The Whip Hand

CHAPTER 29

Hunter ripped the grullo’s reins off the hitchrack fronting the doctor’s office, fairly leaped into the saddle, and galloped along the street for one block before swinging toward the two hitchracks fronting the Angry Dog Saloon and Brewery.

He put the grullo up next to Jack Tatum’s black, who, recognizing Hunter, gave a friendly whinny and one friendly switch of his tail. Hunter ran his hand down the black’s snout, mounted the boardwalk, and pushed through the batwings, finding himself in the twilight world of a smoky bar with only a few of its lamps lit against the coming dusk.

Three men stood at the bar at the room’s rear. They were spaced roughly ten feet apart, one foot planted on the brass rail running along the base of the bar where several brass spittoons were strategically positioned. The man on the far right was Tatum, who stood over a frothy beer mug. A door to his right, flanking the bar, was marked BREWERY.

The barkeep was just then filling the shot glass on the bar before Tatum’s beer schooner. He held out his hand and Tatum tossed a coin at the man too hard for the man to catch it. The coin bounced off the apron’s broad chest and clattered to the floor behind the bar.

The barman scowled then scooped to retrieve the coin.

Tatum chuckled. He glanced to his left to see if the man standing over there had found the high jinks as amusing as Tatum had. Hunter could see in the back bar mirror that the man hadn’t. Leaning forward with his elbows on the bar, wearing a bland expression and pointedly ignoring Tatum, he took a sip of his own, black, frothy ale. Tatum must have glimpsed Hunter standing to one side of the batwings out the corner of his left eye. He turned his head farther around to get a better look at the newcomer.

He turned his head forward and then, his brain registering who the man had seen, swung it back around so quickly he was liable to snap his neck.

His eyes widened when he saw the big blond man in the buckskin tunic and holstered LeMat, and he turned his head quickly forward once more, shoulders tightening in his pinstriped, collarless shirt and brown leather vest. He raised his shot glass, tossed back half the whiskey and, glancing quickly, furtively into the back bar mirror at Hunter, flinched. Needing a bracer, he threw back the rest of the shot.

Smelling the beer wort emanating from the brewery flanking the saloon, which reminded Hunter of old Angus’s own malty ale, Hunter made his way toward Tatum, whose right hand, Hunter saw, had dropped to the walnut grips of the Schofield .44 holstered for the cross draw on his left hip. Hunter increased his pace, shouldered up hard against Tatum and said in a raking, angry rasp through gritted teeth, “Go ahead an’ pull that hogleg, and I’ll blow your brains all over that mirror!”

Tatum’s face blanched behind three- or four-days’ worth of salt-and-pepper beard stubble. His chest rose and fell sharply. When Hunter saw him remove his hand from the Schofield’s grips, Hunter looked at the jowly bartender, who was regarding him dubiously. “Not thirsty,” he said. “Go about your business.”

The big man shrugged, drew a breath, and walked over to where one of the customers sitting at a table had walked up to the bar with his empty beer mug.

Hunter opened Tatum’s vest and pulled the manilla envelope out of his shirt pocket. He recognized the envelope Rufus Scanlon had given him. Peering inside, he recognized the crisp bills amounting to the full two thousand dollars Saguaro Machado had stolen from him when he’d taken Annabelle.

Tatum opened his mouth to object but before he could say a word, Hunter spun him around and gave him a hard shove toward the door marked BREWERY.

“Hey, hey, hey!” Tatum said, stumbling forward. “Someone help me. I’m bein’ robbed in broad day—”

Hunter gave him another hard shove through the door and out into the Angry Dog’s backyard where a cabin sat to the left of a two-hole privy. The cabin door was open. A tall man in overalls stood to the right of the cabin’s open front door. In the same patch of shade, a medium-sized, shorthair, brown dog lay. Between the cabin and the saloon, another man, also clad in overalls, stood stirring a large steel tub with a long-handled wooden paddle. The tub sat on a stone fireplace. Steam rose from it, smelling like brew day out at the Box Bar B.

The two men, the man by the cabin smoking a brown paper quirley, stared at Hunter and his quarry. Growling and showing his teeth, the dog leaped up and ran over to bark and run a single circle around the two combatants before running back to the cabin and taking up his position beside the man smoking the quirley.

Both men wore immigrant hats and wore beards but no mustaches.

Hunter gave the back of Tatum’s right knee a savage kick. The man went down, yelling, “You got no right. You got no damn right, Buchanon!”

Hunter kicked the man onto his back, drew his LeMat, clicked the hammer back, and pressed the barrel against Tatum’s forehead. “Where’d you get the money? Was it Machado?”

Tatum stared up at him, eyes wide. He didn’t say anything.

“You have three seconds to tell me where you got his money. One . . . two . . . th—”

“Fifteen, twenty minutes ago.” A faint smile quirked one corner of the Arapaho Creek foreman’s mouth briefly.

“Where’d he leave from and which way did he head?”

“Lone Wolf Hotel. East.”

“Was Machado working for Scanlon?”

That appeared a harder question for Tatum to answer. He flinched slightly, hesitated.

“Why?” Hunter asked, pressing the LeMat even harder against the man’s forehead.

“You, uh . . . you killed Scanlon’s son . . . the girl’s brother . . . in the war. He was a picket guarding a bridge you and several of your grayback friends blew. One of the other soldiers saw it all . . . heard the way Billy Scanlon pleaded for his life even while he lay dyin’. The Union soldier recognized you. Told Scanlon after the war. Stealin’ that money back . . . usin’ Machado to do it . . . and sellin’ your wife into slavery was his way of gettin’ back at you. He wanted you to live in the same agony he lived with every day.”

“Lucinda was in on it to?”

“Yes,” Tatum said. “She was just a baby when Billy died, but she had to live with her father’s heartbreak. She believes it’s that heartbreak that’s finally killin’ the old man.”

Hunter’s mind was whirling.

He remembered the young Union picket lamenting his own death, sobbing for his family and his girl while the blood and viscera spilled out of his belly. Hunter had felt wretched. But it had been his job to blow the bridge to keep trains hauling munitions from crossing it at the cost of more Confederate lives.

Still, it was that poor kid’s death that still haunted his sleep more than any of the countless others he’d killed.

Hunter pulled the LeMat away from Tatum’s forehead.

A little color returned to the frightened man’s cheeks.

“Get out of here. Go back to Arapaho Creek. Tell them they failed. They both failed. What I did was in war time. It was the natural cost of war. What they did is not. They’ll pay. Both of them. Maybe not soon. But someday they’ll both pay big. Tell them to live with that!”

Hunter holstered the LeMat, snapped the keeper thong closed over the hammer, then went back into the saloon, crossed it quickly, went outside, stuffed the envelope into his saddlebags, and climbed up on Nasty Pete’s back. Pete was tired. He needed a long rest. But there was no time.

Machado and Annabelle were close. Hunter might not ever get this close again.

* * *

Machado’s trail was fresh.

Hunter picked it up even in the failing light out front of the Lone Wolf Hotel and followed the tracks of the six horseback riders east of town on a secondary freight trail, probably one that hadn’t been used in a good ten years, replaced by easier routes. It was rocky and sage-pocked and washed out in areas, so Hunter had to hold Pete to a fast walk. In clearer areas he trotted the mount, impatience nearly exploding inside him.

Why Machado had left so late in the day was anybody’s guess, but it was Hunter’s guess the man wanted to stay ahead of any possible bounty hunters intending to backshoot the big killer and collect the reward money that would likely be offered for his head for killing the federals. Hunter himself should have known better. He wasn’t going to catch up to the gang, all likely riding fresh horses when his own was weary. He should have stayed in town, given both himself and Nasty Pete a good rest, but he just hadn’t been able to do it.

However, just after good dark, when he was a little over an hour out of Lone Pine, he checked Pete down atop a ridge. He curveted the mount and gazed out into a flat beyond, one that was scored by a shallow ravine that Hunter had taken a better look at when there still had been light. A thin, meandering thread of water ran through the bottom of the arroyo. A fire flickered in a cottonwood copse a hundred feet to the left of the ravine, roughly a half a mile from Hunter’s position.

His blood washed through his veins, tingling with expectation.

Machado?

Hunter booted Pete down off the ridge and into some rocks and cedars off the side of the trail.

He was breathing hard, heart drumming at the prospect of having finally closed the gap between himself and Machado and the outlaw’s four remaining riders after Annabelle had given the man Hunter had seen in the brush a deadly shave with the man’s own pig sticker.

Annabelle.

Hunter couldn’t wait to set eyes on her again.

To hold her again, tightly, and never let her go again . . .

He tied the blowing, sweating Pete to a tree and released the grullo’s saddle cinch so he could breathe freely. He slipped the bit from Pete’s mouth, set his hat on the ground, and poured into it what little water he had left in his canteen. The horse needed it worse than Hunter did if the mount was going to get him and Anna back to town.

Unless Hunter could secure a couple of the outlaws’ mounts.

That meant he’d have to kill them all, and that might be a little more of a bite than he could chew. He was hungry, exhausted, and his ribs still ached. Also, he knew that because of all those factors, and how madly, desperately he wanted to rescue Anna, he wasn’t thinking clearly.

“You stay, Pete,” he told the grullo, giving its rump an affectionate pat. “Hopefully, I’ll be back soon with the lady of the Box Bar B.”

He trotted off into the night, toward the orange flames of the fire flickering before him.

Crouching, he strode up and down natural prairie swells and low hills, meandered around thick stands of cedar and cottonwood. As he closed the gap between himself and the fire, he could see the outlaws sitting around the fire, eating. He thought the horses must be picketed in the trees ahead and to Hunter’s left.

He couldn’t see Anna. But then as he moved slowly to his right, opposite the fire from the horses, partially circling the fire around which the men had tossed down their gear, he saw the red of her hair on the fire’s near side, sitting with her back to a cottonwood.

He stopped, dropped to a knee, heart hammering expectantly.

All he could see was her hair from this view. Her head seemed to be dipped forward, her red tressed hanging down over her face so that all he could see was a patch of the paleness of her chin and part of her cheek. But mostly her hair, the firelight dancing in it.

That was enough.

She, too, was likely exhausted, sleeping.

She was alive.

For now, that was enough for Hunter. Now he had to figure a way of getting her out of there without the horses giving him away.

Anna had trimmed the odds against him. Still, in his condition, they were long odds.

He counted the men milling around the camp. He couldn’t see any in detail but he counted four.

Where was the fifth?

Likely on picket duty, which would complicate Hunter’s job.

That’s all right, he silently told himself. You’ve faced these odds before. Many times during the war, albeit you’d been younger and in better condition. You knew the key. Patience and silence. The ability to move with the slow, plodding determination of a tortoise and then, when the time was right, kill with the ferocity of an Apache on the warpath.

Slowly, he got belly down against the ground and began crawling slowly, angling around sage shrubs and patches of prickly pear. As slowly as that tortoise, he crawled. He’d crawled maybe thirty yards, bringing the camp into closer view so that he could make out some of the men’s firelit faces, including that of the savage, one-eyed Machado. The outlaw leader sat on the far side of the fire, against his saddle, one knee raised. He was hungrily eating what appeared a rabbit haunch or a chicken leg, wiping his hands on his pants.

Cigarette smoke touched Hunter’s nostrils.

He’d gotten only a slight scent, and then it was gone.

He lay flat against the ground, between a large sage shrub and a rock. He kept his gloved right hand wrapped around the Henry’s brass breech.

Slow footsteps sounded to Hunter’s right.

He slowly turned his head that way. Presently, a man-shaped shadow gained definition roughly forty yards away. The man moved toward Hunter, at the edge of the firelight so that the dancing flames shone the man’s bearded face beneath a low-crowned, flat-brimmed black hat, holding a rifle on his shoulder. Two pistols and a knife bristled on the man’s hips clad in baggy canvas trousers. He wore a long, black duster and the brass buckle of his cartridge belt glinted in the firelight, between the duster’s two open flaps.

The cigarette in his mouth glowed orange as he drew on it. The orange glow faded as the man blew out the cigarette smoke through his nose.

Moving slowly around the camp, at the edge of the firelight, the man walked slowly toward Hunter. He was around thirty feet from the fire. Hunter was around fifty feet from it. If the man’s course stayed the same, the lookout should pass within twenty feet of Hunter’s position.

He did.

He continued past Hunter, smoking, and headed toward the horses picketed on the fire’s far side.

Hunter heaved a sigh of relief, then backed slowly away from the camp.

He couldn’t give in to impatience. He had to bide his time, wait for the other men to roll up in their soogans. They were passing a bottle, so it shouldn’t be too long before they slept.

He continued crawling back the way he’d come when a man’s sharp voice said, “Hey, Mrs. Hunter Buchanon. Wake up. Time to clean dishes!”

Hunter stopped and looked toward the camp.

Machado himself stood before Anna, a hulking, one-eyed figure in the flickering firelight.

He took a pull from the bottle in his hand, then kicked Anna and repeated, “Take the dishes to the creek.”

Anna groaned and lifted her head.

Machado glanced behind him and said, “Fat Charlie—follow her.” Turning back to Anna, he said, “Anymore tricks and I will blow your purty head off!”