by Carl Dane
“More than that. It was a fucking assassination. Set up by somebody who knew you’d been sent on a mission.”
My head was clear now. My blood was pumping with an instinctive animal rage and I was thinking about how I’d track down and kill whoever did this.
In other words, I felt pretty good. Everything was back to normal.
“And now,” Carmody said, “let me tell you the crazy part.”
Chapter 20
There had been two of them, and they apparently did not realize Carmody was tracking. They had cut into the opening of a canyon and worked their way through a narrow passage.
For some reason, Carmody said, they had stopped before the canyon opening and waited for a minute, as though on the starting line for a race, and then bolted into the opening at top speed.
Carmody knew that he couldn’t follow directly after them without being spotted, so he’d circled around and found another opening. Most people think box canyons have only one entry point, but very few things in nature are built like that. Carmody found a wormhole to the south, staked his horse, changed to some moccasins he kept in the saddlebag, and walked in, crawling and climbing when he had to.
No ordinary man could have done it. Carmody didn’t say that, of course, but the same upbringing that had left him with a taste for homemade liquor and the hindquarters of fox squirrels had imprinted the ability to read terrain, guess the logical way in, remember the way back, and move like a shadow all the while.
He’d drawn on those skills as a Union scout in Tennessee’s First Regiment Volunteer Infantry and honed them a little in the process.
He’d worked his way into a deep canyon, darkened by the high walls and narrow opening that blocked out most of the sun except when it was directly overhead. It wasn’t a particularly big canyon, but it was deep; the farther you travel northwest the more frequent canyons become until you hit the type of giant gorges you see near Amarillo. The type of formations we have in the Hill Country are smaller and craggier and typically lead to caves. Were you find one cave you’ll generally be in one part of a network that leads to other caves and caverns.
Carmody poked his finger in the air and started to explain the differences between caves and caverns but I lost interest – it has something to do with one being bigger and deeper than the other – and I implored him to focus on the topic.
Regardless of which is which, canyons and caves have an understandable attraction to outlaws, especially if the facilities come equipped with limited and complicated access, a perch where the inhabitants can get a view of approaching riders, cave openings or mineshafts that can easily be concealed, and access to water and grass for grazing.
Carmody had spent the afternoon exploring while I was occupied with bleeding and told me that just a few hours northwest of our sleepy little town lay a canyon hideout with all the amenities, essentially a grand hotel of the outlaw world. He estimated during his lurking and skulking he’d seen about twenty men and one woman.
He’d never seen Lydia Davis and neither had I, but she’d been described to us as a sturdy, square-faced young woman with dark brown hair and a stern expression.
Carmody had caught a glimpse of a sturdy square-faced woman with dark brown hair and a stern expression sitting at a rough-hewn table in a low oval-shaped cave, but couldn’t get close enough to discern any more. She was shaking her fist and cursing and might have been a captive protesting her plight. Or she may have just been a resident criminal who likes to shake her fist and curse.
She might have been Lydia Davis. But as Carmody told Harbold, she might have been President Grant’s wife Julia, for that matter. She sure looked a lot like the picture of Mrs. Grant that Carmody had seen.
Or she could have been any one of a million other people.
But whoever she was, she was somehow a part of the web of events that had culminated in the most recent attempt to turn me into flower food, and we were going to start unraveling this damned business as soon as we got back.
Chapter 21
Elmira screamed when I walked into the Spoon.
“He ain’t that ugly,” Carmody said.
The tears flowed instantly and copiously. She hugged me and drove her head into my chest and then jerked it back as though to double-check that it was really me and then she burrowed back in again.
It took me a second to figure out her reaction but then I saw myself in the mirror behind the bar. The wound was still open and still had flecks of fresh blood around the edges and gaped like a mouth. My blood was caked into a powdery, coppery brown mess that had cascaded down my shirt and covered it entirely except for the burn-holes. Blood covered my right pant leg but somehow the left one remained pristine.
Harbold rose up from a chair near the Faro table.
“What happened, Sir?” He asked the question in the same tone he’d use to inquire as to whether the mail had come in yet.
Elmira shot Harbold a look of reproach and I couldn’t figure out why until I remembered that despite the rough edges of her life she had not seen a lot of blood and did not like the looks of it when she did. When she first hired me, Carmody and I had been forced to do some gunwork at the bar and had pretty much turned the place into a slaughterhouse and she threw up for an entire day.
Some things go unspoken, depending on your background. Harbold, who’d seen just about every type of battlefield casualty that could be imagined – and a few that can’t, not by a normal mind, anyway – knew that I was unsightly but not seriously injured. His tone was businesslike because for him and for me, this was business.
Elmira didn’t understand that and now she hated him.
Good. I liked it that way.
Harbold listened and wrote in a small notebook he carried in his back pocket.
“Who do you think could have tipped them off?” he asked.
Unspoken, because it didn’t need to be said, was any denial on his part.
Elmira was looking at him with ice under her eyelids and I was afraid she was going to say something untoward, but she made a reasonable point when she spoke.
“It could have been any one of dozens of people,” she said. “Everybody in town saw or heard about you two riding out, carrying every gun you could lift. You’re assuming that this is related to the kidnapping. There are lots of people who want you dead, probably including friends of Mr. Gillis and that judge you’ve kept locked in a cage for two days now.”
“He ain’t no real judge,” Carmody said.
Harbold interrupted and circled the conversation back to the actual point. “Add to that every drunken cowboy you’ve whacked alongside the head in the past year. And the people connected to the rival saloon down the street – they may hold long grudges. Lots of people do.”
Elmira shook her head.
“But why now?” she asked. “Why wait until they are heavily armed and on the trail?”
“If I had a grudge and wanted to kill the Lieutenant,” Harbold said, “that would be precisely when I’d try it.”
“I’m not a lieutenant anymore,” I said, which went without saying because Harbold ignored me, which he never would have done if we were still in uniform.
“Look,” Harbold said, “how exactly do you kill a marshal in the center of town? Without being seen? Much easier if you see him setting off on a trail, regardless of how many guns he’s carrying. You know he’s riding northwest, and if you know the area you know there are only a few trails headed that way and you set up a perch. That’s simple. The only part that isn’t so simple is that if it was somebody in town, they would have seen the corporal here ride off, too.”
“That’s sergeant,” Carmody said.
“Sorry. But maybe they wanted to kill both of you. Maybe there were more lying in wait on the upper trail. Maybe they saw you and the sergeant and assumed, correctly, that you’d given him all the money to carry. Makes sense that they would pick you off as soon as they could. And maybe it was somebody from Austin who knew about the k
idnapping and knew you were heading for the drop. The major certainly would have kept quiet about it, but how many people did the judge talk to? And the witness? How many sheriffs and marshals and constables and law clerks and telegraph operators heard some or all of the story?”
Harbold had a way of putting things in perspective.
“So,” I said, “that narrows it down to anyone here who wants me dead, or who wanted ten thousand dollars, and anyone in Austin who wanted me dead or wanted ten thousand dollars, or any combination of the above?”
Harbold nodded.
“So basically, we’ve narrowed it down to anyone, somewhere in Texas.”
“I wouldn’t rule out Arizona,” Carmody said. “Or the Indian Territories. Or maybe even all of Mexico. The man’s got a lot of enemies.”
“And just to make it a little more interesting,” Harbold said, “we still have the question of Lydia Davis. We promised the major that we’d get her and the major promised that he’d get you out of the frying pan for beating up on that little judge.”
Harbold lowered his voice, maybe for dramatic effect and maybe because he was feeling as paranoid as I was.
“And Sir, we don’t know who’s involved and who’s leaking information. If we go after her, it’s going to have to be a small operation by people we trust and that no one else knows about. One wrong word picked up by the wrong person and we can tip them off.”
Harbold unexpectedly stood up.
“I’m riding back to Austin, Sir. This is a decision for Major Munro. I’ll be back tomorrow morning.”
And with that he strode out of the bar.
Carmody had fetched a bottle and poured us all a shot.
“If I was you, I’d get a good meal,” Carmody said.
“I’ve lost my appetite for good.”
“I’d also have Elmira put some turpentine on that gash.”
Elmira looked up.
“You might also want a bath,” she said.
“I’ll do that. And tonight I need to ride out and see Taza.”
“The last time you saw Taza he said he was going to kill you,” Elmira said.
“He’ll have to get in line,” Carmody said, dispensing with the glass and drinking right out of the bottle with those lips that had recently feasted on fox squirrel haunches.
“Refill?” he said, offering up the bottle.
I help up a hand and shook my head.
“I think Taza’s promise to kill me was just an open-ended lifetime goal,” I said. “Right now I need some information and some help.”
“He’d be less likely to kill you if I went along,” Elmira said. “We can leave before sundown. After your bath.”
I would take her up on her offer. Carmody agreed to stay in town and keep order. I asked him to hide the ransom money. There are lots of loose tongues in down and a big deposit would start them wagging and we had enough trouble as it was.
Carmody assured me he’d bury it somewhere where not even the gophers would dare look for it.
He also concurred that Taza was probably not an immediate threat. As Taza was married to Elmira’s daughter, I think Apache protocol would stand in the way of killing me in front of his mother-in-law. Or at least I hoped that was how it worked.
Carmody went to visit the outhouse and I asked Elmira if we could have a fresh bottle and she told me that she would fetch it after my bath.
She stopped be as I swung open the batwing door to leave.
“Josiah,” he said, tilting her head. “Where’s your new hat?”
Chapter 22
Taza lifted his tunic to show me the scars from our last encounter.
“Here, you make my ribs look like pebbles in stream when you kick me. And here is where knife went in when I fell when you kicked me in leg like little girl does.”
I admired my handiwork, administered during a knife-fight between the Apache chief and me when we first met. Carmody and I were caught flat-footed and outnumbered by a party of braves, but Carmody had appealed to Taza’s sense of honor and brokered a deal where Taza and I would fight mano-a-mano.
Carmody speaks enough of Taza’s language to gather that Taza didn’t think I looked like much and I would be easy pickings in a knife fight. On that point, Taza was correct. Taza had me outsized and outclassed with the knife, but he, like most Indians I’ve encountered, he knew nothing about striking and didn’t expect the mule kick that had broken his ribs, nor the windmill shin kick to his thigh I’d learned from a fighter who had picked up the technique in Siam. That’s when Taza fell forward, accidentally impaling himself on his knife, and Carmody and I flew out of there like bats at sunset.
A few days later Taza saved my life just as a Comanche was about to finish me off with a rifle shot. Taza did it, he said, so he would have the opportunity to kill me himself at a later date – and take his time doing it.
Taza had surprised me by making that threat in English. He’d played dumb the whole time while Carmody sputtered out the twenty words he knew of the Apache language and Taza pretended he didn’t understand us when we were so cleverly plotting against him.
After discoursing on his healing process, Taza told me, “I will not kill you today. Busy with hunting and putting up buildings for storage and winter shelter. Need time to kill you well. Your death will be delicious for me. Delicious. New word I learn. You know that word? Still think that big dumb Apache cannot speak English? In fact, I know fancy word for big war hero who thinks everybody else is stupid. Word for that big war hero is stupid.”
I smiled and mused about how much fun I’d have breaking his ribs on the other side.
“I came to ask you a favor.”
“To let you die quickly? Not think so, but I make up my mind when I see how hard you beg.”
“No, I was hoping you’d risk your life and the lives of a few of your men to go on what’s pretty much a suicide mission to help save the life of a woman none of us even know.”
“I will do that,” he said. “Hunting and chopping trees gets boring.”
I explained to Taza that I needed someone on whom I could depend to keep the mission secret. He told me that there was no one he knew to tell, anyway. Then I explained that because we couldn’t call in the army or the rangers or any other help because the secret getting out would likely mean the death of the hostage, we would likely be outnumbered, probably by experienced gunfighters. He told me that he welcomed battle and had no fear of gunfighters.
Then I told him about the secret canyon and he told me the deal was off and walked away.
Chapter 23
Elmira gave me an explanation on the way back.
“Taza knows the place and says it’s ‘bad medicine.’ To you and me that sounds like superstition, but it’s not, exactly.”
I told her I didn’t follow.
“It’s like last month when you chased that mail thief to Dead Horse Hill. He hid out in a church and you refused to go in after him. What did you think would happen?”
“I figured he’d get tired after a while and give himself up, and that’s what he did.”
She shook her head and continued in a patient, measured tone.
“That’s not what I mean. What did you think would happen if you went into the church? Did you think God would strike you dead?”
I knew where she was going with this and it was an astute observation. Especially coming from someone who believes that the word “gullible” is not in the dictionary.
“No. It’s because I believe there are some boundaries you don’t cross.”
“Why? You’re not a particularly religious man, as far as I know.”
“It’s not that. Because a church is traditionally a sanctuary. You normally don’t fire on it in wartime, though it happens. But normally, you set limits because once you bust the limits of decency all bets are off. You can call it a warrior’s code, I guess, or the rules of engagement. And yes, it is stupid to think that are rules when you are trying to kill people, but there are
traditional limits. They’re the last thing that protects civilization.”
“And that’s your version of bad medicine,” Elmira said. “Taza says the place is evil, so evil that it’s always in shadow even when the sun is out. It’s a canyon hideout, you’d expect it to be dark. And who knows how the idea that the place was evil got cooked up? Maybe it’s based in reality. It is an outlaw hideout, after all. Who knows how long it’s served that purpose and what goes on in there?”
Again, she had a point.
“Lots of legends and customs get lost in history,” I said. “We do things and don’t know why we do them. Soldiers salute each other, which is a meaningless action, but at one time it served a purpose: When you were in armor you’d raise your visor to be recognized.”
I thought it was interesting, but she was getting bored.
I pressed on regardless.
“We shake hands. That comes from the days when people would hide their weapons up their sleeves, and if you met somebody on the road you’d each feel up each other’s sleeve to see if the person you met was armed.”
She was riding in back of me as he went single-file through a pass and I couldn’t see her eyes. But I think I heard them rolling.
“Getting back to the actual point,” she said, “I don’t think Taza is superstitious or scared. He just feels some things are objectionable because of his customs and beliefs. You just need to come up with the right way to get him to go along.”
She thought for a moment, her brow scrunched up.
“An incentive,” she said.
We’d just finished up the half-hour ride from the Apache camp, and were coming up on the trail that would take us to the edge of the delta and turn into the main road near the bank.
I drew on the reins and turned around.
“Would you feel safe riding the rest of the way back by yourself?”