Chapter 16
Catfish opened one eye. Then he opened the other eye.
For a few seconds, he wasn’t sure where he was. In fact, he was surprised and disoriented not to find himself in his little cabin near his catfish pond with Hooligan Hank on the prowl for mice outside, and Bubba Jones lolling in the muddy pond water, silently taunting him, his nemesis. Then he saw, to his left, the fire that had burned down to just a few barely glowing coals, as he’d run out of dry fuel an hour ago.
He saw Miss Claire—yes, even in his mind, even despite their history, he still referred to the regal woman by her formal surname—curled up in his soogan, her head on his saddle, on the other side of the near-dead fire, near where Beth slumbered, curled on her side. Brazos sat beside Catfish, leaning his head back against the cave’s rear wall, black hat pulled down over his eyes.
Now Catfish thumbed his own hat up on his forehead and lifted his chin from where it had sagged nearly to his chest as he’d slept.
He stared out into the dark night beyond the low, crescent-shaped opening. The storm’s raw fury had stopped hours ago, but it had continued to rain until after dark. Now the rain had stopped, and Catfish thought he could see a few wan stars. The rain continued to drip from the rocks and trees, making a near-musical ticking sound.
What had awakened him?
It came again—a horse’s very low, barely audible whicker.
Soft as it was, Catfish recognized it as Jasper’s.
Brazos heard it, too. He’d been snoring softly, but now the snores stopped and the former buffalo soldier drew a deep breath, lifted his chin, and poked his hat up onto his forehead.
He turned to Catfish, who sat staring out into the night, his hand automatically closing over the bone grips of the .44 holstered on his right thigh.
Very quietly so not to awaken the women, Brazos said, “Jasper?”
“Uh-huh?”
Then another horse gave a snort and shifted its hooves on the damp ground.
“That was Abe,” Brazos said.
“Uh-huh.” Catfish had ridden long enough with Brazos to recognize the whicker of his former partner’s horse, as well as his own. “Somethin’s got ’em spooked.”
Both men pushed to their feet, Brazos moving annoyingly more fleetly than Catfish, Catfish noted with a miffed flare of a nostril. They both grabbed the rifles leaning against the cave wall beside them and, crouching low beneath the cave’s shallow ceiling, stepped very quietly across the cave. They headed outside, where, standing side by side, they straightened to their full heights, Catfish a few inches taller than his former partner. But also considerably thicker in the waist, gallblastit.
The horses continued to stir, stomping around, whickering quietly. Through the murky darkness—it was nearing false dawn—Catfish could see all three mounts staring through the gaps between the boulders, down the gentle grade through the pines to the desert valley below.
Jasper flicked his ears.
“Somethin’s movin’ around down there,” Brazos said, again very quietly.
“Uh-huh.”
Catfish glanced at Brazos, canted his head to their right, then to their left. The message having been well practiced and clear, Brazos understood immediately. He moved down the grade before them, quartering right. Catfish moved down the grade as well, quartering left, holding his Yellowboy straight out from his right hip.
He walked slowly around a boulder and then straight down the slope, taking one slow step at a time, scowling into the night’s thick shadows just now being relieved by a slow-approaching sunrise.
A quiet sound rose from the darkness ahead of him and on his left—a very slight snapping sound, as though the tread of a stealthy foot coming down on a twig.
Yep, something or someone’s moving around down there, all right.
Catfish thought of the three men who’d accosted Miss Claire on the trail. Had they come calling again?
He continued moving slowly down the slope, angling gradually left, toward a ravine cutting around the shoulder of the bluff. He moved as quietly as he could, wincing when his own foot crunched pine needles and old leaves. He used to be able to move more quietly, but that was a good thirty, forty pounds ago . . .
Scattered rocks and boulders lay ahead.
He moved into them, the large rocks rising around him.
He paused to very quietly pump a live round into his Yellowboy’s action, then continued moving into a jagged corridor formed by the rocks.
A thump sounded behind him. He swung around with a start, tightening his gloved right index finger around the Yellowboy’s trigger. A fist-sized stone rolled down the grade for about four feet, then stopped.
Catfish’s heart quickened.
Where had that come from?
“All right,” he said quietly. “Who goes there?”
He moved forward, back the way he’d come, looking from left to right, scanning the tops of the rocks around him, where he had the uneasy feeling someone was about to take a shot at him.
He came to a break in the rocks on his right. Stepping into the break, he drew back a little more firmly on his Winchester’s trigger, expecting a gun flash at any second. He moved deeper into the rocks. The brush and cactus lining the ravine lay ahead of him.
He stopped suddenly, lifted his nose, sniffed the air.
There was the sickly sweet smell of something wild.
“Look out, Cha’les!” came Brazos’s raised voice from behind him.
Catfish swung around.
A large, wailing snarl sounded a quarter second before flames stabbed from a rifle barrel before him, maybe ten feet away and angled up toward his left. Another snarling wail and something large, silhouetted against the lightening sky, appeared above and before him. Catfish raised the Yellowboy and fired just before the rifle was knocked out of his hands and something big and furry slammed into him hard, knocking him flat on his back, smashing the breath from his lungs.
He looked down toward his waist to see two yellow eyes glowing before him. The big cat, lying half on top of him and feeling as heavy as a horse, blinked twice, opened its mouth, filling Catfish’s nostrils with a rancid smell like that of something dead that had lain too long in the sun.
Catfish’s guts recoiled at the stench, as well as at the two long yellow fangs curving down from the cat’s upper jaw. He expected the cat to lunge up at him and tear out his throat.
But then the mouth closed, the large, square head lay down on his chest and turned to one side with a long, deep-throated groan, as though the puma had decided, instead of dining on him, to take a nap on him.
“Good God!” Catfish grunted, trying to suck air back into his lungs and having little luck.
He looked up over the beast’s head to see Brazos step up out of the shadows. Brazos leaned his rifle against a rock, then crouched to grab both of the animal’s rear legs and pulled the beast off Catfish with a loud grunt of his own. When the beast’s head had slid off Catfish’s feet, Brazos released the cat’s rear legs.
“I told you to look out.”
Catfish sucked a breath into his battered lungs and glared up at his partner. “You try lookin’ out when you’re as old and fat as me.” He rolled onto his belly, pushed up onto his hands and knees, then climbed to his feet. He picked up his hat, reshaped it, and set it on his head.
“Ha!” he said. “You still got my back—don’t you, partner?”
“Obviously, someone has to. Just like old times.” Suddenly Brazos gave a rare smile, his white teeth showing in the lightening darkness.
Catfish stepped around the beast, which had nearly had him for an early-morning snack. He rested his forearm on Brazos’s shoulder and said, “What do you think? Should we clean up Wolfwater again . . . once more?” He grinned. “For old times’ sake?”
Brazos pushed Catfish’s arm off his shoulder and gave a sour expression. “Good Lord, you stink!” He brushed off his shoulder with the back of his hand.
“Ha!” Catfish picked up his rifle and brushed it off. He scowled down at the dead mountain lion. “You think I do? That panther ain’t had a bath in a lot longer than me!”
Both men strode back up the hill to where the hobbled horses were still snorting and stomping. Miss Claire stood just outside the cave, her slender, buxom figure limned by the growing dawn light slanting through the trees and around the rocks. She had her hands entwined before her.
“Good Lord,” she said, “I was so worried!” She dropped her voice and pitched it dreadfully. “Did . . . did they . . . those men . . . return?”
“No,” Catfish said, shaking his head. “It was a mountain lion.”
Miss Claire heaved a sigh, as though relieved the shot had meant a cat and not her three assailants. Again, Catfish wondered at the woman’s curious behavior. A shadow moved behind the woman, and then Beth Wilkes ducked out through the cave, the blanket wrapped around her. She stepped up beside Julia and gazed down at Catfish and Brazos.
“I heard,” she said, her voice small and thin and barely audible above the morning piping of birds. “It was . . . it wasn’t them, was it?”
“They’re all dead, except that tied-up polecat in there, honey,” Brazos said. “You don’t have to worry about them anymore.”
She frowned curiously, scrutinizing the lean man standing beside Catfish. “Brazos,” she said. “What . . . what . . . are you doing here?”
Catfish and Brazos shared a curious glance.
The girl must have been so dazed she hadn’t realized that Brazos had been one of the two men who’d rescued her. She was just now coming out of her trancelike state. Miss Claire reached over and took Beth’s hand.
“He came to help, dear,” she told the girl. “Both he and Catfish are here to help.”
Again, Beth stared down the grade at the two men. “Just me an’ Pa? Or the town?”
“The town,” both men said at the same time.
Miss Claire smiled.
* * *
They broke camp as the murky gray light of dawn washed over the ridge.
Catfish was tired and hungry and thirsty for coffee, but a meal would have to wait until they reached Wolfwater. The wood was too wet for a fire. Besides, he wanted to get Beth to Doc Overholser as soon as possible.
Her life had changed drastically over the past several days. Her father had been killed and she’d been kidnapped and badly abused. It would take her a while to accept her new life, as well as to heal her soul, but Catfish was buoyed by the fact that she elected to ride back to town with Miss Claire in the chaise rather than continue on the travois.
She sat up front beside Julia, the body of George McGrath lay on the seat behind her. If the dead man’s presence affected her, she didn’t show it. Catfish thought she’d probably seen so much death and destruction, not to mention endured her own torture, over the past few days that she’d become numb to almost everything.
Catfish and Brazos, with Catfish trailing Skinny Thorson’s horse by its lead rope, followed the carriage down off the ridge, then picked up the trail back to Wolfwater. The lemon orb of the sun rose, and the air warmed quickly, humid from the damp ground. The sky had been scoured fresh and clear by the storm. There wasn’t a cloud in sight during the procession’s slow ride back to town, which they entered just after midday, the motley group with the dead man lying in the back of the carriage merging with Wolfwater’s rollicking midday horse-and-wagon traffic. They rode down the broad main street, to the right of the El Paso & Rio Grande tracks, which had been laid straight through the heart of the town.
Catfish was surprised by all the commotion on a Sunday. Then again, he wasn’t all that surprised. The silver rails were the cause of all the men and painted ladies gathered on the boardwalks of the town’s many saloons and hurdy-gurdy houses. Many of the faces he’d never seen before.
As they passed along the street, loud voices rose from a break between the Continental Saloon and a Chinese bathhouse. Brazos stopped his chestnut and glanced at Catfish.
“Look there.”
Catfish followed his gaze into the break, where a good dozen men were gathered around two other men fighting bare-chested inside the circle of revelers, knives in their fists, slashing and cutting as they bobbed, feinted, and sidestepped, yelling curses at each other. The crowd around them was passing greenbacks around, placing bets on the fight’s outcome.
“Well, I’ll be,” Catfish said as the carriage continued along the street ahead of them. “Abel and Bushwhack never would’ve allowed that.”
“Don’t take long for the mice to play,” Brazos said, “when the cat’s away. No, it sure as heck don’t, Cha’les.”
“Hey, look there,” Catfish said as they gigged their horses ahead. He’d fastened his gaze on a man standing with a crowd of other men outside the One-Eyed Pig Saloon, on the street’s right side. “Isn’t that the regulator, ‘Texas Jack’ Silver? The tall, well-dressed drink of water with the pearl-handled six-shooter in the cross-draw position?”
“Do believe it is,” Brazos said as they rode on past the Pig, as the saloon was locally known. “Didn’t we throw him out of this country about six years ago?”
“He was picking off nesters with a Sharps Big Fifty. We couldn’t prove it, but we threw him out, anyway.”
“Well, he’s back,” Brazos said. He cast his gaze toward the left side of the street and added, “And I do believe I just saw ‘Blue’ Murphy walk into the Red Lantern.”
Blue Murphy was a gunfighting card sharp out of Abilene.
“Do believe we put him away for a few years—didn’t we?”
“Well, he’s out,” Brazos said. “And he’s back.”
Catfish sighed as he watched Miss Claire check her carriage down in front of the largest building on the main drag—her very own Lone Star Outpost, which was three brick stories with the name painted across the top of the upper story in large green letters. It boasted a wide, broad wooden front stoop, on which yet another crowd of men and girls had gathered, over a dozen horses tied to the three hitchracks out in front of the place—on a Sunday!
“I do believe we got our work cut out for us, Brazos,” Catfish said.
“Looks like it, Cha’les,” Brazos said darkly. He glanced at Catfish. “We up to this? It’s been a good many years for both of us. You’re what—sixty-two? An’ I’m fifty-eight!”
“Oh, stop braggin’!”
“Just sayin’.”
Catfish tipped his head back and scratched his neck. “I reckon we’ll find out what we got left.” He glanced at Brazos as they both slowed their mounts in front of the Lone Star Outpost, behind Miss Claire’s chaise. “You havin’ second thoughts, partner?”
“Yep.”
“Yeah—me too,” Catfish said with a dry laugh.
Miss Claire had stopped her carriage, and several bouncers had emerged from the saloon’s batwing doors. Several onlookers had announced the lady’s long-delayed arrival; another man yelled in surprise, “An’ she’s got Miss Beth with her!”
As the bouncers and the customers spilled down the porch steps, Miss Claire yelled for someone to fetch the doctor to her suite.
“Well, I’ll be hanged if it ain’t Catfish and Brazos McQueen their ownselves!” another man said, pointing at where Catfish and Brazos had halted their horses behind the chaise.
“And Skinny Thorson!” exclaimed another man.
“Did you two bring down ol’ Frank?” This question came from the mayor, Derwood Booth, moving quickly out through the batwings as well. Astonishment shone on his face as the dandy stood at the top of the wooden steps, looking with relieved surprise from Miss Claire to Beth, who was now being helped out of the carriage by two brawny bouncers, to the two former lawmen.
Catfish didn’t feel like shouting above the din. He didn’t much care for the popinjay, anyway.
He turned to Brazos and said, “Looks like Miss Beth will be well taken care of. Miss Claire too. Let’s go air out our old office and throw this skunk in the clink.”
He glanced at Skinny, tied to his saddle behind him and Brazos. The kid’s nervous gaze was on the crowd fronting the Lone Star, all giving him the wooly eyeball. He turned to Catfish and glared.
They continued down the street, neither Catfish nor Brazos noticing the dark pair of eyes staring after them from atop the Lone Star’s veranda.