The Killing Breed Page 8

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “The men who did this took Faith, Brody. I’m going after them.”

  Yakima continued walking toward Wolf, his vision blurred so that two blaze-faced stallions and part of a third stood staring at him warily. He could hear Harms walking up behind him.

  “Yakima, I understand your eagerness to give chase,” Harms said in his faint English accent. The son of a shipping magnate, he’d been born in Britain and had moved to Boston when he was ten. “But if you don’t get that head wound wrapped, you’ll bleed dry. You won’t make it a mile.”

  Yakima set his jaws and approached the stallion, who turned his head and lifted his nose, sniffing the bloody trough carved across Yakima’s temple. He grabbed the reins and the saddle horn, turned out the stirrup, and, sucking a deep breath, raised his leg.

  He missed the stirrup, dropped his Winchester. Grabbing the apple with both hands, he sagged against the horse, gritting his teeth, plundering his core for strength. He felt blood dribbling wetly down the side of his face and neck.

  Harms stepped up beside him, bending to retrieve the Yellowboy. “You can’t even climb into the saddle. Besides, the horse needs tending, too. Looks like he took some lead himself.”

  Yakima pushed away from Wolf and ran his gaze across the animal’s sleek black hide. There were several nasty gashes across his hip and neck, and an especially deep one across his left wither.

  Wolf had no serious wounds, but the cards were stacked against Yakima. He’d have to wait until at least tomorrow to start trailing Faith.

  He heaved a long sigh and stared off in the direction the riders had taken her. Then he swung around and began leading Wolf toward the stallion’s corral. Harms walked beside him in pensive silence, the Easterner’s mule calmly grazing off the trail’s left side.

  Yakima paused beside Kelly’s body. “Will you bury the kid for me?”

  “Of course,” Harms said. “After I tend you.”

  He took the reins out of Yakima’s hand. “You go on into the stable and lie down. I’ll put Wolf away and scrounge up some water and bandages. I have a whiskey bottle in my saddlebags.”

  Yakima let the man take the reins. He grabbed his rifle. With one more glance at Kelly lying dead near the corral post, he spat blood from his lips and continued forward past the empty corrals, then turned and headed for the stable.

  His moccasined feet were growing heavy as iron wheel hubs.

  Chapter 9

  Faith half dozed in the saddle she was tied to, her leather-bound wrists wrapped around the saddle horn of the bay mare the men had taken from the corral at the ranch.

  Since she’d been captured by the bounty hunters four hours ago, she’d gone from heart-aching misery and uncontrolled sobbing to raw, blue fury and back again. The image of her brother lying piled up against the stock tank with half his brains blown out would not leave her. Nor would the memory of Yakima being shot out of his saddle and dragged westward across the brushy knobs.

  Kelly was dead. Yakima was probably dead, too, already being gnawed on by wolves or coyotes. Doubtless, the cabin was no more than gray ashes.

  A fresh, raw wave of sorrow and horror overcame her once more, and she bowed her head, cursing and squeezing her eyes closed against the tears rolling down her cheeks. She tried to keep her sobs to herself, stubbornly refusing to let these cold-blooded killers see that they had broken her.

  She opened her eyes when the mare stopped. A few yards ahead of her, the mare’s reins in his hand, the man called Temple had halted his own horse on the lip of a shallow ravine, and turned to regard the other men behind Faith.

  “We’ll stop here for the night. Chulo, you and Kooch go down and check it out.”

  As the two men broke off from the group, separating as they descended the cut, Faith saw Temple regarding her with furrowed brows. “Shut up. I don’t wanna hear no more of that.”

  Faith was about to ask him what he’d meant, but stopped. She must have been sobbing more loudly than she’d thought.

  “This is Apache country,” Temple said in his low, raspy voice. “An Apache can hear a pet mouse scratchin’ around in your saddlebags.”

  Faith hardened her jaw and narrowed her eyes. Her rage at the man, the others, and the man who’d hired him—Bill Thornton—was monumental. The words she was able to find in her grief-tortured mind sounded childish and feeble in comparison. “I don’t have any pet mice scratchin’ around in my saddlebags, you son of a bitch.”

  “No, but that’s what you sound like, carryin’ on. What’s done is done.”

  “You killed my brother. My man.”

  “Stow it.”

  Faith set her jaws. Sitting the saddle and staring at the lead bounty hunter’s back, she felt tears of grief and horror dribble down her cheeks.

  Temple had turned to stare into the ravine in which the scouts had disappeared. A hundred yards beyond the ravine, a high sandstone dike glowed copper as the molten orb of the sun sank quickly behind the dark, western ridges. Far off, a hawk screeched like the high-pitched rake of an un-oiled hinge—a lonely, seemingly bodiless sound.

  “If you let me go, I’ll pay you as much as Thornton has.”

  She stopped when the outlaw leader turned his head toward her sharply. Something inside her recoiled when he unexpectedly smiled, his gray eyes reflecting the waning light. “Shut up or I’ll slap ya silly.”

  One of the scouts called up from the draw, “Nothin’ down here but sand and snakeskins, Temple.”

  The lead bounty hunter glanced at the others and canted his head forward. He yanked on the reins of Faith’s mount and raked his spurs against his gelding’s flanks; the dun gave an indignant jerk as it started down the brushy slope.

  They were in the sandy-bottomed draw, which boasted a high northern bank, in less than a minute. Temple pulled up to where Kooch Manley and Chulo Garza were unsaddling their horses in a deep bend. Both men turned to look at Faith.

  “Hey, Temple,” the middle-aged Manley said, grinning conspiratorially at the Mexican as he tossed his saddlebags down. “How ’bout I give you five dollars of my bounty money for a few hours with the lady?”

  Temple swung down from his saddle. Slipping a knife from a shoulder sheath beneath his coat, he sauntered back to Faith with a weary sigh. “I told you,” he grumbled. “I ain’t her pimp, and she ain’t for sale, fellas. Let’s let that be the end of it, all right?”

  The two men chuckled. The blond bulldog, whose name was Frank Miller, rode up beside Faith and regarded Temple angrily. “Let me get this straight. We gotta ride all the way back to Colorado”—he threw an arm out toward Faith— “lookin’ at that, and that’s all? Just lookin’?”

  Temple extended the knife toward Faith, his mouth corners lifting as his eyes traveled slowly up her buckskin coat. “‘Jesus was led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil.’ ”

  “Yeah, well, we ain’t Jesus,” said the goat-bearded kid, Benny Freeze. “We’re just men who haven’t dipped our wicks in a month of Sundays!”

  “You got that right, Benny,” Miller laughed. “We are most certainly in the wilderness and she . . . boy, don’t she look like a spirit, though?”

  The others laughed while Temple cut the rawhide tying Faith’s boots to her stirrups, then pulled her down out of the saddle. He led her away from the horse and shoved her brusquely down against the arroyo’s shaded northwest wall. He tied two of the shorter rawhide strips together and used it to tie her ankles about five inches apart.

  “I’ll leave your hands free,” he said, straightening and putting a hand to the small of his creaking back. “Unless you try anything foxy. Understand?”

  Faith glowered up at him. The other men were leading their horses down the arroyo where Garza had found some grama grass. Faith’s heart fluttered with freshly stoked anger and bitter memories as she said, “What does Thornton intend to do with me? Beat me? Carve me up? Shoot me?”

&nbs
p; Temple stared down at her, lifting his hat and running a hand through his long, thin hair. “I don’t know what he intends. But it is my intention to see that you’re delivered safe and sound, so that your former employer—against whom it seems your transgressions are grave—may do to you as he wishes.” Temple winked. “I’m just a businessman. I’ve agreed to do a job, and I’m gonna see it through.”

  He turned and began to walk toward his horse.

  “Wait,” Faith said on a sudden impulse.

  Temple glanced back at her.

  “Cut me loose.” She glanced at the rawhide tying her ankles together and funneled as much fake sincerity into her voice as she could. “I’ll gather wood.”

  “Like hell you will.”

  “Please. Let me do something. I’ve been sitting on that horse for the past four hours. I need to move around, get my blood circulating.” Faith tipped her hat brim against the harsh, last rays of the sun, and frowned at the tattooed, gray-eyed man arching a brow at her. “If I tried to run, how far could I get? You’d either run me down, or Apaches would. And there’s border bandits galore. I doubt they’d be as respectful as you, to your credit, have been so far. . . .”

  The place was honeycombed with hostiles of every stripe. But the Eastern gold seeker—Brody Harms—who’d become a close friend of Faith, Yakima, and Kelly, had a cabin near Buzzard Butte. If she could make it to Harms’s cabin, he’d help her get back to the ranch.

  She was still clinging to the slender hope that, while Kelly was dead, Yakima was not. Temple and the others had scoured the brush for him but had been unable to find him.

  Temple stared at her, slitting a pensive eye at her, thinking it over. Her pulse throbbed. She might not be able to outrun these men, but if she could hide until after dark, she’d try to find her way to Buzzard Butte under cover of darkness.

  “Why not?” Temple reached into his coat for a wide bowie knife. “Never been against a woman earnin’ her keep. You can cook, too, once you get a fire goin’.”

  “Sure,” Faith said as the man squatted at her feet and slid the razor-edged blade across the leather, which gave instantly.

  He stood and returned the knife to its sheath. “Don’t disappoint me now, hear?”

  Temple turned and began walking toward his horse and the other men, who were rubbing down their own mounts while smoking and talking in hushed tones. Kooch Manley had popped the cork on a bottle and was passing it around. As Temple approached the group, Miller pointed the bottle toward Faith, who had gained her feet and was strolling ever so slowly, with painstaking casual-ness, westward along the arroyo.

  “Hey, where’s she goin’?”

  “Fetchin’ firewood,” Temple said, reaching under his horse to unbuckle the latigo.

  Manley cursed. “You think that’s a good idea?”

  “If she tried to make like the wind,” said Miller, who sat down on his saddle to build a smoke, “I’d be happy to run her down. Maybe I could sneak one in before Temple laid into us with his Jesus whip!”

  Faith had been glancing over her shoulder at the men as she moved nonchalantly down the arroyo. Spying a piece of driftwood in the corner of her eye, she moved over to pick it up, then continued forward, hearing the men talking behind her, feeling their eyes on her back. She picked up two more sun-bleached branches before she glanced again over her shoulder.

  The men were out of sight around a bend.

  Her heart instantly began racing, her brain swirling as she looked around and tried to clarify her thoughts. She had to get as far away as possible, find a notch cave or a snag of brush or boulders— any hiding place at all—and hope like hell they didn’t find her.

  Faith dropped the wood and pushed into a jog down the sandy-bottomed canyon, continuing to glance over her shoulder to make sure she wasn’t being followed. The men’s sounds dwindled behind her—their occasional laughter and the clatter of tack. Then the sounds disappeared and she could hear only her own breathing, her own foot thuds, and the rustle of the branches on the arroyo’s right bank.

  The dull hoot of an owl made her stop suddenly with a startled gasp.

  Pressing a hand to her chest as if to quell her leaping heart, she continued forward. Ahead, the arroyo branched. She took the left fork, glancing back to see her boot prints in the flood-scalloped sand and gravel. Suddenly, she lurched right onto a boulder, leaped from that boulder to another, then to the top of the bank, pulling herself up with gnarled mesquite roots, trying to leave as little sign as possible.

  The high sandstone ridge, purpling now as the sun sank from view, quartered off to her right as she ran through the chaparral ten minutes later, hot blood racing through her veins, heart pounding. Anxiety, hope, and desperation churned a toxic, energizing elixir that fairly lifted her off her feet.

  Every step took her that much farther from the cutthroats. Every step took her that much closer to Brody Harms’s cabin.

  She slowed her pace to look behind. Nothing but rocks, rotting mesquite branches, and creosote spreading their slender arms toward the dark green sky. A small rabbit hunkered down in the lee of an arrow-shaped boulder, pressing its ears to its head, trying to make itself look like a stone.

  Nothing moved back there. Not even the breeze. No sounds whatever. In the northwest, the top of the sandstone ridge glowed like molten iron, the light diminishing as Faith watched, pricking her ears to listen for footsteps or the drumming of hooves.

  The silence chilled her. Surely by now they knew she’d run. What were they doing?

  Should she continue running or hole up until after good dark?

  A kangaroo rat chittered nearby. Faith sucked a sharp, startled breath, then turned to continue jogging.

  Her right boot clipped a deadfall log, and she went down hard on her chest, her breath hammered out of her lungs in a single, loud grunt. She winced as gravel and goatheads bit into her hands and her chin.

  A spine-tingling rattle sounded, like the prolonged cocking of a gun hammer. She looked ahead and right.

  A diamondback rattler lay under an up-jutting branch of another deadfall log. Its body was coiled like an expertly wound lariat, its head hovering six inches above the ground, its diamond-shaped eyes regarding Faith with cold malevolence. The rattles rose and fell slightly, quivering, the sound ominously changing pitch.

  Muscles drawn taut as fence wire, Faith pushed off her right hand slowly, tilting her body away from the snake.

  “Easy,” she breathed.

  She drew a knee up and sideways, then the other.

  The snake watched her, sliding its flat head slowly toward her, its tongue slithering in and out of its mouth.

  “Easy . . .”

  Keeping her eyes on the snake as if to hold it with her stare, Faith crawled back out of striking distance. She rose slowly, took one slow step forward, then lurched into another run.

  She’d taken only two steps, still looking behind at the snake, before she smashed headlong into a man in her path. With a startled cry, she fell back and hit the dirt and gravel on her butt, staring up in horror at the man grinning down at her through a thick gray-black beard. The man’s brown left eye sparked lustily while the other, white as fresh-whipped cream, glowed wickedly as though lit from within.

  He chuckled, throwing his sombrero-clad head back on his shoulders. “Senorita!”