The Killing Breed Read online

  She tried to scuttle back on her butt, but he crouched and grabbed her wrists in his hands, raking his eyes across her body. More laughter rose behind him, and she glanced up to see two more Mexicans—one sitting on a rock with a rifle between his knees, another standing nearby and holding a revolver straight down by his side. Saddles and camping gear were strewn around them, but there was no fire.

  Faith tried to jerk her wrists free of the big Mexican’s gloved, viselike grip.

  “Jesus has blessed us this night, amigos!” he whooped.

  He lowered his head toward Faith’s, pooching out his lips. A rifle barked to Faith’s left, and the man’s head jerked in the opposite direction. He grunted and stumbled backward, his hands still wrapped firmly around Faith’s wrists and pulling her back as he sagged. Blood spewed from a gaping hole in his left temple.

  The Mexican hit the ground on his back, and Faith fell facedown on his chest with an anguished groan, the hide-wrapped handle of a knife sheathed under his arm raking her cheek.

  “Mierda!” one of the other banditos shouted.

  A rifle barked six times in quick succession, each blast followed by the angry rasp of a cocking lever.

  Faith buried her face in the chest of the bandito quivering beneath her. Ahead, the other two men wailed and screamed, boots thudding. But as the last rifle report ceased echoing across the still, twilit desert, the men fell silent.

  The salty aroma of cordite thick in her nostrils, Faith lifted her head from the bandito’s unmoving chest and glanced to her left.

  Lowry Temple stood atop the knoll, crouched over the smoking Winchester angled slightly down from his right hip. Faith followed the man’s gaze to where the other two banditos lay sprawled around their gear, one on his side and bleeding from several wounds in his chest, the other on his back, spread-eagled, as though he’d been staked out by Apaches.

  Blood gushed from his ruined eye sockets.

  She looked at the man she’d fallen on. He was still shaking slightly. Blood continued spewing from the side of his head though not as energetically as a second ago. His wide-open eyes stared at the darkening sky beyond Faith.

  Faith made a sour expression. Her stomach contracted against the stench of death and powder smoke. She pushed away from the dead Mexican and sat back on her rump, drawing her knees to her chest.

  The rifle reports still echoed in her head. As her eyes found Temple grinning down at her, she convulsed with a sob.

  Temple off-cocked his Winchester’s hammer and set the gun on his shoulder. “Seen those three dog-gin’ us a couple hours ago.” He spat a tobacco quid onto a rock. “Figured you’d flush ’em out for me. Didn’t know you were gonna lead me right into their camp!”

  Faith said nothing. Tears dribbled down her cheeks as she stared through the wafting smoke at the dead men. Temple rolled his chaw around in his mouth and spat another long quid onto the chest of the still Mexican sprawled in front of Faith.

  “Come on,” Temple called. “You was gonna fetch some wood, remember?”

  Chapter 10

  “Faith!”

  Yakima’s own shout awakened him, and he sat bolt upright, instantly biting his lip as a dull lance blade impaled his skull, dropping a bright red veil of pain across his eyes.

  Somewhere to his left a cot creaked and a voice rasped, “What is it?”

  Then it all came back to Yakima in a flood of barbed memories pummeling his aching brain. As he stared through the darkness at the cracks in the stable door etched with misty, predawn light, he sucked a deep, weary breath.

  “Shit.”

  In the dream, Faith had been falling away from him into a deep, black pit as wide as the hell that the priests in a Denver boarding school had once told him about, assuring him that if he didn’t accept their ways, he himself would tumble into that black, fire-bottomed pit of eternal damnation.

  But it was Faith he still saw now—her strong, clean-lined face with its dimpled chin and frank blue eyes fading quickly from his view. Down, down, down, and away from him, swallowed by thick, hot, tarlike blackness.

  “Well, that’s one way to wake up,” Brody Harms sighed. “Dream?”

  Yakima grunted, dropped his feet to the chill, hay-flecked floor, and raked his hands across his face. “It’s coming onto dawn. I’ll build up the fire.”

  He was reluctant to take the time for breakfast, but he’d lost blood and needed to regain his strength. Last night, he’d donned longhandles from the wooden locker he kept in the stable, filled with spare duds. Now he ransacked the locker again for a pair of denims, a patched buckskin shirt, and an old, ratty jaguar coat. He found a spare cartridge belt, filled it with .44 shells from a box at the bottom of the locker, and wrapped it around his waist so that it overlapped his pistol belt.

  He had a feeling he was going to need all the ammo he could get his hands on.

  When he’d made sure his stag-butted .44 was loaded, he pulled on his moccasin boots and hat and headed outside. He kicked down the ashes from last night’s cook fire just outside the stable door, and tossed kindling into the ring.

  A few minutes later, the fire was crackling in the chill dawn, and he and Brody Harms hunkered down around it, eating the salt pork and beans that Harms had carried in his saddlebags, and washing the food down with hot, black coffee.

  “I’ll be pullin’ out,” Yakima said, tossing his dregs into the fire. “Much obliged for the doctorin’, Brody.”

  Harms held his plate up close to his mustached face, shoveling the last bite of pork and beans into his mouth. “I’m going with you. Got most of my camping gear in my saddlebags. I’m down to one mule—that mad-eyed devil yonder.” Chewing, he glanced at Yakima. “Don’t have a lot of ammo, though.”

  “I can’t ask you to come. I don’t even know who those bastards are or where they’re headed. Besides, it’s my woman they have.”

  “Faith’s my friend.” Harms scrubbed his plate with a handful of fire ash and dust. “Kelly was my friend. And you’re my friend, too.”

  He dropped his plate into his saddlebags, then reached over for Yakima’s. “Understand?”

  Yakima nodded, stood, and kicked dirt on the fire. “I’ve got ammo. We won’t need much if we wait till we see their eyes. I don’t intend on giving them a chance. No chance at all. They killed Kelly and took Faith, and they’re going to die for that.”

  Adjusting his possibles in his saddle pouches, Harms looked up at Yakima standing over him, the half-breed’s large red fists balled at his sides. Harms felt himself wince at the simmering, savage rage he saw in Yakima’s keen green eyes—the Germaneyes he’d inherited from his father and which were a startling contrast to his otherwise dark, primitive Indian features.

  The Easterner nodded. He felt a fleeting apprehension at what lay ahead, knowing it would be a hard trail with a bloody end.

  He stood and threw his saddlebags over a shoulder, and they moved over to Wolf and the mule, both standing saddled outside Wolf’s corral, looking fresh and ready to go.

  Yakima had tried not to look at the cabin, but now, as the pale dawn thickened, with buttery sunlight showing behind Bailey Peak, he turned his eyes to the burned-out hulk. Only a few charred logs remained, enclosing drifts of snow-like ash.

  “You’ll get her back, Yakima.”

  Yakima turned to Harms sitting his mule beside him, frowning behind his dusty spectacles.

  “You’ll get her back, and the two of you will rebuild your place.”

  Yakima glanced once more at the cabin. Kelly’s grave flanked it on a low knoll, the rock-covered mound marked by a crude cross that Harms had fashioned from pine branches and rawhide last night before they’d both turned in.

  Yakima swung into the saddle and reined Wolf westward across the yard and out the ranch portal. He and Harms nudged their mounts into lopes along the trail in which the cutthroats’ tracks were still etched like demonic hieroglyphics showing the way to hell.

  The kidnappers’ trail wasn
’t hard to follow. Riding with bold confidence that no one would follow them, believing most likely that Yakima’s head wound or the dragging or both had been fatal, they did nothing to cover their tracks as they headed straight west of the ranch.

  The two trackers left the old two-track prospector’s trail near Hermit Butte and angled north through a broad valley bordered in the west and east by vast, bizarrely sculpted sandstone formations.

  Straight north lay the hazy, flat-topped form of Black Mesa, with the Sierra Mogollons quartering off to the northwest, resembling storm clouds from this distance of a hundred miles or more, with lower, barren, dun-colored ranges rumpling up in front of them.

  Yakima didn’t have to push Wolf to make good time that morning. The black mustang seemed to sense his rider’s urgency and determination, and kept up its pace without prodding.

  Harms’s mule was another matter. More accustomed to pulling a buckboard tool wagon and standing for long hours in the shaded lee of an escarpment while its owner ravaged a vein with pick and shovel, the owl-eyed beast required near-constant spurring. It could keep up with Wolf when it wanted to, but mostly it lagged.

  Harms cursed the beast and batted its ribs with his heels. The mule chugged and blew and, occasionally, hee-hawed and bucked, tail in the air.

  Late morning, Yakima halted Wolf on a rocky hill and peered into the canyon on his right. The cut ran along the base of a pine-carpeted slope spotted with slide rock and gray deadfall. At a wide part of the canyon, the broom-tail bronc stood, lapping water contentedly from a run-out spring bubbling around mossy stones. Up-canyon a ways, Yakima’s mares and foals milled—a remuda of twenty valuable horses—cropping needle grass and bluestem while lazily swishing their tails.

  The bronc lifted its head slightly, its entire body quivering, its lips stretching back from its teeth. The mustang’s whinny sounded a half second later—a bugling cry of victory.

  Wolf answered, bobbing his head angrily.

  Yakima scowled down at the mustang and the harem he’d won at last. “Take care of those girls,” the half-breed growled. “I’ll be back for ’em.”

  The bugling cry sounded again, frightening the foals up-canyon, who jerked and skitter-hopped away from their mothers.

  “I wonder what he just called you,” Harms said, heeling the disgruntled mule up the bluff behind Yakima.

  “Nothing I haven’t called him, I reckon,” the half-breed said, clucking Wolf on down the bluff’s other side.

  At noon they followed the kidnappers’ tracks into a meandering cut and drew rein before a fire ring heaped with gray ashes and three charred tins with twisted, dangling lids. A few unused pine branches lay beside the ring.

  Around lay the prints of the kidnappers’ horses, all of which Yakima had memorized, and near the arroyo’s north wall he saw the indentation of Faith’s boots—smaller than the others and marked in the heel with a small, rearing bronc, which was the signature of the man who’d made them in Saber Creek.

  Yakima swung down from Wolf, crouched over the fire ring, removed his right glove, and sifted the ashes through his fingers. “They pulled out early.”

  While Harms dismounted and slopped water into his hat for the beast, Yakima walked around, following the cutthroats’ trail up a notch in the northern wall, about forty yards away from the fire ring. He climbed the wall and kicked around the hoof-pocked caliche, then wandered along the ridge back toward Harms, who’d rolled a cigarette and stood smoking it bareheaded, his thick, sweat-damp brown hair showing the mark of his hat, which was on the ground in front of the mule. He looked up the ridge at Yakima, letting smoke dribble out from between his lips.

  “You have any idea where they’re headed?”

  The half-breed kicked a stone in frustration. “North. That’s all I know. They seem bound and determined to get somewhere . . . but where, and for what reason, I got no idea. Unless . . .”

  Yakima let his voice trail off. He’d been wondering if the men had been sent by Thornton, but he couldn’t imagine the roadhouse manager holding a grudge that long. Two years had passed since Faith had shot him, and he must have realized by now that he’d had it coming.

  Yakima had worried all morning that he’d find Faith dead along the trail. He was infinitely relieved that he hadn’t, that the men who’d grabbed her obviously wanted her for more than their goatish pleasure.

  But if they’d been sent by Thornton, they no doubt intended to take her to Colorado Territory, which meant the trail could be long and hard. He had to catch up to them before their sign gave out— before they decided to start covering their tracks, or before a rain- or windstorm erased it.

  They were moving fast. Yakima figured he might have gained an hour on them, but he wouldn’t be able to continue gaining on them with Harms’s mule holding him back. He’d considered sending the Easterner back to his diggings, but if he was going to get Faith back, he’d need all the help he could get.

  Yakima wandered farther north from the ridge and stopped. His eyes raked the ground around the kidnappers’ tightly grouped hoofprints. He strode a few paces farther forward, then stopped again and squinted down at the tracks moving onto the cutthroat’s trail from the east.

  He removed his glove again and traced the outline of one of the unshod hooves with his fingertips. The tracks were several hours fresher than those of the kidnappers’. He’d spied the same tracks a few miles back, and he’d been carrying a knife blade of dread in his belly ever since.

  His expression must have betrayed his concern, because after he’d scuttled down the ridge and into the arroyo, Harms removed his quirley from between his lips and cocked his head at him curiously. “What’s wrong?”

  “Injuns on their trail.” Yakima grabbed Wolf’s dangling reins. “Four, looks like. Coyoteros, probably.”

  “Shit.”

  “Depending on how you look at it,” Yakima said as he swung up onto the stallion’s back, “it ain’t all bad.”

  “Indians aren’t bad?” Scowling, Harms quickly field-stripped his quirley, then mounted the skitter-stepping mule, which brayed belligerently, flicking its long ears. “Did that bullet crease your brain as well as your skull?”

  “Nothin’ bad about gettin’ our hands on extra horses.” Yakima glanced at Harms. “If you and I both had a couple Indian ponies, we’d overtake that gang before sundown!”

  With that, he gigged Wolf up-canyon in a fury of pounding hooves and lifting dust.

  “What in the name of King George are you talking about?” Harms called behind him, heeling the mule forward. “No,” he add darkly, shaking his head. “Don’t think I wanna know.”

  Chapter 11

  “Jumpin’ Jehosophat!” Brody Harms whispered. “You’re a raving lunatic—you know that?”

  “Been called such, time or two.”

  “You’re going to steal horses from Apaches?”

  “Why not? They’ve done it to me. Seems only fair I should return the favor.”

  They were hunkered down in the rocks and shrubs along a high, sloping mountain wall. Yakima was staring through his field glasses, adjusting the focus until he’d clarified the tendril of smoke rising from a nest of rocks about a hundred and fifty yards downslope and southwest of his and Harms’s position. The smoke was a thin gray wisp among the rocks, boulders, and cacti behind it.

  Yakima and Harms had followed the cutthroats and the four unshod horses trailing them until an hour ago, when the unshod prints had suddenly veered from those of the shod horses, climbing a rocky slope toward a bald ridge. Hiding their own mounts in a secluded hollow, Yakima and Harms had shucked their rifles and climbed the ridge, swinging wide of the Indians’ trail.