Chapter 9
Slim Duval was sitting with his back against a rock, sipping from the silver flask in his hand, when Latch came up and tapped the toe of his boot against Duval’s foot.
“Get up,” Latch said. “We have things to do.”
“What?” Duval looked around. The gang had made camp and eaten supper, and he was ready to get some sleep after spending another long day in the saddle. “I thought we were done for the day.”
“You thought wrong. Now get up.”
Duval shrugged, screwed the cap on the flask, and slipped it into an inner coat pocket. He pushed himself to his feet.
As the member of the gang who had been with Latch the longest and also as the second-in-command, he was the only one of the outlaws who could get away with failing to follow an order from Latch instantly and without question. Anybody else would be subject to a reprimand that was always painful and occasionally fatal.
Duval was the closest thing Latch had to a friend, however, so he cut him some slack. As they headed for the horses, Duval asked, “Where are we going?”
“I don’t know. I just feel drawn to take a ride. I think there’s something waiting out there for us.”
Duval had experience with Latch’s hunches. It was another part of the man’s crazed personality, claiming he sometimes heard voices speaking to him from out of nowhere, telling him what to do.
“One of those ghosts been talking to you again?” Duval asked.
It was a mistake. Latch stopped short and turned sharply toward him. “Don’t you say anything about that. I know what I hear, damn you!”
“Sorry, boss,” Duval said quickly. “I didn’t mean anything by it. You know I believe those voices are there.”
“Of course they are. I’m not crazy enough to imagine things like that.”
That was where he was wrong, Duval thought. Warren Latch was plenty loco enough to imagine such things.
But Slim Duval was way too smart to express that opinion where Latch could hear it.
As he started toward the horses again with his long duster swinging around his legs, Latch went on, “ As a matter of fact, no one has told me to take a ride tonight. It’s just a feeling on my part. It may be somebody trying to communicate with me, but if that’s the case, I can’t see or hear them.”
“So it’s a hunch,” Duval said. “I’m fine with that, Warren. Nobody has better hunches than you do.”
“You’d do well to remember that,” Latch snapped.
“I’m not likely to forget it.”
They saddled their horses, Latch throwing his own hull on his mount. He wasn’t one to pawn off a chore onto anybody else when he could do it himself.
A burly Mexican named Ortiz wandered over to them. He frowned at the horses they were getting ready to ride.
“We are going somewhere,
jefe
?” he asked Latch.
“Slim and I are going to do some scouting,” Latch said. “The rest of you will stay here. Post guards as usual. We’ll be back later.”
“
Sí, señor
.”
The two men swung up into their saddles and rode off into the night. Duval let Latch take the lead, thinking it was possible they might just ride around aimlessly for a while and then return to camp.
Either that, or Latch’s instincts would actually lead them to something.
When they had gone a short distance, Duval asked, “Doesn’t it worry you, leaving that bunch of robbers and cutthroats back there with the loot from our last three jobs? What if they decide to move the camp and take all the money with them?”
“They won’t do that,” Latch said with supreme confidence. “They know if they did, I would hunt them down and kill them all, even if I had to follow them to the ends of the earth.”
Duval didn’t doubt it for a second. And Latch was right. The rest of the men knew that, too.
“Another week and we’ll be in San Antonio,” Duval mused.
It was where they always went when they had accumulated enough loot. The city was large enough a group of men could get lost in the population, especially if they didn’t ride in together. The gang would stop outside town and divvy up the money, then scatter in twos and threes, or sometimes just a single man, to enter the city inconspicuously.
Duval looked forward to playing poker at the Buckhorn and the other saloons downtown and visiting the warm, brown-skinned señoritas in the brothels.
Of course, in San Antonio, a man with money could have any sort of woman he wanted, from blond Scandanavians to ebony-tressed Chinese to dusky Africans. Duval had sampled the charms of all of them in his time.
As for what Latch did while he was in San Antone, Duval had no idea. The man always disappeared with no explanation of where he could be found.
Weeks would go by, weeks spent in idle dissipation by the Cajun gambler, and then one day Latch would be there, finding him in some unknown manner and saying it was time for them to ride again. The word would go out to the other members of the gang, and they would rendezvous at a place Latch selected, then set out on another long raid.
“Let slip the dogs of war,” Duval thought, recalling that quote from something he had heard somewhere. Maybe not war in the commonly accepted sense of nation against nation, but it was safe to say Warren Latch was at war with the whole world. And Duval and the other members of the gang were his dog soldiers.
Those were fine thoughts for a dark night, he told himself as he shook them out of his head.
Anyway, it wasn’t a completely dark night, he suddenly realized. A dim yellow light was burning several hundred yards in front of them.
Damned if Latch’s hunch hadn’t led them to something, after all.
“Is that where we’re going?” Duval asked quietly.
“I want to see what’s there,” Latch replied.
As they rode closer, a dog began to bark. Latch reined in, and Duval followed suit. Their eyes, well adjusted to the darkness, could make out a double cabin with a covered dogtrot in between. Beyond it lay a barn and a corral, along with a couple sheds. This was a small ranch of some sort, far from the nearest town.
“Chances are these folks won’t have much money, Warren,” Duval said. “I don’t know if they’d be worth bothering with—”
At that moment, a door in one side of the cabin opened, letting out more light. A figure stepped into the doorway, foolishly silhouetted against the glow of a lamp in the room.
“Tip, what are you barking at?” a woman’s voice called. “What’s out there?”
Her voice was clear and sounded relatively young to Duval. He squinted and was able to make out the shape of her as she stood in the doorway. It was an appealing shape.
He could also see that she was holding something. A rifle, by the look of it.
“A woman,” Latch breathed.
“Yeah, a woman with a gun,” Duval said.
“She must be alone here. If there was a man, he would have come to the door to speak to the dog instead of her.”
That made sense to Duval, but he still didn’t see any point in bothering this woman when in less than a week they would be in San Antonio and could have all the whores they wanted.
He didn’t recall Latch ever expressing much interest in women. Duval didn’t know what the man did between raids, but he’d always assumed Latch was the kind of madman who preferred killing to loving.
“If it was me, I think I’d ride on back to camp and forget about this place, boss,” Duval said, knowing Latch wouldn’t kill him out of hand for offering a piece of advice like that. “But I’ll do whatever you say, of course.”
“I say we take a closer look,” Latch declared. He gigged his horse forward.
Duval managed not to sigh as he followed.
The dog was still barking. The woman called him to her, gripped him by the scruff of the neck, and took him inside. The door closed, cutting off the light. The yellow glow still showed in the window.
When they were about fifty yards from the cabin, Latch and Duval dismounted, moving forward on foot. Latch drew one of his Mausers, and Duval followed suit with his Colt.
The window was open to allow fresh air into the cabin on the warm night ... and it let the aroma of fresh-baked bread out into the darkness, as well. The smell made Duval’s mouth water.
Close enough to hear voices, the outlaws heard the woman say, “Paula, when you and Helen finish with the dishes you can go on to bed.”
Another female voice replied, “But I thought you wanted me to tend to the horses, Mama.”
“Which you should have done before it got dark,” the older woman said. “I’ll do it. I just want to give whatever stirred up old Tip a few minutes to drift on its way.”
“What do you reckon it was, Mama?” That was a third slightly different female voice.
Three women, Duval thought as his heart started to pound a little harder in spite of himself. And apparently they were alone.
“Might have been a wolf or a panther,” the mother replied. “More than likely, though, it was just a coyote.”
“Or an Indian,” one of the daughters suggested.
“Hush, girl,” the mother said. “There’s not a savage within a hundred miles of here, and you know it.”
Well now, she was wrong about that, mused Duval.
Warren Latch’s skin might be white instead of red, but Latch was as savage as any Comanche or Apache who had ever roamed the plains. Maybe more so.
The two of them flanked the window, moving with the stealth of true predators. Duval edged an eye over the edge to risk a look.
Gauzy curtains hung on the inside of the window, but they didn’t prevent him from seeing the woman sitting at a table petting the black-and-white dog at her feet. She was in her late thirties, he guessed, and still attractive, with honey-colored hair that hung past her shoulders.
On the other side of the room, two girls worked at a washtub, one of them rinsing dishes while the other dried them with a cloth. They were seventeen or eighteen, Duval judged. Their hair was fairer than their mother’s, and they wore it braided. As their heads turned so he could see their identical features, he realized they were twins.
Son ... of ... a ...
bitch
, Duval thought. Twins.
“Tip’s calmed down now. I’ll go on out to the barn.” The woman stood up. “Come on, boy.”
As the big, shaggy dog got to its feet to follow her, Duval realized the animal was old and made its way with a halting gait. It might not be able to see or hear very well, either, but it could probably smell him and Latch.
Thinking the same thing, Latch jerked his head for Duval to follow him and retreated around the corner of the cabin.
“We’ll follow the woman and take her prisoner,” Latch whispered. “With her as our captive, those girls will be much easier to handle. They’ll do whatever we say. Once we have them all under control, you can ride back to camp and fetch the rest of the men. We’ll spend the night here.”
Duval was a little disappointed he and Latch weren’t going to keep the women for themselves, but Latch was nothing if not loyal to his men. That made them loyal to him, despite him being loco.
“All right, boss,” Duval breathed.
The woman stepped out of the cabin and started toward the barn with the old dog trailing slowly behind her. She was carrying the rifle again.
“Wait until she gets in the barn,” Latch ordered. “I’ll grab the woman, you kill the dog.”
Duval nodded. They waited until the woman disappeared into the barn. A faint glow appeared through the open door. The woman had lit a lantern.
Silently, the two men approached the structure. They moved into the entrance.
The woman had leaned the rifle, an old Henry, against one of the stalls and had a pitchfork in her hands as she forked some fresh hay into the stalls for several horses quartered there.
The dog suddenly turned toward the men and growled. Latch rushed forward. Duval drew his gun as he lunged through the door. The animal tried to bite him but was too slow. Duval’s gun rose and fell, thudding against the animal’s head and causing it to collapse on the barn’s hard-packed dirt floor.
He could have hit the dog again and made sure it was dead, but he didn’t bother. The old critter was no real threat.
Meanwhile, the woman didn’t scream when she saw the two men charging into the barn. Her face grim, she counterattacked, thrusting the sharp tines of the pitchfork at Latch.
He twisted aside, but the fork ripped a hole in his duster. It hung on the coat for a second, long enough for him to grab the handle and twist the pitchfork out of the woman’s grip. He spun it around and cracked the handle against her head. With a groan, she fell to her knees.
Duval’s eyes widened in surprise as Latch reversed the pitchfork again and drove the tines deep into the woman’s chest.
She gasped in shock and pain and pawed feebly at the pitchfork. Latch ripped it out of her body. Blood started to well from the five holes it left behind. The woman’s eyes rolled up in her head, and she fell forward on her face.