“Good morning, Al,” Crane greeted the old scout, then walked off across the compound.
Al Sieber hobbled into the store, using the surviving crutch and what ever other support was available along the way, until he reached a half barrel and sat. Shana refrained from trying to assist him.
“I don’t blame you,” she said, carrying in the remnants of the broken crutch. “Betting as if it were some game. It’s uncivilized.”
“It’s nature’s game,” Sieber said slowly. “And no, it ain’t civilized. Never has been.”
“What do you mean?” Shana leaned back on the counter.
“I mean it’s nature’s bible. Since the beginning there’s been the hunter and the hunted. But nature provides a difference between the two. Trouble is—there ain’t no difference between those two.”
“Of course there is.”
Now she leaned forward. “Not the way I mean,” said Sieber. “In nature’s contest the hunted is usually small, fast, and hard to spot. The hunter’s strong and equipped with tooth and claw. But those two got the same equipment.”
“Oh, Al,” she sighed, “if he hadn’t gone alone, maybe...”
“No.” Sieber shook his head. “That’s the way to do it. The Kid can spot a flea in a herd of buffalo. Alone’s the way. I’ve gone over it a thousand times. The way I’d do it if I was either one, the hunter or the hunted.”
The old scout had silently played out the pursuit over and over to himself. Now for the first time he gave expression to his thoughts. “The hunted’s got things in his favor: space, places to hide, room to get lost—every coulee, every draw, every rise, every depression, every turn, tree, and rock gives him cover. And if the hunter misses him once, he might never find him again.
“But even the hunted has to eat. Food is where you find it, and the Kid knows where—and how. Quail, rabbit, field mice, maybe a prairie dog in the desert.
“And in the mountain flanks, acorns—and there’s Spanish bayonet. The Kid might roast some mescal—tastes good, but you can smell it down-wind. If the going gets really tough, there’s the gum of the mesquite or the inner bark of pine. So the Kid could eat, all right. And so could Tom. He knows every trick of the Apache.
“A hunter like Tom Horn who’s a patient man has time on his side. And Horn knows how to see without being seen. He can read every track on the trail, mark on the grass, scratch on the bark of a tree, and he can tell nearly to the hour how long ago it was made…and by what.
“Did the animal Tom spotted on the trail see what Tom’s looking for? Well, there’s no way of telling that. But sooner or later even an animal smart as the Kid has to leave something behind. And sooner or later Horn’ll find it—the link that says, ‘What you’re looking for passed this way.’
“If the Kid’s still got the squaw with him, it’ll be that much easier for Tom.
“So chances are, Horn’ll find the Kid. But finding him’s one thing. Up to now the Kid doesn’t know Horn is dogging him. When he finds out, there’s no way of telling the outcome. They both got the same equipment…and every living thing wants to go on living. That’s the first commandment of nature’s bible.”
Chapter Thirty-three
It was as Sieber described to Shana Ryan—the Kid and Suwan always on the move, with the Apache Kid making sure that no evidence of their existence was left behind. He covered the ashes of their camps and even buried the waste from their bodies.
On horse back, the Kid moved in the middle of every stream, hunched in the cavity of a rock as the rain of a summer storm cascaded off the crag, doubled back across the forlorn desert, then headed into the high country, where he could survey the landscape from every approach.
Suwan knew what would befall her when the Kid made camp each night. Her buckskin dress had become a tattered rag. Somehow she clung to the faintest of hopes, an unreasonable hope, that Horn had heard about Taw-Nee-Mara and Pedro and would decide to come after their son’s killer. She had little illusion about her own worth to him, but Horn might come after the baby’s murderer.
Even if he did come, and as good a tracker as Suwan knew Horn to be, the Kid was making sure no tracker could follow.
Wherever possible, when she knew the Kid was occupied, Suwan would tear a tiny fragment from her dress and leave it, almost invisible, in the grass, on the bank of a stream, or in the crevice of a rock that pointed to the high country.
But the Kid’s one mistake, one careless moment, had come early, when Suwan flung the rattler at his face.
It took time, crossing, crisscrossing, and doubling back, but as Sieber had said, Horn finally found a sign.
Tom Horn picked it up—the ejected shell from the Apache Kid’s rifle. He walked a few steps and stopped, his foot near the dried-up head of a snake. Nearby, he spotted the rest of the rattler’s remains. That was the beginning.
They were in the high country when the Apache Kid looked back and saw her fall exhausted against a rock and then onto the hard ground. He knew that he would have to get himself another companion. This one was of no further ser vice. She was now a handicap, a useless burden.
The Apache Kid dismounted. He began to walk toward her, then paused and took a couple of steps in the opposite direction. He stopped at the edge of the tabletop precipice that plunged into a bottomless canyon.
He stood at the brink of the escarpment and looked down at the slash of jagged canyon, then back at the crumpled form of the squaw. He started toward her.
Suwan was bruised, barely conscious, and without strength as the Kid reached down, took hold of her arm, and dragged her toward the rim of the plateau.
At the lip of the precipice the Kid dropped her limp arm. As he moved his foot under the flesh of her belly to kick her over the cliff, the gunshot thundered, its echo reverberated, and the bullet burned through the husk of the Kid’s leg.
The Apache Kid wheeled and went for his holster but heard the click as Horn cocked the hammer of his Colt and pointed it at the Kid’s heart. There was a moment of silence as the hunter and the hunted faced each other.
“You got careless,” Horn said finally.
“Yeah.” It was the first word the Kid had spoken since he left Fort Bayard. And for the first time the expression in his eyes changed, softened. His eyes, face, and attitude were almost like those of the easygoing, happy kid that Horn once called brother. The Kid nodded toward Suwan and smiled. “I shoulda shed her sometime back.”
The Kid wiped the blood from his leg—slowly, to reassure Tom Horn that he was not making a play for his gun.
“What the hell did you go and do that for?” the Kid asked as he held up his stained hand.
“Unbuckle the gunbelt,” was Horn’s answer. “Left hand.”
The Kid’s smile diminished a trace as he un-buckled the gunbelt and let it drop near the edge of the cliff.
“Tom,” he said, “I ain’t ever seen your hand…unsteady before.”
Horn’s hand was unmistakably trembling—slightly, but trembling. He was not the cold complete hunter now. He was human. So was the Apache Kid, even if he had killed and pillaged like a wild animal. Horn looked at Suwan as she stirred.
“She was ’most dead,” the Kid shrugged. “I was just gonna put her out of her misery.”
Suwan, a gaunt, almost unrecognizable relic of the glistening-skinned, gleaming-eyed beauty she had been, managed to raise her bruised face and look toward Horn.
“Suwan…” Horn said.
“You know this one?” The Apache Kid was surprised and at the same time disappointed.
“And I knew our son, too,” Horn answered.
“Awww hell, Tom ,” the Kid shrugged, “I didn’t know.” Then he looked into Horn’s haunted eyes and smiled, “But that don’t exactly cover you with glory either.”
“No,” said Horn hoarsely. “It don’t.”
“What are you gonna do, Tom?” The Kid thought he was gaining the advantage. “Take me all the way back to Bowie to stand trial?”
“I�
�m not sure I could get you back.”
“Neither am I,” the Kid smiled.
“So you’re standing trial right here, Kid,” said Horn. “I’m the judge and jury…”
“Awww , come on, Tom.”
“And,” Horn finished, “the executioner.”
“You mean that?”
“I’m gonna kill you, Kid.”
“Are you?” The Apache Kid wiped more of the blood from his leg. “You had the chance. Why didn’t you do it?”
“I wanted you to know it was me.”
With his left hand the Kid tore the thong from his neck and held out the eagle claw.
“What about this…brother?” The Kid hollered. “Remember Sibi’s Boys?”
“You broke that to a finish when you shot him.”
“I could’ve killed him, and you know it. But I didn’t.”
“You’ve killed everything.”
“I saved your hide more than once, brother. It was Sieber’s leg or my life, and you know that, too.”
“I know that you don’t deserve to live, not after killing innocent men and after what you’ve done to her”—Horn looked at Suwan then back to the Kid—“and others like her.”
“I needed…company,” the Kid smiled. “You know how it is.”
“No, I don’t. Not like that. And there was a time you wouldn’t have either. You killed everything that stood in the way—”
“The way to white man’s jail and justice! It was them or me! Not much of a choice when you happen to be me. Sieber said it: ‘Every living thing wants to go on living.’ Well, I’d rather live a month out here than twenty years in Yuma.”
“You’re going to die out here,” Horn said, not wanting to hear any more, not wanting to take the chance, remote as it was, that the Kid might build a defense for his indefensible, reprehensible crimes. As if to reinforce his own resolve, Horn looked again at Suwan, the incontrovertible victim of the Apache Kid’s inhumanity.
She lifted her blurry eyes and realized that her last faint, hopeless hope had somehow material -ized—that Taw-Nee-Mara’s father had followed and stood with gun in hand pointed at the murderer of their son.
“Tow-Kee-Low.” With lips parched and cracked, she hoarsely whispered Horn’s Apache name.
Still covering the Apache Kid with his Colt, Horn walked to the Kid’s horse, unlooped the canteen, and went to the girl. The Kid didn’t move, only watched.
Horn unscrewed the cap of the canteen with the gun still pointed at the Kid. Suwan whispered something. Horn leaned closer to hear. Suwan tried to smile and muttered that she knew he would come—and then it happened.
The Kid leaped like a cougar and crashed into Horn, knocking the Colt loose from his hand and catapulting the canteen over the edge of the cliff.
This, too, was as Sieber had prophesied—a conflict between two animals provided by nature with the same equipment. It was brutal, bloody, beastly, with sounds of broken flesh and cartilage, hammering knuckles, ripping elbows, exploding kicks, and crushing head butts.
It was not a fight, but a struggle to maim, to hurt, to survive. It was two primitive brutes peeling away the layers of civilization, repudiating all rules, and reverting to the earth’s dawn, when the fundamental instinct was to kill and avoid being killed.
They fell tangled to the ground, their battered faces an inch apart, eye to eye, with every bone, fiber, and muscle straining.
Suwan summoned a last ounce of ebbing strength and inched her hand closer to the Kid’s discarded gunbelt. Her quivering fingers closed around the curve of the gun butt and withdrew it from the holster.
The Kid was gaining advantage over Horn. He saw the gun and the movement of Suwan’s arm. The Kid’s fist bolted into Horn’s chin, and he leaped feet first toward the gun aimed at him. Both feet slammed into Suwan, hurtling her and the gun over the precipice and down the rock wall of the canyon.
At the same moment Horn was upon the Kid, twisting him and smashing a fist full of strength into the Indian’s face while losing his own balance. The impact knocked the Kid over the edge, but he managed a desperate hold on Horn’s hand, pulling him onto the ground and almost over the side.
The Kid dangled on the face of the cliff, still clinging to Horn’s hand, which was now clamped around the Kid’s wrist, with death beckoning below.
The Apache Kid’s face was a ghostly, broken basilisk, a garish mask. He said nothing, but his eyes pleaded, maybe even prayed, as they stared up at Horn, who looked into the face of his “brother.”
The Kid could hold on no longer. But Horn’s grip was still firm.
The Apache Kid smiled—maybe because he thought Horn would pull him up, maybe because he knew it was all over and this was his last defiance.
Tom Horn let go and watched the Apache Kid fall, twisted and torn and smashed into eternity.
For a long time Horn looked down through eyes scarred by memories. He relived the times of triumph and tears, laughter and disappointment, serenity and torment, rapture and regret with both Suwan and the Apache Kid. Then Tom Horn rolled over on the top of the plateau, and his face rested near the broken thong with the Apache Kid’s eagle claw.
Chapter Thirty-four
Storm clouds swirled across the night’s blue awning above Fort Bowie and pressed down past the towering peaks onto the mass of slanting earth below. Thunder roared, reinforcing the threat, and the warning became a reality with lightning and then rain, warm rain driven by the wind onto the face of the land. The rain pelted the canyon cliffs and ridges, then the flatlands and basins, and flowed onto the dark, thirsty desert.
But General Nelson Appleton Miles would not let a little wetness dampen the evening’s celebration in honor of his wife’s recent arrival at Fort Bowie. He had planned a party, and General Miles seldom deviated from plan.
Mary Miles was a handsome woman, large boned but with patrician features and with more passion than Miles had expected before they married. And always after their long separations, she ardently reminded him what a hot-blooded woman he had married. Miles looked forward to the physical facet of their relationship and just as eagerly to another aspect of their alliance: Mary was his best and certainly most appreciative audience and admirer. She believed what he believed—that Nelson Appleton Miles was the finest, brightest, most capable officer in uniform and that one day, deservedly so, he would become Commander in Chief of the United States Army. But they both knew that his rise to command would depend on political as well as military campaigns.
Years ago, when Crook won his brigadier’s star, Miles had been bitter with jealousy, and so was Mary. Miles wrote Sherman that the promotion should have gone to him, as did Mary.
Miles always believed that the fraternity of West Pointers invariably stuck together and looked upon him as an alien. Miles, in his early twenties, had been a dry-goods clerk when the Civil War erupted. He purchased a commission and discovered his life’s profession. The army suited him better than clerking and provided greater opportunities for advancement, especially when he made Mary his life’s partner.
Through the years she gloried in watching and listening to him, and he reveled in posturing and posing in front of her and relating all the past triumphs and predicting all the future victories that would be emblazoned on the Miles escutcheon.
When the faithful General was absent, he wrote long, detailed letters almost every night to remind her of his ardor and ambition. Mary needed no reminder of either, but she read, reread, and treasured the letters and had them bound into a book for handy reference to review when he was on campaign.
But now they were together, and both had much to celebrate. Word was already circulating in Washington, disseminated by well-placed proponents and relatives, that General Miles had succeeded at long last where all the other generals had failed, in resolving the Apache problem. He had succeeded from both a military and an administrative point of view. There was even talk of nominating him as a vice-presidential candidate. Neither the general
nor his wife found objection to that office, for the time being. Of course, Washington hadn’t heard about a lone Indian called the Apache Kid or a scout named Tom Horn. Secretly Miles hoped that he would never hear from or about either of them again.
While a dozen couples danced, the orchestra in the gaily decorated hall at Fort Bowie played waltzes occasionally punctuated by thuds of thunder and cracks of lightning against the per sis tent accompaniment of drumming rain.
All the officers were resplendent in their smartest uniforms, and the ladies featured their finest gowns. Most resplendent was General Miles, at the head of a reception line near the door. At least he was modest enough to draw the line at wearing his gold sword. Mrs. Miles, handsome and adoring as ever, smiled and nodded next to her Napoleon.
Al Sieber sat across the room with his crutches between his legs. Van Zeider was at the punch bowl, as was Doctor Jedadiah Barnes in a laundered shirt and a semiwrinkled black suit, and next to him stood Nurse Thatcher, straight as a scalpel in a starched white gown. She sipped blood-red punch from a crystal glass.
“Go ahead,” Barnes commented to her. “Drink it and you’ll look just like a thermometer.”
“You can go to hell, you old beaver,” she replied. “I’m not on duty to night.”
Those still entering were drenched from the unrelenting downpour. The men’s slickers and the ladies’ coats were taken by Sergeant Cahill and Trooper Dawson just inside the door as the arrivals proceeded toward General and Mrs. Miles.
Captain Crane and Shana Ryan entered together, offered their wet outerwear to the soldiers, and advanced to be received by their hosts.
“Miss Ryan,” the General smiled, “I’d like to present my wife.”
“Welcome to Fort Bowie, Mrs. Miles.” Shana also smiled.
“Thank you, Miss Ryan,” Mrs. Miles replied, and added to all the smiles.
The General motioned. “Mary, you know Captain Crane. He’s been of some help here.”
Crane nodded courteously, acknowledging Miles’s generous accolade.
Tom Horn And The Apache Kid Page 16
