‘Towards Thaddeus. Guess he plans to use him as a kind of hostage to get himself out.’
‘Why don’t you kill him, Jed? Before he can reach my husband?’
‘Light’s still bad. Might have a chance later. He won’t kill Thaddeus. Not right off. Longer it takes, the better the light, the better the chance. Wait on, Carola, just wait on.’
‘But he might get away like the others.’
‘Shame that. Still, got us the big fish.’ Until the day he died Jedediah Herne never knew about the ambush of Geronimo and his warriors outside the canyon nor did he know that the last six of El Poco’s men all died in white agony, cursing him for betraying them into a trap. Even if he’d known about the Apaches he would just have been pleased. And cursing never did anyone any harm.
~*~
El Poco wasn’t able to fully comprehend it. He’d known that there was going to be trouble, right when he lost the first men. Then there was that shot from the longest of ranges. But he’d guessed that taking the two men as prisoner would even up the score. The men had been complaining and by giving them a couple of whites to torture and take some sexual pleasure from he’d figured things would be fine.
Then there had been the cataclysmic few seconds with three men down and dead, including his beloved … The thought almost made him shed a tear from his puffy eyes. The voice from the grave that had meant the last straw for the rest of the gang and they’d fled and deserted him to his fate.
The one remaining throw was the surviving prisoner. Still spread and tied bare-assed across the framework of wood. If he could reach the white man and maybe put a pistol to his head? The surrounding bounty-hunters—because that must be who they were—might let him go free. The horses were still there, and his own stallion was a fast flyer.
El Poco grinned and giggled to himself. It wasn’t over yet.
~*~
Jed saw what the Mexican was going to do, but there wasn’t a lot he could do about it. There was some cover clear across to the helpless Thaddeus Ray, and by the time that El Poco reached him he’d be shielded by the naked body. But Herne was good enough with the Sharps to back himself to see a chance of putting a long fifty-five through some part of the dwarf before he could get away.
The little figure popped up like a pantomime gnome, appearing behind Thaddeus Ray, his pistol cocked and pressed into the throat of the white man. El Poco’s eyes flicked nervously around the canyon, not sure how many men there were or where they were concealed.
‘I kill him,’ he yelled. ‘You let me go or I kill him! You hear me?’
Carola wriggled a little higher up the ledge, nearly slipping over the edge in her eagerness to see what was happening. ‘Can’t you?’
‘Shut your damned mouth, woman,’ hissed the shootist, concentrating all of his attention on the macabre tableau below him.
El Poco was struggling with a knife, trying to cut Thaddeus Ray free of the rawhide thongs, while keeping the gun jammed against his neck.
The movement penetrated through Thad’s misery and pain and humiliation, and he raised his head, eyes dull, staring from a foot away at the round dumpling face of the bandit leader. His mouth opened and he tried to speak but his lips were dry, tongue swollen and cracked. All that came out was a whimper, like a drowning kitten.
But locked in the red recesses of the Easterner’s mind was the knowledge that here was the person who had caused him greater suffering than he would ever have imagined possible. Here he was, close enough for Thaddeus to touch. But his arms were too stiff and there seemed no life in his legs. Ashe was released he nearly fell, sliding down to his knees, feeling a grating pain as the foresight of the Colt tore a strip of skin from his neck.
‘It’ll be all right, Jed. All right. Thad can go to a hospital. You and me can go after Geronimo. Be absolutely super for us. Even if I have to crawl I’d go after that Indian. Make our names. Be all right.’
Herne allowed breath to sigh out from parted lips, relaxing a moment. He had been about to try for a shot at the Mexican’s right shoulder as Ray slipped to the dirt, but the woman’s sudden chattering put him off and he’d decided not to risk it.
‘You let me go, huh?’ called Jesus Maria Diego, kneeling by the side of his victim. ‘I kill him if not.’
‘Sure. You can go. You’re free, El Poco. Go where you like.’
‘That your word?’
Herne cupped his hands to his mouth. ‘Yeah. You got my word on it.’
‘Jed, you simply ...’
The shootist turned and looked at the woman, that glance enough to silence her. ‘Giving your word don’t mean you have to keep it. Not to someone like him. Dirt, Carola. Just dirt.’
Thaddeus knew what he had to do. There were things that a man couldn’t just walk around. He knew that. Had read it about the frontier. Even written it himself in some articles. Here he was, with the bandit so close he could smell the stink of terror sweating out of him, riding over the cheap scent that El Poco wore.
‘Can’t walk around,’ he said to himself, lips moving, not a sound passing his tongue.
El Poco knew nothing about it. Thaddeus Ray was just a valuable piece of meat to him. One that was going to let him out of the trap.
Herne leveled the Sharps again, hearing Carola Ray moving backwards on the ledge. Ignoring her, and focusing all of his concentration on looking for a target big enough for him to feel confident about hitting it.
The next ten seconds were filled with desperate, violent, bloody action.
El Poco was fixing all his attention on watching for a sign of movement from the cliffs around him and had just spotted Carola’s scuffling descent on the crumbling ledge. At that moment Thaddeus Ray made his clumsy, desperate lunge for revenge. It wasn’t for liberty. That was a concept that he couldn’t have comprehended. All he knew was that he wanted to kill the dwarf.
He knocked the pistol aside and made a flailing grab at El Poco’s arm, trying to tumble him to the dirt and fall on top of him. But the Mexican was stronger, clubbing at Ray’s head with the barrel of his gun, sending him lurching sideways among the stones.
‘Kill him, Thad!’ screeched Carola Ray, leaping excitedly to her feet, waving her arms in the air.
‘Jesus Christ!’ said Herne, disgustedly.
Thaddeus clawed at the ankles of the little bandit, making him stagger backwards so that Herne’s carefully aimed shot missed him by less than a foot, bursting in orange splinters of stone to the side.
The Mexican saw the woman and hissed between his gold-filled teeth. ‘Puta! Whore!’ Snapping off a bullet from his pistol at her.
It came remarkably close at extreme range for a handgun, kicking shards of the cliff into Carola Ray’s face, blinding her for a moment. So that she stumbled, missed her footing and slid screaming over the edge of the ledge, plummeting thirty feet to the jumble of jagged boulders on the floor of the canyon. Herne heard the shrill cry, and the thump of her body lancing downwards. There was a sharp crack, as if bones had broken, and then her scream was stilled as though it had been cut off by a butcher’s cleaver.
Thad Ray heard the cry and caught a glimpse out of the comer of his eye, through a veil of fresh blood, of his wife, seemingly shot by the Mexican, toppling into space.
‘Can’t walk around …’ he began, clawing once more for El Poco.
Who levered back on the hammer of the Peacemaker, putting a bullet at point-blank range through the forehead of the white man, killing him instantly, showering blood and brains in the dirt.
Thaddeus Ray died, not even realizing he was going, his last thoughts filled with a shattering blow to his head that blanked out every conscious emotion.
Jesus Maria Diego stared down at his last victim, smoke trickling from the barrel of his heavily-ornamented pistol. There was crimson dashed on his silk shirt and he raised a hand to wipe it off.
Herne shot him through the middle of the chest, the bullet splintering ribs, the distorted hunk of lead angling sideways
and tearing through the muscular walls of his heart. The Sharps’ bullet carried enough punch to send the dwarf staggering against a boulder, bouncing forward again and falling flat on his face on top of the still twitching body of Thaddeus. After that devastating ten seconds, Lost Woman Canyon was suddenly, deafeningly silent.
~*~
Carola Ray was conscious, lying twisted among the stones. Her face was whiter than Sierra snow, a trickle of blood snaking from her open mouth, across her neck, down over her torn blouse, stopping at her exposed breasts. One leg was clearly broken, doubled under her at a sickeningly unnatural angle. There was the sharp edge of clawing bone protruding through her thigh, froth a raw, vicious wound that leaked crimson.
But that wasn’t the worst.
The shootist bent over her, bolstering his pistol, having checked that everyone in the canyon was dead. Looking down into Carola’s face, trying to read the extent of her injuries.
‘Thad?’ she said.
‘Dead.’
‘The little Mexican?’
‘Same. Nobody else left. You and me. Better figure out ways of gettin’ you out.’
‘I think I’m going to be sick, Jed. Or, maybe I’m ... I’m going to faint.’
‘Your leg’s broke. I’ll build a travois with that frame. Plenty of horses. Take it easy and you’ll be walkin’ again in a week or so.’
‘No.’ The word was flat and final.
‘That leg might take a while longer to mend but I guess ...’
‘No. It isn’t my leg. That doesn’t hurt at all. The fact is, Jed, I can’t feel my legs at all. I think I’ve broken my spine.’
~*~
From high above them Geronimo and Nachez had watched the last scenes of the drama. Staring emotionless into the shadowy deeps of the canyon, seeing the woman’s crippling fall and the deaths of the white prisoner and the bullet that ended the evil life of Jesus Maria Diego, known as El Poco.
‘We can kill him now,’ suggested the younger of the Chiricahua.
‘I do not wish his death,’ replied Geronimo.
‘He will come back to hunt us again.’
‘No.’ Geronimo leaned a little further forward to see what Herne was doing with the woman. ‘See. Her back is broken. Her legs trail. He must take her to the shamans of the whites, far away. We will not be here when he comes again. I know that.’
‘Where will we be?’ asked Nachez.
There was a spark of anger in the eyes of Geronimo. ‘I have dreamed of a place. I am a hawk and I am netted by other hawks. And I am taken to a cage in a hot, green land where I cannot breathe while my wings are sheared so I can never fly again.’ He sighed. ‘Ah me, brother, but I fear that the days shrink about us.’
‘Perhaps it was not a true dream.’
The old warrior nodded. ‘Aye, perhaps. Perhaps. Come, this is over here. And we must leave.’
Chapter Fourteen
There was a doctor in Nogales, but it was nearly a month before Carola Ray was finally installed in a proper hospital in Tucson. The medical treatment there was better than most, but the news was just the same. And her own diagnosis was proved totally accurate.
‘Break to the back. Fall did it. Your using herbs on that break to the thigh saved us having to carve it off, Mr. Herne. But she’ll never walk again.’
She was totally paralyzed from the waist down, unable to control her own functions and incapable of moving a single step. She couldn’t even manage to crawl.
During the eternally long ride back through the hostile heat of the Arizona summer, strapped to a rough travois behind one of the Mexicans’ horses Herne had looked after the woman with a rough efficiency. With little sympathy, and with less conversation. The whole contract had turned sour and he knew now that there was no chance of his getting any of the money that he’d so painfully earned during the long chase after Geronimo. But he couldn’t have left her to die.
Jed Herne was one of the hardest of men and if it had been his own life measured against hers, he would have ridden away from her without the least compunction. But not all of the milk of human kindness had drained from him, so he stayed. Bathing her when they had water, gently washing away the filth from her body, cradling her in his arms as she wept.
And finally, it was over.
There was a little money, he discovered. Enough to keep her in the hospital for a whiles. The doctor, a crusty but benign old New Englander, had told him outside the ward where Carola Ray was lying that she would not live long.
‘Shock to the brain. Heat and suffering. And the spine’s sore broken. I figure she’ll likely make it into the winter, but I doubt she’ll come out the other side.’
‘I thank you,’ said the tall shootist, starting to turn away.
‘She has asked for you. Many times.’
‘The nurses told me.’
‘But you?’
‘I got business hereabouts, then I got to ride on. Seems to me better this way.’
‘Not even to say farewell to her, Mr. Herne? I would have thought—’
‘I don’t rightly give a damn for you or your thoughts, Doctor. She’s crippled and I don’t get paid. Farewells is best short. Shorter the better. Say them for me.’
‘Then you’re a cold-hearted bastard, Herne.’
The shootist paused from down the corridor. ‘So they tell me. So long, Doctor.’
But that wasn’t the end of the story, Not quite.
~*~
On September 4th, 1886 Geronimo finally surrendered his small band to General Miles, near Fronteras. As Herne had predicted it was Apache scouts, loyal to the Cavalry, who tracked him down and the cantankerous old warrior was persuaded that at last the time had come to yield.
He was put on the Southern Pacific Railroad and taken to Texas. In San Antonio he was close to death when an attempt was made to try him in a civilian court for murder. A trial that would have had only one outcome. But the military intervened and he was finally, some forty days later, put on a train for Fort Pickens in Florida with many of his warriors. Including, incidentally, some of the same scouts who had helped catch him. A sorry reward for them!
~*~
Jed Herne had paused to water his horse at around that time, near the railroad track that ran east. There was no town nearby, but there was a large, solitary water tower on the further side of the twin tracks.
There was a faint smudge of smoke on the horizon and by straining his ears the shootist could just hear die distant singing of the iron rails, signaling the approach of a train heading into the rising sun. His stallion could sense it and looked up from the muddied pool, whinnying softly. Herne took the bridle in his hand and held it, watching the snaking dark line growing larger and nearer
The noise of the locomotive swelled, but Herne saw that the train was slowing down, presumably to take on water from the tower. He patted his horse on the side of die neck, calming it, glancing casually as the carriages rattled and clanged to a halt, less than fifty yards from him. To his surprise he saw soldiers, in dusty blue, leap off the train before it had even halted, circling out, carbines at the ready
‘Now, what the Hell is that all about?’ he said to nobody in particular.
The engineers worked busily, swinging out the long hose, pouring water in, taking no notice of the solitary man and his horse. A couple of the Cavalry troopers looked at him, but a shout from a stockily-built Major brought their heads smartly round
By the time that Herne’s horse had drunk enough the train was ready to go, chugging very slowly forwards, the soldiers swinging back on board. There were guards between all the carriages and as the train pulled away past him Herne finally saw the reason for the precautions.
There were several dozen Apache warriors, prisoners, on the train, faces blankly staring out at the landscape as it crawled by.
‘Chiricahua,’ said Herne to himself, watching the train go.
Seeing that in the last carriage, alone by a window, there was an older man, with a broa
d face and deep-set eyes. Who saw the shootist and turned his head to stare at him.
For a moment out of time their eyes locked and the Indian lifted his hands slightly, showing the chains. Nodding in what might have been recognition or a salute. Herne did nothing, sitting easily in the saddle, looking with eyes cold as flint as the locomotive vanished towards the east, carrying Geronimo with it.
Only then did Jed tip his hat, in what could have been acknowledgement. Setting spurs to his stallion and heeling it forwards.
Away towards the west and north.
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