Die by the Gun Read online

  “You’re giving me boxing lessons?”

  “Somebody has to. Didn’t your pa ever show you anything about fighting?”

  “Him?” Desmond snorted. “He was always doing something out on the range, with the damned cattle. When he did come home, he spent all his time with my ma.”

  “Can’t blame him for that,” Mac said. Desmond’s sudden reaction made him add hurriedly, “Whoa! I meant your ma’s a mighty fine-looking woman. And you’re one ugly little sprout.”

  “Why, you—” Desmond tried to swing a roundhouse punch, but his position seated next to Mac kept him from even coming close with the blow. Mac batted it away.

  “You don’t know when somebody’s joshing you. Learn how to recognize that. Learn, or your life’s going to be a living hell.”

  “It already is hell because of Flowers and you and all the others.” Desmond levered himself to his feet and staggered off, clutching his belly. Within seconds the dark swallowed him entirely.

  Mac closed his eyes and wanted nothing more than to go to sleep right then and there under his wagon. But Hiram Flowers had told him to move the chuckwagon and be ready for breakfast. A glance at the stars told him it was still three or four hours until sunrise, when a passel of hungry drovers would ride up demanding to be fed.

  Using the wheel for support, he pulled himself to his feet. Still not up to climbing onto the box, he made a circuit and checked the harness on the team. He tried to soothe them and convince the horses he wasn’t any happier than they were about traveling in the middle of the night. Returning to the box, feeling up to the chore—maybe—he stepped first onto the yoke and then pulled himself the rest of the way onto the driver’s seat. A snap of the reins got the team pulling.

  The stars blazed down with an intensity that turned the prairie into an eerie world unlike the daytime of heat and sharp shadows. He wished he could ride into it and leave all the bounty hunters and the troubles of the past behind.

  The sound of hoofbeats behind him brought him back to the real world. He looped his reins around the brake and dived back into the wagon, fumbling in his gear for the box of cartridges Messerschmidt had given him. He should have already reloaded, he chided himself.

  His fingers were numb and worked like giant sausages, but he slid fresh ammo into all six chambers. With a painful twist, he came to his knees and peered over the driver’s seat, revolver cocked and ready.

  The rider came up fast, slowed, and then halted just a few yards off. Mac tried to make out his face in the dark but couldn’t.

  “Where are you?”

  The voice was familiar. Mac got his legs under him and climbed over the seat but kept the gun in his hand.

  “What do you want, Desmond?”

  “Not another whipping, that’s for sure. Flowers sent me to help you, but he told me to pick up the gear you dropped after you killed my horse.”

  That wasn’t the way Mac would have put it, but he lowered the hammer gently and tucked his pistol into his holster. Whatever threat dogged his steps, Desmond wasn’t part of it. Not a deadly part, at least.

  “About a quarter mile south of here. Follow the ground all cut up by the cattle. Where the ground’s in good shape, look there.”

  “That’s not much to go on.” Desmond sounded skeptical. Mac didn’t blame him since the directions were so vague. All he wanted was for the young man to leave him the hell alone.

  “Go on. I’ve got to find where Mister Flowers wanted me to set up camp.”

  “I know that,” Desmond said. He paused, as if thinking over something hard. “I’ll help you if you show me where my saddle is.”

  “South,” Mac said. Spending the rest of the night scouring the plains for the dropped gear wasn’t in the cards. By the time he made it back to camp, the cowboys would be lining up for breakfast. An hour after they finished, he had to be back in the chuckwagon making his way to wherever Flowers wanted him to serve the midday meal.

  Nowhere in that next twelve hours was there any time to sleep. He didn’t need much, but he had to get a few hours to keep him from falling asleep while he drove.

  “Which way’s that?” Desmond asked.

  Muttering in impatience at the young man’s ignorance, Mac leaned forward, found the Big Dipper and the Pole Star, then ran his finger from it across the dome of stars to due south. He stabbed out with his forefinger in the proper direction.

  “Go to hell, you son of a bitch.” Desmond yanked on his horse’s reins and trotted off.

  “A pleasant good night to you, too,” Mac said tiredly, too worn out to raise his voice enough for Desmond to hear the sarcastic rejoinder. With the reins resting in his hands, he snapped them until the team began pulling.

  Tangling with bounty hunters suddenly seemed like the lesser of two evils. He had to put up with that annoying little son of a bitch Desmond Sullivan for the rest of the trail drive.

  CHAPTER 9

  “Had better.” The cowboy licked his fingers to get the last crumb of biscuit and dollop of thick gravy. When his fingers were clean—cleaner than the rest of his hand—he looked up expectantly. “Got any more, Mac?”

  Mac forked over a couple more. The cowboy snatched them before anyone else claimed them.

  “When did you ever have better?” Mac challenged. “Your mama? If you say your mama’s done better, I won’t argue. Otherwise, you have to prove it.”

  “Naw, don’t ever remember my ma fixin’ anything this good. Nope, it was a little place in Wichita Falls. Just a stone’s throw from Seventh and Ohio Streets.” The cowboy gobbled down the last of the biscuits, then wiped his hand on his jeans. “A tiny little café called the Green Frog. The woman doin’ the cookin’, she was danged near the size of one of them longhorns. Big woman. Sampled her own cooking too much.”

  “And it was that good? Her biscuits were better?” Mac enjoyed joshing the men as much as he enjoyed a good-natured argument. It was about all they had to pass the time between back-breaking, long, tedious, dangerous days in the saddle.

  “You know, my memory ain’t so good these days. Gimme another and let me see if I can remember. Got to give you a fair trial, I reckon.”

  “All gone,” Mac told him. “You’ll have to wait until this evening.”

  “Not this afternoon?” The man sounded genuinely sad at the prospect of waiting that long for another biscuit.

  “Got a pot of stew ready to heat up, so that will be dinner. Flowers said we’ve got to make up all the time we lost because of the herd stampeding the way it did.”

  “Yup,” the cowboy said, standing, hitching up his trousers, and settling his hat just so before he set off to work. “We’re gettin’ near the Pecos. Mister Flowers he says that’s always a dangerous crossing. Don’t know why we don’t stay on this side of the river till we get up into New Mexico Territory and cross there.”

  “The closer to the headwaters you get, the bigger the river,” Mac said.

  “You talk just like Mister Flowers. You and him share a brain?”

  “Something like that,” Mac said.

  He began cleaning up as the last of the cowboys left to ride herd. Getting the chuckwagon ready for the trail took a mite longer than starting the cattle moving again, but once he got rolling, he would outpace the beeves. It would take the better part of an hour to set up for dinner. Fixing several kettles of stew at a time more than fed even the always-famished drovers. Having leftovers for a second meal sped things up for at least that one meal.

  As he fastened the tailgate, Flowers rode up.

  “You’re too late for breakfast, but I can find something for you,” Mac offered. He started to unlatch the tailgate but Flowers stopped him.

  “Not necessary. We got to move the herd farther in the next couple days and get across the Pecos.”

  “You’re worried about that?” Mac wondered why. He waited for the trail boss to get to the point.

  “The Comanches are still out there. I saw traces of them when I rode aroun
d the herd this morning. They left their tracks on purpose.”

  Mac nodded. “If they wanted to be sneaky, you’d never find any sign. That means they still want a few dozen cattle.”

  “The cattle they can have, as long as they leave us alone. They want our horses. I’ve doubled the night guard on the remuda.”

  “I wondered where Kleingeld got off to last night.”

  “Him and a lot of others are drawing double duty, guarding the horses and then riding herd. I want you to do some double duty, too, Mac.”

  “What more do you want? I can only drive the wagon so fast.” The way his body ached and the cuts he had suffered in the stampede wouldn’t heal for another week, and that was if he was lucky.

  “I’m telling Desmond to drive the wagon.”

  “That’ll keep him out of trouble, I suppose,” Mac said, wondering if he was lying to himself by thinking that. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Scout. I saw how you can do that. You’ve got a good eye and a sense where the herd can travel easiest. The quicker we cross the river, the better I’ll like it.”

  “Will the Comanches stay on this side of the Pecos?” Mac could tell something else was bothering the trail boss. If Flowers watched their back trail as closely as it seemed, he must know about the bounty hunters. But he wouldn’t know why they were dogging the herd. Again Mac wrestled with telling the trail boss that the men were after him for the reward on his head back in New Orleans. But again he held his tongue.

  “They go wherever they want, though they’re not likely to follow us. The other side is Apache country. The Comanches and Apaches don’t get on too well, stealing each other’s squaws and using their children as slaves. I’m more worried about the weather. A good storm will send the Pecos over its banks and make fording it a chore, no matter where we cross.”

  Mac looked up at the blue sky. A few puffy white clouds meandered across it in a lazy way he wished he could copy. After everything he’d gone through the night before and the lack of sleep, he wanted to while away the day. Any chance of that was behind him before he ever signed on with the Circle Arrow crew.

  “You don’t see it up there. You don’t even smell it, but I feel it in my bones. We’ve got a big storm coming at us.”

  “Should I leave the wagon here or drive it to wherever Desmond is?”

  “He got back to camp just before sunrise.” Flowers chuckled. “He spent the night hunting for his saddle. Not that I blame him. That’s expensive tack. I wish he’d take better care of it.”

  Mac was glad he didn’t have to lug it all the way back to camp, just to give it up to the boy.

  “I tried to give him directions to where I left it. Might be I should have gone with him to speed up his hunt.”

  “Don’t worry your head none over that, Mac. He’s got to learn to do for himself. You get some of the spare gear and take a horse. Range out straight west, then curl on northward. I’m scouting straight to the northwest. If you come across a river, head straight on back and let me know. The Pecos winds all over the place. Even if I had a map, it wouldn’t do me any good since the damned river is so cantankerous about keeping to its banks, year to year.”

  Mac nodded and started walking toward the remuda, wondering at how talkative the trail boss had become. Flowers kept to himself and seldom said much at the best of times. This sudden flood of words was a good indication of how worried he was about fording the Pecos.

  Or was he worried about more than that? Mac shivered at what that might be.

  He was out scouting within a half hour. As he left camp, he saw that Desmond had shown up and worked to hitch up the team. Mac considered helping him, then remembered what Flowers had said about the boss’s son learning to do for himself. This chore wasn’t anything Desmond hadn’t done before. Driving the wagon could be difficult at times, especially over rough ground, but if Desmond got a move on, he’d be ahead of the herd and not have to drive through the prairie cut up by their hooves.

  Settling into a rhythm as he rode, Mac tried to keep an eye out for the river and a route to it, but the swaying motion kept lulling him to sleep. Like most cowboys, he had learned to nap in the saddle, but this wasn’t the right time.

  Despite his best efforts, exhaustion caught up with him and he dozed off into a sound sleep. His horse shied and tried to bolt, causing him to snap awake. For a moment he panicked, unsure where he was or how long he had been asleep. The world around him looked different, as if he had ridden for months rather than—what?

  A quick look at the sun’s position in the sky showed he had been asleep for more than an hour. Shaking himself, he forced away some of the fuzzy feeling that stalked him.

  To make sure he wasn’t dreaming, he pulled out his pocket watch and studied it as if he had never seen its like before. The watch ran slow, but he had looked at it when he began preparing breakfast that morning. He had ridden more than two hours without realizing he had done so.

  Grumbling, he tucked the watch back into his vest pocket. It was time to look around and do the job Flowers had given him. Finding a low rise, he gazed due west. No sign of the river. Nothing to the northwest, either. As his gaze slipped northward, he spotted several figures on horseback and caught his breath. Silhouetted on the hill like this, he made an easy target.

  Backing his horse back over the crest, he got out of sight of the Comanches. Flowers had been right. The Indians hadn’t moved on. The lure of so many beeves—and horses!—proved too powerful for them to let a stampede scatter them.

  Mac took a better look around to fix the landmarks in his head. He had to let Flowers know right away that the Comanches lay in wait for the herd.

  As he turned to go back eastward, a knot tightened in his belly. He drew rein and wished he had a spyglass to study the countryside spread out in front of him. For almost ten minutes he sat astride the increasingly restive horse, watching and waiting, before he decided that he hadn’t seen anything suspicious after all. He patted the horse’s neck and started to put his heels to the animal’s flanks, his caution unnecessary.

  He hadn’t ridden a hundred yards when he stopped again. The sun burned hot on his back. And now it reflected from metal ahead of him. If he kept the sun behind him, he’d be harder to see. Not outlining himself against the sky almost assured he wouldn’t be spotted by the men ahead of him. As he watched, this time with better knowledge of what to look for, he made out three men directly ahead blocking his route. A fourth rode to the north, probably scouting in that direction.

  Indians behind him. Bounty hunters in front of him. The old saying about a rock and a hard place went through Mac’s mind as he swallowed and tried to figure out his next move.

  He was cut off from the herd by two gangs willing to kill him, though for different reasons. Humiliating the Comanches the way he had required them to lift his scalp to regain honor. The bounty hunters wanted only money for that scalp. More likely, they’d take his entire body to prove they had earned their reward. It didn’t matter to him which of the two groups won. He was dead either way.

  He turned toward the south, thinking to swing wide around the bounty hunters. The horse balked and began to snort and paw the ground. He struggled to control his mount. Something in this direction spooked the horse. He swung the animal around to quiet it.

  Running away wasn’t any answer. It he kept riding west, he could cross the Pecos and get to the Rio Grande. Cross that river and he could lose himself in Mexico within a week or two. All he had in the way of gear was stashed in the chuckwagon, but he had his gun and a coat pocket weighed down with a full box of ammunition. Taking the horse would make him a thief, and he didn’t like the sound of that. Deep down, he was an honest man and had never stolen except in emergencies.

  “Honest men don’t run out on their jobs,” he muttered to himself. Hiram Flowers had given him a job when he needed it. He had hired on to do that job. Sneaking away, stealing a horse, betraying Flowers’s trust in him, none of that set we
ll. In fact, it stuck in his craw, and he wouldn’t do it.

  Taking on the bounty hunters looked to be the worst trail to ride. They would open fire the instant they spotted him. The Indians, however, likely had no idea he was anywhere around. That gave him a small edge he had to use. How he was going to do that was something of a puzzle, but he turned due north and rode behind the ridge of sand hills in the direction where he had spotted the Comanches.

  Staying in the shallow valley hid him from the bounty hunters, at least until he reached a point not a quarter mile from the Comanches. Careful observation told him that the bounty hunter riding to the north of his partners had spotted him and started for him. There wouldn’t be any honor among men like that, who hunted others for money. If this one reached him first, they’d have to shoot it out. The bounty hunter intended to be the one to collect the entire reward on his head.

  Mac picked up the gait and cantered more to the northwest now, directly toward the Comanches. When he topped a rise, he saw six of them below. They had dismounted from their ponies and now squatted down around a small fire cooking a rabbit. The odor wafted up to him and made his mouth water. He had missed a meal today, while he was asleep in the saddle.

  At the moment, all he wanted was to be alive for supper. Twisting around, he dragged out his revolver and waved it high over his head as he let out a loud holler and galloped downhill toward the Indians.

  Disturbing their meal had been a stroke of luck. They fumbled for their weapons and lifted their rifles. His heart seized up for a moment, fear striking him that they had found ammunition for their weapons since the previous encounter. Comancheros roved these plains. The Indians might have traded a few skins for cartridges. When they dropped their rifles and picked up bows and arrows instead, he knew his luck was holding.

  “Thank you,” he whispered to Lady Luck. Surely, she rode on his shoulder. All he needed now was one more turn in his favor.

  He galloped straight through the camp. His horse jumped the fire, dug in its hooves, and kicked up a cloud of dust. Wheeling around, Mac kept up his string of whoops and hoots to inflame the Comanches. When arrows began to fly in his direction, he bent low and used the horse as a shield. They wanted his horse alive as spoils of war as much as they wanted him dead. The arrows flew well over his head until he got out of range. He pulled himself upright in the saddle and slowed his headlong pace.