Bear made no response and the Apache nodded. “Fear makes the wolf bigger than he is, but not to you. You fear because you know very well what is to come. I read your fear in your eyes. It is a living thing.”
Mingan stepped away from Bear and yelled something to the other Apaches. McBride and Bear were roughly hauled from the rocks, their hands tied behind them and rawhide nooses drawn tight around their necks. Mounted Apaches took up the ends of the ropes, dragging the prisoners behind their ponies.
The sun was at its highest point in the sky and the day grew hotter. Acrid dust kicked up by the horses worked its way into McBride’s mouth and eyes. As he shambled along he began to fantasize about water, the way they served it at Delmonico’s in New York, brimming in a tall glass filled with crushed ice and a sprig of mint.
As if to remind them, the dead warrior, head down over his horse, was kept close to McBride and Bear. Flies buzzed around the bloody wound in the man’s head and his long hair swayed back and forth, brushing the dust of the trail.
McBride turned his head, a movement that brought him pain as the rawhide scraped cruelly against his neck. He spoke to Bear, his words muffled by a dry mouth and swollen tongue. “Where are they taking us?” he croaked.
Bear, older than McBride but toughened by a thousand hard trails in all kinds of weather, glanced up at the sun and then into the vastness of the plain. “The Delaware Mountains, I reckon. The Mescalero had a ranchería in a canyon there a few years back, then abandoned it. Now they’re following the war drums, they may be using it again.”
The Apache dragging Bear turned and angrily jerked on the rope. As the noose tightened and cut into his skin, the old scout yelped in pain.
His own anger flaring, McBride rasped at the Mescalero, “Hey you, quit that!”
Immediately the noose around his own neck tightened violently and he gasped in agony. After that he stayed silent.
The sun was hovering above the Delawares, touching the peaks with gleaming silver light, when the Apaches made a sharp turn to the west and rode into an arroyo, elderberry and dogwood growing on its slopes, prickly pear and other cactus scattered along its sand and gravel bottom. Months ago, in the spring, it would have been a rushing stream, carrying the rain and snowmelt washing off a mountain. Now it was dry and dusty and McBride’s raging thirst grew. But here the air was cooler and the narrowness of the arroyo forced the Apaches to slow their pace, giving him a welcome respite.
But not for long.
The arroyo began to climb, up a gradual slope at first, then steeper, rocks and gravel making the footing difficult. McBride stumbled and fell several times, only to be roughly yanked to his feet again by a pull on the rope. His knees and the palms of his hands were scraped and bleeding, the spines of tiny, hidden cactus digging deep. Beside him Bear was in no better shape and the old man’s face was ashen.
The last two hundred yards were flatter, the arroyo twisting its way around massive sandstone boulders that had toppled from the mountain in ancient times. Gradually the walls grew wider, opening up into a small clearing, the mountain looming a mile above them. The clearing was a hanging meadow of about thirty acres, bordered by scattered spruce and lodge-pole pine.
Ten wickiups stood crowded together close to the pines and a small pony herd was picketed on the opposite side of the meadow. For an Apache ranchería, this one was relatively clean, but that testified only to the fact that the Indians had not been there long.
Within the shallow arc of the wickiups several cook fires burned, sullen flames flickering dull red in the fading light of the dying day. Near the picketed pony herd a dog barked heedlessly into the gloom, annoyed by the yips of prowling coyotes.
Almost as soon as they were dragged into the center of the village, McBride and Bear were manhandled to the ground. Their legs and arms were spread-eagled and staked out with rawhide ropes around their wrists and ankles. Then, inexplicably, they were left alone.
Bear Miller turned his head, pools of blue shadow in his eye sockets and cheeks. The old man was breathing hard, his skinny chest rapidly rising and falling. “John,” he whispered, “I reckon soon we’ll no longer be able to talk, so let’s get it done while we can. Just remember that pain has no memory. When it’s over and we’re sitting in hell, you and me, it will be like this never happened.”
Despite his growing fear and dread, McBride managed a weak grin. “Thanks, Bear, now I feel a whole lot better.”
The old man raised his head and nodded. “Think nothing of it. You know, for a pilgrim you’ve got sand, John McBride. It’s just a pity that you turned your back on your true calling and ended up here.”
“You mean, I should have stayed a detective sergeant of police in New York?”
Bear cackled, a dry, raspy sound. “Dang me, is that what you was? I always took ye fer a lawman of some kind. But that wasn’t your true calling or you wouldn’t have headed west. No, boy, your true calling was to become a famous revolver fighter. You was headed in that direction until you got religion and decided to dish beans for a living. The Tenderfoot Kid, now he was on his way to becoming a man to contend with.”
“Sorry I disappointed you, Bear,” McBride said. His mouth was parched, his lips cracked and swollen, and it seemed that his whole body was crying out for water.
“Well…it don’t matter a damn now, do it? We’re done for.”
McBride made no reply and after a couple of minutes Bear’s voice came out of the darkness, a small, forlorn whisper that had a terrible finality to it. “Be brave, John McBride. Be brave.”
“You too, Bear.” McBride hesitated, trying to gather up his flagging courage. “You too.”
Now the Apache women began to mourn for their dead.
From around the cook fires high, keening wails cut through the quiet dusk like razors, expressing a grief for the dead warrior that had a thousand shadows, each darker than the other. It has been said that the Apaches were filthy, emotionless creatures who cared only for killing. Nothing could be farther from the truth. They lamented the death of one of their own as fervently as any white man, and even more, since the Apaches were always few and their enemies many.
The cries of grief rose in volume, wavering from high screams to low, animallike moans. The women were weeping, believing that their god U-sen washed the eyes with tears the better to see the misty land of the dead where all pain and suffering ended.
The warriors were passing around and drinking deeply from a bulging water bag made from horse intestines. They seemed to be getting drunk very quickly.
“Tizwin, Apache corn beer,” Bear whispered. “But it could be mescal. They’re working themselves into a state, getting in the mood.”
McBride told himself that it could not be much longer. He steeled himself for the torments to come, fearing that when the fire scorched and the knives cut he would scream like a woman in childbirth. He looked at the sky, dark and starless. A wind was blowing off the mountain, rustling among the trees, teasing him, whispering thin in his ears, mocking his cowardice.
Shuffling footsteps sounded near McBride and he turned his head to look. The warrior whose jaw he’d broken stepped beside him. The Apache’s jaw was bound up in a strip of red tradecloth, knotted at the top of his head. For several moments the man looked down at McBride; then he pulled back his right leg and kicked his prisoner hard in the ribs.
The man’s moccasin was soft, the buckskin chewed by his woman until it was the consistency of fine suede. But the toes in the moccasin were rock hard, the nails thick and tough as buffalo horn.
McBride gasped as sharp pain from the kick shrieked across his ribs. The Apache kicked him again, and again. McBride bit his lip until it bled, trying to bear the unbearable. He was certain several of his ribs were broken or at least cracked and he had to fight for every shuddering, agonizing breath.
Then the kicking stopped. But not out of any sense of mercy.
The Apache raised his foot and ground the filthy sole of his moc
casin into McBride’s face. Blood from his flattened nose, tasting like salt and iron, ran into his mouth, and his cracked, puffed lips were crushed against his teeth. For a wild, terrified instant, McBride thought he’d drown in his own blood.
Mingan ended it. He roughly pushed the warrior away and he glanced down at McBride. The man’s cruel face was expressionless, like it had been carved out of mahogany. Then he turned on his heel and walked away.
A couple of minutes later, as McBride’s face was turned to let the blood from his nose and lips trickle away from his mouth, Bear Miller groaned.
It was not a moan of pain but part fear, part resignation.
McBride lifted his head to see what Bear was seeing.
Seven Apache women, their faces blackened with wood ash, dark eyes glittering, were striding toward them. Two of the women carried burning brands from the cook fires, the others knives or sharp-pointed sewing awls.
McBride let his aching head thud back to the ground. For the first time in his life he wished he’d never been born.
Chapter 11
The sky exploded.
Thunder slammed with titanic violence and lightning shattered the fabric of the night into millions of shimmering silver shards. Immediately, driven by the wind, a turbulent rain hammered down, drawing a shifting curtain of steel needles across the ranchería.
Their blazing brands sizzling into wisps of smoke, the Apache women, squealing, ran for their wickiups, chased by rain, thunder and the seeking, skeletal hands of the lightning.
McBride arched his back and opened his mouth, letting rain fall into the parched, shriveled tissues of his tongue and cheeks. He swallowed greedily, opened his mouth and swallowed again.
Beside him he heard Bear gulp as he drank, the rain falling on his buckskins with the sound of a hundred ticking clocks.
The mountain shook as thunderclaps racketed relentlessly around its peak, accompanied by lightning that scrawled across the sky like the signature of a demented god. Rain hissed like an enraged dragon and one by one the smoking cook fires winked out, leaving the ranchería to the darkness.
McBride’s thirst was finally quenched but now he realized the danger of his present situation. Both he and Bear were soaked, spread-eagled in the middle of a flat meadow, lightning all around them. Searing bolts were spiking at the mountain, flaring wetly on gray sandstone, and once he saw a flash immediately followed by a roar of thunder over by the pony herd.
He arched his back and strained at his bonds until his wrists bled. The wet rawhide stretched, but not enough. The only way he would ever get free was to die as quickly as possible. In that case, the lightning, instead of a curse, could prove to be a blessing.
The storm raged for another hour. Then the thunder left, grumbling westward toward the salt flats. Lightning flickered dull scarlet within the departing clouds, touching their edges with burnished gold. The rain settled to an icy, steady downpour that fell straight from the night sky now that the wind had died to a sulky whisper.
McBride shivered and his teeth chattered. He had never been so cold in his life, not even in New York when the winter snows came and every window was etched with frost.
He turned his head and spoke to Bear. “How are you making out?”
The old scout’s reply was long in coming and when it did, his voice rattled. “I’m freezing. I reckon even the Apache women’s fire would feel mighty good about now.”
McBride smiled but let it go. If Bear could make an attempt at humor, he was all right. But come sunup, that would all change. The Apaches would be back….
At some point in the night, he never knew when, McBride drifted into a restless sleep. He dreamed of fire.
The dark was just giving way to a gray dawn when he was shaken awake. A man crouched over him, dressed in a rubber poncho glistening with rain. He wore a cavalry slouch hat, crossed sabers on the upturned brim, and he was smiling under a bristling dragoon mustache.
The man put a finger to his lips, then quickly cut McBride free. Another soldier already had Bear up on his feet.
“Captain Miles Fowlis, Ninth Cavalry,” McBride’s rescuer whispered. “Can you walk?”
McBride nodded. Over the officer’s shoulder he saw black troopers silently deploying into two lines outside the wickiups. They were short men for the most part, since the U.S. Cavalry preferred its enlisted men small.
Fowlis nodded toward a pile of boulders at the edge of the meadow. “You and your friend get over there. You’ll be safer among the rocks when the shooting starts.”
McBride did as he was told, Bear trotting stiffly behind him. They wedged themselves between a couple of boulders and watched the captain walk over to his troop.
The front line was kneeling, and had their Springfield carbines to their shoulders. The rear line stood. McBride estimated there were sixty officers and men in the troop and several Indian scouts. Every rifle was trained on the wickiups.
A minute ticked slowly by, the soldiers immobile in the teeming rain, then another. Captain Fowlis found himself a place at the end of the line and drew his revolver. He threw back his head and yelled.
“Fire!”
A shattering roar of rifle fire and a hail of .45-70 bullets rattled into the wickiups.
McBride heard women scream and then the scramble of moccasined feet as warriors reached for their weapons.
Now the troopers were pouring steady fire into the Apache shelters. Bullets flew so thick and fast that their clatter through willow and bear grass and the rolling thunder of carbines drowned out the sound of the rain.
Warriors threw aside hide doors and leaped outside, only to be immediately shot down. McBride saw the Apache with the broken jaw make a run for the horse herd. An officer tracked him with his revolver, then shot him. The man dropped, spinning, into the wet grass.
Mingan, the Mimbreno war chief, made it outside. His chest was covered with blood, but McBride could not tell if he’d been hit or if the blood belonged to somebody else. The Apache screamed his rage and threw a lance at the closest trooper. The iron point crashed through the soldier’s chest and stuck out a hand’s breadth from his back. Mingan grabbed for his holstered revolver but a dozen rifles immediately cut him down. He died, his face twisted in fury, the hate still strong in him.
A woman, a baby in her arms, saw Mingan’s death. Her face terrified, she frantically tried to scramble out of her wickiup. She and her child were shot several times and they disappeared back inside. A trooper fell, hit by an Apache firing a Colt from his doorway. The Indian’s chest blossomed scarlet as answering cavalry bullets found him and he crumpled onto his side.
The screaming from the wickiups had lessened, but the troopers kept up their fire, reloading steadily with practiced ease. After a few more minutes the screams of the women and children began to die away…then stopped entirely.
Captain Fowlis barked an order and the troopers began to tear down the wickiups. Scattered carbine fire followed as soldiers started to shoot the wounded and the dying.
McBride turned to Bear, his face gray with shock. “He’s killing the women and children.”
“He’s killing everybody.” The old man shrugged. “That’s how it’s done.”
“No!” McBride yelled. He sprinted across the clearing. Captain Fowlis had his back turned to him. McBride grabbed the officer’s shoulders and spun him around to face him.
“At least let the children go!” he yelled.
Fowlis’ face was like stone, his blue eyes hard. “Nits make lice,” he snapped. “My orders are to kill every Apache in this ranchería.” He glanced icily at McBride’s bunched fists on his shoulders. “Now unhand me.”
McBride ran past the officer, toward the troopers. “Stop it! Stop it!” he yelled.
As the soldiers turned baffled eyes on him, McBride heard the captain snap, “Sergeant Johnston!”
McBride heard running boots behind him but before he could turn, something hard crashed into the back of his head…and the g
round rose up and swallowed him.
McBride’s eyes fluttered open. He was lying on his back near the boulders. The rain had stopped and he smelled coffee and frying bacon.
“Is he all right?” It was Captain Fowlis’ voice.
“He’s got a bump the size of a turkey egg on his head, Cap’n,” Bear answered. “But I reckon he’ll live. He’s got a thick skull.”
“Good,” Fowlis said. “Excellent.”
McBride sat up groggily, looking around him. There was no sun, but by the quickening light, he judged the time to be around noon.
“How are you feeling, McBride?” Fowlis asked. “I’m sorry for the unpleasantness, but interfering with an officer in the performance of his duty is a serious offense.” He coughed. “But we’re all a little overexcited and I’m willing to overlook your behavior this once.”
McBride found it difficult to form his words, but when he did he refused to back down. “You killed the women and the children. What kind of man are you?”
“I’m the kind of man who becomes an officer in the United States Army and the kind of man who follows orders.” He abruptly turned to Bear. “Are your horses with the pony herd?”
“I guess so, Cap’n.”
“Then I suggest you cut them out. I plan to kill all the Apache ponies and the dogs. I was ordered to leave nothing alive in this stinking ranchería and, by God, that’s what I fully intend to do.” His eyes angled to McBride. “My troopers will feed you. Now I must bid you good day.”
But the captain caught sight of one of his officers and lingered. “Second Lieutenant Armstrong,” he yelled. “Come here if you please.”
Armstrong was a fresh-faced young man who looked to be about nineteen and he still retained the spit and polish that suggested he was just out of West Point.
Shadow of the Gun Page 7
