Stryker's Misfits (A Stryker's Misfits Western Book 1)

by Chuck Tyrell

  “What’s the landmark?”

  “Large red cliff with white stripe like lightning. Many large rocks at the bottom of the cliff. Good places to hide.”

  Stryker took a deep breath. “Awright, Misfits. You heard Dahtegte. Head for the Hatchets. She says there’s a cliff with a white blaze down it that looks like lighting. We’ll rendezvous there. Break up and head out.”

  “Yo.”

  “Willem Black, hold back a minute, if you would. Rest of you Misfits, get ready and get going.”

  The Misfits broke and headed for their weapons and material. Willem Black stayed put, a question on his face.

  “Will, need you to stay behind here with Fergie. We’ll pick you up on the way back. Promise.”

  Willem kicked at a stone. It rolled about three feet and stopped, dark side up. “Why me?”

  “My choice. Right now, you’re more important at keeping Fergie alive than at setting off pots of blasting powder.”

  Willem scowled. “You figure I’m not good enough.”

  “I figure you can keep us from losing Fergie in case some hostile wanders by. Sometime down the line, we’ll need you and your blasting powder, but right now, standing guard over Fergie’s what we need you for most.”

  Willem still scowled. “If that’s what y’say, Cap.”

  “It’d be a big help, Will. And thank you for doing it.”

  He shrugged and turned away. Stryker stood for a moment, watching Willem move toward where Ferguson lay hidden by mesquite. Dahtegte followed Willem and held a quick conversation with him when he reached the mesquite thicket.

  The sun dropped down behind the sawtooth shapes of the Little Hatchet mountains and the sky turned deep blue and orange. Tiny clouds hugged the peaks and became spots of brilliant gold in the sunset. The Misfits left the grove of cottonwoods two by two, and the men in each pair stayed twenty to twenty-five paces from each other. Not born in the wild nor trained with the intensity of an Apache mentor, they made more noise than was really necessary, but they learned as they walked.

  Stryker left the cottonwoods last. Dahtegte had gone. When, he did not know. He chose a route that took him in a more southerly direction, almost straight toward the Big Hatchets. He moved quickly. Not at a jog, but at the double-time of a seasoned infantryman. He depended on the night to cover his movements.

  When the night darkened and only the light from millions of stars lit his way, Stryker slowed. Moving too fast might put him into a patch of hedgehog cactus or worse.

  “Gopan?”

  Stryker stopped short and stood without movement. He didn’t even blink.

  “Gopan?”

  “Yes,” he said, barely above a whisper.

  “I know a path. One that will get us to the meeting place before more Misfits get there.”

  “Thank you, Dahtegte, I follow.”

  She stepped out from behind a large century plant. Now her off-white muslin top had dark vertical stripes that let her blend with the upright stalks of yucca or century plant. Her long hair was braided and tucked into her waistband. A bandana made a bulky headband into which she had stuck a few feathers and some twigs that still bore leaves. Her face was also painted with vertical stripes of white and black.

  “I go,” she said.

  “I follow,” he said.

  Dahtegte moved away, striding purposefully yet not jarring the surrounds as something foreign and strange.

  Stryker followed, working at imitating the way the Apache warrior woman walked ... or was it a trot? Whichever, she moved faster than Stryker could walk normally. He began to double-time, which sometimes brought a sharp click as a weapon or a button or something else metallic struck a hard object.

  Dahtegte stopped, and Stryker nearly ran into her.

  She turned to stand breast-to-chest with him. “You are loud,” she said.

  Stryker shrugged. “Can’t help it.”

  “Can.”

  “How?”

  “Gopan.” Dahtegte’s tone of voice said she was speaking to a novice warrior at best. “A warrior must use the brain granted him by Ussen. Even the animals move without noise.”

  “Animals do not carry guns and bullets.”

  “Shhh,” she hissed. “Every warrior has weapons. Any true warrior can move without sound.”

  Stryker made no retort, but his stiff back showed Dahtegte that he was upset.

  She pulled a bandana from somewhere within her clothing, cut it with a small knife, and tore it into strips about a foot and a half long. One strip she wound around the grips and action of Stryker’s Remington Army. A second strip covered the action of his Yellow Boy Winchester, even though it was in a buckskin sheath.

  Dahtegte held out a hand. “Give me your bullet bag.”

  Stryker gave it to her.

  “What supplies do you carry?”

  Stryker shrugged. “Live off the land.”

  “Stupid. What if you have no time to hunt or scavenge?”

  “Go hungry.”

  “Stupid,” she said again, and the iron rod running up Stryker’s backbone got straighter and stronger.

  “Watch,” she said.

  Stryker did as he was told.

  Dahtegte fished a handful of mesquite bean meal from her own supply bag and put it in Stryker’s bullet pouch. Then another. And another. She shook the bag gently. “Now the bullets no longer clink together, and you have enough food for two days, maybe three.”

  She held the bag out.

  Stryker took it.

  “I think you no longer click like a pine beetle.”

  “Thank you,” he said. His spine no longer contained a rod of iron.

  “We go.” She moved silently away. He followed.

  After a dozen yards, she stopped.

  “Now what?”

  “You clomp.”

  “Horses clomp.”

  Dahtegte ignored his snide remark. “You clomp when you walk with heel first.”

  “I’ve hunted since I was a little brat. I know how to sneak.”

  “You clomp. You walk heel first. Walk toe first, no clomp.”

  “Hmph.”

  “We go. No clomp.” She struck out again, walking swiftly, but without any sound that Stryker could hear.”

  Toe first, then heel. Stryker found it more than difficult to follow her instructions. He fell behind, but Dahtegte did not slow her pace. Soon she faded into the dark of the distance, even though the moon was high and the land lay before him as a study in light and shadow. He chose to move through a narrow dry stream with a sandy bottom that probably trickled after rains fell on the three mountains of Tres Hermanas. The banks, hardly two feet higher than the sandy bottom, were lined with creosote bushes and yucca that should hide his movement from enemy eyes, should any be looking his way. The dry stream ran almost straight west, but petered out as the valley leveled to become a hard flat expanse that spread toward the black line in the west that was the Little Hatchet mountains.

  Toe and heel. Toe and heel. Toe and heel.

  Stryker concentrated on the soundless stride Dahtegte said he should perfect. His wrapped weapons did not clink. The bullets in his pouch, surrounded by mesquite-bean meal, did not click. The buttons on his muslin shirt did not click. And his footfalls did not clomp. Maybe he was learning.

  The bullet came with the rising sun. It came while Stryker was still miles away from the Hatchets and the lightning blaze cliff where the Misfits were to rendezvous. It came from a ridge north of the dry waterway Stryker used as a path, and it slammed through the deltoid muscle of his left shoulder, carving a groove as if with a sharp knife. While the force of the bullet didn’t knock Stryker down, he went to his knees and then stretched out belly down, using the eighteen-inch bank of the dry wash as cover. Frantically he unwound the strip of bandana Dahtegte’d wound around the action of his rifle from its buckskin sheath and set himself for whatever might come down the ridge and into his dry wash. He just wished the bullet groove in his shoulder didn
’t hurt so much. Without even looking, he could tell it still bled, but not with the pumping spurts of a torn artery.

  He waited.

  The shooter might come to check on his downed target, and he might not. The sound of the shot would reach the ears of every Misfit, and maybe Dahtegte. The shooter might know there was a troop out. And he might not.

  Stryker considered himself lucky. The bullet had sliced through the deltoid of his left arm, but his right was whole. He held his breath and listened. A sparrow hawk screeched from the thermal that took it high above the valley floor, but there was no other sound from man or beast. His shoulder still bled.

  He lay the Winchester where his hand would naturally fall, wadded up the bandana strip, and clamped it over the slice in his shoulder, holding it down with all the pressure he could apply. But he had no way to bind the wad of cloth to the wound.

  Who?

  Stryker’s clothing didn’t give him away as a soldier. The top of the ridge was half a mile or more away, so the shooter was used to making long shots.

  Who?

  Bounty hunter? Someone who thought Stryker was an Apache and wanted to collect the two hundred and fifty pesos the Mexicans would pay for his scalp?

  If it was a bounty hunter, he’d soon be along to collect his victim’s scalp. If not, who knows what’d happen? Best stay still for now.

  Stryker kept the wad of bandana pressed against the bullet groove. He kept his breathing as quiet as possible. No gasps. No deep breaths. No panting. Just hold the wad, the now-wet wad, to the bullet groove.

  Carefully, moving only a tiny bit at a time, Stryker let go of the wad. It stuck to the wound, but blood still seeped from under it. He needed the Remington Army revolver holstered on his left hip. Slowly, slowly, he worked his right hand down beneath his hard body toward the grips of the pistol. Two weeks and more with Bly and Dahtegte had stripped all the extra weight from his body and left him a bundle of stringy muscle.

  Why would a shooter good enough to hit him from the ridge be bad enough to hit him in the shoulder?

  Stryker got his hand far enough to grasp the revolver by its grips. He drew it from the holster an inch at a time. It took an hour, it seemed, to get the Remington to where he could unwrap the bandana strip from the action. Rolling carefully onto his side, he wadded up the strip of cloth that had been on the pistol and clamped it on top of the bloody one already on the wound.

  Damn. Who?

  A covey of quails broke cover and scrambled across the dry streambed to scatter among the weeds on the far side. Stryker’s hand went from the bandana pad to the Remington. Something made the quail run. He cocked the hammer as he rolled onto his back, the revolver ready for whatever came. But nothing did.

  The sun climbed higher and hotter.

  Where’s the shooter? Stryker laid his head on his outstretched right arm. The bleeding seemed to have stopped, but any sudden movement would start it up again. Just for a minute. His eyes drooped shut. Only a minute. In his sleep, he heard Dahtegte’s voice.

  “Remember, Gopan, you have no friends. Your father is not your friend. Your mother is not your friend. Your brothers and sisters are not your friends. The only friends you have are your own legs, your own brain, your own eyes, your own heart. Your hands can be friends because you can use them. Remember, you have no other friends. Think of that.”

  No friends.

  Chapter Ten – A Bullet for Stryker

  The man who said his name was Bly came into Yuyutsu’s camp. As it was not Apache custom to turn away another Indeh, Yuyutsu indicated a place on the far side of the fire. “Sit, if you will,” he said.

  Bly sat, laying his rifle close to hand. Yuyutsu could not help but notice that the rifle was new, a repeater that could fire fifteen times before needing to be reloaded.

  “I am Bly,” the man said. “My thanks for allowing me to enter the camp of Yuyutsu.”

  “We of the Indeh are all brothers, sons and daughters of the White Painted Woman and the Child of the Waters.”

  “This is true.”

  “Are you alone?”

  “For the moment, yes.”

  Yuyutsu raised an eyebrow at Bly’s evasive answer. As it was not permissible for an Indeh warrior to lie, Bly must have companions not far away.

  “How many mouths need we feed, then?”

  “I am not here to feast, Yuyutsu, but to warn.”

  “Why would you warn me, the most successful of all Indeh raiders of Nakaye lands?”

  “I heard.”

  Yuyutsu’s chest puffed up just a little. “Then you would join us? How many warriors did you bring?”

  “No warriors that follow me would fight with Yuyutsu.”

  The raider’s face went hard as a stone. “What Indeh warrior would rather be in the prisons they call ‘reservations’ than to taste freedom with Yuyutsu?”

  Bly nodded, his face grave and thoughtful. “What you say is true, Yuyutsu. Mostly true. But I know something you should know.”

  Yuyutsu made no reply. He waited for Bly to continue, as a proper host should.

  “There is a new kind of soldier at Fort Bliss,” Bly said. “Soldiers that don’t wear blue. Soldiers that don’t ride horses. Soldiers who can run fifty miles in one day, then run fifty miles the next day as well. Their nantan is young. No more than twenty summers.”

  Yuyutsu shrugged. “What do I care of foot soldiers? We have plenty of horses and we can always get more.”

  Bly kept his eyes on Yuyutsu’s face, as the small fire illuminated the raider’s face and gave it a ghostly mien.

  “Take care,” Bly said. “I have given you important information. What you do with it, I cannot govern. I thank you for sharing your fire with me, a White Mountain man.”

  He stood.

  Yuyutsu waved for him to sit back down. “Meat will soon be on the fire,” he said. “You should eat before you leave.”

  “My thanks, but I have rations and water.”

  Yuyutsu nodded, and Bly left. He had warned Yuyutsu of Stryker’s new kind of soldier. His obligation as Indeh was done. He had no doubt that Yuyutsu would send someone after him, so Bly left a trail that even a twelve-year-old could follow. An overturned pebble here, a bruised clump of grama grass there. Just enough to make a young tracker proud to be able to follow an adult warrior like Bly.

  The trail led to the lip of Grandito Canyon, then disappeared. Leaving nothing for the boy, or any other tracker, to follow, Bly struck out for the lightning blaze cliff where Stryker’s Misfits were to rendezvous.

  ~*~

  Stryker shook his head, trying to clear his mind. He had no friends. No one would come looking for him. He should expect no help. But where was the shooter that tried to kill him? Or did the shooter even know what or who he was shooting? Did the answers to the questions bombarding Stryker’s mind even matter?

  The wound in his shoulder no longer bled, but it wouldn’t take much to start the blood flowing again. What was it Dahtegte used on cuts? Nopal, she called it. A cactus. Lying on the sandy bottom of a dry stream did not let Stryker see much of his surrounds. Creosote bush. Bunch grass. Plants that he could not identify. Nopal, ah, yes, the cactus called prickly pear because the pear-shaped fruits were edible. But that cactus did not seek streambeds, rather it usually grew on land a little higher than its surrounds. Places forbidding to most plant life were more attractive to prickly pear plants, perhaps.

  Stryker may have shaken his head again. The sun beat down on the sandy streambed as if bent on turning it into a river from Hell. The back of his throat felt dry and sticky, and he had no saliva to swallow. Maybe the blood he’d lost took moisture from his body, too. He tried to concentrate. How long since the rifle shot? It came at dawn. The sun stood overhead. Four hours? Five? No shooter had come looking for scalp hair or booty. No Apache had come looking for guns and bullets. So who shot? And why? Would a shooter sit still for four or five hours after a target went down? Probably not. Stryker decided to assume no
t. Now. Time to get up. Stand up. Move on. Get to the rendezvous in the foothills of Little Hatchet.

  With his rifle as a crutch, Stryker struggled to his feet.

  Nothing.

  Blood dyed Stryker’s muslin shirt black from shoulder to wrist. Flies gathered, looking for a meal and a place to lay eggs. He brushed them away, but they merely circled and came back. Nopal. If he could find some, he could put a pad on the shoulder wound and not have to worry about blowflies.

  He surveyed his surroundings through narrowed eyes. The sheer brilliance of the noonday sun made it difficult to see. He blinked, then rubbed his eyes. The ridge was still there, but no metallic flash signaled the presence of gun or knife.

  Walk. Move. Step out.

  Stryker bent over and reached down for his rifle’s buckskin sheath and nearly fell over. Had he lost that much blood? Or was it the heat? Or the lack of water? Clutching the sheath, he straightened up. The dizziness subsided somewhat. He tucked the sheath into his waistband.

  He took a deep breath and reached down for his Remington revolver. Not so dizzy this time. He shoved the big six-gun into its hard leather holster.

  Dahtegte carried the water jug, so Stryker was without. He wondered if the shooter got her. He’d not heard any shots other than the one that plowed a groove in his deltoid. He took a step.

  He could see the blue outlines of both Big and Little Hatchet ranges, and in between, some thirty miles of dead flat country. At least it looked flat. In reality, the valley had its share of ups and downs. He took another step. And another. Where was that Apache woman?

  The sun completed another half of its journey across the sky before Stryker saw any prickly pear cactus. The dry streambed led toward the Hatchet ranges, so he kept to the sandy bottom, which made walking easier. Now he left the bed, heading for the light green patch on higher ground. The light green could only be a large stand of nopal cactus. Apaches used split nopal pads to dress any bleeding wound. And it was Stryker’s experience that what an Apache said or did having to do with using surrounding plant life for sustenance and medicine was most likely right.

  At the cactus patch, Stryker lopped off a pad and used his Bowie to scrape the thorns away. He then split the pad in half. By tying the bandana strips together, he could use them to bind the split cactus pad on the bullet wound, raw side down.