The Lonely Breed, page 20
“Yakima, I should have told you this already, but I thought you’d try to talk me out of continuing to Gold Cache if I did.”
He didn’t say anything.
“The woman in Gold Cache I mentioned,” Faith said. “I have a history with her, if you get my drift.”
Yakima touched the scar on her side. “This history?”
Faith straightened, her hair tumbling down both sides of her face. Her nipples were like tender pink rosebuds.
“A few years ago, when I was first starting out, I worked for Crazy Kate Sweney at Crazy Kate’s in Laporte. Makin’ a long story short, Kate killed a deputy sheriff one night in the brothel, and, by accident, I saw it.
“The deputy wanted a payoff. Kate and the local law rigged the gambling tables and divvied the profits. Kate had been trying to fleece her partners. The deputy lived for a few days, and he told the sheriff he’d seen me pass by Kate’s office just when Kate stuck the stiletto in his neck in a rage.”
Faith tossed her hair back with the back of her hand and laughed caustically. “I was only sixteen and scared out of my wits. So when the sheriff called me into his office, I told him everything I knew. Kate fled town but not before ordering two of her bouncers to kill me.”
Yakima didn’t say anything. The stove popped, a log shifting with a muffled thud. Outside, birds chittered in the snow-flocked pines.
“They burst into my room the night after Kate left and shot my best friend, Mandy, while she slept, thinkin’ she was me.” Faith turned to stare pensively at the popping stove. “Killing Kate was my original intention.”
“What about now?”
She thought for a moment, then turned to him with a slight, cunning smile. “More killing won’t bring Mandy back. Now I reckon I’ll settle for any ol’ place of my own. On Kate’s turf, of course.”
“I’m not taking you up to Gold Cache to get you shot or stabbed by some crazy brothel queen.”
“Have some faith.” Faith grinned and rubbed her breasts on his chest, touching her nose to his and wriggling atop him seductively. “I can be right congenial when I set my mind to it. Why, I ain’t hard to get along with at all.”
As she wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him hungrily, Yakima allowed she wasn’t. But as they began making love once more, making the log bed creak like a firewood dray with ungreased wheels, he also speculated that there were going to be plenty of fireworks in Gold Cache.
Chapter 25
Yakima and Faith lay around the cabin for the rest of the day, resting, healing, eating, and making love. Faith cooked a large supper of sonofabitch stew and biscuits, and they washed it down with wild currant wine she found hidden away and forgotten in a hole beneath the woodpile at the west side of the cabin.
They were up before dawn the next morning.
Yakima had regained most of his vigor, and while his left arm was sore, he’d recovered most of his strength in that hand. The last stars were still twinkling in the violet western sky as they headed away from the cabin, Yakima taking the lead and booting the paint toward the timbered high reaches, heading southwest.
He rode quietly, picking his way along the old Basque shepherds’ trail through the pine forest, up and over saddles, the trail marked here and there by rock cairns or cabin ruins or frayed strips of colored rawhide tied to branches. A dark mood haunted him. The closer they got to Gold Cache, the closer they came to the time he and Faith would have to part.
It was all clear to him now, and Yakima silently chastised himself for believing it could have been otherwise.
How could they stay together—a half-breed drifter who’d never spent more than nine months in any one place in his life, tied to no one but his horse, and a beautiful white woman?
He could maybe stay with her for a time in Gold Cache, but he’d never be anything more to her there than a silent partner, a servant. The townspeople wouldn’t let him be anything more. Soon, Faith would grow to despise him for his servitude and inability to become anything more, and he would hate her for being a queen in the eyes of other men.
There was no denying that Yakima loved her, and he could tell by the way she looked at him and made love with him that she felt the same. But it was easy to love each other when you were the only people around, when you’d seen the elephant together, and you depended on each other.
In Gold Cache, after the torpor of everyday life set in, their love wouldn’t last more than a few weeks.
Such thoughts were as raw as the cold, dry air. They sent him reeling in gloominess, cursing the fate that set him apart while wanting only to grab Wolf as soon as he could and bolt free over the mountains, maybe hole up in some abandoned trapper’s shack down south, in the San Juans.
In the spring, he’d ride east and try to pick up enough ranch work to see him through another summer...
Faith.
He was worried about her. Crazy Kate sounded like the genuine article, a real demon. Faith might have a powerful benefactor in the banker waiting for her in Gold Cache, but had she thoroughly considered what she might be riding into? Brothel madames could be as territorial as Texas stockmen.
He wondered if Faith’s quest for revenge was clouding her judgment.
Yakima knew it wasn’t any of his business. She was her own woman. But the thought of anything happening to her was a knot of coiled snakes in the pit of his stomach. He’d die before he’d see her harmed by anyone.
In the middle of the afternoon, Gold Cache appeared, nestled in the gulch below the bench they’d been traversing, flanked and shaded by a blue-green pine ridge veiled in woodsmoke, spotted with shaft houses and ore tipples. They continued past sporadic diggings and cabins, then wound down the canyon and into the town from the north end, assaulted by the smell of latrines and rotting trash and horseshit tempered by fragrant woodsmoke wafting on vagrant, frigid breezes.
Gold Cache was about three blocks long, the snowy main street lined with smart-looking whipsawed business establishments with high, ornate false facades. Firewood was stacked nearly everywhere, draped with hides or burlap and choking the street in many places, causing bottlenecks in the wagon traffic. Cook fires burned along the street, and bearded, heavy-coated men sat around them, sipping steaming liquid from tin mugs.
Dogs barked. Burly men laughed, swilling beer on the boardwalks or woodpiles or the backs of wagons. Somewhere, a baby cried, and there was the perpetual, metronomic thunder of a mill stamping ore into dust, and the regular thuds of someone chopping wood.
A big, unpainted barn with several sprawling corrals sat at the other end of town. That’s where Yakima was heading, weaving around drays and wagons, when Faith called behind him, “Hold up a minute.”
Yakima turned in his saddle. Drawing the mule up close to the right boardwalk, behind which was a whitewashed bank with grilles over the windows, she leaned toward a man sitting on a bench and holding a kitten in the folds of his bulky buffalo coat. A corncob pipe sagged from the right corner of his mouth.
“Does Mr. George Underhill still own this bank?” Faith asked.
The man knocked his pipe against the bench. “Underhill died of a heartstroke last month.” The man grinned devilishly, jerked his head to his right, and wheezed a laugh. “At Crazy Kate’s place, don’t ye know?”
Faith looked as though she’d been slapped. She stared at the old-timer. “Are you sure?”
“I helped haul him outta there, ma’am. Rest assured, he died with a smile on his face!”
When Faith had brought the mule up beside Yakima’s buckskin, her face was white. “That’s all right,” Yakima said. “Winters get too long in these parts, anyway.” Maybe she’d ride on out with him. They had no future together, but he’d feel better leaving her somewhere safer than a gold camp where a brothel madame had it in for her.
“I’m not that easily deterred,” she said stubbornly, heeling the mule forward along the street.
They had ridden only fifty more feet when they’d spied Crazy Kate’s Saloon and Pleasure Palace just beyond a lumber mill and across from a small hophouse. They ran their gazes up and down the ornate spruce green and yellow facade, with the scrolled porch pillars, second-story balcony, and pink curtains in the windows.
They rode on to the livery barn. Reining up at the broad front doors, Yakima slid out of the saddle, then walked back to lift Faith down from the mule.
Men milled around them, several eyeing Faith with keen male interest, smiling and pinching their hat brims. Even in her bulky coat and men’s clothes, she cut a fine, delectable figure. No doubt the best-looking filly this town had ever seen.
Yakima suppressed a pang of jealousy. He opened the doors and stepped into the barn’s aromatic interior, shielding his eyes from the outside glare with one hand. “Hello the barn!”
Leading the paint, he’d taken four steps inside when a fierce, bugling whinny rose from the barn’s pungent rear shadows. There was the thunder of hooves beating the earthen floor and the squawks of hemp drawn taut.
“Shut up, you goddamn demon beast!” a man shouted somewhere to Yakima’s right. “Jesus Christ, I never seen such a horse!”
The man appeared out of the shadows, blinking against the light behind Yakima—a lanky, long-faced man with sandy hair, a weak chin, and one arm in a sling. “What can I help you with?” he asked above the horse’s caterwauling and the thunder of its hooves.
Yakima peered toward the rear of the barn, past the stalls and ceiling joists hung with halters and bridles, past the two supply wagons and the single leather buggy. His eyes were adjusting to the darkness, and now he could see a big, dark horse rearing in the hay-flecked darkness.
He glanced at the liveryman, then dropped the paint’s reins, and strode slowly down the barn’s main alley, moving past the wagons and into the dense shadows, smelling ammonia, greased leather, and hay.
The whinnies rose in volume until Yakima’s ears ached and rang. In a stall in the barn’s left rear corner, a regal black horse reared and pitched against the two stout ropes looped around its neck and tied to posts at front and rear corners of the fifteen-by-fifteen-foot stall.
The ropes were drawn taut, keeping the horse in virtually one place while it slammed the earthen floor with its front hooves and hammered the stout rear partition with its back ones. A feed sack had been drawn up over its eyes and looped over its ears, effectively blinding the creature.
Yakima didn’t need to see the horse’s head to know it was Wolf. He’d know those long, corded legs and that white-splashed barrel chest anywhere.
“Wolf,” Yakima called, feeling a thickness in his throat.
Instantly, the horse stopped pitching. He stood facing him, blowing into the bag, sucking it in and out as his chest expanded and contracted heavily, withers rippling. He shook his head and nickered, stamped one hoof eagerly.
Footsteps rose behind Yakima. “Mister, you don’t wanna go near that horse. He’ll tear your head off. I can’t let him into the corral, ’cause he’ll go over the damn fence. Crazy he is, plumb loco!” Sidling up to Yakima, the liveryman raised his injured arm. “Look how he done me. Damn near stomped one of my hostlers to mush and fine powder!”
Faith walked up behind them and peered into the stall. “Wolf!”
Yakima planted his right hand atop the stall partition and hoisted himself over.
“What I tell you, feller?” shrieked the liveryman. “That horse will take your head off!”
Yakima walked up to Wolf, who stood frozen before him. Yakima placed his right hand beneath the horse’s long, fine snout. “It’s me, feller.” He removed the feed sack and tossed it into the straw, then stared into the stallion’s inky eyes.
Wolf nodded vigorously, twitching his ears and stomping his feet. Yakima smiled as he patted the black’s neck and whispered in his right ear, “I’ll get you outta here soon.”
The liveryman stood staring, spellbound. “I’ll be goddamned. You know that horse?”
“It’s his,” Faith said, tears in her eyes as she watched Yakima remove the two ropes from the horse’s sleek neck.
“Hey, leave those be!” yelled the liveryman. “He might be all right with you around, but as soon as you’re gone—”
Yakima stopped and turned to the man, his jaw set. “He’ll be all right now that he knows I’m here. Who brought him in?”
The man shrugged. “A couple fellers. Gamblers, I think. They sold him to Crazy Kate over to the main brothel in town, and I don’t think...” His voice trailed off, and he shuttled his puzzled gaze between Yakima and Faith, who looked at each other knowingly.
Faith turned to the liveryman. “Crazy Kate?”
“She bought the horse off the two gamblers,” the man said haltingly. “I don’t know what she needs a saddle horse for. She never goes ridin’. Hardly ever leaves the brothel, but... feller, I sure would feel better if you’d leave that horse tied up like you found him.”
Yakima threw the ropes in the straw atop the feed sack. “The horse is mine.” He kicked open the stall door.
The liveryman’s eyes widened, and he stumbled sideways out of the way, watching the horse fearfully. His angry voice trembled. “Now, goddamn it, Crazy Kate Sweney done bought him, and it’s my job to keep him stalled.”
“You can’t buy a stolen horse,” Yakima said, striding into the alley, heading for a set of double doors in the side wall. Wolf followed him eagerly, snorting and bobbing his head.
“You got papers on him?”
“Nope.”
“Well, then, goddamn it, I’m gettin’ the sheriff!”
“Do what you gotta mind for.” Yakima lifted the wooden bar from the doors, kicked both doors open. As blue daylight flooded the barn, Yakima led Wolf out into the side corral, where half a dozen horses milled. They watched the black moving toward them cautiously.
“I’m warnin’ you, goddamn it!” the liveryman shouted, following Yakima to the door but no farther.
Faith grabbed his arm. “Listen, mister, you don’t want that horse around here, anyway, do you?”
He looked at her. She smiled agreeably up at him. His eyes softened. “Well, no, I don’t. But it ain’t my choice. Crazy Kate’s payin’ for his livery and feed, and—”
“You let us handle Crazy Kate. She doesn’t realize she bought a stolen horse. When she does, I’m sure she’ll take the matter up with the gamblers who hornswoggled her.”
“If he don’t have any papers on that horse, there’s no damn way—” The liveryman stopped as he turned his head toward the corral. About twenty yards away, the black stallion stood facing Yakima, holding his head down as if listening intently to every word the half-breed was saying.
The liveryman glanced, befuddled, at Faith, then returned his gaze to the corral.
Yakima’s lips stopped moving. He patted the horse’s neck. As the horse lumbered off, rippling his withers and lowering his head to draw water from a stock trough, Yakima strode over to the liveryman and stopped.
“He’ll be all right as long as you don’t try to hog-tie him again. Leave him out here. I’ll be back for him soon.”
“Jesus Christ, I—”
Yakima stripped his pack off the paint and slung it over his shoulder, then shucked his Yellowboy from the boot. “Stable these animals, will you? I’ll need my paint taken back east. You know of any freight outfits heading that way soon?”
The liveryman scratched his head, a befuddled expression on his deep-lined face. “Well, I reckon.”
“Good.”
Yakima flipped the man a few coins. He took Faith’s arm, and they strode away.
Chapter 26
As Yakima and Faith headed west along Gold Cache’s main drag, looking for a hotel that might accept a white woman and a half-breed, Faith paused on the raised boardwalk before a women’s clothing shop—the only one they’d seen so far.
She looked at Crazy Kate’s brothel a few buildings up on the other side of the street, then glanced at Yakima with a devilish smile. “I could use a new dress. Will you wait for me?”
Yakima looked her up and down. He supposed her soiled, smoke-blackened trail garb was better suited to the trail than to the town in which a girl sought employment. He shrugged and leaned his rifle against the wood-frame building’s front wall as Faith opened the door, its bell jingling, and disappeared inside.
He squatted on the boardwalk beside the street, rolled a smoke, and watched the wagon and foot traffic, mud splashing where the fires had melted the snow. Dogs ran loose, and so did a pig, which was hazed off the opposite boardwalk by more than one broom-wielding, cursing store owner.
A good many Chinamen passed, hide coats over their traditional dark pajamas, queues hanging from hand-knit caps to brush against their shoulders. A slender Chinese girl hauled a big wicker basket to the bathhouses and barber-shops, gathering laundry. Market hunters weaved shaggy horses up and down the street, their pack mounts draped with bloody, field-dressed game.
The doorbell jingled. “How do I look?”
Yakima rose on his stiff legs and turned. Faith walked lightly down the store’s three front steps, holding a black, tasseled cape away from her shoulders to reveal a low-cut purple dress with white lace around the puffed sleeves, shoulders, and bosom.
She wore a black choker set with a tiny emerald, the green stone setting off the purple dress and the sky blue of her lustrous eyes. Barely revealed by the buffeting, pleated skirts was a pair of fawn half boots with ornate gold buckles. Her hair was piled high atop her head in rich, golden swirls.
Yakima’s eyes kept returning to her half-revealed breasts pushing up from the corset like heaping bowls of freshly whipped cream. “I’ll be damned.”
“Does that mean you like it?”
Yakima looked her up and down once more. Someone on the street whistled. Yakima had forgotten how absolutely, incredibly queenlike she could look in a low-cut dress and choker. He remembered many nights at Thornton’s when he couldn’t take his eyes off her and hated the men she led upstairs.
