.45-Caliber Desperado (13 page)

“You drop back. Get into that trough back there.” The federal lawman glanced at the slight depression twenty yards behind him—a shallow gully that carried runoff during the wet times. “I'll cover you.”

“I haven't seen him. I think he's gone.”

“Just do as I say, Sheriff,” Spurr said, seating a fresh round and staring tensely down the brass-framed rifle's smoking barrel at the rocky mound. The bushwhacker had likely been firing a Sharps. Possibly a Big Fifty.

A buffalo gun like that could blow a fist-sized hole in a man, tear an arm or a leg clean off.

“All right,” Mason called when he'd reached the trough.

Spurr stayed where he was. The iron crab in his chest was tightening up on him but it wasn't hurting too bad. His leaky heart was thudding slowly, stubbornly. Keeping his rifle trained on the knoll, he used his left hand to pluck cartridges from his shell belt and to slide them, one after another, into his Winchester's receiver.

“Like I said, Spurr—that bastard's gone,” said Mason with an impatient air.

Just then a silhouetted, hatted head appeared above and between two rocks atop the knoll. The man swung the big gun down. “Oh, he is, is he?” Spurr snarled as black smoke puffed up from amongst the rocks and a stone-sized chunk of lead hammered the ground two feet in front of him, spraying dirt and grass up across his thighs.

The big gun thundered like a fast-approaching prairie storm.

To himself, he muttered, “Mason, you're so damn full o' shit . . .” as he triggered three more quick rounds and watched the slugs blow up dirt and rock atop the knoll. The silhouetted head had dropped back down behind the rocks.

Spurr ejected a smoking brass casing and seated another fresh one as he cursed sharply through gritted teeth. “Come on out if you wanna play, you chicken-livered son of a bitch!”

“You best get back down here, Spurr!” Mason called from the gully.

“Bullshit!” Spurr looked to his left, then to his right. He saw a hummock there that would offer cover of sorts if the dry-gulcher opened up again with his cannon. “Cover me, Mason. I'm gonna get around that bastard.”

He planted a fist on his thigh and heaved himself to his feet much more slowly than he'd intended. His knees popped and cracked, and pain from his recent tumble hammered through his shoulder and hip. His heart chugged like an old locomotive and took a while to get thumping in earnest as the old marshal rambled along the edge of the hummock, heading south through a slight crease in the prairie.

Behind him, Mason opened up with his Winchester. The rifle cracked. Bullets spanged.

Running hard, moccasin-clad ankles twisting between bulky clumps of bear grass and cactus, he made a path partway around the base of the rocky-crested knoll. Another rise humped south and east of it. Spurr gained it, dropped behind a two-foot-high shelf of eroded rock sheathed in grease-wood, and watched the tail end of a prairie rattler slither into a crack in the rock two feet away from him, the snake's three-inch rattle quivering and sounding like a shaken, sand-filled gourd.

“No offense taken, viper,” Spurr rasped, trying to catch his breath as he knelt behind the low escarpment. “I didn't wanna shake your hand, neither.”

Looking north, he saw the dry-gulcher breaking brush down the knoll, heading toward a horse tethered to a lone tree about a hundred yards east. He was a big man in a blue shirt, buckskin pants, and a black, bullet-crowned hat, with a long gray ponytail flopping down his back in a hide-wrapped braid. He ran with a hitch in his step, bespeaking age or gimpiness.

Spurr bore down on him with the Winchester and squeezed the trigger.

Dust puffed just beyond the man, on the side of another knoll. He whipped around suddenly, wide-eyed.

“There you go,” Spurr chuckled savagely, ejecting the spent brass and seating fresh. “How'd you like them apples, you curly fuckin' wolf?”

The dry-gulcher swung around and ran limping off behind a boulder only a little larger than the man himself. Spurr fired again, hammering the face of the boulder and causing the ambusher to jerk back, shake his head against the ringing in his ears, and finger dust from his eyes.

As he raised the big, octagonal-barreled rifle, Spurr drew a bead on the man's forehead, allowing for the distance, elevation, and breeze. It was seventy yards—not a hard shot for a practiced rifleman like Spurr, who'd been using the same rifle now for nearly fifteen years of snipe hunting.

He squeezed the trigger.

The bushwhacker nodded as if responding to a question posed by someone behind him. Then he disappeared.

Spurr ejected the spent brass, seated fresh, and waited. He looked around.

There was nothing out here but low knolls peppered with the occasional boulder, cactus, and sage. A hawk hunted to the south, and a jackrabbit leapt from one rock to another before hunkering low in a shade patch.

The breeze rustled gently.

Finally, Spurr rose creakily and, holding his rifle up high across his chest and continuing to rake his gaze around cautiously, traversed the space between himself and the bushwhacker. The big man lay stretched out on his back behind his covering rock. His hat lay nearby. He had a big, rawbone, pitted face with about three days' worth of pewter-brown beard stubble. His eyes were half open, lips parted, showing the uneven edges of his upper front teeth which were yellow as clamshells.

“Miserable bastard,” Spurr said. “Why in the holy hell were you pot-shooting us?”

Movement caught his eye, and he swung abruptly around, but then let the rifle sag in his hands. Mason was tramping over the hill behind which they'd been ambushed. He carried his rifle low in his right hand, and dust puffed up around the long-legged Texas bastard's boots as he walked in that long, straight stride of his and which Spurr had once had himself, a few years ago.

But Spurr had never had the young sheriff's unearned cockiness—an arrogance which the man still had even after he'd caused Spurr to kill a mixed-up young woman who'd fallen prey to the charms of Marvin the Maiden Killer, though she probably hadn't been aware of that devil's nickname or reputation.

“You get him?” the sheriff asked.

Spurr grumbled and returned his gaze to the dead man, whose foul body odor nearly made Spurr's eyes water. “The question is,” the marshal said, “where'd he come from? And who's he with?”

As if in answer to his question, Spurr spied a dust plume rising in the southeast beyond several hills. He stared at the dust for a time. Could be a stage or drovers hazing cattle to a shipping center.

Could also be where this smelly dead man came from . . .

“I'm gonna check that out,” he said as Mason walked up, stonily regarding the dead man. Spurr stuck two fingers into his mouth and whistled. “You go see about McQueen and his men. I'll be along shortly.”

“You sure you oughta ride over there alone?” Mason had turned his attention to the dust plumes. “That's enough dust for a passel of others of this man's stripe.”

“You do as you're told, Sheriff.”

“Pullin' that federal business on me, eh, Spurr?” Mason tilted his head back and looked smugly out from beneath drooping eyelids. “Well, go ahead. Get your old ass shot off. I couldn't care less.”

“Don't worry,” Spurr said, watching Cochise gallop toward him, the roan's trailing reins bouncing and flipping along the ground. “I don't expect you to sing at my funeral, Mason.” He tightened his latigo then swung into the saddle.

“Hey, Spurr.”

The marshal jerked back on Cochise's reins and turned to where Mason stood holding his rifle across his thighs. The sheriff brushed a gloved hand across his nose. “Sorry about the girl.”

The apology had come out of nowhere. Spurr felt as though a mule had kicked him. He didn't know what to say to that, so he grumbled as he swung Cochise around, flipped his rein ends against the big roan's hip, and galloped off toward the rising dust.

A half hour later, he was hunkered behind several poplars and ash trees, adjusting the army field glasses he was holding to his craggy face. He was on the side of a bluff, looking into a broad valley through which half a dozen large wagons, like army ambulances, were passing from west to east, quartering gradually southward.

Only the men driving the wagons and leading them and following on horseback were not wearing army blues.

They were dressed in buckskins or denim, or duck or checked wool trousers, calico shirts, brush jackets, and shabby hats. They were bearded and long-haired. One outrider wore an eye patch under the brim of a sugarloaf sombrero adorned with grizzly claws. Several others wore tattoos on their sun-bronzed, heavily muscled arms laid bare to the sun.

Spurr scrubbed his jaw as he lowered the glasses, a prickling dread climbing his spine. A mix of whites and Indians, these men. Half-breeds and every other kind of breed. Some with Mexican blood. Granite-faced desperadoes of the foulest sort. A good dozen in all.

Spurr raised the glasses again, shuttled the two spheres of magnified vision back and forth between the wagons.

In the wagon boxes, at least a half dozen per wagon, were children of varying ages. Young boys as well as girls. Most of the children rode sullenly, eyes downcast, heads rolling with the wagons' pitch and sway. They were dusty and sunburned and appeared to be in shock.

One little girl with bright yellow hair was bawling and reaching over the tailgate of the last wagon in the line, toward a man with dark red hair riding a brown-and-white pinto behind the girl's wagon. The man road lazily, chin dipped to his chest—asleep and oblivious to the girl's desperate cries.

Spurr lowered the glasses, bunching his cheeks in a pained look, and cursed. His weary heart hiccupped.

“I LIKE THIS one,” Camilla said.

“Which one?”

“The tan one. It looks the best.”

They were in a hardware/clothing tent near the boxlike depot on the as yet unnamed railroad encampment's southern perimeter. It was their third day in the camp, and Camilla had thought it was time for Cuno to acquire some new clothes and shed the smelly ones he'd garnered from White-Eye. Cuno was trying on hats in the cracked mirror hanging from a nail in the tent's center post, shelves of dry goods heaped on tables around him.

The muscular young freighter set the cream Stetson he'd been trying on back onto a stack of other such hats and took the tan one from Camilla. “I used to have a tan one . . . before the warden took it, along with my rifle and everything else I own. Sure am glad you got Renegade.”

He leaned down and kissed her lips gratefully before sweeping his hair back and snugging the tan hat down tight on his head. He looked in the mirror. The hat was broad-brimmed, good for sunny country, with a medium-high crown banded with braided rawhide.

“It fits.” He turned once more to Camilla. “You like it?”

“It's the best one.”

“All right, then . . .”

He let his voice trail off as movement out the tent's open flap caught his attention. A small-combination spur train had pulled up to the train station a short time ago, when he'd been picking out denim pants and a simple blue work shirt. Several people had detrained—salesmen and whores looking for a new place to ply their trades, mostly.

But now the door of a stock car opened, and several men were leading their horses down the loading ramp, the shod hooves clomping noisily. The men had shaggy, hard looks about them. Rifles jutted from the boots of their saddled horses.

“What is it?” Camilla asked, turning to look out the tent flap.

“A whole passel of riders.”

He watched more men lead horses down the ramp and gather in a large group before the stock car. An ugly, dapper little man in a brown suit and derby hat stood before them. The man who appeared to be the leader of the bunch was talking to the man in the derby, who stood a good head shorter than the group leader, the tips of his fingers buried in his vest pockets. He bounced nervously on the toes of his brown leather shoes.

“Si,”
Camilla said, frowning.

Still wearing the tan hat, as well as the denims and shirt he'd picked out, though he was still in his stocking feet, having not yet decided on a new pair of boots, Cuno began moving toward the door. Behind him, the bald, aproned proprietor cleared his throat.

“That'll . . . uh . . . that'll be one dollar and fifty cents extra for the hat. Handmade by John B. Stetson himself, of course.”

Cuno glanced over his shoulder at the man, who stood behind his plankboard counter, grinning unctuously.

“Don't worry,” Camilla growled. “You'll get your money, senor. We don't rob hardware stores.”

“Of course, of course,” the man responded quickly. “I only thought you might be curious is all.”

Cuno stood in the open tent door. The newcomers and horses were gathered for a time around the derby-hatted man, who jerked his thumb toward the heart of the encampment, and then the leader turned to a couple of his other men, his mustached mouth moving as he spoke. One of the others nodded, and the leader led his horse away from the derby-hatted gent and began walking past the hardware/clothing tent toward the hotels and saloons on the other side of the hamlet.

A Colt pistol poked up from a holster tied low on his right, chap-clad thigh. Another jutted from a cross-draw holster on his other side. He wasn't wearing a badge, but that didn't mean these men weren't lawmen.

If not lawmen, who were they? And what were they doing here in this unnamed little railroad stop so heavily armed and looking so grimly intent?