Bullet Creek by Ralph Compton

Author:Ralph Compton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

Fifteen minutes before Sanchez saw the dust, Billie Brennan, sitting on the wagon seat right of Mordecai Hawkins, looked up from the dress she was sewing and heaved an exasperated sigh. “Doggone, Mr. Hawkins, do you have to hit every chuckhole in the gall-blasted trail? My fingers feel like pin cushions.”

Hawkins glanced at the girl, whose long, light brown hair hung straight down from her floppy-brimmed farmer’s hat. “If your fingers feel like pin cushions, little miss, it’s through no fault of mine. Fool’s work, tryin’ to sew in a moving buck-board wagon.”

“I’ve always done perfectly fine in the past, because you haven’t tried to hit every chuckhole in the road.”

Wrinkling his thick red nose and pitching his voice high, mocking the girl’s supercilious tone, Hawkins said, “I ain’t been tryin’ to hit every chuckhole in the road. There just so happens to be more chuckholes in the road after last week’s gully washer. If I tried to avoid ’em all so you could sew some fancy pretties on your dress to impress that young puncher from the Bar-V, we wouldn’t get back to the station till after dark.”

“They aren’t fancy pretties—whatever fancy pretties are,” Billie said, returning her eyes to the dress sprawled across her lap. “It’s diamond lace I bought in Tucson. I just want to look nice for the dance”—she glanced up at Hawkins, squinting one brown eye—“not for Lee Luther.” Turning back to her work, she added with less vigor, “I hardly know the boy.”

Hawkins chuckled. “I saw the way you two were makin’ eyes at each—” The old mountain man stopped and peered straight ahead, scowling. What had sounded like a distant rifle shot had risen from the direction of the stage station, now only about two miles away.

“What was that?” Billie asked, sudden tension drawing her voice taut. As if in answer, another shot rose, then another.

Holding the ribbons high in his hands, Hawkins stared over the two mules’ bobbing heads. He told himself that the shots—if they were shots—could be those of cowpunchers hazing calves from mesquite thickets or honing their aims on snakes or coyotes. Nevertheless, Hawkins’s heart increased its beat, and small goose bumps rose across his shoulder blades, chilling him like a fall breeze over the Bighorns.

“Hold on, girl!” Hawkins shook the reins across the mules’ broad backs. Braying, the heavy beasts shook their heads and manes and lunged into a shambling run.

Billie stuffed her sewing under the seat, snugged her hat down low, wedged her low lace-up boots against the dashboard, and held on to the seat with both hands. The wagon fishtailed around curves in the meandering trail. It bounced over rocks and potholes and the furrows made by recent rivulets. Spindly desert scrub and sun-baked rocks flew by, the mules’ dinner-plate shoes pelting Billie’s face with dust and fine pebbles.

When the cabin shuttled into view above the scrub, Hawkins jammed his mule-ear boots against the dashboard and hauled back on the reins, stopping the mules under a sprawling sycamore and giant cactus.

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