Arroyo de la Muerte Page 9

  Yakima shrugged. “Someone was bound to find it sooner or later. You can go home now, Emma. Ride out to your father’s place at the Consquistador and have a hot bath. I’ll maybe see you again someday.”

  Yakima turned again and started away.

  Emma dropped her reins and ran forward. She grabbed Yakima’s arm, stopping him. “What in the hell are you doing, Yakima? What’s this about the ‘new marshal of Apache Springs’.”

  “I don’t have time to explain. I sunk a root too deep here already. I’m pullin’ out. Have a good rest of your life, Emma.” He meant it, and once again he started to head for the livery barn when Emma stopped him yet again, this time by stepping out in front of him and blocking his way.

  “They knocked me on the head an’ tied me up,” she told Yakima. “They were fixing to kill me. Look—one of those ugly, rotten boys ripped my shirt.”

  “Well, I bet you taut him he grabbed the wrong tiger by the tail.” Yakima chuckled. “Like I said, I’m haulin’ my freight.”

  He tried to walk around her but she stepped in front of him again. She planted her gloved fists on her hips and glowered up at him, her pretty, heart-shaped face flushed with fury, hazel eyes glinting bayonets of unadulterated rage. “Seems to me you’re always pushin’ on, aren’t you? Just when things get good an’ tough, there goes Yakima Henry—saddling his horse and running away like a jackass with its tail on fire!”

  She screamed that last so loudly that she startled several passing horses and riders, who uttered surprised exclamations and, drawing back on their mounts’ reins, whipped their heads around to regard the pair—the big half-breed and the pretty blonde—in the middle of the town’s main trace, along the edge of the newly laid railroad tracks.

  Emma’s fury literally rocked Yakima back on his heels.

  “Seems to me, Marshal Henry,” Emma continued, screaming the words while balling her fists at her sides and rising onto the balls of her feet, “you’re nothin’ but a low-down dirty coward! Oh, you can handle a few rowdy drunks well enough, but when things get too complicated for you, you wheel and run! To the next mountain! To the next desert! To the next town with a cheap whorehouse desperate enough to take in an unwashed, uncivilized savage like yourself! So go on, then! Saddle your horse and ride the hell out of Apache Springs! We don’t need a cowardly half-breed lawman here! What a town like Apache Springs needs is a strong, brave man who’ll stay when the chips are down! Go! Go on, you low-down dirty Injun!”

  She’d lunged forward and was punching his chest now, making him stumble backward, reaching for her flying wrists. “Go an’ do what you do best and run!”

  Emma sobbed and wheeled. She strode off down the side street to the north, taking long, stiff, taut-armed, angry strides. She scrubbed a hand across her cheeks and continued walking.

  Yakima looked after her. “Where you goin’?”

  She stopped and wheeled back toward him, her words as bitter and loud as before. “To fetch a fresh horse from the livery barn!”

  “What do you think you’re gonna do?”

  “I’m gonna do what you’d do if you had half a spine. Someone’s gotta do it, so I guess that person’s me!”

  She swung around again and marched off to the north.

  Yakima watched her retreating figure for only a few seconds before he glanced around him. The street had fallen suddenly, bizarrely quiet. He realized now in the aftermath of Emma’s onslaught that traffic had come to a standstill in both directions up the busy main drag. Horseback riders and wagons sat dead still along both sides of the iron rails. The only movement was the dust settling between the tall false facades.

  Pedestrians had halted on the boardwalks to stare toward Yakima, squinting against the sun, some shading their eyes with their hands or with newspapers or parcels. Yakima glanced at Cleve Dundee’s handsome establishment, the Busted Flush, on the corner ahead and on his left, and saw that the saloon’s broad front veranda was filled with men and some young ladies of the working variety also standing frozen as they gazed in shock at the incredulous half-breed lawman. Beyond the cross street to the west of Dundee’s place, a dozen or so doxies dressed in all colors of the rainbow stood silently regarding him from the second-story balcony of Senora Galvez’s tony whorehouse.

  Yakima’s heart thudded when he saw Julia standing on the boardwalk fronting the brothel.

  She must have heard the commotion from the Conquistador, just beyond Senora Galvez’s. Now she stood, as did most of the others at the town’s center, gazing curiously toward the big half-breed standing near the newly laid tracks, looking around him with what was no doubt an expression of deep bewilderment and no little embarrassment at having been dressed down so thoroughly by Hugh Kosgrove’s youngest daughter.

  Emma had made quite an impression not only on Yakima but on the whole damn town…

  Yakima couldn’t see from this distance what expression Julia wore. Yes, he could. He just didn’t want to, because she appeared to be staring at him with pity, maybe a little disgust.

  His thoughts returned to Emma and he crossed the damnable tracks that had ruined this once-quiet town and that were laid over fresh ties that reeked of coal oil in the hot sun. He strode down the side street to the Apache Springs Livery & Feed Barn, a new raw lumber building. Like most of the other buildings in the newly rebuilt town, it smelled sharply of pine resin. Gramps Dawson ran the place but he was nowhere in sight though as Yakima mounted the ramp and stepped through the large open doors, he wasn’t looking for the old coot, only for Emma.

  She’d already picked herself out a horse, a sleek mouse-brown gelding, and was leading him up toward the front of the barn from an open stall door behind her. She had an eye for good horse flesh. Yakima would give her that. The gullo was small and it had good legs and a nice barrel—likely a stalwart little pony that could cover a lot of ground fast.

  “Forget it,” he said, it being his turn to play the adversary, resting his fists on his hips as he faced her squarely.

  “Go to hell,” Emma said as she approached, holding the gelding’s hackamore and lead rope.

  Yakima cursed and kicked a horse apple against a stall partition. “I’ll ride out and have a talk with Collie Bundren, goddammit.”

  Emma stopped a few feet in front of him, gazing up at him, a slightly lower grade of her earlier rage still in her eyes. She studied him skeptically for a moment then said, poutily, “You will?”

  “Yes, I will.”

  “I’ll ride with you.”

  “No.” Yakima shook his head. “You stay here.” He held up a commanding finger. “That’s an order. A direct one.”

  She studied him for another second and then said in her pouty tone again, “Are you stayin’?”

  “For now.”

  Emma dropped the grullo’s rope and hurried up to him, closing her hands around his forearms, gazing up at him with hunger in her eyes. “Oh, Yakima. You know she’s not for you. My sister’s not for you.” She reached up and slid a lock of his still damp hair back behind his left cheek, her eyes soft and passionate now. “You an’ me—we’re the ones who’re meant to be together. We’re both as wild as the desert!”

  “Emma…” he started in a scolding tone.

  Ignoring him, she continued with, “You don’t belong in the Conquistador. Hell, a man like you doesn’t belong in town. You belong out at that old adobe in the Javelina Bluffs—you an’ me together. We can live out there, far from…”

  Emma let her voice trail off as they both heard the approach of footsteps just outside the livery barn. Yakima’s mouth turned dry when he saw Julia approach the barn’s ramp. She was squinting against the sunlight, shading her eyes with her hand, trying to see into the barn’s dense shadows.

  “Yakima?” she called, tentative.

  Yakima turned back to Emma. God forgive him for what he was about do. “Yeah,” he said loudly enough to be heard outside the barn. “Yeah, maybe you’re right, Emma. Maybe we should marry. It’s y
ou I love, after all!”

  He drew the young woman to him, closed his mouth over hers.

  He kissed Emma but his mind was on Julia. He could see the older Kosgrove daughter standing just outside the barn, at the bottom of the ramp, staring in from beneath a shielding hand. He heard her draw a sharp breath that was half a groan. She stumbled backward as though she’d been slapped. She wheeled and strode away.

  When she was gone, Yakima pulled his head back from Emma’s, released her from his brawny grip. She smiled up at him, intimately. “Yakima...”

  Heart hammering his breastbone, he stepped back away from her. “Stay in town. I’ll be back soon.”

  She considered that, pulling her mouth corners down, then nodded. “Okay. Be careful.”

  He barely heard that last admonishment beneath the clattering bells inside his head, aggravating his hangover. He retrieved his saddle and bridle from the tack room then, without glancing again at Emma, his mind on Julia striding away from him, heartbroken, he pushed through a side door into the corral to saddle his horse.

  ***

  Yakima wasn’t a mile out of town before he had to rein his big black stallion, Wolf, to a halt. He half-fell out of his saddle, hit the ground, and promptly aired his paunch. Since there was nothing in his belly, he vomited only bile.

  The same thing happened two more times as he rode southwest of Apache Springs. He wasn’t sure if his nausea was due to the hangover or for what he’d just done to Julia, ending their relationship once and for all, or to the overall mess he’d gotten himself into in Apache Springs.

  Likely, it was everything, hangover included.

  After the third time he’d had to vanquish his innards of the sickness eating away at them, he heaved himself uncertainly to his feet, uncapped the canteen he’d filled with cool well water before leaving town, and took several deep pulls. The water plunged down his throat and into his belly, instantly making him feel a little better and tamping down the heat that was raging from his own inner furnace.

  When he’d capped the canteen and hung it over his saddle horn, he stepped back to his saddlebags. Emma had retrieved a ham and egg sandwich from the Bon Ton Café in Apache Springs. She run out into the street as Yakima had been leaving town and, trotting along beside him, she’d dropped it into his left saddlebag pouch.

  “For when you bottom out,” she told him. She’d recognized from his deathly pallor that he was in a bad, bad way.

  At the time, Yakima hadn’t been able to think about the food without that alone making him ill. Now, however, he’d needed something inside him.

  He grabbed the sandwich wrapped in cheesecloth out of his saddlebag, mounted Wolf, and booted the horse on down the narrow trail through the chaparral. As he rode, he took large bites out of the sandwich. With each bite he felt the slow return of his strength and overall health despite the whiskey sweat still oozing from every pore.

  “Thanks, Emma,” he muttered, chewing the last bit of the sandwich and tossing the cheesecloth into the hot, dry wind. “You’re not bad. No, not bad at all…”

  Maybe she’d been right. Maybe he should throw in with the girl. They could hole up out in that old adobe in the Javelina Buttes, and…

  He shook his head. That was just the sandwich and the hangover talking. And the warm, supple, female way she’d felt in his arms an hour ago, her pliant lips pressing against his own, her breasts swelling against his chest as he’d kissed her.

  Again, he shook his head. It might be nice to think about—shacking up with a pretty girl like he’d once done with Faith. But Faith was the only woman he could have stuck it out with. She’d been special. There was only one Faith and she was moldering in a grave up in Colorado. If he tried hitching up with any other woman, they’d be at each other’s throats within a month.

  He had to get out of this country. Everything was closing in on him. Just as soon as he’d settled this matter with the Bundrens and Rusty Tull, he’d pull his picket pin. His home was the tall and uncut, the high and rocky, the distant mountains, the lonely canyons and arroyos.

  He’d die out there someday, no one around to bury him. And that was just fine with Yakima Henry.

  Chapter 12

  It took Yakima another hour to find his way down into that lost, unnamed canyon--the canyon that had shown up on no official map but only in the wild scribblings of a sun-crazed pilgrim or two who’d stumbled on it by accident and whose hearts had nearly exploded when they’d spied the treasure there in the little, ancient church built by the Jesuits. The chasm wasn’t easy to find even when you’d visited previously, for it was hidden behind a jumble of rocks and boulders and bristling chaparral stippling a slope rising gently toward the canyon’s lip.

  Finally, Yakima picked out horse and wagon tracks in the chasm’s general vicinity. The Bundrens’ tracks, most likely. He followed the sign through a narrow corridor that penetrated the rubble and then down the long, gentle slope toward the canyon’s bottom. The sign indicated that the two wagons had meandered through the rocks and boulders and jutting cactus. Yakima saw where they’d stopped and where Emma had apparently confronted them. There were signs of a scuffle, and blood on a rock.

  Emma’s blood.

  That made Yakima’s heart quicken unexpectedly. He had no feelings for the girl. At least, he told himself he didn’t. Still, seeing her blood there on that rock lit a fire of anger just behind his heart. He didn’t like it that they’d hurt her. He didn’t like that at all.

  He’d dismounted to inspect the mix of prints. Now he took another deep pull from his canteen and poured some water over his head. Normally in the desert, he’d ration himself, but he’d find more water on the canyon floor, in a well by the old church. He mopped his sweaty, dust face with his bandanna, set his hat back on his head, then swung back up onto Wolf’s back. He urged the stallion on down the slope.

  Fifteen minutes later, he reached the canyon’s rubble-strewn floor and headed southwest along the base of the canyon wall. Not only was the canyon hard to find from up on the desert, but the church was hard to find even once you were down inside the canyon, for it looked like just another one of the cracked and half-pulverized boulders that lay strewn around it, some as larger as the hovel itself, which was roughly the same size as your average house of worship in any frontier settlement.

  Yakima drew up to the old place, its mottled tan walls cracked and pitted and streak with white bird stains. One wall was crumbling, as was the belfry. A shadow leaned out from the church’s right front corner as the sun angled high over the canyon, starting its westward descent. Yakima looked around carefully, spying no one. There were signs of recent visitors, including wagon and horse tracks, but at the moment the place looked deserted.

  Deserted except for a Mojave green rattler poking its head and several inches of its thick, stone-colored body out of the base of the church’s cracked wall, on the lower right front corner, just right of the large, empty doorway. The snake stopped, apparently spying Yakima, probing the air with its dark, forked tongue. The viper formed a V as it began retreating back into the crack through which it had started.

  “Hello the church!” Yakima called.

  The only response was the tom-tom like beat of insects in the brush and rocks surrounding the place and the piping of desert birds. A wind had picked up and was making a low roar as it rolled up and down the canyon, lifting small curtains of swirling dust. It blew Yakima’s long hair around his cheeks and shoulders.

  “Hello!” he called, louder this time. “Collie Bundren, it’s Yakima Henry from Apache Springs!”

  Still, there was only the birds and the insects and the wind.

  “Rusty!” he yelled.

  He rode into the chaparral flanking the church, to old Jesus’s personal quarters, which was a small, crumbling stone cabin. Nothing there, either. It didn’t look like the Bundrens had discovered it, for there was no recent sign around the place, which was even better concealed than the church. Emma had introduced Y
akima to Jesus’s cabin not long after Yakima had first come to this godforsaken, trouble-bit country, soon after he’d met wild Emma out in the desert and she’d contested him for the deer they’d both been hunting but which Yakima had shot.

  He rode back to the church, took a quick look inside, his heart catching at the sight of all the treasure there--the walls were literally paneled in old, age-begrimed, dusty gold, and more treasure was mounded atop the ancient altar, inside a moldering Spanish treasure box. The floor was even made of gold tiles! The Jesuits had parked a gold cannon inside the church, as well. All told, the treasure hidden away inside the ancient ruin must have reached into the many millions of dollars.

  More money than Yakima would know what to do with. More money than he could do anything good with, that was for sure. He wanted no part of it. Besides, he was just superstitious enough to believe in a vague, half-conscious way in the hex Emma claimed the old Apache witch had put on the treasure and thus on anyone trying to abscond with it.

  He turned Wolf around to face down canyon.

  He couldn’t see much. The canyon was long and bottle-neck shaped at this end, its floor choked with sand- and limestone debris that had plunged from the high ridge walls during the earthquake that had killed the Apache slaves. Brush and cacti of all shapes and sizes grew among the rubble, making it a devil’s playground in which only the smaller and fleetest footed of the desert creatures forayed.

  Peering to his left, he frowned. He saw something in that direction, maybe fifty yards away, that he hadn’t seen before. He clucked Wolf toward the curious object then reined up to stare down at the grisly images of what he’d seen before—three skeletons staked out on the ground beneath the warning Jesus had scratched into the lower ridge wall:

  TURN BACK OR DIE. RETROCEDEN O MORIR.