“My wife never had a clue!” Ardai slapped his thigh once more, turning nearly full around in his saddle. His thick black mustache rolled up under his nose as he laughed, tears of mirth trickling down from his deep-set, cobalt eyes.
The older marshal, sitting on the left side of the seat, holding the leather ribbons loose in his gloved hands, snorted and shook his head. “You an’ the missus must have a real close relationship, Neil. That’s heartwarmin’ as all hell.”
Ardai turned forward in the saddle of his cream-maned vinegar dun and raised an arm to sleeve tears from his cheeks. “You know Lucyanne, Bill. Girl didn’t weigh a hundred pounds when I married her, and she was as sweet as a dish full of chocolate fudge. Now, only two years after our big church weddin’, she’s put on more tallow than a she-buff in January, and grew herself a nice, long, forked tail to go with her acid tongue. I swear that girl so much as turns a glance on a rose, it turns black and tumbles off the vine. Goes up in a smoke puff!”
“Jesus Christ!” Landers exclaimed. “You don’t s’pose her and my wife are
kin
, do ya, Neil?”
“Hey, Neil,” Svenson broke in with an annoyed furrow of his sandy brows, his wandering eye turning darker as he stared toward the narrow stream rushing through a boulder-strewn bed off the right side of the trail. “You sure this is the way to the cutoff you were talkin’ about? I don’t see no way through the ridge over yonder, let alone across that stream.”
“Not to worry, Chuck,” Ardai said. “I use the cutoff all the time when I go out lookin’ for deer or griz. You won’t see it till you’re right up on it, and that’s the beauty of the thing. If you two can make it through that first gap in this here ole wagon . . .” The constable threw a hand up and looked again over his shoulder, his eyes wide and earnest. “. . . And I ain’t sayin’ you can, as I never tried to take a wagon through there, just a saddle horse. But if you
can
make it, no one shadin’ your trail will ever follow you through that cutoff. If they’re not from around
here
, they won’t know about it. The only reason
I
know about—”
“Don’t mean to sound impatient,” Landers said, cutting the constable off again, “but shouldn’t we have come
upon it
by now?”
Landers snorted and shook his head. “Don’t mind him, Neil. Chuck here’s convinced someone’s shadin’ us, though I ain’t seen nothin’ but dust devils foggin’ our trail since we left Cody, and while my eyes might be eleven years older than his, I can see twice as far and smell cutthroats from two miles away
downwind
!”
“You yourself are smelly enough to choke a cur off a gut wagon,” the younger marshal barked back at him. “You didn’t see the group in the Buffalo Flats Saloon like I did when I went in for the whiskey and sandwiches. There were five of the sons o’ bitches . . . and they all looked like
cold-steel
artists.” Sevenson jerked a thick, brown thumb over his shoulder. “Friends of one or more of these bastards behind us, I say . . .”
One of the men lounging in the jail wagon—“Colorado” Bob King—gave a coyote-like howl and laughed. “Friends of one or more of us—you got that right, Chuck!”
Gritting his teeth, Svenson turned and rammed the back of a clenched fist against the front wall of the welded strap-iron cage. He glared at the lanky, Texas-born regulator and bank robber—a bizarre-looking cuss with sinister, Nordic features complete with high, tapering cheekbones and slanted, snakelike eyes. Four gold front teeth glistened on his upper jaw. Long, silver hair hung straight down from his black bowler hat to the shoulders of his dusty frock.
Though born in Texas, the thirty-eight-year-old outlaw had acquired the “Colorado” handle because, according to legend, he’d robbed more banks and killed more men in that territory than any other white man in frontier history.
On the back of one hand King had tattooed a running rabbit with a horrifed look in its eye. On the back of his other hand was a plunging hawk, wings and talons out, beak open, ready to rip and tear.
“I done told you to address me as Marshal Svenson,
Bob
. And keep your goddamn voice down, or I’ll come back there and smash your head like a ripe melon.”
“You keep threatenin’,” said Colorado Bob, resting an arm on one upraised knee while he smoked and swayed easily with the wagon’s pitch and lurch, his gold teeth flashing in the afternoon sunshine angling through the pine tops. “And me . . . I just keep right on quivering . . . shakin’ right down to my boot toes . . .”
He flicked ashes from his tightly rolled quirley and took a deep drag, narrowing his slanted eyes at Svenson with an even more sinister air than usual.
The others sitting or lying on the bed of the wagon around him—Frank Blackburn and the man who’d pissed out of the wagon in town, Brush Simms—laughed or chuckled as they stared at Svenson.
Fuego seemed customarily ensconced in his own crazy head. The scalped, one-eared half-breed merely lay, bare chested, on his wadded-up shirt and jacket, grinning at the sky as if thoroughly enjoying the story he read in the clouds.
“Goddamnit!” Face pinched with fury, Svenson reached under the driver’s seat for his twelve-gauge shotgun. “That seals it! Bill, stop the wagon!”
“Pull your horns in there, Deputy!” the older marshal roared, scowling at his partner as the wagon continued rocking and bouncing over the deep-rutted trail. “You ain’t gonna do no such thing. You keep lettin’ those crazy bastards bait you into their wolf trap, you’ll get your head chopped off. Now, put that Greener back under the seat and wipe the spit off your chin. You’re a professional, goddamnit. Act like one!”
“That’s what I’ve always said,” said Frank Blackburn, leaning against the back of the wagon. “A professional man like yourself there, Chuck, should at least
act
like one.”
Blackburn grinned. He was a muscular, almost midget-sized hard case in his mid-twenties, with short blond hair under the funnel-brimmed hat secured beneath his chin with a horsehair thong. His stout arms, sleeves rolled up above his bulging biceps, were crossed on his broad chest, and his short, muscular legs jutted in front of him, his hand-tooled, calfskin boots crossed at the ankles.
“I’ll act however I feel like acting.” Svenson gave the man a hard, sidelong look through the bars behind him. “And if you got men comin’ to try to spring you, Blackburn, you’ll see how I act when the chips are down.
Comprende
, amigo?”
“Save the Mex talk for Fuego,” Blackburn growled, glancing at the Mexican lying beside him, still staring dreamily at the puffy summer clouds, as though he were a kid lounging in a tree house.
Svenson gritted his teeth, heart pumping boiling oil through his veins, but before he could continue the heated banter, Neil Ardai said, “This is the place, fellers.”
“Where?” Landers said, staring through the scattered poplars lining the stream, which curled along the base of a rocky, sandstone ridge.
Riding his vinegar dun about twenty yards ahead of the two wagon mules, Ardai chuckled. “That’s the beauty of it. Still can’t see it, can you?” He glanced over his shoulder. “Bill, the bank drops around that next bend. Follow me down to the river. You’ll see a rocky ford through the trees. That’s where we cross the stream.”
Ardai gigged his horse into a jog ahead. When Landers and Svenson rounded the bend, they dropped down the shallow bank and rolled out across the riverbed, through a gap in the poplars lining the stream. The water flattened and widened as it slid over a rocky ford—a foot deep at the deepest, Bill Landers thought as he surveyed the crossing.
Riding ahead, Ardai directed the marshals around trouble spots. The wagon leapt, bounced, pitched, and shook as the wide, iron-shod wheels rumbled over the rocks, splashing water up around the bed and evoking indignant yowls and curses from the prisoners.
Ahead, the marshals saw no passage through the sheer, stone ridge on the other side of the stream until they pulled the wagon up the opposite bank and followed Ardai ahead and left. They swerved around junipers, cedars, and huge, cracked boulders fallen from the ridges. When they were a hundred feet from the base of the southwestern cliff, a long vertical shadow appeared in the high, pocked, and crenellated stone wall.
Landers chuckled as, yelling at the braying mules, he watched the shadow darken and widen before him. Suddenly, the wall seemed to split and, as though a door opened and pulled back to the left, the opening in the canyon wall yawned—only about fifty feet wide and littered with brush and rocks, but an opening just the same.
Large enough for the wagon.
Yelling and pointing out obstacles, Ardai led them farther through the gap and down a twisting canyon that narrowed to little wider than the wagon’s rear wheels in places. They had to stop at one point and, using a wagon jack and two crowbars, lever a boulder out of the path. Five minutes later, the canyon opened until it was nearly as wide as the one they’d just left, and threaded with a trickling feeder stream.
“Should be smooth sailing from here on,” Ardai said, rising proudly in his stirrups and surveying the terrain ahead, which was slowly filling with early evening shadows. “At least, for as far as I’ve taken this canyon right down the middle of the Mexicans!”
“This meets up with the Cheyenne River?” asked Svenson, standing in the stopped wagon’s box, resting his shotgun over a shoulder to look over the cut.
“It forks and doglegs. Stay to the west. When you see Sleeping Bear Butte—you’ll recognize it on the right side of the canyon—hang a left. You should meet up with the Cheyenne in about two days. Only take you about two more after that to reach Crow Feather.”
Ardai neck-reined the dun around to head back toward the wagon. “I best get back to Buff Flat, keep an eye on the drunks I have in lockup. Happy sailin’, fellas. If I see any hombres look like they’re shadin’ ya”—he affected a hard, earnest grin and a dry chuckle—“they won’t be shadin’ ya fer long.”
“Much obliged, Neil,” Landers called, reaching under his seat for a canteen while Svenson continued standing and running his eyes along the rocky, fir-and-pine-stippled ridges humping around him.
A skeptical look darkening his wandering right eye, the junior deputy muttered, “I’ll thank ya, too, Neil, if we don’t get so lost even the devil can’t find us.”
“Oh, you’ll be wishin’ the devil finds ya.” At the back of the wagon, Frank Blackburn chuckled. “When the fellas that do find ya,
find ya
!”
Simms and King joined the short, muscular hard case in a chorus of coyote-like laughter while Fuego just stared at a nearby pine top, absently fingering the horrific-looking place where his ear had been.
Constable Neil Ardai splashed back across Buffalo Creek and gained the main trail, swinging the vinegar dun back toward town. His black eyebrows furrowed suddenly over his cobalt eyes, and he drew back on the dun’s reins, stopping the horse in the middle of the trail.
“I work too damn hard,” the constable said, leaning back over his cantle and reaching into the right saddle pouch.
He fished around under the flap for a few seconds, grunting as he dropped his hand down lower in the near-empty bag. A celestial smile spread across his mustached mouth. Straightening, he lifted a corked bottle up over his horse’s hip and swung it forward, raising the bottle in front of his head to gauge the level of remaining amber liquid.
A good two inches.
That oughta hold him till he got back to town.
He wrenched the cork from the lip with his teeth, spat it into the brush along the trail, then set the bottle against his mouth and hefted it high. Two gurgling jugs, and the bottle was empty.
Ardai lowered the empty vessel with a rasping, satisfied sigh and flipped the bottle back over his shoulder. It shattered against a rock, the crash muffled by the rush of the river through the trees to his left.
Singing quietly about an unladylike lady named Mau reen, Ardai gigged the dun back along the river, heading upstream toward Buffalo Flats. He was halfway back, rounding a long bend between high banks, the air sharply tanged with pine, when he reined up suddenly.
The constable stared straight ahead, down a long, curving slope through columnar pines.
The drumming of many hooves grew louder and louder.
A half dozen riders . . . riding fast . . . straight toward him.
4
ARDAI’S THROAT DRIED as he stared down the shaded slope. His gut tightened, and he laid his right hand over the polished walnut grips of his holstered .44.
The riders appeared, silhouetted figures rounding the bend through the pines, bobbing and pitching with the strides of their loping mounts. As they moved around the bend and headed for the hill upon which Ardai sat, statue-still though his heart thudded heavily, the lead rider, lifting his gaze and widening his eyes, reined back sharply, raising his right hand for the others to do likewise.
When all five well-armed, hard-faced riders sat their snorting, fidgeting mounts at the base of the low hill, staring up bemusedly at Ardai, the constable knew without a doubt who they were and what they were after.
He didn’t recognize one of them.
But he knew . . .
A silence stretched, relieved only by the squawk of saddle leather, the faint rattle of trace chains, and the horses’ scuffs and stomps. The breeze sifted through the pine tops, making a nearby trunk creak. All the men stared up the hill at Ardai staring down at them.
One, he saw, was a pretty, tawny-haired girl in men’s rough trail gear. She, too, wore a holstered pistol, in the cross-draw position up high on her left hip. A saddle-ring carbine jutted from the sheath under her right leg. Resting her gloved hand on her pistol grips, she cast a cautious glance up the hill at the constable, then around the men gathered about her.
The lead rider—lanky, with long, dark brown hair, mustache, and goatee, and with a broad, scarred nose—spit a fleck of trail dust from his lips and narrowed a dark eye. “Afternoon, Constable.”