The Killing Breed (27 page)
Authors: Frank Leslie
She snapped her hands to his shoulders and began to push him away. She stopped, then flattened her palms against his shoulders. Though his rancid breath nearly made her wretch, she opened her mouth for him slightly, let him slip his tongue between her lips.
He pulled away slightly, his eyes meeting hers from two inches away—so close she could see the grime in the lines of his face, the tattoo in his foreheadthe color of old rifle bluing. “That’s more like it.”
He chuckled and kissed her again. Letting herself be kissed, she could feel the heat building in him as he mashed his mouth against hers, holding her painfully, his fingers gouging her back and arms. He slid one of his hands inside her coat and began unbuttoning her blouse, working hastily, grunting and sighing and wincing as he kissed her, his lust consuming him.
When he had her blouse unbuttoned, he shoved her away, grabbed the low neck of her camisole in both his fists, and tore it straight down the middle in one violent jerk. She leaned back against the curtained window, throwing her shoulders back, breasts out.
He knelt on the edge of the bunk, staring at her, his nostrils expanding and contracting, breath wheezing up from his throat.
As he moved toward her once more, his hungry eyes on her breasts, she sat up suddenly and flung her open right hand against his face.
The solid
smack
resounded about the small compartment.
smack
resounded about the small compartment.
Temple’s head jerked with the force of the blow, his hair brushing down over his eyes. Rage burned in those dark orbs, replaced quickly with befuddlement.
“You can have me,” Faith said just loudly enough to be heard above the car’s slowly clacking wheels as they pulled away from the station. “But first I want your promise that you’ll let me off the train at the first water stop.”
Temple glowered at her, swaying and jerking slightly with the rock and pitch of the car. The bracket lamp cast shadows into the hollows of his cheeks, turned his eyes to coals on either side of the cross tattoo.
Faith held her breath, waiting.
If he gave his promise, he’d keep it. He was a man of honor, however dubious.
Unexpectedly, the outlaw leader’s lips spread into a grin. He chuckled. The chuckle turned into a laugh, and he threw his head back on his shoulders, guffawing.
When his laughter had dwindled, he looked down at her once more and shook his head. “Once a whore, always a whore. Ain’t that right?”
The words hit her like a clenched first. Frustration combined with anger made her tremble. Tears dribbled down her cheeks.
“Please,” she begged, her voice quaking. “I’ll do anything. . . .”
“Why?”
She stared at him, brushed tears from a cheek with the back of her hand, and hardened her voice with bald disdain. “You could never understand, Temple.”
He narrowed his puzzled eyes at her, cheeks flushing with fury, as though in a losing battle not only with her but with something in his own mind. “You’re a fool. You could have any man you wanted. But you chose that half-breed, and now look where you’re headed.”
Shaking his head, he got down off the bunk and grabbed his hat off the wall hook. He snugged his hat on his head and opened the door to the sounds of snoring and the train’s endless muffled roar. As he glanced back at Faith, she drew her blouse across her breasts and raised her knees to her chest.
“I’m goin’ out for a smoke, but I’ll be watchin’ the door.”
Temple stared at her, frowning as though trying to see inside her brain. Finally, he snorted caustically, shook his head, and dug around in his shirt pocket. He flipped a fifty-cent piece onto the bunk beside Faith.
“There you go—that’s for the look. I’ve never cheated a whore in my life, and I ain’t about to start now.”
Temple winked, his eyes still bright with a confused, toxic mix of humiliation and barely contained fury, and went out, closing the door behind him.
Faith wrapped her arms around her legs, rested her head on her knees, and succumbed to her misery.
Chapter 22
Yakima waited until he was good and full of the Irish barman’s chili before he tossed a fifty-cent piece onto the counter for the refills of both chili and whiskey.
“’Bout time.” Harms stood beside him, where he’d been standing tensely, glancing at the owl-eyed cardplayers flanking them as he sipped his whiskey and waited for Yakima to finish his meal. Ironically, the prospector said, “Are you sure you don’t want some more?”
“Nah.”
Yakima pinched his hat brim at the Irishman who stood off down the counter, scowling at him and Harms while rubbing a towel around the inside of a beer schooner. “The horses have had a fair blow. Let’s get some grain and pull foot.”
“There’s an idea,” Harms grumbled as he followed Yakima to the door, casting one more wary glance at the men behind him, all of whom stared back moodily over the pasteboards in their hands. “I’m tired of that big red target on my back.”
As Yakima stepped out onto the porch, the cold wind blowing the fine, slanting snow in his face, boots thumped to his left. He turned to see a bearded, potbellied gent in a worn wool coat, vest, and pin-striped trousers approach the saloon door, scowling. A sheriff’s star hammered from a peach tin glinted on his vest. His eyes were rheumy, his breath reeked of drink, and there was a smudge of women’s face paint on his right cheek.
The sheriff sized up Yakima and Harms quickly, and licked his chapped lips, peeved at being called away, no doubt, from a whore’s crib. “Someone said they heard shootin’ over here. What’s the trouble?”
“No trouble, Sheriff,” Yakima said, continuing on past the man and descending the porch steps. “Just a little rule change is all.”
Yakima grabbed Wolf’s reins and the vinegar dun’s halter rope from the hitch rail and began leading the horses at an angle across the broad main street in which the mudded wheel ruts had frozen and acquired a thicker snow dusting than before.
Snugging his hat down tight on his head, he headed for a large sign announcing GABRIEL’S GRAIN. Harms followed, glancing over his shoulder to see the sheriff staring after him and Yakima, scowling as he fingered his thick gray beard.
The Easterner was certain that the sheriff, after finding out about the unseemly events in Lucky Joe’s Saloon, would come calling on him and Yakima. But, to his pleasant surprise, he saw nothing of the sheriff again until after he and Yakima had bought a sack of oats, a couple of boxes of ammo, two pounds of jerky, and were mounted up and heading out of town into a light but chill, snow-spitting breeze.
Harms spotted the sheriff moving in the same direction they were on the street’s left-side boardwalk.
As he and Yakima passed, the sheriff glanced toward them, eyes wary. The man paused, scrutinizing them with wary speculation. Choosing the doxies over a possible lead swap with strangers when he was probably making only twenty a month—and this cold was aggravating his rheumatism—he turned into a pink-curtained, plank-board shack and closed the door quickly behind him.
“Well, there’s a good bit of luck.”
Yakima glanced at Harms. “What’s that?” His mind was on nothing now but the trail ahead, and his woman at the end of it.
“Nothing.”
Yakima adjusted his holster on his thigh and spurred Wolf into a lope. “Let’s ride!”
The half-breed winced as the wind lashed him, then raised the thick collar of his jaguar coat. He gave Wolf his head. The black mustang and the vinegar dun had perked up after the rest and the handful of oats he’d given them. Also, the cool air, hovering right around freezing, seemed to invigorate them, and they made good time for the rest of the day.
They stopped after dark in a small mining village—really just a large camp of tents and stone-and-log hovels, with goats and a couple of pigs running free. There, while they were watering their horses at the creek, a stout Italian widow sent one of her two shy, gangly boys out to invite them to supper.
They’d only stopped to rest the horses, boil some coffee, and chew some jerky, but Yakima and Harms gladly accepted the jovial woman’s invitation.
As there were only four other families in the camp, isolated in the mountains just northeast of Taos, New Mexico, Yakima figured she was lonely for company. Finished with their small but hearty helpings of mountain goat stew, they were forced to parry the beseechings of the old widow, who insisted they stay till morning. They thanked her, left some coins on a stump outside the shack, and once more continued their northeastward journey between mountain ranges and known Indian camps.
Continuing to switch mounts every hour, they kept up a brutal pace. The snow turned to a light rain as they rode out of the mountains, and a couple hours later, the rain stopped and the stars appeared.
During a treacherous river crossing, Yakima nearly lost the vinegar dun when the horse started at a prospector’s sluice box drifting past in the glittering black water. Not long after someone took a couple of shots at them—Yakima figured it was stockmen riding night herd and mistaking them for rustlers. He and Harms didn’t return fire, but only kept their heads down and continued loping through the starlit night given voice every once in a while by owl hoots, coyote yips, and wolves howling from pine-studded scarps.
They gained the Santa Fe’s north-south line when they spilled out of the mountains the next morning, just east of the rollicking mining camp of Colorado Springs.
It was a haggard, half-asleep pair that followed the tracks into Denver.
It was virtually a pair of corpses—wind- and sunburned, famished, and exhausted, their bones nearly literally disjointed by the long, hard, jarring pull—who didn’t so much dismount as tumble out of their saddles at the stock corrals near Denver’s bustling Union Station.
“Gotta question for ya.” Harms sprawled over a top corral slat, his arms hanging down the other side and his cheek snugged up to the rail’s weathered top. His glasses hung halfway down his nose.
Yakima tried to walk but dropped to his knees beside Wolf, the black stallion hanging its weary head and standing there, duck footed, dusty, and sweat silvered. One of the Indian ponies dropped and rolled, blowing hard.
“What’s that?” Yakima said.
“In our conditions, how in the hell are we going to get Faith away from those killers?”
“That’s a good question.”
Wincing, Yakima dug his heels into the cinder paving beneath him and heaved himself to his feet, steadying himself with one hand on Wolf’s back. He reached under the horse’s belly to fumble the saddle cinch loose.
“I’ll let you know when I got her figured. Right now I’m gonna go on into the station, see when . . . if . . . their train got in.”
“You do that,” Harms said as Yakima began stumbling his way through the stockyards and warehouses, heading for the vast sandstone depot hulking up above the maze of corrals and bellowing cattle in the east. “I’ll be right here when ya get back.”
Harms dropped to his back and tipped his hat over his eyes.
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