Wilderness Double Edition #10

by David Robbins

  Nate King! Lassiter fumed as he fled. Of all the cursed luck! He couldn’t understand how King had learned of his band. Then he recollected seeing Jeremiah Sawyer and King together at a rendezvous. There had to be a connection, and Lassiter would ponder it later. For now he had his hide to save.

  All his guns empty, Nate sped in the killer’s wake. He pulled his knife and reversed his grip.

  Lassiter was running flat out, glancing back every few yards. The next time he did, he neglected to check the ground in front of him first.

  Nate saw the murky outline of a small boulder. He poured on the speed as Lassiter tripped and sprawled forward. Lassiter landed on his hands and knees, and like a coiling serpent he spun around and began to jerk up his rifle. By then Nate was less than eight feet away. His supple body flowed into a smooth, superbly coordinated throw. The butcher knife cleaved the air straight and true.

  Earl Lassiter’s final sight was of a dully glittering blade as it thudded into his chest.

  Thirteen

  It was Zachary King’s hurling of the club that saved his life. As he threw, he naturally shifted his body into the direction of the throw. The slight movement was just enough to throw Old Bill Zeigler aim off.

  The bullet missed Zach by a hair. He never slowed his charge, and he was on Old Bill a second before his mother. The mountain man roared and snapped his rifle on high. But between Zach and Winona, they brought him crashing to the earth.

  Winona fought in a frantic frenzy for the lives of her children. She gouged her nails into Old Bill’s right eye as he tried to elbow her in the face. His howl was fearsome. She saw him let go of the rifle and grasp the hilt of his knife. To stop him from using it, she clamped her hands on his forearm and held fast. “Zach! Get his pistol!” she cried.

  Young Zach spotted the butt jutting from the top of Old Bill’s belt. He made a grab for it, but was given a swat that sent him tumbling and set his ears to ringing. When he pushed to his feet, he was terrified to find Old Bill on top of his mother, choking the life from her with one hand while striving to pull his knife with the other.

  Winona tossed and bucked, trying to dislodge the demented mountaineer while simultaneously attempting to prevent him from unlimbering his blade.

  In a twinkling Zach rushed to help her. Balling his fists, he barreled into Zeigler and delivered a flurry of blows that would have rendered the older man senseless if Zach had been a few years older. As it was, all he succeeded in doing was drawing Old Bill’s wrath.

  Zeigler’s rage was such that he no longer entertained the notion of keeping mother or son alive. They had hurt him badly, and for that they were both going to die. He cuffed the boy, knocking him to his knees, then clasped both hands around the mother’s slender neck.

  In a moment of panic Winona grasped his wrists and urgently tried to pry the man’s hands from her windpipe. She was so concerned about being strangled that she forgot all else.

  Not so with Zach. He had the presence of mind to remember the pistol and knife. Diving at Zeigler’s waist, he pretended to snatch at the pistol with one hand and when Old Bill lowered an arm to block him, he seized the knife instead.

  Old Bill didn’t feel the blade slide from its sheath. He did feel a strange tingling in his innards though, and he looked down to discover seven inches of cold steel planted in his abdomen. Wailing like a banshee, he leaped to his feet. As he did, Zach ripped the knife loose.

  “Damn your bones!” Old Bill said, staggering backward. He told himself that this couldn’t be happening to him, that a brat and a miserable woman couldn’t be getting the better of him. He tried to stop the crimson spray shooting from his ruptured gut, but it was like trying to plug a cracked dam. Looking up, he sought his rifle, but Winona King held it.

  “Oh, no,” Old Bill said and clawed at his pistol.

  “Oh, yes,” Winona said. She shot him in the face.

  The lanky frame of the grizzled madman did a slow pirouette to the ground. It wound up on its back, blank eyes fixed on the heavens.

  Zach stared at the neat hole in Zeigler’s forehead. The thought of how close they had come to dying caused a tiny shudder to ripple down his back. “We did it,” he said numbly. “We’re safe now.”

  Stepping over to him, Winona draped an arm across his shoulders. “Yes, we are,” she said, struggling to catch her breath after her ordeal. “Tomorrow at first light we will head north to rejoin your father.”

  “He should have been back by now, shouldn’t he?” Zach asked.

  Winona thought so, but she wanted to spare her son any more anguish than they had already been through. “I would guess that he is busy tracking down the men we were after. There is no need to worry about him. Your father can take care of himself better than any man I know.”

  “That’s why he’s the best there is at what he does,” Zach said proudly. Remembering the knife in his hand, he squatted to wipe the blade clean on the grass. Behind him there was the barest whisper of movement, so faint that he thought it was the wind, that the breeze had picked up, and he turned to let the cool air fan his face.

  Eight feet away stood a swarthy warrior holding a rifle leveled in their direction.

  “Ma!” Zach exclaimed, bouncing erect.

  Winona whirled, bewildered by her son’s outcry since the danger was past. Then she set eyes on the warrior and knew by the style of his hair that he was a Blood. “Get behind me,” she said, remembering that Jeremiah Sawyer had told them about a certain Blood who rode with Earl Lassiter. It was too much of a coincidence not to be the same person.

  “I’ll protect you, Ma,” Zach said, moving in front of her.

  Grabbing her son’s arm, Winona swung him around to her rear. The Blood regarded them with a hint of amusement and something else. He took a step, then gestured curtly for her to drop the rifle. It was empty anyway, so she did.

  Brule the Blood had seen the white man slain. He had admired the woman’s fierce resistance, which made her all the more desirable since Blood men looked for fighting spirit in their women. Being fully aware of her battle prowess, he was not about to give her the chance to do to him as she had done to the white man. Keeping her covered, he took several strides.

  Winona tried a bluff to buy time. “Who are you?” she signed. “What do you want with us?”

  Brule hesitated. To answer, he would have had to cradle the rifle in his elbow. Since the woman was unarmed, he saw no reason not to. The child in the cradleboard certainly posed no threat, and the boy couldn’t possibly reach him with the knife before he could get off a shot. “I am in need of a woman,” he said. “I have chosen you.”

  This new threat, coming as it did immediately on the heels of the other, took Winona off guard. She had no idea what to do. A Blood warrior was many times more deadly than Zeigler had been. But she had to do something. Then fingers tugged at her dress. Zach had sidled next to her leg and was giving her a devilish grin.

  “Tell the boy to drop the knife and move aside,” Brule signed.

  Zach was fluent in sign language. He chuckled and said in English, “I don’t have the knife any more, you idiot. I exchanged it for this.” Sliding to the right to be clear of his mother, he extended the pistol he had taken from Old Bill.

  Brule the Blood took one look and swept his rifle up.

  A single shot echoed off the high peaks.

  ~*~

  Not quite twenty-four hours later three riders and a child in a cradleboard met on a pine covered ridge.

  Nate King had nearly ridden his magnificent black stallion to exhaustion in finding his family. “It’s over,” he said after greeting them warmly. He looked around. “Where’s Old Bill?”

  Winona explained, then told about the Blood. “Your son never lost his nerve. He did as you taught him. You should be very proud.”

  “I am,” Nate said, ruffling Zach’s hair. His gaze strayed to his wife’s mare, to a pair of fresh scalps hanging from a rawhide cord strung across its back. “What are
those?”

  “I thought Two Owls would need proof to show his people.”

  “It’s downright spooky,” Nate said.

  “What is?”

  “How much we think alike.” Twisting, Nate pointed at five scalps dangling from his saddle.

  Zach walked over to examine them. “Does this mean the Utes will leave us alone, Pa? Does this mean we can go on living where we always have?”

  “It sure does, son,” Nate said, and he recalled an old saying his grandfather had been fond of. “There’s no place like home.”

  About the Author

  David L. Robbins was born on Independence Day 1950. He has written more than three hundred books under his own name and many pen names, among them: David Thompson, Jake McMasters, Jon Sharpe, Don Pendleton, Franklin W. Dixon, Ralph Compton, Dean L. McElwain, J.D. Cameron and John Killdeer.

  Robbins was raised in Pennsylvania. When he was seventeen he enlisted in the United States Air Force and eventually rose to the rank of sergeant. After his honorable discharge he attended college and went into broadcasting, working as an announcer and engineer (and later as a program director) at various radio stations. Later still he entered law enforcement and then took to writing full-time.

  At one time or another Robbins has lived in Pennsylvania, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Montana, Colorado and the Pacific Northwest. He spent a year and a half in Europe, traveling through France, Italy, Greece and Germany. He lived for more than a year in Turkey.

  Today he is best known for two current long-running series - Wilderness, the generational saga of a Mountain Man and his Shoshone wife - and Endworld is a science fiction series under his own name started in 1986. Among his many other books, Piccadilly Publishing is pleased to be reissuing ebook editions of Wilderness, Davy Crockett and, of course, White Apache.

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