“Lieu—” Ace started to shout, but that was all he got out before the rifle cracked and Olsen dropped like a poleaxed steer as his hat flew off his head.
“Get that redskin!” Corporal Parnell shouted as he flung his rifle up. He fired, as did several of the other troopers, but the Apache who had ambushed Lieutenant Olsen was diving back out of sight already.
The shooting continued, though, with echoes racketing across the foothills as other hidden riflemen opened up. Some of the soldiers cried out as bullets found them.
Ace stared at Olsen’s sprawled figure as the fuses continued to burn, the trail of sparks inching its way toward the rock wall where the dynamite waited. The Indians hadn’t directed any more shots toward Olsen, probably because he had looked dead as he crumpled to the ground, but as Ace watched, he saw the lieutenant’s arm move.
Olsen wasn’t dead after all—but where he was lying, the flying rocks from the explosion might finish him off if the Apaches didn’t.
As bullets whined through the air and kicked up dust all around the work detail and the patrol, Ace pushed himself onto hands and knees.
“Ace!” Chance cried. “Where are you going?”
Ace didn’t take the time to answer. He surged to his feet and dashed along the newly smoothed trail toward Olsen.
If he’d been forced to put his motivation into words, he might have said that he couldn’t just stand by and watch any defenseless person lie there and be killed, even a sorry specimen such as Lieutenant Frank Olsen. He didn’t waste any mental effort thinking about it, though. Instead he concentrated on zigzagging back and forth as Apache lead kicked up dust and gravel near his feet and whined past his head.
Behind him, Chance saw one of the troopers slump to the ground nearby. The man’s rifle fell within reach. Chance picked it up and raised himself onto one knee as he brought the weapon to his shoulder. He knew he was making himself more of a target, but his Jensen fighting blood was up. When he saw an Apache try to dart from one rock to another, he was ready.
The Springfield cracked and bucked against Chance’s shoulder. The slug it spat interrupted the Apache’s dash and flipped him over backward as it ripped through his chest.
The rifle was a single-shot weapon, but by this time Costello had crawled over to the fallen soldier and grabbed his ammuntion box. “Give me that rifle!” he called to Chance. “I know how to use it!”
Chance thought he had done pretty well with his one shot, but he knew that Costello had a lot more experience with the Springfield and could reload and fire swifter and more efficiently than he could. So he passed the rifle over to the former lieutenant and looked along the road to see how his brother was doing.
Ace’s mad dash had reached Olsen’s side without the young man getting hit. He saw a bloody streak along the side of Olsen’s head, then glanced at the fuses and saw that half their length had burned. Maybe a little more than half...
He didn’t waste any time as he grabbed Olsen and lifted him. With a huge grunt of effort, Ace draped the unconscious lieutenant over his shoulder and then started back the way he had come in a half-run, half-stagger. More bullets from the ambushers whipped around him.
Ace didn’t think about what he was doing. He just kept his legs moving. His chest heaved from the effort of carrying Olsen. He knew that if he fell or even stopped moving, the Apaches would have time to draw a good bead on him, as well as the lieutenant.
Panting roughly, he didn’t know how long he had been running when he glanced up and spotted his brother waving frantically at him. It took Ace a couple of seconds to figure out that Chance was motioning for him to get down.
The dynamite . . .
Ace flung himself and Olsen forward even as that thought cracked through his mind. At that same instant, a huge explosion bloomed behind them in a ball of flame, smoke, and dust. The high banks along the sides of the road funneled the force of the blast along it, and Ace would have been knocked off his feet even if he hadn’t already dived to the ground. As it was, rocks pelted him painfully, but luckily none of them were large enough to do any real damage. They hurt like blazes, though.
The blast had hurt his ears, too, like two giant hands clapping over them, but the ringing it left behind subsided fairly quickly. As he lifted his head, blinking his eyes rapidly to clear some of the dust from them, he heard the sharp barking of rifle shots nearby, then, slightly muffled, the voice of his brother shouting, “Ace! Ace, get out of there!”
Then, as Ace’s vision cleared even more, he saw the reason for Chance’s alarm.
All around them, bounding down out of the hills, were dozens of Apache warriors bent on slaughter.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Ace located Olsen lying on the ground a few feet away, still out cold. But the lieutenant’s army revolver was on the hip closest to Ace, in a holster with the flap still closed. Ace lunged for the weapon, tore the flap open, and yanked the gun free.
He rolled onto his other side in time to see one of the Apaches looming over him with a rifle poised to dash his brains out with the butt. Ace fired before the blow could fall. The bullet caught the Apache under the chin, bored up through his brain, and blasted the top of his head off in a grisly, grayish pink spray of blood, bone shards, and brain matter. The dead warrior went over backward as a good-sized chunk of skull with some brain still clinging to it plopped to the ground beside Ace.
He ignored the feeling of sickness that welled up inside him at that gruesome sight and twisted around as a bullet zinged past his ear. The Apache who had fired it was about ten yards away, levering his Winchester for another try. Ace thumbed back the revolver’s hammer and fired first. His bullet tore into the Apache’s guts and doubled him over. The warrior managed to pull the trigger again before he collapsed, but the slug went harmlessly into the ground right in front of him.
Pounding footsteps made Ace roll back the other way. As he came around, he saw an Apache leaping at him and got a flash of a knife in the man’s hand. Metal clashed against metal as Ace used the revolver’s barrel to fend off the blade. That gave him a chance to grab the Apache’s wrist with his left hand and keep the knife away from him.
At the same time, he tried to bring the gun to bear, but the warrior grabbed his wrist. They were locked in a standoff, rolling back and forth on the ground as each of them struggled to strike first.
They came to a stop with Ace on the bottom, the Apache’s knee digging painfully into his belly and pinning him to the ground. With grimacing faces only inches apart, each man strained to use the weapon he held while fighting equally hard to prevent the other man from doing that. Whoever slipped first, even the least bit, likely would die . . .
Suddenly, the Apache’s eyes opened wide with shock and pain. His strength deserted him like water spilling on the ground. The shocked eyes glazed over in death. As the man’s head fell forward limply on Ace’s shoulder, Ace looked up past him and saw Chance standing there, withdrawing the cavalry saber he had just plunged into the warrior’s back. Ace rolled the corpse off himself and reached up to grasp the hand his brother extended to him.
“Where’d you get the saber?” Ace asked, although he could think of only one reasonable answer.
“It’s Olsen’s,” Chance replied. “He took it off and hung it on his saddle before he started getting ready to blast that rock. I saw it and grabbed it.”
He didn’t get to say anything else because at that moment, Ace threw a shoulder into him and knocked him down, dropping to a knee beside him. A bullet whistled through empty air where Chance’s head had been a split second earlier. Firing from his kneeling stance, Ace punched a bullet into the chest of the Apache warrior who had almost killed his brother.
Chance scrambled up and swung the saber at another warrior closing in with a knife. The extra reach the saber gave him allowed Chance to slash the man’s arm and make him drop the knife, and then a backhanded swipe of the long, curved blade opened a crimson-spurting gash in the Apache’s th
roat. Gagging and choking on his own blood, the man clutched at the wound but couldn’t stem the fatal tide. He pitched to the ground and writhed out his last few seconds on earth.
With that, the Jensen brothers stood back to back and waited for the next attack. Chance was armed only with the saber, but he had wielded it to deadly effect so far. Ace wasn’t sure if he had one or two bullets left in the revolver, but however many there were, he would make the shots count.
He didn’t have to, because the members of the patrol Olsen had brought back with him had launched a counterattack of their own, and as a result, the corpses of Apache ambushers littered the ground along the sides of the newly built road. The rest of the warriors were fleeing into the hills. The troopers sent. 45-70 Springfield rounds after them to hurry them in their retreat.
The Apaches hadn’t suffered the only losses, though. Ace saw several blue-clad soldiers sprawled on the ground, along with a couple of the work detail in their gray uniforms.
Ace wasn’t given to profanity, but he had to bite back a curse as he saw that one of the prisoners lying on the ground was Costello. A large circle of blood stained the front of the former lieutenant’s shirt. Chance saw him at the same time and exclaimed, “Is he—”
“Yeah,” Ace said as he saw how Costello’s wide-open eyes stared sightlessly. He hoped that whatever the man was looking at now, it was a prettier sight than this Arizona Territory hellhole.
Costello had been their only real friend at Fort Gila, Ace mused. His death was going to make it more difficult for the Jensen brothers to escape . . . or even to survive their captivity. Ace was pragmatic enough to recognize that.
As if to emphasize that, Corporal Parnell came running up to them and brandished his rifle. “Drop that gun!” he yelled at Ace. “Drop it now, or I’ll shoot!”
“Take it easy,” Ace told him. Carefully, he bent over and placed the revolver on the ground, then stepped back away from it. As keyed up as Parnell appeared to be, he wouldn’t need much of an excuse to shoot.
Parnell jerked the rifle toward Chance and went on, “You, too, Jensen! Put that saber down, now! Where did you get it?”
“It belongs to Lieutenant Olsen,” Chance replied. “But he wasn’t using it, so I figured I might as well.”
“And he saved my life by doing it,” Ace added. “That pistol I was using is the lieutenant’s, as well.”
“It’s against the rules for prisoners to have weapons—”
Vince MacDonald stood nearby with some of his friends. He spat on the ground and then broke into the corporal’s rant by saying disgustedly, “Not even you can be that stupid, Parnell. Those two were just defendin’ themselves . . . and killin’ more than their share of Apaches, too, from what I saw.”
The fact that MacDonald would defend them surprised Ace. Maybe MacDonald disliked Parnell even more than he did the Jensen brothers. Right now, Ace and Chance didn’t pose any real threat to MacDonald or his plans.
Parnell scowled at MacDonald, then turned to Ace and Chance again and snapped at them, “Just don’t try anything funny, you two.”
“We don’t intend to,” Ace said.
With Olsen still unconscious, Parnell was in charge. He told the Jensen brothers to move over with the other prisoners and ordered several troopers to guard the entire group. Other men were posted as lookouts, in case the Apaches tried to sneak back and ambush them again.
With that done, Parnell went to Olsen’s side and knelt by the lieutenant. He placed his rifle on the ground and pushed his forage cap to the back of his head as he frowned and obviously struggled with trying to figure out what to do next.
From what Ace could see, Olsen’s wound hadn’t bled much. Head wounds, even the ones that weren’t serious, normally bled like a stuck pig, so the lack of gore told Ace the bullet must have barely nicked Olsen. The impact had been enough to knock him out cold, though.
“I don’t think he’s hurt bad,” Ace said to Parnell. “Maybe if you get some water into him, that might bring him around.”
“I didn’t ask for your advice,” Parnell snapped. Despite that, he followed it, telling one of the men to bring over a canteen. Carefully, Parnell lifted Olsen’s head and shoulders, rested them on his leg, and tilted the canteen to his mouth. He let only a little water dribble into the lieutenant’s mouth, and even that was enough to choke Olsen. He coughed and sputtered and shook, but as Ace had predicted, he came to. He looked disoriented for a moment, but then as he began to realize that he was lying there with his head in Corporal Parnell’s lap, anger and embarrassment replaced the confusion.
“Blast it, stop that, Corporal,” Olsen said as he batted aside the canteen when Parnell tried to give him another drink. “Let me up.”
“Yes, sir.” Parnell helped Olsen to a sitting position, where the lieutenant promptly began swaying as if the whole world were spinning wrong around him.
After a minute or two, Olsen’s head seemed to settle down. He ordered Parnell to help him to his feet. Parnell and another trooper did so. Olsen looked around at the bodies and asked, “What about the rest of the Apaches?”
“They fled, Lieutenant. I took precautions in case they doubled back, but we haven’t seen any sign of them.”
“And our men? How many casualties?”
“I, uh, don’t know for sure, sir. There hasn’t been time to check—”
“Then check now, and report.”
“Yes, sir.”
While Parnell was doing that, Olsen looked along the road toward the rock wall in which he had placed the dynamite. The rock had a gaping hole in it now, so obviously the blast had gone off, but Olsen would have no memory of it.
He frowned again at the bodies of the slain Apaches and said, apparently to no one in particular, “What happened here? The last thing I remember is lighting the fuses for that dynamite.”
“I’ll tell you what happened,” MacDonald spoke up. “Ace Jensen there saved your life.”
Again, Ace was surprised that MacDonald would give him credit for anything. Olsen looked shocked, too. He peered at Ace and asked, “Is that true?”
Ace shrugged. “I saw you moving a little after you were hit and knew that bullet to your head had just knocked you out instead of killing you. I wasn’t going to let you just lie there and get killed by the blast or by the Apaches.”
“So you came and got me.”
Chance said, “And we both fought to keep the Indians off of you, too. That has to count for something, doesn’t it, Lieutenant?”
“Count for what?” Olsen asked sharply. “You think that out of gratitude to you and your brother, I’ll turn you loose? You can forget about that. It’s not going to happen. That’s not the way things work around here.”
Chance looked like he was going to argue more, but Ace caught his eye and shook his head. It would be a waste of time and energy, he knew. Olsen wasn’t going to let a little thing like Ace saving his life interfere with his plan to wind up with his hands on a big share of whatever fortune Eugene Howden-Smyth took out of that mine.
Parnell came up and reported, “Two members of the work detail were killed, Lieutenant, and one member of the patrol you brought back here with you. Four more men are wounded, but maybe not too seriously.”
“Good. Load everyone back up in the wagons, Corporal, including our men who were killed. We’re going back to the fort so the wounded men can get medical attention and the ones who were killed can receive a proper burial.”
“Yes, sir.” Parnell hesitated. “What about the Apaches who were killed?”
“Leave them where they fell,” Olsen said coldly. “Either the other savages will come back for them later, or the scavengers will take care of them. Either way, these particular filthy redskins are no longer any of our concern.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Because of the bullet burn on his head, Lieutenant Olsen wasn’t able to put his hat on. Ace didn’t think the wound would require stitches, but when they got back to the fort
, the surgeon, Lieutenant Driscoll, could clean it and decide about any further treatment.
It was a sober bunch that headed to Fort Gila. Costello’s body was placed in one of the wagon beds, along with those of the other two dead troopers, and then some of the men covered them with blankets. Ace knew it would be a while before he forgot the sightless stare in the former lieutenant’s eyes.
A couple of the wounded men were hurt badly enough that they had to ride in the wagons, as well, so that meant the vehicles were crowded as they rocked along through the semidesert country toward the fort. The journey was a solemn one.
When they reached Fort Gila in the late afternoon, one of the guards at the gates saw the blanket-shrouded forms and took off at a run toward the headquarters building. By the time the wagons came to a stop at the infirmary so that the wounded men could be unloaded and seen to, Major Flint Sughrue was striding briskly in that direction.
“What’s happened here?” he asked as he came up to them, then exclaimed, “Lieutenant, you’re injured!”
“It doesn’t amount to anything, sir,” Olsen said. He made a vague gesture toward the bloody welt on the side of his head. “Just a little bullet graze.”
Lieutenant Driscoll emerged from the infirmary building in time to hear the comment. He said, “Any head injury is nothing to take lightly, Frank. You’d better come on inside and let me take a look at that.”
MacDonald protested, “There are other wounded men, Doc.”
“And I’ll get to all of them,” Driscoll said with an annoyed frown. “But I’m going to tend to Lieutenant Olsen first.”
Driscoll ushered Olsen into the building, and Major Sughrue followed them. MacDonald muttered, “Reckon the doc intends to carve himself off a chunk of however much loot Olsen winds up with, so he don’t want anything happening to him.”
“Shut up, MacDonald,” Corporal Parnell snapped from where he still sat his horse beside the lead wagon. “What officers do is none of your business . . . or mine.”
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