music he had been starved from hearing in so long—the music of a woman’s laughter—the whore had laughed at his eagerness as she led the gringo back to a dark room where she showed him to a chair, worked him once more into readiness with her tongue and lips, then sat down upon him.
Gazing up now at this new one in the flickering light shed by the tallow candle that dripped and sputtered in its pool of heady grease at the center of his table, Jonah discovered his lips and the end of his tongue already gone mushy, numbing from the potent cactus juice. Something in his mind made him wonder if this whore was really as good-looking as the tequila made him think she was. Bending low over him, she tantalized him, brushing his shoulder with one of her breasts, her fingers raking through his long hair as she luringly moved the breast past his cheek before settling in the chair at the corner of Hook’s table.
Immediately his eyes fell to her loose blouse, hidden partially beneath the folds of a coarse woollen shawl she had knotted against the depth of her cleavage. In the way she thrust those breasts at him, she made it plain that there was nothing else beneath the blouse, nothing but her brown flesh that rose and fell with her every breath as she poured herself a drink from Hook’s bottle.
“Help yourself,” he said with a wry grin, already sensing his hands on those breasts, willing his lips to suck at their warm aureoles.
There was something playful around her big eyes. Jonah supposed it was the fact that she wanted him, had abandoned the Mex at the bar and came over to show the gringo that she wanted him. She seemed so young, though, so likely that look in her eye was only something practiced, for someone so young would not really know how to share herself with a man. He tugged down the last shred of woman-loneliness left in him, hungering to recognize those small, furtive changes in a woman’s face when she draws close to the one she wants to sink her claws in, if only for a night, if only for an hour, if only for as long as it will take the man to seize his satisfaction.
When he spoke his English, she looked at him quizzically, the cup stopped at her chin.
He hadn’t meant to say it in English. “Don’t matter. Drink up.” Jonah took his cup from the table and clacked it against hers, motioning for Two Sleep to toast with them.
She was woman enough and he had been without long enough, she put the blood so thick in his throat that he could scarcely swallow the ribbon of fire the tequila made descending from his tongue. The pulque didn’t possess the reassuring and familiar formaldehyde stench of frontier whiskey.
She smiled like sunrise calm in the autumntime, something smoky and warm to it, and tossed back the hot tequila in one gulp, hammering the table once as she set her clay cup back down and poured more of the fiery cactus juice into it. That teasing, taunting look in her eyes had probably condemned many a hapless, helpless man to doom in this same stinking cesspool of a cantina.
From the corner of his eye Hook noticed the tall vaquero at the bar for the first time, a young dandy who stood a head above his companions, their faces shrouded in smoke rising from their corn-shuck cigarillos, voices clanging sharp-edged like tiny cymbals. The handsome horseman was dressed in creamy leather all lashed together with stamped conchos and roped in gilt braid. In the dim candlelight Hook could barely make out the man, not much more than a foggy blur of the vaquero’s face as the Mexican glared flints in his direction, and for a minute his tequila-dulled mind argued on which one of them the Mex was looking at. Perhaps the vaquero simply did not like Two Sleep. No matter, really. There would always be those who didn’t take to Injuns.
But that did not quite fit, either, the more Jonah’s slow mind kneaded it while he kept on eating, his teeth tearing at the chiles and the tortilla, sucking back the softened beans, then gazed up at the vaquero again and decided the man was glaring at the woman. That was it, he decided. She had come over from the bar, where he remembered seeing her looped beneath the vaquero’s arm when he and Two Sleep had blown in and slammed the crude door behind them, the fine powder from the trail settling like gold dust in the pale, yellow candlelight. Ever since Jonah had felt her hot black eyes on him.
The way he now sensed the Mex’s eyes burning a hole of hate in his left shoulder.
From where Jonah sat, he faced the door and the room’s only window, his back for the most part turned on the bar and half of the room. His partner watched the rest of that low-roofed hovel.
“How many’s the others?” he asked Two Sleep, grumbling it in English.
The Indian did not answer at first. Instead, he swabbed some more beans and chiles into his tortilla and stuffed it in his mouth. As he wiped the back of a hand across his lips, only then did the Shoshone’s eyes quickly rake the half of the room under his gaze.
“Five,” he replied in English. Then moving his hands quickly, but casually, in the ballet of plains sign language, Two Sleep told Hook the rest.
“Three with him?”
The Shoshone nodded his head.
When Hook began to look back to the woman, he watched the Indian’s eyes climb and narrow. Jonah smelled the man before he heard the leather-heeled boots clatter to a halt beside his chair.
“You may be only a slut,” he told the woman gruffly. “But tonight you are my slut. Come with me.”
Her black eyes went to Jonah’s, perhaps to search for hope, to plea for help, to find a hero.
“Come!” he roared at her.
Jonah’s eyes climbed to the vaquero’s now. Blinking, clearing them of the tequila-and-chile tears, he found the Mexican’s eyes shining like those of some despised, creeping night animal. The man’s breath rose and fell in great gusts, sweetened with agave.
“Time enough for you to have her, friend,” Hook told the man in Spanish. “Go and leave her for now. Go back to the bodega and your friends. Time enough for you.”
With a smooth movement the vaquero brought his right hand to rest on the handle of the long knife stuffed in the colorful sash at his waist. The left hand seized the whore’s wrist and yanked it up.
“Come, I said!”
She began to babble in pain, gripping the hand that imprisoned her. Her head was thrown back as he kicked the chair out from beneath her, yanking her roughly to her feet, yanking her back from the table.
“No cause to do that,” Jonah said quietly, in his own tongue. “Leave the woman be.”
As the vaquero’s three companions inched toward them, the bar at their backs and the massive rowels on their Mexican spurs jangling like tambourines, Hook thought he heard the click of two hammers coming to full- cock.
“Two Sleep?” he asked as he rose slowly from his chair, without looking at the Shoshone.
The Indian whispered, “They are dead men—they move on you.”
Jonah turned back to the vaquero. “I will say it for the last time,” he spoke in Spanish. “Leave the woman be.”
With a laugh the vaquero whirled the whore backward out of the way, pulling his knife as Hook’s arm swung, bringing up the cup filled with tequila. It splashed into the Mexican’s face at the same moment the knife glinted candlelight across the distance at the end of the vaquero’s arm. It moved like quicksilver sliding off an upended piece of isinglass.
Numbed by the liquor, Hook didn’t feel the pain of the blade’s slash along his left arm. Yet he knew in that primitive way of the animal that his flesh had been opened. A moment later he sensed the hot, sticky beading along the slash. The Mexican stood smirking at him, wiping the tequila off his smooth brown face.
For a moment Hook stood transfixed by his blood-slicked arm, his glazed eyes crawling past the three others at the bar, then coming to stop on the vaquero’s face as Jonah’s right hand went to his belt for his own knife. It came into the candlelight slowly, a dull glint reflected off the long blade that had scalped more than one of the Danites he hunted with a vengeance.
“No. Shoot him and we go,” Two Sleep snapped, pushing his wobbly chair back slightly. “Put the goddamned knife away. Shoot him now.”
Hook wagged his head, shaking loose wispy webs as his eyes crawled across the men gathered at the bar, stopping once on the fat bartender, his brown neck plopped atop his shoulders in unwashed rolls like a turkey’s wattle, long
