Santa Fe Death Trap Page 3

  All this rolled through Josh’s thoughts. Bill had to raise his voice to get the youth’s attention.

  “Damn it, kid, you think I love my own voice? Save the dreaming until you’re asleep. I said pull in and check your rig. We got a long, steep slope ahead before we hit the springs. It’ll be hard to stop if your saddle slips again.”

  Josh flushed angrily at himself for being so tender footed even after almost a year side kicking with Wild Bill. That was twice now Bill had to remind him they were riding through outlaw country, not dancing on Fiddler’s Green. Yelping at the pain in his butt, the youth swung down to reset his saddle and check the cinch and latigos.

  “This ain’t a particularly hard ride,” Bill said, nodding toward the slope out ahead. “Not for a peeler like you.”

  Bill’s grin was so good-natured, Josh had to join him.

  “Stick close to the trail, you’ll be all right,” Bill assured him. “Just stay behind me. Hold tight rein, but let Old Smoke set his own pace. It turns a little steep toward the bottom is all, and your horse might have to slide the last few yards. Full moon and plenty of stars, so we’ll be all right.”

  Josh felt a tickle in his stomach as he stepped up into leather again and took up the slack in his reins. Old Smoke had settled down since tossing Josh into the cactus patch earlier today. But the slope stretching out before them in the silvery moonlight looked mighty long and steep.

  Bill, who only used spurs in a shooting scrape, started the white mustang forward with a squeeze of his legs. Both animals, like all the remounts, had spent their early lives in the high sierras of Sonora. They handled the descending slope with the surefootedness of mules and bighorn sheep.

  “Why it’s a Sunday picnic!” Josh called ahead to Wild Bill, starting to enjoy the excitement of this wild plunge.

  A few moments after Josh spoke, however, the slope grew noticeably steeper. He hugged the gray’s neck, hunkering lower in the saddle to keep from sliding off forward.

  Thank goodness Wild Bill’s pure white mare was easy to keep an eye on so that Josh could hold the narrow trail. Tall, thin cactus plants, called Spanish bayonets by the local Indians, began to crowd the trail on both sides. A careless rider could get skinned alive—and Josh wanted no more run-ins with cactus.

  Suddenly, even as Josh watched, Bill’s horse just dropped out from under Hickok—literally swallowed up by the earth.

  Wild Bill, thanks in part to his early days as a Pony Express rider, was famous for quick horseback thinking. Even as he felt his mount drop, Hickok lifted both feet from the stirrups, planted them on his saddle pommel, and kicked upward with a mighty flexing of his strong legs. One hand still gripped the lead line holding his remounts.

  Josh barely managed to rein left and avoid the trouble spot himself. He gaped in even greater astonishment at what happened next: As Bill’s mount disappeared, Hickok managed to land on the bare back of his favorite, the chestnut with the roached mane.

  Josh heard a piteous cry of pain from the white mustang, pain that came from deep wounds. Then he and Bill got caught in a confused, sliding rush of whickering animals and boiling dust and chunks of loose scree. Moments later, they reached a grassy flat at the bottom of the slope, a sliding but safe landing.

  “God Almighty!” Josh exclaimed. The shrieking horse could still be heard above them, making enough racket to wake snakes. “What in Sam Hill happened, Bill?”

  “Pitfall trap,” Bill replied tersely. “Well made, too. Hobble your horse, kid, and follow me. Keep an eye peeled.”

  “Indians do it?” Josh demanded, scrambling up the slope behind Bill.

  “Apaches like a pitfall,” Bill replied, his breathing growing more ragged as he fought the slope. “And I’ve talked to Texas Rangers who say Comanches will rig one now and then, too. But the Comanches are mostly up in Oklahoma now, selling stories to your peers for drinks. The Apaches, I’ve heard, are mostly out in Arizona or hiding down in Old Mex.”

  Bill’s injured horse, obviously in death agonies, cried out again, the sound reminiscent of a helpless child crying.

  “Aw, Christ,” Bill muttered in a tone Josh rarely heard him use. It was one of the few sounds Bill could not get used to during the long years of civil war—wounded horses crying. The sound raised a man’s fine hairs even more than the noise of human suffering. Bill had watched it literally drive strong men into insane frenzies.

  “Good heart of God,” Josh murmured when both men reached the deep pitfall. Plenty of moonlight showed the grisly scene.

  The dying horse was impaled through its belly and intestines on a wooden stake that had been sharpened to a lethal point and driven deep into the ground. Cursing softly, Bill drew one of his pearl-gripped Colt .44s and immediately shot the suffering animal in the head.

  “Damn it, kid,” Bill said, his eyes searching the moonlit slope all around them. “That animal had bony withers. But she also had good bottom and always bucked to the same pattern. She was a good animal, and didn’t deserve that.”

  “Why would Indians do this?” Josh wondered. “I thought they respected horses?”

  “Apaches damn sure respect horses—it’s their favorite meat. But Indians didn’t do this.”

  “How can you know that?”

  “And you call yourself a newspaperman? Look there—you tell me what tribe uses a double-hitch knot.”

  Bill meant the now-broken cover of woven branches that had been placed over the pitfall. They had been tied together with well-knotted ropes.

  “That rope, too,” Bill added. “It’s hemp. White man’s rope. Indians around here would use sisal or buffalo hair.”

  “Well, whoever did it, what could be the point?”

  Bill didn’t answer. Something inside the pitfall caught his eye. Hickok folded to his knees. Josh watched him reach around the dead mustang. A piece of broken board lay in the bottom of the pit. Bill pulled it out, then stared at it in the moonlight.

  “What is it?” Josh demanded.

  Bill shook his head. He handed the scrap of wood to the youth. Now Josh saw that the number 18 had been scrawled on the wood with charcoal. Nothing else.

  “What’s eighteen mean?” Josh asked.

  “Christ, kid. It means one more than seventeen, one less than nineteen.”

  “No, I mean—”

  “How the hell would I know what it means? I can’t find sign in tealeaves. Hell, maybe it don’t mean a damn thing.”

  Bill again studied the surrounding terrain.

  “Well,” he said finally, “let’s get below and make camp for the night. Much as I hate to, we better take turns on guard.”

  “Bill?” Josh said as the two men trudged down the slope.

  “Yeah?”

  “That trap ... it wasn’t dug deliberately for us, was it? You, I mean.”

  “I don’t see how. Nobody knows I’m heading this way.”

  “And why the number eighteen? Is that—”

  “Kid, give it a rest, wouldja?” Bill snapped. “I came south to have some fun. And damn it all anyway, that’s what I mean to do. Even if somebody has to get killed.”

  Bill fell silent, and a coyote howled from a ridge or two over. Its long, ululating howl ended in a series of yipping barks. The mournful sound, in that windswept vastness, made the hair on Josh’s nape stiffen.

  “Fun,” Bill repeated defiantly. But the night only mocked him in silence.

  Chapter Three

  Frank Tutt slept off his hangover and woke up late on his second afternoon in Santa Fe, feeling fit as a rutting buck. He bathed and shaved, then visited the hotel dining room and ordered himself a steak with all the trimmings.

  A quick check with a porter at the nearby La Fonda Hotel revealed that Hickok had not yet checked in. If he didn’t reach town by sundown, Frank decided, that meant there was a good chance he was hurt or killed by the pitfall Frank had dug near Chico Springs.

  But Frank did not, as had so many of J. B. Hickok’s vanquished foes,
underestimate Wild Bill’s survival skills. He knew Hickok would probably head for Chico Springs—with Chimayo under plague, it was the nearest graze and water. But mainly, that trap was an opportunity to leave a clue for Hickok. Tell him, but not tell him. After all, what good was revenge if a man couldn’t enjoy it?

  No, Frank reminded himself as he returned to his room at the Dorsey. Before he moved in for the actual kill, eyeball to eyeball, he would let Hickok know what was happening. When you gun down a Tutt, then by God you’d best kill ‘em all.

  Frank crossed to the hidebound chest in the corner and opened it with a key he kept in his fob pocket. He removed the major groups of a disassembled .56 Spencer carbine, wrapped in clean cloths. This weapon, equipped with the 7x crosshair scope Frank had special-ordered for it, was the highly effective sniping gun of the U.S. Army’s new mountain regiments, tasked with killing Indians in their hiding places.

  Frank assembled the Spencer but left the scope off for now. He propped the carbine against the wall and finished unpacking the trunk.

  Its contents included a rattan walking stick, in two sections that screwed together. A fragment of mirror had been embedded into the curved handle so it could be used to look around corners or into doorways. Frank also removed and inspected his “drinking jewelry”—curved horseshoe nails welded together so they easily slipped over his knuckles in a fistfight. With one straight-arm punch, Frank had once used them in Amarillo to bust seven teeth out of a cowboy’s mouth.

  But his special arsenal wasn’t complete until Frank removed a pair of heavy work boots with gut stitching. The right boot had been ingeniously rigged by a ferrier in St. Louis. Frank tripped a spring near the heel, and five inches of razor-sharp iron blade popped out the front of the thick sole, automatically locking into place. One kick to an opponent’s groin could turn a rooster into a capon.

  Frank checked the slant of the sun’s shadow on the floor. Late afternoon. If Hickok was coming, he’d be here soon. Let the puffed-up, back-shooting bastard come!

  A trio of sudden, loud knocks on the door made Frank flinch. He eased his Navy Colt up to the ready simply rotating the specially riveted holster without needing to draw the long-barreled weapon.

  “Who is it?” he demanded.

  “Queen Victoria,” replied a low, sarcastic voice with a trace of Spanish accent.

  Frank hastened to open the door for his boss.

  “Wolf,” he said, greeting a dark, thin, dangerous-looking man wearing a low shako hat. “I wondered when you’d get here.”

  The bandit king known throughout the Southwest as El Lobo Flaco—the Skinny Wolf—stepped into the room and crossed to the whiskey bottle on a nightstand beside the bed. He lowered the contents by a few inches. Then he looked at Tutt from small, mud-colored eyes.

  “Tell me, Frank,” he said in his low, almost whispering voice, “why I should not kill you for deserting your post? I told you to watch the Raton Pass, verdad? Night and day.”

  “Boss, if I ‘deserted’, would I send you word where to find me?”

  El Lobo never came into town without donning his infamous leggings that struck terror into friend and foe alike. One leg was decorated with the brightly painted whole fingernails of Americans, the other leg with those of Mexicanos.

  “‘Sta bien. All right, I am here,” El Lobo said impatiently. “And I am a very busy man, Frank. Are we playing guess my secret? Why did you abandon your post?”

  “Because I knew you’d want me to. Wild Bill Hickok is on his way to Santa Fe—might be here right now.”

  El Lobo took manly pride in never showing his emotions. Nonetheless, at this unwelcome news, a shadow moved across his face.

  “Maldito,” he cursed in a whisper. Out loud he demanded, “You are sure it is Hickok?”

  Frank snorted. “Sure I’m sure. That skirt-chasing poncy shot my brother in the back.”

  “But of course you do not know why he has come?”

  Tutt shook his head. “Not yet. But Hickok likes his fancy ladies. I’d wager he’s here to find one of em.

  “It is probably not because of the bell,” El Lobo agreed. “It is too soon for word to have reached him. But if he should become involved, madre de Dios! That bell weighs seven hundred and fifty pounds. There is no way to cover our trail as we haul it. Unfortunately, we cannot simply take it straight to Los Cerrillos. Someone may guess the truth. Hickok—whatever he is here for, we must watch him closely.”

  “That’s what I thought you’d say, Wolf. That’s why I’m here.”

  “Even better,” El Lobo added in a pointed tone, “if Hickok could have an ‘accident’ before he can make trouble for us.”

  “I’m still one step ahead of you. Hickok always stays at La Fonda. I’ve ... persuaded a kid, who works at the hotel washhouse, that he’d be wise to help me out. That first ‘accident’ should happen soon after Hickok arrives.”

  By the time Josh and Wild Bill rode into Santa Fe, Hickok had nearly shaken off the incident the day before at Chico Springs.

  “You know, kid,” he announced cheerfully as they trotted past El Palacio, also known as the Mud Palace, the oldest government house in the United States, “every rainstorm ain’t meant just to get us wet. That pitfall at Chico Springs coulda been meant for anybody. Local waddies fighting for their brands, anything. I’m putting it away from my thoughts. We’re here to cut loose a little, is all. Damn it all, we will have a high old time.”

  But Josh thought Bill’s tone was a little too determined—like a man who needed to convince himself, not others. And Hickok’s wary, shaded eyes stayed in constant motion. He watched doorways, alleys; the mostly adobe buildings were plastered white and topped by red tile roofs. Josh had observed Indian women making the clay tiles, forming them on their thighs to ensure uniformity without modern equipment.

  The first item of business, as always, was to see to the horses. They rode to the livery barn at the edge of town, stripped their rigging and gear, then turned all five horses loose to drink at the trough in front of the barn.

  “Wagon yard’s full,” Bill remarked. He nodded toward a flotilla of buckboards, buggies, coaches, and dray wagons, all neatly lined up in an open-sided shed. “Plenty of travelers means plenty of card games. I’ve honed you into a fair poker player, kid. But I got no heart for cleaning out a newspaper poet like you who makes forty dollars a month. You can just be dealer when the stakes climb too high.”

  Bill’s mood was improving by the minute. The two dusty, tired riders placed their saddles on racks in the tack room and hung their bridles and headstalls from Arbuckle’s coffee cans nailed to the wall.

  “Curry ‘em good, chico,” Bill told the young mozo who assisted the owner. He flipped him four bits American. “Grain ‘em all, too, wouldja? Crushed barley, if you got it. Don’t stall ‘em nights unless it rains.”

  “We’ll need to get your sorrel to a blacksmith,” Bill commented as both men rinsed off quickly at the water trough out front.

  “Why?”

  “You deaf, kid? Can’t you hear his shoes clacking when you ride him? I told you before, that means they’re loose. They’ll have to be pulled and reset.”

  Bill dunked his head in the water, then shook the drops from his long blond curls. The two men were only getting clean enough so they could enter the La Fonda without trailing dirt on the fancy Oriental rugs.

  From the livery, it was only a short walk to Santa Fe’s oldest and best hotel. This was Josh’s first trip to Santa Fe, and the young reporter stood gawking like a rube at his first sight of La Fonda’s elegant lobby.

  The hand-hewn hemlock beams had been transported cross-country from Pennsylvania. A magnificent carved cherrywood staircase rose in a dizzying spiral toward a walnut cathedral ceiling aglitter with crystal chandeliers. Canaries in gilt cages sent up a melodious chorus.

  “Man alive!” Josh marveled, his eyes wide to take all of it in. “This is the frontier? It looks like Napoleon’s palace.”

 
; “Palatial” was a good word for it, especially in light of the truly royal reception Wild Bill was given despite his dusty trail clothes. A familiar and famous face at the hotel, Hickok was recognized immediately by the staff. Two lads in fancy livery had a quick scuffle over who got to carry Hickok’s saddlebags.

  “Touch you for luck, Bill?” demanded an awestruck clerk behind the wide mahogany counter. Bill gave him a hearty handshake. The manager himself emerged from his office behind the counter, holding a copy of Ned Buntline’s wildly popular dime novel Wild Bill, Indian Fighter. Bill autographed it for him. It amazed, and impressed, Josh when the manager thanked him as if Bill had given him a piece of the cross that bore Christ.

  Bill earned this, Josh thought. But I helped it along, too. Brave deeds meet vivid words, and from that happy marriage fame is born. And the serious trouble starts.

  While all this fuss went on, Josh gazed around the sumptuously appointed lobby As he would write later, when he filed his next story from the Western Union office, the La Fonda was a living catalog of the “better” society in the New Mexico Territory of the 1870s.

  A group of elegantly dressed young ladies shared a huge circular sofa with a central headrest. They had obviously just detrained—one of them was complaining bitterly about cinder holes in her new silk taffeta gown. At nearby reading tables with green-shaded gas lamps, their fashionably dressed husbands and fathers smoked cigars and commented on stories in the country’s major newspapers. Few of them deigned to notice the dusty new arrivals or how deferential the staff was being to them.

  Josh, too, was treated like royalty after Bill mentioned he was a reporter for the New York Herald. He and Bill were assigned adjoining luxury suites on the second floor. The splendor of the main lobby continued up here. Josh gawped at the gold-gilt mirrors, at fireplaces manteled and faced with blood onyx, marble, and slate. Near the head of a huge lit du roi bed was a fancy velvet pull-rope for summoning a bellboy.

  “President Grant couldn’t have it finer!” Josh exclaimed.

  “No more grits and hominy for us, Longfellow,” Hickok gloated as he skinned the wrapper off a fancy five-cent cigar the manager had slipped into his pocket. “For the next week or so, we’re going to live like young rajahs. C’mon, there’s a good washhouse out back. Even got ‘em one of the new hot-water boilers. We’ll soak in by-God style.”