Apache Squaw

by John J. McLaglen

  Issuing classic fiction from Yesterday and Today!

  Elisha Parsons was a hard man. His wife, Emmie-Lou, was the opposite—warm and tender and willing. Trouble was, she wanted to escape him as much as he wanted to contain her. So it was almost a relief when One Eye and his Apaches captured her.

  Almost …

  But for Jed Herne a contract was a contract. Parsons’ money meant that he’d get her back, whatever resistance he met. And the seductive Emmie-Lou, a band of savage Indians, and the Mexican bandit men called El Capitan was sure as hell some resistance!

  APACHE SQUAW

  HERNE THE HUNTER 5

  By John J. McLaglen

  First Published by Transworld Publishers in 1978

  Copyright © 1978 by John J. McLaglen

  Published by Piccadilly Publishing at Smashwords: August 2013

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader.

  Cover © 2013 by Westworld Designs

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book.

  Published by Arrangement with Elizabeth James.

  This is for Elizabeth, with my continuing love and thanks.

  I still get drunk out of my mind, merely from the fact that you are here.

  Chapter One

  The thin cotton of her pale blue shirt chafed at her nipples, making them tender and painful. Emmie-Lou switched the reins from right hand to left, rubbing at her breasts, conscious of the continuous trickle of sweat that ran between them. Shifting in the saddle to ease the discomfort from moist thighs. Wishing that Elisha wasn’t such an old-fashioned husband, and would let her ride astride in trousers, like some of the other women around the ranch.

  ‘Want a break, Mrs. Parsons?’

  She wished that the ramrod, Peter Tanner, wouldn’t put that leer into everything he said. Pete could even make a request for a second helping of beans sound like something downright immoral. But he’d been with her husband, Elisha, for the best part of twenty years. In lots of ways Pete was closer to Elisha than she was. When they rode out west from Virginia, both wild boys from the mountains, looking for land and money, she hadn’t even been a gleam in her Pappy’s eye.

  Now she was eighteen, and Lishe was near forty, with the ways of a man a full twenty years more. Although the temperature was over the hundred, the sun baking the dusty land, Emmie-Lou shuddered.

  ‘I asked you if’n you wanted to take a little break, Mrs. Parsons. Maybe have a lie down and take some of the weight off’n your…’

  Tanner left the sentence dangling, turning his head away with a gap-toothed grin, spitting a dirty stream of tobacco juice at a towering saguaro cactus alongside the narrow trail.

  Emmie-Lou brushed red sand from her black skirt, a short quirt dangling from her right wrist, wishing that she could raise the whip and lash the ramrod across his sneering face. But she knew that Tanner would tell her husband, and Lishe wouldn’t take kindly to such behavior towards an old friend like Pete.

  ‘No. I guess I’m happy to ride on a while.’

  ‘Yes sir, Mrs. Parsons. You’re the boss, ma’am. Sure as heck are. Damned if your word ain’t good enough for old Pete. I’ll go along with anything you like. Anything at all.’

  She breathed deep, trying to clear away the touch of his presence at her shoulder. Ever since she’d gone out for a ride away from the echoing mansion in the middle of nowhere, only three weeks after the wedding, and just kept on riding, Lishe had always made sure that there was a man with her. And that man had to be someone that her husband trusted not to be tricked or bribed by Emmie-Lou. And that man was always Pete Tanner.

  ‘You see that?’

  There was an unusually sharp note to Tanner’s voice, and the girl looked round, shaking the long black hair off her face, wiping sweat from her cheeks with the back of one gloved hand. Staring to where his hand pointed. Up and away to the left, where several deep arroyos snaked down from the foothills of the Mogollons, their depths in shadow as the sun slanted across them.

  ‘I don’t see nothing.’

  ‘Thought I saw a man. Maybe not. Can’t tell this far off. Guess we might make a turn for home now, Mrs. Parsons.’

  It was an order and not a polite suggestion, and they both knew it. But these rides out, once every other month, were the only contact the girl had with reality, away from the cold marble blackness of the great house, set in the middle of one of the biggest spreads in the whole of the South-West. The land that had made Elisha Parsons one of the richest men in the Territory of New Mexico. Riches that had set the barefoot boy from Virginia to thinking about a son and an heir.

  And a wife.

  Strictly in that order of importance.

  A wind sprang up from out of nowhere, setting the dust-devils whirling, and the horses skittering sideways.

  ‘God damn it to Hell!’ spat Tanner, kicking his heels into his roan’s flanks, drawing blood with the Mexican rowels. ‘Still, you son-of-a-bitch bastard!’

  ‘Lishe wouldn’t take kindly to hearing that you’d used that kind of language in front of me, Tanner/ said Emmie-Lou, glad to have the opportunity to put down the ramrod for once. Knowing that Tanner feared her husband as much as anyone, despite their long-standing friendship.

  ‘Yeah, well…’ he grunted, finally bringing the horse under control. ‘I guess that you wouldn’t be the one to tell him, would you, Mrs. Parsons? Not if’n I was to say that I figured you was gettin’ ready to go a’runnin’ again. I guess that old Lishe wouldn’t take none too kind to that neither.’

  ‘That’d be a lie!’

  ‘Might be a lie to say you done it. Wouldn’t be a lie to say you was thinkin’ ‘bout it. I watch you, and I know what you think most your wakin’ moments. I see your eyes go to those hills, and there ain’t no help comin’ from them. You married him, and you are surely married to him until the day you die.’

  Emmie-Lou wiped sticky dust from her face and stood in the stirrups, feeling the hot leather of the saddle peeling from the sweaty skin on the inside of her thighs. The trouble was, Tanner was right. All the way along the line and then clear back again. She knew it. He knew it. And he knew that she knew. There just wasn’t a way around it.

  The marriage had started off as a terrible mistake and gotten worse from there. Elisha Parsons had come courting to Magdalena. Her home town in the towering shadow of South Baldy Mountain, one hundred and fifty miles north and east of his spread. Brought there by the word of the prettiness of Widow Harvey’s daughter. And he’d found they’d told the truth. Some cow-towns and they’d call a girl pretty who wasn’t crippled or downright ugly. But Magdalena hadn’t got a finer sight than Emmie-Lou Harvey swinging down to church, in her best bonnet and dress, her black hair tied demurely back, and blue eyes staring at her feet.

  Pete Tanner remembered it well, the day that Lishe came back from his courting. ‘She’s a sweet little sixteen, Pete,’ his boss had said. ‘You know the sort I mean. And I’m aiming to have her for the mother of my sons.’

  Tanner had told that to Emmie-Lou. Lots of times. Just to make sure she didn’t get too damned uppity with him. That had been two years back. And in those two years there hadn’t been no sign of a son. Nothing to show at all. And God knows but Elisha had tried. Laboring over her like she was a brood mare, which she was. Every night the same.

  Coming three parts drunk up the echoing stairs, with the banisters of mahogany, imported clear from France in Europe. Lurchi
ng along the dim corridors, lined with expensive oil-paintings of fat ladies sporting among water meadows with pink cherubs. Tripping over the fragile furniture with spindly legs that he claimed had cost as much as a. whole year’s cattle drive.

  Into the bedroom, with its monster canopied four-poster, made from English oak, carved with animals of kinds that Emmie-Lou had never seen before. A sort of horse with a great single horn from its brow and something that resembled a shaggy cougar.

  Shaking the hair away from her face, Emmie-Lou thought back to the nights in the house, and suddenly felt cold in the heat of the New Mexico sunlight.

  Lishe was a hard man. Had to be to build up a spread that size, and hold it against the marauding Chiricahua and Mescalero Apaches. And against the Mex bandits that came silently from south of the big river, risking being caught by the U.S. Cavalry on their way over, and by the federales on their way back with women or cattle or American dollars.

  Every now and again, when the day was going well, and his stomach was lined with a slick coating of cheap whiskey, Pete Tanner would open up to the girl on their rides, and talk about the good old days. The days when he and Lishe were boys among the blue-tipped mountains back home, with the sun on their backs and no cares to weigh them down. It was hard for the girl to equate that talk with the stony face of the man she had married.

  When he came courting her, Elisha Parsons had smiled some. Told her all about the spread he owned. The house he’d built. The family he was looking to raise. And she was very young and Magdalena hadn’t got any man like Elisha. With his toughness and confidence. Her mother was impressed, and a little bit jealous, as mothers always will be when their only daughter gets married.

  The difference between their ages didn’t seem so bad. Not so bad then, two years back. Now it seemed a great empty gulf that lay between them, and Emmie-Lou knew in her heart that she would never be able to cross that immeasurable depth.

  ‘Don’t like all this damned dust, Mrs. Parsons. Blowin’ round like this, might be hidin’ half a hundred Mex bastards, or half the Apache nation.’

  Tanner’s voice tugged her back to the present, and Emmie-Lou looked around them. The mountains rose about like peaks of flame, and the way back lay through Pinnacle Canyon, with its steep sides and boulder-strewn deeps. For a moment she shared the older man’s concern, then she wondered if an attack by bandits or Indians might not give her the chance to slip away once more. Despite Lishe’s awful threat of what he would do to her if she ever ran from him again.

  Racing in on the heels of that thought came the one that said it maybe wouldn’t be that bad even if she did get taken prisoner. Not by the filthy Apaches, though there was an odd thrill of excitement at the idea of being possessed by an imperious, naked savage, but by a romantic bandit with a gleaming moustache and a sombrero with a fringe of golden coins, taking her across the pommel of his white stallion to his hacienda among the hills below the Rio Grande.

  It would be different from Elisha’s panting brutality.

  ‘Set your spurs in! I don’t like this one bit. Heard from one of them dog-face soldier boys at the Fort that there was trouble on one of the rancherias way west. Handful of bucks set to raise Hell and win a name. Come on, Ma’am!’

  Tanner kicked his horse up to a full gallop, and Emmie-Lou followed him, rapping her horse in the flanks with the heels of her boots, pushing it on towards the pass and the safety of home.

  They were round about fifteen miles from the house, cut off from it by a spur of the Mogollons, its lower slopes dappled with white-tipped spears of yucca, growing in sparse clumps. Any one of them big enough to hold a half dozen Mescaleros. Wisps of cloud were gathering to the west.

  The pillar of dust about them was whipped up by the wind, and Emmie-Lou, riding on behind the clattering hooves of Tanner’s mount, couldn’t see more than a few paces in front of her. She was conscious of the pounding in her own heart from the excitement. Wondering if the isolated routine of her miserable life would be altered by today.

  There was even the unbidden thought creeping out of one of the locked rooms at the back of her mind that there that would mean food. The two people riding fast on horseback had been ignored. But now they sat still and quiet. Only the tails of the mounts flicking out. Perhaps they might be worth watching for a while. Effortlessly, the big bird let its right wing drop a fraction and it began a long swirling descent.

  ‘You’re getting to be a frightened old man, Tanner,’ sneered the girl, standing in the stirrups, gazing around the mouth of the canyon, and up to where the bright sun etched the top of the narrow pass. Not a thing stirred. Not a sound.

  ‘I seen bodies after the Indians finished with ’em. Gives a man an idea about what fear means. Don’t mean being scared of dark. Means being frightened of being hurt. I been lucky, ’part from a few breaks and losin’ my teeth to a damned quack in Albuquerque. But those bodies…’

  Emmie-Lou had seen something of them, before Lishe had ordered her in. Seen the faces that didn’t have anything that would make them faces. Eyes, nose, lips and teeth. Ears. All gone. And the fingers and the toes and the hands and the feet. And…

  And everything else.

  She had run to her room and been sick, bringing up all that she’d eaten and drunk that day. Retching until there was only bitter bile. For the first time, Emmie-Lou began to feel the fear coming from Tanner.

  ‘Come on. Slow and easy.’

  The ramrod heeled his mount forwards, the hooves pattering in the soft sand, heading out of the blazing sun into the cool shadows of the arroyo. Emmie-Lou waited until he was fifty paces ahead of her, and then moved on. Seeing him half-turn his head to make sure she was following.

  The sides of Pinnacle Canyon opened wider for the first eighty yards, then corkscrewed and closed in, until it seemed as if a rider could reach out and touch both walls at the same time. The girl kept her distance, taking deep breaths, trying to keep calm. Telling herself that Tanner hadn’t been sure that he’d seen anything. That the dust-devils might have been just that. And nobody had actually seen any parties of bucks off their land. The Cavalry had scouts out patrolling the whole time, so it surely wasn’t going to be possible for Apaches to get this close to their spread without someone noticing.

  She had succeeded in convincing herself that there was nothing to be frightened of before she even reached the part of the arroyo where it narrowed right down.

  ‘Close up, Mrs. Parsons,’ said Tanner, just out of sight around the first sharp corner.

  Away from the direct light and heat of the banking sun, Emmie-Lou felt chilled and reached up to button her open shirt. Looking down to concentrate on what she was doing, letting the horse walk forwards at its own pace.

  She never saw or heard the Apaches on their unshod ponies as they rode in alongside her, moving up from behind. The first she knew was when a hand touched her on the arm, with a gentleness that was somehow more shocking than an explosion of violence.

  Although she tried to cry out, her throat had closed up in panic, and only a barely audible gasp came out. There were two of them, she saw at first, but she could make out more riding in behind. Small men, in cotton blouses and trousers, wearing soft leather boots. Headbands of various colors holding back their shoulder-length hair.

  Emmie-Lou closed her eyes for a second, wondering if she would faint. Still not a sound had been made, and there came a moment of wild hope. Hope that they hadn’t seen Tanner, and that the resourceful man might find a way of rescuing her.

  The boom of the rifle from ahead, and the cry of pain that followed, killed that hope. The voice had been that of the ramrod. Which meant that she was on her own. The Indian on her right had been watching her face and he laughed, the noise startling in the echoing arroyo, completing the fright for the buzzard, which had gone skittering aloft again at the crash of the gun.

  ‘Now you close up, Mrs. Parsons,’ he mocked, in hoarse but good English.

  As they rode on, around th
e bend, Emmie-Lou Parsons felt the thin cotton of her pale blue shirt chafing at her nipples, making them tender and painful.

  She wondered what Elisha would think.

  Chapter Two

  ‘Get up!’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I said to get up and face me!’

  ‘I said "No" and that’s what I meant.’

  ‘You’re a coward!’

  ‘Go home, son.’

  ‘A coward. A stinkin’ lousy yellow-bellied coward! That’s what you are.’

  ‘If I stand up, then I’m going to have to fight you, son. I don’t stand up for nothing, and that means I’ll have to draw against you.’

  ‘That’s what I want, you bastard!’

  ‘And then I’ll kill you.’

  It was a long, long silence that dragged on in the small saloon. The older man at the table, his long black hair greying at the temples, took another pull at the long glass in front of him, looking as cool as a rich widow at a church social.

  ‘You…you can’t know that.’

  The confidence had gone from the boy’s voice, standing five paces in front of the table, fingers twitching nervously over the polished butts of a fine pair of matched forty-five Colts. He was tall and skinny, swallowing hard and making his Adam ’s apple leap in his throat like a rabbit in a bag. His clothes were expensive, hanging well on his lean frame. A man in the corner shifted uncomfortably in his chair, making it scrape on the sawdust covered floor.

  ‘Don’t…’ warned the boy, spinning round, half-drawing the right-hand gun.

  ‘You only goin’ to draw that one, then why weight yourself down with the other?’

  ‘Listen, Mister …Herne. I know all about your reputation, and it don’t mean more to me than a streak of chicken-shit on a wall. It’s too long ago, and you ain’t done nothing and killed nobody in years. So just come on outside and let’s see if you’re still what they say you was once if you was what they say you might…’