Last Ride of Jed Strange (9781101559635) (7 page)

The cat hit the floor behind the bar with a thud and an indignant yowl, then, hissing, tail raised, slinked out from under the bar and on out the half-open front door.

Calderon chuckled and said, “Lieutenant, I must warn you—you have made a nasty enemy in El Fuerte.”

Hobart made a face and lifted his shot glass between his thumb and index finger. “El Fuerte needs a bullet, Calderon. I see that cat on your bar again, I'm gonna feed him one between his eyes.” He raised his glass to his chuckling companions.
“Saludos!”

The soldiers tossed back their tequilas. Hobart gestured, and Calderon refilled their shot glasses. “So, if it is not Apaches or Pilar you have come all this way for,
mi amigo
, what is it, if I may be so rude?”

Hobart threw back half his tequila and stretched his lips back from his teeth sheathed by his wet blond goatee, hissing like a cat and shaking his head as though to clear it. “A kid,” he rasped. Clearing his throat, he added, “A young, lanky redhead with an ugly ‘S' branded into his right cheek. That's who we're after,
mi amigo
Calderon. Been after him for the past couple days. He killed Lieutenant Belden 'cause he wanted his girl, and then he killed his girl because she was about to tell me where he was holed up.”

Hobart gestured for another round. “He hasn't come through here, has he?”

Calderon's swarthy face paled as he stared at Hobart.

Still hunkered over his table, Colter Farrow let his fork drop to his tin plate with a loud, ringing clatter.

Chapter 10

Hobart, McKnight, and the other three soldiers swung around quickly, as though they were all tied to the same string. Hands dropped to the covered holsters on their hips. Still seated, Colter lifted his Remington from beneath his table, clicking the hammer back. He extended the revolver out over his table and squeezed the trigger.

In the close confines, the explosion echoed like a dynamite blast. Everyone in the room jumped, Calderon cursing in Spanish and stumbling back away from the bar. The whore screamed, bounded out of her chair, and dashed out the door, barefoot. From the corner of his eye, Colter saw her streak past the left front window as she hightailed it around the corner of the station house.

Hobart screamed and crouched as he grabbed his right knee with his right hand, blood oozing out from the shattered knee to saturate his pale blue cavalry slacks. He dropped to both knees and gave another yowl, showing gritted teeth beneath his red-blond mustache, his habitually sneering hazel eyes locked on Colter. His eyes weren't as sneering now as exasperated.

The other men stood dumbstruck, their hands frozen on their holsters from which McKnight had gotten his Colt Army .44 halfway out.

Colter clicked his Remington's hammer back again, loudly. Keeping the pistol aimed at the bar, he scraped his chair back casually, slowly rose, picked up his rifle and the tequila bottle, held the rifle atop his left shoulder with the hand holding the bottle, and stepped out around the table. He stopped about ten feet from the blue-uniformed statues at the bar and Hobart, who sat on the floor farthest down the bar on the right, his right leg and knee extended to one side as he leaned on the opposite hip.

Blood continued to gush from Hobart's wounded knee. His face was crimson, forked veins bulging in his forehead. His eyes were agonized, fearful, incredulous. They brightened with recognition as Colter stepped into the wan light seeping through the windows.

“You son of a bitch!”

McKnight still had his Colt half out of its holster. He blinked in disbelief, then shaped a grim smile. “Kid, you're one crazy son of a bitch if you think you're gonna get away with this.”

Colter raised his Remington's barrel. “You fellas ease those pistols out of their holsters, toss 'em over there, on the other side of the room. Do that real slow because I'm just itchin' to ruin another knee.”

“You're gonna die, boy,” Hobart hissed through his gritted teeth and the damp ends of his mustache. “You're gonna die real slow.”

“You, too,” Colter commanded the wounded lieutenant. “With your left hand, reach across and ease that Colt out of your holster and toss it over there.”

He kept his eyes on the others as, glancing around at each other nervously, they finally complied with Colter's demand. One by one the Colts arced through the air and hit the floor on the other side of the room with heavy thumps. One bounced off a chair and slid up against the far wall. Hobart's was last. In his weakened condition, the wounded lieutenant couldn't throw his as far. It hit the floor halfway across the room and skidded beneath a table.

“You'll never make it, kid,” McKnight said, fear sweat dribbling down his sun-blistered cheeks. “We're meetin' up with a whole platoon. They'll be here soon. Should've been here by now, in fact.”

“Good. They can take down that son of a bitch's confession, too.” Colter hardened his gaze at Hobart. “Go on, Lieutenant. Tell 'em what happened to Lenore.”

“You're crazy.”

Colter glanced at McKnight. “If you'll take a closer look at Miss Lenore's bullet wound, you'll see it was delivered by a Colt pistol at close range. Not a rifle. I bet it's ringed with powder and only about twice as big as what a rifle would do.”

McKnight slid an edgy look toward Hobart, who met his gaze with a similar one of his own.

“But you probably already know that—don't you, Lieutenant?” Colter looked at the two corporals and the sergeant still staring at him in mute fear. “Hobart killed Miss Lenore because she was foolish enough to tell him she knew what really happened back at Camp Grant, a couple nights back. How they held me so Belden could beat me till my bones rattled. How he died was an accident, sort of. I lashed out with a boot, caught him off balance, and he fell and rapped his head against an open tailgate.”

Colter slid his gaze back to Hobart. “Tell 'em that's true. Even if they don't believe you, tell 'em.”

Hobart's face looked like an overfilled water flask, and above the wet goatee it was as red as an Iowa barn. He shook his head, grinding his jaws, his hazel eyes sparking. “That wasn't how it happened. You killed her 'cause she was gonna sell you out.”

Colter narrowed his right eye as he slid his Remington toward Hobart's other leg.

“
No-o-o!
”

The man's cry was drowned by the Remy's thunder.

Dust puffed from the blue cloth over the man's left knee. Hobart jerked as though he'd been struck by lightning. He threw a wail at the ceiling, then dropped over his left knee, covering it with his left hand and sobbing. “Oh, you son of a bitch!”

“Tell 'em,” Colter said quietly. “Or the next one's gonna raise the pitch of your screams about five hundred notches.”

Hobart glanced at the others, tears and sweat dripping down his face and into his mustache. “I did it,” he said, panting, eyes on Colter's aimed Remy. “I shot her.”

The barman, Calderon, was leaning back against the shelves behind him, holding his hands shoulder high, palms out. He made a raspy whistling sound as he stared brightly over the bar at Hobart.

“Good enough,” Colter said, starting to move toward the door, keeping his Remington extended at the soldiers and his Henry resting on his shoulder. “I just wanted to hear you say it. I wanted Lenore to hear you say it.” Softly, he added, scowling against the knot growing in his throat. “I think she did.”

He glanced at the sergeant. “You might mention that to the major, when you boys get back to Camp Grant.” At the half-open door, he turned to face the soldiers directly once more. “Fairchild can thank me later for not havin' to go to all the work of buildin' a gallows.”

As he stared at Colter, Hobart's eyes jerked wide. His mouth opened, but before he could scream, Colter blew the top of his head against the bar behind him. The other soldiers screamed and jumped, eyes pinched in horror as they glanced down at Lieutenant Hobart flopping and bleeding on the floor.

“You fellas stay put till I'm outta sight,” Colter told them. “You so much as poke your head out this door, you'll look like him.”

He jerked his pistol toward the now-lifeless Hobart slumped on his side with his brains oozing out the top of his head, then nudged the door open with his heels and backed out onto the gallery. He crossed the gallery and backed down the steps, then strode toward Northwest waiting by the hitchrack, staring at Colter and thrashing his tail uneasily. Colter walked quickly, turning often to make sure the soldiers weren't coming after him. From inside the station house came a low murmur of alarmed voices, but he reckoned the soldiers knew he meant business.

None so much as poked his head out the door.

He shoved his tequila bottle into his saddlebag pouch. Keeping an eye on the station house, he slid the bit through the coyote dun's teeth, tightened the latigo strap, and stepped into the saddle. He swung the horse away from the cabin, looked to the east—the direction from which he'd come—then west.

Dust rose like distant smoke. Beneath the rising cloud was a smudge of blue. Just above the blue was a wavering patch of red and blue, which would likely be the oncoming platoon's pennant-shaped cavalry guidon. Judging by the size of the dust cloud, there were probably around twenty riders galloping toward him.

Colter swung the coyote dun south and booted him into a gallop, heading between a barn and what appeared a stone blacksmith shop. As Northwest clomped through the sage and yucca, Colter spied something hunkered down near the base of the hay barn. Calderon's cat, El Fuerte, swung his head to follow Colter and gave his tail a parting flick. Colter pitched his hat brim to the indignant feline, muttered, “My pleasure, cat,” then hunkered low in the saddle, broke out away from the relay station's outbuildings, and galloped straight south across a flat expanse of sandy green desert rolling up gradually toward a rise of distant blue mountains.

He wasn't sure where the line was that separated Arizona from Mexico, but he was heading south, so he was heading for it. And when he came to it he'd cross it and he wouldn't look back.

He figured he'd crossed into Mexico by seven or eight o'clock that night. And, just as he'd vowed, he did not look back. He wasn't sure if the soldiers would follow him across the line, but he had to assume they would. U.S. troops often chased Apaches deep into Mexico, sometimes as far south as the Sierra Madre, but usually with the permission of the Mexican government.

Would they attain that permission to follow him? Most likely. He was wanted for killing several U.S. soldiers and the daughter of a cavalry major, after all, and that probably made him just about as wanted as any bronco Apache. He doubted anyone would believe—or would want to believe—Hobart's gunpoint confession.

He gave a grim smile and reined Northwest to a halt atop a small knoll over which a dusting of stars gleamed so crisply in the dry, cool air of a desert September that they looked close enough to reach up and grab. He, Colter Farrow, a young horse rancher from Colorado's Lunatic Range, was as wanted as an Apache. Hell, maybe he was even more wanted. And here he was in Mexico, once more on the run with soldiers after him, and likely now more bounty hunters than he'd ever imagined.

His chest felt tight with anxiety and uncertainty. He did not know Mexico. He did not know the language. Where would he go, and how, down here, would he ever be able to make a living? He had nineteen dollars in coins rolling around in his pockets and saddlebags, and that would last him a month or two if he lived sparingly, but eventually he'd need money if only for ammo, flour, sugar, and half a bag of Arbuckles'.

If they even sold coffee down here. Did the Mexicans drink it?

He shook his head and sighed. Here he was, practically on death's doorstep, and he was worried about where he'd find coffee in Mexico. He must still be addled from Belden's beating. His ribs hadn't been screaming with every lurch of his horse lately, but he could still feel the fatigue of his injuries deep in his bones, in every fiber of his being.

He needed a long night's rest in a bed.

That half-formed thought was what had stopped him here. He stared southwest, where several wan lights glowed amongst the rolling hills, at the base of a low gray wall of ridges that blocked out the stars along the southern horizon. A town of some size, most likely, as there were too many lights for a stage station or a ranch. He'd find a bed there. He'd done his best these last few hours to cover his tracks, avoiding trails and riding where Northwest's hooves were less likely to leave a print, so he figured he'd bought himself at least a few hours of badly needed rest.

He booted Northwest on down the knoll and after another half hour, when he was half asleep and could tell by the horse's splay-legged stride that Northwest was nearly asleep himself, the trail rose along a gradual slope, and he could begin to smell the smoke of burning piñon and mesquite on the autumn-chill air. He'd smelled that aroma at Camp Grant, as well. It was the sweetest-smelling perfume, and it seemed to go with an almost eerily quiet, night-cloaked desert landscape and the distant yammering of coyotes.

Lights appeared on both sides of the trail—lamplight dimmed by curtained windows in small, boxlike adobe or mud-brick houses that seemed as one with the rolling hills as the rocks or paloverde trees. As Colter rode on up into the town, a potpourri of smells washed over him—the burning piñon mixed with the ammonia musk of chicken and goat pens and privies, as well as the more inviting aromas of spicy roasted meat.

He rounded a bend and caught a whiff of perfume and tobacco smoke, and he heard the low rumble of conversation mixed with women's laughter. On the left side of the trail that had become the pueblo's main street, he saw a three-story adobe with a gallery on the first floor and balconies on each of the two upper floors. On both balconies and on the gallery, he could make out the silhouettes of men and women smoking and drinking and laughing as they sat or stood, the women casting alluring poses, the lamplight from the windows behind them glistening on their brushed black hair and dangling earrings.

On the far right end of the third-floor balcony, away from two other men and one woman, a pair were fumbling and muttering in a lovers' drunken embrace. The woman was speaking Spanish in scolding tones while she laughed and appeared to be nuzzling the man's neck while at the same time brushing away his hands that kept lifting her ruffled skirt to expose her brown legs clear up to her rump.

Colter turned quickly away and lowered his hat brim down over his forehead, perusing the buildings around him for a quiet place to hole up. He drew back on Northwest's reins and stared down into a window on the left side of the street. Just inside what was apparently a café, beyond a warped glass window, the strange blond girl he'd seen earlier at the stage relay station sat at a table with old, rumpled Wade and the rat-faced younger man, Harlan.

Wade sat across the table from her, to Colter's left. His head was resting on his arms on the table, and he appeared sound asleep. Harlan, facing the window on the far side of the table from Colter, sat straight-backed in his own chair, his eyes closed, head bobbing.

Meanwhile, the strange, little blond girl was hunkered over a paper she'd spread out on the table before her, near a pile of what appeared to be their scrap-laden supper plates. She was jabbing the paper with a pencil, and her lips were moving, which meant she was speaking, though her two male companions didn't appear to be hearing her any better than Colter could.