by Ralph Cotton
Today, everybody dies, he said silently to himself, looking back up at the gray-silver mist hiding the hill line. Today, everybody dies. . . .
• • •
In an ancient dugout on the wall of a high bluff at the mouth of the Twisted Hills, an old Red Sleeve warrior named Yehicho, or Iron Belly, awakened with a start and looked up at Wilson Orez, who sat at the front of the high cliff dwelling looking out on the slow, steady rain falling into the canyon below. Neither man acknowledged the other.
After a long silence, Orez said over his shoulder, “Before I cut the face off the man who fathered me, and burned his trading post down around him, I told him it was Iron Belly who informed me he was my father.” Orez paused for a moment. “He didn’t like it. He said you were supposed to be his friend.”
“No, he did not like it.” Iron Belly gave a thin, flat smile.
He had heard the story so many times he didn’t have to pay close attention. Instead he reached up with his knife, cut a slice of dried antelope from a shank of meat hanging from the ceiling of the dwelling and cut it into smaller pieces on his bare knee.
“I was never his friend,” he said. “A Red Sleeve has no white man for a friend.” He took a bite of the meat for himself and held a piece over to the nose of a blind, aged dog who lay curled up beside him on the stone floor. The dog took the piece of antelope in his toothless mouth and gummed it slowly, savoring the taste of it.
Iron Belly pitched the largest of the pieces over against Orez’s thigh.
“Eat with me,” he said. “You smell like a long journey.”
“It has been a long journey,” said Orez, picking up the meat and tearing off a mouthful of it with his teeth. Without looking around at the old warrior, he chewed the meat and reflected. “In the last moon, twenty white men came to kill me, to collect the bounty on my head.” He paused, then said, “But I killed them, one and two and three at a time, until now they’re all dead—all except one.” He shrugged. “I’ll kill him before the day’s gone and the moon rises for the night.”
“The one still coming is not after bounty, is he?” Iron Belly said.
“No, he’s not,” said Orez. “A man I killed today told me this one is an Arizona Ranger. He doesn’t scare easily. These kinds of lawmen don’t stop. They don’t hunt for the sake of bounty. They hunt for the sake of the hunt. This one is a warrior, like we are.”
He sounded pleased, Iron Belly noted. He saw the blood ooze down Orez’s side. But he wasn’t going to mention it. A man knew when he was wounded, and how bad. It was not his place to say anything.
Instead he said, “What more do you want from the white man, Wilson Orez?”
“I don’t know,” Orez replied. “I’ve killed his kind, violated his women and stolen his money.” He paused, then added, “Still, it’s not enough. I’m not satisfied.”
“It’s the white man’s blood in you that keeps you from being satisfied,” said Iron Belly. “You are as much white man as you are Apache. The war you fight inside you never stops.” He shook his head slowly and passed another small piece of meat to the blind dog’s frost-colored muzzle. “When you were a boy, you used to cut yourself, to punish yourself for having the white man’s blood. When you grew up, you cut everybody else for it.”
“I cursed my white blood. I still do,” Orez said, tearing off another bite of meat with his teeth.
“You curse it, but you can’t change it,” Iron Belly replied.
“The other day I thought I had gotten rid of it,” Orez said. “I stood naked in the storm and felt it leave me.”
“But it was back inside when the storm passed, wasn’t it, Wilson Orez?” said the old Apache.
Orez only sat slumped, chewing the dried antelope.
“Tell me, old man,” he said, “what would the Red Sleeves think of me, if they knew I’m one of the last of us alive?”
“Don’t wonder what the dead think,” said Iron Belly. “They knew you as a warrior. Your white blood didn’t matter to them.”
“You’re wrong, Iron Belly. It did make a difference,” Orez said. “I proved myself the best of us warriors, time and again. Still, I knew they thought less of me for my white blood.”
“You did prove yourself a great warrior to the Red Sleeves, Wilson Orez,” said Iron Belly. “But you never proved it to yourself.” Again he shook his head slowly and gave the blind dog another small cut of antelope. He scratched its bony head as it gummed the meat. “And that has cost the lives of so many people whose paths crossed yours on this earth,” he said with regret.
“I have four horses carrying bags of money,” Orez said. “How many bags can I give you?”
“I have no use for the white man’s money,” Iron Belly said, brushing the notion aside. “I once used it when I had no wood to burn. It made my fire burn greasy, and smelled like fish that were too long dead.” He paused, then said, “Does their money always smell that way?”
“Yes, I believe it does,” Orez said. “They don’t smell it, though. At least I’ve never heard them complain.” With much effort he rose to his feet, his hand pressed to his bullet wound behind his right side.
“No wonder you hate them, then,” Iron Belly said in reflection, still scratching the blind dog’s head. “How can they not smell something so bad?” He gave a look of disgust.
“They’ve grown used to it, like they have many other things, Iron Belly,” said Orez. He turned to the open stone doorway and stared out at the rain falling deep to the canyon floor. “I became a Red Sleeve at a time when the Red Sleeves’ world was dying. Now there are two of us, you and me.” He breathed deep. “When we’re gone, they’ll say good riddance. The Apache were too savage, and the Red Sleeves were too cruel and brutal to live.” He stood in silence, then said, “They’ll be right, won’t they?”
“What will we care? I am out of this place as soon as this old dog closes his eyes for the last time,” Iron Belly said. “What about you, Wilson Orez?”
“What about me?” Orez asked.
“Did you come to tell me good-bye?” said Iron Belly.
Orez let out a breath and stood for a moment longer, listening to the sound of the dog sucking on the meat. Then he straightened in the stone doorway and stepped forward, his hand still pressed back on his wound.
“Good-bye, Yehicho,” he said over his shoulder without looking back.
Chapter 22
The Ranger didn’t step down from his saddle when he reached the cliff where Orez had left his two brass shell casings lying in the mud after killing the woman. Instead Sam leaned slightly in his saddle, his Winchester in hand, and studied the hoofprints on the wet trail. His eyes followed the prints from the gravelly floor to the soft inner edge of a path leading up to the trail above the cliff.
Above the path lay a taller, wider world of steep stone and deep, bottomless canyons. It was a place where any man with a mind to could easily vanish, hide himself from the world. Yet Wilson Orez had done nothing to hide himself, Sam thought, the empty cartridge shells, the hoofprints—two of the horses with Xs filed on the front edge of their iron shoes. If he saw these things, Orez saw them too, he told himself, nudging the barb forward in the hoof tracks, up onto the wider trail.
All right, he understood. Orez wasn’t making himself hard to follow or hard to find. Not anymore, Sam realized. No more gruesome warnings left behind, no more captives, no more killings—well, only one more killing, he reminded himself. But as soon as that thought entered his mind, he quickly dismissed it and rode on.
The barb climbed a series of narrow paths in turn, each one winding higher upward into the Twisted Hills, standing like sentinels along the Blood Mountain Range. He knew he was now in the old hiding place of the Red Sleeves band, and he cautioned himself, although he realized he needed no cautioning. It no longer mattered what awaited him in the end. He would go where Orez’s trail
led him, no matter the outcome.
He knew that at the end of that trail, one of them would die. That was the kind of thinking a man like Wilson Orez could appreciate—so could he, Sam had to admit to himself.
The storm had lost more of its fierceness as man and horse climbed higher. All that remained of it now was falling rain and distant rumblings of thunder moving away on the far edge of the earth. This time, there could be felt a finality to the dissipating storm that he had not noticed before.
Was it over? Yes . . . yes, he believed it was.
“Good riddance,” he said quietly to himself, seeing the barb’s black-tipped ears rise at the sound of his voice, then relax again as they rode on.
Even the dark lingering rain cloud now lay in the silver sky below them as the Ranger gradually put himself and the barb up into a steep misty world of split boulder rock and twisting valleys and draws. Here, he and the barb both stopped on their own and stood for a moment, met by massive, towering bodies of upturned plate stone that had broken off from the earth’s fiery belly and over time eternal had risen and fallen and now lay slantwise at angles reaching above a thousand feet.
“My goodness,” Sam whispered as if in awe, seeing the spot for the first time. “Heaven must’ve been born here.”
Below him the barb nickered quietly under its breath and scraped a hoof.
“Shhh. . . . You don’t have to say a word,” Sam whispered, patting the barb’s damp withers. They stood gazing at the land before them for a moment longer, and then the Ranger tapped the horse’s sides and put it forward, up and around a steep, smooth stone plate that appeared to hold back a whole rocky hillside.
• • •
Wilson Orez had taken a position on a high hillside and fitted his rifle with a long brass scope. He’d watched from afar while the Ranger and the barb stopped, staring up at the mountainside rising above them. With the scope to his eye, Orez had been able to observe the Ranger’s face close up. He saw powerful strength in the young Ranger’s face, in his eyes. Yet, lowering the scope for a moment, Orez noted how small and insignificant both man and horse suddenly become to the naked eye against the backdrop of the mountain range.
He raised the scope again and stared into the Ranger’s face as the Ranger steadied the barb and swung it toward the upper path around the long sloping wall of plate stone.
Orez knew he didn’t need the scope to make a shot like this any more than he’d needed it to make the shot that killed the woman. But with the scope, he had seen the bullet rip through the woman’s back. He’d seen her lifeblood form a red-pink mist and loom in the air as she buckled forward into the Ranger’s arms.
He enjoyed watching his kill—what man wouldn’t?
With the scope, he’d managed to see the woman clearly and closely, even through the veil of rain and low drifting cloud cover. Now, with the weather clearing quickly and being in a position to take a front shot, he would see everything. Through the scope he would see the impact on the Ranger’s body when the bullet hit him—see the expression on his face. Watch him die . . . if he wanted to. Taking a breath of satisfaction, he lowered the rifle from against his cheek and laid it across his lap.
As he looked down at the rifle, it dawned on him. He could have taken the shot just then, but instead he’d waited. Why? He ran a hand along the rifle stock wondering, feeling warm blood running down the small of his back.
It didn’t matter why, he told himself, looking all around. The Ranger’s life belonged to him now. Up here in his realm, his lair, he knew he could take that life any time he chose to. Anyway, he decided, he didn’t like this spot. There were much better places for him to kill a man than here, he told himself, standing, pressing his free hand to the bloody wound in his side. There were much better ways to kill him too.
He walked up to where he’d tied his horse and the horses carrying the bags of money draped over their backs. As he took up the lead rope, the roan sidestepped, pawed at the dirt and slammed its hoof down as if in protest.
“No more trouble out of you,” he said to the roan, jerking on the lead rope close to its muzzle. “Tonight I’ll find out if your meat is better than your disposition.”
The roan grumbled but settled in among the other horses as Orez drew his big knife and walked over beside it. The roan stared at him nervously and blew out a hard breath. Orez swung the blade around fast toward the roan’s side and sliced through a short rope holding a bag of money. The roan nickered and swung its head around, but Orez shoved it away. He stooped down, cut the bag open, picked it up and shook it.
Loose money fluttered out over the hillside like moths waning in flight. Orez sliced the bag into two pieces, wadded each piece of soiled white canvas cloth and stuffed them both inside his shirt, front and back, against his bleeding side wound. The roan and the other packhorses stood watching.
“You’re right, Iron Belly,” he said quietly, watching the paper bills float and flutter away off the hillside. “It does smell like fish gone bad.”
Orez stepped back to his horse and pulled himself upward into his saddle. He felt deep sharp pain in his side as he turned his horse up a narrow path toward the rocky trail, lead rope in hand, the string of packhorses in a line behind him.
He rode for over a half hour, through mazes of sloping plate stone and boulder, and across long spills of overlapping stone, where liquid had once boiled up from deep inside the earth and cooled layer upon layer down an ancient hillside. On the other side of the rocky hill, he rode upward onto the trail he had taken earlier, knowing the Ranger would take the same trail following the X-marked shoes of the horses.
He stepped down from atop his horse and hitched the animals in full view, to a spill of large rocks that had broken free and lay across the trail. The roan sawed its head and grumbled at him again. But Orez ignored the horse and stepped up onto the rock spill, rifle in hand. He sat down on one of the larger rocks facing in the direction the Ranger would be coming from.
While he sat waiting, he felt his strength coming back to him in spite of the blood and pain in his wounded side. Holding the rifle propped beside him in his left hand, he reached his right hand up and slipped the big knife from its sheath. He rested it along the top of his thigh, his hand feeling at home, gripped around the knife’s handle.
• • •
When the trail winding high above the stone plates grew too steep and narrow, the Ranger stepped down from the California saddle and led the barb upward another three hundred yards. He stopped at the only place he’d come to where the trail turned sharply out of sight, around a large boulder. For a moment he only stood, rifle in hand, looking up, seeing where the mountain itself twisted behind a blanket of cloud, gunmetal gray, streaked with long rays of breaking sunlight.
Quietly, he led the barb to the edge of the trail and hitched its reins loosely to a jut of rock—loosely, just in case, he reminded himself. He rubbed the horse’s wet muzzle and walked away. He followed a thin, steep game path up around the back of the boulder, a path worn deep by centuries of fleeing hooves and pursuing paws, legacy of both the hunted and the hunter.
At the top of the worn path, where it began its circle back down and off the hillside onto a high cliff, the Ranger lowered himself onto all fours and crawled out atop the boulder. He lay there out of sight, looking down at the trail below. He scanned the rock spill, the horses, the money bags, then, Wilson Orez . . . , he whispered even in his head, as if a man such as Orez might hear even his silent thoughts. Without a moment’s hesitation, he eased his Winchester around, seated its butt into the pocket of his shoulder and drew the hammer back so slowly he barely heard the metal cocking sound of it himself. He took aim down at Orez, fielding the bullet first, drawing its flight pattern and strike in his mind before squeezing the trigger.
A head shot, he told himself, seeing Orez almost in profile, seated atop a rock spill facing what turned out to
be a horseshoe turn in the trail.
Yes, a head shot would do, he thought, lifting his rifle sights off Orez’s chest where the bullet would cut diagonally at such an angle that with Orez’s least movement, or a fluke surge of wind, the shot might graze only across his breastplate. At that point he would have to relever, reaim and fire again.
No, he told himself, raising the sights to the front right side of Orez’s head—diagonal, through the temple. Here, even with a last-second movement of any sort, the bullet would still take out the largest portion of Orez’s forehead. There would be no second shot, he told himself, just the ringing silence of sure and sudden death.
So be it.
The Ranger calmed his breathing and settled into his shot, taking his breath in and out evenly, slowly, each one measured to the same length, same rhythm. He felt his finger begin to squeeze the trigger.
Wait. . . .
He let his finger uncoil from around the trigger and lowered the rifle an inch. What bothered him about this? He looked back and forth, down at the horses hitched to the rocks below Orez, the bags of money tied across their backs. He looked back up at Orez, noting for the first time that had Orez seated himself only a few inches farther back on the rock spill, he would have been at an angle that would have cut off any shot from atop this boulder. It would have put Orez behind the cover of an edge of stone protruding from the inside wall of the trail. Sam lay staring, running the scene through his mind.
Orez was no fool. He had to know this boulder would be the first one standing along the trail. He had to know the Ranger was savvy enough not to walk blindly around it. What was he doing sitting there? Was this a trap, a trick of some sort? Why was he sitting in the open when only a foot deeper on the rock spill he would have been invisible?
Yes, why indeed? the Ranger asked himself, letting out a breath. But he already knew why. Orez had done this for the same reason he had left the shell casings, and not tried to hide his tracks. The same reason he had shot the young woman and let her fall dead in the Ranger’s arms while his second shot missed the Ranger altogether and fell short in the mud.
