Anyone wanna join me? Miss Colette’s girls are a mite flat-chested, but they please right fine.”

  “No, thanks,” Patchen said. He dismounted in front of the jailhouse to help Speares with the strongbox. “I think I’ll bed down over to the hotel. See you in about three days.”

  Speares glanced at Yakima. The swelling had gone out of the sheriff’s broken nose, though the bridge was lumpy. The sutures in his neck wound stood up above his collar on the right side of the neck, where Toots’s bullet had come within centimeters of trimming his wick. “What about you, Yakima? I don’t think Miss Colette’s got any rules against half-breeds.”

  Yakima began to rein Wolf up the street. “Maybe next time. I’ll bed down in the livery barn, pick up my supplies in the morning, and start back to my cabin.”

  “There’s probably a reward for hauling in the gold,” Patchen said. “We’ll split it three ways.”

  Yakima walked Wolf up the dark street. “I don’t have time to wait around for it. Gotta see if the Apaches left me a cabin.”

  “Hold on,” Speares said. Clutching his wounded side, he climbed heavily out of the leather and reached into one of his saddlebags. He turned, tossed something up to Yakima, who caught it against his chest.

  He opened his hand. A deputy sheriff’s star.

  Yakima peered over the star at the sheriff.

  Speares said, “I done lost all my deputies. The pay ain’t bad, and it’s steady.”

  Shaking his head, Yakima lowered his hand to toss the badge back to the sheriff but stopped when Speares held up his hand. “Now, I knew you’d balk. But hold on to that star for a while. Just see how it feels. If it don’t feel right in a few days, toss it into the woods.”

  Yakima dropped the star in his shirt pocket. “It’s a waste of good tin, but have it your way.”

  He pinched his hat brim to the men standing under the jailhouse’s brush arbor, then gigged Wolf up the street toward the livery barn.

  He spent that night in the same stable as Wolf, then started back north the next morning, riding Wolf and leading his paint horse burdened with twenty-six dollars’ worth of dry goods and a couple bottles of whiskey— enough to sustain his quiet life in the mountains for a good long time.

  As he jogged the horses up a rise in the rolling desert, he felt the badge against his chest. He plucked it from his pocket, glanced at it.

  DEPUTY SHERIFF.

  He gave a wry snort. Clutching the star between the thumb and index finger of his right hand, he drew his arm back, intending to toss the badge into a mesquite snag about thirty yards off the trail.

  He stopped, pulled his hand down, and opened it. Lifting his gaze from the nickel’s worth of tin, he saw Wolf craning his neck to stare back at him, eyes wide, vaguely curious.

  “What?” Yakima grunted. “I’m supposed to swap lead with Apaches the rest of my life?”

  He glanced at the star once more, then dropped it into his pocket, buttoned the flap, and heeled the stallion into a jog through the chaparral, gradually climbing the lonely slopes rising toward Bailey Peak.

  Ride the trail with Frank Leslie . . .

  The Wild Breed

  Coming from Signet in March 2008

  Read on for a special sneak preview

  Looking around cautiously, jaws set grimly, Yakima Henry climbed a low rise stippled with crumbling volcanic rock and palo verde shrubs, and reined in his sweaty, dusty mustang—a blaze-faced, coal black stallion with the fire of the chase in its eyes.

  Brush snapped and rustled ahead and left, and the half-breed touched his pistol grips. A mangy brush wolf bounded up a nearby knoll, a charcoal-colored jack hanging limp from its jaws. The coyote turned an owly, proprietary glance over its shoulder, then dashed over the rise and disappeared in a mesquite-choked arroyo.

  Tall and broad-shouldered, his muscular frame sheathed in a sweat-stained buckskin tunic, blue denims, brush-scarred chaps, and a leather necklace strung with large, curved grizzly teeth, Yakima dropped his hand from the stag-horn grips of his .44. He shifted his gaze under his flat-brimmed, dust-caked plainsman hat to the horse tracks dropping down the rise and disappearing in the chaparral.

  Four horseback riders herding five unshod mustangs toward the town lying a good half mile away—a handful of log and adobe dwellings and cow pens clustered in the vast, rolling desert, bordered distantly on all sides by bald crags of isolated mountain ranges.

  Beyond Saber Creek, the ridges rippled away like ocean waves, foreshortening into the misty, blue-green reaches of Old Mexico.

  Yakima shucked his Winchester Yellowboy from the saddle boot under his right thigh. The mustangs belonged to him. The rustlers had taken them out of his corral when he’d been off hunting wild horses to break and sell to the army. They’d hazed them through the slopes and arroyos, dropping down and away from his small, shotgun ranch nestled at the base of Bailey Peak, no doubt intending to sell them south of the border.

  Yakima levered a fresh shell into the Yellowboy’s chamber, off-cocked the hammer, set the barrel across his saddle bows, and booted the horse off the ridge, his shoulder-length black hair winnowing out behind him in the hot breeze.

  A few minutes later, horse and rider gained the stage road, followed it past the first cow pens and horse corrals of Saber Creek, then across the dry creek bed the town was named for, and into the sun-baked little village, somnolent and sweltering in the late-afternoon heat.

  Buildings of whip-sawed cottonwood, sandstone blocks, and adobe brick lined the narrow Main Street, over which a lone ranch wagon clattered, heading toward the opposite end of town. Chickens pecked along the boardwalks. Dogs lazed in shade patches. Few people were about, but Yakima noticed a couple of silhouettes peering at him through sashed windows.

  Cicadas whined, a goat bleated unseen in the distance, and the faint tinkling of a piano rode the breeze, drowned by the occasional screech of a shingle chain.

  Yakima turned the stallion right and angled it around the town’s cobbled square, which was surrounded by old Mexican adobes and a sandstone church with a frayed rope hanging from the boxlike bell tower, and drew rein before a stout log blacksmith shop.

  He stared at the nine horses tied to the hitchrack fronting the Saquaro Inn Saloon and Hotel on the right side of the street, just ahead. The horses stood hang-headed in the shade of the brush arbor—all nine dust-streaked and sweat-foamed. Only four were saddled. The rifle boots tied to the saddles were empty.

  Yakima booted the black up to the hitchrack, dismounted, and dropped the reins in the ankle-deep dust and manure. “Stay here and don’t start no fights.”

  Patting the horse’s slick neck and resting his rifle on his shoulder, he stepped onto the boardwalk. He raked his jade green eyes—which to some seemed startlingly incongruent in his otherwise dark, Indian-featured face— across the five barebacked, unshod mustangs. Then, chaps flapping about his legs, sweat streaking the broad, flat plains of his dust-caked face, he wheeled from the street and pushed through the batwings.

  He paused in the cool shadows just inside the door, letting his eyes adjust as he took in the room—the ornate mahogany bar and backbar mirror running along the wall to his right, the dozen or so tables to his left, the stairs at the back. A little man with spats and close-cropped gray hair played a piano—a slow, Southern balladthat might have been recognizable had it been played in the right key—against the far wall below the stairs. Near him, four hard-faced hombres in ratty, dusty trail garb played cards, Winchester and Sharps rifles leaning against their table or resting across empty chairs nearby.

  One of the two men facing him wore a couple of big pistols in shoulder holsters, revealed by the thrown-back flaps of his spruce green duster.

  To Yakima’s left, a girl’s voice said, “Well, look what the cat dragged in! Did Mr. Henry get tired of taming horses and come to town to see what else needs tamin’?”

  Yakima turned to see a small, pale-skinned brunette clad in a
low-cut, knee-length red dress sitting alone at a table, her bare knees crossed. The dress was so sheer he could see her small pear-shaped breasts through it, and nearly all other aspects of the pretty girl’s delicate anatomy, including a mole on the inside of her right thigh. A strap hung off her skinny shoulder.

  She smiled up at him, showing a missing eyetooth and wagging a dirty, slender foot, the red paint on her toenails as chipped and scaled as the siding on an old barn.

  An empty shot glass and a half-empty beer mug sat on the table before her. Her admiring gaze ranged across Yakima’s broad chest and yokelike shoulders before climbing back to his face.

  She twirled a finger in a lock of her curled hair.

  He nodded. “Rose.”

  “Yakima?” The bartender—a stringbean with wide-set eyes, thick pomaded hair, and a pronounced overbite— rose suddenly from behind the bar. Floyd Sanchez scowled savagely. “What the hell are you doin’ here? I thought the sheriff done banned you from town, for breakin’ up my place and every other place in Saber Creek!”

  “Go back to work, Floyd,” Yakima growled, barely favoring the man with a glance.

  He sauntered forward, his spurs chinging on the rough puncheons, the barrel of his Yellowboy repeater still resting on his shoulder as he approached the table before which the four saddle tramps played cards. One of the men facing him—the man with the dust and the double-rigged holster filled with matched Smith & Wessons— glanced up at him, a stogie in his teeth, five cards fanned out in his left hand. He was a hulking hellion with a freckled, sunburned face and a thick red beard still slick with sweat and coated with seeds and trail dust. He smelled like horses, mesquite smoke, piss, and rancid tobacco.