Hard Trail to Socorro (Bodie Kendrick - Bounty Hunter Book 1)

by Wayne D. Dundee

  All of that made it easier when the Indians finally slowed their horses and started to dismount.

  Kendrick was positioned at the high point of a triangle with Veronica and Ludek in place at lower points down to his right and left, respectively. This gave Veronica a lesser distance to shoot, kept Ludek in front of the bounty hunter and reasonably in his sights at all times. He might be taking the man at his word, but he wasn't fool enough to allow him any more leeway than was absolutely necessary.

  Kendrick’s orders had been explicit: "When the time is right, I’ll be the one to start the shooting. " Tense as they must be right now, Veronica and Ludek obediently held for him to kick it off.

  He fired the first shot as soon as the last dismounting Apache's moccasin touched the ground. The Winchester round punched the buck's Adam's apple out the back of his neck and knocked him flat in a mist of blood and gristle. Instantly, the reports of Veronica's Winchester and Ludek's twin six-shooters started in. Kendrick swung his rifle sights and rapid-fired two more slugs at another brave. The brave's chest exploded into ragged red and he toppled down.

  The fusillade of lead thrown down from the rocks raked the seven targets with merciless efficiency. Gunshots crashed and echoed, painted ponies reared and whinnied screamingly. Apaches fell and died.

  It was over with stunning suddenness. When the final shot had been fired and the last Apache lay still and bloody in the settling dust, the scene became enveloped in the kind of all-consuming silence that can only be heard on the desert.

  After several beats, Kendrick lowered his Winchester and began picking his way down off the side of the ridge. Ludek and Veronica did the same. The woman's face was set in a grim expression, her eyes brittle chips shining under a spill of damp, dusty hair that had lost most of its golden lustre. Ludek was sweating and wearing a broad, half-crazed smile.

  Without a word, Ludek began going to the fallen braves one by one and firing a single additional shot into their heads. He kept smiling the whole time.

  Veronica waited for Kendrick. "For God's sake, why is he doing that?" she asked.

  "Making sure none of them are playing possum," Kendrick said, never taking his eyes off Ludek. "More'n one unsuspecting soldier has been killed by a 'dead' Indian on a battlefield. Not a bad idea, but our boy Jory seems to be taking a pleasure in it that don't seem exactly healthy."

  "I ... I'd better go see to the soldiers."

  Kendrick let her go without looking at her. He walked toward Ludek, stepping over a couple downed Apaches, the Winchester swinging easy in his big hand. When Ludek turned from head-drilling the last brave, Kendrick was standing there.

  "I'll take those guns back now, Jory," he said calmly.

  Ludek was wearing his strange smile. His eyes dropped momentarily to the Winchester, then raised again to Kendrick's square, stern face. The smile didn't change. "Sure thing," he said, starting to unbuckle his gun belt. "Had myself a real swell time with them. Much obliged."

  * * * * *

  They rounded up the Indian ponies to make sure they didn't find their way back to the rest of Fire Shirt's band. Two of them had been seriously wounded by stray fire from the ambush. Kendrick took them out into the dunes, shot them and covered their corpses by collapsing fine white sand over them.

  The dead braves they piled against a wall of the gap, concealing their remains with sand and gravel and a couple fair-sized boulders they were able to roll into place.

  Doing this in the terrible heat of the middle of the day was grueling, exhausting work but it had to be done. Sooner or later the seven braves would be missed and there was no guarantee they had not left some kind of word or sign that would bring the other renegades in this general direction. Circling buzzards can be seen for miles.

  Callahan and Pearlman, clad now in shirts and moccasins from the dead and re-armed with their own weapons that had been taken from them, were fit enough to ride. They had five ponies to choose from and Kendrick would provide them with some grub and a full canteen. They could easily make it back to the Rio Grande and follow that to Las Cruces or until they were met by one of the outlying cavalry patrols. Hopefully, without running into any more Apaches.

  The problem was Thurmond. No way he could sit a horse, and attempting to somehow tie him in the saddle for the ride out would only amount to torturing him some more, let alone severely hampering the progress his comrades could make. He should already be dead, but the madness he had slipped into was in some way sustaining him. They had carried him into the shade where they fed him water and kept him wetted down while they cleaned up the ambush site, but none of it had brought him around any. He kept moaning and mumbling incoherently the whole while, experiencing and seeing things with his destroyed eyes that only existed inside his head now.

  Veronica continued to tend to him.

  Kendrick, Ludek, Callahan, and Pearlman stood at a distance, discussing the problem in low voices, casting uncomfortable glances in the direction of Thurmond whenever he would call out in his delirium.

  "All I know," Kendrick was saying, "is that we need to move away from this place. Now. As far and as fast as possible. We got our way to go, you soldier-boys got yours. If we're lucky and get a desert wind again tonight it will stir the sand smooth and not even an Apache will be able to tell what happened here or to track the way anybody went."

  "Only poor old Thurmond ain't got no luck left," Callahan pointed out.

  "He does if you got the grit to give him some," Ludek said.

  They all looked at the ground. Every one of them knew what Ludek meant, but none of them were ready to deal with it.

  "Ain't as if he's likely to come out of it, is it?" Pearlman said in his soft drawl. "Not the pure hell he's been through. When those buzzards got brave enough to come down before daybreak there ... I could hear them chewing between his screams, before our hollering and thrashing finally scared them off again ... Tied next to him, so helpless-feeling, figuring it was just a matter of time before the varmints got to me ... or the Apaches came back ... I thought I might go out of my own mind."

  "Get past it, kid," Kendrick advised him. "Don't think or speak of it no more than you have to, or it might end up claiming a piece of your mind yet."

  Thurmond called out, louder than usual, something about, "Ribbons of fire ... all pretty colors ... Watch out, boys, they're a-landin' on us! ... Ahhhoooww!"

  When he'd quieted back down, Callahan said, "Ain't like he's gone to some better place inside that poor burned head of his. He's suffering in his brain almost as bad as he did at the hands of the Apaches."

  Ludek spoke again. "Like I said, before—Was me, I know what I'd want somebody to do."

  They were silent again for several clock ticks, all staring sullenly at nothing.

  "Reckon it should fall to one of us ... me or Pearly ... to take care of it," Callahan said.

  "Yeah. Reckon it should," Kendrick agreed.

  Ludek made a gesture with his head, indicating Veronica. "What about her? She's been spending a lot of time with him. You think she'll understand the way it has to be?"

  "I don't know," Kendrick said, rubbing his jaw. "She's been through a lot these last past few days. She's plenty tough, but sometimes I think she gets close to the edge."

  "You should get her out of here, then," Trooper Pearlman said. "You-all have done plenty for us. You saved our lives, you've given us food and water. Like you said, now you got your way to go, we got ours. Even if she could handle it, I ... I don't think the lady should see what we're going to have to do."

  "Spoken like a true gentleman of the south," Ludek said with something of a sneer.

  "Stow it," Kendrick growled. "Our horses are through the gap, saddled and ready. We'll take two of the Indian ponies for pack animals. You can never have too many horses on the desert. Come on, the boy's right. It's time to put this place behind us."

  He allowed Ludek the dignity of being out of sight of the soldiers before he slapped the cuffs back on him. Th
ey said nothing special by way of goodbye to Callahan or Pearlman. Or Thurmond.

  Several minutes later, as they had begun to make their way north again through waves of blazing, stifling heat, the muffled report of a single gunshot tumbled hauntingly over the lava ridge.

  Veronica stiffened in her saddle. "What was that?"

  Without looking around, with no expression on his face, Kendrick said, "Callahan or Pearlman must have taken a shot at one of those buzzards ... Nothing to get excited about."

  Chapter 12: Desert Storm

  Traveling through the remainder of the day was a brutal, mind- and body-punishing ordeal. They passed the twenty-hour mark without sleep or proper rest. The adrenaline rush of the ambush had long since worn off.

  But Kendrick continued to push on. He had a bad feeling about the ambush site, about staying in its vicinity. He was driven to get far away from there, even if it meant taking a battering from the Jornada at its fiercest.

  Finally, with the air beginning to cool around dusk, he signaled a halt. They guided the horses deep into the shade of the ridge, slid wearily from their saddles, found wind-smoothed slabs of rock to collapse against.

  "We'll rest here," Kendrick said. "Take on some food and water, let the horses catch a breather. Figure on staying three hours, tops. Then we ride out the night."

  Veronica and Ludek both made sour faces, but they were too tired to argue.

  Kendrick stripped the horses, watered them from his hat, picketed them in a patch of galleta grass and extra-hobbled the Indian ponies to make sure they stayed put. While he was doing that, Veronica made a spread of jerky, the last of the biscuits, and stewed tomatoes. When Kendrick heard her rattling the coffee pot, he barked, "No fire!"

  They ate in silence, fell instantly into slumber. When three hours were up, Kendrick had them on the move again.

  The rest and the cooling air of evening had a combined revitalizing affect, but the arduousness of the day and the previous night were not so easily overcome. The horses plodded steadily under their loads but not without a detectable weariness to their gait. Veronica and Ludek sat slump-shouldered in their saddles, heads lolling drowsily on occasion. Only Kendrick remained sturdy in his posture, shoulders square, head up, eyes weather-reddened but alert, constantly on the sweep.

  As midnight closed, conditions made a dramatic shift.

  The night wind started to pick up. Not the steady, stinging, amplified breeze of the night before, but rather a howling, gusting, slamming blast that rolled straight out of the north. Visibility instantly went to zero, the silver wash of moon- and starlight obscured by tumbling columns of dust. The bits of dirt and grains of sand that made up these dust formations stabbed endlessly into eyes and flesh like a million tiny knifepoint. The horses began to act up from nervousness and discomfort.

  Kendrick reined his chestnut and motioned Ludek and Veronica to draw abreast of him. Leaning out in his saddle, he pulled the handcuffed Ludek's neck bandana high up over his nose, knotted it tightly into place there, tugged his hat down low over his eyes. He instructed Veronica to fix herself similarly, then did likewise for himself.

  "As you can see," he shouted above the howl of the wind, "we're in for a hell of a blow. Could last all night, could blow itself out in a few minutes or an hour." He swung down from his saddle and pulled the lariat coiled at the fork down with him, began to shake it out. "I'm going to run a line, hook us together at our saddle horns so we don't get scattered. I'll shorten and double-secure the line on the pack ponies, too, make damn sure we don't lose them."

  "You're not going to try to go on in this, are you?" Veronica demanded.

  "Damn right I am," Kendrick shouted back. "I didn't push us as hard as I did all afternoon to let a little wind rob us of traveling the cool hours of the night."

  "You're crazy!" Ludek said. "Like I said all along, you won't be satisfied till you find a way to get us buried in this damn desert."

  "Then you should be happy I'm going to prove you right. So shut up. As long as we keep close to the ridge for bearings and don't get separated from each other, we can lick this thing."

  Kendrick knotted one end of the lariat around his own saddle horn, began playing it out, stepping toward Ludek's mount, who was already rein-tied to the front rigging of the bounty hunter's saddle. The wind howled wildly around them. Just as Kendrick was reaching up to loop the lariat around Ludek's saddle horn, the fugitive braced himself in one stirrup and swung his left leg in a sudden, vicious kick. His boot heel caught Kendrick solidly on the side of the jaw and knocked him sprawling in a tangle of lariat.

  "Kendrick!" Veronica cried.

  Swinging the same leg he had downed the big bounty hunter with, Ludek kicked hard at the reins fastening his horse to the chestnut. The leathers were merely knotted together and tucked through the ring of the saddle's front rigging, meant to be a simple lead, never really a restraint. The knotted ends jerked free with one kick. "Heeyah!" Ludek urged his horse then, digging his left foot back into its stirrup and spurring the animal in both flanks. "Heeyah, get a move on!" The poor beast, already exhausted, confused and frightened by the storm, wheeled in the teeth of the wind started away with a jump.

  Kendrick came off the ground, cursing and spitting bloody dust. His eyes were watery and stinging, but he could make out the blurred shape of Ludek's horse as it wheeled about. Above the rush of the storm, he could hear the commands of its rider. He made a desperate running jump at the horse-shape, fingers clawed like grappling hooks. With one hand he caught the saddle cantle, the other clutched a fistful of leather ties trailing down over the skirt. But the momentum of the springing horse was too great, even for the big man. He was yanked immediately off his feet. Somehow, though, he managed to maintain his precarious holds.

  Ludek's gray gelding, more terrified than ever now, tried to run as fast as it could, hoping to dislodge both of the unpleasant men who were kicking and yanking at it. Kendrick held on, his body dragged poundingly over the rugged terrain. Ludek, fighting to stay balanced in the saddle with his wrists chained behind him, alternately spurred the fleeing horse and kicked at the stubborn bastard who was refusing to let him go. Kendrick tried unsuccessfully to grab Ludek's leg whenever he kicked at him. The spur raked him wickedly. He could feel his grip slipping as the ground hammered him from underneath, knew he wouldn't be able to hold on much longer.

  Before it came to that, however, the gelding plunged unexpectedly into a deep, powdery sand dune. The horse's forward motion slowed suddenly, the hungry sand trapping its churning legs. The horse's own frantic struggles and the lop-sided weight caused by Kendrick effectively knocked the animal to one side and toppled it over. Ludek kicked free of his stirrups and lunged to keep from being pinned. Kendrick barely had time to roll out of the way to escape getting crushed by the gray's falling hindquarters.

  The two men came to their feet, up past their boot tops in the sucking gypsum sand. Knowing Kendrick had to be weakened by the blow to the jaw and from being horse-dragged for several hundred yards, Ludek figured he might still have a chance to make good his escape if he could stomp the manhunter into unconsciousness. Plus, he would now have a chance for the handcuff key—something his initial desperate flight had never provided for.

  He closed on Kendrick, kicking out agilely, trying to cut the big man off at the knees. Kendrick was indeed groggy from the pummeling he'd taken, his reflexes far slower than normal. Ludek's heavy boot crashed against the side of his leg, knocking him off balance. He dropped to his knees. Ludek leaned hard into the slashing wind and kicked out again, slamming his foot to the center of the bounty hunter's broad chest. Kendrick flopped back on his shoulders, emitting a loud grunt as the breath was driven from him.

  Ludek staggered momentarily, buffeted by the wind. Then he got himself braced again and moved forward to stomp the fallen man. Kendrick rolled his shoulders at the last second, dodging the crushing boot aimed at his face, then rolled back and hammered a doubled fist straight into
Ludek's crotch. The prisoner howled in pain and sank to his knees.

  Kendrick struggled to his feet, sucking hard to regain his breath, choking on mouthfuls of wind-driven grit. He dragged Ludek up by his shirtfront, measured him, then knocked him back down with a hard right hook followed by a looping left uppercut.

  Ludek stayed down. The fight was out of him. His escape attempt was finished.

  Kendrick stood bent at the waist for several beats, hands braced on knees, fighting to get his breathing under control. The storm continued to slam everything in its path. The gelding had regained its footing and bolted away.

  Kendrick finally straightened and drew his Colt. He grabbed a handful of Ludek's shirt and dragged him up again. "On your feet, you sonofabitch," he growled. "One more funny move, I'll put a slug in you."

  Ludek lurched drunkenly in his grasp. He hung his head and attempted no reply.

  Eyes squinted against the relentless wind, Kendrick looked around, trying to get his bearings. Visibility remained zero. Being dragged by the horse, tumbling this way and that during the fight ... with gut-thudding suddenness, he realized he had no idea how far they'd gone or where they now stood in regard to the ridge, or Veronica. If the gelding were still at hand it might have some instinctive sense, even in the storm, of where the other horses were. But that was futile wishing, as the gray was long gone.