Return to Massacre Mesa - Edge Series 5 (4 page)

‘It’s been mighty fine grub that your daughter’s provided for me three times a day regular, Mr Russell,’

Quinton said contentedly as the storekeeper-cum-sheriff took a key off a peg on the outside wall and turned it in the lock. ‘I’m almost sorry you have to let me out of here. Been better eating than I ever had in the lousy army that’s for sure.’

‘Lucy was taught by my wife and in my opinion she was the best cook around in her day,’ Russell said with pride. ‘And my daughter’s aiming to be the best of hers.’

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‘She ain’t married that Lieutenant Montgomery yet?’ Quinton asked as the door was swung open.

‘Pretty soon,’ Billy Russell murmured reflectively as he peered toward the fort and offered up a tacit prayer that nothing bad had happened to delay the group of officers assigned to the secret mission.

‘He’s a lucky man, Mr Russell.’ Quinton withdrew into the cell to gather up his scant belongings. ‘No disrespect intended, but I seen the girl looks as good as she cooks. And if I could find me a woman like that I reckon I’d be happy as can be to settle down with her.’

‘Yeah,’ Russell muttered absently and just for a few moments he glowered as he reflected on Lucy settling down with a man ten times the worth of Quinton: once more ruefully contemplated the prospect of facing up to a life not shared with his daughter. But as the ill-clad Quinton shuffled out of the single cell jailhouse and Russell handed the gaunt faced man his gunbelt taken off the same peg as the key, he acknowledged to himself yet again that he ought to be glad for Lucy’s happiness. Not selfishly dejected at losing her to the man she had chosen to marry. Proud that her fresh faced prettiness and cheerful personality and her well honed housekeeping skills were not all she had inherited from her mother - Lucy possessed countless other qualities which made her a fine catch for the lieutenant. Then footfalls scuffed the ground behind him and he turned to look toward the front corner of the cantina. Where Walter Meeks, another ex-trooper, ambled into view and rasped: ‘So it’s true that you’ve got Red locked up in here, Mr Russell?’

‘Not anymore, Wally!’ Quinton countered eagerly, his easy mood at odds with the sullen attitude of the ugly featured man of forty or so who was also tall and gauntly thin.

Meeks yawned from a mixture of weariness and boredom. The released prisoner scowled and spat to the side. ‘I guess Toomey just couldn’t drag himself away from the cantina to come help spring one of the best buddies he ever 23

had? Hank is with you, ain’t he, Wally?’

‘He sure enough is.’

‘And Mr Russell said just the two of you rode in? So you never tracked down Pat and Marty?’ Now he was scornful. ‘Wasted your time when you could’ve been here having a high old time with me in the Wild Dog?’

Pat Crabbe and Marty Farmer were troopers who deserted from the fort two days before Quinton, Meeks and Toomey mustered out of the army. And it was said loudly and often by the drunken Red Quinton that his two buddies had left Fort Chance hoping to collect the reward the army had posted for the capture of the deserters. Meeks peered pointedly into the tiny cell and sneered: ‘It seems to me you’ve got a strange idea about having a good time, Red. Nothing to pay, Mr Russell?’

‘He’s served his time.’ Russell moved forward and came close enough to Meeks to find out the dishevelled man smelled strongly of his own and horse sweat, his body obviously as unwashed as his filthy hands and face. Then Russell realised that he probably smelled a little high himself after the long ride down to the border and back.

‘You tell that fine girl of yours I said thanks for the grub, Mr Russell,’ Quinton called. ‘For such a hick town this place has got one of the best jails I was ever in. And I spent time in a few army coolers, I can tell you that.’

‘Hurry it up, Red,’ Meeks urged impatiently. ‘We got us some important business to attend to.’

Quinton swaggered forward, his renewed good mood not diminished when he saw at close quarters the scowl on the dirty, heavily bristled face of the man who had moved off ahead of him. And as he buckled on his gunbelt he yelled:

‘Hey, Wally! Is there any chance that first we can get down to the kind of business I was fixing to attend to a couple of days ago but didn’t have the price for?

Which is why I landed in jail?’

‘I’ll tell you what Toomey said to tell you, Red,’ Meeks growled as he stepped up

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on to the end of the porch. ‘He said that if you didn’t have your brains so filled with screwing around all the time, you wouldn’t screw up all the time.’

Quinton spat forcefully again and reached the corner of the building as Russell decided against going for a beer: instead headed away from the cantina, hopeful there would be time to take a bath before supper.

As Meeks reached the batwings, Quinton giggled foolishly and called happily:

‘Much obliged for your hospitality, Mr Russell! I surely do like this little town!

Where it’s my opinion that the next best place to the whorehouse is the jailhouse!’

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CHAPTER • 3

______________________________________________________________________________________

IN THE late evening of the second day after the massacre of the cavalry
officers, the dungaree-clad, hatless Hiram J. Ricketts stood at the mouth of a cave on the far side of Mesa Desolado from where the slaughter had taken place. A short, potbellied man of near fifty with a round face and almost hairless skull, he gazed out over Dead Man’s Desert and chewed once more on a plug of now tasteless tobacco, spat out the soggy wad and wished he had a glass of rye to clean his mouth.

‘Are you back, are you out there?’ a woman called from within the cave where newly lit candles flickered.

‘I’m here, Rose.’ Ricketts’ glower of disgust with the chewed out tobacco became more firmly fixed on his deeply lined, heavily bristled, weather burnished face as he swung around to enter the cave. ‘The animals are bedded down fine and I’m all peed out. To tell the truth, I’m pretty well peed off by – ‘

‘The lieutenant is gone now, Hiram,’ the woman cut in, the tone of her accented voice mournfully in keeping with the news she gave. ‘The poor man’s suffering is over at last, God rest his soul.’

Now Ricketts showed a broad smile and there was inappropriate excitement in his attitude as he moved toward the candlelit area where Rose sat. She was a Comanche squaw, twenty-five years old and almost pretty – but the strength of character in her finely sculptured features gave them a somewhat masculine cast that detracted from conventional feminine good looks. Dressed in much darned home made garments that were a mix of styles drawn from her own native and Ricketts’ Anglo heritage, she was seated uncomfortably on an upturned wooden crate, opposite another on which the two candles stood, flanking a framed crucifix propped against a piece of rock. On the pebble-strewn dirt floor of the cave, under some worse for wear blankets, was a human form. The fact that the head was covered emphasised the rigid immobility of the chest that signified Lieutenant Glenn Montgomery was surely dead. 26

There was little else inside the circle of candlelight and its duller fringe glow within the cave. Just some basic mining tools that had seen many working days, an ill-used saddle, a pair of saddlebags, four battered canteens and a once colourful carpetbag faded by the passage of time. The cave had some six feet of headroom between its mouth and the point where the squaw sat close to the corpse. Beyond, the roof sloped sharply downwards.

‘Well?’ Ricketts asked as he stood near the feet of the covered corpse, peering down at it without regret.

Rose gazed up at him with a melancholy frown and shook her head. ‘He said nothing more, Hiram. He opened his eyes one final time and I am sure he tried to speak to me. But no words came from his lips. And it was as if the effort he used to no avail drained all the strength he had left from him. And then he died.’

‘So now we really can leave the mesa, uh?’ He was relieved.

‘There is no reason for us to remain here.’ She was resigned.

‘Was there ever on his account?’ There was a scowl on Ricketts’ fleshy, darkly bristled features as he reflected on the wasted time spent here while he and the squaw waited for the man with a bullet in his chest to die. Ricketts was a prospector who had been scouring the Cedar Mountains for more than two years without finding enough paydirt to more than keep body and soul together. And it had gotten harder in recent months, since he found the squaw –

almost dead from emaciation – and nursed her back to some kind of health. As healthy, anyway, as he was in this godforsaken piece of country where, he had been told in the Wild Dog cantina at the settlement close to Fort Chance, there was a mother lode to be discovered. If a man had the skill to know where to look and the patience to continue his search when early signs proved false.

Another quality a man must have, his informant at the cantina had said, was the courage to do his prospecting in country where the Comanche considered the whites their natural born enemy. He never did have any trouble with the Comanche. Never 27

had much luck at prospecting, either. But he got by and he liked well enough the life he led. Alone for the far greater part of the time, but occasionally indulging himself with American liquor and Mexican whores at the Wild Dog whenever he struck enough ore to pay the price for such luxuries. Enough for that: but he never did find paydirt in the kind of quantity he was looking for. To go back to the eastern cities and live the life for which he hankered now the Civil War was ended.

He had been about to call it a day when he happened upon the starving squaw who spoke English better than he did. And turned out to be a fine figure of a woman after he nursed her back to health and fed her enough to fill out her raggedy clothes. Her name was Rose Bigheart and she was an outcast from the Comanche. That was all she was willing to tell him and he never inquired more deeply into her origins: was content she showed her gratitude to him better than any paid-for whore at the Wild Dog. And out of the bedroll she was a fine housekeeper in terms of what few chores he required of her within caves or at open campsites scattered throughout the mountains. She cooked, washed dishes and laundered and sewed clothes better than he ever could. And providing he did not interrupt her morning and evening prayer ritual, she never allowed her conversion to Catholicism to impinge upon his heathen ways. Then came the evening three days ago when, after they had been staying in this cave for six weeks or so while he dug out a couple of hundred dollars worth of ore and exhausted the small seam, that he decided he had had enough of prospecting. It was a stake of some kind and by this time he had modified his ambition. For he had come to regard his life with Rose as something akin to the only kind of domestic bliss he was ever likely to achieve. Lacking only a permanent proper house for the squaw to keep while he started up some kind of money making business less back breaking and with a better future than the trade he was presently following. But this would be no further east than Fort Chance.

When he told Rose of his intentions she responded in her usual compliant manner: said that if he thought she would be accepted co-habiting with a white eyes in the Fort Chance settlement that was starting to expand into some kind of proper town, then so be it. And early the next morning they packed up their scant belongings, 28

loaded them on the two burros and started away from the cave in the north face of the mesa. Elected to follow the longer way through the mountains that had some shade, a little water and more cover from marauding Indians than the more direct route across Dead Man’s Desert.

It was close to noon when they heard the barrage of gunfire off to the south west, the sound muffled by the intervening high ground. In the years Ricketts had been prospecting in the Cedar Mountains he had fired his own guns only to kill game. Had heard soldiers engaged in target practice at Fort Chance and once was present in the Wild Dog when a federal marshal shot dead one of the fugitives from United States justice who used the cantina to rest up before they ran for the border and Mexico beyond.

His first instinct that morning two days ago was to ignore the shooting: head for Fort Chance and the new life he had promised Rose and himself. But the squaw spotted a distant wagon off to the south: racing headlong along a parallel course to their own, the horse in the shafts out of control and no driver up on the seat. Aware from the start, although she said nothing, that Rose was eager to find out the reason for the shooting, Ricketts surrendered to his own curiosity and her tacit plea to go see if they could help somebody in trouble. Also, the rig promised a more comfortable and speedy journey than travelling on foot leading the pair of laden burros. So they made for where the wagon eventually came to a halt and reached the spot after the exhausted horse was fully recovered: the lather of sweat dried on his coat, the terror gone from his eyes as he waited submissively for whatever was demanded by a new master.