CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Cursing but remaining determined, Matt McCulloch cooked up a second pot of coffee, making this one stronger by seasoning it with soot from the stove, a little bit of snuff he found in Sheriff Garcia’s bottom drawer, and the remnants of the Irish whiskey Breen—certainly not Sean Keegan—had left in a tin coffee mug.
Wooden Arm stood in the corner, amazed at just how drunk two white men could get. Even more shocking was how these white eyes treated their women and ugly-faced men. They threw them in a dark room with rough beds and iron doors, with just one bucket for drinking water and another bucket to do their business in. He grinned at the thought of what might happen if they mixed up their buckets.
Once McCulloch had the second pot of coffee inside the bellies of Jed Breen and Sean Keegan, he opened the bottom drawer of the sheriff’s desk and pulled out a bottle of tequila about three-quarters full and poured himself a morning bracer.
“The hell—” Breen had to choke back something god-awful rising in his throat. Once he had it headed back where it might exit his body through a lower orifice, he continued. “Where did you . . . find that?”
“Where Juan has been keeping it since he was first elected seven years ago,” McCulloch answered. He held the glass toward Breen, who jerked away as though he had been offered arsenic.
“Tequila,” Sean Keegan muttered, “Is the devil’s brew.” He brought the coffee cup up to his lips.
Thirty minutes later, McCulloch had learned all that he was going to until someone with sense and sensibility—and not three bottles of eighty-six-proof in their bellies—could tell him. The Benteen Gang had raided Purgatory City in a failed attempt to free Tom Lovely, alias Tom Benteen, from his date with Lucifer for one final dance on the trapdoor of the gallows. Those gallows were a pile of ash and charred timbers, in the back courtyard of the county courthouse as well as the annex from nine months back. Tom Lovely was dead.
The hangman was dead. The town marshal was dead. A few other citizens were dead, but the undertaker had a free hand to make his rent and get some good folks planted since he didn’t have to worry about burying Tom Lovely.
Sheriff Garcia had led a posse of about two dozen able-bodied men out in search of the Benteen Gang. Whether due to dedication or the fact that an election would be coming up next year, it wasn’t known. The Texas Rangers based in Purgatory City had taken off southeast in pursuit of the Krugers.
The marshal of the town, Rafe McMillian, had caught a bullet through the body, another slug through both lungs, and a shotgun blast of double-aught buckshot in his back. The undertaker, the lousy excuse for a human being A. Percival Helton, would have a challenge making him presentable to St. Peter.
What all this boiled down to was the Rangers were searching for the Kruger brothers and the most of the troops from Fort Spalding were chasing Indians across West Texas.
McCulloch slapped Breen’s face hard. “Are there any good hands left in this whole damned county?”
“I wouldn’t bet my poke on it, Matt.”
McCulloch made the bounty hunter drink more coffee. He looked at poor Wooden Arm and almost laughed aloud but steeled himself and signed to the Comanche I need more time.
Moving to the one-time army soldier, McCulloch slapped Keegan’s face and said, “Keegan, here’s my problem. I have forty rank mustangs that should bring me a good chunk of change if I can break them and sell them. Now . . .”
For a drunken lout, Keegan was ahead of McCulloch, “Matt, me brother, or at least a man I love like me brother . . . don’t take that the wrong way, laddie, for they hanged my brother in County Cork thirty-seven years ago last Monday . . . I testified agin the bloody traitor. But where was I? Matt, do ye really think the colonel, Ol’ Lard Arse Hollister, would buy mounts from ye?” He chuckled, sucked down more coffee, spit out a mouthful, swallowed the rest, and laughed.
“The army won’t buy nothing from you, laddie. Not in Texas.”
McCulloch sipped coffee himself, and after he had swallowed, asked, “What about New Mexico Territory? Fort Marcy? Fort Bascom? Fort whatever the hell they call it down Mesilla way?”
“What about . . .” Keegan said with a mischievous grin, “Fort Wilmont?”
“Wilmont?” McCulloch demanded.
“Arizona Territory, me lad. Beautiful country. Glorious country. The northern part of the territory. Just outside the big burg of—”
“Precious Metal,” Breen slurred.
“Why Fort Wilmont?” McCulloch asked.
“Because, laddie, there are no horse breeders in that part of the territory,” Keegan said. “There’s nothing but miners and stagecoach jehus.”
“Hell no,” Breen slurred, “Stagecoach, we won’t go!”
Ignoring the drunken bounty hunter, McCulloch leaned closer into the stinking Irishman’s face. “Wilmont?”
“Apaches!” Keegan snapped. “Bloody hell, Matt, don’t ye read the papers or hear the gossips outside the striped poles of barbershops?” He burped, shot down another swallow of retched coffee, and continued. “The Apaches be raising more than their share of Cain these days, Matt, me son. And the army can’t keep up with them. An Apache afoot can cover more ground than can a bluecoat like meself do on the back of an army horse.”
Keegan drank again, burped a finale, and grinned. Then he stretched his right hand out and gripped McCulloch’s shoulder. “Did ye hear what I said, Matt? An army horse. Not”—he laughed—“Not, by the love of Jesus, Joseph, and Mary or whatever order ye want to put them in, not a Matt McCulloch horse.”
Breen nodded. “Your reputation crosses all the way to the Colorado River, Matt. I’ve been to Precious Metal. Just passing through, mind you, but it looked like a damned nice town.”
Standing up, without even realizing he had moved, McCulloch turned toward Wooden Arm. He signed,. I will return as fast as my legs can carry me.
An hour later he was back with a pot of café coffee, a pot of beans, and a bottle of castor oil.
* * *
Some hours after daybreak, and two more pots of coffee, McCulloch rolled three smokes, passing one to Jed Breen, another to Sean Keegan, and the last to Wooden Arm. He struck a match across the rough edge of Sheriff Juan Garcia’s desk and lighted the smokes.
“The army at Fort Wilmont will pay forty-five dollars in minted gold for a good horse,” McCulloch said, waving the telegraph reply he had received that morning. “Matt McCulloch horses, that is.”
“Wilmont?” Breen held his head as though it was about to fall into a million pieces. “Isn’t that . . . ?”
“Outside of Precious Metal,” Keegan answered.
That’s all it took to sober Jed Breen up. He grabbed the cup of coffee, swallowed about half of it, and pitched the cigarette onto the floor. Wooden Arm had the presence of mind to crush out the butt with the heel of his Comanche moccasin.
“You want us to ride with you?” Breen asked.
“My understanding is that you want to deliver a couple of parcels to the sheriff in Precious Metal,” McCulloch said.
Breen grinned, sipped more coffee. “How many horses?”
“Mustangs,” McCulloch corrected. “Barely broken. Some of them not even broken. Forty. At forty-five a head, you do the math.”
“You do the bloody math,” Keegan said. “My head’s still pounding like me brothers buildin’ that awful railroad north of here all those years ago.”
“Not that many years, Sean,” Breen corrected, but then his head slumped into his hands.
“It’s eighteen hundred bucks,” McCulloch said. “If we make it. The Indian and I will take fourteen hundred. You two split the difference.”
“How do you figure it?” Keegan asked. “Getting there? Southern route and up?”
“No,” McCulloch answered immediately. “Hans Kruger will want his brother. He’ll be expecting us to go south. I figure we follow the Pecos River to Fort Bascom in New Mexico Territory, then travel straight west, following the stage route.”
“That country’s filled with Comanches first, then Apaches, then the bloody Navajo, and then more Apaches,” Keegan said.
“Plus bandits of all colors,” Breen added.
“Which,” McCulloch said, “Is why my pard and I are paying you two hundred dollars a piece. Providing we don’t lose one damned horse.”
Keegan and Breen stared at each other. Eventually both men smiled and lifted their coffee cups in the general, if unsteady, direction of Matt McCulloch. They hardly noticed Wooden Arm.
“Well,” Keegan said as he turned back to stare at the horseman, “They say there is strength in numbers crossing lawless territories.”
“Yeah,” McCulloch said. “Numbers. One former Texas Ranger with a Winchester. A bounty hunter with nothing but profit on his mind. And a one-time soldier boy who wore the blue and hasn’t spent hardly a sober day in his life.”
“Don’t forget him!” Keegan wailed and pointed at the teenage Comanche brave who suddenly didn’t look so much like a warrior but like a frightened teenager who didn’t know what the devil he had gotten himself into.
“I can add to our numbers,” Jed Breen said, pointing awkwardly at the jail cells. “Kruger will fight if it means keeping his topknot. Nobody in his right mind wants to be tortured to death by Apaches.” He laughed. “Even better than that, my friends, my old fellow Jackals, I’ve got the jim-dandiest cook you’ve ever seen.”