Blood Sky at Morning

by Jory Sherman

  Then he laughed as O’Hara’s eyes sparked with anger.

  O’Hara shot out an arm, reached for the map on the table.

  Trask drove a fist straight into O’Hara’s temple, knocking him to the floor.

  “Don’t get up too quick, O’Hara,” Trask said. “Or I’ll give you an even bigger wallop.” To Cavins he said, “Tie the bastard back up until morning. That’s when we’ll do the decorating and turn this soldier into a peon.”

  Ferguson shrank away from Trask, sucked in a breath.

  He had seen violence before, but Trask really liked it. The man was like a coiled spring, ready to lash out at anyone who stood in his way. Yes, he wanted the Apaches cleared out of the country, but he began to wonder if he hadn’t made a mistake in bringing Trask out from Santa Fe. The man had a thirst for blood that was insatiable.

  Trask fixed Ferguson with a look.

  “Don’t worry, Hiram. The end always justifies the means.”

  And there was that smile again on Trask’s face.

  It sent shivers up and down Ferguson’s spine.

  Chapter 12

  The land shimmered under the furnace blaze of the sun. Lakes danced and disappeared, water images rose and fell like falls, evaporated as Zak approached them, emerged farther on, shrank away in shining rivulets, trickled through the rocks and cactus and flowed along flats, puddled among the hillocks and vanished like fairy lights on a desolate moor. He was sweating and Nox’s black coat shone like polished ebony while his tail flicked at flies.

  Zak saw the station from afar and it, too, appeared and disappeared like some mirage as the land dipped and rose like some frozen ocean of sand and rock. Wagon tracks streamed toward the dwelling for some distance, but vanished among the low rocky hills that stood between him and the dwelling. Rather than follow the tracks through the hills, he chose to climb each one to afford himself a better view of the land ahead.

  And the land he had left behind.

  For Zak had the distinct feeling that he was being followed. He had looked over his shoulder more than once, but saw no sign of anyone on his trail. Yet the feeling persisted, and he knew, from long experience, that such feelings were valid. A man stayed alive because he paid attention to his instincts, those gut feelings that something was not quite right. In a room full of people, you could stare at the back of a man’s head for only so long. Sooner or later that man would turn around and return the stare. He had seen this too often to ignore it.

  For the past few miles he had felt someone staring at the back of his head. Not literally, of course, but he had a strong hunch that even out there in all that emptiness, he was not alone.

  Nox climbed the first hill, paralleling the wagon tracks. Zak fought off the compulsion to turn around when he reached the top. Instead he started down the other side until he was well past the summit. Then he turned Nox and rode back up, spurring the horse to scramble up the slope with some speed. At the top, he scanned his backtrail, his keen eyes searching every square inch of terrain for any sign of movement.

  A hawk sailed low over the ground, dragging its rumpled shadow along as it searched for prey. A pair of gray doves cut across the hawk’s course with whistling wings. A yucca swayed gently in the breeze. A lizard sunned itself on a nearby rock, its eyes blinking, its tail switching. He saw no other movement, but something caught his eye and he stared at it for a long time.

  Shapes in the desert could fool a man. A shadow next to a yucca could resemble a man sitting next to it, or sprawled alongside. Rocks could become human heads, poking up from shallow depressions in the earth. A dark clump of rocks could appear as a horse standing still.

  Zak looked for these illusions and discounted most of them in the space of a few seconds.

  But just beyond a yucca and some brush, ocotillo and prickly pear, there was something, and he stared at it for a long time. It looked like the very top of a horse’s head, two ears and a topknot. It did not move, but still it held his steady, piercing gaze.

  Could a horse hold still for that long? Zak began counting the seconds. He counted to thirty, and still the odd shape did not move. He looked away for a moment, then slowly turned his head back once more to that same spot.

  Whatever had been there was now gone.

  Was he imagining things? Did he really see that shape, or was it just another illusion of light and shadow?

  The image did not reappear, although Zak stared in that direction for several more seconds. Finally, he turned Nox and rode back over the hillock and down onto the flat. There was a jumble of hills all around him and he threaded his way through them before topping another. At the summit, though, he had less of a view than he’d had on the first hill and he did not linger. As he rode down the other side, movement caught his eye and he reined up, stabbed his hand toward the butt of his pistol.

  “Do not shoot. I mean you no harm.” The voice was oddly accented, low and timbrous.

  Zak let his hand hover just above the butt of the Walker Colt.

  “Show yourself,” he said. He realized that he had seen the shadow of something off to his right, nothing of substance. He saw it again, the top of a yucca, torn off, sticking straight out from behind the hill. As he watched, it shook gently, then fell to the ground. A moment later a horse, a small horse, no more than fourteen hands high, emerged from behind the hillock. It was saddled and shod and carried a small, dark-skinned man dressed in old duck pants, a linsey-woolsey shirt, a blue bandanna around his neck. He wore a sidearm, and the butt of a rifle jutted from a scabbard attached to his worn Santa Fe saddle.

  “You have been following me,” Zak said.

  “Yes, I have been following you, because I see what you are doing. What you have done.”

  “Who are you?” Zak asked.

  “I am called Chama. Jimmy Chama.”

  “You are not a Mexican.”

  “No. I am Apache.”

  “Full blood?”

  The man rode up close, shook his head. He wore a crumpled felt hat that had seen better days. But it kept the sun out of his eyes, which were dark brown. His hair was coal black, cut short on the sides, streamed down his neck in straight spikes in the back.

  “My father was a Mexican,” he said. “My mother was a Mescalero.”

  “You’re in Chiricahua country, Jimmy.”

  Jimmy smiled. “I know. I have friends here. Not many, but a few.”

  “What brings you on my track?”

  “I am on the same track. I am an army scout and interpreter. I was sent with Lieutenant O’Hara to look for Chiricahua camps along the San Simon.”

  “Were you with him when he was kidnapped?”

  “No. I was on a scout. When I returned, he was gone. I was sent to track those who took him.”

  “And the army?”

  “They come. I leave sign for them. But as long as it does not rain, they can follow the wagon tracks, too.”

  “How many troops?”

  “A dozen. But a courier was sent to Fort Bowie. There will be more.”

  “Are you sure?” Zak asked.

  Chama cocked his head and a quizzical look spread over his face. “Why do you ask this?”

  Zak shrugged. “I don’t know. I have the feeling that things are not quite right at Fort Bowie.”

  “What makes you think this?” Chama asked.

  “I don’t trust Major Willoughby. He’s in charge, but someone inside that fort had to tell Ferguson where O’Hara was. It’s a big country.”

  “I see,” Chama said. “I wondered about that myself. Whoever took Ted knew where he would be.”

  “Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

  “Why do you say the name of Ferguson? Is that one of his wagons we are following?”

  Zak told Chama about the two soldiers, the coach and Colleen O’Hara, his suspicion that Apaches had not killed the two soldiers. He also told him about the men he had seen at the way stations and what they had told him.

  “You know,” Cham
a said, “that there are many whites who want the Chiricahua driven from their lands. They want to kill them or drive them far away.”

  “I’m beginning to see all that, yes.”

  “Many white people think that the only good Apache is a dead Apache.”

  Zak had heard that talk many times before, applied to any red man. It galled him, as it galled Crook, and his blood boiled not only at the blind prejudice of the comment, but because he knew good men and bad of both races, the white and the red. And he knew that the color of a man’s skin did not reflect what was inside the man.

  “Fear,” Zak said.

  “What?”

  “We fear whatever we don’t know, Jimmy. The white man fears the red man because he doesn’t know him. And he never will unless he shakes a red man’s hand and sits down inside his lodge and takes supper with his family. Same goes for the red man, too, of course.”

  “I never heard a white man talk the way you do, Cody.”

  “Maybe that’s because I’m a breed,” Zak said, “same as you.”

  “You are of the mixed blood? Apache?”

  “No. My mother was Lakota. Of the Ogallala tribe.”

  Chama looked cockeyed at Zak. “Your Indian blood does not show much.”

  “Does it matter? Blood is the same in all men. Mine is as red as yours and yours is as red as any white man’s.”

  “That is not what the white men say.”

  “No, that is true.”

  Zak let the sadness of his words hang in the air between them. He could almost see the thoughts work through Chama’s mind, see it twitch ever so slightly in the muscles on his face. He knew it must have been hard on the young man, growing up with the Mescaleros and trying to find his father’s people among the Mexicans, and seeing how they, too, were treated by what the Indians called “the white man.” Skin. Like the coat of a horse or a longhorn cow, it came in all colors on a human. Yet men separated themselves according to their outward coloring and believed their blood was different, when in truth it was all the same.

  “My uncle,” Zak said, “Tashunka Watogala, Talking Horse, once told me that truth could not be put into words. He said that all we see with our eyes is not true. Only the things that cannot be seen are real and important.”

  “Your uncle sounds like a wise man,” Chama said.

  “He was a wise man. He taught me much. As did my mother, although I did not realize it at the time.”

  “When we are young, we do not wish to learn from the old ones. But we learn anyway,” Chama said. “And when an old man dies, he takes all of his wisdom with him. If we do not listen to his words when he is alive, they are lost forever.”

  Zak nodded, then shook off the thoughts that came rushing in, the words of Talking Horse, his mother, his own father. Good words. Not the truth, perhaps, but guideposts to the truths that lay hidden in plain sight.

  “We’re not going to catch that wagon,” Zak said, “but I aim to put these supply stations out of business. You want to ride along?”

  “But, of course. I am on the same trail as you, Cody.”

  “There could be gunplay.”

  Chama looked down at the pistol strapped to his waist.

  “That is why I carry this pistol, Cody. If it is called upon, it will speak.”

  Zak’s mouth curved in a lazy smile.

  He turned his horse and set out toward the adobe he had seen in the distance. They followed the wagon tracks, then climbed another hill to survey the trail ahead. The adobe sat atop a rocky knoll, less than a mile distant. Horses milled in a pole corral some yards from the dwelling. Shimmering pools of watery light shone like fallen stars all around, dancing and disappearing with every turn of the head. The light was blinding and Zak did not look at any of the mirages directly, but scanned the adobe for movement, for any sign of life.

  “See anything, Chama?”

  “A white man will not bask in the sun like a lizard on such a day as this. If a man is there, he is inside, where the adobe is cool.”

  “He could be watching us.”

  “No. There is no shadow at the window.”

  “You have the eyes of an eagle, Chama.”

  Chama chuckled. “I think that you see as well as I, Cody.”

  They rode down the slope of the hill, the cobbles clunking under their horses’ hooves, tumbling where they were dislodged, rolling a few inches before they halted and lay still once again.

  They stayed to the flat, following the wagon ruts. These were crumbling and their edges lost to the wind, but still plainly visible, days old.

  “We’d better split up, Chama,” Zak said. “Come at the adobe from the sides. I’ll ride up in front, call the man out. You can flank me if he opens up on me. Could be more than one man, too.”

  “We will see,” Chama said.

  Chama rode off then, on a tangent, making a wide circle so he would come up on another side of the adobe. Zak rode straight toward it, his senses honed to a keen sharpness, alert for any signs of life or belligerence.

  He closed to within a hundred yards of the front door, giving Nox his head. He saw his ears stiffen and twist. The horse arched his back, lifted his head high. His neck stiffened.

  What was Nox seeing that was not there? Zak wondered.

  The horses in the corral spotted him and one of them whickered.

  Fifty yards away. No movement at the window. The door was closed tight.

  Forty yards and Nox seemed to stiffen all over, step more gingerly. Zak let his right hand fall to his holster. He put a thumb on the hammer of his pistol.

  The breeze blew against his face. A small sudden gust whipped him, stung his cheeks with grit.

  He thought he heard a metallic sound.

  Then he heard the whump of a rifle booming from inside the adobe. Instinctively, Zak hunched forward, his body hiding behind Nox’s neck.

  He heard the whoosh of a bullet, saw it kick up dust as it plowed a divot ten yards in front of them.

  “You opened the ball, you sonofabitch,” Zak said to himself and drew his pistol as he dug spurs into Nox’s flanks and charged straight at the adobe.

  He knew the rifle that the man used, from its deep-throated roar, muffled by the adobe walls. He knew just how long it would take for the man to fire that rifle again, and each second that passed seemed an eternity.

  Life hung on such a slender thread, he thought, and he could feel that thread stretching, stretching, to the breaking point.

  Chapter 13

  The Big Fifty.

  The sound of the Sharps was unmistakable, and Zak knew he had only seconds to get out of the line of fire before the shooter could reload the single shot rifle. He saw the puff of white smoke cloud the window ledge in the lower left-hand corner. He rode hard to come up in front of the house before the man inside could get off a second shot.

  Nox’s muscles bunched up and he galloped as the energy in those muscles uncoiled. He stretched out his neck and laid his ears down, raced under the guidance of the bit in his teeth.

  There was no second shot by the time Zak reached the front of the house. He took Nox around the corner to the other side, jumped out of the saddle and hunched down beneath a window on that side.

  The scrape of a boot and Zak whirled, his pistol a part of him, swinging like a weather vane to come to bear on whoever was coming around the corner of the adobe.

  Chama stepped into view, hunched over, pistol in hand. He tiptoed toward Zak, who waved him down even closer to the ground.

  “See anything?” Chama said.

  Zak shook his head. “What’s out back?” he asked.

  “A worn-down old wall, a boarded-up window.”

  The adobe bricks were crumbling, the gypsum almost all washed away, sand along the base of the very old building.

  Zak pressed his ear against the wall, listened. He heard only the faint susurrance of the breeze against the eaves and the faint rustle of the nearby brush. Underneath, a silence seemed to find harbor
in the adobe wall and within.

  “You get hit?” Chama whispered.

  Zak pulled away from the wall, shook his head.

  “I think there is only one man inside,” Chama whispered.

  Zak nodded in agreement.

  “Jimmy, can you sneak by that front door, go around to the other side, under the open window?”

  “Yes, I can do that.”

  “I’m going to call the man out through the front door. If he doesn’t come out, I’ll bust in. When you hear that door crash open, you cover that window.”

  “You will take all the risk, Cody.”

  “No. It’s dark inside. You won’t be able to see well through that window, but if he shoots at me, you’ll have a shot.”

  “And you?”

  “He might surrender without a fight.”

  “That would be the smart thing to do.”

  The two men considered their moves for a moment. When Chama was ready, he nodded. Zak waved him on past him. Chama crawled on his hands and knees around the front of the adobe. He made no sound, took his time. Zak followed, also on his hands and knees. He stopped on one side of the door as Chama disappeared around the corner of the house.

  Zak waited. He put an ear to the door and listened.

  He heard the soft sounds, like dream noises from another dimension. The shuffle of a leather sandal sole on dry earth, the faint metallic scrapings as if someone was fiddling with a stuck brass doorknob. Heavy breathing, anxious breathing, like someone gripped with fear and urgency.

  Something about those odd confluences of sounds made him think that there was a child or an idiot on the other side of the door, someone confused and in a state of increasing panic. Someone demented and scared, an imbecile who couldn’t figure out what to do.

  Zak touched a finger to the door, pushed gently. It moved, and the leather hinges made no sound. He pushed with the heel of his hand and the door opened wider, letting a shaft of sunlight pour a sallow streak onto a dirt floor that showed signs that it had been swept flat with a broom. He craned his neck as he brought his pistol up close to the doorjamb, ready to push it through the opening and squeeze the trigger if someone came toward him.