Bullet for a Half-Breed

She was astraddle Yakima, both of them naked now, Yakima lying back-down on the horse blanket he’d taken off Wolf after his and Beth’s first, furious coupling. He’d spread the blanket between two mesquites, and they’d taken their time that second time around, going slowly yet hungrily, bringing each other to a long, gradual, luxurious climax.

She looked around at the blowing branches as though to see if anyone else were out here on this windy afternoon in the tablelands. Lowering her eyes to his big, rope-scarred, work-toughened hands massaging her breasts, she placed her own hands over his and pressed them harder against her. She lowered one to his broad, brick-red chest, traced a knife scar with her long, pale fingers, then pushed the heel of her hand against his bulging pectoral as though she were kneading bread on a butcher block.

She hunched her shoulders and squeezed her eyes closed, tipping her head back, groaning and holding her hands taut over his, enjoying the rake of his callused palms against her.

After a time, Yakima lifted his hands to caress her smooth cheeks as he slid her hair back away from her face. He stared into her eyes, and now her green gaze, staring out of a face so much like one that he remembered from Thornton’s and from his cabin on the slopes of Bailey Peak, dealt him an unsuspecting blow.

And then it was over. Whatever had happened between them. All gone. Only the hollow pit of longing in his belly remained.

He rose to a sitting position, bracing her with his arms, her body so relaxed, so pliant that he knew she’d fall back if he didn’t hold her. “I’d best saddle up and run your horse down. Gettin’ late.”

She frowned, her hair, which she’d taken out of the ponytail, blowing like a tumbleweed about her beautiful head. “I hate the thought of going back.”

She rolled her gaze sideways and slid away from him, rising to her knees, grabbing her camisole and shaking it out in front of her.

Yakima dressed. As he tossed his saddle onto Wolf’s back, he glanced at her. She was dressing slowly, her back to him, a sullen expression on her face, her eyes downcast.

He rode off in the direction in which he’d seen her rented paint gallop away, and returned a half hour later, leading the horse by his lariat. Beth’s ankle had swollen so that she could not put her boot on, so Yakima lifted her onto the paint’s back, and she hooked her bare foot over the horn to keep pressure off it.

She nodded, stared down at him, her eyes vaguely questioning. “I suppose this is going to complicate things.”

The carelessness in his voice belied the ache in his chest now as his heart thudded heavily. She’d reminded him, in both appearance and situation, too much of Faith. His feelings for her were beginning to resemble his feelings for his dead wife. And he couldn’t save her any more than he’d been able to save Faith.

He wanted to run away, howling. But he stood there off her right stirrup, meeting her forlorn gaze that was one more dagger in his heart.

She said softly, clearing her throat first and pitching it with a toughness she didn’t feel: “No, I suppose it shouldn’t, should it?”

Yakima turned away and swung up onto Wolf’s back. Holding Beth’s reins in his left hand, keeping his right hand free for the Winchester if he should need it, he heeled the stallion ahead through the brush, angling toward the main trail.

Neither of them said anything as they headed back toward Red Hill. Yakima found himself grateful for the wind. It seemed to relieve the heavy silence that was between him and the woman now as they plodded along, Beth riding stiffly behind him, her bare foot hooked over her saddle horn, blond hair blowing behind her shoulders.

Yakima was relieved when the town rose before him in the rocky, sage- and cedar-stippled hills sandwiched between shelving red mesas. He rode on in and saw that it had been a mistake to take the main road. He should have ridden into town from one side and approached the doctor’s office from the rear where he and Beth might not have been seen together. Now as Wolf clomped slowly along, men came out onto the boardwalks fronting the stores, strange looks on their faces as they studied the half-breed on the black stallion leading the blonde on the paint.

As they passed the sheriff’s office, Yakima saw Rathbone’s two deputes, Stall and Silver, milling on the shack’s front porch. Stall was sitting in a chair, a steaming tin cup in his hand. Silver had one hip hiked on the porch rail, facing Stall. Stall’s eyes found the improbably paired newcomers, and his lips moved as he said something to Silver, and the half-Mexican deputy turned his head toward the street. His left arm was held against his chest by a white sling. His dark eyes widened, and his upper lip curled a sneer.

Yakima turned his head forward, vaguely wondering how the half-Mexican deputy had gotten that injured wing, and angled the stallion toward the doctor’s office on the street’s north side. He put Wolf’s nose to the hitch rack, then swung down, looped the reins over the rack, and walked back to the paint. He snaked one arm beneath Beth’s legs and slid the other behind her back, and lifted her off the paint. The horse shifted sideways as the woman’s supple weight settled in Yakima’s arms.

He glanced around. More men were watching them now—shopkeepers in business suits and aprons, cowboys in battered, dusty trail clothes, even a couple of women who’d been chinning in front of the drugstore.

Yakima glanced at Beth. She was looking around, too, her own face remaining passive as she took in the stares around her. He carried her up the creaky outside stairs of the saddle shop to Doc Mangan’s office in the building’s second story, and gave the door two kicks with his moccasined foot. Footsteps sounded inside, and a round-faced man with affable, intelligent eyes behind gold-framed spectacles opened the door, brushing bread crumbs from his vest.

The man’s eyes slid from Yakima’s face to the woman’s and back again, his gray-brown eyebrows furrowed skeptically. He kept his weight on his left leg, favoring the right one, the knee of which was bent.

“She twisted her ankle,” Yakima said. “It’s swollen. Doesn’t look broke, but you best take a look at it, Doc.”

Again, the doctor’s curious gaze swept his unlikely pair of visitors. He hobbled back, brushing more sandwich crumbs from his vest and beckoning with a pale, fine-boned right hand. “Come in, come in. Bring her on into the examining room, and I’ll take a look at it.”

When Yakima had carried Beth into the office, the doctor closed the door behind them, his voice hesitant as he said, “You’re Seagraves’s new wife, aren’t you?”

“That’s right,” Beth said tonelessly over Yakima’s shoulder as he carried her through a curtained doorway and into an examining room rife with the smell of medicines.

Yakima set her down on the leather pedestal table and stepped back away from her. He was about to say something, but then the doctor came in, using a cane now and yammering nervously, and Yakima swung around and moved back through the curtained doorway and strode across the office to the main door.

He stopped as the mercantile owner, Seagraves, came in looking harried, his long horsey face flushed. He wore a clean green apron. His thin gray hair and string tie were disheveled from the wind.

“My God,” he croaked, his eyes homing in on Yakima. “What in holy hell is going on here? I was told you rode in with my wife.”

“Don’t get your neck up,” Yakima grunted. “I found her out in the desert. Horse threw her. She twisted an ankle. Doc’s checkin’ her out now.”

Yakima turned a chill look at the man, and curled a mirthless grin. “The concern’s right touching, ain’t it?”

He didn’t normally bathe in town, as he hated paying for what he could get for free out in the tall and uncut, and he preferred moving water for washing his filth away. But there were no near creeks deep enough to soak in around Red Hill, so he paid six bits to the cranky English proprietor who smelled of chocolaty beer malt, hauled his gear into a cedar-paneled bathing room, and let the hot water sear him before he lathered up, then sat back in the water again and lit a cheap cigar.

He smoked the cigar and tried not to think. But the harder he tried not to think, the harder he thought and the sicker he made himself feel.

Christ, why did she have to ride in on that stage? His life had been going all right, memories of Faith not so much diminishing as settling, drawing their barbs in, and he’d been all right with being alone and not giving a shit about anyone, not needing anyone but the occasional cheap whore. But now he couldn’t stop thinking about her, the way she’d felt writhing beneath him while he’d hammered against her, her heels and fingers grinding into his back.

And yet, all the while he’d toiled with her, Faith’s ghost had been tapping his shoulder. When he’d pulled away from her that second time, he’d looked down into her eyes and it was Faith’s cold, dead gaze he saw as she’d hung limp in his arms with the roadhouse burning behind her.

He dropped the cigar stub and it sizzled out in the sudsy water. He dried and dressed and headed across town to the Queen of Hearts, where he had two shots of whiskey before he even started to think about a girl, though there were plenty around him, including Janelle though she was currently occupied, riding the knee of a some pilgrim in a green-checked suit with a thick red mustache and muttonchops.

In the back-bar mirror he saw the girl cast him several speculative glances, but he was glad she was occupied. He didn’t really want a girl. He really just wanted to suck down some whiskey even though he was well aware of the inherent danger in that, and to brood. The wind howled and moaned outside, giving voice to the demons in his head, and he was glad for the whiskey and the gradually loudening din of the saloon’s growing patronage.

He wasn’t sure how much he’d had to drink, standing there and glaring at himself in the back-bar mirror, one foot planted atop the brass rail running along the base of the bar, when someone bumped him from behind. He glanced over his shoulder. It was Deputy Stall, who turned to see whom he’d run into, and his big, bearded face flushed suddenly. He glowered.

“Well, if it ain’t the breed!” Stall’s eyes were bright with drink, and he held a beer in his hand, the other hand draped negligently over his holstered, rubber-gripped Remington. “You know what’s goin’ around town about you and Seagrave’s mail-order bride, don’t you?”

Yakima shrugged and slid his eyes to the smaller, wiry, and compact Deputy Silver standing behind Stall, his injured wing tucked against his flat belly. “I don’t care.”

“You oughta care. That’s dangerous territory you’re stompin’ in, breed. Nobody much cares for old Seagraves, but nobody much cares for you, neither. Ridin’ into town with that good-lookin’ blonde in tow only made it worse.”

Yakima slid his glance between the two men, his nostrils flaring as the color drained beneath Stall’s beard. A confused look spread across Silver’s lips before the small, muscular deputy tried to cover it with a grin.

Before Yakima realized what he was doing but only giving in to the undeniable rage burning through him, he’d sprung forward and grabbed the back of Stall’s neck with his own left hand. Pivoting, he slammed the man’s face savagely against the bar top. He pulled it back and slammed it down two more times before anyone else in the room even knew what was happening, the heavy crackling thuds resounding above the din.

Stall sobbed and made a strangling sound as, leaving a smear of dark red blood on the polished counter, Yakima pulled his head back once more and drove his right fist into the side of the man’s head—two quick, savage blows that tore the ear protruding from the thick, curly, oily mass of the deputy’s hair. The half-breed was about to lift his knee to finish off the man when he spied movement out the corner of his left eye.

It was too late to do anything about Silver. His whiskey-soaked rage had swept the man from his mind while he’d tended to Stall.

The blow he knew was coming came—a pistol butt to the back of his head. He felt himself twist around, felt the bar slam against his back and the back of his head. His knees hit the floor. A brass spittoon shone brightly to his right. It bobbed and swayed like a hot air balloon in the summer sun, winking in the saloon’s flickering lantern light.

His muscles gave, and he was dropping straight forward into a warm, black pit where all sounds faded to silence.