Mesa Grande by Ralph Cotton

Author:Ralph Cotton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2014-11-04T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

Erskine Cord looked around the men, taking stock of them, formulating a plan. He didn’t imagine there would be anyone on his trail. He’d broken jail, but so what? Who hadn’t done that at some point or other? he told himself. Jails were made to bust out of. Nobody would be hunting him down for something like that, not with Quetos and his Wolf Hearts stirred into a frenzy over their dead squaws and their nits. He smiled to himself thinking about it. The shooting he’d done in Mesa Grande was over and done with. Leastwise until things cooled a little, he allowed.

When the time was right, he’d ride in and get his money from Curland, else he’d cure Curland’s nut sack and make himself a tobacco pouch of it. His smile widened a little. Either way suited him, he told himself. He could use a new tobacco pouch, one with a little personal history to it. Behind him on the ground in the shade of cottonwood and cedar, his men lay tired and hungry. But that was all right. They worked harder when their bellies growled. It made them testy and mean, like feral dogs. He looked from man to man.

On the ground lay a Mexican-German, Emilio Siebaugh. A foot from Siebaugh lay Eldo Berne, a Frenchman. Near Berne, Bud Shank sat sharpening a prized scalping knife he was most fond of. Leaning on an elbow in the dirt watching Shank lounged a Kansan named Early Doss, a man once hanged for rape and murder and tossed into a shallow grave for dead.

Four good men, Cord told himself, not to mention Ozzie and Sterling Childs. Seven men in all counting himself. One hard raid on Quetos and his warriors could net them a dozen scalps, maybe more if they caught the Wolf Hearts sleeping. It was time to get back to work. He looked over at Childs and gestured toward Atwater, Parker and the townsman, Flake. Then he and Childs stood up and walked over to where the three sat huddled close under a tree.

“It’s getting late in the evening,” Cord said down to his three buckskin-clad detainees. “Get on your feet. It’s time you ride out of here and earn your keep.”

Parker sat with a stick run up his buckskin shirtsleeve, digging the tip of it at reddened bites of some sort that the rancid odorous clothing had bequeathed him. He stood up, stick in hand, and looked at his own clothes now enclosing Sterling Childs. Atwater and Flake rose beside him, Atwater’s fingertips digging at an itch on the side of his thigh. Flake stood with a sick look on his face, his skin crawly, the length of him badly chewed upon by some ravenous crawling species.

“Where—where are we going?” Flake asked. The front of his buckskin shirt was made up of scalp with human bones woven into it. He tried keeping his chest sunken to avoid the scalp touching him, but it did him no good.

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