The Killing Breed (13 page)
Authors: Frank Leslie
“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 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
?”
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.
Yakima intended to recon the Apache camp and then, depending on where the bivouac was located and how good a view the Indians had of the surrounding terrain, devise a way to slip into the bivouac and make off with the Apaches’ mustangs.
The half-breed’s intention was not only to acquire a couple of Indian ponies for Harms, but to secure an extra one for himself. With two mounts apiece, they could ride twice as fast and overtake the cutthroats who’d kidnapped Faith in half the time it would take them with only Wolf and Harms’s increasingly problematic mule.
“Indeed, it does
sound
fair,” Harms growled, having removed his spectacles to rub the dust around with his gloved fingers. “But I thought our intention was to get your wife back, not get ourselves killed in the process.”
sound
fair,” Harms growled, having removed his spectacles to rub the dust around with his gloved fingers. “But I thought our intention was to get your wife back, not get ourselves killed in the process.”
“You’re right.” Yakima turned to the stocky, sunburned Easterner hunkered down beside him. “This wasn’t part of the bargain. I’m gonna need an extra horse, but there’s no reason why you should risk your hide. You and your mule head home.”
Frowning, holding his bowler hat in his thick hands, Harms opened his mouth to speak, but Yakima cut him off with “There’s no dishonor in being smart.”
Harms looked at him pensively for a stretched second, then turned onto his back, looking around at the penny-colored rocks humping out of the brush around them. “I ever tell you why I came out here?”
“You said somethin’ about not getting along with your family.”
“That was part of it. I’ve always been the black sheep in the Harms household, favoring art and music more than the company my father owns. Then, there was this girl I married. I’d loved her since I was eight years old. Looked a lot like Faith. Redefined female beauty.”
With the back of his hand, he brushed dust from his frayed hat brim. “I came home from my father’s office early one day, and found her doing the mattress dance with a young man she and I had gone to school with. A kid from the wrong side of the tracks, you might say. Turned out she’d always been in love with
him
, just as I’d always been in love with
her
. She’d married me because my father convinced her it would be in the best interest of her and her family.”
him
, just as I’d always been in love with
her
. She’d married me because my father convinced her it would be in the best interest of her and her family.”
Yakima shook his head. “I’m sorry, Brody, but what’s this got to do with stealing Apache horses?”
“The next day, I packed a bag and a bedroll, left a note on my father’s desk, and jumped the train west. I rode the rails aimlessly for nigh on a month. Didn’t know what I was going to do until, somewhere around Santa Fe, I threw in with some prospectors and decided to head out after my own El Dorado.
“Now I live alone in a couple of cramped cabins in the middle of this godforsaken desert, drawing pictures of rocks and cactus by lamplight at night, and hammering rocks by day.” Harms turned to Yakima sharply, squinting an eye behind his dusty spectacles. “What you and Faith have is a rare thing. I’d like to help you hold on to it.” He took a deep breath. “Now, let’s show those Apaches how to steal horses.”
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