The Third Western Megapack

by Barker, S. Omar

  * * * *

  They traveled fast now, on their horses. And Julie understood why Brooke had made that split in her skirt. The ponies were small, mule-hocked, with rasping hides and cockleburrs in their sparse manes. But they were horses. They had an incredible endurance—a rawhide toughness that never wore out. Brooke rode a deer-legged palomino with taffy mane and tail, and soon he was talking to it in soft tones as he had talked to his beloved split-ear.

  They found the wagon trail rather easily, running through the prairie somewhere north of Choteau’s Island. And they followed it, through spreading plains studded with prickly pear, over the spring prairies of eastern Kansas Territory that rose seven and a half feet to the mile—and suddenly they were in the mountains. Great shaggy mountains, covered with timber, pine and cedar and birch. The wagon ruts led into a broad valley for a day’s march. Then, as the valley narrowed and the sun dipped low over the red peaks, that trail ceased.

  Brooke slid from his palomino, leaving it to stand hipshot there in the blue-green buffalo grass. He started circling, head bent low like a hound on the scent. And finally he discovered the new soil. A kick with his worn moccasins revealed the trail, carefully spread over with fresh dirt.

  That they should suddenly take such pains to hide their tracks gave Brooke the hope that he was near the legendary kingdom of Los Diablos.

  Farther on he found some cherries lying on the ground where wagons had knocked them loose. And later, it was a slim birch, bark eaten partly away at the height of a mule’s head. The mountains closed in, the timber thickened. Finally they reached a creek. The timber about it was so dense that Brooke knew the wagons could have followed no other trail than the water itself. He turned boldly into its level, sandy bottom, leading his band through the veritable tunnel of cedar and pine, with plum thickets forming an almost impenetrable wall beneath the trees on either side. The sun shone through, dappling the water eerily. A jay called.

  If this were the entrance to the camp of Los Diablos, there would be guards. So Brooke dismounted half a mile up the creek and left the ponies in charge of Tahrr, whose wound was still troublesome. Then he led the others through the timber, set so close and grown with underbrush so thick that no horse could have penetrated it. Julie insisted on coming with them, and she fought her way grimly and silently through the briars.

  They ascended a slope, and the trees thinned until they were walking through towering pines that reached up to the blue sky and sighed in the afternoon breeze.

  Suddenly, through those straight trunks, they saw the valley. It was set like a cupped hand amid awesome peaks of hazy purple and red that surrounded it completely. A river ran down its center; on either bank grew cottonwoods, their leaves almost hiding the water and forming a broad band of fluttering gold clear across the jade-green pampas grass of the valley.

  “It’s beautiful, David,” said Julie. “And deadly,” said Brooke, pointing to where smoke rose above the cottonwood. “Los Diablos.”

  He felt no triumph or justification in the discovery, and he looked no longer at Hernic than he looked at the others when he said the words. It was just the end of the trail, that was all.

  * * * *

  Brooke led down a spur ridge toward that rising smoke, and finally they stopped at the edge of the timber. Before them was the camp—the place of legend that no man but those who rode with Los Diablos had ever seen. The cottonwoods: had been cleared, and a double row of log cabins set near the river. Farther back was a solid, pack-pole corral, filled with horses; and beyond that grazed a giant herd of cattle, spreading out over the valley. Parked north of the cabins were the wagons. Pittsburghs, Conestogas, Pennsylvanias, even some Red Rivers. Walters’ wagons, Julie’s, Ballard’s—more wagons than Brooke had ever seen collected in one place.

  A bunch of Yaqui Indians lounged in front of one cabin, half a dozen breeds in leather leggins and cowhide vests talked before another. A group of lanky trappers in coon hats and greasy elkhides fished from the cutbank. Renegades from all races, gathered here and welded into a veritable army that could strike as swiftly and devastatingly as it had that night so long ago on the Arkansas.

  Looking to where the river entered the valley, Brooke saw what he would have met had he taken the water route in. A dark knot of men gathered on the fringe of dense timber, low sun glinting on their rifles.

  Hernic and the others must have realized, then, why Brooke had taken such pains to teach them his way of fighting—the Indian way. There would be no sweeping charge down the valley, with accouterments rattling and guidons flapping. Perhaps Hernic would rather have done it that way. But he had no guidons, no accouterments. Only a handful of exhausted wanderers and a shortbow and a gun with one bullet.

  Donahue could contain himself no longer. “Lor’, Lor’, what an outfit. It musta taken a master-mind to figure this up.”

  “Harvey Mohan has an intelligence, of a sort,” said Brooke dryly.

  Night was a blanket that hid the grim little file, struggling up through the shallows beneath thick cottonwoods. A Mexican squatted against the wall of the first cabin, his cigarito a small glow in the dark. Brooke moved his hand slightly, and those behind him sank into the willows. Then he nocked a long-headed arrow to his string.

  Any compunction he felt about killing the man in cold blood was swept away by the picture of those bodies back on the Trail, that singular viscous appearance to the tops of their heads. These men had done that.

  The smoker made no sound. He just slumped forward, the shaft quivering a little in him. Brooke snaked over to pull his arrow free, and to unbuckle the Mexican’s pair of guns. He returned to the river, giving each of Hernic’s two troopers a holstered revolver. One of them slipped his from its cowhide holster—one of Samuel Colt’s newest models. He hefted it almost lovingly in his calloused hand. He had waited a long time for this.

  But Brooke wasn’t ready to use those guns yet. He gave Donahue his skinning blade and told the sergeant to follow him into the valley.

  They squirmed through the willows toward the big park of wagons, pupil moving as silently as teacher. Brooke rose at the first wagon, peering into its bed. Freight still bulked there, and it was the same in other wagons.

  That was the safest way—to hold the stolen wagons here for a season until the memory of the massacres had died somewhat, then to sell the goods anywhere from Santa Fe to St. Louis. A fortune was tied up in this collection alone. There would be many men on the frontier willing to ride with Los Diablos for that kind of money.

  Brooke stalked through the freighters, and caught a lone guard with his silent arrow. Donahue stayed beneath the bed of a Pittsburgh while Brooke crept out to remove his shaft. He was unstrapping the man’s hip gun when an expelled breath whirled him ’round.

  * * * *

  Pinky Haller was easily recognizable in the moonlight, his Green Rivet knife already a glinting arc sweeping down at Brooke.

  The hunter let himself collapse suddenly beneath that charge. The knife slashed past his shoulder. Haller followed it, thrown off balance, body a sudden crushing weight on Brooke. It was a silent, bitter fight there in the damp grass. Haller was a-straddle Brooke, with all the advantage. He caught the hunter’s neck and struck again, up, down.

  Desperately Brooke rolled to one side, warding the blade off with one arm, feeling it slash him from wrist to elbow. He kept jerking from side to side like that, throwing up one arm, than the other. Haller’s face was twisted into a snarl, he panted with each vicious thrust.

  Brooke was glad he’d brought Donahue along, then.

  The bony trapper was suddenly jerked off him by the brick-faced sergeant, and the two of them heaved away into the grass. Brooke got to his hands and knees, breathing hard. He saw Haller rise up and strike. Donahue blocked. Then Donahue struck. Haller didn’t block.

  The sergeant stoo
d up, grinning, “B’gorra, that’s one for Billy Booshway.”

  Somehow Haller’s greasy kerchief had been torn off, and the two men didn’t look at him long because his skull was all pink and scarified and strangely revolting.

  They killed four more men, getting their weapons. Donahue was loaded down with holstered revolvers and Hawkins muzzle-loaders when they came to that fifth man. He was standing in the shadow of a big Pittsburgh, and Brooke’s shaft didn’t strike quite as true as it might have, and he made a lot of noise before he died.

  Brooke and the sergeant hurried back to those in the river bottom, the camp already in an uproar, men running back and forth among the cabins, calling and shouting. The hunter was about to lead his party back down the river when he saw a stocky man lighted for an instant in an open doorway. He was thick-bellied and broad hipped and he wore a gaudy fringed hunting coat. Harvey Mohan.

  Brooke had proved himself deadly enough with his shortbow to have sent half a dozen shafts through Mohan in that short moment; the big man stood silhouetted by the yellow light, a perfect target. Yet the hunter made no move to nock his first arrow. It would have been too much like shooting a deer or a buffalo. This thing between him and Mohan had resolved itself into something far more personal and intense than that.

  The big man moved off into the milling crowd, but everyone had seen him, and it made everything quite clear, even to Hernic.

  It had been Mohan from the first, of course—discouraging Beavis and his Delawares, having Booshway and Thorpe killed, trying to get rid of Brooke. Mohan hadn’t wanted any experienced men to face his Diablos, only a bunch of tenderfeet and a drunken wagon-master and a green lieutenant.

  Well, that lieutenant wasn’t as green as he had been, and some of those tenderfeet were still alive, and Pinkie Haller would knife no more guards.

  Brooke led his party downriver from the roused camp. They were well armed, now. Even the hunter packed a revolver, silver-studded belt rasping strangely against his bare hide.

  * * * *

  The next morning Brooke sent Donahue and a trooper down to get Tahrr where they had left him with the ponies. Down in the valley, men were riding from the camp, in ones and twos, sometimes larger groups. They disappeared into the timber at the valley mouth, taking the river route, and none of them returned. Brooke well knew what it meant to those superstitious Indians, finding their fellows dead in the night with only a bloody hole in the chest to mark their passing. Fear was sapping Mohan’s strength!

  The hunter was still watching, when Donahue and the trooper suddenly appeared down on the slope, supporting Tahrr between them. Brooke ran into the clearing to help them.

  “Some damn Yaquis found me,” groaned the Missourian. “They took me to Mohan. Wuz gonna hang me by muh thumbs till I tol’ whar you was. But I got loose. I think they follered me.”

  Yes, they’d followed him. A lesser man would have opened fire without warning, but Harvey Mohan had a bigness to his villainy. He stepped from the trees a hundred yards below, that Sharps across his square belly, Los Diablos forming a long line behind him.

  “I knew it was you last night, Injun boy,” he yelled. “Nobody else coulda killed seven men so dead they didn’t make a sound dyin’, nobody else coulda led a bunch o’ tenderfeet through two hunnert miles o’ hell. I guess you must hate me just about as much as I hate you.”

  Tahrr gave Brooke his chance. The teamster lurched erect, bellowing in pure rage, and whirled to charge down the slope. Mohan and his renegades had been ready to open up on Brooke and the others. But it was automatic for them to turn their fire on that onrushing juggernaut in the red shirt. Tahrr jerked to the hail of lead through him, but he had a terrific momentum, and he had his rage, and he wasn’t going to die until he got hold of Mohan.

  Mohan dropped his rifle calmly, setting his oak-tree legs, bending forward with his arms out to meet that charge. He was the type to do it that way.

  Tahrr thundered into him with a terrific crunch of bone on bone. Mohan shivered from head to toe, and he seemed to sink a little into the ground. But he didn’t go over. Using Tahrr’s own momentum, he lifted the giant far upward, slinging him back and over to hit with a sickening thud and to lie still.

  Brooke had taken that chance Tahrr gave him, though, retreating up the hill with Donahue and the trooper, picking up Hernic and the others, and moving on up toward the ridge. The battle became a deadly thing then—flitting shadows and sudden thundering guns, and men dying without rightly having seen who killed them.

  Somehow Georges Tremaine worked around to their flank, appearing suddenly on Hernic’s end of the line, a bunch of Yaquis behind him. The lieutenant whirled to meet his charge.

  “Zat blue-coat’s mine,” called the Creole thinly. “Mine!”

  Hernic threw his blond head back that way, spreading booted kgs. And perhaps Tremaine remembered the other time he had faced this boy, for at the last moment he hesitated.

  Hernic began firing, then, that cool, deliberate fire. Cocking and firing, cocking and firing. Tremaine went down with a high, womanish cry, thin body flopping over and over until it brought up against a tree. But Hernic didn’t stop shooting. His .44 bucked and bucked and bucked, knocking down men with thundering precision.

  The Yaquis wavered, just as Tremaine had wavered, and they broke and ran. Hernic stood there with his smoking Walker canted down a little, looking at the men he’d killed. There was no film over his eyes now and he wasn’t shaking with reaction.

  * * * *

  Then Mohan broke through the timber below, dropping one of the teamsters, and Brooke began his steady retreat again. Suddenly they were on the ridge. Brooke called Hernic to him.

  “We’ve held the advantage by being above. I don’t want to lose it my moving down the slope behind us. You take your troopers and the mule skinner and flank Mohan. Do a better job on him than Tremaine did on us.”

  Hernic moved off, gathering his men, disappearing into the timber. Brooke leaned against a tree, shoving new loads into his dragoon.

  “Julie,” he said. “Keep a bullet for yourself.”

  She nodded gravely, eyes glistening a little. “I’ll be proud to die beside you, David.”

  Donahue was loading his pair of dragoons carefully. He would give an account of himself. Los Diablos were nearing, not so many as before, perhaps a score. Mohan led, walking with that strange grace of his. And the rush came suddenly, a hell of screaming men and blazing guns.

  Brooke tried to nail Mohan, but gun-smoke hung thickly through the trees, hiding him. And there were others. A Yaqui erupted through the haze, dark face contorted. Brooke shot him in the belly. A Mexican lurched into the hunter’s sights. Brooke shot him in the face. Another few seconds and Hernic’s flanking charge wouldn’t do any good.

  A big trapper knelt to fire at Brooke, his slugs chipping bark into the hunter’s face. Brooke’s slug caught him square and he went over backward. Then that dragoon was empty.

  Hernic struck suddenly, careful fire dropping half a dozen Diablos. He came on in, and they couldn’t face that surprise from the side. They scattered back down the hill, the lieutenant hot after them with his flaming Walker.

  But Mohan hadn’t run. Brooke saw him suddenly, all alone now, still moving up the slope in a steady, solid-footed jog trot. Coming for Brooke, coming for the lean, brown sword-blade of a man who’d defeated him so utterly. Not hurrying especially, just coming, grimly, inexorably.

  Donahue was on his hands and knees, blood forming a pool between his splayed fingers. And Julie hadn’t saved that last ball for herself. She was vainly trying to reload.

  Brooke dropped his empty revolver, a burning exaltation sweeping through him. He knew now why he hadn’t shot Mohan from ambush last night. Because this was the way it should be, the way it had to be—he and Mohan, face to face. The other m
an was nearer, big buffalo gun held at hip-level, swinging a little with each deliberate stride. Brooke raised his bow with an arrow nocked, and pulled his gut string back smoothly.

  Mohan didn’t even break his stride, just fired from the hip, still coming on.

  With the terrific jar of the .50-caliber slug driving him to his knees, Brooke loosed his arrow, straight, true. Waves of sick pain blinded him momentarily. Then he could see again.

  Mohan was still coming and it was terrible to see. A big, square-bellied man, his awful bull-strength and his implacable hatred driving him on, even with an eighteen-inch willow shaft buried deeply into his thick chest.

  “David,” shuddered Julie. “He won’t Stop. He—won’t—stop!”

  The hunter fought a roaring pain that threatened to sweep him away, and he raised his shortbow again. It was an axiom on the frontier that a skilful bowman could have his sixth shaft in the air before his first had struck its mark.…

  Brooke’s arrows thudded into Mohan like the swift beat of a tom-tom. The first one didn’t even stagger him. The second made him grunt sickly, but he kept right on coming. The third, the fourth, the fifth. But as the last one drove home, he stumbled, took a final step, and fell on his face.

  Even then he didn’t stop. With an awful effort of, will, he began to crawl forward, hands digging into the earth, spasmodically. Brooke was unable to move. He just crouched there on his knees, watching Mohan, fascinated.

  Blood bubbled from the other’s mouth. He rose, thick fingers clawing out for Brooke. Then he collapsed, dead. The heads of those six arrows protruded from the broad back of his gaudy, fringed hunting coat.

  …And a man was more likely to fall with half a dozen arrows in him, than with one.

  They put Donahue and Brooke in one of Julie’s Conestogas, setting out for Santa Fe that same day. The sergeant was a sieve, but hanging grimly to life with all the stocky strength of him. Brooke’s wound was a clean one, though his hip felt numb, pain running through him whenever the wagon jolted over a rock in the river bottom. He lay there in the musty interior, able to see Hernic and a trooper where they sat, spelling each other on the reins. Julie sat beside Brooke, and she caught his eyes on Hernic’s back.