Widowmaker Jones (25 page)

“No one gets to write their own stories.”

“We can all change.”

“It wasn't too long ago that I was thinking the same thing. I thought I might go back East and set myself up in a carriage shop.”

“And who's to say you can't?”

“I know it wouldn't be easy, especially not at first. I thought I might build a place with quarters in the back, and stay there until I got the shop on its feet.”

“And then what?”

He shrugged and looked down at the ground. “You know, maybe build a house and live like an honest citizen. Can you imagine a bruiser like me living like that, with the regular folks passing me on the way to church and tipping their hats and saying ‘Good morning, Mr. Jones. Fine day, isn't it?'”

“Sounds like a fine dream to me. What kind of house would you build?”

“Nothing fancy, but neat and trim, you know. My ma was always partial to flowers, even though we laughed at how she fretted over them. Might be I could plant some of my own flowers. I close my eyes and sometimes I can still smell those flowers of hers.”

She turned her back to him and took the bean pot off the fire.

“You're laughing at me, aren't you?” he asked.

She didn't answer immediately, but finally spoke. “No, I'm not laughing. We had a real house once, but Papa gave it up and we went back on the road full-time. It didn't bother Mama that much. She had the wandering heart more than Papa did.”

“What happened to your folks?”

“Mama took ill in Louisiana. Some kind of fever. The doctors never could tell us exactly what it was, but we lost her three days later. Papa never was the same after that.”

“And your papa?”

“Fonzo shouldn't have told you.”

“You don't have to say.”

“They hung Papa. Hung him like a common thief.”

“Who hung him?”

“We did a show in Austin and camped on the roadside on our way to San Antonio. A group of men rode up in the night and dragged us from our wagon.” She wiped at one eye with the back of her hand. “Somebody back in Austin had stolen a horse, and they thought Papa did it, even though we didn't have the horse.”

Newt had seen more than one lynch mob, and he could easily imagine the scene. The ugliness and terror were written plain on her face as she relived it.

“They were all drunk. Papa tried to reason with them, but they wouldn't listen. All they kept saying was that the no-good thieving Gypsies were going to learn to stay out of their county. They held us while they put Papa on a horse and led him under a high tree limb. Fonzo fought them, but they only laughed and knocked him down. I told him to look away when they hung Papa, but he wouldn't.”

“I'm sorry for your loss.”

“They left Papa hanging. We cut him down and loaded him in the wagon. Didn't bury him until we crossed the river into Mexico. I wasn't about to bury him in Texas.”

“You didn't go to the law?”

“Who's going to listen to a Gypsy? I saw how they treated my Papa, and him a gentle man who never hurt anyone. I never thought such cruel men existed, and we came to Mexico thinking things might be different.”

“And they weren't, were they?”

“Not one bit.”

“I . . .”

“I know you mean well, but there's nothing you can say. This whole country is filled with nothing but callous, coldhearted ruffians.”

“Like me?”

“I'm sorry. I didn't mean to . . .”

“No offense taken.”

“What about your parents?” She wiped at her eyes again and tried to take on a happy face.

“They're both gone. Pa went before I came west, and I got a letter two years back that said Ma had passed away.”

“Any other family?”

“One brother, but I haven't seen him in years. He and I never saw eye to eye on anything. My sister married a missionary and the two of them moved off to Nicaragua, or some such jungle place. Last I heard from her was when she wrote me the letter about Ma.”

“Do you miss your family?” she asked.

“Some. We had hard times, but lots of good times, too.”

“Fonzo is all I have left, and those horses are all we have left of Papa.”

An awkward silence settled between them. Newt tried to catch hold of something he could say, but by the time something witty came to him the judge interrupted his intentions.

“Are those beans ready?” The judge lifted his hat off his face. “I'm nigh to famished, and all this courting talk is keeping me from my rest.”

Newt stood and walked off into the dark to check the horses.

“Touchy, ain't he?” The judge propped himself up on one elbow and looked at Kizzy. “Don't you be getting any fool ideas about that fellow yonder. I've seen his kind before.”

“I was only talking to him,” Kizzy said.

“You listen close and you'll hear him out there—the sound of that pistol of his pulling out of leather and him practicing with it over and over. Maybe he means well and talks well sometimes, but you notice the way his eyes change when you mention Cortina. They don't call him the Widowmaker for nothing. He's mad-dog mean.”

Kizzy spooned some beans on a plate and set them on Newt's saddle for him when he came back. She put some on a second plate and walked over to the judge. He rose to a sitting position and brushed a hand through his whiskers and smacked his lips expectantly.

“Be a good girl and fetch me that canteen, if you don't mind.” The judge held out his hands for the plate of beans.

She turned and dropped the plate on the ground in front of the dog. The judge leaned forward, intending to snatch the plate up, but the dog was already standing over it and growling.

“Why, you no-good, spiteful varmint.” The judge scooted back to his former position and glared at the dog while it ate his supper. “I swear I'm going to kill that mutt if you don't keep him away from me.”

Kizzy bent over the pot and scooped out the last of the beans for herself. She sat down on her saddle and took the first mouthful while she stared into the dark and listened for the sound of Newt out there with the horses.

After a while, she looked to the dog, who was licking up the last of the judge's beans. “Good Vlad. Good boy.”

B
reakfast consisted of nothing but hot coffee, and Newt waited while the judge nursed a third cup and squinted up at the stars overhead. It was still two hours before sunup, but Newt already had his horse saddled. He wished the judge would hurry up. Don Alvarez was probably already gaining on them, and the night's conversation with Kizzy had him feeling awkward in her presence. She glanced his way several times, but he looked away or found something to busy himself with.

She stood beside her white horse, adjusting the cinch on her saddle. She had swapped the dead bandit's saddle to the black draft horse, and they had lashed their bedrolls and other equipment to it to lighten the load on their saddle horses.

Finally, she could find nothing else to busy herself with and needed to say something, anything. “What were you looking for on those dead outlaws back at the presidio?”

Newt didn't answer.

“He was looking for his gold,” the judge said. “Didn't you know that the Widowmaker here is a mining tycoon?”

“I was looking for what Cortina stole from me,” Newt said.

She reached into the bandit's saddlebags on the black, and held up a rusty tobacco can. “I found this in his saddlebags last night.”

“What's in it?” the judge asked.

She pitched the can to Newt and he caught it and pried the lid off. Inside it was a white coffee sack. It seemed empty, but Newt could feel something at the bottom in one corner. He turned the sack up and dumped a little, crudely poured gold ingot into his palm. It was roughly two inches long and quarter that thick.

The judge leaned closer and peered at what Newt held. “So that's the fortune you've been after.”

“There was more than this. A lot more.” Newt put the little gold bar back in the sack.

“I wouldn't be ashamed,” the judge said. “Why, there must be a hundred and fifty dollars in that sack. That's well worth riding down here into Mexico and risking your life.”

“I had twenty of those ingots. Me and Yaqui Jim paid a man down at the stamp mill to pour them for us on the sly.”

“Well, one of them is all you've got now. Better that than a sharp poke in the eye.”

“Cortina could have the rest of them.”

“Or he might have spent his share already.”

“That's what I aim to find out.” Newt poured out the last of the coffee and tied the empty pot to the black's saddle. Then he mounted the Circle Dot horse. “You coming?”

The judge swallowed his last drink and rubbed the inside of the cup clean with a handful of sand before going to his own horse. “Reckon I will.”

Newt rode past Kizzy and looked her full in the face for the first time that morning. “Thank you.”

They turned into the road to Las Boquillas before daylight, with Newt riding far in the lead and none of them talking. The judge waited for the sun to come up before he rode up beside Newt. Kizzy remained well behind them, leading the black draft horse and seemingly content to have some time to herself.

The judge looked behind him to make sure she was out of earshot before he whispered, “Don Alvarez might have already let those rurales have her brother.”

“I know it,” Newt said. “But she doesn't know that, and don't you bring it up.”

“She thinks we're going to ride back to Zaragoza and hand over Cortina's head to get that boy out of the calaboose.”

“I don't see anyway around it.”

“We ain't riding back there. My mother didn't raise any fools,” the judge said with his voice rising a little too much. He lowered his voice to a whisper again. “You help me take Cortina alive, if we can, and get him back to Langtry, and I'll pay you a hundred dollars.”

“Cortina is mine.”

“You gave me your word, or I wouldn't have let you loose in the first place.”

Newt glanced at the dog trotting alongside his horse and then turned to the judge. “Like you gave Don Alvarez your word that you would bring Cortina or his head back to him.”

“Worst thing you could do is to go back there. He wants your head, too,” the judge said. “You keep on the straight and narrow with me and don't waste your time fretting over that Gypsy girl back there, nor her brother, either. Me and you had a deal first.”

“I'll figure it out. Cortina is going to get what's coming to him, one way or another.”

“I done had a hanging post put up. There's the principle of the matter to think on. Cortina's head down here doesn't do me any good. I want him hanging up in Langtry for everyone to see.”

“It's been my experience that we don't always get what we want.” Newt took his hat off, slapped it against his thigh to knock some of the dust off it, and wiped at the sweat on his brow before setting it back on his head. “I think you're kidding yourself if you think we could take Cortina alive.”

“Try is all I'm asking.”

“You're asking too much.”

“You cross me, Widowmaker, and I won't forget.”

“Get in line with the rest of them that want my hide and wait your turn.”

Newt pulled his horse up. Somebody was coming down the road from the north raising a big cloud of dust. After a short wait he recognized it was a herd of sheep driven by a man and two stock dogs.

Kizzy called Vlad over and tied a rope to his collar and secured it to her saddle horn, fearing he would fight with the two strange dogs. Newt waited beside her while the judge went up the road and conversed with the sheepherder.

Newt and Kizzy bided their time and then swung wide of the bleating sheep. The judge met them in the road on the other side.

“That sheepman said he came from Las Boquillas yesterday morning and hasn't seen anyone on the road between here and there,” the judge said. “But he did say he heard horses passing east of him last night on the foot of that mountain yonder.”

“Maybe the best thing we can do is to beat Cortina to Las Boquillas and wait for him, if you're positive that's where he's going,” Newt said.

“Oh, he's headed back to Texas. You can bet your hat on it. Could be he intends to cross the river into Texas elsewhere, but he's headed north,” the judge said. “A lot of the Rio Grande runs in a canyon hereabouts, but leave it to him to know where he can cross.”

“The trouble is going to be finding his trail again.”

The judge shook his head solemnly. “We won't have to track him. That sheepherder said that there's an old trail that goes to the east of those big mountains you can see there to the north. Said that trail goes to an old logging camp and then on to Las Boquillas the back way. Said there's nothing left of that place but an old church and some ruins, but there's plenty of water there.”

The mountains to the north sat alone and separate from the other mountains to the east. In places they rose straight up for a thousand feet, and their tops were shrouded in dark green timber, in sharp contrast with the brown scrubland below. From a distance, the mountains looked more like an island floating in the sky.

They cleared the herd's dust, and the judge waved his hand in front of his face. “Damned Mexicans and their stinking sheep.”

“You are a prejudiced man,” Kizzy said.

“Prejudiced? Hell, I'm married to a Mexican woman.”

“I didn't know you were married,” Newt said.

The judge grunted and tried to look insulted. “What? A fine-looking man like me, and you think some pretty woman didn't latch on to me?”

“I didn't see a wife back in Langtry,” Newt added.

“She lives in San Antonio. I ride up to see her once or twice a year, and the kids stay with me sometimes.”

“That doesn't seem like much of a marriage,” Kizzy said.

“We have a perfect marriage, as long as we keep plenty of distance between us.”

Kizzy let her dog loose, and it loped out in front of them, scouring the brush for rabbits.

The judge watched the dog work and pointed at it after a time. “Did I ever tell you about an old coonhound I had when I was a boy that could count to five?”

Newt looked at Kizzy and shook his head. The two of them spurred forward, leaving the judge behind.

“Hold on there,” the judge called out. “I haven't finished my story.”

* * *

The trail the sheepman had spoken of was hard to miss, as it was cut deep with ruts from the two-wheeled Mexican carts that must have traveled it in some bygone day. Those ruts followed a winding route, climbing through a narrowing valley, crossing over low foothills, and diving off into deep, narrow canyons. The higher they climbed, the more the land changed. The scrubland turned to low ridges covered in grass and scattered oaks. Higher still, they rode through stretches of piñon pines and fir trees, and the terrain became rockier and more challenging. Dogwoods and other trees not seen on the desert below grew in the shady canyons.

Twice they flushed mule deer in front of them, and a startled black bear sent rocks rolling as it fled across a mountainside above them. A lone eagle drifted on a thermal high above them for much of their ride, and high at the top of a dizzying tower of rocks Kizzy spied some kind of animals that the judge said were bighorn sheep.

“What do they call these mountains, Judge?” Newt asked while they were taking a break to let the horses blow on a particularly steep stretch of the trail.

“Maderas del Carmen,” the judge answered.

“What does that mean?” Kizzy asked.

“Timber gardens, or some such like that.”

The constant weariness and worry and all the hard miles behind them weren't enough to make any of them blind to the grandeur around them.

“It's a beautiful place,” Kizzy said. “Like a Garden of Eden in the middle of the desert.”

“Old Adam and Eve never rode such high country,” the judge said.

An hour later they found the rurales, or what was left of them. The dog stopping in the trail and growling warned them of what lay ahead, and they soon saw the bodies lying in the grass and strewn along the trail on an open stretch of ridgeline. All of them looked to have died hard, and all of them were stripped and mutilated.

“There's your Garden of Eden,” the judge said after riding through the bodies. “Apaches caught them unsuspecting coming over this ridgeline, easy as pie. That's the way Apaches like their ambushes. Easy, and no trouble for the killing.”

Newt didn't stop his horse, not wanting Kizzy to look on the dead men any more than she had to. He had heard stories of what the Apaches did to their victims, but he couldn't have imagined it would be like that. All of the rurales were stripped, and most of them had been slashed and cut all over their naked bodies. Body parts were removed and cast aside, like some wicked child's playthings. He was a man with a strong stomach, but what he saw was hard to look upon.

Only one of the rurales' horses was left, and it was as dead as the men. The Indians had obviously taken the rest of the horses, along with the rurales' firearms and everything else of any use.

The judge rode a wide circle around the massacre site, leaning from the saddle and searching the ground for sign.

“What do you think?” Newt asked when the judge came back.

“Don't know how many of them there were. It's hard to tell with Apaches. They'll travel different trails in little bunches, or even in singles. Then they'll meet up someplace and raise hell and filter off in their little bunches again when they're through,” the judge said. “I'd guess they hit the rurales sometime yesterday evening.”

Newt recognized a couple of the dead men as those who had been in Zaragoza. “How did the rurales beat us here?”

“I imagine Don Alvarez sent them through the pass to patrol the road and to block Cortina to the west.”

“Can't say I'm going to miss those rurales, but I wouldn't wish that back there on any man.” Newt scanned the ridgeline ahead of them, and the mountainsides above them. “Those Apaches could be up there anywhere. I don't like the thought of riding into an ambush.”

“No, it's not a pleasant thought. Damned Mescaleros keep leaving their reservation up in the New Mexico Territory and raiding down here until they've raised enough dickens to suit them. Then they go back to the reservation and act like good Injuns. Those Injun lovers in Washington ought to know that you can't tame an Apache, and thinking you can make farmers of them is pure foolishness.”

“How far to this old church? What did you call it?”

The judge cleared his throat. “Saint something or other. They've got more saints down here than you can shake a stick at, and they all get to running together on me so that I can't keep them straight in my head. We should reach it about midday.”

Newt looked at Kizzy. “Maybe you should turn back. The judge could ride with you back to the main road and take you to Las Boquillas.”

“Like hell,” the judge said.

Kizzy straightened in her saddle and stared straight ahead to avoid looking back at the dead men. “No, Indians or not, I'm going on with you.”

“Those Apaches won't care that you're a woman,” the judge said.

“There's no need to scare her,” Newt said.

The judge jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the dead men behind them. “I think it's a little too late to worry about scaring her.”

Newt checked his Winchester to make sure there was a cartridge in the chamber and then started his horse along the trail. “Miss Grey, you're putting me in a hard spot. No man that's any account would drag a woman along on a trip like this. If those Apaches hit us, it will be my fault if some harm comes to you. Same with Cortina if he starts shooting our way.”