Chapter 4
Colter looked around him, dazed, shaking away the cobwebs.
To his left, Northwest also appeared to be shaking away the fog of the violent tumble as he regained his feet in a shroud of wafting dust. The dun clawed his front legs forward and hoisted his rear end while breaking at the hocks of his rear legs and lifting up and forward.
Colter’s saddle hung down the horse’s near side, along with Colter’s rifle and scabbard. His saddlebags were on the ground.
Colter was relieved to see that the horse appeared all right. At least, Colter hadn’t heard the horrific clatter of broken bones.
The redhead whipped his head back in the direction from which he’d come. He was roughly a hundred feet from the gap. His pursuers milled around on their horses roughly another hundred feet beyond the gap, talking amongst themselves. They were obviously discussing the gap between them and their prey. One of the riders threw lead at Colter, but there was a slight slope between Colter and the gap, and the shooter’s bullet skimmed the brow of the slope before ricocheting off a rock to Colter’s right.
Colter lurched to his feet. His bones felt creaky. His hips were sore and his neck was stiff. Still, he didn’t think anything was broken. He quickly grabbed Northwest’s reins and led the horse down into a rocky depression, out of the line of fire from Colter’s pursuers trapped on the other side of the gap.
Colter shucked his Tyler Henry rifle from the scabbard then walked back up onto the relatively level ground of the gap. He dropped behind a rock and racked a cartridge into the rifle’s action. He gazed across the gap at the thirty or so riders gathered there—a small army of heavily armed men speaking in hushed, angrily conferring tones.
One man—a black-bearded man in a black duster and tan Stetson sitting a fine dapple-gray stallion—spat to one side, then, pointing angrily toward the gap, yelled, “He did it—we can, too! He ain’t gettin’ away! Not again!”
Shucking his rifle from the scabbard on the right side of his saddle, the bearded man cocked it one-handed, rested the barrel across his saddle bows, then ground his spurs into his horse’s flanks. He threw his head back to give a caterwauling wail as the dapple-gray lunged off its rear hooves and bolted forward, pinning its ears back against its head.
The others followed suit behind the lead rider, whooping and hollering and grinding their spurs into their mounts’ flanks. The mass of men and horses, forming a triangle behind the point rider, whose duster flew out around him like giant black wings, rushed toward the gap, and Colter hunkered down behind his covering rock, grinning like a bobcat eyeing a cottontail.
Hooves rumbled. Colter could hear the squawk of leather tack and the jangle of bridle chains.
The lead rider chewed up the ground between himself and the gap. Horse and rider grew larger and larger in Colter’s field of vision, the others flanking him also closing quickly on the chasm.
The lead rider’s bearded face trembled with the violent jostling of his galloping mount. Colter saw fear in the man’s dark eyes, beneath the wide brim of his tan Stetson.
The dapple-gray lunged off its rear hooves and vaulted out over the narrow canyon, reaching desperately forward with its front hooves. At the apex of his arc over the earth’s deadly grin, the bearded rider glanced down and his jaw hung in shock.
A second later, when the dapple-gray cleared the gap, landing on its front hooves, its rear hooves also just barely clearing the chasm, the rider’s face stretched into a victorious grin.
Light glinted in the man’s dark eyes. He started to raise his rifle. Colter’s Henry spoke first. Fear returned to the man’s eyes as the bullet punched through the middle of his chest and sent him howling and flying backward off the dapple-gray’s hindquarters. He turned a single somersault in the air before he hit the ground, bounced, losing his hat and rifle, and rolled backward. He disappeared into the canyon.
It was as though the grinning earth had sucked him into its mouth.
Colter ejected the spent cartridge, lined up his sights on a rider just then halfway across the gap on a lunging pinto, and blew the rider out of his saddle and into the gorge.
Colter racked another round and aimed at the man to the right of the one he’d just killed. He held fire as this man’s horse landed short of the ledge and plummeted into the chasm, horse and rider screaming fiercely.
Colter unseated another rider, another, and another, throwing those three men and, unfortunately, their horses into the earth’s jaws. He shot another man as that man’s horse gained Colter’s side of the chasm. That rider didn’t fall into the canyon. Instead, he rolled down the side of his horse and got a boot caught in his left stirrup.
The horse went galloping past Colter, the man screaming as the horse pulled him along beside it, the man bouncing violently. The ground ripped his duster off his shoulders and cast it into the wind, like a lover’s hastily cast-off cloak.
Colter ejected the last spent round, sent it smoking over his left shoulder, and seated a fresh pill in the breech.
Several riders, having seen what had happened to the first wave, were pulling their horses sharply back from the ledge on the chasm’s far side. At the same time, another horse and rider made the leap. The horse cleared the ledge but lost its nerve. Wide-eyed, it plummeted onto its knees and flipped over its left withers, throwing its rider into the air.
For a second, horse and rider were indistinguishable in the dust they kicked up, but in the next second, Colter saw the rider separate from the horse, rolling out away from it. Colter turned his attention back to the chasm as one more horse and rider disappeared into the earth’s mouth while another gained Colter’s side of the cleft.
Seeing Colter bearing down on him, the man leaned back in his saddle and raised his arm as though to shield himself from the bullet, shouting, “Nooo!”
Too late.
Colter’s .44 caliber chunk of death was already on its way. It drilled the man through his right eyebrow. Colter saw the blood spray out the back of his head as he tumbled down his galloping horse’s right hip and rolled off into the brush, limbs pinwheeling like those of a scarecrow torn out of a cornfield by a cyclone.
Rifles cracked from the chasm’s far side. Bullets plumed the dirt and red gravel and the rocks around Colter, several spanging shrilly.
Colter pulled his head down behind his covering rock as another round zinged past his right ear to slam into a rock behind him. When he edged another look around the rock to stare back across the chasm, he saw that the rest of the bounty hunters were sitting their restless mounts a good fifty yards back from the cut in the earth.
Their number had been winnowed appreciably.
The dust still sifted in the hot air before them, having been kicked up when, seeing that the odds of their making it across the chasm without becoming sacrifices to the dark gods at the earth’s bowels, they’d wheeled their mounts and literally hightailed it back to relative safety.
Suddenly, they stopped shooting. They milled for a time in a tight cluster. Colter could hear them conferring now in the heavy silence following the carnage.
A sound rose straight out across the bench, in front of Colter. He peered that way to see the last man to make it across the chasm alive lift his head up from a brush clump. He grunted and wheezed, his clothes in tatters, his dust-soaked hair hanging in his eyes, as he heaved himself to his feet.
He looked in Colter’s direction. His eyes found Colter swinging the Henry toward him.
“No!” the man cried, throwing up his hands.
Colter shot him. Why let him live only to come after Colter again? At one time, the young redhead would have done just that. But he was older now and, after three long years of being hunted across the frontier like a calf-killing coyote, he was wiser, too.
He hadn’t killed any calves. At least, none that hadn’t tried to kill him first.
His latest victim fell back in the brush, blood geysering from the hole in the center of his chest, painting the leaves and vines around him.
“Hey, Red!” a man called from the chasm’s opposite side.
Colter shuttled his gaze in the direction of the voice. The group, dwindled by half—Colter himself hadn’t killed them all; several had been claimed when they’d imprudently tried the leap on horses that couldn’t make it—had drifted a hundred or so yards back from the chasm. Some were riding away with the air of disgruntled schoolboys. Several more were scattered across the bench, staring toward Colter, as was the man who’d yelled.
He was a lean man in a spruce duster on a blue roan. He held a Winchester on his shoulder as he stared toward Colter from beneath the brim of his high-crowned cream hat. A red bandanna buffeted around his neck in the wind.
“This ain’t over, Red!” he bellowed, rising up slightly in his saddle. “This ain’t over by a long shot!”
“Speaking of a long shot . . .”
Colter racked another round in his Henry’s chamber. He snaked his rifle around the rock’s left side and snugged his cheek up against the Henry’s stock.
“You hear me, Red?” the lean man yelled. He canted his head slightly sideways, vaguely puzzled.
Colter lined up his sights on the man’s chest. He slid the sights to the man’s right shoulder then to his arm. “Yeah,” he told himself. “Don’t kill him. Just put him out of commission. Give him a long-distance whuppin’. That’ll be good enough.”
The redhead smiled to himself and yelled, “You hear this?”
He squeezed the trigger.
The rifle bucked against his shoulder, smoke and flames stabbing from the barrel. The lean man continued to stare toward him. A full second after the Henry had bucked, the man jerked back and sideways.
He dropped his rifle and reached for his right arm with his left hand. He must have dropped his reins, too, because just then his horse pitched and swung sharply, and then man was flung off the roan’s right hip.
He hit the ground and lay writhing before, possibly realizing he might still be in Colter’s sights, he heaved himself to his feet and, leaving his hat and rifle on the ground, ran over to where the roan stood angrily switching its tail.
Crouched and in obvious pain, tossing quick, wary glances back toward Colter, the lean man grabbed the hanging reins and fought his way onto the roan’s back. With one more look toward Colter, who could see the white line of the man’s teeth between his stretched lips, the man swung the roan around and put the spurs to it.
He galloped off down the bench, several other bounty hunters booting their horses along behind him, also casting cautious glances over their shoulders.
Colter lowered the rifle, rose stiffly to his feet, and stepped out from behind the rock. He stared off across the chasm. The posse horde was just then dwindling from his view, swallowed now not by the earth but by the sun—by the frank glare of an Arizona afternoon.
They were gone. Colter was alone.
There was only the sun and the pale rocks and the red rocks and the dusty, spindly shrubs, few as there were. And, save for the ratcheting cry of a lone hawk hunting somewhere up in that brassy blue sky, silence.
No, he wasn’t alone. Colter saw them now as he shaded his eyes with his hand—a dozen or so zopilotes, Mexican buzzards, circling high above the canyon. They were dropping lower and lower, likely slathering as they flew, keeping watch on the carrion around Colter and in the chasm, little hearts quickening at the prospect of a tasty meal.
Colter retrieved his hat. He spat to one side. It wasn’t spittle that struck the rock he’d been aiming for, but blood. He hadn’t realized in the frenzy of the dustup that in his tumble with Northwest, he’d bitten his tongue.
“Damnit,” he groused, glancing once more toward where the bounty hunters had fled with their tails between their legs, one man bleeding from his arm. “You privy snipes made me bite my tongue!”
The notion suddenly struck him as funny. After all that, he was walking away with a sore tongue, and he was mad about it. His laughter was probably due to the braining he’d taken in the tumble, but he dropped to his knees, laughing, blood running from his mouth. He leaned forward, pressed his forehead into the gravelly ground, still laughing, and rolled slowly onto his back.
Slowly, the laughter left him.
He heard the slow clomps of a horse approaching. Northwest’s shadow slid over him. The horse lowered its head over Colter, stared down at its addlepated rider through its coppery eyes that Colter had always thought showed more intelligence and character than the eyes of most of the other horses he’d known. And he’d known a few.
Northwest worked his rubbery, bristled lips and gave a snort, blowing his warm, horsey breath, rife with the smell of sun-cured brush, at Colter’s face. His eyes were curious, probing, a little wary.
Colter sobered. “Yeah,” he grunted out, brushing blood from his chin with his sleeve. “Yeah, I know . . .”
He sat up and looked around. Mountains, rocks, more mountains and more rocks. That was all he could see in all directions. He looked to the northern mountains and then to the southern mountains, misty blue with distance. Where in hell was he?
Somewhere west of Yuma. He’d given a wide berth to that notorious prison town for obvious reasons. He’d traveled through hot, dry, rocky desert mountains, sometimes not seeing a patch of green aside from cactus for days at a time. The sunsets had been miraculous, but the rocks had been black, as though sucked down, burned in hell, and then belched back up to this earthly perdition.
The redheaded gunslinger had been headed to Mexico, because he’d known bounty hunters were after him. He’d smelled them on his trail before he’d made it to Phoenix one week ago. He hadn’t known how many. And he hadn’t known they’d followed him southwest from Phoenix and around Yuma.
Now he knew.
Now there would be far fewer. At least, for a while there would be fewer.
But with a four-thousand-dollar bounty on his head, there would always be more where that posse came from—a posse likely made up of both lawmen and bounty men, both as corrupt as the most hard-bitten curly wolf to ever prowl the frontier.
Staring south, loneliness turned the redhead’s heart as cold as a chunk of pure snowmelt. It lifted chicken flesh between his shoulder blades.
Mexico. He had to get down to Mexico if he wasn’t there already.
He didn’t want to. He wanted to ride north. He wanted to ride back to Colorado, back to his home in the Lunatic Mountains just north of the San Juans. An up-and-down land of snowy peaks and tamarack forests and cold streams chugging over boulders. He had family there, a girl who’d once loved him and probably didn’t anymore—so much water under the bridge.
But he’d love her until he breathed his last.
Home.
Would he ever see it again? Would anything ever be like it was?
All he knew was that for now, he was headed in the opposite direction of home—toward Mexico.
Alone.
Leastways, just him and his horse. At least he had Northwest. That was all right. Like dogs, horses made better friends than most men did.
Colter Farrow checked Northwest over for injuries, reset his saddle, retrieved his hat, mounted up, and rode south toward Mexico.