10.
END OF THE TRAIL
N
EARLY twenty-four hours after coming upon the ambuscade in Charley's Wash, D.W. Flagg crested a high ridge and pulled back on his steeldust's reins.
He squinted into the canyon gaping before him, the thatch roofs and red-tile roofs of the
pueblito
's humble dwellings shimmering in the late afternoon sun. The river winding along the south side of the village glistened like the skin of a Mojave green rattler.
The six deputies drew rein on either side of the marshal, their sweating horses blowing and nickering as their hooves, heavy from miles of continuous travel, scuffed the talcumlike trail dust and clattered on the rocks.
“Bedlam,” snorted Franco Villard, reading the faded sign leaning along the trail. “What the hell kinda name is that?”
The others snorted and chuckled while Hound-Dog took a long swig from his canteen, the water dribbling into his sweat-soaked beard.
Flagg's expression remained implacable. “Not long after gold was discovered in these mountains, a crazy prospector killed his three partners with a pickax. Then he killed a padre, a couple
putas
, and a vaquero passing through town.” The marshal's eyes ranged along the floor of the canyon. “Appropriate that a crazy lawman would end up here.”
“Why you so sure Hawk's still here?” asked Miller. “He might have had a mouthful of whiskey in the cantina, and rode on.”
“The trail ends here,” Flagg said. “There's no village beyond here. The only trails are old Indian or prospector tracks. Deep canyons, real devil country, all the way to Mexico.”
Scowling warily into the canyon, Hound-Dog looped his canteen over his saddle horn and rested his shotgun across his knees, his finger through the trigger guard. “How we gonna play it? There must be twenty, thirty shacks down there. He could be holed up in any one of 'em.”
“We start with the bartender, and go from there.” Flagg kneed his steeldust down the hill and into the canyon.
Villard chuckled and gigged his horse after Flagg. “Good idea.”
The seven lawmen rode two abreast, dropping gradually between the motley collection of ancient Mexican hovels and prospectors' shacks. Only a few people, mostly old, leathery-featured Mexican men, milled about the street. As the procession passed a cracked, brush-roofed adobe, an old Mexican woman in a sacklike white dress and bright green shawl regarded them from a clothesline sagging between two spindly pepper trees. A goat near a well coping watched her closely, as if fascinated by her industry.
A low fire burned in the yard. A little boy, long black hair hanging in his eyes, poked in the fire with a stick. Glaring at the lawmen, the old woman yelled at the boy, beckoning, then, grabbing the boy's hand, ambled into her shack. She cast the lawmen one more angry glance, then closed and locked the door with an angry click of a thrown bolt.
“You think she's gonna invite us to supper?” Hound-Dog quipped to Franco Villard.
Hound-Dog stopped chuckling when he heard sharp, frenetic panting to his right. He turned to see a small, three-legged dogâmostly white but with a black snout and a black ring around its right eyeâdash out from a gap between two board shacks and head for Hound-Dog's horse. When the dog closed to within four feet of Hound-Dog's chestnut, the mutt barked shrilly. The tired horse, startled by the unexpected attack, whinnied and reared. Hound-Dog, as fatigued and surprised as his horse, grabbed at the saddle horn, missed, and flew back off the horse's left hip.
Cursing shrilly, he hit the ground on his back.
As his horse sidled away, snorting indignantly at the angry cur, the dog closed its small jaws over Hound-Dog's trouser cuff. Growling like a miniature bobcat, it gave the cuff several fierce shakes before releasing it, backing up, and yipping into Hound-Dog's face, its tiny eyes pinched with spite.
“Goddamn mutt!” Hound-Dog clawed his Colt from its holster, and thumbed back the hammer. The dog seemed to know what the big deputy intended. It pivoted on its one rear heel and ran back the way it had come.
Hound-Dog aimed and fired. The bullet plunked a rain barrel as the dog dashed behind it, disappearing into the gap between the shacks.
Press Miller had grabbed the reins of Hound-Dog's skittish chestnut.
Flagg turned his own horse toward the deputy still floundering on his backside, Colt extended.
“Deputy, holster your revolver!” Flagg's jaws were clamped with fury. “Get back on your goddamn horse and try to look like a professional instead of a drunken court jester!”
Hound-Dog had lost his hat, and his sweat-streaked face was even dustier than before. Lowering the pistol, he looked up at Flagg with a wounded expression.
Behind him, Miller laughed. “Don't you know it's bad luck to shoot a three-legged cur, Tuttle?”
Ignoring the chuckles of the other men around him, Hound-Dog holstered the Colt, grabbed his hat, and heaved himself to his feet. Cursing under his breath, he climbed gingerly into the saddle, the leather creaking beneath his weight, the chestnut rolling its eyes warily.
“Keep your eyes skinned,” Flagg ordered the men, glancing sharply along the street at the mostly empty windows staring back at him. “That shot
probably
announced us to Hawk.” He added through gritted teeth to Hound-Dog, “You stupid bastard!”
Villard gave Hound-Dog a menacing look.
“Damn dog scared my horse!” the big deputy retorted, slapping his dusty hat against his thigh.
Flagg flared his bloodshot eyes at him. “Shut up!”
The procession continued down the street, angling toward the town's lone cantina on the street's right sideâa big structure hammered together from milled lumber during the prospecting boom, and painted spruce green, with dark-blue lettering above the porch roof announcing TATE GREEN'S SALOON. On a bullet-scarred shingle hanging from two rusty chains beneath the awning, sun-faded letters boasted, “Best Wimen in the Territory!”
Two vaqueros in steeple-crowned sombreros and bright serapes stood on the porch, holding beer mugs and staring at the approaching lawmen. Both men wore looks of bemusement, but the expressions faded as Flagg drew up before the hitch rack and swung down from his saddle. As the lawman looped his reins over the rack and mounted the stoop, the eyes of both vaqueros acquired guarded, wary casts.
One removed a brown paper cigarette from his mouth as Flagg stopped before him and shuttled a bland stare between the men. The marshal reached inside his corduroy jacket to remove a quarter-folded sheet from his shirt pocket. His black-gloved, right hand shook the paper open, turned it toward the two vaqueros.
Flies buzzed around the beer glasses as the men lowered their gazes to the Wanted dodger.
“Ever see this man?” Flagg asked, waving the flies away from the beer with his left hand.
The taller of the two men lifted his eyes to Flagg. His face was so sun-seared it looked black behind a two-day growth of beard. He shook his head.
Flagg glanced at the shorter man. A fly crawled around in the man's beer-damp, salt-and-pepper beard. “No, senor.”
Flagg stared into the man's eyes, glanced at the other lawmen behind him, then turned and sauntered through the batwing doors. The other lawmen, each glaring in turn at the two vaqueros, followed Flagg into the building. All but Bill Houston, that was. The tall Texas lawman paused before the two vaqueros.
“You bean eaters better be sure you never saw Hawk.” Houston spit tobacco quid onto the shorter man's scuffed, high-heeled boots. “I find out otherwise, I'll fix ye so you have to take your food mashed up in tequila and drink it from a beer glass.”
Houston spit a quid on the taller man's boots, then turned and pushed through the batwings.
Inside the cantina, Flagg moved slowly toward the bar in the shadows at the back of the big, wood-floored room. There was only one customer, a gray-bearded old Mexican wearing a ratty brown poncho, relaxing at a table to Flagg's left.
A lump on the left side of the poncho bespoke a pistol in a shoulder holster. When the old Mexican looked up from his beer glass, two tequila glasses on the table before him, Flagg saw the scarred cheeks and the eye patch over the right eye. The scars were two matching Xs, carved by an Arkansas toothpick across each cheekbone. The same weapon had poked out the eye.
I'll be damned, Flagg thought. Palomar Rojas. The marshal would have recognized those scars anywhereâreceived from the deputy sheriff Rojas had cuckolded some twenty years ago in Fort Worth, even before Flagg himself had once hunted the old border rough for rustling Texas seed bulls back and forth across the Mexican border. He'd never caught the man. Long ago, he'd heard he'd been killed by Lipan Apaches.
If the old man recognized Flagg, he gave no indication. He glanced at the marshal and the six deputies with keen interestâit wasn't every day a half dozen territorial lawmen rode into Bedlamâthen hunkered low in his chair and buried his face in his beer schooner. He probably wasn't rustling anymore, but he still had paper on him . . . as well as a contempt for lawmen.
Flagg and the deputies continued to the bar reaching across the back wall. The counter wasn't just pine planks stretched across beer kegs, but an ornate mahogany affair with an elaborate back bar complete with lamps and mirrors. Obviously, the place had been built with high hopes for the townâhopes that the short-lived tenure of the gold boom had dashed.
Flagg glanced at the barman standing behind the glistening woodâa burly, gray-haired, blue-eyed American who'd been slicing a chicken on the back counter when the lawmen had entered. He stood frozen now, cleaver in hand, regarding the lawmen with an expression of both apprehension and amusement, his blue eyes glittering.
Out his dusty front windows, he'd no doubt seen the three-legged dog's attack on Hound-Dog.
He leaned on his fists, his glance dancing from one copper badge to another. “You boys shoulda let me know you was coming. I'd have baked a cake.”
“Whiskey,” Flagg said.
The barman set up seven glasses in a row on the pine planks. He ran an unlabeled bottle over each glass, splashing whiskey into each and a good bit on the bar. He corked the bottle, set it on the bar, and returned his gaze to Flagg as each deputy moved up to take his glass.
Keeping an eye on Palomar Rojas as well as the door by glancing in the mirrors behind the back bar, Flagg threw back his whiskey.
“Another?” the barman asked.
Flagg shook his head.
“It's a long, dusty trail to Bedlam,” said the barman, lip curled wryly to show a chipped eyetooth. His face was big and clean-shaven, the eyes ironic. Flagg had noticed he moved with a limp. “The town's so poor the Apaches don't even bother with us anymore. Sure you wouldn't like one more drink to cut the desert?”
“Maybe just one more,” Flagg said.
When the barman had slopped whiskey into each lawman's glass, Flagg dug the Wanted dodger out of his pocket and set it on the bar. He picked up his glass and turned sideways, studying the dusty street before the saloon, running his eyes along the roof lines.
If Hawk was here, he no doubt knew that Flagg was here now, too. No time for carelessness. The marshal knew from past experience that trailing Hawk was like trailing an old, wounded wolfâa wolf who'd slept too long in the moonlight.
A wounded, half-crazed wolf. One that didn't flinch at killing his old colleagues. In Colorado, he'd killed a young deputy, Luke Morgan, whom Hawk himself had not only trained but had considered a younger brother.
“Seen that man around?” Flagg said out of the left corner of his mouth. In the periphery of his vision, he watched the barman turn the dodger toward him, bow his head over it.
The man studied it for a half second, then turned the paper back toward Flagg.
“Think you must've taken a wrong turn somewhere.” The barman picked up the whiskey bottle. “Next round's on the house.” He splashed more whiskey into the deputies' glasses. Several had rolled cigarettes or lighted cigars. Hound-Dog stood with his back to the bar, cautiously studying the street. The man was a buffoon in some ways, but he'd acquired a reputation riding for Judge Bean in Oklahoma. Even the curliest wolves learned quickly not to underestimate him.
At a table near the wall, the old bandito, Palomar Rojas, took a deep drag from a cornhusk cigarette, squinting down at the loose cylinder as if worried about spilling his tobacco. His old, dark face was obscured by smoke.
The barman poured whiskey into Flagg's glass. “I don't make this stuff myself. It comes up from Mexico. Itâ”
Flagg grabbed his Remington from its holster and shoved the barrel up under the barman's chin, tipping the man's head back. The man splashed whiskey onto the bar, over the Wanted dodger. The liquor dribbled onto the floor around Flagg's boots.
Pressing the barrel hard against the barman's jaw, Flagg spoke through gritted teeth. “You might want to look once more at the likeness on that flyer. Make real good and sure you haven't seen that man. He might be callin' himself Hollis. George Hollis.”
The barman looked down his cheeks at the whiskey-drenched flyer. His voice was pinched with contempt. “Maybe I did see him. Yeah. He rode through here about two days ago. Stopped for a drink, rode on into the mountains . . .”
He looked at Flagg, his gaze flat, almost challenging. His eyes slitted, and the corners of his mouth rose scornfully. “In fact, I think he did say his name was Hollis. Yeah, Hollis. Chiricahuas prob'ly killed him out in those badlands west of town, poor bastard.”
Flagg stared into the man's sharp, insolent eyes. He set his thumb on the Remy's hammer, had to will himself not to pull it back and squeeze the trigger.