Shadow of the Gun

by West, Joseph A. ; Compton, Ralph

  “Dang me, John, but I like them big gals. If I could find me a rocker somewheres and put them two in my bed, I’d be a happy man. They’d keep me warm in winter and give me plenty of shade in summer.” His eyes slanted wistfully to the door. “An’ that’s a natural fact.”

  “You couldn’t handle those fat ladies, Bear, a skinny old coot like you.” McBride grinned. “They’d put you in the ground within three months.”

  “Maybe so…but what a way to go.”

  Bear drained his glass. “Ah well, it’s about time I found a bunk at the hotel. I’ll meet you at the livery come sunup.”

  He stepped to the door but McBride’s voice stopped him. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Fifty cents for the second drink,” McBride said.

  Chapter 9

  The sleet and gloom of the night had gone as McBride walked to the livery stable under a blazing scarlet sky streaked with ribbons of gold and jade. The wind had dropped to a whisper and the air was warmer, the scent of the pines and aspen growing on the slopes of the Guadalupe Ridge reaching far.

  He stepped into the barn and heard Drago snoring, lost in the darkness of a stall. He had already saddled the mustang when Bear Miller stepped inside. The old man muttered a gruff good morning, then led out his black. He threw his saddle on the horse and as he tightened the girth he said conversationally, “Drago, you hear me?”

  The snoring stopped abruptly.

  “Figured you was faking it,” Bear said. He was smiling. “Drago, I see you coming out of that pigsty you sleep in with a gun in your hand, I’ll up my Henry and blow you clean through the wall of the barn.” His smile stretched into a grin. “You understand me?”

  Drago’s voice drifted from the shadows. “Bear Miller, you got no call to talk to me like that.”

  The old scout caught up the reins of the black. “Just you remember what I said. I reckon folks don’t call you the Poison Dwarf for nothin’.”

  A taut silence stretched thin across the distance, then snapped. “One day, Miller, I plan on killing you.”

  Early-morning irritability riding him, Bear faced the stall, his hand on the butt of his belt gun. “No time like the present. You want to open the ball?”

  “In my own time, at a place of my own choosing. That’s how it will be.”

  “I’ll be waiting.”

  Bear led his horse outside and stepped into the saddle. He looked at McBride as he clambered onto the mustang’s back. “That,” he declared, “is the sorriest-looking hoss I’ve ever seen, an’ I’ve seen plenty.”

  McBride nodded, his right foot searching for the stirrup. “Maybe, but he gets me to where I want to go.”

  “Eventually, I guess,” Bear said. He kneed the big stud into a walk and threw over his shoulder: “A man would be a fool to ride a hoss that was too much for him.”

  “That he would,” McBride said, refusing to be baited.

  “But then again, most horses are too much for you, huh, John?”

  McBride said nothing. Even though the truth hurt.

  He caught up with Bear and rode beside the old man, looking up at him. “You were a bit hard on Drago back there.”

  “No I wasn’t. He’s trash, murdering trash. Look, a man can’t help the way he was born, but Drago went on to forge his own destiny. He set out to be a killer and he succeeded. Because he’s ugly and misshapen, he’s at war with all of God’s creation, blaming the world for his ills. Know what that means, John, to hate God and all he stands for? That’s the very definition of evil.”

  McBride smiled. “Bear, for a mountain man you sure talk like a college professor sometimes.”

  “Damn right. I read books an’ so should you.”

  The sleet of last night would have washed away Cortez’s tracks and McBride said as much to Bear. The old man looked down at him from his lofty perch on the tall black and grinned. “Spoken like a true pilgrim. The land is always scarred by a man’s passing and no amount of sleet or rain or wind will get shet of it. His mount’s hoof scars a rock or crushes a wildflower and it always leaves dung behind. The dwarf said Cortez was heading west and he told you the truth. I reckon he swung south soon, toward the foothills of the Delawares. He’s planning to cross the peaks and head for the flat, easy-riding country between the Apache Mountains and the Sierra Diablo.”

  Bear nodded, his face set and hard. “There’s a heap of rough country ahead, but we’ll find him.”

  “If he’s still alive,” McBride said.

  “Well, if he ain’t, we’ll find his body.”

  “I can’t be away that long,” McBride said. “I have to get back to the cantina.”

  Bear drew rein and turned in the saddle, both hands flat on the horn. He spoke slowly, as though he were lecturing a child. “John, you told me Cortez rode out scared. Now, it could be he expected somebody to come after him, somebody who didn’t want him to leave Suicide. If that is the case, he’d be gunned fairly close to town. His killer wouldn’t waste time by hanging back and then tracking him all the way to the mountains.”

  The old scout’s eyes reached across the grass and brush flats. Then he kneed his horse into motion. “One way or another, we’ll come up on Cortez soon and you’ll be back in Suicide in time for supper.”

  McBride felt a niggle of irritation. He was a trained detective and he should have figured all that out for himself. Finally he consoled himself with the thought that the rugged Guadalupe country was not New York. Out here it took a whole different set of skills to play detective, skills he had not yet learned.

  But I’ll learn them eventually, he thought. The promise rang hollow, even to himself.

  An hour passed without further talk, the only sound the creak of saddle leather and the jangle of bits. The sun was climbing higher in a lemon-colored sky and the day grew a few degrees warmer. But there remained a chill in the air and, shivering, McBride turned up the collar of his coat.

  Bear had dismounted several times, getting down on one knee to check the ground. In the distance, the sandstone ramparts of the Delaware Mountains were soaring gray against the sky when he drew rein and motioned toward several upthrust slabs of rock about fifty yards ahead of them. “Good place for a bushwhacking, huh?”

  A narrow stream, bordered by crowded coyote willows each standing about fifteen feet high, ran between the rocks. A solitary buckbrush, trailing its fall plumage, struggled to survive nearby. A rifleman could have hidden among the willows or climbed to a perch in the rocks, trusting to the tree branches to conceal him.

  “Cortez rode close to this place,” Bear said. “If he’s dead, he was shot from here. That’s my guess.”

  “But an attacker would have had to get ahead of him.”

  “Cortez was riding a mule. A man on a fast horse could have passed him wide on the trail, then holed up here and waited until he got him in his sights.” Bear nodded to the rocks. “John, you’re young and spry—climb up there and see what you see.”

  McBride had been in the saddle for a long time. He clambered off the mustang stiffly, got his left foot tangled in the stirrup and fell flat on his back. He got up and brushed off his muddy pants, his face livid.

  Bear was highly amused and it showed. “Nice dismount, boy. But that’s not how it’s usually done around these parts.”

  McBride swore, caught up his hat and jammed it back on his head, looking daggers at the old man. “You know,” he said, “I’m beginning to develop an intense dislike of horses.”

  “Hell, so would any man if’n he fell off them as much as you do.” Bear grinned. “Now climb them rocks like I told you an’ scout around.”

  Turning on his heel, McBride walked toward the rocks, but Bear’s voice stopped him. “Hey, John!”

  “What?”

  “Be careful you don’t fall.”

  It took only a few moments for McBride to scramble up the rocks, and he found the empty shell casing almost immediately. Bright and
new, it lay in a gravel-filled crack angling across a flat stone slab that leaned against a second, forming an inverted V. The slab where McBride stood was about eight inches lower than the other. The drop made a handy place to rest a rifle while a man lay hidden behind rock and a covering screen of willow branches.

  He scouted the area but found nothing else, no tracks or any other sign that someone had been here.

  McBride regained the level and walked over to Bear who was now standing beside his horse. “Find anything?”

  “Only this.” He passed the shell to the old man.

  “Sharps big .50,” Bear said. He sniffed the casing. “And it was fired recently, maybe only yesterday.” The old man’s questioning eyes found McBride’s. “Who do we know uses a buffalo gun?”

  “Jim Drago?”

  “Maybe.” He studied the shell again and without looking up said, “But I know for sure Allison Elliot uses one.”

  McBride shook his head. “I can’t believe she’d have anything to do with this, a cold-blooded killing from ambush.”

  “Could be those five men lying in the ground beside her house thought the same thing.”

  “Bear, we don’t even know Manuel Cortez is dead. The shell could have been used by a hunter after an antelope or a mule deer.”

  “That’s a possibility,” Bear conceded. He turned and moved his arm in a semicircular arc. “If Cortez was shot, I’m betting he’s out there somewheres, and within a hundred yards of this spot.”

  “Then it shouldn’t be hard to find him,” McBride said. “Let’s go look.”

  He and Bear split up and quartered the ground. The land around the rock pile was relatively flat, grassy in places, sandy in others, dotted with clumps of piñon, squawbush, mesquite and prickly pear.

  Manuel Cortez’s body was lying on its back near a thick stand of cactus. The man had been shot between the eyes.

  Chapter 10

  “Good shootin’,” Bear Miller commented as he gazed down at the Mexican’s body. His eyes lifted to McBride. “I reckon if you were to pace off the distance between here and the rocks, it’s better than eighty yards.”

  McBride had examined Cortez’s body and he calculated that the man had been killed sometime the day before, probably a couple of hours after he’d ridden out of Suicide.

  Cortez’s mule lay at a distance, its insides and flank meat torn away. The animal had been taken down during the night by wolves or coyotes. They’d be back for the leftovers.

  The man’s pockets were empty, McBride’s money gone. He did not grieve for Cortez, but he did mourn for his five hundred dollars.

  “What do we do with him?” he asked.

  Bear shrugged. “We can’t bury him and he’s getting a mite too ripe to carry back with us. We’ll leave him here. The coyotes will see to him.”

  “His cantina was the El Coyote Azul, the Blue Coyote,” McBride said. “Funny that, huh? I mean in the light of what you just said.”

  “Yeah, real funny.” Bear’s glance shifted to McBride’s saddle. “I see you brought your rifle.”

  “Yes, it’s there.”

  “Well, that’s good, John, because you’re going to need it.”

  McBride’s head snapped around. “What do you mean?”

  “Look right ahead of you, at our back trail.”

  McBride shaded his eyes with the palm of his hand, his gaze searching the distance. “Smoke,” he said finally. “It’s a campfire.”

  “That’s no campfire, boy, it’s talking smoke. Mescalero Apache smoke.”

  “What’s it saying?”

  “It’s saying, ‘Hold on right there, blancos, we’re a-comin’.’”

  A spike of panic rose in McBride. “What do we do?”

  “Well, we could try to outrun them, but they might be all around us. I don’t recommend it.”

  “Then what do you recommend, Bear, for God’s sake?”

  “We hightail it back to the rocks and try to fight them off.” Bear’s smile was grim. “I don’t like that either, but I’ve plumb run out of recommendations.”

  The two men mounted and headed for the rock pile at a gallop, Bear’s leggy black outdistancing McBride’s mustang. By the time he reached the rocks, Bear had already found himself cover, his Henry up and ready.

  A bullet split the air next to McBride’s head as he found the slab where he discovered the shell casing and he hunkered down behind the drop. He looked across the plain, into vastness, then let out with a wild whoop.

  “They’re not Apaches!” he yelled. Bear was below him and to his left. “It’s our brave boys in blue!”

  McBride laid his Winchester aside and got ready to rise to his feet. But Bear’s harsh shout stopped him. “Stay where you are! The gallant boys in blue who wore those coats are all dead. A coat of government wool is a valuable prize for an Apache when he knows fall is cracking down strong.”

  Then McBride saw the full magnitude of his error.

  The necks of the Mescalero ponies were stretched, their quick gallop rapidly closing the gap between the Apaches and the rocks. There were at least a dozen warriors and six or seven wore tunics of soldier blue.

  The roar of Bear’s rifle slapped hard against the quiet, ringing echoes racketing around him and McBride. A horse and rider went down.

  McBride fired at a warrior in a blue coat and cavalry kepi, his long black hair streaming behind him in the wind. A miss. He fired again. A miss.

  A bullet whined off the rock in front of McBride and a second, even closer, sent him ducking for cover behind the drop.

  Bear levered his rifle and looked up at McBride, his face twisted in anger. “Keep firing, damn it! Even if you don’t hit nothing, keep firing.”

  McBride got a knee under him and threw the Winchester to his shoulder. Too late. An Apache had climbed the rock face and was right on top of him. He fired as the man jumped from the higher slab. The Mescalero landed on McBride’s belly with both feet, his rifle butt ready to crash down on his skull. McBride rolled and the Apache lost his footing and fell beside him, his rifle spinning away, clattering down the rock pile.

  The Indian sprang to his feet, quick as a striking rattler. He had a knife in his hand and he swung the blade at McBride’s head. McBride felt a burn across his cheek as the razor-sharp, strap-iron blade slashed him. He suddenly saw blood on the left shoulder of his coat, and, panicked, fell backward. The Apache, his black eyes flat, without emotion, the eyes of a man who had killed many times before, dived on McBride, his knife raised.

  McBride had a split second to react—and he did.

  As the Apache fell on him, he measured the distance and threw a straight right at the man’s chin. The Mescalero’s own impetus added power to the punch and he screamed as his jaw shattered. McBride threw the unconscious man off him and scrambled to his feet…to look at a ring of grinning Apaches, their rifles leveled on him.

  Bear Miller had been dragged out of his hole and his head was bloody from the blow of a rifle butt. The old man looked defeated—and scared.

  McBride had no illusions about what would happen next. The dime magazine he’d read back in New York described in terrible detail the fate of the stalwart frontiersman who fell into the hands of the dreaded Apache. He would endure days of unspeakable torture and in the end beg for death.

  McBride doubted he’d last that long. He was far from being a frontiersman and the fight with the Mescalero, when he’d experienced both fear and panic, convinced him he was not much of a stalwart either.

  “We were beat afore we even started, John.” Bear was talking to him, his voice unsteady. “There was too many…caught out in the open like this….”

  McBride did not trust himself to speak. He said nothing. His heart was hammering in his chest and he heard a singing in his ears as blood rushed to his head. Now he wished that he’d let the Apache kill him.

  That Mescalero had staggered to his feet, his busted jaw hanging loose. He looked around, found his knife and started toward
McBride. His eyes were no longer emotionless. They were filled with black fire. He held the knife low, blade up, for a gutting slash.

  A guttural command stopped him in his tracks. The man who’d spoken stood about five foot seven, tall for an Apache, his lean, whipcord body knotted with muscle. A blue calico headband held back his waist-length hair and his moccasins reached the midpoint of his thighs. Across his nose and cheekbones he wore red and white stripes, the traditional war paint of the U.S. Cavalry scout.

  McBride looked into the man’s eyes and was surprised to see more green than brown. But the Apache’s glance was cold, cruel and as hard and unfriendly as tempered steel.

  He hurled more words at the Mescalero facing McBride. The man hesitated for several moments, his face sullen. Finally he sheathed his knife and spat at McBride. He winced in pain and walked away, holding his jaw.

  Bear had wandered closer to McBride. “The big Apache’s name is Mingan. He’s Mimbreno, not Mescalero, but he’s loco and worse than any of them.” Then, almost as an afterthought, Bear said, “He knows me.”

  The faint surge of hope that rose in McBride’s chest was soon dashed.

  Mingan, a Sharps carbine across his chest, stepped in front of Bear. He motioned to the old scout’s pants. “You still wear the yellow stripe.”

  Bear’s reaction was to display more grimace than grin. “No longer, Mingan. Now I seek a rocking chair and a fat woman.” He made a circular motion with a forefinger near his temple and staggered. “Get drunk often with my friend the great warrior, hunter and scout Mingan. Maybe so.”

  The Apache shook his head. “You are not my friend, Bear. You are my enemy. All blancos are my enemy. Look at my face. See the red and white of the bluecoat cavalry? I wear those stripes not out of pride but to remind me that I must hate and kill those I once served. I will go on hating and killing until every white man is driven from our land.”

  “Hatred is a madness of the heart, Mingan,” Bear said. “It injures the hater, not the hated.”

  The Apache smiled. “Always your words are as smooth as a young maiden’s hair. How well will you talk when the fire is put to you?” Mingan waved a hand. “Out there lies the body of an Apache you killed. He has three wives and they will soon make you curse the day you were born and the mother who bore you.”