At first Clark thought they’d been rescued from one group of bandits by another. But as the lead rider dismounted, grabbed his canteen off his saddle, and moved toward Clark, Clark saw a distinct look of civility and concern in his eyes.
“Hell of a wreck,” the man said as he uncorked the canteen, knelt down, and handed it to Clark. “You two all right?” He glanced at Marina, who appeared to be in shock, holding her blouse closed with her hands and staring blankly at the horses and riders gathered before her.
Clark took the canteen, filled his mouth, sloshed the water around, and spat, getting rid of some of the grit. Then he drank. “Here you are, my dear,” he said, offering the canteen to his wife.
She didn’t take it, and Clark did not have the energy to encourage her. The cut on the side of his head made his brain throb and his vision swim. He assumed he’d suffered a concussion.
The newcomer took the canteen, moved to Marina, and knelt beside her. “Ma’am,” he said gently, “some water might make you feel better.”
Slowly she turned her head and focused on him. She took the canteen in both hands and sipped. She started to bring the canteen away from her mouth, then lifted it again and took two more swallows. Some of the water ran from her lip to her chin as she handed back the canteen.
“Gracias,” she said. “Thank you.”
“Any broken bones, any cuts that need tendin’?” the man asked her.
She shook her head, dropping her eyes.
Corking the canteen, the rider turned back to Clark. “That’s a hell of a tattoo you have on your ear.”
Pressing his neckerchief to the wound, Clark nodded. “Yes, they weren’t exactly gentlemen.”
“Gaston Bachelard is one-hundred-percent snake, is what he is,” the other replied. “I recognized him through my field glasses. Didn’t realize he was raiding this far north these days.”
He untied the bandanna from around his neck and wrapped it around Clark’s head, adjusting it over the wound before he tied it tightly. “There … That should help stop the blood until we can get you stitched.” He looked at his companions, who sat their horses and looked around warily, rifles clutched tightly in their hands.
The big man with the gray beard said in a low, gruff voice, “I’m gettin’ nervous sitting out here in the open like this, Jack. ’Paches might’ve heard our gunfire.”
The lead rider turned to Clark. He removed his buckskin glove from his right hand, and offered it. “I’m Jack Cameron,” he said. Then, jerking a thumb at his companions: “That ornery old cuss with the gray beard is Bud Hotchkiss. Beside him there is Pasqual Varas. The kid is Jimmy Bronco. The Indian goes by Perro Loco. We’re taking him to an Army detail waiting for us in Contention City.”
“You bounty hunters?” Clark asked.
“Only by necessity,” Cameron replied. “We all ranch west of Hackberry Mesa up by Fountain Springs. Perro Loco’s been raiding our spreads for the past seven months, so we got together to track him down. Just so happens the Army was offering a reward, because of all the people he’s killed. They’ve caught him twice, and he escaped both times.”
“I’ve heard of him,” Clark said, nodding as he stared darkly at the Indian sitting his horse with a look of supreme insouciance.
He was big for an Indian, and broad-chested, powerful arms thrust back behind him. His long, blue-black hair hung below his shoulders. Wisps of it blew across his broad, pitted face. He wore the usual Apache garb—deerskin leggings, knee-high moccasins, and deerhide vest. He also wore a duckbilled forage cap, no doubt taken off the body of a slain soldier.
Turning to Cameron, Clark said, “I’m Adrian Clark and this is my wife, Marina. We, too, were on our way to Contention City.”
“Well, if you’re well enough to ride, I guess you still are,” Cameron said, standing and offering Clark his hand.
Clark looked toward the luggage scattered behind the stage. “What about our bags?”
“You’ll have to leave them, I’m afraid,” Cameron said, walking to his horse. “We don’t have the horses to carry them. We’ll be riding double as it is.”
“What about the stage horses—couldn’t we ride one of them?”
“One’s dead and the other three have scattered. We’d be all afternoon trying to catch one.”
Clark turned to Marina and helped her to her feet.
“Your wife can ride with Bud,” Cameron said. He poked his boot through a stirrup and pulled himself into the saddle. “You can ride with me.”
A groan sounded behind the riders, and Clark saw the bandit who’d been shot in the neck push up on a knee and lift his pistol. “Hey…!” Clark yelled.
The sound hadn’t died before Cameron raked the Colt off his hip and swung his horse around to face the gunman. He cocked the Colt and fired, and the bandit sank back with a bullet through his forehead.
Clark whistled through his teeth. He’d heard about Jack Cameron, the ex-Army scout and Indian fighter. Who in the Southwest hadn’t? Cameron’s name had come up when Clark was inquiring about guides, but none of his business associates had known where to find Cameron, so Clark had settled for McCormick. At first he’d thought this man was just a saddle tramp with the same name. Obviously he was the man himself.
“If you two are ready,” Cameron said, “we’d best get a move on.”
“Come, my dear,” Clark said, leading Marina to the graybeard’s skewbald horse and helping her onto its back. Then he accepted Cameron’s hand and mounted the buckskin. As he swung up, his vision blurred for an instant and he felt dizzy.
As they rode off behind Cameron, Clark turned once to gaze at the two dead bandits.
* * *
Gaston Bachelard hunkered down in the shade of a boulder and trained his spy glass on the rocky flat below, where the stage lay like a matchbox crushed by a boot.
“No Apaches,” he snarled to the man kneeling beside him. His voice tightened with anger. “Four white men.” He lowered the glass and looked at the other man. “We were run off by four white men and an Indian tied to his horse!”
The other shrugged and raised his thin, dirty hands, palm up. “I am sorry, jefe,” he replied. “It was Rudolpho who said—”
“Silence!” Bachelard intoned.
He lifted the glass and resumed his study of the scene a hundred and fifty yards down the rocky grade.
At length, the other man said, “If they are not Apaches, then why do we not attack, jefe?”
Bachelard worked a piece of hog tripe from between his two front teeth and bit down on it thoughtfully. “I think that’s Jack Cameron down there.”
“Cameron?” the man asked, wide-eyed. “The scout?”
“Ex-scout, I believe.”
The Mexican straightened, lifting the tattered brim of his straw sombrero and jutting out his chin. The sun discovered his hawklike face and shone in his mud-brown eyes. “We can take Cameron, jefe,” he said with proud confidence. “I know what they say about him, but he is only one man like another—”
“Yes, he is one man like another,” Bachelard snarled, “and I would not hesitate to take him if Miguel Montana had sent me some real men instead of you four sons of stupid dog bitches—every one of you no better in a fight than the little girls you like to fuck in Hermosillo. ‘Apaches!’ you scream!”
Bachelard clamped his big, clawlike left hand on the back of the Mexican’s neck, and brusquely directed his gaze down the hill. His voice was harsh and tight, but low. “There are your Apaches, you goddamn bastard child of a two-peso whore!”
The Mexican squirmed. “I told you, jefe, it was Rudolpho—”
“Keep quiet, fool!” Bachelard hissed. “Don’t fuck things up any more than you already have. We could have had the goddamn plat by now and been on our way back to your fearless leader Montana if it hadn’t been for your so-called Apaches!”
Bachelard grunted and lifted the glass again to his right eye. “‘Send me four of your best men, Miguel,’ I told him, ‘
and I will bring you the plat in a week.’ A week! So he sends me you four horse turds—and who knows how long before we get it?” Bachelard shook his head, mumbling more obscenities and laughing without mirth. He focused the glass and gazed down the slope.
“No,” he continued thoughtfully, voice edged with disgust, “if I had more of my own riders here I’d lay down some lead and storm the son of a bitch. But since I’m shorthanded now, with your buddy Mocho and my man Kruger attracting flies down there with Cameron, and since the rest of you are a bunch of goddamn kittens afraid of your own mother’s shadow, I’ll have to wait for the element of surprise.”
A gun barked below. Staring through the spyglass, Bachelard gritted his teeth and shook his head. “Damn—Kruger had a chance.”
A minute passed, then Bachelard lowered the glass and gazed down the grade with his naked eyes.
“They’re riding off,” he said, brightening. “With Clark and the woman. They’re leaving.”
The other man furrowed his brow. “This is good, jefe?”
“Cameron will look for water, and the only water within half a day’s ride is Cholo Springs, at the southern end of the Whetstone Mountains. He’ll camp there for the night.”
Jesus smiled and nodded his head. “Ah … I see, jefe. And this … this is good?”
Bachelard thought as he spoke, fingering his scraggly goatee. “Cholo Springs is a well-covered spot, easy to defend. But not impregnable. If we follow them there, then wait for the very best opportunity, for full dark or first light, we’ll have the plat and the girl before the sun is up. And we’ll have the great Apache-hunter Jack Cameron roasting on a spit!”
He turned to his companion with an evil leer. “‘Rascal thieves, here’s gold. Go suck the blood o’ th’ grape…’”
The man looked at him, baffled, tentative. “What is that you say, jefe?”
Bachelard clamped a hand on the man’s shoulder, the jefe’s fickle mood swings and propensity for quoting verse keeping the man perpetually on edge. “I said, how does that sound to you, Jesús—the plat and the girl and Cameron squealing like a stuck javelina before morning?”
“Oh!” Jesus nodded eagerly, thrilled to be back in his boss’s good graces. “Muy bien, jefe! Muy bien!”
“Go, Jesús … tout de suite!” Bachelard ordered the Mexican, hazing him up the bluff to where the three other men waited with their horses.
CHAPTER 4
AS THEY RODE with the afternoon sun lathering their horses and painting broad sweat stains down the backs of their shirts, Clark considered one of the many stories he’d heard about Jack Cameron.
It was the year after the war, when the Union soldiers were returning to Arizona and the Yankee settlers were rebuilding what the Apaches had destroyed in their absence. Cameron had bought a ranch in the Dragoon Mountains east of Benson and been engaged to Ivy Kitchen, the pretty blonde daughter of Lester Kitchen, who also ranched in the area.
One morning the Apaches stormed off the trail from Benson, led by Mangus Colorado himself, and laid waste to four ranches. Cameron and his partner, Rudy Poliner, managed to escape into the mountains. Two days later they walked back out and found the Kitchen ranch little more than a pile of white ashes smoldering in the desert sun.
Lester and his two boys, Ray and Steve, lay in the ranchyard pincushioned with arrows. The women—Mrs. Kitchen and her two daughters, Rachel and Ivy—lay in the scrub around the root cellar, where they’d apparently tried to hide. They were all naked. They’d obviously all been raped. And they’d all had their throats cut. Cameron tracked the raiding party and managed to kill three before his horse gave out. Knowing the formidable Cameron was on his trail, Mangus Colorado hightailed it to his stronghold in the Sierra Madre. Enlisting the help of several ranchers and their men, Cameron made three attempts to locate the hideout. All he located, however, was a handful of bushwhacking Indians and death for more than half his men before he finally gave up and resigned himself to the fact he’d never be able to avenge his lover’s death.
Now Cameron turned his horse off the faint Indian hunting trail they were following through the foothills of the Whetstone Mountains. “We’d better stop and let the horses have a blow,” he told Hotchkiss.
Clark slid off the back of Cameron’s buckskin, stepped into the shade offered by a mesquite bush, and sat down. The pain in his head had abated, but he still felt disoriented. He pressed his hand to the bandanna over the wound and it came away dry, a good sign.
Cameron tethered the buckskin in the shade of another mesquite, then filled his hat with water from the canteen and offered it to the horse. The animal dipped its snout and drank noisily.
Clark glanced around at the others: the men watering their mounts and checking the horses’ shoes for loose nails, Marina sitting beside him staring off across the desert. He thought he should probably comfort her, but he wasn’t in the mood. He’d suffered as badly as she. It was probably silly, her being here in the first place, but Clark hadn’t left her in Tucson out of fear she’d fall for some card sharp or get raped by a drunk cowboy. How could he have known she’d be worse off out here?
Besides, she’d wanted to come. She had her own reasons for being here, and Clark thought she probably didn’t trust him to get the job done on his own.
He removed his hat, wiped sweat from the band, and scrutinized the Indian, who sat in the shade of a boulder, shackled wrists over his knees. The man stared off across the desert with much the same expression as Marina’s.
Clark turned to Cameron. “So who’s the Indian?”
Cameron was filing his mustang’s right rear hoof. “People around here call him Perro Loco de Desierto—‘Mad Dog of the Desert.’ He’s been torturing and killing settlers, shooting up villages, and killing livestock off and on for about three years now. Most of the other Coyotero Apaches went to the reservation, but not him and about a dozen others.”
Cameron stopped what he was doing and glanced at the Indian, who gazed off expressionlessly. Cameron chuckled ruefully, bent over the hoof, and went back to work with a sigh.
“I’ve been after him off and on for the past sixteen months. My compadres and me decided if we were gonna keep ranching we were going to have to exterminate ol’ Perro Loco like the mad wolf he is. Well, we got word he was in a little village called Summerville about fifteen miles from my place, so we rode over and found him in the back room of a cantina, drunker ’n snot and diddling a Mexican whore.”
Cameron wagged his head, dropped the hoof, and returned the file to his saddlebags. He ran his hand absently down the mane of his buckskin, and glanced at Marina. Apparently satisfied she wasn’t listening, he returned his eyes to Clark, jerking a thumb at the Indian. “He had his pants down around his ankles and was givin’ it to her with a vengeance. All we had to do was walk in and snug our rifles up against his back—and that was it. We had Perro Loco in the bag. He was so drunk we had to lift him onto his horse.” He chuckled and turned again to the stony-faced Indian.
“So that’s really Perro Loco…” Clark said, staring at the Indian with awe. The Apache was even more notorious than Cameron in the Southwest Territories. Since Clark had arrived here after the war, he’d read several newspaper articles devoted to the renegade.
“In the flesh.”
“I’ll be damned.”
“He’s seen better days,” Bud Hotchkiss said. Sitting near the Indian, he’d just taken a long pull from his canteen. He handed it now to the boy, Jimmy Bronco, and continued, “Not too happy about how we captured him. Shamed him pretty good, which makes him all the more dangerous. He’d like nothing better than to get his medicine back. You’ll want to keep your distance.”
“You don’t have to worry about that,” Clark said gravely.
There was a pause filled with the sounds of cicadas and horses. Clark leaned back on his elbows and said thoughtfully, “How hard do you men think it would be to find a guide in Contention City?”
His gazed shuttled fr
om one man to the next. Only the boy returned it, cocking his head and squinting his eyes curiously.
“Depends on what kind of guide you’re lookin’ for,” Cameron said after a while. His back was to Clark, and he was adjusting the leather thongs holding his bedroll behind his saddle.
“I’m looking for a man to guide my wife and me into Mexico,” Clark said. “I’d arranged for Reese McCormick, but I understand he’s dead. He was supposed to meet us in Tucson. When he didn’t show I decided to start looking for him … or for someone else who could do the same job.”
“I heard about Reese,” the Mexican Pas Varas said in Spanish-accented English. He stood by his horse, holding the reins in one hand, his rifle in the other. “Too bad. He would have been a good guide. It will be hard to find another to take his place in Contention City—one that will not take your money and then cut your throat, that is.” Varas shook his head. “You better go back to Tucson, maybe.”
Clark lowered his eyes, sucking a tooth, then lifted them again. He gazed at Cameron. “How ’bout one of you?”
As though he hadn’t heard, Cameron poured more water into his hat, and returned the hat to the ground before his horse. He took a drink from the canteen as he walked to the mesquite shrub. He sat down next to Clark and offered the canteen. Clark waved it off.
“Where you headed in Mexico?” Cameron asked, setting the canteen aside and fishing in his shirt pocket for a small sack of tobacco and papers.
“The Sierra Madre,” Clark said. “The northwest side.”
Cameron nodded and offered the makings pouch. “Smoke?”
“No thanks.”
Cameron took out a paper and sprinkled tobacco on it. Deftly, he shaped it with his fingers, licked it and twisted it closed. “What’s in the Sierra Madre?” he asked, scratching a lucifer to life on his thumbnail and lighting the quirley.
Clark bit his lip. He didn’t like the idea of sharing his plan with these strangers, but they looked honest enough, and they’d saved his and Marina’s lives, after all. “I have a treasure map.”
Dakota Kill and the Romantics Page 28