Haxan (23 page)

I
rode his horse into the ground, slapped it loose, then mounted my blue roan and raced for the horizon. Salinas Peak crawled away to my left. The wagon tracks were pointed north by northwest. I slowed near sunset to let my horse blow and walk off his lather.

I found a spring as we were crossing through the mountains. Not more than a cup of rank water seeping from a bowl-like depression. I wouldn’t have spotted it but for the thick vegetation around.

It wasn’t much water. When you emptied it another cupful swelled from the razor-thin crack. I watered up. My head throbbed where that bastard had clubbed me. While I was rubbing down my horse I felt my stomach revolt and I brought up all the water I had drank. There was nothing else in my stomach but it kept trying to empty itself. Every time a spasm hit my head burst in blinding fragments of light and diamond. I remained on my hands and knees, head down like a sick dog. My head hurt so much it felt like blood was pooling behind my eyes, making my vision all red and watery.

I felt the back of my head, gingerly. The hair was caked and scabbed with dried blood. The skin underneath felt spongy. I had quite a lump and had to cock my hat to the side so the brim wouldn’t press on it too hard.

I tried more water and this time I kept it down. My horse lowered his muzzle and drank from the stuff that seeped out to replace what I had taken. I let him keep drinking. When he had enough he browsed on the tender shoots growing around the bowl.

I didn’t relish the idea of trying to climb back into that saddle, not in my condition. But the thought of Magra, and what she was going through, forced me to my feet.

The world rocked. I clung to the pommel like a drunken, shattered man. I was afraid if I fell I would never get up. I laid my head on my arms. I may have fallen asleep like that for a minute or two. When I lifted my head again a lot of the fuzziness in my vision was gone.

I don’t know how long I stayed at that spring. It couldn’t have been more than an hour but it felt like years. Finally, I gathered enough strength to pull myself into the saddle. My horse shook his head, jingling the bridle. He had cooled off, too, and was ready to go.

I drove my mount forward. I don’t remember much of the ride. I felt something had snapped inside me back in White Sands, like when a broken guitar string twangs. I remembered what I had in the flour sack, tied to my saddle and thumping against my horse. I had become more animal than man.

I knew this and I didn’t care.

I spotted their campfire as the rising moon was making its appearance like an orange lamp. The moon hung so close to the ground you felt you could touch the face of it.

I let my horse stand, pulled my Sharps Special from its scabbard, along with extra ammunition, food, and canteen. I marched across the scrub waste, boots whisking through brush, fighting every minute to keep myself upright and not fall in an ungainly sprawl.

My head throbbed, but at least I could think after a fashion.

I was far out of Sangre County. Somewhere west of the San Andres Mountains would be my guess. That looked like the Oscura Ridge over on my left, but I wasn’t certain.

But if it was Oscura that meant I was thirty or forty miles southeast of Socorro. Give or take some miles.

Point being, I didn’t know precisely where I was. It didn’t look like the hard pan and scrag around would ever amount to anything.

It was as empty and as desolate as you could get in New Mexico Territory.

Maybe the whole world.

At least White Sands had white serried dunes against the big iron-blue sky. All I saw here was flat, limitless scrub with a slight depression or hollow now and then. A shallow ravine or wallow here or there. The land was as big as the night sky. It was that empty, and that wide.

However, empty as it was, you couldn’t help but feel you were at the centre of something.

I hefted the rifle and kept walking. My horse followed me. I fed him a handful or two of grain from the saddlebags and chided him to stay ground tied.

After ten minutes I came on three rocks, each one the size of a big coffee can. They had white markings on them, similar to the pictographs around Shiner Larsen’s place. I guessed they were of Indian make. Perhaps they were even older than that.

Maybe they were here when the Earth first formed and lava, or whatever, carved those markings into their faces.

I studied the pictographs by the light of the stars and moon, tracing my finger along them. I couldn’t make out what they meant. I don’t know why the stones were there, or if the markings meant anything at all.

But it was the one thing that was different around here. In my mind I called them Three Rocks and I memorized the lay of the land in case I wanted to find this trinity again.

I circled Rand’s camp, coming upon them from the east. I used the yellow glow of their small fire as my lodestone. Rand must have been pretty damn sure of himself to build a fire. Even a small one, burning like that, could be seen for miles. Maybe he put a lot of store in the talents of the man he left behind to kill me.

I don’t know what they used for fuel way out here. Perhaps they picked up chips or something while they were on the run and hoarded them for such an emergency. Didn’t matter much to me. Nothing mattered anymore.

They weren’t going anywhere.

I found a knoll two hundred yards from their camp and set up the rifle. It was difficult to make out faces from this distance and in that dim light. There were three figures sitting around the fire. I thought one of them might be Magra but I couldn’t be sure.

No matter. Time was on my side.
They weren’t going anywhere.
My .50-calibre Sharps would see to that.

All I had to do was wait for the sun to come up.

I settled down and waited out the night on the cold, uncomfortable ground. The desert was quiet and peaceful. Not even the howl of a coyote broke that deep stillness. There wasn’t enough water out here to keep many animals alive, anyway, if the surrounding scrub was any indication. Any water there was likely reeked of alkali—there were several alkali depressions around.

The last good water had been that little depression I found fifteen miles back. I hoped I could find it again.

Even with the moon up I never saw so many stars. You could hold up your finger and count a hundred before you got to the first knuckle. The emptiness of the hushed waste made a sort of roaring sound in your head, until you changed position and heard the soft rustle of your clothes, or your boot leather pop as you adjusted your cramping legs.

It was a long, bitter night. But Magra was out there. I could feel her. Almost touch her.

I waited. From the position of the pointing stars on the Big Dipper I judged it about midnight. I felt dog-tired. I found small rocks and pointed them in an arrow toward the North Star. That way, if it got cloudy during the night, or I fell asleep, I would be compass-oriented come morning.

The weather held. Before sunrise I made a quick breakfast of hard biscuit and half a canteen of water. My head ached, but my thoughts were sharp and clear. I didn’t mind drinking most of my water. If I lived, I could get my horse and ride past Three Rocks toward the spring I found. If not, then it wouldn’t matter anyway.

I arranged my bedroll to rest the forestock of the rifle on for stability. I stretched out behind, legs splayed, boots flat for added support.

While I waited, the world woke up around me by degrees.

I checked the Sharps rifle once more as a band of red and orange coloured the sky behind me. Everything appeared in working order. I laid a handful of heavy cartridges with ninety grains of powder each in a line on my bedroll. They were within easy reach. I kept them on the bedroll because I didn’t want sand or dirt on them. I didn’t want there to be any chance of misfire.

I slipped a cartridge in the breech of the gun and raised the sights. I let my eyes and my body adjust to the morning air and the natural cycle of the desert as it awakened around me.

There was a breeze gusting out of the northwest, maybe five or seven miles an hour. The tops of the thin grass around me bent with the force of the wind. I told myself to remember to use them as windage when the time came.

The gun was ready. I was ready.

Morning came on fast. It always does when you’re in the desert or any other flat and hard country by yourself. I watched them hitch the buckboard while Magra saddled the bay. I recognized her blue Union coat, but something was wrong. She was taller than before.

Even at two hundred yards I could sometimes hear their movements: clink of a coffee cup against an iron pan, snort of a horse in the cold morning, rough bark of harsh language or laughter.

They could afford to laugh. Things were looking up for them. I hadn’t shown my face all night long. Their friend must have gotten me or I would have come in, guns blazing.

Sunlight lifted off the desert floor in bright waves. It worked out just right. By the time they had the team rigged I had a bright sun over my shoulder and I could make them out clear.

I settled down to work. The Sharps roared and the bay standing off to the side dropped. I loaded the single-shot action and the Sharps buffalo gun roared again. The outside horse on the team collapsed, his knees buckling. Another cartridge and the last horse went down, tangled in the traces.

I didn’t like killing the horses this way because it might mean we had to walk out on foot. But I wanted to shock Magra’s captors beyond the ability to think. To let them know they were under the sights of a killing gun, with a merciless hunter on the other end.

If I had gone riding into their camp, six-gun firing . . . well, they would expect that move. They were prepared for that. Few men, I don’t care how tough they are, are ready to hear thunder rumbling out of a clear blue sky as three good horses drop in their tracks around them, a froth of blood spraying from their mouths and noses from the concussion of each shot.

You don’t plan for that. No one does.

Of course, the little doll-like figures didn’t stand around scratching their ass when this slaughter began. The man wearing Magra’s coat grabbed her and leaped behind a raised hummock of turf. The other man, dressed in a blue shirt and brown trousers with long black hair hanging across his face, tried to use the buckboard as a screen.

It would have been a good idea had I been armed with a Winchester, or some other rifle like a Spencer, or even an old Henry.

I wasn’t using any of those. I was using a Sharps Special.

I started pouring rounds through the wagon. It was no match for a .50-calibre buffalo gun powered by ninety grains of powder at 200 yards. Given enough time and ammunition I could chop it into kindling.

They had me spotted. They could see the puff of smoke a second or two before they heard the crack of the rifle. But I had the yardage on them. They couldn’t reach me with their pistols.

I could reach them, though. Hell tapped on their shoulder every time I fired the Sharps.

It takes a lot of nerve to stick under that kind of remorseless fire. My victim behind the wagon didn’t have that much sand. He broke cover and started running across the prairie, snap firing his six-gun wildly in my direction, wasting loads. I cut him down. He thrashed on the ground. I guess I just clipped him with that first shot. Watched the tops of the grass for windage. I put another slug into him. He stopped moving.

There was a stand of silence. I didn’t have time to use a Fisher brush to clean the hot barrel so I breathed down it to moisten the powder cake. I laid out several more cartridges in case I needed them.

The reverberation of the big gun had stilled the land. I could put Rand under the same withering fire, but I didn’t want to risk hitting Magra.

I grabbed my flour sack and walked toward their camp, right in the range of his six. I could see Rand’s slitted eyes under the broken brim of his hat and Magra’s cowed head pressed under his left hand.

“You take one more step, lawman, and I put a bullet in this witch’s brain,” he warned. He had a double-action Starr with the hammer drawn back. “What happened to Tanner?”

“Was that his name?” I flung the flour sack in Rand’s direction. When the mouth of the sack opened up, Tanner’s head rolled out and came to a stop on the incline, staring at the blue sky with sightless eyes.

“What kind of man are you?” Rand asked. There was waver in his voice. “You shot Silas when he was down. You murdered him.”

“That’s right. I did.”

“What kind of man are you?” he asked again.

“I guess you’re going to find that out in about one minute, Rand.”

His dirty Adam’s apple bobbed. “I don’t want to cross guns with you, Marwood. Let me walk out with the girl. I’ll leave her unharmed by a dry wash three miles west.”

“No deal.”

“Listen, you don’t understand.” He stopped to catch himself. He was rising close to panic and smart enough to know that wasn’t going to help him way out here.

“We were paid one hundred dollars in gold to kidnap her,” he said. “We could keep her or kill her, our choice. The d—” he stopped. “The man who bought our guns in Haxan said that was part of the bargain. But we never thought to kill her. We were going to sell her to Comanches in Palo Duro before you got on our trail.”

Magra tried to look up. Rand pushed her face back down in the sand.

“Palo Duro,” I said. “The same place you suckered Breggmann to die. You’ve got thirty seconds left, Rand.”

“I’ll give you all the gold double eagles I have, Marwood. Just let me walk out of here with a whole skin.”

“No.”

He pressed his revolver into Magra’s hair. “I’ll kill this girl, Marwood. I’ve never killed a woman before—you have. But I’ll do it. Her death will be on your conscience. Not mine.”

I put my rifle aside. “Time’s up, Rand. Get to your feet.”

“Marwood, listen to me, I—”

“I said stand.”

He rose, dragging Magra with him and using her body as a shield. He kept the gun to her head. Her face was bruised and her doeskin dress was torn and ripped. She had been given an old pair of pants to replace her leggings. They hadn’t been gentle with her. I didn’t expect they would be. These kinds of men never are.