The Loner: Inferno #12

by J. A. Johnstone

  With that grim chore out of the way, he quickly holstered the Colt, strapped the gunbelt around his hips, and pulled on his boots. He got the saddle on the dun as fast as he could.

  He hadn’t forgotten the sounds of battle he had heard coming from the south, or the glow of flames lighting up the sky.

  He tried to concentrate on the task at hand, but a part of his brain still listened to the shots. They were dwindling, fewer and fewer of them, and The Kid knew that was probably bad. He tried to tell himself that the Apaches had given up their attack on the wagon camp and retreated ...

  But the orange glow of the fire told a different story.

  “The bastards,” he muttered under his breath as he tightened the saddle cinches. “The cruel bastards.”

  The Apaches must have been watching the wagon train for the past couple of days, he thought. They were probably curious and wanted to see where the immigrants were going. Once it was obvious they planned to settle in Raincrow Valley, the Apaches had moved in to snatch away their chance for happiness, and most likely their lives as well.

  The raiders had been lurking out there in the darkness, watching the camp, and they had seen The Kid ride away. They had sent three men after him, no doubt thinking that was plenty to slaughter one lone white man.

  Those three had found out just how wrong that was.

  The Kid couldn’t take any pleasure in that. As soon as everything was ready, he put his foot in the stirrup and swung up into the saddle. Leaving the dead warriors where they had fallen, he rode down the hill to the creek and started south. He pushed the dun as fast as he dared in the darkness.

  From time to time he stopped to listen. When he didn’t hear any more shots, a feeling of rage filled him. Fate had conspired to keep him away from the settlers on the very night they could have most used his help.

  The orange glare in the sky brightened, then began to fade. The fires were dying down, The Kid knew. It was just like the attack on the Conestoga, only on a much larger scale. He dreaded the sight of the devastation that awaited him.

  But not for a second did he consider turning back. He had ridden out of that village several days earlier when violence was about to erupt, and that decision had nagged at him. The circumstances tonight were much different—he hadn’t had any idea the Apaches were about to attack the camp—but he wasn’t going to turn away again.

  He slowed down as he approached the camp. Fires still burned here and there, but most of the wagons had already been consumed. Bodies, human and animal alike, littered the ground thickly. All the oxen had been slaughtered, but as far as The Kid could tell, the Apaches had taken some of the horses with them. They could trade those horses below the border, maybe, or kill them and eat them on the way back to Mexico.

  A bitter taste filled The Kid’s mouth as he rode up to the camp and saw the sprawled corpses. Men, women, even children ... no one had been spared.

  He dismounted and started through the camp on foot, searching for survivors. Horace Dunlap’s body lay just inside the circle of charred wagons. The wagonmaster still clutched a gun in his hand. He had been shot to pieces, riddled with at least a dozen bullets.

  The Kid would have been willing to bet that Dunlap had taken some of the attackers with him, though.

  He moved on, listening for a moan, peering through the flickering light of the flames that still burned for any sign of movement. He didn’t find any.

  After a few moments he came to Jessica’s wagon. At least, he thought it was her wagon. In the midst of all this destruction, it was difficult to be sure.

  He saw a familiar figure lying face down next to the burned wagon. The Kid hurried over and knelt next to the man, grasping his shoulder and rolling him onto his side.

  Scott Harwood’s head hung limply on his neck. His face was twisted in death. The broken shaft of an arrow protruded from his chest. The Kid could tell what had happened. That arrow had driven deeply into Harwood’s body, killing him, and the shaft had broken off when the scout pitched forward.

  Still on one knee, The Kid looked around, thinking that Jessica’s body had to be nearby. He figured she would have died fighting, just as many of the others obviously had.

  He didn’t see her, though, and when he stood up and got as close to the burned wagon as the heat still coming from it would allow, he didn’t see her body in the ashes and debris, either.

  It didn’t matter, he told himself. If she wasn’t there, she was somewhere else in the camp, but she was just as dead either way. From everything he had seen so far, the Apaches had wiped out everyone.

  He kept looking, and a few minutes later was rewarded by the sound of a weak moan behind him. Swinging around quickly, he asked, “Who’s there? Can you hear me?”

  Another moan turned into a reedy voice saying, “O ... over here ...”

  Even strained by agony, the voice was familiar. The Kid ran toward one of the sprawled shapes and dropped to a knee beside it. The wounded man lay on his side. Easing him over onto his back, The Kid propped the man’s head up.

  Milo Farnum gasped in pain as The Kid moved him. The front of the old scout’s shirt was dark and sodden with blood.

  “K-Kid?” he choked out. “Kid ... is that ... you?”

  “That’s right, Milo. Take it easy. I’ll see if I can help you.”

  A grim chuckle came from the old-timer. “Ain’t no ... chance of that. I’m ... gutshot. Been tryin’ to ... hang on ... ’cause I thought maybe ... you’d hear the fightin’ ... and come back.”

  The Kid understood. Farnum should have been dead, but grit and sheer determination had kept the scout alive.

  “I’ll go get my canteen—”

  “No! Water ... water won’t help. I want ... I wanted to tell you ... those red bastards didn’t ...”

  Farnum’s voice trailed off. The Kid waited, thinking for a second that Farnum had died, but then he heard the rasp of breath coming from the old man’s throat.

  “What didn’t they do, Milo?”

  Farnum had to force the words from his tortured throat. “They didn’t ... kill everybody!”

  The Kid’s heart slugged in his chest as the meaning of Farnum’s words sunk in. He leaned closer and asked, “They took prisoners with them?”

  “Y-yeah. I seen ’em... . They had ... Jess Ritter ...”

  Jessica was still alive!

  “And Miz Price ... and her daughter ... and another lady ... Leah Gabbert... . I saw ’em ... drag those gals off... . Thought maybe ... if you came back ... I could tell you... . They headed south.... You gotta ... go after ...”

  When Farnum’s voice faded, it was replaced by a long sigh, the likes of which The Kid had heard too many times in his life.

  The scout was dead.

  Despite that, The Kid said, “I’ll go after them, Milo. You did the right thing by hanging on until I got here. I’ll go after them and do everything I can for them.”

  After making that vow, he eased Farnum’s head to the ground.

  The Kid stood up and continued his search of the camp, hoping he might find someone else alive, but that hope was futile. Farnum had been the only survivor, and now he was gone.

  By the time The Kid finished his search, the horrors of what he had seen were ingrained in his soul. He had been witness to death and destruction before in his life, but never on this scale.

  What made it even worse was the fact that he couldn’t do anything about it. Burying all these people would take him days, and in the heat the stench would choke a man before he could ever get them in the ground. Even if that cavalry patrol had been there to act as a burial detail, it would take a long time to dig so many graves.

  Thinking about the troopers made The Kid’s jaw clench in anger. If Lt. Nicholson had accompanied the wagon train to Raincrow Valley, as Horace Dunlap had asked, the immigrants might still be alive. The cavalry would have camped there for the night, and the Apaches probably would not have attacked.

  Would the raiders have bid
ed their time and struck later, after the cavalry was gone? That was possible, The Kid supposed, but there was no way to know for sure either way. He forced those thoughts out of his mind for the moment.

  But if he ever crossed paths with Lt. Blake Nicholson again, he would make sure the man knew what had happened there.

  In the meantime, there was nothing The Kid could do except keep the promise he had made to Milo Farnum. He walked through the devastation, past the littered bodies, and left the circle of burned wagons. The well-trained dun waited for him with reins dangling. The horse tossed its head as The Kid came up, maybe spooked a little by the coppery smell of so much freshly spilled blood.

  “Yeah, we’re leaving,” The Kid told the dun. “There’s nothing we can do here.”

  He mounted up and turned the horse to the south. Even though it was dark, he didn’t have any trouble following the trail up to the pass through the hills.

  When he reached it, he paused and turned to look back. The fires were all out, but piles of glowing embers still winked here and there in the darkened valley, like the eyes of the ghosts that might linger there. He wasn’t a superstitious man, but a little shudder ran through him as he gazed out over that place of death.

  Gehenna, he thought. That’s what they ought to call Raincrow Valley now.

  He turned to face south again and heeled the dun into a trot.

  Somewhere out there were four women, terrified prisoners of the Apaches.

  And Kid Morgan was their only chance for survival.

  Chapter 12

  He rode to the edge of the hills and stopped. Since the Apaches had prisoners now, not to mention those horses they had taken from the camp, it was likely they would head for the border in a straight line, just as fast as they could.

  But The Kid couldn’t be absolutely certain of that, so the smart thing to do would be to wait until morning and pick up their trail once it was light. A war party of a hundred men couldn’t travel without leaving behind plenty of signs, even in the arid wasteland.

  When he thought about Jessica Ritter and the other three women, he wanted to keep going, but he forced himself to stop and unsaddle the dun.

  If he was going to have any chance of rescuing the captives, he had to keep his emotions at bay. He had to be as coldly calculating as a machine. It was the only way to overcome the overwhelming odds he faced.

  The Kid picketed the horse and spread his bedroll again for the second time that night. He wrapped up in his blankets against the nighttime chill and tried to sleep.

  But even though his eyes were closed, he kept seeing horrific images of fire and blood and death. He hadn’t witnessed the slaughter at the wagon camp, but in his mind it was like he had been there, watching and hearing everything.

  Every terrible thing.

  Despite that, weariness eventually claimed him, but his sleep was restless and haunted by nightmares. He was glad when he woke up the next morning in the cold gray light of dawn.

  The Kid stood up and stretched to ease muscles that ached from tossing and turning so much on the hard ground. He gathered broken branches from some nearby scrub brush and built a small fire.

  He soon had coffee boiling and shaved slices off a chunk of salt pork into his frying pan. There were plenty of biscuits left in the bag of provisions Horace Dunlap had gathered for him the night before. As he hunkered on his heels next to the fire and ate, The Kid thought about the people who had donated that food for him.

  Most of them—maybe all of them—were dead. The meal tasted like ashes in his mouth, but he forced himself to eat anyway.

  By the time the sky was light enough for him to start searching for the war party’s tracks, he had his gear packed away and the dun saddled. The Apaches must have come through this area, he thought as he mounted and began to ride along the edge of the hills.

  That hunch proved right. He had gone less than a quarter mile when he came to a broad swath of hoofprints and mocassin tracks that led off to the south. Some of the Apaches were on foot, but that wasn’t surprising. An Apache warrior moving at a steady trot was capable of running a horse into the ground, Frank had told him.

  The Kid turned to follow the tracks. Figuring out how many men were in the war party was impossible. The prints were too jumbled up.

  The only thing he could be sure of was that there were a lot of them.

  From the looks of it, the Apaches weren’t trying to cover their trail. They knew they had avoided the cavalry patrol, which had moved on west. And they wouldn’t be expecting any pursuit from the devastated wagon camp. As far as they knew, they hadn’t left anyone alive behind them.

  After a few days, when the three Apaches who had gone after The Kid failed to return, the rest might start to wonder what had happened to them. They wouldn’t be concerned, though. The Kid was only one man.

  What could one man do to hurt them?

  The night’s chill disappeared rapidly as the sun climbed into the sky. As the heat grew, The Kid wondered how far it was to the next source of water. He had filled both canteens in the creek in Raincrow Valley before he rode away, but in the semidesert, that water wouldn’t last long. The dun would require quite a bit of it.

  The Apaches had to know this territory, he reminded himself. They would need water, too, and would know where to find it. As long as he was following them, he would come to it sooner or later.

  A couple of hours after sunup, he spotted dust rising to the west. Unless the war party had made a sharp turn for some unfathomable reason, that was the wrong direction for them. The Kid reined in and rested his hands on the saddle horn as he studied the dust.

  It wasn’t the first such cloud he had seen recently. In that arid country, any group larger than a few riders raised considerable dust. The cloud was about the same size as the one he had seen a few days earlier as the cavalry patrol approached the wagon train.

  Could it be?

  The Kid decided the smart thing to do was wait and see. The delay in going after the Apaches grated on him, but he needed to know whether or not he had a new threat galloping toward him. He looked around, spotted a cluster of boulders about half a mile away, and rode toward it, figuring the rocks would conceal him while he got a look at those riders.

  Once he was behind the boulders, he dismounted and pulled his Winchester from its saddle sheath. He found a good spot where he could see the approaching dust cloud and waited.

  Within a few minutes, he could make out the riders. He thought he saw the bright colors of a flapping guidon, so he fetched his telescope from the saddlebags to check.

  Yes, The Kid thought grimly as he peered through the glass, the cavalry had returned ...

  Much too late to do any good.

  He closed the telescope, put it away, and stepped out from behind the boulders. Pointing the Winchester into the sky, he fired three shots as fast as he could work the rifle’s lever.

  The troopers slowed in response to the shots, then turned toward him without stopping. The Kid lowered the Winchester and waited until the blue-uniformed soldiers rode up and reined in.

  Lt. Nicholson was in the lead, with Sgt. Brennan behind him. Nicholson stared at The Kid in surprise. “Morgan! What are you doing out here?”

  “I’m trailing that Apache war party. What are you doing?”

  The lieutenant’s face darkened in anger at the contemptuous tone in The Kid’s voice. “Not that I have to answer to you, but we’re returning to Fort Bliss. We reached the limits of the area we were supposed to patrol.”

  “Let me guess. You didn’t see any sign of the Apaches, did you?”

  “As a matter of fact, no. What’s that you said about trailing them?”

  The Kid didn’t answer the question directly. Instead he snapped, “You didn’t see them because they didn’t want you to see them. They probably knew where you were every minute of the day and night and could have ambushed you at any time. The only reason you’re not dead now is because they found a more tempting target
... that wagon train.”

  Nicholson drew in a deep breath and glared down at The Kid from his saddle. “The wagon train?” he repeated.

  “That’s right. Except for four women the Apaches carried off as prisoners, every man, woman, and child in that party of immigrants is dead now, and I figure you’re partially to blame for that.”

  Angrily, Sgt. Brennan crowded his horse forward. “Hold on just a damned minute! You best keep a respectful tongue in your head when you’re talkin’ to the lieutenant, mister.”

  “I’m not in the army. Those gold bars don’t mean anything to me,” The Kid said coldly. “If you’d stayed with the wagons, Nicholson, the Apaches might not have attacked.”

  “You can’t be certain of that.”

  The Kid shrugged. Nicholson was right about that. He couldn’t be sure. But there was a good chance it was true.

  The lieutenant dismounted and handed his reins to Brennan. He turned to The Kid. “Tell me what happened.”

  The Kid summed up the bloody, tragic circumstances in as few words as possible. Nicholson’s face had acquired a tan during his service in the Southwest, but he turned pale underneath it as The Kid described how everyone with the wagon train had been killed except for the four women who were taken prisoner.

  “You say you were trailing the Apaches?” Nicholson asked when The Kid was finished.

  “That’s right. Their tracks are hard to miss.” The Kid paused. “You might have even noticed them if you’d kept riding.”

  Nicholson’s lips tightened at the thinly veiled insult. “We saw the glow in the sky from our camp last night. The sergeant told me something was on fire, and I was planning to investigate. I recalled that man Dunlap saying the wagon train was headed for Raincrow Valley, and I wanted to be sure the settlers were all right.”

  “Little late for that,” The Kid drawled.

  Brennan started to get down from his horse. “By God, I’ve had just about enough of you, mister!”

  Nicholson waved the noncom back into the saddle. “Stay where you are, Sergeant. Civilians are ... entitled to their opinion, even when they don’t know what they’re talking about. I had my orders, Mr. Morgan, and I followed them. My conscience is clear.”