“We’ll do our best to get the children back.”
“I’m not talking about only getting those kids back. I’m talking about killing those that did it. Setting things right.”
Newt started to tell him that killing never set anything right, and he wondered if Horn had ever killed a man. But it didn’t really matter. He knew what Horn was feeling. It didn’t matter if the need for such revenge was wrong. He kept thinking about that Apache woman with her head caved in. First, they had to get the kids back, but if the Hatchet and his men got in the way he would do for them like the rabid wolves they were. He had done plenty of hard things and had plenty of guilt already weighing down his conscious. What would one more thing hurt?
Hardcase, that Widowmaker, that’s what some said about him. Newt chuckled with little joy in it, and the sound came out of him as icy as a north wind in December. He put a hand to his Smith .44 and made sure it was still there, ready to hand, and he watched the trail of the Hatchet’s men marked plainly in the sandy ground of the valley—tracks headed southward, and tracks headed to a reckoning.
Chapter Thirteen
There was a Mexican village not far downriver. They found it on the second day after leaving the burned Apache camp. It was really no village at all but a few simple huts and jacales gathered together in a mountain hamlet, only existing so far from anywhere by some stubborn persistence on the part of the few inhabitants who called it home and irrigated their cornfields from the potholes of water in the nearby creek. Newt and his party never would have found it if the riverbed hadn’t tightened down into a steep, high-sided canyon with no room to keep following its course. For miles the river ran through such chasms, and they, like the Hatchet and his men, swung west into the big mountains once more.
The Hatchet hadn’t found the village, or he had no interest in it. Newt and his party, on the other hand, needed food, as the chase hadn’t afforded them time or ability to hunt or to detour to some place where they could obtain supplies. And they hoped to find a curandero to check out Horn’s wounded foot. Many villages had such a folk healer. Aside from the more questionable practices of the curanderos that often centered around superstition and magic, many of them had some basic doctoring skills learned by necessity or passed down from previous generations of their profession. Certainly such a healer would be far better at treating Horn’s wounds than Newt and Gok.
At first the villagers had hid in their homes, afraid to come out at the sight of Gok and the two rough-looking white men with him. But Horn spoke to them and eventually coaxed them forth. They were a kind, friendly people. Timid, but hospitable even to a hard crew like Newt and his two companions. The women wore brightly colored dresses, and the men plain white and coarse spun cotton pants and shirts seen over much of Mexico among the peons, with braided grass belts and homemade, low-crowned straw hats. There was not a cobbler in the village, and both men and women wore low moccasins made from deerskin. The hat making was the Mexican side of their heritage, and the moccasins a leftover skill from their native Opata ancestry.
Unfortunately there was no curandero in this village, but they were able to trade for some corn, a gourd-shaped chunk of cheese, and a hindquarter of fresh killed venison.
Gok and Newt lounged under the roof of a brush arbor, while one of the women of the village did her best to clean and tend to Horn’s foot. When the woman was through with him, Horn limped over and sat down with them. He was carrying a pair of Apache-style moccasins, and he didn’t say where he had gotten them from. He sat on a stool and studied his foot as if he were dreading what he was about to do. It took him three times to get one of the moccasins on his bad foot, and he was panting by the time he got it done. Once the worst of the pain was over, he tightened and tied that moccasin and donned the other one.
He stood up and tested his new footwear and crippled foot, hobbling a few steps away from them and back. “There, good as new.”
Hardly, but Newt didn’t say so.
Horn took his boots and disappeared into the village. When he came back the boots were gone, and the same for his big spurs strapped to them.
“That was a good pair of boots, and I paid twenty dollars for those spurs,” Horn said.
“You traded them for those moccasins?” Newt asked.
Horn nodded and looked down at his newly clad toes. “Got three pair of them in trade. There wasn’t any way I could get my foot in those boots, but I’m going to miss those spurs.”
Newt had no idea what one of the villagers would want with a pair of silver-mounted, big-roweled spurs, for there wasn’t a single horse to be seen in the whole village, the only livestock being a few burros and a pair of oxen.
The women of the village cooked for them, grilling the meat on a grate inside a beehive oven, and making a dish of corn, chili, and the cheese. The three men ate all of the venison on the spot, along with everything else served to them. When they rode out of the village they were less hungry, but they only had a sack of dried ear corn in their saddlebags and three canteens filled with goat milk the villagers gave them in parting. Their salt was gone, their coffee was gone, and they had no prospects for resupplying those things in the near future.
Horn wanted to hunt, but game was scarce and they needed to travel fast. Gok had suggested the day before that they eat one of the spare horses, but Newt had thought they might trade it or sell it to buy supplies should they come across a town proper. The poor villagers in that mountain hamlet couldn’t afford the price of a horse, and Horn had paid a single silver dollar and traded a handful of Horn’s .45 Long Colt cartridges as payment for the food. The villagers hadn’t asked to be paid, giving what they could spare freely, but they especially appreciated the cartridges. They only had one gun in the entire village and hadn’t had any cartridges for it in more than a year. Newt couldn’t imagine living in the middle of Apache country and roving slave traders without a single gun to defend themselves with. Gentle people with friendly ways, but they were tough, all right.
Gok thought that they would catch up to the Hatchet at any time, but the outlaw somehow kept ahead of them, towing along a dozen plus children, or not. Gok read the tracks like some men read books, and said that the Hatchet had the children tied in a line, neck to neck, walking until their moccasins wore out and their little feet began to bleed while his men rode. The last two days the Hatchet had made at least ten miles per day, and those kids had walked it all.
Horn may have claimed he was getting better, but he had talked little as of late. Sometimes he slept in the saddle, and sometimes he stared at the countryside ahead through red-rimmed eyes. But he stayed on horseback and he kept going without complaint. Newt didn’t say so, but he admired that. The only thing Horn seemed to take pleasure in was sipping on the goat milk in his canteen. His upper lip was crusted with dried milk, and he smacked every time he took another swig.
The kid’s cavalry hat was smashed and crumpled and had lost its shape, and his clothes were ragged. His white shirt, once so bright and clean back at the border, was soiled and torn and threadbare at the elbows. He had sewn the leg of his canvas pants that the Chiricahua had slit with bits of yucca leaves looped through the fabric and tied into knots to hold the knife slash closed. His crude seam didn’t hold, and that pants leg flapped and flopped in the wind.
Newt knew that he looked no better. The travel and the miles were wearing on their clothes and gear like it was wearing on their minds. Goat milk or not, it needed to end.
* * *
The day after they left the village, the trio came in sight of the river again where it passed out of the tight confines of the canyon it ran through, and the country opened up into a narrow valley choked with brush and cactus. That meant more thorns and things to cut and stab you, and more things to tear your clothes and keep you from seeing too far ahead when you were lost in the brush.
Often, they rode to the top of hills or ridges, trying to get above the brush and find a good view of what lay ahead. It
was on the top of one of those hills that they spied the smoke in the distance, maybe two miles ahead and near the river. It was an hour until sundown.
“Reckon that’s them?” Horn asked.
“Maybe,” Newt said.
“The Hatchet?” Horn asked the old warrior.
Gok nodded.
They rode cautiously toward that finger of smoke drifting upward in the distance and left their horses hobbled in a gully when they were still a quarter of a mile away. Horn remained with the horses, while Gok and Newt moved out on foot. Newt immediately wished he had a pair of moccasins like the other two wore instead of his boots. The Apache moved as quietly as a cat, and it wasn’t only because of those moccasins. It was years of practice. He was at home in such a place, doing what they were doing, hunting and stalking men. Several times, Gok gave him dirty looks when he stumbled or made too much noise.
Later, Gok stopped and smelled the air. Newt had heard that an Apache could smell a man smoking a cigarette from a good distance away, or smell where one had been smoked as keenly as a bloodhound. It was hard to believe that a human’s senses could be so keen.
And then Newt smelled it when the breeze shifted a little. Wood smoke. Faint, but wood smoke it was. They were very close.
When they eased up to the top of the next sharp-combed ridge, the camp was visible below them on the far side. It was dusk, but there was light enough to see what they wanted. It was the Hatchet’s camp.
They waited for true nightfall, counting the Hatchet’s men passing back and forth in the firelight. There were ten of them. They were loud and they were unworried. Only a single guard did they have out, and he looked half asleep where he sat near their horses. The only way they could make him out was by the glow of his cigarette ash every time he took a drag on it. That was a fool thing to do in Apache country.
Newt and Gok slipped closer, until they could see the shadows of the children sitting before the fire. They were still roped together, and one of the Hatchet’s men was doling out bowls of some kind of stew or broth to them. The children drank from the bowls in silence.
Newt could see little detail about the children beyond that. It was too dark and their heads were down. Even if he had been closer he might not have been able to tell if one of them was the Redding boy. He wanted to move down the ridge to the very edge of the camp, but Gok saw what he was about to do and stopped him. Newt, after some thought and grumbling, decided it was too risky, and they moved back toward where they had left Horn and the horses.
Ten men against three—the odds weren’t in their favor. But they had seen two things that might give them a chance. The Hatchet’s guard was careless, and those outlaws had three bottles of tequila with them that they were imbibing freely from.
Newt looked up at the night sky when they got back to Horn and the horses. The moon was almost full. Good light to move among the brush quietly, and a good night for raiding.
But there were two problems that worried Newt, and that he couldn’t figure his way around. One was how to move the children if they managed to regain them. There were eighteen of the kids, and they had no horses to mount them on other than the two spares Gok had taken from the Rurales. Eighteen kids, only five horses, and a week’s hard run to the border while likely being pursued. That wasn’t something pleasant to think on.
The other problem, the main problem, was how to defeat ten professional murderers and thieves without getting the children harmed in the fight. If they went in on the sneak and were discovered, there was going to be a fight. Surprise and shock would be on their side if they went in fast and hard, but again, they would risk the kids getting hurt. Neither option was acceptable except in the direst of straits. All he had thought of since leaving San Antonio was finding the boy. Now that he was finally there, he had no clue how to follow through with the rest of it. And time wasn’t on his side. Every day he waited, the closer the Hatchet came to the larger towns and the coast. If the Hatchet made the Yaqui River with the children, he might load them on a boat to go downriver, and Newt would lose all chance of catching him.
They rode farther away from the Hatchet’s camp before making camp, fearing the outlaws would hear it if one of their horses were to nicker. Newt was still thinking on how to get the kids back when they spread their blankets on the ground with no fire. The Hatchet’s men were most likely to be sleeping soundly under the influence of that tequila, and maybe there was some way he could turn that to his advantage. The waiting and the doubt frustrated him greatly.
It was the wee hours of the morning before Newt’s mental wrestling finally yielded an idea. It was chancy, but less chancy than anything he had thought of thus far. Odds were it wouldn’t work, but maybe, just maybe . . .
He couldn’t sleep, even after his plan was formed and the night was slowly turning toward day. He kept working that plan over and over in his mind. Horn seemed restless as well, tossing under his blanket and mumbling in his sleep.
But Gok had no problem sleeping, not since the instant he first lay down on his blanket. Newt could tell by his snoring and wished he had thought to camp them farther away from the Hatchet’s camp than he had. The old Apache’s snoring could wake the dead.
Chapter Fourteen
“Are you ready for this?” Newt asked Horn.
“Let’s get it done,” Horn answered.
The sun was already an hour in the sky, and Gok was glaring at Newt, still unhappy that they hadn’t attacked the Hatchet’s camp in the twilight before dawn. Regardless of how calm the old warrior had been the day before and how contentedly he had slept through the night, he seemed unusually agitated that morning. There was a set to his mouth and something in those devilish eyes of his that Newt hadn’t seen since Gok had sat and watched him hovering over that torture fire. Newt guessed that it was the nervousness of being so close to the children, yet not having them in hand.
And to make matters worse, Gok had slipped off before dawn to have one more look at the Hatchet’s camp, returning with the news that his niece was among the captives.
And he had another thing to tell.
“Y has visto un güerito tiene dias anos?” Newt asked him. Had he seen a ten-year-old white boy among the captives?
“Sí,” Gok said, and then he held two fingers up. “Dos chicos Americano. Dos güeritos.”
“Dos chicos?”
“Sí, es verdad,” Gok replied.
Newt went to his saddlebags and pulled out the photograph of Billy Redding and brought it back to show Gok. He tapped the photograph with his finger and asked, “Este chico?”
“Sí,” Gok said, and nodded adamantly.
Two gringo boys, and one of them was Billy Redding.
“We’d better get moving,” Horn said.
Gok went against the impatience and seething anger he had been showing all morning and held them up by disappearing into the brush. They thought they heard him chanting or praying, but they could not be sure. When Gok returned a short time later, his face was painted for war—three horizontal lines drawn with his fingers where he had drug them across his eyes and the upper part of his face, two black lines and one white line that crossed over the bridge of his nose.
“What was he chanting about?” Newt asked.
“He was making medicine for war,” Horn replied.
They rode five miles, stopping only once to survey the remains of the Hatchet’s camp. The renegades had left early and their trail heading south was plain to see. Newt and his party circled wide to the east and did not swing back to the west until they were sure they were well past and ahead of the Hatchet. They rode on, looking behind them often, until they struck a road. Gok knew the road but not its name, and he could only say that it went down the Bavispe to Granados and then on to the silver mining camp of Soyopa on the Rio Yaqui.
Newt wondered if the mines at Soyopa were where the Hatchet intended to sell the children. Slavery had long been outlawed in Mexico, but it still went on, regardless of whatever laws
were on the books.
The road passed between the river on the west, and a low mesa to the east with a tower of red sandstone rising up on top of it like the crown of a hat rising up from a hat brim. Horn dismounted and took his rifle out of its saddle scabbard.
“My mouth’s dry,” he said.
“That’s because you’re nervous,” Newt said.
Newt was aware that Horn had been eyeing one of his two canteens hanging from his saddle all along, and the complaint about a dry mouth was probably a ploy.
“Mind if I have a swig of your goat milk before I go,” Horn asked Newt. “I drank the last of mine yesterday, and I’ve got a pure craving for another taste of it.”
Newt looked at the canteen containing the milk. There was only about a third of it left. “You don’t want it.”
“I wouldn’t have asked you for it if I didn’t want some,” Horn said. “Here I am likely to die because of this damned plan of yours, and you’re going to deny me a swig of milk that you haven’t hardly touched since those Mexicans gave it to us. I’d say that’s stingy.”
“Go ahead if you’ve got to. I don’t want it.”
Horn unscrewed the cap on the canteen and turned the spout up to his lips. Just as quickly, he spat the milk out and began to gag. “It’s spoiled!”
“That’s why I let you have it.”
Horn hung the canteen back on Newt’s saddle horn and tried to spit the bad taste out of his mouth while he stared at Newt like he wanted to fight. “You’re going to learn to appreciate me one of these days.”
He gave Newt one sullen last look and left the road and headed up the side of the little mesa. Newt got off his horse and pulled his Winchester free. He opened the flap of one of his saddlebags and took out a box of cartridges that he stuffed in his coat pocket.
Gok rode his horse closer to Newt’s and reached out and took up the canteen that held the spoiled milk. Newt started to say something, but didn’t. Gok seemed to take that silence to mean that the milk was his, and rotten or not, he turned up the canteen and drank greedily and so long that he drained it dry. When he was finished he hung the canteen back on Newt’s saddle horn, licked his lips, and gave a great belch.
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