The Killing Breed (23 page)
Authors: Frank Leslie
Around four o’clock that afternoon, with the sun angling down behind him and the country ahead bleeding shadows, he pulled down hard on the brake levers, then braced himself as the engine’s floor lurched beneath him. He fell up against the cab’s front panel but continued pulling down on the levers until the train had bucked, screeched, and chugged to a stop not far from a tin water tank on a high wooden pedestal.
They were in a shade-dappled valley strewn with boulders and spinelike stone ridges. Far ahead, down a gradual hill and just north of where the rails made their long, slow swing south around a distant mountain range, a village appeared—white adobe hovels and corrals nestled in sage and bordered on one side by a brush-sheathed stream.
Yakima grabbed his hat off the lever he’d snagged it on, then leaped down from the engine and began tramping back along the gravel-paved grade toward the stock car at the rear. The horses clomped and whinnied, bouncing the car as though it were still moving.
“Where the hell are we?” came a garbled cry from the flatcar behind the wood tender.
Yakima turned to see Bob, Steve, and Brody Harms sitting up from where they’d obviously been napping amongst the strapped-down crates and barrels sprouting picks, shovels, bars, and sundry other track-repair equipment. All three looked as though they’d just been awakened from graves in which they’d been moldering for fifty years.
“End of the line,” Yakima said, continuing on past the men toward the flatcar. “At least
our
line.”
our
line.”
He leaped onto the narrow ledge running along the side of the stock car and gave one of the doors a tug. He glanced back toward the flatbed from which Harms was easing himself down, placing his bowler ever-so-gently on his head, as though it were a crown of thorns.
The other two were still looking around blinking through the mussed hair in their eyes. Bob reached blindly around for a nearby bottle while Steve lay back against a burlap sack, hacking phlegm from his throat.
“I
no comprende
,” Harms said, wincing as he pulled his hands slowly away from his hat. “I thought we met up with the north-south line in Belen.”
no comprende
,” Harms said, wincing as he pulled his hands slowly away from his hat. “I thought we met up with the north-south line in Belen.”
“We would.” Yakima drew the other door open and was met with Wolf’s eager, bugling whinny. “But we’re takin’ a shortcut.” He turned to step into the stock car, then stopped suddenly and swung back around to Harms. “If you’re still in, that is. There’s only three of those sons o’ bitches left, and I reckon I can handle ’em if you wanna go on home. You look like you just throwed down from the moon.”
Judging by the Easterner’s pain-stretched lips and bloodshot eyes, his head must have felt like a barrel-sized, open wound. The hard ride they were facing might kill him . . . or make him wish he were dead.
“Ah, shut up,” he grouched, leaping up onto the stock car and doing his best to pretend the maneuver didn’t feel like a war club to his head. “You’re preachier than my old Presbyterian pastor. Why don’t you quit yackin’ so we can saddle these horses and get after your woman?”
“Hair of the dog?” Steve said, raising the half-empty bottle, his big yellow teeth showing beneath his thick red mustache.
“Don’t mind if I do.”
Harms gigged his horse up to the car and reached down for the whiskey. When he’d taken a swig, he offered it to Yakima, who shook his head. The Easterner took another, smaller pull, then gave the bottle back to Steve.
“That should deaden the pain for the first few miles, anyway.” Harms looked at Steve and Bob. “You boys best head down to the village yonder, buy yourselves a couple of good horses and high-tail it to Mexico. The railroad will no doubt be along for their work train.”
“Ha!” Bob howled, slapping his thigh. “Mexico, here we come!”
Yakima pinched his hat brim to the two men, who’d resumed their dog-hair imbibing with the fervor of Irish track layers on their first trip to San Francisco. “Obliged for the ride!” he called over his shoulder as he jogged Wolf and the trailing Apache pony up beside the locomotive.
He turned the horses around the cowcatcher, then down the other side of the grade and up through the rocky, sparsely pine-stippled valley, angling northwest.
During that first hour of hard riding, he glanced behind a couple times, surprised to see Brody Harms staying close off the Apache pony’s bushy tail. The hungover prospector fell behind after dark, but never so far that Yakima didn’t hear his hoof thuds. Once, when they’d stopped to water the horses at a run-out spring in the foothills of a vast range humping up blackly in the east, he heard Harms retching off in the shrubs.
“You all right?” Yakima asked the man as he stumbled back toward the half-breed and the horses, wiping his mouth with a red handkerchief.
“Peachy,” Harms said as he swung back into his saddle.
They switched horses around nine o’clock that night, and continued riding until after midnight. As the terrain had grown rougher the farther they’d angled northwest toward Trinidad on the Colorado-New Mexico border, they stopped for a brief rest about three o’clock in the morning.
They threw down some jerky and biscuits that Harms had picked up in the rail town of Salida, and shrugged into their cold-weather gear. They were gaining elevation, and frost limned the piñons and lodgepole pines, and their breath puffed in the chill air, glinting in the starlight.
Later that night they rode onto a cougar feeding on a deer, and both men fired several shots as the cat chased them through a shallow canyon. They were riding too fast for accurate shooting, but they must have discouraged their feline stalker, for the savage snarls soon faded after they left the arroyo.
A half hour later they felt safe enough to sheathe their rifles and to turn their attention to the vague horse trail ahead of them.
Noon of the next day found them jogging along the broad main street of a little town perched on a high, windy plain under a mass of low, snow-spitting clouds. Evidently the place had once been a Mexican pueblito. There was a grim-looking adobe church at the far end, but the Mexican mud huts had long since been outnumbered by two-and three-story, false-fronted business buildings constructed of whipsawed pine boards. They stood tall along both sides of the wide street in which frozen mud puddles wore a dusting of new snow.
The town looked deserted except for a few stock ponies tied about halfway down the left side of the street. They fronted a saloon called Lucky Joe’s from which soft piano music emanated, as did a woman’s screeching, raucous laughter. A brick chimney crawling up the building’s far side fed gray smoke to the steely sky, tingeing the brittle air with the spicy, succulent smell of chili.
“Might as well rest the horses for a couple of hours,” Yakima said, angling toward the hitch rail. He didn’t want to stop, but killing the horses as well as themselves would get them nowhere. Besides, they were making good time and were likely halfway to Denver. There’d be no point arriving ahead of the train. “Let’s pad our bellies and get a drink.”
“Didn’t I tell you?” Harms said behind the scarf he’d wrapped around his mouth. “I’ve sworn off liquor. Yessir, riding with you and a hangover did away with the whole notion. I may even rejoin the church!”
“Get yourself a God-fearin’ woman?”
“Don’t push it.”
Yakima gave a wry snort as he looped his horses’ reins around the hitch rail. Wolf had nothing but disdain for the Indian ponies, and the feeling was mutual, so the half-breed tied the horses a good distance apart.
As Wolf and the Apache mounts shared evil sidelong glances, heads up and snorting despite their trail fatigue, he loosened Wolf’s saddle cinch and slipped his bridle bit so the horse could drink freely at the stock tank flanking the hitch rail.
A jellied layer of ice had formed on the water’s surface. Yakima stirred the straw-flecked black water around with a stick, then joined Brody Harms on the saloon’s front porch. Both men glanced at the sky hovering low over the town’s rooftops, wood smoke skeining from brick chimneys as small granular flakes continued to fall.
“Well, it’s winter,” Yakima said with a resigned air, lowering the collar of his jaguar coat and stamping snow from his moccasin boots. “We could run into more of this the farther we head north, so we best be prepared for it.” As he turned toward the saloon, he added, “We’ll lay in some grain before we head out again.”
He tripped the latch of the saloon’s glass-topped door, in which LUCKY JOE’S had been printed in green gold-leaf lettering adorned with grinning leprechauns, and moved on into the saloon, spurs chinking over the puncheons as Harms moved in behind him.
The woman was laughing again, and as Harms closed the door, Yakima removed his hat to sweep snow from the brim. Then he tramped toward the bar running along the deep, low-ceilinged room’s right wall.
As he did, he raked his eyes around, noting the eight men in drover’s garb sitting at two tables to the left of the bar. An enormously fat, round-faced woman in a scanty gown and wolf shawl was perched heavily atop the knee of a red-faced gent with long blond hair, her stout arms wrapped around the man’s thick neck. As her head turned toward Yakima—as all the heads in the room did— her laughter stopped abruptly, and a frown dug into her painted forehead.
“What do we have here?” Yakima heard the woman mutter as he stepped up to the bar.
A tall, lanky gent had been placing bottles on the high shelves of the back bar. Now, as the room fell silent behind him, he glanced toward the door over his right shoulder, his pale blue eyes flicking between Yakima and Harms while acquiring a troubled cast.
“Uh, take note of the sign,” he said, turning full around and pointing with the corked bottle in his fist. Long, thick gray hair hung to his shoulders, and he spoke in a faint Irish accent.
Yakima glanced at a chalkboard nailed to a ceiling joist to his left. On the board the silhouette of an Indian head had been chalked, complete with hawkish nose and feathered headdress. A large X was slashed across the figure and, as though for emphasis, NO INJUNS had been scrawled in poor penmanship below.
The bartender, who wore an open fur coat over a bloodstained apron, sneered. “Drew a picture for those who can’t read.”
He smiled at Yakima.
Harms glanced at his partner and winced. “Oh dear.”
Chapter 19
Yakima stared across the bar at the Irish apron, his face implacable. But his chest was burning. Before he could reach across the bar to grab the man by his shirt, Brody Harms stepped up beside him.
“That’s ridiculous,” the Easterner said with a dry laugh. “Can’t you see Yakima’s green eyes? He probably has as much white blood as you do, my friend!”
From a nearby table, someone growled into the silence, which was relieved only by the crackling, sighing woodstove, “Half-breeds is even worse.”
The woman chuckled.
The burn in Yakima’s chest grew, and his jaws were set so hard they ached. He didn’t want to cause trouble. Faith needed him. But the old fury at being treated like a mongrel cur that had wandered in out of the brush was one he couldn’t deny.
His Colt was in his hand before he could stop himself, bucking and roaring.
The slugs shattered first one bottle standing on a beer keg behind the bar, and then the other bottle standing beside it. Glass and liquor flew against the back bar cabinet. Shards crashed onto the floor.
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