Bullet for a Half-Breed

While Derks continued to snore into his pillow, Yakima dressed in the vague light of false dawn, grabbed his saddlebags and Winchester, and headed downstairs to enjoy one of Ma Prate’s stout breakfasts—eggs scrambled with ham, biscuits and gravy, and black coffee served hot in thick stone mugs.

Ma did all the cooking and serving herself, shuffling her tall, heavy frame between the kitchen and small dining room cluttered with more dolls of every shape and size. At this hour there was only one other customer, a tired-looking, bald-headed salesman of windmill parts down from Laramie.

Yakima didn’t speak to the man. He preferred a quiet, solitary breakfast. When he’d finished, he stood, smoothed his hair back, donned his hat, adjusted his single shell belt around his lean hips, and headed out into a chill, quiet morning. He raised the collar of his denim jacket and, stopping on the boardinghouse’s front porch, sniffed the breeze.

Yakima shouldered his saddlebags and rifle and headed for the Federated Feed Barn. Inside, he lit a rusty hurricane lamp, then hooked it on the pole at the head of the large stall in which he housed his prized black stallion, Wolf. The light washed over the stall door. Inside, the black was down on his side, his rib cage expanding and contracting slowly.

The horse pricked his ears at the familiar voice. He gave a loud blow, then lifted his big black head with the Florida-shaped white blaze on its face, snorting, eagerly sniffing the air. Wolf rolled over stiffly, turning his head toward Yakima before sitting up and resting a moment on his haunches, his big lungs raking air in and out excitedly, nostrils working like a bellows, when he saw Yakima grab the bridle and saddle off a tack rack on the other side of the alley.

Yakima dropped the saddle and blanket on the floor fronting the stall, then, bridle in hand, opened the door and stepped inside. Wolf lunged forward over his white-socked front feet as he unfolded his hind legs and pushed up to all fours, stomping and grunting and switching his curried tail with whooshes of displaced air, raking it loudly against the stall’s side partition.

As Yakima approached, the black lowered his head and rammed his snoot a little too hard against Yakima’s chest, and the half-breed grabbed the horse’s ears and, chuckling, pushed the big head back away from him.

“Sorry to have you holed up in here, you wild cuss. Damn fresh hay, though, wouldn’t you say? S’posed to be the best barn in town.” Yakima slipped the bit through the horse’s teeth, ran the bridle straps up and over the stallion’s stiff ears. “Now, it’s time to run some o’ the grain out of you. Gonna get the green heaves before long. What do you say to that, boy? Huh? What do ya say?”

The horse jerked its head up and stomped. He stood patiently as Yakima threw the blanket and saddle on his back and, true to form, sucked a gutful of air as Yakima started to reach under his belly for a latigo strap and buckle.

Wolf released the pent-up air with a loud whoof Yakima pulled the cinch tight and buckled it. When he had the second strap secured, he tossed his saddlebags onto the horse’s rump, behind the saddle cantle, then, taking the reins, led the horse out of the stall, down the alley, and out the barn’s open front doors and into the gradually lightening street.

“All right,” Yakima said, grabbing the apple. He eased his hold on the reins as he crouched low in the saddle and stared east along the broad, abandoned street. “Go!”

The horse lunged off his rear hooves and threw his front legs forward. He tore off down the street, and Yakima grinned at the exhilaration, long overdue, of having the morning air in his face and blowing his hair back away from his shoulders. In less than a minute, the last of the town’s shacks peeled off behind them, and Wolf was lunging off down the two-track trail that traced a pale, serpentine course through the low hills of cedar and sage, heading straight toward where the yellow sun was rising through ragged tufts of purple clouds.

Suddenly, the smell of privies was gone, and Yakima realized that after his month in Red Hill, he’d gotten so accustomed to the perpetual stench that he rarely ever smelled it anymore. That and horse shit and man sweat and the smells of cook fires and the perpetual sounds of milling humanity—the clang of a hammer on a blacksmith’s anvil, yells, shouts, children’s screams, horses neighing and thudding down the street, wagons clattering, mothers calling for their little ones to come home for their noon meals or nightly baths. The occasional crackle of gunfire.

He could feel Wolf’s muscles expanding and contracting beneath his saddle, hear the horse’s powerful lungs pushing and pulling at the morning wind that seemed to be intensifying as the sun climbed away from the silhouetted horizon beyond a low, long jog of chalky buttes. When he passed the occasional bosquecillo , he could hear the wind churning the leaves, see the occasional dust devil spin off across an open stretch of prairie.

Weather was on the way, he vaguely speculated as he kept his head low over the black’s stretched neck. How much weather and what kind of weather was anyone’s guess this time of the year and in this neck of the high desert. Snow might be coming to the high country around Bailey Peak with a couple of inches of the wet wool on the ground by late tonight. Here, south of Tucson but at a slightly higher elevation, they’d likely see only rain. Rain and wind. It could be clear and quiet again by tonight, but damp and chilly, and men would drift between saloons clad in fur coats, and their breath would show, and the cedar and mesquite fires would perfume the air over Red Hill.

The horse was enjoying the run so much that Yakima soon turned him off the trail and put him up a long, gradual rise. There was nothing like a good uphill climb to get the blood of an eager stallion pumping. Wolf put his legs into it, and Yakima could hear the horse chuffing and groaning in appreciation of the workout, of the luxurious feel of blood-engorged organs and muscles, and of the time away from the cramped and lightless stable.

Wolf hated stables about as much as Yakima hated towns, but the two went hand in hand, and at times they were necessary. At least until the half-breed could earn enough of a grubstake to get them back up in the high, lonely reaches for another good stretch of rejuvenating quiet and isolation, where the only sounds were the coyotes, the wolves, the creeks, the breeze, and the rush of the wind in the pine tops.

He and Wolf climbed into the canyon-slashed foot-hills of the Coronados. This was expansive country, and he stuck to the game and wild horse trails that meandered around mesas and bluffs and steep pinnacles of ragged, time-gouged rock, towering monoliths that, as the day progressed, slid shade from a weak sun around their bases.

On open stretches, he allowed the horse short bursts of ground-eating lopes. For the most part, because of the dangerous terrain, he held him to trots. In some cases, when they came to steep, rocky slopes deep inside box canyons, Yakima dismounted and led Wolf up the perilous passages rather than risk a fall or a gash to one of his hocks or cannons.

Several times Yakima came upon the remains of strategically placed campfires and small piles of discarded airtight tins, some so old the labels had faded away and the tins themselves had turned to rust. In the box canyon in which he’d stopped to give Wolf a blow and to eat his lunch of jerky and hardtack, he discovered human bones poking out from a mound of red dirt that had collapsed or been kicked down from the cutbank above.

He’d bet that if he uncovered the body he’d find a couple of lead slugs, possibly delivered by some lawman or posse rider, embedded within the moldering bones. The man might have been buried here in this makeshift grave by his desperado partners who couldn’t take the time for a proper funeral on their fast ride to Mexico.

After noon, he was riding back out of the mountains, heading for the stage road that would take him back to Red Hill. There had been a brief shower while he’d been riding the canyons between low ridges, but a chill wind had picked up since, drying the land and kicking up dust and bits of dried brush and flinging it every which way.

As he topped a gravelly hill under a red scarp that jutted over him like a massive pointing finger, he spied movement on the flat below. He drew back on Wolf’s reins and automatically slid his right hand down his thigh toward the brass butt plate of the Yellowboy jutting from its sheath.

He stayed his hand as he stared down the hill. The rider, astride a skewbald paint, was trotting toward a low, spinelike ridge to Yakima’s right. As horse and rider moved out of the arroyo, moving away from Yakima, horse and rider stopped suddenly.

The man jerked in his saddle slightly, lifting the reins high against his chest. The horse lurched backward, then reared, lifting its front legs high. The rider was already falling off the paint’s left hip when the horse’s indignant whinny reached Yakima’s ears. As the rider fell out of sight behind lime-colored brush, the horse wheeled sharply left and went galloping off across the desert, buck-kicking and trailing its reins, empty stirrups flapping like wings.

Yakima raised his hand from the rifle’s stock and heeled Wolf on down the hill, giving the horse his head as he galloped a serpentine course through cedars and mesquites, occasional flat-topped boulders. Yakima spied a faint trail and followed it into the arroyo, the bottom of which was bathed in an even layer of fist-sized white rocks, and up the other side. He drew rein when he saw the rider on his back, squirming and kicking as though in agony.

Yakima leaped out of the saddle and dropped Wolf’s reins. “You all ri ... ?” He let his voice trail off when he saw the blond hair, the hazel eyes narrowed in pain, the lush body clad in men’s black denim Levi’s, red plaid shirt, and brown leather vest.

The new Mrs. Seagraves was up on her elbows, staring with more frustration than pain at her left foot, on which she wore a soft leather riding boot. The cuffs of her denims were stuffed into the tops of the boots. She glanced at Yakima, and surprise mixed with the pain and frustration before she turned back to her foot and said, “I’ve never seen a snake move that fast.”

“Ankle.” She winced and flexed her foot, and stretched her lips back from her white teeth. “I think it’s broken. Boy, I’m in trouble now.”

Yakima moved around to her other side and dropped to both knees. He glanced up at her pain-racked face as he set his hands on her boot. “Mr. Seagraves know you’re out here?”

“I saw you ride out earlier. You gave me the idea. I’ve been Mrs. Seagraves less than twenty-four hours, and I’m already entertaining the notion of taking my son and riding off into those mountains yonder, and spending the rest of our lives in a cave.”

Her eyes met his for a moment before sliding back to her foot, and she nodded. She grunted softly as he gently slipped her boot off her foot, then peeled her sock off and dropped it atop the boot.

She had a long, fine-boned foot. An altogether nice-looking foot, as far as feet went. It felt good in his hands but he tried not to show it as, resting her heel on his thigh, he leaned down and sideways to inspect her ankle.

“Not coloring too bad. I’d say it’s only sprained, but you better have a sawbones take a look at it.” He lifted his head to meet her gaze, keeping his hands on her foot. “Not going so good, huh?”

She shook her head and squinted off toward the Coronados, wisps of loose hair blowing in the wind. “I made a mistake, I’m afraid. As much of one for myself as my boy. I was a fool to come out here. When I saw you this morning, riding so freely away, I decided to rent my own horse. I was raised on a small ranch. I love to ride.” She turned to him sharply. “I wasn’t following you.”

“I put Calvin in school this morning and afterwards I took some of the money I still had saved—money which Mr. Seagraves tried to confiscate last night when he was going through my trunk—and rented Earl there for the morning.” Beth turned the corners of her mouth down. “I didn’t know Earl was so afraid of snakes.”

“He said he was going to help me unpack, but he was snooping. He found a tintype of my husband and Calvin and me on the shore of the North Platte, and he tried to take that, too, saying it was time to say good-bye to the past.” Beth hardened her jaws as well as her eyes. “He was going to throw it in his incinerator. My money, he said, would go into our joint account at the bank. I said, ‘Oh, so you’ll put my name on the account, as well as your own?’ To which he replied with a condescending little laugh, ‘Don’t be silly, dear. Whenever you need money from the account, you need only ask me, your husband, and I’ll be more than happy to consider your request.’”

She spat to one side and looked into the brush beside her. “Can you imagine that? Taking my money as his own and requiring that I ask him when I want some of it? I took all of it, hid it where I know he’ll never find it, then told him I was going to take a ride to clear my head.”

She narrowed her angry eyes at Yakima once more. “Of course, he wasn’t going to allow that, either, as this is outlaw country and no decent woman rides out alone, anyways, and especially no wife of his. Ha! The old fool can’t move fast, so I got away before he could track me down.”

“Don’t doubt it a bit.” Yakima caressed her foot and regarded her darkly, his own long hair now whipping around his head in the wind. She watched his thick brown hands moving over her foot—slow, gentle strokes. She raised her eyes to his once more, and she leveled an oblique, vaguely troubled stare at him.

He set her foot on the ground and reached for her at the same time that she reached for him. She leaned forward, and he grabbed her, wrapped his arms around her back as she wrapped hers around his neck. Then her lips were against his—warm, pliant, hungry.