The blistering argument between the Broke Mill’s bug-eyed bartender and Del Rio’s visibly reluctant town marshal kept getting louder. The blubbery lawman tried his best to move back out onto the boardwalk but the drink peddler wasn’t having any of it. Right quick-like, angry swearing was coming from their direction and painted the air near the door a deep purple.
“Where would Cutner take the girl?” I asked.
Tanner Atwood squirmed in the growing pool of blood beneath his already saturated back. “J-Jus’ head on out t-toward Uvalde. Ole Mad Dog keeps a rough c-cabin near the base of Turkey Mountain. Cain’t miss the place. Stands out like a sore thumb. ’S sittin’ right next to the only road goin’ up to the t-top of that overgrown haystack.”
Boz pulled a ready-made ciga-reet from his shirt pocket, fired the smoke, then thumped the smoking match onto the floor. He picked the coffin nail from between his lips, and, with an air of suddenly discovered concern, placed it between Atwood’s. The gasping man took a single drag on the smoldering tube of rolled tobacco, then motioned for Boz to take it back.
My partner recovered the ciga-reet, then said, “You figure there’s anyone else sittin’ up there on Turkey Mountain with him, Tanner?”
The rapidly fading outlaw puffed out an abbreviated lung of smoke, coughed, then said, “Have n-no way of knowin’ that, T-Tatum. No one else there w-when we first picked him up after our escape from the pen. D-Do know this though. You don’t get up there damned quick, Cutner’s the kind of feller what’ll use that little gal up like a man d-drivin’ nails in a fence post to hang b-barbed wire on.”
Then, as God is my witness, like a drowning swimmer, Atwood suddenly sucked in one long, ragged breath. Man’s entire body jerked as if a massive, unseen hand grabbed him by the buckle on his pistol belt and pulled up. He bowed up on blood-soaked shoulders and went as rigid as a length of steel railing. His eyelids fluttered in the manner of a broken window shade. Then, he made a series of odd grunting noises. He collapsed as Death stepped up, wrapped bony fingers around blood-filled lungs and heart, and squeezed all the man’s remaining life out.
After near a minute, when the to-be-expected noises of dying finally stopped coming from the corpse, Glo said, “Think this ’un’s done gone on to judgment, Mistuh Boz.”
Boz nodded and said, “Yeah. Think he’s done went and shook hands with eternity, Glo. Satan oughta have his worthless hide in hand by now. Should be roastin’ and toastin’ over Hell’s cook fires right quick-like.”
Pretty soon after that, we left the bodies where they fell and hoofed it for the street and our animals. The local marshal trailed up behind us soon’s we hit the dusty, windblown street.
“Name’s Isaac Goolsby, fellers. Marshal Isaac Goolsby,” he called out as he waddled along. “Reckon you fellers could slow down a second and talk some.”
We all nodded but kept on foggin’ it.
Goolsby huffed and puffed like a hundred-year-old locomotive as he tried in vain to keep up. “Cain’t just go and walk away from this kinda thang so easy, boys. Need some help from you so’s I can explain these killin’s should anyone come a-pokin’ around these parts askin’ questions.”
Three of us stopped beside our animals long enough to make sure everything was still in order for the run we were about to make to Turkey Mountain. Goolsby sidled up to a spot about ten feet away like he was afraid to get too close. Shotgun laid across one arm, he set to yelling out his endless stream of questions.
“What y’all ’spect me to do? Cain’t jus’ let you boys go and ride off ’thout explain’ this mess. Ain’t I got two bodies over yonder in the Broke Mill? Hell, that’s two more’n we had all the rest of this year. What the hell am I s’posed to do with ’em ole boys?”
I pulled a square of paper and a stubby piece of pencil from my vest pocket, wrote Cap’n Culpepper’s name on it, then mine, then Boz’s. Strode over and handed it to the excitable gent.
“Got any problems, just send a letter to our captain care of general delivery in Fort Worth,” I said. “Got expenses, let him know. He’ll take care of ’em. We’d like to talk this whole mess over with you some more, Marshal Goolsby, but we’ve got the life of a young woman hanging in the balance. Don’t have time, at the moment, to discuss it with you.”
Boz threw a leg over his animal’s back, wheeled the beast around and gazed down at Del Rio’s obviously flusterated lawman. “ ’S enough you know that those two jokers in the Broke Mill were part of a murderous group of escaped killers that brutally murdered a Texas state senator and most of his family out on Devils River. Girl we’re lookin’ for is the only member of that same clan as is still living. We don’t hurry, might not be able to save her.”
Got myself mounted, twirled my animal around beside Boz, and said, “Just do like I told you, Marshal. Cap’n Culpepper’ll take care of any problems or questions you might have.”
I turned in the saddle to make sure Glo was primed and ready. He pulled at the brim of his sweat-stained, floppy, gray hat and nodded. “Let’s turn ’em loose and let ’em buck, Mistuh Dodge.” He slapped his mount’s muscular rump with the animal’s reins, then kicked past Boz and me like a bolt of hair-covered lightning.
As we thundered out of town, Boz glanced over a shoulder at me and yelled, “You think we can get to Cutner ’fore he can kill the girl, Lucius?”
“Don’t know, Boz,” I yelled back. “But if we don’t, swear on my sainted mother’s memory, I’ll storm the darkest recesses of Hades and bite Satan’s horns off to find Eagle Cutner and Ax Webb. And I’ll kill ’em both graveyard dead.”
Glo assumed all the aspects of a man on a God-sent mission. Took me’n Boz nigh on an hour to catch up with him. By then he’d almost made it to the Sycamore River.
21
“. . . A BAD ONE NAMED EAGLE ‘MAD DOG’ CUTNER.”
GLO SLOWED A mite. He was walking his mount when I pulled up beside him on the Uvalde stage road. He twisted in the saddle and said, “Have an old friend what has a small horse-raisin’ operation few miles ’tother side of the Sycamore, Mistuh Dodge. Anyone ’round these parts knows how to find Eagle Cutner’s place up on Turkey Mountain, it’s Honus Lavender.”
Boz eased up next to me and patted his winded animal’s neck. “I remember Honus. He’s fought the Co- manche, Messican bandits, and badmen of every sort imaginable down here on the border for more’n fifty years. Hell, the man used to be famous. But, tell the truth, Glo, I thought he was dead. Been rumors of his demise for near a decade, maybe more. Hell, man must be goin’ on a hunnert years old if he’s still alive.”
Appearing pleased to be away from the carnage we’d left strewn all over the Broke Mill Saloon, Glo let a toothy grin play across his ebon face. He gazed east and said, “Man’s sho’ ’nuff still alive, Mistuh Boz. And he ain’t no hunnert years old. ’Course he could be on up there knockin’ real hard on seventy, I suppose. Ain’t seen him in a few years myself, but I’d bet he ain’t changed much.”
We turned off the rutted, dust-choked roadway about five miles past the Sycamore and headed in a northeasterly direction from there. Guess we hadn’t gone much more than another mile or three when we came on a sweet-running creek that dribbled into the river a few miles off to the west. We let our animals stand in the shallow stream and drink for a minute or so.
On the far side of the ankle-deep waterway, beneath a thick canopy of seventy-foot-tall cottonwood trees, we spotted a rough board-and-batten cabin. The rustic dwelling’s only obvious nod toward anything like refinement was a deep, covered porch that ran the entire length of the front facade. A number of comfortable-looking rockers laden with thick pillows sprouted like overgrown plants from one end of the shady, inviting veranda to the other.
Black feller the size of a Concord coach stepped onto the porch as we waded our mounts across the creek and headed up into his leaf-sheltered front yard. Steel-colored hair poked from beneath a hand-ventilated, palm-leaf hat. Muscles as thick as the hawser for a ship’s anchor bulged beneath a faded bib-front shirt. He carried a cut- down, double-barreled coach gun in the crook of one arm and eyeballed the three of us with considerable suspicion. Nothing in his appearance, or demeanor, indicated a man of advanced years.
“ ’S close enough,” he called out when were still a good thirty or forty feet away. “You men can just stop right where you are. Get to statin’ your business from there.”
Boz crooked a finger at Glo and urged him forward with a jerk of the head. Glo heeled his mount and moved
