by Tabor Evans
Vail blew his nose. He sighed as though weary of the cold and his sore, red nose, and flopped back in his chair, making a sour face. “This is serious trouble, gentlemen. Governor McPherson is a proud man, and a hater of the Apache. Lucy’s husband, Major Belcher, was cut from the same cloth. Both soldiered during the Little Misunderstanding Between the States. Both come from wealthy Yankee families.
“Major Belcher has been cuckolded, made to look the fool in front of all his men, and he’s understandably furious. He’s wanting to send American soldiers across the border after his wife and Black Twisted Pine, and both he and his father-in-law have requested that he be given War Department permission to do just that. The permission wasn’t granted, and so far both Belcher and McPherson have restrained themselves. They know that to send soldiers into sacred Apache territory—a small band of whom are still living up there in them mountains—could very well fan the flames of the Apache Wars, have them raging back to the level they were at in the late sixties.
“Besides, the Mexicans are damn protective of their border these days, since a gang of desperadoes—deserters from the American cavalry—have been on the loose down there, raiding mines and robbing trains an’ such. These days, no American soldier is allowed across the border. However, in the weeks since those two—Black Twisted Pine and Mrs. Belcher—ran off together, the U.S. Marshals Service was brought in.
“And you two gentlemen, and only you, have been granted permission from President Johnson himself to scuttle on across the border and to do everything you can to quietly, without the Mexicans learning about it and without ruffling the feathers of those bronco Apaches living up there in the Shadow Montañas, run down Mrs. Belcher, and bring her back to Fort McHenry.
“Kicking and screaming, if you have to. She has to be brought back to her husband and her father at all costs. This is a great embarrassment to two important men. If she’s not brought back, I’m afraid those two men are going to take the bull by the horns, and we’re gonna have another major Indian war on our hands.”
Longarm took a couple of pensive puffs off his cigar. “Can’t they transfer Belcher out of there, Boss? Bring in a new commanding officer?”
“They tried that. Didn’t try very hard, though, I don’t think. Both Belcher and Governor McPherson have friends in high places, don’t you know, and none of his senior officers have pushed very hard to have him transferred. I’ve heard before that McPherson’s wife is a not-too-distant relation to the president. So if the eastern press got wind of this, it would be more than just Belcher and McPherson embarrassed by it. I’ve no doubt that the president himself wants Mrs. Belcher returned to the major as soon as possible.”
Vail sniffed. “So, there you have it, Gentlemen. Henry has travel vouchers all typed out and waiting. You’ll be heading south on the one o’clock flier. You’ll pick up remounts at Fort Dryer in New Mexico, and ride to Fort McHenry. I’m allowing a little over a week for travel. In this heat, you’ll probably wanna travel mostly at night, but I’ll leave that up to you. You been through this before.”
Vail studied War Cloud. “What’s your answer, my friend? Will you take the job? You know that country like the back of your hand, since you scouted it for years. None of the scouts at the fort knows the border country well at all. If anyone can track them two lovebirds down quickly and quietly, without ruffling the Apaches’ feather, you can. I’m offering two dollars and fifty cents a day plus traveling expenses.”
War Cloud nodded gravely. “I knew before me and Magpie left Chicago I’d be taking the job, Chief. Even before I knew what the job was about. I knew you would not call me back into the service without good reason. But now, knowing what the job entails—Black Twisted Pine is my adopted brother, and I do not wish to see him hurt—I’ll go. And I promise I’ll do everything I can to bring the woman back to the major . . . as long as I am not expected to kill my Chiricahua brother, Black Twisted Pine.”
“The reason I’m sending you, my friend, is so that can be avoided. Being the man’s ex-scouting partner, you’re the one man who has a chance to convince him that no matter how strongly he feels about Mrs. Belcher, he has to release her—for his and her own good and for the good of his own people.”
Vail glanced at Longarm. “The job of you two men is to bring Mrs. Belcher back to her husband—preferably before the eastern press gets wind of it and embarrasses not only the major and the governor, but the president himself.”
Longarm said, “What if this Mrs. Belcher don’t wanna go back to her husband, Chief?”
Vail dipped his chin and gave his senior deputy a stern, commanding look. “You flash them big brown eyes of yours and change the lady’s mind. If you don’t bring her back, someone else likely will—and then there’ll be hell to pave and no hot pitch!”
“All right, all right.”
“Oh, by the way.” Vail sniffed and looked sheepish. “If you fellas get caught by the Mexicans over there, or if you run into trouble with the Apaches, don’t expect any help. ’Cause you won’t get it. Those are orders from the president himself.”
Chapter 7
Four days later, in the hot desert dusk, Magpie glanced over to where Longarm and War Cloud lay back against their saddles, hats tipped over their eyes. Apparently believing both men were asleep, the young Apache princess let her calico blouse slip down off her shoulders.
However, Longarm was not asleep.
He’d awakened when the girl had risen from her bedroll, just after the sun had gone down. In the summer in the desert Southwest, travelers rode by night, especially when there was a moon, as there was now. That way said travelers spared themselves as well as their mounts from the merciless sun.
Longarm had been sleeping with the intention of rising with the moon, but Magpie had risen first.
The girl’s stirring had awakened Longarm. Apparently, she had decided to refresh herself at the tinaja, the small stone tank tucked away in this narrow, rocky arroyo in which they’d set up camp earlier that morning.
The tank was fed by a trickle of spring water. Narrowing one eye as he stared out from beneath his down-canted hat, Longarm saw the girl drop to her knees on the small pool’s opposite side, facing him. She glanced up once more, looking toward him.
He closed his eye.
He felt properly chagrined, and more than a little childish, but he didn’t want to interrupt the girl’s ministrations. Also, the boy inside him and in all men couldn’t help wanting to sneak a proscribed peek at her wares.
She was awfully set up, after all. High-busted and long-legged, and though her father had claimed she’d never been with a man, she was one of the most erotically charged young women Longarm had ever known. Aside from Cynthia Larimer, of course . . .
His eyes closed beneath his hat brim, Longarm heard the faint tinkle of dripping water. He opened his eye and peered out from beneath his hat at the girl kneeling on the other side of the pool. She’d slid her doeskin dress and her calico blouse down to her waist and was slowly, quietly cupping water to her chest.
Longarm’s conscience forced him to close his eyes. The little boy in him, however, castigated his more mature self for his discretion. “Ah, go ahead and peek,” the voice said. “What can it hurt?”
The urgings of his grown-up loins were even more convincing.
Shamefully, he opened his right eye again. Magpie had removed her hair from its customary twin braids, and her long, stygian tresses hung forward over her shoulders as she cupped water in her right hand and raised that hand to her left breast.
Longarm could catch only a glimpse of the precious orb in the dim light and through the thin, jostling screen of her hair, but what he saw prodded his loins with a sharp, invisible knife. As she dipped her other hand in the water and brought it up to rub the cool, refreshing liquid across her other breast, she straightened her back and lifted her chin.
Her hair slid
back slightly to hang straight down her sides, nearly to her belly, completely exposing her breasts that stood up proudly against her chest. They were slightly oblong and firm, with large, alluringly dark areolas and red-brown nipples that appeared slightly distended and pointed a little to each side.
Magpie lifted her chin higher, crossing her arms on her chest and cupping her breasts in each hand. She rolled the nipples between her thumbs and index fingers, and gave a barely audible groan.
Longarm heard a grunt rise up from around the hard knot in his throat. The girl dropped her chin quickly to stare across the water at him, flattening her hands out on her breasts, covering them. Longarm squeezed his eyes closed and tensed.
He pricked his ears, listening.
Had she heard him grunt?
He lay there, his senses attuned, keeping both eyes squeezed shut. His cheeks burned with embarrassment. From across the spring pool he heard a faint rustling sound, as though the girl was covering herself. He heard the faint crackling of her moccasins on the sand around the pool.
The crackling grew louder.
Then it stopped.
Longarm sensed the girl standing over him. Feigning sleep, he kept his face muscles relaxed beneath the hat and tried very hard to keep his breaths long and even.
“You damn fool,” his more mature self silently scolded the devilish child inside him.
He steeled himself to receive a kick. None came. He felt the skin above the bridge of his nose furrow, and he was about to open his eyes, but then he kept them closed when he felt a cool drop of water land on his closed lips. Another cool drop landed on the tip of his nose.
Water from the girl’s hair, no doubt.
The notion caused his trouser snake to stir in its lair, but he kept his eyes closed despite his nearly overwhelming desire to open them and see just what in the hell she was doing up there.
At the same time he remembered War Cloud’s admonition to stay away from her unless he wanted his dick to turn black and fall off. Longarm hadn’t taken the warning literally, but part of him couldn’t help wondering about it just enough to make Magpie all the more alluring.
All the more alluring for being forbidding.
When he heard the soft crackling of sand again, he opened his eye. She was walking away from him. She sat down by her gear about ten feet to his right, and crossed her legs Indian-fashion, and began plaiting her hair. Her blouse was buttoned, and she’d drawn her dress up to her shoulders.
She looked at him, and he thought he saw a smug little smile quirk her lips that were normally a knife slash across her beautiful face. Longarm reached up and shoved his hat back off his forehead. He sat up with a grunt, as though just waking.
“Oh, you up, Magpie?” he said, stretching.
The girl said nothing. She merely continued to braid her hair while watching him blandly though with what he detected as a knowing light in her molasses-dark, almond-shaped eyes.
“Shoulda woke me,” Longarm told the girl, seeing the half-moon angling up over the toothy ridges silhouetted against the soft, spruce-green, southeastern sky. He reached over to his left and nudged War Cloud, still snoring beneath his black, felt, bullet-crowned hat.
“Come on, amigo. Rise an’ shine—we’re burnin’ moonlight.”
Several hours later, not long before dawn, they were following an old freight road through the broad, greasewood stippled valley between the Chiricahua Mountains on the left and the Dragoons on the right. War Cloud drew back on the reins of the grulla he’d requisitioned at Fort Dryer in New Mexico, and sat his saddle tensely.
Longarm, riding to the scout’s left, also drew rein. Magpie stopped her own buckskin behind the two men.
Longarm glanced at War Cloud and said quietly, “What is it, amigo?”
“Do you feel it?”
“Them long fingernails been raking the back of my neck for the last ten minutes—that what you’re talkin’ about?”
War Cloud stared straight ahead toward a low, boulder-strewn ridgeline sitting perpendicular to the trail, about fifty yards ahead. The trail had been blasted through the middle of the outcropping, forming a gray notch straight ahead in the moon-washed, purple ridge.
Longarm looked around, as did War Cloud.
The night was eerily quiet. The moon was quartering low in the northwest, casting an eerie, pearl light from behind Longarm’s right shoulder and over the scattered boulders, mesquites, saguaros, and greasewood clumps. Stars flickered like distant campfires.
There was not a breath of breeze stirring the refreshingly cool desert air.
A lone coyote had been baying for the past fifteen minutes.
Nearly straight ahead, a pinprick of light flashed.
“Ambush!” Longarm shouted, reaching forward to yank his Winchester ’73 from the scabbard strapped over the right stirrup of his McClellan saddle.
As the bullet screeched off a rock about two feet ahead on his left, the rifle’s distant crackle reached his ears. He leaped out of his saddle, as his two trail mates did likewise, and slammed his rifle’s butt against the coyote dun’s left hip, sending the horse galloping off to the right with the others, out of the line of fire.
Another rifle flashed just right of the first bushwhacker’s gun. As the bullet plumed dust in front of him, Longarm dropped to a knee in the trail, raised his rifle, and squeezed off four quick rounds at the ridge.
War Cloud, crouched to Longarm’s right, did the same, and when his reports stopped echoing, Longarm ran off the left side of the trail, yelling, “I’m goin’ in!”
Behind him, he heard War Cloud shout in his Coyotero tongue at Magpie. Longarm knew enough of the language to know he’d told the girl to stay with the horses, so they wouldn’t run far. Then he glimpsed War Cloud dashing through the desert and paralleling Longarm off the trail’s right side, heading for the ridge.
The bushwhackers opened up with their rifles but they obviously couldn’t see the two men charging toward them, weaving separate courses around the wiry brown brush clumps, cholla cactus patches, and boulders. Their slugs struck wild, spanging wickedly off rocks or snapping branches.
Running hard, Longarm gained the base of the ridge and didn’t slow his pace much as he lunged up the side, loosing sand and gravel in his wake. One of the rifles flashed ahead and on his right, three bullets kicking up gravel well behind him. The shooter could now hear him, maybe see his shadow, but he couldn’t track him.
Longarm skipped off several boulders, leaped a low barrel cactus, and skipped off another boulder as he reached the razorback ridge between a one-armed saguaro on his left and a horse-sized and -shaped chunk of rock on his right. He pressed his shoulder to the side of the boulder, thumbing back his rifle hammer.
Breath raked in and out of his lungs from the hard climb. He steadied his hands on his rifle. An eerie silence had fallen in the wake of the shooting. Longarm could sense the tension in the bushwhackers. They knew they’d been run up on; they just didn’t know where the runners were.
Longarm consciously slowed his breathing, pricking his ears.
Gravel crackled somewhere ahead and right, along the crest of the ridge he was on. One of the shooters was moving toward him.
He crouched low, took one step forward, and looked around behind the boulder. A shadow moved down the slope and right. Starlight glistened off a rifle barrel. Longarm saw a sombrero silhouetted against the sky. The bushwhacker saw him at the same time and jerked his rifle up.
Longarm aimed and fired.
The man screamed. His own rifle crashed, lapping flames at a slant toward the ground. The ricochet plowed into the end of the boulder near Longarm as the man in the sombrero screamed “Mierda!” and staggered backward down the slope, spurs chinging.
A rifle barked farther right along the ridge, and Longarm pumped a fresh cartridge into his own Winchester but held f
ire when an answering flash and belch evoked a grunt and sent more spurs to ringing raucously.
Longarm called, “War Cloud?”
“Here, Custis,” came the Indian’s deep voice.
A half second later, another rifle flashed out of the darkness on the downslope ahead of Longarm and on his left—about forty yards away. The bullet burned a line across the lawman’s left cheek. He wheeled and, crouching, gritting his teeth, emptied his Winchester, the spent cartridges clinging off the boulder behind him.
He lowered the gun and ran down the slope, following a path that the moon- and starlight revealed between brush clumps and rocks. Ahead, he saw the jostling shadow of the man he’d opened up on moving away. The closer Longarm got to the gent, the clearer the man’s grunts and groans became as he ran in the opposite direction. His gait grew more and more shambling.
Finally, he stopped and half fell against a rock.
“Hold it!” Longarm shouted, palming his Colt.
He wanted the man alive. He wanted to know who the shooters were and what had prompted the ambush.
“Fuck you, you son of a bitch!” the man screamed.
Light flashed off the barrel of the rifle that the hombre was swinging toward Longarm. The lawman extended his Colt Frontier and hurled two chunks of .44-caliber lead at the dead center of the man. The bullets punched him straight back. He dropped his rifle and flailed at the rock to no avail.
He piled up on the ground beyond it with a shrill cry. There were wild snapping sounds. The man groaned, gasped frantically. When Longarm reached the wounded bushwhacker, he saw what the commotion had been. The man had fallen into a sprawling cholla and been impaled by a thousand of the jumping cactus’s porcupine-like quills.
He lay quivering as he died, blood glistening darkly in the moonlight.
War Cloud said in a low, even, unalarmed voice that rang clear in the quiet night, “You all right over there, brother?”
