CHAPTER TWELVE
About the same time Doña Maria Ana’s party crossed the Rio Grande, a solitary lawman made his way through Hellfire Pass, a rugged, high-walled canyon that saws through the Tres Hermanas Mountains, a trio of peaks that dominate the New Mexico Territory’s Luna County. County Sheriff Buford Whelan drew rein on his lanky buckskin and studied his way ahead, the rocky trail partially blocked by mesquite and a few piñons, the only plants of note that managed to thrive in such a hostile environment. In fact, Hellfire Canyon was little more than a narrow, gloomy arroyo, but some forgotten army surveyor had declared it a canyon and the designation had stuck. A wagon train of settlers had been ambushed near there by Apaches and the lone survivor swore he’d seen the devil himself ride out of the canyon on a black horse, wielding a flaming torch as a weapon. From that time onward the place had been called Hellfire Pass, and there were rumors that at a certain time of the year it served as a gateway to hell and hosted the annual Demons’ Ball. Wild tales like that were enough to ensure that most people rode wide of the canyon and never stared into its eerie depths.
Whelan, tough and uncompromising, was a man who’d ride into hell if that’s what his job required. Once through the pass he’d be facing a different kind of demon in the square, strong form of big Blade Koenig.
It was said that when Koenig crowed it was daylight in New Mexico and for the past twelve years he and his hard-bitten Hellfire riders had lorded it over that part of the territory, unchallenged rulers of two hundred and fifty thousand acres of prime range. As he’d grown in riches and power, Koenig ruled his domain with an iron hand and he gained a reputation as being death on rustlers, nesters, and other undesirables. By Whelan’s own count, Blade had hanged and shot at least forty people, but the total was probably twice that many.
The sheriff suspected that the sudden disappearance of the raggedy-assed Tillett family could be tied to Koenig. The Tilletts were as poor as sawmill rats but were neither rustlers nor nesters, since they owned a one-loop spread that adjoined the Koenig cattle empire.
But the Tilletts were not the reason for Whelan’s visit.
A farmer’s daughter by the name of Caroline Briggs was.
Buford Whelan kneed his buckskin forward. It was time to confront Blade Koenig and make some war talk.
* * *
“Out with it, Buford. You didn’t ride all the way from Deming to sit in my parlor and drink my whiskey,” Blade Koenig said.
“And good bourbon it is, Blade.” Whelan smiled. A tall, spare man in his late forties, he had iron-gray hair and weary hazel eyes that had seen and remembered too much. “Well worth the trip, I’d say.”
“But you have other business.” The big rancher looked wary, like a man who expected bad news. “You were never much of a man for social calls.”
When it came, the news was as bad as Blade feared.
“It’s about your son,” Whelan said.
Koenig closed down. He stared at the lawman with blank eyes, silently waiting for what was to come . . . and it was not long in coming.
“I heard that Seth is sparking a farmer’s daughter by the name of Caroline Briggs,” Whelan said. “I’m told she’s fourteen years old and real pretty. Do you know about that?”
“No, no I don’t,” Koenig said. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because if Seth is sparking her I want it to stop,” the sheriff said.
Koenig refilled Whelan’s glass, playing for time. Finally, he smiled and said, “For a minute there I thought you might be playing Cupid, Sheriff.”
“This is no laughing matter, Blade,” Whelan said. “There was another girl. Emily Graham was her name and Seth was sniffing around her all the time. That much I know for sure. She left a note for her widowed mother saying that she’d been raped and couldn’t live with the shame. She wanted to be a nun, her ma says. You know Dead Mule Wash a ten-mile north of here?”
“I know it. Had a paint mare break a leg up there one time.” Koenig’s face was as expressionless as a death mask, but the knuckles of his left hand were white on his glass.
“My, this is real good whiskey.” Whelan held up his glass and stared into its amber depths. “No burn, real smooth.”
Koenig drew a deep breath. “So, Seth was sparking the Graham girl for a spell. He told me about her. He’s a young man, Buford. No surprise there. What did she do, run away from home?”
“No, she didn’t run away from home, but I guess the only surprise is that Emily Graham is dead. I didn’t see the body, but Luke Gorman said—you know him, Blade? Has a horse ranch on t’other side of the mountains?”
“I know him. What did Gorman say?”
“I’ll tell you just like he told it to me.”
“Then get on with it, man.” Blade’s voice betrayed his growing irritation.
“Well, sir, Luke and one of his hands were out hunting a cougar when they found Emily’s body. She’d been dead for a few days and the coyotes had been at her, but it was still obvious how she’d killed herself. Seems she put the muzzle of her dead pa’s Colt Dragoon under her chin and pulled the trigger. Luke says Emily Graham blew the top of her skull clean off.”
Blade Koenig’s heavy breathing was audible in the quiet room. Finally, he said, “All right, Buford, I admit that we heard that the girl was dead. Seth was . . .”
Seth was brokenhearted about it. But Koenig couldn’t bring himself to utter such a dishonorable and nonsensical lie. He shook his head. “It was a terrible thing, an awful thing to happen.”
“Why did you lie to me, Blade?”
“I didn’t lie to you.”
“At first you implied that you didn’t know the Graham girl was dead.”
“I was protecting my son from a false accusation. You have my word that he didn’t rape that girl, Buford.”
“It was an awful thing I don’t want to see happen again,” Whelan said.
Koenig managed to simulate indignation. “After I gave you my word, do you still believe that Seth had something to do with Emily Graham’s death?”
“With her death, no. With what led to her death, yes.” Before the big man could speak, Whalen said, “Blade, why did the Tilletts suddenly pull up stakes and leave?”
Koenig had an answer ready. “I don’t have much truck with their kind. I can tell you that the Tilletts were white trash who didn’t know how to run a ranch. They probably sneaked out on a pile of debts.”
“That, or something or somebody scared them . . . scared them bad,” Whelan said. “Is it possible one of them saw something they shouldn’t have seen?”
“Damn it, man, you’re talking in riddles,” Koenig said. “What was there to see?”
“You tell me, Blade.”
“They saw the debt collector, probably,” Koenig said.
“Any idea where they are?”
“No, I don’t. Why should I? All I can say is good riddance.”
“I think I’ll scout around, see if I can find them.”
“Good luck with that, Buford.”
“Maybe ask them Tilletts some questions.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know . . . what they seen that scared them, more likely.”
“Ask away. It’s got nothing to do with me.” Blade managed a smile as he rose to his feet. “It’s always a pleasure, Buford, but now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some ledgers to update.”
Whelan stood. “Blade, tell your son to leave Caroline Briggs alone. If I hear that he’s walking out with her, I’ll take it hard.”
“Seth is a grown man,” Koenig said. “I can’t tell him anything. What he does is his own business.”
The sheriff nodded, his eyes suddenly as green and hard as jade. “If anything happens to that girl, anything at all, I’ll come looking for him, Blade. Depend on it.” Then, as he stepped to the door, “Rape is a hanging offense in Luna County. Maybe you should tell Seth that.”
* * *
Blade Koenig stood at his open parlor window and watched Buford Whelan ride away. The man sat tall in the saddle, his head turning this way and that, missing nothing. Koenig slammed the window closed as though shutting the lawman out of his life. But he knew more drastic measures were called for. Whelan was smart, very smart, and he suspected too much. That made him dangerous. Koenig nodded to himself. The sheriff had to go.
* * *
A high-powered .56-.56 Spencer rifle bullet can do nightmarish things to living human tissue, its 350-grain ball the distilled essence of violent, sudden death. The bullet that slammed into Sheriff Buford Whelan’s neck, neatly placed between the top of his celluloid collar and the rim of his plug hat, smashed his spine in the middle of its cervical curve and then ranged upward into his brain case and exited at the top of his skull’s parietal bone, blowing a hole the size of a silver dollar.
Whelan was a dead man before he fell out of the saddle and slammed onto the ground.
That fact was obvious to Seth Koenig as he lowered his smoking rifle and grinned. “Damn you, Whelan, when you throw suspicion on a man do it away from an open window.”
Seth climbed down from the brush-covered niche he’d found halfway up the canyon wall and walked to the dead man. Whelan lay on his back, his unseeing eyes open to the uncaring, lemon-colored sky. Toeing the body onto its back, Seth studied the entry wound. Good shooting! But as he’d figured, at a range of just thirty yards he’d shot six inches too high. He’d been aiming for a spot between the lawman’s shoulder blades. Obviously, the Spencer’s rear ladder sight needed adjusting. He’d sight in the rifle at the first available opportunity.
He stripped Whelan of his fancy, nickeled Colt and noticed inlaid on the right side of its grip was a worn, shield-shaped, silver medallion.
SHERIFF BUFORD WHELAN
1874
from the grateful citizens
of WAR BOW,
ARIZONA TERRITORY
With his pocketknife, Koenig levered out the medallion and tossed it away. He shoved the Colt into his waistband and mounted the dead man’s buckskin. Hellfire Pass was seldom used by travelers, and Koenig looked down at the dead lawman and said, “Lie there and rot in peace, you interfering son of a bitch.”
* * *
“I could’ve made him go away,” Blade Koenig said. “I could’ve spread some money around and got him kicked off the job. Damn it, Seth, you didn’t have to kill him.”
“Whelan needed killing. He was too suspicious the way he was nosing around about that Emily Graham bitch. Rape is a hanging offense in Luna County, he said, and he wasn’t bluffing. You want to see me hang?”
“No, I don’t want to see you hang.”
“Yes, you do, Daddy.”
“I want to see you change, Seth. I mean change for the better.”
“Too late for that. I’m rotten to the core and that’s how I want to be.”
“Son, you don’t mean that.”
“I mean every word of it.”
“Why? Why do you want to be—”
“Rotten? Bad to the bone? Because the only person that matters under the sun is me, me, me, the wolf among the sheep. You’ve heard preachers talk about how heaven is waiting for us all. Well, I want nothing to do with heaven. I’ll travel the shortest route to hell a-runnin’, kiss ol’ Beelzebub right on the mouth and take my rightful place among the baddest of the bad.”
“Seth, that’s crazy talk.”
“It ain’t so crazy, old man.”
“You’re not thinking straight, boy.”
“Boy? I’m nobody’s boy.”
“No, you’re not. You’re man grown and that’s why it’s time to change, leave your youth behind.”
“What youth? I didn’t have a youth, damn you. You worked me like a common puncher, driving me from can’t see to can’t see, and paid me thirty a month. I wasn’t your son. I was just another ranch hand.”
“Seth, a man has to learn the cattle business from the bottom up if he wants to succeed. I wasn’t driving you. I was grooming you for bigger and better things.”
“And when does all that come to me? When you die?”
“Or retire.”
“You’ll never retire.”
“I’ve been giving it some thought. But I have to know that you’re ready to take over the Hellfire.”
“I’m ready right now, Daddy, so die real soon, huh? Do both of us a favor.”
Blade poured himself a whiskey and after a while said, “None of this would have happened if you’d kept your damned pants buttoned.”
“How crude.” Seth became defensive. “Emily Graham was asking for it, the way she flounced around in front of me, teasing me with them big tits of hers. I only took what she had on offer.”
“That’s not how Jed Tillett saw it,” Blade said.
“Yeah, well now Jed Tillett ain’t seeing anything, is he?” Seth said. “He should’ve taken the money you offered and kept his trap shut.”
“You raped her, Seth,” Blade said. “Tillett watched you do it and then you took a shot at him. When he came here with his pa he was half-dead and he didn’t want money. He wanted me to have you arrested.”
“I told you, the slut was asking for it. How the hell was I to know she’d kill herself? Hell, she’d probably been done by every man in Luna County. Why pick on me?”
“Emily’s ma said her daughter wanted to be a nun,” Blade said. “I’m guessing she was a virgin. Do you have to be a virgin to be a Catholic nun? I don’t know.”
“Who tipped off the Tilletts that I was coming after them?” Seth said. “Was it you?”
Blade downed his whiskey. “Of course it wasn’t me. I suspect it was one of our punchers with no liking for you.”
“If I find him, I’ll kill him, lay to that.”
“The Tilletts don’t matter any longer, we saw to that. Now that’s behind you, you should settle down, Seth. Get married maybe. Give me a grandson.”
“So you can leave the Hellfire to him? You’re spitting into the wind.”
Blade’s voice speared into his son’s sullen silence. “Where’s Buford’s body?”
“Where I left it, rotting in Hellfire Pass,” Seth said.
Blade nodded. “All right. Here’s what you do. You get a shovel from the barn and go bury him. It’s no small thing to kill a county sheriff, so get rid of the evidence.”
“Damn you, let the coyotes bury him.”
As though he hadn’t heard, Blade said, “I’ll send Shield with you to make sure the job is done.”
“It’s almost dark.”
“Take a lantern.”
“I don’t want that damned Pima anywhere near me.”
“Shield goes.”
Seth’s anger was white hot. He kicked over an embroidered footstool and said, “I don’t have the words to tell you how much I hate you, old man. Every passing day I hate you more, and it will be like that until the day and hour I kill you.”
“And I should’ve drowned you at birth, Seth. Like you said, you’re rotten, a bad apple, putrid to the core, but I cling to the hope that one day you’ll wake up and see yourself for what you are and then you’ll change.”
Seth’s voice was scornful. “Then lose all hope, Daddy. I’ll never change. I like me fine the way I am.”
Blade Koenig listened and died another little death, the latest of many. “Go find the Pima and bury Buford. Maybe you can bring yourself to say a prayer for him.”
“I was spawned in the lowest depths of hell,” Seth said. “A demon doesn’t prattle prayers.”
“Are you really that, Seth? Are you really a demon?”
“One day you’ll find out just how much of a demon I really am, old man. Maybe sooner than you think.”