The Quantro Story

by Chris Scott Wilson

  It was banking to glide into him.

  Death suddenly loomed close, and he forced his weary eyes to track the coming buzzard. The tendons in his strained throat stood out like whipcord as he fumbled back the hammer on the six-gun.

  Closer and closer.

  Click. The hammer held on its spring.

  Silence.

  Closer.

  With teeth gritted against the pain, Quantro raised the Colt in a shaking hand, silently swearing as each minute movement sent spasms through his shattered nervous system. He tried his best to hold the gun steady. If he could have smiled then, he would have done so. The one last thing he would do in this Godforsaken place.

  One touch on the trigger and the ugly bird would just disintegrate into a tumbling ball of screaming, bloodied feathers. He would blow the damn bird right out of the sky.

  Closer.

  Blow it all away.

  Come on you bitch. Come and get me.

  See what you’ll get for your trouble.

  He concentrated on the growing apparition in the sky, his finger crooked around the trigger. His hand shook. Any second now, any seco…

  Then the sun went out.

  No! His mind screamed and his mouth silently uttered curse after curse as he twisted on the baked ground, futilely trying to find a way through the darkness to aim at the buzzard. He blinked, time after time, in the sudden shadow. His eyelids painfully fluttered as he tried to understand. It was noon! The sun was high! What happened? His eyes dilated rapidly as he tried to focus.

  Then he understood.

  It was a man’s shadow.

  Thank God! Then he frowned. Second thought flashed a warning. Was it the boy?

  Then his vision cleared and he saw the rippling, naked brown skin, the breech clout, knee high moccasins and leggings. He saw the shoulder-length thick black hair held back by a headband around the forehead. He saw the whites of the man’s curious eyes as he looked down at him.

  Realization burned up inside of him. He would have screamed his hate out loud if his throat had allowed him. This was a whole lot worse than a hungry buzzard.

  Apache!

  He forced his gun arm up in an arc, but it took an eternity for his muscles to react. It was an easy matter for the Indian to pluck the Colt from his feeble grasp.

  “Easy boy,” said a voice that did not come from the Indian. Or if it did, his mouth hadn’t moved, for Quantro’s eyes were riveted to the dark face. He painfully swiveled his tortured eyeballs in the hot gravel of their sockets and saw the white man. A battered Stetson above a grizzled jaw, flecks of white in the dark beard.

  “Nothing to worry ’bout, boy. You’re safe now.”

  The water that trickled slowly onto Quantro’s lips was warm, but to him it was as cold as the snow of his dreams. His swollen tongue soaked up the precious liquid.

  Pete Wiltshire looked down in horror at the man on the ground. He had seen healthier looking men who had been dead for two days. He knew it would only make matters worse to quench the wounded man’s thirst. The ragged, dirty wound in the blonde man’s shoulder had cost him a lot of blood. It was infected too. The sun had blistered and charred his skin so that he looked almost inhuman, sores on his cheeks, running and scabrous. His pain must be incredible.

  Pete rigged up a shade over Quantro’s head and soaked his bandana with water, gently dabbing the battered face and cracked lips. Wild-Horse produced herbs from his saddlebags and tended to the shoulder wound. When the Indian had done what he could to ease the infection he began to scout around.

  The last thing Quantro noticed was that the sky was empty. His companion, the buzzard, had been cheated and had departed for fresh skies. He slipped away into the darkness, unconscious.

  “Come,” Wild-Horse said with a jerk of his head that tossed the long dark hair around his shoulders. Pete looked up at the Apache’s face, then came up off the ground. He gazed down at the closed eyes of the cowboy, then folded the tattered wanted flyers and pushed them into a pocket.

  The Apache led him down the slope, skirting a patch of ground that bore sign, and up a gentle rise where a low ridge overlooked the hole where they’d found the wounded man. Wild-Horse knelt and touched some shale that carried dried blood. Half a dozen brass casings from a Winchester littered the ground.

  “See,” he said. “The boy who carried this rifle.” He motioned with the Winchester. “He hid here. Bushwhacked the blonde-haired Americano while he was down in the dip. The horse ran, and the blonde one crawled up the shale to the hole. Later, he got a shot at the boy. He rode out.”

  Pete looked at the blood on the rocks. It was apparent the boy had waited a while before riding out. He must have realized he was in a bad way, and his only chance was to get away and find help. He would have known he had hit the blonde man anyway, and figured he was a dead man.

  It all made sense.

  So that meant the blonde one back up there in the hole had been ambushed. Why? And what had the wanted flyers to do with it? He shrugged and walked back to the hole.

  “We’ll have to get him back to the settlement. Even then he might not make it.” He turned his head and examined the face of his Apache friend. Wild-Horse had the inbred Apache hatred for the whites, and who could blame him? But they had accepted Pete into their camp. Would they accept the blonde boy?

  Wild-Horse gazed impassively down at the wounded man. When he looked back at his friend, Pete knew it would be okay.

  “Can you rig up a sling between the two horses? The black mare and the buckskin. There’s no wood to build a travois.”

  The Apache nodded and turned away.

  Pete remained, looking down at Quantro for a while. There was something about his face that bothered him. It reminded him of someone else, a long time ago. No, he couldn’t place it.

  He lit a small brushwood fire with the little fuel he could find and boiled the coffee pot. The noonday sun was too hot to bother with cooking, so both Wild-Horse and he chewed strips of jerky. As far as their wounded guest was concerned, it was all Pete could do to make him swallow a mouthful of warm coffee.

  When the food was gone they watered the two strings of mules, waiting patiently as each animal drank a small ration of the precious fluid. The last in line was the buckskin stallion, and when he had taken his share there was barely enough to fill the canteens. Pete didn’t worry too much about it. If anyone knew where water was in this Godforsaken place, then Wild-Horse did. Pete had implicit trust in the Apache’s skill.

  They lifted Quantro into the blanket sling and Pete took charge of the string of mules while the Indian handled the buckskin and the mare.

  They rode for three hours in the blistering heat. They sat their ponies and the heat slowly sapped their energy until exhaustion gnawed at their bones. The rocky, barren desert went on for ever, smoldering under the heat haze. Pete called a halt twice to check on their wounded passenger and make him drink. South. Always south, at a slow monotonous pace. The desert began to close in, escarpment and rock spurs thrusting up through the ground to point jagged accusing fingers at the sun. Still there was no vegetation, and that meant no water. But there is water in the desert if you know where to look for it.

  And Wild-Horse did.

  The Apache knows the desert like his own hands. For all time, since the Great Spirit had willed it, the Apache had inhabited the southlands. Some of the tribes roamed just north of what was later to become the Mexican border, but most below. The legends and the history, unwritten but related around the campfires, passed from generation to generation. But, in the 1450s, the Espanoles had arrived in their galleons from across the big sea, and those men that became known through history as the Conquistadors were hungry for the yellow and white iron that coursed in thick veins in the earth of Mexico. To the Apache himself, gold and silver were worthless. The metals did not fill the hungry bellies of the children. Who can eat iron? When the Espanoles began to hunt for the metals, the Apache smiled and would have allowed the d
irt-scratchers to take all they wanted as long as they did not drive out the game. But the Conquistadors seemed to hold some strange belief that they could not rape the ground of its riches unless nobody but them lived on it. Duped and helpless against the cannons of the Spanish, the Apache were driven north into the Texas and Arizona territories.

  But then the white people had come. They were different to the dark-skinned Spanish, but as their numbers increased the Apache found himself fighting for his very existence on the face of the earth that he believed the Great Spirit had given to him. He began to find himself imprisoned on reservations, restriction a harsh infringement on the Apache way of life. Some, like the Chiricahua fled back to the high peaks of Sonora and Chihuahua, the Sierra Madre, that the Apache called the Blue, or Mother Mountains.

  Not content to deprive the Apache of both his land and food, the Americano Long-Knives, the U.S. Cavalry, held campaigns, long columns of the horse soldiers under the leadership of General Crook penetrating deep into the mountains and gorges to capture the Indians. They searched along the old Apache trails that criss-crossed and hair-pinned along the sheer canyon walls of the mighty Bavispe River and its tributaries in an effort to scourge the land. In the years of running and hiding the Apache had learnt to live on little and to find food and water where there appeared to be none.

  Today was such a day.

  As the day began to cool, the shadows growing long, Wild-Horse halted the column. He caught up two of the empty water bags from a pack mule and signaled Pete to make camp, then wheeled his pony to scout the desert. He rode for a mile to the north and skirted a wide escarpment. It was as he expected. He found the little-used trail that wound up to the top of the ridge. The stony track twisted in and out between huge boulders, twice as tall as a man in the saddle.

  But he found what he wanted.

  The trail opened out onto a ledge where the tinajas were. There were three of the huge natural rock cisterns that held sweet rainwater long after the infrequent rains had been soaked up by the thirsty desert. Shadow was adequately provided by a convenient rock overhang. The Apache slaked his thirst and filled the water bags, then retraced his own trail back down to the desert floor.

  Pete shook his head in amazement. “Tinajas?”

  Wild-Horse nodded and pointed to the ridge that was now visible owing to the disappearance of the heat haze over the cooling land. Pete sniffed. He too knew of the cisterns, but this was a new part of the desert to him. If they had not spotted the buckskin horse and the buzzard they would not have returned this way. While he unsaddled the remainder of the pack mules, Wild-Horse made another two trips to the rock tanks to fill the rest of the bags and canteens. When he returned Pete had built a fire and was cooking the evening meal.

  They ate and then split the watches. The pack mules and their loads of supplies were vital to the settlement, and they did not want to lose them to prowling bandits who could take advantage of them in the night. Pete took the first watch, stirring the embers of the fire and checking the animals. Occasionally he would take a look at Quantro whose groans had became a regular part of the night sounds.

  Pete Wiltshire did not reckon much on Quantro’s chances of staying alive. If the infection in his shoulder didn’t kill him, then it was odds-on the heat and the traveling would. It was still a long way to the hideout in the Blue Mountains of the Sierra Madre, and at the pace they were riding now, it would take almost a week to get there.

  ***

  Quantro only regained consciousness here and there during the journey. He would look out from the blanket sling, his vision blurred by the movement of the horses as he caught glimpses of the landscape. It was new country and it meant nothing to him. The torture never stopped, his pain jarred awake again and aggravated every step of the way.

  Wild-Horse knew exactly where they were going. Many times he had slipped in and out of Mexico. He had ridden with Nana, Juh, and Geronimo through the years. He knew of little-known passes and winding, zigzag trails barely wide enough for a man on horseback. Some were so narrow that one stirrup would touch the wall of the barranca and the other would hang suspended over a sheer drop of a thousand feet. The intimate knowledge he had of the country helped him to preserve the only thing that meant anything to him.

  Freedom.

  He led them eastwards to skirt Sasabe and Nogales before he turned southward to Naco Springs. They camped that night in Mule Gulch where the water ran green from the copper in the earth. The next day they veered westwards to the east side of the Manzanita Ridge where water was plentiful. They saw deer, wild burros and javelina, the little wild pigs, as they came in to drink the water in the marshy strip of land along the base of the ridge. Wild-Horse had made a trip here once with the tribal Shaman, when the old man had gathered tules for grinding into Hodenten, his magic powder that he used for cures and to make spells.

  The long train of pack mules trailed southwards across the Cananea Hills alongside Black Mountain, and they camped by a long hard ridge of volcanic rock.

  The next day they wound round a pine-capped mesa and through a broad valley beyond. When they halted to allow Quantro some rest, the Apache scouted and returned with ripe fruit and wild honey to supplement their diet. By afternoon the trail grew rougher, potholed, then began to climb up to the high country. The trail wound through clumps of Mesquite and Madrona, and when Wild-Horse found a cold clear spring they made camp for the night.

  Pete laid Quantro on the ground, then helped Wild-Horse to free the pack mules of their loads.

  “I don’t think he’ll make it,” he said absently as he watched the black mare rolling on her back in the rich grass, glad to be unshackled from her saddle. The Apache consulted the sky.

  “If it is the will of the Great Spirit, then it is so.” He shrugged and turned away. Pete watched him go, then knelt down over Quantro. Sometimes the Apache made him wonder. They could just accept it if a man died. They believed that if their God took a life, then it was meant to be. That did not mean they wouldn’t try to save a man’s life. If it was possible, they would, but if they failed what else was there to do?

  Pete sighed and began to skin the two jackrabbits Wild-Horse had shot earlier in the day. Pete had always prided himself on being a good hunter, but the Indian had spotted the rabbits, his new Winchester butt into his shoulder before Pete could even clear his own rifle from the saddle scabbard. By the time Pete had his Winchester to his shoulder, the two rabbits were convulsing in their death throes, the echoes of the twin gunshots fading in the purple hills.

  As they rode, the gunshots had penetrated Quantro’s comatose mind, the unmistakable bark of the Winchester driving him back into the past.

  ***

  Four weeks ago.

  The trail from Zeb Cole’s box canyon in New Mexico territory led to the last known place on the list Mace Howbry had furnished as he hung from the tree, his innards stretching towards the ground. The last name on the list was Jack Kilhern, and the place was on the fringe of the badlands in Arizona Territory.

  The buckskin stallion was sweating, his head hanging so his dilated nostrils could take advantage of the cool breeze that wafted up the hillside. Quantro was sweating too, but he had long ago learnt to ignore the discomfort of the moisture that trickled down between his shoulder blades and from his armpits across his ribs. Countless lengthy days in the burning sun as he worked the cattle in heat and dust, then long winter nights huddled round a few spluttering logs had made him partially immune to bodily discomfort. It was the climate he had been used to all his life. It was there and he put up with it. As simple as that.

  He was practically motionless as he sat astride the stallion, his hard blue eyes studying the valley below from under the sweat-stained brim of his Stetson. The dust clung in the lines of his sun burnt face, his skin drawn tight by the heat. Long hours in the saddle had left his right leg stiff, so he slipped the down-at-heel boot from the stirrup and flexed the troublesome limb for a while before returning it to
its place. His hands rested on the saddle horn, the thin reins held almost negligently by the worn leather gloves.

  Everything was still in the morning heat, except for the flies that had begun pestering the horse in buzzing flight patterns.

  He eyed the valley before him, and it brought back memories of his boyhood, spent in just a valley as this. A few sprawled timber ranch buildings, a pole corral, a patch of cottonwoods clustered by the creek, and plenty of rich grazing land to support enough cattle to make a man sleep easy in his old age. Only if Quantro’s information was correct, and he had his own way, then the owner of this little ranch would not live long enough to reach old age.

  Quantro’s face was expressionless, watching and waiting, and whatever gentleness had been in him as a boy was now well hidden, if indeed there was any left at all. Gone were the long days learning and laughing, and sitting on the back porch at twilight, watching the fireflies as he listened to the lonesome bawling of the calves, or laid in his bed, the cries of the ghostly Whippoorwills taunting him as they called across the flats.

  The buckskin shifted slightly, his ears twitching, and Quantro tore his eyes away from the puffballs of cloud that hung in the sky over the bluffs at the far side of the valley and focused on the yard. A woman had come out and was casually tossing corn from a bucket to half a dozen screaming chickens that fussed around her skirts. She finished her chore and lifted her head, but Quantro remained still, his horse standing under the shadow of a tall pine, and she turned away into the house.

  He swung down from the saddle to squat in the shade. The Winchester was cold comfort to his restless hands. He took out his makings and rolled himself a smoke, his eyes still fastened on the scene below.

  So, Kilhern had got himself a woman. Or maybe she had been waiting here for him all along. Maybe she was his wife. Quantro spat into the grass. As much as he loathed the thought, he would kill her if she stood between him and Kilhern. It was the only way. He steeled himself to the thought. When he dragged up the black image that had been his parents after Kilhern and his amigos had finished with them, it became easier to accept that he might have to do it. Nothing would stand between him and what he had to do. One woman, two, or even ten.