The Backstabbers Read online

  And he was right about that. His luck was about to change, but not for the better . . . for the worse . . . a lot, lot worse.

  * * *

  Brook staked out the burro on a patch of grass, then boiled coffee over a hatful of fire, sat back against a rock, a steaming cup in his hand and his pipe in his mouth. Beside him lay the old .44-40 Henry that he’d carried in the war and that had served him well. When he finished his coffee, he took a Jew’s harp from his coat pocket and twanged out a credible version of “Buffalo Gals,” much to the irritation of the straitlaced Thomas Aquinas, who deplored music of any kind.

  Unfortunately, at that tuneful moment in time, death had begun to stalk Jacob Brook.

  The chase closed in moments after the old prospector said, “What will I play next, Thomas? What’s your pleasure?”

  Brook heard a rustle in the brush behind him but paid it no heed. A night creature, the restless desert breeze, that and nothing more.

  Emboldened, death slunk closer.

  “How about ‘Turkey in the Straw’?” Brook said. “That’s always been one of your favorites, huh?”

  Small sounds slithered all around him. Breathing. Did he hear breathing?

  Something was moving in the night . . . something dark. Something sinister.

  There! A flicker of movement. A bent figure, tall, white, running toward him. No, not one. Two . . . three . . . four . . . five . . . more . . .

  Alarmed, Brook shoved the harp back in his pocket and reached for the Henry.

  He never made it.

  They came at Brook from all sides, six or more, half-naked, pale-skinned, and they piled on top of him. Frenzied arms rose and fell, fisted knife blades plunged home time after time, gleaming in the moonlight. The old man screamed as his lifeblood erupted above him in a scarlet fan, staining red his ashen attackers. But a moment later Brook’s screams gurgled to a halt and the only sound was the triumphant, wild shrieks of his killers. Thomas Aquinas died a martyr’s death. Quickly, the burro was knifed to death, butchered, and his meat wrapped in his skin and carried away. Silence once again fell on the Cornudas, but for the discordant twang of the mouth harp that one of the savages had found in Brook’s pocket. That too faded into distance and the indifferent moon and the stars shone in their sky . . . as though nothing at all had happened.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The stars were still bright in the sky when Bessie Foley rudely woke Red Ryan and Buttons Muldoon. Buttons, a notoriously sound sleeper, came in for some extra attention by being tipped out of his cot, blankets and all, and thudded onto the hard timber floor.

  Bessie, large, threatening and stern, waited until Buttons had finished turning the air blue with his cusses and then she said, “Both of you, faces and hands washed and hair combed before you join Mrs. Talbot for breakfast.” Then, ominously, “You’ve got ten minutes.”

  Buttons scowling, said, “Woman, be damned to ye fer turning a Christian man out of his bed in the middle of the night.”

  “It’s five-thirty, mister,” Bessie said. “Half the day is gone. And now you have nine minutes.” She stared hard at Red who was blinking like a startled owl. “Hotcakes, bacon, scrambled eggs, and coffee. Come and get it or I’ll throw it out.”

  Red nodded at her. “We’ll be there.”

  Buttons grumbled but washed up and wetted down his unruly hair before parting it in the middle and laying it flat as an ironing board on either side. “How do I look? Will her highness approve?”

  Red smiled. “Buttons, you’re a sight for sore eyes.”

  “Damn right I am. As good-looking a driver as ever set foot on a Concord stage,” Buttons said. “Now lead the way, Red. And your hair isn’t combed right.”

  * * *

  As it happened, breakfast was delayed for five minutes as an openly defiant Crystal Casey was given a horse, a three-day supply of grub, and twenty dollars, and told to leave and never set foot on the Talbot ranch again.

  Red and Buttons stood on the porch in front of the house and heard Luna say, more in sadness than anger, “You lied to me, Crystal. You didn’t go out for just a moonlit ride. You met someone. Why? And who was it?”

  The insolent sneer on the girl’s face made her look ugly. “You’ll find out soon enough, Mrs. High-and-mighty Talbot.”

  Leah Leighton wore her gun and a furious expression. “Woman, answer the boss’s question or I’ll shoot you right off that horse.”

  “You go to hell!” Crystal yelled. She rammed her spurs into the pony’s ribs and took off at a fast run.

  Leah immediately shucked her Colt, but Luna said, “No, let her go. Whatever mischief took place out there in the range can’t be undone by a killing.”

  Leah looked disappointed as she holstered her gun.

  Luna Talbot said to Red and Buttons, “Breakfast, gentlemen? Miss Leighton will join us.”

  Despite its unpromising beginning, breakfast was a pleasant affair. Luna talked about her childhood, growing up poor on the west bank of the Brazos with her ferryman father, her mother having died when she was three. Leah Leighton talked cattle and the rumor that the army would soon require an additional twenty thousand head of beef to feed the Indian reservations and its own soldiers through winter, and that could only drive up demand and prices. Then came some woman talk to which Buttons contributed, mentioning how small the hats and how huge the bustles he’d seen being worn by the New Orleans belles during his recent visit to that city. Luna and Leah were suitably scandalized, or pretended to be, but no one mentioned Crystal Foley until breakfast was over, and then only indirectly.

  “I have something to tell you gentlemen, and then a proposition to make,” Luna said. “I hope you will hear me out.”

  “As long as it doesn’t contravene the rules of the Abe Patterson and Son Stage and Express Company. I am set on that condition.”

  Luna smiled. “Mr. Ryan, where on earth did you learn a word like contravene?”

  “It’s wrote down a few times in the Patterson rule book,” he said. “That, and some other big lawyer words.”

  Leah said she had to rouse the hands and left.

  After she was gone, Luna said, “I’m offering you a fare. Does that contravene the rules?”

  Buttons said, “No it doesn’t. Passengers are always welcome. Now state your intentions, Mrs. Talbot.”

  “My intention is that you take me to the Cornudas Mountains.”

  “And back again?” Buttons said.

  “Of course.”

  “Why?” Red said.

  Luna sat back as Bessie refilled her coffee and when the woman left she said, “You’ve been wondering what was in the coffin you brought here.”

  “Besides the dear departed, yes. We’ve been puzzling over it.”

  “We figured it was treasure,” Buttons said. “Gold coins and the like.”

  “No, it’s not treasure or gold coins. It’s a map,” Luna said.

  “A map? A map to where?” Red said.

  “To the Lucky Cuss gold mine,” Luna said.

  That last rang a bell with Red, and he said to Buttons, “Here, remember that road agent Leah Leighton shot? The one they called Hank?”

  Buttons nodded. “I recollect.” He smiled. “How can I forget?”

  “His dying words were ‘Lucky cuss,’ and I remember thinking that it was a strange thing to say because a man with a bullet in his brisket ain’t lucky. Damn it, he was talking about the mine. He wanted the map from the coffin, and that’s why he held us up.”

  “I think Solomon Palmer did too much talking in El Paso,” Luna said. “Now it seems that every outlaw in Texas knows about the Lucky Cuss.”

  “And maybe a whole heap of tin pans,” Buttons said. “Pretty soon you might find yourself in the middle of a gold rush, Mrs. Talbot.”

  “And that’s why we need to talk. I want to find out if there really is a gold mine, and I want you to take me there. Riding north with half a dozen of my hands would attract too much unwelcome atte
ntion. In the coach, I’m just a rancher headed to El Paso on business.”

  “It will cost you four hundred dollars for the round trip,” Buttons said. “You have that kind of money?”

  “I can do better than that,” Luna said. “How does ten percent of every ounce of gold we dig out of the mountain sound to you?”

  Red Ryan shook his head. “Buttons and me, we’re headed for the Patterson stage depot in El Paso and then to San Angelo, up Fort Concho way. We’re a driver and shotgun guard, not miners.”

  Luna smiled. “Silly, you won’t have to dig out the gold yourself. I’ll hire men to do that. All you have to do is sit back and let the money roll in. Red, think about it. If the mine pans out, you’ll be rich or close to it.”

  “We can take you to the mountains for two hundred dollars, and then we part company. That’s the best I have to offer.”

  “Twenty percent,” Buttons said.

  Red stared at him in disbelief. “Buttons . . .”

  “And we’ll take you there and back.”

  Gold fever. Buttons Muldoon had caught the disease. Red could see the symptoms of it . . . the glitter in his driver’s eyes and the flushed skin, the beads of sweat on his forehead.

  Luna didn’t hesitate. “Done and done.”

  “And if there’s no mine?” Red said.

  “Then all bets are off,” the woman said. “You drive me back to the Talbot and then go merrily on your way to San Angelo or wherever with no hard feelings.”

  “Buttons, I don’t like it,” Red said. “We’re already overdue at the El Paso depot.”

  But the driver would have none of it. “Red, we can split twenty percent of a gold mine and retire. Maybe settle down in some big city. Live the good life.”

  “I hate big cities, and we’re too young to retire,” Red said.

  “But not too young to get rich,” Buttons said. He was breathing hard, tasting gold.

  “Any age is a good age to get rich,” Luna said.

  “You’ve got yourself a deal, lady,” Buttons said. “When do you want to leave?”

  “Now. We leave now. I’m leaving Leah Leighton in charge.”

  “I’ll hitch up the team,” Buttons said.

  “I got a feeling about this arrangement.” Red rose from the table.

  “What kind of feeling?” Buttons said.

  “That it ain’t going to end well.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Papa Mace Rathmore was worried, and he voiced his concern to his eldest surviving son. “Damn your eyes, Elijah, the outsider we killed was a prospector. If he knew that there’s gold in the Cornudas, others might. They could descend on us like a plague of locusts, and we can’t kill them all.”

  Tall, pale, and emaciated like all his kin, Elijah said, “Papa, the gold is almost gone. We can move away from this place where the Kanes prey on us and shoot us for sport. We could live in the forest.”

  “Forest? What forest?” Papa Mace said.

  “We’ll find one,” Elijah said. “Head north to where the bears live.”

  “Are you afraid of the Kanes?”

  “Yes.”

  Papa Mace sighed. “The quartz vein continues into the rock. We must dig deeper.”

  “But how long will that take?” Elijah wore an old army greatcoat that made him look skinnier. His thin-stranded black beard was matted from that morning’s burro meat soup, and his eyebrows met above his eagle beak of a nose.

  “Not long. Just until we uncover more of the quartz seam. Put your brothers to work, and their lazy wives if need be.”

  “And the slaves?”

  “Not the slaves. The gold must be found by our blood. The slaves can continue to crush the ore. Use the whip on them if they don’t work hard enough.”

  “We have a new repeating rifle, a Henry,” Elijah said.

  “From the prospector. Yes, I know,” Papa Mace said.

  “It will help protect us from Ben Kane and his cowboys,” Elijah said.

  “We must catch another cowboy and send Kane his skin like we did before,” Papa Mace said. “They didn’t hunt us for a long time after that.”

  “Ben Kane is an evil man,” Elijah said.

  “We steal his cattle to feed ourselves.” Papa Mace shrugged. “He hates us for that.”

  * * *

  Thirty-seven people crowded into a narrow arroyo that morning—Papa Mace and his brood, his seven sons and their wives and twelve children, and ten captive Mexican males held as slaves. The Mace clan was an unwashed, underfed bunch and none of the sons had inherited their sire’s smarts. They dressed in whatever rags they could steal, adding animal skins in cold weather. Papa Mace, a conman, robber, dark-alley killer, and sometimes fire-and-brimstone preacher, had been thrown out of a dozen towns, twice on a rail wearing a coat of tar and feathers. He was hardly an imposing figure. He stood only five feet, four inches tall but weighed close to four hundred pounds, and his great belly hung between his knees like a sack of grain. Run out of the New Mexico Territory, he’d assured his tribe that Texas was the promised land . . . but he’d led them into an annex of hell.

  Deprivation coupled with their low intelligence had made the thieving Mace clan brutish, violent, and deadly. Only the meager amounts of gold from the abandoned mine they’d found kept them alive. Grim old rancher Ben Kane and his Rafter-K riders hated them with a passion.

  The news that the mine’s gold-bearing quartz vein had lost itself in solid rock was a blow to Papa Mace. For the past three years his sons had sold enough gold in Forlorn Hope, a struggling settlement at the northern edge of the Chihuahuan Desert, to buy meager supplies, though Papa Mace made sure his whiskey and cigars were always a priority.

  His brood would have to dig out the quartz vein, hard work that his sons shunned, but there was no other way. The gold must be mined by those of his own blood. God had told Papa Mace that . . . or had it been the devil? Either way he didn’t much care, so long as the precious metal was found, and his family continued to prosper.

  * * *

  “I don’t like this, Jake,” Rafter-K cowboy Milton Barnett said. “We don’t know these mountains.”

  “No, but we know the folks who live in them,” Jake Wise said.

  “The boss won’t like it.” Barnett swallowed hard, his nervous gaze fixed on the Cornudas. “I mean, Mr. Kane ain’t one fer harming woman and children.”

  “Even if they are a bunch of animals?” Wise said.

  “Even so,” Barnett said. He tipped his hat back on his head, letting the breeze cool his sweating forehead. “I mean, killing young ’uns . . .”

  Wise said, “We ain’t gonna kill no young ’uns, just their daddies. And old Ben ain’t gonna find out, because we ain’t gonna tell him. You seen what that Rathmore trash done to Jesse Holt.”

  “I know,” Barnett said. “I seen it, all right.”

  “Then let me hear you tell it,” Wise said. “Say it, Milt. Let me hear you say what they done to Jesse.”

  “They skun him.”

  Wise nodded. “That’s right. They skun him alive. Real white folks don’t do that. See, the Rathmores ain’t real white folks. Like I said, they ain’t human. They’re animals.”

  Jake Wise was big and blond and pale-eyed. Big defined him. Big shoulders, big chest, big hands, a big yellow mustache under a big beak of a nose, big in the confidence that many eighteen-year-olds possess, especially those who walked tall around men and slept with grown women.

  By contrast, Milton Barnett was small and dark and slim and quick and nervous. But he was good with a gun and had killed a man in El Paso.

  Wise said, “Anyways, we ain’t gonna kill anybody. Just shake up them Rathmores a tad, booger them real good. See the smoke rising from the arroyo over yonder? That means there’s a nest of them in there. We gallop past and shoot into the arroyo, make them remember the Rafter-K. That’s all we’re gonna do today, Milt. Just shake ’em up.”

  The morning sun was well risen in a turquoise sky an
d the shadows on the mountain slopes had lowered. The day promised to be a hot one. The frail breeze had dropped and the smoke from the arroyo rose straight as a string.

  Wise gathered his pony’s reins and said to Barnett, “You ready to give her a whirl?”

  “One pass and then we’re outta here,” Barnett said. “Enough to let them know that the Rafter-K is thinking about them. That’s all, Jake. You hear me?”

  “I hear you,” Wise said. “Now let’s grab us some fun.”

  The two young cowboys rode down a sandy slope cluttered with cactus, mostly claret cup and cholla. A lot of fat, black flies were buzzing in the air.

  Wise waved a hand in front of his face. “What the hell?”

  “Something dead,” Barnett said. “Smell it?”

  “Coyote, maybe,” Wise said.

  “Or a jackrabbit,” Barnett said.

  “It stinks, whatever it is,” Wise said. “I’m taking a look.” He kneed his horse into a canter.

  A few moments later he and Barnett rode up on a patch of grass growing between some sizable rocks where a moving mass of flies covered a stinking gut pile and a few feet away sprawled the naked, mangled body of a . . . man or woman. At first glance it was hard to tell.

  “It’s a man,” Wise said, leaning from the saddle for a closer look. “It’s got a beard under all that blood.”

  “Hell,” Barnett said. “He was took by wild animals. Wolves maybe. I think it was wolves.”