Free The Killing Breed by Frank Leslie Page A

ear and clipped the slack of Yakima’s buckskin shirt. The other man near the corral—a tall, gaunt Mexican—triggered his own carbine, howling, as though he was having the time of his life.
     
     
    Yakima squeezed off a wild shot at the man. Hearing Kelly and Faith scream, he whipped his head left to see the young man sag straight back in his saddle. As his roan continued racing toward the cabin, Kelly did a double somersault off the mount’s rump, hitting the ground in a broiling cloud of dust.
     
     
    Yakima had just whipped his head back toward the corral when a slug fired from the direction of the cabin sizzled across his left temple with a grinding burn. He felt his rifle leave his hand, heard it hit the ground beneath Wolf’s thumping hooves.
     
     
    As more bullets sliced the air and drilled the ground around him, Wolf screamed and lurched left, and, his vision dimming, blood dribbling down from his torn temple, Yakima lost his reins and flew back and sideways down the horse’s right hip.
     
     
    His shoulder hit the ground. His ankle barked in misery as his boot toe hung up in the stirrup and the horse whipped him around in a gut-wrenching half circle, plowing dirt and gravel.
     
     
    Tooth-splintering pain shot up and down Yakima’s twisted ankle and leg.
     
     
    And then, as his vision continued to dim as though clouds were quickly filling the sky, he was vaguely aware of being dragged at a furious clip, and of men shouting, guns barking, bullets pounding the ground around him, and of Faith screaming so shrilly that her voice cracked, “YAK-I-MAAAAA!”
     

 
    Chapter 8
     
     
    Yakima swam up out of a deep sleep to a sharp pain behind his eyes and a coiled rattler flicking its forked tongue at him and rattling.
     
     
    The rattler was about six feet away from where Yakima lay at the base of a gully’s southern ridge. Yakima recognized the gully. He figured it had once served as a springhouse for some long-dead ancient settler; cool, sweet water intermittently filled the cut. When it was not inhabited by water, however, the gully was a haven for snakes—diamondbacks and Mojave greens.
     
     
    That’s where Wolf must have deposited him, although, having passed out while he’d been dragged out of the yard, Yakima remembered little but a vague sensation of falling and landing hard.
     
     
    The snake bearing down on him now, eyes like flat shotgun pellets, was a Mojave green, the deadliest of desert vipers.
     
     
    Instinctively, Yakima began reaching toward his hip, and stopped. The snake ratcheted up its rattle and drew taut as a clock spring, lifting its head to strike. From that angle, it would likely sink its fangs into Yakima’s cheek.
     
     
    He breathed a curse and steeled himself for the inevitable bite.
     
     
    A gun barked—a hollow pop that filled the ravine like a shotgun blast, and died suddenly, reverberating in Yakima’s eardrums. Yakima jerked with a start, eyes squeezed shut, for an instant believing, nonsensically, that the roar had somehow been the report the snake had made when it had chomped into his cheek and filled his head with poison.
     
     
    He opened his eyes.
     
     
    The snake lay stretched partly out before him, coiling and uncoiling madly, its head and six inches of neck lying separate from its body, the head furiously digging its teeth into a pencil-thin mesquite branch.
     
     
    “Well, what have we here?” a man’s voice said.
     
     
    Yakima lifted his gaze to the lip of the opposite ridge. A stocky, brown-haired, mustached gent in a shabby fawn vest, bowler hat, and checked trousers stood scowling down at him, the old Remington revolver in his hand still smoking. His round, dusty spectacles winked in the waning sunlight.
     
     
    “Hold on,” said his neighbor, the Easterner, Brody Harms.
     
     
    Holstering the revolver, Harms turned and disappeared from the ravine’s lip. He returned a few seconds later leading a mule by its bridle and glancing