The Vengeance Seeker 4 Page 7

  Wolf knew he could not dispute this old man. He was as wise as God, and it was he who had nursed him back to life after he lay torn on the ground like a piece of poorly plowed earth.

  Diego handed him his rifle. “Come,” he told Wolf. “We shoot again. You must be ready, my young wolf cub, for the task of your manhood.”

  But as Wolf walked back through the mesquite with the old man, he grew taller and Diego became the boy. Smaller and smaller the man shrank before Wolf’s eye. Wolf cried out and the little figure turned to look up at Wolf. Wolf looked away, horrified at the tiny, wizened face of his God. Over them both fell a shadow. Diego and Wolf looked up at the swooping eagle. Diego screamed.

  Wolf turned and ran and kept running, while the eagle over his head grew into a vast shadow that he could not outdistance—until at last it overtook him—and then all was darkness, and he was still running, running...

  Wolf sat bolt upright. He was still trapped in the darkness and his heart was pounding. And then he realized where he was—in an abandoned line shack somewhere beyond the pass. He reached up and felt the bandage still wrapped tightly about his head; then he blinked gratefully at the sunlight streaming in through the single broken window. The cold fingers of the nightmare fell away from him.

  Footsteps approached the blanket that served as the door. A moment later it was thrust aside and Juanita entered.

  She smiled, and at once the rest of it came rushing back to him—the nightmarish ride until they found this shack, and after that the wild, disordered nights and days while he tried to live through the throbbing pain deep within his skull.

  “How do you feel, Señor Wolf?” she asked anxiously, sitting carefully down on the cot beside him, her large dark eyes filled with genuine concern.

  “Hungry,” he said. He reached up again and felt the bandage about his head. “Am I going to live?”

  “Yes, you are going to live. The bone of your skull, it was not broken, I think. But you were hurt pretty bad back there and there was much bleeding and swelling.”

  “I didn’t hurt my nose any,” he said. “I smell something cooking.”

  She glanced over at the far corner of the shack, where a squat wood stove sat, minus one leg. Logs had been propped under it, and he assumed it was Juanita’s doing. Something was simmering in a pot on top of it.

  “Rabbit stew,” she told him. “I have been practicing with Carl’s rifle. I also found potatoes and carrots in a garden out back. Maybe some squatter’s woman start it, I think. It is a very old garden.”

  “Smells positively wonderful.”

  “We’ll have to use cups,” she said, as she got up and walked over to the stove.

  He threw back the saddle blanket she had used for him, saw the pale nakedness thus exposed and hastily pulled the blanket around him. He’d eat first, he decided. Then he’d get dressed.

  He felt the back of his head again. It was still sitting nicely on his shoulders and the pain was only a dim throb now. He was definitely going to live—at least long enough to track Reno down.

  It was two days later and the sun had just set. They were sitting on a log bench in front of the line shack—ever since they had finished one of Juanita’s suppers. In this case it had been a juicy hare she had roasted on a spit. Wolf had a lot of catching up to do, he realized, since he had been under Juanita’s care now for almost four days. It had not been an easy time for Juanita, he gathered. In his delirium he had gotten hold of a six-gun and taken after her. She hadn’t told him how she had managed to get the six-gun out of his hands—and he hadn’t asked.

  She had already explained how she had been beaten by the two miners in Silver City and why she had followed them. She had kept well back of the two men after they left Compton’s ranch and followed Wolf through the mountains to the pass. Only when she found his revolver on the ground by his campsite did she realize the miners had captured him.

  The rest he knew.

  As the darkness fell over them, he got up from the bench and walked across the yard to what was left of the pole corral. Juanita followed after him. When he reached the corral, he turned around and leaned his back against a post and built himself a smoke.

  “Would you make one for me, Wolf?” Juanita asked.

  He nodded, worked quickly, shaped the cigarette and handed it to her. She placed it between her lips and leaned close as he thumbed a sulphur match to life and lit it for her, then lit his own. For a moment they smoked in silence.

  He watched her in the darkness. She was the strongest woman he had ever met—and easily the prettiest. He had insisted she call him señor no longer. And they had grown closer these past few days—closer, he realized, than he had ever allowed any other woman to get. And yet, both of them knew so little about each other.

  “You are a remarkable woman, Juanita,” Wolf said abruptly. “I owe you my life—and yet all I know about you is that you work for a fat little man who provides girls as well as whiskey and rooms for his customers.”

  “My name,” she said softly, “is Juanita Lopez de Santa Rosa. As a girl I lived on a fine hacienda in Ciudad Acuna. I had an English governess to teach me the English—and the vaqueros from the north to teach me the American.” She smiled. “And also to teach me to ride and to shoot. It was a fine ranch with much beef, many longhorns and even some whitefaces we bring down from your country.”

  She paused. The tip of her cigarette glowed powerfully in the dark as she inhaled. “It is all like a dream now—those days,” she said. “My father—Antonio Lopez—was a proud man, but a fair one. He got along even with the Comanches. Then one terrible night a band of Apache devils, they raided our lands. They burn everything, drive off our cattle and horses. They killed many of our vaqueros.”

  “Had you been having trouble with them?”

  “It was not that. The Comanches drove the Mescaleros out of their hunting grounds. So the Mescaleros, they turn on us.” She paused and looked over at Wolf then. “On their way back, they captured me and my sister. Later, my sister, she would not submit. They killed her—slowly. I submitted.”

  She looked away from Wolf then. “It was a party of friendly Comancheros who purchased me from the Mescaleros, and it was from them that Carl bought me. My purchase price, Wolf, is four repeating rifles, four army horses and army saddles.”

  Wolf did not quite know what to say. Juanita had told her story quietly, simply and without a tremor—with an eloquence that astounded him.

  “And your father? Have you contacted him since?”

  “I have written him. He is a poor man now and I send him as much money as I can so that he may buy more stock for his ranch and hire vaqueros to help him.” She took a deep breath. “But what little I send him does not do him much good, I think. The death of my sister—and what happened to me—has made an old man of him, I am very sure.”

  “Does he know what...”

  She looked at him quickly. “No, Señor Wolf, he does not. He would die if he knew that I am—sometimes—more than a waitress and cook for Carl and his customers. It would be too much for him. He thinks I work as a housekeeper for a very wealthy rancher.”

  Wolf nodded, startled by her blunt honesty. Carl had tried to lie for her. And he had been willing to accept the lie as the truth. But Juanita preferred the truth.

  She looked at him closely. “I have told you my story, Wolf. And in your face I see another story—and in your poor body as well. Tell me.”

  He paused for a moment, then shrugged and realized he could do no less than match her honesty. He told her then of the five saddle tramps that had ridden into his father’s yard and murdered both his parents and nearly finished him as well. He told how Diego Sanchez, his father’s foreman, had found him close to death and then brought him up to track and kill those five men.

  “And did you?” Juanita asked softly.

  Wolf nodded. “And it was Johnny Reno who helped me identify and track the first one. And that man led to the others.”

&
nbsp; “So now,” Juanita said, “you must kill those five men over and over. It is maybe too bad this Johnny Reno help you find that first one.”

  Wolf shook his head wearily and leaned back against the post. “No, Juanita,” he said carefully. “I do not think so. Those men deserved to die—and so they did, by my hand. It was Diego who taught me that when evil goes unpunished, the Devil sits in God’s seat—and all honest men are lost. I think Diego Sanchez was right.”

  She thought over what he said for a moment. Then she spoke quietly with a sigh. “I wish what you say were not so, but this man Diego Sanchez was right, I think. I only must think of this Johnny Reno and those two miners to admit this.”

  Wolf was suddenly aware of how tired he was—and he intended to get an early start the next morning. His head had stopped throbbing and his thigh wound no longer bothered him. And each day he stayed in this line shack sent Reno further north into Montana. He left the corral and walked back to the shack with Juanita.

  Inside, he unbuckled his gunbelt and removed the six-gun Juanita had recovered for him and placed it under his pillow. Sleep overtook him with a speed and finality that was astonishing. He barely felt Juanita’s hands pulling the blanket up about his shoulders, and her soft voice bidding him goodnight was like a whisper from another world.

  A long while after the two of them disappeared into the line shack, Tom Gibson left his spot in the pines and crept forward until he had reached the corral. He squatted in the tall grass, listening for sounds until his knees grew cramped. At last he stood up, his six-gun out, and started for the shack. They were asleep by now. They had to be.

  “Wolf!”

  He was awake at once. Juanita’s face was bent close to his, the heavy fragrance of her thick loosened hair hanging about him.

  “There is someone out there,” she whispered, her words barely audible. “Near the corral.”

  He did not doubt her. Withdrawing the Colt from under the grass pillow, he rolled out of the cot and crept across the dirt floor over to the wall beside the door. When he looked back and saw Juanita’s dim shadow still crouched by his cot, he waved her over to the far corner, behind the stove. He saw her move and then lost sight of her in the dim gloom of the place. Leaning his head against the log wall, he listened intently.

  An owl was hooting softly out there somewhere and beyond that, on some cool mountainside, a coyote began yapping. But that was all the sound that came to him—until he heard the sudden muffled clink of a spur in high grass—and then another and another. The goddamn fool was walking straight for the shack’s entrance with his spurs on...

  As Tom approached the blanket that served as the line shack’s door, he rehearsed in his mind what he would do once he was inside. He would look for their bed and empty his six-gun into it. As simple as that. Then he would return to Lawson and tell Johnny.

  Johnny had confidence in him and he was going to make Johnny real happy with the way he handled this. It would have been better if Johnny had tended to this guy when he had the chance instead of leaving it to those two stumblebums. Tom had returned to the pass and found what was left of their bodies still being torn at and quarreled over by buzzards and coyotes. It had not been a pleasant sight, and it proved—at least to his satisfaction—that Wes had been right. Johnny should have finished this guy himself.

  Well, now he would do what those two miners had been unable to do. He’d fix this lawman’s hash for good. And the girl, too. He had been trying to puzzle out where she had come from. He was sorry he would have to cut her down along with Caulder, but he just didn’t see any way around it.

  His mouth was dry and all of a sudden he was having some difficulty in swallowing, reminding him of how he had felt that day in Green River when he had led those saddled horses out of the alley and down the street toward the bank. But he had kept right on coming, and he had been there with the horses when they came boiling out of the place with all that money.

  And he wasn’t going to lose his nerve now. He was just going to step right in there and start blasting.

  He reached out for the blanket, slowly pushed it aside and eased himself through the doorway. The spur on his right boot struck the doorjamb. The sudden loud clink it made caused him to freeze in panic.

  Oh, Jesus! I should have taken the damn things off!

  “Hold it right there, mister,” Wolf said.

  Wolf saw the figure in front of him turn quickly to face him. In the dim light Wolf saw also the dull glint of the man’s six-gun a moment before it spat fire. Flinging himself to one side, Wolf returned the fire, the almost simultaneous roar of the two guns filling the place with a deafening blast. But as the intruder’s bullet thudded into the log wall behind him, Wolf’s slug appeared to have struck home. The fellow crashed backward to the hard-packed dirt floor. Even on the floor, however, the fellow was game. He fired up at Wolf again, the flame from his six-gun lancing up from the floor. Wolf felt the bullet burn past his cheek, aimed quickly at the flash and fired again.

  This time he brought a cry of pain from the intruder, and to Wolf’s surprise the man scrambled to his feet and lurched back out through the doorway, taking the blanket with him. Wolf stepped to the doorway and saw the fellow fall to the ground just before the corral, then stagger to his feet once again and carry himself on for a few more yards before collapsing in the shadows of the pines on the other side of the corral.

  Juanita was at his side by this time. “Are you all right, Wolf?”

  “I’m fine,” Wolf said. “Stay here. He’s down, but he may still be dangerous.”

  He left the shack, ducked low and circled toward the spot beyond the corral where he had seen the man go down. When he came upon the still body from behind, he found the man facing back toward the line shack, his six-gun in his hand, ready.

  There was no moon, but Wolf could see well enough to take the Colt from the fellow’s hand and then kneel beside him. The man groaned as Wolf felt his chest. He pulled away a warm, bloodied hand.

  “Juanita!” he called. “Give me a hand!” Between the two of them they were able to carry the man into the line shack and place him down on Wolf’s cot. A dirty remnant of a candle Juanita had found earlier gave them what little light they needed. In its guttering light the two wounds in the man’s chest were brutally apparent. One of the bullets had struck the man high in the chest, shattering the shoulder; but it was the second bullet, lower in the chest and from which a steady stream of rich dark blood was pulsing, that would prove to be the fatal one, even as Juanita labored to stem the flow.

  Wolf felt an ache as he saw how young the fellow was. He had not had much of a chance to notice this member of Reno’s gang when he had been brought to their camp at the pass. But now in this dim light he found himself studying the youthful lines of the man’s face and thinking only of the waste it represented. His hair was reddish and there were a few light freckles over his nose and cheeks. He could not have been more than twenty years of age.

  The young fellow’s eyes flickered opened and he turned his head slightly to look at Wolf. “Damn,” he whispered, sounding like a kid who had just tried to fill a straight. “I must have missed you both times.”

  “You did that,” Wolf said.

  “I should have taken off my spurs.”

  “Next time you’ll be more careful.”

  “Hell,” the young man replied with reckless truth, “there won’t be no next time.”

  Wolf looked at Juanita. She looked away. The young cowboy was right, of course.

  Wolf looked back at the dying man. “Where’s Johnny Reno?”

  “He’s waiting for me in Lawson.”

  “He sent you back to get me?”

  The fellow nodded. “In case those other two guys ... He said the fewer we have to split with ... the better.” The man smiled with a sudden awareness. “Guess maybe that’s why Johnny sent me on back to see what happened. Now he’s got my share too ...” He closed his eyes and grimaced in sudden pain. “So
nofabitch,” he whispered tightly.

  Wolf got to his feet and looked down at the dying man, a young cowboy who had known only how to follow his six-gun to this line shack and who was too young to know much else—except at the end how skillfully Reno had used him.

  Johnny Reno had sent him back to be killed—and had managed to get Wolf to pull the trigger for him.

  Eight

  As soon as Reno crested the ridge and started along the flat, he could feel the first faint touches of a wind chill enough to have come all the way from Canada. He thumbed back his hat to let the cool wind dry the sweat on his forehead. The day had been a scorcher, considering the time of the year.

  He looked behind him. Rose was still riding well back of them, sitting her horse wearily, a sullen look on her face. Wes was close behind Reno, a sour scowl on his face as well. A fine brace of traveling companions, Reno thought to himself with some amusement. Then he looked ahead of him toward the valley.

  The trail ran level across the top of the pass for about a quarter of a mile before breaking down in a gentle slope to the floor of the valley. From there it disappeared into the well-watered grasslands running north to where the valley ended in a low thrusting of hills. The town of Lawson had been planted alongside a stream just this side of those hills. From where he sat his horse, Reno could see the glint of the late-afternoon sunlight on the town’s windows.

  Pulling up beside him, Wes indicated the nest of buildings with a nod of his head. “That the place?”

  “That’s Lawson.”

  “About time,” Wes said crossly, as if the time it had taken since the Montana border was entirely Reno’s fault. “Be damn glad to get there.”