The Judas Goat

By James A. Muir

IF YOU WANT ANOTHER NAME FOR VIOLENT DEATH - TRY BREED...
Breed-that was what they called him down along the Border. He had other names: Azul ... Matthew Gunn - they all spelled Death!
The man who hired him to take a coffin and a woman south into Mexico forgot that. Forgot that Breed had no time for liars. And his own savage way of settling debts: with a gun. He forgo too, that Breed didn’t forgive wrongs done to him. He was the kind of man who came back to pay the score. No matter who or what stood in his way. And a coffin loaded with stolen money was an open invitation to trouble-the kind that followed Breed like mourners at a funeral. Or vultures circling above a corpse.
THE JUDAS GOAT is the sixth in the blood-drenched Western series about the adventures of Breed

• Language: English
• Publisher: Piccadilly
• Release date: Apr 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215251263

Book preview

Chapter One

WORD REACHED HIM somewhere east of the Guadalupes, between the mountains and the Rio Grande, just before the big river spills out over the Mexican border. It came in a form only an Apache could read. An Apache or a half-breed. It roiled up high through the summer-still air: a tall column of smoke that wavered and broke up where the air currents hit it and turkey buzzards floated on lazy wings, waiting for something to die.

He reined in the black horse and sat for a moment, watching.

The smoke was a day’s ride to the East, but he knew that whoever was sending it up would be waiting long enough for a rider to pick up mirror signals. A day… two days … a week. Time held little meaning for the Apache fanning his blanket over the green wood fire. He would stay there until the message was answered, or someone drove him off, or he got bored and went on to wherever he was headed before he decided to sit down and pass on the word.

The man called Azul turned his pony off to the East and nudged it gently with his moccasined heels, easing the willing horse to a canter that covered ground fast without tiring the animal in the dry burning of the New Mexico summer.

All around him the land was yellow and brown and red, a vast emptiness reminiscent of a baker’s kiln. It looked hot. It was hot. Hot enough that a man’s breath got sucked out of him before he could pull the air down into his lungs and breathe properly. Cholla cactus and the tall-standing limbs of the big cactus trees were the only breaks in the landscape, and they were of a flat, sunbaked green that scarcely showed against the arid dullness. Azul felt at home here.

He camped that night in the depression of a buffalo wallow. There was sufficient water—once he had dug down through the mud—to satisfy his horse; he took only careful sips from the canteen slung across his saddle. He fed the pony a little grain from a sack carried alongside the water, hung well back from the scabbarded Winchester, where the necessities of desert life couldn’t interfere with the swift drawing of the carbine; where daily needs couldn’t interfere with the most vital need. He hobbled the horse with a length of rawhide and left it to find what extra forage it might amongst the cactus plants and settled down to chew on a strip of jerked deer meat, thinking about the smoke.

He woke in the cool time just before dawn, when the lizards are finding one last meal before the sun slows them down and the desert birds are waking up and testing their wings before hunting the lizards. The canteen he had left grounded in the earth was filled with seepage from the wallow and the fire he had built was still glowing enough to drive off the night-chill.

He fed the horse again before eating himself, rubbed two moistened hands over his face, and saddled his animal.

When the sun came up he was closer to the smoke.

By late afternoon it was still rising, drifting slow and lazy into the opalescent sky.

Towards sundown he knew the Apache had spotted him because a mirror was glancing signals off the sun; asking questions only an Apache would understand.

Who?

He pulled the Bowie knife from its sheath on his right hip and wiped the heavy blade against the sleeve of his faded linen shirt. Then, angling the width of the knife to catch the sun’s rays, he flashed a reply.

Chiricahua. Azul.

The return was a series of flashes almost too fast for the eye to follow.

How do I know? Prove it.

He turned the blade, using his knees to guide the horse as he drifted his left hand up and down over the polished steel.

I answered you. I am coming. Who else would come?

The answering dazzle was emphatic.

Come then. If you are not Azul I shall kill you. I am in the high place where the water falls down and the grass stays good into winter.

He urged the horse to a faster pace as he returned his answer.

I know the place. I will meet you there.

The flashing stopped and he sheathed the Bowie knife; kicking the black horse up to an easy gallop. The canyon was still several horse hours distant and he knew the Apache wouldn’t be there. He would be waiting farther out: watching until he was sure that the answer had come from the one called Azul, the one he sought. The half-breed who had been christened Matthew Gunn by his white father, Azul by his Chiricahua mother’s folk. The one who was called Breed around the Border, where more men than he bothered to remember would like to see him dead.

By the time full dark came down and blotted out the desert he was in amongst the foothills of the mountains, heading the black pony up a narrow cleft with a fast-running stream cutting down the center. There was grass on both banks of the stream, protected from the sun by high-standing walls of bare rock, and he camped there, pleased to give his mount something better than grain or desert shrubs to crop. The canyon of which the messenger had spoken—el Cañón de Agua—was about two hours’ distance but he preferred to approach it in daylight, when the waiting Indian could see him clearly. A part of his mind urged haste, anxious to hear what the Apache had to tell him, but another part argued caution. And in New Mexico caution usually equated with living.

He unsaddled the horse and built a small fire. With the stream close by he could afford the luxury of making coffee, so he set a pan to boiling and doled out enough grounds for several mugs. Then he drew the Winchester from the saddle boot and checked over the gun.

He checked it fast, with an economy of movement that might have seemed casual to the idle onlooker. When he was done he wiped a rag over the metal and set the carbine on the grass beside him. Next, he unloaded the Colt’s Frontier model carried on his belt and cleaned and checked that. He pulled a slab of soapstone from his saddlebag and honed the curving edge of the Bowie knife. Still holding the soapstone, he reached down to the top of his knee-high moccasin and withdrew a slender-bladed throwing knife, sharpened both sides of the wicked blade, and tucked the weapon back into his boot.

By now the coffee was boiling and he poured off a mug, drinking the bitter, boiling liquid in slow sips as he stared impassively into the darkness. He chewed jerky, grinding the meat slowly between his strong, white teeth, savoring the taste and extracting all the goodness of the sealed-in juices.

When he was finished, he hauled his saddle clear of the fire’s glow and stretched out. The Winchester rested across his hips, one hand hooked into the trigger and lever. He was asleep in seconds.

An owl, returning from a night’s hunting, woke him with its harsh cry and he opened his eyes, instantly alert. He remained still for a moment, listening. There was no sound of danger, only the customary noises of waking day: the shrilling of birds, the faint scuttering of a buck rabbit running for cover, the crackling of rock heating up under the rays of the early sun.

He came to his feet in a single lithe motion, Winchester canting round to cover the little meadow. His horse looked up in mild surprise at the sudden movement, then went back to its rolling on the dew-wettened grass.

Azul grinned and went over to the fire, blowing it back to life to reheat the coffee. He stretched lazily, his deep blue eyes studying the stream. Then, abruptly, he removed his wide-brimmed, black Stetson and dropped the hat on the ground. Swiftly, he stripped off his linen shirt, unlaced the moccasins, and slid out of his travel-stained buckskin pants. Naked, he plunged into the icy stream.

A watcher would have seen a tall man, lean and corded with sinewy muscle, a tracery of scars showing pale against brown flesh on chest and ribs and forearms. On one shoulder there was the dull reddish puckering of a bullet wound. Of themselves, none of these things would mark him out in the Border Country, where scars were as natural—and plentiful—as the cactus trees. What set him apart from other men was the mingling of dark Apache blood with the blondness of a more northern race. His face was broad, high-cheeked about a slightly flattened nose, a wide, full-lipped mouth: the muted features of an Apache warrior. His eyes, however, were a deep blue and his hair was a mane of sun-bleached blond.

The Apache characteristics evident in his face were inherited from his mother, a Chiricahua woman, Rainbow Hair of the family of the famous war leader, Mangas Colorado. His blondness came from his father, Kieron Gunn, a Santa Fe trader who had loved and married Rainbow Hair. Her people had called him Azul, after his blue eyes. His father, looking to the future, had had him christened in the old Spanish cathedral in Santa Fe: Matthew Gunn.

He had grown to manhood amongst the high reaches of Apacheria, growing up a warrior with all the hard virtues of the Chiricahua. His father had taught him the ways of the whiteman—the pindalickoyi—and taught him to live in two worlds.

Both parents were dead. Killed in the massacre of his rancheria, when scalphunters had slaughtered the peaceful Indians for the bounty on their hair. Five of those killers were dead now¹ and he hunted the last two. Nolan and Jude Christie.

It was that hunt that had given him his third name. A name men feared: Breed.

He climbed out of the stream and rolled on the grass. When he was near-enough dry, he pulled on his clothes and drank the last of the coffee. Then he saddled the horse again and rode on up the stream.

Gavilan Negro watched the rider coming from the shade of an outcrop twenty feet above the trail. It was a good spot, right at the entrance to Cañón de Agua, where the flanks of the Guadalupes narrowed the trail down and a man coming in would most likely have his gaze fixed on the spill of water cascading from the farther end of the canyon. The outcrop was in complete shadow, the sun as yet too high to light up the vantage point. Anyone entering the place must do so under the muzzle of Gavilan Negro’s Spencer carbine.

The Apache clicked his tongue softly against the roof of his mouth. Sí, this looked like the one he had been told about, el hacer de viudoes, the maker of widows. He was dressed right and he had recognized the smoke signs. But still, let him sweat a bit; Gavilan Negro would wait until he was absolutely sure.

The man rode easily, letting the pony make its own speed, one hand on the reins, the other on Iris thigh. Both where the watching Indian could see them clearly.

Then he did something that surprised Gavilan Negro.

He halted his pony and turned the animal towards the nearer cliff. He raised his head, and from beneath the flat brim of the Sonora Stetson blue eyes stared directly at the shadowed outcrop. They appeared to gaze straight at the waiting Apache, and his nostrils flared in amazement.

‘You called me and I came.’ The man spoke with the guttural tongue of the Chiricahua. ‘Why do you hide up there with a rifle pointed at my back?’ Gavilan Negro composed his face and stood up. ‘How did you know where I was?’

‘I know Cañón de Agua. That is where I would hide.’

The Apache chuckled appreciatively and came out from the shadows. He ran swiftly along the ledge, leaped down to another outcrop, sprang to a lower rock, and ran on to the grass, facing the rider.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I think you must be the one called Azul.’

‘I am Azul.’ He smiled briefly, waiting—as was customary for the other to invite him to dismount. ‘I greet my brother.’

Gavilan Negro nodded. ‘I greet you, Azul. Will you sit with me and hear my news?’

‘Thank you,’ Azul swung down to the ground. ‘I have coffee. Shall we drink some while we talk?’

‘That would be good,’ said the Indian gravely. ‘It has been a long time since I tasted coffee.’

The due proprieties observed, Azul brewed coffee and waited for the Apache to speak. There was no point in questioning the warrior; he would pass on his news when he was ready and any attempt to draw it from him before then might mean it was never told.

‘Good.’ Gavilan Negro smacked his lips and held out his cup for more. He sipped the bitter liquid and then, without preamble, began his story. ‘I was down towards the place the pindalickoyi call Fronteras when I met a man who said there were two norteamericano scalphunters selling hair. He died after a little while—he was not very strong—but before he did, he said these men were offering money for the scalp of the indio rubio called Azul.’

‘These men,’ Azul said slowly, ‘what did they look like?’

‘The Mexicano I killed said that one was tall and dark. Dressed in black clothes. He had with him a fair-haired man.’

‘Nolan! Christie!’ The words grated from Azul’s, mouth like a curse. ‘How long ago was this?’

Gavilan Negro shrugged. ‘Nine moons ago. I thought they might be the ones you seek, so I waited here in case you came by.’

‘I thank you for that,’ nodded Azul. ‘I will go down to Fronteras and see if they can take my hair.’

He waited until the Apache was finished drinking, then made a gift of his remaining coffee. It was a small price to pay for