Shadow Shooters

by George Arthur

  The stagecoach, pulled by a brown four-up team, came in sight, swaying and rattling along the rough road, leaving a dusty, boiling wake. The driver watched for deep dips and tree trunks on the road. The shotgun slouched sleepy, with a rifle leaned against his leg pointed up.

  Riding at full gallop, One Eye Tim Brace and Wild Fletch Badger closed distance behind the stagecoach.

  ‘You hit the shotgun,’ the marshal told Hawkstone. ‘Me and Pearl will unload on the driver.’

  ‘Better wait until the coach stops,’ Hawkstone said, ‘liable to have runaways.’

  Before he finished the words, Yates saw One Eye fire and the shotgun rider pitched forward on to the back of a pulling brown and flopped under the coach. The left rear wheel rolled over his chest.

  The driver pulled hard on the reins. ‘Whoa there! Whoa!’ The coach began to slow.

  Wild Fletch fired the same time as Marshal Leather Yates. The driver spun left, then right, and pitched over to land on his head against a rock. Yates and Pearl and Hawkstone ran from the rocks. Hawkstone grabbed the reins of the lead brown to halt the coach. A stagecoach door opened. A fleshy-faced man in a light tan suit jumped out on to the road.

  Hawkstone shouted, ‘Fill your hand, Brennan!’

  The copper mine vice president drew his Colt.

  Yates noticed Hawkstone still hadn’t drawn his weapon. Wild Fletch rode up on the left side of the coach, One Eye on the right. Gunfire came from inside. Wild Fletch grabbed his leg. The two riders opened fire on everyone inside. Brennen fired wild, chipping dirt, then aimed at Yates. Pearl shot Brennan through the head. Yates fired three times into the passenger compartment. After three shots each, the boys stopped firing. Pearl approached the stagecoach.

  Yates saw Hawkstone pull and cock the hammer of his .45, aiming at the marshal, who twisted and shot Hawkstone’s gun hand, and watched the Colt jerk away. Wild Fletch turned his mount from the stagecoach and shot Pearl twice in the face. Yates shot Hawkstone again, hitting a leg, and again somewhere in the torso. The lead horses jumped but did not take off running. One Eye aimed at Hawkstone’s head and fired. The bullet went through the plains hat. Hawkstone tumbled down in the dirt by the hoofs of the lead horses, causing them to jerk back.

  Yates looked inside the coach. A woman was bleeding from the chest. Three men bled over each other, two with drawn guns. One man in a blue suit and a handsome mustache moved. Yates shot him through the forehead. The marshal turned away from the coach and nodded to Pearl’s body face down in the sandy dirt. ‘Get her over the cliff. Got to move along, boys – no way of knowing who will come along.’

  Still on their mounts, One Eye reloaded. Wild Fletch dismounted and tied his bandana around the bullet-creased leg. He remounted and pulled cartridges from his belt one at a time. The riders waited until they were finished reloading while the marshal glanced around the top of the coach looking for a payroll box.

  Wild Fletch walked his horse along the coach. He bent from the saddle enough to pick up Pearl’s leg. Still bent, he dragged the body to the cliff and dropped it over the side.

  One Eye swung down from his saddle and pointed to Hawkstone lying in front of the stagecoach team. ‘What about him?’

  ‘Leave him where he is. Let’s get that payroll. Look for a box or fat bags. You got the Apache stuff?’

  ‘In tied bags,’ Wild Fletch said, riding back from the cliff. He dismounted at the stage and pulled two hefty bags from the back of his mount.

  ‘Start sticking arrows where they fit, and swing tomahawks.’ Yates pointed to the body of Brennan in the brown suit. ‘Scalp that vice-president. We can’t dawdle, boys. Them regulators mighta heard some of the shooting. We don’t know how far away they are, and they could come riding fast.’

  Marshal Leather Yates began his search as the boys stuck arrows into bodies, and jammed them into the side of the coach. Sweating in southwest sunshine, they worked quickly, sniffing and coughing, getting blood on their hands and clothes. Wild Fletch did not hesitate to slice off the boot heel piece of hair and flesh from the top of Brennan’s head. Since One Eye had no stomach for it, Wild Fletch buried the tomahawk deep into the woman’s face. She wore a gold band, which he took. As an afterthought, he ripped open the front of her dress, and smiled his approval at what he saw.

  They wrenched open carpet bags and suitcases, dragged the bodies out and yanked seats apart. When they had stripped all the luggage from on top of the coach, Marshal Yates stood back breathing hard, with his bloody hands on his hips.

  ‘We been outfoxed, boys.’ He looked from one to the other. ‘More like we been betrayed.’

  One Eye said, ‘That bottle-eye mouse.’

  Wild Fletch took a bite of tobacco and slapped his good leg. ‘Roscoe Dees. He went and blabbed about the plan.’

  Yates nodded. ‘Got hisself to the bank, not Santa Fe, and poured out his soul for five hundred back-stab cash. Let’s see what these gents are carrying.’

  After they stripped wallets and purse the total came to eight hundred and forty-two dollars.

  ‘Don’t hardly seem worth it,’ Yates said. He looked back along the road. ‘We better push these folks back in and get this coach outta sight. We’ll take the team ’cause that’s what the Injuns would have done.’

  One Eye gawked along the string of the four-team with his one good eye. ‘Hey!’

  Yates stared at him. ‘The regulators coming?’

  ‘Look!’

  As they watched, the chestnut mare galloped by at full speed, Hawkstone leaned over with both hands gripping the saddle horn, riding hard for the edge of the cliff.

  The three men pulled their weapons and opened fire, splitting the hot air with a staccato of gunfire until they clicked empty.

  ‘I hit him,’ One Eye said.

  Marshal Leather Yates watched as the chestnut disappeared over the cliff. ‘I think we all hit him. No need for concern, boys. Anson Hawkstone is done for.’

  Chapter Twenty

  When Hawkstone hit the river it was as if a solid door slapped him. He went down quickly as the slow current caught him, the water making his bleeding wounds sting with pain. He couldn’t count how many times he had been shot. His head felt as if it had been carved with a tomahawk, making him flow in and out of consciousness. His hat was gone. The chestnut mare swam ahead, kicking hoofs, looking for anywhere she could walk out on firm ground.

  The water close around Hawkstone turned scarlet against the otherwise grey river. He pushed his head up to breathe, only to dip down again and drift with the current. Being lighter, he started to catch up the chestnut. Stone walls dominated to the left; to the right a desert of sagebrush and mesquite sloped down to meet the river. An envelope of pressure closed around him.

  Something brushed his face. He jerked in fear, thinking it was Pearl’s hair. Dizziness made him slip his head under water. But she was far downstream, too far to catch unless her body caught on something. He forced his head into air and blew water from his nostrils, and coughed. He breathed shallow as he flowed.

  His face felt the brush again. It was the chestnut’s tail. Hawkstone had no feeling in his shot right hand, along with other numb areas. He grabbed a fistful of tail with his left, and held tight, strung behind as a fish caught behind a canoe, his head flashing dark and light, unable to see. The chestnut continued to kick her legs under him while she aimed for shore. Her front hoofs touched the bank on the right. She slipped in sandy mud, but lunged ahead, pulling with her front legs, pushing with her back hoofs, digging in, moving up, dragging her rider behind her on to the slick wet shore, then dry mesquite and desert covered with sage grass.

  He wasn’t aware when his left hand let go of the chestnut’s tail. He came back to himself in short bursts, and whenever he did so, he felt the chestnut still close. He felt the hot sun turn his blood-soaked clothes sticky to his skin. Another time he shivered in a night chill. His throat felt parched, but he lacked the strength to turn around and crawl to the river fo
r drink. His stomach gurgled with hunger. He wanted a cigarette, and a swallow of whiskey. Mostly he wanted his leaks patched. Mentally, during an awake time, he counted six wounds, mostly creases because he was moving while they shot. The left shoulder was the worst because the bullet didn’t go through. The head crease hurt most and made him dizzy. The right hand and arm had no feeling. A chunk of meat was torn from his side, and another crease had hit his right leg just above the knee. They all bled, and he had no way to stop them.

  In between his ability to think and reason, his mind turned black without thoughts. He woke surprised by sunshine, or darkness. He tried to move, but he had lost too much blood. Life continued to dribble out of him. When next he woke he tried to think logically. There had been no days and nights. There had been half a day, and one night.

  As a dark night chill crept through his bones he forced himself to move. The head wound seemed to bleed the most. The greatest pain came from his shoulder. He turned to push his head against sand, trying to slow the bleeding. He could have used his bandana to wrap his head tight, but no other part of him would move, not arms or legs, and certainly not his right hand. He lay on his belly, his head turned to the side, consciously pushing it against sand. He still felt nothing of his right hand or arm.

  At times, he drifted in a half-dream world. Pictures of his past streamed behind his eyes. He thought of Hattie, of course – did she huddle with fear in some dark place, wondering and hoping somebody might find her – did she pray for Black Feather or Hawkstone to break in and sweep her back home? And Pearl, her girl body jerked by bullets slamming into it, then lying dead by the stagecoach – now drifted away and gone forever. That hurt because he had warned her, told her to go home. She hadn’t listened and was dead now, long gone, leaving him with a feeling of loss.

  For reasons he could not explain, the face of Rachel Good Squaw emerged and stayed with him. He remembered holding her in that cave years ago when he was married to somebody else – to Susan, with his son, Michael. He had wanted Rachel then, and had thought about coming to her. But when he found his family blown to pieces by bank robbers, he knew it was too late for any kind of good life, with Rachel or anyone else, because he turned outlaw and became no good, as a man, even as a human being. Eventually he had gone to prison, and that had ended any chance with her.

  ‘Rachel,’ he croaked, ‘Rachel,’ saying her name, but knowing the sound was wasted.

  Gone again to black non-thinking, what seemed like days passed in an hour or two and he dreamed again, dreamed of his world-girdling shipmate, Ben Coral. Ben had known Rachel when she was Rachel Cleary, a slim, red-headed girl of sixteen and in love with Ben’s shipmate, Anson Hawkstone. The lads went to sea and the girl stayed behind, in the family way, but this unknown to them – an orphan, her baby girl stillborn, off to business school, then capture by savages. The world of the Apache became her life.

  Why did he think of those soft warm days and nights now? Was it because he had come to face death? Did he want to remember the loving, softest parts of his life?

  If he wasn’t going to die, he’d better start thinking where those animals kept Hattie. And he’d better lay out in what slow and agonizingly painful way the three of them would meet their end.

  He came out of his dream world to a dark, harsh, painful reality. Off to his right among willows, the chestnut shook her head, rattling her reins. Her moon shadow stepped to the river and noisily slurped a drink. She came to nuzzle his spine, and moved her wet nose to the back of his neck. She stood close. She snorted the last drops of water from her nostrils. Then out of the corner of his eye he saw her head go up and her ears point forwards. He could not lift his head enough to see more, but in the ground he felt the pound of hoofs as a horse approached at a gallop.

  Anson Hawkstone went out again and felt, rather than saw, what happened to him. He caught a glimpse of an old man, an Apache, not quite as wrinkled as the old woman, but almost. He rode in shadow. A blank period took over and passed through Hawkstone’s head. His body was moved, lifted with grunts and the smell of man sweat and outhouse and wood smoke. Night passed with the Apache building something using willow and cottonwood limbs tied with leather straps – a travois. The travois stretched in a triangle, the narrow end tied to the chestnut’s saddle horn, the wide end on the ground. Between were stretched more limbs covered with leaves and grass. Hawkstone had been lifted on to it. The right sleeve of his shirt hung torn from wrist to armpit. His buckskin pants carried a slit to show the shot leg. Cloth had been wrapped around his waist and another strip about his head. All the wounds smelled of cavalry latrine leavings and dead animal and river mud, and he knew not what else. A paste of it covered each tear in his body. He was given a cup of water that he gulped quickly.

  ‘More,’ he croaked.

  ‘Enough,’ the old man said. ‘I say how much.’

  In morning sunshine, Hawkstone felt he was leaving again, going away to the darkness. ‘Black Feather,’ he whispered.

  ‘Yes,’ the old man said. He went away from sight and mounted his swayback pinto and began to move, pulling the reins of the chestnut, the travois dragging behind. The chestnut still carried the Mexican saddle, the saddle not completely dry yet from the river.

  The sun began to heat the land, while Hawkstone felt himself dragged and bumped over dips and hollows and through small canyons. He went in and out of his conscious self.

  ‘Rachel,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ he heard the old man answer from ahead. ‘What Rachel?’

  Hawkstone did not know what the old Apache meant. He bounced and grimaced in pain, and hissed through his teeth as sharp pins of agony pierced him. But the smelly paste seemed to be working, because as the day wore on, the bleeding had stopped and the pain appeared to lessen. His thinking almost came back to normal. But he still could not move.

  They stopped, and the old Apache gave him another cup of water and some deer jerky to munch. Hawkstone saw the old man clearly now. Dressed in loose, filthy Apache buckskin, his forehead looked as if it had once been scalped. A wide patch of scar pushed beyond a beaded headband. His eyes were deep and black into a thin wrinkled face with a large hook nose and full mouth. A worm-thick knife scar went across his throat just under his jaw. The dark eyes were flanked by deep wrinkles that went deeper as he squinted against sun glare. He had no front teeth.

  ‘I am Moving Rock,’ he said.

  ‘Where do you take me?’

  ‘To the medicine woman – in your babble you want medicine woman.’

  ‘What medicine woman?’

  ‘In the village, half day ride from Fort McLane. Rachel. You croak for her. Rachel Good Squaw, the white woman with the sunset hair, the medicine woman.’

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Anson Hawkstone slept lightly, vaguely aware of village noise – children mostly, and dogs, and the prance of ponies and the voices of women who talked with their men, a soft murmur when they spoke with each other, a coo while they cradled their babies.

  A woman close said, ‘Help me get him inside.’

  ‘Rachel,’ Hawkstone said, his voice raw with emotion. He barely believed it was her.

  ‘Hush yourself,’ she told him.

  He blinked, tried to focus, but the night and his head kept him fuzzy. Two men lifted him off the travois and carried him into a sod hut, and laid him on blankets spread to the floor. He felt the warmth of burning mesquite and juniper from a fireplace. A lantern hung close to a wall and spread a golden glow to the one-room hut. The men left. A girl he took to be Hattie bent over him and picked at the paste covering his wounds. She was too young to be Hattie. He touched her arm with his good left hand. He wanted to say something but no words came.

  She smiled at him, looking angelic in the glow. ‘I am Little Rain. We wash you. We take care of you now. We make you better.’

  ‘Moving Rock,’ Hawkstone said.

  ‘The old man is gone. He does not care for people.’

  The gi
rl and Rachel cut away his clothes. After the girl had cleaned the wounds, Rachel examined each gash.

  ‘We can’t burn the side or head. I got catgut – looks like six stitches for your side and four to close the head crease. Fetch the knife from the fire, Little Rain.’

  Hawkstone knew what was coming. ‘Get me a stick.’

  The girl brought a cut willow limb the diameter of a dog leg, about eight inches long. Hawkstone put it between his teeth. Without hesitation, Rachel pressed the hot knife against the leg and arm wounds and kept it there, sliding it, making him growl as he bit hard on the limb. His eyes flooded with tears, blocking his vision as he roared against the stick. The smell was of frying meat, but not sweet like cooking game – a rusty, sour smell, the smell of a house of burning people, or the smell of an Apache village after the cavalry have finished killing and are burning everything.

  Rachel said, ‘Your hand will heal on its own.’ She paused and stared at him, looking misty through his tears. ‘You done bawling?’

  With his left hand he pulled the stick. ‘Git it done.’

  ‘Little Rain, put the knife back in the fire,’ Rachel said. She turned back to Hawkstone. ‘We got to get that bullet outta your shoulder. It’s stuck in a bone.’

  Little Rain returned and held the lantern close to his shoulder. The limb went back in his mouth. Rachel began to probe with a thin knife. Hawkstone shut his eyes tight against the pain, letting tears flow. His teeth clamped stiff against the limb. He growled with a bellow that filled the hut, and roared again. She had to be using a hatchet – digging for the bullet with a shovel. He snarled and jerked while the spindly girl, Little Rain, tried to hold him. She couldn’t, and Rachel pressed her knee down on his arm to hold it still.