The Thunder Riders

by Frank Leslie

  His head was canted back, and his jaws were moving, as if he were talking to one of the others.

  Yakima gently levered a round into the Yellowboy’s breech. He snugged the stock to his shoulder and aimed carefully along the side of El Segundo’s head, hoping to clip the man’s ear, and fired.

  The slug drilled the rock before El Segundo with a shrill pshting!

  El Segundo flinched and grabbed his ear as he wheeled, stumbling back against the rock and dropping his rifle. As the others jerked around toward the source of the shot, snapping their eyes wide, Yakima cut loose with four more quick shots, the other four men grabbing, respectively, an upper left arm, upper right thigh, upper left thigh, and left calf.

  When they were all howling like whipped pups, Yakima drilled a hole through one of the vaqueros’ sombreros, then planted the stock of his rifle against his hip and pulled the sorrel’s reins taut in his left hand.

  “Go on back to the hacienda,” he yelled, “or next time you’ll get more than a friendly tattoo!”

  None of the four attempted to raise his rifle. They all stood or sagged among the rocks, clutching their bloody bullet burns and regarding Yakima with awe and fury.

  Yakima considered grabbing one of their horses, no doubt tied nearby. But stealing a horse might put their don on his trail with more men than he could outdistance or shoot, for horse stealing in this country was considered more lowly than murder. Besides, Yakima might have to explain the horse’s brand to rurales.

  Deciding to wait and make a legitimate trade for the gimpy sorrel farther up the trail, he backed the horse away from the five vaqueros, then turned behind a cluster of Joshua trees and heeled the mount into a lope, angling south, hoping the trail of the Thunder Riders hadn’t faded.

  Later the same day, Speares led the posse through a narrow valley with low, sage-stippled hills on the left and a towering sandstone scarp streaked with bird shit on the right. They passed through a cottonwood copse, the few remaining yellow leaves rattling in the chill wind, and Speares reined his horse to a halt at the lip of a broad, sandy draw.

  As the rest of the weary, unshaven posse drew up behind him and around him, Speares cast his gaze to the draw’s opposite bank. A good seventy yards away, it was cloaked in tough brown shrubs and occasional sand-colored boulders.

  Patchen’s horse shook its head as the marshal peered across the draw. “Good place for an ambush.”

  “There’ve been plenty of good places for an ambush, and we ain’t been ambushed yet.” Speares rose up in his saddle to rake his gaze along both sides of the opposite bank, for fifty yards in each direction.

  “Don’t mean there won’t be a first time,” said one of the three dust-clad market hunters, Nudge Tobias. “I say we scout it first.”

  “So do I!” the banker, Franklin, exclaimed haughtily. His saddle-chafed thighs were bleeding through his broadcloth trousers, and every chance he got, he made sure everyone knew how unhappy he was, riding way the hell south of the border with a lowly catch party.

  Speares looked at Patchen.

  “Not a bad idea,” the marshal said. “There’s no cover down there.”

  “Pshaw!” Speares said. “That gang ain’t worried about no catch party. They don’t have enough respect for us to waste time layin’ an ambush.”

  Harley Knutson, who owned one of the two gun shops in Saber Creek, mopped sweat from his sun- and wind-blistered forehead. “How in the hell you figure we can take them down, Speares? That’s what I wanna know. I mean, they’re the Thunder Riders!”

  Speares placed a hand on his cantle and hipped around to regard the beefy shop owner with strained tolerance. “We can take them down, Harley, because they don’t think we can. Hell, I don’t even think they know we’re on their trail.”

  “Well, in that case, Sheriff,” said one of the other markethunters, a walleyed hombre named Jan Behunek, “why don’t you cross first? Just to put our minds at ease.”

  Behunek cut his self-satisfied gaze to his partners, one on each side of him. The other posse members voiced their own agreement, nodding.

  Flushing, Speares looked at Patchen. The marshal offered a lopsided smile inside his silver muttonchops and shrugged. “Looks like you’ve been outvoted, Sheriff.” He reached forward and shucked his Henry rifle from the saddle boot, racked a shell in the chamber. “I’ll cover you.”

  Speares glanced at the men behind him disgustedly before turning forward and shucking his rifle. “Christ!” He spurred the horse off the bank and into the sandy riverbed. The sand was deep, nearly hock-high in places, so Speares held the mount to a walk as he raked his eyes along the opposite bank and up the rolling, brushy hills beyond.

  Nothing but thick brush and rocks. No sound but the breeze funneling down the dry watercourse.

  Speares chuckled and glanced over his right shoulder. The posse was spread out, all holding rifles and watching him warily. Patchen sat slouched in his own saddle, holding his Henry across his saddlebow. He had a tight, slightly mocking smile on his face, which was shaded by his low-tipped hat brim.

  Superior son of a bitch.

  Speares turned forward. The opposite bank grew before him, rocks and shrubs separating, delineating themselves, showing the vacant gaps between.

  When he was ten yards from the bank, brush rustled to his right. He jerked back on the horse’s reins, his heart thudding, and swung his rifle around.

  A skunk, its nose to the ground, meandered out from behind one moss-speckled boulder, heading for another veiled by Spanish bayonet.

  Speares lowered the rifle, felt his face warm. He glanced over his shoulder. On the far bank, Patchen’s white teeth shone under his mustache. A couple of the others were grinning as well.

  Speares spat to one side, then gigged his horse the last few yards to the bank. He put the mount up a narrow game trail curling through the brush. On a hillock overlooking the riverbed, about forty yards up from the bank, he turned the sorrel and planted his rifle on his thigh, barrel aimed skyward.

  He didn’t say anything, just stared at the posse on the other side, waiting in truculent silence.

  Patchen raised an arm and, as the others fell in behind and around him, put his steeldust down the bank and into the deep sand anchored by occasional clumps of chamisa. The marshal swung his head slowly from side to side, shifting the shade across his chest, making his copper star wink in the sunlight, holding his rifle up and ready.

  The others, except for the banker, did likewise. Franklin was too exhausted and miserable to worry about an ambush. His blaze-faced dun fell in behind the others, the banker hanging his head as though nearly asleep.

  The walleyed market hunter, Behunek, threw his head back and laughed at something one of his partners said, riding beside him. At the same time, he dipped his right hand into his shirt pocket, reaching for a tobacco sack.

  Watching the posse move toward him, Speares ran his tongue over his chapped lips. A cigarette would taste good about now.

  The thought had no sooner passed through his brain than a rifle boomed on his right. The rifle was so close, the boom so loud and unexpected, that Speares first thought lightning had struck. Holding tight to the dancing claybank’s reins, he turned toward the source of the blast.

  Blue smoke puffed above a thick brush tuft.

  He snapped his gaze toward the dry watercourse. Behunek was flopping backward in his saddle like a rag doll, the man’s frightened horse leaping and pitching as though its tail was on fire.

  A veritable cannonade exploded out of the brush before and around Speares. The sheriff saw the smoke of a good half dozen rifles rise above the shrubs. His startled mount bucked sharply, whipping him straight up and over its head. His Winchester flew out of his hands and clattered to the ground at the same moment that he landed in a cactus patch with a burning pain along the backs of his thighs.

  Groaning, vaguely aware of screaming men and horses from the direction of the draw, Speares turned onto his belly. Heart
pounding, he pushed up on his hands and knees, trying to rise. His head was spinning and throbbing, and he scrambled only a few feet ahead on his hands and feet, then plopped onto his side.

  Breathing hard, blood racing, he raised himself onto his elbows.

  Through the dust of his fleeing horse, he saw a man moving toward him—a tall hombre in a gray wolf coat and with a hideously scarred eye, silver hoops dangling from his ears. The man grinned as he approached Speares, shifting his Spencer repeater to his left hand while drawing a .45 revolver with the other.

  The man stopped suddenly. He raised the revolver, aiming straight out from his right shoulder, angling the barrel slightly down, directly at Speares’s head.

  Speares was about to raise his hands when smoke and flames stabbed from the revolver’s bore.

  He didn’t hear the shot.

  Chapter 15

  That morning, Yakima made good time on the sorrel, alternately walking and loping. It helped that the terrain was relatively flat, with no high saddles to strain the horse’s tender frog.

  By a little after noon, however, the country became broken and rocky, and there were several rugged passes he and the horse had to negotiate, then a deep canyon to cross. Coming up out of the canyon, Yakima felt the horse balk slightly, favoring the right front hoof.

  Yakima slowed the sorrel to a walk. This was not country in which you wanted to be stranded afoot. He should have taken one of the vaqueros’ horses, the don’s wrath be damned.

  A half hour later, he rode up out of another, smaller canyon and reined the horse to a stop under a tall pine. He’d dismounted to check the hoof when he glanced westward, then did a slow double take.

  A pillar of black smoke rose on the other side of a low mesa.

  It could indicate a brush fire, or some Mexican campesino merely burning slash. Or Indians. If there were Apaches or Yaquis in the area, he wanted to know where they were exactly, and how many.

  He tied the horse to a pine and loosened the saddle cinch to give the sorrel a breather, then, keeping an eye on the smoke, shucked his Winchester from the boot. He rammed a fresh shell into the breech, off-cocked the hammer, grabbed the spyglass from a saddle pouch, and jogged west through low brush, zigzagging around rocks. He started up the mesa’s sloping, brushy wall at an angle, flushing a big jack he wouldn’t have minded roasting for supper and a couple of kangaroo rats.

  As he climbed the slope, he thought he could make out some faint, celebratory yowls, and he felt the hair prick on the back of his neck.

  Near the mesa’s crest, he crouched, keeping his head low, and climbed onto the top of the ridge. He crawled through galleta grass and sage until he had a good view of the canyon on the mesa’s other side. Stopping, he set the rifle down beside him, snaked the spyglass out from under his shirt, and trained it down the rocky slope before him.

  Trailing the smoke column to its source on the canyon floor, he found three big wagons tipped on their sides, spilling freight onto the sage and rocks around them. A couple of mules lay dead in the traces, while several others milled a distance away, trailing their reins. Two of the wagons were on fire, lying so close together that the black smoke rose as one column.

  Seven or eight Apaches in deerskin leggings and calico bandannas scurried around the spilled freight of the unburned wagon, kicking the crates and barrels, plunging knives into food sacks. One held a woman’s pink dress up against him, dancing and shrieking while two others watched him and howled, one bent forward at the waist and slapping his thigh.

  To the left of the Apache with the dress, another Apache was firing arrow after arrow into the bulky body of a dead freighter from three feet away.

  Yakima slid the spyglass right, toward the base of another ridge. The Apache horses, outfitted in rope halters and blanket saddles, their sides bright with war paint, stood in a cluster of low boulders. Two Apaches sat near the horses, nearly concealed by a rocky shelf rising behind them. Passing what looked like a bladder flask, they pointed, talked, and laughed, enjoying the theater being played out on the canyon floor before them.

  Yakima turned the spyglass to the horses again. A desert-bred Apache horse would cut across this devil’s playground like a hot knife through lard. It was asking for death, or worse, but the sorrel was going down, and an Indian pony had nearly twice as much sand and bottom as most white men’s horses.

  Keeping his head so low that his chin scraped the ground, he crabbed straight back the way he’d come, then jogged down the slope to the sorrel. When he’d removed the horse’s saddle and bridle, he swung the saddlebags over his shoulder and turned the horse toward open country.

  “You’re on your own, pal,” Yakima said, slapping the horse’s rump. “A vaquero or campesino will pick you up.”

  The horse ran off, snorting, hooves clipping stones.

  Leaving the saddle in the brush—most Apache horses wouldn’t tolerate a heavy stock saddle—he jogged north along the base of the mesa.

  Crawling on his hands and knees, he crossed the gap between ridges, so the howling, mewling Apaches wouldn’t see him, then scrambled up the butte on the other side. At the top, he stopped between two upthrusts of cracked granite. Straight down and about thirty yards out on the canyon floor, amid the boulders, the Apache horses stood swishing their tails and pricking their ears.

  The two Apache guards sat on separate rocks and boulders, still passing the bladder flask of tizwin.

  The only thing more sinister than raiding bronco Apaches was raiding drunk bronco Apaches.

  Yakima scanned the slope, figured a way down to the horses, and dropped again to his hands and knees. Holding the Yellowboy in his right hand, he crawled down the butte, slithering along the base of one of the stone scarps. He kept his head down but his eyes raised, watching the marauding Apaches.

  The raw alcohol should make the braves easier to take down.

  Setting his rifle and saddlebags against a low rock shelf, Yakima reached into his boot and plucked his Arkansas toothpick from its leather sheath. He hefted the six inches of razor-sharp steel, then glanced through the notch in the shelf. The braves were facing the burning mule train, one yawning widely while the other continued to chatter in his guttural tongue.

  Holding the blade tip straight up, Yakima cat-footed to the top of the rocky scarp and crouched atop the crest.

  He whipped the knife up to his shoulder, snapped it forward. It careened through the air, angling down the slope, flashing in the sunlight until the six-inch blade smacked into the right Apache’s back with a thump.

  At the same time, Yakima propelled himself off the scarp, diving, hands straight out in front of him. The stabbed Apache stood and yowled as Yakima closed his hands around the other brave’s neck and drove him straight forward, slamming him hard against the ground.

  The brave wriggled and lurched, but Yakima kept his hands pressed firmly to the young Indian’s neck and, holding his knees tightly against the brave’s back, gave a sudden, savage jerk. The neck snapped, and Yakima could feel the shattered bones grind beneath his hands.

  He turned to the wounded brave, who lay belly down five feet away, kicking feebly, one hand reaching toward the bone handle protruding from the center of his back. Liver-colored blood spurted out around the blade with each beat of the brave’s pierced heart.

  Suddenly, he lifted his head, his entire body jerking, sighed, and set his chin in the dust.

  Yakima reached over and pulled the toothpick from the brave’s back, wiped the blood on the Apache’s smoke-stained leggings, and peered through the brush toward the mule train. He saw little from this vantage but smoke and occasional brown figures in red bandannas moving around.

  Relief washed over him as he stood and turned toward the snorting, startled horses. He’d taken one step toward a muscular buckskin when a rifle boomed behind him.

  A bullet smacked a rock near his right ankle, the hot lead ricocheting wildly.

  Yakima whipped around, grabbing his .44 from its holst
er and thumbing back the hammer. An Apache crouched forty feet away, ejecting a spent shell from his Spencer’s breech, legs spread, a savage snarl bunching his square, flat, saddle brown face.

  As the Apache leveled the Spencer once more, Yakima whipped his Colt up and fired. The slug bored a hole through the Apache’s left shoulder.

  The Spencer boomed and blazed, but Yakima’s shot had jerked the Apache’s slug wide. As the brave screamed and staggered backward, trying to bring his rifle up, Yakima aimed and fired again, drilling a dark hole through the man’s calico blouse and punching him straight back and down behind a rock.