It was little enough to say over dead men, but I reckoned it was a lot truer than most eulogies.
Wolves and coyotes would soon find the bodies and scatter the bones. In time, scorched by heat and frosted by snow, the bones themselves would become dust and blow away in the prairie wind until there was no trace of them remaining and of the four dead men nothing would be left . . . unless their restless spirits lingered on and haunted this place.
“Choose a horse for yourself, Dusty,” Reeves told me. “The rest of them are now the property of Judge Parker’s court.”
I picked out a big black with a white blaze that looked like it could run and got my saddle out from under the dead buckskin.
Over by the fire, the wounded man had been silent for a long time. Now he groaned, his knees jerking up as pain that was beyond bearing hammered at him.
Seeing this, Reeves nodded. “Seen that afore, how a gut-shot man kicks like that. It means his time is very short.”
He put his hand on my shoulder. “Stay with him, Dusty. Then ride after Lafe Wingo and the others.” He smiled. “I wish you all the luck in the world and I sure hope you get your money back.”
I forced myself to smile. “I plan to get it back, Bass.”
The lawman nodded. “Just be mighty careful. Wingo and the Owens brothers will be no pushovers. Every one of them is good with a gun and they’ve killed plenty of times before. And another thing”—his eyes were troubled—“when you get to Texas, don’t tangle with Victorio if you can avoid it. Best you ride a hundred miles around Apaches than get in a fight with them because chances are you’re going to lose your hair. If they catch you”—he nodded toward the dying outlaw—“you’ll die like him and maybe a lot worse. However they kill you, the last thing you’ll hear on this earth is your own scream. Remember that.”
“All I want is to get Simon Prather’s money back,” I said. “I don’t plan on tangling with Apaches if they’ll give me the road.”
“That’s the way, Dusty.” Reeves grinned. “Al though, when I come to study on it, I’d say Lafe Wingo and the Owens boys are a shade meaner than any Mescalero, including Victorio his ownself.”
The afternoon was wearing on, but there still remained one thing to be done.
Reeves stepped over to the bodies and found Amos Rosenberg’s ring on Bully Yates’ little finger. He held up Yates’ hand, removed the ring and slipped it into the pocket of his vest.
He walked back to his horse and tightened the girth, then helped the manacled Ellison into the saddle of his mustang.
Reeves gathered up the reins of his sorrel and walked toward me. He stuck out his hand and I took it. “Luck, Dusty,” he said. “It sure was a pleasure to ride with you.” He smiled, half-embarrassed. “You played the man’s part and you helped save my skin today and that’s a thing I won’t forget.”
The big lawman dropped his hand. “You know, young feller, if’n I was Lafe Wingo, I reckon I’d be right worried right about now if I knew you was on my trail.”
Reeves had said it all and I didn’t try to outjaw him. “Luck, Bass,” I said. “It’s a long ways to Fort Smith, so ride careful.”
“Always do,” the lawman said.
He swung into the saddle and caught up the reins of the outlaws’ horses. He started to ride out, a dejected Ellison following behind. Reeves touched his hat as he went past me. “Hasta luego, Dusty Hannah.”
I nodded. “See you around, Bass.”
I watched Reeves and his prisoner ride through the valley, then disappear behind the hill that marked the dogleg where he would swing to the east.
The sun was lowering in the sky and the wind had picked up, rustling through the grass and trees and setting the creek to rippling. I stepped to the fire, fed it some more wood, stood there for a while watching the flames dance, then turned my attention to the dying outlaw.
He was looking at me, his eyes wild, whether from pain or hatred of me I couldn’t guess.
“How are you feeling?” I asked, knowing how lame that sounded.
The outlaw didn’t answer for a few moments, then said: “It hurts. It hurts real bad.”
I kneeled beside him and looked at his wound. His shirt and pants were black with congealed blood and when I lifted the shirt aside I saw the bullet wound in his belly, a gaping hole just below his navel.
There was no recovering from a wound like that. All this boy could do now was die.
“Do you smoke?” I asked.
The outlaw nodded and I rolled him a cigarette, lit it from the fire and placed it between his lips. Then I built one for myself.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
The boy took the cigarette from his lips with a bloodstained hand. “Charlie Hunt,” he said. “I was named for an uncle who fell at Chickamauga.”
Pain slammed at him again and he gasped and quickly drew on the cigarette. “Oh God,” he whispered. “I’m dying hard.”
“Try to lie still,” I said. “It will help.”
The day slowly faded into night and a cold moon rose in the bright, star-scattered sky. The flickering firelight played on the bodies of the dead that lay around me, touching their pale faces with red. In the distance a coyote howled his hunger, a long, drawn-out wail that was carried far by the wind.
Mercifully, Charlie Hunt was now beyond pain and the blue death shadows were gathering under his eyes and in the gaunt hollows of his cheeks. He was no longer with me, but had traveled back to another time and place. He spoke to his ma and sister like they were right there by the fire and once he whispered the name of a girl he had known.
I guessed it was about midnight when his eyes flew open and he looked right at me. “I’m obliged to you for staying by me,” he said. Then death rattled in his throat and he was gone.
As Reeves and me had done for the others, I now did for the man who was once Charlie Hunt. I closed the boy’s eyes and straightened his legs and crossed his arms over his chest.
Then I saddled the black and rode away from that place of death, the glow of the moonlight painting the trail ahead, the grass, the hills and the pines the color of tarnished silver.
I rode through the night, the big black, well used to dark trails, moving out sure-footed and confident.
At first light I stopped in a grove of post oak and elm and made a fire. A narrow creek ran close by but only a trickle of water ran over its sandy bottom and it took me near five minutes to fill my coffeepot and the water was bitter at that.
Reeves and me had split what supplies we had, including those we found at the outlaw camp, and I made a meager breakfast of venison jerky washed down with weak coffee.
I eased the girth on the black and let him graze; then I spread my blankets and slept for a couple of hours.
The sun was climbing higher in the sky when I woke, drank the last of the coffee and swung into the saddle.
Doan’s Crossing was a ways to the south of me, but I planned to reach it before nightfall.
By early afternoon I’d crossed two forks of the Red, the Salt and the North, both of them little more than sandy, shallow creeks lined with stunted cottonwoods. When I turned in the saddle, behind me the peaks of the Wichita Mountains were lost in haze and ahead lay a lush, grassy valley about four or five miles wide, brushy ravines on either side cutting deep into the surrounding hills.
I rode into the valley, the black walking knee-deep in grass and wildflowers. After an hour, the sky above me clouded over, and rain began to fall. I shrugged into my slicker and spread as much of it as I could over Sally’s straw bonnet, which I gloomily realized was beginning to look the worse for wear.
The valley gradually widened until the surrounding hills were maybe six miles apart and mesquite began to appear. Here and there a few scrubby elms grew close to the bottoms of the slopes, their branches drooping as the rain fell heavier.
I studied the land around me. Had Lafe Wingo and the Owens brothers passed this way? And if they had, how long ago?
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sp; I had no answer to those questions and the valley seemed as empty of life as the canyons of the moon.
There was no trail where I rode, but once I saw where the grass had been trodden down by a small antelope herd that had passed this way.
The rain continued to fall and I was considering trying to find some shelter in one of the ravines when I heard a sudden rattle of gunfire. Then silence. A moment later another shot racketed through the valley, followed by another.
I reined in the black, trying to puzzle this out. This was a remote valley and as far as I could tell, there was no sign of habitation.
Hunters maybe?
Or could it be Lafe Wingo and the Owens boys shooting at something or somebody?
This I doubted very much, but nonetheless I slid my Winchester from the boot, cranked a round into the chamber and rode forward again, the rifle ready across the saddle horn.
The gunfire seemed to have come from about a mile ahead and a ways to the north of where I rode, and I fretted that I might be riding into more trouble than I wanted or needed.
Catching my unease, the black’s head was up, his ears pricked forward, his eyes on the valley ahead of us. Another shot split the quiet of the afternoon, echoing away into silence.
I rode on, wary now. Despite the slanting mesh of the falling rain, the air was clear and I could see for a good distance. The valley began to narrow again, then, to the north of me. I rode up on a wide saddleback between two high hills. The saddleback rose gradually for about a mile, rising to a height of three hundred feet, its crest studded by a ragged parapet of bare sandstone rock.
I reined in the black and stood there for a few minutes, studying the saddleback, wondering what lay beyond the crest.
A shot rang out, followed by another, and this time there could be no mistaking where they originated. Beyond the bench somebody was firing. But who? And at what?
My first instinct was to swing away from there and keep on riding. But I was always a curious young feller and now my prying nature got the better of me and like a dang fool I kneed the black forward and began to climb the rise.
I dismounted before I reached the crest and led the black into the rocks. Now I was there, I discovered that the summit of the saddleback was flat, about thirty yards wide, and the red sandstone rocks, each as tall as a man, were scattered everywhere around its entire length and width.
Leaving the horse, I crouched and sprinted to the edge of the rise, well hidden by the surrounding boulders, and looked down.
Below me, the saddleback sloped away to end in a wide, flat-bottomed box canyon surrounded on all sides by tall hills. A sod cabin, shaded by a huge oak, lay close to the base of the hill furthest away from me. On one side of the cabin was a small timber barn, on the other a corral and, near that, a pigpen.
Corn shoots were greening a plowed-up piece of land to the front of the cabin and nearby ran a shallow creek, coming off one of the surrounding hills.
All this I saw in an instant, but what made my blood run cold were the Apaches hidden among rocks that must have tumbled down the rise in ancient times when the ground around here trembled.
From where I crouched I saw the backs of three of the Indians, but with Apaches, if you saw three there could be twice that number hidden.
And there were more of them. When I changed position to get a better angle on the cabin, I counted seven ponies tethered in a break in the hill to the right of the Apache position and there may have been others hidden from view.
Wooden shutters with narrow firing slits were drawn across the two small windows to the front of the cabin and from one I saw a puff of smoke followed by the bang of a rifle. A moment later a shot was fired from the other window and I heard the bullet whine off a rock near where an Apache crouched.
A warrior I hadn’t noticed before suddenly rose and fired his Winchester at the cabin. Soon three more stood and began firing, their bullets thudding into the cabin’s sod walls, a couple of shots splintering through the wood shutters.
The reason for all this firing became obvious when I noticed three Apaches run past the pigpen, then disappear from sight near the corral.
It wasn’t hard to figure out what they were planning. They could reach the cabin from its blind side and then get up on the flimsy pole and sod roof, smash it apart and fire at the defenders inside.
I figured the sodbusters in the cabin had chosen to live in this canyon because it was well sheltered from the heat of summer and the snows of winter. But they had chosen unwisely, because now they were trapped like rats and it was only a matter of time before the Apaches wore them down.
On my first trip up the trail I’d seen what Coman ches did to an Irish army scout and his Ute wife they’d captured. There was very little of the two left by the time we came across them, but it was obvious they’d taken a long, terrible time a-dying. Their last screams were still frozen on their gaping mouths and Simon Prather had to close their jaws with binding cloths so they’d look halfway decent for burying.
That was what the two firing from the cabin could expect, but I told myself it was no business of mine.
Bass Reeves had advised me to ride a hundred miles around Apaches and right now that seemed like mighty sound counsel. The sodbusters in the cabin meant nothing to me, and besides, I had to get back on the trail before Lafe Wingo slipped clean away.
But even as I did my best to justify it in my mind, I knew I couldn’t leave. Down there in the cabin were probably a woman and maybe her young ’uns and the way the Mescaleros were riled up, what they would do to them didn’t bear thinking about.
Cursing myself for a damned fool, I slid my rifle forward and sighted on the corral. Rain ran off the brim of my hat as the downpour grew heavier, scattering the slender plume of smoke that rose from the cabin chimney.
I waited. The tap-tap of rain hammered on my hat and I heard the drops hiss as they fell on the grass and bounced off the wet sandstone of the rocks around me. I drew my Colt and set it next to me, where it would be handy if subsequent events called for close work, though I fully planned to keep the Apaches at rifle range. Once I opened the ball, I didn’t want those warriors swarming around me because the outcome of that would be a mighty uncertain thing.
Despite the freshness of the rain-cooled air, my mouth was dry and my quickening heartbeats thudded loud in my ears. I took a deep breath, as Bass Reeves had taught me, willing my heart rate to slow, the better to shoot the Winchester accurately when the time came.
And the time was now.
Down by the corral an Apache in a blue army shirt and white headband rose to his feet, looked around, then slowly moved toward the cabin on cat’s feet. Another warrior, this one with a bright red band around his head, stepped after him.
I took a breath, held it and sighted on the broad chest of the first warrior. I took up the slack on the trigger and squeezed off a shot.
My bullet must have hit the man square because he threw up his arms, his rifle spiraling away from him, and crashed heavily onto his back. The racketing echo of my first shot had hardly died away when I fired at the other warrior. I didn’t see the effect of my second shot because the Apache quickly disappeared from view.
But down among the rocks at the bottom of the hill, I’d sure stirred up a hornet’s nest.
Three Apaches rose to their feet and turned in my direction, one of them pointing at the rocks where I lay hidden. I fired at this man, saw him fall, dusted another couple of quick shots down there and, crouching low, moved my position.
Rifles banged from the cabin and I saw another warrior go down, hit in the back.
The Apaches seemed confused, not liking the fact that they were caught in crossfire, and that moment of indecision cost them dear.
I fired again, nailing another squat, bandy-legged warrior, then quickly looked around for another target. There was none. The surviving Apaches had gone to ground, taking advantage of the cover of the long grass and rocks.
I reckoned four
Apaches were down and maybe five, so there could only be a couple left. But even two Mescaleros were a handful to contend with.
Rifles banged again from the cabin, bullets whining off the rocks below, and I added my own fire, up on one knee, cranking and firing my Winchester from the shoulder as fast as I could. Roaring echoes crashed like tumbling boulders around the canyon and a cloud of gray gunsmoke shrouded the rocks around me.
The Apache is a practical, down-to-earth warrior. When he feels the deck is stacked against him, he has no qualms about running away and living to fight another day when the odds will be in his favor.
Three Mescaleros dashed from the break of the hill, crouched low across the necks of their ponies and hit the slope at a flat-out run.
One of the warriors was hit hard, blood staining the front of his shirt, and he seemed to be having difficulty staying on the back of his horse.
I rose to my feet, rifle to my shoulder, but let them pass. There had been enough killing already and I had no desire to further punish a beaten enemy.
The three warriors topped the rise about thirty feet from where I stood, one of them looking briefly in my direction with black eyes that burned with hate, then vanished down the slope and soon the thud of their ponies’ hooves was lost in the incessant hiss of the streaming rain.
Me, I gathered up my horse, shoved the Winchester back into the boot, swung into the saddle and headed down the rise toward the cabin.
When I got closer, the door swung open—and two beaded, buckskinned Indians, rifles in hand, stepped out.
Chapter 7
Startled, I reined in the black, my hand instinctively going for the Colt at my hip.
But then I realized that the taller of the two Indians wasn’t an Indian at all, but a white man with a red beard, hair of the same color spilling in tangles over his broad shoulders, and now he spoke to me.
“You came right in the nick of time, young feller,” he said. “For a spell there, I reckoned we was done for.”
Beside the man stood a pretty woman in a buckskin dress, her yellow hair in thick braids, a narrow beaded headband encircling her forehead.
Blood and Gold Page 6
