Authors: Frank Leslie
The Killing Breed (12 page)
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!”
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.
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.
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.
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