Thunder Over the Superstitions Page 8

Alvin stopped, thrust his hands up, palms out.

  “Please don’t shoot me. Ah, Jesus!”

  Hawk stopped six feet in front of the young lawman. “You damn fool.”

  “Please . . . don’t!” Alvin turned his head away as though he couldn’t bear to look at the man who was about to kill him.

  “Why’d you do it, you damn fool? Why did you get your two partners killed?”

  “Ah, shit,” Alvin said, licking his dry, dusty lips. “There’s a reward. A big one. Governors of four territories got together, set a bounty. Twenty thousand dollars to any lawman who can prove they killed you!”

  Hawk had heard about the reward, though he hadn’t been sure it wasn’t a mere rumor. There were lots of rumors—lies—regarding his exploits. A few years ago several territorial governors had put out a death warrant on him.

  Now, this.

  Hawk chuckled without mirth. “Twenty thousand dollars ain’t worth a pinch of rock salt if you ain’t alive to spend it.”

  “I know that,” Alvin said. “I know that now.”

  “You got your partners killed.”

  “I know that!”

  There was a dribbling sound. Hawk looked down to see that the inside of Alvin’s left pants leg was wet. Liquid has splashed atop his boot, slithered down the side of the sole to roll up in the dirt.

  “Drop that pistol belt,” Hawk ordered.

  Alvin unbuckled and dropped his pistol and shell belt inside of five seconds.

  “Forget about your horse. You start walkin’ north and don’t stop or take even one look back, hear?”

  Alvin stared at Hawk, lips trembling. “Hell, I’ll die out here without my horse, my gun!”

  “You’ll make it back to the Superstition station. You’ll be hurtin’, but you’ll make it. Unless you want me to shoot you right here, which, when I think about it, is all you deserve.”

  “No! No . . . I’ll make it, all right.”

  “If I ever see you again, Alvin, I ain’t gonna be near as generous.”

  “No.”

  “Move!” Hawk bellowed, stepping around behind the frightened lawman.

  Alvin glanced back at him and then, keeping his hands raised to his shoulders, began running down the slope at an angle, heading for the canyon bottom.

  Behind him, Hawk shouted, “Drag that soggy boot back north and live to piss another day, friend!”

  CHAPTER 11

  THE OUTLAW’S DILEMMA

  As her Morgan lurched up an incline through greasewood and barrel cactus, Jodi glanced over her shoulder, and smiled.

  Miller scowled. “What the hell you grinnin’ at? You simple?”

  The girl did not reply but turned her horse into a crease between two large chunks of sandstone rising from the top of the hill they were on. Miller gave a wry chuff and followed her through the crease. On the other side, the girl slid lithely down from her Morgan’s back and stood looking around, her gloved fists on her hips.

  “What the hell you doin’?” Miller raked out at her. “It’s too early to stop.”

  “Not if we’re where we’re goin’.”

  “Huh?”

  “This is the place I said you get could set up your bushwhack, kill that rogue lawman fella.” She grinned at him again.

  Miller looked around. More mushrooms of sandstone rose before him. Mesquites and cedars grew up out of cracks in the rock. Sandstone boulders stood among the growth. Miller swung down from the back of his brindle bay, tied the horse to a cedar, and then climbed up the shelving mushrooms of sandstone rock.

  At the crest, he could see out over a deep, narrow valley. Really, it was more of a gorge. There were a couple of lower ridges between Miller’s position and the larger canyon on the far side of which jutted an even steeper ridge than the one he was on. From here, the main canyon looked like a mere crease between ridges. He could see it where it doglegged off to his right and away.

  “Best get away from the ridge, silly,” Jodi said, slapping his upper arm with the back of her hand.

  “Why?”

  She pointed at the doglegging canyon to Miller’s right.

  “Because if he’s still on our trail, he’s down there somewhere. Might see us.”

  Miller pointed. “That’s where we came from?”

  Jodi nodded. “We rode right up here—or nearly so, anyway—about an hour ago. Then circled back. The canyon trail passes about sixty yards below where we’re standing.” She nodded toward the canyon side of the ridge. “He’ll follow our trail and you can dry gulch him from here.”

  Miller stared down the far side of the ridge, saw the trail angling from his right to his left beyond some rocks, catclaw, and cedar shrubs. “Shit, we rode past here. Crazy damn country.”

  The girl chuckled, self-satisfied.

  “So he’ll ride right past here—down there.” Miller laughed and ran a gloved hand across his chin. “Yeah, that’ll work.”

  Getting a handle on the layout, he stepped back a little, until a large thumb of sandstone and granite partly shielded him from view from the broader canyon below. “Shit—this is some crazy country. Talk about a devil’s playground!”

  “A fella could get lost without a good guide, couldn’t he?” Jodi’s tone was customarily jibing.

  Miller snorted at her. But she was right. He didn’t like it, but he needed her. There was such a maze of canyons in this neck of the Superstitions that a man could walk thirty yards, blink, turn around and be forever lost.

  Miller retrieved his spyglass from his saddlebags, doffed his hat, and stood just off the corner of the large boulder capping the ridge. He trained the glass to the northwest, the direction from which the girl had led him, the direction from which his stalker would be coming, as well.

  Miller stared for about fifteen minutes through the glass until he finally caught sight of a slow-moving shadow coming along the main canyon. A man was what the shadow appeared—a gray-brown man-shadow moving at a steady pace along Miller’s back trail. The outlaw knew it was Hawk. Of course, it could be a prospector or some lone Indian, but Miller knew it was Hawk. He’d spied the same shadow on his trail early the day before, and he’d noticed it several times since.

  Always moving at the same, maddeningly slow, plodding, steady speed. In no hurry whatever. Apparently, he was so sure of eventually running down his quarry that he felt no need to hurry.

  Studying that slow-moving but purposeful shadow now moving toward him at a seeming snail’s pace, Miller felt the short hairs along the back of his neck rise. His heart quickened. He remembered the man he’d seen in the yard of Nan-tee’s shack, so coolly and sure-handedly dispatching Miller’s second gang.

  Some of the best shooters in the territory. Maybe in all of the Southwest. He’d blown them all to hell and he would have blown Miller to hell, too, if Miller hadn’t had the advantage of being in the cabin, where the shadows had concealed him.

  One of Hawk’s bullets had drilled Miller’s woman. Too bad. But better her than him. Since that afternoon, the outlaw had only considered the child he’d left behind in passing and certainly with no degree of sentimentality. He hadn’t even paused to consider who would care for the boy, whom Nan-tee had called Ti-Kwah, which in her language meant sunrise.

  Or was it sunset?

  He lowered the spyglass, donned his hat, and stepped back behind the boulder.

  The girl was sitting on a rock, her back to a cedar growing up through a jagged crack running through the sandstone. She’d removed her hat and was wiping moisture from the sweatband with a spruce-green handkerchief.

  “This is a special place for me,” she told Miller, smiling fondly as she looked around. The large dimpled areas in the sandstone held water from last night’s monsoon rain.

  “How so?”

  She hiked a shoulder. Her smile grew broader. “I became a woman here. On a blanket right down there.”

  As usual concerning this girl, Miller was incredulous. “What’s that?”

  �
�I told you—I became a woman here.” Jodi dropped to her knees and drank from one of the rainwater-filled dimples.

  “You became a woman here,” Miller said, skeptically.

  Jodi lifted her head, sat back on her heels, donned her hat, and looked around. “One of Geronimo’s warriors found me here. Took me by surprise. Didn’t seem to know whether to kill me or take me, so he took me. And then I killed him. Stuck one of his own arrows through his neck.”

  Miller just stared at her. She’d said it as though she’d just recounted a mildly successful fishing trip.

  She turned her head toward him, smiled, and blinked slowly. Her eyes were dull with threat.

  “Why, you’re crazy,” Miller said, sliding his right hand to the holster thonged on his right thigh. It brushed only leather. He looked down at it, lower jaw hanging. When he looked at the girl, she reached around behind her. When she brought her right hand forward, she was holding his Remington.

  “Lookin’ for this?” she asked, closing her upper teeth over her lower lip.

  “How in the hell . . . ?”

  As she held the gun, she raised and lowered the hammer a little with her thumb, making a faint clicking sound. “You oughta know by now, Mister Outlaw, that I ain’t no little girl you should trifle with.”

  “How did you get my gun?” Miller demanded, facing her, spreading his boots a little more than shoulder width apart.

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

  “I’ll take that back.”

  “Why? So you can shoot me with it?”

  Miller raised his voice. He didn’t want to admit it, but his mouth was dry with fear. “I said I’ll take that back, you little . . . !”

  He let his voice trail off. She was staring at him, one eye sort of slanted in toward her nose. It was more than just a faintly devilish look. That look coupled with his pistol resting in the palm of her right hand rocked him back on his heels.

  “Oh, here!” she said, tossing it up to him.

  He stumbled back, catching the gun against his chest. His face was warm with embarrassment. Anger and rage made his knees feel as though they were filled with warm mud.

  “Did you believe all that?”

  Miller lowered the gun. “All what?”

  “My story about the brave I killed?”

  “Should I?”

  Kneeling there on the stone-capped crest of the ridge, she smiled at him again while staring up at him from beneath her blonde brows and the low-canted brim of her hat. “If I was you, I would. And I’d also keep in mind, I got a knife in my boot. And I got this here.”

  She reached around behind her again. When she showed him her right hand, it was again filled with a pistol. A .41-caliber pocket pistol with ivory grips.

  “Stole this off a gambler passin’ through the station,” Jodi said, hefting the wicked-looking little popper in her hand. “Figured it might come in handy someday.”

  She tossed it from hand to hand before tucking it back behind her, and rising. “Well, I reckon we’d best tend the horses and set up camp,” she said with a sigh, turning away and skipping down the rocks. The little pistol was tucked behind her wide, brown belt, at the small of her slender back. “Probably gonna rain again like it usually does.”

  Watching her, Miller canted his head to one side and raked the fingers of his left hand down through the ginger whiskers on his cheek.

  Later, after a brief rain, Miller took Old Man Zimmerman’s Winchester and had a look around his and Jodi’s camp.

  They were on the side of a larger mountain from the top of which, staring southwest, Miller could see the formation known as Weaver’s Needle. Most folks in the territory had heard about the “Dutchman,” some fellow named Walzer, who’d discovered an old Mexican gold mine somewhere near Weaver’s Needle, which some folks called “Sombrero” because it was also shaped like the steepled crown of the Mexican hat.

  Like many who’d spent more than a week in Arizona Territory and had heard about the vein that was so rich you could literally use a hammer to break the nearly pure ore out of the walls and fill enough of a poke in just a few minutes to put yourself on easy street for the rest of your life, Miller had had a hankering to look for the mine himself.

  But there were other stories, too.

  Stories about many men who’d tried looking for the same mine, but the country was such a maze of cactus and rattlesnake-infested ravines and canyons that they’d become forever lost, died of thirst or starvation, been tortured and killed by Apaches, or had stumbled out of the Superstitions avoiding such fates by a hair’s breadth and had vowed never to return, warning others not to try it.

  Miller had heeded such warnings. Not necessarily because he feared anything the Superstitions could throw at him, but because he was basically a lazy man and preferred to make his living by a much easier means.

  By stealing it from others.

  Still, that brown finger of crenellated rock jutting above the cactus-studded hogbacks held an eerie fascination even for a lazy man like Pima Miller. Imagine walking into an ancient gold mine, the walls around you sparkling with gold so rich and pure it hardly needed smelting!

  Miller brushed a fist across his chin, shook his head, and made his way back down the craggy peak he was on. As he did so, he stopped near a sandstone shelf, and stared down, frowning. A hoofprint marked the sandstone gravel and red caliche to the right of his right boot.

  A hoofprint. Looking around, he saw several more. Two riders had passed along this mountainside, following what appeared a game trail or maybe an ancient Indian trail. The Superstitions, having been claimed for centuries by the Chiricahua Apaches, were woven with such traces. And the mount of neither rider had been shod.

  Unshod horses meant Indian.

  Around here, Apache Indian.

  Chiricahua.

  Miller could tell that the Chiricahuas had passed here maybe an hour before the brief rain of an hour earlier.

  Cold fingers of apprehension raking his spine—Miller had heard plenty of stories of Apache torture—he dropped to a knee and studied the terrain around him. Spying no movement outside of a jackrabbit and a cactus wren perched atop a nearby saguaro, he continued on down the mountain.

  He kept a .44 round seated in his carbine’s chamber, his thumb on the off-cocked hammer.

  By the time he saw the brindle bay and the Morgan tied to ironwood shrubs below his and the girl’s camp, where they could drink from natural tanks filled with fresh rainwater, the sky had again turned the color of oily rags. Thunder rumbled like a giant’s upset stomach.

  Cold raindrops began splattering against the back of Miller’s neck, making him wince against the chill in sharp contrast to the earlier, searing heat.

  He walked up the grade beyond the horses and into the rocks where he and the girl had set up camp on a level, cactus-free strip of ground at the base of the ridge crest from where he intended to rid his trail of Hawk. The clearing was surrounded by tall boulders and cedars, which offered some protection from the rain. Jodi had erected a burlap lean-to angling out from one of the shrubs. She lay under it now, resting her head against her saddle, hat tipped down over her eyes. Her arms were folded atop her chest, boots crossed at the ankles.

  Jodi appeared to be asleep, gold-blonde hair falling messily across the saddle.

  Watching her, Miller’s loins tingled. At the same time, apprehension continued to play a needling rhythm tapped out with cold fingers against his backbone. The girl was damned dangerous. He’d have to kill her sooner or later.

  Now might be a good time, before she could get the drop on him. True, he needed her to lead him out of the mountains, but something told him she wouldn’t let him get that far. Not far enough to feel independent of her.

  Because she knew he’d kill her then.

  He wasn’t sure what her game was, but she was up to something. Could be he was just being nervy, but he didn’t think so. Possibly, she knew about the twelve hundred-dollar bounty on his head,
though it might have gone up since Kingman. And all the torture—even Apache torture—wouldn’t drag the secret out of the girl before she was ready to fess up. Miller had a keen, stone-cold feeling at the base of his breastbone that if he waited to find out what her game was, and how high the stakes were, he would be too late to save himself.

  He held his carbine across his belly. He squeezed the gun in his hands. As cold as it had suddenly turned, with the rain lashing him from behind, his hands were sweating inside his gloves.

  A bass voice whispered in his ear. “Kill her, fool. The rogue lawman is as good as dead. Tomorrow, after you kill him, you’ll have two spare horses, plenty of guns, ammo, and grub. You know where Weaver’s Needle is. Once you get there, swing west and you’ll be to Phoenix in no time. Rest up there with a whore or two, a couple bottles of whiskey, a game of cards, and head on down to the border.”

  Miller’s heart hiccupped, increased its pace. His breath grew shallow. Sweat ran down the palms of his hands, inside his gloves. He squeezed the rifle again, pressing the sweat into his gloves. He slowly thumbed the hammer back. The thunder and the rain covered the clicking sounds.

  “Kill her now . . . before she kills you . . .”

  Miller moved heavily forward, stopped just outside the lean-to, and stared down at the girl. His heart beat more persistently. He prodded her with his boot toe.

  She used a gloved index finger to poke the brim of her hat up off her forehead. She turned to him, wrinkling the skin above the bridge of her nose. She continued to stare at him like that for a good half a minute. And then, so slowly so as to be almost imperceptible, her mouth corners rose.

  Miller eased the Winchester’s hammer back down.

  His hands shaking, he leaned the rifle against the cedar’s twisted trunk, doffed his hat, and crawled under the tarpaulin.

  He woke the next morning to the smell of wood smoke. He rolled over and saw small flames licking up from several catclaw sticks. Jodi had a blanket thrown over her shoulders. It was all she was wearing. It didn’t cover much of her.

  She was just then filling a canteen from one of the natural rock tanks near the fire.