Mojave Read online

  “What are you lookin’ at?” Peach Fuzz rubbed the tears out of his eyes with his fists, and staggered over to where I held a fresh horse turd.

  My jaw jutted toward the team of oxen. “A wagon like that, hauled by a team of oxen,” I said, “don’t move fast. They knowed they could never outrun Whip Watson. So they left some boys here with horses.” I pointed at the picket line they’d left. “Kind of a relay station. Got the girls out of the wagon. Mounted them up. Took off.” I flung the turd toward the north, the way the tracks headed.

  “Who?” He knelt beside me. “Who kidnapped Bonnie?”

  “Candy Crutchfield, appears to me,” I said, and looked for some recognition in his eyes. There wasn’t nothing in them except tears.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Hell if I know.” I pointed at another set of tracks. One that had whipped right past the Conestoga and hardly even slowed down.

  “Candy Crutchfield?” Peach Fuzz asked, his eyes following the tracks.

  “Jingfei,” I said. Hell, I even smiled. The girl whose name meant Quiet Not had plenty of gumption. She wasn’t trying to escape Whip Watson. She was going after the girls, her friends—or maybe even they was just acquaintances—that Candy Crutchfield had woman-napped.

  Peach Fuzz was already moving. “I’m a-goin’ after her,” he said, and I knowed that he did not mean Jingfei. I also knowed that I was, and that meant tagging along with him. Besides, it suddenly struck me that Peach Fuzz wasn’t all that bad of a sort, and that maybe he could get his Bonnie, and I could get Jingfei, and we could get away from Whip Watson, Candy Crutchfield, Calico, and the whole Mojave Desert. Hide out. Forget all about Lucky Ben Wong, even if I had give him my word that I’d bring Jingfei to him. Settle somewhere peaceable. Tombstone, Arizona, maybe. I’d heard it remained a top place for a gambler.

  As Peach Fuzz got into the wagon, and put his hand on the brake, I put both my hands on the harness between them two big gray horses, and watched his eyes get rid of the tears and harden over with the look of the reaper, or maybe of a lovesick fool. His right hand picked up that horsewhip.

  “Get some sense, boy,” I told him. “You got any water?”

  The whip rose.

  “You run these horses to death, and you’ll never find Jing—I mean, Bonnie.”

  The whip reared back.

  “And if Whip catches us . . .”

  He lowered the whip. I pointed to the Conestoga.

  “It’ll take a while before our friends have gathered the horses Crutchfield run off,” I said. “We got some time. We can take some oats from the wagon, water. Just enough to get by.”

  His head nodded like I was making sense, and, for once, I was. Then he said, “Do you know where they’s a-headin’?”

  “No. But there’s too many of them so they can’t hide their trail.”

  Course, that also meant that, once they got them horses, Whip Watson and company could follow us real easily. Maybe he already had, come to think on things. I mean, if Peach Fuzz and I had pursued the bad guys in a Columbus carriage, they was two more of them conveyances back at the camp. Course, if Whip happened to catch up with us, I could just tell him that we was after that women-napping woman Candy Crutchfield, and he’d likely believe me. As long as Peach Fuzz didn’t blurt out that he was in love with a gal promised to some idiot in Calico.

  “You know what Whip will do to you if he finds out you’re sweet on one of his girls,” I told Peach Fuzz as I brought a sack of grain and dropped it in our buggy.

  Peach Fuzz, pretty strong for a kid his size, slung over a bladder of water. “I remember Conrad,” he said, and returned to the big wagon.

  Wished to hell I could forget Conrad.

  As we come back with another haul, I told Peach Fuzz: “Best thing would be for you to let me go, you stay behind, forget all about that girl.” On account that the way I had things figured, I could likely catch up with Jingfei on a hard-blowing black mare that had already covered a lot of ground, then load that Chinese princess in the buggy, and skedaddle. That plan wouldn’t likely get me killed. But if I had to go with Peach Fuzz and try to sneak a girl named Bonnie out of a camp run by the notorious Candy Crutchfield, whoever the hell she was, and with maybe thirty or forty gunmen . . . well . . . that plan didn’t appeal much to me.

  Peach Fuzz didn’t answer. He was climbing into the driver’s seat, and I had the brains this time to get right beside him.

  I pointed.

  “Just follow the tracks. Steady pace. The horses have had a rest, and they shouldn’t be as winded as the ones we’re after. You don’t drive like a lunatic, we can catch up with Jingfei, then Crutchfield and your Bonnie.”

  He was gripping the whip in his left hand, and staring at me like he couldn’t believe what I’d said. He wet his lips after a spell and said, “You sound like you know what you’re doin’.”

  I grunted. Not many folks ever said that about me.

  “I’ve had some experience,” I told him.

  “Chasin’ bandits?” he asked.

  “Being chased,” I answered.

  Hazel-eyed Bonnie Little was five feet, four inches tall, twenty-two years of age, fair-skinned, honorable, brown-haired, modest, liked the opera, grew up as a Methodist in Fort Smith, Arkansas, amiable, her pa had gotten struck by lightning and her ma had succumb to diphtheria, had never been married, was a virgin, and only wanted to live a respectable life and be remembered as an ornament to society.

  “She told you all that?” I asked when Peach Fuzz finally stopped long enough to suck in some oxygen.

  He shrugged. “Some of it was in the Matrimonial News advertisement she showed me.”

  “Even the virgin part?”

  He glared at me. “That,” he said stiffly, “she mentioned to me.”

  “No takers?” I asked.

  Peach Fuzz glared harder.

  “From the ad?” I explained.

  He shrugged. “Rogers Canfield.”

  “I see.”

  I didn’t, not really, but Peach Fuzz flicked the lines, and I glanced out behind us. Only dust I saw was our own, so I turned back and looked at the tails of the two grays. Peach Fuzz was talking again.

  “Canfield says that he’s found the right man for Bonnie, but he ain’t. Do you think a whiskey drummer is right for a girl like my Bonnie?” I hadn’t even finished my shrug when Peach Fuzz said, “Of course, he ain’t right. Whiskey drummers don’t like the opera, do they?”

  Which got me to singing:

  “I’m a hardy sailor, too;

  I’ve a vessel and a crew

  When it doesn’t blow a gale

  I can reef a little sail.

  I never go below

  And I generally know

  The weather from the lee,

  And I’m never sick at sea.”

  But all that did was get Peach Fuzz to glaring again, so I stopped singing. Hadn’t seen many operas, but one time in Leadville, me and Big Tim Pruett had snuck into the opera house to see Our Island Home, and I sure liked that pirate chief named Captain Bang.

  “She don’t love him,” Peach Fuzz told me.

  “Hell.” It was my turn to glare at him. “She ain’t even met the guy.”

  “That’s right. But she has met me.”

  I shrugged, about all I could do in a conversation with Peach Fuzz, settled back into that comfortable, clean, shiny, well-waxed leather.

  “Besides,” Peach Fuzz said, “she comes with her own dowry.”

  I give him one of my looks that wasn’t a shrug.

  “Five hundred dollars,” he said, and flicked the lines again.

  “Not too fast,” I told him. Then I asked, “She’s bringing five hundred dollars with her?”

  “In a money belt. Beneath her corset.”

  Which got me to thinking scandalous thoughts that maybe Bonnie wasn’t no virgin no more. As Peach Fuzz was holding that buggy whip, I didn’t voice my thoughts. His glares was bad enough.

>   “She paid her own expenses to get to Prescott, right?” I asked.

  He didn’t glare, just give me a funny look.

  “And Rogers Canfield said he’d pick up the rest of the expenses from Prescott to Calico. As a marriage present.” That I didn’t ask. Just said it like I knowed it was true, because I did know it.

  “Who are you?” Peach Fuzz asked.

  “Micah Bishop,” I said.

  “Did Bonnie tell you all this, too?”

  I laughed. Peach Fuzz was all right as a buggy driver and Columbus-carriage-seat-waxer, and maybe even as a rescuer of damsels that is distressed by Candy Crutchfields, but he weren’t much when it come to brains. And that’s coming from me.

  “Never even seen her, Peach—son.”

  “I ain’t your son.”

  “Hope not. I ain’t that old.”

  I waited for him to tell me his name, or whatever name he was using this summer, but he didn’t. Just glared some more, and kept the Percherons and the Columbus carriage moving at a good but not too taxing pace.

  Maybe I’ve mentioned this before, but if not, let me put it down in pencil that I ain’t one much for planning. It’s kind of like how you play poker sometimes, let the cards fall where they fall. As we drove deeper into the Mojave and as that sun climbed up higher and got real hotter, I taken a drink from a pot we’d found in the Conestoga and had filled it with water from the barrel, and let Peach Fuzz have a drink, and then I looked at Peach Fuzz’s waist.

  “Where’s your gun?” I asked him.

  He shrugged. “I was a-fryin’ up a mess of bacon when they hit us. Hadn’t gotten around to gettin’ full dressed.”

  “You got any weapon?”

  “Barlow knife.” He tapped his trousers’ mule-ear pockets.

  “You planned on rescuing Bonnie from thirty or forty gunmen with a pocketknife?”

  He shrugged. That boy was smitten.

  Me? I’d left that Winchester rifle with Zeke. So I had a Colt Peacemaker with a shell belt full of bullets, and a Spiller & Burr with a pouch of caps and paper cartridges. No long guns. Not a hell of a lot of water. No food, unless the two Percherons didn’t mind us sharing their grain. I pushed my hat up. Well, the buggy would seat Bonnie and Jingfei. All we had to do was get them, and go for a Sunday drive in a fine carriage.

  “Stop,” I said.

  He was perfecting his glares.

  “Damn it,” I said, “stop this buggy.”

  Could tell he didn’t cotton to the idea, but he tugged on the lines, and the Percherons was glad to take a rest. I pointed. Peach Fuzz stared. Ahead of us was a canyon, a right tight fit, but we could make it.

  Peach Fuzz leaned out, looked at the path, then snapped at me, “Them tracks lead right into that canyon.”

  “That’s what Custer said,” I barked back, even though I doubted if Custer had said anything like that, but my words sank through Peach Fuzz’s thick skull.

  “Oh.” Right then, he looked like a boy. He said, “You reckon that’s an ambush?”

  “It’d make sense.” I pointed at all them rocks, the holes, the cracks. “You put ten, twelve men with repeating rifles”—I recollected the man I’d shot dead had been armed with a Spencer—“that’s all Crutchfield would need to stop a whole posse.” Or, I thought, Whip Watson and the boys.

  “Who the hell is this Candy Crutchfield fellow?”

  “Ain’t a fellow, I said. He’s a woman.” I rubbed the stubble on my chin. “Yeah. Not hiding their tracks, just racing their horses. Makes sense. Yeah, if I was wanting to ambush Whip Watson, that’s what I’d do.” Pointed again at the canyon walls. “Just sit up in them rocks, and wait.”

  Problem was, somebody had thought of something different. Because almost as soon as them words had left my mouth, I heard a rifle being cocked right behind me and Peach Fuzz and the Columbus carriage and the two gray Percherons. That’s when I recalled the dead shrubs and little sinkhole we’d passed right on our right.

  A voice said, “Step out of that buggy, you two, or I’ll blow you both to hell.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Luckily, I recognized the voice, and I reached over to stop Peach Fuzz from trying to get that Barlow knife out of his pants pocket, which would have taken quite a spell since his pants was too tight and he was sitting down.

  “Jingfei,” I said. “It’s me.”

  She said, “I said get down.”

  Loved her voice. It had a hint of the Oriental princess that she was, but unlike her betrothed, Lucky Ben Wong, she didn’t try to fool nobody by speaking that broken English. She spoke plain.

  “Now,” she said.

  We got down. Hands up. Turned around real slow.

  The porcelain face softened as she recognized me. Didn’t lower the rifle, though. Appeared to be studying us, and I hoped that Peach Fuzz wasn’t doing no more glaring.

  Instead, he asked, “Where’s Whip’s horse?”

  She answered, “Dead.”

  That was Whip’s rifle she was holding. Whip’s two canteens hung over her left shoulder.

  Peach Fuzz shook his head. “Whip’ll be mad.”

  She said something rather indelicate about what Whip could do.

  “You shouldn’t speak like that,” Peach Fuzz said. “It ain’t a-fittin’ for—”

  “Shut the hell up!” me and Jingfei both told Peach Fuzz, and for once, he complied.

  “Back away from the buggy,” she said. “I’ll be taking it.”

  I backed, but said, “What about us?”

  “Watson’ll come along.”

  Even I didn’t fancy having to explain to our temperamental boss how a mail-order bride from Trinidad, Colorado, by way of the Orient, had gotten the jump on me and Peach Fuzz and had stole his Columbus carriage after she had ridden Whip’s fine mare to death.

  So I pointed toward the canyon pass. “You try to go through that,” I said, “and you’ll get killed.”

  She said, “I already rode through it, then that black died, and I walked back through it.” She motioned with the Winchester’s barrel that she was tiring of our conversation. “And I’m still alive.”

  “You’re going to get Bonnie, ain’t you?”

  When Peach Fuzz said that, his voice all whiny like the love-struck boy he was, I seen a softening in Jingfei’s face. She took her eyes off me, and locked on Peach Fuzz, and she told him, “You’re a nice boy. Bonnie really likes you.” Her head bobbed. “Yes. I’m going after Bonnie and all the others.” She turned back to me. “This isn’t what we agreed to.”

  Didn’t know what she meant, exactly, but I wasn’t sure about nothing, so as I eased away from the carriage, and Peach Fuzz reluctantly came with me, and Jingfei moved cautiously toward the buggy, I said, “Rogers Canfield’s dead.”

  That stopped her, and she and Peach Fuzz both echoed, “What?”

  “Watson killed him,” I told them. “It was . . . er . . . self-defense. Aw, hell, Whip shot him down like a dog.”

  “He was a dog,” Peach Fuzz said, and I couldn’t dispute that sentiment. “I told Bonnie he was a dog.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Jingfei said. “My Lucky Ben Wong will be waiting for me.”

  “It matters to me,” Peach Fuzz said, “because that drummer ain’t fit to get hitched to my Bonnie.”

  Jingfei was trying to figure out how to get into the carriage without taking the rifle off me, ’cause she was smart. I mean smart because she didn’t trust me. She did manage to sling Whip’s two canteens into the back, but that was about all she could do for the moment.

  “That carriage,” I pointed out, “won’t hold all the girls bound for Calico.”

  “Six will fit,” she said, still trying to figure out how to get into that buggy.

  “There are twenty-four others,” I told her. She give me a look I can’t quite describe, and I could feel Peach Fuzz’s eyes boring into me. I gestured south. “Plus the twelve you left back in Whip’s camp.”

  “Elev
en,” she corrected, which was another reason I admired Jingfei so. She could do ciphering real well. I’d forgot to take her out of the equation of the number of mail-order brides back yonder.

  “Candy Crutchfield,” I said, and explained to her, “the gal who led the attack on your camp and made off with six of your pals. She struck a deal with Rogers Canfield, too.”

  She didn’t care for none of what I was saying, but Peach Fuzz appeared interested because he was asking things like “What?” and “Why?” . . . but Jingfei had leaped into the carriage while I was trying to talk some sense into her, and she done it real graceful, slicker than I can deal from the bottom of a deck. She cradled Whip’s rifle in her lap, the barrel still pointed at my direction, and her hand that wasn’t on Whip’s Winchester reached for the brake.

  So I sighed. “You need a plan,” I told her.

  Which stopped her. Now she give me the look that suggested that she really thought I had a plan, but that’s on account that as a professional card sharp, I know how to bluff.

  “Get in,” she told both of us.

  This time, Jingfei drove, I rode shotgun, though I didn’t have a shotgun and Jingfei wouldn’t let me hold Whip’s rifle, but I did have my two revolvers holstered on my hips. Peach Fuzz bounced around in the big backseat. His Barlow knife remained inside his trousers pocket.

  Course, I bit my lip, ground my teeth, and sweated a whole lot when we rode through that narrow pass, still thinking that would be a right handy spot for an ambush, but we cleared the walls, and the sun was blazing, and we just kept trotting along.

  “Easy pace.” I instructed Jingfei the same as I’d told Peach Fuzz how to drive. “These are the only horses we got.”

  An hour or two later, I made Jingfei stop to give the two grays a breather, and, once they’d cooled down, made Peach Fuzz fill his hat with some water for the horses.

  “Why don’t you use your own hat?” he snapped.

  “Because mine’s full of holes,” I reminded him.

  As the Percherons drunk their fill, I unbuckled my rig with the Spiller & Burr and tossed it into the backseat, and settled back down on the comfortable but rather dusty leather.