by Jory Sherman
“If I find out anything, I’ll get word to you, here at Bowie.”
“Fair enough.”
The two men shook hands and walked back to the coach. Willoughby had been staring at them, a scowl on his face. He turned away when they both looked at him.
Zak walked over to Colleen, who had been talking to some of the women.
“I’m going to try and find your brother, Colleen. Just don’t tell anyone about it.”
“Why?”
“Maybe I’ll tell you someday. You take care. Hold on to hope.”
“Do you know where Ted is?”
“I’m going to find out. Take care.”
He turned and walked up to a soldier.
“Can you direct me to the paymaster’s office?” Zak asked.
The soldier pointed to a building.
A half hour later Zak rode out of Fort Bowie, into the setting sun. He felt a great weight lift from his shoulders. He was glad to be away from Willoughby.
But he kept a wary eye on his backtrail, and he bypassed Apache Springs. He took to open country and felt right at home.
Chapter 5
The tracks were still fresh, clearly visible even in the hazy light of dusk, when Zak’s shadow stretched long across the land. It was a place to start. Perhaps this trail would lead him to where he wanted to go, and perhaps it would cross other trails of interest to him.
The clouds in the western sky, long thin loaves, were bronzed, and rays of gossamer light shone like sprayed columns from beneath the horizon. A roadrunner dashed across the unshod pony tracks, legs working like high-speed darning needles. It disappeared among red and golden rocks that were turning to ash on the eastern side. Zak followed the tracks on a northwesterly course, studying them as he rode, wondering about the riders until, after a mile or two, he determined that his hunch had been correct. They were not Apaches.
He found cigarette stubs tossed to one side, barely visible in the fading light. These were hand-rolled. Later, he reined up when he spotted a crumpled piece of paper on the ground. He dismounted, picked it up, and smoothed it out. It was a label from a package of pipe tobacco. The name stamped on the paper was PIEDMONT PIPE TOBACCO.
“Careless,” he said to himself. “Or sloppy.” He tucked the paper into his pocket and climbed back into the saddle. He did not know who he was following, but he knew damned well the riders were not Apaches.
When it grew too dark to see clearly, he began looking for a place to throw down his bedroll and spend the night. He found a spot partially hidden by stool, chaparral, mesquite, and yucca, rimmed by prickly pear. There was grain in his saddlebags for Nox, and he would chew on jerky and hardtack and make no fire.
He dismounted, hobbled Nox, fed him half a hatful of grain. As he walked around, his spurs went jing jing, and he took them off, preserving the silence of evening, allowing him to hear any sounds foreign to that place. He ate and watched the sky turn to ash in the west, felt the cool breeze on his face, sniffed the aroma of the desert’s faint perfume as if it were a living, breathing thing that sighed like a pleasured woman.
It was full dark when Zak lay down on his bedroll, unholstered pistol by his side, within easy reach. Bats plied the air, scooping up flying insects, their wings whispering as they passed overhead. A multitude of stars glistened and winked like the lights of a distant town, their sparkles made more brilliant by the inky backdrop of deep space. The moon had not yet risen when he closed his eyes and thought about his father and how he had met his gruesome death.
Ben Trask had used a fireplace poker to burn Russell’s flesh. He had stripped off his prisoner’s shirt and pants, applied the red hot iron to his arms and chest. Then he had touched the poker to his father’s testicles, as his men looked on and laughed at Russell’s screams. When he had found out what he wanted to know, Trask made sure that Russell died a slow death.
He cut open his belly with a surgeon’s precision until his father’s intestines spilled out in blue-gray coils. Trask and his men had watched his father die, heard him beg for a bullet to his brain. They watched the elder Cody die slowly, his great strength drained from him, his tortured breathing descending to a rasp in his throat before it turned into a final death rattle.
Zak knew all this because a Mexican boy, Jorge Vargas, living next door, had watched it all through his father’s window, powerless to help, his family gone to market that morning when the men rode up and entered Russell’s adobe home.
From Jorge’s description, he knew the man who had killed his father. Their paths had crossed before, in a Pueblo cantina when he and his father had come down from the mountains, following Fountain Creek. Ben Trask had a reputation even then. A hardcase. A gunny who preyed on prospectors and miners, a merciless killer without a trace of conscience.
All in the past, he thought, and no more grieving for his father. Instead, a vow he had made when he found his father’s body and learned the story of his death. If there was such a thing as justice in the world, then Russell’s death demanded it. An eye for an eye. A life for a life.
Zak folded into sleep, descended to that great ocean of dream where the events of the day were transformed into an odd journey through bewildering mazes inside massive canyons, where guns turned into unworkable mechanisms and people’s faces were ever-shifting masks that concealed their true identities, and horses galloped across dream-scapes like shadowy wraiths and every shining stream turned to quicksand beneath the dreamer’s awkward and clumsy feet.
It turned cold during the night, and Zak had to pull the wool blanket over him. He awoke before dawn, built a quick fire and boiled coffee. He never looked at the flames and stayed well away from the glow, scanning the horizon, listening for any alien sound. He relieved himself some distance away in a small gully and covered up his sign. He was sipping coffee as a rent appeared in the eastern sky, pouring cream over the horizon until the land glowed with a soft peach light that grew rosy by the time he had finished and put on his spurs. He checked his single cinch and gave Nox a few handfuls of grain, then let him drink water from his canteen, which he poured into his cupped left hand. He checked his rifle and pistol, rolled up his bed and secured it inside his slicker behind the cantle. He did not eat, a habit he had formed long ago. When he went hunting, it was always on an empty stomach.
Gently rolling country now, bleak, desolate, quiet, as the sun rose above the horizon, casting the earth and its rocks and flora into stark relief. The rocks seemed to glow with pulsating color, and the green leaves of the yucca, the pale blossoms, took on a vibrancy that Zak could almost feel. It was the best time of day in the desert, still cool, yet warm with the promise of diurnal life returning to a gray black hulk of territory glazed pewter by the moon, now only a pale ghost in a sky turning blue as cobalt.
He rode over a rise, following the pony tracks, and there it was, nestled in the crotch of a long wide gully that fell away, then rose again several hundred yards from its beginning. An old adobe hut, still in shadow, stood on a high hump of ground, nestled against a flimsy jacal that joined it on one crumbling side. A mesquite pole corral bristled on a flat table some two hundred yards away. Zak counted eight horses in the corral, some with noses buried in a rusty trough, another one or two drinking out of half a fifty-gallon drum, next to a pump outside the corral.
Six of the horses were small, unshod, pinto ponies, actually, while the remaining two were at least fifteen hands high and were shod. They were rangy animals, looked as if they hadn’t seen a curry comb or brush, and he could almost count their ribs. None of the horses looked up at him, and Nox didn’t acknowledge them with a welcome whinny, either.
A thin scrawl of smoke rose from the rusted tin chimney set in the adobe part of the dwelling. It hung in the motionless air below the gully’s rim. It appeared to be coming from an untended fire, possibly one that had been banked the night before. There was no sign of life in either the adobe or the jacal, but Zak knew someone had to be inside. He debated with himself fo
r a moment whether to ride up to the door or walk up and hail the occupant.
It took him only a moment to decide. A man on foot was not of much use in such country. Whoever lived there could be off at a well or hunting jackrabbits for all he knew, and could return at any moment. If he was off his horse, he would be caught flat-footed and might lose Nox. There could be a number of men inside the hut, and more out roaming around.
He rode up to the door without being challenged.
He loosened the Walker Colt in its holster, slid the Henry rifle out of its scabbard a half inch.
“Hello the house,” Zak called.
He waited, listening.
Nox’s ears stiffened and fixed on the door as they both heard sounds from inside. The sun cleared the lower rim of the gully and shone on the sod roof of the adobe like spilled liquid gold.
“Quien es?” a voice called out.
“Un viajero,” Zak replied. “Quiero comprar un caballo.”
There was a series of shuffling noises from inside the adobe. Then he heard the sound of a latch bar scraping against wood. A moment later the door swung open on creaky leather hinges. An un-shaven, unkempt man wearing dirty baggy trousers, huarache sandals, suspenders over a grimy white undershirt, stood in the doorway, his brown eyes blinking in the glare of the sun. He wore a pistol on a worn ammunition belt. The pistol was a Navy Colt converted from cap and ball to percussion. The bullets looked to be .36 caliber. Deadly enough, Zak thought. He wore his holster low, just above his right knee.
“Caballo? Tu quieres comprar un caballo? Tienes dinero?”
“I have money,” Zak replied in English, “in my pocket. Habla ingles?”
“Yes, I speak English. You are a traveler, you say. Where are you going? You do not look like you need a horse. You are sitting on a fine one.”
“I need a packhorse. Maybe one of those ponies you have out there in the corral.”
The man’s eyes shifted in their sockets. “Ah, the pony, eh? You would buy a pony to use for a packhorse?”
“I’m a prospector,” Zak lied. “I need to carry some ore to Tucson. That is where I am going.”
“Ah, to Tucson? To the assay office? You have found gold?”
“I do not know what I have found.”
“Where did you find this?”
Zak cocked a thumb and gestured over his shoulder. The man looked off in that direction, a look of disbelief on his face.
“There is no gold there,” the man said, and took a half step backward. His face fell back into shadow. “There is an army fort. Maybe you can buy a horse there. I do not wish to sell the ponies.”
“Mister, you step outside where I can see you, or I’ll blow your head off as sure as you’re standing there.”
The Mexican hesitated. His right hand sank toward the butt of his pistol. It hovered there like a frozen bird with its wings spread for a long moment.
“You would draw the pistol on me?” he asked.
“If you don’t step out right now. I’ll draw so fast you won’t even see it.”
The man laughed and raised his arms, wiggled them to show that he wasn’t going to draw his pistol. He stepped down from the doorway and stood there, looking up at Zak.
“You mean to rob me, then? I have nothing. I am a poor man with only those few horses you see out there.”
“Just don’t move,” Zak said, and swung down from the saddle. He let the reins trail as he walked up close to the man. “What do you call yourself?” he asked.
“I am called Felipe. Felipe Lopez. You will not shoot me, eh?”
“I ask the questions, Felipe.”
“Ask me anything. Just do not shoot me. Take the pony. There is no need to kill me over a horse.”
“I want to know who those men were. They were riding those ponies yesterday.”
“Men? What men? I do not know what you are talking about.”
“Don’t lie to me, Felipe, or you’ll hear a rattle.”
“A rattle?”
“Yeah, a rattle. That’ll be the rattlesnake you stepped on, and that would be me. That’s all you’ll hear before I blow your lamp out. I want to know who those men were, who they work for and where they went.”
Felipe said nothing for several seconds, as if he were weighing his chances, or trying to think up a good lie for the gringo.
“There were some men,” he said. “They rode up here and traded those ponies for six of my good horses. My best horses. They were outlaws, I think. They did not pay me. They rode off. I do not know where they went.”
Zak knew the man was lying. He thought he was a pretty good liar. Likely, he’d had a lot of practice.
“That was a good story, Felipe. You ought to thank me.”
“Thank you? Why?”
“For letting you stay alive a few more minutes. Now, maybe you can live even longer by telling me the truth.”
“That is the truth. I swear it on my mother’s honor.”
“I doubt your mother has any honor, Felipe. I heard she was a whore.”
Felipe’s eyes narrowed to slits. The skin of his face stretched taut as his lips compressed, his teeth clenched.
“Ten cuidado,” Felipe said, his voice a gruff whisper.
Zak looked straight into the man’s flashing brown eyes.
“Be careful,” Felipe had said in Spanish. And Felipe’s body tensed into a coiled spring. He was like a tiger ready to pounce, Zak knew. Like a tiger cornered. He was a man without an ounce of fear. His mother’s name had been besmirched by a gringo. There were few insults more scathing than calling a man’s mother a whore.
Felipe was ready to fight.
To defend his mother’s honor, dubious as that honor might be, Felipe was ready to die.
Chapter 6
Zak knew how dangerous Felipe had become. He’d just been slapped in the face with an insult so foul and demeaning that it had cut through to the core of the man’s being. Few things were more sacred to a man than the woman who had given him life, his mother. Felipe was ready to put his life on the line in defense of the woman who had birthed him.
“All you have to do, Felipe,” Zak said, “is tell me the truth and I’ll take back what I said about your mother.”
“It is too late for that,” Felipe said.
“I’ll find those men anyway. I do not need to know their names. I do not need you to tell me where they went. I will find them.”
Felipe drew back, cocked his head and looked more closely at Zak.
“Who are you?” he said. “What do you call yourself?”
“Cody.”
Felipe spewed air through his nostrils.
“Are you the one they call Jinete de Sombra?”
“I am sometimes called ‘Shadow Rider.’”
“Because you wear the black clothes and ride the black horse.”
“No,” Zak said. “Because I am like a shadow. I come upon a man with no sound. I am not seen and I am not heard until it is too late.”
“Ah, I wondered. You are the Indian fighter. You are the one who rode with the general they call Crook.”
“I am the one.”
“Then, perhaps you come here to kill Apaches, no?”
“Maybe,” Zak said.
“Then you and I, we are on the same side. I, too, would kill Apaches. And the men you seek. They, too, wish all the Apaches killed. Maybe you would like to join them.”
“Maybe.”
“That is why you hunt them?”
“I wish to talk to them, yes.”
“I think they would like to talk to you, Cody.”
“Now we are getting somewhere, Felipe. I want to know who those men were who painted themselves like Apaches, rode the ponies here. I want to know who they work for.”
“You ask much, Cody. But I will tell you so that you will go and leave me alone. Perhaps I will see you again one day.”
“Perhaps.”
“The men you look for have gone to Tucson. You must see a man name
d Ferguson. He owns the freight line.”
“I am looking for a man named Ben Trask,” Cody said.
“Ah, you know this man?”
“Yes, I know him.”
“You are friends, no?”
Cody didn’t answer. He let the question hang and watched Felipe squirm inside his skin. He could almost see the man’s mind working, the way his forehead wrinkled up and his nose crinkled, making his eyes squint.
“This one, Trask, he is there. He works for Ferguson.”
That was all Zak wanted to hear.
Trask was just the kind of man to stir up trouble with the Apaches, but he’d bet money that he had something else on his mind, as well. Trask might be working for Ferguson, but he was also working for himself, perhaps looking for an opportunity to make some illegal money.
“All right, Felipe. I’m leaving now.”
“You do not want another horse?”
“No. You keep them.”
Zak looked around at the ground, the maze of wagon tracks. The adobe with its adjoining jacal was some kind of way station, he was sure. Someone had to haul in fodder for the horses, food and supplies for Felipe. He wondered how many such stations were scattered over the territory. Someone had gone to a great amount of trouble to stir up hatred against the Apaches.
“What have you got inside that adobe?” Zak asked suddenly.
“Nothing.”
“I want to take a look.”
“No. This is not permitted.”
“Are you hiding something in there?”
“No. I hide nothing.”
“I think you are, Felipe. Step aside. I’m going to take a look.”
Felipe hesitated. Zak took a step toward him, his right hand dropping to the butt of his pistol. It was a menacing move, deliberate, and Felipe got the message.
“Go inside, then.”
“You first,” Zak said.
Felipe shrugged. He turned and stepped inside, Cody right behind him. The hovel smelled of wood smoke and stale whiskey. A potbelly stove stood near the back wall, its fire gone out, but still leaking smoke from around its door and at a loose place on the pipe. A pot of coffee stood atop it, still steaming. Several bottles of whiskey lay on the floor, and half-empty bottles sat on a grimy table in the center of the room. The bunk in a corner reeked of sweat. On a sideboard he found several small cans of paint and brushes that had not yet been cleaned with the linseed oil standing nearby, next to a grimy wooden bowl.