Dead Man's Trail (9781101606957) (11 page)

Chapter 14

She wore an ankle-length black bear coat over her purple velvet traveling dress and a marten fur hat that complemented the rich chestnut of her hair, which was gathered into a ponytail by a wide gold clip. The clipped queue hung forward across her left shoulder. It glistened in the coppery sunlight angling through the high, thin clouds.

Yakima had a memory flash of the ponytail curling down over the alabaster skin of her bare back. . . .

The prosecutor and the other men glanced at her, as well, and then they turned to Yakima once more. “My wife,” Mendenhour said with a proprietary air. He was obviously well aware of her attractiveness, her desirableness.

“That's what I understand.”

“I hate that she's a part of all this.”

“I reckon she's just one of several,” Yakima said, sliding his eyes away from her to the driver. “I reckon your responsibility is to all your passengers. How are you going to handle this?”

“Don't try to tell me my business, half-breed!”

“Will you help?” This from Mendenhour. His eyes were no longer as haughty as before. They were faintly beseeching, in fact.

Yakima disliked the man instinctively. He didn't know how much that was the result of his experience with other privileged men like him, and how much his wife.

“I'll pay you,” the prosecutor said. “Five hundred dollars if you get us through to Belle Fourche in the Dakota Territory.”

“The other passengers want to continue?”

“I've told them how it is,” Mendenhour said. “About who those men are out there and what they did to the lawmen in Wolfville. What they want with me. I told them they could stay here, but then they'd of course have to find another way to their destinations. And the stage won't be making its last return trip for the season until after New Year's, so they'll be stuck here for at least three weeks.”

“What about you, Mendenhour?” Yakima asked the man. “Did you consider staying here?”

“That's
Mister
Mendenhour,” snapped Coble.

Ignoring the shotgun messenger, Yakima held his implacable gaze on the prosecutor.

Mendenhour studied him, tensing his jaw. The nubs of his cheeks flushed. “Why not turn myself over to them?”

“Somethin' like that.”

“That would be suicide, Mr. Henry.”

The shotgun messenger gritted his teeth as he stared pugnaciously at Yakima. “No need to call this half-breed ‘mister,' Mr. Mendenhour. We don't need him. We can get you through to Belle Fourche just fine.”

The old driver glanced at his younger partner uncertainly.

“Maybe so,” Mendenhour said, “but
Mister
Henry is obviously good with that Winchester. He's already killed four, possibly five of them. I'm right handy with a long gun myself. I have one in the rear luggage boot, and I'm certainly not afraid to use it. I was born and raised out here, and I've fought all manner of hard cases. The four of us aboard a fast stage might just have a chance to save ourselves and keep all innocent bystanders from harm, as well.”

Yakima looked at the prosecutor's wife, who had descended the porch steps and was walking toward them. The others turned to watch her, as well. She was like a queen to whom everyone administered and deferred, protected. A beautiful queen who put all the men on edge.

As she approached, Mendenhour said, “Glendolene, you'd best wait in the station house where it's warm.”

“I'm sorry to interrupt,” she said, glancing only fleetingly, with vague shyness, at Yakima. “But what's this about?”

Mendenhour spoke to Yakima. “I've offered Mr. Henry here the job of escorting us to Belle Fourche. There are few lawmen between here and there, and the only real town we'll be passing through is Jawbone. The sheriff there is no good. A drunkard. We won't be able to depend on him for help.”

Glendolene lifted her eyes to Yakima. “What do you say . . . uh . . . Mr. Henry, was it?”

“I say keep your money. Just so happens I'm headin' the same direction.” Yakima turned to Glendolene. “How is Mrs. O'Reilly?”

“We've seared the wound closed and bandaged her arm. She says she's ready for travel. She's very strong. I think she is ready.”

“Well,” Mendenhour said eagerly, “let's go, then!”

He and the driver and shotgun messenger started walking toward the coach. The hostlers were finished hitching the team to the doubletree and were checking the snaps and buckles.

Glendolene stared at Yakima for another second. then lowered her eyes, turned, and walked back toward the station house.

* * *

Yakima rode out ahead of the stage and scouted his back trail from the top of a haystack butte. When the stage had passed safely along the trail that angled around the butte's base, he followed from a distance of about a hundred yards.

He saw no sign that the cutthroats had circled around them and gotten ahead, so he paid close attention to the country flanking him, spying nothing but deer grazing sunny slopes carpeted in grass the same color as their winter coats, and a couple of coyotes meandering along a shallow wash.

It was nearly thirty miles to the next station, and by the time they reached it three and a half hours later, the sky had cleared but the temperature had dropped below freezing. He did not venture into the yard of the station that sat in a hollow amongst rocky escarpments, but kept watch on a high stone shelf on the yard's southern edge.

While Wolf cropped grass behind and below him, he sat in the shelf in the rocks, perusing the country to the southwest through his spyglass. It was all rolling sage- and cedar-stippled hogbacks, dusty green in the winter light. The Snowy and Wind River ranges beyond them formed broad, dark lumps in the south and west. Low hills, box-shaped bluffs, and small mesas swelled against the eastern horizon. The Big Horns loomed like near storm clouds in the north, though they were still about seventy miles away. Yakima knew that the stage trail skirted their southeastern-most slopes around the town of Jawbone.

He glanced at the cabin. The passengers were emerging after a fifteen-minute layover, Glendolene walking beside Mrs. O'Reilly, whose right arm was hooked through a makeshift sling. The air was so quiet he could hear Glendolene's voice tinkling like chimes.

After their first day together, coupling on the big cot in the line shack, they'd dressed together slowly in the sunlight pushing through the two front windows from which he'd thrown back the shutters. They were lethargic from exertion and slumber, and they dressed without speaking, though they exchanged long, admiring glances.

When they'd gone out and saddled their horses, he lifted her up onto her palo's back and said, “You don't want to know my name?”

She shook her head. Her slightly tangled hair danced about her smooth ivory cheeks and shoulders. “Nope!” She laughed and reined the palo away.

“You could tell me yours!” he called after her.

She glanced back, smiling, over her shoulder. “Same time, next week?”

He shrugged.

She turned her head forward and galloped down the long hill and swung right to disappear amongst the stone escarpments. He stood there, still feeling the texture of her ripe body in his hands. . . .

Now he waited until the stage had lurched away from the relay station behind the lunging team, then mounted Wolf and rode down to the trail. He skirted the yard and the two hostlers—a couple of Indians and a black man—tending the sweaty team in the corral—and headed out after the stage. He kept it just within sight as he rode, casting frequent looks behind.

Still, the cutthroats were staying out of sight. They'd wait and try to catch him and the others off guard. Maybe attack them tonight when they were overnighting at the Hamburg Station on Seven-Mile Creek.

Ten minutes later, he topped a hill to see the stage stopped between two piles of glacial rubble at the hill's bottom. The passengers had climbed out to stand in a semicircle around the driver and the shotgun messenger, the driver on his knees to inspect the right rear wheel.

“What happened?” Yakima said as he rode up.

Charlie Adlard looked up at him, scowling. “Broke the felloe again.” He glanced at a rock leaning out from the side of the trail. “The horses swerved to miss that rock there and swung the back end right into it. It wasn't there last week—I'll damn sure tell you that.”

He glanced at the three women in the bunch and added sheepishly, “Pardon my tongue, ladies.”

Yakima dismounted and led Wolf up along the opposite side of the coach from the group gathered around the driver. A few yards ahead of the team, he found the imprints of one shod horse that had entered the trail from the west. He stared in that direction, saw a jostling brown speck climbing a distant hill.

He cursed under his breath. One man had gotten around him and kicked the rock into the trail.

Yakima tied Wolf to a cedar and walked back up to where Adlard was talking to Coble and Mendenhour. “One got around me.”

“One what?” said Mendenhour.

“Who do you think?”

The men looked at each other. The three women looked at Yakima, fear in their eyes. Then the third woman, the wife of the young, roughly clad young man, turned to Mendenhour. Tears streamed down her flushed cheeks beneath the frayed wool scarf she wore over her head. “It's because of you, isn't it? They're going to kill us all because of you!” She sobbed and turned to her gangling, rawboned husband standing beside her.

“Now, Sally!” the young man said.

“We should have stayed at the last relay station, Percy! But he made it sound like we'd seen the last of those killers!”

“I didn't say that,” Mendenhour said defensively.

Mrs. O'Reilly took Sally's arm and led her away from the group and the coach. The young woman—round-faced, snub-nosed, with curly blond hair frizzing out around the scarf—glanced back worriedly at the young man, who stood with the other men, though he looked nearly as frightened as his young wife.

Yakima turned to the driver. “Can you fix the wheel?”

“No, we was just talkin' about that,” Adlard said, looking down at the cracked wheel, the iron rim half off, several spokes hanging toward the ground with splintered ends. “I'll have to ride on to the next station and bring one back. Hamburg'll have a spare.”

“Too late to go now,” Yakima said, staring west. “The sun'll be down long before you get back.”

“What do you suggest, Mr. Half-Breed Know-It-All?” said the beefy shotgun messenger, fire in his small light brown eyes set too close to his wedge-shaped nose. “You think we oughta just camp out here with them cutthroats on the prod? One of which, I might add, slipped around your eagle eyes and wrecked the wheel!”

“I say we take the horses and ride to the next station.” This from one of the two drummers sitting off away from the larger crowd of drivers and passengers and Yakima.

They were standing together, smoking and holding their own council, regarding the others soberly. The man who'd spoken wore a spruce green bowler with a frayed brim, and a pair of cheap metal spectacles sat atop his nose. His eyes were rheumy, his voice slightly slurred. Yakima had seen him and his friend passing a small, hide-covered traveling flask.

Yakima's back stiffened as raw fury bit him. He held his ground, however. Glendolene stood nearby, watching him uncertainly, flicking her anxious gaze from him to the shotgun rider and back again.

Suddenly, she turned away with a disgusted chuff and walked back into the rocks to stand with Mrs. O'Reilly and the young Sally. Before Yakima could say anything to Coble, Adlard said, “We can't expect the women to ride bareback to the station.”

“Maybe not,” said the other drummer—short and fat, slightly older than the first, and wearing a cheap brown suit under a long rat-hair coat—“but we two can.” He gestured at his younger, bespectacled buddy. “How 'bout if we ride to the next station on two of the stage horses? We'll bring a wheel back in a wagon tomorrow morning.”

Yakima looked around at the others. They were staring at the two drummers.

Coble said, “How do we know you'll come back?”

“We'd have to come back,” said the younger drummer, taking a pull from the flask. “How else we gonna get off this backside of the devil's ass? No other coaches. No trains that I can see.”

“You might take saddle hosses,” said Adlard. “And leave us high and dry.”

“We stay together,” Mendenhour ordered. “There's safety in numbers.”

“Frankly, Mr. Mendenhour . . . ,” said the older drummer, stopping when Yakima, having had enough, swung around and walked away from the group with a subtle, frustrated air. Let the cows chew their cud. He retrieved his horse and led him off the east side of the rocks and down a hill at the bottom of which stood ponderosa pines and aspens.

“Where you goin'?” the driver called, looking insulted.

Yakima stopped. They were all looking at him peevishly.

“I'm makin' camp down there at the bottom of the hill. If any of you has any brains, that's what you'll do, too, and wait for tomorrow to fetch another wheel.”

He didn't trust the two drummers farther than he could throw them together from one end of a large barn to the other. He didn't trust any of the men from the stage, and he didn't trust the women, either. Throw Glendolene Mendenhour into that category. He figured she'd married well. Any woman who looked like her could have about any man she wanted. But finally meeting the man she
had
married was a big disappointment.

She'd been right about one thing—the less they knew about each other, the better. He'd liked her better when he hadn't known her name or who she was or anything else about her aside from the fact that she was beautiful and was even more beautiful naked and writhing on a crude cot in the summer sunshine. He trusted Trudy Shackleford more than he trusted Glendolene Mendenhour.