Dead Man's Trail (9781101606957) by Frank Leslie Page A

drawing a deep draft of steely-cool air into his lungs and not minding the stench of horse shit and privies. All three deputies lay around him.
    So did Lewis, who must have taken a bullet soon after the first deputy had gone down.
    Lewis was still alive, piled up in front of the boardwalk fronting the jailhouse, clutching his wounded upper right leg and breathing hard, wheezing. He was facing away from Yakima as he said, “Help . . . help me, gall blast it . . . will you, buddy?” Then he turned his head toward Yakima, and a stricken look fell over his wizened, hawkish features, angular jaws clad in a few scattered, dirt-colored bristles.
    Yakima walked over to him, stared down. Lewis sort of cowered, like a dog about to be whipped, but then Yakima continued on past him and walked up the street to Bart English’s Livery & Feed Barn. Bart stood behind one of his thrown-open doors, staring around it and down the main street in the direction the cutthroats had disappeared.
    â€œYou got my horse shod?” Yakima asked him.
    English shuttled his stricken eyes to the half-breed. His big face was nearly as pale as Lewis’s. “They gone?”
    â€œTook their business over to the Silk Slipper.”
    Yakima looked up and down the street once more. C LOSED signs hung in most of the doors, and curtains were drawn across windows. The good citizens of Wolfville were staying indoors until the cutthroat storm had passed. He couldn’t blame them. They were a bad lot.
    He looked again at English. “Well?”
    The big liveryman/blacksmith scowled. “Well what?”
    â€œWhat about the black?”
    â€œWhat about him? In case you didn’t notice, this town was just raided, a girl raped over yonder at the Drug Emporium, and every star packer shot to shit!”
    â€œI noticed.”
    â€œAnd now who knows what kinda trouble they’re causin’ over to the Silk Slipper?”
    â€œI got an idea.”
    â€œAnd you’re worried about your
horse
?”
    â€œI’m burnin’ daylight here.”
    â€œWell, ain’t that convenient!”
    â€œYou got that part right.”
    Yakima brushed past English as he walked into the blacksmith part of his shop, the forge and anvil and corrugated tin water barrel occupying a lean-to side shed. He dropped his saddlebags against the wall near the water barrel. “Now get to it, Bart. I got a trail to fog.”
    Yakima removed his buckskin mackinaw and his hat and rolled up his shirtsleeves. He dunked his head in the water barrel, the water smelling like hot iron but refreshing and cleansing just the same. When he pulled his head up, shaking the water from his long coal black hair, English was still looking warily around his open barn door, his bulky body tense, as though he expected the gang to head this way and do to him what they’d done to the star packers.
    Yakima sighed.
    He donned his hat, then went over and used a tongs to pull down a raw horseshoe from a nail hanging from a ceiling beam and commenced to shaping his own shoe, pumping the bellows methodically as he did. The work was no problem. He’d forged many of Wolf’s shoes himself using far less than English’s shop had to offer.
    When he’d finished hammering the glowing shoe on the anvil—he knew the shape of Wolf’s hooves as well as he knew his own hands—he dunked the iron in the water barrel, making it hiss, then took it and a hammer and four nails over to where Wolf stood in the barn’s shadows, tied to the wheel of a parked buggy.
    â€œWhat the hell are you doin’?” English said, just now looking at him, his lower jaw hanging.
    â€œWhat’s it look like?”
    Yakima led Wolf out into the light near where English still stood, looking dazed, and commenced hammering the shoe to the black’s right front hoof. “Since when did Claw Hendricks start ridin’ this far east?” he