by Jonas Ward
“What—?”
Quick held out both hands, empty. Koenig straightened up, his frown narrowing, and reached slowly toward his gun. Quick snapped his own gun out and said, “Wait a minute. No need to fill the air with bullets, Race. I didn’t shoot him.”
“Then, who did?”
The crew began to crowd inside. Quick said, “Here, take a look at my gun. You’ll see it ain’t been fired.” He thrust the gun eagerly under Koenig’s nose. Koenig took the gun, peered down the barrel, sniffed at it, and opened the loading gate to check the loads. “Sure enough,” he said in bewilderment. He gave it back, and Quick dropped it into his holster.
Someone said, “Who did it, Steve?”
Quick took a ragged breath. “It was that Buchanan fellow. The crowd-sized hairpin that was here before, the one Mike sent after Marinda.”
Koenig said, “Buchanan? What would he shoot Mike for?”
“I dunno,” Quick said. “I only heard a snatch of it. Buchanan must’ve sneaked inside the back way. When I came in, him and the old man were arguing hot and heavy. Buchanan was sayin’ the Apaches had killed Marinda, but he wanted his money anyway, the money the old man promised him if he brought Marinda back alive. The old man refused to pay him. Said Buchanan hadn’t delivered and didn’t have no gold coming. Buchanan said he’d taken a big risk on Mike’s account and he figured that was worth some money. It got pretty hot and heavy, like I said. Buchanan finally dragged out his gun and shot the old man. I came in with ’Tonia, there. We was just in time to see Buchanan duckin’ out through the back hallway, there.”
Koenig cursed. “By now he’s a mile away.”
Quick risked a sidewise glance at Antonia. She had regained her composure; she was looking at him as if she were pleasantly surprised, as if she were proud of his ingenuity.
One of the hands headed for the door. “I dunno about the rest of you gents, but I’m going to slap a saddle on a bronc and see if I can’t pick up the bastard’s trail.”
“Yeah,” another man said.
“Damn right. Come on, Pete.”
The crew filed out quickly. Koenig’s voice reached after them. “A couple of you stick around. Somebody’s got to tend to Mike’s body and keep Antonia company.”
Quick said, “Antonia’s the boss now, Race.”
“What?”
“Sure. With Marinda dead and the old man dead, Antonia’s the only blood relative left to claim the Pitchfork.”
Koenig’s puzzled frown shifted to the girl. “I never heard nothing about you being Mike’s kin.”
“It’s true,” she said. She was making a good act of being grief-stricken.
Quick said calmly, “You calling the lady a liar, Race?”
“I’ll have to have more than your word on it,” Koenig said stubbornly.
“Sure, easy enough,” Quick said. “Check with that lawyer in town, Ford. He’ll testify for ’Tonia.”
“I don’t know,” Koenig said, scratching his jaw.
Quick laughed and said placatingly, “It’ll all work out, Race. You’ll see. You and me, we’ll make peace between us.”
“You’re asking a lot of a good hater.”
“We’re friends, Race. Remember?”
“Maybe,” Koenig said. “But the next time you pull a gun on me, one of us will be a dead friend.” With that he swung with a snap of his wide shoulders. “We’ll talk it out later. Right now I’m going after Buchanan.”
“I’ll stick around here and keep an eye on things,” Quick said.
When Koenig left, Quick turned his enigmatic glance toward Antonia. She came up to him and hooked her arm in his. She said, “I can be very affectionate if you know how to treat me, Steve. And I think you’re learning how to treat me.” She smiled up into his face.
Fourteen
It must have been around two in the morning. There was no moon, but Buchanan’s eyes were used to the darkness by now; he had no trouble picking up the movement of six or eight horsemen filing quickly over the pass a mile ahead of him. The horsemen had to cross an open flat of pale rock shale, and that was what gave them away.
Buchanan reined in. Marinda halted beside him; and Johnny Reo, who had been riding guard, caught up and said cheerlessly, “Didn’t take them long to round up them horses. How in hell’d they get out ahead of us?”
“They know the country better than we do,” Buchanan said. “No sense crying about it. At least they haven’t spotted us yet.”
“Yet.”
Marinda said, “What will we do now?”
“One thing for sure,” Buchanan said. “We can’t ride through that pass up there. We’ll have to cut north or south.”
“They’ll expect us to go north,” Reo said. “I vote we head south, try to lose ourselves in the timber. Nothing up north of here but rock mesas and the most Godawful desert you ever saw.”
Buchanan considered it. He offered his canteen to Marinda, who drank gratefully; he said presently, “No. They’ll figure we’re too smart to head north, so they’re more likely to look for us in the trees south of here. That wasn’t any accident, those six Apaches riding big as life through that pass up yonder. They wanted us to see them. They want us to turn south. If we go south, we get farther from home every step we go.”
“So?” Reo said.
“So we go north,” Buchanan said, and put his horse that way.
They rammed through the mountains at a steady gait, sparing the horses but eating up ground. It was an hour or more of hard riding, without talk, until finally the girl pulled her horse close by Buchanan’s and reached out weakly to pluck his sleeve.
“I’m dizzy, I can’t breathe. I’m sorry—can we stop for a little while?”
Buchanan drew rein. “Sure,” he said. “Horses need a rest anyhow.”
When Reo opened his mouth to object, Buchanan shook his head mutely and gave Reo a pointed look. Reo subsided. They dismounted in a foothill boulder field, watered the horses sparingly from their hats, and sat down with rifles across their laps. “Ten or fifteen minutes,” Buchanan said. “It’s all we can spare.”
“Come daylight,” Reo admonished, “they’ll pick up our tracks. We want to be long gone by then.”
“You want to put wings on these horses, Johnny? You go right ahead.”
Reo grumbled something and tugged off one boot to scratch the sole of his foot. “Been itching for two hours now,” he said.
Buchanan said, “Shake out that boot before you put it back on. No telling what might crawl into it.” He gave Reo a deadpan glance.
Marinda said, “Someone told me once that Indians wouldn’t fight at night.”
“Somebody told me that, too,” Buchanan said. “But I reckon nobody told the Indians.”
Reo’s lip twisted. “You want to say something else funny?”
“Simmer down, Johnny. You’re not mad at me. You’re mad because for once in your life you got scared.”
Reo thought about that. “Maybe you’re right.” He shook out his boot and yanked it on. “But you got to admit, a thing like this can ruin your whole day.”
Marinda said, “Do you think they’re following us right now?”
“Not following,” Reo said. “Chasing.” He got to his feet and started away. “I’d better go on up top for a look-see down the back trail.”
Buchanan watched him go. Reo tended to complain a lot, but he had just as much courage as the next man. His constant beefing, you learned after a while, was only a mannerism. Buchanan hadn’t forgotten the calm deliberation with which Reo had outdrawn Cesar Diaz, or the sizzling accuracy of Reo’s rifle marksmanship on that first day when Reo had pitched in against the Warrenrode crew. Buchanan thought of Lance Corporal Ivy, the truculent soldier. It seemed a hell of a long time ago; actually it wasn’t more than a few days.
This country was full of luck. Some found it, some didn’t. So far, Buchanan’s luck was holding. He was still alive.
Sometimes he felt as though he were at w
ar with the inevitable. It was a curious thing how a peaceable man could find himself dead center in a mountain of troubles.
His glance eased around toward the girl. She was leaning back against a rock, eyes almost closed. She’d been through a meat grinder, that was for sure. Abused and bruised by the Apache women, she couldn’t be blamed for exhaustion. He hadn’t yet heard her utter a single whimper.
One thing was sure. She was an orchid in a cactus garden. She was a willowy beauty; her eyes could melt a man down into a puddle.
She seemed to feel his attention. She lifted her eyelids and looked at him. “Tell me something.”
“What’s that?”
“Do you honestly think we have a chance?”
“I reckon,” Buchanan said.
“I’m glad you said that, even if it’s a lie.” She stirred, pressing both hands to her temples and brushing her hair back with her palms. She said, “Your partner—he’s only here for the money my father offered him. That’s true, isn’t it?”
“You’d have to ask Johnny about that.”
“But it wasn’t the money that made you come.”
“What makes you think so?” he asked.
“It’s one of those things a woman can tell. I can’t explain it any better than that.”
“Lady,” he said, “no matter what happens, it’s been worth it to meet you.” He grinned at her.
She said softly, “Lady? Buchanan, I can tell you this—scratch a lady, and you’ll find a woman.”
He considered her gravely after that, but he had no time to compose an answer. The soft scuff of leather on gravel sent him spinning around, palming his gun.
“Easy,” Johnny Reo hissed, and appeared vaguely in the night.
Buchanan said, “I’d better hang a bell on you so I’ll know where you are. I told you once before to make more noise when you come up behind me.”
Reo walked in, and as soon as Buchanan saw his face, he knew something was wrong.
Reo said, “Just pretend like you’re General Custer and old Sentos is Sitting Bull. We got some company comin’ up behind us.”
“How far back?”
“Twenty minutes, maybe. No more.”
Buchanan strode across the ground to catch up the horses. “Let’s go, then.”
Daylight whiplashed his eyes. The morning sun blazed unforgivingly, pouring rivulets of sweat down Buchanan’s body under the thin shirt. The white glare sent fragments of light against his eyes like painful metal slivers.
On laboring horses they lined out across the flats, leaving the foothills behind. Wherever the Apaches were, they hadn’t put in an appearance.
They passed a goat-herding family of Papago Indians, whereupon Reo gave Buchanan a disgusted look; there was no doubt the Papagos would give the Apaches an exact description of the three white riders and the direction they were riding.
But there was nothing to do about that. They prowled forward into the desert, toward a monumental rock spire that measured a good half mile across at its base. It towered several hundred feet in the air; its top was cut off, flat as a table.
Buchanan twisted in the saddle to look back—and found half a dozen horsemen driving forward at a gallop, raising a good deal of dust. There was no mistaking the determined flatness of their run, nor the fact that they were aiming right for Buchanan and his companions.
Plunging spurs into the horses’ flanks, Reo and Buchanan laid themselves low in the saddles and whooped the girl forward, swinging in an arc to bypass the end of the mesa. To escape being trapped against the monument, they would have to beat the advancing riders to the end of the mesa, then get around and beyond it before the Apaches came within rifle range.
They might have done it, too, on fresh horses. The game ponies settled evenly into the low, leg-stretching smoothness of the thundering dead run; but the speed of freshness wasn’t there. Stones and dust flew up behind the drumming hoofs. The ground was uneven, pitted with angry scars and holes. An ocotillo raked Buchanan’s arm, tearing the sleeve away, leaving streaks on his skin like a cat’s claws.
They had to slow the gait to pound through a patch of saddle-sized rocks; and when they cleared it, with four hundred yards yet to run, Buchanan whipped a glance over his shoulder.
The six riders had fanned out wide. They charged down in earnest, close enough for him to see their band-tied hair and rifles lifted at arm’s length. They didn’t waste any breath whooping or shouting. They were running on a tangent with the line of the fugitives’ course, only a quarter-mile away.
Johnny Reo’s curses fell against the laid-back ears of his horse. They swept toward the bend in the cliff, and the nearest Indian’s rifle opened up.
Buchanan did not hear the strike of the bullet anywhere nearby. The sun-battered country glittered, and the horses’ metal shoes made a hard racket over the rocky earth. A foam of sweat burst out on Buchanan’s horse. Rifles cranged behind him; two or three bullets screamed off the cliff, one of them close enough for Buchanan to see the white strip it tore out of the rock. That was uncommon shooting at long distance freehand. When he glanced back, he saw why it was so good. Two of the Indians had halted to take aim. They were too far back to make their shots effective; most of them fell short. But the other four Apaches kept gaining steadily—the angle of their approach made their run shorter than the fugitives’.
They were within three hundred yards when Buchanan leaned to the left and swept around the sharp cliff edge, herding Marinda and Reo ahead of him. The Indians massed their fire as he made the turn; he was the target of a vicious fusillade before the horse carried him out of their view behind the jut of the cliff.
The slope on the backside was broken here and there by loose talus slides; they had to run around them to avoid fouling the horses’ feet. All of it glared painfully in the hot sun. Marinda’s horse seemed to be lagging; and a glance that way made Buchanan’s jaw clamp tight. The horse was bleeding from a bullet slice across the flank. It was not a serious wound, but it would defeat them in any cross-country chase.
He looked back. It wouldn’t be more than a few seconds before the Apaches would whip into sight.
Buchanan yelled at Reo, got his attention, and held up his arm. Reo’s face instantly creased into a frown, and he said, “No, goddamn it. What the hell for?” His voice carried over the thunder of hoof beats. But Buchanan shouted at him and guided his running horse in close to the toe of a sprawled shale slide. Before the horse could stop, Buchanan leaped from the saddle. He wheeled toward Marinda, lifted her bodily off her horse and placed her on his own.
“Work your way up the slope, both of you. Find some cover. Try to find some rocks that don’t look too much like tombstones.”
Marinda said, “But what about you?”
“Just get going,” he shouted.
Reo held still long enough to say, “Hope we ain’t got our powder wet, amigo.”
“Keep close to her.”
“Yeah. Well, console yourself with this, amigo—the closer they come, the harder they are to miss.”
“Get out of here,” Buchanan roared.
Reo went ramming after the girl. Buchanan jogged the rifle in the circle of his fist, slapped the girl’s injured horse, and watched it hump away from the mesa. With a little luck, the horse’s dust cloud would conceal the fact that it didn’t have a rider. It might draw the Apaches in pursuit.
Buchanan scrambled behind the hump of the talus slide, dropping flat on painfully sharp rock slivers just as four Apaches raced into sight.
He jacked a shell into the chamber and braced the rifle against his cheek.
One of the Apaches wheeled after the riderless horse; but the others came ramming close along the base of the cliff, straight toward Buchanan.
He squinted against the glare and squeezed off a shot. Without waiting to see its effect, he swung to bear on a second rider and his steady pressure on the trigger made the gun go off. It caught him almost by surprise.
The first
Indian pitched from his horse and rolled to a limp hunched stop. The second threw up his arms but kept his seat, lurching in the saddle. Buchanan took unhurried aim and dropped that man with a shot that recoiled heavily against his shoulder.
Reo’s rifle was banging away from the rocks some distance upslope. He was concentrating his fire on the lone Indian who had gone after the riderless horse. That one was almost out of range when one of Reo’s bullets knocked him off his horse.
Buchanan got to one knee, lifting the rifle with him. One Indian was circling, out of range, and it was about time for those other two to come running past the end of the cliff.
They didn’t.
Buchanan nodded. He reloaded the rifle and turned, starting to make his way up toward the rocks where Reo and the girl had taken cover—and a bullet smashed into the talus, making a racket like a pebble crashing around inside a metal drum. It drove Buchanan to cover, flat against the ground. His mind automatically analyzed the high, flat report of the rifle. Long-range stuff. Maybe a .38-56, a small slug backed by a lot of gunpowder.
He inched his head up to spot the rifleman’s position. There wasn’t any more shooting. That lone Indian out on the flats was circling beyond rifle range; it was hard to tell what he had in mind. Buchanan felt the dryness of his lips and wished he had his canteen. The sun was a brass fist that slugged the back of his shirt.
A bullet whined off the rocks. Just to let us know he’s still there, Buchanan thought.
A new thought grenaded into his mind: it was stalemate right now, but if the Indians kept them pinned here very long, Sentos’ reinforcements would come up.
Echoing that thought, Johnny Reo’s call came echoing down the slope: “We got to get out of here, Buchanan.”
Buchanan gave the desert a regretful look; and finally he tossed his head back and answered Reo. “You two go on. I’ll try to hold them up here.”
Faintly he could hear the girl’s immediate protest. Reo argued with her. Buchanan couldn’t make out the words, but he had already thought of all the arguments. There were three of them and only two horses; there was a chance for two to escape but not for all three. There were a dozen arguments. They all came back to the same thing. Two horses, three riders. Those Indian ponies were too far away to catch.