The Lonely Breed, page 18
The acrid odor of cordite wafted around his face. He stared through the smoke.
The short figure had fused with the taller tree and dropped to its knees, head hanging. A rifle lay several feet away.
Slowly, Yakima approached, stopping three feet in front of the slumped figure.
The man lifted his head, the flaps of the rabbit hat hanging straight down on either side of his face. His long chin whiskers wisped around in the breeze. Blood oozed out one corner of his mouth, glistening in the starlight reflecting off the snow.
The man’s face bunched with pain. “Who... are you, breed?”
Yakima stared down at him, his chest rising and falling heavily, the medallion winking in the night’s ambient light. Yakima raised the Yellowboy to the man’s forehead. The man stared up at him fearfully.
“Go to hell wondering, hombre.”
The rifle barked. The man fell straight back in the snow, kicking.
Yakima turned and started jogging back down the hill toward the camp.
Chapter 22
The gunshot flatted out across the lonely, star-capped ridges, echoing faintly and setting several coyotes to howling.
Ace Higgins turned to Bardoul and Brindley, standing along the ridge of the low hill beside him, their breath wreathing in the chill night. “Came from straight north,” Higgins said, pointing over a jog of pine-covered rimrocks limned by starlight.
No one said anything. They stood staring across the snow-basted bluffs, shivering at the slight breeze sliding icy hands beneath their coat collars and tied-down hats. In the hollow down the hill behind them, their campfire made a small orange smudge in the aspen copse.
“We can’t be that far off the trail,” said Brindley as the howling of the coyotes faded.
“Well, how the hell would we know without a map?” Bardoul said, ramming the back of his fist against Brindley’s shoulder. Brindley staggered sideways, grabbing his upper arm and casting the bounty hunter an injured look.
Earlier that day, Brindley had hunkered down beside their coffee fire to study the map. He’d turned his head away for a time, peering into the distance. When he’d turned back to the map, he saw that he’d let the paper hang too close to the flames. It had caught fire, and by the time he’d stamped it out, the map was little more than brittle ashes flung about on the wind.
“I done told ya I was sorry, Bardoul!” Brindley could barely see through his swollen right eye, which Bardoul had blackened when he saw what remained of the map Gillespie had drawn of the old Basque shepherds’ trail. “You could do with a little forgiveness, you know that? It was an honest mistake. Don’t tell me you haven’t made ’em before!”
Bardoul stepped toward him, raising his fist and gritting his teeth. Three shots echoed quickly, one after another. Bardoul jerked his head northward once more, letting his clenched fist sag to his side.
Again, they all stood listening as another shot flatted out across the glowing night.
After nearly five more minutes of hearing only the coyotes and the breeze combing the new-fallen snow, Higgins turned to Bardoul. “It ain’t necessarily the breed and the woman. Could be a mountain man or a prospector.”
Bardoul ran his gloved hand across his runny nose. “This late at night?”
“Maybe someone’s huntin’ a bobcat,” offered Brindley meekly. “Or, shit, maybe—”
“Shut up!” Bardoul turned to him sharply and flung an arm toward the camp. “Saddle the horses. We’re headin’ north.”
Higgins stared at him. “Tonight? In the dark?”
“We done lost enough time chasin’ shadows because of this goddamned lead-headed tinhorn here,” Bardoul said, glancing at Brindley, who leapt back like a frightened doe, raising his hands defensively. “We’re gonna make up that time tonight, so get movin’!”
He jerked forward, threatening. Higgins and Brindley jumped up and, tramped toward the campfire like scolded schoolboys.
Bardoul turned northward and stared. “It’s you, ain’t it, breed? You half-wild savage, you.” He sucked at the chaw in his lip and spat, then licked the remains from his beard. “Yeah, it’s you.”
Bardoul turned and followed Brindley and Higgins into the aspens.
When Yakima had jogged back down to the camp, where the burning bushwhacker was still burning, he found Faith safe in her hiding place beneath the deadfall. He doused the burning man with snow, then dragged him and the other two dead men a good fifty yards down ravine from the camp and rolled their bodies into a brush-choked gully.
Food for the carrion eaters.
He and Faith had a cup of tea, then rolled into their blankets and robes, their limbs entangled, and slept till dawn.
They made good time the next day, until around noon when the mule threw a shoe. Yakima built a fire and brewed tea. Faith sat on a rock and sipped the tea as Yakima removed the mule’s other three shoes. The beast could go without shoes in this snowy terrain at what seemed to be the top of the world, blue-green pine forests rolling away in all directions, relieved only by occasional rocky scarps and frozen lakes appearing like rare pearls studding a lush green carpet.
There was another short delay while they waited for a snow squall to blow through. When the storm had drifted southeast, leaving another foot of powder on top of the already deep snow and a good twenty-degree drop in temperature, they moved on toward the distant conifer-stippled saddle. On the other side of the saddle lay Gold Cache, only fifteen or so miles as the crow flies but another seven or eight hours away via snaking valleys, stream fords, and canyons.
Yakima figured that Thornton’s men had lost their trail. Still, he kept a keen eye skinned.
It was during a habitual sweep of their back trail, as they traversed a deep, pine-studded ravine, that he spied two men jogging through the trees they’d just left. The men were heavily bundled and carrying rifles, and they were obviously trying to gain position on Yakima and Faith.
Yakima reined his horse to a sudden halt, turning the paint sideways as he stared at the edge of the clearing. The men had disappeared behind tree boles.
“What is it?” Faith asked, riding the mule behind him.
Yakima reached behind and grabbed the reins from her hands. “Hold on!”
He heeled the mare into a lunging gallop, jerking the balky mule along behind. They’d galloped twenty yards through the deep, scalloped snow before two shots resounded, one after the other. Yakima glanced over his left shoulder.
Smoke puffed amid the trees. There were three more erratic shots, but the shooters were too far away now to have much chance of hitting two fast-moving targets.
The thought had no sooner passed through Yakima’s mind than something tore into his upper left arm. The bullet had come from ahead and to the right. Yakima cursed and sagged back in the saddle, gritting his teeth as cold fire engulfed him.
Faith jerked her head toward him. “Yakima!”
“Go!” With his right hand, he tossed her the reins. When she’d caught them, Yakima reached for his rifle.
Before he could slide the Yellowboy from the boot, another bullet spanged off a rock two feet before the paint’s left front hoof, and the report echoed sharply off a snow-blanketed scarp towering over the ravine’s right, pine-studded wall.
The horse screamed and reared. Yakima was holding the reins in his left hand as he’d reached for the rifle with his right, and he didn’t grab the horn in time to brace himself. Before he knew it, he was falling off the horse’s left hip, hitting the snow and rolling downslope.
“Yakima!” Faith cried as his horse raced past her. She was turning the fiddle-footing mule toward him, her face etched with terror.
Yakima looked ahead. A sombrero-hatted man in a heavy buffalo coat squatted atop a rock-studded hillock, aiming a rifle at Yakima. The rifle stabbed smoke and fire, and the bullet tore up a gout of snow and sod a foot from Yakima’s left knee, the heavy-caliber slug sounding like a cannon blast as it echoed off the scarp.
Behind came the sound of men running through the snow, breathing hard, their heavy clothes rustling.
Yakima glanced at Faith, swinging his right arm wildly. “Goooo!”
Sitting on his butt, he clawed his Colt .44 from the holster beneath his capote and cocked it, then kicked himself around. The two men were heading for him, trudging through the knee-deep snow, holding their rifles straight up and down before them, eager grins on their unshaven faces—one wearing an engineer’s pin-striped cap, the other, a high-crowned, snuff-brown Stetson and a bulky buckskin coat.
Brindley and Higgins.
Yakima fired a shot. Brindley screamed and grabbed his right thigh. Higgins dove for cover, and Yakima threw himself left as another heavy-caliber slug tore up snow and sod where he’d been sitting.
Yakima rose to his left elbow, setting his jaw against the pain searing his left arm, and extended the revolver in his right hand. The man with the rifle—the bounty hunter, Wit Bardoul—was too far away for the short gun, but he fired two shots, anyway.
One shot plunked into the spindly cedar to Bardoul’s left, while the second drilled a rock below him and to the right. The bounty man flinched and scrambled back behind the rocks capping the rise.
Yakima flexed his wounded arm. It felt as though the bullet had gone through without breaking the bone. Cold blood soaked his coat sleeve, adding a fine chill to the burning pain.
He rose to his haunches and looked behind him as the man on Brindley’s right, Higgins, fired his Spencer from the cover of a low cedar, the smoke wafting, the bullet whistling over Yakima’s shoulder and plunking into the snow twenty feet upslope.
Yakima returned an errant shot, looked around quickly. A shallow coulee lay about twenty feet straight ahead, between him and Bardoul. As Bardoul and Higgins stitched the air around him with whistling lead, Yakima bolted forward, running hard and diving.
What felt like a bee buzzed around his left ear and snapped a sage shrub.
He smacked the bottom of the depression on his right shoulder, pain hammering his left arm. He lifted his head, glanced back to where Higgins hunkered behind the snow-draped cedar.
Brindley was thrashing around in the snow, beating his gloved fists against the ground and cursing loudly.
“Come on out and get it over with, breed!” Bardoul called from the stone barricade in the opposite direction.
Quickly, Yakima thumbed open his six-shooter’s loading gate, plucked out the spent cartridges, and replaced them with fresh from his shell belt.
A low rumbling sounded, as if a train were chugging somewhere in the distance.
Ignoring the sound, Yakima stretched his pistol over the depression’s lip, thumbing back the hammer and aiming at the gray sombrero and broad, bearded face showing above the snow-tufted rocks capping the hillock.
Bardoul was forty yards away. Adjusting for distance, Yakima fired. The slug ground into the rock below and to the left of the bounty hunter’s head, and, cursing, he jerked down behind the natural barricade.
Yakima couldn’t lie in the depression forever. He had only so much ammunition. He had to make his move now, or shake hands with the devil soon.
As the man behind him fired, blowing up snow at the depression’s lip, Yakima leapt to his feet and sprinted toward the hillock.
He raised the revolver, triggered a shot. Bardoul returned fire. Yakima dodged the bullets stitching the air around him, ducking and swerving, leaping cedars, extending the pistol before him, firing and trying to keep the bounty hunter from drawing a steady bead.
He fired four shots, then five.
When he was twenty yards away, his sixth smashed the shooter’s rifle with an angry clang. Sparks sizzled along the barrel and over the hammer. Bardoul screamed and tossed the rifle away, as though he’d suddenly found himself holding a striking diamondback.
The rumbling grew louder, the ground shifting and sliding beneath Yakima’s moccasins. Out of the corner of his right eye, he could see something large and white seeming to plunge toward the ravine.
Not breaking stride, Yakima turned his head. A wave of snow, dislodged by gunfire from the rock face above the clearing, was rumbling toward him, bending and snapping pines in its wake.
The avalanche seemed to get caught in the back of his mind, a secondary consideration.
First, Thornton’s men...
Fury boiling through him, Yakima pushed off the snowy ground, leaping toward the rock barrier while sliding his broad-bladed bowie knife from its beaded leather sheath on his left hip. As his left foot landed atop the wall, he adjusted his grip on the knife so that the blade angled down.
The snow was like an ocean wave, roaring toward him. He could feel its cold breath, hear the trees groaning and snapping under its weight.
Before him, Bardoul was down on one knee, snarling, his rifle lying several feet away. The bounty hunter was trying to grab his pistol from beneath his buffalo coat, but the long barrel was caught in the curly hide.
Bardoul cursed loudly, enraged eyes snapping wide, silver front teeth flashing inside the gray of his scraggly beard.
Yakima flew toward him.
The snow caught him in midleap. Before him, Bardoul was swept away in a blur, replaced with white. Yakima felt the air driven from his lungs as the snow picked him up and hurled him in the same direction as the bounty hunter.
In less than a second he was rolling and tumbling amid the snow chunks, beaten and pummeled, feeling like a cork in a raging millrace.
Chapter 23
Lying flat on his back beneath the leaden snow, Yakima swam up from unconsciousness and immediately felt as though a giant were kneeling on his chest. He opened his eyes. Rather, he tried to open his eyes.
The snow was so heavy, pressing on every inch of his body, that he could hardly lift his eyelids. It didn’t make any difference. All he could see through the slits was darkness.
Panic raking over him, he sucked a breath. His lungs expanded only a hair, drawing snow up his nose and down his throat. He choked, tensing, feeling the panic grow, sending a ringing through his ears as his heart pitched like a bucking bronc. He jerked his legs and arms, trying to get some space around him, room to breathe.
But it was like trying to swim through wet adobe. He could move only a couple of inches.
Somewhere above, as though from a long way through water, Faith was calling his name.
Yakima’s heart pounded harder. He bunched his lips and funneled his strength into his right leg and right wrist, drawing the wrist up along his thigh, then angling it up and, grinding his foot into the snow for leverage, lifting that arm from the shoulder.
Grunting with the effort, choking at the snow in his mouth and nose, he began raising his arm against the leaden weight above.
“Yakima!” Faith screamed, bounding into the knee-deep snow blanketing the ravine in scalloped drifts and chunks. She whipped her head around at the pine branches protruding here and there like human limbs from the snowslide.
From the rocks fifty yards away, she’d watched the avalanche sweep into the ravine, literally erasing Yakima just as he’d leapt toward the bounty hunter, Wit Bardoul. She’d sloughed through the snow to where she’d last seen the two men, and now she saw only the tops of rocks protruding from the crusty snow chunks.
“Yakima!” she shouted, turning her gaze toward the pines at the ravine’s far side, in the direction the snow would have swept him. “Can you hear me?”
She continued calling his name as she trudged through the knee-deep snow, turning her head frantically from right to left, breathing hard. Finally, just as hopelessness began to wash over her, a crackling sound rose behind her.
She spun around, hair flying. Thirty yards away, near the edge of the ravine, a gloved hand protruded from the snow, forming a fist, snow capping the glove. The hand disappeared. A moment later, it reappeared with a crusty rasp, snow flying out from around it.
“Yakima!”
Faith scrambled over and dropped to her knees. She squeezed the fist and began scooping the snow away from around it, trying to gauge where his head would be. She dug deep, scooping the snow toward her until a red-tan shape appeared.
Yakima’s face rose from the snow as though from the surface of a lake.
“Hahhhh!” he grunted, bolting up to a sitting position, spitting and blowing snow from his mouth and nose. He tipped his head back and took a deep, grating breath.
Faith leaned toward him, placed her hands on both sides of his head, and pressed her cheek against his shoulder. “I thought you were gone!”
He sucked another breath, then another, the hoarseness slowly leaving his voice, his breath evening out as oxygen pumped through him freely once more. She could feel him shaking, saw the blood-soaked left coat sleeve and the small, ragged hole. His legs were still covered with snow. She began brushing it away.
“We have to get you warm. I’ll build a fire.”
She pulled away, but he grabbed one of her arms. “Where’s Bardoul and the others? You seen ’em?”
“No.” She looked around, frowning. “They’re under the snow somewhere. Best place for ’em.” She placed her own hand over his as he clutched her forearm. “Come on, Yakima. You’re shaking like a leaf.”
“Wait.” He released her and stood, snow flying off of him. His wet buckskins clung to him. The snow stuck to his coat and breeches in white patches, already crusting in the cold air.
He began to, slog through the snow, his wet hair flying around his head, the wounded left arm hanging straight down at his side.
He stopped, staring into the trees, then moved down the slight slope toward the edge of the ravine. Faith followed him. When he stopped, she sidled up to his right shoulder, followed his stare.
Ten feet away lay Bardoul. Only his head, neck, and about six inches of chest protruded from the snow. His greasy pewter curls swirled lightly in the breeze and his brown eyes were glassy with death.
His head was tilted against a small pine, as if he were just resting there. Yakima’s bowie knife protruded from the left side of his neck. Liver-colored blood bathed his neck and shoulder, staining the snow around his head.
