by Jake Logan
As they pounded forward, pursued and pursuers, too many of the latter for Slocum’s taste, time seemed to slow. Harsh chuffing rose up from his horse’s powerful chest, the morning sun pulled wavering rays of heat off the fist-tight hardpack before him, and spider legs of sweat slipped down his forehead, collected in his eyebrows, and quivered there while he touched off another round over his shoulder. He swore he heard a yip cut short, strangle into a grunting gurgle, then the unmistakable sound of a man slapping hard to the unforgiving ground.
Slocum wished he felt something more than he did for the one he’d shot, probably killed. But he didn’t. Too long he’d been pursued, too long he’d been overwhelmed by odds stacked too much in the house’s favor. And this was just another one of those times. But those high rocks ahead would offer some shot at evening the odds, however slight. Just like mountain ranges seen from far off, the pile felt more mirage than reality, as if he’d never reach it.
The sun continued its leeching ride skyward, baking everything beneath, pulling the strength from his horse. He felt the Appaloosa’s strength wane, was amazed that it hadn’t yet taken a shot from the Apache. Come to think of it, he should be more amazed that the Indians weren’t shooting more. He risked another glance behind, and yes, they were still there, and had flanked him most effectively, making escape to either side impossible.
That told him a few things. First, that the Apache were in no rush to catch him. They must know something I don’t, thought Slocum. And that something can’t be good. The rocks rising up to form the cragged height ahead of him were his only hope, no matter what they represented. Beyond them he assumed was more of the same plain he now galloped over.
Another shot whistled by, far wide, and he knew then without a doubt that these Apache weren’t after his hide . . . just yet. They wanted him alive. And since they had slacked off, though kept up their pursuit to the left, right, and rear, he knew what that represented—they felt sure they could trap him in the rocks.
Slocum guessed they were planning on circling the rocky knob, trapping him there, and waiting him out. It was obvious he had few supplies and his ammunition would be no match for theirs.
He would figure out those worries when he made it to the rocks.
And when he turned back around, patting the straining horse’s lathered neck, the view beyond the rise of rocks began to inch into his sightline, up up up with each galloped step forward. And it revealed not more of the same desert plain he now traveled, but it was as if the earth dropped away, replaced with a remarkable vista both impressive and unnerving. Even the Appaloosa sensed what they were fast approaching and slowed his gait.
Slocum pivoted in the saddle—the Apache had also slowed. He swore he could see smiles on their faces. And no wonder, for the rocky rise before him, his last stop, formed the head of a hidden canyon.
Slocum swallowed back the hard knot formed of equal parts disbelief and queasiness lodged in his gorge. He’d worry about the canyon later. Right now he had to get himself and the Appaloosa into the rocks, secreted enough that he might pick off a few Apache before they got to him. If it seemed hopeless, he’d go out fighting. There was no way he was going to put up with torture for their sadistic pleasure. Torture his body all they wanted once he’d gone out fighting the bastards to the last, but he’d be damned if he was going to hand himself over to them without a hard-fought battle.
The sandstone seemed to reflect the heat off the very surface of a bacon-ready griddle. He felt sure if he spit on one of the rocks, it would sizzle and pop. Once behind a lower-down boulder, Slocum slipped from the saddle and slid out his Winchester rifle from its scabbard. Long-range work would require them to snipe him from a distance. It was worth the shot, even though they would work, he knew, to keep themselves back out of his range.
“Appy, old pal,” said Slocum, stripping from his horse the saddle and blanket, and hastening to pour water into his cupped hands. He wasn’t about to dump it into his hat. He’d seen a few decent hats ruined by such notions. He didn’t think they were quite at that stage yet, though. “You’re going to have to keep yourself hidden and low.” Slocum realized what he was asking a horse to do and let out a short, tight laugh.
“I swear,” he said, “if anyone were to hear me, they’d consider me officially around the far bend of the river. But right now, I don’t much care.” He patted the horse one last time, then led him into a narrow shadowed natural grotto of sorts. He didn’t expect there would be much use in trying to hobble or tether the creature—mostly because there were few places to do so—and where was the horse going to go anyway?
With the horse somewhat secure, Slocum reached back to the meager stack of goods he had in his possession. One saddle, a set of saddlebags half-filled with scant personal possessions, a blanket, and a small assortment of foodstuffs. That’s all he owned in the world, and he didn’t mind it one bit. But he sorely wished he had more food, a few more boxes of ammunition, maybe another water vessel or two.
But you don’t, he told himself. Now get over it and snipe the foul yippers. Any notions he’d had minutes earlier of feeling guilty over killing one of them had long since vanished. Especially when he found out they knew they were running him toward the canyon. He had to climb deeper up and into the jagged tumbledown to get a better sense of the canyon. Maybe there was a steep trail down.
Up he climbed, looking for a toehold, keeping a watchful eye lest they had already surrounded him. He wasn’t wholly convinced that they didn’t want to just shoot him now, something they could do from a distance, instead of taking him alive, then torturing him. No thank you, ma’am.
Grit sprayed upward along the right side of his face, stung his eye. He ducked back down into the cleft in the rocks where he had just risen from. Another close shot followed that one. They had him pinpointed. He was only halfway up the rise, but already he knew he wouldn’t stand much of a chance of getting all the way up. Opportunities for cover would dwindle the higher he might climb. He sighed and decided to make his way toward the back, the side of the knob he assumed overlooked the canyon.
One second, Slocum was inching his way around the backside of a particularly large boulder, keeping himself hunkered low and hidden, and the next, his right leg spasmed, stiff and trembling. He happened to have been looking downward when some Apache’s lucky shot drove into his leg, spraying blood and meat up at his face. The bullet had threaded its way through the rocks, like a bee from hell, before finally finding a place to deliver its vicious dose of pain.
It slammed in just above his boot top, then out again a few inches below and behind his knee, taking what felt like a pound or more of flesh with it. The bullet spanged off the rock but didn’t hit him again in its last gasp effort, before it dropped, spent in the grit of the declivity in which he found himself trapped.
Slocum’s neck muscles tensed and he bit back the urge to bark an oath that would make a teamster blush. He scooched deeper into the narrow cleft, hoping it was enough to prevent him from being seen and shot again. Maybe they weren’t interested in taking him alive, after all. Now he wasn’t so sure that would be a good thing. Especially since he was wounded.
He’d been in many a tight spot before this, but now he knew he was really screwed. A lucky shot, that was all he needed. He didn’t want to give the Apache the satisfaction or the upper hand that knowing he’d been shot might give them. Let them think he was just fine, holed up and waiting to pick them off, with any luck of his own, one by bloody one.
When the hot pain that clouded his senses began to diminish, Slocum pressed his temple tight to the cool shadowed rock and fumbled with the cotton bandanna he kept knotted about his neck, a regular and valued piece of his trail garb, especially useful when he found himself cutting through dry landscapes, kicking up the dust of the ages, swirling and choking everything in its path.
Once he’d knotted the thing as tight as he dared just be
low the knee, he flexed his leg. Felt like the bullet passed through. And it didn’t feel like a big round, thankfully. Maybe he’d get out of this with nothing more than a limp. If he got out of it at all.
Blood had seeped into his boot, but he knew better than to shuck it, as the leg would swell and he might never get the boot back on again. But it did remind him to check his boot knife—still there. That little biter had come in handy more than a few times in his days on the trail, and he hoped it would for quite a while yet.
He let a few more moments pass, holding his breath, listening hard to the stillness. It seemed as if he could hear the very heat ticking from the rocks, the slightest of breezes soughing through the cracks and crevices. Finally satisfied that no one was scuffing their way closer, he sucked in a breath, snatched up the Winchester rifle from where he’d leaned it, and headed out past the big rock. He crept ever closer to the far side of the canyon, the overlook, hoping like heck he’d be able to find a perch from which to snipe the bastards, and if worse came to it, maybe he could find a way down. He hated to leave his horse and gear, but with any luck the Apache would give up and go home . . .
“Ha,” he said as his head emerged from between two jag-ended boulders. And then the view before him took his breath away. It was truly stunning.
For a good half mile before him, the land dropped away hundreds of feet down to a canyon bottom that was cut lengthwise nearly through the middle. It looked from his birdlike vantage point to be divided by a stream switching back and forth. He also bet that on the ground, that stream would at least be a brook, maybe even something more substantial.
But the most interesting thing about what he was seeing way down there was the color green. He rubbed his begrimed, bloodstained fingers into his eyes and blinked hard. Yep, still green. He was seeing meadows and treetops. It was as if he were looking down on some sort of Garden of Eden. How could that be? Must be that waterway that nourished all that rich-looking landscape.
Surely the Apache knew of it. But what if they didn’t? Or what if there was no way down there? Nah, the Apache had to be aware of it. Had to be. Maybe that was why they were chasing him so hard? Maybe they lived down there and they didn’t want any whites to know about it? If that were the case, they surely wouldn’t stop their attack. Maybe they were advancing on him from below, too. Great, he thought, Garden of Eden–dwelling Apache Indians from every angle.
How the vast vista before him had been hidden from view from every angle and direction he’d come from seemed almost impossible. And yet there it was, a genuine secret canyon. He scouted the rim with his eyes. It tapered to a narrowed end a good half mile away. But in between, the rim looked like any other canyon rim he’d seen. He wondered if riding on it from the east or west would look any different? Maybe it would appear to be an illusion until it was almost too late? He shuddered at the thought—a man at night on a hard gallop—hell, any sort of forward motion at all—might well take himself a tumble he’d never recover from.
And then a sizzling sound snapped him from his reverie. Something whipped by his head and he flinched. An arrow zipped right through the spot where his head had been, then sailed outward right over the little canyon and, losing its power, drifted downward. He lost sight of it as he watched, then jerked his head back—he didn’t like the idea of getting killed just yet.
He looked left and right, and was rewarded with a narrow, flat, sandy ledge fronted with lower boulders forming a natural knee-high barrier between himself and open space over the canyon. Just behind him to the right, the rocks thickened and overhung the sandy ledge. This would provide him protection from above, a respite for a while at least from the sun. A little depression in the rock would allow him to take shots to his left and right without showing too much of himself. Problem was there wasn’t much space for him to sit down and that shot leg was paining him something fierce.
He backed into the space and found it was deeper than it had initially appeared—deep enough for him to ease down to a leaning position, enough so anyway to take the pressure off his bum leg. He sighed at the mild relief it gave him. He wished he’d thought to have filled his canteen the night before. It was a near-dry thing and so he hadn’t bothered to take it with him after he’d watered the horse with a few meager cupped handfuls.
“Now we wait, Slocum old boy,” he said aloud, still marveling at the sight before him, just mere feet away. He was looking down the length of the canyon, waiting for what might well be certain death. He couldn’t go back, couldn’t go forward, left and right would also be teeming with approaching Apache. He was screwed.
“Well, Slocum, you’ve been in tighter fixes, I’ll say that. But this has to rate right up there with the best of them.” He sighed again, slapped at the itchy little trail a drop of inching sweat made in the stubble on his face. “If you do have to check out, you had one hell of a last night.” He almost smiled at the memory. But the throbbing in his leg and the picture in his mind of thousands of Apache crawling like lizards over the rocks toward him kept him from cracking a grin. His mind did like to make the most of a situation.
He double-checked the rifle, eased a shell into the chamber, did the same with his Colt Navy, and waited.
2
A mountain lion’s low growl of warning stippled instant alarm across Slocum’s shoulders and up his sunburned neck. He ground his teeth together hard and slowly squinted his right eye to squeeze a stinging runnel of sweat gathered there.
He’d gotten himself into a fine fix, caught between a shady overhang less than an arm’s length to his left, under which he spied the dry, ribbed, wrist-thick girth of a coiled diamondback, and to his right, the soft scuffing sound of an angry-sounding mountain cat. Before him, the edge of a cliff and then hundreds of feet of open space, and behind, a creeping handful of pissed-off Apache.
And here he was in the middle, John Slocum, a bleeding wanted man with a long-term price on his head, no horse, his Colt Navy revolver with exactly two shells left, no hat to cover his baking head—he’d lost that while scurrying in the rocks moments before, trying to skedaddle away from the Apache’s blood-seeking bullets—and a seeping wound in his left leg. He did have a small boot knife and a larger skinning knife sheathed on his belt. At the moment, they could do him no good. But in close-in fighting, they might be useful. And he had a feeling it would come to that soon.
Yessir, Slocum, he told himself. You’re in a fine fix. With one useful leg, a snake that looked ready to strike if he shifted enough to deal with the padding approach of the lion, and the trailing Apache, who, if he rose up at all from his precarious haven in this cliff top tumbledown of rocks, would send a few bullets his way.
“Hellfire,” he said, sighing. “This is no way to live, cowering in the corner and wishing you were somewhere else.” He pulled in a deep draught of air and pushed himself to a standing position.
The lion poked its head out from between boulders to his right. From its size, it looked to be a she-lion, and she regarded him, an interloper on her mountain, with a cold stare, her ears pinned back hard to her head. In no time at all, she managed to slink forward, the thick whiskered snout bristling and stretching wide, a low-down growl guttering upward from her slowly stuttering chest.
Slocum didn’t want a thing to do with her, but he knew it had gone far beyond that. He was committed to either being her next meal or killing her. And despite the fact that she could tear into him at any second, he felt no great inclination to end her days with a well-placed bullet. Not only would a gunshot tip off the Apache to his location, but he was, after all, a trespasser on her home ground. He bet himself a dollar that she had a den near there. And since it was still just past early spring, despite the heat, he figured she was protecting a youngster or two up there in the high rocks. That thought more than any other made him reluctant to kill her and leave her young to starve to death.
But the rattler to his left? Now that wa
s another story. But how to dispatch that thick tongue flicker without giving away his location? Or without prodding the lion into death-dealing action.
As it turned out, the rattler didn’t seem to have much interest in Slocum. It had slithered into its spot just after Slocum had passed over the location himself. So once again he took stock of his situation, and found nothing had changed. He was still trapped by a viper, a lion, a band of angry Apache, and a drop of Lord knew how many feet straight down.
As the hours passed, the cat would disappear, then suddenly reappear as if conjured by a magician’s hand. It was unnerving. The damn snake, however, just stayed right there, coiled like a living wad of massive rope. It had to be one of the biggest rattlers he’d come across in a long, long time, maybe ever. But as long as it stayed put, and so did he, Slocum reckoned they might both make it through the coming night without too many fang marks.
But it was the night that both nerved him up and gave him ideas. He had to do something, even if it was wrong. Soon his leg would swell tighter than a hat band on a fat man, he would dehydrate, and the Apache would swarm all over him like the angry bees they were. Then they could fight over his carcass—the snake, the lion, and the Apache.
Hey, wait just a cotton-pickin’ minute, he thought. Wouldn’t that be just the thing? Somehow play all these elements off one another, meanwhile, he’d be . . . gone. But how? He had hoped to use the coming nightfall to backtrack on out of there, slip back down to his horse, and ride hell-for-leather back across the plain.
