by Rory Black
‘Holy smoke, Delmer,’ Caleb gushed nervously before glancing at Spike’s pale face as it drooped over his saddle horn. ‘That ain’t good. He’s lost way too much blood.’
Delmer eyed Caleb. ‘Water the horses. I’ll tend to Spike.’
Caleb rubbed his unshaven jaw and obeyed.
Delmer raised his arms and placed his gloved hands around his wounded brother’s waist. He carefully eased Spike off his saddle and lowered him to the ground. Spike was as limp as a dead man as his legs buckled under him and Delmer was forced to lower his brother on to the sand.
‘You’ve lost too much blood, Spike boy,’ Delmer growled as he rested on one knee and looked at the arrow. The gore-covered arrow tip had gone straight through his brother’s thigh. ‘Damn, this is bad.’
Spike’s eyes fluttered as the words filtered into his dazed mind. He tilted his head and stared at his older brother and feebly forced a grin.
‘Pull that sucker out, Delmer,’ he said. ‘It can’t hurt any worse than it already does.’
The eldest of the Holt clan bit his lip and shook his head as his fingers checked the savage wound. ‘I don’t reckon that would be too smart, Spike.’
‘Why not?’ Spike asked as he fell back on to one elbow.
Delmer glanced around the desert, but all he could see were the mountainous sand dunes that surrounded their resting spot and a sky that was slowly darkening. He returned his attention to his brother.
‘If I do that, I might rip every vein left in your leg apart, Spike,’ he muttered as he pulled out two cigars from his jacket pocket and placed them between his lips. He lit them both. He inhaled deeply and then transferred one of the cigars to his sibling’s cracked lips. ‘Suck on that.’
Spike barely had the strength to obey, but the taste of the smoke made him feel a little better.
‘What you talking about, Delmer?’ Spike asked through a cloud of smoke. ‘You can’t leave the damn thing in my leg.’
Delmer raised himself up on to his knees and unbuckled his belt. He pulled the inch-wide leather free of his belt loops and then wrapped it above the arrow where his brother’s blood was still pumping in rhythm to his pounding heart. Delmer tightened the belt until its pressure forced the blood to stop squirting from around the wooden shaft.
Spike dragged feverishly on the cigar and then looked at his brother’s bloody gloves. He watched as Delmer secured the strap and rubbed the blood down his jacket front.
‘That’s it?’ he groaned. ‘You gonna leave me like this, Delmer? I can’t spend the rest of my days hobbling around with a damn arrow sticking out of my leg.’
Delmer stared at Spike and then looked over his shoulder to Caleb. He whistled in the fashion most men would use to attract a hound dog. Caleb reacted in a similar way and walked the short distance to his elder.
‘What you want, Delmer?’ he asked. ‘I ain’t through watering these nags yet.’
Delmer held out his right hand.
‘Gimme your knife,’ he demanded.
Caleb pulled the blood-stained stiletto from its sheath and placed its wooden grip on the palm of Delmer’s hand. He then shrugged and silently returned to the horses.
Spike might have been short on energy, but his instinct for self-preservation was still as honed as ever. He raised himself up on his elbow and looked at Delmer as his brother removed his gloves and ran his thumb along the knife blade.
‘What you figuring on doing, Delmer?’ he asked through cigar smoke. ‘I ain’t hankering to have you cut my leg off.’
Delmer Holt looked up through his own cloud of cigar smoke and then leaned toward his badly-wounded brother. ‘I ain’t figuring on cutting your damn leg off. I’m gonna try and cut the arrow out.’
Spike raised his eyebrows. ‘Cut it out? That’s sounds almost as bad to me. Do you know how to do that?’
Delmer stared at the bloody pants leg.
‘It can’t be that hard,’ he reasoned. ‘Like trimming a T-bone steak.’
‘I ain’t no T-bone, Delmer.’ Spike vainly tried to scramble backwards, but Delmer rested his knee on his brother’s boot leather.
‘Don’t move,’ Delmer put the edge of the knife under the cuff of Spike’s pants and then slid the knife upward. The bloody material split apart as the honed edge of the knife moved steadily past the knee and the horrific arrow protruding from either side of Spike’s thigh.
Ash fell on to Spike’s shirt front. ‘You’re starting to scare me, Delmer. What exactly are you doing?’
Delmer leaned over the arrow as blood trickled from the savage wound. He sighed and then pulled the cigar from his mouth and tossed it aside.
‘This ought to work,’ he muttered.
Spike stared at his concentrating sibling.
‘Ought to work?’ he repeated.
Delmer nodded. ‘I reckon I’ve figured out the safest way to do this without you losing the rest of your blood, Spike boy. Relax.’
Spike swallowed hard. ‘It ain’t easy relaxing when you got that long knife in your hand. What are you figuring on doing, Delmer?’
Delmer pushed the brim of his Stetson off his brow and studied the arrow on both sides of his brother’s thigh. He looked at Spike.
‘I’m gonna cut the arrow shaft, Spike.’ He explained calmly. ‘Then I’ll pull it through in the same direction that it was going when it hit you. It shouldn’t bust any more of your veins.’
The expression on Spike’s face matched his confusion. He leaned forward and stared at his brother. He poked a finger into Delmer’s chest.
‘Have you ever done this before?’ he winced as the knife blade was placed on the shaft close to the feathered flight. ‘I don’t recall you ever doing this before.’
Delmer started to move the honed blade back and forth on the wooden shaft in a sawing action. ‘Will you hush the hell up, Spike? This ain’t easy.’
As the knife slowly progressed through the bloody wooden shaft, Spike screwed up his eyes in agony. He clenched both his fists and gritted his teeth.
‘Sorry, Delmer,’ Spike shook his head and drew hard on his cigar while pain rippled through his entire body. ‘I’d hate for you to cut your finger.’
Suddenly the sound of war drums drifted through the dunes and caught the attention of the three wanted rustlers. Caleb looked over his shoulder as his fingers carefully screwed the stopper back on his canteen.
‘I’d hurry up if’n I was you. Delmer,’ he advised as sweat trailed down his rugged features. ‘Sounds like them Injuns have caught our scent again.’
CHAPTER TEN
The red rocks grew even larger as Iron Eyes thundered toward them. They loomed above the bounty hunter as he steered his palomino around the rolling dunes in pursuit of the Indians and their captive. His cold stare studied the countless hoof tracks that cut through the otherwise virginal sand and knew that they might be leading him into the jaws of Hell.
There were only two ways this could possibly end, he thought as he rammed his vicious spurs into the flanks of his intrepid stallion. Life and death were like a silver dollar being tossed up in the air for the ultimate of wagers. You had no way of knowing which way the coin might land and therefore you had to accept its random decision.
Some men hide when faced by danger. Others face up to the challenge and lay their lives on the line in the defence of those unable to defend themselves.
Iron Eyes had always chosen the latter course.
Even though he despised wasting valuable bullets on folks who did not have bounty money on their heads, Iron Eyes would willingly fight and kill anyone in order to save helpless females or children that were in danger and rescue them from the clutches of the real monstrous men who roamed the west.
His precious Squirrel Sally could never have been described as being helpless, but she had fallen victim to the overwhelming might of those who lived by a different code to the one which the bounty hunter lived by.
Iron Eyes dragged rein and stopped the snorting
stallion.
As the powerful animal steadied itself at the base of a dune, the fearless bounty hunter listened to the sound that had tormented him for hours. The drumming was far louder now and he could hear the unmistakable noise of chanting as well.
Any normal man would have been frightened, but Iron Eyes was not like other men. He simply listened as his hunting brain formulated a plan which might or might not work.
All he wanted was to save Sally, but knew that he would have to kill a lot of her captors to do so. He gathered his long leathers in his bony hands and turned the tall animal so it faced the high scarlet-coloured rock face.
Iron Eyes leaned back against his silver saddle cantle and looked upward. The sky was no longer blue but changing as the sun began to set.
His narrowed eyes looked at the mountain in awe. He had never seen anything as large before and yet it did not deter him. A plan had started to ferment inside his head and he wondered if it might just work.
It was obvious that the Indians who had captured Sally and her six black coach horses had not imagined that they would be trailed back to their encampment. His searching eyes studied the high mesa which towered over the sand, but did not spot anyone upon the high craggy ledges. A wry smile etched his horrific features. There were no sentries upon the crimson cliffs, he noted.
‘That’s your second mistake,’ he hissed ominously. ‘The first was taking Squirrel.’
His bony hand slapped the cream coloured mane of his mount. The animal responded and powerfully rode up the dune and down the other side. As the sand levelled out, Iron Eyes closed the distance between himself and the foot of the blood-coloured rocks.
The haunting horseman glanced around the sand as the stallion neared the immense monolith. There were no signs of anyone close to it. He looked to his left and stared at the sand dune that rested against the rock wall. The pulsating sound of drums filled the air.
Iron Eyes halted the stallion again. He balanced in his stirrups and looked even harder to where he could hear the continuous beating and then detected another noise.
The strange chanting and continuous drumbeats were louder now, he thought. So close he felt that he was within spitting distance of the warriors he knew were celebrating the capture of Sally.
Every fibre of his tortured being told him that the Indian encampment was somewhere beyond the hills of sand. He lowered his pitifully lean frame back down on to his saddle and looped his leathers around the ornate saddle horn.
Iron Eyes threw his right leg over the head of his mount and then slid silently to the ground. The sand muffled his mule-eared boots, but not his jangling spurs.
The bounty hunter knew that if he had been closer to the Indians, the spurs would have betrayed him. He leaned down and removed them from his boots before putting one into each of his deep coat pockets among the loose bullets he always carried.
Iron Eyes glanced upward at the darkening heavens, squinting and searching the vast sky and then nodded in satisfaction. There was no moon to warn his adversaries that he was bearing down upon them, he told himself. He looked around at the long black shadows which were getting larger in response to the fading light.
Iron Eyes silently vowed that he would use every one of the shadows to his advantage as he had done many times before in the past.
Squirrel Sally had no idea yet that her beloved betrothed was going to save her. Iron Eyes viewed the enveloping blackness and wondered if he might have bitten off more than he could chew this time.
He had no idea of how many Indians stood between him and Sally. He also had no notion of where she was or how to get to her without being peppered with arrows.
No matter how daunting the prospect of his failing was, he could not be deterred from doing what he knew he had to do. The skeletal figure checked the horse and then his weapons. He pulled spent bullets from both Navy Colts and then replaced them with fresh bullets from his deep pockets.
‘I ain’t gonna tether you, horse,’ Iron Eyes told the palomino. ‘If I don’t come back, at least you can high-tail it before you starve to death.’
The gaunt bounty hunter moved to his saddle-bags, lifted one of its satchel flaps and looked in. He had two unopened bottles of whiskey left and knew that if things went wrong, he might not be able to replenish his stock.
His skeletal hand lifted one of the bottles, pulled its cork and then lifted it to his scarred lips and took a long determined swallow.
As the whiskey burned down into his guts, he patted the cork back into the bottle’s neck and returned it to his saddle bag. His long legs paced back to the head of the horse and paused beside the animal’s neck. Iron Eyes detached his saddle rope from his silver horn, looked upward and looped it over his shoulder.
The light was fading fast but that did not diminish the gravity of what he was going to attempt. The vivid red rocks were equally impressive in the darkness and probably a hundred times harder to scale.
Iron Eyes screwed up his eyes. He had spotted a ledge roughly twenty feet above him as he had ridden over the last dune – a ledge that appeared to go in the same direction from where he could hear the triumphant noises.
‘All I gotta do is climb up there,’ Iron Eyes whispered to himself. ‘Find that ledge and then make my way along it until I’m right above the festivities. Then I’ll have to play it by ear, if I’m still alive.’
The scrawny bounty hunter moved to the rocks and raised his hands until he found a grip. He turned his head and stared at his prized palomino through his dangling black mane of hair.
‘You’d better still be here when I get back, horse,’ he growled at the handsome animal. ‘If you ain’t, I’ll be mighty angry. Glue-making angry.’
With the determination and agility of a mountain goat, Iron Eyes hastily ascended the rocks. His height, light frame and long reach hastened his ascent up the rugged wall of rocks as he made his way toward the ledge.
A desert tarantula would have envied the speed that the bounty hunter achieved climbing up through the darkness as he reached the over-hanging ledge and gripped it with his long bony digits.
Iron Eyes mustered every scrap of his strength as he hung from the high rocks by one arm as his other hand desperately searched for something to grip. He swung back and forth until he was able to throw his right leg on to the ledge.
For a moment the exhausted figure panted like an ancient hound as he attempted to get his breath back. Then he summoned every last drop of his dwindling resolve and forced himself up and over the crumbling rim.
His emaciated body scrambled on to the eighteen-inch wide ledge just as the last rays of the sun finally ebbed. Iron Eyes rested his back against the rocks and looked out at the desert sand below him. It was like looking at the sea as darkness swept across the rolling dunes.
He turned his head and screwed up his eyes.
The flickering flames of the Indians’ campfire a few yards from the rocks drew his attention. A dozen high dunes separated the camp and his palomino. He could see their ponies and the six black stagecoach horses bathed in the dancing firelight twenty yards beyond.
Then he concentrated on the dancing braves moving hypnotically to the beat of the constant drums. His heart quickened its pace as he realized that from here on there was no turning back.
He could not get back down from the high ledge without breaking his neck. It was too dark to see any possible hand and foot holds. The bounty hunter would have to do what he had originally planned. He would have to continue on and hope that luck was on his side.
Iron Eyes carefully got to his feet and steadied himself on the narrow ledge before glancing away from his perilous perch at the barely recognizable desert below. The desert was bathed in a moonless darkness as a few final scarlet rays evaporated from the heavens. A million stars started to slowly appear in the black sky like diamonds.
Iron Eyes exhaled and rubbed the sweat off his mutilated face as his eyes looked at the narrow ledge. It had grown far darker than he had
first imagined and it was virtually impossible to see it.
The gaunt bounty hunter adjusted the coiled rope over his wide shoulder and then began the dangerous walk along the ancient stony platform. Iron Eyes cautiously put one foot before the other and slowly started to inch his way toward the campfire light.
His narrowed eyes darted between his unsteady feet and the campfire, which he could see was being fed by the multitude of Indians.
The closer he got, the clearer it became.
Iron Eyes focused hard on the activities below him. There were far more Indians than he had even imagined possible in this arid region. His eyes darted from one group of warriors to the next as his mind attempted to calculate their number. Then he noticed that at least three quarters of the assembled Indians were females or youngsters of various ages.
He gritted his teeth thoughtfully. In all his days, Iron Eyes had never knowingly made war against womenfolk. His blood started to run cold.
Iron Eyes had never cared for wasting bullets on anyone who did not have reward money attached to their name. The law allowed outlaws to be legally tracked down and killed, but Indians were different. He would never waste ammunition on Indians if they did not start shooting at him first.
There was no profit in it.
Yet it seemed that from the Apache to the Cheyenne and a bunch of tribes in between, Indians just could not see the legendary Iron Eyes without trying to kill him.
He was like a red rag to a bull when it came to Indians.
Iron Eyes could count on one hand the warriors he had encountered who had not attempted to kill him. Mostly they saw him and reacted the way most folks react when they see vermin. They tried to kill him.
Maybe it was because they had built up a myth about the horrifically scarred bounty hunter. They believed he was an evil spirit that had to be destroyed. A spectre. They told tales about him which had grown out of all proportion concerning the ghost who could not be killed because he was already dead. So many colourful stories had been attached to Iron Eyes that he knew it was impossible to do anything but accept the fact that Indians genuinely believed them.
