CHAPTER 34
Hunter caressed the Henry’s hammer as he watched the shadows of the four slave traders running toward him, silhouetted by the distant fire in the camp behind them.
He glanced over his shoulder toward where Annabelle lay silently on the flat tableland forty yards away. She made no sound; she wasn’t moving. Passed out from exhaustion, most likely. He hoped that’s all it was. Worry racked him.
He turned his head forward and levered a fresh round into the Henry’s breech, raking out, “We’re almost done here,” through gritted teeth.
The four men, running abreast roughly eight feet apart, came on quickly. The muffled pounding of their running feet grew louder until Hunter could hear the breaths raking in and out of their lungs. They held their rifles up high across their chests. He watched as they dropped down into a trough between rises. He waited. He could still hear them but he couldn’t see them.
They reappeared, running up from the bottom of the rise he was on—first their hats and then the dark silhouettes of their faces . . . their chests, two of which were crisscrossed with cartridge bandoliers, the casings glinting in the starlight. Then their pumping arms and scissoring feet. Quickly, they closed the gap between Hunter and themselves. When they were fifteen feet away, one of them said, breathlessly, “Where the hell is he?”
Hunter gained his feet and snapped the Henry to his shoulder.
“Right here.”
He shot the man on the far left first and kept shooting, jacking and shooting, jacking and shooting, until all three were screaming and twisting around, falling, dropping their rifles, and losing their hats.
Hunter stared through the wafting powder smoke, frowning, apprehension a cold finger tickling the back of his neck.
“Three?” he whispered.
Where was the fourth one?
Machado.
Hunter racked a fresh round into the Henry’s breech and moved slowly forward. Cold sweat bathed his face and the insides of his gloves as he nervously squeezed the Henry’s neck and forestock. He stepped over one of the dead men, a half-breed with long, greasy hair and a death snarl frozen on his lips, and continued down the rise into the rough in which the four slavers had briefly disappeared.
He stopped, looked around.
“Saguaro?” he said. “Come out, come out—”
He cut himself off. The sickly-sweet smell of some animal touched his nostrils.
He was about to whip around when something cold, hard, and round was thrust against his back, between his shoulder blades.
An animal, all right. The human kind. The worst kind.
“Drop the rifle or take it in the back, Buchanon,” came the outlaw’s guttural snarl from behind him. As big as he was, he could move as quietly as an Apache.
Hunter’s blood rushed like ocean waves in his ears.
“Drop it,” Machado repeated with menacing quiet, “or I blow your grayback heart through your breastbone.”
Hunter sighed, tossed the Henry into the sage.
“Think I’ll take her to Mexico,” Machado said quietly, jeeringly, in Hunter’s left ear. “Kept my hands off her till now.” Hunter heard the infuriating smile in the man’s mocking voice: “But tonight, I’m gonna find out what I been missing.”
The rage of a wild stallion inside him, Hunter started to whip around, intending to thrust the outlaw’s rifle aside and deliver a hammering blow to his jaw. Machado was ready. Hunter wasn’t halfway turned around before the butt plate of the man’s Winchester smashed into the side of his head.
“Oh!” Hunter said, staggering backward and tripping over his own boots, striking the ground hard on his butt between sage shrubs.
He looked up, shaking the cobwebs from his vision.
The hulking, one-eyed bear of Saguaro Machado, wearing his customary opera hat, aimed the rifle at a downward angle. He spread his lips in a savage smile. “Two’s company, Buchanon. Three’s a crowd.”
Hunter saw the man’s right, gloved finger begin to draw back against the trigger.
He steeled himself, waiting for the bullet.
Rapid thuds sounded to Hunter’s right, on the uphill side of the trough. Quick breaths and then a deep growl. Something long and gray leaped from Hunter’s right to his left, three feet in front of him. Bobby Lee threw himself against Machado, closing his jaws around the man’s right wrist just as the slaver squeezed the rifle’s trigger.
Machado screamed as the Winchester stabbed orange flames, the bullet tearing into the ground only inches to the left of Hunter’s head.
Machado dropped the rifle and staggered back and to one side, trying to fight off the enraged, snarling, and growling Bobby Lee biting into the man’s left arm as though trying to rip it out of its socket. Machado bellowed like an enraged, wounded grizzly as he staggered backward, trying to fight off the coyote.
Finally, he gave an echoing cry of bald fury and, using both hands, grabbed the snarling beast around its neck and hurled the coyote away from him. Bobby was a gray blur in the darkness as he struck the ground ten feet away from the bear-like Machado, who turned to Hunter, his right hand dropping toward the revolver jutting from the holster on his right thigh.
Hunter’s head was spinning, but his instincts kicked in, bypassing his brain.
Suddenly, as though of its own accord, the LeMat was in his hand and blasting and flashing once, twice, three times.
Machado wailed, triggering his own pistol skyward, as he staggered back and dropped with a grunt. He lay groaning, slowly kicking his legs, grinding his heels into the turf.
He cursed, lifted his head to stare toward Hunter. His chest rose and fell heavily as he raked breaths in and out of his lungs.
“Mierda,” he said in his native Spanish. “Forgot about that . . . whip hand!”
His head flopped back against the ground. One foot shook, stopped shaking, and the man-beast was dead.
Hunter sat up, staring at the long, broad, lumpy form of the dead man from over the LeMat’s smoking barrel.
A low yip sounded, and Bobby Lee hurried over to Hunter, whining and licking Hunter’s face with his dry, rough tongue, wagging his shaggy tail.
Hunter chuckled. “There you are, you ol’ devil! Where you been keepin’ yourself? Out fraternizing with the opposite sex, I got me a feelin’.”
Bobby Lee leaped up and placed his two font paws on Hunter’s shoulders, continuing to run his tongue over Hunter’s unshaven cheeks.
“Well, better late than never to the party,” Hunter said, shoving the coyote away and chuckling as he rose heavily, his head aching from Machado’s blow. His ribs were on fire again, too. That was all right.
As long as he still had Annabelle.
He staggered up and over the rise and over to where Annabelle lay belly down. She wasn’t moving.
“Oh, God,” Hunter said. If he’d lost her now, after all he’d gone through to get her back.
He dropped to a knee, placed his hand on the back of her neck. Bobby sat beside Hunter, nuzzling Anna’s neck.
“Honey . . . don’t you die on me, Annabelle . . .”
She stirred, turned her head to look up at him through the screen of her tangled hair, grimacing against Bobby Lee’s fervid ministrations. “Are they . . . ?”
“Yep.”
“Even . . . ?”
“Yep.”
Anna heaved a relieved sigh as she sat up. She hugged Bobby Lee tightly and then she threw herself into Hunter’s arms and hugged him, too.
Hunter picked her up, rose, and began tramping off in the direction in which he’d left Nasty Pete, whom he could hear nickering in the darkness ahead of him. Annabelle looked up at him. “What about the money . . . for the horses?”
“Got it back . . . in Lone Pine. Intercepted a courier on his way to Arapaho Creek.”
Anna frowned, deep lines cutting across her forehead in the starlight, which glinted in her bewildered eyes. “To the Scanlons?”
“It’s a long story,” Hunter said as he continued walking, Bobby Lee running ahead. “A long, sad story. Not sure what I’ll do about it. Nothing, most like.”
They’d been in agony ever since that dreaded Southern night during the war, just as Hunter had been. And would continue to be.
“Hunt, I don’t understand.”
“I’ll tell you on the way home.”
“Home,” Annabelle said, resting her head back against her husband’s muscular arm. “I like the sound of that.”
“Mmm. Me, too.”
“I like the sound of ‘Angus’ and ‘Nate’ even better.”
Hunter chuckled. “Wonder what those two have been up to while we been gone.”
“They’ve probably been sleeping in, waking at noon. Angus has probably been drinking his beer for breakfast. I bet they haven’t gotten a thing done!”
“Nope,” Hunter said. “Don’t doubt it a bit. Just restin’ and relaxin’. That’s Angus.”
“He’s gonna infect that boy with his sloth!”
They laughed.