Dead Man's Trail (9781101606957) Read Online Free PDF Page A

deer or an antelope could.
    â€œWe’ll talk about it later, Lewis,” Yakima said, apprehension stiffening his neck as he touched moccasin heels to the flanks of his black stallion, who gave an eager nicker at the prospect of a warm barn and a bucket of oats.
    Yakima rode back through the canyon where they’d first seen Hendricks’s men trailing them and had hightailed it to the dry wash. Lewis’s roan clomped along behind, leading the black man’s mule.
    The half-breed didn’t like Lewis riding back there. He’d gotten to know the man well enough over the past four months that they’d been working together, splitting their income from their mustanging sixty-forty, since Lewis had the ranch and the corrals they needed for breaking, but Yakima knew that you never really got to know a man as hardheaded as Lewis Shackleford. You never really got to know an alcoholic, especially one given to Lewis’s dark moods that could often evoke the rough-hewn poetry in him but would often as not boil into a walleyed, unreasoning rage.
    Those rages had not yet been directed at Yakima, but the half-breed knew they would be eventually. And the gold could be just the trigger. So he didn’t like him riding behind him, because he wasn’t entirely sure that Lewis wouldn’t back-shoot him. Though not from anything specific Lewis had said, he knew that his partner considered him less of a man for his Indian blood, just as his mother, Old Judith, did. As he rode, keeping a sharp eye on the darkening land around him, he kept an ear skinned for the snick of Lewis sliding one of his old hog legs from its holster.
    The only sound he heard besides some wailing wolves and coyotes, however, was the sudden screech of glass as Lewis, finished with the brandy, hurled the bottle against a rock along the trail. When Yakima jerked with a start and looked back at the man, his right hand instinctively closing over the horn grips of his Colt, Lewis merely snickered.
    When they rode into the ranch yard, it was good dark, stars glistening across the sky. The high sandstone ridge looming up behind the two-story cabin made the clearing even darker despite the glow in the cabin’s first-story windows, behind the flour-sack curtains that Old Judith and Trudy had dyed ochre with Indian roots.
    In the barn, Yakima and Lewis tended their mounts in moody silence. They turned the horses and their savior’s mule into the rear paddock with seven half-broken mustangs, then headed for the cabin.
    Yakima had the black man’s saddlebags slung over his left shoulder. He didn’t know what else to do with them besides haul them into the cabin. He and Lewis would have to have it out over the gold, so he’d best keep it close. He already knew what he intended to do with it. While Lewis wouldn’t like it, he felt certain that he’d made the right decision.
    Trudy warmed some elk roast and potatoes for the two men, who ate at the long half-log pine table while Trudy washed supper dishes and the wizened Old Judith sat in a rocking chair by the fire, knitting and rocking. Neither woman said anything. They’d sensed the tension between the two men who’d returned after dark, and neither had even inquired about the saddlebags that Yakima had carried in with him and hung on a peg by the door.
    Lewis washed his food down with frequent sips from his stone coffee mug in which Yakima had seen him pour as much whiskey as coffee. The brown-haired Trudy, who was eighteen but sported a full, ripe body behind her gingham dress and soiled apron, had seen it, too, and she’d shot Yakima a tense, suspicious glance. When both men had finished, Lewis slid his plate forward and said to Trudy, “Get this plate out of here, girl. I’m done with it.”
    â€œYes, Pa.”
    The girl gave Yakima another faintly accusatory glance as though to ask: “What did you do to rile him?”
    When Trudy had taken