Ralph Compton Doomsday Rider

by Ralph Compton

  Fletcher quickly walked outside, stepped over the recumbent form of one of the soldiers, and swung into the saddle, Moore doing the same thing beside him.

  “They overlooked your Winchester on account of how it was still in your saddle boot,” Moore said, his breath steaming, eyes tearing from the cold as the snow stung his face. He handed Fletcher two Colts. “And I brung you these. Got them off them two soldier boys.”

  Fletcher shoved a gun into both pockets of his mackinaw and Moore nodded his approval. “Now we just ease on out of here real slow and easy, like we owned the place. If we ride out fast we’ll attract the attention of the pickets, at least them who haven’t as yet froze to death.”

  Fletcher and Moore rode out of Fort Apache without a single head turning in their direction.

  An hour later they were riding among the hills and canyons along the northern bank of the Salt River, the craggy slopes of the Mogollon Rim to their right lost in darkness and swirling snow.

  The riders crossed the partially frozen Dead Coyote Creek, then climbed a low hill crested by manzanita, mesquite and scrub oak, some of the mesquite topping thirty feet in height.

  Moore reined up among the trees and tilted his head toward a sky he could not see, the low, black clouds lost in the darkness.

  “Fletcher, we got to take shelter,” he said, taking off the fur glove on his right hand, blowing into numb, curved fingers. “It’s getting colder, and a man could freeze out here afore morning.”

  Fletcher nodded, his face troubled. “What about Crook? Won’t he have discovered we’re gone by now?”

  Moore peered at Fletcher through the gloom and fluttering snow and shook his head. “Fletcher, I never took ye for a pilgrim. Listen, Crook’s here to fight Apaches, and about now he’s saying to himself, ‘Well, the hell with him.’ Trust me: He don’t care a hill of beans about recapturing you so long as he’s got a war on his hands. And secondly, ain’t nobody in their right minds will be riding out on a night like this except poor, fugitive creatures like us.”

  “Moore, I’m real sorry I got you into this,” Fletcher said, meaning it sincerely.

  “You didn’t get me into anything. I done it my ownself and I’d do it again.”

  The old mountain man pulled on his glove and inclined his head to the north. “We come down off this hill and head thataway for maybe three miles. We’ll reach another hill, kinda like this one, but there’s a cave among a stand of sycamore and ash where we can shelter and build a fire.”

  Moore kneed his horse forward, then turned his head in Fletcher’s direction. “I told you wrong. It ain’t exactly a cave, but I reckon it will have to do.”

  They rode off the hill and back onto the flat, their horses’ hooves crunching on snow covered by a brittle frosting of ice. Above them the crescent moon horned the clouds aside for a few moments, revealing a patch of purple sky. But this was soon lost as darkness again covered the moon and the sky was as black as before. Falling snow was slanting into Fletcher and Moore, whitening the mountain man’s beard and eyebrows, adding winter’s aging to Fletcher’s mustache.

  Moore reined up his horse. “Not far,” he said, his breath forming a drifting gray haze around his face. “The hill is right ahead.”

  Fletcher peered into the gloom and made out a steep-sided butte. Trees covered its slope, and shadows rising from the plain shaded the narrow arroyo on its southern flank into an inverted vee of blackness. The rise looked cold, stark, and unwelcoming in the distance, just another hill to climb in a harsh and unforgiving land where there were many such.

  Moore led the way and Fletcher followed, the collar of his sheepskin pulled up around his frozen face. His horse was tired, drained by cold and distance and badly in need of rest. Yet when he and Moore reached the base of the hill and began to climb, the big stud suddenly found the energy to rear, head twisting violently this way and that as he fought the jangling bit.

  Taken by surprise and only half-awake, Fletcher tumbled backward out of the saddle and landed in the snow on his back, the reins still in his hand.

  He lay stunned for a few moments, then jumped to his feet and fought the frightened horse as it tried to turn and run. Finally the stud quietened down, though it was trembling hard, its eyes rolling white, and Fletcher looked up to see Moore, still mounted, looming above him.

  “Cougar,” the old mountain man whispered. He put a gloved finger to his lips, hushing Fletcher into silence. “Just up ahead.”

  Moore rode a mustang, mountain bred and well used to the smell of cougar, and its calm presence seemed to steady Fletcher’s stud.

  The mountain man nodded in the direction of their back trail, silently indicating that they should go back the way they’d come.

  Fletcher led his horse to an outcropping of granite about a hundred yards from the base of the hill and looped the reins around a dead, stunted spruce gnarling out of a cleft in the rock.

  Moore swung out of the saddle and left his mustang, reins trailing, close to the stud. He pulled his Winchester from the boot, and Fletcher did the same.

  “We don’t have time to ride around that cat if he’s got a mind to stay on the hill,” he said. “Let’s go see if we can scare him off.”

  The two men walked across the flat, rifles at a high port and ready, and again found themselves at the base of the hill.

  “Damn, it’s as dark as the inside of a buffalo,” Moore said into Fletcher’s ear as they slowly climbed the slope. “Step easy. I’ve never known a cougar to attack a human afore, but there’s always a first time.” The old man pointed to the distant Mogollon Rim with the muzzle of his rifle. “The deer are climbing higher on account of the snow and too many sodjers and Apaches down here shooting at them. That cat could be almighty hungry, an’ if he’s hungry he’ll be testy.”

  The men climbed, doing their best to keep their footfalls quiet, red-rimmed eyes trying to penetrate the snow-flecked gloom around them. Above lay the stand of sycamores, dark spruce growing among them, and a few scant and scraggy cedars struggling to live on the thin soil.

  Fletcher misjudged his step over a fallen tree limb, slipped on a patch of ice, and fell flat on his face. He lay there still, the breath knocked out of him, the rowel of his right spur spinning and squeaking.

  Stepping beside him, Moore extended a hand and Fletcher took it, and the big mountain man hauled him effortlessly to his feet. Fletcher, breathing hard and cussing a blue streak, rubbed snow from his mustache as Moore raised a disapproving eyebrow.

  “Them Texas boots and jinglebobs ain’t exactly what a man should be wearing when he’s hunting lion,” he said. “No offense, mind, but I just thought you should know.”

  A sharp reply didn’t immediately spring into Fletcher’s head, and he contented himself with picking up his rifle and cussing some more, especially at the snow that had somehow worked its way deep inside the waistband of his pants.

  “Well,” Moore said, “if that cat was hanging around, he’s sure enough to hell and gone by this time. Fletcher, you made more noise than a Missouri mule in a tin barn.”

  “Sorry,” Fletcher said, knowing how inadequate it sounded, but, annoyed with himself as he was, deciding to try no better.

  Moore shrugged, his long hair blowing in the wind. “No harm done. But let’s just go make sure all that cussin’ and fussin’ really did drive the lion away.”

  They found the cat higher up the hill, lying beside a deer trail. He’d been dead for hours.

  The cougar’s jaws were drawn back in a defiant snarl as he’d fought the inevitable destiny of his dying to the bitter end. He’d been very old and his teeth were worn almost to the gum and he’d starved to death. But his eyes still blazed with fire, and soon he’d fade away and become one with the land and give it strength.

  Fletcher and Moore stood for a few moments, looking down at the cat, wondering at his great size and his determination to live. Then they dragged him away from the trail into a clump of mescal, and there they l
eft him, returning a few minutes later for their horses.

  The cave Moore had talked about was just a shallow depression at the base of a rocky outcropping jutting like the prow of a ship from the side of the hill. No more than six feet deep and twice that wide, the cave nevertheless provided shelter from the snow and the worst of the wind, and with a fire it could become fairly snug.

  After Moore stripped the saddles and blanket rolls from the horses, Fletcher staked them out on a patch of grass that grew in a small clearing among the trees and was relatively free of snow.

  By the time he returned, Moore, with a mountain man’s expertise, had coaxed a small pile of dead leaves and twigs into flame and was already cramming snow into a battered pot for coffee.

  The old man, who seemed to be prepared for any eventuality, produced a small slab of salt pork and cut some thick slices, ready for broiling.

  After they’d eaten and passed their only coffee cup back and forth, Fletcher built a smoke, enjoying his blankets, the taste of tobacco, and the closeness and warmth of the guttering fire.

  It was still snowing, wide flakes swirling in the wind, and the air smelled of sage and pine and of the thin pane ice along the creekbanks. And it smelled of winter and of mountains and of high, secret places and of bears and wolves and the cry of the hawk.

  Moore lit his pipe and studied Fletcher in silence for a few moments, then he said, “Man feels like talking, he should talk. Good for a man to tell his story, get things off his chest.” He shrugged, giving Fletcher a way out. “Maybe it is.”

  It was a way of asking without asking, and Fletcher recognized it as such.

  “How do I tell the story, Charlie?” Fletcher asked. “Some of it I understand; much of it I don’t.”

  “Seems to me,” Moore said, his pipe clenched in teeth that were still white and strong despite his years, “a man starts at the beginning and takes it from there. That is, if he feels so inclined and ain’t being pushed to it none.”

  “You’re not pushing me, Charlie,” Fletcher said, smiling. “Well, not hardly.”

  And he told his story.

  Fletcher began with his arrest for the murder of the Wyoming sheriff, his meeting with Falcon Stark, and the senator’s plea to find his daughter. He described his journey from Lexington to Arizona by steamship, train, and horse, his brush with Apaches, and finally his arrest by General Crook.

  “And the rest you know,” Fletcher wound it up, “and I haven’t jawed so much since the time I talked the loincloth off a wooden Indian.”

  “Like I said, sometimes it’s good for a man to talk,” Moore said, thumbing a match into flame, relighting the pipe that had gone cold during Fletcher’s story.

  “Well, what do you think?” Fletcher asked after a few minutes of silence had passed and Moore showed no inclination to speak.

  “About what?”

  “Hell, Charlie, about what I just told you.”

  “Oh, that.”

  “Yeah, that.”

  “Well, for one thing, I wish you’d spoke to me about Estelle Stark afore you went barging in to see ol’ Georgie Crook.”

  “How come?”

  “Because I know where she’s at.”

  Eight

  Fletcher sat up in surprise. “You know where she is?”

  Moore nodded. “I surely reckon I do.”

  The old mountain man moved in his blankets, easing his hips into a more comfortable position. “About a week ago I was down on t’other side of the Salt a fair piece south of here and I got to talking to a feller by the name of Indian Jake Hooper. Jake trades with the Apache out of a horse and wagon and he’s got hisself a Tonto wife, a passel of breed kids, and a bad case of the piles. On account of that particular misery, he does a lot of standin’, you understand.”

  “What did he tell you, Charlie?” Fletcher asked, prodding, impatience riding him.

  “I’m getting to that. Well, anyhoo, Jake says the Apaches have been telling him about a white woman with yeller hair who’s been seen at the old Indian cliff ruins in the black basin timber country south of here. They say she’s got a man with her, a young feller with a beard and long hair like mine and he dresses in a white robe most of the time.”

  “That sounds like Estelle,” Fletcher said. “The man in the white robe calls himself the Chosen One, and he claims he’s on a mission from God to convert the Apache.”

  “So I heard tell,” Charlie said. “Only the Apache, riled up the way they are, don’t much feel like being converted right now, so this Chosen One feller could find himself staked out on an anthill, maybe a piece sooner than later. I reckon the only reason the young bucks haven’t done it so far is because they think he’s plumb loco, and Apaches tend to steer clear of crazy folks.”

  Moore laid his cold pipe on the ground beside him, close to hand. “I was told by Indian Jake that, crazy or no, the Chosen One is attracting a lot of people to them ruins, men and women and a passel of young ‘uns. And there’s one thing more.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The yeller-haired woman, if she is Estelle Stark, is out to here,” Charlie said, sticking his cupped hand in front of his belly.

  “You mean she’s pregnant?”

  Moore nodded. “Either that or she’s eatin’ too many of them Mexican beans.”

  “Listen, Charlie, this is important,” Fletcher said, ignoring Moore’s grin. “How pregnant would a gal have to be to get that size?”

  “Buck, a woman can’t be a little bit pregnant. I mean, she either is or she ain’t.”

  “I know that, but how many months?”

  Moore thought for a while, then said, “Well, I’ve been married maybe seven times to Indian women, and thinking back on it now, for a woman to be out to here”—he put his hand in front of his belly—“maybe five, six months.”

  “Then she was already expecting the Chosen One’s baby when she fled Washington,” Fletcher said. “That’s the scandal Falcon Stark is afraid of! He’s terrified the voters and his own party will discover that his daughter has a bastard child—to a crazy, doomsday prophet, of all people.”

  “Could be,” Moore allowed. “But why would Stark send you down here to find her?”

  Fletcher shook his head. “He never wanted me to find Estelle. Charlie, I think he aims to kill her and then have the murder pinned on me. It would be real convenient to have a dangerous escaped convict like Buck Fletcher take the blame.”

  “You mean you was set up all down the line?”

  “I mean just that, and getting railroaded into prison for the killing of that Wyoming sheriff was only the first of it.”

  Moore whistled between his teeth. “That Falcon Stark feller leaves nothing to chance, does he?”

  Fletcher rolled another smoke, taking his time to collect his thoughts. He lit his cigarette with a brand from the fire, then said, “That could explain why Scarlet Hays and his boys are in the Territory. Maybe Stark has paid Hays to kill Estelle and then pin it on me, or better still from his point of view, kill me as well.”

  Moore thought this over, then said, “I’d say Senator Stark cuts a mighty wide path in Washington and he has a lot of power and influence. Do you think maybe George Crook is in on it?”

  “Could be, Charlie,” Fletcher replied. “He was pretty quick to believe Stark’s story and dismiss mine.”

  “Well, the way I see it, his plan could still unravel. All you have to do is get the warden to speak up for you and them sodjer boys that escorted you to Lexington.”

  Fletcher shook his head. “The warden is a political animal and he’ll do or say whatever Stark tells him. As for Lieutenant Simpson and his men, they’re either dead by this time or buried alive in some forgotten outpost in the middle of Sioux country. Besides, Simpson is a professional soldier, a West Pointer, and if it ever came right down to it he’d obey orders and do as he was told. It would be either that or throw away his entire military career. He told me he’s beholden to me for saving his father’s
reputation at Antietam, but even so, I don’t think he’d be willing to sacrifice his future for me.”

  “Seems like this Senator Stark went to a heap of all-fired trouble with all his planning,” the old mountain man said. “Why would he do that?”

  “Because he can,” Fletcher said.

  Moore put his cold pipe in his mouth and gazed out at the spiraling snow driven by a sighing north wind. After a few moments’ silence, he said, “Here’s what you do, Buck. You fork that big stud of yours, head him north, and get the hell out of Arizona.”

  Fletcher shook his head. “I can’t do that, Charlie, not now.”

  “Hell, boy, if it’s money you need—”

  “I’ve got money.” Fletcher slapped the money belt under his shirt. “Right here.”

  He sat quiet for a while and said, “My parents built a cabin on Two-Bit Creek up in the high country of the Dakota Territory. Even if I went there, I’d constantly have that twenty-year prison sentence hanging over my head, and the shadow of Falcon Stark would always be nipping at my heels.”

  Fletcher tossed his cigarette butt into the fire. “It wouldn’t work. I’m not a man who borrows trouble, but it seems to just naturally follow me. I couldn’t stay hidden for long.”

  “Then what are you planning to do?”

  “Find Estelle Stark and the man who’s been paid to kill her. I’ll beat a confession out of him if I have to, and in front of witnesses.”

  “It’s thin, Buck,” Charlie said. “Mighty thin.”

  “I know it’s thin, but right now it’s all I got.”

  Charlie lay back on his blankets, his head on his saddle. “Well, it’s time for this old man to get some shut-eye, an’ I suggest you do the same, Buck. We got a long ride ahead of us tomorrow.”

  “We?”

  “Sure, if you don’t mind me tagging along.” Charlie rose on one elbow, studying Fletcher in the weak glow of the firelight. “Buck, I’m a man who pretty much has lived his life alone. Oh, I’ve spent some time with Indians, and like I told you, I settled down to married life for a spell at various times, but mostly I lived my years in the high country, up in the mountains among the beaver and the tall pines.” He smiled. “I’m getting stiff, Buck, and old, and recently I’ve begun to figure all my adventures were behind me. Then I ran into you.”