Border Snakes Read online

  It being winter, there was a chill in the air that not even the large fire of stout mesquite and piñon logs could ward off completely.

  “Gideon?”

  Hawk turned his head to her.

  “Tomorrow, I’d like you to leave.”

  Hawk studied her closely. His face must have betrayed his shock.

  Understanding flickered in his haunted eyes when he realized that the man she was looking at was not the Gideon Hawk of years ago, before Linda and Jubal had passed. Not the family man, Hawk. The man she saw sitting here in her candlelit parlor was Gideon Hawk, the outlaw lawman.

  Hawk found that he had tightened his belly. Now he released it along with a held breath. His soul felt like lead—an anvil-like depression hammering his shoulders straight down without mercy. He nodded.

  She rose slowly and moved toward him, staring down at him grimly, the flames sliding shadows across her face, showing in her eyes. The fire cracked and fluttered. She pressed her hands together, mashing her fingertips together nervously, pensively.

  “This last night, Mr. Hawk, you’re welcome to share my bed.”

  Hawk arched a shocked brow. For several seconds, words defeated him. “You don’t have to do that.”

  “Men,” she scoffed. “What makes you think I’m doing it for you?”

  She turned and, holding his gaze with hers, walked across the cabin to her room. She disappeared inside, leaving the door open behind her.

  Hawk sat there for a time, elbows on his knees. Finally, he ran his hands back through his hair, heaved up from his chair, and followed her. Inside the small but neatly appointed bedroom, she’d lit the red lamp on the table beside the bed. She stood beside it naked, reaching up to let her hair down.

  Her body was heavy-breasted and willowy, and in the lamp’s red glow her skin shone like polished brass.

  Letting her hair, as black as crow’s feathers, tumble down across her shoulders, she walked toward him. He placed his hands on her slender shoulders. She closed her eyes and set her cheek against his chest, and then he felt her hands slowly, expertly unbuttoning his pants.

  They made love hungrily, tenderly, wordlessly. When they finished, she rolled away from him. Hawk got up, gathered his clothes, and returned to his own room.

  In the morning, before dawn, he left.

  15.

  BUZZARD BAIT

  TWO weeks later, camped by an unnamed creek in the lonely wilds of central Arizona, Hawk drew deep on a half-smoked quirley and let the smoke out slowly through his nose that bulged where it had been broken and had not healed properly. The nose complimented the pocked and pitted scars of his cheeks and lips, and the short, hoof-shaped knot of gristly white tissue hanging like a half-moon above his left brow.

  His back to his fire for its warmth this crisp mountain night, he stared into the night-shrouded pines and rocks that tumbled off toward the murmuring stream.

  He felt hollow and used up, but he’d gotten used to it before. He’d get used to it again. Though now there seemed a hard finality about it.

  After leaving the ranch of Gloria Hughes—or, rather, seeing that last sad, faintly accusing look in the woman’s eyes—he’d realized there was only one clear path for him from now on. Really, he’d been on that path for a long, long time while only a small part of him had believed he was still partly the man he’d been before Linda and Jubal had died.

  Now there was no doubt. There’d never again be any hope of his ever returning to a less violent life.

  And that was all right now that it was straight in his head. There was no more Gloria or Harry Hughes, but only another couple of men to kill—Kid Reno and Wilbur “Knife-Hand” Monjosa.

  And so it was with an ear-ringing tolling of fate’s bells that he took another drag from his quirley and opened the newspaper he’d picked up when he’d passed through Prescott earlier that day, and saw a headline near the bottom of the second page: “Quartermaster Depot at Fort Bowie Robbed.”

  A caption just below the headline announced: “Six Cases of Winchester Repeating Rifles Stolen by Eight Murderous Desperadoes!”

  Hawk’s heart thumped, nearly drowning the ringing in his ears. Quickly, eyes blazing and quirley smoldering between his lips, he scanned the article.

  The robbery had occurred the day before the paper had been printed, sixteen days ago. The rifles had been taken by eight men masquerading as cavalry soldiers. They’d killed half a dozen soldiers at Fort Bowie and busted out the stockade gates with the aid of a team of army mules and the Gatling gun they’d also stolen from the depot.

  A contingent of soldiers had been dispatched to “run down the thieves and return the guns and ammunition safely to Fort Bowie before the feral Apaches can get their hands on them.” As the robbery and butchery had occurred on a moonless night, none of the thieves had been identified. When the article had been published, the wagon had been seen by several ranch hands heading southwest via old Indian trails in the region of the Gila River.

  Hawk lowered the paper slowly and closed it. He removed his quirley from between his scarred lips and stared off through the pines and the creek twinkling in the milky light of a powder horn moon.

  The only reason rifles were stolen around here was so that they could be sold to bronco Apaches or Yaquis. Was it just a coincidence that Hawk had had only a couple of months ago run into Kid Reno out here in the high-desert hills and mountains, only about a hundred miles from Fort Bowie? Reno was the most notorious contrabandista in the entire Southwest, and until recently he’d been in cahoots with another gunrunner just now building a name for himself along the border.

  Either with or without his partner, it looked very much like Kid Reno was back in business.

  Hawk’s mind churned as he walked off to check his horse and evacuate his bladder. He was glad to feel the old pull of the trail again. Now, he just needed some fresh sign.

  He went back to his bivouac, kicked dirt on his fire, and rolled up in his soogan. He thought for a while, and then he slept.

  Three bodies, partly clad in soldier blue, twisted and swayed in the hot, dry breeze.

  The ropes stretching their necks from the branch of the lone cottonwood creaked and squawked beneath the barks and mewls and bizarre, frenzied chortling of the half dozen buzzards that, spooked by Hawk’s approach, flew up to perch in the tree’s higher branches, staring hungrily down at the corpses.

  Two young men with corporal’s stripes on the bloody sleeves of their blue wool tunics and an older gent with a silver spade beard, brushy mustache, and sergeant’s stripes. All three had been hanged and shot several times, right here by the road where they’d be seen by anyone who might be following.

  A warning.

  Hawk looked the bullet-riddled corpses over. They didn’t appear too stiff yet, and the zopilotes had only just started working on them. This had probably happened less than three hours ago.

  Hawk looked around for the other members of the patrol. Odd there weren’t more bodies. Maybe the patrol had split up and only these three had been bushwhacked. That would mean the others were still after Kid Reno and the stolen rifles.

  Hawk had picked up their trail a couple of days ago. It hadn’t been all that hard to find; he’d been down here before, hunting outlaws, and he’d suspected Reno’s bunch would be following one of the main wolf trails across Arizona and into Mexico. A couple of prospectors who’d seen both the wagon and the soldiers shadowing it had put Hawk on the right one.

  Now he swung the grulla away from the cottonwood and gigged it into a lope down the trail, over the rocky, cedar-stippled shoulder of a steep volcanic mountain, heading southwest.

  It wasn’t long before he checked the mount down again, stopping dead in the trail and staring ahead, reaching down to slide his Henry repeater from the boot under his right thigh. Less than fifty yards away, a horse lay in the trail.

  Hawk raked the brush and rocks on both sides of the trail with his gaze. The only sound was the eerie piping of wa
rblers in the creosote shrubs. Nothing except the birds themselves moved.

  Hawk walked the grulla ahead. The fallen horse grew large in the trail before him, until Hawk could see a boot poking out from beneath the white belly. The boot was attached to a leg, and on the other side of the horse, a young, red-haired soldier lay belly up on the trail, pinned beneath the horse.

  Corporal stripes marked the young man’s sleeves. He had a broad, freckled face, and his light blue eyes were wide and death-glazed.

  A Colt Army with a seven-and-a-half-inch barrel lay in the dust just ahead of the corporal’s outstretched right hand. He’d been shot through his right temple and no telling how many times in his blood-bibbed chest.

  Looking around again, a worm of apprehension lifting its tail in his belly, Hawk saw two more buzzards waiting nearby—one perched on a boulder, another on the tall saguaro beside it. The carrion eaters mewled repellently, ruffling their feathers and shifting their weight from foot to foot, eagerly awaiting Hawk’s departure.

  Carefully, Hawk rode on. He found no more bodies until he pushed through gnarled mesquites lining the bank of an ancient riverbed paved in black volcanic rock washed down from a low, distant sierra. Halting the grulla at the edge of the wash, which was nearly a hundred yards across, he stopped again and stretched his gaze across the dozen or so men and horses strewn about the rocks in a shaggy line.

  Hawk grimaced and shook his head.

  The soldiers had been cut down from the opposite bank, most likely. Judging from how they lay, hardly having been given time to break formation, they’d been cut down quickly by the stolen Gatling gun.

  Hawk toed the grulla out onto the riverbed, zigzagging around the fallen men and horses. Buzzards flapped and squawked around the carrion, several holding their ground defiantly until Hawk was right up on them, then leaping airborne in a hammering whoosh of large, dusty black wings, viscera trailing from their long, hooked beaks.

  “Christ,” Hawk said, seeing how young some of the dead men were, lying sprawled in every position imaginable, some pinned beneath their horses in thick, still-wet blood pools.

  When he was nearly to the far bank, he stopped suddenly and whipped the grulla to the right. An ocotillo stood nearby with its drooping, slender branches. On the other side of the ocotillo, something moved. A buzzard squawked. A man cursed shrilly, and then a gun spoke twice, the slugs wailing off the rocky riverbed.

  The bird screamed, and then Hawk saw the black bedraggled body bounce like a ball and lay quivering, one wing extended like a shroud.

  Grinding his heels into the grulla’s flanks, Hawk galloped toward the ocotillo, swinging around the plant, turning the horse, and extending his rifle out from his right hip. Several feet from the still-quivering bird, a burly man was on his hands and knees, an Army .44 in his right hand against the ground. He was trying to get a cavalry boot under him, to push himself to his feet.

  He must have seen Hawk in the periphery of his vision. He turned his head quickly, his thin, light red hair flying about his broad, craggy face, and losing his balance, he plopped down on his butt, raising the Colt.

  “Hold it,” Hawked warned, aiming the Henry at him. “I’m friendly . . . long as you are.”

  The man blinked. His face was freckled, with a two-day growth of red beard stubble. He had a high, freckled forehead with a receding hairline, and a slight jowl. A not-so-slight paunch stretched his army-issue yellow suspenders forward. Sergeant’s stripes shone on the wash-worn sleeve of his unbuttoned tunic. A bad bullet burn across his left temple had attracted flies that weren’t as easily discouraged as the buzzard.

  The sergeant’s bleary, close-set, light blue eyes bored into Hawk. His Colt sagged, and he depressed the hammer. “Who’re you?”

  “Hawk.” He was in no mood for made-up names. “How long ago they hit you?”

  The sergeant looked around, blinking hard and shaking his head as if to clear it. “I don’t know. I reckon I was out for a while. Maybe an hour.”

  “How bad you hurt?”

  The sergeant winced as though the words themselves drilled at the wound across his bloody temple. He pressed the heel of his hand against it, then looked at his hand. “That damn Gatling gun.” He looked toward the near bank. “They bushwhacked us from them mesquites.” He looked at Hawk again. “It was Kid Reno. You a lawman?”

  “I asked you how bad you were hurt, mister.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if you can make it on your own, I’m gonna leave you here and try to catch up with Reno. Appears all your horses are dead.”

  The sergeant looked around, wincing and muttering.

  Hawk said, “I’ll be back after I run Reno down.”

  He’d started to spur the grulla ahead when he heard the ratcheting click of a gun hammer. Hawk stayed his spur, and turned to the sergeant.

  Still on his butt, the man glared at Hawk. The Colt was in his hand, aimed at Hawk’s chest, the hammer locked back.

  “I do apologize,” he said with no apology in his voice, “but I’ll be confiscatin’ that mount, mister.”

  Hawk pressed his lips together. “I don’t think so, friend.”

  “Step down. Official army business.” The sergeant grunted as he heaved himself to his feet, wincing and blinking and keeping the Colt aimed unsteadily at Hawk.

  “Don’t be a fool, sergeant. You’re in no condition . . .”

  Hawk didn’t have to finish the sentence. The sergeant had no more gained his feet before he gave a pained yelp and, lowering the Colt and clapping a hand to his battered forehead, stumbled sideways and hit the ground hard on his back. The gun clattered to the rocks beside him. He grimaced, and then, gradually, his face fell slack.

  His broad chest rose and fell slowly, deeply.

  Hawk chuffed as he glared down at the man coldly. “Goddamn fool.”

  He looked around, pondering the situation.

  Finally, he stepped down from the grulla, grabbed the sergeant by both ankles, and dragged him over to the bank, depositing the comatose soldier in the shade beneath the mesquites. He wrestled him into a half-sitting position against the bole of one of the trees, then retrieved a nearly filled canteen from one of the dead horses and propped it beside the sergeant’s bulging belly.

  That should do the fool until Hawk got back with a horse of one of Kid Reno’s bunch. With any luck, the copper-plated tinhorn would die and save Hawk the trouble of figuring a way to get him to Fort Bowie.

  Hawk mounted the grulla and loped off, following the alluringly fresh wagon tracks and the dozen or so sets of shod hoofprints showing plain in the sand and gravel, trailing off through the chaparral.

  16.

  RECKONING

  IT took Hawk less than an hour, urging the grulla hard, to push within view of the Kid Reno bunch. At the rear of the pack, the high-sided wagon, a dirty cream tarp tenting its box and driver’s boot, lurched and bounced across the stark, stony desert between tabletop mesas angling trapezoids of purple shade onto the trail.

  Hunkered low between cracked boulders on a hill shoulder, Hawk saw that most of the pack trotted their mounts ahead of the wagon. A single point rider—to Hawk’s naked eye little more than a dark speck on the powdery trail—rode a hundred yards ahead of the main bunch. Another single rider rode drag, staying about a hundred yards behind the wagon and pulling up every few yards to peer cautiously along his back trail while holding a carbine barrel-up on his thigh.

  The flanker was the tall Mexican in the steeple-crowned sombrero whom Hawk had head-butted at the beginning of the set-to that, while having occurred a couple of months ago, was so fresh in his mind it could have happened only yesterday.

  Hawk narrowed his eyes and tightened his jaws. A snarl pulled at his upper lip. They’d beaten him and left him for dead. They no doubt thought he was dead. By rights, he should be dead. Thanks to Gloria and Harry Hughes, he wasn’t dead, and Kid Reno’s bunch was in for one hell of a surprise. . . .

  Hawk w
aited until the gang had dropped out of sight behind a distant rise, then jogged back to the grulla, mounted up, and started a minor rockslide as horse and rider dropped down the hill to the trail.

  He continued shadowing the bunch, staying at least a half mile back at all times while keeping the flanking rider in near-constant sight. Near sundown, he watched the gang pull their horses and their wagon to a stop inside a broad, steep-walled canyon in which a small ruined church hunkered amid tumbled boulders, brittlebush, and cat’s claw.

  The church was little more than a brown adobe box with a bell tower minus the bell, and a few dilapidated stone-and-brush sheds flanking it. Another, slightly larger shed lay across the trail from the church, and into this the gang pulled the wagon. They drew two stout wooden doors closed behind the wagon and locked the doors with a rusty chain and padlock that Hawk scrutinized with his field glasses.

  The flanking rider caught up to the others in the canyon between the church and the wagon shed, his dust brushed pink by the fading light seeping down the mostly shaded canyon walls.

  Kid Reno gave orders, his jaws moving, hands gesturing, and then, while two men were left in the yard to keep watch and the others turned their horses into a rickety corral formed of ironwood poles, Reno and one of the other men fished bottles from their saddlebags and headed into the church, slapping dust from their pants with their hats.

  Hunkered atop a stone thumb protruding from the canyon’s north wall, the grulla grazing galleta grass below, Hawk watched until the other men had finished tending their mounts in the corral. One remained in the yard, resting his Winchester across both shoulders behind his neck and draping his arms over it, rolling his head around as though to work kinks from his neck. The others headed inside the church.

  The yard went dark and quiet. In the corral, a couple of horses rolled. The lookout walked around, kicking stones with a desultory air, yawning, then finally leaning back against the corral and crossing his boots to leisurely roll a cigarette.