Bear Miller, McBride considered, was tough as they come and in a fight, close up or far off, he probably shaped up to be a wildcat.
“Rain’s coming,” the old man said, glancing at the threatening sky as he unsaddled his black. “Best we cook our chuck and bile up some coffee.”
“I thought you said I couldn’t have a fire?”
“I didn’t say that. I said you couldn’t have a fire where you were fixing to build it.” Bear grinned. “But after I seen you set your mustache on fire, I figured you wasn’t about to get one lit anyhow.”
The matter of his scorched mustache still rankled, but McBride let it go.
“We’ll make our fire among the trees where the leaves will spread the smoke,” Bear said. “And not the bonfire you was planning. All the fire we need can be covered with that fancy plug hat of your’n.”
The old mountain man watched his horse wander off to graze beside the mustang; then he said, “Anyhoo, I don’t reckon we have anything to fear from Apaches tonight. They don’t like to be out in the rain any more than we do.”
To McBride’s considerable chagrin, Bear quickly got a fire going among the trees and within a few minutes their coffee was heating. They rigged up a shelter of sorts from fallen tree branches and Bear’s slicker, and by the time the light died around them they were sharing broiled salt pork and bacon and drinking hot coffee.
Bear gave McBride a sidelong glance. “What brings you this way, John?”
“I could ask you the same thing.”
“I was a mountain man, then an army scout until I retired a month ago,” Bear said. “Now I’m just an old coot looking for a shady porch and a rocking chair.”
McBride laughed. “You won’t find them out here.”
Bear shrugged. “A man never knows. I reckoned maybe I’d meet up with a propertied widder woman along the trail, if one was to be found.”
The old man’s face still held a question and McBride answered it. “I’m passing through, looking for a store to buy. I thought I might prosper in the hardware business.”
The rain started, slowly, making a sound like a loudly ticking clock. Bear took a sip of coffee. “There’s a settlement to the east of where we’re sitting, about a two-hour ride from the Delaware Mountains and the salt flats. They call the place Suicide and there’s two accounts of how it got the name. One is that a man named Elliot founded the town, then for some reason shot himself. The other is that only folks bent on suicide would settle there in the first place.” The old man gazed intently at McBride. “Seems to me somebody might be willing to sell a store down there.”
“Does it have a hardware store?” McBride asked, his interest quickening.
“I don’t rightly know. As I recollect, there’s a saloon, another Mex place where they sell mescal and a livery. There might be a store or two. I don’t rightly remember. One other thing—a big white-painted house on a hill overlooks the whole place.”
“Who lives there?”
Bear’s eyes had a guarded look. “You’ll find out when you get there.”
“Sounds fair. I’ll ride down that way and take a look,” McBride said.
Suddenly Bear’s glance was searching as he turned to McBride in the gathering darkness, firelight staining the bronze planes of his face with shifting scarlet. “Now why would the man who gunned Hack Burns and is reckoned to be better with the iron than Hickok ever was want to sell pots and pans?”
McBride was taken aback. “How did you know?”
“I knew it right off,” Bear answered. “You’re a famous man, John, and as soon as you gave me your name, I figured you for the Tenderfoot Kid. Who else has shoulders an axe handle wide, dudes up like a city gent and carries a stinger gun under his armpit?”
Earlier McBride had been taken aback; now he was appalled.
“That’s what they’re calling me, the Tenderfoot Kid?”
“Around these parts they do, and maybe in other places.” Seeing the tangled emotions on McBride’s face, Bear said, “The gun casts a long shadow, John.”
“Then I want no part of it. I’ll be more than content to sell pots and pans and never have to wear a gun again.”
“Good plan, I guess. If you can use them pots as a running iron to alter your gunfighter brand.”
As the rain started in earnest, drops falling, hissing, into the fire, McBride’s eyes sought Bear’s in the gloom. “There’s another reason I’m here. I have three wards being cared for by friends up in the Colorado Picketwire country. They’re young Chinese girls and I’d like to send them to a finishing school back east for a couple of years. I’ll need a steady source of income for that, and a thriving hardware store fits the bill.”
Thunder rolled across the sky and silver lightning flickered around them. The rain was driving harder, hissing like a dragon, rivulets of icy water streaming into their rickety shelter.
Bear Miller didn’t seem to notice. “Knew some Celestials once, over to Deadwood. They did laundry and sold opium.”
Like most Westerners, the old mountain man’s opinion of the Chinese was low and, disinterested in the fate of McBride’s wards, he did not press him for details. He waited for an explosion of thunder to pass, then said, “Best we get some shut-eye, Kid. It’s going to be a long night.”
“Enough with the Kid stuff already,” McBride said. “The name’s John.”
Bear nodded. “Suit yourself. Then John it is.”
The old scout curled up on his side and was asleep instantly. McBride, wet, chilled and miserable, envied him, then rationalized that a man who once hibernated all winter long in a hollow log with an ill-tempered grizzly could sleep through a thunderstorm.
McBride had never seen a grizzly bear. But back in New York he’d read in dime novels that the creatures stood twenty feet tall, had horrible fanged jaws and had torn to pieces many a blushing maiden and stalwart frontiersman. Only brave outlaws like Billy the Kid and heroic scouts like Buffalo Bill Cody dare face the ravening beasts, using their six-guns to deadly effect ere the terrible animals rend them asunder with their sharp claws.
McBride smiled into the night. Now he was sleeping alongside a bear, but this one was just a skinny old man who snored.
He lay on his back and closed his eyes. Rain showered through the roof of the frail shelter, and the fire had long since died in a feeble wisp of smoke. All night long the thunderstorm raged, lightning cracking the sky apart. Once McBride heard Bear’s horse whinny in fear as a bolt struck a cottonwood farther along the creek. He rose and gazed into the rain-lashed darkness. The tree was split in half and on fire, scarlet tongues of flame fluttering on its trunk and branches. But one by one the fires blinked out in the downpour, leaving the night darker than it had been before.
McBride wiped raindrops off his mustache with the knuckles of his index finger, then crawled into his meager shelter. At some point he managed to fall asleep and he woke to a gray, watery dawn.
He put on his hat, stepped outside and, looking around him, worked a kink out of his back. Bear Miller was gone, probably chasing his horse. The skeleton of the lightning-struck cottonwood stood black against the surly sky and the air smelled of wet earth and rain. A wind, driving chill off the snow peaks of the Brokeoff Mountains, made McBride shiver. He considered trying his hand again at a fire to warm up the coffee but immediately dismissed the idea. Everything was wet and all he’d achieve would be a strand of flimsy smoke that came and went and a bellyful of disappointment.
He reached into the shelter, lifted the pot from the muddy coals and drank from it. The coffee was cold, gritty and bitter…but it was coffee.
Pot in hand, McBride strolled to his mustang. He was looking at the ugly little horse and it was looking at him. The animal seemed to have fared all right and even allowed McBride to pat its neck a time or two before it lashed out with a flinty rear hoof, missing his knee by inches.
“Never at your best in the mornings, are you, horse?” he said.
The mustan
g regarded him with a mean eye, then moodily lowered its head to its grazing.
McBride drank from the pot again and nodded. “Not too bad once you get used to it,” he said aloud, licking his lips. “A man could get to liking a drink of cold mud.”
A couple of minutes later Bear Miller rode into camp…and the old man looked scared to death.
Chapter 4
McBride’s raised eyebrows asked a question and Bear answered it. “Apaches! Coming this way!”
“How many?”
“Enough.”
“Can we go around them?” McBride asked, the coffeepot forgotten in his hand.
Bear leaned forward in the saddle and shook his head. “No. We could try to go through them, but our hair would be decorating some buck’s lance by noon.”
“How much time do we have?”
“Time enough to start over that.” Bear nodded toward the grim peaks of the Guadalupe Ridge. “And hope we’re out of rifle range afore the ’Paches get here.”
“Bear, will they come after us?”
“Boy, you can bet the farm on it. Now saddle that thing you call a hoss and let’s get the hell out of here.”
McBride picked up his saddle. “Do you know a trail across those mountains?”
“Nope. Never tried to find one.”
“I looked, but didn’t see any kind of trail.”
“There will be one. All we have to do is find it.” A frown gathered between the old man’s eyes. “Now saddle that damned hoss. You ain’t sitting on your porch on a Sunday morning with all the time in the world.”
A few minutes later McBride was moving the mustang at a slow walk along smooth rock that seemed to rise straight up. Ahead of him rode Bear on his rangy black and ahead of Bear…a nightmare landscape of steep slope, gravel and brush. Higher, the slope met up with a band of thick pines, interrupted here and there by massive outcroppings of rock and small grassy areas.
The air was thinning as they rode higher. Clinging to the wind, rain and snow-polished slant like moss on a rock, McBride looked beyond his right stirrup. The mountain fell almost vertically away from him, past a boulder jam and then…dizzying nothingness. He swallowed hard, realizing that if his pony slipped, he would fall for a mile before hitting ground.
It was a thought that did little to comfort a man.
The clouds were dropping lower, towering gray banks of them that looked like the ramparts of an ancient fortress. It was as yet only early morning but McBride had the feeling that the sun was dead and that darkness was about to take over the entire world. Ahead of him Bear Miller kept looking over his shoulder, his troubled eyes searching their back trail, a sight that did little to soothe McBride’s jangled nerves.
Bear dropped lower onto a narrow ledge that rose again gradually and disappeared around a jutting rock face shaped like the prow of a ship. He turned in the saddle and yelled, “Game trail! I reckon she’ll switchback up into the pines.”
McBride grimaced. And what if it doesn’t, old man? If the trail peters out around the rock face there will be no going back. Did you think of that?
He estimated they were maybe seven thousand feet above the flat and climbing. It was a long way to fall. A long time to think about dying.
Then two dire events happened one right after the other, stabbing equal spikes of fear into McBride’s belly.
The first was a rising wind that slapped pitilessly at his face…and carried icy drops of rain.
The second was the bullet that spaaaanged! off the rock a few inches above his head.
Startled, Bear swung around in the saddle. “They’re after us! Unlimber that rifle, boy, an’ have at it.”
Easier said than done!
The ledge was so narrow McBride had no room to turn and bring the rifle to his shoulder. In any case he was not much of a hand with a long gun and all he’d do is make noise.
A second bullet hit the rock, another right after it. The mustang tossed its head, made jumpy by the gunfire and the sudden unease of its rider. The pony’s hoof slipped, raining down a shattering shower of shingle and gravel, and McBride’s heart stood still.
He drew rein. Ahead of him Bear disappeared around the prow-shaped rock. The old man hadn’t once looked back, intent on saving his own hide, and McBride cursed him loudly and passionately.
He drew his Smith & Wesson and turned his head as much as he dared. A small, wiry man with long black hair bound by a red calico headband was walking along the ledge toward him. The Apache wore a faded, Mexican shirt, white breechcloth and moccasins to his knees. He carried a Spencer rifle and a holstered Colt.
So that’s what a whole Apache looked like!
McBride raised his revolver, fired over his shoulder—and missed. The Apache pressed himself against the rock slope, then threw his rifle to an aiming position. The man fired and McBride felt the bullet burn across the thick muscle of his right bicep.
Another Apache inched along the ledge, saw McBride and took a kneeling position. He threw up his rifle and McBride fired, this time with better effect. His bullet ricocheted off the rock, close to the Indian’s face, throwing splinters of rock into his cheek. The Apache yelped and his finger closed on the trigger. The shot went high and wide.
A third Apache appeared and then a fourth. McBride knew his time was short. He kicked at the mustang’s sides, but the horse refused to budge. Cursing a blue streak, at any second expecting a bullet in the back, he lashed at the horse with the reins.
Nothing. The mustang tossed its head, snorted and refused to budge.
The rain started in earnest, hammering into McBride’s face, making the narrow trail slick and even more dangerous. The Apache fire was hitting around him as they began to find the range and they were edging closer. Then it dawned on McBride why they hadn’t already killed him—they wanted him alive! As though he’d set out to learn them by heart, the words of a dime novel he’d read came back to haunt him:
Joachim van Sloot, that stalwart frontiersman, bore well the torture of the feathered fiends for the first few hours or so, not a sound escaping his bearded lips. But after three days of torment, his skin flayed from his body, his eyes and ears gone, he begged his callous captors for death. The savage reply of the buckskinned beasts was to cut out his tongue. Being a strong man, Joachim lingered in mortal agony for two more long days ere our merciful Lord finally put an end to his suffering and he cast off his mortal coil.
McBride had no intention of being tortured to death. If worse came to worst, he’d empty his service revolver into the Apaches, then jump the mustang off the ledge. His death would be just as certain, but much quicker.
Behind him he heard an Apache yell at him in English, ordering him to stay where he was. He turned in the saddle, ready to make his fight. The Apache fired a warning shot. The bullet bounced off the rock just behind the mustang, then burned across the top of its hindquarters. The little horse shrieked in fear and took off along the ledge at a gallop.
McBride heard disappointed yells behind him as the mustang rounded the bend at breakneck speed. All he could do was hold the saddle horn in a death grip and pray as the mountains cartwheeled crazily around him.
To his relief the ledge opened up to a width of several feet, climbing steeply upward toward a stand of pine surrounding a pile of huge boulders that had tumbled down the mountain during some ancient earthquake.
McBride had almost reached the pines when a rifle fired, a puff of gray smoke rising from the top of the boulders. Behind him he heard an Apache scream as he pitched over the ledge into the abyss below.
The frightened mustang reached the pines and skidded to a stop, throwing McBride over its head. He hit the ground with a thud and lay there, all the air knocked out of him.
Suddenly Bear Miller took a knee at his side. “Are you hit, John?”
McBride tried to answer, gasped a few times and gave up. He pointed to the wound on his arm.
Bear studied the bullet burn and nodded. “Uh-huh, just a scratch
. You were lucky, boy. When I saw you fall off your pony, I thought for sure you’d been hit bad.” The old man’s face took on a shrewd look. “Don’t have a very secure seat in the saddle, do you?”
McBride let that go and rose to a sitting position. He was able to breathe again, barely, but managed, “The Apaches?”
“Gone, I reckon. After losing one man, an Apache is too savvy to climb a narrow ledge into the fire of two waiting rifles. He’ll bide his time and lift your hair another day when the odds are more in his favor.”
A few moments later Bear’s analysis of the situation proved accurate. A lone Apache appeared at the bend of the trail and, his hands cupped around his mouth, started hollering.
“What’s he saying?” McBride gasped.
“Well, he’s cussing us out in a mixture of Apache, Spanish and English, but mostly Apache. He says we’re a couple of old women who are too scared to leave the trees and come out and fight.” Bear listened for a while, then grinned. “He’s got a special word for you, John.”
“What’s that?”
“He says you can’t ride, can’t shoot and from now on should stay home with the white squaws.”
“Well, he knows I can’t understand a damn thing he’s saying, so more fool him.”
The Apache turned his back, raised his breechcloth and bared his rump in McBride’s direction.
“Understand that?” Bear asked, his eyes twinkling.
“I think,” McBride said, “he just made his opinion of me pretty clear.”
Shadow of the Gun Page 3
