Rope Burn

by William W. Johnstone; J. A. Johnstone

  “And if my hands are free, I can untie the rest of us.”

  “Seems like it’s worth a try.”

  “It’s going to take a long time, though,” Chance warned.

  “What do we have, other than time?”

  “Yeah, but only a limited amount of it.”

  “MacDonald doesn’t think they’ll torture any more of us until night falls again,” Ace said. “We probably won’t want to make our move until it’s dark, anyway. Easier to give them the slip then.”

  Chance grunted. “It won’t be easy any time, but I guess we should take whatever gives us the best odds. I ought to get started, though. They’re not watching us very close. They don’t think there’s anything we can do.”

  “Let’s prove them wrong.”

  The brothers had carried on the conversation in urgent whispers. Now Chance turned his head the other way and said, “Evelyn. Evelyn, listen to me.”

  “What?” she murmured without opening her eyes.

  “I’m going to lean forward, and when I do, you slide down behind me.”

  That answer was unexpected enough to make her open her eyes and look up at him in confusion.

  “What? I don’t—”

  “Just lean over far enough that my hands can reach your chest.”

  Her eyes widened. “Chance, I . . . I thought you were a gentleman—”

  Through gritted teeth, he said, “I’m going to get that brooch and try to use the pin on it to work the bonds on my wrists loose.”

  “Oh! I . . . I think I see what you mean. But do you really believe it will work?”

  “We have to do something. We’re not going to just sit here and wait for the Apaches to kill us.”

  Evelyn swallowed hard and then nodded. “All right. I think I can do it. When?”

  “There’s no time like the present.” Chance hunched his shoulders a little and leaned forward, grunting with the effort it took to do so in this position. Like a tree toppling slowly at first and then falling faster and faster, Evelyn leaned to her right behind him.

  “What in blazes are you doin’ over there?” MacDonald asked.

  Ace was watching the two Apache guards, who appeared to be paying no attention to what the prisoners were doing. “Just be quiet,” he told MacDonald. “Chance and I are trying something.”

  “If it gives us a fightin’ chance—” MacDonald began.

  “Wait!” Ace said. He had spotted Ndolkah coming toward them. The chief’s determined stride made it clear that he intended to visit the prisoners. “Chance, Ndolkah’s coming!”

  Chance had been fumbling with his bound hands at the front of Evelyn’s blouse. He got his fingers on the brooch, but not before they unintentionally explored the soft mounds of flesh underneath the fabric. He hadn’t been the sort to blush since he was a kid, but his face felt warm now.

  He saw the Apache chieftain approaching, too, and whispered, “Evelyn, sit up!”

  He felt her struggling behind him. “I . . . I don’t know if I can!”

  He understood. Since she couldn’t use her hands, she had no way to gain any leverage and lift herself back to a sitting position.

  He got his hands against her shoulder and tried to push. That was something for her to brace against, anyway, and he felt her rise a little. She struggled to come up more. He twisted, managed to hook his left shoulder against her right one, and pushed her up farther. The contact between them slipped loose and Evelyn started to topple over again, but Chance pressed his heels against the rocky ground in front of him and shoved back hard, flattening himself against the wall behind him. Evelyn wound up falling with her head in his lap.

  “Oh!” she exclaimed.

  “Just lay there,” Chance grated. “I know it’s . . . undignified. But you can, uh, pretend you fell asleep that way.”

  “Oh,” she said again, this time sounding utterly mortified. Chance just sat there next to Ace with his face impassive as they watched Ndolkah walk up.

  The chief hunkered on his heels in front of the prisoners. “The women will bring you food and water,” he said.

  “What if we don’t want your heathen swill?” MacDonald asked.

  Ndolkah shrugged. “You will not starve or die of thirst in the time you have left, so it does not matter whether you eat or drink. But you might as well satisfy your bellies while you can.”

  “That’s not a bad idea,” Ace said. He didn’t see any point in antagonizing their captors. Doing so would just make the Apaches pay more attention to them, and that was the last thing they wanted right now. “Thank you.”

  Ndolkah looked at Evelyn and smiled. “The woman sleeps?”

  “That’s right,” Chance said. “She’s exhausted.”

  “She will learn. A slave’s life is not an easy one. She will learn . . . or she will die. As simple as that.”

  Ace changed the subject by saying, “You’re not like the other warriors in this band, are you?”

  Ndolkah frowned and tapped his chest with a fist. “I am Apache!” He shrugged. “But it is true that my mother was a Mexican, a captive. Mostly of Spanish blood, she claimed to be, or so my father told me. I never knew her. She was weak and died giving birth to me.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ace said.

  “Do not be. If she had lived, she might have passed that weakness on to me. By dying, she freed me to be a true Apache!”

  Driscoll spoke up. “Chief, I . . . I really need something done about this arrow in my shoulder. I think the wound is infected. I . . . I feel like I have a fever . . .”

  “Very well,” Ndolkah said, nodding. “I will do something for you, white man, so you will not suffer. When evening comes, we will see how well you die.”

  “No!” Driscoll wailed. “That’s not what I—”

  Ndolkah wasn’t listening. He straightened to his full height, gazed contemptuously at the captives for a moment, and then turned to walk away. Driscoll just slumped against the wall and sobbed quietly and miserably.

  “Well, that makes it pretty plain,” Ace said. “By nightfall, we need to be ready to make our move.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Chet Van Slyke leaned over in the saddle and spat next to the corpse of a trooper with a good-sized chunk of his head blown away. The man’s body had been mutilated, probably after he was dead—hopefully after he was dead, if anybody had any sympathy for the poor varmint—and flies had covered the bloody flesh. They had risen in a black swarm when Van Slyke rode up.

  “Told you we were on the right trail,” the gaunt gunman said to the riders reining in nearby.

  Lieutenant Frank Olsen nodded. He felt no real loyalty to the men under his command, but the sight of the hacked-up bodies lying around on the canyon floor made his gorge rise. The place looked and smelled like a charnel house.

  Olsen looked over at Corporal Cochran and said, “If you can find a place where the ground’s not too hard, give these men a decent burial. If you can’t . . . well, pile some rocks on them, anyway.”

  Cochran swallowed hard and said, “Yes, sir.” He turned in the saddle and called out the names of six troopers to form a burial detail.

  “Post lookouts, too,” Olsen snapped. “I don’t think it’s likely the Apaches will come back here any time soon, but you can’t ever tell with those savages.”

  While the troopers got busy with their grim chores, Chet Van Slyke and Navasota Jones dismounted and led their horses over to the tank in the rocks so they could drink. The sight of such violent death clearly didn’t bother the two gunmen at all.

  Olsen wasn’t particularly shaken by it, either. He was just relieved that they hadn’t found Evelyn Sughrue’s body along with the others. Evelyn was the only one of the captives he really cared about rescuing, although it would be nice if some of the men could be brought back safely, too—and put back to work on building that blasted road.

  Olsen brought his own mount over to the water. As the animal lowered its muzzle to drink, Olsen said to Van Slyke, �
�Do you think you can pick up the trail from here?”

  “I brought us this far, didn’t I? Yesterday evenin’, you figured I had lost the trail, but I led us right here.”

  Both of those things were true. Olsen had been convinced that Van Slyke was leading them astray when they kept going more and more toward the northwest, away from the border. That was just the opposite direction from where Vince MacDonald had indicated the deserters were going.

  However, the theory that MacDonald’s words had been meant to decoy any possible pursuit away from them still was possible. If they had misjudged the situation, though, then MacDonald and his cronies—and Evelyn—would be getting farther and farther away from them with each mile that fell behind the rescue party.

  The situation was uncertain enough that every nerve in Olsen’s body had been stretched almost to the breaking point by the time they made camp the night before. He had hoped to catch up and rescue Evelyn before darkness fell, but frustratingly, things hadn’t worked out that way.

  Van Slyke had remained confident, though, and now that confidence had proven justified with the discovery of this battleground, along with the bodies of the troopers who had been left behind.

  “How far ahead of us do you think they are?” Olsen asked.

  “Those fellas have been dead since sometime late yesterday afternoon, I’d say,” Van Slyke replied. “So the Apaches have a five- or six-hour lead on us with their prisoners. That’s assumin’ they holed up somewhere and didn’t travel all night. For all I know, they might’ve even made it back to their village.”

  “You’re certain the Apaches won this fight?”

  Van Slyke grunted. “Aren’t you? You don’t see any redskin carcasses layin’ around, do you? They had time to gather up their dead and wounded and take ’em with them when they left. If MacDonald and his bunch had won, wouldn’t they have buried those dead troopers and left the ’Paches where they fell?”

  “MacDonald might not have taken the time to bury those men,” Olsen said. “It would depend on how big a hurry he was in. And the savages could have come back later to retrieve the ones who were killed.”

  “Whatever you say, Lieutenant.” Van Slyke hauled on his horse’s reins and lifted the animal’s snout from the tank. “We ought to be able to tell for sure, though, once we pick up the trail again.” He jerked his head at Jones. “Come on, Navasota. We’ll scout around while the soldier boys are plantin’ their friends.”

  The burial didn’t take long. The troopers were only able to scratch shallow graves out of the ground. More than likely, scavengers would get the bodies anyway, but the dead men were beyond caring and Olsen hadn’t cared to start with. He’d made the gesture, and that was enough to satisfy the men in the rescue party. He didn’t want them turning on him.

  By then, Van Slyke and Jones had located tracks leading on up the canyon. Van Slyke pointed them out to Olsen in one of the rare stretches where a thin layer of sandy soil overlay the rock.

  “You got a dozen or more Injun ponies and eight or nine whites afoot,” Van Slyke said. “You can make out the boot prints. And that smaller track there, that must’ve come from one of the girl’s shoes.”

  “So she’s still alive.”

  Van Slyke’s narrow shoulders rose and fell. “Could’ve expected that much when we didn’t find her body with the others. Not even Apaches would go to the trouble of totin’ along the body of a dead girl, and they ain’t hardly human.”

  “So there’s still hope,” Olsen said.

  Jones scratched a lucifer to life and held the flame to the tip of the quirley he had just rolled. Grinning around the smoke, he said, “Well, there’s hope . . . and then there’s hope. Can’t never tell. Right now, that little gal may be hopin’ that it won’t be too much longer ’fore she dies.”

  * * *

  Once Ndolkah was gone, Evelyn rolled toward Chance’s knees, then strained and struggled until she was sitting up again. Chance said, “I’m sorry about all of this—”

  “Don’t be,” she told him as she pushed with her feet and scooted back against the wall. “I admit, I was . . . embarrassed . . . but a little embarrassment doesn’t mean a thing compared to our lives. Shall we try again?”

  “Wait a little bit,” Chance said. “Those guards are paying too much attention to us right now. They’ll get bored again after a while.”

  On Ace’s other side, MacDonald whispered, “You better tell me what you boys are up to, Jensen. I don’t want to be taken by surprise.”

  “I planned on telling you,” Ace whispered back. Keeping his voice low enough that only MacDonald could hear, he explained the plan, then said, “As soon as Chance and I are free, we’ll untie your hands, too, and you can let the others loose. You’ll need to be really careful about it, though, so the guards won’t notice what we’re doing.”

  MacDonald grimaced. “We’d stand a better chance of gettin’ away if it was just the two of you, the girl, and me. We can move a lot faster than if the whole bunch makes a break.”

  “You’d leave Parnell and the rest of your friends here?” Ace asked. The thought of abandoning the others to the Apaches made him aghast.

  “I don’t have friends,” MacDonald snapped. “There are folks who can help me get what I want, and folks who can’t.” He paused for a long moment, then blew out a breath. “But after seein’ what those devils did to Shoemaker and Barnes . . . no, I don’t reckon I could leave any white man to that, not even a snivelin’ wretch like Driscoll. But I ain’t gonna tell him what’s goin’ on until I have to. He might sell us out to the savages in the hope of gettin’ some sort of break from them.”

  “The only break they might give him is a quick bullet in the head.”

  “After seein’ what we saw last night . . . he might think that’s worth it.”

  Ace couldn’t argue with that. He fell silent and sat back to wait for Chance and Evelyn to try again on the first part of the plan.

  When Chance thought the Apache sentries were no longer watching them closely and it was safe to try again, he told Evelyn, “I’m going to lean forward, but instead of lying down behind me, just hunch over a bit and I’ll try to raise my hands as high as I can. You can tell me when I’m getting close to the brooch.”

  “All right,” she said. “Just be careful.”

  He moved forward and turned a little so she was partially behind him. Then he strained to raise his arms and reach toward her with his bound hands. Evelyn leaned toward him and his fingertips brushed the front of her blouse.

  “About a foot higher than that,” she whispered. “Can you raise your arms that much?”

  “I don’t know,” Chance said, “but I’m sure going to try.”

  He leaned forward a little more to give himself a better angle and then attempted to reach higher. His muscles creaked, and bones ached as they were forced to move farther in their sockets than nature had intended. If he dislocated his shoulders, Chance thought, then all this effort and risk would have been for nothing.

  His mind flashed back to a traveling show he and Ace had seen one time over in Kansas. One of the performers had been a girl who could twist herself in all sorts of unnatural ways, bending her limbs until it looked like her head was on backwards and the upper and lower halves of her body were going in different directions. The India Rubber Girl, she was called, and she had lived up to the name. Chance would have given a lot to have just a small part of her abilities right now.

  He was thinking about that when Evelyn breathed, “You’ve almost got it . . . Just a little more . . .”

  Chance gritted his teeth and stretched his arms and felt the brooch with the fingers of his right hand. He closed them around the hard, round shape and hung on for dear life.

  “You’ve got it!” Evelyn whispered.

  “I’ll see . . . if I can . . . work it loose . . .”

  “Just rip it off of there,” she told him. “I don’t care about the blouse.”

  “Let me get . .
. a better grip on it . . .”

  When Chance was ready, he pulled and Evelyn leaned back away from him at the same time. He heard cloth tearing, and the brooch came free. The sudden release of tension made him sag forward.

  One of the Apache guards glanced over his shoulder, probably having seen the movement from the corner of his eye. Chance thought fast and leaned forward even more, lowering his arms behind him so the warrior couldn’t see him clutching the brooch and a small piece of fabric attached to it in his right hand. He acted like he was gagging and about to throw up, but after a moment he pretended that the spasm had passed and straightened to a regular sitting position. The Apache just shook his head, sneered at the white weakling, and looked away again.

  “Got it?” Ace whispered.

  “Got it,” Chance said.

  Now it was a matter of seeing what he could do with it.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  “Ouch,” Chance said quietly.

  “Poke yourself again?” Ace asked.

  “Yeah, but a little pain is worth it. I’m getting there. This rawhide’s the loosest it’s been so far.”

  Chance had been working at his bonds for an hour. He’d had to stop for a while when a couple of the Apache women brought gourds of water and bowls of some sort of mush to the prisoners. They spat in the food and used their hands to shove it into the captives’ mouths, then allowed them to drink from the gourds, being so rough about it that more water got spilled than went down their throats. It was a miserable experience but eventually was over with.

  Now Chance paused to rest for a few moments. His wrists were bleeding in several places where he had jabbed the brooch’s pin into his flesh instead of hooking the rawhide strips. He mentioned that to Ace, then added, “It’s a good thing, though. Rawhide stretches more when it’s wet, even with blood.”

  “You lose enough blood to make much of a difference and you’re going to be in pretty bad shape.”

  Chance chuckled. “No, I’ve got plenty of blood. Blood to spare.”

  Ace hoped that was the case.

  Chance got back to work. MacDonald whispered to Ace, “How’s he doin’?”