“Jesus!” said one of the two salesmen near the window, running his nervous gaze across the ceiling, which most of the other passengers, hearing the footsteps and gunfire from above, were doing as well.
Chulo Garza’s bloody face smeared blood against the smoke-stained glass for about two seconds before the man screamed,
“Help me!”
and dropped straight down from the window and out of sight.
Atop the car, Yakima jerked his eyes away from where the Mex had fallen as a pistol cracked to his right, the slug whining past his nose. He lurched back as another pistol popped in the other direction, the slug clanking off steel.
He leaped to one side to recover his footing, but just then the car swerved. His feet flew out from beneath him.
“Goddamnit, Freeze!” someone bellowed above the wind and rumbling wheels. “Don’t shoot in my direction, ya damn tinhorn!”
Yakima rolled down the sloped, tin-covered ceiling and felt his stomach lurch into his throat as his legs fell over the side of the car. Gravity pulled at his feet, and before he knew what had happened, he was hanging by his fingers from the edge of the car, his face pressed against a window through which he could see a stout woman in a black scarf holding a baby and glaring back at him, shouting something in German.
He gritted his teeth as he pressed his fingers into the car’s roof, but even as he did, they were sliding over the curved tin. He’d no sooner looked beneath him at the raised, cinder-paved rail bed racing away beneath him, than he felt nothing but air under his hands.
The graded stones shot up at him, and he landed on his right foot, the blow smacking his jaws together with an audible
clack
. Before he could get the other foot down, he flew forward, and he was rolled down the stony bank, the sharp-edged rocks biting into his back and shoulders. Mercifully fast, the stones slipped away and he was rolling down a steep, grassy bank.
“YAA-KIMAAAA!” Faith screamed out an open window.
The cry faded as the train squawked, creaked, and rumbled around a curve, the whistle blowing suddenly to abruptly snuff the echo.
As he rolled to a stop at the bottom of the bank, his head throbbing, feeling blood leaking out from under the bandage to dribble down the side of his face, the train gave a few more dwindling chugs and fell silent as it slipped into the distance.
The ground beneath him stopped quivering.
The breeze ruffled the needle grass around him.
On his back, arms spread, Yakima sucked a breath against the Apache arrows of pain shooting through his bullet-burned temple, and he lifted his head. All he saw was a dusky green sky and the dun embankment rising on his right. On his left the grass was stippled with piñons and cedars, a few mesquites.
In the far distance, a hawk screeched. The screech sounded like “Faith.”
Yakima lowered his throbbing head to the grass and cursed.
Chapter 17
Yakima lay there in the brown grass, so frustrated that he’d let himself get thrown from the train when he’d been only a few feet from Faith, that he wanted to end it all with his Colt.
But a bullet was too good for him. He needed to get his ass up and figure out how he was going to catch up to those cutthroats and get his woman back. He didn’t have time to lie here mentally licking his wounds and lamenting his bad luck and idiocy.
When he finally heaved himself up from the grass, slitting his eyes as his head barked at every breath and movement, things looked just as hopeless as they had when he was on his back. There was no sign of the town behind him. He didn’t know how long he’d been on the train or how fast it had been traveling—probably fourteen or fifteen miles an hour—but he had to be at least a couple of miles from town.
Nothing to do but head back for it. He doubted there’d be another train through here for a couple of days, so he’d have to retrieve his horses and start heading cross-country. If he busted ass, he might be able to overtake the cutthroats before they gained Trinidad, at the border of Colorado and New Mexico Territory.
But he hadn’t walked the rails for five minutes before the smell of blood wafted like copper on the cooling night air, and he looked around to see bits and pieces of blood-soaked clothing lying strewn between the rails like carrion left by coyotes or wolves. About ten yards farther up the track lay a severed human arm in a thick coat sleeve of bear hide. The hand was gloved.
The Mex whom Yakima had fought atop the passenger car must have gotten sucked down under the train’s iron wheels.
Yakima had smelled fresh blood before, but in his current state—defeated both physically and mentally—his gut heaved, his vision swam, and his moccasins turned to lead.
He staggered down off the graded rail bed and looked around for a place to hole up for the night. There was no point in going on. He’d likely pass out before he made it back to the depot town. He might as well hole up, get some sheltered rest, and start fresh in the morning.
Stumbling around in the thickening darkness, he found an arroyo concealed in mesquites and spindly desert berry shrubs. He reloaded his Colt from his shell belt before he dropped down into the cut—a rocky gorge littered with flood debris and dead leaves.
There were several notch caves at the base of the steep walls, and, finding one large enough to conceal him from a possible rainstorm and Apaches, he poked a stick in it to make sure a bobcat wasn’t calling it home, then brushed out the large rocks and rabbit shit.
He gathered some small chunks of wood and built a fire where the cut’s overhanging willow shrubs would conceal the smoke, then sat down heavily and rested his back against the ravine wall.
“Shit.”
He didn’t usually imbibe in liquor stronger than beer except for medicinal purposes, but he could have used a stiff shot of rye. But there was no rye. Not even any water. He probably could have found a spring if he looked around, but the darkness was washing quickly down from the Mogollons in the south. He’d sit tight and roll a smoke and try to get a couple of winks before resuming his tramp to town.
He smoked the cigarette while leaning against the ravine wall, the small, crackling fire holding the desert chill at bay. Staring at the stars, he tried to count the constellations to keep his mind from Faith and the distance that was, every second he sat here smoking his cigarette and staring at the stars, growing between them.
He didn’t know that he’d slept before his own grunt woke him.
Lifting his head from his shoulder, he looked around. Soft gray light had seeped into the arroyo. The moon must have come up. But he raked his gaze across the sky in which the stars had faded, and he couldn’t see one.
He looked at his fire. Nothing but gray ashes with a few bits of blackened wood sticking out. His quirley lay on the ground beside his right hand, a good three inches of gray ash snaking up from the flat, slightly chewed butt. The ash was as insubstantial as a spider’s web, and as cold as the ground.
He looked around once more, his neck muscles feeling as though they’d turned to rawhide. Blood had crusted on the side of his head, where it had run down from the bandage. Birds were chirping in the brush, and the dense night chill was lifting.
Christ, he’d slept all night. It was damn near dawn.
He kicked to his feet, a scowl biting deep into his forehead, and, donning his hat, scrambled back out of the arroyo. Getting his bearings, he headed back to the rails and began walking, sort of half skipping the inconveniently spaced ties, toward the town of unknown name in the west.
He should have retrieved his horses and been heading east by now. But he had to admit that the sleep had done him good. It had lightened the throb in his head and generally rejuvenated him in spite of the lingering stiffness not only from the fight and the tumble from the car’s roof, but from the several hours he’d slept in the chill arroyo, his back against the cool, uneven bank.
He’d walked about a hundred yards beyond the Mexican’s strewn remains, much of which appeared to have been dragged off by a bobcat during the night, when he stopped and lifted his chin, frowning along the rails ahead of him. The sun was a pearl wash behind him, and the rails were two brown, silver-mottled snakes stretching west. Above the distant black ridges, several stars still guttered in a lilac sky.
He’d heard something. He’d spied movement in the dense shadows straight ahead.
It came again—a
chug
.
A bell clanged, and there was another
chug
, and Yakima felt the stiff muscles in his neck suddenly loosen.
A train!
He quickened his pace, awkwardly skipping the ties, and watched the bulky silhouette of the snub-nosed locomotive grow before him. The rumble of iron wheels and the pant of compressors sounded disturbingly like the primal beats of an Apache war dance, but his heart beat eagerly.
He couldn’t have been happier to run into another train heading west. He’d leave the horses and acquire some strong runners when he needed them farther on up the line—probably in Denver.
The train came on quickly, squawking and squealing and rumbling, the locomotive snorting like a giant bull buffalo in heat, and Yakima could feel the vibration intensifying beneath his moccasins. When the train was about seventy yards away, the night lanterns jostling and flashing on both sides of the cowcatcher, he scrambled down the raised bed where he could get a good look at the combination and figure which car to run for.
The train came fast, smoke pluming from its stack, cinders flashing like fireflies. But behind it, instead of the eight or nine cars Yakima was expecting to see, was only a tender car heaped with wood, a flatbed, and what appeared from this distance to be a slat-sided stock car.
“Hell . . .”
“Yakima!” a familiar voice shouted. “That you?”
A bell in the engine clanged, and there was the inexplicable sound of breaking glass nearly drowned by the locomotive’s chugging thunder. Just as inexplicably, there was a wind-torn whinny of a horse.
Instinctively, Yakima’s hand dropped to his Colt’s grips, but he left the revolver in its holster as he said, so softly that even he could barely hear, “Who the hell . . . ?”
“Come on, ya bloody redskin!” the familiar voice shouted once more as a hand waved outside the engine’s window. “Don’t stand there gawkin’ like you never seen an iron mustang before! Come and join the bloody party before these Irish drink all the hooch!”
“Harms?” Yakima muttered, incredulous.
The train approached, bell clanging and whistle blowing, an Irish-accented voice singing inside the engine’s cab. Brody Harms, poking his bespectacled head out from the vestibule, beckoned broadly.
“Run!”
“I’ll be damned,” Yakima grunted, breaking into a run.
He scrambled up the rocky bed and gained the crest just as the big double 00s on the engine’s nose drew even with him. Throwing up his right arm, he saw Brody Harms grinning, the Easterner’s spectacles colored with milky dawn light as he leaned so far out of the engine’s vestibule that he was nearly perpendicular to the ground.
Harms’s hand slapped Yakima’s. At the same time, Yakima lurched toward the vestibule, grabbed the brass rail with his free hand, and let Harms heave him toward the engine with a powerful pull. He got his right foot on the bottom step, and Harms backed up the other two steps, pulling Yakima’s arm.