Quincy’s face was a picture of deviltry, for he was enjoying this moment of power. It was pure mischief, but Shiloh’s words put it on a totally different level.
“He might,” the half-breed hissed. “Anyone here think he could stop him?”
That put Quincy’s pride on the block; Shiloh Platt congratulated himself upon a particularly clever stroke. There would be little difficulty in cutting loose the horses of the two men before the party left, thus abandoning them and leaving the way clear for him to collect the reward money for the girl and keep it all for himself, for this was Shiloh’s sworn intent. He found himself again set off-balance by the cold voice of Rusty.
“I’d stop him,” the boy said quietly.
Quincy lumbered to his feet, an evil grin on his lips.
“Yu reckon yu could take me – an’ Shiloh?” he leered.
“I could try.”
Shiloh laughed harshly, but at the same moment, Tucson stepped in. “Yu try anythin’ like that, Quince, an’ I’ll back the kid’s play,” the giant rumbled. His words tore away the last of Quincy’s restraint.
“Yu big dumb oaf!” he screeched, and leaped for Tucson.
The giant did not move; his huge ham-like fist swept around, catching Quincy on the point of his jaw, felling the scar faced man like a slaughtered steer. Rubbing his knuckles, Tucson looked at the half-breed. “Shiloh?”he said.
The half-breed backed away, his hands in front of him. “No – now, take it easy, Tucson, I -I ain’t…”
“Got no guts?” Tucson gritted. “Hell, that’s plain. Yu goad Quincy into a corner, an’ then when the chips go down, yo’re missin’. What kind o’ animal are yu, anyway, Shiloh?”
Shiloh looked around; he saw nothing but distaste on the watching faces. He turned to the girl, who stood nearest to him.
“Lissen,” he panted. “Tell him. I didn’t mean nothin’ – it was a joke. I never reckoned Quince’d take it serious. Yu don’t figger I’d leave a man afoot with them war whoops ready to take his hair, do yu?”
“I think that is exactly what you would do,” the girl said coldly. “I also think you are a liar, a cheat, and a murderer.” These biting words were too much for Platt’s control and rage flooded the flat, dark eyes. The Mexican blood had put a fierce and touchy pride in Shiloh’s veins, and slighted, he reacted without thought of consequence.
“Why yu—” he spat, raising his arm to strike the cowering girl. Before he could move it a foot higher, Sudden was across the room in one stride, and the barrel of a six-gun which had appeared magically in his right hand was jammed into Shiloh’s middle.
“Go ahead, yu yeller dawg!” grated the Texan. “An’ I’ll put yu down like the snake yu are!”
Shiloh Platt read death in Sudden’s eyes, and his hand fell. He passed a hand across his eyes, to conceal the burning hatred in them, mumbling the while, “Yu – look – I’m sorry. I didn’t mean no harm. My temper—”
“Will get yu killed one o’ these days,” snapped Sudden, stepping back and holstering the weapon in his hand. “Get it under control – we got no more time to waste!”
Like a whipped cur, Shiloh Platt slunk away to one side and slouched into a chair, gazing vacantly at the wall, his mind a churning morass of seething hate.
“Yu’ll pay,” he thought, the hate coursing through him like fire. “All o’ yu. And as for yu, my proud beauty, yu’ll pay the highest o’ them all. Afore I’m through with yu, yu’ll beg on yore knees for a kind word from me.” With lurid pictures flickering in his twisted mind, Shiloh Platt hunched in his chair, ignoring the preparations of Eady and Sudden behind him. Presently the chastened Quincy joined him.
Night was closing in fast now, dropping like a curtain. It was black dark before long, with the diamond twinkle of stars in the velvet of the heavens, and a faint soughing wind which lifted tiny dust-devils, twirling them like faery dancers across the empty corral outside. Eady and Sudden worked quickly and efficiently.
From two grey saddle blankets they cut holes just large enough for their heads; when they tried them for fit, the blankets hung down almost to their knees. Nodding his satisfaction, Sudden poured some water on to the dirt floor, mixing up a small amount of greyish-black mud. This he proceeded to daub upon his face and hands, with Eady following suit. They both kicked off their boots, and stuck a six-gun each into their waistbands. Sudden laid his gunbelt aside with a meaning glance at Rusty, who sauntered idly over and stood close to the weapons.
“I’ll see they’re on yore saddlehorn,” he told Sudden. The puncher nodded and completed his preparations by donning the blanket and crouching slightly.
“How’s she look, Tobias?” he asked.
“Purty gruesome,” Eady grinned through the mud on his face. “I dunno what yu’ll do to them ’paches, Jim, but yu shore as Gawd skeer the hell out o’me!”
A last-minute check to ensure that the arrangements were fully understood, and the two men eased out of the building. Snaking across the empty corral, they stopped in the deep shadow of the wall. The faint throbbing of a drum came from somewhere in the blackness.
“Scouts?” breathed Eady.
“None,” came the whispered reply. “They ain’t expectin’ trouble.”
“Jes’ as well,” hissed Eady. “One wrong move an’ the whole b’ilin’s sp’iled.”
Sudden nodded. “Let’s go,” he muttered. His eyes gleamed faintly white in the darkness of his mud-smeared visage. Eady tried a practice flutter of the blanket enveloping him. In the darkness he looked like some huge, shapeless, grey-black thing, headless, armless, legless.
“Skeery enough?” he hissed.
“It better be,” was the sober reply. The two men slid now like shadows across the uneven ground, guided by the faint glow of the tiny Apache fires visible around a bend in the creek bed. Around the fires squatted the Apaches, chanting weirdly in time with the slow beating throb of a drum held by a shaman, or medicine man. When they were within thirty feet or so of the fires, Sudden touched the old man’s arm, and signaled him to move off to the right. He himself edged left, matching Eady’s progress so that their path forked to the sides of the Apache camp.
Moving now with infinite care, they came nearer to the glow of the fires. One cracking twig, one slithering stone, and they would be dead before they could get to their feet. Using every ounce of the skills taught him many years before by the old Piute horse-trader who had raised him, Sudden matched the crawling inch-by-inch progress of the old desert rat, whom he could see as a vague lump of darker blackness about ten feet or so to his right. The oldster was as well versed in this kind of work as any Indian; he had survived in these mountains only by knowing as many tricks as the Apaches, and one or two of his own as well. Sudden, counting to one hundred slowly beneath his breath, knew that Eady was doing the same. When he reached the end of his count, Sudden drew a deep breath, rose to his knees, and gave vent to as weird-sounding a moan as he could contrive. Eady appeared simultaneously from the ground a little distance away. The effect was electric.
The Apaches leaped to their feet, bug-eyed with fear and astonishment. For a moment that seemed as long as an aeon, they stood frozen, their weapons clutched in their hands. Then Eady moaned again, and added this time a gurgle so convincingly like a death-rattle that for a moment, the Texan’s blood ran cold. It was the breaking-point.
“Ayeee!” screamed one warrior. “It is Death Face and his helper!”
Again Sudden moaned, and this time lurched forward, flapping the blanket. In the darkness he looked like some shapeless fiend. The Apaches broke. Like startled deer they scrambled for their horses or ran, their possessions forgotten, intent only upon outdistancing the terrible malevolent spirits behind them. Lashing their ponies madly they thundered out of the gully, fear lending wings to their headlong feet. The two men stood up in the boiling dust of their flight, Eady was laughing wheezily, slapping his thigh.
“I never seen the like,” he croaked, helple
ssly. “Jim, yu shore beat all, the idees yu got!”
Sudden could not refrain from grinning. “They musta thought their last hour’d come,” he agreed. “Lady Luck shore smiled on us. Now let’s fade afore they pluck up enough nerve to come back!”
Eady clapped his companion on the shoulder. Together the two men sped across the open ground to the station. There, tied to a viga pole, their horses stood, ready saddled.
“Good for yu, Rusty,” was Sudden’s unspoken thought as he swung into the hurricane deck. He wheeled Midnight’s head around, as Eady vaulted into his saddle with an agility that many a young man might have envied. They thundered out of the corral and down the slight declivity to the south where the faint dust raised by the fleeing defenders of Apache Wells hung glinting in the dark starlight. After about ten minutes” hard riding, they discerned the black bulk of the waiting quintet, who had heard their approach and were bayed ready with guns drawn.
“Hold it!” Sudden heard Rusty snap. “It’s Eady an’ Green. Put yore guns up!”
Again the Texan thanked his stars for the hunch which had led him to juxtapose the youngster and Barbara Davis. Without Rusty there would have been every possibility that Quincy and Shiloh might have risked the chance of the Apaches hearing them, and shot him and the old man out of their saddles as they approached. They reined in alongside the waiting group.
“I reckon we razzle-dazzled ’em,” he panted. “So we got mebbe an hour or two head-start.”
Rusty swung back into his saddle, saying: “Let’s make the most of ’er, then.”
“Hold on, thar!” The command came from old Eady, and they turned in surprise to face him.
“What’s this?” whined Shiloh. “We ain’t got time—”
“Time a-plenty,” Eady said. “Yu’ll recall I told yu I wasn’t ridin’ along. This is whar our trails fork, gents.”
“Yo’re takin’ a mighty big chance alone, Tobias,” Sudden warned the oldster. “It’s yore skin, o’ course, but—”
“But me no buts, Jim,” the old man grinned. “I was doin’ fine afore yu jaspers happened along an’ brung yore ’pache frien’s with yu. It’s yu they’s lookin’ for, not a stringy ol’ goat like me. I’m figgerin’ I’ll be a damn sight safer away from yu.”
Quincy spurred his horse forward. “What d’yu mean, yu –”
“Yu heard me,” Eady snapped. “I’m cuttin’ loose. Yu boys foller yore own trail. I aim to go back to my prospectin’, an’ if yu don’t like the idea, well –”
He swung his body to reveal the big old Sharp’s rifle, cocked and leveled. Sudden frowned. The old man’s attitude was contradictory, but after the endless years of shifting for himself, with only the rocks and his rifle for company, Eady was entitled to his decision.
“Sorry yu feel this way, Tobias,” he said. “Ain’t no point in tellin’ yu I’d be glad to have yu backin’ me this trip? Shore ain’t no pleasure-jaunt we’re facin’.”
“Like to oblige ye, Jim,” Eady said with regret, “but scalp-huntin’ ain’t none o’ my doin’s. I’m lettin’ yu go yore own way, an’ I’m goin’ mine. I suggest we get at it.”
“Aaaagh, stupid ol” goat!” snarled Shiloh Platt. “Stay an’ get yore ha’r lifted. Come on, we got to cover ground.”
Quincy hesitated for a moment, then wheeled his horse around. “Yo’re right,” he said. “Let’s ride, Sudden.”
Green nodded. “Adios, ol’ timer,” he said to Eady. “Thanks for what yu done – back there.”
“No thanks needed,” Eady replied, his eyes meeting Sudden’s levelly. “Even Steven, if yu ast me. We all got out with our ha’r on. Adios, Sudden. Watch yore back.”
“Bet on it,” Sudden said, and turned his horse to follow the party, which was moving already across the open ground, Quincy at its head, Shiloh and Tucson on the flanks, Rusty and Barbara Davis neatly hemmed in the middle. With a last wave to the old prospector, who sat watching them go, Sudden raced after the party. He was sorry to lose the backing of the old man, and felt somehow that there was something unexplained about Eady’s withdrawal. He could not put a finger on what it was.
As he rode level with Tucson, the giant turned in the saddle to yell: “Yu reckon we’re clear, Green?”
“Hard to tell,” he said in reply. “Apaches ain’t fools – they’ll ketch on soon enough to what we done. I’m just hopin’ Juano won’t think we’re loco enough to go into the desert, an’ mebbe follow a blind trail awhile afore he realizes we done just that.”
“Yu think it’ll work?”
Sudden shrugged to indicate his uncertainty. Right now, the question of what the Apaches might or might not do was rapidly becoming a secondary consideration to the perils and problems of crossing the desert. But it was not far, and therefore just possible. If they could get across, high though the odds were against it, there was a chance that they could head down the San Pedrito valley to the umbrella shelter of Fort Cochise, where the presence of cavalry patrols might serve to keep the Apaches at their distance. This, in fact, was the basis of Sudden’s gamble. Purty “iffy’, all the same, he told himself.
If Juano jumped to the conclusion that he hoped the Apache would; and if Shiloh and Quincy didn’t bushwhack him before they reached safety. A wry grin touched his somber face, and he recalled the long talk in Governor Bleke’s office before he had set out upon this perilous mission.
Bleke had said at one point: “Jim, if you don’t make it—” and Sudden had interrupted him “Shucks, seh, that li’l word “if” is shore a good jumpin’ off place if a feller wants to give hisself grey hair. If I was a sensible hombre, I wouldn’t be takin’ this job on in the fust place. If I’m takin’ it on, however, it ain’t no use frettin’ about what’s go in’ to happen if the Apaches try to trim my hair with a throwin’ ax. If it happens, well – it happens. All the ‘iffin’ in the world ain’t goin’ to alter it. So – if yu got any more o’ that tobacco-juice yu call whisky, yu can give me a drink an’ wish me luck iffen yu don’t mind!” The twinkle in his eye had drawn a broad smile from Bleke, and they had drunk a toast to Sudden’s success.
“Which I’m hopin’ yore luck’s holdin’, Governor,” Sudden muttered, peering ahead into the night as if trying to divine what lay beyond it.
Chapter Eleven
The party pushed on through the night, and sunrise found them in a jumble of hills, surrounded on all sides by a desolate vista of cactus-dotted hogbacks, burning rocks and parched earth. Of this emptiness there seemed no end, but after another hour’s riding the land leveled, and ahead of them appeared the shimmer, as if of water lying thin upon the ground, which indicated the proximity of the desert.
“That’s it,” Sudden announced, pointing ahead. “From here on it, it’s nothin’ but hot.”
The news was received in silence, each one’s mind occupied with thoughts of the ordeal lying ahead. The sun climbed higher now above the blue darkness of the Dragoons, and its heat grew steadily stronger.
Presently Rusty pulled his horse alongside Sudden’s and bent an inquiring gaze upon the tall Texan.
“Yu aimin’ to cross the whole stretch, Jim?” he asked. “She looks some wide.”
“Looks fool yu a mite,” Sudden replied, “although at some points it’s sixty, seventy miles across. This stretch o’ desert ain’t shaped reg’lar, however. She’s kind o’ U-shaped, an’ I’m headin’ for the bottom of the U, which ain’t more’n thirty miles across. After that there’s some more country like this—” he made a gesture with his free hand. “Gullies an’ hogbacks, good country to hide out in if we got to. But I’m hopin’ it ain’t goin’ to be necessary. If them ’paches figger we took the easy road for Tucson, we might be able to get across afore they can catch up with us. Once we get in the vicinity o’ Fort Cochise, they won’t be too eager to start no shootin’ match, in case the so’jer boys come out to see what’s goin’ on.”
“Good thinkin’,” the younger man said. “I’m on’y a mite worr
ied about Quincy – he shore ain’t goin’ to be mad keen about ridin’ into Fort Cochise.”
“I guess not,” was the reply. “He ain’t fool enough to think he’s got much choice, however, an’ that oughta clinch it.”
They rode in silence for a while, then Rusty spoke again. “I got to thinkin’ about what might happen to Bar – Miss Davis if anythin’ went wrong with yore plan, Jim,” he said hesitantly. “It could shore go hard with her.”
“Shucks, I’m set on avoidin’ trouble,” Sudden told him. “I ain’t about to set Quincy an’ Shiloh on the warpath on account o’ no thin’. I don’t want the reward money – that ain’t my reason for mixin’ in this shindig.”
“Why don’t yu jest tell them that?” burst out the boy in astonishment, then, seeing the bleak look on his companion’s face, he nodded. “O’ course, they wouldn’t believe it, yu bein’ Sudden.”
“That’s right,” the Texan said, and his voice was harsh. Rusty looked up quickly at the tone in Sudden’s voice, and then spoke softly.
“I never believed all I heard about Sudden,” he said. “Yu don’t look the owlhoot breed, Jim.”
Sudden smiled, the warmth lighting up his entire face and making him look strangely boyish for a moment.
“Which I’m thankin’ yu, Rusty,” he said. “Mebbe yu’d better hear the whole story. It might just be useful to yu in case yu ever get the easy money itch.” His voice was once more cold and hard, and as they rode along, the younger man listened in silence to the tale the black haired rider told, a tale of a promise to a dying man, and the blind search for two killers which had ensued. Sudden told Rusty how he had gained his reputation and his sobriquet, and of the false charge of murder which had sent him alone into the west, a price on his head, fair game for any man willing to try shooting him down. At the end of the story, Rusty shook his head.
“What I said afore goes double, now, Jim,” he promised. “I’ll back yu any way I can. These jaspers’ll try to cut yu out if they’s any chance they can do it.”
Sudden Apache Fighter Page 8
