I staggered back, gasping for breath, unwilling to move, waiting for the man to get back to his feet. From a great distance away I heard thunder rumble and off to the west sheet lighting flashed above the Staked Plains.
Slowly the Apache rose. He was splashed in blood and sweat and his nose and arm were shattered, but there was no quit in him. Wary now, he shuffled toward me, his silent moccasined feet slowly sliding through the wet grass.
I didn’t have the strength left to meet him, so I stood where I was and waited for him to come to me.
The Apache ran at me, trying to grasp me with his left hand. But I took a single step toward him and grabbed his broken arm again. I turned my side to the Apache and hammered the arm onto my upraised knee. One, two, three times.
Screaming, the warrior pulled the arm out of my grasp. He swung his leg and knocked my feet out from under me and I thudded onto my back, hitting hard rock. Winded, with my rifle lying three feet away, I lay there, desperately trying to catch my breath.
I moved my hand to support myself as I struggled to get to my feet. I shifted my hand again and my fingers touched the handle of the Apache’s knife. I grabbed it and held it ready.
The man, snarling his fury, tried for the rifle. He dived for the Winchester and I threw myself on him. The arc of the knife blade glinted in the moonlight as I swung it high and plunged it deep into his back. I heard the warrior’s gasp of pain and rammed the knife into him again and again. The Apache’s legs kicked convulsively and he rattled deep in his throat, then lay still.
I rolled off the man and lay on my back, my mouth open, gasping for air.
After a while I stumbled to my feet, teeth bared, panting, looking down at the man I’d killed. I’d battled this warrior with fangs and claws and I had won, and by right of conquest his head and weapons were mine.
No longer completely sane, crazed by the sudden, shocking violence of the fight, I kneeled, grabbed a handful of the Apache’s long, greasy hair and scalped him.
Jumping to my feet again, I brandished the dripping scalp high, tilted back my head and let a savage Rebel yell tear from my throat. It was a barbaric, angry shriek, half wail, half scream, heard on hundreds of battlefields during the War Between the States. But the yell had much more ancient and darker roots, stretching back across the echoing centuries to the war cry of the wild, blue-stained Celtic sword warriors from whom my ancestors had sprung.
If there were Apaches around, I wanted them to know by that victorious scream that I’d killed one of them, that I’d torn out his throat with my teeth. I wanted them to suffer as I had suffered, wanted them to know fear as I’d known fear.
Finally, blood from the scalp running down my arm, I slowly returned to sanity.
Suddenly drained, I dropped the filthy scalp on the Apache’s back, picked up my rifle and staggered down the slope. At the creek I fell flat on the bank and splashed cold water onto my face and arms, washing away as much blood as I could.
Lila met me at the door of the cabin, awakened by my dreadful howling. She took one look at me and shrank back in horror, stiff with shock, her eyes wide and fearful, face as white as someone dead. I ignored the girl, brushed past her and collapsed onto a bunk.
Then merciful sleep took me and I knew no more.
I woke slowly to a gray dawn.
Shivering, I put on my hat and stepped to the stove. The fire had gone out during the night and I made it up again and soon had a small blaze going.
Lila and her pa were still asleep, so without disturbing them, I picked up the coffeepot and my rifle and stepped outside.
The rain had stopped but surly gray clouds hung low in the sky and the gullies and clefts of the surrounding hills were deep in shadow. The air smelled clean and fresh, like a woman’s newly washed hair, and a whispering wind teased the buffalo grass, the shy wildflowers nodding their approval.
I kneeled by the creek and began to fill the coffeepot, wary, my eyes searching the ridge. Nothing moved, but that in itself brought me little comfort. Apaches didn’t believe in making themselves obvious. There could be a dozen of them up there. Or none. Fickle fate was dealing the hand and I’d have to gamble that the Apaches had moved on and that the ridge and scattered rocks were as empty of life as they seemed.
Such thoughts do little to reassure a man, and after I filled the pot and rose to my feet I reckon I was a slump-shouldered study in uncertainty, feeling a lot older but not much wiser than my eighteen years.
The fight with the Apache had left me with a numb ache all over my body and my shoulder burned where his knife had grazed me. I remembered the fight like a man remembers a bad dream, hazy, terrifying and confused, without rhyme or reason.
I had scalped the warrior and held my bloody trophy aloft and like a madman I’d howled my triumph to the uncaring night.
That I recalled, but the why or wherefore of it escaped me. For a brief spell I’d been more animal than human, possessed by a blind, killing rage that had transformed me into something savage, something primitive and dangerous. I fervently wished that as long as I lived I’d never feel the like again.
All the soft thoughts, the lace-and-lavender thoughts I’d once had of pretty Sally Coleman were fast receding from me, being replaced by something darker, harder, more violent. As I stood there in the newborn morning, I felt my carefree youth slip-slide away, the sappy love songs I’d once sung forever stilled on my lips, circumstances thrusting a bleak maturity on me I’d never sought.
I glanced up at the lowering sky and saw only its uniform grayness, the clouds heavy with rain, without light.
Now I must get back to the cabin, yet there remained one last thing to do.
Quickly I walked to the wagon and searched under the tarp. Within moments I found what I was seeking, a half-full jug of whiskey and two more full ones.
One by one, a vague anger building in me, I smashed the jugs on the iron tire of a wagon wheel, smelling the sharp, smoky tang of the whiskey, and tossed away the broken shards.
Only then did I step into the cabin and put coffee on the stove to boil.
Ned Tryon was the first to wake.
The man rolled out of his bunk and fell on the floor, staying there for several minutes on his hands and knees, his head hanging between his arms. The thump woke Lila and she stirred, looking with shocked eyes at her pa. She made to rise, but I held up my hand, stopping her.
“Let him be,” I said.
Warned by the tone of my voice, Lila stayed where she was, gathering her blanket around her against the morning chill, eyes moving from me to her pa and back again.
Ned finally rose to his feet and stumbled toward me, trying to form words through the thick cotton lining his mouth.
“Whiskey,” he gasped finally.
I shook my head at him and held up the coffeepot. “There’s no whiskey. Have some of this.”
“Damn you, I don’t want coffee. I need whiskey.”
He staggered to the door and lurched outside and I followed him.
It didn’t take Ned long to figure out what had happened. He stood by the wagon, looked down unbelievingly at the broken jugs around his feet, then turned his shocked, bloodshot eyes to me.
“All of them?” he asked.
“All of them,” I answered, not a shred of pity in me.
“Damn you, Hannah,” the man whispered, his eyes ugly. “Damn you to hell.”
After the harrowing events of the night, I decided right there and then that I’d had just about all I could take. I stepped quickly to Ned, grabbed him by the front of his shirt and dragged him behind the wagon away from the door. I slammed him hard against the side so the whole rig shook and, anger flaring in me, said: “Mister, when you get to where you’re going, you can get as drunk as a pig as often as you want. It won’t bother me none. But until we’re clear of this country and the Apaches, you’ll stay sober as a watched preacher.”
Ned swore and tried to struggle out of my grasp, but I slammed him against the wagon again. “Lis
ten to me,” I said, my face just inches from his own. “The only way we’re going to make it out of here alive, the only way Lila will make it out alive, is for you to stay the hell away from whiskey.”
I pulled him closer to me, anger scorching my insides like scalding coffee. “Now, personally I don’t give a tinker’s damn about you, but I do care a whole lot about Lila. You risk her life by getting drunk again and I swear to God I’ll gun you.”
Ned Tryon’s smile was thin. “Yet from this earth, and grave, and dust, the Lord shall raise me up, I trust.”
I nodded. “My friend, that’s between you and your Maker. But get this straight. One more drunk and I’ll put a bullet into you, Lila’s pa or no.”
“Hard talk in one so young,” Ned said.
“Mister,” I said, “I’ve had to grow up fast and recently it seems the hard talk has come natural to me.”
Ned stood there blinking like an owl, thinking things through as much as his muddled brain would allow. Finally he nodded. “So be it. I’ll have that coffee now.”
I didn’t give the man any credit for his decision, since he wasn’t in much of a position to do otherwise.
I left Ned and stepped back into the cabin. Lila was already up and dressed, and when her pa came inside, she kept looking from one of us to the other. I guess she felt the tension stretching between us because she made no attempt at conversation as we sat at the table and drank coffee.
Only when I refilled my cup and rolled a smoke did Lila speak to me.
“What happened last night?” she asked. Some of the horror that had showed in her eyes when I came off the ridge was still there, a reminder that this girl was unused to the West and the sudden violence that came along with it.
“I was jumped by an Apache,” I said. I motioned with my head to the ridge. “Up there.”
“Is he . . . is he . . . ?”
“He’s dead. I’m alive,” I said, ending it. I rose. “I’ll go hitch the oxen. Better get ready.”
I stepped outside and hitched up the oxen, a task that was easier than I’d expected. A horse or mule team offered a lot more trouble, being much less placid animals and by times difficult to handle.
So far the rain was holding off, and when I saddled the black I tied my slicker over the blanket roll. Sally Coleman’s bonnet was in a sorry state and getting sor rier. It had already lost a flower from the brim and the straw was starting to shred here and there.
Shaking my head at yet another unfolding tragedy, I led the black out of the barn and back to the cabin.
Last night I’d thought to ride on and leave Lila and her pa behind. But now I knew I couldn’t do it. I was well and truly trapped. Me, I was all that stood between Lila and the Apaches and what they did to a woman, and to haul my freight now would be a lowdown thing.
I made the decision but didn’t feel particularly brave or honorable, like that Lochinvar knight Ned kept wagging his chin about. All I knew was I had it to do and there could be no stepping away from it . . . not if I wanted to live with myself after.
When I went into the cabin, Lila handed me a plate of bacon, salt pork and pan bread; suddenly hungry, I wolfed it down.
Ned didn’t eat, but sat at the table, his head in trembling hands, battling whatever demons were tormenting him.
Despite myself, I felt a sudden pang of sympathy for the man. Sometimes the best remedy for wrongs is just to forget them, and I tried to do that now.
“Ned,” I said, “we got to get moving.”
The man looked up at me with faraway eyes and nodded. He rose to his feet and stumbled outside.
Lila watched him go, then asked: “What happened between you two out there?”
I shrugged. “I got rid of your pa’s whiskey.”
The girl studied me, judging my motives. “He’ll be better off without it,” she said finally. Then, after a heartbeat’s pause: “Thank you, Dusty.”
I smiled at her. “I’m starting to think that recently every person I meet is a problem in search of a solution. I found the solution, is all. At least for now.”
Ten minutes later we crested the rise and were once more among the rocks. Lila riding the black while me and her pa walked beside the oxen.
At the top we paused and I looked down at the long miles stretching away before us, the Staked Plains to the west lost behind a gray morning haze.
Without saying a word to Lila I left the wagon and went back to the place where I’d fought the Apache. The man’s body was gone but written in charcoal on a flat rock near where he’d fallen were the crudely scratched Spanish words:
MATANZAS CON SUS DENTES
I knew enough of the language to translate. It said: Kills with His Teeth.
The Apaches had given me a name and were letting me know that I was a marked man. All they wanted to do now was capture me alive. After that, using all the devilish ingenuity they could muster, they’d test me to see if I was the great warrior I seemed.
I knew that test would be much worse than anything Shorty Cummings had suffered and I would scream and shriek my way into eternity.
A sudden chill in my belly, I walked back to the wagon. Lila raised an eyebrow, but didn’t offer a question. For that, I was glad, fearing that my tongue would stick to the roof of my dry mouth.
When Lila did speak, her words did little to allay my fear.
“Dusty,” she said, pointing south, “look over there. It’s more smoke.”
I followed her pointing finger to the low hills and mesquite flats stretching away from us. In the distance I watched the smoke rise, then break, then rise again, black puffs drifting one after another into the lead-colored sky.
Fascinated, fearful, I couldn’t tear my gaze away from it. “Lila, that’s talking smoke. Apache smoke.”
“What are they talking about?” the girl asked, her dark eyes huge.
“Us,” I said.
Chapter 12
We were halfway down the slope when the rain began, not the downpour I’d expected but a soft drizzle, lacing across the landscape as fine as spun silver.
As soon as we reached the flat and turned south, I remounted the black while Lila took my place beside the oxen and I rode away to scout the trail ahead.
For the most part this was open country, a grama and buffalo grass plain with low hills rising here and there, their slopes dotted with mesquite and post oak.
I startled a small herd of grazing antelope and they bounded away from me over the crest of a hill and were soon lost to sight. Several times I spotted long-horn steers, strays from the spring herds, but they were every bit as wild as the antelope and kept their distance.
When I reached a shallow valley between a couple of low, flat-topped rises, I reined in the black and slid my Winchester from the boot.
My ears straining for the slightest sound, I sat still in the saddle, scanning the valley ahead and the surrounding slopes.
Nothing stirred.
The drizzle continued to fall silently on the grass and far above me the gray clouds were starting to thin and far to the west I saw a patch of blue sky.
I turned in the saddle, looking for the wagon. It was about a mile behind me, the oxen plodding through the long grass, and I could make out the tiny figures of Lila and her pa.
There was no way around it—the wagon would be here soon and before it arrived I’d have to scout the valley, a likely place for an Apache ambush.
I wheeled the black around the screening rise of the hill to my right and got behind its shallow slope. I rode down into a rocky wash, followed it for a couple of hundred yards, then rode out of it again, finally stopping at a dense thicket of mesquite growing low on the hill.
Rifle in hand I swung out of the saddle and, crouching low, made my way up the rise. I reached the crest and looked around. As far as I could see the land around me seemed empty.
But the Apaches had been here.
A small, charred circle on the grass showed where they’d coaxed a sullen fire o
ut of mesquite root and sent up smoke, probably the talking smoke we’d seen earlier in the morning.
I got down on one knee, my rifle at the ready, but saw only silent hills and rain-washed grass. After a few minutes the pattering drizzle petered out, discouraged by the blossoming sun that felt warm on my back, and around me the color of the grass and hills shaded from dark to light green as the sunlight touched them.
I rose to my feet just as the riders started to come.
A column of cavalry was riding through the valley, a red-and-white guidon fluttering at their head, two pack mules bringing up the rear. The officer in command threw up a hand when he saw me and halted the troop.
I made my way down the hill, under the careful scrutiny of two dozen hard-eyed buffalo soldiers, and stopped beside the officer, an elderly white captain with iron gray hair showing under his battered campaign hat.
“Captain James O’Hearn,’ the officer said by way of introduction, his voice harsh like he gargled with axle grease. “Ninth Cavalry.”
I gave O’Hearn my name and added: “I see you’ve fared badly, Captain.”
The officer nodded. “Had a run-in with Apaches south of here. Lost my scout and a couple of my men are hit hard.”
I glanced along the column and saw a Pima draped belly down across his saddle, his long black hair hanging loose, almost touching the top of the grama grass. Two of the soldiers sat slumped in the saddle, one with a bloodstained bandage around his head.
O’Hearn studied me with interest. “What brings you out here, Hannah?”
I nodded toward the approaching wagon. “That. We’re headed for the Clear Fork of the Brazos.”
The captain watched the wagon creak slowly toward the column, and when he saw Lila walking by the side of the oxen as she finally reached us, he touched the brim of his hat. “Captain James O’Hearn, ma’am. Ninth Cavalry.”
Lila dropped an elegant little curtsy, then introduced herself and her father.
Obviously taking pleasure in the sight of a pretty woman in this stark wilderness, O’Hearn smiled and swung stiffly out of the saddle. He turned to his sergeant, a clean-shaven man in a faded blue army shirt, tan canvas pants tucked into his high cavalry boots. “Rest the men for fifteen minutes, Sergeant Wilson.”
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