Widowmaker Jones (27 page)

“A man down there might take that for someone covering the trail,” Newt said.

“Might work if they don't get too close, or if one of them doesn't have a set of binoculars or a spyglass,” the judge answered.

“Ought to buy us some time, anyway.” Newt went to his horse and mounted. “We'll have to ride hard.”

“My brother will die if you leave with the girl,” Kizzy said.

Newt turned his horse so that he could face her. “We'll trade for your brother at Las Boquillas.”

“It's a man's life you're gambling with. My brother's.” She yanked her right-hand pistol from its holster and leveled it on Newt.

He glanced at the pistol and then returned his gaze to meet her eye to eye. “If we take the girl down there to him, there's nothing to stop him from letting those rurales have your brother or stretching my neck because he wants to think I killed his son.”

“The rurales listen to him.”

“What if he only made a deal with those rurales to hold off on tending to your brother until he saw if we could catch Cortina? A man like this Alvarez wouldn't like owing any favors to the likes of those rurales, and asking them to free your brother would be a favor that he would have to repay some day. Have you thought about that?”

“I've considered it, but what other choice do we have?”

“We run for Las Boquillas. We get Cortina, we trade him and the girl for your brother, and then we dash over the river,” Newt said. “Don Alvarez won't follow us far into Texas.”

“You don't know he won't follow us.”

“He won't cross into Texas,” the judge said. “At least I don't think so. He may be a rich man down here, but he got into some trouble north of the river when he was young, and there are people in Texas liable to remember him.”

Newt turned his horse and started across the ridge top, headed north. Kizzy raised her pistol to shoulder height. “You stop.”

The judge rode past her, leading the Alvarez girl's horse. Kizzy swung her gun on him.

“Stop!” The pistol in Kizzy's hand trembled.

“The problem with guns isn't always hitting what you're aiming at,” the judge said over his shoulder as he left her. “Sometimes it's pulling the trigger in the first place.”

“You can't do this.”

“Ain't like this in your Wild West show, is it?” the judge said as he rode over the ridge top and dropped out of sight on the far side.

Kizzy took one last look at the meadow behind them. Don Alvarez and his vaqueros were still bunched up and looking up at the smoke from their campfire rising into the sky. She spurred her horse after her companions, her hair flying behind her as her horse clattered through the rocks at a run.

T
wo hours after they left the ridge above the church they found the other bandit who had ridden off with Cortina. He was lying dead on the side of the trail. A big-bore bullet had taken one side of his face off, and what the Apaches had done to the rest of him was an ugly thing.

There was no sign of Cortina, so they left the dead bandit behind and moved on. Nearing sunset, the trail dropped to lower country, leaving the pine, fir, and spruce forests behind for grassy, open ridges and mesa tops dotted with stunted oak trees. To the north, far away in the hazy distance, they could see the canyon of the Rio Grande, and across it the Big Bend country of Texas.

They paused often to check their back trail, but there was no sign of Don Alvarez's vaqueros, although they knew they were coming. It was only a matter of time, and delaying the inevitable.

And often they stopped for Newt or the judge to ride ahead to scout likely ambush sites where the Apaches might lie in wait for them. The Alvarez girl had grown silent, her chin resting on her chest, staring at nothing but her horse's neck and refusing to look at any of them or take a drink from a canteen when offered.

They soon found another of Kizzy's white horses atop a high, windblown mesa. It was lying on its side with strips of meat cut out of its loin and one hindquarter. Kizzy dismounted and knelt over the dead horse with a hand on its neck.

“Her name was Sheba,” Kizzy said. “She was the fastest and the sweetest of them.”

“Apaches are partial to horsemeat,” the judge said. “Only thing they like better is mule.”

Kizzy glanced at the judge with tears streaming down her cheeks, but he either ignored her or didn't notice.

“An Apache can get anywhere he wants on foot,” the judge continued. “Your common Apache, he don't love horses the way, say, a Comanche does. He'll steal him one and ride it to death if he's pressured. He'll stop and eat it and wait until he can steal him another one. Any kind of Injun will eat horse in starving times, but Apaches, they like it.”

“Would you shut up?” Kizzy asked with a quaver in her voice.

Newt came riding back from where he had gone on a little ways to scout the trail ahead. He glanced at the dead horse. “Looks like Cortina got away from them.”

“Looks like it,” the judge said. “Those Apaches stopped long enough to cut off some supper for later tonight, and then went on after him.”

Newt dismounted and stood beside Kizzy. The Apaches had tossed the dead horse's saddle aside to get at the cuts of meat they wanted. The saddlebags were already open where the war party had gone through them, but Newt checked them anyway. There was nothing to be found.

“All you care about is your gold,” Kizzy said. “You don't care anything about my brother or our horses.”

Newt remounted and sat quietly with a calm, unreadable expression on his face. After a while he said, “Are you coming?”

She rubbed a strand of the dead mare's mane hair between her fingers while she looked at the trail behind them. Newt's saddle creaked when his horse shifted its stance, and she could hear the judge bite the end off a cigar and spit it on the ground. A gust of hot wind picked up and rustled through the brown grass.

The whole country was dry and dead, like some desiccated corpse refusing to rot. Everything was dead or about to be dead. Waiting for the worst to come, like she and Fonzo were, and not a thing anyone could do about it.

“We'd best be moving,” Newt said.

She left the dead mare and got back on Herod.

“Apaches don't have any use for a white horse,” the judge said. “Too easy to spot for a sneaky fighter riding through this kind of country.”

“Don't you say another word,” Kizzy said to the judge. “Not another word.”

They rode away and left the dead mare behind, the trail taking them off the foot of the mountains and down into a scrubland valley snaking its way through flat-topped mesas and the knife-edged mountains to the east. The trail was scarred with the barefoot pony tracks of the war party, and occasionally intermixed with them were the shod tracks of the horse Cortina rode.

Behind them, miles away and still high up in the mountains, they could see something else moving. None of them mentioned it for a long while, but they all knew it was Don Alvarez coming with his vaqueros.

The judge finally stopped his horse at the end of their line and studied the ant-sized dots on the mountainside that were vaqueros. “Do you think he sent anyone back after the boy?”

“We'll know before tomorrow's over,” Newt said. “Maybe sooner if we don't pick up the pace.”

Close on to sunset, they came to a point where the trail passed through a narrow defile between two mesas. The Circle Dot horse stopped at the mouth of the pass without Newt asking him to. The gelding stood with his nostrils flared and his ears erect and alert. Newt thought for an instant that the horse was going to nicker.

“Acts like he smells or sees other horses,” the judge said.

Newt studied the high walls to either side of the pass. The sides of the mesas were littered with tumbled rock and a million places for someone to hide.

“Good place for an ambush,” the judge said.

“We don't have time to find a way around.”

“Could be you're overly cautious,” the judge said. “That war party is apt to be hot on Cortina's trail and don't even know we exist.”

“I'm supposing they heard my gunshot back on that ridge,” Newt said. “A gunshot carries a long way.”

“You thinking on making a run through there?”

“Looks like it's a short run, and then the country opens up again.”

The judge grunted. “There's no such thing as a short run if there are Apaches up on the sides of those mesas shooting at us.”

Newt nodded. “We've got the women to think of.”

“Cortina's going to gain on us if we leave the trail and find a way around.”

“How many of them do you think there are?” Newt asked. “The Apaches, I mean.”

The judge shrugged. “Can't tell. Not many. Maybe five or six, but that's plenty. Worst damn fighters you've ever seen. They can kill you seven ways from Sunday, and you not so much as see them until it's too late.”

Newt looked at Kizzy and the Alvarez girl, and then at all of their horses. They had watered the horses a few hours back when still in the high mountains, and despite the miles, the animals looked in good shape. Kizzy, too, looked fit, if gone unusually quiet since they had found the dead mare, but the Alvarez girl looked all used up.

It didn't matter. They had no choice but to move ahead.

“When I say
run
, we run,” Newt said to all of them. “Could be I'm worried over nothing, but if I was an Apache I would be waiting up there in the rocks on either side of the trail.”

Kizzy studied the pass with fear, but the Alvarez girl didn't look up at him. The judge was getting his shotgun ready and methodically chewing on the stub of the unlit cigar in one corner of his mouth. Newt propped the Winchester up on his right thigh and led them into the defile.

“Gonna be hard for me to fight and hold on to this girl's horse,” the judge said, all the while keeping his eyes on the sides of the trail above them.

Newt slowed his own horse until the judge and the Alvarez girl caught up to him. Without stopping, he took the girl's rein from the judge and handed it to her to mate with the other rein.

“You'll keep up with us if you know what's good for you,” Newt said to her.

“She knows what Apaches are and what they do,” the judge said. “There isn't a Mexican in these parts that don't have nightmares about Apaches.”

The Alvarez girl looked from one to another of them and then to the sides of the mesas above them with her eyes big and full of fear. She nodded at Newt. “I will run when you tell me to.”

Newt took them fifty yards into the pass. The trail dipped down ahead of them, and then climbed again near the far end, where it looked like open country again.

“You keep an eye on that side, and I'll watch this 'un,” Newt said to the judge.

They hadn't gone a few more walking strides when Newt thought he saw movement up in the rocks to his left. It could have been some animal, a bird, or maybe nothing but his imagination and his nerves working on him, but he put his heels to the Circle Dot horse anyway.

“Run!”

All four of their horses bolted forward, and they ran abreast of each other with the white dog racing to one side of them with its tongue flopping out of one side of its mouth. The Circle Dot horse hadn't taken three strides before a bullet skimmed by them and whined off the rocks on the other side of the trail. Other guns boomed from above and from both sides of them. An arrow thudded into the judge's saddle swells, stuck there, quivering from the impact like a rattlesnake's shaking tail.

Newt couldn't find a target. The horse beneath him was rising and falling and ducking around rocks and brush, and he couldn't have hit anything if he saw it. Kizzy was bent low over her horse's neck, and it was easy to see that white horse of hers, Herod, could outrun any of them.

The Alvarez girl had fallen a little behind, the draft horse being slow and plodding. Newt slowed up enough to slap her horse hard across the top of its hips with his rifle barrel. Another bullet kicked up dirt and gravel just beyond them.

There was no way they were going to make it. It was too far. The instant Newt thought that, the Alvarez girl's horse stumbled, and he saw the red splotch of blood and gore where some Apache's bullet had passed through its flanks. He hit the wounded animal again on the top of the hips with his rifle, and it charged on, laboring but still running.

The judge's shotgun boomed, and Newt couldn't tell if he had seen an Apache to shoot at, or if he was only firing to be firing. Newt twisted in the saddle and saw the Apaches they had left behind clambering down through the rocks, clutching bows and arrows, or their rifles smoking as they shot at the fleeing group.

In the instant before they cleared the pass, two more horseback Apaches broke from a little side canyon, leading more horses for the other warriors. Newt snapped a one-handed shot at them with his Winchester, but knew he didn't hit anywhere close to them. He fanned the Alvarez girl's horse with his hat. The judge and Kizzy were pulling away from them.

A half mile past the ambush site, the girl's wounded horse faltered and broke to trot. In a few more steps it stopped completely. Its knees buckled and it fell to the ground with the girl barely getting out of the saddle before it did. Newt was reaching to pull her up with him when Kizzy and the judge rode back to him.

Newt dismounted and handed one of his reins to the girl. “Take my horse, and I'll see if I can hold them off.”

The girl took the rein, but Kizzy rode between them, knocking the rein out of her hand. She lifted a foot from her stirrup, and the Alvarez girl quickly climbed up behind her.

“You'll need your horse,” Kizzy said.

“I'll see if I can slow them down,” Newt said.

“Don't wait too long,” Kizzy answered.

Newt slapped her horse with his hat and sent it fleeing away. The judge held his gray in place for an instant longer and then spurred off after the two women, leaving Newt alone.

There was no time to think on good-byes, for Newt spotted the Apaches coming at a run toward him. There were five of them. Newt quickly lay across the dead horse's shoulder with his Winchester resting on it. The horse on its side made a solid barricade and a good gun rest.

The Apaches were still better than a hundred yards away, but caught in the wide open. Newt found the first one in his sights and squeezed the trigger. The Winchester bucked against his shoulder, and the Apache he had fired at veered wide, wounded, or simply taking a more evasive course. Twice more, he fired, levering a new round home in the chamber and taking hasty aim. They were moving fast, and difficult targets. His second shot was a clean miss, but the third one struck the lead Apache's horse and tumbled it end over end. Two of the Apaches turned around and fled the other way, shouting at him, while the rest of them dismounted around their fallen friend. Newt could see the Apaches' horses, but he couldn't see where the warriors had taken cover in the grass and low scrub brush.

He took longer aiming that time and calmly shot the Apaches' horses in succession, one after another of them going down to the Winchester's big .45-caliber bullets. He thumbed fresh cartridges from the bandolier across his chest into the side gate of the rifle while he grimaced at the downed horses. Rising to his feet, he took one last look in the direction of the Apaches. A white streak appeared headed toward him. It was Kizzy's dog, running like its tail was on fire. A bullet passed near Newt as he was mounting, and he put the Circle Dot horse to a run in the direction the judge and the women had gone. The dog pulled alongside him. Of all of them, the dog seemed to live the only charmed life.

A couple of more shots came his way from the Apaches hiding in the grass, but he was soon out of range. After another mile run, he pulled up the winded horse to a walk. The judge and the women were nowhere in sight, and there was no sign of the Apaches following him on foot or otherwise. He took up his canteen, intending only to wash the dust from his mouth, but was shocked to find how thirsty he was. He drank half of what was left in the canteen, and let more of it slosh over his face. Nearly dying was thirsty work.

He stoppered the canteen and hung it from his saddle horn, twisting often in his saddle to check his back trail. After a short spell, he put the Circle Dot horse to a lope, his attention to the north. Somewhere up there was Las Boquillas, and maybe Cortina would be there.