Dark Shadow

by Roy F. Chandler

  Logan dropped the lever and looked through his rifle bore. "Always clean your bore and make sure it's dry for long shooting, Lilingham, or you will miss more than you will hit." He ran his cleaning rod rather gently through the rifle bore, removed the ticking patch at the muzzle, replaced it with a clean patch and withdrew the rod. I am sure that we military men have seen a half million soldiers clean rifles, but I never saw one treat his bore with such tender care. Excessive, I believed, and pointless at this absurd distance, anyway.

  Logan still was not ready. He withdrew a cartridge from his pocket, and it was a longer round than I have ever seen. I suddenly wondered if this old man actually did expect to hit an enemy almost too far away to see.

  He studied the cartridge carefully, apparently examining it for defects, then chambered it and closed the action with the same gentleness he had already demonstrated.

  "Now what I ought to do, Lieutenant Lilingham, is to shoot a few ranging shots into rocks around that hombre's position, but I don’t know how steady a man he is, and I'd prefer killing him to having him ride off while you chased him.

  "So, I'll start out serious, and try to hit him right off. Now, your job is to see where my bullet hits, and tell me so I can correct for the next shot."

  Now that sounded like something sensible, so I got myself settled with my binoculars on the ambusher's position.

  Logan took his time getting reset, but after a while he said, "All right, he seems to be staying still so I'll try him."

  Of course, just then the bandit hopped up and moved to a spot where we could not even see him. Logan sighed and leaned back. 'You watch him for me, Lieutenant, and I’ll just rest my eyes until it's time."

  While we waited I asked, "Did you ever make a shot this long, Mister Logan?”

  The man was slow to answer, but finally he said, "Why back in Perry County, Pennsylvania we make shots like this one all the time. Of course, most of those hunters use muzzle loaders and they are shooting at deer or bear, maybe a turkey once in a while."

  I know Pennsylvania, Major, and it is hard to find a shot more than three hundred yards in the whole state, so I knew I was being joshed and decided to say no more. It was just as well because the ambusher moved again, and this time his head was in my view. I told Mister Logan and he moved in behind his rifle.

  I was torn between watching him get ready to shoot and keeping ready to call the strike of the bullet. I was really surprised when Mister Logan just went ahead and shot without hardly seeming to aim. He just settled in and touched off. The muzzle blast startled me clean off the target, but I got back on while the bullet was traveling that long distance.

  Now, sir, I hope I can adequately convey what I then observed and felt. The fact is that in my binoculars I saw the ambusher's head explode as if he had held a stick of dynamite in his mouth. One instant he was there, and the next he was virtually headless.

  Joshua Logan had made a shot at a half a mile as perfect as most marksmen would have at fifty yards. My mind could not accept what my eyes saw. I did not realize it but I leaped to my feet and shouted out loud. I found myself running down the talus slope yelling that Logan had killed the ambusher and for our men to rush the ravine. I saw the Colonel standing with his mouth open, and I realized that he could not believe it either.

  After that things got hectic. Our scouts went through the gap and found the ambusher with his head mostly gone. The command saddled up, and we were underway within minutes. During the rushing around, Logan came down from the hill, trudging along, carrying his equipment, as unconcerned as if he made such shots every day. Colonel O'Cortez congratulated

  Logan, but I am sure the Colonel believed he had just been present for the world's luckiest shot

  I was not so sure, and I am still not one hundred percent certain about the luck of it. Josh Logan expected to make that hit. I am at least positive of that, and I have wondered ever since if he was serious about Pennsylvania people shooting those long distances.

  Colonel O'Cortez held the command just past the roadblock while our scouts picked up the trail of the two surviving bandits. While we waited, Mister Logan came up with his mule in tow. He examined the corpse closely and studied the outlaw’s horse as if he wished to know more about the dead bandit.

  To explain more swiftly, our trackers lost the trail in a mountain stream, and Colonel O'Cortez decided that killing the rapist would be enough and chose to return to his main body and move on to Caliente.

  Mister Logan was congratulated more thoroughly, and his rifle was examined with great interest. Someone asked why the bandit's head exploded as it did because no one had ever seen such a destructive hit. Logan claimed that he had seen it before, but offered no further explanation. The last we saw of Josh Logan was the rump of his mule moving on west, toward Durango, he guessed.

  If that had been the end of the story I might not have reported it at such great length, Major Ormsby, but when we arrived at Caliente we received another surprise.

  A storekeeper, one Tobias Brisbane, explained that a band of raiders had struck towns in Texas and fled south. Although Brisbane did not know the reason, Joshua Logan had taken their track and was steadily killing them off.

  Logan, in fact, had done all of the killing we had been told about in and around Caliente, and according to Brisbane, all of the dead were bandits except one vaquero who had accepted money to hunt down Logan.

  The leader of the bandits was an American called Punto Negra, and that villain had a distinctive blotch on his face, from which he derived his nickname. It did not take lengthy reasoning to recognize that Punto was the American claiming a sore tooth to explain his covered face, or that Joshua Logan was hot on their trail.

  Colonel O'Cortez has lost interest in the case as all concerned are now many marches away and presumably hurrying ever further from the scenes of Logan's reprisals.

  I conclude that Logan was more than willing to shoot the ambusher holding us at bay because he was one of the bandits Logan was after. That reasoning also explains why Logan wished he had the American in his sight instead of the dullard.

  As to the long shooting, more has surfaced. According to Brisbane, Logan shot most of those he killed from similar distances. Brisbane claims to have been told that more than one of the bandits Logan shot was killed at ranges in excess of fifteen hundred yards.

  Now, Major, I too find that difficult to accept, and the storekeeper was one who would willingly improve a story to convince a listener, but I have also scoffed at half mile shooting and was wrong, so perhaps Joshua Logan is capable of such incredible feats.

  The final discovery is that Joshua Logan is a famous scout who came into the mountains around Caliente decades ago and personally killed off the wild Apaches raiding from there.

  Logan is known here as Sombra Preta, which interprets to Dark Shadow because he stalked the Apache like their very shadows and slew them as he found them. If I were one of the men Logan now searches for, I would flee until there was no more land. Then I would take ship for a distant and unannounced foreign country.

  This concludes my informal report, Major, but I intend to follow with a reasoned proposal that talented marksmen be armed with telescopic sighted rifles for use at extreme ranges. No doubt we will not have success at Joshua Logan distances, but we might introduce a tool capable of extending our effective shooting some hundreds of yards."

  Respectfully,

  George Lilingham

  20

  The Yaqui led their flight from the ambush, and Punto marveled at the Indian's ability to choose routes even within the strangeness of mountains distant from his own.

  They wound and twisted and traveled as swiftly as their horses could manage. Mountain streams running over rocky beds afforded opportunities to lose followers, and Juan of one eye used them.

  The sound of Tonto the fool's gunfire quickly faded. Tonto would hold the soldiers at the narrow place, and then he would get away in the dark. If the half-wit was fortuna
te, he would not ride into a blind canyon and become trapped. If he was caught alive, the military would execute him on the spot. Punto did not for an instant expect that Tonto possessed Juan's instinct for paths that led somewhere, but Tonto was a survivor. With luck he might eventually ride into the distant hacienda.

  Punto weighed that arrival. Other than himself and the indispensable Juan of one eye, Tonto would be the only link to Punto the raider. The stupid Tonto drank heavily, and he might speak into the wrong ears. Punto had kept the man close at hand on the ranchero but over the years? Perhaps he should shoot Tonto and bury his body. That would end the wondering and sever the last weak link between Punto Negra the raider and Senor Wesley Seer the rancher.

  Tonto deserved to die. His animal-like attack on the child-woman had happened too suddenly for Punto to interfere, and to have then denied the fool his anticipated amusement might have initiated other sullen or intolerable behavior. The grandfather's appearance had also been a surprise. Punto did not really care about the grandfather, and there had been no hint that the Mexican army had a regiment close by.

  When the soldiers had ridden away, the trio had flogged their mounts attempting to put distance between them and possible pursuit, but the soldiers had returned and had gradually ridden them down. Because he had been responsible for their troubles, Tonto had been left to hold the pass. The idiot dared not complain, and for his own sake he would remain in place until darkness was upon him.

  The problem with simply killing Tonto was that Senor Seer had no other hard riders on his ranchero. Juan of one eye and Tonto were the last of his fighters. The other ranch hands were only workers with no practiced fighting abilities.

  Punto decided that if Tonto made it through, the man would have proven his ability enough to be spared. Until he could hire a few gun-skilled vaqueros of the right temperament, Punto would keep Tonto by his side.

  Joshua Logan might still be back there somewhere. Juan never doubted that the hunter would reappear. When Punto questioned how the man could find them more than half way across Mexico? The Yaqui answered only that Sombra Preta would come.

  The Yaqui's unfounded certainty irritated Senor Wesley Seer, but suppose the Indian was right? Tonto the fool could shoot, and with Juan of one eye scouting for the first sign of Dark Shadow, Seer could use a steady gun at his side.

  Despite their need for supplies, the Yaqui led them around every touch of civilization, and when they finally broke free of the Sierras, Punto believed they had left no traces for anyone to follow.

  Ranchero Seer lay twenty miles north of the village of Guaymos near a trading center called Ortiz after a hero of the Yaqui wars. The ranchero was a mixture of plains and low but steep, eroded ridges. There were natural water tanks and a few intermittent streams. In a land of perpetual drought, the water had value.

  Well before reaching his own holdings, they began encountering S branded cattle. Punto liked seeing his brand on animals, but individual cows were worth little. There were no hungry markets, and the boggling heat of most of the year defeated any plans for shipping meat further than Guaymos. Because of the great mountains and bitter deserts, cattle herds could not be driven to distant markets as the Yankees did. Sometimes the ranchero shipped hides, and the ranch's table offered beef for eating. Seer had tried sheep, but the wool market was equally small, and predators took a great toll of the small animals.

  With the railroad beginning to reach distant centers, Seer had hopes that markets would soon open. On the other hand, he now had enough gold and silver to live through his days in comfortable elegance without other revenues.

  The mule-mounted Mexican soldiers undoubtedly believed they had simply outdone the horses of their quarry, but Punto's trouble had been their heavy saddlebags. Both his and Juan of one eye's horses had been, in effect, carrying double burdens.

  Gold and silver were heavy, and the horses suffered for it, but Punto would not place his wealth on a pack animal. Such beasts of burden fell over cliffs and disappeared in torrents. Some ran away and could never be found.

  Juan of one eye cared nothing for the gold. To gather it was part of his task. To carry it was another. When they returned to the hacienda, Punto would offer him all that he wanted, but the one eye would take only a few pieces of silver to give to some favored woman of the town. For himself Juan, now of one eye and one hand, wanted nothing more than he already had.

  Punto supposed that the thought no longer rang true. Juan wanted Joshua Logan's life. The Yaqui wanted Logan more than he did food.

  Punto supposed that was why the one eye insisted that Logan would appear. The Yaqui could not surrender the belief that he would have his chance at Sombra Preta.

  Seer could understand the insistence. If a man had shot his hand off, he might also hunger for vengeance. At least as important, Punto suspected, was the fact of Dark Shadow's ability to disappear and Juan's inability to find him.

  A man inordinately proud of his tracking and hunting skills, Juan of one eye was stung by his failure to find Joshua Logan. Coupled with his mutilation, the humiliation burned at the soul of the one eye.

  Juan the Yaqui would wait, and he would watch. Sombra Preta would come. He knew it in his pagan soul. And when he did, Juan would bury his long knife in the gringo's beating heart.

  21

  Hacienda Seer lay within a small valley near the western edge of Ranchero Seer. The King's highway, which extended from Mexico City to central California, hugged the coast and ran only a dozen miles from the ranch’s western edge.

  Hacienda Seer had been established during the worst of Indian times. The local Yaqui tribes had fiercely resisted the Spanish occupation, and the Don who had first attempted to build a ranchero on Yaqui land had engaged in continual warfare with the original owners.

  The occupier, a Spaniard of noble lineage, answered the continual Yaqui raiding with an old world solution. He built a castle for protection.

  While he could not build with granite or limestone, the new owner was able to put his pacified Indians to work making adobe bricks. The bricks, in turn, created a massive keep within which the master, his family, and chosen servants could retire in safety from anything the primitive Yaquis might attempt.

  The son of the Spaniard in his turn expanded the keep. A brass cannon was mounted atop, and adobe living wings were added to the structure. The buildings were complemented by a high curtain wall that enclosed a sizable courtyard. The wall boasted guard towers on its corners and was topped at first by jagged stakes and in later years by broken glass.

  Only once had attackers overwhelmed the wall to challenge the hastily sealed keep. The inner castle had not been penetrated, and when relief arrived, the latest owner, the grandson of the builder, retaliated against all Indians within his reach. His revenge was brutal and unsparing. The Yaqui did not again war against the hacienda.

  A succeeding Spanish generation wearied of the unceasing battle to squeeze a livelihood from the harsh wilderness and chose to leave the loneliness of western Mexico for a return to the comforts of their native land. Wesley Seer purchased the failed ranchero for a pittance and had since maintained a comfortable life style interrupted only by annual absences to raid into New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas where the citizenry had money and precious metals.

  At first Seer had experienced difficulty with the neighboring Yaquis who slaughtered his beef, stole his sheep, and even raided his vegetable gardens. Then Seer had found a young Yaqui called Juan of one eye, who it was told, could stop the poaching.

  The One Eye in turn had hired a band of merciless fighters and went after all who dared seize Senor Seer’s property. Rustling and thievery ceased within weeks, and when Seer began his yearly raids into the soft underbelly of the United States, Juan of one eye rode at Punto's elbow.

  Senor Wesley Seer rode through his gate with a sense of homecoming. He recognized an inner relief and an easing of tension. Sombra Preta, he supposed had been more on his mind than he had allowed himself t
o accept.

  The polished glitter of his cannon atop his residence, the earth-sweeping arc of his gatekeeper's sombrero, and the peon's humble bow restored much of Seer's sense of importance.

  Here, he was Senor Seer, a hidalgo, a caballero, a figure of wealth and respect. The outlaw, Punto Negra, was gone and buried. He would not rise again, and if Joshua Logan stumbled upon the Seer ranchero he would be ridiculed. No bandidos resided here. The thought would bring mirth to listeners.

  Wesley Seer also reminded himself to have Juan of one eye immediately recruit replacements for those fighters who had not returned. If Dark Shadow did somehow find him, Wesley Seer would be prepared to answer Logan's accusations with more than ridiculing laughter.

  Juan of one eye no longer laughed at anything. Least of all at Sombra Preta, who he knew in his very soul would come.

  At times, the one eye wondered what they had done that set Dark Shadow after them. There could have been many things in many places because the band had raided widely. Somehow, they had roused Sombra Preta from wherever he had dozed, and the shooter of great distances had taken their trail.

  The continual pain in his hand that was no longer there nourished Juan's hatred for the gringo. Even now, he could scarcely accept that the man had shot his pistol from his hand at so great a distance that the pistol could not have been seen. Except for his wound, Juan of one eye would have run down Sombra Preta, but the pain and the drink of Maria had dulled and numbed his thinking. Later Senor Seer would not allow him to be first into the mountains, and when he had gained the heights, Logan was gone.

  That disappearance too bothered the one eye. A man afoot should have been caught by the mounted vaqueros who were hungry for the reward, but no one had found Sombra Preta's trail. Juan could understand why the Apache had given him his name. The gringo did move like a shadow, but when Logan arrived on the Seer Ranchero he would be in a land where Juan of one eye knew every shadow. Then Juan would stalk the long shooter and kill him with his knife.