Authors: Frank Leslie
The Killing Breed (5 page)
Yakima lowered the Yellowboy and cursed.
Last time the horse had visited the ranch, it had led Yakima away from the yard, then circled around from another direction. That time, the mares had broken out of their corral and trailed the stud into the desert twenty miles south. It had taken Yakima, Kelly, and Faith a good week to retrieve the scattered band, and they’d lost a foal to a mountain lion.
Yakima gained the ridge crest where the bronc had been standing, and cast his gaze down the other side. The wild stallion was a jostling silhouette retreating toward the bottom of the ridge directly below Yakima’s position, meandering through the pines with its tail up, its hoof thuds rising dully.
The half-breed, frustration edging aside his reluctance, snapped the rifle to his shoulder. He fired three quick shots, the reports flatting out across the ridges, the slugs plunking into rocks and pine limbs.
The bronc whinnied and faded into the darkness at the bottom of the ridge.
Yakima knew where the horse was heading; he bolted left across the ridge crest to head him off. Down the ridge’s south end he plunged, tripping on a root and falling and rolling once before he leaped to his feet once more and continued down the slope. Fleet as an antelope he ran, the moccasins nearly soundless on the gravelly, weed-tufted terrain. Dodging pines and crossing two more hills and another steep ridge, he stood atop a rocky bluff and stared into an ink-black canyon yawning on the other side.
The cold air raked in and out of his lungs, burning.
Holding his rifle across his rising and falling chest, he narrowed an eye, pricking his keen ears, waiting.
Faith’s voice rose faintly behind him. “Yakima?”
He continued to stare into the canyon, listening for the horse. But there was only the slight rustle of the breeze against the pine boughs and boulders, the faraway yap of coyotes.
The broad canyon before him yawned blackly. Beyond stood the high, snub-peaked Sunset Ridge mantled in flickering starlight.
The bronc must be circling, intending to head back to the ranch from the base of Bailey Peak. Smart son of a bitch.
Yakima lowered the rifle and loosed a long sigh. He’d just started to turn and head back down the ridge when he smelled the faint but unmistakable musk of horse sweat and sagebrush.
His pulse quickened. He started to raise the rifle once more. Before he could get the barrel leveled, a large black mass bolted out from behind a thumb of rock and shrubs on his left.
Eyes blazing starlight and fury, the sleek coyote dun rose onto its rear hooves with a bugling scream that echoed inside Yakima’s skull, blurring his vision and rattling his eardrums. There was no time for a shot.
Yakima dropped the Yellowboy and flung himself toward the canyon. A half second later, the horse’s front hooves plunged into the ground where the half-breed had been standing, kicking rocks and gravel.
Propelled by his own momentum, Yakima rolled toward the canyon’s vast black mouth. The bronc continued screaming and bucking, flailing its front hooves, intent on grinding Yakima to a fine powder.
One blow glanced off Yakima’s right calf while another grazed his back with an eye-watering slice of stone-sharpened hoof. As the horse rose once more, screaming, its front legs curved like scythes, Yakima rolled farther toward the canyon. His gut fell when his legs slid over the edge.
Desperately, he clawed at the ground with both hands but to no avail. The rest of his body followed his legs, until only his head poked up above the lip of the ridge.
He reached for a rock knob, caught it, began to pull himself up. The knob crumbled.
“Shit!” His stomach surged into his throat as he slid straight down the canyon wall, the rock raking him painfully as he flailed with his moccasin boots and hands for a hold.
A stout root shot up under his arm and he didn’t so much grab the root as the root grabbed him—a stop so violent that for a second he thought his arm had been torn from its socket. Beneath the arm, the root squawked like overstrained hemp. Grabbing it with both hands, grunting and sighing, sweat popping from every pore, he dug his fingers into the root while gravity seemed to be pulling him toward the canyon, like a thousand-pound anvil tied to each ankle.
He tried to dig his moccasin toes into the rocks, but he could find no crack or fissure wide enough. Above his grunts, groans, and pants, he heard the drumming of horse hooves. He figured it was the bronc doing a victory dance atop the ridge.
Then Faith’s warmly familiar, reassuring voice yelled, “Yakima?”
“H-here,” he grunted, grinding his fingers into the root while feeling as though his swollen knuckles were tearing slowly apart. “Here!”
Hooves clomped atop the ridge. A horse snorted. Faith’s voice again: “Where?”
Yakima gritted his teeth as his sweat-slick fingers slipped off the root. Wincing, he renewed his hold, trying to grab the root as close to the canyon wall as possible.
He sucked a breath and used it to call as loud as he could, “Down here!”
It was too dark for her to see him, so she’d have to locate him by his voice.
“Down here!” he yelled, louder. “Throw a ro—”
Without warning, the root snapped with a cracking
pop
. He shot straight down the canyon wall like a stone.
pop
. He shot straight down the canyon wall like a stone.
Chapter 4
“Christ!” Yakima rasped, gritting his teeth as he raked his hands along the canyon wall rolling up in front of him like a fast-flowing river seen from above—a blur of shadows and starlit rock and small tufts of wiry brown brush.
He kicked at the wall, desperately searching for another hold.
His moccasins nudged something and slipped on past it. His hands grabbed it—a lip of rock two or three inches wide.
Faith called from above, her voice so shrill with terror she sounded angry.
“Yakima?”
“Yakima?”
He dug at the rock ledge with his fingers, sweat bathing his face and pasting his underwear top to his chest. He ground his teeth together and managed a wry, taut “Yes, dear?”
“Where
are
you?”
are
you?”
He kicked at the canyon wall, searching for any hold at all. “A few yards farther down from where I was a second ago.”
He wasn’t sure she’d heard him. He was expending so much energy trying to cling by his fingertips to the narrow rock ledge that he couldn’t work up much volume. His stomach sank as his aching fingers began to slip down the curving edge of rock. He continued kicking the wall with his boot toes but found nothing but a sheer rock surface.
“Uhnnnh . . .” He sucked a sharp, shallow breath, his fingers sliding with agonizing certainty down over the dull edge of the rock.
Something slapped his left shoulder and ear with a raking sting.
“Grab the rope!” Faith called.
He glanced to his left. A lariat sloped down the wall above and over his left shoulder. With a curse he channeled his waning strength into his right hand, dug those fingers more firmly into the rock.
He released his left hand from the ledge and grabbed the rope. When he had a hold, he grabbed it with his right hand, too, dropping another foot as his weight ate up the slack.
“Got it?” Faith called.
“Got it!”
Yakima got a good grip on the rope, clutching it as though to wring water from a towel, and when Faith led the horse forward—she probably had the lariat dallied around the saddle horn—he began to rise, walking slowly up the sheer stone wall.
His hands screeched from grappling with the root and the narrow ledge, and the rope burned into his chafed palms, but he hung on. It was a jerky ride, with the horse pulling, and slowly the ridge came into view above, stars winking beyond the arrow-shaped tops of the pines.
“Yakima?” Faith called again, when he was about ten feet from the ridge crest.
“Keep goin’.”
A couple rocks and some gravel broke loose beneath his feet, bouncing and rattling down the wall behind him as he neared the lip, walking up onto the crest as though gaining the top of a staircase.
“Okay.” The word rushed out of him on a feeble sigh.
Yakima slumped away from the canyon and dropped to his knees, breathing heavily and massaging his palms. Faith ran up from the far side of the ridge, where she’d stopped her horse in the pines, and dropped down beside him. She threw her arms around his neck and pressed her face to his sweaty cheek.
“Jesus, are you all right?”
Dropping onto his hands and knees, he sucked air as though he’d sprinted a hundred yards. “Little . . . worse . . . for the wear.”
Faith had a strong, pretty face with almond-shaped blue eyes framed by thick gold-blond hair. She could give you a look that could make you feel like a copper-riveted fool. “What were you
doing
down there, anyway?”
doing
down there, anyway?”
He chuckled, sat back on his heels, and drew a deep, long breath of cool, high-mountain air. “That damn broom tail’s even smarter than I thought he was. Smarter than me, I know that.”
“He ran you down there?”
Yakima’s face warmed with chagrin, and he shook his head as he glanced at the thumb of rock the bronc had hidden behind. “Bastard drygulched me.”
“He is smarter than you.”
Faith chuckled dryly, grabbed his hand, and leaned close to inspect his arm. His longhandle top was torn in strips across his chest and shoulders, and bloodied. Through his torn denims, his left knee looked like raw meat.
“We best get you back to the cabin and assess the damage, chump.”
“I figured Wolf was the only horse smart enough to pull something like that.” Yakima shook his head, still breathing hard and only now beginning to feel the cold sting of his cuts and bruises. “But that little dun could teach Wolf a thing or—”
A rifle shot cut the night. Before its echo had died, two more shots flatted out from the direction of the ranch. Horses whinnied, and there was the distant thunder of stomping hooves.
“That’s Kelly!” Faith said.
His heart quickening its pace again, Yakima lurched to his feet and stalked down the grade toward Faith’s mare, Crazy Ann, nickering quietly and staring in the direction of the ranch yard. “That damn bronc circled around just like I thought he would!”
“Careful!” Faith rasped, jogging toward him, kicking stones as she descended the ridge.
Yakima jerked the riata free of the apple—he’d retrieve it later—and swung up into the saddle that Faith must have thrown on Crazy Ann in a hurry, using only the rope halter the mare had already been wearing. He held out his left hand. Faith grabbed it, and he swung her easily up behind him and ground his heels against Crazy Ann’s ribs.
He put the horse down the slope through the black pine columns. Faith squeezed his arm and said in his ear, “Yakima, don’t run her—it’s too dark.”
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