The Lawbringers 4 Page 4

  Feeling had come back and now he was shivering energetically with cold. He had to find a place where he could build a fire. He looked around, and his eyes fell on the calico horse. His breath held back in his chest.

  “Goddamn,” he muttered, and went to take a closer look at the horse.

  Its nostrils were closed and its eyes were filmed over, half-shut. Its legs were still splayed, wobbling a little. When he touched the lips they were dry and the horse did not respond to his hand.

  “Goddamn,” he whispered again.

  The calico coughed raspingly. Its belly began to heave with retching. The film glazed its slitted sleepy eyes and Jim Brand knew there was nothing to do but one thing, and so wearily he drew his pistol and shot the animal.

  Echoes of the single shot caromed around the room hollowly. The horse dropped heavily against the stall partition, rocking it; its knees shuddered and it collapsed.

  “Goddamn,” he said a third time, and stepped back into the runway.

  He was holstering the gun when he saw the flicker of lamplight along a knife blade and, behind that, a fleeting dark shape coming in a long-armed silent lunge.

  CHAPTER VII

  HE WAS SLOW with cold, but not so slow that instinct could not send him wheeling away, dropping the lamp and making a grab for that thrusting knife hand. Turning, in the split second before the lantern hit the ground he had a glimpse of a thin, wide-eyed face, and then the light went out and the stable was plunged into stygian invisibility and he had his hands full, one fist locked around the knife wrist and the other sweeping around to grab his antagonist.

  The storm had weakened him; he stood small odds against a strong adversary. Already his fingers were slipping in their hold while he tried with his free hand for a grip on the wiry, squirming body. His grip was not as tight as it should have been and he knew that a powerful enough twist would free the knife—and in the darkness, he would not find it again before it found him.

  Grunting and heaving, he hooked a leg desperately around his opponent’s and threw his own weight against the other’s body, overthrowing the man and spilling him to the ground, dropping heavily on top of him and pinning the knife arm to earth. He heard the heavy rush of breathing and a tight gasp of strain. Effort made all his muscles erupt in tremors. He braced his body and used his free hand to pry open the fingers and wrench the knife away.

  His opponent seemed frail, even weaker than himself. Brand held the knife in his fist, for a single instant debating whether to sink it in the other’s flesh; a wild-batting arm came out of the darkness and struck his wrist, and his grip was so tenuous that the knife flew from his hand and clattered against a wall. Brand cursed and brushed his hand across a smooth jaw. With that target placed, Brand drew back his hand angrily and slugged the exposed jaw.

  The body went slack under him. He grunted another oath and loosened his hold on the man’s wrist. The man moved sluggishly under him and Brand felt around the waist for a gun belt, but none was there. Then the man moved swiftly, uncoiling and rolling away. Brand grabbed blindly and caught a thin, taught-muscled arm; he jerked the man forward, still on his knees, and snagged his fingers on cloth, tearing it irritably.

  “That’s about enough,” he said grimly, and reached out.

  What his hand encountered was startling enough to make the hairs stand up on the back of his neck. A smooth, hard tipped roundness where the torn shirt had fallen away—a high, angry voice said, “Get your Goddamn hands off me.”

  “Judas,” Jim Brand said, and almost laughed. “Hold still, will you?”

  “Like hell I will.”

  “Your choice, lady. I can always slug you again.”

  There was no answer. Brand kept one hand on the other’s arm while he swept the ground for the lantern, found it, set it upright and put a match to it.

  The yellow flame showed him a sheepskin coat thrown open and a heavy flannel shirt torn to the waist, and the lift of two very firm, very proud half-globes of breasts that lifted impudently with each heavy breath.

  Lamplight flickered on the girl’s thin face. It was a strong face, dark, wide at the cheekbones and determined at the chinline. Black straight hair fell lawlessly about her shoulders and her dark eyes flashed spitefully.

  She sat leaning back on both straight arms, head thrown back defiantly, and there was a kind of primitive simplicity about her that somehow deflated his first sardonic reaction to the disregard she displayed toward her condition.

  Brand bent with a grunt, picked up the discarded knife and bounced it lightly in his palm, standing up. “One way to get warmed up,” he muttered sarcastically, and gestured with the sharp-edged knife. “This is kind of a sudden weapon, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Is it? You just shot that man.”

  “Not exactly,” he said, feeling the return of weariness. He glanced at the deputy’s stiff, prone body ten feet away. “He’s been dead for hours.”

  “Don’t fool with me, mister. I heard you shoot.”

  He pointed the knife toward the open stall. “I had to shoot my horse,” he said in a ragged tone. “If you’ll take a look at that corpse, you’ll see he was shot quite a while ago—and with a bigger gun than mine.”

  The girl was motionless, anger and suspicion still gliding darkly behind her narrowed eyes.

  “See for yourself,” he said.

  “Never mind,” she said sullenly. “I’ll take your word for it.” She pinched her lips together and dropped her eyes. “It’s cold,” she said, as if by way of explanation, standing up and wrapping the torn shirt around her, then buckling the coat closed. Her glance was cool.

  Jim Brand said, “Where did you come from?”

  “The tackshed connects this place with the saloon.”

  “Now,” Brand said softly, “what would a pretty little thing like you be doing in a saloon?”

  “That kind of taffy won’t pull in this weather,” she said flatly. “Don’t get funny with me, mister.”

  “What about the saloon?” he said with gentle patience.

  “It’s the only building left standing in town. And the only room with a stove and fireplace.” She came forward, meeting his eyes levelly, and took the knife, shoving it matter-of-factly into a rawhide belt sheath. Then she turned around and said shortly, “You coming?”

  “Not just yet.”

  “Freeze, then,” she told him, and went forward along the runway.

  “Hold it just a minute, lady.”

  “What for?”

  “You jumped me with a knife,” he said. “That’s not exactly lady-like.”

  The girl laughed. “I never claimed to be a lady, mister.” Her hand touched the hilt of the knife. “Watch yourself,” she said more quietly.

  “Around you, that’s a good idea. Stay put a minute. It took a lot of insides to jump me with just that knife, when you knew I had a gun.”

  “I take care of myself,” she said. “You don’t frighten me.”

  “No,” he agreed drily, “I guess I don’t. Who are you?”

  “Is that your business?”

  He tried to smile at her. “I’m Jim Brand,” he said.

  “What of it? Listen, friend, it’s cold out here and I don’t intend to spend the rest of the day freezing in this tomb and keeping your friend here company.”

  “You can go,” he said. “I’ll go in with you—just as soon as you answer a few questions.”

  “What if I don’t answer them?”

  Brand clamped his mouth and glared at her. “I’m getting a little fed up, lady,” he told her. “I’ll keep you here if I have to.”

  “You’ll have to catch me first,” she said tentatively, and in reply Brand merely lifted his pistol from holster and let it dangle from his finger on the trigger guard. “All right,” the girl said.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Michaela,” she said, and dared him with her eyes.

  It was a pretty name. “Michaela who?”

  “Manning
.”

  “Where in hell did you get a name like that?”

  “From my pa. It’s a good English name.” She said it with a kind of stiff-backed pride that made him suspect something.

  He said with his eyebrows curling up, “Who’s your mother?”

  Made bulky by her bearskin coat, she leaned forward at the waist, hands cocked on her hips, and squinted at him. “Her name was Malna and she was a Yuma Indian. Which makes my old man a squaw-man and me a half-breed. You got any more prying to do, do it and get it over with, Mr. Brand.”

  “Sorry,” he muttered. “I didn’t mean to pour salt into any wounds.”

  “Don’t lose any sleep worrying about it,” she snapped.

  “Pride goeth,” he said quietly, and frowned toward the back door through which she must have come. “You say that leads through a shed into the saloon?”

  “Yes.”

  “I count six horses in here, not counting my dead one. Who owns them?”

  “Five men and me.”

  “What five men?”

  “My Pa and four others.”

  Brand grunted and leaned stiff-armed against a stall partition. The cold was getting inside him again but he had to find out certain things before he walked through yonder door and faced whoever was in there.

  “Look,” he said. “I’ll accept that you’re fast with smart answers. All right? Just tell me what I want to know. Some joker with a buffalo gun killed the deputy, there, and damn near killed me, too.”

  “Deputy?” The girl’s forehead showed creases and she turned to crouch by the dead man, turning his face toward her. “Why,” she said, “I’ll be damned. Kirby.”

  “You know him?”

  “Sure. He’s … he was sweet on me.”

  “Good for him,” Brand said drily.

  “He was the deputy for this end of Coyotero County. Every few weeks one of the nesters over on the far side of the mountain would get sore and send him packing in here to lay down the law to me. He didn’t mind.”

  “To you? What for?”

  “I steal,” she said with a mock-sweet smile. “Chickens and other little things. That’s how we eat here. My Pa’s crippled and sometimes he’s a little loose in the head. He goes around stumping on his wooden leg and the racket scares all the game away before he gets close enough to shoot, if he can remember to shoot.” She said it with an ill-concealed sadness, or perhaps it was bitterness; he couldn’t tell. The girl said, “My old lady used to teach me there was nothing wrong with stealing. If you steal something and don’t get caught, that makes you pretty smart.”

  “You believe that?”

  “That’s the Indian way.”

  “You consider yourself an Indian, then?”

  “I don’t bother about that kind of thing,” she said. “But the old woman taught me some useful things.”

  “So,” Brand said, “the deputy was coming up here to lecture you—or maybe give you a spanking. Does that mean you rode down the trail to head him off? Lover’s quarrel, maybe? Did you shoot him?”

  “Me?”

  “Why not? It’s possible, isn’t it?”

  “Sure,” she said. “I guess it is. But what difference does it make to you? You a friend of his?”

  “I first made his acquaintance,” Brand said drily, “after he was dead.”

  “Then why should you care about him?”

  “I don’t,” he admitted. “All I aimed to do was give him a decent burial and forget him. But then somebody wasted a lot of ammunition on me, and I suspect it was the same joker who shot the deputy. Maybe he thinks I was a witness to the murder. That makes it pretty important for me to find out who shot him. It might save my skin.”

  “Is it worth saving?”

  He regarded her wryly. “It’s cold out here,” he said. “Tell me who’s inside the saloon, so I’ll know what to expect. Then we can go inside where it’s warm.”

  “One thing first.” she told him.

  “What’s that?”

  “Don’t get the idea the deputy was on his way up here to see me. There are four other reasons in that saloon why he might have headed up this way.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, two of them I never saw before, but they look like the type a lawman might be chasing. Toughs, I mean. One of them says his name’s Armando Elias. He’s Mexican, with his face all scarred up. He doesn’t talk much but if his face is any sign, he’d just as soon eat you as look. He’s got a partner, a kid with one arm, says his name’s Billy McCasford. If you ask me, those two probably held up a store or broke out of jail or something, and maybe Kirby was trailing them.”

  “Maybe,” Brand said. He noticed the cool manner in which she had dismissed the death of Kirby, who according to her own words had been something of a suitor. Perhaps it was the Indian in her; perhaps it was just a blended part of her unbridled and primitive regard for life. He said, “Who else is in there?”

  “Two gents from over the other side of the mountain—Mitch Andrews and Wayne Lutz. Lutz is the big one. You’ll spot him right off. He weighs more than you and me put together. He owns the Diamond L, which is half the county and maybe thirty thousand head of beef. Mitch Andrews is the short one, built like a beer wagon. He’s a homesteader. Andrews and his brother are the leaders of a bunch of nesters that Lutz says are thorns in his side. Andrews claims it’s the other way around, says Lutz and the other big outfits are trying to starve the farmers out.”

  “Which one’s telling the truth?”

  “Maybe neither, maybe both. I don’t much give a damn.”

  “I can see that,” Brand observed. “All right. Just one more thing.”

  “Go ahead,” she said in a tone of bored patience.

  “A little while after I found the deputy, I came across the tracks of two or three riders. I was still following those tracks when I was deadfalled.”

  “Maybe it was the Mex and his friend, and maybe it was Pa and me. We were out hunting.”

  “Hunting deputies?”

  She ignored him. “Rabbits. The storm came up faster than I expected and we had to hightail back this way. As it is, we just made it.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Less than an hour.”

  “I don’t suppose it was one of you who fired on me.”

  “Why should we?”

  “Never mind,” he said. If the girl was lying, there was no way to prove it now. “What about the two toughs? When did they show up?”

  “About twenty minutes after we got here.”

  “All right.”

  He holstered the gun and rammed his gloves into his belt, and all the while kept working his fingers around to get the stiffness out of them. Then he untied his warbag and blanket roll from the dead horse’s saddle, gave deputy Kirby a parting glance, and gestured to the girl; and followed her into the tackshed, carrying the lantern. It threw crazy dancing shadows on the walls.

  CHAPTER VIII

  A DECAPITATED CHICKEN hung from the wall in the cold tackshed. “You steal that?”

  “Sure,” said Michaela.

  As he reached for the latch on the saloon door, she touched his arm and looked into his eyes. Her expression was enigmatic, guardedly blank. She was almost of a height with him. She said, “I don’t like you any more than you like me, pilgrim. Remember that.”

  “Lady,” he drawled softly, “nobody said I didn’t like you. I mean, a little thing like jumping me with a knife—”

  “You know what I mean,” she said. “You don’t like half-breeds, do you?”

  “Well,” he observed, “I never met one like you.”

  He did not add that past experience had made him more distrustful of women as a group than he had ever been about half-breeds. He had learned, through long and sometimes intimate acquaintance with them, that women were seldom to be relied on for more than one night in a row.

  Wary of the reception that might await him beyond the closed door, he hitched his holst
er around where it was more easily accessible; he tipped his hat back, swept the coat away from the gun, lifted the latch by its peg handle, and opened the door.

  It was a big room, long and wide. Men stood and sat around it at odd points; there was an air of charged tension in the place and every pair of eyes came around to lie boldly, suspiciously and challengingly against Jim Brand.

  The walls were made of massive, stripped logs, built for impression and endurance; that was why it had lasted out the years of weather. The chinking between logs was firm and thick, and none of the storm pried its way inside, except for an occasional downward gust that batted the big fire in the fireplace.

  Here was all the ornate but dusty splendor of the days less than a decade ago when Rifle Gap had been at the peak of its bonanza. Crystal chandeliers, some of them partly cracked and broken, hung on great brass chains from the rafters. A long mahogany bar, once polished but now dull and scratched, ran half the length of one wall.

  The floor was made of stout, hand-hewn planks; posts around the room helped support the second floor; a great stone fireplace at the far end roared with high red flames, and whale-oil lamps hung all around the walls, a few of them lit now and adding beams of soft yellow to the fire’s red glare. Parts of the floor were still covered by the faded and worn remnants of what had once been a colorful tapestried carpet.

  A potbellied stove near Brand’s right hand glared with one evil, scarlet eye out of a square isinglass window, warming this end of the big saloon. Along the wall beyond the end of the bar were stacked high-piled cords of wood, probably laid in for the winter by Michaela’s father or even perhaps by the girl herself—blocks and branches laboriously axed.

  The room stood hollow, like a great forgotten monument to its builders, scarred and embattled but still holding firm against the angry lashes of nature’s vindictiveness. The storm was a muffled loud rage that pounded the walls. There were a heavy long table made of split aspen trunks and a scatter of wood-frame armchairs with laced rawhide backs and seats made of dried buckskin leather.