CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“I send you on a scout and you come back with a woman,” Johnny Teague said. He was highly amused. “Sanchez, where in hell did you find a woman in this wilderness? Even a downright homely one like her?”
Sanchez shrugged. “She was traveling with her husband, a preacher, and wanted to come with me. She doesn’t like her husband much, I think.”
“Have you done her yet?” Teague said.
“No.”
Teague ran unenthusiastic eyes over the disheveled, sunburned Daphne Loveshade. “Yeah, well, there’s no rush, is there?” Then, “Here, you didn’t gun her old man, did you?”
“No.”
“Bueno. Killing a preacher is bad luck.”
Tom Racker, looking mean, said, “Sanchez, did you do what the boss told you to do, huh?”
“Yes. The stage with the Talbot woman is headed for the Cornudas Mountains,” the breed said.
“That would make sense,” Teague said. “I’ve always figured there was gold in them mountains.” He smiled. “Along with plenty of others who figured the same thing.”
“And that’s why there’s a map,” Crystal Casey said.
“We only got the breed’s word for it,” Racker said, on the prod. “For all he knows they could’ve headed into the New Mexico Territory. He should’ve stuck on their trail for a while longer instead of picking up a woman.”
“Racker, you doubt my word?” Sanchez said, speaking low, slow, and tight.
Racker heard the tone, saw the devil in the breed’s eyes, and decided he wanted no part of him that morning . . . or any other morning come to that. “I was just saying—”
“Saying what, Racker?” Sanchez said, pushing it.
“Saying that they could be headed anywhere north of here.”
“Sanchez claims the stage was bound for the Cornudas,” Teague said. “I don’t see any reason to doubt him. I’m willing to bet the farm that the Lucky Cuss gold mine is somewhere among them peaks.”
“Then l say we saddle up and get ’er done,” Racker said. “I’ve had enough of this damned desert to last me a lifetime.”
“Suits me, Tom,” Teague said. “But have a cup of coffee first. You ain’t had any yet, and it’s making you downright unsociable. You, too, Sanchez, and the woman looks like she could use a cup.”
“What about the woman?” Racker said.
“We’ll take her with us. She can ride Sam Canning’s horse. Sam don’t need it no more.”
As the Teague gunmen stood around smoking and drinking coffee, Crystal Casey revealed that impulsive compassion that some whores possess. She put her arms around Daphne Loveshade’s shoulders, found a place for her to sit, and gave her coffee. Within five minutes the two were conversing like old friends, and an eavesdropper might even have heard Crystal talking about the ups and downs of the oldest profession and advising Daphne to consider it as a future career path. The girl seemed more than interested, her face alight as the possibilities of such a glamorous life overwhelmed her.
* * *
Johnny Teague and his nine gunmen and two women broke camp before noon and headed north, leading a mustang packhorse. Since he considered Daphne Loveshade a new pet that had to be protected at all cost, Juan Sanchez rode between the women. He had no sexual intentions toward the girl, mainly because he considered the dogs and cats he’d owned at one time or another all a sight prettier than she was.
Daphne was blissfully unaware of the gunman’s attitude toward her, but if she’d known, it might have put a damper on the newly minted vocation that called her to the whoring profession.
Teague and the others rode under a blue sky and a hot sun.
There was little talk among the men, and for some reason Tom Racker was still brooding, nursing his ill temper of the morning. There was little reason to believe that Racker sensed something amiss, that his bad luck was about to turn blacker.
Former gang member Dave Quarrels always insisted that the gunman knew death was stalking him. “Later that day, I reckon he went into the gunfight with Arch Storm and them knowing he was a dead man,” Quarrels said during his 1936 interview with newsman A. B. Boyd. “Hell, after that battle even Johnny Teague was never the same again. That’s my opinion and you can take it to the bank.” Asked by Boyd if he thought the Lucky Cuss mine was jinxed, Quarrels said, “Of course it was hexed. You know all the bad things that happened in them mountains because I told you about it yestidy. But the fight with Arch Storm and them other three was before all that. Now, you tell me this . . . if’n that wasn’t an ill-starred mine then why did Arch catch up with us while we were on our way there? Huh? I’ll tell you why. Because the Lucky Cuss brought nothing but death and destruction to everybody who was ever associated with it, an’ that’s a natural fact. It was cursed . . . cursed by God and the devil, an’ there’s the truth of it.”
Quarrels had maintained that the Teague/Storm gunfight erupted because Arch had wanted to avenge the death of his brother, killed by Johnny Teague in a Dallas poolroom. But that was hogwash. Arch Storm once did have a brother, but he’d died of scarlet fever when he was seven. No, the one and only reason for the gunfight was that Arch had wanted the women.
Arch Storm was forty-seven years old that summer. He’d been a buffalo hunter and an army scout and made a precarious living as a wolfer. With him were Noble Hunt, Jud Epps, and Benson Egan. Like Storm, the three had been buffalo hunters. Epps had been a New Mexico Territory lawman for a spell, and Hunt had just spent two years in Huntsville for rape.
All four were big men who affected wolf skin capes, fur hats, and miners’ boots, and collectively they smelled like a gut wagon. Epps had a slight reputation as a pistolero. The others favored the .44-40 Winchester, with which they were extremely skilled.
Taken together, they were men to be reckoned with.
Johnny Teague was the first to spot the freight wagon that had halted on the trail, a couple of mounted men flanking it. As Teague and his boys rode closer, two men jumped down from the wagon and stood watching them, rifles across their chests. Always on the lookout for a fast profit, Teague correctly pegged the men as wolfers and doubted that they carried much money, but the two draft animals and the horses ridden by two of the men were worth something.
The stink of the pelts in the wagon and the stench of the wolfers themselves became unpleasantly apparent as Teague and his gunmen drew rein at a distance of five yards.
“Howdy, boys,” Teague said, smiling. “Where you headed?”
“Go to hell,” Arch Storm said. “I ain’t in the mood for pleasantries. I’ll cut to the chase . . . how much do you want for the women? We got a cold winter coming up, and we need female company.”
The two mounted men swung out of their saddles and joined Storm and Epps in front of the wagon.
“Ah, that depends on how much you’re willing to pay,” Teague said. His eyes flicked over the horses and was disappointed. About thirty dollars at a knacker’s yard for all three.
“If she isn’t diseased, fifty dollars for the blondie,” Storm said. “Twenty for the other one. She ain’t worth much.”
Teague grinned. “Hell, man, just looking at you, I know you don’t have that kind of money.”
“Try me. Do we have a deal?” Storm said.
“No deal.” Teague decided to play with the wolfer. “The blonde’s name is Crystal Casey. She ain’t diseased and she’s worth an even two hunnerd. The other one, well, I’ll take a hunnerd for her.” His grin widened. “Come now, let’s be thrifty. I’ll part with both for two-fifty on the barrelhead. Now, show me some gold. I won’t take Yankee scrip from a stranger. Man never knows if it’s even genuine.”
Storm’s bearded face hardened. “You’re messing with me. I don’t like a man who messes with me.”
Supremely confident in his nine gunmen, Teague said, “Who’s messing with you? You want the women as winter belly-warmers, you pay the price. Simple as that.”
“I said fifty for the blonde, twenty for the other one,” Storm said. “You’re one deef bullethead, ain’t you?”
Teague decided that the game was over. It was time to see if the wolfers were worth robbing. “Let’s see your money.” He sighed as though the dickering had worn him out.
To Epps, Storm said, “Jud, take seventy dollars from our stash.” As Epps reached into his cape, brought out a canvas bag, and began to root for coins like a great, shaggy bear, Storm said, “I’ll need to see them gals naked. I ain’t buying no pig in a poke.”
“Mister, you ain’t seeing me naked,” Crystal said, her eyes blazing. “And why don’t you take a bath now and then?”
“You shut your trap, girlie,” Storm said. “We’ll take care of you later.”
Teague was primed for the draw and the confiscation of the wolfers’ bulging money poke, but he didn’t start the gunfight . . .
A butterfly did.
“It was one of them yellow, fork-tailed butterflies you get in Texas. You know the kind,” Dave Quarrels would later recall. “Damn thing fluttered past one of the wolfers, a man called Joe or maybe it was Jim Epps, I never did find the right of his name, but a few days after the gunfight the Ranger who reported finding the bodies called him Joe Epps, a one-time deputy sheriff out of the New Mexico Territory. Well, anyhoo, that’s how it was wrote in the newspaper, so it’s probably right. Now, where was I? Oh, yeah, the butterfly. Well sir, Epps took a swat at it . . . and the ball opened.
“That damned crazy lunatic Tom Racker, who was always looking for the trigger, thought Epps was drawing down on him and shucked his own gun. He shot Epps in the belly and then Johnny Teague yelled, ‘No, I don’t want any gunfighting,’ but it was too late. Them wolfers unlimbered their Winchesters and commenced to shooting. Epps meantime, dead on his feet but as game as they come, cut loose on Racker. Hit him, too. Tom took a bullet to the chest and went out of the saddle like he’d been whacked by a twenty-pound sledge. Now the fighting had become general.
“At that time I rode a three-year-old mare, and at that age a horse knows nothing. When the firing started, she gave me no end of trouble. I snapped off a shot but only God knows where it went. Next thing I know, I’m on my back in the dirt, watching the fight from the ground. I seen three of our boys go down, seen the Casey gal get hit by a stray round, and then I seen Steve Curtis get plugged. We called him Dancer Curtis on account of how he loved to shake a hoof and he was mighty good with the iron. Bullet took his jaw clean off. I spied that with my own two eyes and it was no sight for a Christian man. Well, it didn’t take but a minute before the wolfers were all shot to pieces, lying in the dirt weltering in their blood. We lost five of our own that day, all good men, true blue you might say, and the Teague gang never recovered from that fight. No sir, it never did.
“The damnedest thing is, the wolfers had but ninety dollars and twenty-seven cents in their poke, so we fought that battle for next to nothing. I still recollect to this day what Johnny Teague said to us after the smoke cleared.”
* * *
“I’m sorry boys,” Johnny Teague said, looking around at the dead. “This was all my fault. I called the play.”
“No fault of your’n, Johnny,” Dave Quarrels said. “Racker figgered one of them wolfers was drawing down on him.”
“Why the hell did he move like that?” Teague said.
“The wolfer?” Quarrels said. “He swatted at a butterfly.”
Teague looked stricken. “What are you talking about, Dave?”
“A butterfly flew past him and the wolfer swatted at it. Racker thought the man was going for his gun. I seen it all.”
“Nine men,” Teague said. “Nine men dead because of a butterfly?”
“A yellow butterfly. Yeah, what you said just about sums it up.”
“And what about me, Johnny? What about me, you crazy man?” Crystal Casey stood and glared at Teague, her fists on her hips. The left side of her head was bloody, and Daphne Loveshade dabbed at it with a piece of white cloth she’d torn from her petticoat.
“She was grazed by a bullet,” Daphne said. “She’ll be all right.”
“I lost some curls, Johnny,” Crystal said. “I lost a whole handful of curls. I wanted to have my likeness made in El Paso or somewhere. So now what do I do?”
Teague looked at the woman but did not really see her. He walked away, sat, and hugged his knees, his head bent.
Crystal angrily stomped in his direction, but one of the surviving gunmen blocked her path. He shook his head and said, “Not now.”
Crystal looked into the man’s eyes, got chilled by the green ice she saw, and turned away. “Daphne,” she called. “My head’s bleeding again.”
The green-eyed gunman looked at Teague and felt a tremor of shock run through him. Johnny was bleeding from a neck wound! The word always had been that the bullet hadn’t been cast yet that would harm Johnny Teague. Yet one had. And for the gunman, that was a worrisome thing . . . for the first time he realized that his boss was not invincible.