Dead Man's Trail (9781101606957) by Frank Leslie Page B

asked English.
    â€œSince today, I reckon.”
    â€œWhy’s he ridin’ with old Betajack?”
    â€œWho the hell knows? Maybe they both had the same beef with Neumiller.” English turned to direct his gaze down the street again as Yakima continued hammering nails through the shoe. “The sheriff hanged Preston Betajack just yesterday. Last night, somebody—Betajack, I figure—hanged one of Neumiller’s deputies. The prosecutor’s wife was the one who found him.”
    Yakima looked up from his work. “Prosecutor’s wife?”
    â€œYeah, Mrs. Mendenhour.”
    Yakima considered that a moment while holding Wolf’s hoof between his knees. Then he looked at English’s broad back once more. “She the woman I saw in the stage earlier, when they was just pullin’ out?”
    â€œIf she was just about the purtiest creature you ever laid eyes on,” English said, “then it was her, all right.”
    â€œAnd they’re after her husband,” Yakima said, half to himself.
    â€œI’m sure they are.” English shook his head darkly. “What those men do when they run down that stage is anyone’s guess.” He looked at Yakima, narrowing one bushy-browed eye. “But I don’t have to guess what they’ll do to the man’s purty wife.”
    Yakima felt that stone drop in his belly again. Inwardly, he cursed. He cursed the killers and the sheriff and the prosecutor and even the prosecutor’s wife. He cursed them all for the fix they were in. Most of all he cursed himself for being here in the middle of it.
    And for not mounting up and taking the gold and riding south to Texas. Maybe Mexico. All the gold he was carrying would take him a long ways, for many years, in Old Mexico.
    The good feeling he’d felt only a few minutes ago was gone.
    When he’d finished hammering the shoe onto Wolf’s hoof, he tossed the hammer to English, slung the saddlebags over Wolf’s back, and stepped into the leather. He stiffened when he saw Lewis still writhing on the ground in front of the sheriff’s office. The double-crossing rancher was the only living person on the street. All the rest of the town appeared to still be cowering behind closed doors and shuttered windows.
    Yakima looked at English and said tightly, “Find Shackleford’s horse. Get him on it and slap him home!”
    Then he rammed his moccasin heels against Wolf’s flanks and loped along the street, taking the left tine at the edge of town and following after the stage toward the northeast.

Chapter 11
    She’d ridden her sleek palomino, Taos, through the notch in the rocky bluffs and come up through the aspens to see him working in the corral of the old line shack.
    He was repairing the corral, with several slender logs lying around him and the white-socked, coal black stallion standing nearby, always close at hand. The two seemed part of each other. He’d taken his shirt off because of the heat; it hung over a corral slat. One log rested across two sawhorses on the corral’s left side, away from the cabin. A tendril of white smoke rose from the cabin’s chimney, unspooling amongst the pines jutting around the scarp to the right of the shack.
    The sun made a shimmering gold line along the stallion’s broad back.
    Even as he sawed the slender log stretched across the sawhorses, he was looking toward her, for he’d obviously heard her and Taos riding toward him. He had a shell belt and a holstered revolver slung over the corral, near his buckskin shirt, and a rifle with a brass receiver leaned against a post, below the pistol.
    His black, sweat-damp hair dangled to his broad, muscular shoulders, his skin the color of varnished cherry. Sweat glistened on his bulging arms and on the heavy slabs of his thick chest that formed a mantle beneath his stout brown neck. He’d been quite a vision working and sweating there in the