Last Ride of Jed Strange (9781101559635) (18 page)

Colter sipped his coffee. “My foster ma's there—Ruth—and David and Little May.” Marianna was there, as well, though two years older since he'd left and most likely married to someone else by now. He didn't mention Marianna, however, because there was no point in twisting that knife in his gut.

“You ever thought about goin' back to 'em?”

Colter shook his head. “I'd just lead bounty hunters right up to their front door, if I did. Oh, it'd be nice to see 'em all again, but I can't for a long time. Maybe someday.”

Bethel turned her face back to the sky. After a long time, when Colter's cup was nearly empty, she turned back to him once more. “You get lonely?”

“Always.”

“It never goes away?”

“Oh, it fades after a fashion. But it never goes away for good.” He saw no point in lying to her. It was a tough road she had ahead, without her father and mother. Expecting it to be easy only made it tougher. “At least, you got your aunt.”

“It's not the same.”

“No, it ain't.”

He finished his coffee and stomped off with his rifle to have a look around their camp. When he was sure they were alone, he checked on the horses hobbled in some nearby scrub, then returned to camp and picked up his saddle and bedroll and carried them over to Bethel's side of the fire. He set his saddle down beside hers and spread out his blankets in front of it.

He removed his pistol and shell belt and coiled the belt around his saddle horn. Lying down beside Bethel, he rested his head back against his saddle and nudged his hip up close to the girl's. She rolled toward him, her eyes bright now, tears clinging to her lashes. She threw an arm across his belly and rested her head atop his shoulder. He wrapped his own arm around her, gave her a comforting squeeze, and pressed his lips to her temple.

Bethel sighed raggedly. She closed her eyes. Gradually, her breaths grew deep and even.

Colter fell asleep then, too.

Chapter 24

Anyone stumbling across Jed Strange's grave would most likely have mistaken it for a natural buckling of stones and rocks between a spindly mesquite and a large barrel cactus marked with several gaping holes carved by birds. The grave was set about fifteen yards back of the faint, seldom-used cart trail, and the crude wooden cross that the one-eyed man had erected at its head had been knocked over by the wind or some passing creature.

The grave lay in a broad, sloping valley on the shoulder of a mountain on which virtually nothing but the single mesquite and barrel cactus lived, with two pillars of rock jutting from the crest of the slope to the right of the grave, and a jagged fist of cracked basalt rising toward an even higher, sheerer ridge on its left.

It was a rugged moonscape of sand, gravel, and solid rock torn and blasted by time and weather.

Bethel had searched hard for the small, wiry bits of wildflowers that she now placed atop the mounded stones that marked her father's final resting place. She knelt there for a time, her head bowed, while Colter stood on the trail with the horses, in a trapezoid of shade offered by a wagon-sized boulder. Finally, Bethel rose, straightened the crude cross with heavy stones, then stood beside it, staring down at the grave once more and muttering a prayer the words of which Colter couldn't hear above the sifting breeze.

Northwest lifted his head suddenly, nickered, and worked his nostrils in agitation. Colter studied the horse, frowning. “What is it, boy?”

The horse stomped and turned his head slightly back to sniff the building breeze. Colter tied both horses to a knob of rock jutting out from the boulder, then walked off the trail opposite the grave. Thirty yards from the trail, a deep valley opened, its floor about a hundred and fifty feet below where Colter now stood, casting his gaze around the tan and gray landscape, the breeze bending the brim of the tan kepi he'd taken off McKnight's corpse.

He squatted suddenly, detecting movement down along the canyon bottom, on the same trail that he and Bethel had taken before they'd ascended the mesa they were now on. Squinting, he made out five or six riders. From this distance, he couldn't tell much about them except that they were dark-skinned, all had black hair held back with colorful bandannas, and they also wore bright, probably calico shirts.

Apaches, possibly Yaqui. Either way, if they were following Colter and Bethel's trail, he and the girl were in trouble.

He straightened and walked back toward the horses. Bethel was walking back onto the trail, staring toward him, her own eyes becoming wary when she saw the fear in his own. “What is it?”

“Injuns.”

“You think they're after us?”

Colter helped the girl onto her horse. “No way to tell. One thing I do know,” he said as Bethel settled herself in her saddle, “is we can't go back the way we came. We're gonna have to keep followin' this trail and hope we can shake 'em.”

Colter stepped into his saddle and looked at Bethel sitting beside him, her face still pale from shock and sorrow beneath her tan. “You get enough time with your pa?”

She nodded bravely. “I said good-bye.” She swiped a sleeve of her wool shirt across her cheek.

Colter tapped his spurs against Northwest's flanks, and the horse lunged off its back hooves, barreling into a gallop up the gravelly slope, tracing a meandering course amongst the rocks and boulders. They crested the slope and galloped down the other side and into more of the same kind of harsh, barren, up-and-down country they'd been traveling since they'd started into the Los Montanas del Dragones.

They rode as hard as they dared over the treacherous terrain for a good hour before checking their mounts down to rest them. Colter slipped out of the saddle and tossed his reins to Bethel. “Stay here while I have a look behind us.”

He slid his Henry from its boot, racked a round into the chamber, off-cocked the hammer, and hiked back up the hill they'd just descended. At the top, he dropped down amongst some rocks and stared into the broad, angling ravine below, and chewed his upper lip. Far off down the ravine, the riders came toward him, winding around the rocks and sparse tufts of catclaw that littered the wash's floor. The wind was picking up, and occasional curtains of windblown dust obscured his view of the Indians.

But as soon as the dust dwindled, there they were again, clinging to Colter and Bethel's trail like hungry, stubborn coyotes.

Colter cursed loudly, squinting against a gust of windblown grit. The jerk of his head saved his life as an arrow whistled past his face to hammer into the rock beside him. He swung his head left. Just then a shrill war cry filled his ears as an Apache bolted toward him from behind a rock, flinging down his bow and swiping the stone-bladed war hatchet from the red sash encircling his waist. Propelling himself off a low rock, he dove toward Colter, who managed to get his rifle raised, hammer fully cocked, and trigger tripped.

The rifle thundered.

The Apache's cry grew shriller as the bullet took the shirtless brave through his lower belly. The hatchet thudded to the ground. Colter threw himself sideways, and the Apache bounced off his right shoulder to pile up in the rocks, groaning and frantically reaching for the hatchet. He'd just grabbed it when Colter, shoving his back up against a boulder, quickly pumped a fresh round and shot the brave through his breastbone.

As the brave dropped the hatchet once more and staggered backward as though drunk, Colter turned to see three more dark-skinned figures running toward him down the sandy slope, all three running in a side-skip motion, the fringes of their high-topped moccasins jouncing, as they nocked arrows to their bows. Colter pumped the Henry again, aimed, and fired three rounds toward the oncoming Indians, plunking one bullet through one brave's thigh. As that brave yowled and dropped, rolling, the others dove behind rocks. They were all yowling like enraged mountain lions.

Colter bolted to his feet. There were likely more Apaches where those four had come from. He didn't think he'd ever run so hard in his life, holding the rifle in both hands across his chest, pumping his knees, and leaping rocks as he descended the hill toward where Bethel waited with the fidgeting horses, a look of bald terror in her eyes.

He'd never fought Indians before. And, after hearing the soldiers' stories at Camp Grant, he'd never wanted to. Fighting the dark-skinned aborigines was just as the cavalry boys had described it—like tangling with a rabid cougar in a one-room, locked cabin.

Wide-eyed and even paler than before, Bethel tossed him his reins, then leaped onto a rock from which she stepped into the fancy saddle of her pinto. Colter hurled himself without aid of his stirrup onto Northwest's back. Hearing the shrill, animal-like wails behind him as the Apaches came after him, he rammed his spurs hard into Northwest's flanks. Horse and rider lunged down the trail with ground-chewing speed though Colter wished he could fly.

As he rode over the hills, plunging into the troughs between them, he slowed only to turn around natural formations and to cross shallow but steep-sided washes. Occasionally, he looked over his shoulder to make sure he hadn't lost Bethel, who rode nearly cheek to cheek with the lunging pinto, the brim of her old hat pasted against her forehead by the wind.

They'd ridden hard for fifteen minutes when Colter's ears filled with an eerie chugging sound. It sounded like a freight train about to run him down. He looked around to see a thick brown buffeting curtain hurdling toward him from a vast tableland opening down the long slope on his right.

The wind moaned like an agonized giant, lifting dust around Colter and Bethel. Bethel screamed and shielded her face with her arm, holding the pinto's reins in her other hand. Northwest rose off his front hooves and whinnied, terrified by what sounded like a million demons screeching around him.

Colter grabbed his hat before it could blow away, tugging it down firmly on his head, then slipped out of his saddle.

“Hold tight!” he shouted against the bellowing wind. He grabbed Bethel's reins out of her hands and, pulling his hat down over his eyes against the stinging grit, headed for a rock formation rising on his left. He had to get himself, Bethel, and the horses into some sort of shelter—out of the wind and away from the Apaches.

Bethel held her head in her arms as Colter led both balking mounts along the cliff wall. After what seemed like hours, he found an opening in the wall, and pulled both mounts into it, instantly finding some release from the pelting bullets of wind-whipped sand.

He lifted his hat brim and looked around, finding himself in a vestibule of sorts with sheer, eroded rock walls rising two or three hundred feet straight above him, forming funnels and flues and pinnacles of crumbling rock streaked with bird dung and various mineral layers. The sky far beyond was a streaming banner of windblown sand.

Just beyond him, a corridor angled darkly into the mountain. Maybe, in there somewhere, Colter could find a cave in which he and Bethel and the horses could wait out the storm . . . and hope the Apaches lost interest and hightailed it out of the weather.

He tied the pinto's ribbons to Northwest's tail and led the coyote dun deeper into the dark, narrow fissure, the wind's keening now sounding eerily distant though cool drafts sifted sand on him from above. After he'd walked for fifteen or so minutes, he stopped where the right wall drew back several feet, forming a natural alcove. If the Apaches came, it wouldn't be hard to hold them off down the narrow corridor, where there was little cover. They couldn't want him and the girl badly enough to sacrifice themselves to .44 rounds slung at them down a narrow stone hall.

They might, however, wait outside, knowing that their quarry had to leave the mountain sooner or later. But that was a bridge Colter would cross when he came to it. For now, he'd secured shelter.

He reached up and pulled Bethel out of her saddle. She was basted in sand and seed flecks and bits of plants that the wind had carried a long way to pelt them both with. He realized now, out of the wind, that his own face and eyes were caked with the stuff. Grabbing his canteen off his saddle, he poured water over his face, blinking his eyes to clean them. They stung, tears rolling down his cheeks.

“Here,” he told Bethel, lifting her chin with one hand and pouring water on her face with the other.

She blinked and blew, shaking her head and blowing the sand from her nose and mouth. While she bent over, spitting, Colter swabbed out the eyes and noses of both horses, using nearly half the canteen. They'd need to replace their dwindling water supply soon.

He shoved the cork back into the canteen's mouth, hung the canteen over his saddle horn, and walked over to where Bethel knelt beside her weary, frightened horse, sort of leaning back against the mount and looking fatigued as she scrubbed her face and the back of her neck with a red bandanna.

“You all right?”

She lowered the neckerchief and stared back along the corridor. “You think them redskins are gonna follow us?”

“I'm gonna walk back a ways, check it out. Sit down over there, take a breather.” Colter jerked his head toward the depression in the cliff wall, where a single, flat-topped boulder stood. “I'll be back in a few minutes. If you see anything from the opposite direction, fire a shot in the air. I'll come runnin'.”

Wearily, Bethel stepped between the two dusty horses and sagged down on the boulder, scuttling her rump back toward the wall, extending her legs straight out in front of her, and half reclining. She set her hat on her thigh, rested her hands in her lap, and stared straight out across the corridor.

Her cheeks were chafed pink from the scrubbing she'd given them, but the paleness shone behind the flush. She looked exhausted. Beaten down in a way Colter hadn't seen her before. It unsettled him. Throughout the entire journey, she'd been tough as rock salt. Now, having learned of her father's death, she looked as if the sap had drained out of her. He hoped that her determination to push forward hadn't bled away, as well. Her flat, wary eyes were not a good sign.

He pulled his canteen down from his saddle and offered it to her. “Have a drink. Take a long one.”

“I'm all right,” she said, not looking at him but continuing to stare straight across the corridor.

He set the canteen down against her leg. “In case you change your mind.”

He looked at her once more, and worry for the girl turned like a worm in his belly. She couldn't travel anymore today. They'd have to stay here, as long as the place wasn't soon swarming with Apaches. . . .

Turning reluctantly away from Bethel, Colter slid his Henry from its sheath and walked back along the corridor. Ahead of him the wan sun washing down from far above painted the walls a dull red. Through occasional shafts of saffron light, dust sifted like small tan snowflakes.

Slowly, he made his way back to where he and Bethel had entered the corridor, relief swelling in him when he saw no sign that the Apaches had followed him. A peek outside, squinting against the sandstorm, gave him no indication that they were trying to enter. Promising, but odd. Had they simply given up on their quarry? From the stories Colter had heard about the Indians, he hadn't thought they'd let something as insignificant as a little wind and sand deter them.

He waited fifteen or twenty minutes. For whatever reason, the Apaches didn't try to enter the corridor. Feeling lighter, less weary, Colter turned around and, keeping a vigilant eye on his back trail, tramped back to where he'd left Bethel and the horses.

Only, Bethel wasn't where he'd left her. The flat-topped rock was vacant. His canteen, too, was gone. Both horses were wide-eyed and shuffling around nervously.

Colter raised his rifle in both hands, racking a shell into the chamber. “Bethel?”

The echo of his voice was the only response.

He called again. Again, only the echo replied.