“If he pulled the trigger he will hang.”
“He won’t talk then. You can bend a rifle barrel over the skulls of these southwestern road agents for twice your month and they will just laugh at you. They all fear the rope, but if it’s swing for Dutch Tim or swing for the Spooners I don’t see the choice in it. Nor will he.”
He touched his beard. “Life then. But only if he gives up his companions and the name of the man who planned the raid.”
“That would be Frank or I miss my guess. There is the little problem of tracking Ross down. The trail is cold. I had hopes of getting to him by way of Frank’s wallet but that will require more time than we have. Also if I take out after him alone it will look wrong. I’m not a lawman down there, remember. As a saloonkeeper I’m only out the price of a burial. The holdup didn’t go through.”
“Who keeps the peace in San Sábado?”
“No one. A fat Mexican named Ortiz pins himself to the town star when he is not weeding his roses or shouting at his many children.”
“Ortiz? Intriguing. We captured a young lieutenant by that name at Cerro Gordo. On the second night he strangled one of the sentries guarding him and shot another with the man’s musket. He bayoneted a third on his way over the stockade. The following day he was observed fighting alongside his countrymen. I haven’t thought of him in years.”
“It isn’t the same Ortiz.”
“Likely not. The surname is a common one. You must try to bring this man around. Fewer questions will be asked if you assist him in Ross Baronet’s arrest.”
“It will be like assisting a boulder up Granite Peak. One question, sir.”
He read the face of a mantel clock mollusked over with gilt cupids. “Make it brief. You have just time to board the Santa Fe southbound. It leaves at one forty-five.”
“Pinholster is the deputy with all the experience under cover. He was a Wells Fargo agent for four years. Arnsen knows that Socorro country like the clay under his nails and O’Donnell has been with you longer than anyone and has more of your trust than all the rest of us put together. Why did you ask me to help in this?”
“I do not submit my decisions to committee, Deputy. You will miss your train.”
“That’s too thin, sir. It works when we are judge and officer of the court, but you said it yourself, this is a personal favor. The question deserves an answer.”
“You may be right. I may even concur. That does not mean I will provide it.”
I rose. “It doesn’t signify anyway because I’ve guessed it. Pinholster and O’Donnell are as straight as a short drop. They bring their men in alive. So does Arnsen, but for a different reason. He’s close with his purse and would avoid paying a federal burying fee at the cost of his own skin. I make the effort, but it doesn’t always answer and I will kill a man without thought if he brings me grief. That’s why you chose me, not because I’m loyal or dependable. The odds are better than even I will spare the United States the bother of a trial, which might delay things long enough for Dolan to get back from Washington City with his box of pardons. This way he will be forced to nail them up in matching coffins.”
“You are misled.”
“I’ve never thought so.”
“Good hunting, Deputy. Wire me in Helena when you have something worth sharing.”
I left him then surrounded by his borrowed bric-a-brac. You can read about Judge Harlan Amsdill Blackthorne in the florid memoirs of the tenderheel attorneys who pleaded in his courtroom, about his Old Testament views and the forty-six men and one woman he sentenced to hang in their observance, and it’s all true. But something he said on the subject of justice while handing down one of those sentences is carved over a doorway at the Harvard School of Law, and the memoirs are all mustering dust and dead flies on some forgotten shelf. The fact that I don’t understand those chiseled words any more than I did the man who spoke them is neither here nor there. He had more enemies than Custer on his hill but few peers.
10
THE SAME THREE Apaches, or three from the same litter if not them, locked on to my trail half a day out of Socorro City on the way home, and inside two hours had closed to within a thousand feet. That was close enough to show their long shirts sashed about the waist and their hide leggings, proof against mescal spines and diamondbacks, and too close for me. Two had lances. The third carried a carbine behind his shoulder and what looked like extra cartridge belts slung from the horn of a proper saddle. Sensing them, the claybank told me in a hundred little ways what it thought of the situation, but I held it to a brisk walk, conserving vinegar for when a dash might be required. It seemed to understand and made only a token try at throwing the bit.
Another good reason not to run was I was in no hurry to quit that rolling foothill country west of the Oscuros until nightfall, when I might have a chance to cross the Jornada del Muerto under cover of darkness, which was the only cover that flat desert land offered. That was the plan, and the only thing wrong with it was it depended largely on Indian patience, a commodity rarer there than springwater.
It ran out in another hour. Something struck the parched earth in front of us and to the left with a tuck sound and a ball of dust. The report reached me a beat behind, bent in the middle and dulled by distance, palop, a pebble dropping into a shallow pool. I didn’t look around, but quirted the reins across the gelding’s withers and leaned over the pommel, offering less opposition to the wind while reducing the target. The bottom dropped out of the horse’s gait. Its long legs chewed up ground and the wind pasted the front of my hatbrim to the crown. I thanked John Whiteside and myself for our taste in mounts. A big rump has all the mechanics necessary to push an animal along.
There may have been other shots. Probably there were. I didn’t listen. I was too busy looking for a place to come to ground. You can’t outrun Indians, there is no use trying. Apaches especially will overtake you on a bag of buffalo grass and bones no matter if you are riding von Bismarck’s finest. They run them on pure mean, of which they have an unlimited supply.
The outlook held small promise. The foothills themselves lay too far to the east and there was nothing handy in the way of a breastwork. I risked a look back and saw all three riders closing, the one with the carbine foremost. He would be coming hardest to give himself time to draw rein and make a stationary shot before I fell out of range. Savages were poor marksmen as a rule and disliked wasting lead on a moving target from a moving platform.
Well, hell. Three hundred dollars doesn’t go as far as it used to.
I reached back and unsheathed the curve-bladed skinning knife I’d carried since my winter wolfing days up on the Cut Bank. Shooting horses is preferable to cutting their throats for a variety of reasons, but not when you are in for a long siege and can’t spare the ammunition. Next to a clay hill a supine carcass is the best thing in nature for stopping enemy fire.
I was just about to dig in, leap off, and cut when I spotted something sweet to the southwest. This was a long gentle swell of land much like all the others in that region but with the attraction of a line of junipers behind which a man could crouch and give battle without making a bull’s-eye of himself into the bargain. I veered that way and raked the claybank’s flanks, drawing blood and a squeal of pain and rage and a burst of speed that almost snatched my hat off my head. A spark flew off a flat rock just to my right, a snap shot intended to steer me away from the junipers. I hoped the nearness was a fluke. Trust me to draw the only sharpshooter in moccasins this side of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.
Going around the end of the juniper bank was the long route. I headed straight for it. I hoped the gelding was game and not one of those treasures that set their brakes at the prospect of leaving the earth for any reason. In the end it wouldn’t matter, though, because either way I was going over, and if I made the trip alone and landed on my head and broke my neck I’d make a poor subject for the Apache notion of entertainment. I clawed for meat once again. I could tell by the answering shudd
er that I had made a friend for life. It’s just as well they don’t have trigger fingers.
And then we were airborne, the drumming gone from below and only the wind whistling past my ears to take my thoughts off what was behind and what might be ahead. The claybank grunted when it pushed off. Only the whites of its eyes showed on the way aloft. A branch brushed my leg and then we were clear. Open ground swept away in front of us. My teeth snapped together when we struck down, a pair of disks scraped against each other in my lower back. I gave the horse a few yards to find its footing and then I leaned back on the reins, turning its head and slipping my left foot out of the stirrup. When it went down I leaped clear, landed on both feet, and snapped the Winchester out of its scabbard. By the time the claybank got up and shook itself I was down on my stomach and drawing a bead between junipers.
The three braves had slowed their approach, reading my mind. At that distance I couldn’t tell if they were painted, but then I’d gotten drunk in Helena one night with a former aide of General George Crook’s who told me Apaches wore theirs on the inside where it never rubbed off. Resting my forearms on the slight rise, I laid the front sight on the arch of the rib cage of the one with the carbine, took a breath, let out half of it, and squeezed the trigger. A rooster tail of dust bristled in front of his mount’s left forefoot.
Damn the duplicity of that sand country. The heat made a long lens of the air near the ground and made everything look closer than it was. All three Indians hauled back on their hair bridles and retreated farther out of range.
While they parleyed I crawled back toward the claybank for my canteen and the extra cartridge boxes in my saddle wallets. The damn beast was still indignant over having been made to soil its coat and shied, but I lunged for a dragging rein and hauled it close hand over hand. When I had what I needed I crawled back to my rise. One of the Apaches was missing along with his horse.
How they manage to move around in open prairie and stay invisible is one for those eggheads in Chicago who take them apart like frogs and study the pieces and publish papers on the subject. It didn’t much matter, because I knew where he was going. I measured the height of the sun with my hands and decided there would still be enough light for him to see what he was doing by the time he got behind me. At least I still had a view of the one with the firepower.
Not that dying from a lance thrust instead of a bullet makes much difference beyond what they carve on the headstone.
* * *
Desert heat doesn’t follow any of the standard rules. You’d expect it to be worst when the sun is straight up, but a hat will protect you from it then. When the only shade for miles is on the wrong side of the shrubbery you’re using for cover, there is no hiding from that afternoon slant. I turned up my collar and unfastened my cuffs and pulled them down over the backs of my hands, but I could feel my skin turning red and shrinking under the fabric. Pinheads of sweat marched along the edge of my leather hatband and tracked down into my eyes, stinging like fire ants. The water in the canteen tasted like hot metal. I wanted the Montana snow, blue as the veins in Colleen Bower’s throat with the mountain runoff coursing black through it carrying shards of white ice. All this time the two Indians sat their ponies, as motionless as buttes and just as easy to reason with. I was just something to break up the day, that and a horse and a long and a short gun to bring the two braves with lances into the nineteenth century.
I thumbed a fresh cartridge into the magazine to replace the one I’d fired and took another shot at the man with the carbine. There was no reason for it other than to spook his horse and spoil his mood. For all the reaction the pinto showed I might as well have waved my hat and sung Dixie. I guessed I was becoming addled by the heat and worry.
A rifle cracked. I swore it was behind me, but that country was full of distortions and I wasn’t thinking right to begin with. I did know that the Indian with the carbine hadn’t moved and there was no smoke in his direction. I rolled over, reversed ends, and squinted through the ground haze to the west at a rider coming hard my way. I swept a sleeve across my eyes to clear away the sweat, polished them with the heels of my hands, but he was still there, and closer. His horse’s hoofbeats reached me then, hollowed out by distance and warped by heatwaves. I worked the Winchester’s lever and settled the iron sight in the middle of the shimmering bulk. Either the man they’d sent to shut the back door had a long gun I didn’t know about or a fourth had joined the fracas. I fired. I will still testify that I saw the bullet leave the barrel and find its mark. Fear and sunstroke are like peyote. You will see things.
What counted was my target heeled over and struck the ground with a grunt that was real enough. After a couple of seconds it separated into two pieces, one smaller than the other, and when the smaller piece rose from a crawl to a crouch I knew I’d deprived the rider of his horse. I racked in another shell and took aim on the man.
“Mother of God, don’t shoot me!”
I knew there were Christian Indians and had met one or two, but rarely enough to make me hesitate with my finger on the trigger this time. That was sufficient time to see that this was no Apache. He ran like a white man for one thing, long strides with his toes pointed out, and his high boots and striped trousers and white shirt were store-bought. In another second I recognized the flat-brimmed Stetson and the rifle he carried, ready to raise against me if I failed to lower the Winchester.
“Jubilo, is that you?”
“Murdock?”
I said it was. The deputy sheriff of Socorro sprinted the rest of the distance and dived headfirst into the shallow depression, holding up the Creedmoor to keep sand out of the action. He crawled forward to face me. “I just shot a damn Apache off a horse for you. If I knew you was fixing to shoot my horse I’d of caught his.”
“Next time raise a yell. I didn’t know you from Geronimo.”
“See if I come help a white man out of a hole next time.” The expression on his half-caste face was unreadable. “Did you even know you had a red bastard climbing your back fence?”
“Knew it. Couldn’t fix it. Care to see what’s up front?” Without waiting for an answer I rolled over and slithered back up to the shrub line. He joined me a second later.
“Shit, I’d of thought Satan’s Sixgun was more than a fight for two little mimbreños.”
“Three. And I didn’t write that book.”
“They’ll be getting restless in a minute. They’re thinking their pard should be on you by now.”
“Maybe they’ll come in range to investigate.”
“Why wait?” He rolled back the Creedmoor’s Remington block, removed the long cartridge, blew inside, and replaced the cartridge. He rolled the block forward.
“You any good with that competition rifle?” I asked.
“I was Lincoln County champion two years in a row. One thing they like to do in Lincoln is shoot.” He unfolded the sight, locked it into place, looked through it at the waiting Apaches, adjusted the slide, looked through it again, and stretched out full length, finding a comfortable spot to rest his cheek. The Indians were straining their necks to see past the junipers. They didn’t appear agitated. They knew they were well outside the Winchester’s reach.
Jubilo pressed the trigger. The gun roared, backing up against his shoulder. Far away across the plain the Apache with the carbine, still craning for a good look, threw back his arms and slid over sideways. While he was still falling Jubilo opened the block, plucked out the hot shell, poked in a fresh cartridge, slammed home the action, and took aim again. But the other Apache was already moving, wheeling his horse and slapping its rump. Jubilo fired again.
“Miss.”
“Maybe.” He extracted the casing and reloaded. “The sons of bitches are like antelope and will run forty miles with the top of their heart blowed to hell.”
But he didn’t fire the third cartridge. The Indian now was out of range of even the big rolling-block and moving fast. Jubilo glanced at the sun. “We’ll wait here til
l dark. No telling how close his other friends are and this is the only cover for miles. Such as it is.”
The Apache he’d shot wasn’t moving. His horse had bolted when he fell. I calculated the distance at right around four hundred yards.
“The sheriff said you were an artist,” I said.
“I am when it comes to drawing a bead.” He sat up and brushed sand off his cheek. “What you doing way out here? I thought you went back to San Sábado a week ago.”
“I had business up north. What are you?”
“Sheriff sent me your way to pick up a prisoner. I’m just on my way back.”
“Where’s the prisoner?” I had almost forgotten about Abel Freestone.
“Dead as Andy Jackson. When that hand swoll up and turned black he wouldn’t let the sawbones take it off and he was gone the next day.”
“Hard luck.”
“Not so bad. I had to bring back some papers anyway.”
I watched him wiping dust off the Creedmoor with his bandanna. He had slender hands for a Mexican and appeared to be fussy about the nails. That was an old story among gun men. It started with taking care of your weapon, spread to your hands, and before you knew it you were wearing red velvet coats and perfume in your hair like Hickok. “How long have you been working with Frank Baronet?”
“Just since last fall as deputy. I come back up from Mexico after he got elected.”
“I mean since before that.”
“Two years. I knew his brother Ross and we all hired on to regulate for the Dolan-Murphy combine. We had us some times, Frank and Ross and me, till that carpetbagger Wallace took over and brung in the army. There was a stir over this cow thief that got killed, him and his whore wife, and Ross and me went down to Chihuahua. He had a ball in his hip and died of mortification there.”
“Were you with him then?”
City of Widows Page 8
