Thunder Over the Superstitions

by Peter Brandvold

  Hawk lifted his hands to his wife’s breasts, gently massaging the full, high, cherry-tipped orbs before caressing her cheeks with his thumbs. He slid her hair back from her face with the backs of his hands.

  Hawk froze, staring up at the girl straddling him.

  It was not Linda’s soft, light-blue eyes smiling down at him now but the glassy, nearly opaque, folly-ridden gaze of Saradee Jones.

  The beautiful outlaw shook her head slowly, stretching her rich lips back from her white teeth in gentle mockery. “Not her, Gideon. Linda’s dead. She’s back in one of those two graves you visited back in Crossroads—remember?”

  Saradee lowered her hips to his and then bowed her head and tightened her face as she ground against him, groaning hoarsely. “Just me now. Just . . . ohhh, god . . . me!”

  Hawk tried in his mind to resist her. He could not.

  His blood rose undeniably. He grunted and cupped her breasts almost savagely and drove himself up deep inside her. He pressed the back of his head fast against the blankets, cursing and squeezing her breasts as he spent himself.

  Saradee sighed and collapsed against his chest.

  Outside, the palomino whinnied.

  Then came the thuds of many galloping horses.

  Saradee gasped. As she flung her naked, sweat-slick body off of Hawk, he reached for his Henry.

  CHAPTER 16

  IN THUNDER GOD’S ABODE

  Hawk had automatically gone for his rifle, which he’d assumed was lying where he usually kept it, to the right of his bedroll. He’d forgotten that he’d taken his leave of Miller and Jodi Zimmerman without any weapons save for the dagger he kept in his boot.

  He’d remembered too late that his rifle was still with Miller. The quick, twisting move had grieved his battered ribs. As he gave an agonized grunt and pressed his right hand to his side, he heard the thunder of several horses outside the ruined hovel.

  Naked, Saradee turned to Hawk.

  “Here!” she hissed, and tossed him one of her silver-chased, pearl-gripped Colts.

  Hawk caught the weapon against his chest. Saradee quickly threw her shirt over her shoulders and ran to the outline of a window to Hawk’s left. The fire had burned down to a soft, umber glow, leaving the hovel in thick, inky shadows lightly limned in red.

  Hawk spun the Colt’s cylinder and, rising heavily but vaguely realizing he wasn’t in as much pain as before, he moved to a window on the opposite side of the cabin from Saradee. He hunkered on one knee to the left of the empty casing and gazed out into the dark canyon.

  Hooves thumped. Horses whickered softly, occasionally blowing. There was also the rasping of men. For a moment, Hawk could see nothing out there, only hear the horses and the men who seemed to be circling the hovel. But then as his eyes adjusted to the night’s moonless darkness, Hawk saw the quick-moving shadows maybe thirty, forty yards out from the shack.

  Occasionally, starlight reflected off a face or an eye or some metallic object that the riders carried. Briefly, between two shrubs, Hawk glimpsed a patch of red. Likely a calico bandanna—the kind favored by Apaches. He could tell from the muffled hoof thuds that the horses galloping around the hovel were unshod, another sign that Apaches—likely, Chiricahuas—had come calling.

  Hawk felt the chill of apprehension seep into his battered body. Out of the frying pan and into the fire. And he had neither his own pistols nor his Henry repeater. Just Saradee’s Colt, which left her with maybe only one more Colt and her Winchester.

  How many Indians were out there?

  Hunkered down beside the window and staring out into the night, he tried to count the shadows swirling around him. They seemed to be moving at a fairly good clip on their sure-footed, desert-and mountain-bred mustangs—too fast for Hawk to get a handle on their number.

  He waited, his thumb caressing the cocked hammer of Saradee’s Colt. He hadn’t realized how hard he’d been clamping his jaws together until they started to hurt. His palm grew slick against the Colt’s pearl grips.

  Movement behind Hawk. He turned to see Saradee leap the fire and run toward him. Light from the umber coals bathed her bare legs, glistened in her blonde hair and her eyes. She hunkered down on the opposite side of the window from Hawk. He could sense her anxiety as the riders continued circling.

  “Injuns!” she hissed.

  “Hold your fire.”

  “I’ll hold mine if they hold theirs!”

  Hawk continued staring out the window. The riders continued circling, jangling Hawk’s nerves just as he knew they were doing to Saradee’s. He had the urge to dress but he didn’t want to turn his back on them. Besides, it wasn’t cold and he might as well die naked as clothed.

  Give the carrion eaters an easier time of it.

  Just when Hawk thought he couldn’t endure the tension any longer, the hoof thuds began to dwindle. Fewer and fewer shadows passed outside the window. Then one more passed, and that was all. The hoof thuds dwindled into the night.

  Silence.

  “What the hell?” Saradee said.

  “Might be a trap.”

  Hawk rose and stiffly gathered his clothes. Even more stiffly, he wrestled his way into his longhandles, whipcord trousers, socks, and boots. He pulled his suspenders up over his long-handle top. Again, he looked for his rifle. It was so much a part of him, he felt as though one of his arms had been hacked off at the shoulder.

  He tossed Saradee’s Colt her to her, and picked up her Winchester carbine. She preferred pistols. He preferred a long gun. He racked a shell into the Winchester’s chamber and then, thumb on the hammer, walked slowly out into the night.

  In front of the door, he stopped and looked around. He did not hear Saradee move out of the shack behind him. She was as stealthy as a night-hunting puma. He only felt the slight displacement of air as she stepped up beside him. She smelled like cinnamon and the musk of love.

  Hawk canted his head to his left. The girl drifted off that way. Hawk moved to his right. He didn’t know the terrain like she did, so he had to move especially slowly and carefully so he wouldn’t trip and give himself away or walk into an ambush.

  When he figured he’d moved about fifty yards out from the canyon, he stared off in the direction in which he was sure the Indians had headed. West. Nothing but silence out there in the stygian darkness, save for the distant yammer of a lone coyote.

  Saradee’s voice cleaved the silence. “Hawk.”

  He turned and walked back toward the shack. He stopped when he saw the cream figure of the big palomino fidgeting around the mesquite it had been tied to. Saradee stood several yards behind the horse. Some slender object slanted down before her.

  Hawk moved toward her and saw the feathers trimming the wooden shaft protruding from the ground behind the palomino. An Apache war lance.

  “What the hell’s that mean?” the girl said, her voice pitched low with gravity.

  “It means get out or they’ll escort us out . . . by way of hell.”

  Hawk turned and walked back to the shack.

  “You know, I think I’ll kill you for lyin’ to me, girl!”

  Pima Miller glared at Jodi Zimmerman, who, sitting on her Morgan mare in one of the many shallow canyons that formed a maze in the heart of the Superstitions, turned her head this way and that. Her brows hooded her troubled eyes, and her lips were stretched, balling her cheeks in a frustrated scowl.

  “I don’t understand it,” she said, glancing down at the penciled scrap of paper in her gloved hands. “I was careful to write down the directions and draw clear pictures of the terrain. I knew I’d have trouble finding it if I didn’t, and—”

  “And now, even with your map, you’re still havin’ trouble findin’ it. And we’ve been out here for three days now. Three long days in this heat followin’ your so-called map and your so-called story of the richest gold mine in all of North America.”

  “Oh, hush—I’m tryin’ to figure.”

  “Tryin’ to figure, huh? I’m tryin’ to
figure what in the hell ever got into me to listen to your wild story in the first place. Now, not only do I not have a pair of saddlebags bulgin’ with nearly pure gold ore, but I don’t have that rogue lawman’s head in a gunnysack!” Miller wagged his head from side to side, groaning. “Did I say that head of his is worth twenty thousand dollars? Did I say that?”

  “I believe you might’ve mentioned it among all your other caterwauling,” Jodi said, holding the map in front of her but looking back over her left shoulder at the large, red pinnacle of El Sombrero.

  The formation did indeed resemble a sombrero from this vantage—the steeple crown of the hat rising from a stark, red, boulder-strewn, cone-like mountain and presiding over the entire Superstition Range and the Salt River Valley, with the airy blue backdrop of Boulder Canyon to the southwest.

  The vastness and starkness of the land here always took Jodi’s breath away. It made her feel at once lonely and anxious but, also, knowing the ancient mine that the land contained, like a jewel clamped in the palm of a giant fist, it made her giddy and eager. It made her heart tap-tap-tap-tap, like an Apache war drum, in her throat, in her ears.

  But, now, if she couldn’t find it, knowing that she’d been so infernally close, maybe within only two hundred yards after waiting for the old man to die or for her to work up the gumption to leave him behind and ride out here alone and chip off what she could from the precious jewel and then head for far, far better climes—the disappointment would be a bottomless well.

  She’d never stop falling into it.

  If she couldn’t find the old Peralta mine, she’d put her pistol in her mouth and blow her brains out.

  How could anyone go on living, knowing the riches they’d left behind? She’d seen it! After the Dutchman from Apache Springs had left with his two burros, she’d backtracked him, found the mine and explored it, seen the color in the walls.

  It had been like the scales of a giant diamondback fashioned from raw, glittering gold!

  Jodi was sweating. It was running down her cheeks, between her breasts and down her shoulders under her shirt. Her breath was short and shallow. The cicadas were screeching a raucous, throbbing rhythm that matched the throbbing of the girl’s own heart.

  Desperately, she looked around. There were several lesser canyons, most brush-and rock-choked, angling away from this main one they were in and which was maybe fifty yards across at its widest. The old man had said these ravines were old lava rivers from the time the Superstitions had been created by exploding volcanoes.

  She glanced back over the rumpled, barren land to the southwest and El Sombrero, and then “Tsucked” her horse on ahead, looking around for some of the landmarks she’d carefully penciled on her sheet of lined notepaper.

  “You best find that gold, girl.”

  Behind her, Miller stepped down from his saddle and removed his canteen from the horn. He was leading Hawk’s grulla. They figured they’d use the rogue lawman’s mount and his saddlebags for squirreling out an extra parcel of the Dutchman’s gold from the mine.

  “You best find it . . .” Miller let his voice taper off maliciously as he walked over to the shaded base of the arroyo’s western bank, and sagged down with a grunt. “Me—I’m gonna rest here, have me some water. I think your stitches done opened up on me.”

  Jodi looked behind her again. She could see a little splotch of fresh blood on the outlaw’s shirt.

  She lifted her gaze to the red sandstone ridges rising all around her. She’d spied Apache sign the day before, and she thought she’d sensed the red men following them, staying just out of sight. It was said that Geronimo saw himself as a keeper of the Superstitions, so to speak. The Chiricahuas had long called the mountains their physical as well as spiritual home. It was also the home of their Thunder God.

  Geronimo, as did Cochise before him, wanted to keep the mountains free of the white-eyes. The Apaches haunting these mountains didn’t kill as automatically and wantonly as they once had, fearing retribution from the cavalry, but gold hunters were still known to disappear in these mountains, never to be heard from again.

  Somehow, the old Dutchman, as well as Jodi and the old man, had managed to steer clear of the dangerous Chiricahuas. Her time was likely running out, she thought as she continued to rake her gaze around the rocky ridges for sign of the little, dark, savage men with their coal-black hair held back by calico headbands.

  The Morgan moved steadily north along the ravine. The sun shifted across the sky, angling westward. Shadows slithered along the wash and along the crags. As one particular shadow edged along the top of a boulder rising along the ravine’s eastern bank, it revealed something.

  Jodi looked at the map in her hands, its corners ruffling in the dry breeze.

  Her heart hiccupped as she slid her gaze from the rock drawn on the map to the actual boulder rising on the eastern bank. When she saw the ancient drawing painted on the boulder’s upper right corner in ochre—a stick man on foot facing down some large, round, bear-like creature with a long lance—she had to purse her lips to hold back a scream.

  A smile exploding across her face, she looked back at Miller who sat against the bank, his canteen beside him, one knee raised, running a wet handkerchief back and forth across his hatless head.

  “I found it!” she hissed. “Bring the horses! I found it!”

  The outlaw looked at her, his mouth open, his ginger-bearded, narrow-eyed face turned sunset red by the sun. “Huh?”

  Jodi beckoned broadly. “Hurry, you damn fool—I found it!”

  CHAPTER 17

  THE STRANGER

  Hawk pressed his back against the escarpment and set his boots a little farther than shoulder-width apart. He was in the shade here in this rocky corridor, but the air was still as hot as the hobbs of hell. As he heard footsteps approaching from the boulder’s other side, he told himself it was about to get hotter.

  He held Saradee’s carbine barrel up in front of him. The Winchester was cocked, and his right index finger was curled against the trigger, ready.

  The soft, crunching falls of moccasin-clad feet stopped. A sweat bead dribbled down from Hawk’s right sideburn to his jawline. He frowned, squeezing the Winchester in his hands.

  Why had the brave stopped?

  Then he glimpsed movement in the corner of his right eye. He turned to see a dark head wrapped in red calico and a pair of black eyes staring at him from over the top of a boulder on the other side of the ravine down which the first brave had been coming. The first brave had apparently been warned to hold his ground by the one atop the boulder who just now slid his cheek against the neck of the Winchester he was aiming at the rogue lawman.

  Hawk threw himself forward against another boulder as the Apache’s Winchester coughed shrilly, smoke and red flames leaping from the barrel. The slug slammed into the rock against which Hawk had pressed his back a moment before.

  Shards and rock dust flew.

  Hawk raised his own carbine and fired at the Indian atop the rock, who was suddenly no longer there, and then he stepped out from the gap between boulders he’d been hunkered in. The Apache whose footsteps Hawk had been hearing was just around the corner. Hawk’s sudden appearance caused the brave to snap his eyes wide and trigger the carbine he was aiming straight out from his left hip.

  Hawk triggered his own rifle a quarter second later. The staccato blasts echoed shrilly together. The Chiricahua’s bullet hammered the boulder flanking Hawk, maybe two inches off the rogue lawman’s right hip, while Hawk’s slug took the brave in the gut.

  The brave leaped dramatically back, as though from a coiled snake, his carbine dangling in his left hand, barrel aimed at the ground. His molasses-colored eyes flashed at Hawk as he tried to reset his feet, but then Hawk shot him again, in the forehead.

  The second bullet lifted the young, stocky brave with tattoos on the insides of his cherry-brown arms, straight up and back and threw him onto the ground that Hawk’s slug had painted with the red and white c
ontents of the young warrior’s skull.

  Instantly, Hawk wheeled toward the boulder atop which he’d seen the other brave. The rogue lawman’s second spent cartridge wheeled over his right shoulder to clatter onto the ground behind him as he pumped a live round into the chamber.

  He stared at the boulder, skidding his gaze from side to side and to the top. And then, not seeing his target, he ran across the narrow ravine and along the boulder’s left side. He continued running straight out behind it, stopping suddenly and wheeling to his right, expecting to see the brave hunkered down behind the privy-sized chunk of black lava.

  “Hawk!” It was Saradee’s voice behind him.

  Hawk wheeled as a pistol popped. Ten yards behind Hawk, the second brave lowered the Spencer repeater he’d been aiming at Hawk. The Chiricahua stumbled forward on the toes of his moccasins, the fire in his eyes dying fast. He dropped the Spencer as he twisted around to see Saradee aiming one of her silver-chased Colts, gray smoke curling from the barrel.

  Movement behind Saradee.

  “Down!” Hawk shouted.

  The girl dropped like a fifty-pound sack of cracked corn as Hawk snapped his carbine to his shoulder. Hawk fired and watched the brave who’d been coming up behind the blonde, nocking an arrow to an ash bow, fire the fletched arrow into the ground at his feet and then twist around and stagger back in the opposite direction before dropping to his knees.

  He gave a guttural cry as he tried to heave himself to his feet, but then he stumbled forward and fell belly down on the ground, quivering as the life left him. Saradee, also lying belly down, lifted her wide-eyed face toward Hawk, glanced behind at the brave who’d almost perforated her pretty hide with a razor-edged strap-iron arrow point.

  She turned back toward Hawk and grinned.

  Hawk walked back the way he’d just come, looking around carefully. He gazed up and down the ravine before crossing it and crouching down beside the first brave he’d shot. The brave was carrying a Winchester repeater outfitted with a leather lanyard trimmed with filled cartridge loops. Kicking the dead warrior over, Hawk also found that he carried a Schofield .44 behind a red cotton sash.