The Thunder Riders Read online

  One such sound made him slam his chair down and lower his legs from the porch rail as he jerked his Winchester sharply right, thumbing back the hammer. A coyote stood at the corner of the house, staring at Yakima. The brush wolf’s ears were pricked, and its brown eyes were touched with the gray light of the false dawn.

  Yakima released the rifle’s hammer and loosed a relieved sigh. The coyote had been coming around since Yakima had started building his humble ranch headquarters six months ago, with the intention of catching and breaking wild horses for the cavalry. He’d fed the coyote deer and grouse scraps and had come to enjoy his frequent visits in spite of having found the animal sniffing around on his kitchen table one morning when Yakima had stepped out to fetch water from the creek, leaving the cabin door cracked. “Sorry, fella. No scraps this mornin’.”

  The coyote put its head down, nose working, then groaned and turned away, padding softly off toward the cabin’s rear.

  Yakima gave a wry chuff. He’d been here less than a year, having fled trouble in Colorado—trouble and the memory of a pretty whore with the unlikely name of Faith—and he was already talking to coyotes.

  Yakima leaned the rifle against the cabin wall, stood, and stretched, feeling the tension leave him. If there’d been any Apaches within three miles, the coyote wouldn’t have shown itself.

  He glanced east. The sky was lightening above the pine-studded ridge. Turning his gaze toward the corral, he saw the black mustang move up to the gate, hooves thudding softly in the quiet morning, and thrust his blaze face toward the cabin. Wolf loosed a whinny and shook his head, blue-black mane buffeting. A couple of the Apache mounts shook their own heads and milled around with their tails up, edgy.

  Yakima stepped off the porch, crossed the yard, and opened the corral gate. Wolf sprang out, putting his head down to gallop, then buck-kicking in frisky circles around the yard.

  “Go find yourself some grass,” Yakima told the horse, throwing the gate closed and securing the leather latch. “We’ll be headin’ out soon.”

  Yakima returned to the cabin to build a fire in the stove and start breakfast. Hooves drummed behind him, the ground trembling beneath his boots. Yakima chuckled to himself but didn’t turn around. Then, at the last second, he stepped to one side as Wolf ran by. The horse lowered his head to give Yakima’s shoulder a playful nip, missing by inches.

  Yakima had had enough shoulder bites and ripped shoulder seams to know when another attempt was coming.

  “Keep it up,” he scolded, mounting the porch as the self-satisfied black went buck-kicking and snorting across the yard, “and I’ll send you to the Apaches with those other four.”

  After a breakfast of venison sausage, buckwheat cakes, and tea, Yakima shook down the ashes in the sheet-iron stove and secured the cabin. He saddled the black stallion, who’d been eagerly snorting around outside, always seeming to sense when a long ride was imminent. He strapped his packsaddle on the paint horse, strung a lead rope to the four skittish Apache horses, dallied the rope around his saddle horn, and started off down the mountain.

  The sun was high when he left the cool, aromatic pine forest for the low, gravelly slopes covered with chaparral. The air was winter-cool, the sky a faultless cobalt bowl, the sun brassy. Occasional roadrunners and kangaroo rats dashed across his trail. Bobwhites and wrens flitted about the greasewood.

  He released the Apache horses at Papago Springs, then continued eight miles south, toward Saber Creek, before meandering southeast up Torcido Gulch. Sheer rock scarps jutted along both sides of the gently climbing trail, the slopes covered in greasewood and barrel cactus, which angled their cigar-shaped shadows across the caliche.

  It was high noon when Lars Schimpelfennig’s cabin appeared among the boulders and cactus about halfway up a rocky bluff—a makeshift hovel of stones and logs, with a narrow porch jutting over the steep slope on the right, supported by posts and boulders and roofed with brush. The dry logs were cracked and weathered, the stone walls bleached and buckling.

  Yakima stopped Wolf and the paint a good hundred yards from the cabin, poked his flat-brimmed black hat off his forehead, and stared up the bluff, frowning.

  Lars usually kept coffee on the stove all day, while he chipped and picked for gold in the surrounding steeples and knobs, but no smoke rose from the shack’s tin chimney pipe. No sign, either, of the mule and the two burros he usually let graze freely on the slopes below the cabin.

  The old German wouldn’t have pulled out without letting Yakima know. Being two of only a handful of non-Apaches in twenty square miles, they’d become friendly over the past several months, trading game and supplies and showing up periodically at each other’s doorstep with a bottle and a poker deck.

  Yakima swiveled his head to look around. Nothing moved except the breeze-jostled creosote branches. He swung down from his saddle, looped Wolf’s reins over an ironwood shrub, then shucked the Yellowboy repeater from its oiled boot. As he did, a breeze drifted from the direction of the cabin, and both Wolf and the paint snorted and sidestepped nervously, smelling something they didn’t like. Holding his gaze on the cabin above, Yakima levered a shell into the rifle’s breech, off-cocked the hammer, and began climbing the bluff’s steep slope, meandering around the cactus, shrubs, and boulders.

  Twenty yards from the sunbaked hovel, he stopped and held the Winchester at port arms. He yelled just loudly enough for anyone in the near distance to hear: “Hello, the cabin. Lars, it’s Yakima Henry.”

  The cabin stood silent beneath the blue sky and the jagged rocks of the ridge crest. A lizard scuttled along the shack’s rock wall and disappeared in a crack. The cabin door was open a foot, but Yakima couldn’t see inside.

  He continued up the slope, climbed the three rotten steps to the porch, then nudged the door with his rifle barrel.

  The stench was like a punch. Wincing and holding his breath, hearing flies buzz, he peered inside until his watering eyes adjusted to the darkness. Thick blood was pooled on the floor a few feet from the door, strewn with what could only be hacked-up human limbs and intestines. A blood-soaked boot poked out from beneath the wooden eating table. Something was stuffed inside.

  Yakima turned away and dropped to one knee, his gut contracting at the horror.

  “Christ!”

  A half second later, a bullet barked into the railing a foot left of his head. Another half second after that, the rifle’s blast sounded, echoing around the canyon.

  Chapter 3

  Yakima snapped his head up, staring east of the old prospector’s cabin, the direction from which the rifle report had sounded. At the same time, he began raising his Winchester, but before he could get the butt snugged to his shoulder, a man shouted, “Hold it! The next one’s goin’ through your brisket, you son of a bitch!”

  Yakima froze on one knee, letting the rifle barrel sag as he peered up the rocky slope east of the cabin. Amid the creosote, his eyes picked out the man standing in the shade of a large, slab-sided boulder, aiming a rifle straight out from his left shoulder.

  He wore a white shirt, black trousers, and suspenders. His sleeves were rolled above his elbows, and a snuff brown slouch hat was tipped back off his forehead. Gray muttonchop whiskers and a mustache showed against the saddle brown of his face. A copper star shone on his shirt pocket.

  “Set the rifle down and stand up!” he shouted, still aiming down his Henry’s barrel.

  Yakima set the rifle on the porch and straightened his legs slowly, holding his hands up, palms out, an incredulous look on his face. What the hell was a lawman doing way out here?

  The lawman lowered the rifle to his side, keeping the barrel aimed at Yakima. Glancing around cautiously, he began moving down the slope toward the cabin, his hat’s leather thong swinging beneath his chin, his spurs ringing, boot heels raking gravel.

  When he was about halfway to the cabin, he turned his head slightly and whistled. Presently, a blaze-faced dun moved out from behind the boulder and, bridle reins w
rapped around its saddle horn, put its head down and doggedly followed the lawman through the chaparral.

  The lawman aimed his rifle at Yakima’s belly as he leapt onto the porch and stopped, squinting his flinty blue eyes under his hat brim. He was Yakima’s height, about six feet, nearly as broad through the shoulders, and narrow-hipped, but a good fifteen or twenty years older. His sun-leathered skin was pockmarked, his shoulders bowed slightly, and deep lines spoked his eyes. Still, he had the look of a tough son of a bitch.

  “You’re not Apache,” he said, canting his head to one side. “What the hell are you?”

  Yakima kept his hands raised. “I ain’t Apache.”

  “You live here?”

  Yakima shook his head. “Friend of mine did. What’s left of him’s still inside.”

  The lawman strode forward and, keeping his Henry’s barrel aimed at Yakima’s belly, glanced through the cabin’s open door. His rugged features pinched up, and, his blue eyes glistening from the stench, he turned back to Yakima. “Chiricahua?”

  “That’s what I figure.”

  “You gotta handle?”

  Yakima told him his name.

  “You wouldn’t know anything about two dead Arizona rangers just east of here, would you, Henry?”

  “Maybe you better ask the Apaches about dead rangers.”

  The lawman shook his head. “These weren’t killed by Apaches. White men killed ’em—an old friend of mine and a kid. And that gravels me.” He strode forward and stopped a few feet in front of Yakima, eyes glazed with unreasoning anger. “Might be you’re part of the gang that killed ’em. The gang that’s lookin’ to bring down that gold shipment passin’ through this country tomorrow.”

  Yakima held the man’s stony gaze. “Might be.”

  The man swung the Henry’s barrel sideways while snapping the butt toward Yakima’s cheek. Yakima flung his forearm up, blocking the blow.

  He leapt straight back, then swung his foot up, planting the heel of his boot against the side of the lawman’s face. The lawman screamed as he bounced off the cabin’s front wall, dropping the rifle, and piled up on the porch. He rolled onto his back, groaning, his cheek as red as an Arizona sunset, blood trickling from his split lower lip.

  “Son of a bitch!” he raged, shaking his head as his right hand fumbled for the walnut-gripped Colt Army holstered on his hip.

  Yakima stepped down on the man’s forearm, clamping his hand against his thigh, then reached down, slipped the Colt from the holster, and tossed it over the railing into the yard a good twenty feet below. The gun hit the gravel and rolled.

  Yakima picked up the man’s Henry and gave it similar treatment, then scooped his own rifle off the porch, thumbed back the hammer, and snugged the barrel against the man’s forehead. The lawman froze, squinting up the barrel at Yakima, his pupils contracting fearfully.

  “I said I might be one of the killers you’re after,” Yakima growled. “I didn’t say I was.”

  Keeping the rifle aimed at the lawman’s head, he backed into the cabin and, holding his breath against the sweet, coppery death stench, pulled a lariat off the wall. He stepped back onto the porch, held the Winchester’s maw an inch from the lawman’s right eye. “On your belly.”

  The man glared up at him, then cursed and slowly did as he’d been told. Yakima dropped to a knee, set the rifle down, and quickly wrapped the rawhide around the man’s wrists. When he’d tied a square knot, leaving a good five feet of the rawhide hanging free, he ordered the man to his feet and shoved him toward his horse.

  In a minute, he had the lawman lying belly down across his saddle and was tying his ankles together. When he’d looped the end of the lariat around the man’s wrists for one finishing dally, he led the horse back out toward the boulder from which the man had fired the warning shot.

  In the shade of the boulder, Yakima stopped, wrapped the reins around the saddle horn, then walked back past the man’s head, which hung down behind the stirrup fender. He stopped at the horse’s right hip and held his rifle out like a club.

  The lawman turned his red, enraged face at Yakima. His hat was back on the porch, and his pewter hair hung toward the ground. The blood from his split lip had switched direction and was trickling into his eye socket. “You’ll rue this day, you son of a bitch.”

  Yakima rammed the Winchester’s barrel against the dun’s hip. The horse lunged off its rear hooves and galloped down the rise and into the chaparral beyond, weaving around barrel cactus and ironwood shrubs, scaring a wren out of its cactus burrow, and kicking up a fine curtain of cinnamon dust.

  “Not half as much as you,” he said when the hoof thuds had dwindled into the distance.

  Yakima returned to the cabin and, wrapping his bandanna around his nose and mouth, stepped inside.

  He didn’t look at what was left of the old German’s hacked up body on the floor. He knew where the old man kept his coal oil, so, sidestepping the massive pools of congealed blood and viscera, he grabbed the oilcan off its shelf, popped the cork, and doused the room. Stepping outside, he dribbled the remaining oil on the porch, then tossed the can back into the cabin. He struck a lucifer to life on his thumbnail and tossed the burning match through the door.

  The match ignited the oil with a thunderous whoosh, and flames instantly filled the cabin’s interior and licked out through the door, smoke billowing, the fire roaring and snapping and crackling as it rapidly consumed the dry wood.

  Yakima leapt off the porch and, holding his rifle over his shoulder and not looking back at the cabin, strode down the hill to where the black stallion and the paint horse waited in the brush.

  He mounted up and, dallying the packhorse’s lead rope around his saddle horn, put Wolf into a wind-splitting run. He held his rifle across his saddlebow and kept a sharp eye on the ridges. The smoke would no doubt attract Apaches, and he wanted to be out of the area when it did.

  After twenty minutes, he checked Wolf into a trot. He stopped at Ironwood Springs for ten minutes, letting the horses draw water from the murky granite tanks, then headed off again under the brassy sky. He saw no one but a couple of saddle tramps on a distant horse trail until he pulled up on the crest of the low ridge overlooking a vast sunlit valley, broken here and there by rock outcroppings and boulder-strewn knolls.

  Amid the sage a mile from the ridge lay Saber Creek—a motley collection of sandstone hovels strewn willy-nilly about the valley floor. The town, once a Mexican village, had grown up haphazardly along the Butterfield Stage line. It still wasn’t much, and because its sandstone and adobe buildings and bleached-log corrals blended so well with the sandy valley floor and the chaparral, many folks didn’t know it was here.

  Yakima didn’t care for the town, as it didn’t care for him. But it had a nice watering hole and a mercantile, and it would have taken him another day to ride to Benson.

  He put the horses down the ridge and followed the trail between the outlying corrals and goat pens and into the town itself, weaving around the heavy traffic—ranch wagons and freight outfits serving the gold and silver mines in the Dragoons and Chiricahuas.

  A woman’s voice rose behind him. “Look what the cat dragged in!”

  He stopped and turned, squinting against the wagon dust. A young woman stood by the stone well coping twenty yards before the best saloon in town—Charlier’s Hotel and Tavern. Anjanette Charlier smiled at him boldly from beneath the hand shading her eyes, her long jet-black hair dancing in the chill breeze. She was a tall, dark, regally beautiful young woman, with what appeared to be a small knife scar on the right side of her dimpled chin.

  She wore a simple brown skirt with a wide black belt, men’s black stockman’s boots, and a red bandanna. A cream blouse stretched taut across her full breasts, the top two buttons undone to expose deep cleavage. Half French, Anjanette had been raised by her French grandfather, who had prospected nearly every mountain range in Arizona before buying a saloon here in Saber Creek and putting his granddaughter to work
renting rooms and slinging drinks to miners, drovers, and mule skinners while he cooked and tended bar.

  Yakima pinched his hat brim, feeling the old male pull. Old Antoine’s granddaughter was not the kind of exquisite beauty a man saw every day on the Arizona frontier. “Miss Anjanette.”

  “It’s been a while,” she said, placing her free hand on her hip, her bosom swelling till a good half of her cleavage pushed up from the V-necked blouse. “What’s kept you up in those hills so long, Yakima Henry?”

  He’d met her last time he was in town, when he’d gotten thrown out of the Saguaro Inn and had had nowhere else to drink. She’d served him several relatively cold beers, a hot supper, and, since it had been a slow evening, had sat down to chat and play a game of red dog. No whore, this girl. A pretty tavern owner’s granddaughter who served only the liquor, not herself, though Yakima didn’t doubt that plenty of men had tried to change her and her grandfather’s mind about that.