Foley smirked, but holstered his gun. Marcus, Slocum noted, was a little slower to respond. But he holstered his gun, just the same.

  Slocum said, “Mind if I step down and have a cupa coffee?” There was a pot sitting on the edge of their small fire.

  “No skin off my back,” growled Foley.

  “Only if you got your own cup,” snarled Marcus. “We don’t carry no tea sets for company.”

  Slocum forced himself to keep a straight face, and said, “Yeah, I got my own.”

  He swung down and dug through his saddlebag for his tin cup, then knelt beside the fire and poured himself a mugful.

  “And don’t go askin’ for no cream nor sugar,” snapped Foley.

  It was all Slocum could do to keep from laughing out loud. Foley had missed his true calling—he really ought to go on the stage.

  Slocum sat on his heels and sipped at the brew. It was pretty bad, but better than nothing for a man who’d been wandering in the dark for a few hours and had given the last of his water to his horse.

  “Right good,” he lied, keeping his eyes on both of them.

  “It’s liquid horseshit and you know it,” remarked Marcus. “Foley never could make decent coffee. Or anything else, for that matter.”

  Slocum had just noticed something decidedly odd about Foley’s shirt, and asked, “What’d you tussle with, Foley? Looks like you tore your sleeve up good.”

  Foley didn’t answer, but Marcus barked out a laugh and said, “He tangled with a badger! Damn near took his arm off, too. Would have, if I hadn’t shot it.”

  Now, how in the world a badger had managed to get from the ground and clear up on Foley’s arm—while Foley was probably on horseback, to boot—was a puzzlement.

  Slocum said, “You boys got flyin’ badgers around here? Anything I should be worried about?”

  Foley snapped, “Don’t be a fool, Slocum! It done attacked me on the ground!”

  “He had his arm up the den at the time,” Marcus said, and laughed again.

  Foley with his arm up a badger den? This time, Slocum couldn’t hold back his laughter.

  “What the hell were you doin’ that for?” he asked, once he caught his breath. “You were just askin’ for it, Foley.”

  He watched as a warning look flickered over Marcus’s face, directed at Foley, and then Foley’s expression changed.

  Foley turned to Slocum and said, “Just cause you laughed, I ain’t a-gonna tell you. So there.” He looked back at Marcus, who sent him a nod, as if he’d done the right thing.

  “You stayin’ all night, Slocum?” Marcus asked curtly.

  Slocum tossed back the last of his bad coffee, then stood up. “As appealin’ as you make it sound, Marcus, I believe I’ll be off before we turn this into a slumber party. Appreciate the coffee, though.”

  With that, he stepped back up on Cougar, tucked his mug down into his saddlebag again, and reined away from the fire.

  Nobody said good-bye.

  Slocum didn’t expect them to.

  Actually, he half-expected a slug in his back, but it appeared that these boys weren’t going to be so bold at the moment. Slocum figured that there weren’t any trees for them to hide behind, and chuckled softly.

  The moon had come out again, and looked like it was going to remain free of cloud cover for a good time, so Slocum had no qualms about setting Cougar off in a jog. He could see pretty well, and the ground was flat.

  He couldn’t help but wonder, though, how in the heck Foley had managed to get his arm clear up a badger’s den—and why! He could think of a thousand other things he’d rather do for sport.

  He also wondered why he hadn’t run across Abel, or any sign of him. Frankly, when he’d first stumbled into Marcus and Foley’s camp, he’d half-expected Abel Cassidy to stand up from the shadows with his rifle raised.

  But then thoughts of Miranda wiped the badger’s den—and Abel—from his mind.

  He jogged on, toward the ranch, with a smile on his lips.

  Berto had fetched Dilly, another trusted hand, and swearing an oath not to tell a living soul, the two of them had moved Uncle Abel’s body to his own room until the morning, when they would bury him.

  But Miranda still had to go back to the scene of her ordeal—and his death. There were the papers to retrieve, and the bag, and the little pipestone pieces to be gathered up.

  The papers had Uncle Abel’s blood on them, and she set them aside on her nightstand to dry. And hopefully, the blood would magically vanish. She could dream, couldn’t she?

  She sat down on her bed and spread out the pipestone pieces, but couldn’t make heads or tails of them. The bag she pulled onto her lap and opened.

  She didn’t move for quite a while. She couldn’t take her eyes off its contents.

  Finally, gingerly, lest it evaporate as she was wishing Abel’s blood would, she reached inside.

  Money.

  Good, honest, American scrip.

  Bundles and bundles of it!

  She began to count it out, her eyes twinkling while a smile danced around the corners of her mouth.

  Marcus was filling the coffeepot this time. He could put up with a lot from Foley, but one pot of his stinking coffee was all he could stand.

  He set the pot on the fire, then leaned back. Things weren’t going very well. First, they’d had to kill Jefferson, then Crone—well that had been an accident, sort of—and now it looked like they’d have to take out Slocum, too.

  He didn’t know that he was up to plugging Slocum, not unless they caught him out in the open with his back turned again.

  Back in the old days, Slocum had been nothing but solid speed with a gun, and if a man listened to the stories going around, he had only gotten faster with the passage of years.

  Marcus sure knew that Foley couldn’t do it. Not a prayer of it from close up and certainly not from the distance Marcus planned. There was no way either of them would face off with Slocum!

  Plus, they were going to have to stop killing horses pretty soon. Abel was making some awful strong sounds about it.

  Well, to be honest, threats. When they’d killed that good roping horse of his, he’d nearly busted a blood vessel.

  Well, how was Marcus to know it was a good horse? It looked just like all the others out there on the range.

  A horse was a horse was a horse, so far as he was concerned.

  And they were no closer to the stash than they’d been when they arrived at the Bar C. Foley was getting so desperate that early this evening, he’d stuck his arm clear up to the elbow into a hole he thought might be a hiding place. He yanked that arm out fast, though, when he touched hair instead of gold, and that badger came ripping out right along with him.

  It was plenty riled, too.

  But Marcus had shot it, saving both Foley’s arm and gaining them supper at the same time.

  He started to chuckle again, thinking about the look on Foley’s face. Pure terror. And then surprise and anger, as Marcus waited to shoot the damned thing until it had raked its way clear up to Foley’s shoulder and was closing in on his ear.

  “What’s so goddamn funny?” asked Foley, from across the fire.

  “Nothin’,” replied Marcus. “Either go to sleep or check to see if that coffee’s ready yet. I got no time to talk. I’m thinkin’.”

  “Fine by me,” Foley said, sitting up. “Don’t want to talk to you neither, you coward.”

  “Watch what you say, there, Foley,” Marcus barked. “What call do you have to call me a coward, anyway?”

  Foley’s eyes narrowed. “He was sittin’ right there! Right there, Marcus! You coulda plugged him easy. I’m getting tired of this shooting from the trees shit! Makes me feel all crawly in my skin, you know? Like I’m yeller, too!”

  Actually Marcus knew exactly how Foley felt, but he wasn’t about to admit it.

  Frowning, he said, “Get over it or get gone.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. I’ll take care of Slocum in my own damn time. If you don’t wanna wait for it, then get goin’. Conversation closed.”

  Foley stared at him for a long minute, his face torn—as was usual in these moments of confrontation between them—between anger and fear.

  And then, instead of answering, Foley simply lay down in his blanket and rolled away, his back to the fire.

  And Marcus.

  14

  Bob Marcus was the brains of the outfit. Foley knew it. But he also new that Marcus was hot tempered and meaner than a chuck-wagon cook.

  There was a running joke back in the days when the five of them took turns cooking out on the trail. The joke was one Marcus loved well and told every chance he had:

  “Bunch of cowpokes was drivin’ cattle when the cook up and died. So the rest of ’em come up with the bright idea to take turns rustlin’ up their grub. It stayed each person’s turn to take a spell over the campfire till someone else was fool enough to complain. Then he’d have to take over. Well, sir, Ol’ Tex had been cookin’ for two weeks and there’d been lots of grumblin’, but nobody’d out-and-out complained. So one night, he added all the chili peppers to the beans, but all he got was some ugly stares. Next night, he tried a handfula dirt. Still nothin’. Finally, outta desperation, Ol’ Tex threw in a cowpie. It was more’n one cowboy could stand.

  “He said, ‘These here beans taste just like cowshit.’ Ol’ Tex started to get all gleeful-like. Then the other cowpoke quickly added, ‘But it’s the best damn cowshit I ever et.’ ”

  They’d all got a good laugh out of it, till Cassidy mentioned, “There’s a little bit of truth to every joke.”

  Marcus had never taken a turn over the pots after Cassidy’s observation. They’d made sure of it. Tripped over their tongues to complain when it was his turn.

  True, they’d had some wind-up, shake-’em-down times together, especially when they’d been tearing up the countryside over by Prescott. Bill Buckley, Abel Cassidy, and Vance Jefferson were the best for thinking up prankish deviltry.

  Up until the time they happened upon that Apache woman on the flats past the rock formations called the Dells. They’d sat in the rocks and watched her for a while, grinding corn and patting tortillas out to bake on a hot slab of rock.

  Hot damn, she’d been exciting when she took out her tit to feed her baby!

  “Come on, gents,” Marcus had said. “We’ll send smoke signals to the rest of them Apache not to go running off from the reservation.”

  The five of them had spent the afternoon in her wickiup taking turns with her before it turned ugly. That damn papoose, screaming its brains out in its cradle board. Finally Marcus blew its brains out, right where it hung, just to shut the thing up.

  The squaw bitch. She’d fought like a madwoman . . . for a while. Nearly chawed Buckley’s nose off, till Marcus knocked her front teeth out and shoved his cock down her throat.

  Years later, Marcus still laughed over what he’d done to her next. And it was still enough to make Foley gag when he thought of it.

  To this day he wondered just who the real savage was.

  First he’d burned off her hair, then mutilated her face and cut off all her woman parts. Her own mother wouldn’t have recognized her. She’d been used up to the point of drawing her last few breaths when he ripped the silver out of her ears and off her neck, and slashed her throat like an antelope’s.

  The cradle board he threw inside, and set the whole shebang afire.

  Marcus had stuffed his mouth with the tortillas she’d been cooking and said, “There’s two good Indians.”

  They’d had sense to make tracks for town before her buck returned.

  That same evening they’d gotten word of the Double Aces payroll. Soon as Marcus heard about that $50,000—all of it in gold—he’d slavered and foamed over the news like a rabid, crazed wolf circling a pool of water.

  Money could twist a man’s brain—make him do stranger things than when he had dreams of saloon girls after a month on the range. Foley still had nightmares about that squaw—and the folks on the Butterfield stage. It wasn’t enough for Marcus just to ambush them. He’d gutted the driver and staked the passengers out like hides curing in the hot Arizona sun.

  Townspeople thereabouts still believed it was the work of that renegade Apache.

  Payback for his woman and baby.

  When they’d apprehended that brave’s sorry ass, they’d strung him up faster than packrats can funnel down a hole.

  Foley had trouble buying that Marcus ever allowed Bill Buckley to ride off with that gold in the first place. Lord knew, Foley wasn’t the smartest post on the fence line, but he was experienced enough to realize it was against Marcus’s nature to let Buckley control all that cash.

  Something didn’t smell right.

  Hellfire! Years passed before he and Marcus managed to track Vance down. By then, Buckley was dead and Abel had split off on his own to help his brother with the Bar C. Vance, the slippery bastard, had zigzagged them across the whole New Mexico and Arizona Territories—and then some.

  But still, it went against Foley’s grain to kill the asshole on a trumped up fight over a bar girl after they caught up with him.

  But it wasn’t against his partner’s grain at all.

  Marcus had done a number on Vance before plugging the sniveler. They’d ransacked Vance’s saddlebags and pack roll, but other than a few hundred in double eagles and some unusual looking pipestone carvings, there wasn’t enough shit in Vance’s stuff to give a clue where the rest of the money was squirreled away.

  It was someplace back on the Bar C was all he said. But Marcus was positive Cassidy would know right where it was stashed.

  Only Cassidy hadn’t known donkey shit. In fact, Cassidy had been pushing them to find it faster.

  It was Marcus who had the brilliant idea of killing those horses, just to get Cassidy’s attention. And he’d made it clear to Cassidy, too—if he didn’t ease up pretty damned soon, Miranda would be next.

  That’s when he’d reminded Cassidy of that Apache woman, and the people on the Butterfield stage. But even whipping the blubbering son of a bitch with a pistol hadn’t learned them a damn thing.

  Marcus had screwed up.

  One thing was certain—Foley had found out Marcus was capable of the vilest acts known to man after he’d watched him kill that first mare and her foal. He was wrong thinking he’d never see anything more disgusting than that Apache woman and her baby. Dead wrong. Marcus’s words chilled him to the bone—still turned Foley’s stomach more than two months later.

  As soon as they’d dismounted, Marcus had unbuckled his pants. “First we shoot ’em, then we screw ’em, then we butcher ’em.”

  “What in Hades are you talkin’ about, Marcus?” Foley had asked, shocked to the toes of his boots.

  “Soon as I get my dick out, I’ll show you.”

  And that was just what Marcus had done while Foley stood by, puking up last week’s enchiladas.

  When all this was over—when they’d found the Double Aces gold—he’d kill Marcus himself.

  Foley! Nothing but a good for nothing, sanctimonious cry-baby, Marcus thought.

  He rolled up in his blanket and turned his back to the fire. Foley was good for a few things—sticking his arm into badger holes, rolling a tight quirlie, or boiling water. But he was dumb as a rock. You could piss on his foot and convince him it was rain.

  Maybe that was a good thing, too. Good for Marcus, anyway.

  But it was glaringly obvious Foley didn’t have the heart to be a proper bandit.

  Marcus focused his mind on more pressing matters. Right now, Slocum was nosing around, and there was Abel Cassidy to contend with.

  Despite all his speed, Slocum would be an easy mark. Marcus had already had him in his sights twice that day. Half the town of Apache Wells either saw or heard that Slocum had laid Foley’s cheek open.

  And Marcus made sure they knew Foley carried a grudge. A grudge likely to be settled. Cassidy might be harder to explain, but he wasn’t the first man to get lost in the desert.

  And that left Miranda.

  When all was said and done, he’d take over as the new head honcho at the Bar C and she’d be the sweetwater on a dying’ man’s throat.

  Word on his mother’s grave.

  When all this was over, and they’d found the Double Aces gold, he’d kill Foley himself.

  Miranda heard a soft knock on her door. She quickly covered the papers and bag of money, and put her hand in her pocket. Reassuring herself with the derringer, she crossed the room.

  “Yes?” she said through the door.

  “It is me, Carmelita, señorita.” She opened the door and stepped inside. “I have idea. I hope you approve. Berto thinks it’s a good idea.”

  Carmelita! Miranda’s grip on the gun relaxed and she withdrew her hand from her pocket. “What do you mean?”

  “No matter how you try to explain, this not look good, Miranda. People might think you make up the story about why you kill Señor Abel.”

  “But the filthy goat tried to rape me!” Miranda shuddered and rubbed her arms.

  “You need not try to convince me.” Carmelita’s gaze dropped to the floor. “Carmelita like to shoot him, too. But not between the eyes. Between his legs! He . . . After your poppy, die, he—” The woman’s face was shot through with rage and pain; then she crumpled.

  “Don’t, Carmelita. I’m sorry.” Miranda hugged and bolstered the woman who had been both a second mother and friend to her.

  Carmelita straightened her shoulders, wiped her eyes, and continued confidently. “Everyone knows your uncle has been half-crazed over those horses of his. And that he bought the guns of Foley and Marcus to find out who has been doing this despicable deed.”

  “But, Carmelita, I’m not so sure that pair’s telling the truth. Just the opposite. I’ve had a terrible feeling they might be involved. That they know way more than they let on.”

  “We find out soon enough, now that Señor Slocum is here.” Carmelita shifted from foot to foot. Then she hissed, “I tell Berto not to go for the undertaker. I tell him to bring feed wagon to the back door and drive Señor Cassidy to the canyon where you find those first dead horses. I tell him, dump Señor Cassidy’s body for the buzzards and coyotes. That way, when the sheriff find him, he will think your uncle surprise the bandidos and gets himself killed.”