“There!” the man raged. “I blew out the other!”
Willis cried and panted. He whimpered like a small child.
“Just ’cause you,” Willis managed to squeak out accusingly, “just ’cause you can’t take no pleasure . . . since the war . . .”
Another gun blast silenced him.
“And now for you, Pancho . . . a lesson to take to the next world.”
“No, por favor!”
Pop! Pop!
Silence except the distant murmurs of the other men spilling out from the camp.
“Should I bury ’em, Edgar?” Dupree asked.
“No,” Bontemps said. “Drag ’em back to camp so the others get a good look at what happens to those that fool with the merchandise.” Walking away, he holstered his pistol and grumbled, “And tie those girls with the others.”
Two days later, Mordecai Hawkins—chief wrangler for the Butterfield stage station at Benson, Arizona—halted his horse along a rocky saddle high in pine-clad Sonoran mountains. Holding his Henry rifle in his right hand, he leaned out over his left stirrup and scoured the ground with his gaze.
After a minute, Hawkins straightened, slammed his left fist down on his saddle horn so hard that the claybank spooked, flicking its ears and tossing its head. The old wrangler loosed a spiel of epithets that would have colored the cheeks of the woolliest St. Louis grogshop proprietor.
“What is it, Mr. Hawkins?” a woman said behind him.
The wrangler broke off the tirade midsentence and whipped around in his saddle, startled. “Uh . . . sorry, Mrs. Talon,” the old wrangler said meekly. “Didn’t hear ye ride up.”
“Have we lost the trail again?” Louise Talon asked.
She sat a tall paint mare—a regal brown-eyed woman of early middle-age, with long cherry blond hair pulled back in a ponytail held fast with a bone clasp at the nape of her neck. She wore black gloves, a felt hat, a cream blouse that accented the full breasts and slender waist, and a belted wool skirt with a slit for riding astride.
Louise Talon had what Hawkins had heard described as classical beauty, with a prominent chin, straight nose, and salty Irish humor lines around her wide-set eyes, which shone like pennies at certain times of the day. Hawkins thought the woman could pass for an Irish queen, but she was no fainting Fianna. She had run the swing station at Benson since her husband, a freight contractor, died six years ago, leaving her with one swaybacked gelding and a file drawer swollen with unpaid bills.
At first, Hawkins had scoffed at working for a woman. But having seen Mrs. Talon fight off marauding Apaches and horse thieves with a Winchester rifle, in addition to cooking, cleaning, serving stage passengers, and tending an irrigated kitchen garden, he’d deemed her as tough or tougher than many of the men he’d once trapped with up along the Green River in Wyoming—high praise from an old hardtack frontiersman like Hawkins.
“ ’Pears the rain washed it out,” Hawkins told her with a faint edge of annoyance. “Why don’t you wait here, give the horses a blow? I’ll cross that creek yonder. See if I can cut the sign again in them trees.”
Without waiting for her reply, he dismounted, handed her his reins and the packhorse’s lead rope, then ambled down the gravelly hill tufted in short tough grasses with a sprinkling of blue and purple wildflowers. He crossed the creek and tramped along the pine-clad shoulder of the opposite hill, lowering his head to scour the ground with his gaze.
Finally, he hunkered down on his haunches. He took his Henry rifle in his left hand, removed the worn glove from his right, and ran his fingers over a shoe print clearly defined in the needle-flecked black dirt of the forest.
He probed the soil around and within the print the way a doctor would feel for a patient’s pulse.
A crow cawed in the tree crowns. Closer by, a black squirrel berated Hawkins from a rotten nook in a lightning-split lodgepole.
Ignoring the din, the old wrangler straightened. He removed his broad-brimmed hat, ran his hands through thinning salt-and-pepper hair combed back from a prominent widow’s peak, and peered along the shoulder of the hill, following the tracks with his gray-eyed gaze.
Finally, snugging the hat back down on his head, its thong hanging free beneath his chin, Hawkins turned and ambled back the way he had come. He waded the stream and approached the three horses and the woman waiting for him on the other side.
“It’s right where I figured it would be, ma’am,” Hawkins said as he slid his Henry into his saddle boot. “The forest kept the rain off it. Looks like they crossed the stream and rode along the shoulder of the hill yonder.”
“They’re avoiding the main trails again.”
“Looks that way. Cautious son o’ bitches, pardon my French.”
“How far ahead?”
Hawkins took the reins from her and swung up onto his claybank. “I’d say about two days, ma’am. Maybe three. Even where the tracks are protected from the weather, they’ve disintegrated some.”
“Damn,” Louise said. “I was hoping we were gaining on them.”
Hawkins heeled the claybank forward, tugging on the lead rope attached to the steeldust packhorse. “It’s gonna be tough catchin’ up to those skanks. They been through this country more than once, know it well, and what’s more, they know where they’re headed. All we can do is follow, read their sign . . . where we can find sign.”
They’d been on the trail for the past week and a half, since Billie Brennan, the girl who worked for Mrs. Talon at the swing station, didn’t return from doing laundry down at the creek one afternoon. When Mordecai had gone to check on her, he’d found the laundry strewn across the brush and in the water, and the prints of a dozen horses. Not barefoot horses, like the ones Indians rode, but horses, like the ones white men rode.
Word was out that Edgar Bontemps’ crew of slave-trading scalp hunters was working the country.
Mordecai had saddled a horse and followed the slavers’ trail, slowly arcing south toward Mexico, till it was too dark to see. He’d returned to the swing station to find Mrs. Talon standing before the cabin’s lighted windows, hands on her hips, waiting. He’d ridden up to her and, in response to the question in her brown eyes, slowly shook his head.
“I’ll pack provisions.” Turning on a heel, the woman headed inside. “We’ll ride at first light.”
“Mrs. Tal—”
“That girl’s like a daughter to me, Mordecai,” she’d said, swinging back around to face him, her hourglass figure silhouetted by the lantern-lit windows behind her. “I intend to get her back. I’ll buy her back from those savages, if I have to.”
Now Hawkins shook his head as he urged the claybank into the stream, then up the bank on the other side, and up the hill beyond, following the fading tracks of nearly two dozen shod horses. “We’re just lucky we ain’t run into bandits yet, or worse,” he grumbled half under his breath.
Urging her horse up the hill behind the plodding packhorse, through the forest of columned sun and shadow, Louise stared at the old wrangler’s slouched shoulders and the back of his sun-cracked vest. “You think I’m wrong, going after them?”
Hawkins didn’t turn to her. “I don’t think you’re wrong, necessarily, ma’am. I think it would’ve been better if we’d waited till I could throw together a posse, track the scallawags with a bit more fightin’ force.”
“Forming a posse might’ve taken a week or more, spread out the way the ranches are around here. We know we can’t depend on the lawmen or the Army.”
Hawkins conceded the point with a nod. “I’m just wonderin’ what we’re gonna do once we’ve caught up to this bunch.”