White Apache 10

by David Robbins

  “If there is, it’s my mind, and I’ll keep it to myself,” Baxter said.

  Crane took another sip, ignoring Skinner s grin at his expense. The old buffalo hunter was notorious for having a stinging wit and an acid tongue.

  The lawman wondered if Baxter had guessed what he was up to and thought less of him because of it. Not that he cared one way or the other how the old man felt. But he didn’t want the suspicion to spread. All it would take was a few words from Baxter, in passing, to any prominent townsman, and rumors would spread like the plague.

  “If you have a complaint, I’d like to hear it,” Crane said to spur the old man into revealing the truth.

  Baxter glanced in contempt at the saloon crowd. “I should think you’d have a belly full of complaining by this time. To hear those men whine, you’d think they were just out of diapers.”

  The six no-accounts overheard Baxter’s comment. Thorson, a beefy man with a bristling red beard and unkempt red hair, swiveled. “I’d be mighty careful who I poke fun at were I you, old-timer.”

  The frontiersman lowered a hand to the big Sharps rifle at his side. “I’m always careful, polecat,” he said evenly. “Ask the folks back in Tucson. They’ll tell you just how careful I can be.”

  Everyone knew what he was alluding to. Over a year ago, a pair of drifters had accused Baxter of cheating at cards. He had calmly sat in his chair while they called him every vile name there was, calmly sat there while one of them covered him with a pistol, calmly sat there as the other man started to rake in the pot, and then, just as calmly, he had knocked over the table, produced his Sharps, and shot the hard case through the heart with the pistol. The other drifter had gone for his iron, but he had not even cleared leather when Baxter s Bowie thudded into his chest.

  No trial had been necessary. The other men had drawn first and threatened the frontiersman at gunpoint. It had been a clear-cut case of self-defense and a stupid stunt on the part of the drifters. Whatever else might be said about Clell Baxter, he was no cheat. The man was honest, one of the rare breed whose word was his bond.

  Thorson decided he didn’t want to risk rousing the old-timer s wrath. But a weasel with oily hair and a pockmarked face did not know when to leave well enough alone.

  “You don’t scare us, you old buzzard. There are six of us and only one of you. Give us any more guff and we're liable to take you over our knee and spank you until you beg for mercy.”

  Some of the no-accounts started to laugh, their mirth choking off when Clell Baxter rose, the Sharps* held in both gnarled hands. “On your feet, you son of a bitch, and die like a man.”

  The man named Gritz had been about to take a bite of jerky. He went rigid, his eyes imitating saucers.

  “I’m waiting,” Baxter said calmly.

  “You hold on, old-timer!” Gritz said. “I didn’t mean no insult.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have opened your mouth.” Sighing, Crane put down his cup and stood. “That’s enough out of both of you.”

  Baxter did not even look at the lawman. “This doesn’t concern you, Marshal. It’s between me and that slimy son of a bitch who thinks he can treat others like dirt and get away with it.”

  Gritz was no gunman. He wore a Colt, but he was usually too drunk to be able to draw it, let alone fire. Blinking like a bird trapped by a cat, he swallowed and looked to the lawman for support. “You ain’t just going to stand there and let him put a window in my skull, are you?”

  “No one is going to shoot anyone else,” Crane said.

  The frontiersman took a step to the left, giving him a clearer view of Gritz. “That remains to be seen, lawman. I haven’t heard no apology yet.” Crane nodded at Gritz. “You heard the man.” Flushing with anger, the weasel seemed about to make an even bigger mistake and insult Baxter again. At the last instant, he caught himself, then said, “I told you that I didn’t mean no insult, old-timer. What more do you want?”

  “Apologize for calling me a buzzard.”

  “Like hell I will!”

  Baxter shrugged and hefted the Sharps. “Your choice.”

  Crane was ready to move in if it appeared the frontiersman was really going to fire. That eventuality didn’t seem likely, since Baxter’s finger wasn’t even on the trigger. But the saloon crowd couldn’t see that from where they sat.

  Gritz flapped his hands in front of his face as if to ward off a horde of bees or a hail of flying lead. “All right, damn it! I’m sorry! I’m sorry! Are you happy now?”

  “Tickled silly,” Baxter said and sat back down. The Sharps went back to his side as he bent to help himself to a cup of coffee.

  Rafe Skinner wore a Remington on his right hip, and he had traded in his white shirt and black jacket for a brown shirt open at the collar and a blue bandanna. He had not spoken a word during the clash. Yawning, he indicated the Big Fifty and inquired, “Is it true, Clell, that you once dropped a Comanche at twelve hundred yards?”

  Baxter arched his good eye at the saloon owner. “Are you saying I’d lie? I credited you with more common sense than that.”

  “Then how can you even ask?” Rafe said, holding his own. “Besides, you know as well as I do how tales grow in the telling. Remember that time some drummer reported seeing a couple of Injuns south of town? By the time that story made the rounds, half the folks in Tucson believed over two hundred Apaches were set to swoop down on us.”

  “Yep, I recollect it well.” Fondly, Baxter patted the rifle, then stroked the barrel as other men might a woman’s leg. “Old Bess has been saving my hide for more years than you’ve lived, Mr. Skinner. And, yes, the story is true. Eight of us buffalo hunters were surrounded by a passel of Comanches. I picked off Chief Broken Ear. Billy Pike measured off the range after the Injuns skedaddled.”

  “That was some shot,” Skinner said.

  Crane had to agree. Twelve hundred yards was well over half a mile. A Winchester was only reliable at ranges out to three hundred yards, maybe a little farther in the hands of a competent marksman.

  “If we see that White Apache feller,” Baxter said, “I’m of a mind to earn me that reward money being offered by the government. How much is it now?”

  “Ten thousand dollars, I think,” Crane said. “It keeps going up after every raid.”

  “You don’t sound very pleased about that,” Skinner said.

  “I’m not,” the lawman said. “The higher the bounty, the more bounty hunters flock to the area to try to claim it.”

  Crane didn’t object to the professionals who went gunning for Taggart; they knew what they were doing and never gave a lawman any headaches. It was the damned amateurs – the ones who didn’t know one end of a gun from the other and who figured on making easy money – who were forever getting into hot water. They trespassed on private property, shot at shadows, and often mistook innocent citizens for the outlaws they were after.

  In this case, three times in the past few months, so-called bounty hunters had shown up at his office crowing that they had killed the White Apache. Twice their victims had been harmless Pima warriors, the third time an elderly wrinkled Navajo too scrawny to lift a war club.

  Crane had let them off with a stern warning never to show their miserable faces in Tucson again. In his estimation, killing Indians hardly rated a trial. It was the same as stamping out bothersome bugs.

  At that moment Thorson stopped stuffing baked beans into his gullet long enough to inquire, “Marshal, how do you figure your girl is holding up through all this?”

  “I can’t rightly say,” Crane said, resenting the mention of Tessa. He was doing his utmost to avoid thinking about her.

  Gritz had to throw in his two bits’ worth. “If that turncoat has laid a hand on her, we’ll carve him up but proper, Marshal. No renegade can violate a white woman and get away with it.”

  Rafe Skinner fixed the weasel with a flinty stare. “Were you born stupid or did a bull stomp on your head somewhere along the line?”

  “What did I
do?” Gritz said, genuinely puzzled. “Why the hell is everyone picking on me?”

  On that friendly note, conversation lapsed. It wasn’t long before all of them had turned in except the man Crane selected to stand guard. They took turns throughout the night, each posse member working for two hours.

  Crane was up before first light. He had slept remarkably well under the circumstances. As he pulled on his boots, he saw Baxter stroll out of the brush and nodded in greeting.

  “Morning,” the frontiersman said. “Today we should save that girl of yours, unless, of course, all the horses go lame.”

  “All of them at the same time? Never happen,” Crane said.

  Baxter smiled. “With this outfit, a gent never knows. Things ain’t what they seem.”

  Crane did not rise to the bait. Starting the day being accused of not doing his best to rescue Tessa put him in a sour frame of mind, and he barked at the others to wake them. In short order the posse had downed cups of coffee, and every last man was in the saddle, riding briskly toward the rising sun.

  Baxter assumed the lead. The Sharps resting across his thighs, he rode alertly, scouring the vegetation on either side. If there were any sign to read, he would spot it.

  In due course the frontiersman slowed and extended his rifle toward the sky. “I reckon we’re closer than we thought,” he said.

  Vultures circled half a mile ahead, over a dozen of the large black birds, wheeling and dipping gracefully, like aerial dancers.

  Crane spurred his dun into a gallop. After rounding a series of bends, he came to a straight stretch and spied three bodies sprawled in the road or near it. All three were covered with buzzards. Palming his Colt, he bore down on them. His first shot took the head off a bird nibbling at an eye socket. His second nailed a buzzard striving to take wing.

  In a flurry, the rest of the vultures hastily rose into the air. Thorson, Gritz, and a few of their friends opened fire, cackling in glee as they blazed away. Over thirty shots were fired, yet the men only downed one bird.

  Marshal Crane reined up and dismounted. The nearest body was that of Will Allen, the shotgun messenger. Close to it lay Ira Kent. On the south side of the road was Curly Decker. All three swarmed with flies.

  For some reason, the buzzards had done more damage to Kent than either of the other two. His eyes, nose, and lips were gone, and a jagged hole had been torn in the soft part of his throat.

  “There’s no sign of your daughter or the soldier,” Rafe Skinner said.

  Crane absently nodded. His hunch had proven right. Clay Taggart was using Tessa as bait. But little did the bastard know that Crane was not going to go one step farther than he already had. “We’ll bury these three, then head on back to town.”

  “Head on back?” Skinner said in surprise. “You can’t be serious. What about Tessa and the trooper?”

  Putting a hurt expression on his face, Crane said, “No one wants to go on more than I do. But we have to face facts. Taggart has learned Apache ways real well. He never leaves tracks. I doubt even Baxter will be able to trail him.”

  “We have to at least try,” Skinner said.

  Clell Baxter stood at the south edge of the road. Bestowing a wry smile on the lawman, he said, “I wouldn’t fret about how hard it will be, not when Taggart has obliged us with an engraved invite.” He pointed at the ground.

  Intuition filled Crane with fleeting unease. “What are you talking about?”

  Abe Thorson got there first. “Well, I’ll be! Take a gander at this, boys! Seems as how the White Apache is hankerin’ for a showdown.”

  A six-foot stone arrow pointed due south. Crane looked at it and wanted to rage, to kick, to punch. Taggart, that clever coyote, had outfoxed him again. Or had he? Crane saw a loophole.

  “It must be a trick to take us off the scent. And if it’s not, we’d be riding right into an ambush.”

  It was Gritz, of all people, who summed up the attitude of the rest of the posse and shamed the lawman in the bargain. “What’s more important to you, mister – your skin or your own flesh and blood?”

  No one other than Baxter appeared to notice that Crane didn’t answer. They busied themselves burying the dead men, while the frontiersman looked at Crane and shook his head. Then he walked off into the mesquite.

  Although it was only the middle of the morning, the temperature soared. They were a hot, parched, tired bunch by the time the bodies were planted. Rafe Skinner tamped down the dirt on Curly Decker’s grave and said, “Someone should say a few words over them. Decker and Will were decent men. They deserve it.”

  “I’m a lawman, not a parson,” Crane said.

  “Count me out too,” Thorson said. “I ain’t been to church since my ma died, and I was six when she took sick and gave up the ghost.”

  The matter was solved by Baxter, who glided out of the vegetation to report. “I found another arrow a short way into the brush, near where Taggart had his horse picketed while he waited for the stage. This one points east.”

  “Toward the mountains,” one of the men said.

  “Toward Chiricahua country,” another said.

  Soberly, the posse mounted. The frontiersman led them to the second stone arrow. In a compact group they headed out, the majority of them holding rifles.

  Marshal Tom Crane was at the forefront most of the time, but his heart wasn’t in the pursuit. Despite himself, he was being forced ever deeper into the wilderness, ever closer to the snare Clay Taggart had set for him. He found his situation so damned frustrating. It was akin to being a steer led to slaughter. No matter what he did, no matter how clever he thought he was being, circumstances foiled him again and again.

  In under an hour, the posse came to a third stone arrow.

  “Don’t this beat all?” Thorson said. “The mangy varmint is doin’ everything but drawing us a map.”

  “He’s not moving all that fast either,” Clell Baxter said as he bent low to read the prints. “The woman and the soldier boy are on foot, walking in front of his horse.”

  Rafe Skinner glanced at Crane. “At least she’s still alive. That counts for something.”

  Tom Crane begged to differ. If Tessa were dead, the posse would have no reason whatsoever to go on. The others would do as he wanted and turn around. “It sure does.”

  “I wonder what they’re doing right this minute,” Gritz said.

  It was Skinner who responded. “Who can say? If I were in their boots, I’d just be glad to be alive.”

  Miles ahead, Private James Calhoun was consoling himself with those very sentiments. His feet were so sore every step hurt. His legs felt as if he had run fifty miles without stopping. His throat had become a desert, his mouth a sand dune. When he licked his dry, cracked lips, no spittle formed.

  “I’m dying of thirst! We need water, Taggart, and we need it soon, or you’ll have two more bodies on your hands.”

  Since sunrise, Clay Taggart had been pushing the pair just as hard as the day before. They were well into the foothills, picking their way up a talus slope to a high ridge that would afford him a panoramic vista of the countryside.

  White Apache studied the trooper, annoyed by his weakness. It reminded him too much of his own when he had first taken up with the Chiricahuas. The warriors had been able to do everything better than he had. They could run twice as fast, travel ten times as far without tiring, and last days longer without food or water.

  “You’ll get to drink about noon,” Clay said. Beyond the ridge lay a valley watered by a creek that was dry during the summer months, but should still have water in it at that time of the year.

  “How are you holding up, woman?” Clay said.

  Tessa Heritage was on the brink of exhaustion. How she kept going she would never know. Her limbs were leaden. Her stomach was shriveled to the size of a peach pit, and her throat was as raw as red meat. But she refused to give her abductor the satisfaction of seeing her collapse or crawl. She would forge on for as long as she could hold o
ut. “I’m fine.”

  “You’re a lot tougher than you seem,” Clay said. “You’d make a fine wife for an Apache. Most white women don’t last very long.”

  Tessa twisted. “How can you talk like that? Don’t you feel any guilt at all over what you’ve done? Over what you’ve become?”

  “Not a lick,” Clay said.

  He honestly didn’t. What he had become, as she phrased it, had been forced on him by his own kind.

  It was a white man who had accused him of a crime he had not done, a white man who had stolen his land out from under him. It had been white men who had chased him down and made him the guest of honor at a necktie social. White men had placed a price on his head. And it was white men who would not give him a moments rest until he was six feet under.

  White Apache frowned. The woman was typical of Easterners, most of whom branded all Indians as wicked savages.

  “I don’t see how you can’t be,” Tessa said earnestly.

  A white man going Indian was unthinkable to her. Yet Taggart wasn’t the raving lunatic she had dreaded he might be. Every so often, she detected a spark of humanity under his gruff surface, and it made her wonder.

  Suddenly, a loose rock slid out from under Tessa’s heel. Taken completely unawares, she tottered and would have gone down if not for James Calhoun, who always seemed to be there when she needed him.

  “Got you, miss!” the young trooper said.

  Tessa met his gaze and he looked away shyly. The pressure of his arm around her waist brought warmth and comfort. “You can call me by my first name, kind sir.”

  “Whatever you want,” Calhoun said, his fatigue and the severe heat momentarily forgotten. As he helped her straighten up, he marveled that her hair was still as fragrant as it had been the day before.

  Tessa made no move to break his hold. She rather fancied being close to him and harbored a secret desire to get to know him better if they survived their ordeal.

  “The two of you can make cow eyes at one another later,” Clay Taggart said.

  Blushing, Tessa pushed free and smoothed her dress. “You, sir, are no gentleman.”