Shadow Shooters

by George Arthur

  ‘Got it,’ she said. ‘Quickly, Little Rain, bring me the hot knife.’

  Hawkstone’s thinking went black.

  In the morning he woke clear-headed. The fire of pain in his body burned deepest from the left shoulder. Rachel Cleary, now Rachel Good Squaw, dressed in a buckskin skirt to her knees and calf moccasins, and a beaded linen shirt, sat beside him on the dirt floor, cross-legged in the Apache way. She pulled the blanket higher along his chest to his throat. She smiled. Her red hair grew wild out and around her head and down to her shoulder blades, but now there were streaks of grey in the flow of it. Her face showed a permanent flush, oval and smooth except for tiny wrinkles along the sides of her blue eyes, eyes as blue as a china cup. The single-line tattoo ran from her lower lip to the bottom of her chin. Her hand rested on his shoulder, elegant with long fingers.

  Hawkstone felt his right arm again. He raised it. ‘The hand.’

  ‘You’ll get feeling back in a day or two. The bullet went between the knuckles. The wrap is tight.’

  He pushed his left arm out of the blanket and touched her knee. ‘It is good to see you again, woman. I heard you moved, but not where. You look good.’

  More tiny wrinkles worked the edges of her mouth when she smiled. ‘I’m forty now, Anson. I help heal from what I picked up over the years, but I reckon I’m less desirable these days.’

  ‘Great modesty often hides great merit,’ Hawkstone said.

  She sat back and he saw fondness in her blue eyes. ‘Do you still do that?’

  ‘Benjamin Franklin? Yup. What I can remember. I ain’t always exact.’

  She leaned over and kissed his cheek. ‘You’ll be with us a spell, Anson Hawkstone. You lost too much blood. You rest a few days.’

  ‘You may be the medicine woman, but I got to ride out soon. Men got to be dealt with.’

  ‘I’ll say when you ride,’ Rachel said. She pointed a finger at him. ‘You listen to me.’

  He went in and out of sleep as the pain in his wounds diminished. Rachel had a string of Apache visitors, children with sniffles and stomach aches, pregnant women and girls, young men with bullet wounds. The girl Little Rain tended to Hawkstone. She changed bandages that covered scabs from the hot knife, and the wrap around his waist and head, and when he woke she waited with a cup of water. She brought him cooked goat, and rabbit, and venison. She was young and graceful and easy to look at, and she smelled of deep mountain forest and pine needles. She reminded him so much of Hattie, and his need to get moving clawed at him.

  During the second evening Hawkstone, now able to sit, and Rachel sat in the lantern glow and spoke softly of the last time they were together, and what had happened to them in the years between. He told her of his life with the Apache, and of prison and the stage hold-up, and who had shot him up. She told him of the move, and how several older braves had wanted her, and had offered her animals and gold to take them as her man. But what they wanted was her long-legged, full-bodied shape, and to be waited on by her, and she discovered she did not need a man to live a comfortable, satisfying life.

  She kept busy, and she stayed with the Apache because she could not live with the Christian judgments in the white man’s world. Most supplies not available in the village she could get from Fort McLane. As they spoke she allowed him to keep his hand against the inside of her bare leg above the moccasin, and twice, before she crossed to her own bed, she left him with a warm wet kiss that got him stirred.

  In the morning of his third day, Hawkstone heard and saw Rachel talking with a rugged Apache warrior who stood outside her door.

  The warrior paced back and forth in front of her. ‘I, Great Eagle, have been patient with you, Rachel Good Squaw. You know I have not pressed you for an answer.’

  ‘You’ve been patient,’ she said. ‘Even when I told you I got no interest.’

  ‘You do have interest. I see it in your eyes.’

  ‘You see what you wish, not what is there.’

  Great Eagle pointed behind her to the inside of the hut. ‘Who is he, this Anson Hawkstone? Will he be your man?’

  ‘Yes, when he has put himself back together.’

  ‘I have offered you horses and pigs and a better hut, and the company of my two boys. What can he offer you?’

  ‘History. He brings me a time of happy years when a young girl was in love. We have many years when we should have been together.’

  ‘He will stay with you?’

  ‘No, he will leave me. But he will come back and he will stay with me for a spell. He will always come back.’

  Great Eagle stopped, lips tight, black, deep-set eyes glaring. ‘You cannot live with a sometime man, gone to the wind and coming back for your favours, then gone again.’

  ‘Yes I can. I want it that way.’

  ‘You need all-time man, a man to lie with every night, a man to look after, to cook for, to tend his children, to provide his needs.’

  ‘As heavenly as that sounds for a woman, I do not need any of it. I find that most of the time men are a demanding nuisance. I am the medicine woman. That is enough for me. When the Hawkstone man is with me, I will enjoy him. When he goes away I will think good riddance, but I will wish him well and look forward to his return so I can enjoy him until he leaves again.’

  ‘Ah, you a stupid woman.’

  Rachel sighed. ‘Why would Great Eagle want a stupid woman?’

  Great Eagle shook his head and stomped away.

  Rachel came back inside the hut. Little Rain washed her patient’s face with a wet cloth. She turned, her black hair down to her waist like Hattie’s, and faced Rachel.

  When Rachel saw Hawkstone sitting on the blankets watching her, she put her hands on her hips. ‘I’ll have no blustery wind from you, Anson Hawkstone.’

  ‘I am speechless,’ Hawkstone told her. ‘What man can know the thoughts that carry a woman?’

  Little Rain said, ‘This one will be your man, Rachel?’

  ‘I intend to keep him.’ She stepped to Hawkstone while Little Rain scurried out of the way. She looked down at him. Her red hair looked on fire from morning sunshine coming through the door. ‘I suppose you think you get special favours now I spilled myself out.’

  Hawkstone placed his left hand on the calf of her moccasin. ‘I suppose I do.’

  ‘Tonight you will move yourself to share my bed. I will be gentle with you – at first.’ Though her face looked stern, the corners of her mouth worked up a little to a smile.

  ‘Rider coming in the village,’ Little Rain said, looking out of the open doorway.

  Hawkstone could not see outside with willowy Little Rain and shapely Rachel blocking the way. A grip squeezed his chest. He caught glimpses of an appaloosa’s legs as they passed. The painful shoulder announced itself from his movement to see. The horse went into the village.

  Rachel turned to him and saw his expression. ‘You know that Apache, Anson?’

  ‘I think so. He comes here.’

  Rachel went back to the doorway as the appaloosa approached. ‘Do you look for Hawkstone?’

  ‘Yes, he is my blood brother,’ the rider said. ‘Is he inside?’

  Rachel stood back and Black Feather entered carrying full saddle-bags, and looked down at Hawkstone. ‘You are alive.’

  ‘You took your sweet time tracking me.’

  ‘The river slowed me. I brought your money, ten thousand, from the first robbery, the Mineral City bank.’ Black Feather dropped the saddle-bags next to Hawkstone. He carried the scent of his horse and the outside air and the trail, and a dark brooding cloud on his face. He knelt and put his hand on Hawkstone’s arm. ‘I got to get back to the village. The smell of events is bad. But I must tell you, my brother, our little sister, Hattie Smooth Water, is dead.’

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Wharton City Marshal Leather Yates did not try to hide his frustration. Getting a decision from the army at Fort Grant was like riding a horse backwards. Anything to do with government was the same. Bu
t they had to move on the village before word reached it and they found help. He told nobody that he and his two deputies had left the stagecoach behind the rocks with the passengers inside to smell up the landscape. There was enough evidence – Lieutenant Horatio Crock clearly saw the work of Apache when the marshal showed him the scene. Lieutenant Crock did not impress Leather Yates at all. He reminded the marshal of a desk clerk in a bank, with his immaculate uniform and baby face and spare boyish frame – maybe early twenties, with about as much life experience as a schoolgirl.

  Yates explained, as they studied the stagecoach aftermath, the village where the renegades came from was not far, out along Disappointment Creek. The cavalry, the four regulators from the bank, the marshal and his two deputies had to move fast.

  Now, it had been a week since the hold-up, and the lieutenant still waited for orders from his colonel, who was somewhere north with a campaign against hostiles around the copper mines. Yates sat in the waiting room six days straight. He sweated and grew hungry and thirsty with not enough food and drink while he waited for a decision. His deputies kept an eye on the village, one ready to ride hard to him if any alarm went out.

  Yates’ biggest concern now was the news from Rocky Face Fiona that Black Feather, sidekick to the late deceased Hawkstone, had tracked their trail to the Way Out Saloon and found the clothes of the demised princess in the shack. But worse was what his deputies who were watching the tribe saw: a brave from downriver who rode into the village with the girl’s body over a spare pinto. She hadn’t flowed far down the river, maybe got snagged on some outgrowth, so the braves in the village knew the princess had been raped and killed, and they’d have a real grouch on – especially that Black Feather fella who might get warriors together.

  On the seventh day the marshal at last learned that the lieutenant had received instructions from his colonel via a worn-out rider: attack the village. Try to spare women and children. Burn everything. Dispense with those responsible for the stagecoach massacre.

  Yates learned that before word about the stagecoach massacre – as it became called – circulated through army barracks, the one woman aboard had been brutally raped by at least twenty savages and murdered with a tomahawk to the face. By the third day after the news, the number had grown from twenty to forty, and the woman went from hardware store wife to young nun.

  Once a decision had been made as to when they would attack, Marshal Yates relaxed. He met his two deputies, One Eye Tim Brace and Wild Fletch Badger at the Way Out Saloon. The first thing they noticed at the shack was that the clothes of the princess were still there, undisturbed.

  Wild Fletch spat to the floor. His buzzard face glanced around at three men drinking before he looked hard at the marshal. ‘We got no payday. Eight hundred dollars ain’t gonna cut, Marshal. ‘ ’Specially after we been talking to them regulators.’

  Yates squinted at him. ‘What about the regulators?’

  One Eye lifted his hat brim enough to give the marshal a cyclops stare. ‘We talked to this fella, this Two Handle Rowdy Smith. He carries a pair of pearl-handled Peacemakers, like that federal marshal.’ One Eye sat back in his chair. ‘You know why some of them gunfighters carries two guns?’

  ‘Showing off,’ Yates said.

  One Eye grinned with self-satisfaction. ‘Nope. It’s on account of the Colt Peacemaker sometimes don’t hit on a cylinder, it misfires, don’t shoot when it’s supposed to. Then another gun can be pulled and blasted away.’

  The marshal stared at One Eye. ‘Why do you think that is?’

  Wild Fletch spat. ‘Dunno, bad design.’

  The marshal rolled and lit a smoke. ‘It’s ’cause men like you – and likely this Rowdy fella – ain’t clean. Look at you. Dirty clothes, dirty skin, dirty hair – even a dirty mind. And a dirty weapon. You don’t clean yourselves, and you don’t keep your pistol clean. That’s why it will misfire.’

  Wild Fletch pushed the wad of tobacco to his left cheek. ‘We’re ridin’ all over the countryside doin’ one thing and another, we ain’t got time for a clean. All we can do is wet our whistle once in a while, and get a poke if we’re lucky.’

  One Eye looked out of the pulled curtain door. ‘You know what else Two Handle Rowdy told us? He says to me and Fletch here that somebody done took that payroll money.’

  Marshal Yates twisted his head so fast he almost lost his hat. ‘What?’

  Both deputies nodded. ‘The bank ain’t sayin’ nothing about it. It was a week before the stagecoach, not the day before. They sent it in a wagon, and the wagon got held up.’

  Yates frowned. ‘The spectacle clerk would have known.’

  ‘Mebbe,’ Fletch said. He spat. ‘Only the clerk got no reason to tell us. He don’t like us so much since we didn’t pay him his five hundred dollars. But that ain’t the all of it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ the marshal said.

  ‘Whoever robbed the wagon come up empty like we done the stagecoach.’ One Eye said. ‘The money was really in saddle-bags riding fast overland with fresh horses, like the old Pony Express. That’s what was held up.’

  ‘By who?’ the marshal asked.

  Wild Fletch spat what was left of his wad towards the doorway. ‘A woman drivin’ the wagon and the two guards and the fellas holding a fresh horse all said the same thing: four riders, three of them Injun.’

  Marshal Leather Yates slapped the table. ‘Anson Hawkstone!’

  ‘That’s how we figure,’ One Eye said. ‘He come with us on the hold-up on account of the princess, but he already had the payroll money, only we don’t know where.’

  The marshal rubbed his whiskered jowls. ‘The burned-out house.’

  The deputies shook their heads. ‘No,’ One Eye said. ‘We figure he hid it with his tribe, that village he belongs to, in one of them tepees.’

  The marshal looked from one to the other. ‘You boys know what we got to do when we hit that village.’

  Wild Fletch said, ‘It’s gonna be hard. He coulda buried it anywhere around them tepees. And we can’t ask the man on account of he’s already dead.’

  ‘His sidekick, Black Feather, ain’t dead,’ the marshal said.

  Four days later, they bunched outside the north-east area of the village just after dawn. The lieutenant had told Yates that ten horse soldiers should be able to do the job. There would be the four regulators and the two deputies and Yates to back them.

  The village stirred with morning fires started. Animals made impatient noises for attention and food. The smell of them mixed with burning wood in still, dew-dripping air. Smoke rose slightly from greenwood fires and hung there with no wind to carry it off. Yates sat his horse next to the lieutenant and caught a glimpse of warriors darting between tepees, carrying rifles. He felt a slam of fear hit his chest.

  ‘Lieutenant,’ he said – and no more.

  ‘Attack!’ the lieutenant shouted. With the order barely out of his mouth, he was immediately shot and fell dead to the ground.

  ‘Kill them all!’ Yates bellowed. As riders leaped their mounts forwards to descend on the village, weapons began firing, men shouted, the crack and snap of gunfire rolled across tepees and echoed off nearby hills. Yates pulled the reins to hold his horse back, but it didn’t want to stay back – it kept lunging forwards with the others. Yates yanked hard until the last rider galloped into the village, firing left and right. His mount settled.

  One Eye Tim Brace and Wild Fletch Badger rode at the front, shooting children first, then young mothers, then women – any human that moved in front of them. They rode into tepees to empty their pistols, then leaped with their mounts just outside the carnage to reload and return. Old men and women, young men and boys were gunned down. Most ran from the bluecoats to drop in their steps. Brave warriors fired their rifles until they ran out of cartridges, then used the weapons as clubs. Five of the ten horse soldiers fell dead, one regulator was killed. Shouts of hate dominated louder than the screams of women as they ran. Children yelped whe
n shot, then died in silence.

  Yates watched from the safety of the village edge.

  The coldest killers, besides his deputies, were the regulators, whom he reckoned were no more than outlaw quick-draw, kill-for-hire gunmen. The invaders loaded and emptied their rifles and pistols. Apache fell and were trampled by running horses. Even animals were not spared – dogs, pigs, goats, chickens jerked as hot lead sliced into them. A couple of young, inexperienced men of the army quickly lost the excitement of slaughter, and with tears sliding down their cheeks, rode outside the village to stare.

  Marshal Yates figured them to be cowards.

  Neither soldiers nor regulators spared older girls and young women aged fourteen to twenty. With the village burning and littered with bodies, four girls were yanked up to a rider’s saddle and ridden off along Disappointment Creek. One of the riders along the creek included the sergeant now in charge with the lieutenant dead. No orders were issued to stop. The snap and clip of gunfire ceased when there was nothing more to kill, or burn. Tepees quickly blazed with the dead animal smell of buffalo hide to blend with the rusty odour of butchery. Smoke rose wide and high, and hung because no breeze had started yet. Two sweating soldiers rode slowly through the bodies to fire bullets into those still with a flicker of life.

  The entire episode took eight minutes.

  Marshal Yates sat back in the saddle, his hands shaking on the saddle horn as he tingled with excitement. He found himself rocking back and forth in the saddle, hissing in and out through his teeth. A private rode up to him, sweating, with splatters of blood over his uniform and face.

  Yates pulled off his bowler and ran his hand over his scalp. ‘That’ll teach ’em to massacre a stagecoach.’

  The private’s young face wrinkled in disgust. ‘Where the hell was you, fat man?’ He rode on to another spot and held up his arm for others to see. With the sergeant having ridden off to the creek with a girl, there were just three other cavalrymen who joined the private.

  Yates did not like the sting of the words. The cavalry patrol had lost half their men – but, he reckoned, they should have sent more, at least twenty. Still, they made a good account of themselves, killing off thirty-eight hostiles – maybe four warriors. All three of the surviving regulators and his two deputies had gone off to have sport – and why not? They deserved the spoils of victory.