Dead Man's Trail (9781101606957) (3 page)

Chapter 3

“Who you s'pose he is?” Lewis said as he and Yakima stared at the black man's unmoving body at the bottom of the ridge from which he'd fallen. The ends of his scarf blew gently in a building breeze.

“Don't know.”

“Poor ole fella. Saved our bacon only to be killed by a dyin' desperado for his trouble.”

Yakima stared down at the man.

They'd gone through the pockets of his shabby coat, wool vest, calico shirt, and twill trousers. They'd found nothing except a silver-chased watch and an old supply list scribbled in pencil. Yakima had removed the man's shell belt and holstered Russian .44 from around his waist. The shell belt was half-filled with .50-caliber rounds to feed the big Sharps rifle, commonly called a Big Fifty, and .44 cartridges for the pistol. The rusty six-shooter needed oil, and the walnut grips were loose and cracked, indicating the gun had probably mostly been used for grinding coffee beans and jerky, maybe pounding the occasional horseshoe nail.

Yakima looked at the blood soaking the man's vest and calico shirt about midway between his breastbone and his belly button. Then he shook his head against his guilt at the man giving his life for him and Lewis, total strangers, and the senselessness of being killed by a desperado who likely would have died only a few minutes later from the slugs Yakima and Lewis had slung into him.

So damn senseless, like Faith three years ago in Colorado. . . .

The demons inside Yakima were limbering up, so he shook them back into the far reaches of his consciousness and looked around him and Lewis. “He must have a horse behind the ridge somewhere. You stay with him while I look.”

Yakima rested his Yellowboy over his shoulder and walked over to where a fissure ran up the side of the ridge in a jagged line, offering a way to the top. Twenty minutes later, he walked around the ridge's far eastern side, leading a long-legged grullo with black legs from the knees down and with a black mane and tail. He also led a dark bay mule wearing a packsaddle. Lewis, sitting on a rock beside the dead man and holding a canteen, heard the hoof clomps of the two animals and stood.

“Prospector?” he said, frowning at the packhorse to which two shovels and a pick were strapped.

“Looks like.”

While Yakima removed a pair of worn leather saddlebags from the grullo's back, the horse itself nickering as it lowered its neck to sniff its dead rider, Lewis went through the panniers strapped to the wooden packsaddle. Yakima sat on a rock and began going through the saddlebags. If they could find out who the man was and where he was from, they could take him home for burial, or at least send word back to his family, if he had one. They owed him that much.

“Nothin' much over here. Most of the panniers are empty. A little coffee and flour and pipe tobacco. Some rocks with a little gold color in 'em. Small bottle of busthead. He must've been headin' to Wolfville for supplies.”

Yakima hadn't found much in the saddlebags, either. A few more small quartz rocks streaked with gold, a few old Confederate gold pieces in a small hide pouch, a bag of chopped pipe tobacco, and a pale envelope. All by itself in one bag was a burlap sack about the size and weight of a five-pound sack of sugar. He set the saddlebags and the envelope aside, then, balancing the sack on his knee, untied the whang string holding the neck closed, and peered inside.

He frowned. His heart beat faster.

He dipped a hand into the sack, poked his fingers into the sugary grain but knew right away it wasn't sugar. Why would a man be low on all other supplies and still carry five pounds of sugar around in his saddlebags?

Yakima carefully pulled out a handful and looked at the gold dust flashing beguilingly at him. “Holy Moses.”

“Huh?” Lewis said, lowering the small liquor bottle he'd found in a packsaddle pouch.

“Somewhere he struck a vein.”

“Let me see.”

Lewis walked over in his bandy-legged way and stood over Yakima, extending the half-filled bottle of brandy to him. The half-breed shook it off and looked up at the small brown little man with a hawk nose and close-set gray-blue eyes that grew brighter by the second as they stared down at the gold dust in Yakima's broad red-brown palm.

“Holy shit,” Lewis said, dipping a finger into the small mound of dust in Yakima's hand, then touching it to his tongue as though to prove to himself it wasn't flour or sugar, though Yakima had never seen flour or sugar that color. “How much you think he's got there?”

Yakima carefully poured the dust back into the sack, then lifted the sack in both hands, hefting it. “I'd say five, six, maybe seven pounds.”

“Damn,” Lewis said. “That man done found him a fortune!” He paused, licked his lips. “You . . . uh . . . you reckon it's ours?”

Yakima was about to set the gold on the ground, but Lewis took it from him, hefting it in his hands, pale eyes growing brighter, the older man's breath wheezing eagerly in and out of his lungs. Lewis was a wild-horse hunter and breaker, and he was as wild as the horses he trapped and sold to the army and area ranchers, and sometimes as hard to figure and get along with. His mother, Old Judith, was the same way, as was his daughter, the scrappy but lovely Trudy.

“Go easy on that,” Yakima said as he reached down to pluck the envelope off the right saddlebag pouch.

“What—you think I'm gonna drink it?” Lewis chuckled. “Hell, I'm just gonna ogle it some's all. Why, this bag here's prettier'n them teats on the beefy whore over to the Silk Slipper in Wolfville!”

“I'm gonna tell Old Judith on you.”

“Go ahead, and I'll tell Trudy about you cavortin' with . . .” Seeing the flat, reprimanding cast to Yakima's gaze, Lewis let his voice trail off and looked away like a chastised dog. His good mood returned only moments later, however. He chuckled as he dipped a long, gnarled hand into the gold bag and let the dust sift through his fingers.

Meanwhile, Yakima turned the envelope over in his hands and read the delivery address on the front. Mr. Delbert Clifton, Wolfville, Wyo. Terr. The return address was Mrs. Delbert Clifton, Belle Fourche, Dakota Terr.

* * *

Yakima used the pick and Lewis used the shovel to dig a neat grave about four feet deep. While they worked, hawks and buzzards circled over the dead marauders who'd attacked them, and they kept a close eye out for more.

It was late in the day, the shadows elongating from rocks and shrubs and surrounding bluffs, when the half-breed and Lewis Shackleford wrapped the man whom Yakima assumed to be the recipient of the letter he'd found in the saddlebags—Delbert Clifton, previously of Belle Fourche in the Dakota Territory—in the man's own soogan, and stared down at his face one last time. Guilt no longer pained Yakima. He knew it wouldn't bring the man back. Most men died ugly, needlessly out here.

The gold, however, burned in his brain. And the letter . . .

When he and Lewis had lowered the man into the grave and then covered it and mounded rocks over it to keep the predators away, Lewis leaned on his shovel, his wrinkled, sweaty forehead glistening like copper in the early evening sunlight angling under dark, flat cloud strips in the west. “What's it say?”

Yakima looked at him.

“The letter.”

“I'll tell ya later. Best be gettin' back to the ranch.”

Yakima walked over to where his black stallion, Wolf, stood tied to a piñon, near where Lewis's own blue roan mustang stood with Delbert Clifton's grullo and the bay mule. The black and the roan switched their tails eagerly, knowing it would soon be suppertime and they still had an hour's ride back to the ranch. The men had run the horses down before they'd dug the grave, keeping them close now that night was falling fast, as it did in December this far north.

Now as Yakima grabbed the grullo's reins and stepped into Wolf's saddle, he again looked around cautiously, making sure no more of Wyoming Joe's bunch was closing in on him and Lewis, and then reined Wolf around. He glanced at his left saddlebag pouch bulging around the gold. He'd stuck the letter in the pouch, as well.

“You know, Yakima,” Lewis said, taking another pull from the black man's brandy bottle and then giving a sigh and smacking his lips, “that gold's ours now. Yours and mine. I say we split it like everything else—sixty-forty.”

Yakima's belly tightened against the man's comments. He looked at the flat bottle that Lewis held low by his side as he stared up at Yakima. He sensed the fire that was starting to grow inside the old, horse-hunting Irishman, because tanglefoot often had the same effect on Yakima himself. That's why he kept a thumb on the vice, sticking mainly to beer and the occasional cigarette, though he knew that if a man smoked too much he lost his sniffer. And a man often on the run, as he was, couldn't afford to lose his sense of smell any more than a deer or an antelope could.

“We'll talk about it later, Lewis,” Yakima said, apprehension stiffening his neck as he touched moccasin heels to the flanks of his black stallion, who gave an eager nicker at the prospect of a warm barn and a bucket of oats.

Yakima rode back through the canyon where they'd first seen Hendricks's men trailing them and had hightailed it to the dry wash. Lewis's roan clomped along behind, leading the black man's mule.

The half-breed didn't like Lewis riding back there. He'd gotten to know the man well enough over the past four months that they'd been working together, splitting their income from their mustanging sixty-forty, since Lewis had the ranch and the corrals they needed for breaking, but Yakima knew that you never really got to know a man as hardheaded as Lewis Shackleford. You never really got to know an alcoholic, especially one given to Lewis's dark moods that could often evoke the rough-hewn poetry in him but would often as not boil into a walleyed, unreasoning rage.

Those rages had not yet been directed at Yakima, but the half-breed knew they would be eventually. And the gold could be just the trigger. So he didn't like him riding behind him, because he wasn't entirely sure that Lewis wouldn't back-shoot him. Though not from anything specific Lewis had said, he knew that his partner considered him less of a man for his Indian blood, just as his mother, Old Judith, did. As he rode, keeping a sharp eye on the darkening land around him, he kept an ear skinned for the snick of Lewis sliding one of his old hog legs from its holster.

The only sound he heard besides some wailing wolves and coyotes, however, was the sudden screech of glass as Lewis, finished with the brandy, hurled the bottle against a rock along the trail. When Yakima jerked with a start and looked back at the man, his right hand instinctively closing over the horn grips of his Colt, Lewis merely snickered.

When they rode into the ranch yard, it was good dark, stars glistening across the sky. The high sandstone ridge looming up behind the two-story cabin made the clearing even darker despite the glow in the cabin's first-story windows, behind the flour-sack curtains that Old Judith and Trudy had dyed ochre with Indian roots.

In the barn, Yakima and Lewis tended their mounts in moody silence. They turned the horses and their savior's mule into the rear paddock with seven half-broken mustangs, then headed for the cabin.

Yakima had the black man's saddlebags slung over his left shoulder. He didn't know what else to do with them besides haul them into the cabin. He and Lewis would have to have it out over the gold, so he'd best keep it close. He already knew what he intended to do with it. While Lewis wouldn't like it, he felt certain that he'd made the right decision.

Trudy warmed some elk roast and potatoes for the two men, who ate at the long half-log pine table while Trudy washed supper dishes and the wizened Old Judith sat in a rocking chair by the fire, knitting and rocking. Neither woman said anything. They'd sensed the tension between the two men who'd returned after dark, and neither had even inquired about the saddlebags that Yakima had carried in with him and hung on a peg by the door.

Lewis washed his food down with frequent sips from his stone coffee mug in which Yakima had seen him pour as much whiskey as coffee. The brown-haired Trudy, who was eighteen but sported a full, ripe body behind her gingham dress and soiled apron, had seen it, too, and she'd shot Yakima a tense, suspicious glance. When both men had finished, Lewis slid his plate forward and said to Trudy, “Get this plate out of here, girl. I'm done with it.”

“Yes, Pa.”

The girl gave Yakima another faintly accusatory glance as though to ask: “What did you do to rile him?”

When Trudy had taken both their plates and was working on them over at the scrub pail in the dry sink, Lewis said, “What'd the letter say? Read it to me.”

Yakima stood and retrieved the letter from the saddlebags.

“Bring the gold over here, too.”

Yakima looked at him and shrugged. Lewis wasn't going anywhere with the bounty tonight. The half-breed pulled the hefty sack out of the saddlebag pouch and set it on the table.

Trudy was looking over her shoulder at the sack, one brow arched, as she added hot water from the reservoir on the range to her bucket of dishwater. She held her head and lips so that Yakima could see the missing eyetooth, courtesy of a contentious, ewe-necked broodmare, on the left side of her mouth. Still, she was a pretty brown-eyed girl growing up too soon out here, on the backside of nowhere. Old Judith looked at the table over the half-glasses resting low on her age-spotted nose as she rocked and knitted.

“What you got there, Lewis?” She hadn't addressed Yakima directly since he'd thrown in with Lewis. She did her best to pretend the redskin heathen wasn't here, that it was still just her and Lewis and Trudy, though Lewis was getting too old and becoming too much of a drunk to do much horse trapping or hunting on his own anymore. Yakima knew the old Irish horse hunter had a good grubstake for himself and the women, however, for whenever he and Yakima had ridden to town for supplies, Lewis had paid from a large wad of cash he carried in a money belt.