Dead Man's Trail (9781101606957) Read online

  “All’s clear!” came the man’s deep, Southern-accented voice. “They’re all dead.” Then, a little lower as he looked into the distance: “All’s that’s still here, I’m sayin’.”

  Yakima kept his Yellowboy aimed straight out in front of him but eased the pressure on its trigger as he strode forward. He was a big, long-haired, green-eyed, rawboned man with cherry red skin, in a buckskin shirt under a heavy buckskin mackinaw, faded Levi’s jeans, and high-topped moccasins. He wore a dirty gray scarf under his black hat, knotted over his left shoulder. The hands holding the rifle were clad in gloves; the right glove had its fingers cut off for easy shooting.

  Such an imposing figure was the one that his and Lewis’s savior saw as Yakima moved toward him, and the man seemed to hesitate a little, wisely, staring warily in the way every man greets a stranger in this harsh, merciless land. Especially a big green-eyed half-breed. The jade eyes set against the chiseled, granite-hard, red-brown face always evoked pause, sometimes trepidation, often downright belligerence.

  Yakima was about to throw up his own hand in affable greeting when a rifle barked. He jerked with a start and raised the Yellowboy again in both hands, raking the area around him carefully. Not seeing a shooter nearby, he flicked his gaze to the stranger, aiming the Yellowboy at the man atop the ridge. The so-called savior must have been setting a trap for him and Lewis.

  Yakima frowned.

  No.

  The man stumbled forward, dropped the big rifle in his right hand, the hat in his left, and, clutching his belly, tumbled straight forward. He fell over the side of the ridge, turning a stiff somersault as he plunged behind a thick tangle of wild mahogany and piñons.

  Yakima lurched forward. A man lay belly-down on the ground to his left, facing the ridge. Yakima saw the scarred face and long, tangled, greasy auburn hair of Wyoming Joe himself. Joe was turning toward Yakima and extending a carbine from the octagonal maw of which gray smoke curled. The gang leader, showing blood across his chest and shoulders, stretched his lips back from his teeth in a grimace as he brought the carbine to bear on Yakima.

  The half-breed fired three quick rounds and watched all three puff dust from Joe’s brown wool-lined vest and the checked shirt beneath it, causing a pendant hanging by a leather cord from his neck to jounce wildly. Wyoming Joe rolled onto his back with a sigh, as though he were merely going to sleep, and then jerked his arms and legs as he died.

  Yakima ran ahead through the brush and rocks, bulled his way through a heavy stand of cedar and chokecherry. He stopped ten feet from the base of the sandstone ridge. The black man with the big rifle lay belly-down in a pool of blood oozing out beneath his brown wool coat.

  The half-breed couldn’t tell if he was breathing.

  “Easy there,” he said, setting his rifle down and kneeling to grab one of the man’s shoulders gently and roll him onto his back. “Easy, partner.”

  The man didn’t hear him. His broad jaws, lightly covered in a gray-flecked beard, hung slack. Full pink lips were stretched slightly back from thick, square white teeth. His chocolate brown eyes stared sightlessly up past Yakima at the cold blue sky yawning to accept him.

  Chapter 2

  “I’ll be seein’ y’all in hell soon, you yellow-livered sons o’ bitches! You’re killin’ an innocent man here!”

  Glendolene Mendenhour jerked her head up from a light doze at the man’s intoned warning that vaulted above the thudding of the stage horses and the squawking of the Concord coach’s thoroughbraces. She turned her head, elegantly adorned with a sleek marten-fur hat, toward the stage door on her right, and stared out past the drifting dust kicked up by the galloping team.

  They were just now entering Wolfville, in the Wyoming Territory, and in the broad main street stood a tall wooden platform that she knew to be a gallows. A crowd of men as well as women—and, for heaven’s sake, children!—was gathered around the death-dealing platform, as solemn as a church congregation. A few dogs milling with the crowd were the only ones making any noise, but suddenly above their barking sounded a wooden scrape and a man’s agonized scream.

  Close on the scream’s heels, the crowd expelled a loud, victorious roar, several men pumping their fists in the air. The cacophony was so sudden and loud that one of the dogs gave a yelp and ran, tail between its legs, toward a gap between two of the main street’s clapboard-sided business buildings. As the stage driver gave a bellow nearly equally as loud as the crowd’s roar, the stage swerved toward the left side of the street and slowed until it came to a stop in front of the Andrews & Meechum Stage Line office, which shared the low, shake-shingled building with the Wells Fargo office.

  Glendolene only glanced at the building out the stage’s left door before looking out the right door window again, blinking against the dust that caught up to the stage in thick waves rife with the stench of ground horse manure.

  She couldn’t see much of the gallows because of the crowd milling around it, but as the shotgun messenger opened the door and she hiked her wool skirts up beneath her long brown wolf-fur coat to step down to the wooden platform he’d placed in the dusty street for her and the coach’s three other passengers, the crowd parted slightly. She stepped to one side, squinting against the coppery late-afternoon sunshine that only partly warmed the chill December air, and found her stomach tightening.

  She was unaware of the grimace twisting her face as she stared at the gallows, beneath the open trapdoor of which a man dangled at the end of a rope. No, not dangled. He appeared to be dancing there beneath the gallows, almost as though he were performing one of the old German dance steps Glendolene had frequently witnessed in a dance hall in her hometown of Belle Fourche, in the Dakota Territory—the old folk dances where the dancers lift their knees high, nearly to their chests, and thrust them down again while crossing their arms on their chests and nodding their heads.

  Only this man who danced from the rope beneath the gallows did not have his arms crossed on his chest. They were tied behind his back. He wore no black hood, as Glendolene thought she’d heard that condemned men wore when they were executed in such a fashion. This man’s long, stringy light brown hair danced about his head, the bangs sliding across his eyes. He stretched his lips back from his teeth, and they shone in a hard white line against the dark brown of his sunburned face as his head jerked and he continued to dance the bizarre old folk dance that Glendolene remembered from her childhood.

  He danced with such vigor that one of his boots slipped down his right ankle; when he kicked that leg again the boot dropped into the street beneath him. The crowd had fallen nearly silent again as the men, women, and children stood in rapt attention as the man kicked and twisted at the end of the rope. Glendolene could hear the creaking of the straining hemp. A towheaded boy of maybe six or seven broke away from the crowd, ran toward the hanging man, and stooped to pluck the boot off the street. The boy turned, smiling broadly, and held the trophy proudly above his head.

  A man whom Glendolene recognized as Sheriff Dave Neumiller dashed to the boy and, holding a sawed-off shotgun straight up in one hand, grabbed the boot from the boy with the other before tossing the boot back down beneath where the hanging man’s kicks were losing their vigor, and brusquely shoved the boy back into the crowd.

  Glendolene’s knees had turned to warm mud. Now as she swung around to walk around the stage to the Snowy Range Hotel just beyond it, a warm wave washed over her, and she dropped to her knees in the street. She heard her dress tear beneath the wolf-fur coat.

  She’d seen men dead before. Dead men aplenty. Even a wagonload of dead Indian women and Indian children killed by the army back in Dakota, but somehow knowing that her husband was responsible not only for this death but for the celebration around it made her sick to her stomach.

  “Oh, God, no,” she heard herself rasp, both sickened by the spectacle and embarrassed by her reaction to i
t.

  “Mrs. Mendenhour!” said the shotgun messenger, reaching down to wrap his hand around her arm. He was a stocky, ginger-bearded man dressed in a dusty brown vest and striped trousers, with a grimy cream duster sliding around his boot tops.

  “I’m all right, Mr. Coble. I’m—”

  “Glendolene!”

  The familiar voice jerked her head up. Her husband, the prosecutor of Big Horn County, was striding toward her from the crowd still milling around the hanged man. Sheriff Neumiller was behind him, looking customarily smug and holding his shotgun and smoking a fat cigar, canting his head a little to one side to inspect the prosecutor’s wife slouched in the dirt. Lee Mendenhour dropped to his knees beside her and placed his hand on her back. He, too, was smoking a cigar and held it now in his beringed left hand.

  “Are you all right? Damn, you don’t look good. The ride in from the ranch too rough for you?”

  Glendolene looked at her husband—he was a cinnamon-bearded, handsome man in his late twenties, and his tailor-made suit beneath his long, natty elk-hide coat with a rabbit-fur collar fit his slender, well-proportioned frame perfectly. His beaver slouch hat was tipped at a rakish angle, opposite the wing of thick auburn hair slanting over his right brown eye.

  “I’m fine, Lee,” Glendolene said, letting him help her stand. “Just stumbled over my own clumsy feet, I guess.” She glanced down at her elk-skin boots. “I haven’t worn these boots yet this winter, and . . .”

  “Sure?”

  “Yes, of course I’m sure.” Glendolene glanced past the administering eyes of her young, confident, accomplished husband on whose breath she detected a few fingers of celebratory brandy, to the hanged man who had now stopped dancing the macabre dance at the end of the rope. The man’s body hung slack now, neck elongated, chin dipped toward his chest. He turned ever so gently this way and that, and his chin slid across his chest as he moved.

  The crowd was slowly disbursing around him, and a low hum of conversation sounded along with the occasional screech of one of the painted ladies enjoying a midweek business boom over at the Silk Slipper Saloon & Sporting Parlor on the far side of the street, beyond the gallows.

  Glendolene cleared her throat as she stared at the hanging body, one boot lying in the street beneath it. “Is that . . . ?”

  “Preston Betajack, yes. You shouldn’t have seen that, Glen. What a time for your stage to roll into town!” He thrust his dimpled, confident chin toward the jehu, Charlie Adlard, a middle-aged man standing nearby. “Adlard, couldn’t you see what was happening here? Good Lord, man, you might have stopped outside town and waited for this grisly affair to be finished!”

  Part of Glendolene was glad she’d seen it. It gave her a better idea of who her husband was. Maybe it would help her make up her mind whether she wanted to stay married to him, a question that had been haunting her for several months now.

  “It’s all right. It’s fine,” she said as he took her carpetbag and steamer trunk from the shotgun messenger, Melvin Coble, who was unloading the coach’s rear luggage boot. “I’d just like to go on into the hotel and have a hot bath. It was a chilly ride in from the ranch.”

  “Certainly, dear,” the young prosecutor said. “He turned to a tall, broad-shouldered Indian standing nearby and who Glendolene knew worked for the hotel. He said, “Luther, would you please take my wife’s bags on over to the hotel? Room twenty-two.”

  The Indian accepted the nickel proffered by young attorney Mendenhour and dropped the coin without looking at it in a pocket of his worn duck trousers. As he took both bags in his large red-brown hands, Glendolene could not help watching him, feeling a flush rise in her cheeks as she remembered a man with similar hands, with a similar build, and also with native blood running through his veins. She studied Luther’s broad back clad in a black wool vest, remembering the grizzly claw necklace that dangled down the broad chest of this other man she’d known for a short time, as the full-blood turned toward the hotel beyond the stage station depot.

  Glendolene looked away from the retreating Indian’s back, the man’s long blue-black hair braided with small gray feathers hanging down from beneath his bullet-crowned black hat to brush across his shoulders, but the memory of the caress of those other hands—large brick-red hands, rough but gentle—was slow to leave her.

  Another flush rose in her cheeks when she saw the sheriff and several other men, including Lee’s assistant, Mark Pettitbone, staring at her from where they stood near the stage. The men, business associates of Lee, had followed him over to the coach, and they studied her now with faint but obvious male interest, smiling as they puffed on their cigars. Glendolene was well aware, by the way she’d been turning men’s heads since she was barely out of diapers, that she was a beautiful woman. But the men back home were able to conceal their goatish lust a little better than the breed of male out here. She supposed it was because that, outside of sporting parlors, even plain-faced young females with lush bodies and full sets of teeth were rare in these parts. The lascivious looks she attracted from even the most civilized males, like the ones she evoked now, caused a pang of revulsion to tighten her smile.

  “Sheriff Neumiller,” she said in greeting with a cordial nod, watching the lawman’s lusty eyes flick furtively across her. “Mr. Pettitbone.”

  “Now, Glendolene,” said Sheriff Neumiller, “I thought we agreed you’d call me Dave.”

  “Dave it is,” she said with her winning smile, though wishing only to get off to her room to be by herself. “How’ve you been?”

  “Very well, very well.”

  “Glendolene and I are catching tomorrow’s stage for Belle Fourche,” Lee told the two men, wrapping an arm around his young wife’s slender shoulders. “We’re heading there to spend Christmas with the aunt and uncle who raised her. And after what we accomplished here today, I do indeed feel it’s time for a break.”

  “We did well here today, Mr. Mendenhour,” said Pettitbone, brushing a tobacco speck from his thick red mustache set beneath a fine, pale nose. His round spectacles reflected the west-angling light beneath his crisp bowler hat. “Like the circuit judge said over drinks this morning, this execution will send a message to brigands throughout the county that no matter who they are or where they come from, they must toe the line along with everyone else!”

  The law assistant smugly puffed on the cigar and grinned at Glendolene, showing off.

  “Yes, but what about Floyd Betajack?” Glendolene said, glancing with concern at her husband. “Won’t he . . . ?”

  “Enough business talk,” Lee said, straining slightly with his reassuring smile. “Fellas, my wife makes it to town so seldom, I’d hate for us to bore her ears off. I’m going to get her situated over at the hotel, and then I’ll be down to finish up business for the day.”

  “Enjoy your trip, Glendolene,” said Sheriff Neumiller, lifting his gray felt Montana-creased hat as Lee ushered her off toward the hotel.

  “Thank you, Dave. Be well, gentlemen!”

  She saw that several armed men with badges stood around in the street near the hotel’s broad wooden veranda. They regarded her a little bashfully but also officiously, and they gave her husband cordial nods. She knew why they were there. And she also knew why Lee had decided to accompany her to Belle Fourche.

  Because of Floyd Betajack, sometimes called Old Man Betajack and also—she’d overheard this from some of her husband’s and father-in-law’s ranch hands out at the Chain Link—known as Big-Bad Betajack, who had some of the most formidable, cold-blooded gunmen on the frontier riding for him.

  One of the sheriff’s deputies, cradling a shotgun in the crook of his right arm, pinched his hat brim to Glendolene, who nodded at the man before turning to glance once more at Preston Betajack hanging slack from the gallows, his lifeless body clad in a short, fringed elk-hide jacket turning in a chill, building wind.


  Chapter 3

  “Who you s’pose he is?” Lewis said as he and Yakima stared at the black man’s unmoving body at the bottom of the ridge from which he’d fallen. The ends of his scarf blew gently in a building breeze.

  “Don’t know.”

  “Poor ole fella. Saved our bacon only to be killed by a dyin’ desperado for his trouble.”

  Yakima stared down at the man.

  They’d gone through the pockets of his shabby coat, wool vest, calico shirt, and twill trousers. They’d found nothing except a silver-chased watch and an old supply list scribbled in pencil. Yakima had removed the man’s shell belt and holstered Russian .44 from around his waist. The shell belt was half-filled with .50-caliber rounds to feed the big Sharps rifle, commonly called a Big Fifty, and .44 cartridges for the pistol. The rusty six-shooter needed oil, and the walnut grips were loose and cracked, indicating the gun had probably mostly been used for grinding coffee beans and jerky, maybe pounding the occasional horseshoe nail.

  Yakima looked at the blood soaking the man’s vest and calico shirt about midway between his breastbone and his belly button. Then he shook his head against his guilt at the man giving his life for him and Lewis, total strangers, and the senselessness of being killed by a desperado who likely would have died only a few minutes later from the slugs Yakima and Lewis had slung into him.

  So damn senseless, like Faith three years ago in Colorado. . . .

  The demons inside Yakima were limbering up, so he shook them back into the far reaches of his consciousness and looked around him and Lewis. “He must have a horse behind the ridge somewhere. You stay with him while I look.”

  Yakima rested his Yellowboy over his shoulder and walked over to where a fissure ran up the side of the ridge in a jagged line, offering a way to the top. Twenty minutes later, he walked around the ridge’s far eastern side, leading a long-legged grullo with black legs from the knees down and with a black mane and tail. He also led a dark bay mule wearing a packsaddle. Lewis, sitting on a rock beside the dead man and holding a canteen, heard the hoof clomps of the two animals and stood.