Bullet for a Half-Breed

Rathbone had drawn his pistol when the kid had bounded around the abandoned brick stable he’d been crouched behind, pressing his back to the crumbling west wall. Now he cocked the pistol and aimed at the kid’s laughing face, gritting his teeth as his heart thudded.

Rathbone, in no mood for children, snarled, “Go on, git outta here, you smelly little privy rat, or I’ll drill you between your beady little eyes!”

The kid’s suntanned face bleached. He let the “rifle” stick he’d been aiming at Rathbone droop in his hands. He backed away, the frayed laces of his badly worn brogans slapping about his feet.

“You tell anyone you saw me here, I’ll cut your ears off,” Rathbone yelled into the hot wind that had started blowing just after sunup as though to purposely increase the pain in the sheriff’s already aching head and eyes. “You hear me, you little cur? Not one word!”

He doubted the kid had heard that last. Letting one suspender holding up his baggy denim coveralls drop down his right arm, the kid tossed his stick away and ran straight off across the sage-covered lot behind the stable, arms and legs pumping hard, his carelessly cropped hair blowing in the wind. As though to avoid lead buzzing toward him, he caromed off toward the abandoned stone shack of one of Red Hill’s original and now-deceased dwellers, and disappeared in some cedars.

Rathbone depressed the Colt’s hammer and lowered the piece. Squatting on his haunches, he pressed his back once more against the stable wall. He grimaced as the pain kicked up across the front of his head, just behind his eyes. Fingering the goose egg on his right temple, he gave a savage curse, knowing the howling wind would cover it.

He’d regained consciousness just before sunup, just in time to have the rising wind add to the pressure inside his head and to increase the tolling of cracked bells in his ears. For a time, he wasn’t sure where he was or what had happened, and then, when he saw the open safe gaping like a great toothless mouth before him, all his hoarded loot gone, he remembered the hammering blow he’d received earlier.

He hunkered there, edging an occasional look around the corner of the stable every few minutes. A path from the main street of Red Hill had been worn into the brush, angling northeast toward the frame house where the banker and his cool, plain-faced, lush-bodied daughter dwelled on the town’s ragged fringe.

Every afternoon around four, Rae Roman took the path home, holding her purse in one hand and lifting her skirts above her expensive leather side-button boots. Rathbone had seen her countless times though he’d never really paid much attention to her route. He hadn’t thought he’d ever need that knowledge.

Earlier, when he’d regained his senses, and unbridled fury had begun coursing like miniature pitchforks through his loins, he’d intended to storm into the bank and shove his Colt down the bitch’s throat just to enjoy the sheer terror in her eyes. And the sudden-dawning knowledge that she’d crossed the wrong bobcat.

Then he’d find out where she’d squirreled away the money. After that, he’d shoot her. He’d shoot anyone else who stood in his way. Then he’d take both his own loot and hers and any other money that was handy and ride out of Red Hill to a far, far better life in Southern California.

If you couldn’t trust a banker’s daughter, who could you trust? It was getting so that even the outlaw life didn’t make sense anymore....

He dropped to his butt. The bitch was taking her time today. Probably got tied up berating some poor honyonker who couldn’t pay his mortgage. Rathbone chuckled savagely and, elbows on his knees, toyed with the gun in his hands, slowly turning the cylinder but barely hearing the clicks above the wind.

He’d be a curious sight if anyone saw him out here. The Coronado County sheriff hunkering before an abandoned stable like some bottle-tipping ne’er-do-well, or a Peeping Tom. Fortunately, few people wandered this empty lot except useless children spawned by whores and left to run amok around Rathbone’s fair town. When he saw that kid again, he’d drag him into a wash and give him the whipping a responsible father would give him, if he had one.

Occasional gusts swept dust, prickly goatheads, and other grit at him, and he closed his eyes and lowered his face against it. When she finally came, it took him by surprise. Suddenly she was before him, angling away from him along the path, her chin down, a powder blue cape flapping about her shoulders like the wings of some evil bird the devil had loosed from hell to further torture humanity.

Rathbone heaved himself to his feet, glanced around quickly to make sure they were alone, then grabbed her arm and spun her around. She gasped and lifted her head to him, eyes shocked. Rathbone didn’t give her time to call out. He threw her to the ground at the base of the stable, and just as she opened her mouth to scream he rammed the barrel of his Colt into her mouth. She gagged and tried to fight him, but he pinned one of her arms with his free hands and a knee.

There it was—the horror he’d been dreaming of. Her eyes were nearly exploding with it while her lips fought the barrel and she made gagging sounds, her throat expanding and contracting grotesquely.

“I oughta drill you right here, you bitch.” Rathbone shoved his face down close to hers while she flopped helplessly beneath him, gagging and groaning. “Give you a pill to choke on? Huh? How’d that be?”

He let her flop and gag for a time, resisting the urge to squeeze the trigger. She wouldn’t be any good to him dead. He’d never find out or get access to where she’d hidden the stolen loot she’d taken from him.

He pulled the Colt out of her mouth and scuttled back, freeing her arms. Gulping air, eyes bulging, she grabbed her throat with both hands and made sounds as though she was trying to speak but couldn’t get her vocal cords to work.

“You crazy bastard!” she finally pinched out just above a rasp, tears dribbling down her cheeks. “Have you gone—gone insane?”

“Where is it, Rae?” Rathbone pressed the Colt’s barrel against her forehead, drove the back of her head to the ground again. “You tell me and I’ll think about letting you live. You don’t tell me, and you don’t have a chance.”

“You have, haven’t you?” She stared up at the pistol in his hands. Her voice was almost calm, resigned. “You’ve gone crazy. I guess this place will do it to even you, Frank. ...”

“Quit playin’ games, Rae,” he said, menace in his voice, spittle frothing on his lips. His eyes were pinched to slits. “I wanna know where you put my loot. I wanna hear it in your next breath or I’m gonna pop a slug through your brain plate.”

She looked up at him around the gun in his clenched fist. “The loot? You mean the money from the strongbox?” Her eyes crossed slightly, and what appeared to be genuine exasperation flicked across them. “You mean you lost your cut?”

“No, I didn’t lose it. You stole it from me, you double-crossing whore. You were waiting in my room last night—any skeleton key will work in those locks—and you brained me with a pistol butt. Or something equally as unforgiving. Then you took every last dollar of my loot. Every coin. Even the pennies.” Rathgone gave a wolfish grin. “Thanks for leaving the Colts.” He cocked the pistol and pressed it down harder against her forehead. “But they’re not enough to save you. Where is it, Rae? I won’t ask you again!”

She closed both her hands over his fist, dangling her long fingers over the cocked revolver. “Please, Frank. I can appreciate how upset you are. But I did not steal your cut of the strongbox money.” Her upper lip quivered, and tears varnished her eyes. “Please, Frank. You have to believe me. If I had done that, don’t you think I’d tell you? I don’t want to die!”

Slowly, the unadulterated rage in Rathbone’s face dwindled to incredulity. He turned his face slightly, narrowed a skeptical eye.

“Frank, please,” Rae said, opening and closing both her hands over his and staring up at him with beseeching and terror. She swallowed and pitched her voice with reason. “Think it through. Why would I do something that blatantly stupid? Of course, you’d think it was I who’d stolen your money, and you’d come looking for me. I’d be defenseless against you, as I am now.”

She said, “If I were going to do that—which I wouldn’t—I’d certainly do it when I had the best chance of getting out of town fast. Well, I didn’t do that, did I, Frank? No, I took the same route I always take home, in fact. And I have nothing on me with which I might possibly defend myself from you.”

She ran the pink tip of her tongue along the underside of her upper lip, gently squeezed his clenched fist. “Would you like to run your hands over me to see if I’m carrying a gun? Perhaps a knife?”

“Think it through, Frank.” She caressed the bulging knuckles of his gun hand with her fingertips. “You’re an intelligent man. Think it through. I’d have been a total idiot to have tried such a stunt.”

Deep frown lines cut across Rathbone’s forehead. He angrily bit at his upper lip. Finally, he pulled the gun back from her forehead, and Rae drew a deep, relieved breath as she tipped her head back and swallowed.

“How should I know?” She glared up at him, her indignation returning on the heels of her fear. “With the brand of men you run with, you’re certainly better equipped to figure that out than I am.”

“Brand of men?” Rathbone chuckled mirthlessly. “What makes you so special? The men I run with I trust. Look at you, Miss Roman. Why, you’d double-cross your own dear father if ...” He let his voice trail off dramatically, then gave a mock look of surprise. “Oh, wait a minute—you did double-cross your dear old pa, didn’t you? Still are, as a matter of fact.”

She pushed up on her elbows. “Maybe we should save the morality discussion for another time and place, Frank.” She looked around cautiously. “I don’t think it wise, us loitering out here where the whole town could very easily see us. If anyone walked up right now, Frank, the game would all be over.”

“It is over,” Rathbone said. “For you. At least until I get my money back and find out who stole it.”

“It was one of your men, of course!” Rae shot him an exasperated look of supreme impatience. “Probably Stall or Silver. Who else?”

“They blew it again? I thought I saw the half-breed riding out of town a few hours ago. I’d hoped my eyes were lying. Oh, Frank!”

“Leave it to you to lick your own scratches when I’ve just been wounded. Wounded big. I’m as penniless now as when I started this shindig.”

Rae climbed to her knees, paused to brush dirt from her cheek, and then Rathbone helped her to a standing position. “If you don’t find the money today, you’ll make up for it tomorrow. Father just told me that fifty thousand dollars will be riding in the strongbox of tomorrow’s stage. Both the payout from the sold horses and extra cash that the Sand Creek manager asked for, probably to buy out a couple of squatters.”

Rathbone had bent over to brush sand and grass from his knees. Now he jerked a surprised look up at her, his big face mottling. “I don’t believe it. They’ve never carried that much cash. Not without an armed escort.”

“Tomorrow they are. Father probably thinks that since an attempt was made on the stage yesterday, no one will try it again for a while. Especially not with the half-breed riding shotgun. I think Father might even be weakening, considering giving that heathen the reward that was on the heads of your friend Gries and his useless men. Father really wants that man to stay on.”

“Well, I can see why.” Rathbone turned to gaze speculatively across the vacant lot to scraggly mesquites and cottonwoods lining a wash, and beyond the wash to the bald Coronados rising in the dusty, wind-howling distance. “Fifty thousand dollars ...” He turned a cunning grin on Rae, who was making a futile effort to straighten her picture hat in the wind. “I reckon me and my deputies will be handling this one ourselves.”

“Oh, we’ll manage it this time. Now that we know what ... or who ... we’re up against.” Rathbone looked toward the Coronados again, grinning.

Rathbone shook his head as though she’d injured his honor as well as his feelings. “Rae, now, you see.” He pointed an incriminating finger at her. “I wouldn’t do that!”