Thunder Over the Superstitions

by Peter Brandvold

  The afternoon before, after Hawk’s and Saradee’s own encounter with the Apaches, the rogue lawman managed to run down one of the Chiricahua’s horses—a cream with cinnamon speckles across its rump and down its hips—and he and Saradee headed on down a twisting, turning arroyo to make camp a mile away from where the Chiricahuas lay moldering in the desert heat.

  Hawk hadn’t seen the old prospector since the man had wandered off in search of his burros. He figured the man had gone his own way, but when the purple evening shadows were stretching long and Hawk was perched on a rock at the lip of the arroyo, on the scout for more attackers, his Apache carbine resting across his thighs, he saw the lone figure moving toward him along the wash.

  Two pack-laden burros flanked the bearded desert rat.

  Saradee sat atop another rock on the wash’s far side. Between her and Hawk, a low fire built from the near-smokeless branches of the catclaw shrub snapped and crackled, a pot of coffee gurgling as it warmed. She, too, watched as the man walked slowly toward them, his crunching foot thuds and the clomps of the burros rising gradually in the quiet desert gloaming.

  “Company for dinner tonight,” Saradee said in her wistful tone. “Hope the maid polished the silver.”

  As the stranger approached, he paused, blinking owlishly as he gazed at Hawk and Saradee. He glanced down at the fire and then swung the burrows, which he led by a stout rope, toward the horseshoe in the wash in which Hawk and Saradee had tethered their horses, which were now eating mesquite beans.

  A large, bloody jackrabbit hung down one side of one of the burros, the rope around the rabbit’s neck tied to the pack frame.

  The old man said softly, dully, “Meat for the fire.”

  He didn’t say so, but Hawk knew it was an offering in return for Hawk and Saradee’s intrusion on the Chiricahua’s festivities, which doubtless had been about to include their seeing how loudly and for how long they could get the prospector to scream.

  “That’s funny,” Hawk said, eyeing the bloody rabbit. “I didn’t hear a shot.”

  As the desert rat began removing the pack frame from the back of his stockiest burro, Hawk saw the Apache war lance hanging from the frame, amid the bulging canvas panniers. The strap iron tip of the lance was still speckled with what appeared to be fresh blood.

  Hawk gave a quiet chuff in recognition of the oldster’s desert survival skills. Moving around out here as silently as possible was likely the reason he was still moving around at all.

  When the prospector had finished unrigging and then carefully, thoroughly tending his burros, who snorted up the parched corn he’d mounded before them, he picked up an old Springfield rifle from among his gear. He walked shyly over to the fire, thumbing his hat back off his forehead and staring up at Saradee. The girl grinned at the old German, and climbed down off the boulder she’d been sitting on, one knee raised. She walked around the fire and stuck out her hand.

  “I’m Saradee. Welcome to our fire!”

  The old man looked at her hand. Apparently, he’d never shaken a female hand before. Haltingly, he lifted his own and gently squeezed Saradee’s hand before running fingers through his grizzled beard and saying shyly, “You’re right purty.”

  He’d said it so quietly that Hawk had barely heard him. The rogue lawman barely heard the oldster’s low, sheepish chuckles as, steeling quick, frequent, admiring glances at the well-turnedout blonde before him, he dropped to his knees, slipped a knife from his belt sheath, and began deftly dressing the jack on a rock.

  When the rabbit had finished roasting, they all ate hungrily around the fire that they kept low, so the glow couldn’t be seen for more than a few yards beyond it. The prospector didn’t have much to say. Like most desert rats not accustomed to being around others, he was odd. He glanced around at Hawk and Saradee with a vague, speculative suspicion, as though he were wondering what they were doing out here.

  He also cast Saradee several lusty looks, his glance dropping to the girl’s swollen hickory shirt. Saradee pretended not to notice but only grinned over her plate or her raised coffee cup at him.

  “I had one like you,” the prospector said as he broke a rabbit bone and then loudly sucked out the marrow.

  “You mean you had a woman,” Saradee said with a dubious arch of her brows.

  “Yep. I had one.” The prospector rolled his dark eyes toward the darkness beyond the fire. “They killed her.” He sighed, tossed his bones into the fire. “Killed her bloody, the devils.”

  That was the extent of his conversation for the evening except for one more sentence, spoken when they’d cleaned up their eating utensils and Hawk was about to situate himself for taking the first night watch.

  The old prospector had just reclined against the bed he’d made of several blankets and a burlap feed pouch. “No need to keep scout.”

  And then he tipped his hat brim down over his eyes.

  Hawk glanced at Saradee, who shrugged a shoulder and then spread her own bedroll. Confident that the old-timer’s senses were even keener than Hawk’s own, and likely finely attuned to the smell of stalking Chiricahuas, Hawk rolled out an Indian blanket and drifted into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  He awoke before dawn. It was the old-timer who’d awakened him. The man was outfitting his burros on the far side of the wash. When he had them rigged up, he simply walked away, leading the burros. His and the burros’ footsteps dwindled gradually against the backdrop of a single, howling coyote.

  Saradee was sitting up, leaning back on her elbows.

  “What do you think about him?” she asked.

  “I think I’m gonna follow him,” Hawk said.

  “How come?”

  “Got a feelin’ . . .”

  Hawk flung his blanket aside, rose, and grabbed his rifle.

  CHAPTER 19

  IN THE DINOSAUR’S MOUTH

  “I’ll be damned,” Hawk said the next day.

  “What is it?”

  On one knee atop a ragged-edged, red stone ridge, Hawk trained Saradee’s spyglass through a notch overlooking a broad, red stone canyon with more red crags, like gothic church steeples, looming on the other side of it. Hawk and his blonde companion were at the heart of the Superstitions, among the towering peaks, plummeting canyons, and narrow, meandering washes littered with volcanic rubble.

  This dramatic part of the range was a rocky waste composed of red rock striated like a giant turtle shell and liberally adorned with ancient petroglyphs. All that grew here were sparse bunches of Mormon tea, prickly pear, and ocotillo. Such ragged life had a tough fight, competing as it did with so much rock.

  Mostly, the area was a beguilingly beautiful, three-dimensional statue of a dinosaur’s mouth that seemed to have been carved from one massive chunk of volcanic ash and basalt and set down here in the heart of the Arizona desert. The cobalt blue of the sky arching over the awful formations gave it a mind-jarring depth.

  “Don’t see him,” Hawk grunted, continuing to stare through the glass, sweeping the single sphere of magnified vision up and down the uneven floor of the canyon beyond and below him.

  “We saw him turn into that canyon, lover. He’s gotta be there, looking for his mine. If he really is the Dutchman, like you think he is.”

  “He is,” Hawk growled, stung by her having called him “lover” again. Every time she used the moniker, it was like razor-edged claws raking the back of his neck.

  He collapsed the spyglass and then began moving carefully down the steep, stone-carpeted slope toward where Saradee sat her palomino, holding the rope reins of Hawk’s appropriated Apache mustang. His Apache carbine hung down Hawk’s back by its leather lanyard, and his Apache bandanna ruffled in the hot breeze, the dry edge of which burned his eyes and made him forever thirsty. He was fortunate it was the monsoon season, and water was plentiful in the natural tanks among the rocks.

  He paused now beside one such tank—little more than a shallow, egg-shaped dimple eroded out of the mosaic-like stone slope, in the
shade of a square basalt boulder. He cupped the tepid water to his mouth, sucking it up and feeling the freshness roll down his throat. When he’d slaked his thirst, he removed his bandanna, soaked it, wrung it out only a little, and wrapped it around his head once more.

  The wet cloth was instantly refreshing, cooling.

  Hawk’s thoughts were on the bearded stranger. Hawk figured the man, the “Dutchman”—who else could he be?—was heading for his secret mine, taking a roundabout route due to the comings and goings of the small bands of Apaches that roamed this stony wilderness, protecting their Thunder God from interlopers.

  If so, the Dutchman might very well lead Hawk to Pima Miller and Jodi Zimmerman.

  As long as the girl had actually been heading for the mine herself, of course. It was entirely likely she’d only been spewing hot air about knowing where the mine was located. Hawk didn’t doubt she was more than a little soft in her thinker box. She might have only imagined she’d discovered the Dutchman’s famously secret mine.

  But following the so-called Dutchman had been Hawk’s only hope of catching up to Miller, for it was impossible to track anyone through such rocks as those that comprised the Superstitions. Of course, Hawk could have let the man go in hopes of catching up to him later, in less forbidding territory.

  But it was more than likely that Miller would head for Mexico after this, and Hawk might never get the chance to finally give him the bullet he was due. The bullet that he’d inadvertently given to the man’s woman, Nan-tee, leaving their infant son an orphan.

  Killing Miller wouldn’t make up for Hawk’s deadly mistake, of course. But it would make him sit a little easier, if such a thing were possible.

  No, he wouldn’t let Miller go. He’d try everything he could to run him down as fast as he possibly could. He didn’t have anywhere special to be. If he died here, hunting Miller, so be it.

  Men had died for worse causes than killing a killer like Miller. One who’d left his own boy behind . . .

  Hawk continued down the slope. He tossed the spyglass up to Saradee. She tossed his rope rein down to him, and he had to leap, Apache-like, onto the rope saddle, which sported no stirrups. He reined the horse around—it was a fiery mount, and he had to keep it on a short leash lest it throw him—and rode along the bottom of the canyon they’d been following all morning.

  The canyon slanted upward and doglegged to the right. The horses’ hooves clacked on the canyon floor’s solid stone slab. The hot breeze wheezed among the towering peaks and ratcheted the branches of a near ocotillo.

  Hawk turned the mustang around a mushroom-shaped scarp into the mouth of the canyon that he and Saradee had seen the Dutchman turn into about an hour ago. This was a narrow, winding cavity that appeared to climb gradually toward little but the blue sky far beyond.

  They rode for an hour, the sun hammering down on them, and then suddenly Hawk’s horse stopped and tossed its head and rippled its withers.

  “Hold on,” Hawk said, tightening his hold on the horse’s rope rein, squeezing his knees against the mustang’s sides. Getting pitched here onto solid rock could mean death or at least a broken bone or two.

  In the distance, a gun popped. Saradee’s palomino jerked, sidestepped. There was another pop and then another until it became obvious that several guns were being triggered farther up the trail, which appeared to grow steeper not far ahead. The gunfire continued—sporadic but angry, spanging shots—and then Hawk could hear men yelling, as well.

  The sounds were growing louder.

  From up trail, the trouble was moving toward him and Saradee.

  Both Hawk and the girl leaped down from their horses, tied the reins to some tough, brown shrubs growing between boulders, and ran up the trail. They stopped at the brow of the next steep rise. From here Hawk could see the canyon they’d been following twist around to the right and climb more steeply before disappearing in chunks of red basalt capping a razorback ridge.

  Hawk swung the Apache carbine around to his front, and poked his finger through the trigger guard, his heart beating faster. He dropped to one knee, ran a hand across his mouth, and stared up to where the canyon trail climbed and disappeared in the crags.

  He was thinking that the Dutchman had run into an Apache patrol.

  “Hawk!”

  He turned to his right. Saradee was standing and pointing toward where several dark, willowy figures clad in calico headbands were scrambling down from the giant, jutting rocks protruding straight up from the ridge. The Apaches were running down toward Hawk and Saradee.

  Just then, one of the Apaches dropped to a knee, raised a carbine to his shoulder, and showed a flash of teeth in his brick-red face as he snapped off a shot, his rifle barking hollowly, the slug screeching off a boulder slightly upslope from Hawk and his blonde companion.

  Hawk snapped up his own carbine and returned fire once, twice, three times, the rifle screeching and lurching in his hands.

  “Free the horses!” he shouted, rising and snatching his mustang’s reins from the shrub he’d tied them to. At the same time, Saradee did the same. They couldn’t risk their horses being killed out here in this natural sarcophagus. Better to run them down later.

  Neither mount needed encouragement. As the Apaches continued firing their repeaters while they ran down the slope, both mounts gave shrill whinnies and then scrambled around wildly and galloped back down the slick, rocky slope, their hooves slipping so that several times they both nearly fell.

  Hawk ran up the slope toward the Apaches. He’d known from being in Apache country before, and encountering Apaches from several different bands, that there was no running from the warriors. They were like wildcats. You had to bring the battle to them, and you cut loose with as much ferocity as they did. It was your only chance.

  Hawk just hoped that he and Saradee weren’t so badly outnumbered that their efforts would be in vein.

  Suddenly, Hawk wasn’t so sorry to have Saradee at his side. She had no trouble, even facing Apaches, to bolt forward whooping and hollering, every few steps stopping, raising her own carbine, and triggering .44 rounds toward the little, savage men bolting toward her.

  Hawk felt a grim smile shape itself on his lips as he ran around the left side of a cabin-sized boulder, hearing Saradee screeching and firing on the boulder’s opposite side. The girl was too damned much like himself.

  Gonna be a shame to kill her . . .

  He paused in his own sprint toward the ridge to snap off another round. He watched one of the Apaches fold like a pocketknife and turn a forward somersault off the boulder he’d just fired from.

  Hawk glanced to his right as Saradee triggered her own carbine. An Apache about thirty yards upslope from her gave a screech, dropped and rolled. He piled up about ten feet in front of the blonde, who gained her feet, strode purposefully toward the howling brave bleeding from the bullet wound in his bare chest, and calmly blew the top of his head off.

  She glanced at Hawk, winked, and cast her gaze upslope as she ejected the spent shell casing and seated a fresh one in the chamber. Hawk moved forward, aiming his own carbine straight out from his right hip, sliding it from side to side. Two more figures ran leaping down from the ridge straight above him, and then he saw two more leaping down from above and left.

  At the same time, the shooting on the other side of the ridge was growing louder, as though the separate shoot-out was moving toward him.

  Rifles crackled above Hawk. He dropped behind a boulder as the bullets plunked into the rocks around him. He snaked his rifle over the top of the rock, aimed at a lean brave running low between rocks, making his gradual way toward Hawk’s position.

  Hawk fired, watched his bullet kick up rock dust upslope from the brave continuing to work down toward him. At the same time, he spied movement in the upper-left periphery of his vision.

  Hawk ejected the spent shell casing and looked toward where the canyon trail disappeared among the boulders capping the ridge, above and to his left. A man
and two horses were running down from the ridge along the canyon trail. The man was running fast but stopping now and then to trigger lead back in the direction from which he was fleeing.

  Crouched behind his covering rock, the rogue lawman began sliding fresh cartridges from the loops on his leather lanyard through the loading gate on his carbine. Two loud blasts sounded from upslope, not far away. The slugs hammered the opposite side of his covering boulder, blowing rock shards up and over his head.

  He edged a peek over the rock to see the raisin-like face of a middle-aged Apache aiming an old Spencer repeater at him from the notch between two abutting boulders, twenty yards upslope from him. Hawk ducked as the rifle lapped flames toward him. The bullet screeched through the air where his head had been and puffed dust in the trail at the canyon bottom.

  A rare apprehension raked the rogue lawman. During his peek over the top of the rock he was crouched behind, he’d seen more than merely the old Apache bearing down on him. He’d seen at least three more braves dropping down from the rocks capping the ridge. They seemed to be angling toward him and Saradee from the left, as if they were breaking off from the separate fight over that way.

  His blonde partner must have gotten the same idea.

  “Hey, Hawk!” Saradee called. She was belly down behind a large scarp to Hawk’s right, sort of angled toward him, her carbine in her hands. He could see her bright, white smile through her delighted grin beneath the brim of her hat. “I think we might be about to powwow with old Geronimo—what do you think of that, lover?”

  She laughed and fired her carbine.

  CHAPTER 20

  POWWOWING WITH GERONIMO

  Another rifle blast caused Hawk’s covering rock to quiver. Shards flew.

  Gritting his teeth, Hawk lifted his head and rifle above the rock, planted a bead on the raisin-like forehead of the middle-aged Apache bearing down on him, and fired.