Bullet for a Half-Breed

Yakima had one hell of a tough time climbing up out of the canyon. The climb was tougher and longer, albeit less painful, than the descent.

When he finally reached the trail above, he dropped to his knees, holding his wounded right arm in front of him, gripping that wrist with his other hand while he caught his breath and tried to blink the cobwebs from his vision. The soft, dusty colors of the desert washed around him like mirages. He was hot and then cold by turns, his calico shirt pasted against his back.

He looked at his arm. Blood trickled out from beneath the bandanna he’d wrapped around it. He’d have to get that stopped soon. First things first. Heaving himself to his feet, he walked up trail until, after nearly twenty minutes of fervent searching, he discovered the Yellowboy lying in a patch of scrub. He dropped to his knees again, resting, and scooped the rifle up out of the caliche. He rested the gun across his thighs, running his left hand down the length of the fore stock and brass receiver in which a bear had been scrolled, rising on its haunches to fight off several hungry wolves in knee-high grass.

His Shaolin-monk friend, George, had won the rifle in a poker game. George had been a man of peace, so, having no use for the weapon himself, he gave it to Yakima. The half-breed prized the rifle almost as much as he cherished his stallion, Wolf, or his memories of George, who’d been a father to him for one bright, halcyon moment in his otherwise bitter past.

There were several scratches in the fore and rear stocks but the receiver had made out all right. A little hog tallow would take care of the scratches in the wood, and a liberal rub of Patriot’s gun oil would bring a shine back to the receiver. He thumbed cartridges from his belt, sliding them into the Winchester’s loading gate, racked a shell to check the action, then depressed the hammer and rose, resting the rifle barrel across his left shoulder.

He looked around to see if there happened to be any travelers in the area. Spying nothing but a small dust devil climbing a distant, eastern hogback, he swung around and began tramping west toward Red Hill. Diamondback Station was only a few miles down the road. If he could hold to a steady pace in spite of his aching body and pounding arm, he should make it before sundown.

One step at a time, he told himself, when he began climbing the second hill along the stage road and his feet were starting to feel as though rocks were bound to his ankles.

Nearly a half hour later, he stopped suddenly and blinked, pricking his ears. He’d heard something. Hoof-beats. As the muffled thuds grew more and more distinct and a high clatter joined them, he realized the sound of the approaching riders was coming from straight ahead and from behind the next low rise.

His heart quickening, he worked his way to the top of the hill and stared down the other side to see two dust plumes growing before him, a small wagon and a horseback rider pulling them around a hat-shaped bluff. The wagon driver was whipping his reins across the back of the gray horse hitched to the singletree.

Cautiously, Yakima drew the Winchester’s hammer back to half cock, loosened his Colt in its holster, and continued forward, a skeptical glance to his green eyes set deep in their red-brown sockets. The lines in his forehead planed out when he recognized the long nose set in the horsey face of Chick Bannon driving the spring wagon. Bannon’s Mexican hostler, Ivano Santiago, rode the white-socked dun a little ahead of the wagon, the man’s chaps flapping against his denim-clad legs.

Santiago and Bannon drew up in front of Yakima, and the Diamondback stationmaster’s eyes were sharp with dread. “Don’t tell me ...”

Bannon frowned as though Yakima were a vision he was trying to make out from a distance, several questions bouncing around in his head at once.

Bannon swallowed and his flat leathery cheeks rose higher beneath his eyes. “Hellfire. A good man—Avril.” He wagged his head. “And ... the strongbox?”

“It’s still there,” Yakima growled. “Someone filled it with rocks. Never did have any money in it. The Romans pulled a fast one, outfitted us with a dummy box.” He strode forward, holding his right wrist against his belly, biting back the pain. “Good businesspeople, the Romans. Used us for decoys. Must be havin’ the strongbox hauled in by another means.”

Yakima spat to one side in distaste, slid his rifle onto the floor of the driver’s boot, and climbed up onto the seat beside Bannon, who was still regarding him like some strange creature fallen from the sky. “You get a look at the robbers?”

“Nope,” Yakima lied. He didn’t want it getting around to Rathbone that he was onto him. Prey was easier to hunt when it didn’t know it was being stalked.

Bannon glanced at Santiago, who stared grimly down from the saddle of his dun, both the hostler’s gloved hands resting on his broad, California-style saddle horn. “Check it out, Ivano. Fetch Derks back to the station. The mailbag, too. We’ll haul him to town tomorrow.”

The Mexican nodded, pulled the dun’s drooping head up, then spurred it into a gallop up the trail. At the same time, Bannon swung the wagon around and headed back toward Diamondback Station. “How bad you hit?”

Yakima leaned forward to remove the pressure of the seat back against his arm. His pinched voice belied the pain and nausea that gripped him. He felt himself weakening and was having trouble keeping his head up. “I’ll live.”

“Damn,” Yakima heard Bannon say above the clomps of the gray’s trotting hooves. “The Romans sure ain’t gonna like losin’ a stage, a good driver, and six horses. A dummy strongbox, you say? I’ll be damned.”

Yakima gripped the seat so he wouldn’t bounce out. He felt himself slipping into unconsciousness in spite of the wagon’s jouncing, and let himself go.

He didn’t go far enough to relieve the pain, however. And the jolting ride kept bouncing him back to wakefulness. It wasn’t long before every inch of his body registered every rock and thorny shrub he’d hit on that tumble down the mountain, and his arm once again felt as though it had been slathered in hot tar.

Bannon stopped at Diamondback Station to hitch a fresh horse to the wagon and to grab a full canteen, and then they were off again, hammering over the low ridges and caroming around jutting cliff walls. Crossing rocky washes was twice the misery of the general trail, and Yakima heard himself groan when Bannon put the horse a little too briskly up the steep bank of Soldier’s Gulch.

He lifted his chin from his chest and looked around. There was only a little natural light left on the main street of Red Hill, and the oil pots fronting the saloons had been lit. The sky over the town was dark green. Men were milling along the boardwalks—many more than normal for this time of day.

The seat bounced as Bannon climbed down from the wagon’s driver’s boot and pounded up the steps of the doctor’s office, using the rickety railing and yelling, “Doc Mangan? Doc—you in there? Got a wounded shotgun rider out here!”

Yakima looked up the street. He could see the shadows of a half dozen or so mounted men milling in front of the sheriff’s office directly across from the bank. Two other people stood in the street near the riders. From this distance and in the failing light, it was hard to tell for sure, but the two standing in the street appeared an older man in a suit and long coat, and a woman with her hair up and holding a cape around her shoulders.

None of the group had apparently heard the wagon clatter into town. All heads were turned toward the jailhouse, where Yakima could hear Rathbone’s familiar voice rising above the crowd’s din. Beyond the milling riders, a tall, slender, black-clad figure silhouetted by lit flares attached to the jailhouse’s porch posts jerked this way and that.

As he started down, his boots clomping loudly and his spurs ringing, the man and the woman on the street before the sheriff’s office swung their heads toward the doctor’s second-story office. The umber torchlight bathed their faces and glistened in their eyes. The Romans, all right—father and daughter. Yakima felt a burning desire to shoot both of them, as well, though he supposed he couldn’t really fault their business decision. The decoy strongbox had been a wise move, if a heartless one—throwing two men, albeit a black man and a half-breed, as well as six good horses, to the wolves for nothing.

He’d let them go. If there was a God, they’d answer to him. Rathbone, Stall, and Silver, however, would answer to Yakima.

As Bannon dropped down the stairs to the street, the Romans glanced at each other in complicity, and then, by ones and twos, the horseback riders started turning toward the doctor’s office, as well. As Bannon reached up to help Yakima down from the wagon, the Romans began walking toward the office, and one of the riders swung his prancing horse around and pointed.

Yakima reached under the wagon seat for his rifle, then eased his weight against Bannon as the Diamondback Station manager helped him over the front wheel and down to the ground. The crowd was moving in a mass toward Yakima’s side of the street, converging on and surrounding the Romans.

“Bannon!” Roman called, the banker moving choppily on his short legs, his unbuttoned camelhair great-coat flapping against his thighs. “Henry, that you? Good Lord—what happened?”

He pulled away from Bannon and started up the stairs. The doctor had come halfway down. He held a hand-carved bamboo cane in his right hand, and his gold-framed spectacles glinted in the light from the flares and burning oil pots.

“I can’t help you, young fella,” Mangan said, frowning down at Yakima. His southern accent was as soft and rolling as the Tennessee hills in springtime. “I got a bad hip and knee. Can you make it?”

Yakima climbed the steps, passing the sawbones, who then turned and followed his patient up and inside the doctor’s office, where a black German shepherd with a long gray snout waited, just inside the door. The doctor backed up as Yakima moved inside, and the dog watched him with attentive, cautious eyes, groaning.

“Back, Buford,” the doctor said, waving the dog off. “Go on back to the examining room, son. Straight back. You know where it is.”

“Named after my commanding officer at Gettysburg. Don’t tell these carpetbaggers around here, or they’ll shoot him.” He waved to the dog that followed Yakima, head in the air and nose working as he smelled the fresh blood. “Go lie down, you impertinent cuss!”

Buford gave a frustrated yip and turned around several times before plopping down in the nest of empty feed sacks abutting the doctor’s rolltop desk in the office’s central room, where a thick cigar smoldered in an ashtray amongst a mess of scrap paper and medicines in jars and bottles of every shape, color, and size. Yakima went into the examining room and eased himself down on the horsehide-upholstered pedestal table.

“Lord!” Mangan touched the match to the wick he’d just raised, then lowered the wick back down a notch and set the chimney over it. “What happened?”

“Oh, for pity’s sake,” Mangan clucked, drawing the door curtain closed on the main room. “I’ve never heard the like. What are things coming to?”

Yakima stared at the red-curtained window behind the lamp that the doctor had just lit. He kept seeing the stage disappearing into the dust fog as he heard the horses screaming and Derks bellowing. Then the front of the stage pitched abruptly forward, and the last thing Yakima saw was the rear luggage boot jerking sharply up, then following the rest of the stage into the rocks and dust over the edge of the cliff.

Yakima felt his chest tighten even more, and then the flames of fury wrapped his heart, as well, and he tightened his jaws until his cheeks dimpled as he imagined how it was going to go for Rathbone and the sheriff’s murdering deputies.

“I asked you what you did here.” Mangan had his hand gently wrapped around Yakima’s wounded arm. “Are those powder burns?”

“Good thinkin’, young man. I’ve seen fellas burn themselves good, cause a bigger problem than the one they started with. But it looks like you kept the powder in the hole.”

“That’s all right,” the doctor said. “You lie back. I’m gonna have to open that wound up and swab it out. Don’t want infection setting into the bone, or you’ll lose the arm. I’ve chopped enough arms off during the war for one lifetime.”

“Do what you need to, Doc.” Yakima lay slowly back, rested his head on a pillow covered in blue-striped ticking, and stared up at the pressed tin ceiling. “Do whatever you need to.” He had to get sewn up well enough to go after Derks’s killers. The sooner the better.

“Holy Christ!” the doctor said in astonishment when he’d unbuttoned Yakima’s shirt and pulled it open. He stared down at Yakima’s chest and belly.

Yakima lifted his own head to follow the doctor’s gaze. Nearly every inch of his torso was scraped or nicked or gouged, with scattered thorns protruding from his thick hide the color of old saddle leather. Plum-colored bruising was beginning to rise over and around his ribs and across his shoulders, edged with a sickly yellow-green resembling a stormy midwestern sky.

“I see that,” Mangan growled as he brushed a blunt-tipped finger across one of the knotted knife scars. “And I hope you are a good healer. You’re gonna need—”

Buford’s sudden bark cut the doctor off. There was the click of the outside door opening, and a man’s voice called, “Doc? It’s Sheriff Rathbone. Me and the Romans are here to see the breed.”