“So soon?” He poured his friend a fresh drink from the bottle before him. “We just got here.”
Chapter 20
In his roadhouse in northern Colorado, Bill Thornton awoke with a start, jerking his head up from his pillow, his heart racing.
“What is it?”
Blinking the sleep from his eyes, he turned to the Indian whore, Ruby, sitting up in bed beside him, frowning over the nail file in her hand.
“Didn’t you hear it?”
“Hear what?”
Thornton stared at the red and gold-papered wall beyond the bed, to the left of the closed hall door, and pricked his ears, listening. There was only the late-autumn wind rustling leaves in the yard and whining under the eaves, the squawk and muffled thud of an outbuilding door slapping free against its frame.
He turned to the window. Wan gray light pushed through the dusty panes.
“It was only me.” Ruby ran her nail file over her fingers quickly, and stopped. “Filing my nails, huh?”
Thornton let out a held breath. “I reckon. Thought I heard voices. Must have just been dreaming they were bringing that bitch back to me.”
Ruby ran the file across her nails again, then stopped. “Bitch?”
“Faith.”
“You don’t need her.” Ruby pulled the buffalo robe down to her waist, exposing her full, olive-colored breasts with their brown nipples, and slumped toward him, letting her breasts slope toward his sweat-beaded face, giving him a good look. “See? You don’t need her. You got Ruby.”
Thornton chuckled and cupped the girl’s right breast in his hand. “You got that right. No need to be jealous, Ruby. I ain’t havin’ that bitch hauled back here to take your place. I’m havin’ her hauled back here so I can punish her the way she deserves to be punished.”
He closed his hand over the girl’s breast and hardened his jaws. “The way a whore oughta be punished, who did to me what that whore did!”
“Oww!” Ruby complained, tensing suddenly.
Thornton looked up at the girl scowling down at him, her dark cheeks flushed, eyes etched with pain. He’d squeezed her too hard. Pulling his hand away from the red-mottled breast, he turned away, his face warming with chagrin.
“You too rough, sometimes, Bill!” Rubbing her breast, the girl scowled at him, hurt.
“Jesus Christ,” Thornton grouched, reaching for the bottle on his bedside table. “I said I was sor—”
He froze with his hand wrapped around the bottle’s neck. He’d heard the sound again. It wasn’t a hoof clomp or a horse’s whinny, but a low, guttural growl swirling on the wind.
“There it is,” he muttered, lifting his head and turning toward the window in the wall to the right of the bed.
“Damn!” he exclaimed when, as he twisted and stretched toward the window, a sudden pain seared the lingering, open sore in his right side. Holding his side with one hand, over the perpetually soggy bandage, he swung his legs to the floor, muttering, “Goddamn bitch!” and, placing his other hand on the bedside table, heaved himself to his feet.
“What?” Ruby said, cupping her breast and rubbing a thumb across the nipple, staring up at him now, curiosity tempering the injured look in her molasses black eyes.
The growl rose again, swirling slightly with the gusting wind.
“I thought you people were supposed to have such sharp senses,” Thornton said, ducking his head to stare through the window, at the dust and leaves blowing this way and that about the yard. “You don’t hear it?”
“The growling?”
“Yes, the growling!”
“I heard it,” Ruby said, drawing the buffalo robe up to her neck and sinking deeper into the bed. “It’s coyotes or wolves. They pick through the trash heap. So?”
“They pick through the trash heap, huh?” Thornton said, still staring out the window. “Or maybe they’re in the barn—the door of which I see you left partway open when you went out to saw that quarter off the buck in there!”
Ruby drew the robe up around her jaws, regaining her injured expression. “I closed the doors!”
“Bullshit, you did!” Thornton turned to the girl, bending slightly at the waist, holding his side with one hand while pointing at the window with the other. “Suppose you tell me who opened it, then. The wind?”
“Maybe robbers opened it.”
“Robbers!” Thornton laughed without mirth as he stepped into his elk-skin slippers and grabbed his revolver off the bedside table. “Hell, since the mine company moved the road, I’m so damn far off the beaten path, robbers don’t even come around anymore!”
He opened the Colt’s loading gate, spinning the cylinder to make sure all chambers showed brass, then grabbed the bottle off the table and threw back a long pull. The whiskey washed over his tongue, burning soothingly as it plunged down his throat and into his belly. It quelled the burn in his side but did nothing to temper his rage, which, while he’d waited these past several weeks for Temple to fetch his wayward, double-crossing whore, had been growling like a dry-summer lightning fire, consuming him.
He slammed the bottle down onto the table, causing Ruby to give a startled yelp, turning away from him. He shrugged into his tattered robe. Then, holding the pistol in one hand, the bottle in the other, he scuffed to the door, barking, “Gotta do every damn thing myself around here—is that the way it is? Jesus
Christ
!”
He went out and slammed the door to keep the heat in the room, as it was the only room he bothered to heat in these lean times, and stomped down the stairs. “Should have learned my lesson about hiring breeds after I hired that damn rock-worshipping heathen, Yakima Henry. Christ! There was a double-crossing son of a bitch!”
In the dark, dusty saloon hall, as ghostly silent as a catacombs, Thornton paused to sip from the whiskey bottle, then continued scuffing past the cold, bullet-shaped stove toward the front door. “Hired that son of a bitch, gave him a roof over his savage head and money in his buckskins, and how’d he repay me? By diddling and thus devaluing my best whore!”
Thornton pushed out the saloon’s front door and, leaving the door open behind him, stepped out onto the front porch.
A chill blast assaulted him, blowing dust and leaves into his face. Cursing, he held his robe closed at his chest and, his thin hair sliding about his withered,sunken-cheeked head, dropped down the porch steps and headed across the yard.
As he approached the barn, gritting his teeth against the chill wind, Thornton raised his revolver, the growls, angry yips, and scuffs emanating from the barn growing louder with every step.
He sidled up to the partly open door and shoved his head close to the gap, listening for a half second and then gritting his teeth furiously, thrusting the door wide, and bounding into the opening.
He stopped just inside the barn door and squinted into the musty shadows rife with the smell of fresh meat. He could hear the growls and snarls but could make out only a couple of jostling shadows until his eyes adjusted. Then he saw one of the coyotes literally hanging from the deer carcass that Thornton had bought a couple of days ago from a local mountain man, Wes Stanley. Stanley had hung the carcass from a ceiling to let it age.
The coyote’s teeth were dug into a shoulder of the gutted buck. A shoulder was about all that remained, leaving only shredded, bloodred venison clinging to the comblike spine. Jerking its head back and forth and snarling, trying to free the shoulder from the socket, the coyote thrashed and kicked while another coyote was chomping part of the tailbone on the hay-strewn floor just below the scissoring, twisting hind feet of its zealous partner.
“Damn it!”
Thornton bellowed, leveling the pistol and barking an echoing shot into the shadows.
The slug plunked into the carcass wetly. The hanging coyote yipped with a start and dropped straight down to the floor.
“Steal my meat, will ya?” Thornton bellowed as he popped off another shot at the coyote dashing off into the barn’s left rear shadows, its tail between its legs. Thornton drilled a shot at the other beast, blowing up dirt and straw a few inches in front of it.
The coyote yowled, darted away, then, unable to abandon its prize, bolted forward once more to snap up the bone between its jaws while eyeing Thornton defiantly.
Thornton fired again. Again the slug plowed into the floor as the coyote skipped and danced and dashed off into the barn’s right rear shadows.
“Son of a bitch!”
He wheeled as the first coyote leaped over a hay mound to his left, angling toward the open door. Thornton fired at the blurred figure, but his slug crashed through a side window, and the coyote dashed on out the door flanking Thornton.
“Oh, no, you don’t, ya damn scavenging savage!”
Thornton bolted out the door, his bathrobe dancing around his longhandle-clad legs, wincing sharply and clamping his hand to his aching side. He drew a bead at the coyote loping off down the trail east of the roadhouse yard, and triggered the Colt.
Dust and rocks blew up a good ten yards behind the fleeing beast, which swerved left from the trail and disappeared into the scattered aspens and pines.
Quick, rasping breaths sounded behind Thornton. He wheeled as the other coyote materialized from the barn’s shadows, its gray-dun fur bloodied from its feeding frenzy, the three-foot length of the buck’s tailbone clamped between its jaws.
Raising the revolver again, Thornton shouted, “No, you don’t!”
As he triggered the Colt and heard the ping of the hammer slamming against the firing pin, empty, the coyote bumped the bone against the open barn door with a wooden thud.
Eyes wide above the bone in its teeth, its nostrils flaring as it breathed, the coyote turned sharply in front of Thornton and galloped westward past the mud-brick blacksmith shop and the windmill, angling toward the river meandering along the base of a high, stone cliff.
Thornton jogged after it, triggering the empty revolver and bellowing,
“Get back here, you mangy, thieving bastard!”
His side grieving him, his chest rising and falling heavily, he tripped on a deadfall branch and dropped to his knees at a corner of the empty corral. He raked air in and out of his lungs, the cold air feeling like sandpaper, as he watched the coyote bound through the sage and scattered pines, leaping and swerving as though to mock the man he’d stolen good meat from, before disappearing into a ravine paralleling the stream.
“Son of a bitch!”
Thornton rasped, his throat clenching, tears of rage rolling down his cheeks.
He cursed again, louder, and then again, even louder, until his throat gave out and he was only kneeling there, bawling, tears dribbling down his chin to splatter the sand and gravel beneath him.
“Stupid heathen,” he grumbled after a time, grabbing a corral slat and pulling himself to his feet.
He turned toward the sprawling, weathered gray roadhouse, which looked gaunt and abandoned in the wind and flying leaves behind him, the paint chipping and peeling on the whipsawed pine boards, blown paper and tumbleweeds littering the porch. Plucking the whiskey bottle from his pocket and popping the cork, he stared at the window of the second-story room in which he’d left Ruby.