Red Ryan kneed his horse forward. Now he could see the skirts of Maud Nolan’s dress lifting in the wind, fluttering like pale blue moths. He rode closer, his mouth dry, a sense of dread cold in his belly. Was she alive or dead?
The answer to that question came when he dismounted and walked to where the woman lay. Maud was dead . . . and she’d taken her own life. Red couldn’t even begin to imagine the strength of will it must have taken for the woman to plunge a butcher’s knife into her own chest between her naked breasts. Judging by the almost serene expression on her face, she’d died quickly and gratefully, and Ryan figured that such a death had surely been one of God’s tender mercies.
* * *
Red Ryan buried Maud Nolan beside her husband, uniting them in death and with their unborn child. It was a task that took him well into the afternoon, and by the time he rode away from the station the daylight was waning. Buttons had swung the stage to the north-east, its passage through the prairie grass as obvious as a railroad track.
A single star hung in a blue steel sky when Ryan encountered wagon tracks that had come in from the west and then swung into the path left by the stage. The lost C Company cavalry patrol? Unlikely. With fast, hard-hitting Apaches on the warpath, a wagon would be too much an encumbrance, and Red had seen no wheel tracks around Ketchum Mountain. Frightened settlers fleeing for the safety of Fort Bliss was the more obvious answer.
Ryan dismounted and studied the wagon tracks. Four wheeled, drawn by four small horses or mules. Judging by the depth of the wheel ruts, the wagon was fairly heavily loaded and it looked like three, maybe four people walked alongside. Red straightened and looked ahead to where the paths of both vehicles gradually disappeared into the crowding murk. It seemed that settlers driving a wagon, no doubt piled with furniture and Aunt Minnie’s spinet, followed the stage in hopes of gaining its protection. Red’s smile was grim. Their chances of catching up with Buttons’s speedy team with a heavily loaded wagon were slim to none.
“But good luck to you whoever you are,” Ryan said aloud. “I reckon you’re going to need it.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Red Ryan decided not to attempt to outrun the darkness and settled for a night on the prairie. He ate a supper of the venison jerky he’d found in the station’s kitchen, smoked several cigarettes, and then spread his blankets on the grass. Tired from his newly discovered calling as gravedigger in chief, he slept soundly, waking with the dawn and a gun muzzle pushed into his face.
“Ain’t a watch-keeping man, are you, mister?”
The ranny behind the Winchester was young, tall, skinny, and shabby with a slack-mouthed, inbred face and eyes the color of muddy swamp water.
Red blinked, blinked again, and then said, “Who the hell are you?”
“Name’s Billy Buck, and I’m the man that’s gonna kill you just as soon as you saddle that there hoss of your’n.”
“Saddle your own damned hoss,” Red said.
“Cain’t do that, on account of my bad back,” the man said. “Now do what I tell you or I’ll scatter your brains right now.”
Then Billy Buck, his frayed hat pushed to the back of his head, took an aggressive step forward, his Winchester at the ready. Billy was not long on smarts and he’d just made a major mistake.
Red turned on his side and at the same time swung his powerful right leg like a scythe, sweeping the man’s legs out from under him. Billy Buck’s mouth opened in a startled O of surprise, and he hit the ground hard, falling heavily on his bad back. Ryan jumped to his feet and caught Buck with a tremendous straight right to the chin as the man tried to scramble to his feet. Irritated at Billy Buck for giving him such a scare, Red was merciless. He followed up the right with a left uppercut that slammed into Buck’s belly and dropped him, all flailing arms and legs, like a puppet that just had his strings cut. The man got to his hands and knees, gasping for breath, his mouth stringing blood-streaked saliva, and Red Ryan, never a stickler for the Marquess of Queensberry Rules, booted him hard in the ribs. Red picked up the Winchester, pointed it at Buck and said, “On your feet.”
Billy staggered to his feet and squealed, “For God’s sake, don’t shoot me, mister.”
“I ought to blow your damned guts out,” Red said. And then, “Where the hell did you come from?”
Buck pointed to the wagon tracks. “With the wagon just ahead of you. I’m with my Ma and my brothers and them.”
“Who’s ‘and them’?”
“Three womenfolk, Mildred, Minerva, and Molly, they’re sisters that jumped the broom with my brothers.”
“You got a wife?”
Billy Buck shook his head. “No woman will have me. I got a bad back.”
“Could be you got a bad attitude,” Red said.
“Women told me that very thing afore.” Buck rubbed his chin. “You hit hard, mister.”
“Well, maybe you should find another line of work, Billy boy. Bushwhacking a man sure don’t fit your pistol.” He took stock of the youngster and then said, “Seems like I got two options with you, Billy Buck. I can drill you right where you stand or take you back to your ma. What’s it to be?”
“Hell, mister, one’s as bad as t’other.”
“What’s worse than dying?”
“My ma with a hickory switch.”
“Good, maybe she can beat some sense into you,” Red said.
He used the rope from Nolan’s saddle to truss up Buck like a chicken and once mounted, tethered him behind his horse. After a mile with Buck constantly complaining that walking hurt his back, Red turned his head and said, “Your ma know the Apaches are out?”
“Nobody told us that. We come up from the border country, and we ain’t seen no Apaches or anybody else either.”
“Around these parts, if you see Apaches, you’re already a dead man. You better warn your ma.”
“Our wagon is just a little ways ahead,” Buck said. “You can warn her your ownself. She won’t believe me, she never does.”
“Well, somebody should tell her, I guess,” Red said.
He thought he saw a sly look flit across Billy Buck’s face, but he figured he was imagining things. As a responsible employee of the Patterson & Son Stage and Express Company, he considered it his duty to warn Ma Buck about the Apache uprising, a thing he could not trust her son to do.
And so it was that Billy Buck had made his mistake earlier . . . and now it was Red Ryan’s turn to make his.
* * *
The Buck family wagon was parked on the long grass and its four-mule team were out of the traces, grazing. The wagon was a canvas-covered Conestoga that showed considerable wear, its weathered sideboards held together by baling wire and twine. The ribs of the underfed mules stood out like rows of fence poles, and their scarred flanks revealed whip abuse.
When Red Ryan rode closer, his prisoner in tow, four women and three men stopped what they were doing and watched him come. The men wore belt guns over their dingy rags and one of the females, who Red at first took to be a man wearing a woman’s dress, carried a rifle. A blackened cooking pot hung over a stingy campfire, and a coffeepot bubbled on the coals. A rank smell hung over the camp, deriving from the wagon, from the people themselves, or both.
Ryan summed up the Bucks as a two-by-twice outfit, the younger women wild-haired and slatternly and the men unshaven and dirty, dressed in whatever pants and coats they’d been able to scrounge or steal. None looked intelligent, or even aware, as they stared at Red with the flat, empty, button eyes of rag dolls.
A wretched, poverty-stricken bunch and no mistake, Red thought. No one is happy to be destitute, and Red had seen and admired plenty of poor people as they struggled to make a better life for themselves in the West, but the Bucks seemed content to wallow in their own filth, like pigs in a sty, and that he could not forgive.
Red reminded himself that he was not there to pass judgment, but to warn the folks of the impending Apache danger, and he was prepared to be sociable.
He drew rein, touched the rim of his derby, and said, “Howdy,” and hauled Billy alongside his horse. “I believe this is yours,” he said.
A shove in the back from Ryan’s boot propelled Billy forward. The man tried to keep his footing but fell flat on his face in front of a heavyset, older woman with close-cropped hair and hard, mannish features that Red took to be Ma Buck.
Red saw the question on the woman’s face and said, “He tried to steal my horse.”
The woman was not in the least surprised. “Oh, he did, did he?” she said. Her voice was harsh, the words formed in the back of her throat. She rushed to the wagon, lifted the canvas, and found what she wanted, a supple hickory wand about an inch around and four feet long.
Billy Buck fell on his knees, his face paralyzed by fear. “No, Ma, don’t,” he said. “Don’t beat me.”
Wielded with the full force of her strong arm and to the grinning delight of the Buck family, Ma’s hickory wand slashed across Billy’s head and shoulders, the vicious, cutting strokes sounding like a string of firecrackers. Blood poured from the man’s scalp and a thin gash opened up on his cheek. Billy shrieked and begged for mercy but the hickory wand rose and fell, ripping, slicing, tearing, blow after savage blow.
But Red Ryan had seen enough. He swung out of the saddle, crossed the distance to the woman in a couple of wide steps, and wrenched the wand out of her hand.
“Damn it, woman, you’re beating him to death,” he said.
Ma Buck’s face was a mask of rage, and when Red looked into her red-rimmed eyes he caught a glimpse of hell. The woman visibly fought a battle with herself, and gradually her breathing slowed and the insane fury left her face. She turned away from Red and stood over her whimpering son like a vengeful colossus. Then, in a voice like a murmur from the tomb, she said, “When you want to steal from a man what is his’n, kill him first. You hear me, kill him first. What did I teach you, you stupid, ungrateful, whoremaster’s whelp?”
“Beat him some more, Ma,” one of the grinning sons said.
“You shut your trap, Enoch,” Ma said. She looked down at the bleeding, cowering Billy. “Now will you heed what I tell you?” She waved a hand in Red’s direction. “He shouldn’t be here, only his horse.”
“I’ll remember next time, Ma,” Billy said. “I swear I will.”
Ma Buck turned to her inhuman brood. “Anybody else need a lesson on when to kill a man . . . or a woman, come to that?”
No one answered. Then one of the sons spoke up, “Ma, can I have his fancy shirt with all that Injun stuff on it?”
“Maybe, Gabe. I’ll study on it,” Ma said. Then to Red, “Unbuckle that fancy gun rig, drawfighter. Let it drop and don’t make any fancy moves.”
“The hell I will,” Red said. But then something cold, hard, and double-barreled shoved into the back of his neck and a voice said, “Do as Ma says, Tex.”
Red Ryan’s reeling brain snarled at him. You damned fool, you lost track of one of the brothers.
He unbuckled his gunbelt and holster and let it drop at his feet. A moment later a shotgun butt crashed into the back of his skull, and he plunged headlong into darkness that had no beginning and no end . . .
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The soul of Ilesh the Mescalero was dark, his grief scalding him as though he’d drank molten metal. The screams of the two Mexican sheepherders being tortured by the women would have pleased him yesterday or the day before, but not today.
The news of the death of his youngest and much-loved brother at the hands of white men had just arrived, brought by a sorrowful messenger on a fast pony.
“Men riding in a stagecoach killed Yuma,” the messenger said. “His body will be brought to you.”
“Where is this stagecoach?” Ilesh said.
The messenger waved a hand. “To the west of this place.”
“Then we will find it and kill every one of the white men, but before they die they will beg us for death,” Ilesh said.
Woe to the bringer of bad news, and the messenger was so afraid he trembled. But Ilesh gave him a fine blanket and sent him away.
Many of the lodges were dark as the people mourned for their dead, and Ilesh spent a day and a night by himself, grieving for Yuma, a brave warrior and a singer of songs. Then, on the second day he emerged from his wickiup and spoke to the young men. Ilesh reminded them of Yuma’s prowess in battle, how the as yet unwed woman smiled at him as he passed and crowded around him when he sang his songs or played his flute.
The young warriors smiled and slapped each other on the shoulder, pleased that they remembered Yuma so well and had held him in such high esteem.
Then Ilesh told them of the white men in the stagecoach and he said that they must wreak a terrible revenge. He told them that the attack on Fort Concho must wait until Yuma’s death was avenged, and with this the warriors agreed.
Ilesh was greatly pleased with his young men and how they’d loved Yuma, and he ordered a mule be slaughtered and for the woman to prepare a great feast. Then Ilesh said that only the deaths of a hundred white men would atone for the death of Yuma, and the warriors must kill without mercy.
All this the young men heard, and their hearts were light that they were going to war against the white beasts in the stagecoach and they sang the Mescalero war song and Ilesh listened and planned . . .
The death of Yuma would soon be avenged.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Red Ryan woke with a thumping headache and opened his eyes to darkness. Slowly, as his senses returned, the full seriousness of his predicament dawned on him. His wrists were roped to a huge rear wheel of the Conestoga, and his ankles were tied. His shirt and boots were gone and so was his derby hat, bullet-holed now, but bought new only a couple of weeks before.
Red cursed under his breath. He’d fallen in with thieves.
A horned moon hung high in the night sky surrounded by the clustered stars. The wind restlessly prowled around the wagon and rocked it gently, soothing its snoring occupant that Ryan guessed was Ma Buck, the formidable matriarch of her mangy clan.
As coyotes yipped out in the long grass, Red tried moving his wrists, but they were securely bound to the wheel and didn’t budge. He gave up and looked around him. The blanketed Bucks lay sleeping around the low, guttering campfire, one of the women muttering in uneasy slumber. Beyond the somnambulists, neatly piled on a white-streaked chicken cage, were Red’s clothes, his gunbelt, still with his Colt in the holster, on top. It seemed that Ma Buck had not yet decided to whom would go the spoils, deciding to wait until daylight to determine who among her brood was the most deserving.
Red stared at his gun . . . if only . . .
Not a chance. When the Bucks tied a man to a wagon wheel, they tied him good.
And then a thought: Why the hell was he still alive?
Red couldn’t figure that one.
Unless . . . torture was a possibility. He shook his head. Nah, white folks didn’t torture people. Did they? Of course not. Red dismissed the thought, but then hit on the obvious . . . Ma Buck would kill him at her leisure, probably come morning after breakfast and before she and her clan moved out.
Well, there was no dismissing that possibility, and Red moved it forward in his mind from probable to dead certain. He smiled to himself. He hadn’t even warned Ma about the Apaches, and that served her right. She was no better than an Apache herself.
Ryan sighed over his perilous plight and then dropped his head and dozed.
He woke up with a start, thinking that it was morning, but the night was still dark, and the moon remained in her heaven and Ma Buck continued to snore in the wagon. Red tried his bonds again, a futile struggle that only hurt his wrists and deepened his despair. No matter how he cut it, he was doomed and that was a natural fact.
Then, a whisper in the darkness, not a voice but the soft rustle of booted feet moving through long grass . . . followed by silence. Ryan’s eyes searched the gloom. He saw nothing. Heard nothing. His heart sank. He
was imagining things. One of the Buck men snorted, turned over on his side and then lay still. Long seconds passed . . .
Wait, there it was again, louder now, making more noise than even the clumsiest Apache ever would. It could only be a tangle-footed white man trying to injun closer.
Buttons Muldoon emerged from the murk, a rifle in his hands and an uneasy look on his face. He looked around, saw Red, and sneaked toward him with all the stealth of a longhorn bull in a brothel. Buttons took a knee beside Red, put a finger to his lips and said, “Shh . . .” so loud that it sounded like steam escaping a burst boiler.
Red looked around him in a panic, but the Buck family still slept and Ma’s steady snoring reassured him.
Buttons produced a barlow, opened the blade, and sawed on the rope binding Red’s left wrist. In a moment, his arm was free. Then the right . . .
Ma Buck stopped snoring and the ensuing silence was as ominous as a skeleton dangling in a cottonwood tree.
Urgently now, Buttons slashed the rope away from Ryan’s ankles and whispered, “Let’s go.”
“My duds,” Red said.
“Leave them,” Buttons said.
“The hell I will,” Red said.
“Oh my God, we’re all gonna be killed,” Buttons said.
On sock feet Red tiptoed past the sleeping Bucks, put on his derby, then grabbed his gunbelt, boots, and shirt and followed Buttons into the sheltering darkness.
But then an unexpected disaster . . .
Ryan yelled, “Owww! Damn it! Damn it! Damn it!”
Buttons turned and saw Red hopping around on one leg, his face twisted in pain. “What happened?” he said, no longer bothering to whisper.
“I stubbed my toe on a rock!” Ryan wailed. “I think I broke it!”
Rifles roared and bullets buzzed through the air like angry hornets.
Buttons said, “That was a damned fool thing to do!”
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