“Ruby!” Thornton barked.
The girl stopped abruptly, casting her frightened gaze over the balcony rail and into the saloon hall below. She held the robe closed at her throat with one hand while holding the rail with the other. Her brown breasts poked out of the robe’s partially open front—heavy and brown nippled.
“Mr. Bill?” the girl said softly, frowning curiously as she slid her eyes from Thornton to the hard-faced gents sitting around him.
“I told you to stay in your room,” Thornton said with a defeated air, aware that all pairs of eyes behind him were directed at the balcony.
He pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and index finger as Frank Miller whooped loudly and, pushing his chair back so hard it fell over with a slam, leaped to his feet.
“You done lied, Mr. Bill!” the fiery-eyed blond bellowed as he sprinted toward the stairs. “That there’s a doxie if I ever seen one!”
Ruby gave a clipped, horrified scream, eyes popping wide. She wheeled and sprinted back the way she’d come.
Miller took the steps three at a time, laughing, pulling himself up the stairs with one hand on the scarred rail. The girl’s running feet drummed in the ceiling above the bar.
Thornton jerked with a start as another gun barked behind him and left. The slugs seared the air in front of his face before plunking, one after another,into the staircase around Miller’s boots and into the rail a mere inch behind his hand.
Wood slivers flew as the cutthroat dropped to his knees, his hat tumbling off his shoulder. Cowering against the sudden fusillade, he turned a shocked, indignant look over his shoulder, a lock of blond hair hanging like a bird’s wing over a cold blue eye.
“What the—?”
Behind Thornton, Lowry Temple sat with a long-barreled, silver-plated revolver extended over the table, smoke curling from the barrel. He bunched his lips angrily and canted his head toward Thornton. “Pay the man.”
The blond scowled. “Huh?”
“Thornton doesn’t give away his girls for free,” Temple said reasonably. “And no man in my party takes a woman against her will.” He glanced at Thornton, and added, “Or the will of her pimp.”
Rage kindling in his crazy eyes, Miller glanced around at the quarter-sized holes in the steps and in the railing around him. “You coulda killed me, ya crazy—”
Temple’s revolver barked once more, causing all the men, including Thornton, to nearly jump out of their chairs. The bullet smashed into the step about six inches left of the blond’s left knee.
“Pay the man.”
“For chrissakes!” Miller shoved a hand into his coat, digging around in the breast pocket of his shirt. “How much?”
Thornton just stared at him until Temple turned to him, both brows arched with incredulity, his voice now pitched with impatience, like a school-master dealing with the antics of idiot children. “How much for the whore?”
Thornton wanted to tell the killer that the girl wasn’t for sale, but he no longer felt as passionate about it. His mind was on the prospect of Faith and Yakima Henry being hunted down like mangy coyotes by Lowry Temple.
He hesitated, shrugged. He grabbed a split log from the wood box and leaned forward to toss it into the stove.
“Six bits oughta cover it.”
Chapter 3
Yakima Henry bolted out of a deep sleep with a startled grunt and grabbed the Winchester Yellowboy repeater that he always kept lying across a chair beside his bed. He rammed a shell into the chamber, the shrill metallic rasp shredding the night’s dense silence, and aimed the gun at his bedroom door—a vague rectangular shape in the darkness.
His woman, Faith, gasped as she shot up from her own pillow beside him. “What is it?” Her hushed voice trembled slightly as she whispered, “Apaches?”
Breathing hard but holding the Winchester steady, Yakima stared at the door. He’d fought Apaches enough here at his small horse ranch at the base of Bailey Peak, in Arizona Territory, that he expected the door to burst open and for a screaming, painted brave to bound toward him with a war hatchet raised above his head.
But the door remained a solid black rectangle in the wall before him. He frowned. There was only the sound of his and Faith’s breathing, the light scrape of the night breeze brushing a weed against the outside cabin wall.
Yakima wasn’t sure what he’d heard, if anything. It could have been a dream. But then a shrill, bugling whinny rose in the distance, starting high and slowly dropping until it faded off to silence. It was answered a moment later by the near clatter of corral rails, the scuffle of prancing hooves, and the sudden, screeching, angry wail of Yakima’s own black stallion, Wolf.
Yakima cursed and depressed the rifle’s hammer.
“The broom tail?” Faith said darkly.
“Sounds like him, don’t it?”
Yakima laid the Yellowboy across the chair, threw the covers back, and dropped his bare feet to the floor with a weary groan. Then he dug his heels into the floor and pushed himself off the bed, stiff and sore right down to his bones. He’d spent all the previous day digging a new well behind the cabin, and he was nowhere near ready to leave the mattress sack. Sweeping his long black, sleep-tussled hair back from his face, he grabbed his balbriggans off a wall hook. “The son of a bitch is back for the mares.”
Faith yawned loudly. “That horny bastard.” She scuttled out of bed, making the pine posts and woven leather springs creak, and began stumbling around, gathering her clothes. “Thank God it’s not Apaches—I’m not ready to meet them yet. But if that stallion runs off those mares and colts again . . .”
“It’ll take us another week to get ’em back.” Yakima pulled on his worn blue denims over his balbriggans and, breathing hard, his long hair jostling across his shoulders, sat on the bed to pull on his moccasin boots. “He’s bound and determined to lead the whole damn remuda down to Mexico!”
“What is it about you men?” Faith growled, dropping a chemise down over her naked breasts. “How many women do you think you need, anyway?”
Yakima grabbed her, drew her to him quickly, enjoying the feel of her breasts mashing against his chest through the thin chemise. “One’s good enough for me.”
He kissed her and let her go.
“Yeah?”
Yakima chuckled dryly. “More than enough.”
Grabbing her denims off a chair back, Faith punched him with the back of her fist. “Bastard!”
Yakima grabbed the Yellowboy and a handful of .44 shells and headed out the bedroom door, grumbling as he moved through the dark cabin toward the front. He left his hat and jacket on the kitchen wall hooks, in spite of its being fall, with the mountain nights having turned downright brittle. He flung the door open angrily and stepped out onto the porch.
He’d dropped one foot off the top porch step when the broom-tail bronc loosed his tooth-gnashing whinny once again. It swirled as though from all directions, breaking off at the end in a series of knickers and coughing grunts and the clack of a kicked stone.
“Where are you, you son of a bitch?”
Two peeled log corrals and a low, log-and-stone stable sat kitty-corner from the cabin. Yakima’s blaze-faced black stallion, Wolf, was running in circles, bobbing his head wildly, his sleek black mane glistening in the shimmering starlight. The mares and foals were dancing around the adjacent stable, the foals skitter-stepping close to their nickering mothers.
Their hoof thuds rang clear in the cool, dry, silent night.
Around the cabin, the stable, the corrals, and the windmill that squawked softly above the stone water tank at its base, pine- and fir-stippled hills and low, rocky ridges humped, silhouetted against the starry sky and the black velvet mountain walls rising in all directions beyond the clearing.
The wild bronc bugled his crazed call once more. Yakima turned his gaze to the bluff rising north of the cabin. A silhouette moved at the top of the bluff, amongst the tall firs and pines and cabin-sized boulders.
Boots ground gravel in the yard, and someone said, “The bronc again?”
Yakima glanced to his left. Faith’s younger brother, Kelly, was moving out from the stable, tucking his shirt into his pants, holding a rifle under his right arm. The kid still hadn’t regained his weight after his six-month stint in a Mexican prison from which Yakima and Faith had sprung him, and his angular shadow slid along the rocky ground beside him. His breath jetted in the air around his head.
“It ain’t Santa Claus.”
Kelly stopped before the cabin, lifting his chin to listen. He wore an overlarge sheepskin vest on his narrow shoulders. “You see him?”
Yakima stared at the silhouette, which was frozen now. He felt the bronc staring back at him with challenge.
“Think so.” Yakima moved off the porch steps and began jogging north. Behind him, boots thumped and there was the rasp of a rifle’s cocking lever as Faith ran onto the porch.
Staring straight ahead as he ran, Yakima said, “Faith, you and Kelly stay here in case he circles around on me again.”
“You want us to shoot him if we see him?” Faith called, a reluctant note in her voice.
Yakima didn’t like shooting horses any more than she did. In fact, he’d always gotten along better with horses than with most people he’d run into. But the broom-tail stud was wreaking havoc with his still-fledgling ranch operation, and if the stallion had his way, Yakima would end up with no ranch at all.
“Kill the bastard!” he called over his shoulder as he ran north through the sage and piñons.
He held the Yellowboy in both hands across his chest. Leaping stones and brush clumps, he bolted up the slope, huffing and puffing against the quickly steepening grade. A hundred yards straight above him, beside a lightning-topped fir at the top of the ridge, the stallion held his ground, breath jetting from his nostrils—a nightmarish silhouette against the glinting, starry sky.
Watching Yakima run toward him, the horse nickered angrily, snorting, bobbing his head, and clawing gravel. His black eyes glistened demonically.
Yakima took his rifle in one hand and grabbed a juniper branch with the other, pulling himself up a steep shelf between the shrub and a fan of slide rock. “I’m comin’, you son of a bitch.”
Just beyond the talus, he stopped, bending forward to catch his breath. The horse stood frozen again, staring down at him from forty yards away. Yakima grinned. The horse flicked its tail—a fan-like shadow moving behind him.
Yakima was downwind of the bronc, and he could smell the horse’s gamey, sagey scent—the wild aromas of Southwestern mesas and canyons and lost, nameless barrancas in which no man save Apaches and maybe a few conquistadores had ever stepped foot.
Slowly, a snarl belying his own reluctance at shooting something so raw and untrammeled, he raised the rifle to his shoulder. He glanced down to be sure of his footing, then dropped to one knee. The movement hadn’t taken him much over two seconds, but when he raised his head again to sight down the Yellowboy’s barrel, the place beside the lightning-topped fir was filled only with stars sprinkled like sugar on a black table.
The bronc had disappeared as though he’d never been there at all. Hoof thumps rose from the other side of the ridge, quickly fading.