The Thunder Riders Part 6

His hat tumbled off his shoulder and dropped to the ground. He gave a savage grunt as he entered her. She cursed and sagged forward, wrapping her arms around his neck, her legs around his waist.

Considine ground up and into her, and she rose and fell against the escarpment as though riding a green mustang over broken terrain. Her hair bounced over Considine's shoulders and down his back.

Considine gave a final grunt, sighed deeply. His knees bent, and they dropped slowly together, raking air in and out of their lungs, down the rock wall to the ground.

Anjanette buried her face in his shoulder, and Considine leaned his head against the scarp behind her. Gradually, their breathing slowed.

"I'm sorry, Chiquita," Considine said, clearing his throat and smoothing her hair back from her face with both hands. "I shouldn't have thrown you over my horse, given you such a hard ride. I only wanted it to look convincing."

Anjanette's black eyes softened slightly. "You nearly killed me, making me ride that way. You're too rough sometimes, Jack."

"I forgot to bring you a horse. I'm sorry." He kissed her gently. "Forgive me?"

She lifted her chin defiantly. "I also thought you were coming yesterday yesterday morning." morning."

"My man from the bank sent me a cable yesterday in Javelina, said the company delayed it a day to throw off possible"-he smiled, broadening his mustache and showing a chipped front tooth-"holdup artists." He lifted her chin with his gloved right hand. "Did you miss me, baby?"

Anjanette hiked a shoulder and quirked a corner of her mouth. "I got along."

Considine stared back at her, his eyes pensive. Finally, he stretched his lips in a broad smile and caressed her cheek with the palm of his hand. "I can tell you missed me. You're not nearly as tough as you make out. There isn't a woman alive-not even the desert-rat granddaughter of Old Antoine-who has yet been able to resist my charms."

The thunder of hooves and wagon wheels rose behind Considine. He turned to look back through the chaparral, where a dozen riders loped toward them. Behind them came the stage, bouncing through the greasewood and cactus, weaving around shrubs and boulders while Wolf MacDonald whipped the reins over the team's backs and bellowed long-practiced curses.

Considine turned back to Anjanette, dropping his head to nuzzle her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, licking her nipples. He'd met her four months ago, when he and the rest of the gang except for Mad Dog McKenna had split up after robbing an army payroll caravan near Pima Tanks. Considine and McKenna had meant to spend only one night at Charlier's Hotel and Tavern, then light out for New Mexico.

But that was before Considine laid eyes on Old Antoine's granddaughter. Anjanette had sashayed around the saloon that night, grinning and smiling and cavorting like one of the boys, her colored bandanna holding her Indian-black hair back from her finely sculpted face, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s pushing like ripe melons from behind her white cotton blouse, skirts swishing about her legs.

When she set down a beer and a tequila shot before Considine, sitting slumped back in his chair, he could tell from her eyes-cool but with little sparks of copper-that her attraction to him was as keen and immediate as his for her. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s swelled and her light brown cheeks flushed. Her pa.s.sion was like heat radiating from a stoked boiler.

They spent the entire week frolicking in Anjanette's bedroom every night after Old Antoine took his customary bottle to bed and drank himself to sleep. One night, unable to wait until Anjanette had finished sweeping the saloon, they made love atop the long mahogany bar, her blouse ripped open, skirt thrown up across her belly, his denims bunched around his ankles.

At the end of the week, Considine had promised Anjanette he would spring her from the confinement and boredom of Saber Creek and her grandfather's tavern and show her a world of adventure she'd only dreamed about. A month ago, when he'd learned of the Wells Fargo gold shipment from an hombre working in the Saber Creek bank, he'd figured he'd found a way to do just that.

They decided to make her exodus from town look like a kidnapping, to make a posse afraid of getting a hostage killed, and to keep her face off wanted dodgers. She, unlike the other Thunder Riders, wasn't a seasoned owlhoot, after all.

Now Considine lifted his head and kissed the girl's lips. "We best go meet the pack."

As he and Anjanette walked back through the mesquite thicket, holding hands, Anjanette said, "Speares will be gathering a posse, you know."

"Sure. But it's suicide to ride after us. More than one lawman has found that out the hard way." Considine glanced at her, giving his rakish smile. "Besides, Chiquita, isn't that what you're for? To slow him down? Your sheriff wouldn't want us to kill our lovely hostage-the loveliest girl in Saber Creek, if not all of Arizona."

He kissed her cheek and snaked an arm around her waist as they moved out of the mesquites. Before them, the other gang members were dismounting their dusty, sweaty horses, casting knowing grins and smirks toward Considine and Anjanette.

The stage driver, Wolf MacDonald, drew back on the team's reins, bellowing.

"I almost killed him last night," Anjanette said tightly. "He pushed me too far."

Considine looked at her again quickly, and grinned. "I don't doubt it! Is that how he got that-?" He gestured to indicate the wrapping over Speares's broken nose.

Anjanette shook her head, staring at the stage stopping twenty yards away, the horses lurching back in their collars, digging their hooves into the dirt. "A friend stepped in."

"Hey, pard, I think we oughta ditch the stage here!" A tall man in faded Union cavalry trousers, wolf coat, and stovepipe hat rode up on a cream barb. He was round-faced, unshaven, with long, straight black hair and silver hoop rings dangling from his ears. On his right cheek a dog's face had been tattooed. The other cheek and eye had been horribly disfigured by Apaches when Ernst "Mad Dog" McKenna was only five years old, and his Scottish parents were ranching in the White Mountains. "No point in haulin' it any farther. Country breaks up only a few clicks farther south. Let's strap the lockbox to a couple horses and light a shuck due south."

Considine strode between several horses, squinting against the dust, and approached the stage. MacDonald set the brake and began climbing down from the driver's box.

"Anybody still alive in there?" Considine asked, nodding at the bullet-riddled carriage housing.

MacDonald chuckled and wiped a stream of dusty chaw from the right corner of his mouth. "s.h.i.t, if all the bullets flying in town didn't kill 'em, the ride I just gave 'em did did!"

As MacDonald leapt to the ground with a grunt, Considine drew his pearl-gripped Peacemaker and opened the coach door. A woman in a green traveling dress rolled halfway out, head and arms dangling toward the ground, gla.s.sy eyes staring up at Considine as if with a puzzling question. Blood dribbled from her lips and from the holes in her right temple and shoulder.

Considine shuttled his gaze from the woman to the coach's dark innards, where two men and an old woman in a black dress with white lace trim lay sprawled every which way. The desperado leader winced and shook his head as he holstered the Colt.

"Well, that makes it easy."

He reached in, pulled the woman in the green dress out, then reached in again, found the handle on the strongbox, and yanked it out from beneath the gray-haired lady, grunting with the effort.

"Dog, help me here!"

Mad Dog McKenna swept his bear coat back from the big bowie sheathed over his belly and grabbed a handle of the strongbox. Together, he and Considine lifted the box, which must have weighed over a hundred pounds, to the ground beside the dead woman in the green dress.

"Must be payday soon out to Fort Chiricahua," Considine said with a laugh.

"Ah, s.h.i.t," Considine said, "what do those soldiers need with money, anyways? There's nothin' to buy buy up in them bald hills." up in them bald hills."

MacDonald stepped forward, rubbing his big hands together. "Come on, Jack, open her up, will ya? I wanna see all them coins!"

Considine drew his Colt, stepped back, and triggered the gun. He had to fire once more before the heavy iron lock broke and hung slack against the stout wooden box. Holstering the revolver, he knelt down, removed the lock from the chains, and opened the lid.

Several lumpy burlap pouches, tied with rawhide, snuggled in the box like baby pigs at their mother's belly. Each one was marked WELLS FARGO, LORDSBURG, N.M.T.

MacDonald whistled. "Can I open one?"

"Not till we get to the tavern." Considine looked around. "Prewitt, Cooper, Sanchez-separate these pouches, rig them to a couple of the stage horses."

As Prewitt and Cooper stepped forward, Cooper said, "Sanchez didn't make it out of Saber Creek, Jack."

Considine cursed and cast his gaze around the well-armed men-mostly Yanquis but a few greasers, a black man, a half-breed Sioux, and a former Apache cavalry scout humorously known to the desperado gang as Kills Gold-Hairs because of his predilection for towheaded wh.o.r.es. There was also a round-bodied Mexican woman named Toots, sister of one of the Mexicans, who could shoot better than some of the men, and who hunted, trapped, cooked, washed dishes, and tended wounds.

Considine brought his eyes to Mad Dog. "How many we lose?"

"Four," said Ben Towers, the only black man in the group-a former slave and hide-hunter whom Considine and McKenna had met in Yuma Pen's infamous snake pit. Towers had gone on a bender and killed several men in his hide-hunting outfit, and found that he enjoyed killing men more than buffalo, and robbing banks more than stretching hides for a living.

"But Eddie-he's not in good shape," said Toots, standing among the men who'd gathered in a semicircle around the strongbox. She was a Duke's mixture of Pima, Mexican, and Irish. She turned her barrel-shaped body to indicate the man sitting on a tall, blaze-faced black stallion about forty yards away.

The man was crouched forward in the saddle, hatless, curly auburn hair blowing in the breeze. The horse's head was up as the animal looked around, twitching its ears and snorting angrily.

Considine cursed again and pushed through the crowd toward the man, Eddie Tomlain, a young outlaw from Kansas. Knowing Considine's gun reputation, Tomlain had called him out in the main street of Tularosa one drunken Sat.u.r.day night. Considine had known a good, albeit green and ga.s.sy, cold-steel artist when he saw one, so he'd shot the kid's gun out of his hand, beat him to a b.l.o.o.d.y pulp, and invited him into the Thunder Riders.

"Ah, s.h.i.t, Eddie." Considine reached up to pull the kid's crossed arms away from his lower right side. "What the h.e.l.l those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds do to you?"

Tomlain raked out through gritted teeth, "I'll be all right, Jack. Bullet went through my side. I'll be all right . . . once I get to O'Toole's."

"Well, you sure got you a nice horse there, Eddie." Considine stepped back to inspect the horse. Wolf lowered his head and gave Considine an angry stare, expanding and contracting his nostrils. "Where'd you find him?"

Tomlain forced a smile, and blood gushed from one corner of his mouth. "He was tied in front of the mercantile. Sure is a fine one, ain't he?"

As he reached out to pat the black's sleek neck, the horse lunged suddenly, lifting its front hooves a good six feet in the air and loosing a shrill whinny. Considine bolted back with a start as Tomlain gave a cry and tumbled off the saddle, somersaulting and hitting the ground with a heavy thud and an anguished grunt. Considine grabbed the black's reins, planted his heels in the turf, and held tight as the horse whipped around, buck-kicking, then rising off its front hooves once more.

The horse nearly pulled Considine off his feet, but the desperado leader held the reins taut and didn't let the horse turn. With this stallion's strength and fury, if he got turned around, he'd be halfway back to town in five minutes.

"Help me, Latigo!" Considine shouted as the horse began to pitch once more.

The biggest, most muscular man in the group-Latigo Hayes-rushed over and grabbed the reins in front of Considine. When the men got the horse reined down, Latigo held the reins up close to the bit, then led the horse a few yards away and tied it tightly to a stout cottonwood.

"Fine horse," said Latigo in his slight German accent, running a hand along the quivering beast's arched neck. "Boy, is he p.i.s.sed!"

Considine had already turned back to Tomlain. Several of the others stood around him as well, while the rest of the group watered their horses or separated the bags of gold coins for packing on a couple of stage mounts.

Breathing hard, Tomlain looked up at Considine. "I reckon I'm gonna need a hand up," he said with a chuckle. "D-d.a.m.n hoss. I'm gonna knock some sense into his head . . . show him who's boss."

Considine glanced at the others gathered around the wounded desperado, then smoothed his mustache and pinched his denims up his thighs, and squatted down. "You took a bad one, Eddie." He removed his hat and worried the brim with his fingers. "I hate to remind you of the rules at a time like this, but . . . well, you know we can't let wounded riders slow down the rest of the group. And we couldn't leave you here. One, it wouldn't be fair to you. Apaches or bobcats might find you. Two, if a lawman found you, he might make you tell him where we're headed."

Tomlain's eyes turned dark in the sunlight as his chest rose and fell, blood gushing out from the hole in his side, sopping his shirt and vest. "You son of a-"

His right hand reached for the Smith & Wesson holstered low on his right thigh in a black rig he'd had tooled and st.i.tched in Durango on their last trip to Mexico. Considine's own hand closed around the gun's grips before Tomlain's could reach it, however, and he slid the .45 from the holster.

He held the oiled weapon up close to his face, looking it over. "Sorry, Eddie. Anyone you want me to notify?"

"Come on, Jack. I can ride. Put me back on my horse."

Considine sighed, stood, and regarded the other five men facing him. Anjanette stood off to his left. The other woman, Toots, stood near Anjanette, rummaging around in her saddlebags as she glanced over her right shoulder at Considine.

"I did the last one, so I ain't gonna do Tomlain. I don't wanna get the reputation of bein' an executioner executioner." He glanced at a short, sharp-featured man in a bowler hat decorated with bear claws, with a string of wolf teeth around his long, thin neck. "Luther, I know you and Eddie were tight, so I won't ask you."

Considine raked his gaze across the other four men, his eyes expectant, waiting.

"Hold on." It was Toots, standing beside her horse and facing the group, with a hand-rolled cigarette drooping from her lips. She held a lucifer in her left hand. A smile shaped itself slowly on her round, fleshy face, the pug nose peeling from sunburn.

She sc.r.a.ped the lucifer to life on the cartridge belt wrapped around her thick waist, on the outside of her wool poncho and deerskin leggings, and cupped her hands to the cigarette, puffing smoke. Drawing deep on the quirley and tossing down the spent match, she walked over and took the Smith & Wesson out of Considine's hand. Staring at the desperado leader, she held the gun out toward Anjanette.

"If she wants to be in this group, let her show how much sand she's got under those purty t.i.ts."

Chapter 8.

Following the tracks of the dozen galloping riders and the stagecoach fishtailing through the chaparral, deputy U.S. marshal Vince Patchen galloped his steeldust over a low b.u.t.te crest and down the other side. He followed the tracks and the trail of torn sage and cactus toward a mesquite thicket standing in a shallow bowl and checked the steeldust down twenty yards from the abandoned stage.

The six-hitch team was gone, their harness scattered about the scrub, the wagon tongue drooping.

Dismounting, Patchen shucked his rifle, levered a round, and approached the stage warily, swinging his head from left to right. He didn't want to get himself bushwhacked as his old ranger friend, Wilson Pyle, and Pyle's young partner had done.

Patchen squeezed the Henry in his gloved hands and licked his lips. Poor sons of b.i.t.c.hes had been shot down like dogs.

When he'd scrutinized the area thoroughly, concluding the gang had moved on, Patchen walked back to the stage and knelt down beside a woman lying near the coach's open door, in a blood-splattered green traveling outfit. The woman's sandy blond hair had fallen from its bun to hang in disarray about her pretty face.

Patchen didn't bother lowering his head to listen for a breath. The open eyes were death-glazed.

Horse hooves thudded and tack squawked behind him. He straightened, looked over his shoulder at the twelve-man posse galloping toward him, with Speares in the lead, then poked his head through the stage door. Inside the coach, three more bodies lay, b.l.o.o.d.y and broken, in a single pool of slowly congealing blood on the floor between the seats. Flies droned. The blood smell hung heavy in the close quarters.

"I figured they'd dump the stage sooner or later." Speares drew up beside Patchen's steeldust. Blood spotted the thick gauze wrap over his nose. Adjusting the bandage with one hand, he said, "They'll be picking up the pace now, headin' for the border, no doubt."

"That means we're gonna have to pick up the pace," Patchen said, his jaw hard as he raked his gaze over the posse pulling up to either side and behind Speares. The catch party was made up mostly of shop owners and their sons, with one Mexican vaquero and three Anglo market hunters whom Speares had la.s.soed in one of Saber Creek's saloons.

"I can't ride any faster than this," said the bank owner, Franklin, wincing as, with one hand on the cantle, he shifted in his saddle. "You men better go on ahead. I'll only slow you down. I'll go back and alert the army out at Fort Chiricahua, have them send a patrol-"

He stopped as Speares raised his Remington to his head and thumbed back the hammer. "Isn't that your your money we're chasin', Franklin?" money we're chasin', Franklin?"

As the banker turned toward the sheriff, his lower jaw dropped, his face flushing with outrage. "Really, Speares!"

Speares squinted one eye. "Ain't you the one responsible for all that Wells Fargo gold? You tell me if I'm wrong."

The others, except Patchen, snickered as Speares held his gun barrel against the banker's left temple. Franklin's mouth opened and closed several times before he finally loosed a few words. "Well . . . yes, of course I'm responsible. But-"

"But nothin'," Speares said through gritted teeth. "I'm shorthanded the way it is, since all my deputies were gunned down tryin' to protect your gold. Now, I realize you ain't no gun hand, but, by G.o.d, I need every warm body I got, if for nothin' more than keepin' an eye out for an ambush. In other words, you ain't goin' nowhere but south with me and this posse, and you ain't comin' back till either you're you're dead or we've killed every last one of that bunch of border snipes that invaded dead or we've killed every last one of that bunch of border snipes that invaded my town my town."

Franklin shifted his eyes nervously, swallowed. "You don't think someone should notify the army?"

"Take too long. Besides, those blue-bellies got their hands full with them bronco Apaches." Speares pushed the revolver's barrel more firmly against the banker's head, causing Franklin to stretch his lips back from his gold-capped teeth. "Have we come to an understanding now, Mr. Franklin?"

The banker slid his gaze to Patchen, standing before the posse, grinning and holding his Henry over his shoulder. Finding no help there, Franklin returned his gaze to Speares. "I guess I have, Sheriff-"

A voice from behind cut him off. "What I wanna know is what's in it for us us?"

Patchen glanced at the man riding directly behind Speares-one of the market hunters in a broad-brimmed hat, chaps, and a long tan duster. He was probably twenty-five and, like his two compatriots, carried himself like a man who knew how to use his well-tended sidearms.

"I mean," the man said, sliding his flinty gaze to the sheriff, "I think there should be a reward."

"Yeah," said the man sitting on an Appaloosa to his right. "Me and Jim and Nudge was just ridin' through when that gold was. .h.i.t. We got no ties to this town. We hunt for a livin', and by G.o.d if we're gonna hunt that gang of cutthroats and your loot, we want a re reward!"

Speares gigged his horse forward, turned it around to face the three market hunters. "They took a girl. That ain't enough for ya?"

The one on the far right glanced at the other two, then turned back to Speares. "h.e.l.l, her old man ain't even ridin' after her. Last I saw, he was curled up drunk behind his bar."