Read Online The Guns of Santa Sangre by Eric Red - Free Book Online Page B

questioned, looking back and forth between her companions.
    “Maybe somethin’, maybe nothing,” replied Fix. “They come in front from the north back at where we met up, then doubled back, crisscrossing their own tracks. Eight miles back, the tracks entered a shallow creek and didn’t come out the other side, disappeared like, meaning them riders was heading in single-file formation through the water bed to disguise their movements, and when the creek turned into a river, too tough to negotiate with horses, the tracks finally came out.”  
    “We ain’t seen nobody.” Bodie shrugged.
    “Doesn’t mean they ain’t out there.”
    “Could be we’re being followed,” Tucker said.
    “Let’s keep our eyes peeled.”
    The peasant girl was worried. “Them, they are after you?”
    The gunfighters looked at one another with a shared mutual understanding, but did not respond. It was an answer but no answer.  
    “Which them?” Bodie mumbled.
    “Were you followed?” Tucker asked Pilar. “By whatever those varmints are holding your town?”
    “I don’t think so, Tuck,” Bodie said. “We’ve been retracing her trail due south and Fix just said those tracks started from the north.”
    “We can sit around here scratching our balls talking about this all day. If we meet up with ’em we meet up with ’em. Let’s get a move on.” Tucker said.  
    His gang nodded. Pilar shrugged, and all four kept riding as the sun raised another few notches like the hand of a clock.
    Fix, the signcutter of the bunch, noticed the stagecoach trail first.  
    It was two deep ruts in the ground heading east and west that he recognized as the Wells Fargo Durango route. They had happened onto it by accident. The cowboys briefly discussed following it, but Pilar insisted her village lay due south so off they set.  
    A mile away they came upon the stagecoach, or what was left of it.
    The shattered wheel was the first thing they encountered, but the wreckage was not far off. The wagon had been completed destroyed. The carriage lay in an upside-down heaping pile of broken wooden boards and twisted metal chassis frame. The splintered doors, roof rack and spilled luggage were scattered debris all over the sun-baked rocks. The crushed skeletons of a team of dead horses were like one unrecognizable thing in a mountain of grinning skulls, spines, leg bones, hooves, horseshoes and caved-in rib cages jutting this way and that in a knotted confusion of harness and bridle, bleached clean in the merciless sun.
    The horses they rode didn’t like this, not one bit, and strained contrarily against their reins, protesting noisily and rearing so the men had to wrest them under control with a chorus of “woahs” and “easy”. It was a bad place.
    “Holy shit,” muttered Bodie.  
    Tucker wondered what could have done this.  
    Pilar gazed on in knowing horror as the gunfighters took a few moments to ride around the wreckage, taking it all in.
    “The stage must have been moving at a clip when it went off the road. What the hell was it doing driving this kind of terrain at that kind of speed? Must have been running from something,” Tucker observed.
    “It didn’t just go off the road, boys. It got attacked,” Fix added.
    “The bandits around here don’t mess around,” Bodie said, just to say something.
    “If it was bandits, why didn’t they rob it?” Fix nudged his jaw down at an open suitcase spilling clothes, a lady’s purse and wad of cash on the ground. Sitting in his saddle, he drew out his carbine and held it by the stock, leaning down to pick up the valise using the long barrel. Confiscating the cash, he flung the empty purse and suitcase back into the dust. “Looks like this ride was already worth our time. We’ll divvy this up later.”
    “How long you figure this wreck been here?”
    “Judging by those bleached bones, a month, mebbe longer.”
    “You boys notice something strange?” Tucker mentioned, bothered, as he