* * *
The clouds came, scudding in from the southeast and blanketing the sky, but the rain didn’t. In the mountains, thunder boomed, and lightning flashed in the distance, in every direction, sometimes stabbing the earth for what seemed like seconds at a time. The killer’s trail led east, then cut northeast for a while, crossing the river and gradually drifting southeast. They might be in Mexico by now, Tuck thought, though he hadn’t seen any markers. They had made up some ground on the killer, which they could tell by the freshness of his tracks, but he was still well ahead.
The Huachucas were well behind them, but in this country, there were always more mountains ahead. The landscape rose in a jagged line, then dropped away to a broad, flat valley, on the far side of which were more mountains, with another valley waiting beyond.
The sun lowered beneath the clouds but above the distant peaks, and its light angled across the valley floor. The shadows of the posse members stretched out ahead of them, like giants walking the earth.
Men were starting to grumble again, first Maier, then Darlington joined in. “We been at this for nearly twenty hours, Hank. How much longer we got to do it? We lost the guy.”
“We ain’t lost him yet,” Turville said. “We’re catchin’ up.”
“If you and the rummy are right about whose tracks you’re following. You ask me, we lost him that first night, in the rain. We’re probably trailing some prospector or cowboy.”
“We keep followin’ him. When we know we’re wrong, then we’ll worry about it.”
“I am so hungry,” Maier said. “My business is suffering. My behind suffers more.”
“We’re dogging the right trail,” Tuck said. “No reason to give up now.”
“The reason is I’m plumb wore out,” Darlington said. “And like Alf said, we got things waiting for us back in Carmichael. Ralph and I are both here, so who knows what’s going on at our livery?”
“There’s hours of daylight left,” Turville said, scanning the sky. “We’ll stop for the night, once it’s full dark. How’s that? I’ll tell you now, though, he ain’t likely to stop for the night. Just means tomorrow we’ll have to ride harder to make up lost ground.”
Darlington slowed his horse a little, letting Tuck catch up to him. As Tuck came alongside, Darlington shot him a scowl. “You’re liking this, aren’t you, rummy?”
“Liking what? Riding my ass raw chasing a guy who killed a woman I don’t even know? It’s not my favorite thing.”
“You and the marshal seem like old pals.”
“Never met him before last night.”
“You say so.” Darlington gigged his mount and sped up to a canter, slowing only when he drew up beside Hendershott.
More than ever, Tuck didn’t want Charlie Darlington behind him with a gun.
Chapter Nine
When Kuruk, the Apache scout, returned to the company with word that he had located the mule train, Colonel Cuttrell ordered the men to a fast trot. He would rather have called for a full gallop, but Kuruk said they were getting close, and they had to pass through a narrow canyon to get there. The sun was already beginning to lower toward the mountains.
Kuruk led the way between steep, rocky walls that reduced the sky to a thin blue river overhead. Perfect spot for an ambush, Cuttrell thought. Chiricahua Apaches loved to roll heavy rocks down on their enemies, and this place was ideal for such an attack. But Kuruk assured him that he had scoured the upper reaches carefully, and they were safe.
Cuttrell hated to trust an Apache’s word for that. Any one of them would sell the whole army to his brothers for whatever the Indian equivalent of a double eagle was. Those doubts were compounded by the fact that Kuruk was, himself, a Chiricahua, working for the army against his own kind.
But Kuruk had proved himself loyal so far, and Cuttrell thought the best way to destroy that trust was to reveal his doubts. Instead he kept a close eye on the man, directed his senior officers to do the same, and listened when Kuruk spoke, because he had always provided solid information. He was, Cuttrell had to admit, a brilliant scout. On a major operation, Cuttrell took along ten or twelve Apache scouts, who ran ahead of the troopers. They were tireless. If there was no enemy activity to report, by the time the column halted for the night, the scouts would have set up camp, brought down some deer or antelope or rabbits or turkey, and started cooking.
On a smaller sortie, like this one, he tried to always take Kuruk. The man’s English was excellent. He was blessed with good cheer, strong legs and shoulders, a deep chest, and a handsome countenance. He kept his black hair tied down with a scarlet band, and regardless of whether he wore trousers or only a breechcloth, he was always dressed in a regulation gray CSA blouse, to which he had affixed buckskin fringe across breast, back, and sleeves, and decorated with feathers, bones, teeth, and other accoutrements he had collected. Despite those, when he moved, he was as silent as a shadow. At his waist he wore a cartridge belt, and he kept a canteen strapped across his chest and carried an old Spencer repeating rifle. On his feet were thigh-high moccasins with upturned toes, which he folded down to just below the knee. Other scouts had explained to him that the toe served as a kind of shield against sharp stones, or cactus thorns, and every Chiricahua of Cuttrell’s acquaintance wore them that way.
Cuttrell didn’t like the man, but he had little choice but to trust him, so he did. That practicality had served him well, as a soldier and an officer, so he saw no reason to change. As it happened, Kuruk was right about the canyon. They exited without incident and dropped into a depression that rose slightly on the far side and then sloped down toward the river. In the shallow bowl, Cuttrell saw the mule train. What was left of it, at any rate.
There wasn’t much.
A bevy of vultures lifted off as the troopers bore down on them, an immense black cloud, the flapping of their wings like low thunder. They had been scavenging on a long line of mules and burros and some horses. The animals had been hacked to bits, and the carrion eaters had been at them, not just the vultures but coyotes, too, opportunists that they were. The ground beneath them was red from all the blood that had spilled. Guts had been yanked free of split-open carcasses, eyeballs eaten, in some cases brains strewn in the dirt.
The stink was sickening. To mask it, Cuttrell lifted a gloved hand to his mouth and sniffed the leather. All around him, troopers puked from their saddles or dropped to the ground to do it there, hunched over or on their knees.
Cuttrell estimated forty or so pack animals, most burdened with cargo, lay before him. Another fifteen horses, and a dozen burros. But among the animals were the people, maybe thirty of them. Civilians, it appeared, but there were plenty of weapons around, rifles and revolvers, swords and knives. They’d been outfitted like an army troop, even though they wore no uniforms.
“What do you make of it, sir?”
Cuttrell glanced at his second in command, Captain Hannigan. Ezra Hannigan was a burly, bearded brawler with short legs and an unexpectedly high, childlike voice. But his courage was unmatched, in Cuttrell’s experience, and he was a dead aim with a rifle. “I think it’s terrible,” Cuttrell said.
“Yes, of course. I mean, why a mule train? If they’re bringing in ghost rock from California, why not by rail? The Bayou Vermilion’s faster and safer, I’d say.”
“Maybe they were associated with one of the other rail companies. Dixie Rail has taken an interest in this region, I’ve heard. They might want to move quantities of ghost rock without letting Bayou Vermilion in on their plans. Even if not, Bayou might have refused them passage. Any number of reasons.” Cuttrell looked at the corpses spread out below. “One thing’s for certain, we’ll not be asking them.”
“No,” Hannigan agreed. “We could ask, but they’ll not be answering, will they?”
* * *
While his men dug a wide, shallow pit and laid the bodies into it, Cuttrell walked the line. The animals appeared to have been butchered where they stood, for the most part, a
lthough hoofprints in the soft earth indicated that some had either wandered off or been led away. Scattered here and there around the scene were foul-smelling, black, tarry puddles that no one had been able to explain.
What really made no sense, though—as if the entire scene weren’t incomprehensible enough—was that the cargo had seemingly not been touched. Wagons mounded with ghost rock just sat there, the draft animals dead in their traces. Other beasts had cargo wrapped up and strapped to their backs, and the knots hadn’t been undone, the wrappings were intact. Much of it was the standard stuff of any traveling caravan: cook pots, tools, food and water, rifles and shotguns and ammunition. But ghost rock was valuable stuff. Someone had gone to the trouble to mine it in the west and then transport it here, where someone else had attacked the mule train, then left with everybody dead but without the cargo.
Burning hotter and longer than coal and possessing other, less easily defined properties bordering on the preternatural—if not well across that line—ghost rock had become more valuable than gold in the years since its discovery after the Great Quake of ’68. Ghost rock–powered weapons might yet turn the tide of the war for the Confederacy, and even now ships burning it steamed up and down rivers throughout the land. For anyone to have walked away from such a rich supply of it was staggering. Maybe they had taken all they could carry, but if they’d kept some of the draft animals alive, surely they could have left with more. Why kill all the people, then ignore the precious load they’d been hauling?
The reason for the attack appeared to be murder, and nothing more. Someone wanted to see blood spilled, to watch the vultures descend from the sky and bury their bald heads and scrawny necks in still-warm carcasses.
It was incomprehensible. Cuttrell had seen atrocities at the hands of Indians: white men trussed up like poultry and roasted over open flames. A man staked down, on his stomach, atop a colony of huge fire ants—they had eaten his eyes out first, then gone in through the openings they’d made and worked on the brain next. Women—he shuddered to think about the fates they had suffered.
But as much as he distrusted most red men, he was aware that each of those atrocities had been in response to something just as horrible done to them by whites. The roasted man had led a troop into an Indian encampment just before dawn one cold morning, and the soldiers had moved through the camp in an organized fashion, setting fire to each dwelling they came to and shooting everyone they found. A few braves had managed to get away, so the major who had led the assault had been identified and suffered accordingly. Indians could be vicious, but not senselessly so. If you followed the path of events back, in every case Cuttrell knew of, they were responding to cruelty, not initiating it.
This didn’t seem like them. If they had attacked the train, they would have wanted the horses and mules. And they would have looted. They might not have been interested in the ghost rock—although that wasn’t a given—but they would have taken guns and ammunition, some of the food, maybe clothing. Apaches loved to wear stolen hats, for one thing.
If it wasn’t Apaches, who, then? Bayou Vermilion, taking revenge? But why? If they had turned down good money for hauling freight, that rejection would have sufficed. And if this had been payback of some sort, they would have wanted the ghost rock as well as the blood. No better fuel existed for powering a train.
He was left with one question on top of another, and he didn’t like it. And he definitely didn’t want to still be here when night enveloped the landscape. They could come back in the morning to recover as much of the ghost rock as they could.
“Get some earth over those bodies!” he shouted, clapping his hands twice for emphasis. “Let’s go! Double time!”
The men were already moving as fast as they could. Nobody liked being here, breathing in the rank air, which seemed soupy with blood and death and whatever those viscous puddles were. At Cuttrell’s urging, some tried to work faster, with the result that they ran into one another, tripped, dropped mangled corpses on the ground. Cuttrell was about to call them away from the task, to put some distance between them and this place before full dark, when he heard Kuruk call out.
“This one’s alive!” he cried. “It’s a girl!”
“A girl?” Cuttrell echoed. He started toward where the scout was crouched, beside one of the few wagons that had fallen over and spilled its contents.
In a moment, Hannigan was beside him, legs scissoring quickly to keep up. “All the bodies I’ve seen have been men,” he said. “No women or children. Just thirty-some well-armed men, and still, whatever got to them killed every mother’s son of ’em. Without, as far as I can tell, firing a shot.”
“No?”
“They’ve been … I don’t know, torn apart. Knives, swords, something like that. No bullet holes, no arrows. It’s the damnedest thing.”
Cuttrell stopped in his tracks and clutched Hannigan’s arm. “You’re sure about this?”
“I haven’t looked at every corpse,” Hannigan said. “But the ones I’ve seen? Yes. I looked for bullet wounds. I looked for arrows, or parts of them, heads or shafts. Nothing.”
“What the—” Cuttrell interrupted himself, remembering Kuruk and the girl. “Come on,” he said, returning to his original course.
By the time he reached them, other troopers had gathered around. Kuruk was doing his best to keep the soldiers at arm’s length from the girl. Cuttrell bulled through the pack. “How is she? Is she hurt?”
Kuruk was kneeling on the ground, holding a young woman’s head and upper torso across his thighs. Her eyes were closed, her face badly bruised and cut in dozens of places. She didn’t look to be more than eighteen or nineteen. Her hair was long and dark brown, matted and with twigs and dirt worked into it. She was a white girl, though, with fair skin and a scattering of freckles across cheeks and nose. “She breathes,” Kuruk said. “But she sleeps deep.”
“Be careful with her, man,” Cuttrell said. “Does she have any broken bones?”
“Don’t think so. Anyhow, I haven’t seen any.”
“Where’s Dr. Spring?” Cuttrell demanded. He had last seen the company surgeon examining corpses, to whom he could be no help. “Find him!”
A few minutes later, Hannigan returned with the surgeon. Spring was getting long in the tooth, and extended rides were hard on him. He looked pained when he crouched beside the girl, and one hand went to the small of his back, rubbing there momentarily before attending to her. He glanced at Cuttrell. “These men…” he said.
Cuttrell took his meaning. Checking her condition would require examining her entire body, since she was unconscious and couldn’t tell them where she was hurt. It might have been awkward at any time, but worse with the troopers gathered around. “Don’t you people have something better to do? Are all the bodies dealt with?”
Some of the men mumbled obedience and went to continue that unpleasant task, but others stayed to watch the inspection of the girl. Spring worked his hands up and down her limbs, coming at last to her torso. “I’m not finding anything, Colonel,” he said. “She doesn’t seem to be bleeding anywhere, either.”
“Well, something happened to her. Look at her face. She looks like she fell out of a wagon and rolled. Where did you find her, Kuruk?”
“Behind this wagon, Colonel,” the scout said. He glanced toward the sky. “There was shade, in the afternoon. But not the morning. Still, her skin is hardly burned.”
“Perhaps she moved to stay in the shade,” Spring said, prodding her torso.
“Unconscious?”
“Perhaps she passed out later.”
“Maybe we can ask her, but not until she wakes up,” Cuttrell said. He fixed his gaze on two of the privates who stood there watching. “Find a wagon that’s upright and in good repair. Hitch a couple of our horses to it. We need to get this girl away from here.”
“Yes, sir,” the younger one said. He caught his companion’s gaze, touched his arm, and they both raced away. Cuttrell watched them, hoping the
y had sense to actually pick a serviceable wagon.
“Sir,” Spring said. Then, with more urgency, “Sir?”
“What is it?” Cuttrell demanded. He swung around toward Spring and the girl.
Her eyes were open. They were brown and wide, but for all they revealed, she might have been dead. “Can you see? Hello, miss. Can you hear me? Can you see?”
The girl’s brutalized lips parted, but no sound escaped them. She stared past Cuttrell at nothing in particular.
“Her head, Kuruk,” Cuttrell said. “Is it badly hurt?”
“Cut, bruised. Not bad.”
“What’s the matter with her, then?”
“We don’t know what she’s been through,” Spring pointed out. “What she’s seen. What happened to her.”
“And we never will if we can’t get her fixed up.” He looked over his shoulder. “Where’s my wagon?” he cried.
“Coming, sir!” someone answered.
“I want it now, damn it!”
“Yes, sir!”
He looked back at the girl. She hadn’t budged. Her unseeing eyes remained open, her cracked, swollen lips slightly apart. “Who are you, girl?” he asked. “What are you doing here? Why are you the only female with this train?”
The thought briefly flitted through his mind that maybe there had been other women, but the Apaches had taken them. Then he remembered what Hannigan had said. No bullet holes, no arrows. “Kuruk, could Apaches have done this?”
“No,” the scout answered. His response was immediate, without any consideration. Cuttrell didn’t think he answered that way because he was trying to hide something—it was simply inconceivable to Kuruk that his people could have been involved. Cuttrell had reached the same conclusion, and Kuruk’s certainty buttressed his belief.
“You’re sure?”
“Sure,” Kuruk said.
The scout was somewhere in his thirties, Cuttrell thought. But he looked ageless. He could have been fifty or seventeen. His hair was as black and shiny as a raven’s wing, his dark skin almost unlined.
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