Border Snakes Page 10

  Ahead, at the end of the rope slanting down from the left hip of a lineback dun, a man in a dusty cream slouch hat adorned with silver conchos whooped and hollered as he ground his black, spurred boots into the mount’s lunging flanks. Hawk groaned as the ground shot out from beneath him, and horse and rider galloped off down the arroyo, Hawk fishtailing along behind, blinking against the sand and rocks being kicked up by the lineback’s hammering hooves.

  “Got me a big ole fish on the line!” the rider whooped, showing tobacco-stained teeth inside his scraggly beard.

  Hawk gritted his teeth as the horseman dragged him along the arroyo. He could feel his sleeves and jeans tearing, feel the burning of the rocks and sand rawhiding his knees and elbows.

  In spite of the pain and the violent hammering, he lifted his forearms and grabbed the taut rope with his hands, pulling, trying futilely to unseat the rider. Hawk couldn’t see much through the sifting dust and flying gravel, but the rider had apparently dallied his lariat around his saddle horn.

  After he’d galloped a hundred yards, whooping and yapping like a crazed coyote, the rider swerved his horse up the arroyo’s low right bank. Hawk followed about fifteen yards behind the horse, his hat off, his hair in his eyes, his knees and elbows on fire, the rope cutting into his arms. Fishtailing up the bank, Hawk lowered his head as the horseman dragged him through mesquite snags and over greasewood shrubs and hard-edged chunks of black volcanic rock.

  Branches snapped. Rocks rattled. The dun’s hooves thudded loudly.

  The mesquite and greasewood branches clawed at Hawk’s face and scalp. He felt the icy burns oozing blood.

  When he was clear of the shrubs, he looked up and peeled his eyes half open. The rider swerved just left of a saguaro, almost hitting the tall, one-armed cactus. The near collision startled the gent, and he jerked sideways in his saddle, nearly toppling his horse.

  On impulse, Hawk leaned as far right as he could without rolling over. The movement was enough to angle him over to the saguaro’s right side. He could hear the horse whinny angrily, its hooves raking the ground.

  Working quickly, Hawk set a shoulder snug against the base of the saguaro and peered around the front of it. His tormenter had regained his balance and was savagely raking the dun with his spurs.

  Behind him, the rope sagged slightly.

  The horse lunged off its rear hooves.

  Hawk felt the violent jerk as the rope pulled taut once more, but he ground his left shoulder into the saguaro, ignoring the thorns gouging through his shirtsleeve. Desperately, he ground his boot toes into the sand.

  The horse screamed again, and as Hawk peered across the front of the saguaro at it, the horse jerked hard right. The saddle slipped down its right side a quarter second before the horse hit the ground on its right hip as it twisted its neck and head up, trying in vain to keep its balance.

  The rider gave an indignant cry as he rolled down the side of the horse, still clinging to the saddle. He gave another cry as the floundering horse’s right shoulder fell atop the man’s right leg, pinning it between the stirrup and the ground.

  He bellowed, gritting his teeth and throwing his head back on his shoulders.

  The horse whinnied and struggled to right itself, the saddle falling farther and farther down its side, the rope raking across the left side of the rider’s neck. Hawk scrambled back on his hands and knees. When he had enough slack in the rope, which the horse continued to jerk as it tried to rise, jostling the half-attached saddle, he whipped it up and over his head and tossed it away.

  His knees burned like liquid fire, and the ground pitched and swayed beneath his boots. But Hawk sleeved blood from his left brow and staggered around the saguaro just as the horse gained all four hooves with a final lunge and galloped away.

  The dragger screamed as the weight lifted from his right leg, and rolled onto his butt, propping himself up on his elbows. His hat was gone, and sandy-blond hair hung in his eyes. He stretched his thick, bearded lips back from his teeth painfully and panted.

  His right leg was bloody where the bone had pushed through his deerskin breeches, just above his knee.

  “Ayyy!”the man cried, throwing his head back on his shoulders, sobbing. “Oh! Oh! Oh, mercy, Jesus!”

  Both of Hawk’s six-shooters remained in their holsters. The Rogue Lawman unsnapped the keeper thong and slid the Russian from its cross-draw holster, raising the silver-chased iron and ratcheting back the hammer.

  Hawk snarled, “He ain’t here, friend. It’s just me and you.”

  “Not quite!”

  Hawk wheeled. His ears were ringing. That must be why he hadn’t heard the clomps of the horses that were now moving up out of the arroyo from which Hawk himself had been dragged.

  They were seven men on well-set-up mounts, some Mexicans, some Americans. They rode abreast, all clomping through the mesquites and creosote shrubs at the same time, spaced from eight to fifteen yards apart.

  All holding either rifles or pistols aimed with casual menace at Hawk.

  All except the man who rode slightly ahead of the others and whom Hawk took to be the leader. He held a Winchester straight up, its butt snugged against his buckskin-clad thigh. He was a tall, rangy man with anvil-wide shoulders and long silver-gray hair gathered into several thin, rawhide-wrapped braids. His gray hair was in stark contrast to his clean-lined, brick-red face that boasted a brushy gray mustache, its ends upswept and waxed to fine points.

  His eyes were blue as the desert sky on a windswept winter day, and they surveyed Hawk and the fallen dragger from deep sockets mantled by grizzled brows.

  Hawk held his cocked Russian half out from his side as the gray-haired man and the others closed on him in a sauntering, shambling pace. Their horses blew. Tack creaked. Shod hooves clipped stones. Dust rose, gilded by sunlight.

  “Fuck,” groused one of the riders approaching from the leader’s left flank. “What’d he do to you, Merle?”

  On the ground behind Hawk, Merle groaned and panted. “Ah, Jesus, my horse fell. Oh, God, I’ve never known pain this bad!”

  “You were supposed to lasso the son of a bitch and drag him to us, Merle,” the leader said. “Why in the hell did you cut up this way?”

  “Didn’t mean to,” Merle sobbed. “My horse spooked at a rattler, so I figured I’d circle around. Then this goddamn saguaro got in the way, and that son of a bitch wrapped the rope around it, and sure as hell, my dun went down on top of me!”

  Merle kicked his good leg and threw his head back on his shoulders, gritting his teeth. “Oh, please, boys! For chrissakes, don’t just sit there. Help me!”

  Hawk waved the Russian around uncertainly as the men slowly circled him, the leader heading around Hawk toward the sobbing man on the ground behind him.

  Hawk’s belly was tight. He was worn out and beaten up from the dragging, and he blinked blood from his left eye. He’d need that eye when the shooting started, or he’d go down fast without taking so much as one of these cutthroats with him.

  “How bad you hurt, Merle?” the leader said, and Hawk turned to see the man sitting on his steeldust gelding over the dragger, leaning forward against his saddle horn and regarding Merle with bemusement. “You gonna make it?”

  Merle’s voice was losing its vigor. “My leg’s broke, Kid. Can’t you see the blood? I’m gonna need a doctor. Shoot that son of a bitch and take me to a doctor!”

  Inwardly, Hawk had flinched at the name by which the dragger had addressed the gang’s leader. No. Couldn’t be. He couldn’t have let himself get run down by the very man he’d been tracking.

  He wasn’t that goddamn careless. . . .

  “Ah, hell, Merle—look at you,” the leader said. “You’re a goner.”

  He raised his Winchester to his shoulder and fired. His horse barely flinched. The bullet plunked through Merle’s right temple and exited the opposite rear corner of Merle’s skull to smack the ground with a little dust puff.

  Merle’s head jerked
as though he’d been slapped, and then he collapsed, dead before his right shoulder hit the ground. The men sitting on their horses in a semicircle around Hawk stared at their dead companero with expressions on their craggy, hard-planed faces ranging from mild concern to sneering amusement.

  The leader ejected the spent cartridge, seated fresh, and pulled his steeldust’s head around, spurring the mount back toward Hawk. With a clattering of hooves and a rattle of bridle chains, he turned the horse so that he sat among the others, slightly ahead of them and between a rail-thin Mexican with long, black sideburns and a white-haired American with a yellow Vandyke beard and a string of Indian-dark human ears around his neck.

  The leader leaned forward on his saddle horn again, resting his Winchester barrel across his left forearm, and regarded Hawk severely. “Now, friend, I’m going to ask you real nice to throw that hogleg off in the brush over there—as far as that cholla there—see? And then I’m gonna ask you to follow it up with the one still at peace in its holster.”

  Hawk caressed the hammer of his cocked Russian with his thumb as he glanced around the hard-eyed group before him. Aching and sore and more than a little addled from the dragging, he was still trying to figure out if he’d made the dunder-headed mistake of becoming his quarry’s prey. At the same time, vaguely, he considered his options against this bunch of obvious killers.

  There weren’t many. Instead of dying in a hail of lead without even a chance of running Knife-Hand to ground, he depressed the Russian’s hammer and tossed it into the brush. He followed it up with the Colt. Then he stood there, looking grim and not a little chagrined, hands raised to his shoulders.

  13.

  A FRIEND OF GALVIN WOODS

  “NOW,” the gang’s leader said in his resonate, authoritative voice as he continued leaning forward and narrowing one eye at Hawk, “please tell me who in the winds of blazing fury you are, and why you’re trackin’ me.”

  “Kid Reno, then,” Hawk said. Odd to see a man of Reno’s years—at least as old as Hawk—called “Kid.”

  “Kid Reno.” The man winked and smiled proudly. He had a wasted face, and Hawk remembered Saradee telling about the Kid’s health problem. “But you haven’t done me the courtesy of telling me who you are.”

  “Hall,” Hawk said. “Gideon Hall.”

  If Reno had heard of Hawk, like so many others had by now, the outlaw would likely know why Hawk was tracking Knife-Hand. Hawk wanted to keep that card facedown as long as he could.

  “And your business?”

  Hawk hiked a shoulder slightly. “I heard you were a man who knew your business. Sorta thought you might be someone I’d want to throw in with.”

  “Oh, you wanna throw in with me, huh?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Throw in with me for what?”

  “For . . . whatever it is you got goin’,” Hawk said.

  Reno frowned with mock sincerity. “And who is it who told you about me?”

  “Fella by the name of Galvin Woods out of Tucumcari.” Hawk’s mind was working fast. “Told me he’d ridden with you once . . . under a different name.”

  Reno stared at Hawk, not buying it. “Galvin Woods.”

  “That’s right. Can’t remember what handle he said he went by back then.”

  “Galvin Woods,” Reno said. “Hmm.” He paused. “And he gave me a good recommendation, did he?”

  “Fair enough.”

  Silence.

  Reno and his men stared at Hawk.

  None of them was buying Hawk’s story. Oh, well, Hawk thought. It wasn’t a bad story, or a bad alias, on short notice. Galvin Woods was an old Welshman who’d farmed near Hawk’s old ranch in Dakota Territory. Hawk could tell Reno why he was really looking for him, but then they’d all know who Hawk really was. Likely their knowing he was no friend to outlaws wouldn’t put him in any more favorable light than that which he was already in—no matter how Reno felt about his former partner, Knife-Hand.

  If Reno wanted Knife-Hand dead, he likely could have killed him himself. He didn’t need Hawk to do it for him. Besides, Hawk had sort of figured he’d kill Reno when he’d gotten the information he needed. . . .

  Kid Reno glanced at the men to his right. He returned his gaze to Hawk and fashioned a menacing half smile on his sharp, pasty face. “Mister, I believe you’re a bounty hunter. Pinkerton, maybe. No man who’d want to ride with me would be announcing my name around the territory. Especially no man who’d ever ridden with a man who’d ridden with me.” He blinked. “If you catch my drift. . . .”

  He glanced to his left, then tossed his head toward Hawk. “Fellas, you’ve handled bounty trackers before. Been a while, though. Time to get back in trim.”

  Hawk chuckled dryly to himself as the men began to dismount, looking eager. Maybe he should have just gone ahead and told the truth. Instead, he’d bluffed himself into drawing on an inside straight.

  Seven men against one. And he was still addled from the dragging, not to mention stove up and sore. . . .

  They moved in on him quickly, circling, a couple glowering hatefully, a couple of others grinning devilishly. Hawk backed up and shuffled around slowly, trying to get his feet firmly beneath him, raising his hands.

  He glanced at the pistols on their hips. They’d left their rifles in their saddle scabbards. Maybe Hawk could get his hands on one of the pistols and take a few of these rawhiders to hell with him. . . .

  Kid Reno remained on his horse, leaning forward and grinning down with expectant satisfaction, like a Roman general at a gladiatorial match.

  Reno’s men moved closer, closer, starting to feint and raise their fists, shuffling their feet. In the corner of his left eye, Hawk saw a man lunge toward him. Hawk leaned back, and the fist only grazed his jaw. Wheeling, he raised his own right fist and felt the man’s nose give with a chewy crack of breaking gristle, blood flying across the man’s face in all directions.

  The man grunted and stepped back, eyes crossing slightly as he continued moving his balled fists out in front of him. His nose began swelling, turning a dull purple.

  A couple of his compatriots chuckled, but he only glared at Hawk and hardened his jaws, nostrils flaring.

  “That’s it, Santos,” Kid Reno encourage from his saddle. “Stay with it. Stay with it, now.”

  Another man lunged in suddenly and hammered a right cross against Hawk’s cheek. Hawk ducked an attempted left follow-up, then rammed his right fist into the man’s gut. The man groaned and staggered backward, sucking wind.

  Another man stepped toward Hawk and landed a sound right cross on Hawk’s chin. Hawk’s jaws clattered together, and for a moment the men jostling around him, trying to gain position, blurred and doubled. Fury burned through Hawk, and he ground his heels into the sand and gravel, and bolted forward, straight into a Mexican in a straw sombrero.

  The sudden offensive took the man by surprise, and he gave a little cry of alarm as Hawk head-butted him, driving the man to his knees, then smashing his right fist into the man’s cheek, opening a four-inch cut spurting blood. Pivoting right, Hawk drove his left fist into a fat belly clad in a faded blue shirt and, as he heard the deep-throated groan, pivoted to his left, and broke another nose, feeling the warm blood bathe his knuckles and wrist.

  “Son of a bitch!” he heard behind him as he ducked a fist adorned with three silver rings and a miniature pinky pendant.

  The fist whistled over Hawk’s head, and when he came up, he slammed both his own tightly clenched fists into the underside of the beringed gent’s chin, hearing the teeth clatter and crack and seeing the blood from the man’s tongue dribbling over the man’s lower lip.

  As the man spit out several bits of broken teeth, cursing, Hawk grabbed the bone-handled Colt in the man’s cross-draw holster. He’d gotten it out and half raised it before a gun butt slammed against the back of his head. He stared at the ground, and the rocks and tufts of wiry brown grass shifted and pitched wildly.

  A rooster
crowed in his ears, and his knees turned soft as axle dope.

  “Ouch!” someone whooped. “Damn, Ed, you smacked him good.”

  A delighted laugh.

  Hawk dropped to his hands and knees, gritting his teeth and blinking his eyes, trying to clear them. He gave a savage grunt as he tried heaving himself back up, but he hadn’t risen two inches before someone drove the toe of a boot deep into his ribs. Suddenly he was on his back, goatheads and sharp pebbles cutting through his shirt, and far up in the brassy sky, a dot-sized hawk soared.

  Hawk’s side was on fire. He could do little but stare up at the sky, waves of pain washing through him on a tide of raw fury. And then he felt brusque hands pulling him up, and a fist smashed deep into his solar plexus, forcing the breath from his lungs with a loud, “Haaah!” of exploding air.

  He bent forward. A pin-striped knee smashed his forehead. He flew up and back. Arms caught him under his own arms, and he was hauled back to his feet.

  He had only just started to set his boots and regain his balance when someone clobbered his right ear. Someone else clobbered his left, and Hawk spun, hearing himself groaning and sighing, his boots crackling gravel and creosote branches.

  His attackers grunted and swung, grunted and swung, laughing, hooting, howling like lobos. Their fists connected with Hawk’s cheeks, chin, and temples with solid, crunching smacks. Hawk staggered this way and that, stumbling, the blows steering him in circles like a weather vane in a fickle gale, and when he’d fall his assailants picked him back up again and started the entire savage dance over.

  In the midst of it all, his senses dulled. All but his hearing and the ringing in his ears, that was. Below that, he could hear the cacophony of the jubilant savages, the thumps of boots—his own and those of the men around him—and the raucous chings of ground-raked spurs.

  His eyes swelled and knots sprouted on his head. The cool wetness of blood trickled from his torn lips and brows. His ribs felt as though they’d been pierced by a half dozen Apache arrows, and he found himself no longer even trying to raise his hands to deflect the blows, but only wishing to fall and remain fallen and to sleep.