Part 8 (1/2)

He waited, hearing the hoof falls and the occasional ring of an iron shoe. Fifty yards back along the trail, three jostling silhouettes took shape in the darkness, starlight flas.h.i.+ng off bridle bits and rifle barrels held across saddlebows.

Yakima straightened and raised the Winchester to his shoulder. He loosed five quick shots, one after the other, blowing up dust a few feet in front of the horses. The horses whinnied and the men shouted.

When the echo of the last shot had died, the silhouettes were gone. The thuds of galloping horses dwindled in the hushed night.

With a satisfied chuff, Yakima turned and walked back toward his own mounts while thumbing fresh sh.e.l.ls into the Winchester's loading gate. He mounted the sorrel, deciding to give the roan a rest, and angled back out to the trail pocked with the shoe prints of a dozen galloping horses and the two ragged furrows of the stagecoach.

He found the stage a half hour later, a black smudge in the darkness before a mesquite patch. Brush wolves were growling and yammering around the carriage, snapping brush, and Yakima didn't stay to see what they were fighting over.

He kicked the sorrel ahead, wrinkling his nose at the smell of blood and viscera wafting toward him from the stage, and continued following the gang's sign through the rocky desert. Two hours after finding the stage, he switched horses, loosening the sorrel's saddle cinch and slipping the bridle bit, and continued astride the roan, with the sorrel's reins dallied around the saddle horn.

He rode hard all night, losing the trail only twice and having to backtrack to pick it up again. At dawn, he watered the horses at a runout spring, then sat on the ground with his back against a boulder. Fatigue was heavy in his bones. His eyelids drooped, and he was out.

In a dream, he was standing in the yard of his cabin, digging a root cellar, when Wolf trotted toward him from the corral, head down, a playful cast to his mola.s.ses-colored eyes. The mustang nuzzled his neck, the bristled lips tickling.

Yakima lifted his head sharply, heart beating fast. The roan jerked its head back with a startled snort, turned, and trotted to the end of its tied reins.

Yakima picked up his rifle, stood, and peered eastward. Rose touched the horizon, dimming the stars and ribbing the high, long clouds with red, purple, and gold.

He mounted the sorrel, dallied the roan's reins around the horn, and headed south.

Chapter 10.

That evening, just as the sun set, the posse's tracks angled off the desperadoes' trail into a notch in the rolling, scrub-covered hills. Probably to bed down for the night. Yakima pulled on past.

He had two good horses; he could keep riding for another couple of hours before the mounts would need rest. The desperadoes would probably hole up soon as well, which meant Yakima would continue gaining on them. He might even catch up to them by morning.

What he'd do when he did catch up to them, he wasn't sure. He couldn't take down the entire gang alone. He would have to wait for dark, steal into their camp, rescue the girl and Wolf, and then get the h.e.l.l away without getting drilled.

A tricky maneuver at best.

Two hours later, he made camp in a dry arroyo, staked out the horses in the spa.r.s.e gra.s.s growing among the cottonwoods. There was no water, but he'd filled his canteens at the last rock tank.

When he'd let each mount drink from his hat, he unsaddledboth of them, rubbed them down with gra.s.s, scrubbing off the sweat foam and dust, then built a small fire and made coffee with the supplies he'd found in the saddlebags. There was little food-only a few strips of jerky and some biscuits-but that with some wild roots he'd dug up near the cottonwoods would be enough to sustain him until he caught up to the gang.

He slept fitfully for three hours, huddled up in his blankets as the temperature fell to near freezing. Waking and s.h.i.+vering, he built up the little fire again. He heated the remaining coffee and had another cup with his last biscuit before kicking sand on the fire, shrugging into his sheepskin vest, and saddling the horses.

His breath fogged under the stars. h.o.a.rfrost glazed the rocks, brush, and cottonwood limbs. The thuds of his horses' hooves seemed loud as gunshots in the cool, quiet air, under the s.h.i.+mmering stars, as he rode up out of the arroyo and back onto the trail of the Thunder Riders.

It remained cool even after the sun rose. Cresting a steep saddle, Yakima s.h.i.+vered as the chill wind blew up from the valley below, over the ruins of a ragged gathering of crumbling pueblos and rotting brush pens spread across a slope stippled with cedars and ironwood clumps.

A blocklike adobe church with an empty bell tower stood amid the pueblito's ruins, its wooden cross lying on the ground before the stout gray doors, which opened and closed gently in the breeze. On the slope behind the church, amid elms and oaks, lay a cemetery spotted with leaning wooden crosses and cracked adobe shrines.

Yakima scrutinized the village for a time but saw no movement. He gigged the horses down the deeply rutted wagon trail, aiming for the stone well coping in the middle of the main street, riding slowly and raking his gaze across the fire-blackened adobe hovels, pens, and corrals on both sides of the trail.

It appeared that no one lived here anymore, but Yakima saw the remains of a couple who had-no more than skeletons clad in threadbare white slacks and tunics, Yaqui arrows protruding from their remains. Apparently, the attack, which had occurred a good five or six years ago, judging by the decay and the brush that had grown up around the buildings, had been swift and efficient, leaving no one from the village to bury their dead.

Yakima stopped the horses near the well. A skeleton lay about twenty feet away, at a corner of the church and beside an overturned hay cart. The dead man's empty eye sockets stared at Yakima, a thin, faded red bandanna whipping around the neck to which only a few strips of dried brown skin remained. Yakima wrapped the reins around the roan's saddle horn and turned to the well.

Though the village appeared abandoned, someone apparently tended the water source, as the wooden bucket sitting upside down on the low stone wall had been patched several times and a new hemp rope attached to the handle.

Yakima dropped the bucket into the well and pulled it back up, water slos.h.i.+ng over the sides. He filled his two canteens, then set the bucket in front of the horses. He hadn't yet released the handle when a bullet tore into the ground beside him, the rifle's crack cleaving the breeze-sweptsilence, the horses whinnying and jerking back with a start.

Yakima slapped his .44 and wheeled toward the church.

At the same time, a familiar voice shouted, ”Hold it, breed!”

Sheriff Speares stood just inside the church's open door. Speares no longer wore the bandage on his face, and his swollen, crooked nose resembled a purple-yellow gourd. He aimed Yakima's own Yellowboy repeater straight out from his left hip. Movement to the right of the church attracted Yakima's eye, and he turned to see the deputy U.S. marshal, Patchen, moving up along the church's cracked adobe wall, snugging the stock of his Henry rifle against his shoulder.

”Less'n you wanna buy a bullet from your own rifle,” Speares said, ”you best pull that six-shooter nice and slow, drop it on the ground.”

Yakima cast his gaze from Speares to the marshal and back again. He'd been concentrating so hard on the desperadoes, he hadn't kept an eye on his back trail. The posse had caught up to him.

He kept his hand on his pistol grips. He didn't want to kill them, but he wouldn't let them take him again.

”Drop it!” Patchen shouted, as though reading Yakima's mind.

The man's echo hadn't stopped before Yakima at once jerked his stag-b.u.t.ted .44 from its holster and dove behind the well coping. Speares and the marshal fired their repeaters, both slugs slamming into the well coping and spraying chipped rock.

The horses nickered and pranced and s.h.i.+ed away from the well. Speares fired again, and the roan screamed hideously behind Yakima, who snaked his Colt around the coping and fired three quick rounds, two drilling the church wall near the marshal, the other chewing into the door to the right of Speares and sending the sheriff lunging inside the church's heavy shadows.

Yakima rose and wheeled toward the horses.

The roan was down, legs quivering, blood gus.h.i.+ng from the hole in the side of its head, just beneath the ear. Yakima swerved wide of the thras.h.i.+ng horse and ran to the sorrel, which was sunfis.h.i.+ng toward the other side of the street. The horse was planting its rear hooves, ready to gallop, when two more shots sizzled over Yakima's head.

Sprinting up to the left of the sorrel, Yakima grabbed the saddle horn. The sorrel lunged forward, and Yakima had to fight to maintain his grip on the apple as he hop-skipped on his right foot before kicking his left boot into the stirrup.

As the horse galloped between two ruined adobes, Speares shouted behind him, ”Bring the horses!”

Two more rifle shots sounded, one slug drilling a rotting rain barrel just off the sorrel's right hip, the other grinding into the faded pink adobe wall on Yakima's left.

The horse traversed the gap in four long strides, then Yakima neck-reined it left, avoiding an old privy pit, and they shot west, paralleling the village's main street.

Behind him, Yakima heard men shouting and horse hooves thumping, Speares's voice booming above the others.

Yakima crouched over the sorrel's stretched neck as they galloped off across the brush-tufted slope. When they were clear of the village and an old placer digging, Yakima glanced over his left shoulder. The posse was gathered in front of the church, a tall man in a tan duster holding the reins of Speares's horse as the sheriff swung into the saddle. Already mounted, Patchen was pulling away from the group, elbows flapping like wings as the steeldust lunged toward Yakima.

Yakima hipped forward. Ahead, a notch in the northern ridge opened. He reined the galloping sorrel into it, hoping it wasn't a box canyon, and the sorrel tore up red gravel along the bottom of an ancient riverbed.

A couple of old stone shacks sagged along the low banks, and the horse's drumming hooves startled a small herd of Sonoran deer, which bounded up the left slope, disappearing among the rocks and pinons.

The sorrel followed the riverbed's slow curve westward. Yakima cursed, hauling back on the reins when the bed of the ancient river disappeared under a towering wall of wagon- and cabin-sized boulders. Tufts of brown and faded green grama gra.s.s pushed up between the rocks, and a couple of stunt pines twisted, leaning as though under a heavy wind.

Yakima jerked a look behind. Speares's posse was out of sight around the bend, but the clattering of shod hooves on rock grew steadily louder.