Rogue Lawman #3: Cold Corpse, Hot Trail

NOT long after their reunion, Hawk and Primrose lost the outlaws’ trail in a rain squall. When they came upon a forlorn little prospectors’ cabin along a gurgling stream nestled in cottonwoods, with three dead men lying in the shaded yard, half-eaten by buzzards and coyotes, they figured they’d found it again.

The prospectors had been shot, probably ambushed from the trees lining the stream. The smallest had been stripped of his shirt and pants. Nothing except food appeared to have been taken from the thatch-roofed casa. The cabin and adjoining barn and stable hadn’t been burned, the bodies hadn’t been desecrated, which told Hawk the killings hadn’t been the work of Indians.

Hawk looked at the youngest of the three dead prospectors. Shot twice in the head so the clothes hadn’t been torn by bullets. Damn practical. He’d been carrying a shovel, which lay nearby.

Hawk glanced back at the young lieutenant, standing at the edge of the yard, holding his horse’s braided rawhide reins.

As he stepped the blade through the thin sod pocked with yucca and sage, Primrose walked up and stood beside him. “I don’t understand you. Why bury them, when you wouldn’t let me bury my detail?”

“We have time.” Hawk tossed a shovelful of sod aside and again stepped the shovel into the ground. “I know where they’re heading now. We’re not far from a village rumored to be a haven for gringo outlaws—as long as they pay a tribute to the local federale troupe, that is. We’re only about a day away.”

He was breathing hard as he dug. “These poor bastards were killed through no fault of their own. We have time, so we’ll bury them, and then we’ll ride.”

Primrose watched him, incredulous. He shook his head, then tied his horse to a sycamore and tramped off to the stable in search of his own shovel. “You’re an odd one, Hawk. Damn odd . . .”

They dug three shallow graves and covered each with rocks from the creek. Into the rocks they poked oak branches resembling crosses. Hawk stood before the graves, removed his hat, and bowed his head. Watching Hawk with a vaguely bewildered expression, the lieutenant followed suit.

He stopped and turned to Primrose. The lieutenant glanced at the rocky ridge behind the casa, golden brown in the mid-afternoon light, each rock and piñon standing out clearly against the slope. Primrose lowered his head with feigned casualness, hooked a finger across his nose.

“In the past hour I’ve seen three sun flashes off that northern ridge. Something tells me we’re been spied upon through field glasses.”

Hawk stopped before the tree to which the grulla was tied. “When we split up, I had my own little adventure. A deputy U.S. marshal by the name of D.W. Flagg and a sheriff named Killigrew tried to blow out my candle. I warned them to go on home, but I reckon they haven’t cleaned their ears in a while. Somewhere, somehow, they found a dozen or so men—scalp-hunters, by the looks of them—to help hunt me down.” He slipped the reins loose from the sycamore branch and swung onto the saddle. “I glassed them day before yesterday. They’ve been gaining on us steadily . . . by my design.”

Primrose stared up at him. His face was now more brown than red, his goatee sun-bleached, but the peeled skin made him look diseased. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”

“To tell you the truth,” Hawk said, “I’ve been riding alone so long, it never really occurred to me.” Chuckling wryly, he gigged the grulla southward along the stream.

“Fork leather, Lieutenant,” Hawk called without turning around, walking the grulla downstream. “And fill that empty chamber you’ve been keeping under your pistol’s hammer. You’re gonna need it pretty soon.”

An hour later, Hawk and Primrose dropped over a jog of rocky hills and into the yard of a combination store and saloon.

The pulperia’s main building was a barrackslike, two-story adobe with a second-story balcony wrapping around the front and both ends. The owner probably rented out the upstairs rooms to freighters. Two heavy-axled wagons sat, tongues hanging, ash bows exposed, before the low adobe wall fronting the main building.

As Hawk and Primrose rode into the hard-packed yard, cleaving the small herd of goats and chickens, a skinny, stoop-shouldered Mexican sauntered out of a stable, smoking a brown-paper cigarette and glancing up at the riders beseechingly.

“Not tonight,” Hawk said, looking the place over, eyes picking out every object behind which a man might seek cover during a lead swap. The pine smoke drifting from the main building’s big fieldstone chimney was laced with the smell of grilled chicken.

“Business, she’s slow,” the Mexican drawled, removing the cigarette from his lips, turning his head to follow Hawk and Primrose across the yard. “I give you special deal, uh? Free pussy!”

“I’m thinking Flagg and his boys will stop there for the night. Flagg’s getting old. I’m guessing he won’t be able to pass up a real bed and a free female.”

“Flagg was a guest of Major Devereaux’s at Fort Bowie a few times. Apparently, he and Devereaux were at West Point at the same time. I’ve played cards with the man. He has political ambitions. Rumor has it he could very well be the next territorial governor.”

Primrose didn’t say anything for a time. He glanced at the falling sun to his right, then turned to Hawk. “I can’t help you kill him. He’s just doing his job.”

“And he’s a friend of your father-in-law’s.” Hawk grinned. “That’s okay. I’ll kill the son of a bitch myself.”

When he looked over at Primrose riding along beside him, the lieutenant, sagging forward in his saddle, appeared pale, as though he were having a bout of the ague.

They rode for another twenty minutes, traversing a jog of mesquite-covered hills rising to steeper mountains in the southern distance. Hawk dismounted, climbed a knoll, and glassed his back trail. Seeing no sign of Flagg or Sheriff Killigrew and their six mercenaries, he turned to Primrose, who was sitting a square, flat-topped rock lower down the slope. Hands on his spread knees, the lieutenant studied the ground as if looking for something he’d lost.

“This is where we part company, soldier. “ Hawk gained his feet and walked past the lieutenant toward the two horses ground-tied at the bottom of the hill, their tails swishing in the early evening light, flies buzzing around their heads.

Primrose had slipped his Army Colt from its holster. He brought it up as if it weighed a ton, aimed it at Hawk. He curled his lip with savage resolve as he ratcheted back the hammer. “I can’t let you do it, Hawk.”

He reined the horse around so hard that the grulla pawed the air. He put the steel to him, and the horse lunged off its rear hooves into an instant gallop, thundering around the hill and heading back the way he’d come. Hawk didn’t look back, didn’t see the lieutenant sitting his rock, stewing, staring at the empty place Hawk had just vacated, cocked revolver aimed at nothing.

Fifteen minutes later, Hawk was glassing the pulperia from a notch in the basalt ridge just south of it. The grulla was tethered in a hollow at the bottom of the ridge. As he peered through the lenses, Hawk curled his upper lip in a grim smile.

The pulperia’s owner was no doubt very happy this night. Ten horses milled in the corral flanking the main building. A skinny Mexican boy in white slacks, sandals, and a dark brown poncho was hauling water from the well. Another, shorter kid was forking hay through the fence slats.

Smoke puffed in earnest from the building’s rock chimney, while five men milled on the front ramada, spilling into the yard—laughing and smoking, glasses in their hands. They were rough-looking Mexicans, revolvers and long-bladed facóns jutting from sheaths on their hips, thighs, and from shoulder rigs under their arms. One man, hearing something from the second story, looked up and, cupping a hand around his mouth, shouted encouragement in Spanish. He and the other men in the yard laughed.

A man yelled something through one of the second-story windows—Hawk couldn’t make out the words—and the men in the yard laughed harder.

Flagg and Killigrew were probably in the bar drinking or upstairs getting their ashes hauled. Hawk wasn’t so much concerned about them as the scalp-hunters. Fighting men, they wouldn’t be easy to take down. Let them keep drinking. Let the light fade, and he’d have the drop. . . .

Hawk made a thorough reconnaissance of the place, noting the arroyo behind it, then scuttled a few feet down the ridge, rose, and jogged to the bottom, taking long strides, his spurs chinging, boots lifting sand. He stowed the field glasses in his saddlebags, sat down to remove his spurs, shucked his rifle, tugged his hat brim low, and jogged west along the base of the ridge.

By the time he’d stolen around behind the main building and dropped into the ravine, the sun was down, but the sky remained pale. The brown ridges were mantled in umber. There’d be enough light for another forty-five minutes or so.

The Henry in his right hand, keeping his head low, he jogged through the ravine, the low sides canting shadows onto the sandy bottom and swallows wheeling over his head. The ravine’s sides dropped, the cut rising to level, brushy ground about thirty yards behind the pulperia, a few barrel cactuses and pecan trees towering over the blocky shapes of disintegrating chicken coops and abandoned shacks. The place at one time had probably been an abbey or a monastery.

To Hawk’s left were the corrals in which the horses ate and drew water, a couple rolling in the dust, the dust rising in a soft brown cloud above the corral. On his right, a girl cried out softly. There was the wooden clatter of logs tumbling. Beyond the chicken coop, grown up with brown scrub, stood another tin-roofed structure resembling a stable. From there, a man’s guttural voice warned the girl in Spanish to be quiet and pull her bloomers down.

Hawk moved right through the knee-high brush, crouched over his Henry, until he’d gotten the chicken coop and scattered pecan trees between him and the main building. As he continued across the yard and through the pecans, the building, resembling a stable, slid up before him.

It wasn’t a stable, but a simple, roofed shed. The side facing Hawk was open. Inside, split logs were stacked. Sitting on the stack, half-reclining, was a dark-haired girl. Between her flailing legs was a man in a short leather jacket and buckskin breeches, a steeple-crowned sombrero hanging down his back. On the back of his wide cartridge belt was a black knife sheath trimmed in silver.

The girl kicked feebly at him, struggling, as he pulled her underwear down her thighs. Hawk’s Spanish was poor, but the girl seemed to be telling the man she wasn’t one of the putas, but a simple errand girl. If he took her like this, her mama would have to send her to a convent.

The man ripped the underwear with one enraged jerk, and tossed it into the brush. The girl sobbed and continued pleading as he bent his knees, opening the fly of his breeches. He thrust himself at the girl once, twice, grunting savagely.

As he thrust the third time, Hawk’s knife careened end over end and buried itself hilt-deep in the man’s back, cleaving bone with a crunching thump.