The Killing Breed Read online

  Ace Cavanaugh, the gambler she’d married in Gold Cache and who’d been killed by rurales in Mexico.

  Yakima splashed another finger into his cup and shook his head. “Nope.”

  She studied him as her hand continued to work automatically, her eyes searching his, suspiciously probing all his secrets. Finally, the corners of her full mouth rose, and she took the cup out of his hand, sipped, and handed it back to him.

  Her eyes watered slightly from the whiskey rolling down her throat, and her voice was husky as she said, “We’re doing pretty well, aren’t we, Yakima? Considering where we both came from. . . .”

  Staring down at her, caressing her smooth cheek with the backs of his brown fingers, Yakima nodded. “Fine as frog hair.”

  She smiled brightly then, her eyes flashing. She lowered her head and continued to work in silence, moving from his arm to his leg as he sat there naked in the chair, sipping the whiskey to ease the stinging pain and feeling himself grow aroused by his woman’s touch.

  When she’d finished wrapping the wounds with strips of torn sheets, she glanced at his belly, and smiled once more through the strands of hair in her eyes.

  She wrapped her hand around him, squeezed.

  “Sometimes,” she whispered, “it’s an advantage . . . keepin’ house with an experienced woman.”

  She caressed him gently, then slowly lowered her head, her blond hair spilling across his groin.

  Yakima squeezed the chair arms and groaned.

  Chapter 5

  In spite of the whiskey and his woman’s soothing ministrations, Yakima didn’t sleep well the rest of the night. He’d endured plenty worse scrapes and bruises than those he’d acquired in his tumble down the canyon wall. But his mind turned every coyote yap and owl hoot into the stallion’s challenging bugle.

  He, Faith, and Kelly were up before dawn, as the others hadn’t slept any better than he had. Faith whipped up a quick breakfast of side pork, fried potatoes, and strong black coffee, and they ate by the light of a hurricane lamp, the crackling cookstove pushing the night’s cold out of the kitchen.

  After breakfast, Yakima and Kelly saddled up and slid rifles into their saddle scabbards.

  It was time to take care of the broom-tail bronc once and for all, before the hot-blooded stallion wreaked any more havoc on the ranch, or the Bailey Peak Outfit, which was the name the half-breed had burned into the wooden portal at the edge of the yard. He thought the handle gave the place, so recently carved from the rocks, sage, and pines, some authenticity and respectability. Since Faith and Kelly had come, it had become more than just a bunkhouse; it was now a real home.

  It deserved a name.

  As Yakima finished double-checking his saddle cinch, Faith stepped out of the cabin swinging a burlap sack. “Here’s your grub, in case you’re not back by noon.”

  “Obliged.” Yakima took the sack, glanced over his shoulder at Kelly, who was still fiddling with his rifle scabbard, then wrapped a muscular arm around Faith’s waist, bent her slightly back, and gave her a quick but passionate kiss on the mouth. She returned the kiss, laughing and tugging on his long hair falling around his shoulders.

  Pulling away from her, Yakima swung up onto the black’s hurricane deck. “I hope to be back by noon. Something tells me that bronc’s stayin’ close. He’s got a good whiff of those mares, and he likes what he smells.”

  Shivering, Faith hunched her shoulders inside the buckskin coat she’d donned against the morning’s sharp chill. The cabin’s chimney lifted gray smoke behind and above her. “You two be careful.”

  She’d wanted to ride along, but Yakima had convincedher to remain at the ranch in case the bronc returned.

  The boy and Yakima put their horses into jogs across the yard and out through the wooden ranch portal. In the sage- and pine-studded buttes beyond, they heeled the mounts into lopes, hooves thudding, dust rising in the wan dawn light behind them.

  Faith remained on the porch, watching their jostling figures disappear in the purple shadows. When they were gone, she turned toward the corral.

  The mares were milling about with their foals, a couple of which were milking, and staring at Faith expectantly. It was still a half hour early for the morning feeding, but Faith said, “All right, ladies. Since we’ve eaten, I guess it’s only fair you and the children eat. . . .”

  She let her sentence trail off, frowning at her claybank mare, Crazy Ann, who stood pricking her ears southward, as though she heard something in the far distance.

  Faith turned to peer across the broad, hilly meadow in which the ranch sat, and along the faint horse trail stretching south toward a stand of dark pines and blue mountains beyond. It was the trail that angled down the foothills and across the desert to the town of Saber Creek, thirty miles away.

  “What is it, Ann?”

  Faith stared in the direction the mare was gazing for a time, wondering if the broom-tail stallion was out there somewhere, stalking just beyond the limits of her own vision and hearing, waiting for another chance to strike.

  But, as far as she could tell, there was nothing but a slight breeze ruffling the sage and broom grass. Crazy Ann, whom Faith had named after seeing the mare’s crazy stare and quirky, fidgety corral dance, as though she were imagining unseen predators, was probably only hearing her own wild conjurings.

  Faith went inside for her work gloves and her man’s felt Stetson, which she thonged beneath her chin, then headed back outside. Drawing her hair into a loose ponytail, she crossed the yard to the corral. A couple of the mares, realizing it was time for breakfast, whinnied happily, and the foals nickered like lambs, bolting into playful runs, nipping at the other foals’ ears and backsides. Even Crazy Ann came to the fence, and Faith was relieved.

  She knew the broom tail needed to be taken down, but she didn’t want to have to do it herself.

  Faith fed a coffee tin of oats to each mare and foal, and tried to keep the more aggressive mares out of the others’ feed, then pitched fresh bluestem hay from the cribful that Kelly had cut down by the stream while Yakima had dug the new well. She enjoyed being in the corral with the horses, checking the foals for ear mites and tics and doctoring with turpentine and mud the nips the contrary mares sometimes inflicted on one another.

  She’d enjoyed ranch work when she’d been growing up in the Chugwater Buttes, though her and Kelly’s father had been a brooding, arbitrary man, given to the whip and the bottle. It felt good to return to such work in the open air again after the half dozen years she’d spent working in saloons and brothels.

  She didn’t feel guilty about those years. For girls who’d found themselves alone on the frontier, as she had when her father had turned her out after her mother had died, there were few other alternatives save starving to death. But she knew it had condemned her to a certain cynicism and darkness, a certain callousness. And she sometimes wondered, even when she was making love with Yakima, enjoying working in the cabin or out here in the stable and corral, if her past would leave her in peace.

  She hoped with all her soul that her luck would hold, that her happiness would endure—that the Fates would continue to allow her to enjoy her life out here with a good man whom she loved with all her heart.

  When she’d filled all the stock tanks with water from the windmill, hauling the buckets on an oak pole draped across her shoulders, she gathered tack in need of mending from the stable. It was now nine o’clock, judging by the sun kiting high and lens-clear above Bailey Peak. She’d spend the rest of the morning mending and oiling tack, but first she’d put on a fresh pot of coffee to help leach the autumn chill from her bones.

  She wished Yakima were here. She and the half-breed and Kelly had formed the stockman’s custom of midmorning and midafternoon coffee, kicked back in chairs on the cabin’s front porch. It helped break up the often grueling albeit satisfying ranch work that left them all exhausted by sundown.

  A slight breeze picked up, shepherding a tumbleweed into her path as s
he crossed from the stable to the cabin. She kicked the weed away, squinting against the dust, then turned suddenly toward the south, peering beyond the meadow toward the far line of trees showing spruce green now in the cool, crystal mountain sunlight.

  She’d heard something. A clipped voice on the breeze and possibly the rattle of a bit chain.

  Crazy Ann nickered behind Faith. Feeling a cricket of apprehension skitter up her spine, she stood staring for a minute, shading her eyes with her free hand. She half expected the wild stallion to come barreling over those knobs, stepping high and buck-kicking, head down, his dun mane blowing.

  After last night, she wouldn’t put it past the horse to lead Yakima and Kelly a half day’s hard ride from the ranch, then circle back for the mares he’d set his hat for.

  But there was nothing out there but the sunlight and rolling, sage-covered knobs and the line of thick pine forest beyond. Beyond them, mere shadows this time of the day, distant ranges rolled up like fog between here and Mexico.

  She continued striding to the cabin but stopped again suddenly when Crazy Ann and another mare whinnied almost in unison. Now there was something moving amidst the pines and firs, bobbing slightly above the sage. Her heart quickening, Faith lifted a shading hand once more.

  Not something.

  Someone.

  Riders galloped toward her, rising and falling with the swell of the land, moving out of the pines at the edge of her vision and out of sight behind a high, thimble-shaped butte. She’d only caught a momentary look, but there appeared to be five or six riders—white men, not Apaches. Sunlight flashed off steel.

  Faith felt a tightness in her shoulders. She turned with forced calm toward the cabin, stepped up onto the porch, and strode inside, where she dropped the tack on the kitchen table and grabbed her Winchester rifle off the deer antler rack on the living room wall.

  As she turned toward the door, which she’d left standing ajar behind her, she racked a fresh shell into the Winchester’s breech and stepped back outside, turning on the porch to face south.

  Hoof thuds rose clearly now as five riders loped toward her along the trail, a hundred yards away and closing. Watching them come, Faith cocked a hip and held the Winchester low across her thighs. Not a very friendly way of greeting newcomers, maybe, but since she was alone here, she wasn’t taking any chances.

  She studied the men warily—five rough-looking hombres in fur coats, riding good horses bathed in silvery sweat. The lead rider had long black hair like Yakima’s, and a black stovepipe hat with a snakeskin band. As he and the others rode even with the stable and continued into the yard, she saw they were well and prominently armed with pistols, knives, and rifles.

  Faith had encountered enough such men to know that they were hunters of some sort—market hunters, scalp hunters, or bounty hunters.

  She gave a slight, involuntary shiver as the memory of Wit Bardoul swept through her mind—the tracker who’d ghosted her and Yakima into the Rocky Mountains west of Thornton’s Roadhouse in Colorado, and whose intention was to kill them and bring their heads back to Thornton for the bounty.

  Faith drew a deep breath as she watched the riders approach the cabin, fanning out in a semicircle as they closed on the porch, the mares nickering in the corral behind them, and the colts running in circles, kicking.

  The strangers reined their mounts to a stop about thirty yards from the front porch and sat their tired mounts round shouldered and staring at Faith. She stared back at them, frowning, that cricket of apprehension now fluttering up and down her spine in earnest.

  The lead rider, who wore a cross tattoo in the middle of his forehead, suddenly doffed his stovepipe hat with a flourish and held it over his heart.

  “Well, hello there, little lady,” he said, grinning. “How are you this fine mountain mornin’?”

  Chapter 6

  “Mornin’.”

  Faith raked her wary gaze across the five riders sitting their sweaty mounts in front of the porch. They were four white men and a Mexican. All five pairs of eyes stared back at her, faint lascivious sneers stretching chapped, windburned lips.

  “Dusty ride,” said the leader, swiping his hat across his jeans. “Sure could use a drink of water and a cup of coffee, if you’d see fit to accommodate, ma’am.”

  Faith sized them up once more, quickly darting her eyes across their guns. “Where you from?”

  “Saber Creek.” The tattooed leader scrubbed his arm across his forehead, then set the stovepipe hat back down on his head. “Chasin’ bank robbers.” He hipped around in his saddle to scrutinize the yard. One of the others, a beefy, middle-aged gent, had been looking around the yard as well, as though looking for someone. “Sure could use some belly wash before we head back after ’em. And our horses could use a blow. Wouldn’t mind if we tied up here at your hitch rail, would you?”

  “Posse from Saber Creek, huh?” Faith said. “Where’s Sheriff Speares? He usually leads posses out of Saber Creek himself.”

  “Broke off north,” said a fair-skinned man— short and muscular, with a bull neck and cobalt blue eyes dancing around beneath his tan hat brim. His heated gaze flickered across Faith’s body quickly before he turned his head to one side to dribble chaw into the dust beneath his horse.

  “Bank robbers, huh?” Faith said, not believing a word of it. “They usually head south toward Mexico.”

  “Well, maybe these were Canadian bank robbers,” chuckled the youngest member of the group, a bucktoothed kid with a sparse goat beard the color of corn silk.

  The lead rider leaned forward on his saddle horn, smiling affably, though on such a steely-eyed, weirdly tattooed face, it came off like a sneer. “Invite us in? We’ll mind our manners.”

  Faith didn’t know what they wanted. Maybe the horses. Maybe her. But she wasn’t letting them into the cabin.

  “I can’t ask you in,” she said, shifting the rifle in her sweat-moist hands but keeping it low against her thighs. “My man’s taken ill. Has a fever. Might be catching. You can water your horses and rest right here on the porch. I’ll bring you out some coffee.”

  “What?” the tall Mexican said, scowling beneath the brim of his worn leather slouch hat. “You gonna make us lap it up like stray dogs on the porch?”

  Faith held the man’s indignant gaze. Squeezing the rifle in both hands, she turned and began slowly moving toward the half-open door behind her. As she glanced back at the strangers, the leader swung deliberately down from his saddle. The others leaped down from their own mounts then, too, the Mexican setting his jaws and snarling.

  Heart hammering, Faith bolted over the cabin’s threshold, glancing back again as the group’s leader ducked under a hitch rail and strode quickly onto the porch, his cold steel eyes riveted on Faith. She grabbed the door handle, swung it closed, and, as the lead rider slammed himself against the other side with a loud, wooden thump, she slammed the locking bolt home.

  “Goddamnit!” The man threw his body against the timbered door again, and the stout door shuddered in its frame, making cracking sounds. “Frank, run around back!”

  Faith wheeled and, holding the rifle in one hand, ran between the kitchen and living room and into the back add-on. She rushed past her and Yakima’s bedroom just as, in the sashed window right off the back door, the bull-necked blond appeared sprinting around the cabin’s right rear corner. He’d lost his hat, and his broad, clean-shaven face was flushed, his lips bunched.

  Faith screamed as she threw her shoulder up against the door just as the blond tripped the latch with a metallic rattle. Frank pushed the door open, laughing. Faith dropped the rifle, set her boots into the puncheons, and heaved the door back against its frame, then rammed the locking bolt home.